THE OXON DIARY
"It's Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, Mr Gibson"
By Sir Oxon
Oxford,
England King George III once remarked to the author
of The History of The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire: "Well I suppose it's scribble, scribble,
scribble, Mr Gibbon". Scribbling, or doodling
as I prefer to call it, can be an obsession. You
have to do it. Digging around for information
and then having the opportunity to share it with
others is a most enriching experience.
Try it! It's not very nice (and that's putting
it mildly) to be sick in bed trying to interpret
the patterns on the ceiling. It's damn awful,
I tell you. The worst thing is not being able
to do the things that one loves: doodling, for
example. I had planned to cover some exciting
topics in this column over the past few weeks,
alas! Just before I was made horizontal, I was
all geared up to do a piece on Lord Macaulay in
India for I have recently acquired a beautifully
bound 1868 edition of his Critical and Historical
Essays which contains chapters on two key figures
of British India: Lord Clive and Warren Hastings.
To help me, I had already gone through Sir Arthur
Bryant's 1932 biography simply titled Macaulay.
Bryant has this quote of Macaulay: "I have always
been firmly convinced that the confidence of the
English people is to be obtained, not by a sycophancy,
which degrades alike those who pay and those who
receive it, but by rectitude and plain dealing...".
Which reminds me: President-Generalji, you are
doing a wonderful, wonderful job! Not since Khaled
bin Walid have we had such a general. And, Minister
Sahib, what a fantastic job you're doing, too.
We've never had such a smart minister since...
1947. I was looking forward to sharing something
from Sir Francis Younghusband's book Dawn in India
(1930). He talks lovingly about his early years
in the area that is now Pakistan. He says: "I
was born in India. The air I first breathed was
the air of India. And it was cool, fresh, sweet
air, for I was born in the Himalaya. My birthplace
was one of those beautiful retreats in the mountains
which we British have in the outlying spurs of
the Himalaya. Murree was its name". And what are
we now doing to this area? I think they call it
development or perhaps it's called destruction.
I was getting organized to write on the Pakistani
connection of the following authors: Prof Rushbrook
Williams; the Cambridge scholar Ian Stevens; and
the Oxford resident Richard Symonds, who was a
relief worker in the sub-continent from 1942-49.
As for the present, I was keen to do a piece on
Prof Iftikhar Malik of Oxford as well as on the
new Iqbal Fellow at Cambridge, Dr Dushka Saiyid.
I remain optimistic that I'll be able to do these
pieces despite the shyness of the subjects. I
had also planned to write further on two former
Cambridge students, Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Sir
Fazl-i-Hussain, in the light of some new books
that I've bought recently.
I was particularly excited by what I think must
be the oldest photograph, taken in 1901, of a
meeting of the Muslim Association of Cambridge
University. Besides old books, I have collected
other historic objects too. I have old postcards
(there are some lovely ones of Calcutta during
British rule), a 1947 Independence medal, a collection
of photographs and letters of a British soldier
in India, a medal awarded for the Rawalpindi Poultry
Show 1916, and an East India Company document
dating back to 1833. And, talking about 1833,
brings me to another historic event a hundred
years later: the publication of Choudhary Rahmat
Ali's Pakistan demand, Now or Never, on January
28, 1933.
It is baffling how a nation can continue to ignore
such date in its history, the day it was "christened".
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
