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Nayeem Bhat: A star snuffed out

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Nayeem Bhat didn’t hesitate to travel 60 kilometres to Srinagar to rub shoulders with the who’s who of Kashmir cricket. © Nayeem Bhat’s Facebook page
Nayeem Bhat didn’t hesitate to travel 60 kilometres to Srinagar to rub shoulders with the who’s who of Kashmir cricket. © Nayeem Bhat’s Facebook page

“If I die and go to heaven, I’ll put the name of Star Eleven on golden star, So that angels can see, How much Star Eleven means to me,” read a Facebook post from Nayeem Bhat.

He wrote it in 2014. Now, that ‘if’ is a reality. Nayeem is dead. He won’t represent Star Eleven – a cricket club in north Kashmir’s Handwara town – any more. His all-round brilliance is history. A bullet has silenced the face of cricket in Handwara forever.

Nayeem, a 21-year-old allrounder, had a dream. A cricketing one. Make it big in the sport. Play with the best. Play for Jammu & Kashmir. Maybe, someday, play for India. Like many youngsters in this part of the world, his room was dotted with the posters of cricket stars. Virat Kohli and Parveez Rasool, now team-mates at Royal Challengers Bangalore, featured prominently.

Nayeem played the sport with passion, doing everything to improve his game. He didn’t hesitate to travel 60 kilometres to Srinagar, the state’s cricket capital, to rub shoulders with the who’s who of Kashmir cricket. The men that matter acknowledged his talent. Kashmir Gymkhana, one of the premier clubs affiliated with the Jammu and Kashmir Cricket Association, recruited him to play for them. One small step towards realising his ambition. But his journey had a terrible end. A dream to be weaved with bat and ball was shattered by a bullet – another instance of cricket and conflict being intertwined in Kashmir.

Nayeem’s death has left the cricketing community in Kashmir in a state of mourning, for his team-mates and coaches believed he had all the ingredients to be a ‘perfect allrounder’. Nayeem, his coaches said, had a repeatable action and his height gave him lift off the deck at pace decent enough to trouble the batsmen. He was also good enough as a batsman to play in the middle order for the teams he represented during his short career.

Nayeem’s cricketing journey coincided with that of Akeel Ahmad, his childhood friend and an Under-19 player for J&K. For Akeel, Nayeem was a rival on the cricket field, but best buddy off it. The duo was on a mission: to make otherwise neglected Handwara part of the cricketing landscape.

Nayeem and Akeel were together just half an hour before they were separated forever. Before the fateful moment, they were busy doing what they often did when not playing cricket: photography. Done with their session, Akeel said, they went to the market. Suddenly, an assembly of protesters caught their attention.

Nayeem was called by his brother, a journalist, asking for a camera. “I left the spot and after sometime got to know Nayeem was hit by a bullet,” said Akeel. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Bhat’s room was dotted with the posters of cricket stars – Virat Kohli and Parveez Rasool featured prominently. © Nayeem Bhat’s Facebook page
Bhat’s room was dotted with the posters of cricket stars – Virat Kohli and Parveez Rasool featured prominently. © Nayeem Bhat’s Facebook page

Akeel told Wisden India that he was in awe of Nayeem’s work ethic and passion. “Nayeem would play for Star Eleven, and I played for Handwara Cricket Club. We used to play against each other very often. Nayeem was someone I have known closely. He was my fiercest rival on the field, but we were buddies off it,” he said.

“We would discuss cricket more often than not. He wanted to improve all the time. He had his eyes on top-flight cricket. He was very keen on his fitness, and would train hard. I am shattered by his death. I don’t know how to cope with his loss. This is a huge loss to cricket, and Handwara town in particular. He was trying his best to give our town a cricketing name.”

Nayeem’s coaches remember him as someone who didn’t hesitate to ask questions about his game. Manzoor Ahmad Dar, coach of Kashmir Gymkhana Club, was impressed with what he saw of his young charge. “Nayeem was a very humble and down-to-earth cricketer and he took his game seriously,” Dar told a daily. “Nayeem was a dedicated cricketer and would come all the way to Srinagar from Handwara to practice and train. He had skill and the temperament to improve all the time. We are in complete shock over his death.”

Nayeem’s death has social networking sites abuzz, with Kashmiris expressing their sorrow and sadness.

The young allrounder had a brush with franchise-based Twenty20 cricket, playing two seasons for Srinagar’s Pride Riders in the Downtown Champions League. Mubashir Hassan, a coach licensed by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, is a mentor of the team. Hassan is understandably devastated by the death of his talented ward, who called him often for tips. Nayeem wouldn’t mind calling him on his phone for tips, remembered Hassan.

“Nayeem had a bright future and promising career ahead,” he told Wisden India. “He was a keen learner and I had high hopes of him. He had that hunger and passion that impressed one and all. This will have a huge impact on the players who have played with and against Nayeem. They will be mentally scarred, and it will take them some time to come out of it.”

His parents used to call him Gavaskar, while some of his friends compared him to Martin Guptill, the New Zealand opener. On Tuesday (April 12), a bullet claimed Star Eleven’s brightest star. Hopefully, the angels will realise what his local side and the game of cricket meant to Nayeem.

