The Great War

by Rakhshanda Jalil

  Bless me, all of you, that when I come again to my stage, all my shame, all my sorrows and doubts are washed away by my tears, and that with complete peace I can look into your eyes.

  Your accursed,

  Nurul Huda

  1 Translated from Bengali by Tanveer ul Haque, Asfa Hussain, Shirin Hasanat Islam, Ayesha Kabir, Jackie Kabir, Saeeda Karim Khan, Shahruk Rahman, and Niaz Zaman of The Reading Circle, Dhaka, and published by Nymphea. It has been reproduced here with the kind permission of Niaz Zaman.

  2 The first extract is from Chapter Two and written by Nurul Huda (the protagonist) to his friend Monu.

  3 The Bengali has been Sanskritised for humour. It means, ‘I bless you. Off with your head. May entire generations of your family perish. May all your eight limbs drop off with leprosy. Burn and die.’ Many families in Bengal used to say ‘Ashirbadong shiroshchhedong purey morong’, that is, ‘I bless you. Off with your head. Burn and die.’ The explanation was provided by Mrs Shireen Lutfunnessa.

  4 Normally, with bhuna khichri, a dry preparation of rice mung, Muslim Bengali families have a spicy meat curry, rather than a mild korma.

  5 This is the name of a book by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar.

  6 The complete word in Bengali would be shala, literally a wife’s younger brother. However, it is used as a term of abuse, equivalent to rascal.

  7 De Gorun Ga Dhuiye is a song by Nazrul Islam. Priti K. Mitra, in the article The Rebel Poet and the Mahatma: Kazi Nazrul Islam’s Critique of Gandhi’s Politics in the 1920s, notes how, in this poem, Nazrul Islam ‘ridiculed some people’s persistent interest in the rotten idea of a vague swaraj and their unwillingness to accept the challenge of war’ (p. 54). Mitra dates the poem circa 1930. However, Bondhon Hara began being serialised in Moslem Bharat from 1 Baishakh 1327, that is mid-April 1920. The poem, or the opening line of the poem, was already in Nazrul Islam’s mind.

  8 Nazrul Islam seems to be eulogising Rabindranath Tagore here.

  9 While the topography of Karachi is generally plain, there are hills located in the north of Karachi. According to an email received from Yasmeen Lari, dated 22 July 2012, the place known as Qasba Colony, where mostly Pathans from the North-West Frontier Province reside, is actually built on a hill.

  10 Nazrul Islam did not study at Bankura Collegiate School.

  11 This letter forms the ninth chapter in the book.

  12 The reference here is to the Mesopotamian Campaign, during the First World War, which took place in the Middle East between the Allies, represented by Great Britain and its allies, and the Central Powers, mostly of the Ottoman Empire. The main theatre of the war was Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and the Tigris, what is now present-day Iraq. The British troops engaged in the war were mostly from the British Indian Army, consisting of the Indian 6th (Poona) Infantry Division. The beginning of the war may be dated 6 November 1914, when the British attacked an old fort at Fao, where the Shatt-el-Arab meets the Persian Gulf. The British entered Baghdad on 11 March. The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918. The war ended on 14 November 1918. The 49th Bengal Regiment did not take part in the campaign but, in Karachi, Nazrul Islam would have been very much aware of what was happening in the Middle East.

  13 This forms the eighteenth chapter in the book.

  14 The Mesopotamian Campaign ended on 14 November 1918.

  15 The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918, but the war ended a fortnight later.

  16 Nazrul Islam uses the English term ‘short sight’. However, he was confusing hyperopia or long-sightedness with myopia. In myopia or short-sightedness, distant objects appear blurred. In hyperopia, near objects appear blurred, whereas distant objects are clear. In the last sentence, he uses the correct term.

  17 The name of the journal Nazrul Islam started on 11 August 1922 was Dhumketu, meaning ‘comet’.

  Reaction to Turkish Politics1

  Mohamed Ali

  The War and events leading to the participation of Turkey not on the same side as England undid all the good we had expected to follow the friendly deputation of the Indian Musalmans which we had taken to wait on Lord Hardinge earlier in the year and which had been received by that viceroy with every show of goodwill.

