Memoirs of Three Continents: I Tell You the Truth and Nothing but the Truth

By Mirza Saeed-Uz Zafar Chaghrai

Prof. Mirza Saeed-Uz Zafar Chaghtai is a renowned scholar, scientist and author of many books in various languages. He looks back at adventures that have spanned thousands of miles and included some of the worlds most remarkable people.

With candor and humor, he outlines his social, political, and religious beliefs and shares insights on scientific and literary life in India, Europe, the United States of America, and elsewhere.

His rise to the top of the scholarly community began in a small town in British India and brought him to Paris, London, Sweden and various places throughout the world, where he shared ideas with distinguished scientists, Nobel laureates, men of letters and many exemplary people.

From rural and feudal British India to pragmatic and modern Europe, he honed his understanding of the world and, at times, went through personal, social, political, religious, scientific, and literary upheavals before returning home enthused to work for his people as a scholar and scientist.

Scholars, history buffs, and anyone eager to learn about people and places, especially India and Europe through the turn of the century, will be inspired and educated by Memoirs of Three Continents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781462056385

Mirza Saeed-Uz Zafar Chaghrai

Mirza Saeed-Uz Zafar Chaghtai was educated at the Universities of Lucknow, Paris, and Lund. An Atomic Spectroscopist and Professor of Physics, he has also taught French. He enjoys traveling, reading and writing books in various languages including poetry. He lives in Aligarh, India.

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Copyright © 2015 Atomic Spectroscopist, Aligarh Prof of Physics,French Teacher,

Urdu Author and Poet,Reads ten languages,Translated Sartre and Iqbal.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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CONTENTS

PART 1: CRYSTALLIZED

1 Daryabād

2 Faizabād

LUCKNOW

3 Historic Lucknow

4 Lucknow Christian College

5 Jehāngirābad Palace

The Yagaana Affair

6 Qaazi Khursheed Ahmad

7 Molviganj and Aminabad

7.1 Ganga Prasad Memorial Hall

8 Chowdhary Abd-us-Sattaar

8.1 Haazil

8.2 Najmi

9 Lucknow University

9.1 Achaarya Narendra Dev

9.2 D.P. Mukherji

9.3 A Palmist/Astrologer

9.4 Department Of Statistics

9.5 Department Of Mathematics

9.6 Physics Department

9.7 Tagore Library

10 Summer in Allahabad

11 Sugarcane Commisioner’s Office

12 Post Graduation in Physics

13 Dr. B.G. Gokhale and Research in X-Rays

14 Subhash Hostel

14.1 My Marriage

15 Gorakhpur

16 Farewell Gorakhpur and India

17 ELDERS

17.1 Ali –Mian

17.2 Ansari, Uncle Hafeez

17.3 Asar Lucknowi

17.4 Baari, Maulana Abd-Ul

17.5 Bannerji, A. C.

17.6 Chatterji, A. C.

17.7 Gandhi, M.K.

17.8 Hussain, Uncle Mirza Aabid

17.9 Maajid, Maulana Abd-ul

17.10 Masjidi-Begum

17.11 Nehru, Jawaharlal

18 FRIENDS

18.1 Aazmi, Iftekhar

18.2 Achaarya

18.3 Bannerjis

18.4 Karaja, Yousuf Saaleh

18.5 Punhani, Sudershan

18.6 Warsi, Aijaz Ahmad

PART 2: RECRYSTALLIZED

1 First Glimpse of Paris

1.1 Bordeaux

1.2 Initiation to Paris Life

1.3 Orsay

1.4 What a Maddening Summer

2 Mount Saint Michel

2.1 Other Tours

2.2 Maheshwari and Nigam

3 The New Academic Year (1963-64)

3.1 Levi’s Courses on Theoretical Physics

3.2 B. G. Gokhale arrives

4 Aix-en Provence

5 Another Tale of Two Cities

5.1 London in Summer 1977

6 Life in Cité Universitaire

6.1 Misraji

6.2 Dr. Vasudev Singh

6.3 Laila

6.4 Association of Indian Students in Paris

7 45 Days in USA

7.1 Upper Arlington Park

7.2 Indo-Pak War of 18 days (Sept 65)

8 Club Des Quatre Vents

8.1 Club Universitaire and Maxim Sourie

9 On Cinema

10 Guest in my Own House

11 Experimental Progress in the Laboratory

12 My First Five Weeks in Sweden

13 In Orsay Again

13.1 6-Day Arab-Israel War

14 1968 Movement

15 L’aile De Gabriel

15.1 Maxim Rodinson

16 In Lund University

16.1 December in Paris – Disillusion

16.2 Back to Lund

16.3 Merriam Zenzi Makeba (1932-2008)

16.4 Taage Erlander

16.5 First EGAS Conference

16.6 Basheer

16.7 Summer Job

16.8 Vännersborg

17 Towards a Renewed Life

18 Elders

18.1 Bengt Edlén (1906-94)

18.2 Shaadan, Inaayat Hussain

18.3 Lateefi

19 Friends

19.1 Balouch Ishaq

19.2 Macky

19.3 Oberoy

19.4 Underbrink, Frank Kei th

19.5 Labigne, Françoise

PART 3: ALIGARH YEARS

1 Early Days

2 Bangladesh Created

3 Teachers Association

4 Salaam ICTP

5 Vice Chancellors of the 70’s

5.1 Abd-Ul-Aleem

5.2 K. A. Nizāmi

5.3 Ali Mohamad Khusro

5.4 M. Shafi

6 Patiala

6.1 The Sikh Affair

7 Some Family Affairs

7.1 Kailanagar

7.2 Ishrat Weds Mahmoud

7.3 Soraya Weds

8 Travel To Pakistan

9 Other Notable Vice Chancellors & Events

9.1 Saiyed Haamid

9.2 Hashim Ali

9.3 Biennial Conference On Atomic Physics

9.4 Naseem Farooqi

9.5 Mahmoud-ur Rahman

9.6 Selection Committees for Physics Teachers

10 Some Practical Experiences

11 Months in England and America

12 A Week in Dubai

13 Affair with Computer

14 Glimpses of Latin America

15 China from Within

15.1 First Glimpse

15.2 China Again

16 The Movement Of Muslim Preachers

17 My Maternal Relatives

18 PERSONALITIES

18.1 Intellectual Evolution of the Mental Traveler Maulana Aazaad (1888-1958)

18.2 Surgeon Naseem Ansari

18.3 Remembering A.A. Suroor (1911-2002)

18.4 Izhar Husain

18.5 Moin Ahsan Jazbi

18.6 Qazi Abdus Sattaar

18.7 Aslub Ahmad Ansari

18.8 Doctor Samee Hameed

18.9 Hāmid Bhaï

18.10 Naseem Quraishi

18.11 Zaidi Family

18.12 Manzar Safi

18.13 Farrukh Jalaali

Conclusion

Family Pictures

Glossary

Dedicated to the memories of

Maulana Abdul Maajid Daryabādi (1892-1977)

