The Kabuliwalas : A Bengali in Afghanistan

Representational image.: Getty Images 

Uddalak Mukherjee | TT | 25.08.21 : Should copies of Deshe Bideshe, Syed Mujtaba Ali’s memorable chronicle of the one-and-a-half years he spent as an educator in Afghanistan, be sent to Washington DC and New Delhi where, the grapevine says, the mandarins apparently watched, bewildered, as the Taliban strolled into Kabul without having to fire a shot?

The suggestion is not being made in jest. Neither is this another mutation of that contagion known as Bengali exceptionalism. Even though scholarly works on, what an American Colonel christened, the ‘Afghan Puzzle’ are voluminous — Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos is one notable example — Mujtaba Ali’s book has an advantage over these. It is his gift of prescience. Some of the passages in Deshe Bideshe — Nazes Afroz translated it into In a Land Far from Home — blur the border between past and present, lending Mujtaba Ali’s experience of events that took place between 1927 and 1929 a remarkable degree of contemporaneity.

The closing chapters of the book evoke a Kabul besieged by the fear of civil war. Mujtaba Ali’s Kabul could well be the Kabul we are reading about, or whose images we are devouring, in our time. In Mujtaba Ali’s Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, the sovereign, attempts to introduce ‘Western’ reforms — doing away with the purdah for women, introducing the dereshi, as well as modern education for boys and girls and so on — but enraged clerics mobilize public opinion as well as the dreaded outlaw, Bacha-ye Saqao — the Taliban’s poster-boy? — forcing Khan, much like Ashraf Ghani, to flee the nation. Mujtaba Ali, his 117th birth anniversary falls in a few weeks, also brings to life the desperation of expatriates and Kabulis trying to escape the yoke of imminent brutality, with the British Ligation — an ancestor of the Indian Mission? — being notoriously leaden-footed when it came to anticipating the unrest and, then, in its rescue and repatriation mission.

That the Afghanistan unveiled by Deshe Bideshe echoes with its readership decades after Mujtaba Ali’s sojourn makes it a perfect text for the wise men in Washington and New Delhi to pore over. Mujtaba Ali was alert to some of Afghanistan’s quandaries that seem to have foxed the United States and its allies as they went about rebuilding that strife-torn nation in their own image. The maulvi — the mullah, a scourge in the Western eye — Mujtaba Ali argues, functions as the lynchpin of Afghan society no matter who possesses the sceptre in Kabul. The clerics’ conservatism, he writes, did not dull their anti-colonial sensibilities.

A report in Forbes has revealed that in the course of its 20-year occupation, the US has spent a total of $2 trillion — around 300 million dollars per day for two decades — on Afghanistan. A bulk of these expenditures, Brown University’s ‘Costs of War Project’ estimates, must have gone into war expenses as well as training the Afghan National Army. It would be interesting to speculate the outcome of a proportionate investment by the West in social reform and religious moderation, especially in rural Afghanistan. Interestingly, Ahmed Rashid attributed the Taliban’s resurgence after its defeat in 2001 to the international community reneging on its commitment of bringing equitable development — educational and cultural — to large swathes of Kabul’s hinterland, especially in the southeast.

The sharp-eyed Mujtaba Ali spots another anomaly; the tension between the collective —Afghan — fidelity to ethnicity and the imperatives of the nation-building project. One of the pearls of wisdom in Afghan Statecraft, Mujtaba Ali writes cheekily, is to exploit fissures among tribal entities and turn these groups against the sovereign — be it an autonomous Emir or a puppet of the West. This pearl continues to sparkle. One curious manifestation of the persistent ethnic pulls and pressures has been the changing nature of the Afghan national anthem: perhaps no other country has had to change its national anthem five times in 95 years to honour the political ascendancy of a particular ethnic constituency. The “Milli Surud”, the anthem adopted to celebrate the spirit of a new, united Afghanistan, evidently fell on the proverbial deaf ears of the squabbling warlords. Even a pan-Islamic identity, such as the one that the Taliban lays claim to, is not immune to these contestations. Panjshir — the home of Bacha-ye Saqao as well as of Ahmad Shah Massoud — a stronghold of the Tajiks, Afghanistan’s second-largest ethnic group, has pledged to resist the Taliban. And yet, conquerors, deshi or bideshi, force a non-representative national unity upon a land that has imagined nationhood to be a complicated, usually competitive, solidarity among clans.

What gives Deshe Bideshe its distinct flavour is Mujtaba Ali’s joyful communion with people and their politics that challenges some of the modern — mischievous — misconceptions about Muslim society. The Bengali reader, so enchanted with Rabindranath Tagore’s politically benign kabuliwala, is suddenly confronted with Kabulis spiritedly opposed to dogmatism, orthodoxy and bigotry. Among Mujtaba Ali’s friends is Dost Mohammed, a Socratic figure, detached from all else but the spirit of liberty: he conscripts himself to defend Kabul from the approaching fanatics. There is Mir Aslam, a scholar of shastras, who fearlessly denounces the rebellion by Islamists as anti-progressive at considerable personal risk. And, of course, who can forget Abdur Rehman? More friend and confidante than man-servant to Mujtaba Ali, Rehman, who could not stop talking about the silvery snowfall in Panjshir, thinks nothing of leaving Afghanistan to find refuge in hot and humid Hindustan.