Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  Kulsoom tries to encourage Papu to speak in African boli (language). ‘When I was little our elders would talk like this,’ she says: ‘“Makoti” meant bread, “magera” meant money. “Magera hakoona,” they would say when someone was going down to the shops, “There isn’t any money.”’ (Some of these words are pure Swahili–kate: ‘bread’ hakuna: ‘there is none’.) Instead, Papu begins to sing. It is a song in Sindhi about a woman called Mai Maisira:

  Mai Maisira bagh banaya,

  Lima archaar le

  Heman manga hera thera

  Heman manga re.

  In Gujarat, Mai Mishra is revered by Sheedis as a saint, a woman who travelled from Africa to Mecca to India with her two brothers to do what they were unable to do, and defeat a demoness. But the story seems to have been forgotten in Pakistan. When Kulsoom asks Papu, ‘What does the song mean?’ the old woman pulls her printed cotton shawl over her head, and says, ‘Nobody can remember.’

  I have also come to Tando Bago to find out about Mussafir, the writer and teacher whom Faiz Muhammad Bilali, and all other vocal Sheedis in Badin, call ‘the true liberator of our community’. Faiz Muhammad was awarded a place by Mussafir at the high school he ran in Tando Bago. ‘He allowed my parents to get into arrears with the fees of four annas a month,’ Faiz Muhammad has told me. ‘We Sheedis owe everything to Mussafir. He not only gave us a good education, he gave us awareness. Without him we would still be working in the fields for the Syeds.’

  Mussafir lived and died in Tando Bago, and Kulsoom and I walk to the overgrown village graveyard to visit his white-and-blue-tiled tomb. Nobody from Kandri Paro has time to come with us. ‘Where are his descendants?’ I ask as we leave; but their answers are noncommittal: ‘They have gone away to Hyderabad city.’

  That night, Kulsoom and I travel back to Badin. As soon as we reach home, I ask Faiz Muhammad: ‘Please may I see Mussafir’s books?’ But Faiz Muhammad turns his palms upwards in a sorrowful gesture–he no longer owns any. Nor are there any, I discover the next day, in the local library. Iqbal eventually finds a first edition of Mussafir’s influential 1952 study of slavery in one of his cupboards, but it has been nibbled down the right-hand margin by mice, and warped by the monsoon. Nevertheless, I have been told enough now to know that this book–printed on crumbling yellow paper, in cramped Sindhi script–is the key to understanding the evolution of Sheedi culture. We slowly begin work on a rudimentary translation. Days pass, and then one day Ali Akbar, who works in the office, sees me bent over the fragile volume. ‘Do you want to meet Mussafir’s son?’ he says. ‘He is married to my sister.’ I look up in astonishment: it is as if I have been let into the Sheedis’ inner sanctum. At last, the chance to meet somebody with memories of Mussafir–the architect of Sheedi identity, the man whom all Sheedis credit with ‘bringing our people up’. In a state of some excitement, I board the bus to Hyderabad, Sindh’s former capital, one hundred kilometres away to the north.

  I have been to the city several times, but never to this convoluted old quarter with its streets too tiny for cars to pass along, lined by black drains dotted with piles of rubbish as bright as marigold garlands–coriander stalks, milk sachets, mango skins (waiting there, I find out later, for the proud Hindu sweeper who calls himself ‘Flower’ to come by and collect them). As we approach the house, I hear rhythmic, hypnotic singing coming from the mosque. It is a sound that I will get to know well over the next few weeks–a dirge for Muharram, the month of mourning for Shias. Bazmi, Mussafir’s only son (his one daughter is dead), lives with his two wives and their nine children in a modest, sparsely furnished house; a sanctuary of cleanliness and light at the end of a long claustrophobic alleyway.

  When we arrive at the house I am shocked to discover that Bazmi cannot speak, read or write. For years, he worked as a teacher and poet, but a decade ago he suffered a stroke that left him unable to communicate verbally. We sit in his bedroom exchanging gestures and words of frustration and sympathy. Bazmi sends his daughter Ani–a slender, self-composed woman who, like her parents, is working as a teacher–to unlock his library. ‘My father wishes that he could tell you the stories and histories of our Sheedi people,’ she says, interpreting Bazmi’s wordless grunts and hand signals for me. ‘He is sorry that he cannot talk to you about my grandfather. But these,’ she hands me two books, ‘contain some of our family history.’

