Birth—1908 Where—Rampur

Education: Sherborune School in Dorset, Oxford

Death: 1954

Bibliography

• Angāre (1932)

• Quest for Life – Travelogue on Soviet Union (1954)

• Editor Chingari, CPI’s journal (1938)

A Comrade and a Gentleman Rakhshanda Jalil

Scion of a distinguished family from Rampur and the son of Dr Saiduzzafar, a professor of anatomy at the Lucknow Medical College, Mahmuduzzafar (1908-1954) was a comrade and a gentleman. Sent to Sherborune School in Dorset at the age of 12, he graduated from Oxford. Yet, when he returned to India in 1931, he had become an active nationalist, choosing to wear khadi and refusing to sit for the civil services examinations as was expected of someone of his class and privilege.

Betrothed to his cousin Zohra in childhood (she was to become the brilliant actress Zohra Segal), he was swept off his feet by the charismatic Dr Rashid Jahan. Together they weathered the worst of the storm over ‘Angarey’ – an incendiary collection to which both had contributed, along with Sajjad Zaheer and Ahmed Ali, and which was banned by the imperial government in March 1933. While Mahmud’s literary output after ‘Angarey’ was almost negligible, he was a committed and active member of the Communist Party of India and remained associated with the Progressive Writers’ Association all his life.

The only story by Mahmuduzzafar in ‘Angarey’ – possibly his only known Urdu short story published anywhere – is ‘Jawanmardi’, a tale of man’s pride, vanity and willfulness. Literally meaning ‘young manhood’, the word carries notions of virility, bravery, gallantry and courage. ‘Jawanmardi’ begins thus: “That wife of mine, she passed away.” The man’s wife had been sick for a long time and had become “no more than a bundle of bones”. Her dead eyes are filled, not with love or tenderness for him, but with aloofness, even hatred. And the cause of this hatred is the stillborn child whose head can still be seen stuck in her hipbones. “Who could have thought,” the man wonders, “that my wife would have such hatred for me when she was dying?”

What follows is the portrait of an early loveless marriage between two people who are poles apart: “My wife walked on old-fashioned dark and dingy alleys while I like the modern, clean, broad and pucca streets.” The man has lived abroad, seen the world and its ways and indulged in meaningless affairs, while in keeping with the time-honoured tradition of sequestered spaces for men and women, his wife has led a pure, sheltered life, cloistered in her strong citadel. The man knows that her eyes hold nothing but aloofness, even hatred, but just as planting a seed in her sick womb bolstered his pride and reinforced his virility in the eyes of his friends and family, so too these false and token words of consolation offer balm to his guilty heart. The man, then, is not utterly contemptible; he is weak and typical of his class and background.

Mahmud was content to paint a picture of a society that was as sick and ailing as the man’s wife. He offered no cures. His valuable intervention in ‘Jawanmardi’ was picked up in later years by women writers such as Rashid Jahan, Ismat Chughtai, Khadija Mastur and others, and put to better use.

Mahmud had very little to do with Urdu literature after ‘Angarey’. He wrote one play called ‘Amir ka Mahal’, which was possibly his last piece of writing in Urdu, though it cannot now be traced. In 1934 he married Rashid Jahan and moved to Amritsar, where he taught History and English as Vice-Principal of the Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College from 1934 to 1937. After that he became a full-time worker for the Communist Party of India (CPI), editing the Urdu edition of the CPI’s journal Chingari from late 1938. In 1948 he became General Secretary of the CPI in Uttar Pradesh and was thereafter forced to go underground when the CPI was banned. His major work is the travelogue ‘Quest for Life’ (1954), in which he describes his travels in Russia where he had gone with Rashid Jahan, who was at the time terminally ill with cancer. Rashid Jahan died on 29 July 1953, three weeks after their arrival in Moscow; Mahmud stayed on and traveled throughout the Soviet Union and recorded his impressions. Published by People’s Publishing House in 1954, ‘Quest for Life’ is an unabashed, almost naive, account of the author’s complete adoration of all things Soviet. For a well-traveled man, his unquestioning and child-like admiration for the land and its people is a trifle over-the-top. (He gushes over “Moscow, the city of our dreams!”, its wide roads, modern architecture and energetic people.) In the course of his five-month stay, he travels to Georgia, the Black Sea, Stalingrad and Uzbekistan, visits institutions, theatres, art galleries, etc. In Moscow he attends the XIX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), where he meets several leading figures from the worldwide communist movement.

Mahmud’s other major contribution was the setting up of the PWA and his help in organizing the first AIPWA on 10 April 1936. Held in the Rifa-e-Aam Hall in Lucknow, it was presided over by Premchand and attended by a cross-section of people. Mahmud, the diligent note-taker, general factotum and silent lynchpin of the conference, too, took time off from his administrative tasks and read a paper entitled ‘Intellectuals in Cultural Reaction’. It gave a glimpse into his orderly mind, with Mahmud insisting that it was “not enough to form an Association or sign a Manifesto.” Instead, he believed, “We must also come to an understanding as to what we mean by progressivism, and also what we intend to do after we have understood.” Placing the intellectual firmly within the “essential part of the whole we call society”, he more than anyone else drew the audience’s attention most strongly to the threat of fascism. And given the nature of the threat, he believed it became more important than ever before to understand what did and did not constitute progressivism in literature. He listed “all tendencies towards sympathy with reaction, with imperialism, with feudal superstitions, with fascism, imperialist aggression and war” as patently non-progressive, which must be “mercilessly attacked and rooted out.” Similarly, all tendencies towards “irrationalism, mysticism, introversion, sex-perversion or obsession, over-concern with the fate of the individual as against society as a whole, dreams of the irrevocable golden age or the never-to-be-realised future” too were to be regarded as dangerous because “they are the indirect allies of reaction.” Mahmud’s short but succinct speech is a luminous example of the clear-sightedness of the early progressives which dimmed and eventually got lost in the murky waters of Party politics. In the light of this clear denunciation of imperialism, fascism and war, one wonders what men like Mahmud would have made of their Party’s support of Great Britain in the Second World War (what with them calling it a “people’s war”).

