A tribute to Shamim Ahmad Shamim’s Craft: Chiraag Beigh: The Fictional Narrator

Since most of the thematic strands of Shamim Ahmed Shamim’s journalistic oeuvre have been unravelled by scores of scholars and analysts, I would like to focus exclusively on Chiraag Beigh, the fictional narrator, who has largely remained unexplored so far.

Chiraag Beigh is a flaneur, a saunterer of the city, deployed by the editor to narrate, interpret and pass informed judgements on events, situations, daily happenings, current affairs, persons and politicians and myriad other subjects related to the society. It was Shamim’s passion to generate and guide public discourse on important contemporary issues that he launched his periodical in the first place. To win public trust and establish reliability of his voice yet not to speak in the first person all the time, for its obvious drawbacks, he created an imaginary character whose consciousness would become a filter and a site for dialogue. To find out whether such fictional frameworks were used before him, I will have to explore Chiraag Beigh’s ancestors, metaphorically speaking.

On a cursory tour de horizon across cultures, I find such a narrator, a flaneur, was used for the first time in journalistic history in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in their jointly launched periodical, The Spectator, inspired by Tatler (1709), a one page periodical launched by Steele which changed the whole approach to journalism. It was short lived, lasted only for two years ( was revived in 1901 and continues till date) but influenced The Spectator, Johnson’s The Rambler and The Idler and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the world. Later in 19^th century French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire and German philosopher, cultural critic, essayist Walter Benjamin used flaneur as their creative medium in their works. Baudelaire’s flaneur is a literary and sociological figure who wanders through urban spaces observing and absorbing the city’s life. Benjamin adopted flaneur, a leisurely urban wanderer to analyse the social and cultural shifts of modernity.

The writers of The Spectator aimed to shape public opinion, stabilise the new social order and encourage thoughtful conversation on various aspects of life including literature, politics, manners, morals and social customs after the Glorious Revolution. It provided a model for periodical writing as it thrived on clarity, wit, and insightful social commentary. It became the sole arbiter of taste and judgement in 18^th century England as it enlivened morality with wit and tempered wit with morality. It did so through essays written by Mr Spectator, the flaneur who would frequent coffee houses to watch manners and morals of people, their thinking patterns, social attitudes and then comment on them to correct moral foibles, social and political attitudes and improve them on the touchstone of moral vision. The Spectator served as the voice of the periodical and fictional letters were written to the editor. In essence it was more than a publication. It was a social force and took Britain by storm as it mainly shaped the British culture in the Enlightenment Period and continues to be studied for its literary and historical significance. The Spectator, in short, set the standards for later generations of journalists and writers. Shamim being a well -read man couldn’t have been unaware of this historical development.

When he launched Aaina Numa in 1964, there was a similar situation of sorts in Kashmir as obtained in Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688; that permanently established parliament as the ruling power of England and later of Britain, representing a shift away from absolute monarchy to parliamentary supremacy as the crown was conditionally given to William III, prince of orange (Dutch) and his wife Mary, the deposed King James’s daughter, along with a Bill of Rights for the citizens. This led to huge revolutionary structural changes in the governance of Britain. Kashmir had also seen such a transition.

The reversal of democracy had already occurred with Sheikh Abdullah’s ouster when Shamim launched his periodical. In a sense his whole political-journalistic output could be seen as an explication, an elucidation, an analysis of Faiz’s poem, Ye Daag Daag Ujala..., and an elaborate commentary on undemocratic practices in Kashmir. The stark, unpalatable and shameful portions of it he has distilled through the consciousness of Chiraag Beigh, the Kashmiri version of the Spectator who saunters through the city, the society, collects observations on political, social and cultural scene, organises them at the end of the day and then narrates these with the icing of the witty, mordant and insightful commentary. He is a detached observer but a passionate spectator as he depicts with passion the exact picture of whatever he sees that enchants the reader.

Darey qafas pe andharay ki muhar lagti hai

To Faiz dil mein sitaray utarney lagte hein

(When the darkness envelopes the prison

Faiz, stars begin to descend in my heart)

The macrocosm’s darkness kindles light in the microcosm of Chiraag Beigh’s heart which helps him to consolidate his material and then offer insightful judgements on these. In most pieces Chiraag Beigh reveals that he was very much present when such and such thing transpired between the two leaders or groups of people or even present at the outpouring of soliloquies of some characters, affirming his status as an omniscient narrator.

