Memoirs: Guru di nagri, Ambarsar
by Zafar Ullah Poshni
An undated picture from an old postcard shows the Golden Temple, Amritsar
– Photo author’s collection.
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was in born in 1926 in Amritsar (Ambarsar in
common Punjabi), but my father who was an engineer in the M.E.S.
was posted in Bareilly (U.P.) and I spent the first nine years of
my life there. In 1935, my father, who had risen from the ranks to
be given the title of Khan Bahadur by the British for meritorious
services, retired with a handsome pension. He immediately shifted
to his home town, Amritsar.
Dad was an affluent man and purchased a large sized
bungalow on Maqbool Road in the Civil Lines area. I was proud of
the fact that we had a car — at that time I estimate there were
probably no more than 50 cars in Amritsar. Many rich people
preferred to maintain horse-driven vehicles like a phaeton, buggy
or raeesi tonga rather
than a car, even though the cost of feeding a horse would have
been higher than the cost of petrol, which was dirt cheap then.
Actually, everything was dirt cheap, but then salaries were pretty
low too.
We used to pay five rupees a month to a manservant and
three to a maid, plus food, of course. My father was really rich,
even his pension was about Rs 350 a month, but other relatives in
our clan were just so-so, and some were very poor.
I remember one cousin of my Dad’s who was considered
to be doing relatively well. He was a clerk in a government office
with a salary of Rs 35 per month and his lifestyle seemed devoid
of any discomfort. If you were earning between Rs 30 and Rs 50 per
month in those days you were considered to be in the comfort zone.
I, a privileged child, was living in this big house in
the Civil Lines, which had lights and ceiling fans in all the
rooms (of course nobody had even heard of air-conditioning at the
time). But when I used to go downtown to the congested areas to
play with my various cousins I used to feel very depressed to see
that in most of their houses there was no electricity at all and
they were using lanterns or oil wick lamps (deeva) at night.
During the long summer days the sun would heat up the
rooms so much in these usually double (or at the most triple)
storeyed houses that the extended families living in them had to
sleep on the open roof tops (kotha
in Punjabi). I can now well imagine the problems of privacy this
must have entailed, especially for young married couples, but at
that time I was just a kid and did not comprehend this aspect of
the sleeping arrangements of multiple families living in the same
house without electricity! At a rough guess I would say that
nearly three-fourths of the city folk were living without electric
lights or fans in Amritsar at that time.
But Amritsar was cosmopolitan. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs,
Christians, even some Parsees, lived in this city. I recollect
that one of the most attractive bungalows on Mall Road belonged to
a certain Parsee gentleman, Dr Maneckshaw. His daughter, Celia
used to teach English in the school where I studied. Dr.
Maneckshaw’s son, Sam Maneckshaw, had joined the Army. Many
decades later he planned the conquest of East Pakistan (1971) and
was rewarded by the Indian government by promotion to the rank of
Field Marshal, the first and the only Field Marshal to command the
Indian Army since Independence.
While in Amritsar city itself Muslims were in a
majority, in the Amritsar district as a whole they were a
minority. The reason being that most of the villages in the
district were populated by Sikhs and Hindus, though there were
Muslims also living in these villages and there were even some
villages which were overwhelmingly Muslim. But at the time of
partition the Boundary Commission decided on the basis of the
district as a whole, and so Amritsar was allocated to India
because the non-Muslims were slightly greater in numbers.
By and large the various communities lived quite
peacefully, even though there were Muslim areas and non-Muslim
areas of residence, and there was the Muslim Anglo Oriental (MAO)
College (where Professor M.D. Taseer and Faiz Ahmed Faiz taught),
a Hindu Sabha College and a Khalsa College in Amritsar. During
inter-college hockey and cricket matches tension would sometimes
arise when the students cheered their respective teams and
sometimes there were minor clashes; usually fisticuffs and at the
most hockey sticks were used as weapons.
Unlike today’s bloody happenings there were never any
fatalities, and before the vicious partition riots broke out, I
seldom heard of any clashes where firearms or even knives and
swords were used. Prior to 1947, the British administration was
effective and firm, impartial as between the ‘natives’, and
there was definitely rule of law, something which has been almost
totally annihilated by our ruling class over the years. Compared
to the present day, frequency of crime was far lower. My younger
sister used to ride a bicycle alone to her school and there was
never any incident or mishap to discourage her.
Except for a very, very few emancipated families like
mine where the girls did not observe purdah, almost all Muslim
females in Amritsar wore the burqa — either the white
shuttlecock burqa or the two piece ‘fashionable’ black burqa.
The non-Muslim women were a bit more open, but even among them
some would cover their faces with their head covering (ghunghat)
when venturing into the street. There were very few cases of
molesting, harassment or rape compared to our present horrendous
and disgraceful state of affairs.
Of course, except for a few Anglo Indian and Christian
nurses, there were hardly any working women in those days. Almost
every woman was a housewife and cooking and serving the males was
her primary duty. These ladies certainly believed that the way to
a man’s heart was through his stomach!
In my community (Kashmiris) tea drinking was common,
but in other communities the morning breakfast usually included lassi.
The Indian Tea Board in the 1930s was making a concerted effort to
popularise the tea habit by putting up big framed posters at the
railway stations which announced that “Garm chai garmion mein
thandak pohnchati hai”. (Hot tea cools you down in summer). This
campaign proved highly successful and one could see how in a few
years more and more families switched over from lassi to tea, all
over Punjab. It certainly happened before my eyes in Amritsar.
In February this year I got the chance to revisit
Amritsar after more than 60 years. The city has grown many times
larger, like Lahore or Karachi. The wide open spaces, plots and
orchards in the Civil Lines have disappeared, a concrete jungle
has encroached upon them. The big bungalow on Maqbool Road where I
used to live was intact; a Sikh family was living in it. The
pleasant thing was that the government had not changed the
road’s name… it is still called Maqbool Road. This made me
very happy.
I visited the old landmarks, the Golden Temple, the
Jalianwala Bagh, the Hall Bazaar. An intense nostalgia overwhelmed
me just for a while, but then I remembered the old saying: “The
past is gone, never to return. The future is uncertain. The
present moment is every thing”. And then another witty phrase
assailed me: ‘Even nostalgia is not what it used to be’.
•
Lahore-based author Zaffarullah Poshni
is the last survivor of the Rawalpindi conspiracy case. He was
imprisoned along with Faiz among others. In a recent article on
Faiz, he writes: “I
learned a lot from both of these [Faiz and Sajjad Zaheer] and the
knowledge I gained from them during confinement made the rest of
my life a real ecstasy and delight.”