Conservation architect Vikas Dilawari’s work on Worli shrine is a significant chapter in the city’s built heritage
Cocooned in the shielding hold of the bay, just off the arterial, traffic-clogged road that hugs the coastline, is the 111-year-old Ma Hajiani Dargah, restored to its former glory. The restoration of the building began in November 2017 and was completed by conservation architect Vikas Dilawari on April 19, which also marked the eve of Shab-e-Baraat.
The dargah is one of the lesser-known spots of quiet in the city, often interchanged with the more popular Haji Ali Dargah, a stone’s throw away. Built in 1908 when Sir George Sydenham was the Governor of Bombay — primarily in Porbandar stone and basalt ashlar plinth — it is an ideal example of Indo-Saracenic architecture. Subtle influences of the colonial style of construction are evident, particularly in the ornamental work. “This is a very unique building. It is a magical place, of tranquillity, at the tip of the land on a natural rocky outcrop, elevated so gracefully,” Mr. Dilawari said.
Over the years, the dargah’s neighbouring plots of land were sold to private developers. The towering Samudra Mahal — a piece of prime real estate — was where the residence of the Scindias of Gwalior once stood, before being demolished in 1960. “Until a few decades ago, the Mahalakshmi temple, the Haji Ali Dargah, and the Ma Hajiani Dargah would have been the beacons along the coast of Bombay. The proliferation of high-rises without appropriate urban design is certainly impacting the pristine setting, and this might change further with the introduction of the impending coastal road,” Mr. Dilawari said.
A nautical past
The dargah is the site of three graves: Ma Hajiani, Haji Ismail Hasham Yusuf, and his son, Sir Mohamed Yusuf, draped in red and green brocaded chaddars and rose petals. The Yusuf family has been eminent in shipping trade and philanthropy in the city. Haji Ismail Hasham Yusuf founded the Bombay Steam Navigation Company in the late 19th century, and established the erstwhile Marine College at Rashid Mansion in Worli as a charitable institute, later moved to the island of Nhava and still functional as Training Ship Rahaman.
The mausoleum is built in honour of Ma Hajiani, a saint believed to be the sister of Saint Pir Haji Ali Shah Bukhari. The Haji Ali Dargah, houses the tomb of the latter. According to legend, they died at sea and their bodies were washed ashore, a few metres from each other. They were then buried at the respective spots they were found. Subsequently, two tombs were built — Haji Ali for the brother and Ma Hajiani for the sister. At the Ma Hajiani Dargah, women have always been allowed to access the maqbara. Women frequent in large numbers, making offerings of red or green glass bangles: red indicating one’s wish for marriage, and green for offspring.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Society> History & Culture / by Khorshed Deboo / Mumbai – April 23rd, 2019
Hues of an art Farha Ansari and her designs / Murali KUmar K
From Hillary Clinton to Alia Bhatt, Ahilaya’s designs have invaded the wardrobes of celebrities
In the Bombay of the 1970s, when his daughters were young, Anwar Ansari started a hand-printed chikankari textile business called First Lucknowi, because he believed he was the first to start such a venture. Chikankari is a traditional embroidery style that originated in Lucknow. Anwar and his partners hired local artisans in Bombay and Lucknow to handcraft these designs on cotton, silk, chiffon and other fabric.
Almost half a century later, First Lucknowi is different yet, essentially, the same. Today, it goes by the name Ahilaya, named after the queen of the 18th Century Malwa kingdom, Rajmata Ahilyadevi Holkar.
Managed by Anwar’s daughters, Farha, Nagma and Sana, the number of employees has grown from 40 to 200 and its customer base has also increased. Many celebrities — Hillary Clinton, Ivanka Trump, Drew Barrymore, Anushka Sharma, Alia Bhatt among others — are among Ahilaya’s customers.
According to Farha, the chief reason for the brand’s longevity and success is, “We do everything and do not outsource anything.” “The materials have to be pure; there should not be any synthetic. We are stringent about that.”
The designs and raw material are couriered to the artisans in Lucknow and Mumbai, who in turn handcraft the clothes, she adds.
Farha, now lives in New York and oversees ‘Leaves of Grass’, an international offshoot of the family-run business. Though her sisters, Nagma and Sana, take care of the Indian affairs, Farha visits the Bengaluru store at least once a year. This visit is ritually followed by a meeting with craftsmen too.
“They feel happy when they learn that the clothes they make are worn by models and celebrities. We sometimes call them for photo shoots, order biryani and have a good time.”
The price range starts at Rs. 4,000. Farha says, exclusively handcrafted wear often costs more. Comparing synthetic and machine-made wear to handmade garments, according to her, “is like differentiating microwaved dinner from gourmet food. We also pay fair wages to our workers. If we reduce the price, we might not be able to do that.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Praveen Sudevan / April 16th, 2019
Captain Haneef Uddin was preparing to celebrate his 25th birthday at an altitude of 18,500 ft in Kargil when a bullet fell him in the summer of 1999.
