It was one of the self-evident truths of his life that everything has its place. Or consider the proposition conversely, that lifeโs worst eventuality is for things to end up in places they are not supposed to be. The fundamental purpose of his life had been to guard unceasingly against this eventuality. So, when at last he was arrested, the Arab was surprised to feel a relief as satisfying as any he had ever known. The act of being gathered up and placed in a room brought with it a pleasantness unexpectedly reminiscent of boyhood, evening, and his mother.
โSo tired,โ he muttered as he pressed a thumb and a thick index finger deep into the sockets of his eyes as if he bore them a grudge. The others in the tight lockup, mostly Persians sporting chins untouched by razors or water, would have been surprised, had they known that a man such as he shared their space. They, the leftover youth of Iran’s cities in search of an alternate route to Europe; a route unhindered by passport checks, boarding passes or hefty airline fares. He, Abdul Rahman al Fazul. Senior Inspector Abdul Rahman. Or used to be. Now just another cat in the sack. Waiting for someone to tell him if he would be allowed to continue his journey, or if he would be sent back across the border he had crossed just the night before. Illegally. Without papers and cash. And with a half-cocked idea that he’d find a United Nations refugee office in some town called Quetta.
The small, shared space was stuffy. A tiny hole near the ceiling allowed the sharp light of the desert afternoon sun, and all of its heat, to barrel into the room; but it was too insignificant an opening to stir up a breeze. A wooden door painted bright Islamic green and locked from the outside was guarded by men balancing loosely wrapped
turbans on their heads and old double-barrelled carbines on their shoulders. The Arab counted thirteen men, fourteen including himself, standing or sitting on their haunches, as one of the turbans pushed him into the room. The men (there were no women) were like brooms in a closet. Someone asked him something, but the question was in Persian. Being Iraqi he spoke only Arabic. And, of course, a few words of English collected over the years like knickknacks from the television and radio. Hello. Good evening. OK. What is your name? Welcome. Cigarette. Please take a seat. I love you. Thanks God. His arrival in the lockup had the effect of a pebble landing in a pond. Ripples of whispers moved around the room growing dimmer and dimmer until within a few minutes the heat, hanging like a stage curtain, heavy and patient, was all there was.
*
Two months in Iran, always with an eye over his shoulder or fifty metres out in front, on the lookout for Revolutionary Guards or basijis. Forever aware of his accent and afraid that his dark skin would do him in. Speaking nothing more than simple phrases and commands. Moving in the shadows always takes its toll. Zahedan, the border town, wasnโt a problem. Every sort of criminal and smuggler huddled at the bus stand openly discussing the price of hashish and hawking fake Afghan passports. Fuโad, of course, had been a help. Yet crossing into Pakistan had been the easiest part of the journey.
Fuโad, a Khartoumi, black and smelly like a backstreet sewer, spotted his accent immediately. โFrom which part of Baghdad are you, my friend?โ he hacked as he slid in beside the Arab at a teashop next to the railway station where Abdul Rahman had come in dubious hope of catching a train to Pakistan. The line had been closed since the days of the Shah. Rusted steel track running crazily toward the desert horizon was all that survived of the railway. He’d have to find another way; three hundred american for an Afghan passport was more than he could afford. I’ll walk across if need be. He ordered another cup of tea. When will I enjoy a small sweet glass of coffee again? He didnโt say a thing to Fuโad, but the black man went on as if the Iraqi had called him over to share a secret.
โStudent in Kirkuk I was. Geological engineering. Visited Baghdad many times. Are the girls still so expensive in al Mansour?โ He inhaled with a hiss and slapped two bony fingers against each other by way of exclamation. โOn a government scholarship I was but when the war began fell victim to the expulsion of all foreigners. Abandoned the academic life. Fish are fatter in these ponds.โ Fuโad indicated, by rolling his eyes, the pond he meant: this dried-up, gritty corner of the world where the smugglers’ routes mocked the paper borders separating Persia from the Indian sub-continent and both from the madness of Afghanistan. Civilisation from chaos. The past from the dissolution yet to come.
The Arab glanced obliquely at the African, whose uneven false teeth flashed like signals from a ship that everything about the man was crooked and unreliable. He wanted the Iraqi to pick up the conversation, but the Arab remained silent. Not about to start chatting to Africans within walking distance of the borderline. He
sipped at his tea, then made an effort to get up, but Fuโad didnโt give an inch.
โReturned to Khartoum I did, but after living in a foreign country for so many years my own seemed somewhat less wonderful.โ The Arab was trapped. Fu’ad must be working for the Revolutionary Guards. Any moment his sidekicks will jump out and grab me. The teashop reeked of goat piss. Tribals in white and yellow turbans, wearing long-barrelled rifles, brassy knives, and leather ammunition straps across their chests, spoke in shouts. They stroked their moustaches with the backs of their huge coppered hands. Fuโad raved on about living in Saudi Arabia before joining the Afghan jihad. A few years ago he had set up here in Zahedan, the last Iranian town before the border. He had no particular reason to be here except that it was the frontier and should the situation unwind too badly he could disappear across an international border in less time then it took to grease a shipment of Johnny Walker through Iranโs Revolutionary customs.
โGoing to Pakistan?โ he asked. โBe of assistance I can. Only because you are a Baghdadi like me.โ His laugh broke down into the watery hack of a heavy smoker.
Youโre no Baghdadi. There were plenty of Sudanese and Somalis in Iraq; all part of the fraternal policies of the Baโath Party designed to attract cheap labour from the Muslim world. They did the shit work. Pumping petrol. Standing by doors all day waiting to open them for more important people. Cleaning up oil spills. They sent home pay packets heavy with oil money, but no proper Baghdadi would allow a black African to eat in his home. Not Lt Colonel Abdul Rahman. It was Fuโadโs over-friendly manner, his insistence that they shared something, ev
to be done with him. But the black man pushed a shoulder into Abdul Rahman โ foul breath undermining his flashy smile โ and whispered. โA contact. In the army. Pakistani that is; Iranians only do business with themselves.โ Another short cough and a quick look over his shoulder. โArrange things for him. Logistically I do. Time to time. Friday he’s running a convoy from here to Chaman on the Afghan border. For a very reasonable price,โ he took a moment to look his prey up and down, โonly two hundred and fifty american, I can have you dropped in Quetta.โ
โWhat is Quetta?โ
โQuetta is nothing. Like a camelโs fart, it is has no substance. But for you it is heaven.โ The sweating black face floated closer to Abdul Rahman’s. โIn Quetta you will find a UN office and there you will receive your ticket to breathe freely. The UN will give you a card that certifies that you are a refugee, and then no one will bother you. You will be protected by the world. If you are lucky you may even go to America or Germany with that card.โ
None of this impressed Abdul Rahman. He was not in the habit of believing the words of strangers, especially when they spoke of freedom or heaven. His life had been dedicated to doubting and challenging the statements of others, and besides, visiting a UN office was the same as registering with the Revolutionary Guards; a place to avoid, not seek out.
And what if he did not stop in this Quetta? If he paid more would Fu’ad’s contact arrange to take him to Peshawar? One of Abdul Rahman’s ironclad rules had always been never to trust anyone’s plans except his own. In Tehran a few weeks ago he’d met a Pakistani
doctor who had sold him some strong pills for the pain that never seemed to leave his head these days. โIf pain persists, your only hope is a visit to the tomb of Zinda Pir near Peshawar,โ the doctor had confided, as if he knew his medicines were useless. โVisit the tomb, sir. Its powers are appropriate for all disorders. Physical, mental, and those of the spirit. And of course, your sexual desire will dare not slacken after the saint accepts your prayer.โ Dead saints held no interest for Abdul Rahman and he had put the conversation out of his mind. But he distrusted Fu’ad, and suddenly the doctor’s advice came back to him from nowhere.
โOf course. Drop you anywhere he will. Peshawar. Lahore. Even Karachi. But why?โ The African smiled again. Then burped. โWhat is your number one problem? Money? Papers? Money and papers. Without these you will not leave even this place.โ He rolled his eyes around the teashop and the bright white heat beyond. โBut visit the office in Quetta. Not only will you receive papers you will not need money. All refugee cardholders receive a monthly salary from the UN until they are resettled in America or Europe. Both problems solved. You see, Mr…Mr… โ Fuโad wanted his new friend to fill in the blank but Abdul Rahman ignored him. โSee, the UN office in Quetta will give you a card. Will make you a refugee. And when you become a refugee the world feels it owes you for the suffering you have endured. And I can judge myself that you have endured more than enough. Now. What do you say?โ
Abdul Rahman was no longer wary of Fuโad. If he had come to grab me he would have made his move long ago. In the end it was agreed. Abdul Rahman paid only one hundred and twenty five dollars: more than he wanted, but far below the bazaar price. They met the following day at the same teashop; Fu’ad introduced him to Bashir
who would drive him across the border in his lorry. Bashir spoke no Arabic and Abdul Rahman was glad. He didnโt want talk of any kind. Sleep more than anything was what he craved. He handed the money over to Fuโad who instructed him to be at the terminal at nine thirty on Friday night.
The next night Bashir showed surprise (or was it disappointment?) that his Arab passenger had no bags. Abdul Rahman held out two small bundles. โOnly this.โ He tried the words out in Persian but didn’t like their sound, which struck him as effeminate and pompous. The lorry driver sniffed and pulled his passenger into the cabin. From behind the wheel a boy, no more than sixteen, scanned Abdul Rahman through red eyes. They were barely open but they penetrated with the viciousness of a mistreated dog. The truck lurched into motion even before Abdul Rahman had time to shut the door.
It was only when they had left Zahedan city behind and were crawling into the desert โ the fifth lorry in a convoy of seventeen trucks, like a trail of ants โ that he realised how easy the border crossing had been. His companions were absolutely unperturbed by him sharing their lorry and made no attempt to hide him. They passed through Iranian checkpoints unchecked. At the first one Abdul Rahman caught a glimpse of a Persian officer โ big plate hat, brown uniform, ugly as a turd โ counting a tabletop full of notes. Bashir saw him too and grinned insanely, then sniffed; he rubbed his thumb and finger together as if he were counting the notes. He laughed out loud, but the angry boy kept his bloodshot eyes unblinkingly on the red dots of the taillights in front.
After passing into Pakistan, Bashir gave Abdul Rahman a plate of meat and bread, which he ate in the cabin. The Iraqi stayed awake until three in the morning. Then, at last, he fell asleep.
Bashir shook him awake and offered a drag from his cigarette. Abdul Rahman declined. I would rather share tea with smelly Fuโad than smoke with a dirty simpleton like you. The red-eyed boy was sleeping; his head tapped an irregular beat against the steel window with every bump, but he didnโt wake. Bashir had taken the wheel. The sun was shining brightly and already hot; the sleeping boyโs sweating body cooked in the heat and made Abdul Rahman’s stomach queasy.
08.00 a.m.
A milestone flashed by. Someplace. 28 kilometres.
An hour and a half later the trail of ants stopped. Or rather, the fifth of the seventeen teeny mechanised bugs crawling across the sand pulled to one side of the narrow tarmac strip. Lorries rumbled by like monsoon thunder and when the last one was nothing more than a shimmering bit of sound on the horizon Bashir turned toward Abdul Rahman with a knife. He sniffed and smiled but didn’t bother to explain. What would an Arab know of the language of the deserts of Baluchistan? Abdul Rahman didn’t move except to notice that the boy had woken up. A kalashnikov peered at Abdul Rahman’s freshly cropped head. As if he were reaching for the flesh of a young girl’s breasts, Bashir patted Abdul Rahman’s chest and delicately twiddled his fingers in the pockets of his shirt. Nothing there except three twenties; they went under Bashir’s purple and orange skullcap, whose
small cracked mirrors sparkled in the early sun. It seemed that anyone who didn’t have a turban wore one of these sparkly hats. Abdul Rahman observed himself being thieved in silence, as if the sound on the television was turned off. The boy pulled him from the cabin giving him no time to reach for the small plastic bag with an airlineโs faded imprint on both sides, containing the only clothes he had except those on his back. All night he had held his other bundle in his lap, and now that he was on the ground and the truck was shifting prematurely into third gear he was thankful that at least they had not taken that.
Fu’ad was right. There was nothing here of substance. The sun blinded his eyes, but Abdul Rahman thought he could make out a few buildings right about the place on the horizon where the lorries had faded from view. He moved towards them like a camel that smells water. Within twenty minutes a village had grown out of the desert sand. A handkerchief around his neck to protect him from the sting of the sun came off and he wiped his face. Adjusted his eyes. Nothing suggested coolness or rest. But a desert animal doesn’t lie down to die. It keeps moving until it finds the water it needs.
Flies rose to his lips and eyes as he stepped over the swollen, stiff corpses of three dead goats. Exactly what I expected of Pakistan. His money, thanks to Bashir and the slit-eyed boy, was finished, but it didn’t register with him yet to consider how he was to continue his journey. The sun chewed into the back of his neck. Sweat drew out his strength and left it to evaporate.
A man with a loose white turban and long shirt hanging below his knees watched the Arab from inside a thatch hut. He called out, โMohajir. Repyugeeโ, motioning to the stranger with his hand. When
Abdul Rahman didnโt move he strode out of the hut and demanded, โIrani?โ
Abdul Rahman stood motionless.
โIraqi? Kurdi?โ he yelled Unable to communicate, he kept on trying neverthless; rattling on for several minutes and flapping his arms. At last he stopped shouting and laughed. He grabbed the Arab’s hand. Abdul Rahman pulled away but the grip was like rock. He was pushed on to a sting bed and a cup of sweet milky tea appeared in his lap. โChai. Chai,โ the turban laughed. The slurping sound he made reminded Abdul Rahman of a donkey. Out of the horizon a white jeep, with its horn sounding, skidded to a stop outside a walled compound. Gates opened from within and the jeep entered.
Nothing stirred.
The tea man nodded his turban at the compound where the jeep had just entered. The Arab approached the gate and knocked, then began kicking, but there was no response. The heat against his back made him weak. Still no response. On the far side of the road some donkey drivers stopped to stare. A head wrapped in a red pressed turban with a gold medallion on the side emerged unexpectedly from a small door in the gate. More abuse. Another push. The onlookers across the road laughed. One or two even clapped as if Abdul Rahman were a dancing bear. He continued to bang on the tin door, but not for long. The gate swung open and the jeep that had just gone in came out. It stopped in front of Abdul Rahman. A fat man in bedclothes rolled down the window and rattled something off at the sweating Iraqi.
