The violence in Assam was subsiding though the devastation remained when the tale of Saadat Hasan Manto, the picaresque Pakistani writer whose birth centenary is being celebrated this year, reminded me of another Muslim intellectual who is in every way his opposite.

I mean Dr Saharuddin Ahmed, Guwahati State Museum’s director, whose Sanskrit chanting still resonates in my ears. I was captivated at our first meeting when he recited from a medieval Sanskrit poem to the glory of a king of “Cambuj-desa”, Cambodia, while refusing to join me for tea because of “Holy Eid.”
The information on Manto came from a talk by his grand-niece, Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani historian who teaches at Tufts University in the US. The parallel between the romantic Manto and the prosaic Dr Ahmed is especially poignant when viewed in the context of Assam’s recent Bodo-Muslim riots. For Manto Partition was Punjab’s tragedy; but Assam’s trauma is India’s travail. Even though Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram have been lopped off, Assam remains India in microcosm. If a solution can’t be found for Assam’s problems of land, language, religion and identity, neither will India’s many communities ever live together in harmony.
That danger suggests a further thought that many may find revolutionary and even offensive. India is riddled with enclaves of the mind as well as the body. Verrier Elwin’s philosophy for the former North-East Frontier Agency (now Arunachal Pradesh) influenced Jawaharlal Nehru’s thinking on the entire Northeast which he tried to seal in isolation. Believing it to be lost in 1962 made things worse. But retaining the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873 in the form of Inner Line Permit travel restrictions even for Indian citizens for Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Mizoram hasn’t saved indigenous lifestyles from corruption or protected indigenous people from exploitation.
Officially, plains people cannot buy land in the eight north-eastern states. Non-Kashmiris are similarly prohibited in Jammu and Kashmir, a restriction that provoked the late Shyama Prasad Mookerjee to defiance and led to his death. Muslims are exempt from the personal laws that apply to others. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes already enjoy special privileges. The Bodoland Territorial Council was followed last Saturday by the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration.
Jharkhand and Uttarakhand reflect exclusiveness. Telangana is waiting to emerge. Manipur wants the 1931 Inner Line Permit system restored. The Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council areas seek safeguards. Kolhan, a small pocket in Jharkhand, claims every so often to be autonomous if not independent (and even once petitioned Queen Elizabeth) because a 19th-century British officer drew up a set of regulations (Wilkinson’s Rules) whereby the region was excluded from many state laws.
Exercises to buy peace in the short term are likely in the long run to aggravate these problems of parochialism. More demands for special treatment can be expected. It may be time, therefore, to consider whether the alternative of an India that has no separate compartments and is free for all Indians to travel and live in may not ultimately be the best guarantee of national integration.
A universalist like the Guwahati museum director would have no problems with that solution. Born in a modestly placed observant Muslim family, he learnt Persian and Arabic in the mornings and mastered Sanskrit and Pali at an old-fashioned tol in the evenings. When we talked last, Dr Ahmed mentioned a proposal to add a Southeast Asia wing to the Museum which already boasted a rich and surprisingly well-organised collection of Assam’s artifacts. The additional gallery would highlight the greater unity of the Tai-Kadai language family of which Thai, Lao and Ahom are members.
I have singled out Dr Ahmed because his humanistic erudition is so striking at a time of communal polarisation. The central message of even the heartbreaking tale of Manto seems to be not that the Kashmiri-Punjabi idealist deplored and denounced the absurdity of Partition but that, in the end, he, too, succumbed to it. As the tale was told, despite his deep emotional attachment to the Hindi actor, Shyama, and his close emotional bonding with Ashok Kumar, Manto blamed his failures in the Bombay movie world on his religion. Convinced that a Muslim would never get a fair deal in Hindu India, he packed his things and took a boat from Bombay to Karachi, leaving Shyama, with whom he shared a bachelor flat, bewildered and bereft.
Manto pined for India. He yearned for Bombay in Lahore and for Lahore in Bombay. Bombay, especially, was the scene of some of the most poignant moments of his early life. According to Rafia Zakaria, “Bishen Singh, the protagonist of Saadat Hasan Manto’s most famous story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ insisted that he wanted to be neither in Pakistan, nor in India, but in Toba Tek Singh.” That dream not being possible in real life, Manto must have felt justified in his decision to abandon India. It’s something I cannot speak about. I feel limited like Richard Baldwin, the African-American writer, who said he never knew whether he had to wait for the lift because the white liftman was busy or because he himself was black. It’s equally impossible for a Hindu to get into a Muslim’s skin (and vice versa) and pronounce on the sensitive subject of discrimination.
But I can hazard a guess about Manto’s question, “What will our dreams be now that colonial rule is over?” Across time and space, the harmony of Dr Ahmed’s culturally integrated person supplies the definitive answer. He, too, must have faced — and still occasionally faces — agonising choices. India is not perfect. Communal injustice persists. But he hasn’t run away from the challenge of life in his own country.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author