Calcutta:
Captain Haneef Uddin was preparing to celebrate his 25th birthday at an altitude of 18,500ft in Kargil when a bullet fell him in the summer of 1999.
The young officer’s story of valour remains at the centre of a 13-part series on little known heroes of the Kargil war on All India Radio’s FM Rainbow station that is played out at 3pm every Sunday.
On Kargil Vijay Diwas on Thursday, Major Akhil Pratap, an ex-army officer who has been hosting the series, will have family members of 13 such unsung heroes as guests for a live-chat on AIR.
“Kargil was one of those battles which witnessed many casualties. There are several faces whose stories have remained unheard and untold despite all the coverage by the media. I have tried to dust out some of those faces and present them to India,” said Akhil, who was last posted with the Rashtriya Rifles in Jammu and Kashmir in 2010.
“I believe this is the first time that AIR is hosting such a show on the occasion of Kargil Vijay Diwas.”
Born in Delhi, Captain Haneef was a service code officer attached to Rajputana Rifles and posted at Turtuk during the war. His body lay at the height for 46 days before it was handed over to his family.
The army later renamed a sub-sector in Kargil after Captain Haneef.
Apart from Captain Haneef, those feature in the radio series are Captain R Jerry Prem Raj from a small village in Venganoor near Thiruvananthapuram and several others who fell to bullets at Kargil.
“Each of these men had responded to the war-call differently. But they died almost the same way,” Akhil said.
Captain Prem Raj was with his wife on honeymoon in Ooty when a call came from his headquarters and he rushed to Drass.
On the intervening night of July 6 and 7, he was on duty as observation post officer, trying to locate enemy camps. A bullet first hit his shoulder. He fell down, stood up and fired back. A shower of bullets pierced Captain Prem Raj. The army has a hill to his dedication – the gun hill in the Drass sector.
Commissioned in June 1997, Haneef was doing his rounds braving the sub-zero temperature in Turtuk when he suddenly faced a shower of bullets from an altitude.
“Haneef’s parents didn’t seek anything, just his body. The government honoured him with Vir Chakra posthumously,” said Akhil.
Prem Raj, too, was honoured the same for taking bullets in the Drass sector two years after he was commissioned as an artillery officer.
“Prem Raj’s brother is an IAF person and elder to him by three years. Together, the two brothers had brought home several trophies and laurels. But when Prem Raj’s body arrived, his brother stood all alone,” said Akhil. “We want to share these stories with India.”
The Thursday’s live chat is scheduled for 8 am.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> West Bengal / by Kinsuk Basu in Calcutta / July 26th, 2018
THE TRIBUNE COMMEMORATES JALLIANWALA BAGH CENTENARY
Dr Kitchlew & Dr Satyapal were towering freedom fighters, their arrest led to Jallianwala rally
Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal — a hundred years after Jallianwala, these are the two names with which each conversation about the massacre starts in Amritsar. But in the past 100 years, the governments have rarely mentioned their names.
The meeting that was “dispersed” by General Dyer’s bullets had been called to protest Dr Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal’s arrest. The two towering leaders had emerged as great symbols of Hindu-Muslim unity during the April 6 hartal and, on April 9, people had raised slogans of ‘Kitchlew ji ki jai’ and ‘Satyapal ji ki jai’ during Ramnavami jaloos. It was the collective charm of both the leaders that the Hindus and Muslims were publicly drinking water from the same glass.
Dr Kitchlew’s father Azizudin, a prominent Kashmiri businessman dealing in embroidered shawls, had moved to Amritsar in the 19th century. He sent his son to England and Germany from where he obtained his PhD degree and also developed close ties with Jawaharl- al Nehru. “Kitchlew was widely admired in Amritsar and his picture would be seen hanging in almost every shop as a tribute to the sacrifices he made during the freedom struggle. Tall, fair-complexioned and mostly attired in white khadi, he was known for his unfailing courtesy and winsome smile,” historian Prof VN Datta, hailing from Amritsar, recalled in the preface of a book.
A few days before his death, Dr Kitchlew told Prof Datta that the trouble on April 10 in Amritsar could have been averted had he and Satyapal not been arrested. The government was absolutely despotic and never understood what the people felt and wanted, he said.
After Partition, Dr Kitchlew refused to move to Pakistan and decided to stay back in Amritsar. He, however, was forced to leave the city he loved the most and shift to Delhi after rioters burnt down his four-storey house and the family-owned Kitchlew Hosiery Factory in the heart of Amritsar.
During his last meeting with Dr Kitchlew in Delhi, Prof Datta saw a bare cot, old furniture and broken pieces of crockery eloquently speaking of the financial difficulties he was facing. Yet, there was no bitterness for anyone. “I manage to live because Jawahar sends me some briefs,” he would say.
