A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo, page 31
Many years later in June 1964, an obituary appeared in the The New York Times that gave Syud Hossain a fleeting posthumous fame.2 In a report titled, “Inventor Leaves Half Million for Translation of 2 Persian Poets”, it went on, “The inventor of Minute Rice, in a will filed here yesterday, left more than half of his $1 million estate for the translation and study of the works of two 19th-century Persian poets. Ataullah K. Ozai-Durrani, an Afghan by birth, died May 9 in Englewood, Colorado, at the age of 67. He became wealthy overnight in 1941 when he walked into the offices of the General Foods Corporation, set up a portable stove and cooked a batch of his rice in 60 seconds. Under his will, the bequest is to go to Harvard University or some ‘such nonprofit institution’ for the translation into English of the works of the poets Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Meer Taqui Meer. The bequest would also finance studies of their writings and lives. Mr. Ozai-Durrani’s lawyers, Hays, Saint John, Abramson and Heilbron of 120 Broadway, admitted that their Persian was weak. But one of the lawyers said he was pretty sure the works were in Persian ‘or whatever language they spoke in India in the 19th century.’ A librarian at the Indian Consulate suggested that it was really a matter for the Pakistanis. After some research, he was able to provide the information that Ghalib’s poetry was romantic and philosophic, while Meer’s was religious, an espousal of the beliefs of the Shiite sect of Islam. Dr Ehsan Yar-Shater, professor of Iranian studies at Columbia, said the two poets had lived in what now is Pakistan. They are not outstanding, he said, ‘in the vast panorama of Persian poetry, but they are very important to Pakistan.’ Ghalib’s work, he said, is much better known than Meer’s. The poet wrote both in Persian and Urdu, a dialect of Hindustani that is heavily laced with Persian. His poems, the professor said, were ‘lyric and mystic.’
Mr. Ozai-Durrani’s will said that the translation and study of the works of the two poets was intended as a memorial to the inventor’s late friend, Syud Hossain, India’s first ambassador to Egypt, who died in Cairo in 1949.* Mr. Hossain, an Indian Moslem and disciple of Mohandas K. Gandhi, came here frequently on lecture tours in the 1920’s and 1930’s. On his first visit in 1921, he was described as a descendant of Mohammed. Mr. Ozai-Durrani also left his technical library to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, along with $30,000 to prepare ‘an encyclopedic text on the subject of rice culture.’ He left a $300,000 trust for his divorced wife, Louisa Ebbs Harrison of Denver, and her daughter.”
The subject of this obituary, Ataullah K. Ozai-Durrani, was an Afghan with a royal pedigree (he was a cousin of the King of Afghanistan) and had studied at the Aligarh Muslim University and later majored in Chemistry in Europe. He came to New York in 1926 to continue his research in Chemistry specializing in Petroleum. Unable to find a job in that field, he established an importing business. One night over dinner he met an executive from a canning company (Dr Herbert A. Baker, the future President of the American Can Company) who advised him to get into researching on rice to find a solution to the time consuming process of cooking and storing it. Ozai-Durrani went to work on this and came up with a method to cook rice faster. He then seems to have gone to Hollywood in 1934 where he served as a consultant for Oriental movies before moving to Arkansas in 1939.
