A Journey of Ages

By Mahmood Khan

It's a story of a man who was born in the Himalayan foothills, nurtured by devoted parents and tutored by many dedicated teachers. He grew up in a lower middle-class family, governed by age-old values and customs that left little freedom to the individual. He managed to ride up the socioeconomic ladder through education, with a bit of tenacity and a lot of luck. His journey began on the Indian subcontinent, with a happy sojourn in the Netherlands, and ended on the west coast in Canada.

In this book, the reader will make a leap of centuries in a lifetime—a journey from a 'primitive' to 'modern' age. There are glimpses of people struggling to get out of poverty in some harsh physical and social environments; of sights and sounds of the ancient, medieval and modern worlds; of changes in the human condition brought about by new technologies, societal values, customs and institutions. The book has in store accounts of travel, joyful sojourns and experiences in countries on four continents. And so are some funny and not-so-funny anecdotes, events and stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Sep 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228840305

Mahmood Khan

Mahmood Hasan Khan is a retired professor of Simon Fraser University, where taught for nearly thirty-seven years. He has published books and professional papers, visited universities and taught in the US, Turkey and Pakistan, and worked as a consultant for several international organisations. He lives with his wife of over fifty years in Metro-Vancouver, one of the most liveable places on earth.

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Second Edition

A Journey of Ages

Mahmood Hasan Khan

A Journey of Ages

Copyright © 2020 by Mahmood Hasan Khan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-4029-9 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-4030-5 (eBook)

To my late parents, siblings, wife, children, grandchildren, teachers, benefactors and many friends

PREFACE

This is a thoroughly revised version of my earlier book of the same title. It is not a book of fantasies nor an embellished bio-graphy. Its title captures reasonably well my life experiences and learning from others’ wisdom and knowledge. I give glimpses of the sights and sounds from four continents about people’s struggles for a better life. My bias is on the side of optimism. I do not subscribe to Immanuel Kant’s view that ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.’

I have relied on three sources. One is my fallible memory. The second one includes my daily diary and the field notes about my visits and meetings in rural Pakistan, stretching from the Thar Desert in Sindh to the high mountains in the north and the barren hills and valleys of Balochistan. Finally, I have used my readings of books, magazines, journals and newspapers. I have tried to be truthful, but there may still be mistakes for which I take full responsibility.

I couldn’t have written this book without Aiysha’s ungrudging support. I owe her a lot that I can’t repay, certainly not in words. I am grateful to Redjell Arcillas and the production team at the Tellwell Talent for their support in the endeavour.

Mahmood Hasan Khan

August 2020

Table of Contents

The Roots and Growing Up

Refugees on the Train

To the South on the Train

Go to the Farm to Learn

On the Farm and in Academia

In the Lowlands

Migrate to Canada (Kanata)

To Anatolia and Back

Gaining Experience

Encountering the Real World

To the Nile and the Karakorum

Travails and Travels

In The Rural World I

In The Rural World II

End of the Second Millennium

Into the Third Millennium

Free at Last!

Return to the Rural World

Toward the End of the Odyssey

The Odyssey Ends

The Twilight Years

1

The Roots and Growing Up

Rampur, to the eye of a connoisseur, is that city/where the eight heavens have come together.

Rampur, today, is that inhabited piece of earth/to which come and settle the best of humans.

Rampur is a big garden, like an unrivalled example/heartwarming, fresh, fertile, expansive, and delightful.

Like the abundant monsoon rains fall in the garden/the hand of generosity here is like the unending Tigris.

(Mirza Asad Ullah Khan Ghalib, Diwan-e-Ghalib)

I am in my eighty-fourth year, or eighty-seventh by the Islamic calendar. As I looked back on these years, I realized I had a story to tell. It is a story not only of four eventful rides, three on the train and one in the air, but of the almost revolutionary changes that have transformed my world. You will get glimpses of communities and individuals, in different places and times, in their struggle for progress. There are accounts of the ordinary and familiar; of the exotic and unfamiliar; of joy and grief; of poverty and luxury; and of wars and peace.

My mother used to tell me that my birth was premature and painful to her. Besides my fragile existence in the first year she also had to cope with her own illness. In India at the time of my birth an infant under one was expected to live up to the age of 45 or slightly more. Yet my mother lived a busy and long life—she raised eight children to adulthood and died when she was about 82. I spent the first ten years in the house of my father’s two maternal uncles (Mamoo) with whom he had lived after his mother’s death when he was twelve. One of my father’s Mamoo got him inducted into the Rampur State Infantry as a foot soldier at fifteen since he apparently showed little interest in school beyond grade eight. I never found out from him the real reason(s) for it and wouldn’t like to speculate now. I do know that he did everything he could to get his children (especially boys) educated for professional careers that he had missed. Father’s exposure to modern life—he spent almost four years in Egypt, Cypress, and the Yemen as a junior commissioned officer (JCO) in the British Indian Army during the Second World War—was to have important consequence for his own and his children’s life. When our parents married in the spring of 1936, mother was probably eighteen and father about twenty-two. I was born in less than a year after our parents’ wedding. At the time, father was a non-commissioned officer (perhaps Haveldar) in the Rampur State Infantry.

