Tag Archives: Diba Siddiqi

PHOTO FEATURE : Her father’s voice: A photographer pays tribute to her celebrated scientist-father

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UTTAR PRADESH / Bengaluru, KARNATAKA :

How a series of breakfast conversations grew into an exhibition and a book.

On some mornings, Diba Siddiqi would sit down at the breakfast table in her parents’ home in Bengaluru, and record her father’s voice.

He would hold forth on everything under the sun – science, history, justice, conflict, photography, politics, poetry, philosophy, the evolution of language and silence. The musings continued well after the meal was over and an Olympus digital voice recorder Diba Siddiqi had placed nearby would capture her father’s thoughts.

The sheer range of topics wasn’t surprising. Obaid Siddiqi was one of India’s most eminent scientists whose pioneering work in the field of molecular biology and neurogenetics are well known.

Siddiqi was keen to have an account of her father’s stories in his own voice so that she could revisit them later. She had tried taking notes, but found the process distracting. She started using the digital recorder so that she could give him his full attention.

But the recordings, which started in 2007, ended in 2013 when the senior Siddiqi was killed in an accident while taking a stroll near his home. He was 81.

Immersed in history

Months later, Diba Siddiqi finally revisited the “breakfast monologues” as she called them.

She immersed herself in the stories her father had shared of growing up in eastern Uttar Pradesh in pre-Partition India and the sadness at how the Siddiqis lost track of family members who moved to Pakistan.

It wasn’t long before Siddiqi began to dig through old family photographs, many of them developed in darkrooms by her father and his siblings.

It didn’t stop at that. Diba Siddiqi’s mother, Asiya, is a distinguished historian, who has spent a large part of her life studying Mumbai’s past. Siddiqi began to delve into her mother’s life too.

The result is Rooh: The Enduring Spirit, an exhibition of old family photographs interspersed with new images Diba Siddiqi has taken of places that played an important part in her parents’ lives. A book of the same name is set to be released shortly.

Dominating figure

It’s obvious that Obaid Siddiqi was an overarching presence for his daughter. “My father was this colossal figure in my life,” said Siddiqi. “No language is adequate to express his continuing presence in my life. I still find myself quietly and unconsciously carrying on conversations with him.”

Born in Basti, Uttar Pradesh, in 1932, Obaid Siddiqi completed an MSc from Aligarh University before obtaining a doctorate from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. His family lived in Benares in two spells between 1932 and 1948 before finally settling down in Aligarh.

Preventive detention

The includes an account of the two years Obaid Siddiqi spent in jail from 1949 under preventive measures at a time when 30,000 communists were detained across country. Recalling his period of detention in the company of 13 Communist leaders, he said:

“So you see jail authorities, they used the criminals, who were called pukkas, to beat us up. They were prisoners who had served ten years, fifteen years, had life imprisonment… They acted like small unofficial wardens to control other prisoners. They were dressed to look like police. They beat up our friend Syed Ali badly, giving him galis, saying, ‘Pakistan se saala Pakistani Communist banta hai!’

However, Obaid Siddiqi could also recognise the benevolent side of the police officer who had beaten up the comrades, realising that human nature can never be categorised as entirely good or bad.

His parents and six siblings managed to send him letters during his imprisonment. His sisters arranged to smuggle letters in and out of jail while delivering home-cooked food to him once a week.

In 2014, Siddiqi visited Benares, where her father spent some time as a child. Waking at the crack of dawn every day, she walked around the ancient city, photographing the people and its streets.

Mumbai chronicler

Siddiqi also took many pictures in Mumbai, a city whose past her mother has written about extensively. One of Asiya Siddiqi’s celebrated works recreates the lives of people who went bankrupt in the 19th century. Roaming the bylanes of Mohammad Ali road and Dongri, in Mumbai, Siddiqui imagined that the ghosts of these people “and their descendants surely dwell in the neighbourhood I roamed in… The descendants of tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, milk vendors, courtesans, dancing girls and prostitutes may continue to live and work here.”

Though the project is intensely personal, she believes it has broad appeal. She said she hoped viewers would let her work touch their mind and spirit and perhaps remind them of their own histories. “It is an expression of life that I have been a part of,” she said. “It has been about finding a voice in the images and bringing it together in one space.”