In Stuttgart, he got the Arkansas Rice Growers’ Cooperative Association interested in his method. He was given some funding by the Association to set up a small laboratory and to devote his time to refine the process. Eventually he was satisfied with his method for pre-cooking, drying and storing rice so that consumers could easily prepare it in a couple of minutes and store it without trouble. The story goes that he now went to the office of General Foods in New York in 1941 with a bag containing some rice, an electric stove and a copper pan, set up his equipment on the desk of the head of research and gave a demonstration. The demonstration was convincing enough to persuade General Foods (later Kraft) to give Oza-Durrani a retainer and obtain a patent in his name. It is still known today as the Oza-Durrani process for par boiling. General Foods spent an enormous amount of money in establishing a new plant to make the “Minute Rice”, but made a lot more by selling it to the armed forces during WWII. After the war, the rice was made available for public distribution from 1946, and helped by a deluge of advertisements, was a stupendous market success.3
All of this made Oza-Durrani a wealthy man virtually overnight. He later moved to Denver, Colarado and is believed to have married an American lady, Sarah Kellams, but divorced her in about a year as she found the lifestyle that Ozai-Durrani expected her to live by extremely restrictive. He then married another American lady, Louisa Ebbs Harrison, who too divorced him, but perhaps under better circumstances. Ozai-Durrani died in the Swedish Hospital at Englewood having battled lung cancer. Before he made the bequest to Harvard, Ozai-Durrani reportedly had funded the Department of Urdu at Aligarh Muslim University for a “Syud Hossain Memorial Professorship” and a project to translate Ghalib’s Urdu verse into English. However, this did not lead to anything, and consequently Ozai-Durrani withdrew his support. Harvard used part of the bequest to fund the appointment of Annemarie Schimmel as Professor of Indo-Muslim Studies and the rest of it to publish translations from Mir and Ghalib by Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam in their books, Three Mughal Poets: Mir, Sauda and Mir Hasan (1968) and Ghalib: Life and Letters (1969).4
How did Syud Hossain and Ozai-Durrani meet? As we have seen, Syud landed in New York in October 1921 and moved to U.S.C. in Los Angeles in 1934. Ozai-Durrani came to New York in 1926 and went to Hollywood in 1934, before moving to Arkansas in 1939. It seems likely that the two met in New York or Los Angeles. The inveterate chronicler, Mumtaz Kitchlew, wrote to Abnashi Ram in November 1964, “…All our old friends are slipping away quietly to eternity one by one…Mr. Durrani (who invented Minute Rice & then sold his invention to General Foods) also passed away early this year. According to Mango Swami [?] he left over a million dollars out of which he has bequeathed some university here to translate the works of a famous Persian poet into English in memory of Dr. Syud Hossain who inspired him so much and who was responsible for his success. They were very good friends. What a noble deed! And what did the great Govt. of India even do in memory of this great leader who did so much work for the freedom of India in this country?”5
As Asaf Ali had said of Hossain, “…his general love of literature, Persian and Urdu particularly, was of a nature of a deep passion.”6 Perhaps Syud introduced Ozai-Durrani to the beauty of Ghalib and Mir, and this formed the basis of their friendship. Maybe they found themselves as kindred souls as alumni of the same university halfway around the world. Or perhaps, both of them knew the pain of broken hearts. It was again left to someone in a foreign land to perpetuate Syud Hossain’s memory.
30
Syud Hossain’s Papers
AMONG THE MOST important primary sources that were referred to during this work are Syud Hossain’s papers in two instalments available at the NMML. As noted earlier, the first instalment of his papers were donated to the NMML sometime around 1952 by Syed Mahmud through the External Affairs Ministry of the Government of India. The first instalment is the smaller of the two collections and contains correspondence with Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Jinnah, P.S. Gill, and a few others, apart from copies of speeches given by Syud.
The second instalment, though, is far more fascinating with the cache of letters from Sarojini Naidu, Eliza Haigh, the Nehrus and Horniman forming part of it. It also has a more interesting story behind it. This set of papers was donated to the NMML by Prof. Ismat Mehdi in 2015. Prof. Mehdi, a polyglot in English, French, German and Arabic, lived in Egypt for a few years in the early 1990s, and was the Cultural attaché and Director of the Maulana Azad Indian Cultural Centre in Cairo (part of the Indian Embassy). She is the niece of Abid Hasan Safrani who was a close associate of Subhas Chandra Bose and a member of Bose’s Indian National Army (INA). Abid Hasan later joined the IFS and became India’s Ambassador to Egypt. Prof. Mehdi, who grew up in Hyderabad and now lives in that city, hails from a family with strong connections to Gandhi, the freedom movement, and Sarojini Naidu and her family.
