Dr Shahid Siddiqi is an educationist, linguist, research scholar and — ahem — a novelist, too. His research-based books on education have earned him a name in the field. And he has penned a novel Aadhe Adhoore Khwaab. Sounds incongruous?
Yes, it does, but, as Asif Farrukhi has mentioned in his intro to the novel, in our society most of the social scientists neither have any interest in creative work nor have the ability to express creativity in writing. This makes Shahid Siddiqi an exception. Does that mean that the incongruity is in society and not the social scientist or scholar with a creative streak?
But then the situation is not much different in the west either. Quoting CP Snow, Farrukhi says that Snow had lamented the gap between literary persons and the scientists long ago. Snow had delivered in 1959 a lecture titled ‘The two cultures’ that sparked a heated debate. He was of the view that a big hindrance to solving the problems of the world was the snapped communication between the sciences and humanities. Sciences and arts had become two different cultures and each knew nothing about the other, he said in the lecture, that later appeared as a full-length book. Snow, being a novelist and a scientist himself, was a good example of how a scientist can blend literary, artistic and creative ingenuity with scientific research.
We in our society have some shining examples of scientists showing a remarkable talent for art, literature and creativity. Saleem-uz-Zaman Siddiqi, the world-renowned Pakistani scientist was an artist of considerable merit and used to paint while studying in Europe for a higher degree in science. He loved poetry, too.
Dr Raziuddin Siddiqi, another scientist of ours too, was well-versed with literary trends and wrote some good pieces in Urdu prose. Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear scientist, has a deep love and understanding of poetry. Even when he was a student in Germany for higher education in science, Dr Qadeer Khan used to maintain a notebook in which he would jot down his favourite Urdu and Persian verses. Titled Uraaza and compiled by Jabbar Mirza, the facsimile of Dr Abdul Qadeer’s poetic notebook in his own handwriting was published a few years ago from Lahore.
But science and art are divorced in our society. Therefore, Shahid Siddiqi’s novel comes as a pleasant surprise. What is more surprising is that recently the National Book Foundation has published a new edition. In Urdu, the second edition of a book is an occasion for celebration itself. And if the book is a novel by a researcher it is all the more pleasantly surprising.
Aadhe Adhoore Khwaab is a novel of ideas, or, as some would like to have it, philosophical fiction. In western literature, this genre is quite common and the novelist does not have to be ashamed or keep it secret that he or she has some idea and wants to discuss it through a plot and some characters. Works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoyevsky and Hermann Hesse are good examples of philosophic fiction. In such works, sometimes the reader feels that the author is digressing from idea to idea, but this is exactly how the author wants to drive his or her point home, using a simple story to explain the philosophical dilemma of the characters and highlight some difficult questions that may culminate in a breakdown in the society.
Aadhe Adhoore Khwaab has a simple plot but it is not the story that Dr Siddiqi wants to narrate; it is the theme, with many smaller themes, that he wants to discuss. Being an educationist he wants to tell what makes a perfect and ideal teacher, how an ideal teacher can change society and how can he or she create more ideal teachers like himself or herself. The main character of the novel is, naturally, a professor, named Saharan Roy. Most of the other characters are students, impressed and inspired by the professor’s views, his philosophy, his way of teaching and his commitment to certain ideals. Ultimately, the teacher dies of torture in police custody but refuses to name the students responsible for unrest. But he leaves behind his philosophy, his half-sown dreams, idealism and a host of students who are willing to emulate him.
Let us hope that the half-finished dreams that Shahid Siddiqi has all along been sowing may germinate and reach the stage of fruition. What we need is the scientist with creativity to see things in perspective and address some of our problems in a creative way with the wisdom acquired through research.
Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2016
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