A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo Read online

  A FORGOTTEN AMBASSADOR IN CAIRO

  A FORGOTTEN

  AMBASSADOR

  IN CAIRO

  The Life and Times of Syud Hossain

  N.S. Vinodh

  Dedicated to the legacy and memory of Mahatma Gandhi

  Prologue

  IT WAS THE last week of March 2018. My wife, son, and I were returning to Cairo after a visit to the pyramids at Giza. We had some time before lunch and our affable guide Ahmed asked us if we would like to see the tomb of an Indian envoy. My curiosity kindled with visions of a tomb of a medieval Indian traveller doubling up as an emissary of an Indian king, I assented to Ahmed’s suggestion. We drove on the traffic-choked Saleh Salem Street, the boulevard that heads to the airport. For a considerable distance the road cuts across the City of the Dead, so named because of the tens of thousands of graves and tombs that lie within. The ‘City’ is a 6 km strip within which live half a million people amidst the tombs and monuments, a consequence of Cairo’s inability to provide its poor a better habitation. We turned off the main road into one of the by-lanes of the City of the Dead. After driving through a labyrinth of such lanes, most of them piled high with garbage on the sides, we stopped in front of a compound enclosed on all sides with high walls. The entry was through a green coloured gate under a rectangular arch on the eastern side. Ahmed had a word with the caretaker who opened the door for us.

  Within the interiors of the compound stood a solitary, elegantly made marble tomb with epitaphs in Arabic and English. It read: “Late Syud Hossain. Son of Late Nawab Syud Mohammad. Born in 1890 AD in Calcutta. First Indian Ambassador in Egypt. Died in 1949 AD”

  I recalled the name from a book I had read long ago, M.O. Mathai’s racy and borderline-salacious book, My Days with Nehru.1 Mathai (1909-1981) had been private secretary to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru from 1946 to 1959. Some snippets from the book, “Syud Hossain…would come…with a flask of cognac (brandy) tucked into his hip-pocket…fancy drinking cognac in the morning” and “…death put an end to an unhappy and tortured life.”2 It seemed incongruous that a gentleman so described had been laid to rest in a large and beautiful mausoleum in this enclave of Cairo, an honour normally reserved for the elite of this city. I took some pictures. The compound was badly kept; the caretaker was using it as a storehouse for his materials. Old chairs, flex boards and metal rods were randomly strewn about. It didn’t look as if the Indian Embassy in Cairo, which had the responsibility for the tomb, was doing much to maintain it well.3

  With my interest piqued, I read whatever I could find on Syud Hossain and a picture emerged of a man who was a significant but little known hero of India’s independence struggle. Born of an elite pedigree, dashingly handsome, erudite, articulate, a mesmerizing orator, an outstanding writer, and a secular patriot but with an equally prominent wild side, Syud Hossain’s noteworthy accomplishments went unrecognised perhaps because he had fallen foul of a powerful family. Much of the extant writings on him suffer from grievous inaccuracies, with prejudices, rumours, and the bawdy masquerading as facts. Sadly, Mathai’s derisive essay on Syud Hossain has become his most quoted curriculum vitae. Despite being a prolific writer and speaker, Syud was parsimonious in what he said about himself; there is no autobiography that he wrote, no biography that he authorised, no copious letters that he penned, and no self-congratulatory interviews that he gave. It may have been extreme modesty or an intense reluctance to reveal anything of himself.

  Here was a man who was relegated to insignificance by his country and history, despite his immense contributions and achievements. A nationalist editor across three continents; a member of the sole delegation that met the British Prime Minister to plead for the Khilafat cause; the solitary unofficial ambassador for India’s independence movement in America for many years; a champion for the citizenship rights of Indians in the United States; a virtuoso in the English language…and the list goes on. Syud Hossain remained resolute in his principles despite the tribulations he had to endure—a life of bachelorhood, an exile from his country, and sorrows he tried to assuage by taking to the drink. He lived in a Shakespearian tragedy.