Abdul Rahman shouted. โI am refugee. Refugee.โ
โNo refugee office. Go to Quetta.โ The fat man spoke a mix of Persian and Arabic, just like everyone in the borderlands. The glass rolled slowly up again sealing off the fat man from the heat. And Abdul Rahman. The obese man motioned his driver to proceed but Abdul Rahman jumped in front of the jeep and yelled again, โI AM REFUGEE.โ
The fat man, probably some sort of local big shot, spoke quickly, but Abdul Rahman understood nothing. Again the driver was instructed to move but Abdul Rahman stepped in front of the jeep and shouted, โRefugee. I am refugee.โ
Armed men jumped from the back of the jeep as if they had been shot from a rocket, and pinned Abdul Rahman to the ground. The onlookers across the road had stopped clapping. The fat man harrumphed out of the air-conditioned jeep and squeezed Abdul Rahman’s face with strong, fleshy hands. His foot rested on the Arab’s groin. Whatever he said sounded like stones rattling in a tin cup, but his armed soldiers took hold of Abdul Rahman and dragged him into the lockup.
My first novel was published in London in 2000. It was nominated for a couple of awards including the Guardian First Novel Award. I will be serialising it here as it is out of print.
AUTHORโS FOREWORD
The Book of Accounts is a work of fiction and imagination. The inspiration comes from the many Iraqi friends and refugees with whom I have worked, who have endured the hell of torture.
Although this novel is fictional many of the events described โ including the gassing of Halabja, the hostage-taking incident and the Muhyi-Ayash conspiracy โ are historical facts. The organisations mentioned: al Amn al Khas, Mukhabarat, Estikhbarat and Jihaz Haneen are real. In the case of Jihaz Haneen very little is known of the organisation even within Iraq, and therefore any description of its structure in the Book of Accounts is based largely (but not entirely) on speculation. These organisations are integral to maintaining Saddam Husseinโs and the Baโath Partyโs grip on the Iraqi people.
Other than Saddam Hussein, Muhyi Rashid, Mohammad Ayash and โChemicalโ Ali, and one or two very minor personalities, all characters in the book are fictional, though some have been based on historical personalities. All revolutionary parties, including the Peopleโs League, are also fictional.
The historical context of the novel is the recent past of Iraqi history from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. Unlike the characters almost all locations in the book are actual villages, towns and neighborhoods. I have provided a historical timeline of the major events referred to in the novel as well as a glossary at the end of the novel.
For the reader who knows Iraq and who may find some of the liberties have taken for the sake of the story irksome, I beg your indulgence.
_________
PROLOGUE
He lay shivering on the stone floor in a cell in Baghdad that had become colder as the storm outside built in intensity. He hugged himself tightly and let out a sharp sneeze.
โOh! Lucky boy. Someone is thinking of you!โ laughed the guard.
For two nights no one had bothered him. But on night number three as he lay sleeping, pushed up against the stone wall, they called his name. โPlease,โ he said, โit is very cold,โ but the words were lost somewhere between his mouth and the wall. Two men in grimy uniforms pulled him from the cell; one of them held him tightly while the other tied a band around his eyes then reached down to secure the young manโs hands behind his back. When he was pushed forward into the corridor, a lady guard stepped towards him and whispered, โThis way. Your time has come.โ
The small party made its way through the building. He tried to imagine the surroundings. When they didnโt leave the building he thought, Executions must be carried out inside. I only wish I could see. Why stop me from seeing if I am to be killed? I am glad they didnโt give me any warning. I wonder if this is how everyone feels. He felt calm. He did not feel self-pity. Thoughts of his family, and of picnics and parties, of books unread and questions unasked, seemed tiny and hard to pick up. He remembered the soft fullness of his loverโs breasts, and for a moment he even thought he caught her scent.
The lady guard pressed the prisonerโs shoulder as a signal to stop. A door opened and the prisoner was nudged forward. He thought he
saw a room with no back wall. A line of men with rifles stared straight ahead with dull eyes. White billowy clouds and a blue sky. He felt the wind on his neck as he took up his position against the openness. Each man raised his rifle but he saw only one; an eye squinting, a finger resting against the trigger. An arm wavered slightly as the marksman took aim. The bound man stared directly into the one open eye and for a second the executioner hesitated, then a bullet shot forward. The prisoner watched as it spun through the air. The woman guard wore a crooked smile. Suddenly the prisoner felt warm.
โSit down here and wait. Do not try to see anything.โ It was the voice of the lady guard, who pushed him firmly into a chair and removed his blindfold; a cloth hood fell over his head as a substitute. She squeezed the prisonerโs shoulder then left him alone in the room.
The hood over his head was damp and stank of fear. He stared at his feet on the floor until the opening of the door diverted his attention. Footsteps on one side of the room. A chair scraped against the concrete. Must be the man with the gun.
As the newcomer came in, did he even notice the shivering figure tied like a rabbit to the chair? Or did he see him and feel only scorn? What was he thinking? This is him. Disgusting dog. His mind was already familiar with the territory ahead. The map was drawn.
The newcomer, the invisible one, was eager to proceed. He lifted his head and stared at the hooded prisoner in front of him. He sized him up like a chicken in the market. They shared the silence and the relief an actor feels when the curtain goes up on the last night.
The chair scraped across the floor again and the hooded prisonerโs muscles tensed involuntarily. His saliva tasted sweet and cool. He sensed the other behind him and waited. But for what?
A blow?
A shot?
He was lost without a compass. Is he still behind me or has he moved to my right? The hood was hot and suffocating. He was being stalked by a lion and prepared his body for the pounce. But nothing happened. The beast was examining its catch. Admiring another fish in the net. The big one at last? But after what seemed an hour, the hunter still had not slapped or even clawed his captive. Slowly โ he was back behind the boy again โ the invisible man lifted the bloodstained woollen hood from the prisonerโs head and let it drop to the floor.
He had decided that his prey deserved to see his tormentor from the beginning. And he was determined to enjoy the young manโs fright
He is coming soon. I can sense it. Heโll be here before dawn, in a few more hours, just as daylight cracks on the mountaintops. Like warmth fading from a bath, I feel his coldness creeping steadily up the valley. Iโve given word to the men to let him through unhindered, though heโll never be out of their sight.
My name is Michaelson. Youโve heard of me. Iโm the one they call mad. โGone nativeโ was what they used to say about people like me. They say Iโm evil, a sort of human tumor. Iโm an object of hate. A mirror reflecting the darkness they fear.
I no longer believe.
They want to see me dead. Five times theyโve sent their assassins up this valley. Always this time of year, as soon as the snows melt and the apricot blossoms cover the trees. Five times theyโve forced me to act. He who lives by the sword shall die by the same, my father used to say. Evangelista, the one on his way, the latest assassin, will be here soon. Perhaps this time they will succeed. I am tired. My insides are eaten away. Perhaps I do have the madness. It is such a thin line. Iโll let you decide. But first let me tell you my tale.
I came to Afghanistan after the big quake. Four, maybe five years ago now. The villages around here were flattened–the landscape was a wasteland. Houses which had once protected little children and animals had become murdering things, squashing, splitting apart and covering all living beings. Mountains slipped away as new ones rose from the earth. For those minutes of terror, the ground became as unstable as the sea, sucking everything into its swirling mouth.
By the time I arrived, the first outsider, five days later, the survivors had crawled out from beneath the stones and earth, but they moved and blinked in slow motion. They spoke in whispers as if afraid to disturb the mountains again. Women wailed in silence for their dead. I had come with medicines, water pipes, sacks of food and gear of all types. Ready to rehabilitate the survivors, bury the dead and quarantine chaos from order. The agency had sent me up to establish a beachhead against the forces of disorder and local helplessness. It was nothing new. Thatโs what I do. I am an aid worker. A post-modern missionary.
That was before. Now I am mad.
My former colleagues, my co-religionists, who once praised and promoted me as a secular saint, now want me dead. Murdered is all right with them. I havenโt left the Wakhan, Afghanistanโs thin extended finger, since the quake. This is my home now, and these people are my family. I am safe with them, and they leave me alone. I ask nothing of them, but they give me all I need.
My father was a man of the old religion who believed in the salvation of souls and the mandate of Heaven. But I gave my soul to another Faith. I became an apostle of Humanitarianism. A creed universal and acceptable to all. Infallible and intolerant of dissent. My conviction in the Greater Good was no less strong than my old manโs had been in the Almighty. He had his Great Commission, given by the Spirit to spread the Word to every corner of the globe. We Humanitarians had the Imperative, given by ourselves, to ourselves, to feed the hungry, reconcile the fighting, empower the weak and to spread the new gospel: that the day of salvation was at hand once we arrived with our trucks full of kit, our experts full of knowledge, our bags of food, our tents and latrines.
I was a true believer. One of the Elect. If you wanted to make sure your program was a success, if you wanted to get a real mess cleared up, you got Michaelson. I cut my teeth in the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand and in the dry lands of Ethiopia. Since then, Iโve been spreading the gospel in dozens of places: Mogadishu, Kurdistan, Sudan and Guatemala. Freetown in โ97, Sarajevo in โ92. Great Lakes I and Great Lakes II. The biggest human disasters of our time. I liked that they called me great.
I accepted the agencyโs call because they were paying well and because the Wakhan seemed about the farthest place from where I was: Angola, where I went cross-line.
***
They flew me in from Brussels and didnโt let me leave Luanda airport. Three pot-bellied big wigs, one each from the American Embassy, the European Union and the UN, briefed me for three hours in a huge room with grimy windows facing the sea. Russian cargo planes and fat troop transporters skidded and roared down the runway. The American is the only one I can still remember. Dick Jaspers was who he said he was as he shook my hand; I canโt remember who he said he represented.
I introduced myself but the other two didnโt say much. The UN guy slid his card across the table like he was putting a deposit down on a dirty deal. The European mumbled his name and took the notes. Jaspers, a former military man–I could read a hairdo–was in charge of the show.
He knew my CV real well, and ran through it; for the benefit of the other two, he claimed, but I think he really just wanted to let me know how much he knew. While he did, I stared out at the Atlantic and thought of all that oil beneath the surface and of the Indian diamond dealer who had sat next to me on the plane. Angola was rich and a rich country in Africa is to be pitied.
Jaspers stood up and with the aid of the UN man was blu-tacking a badly reproduced map of the country to the wall, making Angola look like a mess of spilled ink. There was a pocket of displaced persons, internal refugees, โright about here,โ he said, moving his finger in a circle on the map. โIn the Altiplano, the highlands. Rebel country.โ There were, he reckoned, about 30,000 in Chitembo, 14 maybe 16, 000 in Cangote and an unknown number in the jungle between Vila Nova and Jamba. โAbout a hundred thousand, a hundred and a half, tops.โ
Naturally, Jasper and his friends wanted to get food and relief to these people immediately. The jungles of the Altiplano were thick and the roads completely fucked if they existed at all. Most of the fighting was further to the west, Jaspers said, but mines were a problem and the fact that the DPs, the displaced persons, were spread over a space of several hundred square kilometres would mean this project needed strong leadership. โWhich is why we insisted upon you, Michaelson.โ
Iโd run similar missions deep in Zaire, before it became Congo. At least these DPs werenโt on the run moving deeper into the jungles like Hutus fleeing Rwanda. Setting up a camp is one thing but running mobile soup kitchens in the middle of a forest that hasnโt been penetrated in centuries is insane. This operation, what Jaspers and these other two wanted me to do, seemed a cinch.
The hitch of course was that it wasnโt. Angola was not Congo. War here was a refined art; theyโd been at each otherโs throats, burning each otherโs villages, stealing each otherโs children, and violating one anotherโs women for thirty years without intermission. Lines here were never crossed. You chose to work on one side of the line or the other. Either you worked with the government or you worked with United Movement for Angola, UMFANG. The rebels. No question. Angola was an expensive place to operate out of. Every agency had to run double programs. Like working in two different countries. People who worked in UMFANG-controlled areas never saw Luanda. And if you worked in Lobito forget visiting your colleagues in Caimbambo, just thirty klicks up the pike. The country was stained in hate and distrust and we agencies began to act that way too. You distrusted your sisters and brothers working across the line. You despised them. Hate grew inside you like a hungry worm.
Jaspers was saying that this project was unique and innovative. Cutting edge was the phrase he used. This was the first cross-line operation ever attempted in this country.
โThe front lines in this area,โ Jaspers was tracing his finger down a river and then inland and then back towards the river, โare always shifting.โ Because the DPs were stuck behind both lines and because the armies were so close, they were pretty freaked out. Constantly moving a few miles this way and then back the other direction. They were getting pretty weak; some had already died from desperation. They need help, Jaspers said, but no one was willing to set up a program across the lines. Too risky. Who wanted to lose all their vehicles and supplies? No one wanted to put the lives of their staff at risk. The government troops up in the Altiplano were the toughest; they had been given liberties, a different rulebook, than their fellow soldiers in the lowlands.
โI thought the DPs were in rebel-controlled land,โ I said to Jaspers, still looking out at the black ocean.
โSome of them are. Chitembo is a UMFANG town. Vila Nova isnโt. Cangote goes back and forth, depending.โ
The European kept taking notes. The UN just nodded.
โDepending on what?โ
โThings.โ Jaspers wasnโt a smoking man ,but he looked like he could use a cigarette. I turned away from the window to look at him. He had sat down next to the UN man and for a moment avoided my eyes. I waited.
โHell, Iโll level with you, Michaelson,โ he stood up again but then sat right back down. โThis is Angola weโre dealing with. Itโs different here.โ
โWhat are you telling me?โ
Angola, he said, was not just another screwed-up African backwater ala Somalia. There were things at stake here. Lots of things, like wealth and influence, for example. Oil and diamonds. Coastal waters thick with fish and the richest soil in Africa. Angola was prime real estate. South Africa right there, Congo to the east. French, British and American oil companies had been here for decades, but they had never been allowed to truly exploit the black crude because of the fighting. The time had come, Jaspers said. The world wasnโt prepared to stand around any longer waiting for the government and UMFANG to settle this thing. โTheyโve had 30 years already, for Chrissakes, and theyโre no nearer ending the war then when the Portuguese left in โ75.โ
Angola needed development. But that just wasnโt going to happen, Dick Jaspers said, as long as the military situation remained as it was. One side had to get the upper hand. Sure, everybody, the UN, the Europeans, we Americans, hell, even the Russians, were trying their damnedest to keep both parties true to the peace accord, โBut to be honest, Michaelson,โ Jaspers sighed, โthere comes a day when you gotta draw a line.โ
I suspected there was more to come.
โSince the last government offensive in November,โ Jaspers was back at the map pointing at things, โUMFANG hasnโt been able to get back to Vila Nova. Itโs immensely important to them, symbolically. Where their movement started back in the early sixties. A holy sort of place. But the government has the town locked up tighter than a you know what.โ Jaspers coughed but didnโt smile; I was getting antsy. I could sense where he was leading but I just wanted the bottom line.
