I met Ahmad Bashir – born 96 years ago on March 24 – only once. I had first heard of Bashir through an interview of Ahmad Bashir in The Herald where he came across as a fearless maverick unafraid to challenge orthodoxy, whether of the Left or the Right.In that interview, he mentioned his struggles with different Pakistani regimes, as well as the fact that he was almost perpetually out of work. So with this hazy background in mind, I called him and immediately received an invitation.When I met him, I immediately recognised him as a fellow-participant of many seminars and conferences concerning the Left or social justice. He almost always gave me the impression of being perpetually angry or upset, dressed in his signature kurta shalvar, and never conversing in a language other than his beloved Punjabi. It occurred to me much later that perhaps he really had much to be angry about, or perhaps it was his struggle with his debilitating cancer.Khoon ki LakeerI began the interview in Urdu, but he cut me short and insisted that I speak Punjabi. I responded that I preferred Urdu as it is my mother tongue. Upon hearing this, he became more agitated, and I, already intimidated, was about to leave, having concluded this to be a lost cause. He mellowed down and agreed to give the interview in Urdu.I don’t actually remember quite a lot of what followed for the next hour, but I do remember two things which he had said. I committed these to my subsequent memory and practice, not even tomes by Marx, Lenin, Gramsci could have taught me. One was that Pakistan did not have a bourgeoisie to speak of and secondly, that every person, consciously or unconsciously, speaks of his own class.Following this one meeting, I forgot about Ahmad Bashir and moved on with life, until coming across a superlative sketch of him titled ‘Comrade’ in Irfan Javed’s book Darvaaze. The book also alerted me to Bashir’s lesser-known collection of research articles in English, Dancing with Wolves. But more on that later.A generation of gifted poetsBashir was part of an especially-gifted generation of poets, writers and journalists that included Safdar Mir, Hameed Akhtar, Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, Sobho Gianchandani, Abdullah Malik, Shaukat Siddiqui, Ibne Insha, Habib Jalib, Khalique Ibrahim Khalique and A. Hameed.Many of these, like Bashir himself, made an indelible impact on Pakistani culture, politics and society. They were denied the recognition due to them in their lifetime. For some reason, I keep returning to a comparison of Bashir with other non-conformist mavericks Saadat Hasan Manto and the Islamic socialist Maulana Hasrat Mohani.There are many astonishing similarities between both Bashir and Manto.Both were non-conformist leftist Punjabis who did not join any party or movement, but remained progressives and socialists towards the end of their lives.Both writers were also shaped by their partition experiences. Manto’s partition stories and sketches (Siyah Hashiye) achieved greater fame. However, Ahmad Bashir also emerged with his own harrowing account in Khoon ki Lakeer (The Blood Line), which forms part of the book compiled by his daughter Neelum Ahmad Bashir on both his parents’ memoirs published as Do Tehreeren.Bashir’s account is a snapshot of how partition affected his native town of Eminabad and how strong the sense of entitlement and self-righteousness was within the new entrants to the area, who were intent to keep the property and the women of the fleeing Hindu and Sikh inhabitants. Here is Ahmad Bashir’s own black margin from his account:The population of Mozang was Muslim and here people would smoke the hookah and gossipped in the bazaar. I had to visit the home of the poet Ehsan Danish. When I passed by it, the route was closed. The place was warming with people. In the middle on the big charpoy were sitting heavy-set wrestler-like men. A fifteen-year old boy was being beaten, squatting like a rooster in front of them. Shoes were raining on his hips and he was pleading by sobbing. I watched the spectacle for some time. I felt great pity for the boy. I asked the person next to me, “Why are they beating this boy?”“He’s such a m**********r ji. You have no idea.”The wrestler sitting on the charpoy too heard this. He said, “Baoo! Come let me tell what offence this m**********r has done. Whenever this son of a bitch kills a kafir, he leaves the knife inside the stomach. I explained to him so many times to do the work with finesse and pull back the knife, but this evil seed gets confused after doing the work and tries to escape after leaving the knife there. Hit him Cheeme, make sure his hips are well-exposed.”I said, “Now leave it ustad, he won’t do it again.”He replied, “No ji, he won’t understand. A good knife costs Rs 1.5 these days. What use is it if left in the kafir’s stomach? I have asked him to have his mother’s nikah solemnised with a blacksmith.”In one of his letters to his adopted son Majeed, Bashir mentions that he sent 200 pages of his eyewitness account of the partition for a book Gulzar was compiling. His daughter Neelum now tells me all attempts to repatriate those precious pages to Pakistan have so far come to nought.Both Manto and Bashir traced their descent to Kashmiri pundits. Amritsar played a great influence in the former’s life, while Srinagar was seminal for the latter. Bashir devoted great portions of his autobiographical novel Dil Bhatke Ga (The Restless Heart) to his childhood in Kashmir.Both writers often ran afoul of the government and both miraculously managed to stay out of jail. Both also worked in the film industry, Manto far more successful than Bashir, whose sole foray into film-making yielded a commercial disaster in the form of Neela Parbat (Blue Mountain), an experimental film too far ahead of its time for popular appeal. It bankrupted Bashir and made him nearly lose his mind.Jo