In memoriam
Eqbal Ahmad 1933-1999
The noted historian, revolutionary and journalist, Eqbal Ahmad, died in Islamabad on May 11. Over the past five years, he had devoted his energies towards overcoming the hostilities of the 1947 Indian partition. Born in Bihar at the height of the Indian nationalist movement, Eqbal and his brothers moved to Pakistan in 1947. Some part of that journey has been recounted in a BBC documentary entitled ‘Stories My Country Told Me’, a five-part series in which Eqbal was featured along with Edward Said, E.J. Hobsbawm, Desmond Tutu and Maxine Hong Kingston. Significantly, Eqbal chose as his country both his village Irki, and the Indian subcontinent.
It may seem strange to say that Eqbal Ahmad was imbued by the spirit of so poor, violent and bigoted a state as Bihar, but that is only because we forget that Bihar produced two of the sweetest dialects of India, Mythili and Bhojpuri; the strongest and most radical peasant movements – both the non-violent Bhoodan and the insurrectionary Naxalbari; and was the state in which Gandhi launched the non-cooperation movement, at Champaran. And in ancient India, Bihar’s capital city Patna (then Pataliputra) was the seat of the enlightened Mauryan empire, while one of the greatest Buddhist shrines, Sarnath, lies on its western border with U.P.
Eqbal’s own family were wealthy Muslim landowners who were devoted to learning. His grandfather founded the Khudabaksh library in Patna, which remains one of the most valuable collections of medieval Persian manuscripts today. He was also a fierce anti-colonialist who had to be forcibly restrained from riding off to the Indian Mutiny. This heritage was expanded by his parents who were early Gandhians. His father was one of the first men in Bihar to distribute his farms to the peasants who worked them; for this he was killed by his own relatives. The child Eqbal was with his father when he died; in fact, his father died shielding his son from the assassins’ blows. In the hope that distance might alleviate this trauma, his mother sent him away to live with his older brother, where he suffered further lonely torments.
Nevertheless, it was the influence of this brother which he treasured almost more than his mother’s. From his brother he gained tenderness and the sense of what the best kind of civil servant could be. From his mother he gained sterner principles, and the sense of a family’s first responsibility being to their dependents. He was always a little cross with her for sending him away to spend six years with Mahatma Gandhi when he was thirteen; I suspect his young manhood was offended by Gandhiji’s talk of the womanliness of men.
For a boy brought up in this untidy and organic amalgam of Islam and Hinduism, colonial service and fiercely indigenous gentry, the 1946 Bihar riots which were the prelude to Partition came as a dreadful shock. A world had ended, and he and his brothers decided to leave for Pakistan. Their mother refused to leave; indeed she roundly abused them for having become ‘Muslim Zionists’. Whether it was this taunt or whether it was the belief that a civil servant must never exploit his privilege for personal use, Eqbal refused to take the aeroplane seat his brother had arranged for him to Lahore. Instead, he elected to make the long march from Delhi’s Purana Qila in the company of strangers.
This is not the place to talk of that unspeakable experience; what he made of it 30 years later can be found in the BBC documentary. For us what is germane is that having lost his faith in a subcontinent where religions could enrich each other’s world views, he was one of the myriad who hoped to build Pakistan as a country of enlightened, absorptive and inclusive Islam, a place based on culture and citizenship. As the country descended into sectarian and elite squabbles, this hope too was disappointed. He left for the United States where he immersed himself in Arab studies in the hope of finding there the Islam which had always engaged with the world rather than turning its back on it. The US made him a two-fold gift: a cause, in the Algerian liberation war, which then extended to a commitment to North Africa and its particularly unsuspicious form of Islam; and a kinship, of culture in the Middle East, in particular in Beirut and Cairo. These were gifts he retained, even as his campaigns for Palestinian and Middle Eastern independence – in the sense of the freedom of peoples not nations – were dashed.
Returning to the US in the 1960s after the liberation of Algeria, he plunged into the anti-war movement and was arrested tried and acquitted on the charge of attempting to kidnap Henry Kissinger. Hunted by Kissinger, he was admired by De Gaulle.