The bottom line was that this was not your straightforward humanitarian mission. Sure, the DPs, on both sides of the front line, needed assistance, but so did the UMFANG units in the area. If they could recapture Vila Nova, the government would suffer a psychological blow that just might bring the whole corrupt facade down like the walls of Jericho.
What did they need me for, I wondered.
โTo make sure that the two programs go ahead with equal urgency but that the, ah…um, assistance to UMFANG segment doesnโt get out of the bag. Thereโll be lots of publicity, media interest and what not, in the relief program โcause itโs the first time anyoneโs attempted it across the lines. So thatโll be a natural diversion, so to speak, from the other operation.โ
The other operation, the guns for the rebels part. I raised my eyebrow and turned around and asked who was running that?
Jaspers said not to worry. What he needed me to do was to keep the focus on the relief side of things. He and his sour companions wanted a perfectly run operation, something the media and the UN could feel proud about. Something so clean, so big, even Woodward and Bernstein wouldnโt suspect the shadow operation. โCan you handle it?โ Jaspers asked.
I know what youโre thinking: running guns and grain in parallel convoys, you got to be kidding, right? But what Jaspers had to say didnโt phase me. Iโd seen the same thing done in Afghanistan in the early โ80s and youโre looking at one of the Contras biggest fans. You canโt swim in the river without getting wet.
I could handle it, I said, as long as we kept a couple of things absolutely crystal clear. One, UMFANG kept Jaspersโ guns pointed at government soldiers and, two, they stayed out of the DP camps. As long as the Greater Good was being served, Jaspersโd have no problems from me. In this world things arenโt always as clear-cut as weโd like them to be. Making sure the rebels got a steady stream of weaponry may be a humanitarian act. Who knows? Depends which side of the line you look at it from.
***
I set up base in Chitembo because it was the furthest settlement from the fighting and because the airstrip there seemed like it could be re-rolled quickly if we needed to. The few buildings that hadnโt been destroyed had no windows and were pock marked from bearing the brunt of thousands of artillery shells. Kids in tattered shorts and barefeet played on the rusting Russian tanks that lay half buried in grass and clay on the edge of town. The DPs were huddled close to the town to avoid the constant shelling in the jungles. Every building overflowed. Excess humanity shivered under tin, or plastic, or shanties with leafy roofs. The highland colours are the only pleasant memory of the place I have. Wide blue skies, the burnt red clay roads, green green jungle, black faces. Red mangoes, yellow plantains, avocados by the ton.
The little market started to grow again as soon as we arrived. The three camps around town and the market drew people out of the jungles like a magnet. Creaky lorries, with old tires bolted on the wheels, splashed through the puddles. Twisted, rusted metal-framed beds, scraps of blue plastic, roots, cassava, scrawny chickens and porcelain toilet bowls looted from the houses, were put on sale on the side of the road. That thin, skittish Congolese music flowed out of battered tape machines from morning till night. Chitembo was a carnival at the gates of hell.
Jaspers found some Australian engineers and a slew of Irish nurses. We set up camps near Vila Nova and in Cangote as well. Jungle was cleared, roads were bulldozed, latrine pits three meters deep were gouged into the earth, huge tin water tanks erected. Overnight six new villages complete with clinics, food stores, administrative offices, whorehouses and video halls sprung up on the outskirts of the three camps. We worked our asses off but when the camps were finally up and the displaced families issued with their ration cards you couldnโt help but feel good. The Europeans made sure we had all the money we needed, and those camps were the best Iโd ever seen. Each time I drove through the camps with the kids jumping and hanging from the jeep, seeing the queues by the water collection points and nurses weighing the new babies, I tell you it was a feeling like a king. Almost divine. We had done it again. Drawn a thin line between madness and order.
After an endless series of meetings and negotiations with government and UMFANG, both sides agreed to let our vehicles move freely across the lines. As long as we gave each side notice each morning and as long as we kept to the one radio channel they allowed us. There were teething problems, to be sure. Government commanders tried to negotiate a cut of the food rations. Some of our nurses were detained for 6 hours by drunken UMFANG soldiers at a checkpoint, but they were just young boys having a hoot. Both UMFANG and the government were glad to have us in the area because our camps meant they could officially wash their hands of any responsibility for the displaced and concentrate on the real objective: continuing the war.
I didnโt see Jaspers much once the camps were set up. On one of his trips up from Luanda he introduced me to the UMFANG regional supremo, Joao Batista Mulagu, a tall man with a wrestlerโs chest who never removed his sunglasses and who wore a rubber shower cap under his blood-coloured beret. Once a week Iโd travel out to his bush headquarters to be briefed on the โotherโ operation. Whenever his people harassed us at the checkpoints, I reported it to Joao Batista, and he took care of it. He was always interested to know how the camps were running, and expressed his appreciation for the international communityโs kindness to his people. I wasnโt looking for a friend and only visited him to make sure his men stayed away from my camps.
Commander Joao loved to smoke, and had a collection of smoking paraphernalia. One afternoon before the rains started in earnest, with the sky bruised all black and blue with heavy, threatening clouds, he pulled out his leather case and proudly showed me his collection of pipes, cigarette cases, lighters, worn leather tobacco pouches and Portuguese wooden match boxes, decorated with pictures of old Popes and the dictator Salazar.
โIn three days we go for Vila Nova,โ he said, setting the case on the camp bed. We sat inside his large canvas tent drinking rum and warm banana beer. Outside you could hear the low rumble of heavy lorries rolling through the camp; Jaspersโs convoy of arms, mines and ammunition.
โWill you take it?โ I asked. I hoped so. That would mean easier access to the camps around Vila Nova. I didnโt think, like Jaspers and Joao Batista, that the government was going to collapse if they lost the town but if the rebels managed to move the front line back towards the lowlands, that would give the DPs more protection.
โWe have the weapons this time,โ Joao was tamping the tobacco into a large-bowled pipe. โAnd the men are eager and brave. But in warfare you always need some luck.โ He smiled at me from behind the veil of smoke that rose from the pipe with each deep pull.
The rum was sweet but the banana beer rancid. I avoided the dirty glass of it that he had placed in front of me. I returned his smile but wanted to leave.
โYou have been good to us Mr. Michaelson, to my people. Without your camps we would not have been able to concentrate on our main goal.โ
โThatโs what it’s all about, Commander Joao,โ I said. I had no idea what it took to win a battle, whether luck played a part in victory or not. All I knew was that on this continent there were millions of people who needed help and that it was up to people like me and the nurses and our logisticians and engineers to save them. Nothing would happen if we left it to the government of Angola or UMFANG. Without me and my people, his people were snowballs in hell.
I finished my rum and lit a cigarette of my own. I stood up to leave. Commander Joao rose as well and put his hand on my shoulder. I bent my head and moved out of the tent into the humid, greying evening. Commander Joaoโs pipe needed lighting too, so I held out my old Zippo lighter with the faded โHHH in 68โ logo on it. His tobacco was nearly gone; he was having trouble getting the smoke going. But I was edgy and wanted to leave. โAdd it for your collection, Commander,โ I said. โGood luck at Vila Nova.โ
A weak ray of sun flickered against his reflector shades as he waved to me. I drove out of the bush towards Chitembo.
The assault on Vila Nova never took place. The rains began to fall the night I left UMFANG headquarters and didnโt stop for a week. Floods were reported on several rivers and half of Cangote II camp was under water. One of my people radioed me to come as soon as possible but I couldnโt do anything till the rains stopped. On the ninth day after my meeting with Commander Joao, I took a driver and a jeep and headed down toward Cangote town.
The road was rutted deep making progress slow. We kept the jeep in low gear, moving steadily forward lest we got bogged in the red gluey mud. It was a beautiful morning. The black clouds were far to the east hovering over the hills but on three sides we had blue sky and revealing sunshine making the water on the avocado trees sparkle. You had the feeling, as so often in Africa, of looking out onto Eden.
At midday we had to turn off the main road because a bridge was out and a lorry had broken its rear axle and would block the way for days. The higher we climbed into the hills the rockier the narrow path became but the less muddy. We made good progress. With my arm out the window I was enjoying the sun for the first time in days.
Very few people were on the track. Most of the villages in this area had been forcibly evacuated years before. Both warring parties were desperate to ensure that no civilians remained to give succor or support to the enemy. The only people who lived outside the camps were the families of UMFANG fighters and the nuns who kept a watch over the churches and convents that lay in the shallow valleys like they were trying to avoid detection.
The wet sunshine stung my arm and neck. The driver said that his sister was a nun at the convent of Donna Maria de Corrao, just a few klicks up the road. Could we stop and have some coffee? The difficult driving conditions had exhausted him. I said yes, but that we had to make Cangote before dusk. Iโd never been to the convent of Donna Maria de Corrao but some of my nurses visited the place every fortnight to deliver high protein cereal for the orphans.
We could see the square steeple of the conventโs chapel with its huge white cross from across the small valley. The driver moved faster, eager to see his sister and stretch his limbs.
When we pulled into the gate a half hour later we realised that the chapel was the only building not destroyed. Three long residential halls to one side, the school rooms behind the chapel and the shacks which housed the animals the nuns kept for food and milk were burned to the ground. All that remained were charred smouldering limbs of timber. All around the courtyard, strewn like cans of beer at a festival, were the heads and limbs of infants, small stuffed toys and grey and white pieces of the nunsโ habits. The sisters, their bodies contorted and twisted, some with the horror still on their dead faces, lay to one side. Blood, like pink spray paint, covered the chapel walls and next to a mound of burned animal and human carcasses lay a Bible and a calendar photo of an old church in Lisbon.
The driver walked through the carnage muttering to himself. He didnโt stop moving, just walking around and around in circles, whispering to himself as if heโd gone mad. The government had been active in this part of the country. The front line was on the other side of the bridge that had washed out, but the convent was definitely on the government side. Dirty fucking bastards.
The smell of death made my neck cold; my rage made me queasy. I was desperate to get to Cangote to protest to the governmentโs man. This sort of thing threatened our continued humanitarian presence in the area. I called to the driver who was still muttering and rubbing his fingers against his dry lips. I would drive. I started the jeep and was about to turn the wheel when near the pile of charred bodies Iโd just come away from I saw something glint in the sun. I donโt know why but I got out of the car and walked toward it. It was only a few paces away. I stooped to pick it up. A battered Zippo lighter.
***
Jaspers couldnโt understand why I was leaving. Iโd done, he said, such an outstanding job. Both operations were a success. Things were working out just like we planned. For once.
I said I couldnโt explain. I had to go. I caught the Sabena flight back to Brussels and then the quake happened. Sent eighteen villages and four thousand people under the ground. An agency Iโd done work for from time to time was surprised I was in town. Would I go? It was a humanitarian disaster. The worst thing to hit this part of the world since the last worst thing. Already they had raised a million and a half dollars without even trying. The victims needed food, medicine, shelter, the whole shooting match.
Youโre our man, they said. We pay well.
I accepted.
It wasnโt Angola that I was afraid of, or running from. It was the blackness. Something had worked its way inside me at that convent, and it had begun to devour me from inside. Itโs still eating me alive. The world ended for me at Donna Maria Corrao and I saw it for what it was. A conjurerโs trick. The lid popped off, revealing nothing but an empty box. The curtain of the temple had been rent from top to bottom. Dunant was dead.
That day when they said go to Afghanistan the people need you, they are suffering, I wanted only to cover the blackness. I flew to Islamabad and two days later, with a lorry loaded with pipe, chlorine, plastic sheeting, sacks of wheat and tins of oil, I jumped out on to a narrow mountaintop and surveyed the scene. The agency had sent a Dutch administrator and a water engineer from Bangladesh as my team. More would be recruited they told me, just get there now. Itโs an emergency.
It was too late that day to do anything. And that night I saw the dream. The same one I had had since my visit to Donna Maria de Corrao. A vast landscape of devastation. Trees have been turned to stumps, rivers have run dry. Fields no longer produce paddy or wheat. People have shrunken into grotesque children. The sky is red and purple and the giants on the earth are ghostly and silent. They reach down with pale hands full of food but as the โchildren-peopleโ reach up the food disappears and the hands throttle the supplicantโs throats. Some โchildren-peopleโ do not come forward, preferring to cower in the shadows, afraid of and yet desperate for the attention of the giants of the land. In the earth are scraps of tattered clothes, broken pottery, shards of glass and twisted striplets of iron. It is ugliness. I am observing the scene, unsure of where I am but with a warm sense of familiarity. Iโve been here. This is where I live.
Slowly, a โchild-personโ crawling on all fours approaches me. Its face is that of an old woman, wrinkled and ashen, but her body is of a nine month infant. Her eyes are black and impenetrable but as she moves with such fragility I am not afraid. I look at her. She moves closer and reaches out her small, fleshy hand. In it is a shard of green glass and I am afraid lest she harm herself. I come close and try to remove the glass from her hand but now she is growing larger, more adolescent. I reach for the glass but she moves her hand away and brings it to my neck. I know what she is to do. I donโt move. I feel the glass press against my skin and feel the vein pop as she cuts me open. She has now lost her childโs body and her face has become young. Her body is strong and adult and beautiful. She moves away and I see that the other โchildren-peopleโ have grown as well and the giants have disappeared. I am alone and dying. The people have turned away and left me.
***
The agency wanted to know what had become of the Bangladeshi and Dutch. Why did I not allow the helicopter to land? How could I explain the lack of communications from my side? Why didnโt I answer their messages? Had I forgotten that there were people to be saved? The world had responded to helplessness and chaos once again. What the fuck are you doing?
***
Heโs here. I know he has arrived. Feel my him in limbs and neck. Here. They are cold. Heโs brought the coldness. Even though itโs summer, I am shivering.
It will consume the little of me that is left.
They say Iโve gone mad. Iโm the devil, is what they say. Michaelson is the devil. Iโve heard the reports. I know what goes on. Donโt think I donโt. This one, Evangelista, the sixth emissary to come and collect me. Why should I allow him to get away? I canโt resist any more. Iโve tried. Iโve tried to forget. To cover the blackness. Iโve prayed to it and cursed it and pleaded and let my mind be ravished by it, but it is never satisfied. There is no salvation.
My father was a man of faith. I told you that, didnโt I. He used to warn me, but what son listens to his father? I remember his warning. I can hear it now: the devil comes as an angel of light.
This is a story I wrote many, maybe 30 years ago. None of the people I shared it with liked it. They found it silly. I think its derivative and a bit too earnest. And pointless. But it was fun to write.
If you donโt know by now, let me lay it out there once and for all: I am in love with the music of the 1970s. Itโs when my musical ears started to grow up. I am emotionally tied to the โ70s, the years that took me from a 13-year old dork to a married man in 1980. University, travel, losing the Big V, jobs, drinking too much, etc. Formative years.
