Salman Rushdie has his history all jumbled up

In his lavish memoir Joseph Anton Salman Rushdie expresses bewilderment at the decision of his father Anis to choose Pakistan over India late in his life. We are not provided the precise year in which Anis and his family took residence in Karachi. Only this much is known – at the time of their departure Rushdie was studying in a British school. But we know the year of their shift because of the disclosure made to a magazine by Rushdie’s lawyer, Vijay Shankardass, who claimed Anis left India in 1963.

Anis’s decision was inexplicable to Rushdie, for his father was “a godless man who knew and thought a great deal about God.” He also believed the sequence of verses in the Qur’an was jumbled up, occasionally visited the Idgah for the “ritual up-and-down of prayers”, and loved his liquor. How could Anis then opt for Pakistan, tacitly accepting Jinnah’s two-nation theory? Rushdie writes, “They felt, they said, increasingly alien in India as Muslims. They wanted, they said, to find good Muslims for their daughters. It was bewildering. After a lifetime of happy irreligion they were using religious rationales.” Not persuaded, Rushdie suspects there must have been business and tax problems, or “other real-world problems that had driven them to sell the home to which they were devoted and abandon the city they loved. Something was fishy here.”

Rushdie smells something fishy because he erroneously believes the embracing of Pakistan necessarily reflects the person’s religiosity. Doesn’t Rushdie know that the idea of Pakistan was a modernist project, mooted and fought by those who, like his father, lived a life of happy irreligion? Indeed, among the most delicious ironies underlying the demand for Pakistan was the robust opposition it encountered from the ulema, or Islamic scholars, those who were the very antithesis of Anis.

For instance, Jamiat-Ulema-i-Hind (JUH) was an eager partner of the Congress in its many battles against the British. Expressing his unequivocal opposition to the two-nation theory, JUH’s Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmad Madani argued that it wasn’t necessary that a “nation, to be a nation, should share the same religion and culture” and profusely quoted from the Qur’an to bolster his case. Even Maulana Abul Maududi, counted among the leading proponents of political Islam, was opposed to the idea of Pakistan, but subsequently shifted there following Partition.

Yet, we must eschew the tendency Rushdie demonstrates in locating neat binaries in the past. Thus, for instance, a faction of JUH under the aegis of Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani broke away and campaigned vigorously in favour of Pakistan. Indeed, religiosity engendered as much support as it spawned opposition against the two-nation theory. Religiosity apart, Indian Muslims migrated to Pakistan because of their fear of riots as well as the possibility of securing greater pecuniary gains or better status in a new nation-state. Litterateurs such as Niaz Fatehpuri and Josh Malihabadi opted for Pakistan because they were skeptical about the future of Urdu in India.

Individual experiences were also a factor. Take the great Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who had an epiphany the night his friend and actor Ashok Kumar drove him home, taking a route through a Muslim locality infamous for its hotheads. In the colony, Manto was surprised to see a mob surround their car and joyously welcome Kumar. Manto thought he wasn’t safe in India because a murderous mob could not identify him, his religion or his ideology. He crossed over to Pakistan, believing such apprehensions were bound to be minimal in a predominantly Muslim country.

Perhaps Anis’s fears were similar to Manto’s. In an attempt to imagine Anis’s social milieu, I called Asghar Ali Engineer, a Muslim reformer, and asked him whether there were incidents in Bombay which could have made Anis feel alienated. Not in Bombay, said Engineer, but he talked at length about the horror of the first major post-Partition riot in Jabalpur in 1961, which sent shock waves reverberating through the country. Could Jabalpur have scared Anis to shift to Pakistan?

In the 1960s, India witnessed a rash of riots, including in Maharashtra. It is easy to imagine Anis, tippling and marvelling at the sagacity of his decision to abandon India. It is a sentiment his son, studying in England, could not have experienced. Rushdie describes, on page 554, the response of fellow writers to his decision to accept Delhi’s offer of a five-year visa and visit India. Louis de Bernieres cautioned him against it. Rushdie notes sarcastically, “De Bernieres then delivered a short lecture on the history of Hindu-Muslim politics to a writer whose entire creative and intellectual life had engaged with that subject and who, just possibly, knew more about it than the author (Bernieres)…” Clearly, Rushdie needs to read his history anew.

The author is a Delhi-based journalist.