| July 03, 2008 | Thursday | Jamadi-us-Sani 28, 1429 |
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A pilgrimage in Lahore
THE visa regime between India and Pakistan is oriented to the spread of religious beliefs. There are special arrangements for visitors to Nankana Sahib and Ajmer, among other places of religious importance.
Intensive discussions have been devoted to Katasraj, a place off the Lahore-Islamabad motorway, which is of importance to Vaishnavite Hindus. Whenever I can, I make my own personal pilgrimage to Pakistan to meet a deity — not of religious wisdom but of devout secularism. Neruda would call her a deity of wheat and revolution.
Between August 1997 when I met her first in her arborous house in Lahore for a documentary on South Asia (sponsored by the Indian foreign ministry), and a few days ago, when I visited her as a doting pilgrim, Tahira Mazhar Ali had not changed. Well into her eighties she remains an indefatigable campaigner for the underdog. She ushered me to an airy room with old books and pictures of her family, which includes a few illustrious journalists. This was the same room where she had spoken to me on television about the vital need for India and Pakistan to join hands to improve the lot of their people.
This was also the room, she revealed this time, where she had comforted Benazir Bhutto when her father was going to be hanged. She recalled the dramatic moments that ensued, allowing the narrative to be interspersed with an easy smile or an elaborate pause.
“When she drove up, I saw two other cars following her. I said to myself, this girl is in trouble. They were police cars. During lunch I held her arm and said to her, ‘Benazir, they have come to take you. But you don’t get upset. Just take your time and eat well.’ And she ate very calmly after that,” recalled Tahira Mazhar Ali. After what must be the longest luncheon meeting of its kind it was time to face the inevitable moment.
As they headed for the door, she held Benazir’s arm again and whispered words of solidarity and comfort. “As she sat in her car, I looked at the two cars behind. They remained motionless. After a hundred excited bye byes, when she finally sped off and disappeared from sight, the two men from the police cars walked up to me. They said politely, ‘Bibi we have come to take you.’”
Tahira Mazhar Ali has been to prison a few times to uphold her idealism and also to motivate her fellow comrades. This particular outing was going to be longer. I think she stayed six months or so. Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote a moving poem on Bhutto’s execution, which he sent her to read.
“By then, I had befriended all the women from the so-called criminal cell. They were lovely women — unlettered but emancipated women, and mostly victims of their circumstances. They openly admitted to killing a husband or some other relative or a neighbour and said they would do it again to defend themselves from their savagery. One early morning we (the political women prisoners) woke up to a lot of wailing from the other cells. Bhutto my son, Bhutto my brother, Bhutto my father, they were screaming. Shouts in rustic Punjabi of long live Bhutto rent the prison walls. They were all acutely political women in their own way.”
But for her sense of humour and an even more defined sense of the absurd Tahira Mazhar Ali could be mistaken for a stubborn rabble-rouser. One day when she decided to read out the poem on Bhutto to the inmates, they thought it was a letter from home.
“They all clapped indulgently at every line I read. When the poem was over and we dispersed, a woman walked up to me and asked very earnestly if the person whose lines I had read was my close relative. She confessed she had not understood a word of it, but the trouble I took to read it suggested that somehow this was a letter from home. So they cheered at every inflection and pause.
“These women had never heard of Faiz, nor did they care for his poetry. They merely cheered me because they thought it was a letter from home and I was feeling lonely. And yet there was never a night when we did not hear them sing Bulleh Shah in their prison cells. They sang him and wept copiously as they sang for so many days during my incarceration. When I told Faiz how the women inmates preferred Bulleh Shah to him, he had a hearty laugh and asked me to write about it. Now that was a tall order. I don’t like to write.”
That’s not entirely true of course. As recently as in May I found a letter written quite spontaneously to this newspaper. It was a simple, old-fashioned communist’s admonishment of the way things had turned out thanks to the betrayal by those she had expected better from. Punjab that had fed the rest of India was going hungry, she protested. Her outrage flowed from six decades of engagement with the peasants’ movements, of grassroots work for educating women and fighting for their still largely elusive political and social rights.
When the world grieved over Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Tahira Mazhar Ali felt a mixture of pain and anger at the loss — pain because she knew Benazir had cared for her people, angry because she saw her straying from the path that took her to the people.
“I couldn’t believe that her last speech was entirely addressed to the American patrons. Had she solved the problem of poverty and hunger of the people that she had moved to a new agenda? No. She still needed to fulfil the promises made by her father. Now, after her there’s no one else who will.”
Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan reminds me of a few valiant women the Indian subcontinent has produced. There is a glimpse of the late Kalpana Joshi (nee Dutt) who was accused of terrorism and imprisoned by the British. I once travelled with Kalpana Joshi in a DTC bus in Delhi when she was going to buy fish. With her simple anecdotal conversation, the octogenarian Marxist could convince a hardboiled cynic into believing that meaningful social changes were nigh.
She also reminds me of Arundhati Roy in a way, because both are sceptical about the efficacy of NGOs when the need really is for a wider political mobilisation. But most of all she reminds me of Fidel Castro of recent days. Someone asked the Cuban leader amid the rubble of the Soviet Union in 1991, why he liked to stick out like a sore thumb with bristling idealism when everyone else had accepted moderation. His reply was simply withering: “As the world moves to the right, I look that much more of a leftist by simply remaining where I was.”
Tahira Mazhar Ali is like a character out of Brecht who refuses to budge from her belief in the undulating dialectics of life. She may not be part of the India-Pakistan radar about visas. But her house in Lahore is always worth a pilgrimage.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