This doesnโt mean I spend my days listening only to peak Elton and Born to Run. I spend a lot of time in the weeds in music from around the world, especially the Indian barsageer, and contribute to the profits of Bandcamp quite faithfully. But with age comes many things. One of which is a dropping away of the need to be considered hip. Another is going deep into things. The music of the 70s may be comforting and familiar but in the same way I knew nothing of India until I came to America, it is only in the 3rd decade of the 21st century that Iโve begun to try to really listen to what was going on in the popular music of those years.
I knew of Ramsey Lewis from regular visits to the local record store. His albums of that time, especially Sun Goddess (1974) and Salongo (1976) were very attractive. Covers that stood out from the mass that called out to be picked up handled. Being poverty struck I was never going to put $4.98 down to actually buy one, but man, I really did love the look of those albums.
Ramsey had got his start in Chicago in the mid-50s. He played what I call club jazz. A sort of diet-Jazz that was accessible, occasionally funky and generally soothing. Youโd hear it in small clubs in big cities across America. Les McCann and Lou Rawls, would be there the week before you, maybe Willis Jackson or Brother Jack McDuff, the week after.
Ramsey was a very accomplished pianist/keyboard player and a warm person. But the overseers of โJazzโ showered him with putdowns like lightweight, mainstream, โhappy clappyโ and bland. He didnโt care. Some of the giants of jazz, including the Duke himself, were fans and mentors. And besides, he was actually making money and had a mixed audience of black and white fans who liked his cross-pollination of styles.
When jazz synced up with R&B and became soul-jazz in the late 60s and allowed George Benson, Grover Washington Jr., and the like to become pop stars in the 70s, Ramsey fit right in. Heโd been laying the foundations of soul-jazz for years.
Sun Goddess was released at the end of 1974. The cover pictured the gilded face of a beautiful woman set against what looks like a background of liquid silk shooting out like rays of the sun. Bold & beautiful. Confident. Daring & intriguing.
When the stylus hit the wax that lush, warm sound of the times filled the room. Maurice White and several mates from Earth, Wind & Fire were in the studio as players and producers which gives several of the tracks, especially the title and opener, a funky EW&F feel. Maurice and Ramsey went way back. Maurice had been picked up as a session drummer by Ramsey after the departure of Redd Holt in 1966. They had stayed together for several years until Maurice laid out his idea for a large, dance, funk and pop group to Ramsey around 1970. Ramsey smiled and wished him every piece of luck as Maurice moved to LA.
By 1974 Whiteโs group was about to release their breakthrough That’s the Way of the World which included the Billboard Number 1, Shining Star. That EW&F were in essence Ramseyโs backing band on Sun Goddess no doubt gave him and the album a huge boost of street cred.
The music exemplifies that strain of African-Americana which is confident, unapologetic and intensely positive. On the charts in those years were songs like Love Train (The OโJays), Wake Up Everybody (Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes) and Black Wonders of the World (Billy Paul). Sun Goddess is the sonic realisation of the popular slogan, โProud and Blackโ.
Scratch guitars look forward to disco, about the happiest music ever created, but which was still an underground phenom. Ramseyโs keyboards, on piano or Fender Rhodes, always stand out even though he is surrounded by some of the best musicians working at that time. Critics consider Sun Goddess to be a deliberate attempt by Lewis to cross over to R&B. Could be. But there is no sense that he is out of his depth or uncomfortable with the increase in funk that defines the sound. Heโs perfectly at ease and as accomplished and classy as ever.
If youโre interested in understanding the music of the 1970s, then youโve got to get this record.
For the first several minutes he said nothing, just guiding his yellow and black Suzuki taxi through the clamorous traffic of midday Delhi. My daughter wanted me to ask him what his name was. โJai Bhagwan,โ he said. โAn old-fashioned name.โ His smile is half apologetic.
โYouโll be going to Jaipur? Thatโs a beautiful city. They call it the Pink City. Its a five hour drive from Delhi and Pushkar is another 2 or 2 and half hours further.ย Youโll stay in Pushkar for a few days? No? I see, just for a day. Ajmer is just a half hour more away. What a place that is. Moinuddin Chisti…the Emperor of India!ย Will you be taking the train from Ajmer to Varanasi?ย No, from Agra. Ok. I see, your agent arranged it that way. Watch out for these agents. Theyโre in it for themselves, a lot of them.
“This traffic is like this but not for too long. Thereโs a fly over upย ahead and the road narrows so everything slows down to a crawl. But soon weโll be moving again.ย Yes, that metro line was made for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. What a rip off!ย The organizers stole 80% of the investments. Only 20% was spent on the infrastructure. The main crook, Kapladi is in jail but what does it matter. It wonโt change anything. The rich and our netas (leaders) donโt give a shit. All the rules are for the poor, not one of them is for the rich.ย It never changes.
“My people used to own the land around the airport.ย A long time ago the government came and forced us off the land and gave us Rs. 1.40 per square meter! A very low price. But they got what they wanted. You know Gandhi? They say he is the father of the nation. We say heโs the number one Thief. Donโt believe me? What did he ever do for us? Did he do anything to improve our lot? He and Nehru did everything for themselves and to make their own money and name.ย Gandhi, the old bastard, used to feed his goat grapes while the rest of the country starved.ย
“The real hero of India was Subhas Chandra Bose. What a guy. You know what his slogan was? Give me your blood and Iโll give you freedom!ย He was a man of action. Thatโs why they killed him. You know Gandhi could have freed Bhagat Singh but he didnโt. He let him hang. All for his own glory.
“Ambedkar? Yeah, he was a good man too.ย He wrote the Constitution. No one else could have done that. He was a great man actually. I have nothing bad to say about Ambedkar.
“Right, weโre almost at your destination. Just 5-10 minutes more.โ
The political weather had been getting rough for a while.ย It seemed as if everybody had a knife sharpened for the bijou General with the face of a hawk. ย Gorby warned the Americans they were going to do a hit job on him. India always hated the guy. Najibullah, the barrel-chested leader of communist Afghanistan had thousands of agents in Pakistan looking for the opportunity. Even the Yanks were sick of his repeated moving off script. Oh, and donโt forget all the generals he had jumped ahead of when he was appointed Chief of Army Staff by the PM, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who he then turned around and deposed and had hung in his first spurt of manly Islamic machismo. ย The entire political class, civil society and media resented him. He had spent the last three months hunkered down inside his heavily protected residence, ย some say humming the blues lament, โNobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too.โ
General Mohammad Zia-ul Haq
Dark clouds indeed.
But the 17th day of August 1988 showed not a cloud in the sky. Today, the โill man with ill intentionsโโthe summation of his military commanding officer several years previousโwas flying down to the deserts of southern Punjab to witness a field test of General Dynamicsโ Abrams M1 tank. His American sponsors had been twisting his arm to buy a bunch of them. The American Ambassador, Arnold Raphel, and his military attachรฉ would meet the President in the desert. Zia, as per his usual practice, would be accompanied by several of his top generals including his presumptive successor, Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman.
The Abram M1 no doubt missing its target
The Abram tank proved to be a dud. The Americans were embarrassed that it missed its targets and repeatedly sputtered to a halt, unable to handle the clay-laden dust of the Thar desert. Zia and his men were openly relieved. What they really wanted were AWACS. Still, the party was surprisingly cordial given the deflating exhibit of American tech and general ill-will swirling around the figure of the President.
After a nice lunch, the President invited the Ambassador and his attachรฉ to join him in Pak-1, Ziaโs Hercules C-130 transport plane with its specially fitted airconditioned VIP capsule for the hour-long flight back to Rawalpindi. No hard feelings, Mr. Ambassador. Now about those AWACS.
Ambassador Arnie Raphel
As everyone settled into their seats a couple crates of local mangoes of the best variety were stuffed on board.ย At 3:40 pm the giant aircraft lifted off. Eleven minutes later it nose-dived into the desert killing everyone on board bringing Ziaโs unpopular eleven-year reign to an emphatic conclusion.
Strange things began to happen pretty quick smart. An order was given (probably by both countries) to do no autopsies. Why not? The FBI, who had just a year or two earlier been mandated by Congress to investigate every terrorist attack in which an American was killed was denied entry to Pakistan for a year. And when they did arrive, they seemed less interested in the crash then in sightseeing. Ohkaay. The Pakistanis settled on sabotage. The Americans on mechanical failure. After the tank debacle youโd think they were probably right but then again, no evidence has ever been produced along those lines. So, the Pakistanis were probably right. Right.
But what kind of sabotage and by whom? The latter was too hard to answer. Everyone wanted this prick out of the picture. How, was somewhat easier to answer. Eyewitnesses on the ground claimed they saw no smoke, no explosions, no missles hitting the plane. Remember it was a clear hot summer day. Just the damn plane genuflecting up and down and then smash.
Elaborate proposals involving military men and fast acting, time and altitude activated nerve gas were put forward. Ultimately, too much was at stake for the truth to be ever told and within a few months the drama and official curiosity was over.ย Pakistan had a woman PM, Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the man Zia had murdered. To her the crash had been โan act of Godโ. The Soviets had been routed and the Yanks were heading home.ย Good riddance all round.
Sindhri mangoes
But what about those mangoes? No one denied they were put on board in the desert. Some claim every single piece (around 60) were checked by security. Highly unbelievable. Others claim they were shoved on at the last minute with no scrutiny. Much more credible.
Early reports appeared that traces of chemicals were found on the skin of some of the mangoes recovered from the wreckage. Had the nerve gas been hidden inside the fruit? The public loved this idea. And it remains the most popular explanation until today. A novel, The Case of the Exploding Mangoes got quite a bit of press in the late aughts.
Hmmm. No one can say for sure what actually led to the death of a dictator, his general staff and an American Ambassador. Leastwise, no oneโs talking. But isnโt ย it interesting that those crates of luscious juicy mangoes were a late inclusion on the plane?
On another August day, twenty years before, another case of Pakistani mangoes, from the same region as those hitching a ride on Ziaโs plane, did a star turn that has to be remembered as one of weirdest sidebars in modern political history.
Pakistan and China have been best friends forever. But their friendship was especially strong in the 1960s when Pakistan was still young and China was caught up in the whirlwind of an endless series of self-induced crises with Cinemascope names. The Great Leap Forward. The Great Famine. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.ย China didnโt have a lot of friends; the Pakistanis needed a big power to balance the friendship of India with the USSR.
In August 1968, the Pakistani Foreign Minister on an official visit to Beijing, gifted Mao Ze Dong (The Great Helmsman) a case of Sindhri mangoes, considered by many as the King of all mango varieties. Mao didnโt like the look of them. In fact, the fruit was pretty much unknown in China at the time, so the following day, as a token of his personal gratitude he re-gifted the funny fruit to a group of โworkersโ who earlier in the week had subdued some angry students at Qinghua University.
Things were messy in China. In fact, the place was a real shitshow. Two years previous with the slogan, โSweep Away All Monsters and Demons!โ the Peopleโs Daily announced The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. With the stated aim of ridding society of all remaining bourgeoisie elements, the CR seemed to be more about Mao remaining the unchallenged leader of China, a position he feared was on somewhat shaky ground.
A poster depicting what happens to monsters & demons. 1967
What ensued was a period of chaos in which students, with direct and active support from the Communist Party, formed themselves into bands of Red Guards denouncing, killing, destroying buildings and otherwise wreaking havoc against officials and political foes of Mao. The main cities across China turned into battlegrounds. Factions of Red Guards each claiming to be the true executors of the Chairmanโs will, battled other factions of Red Guards. Public executions and torture sessions, wanton destruction of public property and street battles became the order of the day. Mao and the Cultural Revolution Group of senior Mao loyalists watched quietly; some in horror, others with glee.
But by the time the Pakistani Foreign Minister stopped by for a visit, even Mao realised he had unleashed a red wave of terror that even he could no longer control. A fresh slogan, โThe Working Class Must Exercise Leadership In Everythingโ was promoted and Mao invited workers to oppose the wild students.
After their victory at Qinghua University, Mao sent the Pakistani mangoes to various work sites as a gift. In a way that only those who live in such mad situations can make out, this was seen as a signal that power was shifting and the Red Terror of the students was over. Things were bound to better from here on in. And this strange fruit from friendly Pakistan was to symbolise that (unwarranted, as it turned out) faith.
The worker-peasant propaganda team in Qinghua cheers the gift of mangoes – the ribbon reads: “Respectfully wishing Chairman Mao eternal life”
Not sure whether they should eat it, one factory sunk their mango into a jar of formaldehyde to preserve it for posterity.ย In other factories people crowded around to sniff the fruit and stroke its smooth skin.ย Some boiled the rotting pulpโI mean mangoes are great but they donโt last more than a day or two or threeโin water which they claimed became holy.ย If you took a sip, you were in direct touch with the Great Helmsman. A cottage industry popped up to produce wax replica mangoes encased in glass which were given pride of place in factories and workplaces. These wax mangoes became relics. Like the hair of the Prophet for Muslims or a Piece of the Cross for Catholics.ย Mao was amused but didnโt intervene. In fact, the Mango became a stand-in for the Great Man himself.
Mangoes were carried ceremoniously in parades on national holidays, flanked by portraits of the Chairman. The mangoes were toured around the country. In one case a plane was chartered to deliver a single mango to Shanghai.ย At a time when Mao had felt his personal following to be waning, the mango re-invigorated the Chairmanโs personality cult. Mango posters, tea cups and plates appeared in the shops. There were reports of workers bowing in front the wax mangoes each morning as if it were an ancestor shrine from pre-Communist days.
From โ68-โ71, now feeling a bit more in control, Mao shifted his focus to the countryside. Millions of students and other bad characters were sent into the fields of China to learn from the peasants. Millions died. Others were not permitted to return to the cities ever again. Life across China was yet again completely disrupted. The economy severely damaged yet again.
The mangoes inevitably were forgotten as people struggled to survive, working the land with few tools, no wages and in inhuman conditions. ย All that remains, like the mango skins in the wreckage of Pak-1, is the story.
Lollywood: stories of Pakistanโs unlikely film industry
This brings to a close ‘the background’ story of Lahore. The next sections will deal directly with the movies and movie-making culture of Lahore.
Bahut ghoomi ham ne Dilli aur Indore ki galiyan Na bhooli hai na bhoolengi Lahore ki galiyan Yeh Lahore hai Punjab ka dil/Jis zikr par aank chamak uthi hai dil dharak urdthe hain
I’ve roamed the lanes of Delhi and Indore, but Iโve never forgotten nor ever can forget the lanes of Lahore. This is Lahore. The heart of Punjab whose very mention causes the eye to sparkle and the heart to skip a beat
These opening lines of the 1949 Indian filmLahoresum up the deep affection and nostalgic sentiment millions of South Asians feel for the city of Lahore.