  Bazmi’s original library was kept in the village, but it was destroyed by a cyclone, and almost all the copies of his father’s works were lost. Today, only one library in Pakistan contains a copy of Mussafir’s study of slavery, and it seems that only Bazmi owns an edition of Mussafir’s autobiography. I look at the two books Ani has placed in my hands. They are like a forgotten memory, or a fast-fading dream; the vestiges of a history that may soon be entirely lost.

  Bazmi’s two wives and four daughters, surprised and pleased to meet somebody who wants to know about Mussafir, invite me to stay; and grateful for the chance to talk about the history of black slavery in Pakistan, I accept. During the three weeks that I spend in Bazmi’s house, Ani and her sisters work on me in significant ways: by the time I leave their house to travel on up the river, my sartorial disarray has been corrected by tactical purchases from the Silk Bazaar; I have been taught how to cook a simple dal with lemon; I know that Ani wears her burqa to visit the tailor but not when she walks to college; and I understand more about the priorities of an educated but economically straitened family in Pakistan. I also have a deeper understanding of the world of good, well-behaved, God-fearing Muslim girls.

  I make friends with Ani on the very first night, as we sit up together, reading Mussafir’s autobiography. Bazmi normally keeps his books locked away, too sad even to look at them now that he cannot read, and Ani has never been given the chance to explore her family’s history. She is as apprehensive as I am about what her grandfather’s autobiography might contain. Like all Mussafir’s books, the autobio g-raphy was written in Sindhi, and like all of them, it has never been translated into Urdu, English or any other language before. But by midnight–with Ani reading the book in Sindhi, rendering it into Urdu, and me writing down the English translation–we have managed to read Mussafir’s tale of his father’s transition from slavery to freedom, with which the autobiography begins.

  ‘Mussafir’ was Muhammad Siddiq’s pen-name–the word means ‘traveller’: a veiled allusion to his own father’s forced emigration out of Africa. Both Mussafir and Bazmi were born when their fathers were extremely old. Encapsulated in Mussafir’s autobiography, then, is the history of the past two hundred years–‘from the time of slavery,’ as Mussafir writes, ‘to the time of freedom’.

  Mussafir’s father was born in Zanzibar in approximately 1793. When he was five or six years old, his entire family was killed by a rival tribe and he alone sold into slavery. He remembered being taken down to the sea by the victors and put on to a ship. Eventually the ship docked at Muscat on the Arabian coast, where a trader, Sheikh Hussain, bought the whole human cargo. The Sheikh sold on every other slave except Mussafir’s father–‘and that,’ wrote Mussafir, ‘was his good luck’.

  The Sheikh gave his Zanzibari slave boy a new and significant name: Bilal. (Presumably this also marked the moment of Bilal’s conversion to Islam.) Two years later, Sheikh Hussain sold Bilal to a trader from Sindh, who took him by boat along the coast and up the Indus to Thatta. There he was bought by a stonemason who had just been commissioned to build a fort for a member of the ruling Talpur clan, in Tando Bago (a building which later became Mussafir’s high school). Once they arrived in the village, the stonemason sold Bilal on to Hour Ali, a childless nobleman.

  So began Bilal’s life as a Sindhi. For the first time since leaving Zanzibar, wrote Mussafir, ‘my father was happy’. Hour Ali’s wife educated Bilal, teaching him how to fast and pray. When Bilal grew up, Hour Ali purchased an African woman to be his wife.

  Then in 1843 the British banned slavery. Hour Ali freed Bilal, but he w
as so fond of his former slave that he built him a house at the bottom of his garden and asked him to stay. By now, Bilal was fifty years old. He was elected leader of the local Sheedi panchayat, the community’s decision-making body, with seven nearby villages under his charge. The only vexation was that of issue: his wife had given birth to eighteen children, all of whom had died in infancy. Soon afterwards, his wife died too. When he was sixty years old, Bilal married again, and his second wife had twelve children in her turn. Of these only the youngest survived. This was Mussafir.