Waheed Mirza is a journalist in Srinagar. He tweets @mirzawaheedz.

source: http://www.wisdenindia.com / Wisden India / Home / by Waheed Mirza / April 15th, 2016

Forgotten histories: A library in a Guwahati mosque shares the fate of an old Assamese community

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Community Involvement / Social Issues, Education, Travel & Tourism, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Guwahati,  ASSAM  : 

Sirat Library finds few mentions in recorded history and it is even fading from the personal histories of the Khilonjia Muslims who live around it.

Image credit: Shaheen Ahmed
Image credit: Shaheen Ahmed

Every time Assam heads into an election, the political discourse in the state invariably veers towards the issue of indigeniety. Who is an original inhabitant (and who is not) becomes a central question, with all the political parties nudging the electorate’s collective memory to recall real and imagined injustices.

With elections having kicked off in Assam again, my thoughts returned to something else, to my childhood when I would accompany my parents to a concrete structure in Guwahati’s Lakhtokia area. The structure was architecturally nondescript, but the images and the experiences of it still coalesced to form fragments of my memory. Known locally as Sirat Library – although the Assamese pronunciation Sirot often rendered the name incomprehensible – it was located within the precincts of a mosque called Lakhtokia Masjid No. 1.

I vaguely recall public meetings being held in the small library. And till the early 2000s, it moonlighted as a voting booth. For a child, it was an unusual sight to see so many people of different religions line up to cast their votes and even more unusual to see them do so in a library inside a mosque.

The structure still stands today. But the only sight that greets a visitor is of a small room bereft of books or readers. Its holdings are restricted to a small glass cupboard and a few Islamic texts in it.

Legacy of the past

The history of the library is really important to the Khilonjia Muslims or ethnic Assamese Muslims living in Guwahati. Khilonjia Muslims have been in Assam since before the Ahom invasion in the 13th century and they have always been known to relate to their ethnic, rather than their religious, identity.

Shehabuddin Talish, the official scribe of Mir Jumlah, the Nawab of Bengal who invaded Assam in 1662, described their encounter with the Muslims in Assam: “The Muslims whom we met in Assam are Assamese in their habits, and Muhammadans but in name.”

The famous colonial historian Sir Edward Gait, in his monumental work A History of Assam published in 1905, extensively employed Talish’s descriptions to map out a definitive chart of Assam’s history. Nevertheless, historical narratives of Khilonjia Muslims remain sketchy. The same fate is shared by the library in Lakhtokia.

There are no written records of when or who constructed the library. It is, however, believed that the structure is among of the oldest libraries in Guwahati, and the mosque it is a part of is among the three oldest mosques constructed in the colonial period.

The mosque finds a mention in an article in 1885 in the journal Assam Bandhu, which was edited by the Assamese intellectual Gunabhiram Barua. The land for the mosque was donated by Col. Jalnur Ali Ahmed, the father of the fifth President of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed. Col. Ahmed was a distinguished Assamese of his time: he was the second Assamese associated with the Imperial Medical Services and the first Assamese to receive an M.D. degree from London.

Personal histories

Writer-lawyer Akdas Ali Mir, one of the inhabitants of the locality, points to a letter written in 1915 by AHW Benting, the then Commissioner of Assam, which is probably one of the earliest and only clues to tracing the history of the library. “Benting had issued directions in an Order Letter to shift the Makhtab (primary Islamic school) established by the British from the mosque to the present location, where the Junior Madrassa High School is in Guwahati.”

Mir continued: “We can surmise that Sirat Library is the spot where the Makhtab was and then got converted into a library.” This may be true as Sirat is an Arabic word meaning a “way of life”.

As with all public libraries in the state, Sirat Library too was awarded a monthly grant from the government for its upkeep. But the actual running was done by the area’s Assamese Muslims, with people taking turns as librarians. Renowned Assamese filmmaker Altaf Majid remembers his childhood days spent in the library reading in the quiet. “My uncle used to be the librarian for many years. Every Friday afternoon he would take me to the iconic Lawyers’ Book Stall in nearby Pan Bazaar to buy books. In fact I read the Mahabharata in Bengali in Sirat Library in the 1960s.”

Majid continued: “This library was also a repository of well-known pulp fiction of the period. They were in English, Assamese and Bengali. In fact, I also read my first English novel in this library as well as the famous Bengali Mohan Detective Series and the Assamese adventure series Pa-Phu.”

Credit: Shaheen Ahmed
Credit: Shaheen Ahmed

Mukimuddin Ahmed, another resident, talks of the days in the late 1950s when he would act as the librarian in the evenings. “I was paid Rs 5 every month as the librarian and I worked for a year. Every afternoon after school I would go to the residences to collect the newspapers for the library. In the evenings after the readers had finished reading them I would then return them to the respective households.”

Assamese Muslim women had a strong role to play in the library’s upkeep. In the late 1960s, the only Assamese Muslim women’s social organisation, Anjumaan-E-Khawaateenein Islam, contributed Rs 10,000 to construct the new building for the library from the earlier Assam-type house construction. Noted Assamese woman writer Alimun Nessa Piyar donated furniture to the library in 1960.

As Helena Barranha and Susana S. Martins poignantly observed , “Memory has become both an intellectual challenge and a commodity for easy consumption.” This is true for contemporary India in general, and Sirat Library epitomises the trend. The erasure of the library from popular memory testifies to the erasure of cultural traditions that were once so integral to the Assamese society.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Memory Lane / by Shaheen Ahmed / April 05th, 2016