BUREAUCRATS wed twice — to a natural spouse, and also to an extracurricular distraction.
One was reminded of this intellectual infidelity when reading a volume of modern (ie, post-revolution) Persian poetry — Honeyed Poison — translated by a Pakistani diplomat, Malik M. Danish. A graduate from Lums, Punjab University and Georgetown University, Danish is the latest in a line of officials who will be remembered for their literary contributions.
One could begin with names like the Mughal emperor Akbar’s wazir Abul Fazl. He spent his spare hours chronicling his master’s court and its functions. Closer in time and to home, though, is the 19th-century engineer Kanhaiya Lal. He worked in the Public Works Department for 30 years before retiring as superintendent engineer in 1885.
His legacies to the architectural visage of Lahore have survived time — Government College, Montgomery and Lawrence Halls, the then Mayo School of Arts, to name a few. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’. (If you seek [his] monument, look around you.) Kanhaiya Lal’s equally enduring achievement is his book Tareekh-i-Lahore, first published in 1884 (a year before his retirement), and republished many times.
Not all bureaucrats can disguise ‘their expressive part’.
Since then, there have been Syed Muhammad Latif’s magisterial histories of the Punjab (1891) and of Lahore (1892). Latif’s official responsibilities, though, were as an extra-judicial assistant commissioner.
Lepel Griffin (once chief secretary Punjab, 1880) assembled the genealogies of the Punjab chiefs in 1890). In it, he sifted the proof of research from the fiction of family legends. (His modern counterpart — the former high commissioner to Pakistan Sir Nicholas Barrington — absorbed himself in Islamabad, pruning the family trees of Pakistan’s prominent families.)
Sir Charles Aitchison, even while lieutenant governor of the Punjab, found the time to compile his 11-volume Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sanads relating to India and neighbouring Countries (1862-1892). Subsequent research into Punjab’s history continued with the History of the Panjab Hill States by another official, J. Hutchison, and his colleague, J Ph. Vogel (1933).
More recently, Dr M.S. Randhawa (an ICS officer), Parsi lawyer Karl Khandalavala and Dr B.N. Goswamy (who left the ICS for academia), through their seminal researches brought painting done in the Punjab hills into the plains of the art world’s consciousness. Some like G. Mueenuddin (once of the ICS, later our chief negotiator in the Indus Waters Treaty) had much to tell, if only his pen had not been so shy.
Every retired bureaucrat in Pakistan feels impelled to publish their version of a history they could not prevent. They believe that their book — whether a biography or an autobiography — will ensure them the bronze of recognition, if not the gold of immortality. Not all can disguise (to paraphrase American poet and essayist Mark Strand) that ‘their expressive part [was] rather tedious — never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving’.
Strand foresaw perhaps the recent publication of memoirs by a former bureaucrat, responsible in the 1990s for the ingenious yellow cab and yellow tractor schemes, and later the squalid birth of the IPPs.
There was a time when bureaucrats saw themselves as modern Medicis — patrons of the arts. B.A. Kureishi and Mukhtar Masood spring to mind. Which one of their successors today would expend their energies on restoring the Lahore museum?
Kureishi sponsored Sadequain there as an artist in residence. Squirrelled in the museum’s basement, Sadequain produced many inimitable masterpieces. His tour de force — its painted ceiling — has become Lahore’s distant echo of the Sistine chapel.
Who today would commission two of Pakistan’s greats — Sadequain and Sha-kir Ali — to paint a mural, each in his unique style? They hang in the Punjab Public Library, a contest using brushes, a visual bait bazi between Akbar’s singer Tansen, and his rival Baiju Bawra.
Malik Danish found his Persian muse in a language teacher at Jhelum and then in Dr Athar Masood, a fellow bureaucrat with a passion for Persian poetry. Danish is a brave scholar to venture into Persian poetry when the very word ‘Iran’ releases thunderbolts of sanctions from Washington, D.C.
If one had to isolate a few stanzas from among Danish’s 20 poets — the ‘frightened flowers’ in a traumatised Iran — they would be from Mehdi Akhavan-e-Sales’ Lament. He speaks for every Iranian and Pakistani: “My house has caught fire, a deadly fire/ which is burning the engravings/ I etched with my heart’s blood.”
Or Qeyser Aminpour’s moving advice on behalf of fellow authors to readers everywhere: “My hairs are turning white/ as pages of my book are turning black.” He concludes: “Read my works/ Dot by dot/ Word by word/ Line by line/ and count the verses in my Divan/ Hair by Hair.”
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2024
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.