Philosopher, Psychologist, Literary critic, Essayist, Stinging Satirist, Journalist,

Commentator of the Holy Qur’aan, Yet a Romantic, Fallible Human

Professor Bengt Edlén (1906-93)

who developed Atomic Spectroscopy as a prime field of research, and applied

it to discover properties of the Sun and other stars.Everything good I contributed to this field is due to his patronage.

and

Professor Yvelle Cauchois (1908-99)

Inventor, X-ray Spectroscopist who supported my stay in Paris for five and half years

I kiss the feet of the saint and the lesser saint

(Ram Charitre Maanus)

My father

Mirza Mohammad Naazir Baig Chaghtai (1908-80)

My Teachers

Neither disdain the East, nor shun the West

(Iqbal)

Human needs of people everywhere are the same: to alleviate poverty, to educate the masses and polish their talent, to remove prejudice and control exploitation. These are the main aims; differences because of climate and traditions of the past are secondary in this evolving and compacting world.

(Dr. Walker)

Preface

The first part of these memoirs covers the childhood and early boyhood I lived at my hometown Daryabād: three years of early adolescence in the city of Faizabād, nine formative years of early youth at Lucknow, and less than two years of my first teaching appointment at Gorakhpur. Then I left for Europe, not yet twenty-seven years of age, in search of exposure to a different civilization and its scientific laboratories. I had matured enough by that time to form a confident view of life and ethics. This crystallization of my personality confronted with the dynamism of Europe, melted and recrystallized over the course of time, imbibing a broader and pragmatic world vision of science, society and literature. This maturation of my personality is the subject matter of the second part. The third part covers my forty years at Aligarh.

The reader will hopefully also evolve mentally throughout the book, observing and experiencing with the author, shocks that accelerate the process; he will travel through the great sweep in Space from the rural and feudal India of 1940’s to France progressing under President Charles De Gaulle– a political colossus– and in Time from the hey-day of the British Empire to the Independent World of the late 1960’s. One full chapter deals with the evolution of the French Fifth Republic and culminates in my eye witness account of the 1968 Revolutionary Days. Another unique feature of this book consists of describing Life in Science Laboratories and their personal politics not uncommon anywhere; Julian Huxley has touched it for Biology in his ‘Memories’. I hope to provide the reader more of it on Physics in the coming volumes.

This volume differs from other biographies; it tells about the contemporary world that I observed rather than only my own life. In this respect it is more an anti-memoir, as André Malreaux wrote. Students of History will enjoy pertinent information on four Indian and two European cities, particularly the chapter on ‘Historic Lucknow’, putting together results of a long spread out research. The joys of Upper Arlington Park in Columbus, Ohio, may not be overlooked.

In penning these pages, I have preferred English to my parental language, Urdu, because I think they deserve a wider readership, and that the readership has a right to participate in my experience. I cannot address the French reader directly as, ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for the last four decades, I have lost my bridges and boats to France.

This description in the first person preserves the raw facts as observed. The interested reader may supplement them on Daryabād and India by an earlier account, published in Urdu as ‘Sahar ke Pahle Aur Baad’ (Delhi 1991), which is to appear in English as ‘The Dawn, before and after’; but in that, I have fictionalized the main venue of happenings and a few personalities.

Acknowledgement

Madame Suzanne BUSSAC (Loulay, France, deceased 2012) provided me pertinent literature on current French affairs, and read this text before publication to offer her brief comments rapping startling encouragement. For that I thank her heartily.

I owe my profound gratitude to Mrs. Scheherazade Alim (Oxford) for the enormous amount of time she has spent in civilizing my expressions. Prof. Waqar Hasan has provided to this writing some most pertinent words and excellent expressions; he has also corrected a number of factual errors that had deceived my memory. For that he may accept my great appreciation.

Attorney Leslie Riley has gratified me by taking care of the American idiom. I gratefully acknowledge the constructive suggestions of the publishers Editorial Board, and I would appreciate reader’s comments and suggestions for improving eventual future editions. And, last but not the least to my son, Asad.

Introduction

The basic theme of this book is that the human nature is essentially the same everywhere. The world of perception began for me in the early 1940’s, when World War II was raging in Europe, North Africa and the Far East. Meanwhile India, far remote, was living in peace, seldom exuding enthusiasm for freedom from British rule.

Mine was a lower middle class family, living in a town of four thousand people on a small landed property that the head of the family supplemented through a minor white-collar job. Indo-Persian culture ruled our society, Hindus and Muslims mixed; the ethos of the former being soaked more in old Indian tradition baked into Sanskrit and Pali literature.

I was the lone child in the family of either parent; my father’s widowed sister, more than a decade older, was the only living sibling, with no first cousins. The presence in the vicinity of two related families, including one in the Bara Ghar (neighboring Big House destined to be my in-laws’), provided me with many boys and girls to play with. Being the only son of the family, my parents and grandparents thought of educating me to a level apparently beyond their means. I succeeded at it because, though not a University topper, I was not a bad student, and earned many scholarships and bursaries over the course of time. I owe my academic career in Physics to the Indian government’s general support of scientific and non-scientific research, leading me to study in France, and learn more languages than I could otherwise afford at indigenous facilities. Reading paved my way to writing prose and poetry in my mother tongue, as well as translating literature from Urdu into French and from French and English into Urdu.

From childhood, I happened to take any given tradition with a pinch of salt, doubting what others told or taught me, comparing it with what they actually did, until experience confirmed or refuted the claim. My mind, and hence my personality, went on evolving, choosing and rejecting all the time. By the time I came to Europe, I had formed a world view with great confidence, and stuck to it for quite some time. Then I started realizing that I was losing some thing, which kept growing, till my crystallized approach melted, and for a period I remained suspended in a vacuum, sure of nothing.

A recrystallization began thereafter; I did not let it solidify immediately, but took time to verify it, repeating the experience to and fro. After seven years, I returned to India for good; new national and international realities did impress me, but they did not change the course of my thinking substantially. Since then I have continued to believe in basic human values, that there are good and bad people everywhere and that we should base our assessment on pure merit.

