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Journalism of Courage
8212;Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City
LAST Sunday, on the other side of this week that has convulsed the BJP, L K Advani returned to the land where he was born 77 years ago. For days he had wondered if his childhood home would still be standing. It was not. Iqbal Hussain Jiwani, the current owner of the plot that now has a swanky block of 39 flats, instead tried to reconstruct the house from memory. For the returning man, all he could offer was a fraying sale deed, registering 8216;Plot 133, JM8217; out of the possession of 8216;Kishanchand Dharamdas Advani8217;.
It is reflective of the enigma of return in a subcontinent abruptly partitioned that the old resident often becomes the guide. This was called Lal Cottage, Advani told the residents streaming out of neighbouring houses. Jethi Sipahimalani, then deputy speaker of the Sindh assembly, lived a few houses away, he remembered. Vanished vistas soon began appearing.
For a city with such ancient provenance, Karachi is spectacularly bereft of monuments. To know the city, one must make contact with its people. In this pocket between desert and sea, cultures have comingled and empires have left their impress. To find one8217;s bearings in Karachi one must anchor oneself in a narrative.
C/O Memory Lane
WHEN L K Advani was born in this city in 1927, it was a tranquil outpost of the British empire. The British may have 8216;8216;sinned8217;8217; in taking Sindh province, but in their time all the possibilities of a rapidly modernising subcontinent were made available to the city. The young Advani, by all accounts, optimised them.
His capacious childhood home8212;now in what8217;s called Parsi Colony, but then referred to as Amil colony, denoting an inhabitation of Sindh8217;s Hindu professionals8212;was fitted, for instance, with rooms for boardgames, an indication of refined aspiration.
He was schooled at St Patrick8217;s High School, under the gentle guidance of Irish brothers, who would later give to Pakistan its present president, prime minister and foreign minister. He made it to the cricket team. And he ventured further beyond the confines of home and school for religious-cultural moorings, making acquaintance with Swami Ranganathananda, then the head of the Ramakrishna Math in Karachi, and soaking in discourses on the Bhagwat Gita.
Karachi, as he recalls it now, was a city at ease with itself. The young Advani would cycle to school, enjoying the ride even more when Karachi would be moistened in a rare drizzle, just to read the notice that school was called off for the day. And a 10-minute walk away, he says, was a hillock, surely a topographical landmark in this flat city by the sea.
These were the stories of a growing-up suddenly severed from the rest of his life by Partition that the BJP president laid out on the eve of his departure for Pakistan last month. 8216;8216;Yes, it is a trip down memory lane,8217;8217; he said, as he pulled out old photo albums and perfected old school tricks.
The Karachi he returned to a week later, after four days in Islamabad and Lahore, was 8216;8216;changed beyond recognition8217;8217;. This city that acquired strategic prominence during the Great Game now bears scars of other tumults8212;the influx from northern India after Independence/Partition, the blowback of the Afghan resistance years, the sectarian strife for political and economic spoils, the burden of a population grown 35 times since 8217;47.
But the enigma of return in this divided subcontinent is perhaps better projected on the person returning than on the lost city. To understand Advani8217;s words on Karachi8217;s other son, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, it is important to note the road he took to revisit the city.
Map of the Mind
THE road to Karachi began in Islamabad. Perhaps it could not have been any other way. To return to a city withdrawn from him by history, the peacemaker had to ascertain the matrix of coexistence first. In this planned, scenically appointed city at the foot of the Margalla Hills, Advani met Pakistan8217;s top officials to state his party8217;s continued support to the India-Pakistan peace process.
Specifically, in a meeting with President Pervez Musharraf, he lauded him for his joint statement with Atal Behari Vajpayee in Islamabad in January 2004, resuming the composite dialogue. In that, India agreed to discuss Jammu and Kashmir, with Pakistan saying it would not permit its territory to be used to support terrorism. Advani said he told Musharraf, 8216;8216;What you said in respect of terrorism needed a lot of courage and guts. That provided the breakthrough in the peace process.8217;8217;
However, as both Musharraf and Advani are reported to have said, the process has already been taken over by the people. That groundswell of support for people-to-people contact, in a curious way, echoed at Advani8217;s next two stops: Taxila on the outskirts of Islamabad, and the Katas Raj temples in the Salt Ranges in Punjab8217;s Chakwal district. These Gandharan ruins and abandoned temples speak of an older connect between the peoples of the two countries. They hold8212;among so much else 8212;Asoka8217;s projects in Taxila and Hinduism8217;s most resonant myths the pond near the Katas Raj temples is associated with the Mahabharata. Their architectural wealth strings together the story of South Asia.
8216;8216;Look at the symbolism,8217;8217; gushed Mushahid Hussain of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League as former Pakistan prime minister Shujaat Hussain invited Advani to inaugurate restoration work at Katas Raj. 8216;8216;This marks a healing of wounds.8217;8217;
Next stop: Lahore. In this exuberant city that brooks no comparisons, Advani emphasised: 8216;8216;The creation of India and Pakistan as two separate and sovereign nations is an unalterable reality of history.8217;8217;
Home, at last
AND two days later, in his first appointment in Karachi, Advani visited Jinnah8217;s Mausoleum. His inscription in the visitors8217; book highlighted the Jinnah speech of August 11, 1947, to Pakistan8217;s Constituent Assembly. In it Jinnah had said: 8216;8216;You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the state.8217;8217;
Advani would say a day later: 8216;8216;I believe that this is the ideal that India, Pakistan as well as Bangladesh8212;the three present-day sovereign and separate constituents of the undivided India of the past, sharing a common civilisational heritage8212;should follow.8217;8217;
Having laid out a framework of civilised coexistence between India and Pakistan during this long, long week8212;one that made redundant any urge to militate against the other8217;s country8217;s existence8212;Advani ventured forth to find the site of his old home. It could have been no other way.
