3 Humberstone Road

"The idea that India's Muslims should set up a state of their own was formally articulated for the first time on four-and-a-half pages of typing paper in a nondescript English cottage at 3 Humberstone Road in Cambridge." - `Freedom at Midnight' by Collins and Lapiere.

3 Humberstone Road has managed to stay relatively anonymous considering it was the birthplace for an idea that changed one of the most densely populated parts of the world in more ways than one can comprehend. From this "nondescript English cottage", on January 28, 1933, Choudhary Rahmat Ali issued a pamphlet "Now or Never?" He coined the word Pakstan for 30 million Muslims who lived in the five northern units of Punjab, North-West Frontier (Afghan), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan. Later on, an "I" was added after the letters Pak for easy pronunciation.

As an Indian who grew up listening to stories about the struggle for independence and partition that created two separate nations of India and Pakistan, I had a strange obsession to go and see this house in Cambridge. Last autumn, while in England, my wife and I decided to drive up to Cambridge. A road accident and several detours made the journey a few hours longer than we anticipated, but we managed to get in to Cambridge by late afternoon. I did not know what to expect. The map clearly identified the road, which told me that it had survived the war and had not been overtaken or destroyed by urbanization either. Tracking the directions through the curvy roads and rotaries, we approached Humberstone Road. The neighborhood looked well kept and quiet. Trees and hedges covered most of the approach and the autumn foliage was beginning to make its way to the sidewalk.

We saw the sign Humberstone Road 500 yards to the left, the street where Rahmat Ali lived in 1933. This is where he sought "sympathy and support in our grim and fateful struggle against political crucifixion and complete annihilation" -- words way overstated and exaggerated by any standard, words that were meant to spread fear and ignite a religious movement. However, he was not alone in this stream of thought. There was a growing concern within the Indian Muslim community that the Hindu majority may squash their interests into irrelevance after the British left India. Rahmat Ali, with his words, brought forward, in a well-articulated manner, a solution that would provide respite to a tenth of the whole Muslim world by creating their own nation. Writing from a house on this street, he appealed to the Muslims of India and "to the other two great interests -- British and Hindus." He put forward a case of how the Hindus and Muslims are essentially different in every aspect -- customs, calendars, diet and dress. Rahmat Ali even attempted to justify Pakstan by citing the total area of the proposed new country being four times that of Italy, three times of Germany and twice that of France.

As we made the left turn on to Humberstone Road, our eyes started traveling the row of houses on both sides of the street, searching for number `3'. The light rain and the grayish sky did not hinder us from seeing the house that we had driven for long hours over the course of the afternoon. It just seemed like any other house on any other street in any town in England. The thought did cross my mind that someone may be living in this house totally oblivious to the historical ramification the house had had on generations in a faraway land. The house looked as if it was occupied but deserted at that moment. As my wife and I stepped out of our car to briefly look at it, the vision of its long time gone resident did not escape us -- "...lay the foundations of a peaceful future for this great continent..."

Rahmat Ali's vision of the two nations living side by side in peace has long been proven a dream unfulfilled. At the birth of the nation, which he named Pakistan, the Indian subcontinent had to go through what Collins and Lapiere call `The Greatest Migration in History'. This migration resulted in a human tragedy of incomprehensible proportions, wiping out families, wealth and property on both sides of the border. It is said that Rahmat Ali was shattered by the events associated with the partition and, although he had expected people to fight to create Pakistan, he never imagined the horrors of the communal rioting and mass murder that took place. Ironically, he lost his property (in Hoshiarpur district on the Indian side of Punjab) in the storms of partition, thus losing his source of income, and died in a state of poverty.

Mired in military coups and extended dictatorial rule, a hub for international terrorist activity and trailing most nations on key economic indicators, Pakistan struggles to find its identity and is far away from Rahmat Ali's dream of a `peaceful future'.

My wife and I stood there looking at the house and the street for a while. A flash of the last 70 years seemed to pass us by -- Hindu-Muslim riots, partition followed by a tragedy of major proportion, three wars, nuclear weapons and now the threat of terrorism emanating from Pakistan. It is said that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, while having dinner with Rahmat Ali in 1933 in London, called Pakistan "an impossible dream." Both did not live long to see the impossible nightmare the people of Pakistan have had to go through over the last 50 years. Jinnah died on September 11, 1948, and Rahmat Ali died on February 3, 1951.

I wonder, if today Rahmat Ali were alive and aware about the tumultuous history of Pakistan, would he have repented formalizing his thoughts on paper on that day in 1933 in a nondescript English cottage in Cambridge?

We slowly drove out of Humberstone Road, immersed in our own thoughts about all sorts of possibilities for the region -- perhaps a unification...some day?

(This column was first published on www.sulekha.com)