**
Lahore, modern Pakistanโs cultural capital, is one of those cities that lives in the very soul and DNA of its residents. Like a handful of other cities across the continents it occupies a place not just on the map but in the imagination of those who know it. It is at once an indivisible part of peopleโs self-image and something beyond capture. As residents of the city say, Lahore, Lahore hai (Lahore is Lahore). So profound and all encompassing is the cityโs essence that the simple acknowledgement of its existence is enough to conjure an entire world.
Thereโs a small but passionate genre of writing that centres on the city. Novelists, poets, journalists and emigres, displaced at the time of Partition, wax lyrical in their books and gatherings in praise a city they all remember as sophisticated, vibrant, classy, tolerant, full of tasty food, and shady boulevards. Its fabled history and stunning architecture. Itโs unique urban culture. If, as they say, nostalgia is a narcotic, then Lahore is one of the subcontinentโs biggest addictions.
It certainly is an ancient city and the millennia have added a depth of colour and richness that most other cities can only envy. But Lahore has also experienced long periods of cultural and physical devastation when the cityโs palaces and shrines were little more than crumbling ruins. When its resplendent gardens lay overgrown and unattended. And it was this sort of Lahore that the East India Companyโs redcoats grabbed away from the Sikhs who had ruled Punjab for much of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Chauburji. Gateway to a large Mughal garden completed in 1646. This depiction is by an unnamed English woman whose husband served with the EIC in Lahore. This is from 1852, three years after the British annexation of Punjab and indicates how run-down this great city was at that time.
After โannexingโ Punjab, the British set about rebuilding Lahore. Though the Sikhs, under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, had added some new buildings and gardens to the old city, in general the once glorious imperial city, famous throughout the world for a thousand years, was in an awful state. Amritsar, 80 kms to the east was the Sikhโs spiritual home and a booming commercial hub; Lahore, their world-weary political capital. Important more for what it had once representedโthe imperial grandeur and awesome power of the mightiest Empire of the medieval world– than what is now was: a cramped, unhygienic, walled city down on its luck.
The storied tomb of Anarkali, 1852. As drawn by an unknown English woman.
At the time the British narcotic-peddling businessmen defeated the Sikhs in February 1849 the suburbs surrounding the old city were little more than ruins. โThere is a vast uneven expanse interspersed with the crumbling remains of mosques, tombs and gateways and huge shapeless mounds of rubbish from old brick kilns,โ wrote an Englishman who visited the city around this time. Though the Sikh sardars had not gone out of their way to destroy existing Mughal-era buildings they displayed no hesitation in stripping the creamy, jewel-encrusted Makrana marble off the walls of the tombs and palaces to adorn their own havelis.
More than with other cities, the British sensed that in Lahore they had indeed captured a jewel. Miltonโs reference to the city in Paradise Lost had been rather cursory. More elaborate and accessible was Thomas Mooreโs Orientalist fantasy Lalla Rookh which in the early 19th century had become hugely popular across Europe. Based vaguely around an imagined romance of a Mughal princess in the time of Emperor Aurangzeb (1658-1707), the poem introduced the name and idea of Shalimar into Western consciousness.
They had now arrived at the splendid city of Lahore whose mausoleums and shrines, magnificent and numberless, where Death appeared to share equal honours with Heaven would have powerfully affected the heart and imagination of Lalla Rookh, if feeling more of this earth had not taken entire possession of her already. She was here met by messengers dispatched from Cashmere who informed her that the King had arrived in the Valley and was himself superintending the sumptuous preparations that were then making in the Saloons of the Shalimar for her reception.
The development of Lahore into one of British Indiaโs premier citiesโand a place where a sophisticated industry like movie making could thrive– has to be understood as part of the development of British rule in India. The great riverine plains of Punjab–a stretch of geography that historically included Delhi at the eastern edge and touched the Afghan border in the west–were the last big chunk of agricultural land available in northern India. They marked the final frontier of British India. The Empireโs very existence not to mention the Companyโs business model depended on a perpetually growing revenue base collected primarily from raw agricultural products and oppressive taxes on those who worked the land. By the time they reached the Punjab, the Company was the unassailable political and military force in politically fluid landscape. But at the same time, their purely extractive approach to governing had reached its limits too. Beyond Peshawar, a largely Afghan city but in the early 19th century an important Sikh holding, towered the rugged mountains of the Hindu Kush, the historic barrier dividing South from Central Asia. These were a useful security asset but absolutely bereft of economic value.
Soon after wresting control of Punjab the English were confronted with the first substantial resistance to their rule. In 1857 soldiers in the employ of the British East India Company โmutiniedโ and for over a year engaged their European masters in an armed conflict that engulfed much of north India, saw the destruction of Delhi and the final collapse of the (by this time, entirely symbolic) Mughal Empire. A shocking numberโ800,000–Indians lost their lives either directly or indirectly as a consequence of the uprising. The European community estimated at around 40,000 in all of India at the time, lost about 6000 people. Though a much smaller number, proportionally it meant that about 1 in every 7 Europeans perished. If it did nothing else, the war exposed the underlying vulnerability and inherent instability of European rule in India. And though they would rule for nearly another century, everything that happened in India after 1857 in some way can be seen as a reaction or delayed response to the conflict.
Though the uprising was ultimately quelled the British were shaken to their core. The East India Company, which over the previous 150 years had demonstrated itself to be little more than a rapacious business enterprise intent on asset stripping the richest country in the world was disbanded by an act of Parliament. India was reconfigured as a Crown Colony under the direct purview of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. The British realised that things had changed. And if they were to continue to benefit from their Indian Empire they would need to experiment with different management techniques including setting up a system that at least appeared to take some interest in good governance rather than simply syphoning off Indiaโs great wealth. One of the immediate, visible signs of the new era was the rise and promotion of the Punjab as a โmodelโ province. A place where the noble intent and attributes of a Pax Britannica could be readily demonstrated and accessible.
Punjab was a vast piece of land but it was by no means uniform. The eastern and to some extent, central districts of Punjab were rich, well-watered agricultural lands with relatively dense populations. The much larger western part of the province spreading out towards the northwest and southwest of Lahore were arid, sparsely populated and agriculturally unproductive lands. In terms of the colonial economy, eastern Punjab was valuable; the west, not so much.
It didnโt take long for the administrators of Punjab to understand that this was unsustainable. It wouldnโt be long before the eastern/central portions of the province would be overpopulated and the land overused. Productivity and more importantly, revenue for the British Exchequer would fall. Also, never far from British minds was the prospect of rising social tensions that an unmet demand for land represented. No one wanted to risk another 1857. Especially not in the land of the fabled Sikhs, who had been consistently lionised by the British as a great โwarrior raceโ and upon whom they were banking to be the backbone of their own security and military apparatus. To use contemporary language they needed to keep the Sikhs sweet.
And so, beginning in the 1880s, with the intention of keeping the Sikhs happy and the Punjab prosperous, the government tilted imperial policy in Punjab toward investment rather than mere extraction. The vast, underutilised and dry western tracts of the province became the focus of a massive economic and social experiment. Construction began on a network of massive canals that diverted water from the Jhelum and Chenab rivers, that by 1920 had turned 10 million acres of โformerly desert lands, most of which had been the hitherto uninhabited and worthless property of the Rajโ into some of the richest agricultural land in India. Six districts including the rural areas around Lahore experienced a demographic and economic revolution as hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Hindu and Sikh farmers, were encouraged to move from the eastern parts of Punjab to the west. They settled in new purpose-built towns along the canals to produce wheat and cotton on a scale India had never seen before. And as the biggest city in Punjab (and the largest between Istanbul and Delhi) Lahore itself, the urban hub from which the new Canal Colonies were managed and supported, entered a fresh era of prosperity.
Reimagining Lahore
From the moment the Sikhs were defeated, the British set about rebuilding the crumbling historic city they had inherited. The new administrators were bewildered and not a little intimidated by the old walled city, which they left largely to its own devices. Instead, the English concentrated on the ruins that lay outside the walls. With a fearsome industriousness they cleared the plain to the southeast and laid out a European style suburbia. Christened Donald Town after Donald McLeod, an early Lt. Governor of Punjab, the main thoroughfare in this new part of town was christened McLeod Rd. On either side, a residential and business area for Europeans sprang up including an important and large military base or cantonment, further south in Mian Mir. By the 1930s, the place where McLeod Road crossed Abbott Rd, a junction called Laxmi Chowk, would become (and remains to this day) the central locus of the cityโs film industry.
Between 1860 and the early 1900s Lahore found new life as a hugely important regional centre for education, communications, publishing and culture. Delhi, the age-old capital of northern India had been savagely destroyed during the fighting of 1857. The city’s famous tribe of musicians, writers, poets, artists and thinkers fled the capitol in search of more secure places; some headed south to Hyderabad and others east to Lucknow. And with its newly acquired territory in the northwest the British government deliberately identified Lahore as an alternative cultural hub to which they encouraged รฉmigrรฉ artists and intellectuals to settle.
Several prominent Urdu language writers and poets did move west to settle in the city where educational institutions were springing up under official sponsorship but also with the investment of wealthy Punjabi landowners and businessmen. Though the city had no real affinity with or history of speaking the Urdu language, a combination of official policy and organic economic development saw Lahore become one of Indiaโs most important Urdu centres. Though the cityโs residents continued to speak their beloved Punjabi, using Urdu only for official work or to get a job, Lahore was transformed rather quickly into a bi-lingual town. Their easy facility with both languages and often with English as well, in time would give Punjabis a huge advantage in the nascent Indian film industry.
Lahoreโs publishing and printing industry produced newspapers, books, religious texts and magazines in multiple languages including Urdu, English, Persian, Punjabi but also Arabic and Sindhi. The city, already famous for its literary culture, refreshed its traditions with poetry recitations called mushaira which drew poets from across north India as well as significant audiences from the cityโs many colleges. By the turn of the century a hundred or more newspapers were available across the Punjab most of which were in Urdu including many published in Lahore, such as Kohinoor, Mitra Vilas and Punjab Samachar. In addition, though catering to a much smaller audience, but widely read and highly regarded were two English dailies, The Tribune and the Civil and Military Gazette, most famous today for itโs most famous resident journalist, Rudyard Kipling.
Rudyard Kipling
The number of prominent Urdu writers who were born, educated or settled in Lahore is too vast to mention: Agha Hashr Kashmiri, Taj Imtiaz Taj, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Hali, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishen Chander and of course, in the last years of his life, Saโadat Hasan Manto many of whom developed a connection with both the local and national film industries.
Northwest Indiaโs educational Mecca
In the late 1830s and 1840s the British laid out the basic parameters of an education policy for India. The ultimate purpose of the policy was very much in keeping with the political agenda of the EIC which was all about control, avoidance of undue investment and efficiency of administration. As such, to the extent that official British efforts were to be focused on educating Indians, it was as a means to advance the Companyโs and then Britainโs, commercial and political ends: to create a loyal group of Indian elites who would be conversant in the English language, imbibe European values and culture and be dependent upon Official patronage. In the famous words of William Macaulay a senior and prominent 18th century administrator of the Company, โwe must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.โ
And to that end government efforts were to be focused on developing and supporting a system that preferenced higher education as opposed to mass primary education and which was to be delivered entirely in English through institutions modelled on those in Britain, especially the great universities in Oxford and Cambridge.
By the time the final piece of the India puzzle, Punjab, was tapped into place these ideas were fresh in the minds of the English. And so, in keeping with their intent to make the province an exemplar of the colonial project, Lahore was developed into the premier educational city of northwest India. Beginning in the 1860s and continuing up through the first decades of the 20th century, the British supported or sponsored the establishment and development of a number of colleges that became famous as some of the best in India and whose alumni included several generations of elite leaders including multiple Prime Ministers of both Pakistan and India.
Schools like Forman Christian College, founded by an American missionary in 1865, and Government College a year earlier, provided English/Western education to the first generation of Punjabis to live under British rule. These schools were complemented by pioneering medical training colleges (King Edward Medical College) or absorbed into more prominent larger institutions like the University of Punjab in the 1880s. Secondary colleges, especially the world-famous Aitchison College (1864) prepared the young sons of the princes and the landed aristocracy of the Punjab to enter the elite colleges and ultimately, service in the bureaucracy. Being educated in Lahore became almost compulsory if you wanted to pursue a career in business, science, government or the arts. Students came to the city from all across the northwest and in the 1930s Lahore was said to have a student population of nearly 100,000 students enrolled in 270 colleges and schools.
Actor and Hindi movie superstar Dev Anand and his equally talented brothers came to Lahore from Gurdaspur in the east to be educated at Government College, part of the University of Punjab. At the same time, from Rawalpindi further to the northwest, came Balraj Sahni, who established himself as one of Indiaโs finest cinema artists after the Partition. We could fill several pages with the lists of prominent politicians, sportsmen and academics, not to mention military leaders who graduated from Lahoreโs elite schools but just a few provide a flavour of the quality of education the city provided. Imran Khan (former Prime Minister of Pakistan and international cricket star), Abdus Salam (1979 Nobel Laureate in Physics), Inder Kumar Gujral (Prime Minister of India), Pervez Musharraf (President and Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan), Allama Mohammad Iqbal (writer and philosopher), Kuldip Nayyar (prominent Indian journalist), Krishen Chander (pioneering Urdu writer), Har Gobind Khorana (1968 Nobel Laureate in Medicine) and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (modern Urduโs greatest poet).
While Dev Anand and Balraj Sahni were able to attend the elite colleges most of Lahoreโs film industry personalities were either educated on the job in the studios and sets or attended a set of schools established to cater to the middle class Hindu and Sikh communities who controlled Lahoreโs economy. Schools like DAV College founded by the reformist Arya Samaj educated tens of thousands Hindu and Sikhs. Islamia College, long associated with Allahabad University, offered higher education to Muslims who were a little more sceptical of attending the heavily westernised University of Punjab or Forman Christian College.
The learning environment of Lahore extended to female education as well and the city had a reputation for its relatively progressive attitude towards women participating in public life. Kinnaird College, established by missionaries in 1913 as a counterpart to Forman Christian College, educated the daughters of Punjabโs best and brightest families. Writers Bapsi Sidhwa and Sara Suleri, academics of all disciplines, the human rights lawyer and campaigner, Asma Jehangir and Hindi film actress Kamini Kaushal all graduated from Kinnaird.
Migrants, not only from eastern Punjab but the rest of India came to Lahore to get in on its vibrant economy and cultured society. By the 1920s the city was known not only as a premier destination for higher education but a city of ideas. Hindu reformist movements such as the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, from Bombay and Calcutta respectively, found fertile ground in Lahore and in the case of the Arya Samaj enjoyed significant growth and popularly in the city.
Political flashpoint
The many educational institutions created an environment in which ideas of all sorts were traded, debated and contested; Lahore slowly gained a reputation as a political hotspot. The British policy of building up a class of loyal Indians ready to fight for the Raj may have been the stated outcome of education in British India but too often things donโt go exactly to plan. With so many students enrolled in hundreds of schools things were bound to get out of control.