I was born and brought up in a Muslim family within a multicultural society of India. At the time of my birth, Nazis ruled Germany, and having removed all traces of opposition, were persecuting the Jews and preparing for war. In the Soviet Union, Stalin was ruthlessly asserting his power in the name of communism. Policymakers in the United State and parts of Europe were trying new policies to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression. Japanese imperialism was flexing its muscles in East Asia, invading the Chinese mainland after having taken over Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan earlier. The European colonies in Asia and Africa were starting to simmer and in some of them there were organized movements to gain independence from colonial rule. Soon Europeans were at war again, just three months before my third birthday, this time more widespread, costly and deadly than in the Great War two decades earlier.

I grew up in India when it was a British colony and Rampur was one of its subsidiary states. The process of modern colonialism went back to the late fifteenth century, thanks to Christopher Columbus’s accidental landing on one of the islands, Hispaniola, in the Caribbean on his westward journey from Spain to India. [It was heralded as discovery of a new continent, later named America after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer.] More navigators followed from Spain and Portugal to the Americas and Asia through the eastern route around the Cape of Good Hope (Vasco da Gama to India) and the western route around the southern tip of South America (Magellan to the Philippines). The Spanish and Portuguese invaders of the Americas first depopulated many areas where they landed and took over much of the land and its resources. Other Europeans, from Holland, Britain and France, soon followed to the Americas and Asia.

Initially Europeans tried to engage in trade in South and South-East Asia; soon they entered into wars with the native populations, both co-opting and forcing the local rulers into submission for territory and resources. That’s how the Philippines, the Indonesian Archipelago, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, and later Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, became European colonies. The islands in the Oceania, particularly Australia and New Zealand, were settled by the British at the expense of the indigenous people. The African continent was either settled by Europeans, as in South Africa after wars, or taken as colonial possession. This process continued until almost the end of nineteenth century. At that time colonial rule was at its zenith in Asia and Africa but had started to weaken after the First World War —the European imperial rule in the Americas was gone by the middle of nineteenth century.

The First World War was about empires and colonies: the British and Russian royalty supported by France aligned on one side, and the German Kaiser and Austrian Emperor supported by the Sultan of Turkey aligned on the other. The so-called Great War was catastrophic: millions were killed or maimed and many lands destroyed, particularly in Europe, Russia and the Middle East. At the end of the war, three empires were gone: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Turkish. Russia fell into the hands of communist revolutionaries; Germany and Austria remained in economic and political turmoil for over a decade; Turkey fought for its survival; and the former Turkish Middle East and North Africa were occupied by Britain and France. By the end of the war, United States had emerged as the dominant player in world affairs, unaffected by war, with the strongest economy, and stood on a high moral ground. President Woodrow Wilson played a key role in the post-war settlement and in the formation of the League of Nations to settle disputes between nations. But the League would soon become victim of the rising tide of Fascism in Europe.

Technological advances had been gaining speed following the first Industrial Revolution: factories with machines and men were manufacturing goods; steamships were navigating the world for travel and trade; it was followed by the railways, telegraph, telephone, electricity, motor vehicles, and airplanes were common. By the 1920s, the age of `consumerism had started first in the United States which offered bank credit to buy homes and other durables, refrigerators, washing machines, automobiles, etc. There was economic recovery in some parts of Europe and the American economy was flourishing. But in Italy and Spain, Fascism became the ruling ideology with Mussolini and Franco, respectively, in the saddle. Germany was struggling with reparations, inflation and unemployment. Given the harsh economic conditions and sense of shame after defeat, the fascist ideology mixed with racism, antisemitism in particular, started to take hold. Populist rhetoric, demagoguery and organized militancy on both the right and left gathered momentum, which the weak Weimer Republic could not arrest. The march to Nazi rule in Germany was on.

The euphoria of the 1920s, felt in the United States and some parts of Europe, ended shockingly on 29 October 1929, when the New York Exchange crashed. This triggered the Great Depression—rising unemployment, falling income and investment, rising bankruptcies and reduced trade between nations—that lasted until the countries of Europe, led by Germany, started preparing for the Second World War. In the Soviet Union—formed a few years after the October 1917 Revolution—the nature of problems was different: it was struggling to build a new economy and society without private property, markets and similar other institutions of capitalist societies. After the death of V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin took over control of the communist party apparatus and launched a ruthless process of state-led industrialization through central planning and forced collectivization. It’s fair to say that there was a state of totalitarian terror in the Soviet Union from the time Joseph Stalin assumed power until his death in the early 1950s. It was a period of summary trials, forced exiles to Siberia, mass migrations, labor camps and murder of millions. Perhaps of all the population, peasants and ordinary farmers bore the brunt of destruction, hunger, disease and death.