  This book is an attempt to tilt the scales, to portray one who deserved a higher claim to fame, someone who, despite the pulls of religious bigotry, remained steadfast in his loyalty to India and to its greatest son, Mahatma Gandhi. It is equally an attempt to narrate the events of his times, especially those of the first Indians who mass-migrated to America in the early twentieth century, and to rescue from our collective amnesia the more prominent among them whose battle against racial oppression paved the way for the second mass migration of Indians to America from the 1960s. Syud Hossain belonged to that generation of Indian leaders that was baptised into politics by Gandhi himself, a group that combined a formidable scholarship of their own culture with the sophistication of western liberalism, and an unwavering nationalism that rose above sectarian distinctions. They were the finest that India produced.

  PART I

  1

  Early Years and Calcutta

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE in India was at its zenith in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria had celebrated the Golden Jubilee of her reign in June 1887 marked by a grand function in London where a host of Indian Maharajas and rulers paid obeisance to The Empress of India. The presence of the Maharajas of Baroda, Cooch Behar, Indore, Bharatpore and many others in their ostentatious Indian attire added lustre to the celebrations hitherto unseen in London. The event had been celebrated earlier with equal pomp in the Delhi Durbar of January 1887 presided over by the Viceroy, Lord Lytton. Even though Calcutta was the capital of the British Empire in India, the holding of the Durbar at Delhi was a symbolic proclamation that Queen Victoria was now heir to the Mughal throne.

  Calcutta, as the capital of British India and the largest city in the subcontinent, attracted merchants, scholars, intellectuals, adventurers, and charlatans who flocked to the city to get a piece of the wealth offered by the civil services, the textile industry, or the immensely profitable trade in commodities such as tea and spices. The Bengal renaissance of the early nineteenth century embraced not merely the socio-religious but had also led to a dazzling outburst of Bengali literature personified by the towering figures of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore. The emergent shoots of societal changes saw the zamindars (the traditional land holding class) on their way to financial decline and being replaced by the new trader class. An incipient political awakening had manifested itself by a demand for an Indian representation in the governance of the country articulated by the Indian National Congress (INC)* that had its first session in December 1885 at Bombay, where present were stalwarts such as A.O. Hume (a retired civil servant), W.C. Bonnerjee, Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, and Annie Besant.1 As yet unknown to the world were future leaders of the Congress such as Mohandas Gandhi (the future ‘Mahatma’) who had set sail in September 1888 to England to study to be a barrister, and Jawaharlal Nehru who was born a year later in 1889 at Allahabad.

  It was in this milieu that Syud Hossain was born on 23 January 18882 in Calcutta to Nawab Syud Mohammed Azad (1850–1916) and Saleha Banu. His was a distinguished and aristocratic family that traced its lineage to Persia with some of its members being nobility in the Mughal court of Delhi. Syud Hossain’s great-great grandfather on the paternal side was Mir Ashraf Ali of Dacca, one of the biggest zamindars of East Bengal at the time.3 On his maternal side, his grandfather was Nawab Bahadur Abdul Latif Khan (1828–1893), a senior government functionary and scholar, who did a great deal to encourage education amongst the Muslims, recognising the great disservice his co-religionists were doing to themselves by “keeping thems
elves aloof from the widespread educational movement of the day”, especially the knowledge of English. Abdul Latif, aware of the immense possibilities that a fluency in English could offer, was one of the first from his community to immerse himself in the attempt to master this hitherto alien language, and tried to introduce it in some of the Mohameddan schools, much against the views of his fellow Muslims. His career with the government reached its apogee when he was made a member of the Bengal Legislative Council in 1860, the first Muslim appointee, and was re-appointed to the post twice more. On his death, The Times (of London) paid him a handsome tribute and said, “…The British Government gave him what it had to give in the shape of titles and honours, but it is as a Muhammadan who led forth his countryment into new fields of achievement and new realms of knowledge, without losing his own orthodoxy, that Abdul Latif has won his place in Indian History.”4

  Hossain’s father, Nawab Syud Mohammed, whose ancestors belonged to the Shia sect, had settled down in Dhaka during the reign of the Mughal Emperor, Farrukhsiyar (1713–1719). The family, conscious of its wealth and status, married only into families of similar birth and background. Dhaka was considered one of the outposts of the Mughal court, and families such as Syud Mohammed’s took upon themselves the role of the custodians of the gracious and refined Mughal culture, and continued its customs and traditions as best as they could. Syud Mohammed, a traditional upper class Muslim, found it difficult to reconcile his feudal upbringing with the new mores of society that British rule had brought to his land, and never fully accepted the changes to his way of life.5

  Nawab Syud Mohammed’s marital life was, however, steeped in tragedy. His first marriage at the age of eight to his aunt’s daughter was dissolved amicably before consummation. His second was to Shahzadi Khanam who unfortunately died due to a miscarriage within a year of the marriage. Syud Mohammed was devastated by this loss and it took him a few years to recover from the grief.

