The last of the Mohicans

hen the news of Professor Amin Mughal's passing flashed across the screens in the late-night hours of August 12, it did not cause an emotional breakdown. It had been anticipated for some time - and dreaded. The human mind responds to irreparable loss, piercing grief and an enduring void in myriad ways. In this case, my mind drifted to some apparently unrelated literary references. There flickered Walt Whitman's 'When lilacs last in the courtyard bloomed,' closely followed by an excerpt from Victor Kiernan's translation of Faiz's A Prison Daybreak. 'The stars, Like lotus-petals fallen from the moon's hand, Came sinking, floating, fading, opening out; Daybreak and night lay long in each other's arms.' While Whitman's line could point to the towering stature of the revered icon that Amin Mughal was, Faiz's lines unmistakably referred to the ideological moorings of the departed soul. Mughal had been living in self-imposed exile for 42 years; a distant resonance for a generation that is fast fading away. Who was Amin Mughal, after all? Professor Amin Mughal was an indefatigable political activist; an incisive political analyst; an unparalleled teacher; a courageous journalist; a towering scholar in multiple disciplines; a man of impeccable personal integrity; a diehard opponent of all forms of inequality, injustice and exploitation; an insightful connoisseur of questions concerning culture, arts and literature; a cosmopolitan character who could hold his argument and glass with equal grace; an avid reader with an uncanny eye for the dynamics of global politics; an unassuming conversationalist who could charm audiences across the globe and a self-effacing humanist, humble and humane to a fault. Born in Kotler Losartan Shari, a village near Sialkot, circa 1935, Amin Mughal received his early education at Ajodhya Prasad Narmada High School, Jabalpur (now Madhya Pradesh), where his father, Muhammad Din, was stationed as part of the Electrical and Mechanical Engineers Corps of the British Indian Army. The professional commitment and lofty ethical standards of his school teachers left an indelible mark on his character. After Partition, he moved to Sialkot, where he completed his intermediate education at Murray College before entering Government College, Lahore, for a bachelor's and later a master's in English language and literature. From his formative years, Prof Mughal's personality was marked by an uninhibited exploration of ideas, without prejudice or bias. He was alternately attracted by the views of Syed Abul A'la Maududi and Ghulam Ahmad Pervaiz, two divergent, challenging and reformist Islamist approaches till he found his anchor in dialectics and historical materialism of Marx. Amin was not one to be content with a given template. By the late 1980s, he had moved beyond the Stalinist version of stolid Marxism and chosen the identity of a Marx-conscious person for himself. In 1958, Amin Mughal started teaching at Islamia College, Civil Lines, Lahore. Professor Hameed Ahmad Khan, the legendary educationist, headed the institution then. Despite his own unquestioned tilt for a conservative paradigm, he was urbane enough to invite known dissident teachers to the faculty and proffer them the space to promote their views freely. The classrooms were meant to generate debate and to phrase relevant socio-economic questions rather than regurgitate officially approved narratives. It was here that Amin Mughal assembled a galaxy of like-minded academics and founded the All Pakistan College Teachers' Association in 1962. Under his able-minded stewardship, this organisation became a breeding ground for academic dissent and a clarion call for the rights of teachers and students. Strange as it may sound today, Amin Mughal was simultaneously provincial secretary of the National Awami Party. It was during a meeting of the NAP, presided over by Abdul Wali Khan that Amin Mughal stepped beyond the unspoken lines and drew the ire of his leader. Abdul Wali Khan abruptly ordered the expulsion of all 'communists' from the party. Wali Khan might have acted within his presumed leadership prerogative, but this action cost his party of its invaluable equilibrium, a rare combination of nationalist and leftist elements that could stand up to the ruling junta. Amin Mughal was a passionate political actor but never hot-headed. He astutely swallowed his pride and continued his political journey. Before and during this period, his visits to lock-ups and jails continued. Then came the inevitable change of guards. Yahya and his coterie rehearsed the ouster of Ayub in February 1968 and orchestrated his exit in March 1969, through a 'popular' uprising. The new regime resurrected Sher Ali Khan Pataudi, a long-forgotten obscurantist in the closet as federal information minister, a double shot of a Goebbels and a half-baked ideologue. The Yahya clique had clobbered together a conglomeration of industrial workers, students, teachers, journalists, intelligentsia and common citizens to foment agitation against Ayyub. As a leader of the College Teachers' Association and a prominent voice of the literati, Amin Mughal was inevitably targeted by the emerging McCarthyism. These were the heady days of the Sixties' Revolt when De Gaulle was packed away to his estate in North Eastern France, bullets flew across campus courts in America and thousands were murdered in Indonesia by Suharto. Amin Mughal was imprisoned, tortured and tried by a military court. Fearful of his influence as an academic, Pataudi influenced Anjuman Himayat-i-Islam, the patron of Islamia College, Civil Lines, and managed the ouster of three brilliant academics, Amin