Dr. Tariq Rahman
Book Review
Syed Habib Ahmed, From South
Asia to North America : An Autobiography 1915-2000
(Karachi : Oxford University Press, 2001), PP. 402. Price. Rs. 595/--
In the last two decades a large number of autobiographies have been published. Usually these are accounts of the lives of senior military officers and bureaucrats. While in other countries academics, writers, artists, journalists, and politicians generally write biographies, in our case these are either absent or present but in the form of the occasional rare piece. Because our biographical accounts are predominantly by functionaries of the state they dwell on contemporary events in the world of power relations. Thus they are useful for providing us data about the actual happenings which officials want to make public. In short, our autobiographies help us understand Pakistan, international relations and politics in general. Syed Habib Ahmed’s autobiography is different on all these counts.
First, the author spent most of his life in India and North America (The U.S.A and Canada) and not in Pakistan. Second, although he was a bureaucrat (in the international arena), he gives us glimpses of several countries from a personal (not necessarily United Nations) point of view. And thirdly, he tells us a lot about his personal life and the culture he was born in and adapted himself to. In short, while other Pakistani biographies are archival material for comtemporary Pakistan studies, this biography is archival material for the social history of the culture of North Indian Muslims and the South Asian diaspora in the North America.
The book begins with a fascinating and surprisingly detailed account of the life of a middle class Muslim family in Dehli. Syed Habib’s extended family complete with grandparents, parents, aunts and cousins reminds one of the fictional families in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Dehli and other such literary works. As he is writing for non-South Asian readers he takes care to describe the customs, clothes and food—especially the food--- in elaborate and clear detail. Food was, indeed, an important part of gentlemanly (ashraf) status in North India and this account brings out its centrality in the culture of that part of the world. Apart from the food he tells us what norms and values governed peoples lives; what games were popular; how people greeted each other and so on.
He boldly addresses the problems of young adulthood and marriage. His was a society which neither allowed dating nor even meetings between girls and boys. However, despite these restrictions, young people did meet, did fall in love and, as in the author’s case, got married to partners of their choice. The chapter entitled ‘marriage’ offers us very useful glimpses into the puritanical culture of Indian Muslims which others have ignored. Unfortunately, among biographers, those who has dwell on sexual themes, such as the poet Shabbir Hasan Khan Josh Malihabadi, have over emphasized the salacious at the expense of the ordinary. So, while Josh’s account is the Urdu equivalent of Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves (1925), Syed Habib Ahmed’s account gives us an idea of what puberty and marriage must have been in our part of the world a little more than half a century ago.
The author goes on to tell us about his education and dwells at length on his extraordinary capacity for self-education. He then mentions how he became an accountant and got promoted on the basis of sheer hard work and intelligence. In the nineteen forties he worked in Karachi and then for the Tatas in India. The partition forced him to migrate to Pakistan where he managed to get a fairly good executive position. Then, in 1948, he was selected by the United Nations and from then on there was no going back. He climbed the bureaucratic ladder eventually getting positions of tremendous importance in several countries such as Somalia(1964-1967) Libya (1967-71) and Syria (1971-75). In some of these places he used his tremendous capacity to learn new things and use his knowledge to work in the interest of the U.N.O. Eventually, after retiring, he settled down in Canada where, once again, he set about to learn how to become a householder and a sociable neighbour. This, then, is the story of the author’s successful life.
The author’s style is simple and unpretentious though, at places, a bit prosaic. One does not know, however, whether the style has been changed by editing (done by his grandson to fulfil his academic requirements) or is naturally his own. He conveys his tremendous capacity to learn and adopt himself to the fast changing world around him without boasting. However, despite being a high official (or maybe because of it) he is oblivious or indifferent to the dark and seamy side of international politics. Thus we find no insights into realpolitik. All we hear is how the U.N works to ‘develop’ countries but not a word into why this is done? In whose interest it really works out? And what really is the power distribution in the world. In short, in common with other biographies of officials, this work implicitly supports the status quo which, indeed, is what one expects of a conventional bureaucrat who has got on in life by accepting the world as it is. This drawback – if drwaback it can be called – does not detract from the significance of the work as a source of first hand information of a way of life which has all but vanished. It also gives us an understanding of an exceptional individual whose gift for self education took him to high positions in a world which does, at least sometimes, reward hard work, dedication and intelligence (if, of course, you don’t rock the boat).