Words fail. Not because Badshah Khan’s death has come as a sudden shock. On the contrary, the grand old man lay dying for months. And he had been incapacitated and out of action for years. Words fail because one must find it virtually impossible to fit Badshah Khan into a framework. Who was he? One of our great freedom-fighters who linked the warlike Pathans on the frontiers of Indian civilization with the Gandhian mainstream through acceptance of Buddha-like non-violence? A dissident Pakistani who spent years in Pakistani jails because he would not reconcile himself to the whole country being converted into a vast prison-house for individuals and for cultural linguistic entities under military-bureaucratic domination? A unique Pakhtoon determined to ensure for his people a place in the political arrangement worthy of them? He was, of course, all these things and more – a man of indomitable will who in the subcontinent bears comparison only with the Mahatma in that respect. But to say this is only to burke the central issue about the man. How did he, or even how could he, reconcile these apparently conflicting loyalties? He did, and therein lay the true measure of his greatness.
India did not cease to be his country on partition. He continued to share her triumphs and tragedies and, equally important, he felt entitled to make claims on her and offer her advice on how to handle her affairs, especially the communal problem. He saw himself (and we saw him) as an Indian elder, though no longer living on the soil of the new state of India. This did not negate his Pakistani identity. He saw himself as a genuine Pakistani, indeed a more genuine one than most of his loud-mouthed compatriots, precisely because he did not identify Pakistan’s selfhood and interests in terms of hostility towards India. Many of his countrymen questioned his bona fides for that very reason, especially because he was also engaged in the struggle to assure a place of honour and dignity to Pakistan’s distinct linguistic-cultural groupings sought to be trampled upon by the predominantly Punjabi elite, with a sprinkling of Pathans. And as if the task of promoting this liberal humanist-nonchauvinistic approach in the subcontinent was not enough, Badshah Khan saw himself as much a citizen of Afghanistan as of Pakistan or India. He not only spent years in exile there, but stipulated in his will that he be buried in Jalalabad, about 100 kilometers from the Pakistani border.
This raises another problem. What age did Badshah Khan belong to? To a past which recognised no permanent frontiers, and knew no nationalism? Or to a future where civilizational values will supersede nationalistic obsessions, enhancing rather than suppressing the deeper, inner personalities of individuals, as well as of collectivities? As a member of the Pathan brotherhood he harked back to the past, Pathans once being among the great wanderers of the region beginning with the Central Asian steppes and covering the whole Eurasian continent. But by the same token, he belongs to the future. The wanderers connect.