There is a common illusion that academic life is pure as gold and transparent as a crystal. On entering into scientific laboratories, I found there all the characteristics of life in general: ups and downs, favors and disfavors, politics, intrigue, rivalries, jealousy, groupism, personal considerations, exploitation and the rest; the smaller an institute, the worse these characteristics are. A worker flourishes on his talents and depth of knowledge of course, but his survival also calls for worldly wisdom, give and take, compromise, and ability to handle back biting and blackmail. Within my limits, I have had my due in the initial stage of my career at Lucknow, in the middle of it or so, and in the finale at Aligarh. I have waded through the mud on my way; others have followed their way, and will continue doing that in the future.

In my early days, the concept of Divine Will dominated our society. We were only pawns and pieces on the chess board of existence; everybody acted a part according to the written script, from which no one had the power to deviate, nor to improve one’s lot. Hindu and Buddhist philosophers have analogized it to the theory of rebirth; but Muslim divines have their own way of convincing us of it, prohibiting rational thought and reason, logic and science, and above all free thinking. Doomsday loomed large and near, showing its signature very frequently. Developments in independent countries have blown up that nihilism, but I very much remember how it was difficult in those days to refute the general theory of our impotence, total ignorance and inexistence in face of the Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnipresence!

Human beings are still conditioned, not totally free to act or choose. But that is the existential situation, where the law of probability dominates. According to J.P. Sartre, anybody has the first choice free, but the first choice conditions the second one, and the first two choices condition the third even more.

Wider contacts in our ever shrinking world have made us more tolerant, for which there was no room in the orthodoxy of any sort; to the extent we lend our ears to hear and our memory to store a foreign idea, to that very extent our belief in the uniqueness of only our truth weakens. All of us are, therefore, knowingly or unwittingly, becoming lesser believers every day.

I don’t claim to provide to the reader an ultimate light, but only that which life has told me, that experience– ours or of others– which makes us wiser. And I am here with mine.

PART 1

Crystallized

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Daryabād

DEARER THAN SOLOMON’S KINGDOM

(Childhood: Primary and Middle Schools)

Image59165.jpg

The dust of homeland is dearer than Solomon’s kingdom

A thorn of homeland overvalues drooping willows and ocimum pilosum

Joseph, while he ruled Egypt as a king

Preferred himself to be a beggar in Cana’an

One pleasant afternoon when I had grown enough to venture alone outside the house, I returned home after loitering for a couple of hours, flowers in hand, which I had picked from the back garden of Bara Ghar. In all excitement I called out to my mother loudly on entering the house only to find her lying, fainted, on a cot in the open area of the house under the growing shadows. Phoophi (my father’s elder sister) lovingly chided me for my absence while my mother took ill. I sat by her and never had I found her so beautiful and so perfect a woman. She regained consciousness in a while and I learned decades later that she had reacted instantly to a letter some spinster had addressed to my father. She, the lady of the house, opened it in his absence and read it to find that a spinster had sought through it my father’s help so as not to marry against her will. Coercion by parents was considered normal, not only then but now in Indian society, even against a son weak in decision, will or socio-economic status living in India or abroad. Only upon my return from Europe could I successfully intervene in favor of a female student of mine with her mother.

Father did not get the letter, but the two isolated ladies found it shocking in itself an unmarried woman writing to a man and on an intimate subject. I remember Trevor Huxley, in his late teens, committed suicide on finding himself unable to act in a similar situation; Julian Huxley has eulogized his younger brother’s reaction in his Memories¹ in so many words. But, apprised of it at the right moment, whether my poor father, Naazir Mirza, would have kept mum or intervened with the parents of the young girl, I cannot imagine. I remember at this juncture what Qudrat-ullah Shahab has described² to have done against a Pir (divine) under his jurisdiction as a Collector in the Punjab when he received such a supplication.

This episode happened in a town of fifteen thousand inhabitants called Daryabād and situated at 81°33’ latitude East and 26°53’ longitude North, midway between the cities of Lucknow and Faizabād, the ancient capitals of Avadh (Oudh) an autonomous principality in eighteenth and nineteenth century (1728-1859 AD) south of the Nepal Kingdom. Full of monsoon forests, the region was the abode of the nomad Bhaŕ tribe, which gave its name to the district and city of Bahra’ich (Bhaŕ-reich) north of the river Ghāgra (Gogra), and to Bhaŕuch at the delta of river Narbada (nar-māda) north of Bombay (now Mumbai).

Darya Khan Lodi was Governor of Sambhal about 1450 AD, when, during the rule of Mahmood Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur, he founded Daryabād and built a fortress around it; a Hindu town called ‘Daridravād’ existed at this place since well before the end of the first millennium. Bakhtiar Khilji attacked and annexed Bengal to the empire of Delhi in 1246, inciting exodus from Gaur. Of that, a number of prominent Kāesth families settled in Daridravād in the thirteenth century because their relatives had already lived there for more than a hundred years. Most of the settlers left the town five hundred years later; but the old Kāesth families, still living in Daryabād, assimilated the rest and have a long ancestry there.

In due course, the town grew, becoming a center of commerce and communication, with wide roads that multi-storied buildings bordered, along with small houses of cultivators, artisans and craftsmen in abundant variety. Brij Bhookan Mohib, historian of Daryabād, gives its dimensions during the Moghal empire and the Avadh dynasty, when it rose to district and divisional headquarters, as two and half miles in length east-west by a mile in breadth north-south; now it is limited to about one square mile. Mohib enumerates its eight inns, four dharmasālas (ancient rest houses), five wholesale and seven retail markets, fifty mohallās (localities) and thirty-four gates; out of them two extended markets and nineteen localities survive in a way to this day.

The old Lucknow-Faizabād concrete road has turned muddy due to neglect through a century. On it, I have witnessed dilapidated Avadh-styled two-storey gates of the town dug away after Independence, the west gate in 1950’s and the east gate in 1960’s; probably Roshanlal had built them. Mohib mentions some palaces and mansions too, the most imposing of which stood near the east gate in the eighteenth century, of which the owner, Singaee Sah Jain, was said to possess legendary amount of wealth. The mansion has left no trace, and I do not know whether Sah lived there or whether it was a pure myth³.

At present the old 13 x 7m² hall of the Friday mosque on 1.5m thick robust walls under a solid 10m high dome is the oldest surviving monument, which dates to pre-Moghal period perhaps to fifteenth century; the hall has three low doors on the east. During the last ten years, people have built a four-meter wide veranda in front of these doors and two 5-stage minarets on its east corners, extending the open space east of the veranda further. In old documents it is called ‘Mosque of the Fort’, implying that the now extinct Fort covered this mosque, possibly along the elevation of about 150x100 square meters west, on which stand the Post Office, the local hospital and the middle school; the latter could have been old Tehsil Bungalow, and the chain of ponds on the west and south of the Middle School terrain, the fort ditch.

