Category: Features

John Butt came to Swat in 1970 as a young man in search of an education he couldn’t get from his birthplace in England. He travels around the region, first only with friends from his home country, but as he befriends the locals and starts to learn about their culture and life, he soon finds his heart turning irrevocably Pashtoon.

Read an excerpt from his book, A Talib’s Tale below:

A Talib’s Trade

The best provision is that which one has worked for, with the labour of one’s own hands.

—Hadith

1973

I owe a lot to Maulana Khan Afzal, but two things in particular. For one, he instilled in me a love of India. Secondly, he showed me practically that one should always work for one’s living.

When I said to Samar Gul in Bara that I was going to the Afridi heartland of Tirah Maidan, he immediately mentioned Khan Afzal. Laiq’s family had some land in Tirah, and he and I had decided to move there for the summer. : ‘That is great,’ Samar Gul said, ‘you will be able to study with Maulana Khan Afzal.’ Like the Sarkai maulvi sahib, Maulana Khan Afzal was an eminent scholar, but at the time he did not have any students residing with him. He was able to devote all his time to tutoring me. I believe it was largely because Tirah was so inaccessible that there were no other students studying with the maulana. Later on, in the late nineties when I visited Maulana Khan Afzal again, he had a good ten to twelve students studying with him. He had become a focal point for talibs, as the Sarkai maulvi sahib had been in the 1970s.

Every day, with my books under my arm, I would make the forty-five-minute walk from Saddar Khel, where Laiq lived, to Landi Kas. Tirah Maidan is a huge, expansive plateau, the like of which there are many in Afghanistan—the Gardez and Logar plateaus are two that spring to mind. The difference with Tirah Maidan is that it is surrounded by richly forested hills, while the hills that surround other Afghan plateaus are mostly bare. Two tributaries of the Bara river meet at the centre of Tirah Maidan, the Malik-Din Khel Bagh. It is the natural capital of Tirah Maidan. The land dips towards that point, as do the streams and the people. From the eastern side, the tribes of Zakha Khel and the Lower Qambar Khels, known as Shalobaris, from the western side the huge swathe of Malik-Din Khel territory, and beyond that the Upper Qambar Khels. From Saddar Khel, I would walk down towards the Malik-Din Khel Bagh, then fork right towards Landi Kas, tucked in a hillside between Bagh and Dunga in Sholobar territory.

I had been studying a Sufi type of collection of Hadith, entitled Riyadh’as-Saliheen—the Path of the Righteous. I say it was Sufi oriented since it was mostly organized according to the virtues that Sufis strive to attain—repentance, patience, sincerity, trust in Allah, steadfastness. It is very spiritually oriented. I am glad I began my study of Hadith with this book. It has remained my favourite collection of Hadith—extremely cleansing and refreshing. However, Khan Afzal switched me to the more mainstream and standard Mishkat’al-Masabih. Mishkat is arranged more conventionally, according to the various strands of jurisprudence: prayer, fasting and the other forms of worship or ibadat—one’s interaction with Allah—followed by muamilat—one’s dealings with other human beings. In the entire Islamic canon, there is this distinction between the rights of Allah—huqooq’Allah—and the rights of one’s fellow beings, indeed of all Allah’s creatures—huqooq’al-ibad. While in Hadith study Khan Afzal went for the more orthodox Mishkat, in jurisprudence, his choice of book for my study was distinctly unorthodox. His preference was Taaleem’al-Islam, written in Urdu by his own teacher, Mufti Kefayatullah of Delhi. ‘Along with learning Islamic jurisprudence—fiqh—you will learn Urdu,’ he recommended. For Taaleem’al-Islam I went outside with his elder son Abdul Hakeem, then a teenager. I guess Abdul Hakeem felt more comfortable teaching me with his father not immediately on hand. We sat on the verge of the field, had a laugh and chatted a lot, while at the same time also reading Taaleem’al-Islam.