  From November 1914 to the time of my conviction and sentence of imprisonment at Karachi seven years later, almost to a day, Government and I have not been able to see things eye to eye. The result was that once more, through the instrumentality of the Press Act, my press was forced to suspend its activities on the very day that War was declared by England against Turkey and when, at Russia’s obvious pressure, the plans to partition Turkey among the Allies were complete and it was settled that Constantinople, the seat of the Khilafat, was at long last to become Tsargrad in fulfilment of the ambitions of Peter the Great, and when early in the summer of 1915 the forces of General Sir Ian Hamilton were ready to land on the Gallipoli peninsula preparatory to the forcing of the Dardanelles, and the occupation of Constantinople was expected at an early date, I was ordered to be interned under the Defence of India Act. My brother Shaukat, who had up to that time never taken any part in politics and had, in fact, just retired with an extraordinary pension after 17 years spent in the public service, was also interned. During all this time, his activities outside his official duties had been confined to education, and particularly to the educational reform of our old College at Aligarh for which he had successfully organised the Old Boys’ Association. When the King announced his intention of coming to Delhi to hold his Coronation Durbar, my brother took furlough for two years in order to assist in the evolution of that College into a Muslim University, which he so keenly wanted to be opened by His Majesty himself. His incessant touring throughout the country had resulted in contributions to the university fund that well exceeded two out of a total of three million rupees collected for that purpose. But finding that even such a purely non-political activity was not immune from being regarded by some officials as questionable, he decided to retire from public service and devote himself entirely to communal work.

  The Deendars and Nai Raushani2

  The international development which had resulted in the disintegration of the already enfeebled temporal power of Islam were bound to exercise a great influence on the Musalmans. But few could have prophesied the precise form this reaction was to take. Western education had thrust, so to speak, a wedge into the ranks of Indian Muslim society. The old type of Indian Muslim, who was either a theologian or still under the theologian’s influence, finding that he was unable to stop the progress of an avalanche of bedeeni or ‘irreligiousness’, had taken with all the greater zeal to a sterile ritualism and shook off from the skirt of his orthodox gown the dust of ‘worldliness’. Few of this class were any longer wholly ‘unworldly’; but all prided themselves on their ‘other-worldliness’, which consisted chiefly in leaving a world which no longer heeded their fulminations and fatwa to manage its own affairs, and go the perdition that they predicted for it. The younger men — the men of the Nai Raushani or ‘New Light’— had the pretensions not only to be men of light, but also men of leading, dominated the public life of their community. For a long time, educational propaganda was the crying need of Musalmans and educational conferences and touring deputations and lectures were organised by the men of ‘New Light’. Latterly they had been encouraged by the Government itself to take a more assertive part in politics and had organised political propaganda with the same zeal and energy for securing their proper share of the communal representation. As I have already indicated, their zeal was more communal than religious; they knew so little of their religion and their orthodoxy was more than suspect. They did not sneer at religion but they certainly sneered at the ‘religious’ their social ‘reform’ had begun with a very outspoken criticism of the ancient, time-worn customs of the east and had ended in their almost complete adoption of western ways. From the so-called ‘England-Returned’ who was a barrister or an Indian civilian, a doctor
or an engineer, full of Huxley and Herbert Spencer, often took wine, was, in just a few cases, not without a partiality even for pork, and occasionally had married an English wife, to the clerk in a Government office or a ticket collector on a railway, whose acquaintance with English began and ended in the lowest form of a ‘Zilla School’, but who could not speak his own language without introducing some English equivalents for some of the commonest words in the vernacular regardless of their absurd incongruity, and who would wear a coat or waistcoat more or less of European cut even when the rest of the costume was purely Eastern, there were many shades of the ‘Anglicised’ and ‘Europeanised’ Indian Muslim, whose chief concern was this world and not the next, but who bore the name of Muslim with as much pride and glory as the most orthodox ‘other-worldly’ divine.