The last tragic memories of Dr Kitchlew’s family were related to his youngest son Toufique, who spent his last days in penury. Before he passed away, he had expressed a desire to shift to Amritsar and the Punjab Government even annou-nced rent-free accommodation, but the address was never shared with him.
Dr Satyapal, on the other hand, became the Punjab Vidhan Sabha Speaker post-Partition. He had famously said: “I was never a rebel, but to revolt for righteousness is our religion and duty.” He completed his MBBS with a gold medal from Punjab University and became active in the freedom struggle.
Dr Shailja Goyal, a lecturer at DAV College, Jagraon, who has done her PhD on Dr Satyapal, says he was a man of rare integrity and character. She says he was vocal even about the wrongs within the Congress. “He was instrumental in organising the AICC session in Amritsar.” He died in 1954 and his two daughters moved abroad.
Darbari Lal, former Deputy Speaker of Punjab Assembly, says Dr Kitchlew was a powerful orator and his words would sway the masses. “Dr Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal are household names in Amritsar and will surely remain so.”
source: http://www.tribuneindia.com / The Tribune / Home> Punjab / by Vishav Bharti, Tribune News Service, Amritsar / April 13th, 2019
A vivid piece of maritime history is hidden in the memories of the cooks and deckhands who once sailed off the Malabar coast
By noon, the sun would heat up the vast blue expanse through which they sailed at great risk to their lives. By evening, when salt and dirt clung to their bodies, the skies would turn crimson, symbolising streaks of revolt. Later, weather permitting, the shimmering stars would give them clues to the voyage that lay ahead through the inky waters of the Arabian Sea, often to the Persian Gulf. On the shore, they would unload the goods they had loaded on to the wooden dhows: timber, bamboo, coconuts, tapioca, tiles, salt, sugar, fertilizers. And sometimes, hidden among the cargo, people .Being smuggled to the far shores.
But even when they returned to their homes in Kerala, none of the deckhands of the dhows wrote about their experiences; in fact they actively strove to forget this tempestuous period in their lives that ended when better transportation facilities arrived. It’s been nearly four decades since these traditional vessels with their distinctive masts set sail from the Malabar coast, either along the coastline or farther afield. But it’s only now that the world has begun to hear the stories of these intrepid men, an integral part of the maritime history of peninsular India.
And this is thanks to a photo artist from Kerala’s port town of Kodungallur, around which scholars speculate the ancient Muziris harbour existed until destroyed by the 1341 calamity. K.R. Sunil’s photographs, a series titled ‘Manchukkar — The Seafarers of Malabar’, captures the faces of 34 deckhands. It was on show last month at URU Art Harbour in Kochi. Through them we learn of the misery of people caught in a vortex of exploitation and unshielded from nature’s furies.
Bare frames
The faces are stark, the frames bare. But every black-and-white image tells a story. Of how poverty forced pre-teen boys to pack themselves off in an uru or sailing vessel on long-distance voyages battling rough seas and uncertainty for weeks on end, and then return home — if lucky — only to set off on another strenuous voyage. Years would pass, the boys would turn into middle-aged men. Then, seen as worthy of nothing else, plagued by ill-health, they would be sent home, discarded like boats with rotten hulls.
T. Ibrahim is now 80 and lives an unremarkable life in Ponnani, a fishing town in Malappuram district. He considers himself fortunate to have lived this long. As a youth, he recalls how he once sailed a dhow laden with tiles and a dozen sailors that got caught in a storm on its way to Ratnagiri in Maharashtra. Ibrahim joined his panicked colleagues and began jettisoning cargo. The vessel sank nevertheless. “Some of them managed to get away on a lifeboat. Ibrahim and four others held on to a piece of wood and floated for two days,” says Sunil, recalling his meetings with Ibrahim.
Ibrahim’s …
The youngest in Sunil’s photo series is also called Ibrahim, or simply Umboocha. Now 53, the man from Kasargod, along the Karnataka border, had his final sailing trips on motorised dhows in the 1990s. Memories of manchu, as the boat is called in his part of Malabar, where people also speak Tulu and Kannada, still make him shudder. Their vessel once sank during a cyclone when they were bound for Iran. They roped together emptied cargo barrels and drifted on the improvised float for three days. Rescue came, but they landed in jail: all of them had lost their identity documents.
Siva Sankaran, also from Ponnani, remembers that his first trip on a dhow to Bombay took seven weeks instead of four days. Reason: bad weather. But tempests were just one part of the deckhands’ ordeal, says Sunil. From starvation to sexual exploitation to unhygienic conditions to taxing work hours, the voyages were invariably hellish. “Circus in the seas,” is how Abdul Rahiman, 68, recalls them. “One had to climb 50 feet up on swinging ropes to set the sail. You may have to do it deep in the night, when the boat is violently rolling,” Sunil quotes the sailor as recalling.