In encouraging me to learn Urdu, it was as though the maulana had a premonition or was goading me in the direction of study in India. It had not been that long, maybe twenty or twenty-five years, since he had returned from studying in the Aminiya madrasa in Delhi. India had rubbed off on him to a considerable degree, in a way making him an unusual Afridi. He even continued to wear a lungi—a skirt-like garment favoured by Muslims of India—at home. Pashtoons generally consider this garment effeminate. Even the maulana would not be seen in that garment outside the home. I have replicated Maulana Khan Afzal in this regard. Even when I am in Afghanistan, I wear a lungi in my place of residence; when I am in north India, I wear my lungi a little further afield, as far as the local shops; when I am in south India, I wear a lungi pretty much all the time. At the time when I was studying with the maulana, I used to ask him a lot about India. In a memorable phrase, he once told me that ‘even the dogs of India have manly virtues’—’da Hindustan spi ham saritob laree.’ ‘What’s Delhi like, compared to Peshawar?’ I once asked. ‘What is Hangu like compared to Peshawar?’ he asked rhetorically, referring to a town in the Frontier province, where buses set out towards Tirah. I answered that it was just a tiny town by comparison to Peshawar. ‘Well, so is Peshawar tiny compared to Delhi.’

Yet at the same time the maulana was the most staunchly Afridi of all the Panjpiris. He absolutely loved his native Tirah. I am getting ahead of myself here, but when he was expelled from Tirah along with other Panjpiris and resided for a while in Peshawar, he pined for his motherland so much that he used to console himself by reciting poems written by muhajirs—those who had emigrated from Mecca to Medina at the time of the Holy Prophet—expressing their homesickness for Mecca. He was also invariably cordial with his fellow Afridis, irrespective of whether they subscribed to his Panjpiri views or not. I never saw him take issue or argue with anyone about matters of dogma. He would enact his duties as the pre-eminent Islamic scholar in Tirah Maidan, in the course of which he would explain how important it was to believe in the oneness of Allah and to follow the Sunna of the Holy Prophet. These two things—Tauhid and Sunna—are the twin pillars on which Panjpiri dogma is founded. But he would never become aggressive towards those who did not subscribe to Panjpiri beliefs.

The Maria girls from Bastar practise sex as an institution before marriage, but with rules-one may not sleep with a partner more than three times; the Hallaki women from the Konkan coast sing throughout the day-in forests, fields, the market and at protests; the Kanjars have plundered, looted and killed generation after generation, and will show you how to roast a lizard when hungry.

White as Milk and Rice weaves together prose, oral narratives and Adivasi history to tell the stories of six remarkable tribes of India-reckoning with radical changes over the last century-as they were pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them fathomed.

Here’s an excerpt from the book below:

Lying on the mattress, Mani follows the movement of his father’s breathing. Moments ago, he had watched his father’s sweaty hips thrust up and down while his stepmother, Bindu, lay still beneath him, muffling her pain. His father stayed silent, though maybe his lips kept moving – he was always moving his lips as though he were talking to someone invisible. A mongrel laid beside Mani’s feet, its ears pricked for the sound. Each time his stepmother moaned, the dog yelped.

Like most other children in Hulikkal, a small village in the Nilgiris, Mani lives in one-room mud hut, where pots and pans are pushed aside every night to make room for mats, where they can hear their parents make love, or whatever else it is, through the mosquito net that hangs between them. He shifts on the floor; his upper back hurts from being slammed against walls by his angry father when he had come back jobless from the Badaga village.

“I can’t pay for the giant morsels you eat any more,” he had shouted as he thrashed Mani. Mani wonders what it must be like growing up in the big Badaga houses he saw today, where children sleep in different rooms, thick brick and cement walls separating them from their parents.

He had not seen anything quite like the homes that appeared in the Badaga village: concrete square structures with windows painted smooth in purple, green and blue, with large vegetable patches or a stretch of tea estate sloping down in front. Each home had a little chimney with smoke swirling from it like the incense sticks his father used for the pujas.

The trees and bushes were all trimmed; from the top of the hills, he could see fields of tea, with men and women moving through them, carrying their baskets on their backs, their feet stained red from the soil. When it rains in the Nilgiris, this red earth trickles like blood under its green skin.

Earlier in the day, Mani and his uncle had walked uphill after getting off the bus; the long walk had made his legs hurt, but that did not bother him. He was willing to cross many more such hills. In the absence of trees, that part of the Nilgiris was full of gusty wind that stung his eyes till tears stained his cheeks.