Adjacent to the demolished west gate, there are still remnants of a rest house or inn (Sarāe) where the poet Mīr Taqi Mīr finished one of his narratives in verse (Mathnavi). Half a kilometer further up the west side a vast pond, with steps down the four sides and a building on its north west–all in well baked bricks–reminds us of its builder Lala Roshanlal, Divān of Asif-ud-Daula (1750-98), Nawab of Avadh (1775-98)⁴.

Daryabād finds mention in many books of history like Āiné-Akbari, Tareekh Ghadre Avadh, Bostan Avadh, Afzal-ut Tawareekh and Muntakheb-ut Tavareekh. Waajib-ul Arz Daryabād and Barābanki Gazetteer provide important information on it. At the beginning of the British Empire in North India, Daryabād was still a district. Around 1863, headquarters moved to Nawabganj, and the district was renamed Barābanki about 1872; the sub-division (tehsil) shifted to the newly named Shameargunj, later called Ram Sanéhi Ghat in 1882. Atlases listed Daryabād on maps of India until recently; ‘Daryabādi’ appears on the ‘Avadh’ map of Col. I.B. Genbil’s 1770 Atlas of the Mughal Empire.⁵

The Daryābad, where my mother, Rābia Ummé-Salma Begum (1909-91), gave birth to me on the 13th of May, 1936, was a town of only six thousand inhabitants equally divided between Hindus and Muslims, living together in peace and harmony under the control of coexisting small and medium size feudal communities. Some inhabitants ran small businesses as tradesmen or artisans; a large number of them labored on cultivation or civil construction, or performed household services. There also lived a percentage of the population in abject poverty, looking for small charities to survive.

My father Mirza Naazir Baig (1908-80) inherited three small pieces of agricultural land, totaling in area about 1.3 hectares. In order to make ends meet, he rejoined Rāja Aijaz Rasool (d. May 1947) of Jehāngīrabād Estate as his private secretary, Mukhtār–e Ām and/or Zilaidār, after a break of many years; he only stayed home, therefore, on alternate weekends or so. Aijaz Rasool was an aristocrat of rare distinction, keeping very close relations with the British Governor of UP, whoever he may be. To fulfill his wishes without frowning was an unofficial duty of every Barābanki Collector.

After their marriage in 1927, my mother lived in a modest old house with her mother-in-law⁶ barely two hundred meters from her parents. Hafiz Khwaja Ali Ahmad (1889-1948) visited his only daughter daily, before cycling to the sub-registrar’s office at tehsil headquarters, where he wrote documents, and when he returned home. When I was born, my father was away, and my maternal grandfather bore all his responsibilities.

A neat and clean Government hospital ran in Daryabād under the control of an MBBS doctor assisted by a compounder. But there was no official midwife in those days and a private sage-woman delivered babies with dexterity. Thus I saw the first ray of sun in the afternoon of a Thursday on the 20th Safar 1355 of the Muslim lunar calendar (Hijri). Father gave me the name Saeeduzzafar, by using the numbers assigned to the Arabic alphabets of my birth dates, which total (60+70+10+4+1+30+900+80+200 = 1355.

Khwaja Ali Ahmad was more than six feet tall and lean; his wife Fatima Begum (1891-1961), a first cousin, was a huge figure, very active and dominant despite her bulk. It was the advantage of listening less to her running commentary that drew Ali Ahmad to social service. Their fathers⁷ were brothers whose ancestors lived in the village Aidha-Barha of District Gonda but moved to Faizabād/Ajodhya (Ayodhya or Avadh) in the infancy of the two brothers. When their sister⁸ married Shāhjehān Begum`s father, she brought her youngest brother, Ahmad Mir, to Daryabād with her.

My paternal grandfather Mirza Mohammad Baig ‘Nadeem’ (d 1931) lived in the town of Mahōna (Dist. Lucknow), spending the days he spared from his job at Jehāngirabād in the house of his in-laws at Daryabād. He was an authority on traditional Persian literature, and composed poetry in Urdu and Persian, often reproducing dates in his verses. I preserved his divān in manuscript form, partly calligraphed and partly written in his elegant handwriting. His uncle¹⁰ left behind for us, among others, a number of elegies (marthiyas) in print. My father was not a poet, but displayed a command of Urdu and Persian as a family tradition, had a good knowledge of the English language, practiced advanced arithmetic and mensuration, and learnt reading and writing Hindi in Nāgri script after the independence of India. Āisha Begum (1893–1966), father`s only surviving sibling about fifteen years his elder, recited to us extempore, hundreds of Urdu couplets and occasionally Persian verses too. I have described her wits in some detail elsewhere¹¹. Āisha Begum, as well as her two elder sisters and two younger brothers, one of which was older than my father, left no child, while Shabban, the only child of Āisha Begum, died in infancy.

Āisha Begum used to talk of a certain Mohammad Ali Athar considered the only equal in learning to my grandfather; ‘Athar’ was his pen name, as Hakīm Rafiuzzaman specified to me. He also told me of Athar’s rare, though modest, possessions, like a glass bottle inside of which his name was calligraphed beautifully. Ali Athar was a native of some other town and came to Daryabād in the early twentieth century as a tutor for the young Abdul Majid. Then he settled down there never to return. He was, I guess, a bachelor, as the well-known Islamist Dr. Mohammad Hamīdullah of Paris had been, of whom I shall talk later.

Regarding our surname or titles, the name of a descendent of Moghol nobles usually begins with Mirza as title and ends with Beg (Baig), but the practice has varied in course of time. Chaghta’i (Çagatay, Jagatay or Chagatayee) constitutes only a particular Moghol tribe with sub-tribes and sub-titles. The oral tradition tells us (because most of our family documents perished in Mahōna) that our paternal ancestors were Barlās (Berlās) Chagatayees. Men of our tribe are sparse; families survive in India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Central Asia, of course, of which many newly independent republics call one of their national languages ‘Jagatay’, where I read ‘J’ as ‘ch’. There are many more people in India who claim to be Moghol and live in isolation, in mixed societies, in pockets or in their exclusive villages like ‘Daih’ Moghalān, which is now a locality of the town Fatehpur in District Bārabanki. For the sake of brevity, individuals drop titles and re-adopt them as they feel convenient. A recent trend consists of putting Mirza at the end of the name as surname.

