Who Is a Muslim?

4 / Martyr/Mujāhid: Muslim Origins and the Modern Urdu Novel There are two ways to continue the story of the making of a modern lit- er a ture in Urdu a fter the reformist moment of the late nineteenth c entury. The better- known way is to celebrate a rupture from the reformists by writing a history of the All- India Progressive Writer’s Movement (AIPWA), a Bloomsbury- inspired collective that had a tremendous impact on the course of Urdu prose writing. And to be fair, if any single moment DISTRIBUTION— in the modern history of Urdu “lit er a ture” has been able to claim a global circulation (however limited) or express worldly aspirations, it is the well- known moment of the Progressives from within which the stark, rebel voices of Saadat Hasan Manto and Faiz Ahmad Faiz emerged. Founded in 1935–6, the AIPWA was best known for its near revolutionary goals: FOR the desire to create a “new lit er a ture,” which stood directly against the “poetical fancies,” religious orthodoxies, and “love romances with which our periodicals are flooded.”1 Despite its claim to represent all of India, AIPWA was led by a number of Urdu writers— Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmad Ali, among them— who continued, even in the years following Partition in 1947, to have a “disproportionate influence” on the workings and agenda —NOT of the movement.2 The historical and aesthetic successes of the movement, particularly with re spect to Urdu, have gained significant attention from a variety of scholars, including Carlo Coppola, Neetu Khanna, Aamir Mufti, and Geeta Patel, though admittedly more work remains to be done. Writing as a collective with national aims, the Progressives for a few de cades or so managed to demonstrate, to quote Mufti, “that Urdu could be and was the terrain for truly national social imaginings.”3 Abandoning aspirations the Modern Urdu Novel / 127 of religious piety and markers of bourgeois domesticity, the collective wrote stories of prostitutes at the peripheries of the emerging nation, of the desolation and paralyzing poverty of peasants and farmers in the so- called modern colony, of wives at the mercy of husbands with alternative sexual interests and shared streams of consciousness that denied god and nation. Actively positioning themselves against the stylization and separation of Hindi and Urdu established from the Fort William years as well as the nationalist agendas of the Congress and newly founded Muslim League, the Progressives offered the possibility, perhaps for the first time, of a utopic India where peasant and aristocrat could be equal, women liberated, and language secular. At the very least, they forced readers, as Mufti argues, to “confront the paradox that the era of modern Indian history that saw the most decisive bifurcation of national politics along religio- communal lines is perhaps the most secularist period in the history of modern Urdu lit er a ture.” 4 The question that remains, however, is one that has gone largely un- addressed by scholars and historians of the Progressive movement: What was it that the Progressives positioned themselves against? That is to say, what kind of literary production did the collective hope to counter, perhaps even reform? In the case of Urdu, a major recruit in the movement, the Progressives railed against what they deemed a fanciful poetic tra- dition and vacuous prose fictions. In a more direct iteration of these DISTRIBUTION— questions we can ask, what were those works, narratives, and writers that commanded the mainstream Muslim imagination? That is to say, if the Progressives aligned themselves with the idea of a secular India, who and what were their literary and po liti cal antagonists? This latter set of questions directs us to the other, still unexplored corpus of prose fiction FOR in Urdu, a vast body of novels and stories produced in conformity with the increasingly power ful markers of qaum or nation that had emerged during the reformist moment. My interest in this chapter, thus, is in that which was not Progressive and yet managed to claim a lasting, if not universally acknowledged, place in the greater literary canon of Urdu as it advanced into the twentieth —NOT century. While the Progressives and their ideology for a new lit er a ture are generally (though not necessarily accurately) seen as severing ties with the past, the writers and works I intend to examine, are continuous with reformists such as Nazir Ahmad and Hali and extend from the early part of twentieth century until well into its final de cades. There is, in other words, no rupture or revolt in this case: Prolific, bestselling, ubiquitous writers such as Rashid ul- Khairi, Nasim Hijazi, and Razia Butt, among others, produced a body of Urdu