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Ziauddin Sardar Interviewed by Paul Merchant: Full Transcript of the Interview

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Ziauddin Sardar Interviewed by Paul Merchant: Full Transcript of the Interview NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Ziauddin Sardar Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/32 This transcript is copyright of the British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] IMPORTANT Access to this interview and transcript is for private research only. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ([email protected]) The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1672/32 Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Interviewee’s surname: Sardar Title: Professor Interviewee’s forename: Ziauddin Sex: Male Occupation: Academic, journalist, writer Date and place of birth: 31st October 1951, and broadcaster Bahawalpur, Pakistan Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Factory worker Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 13/10/2016 (track 1-2), 14/10/16 (track 3-4), 08/11/2016 (track 5), 15/11/2016 (track 6-8) Location of interview: The British Library, London and interviewee’s home, Colindale, London Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel Total no. of tracks 8 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 8 hrs. 30 min. 07 sec. Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: OPEN Interviewer’s comments: Ziauddin Sardar DRAFT Page 1 C1672/32 Track 1 [Track 1] Could you start then by telling me when and where you were born? Okay. I was born in Pakistan, allegedly on October the thirty-first, 1951. Now, I was born in a place called Dipalpur which is not too far from the Indian-Pakistani border, and during 1951 my parents had migrated just after the Partition, so they got there around 1948 and they found a place to live. There were still uncertainties with the border so when I was born my parents were still not sure whether they were in Pakistan or India, because of the uncertainties of the time. So my birth was not registered till about a year when things had settled down, and then my mother eventually asked my father to go and register my birth. Now, the place where you’re supposed to register your birth, the council office, was in a city called Okara, which was like, I suspect, about a hundred miles from Dipalpur, so my father trekked off to Okara, when he got there he forgot whether I was born on the third of October or the thirtieth of October, or the thirty-first of October, but he did remember the year. So anyway, he put thirty-first on the birth certificate and started to travel back to Dipalpur and in between he got caught in the monsoon. The monsoons rain started and it rained very, very heavily, and the birth certificate was written in Indian ink, you know, so it got all washed off, but because it was written with Indian ink with old- fashioned pen, it left marks on the paper, so I ended up with a birth certificate which was clean, but if you actually looked very closely at it, you could discern what [was written]. Now, this is the conventional story that my father told me, why my birth certificate is the way it is. But my mother’s side story’s slightly different, she just says my father was very lazy and it took her one year to persuade, to go down to the registration office. So the exact date of my birth is a slight dispute, but it says thirty-first of October 1951 on my passport. [02:45] Thank you. Could you tell me now as much as you can about the life of your father? My father was initially an engineer. He was born in Bhopal in India and he went to Aligarh Muslim University where he got an engineering degree. And he was also into poetry and drama and things like that. I have a photograph of him, which is a photograph of the cast of the play Mizeraleb which is about the great Indian poet, so I suspect that he participated in drama societies over there. But he didn’t get a job or anything like that in India, so when he migrated to Pakistan he had difficulty finding a job and eventually he became engineer at the biscuit factory in a city called Montgomery. The name of the city has been changed to Sahiwal, it is now called Sahiwal, but in those days it was called Montgomery. And Montgomery is famous for two things. One is the Montgomery jail, which basically dominates the city and two, the nice biscuit factory where my father worked. So he got a job there in something like 1954/55 and we moved to Sahiwal, we stayed there for a couple of years, and there was a strike at the biscuit factory and my father was one of the union leaders leading the strike. And it became quite nasty and you know in 1958 there was martial law and Ayub Khan came in power. So before they had the martial law, it was pretty obvious that martial law will be coming, so six, eight months before that, my father was warned that it was very likely that he’d be arrested, it’s better that he get out. So he decided that instead of kind of staying in Pakistan, he decided to actually migrate to Britain. So just before the martial law, something like early 1958 he came to Britain. Ziauddin Sardar DRAFT Page 2 C1672/32 Track 1 [05:14] What memories then do you have of that period before the move? I have very few memories of that period. The most vivid memory, I have two or three most vivid memories. One is that when I was a young boy I used to wander about in the sugar cane factory, sorry, sugar cane field, which was not too far from our house. In fact Sahiwal, or Montgomery as it was then, was very kind of arable land. There was phenomenal kind of agriculture there, sugar cane fields and oranges. There’s a fruit called ber, I don’t know how to translate that, they’re little berry things, round berries that you find in huge… where we used to live there were lots of ber trees, so one of my memories is picking up a stone and throwing it at the ber tree and all the bers will fall out and I’d collect them and eat them. But I used to, with my other companions, wander about in the sugar cane factory. And then we will of course just find a patch, cut the sugar cane and start chewing it, and eventually the farmers will find out. And the way they will find out, they will look and they’ll see a gap, missing, they’ll come running and we’ll kind of then run off. So that’s kind of one of my most vivid memories, I seem to have done that most of the time. And my other memory is that one day… my father used to do something every autumn. He will buy lots and lots of mangoes, which are very cheap, in fact truckloads of mangoes will arrive from the local farms and they’ll be raw mangoes. So he will buy them raw, cheap, and then where we used to live, it was a kind of bungalow which was divided into two halves; one half belonged to us and the other half belonged to the migrants. So there was, a room was set aside for my father to kind of put his mangoes, so they’ll be a cotton layer and the layer of mangoes on top, and then another cotton layer and mangoes on top. And then when the mangoes started getting ripe then we would kind of start eating them in large quantities from the top layer onwards and we’ll just gather in the evening after dinner and, you know, a whole basketful of ripe mangoes will be brought and all of us. So that was the kind of communal thing that we used to do regularly throughout the summer, eating mangoes was one of my favourite things. But one memory is that my grandmother disappeared and all of us kind of wandered about looking for my grandmother and we couldn’t find her anywhere. We looked and we looked, and then I remembered where she used to hide, so this bungalow had lots of small rooms that were connected and some rooms we didn’t go to because we thought they belonged to the neighbour, and the neighbour thought they belonged to us. [laughs] So they were left empty. So I went in there, eventually opened a door and there she was, sitting there reading a huge novel called Chasma, which is in two volumes, a novel of Partition. Chasma is the leading protagonist, she kind of migrates with her family to Pakistan.
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