I should now turn to the story of Rampur, a subsidiary (princely) state in British India—there were about 680 of them—which is now a district in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Before the arrival of the Rohillas (Afghans or Pathans) in the area, Rampura was an old but small settlement. While Afghans had a long history in India, most of the Rohilla settlements in the Gangetic Plain were established during the tumultuous period after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. Rohillas, ordinary traders and mercenaries, managed to acquire, by force, deceit and enterprise, large tracts of land owned or controlled by Hindu rajahs and the Mughal emperor. Eventually the Rohilla commanders formed a confederacy comprising eight or nine districts in what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh. Their armies remained engaged in alliances of convenience and embroiled in wars with the other groups then competing for land and power. The competitors of Rohillas included the Mughal king and his provincial agents, Nawab of Awadh—nawab means a king’s deputy or governor—in Lucknow, and the Marathas from the southwest. The Persian and Afghan invaders, Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Durrani, had made the war theatre murky and bloody. The Rohilla confederacy flourished for about fifty-five years though it was never secure in the midst of shifting alliances and wars. The EIC, on the other hand, while well settled in Bengal kept its eyes westward for expansion. In 1774 the armies of Nawab of Awadh, supported by the EIC, defeated the Rohillas. The victors allowed one of the remaining Rohilla chieftains, Faizullah Khan, to retain the jagir of Rampur, a tiny piece of what was once Rohilkhand, as a subsidiary state. That’s how the state of Rampur came into existence and it lasted until 1949 when the Indian government dissolved all princely states.

The history of the Afghan migrations from the mountains or hills (roh) in the northwest to the Gangetic Plain over the centuries, perhaps even before the times of Mughals, is by now well documented, but the personal story of ordinary Afghans is sparse and murky at best. Very few of the personal stories have been recorded or told. Luckily, I have found some interesting documentation, thanks to the efforts of some dedicated disciples of Nabi Raza Khan, my father’s eldest uncle. Apparently this uncle was venerated as a mystic (sufi) or saint (pir) by a large number of Muslims across northern India. After his death in 1911, his acolytes buried him in Lucknow and built a mausoleum (mazaar). One branch of my father’s family took over the mazaar and its members have flourished thanks to donations they collect from pilgrims and devotees, especially at the anniversary (urs) each year.

It seems that in the early to mid-1750s—the exact year is not recorded—two brothers left their ancestral home in the qasbah of Sheikh Jana—it is on the main road between Mardan and Swabi in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). A third brother stayed back and his brood apparently prospered on whatever little land (most of it quite good in quality) there was in the family. The two relatively young brothers left their home for the same reason many other Afghans (Pashtuns or Pathans) were doing for centuries: to find greener pastures in the Indian plains compared to the hard life and meagre living in their homeland. After all, many thousands of their compatriots were joining the ranks of migrants for service as mercenaries with the Afghan and Persian armies. In addition, there were stories being told and retold about the growing Rohilla settlements in the Gangetic Plain up to terai in the Himalayan foothills. Migration was a risky business, but given the difference between their precarious existence in the Roh and the reported rewards in the new land—which included money, land and probably status—the risk was worth taking.

Apparently the two brothers from Shaikh Jana settled in the village (later qasbah) of Bhainsori in tehsil Milak which was then probably a part of Bareilly district of Uttar Pradesh. [The Rampur state records show that in 1860 the British government awarded 146 villages of Bareilly to Nawab Yusuf Ali Khan of Rampur, in return for his service to the English during the Rebellion of 1857. Our family record shows that several members of the extended family made their homes in qasbah Shahi, not too far from Bhainsori, in Bareilly district.] My ancestors most likely served in the Rohilla armies and found a bit of land which they did not cultivate themselves, but shared the output with their mostly Hindu sharecroppers. We do not know if the two brothers from Sheikh Jana were already married and came with their women and children, or if they married after their arrival in Rohilkhand. Bringing brides from one’s homeland was apparently a common practice among the first generation of migrants. There were at least two good reasons for the practice. First, since marriages in Afghan families were arranged between first or second cousins (or within the lineage or clan), the chances of such matches were very small in the new settlements. Second, unmarried young men had to first save some funds to pay for the bride and support the family.

The scanty record about the family reveals three important aspects. First, Bhainsori, located about thirty-three kilometers southeast of Rampur city and three kilometers south of the town of Milak, was part of an Afghan (Rohilla) settlement on lands cultivated by Hindu tenants. By the early twentieth century, the village population of nearly 2,100 was divided between Hindus and Muslims (most of them Afghans) in the 60:40 ratio. Most of the land was cultivated and the farming depended on both natural precipitation and irrigation by wells and a canal. Second, the men in the family, including my grandfather, spent only a part of their life in Bhainsori, where they owned a bit of land; the rest of their time was spent in the military (mostly cavalry) service. Our Dada (paternal grandfather) and his elder brother had served for a time in the Bengal Lancers. But Dada spent most of his time managing his part of the patrimony and also leased in some land for cultivation in the area to supplement his income. The men in the family were all reasonably well-educated in Urdu and Persian and practiced quite earnestly their Sunni faith. It seems from the record that men of our family, at least of my grandfather’s generation, were well respected and well connected to some prominent families in Bareilly, Badaun, Nainital and Rampur.

