Remembrance of things past

[Khurshid]

Remembrance of things past

By Fazlur Rahman Khan

ARCHAEOLOGIST and anthropologist Dani’s 88-year journey from a small village of Basna (about 100 km to the east of Raipur; now the capital of the newly created state Chhattisgarh in India) to Islamabad, and which was academically awe-inspiring, scholarly dazzling, and intellectually monumental, has now come to end. For me, it symbolised a century’s relation with the Dani family.

A young fair lady from our extended Moplah family in Raipur was married in the latter half of the 19th century in the Dani family of Basna. Childless, she was reported to have adopted a Dani child (who later on, became the father of Dr Dani) as her son. Imposing, she lived in almost a regal manner. She moved about in a grand and majestic style. Whenever she came to Raipur, she travelled in a convoy of 20 bullock carts.

Years rolled by. One day, in one of the earlier years of the 1930s, it came to pass that a lad of Basna got into a bullock cart, and travelled west to Raipur. After several stops, he reached the portals of St Paul’s School to be received by one Mr Williams, the hostel superintendent. That lad was Ahmed Hasan Dani.

By coming to St Paul’s, Dani was following the footsteps of another Muslim boy, Muhammad Hussain, of the same school, who had topped in Sanskrit in the province in the Matriculation examination, and maintained that position in the Nagpur University, right up to the Master’s level. But he was lost in the wasteland of provincial civil service.

Like Mohammad Hussain, Dani appearing in the matriculation examination from St Paul’s, topped in Sanskrit in the province, and he did so in the Intermediate and Bachelor’s examinations of the Nagpur University. The panditji who taught Hindi and Sanskrit courses for Matric was proud of these two Muslim boys.

From Nagpur, Dani went to the city of Tulsi Das and Shiva — Benaras — to do his Master’s in ancient history. (Perhaps, Raipur was the only city in British India that sent a Muslim boy to the Hindu University, and a Hindu boy to the Muslim University. Both of them excelled in their preferred disciplines.)

Standing first, Dani, under the Hindu University rules, should have been appointed as a lecturer, but the Vice-Chancellor Radhakrishnan was helpless as a non-Hindu was not entitled to get such a job. Radhakrishnan did not want to lose Dani.

So he asked Dani to conduct some research on an unexceptional monetary compensation. From there, he was picked up by the Federal Public Service Commission for Mortimer Wheeler’s organisation.

In the 1970s both of us were in Peshawar. He was at the university as a professor of archaeology and I was secretary finance in the provincial government.

We used to meet regularly. At that time I realised that he was developing interest in anthropology. Since I am an anthropologist manqué, a sort of another link developed between us.

In our house in Raipur, there were a few copies of an issue of Man in India, a quarterly anthropological journal, which was started in the early 1920s by the doyen of South Asian anthropology, S.C. Roy, and it is still being published. I brought a couple of copies of the journal with me to Pakistan.

More than that, the work of Verrier Elvin who lived barefoot amongst Chhattisgarhi aboriginal tribes for 25 years, and wrote heavy tomes on them, influenced me a great deal to think about adopting anthropology as my profession. That was not to be. But Dani encouraged me to keep up my interest in the subject, and always recommended new books to read.

I had been a collector and selector of saris for my late wife, who always wore saris in traditional way — not in Satya Paul’s style. To know the weft and warp of such diverse saris as Maheshwari, Chanderi, Tanchoi, Kanjeevaram, Pochampalli, etc, I had to read a lot of literature on saris.

Two well known experts Kapur Chisti and Amba Sanyal wrote a book Saris of India in 1988. They visited all places known for weaving of saris. They also went to Basna, and wrote, “….Ghulam Sarwar Dani is the biggest trader of traditional saris here…. Ghulam Sarwar Dani has been in the trade for the last 20 years; and the story of how this shalwar kurta-clad 70 years old patriarch came to these parts sounds like a classic trader’s tale. ‘We are Kashmiris. …My pardhada lost a bag with 1,000 coins in it. He came here searching for the man he knew had stolen it. Here, he was able to cure the queen of her longstanding cold with a special snuff. After all, he came from the mountains. He was rewarded with a gift of land and given the title of Dani, the giver’.”

When I showed the book to Dr Dani, his slit eyes opened up and he went into remembrance of things past. My response that the difference between him and me was that he went to school in a bullock cart, and then went on to a highway leading to the academic Everest, while many years later, I used to cover the five minutes distance from our house to St. Paul’s on foot, and eventually got lost in a pathless arid scrubland of civil service, was received by Dani, first by shrinking away into silence, and then by a supremely generous smile.