Mughal, Prof Manzoor Ahmad and Prof Eric Cyprian. They were accused of espousing atheism and anti-Islamic activities. It may be recalled that the Anjuman was founded in 1884 to educate Muslim children, and that funds were raised initially by collecting a handful of flour from each Muslim household. The ousted teachers, however, were not made of acquiescent material. They decided to establish a private college along with their own ideas of education. Free inquiry would be encouraged; respect for dissent would be the order of the day. Every evening, the three would gather at the residence of Hamid Sheikh, a veteran journalist of The Pakistan Times and draw the outline of an alternative academic institution. The financial resources were provided by Prof Manzoor Ahmad's family. The college was named after the 16th-Century mystic and poet Shah Hussain. Its emblem carried the hammer and sickle logo. The college offered courses, inter alia, in Punjabi studies, computer education and film-making. Ironically, the college building on Lawrence Road had been rented out by the family of Nawabzada Sher Ali Khan Pataudi, the architect of the plan to cleanse Lahore's academic scene of the three troublesome teachers. Shah Hussain College became a hub of progressive activity alongside academic excellence until it was nationalised under the Bhutto regime and morphed into the larger, blasé scene of public instruction run by apparatchiks and teachers who knew next to nothing about mass instruction. In between, Mughal and Cyprian had another stint of incarceration when they publicly opposed the brutal military operation in East Pakistan from March 1971 onward. The Bhutto regime was followed another interregnum of military rule. The Zia regime epitomised senseless imprisonments, torture and public administration of brutal punishments. It also introduced some blatantly discriminatory laws. The state patronised criminal gangs under the thin veneer of language and sectarianism to frustrate all options of a civilised political discourse. The media had to endure the ignominy of pre-censorship and self-censorship. Academia were purged of all that dared deviate from the dictatorial decrees. Thick obscurantist darkness descended upon the polity and sapped every sign of light and freedom. The nation was disenfranchised to the point where citizenship ceased to carry any meaning. Amin Mughal couldn't have escaped the shenanigans of the times. He was rounded up and detained at Lahore Fort, notorious for brutal torture of political prisoners. After some time, it transpired that his arrest was a case of false identity. He was not the man from Bahawalpur actually wanted by the law enforcement. Still, he had to endure the agony of the dreaded torture cells for three months. It was during those days that I saw him brought to the premises of Lahore High Court for the hearing of a petition for habeas corpus. Standing alongside Professor Aziz-ud Din Ahmad under the banyan tree, his frail structure barely hinted at the enormous strength of character and uncanny courage of conviction. In the summer of 1981, when he was finally set free, he decided to visit his ailing brother in the UK. Professor Amin Mughal left Pakistan in 1984 at the age of 39. He never returned to his homeland and never and never relinquished his Pakistani nationality. Perhaps there was never a more patriotic Pakistani. In his commitment to a better morrow for humanity, he could match perhaps the best of the species. Surrounded by his books, music and his ritual of a happy hour in the evening, he would regale his friends with tales of his days and ways in his characteristic authoritative note of a teacher. He was definitely not a hermit. His laughter was contagious and his musings profound. He was alive to the times and would jump at the idea of learning the use of a new gadget. While his body lost weight and agility, his mind remained incisive and alert. Amin Mughal was not the kind to care about physical attributes. His strength lay in his ability to think, think straight and resolve the most intricate questions in simple, lucid and affable equations. Even in his last bout with failing health, he was wrestling with weighty questions. For those having to bear the burden of his loss, two questions remain. First, what is the true substance of his legacy? He didn't write books. His legacy lies in his unwavering commitment to the dream of a more just and free world. This he accomplished in the tradition of Athenian philosophers and Chinese sages. He spelt out his wisdom in his conversations. He watered the subterranean dreams of those who he met or he knew him in one way or the other. The second question concerns his relationship with his motherland. Once he went into exile, he never returned to Pakistan. Given his political persuasion, Pakistan could not have sat easily with his conscience or his ideals. Having spent four decades in his native Pakistan, he had seen enough to conclude that the country had little hope of retrieval from the path it had chosen. Amin Mughal was a citizen of the world. He could realise his intellectual potential only in a land that swam along the right side of the historical stream. As serious a scholar of world literature as Amin Mughal was, it is improbable that he was unaware of the old dictum that, 'there is no come back on the waters of life.' The same holds true for nations. Once a nation opts for an off-ramp, course correction is almost impossible. In Pakistan, we have made such atrocious choices on so many occasions that no rational analysis seems to point toward a return to calmer waters. The writer is a human rights activist and a political analyst