Finally, very few members of the extended family of our Dada were exposed to modern education until the early 1930s. My father’s early years were spent in Bhainsori, so his exposure was almost exclusively to the traditional system of learning in Urdu and a bit of Persian, after attending a maktab for one or two years. My great-grandfather was perhaps a representative of the lot, but two of my grandfather’s brothers acquired reasonably wide reputation as pirs; one’s mausoleum is in Lucknow and the other’s is in Bhainsori. Our Dada has had conventional education in Persian and Urdu and was part of the upper middle-class in the qasbah. Dada had married four women, with each marriage occurring after the death of his current wife, and died in early 1947 just before he was sixty, leaving behind a widow and four children.

The signs of change started to emerge in the society generally, and in our family in particular, when my father was in his early teens. His mother died quite young leaving him and a younger sister with their father. My grandfather married again and, probably around the year 1926, my father’s two Mamoo took him to Rampur to live under their guardianship. Father’s younger sister—they were of the same mother—stayed with Dada and the stepmother. It’s hard to speculate what was going on in my father’s young mind when he lost his mother and moved to the big city so different from the small qasbah (Bhainsori) where he grew up to the age of twelve. Like his contemporaries, he first spent about two years learning to recite the Quran in Arabic, but not learning its meaning, at a local mosque or maktab. His education at school consisted primarily of Persian and Urdu and some exposure to arithmetic, geography and history. Apparently he did not adjust well at school in Rampur. Probably in 1930 his younger Mamoo, who was a JCO in the Rampur State Army, got him recruited as a foot soldier at fifteen or sixteen years of age. Mamoo’s support, both moral and material, was quite important to our father in the initial years. [My father’s deep love and respect for both of his Mamoo remained unaltered all his life.] He did his best to earn the ranks in quick succession from the position of foot soldier to the rank of Subedar—it was the second highest rank among JCOs in the army. Apparently, he started to appreciate the value of modern education and he took every opportunity for learning that came his way in the military.

In the spring of 1936, my father was married—his bride (my mother) was his second cousin on his mother’s side—all according to the family custom. [On my mother’s side, I know almost nothing about her Pathan father, my Nana, and his family, except that he was a self-made contractor. He had married my maternal grandmother, Nani, who was no relation of his, when he was about thirty and she was only fifteen. My Nani and Dadi were first cousins—Nani’s mother was a sister of Dadi’s father. Nani who lived to be over eighty never gave us a clear picture of her father’s family or profession.] When my parents were married, father had achieved the rank of Haveldar, a senior NCO, in the Rampur State Infantry. During the Second World War, he went with a Rampur contingent in the Indian Army to the Middle East, where he spent more than three years. It was during the war that my father, working with and for British officers, saw glimpses of modernity in Egypt, Cypress and Aden. Just before the end of the war when he returned to India, with the rank of Subedar, a senior JCO, he moved quickly into the educational service for soldiers in his battalion for which he had received training at two military schools in India.

Around the time of my birth, our father’s younger cousins and his two younger step-brothers, Siddique Chacha and Munnay Chacha, were the first generation in the family who were getting educated with a modern curriculum right from the beginning. It was in this stream that I was also placed at the age of about six after completing a year or two of religious instruction which focused mainly on learning to recite the Quran. At school, learning the English language, its grammar and composition, was compulsory and some other subjects (like general science and mathematics) were taught partly in English. Urdu was the lingua franca of Muslims in Rampur and the medium of instruction for most subjects at school. By and large girls of the family were left at home and acquired literacy at best in Urdu. In my mother’s generation—she was one of the few who could read and write Urdu—this was a great privilege even in the middle-class Muslim families of Rampur. My father was entirely sold on the idea that modern education, at least for the boys, was the most important source of material progress and civilized life. At the same time, it was important for a Muslim to adhere to the basic tenets of Islamic faith as his or her anchor. In speech and practice, I saw my father doing just that and more: he was generous and kind to those, Muslims and non-Muslims, who needed help. He told his children repeatedly how fair and compassionate his own father was to his Hindu tenants and had maintained harmonious relations in the community. I never saw any sign of religious or ethnic bigotry in my father’s speech or behavior. The overriding emphasis was on polite speech and civilized behavior, values of the Muslim ashraaf (the white-collar middle class).

Rampur had acquired fame as a settlement of mostly Afghan (Pathan) clans with little education but much dexterity. It became a gathering place for prominent personalities of religion and literature under the Nawab’s patronage. Its library was stocked with an impressive collection of books, rare documents and miniature paintings. The state was also known for its rich and abundant variety of fruits (mango in particular), vegetables, grain, and sugarcane. Rampur’s location—just south of the terai—and its climate allowed its inhabitants to experience all four seasons. Winter’s cold was not as intense as the heat in the summer season, though they were equally long. Monsoon rains in late June to August brought great relief from the heat, especially the loo (intensely hot winds) in the months of May and June. The rains and mango were a sweet combination, but they also carried the threat of seasonal fevers and infections.

