Buzurgaan-e Panipat Khwaja Ahmed Abbas by Syeda Saiyidain Hameed
Syeda Saiyidain Hameed
Two decades into the 21st century, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas has become even more relevant than he was in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. He touches every contemporary issue with prescient understanding as if he is watching the unraveling of our world. In his own life span, he was driven by an urge to express his ideas with a breathless ‘Mujhe kuchh kehna hai’ ‘Mujhe kuchh kehna hai’ ‘Mujhe kuchh kehna hai’, a chant
which reverberates in all his work. He wrote furiously and prolifically for films, newspapers, journals. He wrote stories, novels and dramas; his pen swept easily across languages, Urdu and English. A Hindi typist sat to his right and simultaneously transcribed his Urdu writing into Hindi script. The vocabulary he used was simple; very few words needed to be changed, as page after page flowed out from his most fertile brain.
But somehow, in the interregnum i.e. the 27 years between his death in 1987 and until his work was revived three years ago in 2014, he was forgotten by all, including by film historians. In his Introduction to Abbas autobiography I am not an Island (2010) journalist and film maker Suresh Kohli writes,
‘The name of KAA brings back innumerable memories despite the passage of time…. But it seems he is already a forgotten chapter. His books and films are forgotten so also his legacy.’
Then as if by divine intervention something happened. A group of people in 2014 decided to resurrect Abbas. Why? Perhaps it was destiny. There was no external trigger, which made 2014 suddenly jump out as a compelling imperative. When the group we began its work, the tablet was blank. There was nothing except a few books given to individuals as gifts. Within the few years that followed his centenary celebrations, one saw the start of what ultimately become a cult status for Abbas.
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas Centenary Celebrations Committee was headed by the visionary public intellectual and politician Aziz Qureshi. Having carried out half a dozen events over the year, the Committee was dissolved. Thereafter was born the Khwaja Ahmed Abbas Memorial Trust with the objective of using Abbas’s entire corpus as a template for current struggles, most of which are the thematic of his writings and films.
Abbas’s voice is linked with global struggles against intolerance, extremism, religious and linguistic chauvinism, cult worship, corruption, greed, displacement, violence against women and environmental degradation. He stands opposite them, a biblical David versus the giant, Goliath. Or to use popular culture, the analogy is Abbas Skywalker vs. Injustice aka Darth Vader.
To capture in a few pages the oeuvre of a man who wrote 74 books in his lifespan of 73 years apart from over 200 short stories, 3000 pages of newspaper columns for Blitz and other papers is nearly impossible. He made 13 films under his own banner Naya Sansar and countless for others including six immortal blockbusters for Raj Kapoor This article provides a just nibble for the palate, which we hope will be hungry to tease out more facets.
Abbas was the inveterate communicator. He used every medium at his command to transmit his message. All his literary activities were subservient to his ever favourite expression ‘Mujhe kuch kehna hai’ (I want to say something). When he picked up his pen (literally, because he was, at best, a two-finger typist on his archaic machine). He wrote effortlessly on whatever struck his fancy, so long as it communicated his objective. His objective? To hold a mirror to society. By exposing the underbelly of polite society he wanted to open eyes and touch hearts. The journalist Amar Kumar (played by Vimal Ahuja) with an ideal and a dream in Bambai Raat Ki Bahon Mein, was Abbas himself refusing to sink into the morass of the rotten samaj (society) by which he was surrounded.
He found hope primarily among the common people. Jawaharlal Nehru, whom he unabashedly loved, once advised him not to take his credo from books or discourses of others. He advised him to travel far into the country’s hinterland and experience the country for himself. ‘Outside these walls is the real India’ he said to students of Aligarh University at Strachey Hall in 1931, while a young Abbas listened. This advice is nothing new; wise men and women have given it since the dawn of civilization. Abbas took it to heart. He trudged through the globe on a shoestring budget and picking up nuggets along the way, transformed them into his stories and columns.