In response to the missionariesโ evangelising, each of Punjabโs three major religious groups took upon themselves to reform their own faiths turning Lahore into a site of new self-styled progressive religious teaching. Though founded in Gujarat to the south, Lahore became the main centre of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reformist group which championed education, womenโs participation in public life, a return to Vedic Hinduism as well as an aggressive anti-Muslim, anti-Christian stance. Many of the Hindu middle classes of the city were attracted to its teachings and sent their children to the Samajโs schools and the influential D.A.V College.
Initially, middle class Sikhs were welcomed and participated in Arya Samaj activities but eventually split from the movment over, among other things, the Samajโs aggressive campaign of mass reconversion of rural Sikhs to Hinduism. In response, the Sikh community sought to distinguish themselves from the Arya Samaj and began preaching a more exclusive and purist form of Sikhism which focused on the reformation of the government-sponsored โclergyโ that controlled Sikh places of worship. The Akali Dal, a group that arose out of activist Sikhs, many from the new Canal colonies, quickly took on an anti-British political agenda which the British promptly labeled as a greater threat to the stability of Punjab and India then Gandhi and the Congress Party. The Sikh Sabha and Akali movement was active across Punjab but especially in Amritsar and Lahore, whose branch was seen as the more radical and political.
Several Muslim communities found themselves developing new identities and leaders too. in the 1930s and 40s, the rural agricultural Muslim communities bounded together with similar rural groups to form a loyal pro-British political coalition. But other groups, such as the Ahrars, established in 1929, articulated a strong anti-British, nationalist and anti-feudal agenda. At the same time, it spearheaded a religious reform agenda that among other things was the first to demand that the small but successful Ahmadiya community be declared non-Muslim.
Though reform and purification of faith were the starting point of all these movements, by the 1920s they had blurred the line between religion and politics. The British kept close tabs on them and openly interfered in their colleges (Khalsa, DAV, Islamia) in an attempt to try to weed out nationalist thought. But it was not to be. The massive economic success of the canal/irrigation projects not only transformed and enriched certain groups but at the same disenfranchised many others, especially the urban middle class Sikhs and Hindus, who were the backbone of Lahoreโs economy.
The British state was strong and able to quash most rebellious ideas before they became widespread but in 1907 as a result of a number of pieces of legislation that further pressured and alienated the very population of rural Punjabis that the security of India depended on, violent protests broke out in the Canal Colonies. The cause was championed and given an anti-Raj colour by leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai in Lahore. The British were caught flat footed, and unprepared. Repression and suppression followed quick smart which for a few years seemed to work.
But after WWI Lahore continued to gain a reputation not only for high quality education and culture but as a political hot bed. So much so that its reputation spread far and wide. In 1922 newspaper a rural newspaper in faraway Australia reported โThe visit of the Prince of Wales to Lahore, which has been looked forward to with deep anxiety by those responsible for his safety, will, it is believed not be marred by disturbance of any kind. The tension has relaxed in the native city in the past week and it is too much to expect a general attendance of Indians to join the official welcome on Saturday afternoon for Lahore is the notorious centre of political unrest in Northern India but the Prince will not touch even the fringe of the bazars during his four days stay.โ (Tweed Daily, Muwrillumbah 25 Feb 1922)
T.E. Lawrence during his time in NW India (1920s)
Around that very time T.E. Lawrence (of Arabian fame) was reported to be in Lahore and causing trouble in Afghanistan. Indeed, possibly in the very weeks leading up to Lawrenceโs stealthy escape back to England, a young Sikh revolutionary who had been educated in Lahore, Bhagat Singh, assassinated a senior British police official in a case of mistaken identity. Though he escaped and a few months later exploded several smoke bombs while the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi was in session, he allowed himself to be arrested and imprisoned by the Indian government. Using his imprisonment and trial to denounce the Raj, Bhagat Singh became a national cause celebre. Anti-British protests broke out all across India and the chant โBhagat Singh ke khoon ka asar dekh lena Mitadenga zaalim ka ghar dekh lenaโ (Wait and see, the effect of Bhagat Singhโs execution: The tyrantโs home will be destroyed, wait and see) became a popular public cry. Though he was hanged in 1931 for his crime, Bhagat Singhโs trial and resistance to colonial oppression made him an exhilarating figure around which the nationalist and Independence movement rallied. Even today he is hailed as a beloved historic martyr across the political spectrum.
Bhagat Singh (back row 4th from right) during his college years in Lahore
Bhagat Singh and ‘co-conspirator’ jailed for their involvement in the Delhi Assembly bombing case (1929)
Culture and Arts in Colonial Lahore
Intrinsic to Lahoreโs self-image is the world of art and culture. It has always been the cultural capital not just of Pakistan but at various times throughout the past, especially during the Mughal period, one of the major cultural centres in all of South Asia.
With the advent of the British, art and art education, like everything else in Indian life, became a project to be moulded into something that served Imperial outcomes. Most British administrators and educationists dismissed Indian art as primitive or bizarre. In the words of John Ruskin, British artist and critic, the only art Indians were capable of was drawing โan amalgamation of monstrous objectsโ. As such, British administrators saw yet another deficit gaping to be filled. In 1875 the Mayo School of Arts, the first such institution outside of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, was established in Lahore. As in education more generally, the purpose of the school was โto initiate the native into new ways of acting and thinkingโ and of course provide skills that could be put to economic purpose.
John Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard, was appointed as the Collegeโs first principal with a mission to introduce Western drafting and realistic drawing skills to traditional artisans and craftsmen. Kipling himself saw much to admire in Indian art and did what he could to promote it among his colleagues and students, all the while delivering a skills-based, industry-facing curriculum which eventually included the new-fangled medium of photography.
Interestingly, Bhagat Singh, the young political radical had cottoned on to the great potential of photographic images to educate and mobilise the masses against the British. Prior to his arrest and trial, as leader of the radical Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, Singh had used a magic lantern, an early proto-slide projector, in his lectures and political activities. Itโs intriguing to consider that perhaps it was a piece of equipment that the Mayo College of Arts had introduced to its students and wider public in Lahore.
Soon to be superstar Mohammad Rafi sings on Lahore All India Radio in May 1941.
Lahore was a part of the classical music circuit of music conferences which brought a range of classical artists together to perform and compete. The local All India Radio station broadcast live sessions of local residents such as the eminent female singer Roshan Ara Begum and sitarist Ghulam Hussain Khan. And not just classical music. Three years before he broke onto a film scene he was to dominate for the next three and a half decades, in May 1941, a young Mohammad Rafi had a gig singing live on Lahoreโs All India Radio station at 9:15 am and again at 6:10 pm.
But it was not just formal art education. Lahore was a city famous for its writers and poets. Its poetry reciting contests, were famous across north India and drew poets, as well as audiences, from far and wide. Music, especially classical music, had a long history of patronage in Lahore. The Bhatti Gate area in the old city, from where some of the earliest film personalities emerged in the early 20th century was renowned for its venerable tradition of classical music. Such luminaries as Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, considered one of the finest voices of modern times, Pandit Amar Nath, and later the brothers Amanat Ali and Fateh Ali Khan of the Patiala gharana, entertained listeners often in their own homes.
Indeed, the city was in love with music. So important a musical centre was Lahore that by the 1930s and 40s several international record companies including Columbia, RCA and HMV had offices in Lahore. The city had been on the talent recording circuit for European companies as early as 1904-5 when two Europeans, William Sinkler Darby and Max Hampe, representatives of Gramophone Records, popped up in Lahore. They made a large number of recordings of women singers, apparently tawaifs (courtesans) who had entertained men for centuries in Lahoreโs fabled red light district, Hira Mandi (Diamond Market). In 1906 an ad in a London newspaper read as follows:
Shunker Dass &Co. Nila Gumbaz, Lahore, are prepared to invest a considerable sun, in conjunction with a thoroughly practical firm of makers or factors, to open a Manufactory in India, in order to supply the ever increasing demand for talking machines.
It seems Mr Shunker Dass was unable to generate the capital to set up his talking machine business, as records were known in those early days. But such an ad is evidence of Lahore being on the cultural radar that not only did Mr Dass feel confident to advertise in England but that he had the vision to see an opportunity that was just beginning to emerge when he ad was placed.
With a sizeable but not overly large population of European and American residents, Lahore attracted performers from around the world and catered to the needs of its non-Indian community. According to the Melbourne Age in January 1947 one of that cityโs citizens, a dance instructor by the name of Frank Webber, was on his way to Lahore for a season of dancing at one of the cityโs prominent hotels, Falettis. The city regularly hosted travelling dramatic troupes from Europe and America in its theatres not to mention the British communityโs love to amateur theatrics which added to the cityโs cultural lustre.
Much of the music and poetry and dance took place in and around Hira Mandi, the cityโs famous red light district and from whose residents the film industry drew many of its musicians, singers and actresses. During the early days of cinema, actresses who had originally come out of the world of traditional dance, gave recitals to great acclaim and massive audiences before and after their movies.
One local dance troupe the Opera Dancers founded by a Siraj Din from โa poor familyโฆpassed his matriculation from Punjab University in 1932 and started a troupe to entertain the public with Sarla (a famous danseuse) as his chief artistโ. Pran Neville in his book tells of how Miss Sarla drove audiences wild in between shows at local cinema houses
Responding to the loud applause of โMukararโ (Say it again) from the audience, Sarla advanced gracefully towards the front of the stage. With the burst of a song she turned around with such vigour that the loose folds of her gown expanded and the heavy embroidered border with which it was trimmed fanned out from her waist, showing for an instant the alluring outline of her lower form. She displayed remarkable muscle control and coordination as she worked herself up to reach the climax of her dance. The music went on in waves of tumultuous sound, with the musicians falling more and more under the hypnotic influence of their instruments, crying out โWah Wah-Shabashโ to encourage the dancer. The audience burst out in applause, which manifested itself not only by loud clapping but by the showering of coins onto the stage. The tinkling sound of the coins drove the musicians to a new pitch of enthusiasm just as Miss Sarla made her exit.
Siraj Din and Ms Sarla and the Opera Dancers featured regular shows in Lahore but also entertained Indian and foreign troops during wartime through a special vehicle he called Fauji Dilkhush Sabha (Soldiers Happyheart Association).
V.D. Paluskar and The Gandharva Mahavidyalaya
The story of V.D. Paluskar, one of the most significant figures in modern south Asian cultural history probably illustrates better than any other the sort of city Lahore was in the early part of the 20th century and how many of the necessary elements for a film industry came together in the city. Paluskar himself had only a tenuous relationship with the film world but as an influential cultural figure his ten year sojourn in Lahore is a wonderful window into how the city provided the perfect environment for new cultural ideas.
Vishnu Digambar Paluskar
Vishnu Digambar Paluskar was born into a traditional musical family in Maharashtra, western India in 1872. Fired with a deep spiritual need to blend traditional classical music, Hindu devotional practice and education Paluskar was in essence a missionary of sorts. After spending the first 24 or so years of his life as a paid musician in the courts in several small princely states in southern Maharashtra he set out on his own to find a different sort of patron then the small minded autocratic and often musically limited petty royalty his family had been used to serving.
On his travels through western India, Paluskar encountered, at a hilltop shrine, a Hindu ascetic who among other things advised him to head north and to the Punjab in particular. The ascetic instructed him to set up a school in order to live out his destiny. And so the young singer headed north stopping to perform and build his reputation in Gwalior, Delhi, Amritsar and the market center, Okara. In 1898 he made one final move, 130 kilometers NE to Lahore where he began immediately, despite knowing no one or speaking any of the cityโs three main languages (Punjabi, Urdu and English), to put together plans for the establishment of a music school.
His choice of Punjabโs capitalโnow in the midst of rapid development and growth under the Britishโwas unlikely to have been random. Even though he had no connections, the city was well networked and open to exactly the sort of innovative, even revolutionary ideas, Paluskar had banging around in his mind.
To get his idea of a school off the ground he had to raise money and so turned to the middle class Hindu community who were embracing Hindu reform movements like the Arya Samaj which, though founded in Gujarat in Western India, found Lahore to be one of its most important, if not most important site in north India. Arya Samajis were urban and salaried and had both the education and the money as well as the motivation to support causes like Paluskarโs musical-devotionalism. Lahoreโs fast developing reputation as a city of education, politics and economic opportunity meant that the the elite and rulers of the many princely states from Baluchistan, Kashmir, and Punjab maintained ties and often residences in the city. Many, especially the maharaja of Kashmir offered Paluskar and his academy, the heavily Sanskritised named Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, critical financial support and patronage.
And though he may not have been conversant in Punjabi or Urdu, Lahore was attracting migrants from all over India. Its economic and strategic rise in importance meant that national vernacular newspapers often had correspondents reporting on events in the city. One such Marathi newspaper, Kesari, began publishing stories about Paluskarโs activities. And though most of his students were local , many were immigrants like himself from Maharashtra including a large number of Parsis who though small in number were prominent as retailers of European goods and services, including owners of Lahore movie halls.
That Lahore and western parts of Punjab were heavily Muslim also had an appeal to the Hindu activist. Paluskar’s entire understanding of north Indian music was that it only could be truly understood and appreciated when performed within the context of a personal Hindu faith. Furthermore, Hindustani classical music, not to mention most of Indian culture, had been debased by Muslims . He believed Muslims performed music only for entertainment and often risque, morally suspect entertainment like courtesan dance recitals, at that.
Paluskarโs vision of a purely Hindu musical world was influential. In nearby Jalandhar where Indiaโs first annual musical festival the Harballabh festival had since 1875 been a place where Punjabi musicians of all creeds and persuasions, but especially Muslim dhrupad artists, performed, Paluskarโs sectarian and vigorously anti-Islamic/anti-Punjabi stanct, made the festival unwelcoming for some of the greatest Muslim classical musicians of the era.
Though Paluskarโs vision and mission could be interpreted as being conservative and traditionalist in that it sought to reclaim the north Indian music system from Muslims and restore it to its rightful place as part of true Hindu faith and practice, (however, contentious that position was/is) there were several elements that should be seen as radical. The most important being his musical notation system. North Indian classical music has traditionally been an oral tradition; Paluskar himself never received formal training and his own teacher never even shared with him the names of the ragas he was learning. It was a secretive and territorial business with performers and gharanas fiercely committed to protecting their styles, innovations and knowledge. This was done through a guru to whom a student devoted his life and fulfilled the role of servant until he was accomplished enough โafter many yearsโto take on his own students. Unlike in Western music, no music notations had ever been committed to writing.