In my infancy, gran’ma took Mother to Faizabād for some internal treatment leaving me behind in the care of Āisha Begum, Father’s fifteen year older widow sister whom he had brought back to Daryabād with a teenage niece of her slain husband from Unnao. Despite the best treatment they gave me, I still remember pangs of separation from my mother till Father took me to her. Remembering that, now I realize what Marcel Proust has described of his childhood experience¹²! Of that visit, I find two glimpses in memory: the clean and peaceful district hospital of Faizabād where mother was under treatment and Zahra Begum, the elder sister of gran’ma, thin unlike her, stately, and kind who gave me a quartz prism, of which I still remember the six cylindrical sides and the two tapering ends. Soon after enjoying its rainbow colors for the first time, I left it somewhere and pined for it all my life. Nor did I see Zahra Begum again!

I do not remember what toys I played with in early childhood. When I was a boy my father brought for me a number of spinning tops of different sizes and shapes. Ones long and sturdy enough to hit the ground hard from a height of a meter or more, in the process unwinding the string from around their cones grooved spirally, before whirling and buzzing wildly like bumble bees. One’s low and wide, excavated at the top to increase the moment of inertia, hence the dancing period, exhibiting to their satisfaction the bright multi-color rings on the concave; these we flung horizontally with a jerk to unwind and dance like a colorful little girl or a male peacock. I remember how the peacock, our neighbor’s pet, used to come to entertain me as a child of four years or so on the vast elevation (Chabootra) in front of our houses. My ears still cherish the masculine music of his call. In school I was never good in drawing and painting. But earlier I practiced drawing and painted him in color so much that it is a pity some of my childhood peacocks, alive on paper, did not survive. This leads me further to record the obsession As’ad, my son, developed as a school child in 1970’s with horses. His brush could vividly paint them in any pose.

At my times in Daryabād I witnessed nothing in the making and flying of kites comparable in talent, novelty and expertise to what Mirza Ja`afar Hussain¹³ has described or what we still witness on or around a bank of the river Thames in London on a bright summer afternoon. I do remember that at the advent of the rainy season, the summer got mild, and paper kites appeared in the sky in numbers, involving air skirmishes to cut the rival under mooring and fall down, like the people of a decadent disarranged country, fighting among them easy prey to the strong. I did not have the age and experience to fly my own fighters, nor had I, on growing less fragile, time to cultivate the necessary skill. Father, however, provided me with a number of kites and a big reel of the appropriate string, so that someone flew one of them for me on a calm afternoon, avoiding an eventual attack from a jealous neighbor. That gave me a feel for aviation: the tension of the string, the sense of responsibility in the open air and the soothing effect it produced on my eyes to gaze into the fathomless blue for a while in leisure. There were often additional living spots of different sizes filling the field of view at their sweet will.

My father had cultivated a few talents for the fun of it like kite making and book binding. Beyond that I remember buying kites from Alli (Ali) Khan’s Obi, a phenomenon that lived and died with Alli Khan. Behind Khan’s house lay a piece of land where he grew vegetables in abundance. He enclosed it within a two-meter high mud wall without a door or window. Within, he ran his workshop of kites in variety and we negotiated with him through a temporary bridge he had thrown over the wall running inside as a roofed gallery.

Father smoked on average three cigarettes per day of the mild Passing Show, Scissor or Berkley brand. I collected the empty packets to build my ‘railway trains’ by sewing them sideways to bamboo sticks. Spokes could then be attached transversely at regular distances of length to hold wheels of clay baked in the hot ashes of the house oven. An erect matchbox led them as an engine. With a fastened string I dragged the train smoothly on the ground. That incited the fancy of a fellow boy in the Bara Ghar to produce a homemade steam engine. One holiday, our gang of four or five gathered at the edge of the pond that surrounded our houses beyond the sprawling back (rather than kitchen) garden, called ‘Pāinbaagh’, to collect the amount of mud necessary for the project. One of us slipped, sullying his trousers, and we spent the rest of the time returning him safe and unseen by the elders’ eyes. This episode I recall with the same thrill as my grandchildren, Haider and Amber, felt from running on circular plastic rails, their metallic train consisting of a passenger carriage and a goods bogie that a battery operated engine pulled at their Columbus, Ohio house in 2004.

Rudauli, east of Daryabād, is a famous town, noted for its leather work and the old shrine of Shah Abdul Haq, at which devotees celebrate his anniversary over many days. My grandfather visited it on that occasion every year, listened to qawali (traditional singing of mystic lyrics in Urdu, Persian and Hindi), rewarded singers handsomely in his ecstasy and returned with new samples of earthen pots. He took my father and me with him once when I was a little boy. On the way back home, he gave me a beautifully carved and painted kettle to carry in my hand. When we reached home I was so excited to show it to Mother that I struck it against the entrance door.

I was six years young old when Maulana Hāfiz Nizāmud-Deen formally initiated me into education at a small Bismillah ceremony in front of the town’s male gentry, entertained with Mithaee sweets, Agarwal incense and Muhammad Ali scents. Nizāmud-Deen had completed his oriental education in the historic seminary (madrasa) of Firangi Mahal at Lucknow and taught Arabic in the High School Nawabganj in District Gonda. He recited The Qur’aan with melodious distinction. Mother taught me to read and write Urdu, as well as addition, subtraction and some elementary tables. I doubted the veracity of what she told me till I found other teachers teaching the same thing later. She gave me lessons also in the traditional Baghdadi primer, which would lead to reading the Qur’aan without understanding, but I avoided that tasteless exercise as much as I could. Women were prisoners in their houses; my mother did not see her mother for months though they lived only two hundred meters from each other. I, as a child, could, of course, walk that distance alone. Gran’ma was unlettered and would often ask me what I learnt that day in the primer. I satisfied her curiosity by inventing absurd expressions at the spur of the moment.

On an auspicious day in 1943, gran’pa took me to the Islamia Primary School that Mohammad Naqi Khan, a saintly figure from our neighborhood (everybody called him Molvi Naqi) ran as Teacher Superior. The school provided five years of education starting with class zero and ending with four, which a local Board of Education examined. After a brief conversation, Molvi Naqi enrolled me in Class One, entered that date, the 4th September, as my birth date, and gave me one year’s advantage in age of retirement. The error I discovered in the year 1955-56 when, Surjeet Singh, a Sikh astrologer, fixed it factually as I have given here to straighten the record. In doing that, he consulted old calendars, tallied with oral family statements, as I remembered, and my personal name’s alphabetical digits. In the meanwhile, I had already stated my invented date of birth hundreds of times in writing. It had gotten inscribed on the basic document for our High School Certificate, and later, my passports would carry that same date. I have, therefore, been bound to state that date of birth on all formal documents to identify me.