A journalist once asked him about the net gain of 22 years of writings on the same subject: ‘What improvements have you affected? Has anything changed on your account? Who is going to bring about the change you talked about?’ Abbas replied that despite his anger and frustration, he has never lost hope that change, sooner or later will come from common folk. In the last article in his book I Write as I Feel, which is a compendium of his articles for Last Page in the Blitz, he assigns the responsibility of constructing post-Independence India to himself and to people of India (and Pakistan). He writes:
‘But the end of one era is also—and always—the beginning of another. The struggle for freedom has ended. But freedom has just begun. The preservation of the newly-won freedom against attacks from within and from without, the enlargement of its scope in terms of social justice and economic betterment of the masses, the need for a cultural renaissance—all these impose fresh responsibilities on all of us. The tasks of reconstruction are as important and as difficult as the struggle to wrest power from unwilling imperialist hands.’
Who then was Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, the boy from Panipat?
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was born in Panipat, erstwhile Punjab, now Haryana. He was great grandchild of the renowned Urdu poet, social reformer and India’s first feminist poet, Khwaja Altaf Hussain Hali. His paternal grandfather Khwaja Ghulam Abbas was ardent supporter of the 1857 liberation uprising. There is a popular romance that he was the first martyr from Panipat, blown from the mouth of a cannon. Abbas's father Khwaja Ghulam-us-Sibtain among the first graduates from Aligarh Muslim University was a tutor of a prince and also a prosperous businessman, who modernized the preparation of Unani medicines. Abbas's mother, Masroora Khatoon, was the daughter of Khwaja Sajjad Husain, son of Maulana Hali. Sajjad Husain was a passionate believer in Taleem e Niswan (female education) who established the first school for girls in Panipat. KAA’s early education was at Hali Muslim High School, Panipat, which was also established by his maternal grandfather. Abbas's lineage may be traced to Khwaja Ayyub Ansari, the first person who hosted the Prophet of Islam and his band of Muslims when they were driven out of Mecca and performed the Hejrat to Madina. This Hejrat marked the commencement of the Islamic calendar.
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s first article (at the age of 11) was published in ‘Phool’ a Children’s Magazine from Lahore, in 1925. He completed his matriculation at the age of fifteen, his BA (English literature) in 1933 and LLB in 1935 all from Aligarh Muslim University. While studying law at Aligarh Muslim University in 1934, he started Aligarh Opinion, India's first university students' weekly during the pre-Independence period.
As a cub reporter, Abbas joined National Call, a Delhi-based paper. Then he made the great leap from Panipat/Aligarh to Bombay which would henceforth be his home until the end. There he joined Bombay Chronicle as Reporter/Sub Editor from 1935 to 1939; as film critic from 1939 to 1940; and as Editor for the Sunday Edition and columnist from 1940 to 1947. While at the Bombay Chronicle (from 1935–1947), he started a weekly column called Last Page (Azad Qalam in the Hindi and Urdu edition), which he kept alive when he joined the Blitz after the Chronicle’s closure. He continued the column until his last days. A collection of these columns was later published as two books, I Write as I Feel (1948) and Bread, Beauty and Revolution (1982).
What was waiting in the wings was a film career. In 1936 Abbas entered films as a part-time publicist for Bombay Talkies, a production house owned by Himanshu Rai and his wife the famous cinestar Devika Rani. He sold them his first screenplay Naya Sansar (1941). In 1951, he founded his own production company, which he named Naya Sansar after this first venture. In the years to come it would consistently produce socially relevant films including, Anhonee, Munna, Rahi, Shehar aur Sapna, Bomabai Raat ki Bahon Mein and Saat Hindustani. Generations to come, however, would recognise Abbas primarily as the one who discovered the millennial star Amitabh Bachchan.
The first film that Abbas directed was the world classic Dharti Ke Lal (Children of the Earth). It was made in 1946 under the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) banner. The era of realism had begun. In Abbas’s style Chetan Anand made Neecha Nagar. But it was DKL which in 1949, became the first Indian film to receive global distribution, biggest in USSR.
If Anhonee was the first film produced by Abbas’s company Naya Sansar in 1952, it was also the first film in India to feature Nargis in a double role. Munna (1954) was the first feature film without songs. Dharti ke Lal provided the template for Satyajit Ray’s world classic Pather Panchali (1955) after more than a decade. Pardesi (1957) was the first Indian film to be co-produced with a foreign film company (Mosfilms) from Moscow, USSR.