Intelligence reports in the British Museum refer to Mahmud’s visit to London in autumn 1936 at a time when he was living in Anand Bhawan in Allahabad and working as Jawaharlal Nehru’s personal secretary. Accompanied by his wife, he discussed the possibility of collaborating with the firm of Victor Gollanz and furthering the scope of the activities of the Left Book Club. The purpose of such a venture was to evade the restrictions under the Sea Customs Act and to publish Indian editions of Left books from manuscripts which would be sent over from England. Gollanz himself had a lively interest in the dissemination of communist literature in India and was determined to popularize the Left Book Club there. Mahmud had earlier gone around Lucknow University selling Marxist books in a bid to popularize this literature among young people. Dr Ranjana Sidhanta Ash, a friend of his sister, Dr Hamida Saiduzzafar, remembers Mahmud as: “…the most polished and charming communist who would come round on his cycle to the [Lucknow] university intelligentsia selling ‘progressive literature’.” Dr Ash remembers Mahmud as being “not merely the bearer of Marx and Lenin, Gorky and the Gollanz Left-book Club orange volumes” but also as the husband of Dr Rashid Jahan; the two “charming and charismatic people”, a “wondrous couple”, were her “idols”.

Others too have commented on Mahmud and Rashida (as Rashid Jahan was popularly called) and their role as the “ideal couple”. She was untidy and unmethodical whereas her husband was orderly and organized; yet the two were firm friends who appreciated the good and selfless qualities of the other. Sajjad Zaheer, their friend and comrade, wrote in his ‘Roshnai’.

‘The union of Rashid Jahan and Mahmud was really a meeting of opposites. Rashida hated orderliness. It used to astonish her friends and acquaintances that she was such a good doctor, and they could not understand why she was so popular with her patients. Losing and misplacing her belongings was a daily occurrence with her, while Mahmud never forgot anything. He remembered not only his own but also his friends’ responsibilities and plans for work… he would always smoothen out the confusion spread by Rashid Jahan. Yet the golden chain of love that tied them together was a sight worth seeing. Both seemed to have substituted the care of humanity for their own selves. A serene domestic life was not in their stars. For Mahmud, the future held imprisonment, hard labour, and anxiety related to his work for the homeland. For Rashida it held long periods of solitude, financial problems, and physical stress. But… whenever one went to their house one felt that it was suffused with happiness – the kind of happiness that springs like a clear pool of water from the meeting and harmony of two hearts and minds. It was a happiness that enlivened sad spirits, and brought lushness and music into their life.’

Dr Sarwat Rehman, Mahmud’s neighbour in Dehradun, captures the aura of this most unusual young man who had come back home in 1931 after spending fourteen long years studying in England:

‘The accomplished young man, product of an aristocratic and almost purely occidental education, came back with revolutionary ideas of social change. How much his idealism, his artistic gifts, his youthful good looks and distinguished Oxford accent must have appealed to his numerous girl cousins and other ladies of his generation!’

Mahmud, who had studied economics and history at Balliol College, Oxford, was also a keen painter. In fact ‘A Quest for Life’ carried some fine drawings causing his sister, Dr Hamida Saiduzzafar in her autobiography to lament how Mahmud had neglected his painting and could have been a fine painter had he chosen art as his calling:

‘He had a great talent for sketching…Sad to say, Mahmud neglected this gift of his, and later in life devoted his time and energy to politics rather than drawing, painting and sculpture where his real talent lay.’

Hamida remembers her much older brother being full of nationalist ideas after he returned to India in 1931. Despite a severely English education, upon his return, Mahmud “wore a Gandhi cap, wanted to wear khadi clothes, and tried hard to speak Urdu (or Hindi) rather than English.” He also gave his sister, then barely 10 years old, Gorky’s ‘Twenty-Six Men and a Girl’, much to the chagrin of her snooty governess (who was “of French descent” and disapproved of Mahmud’s “progressive” ways). Mahmud’s cousin Hajra Begum, who later married Dr Z. A. Ahmed, in an interview revealed how she was lured towards communism by Mahmud and other relatives: they gave her Bernard Shaw’s ‘The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism’.

Sarwat Rehman remembers Mahmud coming to their home in Dehradun to learn to read and write Urdu from her mother. Sajjad Zaheer too noted Mahmud’s great desire to learn Urdu and how whenever the rest of them:

‘…quoted Persian or Urdu poetry, or discussed a subtle literary point of our own language, an expression of sadness would suffuse his face. Mahmud was always troubled by the fact that he was not proficient in his mother tongue. He used to write poetry in English and sometimes even wrote short stories and literary essays, but he was well aware that no matter how hard we try, we can never produce a major creative work in a language that is not our own. … Mahmud was not just literary; his English upbringing and his study of philosophy, logic, and economics had endowed him with the ability to work untiringly and systematically.’

Eventually, Mahmud chose to devote himself wholeheartedly to the CPI, and “putting his ideas into practice distributed his lands and inherited villages to the peasants and reduced himself to the status of an ordinary worker of the Communist Party.”

It is sad that the Party Mahmud devoted his life to has done little to retrieve the legacy of one of its finest comrades and most loyal members. Rakhshanda Jalil has recently completed a study of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and its impact on the National Freedom Struggle.

(Rakhshanda Jalil, The Friday Times, March 2011)