Saturday will mark the 30th death anniversary of
The Lata-Rafi pairing was not some deliberate shoring up of maudlin secularism in the clich?d Hindu-Muslim mode. Just before them, the duets of Kundan Lal Sehgal and Khurshid were a rage in a self-assured India. After the trauma of 1947, Rafi and Lata, unconsciously and unobtrusively, came to symbolise the multicultural resilience and the feasibility of the experiment called India. And nearly all their duets were similarly ? unconsciously and unobtrusively ? a musical rejection of the idea of Pakistan, not necessarily the way its founder conceived it, but the way it evolved.
For decades after partition there were other ways in which India claimed the higher moral ground over Pakistan in the realm of popular and classical cultural motifs. I am privy to an ongoing discussion between worried artists, mostly from Pakistan, about
Only on Sunday, says Waseem Altaf who seems to have initiated a web discussion in Pakistan, he was watching a TV programme on the novelist Quratulain Haider. She went to Pakistan in 1949 where she joined the Press Information Department. In 1959 her great novel Aag Ka Darya was published. It raised important questions about partition. It was this more than anything else, feels Altaf, that made it impossible for her to continue to live in Pakistan. So she returned to India and permanently settled there.
Similarly, Sahir Ludhianvi, a much-loved romantic poet, had settled down in Lahore in 1943, where he worked for a number of Urdu magazines. Everything was going well until his writings, influenced by communism, appeared in Savera. A warrant for his arrest was put out by the Government of Pakistan. In 1949 Sahir fled to India and never looked back.
Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, the magical classical singer, was a Pakistani citizen. He became so disillusioned by the apparent apathy towards him and his art in Pakistan that he applied for and was granted a permanent Indian immigrant visa in 1957-58. He migrated to India where he lived happily till his death. Perhaps all who migrated to India lived a full life and were conferred with awards and affection.
On the other hand, Saadat Hassan Manto, whose acerbically crafted stories of the partition still evoke and define the tragedy, migrated to Pakistan after 1947 where he was tried thrice for obscenity. Disheartened and financially broke he died at the early age of 42.
Zia Sarhadi, the Marxist filmmaker who made memorable films like Footpath and Humlog was a celebrity in Bombay when he chose to migrate to Pakistan. Rahguzar, his first movie there, turned out to be the last he ever directed. During Gen Ziaul Haq?s martial law he was picked up by the army and kept in solitary confinement in terrible conditions. The charges against him were sedition and an inclination towards Marxism. On his release he left the country to live in the UK never to come back.
The scholar poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz was arrested in 1951 under the Public Safety Act and charged in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case. Later he was jailed for more than four years.
It was common to find Pakistanis seeking refuge in India right up to Ziaul Haq?s martial law regime.
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