As a screenwriter, Abbas is a pioneer of Indian parallel or neo-realistic cinema. He wrote scripts for other directors, Neecha Nagar for Chetan Anand (Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival) and Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani for V. Shantaram. He went on to write scripts for most of Raj Kapoor’s hit films such as Awara, Shri 420, Mera Naam Joker, Bobby and the posthumously released Henna.
As said above, Abbas’s work spans 74 books, more than 200 short stories and 3000 journalistic pieces. His best-known fictional work is Inquilab, a historical novel about the freedom movement, which made him a household name, not in India, but in Russia where it appeared as Sen Indie (Son of India). In1955 the book was translated and published in the former Soviet Union with a print-run of 90,000. A year later a German edition hit the bookstalls. Only thereafter a publisher in Bombay agreed to publish it in English in 1956 after pruning it down by 60 pages. He paid Abbas Rs. 750 as royalty which as he rues in his autobiography, barely covered his typist’s fee. In 1961, his brother in law Munish Narain Saxena rendered the book in Hindi and Abbas published the Urdu edition himself in 1975 at the age of 61. In 1982 he wrote The World is my Village, which he writes was the sequel to Inquilab
Abbas towers above his contemporaries as a leading light of the Urdu short story. He wrote his short story Ababeel (The Sparrows) in 1935 at the age of 21 over one wakeful night. It was included in a West German anthology of the World’s 100 best stories. Like many of his works, it was translated into many Indian and foreign languages including, Russian, German, French, Swedish, Arabic, and Chinese.
Abbas’s short stories have been included in anthologies along with stories of Sadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chander, Ismat Chughtai, Ahmed Nasim Qasmi and Rajinder Singh Bedi; all of whom were his close friends. His short stories like those of his contemporaries were not without their share of controversies. Ek Insaan ki Maut caused a hue and cry not only the first time it was published, but every time that it appeared in magazines. It was also published under the title Sardarji, which had the Sikhs up in arms and even led to a case of disturbing communal harmony being filed and Abbas being summoned by the Allahabad High Court. It was condemned in India as anti national and condemned in Pakistan as anti Muslim. People on both sides were crying for is blood over a story which no one bothered to read. Years later Khushwant Singh translated it under a new title The Death of Shaikh Burhanuddin. and wrote that no book of ‘Punjabi’ stories would be complete without it. Ironically, the story was written entirely in Urdu!
Some books were born of personal encounters. Abbas interviewed several renowned personalities in literary and non-literary fields, including the Russian Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev, American President Theodore Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Mao Tse-tung and Yuri Gagarin. He was the first biographer of Indira Gandhi and wrote her bio-trilogy: The Return of the Red Rose (1966), That Woman: Her Seven Years in Power (1973) and Indira Gandhi: The Last Post (1975). He wrote biographies of Nikita Khrushchev and Yuri Gagarin. His autobiography, I am not an Island as well as other novels written by him have been translated in a large number of Indian and European languages and command a global readership.
Abbas’s intellectual alignment was with Progressive culture and tradition that prevailed in India during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Like many of his contemporaries he was one of the leading exponents of the All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) established in 1936, and its allied theatre organization the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) established in 1943. As a stalwart of the PWA and IPTA, the first film that he directed was Dharti Ke Lal (Children of the Earth) about the Bengal famine. The cast of the film consisted mainly of actors from IPTA. IPTA had got a license to produce two films, one each was assigned to Abbas and Chetan Anand. DKL was the first one completed and became one of the most important Hindi films of the century. Based on an IPTA play, Nabanna, it was the first realistic film on rural indebtedness and dispossessed peasantry shown in the context of the Bengal famine. The film marked the screen debut of Zohra Sehgal and gave actor Balraj Sahni his first important screen role.
