Как появился Ибн-уль-Вакт

Had it been an age like the present, nobody would have heard a whisper of it. The chief reason Ibn-ul-Waqt became so notorious was that he took to English ways at a time when learning English was thought unbelief and using English things was thought apostasy. These are things we saw with our own eyes: if some respectable man had to smoke a cheroot on the railway, he would hide it, furtive, from anyone who knew him. A friend of ours was employed in the land settlement somewhere out of town and had to go from field to field for his inspections. What Indian slipper would last in that mud? So he had perforce taken to wearing English boots. But when he came to Delhi for two or four days, he would dig out some cracked old down-at-heel slippers that had been lying about the house for ages, shuffle his feet into them, and only then step out of doors. Delhi College was in its glory in those days. The Lieutenant-Governor came and went round all the classrooms, inspecting them. Such was his appreciation that in every class he entered he shook hands with the teacher. The senior Maulvi Sahib, willy-nilly, against his will, did give half a handshake; but he held that hand apart afterwards like an unclean limb. The moment the Lat Sahib's back was turned, he washed it with the greatest thoroughness, not with English soap, mind you, but scrubbing and scrubbing it with earth. If not of Ibn-ul-Waqt's stamp, there were, rare as they were, a few other like-minded Muslims whose boys, one here and one there, were studying English at Delhi College. If one of those boys wandered into the Arabic or Persian classes and, when no one was looking, drank some water, the maulvis would have the water jars smashed. And though there was no limit to these foolish prejudices, the English government was more at ease in those days than the English will ever be again, even in their dreams, for as long as their empire lasts. People had no skill in telling useful from harmful, good from bad. The Sarkar was like a kind father, and the simple subjects like innocent children. For our brethren, learning English has turned out as ill-starred as eating the wheat was for Adam and his descendants. They went to get their prayers excused, and had fasts hung round their necks besides. They made English ways their very bed and blanket, so that there should be friendliness with the English, intimacy; but look now, and in place of friendliness there is a barrier, and in place of intimacy, aversion. The strain between ruler and ruled goes on growing. Living in the river and at war with the crocodile. We shall see which way this camel finally sits down.

It will be hard to discover what moved Ibn-ul-Waqt to adopt English ways. He came of a prosperous and well-born family whose people held that keeping to one's traditions was the very condition of good birth. Learning was their inheritance. Of that family some were physicians, some teachers (not in government schools), some muftis, some preachers, some had the Quran by heart, some sat on the prayer-carpet of a Sufi order: in short, "every soul in this house is a sun." If not all of them, then most, and the most count for the whole, were gifted with every kind of skill and shone with every kind of accomplishment. The royal Fort provided for the livelihood of them all. If these people had any connection with the English, it was only that they lived under English rule, and even that not in their own estimation. The reason Ibn-ul-Waqt entered the College was that the government had picked out, one by one, the leading men of the city who were authorities in Arabic and Persian, and had attached them all to the College. So Ibn-ul-Waqt was entered in the College, not so that he might make study there his means of livelihood, but only so that his Arabic and Persian might be of sterling quality. If he was not among the very best of his time, he was still counted among the good boys. Some of his classmates, by bent of nature, were better than he in particular subjects; but his total marks were never behind anyone's. The reason was that, weak as he was in mathematics, the gap was well made up by history, geography, political economy, ethics and the like, which he loved. Of all the College studies his favourite was history, of whatever country and whatever age. His mind took very well to general subjects. Every year a silver medal was given for the essay, and in the six years Ibn-ul-Waqt was at the College he never once let anyone else carry it off, whether in English, Arabic, Persian or Sanskrit. Whenever he had the chance, he was sure to spend his holidays among the ruins of old Delhi. When people from foreign lands came to the city for trade, travel or some other business, Ibn-ul-Waqt would make a point of meeting them and questioning them about the conditions and customs of their country. His memory was so stocked with historical knowledge that in ordinary conversation he would often cite events of past ages in evidence. Once, while talking, he drew a map of Asia from memory on a slate and marked on it the positions of the famous cities, mountains and rivers; and when it was compared, it was mostly correct, with very small differences. He was always prying into the nations, castes and customs of the world. His knowledge of religions was far greater than that of the Book of Sects and Creeds. When a new book was begun in class, his first question would be: Who was its author? Where did he live? In what age? With whom did he study? Who were his contemporaries? What things in his life deserve to be remembered? There was such a degree of self-regard and loftiness in Ibn-ul-Waqt's temper that people thought his self-respect verged on pride. He had a great horror of being under an obligation to anyone, so much so that, apart from his teacher, he would hesitate even to ask a classmate a question. He always wanted to be in the class of the teacher whom the Principal respected most, and for this reason he switched several times from Arabic to Persian and from Persian to Arabic. Ibn-ul-Waqt was slow to form an opinion; but once he had formed it, it was as though he had sworn never to change it. It was hidden from no one that he held this opinion: that a nation's possessing an empire is sufficient proof that its customs, habits, ideas, deeds, words, its every movement and stillness, in short its whole way of being, are better, if not item by item, then certainly taken together. He used to say openly and with great conviction that empire is the necessary and inevitable result of a nation's superiority. He had neither need nor wish for English service. So, on the strength of this opinion and with no ulterior motive, he looked with great respect on every Englishman, even if he were some worthless, low-class Eurasian. A man of these views, especially as he was at the College, ought to have learned English, and the urge to learn it must certainly have arisen in his heart; but on his father's death the hereditary stewardship of the household of Nawab Mashooq Mahal Begum fell on his shoulders. He did have an elder brother, who could have taken on the stewardship had he wished; but he had not a moment free from his litanies and devotions, and was besides a rather wild, distracted sort of man. So Ibn-ul-Waqt was obliged to take charge of that large and weighty establishment. For a few days he tried looking after the business of the Fort outside College hours. There was, God forbid, no pressure of any kind from the Begum; but Ibn-ul-Waqt saw for himself that his time would not stretch to both tasks. So he was compelled to have his name struck off the College rolls. Even so, he was among the daily regulars at the royal library for history and other books after his own heart, and at the Sultani Press for newspapers. He had such a passion for history and news that he never tired of them.