  The story that Mussafir tells of his father’s life is full of hope, luck and triumph. Mussafir, too, led a fortunate life. Born in 1879, when his father was eighty-six years old, he made friends as a child with Mir Ghulam Muhammad, heir of the local Talpur clan. Together, they changed the social prospects of Badin’s Sheedis. Mir Ghulam had no children and plenty of money, and Mussafir persuaded him to open a school for Sheedis–including, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, education for Sheedi girls.

  Mussafir felt the sufferings of his people deeply. In his 1952 book on slavery, published in Sindhi as Ghulami ain Azadi Ja Ibratnak Nazara (Eye-opening Accounts of Slavery and Freedom), he described how ‘Sheedis have suffered such persecution that all the windows of tenderness and kindness were closed to them.’ The book is a polemic, informed both by the ‘shivering and miserable tales of slavery’ that Mussafir heard first hand from his elders, and by his own wider reading on the global slave trade.

  The history of black people in America was a big influence on Mussafir. He wrote about abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, and included moving histories of the American slave leaders, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Sheedis in Pakistan, he pointed out, should be grateful: ‘it is a fact that the cruelty and hatred which was suffered by the Sheedi slaves of America, was not endured by Sheedis in Sindh.’

  The stories that Mussafir collected from his people, however, could hardly have been more distressing. One particularly horrific account was related to him by two slaves from Tando Bago, who escaped mutilation, forced cannibalism and death in Muscat. They described being shunted into a slave factory, where the healthiest males were picked out and killed in front of the other slaves by a blow to the head. Their bodies were placed in huge cauldrons, and cooked to extract a ‘special medicine’, and the discarded flesh was given to the remaining slaves to eat. The two men from Tando Bago were saved from death when a guard took pity on them, feeding them a handful of salt to bring on sickness. Instead of being killed, they were sold to a trader from the Indus.

  Other Sheedis told more mundane stories of ritual humiliation. A woman in Tando Bago described to Mussafir how, as a young woman, she was made to stand all day with a pot of food on her head so that her master’s favourite camel could eat without bending down its head to the ground. Most Sheedis toiled ‘severely’ in the fields, regardless of the weather. A few lucky ones–such as Mussafir’s father–chanced upon a kind master. Contrary to the academic picture of Hindu slavers, Mussafir stressed that Hindu businessmen cared for their slaves with particular ‘softness and kindness’.

  Because he was poor, Mussafir ghost-wrote books for a rich businessman but altogether twenty-five books were published under his own name: texts on Islam, translations of Urdu and Farsi novels, a biography of the Sindhi writer Mirza Qalich Beg, and a book, Sughar Zaloon, about wise women.

  It was his book on Sheedis, though, which made him well known. It was a bold endeavour, and it ended with a series of appeals–to the Sheedi community, to Pakistan’s Muslims, ministers, newspaper editors and educationalists–proposing an agenda to lift Sheedis out of poverty and illiteracy. The Prophet showed respect for Sheedis, wrote Mussafir, and so should every Muslim in this country.

  Mussafir’s emphasis on education as a means of social emancipation has been a blessing, but it has also caused a rift between Mussafir’s descendants and the Sheedis in Tando Bago. Like his father and grandfather, Bazmi was the Sheedi’s community leader. In the 1970s, he coined a slogan in Sindhi, Paro ya Maro: Read or Die. Sheedis are renowned in Sindh as musicians, wrestlers and dancers; they also make a trade as comics, or ‘joke-masters’ at weddings. Bazmi felt that this was demeaning–he wanted Sheedis to be known for more than just sport or entertainment–and so he held a meeting at which he urged them not to work as servants in other people’s houses, not to ‘eat without invitation to weddings’ (that is, not to go as hired dancers, or to queue up for the free food), and to educate their children. The other Sheedis grew angry. ‘Our fathers were slaves,’ they said. ‘We are poor and need to work as servants. What is the point of educating our children?’ This, at least, is how Mussafir’s granddaughter Ani tells it to me. But perhaps the Sheedis of Tando Bago also felt frustrated by Bazmi’s dismissal of their music, their leva, their African culture.