fiction, mostly in the form of the novel, 128 / Martyr/Mujāhid that allows us to see the moment of Muslim reform as decisive and enduring for Urdu and the par tic u lar cultural and po liti cal identity the language comes to hold for Muslims in India and, l ater, Pakistan. Their predilection for the novel form, in fact, complicates Mufti’s well- known argument regarding the failure of the novel as a dominant literary form in twentieth- century Urdu. While Progressive and associated Urdu writers such as Manto, Faiz, and Ismat Chugtai garnered well- deserved literary fame both within the subcontinent and beyond by way of their works finding their way into En glish and gaining scholarly attention in the Euro- American acad emy, writers such as Khairi, Hijazi, and Butt w ere house hold names even before the official creation of Pakistan. To be clear, I am not making an argument here that dismisses the significance the Progressive group has exercised on Urdu literary writing. I am making a case in this chapter for considering that which aesthetes and scholars have largely ignored when writing histories and critical volumes on Urdu, particularly with re spect to the twentieth c entury. I argue that in spite of the parallel rise of a Bloomsbury- inspired movement in Urdu lit er a ture, as espoused by the Progressives, the twentieth century remains critical to the maturation of Urdu lit er a ture as a body of works that claimed the authority to determine and prescribe ways of being Muslim, and of imagining the pasts and futures of the Muslim qaum that had begun to take form in the late nineteenth century. An inadvertent DISTRIBUTION— collective of nationalist writers, if we may describe them as such, takes on the helm of fiction writing in Urdu in the early and middle de cades of the twentieth century, at much the same time as the AIPWA forms and publishes. Their concerns, expressed through serialized or standalone, often romantic, novels are with narrating the past in terms of Muslim FOR conquests and conquerors, with the correction of an errant society, and with the place of women within the larger workings of the nation, or qaum. The perspectivest hese writers take on religion are largely one dimensional and derive from the notion that a chaste and finished Islam was bequeathed to the world during the lifetime of the Prophet Mu- hammad. Their relationship with the idea and realization of Pakistan, —NOT however, is a more complex one, where the emergent nation- state is both an aspiration and an eventual object of nationalist critique. The Maho- metan chronotope, whose evolution and transformation I have traced in earlier chapters, persists in these novels, articulated from a nationalist, at times anticolonial, position. One explanation for the marked absence of writers such as Hijazi and Butt— and to a lesser extent Khairi—in academic volumes on Urdu lit er- a ture or the history of Urdu is the overwhelming success the Progressives the Modern Urdu Novel / 129 commanded as the “modernizers” of Urdu prose. To be sure, Manto and Chugtai, as well as the infamous Angārē group, dealt with obscenity charges in their time, but their cultural capital extended from a changing literary world to that of All- India Radio and the thriving Bombay film industry.5 Little stock, however, has been given to the fact that even as the Progressives took up the mantle against religious orthodoxies and fought for lit er a ture to represent the peasant, prostitute, and laborer as much as it did the nawab, an entire world of fiction, shaped within a series of Urdu journals and serial novels, continued to thrive on account of its unfailing devotion to issues such as sharīf morality, the significance of Islam and Islamic history for Muslims living u nder British rule, and the rights and duties of Muslim women in Indian society. It is from this world of domestic novels and literary journals such as ‘Ișmat and Zamānā, the latter set founded by Khairi, that a new generation of fiction writers in and for Urdu emerges. The purpose of lit era ture, for Khairi or Hijazi, is not to uplift and find beauty in the lives of a “struggling humanity,” as the Progressives would have it, but rather to improve the declining state of the Muslim qaum and restore it to its former moral and po liti cal glory.6 At the same time, it would be simplistic to claim that there was merely contradiction and opposition between the Progressives and this second group. Both, though differently, were consciously writing what can informally be called an avāmī, or “ people’s” lit er a ture, a term first DISTRIBUTION— used in the contexts of Urdu and India by the Progressive writer Ahmad Ali.7 The idea of avāmī functions indirectly against what is a high or elite lit er a ture.

Load more