Rooh: The Enduring Spirit can be viewed at Bangalore’s  1 Shanthi Road gallery until February 11.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Photo Feature / by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri / February 09th, 2016

A historian who shed light on colonial-era opium trade in the city

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Lucknow, UTTAR PRADESH / Mumbai, MAHARASHTRA, Bengaluru, KARNATAKA :

Asiya Siddiqi (1928-2019) (Pic Courtesy: Obaid Siddiqi)

Siddiqi also broke new ground by studying 20,000 HC insolvency records to recreate the lives of an array of 19th-century city inhabitants.

In an age that sometimes overrates quantity and is beguiled by grandiloquence, economic historian Asiya Siddiqi, who passed away on Monday morning, went against the grain.

A chronicler of 19th century India, she wrote just two books. But each was a culmination of decades of painstaking original research, presented in prose that many might describe as being quietly elegant. In between working on the two books, she edited a volume on trade and finance in colonial India.

She broke new ground in both her books by closely reading new or underutilised primary sources. In the second book, Bombay’s People, 1860-1898: Insolvents in the City, published in 2017 by the Oxford University Press, she not only tapped a voluminous new source, namely about 20,000 insolvency records in the high court, but also incorporated the innovative conceptual approach of microhistory to illuminate the past.

She admired the work of one of microhistory’s founding scholars, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, especially his book ‘The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller’. Microhistory focuses on small units of research, such as a village, a single event or an individual, instead of large ones such as nations, kingdoms and cities. Siddiqi’s chapter, ‘Ayesha’s World’, the story of an unlettered butcher’s wife, is a gem of this genre.

“She was a first-rate historian, approaching her work with a craftlike precision,” said Mariam Dossal, a friend of hers who is an urban and maritime historian of 18th and 19th -century Mumbai and a former professor at the University of Mumbai, where Siddiqi worked for everal years. “In Bombay’s People, her view was so rich and broad that it covered every kind of person who inhabited the city, from the wealthy Jamshetji Jejeebhoy all the way to Ayesha. One marvelled at her beautiful use of language, through which she recreated the worlds of these inhabitants. For Asiya, everybody deserved a history.”

Her early work on the 19th-century opium and cotton trade based in Mumbai was also influential, in particular her article ‘The Business World of Jamshetji Jejeebhoy’, which appeared in the Indian Economic and Social History Review in 1982. She worked for years on the private papers of the merchant who was a central figure in those two trades to offer a finely-etched view of the entrepreneurial climate of that period, while also shedding light on the ways in which Mumbai supported the growth of the British economy.

A large portion of these papers consisted of letters in which Jejeebhoy had recorded both his business dealings and social life in great detail. Because the papers were disintegrating in the heat and humidity of Mumbai, she got them laminated with help from her uncle Saiyid Nurul Hasan, who was then the union minister of state for education, Dossal recalled.

Asiya Siddiqi’s first book, Agrarian Change in a Northern Indian State: Uttar Pradesh, 1819 to 1833, published in 1973 by Oxford Clarendon Press, grew out of the thesis she did for her DPhil at Oxford University. In what became a classic of South Asian economic history, she analysed the relevant records with characteristic rigor, becoming one of of the earliest to show how colonial trade policies contributed to a severe agricultural depression in the region.

She grew up in Lucknow, and from 1962 worked in and on Mumbai for four decades. She moved in the late 1990s to Bangalore, where her daughter said she passed away peacefully in her sleep. Her husband was the eminent biologist Obaid Siddiqi, who founded the biology department at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Colaba and the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. He passed away in 2013.

Asiya Siddiqi balanced her research with bringing up four accomplished children: the eldest Imran, a leading plant biologist based in Hyderabad; Yumna, a professor of English in the US; and fraternal twins, Diba, a visual artist and high school social science teacher in Bangalore, and Kaleem, a computer scientist in Canada.

Siddiqi seemed happiest working by herself in the archives, as an independent researcher, although she had two productive teaching stints: one at Aligarh Muslim University, where she met her husband just after getting a bachelor’s degree at Oxford University, and the other at Mumbai University.

She quit teaching when, at one point she found it difficult to commute from her home in south Mumbai to the university campus in Kalina while also keeping up with her research and and raising four children.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s own. The opinions and facts expressed here do not reflect the views of Mirror and Mirror does not assume any responsibility or or liability for the same.

source: http://www.mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com / Mumbai Mirror / Opinion > Columnist / by Sumana Ramanan / October 11th, 2019