From the next day onwards, our maid-servant, Gulshan, helped me carry the bag of books to school in the morning and bring it back home in the evening. This included a homemade cushion so that I did not sit on a bare plank that three boys shared. The teachers promoted me to class two in three months’ time, and there I still remember my thrill at seeing my division exercise ticked correct for the first time, thereby discovering the right procedure. Gulshan, even in middle age, was tough and healthy, never complaining of an ailment. Her main duties consisted of helping my mother in cleaning the utensils and feeding her sturdy and loud-mouthed husband from her most modest earning. I do not remember when and how she disappeared.

There was also a Basic Primary School in Daryabād, adjacent to the middle school at its west. That school taught spinning and weaving instead of Mufti Kifāyat-ullah’s primers on Muslim theology. Mahātma Gāndhi had introduced the former in the country through the recommendation of the Shārdha Commission on Primary Education under the Presidentship of Dr. Zakir Husain, who earlier served as Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, after Indian independence, and died as the President of the country. Husain had studied in Berlin and returned home at the start of the Second World War through Switzerland. There, in addition to earning a Doctorate in Economics, he published a selection of Ghalib’s Urdu poetry and translated, perhaps from its German translation, Alfonse Daudet’s ‘La Chèvre de Monsieur Séguin’ into Urdu prose as forceful as in the original French.

Jamal Yousuf, who became my brother–in-law fifteen years later, studied in Basic Primary School, spun cotton threads and sang ‘Bandai Matarum’, which Muslims disapprove of even today ‘because it deifies the country.’ His father, Hakeem Āfāq Baig, though politically a Muslim Leaguer, liked the mainstream education under the influence of Hayātullah Ansari, who had taught him at Firangi Mahal and who later earned fame as editor of the Urdu ‘Daily Qawmi Awaz’ and as a fiction writer.

In Class Three, Molvi Naqi taught us. He ran through the insipid theology primer part III fast to read to us, from the translation of The Qur’aan, the chapter on Joseph: The best story told. I cannot assess how much we followed him, but it did cast a very solemn spell on us. Naqi was an ideal teacher. He took care of the physical health of the children also and, in the absence of facilities for games and sports, arranged bouts of Indian wrestling in the school courtyard. He advised parents, among other beneficent deeds, to expose their children’s body to natural sun and breeze from time to time.

That very year Molvi Naqi left us on promotion to a middle school elsewhere. Ilahi Bakhsh replaced him from a neighboring village to face painful practical jokes from the final year students. He was a competent teacher but a stranger and could not equal the stature of his predecessor. One afternoon he led prayers in the nearby mosque and his resounding Allaho Akbar let boys giggle uncontrollably. Ilāhi Bakhsh was an unconventional and pretty enlightened man for his social set-up. He discouraged me using the notion of ‘slave of God’ or ‘of the Prophet’.

I was in the fourth and final year of the school when the Sub-deputy Inspector of Schools came inspecting. Those days we paid a small contribution to sports in our nominal fee. That collection enabled the school to entertain a visiting dignitary like him once in a blue moon. We put to him a written request for a football without result, evidently because at that time even he had no funds with him to spare.

The Second World War had a decisive phase by then; my father explained the situation with the help of maps and reports the newspapers published, but I understood nothing of it. When the schools reopened after summer vacation in 1945, the war had ended and Daryabād Middle School celebrated the victory of Allied Forces under the instruction of the district authorities. I was in the final year and our school presented an educational drama at the function. In it, Satan could fool an uneducated pious man but the educated one rebuffed him.

The political process of Indian Independence began immediately. The British National Government reached an arrangement with Indian leaders during the War. The economics of post-war Europe could not afford maintenance of colonies. The doctrine of the United States’ President Franklin D. Roosevelt of national government for every country in the post-war world also played a major role in this process. In British India, constituencies were separated between Hindus and Muslims in a population ratio of 3:1 with large variations from region to region. The Indian National Congress won almost all Hindu seats unopposed, but the Muslim League fought for Muslim constituencies tooth and nail. Election for the Viceroy Council took place first, in October 1945. Our Muslim constituency covered the twelve districts of Oudh, and only men and women of a certain status could vote; that included my would-be parents–in-law, but not my parents or grandparents. At the Daryabād polling station, the list of voters contained only thirty names and they exercised their franchise at their leisure. Mahārāja Ameer Ahmad Khan of Mahmoodabād, a gentle and generous leader of the Muslim League, trounced his Congress opponent; Daryabād voted 29 to 1.

Assembly elections for provinces, redesignated ‘states’ after independence in view of the partial autonomy granted to them in the Indian constitution, took place months later, in February 1946. They were lively, involving heat and dust. Posters and banners appeared, leaders traveled distances to lead processions and address meetings. Jawaharlal Nehru (1989-1964) came to Daryabād and spoke, while Maulāna Abdul Mājid (1892-1977) presided. The Muslim League candidate Jamāluddin Abdul Wahhāb, at his reported 26 years, looked very young, hardly of voting age; yet he won District Barābanki comfortably.

Parallel to these political developments, a short-lived public construction also took place in pre-independence Daryabād. Chowdhary Sirāj Ahmad Mijjay, a leaguer and practicing Hakeem at Bārabanki, used his personal influence on the newly arrived Deputy Commissioner to extract approval and money for a children’s park. The site was chosen opposite to the entrance to the Friday Mosque, on a strip of land that was expanded to the east. A roundabout and laddered, wavy slides were enclosed inside a two-meter high boundary with open entrances. There being no tradition in the town of entertaining children like this, the inhabitants did not appreciate the ‘Neblet Park for Children’ to the degree it deserved. Neither the Town Committee nor any well-to-do individual showed interest in its maintenance, and it was left to decay, untended, in independent India. It disappeared bit by bit. A junior co-educational school for boys and girls opened in the adjoining building and now visitors can see students and teachers in open air discourse during the brief Indian winter. It was a surprising pleasure for me, however, to see this barren strip animated in Feb 2005 for a week with children’s amusements more in abundance than during the days I remembered above. The occasion was the Jain festival which takes place only once every thirty-six years or so.

Neblet was a philanthropic British Officer, popular wherever he served. After our independence, he went to East Pakistan as Commissioner of Chittagong and, in that capacity, helped some of his UP friends cultivate nice academic and administrative careers there.

It was the second week of July 1946 when I joined Class V in Daryabād Middle School and that provided the first widening of my mental horizons. It was a secular school with both Muslim and Hindu teachers and students, with Urdu as well as Hindi sections of each class. Students respected every teacher and teachers paid attention to every student; the only distinction was merit. There came from other primary schools in the neighborhood students who were more talented than me in arithmetic or drawing and painting. The coming year, Saīduzzamān would join, head and shoulder above us in knowledge of English language.