Abbas also wrote for IPTA a half-hour one-act fantasy play, Yeh Amrit Hai (Invitation to Immortality) in which a scientist who discovers the elixir of life is approached by representatives of different sections of society (e.g., an imperialist, a capitalist, a decadent poet, a society butterfly, a man of religion, and a dictator who was a cross between Hitler and Mussolini) for it but he gives it only to a worker who refuses to take it, for he says he is already immortal! The play was a big success and Abbas was thereby persuaded to write a full-length play. That is how he wrote his first full-length play Zubaida. He first read it out at a makeshift rehearsal room of IPTA in the little basement hall of the Deodhar School of Music in Bombay. Among the members who heard the play reading were Balraj Sahni (who later directed the play for IPTA in 1943), Damyanti Sahni, Chetan Anand and Dev Anand. Abbas himself offered to play the old Meer Saheb, the arch reactionary of the play.
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas breathed his last on June 1, 1987 after a career spanning over half a century. He emerged on the Indian and global scene as a communicator par excellence. He lived a life consistent with his high values and ideals and used his genius in trying to reach the masses, the less educated, an audience of millions. He worked tirelessly, and as he grew older, his credo became an institution.
Abbas's health began to fail in the 60s, when he suffered his first heart attack. His eyes gave trouble; but the worst was an accident, which happened at an airport. A luggage trolley ran over his foot. While he doubled with pain and tipped over, the woman behind the trolley said sorry and disappeared. That for Abbas was beginning of the end. After immediate hospitalization he came home but he was he was in and out of the hospital. He attended his very last meeting, the Producer’s Guild Meeting by sneaking out of the hospital on a stretcher carried outside by his friends. This was a few weeks before his death. Everyone was amazed to see him coming out of a taxi in his hospital kurta pyjama. Abbas had been an active member and one time President of the Guild.
Until a few days before his death in June 1987 he was shooting for his film Ek Aadmi (One Man) which was autobiographical, a chronicle of his own life. It was released posthumously in 1988. Since all doors for financing were closed he wrote with his now semi paralysed hand a letter to family and close friends asking for small contributions (first instance of crowd funding) which he promised to repay, to keep up the shooting schedule. ‘The film he somehow managed to complete before his death, courtesy Hrishikesh Mukherjee as Chairman of NFDC, was Ek Admi which had among others Anupam Kher, Saeed Jaffrey, Sharon Prabhakar… Based on his own story ‘June in December’ Ek Admi might have become a landmark Hindi film had the maker not suffered from bouts of ill health and hospitalisation and had made it the way it was conceived’ writes Suresh Kohli. ‘It is a simple story though the technique of narration is somewhat odd because it is full of flashbacks which do not follow any familiar line. If anything, it follows the stream of consciousness of a dying man. I have not yet tasted death but this is how I feel that a dying man’s consciousness would lead him from one incident to another’ Abbas spoke these words which were recorded by Kohli and published in Filmfare June 16-30, 1987, two weeks after his death.
Abbas seldom compromised on his ideals, social and political; they became his lifelong crusade. He liked to take his battles to the bitter end. “My motivation (despite commercial failure of films) remains the same. To communicate my thoughts to as large a public as possible.” A few weeks before his death, Abbas sent a leave application to the Editor-Founder of Blitz, RK Karanjia requesting few weeks leave. A man who wrote his weekly column for forty-six years without a break and what does he do under the shadow of death? He writes a leave application letter!
Of his entire corpus the two films which best reflect his philosophy are Char Dil Char Rahen (CDCR) and Shehr Aur Sapna. CDDR is a story anchored on a chauraha (crossroads). There are four roads, one leads to Sultanabad, the second to Ramkunj, the third to Hotel Parbat and the fourth is still unbuilt and nameless. The story of an Ahir boy Gobind and a ‘Chamar’ girl Chavli is located in village Ramkunj. Childhood friends, they discover love when Gobind returns from town after many years. Their love violates social norms and the village rises as one to punish the woman for daring to look beyond her station. Honour killing is the only way. Chavli is to be burnt alive in her hut. Scene opens with the villagers moving towards her hut, carrying torches. At the same time Gobind has pleaded with ‘chamar’ basti dwellers to beat the drum to his ‘single person’ barat to Chavli’s hut. The two processions proceed on parallel roads. Drum sounds like a death knell. Burning torches scorch the trees on the road. The villagers reach the hut before Gobind. Flames touch the walls and the fire is massive. Gobind thrashes around, cries, screams and runs towards the chauraha. As he collapses at the crossroads he sees a silver gleam in the dust. It is a woman’s payal. Chavli lives! But what road did she take? Gobind waits.
