Speed of enlightenment

FS Aijazuddin

One should never write a book. One will never live long enough to savour the gratitude of posterity. Then why do authors spend their lives scribbling ‘another damned fat book’? (The Duke of Gloucester’s inane response to Edward Gibbon upon receiving yet another volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.)

Most authors will tell you that their books are written in response to an unborn command from the subject. They write because they cannot side-step inspiration. My latest book, Sketches from a Howdah, was born of such an unexpected encounter. Thirty years ago, I came across a watercolour of Lahore’s Shalimar Gardens, done in 1860 by Charlotte, Lady Canning (wife of Viceroy Charles Canning). I was sure she must have done others like it during their viceregal tour across northern India, starting in Kolkata and reaching the extremity of the Khyber Pass. 

The descriptions she included in her journals and letters to her family and Queen Victoria found perfect companions in the illustrations she executed at every stage of her long journey. Undaunted by the rigours of primitive transport and make-shift lodgings, she recorded her impressions of the scenery she passed through, the plebeians she met, and such notables as Begum Secundra of Bhopal and the wife of then Anglophile Raja of Kapurthala, who wished his lady-wife be addressed as ‘Lady Run-dear’, rather than Randhir.

Inevitably, it was with a perceptible sigh of relief that she passed through cities (Lucknow and Delhi) bloodied by the traumatic events of 1857 and reached the placid Punjab. Her diary entry for February 2, 1860, reads: “We marched 13½  miles to Khurtarpore (Kartarpur), where we were received by a very old man on a white horse with the most enormous mane I ever saw.” That evening, the Cannings were taken through ‘very narrow streets to this great house almost like a fortress with a fine high tower at the centre pierced with arches’. 

Inside, Lady Canning noticed ‘the rooms were like the inside of a Chinese cabinet polished and coloured, and gilt in patterns of the most complicated design and covered with little framed pictures of animals. There was another part with legends or pictorial subjects. Very like paintings in the old missals… (then) another set of odd shaped rooms with pillars of inlaid looking glass and a roof of the same and a low room all painted and covered with pictures.’ There, in an inner sanctum, the Cannings were shown one of the earliest copies of the Guru Granth Sahib. 

How many of us today would have the patience or application to leave such a detailed record of a day trip for posterity?

Last week, on November 19, I gave a lecture on my book in Islamabad. The day coincided with Lady Canning’s death anniversary. I had asked a friend in Kolkata to place a wreath on her grave. He obliged and sent me a photograph. It became an apt finale to my presentation. Indian High Commissioner Ajay Bisaria spoke at the end. He mentioned how he too had just travelled from Kolkata, to Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore and, finally, to Islamabad (within reach of the Khyber Pass). Except that he had done it in six days, not six months like Lady Canning, and not in a swaying howdah.

Edward Gibbon, in his study of an earlier empire, had contrasted ‘the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery (of gunpowder) with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace’.

That evening in Islamabad, the gesture of a wreath placed on a grave in Kolkata, appearing within an instant on a lecture screen in Islamabad, demonstrated that the arts of peace and intellectual affinity can travel at the speed of light.