  Views of the Reformed

  The less intellectual seldom worried about the theological dogmas, even when the tide of a superficial and for that reason all the more aggressive rationalism make it easy for them to believe precisely as their fathers had believed, particularly on the subject of the supernatural with which later-day Islam had been lavishly supplied by the more numerous but less learned class of Muslim waiz or preacher; the line of least resistance, which readily lent itself for such purposes was cheerfully followed and in a hazy, undefined way to separate religion from life just as most people separate this world from the next and do not believe that they are required to argue or think about such things too nicely. The more intellectual or the more venturesome satisfied their mental cravings by ridiculing the mildewed conservatism and literal interpretation of sacred texts, and contented themselves with the gratifying belief that they at least were among the ‘reformed’ though they never took the trouble to define what their ‘reformed’ beliefs were and how they fitted in with the sacred texts to which, if required, they would have acknowledged their completest [sic] allegiance as unhesitatingly as the most orthodox.

  Europe’s Temporal Aggression

  It was to a society thus constituted that European temporal aggression presented an ultimatum. We in India who had already lost our own Empire several generations if not a whole century ago, were not probably expected to feel as acutely as we did the loss of our co-religionists in Persia, in Egypt and in Tripoli, and in far-off Morocco.

  But the temporal losses of Turkey, which we were advised by Europe to ‘cut’, touched a peculiar chord in our sub-consciousness, the chord of religion; for, the Ruler of Turkey was the Khalifa or Successor of the Prophet and Amir al-Muminin or Chief of the Faithful, and the Khilafat was as essentially our religious concern as the Quran or the Sunna of the Prophet. It needed no alarmist cry of ‘Religion in danger’ to rouse the Musalmans in India, if religion had still any real hold on them. That indeed was the great test. Was Islam only a label for the Indian Musalmans or had it a real living concern with worldly life? It is idle to speculate now what would have happened if in such a crisis, Indian Musalmans had also reached the stage of indifferentism if not practical unbelief, that is lamented by the religious among the most civilised and progressive sections of Western Christendom. But, no doubt, many a progressive European believed that even if Muslim orthodoxy in India could not be brought by such a remarkable succession of the ‘failures of Islam’ to view its conservatism and narrowness differently, at least those who had received a Western education, those who had learnt to sneer at the religiosity of an earlier day and for many of whom Europe’s materialism had such fatal fascination, would now be weaned off from such remnants of spirituality as still lingered as a result of their Eastern heredity in some remote corner of their being. These, at least, they thought would now solidly vote for a complete renunciation of such useless remnants and for dropping off all such hampering impedimenta in their march towards the secularism of Europe, which had given it such a complete victory over the unprogressive and superstitious East.

  Religion with a Brief Creed and No Clergy

  Perhaps I am anticipating my reposition of the essential characteristics of Islam, but it is my firm belief that what prevented such a consummation was the fact that in reality. Islam had so little of dogma with which to overburden a Muslim. Christianity has been in recent times so skilfully idealised by the new school of its writers of Apologetics that none of the Church Councils that were held from time to time to regulate Christian belief and anathematise successive heresies and schisms could recognise it. In fact, even to the most latitudinarian student of religion it is so featureless that it is not easily possible to be identified with any religion. And yet, except for that large class which from abhorring theology has come to abhor religion itself, even this so-called religion without ‘theology’ has a theology which presents great difficulties to the least critical of believers, unless, of course, he permits his beliefs to benumb and paralyse his intellect. The Church can fill tomes with its theology, but even the briefest catechism would require the proverbial half-sheet of note-paper to contain the truncated dogma of reformed and modernised Christianity. But when you compare this with Islam you will find that even the half-sheet is superfluous, for a postage stamp would be ample to cover its creed. And I do believe the postage stamps of Muslim States contain the Kalima or ‘Creed’ for Muslims. ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is His Messenger’ is all his dogma and it makes no great call on his powers of thinking or on his credulity. When this great storm overtook the Muslim, he had no unessential freight to throw overboard and lighten the ship. He could have of course thrown Islam itself overboard, but that he hugged as his life belt and the world is waiting to see if he can that way weather the storm. Moreover, ‘the absence of a priestly ideal, of any theory of the separateness of the religious teacher from the common body of the believers or of the necessity of a special consecration and authorisation for the performance of religious functions’, which has resulted in Islam in an added feeling of responsibility resting on the individual believer and in a general level of uniformity in Muslim society unknown in communities that maintain a priesthood, has also tended to keep religion undivorced from life among the Musalmans, and to make it the concern of all alike. These two essential characteristics of Islam, as we shall presently see, helped the India Muslim to answer Europe’s ultimatum.