When Ibn-ul-Waqt left the College, although he had been a student in the Arabic and Persian classes, he had always needed help from English books on mathematics for practice, and so he had been obliged to learn the English letters. He had a quick mind: no sooner had he learned the letters than within a few days he began to make out, by guesswork, how the problems were solved; and so, through the back door of mathematics, his English went on improving. Even in the days when he had adopted English ways and become, in his own conceit, a complete sahib, he could understand English well enough, but all his life he never gained the power to converse freely in it. We never saw him studying English lesson by lesson, either as a student or afterwards; and how would his self-respect, after the College, have let him cut off his horns and mix with the calves? But this much is certain: he tried very hard to learn English to a degree suited to his position. That he got so far by mere hearing, to tell the truth, was something only he could have done. For it is my own maxim that a man can never master any language but his mother tongue as a master ought to.

Have you not heard the story of the author of the Qamus? Well, you will at least have heard that there are many dictionaries of the Arabic language, and that the most comprehensive and authoritative of all is the Qamus. The author of the Qamus was by birth a Persian. From childhood he was fired with a desire to perfect his Arabic. He learned as much as could be learned in Persia. For years he wandered through Najd and Tihama, Yemen and Syria, among townsfolk and desert folk, sifting the dust after the language; and at last, after a lifetime of searching and inquiry, he made the Qamus, and made it so well that the whole world cites it as its authority. But God meant to tear the veil from his mastery of the language. He married a lady of Arabia. One night he told the maidservant to put out the lamp, and, as the parrot can never quite lose its squawk, instead of atfi'i-s-siraj, "put out the lamp," he blurted out, after the Persian idiom, uqtuli-s-siraj, "kill the lamp." The lady caught it at once. In the morning she rose, went to the qazi's court and lodged a complaint. God knows whether the lady stayed or left, but the gentleman's Arabic was well and truly disgraced. In the English newspapers edited by Englishmen, babu English is always being laughed at. The name given is that of the Bengalis, but in truth the boatman's abuse falls on everyone who knows English, and on others even more, since the Bengalis have progressed so far in English that it is almost becoming their mother tongue, and some Bengalis have been, and are, so eloquent and polished in English that even the English acknowledge their mastery. But such examples are rare.

A friend related that he once needed to see a certain Englishman. At his bungalow he learned that at that hour the gentleman would be at his club, so he was obliged to go to the club. While the orderly was waiting for a chance to announce him, he heard with his own ears that inside a great many Englishmen were gathered, roaring with laughter as they mimicked the English of Indians. This friend also said that the English being laughed at certainly deserved to be laughed at, and that native speakers always have the right to laugh at foreigners. But if the English of Indians is fit to be laughed at, the Urdu of the English is fit to be wept over. Indians learn English only from books, whereas the English, besides their books, live all their lives in Indian society, and still it is "Well, tum kya mangta?" To whom shall we cry over this misfortune? English rule had already washed away our wealth, our riches, our customs, our dress, our manners and ways, our trade, our religion, our learning, our skills, our honour and our good birth. We had one language left, and now this is its state: on the one side the English, out of incapacity and ignorance, have begun speaking a broken, wrong, disjointed Urdu, and on the other, since "whatever fault the Sultan likes becomes a virtue," our own brethren have begun to copy it. There is the story of a certain gentleman, with a good full beard and moustache, who went to England in early youth. After living four or five years in England he came back having so lost his wits that when, now and then, he had to speak Urdu, he would stop and pause and screw up his eyes, like a man thinking and thinking and lowering each word down from his brain.