In an email forwarded to the author, she described how she obtained Syud Hossain’s papers:1
“…In fact a whole lot of letters written to him [SH] by Congress leaders and some articles written by him, were with me for a long time. These were entrusted to my uncle, a good friend of Syed Husain [sic] for safe keeping, before he left for Cairo, with clear instructions on how to deal with them later. I inherited the letters (minus the personal ones from Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit). After debating whether to write about SH myself I gave these letters / articles to Nehru Memorial Library.” The uncle she refers to in her email is Prof. Jafar Hasan, elder brother of Abid Hasan, and an academic who was based in Hyderabad.
When the author met Prof. Mehdi in Hyderabad in March 2019 (at her house, over a delicious lunch ending with Double-ka-meetha*), she elaborated on her email and said that Syud had given her uncle the papers before he left for Cairo with instructions that the letters between Hossain and Vijaya Lakshmi be destroyed immediately should he pass away. Jaffar Hasan presumably did so, and the remaining papers finally reached Prof. Mehdi many years after the former died in 1973.
As seen in our narrative, there existed a closeness between Sarojini Naidu and Syud Hossain, as evident from Sarojini’s own references to Syud in her letters to her children and friends, as well as Asaf Ali’s recollections in his autobiography. But the depth of their friendship was barely known outside their immediate circles; it is however revealed in more than a hundred pages of letters that Sarojini wrote to Syud that are part of the second instalment of Syud Hossain’s papers, accessible to us only since 2015. Thus, an earlier researcher such as author, poet and academician Makarand Paranjape, who has extensively documented Sarojini’s letters, did not get to see this material when he published his book of her letters in 1996.2
As Paranjape points out, Sarojini, having grown up in Hyderabad (in present day Telangana) with its predominantly Muslim culture, was uninhibited in the society of Muslims. She thus knew almost all the Muslim leaders of her era, and was close to many of them including Jinnah, Asaf Ali, M.A. Ansari, Maulana Azad, the Ali brothers and Syed Mahmud. Syed Mahmud was a Congress leader who hailed from Bihar, about ten years younger to Sarojini, and who was educated at Aligarh Muslim University and Lincoln’s Inn. They probably met for the first time at the Bombay Congress session in 1915. Paranjape observes from the exchange of letters between them that, “It is clear that Mahmud and [Sarojoni] were very intimate friends. They seemed to have formed a strong attachment to each other…Mahmud seemed too stricken by his love for Sarojini. She, however, counsels self-control, discipline and sacrifice…The relationship with Mahmud lasted for about five years, gradually decreasing in intensity.”3
When this author attempted to peruse the cache of letters from Sarojini to Syud Hossain he was faced with a formidable challenge. Sarojini’s handwriting was virtually indecipherable! Paranjape too had found her “illegible scrawl” or “hieroglyphics” equally unreadable, but he had persisted in his quest and succeeded. As he observes, many a time Sarojini herself couldn’t decipher the letters she wrote. So here was the author, with this treasure trove of letters before him, but no easy way of knowing what they said. Lacking Paranjpape’s persistence, this author decided to leave the task of decoding them to a more heroically inclined researcher in the future. Sarojini’s correspondence with Syud, consisting of letters, telegrams and postcards, began sometime in 1914 when both of them were in London, continued sporadically when he was in the United States, and ended with a letter from her in 1947 from Hyderabad. These constitute the largest collection of letters in Syud’s portfolio followed by those from Eliza Haigh.4
The few phrases that the author could figure out from the letters betray the affection that Sarojini felt for Syud:
“How are you—where are you—also why are you?”
“Dear and only Syud…”
“O darling Syud, how dear of you to send me a…”
“I cannot tell you how much I have wanted you…”
To many of her letters were attached her own poems (in a better handwriting) such as The Imambara of Lucknow, The Broken Wing, The Sinner, Awake, Devotion, and a few others. Someday when this collection of her letters is deciphered, this author can perhaps justifiably boast to Paranjape, “My Syud was closer to Sarojini than your Syed.”5
If events relating to the second cache of letters did indeed take place as narrated, it seems that Syud Hossain preserved till his very end the letters of the three women he was closest to—Eliza, Sarojini and Vijaya Lakshmi—and displayed a commendable sensitivity in not wanting his relationship with Vijaya Lakshmi to resurface as a subject of bazaar gossip. Their story died with them.