Fifteen years ago he came back to the subcontinent to make his peace with the troubled history which had driven him hence. It was typical of Eqbal that this attempt should take the form of giving. A builder in the best Muslim tradition, he wanted to create a liberal arts college in Pakistan in the spirit of the great Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, while architecturally he looked to Fatehpur Sikri. At the same time, he was increasingly drawn to a larger and most personal cause, of overcoming the hostilities of Partition, and in the last years of his life it was this that became his overwhelming passion. He sought every opportunity to speak and act, from trying to prevent Pakistan from entering into an arms race with India, to arguing that the Kashmir dispute should not hold the two countries back from regularizing trade and easing freedom of movement.
As all those who knew him will testify, Eqbal Ahmad could charm the birds from the bush, the snakes off the earth, and the communalists from their lair. Last year, shortly after the BJP government came to power, he went to interview a noted Hindu ideologue. When the interview ended, Eqbal invited the man to Pakistan. He responded, ‘Not only will I come to Pakistan, but I will come with the forces of Akhand Bharat.’ And then, as Eqbal turned to leave, he caught Eqbal’s hand, bent his head and asked for Eqbal’s blessing. The boy who squirmed away from Mahatma Gandhi had after all acquired some of the same grandeur of spirit.
Radha Kumar
Myron Weiner 1931-1999
Myron Weiner, doyen in the field of Indian political studies in North America, died at his home in Vermont in the morning of June 3, 1999, at the age of 68, the consequence of a cancerous tumour embedded in his brain that had been diagnosed after last Thanksgiving. He was buried, according to Jewish tradition, the next morning, June 4, in the Jewish section of the Montpelier cemetery. He is survived by his wife, Sheila, and two children, Saul and Beth.
Myron was born in New York in 1931, graduated from the City College, New York, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1951, and received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1955. He began his teaching career at Princeton as a lecturer the year after he received his degree, moved to Chicago the following year where he remained as Assistant Professor of Political Science until 1961. After 1961, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he progressed from Associate Professor of Political Science to Professor, Chairman of the Department, and Ford International Professor of Political Science. He had also been Director of MIT’s Centre for International Studies between 1987 and 1992. During his career he held several visiting appointments at Harvard, Oxford, the Hebrew University, Delhi University and the University of Paris. He was also the recipient of numerous fellowships, awards and research grants. He was active as well in many professional and public service organizations and editorial boards.
Myron will be long and best remembered in the field for his scholarship and teaching. During his enormously productive career, he published 13 books of his own of outstanding quality, 19 books coedited with others, and a great many articles in other books and scholarly journals. His most recent book on India, The Child and the State in India: Child Labour and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective, published by Princeton University Press in 1995, has had a powerful impact beyond the academic world, throwing an entirely new light on the issues of child labour and illiteracy and completely changing the terms of discussion among policy-makers as well as scholarly observers.
Most of the most productive scholars in the field of Indian political studies in the United States today are former students of his. He was a model for all those of us lucky enough to have been his students, setting standards that none of us have yet fully reached.
Those standards were not just of scholarly production. He was also a model of dedication in teaching, scholarly and personal integrity, energy and enthusiasm for his work, discipline and drive, commitment to Indian studies and close relations between India and the United States – all carried off utterly without pretension of any sort. Moreover, his commitment to the scholarly life was absolute. He never sought office, power or recognition in professional or any other organizations and associations, though he was always ready to serve when asked to do so.
Although his productivity was prodigious and his commitment to scholarship exemplary, he was also a whole person, who enjoyed life, his family, his colleagues, friends and students to the utmost. He lived life enthusiastically and travelled extensively, both in his work and for pleasure. His last major trips were across the Silk Road and, less than two months before his death, in March, to South Africa – in between bouts of treatment for his tumour – for a safari, fulfilling a promise to Sheila.
Myron was loved by those who knew him. He had boundless time for everyone who needed his help or who just wanted to discuss something with him, academic or otherwise. A phone conversation to Myron required an allocation of at least an hour of time, if not two. A visit to his office might take two or three hours, during which Myron’s attention, conversation and interest never flagged.