Sanitation and public-health facilities were woefully inadequate, as were private physicians scarce and unaffordable for many families. Grandmothers, religious leaders (pundit and maulvi) and quakes were the major caregivers. There were few homes with electricity and running water. We had access to both when I was in my twelfth year. Somehow most people managed to survive without them, though certainly in great discomfort given that both firewood and kerosene were expensive. But a rich social network, from the extended family to clan and caste, well-defined and rarely trespassed, was a great compensation. A stable social system governed by religion and customs, though hierarchical and patriarchal, played a central role in everyone’s life. Deviant behavior was not uncommon, but much of it subterranean. Strict separation of the sexes and sexual repression were perhaps the primary cause of sexual abuse of boys, women and girls. Pederasty among Muslim men had a long history, acknowledged by writers and historians in prose and verse. Young boys were preyed upon for sex by adults usually known to them.

There was always great emphasis in speech on fidelity and honesty, but in practice deception and hypocrisy were more common. In the first decade of my life in Rampur, I was much influenced by a comfortable home environment and support of the ever-watching eyes and ears of elders in the extended family. Expressions of love and discipline, sometimes harsh, were everyday experience. I was taught to respect my elders no matter how unreasonable their demands might be, or else. Fear, more than respect, was a dominant emotion because of the likely consequences of defiance, which were either severe tongue-lashing or occasional thrashing. There was almost no room for argument on your side. As a social norm, questioning authority was verboten at family gatherings and in other settings. I don’t remember ever having a heart-to-heart conversation with my father; with my mother I did but that was late in her life. I also knew in so many ways that they both loved and cared for their children. Luckily our father, much as he wanted us to devote our time and energy to education, encouraged us to play sports as well.

After our father returned to India from the Middle East in 1945, the family—father, mother, and four boys—started living in reasonable comfort. We moved into a brick-and mortar (pucca) house with tap water and electricity—we never had these before—and a servant or two for help. Like most other houses ours had a latrine which was cleaned daily by a male or female sweeper (mehtar or mehtarani) from the lowest Hindu caste, who took away other household waste as well. Rampur could be quite hot for at least two months in summer and quite cold for about equal time in winter. Our house, like most others, was not equipped to cope with the extreme weather so various improvised means were used to mitigate the effects. Sharing was one of the most common and important experiences for all of us from a very young age: it helped in coping with scarcity and induced family and clan solidarity.

But living together and sharing in an extended family system—there were few if any nuclear families—had its downside. There was little regard for or sensitivity to one’s identity and privacy. To make the sharing experience bearable, even enjoyable, parents and guardians made every attempt to be fair to everyone. There was always someone in the family with authority to whom one could go for justice and sympathy at the end of the day. In our family, as was the custom in almost all Muslim families, females observed strict purdah—they were secluded from all non-related males—from a very young age. Most of their life was spent within the four walls. And they were married soon after they reached puberty to one of their own first or second cousins, rarely outside the clan. Since women could not go out of the house even in a burqa (veiled robe), they were transported in an enclosed horse-drawn carriage (tanga) in the company of a male relative. Boys and men depended on their legs for short distances, tangas for long distances and some, like our father, had bicycles. Motorcycles and cars were a rare sight until the early 1950s.

The most enjoyable time of the year was the monsoon season when heavy rains brought relief from heat and offered the delightful mango—a fruit for which Rampur was famous—to enjoy. But often it came at a cost: rain water used to paralyze normal life for days, cripple transport, damage homes and other buildings, and leave many young and old quite sick from infections of the stomach and skin. Our houses, both the allotted one in the army and later our own, were far better than the average thanks to their sturdy brick and mortar structure. We also had access to better than average medical services though they were by no means comparable to those available in the neighboring cities of Moradabad or Bareilly.

In Rampur, the state-sponsored schools for modern education were established in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. The conventional, mostly religious, education of Hindu and Muslim boys was limited to the upper and some middle-class families. Almost all women and girls and most men and boys had no opportunity to become literate. British advisers were able to persuade the state’s rulers, after years of resistance to public education based on modern curriculum, to build and finance elementary and middle schools at least in the city. Until the mid-1930s there was only one high school in the entire state. The high-caste Hindu elite and likewise the Muslim clergy along with landlords saw no good reason to pollute the minds of their children (i.e. boys). Families with some wealth, and inclined to expose their children to modern education, sent them to out-of-state schools and colleges. They also saw in this education considerable potential for economic and social advancement.

