Go to a bookstore anywhere in urban Pakistan. Or try and find some time to browse through the bookstalls dotting railway stations and bus terminals. If you take a look at books written in Urdu, a few serene-looking babas will stare back at you. While I concede that works by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Saadat Hasan Manto or Juan Elia will also be perched on the edge of some shelf, but mostly finding someone like Krishan Chander is almost impossible. Apparently it is of no consequence that Krishan Chander is one of the finest fiction writer Urdu literature can boast of. Finding Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat Chughtai, or Ghulam Abbas will also be equally difficult.
Pakistan’s shrinking book world is ruled by four best-selling babas: Qudratullah Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmed, Mumtaz Mufti (not that much in vogue these days and replaced by Baba Yahya lately). In a bid to strike gender balance, titles by a bibi – Bano Qudsia – are also tagged with the mystic works of these selfless ‘spiritual’ babas.
What about Wasif Ali Wasif? His sprawling mausoleum at the Miani Sahib graveyard in Lahore deserves my pen’s attention more than his ‘sayings’ – not hard to find at any bookstore. In the overcrowded graveyard, where bereaved people find it hard to find space to bury their dear departed, Baba Jee Wasif is eternally resting in a place many in Pakistan would never be able to rent.
From bookstores and mausoleums, these babas have now also begun to permeate social networking sites. Banal homilies attributed to these babas are shared and commented upon – almost reverentially. The ‘wisdom’ concealed in these homilies is attributed to metaphysical forces. While Qudratullah Shahab and Mufti invoked bhoot preet (spirits) to establish their aura, Ashfaq Ahmed proved cleverer. He would attribute his mystical teachings to a baba. In all their sayings and writings, our apparently otherworldly babas teach us kina’at (contentment), total submission, simplicity and austerity.
In the case of Ashfaq Ahmed – the most astute and successful of all – the concept of Sufi was vulgarised. He adopted Gen Ziaul Haq’s mullah, recycled it and offered it as a Sufi. A mullah preaching shariah while wearing a Sufi’s skin had a better chance to gain currency. Not only that; by dressing his mullah in Sufi attire, Ashfaq Ahmed turned the tables on his leftist rivals – especially in Lahore. Sufi rebels and their resistance poetry have been a source of inspiration for centuries. The progressive literary movement successfully harnessed the Sufi message with the struggle for democracy and social justice in the country.
Patronised by the state, this team of babas was put together to counter the intellectual and aesthetic challenge posed by the Progressive Writers Association and its sympathisers. Shahab was both team captain and chief selector; and as Gen Ayub’s propaganda commissar at the Ministry of Information, he recruited Ashfaq Ahmed.
In 1962, Ashfaq Ahmed started his weekly radio programme Talqeen Shah, which continued for three decades. In 1966, he was appointed director of the Markazi Urdu Board (re-christened Urdu Science Board and housed in a beautiful building on The Mall Road in Lahore). Later, he served as adviser in the Ministry of Education during the Zia dictatorship.
On the one hand, our otherworldly babas – from these positions of power – preaching contentment, simplicity and austerity were able to extend a network of patronage. On the other hand, they unscrupulously benefitted from their positions without any thought devoted to their philosophy of contentment. For instance, Qudratullah Shahab (along with Altaf Gauhar) as Gen Ayub’s Goebbels at the Ministry of Information vitalised the Department of Films and Publications (DFP). The strategy of using documentary filmmaking as a tool for government propaganda was cleverly devised through the DFP.
Mushtaq Gazdar narrates some details of this documentary project: “The budgetary provision was enhanced many times to launch a series of the desired documentaries. The first major project was Nai Kiran (A new ray of light), a feature length film of about one hour and twenty minutes with a distinct storyline, songs and dances... The exercise was like Hitler’s full-length propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Nai Kiran had the well-defined objective of dismissing politicians and politics as corrupt and projecting the field marshal and his junta as saviours. Qudratullah Shahab, who was also a recognised Urdu writer, penned the story of the film and was paid, or rather awarded, Rs20,000 for it by the government. In 1959, that kind of money was considered a record achievement for any writer in Pakistan”.
These babas – and the only bibi in the gang – would no doubt appear as paragons of simplicity when in public. But their apparent simplicity was a ruse. Glorifying illiteracy and preaching contentment, Ashfaq Ahmed built himself a house in Lahore’s historically-posh neighbourhood, Model Town. Ashfaq Baba and Bano Apa also did not keep their son illiterate. But all these contradictions pale before the fact that all these babas unscrupulously served dictatorships that devastated Pakistani state and society.
Shahab, as an all-powerful bureaucrat under the Ayub dictatorship, not merely oversaw an illegal and immoral takeover – ‘nationalisation’ – of Progressive Papers Limited, his otherworldliness went into hibernation when Faiz, Jalib and Ustad Daman were sent to jail by the Ayub dictatorship. In his Jo Milay Thay Raaste Mein, the late Ahmed Bashir penned Shahab’s sketch, indicting his crimes and devastating the aura attributed to Shahab by his followers.
Ahmed Bashir claimed that Shahab had, in a private meeting, regretted his role under the Ayub dictatorship. One wishes he had done it publicly. But did Mumtaz Mufti, who accepted the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 1986, or Ashfaq Ahmed, ever regret their roles as the Zia dictatorship’s ideologues? That has not yet been made clear. However, certain facts are well established. When Ashfaq Ahmed was ruling the PTV roost, let us remember (and honour) those writers and intellectuals banned on the state-owned channel merely because they refused to submit before puritan terror:
Akhlaq Ahmed Dehlvi, Safdar Mir, Amin Mughal, Altaf Ahmed Qureshi, Asif Sheikh, I A Rehman, Tariq Zaheer, Iftikhar Ahmed, Idrees Butt, Ghulam Rasul Chacha, Azhar Jafri, I H Rashid, Aziz Mazhar, Riaz Malik, Syed Mumtaz Ahmed, Aurangzeb, Ikramul Haq, Sadiq Jafri, Mahmud Zaman, Anwar Qamar, Usman Irfani, Saleem Akhtar, Karamat Ali Samar, Ahmed Bashir, Ibrar Zaidi, Muhammad Mushtaq, Masood Ishar, Qazi Javed, Mehdi Hassan, Rakhshanda Hassan, Shafqat Tanvir Mirza, Altaf Malik, Salim Shahid, Habib Jalib, Kanwar Mushtaq, Shafeeq Mirza, Hussain Naqi, Rafique Mir, Yunus Adeeb, Abbas Najmi, Sadaat Saeed, Alam Khan, Ghulam Dastgir, Zubair Rana, Anwar Sajjad, Ustad Daman, Nazir Naji, Badrul Islam Butt, Qateel Shafai, Abid Hassan Manto, and Fakhar Zaman.
Most of these names were also banned on Radio Pakistan. I have always wondered why the wise baba guiding Ashfaq Ahmed and all the bhoot preet visible only to Shahab Sahib and Mumtaz Mufti never took an interest either in the heroic political struggles marked by Hasan Nasir and Nazir Abbassi’s martyrdoms or the brutal dictatorships that devastated and brutalised the society. Or was it a mere coincidence that the wise revelations that came to these babas were in perfect harmony with the politics practiced by generals Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq?
Email: mfsulehria@hotmail.com
Source : http://e.thenews.com.pk/4-18-2013/page7.asp#;