A sample of Paluskar’s notation system published in 1928
Paluskarโs musical notation system, which he had begun to put down on paper while living for some months in Okara, became of his first projects upon arriving in Lahore. With the support of Hindu supporters, Paluskar was to publish the system which formed a fundamental part of the curriculum of his school.
The Gandharava Mahavidhalaya became another of Lahoreโs many and varied educational institutions. It offered a rigorous traditional 9 year (!) course of intense training but also shorter teacher training courses called updeshak, for poor students. The school also actively recruited middle class women, revolutionary step for the time. Paluskar not only used the press to promote his work but tapped into the booming printing industry of Lahore to publish short instructional texts in pamphlet form on various instruments and music themes.
His student body grew and included a relatively large number of women and especially Parsi women but also Maharashtrians who had migrated to the city. Within several years his school was well established and financially sound but Paluskar still felt he needed a higher national profile if he was to really have an impact. Once again, Lahore, his adopted city, was able to provide the opportunity.
In 1906 a โdurbarโโa public ceremony to honour the visit of royaltyโwas organised to mark the birth of King George V’s son. Paluskar recognised that if he could get on the program as part of the entertainment the eyes and ears of the entire country would be upon him. Through his own Lahori and royal connections he was able to secure a 15 minute slot which he used to promote his vision and school even further. By 1907/8 his school was not only well established but the Paluskar name as a educationist, a Hindu cultural reformer, an innovator and as an accomplished singer in his own right was secure. Though he left Lahore to return to Bombay in 1908 where he set up another branch of the GMV, Lahore was the city in which, as the sadhu had predicted, he would meet his destiny. The GMV in Lahore continued to operate until 1947 and the Partition when itโs heavily Hinduised curricullum and patronage became unviable.
Several of Lahoreโs greatest musical names such as Pandit Amar Nath had associations with the GMV either as students or instructors and throughout the 1940s contributed musical scores for Lahoreโs film industry. Paluskar himself probably felt films were exactly the sort of entertainment classical music should NOT be associated with but before his death in 1955, his son, D.V., performed in two films, the most famous of which, Baiju Bawra, he surprisingly performed a duet with the Muslim vocal maestro Amir Khan!
I recently moved from Melbourne’s ‘leafy’, wealthy suburbs of Armadale/Toorak to the well-settled northern suburb of Coburg. It’s been like moving to a different country. In a good way.
Coburg, originally named Pentridge, was carved out of the traditional lands of the Woi Wurrung Aboriginal people, in the 1830s. The site of one of Australia’s most notorious prisons, Pentridge, residents changed the name to honour Queen Victoria’s deceased consort, Prince Albert’s, German family, Coburg, in 1870. Throughout the 19th century Coburg and surrounds provided its famous heavy bluestone to other parts of Melbourne as well as hay, some fruit and grapes.
The town was incorporated in the 1920s and has a long history of progressive social and political causes. A stronghold of the then new Australian Labor Party (which just kicked the Conservatives out of existence last weekend) the community pioneered child health facilities that were among the first in the State.
Sydney Road runs through the heart of the area and is one of Melbourne’s many local communities. Today its home to recent immigrants (Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, Somali, Ethiopian, South Asia) as well as small group of older Italians and Greeks. Young people like the endless number of farmers’ markets, cafes and used bookstores. They wear black, dye their hair bright blue and bling themselves up with tattoos and all sorts of silverware.
I took a stroll down Sydney Rd on Saturday, after voting.
A quiet drink in the Edinburgh Castle Hotel.Local hero.What the hell has happened to the price of beer?Remnants of brunch.Halal meats for recent immigrants.Coburg Motor Inn, Sydney Road.
Last night Australians demonstrated their good sense, groundedness and well-honed pique in a big way. They voted for an imminently moderate, Elmer Fudd-like, Labor party lifer, someone who I (like almost all Aussies, except Labor party lifers) thought would probably lose the election or be so constrained by the political forces around him and his party that he/we would limp through another 3 years of soothing talk but precious little action on things we all care about: climate action, costs of life and health care.
His opposite number, the bald pated ex-Queensland cop (for non Australians, that is like being an ex-LAPD cop) not only the lost the election but also was given a tight kick in the pants by his own constituents. His career was yanked out from under him and there will be few tears shed.
Peter ‘Spud’ Dutton/Trumpf
I watched Albo’s acceptance speech. This guy has turned from Elmer Fudd into Conan the Barbarian! He spoke like he has rarely done. Confident, strong-voiced (yes he still has a high, slightly silly voice) and full of grace, goodwill and kindness. He didn’t bag the Liberals or his counterpart. He spoke of doing things the ‘Australian way’, with decency and kindness and caring for those doing it tough.
It’s easy to get cynical about politics and I’m a deep cynic. But I felt my chest swelling (for once outdoing my belly) as he spoke. I especially felt glad and proud to be Australian for one of the first times since I became a citizen. I am so grateful to be living in a country that despite being full of larrikins, (Crocodile) Dundees and (Breaker) Morants and which can be pretty crude from time to time, is indeed a country in which decency is deeply felt and practiced across all layers of society.
Pundits predicted a minority government for Labor. Once again, they got it wrong. Not only did Labor win a thumping majority, on track to have more than twice the number of seats of the Libs, but have won the largest number of primary votes (sort of like the popular vote in the USA) ever by a Labor government since WWII. And that includes those of Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd!
The Liberals have experienced a plane crash in which most of their leaders (a pretty low standard I admit) are gone and their brightest rising stars have all been killed. They have almost no (zero, zip) representation in the major urban centres of the country where most Aussies live. They’ve lost young people, women and the sane.
The Liberal/National Party are now even more adrift than the American Republicans. At least the spineless yesmen of the GOP are united in blindly marching over the cliff. Where they stand is clear…behind Trump with their noses and tongues on his arse. Their Australian wanna-be’s have no idea of what they want, should want and most of all have spent nearly two decades stubbornly ignoring what their own constituents want. Good luck to the grubs.
The Australian Labor Party has delivered every major social and economic reform that makes us a modern serious country. It began with Whitlam 50 years ago and continued through Julia Gillard. The Liberal grubs have done nothing but undermine, block and seek to take a torch to all of these reforms all the while espousing pioneering ideas on how to mistreat asylum seekers (El Salvador and Trump have lifted the overseas gulag idea from the Liberals), demonstrated their luddite attitude toward technology while all the time bashing the oldest human culture, Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples, at every turn.
Like the Republicans in Washington they’ve become more extreme and stupid with every election. They can be formidable in opposition but perfectly inept and corrupt when every they get near the cookie jar. Their analysis of their own coalition and approach was summarised by a senior Liberal senator last night as a ‘knife fight’.
Corruption, fear mongering. A party of drunks and women haters the LNP is out of touch with Australians on every single issue. So confused were they this time they actually took a policy of ‘tax increases’ to the election.
We did the needful, Australia. We wiped them off the mat, save for a few skid marks.
Suddenly, we are in a new era of gradual change but decency in public life. That sounds like a winner to me.
Trump was a definite factor in the final tally. Dutton praised Trump’s ‘big thinking’ and announced a cut of 40,000 bureaucrats which went down like a loud fart in church. One of the Party’s attack dogs, a young Aboriginal woman, who goes about with 3 or four bouncer types pinned in close, swore to Make Australia Great Again and proudly sported the ubiquitous red cap.
In the words of a former Liberal Prime Minister, a man who was politically assassinated by Peter Dutton in one of their Party’s famous ‘knife fights’, Trump was the mood music in the background to the election. Very clearly Australians don’t dig that sort of music. Another reason to be proud today. Trump was not THE factor as in Canada. The LNP just got whupped everywhere on every issue. Refer to my comments on ineptitude above.
So, today is a bright sunny day. Literally and politically. This has been a victory for consistent trimming of the “system” in favour of the non-millionaire class, calm and considered responses to the devils Trumpism has released. Australians chose not to go with radical ambition or goofy ideas but rather voted for the dull, the gradual and the diligence of the Labor Party lifers.
Lollywood: stories of Pakistanโs unlikely film industry
Mughal Stories
From day to day, experts present books to the emperor who hears every book from beginning to end. Every day he marks the spot where they have reached with his pearl-strewing pen. He does not tire of hearing a book again and again, but listens with great interest. The Akhlaq-i-Nasiri by Tusi, the Kimiya-yi-saโadat by Ghazzali, the Gulistan by Saโdi, the Masnavi-i-maโnavi by Rumi, the Shahnama by Firdausi, the khamsa of Shaikh Nizami, the kulliyats of Amir Khusrau and Maula Jami, the divans of Khaqani, Anvari and other history books are read out to him. He rewards the readers with gold and silver according to the number of pages read.
Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar. Grandson of Babur, (founder of Mughal Empire), and ‘greatest’ Emperor of Mughal India. (1542-1605)
It was between the 9th and 19th centuries when north India was ruled by a series of Muslim sultans that Lahore reached its cultural apogee. And especially under the Mughals who built India into the medieval worldโs grandest empire. Akbar, the greatest of all the Mughal emperors of India loved books and stories. The snippet above, from his biographer Abul Fazl, is a fascinating glimpse into the cultured atmosphere that permeated the courts of the ruling elite of northern India. The royal library, Abul Fazl proudly noted, included books written in Hindavi (early Hindustani), Greek, Persian, Arabic and Kashmiri. Akbarโs sons and grandsons and many of his senior nobles continued to add to the library, composing their own works but also drawing to the great darbar (court) of Lahore the greatest talents from all across India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and even as far away as Iraq.
The Mughals looked to Persia for their notions of culture and gave pride of place not just to the Persian language but to the great poets and thinkers of Iran. And it was from Persia that many of the grand stories they loved so much and which they adopted and were absorbed into Indian culture first came. The elites of northern Indian during this period adopted a number of Persian poetic and literary forms in which they preserved their histories, but also stories, poems and philosophies.
Several of these forms, especially the qasida, which was a poem in praise of the monarch, remained a novelty of the darbar and did not influence broader society, but several others did. Chief among these was the qissa, an extended poem that combined elements of moral and linguistic instruction as well as entertainment. The subject matter were stories of military valour, spiritual attainment, love and romance. The Mughals, especially Akbar and his son Jahangir enjoyed the qissaDastan-i-Amir Hamza which relates at great length and with vivid imagination the fantastic adventures of the Prophet Mohammadโs uncle Hamza. So much did Akbar appreciate this work that he commissioned a massive project to illustrate the entire epic. Completed over a period of 14 years (1562-77) the final product included 1400 full page miniature paintings and was housed in 14 volumes.
Qissas were not just stories but in the control of a good narrator, complete one-man performances/ shows. Some of the royal qissa-khawans (story tellers) are recorded as demonstrating all manner of expressions, body movements and vocal tones in their telling, sometimes even transforming themselves, in the words of one critic of Lucknow, into tasvirs (pictures). Thus, introducing for the first time into Lahore the concept of moving pictures! Akbar so loved the story that several times he is described as telling and acting out the qissa himself in front of courtiers and guests. When Delhi was sacked by the Afghan Nadir Shah in 1739 the reigning emperor Muhammad Shah pleaded that after the peacock throne what he most desired to be returned to him was Akbarโs Hamzanama which had illustrations โbeyond imaginationโ.
Folio from a Hamzanama ca. 1570 depicting the story of the spy Zanbur bringing Mahiyya to the city of Tawariq,
The critics of the day stressed both telling and listening to stories were beneficial to the soul with some claiming that in the cosmic order of beings, poets and storytellers were ranked second, right behind Prophets and before Emperors! Though this is undoubtedly a minority view, the best qissa-khawans were indeed highly esteemed.
In 1617, Emperor Jahangir, son of Akbar the Great, recorded the following event:
Mulla Asad the storyteller, one of the servants of Mirza Ghazi, came in those same days from Thatta and waited on me. Since he was skilled in transmitted accounts and sweet tales, and was good in his expression, I was struck with his company, and made him happy with the title of Mahzuz Khan. I gave him 1000 rupees, a robe of honor, a horse, an elephant in chains, and a palanquin. After a few days I gave the order for him to be weighed against rupees, and his weight came up to 4,400 rupees. He was honored with a mansab of 200 persons, and 20 horse. I ordered that he should always be present at the gatherings for a chat [gap].
It was under the reign, and patronage of Jahangir that Lahore became the favoured city of the Mughals. The emperor is remembered for ruling over a stable and prosperous Empire and for patronizing painting, poetry and architecture. A man of artistic inclinations it was during this time that story forms like masnavi which told of current events and wonderful victories and ghazal a short romantic-mystical form of poetry superseded other forms of literature. The ghazal in particular was championed by Jahangir and his son and successor, Shahjahan.
The ghazal both facilitated a large appreciation of poetry outside the circles of the aristocracy, among people of all walks of life, and began to be composed and recited in all sorts of settings including by women, in private homes, in public houses and in competitions. The masnavi quickly declined because compared to the ghazal it was a bit lengthy and rather tedious. The ghazal on the other hand, was snappy, called for clever word play and rarely ran more than a few verses. Mushaira, poetry recitations that centred around the ghazal, became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in Lahore during this period.
Many tales are told of courtly mushaira presided over by the Emperor who believed that when expertly delivered, a ghazal was full of magical power.
One night a singer by the name of Sayyid Shah was performing for the Emperor and impersonated an ecstatic state (sama). Jahangir questioned the meaning of one line from the ghazal
Every community has its right way, creed and prayer
I turn to pray towards him with his cap awry
From the audience the royal seal engraver, one Mulla Ali gave an explanation of the line which was written by Amir Khusrau and which his father had taught him. As soon as he finished telling the story, Mulla Ali collapsed and despite the best efforts of the royal physicians to revive him, passed away.
Of course, this literary world of elaborate illustrated tomes, royal qisse and the like was not uniquely Punjabi. Rather it was the literary province of the elite and as such, familiar to most urban literate North Indians. But the mass of people was not literate and had no access to the libraries, the texts, treatises and poets of the nobility. And yet beyond the forts and palaces and even beyond the urban areas of Mughal India there pulsated a great tradition of storytelling that influenced the emergence of films in the early 20th century.
To name all of the genres of Punjabi storytelling would be nearly impossible. In addition to qissa and ghazal there were afsane (stories), dastan (heroic tales), latifa (jokes), katha (Puranic stories), naat (poetry in praise of the Prophet), kafi (sufi poems), boliyan (musical couplets sung by women), dhadhi, kirtan, bhajan, swang, sangit, nautanki , marsiya, moโjizat kahanis (miracle stories of Shiโa Muslims), mahavara (proverbs) and so on.
These forms of storytelling were a part of everyday life for the people of Lahore and the Punjab. Though they may never have seen the beautiful courtly books produced by the Emperors, the characters, plotlines and themes were deeply embedded in the consciousness and culture of common folk.