The second road leads to hotel Parbat, where Johnny, played by the irrepressible Shammi Kapoor, lands a waiter’s job. There he meets Stella D’Souza an Ayah of a rich couple’s small boy. Love blooms between the ayah and waiter. But Stella is coveted by Mr Braganza the hotel owner. He carefully plots with local police. Johnny is framed in a bootlegging case which lands him in jail. An ill father, sanitarium fees, a jailed lover, Stella crumbles. She succumbs to the old man’s lust. Freed from jail but jilted in love, Johnny opens a wayside garage at the same chauraha at which Gobind waits for Chavli. He vows to make a lot of money and build a chandi ki sadak from his workshop to Hotel Parbat where he had lost his beloved. Stella runs away from her tormentor, gets hit by a vehicle and lands up at the chauraha in her lover’s arms.
The third road leads to Sultanabad the riyasat of Nawab Shujah ul Mulk, who suffers from incurable insomnia. His disease forebodes the edict which, under the newly independent India, will soon abolish his princely state. The cure is discovered by his Munshi in the form of the melodious voice of Pyari Jan a courtesan from a nearby basti. His Pathan driver Dilawar Khan goes every evening to bring the woman to the palace. Dilawar’s initial hatred for courtesan turns to love over the daily drives back and forth. Then comes the abolition, death knell for the riyasat. The Nawab makes an offer to Pyari Jan and her mother, a house and a salary in the big city. Pyari declines and chooses Dilawar’s offer of marriage. But he makes a condition; she would have to leave her courtesan mother. Heartbroken, Pyari refuses, saying, the only family a courtesan has is her daughter. They part.
Fourth road is in the process of being born. It is being built by a collective; the institution of thekedars (contractors) has been rejected by the workers. The leader is Nirmal Kumar, beautifully played by Jairaj, who inspires the workers to script their own fate. The workers learn to use dynamite to blow up rocks, while their leader teaches them socialism. ‘What is socialism?’ they ask him. ‘Socialism, ye bhi ek tarah ki dynamite hai!’ On this road three pairs of lovers reunite and join hands to build a new India. In the Boardroom, while the Contractors including the Nawab and Mr Braganza, discuss ways to break the Collective, a bright shiny road is being born connecting the world with the chauraha. The workers’ song was written by the one and only Sahir Ludhianvi, classic lyrics which reflected the philosophy of progressive writers, IPTA, collectivism, all that was the creed of the man called Abbas:
Kadam kadam se dil se dil
Milaa rahe hai ham
Watan mein ek naya chaman
Khilaa rahe hai ham
We are walking in step, hearts beating together
A new garden is being seeded in our land
The song then heralds the new social order, the new India:
Saathi re bhaai re
Ham aaj neev rakh rahein hai us nizaam ki
Bike na zindagi jahaan kisi ghulaam ki
Lutein na mehanatein pise huey aavaam ki
Na bhar sake tijoriyaan koi haraam ki, saathi re bhaai re
Brother, Companion
We are laying today the foundation of a system
Where the life of a slave is not for sale
Where the labour of oppressed populace is not plundered
Where criminals cannot fill their coffers
Saathi re bhaai re
Utha liya hai ab samajvaad ka nishaan
Alag alag na hongi ab hamari khetiyan
Chalengi sabke vaste milon ki charkhiyan
Zameen se aasman talak uthengi chimniyan
Kaha tha jo wo karke ab dikha rahe hai hum
Brothers, companions
Today we are holding high the insignia of socialism
Our farms will no longer be fragmented
For one and all the mills will run
Their chimneys will rise from earth to sky
We are delivering on our promises
Abbas experience in making this film was the worst disaster. For the first time he deviated from his norm and cast stars in this film Meena Kumari, Nimmi, Raj Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor. And they caused no end of trouble! Shammi refused to complete the shooting because KAA could not pay his fees. Meena Kumari was stopped by her husband Kamaal Amrohvi from giving dates for the same reason. She came secretly for the shooting given her great regard for Abbas. Ali Raza, Nimmi’s spouse gave trouble about his wife’s payment. With great difficulty Abbas completed the film. In his autobiography he records the promise he made at his wife’s deathbed that he would never again take big stars for his films.
