Le grand historien – (KK Aziz 1927-2009)

	Zarina and KK Aziz, Lahore, 2007
	KK Aziz, aged 11 years
	Author with the grand historian of Pakistan, 2007
	KK Aziz, aged 10 years
	KK Aziz at MB high school, Batala, 1941-42
	KK Aziz at Government College, Lahore, 1946

It was a humid evening in Peshawar when I found out about the demise of Pakistan’s neglected, grand historian KK Aziz. As it is, visiting Peshawar these days is quite depressing, and this news hit me for its stark, brutal reality. This was the physical death of the historian, for the scholar had already been marginalized from the mainstream of an anti-intellectual Pakistan. Only a week before, I had spoken to Zarina Aunty, his wife, and inquired about Aziz’s health. I am overwhelmed by the regret of not having met him for months, knowing full well how fragile he had been for the past few years.

It had become a routine over the years to meet the historian at his Lahore house and spend long, engaging afternoons duly arranged in advance. Aziz was an old-fashioned gentleman: proper, entertaining and hospitable. It was his wife, Zarina, who was more of a light-hearted character in their lonely house full of books and research materials.

At school, our exceptional history teacher had introduced us to KK Aziz and his writings; and the experience of reading shoddy, deceitful textbooks and Aziz’s reasoned critique was both revealing and entertaining. It was years later when my friend Faheem, with whom I explored history, introduced me to K.K. Aziz. That was a fantastic moment, for meeting Aziz was always a mixed experience: exciting, disquieting and sometimes depressing. He peeled away layers and layers of the ignorance and half-truths that have been so viciously grafted on to historiography by Pakistan’s nervous and irresponsible state.

Khursheed Kamal Aziz, commonly known as KK Aziz, was born to Barrister Abdul Aziz, in Ballambour near present-day Faisalabad on December 11, 1927. KK Aziz’s father was acclaimed as “a historian in his own right” for work on Heer Waris Shah, and in the Urdu work “Woh Hawadis Ashna” KK Aziz elucidates his family legacy and his father’s history.

True to his lineage, Aziz was to pen dozens of historical works and there is little doubt that he shall be remembered for generations of academia and independent scholarship. He was an alumnus of Government College, Lahore, where his tutors included Professor Ahmad Shah Patras Bokhari and Professor Sirajuddin. Later, Aziz became a full professor, and over the years taught courses in politics, history, Islamic Studies and Asian studies at various universities in Lahore, Toronto, Cambridge, Heidelberg and Khartoum. His research interests and capacities were emboldened by this international exposure. However, he yearned to bring back his experience and expertise to his country, but each time the co-joined twins of the Pakistani state and its ‘ideology’ were to harry him. Independence in scholarship is not a trait respected by officialdom, for it tends to promote and honour the cop-outs and the conformists.

Aziz served as an Official Historian to the federal government, Chairman of the National Commission on Historical & Cultural Research, and a Special Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister between 1973 and 1978. In these official capacities, he was characteristically important in the historical definition of Pakistan’s ‘life’ as a nation. In 1978, he was heading the National Commission of Historical and Cultural Research in Islamabad when he was forced to leave Pakistan by Zia-ul-Haq.However, this did not dissuade him from his passion and his academic pursuits.

Even before the draconian Zia era, K.K. Aziz faced various impediments from the state. For instance he related to me how the state censored certain portions of Fatima Jinnah’s monograph “My Brother”, where unsavoury remarks about Liaqat Ali Khan were kept under lock and key lest they demolished the official mythologization of Pakistan’s early leadership. Jinnah in Ziarat apparently had refused to see Liaqat Ali Khan, and only on the persuasion of his sister did Jinnah agree to see him, along with Abdur Rab Nishtar. Jinnah reportedly told his sister that the visitors, on the pretext of inquiring after his health, had come to check how soon he was going to die.

Such flagrant abuse of power and distortion of facts has led us to a point where we exist as an imagined fortress of Islam seeking glories, while in reality society and the state are struggling to survive. This is why the exit of KK Aziz is significant, for we have lost the home-grown voice of sanity which gave primacy to facts over spin-doctoring.

Aziz authored “The Pakistani Historian: Pride and Prejudice in the Writing of History” in 1993, elaborating upon the experience from his own professional career and the kind of life that a historian in this country would live through. In the same year he also wrote “The Murder of History”, a succinct rendition on history and how it is presented or obscured by official raconteurs. It was in the 90’s that he also admitted to having ghost-written “The Struggle of Pakistan”, published under the name of Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi. In 1995 he attended the 62nd anniversary celebration for the name “Pakistan” at an event in London, where he elucidated upon the history of the word “Pakistan”, taking initiation from Rehmat Ali’s declaration “Now or Never” in January 1933. In 1997 he was elected to the coveted Aziz Ahmad Memorial Lectureship at the University of Toronto; signaling his position as a political scientist, as a historian and as an instructor/lecturer of global repute.

The works of KK Aziz testify to his penchant for detail, of verified sources of information and astute analysis. His seminal work, “The Making of Pakistan: A Study in Nationalism”, is a standard textbook and is a superior work on Pakistan’s troubled nationalist identity. His other well-regarded books include “Party Politics in Pakistan 1947-1958”, “History of the Partition of India” and “Britain and Pakistan”, among others. He also authored a diverse range of books that dealt with pre-Partition history: “Public Life in Muslim India: 1850-1947”, “Muslims under Congress Rule 1937-1939: A documentary record”, “British Imperialism in India”, and “The All India Muslim Conference 1928-1935: A documentary record”. His original works on political science and history, such as “Studies in History and Politics” and “Britain and Muslim India” are also well-known. Another well-researched document, “Rahmat Ali: A Biography” was published in 1987, and this is a magnificent tribute to an elusive historical figure who coined the term ‘Pakistan’ in the first instance.

