A Personal View of Professor Khan Sarwar Murshid

I have been contemplating about how my father, Professor Khan Sarwar Murshid, became an aesthete. Over the years he came to embody a personality that combined refinement and sensitivity alongside a Herculean pursuit of knowledge. Often referred to by former students as the best dressed man at Dhaka University, where he taught several generations of them, he also was idealised as a national icon, a role model, and  'the conscience of the nation' as he struggled for a sane society in Bangladesh. While these aspects of his life have been discussed, the image of him as an aesthete is less explored.

I have wondered about what made my dad special, made him stand out, be a cut above the rest. How does a shy, frail home-schooled child become so eloquent, so erudite, so charming, so principled, and so upright? How did he come to be so noted for his use of language, his oratory in both Bangla and English, his style of dressing, bearing and manner of speaking - all the hallmarks of an aesthete?

There is no other from his family or generation that could match him in this regard. Yet some influences are traceable. Beauty and looks were household topics of discussion. His father and grandfather were tall and handsome men. As an MLA in the Bengal Legislative Assembly, his father Maulvi Ali Ahmed Khan cut an impressionable figure as the handsomest and most presentable, so the saying goes in Brahmanbaria circles.  Ali Ahmed Khan had few clothes, but whenever he went out, he was impeccably dressed in his starched white kurta-pajama, or dark sherwani for formal occasions.

Some have wondered whether Sarwar's style and taste derived from his foreign travels to the UK and the US in the fifties and sixties; he had studied for his PhD in Nottingham and enjoyed a fellowship at Harvard, subsequently. To an extent for sure, his taste for sober suits owes to English influences, while his interest in colours probably can be traced to his stint in America where colourful summer wear for men was common. But he developed his own style and colour combinations that matched his personality, the demands of the weather alongside his quest for beauty and perfection.

However, the quest for external perfection came long after his search for internal perfection began. Sensitive from childhood, he consciously rejected the pettiness of provincial manners - the intrigue, the backbiting, the intolerance, the inability to concede beauty in others. As I have written elsewhere, he rebelled against the use of coarse language, crude behaviour, garish colours, the lack of symmetry wherever he found it, the local idea of beauty as fair and limited to the face only, the petty criticism of neighbours common in provincial towns and villages. In fact, he decided that the only way out of such a world was to create one in your own image of the ideal; in which, through personal example, you demonstrate how a refined and cultured existence is possible. It is thus that he became an aesthete, through a meticulous approach to truth and beauty embodied in the personal, cultivated self.

While he consciously rejected crude language and behavior his cultivated persona evolved over time. Literature put him in touch with great minds and ideas. Bernard Shaw no doubt showed him the route to the acquiring of genteel language and the pursuit of perfect speech in English. He learnt the Queen's English from no other than Richard Burton, listening to his records, and repeating the phrases again and again to achieve the most sophisticated pronunciation possible. He looked up the phonetic spelling of words to ensure that he uttered the right sounds.

A friend arguably commented that he was perhaps a 'dandy'. This is to misread him totally. For his quest was always to turn his surroundings into a better and more beautiful place. What better way to do this than through personal example? He was a soft spoken man, spoke deliberately, often with a wry sense of humour, took great pains not to make anyone uneasy, which was no mean task given his vast knowledge, erudition and tendency to be a bit formal at times because of having been a shy youth earlier.

So how did he come to stand out, to distinguish himself from others in the manner that he did?  I think it was the result of a combination of his keen capacity to observe, his sensitivity to his surroundings and a profound desire to make a difference to his world. While he has tried to do this in the social and political landscape as has already been acknowledged by many, including myself, he also tried to achieve the same within his personal landscape with friends, family, students and those who came into contact with him, by embodying what he wished to see in others.

As the second year of his passing draws to a close on 8 December 2014, I find myself exploring the legacies left by our father and teacher and take what lessons I can from these, not just for myself but also for all those who owe to him the values that make our lives a little bit richer, a little bit more meaningful, a little more aesthetically appealing.

The writer is author of The Sacred and the Secular: Bengal Muslim Discourses 1871-1977, OUP, 1995. She  is also a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, New York. 
Email: tm2764@columbia.edu