  In Tando Bago, there was mutual incomprehension between the Sheedis and their leader and eventually Bazmi moved his young family away to Hyderabad, protesting that the rural Sheedi community was not making enough effort to emancipate itself from its slave background. But he remained head of the panchayat and Sheedis, Ani says, would often ring and consult him. Then, ten years ago, a disagreement arose over a plot of land belonging to the community. Bazmi believed that it should be used to build a high school. Others wanted a marriage hall. Still more argued that the land should be sold because they needed money. The discussions were acrimonious, and that evening, when Bazmi returned from Tando Bago, he had a stroke. When he recovered, he found himself unable to communicate linguistically; literacy, the one thing that he had always seen as the route to social improvement, had left him.

  Ani tells me this troubling story of her father’s stroke, with difficulty, after I have been staying in Bazmi’s house for some weeks. Since their father’s illness, she and her sisters have not returned to Tando Bago. Instead they have immersed themselves in a quiet interracial city life: they study diligently, take part in neighbourhood prayer groups, and are attentive aunts to their young nieces and nephews. They are serious, sweet women, aloof from the preoccupations with cosmetics and husbands that trouble most other Pakistani girls of marriageable age. Only in their father’s disability does the sad memory of a community’s distrust of itself linger.

  One afternoon in late December I am sitting on the terrace in the cold winter sun reading the English translation of Mussafir’s book on slavery, prepared for me by a friend of Bazmi’s son-in-law. I have reached the final section.

  At the end of his book, Mussafir laid out the remedy for his fellow Sheedis’ ills–illiteracy, poverty and lack of social cohesion. He called for his people to organize themselves, to educate themselves, and to be good Muslims–but above all to embrace African culture. The mugarman drum, he wrote, was not incompatible with Islam, as some clerics had been complaining. Quite the contrary; the Prophet himself, Mussafir claimed, used to take his favourite wife Ayesha to listen to the mugarman being played. Every nation, he pointed out, has its own ‘spiritual instrument’ which ‘they use for worship and also for the entertainment of their souls’. The Pashtuns have their rabab, the Arabs their duff and the English their piano. For Sheedis there is the mugarman. Old Sheedis would listen to the beat of the drum and weep, remembering the lands they had been snatched from. When the drum was played and the dancing began, the ‘old language’ would come back to them. Mussafir urged Sheedi parents to play the mugarman to their children, to teach them the old language, and to pass on the African culture they had inherited. Sheedis should not feel ‘shame and disgrace’ when playing the mugarman. Their ‘ancestral instrument’ was a ‘weapon’ for building Sheedi solidarity–one of the principal things, he felt, that Sheedis had lost since the time of freedom.

  For Mussafir, the time of ‘freedom’ was not 1947 but 1843–when the British took over. It was a happy time, for Sheedis were so grateful for their liberty that they worked with enthusiasm, formed vigorous social networks, and even though they had few
possessions, were always ‘dancing and laughing’ (contrary to Richard Burton’s characterization of emancipation being ‘to them a real evil’). Because of their ‘joyous nature’, they were called ‘Sheedi Badshah’ by other Sindhis. Though meaning literally, ‘Sheedi is King’, for Mussafir it described the Sheedi people’s elation in their freedom:

  Most of the rich men observed their joyful nature with jealousy, because now they could not force them to work by threatening them with swords or sticks.

  Bazmi’s two wives have come upstairs to sit with me on the terrace while I read. Zubeida, Bazmi’s first wife, was just twelve years old when she married, and she remembers her father-in-law well. She has often told me what a serious and pious Muslim he was. So I ask her: ‘Did Mussafir talk about “Sheedi Badshah” with you?’ ‘With me?’ She shakes her head ruefully. But Zarina, Bazmi’s serene younger wife whom he fell in love with and married long after his father died, has read all the books in her husband’s library. She smiles briefly and says: ‘Haven’t you heard of the Mombasa Art Club?’

  The next day Ani and I take a rickshaw to Jungli Sheedi Paro, where Vikee Jackson (real name Khuda Baksh) is waiting for us. It is clear from Vikee’s chosen name where his musical tastes lie; but the name of the house is a throwback: it was named so one hundred years ago, in memory of the journey from wild jungly Africa. In the sixties, Vikee Jackson’s father founded the Mombasa Art Club here. We have come to listen to Vikee sing a song written in Sindhi by his father and uncle.