Myron lived and died gracefully and graciously. There was not a shred of remorse, self-pity, or resentment in his attitude to life or death. Although he lost his short-term memory and was extremely weak during his last days, he retained his mental capacities, his sense of humour, and his wit until the end. He died peacefully in the morning after a light breakfast. He will remain a model in the way he faced death as he lived his life. Myron will be long remembered and sorely missed.
Paul R. Brass
Mervyn de Silva
Late evening on Tuesday, 22 June, Mervyn de Silva, the founder and co-editor of The Lanka Guardian passed away at the National Hospital in Colombo, succumbing to a heart attack. He had, characteristically, spent a convivial day at the Orient Club, among friends, regaling them with his acerbic wit and satire in his last contribution for his column in The Island, written under the pseudonym, Kautilya.
Over the last few months, Mervyn had been preoccupied in his role as nurse and dietician to his ailing wife, Lakshmi, who must be more shocked than anyone else that Mervyn should choose to disappear like a copy of yesterday’s newspaper. However, we are confident that having been his companion for long years, Lakshmi would have the resources in ample measure to cope with the shock. Our thoughts are with her and with Dayan Jayatilleke, who has some of his father’s traits in good measure, including the trait not to be a camp-follower, falling in line with fads and fashions in the corridors of power. Mervyn had a brilliant academic career, during which he distinguished himself as a terrific orator, at the end of which he showed his disdain for symbols of achievement by successfully failing to secure a first class degree.
While a young man these days (and only slightly less so, a young woman) who does not secure a distinction is doomed to have life chances severely compromised, it was fortunate that Mervyn lived in times when newspapers had great editors (not market-savvy executives). The legendary Esmond Wikramasinghe spotted the talent in Mervyn de Silva and took him into the Lake House group in the company of Tarzie Vittachi (later Newsweek columnist), Alan Chalkey and Reggie Siriwardene (who has, in the last decade, illuminated the publications of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies). Development journalism as we now know it really had its genesis with this group in Sri Lanka.
Mervyn de Silva was Sri Lanka’s Nikhil Chakravartty. The world of journalism is so much the poorer having lost these two giants in the profession who represented a very special species. Nikhil Chakravartty founded and nourished Mainstream; Mervyn did likewise with The Lanka Guardian. Nikhilda turned down a Padma Bhushan, concerned that accepting it might be perceived as a signal that he was in the good books of the government of the day. Mervyn de Silva also prided himself in being fiercely independent, loathe to be perceived as being in the pocket of anyone in power. As editor-in-chief and editorial director of Lake House, he was unable to pander to the babus who had taken over the Lake House Group, and parted ways with the institution that had given him his great start as a journalist and which he had adorned with distinction. He had distinguished himself before the state takeover as foreign affairs correspondent and deputy editor of Observer. Mervyn was irrepressible and he started the irreverent yet insightful paper, The Lanka Guardian, and ran it all these years on a shoe-string budget, only occasionally helped by the odd grant from the Ford Foundation in New Delhi or the Asia Foundation in Sri Lanka. Programme officers at Ford can testify that Mervyn was able to teach them that unknowing to themselves they could be exercising power at the behest of others, and how to be on guard against being used!
When the Indian High Commissioner in Colombo, in the heydays of regional superpower showmanship, behaved like a Viceroy, only Mervyn could use his pen to puncture the egos of those (in India and Sri Lanka) who strutted about in raiment of petty authority. Having been mentored in 1956 into foreign affairs by the Prime Minister, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, Mervyn became an expert commentator.
Mervyn de Silva was a frequent contributor to The Economist, Financial Times, Far Eastern Economic Review, Guardian, Newsweek and The Times of India. He was also for years the Colombo correspondent for the bbc. In the passing away of Mervyn, journalism bids goodbye to the Last of the Mohicans. The likes of Nikhil Chakravartty and Mervyn de Silva are an extinct species.
R.S.
