THE GREATEST URDU STORIES EVER TOLD Also by Muhammad Umar Memon
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THE GREATEST URDU STORIES EVER TOLD Also by Muhammad Umar Memon My Name is Radha: The Essential Manto Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories Naiyer Masud: The Occult The HarperCollins Book of Urdu Short Stories An Epic Unwritten: The Penguin Book of Partition Stories The Colour of Nothingness: Modern Urdu Short Stories Fear and Desire: An Anthology of Urdu Short Stories Hasan Manzar: A Requiem for the Earth Abdullah Hussein: Stories of Exile and Alienation Intizar Husain: The Seventh Door and Other Stories The Tale of the Old Fisherman: Contemporary Urdu Short Stories Abdullah Hussein: Night and Other Stories ALEPH BOOK COMPANY An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India First published in India in 2017 by Aleph Book Company 7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110 002 English translation and Introduction copyright © Muhammad Umar Memon 2017 Cover illustration: Detail from ‘Flower studies’, the Darah Shikoh Album; attributed to Muhammad Khan © The British Library Board All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Aleph Book Company. ISBN: 978-93-83064-07-6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. For Luca and Kai with much affection CONTENTS Introduction 1. Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire NAIYER MASUD 2. The Shepherd ASHFAQ AHMAD 3. The Shroud MUNSHI PREMCHAND 4. Toba Tek Singh SAADAT HASAN MANTO 5. Laajwanti RAJINDER SINGH BEDI 6. Aanandi GHULAM ABBAS 7. The Saga of Jaanki Raman Pandey ZAKIA MASHHADI 8. Sunlight ABDULLAH HUSSEIN 9. Of Fists and Rubs ISMAT CHUGHTAI 10. Sukhe Saawan ZAMIRUDDIN AHMAD 11. Banished JAMILA HASHMI 12. Beyond the Fog QURRATULAIN HYDER 13. The Wagon KHALIDA ASGHAR 14. The Back Room INTIZAR HUSAIN 15. Voices MUHAMMAD SALIM-UR-RAHMAN 16. Do You Suppose It’s the East Wind? ALTAF FATIMA 17. Ma’i Dada—The Man With Three Names ASAD MUHAMMAD KHAN 18. The Old Mansion IKRAMULLAH 19. Two Old Kippers SIDDIQ AALAM 20. Fable of a Severed Head SAJID RASHID 21. The Pose ANWER KHAN 22. The Man SYED MUHAMMAD ASHRAF 23. A Sheet SALAM BIN RAZZAQ 24. The Vultures of the Parsi Cemetery ALI IMAM NAQVI 25. The Tree TASADDUQ SOHAIL Notes on the Authors Notes on the Translators Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION Fiction in its limited Western sense and in two of its major forms— the novel and short story—is only a recent and borrowed phenomenon in Urdu. Exceptionally rich in poetic creation, the pre- modern Urdu literary tradition offers few works of belles-lettres in prose that can compare favourably with modern notions of the short story or novel. It isn’t exactly that Urdu lacked fiction of any kind. There was always the dastan, to be sure. But the dastan, until it was finally written down and printed in the nineteenth century, was an oral and anonymous composition, narrated by professional dastan- gos or story-tellers for the entertainment of feudal or metropolitan aristocracy, though it didn’t preclude public recitals for the amusement of the masses. More significantly, the dastan, because of its flair for exuberant fantasy and the supernatural, used plot and character in fundamentally disparate ways from Western fiction. Here, the intent and design was to prove or disprove, rather than to reveal, some established or preordained truth about life. It referred all causality to supernatural rather than to human or natural agencies, offered a different notion of time, and its characters were unavoidably two-dimensional. Stripped of individuality, they were commissioned to personify abstract ideas. The dastan was thus a different—but by no means inferior—fictional possibility from the Western novel and short story. Although artistically more refined works of fiction were still roughly a hundred years in the future, some transitional work had already begun to appear in the early nineteenth century, as in Mir Amman’s Baagh-o-Bahaar (1801) and Rajab Ali Beg Surur’s Fasaana-ye ‘Ajaa’ib (1834). However, they did not depart in any significant way from the long-standing tradition of the dastan, except perhaps in length. And while its setting was contemporary, its contents in some respects new, and its dependence on supernatural incident practically non-existent, Pandit Ratan Nath Sarshar’s Fasaana-ye Aazaad (serialized between 1878 and 1879 in Avadh Akhbaar) too, did not manage to break away entirely from the style of the dastan. Not until the novels of Deputy Nazir Ahmad (d. 1912) would the prolonged courtship with the dastan finally appear to break off, only to be resumed briefly