  By this time, the fortunes of the family had dwindled, and Syud Mohammed had to forsake the life he loved by moving to Calcutta to find a job. He was twenty-two at that time, and was lucky to make the acquaintance of Nawab Abdul Latif Khan, who was so impressed with this young man from a noble family that he not only married off his daughter, Fatima Banu, to him but also helped him get a government job. Syud Mohammed, thereafter, converted himself to a Sunni, (the creed of his father-in-law), to which his descendants continued to adhere.6 Though Syud Mohammed was well educated in the traditional classics of Islam, he was barely fluent in English. The family primarily spoke Urdu but was equally adept in Bengali. The lack of a formal education was not a great impediment to getting a government job in those days as the British had passed an Act in 1870 authorising the appointment of Indians to the Civil Services without an examination and they were to be “recruited from young men of good family and social position possessed of fair abilities and education.”7 Despite the handicap of a lack of formal tutelage, Syud Mohammed ultimately rose up to become the Inspector General of Registrations of Bengal, a very senior position, and one of the first Indians to reach that level.

  Syud Mohammed and Fatima Banu had three children of whom the first, a girl, died at birth. Unfortunately, Fatima Banu too died within five years of their marriage when Syud Mohammed was a special sub-registrar at Birbhum in Bengal. Syud Mohammed then married Saleha Banu, the widowed younger sister of his late wife. In the twelve years of their blissful married life they had five children of whom Syud Hossain was the youngest. Saleha Banu died of cholera in May 1890 when Syud Hossain was just two years old. The loss of a mother when he was just an infant, and being the youngest of seven siblings (four brothers and two sisters of whom one brother and one sister were from his father’s previous marriage to his deceased aunt) perhaps made for a pampered childhood that had a bearing on his trait of rebelliousness.

  Theirs was a happy family that lived in a large house built in the style of Muslim houses of the nineteenth century in an area called Taltala in Calcutta. As described by his niece, Shaistha Ikramullah*, who was born in this house and would frequently come with her mother to visit her grandfather, “The house stood in a narrow lane off the main road. There was a small unpretentious gate which opened into a long gallery. At the end of the gallery at the left was a door. This opened into yet another uncovered gallery which turned into a courtyard. All around the courtyard were the various living-rooms. These rooms were grouped together with a deep verandah running the entire length of them and each group formed a separate unit. There were four or five such units. These verandahs were the equivalent of drawing-rooms in a Western house. The rooms were quite small and were used more or less as dressing rooms or for storage purposes. There was an upper storey and another completely self-contained apartment with courtyard, kitchens and servants’ rooms leading from the main part of the house. But, as the windows of some of some of the rooms opened upon the lane, only young married couples were allowed to live in this part of the house.”8

  Records indicate that Syud Hossain’s family home was at 19, European Asylum Road, Calcutta** in Taltala.9 The road is now renamed as Abdul Halim Lane though the local post office is still called Asylum Lane Post Office, perhaps named after an institution in that area that looked after destitute Europeans. Branching off from European Asylum Lane is Nawab Abdul Latif Street, named after Syud’s grandfather, who also used to live nearby in Taltala Lane.10 As E.A.H. Cotton describes the area in his encyclopaedic book on Calcutta,11 “Parallel with Chowringhee Road runs Wellesley Street, the fine broad thoroughfare…Along its course are situated Wellesley Square, the north side of which is occupied by the Madrassah, or great Mahomedan College, and Wellington Square which contains the Great Reservoir and the Pumping Station of the New Water Works. To the east of Wellesley Street, and bounded on the north by Dhurrumtollah, on the south by Collinga, and on the east by the Circular Road, is the district called Toltollah, chiefly peopled by Mahomedan khalassies and lascars [sailors and dockyard workers]. Park Street, and the districts south of it, are [sic] almost entirely inhabited by Europeans.” Today, 19 Abdul Halim Lane, the location of Hossain’s house, is a four-storeys-high block of flats. A portion of the compound around the building consists of an old brick structure with a window that could have been the outer wall of a room. This perhaps is the only remnant of the house in which he grew up.