The artist’s first trip to Ponnani was in 2014, though it was only two and a half years ago that he turned his focus on these deckhands of yore. “As a child, I had heard a lot about Ponnani. We had country boats with merchandise travelling there from Kodungallur.” The town charmed him on his first visit and inspired several more. The next time he brought his camera along. A photo series from these trips was shown at the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Steeped in pathos
Then, four months before the biennale, Sunil stumbled upon an old man singing a song to his friends. “There was something curious about its lines and the tune steeped in pathos. I thought I should explore more,” he says.
This was T. Ibrahim and this wasn’t the only sailing song he knew. He had learnt several from Rasakh Haji, a merchant of essential oils who owned the boat in which Ibrahim was a deckhand. Haji had a talent for creating songs and had composed one about the dhow. They sailed together from Mumbai to Kerala and “the ditties seeped into Ibrahim too,” says Sunil.
Most deckhands began their careers as cooks (pandari) when they just 11 or 12 and were routinely sexually exploited. Those who moved up the ladder became deckhands or khalasi. The capable among them rose to become captains or srank.
Abdul Lathif thought himself lucky to become a deckhand at 17, but is now repulsed by the memories. “The boat’s woodwork was always infested with roaches and scorpions. You would see them floating even in the drinking water. We were covered with lice. The winter winds gave us mouth ulcers,” he trails off. “After unloading the goods, we would appy a mixture of oil, lime and ghee to the boat’s keel to prevent barnacles. The work was done standing in a slush of mud and human excrement.”
C.M. Ummar was a young man during the 70s when he crewed in dhows carrying people looking for work in West Asia. Illegally. “A couple of hundred job-seekers would be taken aboard along with the cargo. You’d hide them with a tarpaulin. And in the high seas, another boat would come to fetch them,” he recalls. “Sea-sick, they would sometimes plead to be taken back home. Getting them back was equally dangerous.”
Deaths weren’t uncommon — whether from falling from the mast or from disease. Hussain, 64, recalls a friend’s demise: “With a heavy heart we offered prayers, and buried him at sea with a rock tied to his body.”
The primary duty of Muhammad Koya, 81, was to smear kalpath, a mixture of coconut-fibre, cow-dung, sawdust and ghee, on the keel to plug gaps. “It involved holding one’s breath under water for long periods; the job affected Koya’s hearing,” notes Sunil, who is now in the process of making a documentary on this bit of “ignored history”.
Floating bodies
P. Ummar is 20 years younger than Koya, and recalls how armed pirates would sometimes rob their cargo. “Such encounters were common along the Maharashtra coast,” he says. Koran, now an oracle for the traditional Theyyam dance in Kasargod, talks of the dead bodies he saw floating near the Bombay port during his manchu days. He suspects this was from the smuggler-customs encounters.
Kochi, Kerala, 07/02/2019 : K K Khadher, from the series ‘Manchookar – The seafarers of Malabar’ by K R Sunil. Photo: Special arrangement
K.K. Kadar talks of how seasoned sailors would read signs of impending danger in “unusual changes in the colour of seawater, the rising froth, intertwined sea-snakes, dead fish…. they were indicators for the crew to prepare themselves for eventualities,” he says. Today, he is a public worker, and preoccupied with the 80th anniversary of a historic beedi workers’ strike that had once been held in Ponnani.
T.V. Moideenkutty …
For T.V. Moideenkutty, too, life is calmer. The 54-year-old lives on the tranquil shore of Ponnani with his family in a tile-roof house. He started life as a cook in a dhow and then worked as a deckhand for eight years. At least it staved off poverty, he says, smoking a beedi.
Life on the dhow taught him a lesson: the value of drinking water. “I learned the word for water in many languages, especially before hitting ‘Hindistan’ during our Mumbai voyages,” he says, retying his mundu and tucking it in at the waist.
The lighthouse near Moideenkutty’s house stands tall with its gas flasher scanning the ocean. Standing outside URU gallery, I can see the sea dotted with gleaming new-age ships filled with crew and cargo heading out to harbours around the world.
The Delhi-based journalist is a keen follower of Kerala’s traditional performing arts.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu> Voyager> Society / by Sreevalsan Thiyyadi / April 13th, 2019
They beckon all of us to give human freedom respect, human beings dignity, and human rights recognition
One hundred years ago, on April 12, a letter dropped into the British Raj’s postal system. The writer of the letter was a world-famous poet. That is not the only reason for the letter having been unusual. It was, by the political sights of the government of the times, seditionist. But luminously so.
The Raj’s censors must have been greatly tempted to see its contents; perhaps they did, spurred by the ruling ‘order’ of the day, the Rowlatt Act. Curbing, in the name of war-time discipline, every conceivable civil liberty, the Act enabled stricter control of the press, arrests without warrant, indefinite detention without trial. It empowered the police to search a place and arrest any person they disapproved of without warrant. Naturally, it outraged India, and both the writer and recipient of the letter.
Written on April 12, 1919, by Rabindranath Tagore to Mohandas K. Gandhi, it was about what its writer called “the great gift of freedom”. He said: “…India’s opportunity for winning it will come to her when she can prove that she is morally superior to the people who rule her by their right of conquest.”