31
The Curtain Falls
THE INDEPENDENCE OF India and the passage of the Luce-Celler Act made the Indian organisations in the United States largely irrelevant for the original purpose for which they had been established. Not surprisingly, the activists of the various Indian groups began to disperse once the glue that bound them to their overarching mission disappeared. Amongst Syud Hossain’s fellow travellers in the United States, a few chose to stay back, while others returned to India to chart new careers for themselves.
B.G. Horniman returned to India in 1926 (after his deportation in 1919) and was successively the editor of The Bombay Chronicle, The Indian National Herald, The Weekly Herald, The Daily Mail and The Bombay Sentinel, the last of which he was associated till his retirement in 1945. He died in Bombay on 16 October 1948 at the age of seventy-five.1
Mohammad Ali Jinnah became the first Governor General of Pakistan, and died on 11 September 1948 in Karachi of suspected tuberculosis. While Jinnah has been canonised in Pakistan and demonised in India, Nehru sounded a more realistic note, “…he succeeded in his quest and gained his objective, but at what cost and with what a difference from what he had imagined”. His biographer, Stanley Wolpert, more distant from the immediacy of the emotive moments, took a more dispassionate and historical view, “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”2 Nonetheless, it cannot but be denied that Jinnah’s arrogant refusal to subdue his ego ignited the most horrific human tragedy ever to befall the sub-continent, the effects of which the two countries continue to grapple with.
Asaf Ali, on the expiry of his tenure as ambassador in U.S.A., returned to India and took over as the Governor of the state of Orissa in June 1948, and remained in that post till 1952. He was in Orissa when Syud died. He writes about Syud Hossain to Hosain Ali Khan in March 1948, “He lived and died like a prince which he was, and how enviably. Sarojini too breathed her last the same way five days after. It is obviously my turn next.”3 Asaf Ali was appointed as Ambassador to Switzerland in May 1952. He died in Berne on 2 April 1953, and was buried next to his mother’s grave at Nizamuddin in Delhi. Shaistha Ikramullah, Syud’s niece and a friend of Asaf Ali and his wife Aruna, says about Asaf Ali, “He had the courtesy and the charm, the grace, the elegance and the manner, that undefinable [sic] air of breeding which only those nurtured in the best tradition of our culture possess. I have never heard and never shall hear again Urdu spoken as Asaf Ali spoke it.”4
Jawaharlal Nehru remained as Prime Minister of India for seventeen years, virtually unchallenged. He firmly steered the nascent republic in the path of a democracy with secular values in a categorical repudiation of Jinnah’s two-nation theory. While his decisions on Kashmir hobbled India with an intractable problem, and his policy with respect to China can at best be described as naïve, he can nonetheless take singular credit for establishing the democratic traditions and institutions of the country that have stood the test for over seventy years despite assaults on them, first by his daughter, and currently by a right-wing, nationalistic Hindutva government. He died in New Delhi on 27 May 1964, leaving his mark as one of the greatest statesman of the twentieth century.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit had an illustrious diplomatic and political career. After her stint as India’s first ambassador to the U.S.S.R. (1947–49), she was appointed as India’s third ambassador to the United States (1949–51), subsequent to which she became the President of the United Nations General Assembly in 1953–54. She was then posted as India’s High Commissioner to the UK, a position she held for seven years, and was simultaneously appointed as Ambassador to Spain in 1957. Returning to India in 1961, she served as Governor of the state of Maharashtra from 1962–64. After her brother Jawaharlal’s death, she contested from Phulpur constituency (a continuation of his legacy) and was elected to the Lower House of India’s parliament of which she was a member till 1968. When Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, became Prime Minister in 1966, Vijaya Lakshmi’s relationship with her niece gradually soured, and she retired from active politics. She moved to her home in Dehradun, a large house overlooking the picturesque Doon Valley. She died on 1 December 1990 at the age of ninety having lived an enormously fulfilling and exciting life. Her daughter, Nayantara Sahgal, continues to live in the same house on Rajpur Road, crammed with memorabilia of her family’s intimate involvement with the nation’s freedom struggle.
