Reflections: The roots that clutch …

Syed Badrul AhsanSyed Badrul Ahsan
Published : 26 July 2015, 03:06 AM
Updated : 26 July 2015, 03:06 AM

Barack Obama, as we converse, is in his ancestral land of Kenya. He will not be going to his parental village, a place he has been to earlier as United States senator. This time, with all those worries about such murderous outfits as al Shabab flying around, there are proper security concerns related to the visiting US President. But note that on his first evening in Nairobi, Obama spent a cheerful bit of time with his Kenyan relatives, all of whom had turned up from his father's village to have dinner with him. Among those relatives were his step-grandmother Sarah Obama and his step-sister Uma Obama. There was much laughter and banter at dinner. You could sense the sheer joy, in both the American leader and his father's family, at the knowledge that a child of the clan had come home, even if for a couple of days. Here was the Luo tribe in all its heritage, proud in the knowledge that one of its own happened to be the most powerful man in the world.

Ancestry is important. More important is the ability and a willingness in one to connect or keep links with that ancestry. Egypt's Anwar Sadat, in the years he was President of his country, made it a point to remember that his roots lay in a little village called Mit Abu el-Kom. Despite his workload — and it was heavy considering Sadat was always battling crises on the global front — the Egyptian leader made it part of his routine to spend time in his village. There was a refreshing absence of formality in him when it came to dealing with people. In Mit Abu el-Kom, he was always among his own people, more as a native son than as President. He took long walks, exchanged thoughts with his relatives and neighbours. Roots, he knew, were important. When he was assassinated in 1981, it was to Mit Abu el-Kom that he returned. His remains are buried there. And his place in history is assured — because of that nocturnal, ground-breaking journey he made to Jerusalem in 1977.

Roots were also what mattered in the life of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Throughout his long and tortuous political career, much of which was spent in prison, the man destined to be his country's founding father lost no opportunity, when it came, to travel down to his village Tungipara and reconnect with his people. His parents, troubled by his travails in politics and yet proud of his consistency of commitment, lived in Tungipara. That was a typical hint of middle class Bengali life — no matter where you happen to be or what changes take place around you, it is always the ancestral village you go back to, for that is home. During the course of the Agartala conspiracy trial in 1968, Mujib was escorted to Tungipara on parole by police and army personnel to see his ailing parents. When he was murdered in 1975, his assassins figured, wrongly, that his burial in Tungipara would bring about an end to his role in history, that he would be forgotten. Today, Tungipara is as much a focal point of Bangladesh's history as it is a usual Bengali village preserving the remains of its greatest son. You walk around the village. Every man you speak to — at the market tea stall, in the rice fields, beside the lake or beel — is an individual in whom you spot the sparks that once shaped their 'Mojibor'.

This question of ancestry is related, in a big way, with the kind of earthiness that defines an individual. You think back on Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the greatest of American presidents, and on the folklore associated with him. You will not get to know much about his parents or larger clan, save only to be let in on the reality of poverty which defined the life of the family. There is the log cabin background to the Lincoln career and with that the stories or yarns which revealed him to be a man of intense humour. In the White House, even as he battled mightily to save the Union, he took time off to lie on the floor, his long legs resting on a chair — a sight which constantly irritated his wife — and played with his sons and told them tales. His wit often let in some light into the darkness of intense cabinet meetings in the White House. There was the prophet-like in him. Had he not come into politics, had he been born in biblical times, Abraham Lincoln could well have been a mendicant recapitulating the old tales of Moses looking for God on Mount Sinai. Lincoln was President. And yet he was more than that. He was a person, like everyone else. It was an image that would come through at Gettysburg and at his second inaugural.

But life does not treat everyone well. Or put the argument the other way. There are men of power who treat the life in those around them with disdain and then end up paying a price. The Shah of Iran, confused between being a modernizer and a tyrant, saw hardly anything wrong in keeping a distance from his people. His faux empire — and it was false because his clan had never been royalty and his father, an army officer, had seized the country and quickly laid claim to Persia's two-thousand-plus years of imperial tradition — was brought to an end in early 1979. He then went looking for refuge all over the world. Jimmy Carter's America, having first let him in, was then forced to ask him to leave. Not until Anwar Sadat welcomed him to Cairo did the Shah, by then in an advanced state of cancer, find a degree of respite. His grave lies in the Egyptian capital. It is unkempt, with dust and dry leaves gathering all over it. No one visits the place. Reza Shah Pahlavi, Arya Mehr, Shahinshah of Iran, lies buried hundreds of miles removed from his roots.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is in his grave in his native village of Garhi Khuda Buksh outside Larkana in Sindh along with his daughter Benazir. The man who first gave him a berth in government, Iskandar Mirza, has his remains ironically in a grave in Tehran because General Yahya Khan refused to permit him a burial in Pakistan when he died in London in 1969. The very Bengali Nurul Amin, having served post-1971 Pakistan as vice president under Bhutto, died in 1974. His remains lie beside Mohammad Ali Jinnah's in Karachi, more than a thousand miles away from his ancestral Mymensingh.

The Nehrus, with roots in Kashmir, have never let go of their hold on heritage. Those who live by the stream — jo neher ke kinare raehte hain — is what the Nehru name implies. To the end of his life, Jawaharlal Nehru remained proud of his ancestral links to Kashmir. His daughter and those who came after her have remembered the heritage they are heir to.
Just as Barack Obama has.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a bdnews24.com columnist.