Mile TheBoth Manto and Bashir were also astonishing sketch-writers. Manto gave us the acidity of his Ganje Farishte while Bashir achieved notoriety with his acerbic Jo Mile The Raaste Men (My Fellow Travelers).Both spoke for the depressed classes. As I write this (March 30), the International Day of Domestic Workers is being celebrated in Latin America, while tomorrow (March 31) is the International Day of Transgender Visibility. Both subjects would have been par for the course for Manto and Bashir.Both writers would certainly have been killed had they lived on in ‘Naya Pakistan’.However, here the similarities end.Manto died young, but achieved everlasting fame – both Pakistan and India have even made their own versions of films on him. Ahmad Bashir, on the other hand, passed away after living a full life. His life reads like the reel of a film, but it has been adapted to the screen yet.I am not sure if Bashir actually met Manto, but surely it would have made for a very interesting encounter had they done so.Bashir’s influence on Pakistani journalismBashir introduced two trends in Pakistani journalism: feature-writing while working for the daily Imroze and research journalism. This latter is best exemplified in Dancing with Wolves.Towards the beginning of Jo Mile The Raaste Men, Bashir writes in a section titled ‘Why I Write’:‘Had I been asked “Why I Don’t Write”, that would have been a different matter. In response I could have written a lot, for example I don’t write since I have become very slow and lazy. I abstain from hard work, those who want me to write don’t pay for it; if they do, they do it as if they owe my father and grandfather a favour, make me do the rounds (of their offices); avoid me like the plague; delay it by laughing it off. They promise (to pay) by next Thursday or dismiss me by inviting me to fish kebabs and cold lassi from the shop outside the Lahori Gate; or treat me with such kindness and love that I dare not even have the strength to talk about payment.Another reason for not writing is why should I write at all? I do not have wish to serve the cause of knowledge or literature. My wife is only concerned with my regular salary, whether I work in a newspaper, or as an editor of a magazine, or as a water-carrier in Karachi, she just wants the salary on the 1st of every month. She has not read a single article of mine. She reads Shama and Director, which are read in every decent household in Pakistan and India; and unfortunately none of my articles are publised in these journals. Meaning that when my articles are not read in the decent homes of Pakistan and India, why should I write, if at all?But the greatest reason in my not writing is that I do not trust my writing! Despite that, I do write off and on and I don’t know why. Just know that I write, because others write; because I do not like the discipline of the world…because of the fact that I used to write once!’He used to say, “When I take up the pen, I am at war.”His collection of essays in English lays bare little-known, often unrecorded facts from our history. For example, in the essay ‘Kingdom of Chach Brahmin’, he punctures the myth surrounding the conquest of Sindh; in ‘Story of the Punjab Partition’ he tells us the Shakespearean but true story of Giyani Hari Singh, who wanted to migrate to Pakistan and ran afoul of the Sikh khalsa in doing so and lost 128 relatives in the riots. This latter story cannot be found even in the works of such meticulous scholars of partition like Ayesha Jalal and Ishtiaq Ahmed.Other essays in the collection like ‘Muslim League Manifesto of 1945’ and ‘Two Pages that Damned Hindustan’ are also interesting. In the concluding essay of the volume, ‘Fatwa for My Beheading’, he says:The society has not been spoiled by me. If the consumption of liquor has increased and corruption, violent crime, and lawlessness have become the order of the day, it is because the ulema do not allow the people civil liberties and governments are blackmailed.They want my blood because since the Quaid-e-Azam‘s times, I have been fighting against obscurantism, hypocrisy and mullaism, and writing about the revolutionary character of Islam.I believe that religion is a matter between man and God and that the ulema have no right to enforce their brand of Islam. If Pakistan wants American dollars (and the ulema have never objected to it) beggars, break-dancers, Pepsi Colas, social violence, alienation, increased consumption of liquor and free sex will follow. My assassination will not stop the flow.His novel Dil Bhatke Ga took twenty years to write and is an underrated and unacknowledged classic of the twentieth century in league with that other literary behemoth, Abdullah Hussein’s Naadaar Log. It deserves a separate detailed essay.Sometimes I think where maulanas who pronounce fatwas of infidelity and apostasy on socialism, and on Ahmad Bashir himself, were in the period when Maulana Hasrat Mohani called himself a Muslim communist. Despite this, neither the ulema of Deoband called him an infidel, nor the muftis of Farangi Mahal gave a fatwa of apostasy on him.Ahmad Bashir never weighed his conduct in the scales of profit and loss; nor reconciled the voice of his conscience with the compromises of time. He neither had a house nor car, shares in factories nor shops and permits. His pocket was empty, but his heart was generous. He was the Hasrat Mohani of the 20th century, and obviously could never have been a eulogist of Ayub and Yahya.Note: All translations from the Urdu are the writer’s own, unless otherwise stated.Raza Naeem is a Pakistani social scientist, book critic and translator based in Lahore. He is presently working on a book of translations of Manto’s progressive writings. He is also the president of the Progressive Writers Association in Lahore. He can be reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com.