When his uncle spoke, the winds carried his voice louder than he meant it to be, “I told them you already know sowing”; he’d brought him here for a daily wage job at a tea garden. Mani nodded, although he’d hardly worked in fields: They had only a small plot where they grew vegetables and some millet.

On other days, they ate what they collected – roots of yam, herbs and honey – from the forest where they lived or rice given to them by the government. This village, meanwhile, only housed the Badagas, an educated, prosperous tribe that had migrated to the Nilgiris in the early twelfth century. The estate owner his uncle was taking him to had political aspirations and everything he did was to be transactional, driven by the desire to secure votes. Among his pet constituencies were the hamlets of the Kurumbas, also some of the poorest people in Nilgiris, and the area beyond.

“Call him appa,” his uncle insisted, in the Alu Kurumba language, a mix of Tamil and Kannada.

“Remember, you’re a Kurumba. Do not stare at their family members.” Mani nodded, though his uncle had already told him this many times, just as he had told him to pat his hair down and not to say inane things: They are all educated, so don’t talk any jungle hocus-pocus.

Mani wished people did not speak to him as if he were a jungle idiot; that said, he couldn’t help but gape at the women who were walking their children to school. How smooth their skin was, their hair shining with oil, decorated with jasmine and plaited neatly with ribbons; their eyes, unlike the yellowed eyes of Kurumbas, were as white as their teeth.

Minutes later, Mani waited outside the Badaga man’s house, while a few boys chatted on their way back from school, clapping each other’s backs, laughing as they walked past him. Only a few from his hamlet went to school, but he could read what was written on their bag – “Government”. He recognised the word from its shape – it was on every pamphlet and poster handed to them.

One of the boys said something that made the others shout with laughter. Mani bunched the hole in his shirt with his fist while admiring their uniforms. They then slowed their steps to look back at their friends coming behind them, signalling them to join. That was what he wanted to do when he got older – saunter with friends through these neat little hills, talk and laugh.

When Mani looked at them again, one of the them seemed to be pointing at him, at his hair matted like a mop on his head, teeming with vermin. After some whispering, one of the boys, pretending timidity, wrung his hands beseechingly before Mani, “Spare me, oh Kurumba! Spare me from your sorcery,” and ran up the lane with the others, received by them with a hoot of laughter and much back-slapping. Mani had squeezed his eyes shut against the fierce brightness in which the boy’s oiled head laughed and moved among the waves of sudden bright sunlight.

When he recovered his vision, Mani ran behind them, but only mustered enough courage to spit in their compound. Before the Badaga estate owner could see them, his uncle tugged at his wrist and hurried him back to the bus stop. The sun was sinking behind the mountains without any play of colours or movement, save for their flustered stomp downhill.

It was only in these last few years that his forest tribe, the Kurumbas, had started working in the fields of Badagas during the day. Until a few years ago, whenever the forest tribals came in view of a Badaga, word flashed through their village, and women and children ran for the safety of home, hiding inside till the Kurumbas had gone.

If Mani knew a spell or two, he would have twisted those boys’ knickers till they fell screaming from groin pain, and practise the sorcery that they claimed his people knew.

The Kurumbas, they said, had medicines that could put all the inhabitants of a Badaga village to sleep before slinking back into the woods. Their ace sorcerer, an odikara, could make openings in the fence, and the Badaga’s livestock, under his spell, would follow him through it without so much as a cluck or a bleat. They could, apparently, turn into bears and kill people, just as they knew how to counter the other spells, to remove or prevent misfortune.

Many decades ago, when the Badaga grandfathers were little boys still hanging from their mothers’ waists, one of their elders returned from a Kurumba settlement situated outside the jungles, where he went to scout a plot for tea planting. He came back breathless, just about stuttering that their end was near and that a monster was around. Now, a Badaga knew that if a Kurumba sorcerer was casting spells, he could be appeased with rice, oil, salt and clothes. But what was this big brown animal he was screaming about, its eyes glowing red?

As the story goes, the goats, hens and cows were restless; they knew for certain that the elderly man had seen an irate Kurumba-turned-monster. All night, they howled in their sheds and tapped the ground, and the villagers slept fitfully, imagining figures and shapes in the hilly darkness.

