Harking Back: Abdullah Malik and the geniuses of Kucha Chabakswaran

It was in the 1920s that every morning a group of youngsters would leave together for school Kucha Chabaksawaran, inside Lahore’s Mochi Gate, located towards the edge of Rang Mahal, who half a century later would become the sub-continent’s leading intellectuals, each in their own right.

Just imagine four schoolboys emerge from the house of Maulana Noor Ahmed Chishti, the renowned writer of ‘Tehkeqat-e-Chishti’, they being Pakistan’s finest psychologist, Dr Muhammad Ajmal Makhdoom, Dr Ahsanul Islam the famous zoologist who almost won a Nobel Prize and his brother the air force pilot Anwarul Islam, who fought in the 1967 Middle East War and is mentioned in Israeli accounts as the most dangerous man best avoided, and lastly Mr Abdul Hamid Sheikh, the journalist and Editor of the C&MG known famously in Lahore as HS. The mothers of these four were sisters and circumstances had brought the cousins back to their grandfather’s house. All of them went to Central Model School.

From nearby they were joined by the great short story writer Rajinder Singh Bedi. Then emerged from a neighbouring house the great historian and journalist Abdullah Malik and his brother Rauf Malik. They were joined by brothers Medjid and Hameed Almakky, publishers and among the social elite of old Lahore. Sometimes they were joined by a student from the house of the great artist Abdul Rahman Chughtai. In those days the young boys walked to their schools together. Along the way they greeted every elder they crossed, for then they recognised all of them. Each one of these famous names deserve a column on their own, such was the role they played to make Lahore what it became. But in this column we will dwell on the life and times of Abdullah Malik.

Abdullah Malik was born on the 20th of October, 1920, in Kucha Chabakswaran. After learning the Quran at home he was admitted to the Mission High School at Rang Mahal. This was the first English-medium school set up in Lahore after British takeover in 1849, and was in its days the finest. From there he got admitted to Islamia College on Railway Road.

He belonged to a very religious environment, as were the rest of those youngsters who trudged to school every day then. The Chishti and the Almakky households were known for their religious piety and scholarship, as were the Maliks and Chughtais. Abdullah Malik set off to become a teacher and given his religious scholarship he joined the ‘Tehreek-e-Ahrar’, which with time was becoming extremely communal. The young Abdullah started to avoid their meetings, and after considerable discussion with his friends he joined the Communist Party of India. His commitment to a secular way of life, to tolerance, social justice, to democracy and to scholarship remained with him till his dying day in April 2003.

He started his journalistic career by editing the Islamia College magazine. Among his class-fellows was the Kashmiri politician Sheikh Abdullah and Chaudhary Rehmat Ali, the man who coined the name ‘Pakistan’ while at Cambridge. In essence Malik was anti-imperialist and secular, and because of these traits he joined the Communist Party newspaper ‘Qaumi Jang’ and advanced the message of independence for his homeland from colonialism.

During the Second World War, the CPI decided to oppose the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini and once the war was over to push for independence. But given the communal path that Nehru’s National Congress was taking in negotiations with Jinnah’s Muslim League, it was clear the Pakistan promised to be a land that was “secular, tolerant, democratic and socially just”, very much how Abdullah Malik was to describe Jinnah in his writings. So Jinnah and other communists opted for Pakistan, letting go of the dream of a united India.

Sadly, by the time he passed away at the age of 82, he was to see an “extreme communal military-mullah controlled Pakistan”, quite the opposite of what he till his dying day stood for. His fearless nature and his outspoken views remained his trademark. After 1947 the communist newspapers were closed and Abdullah Malik was arrested and spent three months in the notorious dungeons of the Lahore Fort. He was released on the condition that if he continued to propagate his views, he would have to endure further torture and imprisonment.

In 1951 the government of Liaquat Ali Khan started arresting members of the CPP for planning a coup, and in the infamous Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, journalists like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mazhar Ali Khan were jailed. At this stage to keep the struggle going Abdullah Malik joined the daily ‘Imroze’, an Urdu newspaper founded by the Marxist freedom fighter Mian Iftikharuddin, who had with Jinnah’s assistance also founded the daily ‘The Pakistan Times’. His column soon found his name being mentioned among the top journalists of Pakistan. By this time he was working with exceptional writers like Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi and Sibte Hasan, and their influence on him was considerable.

As ‘The Pakistan Times’ influence grew, he in the late 1960s served as the London correspondent of ‘Imroze’ and ‘The Pakistan Times’. By this time the military government of Gen. Yahya Khan had denied the winners of the 1970 general elections their right to form the country’s government. On his return to Lahore in 1971 he was again arrested and jailed. He was among the very few Pakistani intellectuals who openly sympathised with the Bengali democratic position, and went as far as supporting the independence of East Pakistan in the form of Bangladesh. For this and for his opposition to the ‘planned’ hanging of Sheikh Mujib, he was sentenced to whipping. This luckily was never carried out. “There is no way for any fair person to support the political corruption and military dictatorship of Pakistan”, he was to say.

His trade union activities saw him, and a number of his colleagues, being dismissed from ‘Imroze’. But with two of his friends he set up a national daily newspaper titled ‘Azad’. But because of military threats and advertisers being warned, it closed once the military action started in East Pakistan.

But all these setbacks did not deter the free spirit of Abdullah Malik, who started off on a career of writing a history of Pakistan and other aspects of sub-continental issues. His books on the history of Punjab are masterpieces in their own right. Being an established columnist, and now also a respected historian, he started writing a column in the right-wing Urdu newspaper ‘Nawa-e-Waqt’. His dialectic approach soon made his the most read column in the newspaper.

On Christmas Day of 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, and this was a blow for the committed Communist that Abdullah Malik was. The coming to power of Gen. Musharraf led him to write an excellent book on the history of military takeovers in Pakistan. He was of the considered view that military generals have, and never can, understand the damage they do by grabbing power. He was convinced that military dictators are natural enemies of democracy, which leads them and “their political lackeys to nurture corruption in all its forms”. His deep understanding of the praetorian mindset led him to write a number of books on the subject.

So on the 10th of April 2003, the great Abdullah Malik passed away in an Islamabad hospital. He was to write in his book ‘Purani mehfilain yaad aa ra’hi ain’: “I have spent my entire life committed to the beliefs of one day establishing a Socialist Pakistan, where the love of mankind transcends all religions, faiths and creeds”. Sadly, that day is still far away.