Autobiographies
of the Powerful
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, Mass
More than 150 years ago, the Scottish
historian and essayist, Thomas Carlyle, in his
book On Heroes and Hero Worship noted, “The
history of the world is but the biography of great
men”. For many years now, powerful world
leaders have been writing books to recount their
life stories in an attempt to influence the way
history will judge them.
A number of US presidents, at the end of their
presidential terms, wrote or paid others to write
their autobiographies mostly to present the performance
of their administration in the most favorable
light. These attempts, however, have met with
varying degrees of success. Most recently, former
President Clinton’s 957-page memoir, My
Life, was released in the midst of the last American
presidential elections. It soon became a world
best seller, reaching a first-day sales record
of 400,000 copies. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf,
reportedly offered the former president an advance
of 10-12 million dollars, and, anticipating a
big demand, printed 1.5 million copies even before
the book was released.
The Clinton autobiography can be counted among
the few successful books written by former US
presidents, most of which have now largely been
forgotten and relegated to the dust heap of history.
The practice of writing presidential memoirs was
uncommon in the early years of the republic. George
Washington left no written record of his reign;
he quietly retired to his plantations and spent
the rest of his life at his country home in Mount
Vernon, near Washington. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson,
the third President, a prodigious writer who drafted
the US Declaration of Independence, did not author
any memoirs. Instead, he invested his retirement
years at Monticello, Virginia, designing and establishing
the University of Virginia. Among the more recent
presidents, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Bush,
each wrote autobiographies, but none of them was
rated highly by the critics nor were they big
monetary successes. President Jimmy Carter has
now established himself as a writer of much distinction,
having published several literary works that have
been acclaimed by readers. However, his presidential
autobiography, Keeping Faith, was not as well
received as one of his more recent books, An Hour
before Daylight, describing his boyhood experiences
in a small rural town in Georgia. When President
Reagan retired in 1989, he was already suffering
from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine,
is quoted as saying, “Reagan not only did
not write his book, he most probably did not even
read it.”
Of all the books written by former US Presidents,
one has achieved the status of a classic and has
not lost its luster even after more than a century,
the Personal Memoirs U. S. Grant, the 18th US
president who commanded the federal armies leading
them to victory in the civil war. As opposed to
his luminous career as a military commander, his
presidential tenure was neither memorable nor
distinguished. In fact, it was riddled with a
series of scandals. When he retired in 1876 from
the presidency, he had no money and few means
of support. Mostly to stave off bankruptcy and
to make some money, he wrote his memoirs which
were entirely focused on his military campaigns.
As he struggled to work on his manuscript, he
was suffering from terminal throat cancer and
was in much pain. The famous American satirist,
Mark Twain, greatly encouraged him to continue
the project and to complete it. The book has an
entrancing literary style, and was widely successful
in its days. It earned the author a sum of $450,000
which was an enormous sum of money in the late
nineteenth century. Alas, President Grant did
not live to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but
his wife did.
To the people of the Indian subcontinent, the
notion of mighty rulers recording their achievements
is not novel. In the early sixteenth century,
the founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur, meticulously
kept his personal diary which later became his
celebrated memoirs, the Tuzak-e-Babri. The hand-written
manuscript was heavily adorned with exquisite
paintings; the book now has been translated into
several languages. The original text of Babar’s
autobiography was written in his native tongue,
Chugtai Turkish. It was later rendered into Persian
by Abudul Rahim Khankhanan who presented the translation
to Akbar as a gift on emperor’s return from
a visit to Babur’s tomb in Kabul. It is
now generally agreed that the Tuzak-e-Babri as
available today does not represent the complete
transcript and some of its parts have ostensibly
been lost over the course of five centuries. However,
whatever has been preserved contains a wealth
of information about North India of the sixteenth
century.
Babur was intrigued by the diversity of the new
country he had conquered, so different from his
native Central Asia. He assiduously studied and
described the large variety of fruits and animals
he found in his new realms. He was especially
fascinated by the geography of North India and
unfamiliar customs and habits of the people he
encountered there. Except for its gold and wealth,
however, he found nothing in India to his liking.
His former capital, Kabul, was superior in every
respect, or so he believed. He even chose not
to be buried in Indian soil.
Babur’s early memoirs were later matched
by a more detailed and insightful chronicle left
by Emperor Jahangir, his great grandson. The empire,
thanks largely to the wise and tolerant policies
of Akbar, had by that time been largely consolidated
and the Mughul rulers had absorbed the Indian
culture and mores. The court language had changed
to Persian, which is also the language in which
the Tuzak-e-Jahangiri was written. The diary covers
the larger part of Jahangir’s reign as he
started to keep his journal in 1605, the same
year that he acceded to the throne. He continued
the daily practice of keep a record of events,
until five years before his death in 1627. By
then, he was too ill to do so himself and dictated
the text to a secretary. The Tuzak reveals Jahangir’s
keen powers of observation, his insatiable curiosity
about nature, and his uncommon habit of analyzing
what he heard or saw in a logical manner. Unusual
animals and plants in his realm were the subject
of his special interest and he described them
in minute details. In the modern-day lexicon,
he would be characterized as a naturalist. While
neither a distinguished warrior nor a remarkable
administrator, he was undoubtedly a great patron
of the arts.
Unfortunately, Pakistan’s founding fathers
left no personal chronicles, as far as we know,
for future generations. Neither Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah,
nor the first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan,
had the opportunity to describe the momentous
historic processes which they witnessed and had
a major share in shaping, and that finally culminated
in the independence of India and the creation
of Pakistan. Such documents would have provided
the historians a unique window into the freedom
struggle, also revealing crucial details about
behind-the-scene battles that were waged long
ago to assure the survival of the embryonic country.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