‘Faith or the life in death’
Tagore knew, doubtless, that the phrase “morally superior” would strike a chord in Gandhi. As would the sentence that followed: “She must willingly accept her penance of suffering, the suffering which is the crown of the great. Armed with her utter faith in goodness, she must stand unabashed before the arrogance that scoffs at the power of spirit.” Tagore ended the letter, as a poet would, with a verse: “Give me the faith of the life in death, of the victory in defeat, of the power hidden in the frailness of beauty, of the dignity of pain that accepts hurt but disdains to return it.” Prose is ever the ‘doer’, poetry the ‘artist’. And so this letter and the line just cited cannot hope to compete with Tagore’s much-quoted poem ‘Where the mind is without fear…’. But taken for itself, this sentence has to rank among the greatest expressions in prose of truth’s protest against power. Certain words, poetic word-images, in that line are scorching: death, defeat, dignity, pain, hurt.
India had, only a few days earlier, seen all those five word-images at play in Delhi. As the scholar-lawyer Anil Nauriya has recently reminded us, on March 30, 1919, the Raj’s police fired at a gathering in Delhi protesting the Rowlatt Act on a call by Mahatma Gandhi for a nation-wide hartal. Nauriya lists among them Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims.
A sample:Abdul Ghani, b. 1894. Killed in bayonet charge by a British Army unit near the Town Hall, Delhi. Atam Prakash: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Chandra Bhan, b. 1889. Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Chet Ram: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Gopi Nath, b. 1889: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Hashmatullah Khan: b. 1890: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Mam Raj: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Radha Saran, b. 1897: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Radhey Shyam, b. 1891: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Ram Lal, b. 1886: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Ram Saroop: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Ram Singh: b. 1891: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Chander Mal: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Seva Ram: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Swattin, son of Abdul Karim: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day.
The Delhi firing was, as it were, a macabre rehearsal for what was to follow. And it was doubtless on Tagore’s mind when he wrote the letter to Gandhi. It was still in the post’s pipelines when, the next day, on April 13, 1919, his poetic vision was to find prescient corroboration. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, Punjabnot to oppose Rowlatt but for a festival that marks the Sikh new year, Baisakhi. Its intent was totally un-political. But who is to say how arrogance will work?
On April 13, 1919
What followed is now part of the world’s annals of state-led crime. Troops under the command of Brigadier General (temporary rank) Reginald Dyer entered the garden, blocking the main entrance after them, took up position on a raised bank, and on Dyer’s orders fired on the crowd for some ten minutes, minutes that were an eternity. They stopped only when the ammunition supply was almost exhausted. Official sources themselves gave a figure of 379 identified dead, with approximately 1,100 wounded. In those ten minutes Amritsar became India. It embodied a nation’s death-defying dignity in pain, hurt.
Tagore was, at the time of the mowing down ‘Sir’ Rabindranath. And he had been a Nobel Laureate for Literature for six years. On May 30, 1919, Tagore picked up his pen, this time, not that of a Nobel Laureate but of a Knight of the British Empire, to write a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. “News of the sufferings,” he wrote, had “trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India”. He then said: “The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation… I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.” And he asked of the Viceroy, “relieve me of the title of knighthood”.
Solidarity with suffering, especially when it is spontaneous, takes many forms. One is sharing by renunciation. Tagore’s self-divestment of the title, then perhaps the most coveted, of ‘Sir’ was an act of spontaneous solidarity with the suffering of Delhi, of Amritsar. And it was a chastisement, in Tagore’s words, of the “arrogance that scoffs at the power of spirit”.
The martyrs of Jallianwala beckon this generation, all of us, including India and Indians, Pakistan and Pakistanis, Bangladesh and Bangladeshis, Myanmar and Myanmarese, not just Britain, to give human freedom respect, human beings dignity, human rightsrecognition. Looking around them at those slain — Hindu with Dalit among them, Sikh and Muslim — the martyrs of Jallianwala would want correction and atonement from those on the Indian subcontinent and beyond its boundaries, who today foment division, discord, disunity.
Enduring arrogance
They also beckon us to see that “arrogance of power” is not a colonial or imperial patent, nor “the power of spirit” an attribute of liberation struggles alone. Arrogance can occur under post-colonial, post-imperial, ‘independent’ skies and can — must — summon the power of spirit.
‘Rowlatt’ is a temperament that seeks domination, control, hegemony. It has the characteristics of the bully — strength and insecurity. Asia, Africa and Latin America have known that temperament in both the hubris of the external ruler, the hauteur of the one within. And they have seen peoples’ power dismantling both. Bowing to public opinion in India and in the U.K., the Raj repealed the Rowlatt Act, the Press Act, and 22 other laws in March 1922 – a victory of the people. The Rowlatt temperament is not a feature of governments alone. It works in society as well, keeping sections of it in a state of chronic enfeeblement. The Rowlatt temperament is also to be seen in corporate India seeking monopolist domination over its natural resources and public commons.
