The number of writers who have written sketches of contemporaries is legion. Among the best known to Pakistani readers are perhaps Sadat Hasan Manto’s Ganjay Farishte and Mumtaz Mufti’s, Okhe Log. For these who read English are Khalid Hasan’s Scorecard (1984) and, indeed, many of his columns now available in numerous collections. Brigadier (r) Ismail Siddiqui, an officer of the Education Corps of the army and a playwright and biographer, has now added to this sub-genre by writing this book.
The book is not a biographical account but, since it starts with a piece on his mother ‘Poji’, it tells us much about his family’s history which biographies do. Then he devotes chapters to his teachers---Munshi Tilak Chand Mahroom and Maulana Riaz ul Haq Abbasi---which tell us much about his childhood and schooling. Then there are chapters on friends, colleagues, relatives and so on which tell us much about his own life and personality. As his friends and colleagues were famous figures in the world of art (such as Ali Imam and Abdurrahman Chughtai) and literature (Colonel Mohammad Khan, General Shafiq ur Rahman, Syed Zamir Jafri etc), we get, so to speak, glimpses into the social and cultural history of Pakistan. In other words, the book has both biographical and historical value.
Ismail Siddiqui’s style is the opposite of Lytton Stratchey whose Eminent Victorians has long been seen as having undercurrents of irony. He looks at the subject in a benevolent manner and writes in an inoffensive one. The faults and drawbacks of the subjects’ character are either glossed over or understated. This style comes from a world where politeness takes precedence over truth and, because of its non-abrasiveness, this style is most engaging. However, despite the constraints of politeness, we are given unambiguous cues to peoples’ character. For instance, we discover that the writer’s mother was not treated well in his father’s family as, indeed, was the wont during that period of unjust domination over young people in general and women in particular by the elders of the family. We also discover that the writers’ Hindu teacher, Mahroom, expressed anti-Muslim ideas when he was forced to immigrate to India. All this becomes clear but the polemics and bitterness and character assassination which accompany such disclosures are absent and, for once, I should say this is how it should be. Coming from me, a great upholder of the precedence of truth over all other considerations in biographical writing, this is an unusual admission.
Why I have deviated from my normal order of preferences is because of two factors. Firstly, this book’s real value is literary not biographical. The literary worth of the book lies in the author’s unpretentious, spontaneous style which creates a genial narrative flow which absorbs the reader. Had the author used hard words or been less polite the geniality would have dried up and the reading pleasure diminished. The second reason is that the writer’s own ideas are right-wing, as he hints at in the chapter on ‘Ali Imam’ and expresses at places in ‘Paevand-e-Akhir’. Even in this last chapter, ‘Paevand-e-Akhir’, they are irksome for those who hold different views. Had he expressed them more often in his writings on personalities, such as Mahroom or Imam, his style would have become abrasive and polemical. That would have decreased interest in the book. As such, I am glad the writer has chosen the genial and polite way of writing biographical sketches rather than any other.
Ismail Siddiqui conjures up a world which is probably already dead or is in the process of dying. It is a world where extended families welcome guests, sometimes in large numbers, for months on end. Friends drop in at unexpected times and share meals as a matter of course. This endearing generosity of extended families is on the decrease as the busy nuclear family with its self-absorption and Westernized individualistic lifestyle takes over. The endless debates in the cafes of Lahore, out of which he memtions the Tea House and the Coffee House, have ended. The T.V, the computer screen glues isolated, atomistic individuals to it and the give and take of debate is lost. This world needs preservation in accounts as lively, absorbing and genial as Ismail Siddiqui’s. I welcome the book as an interesting addition both to writings on our social history and literature.