{"id":4089,"date":"2019-03-10T23:33:31","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T18:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/?p=4089"},"modified":"2019-03-10T23:36:50","modified_gmt":"2019-03-10T18:06:50","slug":"prison-tales-iv-jails-the-cauldron-of-ideologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/point-of-view\/kashmir-talk\/prison-tales-iv-jails-the-cauldron-of-ideologies\/","title":{"rendered":"Prison Tales IV: Jails The Cauldron of Ideologies"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/fb:like>\n

Nostalgia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZGM\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a shelf in my small study, I have a beautiful book printed on glossy paper \u2018Rubaiyat\nof Omar Khayyam\u2019, translated from Persian into our mother tongue by Ghulam Nabi\nKhayal.    It was\nmy second introduction to Khayyam, after having read translation of Rubaiyat by\nEdward FitzGerald as a student of literature and parroted verses like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \n\u201cAwake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before Life\u2019s Liquor in its Cup be dry.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many a critic of Kashmiri\nliterature considers Khayal\u2019s translation of  \nRubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as one of the best in our native language. Long before, as a young student passing my\nleisure time inside a bookshop in our Mohalla, owned by one of the then famed\ncalligraphist Mahajan Sahib, I had seen the first edition of the translation\nand heard the story that poet had rendered 15o quatrains from Persian into\nKashmiri during his days in jail- like many others he also had been implicated\nin fabricated \u2018Hazratbal Conspiracy\u2019 case of 1958. The glossy edition on my\nshelf for past almost a decade and reprinted after forty years staring at me\nreproachfully about our apathy towards our literature reminded me how jails had brought best in some of the inmates and how these had turned into\nseminaries and schools for some of my contemporaries and classmates \u2013 and how\nthinking of some students had metamorphosed in these cauldrons of ideologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would have\nno idea if there were any students behind the high walls of the prisons in the fifties   when translator of Khayyam\u2019s quatrains was jailed.\nBut, for a decade after 1965, thousands of students were sent to use Charles\nDickens phrase to the \u2018melancholy house\u2019 to pass their \u2018weary days\u2019 in long\nbarracks and pace on metalled prison pavements like \u2018mourners at a funeral\u2019. After freedom from jails   for years,\nthey recounted the horrific experiences and sour stories and shared tales how\nin the dismal scenario they saw a silver lining that changed their lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple of friends often talked about the dedication of an inmate Master Mohammad Abdullah Beg of Uri who taught them to read the \u00a0\u00a0Quran and made them memorize many a Surah of the Holy Book. In their childhood, they had not been to Quran Chatahall<\/em>; there were stories that after 1947 the emergency administration had closed Chatahalls, <\/em>and these were re-opened after 1953 only. Some received lessons on the Holy Quran, from Qari Saif-U-Din Sahib one of the founding members of the Jama\u2019at-e-Islamia Jammu and Kashmir. It was their first-time introduction to the literature on Islam by one of the greatest twentieth-century South Asian Islamic Scholar Abul A’la Maududi \u2013 the literature changed their outlook for the rest of their life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some \nfriends often felt nostalgic about the human qualities of Abdul Kabir, an\nunlettered communist leader, master in stitching clothes with a needle who\nvisited various barracks to know from the students\nif he could be of assistance to them, including mending their clothes and\nfixing button in their shirts. In the mid-sixties, when G.M. Sadiq, a communist\nwas in power ironically many left-leaning students, perhaps professing\nMarxist-Leninist ideology was jailed. A\ncouple of friends often mentioned that while visiting them in their barrack and\nlistening to  their discourses on works\nlike Das Kapital and Dialectical Materialism \nthey  for the first time learnt about Karl Marx and Friedrich\nEngels \u2013 and got influenced by the ideology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a place where over a period of hundred years people have been jailed, there are a plethora of stories suggesting that jails have been the cauldron of ideologies- that have metamorphosed detunes political outlooks- on occasions oscillated them from one extreme to another. The story of Engineer Ghulam Qadir Sufi, a footballer and one of the founding members of Islamic Study Circle could be a classic example. Talking on student politics in Kashmir and remembering his days in jail, he told me that during his days in S.P. College he read communist literature and was actively associated with the Democratic National Conference. He knew all prominent socialist leaders D.P. Dhar, Noor Mohammad and Sadiq, and as an activist of the party hawked party newspaper \u2018Hamara Kashmir\u2019 with another friend Ratinder Koul. In 1965, as a student of the Regional Engineering College, he was detained and lodged on the Central Jail, Srinagar. On the first night inside the jail in the evening, someone slipped a book into the barrack. He picked up the book; it was a collection of Iqbal\u2019s poetry. Next morning, a man introducing himself as Jahangir Khan asked the jailed students, if any one of them had picked up the book he had slipped into the barrack. Knowing Sufi had picked it up, Jahangir Khan suggested to him read Iqbal and try to understand him. Iqbal transformed Sufi; then he started reading Abul A’la Maududi. \u00a0\u2018The second volume of \u2018Tafhimat\u2019 was the first work of Maududi, in barrack no 3, then he read \u00a0\u00a0one after another work by the Islamic scholar in the jail- and he left the prison as a learned man with a changed ideology. \u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/fb:like><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nostalgia<\/p>\n

By<\/p>\n

ZGM<\/p>\n

On a shelf in my small study, I have a beautiful book printed on glossy paper \u2018Rubaiyat
\nof Omar Khayyam\u2019, translated from Persian into our mother tongue by Ghulam Nabi
\nKhayal.    It was
\nmy second introduction to Khayyam, after having read translation of Rubaiyat by
\nEdward FitzGerald as a student of literature and parroted verses like:<\/p>\n

 
\n\u201cAwake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup<\/p>\n

Before Life\u2019s Liquor in its Cup be dry.\u201d <\/p>\n

Many a critic of Kashmiri
\nliterature considers Khayal\u2019s translation of  
\nRubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as one of the best in our native language. Long before, as a young student passing my
\nleisure time inside a bookshop in our Mohalla, owned by one of the then famed
\ncalligraphist Mahajan Sahib, I had seen the first edition of the translation
\nand heard the story that poet had rendered 15o quatrains from Persian into
\nKashmiri during his days in jail- like many others he also had been implicated
\nin fabricated \u2018Hazratbal Conspiracy\u2019 case of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kashmir-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4089"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4090,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4089\/revisions\/4090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}