Urdu press in Old Blighty

he first modern Urdu reportage, published in the 1950s, was Mahmood Hashmi's Kashmir Udas Hai - as readable today as it was then. It remains a moving account of the upheaval that independence brought to the lives of millions on both sides of the arbitrarily drawn dividing line. Hashmi's work is also the story of a great friendship between a Muslim - the author - and a Hindu, Apoorab Somnath. They taught at the same college and were as close as any two people can be. The maelstrom of 1947 forced one, Hashmi, to leave Kashmir carrying nothing with him but the memories that he recorded in what is an elegy for a world that had ceased to exist.

Hashmi moved to England and has lived there since. He remains one of the pioneers of Urdu journalism in Britain, having founded Britain's first Urdu weekly, the Mashriq . Several years ago, he wrote an account of how that came to be, which was translated into English by eminent British Urdu scholar Prof Ralph Russell and published in an academic journal. Hashmi's story and the story of Mashriq deserve to be told because few in Pakistan know anything about it. When Britain started to rebuild after the Second World War, what it lacked was manpower; thus it threw its doors open to immigration, bringing in thousands of young men from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir and several parts of Punjab.

When Hashmi arrived in England, he discovered that while the British were very happy to provide work to those who could not speak even a word of English, they felt ill-at-ease with educated people and found their English quaint, if not downright Victorian. The education these men had received from their English rulers failed in its first encounter with the language's mother country. The immigrants were hardy people and they were determined to stay and do well. As time passed, they began to acquire confidence and grow roots in the alien soil that was now their home. A new Eastern enclave began to take form in Old Blighty and the first Urdu weekly was launched from the city of Birmingham in the Midlands by Mahmood Hashmi. His audience mostly consisted of those who could not read but would have the paper read to them by those who could. According to Hashmi, "When Mashriq appeared it was greeted eagerly, as though it too had come to them from their homeland, and it often happened that they would compare the paper with the letters which they received from home. This comparison was sometimes quite unfavourable. For example, if one of our readers had received a letter from home giving him news of the transfer of his local tehsildar or of the tour of some official, and this had not been mentioned in Mashriq , he would phone us up, rebuke us, and read us a lecture about how it was necessary for people who brought out newspapers to keep abreast of the news.”

Hashmi recalls that on one occasion he had asked a grocer to place an advertisement in Mashriq . He enthusiastically agreed, and when it was suggested to him that it would be a good idea if he repeated the advertisement every week, he happily agreed. But when after four or five issues, when he was asked to pay, he was both surprised and annoyed. He thought that newspapers existed to bring information to others, such as that relating to his grocery store. He just couldn't understand where money had come into this arrangement. Another reader was so moved by a short story in the magazine that he sent Mashriq a self-addressed envelope, asking that it be sent to the story's heroine Naseema as he wanted to meet her. Naseema of course was a fictional character. Then there were those who had only read the Quran in their village and who tried to read the paper on the basis of their ability to read the Quran - without of course understanding it. A good deal of the paper they could not quite manage to read.

At work in the factory, while their British mates were doing their football pools, these faithful readers could be found poring over Mashriq. As the paper grew in popularity, so did its coverage of the social and political life of the rapidly growing community, including protest marches - sometimes outside the Indian High Commission, at others its Pakistani counterpart. Mashriq also may have given birth to a lot of leaders keen to see their statements and pictures in the paper. Failure to oblige often led to an irate visit to the office and a confrontation with the editor. When the families of the immigrants began to join them from Mirpur and Pakistan, the paper had to add women's and children's pages. The immigrants moved up the ladder fast and it was not long before one of them was a justice of peace, and another was declared her school's top student. Mashriq had the pictures of both on the cover.

Once a reader denounced Mashriq for printing a poem that described an English beauty as a houri . That, he protested, was blasphemous and un-Islamic.The poet replied that it was an Arab not an English houri , which made her perfectly Islamic. Hashmi writes, "I was with Mashriq for eleven years and four months. When I launched it, it was a challenge, probably much the same sort of challenge which the discoverers of new worlds experienced after crossing the oceans. Work on the paper was a sort of obsession. I felt as though I was waging a very great campaign. Along with a few friends I worked from seven in the morning until eleven or half past eleven at night and never took a break at the weekend; and yet I never felt tired. We were all very happy. Ahsan Malik did the calligraphy and also attended to the layout. Every now and then, he would make some addition to the headline that I had written. Khan Wali who came from Mora Kanyal, Mirpur, used to run the printing machines and until such time as we were able to afford a mailing machine he used to stick the stamps on the envelopes mailed to our annual subscribers. In addition to my work as editor, I had many other tasks to do. One of them was addressing the envelopes. Khan Wali was very particular that I shouldn't make any mistakes in writing the addresses. For example, he would want to be quite sure that before the name of Choudhry Allah Ditta I had written ‘Qaid-e-Andhral.' Adding the words ‘Qaid-e-Andhral' made the address inordinately long, but he insisted that I write out the full name with the title.”

Mashriq is no longer published; or if there is a paper under that name it is not Mahmood Hashmi's Mashriq . There are several Urdu dailies and many weeklies, but to Hashmi will always belong the credit of having been the first. As for Arab houris , they have many bearded claimants from among the faithful whose number in Britain, legal and illegal, has reached a figure that it is no longer possible to count.