The Badaga elders today still fear the sorcerer Kurumbas, often banding against them; their school-going children, though, have less faith in the Kurumbas’s magical abilities. “Isn’t your father, what is his name…Moopan? The limping old man who pretends to be a doctor?” a boy had teased Mani at the bus stop.

The Kurumba magic was wearing off, and a pervasive sense of futility remained. There it was, a distant murmur telling Mani that this fat Badaga life was not his birthright; there was always the possibility of running into people who spoke in hushed whispers around him; always a chance that however clean a shirt he wore, a passer-by may assume from his yellow eyes and uncouth hair that he was not a farm owner but the son of Moopan, the limping old sorcerer. His uncle had fallen asleep on the bus ride back home; Mani’s eyes burnt as he looked out at the rolling tea estates of the Badagas.

 

White as Milk and Rice has stories of India’s isolated tribes.

Translated by Maharghya Chakraborty, this latest translation of Taslima Nasrin’s celebrated memoir recollects Nasrin’s early years against the backdrop of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.

My Girlhood revisits Nasrin’s memories of war, trauma, survival, and the beginning of a journey that redefined her world.

Find an excerpt below that gives us a glimpse into life after the War.

*

After the War

The murmurs continued for a few years. Unrest among the people continued to rise as well. Sheikh Mujib formed a political party called Baksal and prohibited all other parties.

‘What sort of government is this that lets its people die in a famine because they have no food?’ Father said one day. Bearded men wearing fez caps materialized out of nowhere and began to clamour that such an Independence was of no value. The country needed to be put back under Pakistani rule. Boromama sighed and said he did not know which direction the country was headed.

‘The government is doing things that did not happen even when Pakistan was ruling us. They are celebrating Shab-e-Baraat in Banga Bhaban with so much pomp. It never used to happen back when this was East Pakistan. Mujib attended an Islamic conference recently. Russia helped us so much during the war and here Mujib is bent on making Bangladesh a part of the Islamic world. The government is even saying things against India. Would we have become free if India had not sent its forces?’

I understood very little of politics. The only thing I knew was that I liked listening to Sheikh Mujib’s 7 March speech whenever it was played on the radio. I would get goosebumps from excitement. ‘This struggle is a struggle for Independence, this struggle is a struggle for freedom,’ this was not just a slogan but a verse that could make the blood boil. In our music classes we would sing ‘Joy Bangla, long live Bangla!’ It was not merely a song, it was something greater, something that sent a jolt through the heart. Every few days pandals would be built in the neighbourhood for music and dance programmes. Every time they would play something on the mike I would be off to see it. Boys and girls would play the harmonium and practise singing and dancing. They all looked so beautiful and their songs always managed to shake me to the core. Like it used to happen while listening to Khudiram’s songs. Kana mama used to tell us Khudiram’s stories, how a young boy had bombed a British Governor-General and embraced death, all for the sake of freedom. I wanted to be like Khudiram, as courageous and as devil may- care.

Then suddenly one day, quite abruptly, something happened that plunged the city into uneasiness again. People gathered on the roads to talk as if the world was about to come crashing down on them any moment. Some had radios stuck to their ear, faces dry, eyes threatening to pop out. What was the matter again? The days of sticking close to the radio for news had come to an end back in ’71, so what had happened again! Whenever things in the country were tense in any way everyone tended to switch on BBC radio for news. No one had too much faith on our own broadcasters. Father too did as expected. I was asked to turn the knob of the radio to try and catch BBC, a big responsibility I felt very proud of having been given. Father never ordered me to do anything except studying, I was never usually asked to participate in anything else. Earlier it was either Dada or Chotda who were asked to turn the knob while I had to stand apart and watch. But that day Dada was away on a work trip to Sherpur for a couple of days. Chotda was not even living with us any more. Hence, the responsibility fell on me. I had almost found the BBC channel when Father asked me to stop. Words could be heard over the ether, broken fragments of half-truncated news.

Sheikh Mujib was dead.

From her birth on a holy day to the dawn of womanhood at fourteen to her earliest memories that alternate between scenes of violence, memories of her pious mother, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the trauma of molestation and the beginning of a journey that redefined her world, My Girlhood is a tour de force.