  While Syud Mohammed reluctantly accepted the changed way of life for himself and his sons, he was determined not to let his womenfolk be affected by it. They continued to be in very strict purdah and visits from other women too were restricted unless they were known to the family. Social interaction with the women of the nouveau riche of Calcutta was also looked down upon. Their education in the family too was in line with orthodox tradition—reading the Koran, reading and writing in Urdu, cooking, sewing and some amount of music—all taught by aunts and relatives who took on the role of governesses of sorts. For Syud Mohammed, family honour and whatever it exemplified in terms of behaviour, taste, and manners was paramount. He would be appalled if his sons had not paid off their debts or if his daughter was not conversant with the finer aspects of cooking a dish, or if their comportment in any way fell below his own high standards of conduct. As Shaistha Ikramullah observed, “Nawab Syud Muhammad lived by the values of a vanished age; and what is more, he so impressed these virtues on his children that they all clung to it, and thus failed to come to terms with their world—and because of this, became by worldly standards, failures. All of them, that is, except the youngest, Syud Hossain, who reached great eminence as a fiery young writer and politician and who, after India’s independence, became Ambassador to Egypt. To compromise on principles was a great sin and so it remained a cardinal sin for all his children. They rejected adjustment and discarded ‘give and take’ as compromise, and so they continued to live in a changing world by the values of one that had vanished. [Despite this] his children not only respected and admired but loved him very deeply.”12

  Syud H
ossain’s childhood was thus moulded by the values of his father and the scholarship of his maternal grandfather that continued to permeate their home. He was exposed at an early age to the beauty of poetry, both Persian and Urdu, that continued to delight him throughout his life. Perhaps due to his father’s insistence on the traditional, Hossain’s initial schooling was at the Calcutta Madrasa School from where he passed his Matric examination (Class 10).13

  The Calcutta Madrasa School has an impressive history. It was founded in October 1780 by the then Governor General, Warren Hastings. The Bengal government took control over it in 1782 and the school trained students for lower government and judicial posts through an education covering Persian, Arabic, and Muslim Law, thus giving an opportunity to Muslims to enter the mainstream of British administration. The school, thereafter, saw induction of Europeans as Principals of the school to introduce a broader syllabus including English, as well as to restore discipline in the institution that had deteriorated over the years. Amongst those involved in initiating the reforms at the school were Hossain’s grandfather, Nawab Abdul Latif. The school that he went to continues to exist at Wellesley Square, now called Haji Mohammed Mahsin Square, a lower middle class area largely inhabited by Bangladeshi migrants. The school was also called Aliah Madrasah and was upgraded to Aliah University in 2008.14

  The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of great political ferment in Bengal. Lord Curzon, who held office from 1899 to 1905, was one of the most enlightened of the Viceroys. He streamlined the administration, and brought in a number of reforms in such areas as university education, railways, and irrigation and set up the Archaeological Survey of India. Nonetheless, surging nationalist tendencies in Bengal began to worry the British, and they sought to drive a wedge between the Hindus and Muslims. The Muslims, who had fallen out of favour after the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ of 1857, were now back to being wooed by the British Raj as a counter to the Hindus. The partition of Bengal carried out by Curzon in 1905 was ostensibly to improve the efficiency of administration, but in reality sought to reduce the power of the Hindus through a divided Bengal. This aroused intense opposition amongst the Hindus and even led to the beginnings of a terrorist movement to oppose the partition. The Muslims supported partition, and their growing loyalty to the British was reflected in their getting a larger and better share of the positions in government services. The partition of Bengal was a seminal event in the modern history of India; Will Durant remarked with rare insight, “It was in 1905, then, that the Indian Revolution began”.*15