31 Jan. - 6 Feb. 2002
Issue No.571
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 31 Jan. - 6 Feb. 2002 Issue No.571 |
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Plain talk
Last Saturday 26 January India celebrated the 52nd anniversary of its Republic Day. Standing in the queue to shake hands with the ambassador and the embassy staff, my mind went back to 5 October 1964. Then the occasion was a reception given by the Indian ambassador for the second summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. I stood in a similar queue, only then it was to shake hands with Jamaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the President of Egypt.
This was the zenith of Indian/Egyptian relations. The first time Nasser and Nehru had met was in Bandung in April 1955, though it was to take until 1961 when, together with President Tito of Yugoslavia, the Non-Aligned Movement convened its first conference in Belgrade.
Here, though, I am concerned with relations between India and Egypt, of which I can claim to have been "a participant observer".
My own interest in India goes back to the early fifties when I watched a dance performance by Ram Gopal and listened to the music of Ravi Shanker. And it was in 1957 that I had my first face to face contacts with Indian personalities, during the first Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference convened in Cairo. The conference was the brain child of Prime Minister Nehru but, unlike Bandung, it was not a governmental initiative.
The conference resulted in a permanent secretariat being established in Cairo. India, with Egypt, the Soviet Union and China were the main financiers of the secretariat. Out of that movement came different groupings, the most important being of Afro-Asian writers. The first writers' conference was held in Tashkent in 1958 and it was there that I had the pleasure of meeting a number of Indian writers, including Mulk Raj Anand and Sajad Zakeer.
Mulk and I became close friends. He represented India, I Egypt on the Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers whose headquarters was Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Mulk introduced me to Indian literature, starting with his own. I read his novels Untouchable, Coolie and Two Leaves and a Bud. I remember him describing his novels as being shaped by "the double burden on my shoulders, the Alps of the European tradition and the Himalayas of my Indian past."
When the Permanent Bureau moved to Cairo following the 1962 Conference, my meetings with Mulk became more frequent. I discovered his other interests, dance and social work. When I visited India he invited me to his dance studio where young men and women trained in classical Indian dance. His interest in art was reflected in Marg, an art magazine which he started in 1946 and which he still edits.
Apart from such personal relations, there were many fields of cooperation between India and Egypt. The pylons needed for the electricity produced by the High Dam came from India and at one time buses and lorries produced in India were a common sight in Egypt. During these years a "payment agreement" between the two countries existed that in practice was tantamount to barter.
In this respect I remember an incident in which I played a part. After 1956 relations between Egypt and Britain were severed. We used to import textbooks from Britain, the flow of which stopped. Longmans Greene was the main supplier of the books, and I knew that they had a branch in India called Orient Longman. To cut a long story short we signed an agreement with the Indian publisher and thus an educational crisis was avoided.
When the Afro Asian writers started publishing their magazine it was decided to call it "Lotus", a flower sacred both in both India and ancient Egypt. The magazine was published in English, French and Arabic and through it we got to know such Indian writers as Sajjad Zakeer, Prakash Chandra Gupta, Attar Sing, B.R. Malthairi and others.
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