Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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There are some people who, once you meet, you can never be forget. Such a man was Apa Pant who was the Indian Ambassador to Egypt for a number of years. He was a friend of so many people in Egypt, high and low, ministers and workers, Muslim sheikhs and Coptic priests; and whenever he moved in Cairo, or elsewhere in the country, he was met with enthusiastic greetings, or, as he says in his memoirs "Ahlan wasahlan", adding (and I quote), "The hospitality of even the poorest was traditional in Egypt as in India. But, somehow in the Egyptian countryside the greeting of 'Ahlan wasahlan' (You are welcome, this is your home) comes more easily and naturally, from a background more relaxed, more confident."

After the independence of India in 1948, new horizons were unexpectedly open to him when Jawaherlal Nehru chose him to be India's Commissioner in what was then British East Africa. That was for Apa Pant an experiment which involved him for five years in multi-racial problems, and gave him the chance to live amid the winds of change in Africa.

Apa Pant then moved on from one country to another as the Indian Ambassador: Indonesia, Norway, Egypt, London and Italy. His experiences are recorded in his recently published book A Moment in Time, in which he devotes a good part to his years of service in Egypt. I was lucky enough to be very close to him during that time, and later on when he became India's High Commissioner in London.

In a chapter entitled "The Phenomena of Personality", Pant talks about the idea of an "aura" that is peculiar to certain people. This aura is some kind of radiation that cannot be seen or touched but only felt, received inside oneself. Ghandi had such an aura, so did Sukarno and Nehru and, of course Nasser, who, he writes "was quite different. He did not have Sukarno's excitable exuberance; neither did he have his versatility. Sukarno was a scholar equally at ease in Islam, Hinduism, Christianity. Nasser was a soldier. He understood power and he knew the needs of a social revolution. He was clear and clean and his aura was steady until the war of 1967 when a large part of it just faded away. With Nehru, too, there had been a loss of aura, beginning suddenly after the Chinese invasion of India in 1962.

Apa Pant traces his contact with Islam and Muslims back to his childhood and maturity, when Hindus and Muslims lived peacefully together in his motherland, and where they celebrated each other's feasts. Then he came face to face with Islam in Indonesia. But his experience in Egypt was defeat. Egyptian society, he writes, is much more Mediterranean, with certain aspects that were more European than anything that Islam had brought to India or Indonesia. "It seemed to me," he goes on, "that the life of the Egyptian peasant was different in Egypt from what we knew in India. In Egypt, sun, soil and water were constants. The level of living might be poor, but the Egyptian peasant did not have etched on his face the too familiar lines of care and anxiety under the age-old and ever present uncertainty of India's monsoons."

Apa Pant worked in some Arab countries, but he found that the Egyptian society was more flexible, and infinitely more capable of bearing the weight of problems, than anywhere else. In India the Muslims had always individually and collectively reacted as minority communities conscious of a threat to their identity and survival. In Egypt, the problems of maintaining identity in a fluid situation of rapid change were obviously of a different order and could be tackled with comparatively greater resilience.

He describes his meeting with many Egyptian thinkers, intellectuals and mystics, whose scholarship and spiritual background provided a stable base for response to the pressing phase of change. But his greatest satisfaction in Egypt was to make contract with the Sufi tradition which in its roots, he says, is pre- Islamic, pre-Christian, and a continuation of Pharaonic mysticism. Then he goes on to explain how the name, that is God, according to the Sufis, could save one from eternal ignorance. The name alone had power to transform the limited consciousness and merge it with the divine.