in the works of his younger contemporary, Abdul Halim Sharar. Nazir Ahmad was motivated less by a creative impulse than by a concern for the moral education of his own children. For greater effect, he turned to the form of the novel: a story with a plot—but nonetheless a story to teach, yoked inexorably in the service of moral instruction. He wrote several novels. All shared his unfailing touch for realism. The idiom was unpretentious, crisp, and close to everyday speech. Often his prose managed to achieve great evocative power. But ultimately, Nazir Ahmad’s transparent didacticism only managed to subvert the notion of fiction as an autonomous realm. With Abdul Halim Sharar (d. 1926), a journalist and pioneer of historical romance in Urdu, the world of Urdu letters began to harken back to the dastan, or so it seems. He wrote out of a desire to rehabilitate Islam and sing its bygone glory at a time when Muslims were on the retreat in practically all areas of their political life. Their pride had been badly hurt in the 1857 War of Independence, which they had lost. Sharar’s romances, of which he wrote many, flouted every law of probability and played fast and loose with history. But this didn’t deter the Muslims from loving them, mostly for their balmy effect; their immense therapeutic potential. It was this fictional background against which Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa wrote his Umraao Jaan Adaa (1899)—the first true novel in Urdu, more in the sense of fundamentals than in refinements. For Ruswa hadn’t fully managed to suppress the didactic element, yet this element was least intrusive or jarring. What Ruswa had managed to achieve was considerable: a sense of character with distinct selfhood; a keen understanding of the mechanics of good fiction. He told his story skilfully; he gave it a well-constructed and coherent plot which developed according to believable causality; and he also knew how to enliven the work with dialogue full of subtlety, wit and humour. Although the short story had made its hesitant appearance during this period, its employment by the Urdu writer was both sporadic and tentative. Not until Munshi Premchand (1880–1936), the first professional short story writer in Urdu, did it develop into a discrete genre and a major landmark of literary topography. But even in Premchand, the notion of fiction as an autonomous realm was relentlessly subordinated to a notion of fiction as an instrument of protest, reform, and redress. As much was already clear in his very first short story, ‘World’s Priceless Gem’ (1905). In the pervasive, gushy and oversweet romanticism of the period, it set the tone for a new kind of literature—at once socially more aware and aggressively patriotic. However, there is enough evidence to suggest that in his later work, as in the short story, ‘The Shroud’ (1936)—a masterpiece of wry humour and clawing irony subsumed by a dispassionate, objective narrative style—he was slowly edging towards some notion of fiction’s autonomy. His limitations aside, Premchand’s chief contribution lay in helping the short story emerge as a distinct, freestanding narrative genre. He was also able to give it a more expansive range of topics and, more importantly, finalize its inevitable and long-pending break with the cloying romanticism of his time, best exemplified by such writers as Sajjad Hyder Yildirum and Niaz Fatehpuri. Premchand’s discovery of rural life and its conflicts as potential fictional subject matter opened new possibilities for many of his contemporaries. Under his influence, Pandit Sudershan, Ali Abbas Husaini, Akhtar Orainvi, Suhail Azimabadi, Lam Ahmad, Upendra Nath Ashk, and Hayatullah Ansari produced many short stories focusing on life in rural India. The joint legacy of Ruswa and Premchand was enriched by the publication, in 1933, of Angaare (Embers), a collection of ten short stories by a group of four young writers: Ahmed Ali (d. 1994)—the future author of the celebrated English novel Twilight in Delhi, Sajjad Zaheer (d. 1973), Rashid Jahan (d. 1951), and Mahmuduzzafar (d. 1954)—all from the urban upper-middle class, and all highly educated. Embers strove for an alignment of literature with the contemporary socio-political reality of India. At a deeper level, however, because the writers were well read in Western fiction, the work introduced a more varied and relatively more complex treatment of the form of the short story, under what appeared to be unmistakable Marxist and Freudian influences. Naive and simplistic from today’s perspective, these stories nonetheless carried within them the embryo of some of the future developments in the form.