From being an avid nationalist, KK Aziz also journeyed through a phase of disillusionment with the country that he had cherished. I recall a meeting where he was brutally frank about Professor Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, who had doctored historical facts to serve the new state, and created a fabricated account of Pakistan’s creation. Even though he had contributed to the writing of the book, Professor Qureshi had tinkered with the truth and set a wrong precedent for coming generations. It is no wonder that historiography in Pakistan is nearly extinct. A handful of Pakistani academics, mostly working in Western universities, such as Ayesha Jalal, are keeping the torch ablaze. But they are condemned and mocked by the guardians of official truth within the country, who cannot view Pakistan’s history beyond the right-wing narratives of anti-Muslim biases of the Hindus. Aziz in his last years was not as firm about his earlier views on the creation of Pakistan, and he did make a few revealing statements that I would rather not quote, for he should now rest in peace and not become a target for self-styled nationalist Mullahs.

Aziz highlighted countless inaccuracies, distortions, and prejudices to be found in various officially prepared and prescribed textbooks. In “Murder of History” he undertook a brutal post-mortem of sixty-six textbooks, and assembled key examples of distortions. For instance, he quoted the following statement from a textbook: “After the partition of the subcontinent, the Hindus and Sikhs started a properly planned campaign of exploiting the Muslims generally in the whole of Bharat and particularly in East Punjab, as a result of which the Hindu and Sikh, enemies of mankind, killed and dishonoured thousands, nay hundreds of thousands of women, children, the old and the young with extreme cruelty and heartlessness.”

In the book Aziz’s reply was: “the Hindus and Sikhs were not the only aggressors in the riots of 1947. Muslims also killed and raped and looted wherever they had the opportunity.”

It was not in a vacuum that Aziz wrote this. He migrated from his beloved Batala in eastern Punjab and could not return until his old age, when he finally made a visit and found his house. His beloved town and ancestral home had changed altogether. Aziz could not stop crying for days, and when we met after his second visit, the old historian broke down and raised the issue of how futile and traumatic the Partition violence was.

Zarina Aunty, the brave and assiduous companion of KK. Saheb for over fifty-four years rightly says that they had fifty children in the shape of all the books that her husband authored. Aziz did not even have a stenographer, or a research assistant most of the time. “He would spend hours, sometimes nineteen in a day, to write, proofread and then type his manuscripts. Nobody helped him and the state was indifferent at best,” says Zarina Aziz.

It was the last years of his life which were the most painful. He was lonely, clamouring for friends and intellectual exchange, and he was also very ill. This year when he was hospitalised, time and again, the financial situation of the couple was most precarious. Zarina Aunty raised money from her family and is now heavily in debt for the expensive medical treatment which he underwent. That we deal with our historians in such a manner amply proves that we as a country have complete disregard for this discipline. For if we were to dig deeper, our identity and perhaps the whole notion of belonging would be shattered to bits.

The management and staff of Fatima Memorial Hospital looked after K.K. Aziz and gave much support to his battling wife. Similarly, his friends and followers were there, though few in number, to give moral support to Zarina Aziz. After his death, Zarina in a state of misery asked quite a few visitors as to why they were sad, considering no one bothered to give Aziz company or intellectual support when he was alive for years, forlorn, neglected and marginalized.

To his credit, the Chief Minister of the Punjab ordered free check-ups at Jinnah Hospital for Aziz, but the procedures and circumstances at the hospital were such that the treatment was far from satisfactory. Ultimately, they had to move him to a private hospital where Aunty Zarina would wait outside the wards until a generous admirer of the late historian found a private room for the couple. After his death, Zarina wants no support in terms of settling her outstanding bills. She even returned the crate of mangoes sent by the Governor of the Punjab by simply stating that a bed-ridden dying Aziz was hardly going to eat mangoes.

I am absolutely livid at myself for not being in Lahore enough times to meet KK Aziz. In his discomfort he would ask for his reading glasses as a matter of habit, for books to read and pens to write with, but his physical state would not allow him to pursue any intellectual endeavour. Perhaps this was the end of him before the fateful day of July 15, 2009. Aziz braved a decade of tribulations, since his return from abroad in 1999, for boldly denying the “official truth monopolies” over Pakistan’s history.

Strangely enough his last three years were not unproductive. He was working twelve hours every day, from “an average of eighteen”, as Zarina Aunty told me. For instance, part one of his autobiography was published in 2007, and I am the proud owner of a signed copy. ‘The Complete Works of Chaudhry Rehmat Ali’ was published in 2008. He also managed to complete a two-volume masterpiece on Sir Aga Khan III, which was later vilified as being alienated from the meta-narrative of the Pakistan Movement. In a similar vein, Aziz’s works on Rehmat Ali are regarded as classics of history, yet he was ostracized for “poisoning the popular mind”. In these dire times, he also finished the second part of his autobiography, “The Coffee House of Lahore – A memoir 1942-57”, which details the cultural renaissance of post-independence Pakistan. This lively memoir-cum-chronicle records Aziz finding a niche among the budding intellectuals and literati of Lahore. However, this niche was lost as Pakistan fumbled from one oppressive regime to another, and from suspicion of independent scholarship to outright silencing of dissenting voices. Aziz was silenced not through incarceration, but because all doors were closed on him by the state, and even by the education industry.

Fledgling nations require historians more than bureaucrats and soldiers. A country ignorant of its past and hostile to its intelligentsia is bound to implode, and this is precisely the spectre that we are facing now. KK Aziz will always be remembered for challenging the narrow nationalist interpretation of Pakistan’s existence in a historical and academic context; and history will indeed miss him.

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