That was when he took newcomers for his film Shehr aur Sapna (S&S).
S & S was a film without a single star. Two newcomers, Dilip Raj and Surekha and several veterans, friends, fellow travellers, . The word ‘Lihaaz’ epitomised Abbas. Lihaaz is difficult word to translate. Its general sense is ‘concern for others often at one’s own cost’. Abbas cast his friends’ children out of lihaaz for them. His S&S hero was his good friend Jairaj’s son and heroine was his friend Mohammed Ali Parkar’s daughter. In the film they played a Haryanvi boy and Maharashtrian girl. The ‘real’ Haryanvi boy waited in Abbas house for 2 hours hoping to get an audition. The boy was was none other than Dharmendra would later become the biggest star of Bollywood. True to character (lihaaz) Abbas opted for friendship. Dilip and Surekha never rose on the film firmament. By casting them Abbas did no favour to himself or his film. Although this one time there was a surprise in store in terms of the President’s Gold medal.
When entered for the award, the film was rejected at the state level. It was not considered worthy of being sent for national selection. One Member of the Maharashtra Board had seen the film and he insisted that it be entered for national selection. When he got the phonemail from Delhi no one was more surprised than Abbas himself. ‘Your film has won the President’s Gold Medal’ said the caller. At last there will be money in Naya Sansar’s bank account. But that never happened.
When he began the film, Abbas had made a deal with 13 members of his cast and crew that they would not take a fee but would become shareholders in the venture. Accordingly, the award money and modest box office collections were evenly distributed between all 13. Abbas who wrote performed four functions, story, screenplay, production and direction had only one share. He was content. And the gold medal? What happened to the gold medal which was displayed on the screen at the start of the film. The story is that Abbas gave it to his sister for a reason that would be difficult to believe if there was no eye witness. In this case it was his nephew Anwar Abbas. He recounts that Abbas’s servant Yaqub’s daughter was getting married. The medal was to be turned into wedding ornaments.
The story is long though his life was too short for what he set out to do. 73 years of tireless work in all mediums of communication, here was a man in a hurry to change the world. The world which beat him down, only he refused to be beaten. He saw beauty and beauty saw him, they savoured each other. There is no better description of his vision of life than his own words from his autobiography I am not an Island. Let no one forget that this book found no publisher in India and it was sheer dint of his persistence that the manuscript saw light of day. He writes:
‘I have seen the Taj and Ajanta as also the Acropolis and the Parthenon; I have trekked up to the flower-strewn meadow of Khillanmarg in Kashmir, and taken a lift to the top of the Empire State Building to look at the utterly fantastic panorama of New York by night.
I have seen the serene face of the Buddha at Sarnath and the sad smile of Mona Lisa; I have suffered with Christ and laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s sadly comic tramp. Together with other fellow students I have cried with anguish when the news came that Bhagat Singh had been hanged; and I cried with joy as I danced, with a hundred thousand others, on the streets of Bombay on the day of freedom – 15 August 1947.
All this I have witnessed, observed, experienced, felt, all this is within me, a part of me, and I am a part of all that I have observed, experienced, felt! The world has made me and I have made the world (at least two thousand millionth part of it), I am involved in humanity even as humanity is involved in me, as the seed is born of the tree, and the tree is the offspring of the seed.’
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(Syeda Saiyidain Hameed is a writer and activist. She was Member of the Planning Commission of India. She is a feminist who is widely recognised for her passionate engagement in public affairs and social issues, especially for women, minorities and peace. She is Founder of the Muslim Women’s Forum. An author of books on Islam, Sufism, gender and development, and modern Indian history, she was awarded the Padma Shri in 2007).
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