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Journalism of Courage
Doctor Sahab awoke on a bedsheet drenched in sweat. It wasn’t just the fact that it was four in the afternoon, or that Karachi was experiencing one of those sultry August days, or even that the Sindh Club was suffering from one its periodic power cuts. It was his first visit home to Pakistan since the marital law administration of Zia ul-Haq had removed the ban on his entry. The sweat was the result of his first nightmare, on the first day of his first visit in almost a decade.
The country was celebrating Bakr Id, and Doctor Sahab’s nightmare went like this. The streets of Karachi were deserted, but for a horde of sheep walking around in uniforms, knives in their hands and looking for human beings to slaughter. He recounted this incident to us, his coterie, basically a group made up largely of his family, and which included Kavita and me.
Only Doctor Sahab could have had such a nightmare, for it takes a certain romantic with an imagination and an obsessiveness with bettering the lives of people. But thenit is also a certain disregard for the power of the state and that of society which propelled him. Only he had such an irreverential approach to the state and society.
It was the study of "state and society" in the Arab world which brought me into contact with Doctor Sahab. And it was a contact that was to have the most profound impact on my life, quite simply the most influential ever.
Coming from a provincial Indian town to an east coast American college and into the circle that gravitated around Doctor Sahab, it was a life-changing experience. And all of that was due to a man the world called Eqbal Ahmad, but provincial me could only call him Doctor Sahab.
At anarchic Hampshire, such labelling was extraordinary, and most colleagues made me feel as such. But not Doctor Sahab, he fully understood the cultural baggage I was carrying, and in fact quite liked it that way. During my first, very formal, interaction with him in the office, he shushed me out instantly. "No reason to feel guilty about afeudal heritage, forget all this left-wing liberation jargon, you are a conservative revolutionary and you can still champion the cause of Palestinian independence," he remarked after I made my initial, political, remarks. Issa Barakat, his Palestinian friend, was the only one who grasped what Doctor Sahab said that day. It took me a long while.
Coming from a prominent Bihari zamindari family, and one which played an important helping role to Gandhiji during the Indigo workers strike, Doctor Sahab was very astute about cultural traits and sensitivities. He made no bones about his past, and Nasim and I in fact used to tell him frequently that he was still very much a feudal. He liked a retinue around him, which I as his research assistant, housekeeper, sometimes driver, most times family, was very much a part of.
And it was this spirit, romantic as well as revolutionary, which made him into the extraordinary person that he was. Whilst still pursuing his higher studies, the last great Arab war ofindependence, in Algeria, gripped him and enough for him to have been accepted as a leader and participant in the final peace talks with the French. Denied a coffee in the American south, he stormed out to bump into a reverend called Martin Luther King, and then began the peace marches.
That is what Doctor Sahab was all about. In the mundane and mediocre world of South Asian academia, Doctor Sahab stood apart. On account of his past, as well as how he developed himself to think of bettering the future of people. He died yesterday without fulfilling one last wish: to open an institution for higher learning. He wanted to call it Khalduniya. And if that name is not evidence enough of the romantic, adventurer and visionary that was Doctor Sahab, there can be none other in this part of the world.
