August 18, 2002

“I LIKE many of my own stories but my favourite is ‘A story in defence of pigs’ which I wrote in 1978. Its subject is conservation of the environment but it is also a dirge on the horrors that are being inflicted on us by ecological disturbances.”

Asad Muhammad Khan, short story writer par excellence, was born into what he calls “genteel poverty” in Bhopal. His grandfather’s property had been taken away because he was not prone to sycophancy. Then he was a very hot tempered man. Showing your temper in front of royalty was a luxury that could not be tolerated for very long. It was enough that he had not been taken and killed in some forest. This was the time of the swadeshi movement and the Khilafat Tehreek.

Asad’s father was thus from a has been family studying in Aligarh among the spoilt offsprings of the nawabs and landlords. He decided that the only way for him to survive was to emphasize his plebeian and common state. So he would wear handloom clothes and wave it around like a flag. This would create quite an impression in those times.

By the time he got married and Asad was born he had become an art teacher in a local school, having in the meantime had the good fortune to attend Tagore’s Santiniketan. He always found a sense of dignity in working with his hands and this is a legacy he passed on to his sons. This was providential because when Asad came to Pakistan he did not shelter in middle class situations but lived in huts and even collected water from the community tap. He worked for more than 37 years in the Karachi Port Trust. His best friends there were the clerks, labourers and dispatchers.

“They would tell me what was in their heart without any hesitation,” he says. “They could come to my house at any time they wanted to just as I would go to theirs.” These encounters laid the foundation of his stories which are about ordinary people in urban locales.

Asad Muhammad Khan began his literary career as a poet, publishing his first poem in 1960, and only much later, in the seventies, did he switch to writing short stories. His first published pieces were a geet (song) and a poem titled “Nau-manzila building”, which appeared in 1960 and received such high critical acclaim in India that ten years later it was included in the book Na’i nazm ka safar, compiled for the MA Urdu course on modern poetry. This book was adopted as a textbook at Aligarh Muslim University and also at other Indian universities offering the Master’s programmes in Urdu. Yet at home in Pakistan the poet continued a relatively anonymous existence, receiving little notice or recognition.

His first short story, “Basode ki Maryam” was published in 1971 in Funoon (Lahore). Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, editor of the journal and a renowned short-story writer and poet, remarked in an interview that even if the genre of the Urdu short story were to become obsolete, this story would live for ever. In the last twenty years it has been read out in cultural gatherings and at universities all over the world, along with another of his stories, “Ma’i dada”. These stories have been cited as examples of outstanding Urdu prose.

Asad’s first collection of works Khirki bhar aasman was published in 1982. It contains twenty years of writings and includes poems as well as short stories. He knew that Urdu books did not sell, but he wanted to put on record all the work he had done up to then. His second book was a collection of short stories titled Burj-i-Khamoshan. Incidentally, both books earned a decent profit.

More importantly, they established him as a writer of considerable strength. His third collection titled Ghusse ki nayee fasal was published in 1998. His latest short collection is called Narbada. Oxford University Press in its Pakistan Writer Series has recently published a collection of twelve of his stories translated into English, under the name The harvest of anger.

Asad Muhammad Khan believes that a writer should experiment with all forms of writing, at least once. For his own part he has also written television plays and serials. And even though his televized historical serial, “Shaheen”, turned out to be quite successful, he still considers the short story his main calling and the life of the common man his main concern.

Asad has extensively researched into the life and times of Sher Shah Suri (1486-1545). Out of this endeavour he wrote a total of thirty-five episodes in what can be described as soap-opera style for a local periodical. Seven other short stories also materialized. Sometimes he takes an event, or a character, or simply a paragraph and weaves a story around it. His fascination with Sher Shah Suri stems from the fact that this legendary monarch rose from a very humble background and thus was able to identify with his subjects.

Among Urdu writers Aziz Ahmad and Manto are his ideologues: Manto for his pure realism and a kind of sensational craftsmanship. Whatever he did for Urdu short stories is legion, “If, for one instant, we remove him from the realm of Urdu short stories then this genre remains a mere anaemic, boring experience, and one that goes a begging for interest. I like Aziz Ahmad for his historical sense and aesthetics as also for his mastery of technique,” Asad observes.

He reads old timers like Rudyard Kipling with the same interest as contemporaries like Julian Barnes, John Updike or Oates. Homer’s Iliad and Kafka’s metaphorical stories are equally important for modern readers. In his opinion, the concept of what is acceptable and what is not i.e the concept of kosher and taboo in literature is almost cruel. “Let whoever wants to write, do so in his own way. Whatever a person wants to read let him. This would indeed be a great blessing.”

Asad says that his creative journey is still on. And that he is a very ambitious writer. In his short career he has adopted many different forms of literary expression. Although one does not find any clear periodical boundaries of satire, symbolism or metaphorical representation in his work, yet in the seventies and eighties he laid greater emphasis on satire and symbolism.

What about the present? “From the eighties onwards I have written more ‘story like’ stories. I have written a lot and will continue to do so independent of these tags. But lately my heart is telling me to write more metaphorical stories like “Tirlochan” [The three worlds],” he says.

He reads his own draft again and again. Sometimes he makes changes as many as 70 times. Until he is satisfied he keeps changing, cutting and adding. He says, “One thing that readers may notice is that I have not selected any particular style or technique for my stories. Going from one story to another I change technique, style of narrative and even language. This is perhaps because my father was an artist. I learnt the art of imagery from him. He would use oil colours generally to make the portraits but worked with crayons as well and would often change his medium going from one painting to another.

“I took lessons in painting in my early years and perhaps this is what makes me choose my tools according to the subject. Maybe this is an aberration in the opinion of those who master a particular style but this is not me.”

Whatever form it takes literary expression must be made available in writing even if it is hidden away for hundreds of years. So the first merit of a piece of writing is that it must not be still-born.

According to Asad, the “Urdu wallahs” are not so effective otherwise they would be using literature as a medium for constructive reform. But he concedes that literature is an end in itself. Vibrant literature expresses life, illuminates it and immortalizes it and can never ever isolate itself from life. The “Urdu wallahs” sometimes become too anxious when they see the literary trends in the West. He feels that wherever something good is happening, be it in the West or the East, it should be adopted.

“This is the way men behave in history. When the subcontinent was under the grip of the Persian speakers and the official language was Persian, our poets sought out avenues of expression in the ghazal and qasida and adopted the Persian idiom and mannerisms. In ghazal we sang of the man as the mehboob. This was not the tradition of this land where we were living, where Kalidas, Tulsi, Surdas, and Mira Bai were creating poetry. What did we take from the subcontinent itself? The local birds were not the bulbul but koels and papiyas, and the rose came from Iran whereas our flower was the gainda, that is, marigold,” he comments.

Is this his lament or an expression of the fact that one can learn from any language or person “from the Eskimos and even from George Bush”?

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