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| 13/04/2002 |
| A SINGULAR HOSTAGE (Part 1) |
Book launch of Thalassa Ali's A SINGULAR HOSTAGE, Lahore, 13 April 2002.
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| Whenever I am confronted by a book that is 400 pages long, I am reminded of Woody Allen’s famous remark after he had taken a speed-reading course. His first assignment was Tolstoy’s mammoth epic War and Peace. He finished it in 10 minutes, and when he was asked what the book was about, he replied: “Oh, Russia.” |
| Similarly, it would be tempting to say, after reading 401 pages of Thalassa’s novel, that it is about ‘the Punjab’. |
| Thalassa’s work, of course, is more than simply about the Punjab. It is a serious, mature and entertaining evocation of a period in our history that has had long shadows – dark shadows that extend even into today. |
| Before talking about the book, let me say a few words about the author – for without an author one cannot have a book – modern genetic engineering notwithstanding. |
| Almost all of you know Thalassa as a dear friend and a former resident of Lahore. In the biographical notes she provided me, she mentioned that she came here as a 22 year-old bride, and left as a 34 year old widow. She went back to Boston in the USA. During the intervening 28 years, she has returned many times to Pakistan – here, to her other home. Her novel is, therefore, in a real sense a symbol of an unbroken, emotional bonding with the land of her late husband, and with the land of her friends. |
| The backdrop that Thalassa has used for her readable novel is the Punjab, during the last year of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s life, just before his death in June 1839. Because of our Fakir family’s association with the Sikh Raj and my own books about the art-history of that period, and probably because of my advancing age, people assume that I must myself have lived during those turbulent times. In this connection, let me repeat a quip made by President Ronald Reagan, when he was asked at the US Bi-Centennial about the Declaration of Independence of 1776. He replied that he couldn’t recall the event because ‘When you get to my age, you don’t remember anything that recent.’ |
| The period that Thalassa recreates in her novel is a Punjab following the disintegration of the Mughal empire and the emergence of the Sikh misls or confederacies. In 1801, a young Sukerchakia leader Ranjit Singh, who had captured Lahore a few years earlier, was acknowledged the raja of Punjab. Gradually, over the next twenty years of his reign, he conquered the whole of the Punjab – to Kashmir in the north, as far west as Peshawar, down to Sindh in the south, and to the banks of the Sutlej river in the east. Across it, waiting and watching and biding their time, were the British. |
| Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom was both powerful and colourful, but it contained two inherent fault-lines. The first was that the Sikh state was personified by the diminutive figure of Ranjit Singh himself. He was both the king and the kingdom. He and those around him knew that after him, his kingdom might continue for a while but would not survive for long. The second defect was its location – wedged as it found itself between the British and their distant horizon, Afghanistan. His kingdom was the practice ground between them and the Great Game. |
| Ranjit Singh realized that, in 1838, when the British invited him to participate in a coalition against the ruler Dost Mohammed, whom they wanted to replace with the more pliant Shah Shuja, the scheme was simply a dress rehearsal for British expansion. The British tried to coax Ranjit Singh into allowing their forces to traverse his Punjab. He suspected that they would use the opportunity to reconnoitre his territory about which they had only sketchy information. Ranjit Singh, advised by his Foreign Minister Fakir Azizuddin, cleverly deflected the British proposal, made the British Army of the Indus cross at Sukkur, and then scramble up the Bolan Pass to Quetta. |
| Although during his long reign, Ranjit Singh had received a number of major British delegations, the one that is the best chronicled was Lord Auckland’s visit to his court in December 1838, seven months before the maharaja’s death. Lord Auckland, accompanied by his sisters Emily Eden and Fanny Eden, met Ranjit Singh at Ferozepore. They were taken by the Maharaja to the Golden Temple at Amritsar and finally admitted into his capital - Lahore. |
| Although both the Eden ladies were prolific letter writers and competent artists, Emily was the stronger of the two in every way, and it is her witty account Up the Country and her published set of lithographs, titled Portraits of the People and Princes of India (published in 1844) that have provided such enduring images of Ranjit Singh’s court and its volatile courtiers. Other artists and writers who left their own impressions of that period were the British Charles Hardinge, the Prussian Prince Waldemar, the German Doctor Martin Honigberger, the Austrian Charles Hugel, and various others – all of whom etched images of the Sikh ruler and his darbar. Their works have become a rich quarry of information and detail for us modern historians, and for anyone wanting to recreate that period, as Thalassa has so cleverly done. (contd. /2) |
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| 13 April 2002 |
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| All Speeches |
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