Stepping back in time

April 10, 2015 07:58 pm | Updated 07:58 pm IST

Author Dilip Hiro. Photo: V.V. Krishnan

Author Dilip Hiro. Photo: V.V. Krishnan

Human beings are like water. They find their own level, their own way. This thought kept coming back to my mind for more than a decade. Every time I meet Dilip Hiro, that wonderful chronicler of times present and past, I wonder about the glue that bounds him to the nation. Every spring he comes back to New Delhi for a couple of weeks. Every spring we meet at New Delhi’s India International Centre. Every time he talks of his new book coming up.

Across lunch table, reclining on easy chairs, I have had the privilege of listening to him talking about his upcoming works, almost like a new parent waxing eloquent about the new addition to the family. He throws in words of Urdu in conversation and always signs on his book in Urdu for me. He has always been thorough with his research, always disciplined, almost like a bird that leaves the nest at dawn and comes back only at dusk.

So anything he points out, he backs it up by pointing out the page number, the line number where he has talked of the issue.

Over the past decade or so, he has written happily about the oil politics of West Asia, emerging contours of Central Asia besides pretty revealing accounts of Iran and Iraq.

Then of course, there was a book on Jihadists of South Asia. Some 30-odd books in a little over 40 years later, he has just filled a vacuum in his resume.

For all his prolific ways, he had not written as much about India as one would have liked.

So last year he came up with “Indians in a Globalizing World” where he drew stark contrasts between the world of haves and have-nots in the country, a world where one family struggles to earn in a year what another blows up on a single meal. It is then that he talked about completing his series on the area from Iraq to India with a new book, “The Longest August”. It is about the age-old rivalry between India and Pakistan, the countries which shared a past for centuries, and which separated in one of the bloodiest ways in human history.

As Hiro notes in the book, “More than 750,000 lost their life in the Partition and 12 million fled their homes — primarily in bullock carts.”

Hiro should know about the horrific events. A pre-Partition child, born in Larkana in what is now Pakistan, Hiro settled down in Ulhas Nagar this side of the border.

“I lived in a refugee colony, Ulhas Nagar, after the Partition. I come from Sindh. In 1947, both Punjab and Bengal were bifurcated but Sindh remained one piece. Somehow, for the better part of my life — if not the whole — I have been in a minority.

Even in the U.K., I am ethnic minority,” he once said ruefully, revealing that his family had a liquor licence in Pakistan, probably because they were not Muslims.

His family’s plight encapsulates the difference between secular India and Pakistan, a State with one religion.

A couple of chapters into this 500-odd page book and I realise that this is not just an account of the events that led the creation of Pakistan.

This book is not about the Muslim League and Jinnah, Congress and Nehru. It, to me, is all about Gandhi’s original sin, as Hiro prefers to call it. Referring to the Khilafat agitation led by the Ali brothers, Hiro comes up with a new perspective. “The Khilafat Committee declared October 17, 1919, Khilafat Day.

It urged Muslims to fast and pray…and it appealed to Hindus to join them. Gandhi backed their call. Bazaars in major cities remained closed on that day.

In Bombay Gandhi addressed a Muslim congregation after weekly prayers.

In Delhi, a meeting of fifty thousand was addressed by Muslim notables as well as Swami Shradhanand, leader of the Arya Samaj.” Jinnah, at this time, advised Gandhi to go along with Muslim religious leaders but he spurned the advice.

Around this time, another Muslim leader, Maulana Abdul Bari, said something which would have a contemporary ring for many. Overwhelmed with the Hindu support for Khilafat, Bari said, “I for my part will say that we should stop cow-killing, because we are children of the same soil.”

It is at this time Hiro shows the difference in the attitude of Jinnah and Ali Brothers, the latter having a halo around them due to prolonged incarceration, the former opposed to the idea of boycotting European goods! And to think, he went on to be a founder of Pakistan.

Khilafat is not the only cause Hiro handles with dexterity here. He is equally at ease opening a window to Kashmir and the much talked about division.

He does not withhold his punches while talking of Sir Hari Singh and Sheikh Abdullah.

All this without any airs, without the slightest attempt at stoking up a fresh controversy.

Hiro is that kind of man — quiet, persuasive but never angry.

“The Longest August” needed a mix of skill, patience and courage.

Hiro exhibits them all in good measure, and happily takes the book above most Partition sagas.

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