A tall, proud, thickly mustached Pandit Rām Saran was our class-teacher. A staunch nationalist, he wore ‘Jai Hind’ on the left shoulder of his jacket. Coming upon a patriotic poem in our Urdu text- book, he sent out boys to the school lawns marching and singing behind Jamal Yousuf in Prabhātpheri. In an exploratory discussion, Molvi Naqi finally agreed to his interpreting Hindu devtās as Muslim angels. Many years after I had passed out of that school, Rām Saran received me in Lucknow, still dignified, though bitter about Dr. Sampūrnānand, the then education minister of UP and later Chief Minister, for his disregard of the demands of teachers on strike. Those were very trying days for our republic. An enlightened Prime Minister like Jawāharlāl Nehru is reported to have said one day in desperation that instead of raising teacher’s salaries, the financial crunch could force him to close universities.

I was in Class VI when India gained independence, on August 15 1947, truncated and reeling as if a woman gave cesarean birth to twins after prolonged travail. This dawn of independence, important and auspicious that it undoubtedly was, Faiz Ahmad Faiz called ‘black-spotted light’ and ‘night-bitten morning’¹⁴, because of the wide-spread violence that preceded and followed it for an indefinite period, killing thousands and forcing millions of people on either side of these newly created political boundary to transmigrate. Our town and the region around remained largely safe, but every newspaper was full of bloody details. On this occasion the wisdom of my father was illuminating:

Do not brood on morbidity beyond your control, he told us, keep your mind sanely usable when a real event confronts it.

I lost balance despite that and urged him and others:

Migrate to the new country we helped create, before the heavens fall on us.

Upon that he elaborated his position further saying:

Muslims like us lived in peace with Hindu neighbors for the last many centuries. There was no conflict with them before independence except that the country needed for independence a political solution between the two communities. We had to provide that and voted for the sake of it. Once that phase in over, we would live on in the old country as before. In our vicinity, neither we Muslims nor Hindus nourish hatred or fear against one other. Existing apprehensions are temporary and would die out with time.

And so they did, although taking many decades. Then he gave me some personal advice:

As a young boy at the verge of teens, you cannot support even yourself, what about rendering a service to others or upholding a noble cause. Pass at least the High School examination with us. Then if you still so desire, I shall let you go to wherever you like, but I will live in India till I die.

And so he did. The socio-political situation improved in the sub-continent as the time advanced and I grew and gained maturity to tell you this story as it evolved. My first passion, the first love of childhood subsided to give way to other passions that proved to be not only part and parcel of my life but also food for my ongoing development.

The year 1948 was very eventful for us. On the 30th of January, when I was a student in Class VI and Molvi Naqi was again our class teacher, the news of Mahātma Gāndhi’s assassination darkened the day. Muslims feared an unprecedented holocaust, the sort Sikhs experienced three decades later in November 1984, but within half an hour, Jawaharlal Nehru announced from All India Radio that the assassination was committed by Naathu Raam Godsē, a Hindu, and saved us. The Government of India investigated the underlying conspiracy with exemplary efficiency to determine how Hindu Maha Sabha hatched the plot, trained volunteers for the purpose, and finally executed it in minute detail with the possible assistance of Rashtriye Swyam Saivak Sangh. The Sangh agents within the Congress Party saved RSS from proscription, describing it as a social welfare organization.

Regarding the reason for the assassination of the Mahātma, we should remember that, despite his appearance and simple life, he was quite a modern man. He went to England for his legal education and, after his return, to South Africa to practice law, protesting the strong injunction of Gujarati Hindu Society against sea travel. On his final return from South Africa, the Hindu masses had to accept him as one of them before following him. He, therefore, went as a pragmatic pilgrim to Benares and Rishikesh, not promising to holy men there anything, like growing a ponytail or wearing a sacred thread as they proposed ¹⁵.

Once established as an all India leader, he campaigned to abolish untouchability and to rehabilitate the untouchable. The primitive Hindu, however, contained his ire in view of the Mahātma’s stature. But then he adopted a sort of unified religion by reading in his evening prayers passages from the Bible and Korān, along with the Gīta, while disciples chanted his hymn:

Allah and Eshwar are only one name.

Neither an orthodox Muslim nor an orthodox Hindu appreciated that better than the Din Ilāhi of Emperor Akbar.

Simultaneously with freedom, the partitioned India started receiving battered and humiliated refugees from across the border. In return, right-wingers of the Indian National Congress, which the Home Minister Vallabh Bhai Patel headed, harassed and swept away Muslims from Delhi and surrounding areas, which were otherwise peaceful. Gandhi found it immoral, as did Abul Kalām Āzād ¹⁶.

British India had to its credit foreign exchange worth 2.2 billion rupees; a quarter of that constituted Pakistan’s share. Money–adorers in Delhi did not like the idea of parting with that. The army was divided by the will of the soldiers; those identifying with Pakistan carried their small arms and ammunition with them. But Indian leaders refused to divide the heavy armaments like artillery and tanks, which British India owned and lay in India, because in case of a possible war between us, we shall face their mouths. But Mahātma took the position of principle:

Give the Devil his due!

He then went on a fast unto death on these issues. This last straw broke his backbone.

Mr. Tasneem Ahmad, an ex-journalist and conscientious freelancer thinks that the Mahatma was eliminated because his philosophy of, and belief in, non-violent was a great embarrassment to the state policy of Independent India and reciprocally to Gandhiji himself.

My grandfather Hāfiz Ali Ahmad was so competent a document writer that no property suit ever succeeded against his writing. He spent his earnings first to build his father’s mosque and house, and then to take care of the neighbors within his means. Hafizji visited their houses in the morning hours to collect their needs, particularly in the war days when the market was short of all commodities: salt, sugar, kerosene oil, matches, cloth and other items.

After his work in the sub-registrar’s office was over, he would go to the tehsīldar and apply on false pretexts for a permit to buy the needed items. The officer would grant him every application and he would purchase the goods from the wholesale market of Bhitarya on the way home, load them on the carrier of his bicycle, and unload at the house of the needy before reaching home, in order to keep his wife in dark. Even so she would grill him on returning late and for that he would blame his bicycle’s break down on the way. Everybody knew that Hāfizji financed a friend to open a shop of Unani (Greco-Arab) medicines and another shop for cloth. In his later years, he had formed, with the colorful Rasheed Mian and selfless Idrees Khan, a group of Sufis, attired in bark color, who contributed to the Bareilly tradition of venerating tombs and making offerings to the dead. After Indian independence the beleaguered Muslim leaguers elected him their Town President and he introduced some popular elements in the dying Working Committee.

