Eye for an eye
EVERY body part is important, but few are as important as an eye. I use the singular for a body part that comes in pairs because its function is so crucial that one outweighs the combined functions of many others. Even diminished sight is so essential that ‘in the land of the blind, one-eyed man is king’ has become an idiom. Its vernacular version goes something like ‘andhon mein kana raja’ (‘among the blind, the one-eyed rules’).
In an old interview, one of Imran Khan’s sisters reminisced that even as a child he likened himself to a tiger. It’s a coincidence that a very charismatic Indian cricketer of the 1960s and 1970s, Nawab Mansoor Pataudi, was nicknamed Tiger Pataudi. He was a stylish right-handed batsman and considered the best fielder of his day, despite losing vision in his right eye in a traffic accident. He was named captain of the national team at the age of 21. Gen Amir Abdullah Niazi, who surrendered during the 1971 war, also styled himself as ‘Tiger Niazi’. Though his sight was not impaired, he was handicapped in vision and character.
Some physical features are stereotyped in history as characteristics; some archetypes are restricted to a geographical region, while others have universal appeal. For instance, what would a pirate be without an eyepatch? In modern times, the look became notorious when Israeli Gen Moshe Dayan wore an eyepatch. Salman Rushdie lost an eye to a knife attack and uses a dark lens on that side of his spectacles.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the famous Sikh ruler who extended Punjab’s borders to Kashmir and the Khyber Pass, did not cover his bad eye. In his early years, he may have been conscious of it, leading to his profile portraits which show only the good eye. Later in life, he wore his disability with aplomb and turned it to his advantage, asserting, “I look at all my subjects with one eye.”
Some physical features are stereotyped in history.
In the olden days, disabilities were described by their attributes, as in the Central Asian tyrant Temur’s name, ‘Lang’, which refers to the limp he walked with. In the Western canon, ‘lame’ became ‘lane’; Tamerlane is the distorted version of Temur-lang. It is another matter, though, that his brutal ways could have earned him the epitaph ‘Temur-out-of-lane’. There was a time when cinegoers were enticed by vernacular translations of English titles. A blockbuster martial arts movie One-Armed Boxer was translated as Tunda Badmash in Pakistan.
Etymology, an utterly fascinating field, does not always make it entirely clear how a particular word or term develops. For instance, in colloquial Urdu, making someone an accomplice to keep them in check is referred to as ‘kana karna’ (blinding someone in one eye). Another proverb in this vein is ‘kana mujhey bhai nahin; kaney bina suhaey nahin’. It roughly translates to ‘cannot live with them, and without them.’ Its applicability in the current political context cannot be denied.
In the game of thrones, especially in South Asia, succession politics included blinding the heir apparent or a pretender by gouging out their eyes. This barbaric practice of rendering the opponent unfit to rule in the rough-and-tumble of dynastic politics and the battlefield demands of physical fitness is generally thought to be a male preserve; however, mothers and even grandmothers are known to have resorted to this.
Allama Iqbal, in his poem ‘Ghulam Qadir Rohilla’, depicts the revenge the Afghan chieftain exacted against the Mughal king Shah Alam II — gouging out his eyes and ordering the women of the royal household to dance in court to entertain the victor. The Rohilla was captured from the battlefield as an eight-year-old boy when the uprising by his father Zabita Khan, an erstwhile army chief of Shah Alam, was crushed. The boy was raised in the royal household and was purportedly castrated. He was returned to his father as a youth after a patch-up with the Mughal ruler. After the elder Rohilla’s death, Ghulam Qadir attacked Delhi and exacted his revenge on the king. As he retreated, he was pursued and captured by the Maratha. Shah Alam II was restored to the throne. He demanded that the Maratha leader, Mahadaji Shinde, send him the Rohilla’s eyes, who obliged. The first line of Iqbal’s poem goes, ‘Rohilla kis qadar zalim, jafaju, keena parwar tha …’ (how brutal, unjust, and begrudging was the Rohilla…). One hopes that an eye-for-an-eye vendetta stops.
As for the pirates, they didn’t always wear an eyepatch because of injury; it gave them a tactical advantage in combat. The human eye takes time to adapt between bright light and pitch darkness. Moving between the mayhem on the upper and lower decks of ships, all they had to do was to switch the patch and strike.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2026
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