This centenary of India’s rebuffing of the Rowlatt Act’s scowl through what Tagore called “the power of spirit” is one to be cherished, celebrated and be inspired by.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and governor
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Opinion> Lead / by Gopalkrishna Gandhi / April 13th, 2019
Priceless editions of Urdu, Persian and English lie in neglect as no one cares to maintain a library that should have been a national treasure.
Daniel Jacobius Morgan
I have spent much of the past week digging through piles of books at the Saulat Public Library in the city of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh. I am looking for a single manuscript: Muhammad Sanaʾullah Panipati’s Khawass-i Hizb al-Bahr, an 18th century Persian commentary, written in Delhi, on the occult properties of a famous prayer formulae compiled by Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, the Maghribi mystic of the 13th century. It is, very likely, the only copy of the commentary in the world.
I know it is somewhere in the library because it appears in Abid Reza Bedar’s 1966 catalogue, but despite my excavations and those of Mazhar Muin Khan, the endlessly patient librarian, the manuscript remains hidden.
I am sure that Muhammad Sanaʾullah Panipati would have understood my search: just as words have occult sympathies with the material world, so too does this hidden manuscript exercise its power, drawing me to the library day after day although it remains unseen, buried beneath thick layers of dust, cobwebs and mouldering pages. As I dig through the stacks, I can’t help but call to mind the hadith qudsi: “I was a hidden treasure that loved to be known.”The disappearance of a single manuscript, though serious in itself, is part of a far larger problem at Saulat Library: one of India’s richest archives of Urdu, Persian and Arabic works, it has fallen into a state of absolute desuetude.
Reader’s ticket
Founded in 1934, the library was once an important centre of political and social life for North Indian Muslims. In its heyday, famous visitors included Khalid Sheldrake (the British pickle manufacturer turned king of Chinese “Islamistan”), Sayyid Hashimi Faridabadi (author of a famous Urdu history of Greece), Khwaja Hasan Nizami (the great Chishti Sufi of Delhi), and the Agha Khan.
Besides 25,000 Urdu printed books – including the only known first edition of Ghalib’s 1841 Urdu diwan – the library holds hundreds of irreplaceable manuscripts: eighteenth-century Afghan chronicles, works on occult science, personal diaries of Rampuri notables, volumes of Persian poetry, and richly-illuminated Qurʾāns. It also holds a complete run of Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s Persian newspaper Jam-i Jahan Numa, Muhammad ʿAli Jauhar’s Urdu-language Hamdard and English-language Comrade, as well as Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Tahzib al-Akhlaq.
Since the partition, when many of its leading lights moved to Pakistan, it has undergone a process of steady decline. A further blow came with the abolition of the privy purse of the Rampuri royal family, the library’s major patrons.
The reading room with pictures of Hakim Ajmal Khan, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Ali and the first Nawab of Rampur
These days, residents of Rampur have barely heard its name. As I searched for it in the city’s narrow lanes, I kept being directed to its well-funded and illustrious sister library, the Raza Library, housed in the old Nawabi palace. Like its manuscripts, Saulat is hidden. To get there you have to walk through the winding streets that lead to the heart of the Chaku (knife) Bazaar to a small courtyard behind the city’s Jama Masjid (the congregational mosque). The library is up an unlit staircase behind a tailor’s shop. You really have to know where it is to get there.
The main reading room only has three walls now: the fourth collapsed in March 2013, and there is no money to replace it. All the books have now been moved into a single room where the electricity is intermittent at best and daylight comes in through a few holes in the ceiling. The library was already in poor condition when the wall fell. Since then the cataloguing system has broken down entirely.External view with missing wallThe library’s one regular patron, a retired engineer who studied at Aligarh Muslim University, comes each morning to read the newspaper. He described the library as a “graveyard for books” (kitabon ka qabaristan). It is hard to disagree: the books are piled high on shelves, some strewn on the floor, torn and covered in dust so thick it looks like the set of a low-grade horror film.The sad irony is that the collection survived almost certain destruction once before. In the violence that accompanied partition in 1947, the managing committee of the library faced an enraged crowd who were marching through the city torching government buildings. Because the library is located in a former tehsil office, it was targeted for destruction. Forming a human chain, they passed thousands of books, manuscripts and newspapers from hand to hand across the courtyard that separates the library from the Jama Masjid (congregational mosque) some eighty metres away. But where fire and violence failed, ants and neglect are winning the day.I have come to Rampur to gather materials for my PhD dissertation on the history of eighteenth-century North Indian intellectual culture. For my task, the most precious manuscripts are often those that were never printed because they reveal much about fields of knowledge that were neglected with the coming of colonial rule. To see these irreplaceable texts crumbling before my eyes is heartbreaking.