  Impact of International Politics on Indian Muslims

  The temporal misfortunes of Islam, therefore, drew the Muslims to their religion as if inevitably and the wedge that Western education had seemed to insert between the ranks of the religious, and of the men of the ‘New Light’ vanished as if by magic. The orthodox and the anglicised were drawn together and, as in a flash of lightning, saw that after all they were not so unlike each other as they had imagined. The men of the ‘New Light’ were, as I have said, in a sense, the men of leading as well, and they at any rate had not shrunk from the affairs of this world like their deendar co-religionists, who had, almost as if making a virtue of necessity, retired from public life and became recluses, when they had gradually lost most of their former hold on the people. Moreover, they alone could understand and explain what precisely Europe was doing and threatened to do directly to the temporal power of Islam and indirectly to its spiritual influence in the world. Their outspoken championship of Islamic states in the Indian press and on the public platform, no greatly impressed these semi-recluses, and informal and tentative overtures from both sides soon followed. Be it said to the credit of the ulama that they did not hesitate at this juncture to pocket their pride and in a way even accept the lead of men whom they had but a generation ago finally consigned to perdition. But, if revenge is a word that may be used in this connection, they had their fill of it in the transformation that these temporal misfortunes of Islam wrought in the spiritual temper and tone of ‘the men of light and leading’: Only those of the ulama whose concern seemed to be the retention of their own quasi-priestly authority more than the maintenance of orthodoxy still kept aloof, and these for the most part exhibited a deplorable pusillanimity when faced with some unpleasant
consequences of religious zeal. Among the anglicised also, there was a section that sought the limelight for its own interest rather than of the community, and in the hour of danger, it quietly slunk away into dark corners. Just as the selfish among the ulama had sought to cover their self-seeking cowardice under an extreme narrowness and fanaticism of bigotry and had anathematised all others as involved in different degrees of heresy, so too these political leaders who forsook their erstwhile associates in the press and on the platform pretended to sneer at the latter’s return to the obscurantism and bigotry of the Mullahs. Thus, we and the ulama, who now began to associate with us in our communal work were attacked by two sections of Indian Musalmans who were brothers under their skins, for the opposite faults of being too religious and not sufficiently religious at one and the same time. But neither section was sufficiently considerable to affect the situation vitally. Once more Muslim society in India presented a level of uniformity and the bitterest opponents of a generation ago stood shoulder to shoulder, working together with great zeal and with a mutual appreciation of the good points which each lacked himself, but which the other possessed. If even a decade previously anyone had ventured to foretell such a result, he would have been laughed at for such as a fantastic prophesy; for it was little short of a miracle in an age which had assured itself that miracles were things that did not occur.

  1 Extract from My Life: A Fragment by Mohamed Ali, first published in January 1942. The book was originally titled Islam: Kingdom of God. Its first editor, Afzal Iqbal, gave it the title My Life: A Fragment.

  2 The Men of Faith and the New Light

  Across the Black Waters1

  Mulk Raj Anand

  At Orleans, the two divisions camped at the Champs de Cercettes, a park about six miles out of the town. And here, almost on their arrival, they were equipped with mechanical and horse transport.