My early schooling followed the general pattern as in most middle-class urbanized Muslim families. Boys, reaching the age of five, were first sent to a neighborhood maktab for religious education, particularly reciting the Quran, for a year before they were sent to a primary school. The two could overlap as well for a year or two. School education was based on a modern (Western) secular curriculum. I spent three years (grades five to seven) in a school with boys and girls studying and playing together. It was unusual at that time in any place as conservative as Rampur was, but it worked. I certainly liked it. There were adolescent attachments, but nothing more; I never heard about or witnessed major transgressions. For me another novel experience at that school was a week of winter camping (but only for boys) in a small tehsil town fifteen to twenty kilometers away from Rampur city. Two or three of my class teachers accompanied us and kept us busy doing nature-walks in the surrounding area in the daytime and, after dinner, storytelling and reading poetry around a campfire. Nights were spent indoors with quilts and comforters to protect us from the chill—we were not too far from the high mountains. But it was all fun and a bit of learning about Nature—stars in the sky and flora and fauna on the ground.

I found boys of my age at school and outside with whom I played cricket, an English sport that was popular on the Subcontinent and so it remains to this day. The game of cricket allowed me to get to know a few boys and make friends. Our family’s move to Pakistan in April of 1950 ended this company. [I was able to reconnect by e-mail with one of my classmates, Keki Daruwalla, after almost 50 years and have tried to keep in touch with him.] My first visit to a cinema house was arranged by our English teacher and cricket coach, Iftikhar Ahmed or Baray Bhai, as a reward for our team’s performance at an inter-school tournament. I was then in grade seven and have vivid memory of Naheed cinema and the movie I saw—it was Kaajal with Suraiya and Wasti as the lead actors. In the middle school, one of my dreams was to have a bicycle of my own like some of my classmates had. Keki was one of them. And I occasionally tried my hands on my father’s bicycle without his knowledge. I was caught once or twice followed by harsh words but no thrashing. [Father bought me a new bicycle after I finished grade ten in Pakistan.]

By the time I was in eighth grade I had been exposed to some of the abridged texts of English literature, Indian and European history, local and general geography, basic arithmetic and geometry, arts and crafts, civics, and some elements of science. While English was a required subject, Persian, Hindi and Arabic were optional languages. All my teachers were male; I never had a female teacher at school or in college. Our school teachers were practitioners of rod and rote, a combination quite common at that time in the Subcontinent. Curious minds and creative impulses were repressed and had no opportunity for expression.

Generally, the pedagogic method laid great emphasis on learning by rote without much concern for comprehension. Most of the time I was learning to regurgitate the material at examinations held once every quarter. Public education up to matriculation (grade ten) was quite inexpensive, but my father always retained a tutor to help me maintain respectable grades. It is fair to add that both at home and in school my guardians and teachers used corporal punishment if necessary but not necessarily as the last resort. Team sports, particularly field hockey and cricket, were part of the experience of growing up in which almost all of the family youth participated with much interest; some of us even excelled. There were adequate facilities and a friendly environment for organized sports at school.

I can recall vividly the partition of British India into two independent states in 1947—without grasping its significance at that time—and its immediate effects on our life in Rampur. There were the usual celebrations at school and elsewhere in the city. But once the Nawab decided to accede the state to the Indian Dominion—that made good sense—a large number of Sunni Muslims opposed the ruler with protests and some violence. However, most Shia Muslims and almost all Hindus did not support the protest movement. The Nawab disarmed the state infantry—seeing some mutinous signs among its Muslim officers—and called in some Indian Army units to quell the protests and help maintain order in the state. Eventually, after a period of patrolling and curfews, order was restored but with significant loss of property and some life. Luckily in Rampur, unlike some other places in the Subcontinent, there were no major incidents of communal violence. I remember seeing Muslim refugees from some other towns where such violence had erupted. It was a year of tension and fear all the same. The partition of India and the events that followed in Rampur were the drivers of my first eventful ride on a train and a turning point in my life.

2

Refugees on the Train

The rather stable social and political environment in Rampur started to change in 1947 once it was announced that British India would be partitioned into two independent states. The rebellious response of some Muslims to the Nawab’s decision to accede the state to the Indian Dominion shook Rampur with tension and violence, but it was not communal. Muslim families started to seriously consider the options before them: should they stay in India or migrate to Pakistan? This was a crucial turning point for many families. Initially few from my extended family decided to migrate, but that changed between 1948 and 1949. Our father had shown no signs that he wanted to move the family to Pakistan, but that changed when he was told that the Rampur State Infantry would be absorbed into the Indian Army. The option was either to stay in the army in India or retire, since by that time he had served in the state army for almost twenty years. He decided, for reasons then unknown to me, to retire in 1949 and take the family to Pakistan.

Our father made this decision in spite of the advice of some of his elders to stay in Rampur. Some of them genuinely believed that they could live in a multi-ethnic and secular India, maintain their culture, and prosper. Others did not want to leave the land in which they had deep roots. Still others had valuable assets (land or business) or secure employment on which they could live comfortably and not take the risk in moving to Pakistan. It was almost ten years after we had moved that my father told me and my siblings about the reason for migration to Pakistan: that his children would get better opportunities to prosper in a Muslim-majority state. He saw us as his most important asset and it was our future on which he was betting. He knew that it was a big bet, considering the potential cost of migration, but he was probably encouraged by messages from some friends who had migrated earlier to Pakistan. I think I should pause here and say something about the genesis of Pakistan.