A water-damaged Persian manuscript
Given the working conditions, Mazhar Muin’s daily enthusiasm for our thus far thankless search is remarkable. But without some urgent action to preserve or at least digitise the collection, the loss to India’s intellectual history will be immense. In the words of Ghalib:
“nāla-yi dil ne diye aurāq-i laḳht-i dil ba bād
yādgār-i nāla ek dīwān-i be-shīrāza thā”
“The heart’s lament threw the pages of the heart’s fragments to the wind
The memorial to the lament was a single unbound book.”
Neglected stacks
All photographs by Daniel Jacobius Morgan.
Daniel Jacobius Morgan is a PhD scholar at South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago.
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll / Home> Library of India / by Daniel Jacobius Morgan / November 25th, 2017
It is a classic case of believe it or not. Ebrahim Alkazi, the celebrated Indian theater director, has his roots in Unaiza in Qassim.
Alkazi’s businessman father, Hamad, came from Saudi Arabia and did business in India in the 1960s and 1970s. That was before the oil boom changed the face of Saudi Arabia.
Alkazi, now 90, went to St. Vincent’s High School in Pune and St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. He went to London for training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
On Feb. 20, when Alkazi will be honored at the 2nd Saudi Film Festival in Dammam, it will be like a homecoming for the prodigal son.
“We want to honor pioneers in the field of theater,” said Ahmed Al-Mulla, director general of the festival. “And Alkazi is top on that list.”
Alkazi has played the role of a bridge between Indian and Arab cultures. “We consider him as a treasure and a maker of history. We want to present him as a role model to our Saudi youth,” said Al-Mulla.
He said a documentary on Alkazi will be screened during the opening ceremony, and a book is also being published illustrating his remarkable life and achievements.
Early on in his career, Alkazi got associated with the Bombay Progressive Artists Group, which included M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, artists who were later to paint from his plays and design his sets.
As the director of the prestigious National School of Drama, Alkazi revolutionized Indian theater by the magnificence of his vision, and the meticulousness of his technical discipline. He trained many well-known film and theater actors and directors, including Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah and Rohini Hattangadi. He also founded Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi.
Alkazi’s father spent his life trading between Pakistan, India, Turkey, Kuwait and Lebanon. He settled for some time in India, when his son Ebrahim was born in 1925 in Pune.
His daughter Amaal and son Faisal are also associated with theater.
Alkazi speaks highly about his father and takes immense pride in his Saudi roots and considers his early days in Pune as “the richest moments in my life.”
source: http://www.arabnews.com / Arab News / Home / Jeddah – February 18th, 2015
Most people know of this hierarchy but how much do we know of the women behind this great dynasty?
Mughal empire
The Mughal Empire (1526-1707) was established by Babur defeating Ibrahim Lodi in the First Battle of Panipat. His reign went on for four years (1526-1530). His successor was his son, Humayun. Then arrived Akbar, followed by his son Jahangir, followed by Shah Jahan, and the, the last great Mughal ruler– Aurangzeb.
Most people know of this hierarchy but how much do we know of the women behind this great dynasty?
Here’s a list to educate you about the same!
source: http://www.indiatoday.in / India Today / Home> News> Education Today> GK & Current Affairs> History / by India Today Web / New Delhi – May 06th, 2016
Taking up the challenging task of achieving unity and tolerance
M.H. Ansari viewing an exhibition on Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari at the M.F. Hussain Art Gallery, 2015
Fifty-six is no age to die. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, MD, MS, with a tall reputation in London’s Lock Hospital and Charing Cross Hospital, and ‘free Doctor’ to uncountable poor in Delhi, was on a train bringing him back to his hometown, Delhi, from Mussoorie where he had gone to treat the Nawab of Rampur when, on May 10, 1936, a heart attack – his first and fatal – took him away. He was four years short of sixty.
Doctors are human and death’s sudden grasp comes to medical luminaries just as it comes to ordinary mortals. Ansari must have been in some disbelief at his heart’s capitulation. But his death shocked a whole world beyond himself, a world of grateful and trusting patients, former patients, friends, families of patients, countless Congress and Muslim League leaders who were his patients, some of them, and fellow freedom fighters, all. For he had been more, incredibly more, than the ‘good Doctor sahib‘. He had been, for over two decades, a political guide and pathfinder to all those who believed in India’s plural integrity and in India’s destiny as a leader of progressive causes globally.
The Balkan War in 1912 saw 32-year-old Ansari lead a medical team from India to Turkey to help wounded Turkish forces in what was not just a humanitarian act but one that formed lasting bonds, as the medical mission of the doctor, Dwarkanath Kotnis, to China in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese war was to do. The Kotnis Mission has been the subject of a film, Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani by V. Shantaram, for which K.A. Abbas wrote the script. A film has to come on Dr. Ansari Ki Amar Kahani about that mission’s work. Mrinal Sen could well have made such a film a decade ago but perhaps Javed Akhtar or Shyam Benegal will yet do it, for it cries out, filmographically and civilizationally, to be done.