On the 30th of April, 1948 Hāfiz Ali Ahmad died, at 59, after a prolonged affliction with a thigh abscess, not allowing the local doctor to inject the recently arrived Penicillin to save him. Before death, he advised my grandmother to accept if somebody repaid to her his debt, but not to demand it from anybody, because he earned something for this world and something for hereafter. It was my first experience of someone dear and near dying before my eyes.

A little afterwards, Father noticed reddening on his left wrist; the swelling soon spread over the entire forearm. Dr. Chowdhary FRS, recently arrived from Pakistan as a refugee, had started working as a surgeon in Balrāmpur Civil Hospital, which enjoyed international reputation for studying the mental progress of Master Raju, whom a she-wolf had reared up as a child in her den for many years. The Government had allotted Chowdhary rooms in Jehāngirabād Palace where he lived and ran a private clinic also. Father consulted him to discover that the bone was infected, needing immediate surgical operation. Dr. Chowdhary performed the operation in early 1949; he removed most of one bone, leaving behind only a thin connecting strip. When the plaster of Paris was removed months later, a long depression was readily visible; it filled in only over course of many years for the hand to regain its normal shape. In order to meet the expenses of this treatment, Father sold out his two-barrel twelve-bore Jeffrey’s for Rs. 400. Soon after the death of Hāfizji was a greatly worrisome period for our family; fortunately we were able to tide matters over.

In Middle School we sat on planks, three boys sharing one. The size of classrooms permitted placing twelve to fifteen planks separately in three columns, with the teacher’s chair and table at the head and a big blackboard in the corner left of him. English class was an exception, for which desks and benches in two rows filled two-thirds of the school’s central hall exclusively. Mr. Qaasim Ali BA, a known figure of the greater town and reputed for his university education and liberal mind, presided over it. While teaching history, he shocked us, telling for the first time that Mahmood Ghaznavi was simply a plunderer king devoid of any religious sanctity, which the common Muslim folk was reveled to. Qaasim Ali enjoyed the folk drama evenings Rāe Saheb, the first landlord of Daryabād, organized on the occasion of Dassehra and which the traditional Muslims considered blasphemous. As an English teacher, the twelve tenses constituted the heart of his syntax. Once introduced, he would give us, daily a verb to practice as instructed. He checked the homework punctually and punished the defaulter without accepting any excuse. During the summer vacation of 1948 he died of cholera, leaving behind a sharp and intelligent son under school education.

In the south-west of the central hall sat the tall and imposing Headmaster, the late Mātā Prasad, who on account of seniority and competence often acted as Sub-deputy Inspector of Schools at Bārabanki. On the south side of the hall, doors opened to the Class Seven Urdu and Hindi Sections; Molvi Dargāhi taught the former. On the financial backing of a good piece of agricultural property in his home village, he was a fanatically devoted and harsh teacher. He taught us with great competence, particularly algebra, geometry and structural analysis of Urdu sentences in a way few teachers could have done at that level.

On the 8th of September, 1948 Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder and first Governor–General of Pakistan, died at work. In the second decade of the 20th century, he was an important leader of Indian National Congress, and Mrs. Sarojini Nāidu called him ‘Messenger of Hindu-Muslim Unity’. Then a tussle started between him and Mr. M. K. Gandhi, newly returned from South Africa, first on the question of home rule that Jinnah demanded and Gandhi opposed because the time was not yet ripe for it, and then on civil disobedience hand-in-hand with the Khilāfat Committee, that Gandhi approved and campaigned for while Jinnah opposed. Jinnah lost on both issues and left the Indian National Congress in frustration. In the second phase of his political life, about a decade later, he rose as the unquestioned leader, Qāid-e Āzam or the Great Leader, of the Muslim League, to press the demand of an independent country in India called Pākistān. The demand conceded, he advocated, in his first message to the new nation, to develop Pākistān into a secular country where the Muslim majority would cohabit peacefully with the Hindu and Sikh minorities. His dream could not withstand the communal fury, raging for months before independence and lasting till long afterwards. Jinnah requested Prof. Jagannath Azad to write Pakistan’s first National Anthem, before the latter had to migrate to India, and it remained in official use till Hafeez of Jalandhar wrote, after Jinnah died, what has been permanently adopted.

Jinnah’s death marred the normal process of democratic evolution of Pakistan, paving way for the immediate beginning of struggle for power between local groups in the new country, which departed further and further from a modern secular structure of government as the time passed. The resulting instability forfeited the subcontinent’s future chance of a healthy evolution in peace and understanding between the constituent states.

In addition to the eleven directly governed big provinces and some small territories, British India consisted in length and breadth of the country, hundreds of locally governed, subordinate states, the area, population and income of which varied largely. At the time the British government left India, they gave the subordinate states three options: join India, join Pakistan, or declare independence. The association of some local princes in the plot to assassinate Gandhiji provided the Government of India the occasion to deal firmly with heads of states like Gwalior, asking them to accede to the Indian Union and receive clemency, or face criminal proceedings. That started the process of accession that others followed.

But there remained still some anomalous cases. In Kathiawārh Peninsula, Indian territory surrounded Junagarh, except at the Arabian Sea. Its population was Hindu in majority, but the Muslim ruler opted to accede to Pakistan. The hostile public forced him, however, to flee with his family and associates, leaving the state to India. The ruler of Travancore and Cochin in the extreme southwest declared independence, but revised this decision on persuasion. There remained two major principalities then, each with area comparable to average Indian provinces. One of them, Hyderabad, was landlocked in the upper part of South India. While its predominantly Hindu population exceeded 5% of the divided India’s and 15% of Pakistan’s population, a Muslim dynasty ruled it ever since the Moghol Empire of Delhi declined, after Aurangzeb in the early eighteenth century. Going on ruling such a land, now as an independent monarch, must have been a great decision for Mir Osmān Ali Khan, His Exalted Highness the seventh Nizām to take. Qaasim Rizvi, the chief of Ittihād-ul Muslimeen, with three hundred thousand volunteers, was pressing him hard to declare independence without any negotiation with Delhi. All the defensive mechanisms of which the State could boast was a primitive, ill-equipped infantry and a cavalry under the honorific control of one Al-Eed-Roos, an Arab who ignored even the basic geography of the State. The Nizām government tried to arm their men to some extent using what Sydney Cotton could smuggle during the year by air through Goa.

The Nizām government agreed, however, to receive K.M. Munshi as the Indian representative in the city of Hyderabād. He supplied the government of India with reliable details and information on its state of military preparedness, or rather the lack of it, in detail. Then the Indian military entered into the State from five directions on the 9th of September, 1948, under the command of Major General Joyanto Nath Chowdhary (1908-83, later General). His army experienced some resistance only on the