The first piece in the chapter: Chiraag Beigh ke Qalum se titled “Raqaabat se Qurbat Tak” in the 13^th edition of Aaina Numa, he takes a spatial tour of the world and sums up the changing world situation where the dead values of mutual understanding, reconciliation, co-operation and friendship are being revived. This new dawn, he tells us, began with President Nixon’s visit to China and then gives details about other countries where positive changes are taking place. Eventually he comes to comment on the local situation where the new dawn is evident in the end of S.M. Abdullah’s one and a half years’ exile from the valley in 1972.

But after the first contact between the Sheikh and Mrs Gandhi, the contact was almost lost and it was revived with Mir Qasim visit to the Sheikh on Eid day. Chiraag Beigh, who is accidentally present on all occasions by his own admission was present there as well, and starts speculating on the extraordinary significance of this ordinary meeting which proved prophetic, as it later resulted in the 1975 accord. What I am trying to say is that Chiraag Beigh is a flaneur who saunters around observing society through kaleidoscope, finds solitude in a crowd and takes every day life as its own creative space, thrives in the demands of immediacy, observing the fleeting moment in which they occur .

Yet there is another way in which one could describe Chiraag Beigh not merely as a bifurcation or alter ego of the authorial self but the objective voice of the other in a dialogue. George Eliot says in her celebrated novel, The Middle March; “we are all of us born in moral stupidity taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves”. Very rarely do people emerge from that stupidity and ‘conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling (an idea wrought back to the directness of self, like the solidity of objects) that the other has an equivalent centre of self whence the lights and shadows must fall with a certain difference’. It is this emotional empathy with the other, the society at large, that gives birth to dialogic imagination culminating in the merger of imagination and emotion, resulting in the birth of passion. In his columns Chiraag Beigh engages us in a dialogue where all the possible perspectives are explored, issues thrown open, persons and situations discussed.

That is why when he delivers his judgement, it carries conviction. After thorough examination of all angles, we do not see any malice, bias or bigotry toward a particular perspective; we see evaluation of all in an honest and fair-minded manner. Colonial mind or a propagandist enslaves the other, casts the readers’ net, traps them in a cage and reduces them to lifeless objects, talks at them all the time as the question of talking to does not arise. That would invest the ‘other’ with a wholesome self which is anathema to the colonial mind. Because of necessity it has to enslave the other to feed itself, to aggrandize itself. Chiraag Beigh represents the contrary objective voice that is given complete liberty to narrate, analyse, interpret and judge issues, situations and politicians and to arrive at his own conclusions.

Besides, Chiraag Beigh provides dramatic interest in the subjects he deals with and rescues Aaina from the dominance of the monotony of monologic discourse. I have a feeling people must have been waiting for Aaina every week more for reading the rumination of this dramatic mystical figure who through subtle hints here and there builds his persona as an all-knowing figure. The tone of his narration is mordant and conversational. The prose style is literary without having the boring literariness; its wit and humour is bewitching. The style is chaste, terse, translucent and has a natural flow of a stream that carries the reader with its flow. One simply races through it. In the ultimate analysis, style is the man. Only those people who possess a moral compass have a vibrant, clear, transparent style. There is an irresistible urge in me to quote most of the columns in this compilation of Aaina Numa to prove my point with textual evidence, however, that is not possible in this limited space.

It is Shamim’s passion for honesty and truth, his extreme critical sense coupled with sharp humour and his intense desire to share truth with his audience that he uses the fictional omniscient narrator to generate multilateral, informed discourse on important political, literary and social issues; this is what lifted Aaina Numa from a routine periodical to the status of a truly representative mirror of the society in which he lived. These writings form the first authentic draft of history of the times in which he wrote, and beyond, and therefore of enormous significance for historical, political and cultural studies in the generations to come like its ‘grand father’ archetypal figure in the The Spectator in a different cultural milieu.

Prof. Hameedah Nayeem, formerly Head Department of English, Kashmir University.