M.A. Ansari’s life as such needs to be known, not for his sake – he is beyond the reach of recognition or neglect – but ours. Being invited to play a constructive political role in the formulation of the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League in 1916 and to preside over the Muslim League’s sessions in 1918 and 1920, Ansari emerged as a sturdy champion of the Khilafat Movement and Hindu-Muslim unity.
His commitment to that cause soon steered away from League politics, the separate electorates idea and all that was to lead to the demand for Pakistan. This resulted in his becoming inevitably, a general secretary of the Indian National Congress in 1920, 1922, 1926, 1929, 1931 and 1932 and in 1927, its president. A former president of the Muslim League becoming president of the Indian National Congress? Incredible, but incredible things did happen in Gandhi’s and Nehru’s India.
Drawing close to the Mahatma’s eclectic nationalism, Ansari became Gandhi’s ‘Delhi host’ in his old Delhi manor called ‘Darussalam’ and physician to members of Gandhi’s family, including his grandson, Rasik, son of Harilal Gandhi, who contracted typhoid in 1929 while on a visit to Delhi (from eating roadside jalebis, as Rasik himself explained) and in spite of Ansari’s valiant efforts, could not be saved. Gandhi was touring the North West Frontier at the time. Ansari sent him a telegram conveying the news. Gandhi steeled himself. “I loved the boy,” he wrote, “I had placed high hopes on him…” The trauma brought the doctor and the Mahatma closer to one another.
Ansari was instrumental in the founding of the Jamia Millia Islamia, and bringing to it a whole host of nationalists, Muslim and Hindu, to learn and to teach. In return for learning Urdu, Gandhi’s youngest son, Devadas, was recruited to teach the Jamia spinning. Ansari was Jamia’s chancellor when he died.
Liberation from mutual animosity and mistrust among Hindus and Muslims was for him a passion. Ansari was, to use an old-fashioned phrase, a man of God. He was also a man of Science. His being a man of science doubtless had something to do with his harbouring his eminently rational goal of wanting Hindus and Muslims to live in civilized amity, not conflict.
As it happened, on the very day Ansari died, Gandhi was meeting in the Nandi Hills, near Mysore, India’s most famous man of science, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. If a man of god can be a man of science, a man of science can be a man of god.
Raman to Gandhi: “The growing discoveries in the science of astronomy and physics seem to me to be further and further revelations of God. (But) Mahatmaji, religions cannot unite. (Only) Science offers the best opportunity for a complete fellowship. All men of science are brothers.”
Gandhi to Raman: “What about the converse? All who are not men of science are not brothers?” ( The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 62, pages 387-9)
Within a few hours of this conversation, M.A. Ansari, man of science and of god, brother to all who came in contact with him personally, professionally or politically, lay dead in his railway coach.
Gandhi had gone to the Nandi Hills with Sardar Patel, among others, for a ‘health’ sojourn at Ansari’s behest. When the news reached him the next day, he was stunned. Penning a tribute for the Associate Press, he described him as “the poor man’s physician if he was also that of the Princes” and said, “His death will be mourned by thousands for whom he was their sole consolation and guide.” He added: “…He was my infallible guide on Hindu-Muslim questions. He and I were just planning an attack on the growing social evils.”
An attack on social evils. Strong words, scorching words. What was the biggest ‘social evil’ that Gandhi was exercised most about in 1936? Hindu-Muslim mistrust.
He needed a guide from among the Muslim community to tackle this. And, with Ansari, that guide was gone. At a loss to find a successor he turned first to Zakir Husain. “I ask, will you take Dr Ansari’s place?” On Zakir Sahib not agreeing, he turned then to Maulana Azad for that crucial assistance. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that had Ansari lived he would have played a defining role as a symbol, spokesman and strategist for Hindu-Muslim unity in the Constituent Assembly and then, very probably, in 1950, become president or vice-president of India. He would have been only 70, the age at which his grand-nephew, Mohammad Hamid Ansari, first became vice-president of India.
What was the main concern – ‘social evil’ – forcefully, passionately expressed in Vice-President Ansari’s farewell address to Rajya Sabha? The challenge to Hindu-Muslim unity, pluralism, not as mere ‘tolerance’ but in Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s words: cultural intimacy.
We know what Vice-President Ansari, descended from that great name in Indian pluralism – Dr M.A. Ansari – who rejected everything that led to Pakistan, has received by way of a ‘reward’.
Seventy five years after the Quit India Movement, 70 years after Independence, we the people of India, brothers and sisters in plural mutuality, must tell the shatterers of India’s unity, Hindu, Muslim and other: Quit, quit terrorizing India.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online editon / Home> Opinion / by Gopalkrishna Gandhi / August 22nd, 2017
All photographs by Daniel Jacobius Morgan.
Daniel Jacobius Morgan is a PhD scholar at South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago.
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll / Home> Library of India / by Daniel Jacobius Morgan / November 25th, 2017