I should begin in 1858, the year when the British Crown (Queen Victoria) took the reins of power from the EIC in India following the Rebellion of 1857. This event was a watershed for Muslims and Hindus alike, but they were not on the same platform. Muslims were in the minority and also lagged behind Hindus in education, government services, commerce and industry. The Muslim elite comprised landowners, religious leaders, and those in government service. Hindus dominated almost all public and private occupations; most cultivators (peasants) and craft-workers were also Hindus. The imbalance between the two communities was a source of strength for the British. The Hindu and Muslim perceptions of British rule in India were as different as were their aspirations for an India devoid of British influence. The Indian nationalist movement had a deep communal division right from the beginning. In 1905, Lord Curzon divided Bengal in response to the demands of Bengali Muslims. The Hindu elite reacted fiercely against the division to which the colonial government gave in and restored the pre-partitioned Bengal in 1911.

There were two political platforms in India in the early twentieth century. One was held by the Indian National Congress (established in 1883) dominated by Hindus and the Muslim League (established in 1906) held the other platform. [It is also true that both the Hindu and Muslim communities were divided internally by caste and class interests.] The Congress and the League demanded greater representation in the governance of India and its eventual independence from the British rule, but their vision of and strategies for an independent India were not similar. In fact, the division of Bengal added an element of mutual distrust which grew stronger with time. The experience of limited self-rule in the 1930s further widened the gap between the Congress and the League. Soon after the beginning of the Second World War, Muslim League put forward the demand for Pakistan.

The British informed the two parties that they would withdraw from India after the war. The moot questions for the League were: what would an independent India look like? What would it mean to Muslim communities, especially in the Muslim-majority provinces? Many ideas were floated. After the war ended, the British government offered a formula to Indians based on the Simon Commission report. India was to be a loose federation of three groups of provinces: Group A (Bombay, C.P., Madras, Orissa and U.P.), Group B (Balochistan, N.W.F.P., Punjab and Sindh) and Group C (Bengal and Assam). Each province would enjoy considerable power and potential for separation. Initially the leaders of Congress and the League accepted the British proposal, but soon one of Congress leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru, adopted a dubious interpretation of what it really meant. Given the deep mistrust of the Congress leadership, the League leaders declared a day of public agitation for Pakistan. At the same time, the British government declared its intent to withdraw from India by the spring of 1948.

The partition of India into two independent states became imminent and urgent given the British ultimatum and the rising incidents of communal clashes and bloody riots. The partition formula in theory was simple: the congruent Muslim-majority provinces in the east (mainly Bengal) and the west (Sindh, Punjab, N.W.F.P. and Balochistan) would comprise Pakistan. On the demand of the Hindu and Sikh communities, it was decided to partition the provinces of Bengal and Punjab by districts, making adjustments based on populations and property. In addition, the subsidiary (princely) states were asked to accede to one of the two new states. The accession of Hyderabad and Junagadh to India was resolved by force. India and Pakistan went to war in Kashmir on the question of its accession, resulting in its de facto division but without resolution of its de jure status. The divided Kashmir has remained a big bone of contention and perhaps the main reason for hostile relations between India and Pakistan. [Last year the Indian government abolished the special status of the Indian-held Kashmir and made it a federal territory under direct rule from Delhi.]

India’s partition was not inevitable but became necessary for the Muslim community. The lack of trust between the leaders of Congress and the League, and perhaps their egoisms, came in the way of compromise on the issue of minority rights in a post-British confederation. The British decision to quit India was also made with unnecessary haste. The inaptitude of the British government, given the communal tensions in India, contributed to violence and bloodshed and to the chaotic migration of eleven million people across the hastily drawn borders between India and Pakistan. The colonial government should have had a better plan to protect people and their property during this tumultuous period. It also left the issue of the division of financial and military assets between India and Pakistan unresolved. The British interest in India—which was initially to transfer its resources abroad—had ended by the end of the First World War. Britain was also exhausted after the Great Depression and the Second World War. This fatigue was evident in its hasty decision to quit India.

I should now turn to my own eventful train rides after partition. I am not including here my first train ride from Rampur to Kohat, a city in northwestern Pakistan, where a battalion of the Rampur State Infantry was stationed after its return from the Middle East just before the end of the war in 1945. I have reasonably good recollection of that long train trip—via Delhi, Lahore and Rawalpindi—and our stay in the cantonment of Kohat for over six months. But I don’t recall making any trip outside the cantonment area. I do however remember the intense heat—summers in Kohat are still very hot—without respite even at night. My days were full of play and sport and some learning of arithmetic, English and Urdu, imparted by one of my father’s colleagues. Needless to add, my siblings and I were well fed and comfortably clothed.