One story in particular, Heer Ranjha, based on the Arabic classic Laila Majnun, was especially beloved by Punjabis. Compiled originally in the time of Akbar by a storyteller named Damodar Gulati, Heer Ranjha tells the story of a beautiful girl, Heer, who is wooed by a flute-playing handsome young man Ranjha. Rejected by Heerโs family because he belongs to a rival Punjabi clan, Ranjha turns toward a spiritual path. He spends time in Tilla Jogian, the premier centre of Hindu ascetism in the medieval period, and becomes a powerful kanpatha (pierced ear) jogi. His identity is uncovered by Heerโs friends who convince her to run away with him which ends badly with the death of both lovers.
The tale is the greatest of the many similar legends known as tragic love stories, the speciality of Punjab. Sohni Mahiwal, Sassi Pannu and Dhola Bhatti are taken from the same tradition and have been told, acted and sung to rapt audiences for centuries. Stories such as these and others, like Anarkali, whether recorded in royal tomes or told under a tree by a wondering minstrel formed the foundational inspiration for Lahoreโs movie makers. By 1932, just four years after the Lahore produced its first film, Heer Ranjha had already been made into a movie four times!
Performing Arts
Though the earliest Punjabi stories were written down during the Indus Valley civilization, once Harappa and the other cities were abandoned, India would not use writing again until the rule of the emperor Asoka, more than 1500 years later.
The Vedas were memorised and passed on word for word from generation to generation through a caste of priests, the Brahmins. And though many of the later Buddhist tales and eventually, even the Mahabharata and Ramayana were put into written form, writing, reading and access to these skills were confined to the very thinnest layer of elite society. The stories of Punjab survived because they were remembered, retold, performed on stages, recited in poems, acted out in the streets and reimagined with each generation. This oral and physical transmission, this retelling and telling again, kept the stories fresh and alive, changing, not only depending on who was doing the dancing or singing but whether the context was spiritual, secular, public or private.
Mirasi hereditary musicians ca. 19th century.
As with its oral and written literature, Punjab is likewise blessed with a huge variety of musical styles and musician groups. Broadly referred to by the public as mirasi, the society of hereditary Punjabi musicians is complex, and highly differentiated. Though musicians, singers and dancers were uniformly relegated to the outer limits of the caste and class system they played an important, even essential role in Punjabi society. They were the repositories of significant parts of family, folk, clan culture and history. When the movies arrived, the mirasi provided many of the musicians, dancers, singers and composers of what more than any other single trait exemplifies Pakistani/Indian popular movies, the song.
Certain groups of singers have had a direct and enduring connection with the film industry. The dhadhis, wandering minstrels and balladeers who trace their lineage back to the times of Akbar the Great, were particularly active in Punjab. Accompanying themselves on an hourglass-shaped hand drum (dhadh) and a variety of bowed instruments, dhadis specialised in singing heroic tales (var) of local chieftains, especially Sikh rajas ,as well as the tragic love tales such as Heer Ranjha and Sohni Mahiwal. Qawwals, who are sometimes considered part of the dhadhi tradition, were associated with the Sufi shrines and sing an intense trance (sama) inducing music that is so identified with South Asian Islamic practice. Qawwali was a form that was quickly picked up by film makers who inserted it into scenes as light relief or as a sonic representation of an Islamic character or theme.
Also associated with spiritual singing were a class of Muslim singers known as rubabis (after the Afghan stringed lute, rubab). The Sikh gurus employed rubabis to sing kirtans and shabad, essentially the sayings of the various Sikh gurus sung in their temples (gurdwara) as part of Sikh worship. These musicians had respected musical pedigrees and were expert on the rubab, harmonium, drums and other instruments. Being largely a Muslim group, most moved to Pakistan after 1947 and several played critical, pioneering roles as musical directors in the film world that grew up in Lahore.
The brass wedding bands that became an urban phenomenon in north India in the 19th century drew their members from yet another group of hereditary musicians known variously as Mazhabi (if they were Sikh), Musalli (if they were Muslim) and Valmiki (if they were Hindu). These musicians provided services including acting as town criers and news readers. They would make community announcements while beating their drums and playing their horns and clarinets. During festivals and celebrations they entertained people from their vast repertoire of religious and secular songs. As the forms of entertainment changed in the 20th century and especially when sound and music were incorporated into movies in the 1930s, these skilled players formed the backbone of the studio orchestras that produced the amazing soundtracks of the films.
In addition to singers and musicians a universe of street performers, actors and magicians made up part of the Punjabi landscape as well. There were bazigaars (acrobats and contortionists who also sang and acted), bhands (comics) who interrupted weddings and other events to make fun of prominent members of the family and their guests with quick jokes and bawdy repartee for small sums, madaars (jugglers and magicians) who with their magical powders and wands would make birds, eggs and even people disappear and reappear at will.
These groups performed publicly on the streets, in city squares or open fields and bazaars. At any fair (mela) or โursโ (sufi celebration at a shrine) all of these and more would be part of the entertainment. Indian diplomat, Pran Neville, writes in his memoir of Lahore, ๏ปฟโwe had but to walk into the streets to be entertained by one or the other professional jugglers, madaris (magicians), baazigars (acrobats), bhands (jesters), animal and bird tamers, snake charmers, singers, not to mention the Chinese performers of gymnastic feats who would be out on their daily rounds.โ[1] Like the mirasi, many of these castes of public entertainers found that the new film studios popping up in Lahore could be an unexpected source of livelihood.
An acrobat (baazigar) climbing a pole held by another man while a musician drums out a beat. Gouache painting by an Indian painter. 19th century.
If Parsi Theatre inspired the early film makers of Bombay, in Punjab other forms of theatre were just as important: swang, naqqali and nautanki. Each of these theatrical codes were common across the Punjabi countryside where performing troupes travelled and performed a rich variety of dramas.
The most important of the traditional theatres in Punjab was a form of nautanki known locally as swang. In essence swang which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for music (sangit) is informal folk opera. The production incorporates liberal portions of singing and dance and often all the parts are sung rather than spoken.
A performance would generally take place in an open part of a village where a local dignitary had invited the troupe to play. After a day of preparation during which the excitement built as stages were erected and children ran amok amidst the activity. The performers prepared by singing for hours with the heads facing downwards into the villageโs wells, a practice that allowed them to improve their range and enhance their projection. The actual performance would finally begin late in the evening and continue till the early hours of the morning. If the plot was a long one this would continue over a number of evenings.
Audience participation–hissing, shouting, calling out requests for songs or jokes to be repeated–was expected and happily accommodated. The performers were masterful singers who had to project their voices over the audience noise and often compete against a rival troupe performing in another part of the village. It was said that some of the best singers could be heard more than a mile away. One only needs to listen to the resounding voice of Noor Jehan, Pakistanโs Queen of Melody, and one of the greatest film singers of the subcontinent, to get a sense of the amazing power of these traditional singers.
Long before Nargis played Radha in Mother India (1957) or Prithviraj Kapoor played Akbar in Mughal-e-Azam (1960) these open-air travelling opera companies were laying the essential template of and sketching out the iconic roles for South Asian popular cinema.
The City as a Story
Lahore, the cultural capital of the greater Punjab region was itself was a city of a million tales. In many ways Lahore, a city so fabled for so long, was the most famous of Punjabโs myriad stories.
Sita in the forest with her two sons. Lav is credited with founding the city of Lahore.
The origins of Lahore stretch back to one of the two foundational epics of Hinduism, the Ramayana. In a storyline familiar to all movie lovers in South Asia, we are told that Sita, Ramaโs wife and a goddess in her own right, becomes pregnant making her jealous husband, Rama, question her fidelity. Falsely accusing her of adultery, Rama turns Sita out of the house. Deep in a forest Sita gives birth to twin boys, Lav and Kush, whom she raises with great love and devotion. In a dramatic twist of Fate, years later, the boys are reunited with their father whom they have never met. They take him into the forest to meet their mother. Ram is stunned and realises his mistake but despite Ramaโs protestations and desperate apologies, Sita is swallowed up by the earth and returned to the Heavens. Rama goes on to rule his kingdom with his two sons by his side in a Golden Era of peace and stability. When the time comes, he sets Lav and Kush up in the far West of his country where they establish themselves in two cities. Kush in Kasur, 52 km southeast of Lahore on the Indian border, and Lav in Lavapuri, modern Lahore, where even today, inside the fort of Lahore, there is still a small temple dedicated to this son of Lord Rama.
Despite its hoary Hindu roots, and being described as early as 300 BCE by the Greek historian Megasthenes as a place โof great culture and charmโ, Lahoreโs greatest glory was experienced when it was the capital of various Muslim sultanates and states. Throughout the medieval period when northern India was ruled by a succession of ethnic Turkish rulers who promoted a heavily Persianised culture, Lahore was a city of prime strategic, commercial and cultural significance. And despite its oppressive summer heat a reputation of luxury, elegance and sophistication attached to the city. Its guilds and craftsmen were heralded throughout the region and beyond; its poets, some of the most beloved, even in Persia. Like a handful of other cities around the worldโmodern Paris and New York for exampleโLahore has developed a special atmosphere which has caused both natives and visitors to fall in love with it. Way back in the 12th century, Masud ibn Said al Salman one of the cityโs most popular poets found himself imprisoned far from his home city for pissing off one of the cityโs rulers. Pining away in his cell he wrote a lamentation.
Lahore my loveโฆ How are you?
Without your radiant sun, oh How are you?
Your darling child was torn away from you
With sighs, laments and cries, woe! How are you?
Each of the four great Mughals (Akbar, Jahangir, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb) did their bit to build, extend and refurbish the city. Along with Agra and Delhi and for a while Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore served for years at a time as the Imperial capital and was heavily fortified as a military hub. As it enjoyed the presence of the Emperor himself, artists, administrators, philosophers and emissaries hailing from all across the world came to Lahore to live, seek patronage and practice their speciality.
Poets such as โUrfiโ of Iran made Lahore their home finding the relatively tolerant and inclusive atmosphere a delicious change from the claustrophobic Shiโa Islam of his home country. He and other poets employed by the durbar [court] produced sublime poems which were sometimes reproduced on paper reputed to be as delicate and as thin as butterfly wings. Artisans brought their skills and looms to the royal city which by the 16th century had an international reputation for producing exquisite silken carpets which, in the words of one historian, made โthe carpets made at Kirman in the manufactory of the kings of Iran, look like coarseโ rugs.
Kirmani carpet
The painters who made Lahore their homeโboth immigrants from Iran and the hills of Punjab and Kashmir, as well as nativesโbrought glory and awe to the city and its rulers. Ibrahim Lahori and Kalu Lahori, two painters in the court of Akbar illustrated a book called Darabnama (The Story of Darab) which set out the exploits of the young Akbar, sometimes in fantastic detail, just after he had decided to leave his new purpose-built capital, Fatehpur Sikri, to take up residence in Lahore. Their miniatures brought to life the Persian text which told wild tales of dragons swallowing both horses and their riders in one awesome gulp, as well as radical illustrations of naked humans which according to art historians were never before so accurately depicted by Indian artists. The Darabnama which is recorded as being one of the emperorโs favourite story books also depicts scenes from courtly life such as Akbar being praised and honoured by rulers from other parts of the world and India. Ibrahim Lahori along with miniaturists like Madhu Khurd are credited with bringing a fresh and naturalistic realism to portraiture. It was in Lahore-produced books like the Darabnama that for the first time individuals with all their physical quirksโbulging pot bellies, monobrows, turban stylesโcould be identified as real historical individuals.
The cityโs countless mosques and Sufi dargah (tombs) honouring Lahoreโs many saints and pirs are not just revered places of devotion but subjects of and characters in stories filled with miracles and magic that are still told today. The cityโs storied inner walled city dominated by the domes of the Jamโa masjid but filled with hundreds of other havelis (mansions), shrines, tombs, pleasure palaces and gardens are themselves characters in the various storylines. How many poems, songs, operas and movies, including made in Hollywood, include the name Shalimarโthose famous Mughal-era gardens of Lahore?
Poster for 1958 Pakistani film, Anarkali, which is only one of many South Asian films to picturise the famous Lahore-based story of Prince Salim and the beautiful Anarkali.
Probably the most famous of Lahoreโs many stories and one that has been retold in film in both Pakistan and India many times, is that of Anarkali. Like all tales that have been passed down through generations this one has several different tellings but the most famous and popular one is the tragic one.
One day a Persian trader came to Lahore for business and brought with him members of his family. In his caravan was his beautiful pink complexioned daughter Nadira also known as Sharf un-Nissa. Her beauty stunned the bazaars of Lahore and word quickly reached the Emperor himself that there was a woman as splendidly gorgeous as a pomegranate seed in his city. He summoned the merchant to his court and upon seeing the young woman fell immediately in love with her graceful charm. The young womanโs father was only too pleased to accede to the great Mughalโs request for Nadira to be allowed to join the royal harem.
Much to the chagrin of his wives and other concubines Akbar seemed completely fixated upon the beautiful Iranian girl who was rechristened Anarkali (pomegranate seed) by the King himself. The only time she was not by his side was when he was away from Lahore, conquering yet more lands and expanding the glory of his family and empire. And so it happened when Akbar was leading his armies in a campaign in central India, Anarkali and the crown prince, Salim, later to rule as Jahangir, developed an intimate relationship. The gossip hit the bazaars and everyone spoke of how much the two loved each other. Salim it was said was ready even to renounce his right to the throne of India for a life with Anarkali.
When Akbar returned to Lahore he called for Anarkali but immediately sensed something different in the way she approached him. โWhat is the matter,โ he cooed but she resisted his embrace and made an excuse to retire to her chambers as swiftly as possible. Akbar was upset and soon livid when his spies and courtiers informed him of the fool Anarkali had made of him during his absence. โThe bazaar is echoing with jokes that say Your Highness is too old to water such a lovely tree as Anakaliโ.
The next day Anarkali was summoned to the Emperorโs chambers. โIs what I am told true? That you love Salim more than me?โ
Anarkali tried to demur but the wizened old ruler knew a lie when it was uttered no matter how lovely the lips that spoke it.
He sent his favourite concubine back to the harem and then called his chief wazir and instructed him to arrest Anarkali before the night was through. โYou should bury the witch alive and leave no marking of her cursed tombโ.
In the years that followed Lahore was abuzz with rumours and theories of what happened to Anarkali. Salim was depressed as she was nowhere to be seen. Had she been banished back to Iran?
Eventually the old Mughal died and Salim ascended the jewel encrusted throne of Lahore. One of his first acts was to build a simple tomb on the spot where Anarkali had been so heartlessly murdered. Inscribed upon the tomb is a couplet from the love-lorn Jahangir himself, If I could behold my beloved only once, I would remain thankful to Allah till doomsday
[1] Pran Neville. Lahore: A Sentimental Journey. (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997), 60.
