by Syed Badrul Ahsan
There were a number of twists and turns in Abul Hashim’s life. When the partition of India took place, he decided to stay back in India and with that end in view went off to his village in West Bengal. But when a mob burnt his home down, Hashim knew that he had hardly any place left in free India he could call home. He moved off to Pakistan. But that was where he should have been in the first place, for in the years leading up to the division of the country he had worked loyally for the All India Muslim League as the party waged its battle for India’s Muslims for a free state of their own. But in the early 1950s, when Abul Hashim opted to be a citizen of Pakistan and settled in Dacca (as it was spelt then), there were enough hints to tell him that all was not well in the new country. There were not merely the old stirrings of communalism but the very clear indications of Bengalis being threatened with insignificance in the new order of things. That was when Hashim felt wounded in the soul.
The wound in Hashim stemmed from his very deep feelings of being Bengali, despite all his enthusiasm for the establishment of a communal Pakistan. His was essentially a secular spirit, one of those forces trapped in the chaos that was to end in mayhem and blood for the people of India. In East Pakistan, he swiftly found himself caught up in the frenzy of the Language Movement. It was clear to him that unless there was resistance to those who believed the Bengali language could be relegated to the backyard in the interest of the Pakistan state, the future for Pakistan’s Bengalis would be at risk. The authorities did not fail to notice his activist role in the movement and only days after the shootings of 21 February 1952 packed him off to jail. He was to remain a prisoner of the Pakistan state for sixteen months. When he was freed in 1953, he formed the Khilafat-e-Rabbani Party, to which he provided leadership till 1956. This is part of the old tale that Badruddin Umar chooses to retell in this small but moving biography of his father. A particular aspect of Umar’s narration of the way Hashim conducted his life comes through the former’s deliberate staying away from endorsing or otherwise, as the case may be, of the politics his father pursued in the course of a difficult career. But within the ambience of the story, Badruddin Umar does not let his reader forget that it is remembrance of a father by a son that is of essence. That is just as well.
A recapitulation of the life and times of Abul Hashim is fundamentally a going back to an era where good men defined the parameters of politics. And yet some of these good men, for all their political integrity, somehow found themselves drawn to the tragic drama that was soon to divide India on a scale of violence and passion never before seen in its history. Hashim was one of these men. He loved nature and was fond of flowers. For him life was forever a matter of aesthetics. When he linked up with Muslim League politics, he saw his job as basically one of ensuring for India’s Muslims the rights and privileges they were entitled to as part of the national heritage and as people who inhabited an increasingly pluralistic world. Umar goes to pains to point out that despite being part of the Muslim League, Hashim did not subscribe to the two-nation theory on the basis of which India was subsequently to be sundered. It was Hashim’s opinion that India was a mass of nationalities, each with its distinctive linguistic and other social features. The idea was surely quixotic, but when Hashim suggested that the peoples inhabiting the various regions of India strive for freedom on the strength of their linguistic heritage, he was principally arguing for the creation of an independent Bengali state where language would serve as the foundation. But what remains a puzzle for the subcontinent nearly six decades after partition is how Hashim’s belief in linguistic nationalism tallied with his association with the Muslim League.
The book is replete with things anecdotal. Abul Hashim’s assessment of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy is not exactly flattering to the latter. It was his belief that when Suhrawardy, almost in the manner of the dramatic, argued for an independent, united Bengal in the run-up to partition, he did so out of the fear that in Pakistan he would have no place in politics. At the Delhi session of the Muslim League in April 1946, Mohammad Ali Jinnah presented a proposal for the creation of a single Pakistan state, a position that contravened the Lahore Resolution of March 1940 where the concept of independent states (meaning two) for India’s Muslims had been enunciated. When Hashim drew Jinnah’s attention to ‘states’ rather than ‘state’, the future father of Pakistan suggested that the absence of the letter ‘s’ had been a printing error. Hashim then asked Liaquat Ali Khan to read out the 1940 resolution. It was soon revealed that the resolution had actually spoken of ‘states’ instead of the single ‘state’ Jinnah was now harping on. In the end, though, it was Jinnah who called the shots. A single Pakistan was established. The results could not but be disastrous.
Badruddin Umar’s work should be required reading for people who missed out on the tragic and yet inevitable happenings of 1940s India. It is more than the story of an individual. In a symbolic manner, it speaks of a generation that lost its way in the woods.