The train trip from Rampur to Pakistan in 1950 was altogether a different experience. Our group comprised twenty souls (seven adults and thirteen children), representing three families. The senior most individuals were our grandmother (Nani) and one of our father’s uncle on his mother’s side (Dada Amanat Ali Khan)—he was our guardian on this trip because our father had to stay back in Rampur to settle his financial affairs. [Dada had left his wife and two children behind in the care of his father.] Besides these two were: our family of six (mother Araishi Begum and five children); our father’s sister (Phuppo Amira Begum) with her husband (Phuppa Mohammad Ashfaque Khan) and four children; and our mother’s younger sister (Khala Sanjeeda Begum) with her husband (Khalu Shafqat Ali Khan) and four children.

Phuppa was in his late twenties, has had some education and was a small merchant in the main bazaar (Bazaar Nasr Ullah Khan) of Rampur city. Phuppa’s father, Mohammad Ishtiaq Khan, was a well-known merchant in the bazaar and had helped his son to establish his first business, although Phuppa was not a particularly talented businessman. Khalu was in his early thirties, well educated in Persian and Urdu, and had served as a revenue supervisor (qanungo) in Rampur. Dada was in his late forties with some education but had no particular occupation at that time. He and his dependents lived reasonably well, supported by his father and an elder brother. The three women, my mother Phuppo and Khala, were in their late twenties and early thirties; only my mother was literate in Urdu. They were brought up and had lived in a conservative and patriarchal social milieu. They lived mainly to serve their husbands and children, but once these women crossed the border into Pakistan there were many unanticipated and consequential changes in their lives.

We boarded a train at the Rampur railway station for Delhi on a sunny Sunday, 16 April, 1950. I knew we were going to Pakistan, but I had no idea where in Pakistan our train ride would end. From Rampur to Munabao in Rajasthan, the last railway station before the India-Pakistan border, we had to change trains at three railway junctions in Delhi, Rewari, and Marwar. After two days on the train, we reached Munabao where we were lodged in a refugee camp for another three or four days. This camp was established to screen the people migrating to Pakistan. [The border between the Munabao and Khokrapar railway stations was opened for traffic, under the Nehru-Liaquat Pact of April 8, 1950, to facilitate the movement of migrants between the two countries.] Living in the camp was a very unpleasant experience. We spent most of our time in the tents, eating rationed food and sharing with many others the outdoor make-shift latrines. Water was scarce and the food tasteless though adequate. Since my mother was in the late stages of pregnancy, Khala and Phuppo bore the burden of cooking, cleaning and feeding everyone. Phuppo was apparently quite sick, but we didn’t know it then.

Our stay in the camp was not as eventful as our march, partly on foot and partly on camel-back, through the no-man’s land between India and Pakistan. The distance was at least ten kilometers. It was awfully tiring. The long journey on the train, the sojourn in the camp and the march on barren land brought to surface the simmering tensions between our male guardians. The relief felt on reaching the Khokrapar railway station in Pakistan was inexpressible for adults and children alike. The warm welcome extended by Pakistani citizens made us forget the pain and discomfort we had suffered in the past six or seven days. I cannot recall how long we spent at the railway station. The first leg of our train ride in Pakistan was from Khokrapar to Hyderabad via Mirpur has on a narrow-gauge railway track. We reached Hyderabad in the afternoon. As we continued to ride north, our group of twenty split along the way: Khalu and Khala with their children and Nani disembarked at the Rohri railway station on their way to Shikarpur. Dada and our family disembarked at the Liaquatpur railway station (in Bahawalpur State) and proceeded to live in Allahabad, a small town nearby. Phuppa and his family continued their journey and ended up in Lahore.

The princely state of Bahawalpur was founded in 1802 by Nawab Muhammad Bahawal Khan, a warlord with the armies of Ahmed Shah Durrani, after the breakup of the Durrani Empire in northwestern India. In 1833, the EIC made a subsidiary alliance with the ruler, thus recognizing Bahawalpur as a princely state in British India. Bahawalpur acceded to Pakistan in 1947, given its predominantly Muslim population and location between Punjab and Sindh on the western side of the new border between India and Pakistan. When we arrived in the state in 1950, it was about 45,911 square kilometers in size with only 1.5 million souls. The state’s economy depended mainly on agriculture, but only part of its land was irrigated. There was almost no industry; the road infrastructure was meagre and of bad quality; approximately four percent of the population was literate. The Punjabi settlers enjoyed a much better life than did most of the natives (riyasti) who spoke the Saraiki language, a hybrid of Punjabi and Sindhi languages. The two stark characteristics of the state were its economic backwardness and a repressive regime of oligarchs belonging to the family of the ruler and a small feudal elite.

Of course, I didn’t know all this when we arrived in the town of Allahabad, about eight kilometers northeast of Liaquatpur railway station. A friend of our father, Siddiqui Saab, from Rampur—who with his family had settled in Allahabad soon after partition and had invited our father