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March 16, 2003
Review: Nostalgic for history
A PASSION for history is an essential ingredient of the South Asian psyche. This is despite the daunting fact that we hardly ever learn from history, or use it as the defining perspective of our reflexes and actions.
The historical Urdu novel is an old tradition, and has been a pillar of strength in our literature. This genre of writing produced some sterling names, like Maulana Abdul Haleem Sharar and, in the post-partition age, a romantic like Naseem Hijazi with a searing nostalgia for the halcyon, glory, days of the Muslims. The partition itself spawned a rich milieu for novels that drew heavily on that painful and tortuous experience, and led to some of the greatest Urdu novels, such as Abdullah Hussain’s Udas Naslein, and Quratul Ain Hyder’s seminal Aag ka Darya.
However, the Urdu short story has been conspicuously bereft of rich historical matrix. Only two names stand out in this department, Quratul Ain Hyder and Intizar Hussain who know the art of weaving history effortlessly into the mainstream of their narrative. Not many others come anywhere close to them in the art of blending history into a short story, giving it a texture and flavour uniquely its own without losing the main stock.
Dr Muzaffaruddin Farooqi is not a familiar or household name in Urdu literature or, more precisely, in Urdu short story. A clinical chemist by profession, and an Indian expatriate settled in the US, he doesn’t have the ideal credentials to claim a place in the pantheon of modern Urdu short story writing. Yet he seems to have an impeccable, innate, insight into the history of South Asia, its arcane religiosity and religious myths, and its fascinating tapestry of richly brilliant cultures competing with one another and trying to dominate each other.
Perhaps his native Hyderabad Deccan, located at the historical crossroads of the subcontinent, helped instil such a formidable sense of history in him. Farooqi’s erudition in the history and mythology of the region is, undoubtedly, impressive. His scholarship in Hindu mythology — the Vedas, the Mahabharta, et al — is his forte and is almost intimidating to an average reader of his short stories woven around history.
Farooqi’s reconstruction of South Asian history is founded in his belief that this land of fabulous variety and contradiction, inheriting such an enormously rich texture of religions and cultures, has gone through various ages and stages of exploitation of man in the name of religion and religious myth.
Most of the 14 short stories in this collection have been exquisitely crafted around historical themes. My favourite is a very poignant one called “Sheesha” (Mirror). It is the story of a Hindu from Meerut who kills his Muslim neighbour in a bout of communal frenzy because he had been brainwashed by a communalist agent-provocateur posing as a saint. Mohan, the assailant, was drafted by the communalists because he always resented his Muslim victim’s little patch of land sandwiched between his extensive holdings.
It was only afterward that he learned from an old testimonial left behind by his ancestor how the victim, Sultan Deen, happened to acquire his land. Sultan’s ancestor, a brave soldier from Oudh, had saved Mohan’s forebear from bandits and was rewarded with that piece of land. This discovery drives Mohan crazy. He sees Sultan’s bleeding face every time he looks into a mirror. To atone for his crime, he becomes a convert to communal harmony and a sworn enemy of the communalists.
Another touching narrative is “Teen Mulk ek Kahani” (Three countries, one story), which has lent the book its title. It is the saga of a Muslim family from Bihar whose progenitor fought alongside the legendary Syed Ahmed Shaheed against the Sikhs and the Farangis (the British) and laid down his life for his motherland’s dignity.
His progeny faces another jihad in East Pakistan, fights on the side of the Pakistan army but is rendered destitute and forsaken in Bangladesh. A son manages to trek into Pakistan but faces an agonizing travail to justify that he is really a Pakistani and not an Indian agent. His plight, for being a Pakistani by conviction, is most touching and inspiring.
Farooqi’s short stories not only take the reader through various layers of socio-cultural accretion. He also guides them through the labyrinth of history with his richly textured narrative. He is more a critic who constantly goads the religious and historical conscience of his reader with a candid critique of how the rights of man were ruthlessly bartered away by sages and conquerors in the name of God.
Historical continuity is the main thrust in Farooqi’s narration, a common thread which binds all the strands of his thought into an unbroken chain. His canvas of time is vast. The journey of nostalgia for him and his reader begins in the Vedic age and meanders through centuries of Brahmin raj, the ascendancy of Muslim rule in South Asia, the brutal onslaught of western colonialism, and the vagaries of contemporary predators unleashing colossal human tragedies in Kashmir, Palestine, Bosnia and Kosovo.
In the process of dissecting layers of history, Farooqi demolishes some titans and reconstructs some demons. Buddha gets the chop of an iconoclast as a non-revolutionary, a much-maligned Aurangzeb comes across as a man of great tolerance and accommodation for others’ beliefs, such as Hinduism. Farooqi proffers the existence of Wishwanath mandir (temple) in Benaras, side by side with an Alamgiri mosque, as an irrefutable evidence of Alamgir’s tolerant religious temper. Many may not agree with that assessment. A man, cold-hearted enough to incarcerate his father and slaughter his own brothers for power can never covet the mantle of tolerance.
It is true that history has been used allegorically and symbolically by Urdu writers quite liberally. But Farooqi doesn’t subsist on symbols or allegorical analogies alone. His structure of story is built solidly on foundations of history and he uses socio-historical progression of societies as the mortar to keep his narrative together. A creditable thing is that he has lost nothing of his passion for history of his native land while living so far away from it in a social ambience poles apart from his own. But after all, the exploitation of man in the west is no less or different than exploitation in other parts of the world.
But Farooqi is in imminent danger of not becoming acceptable to, much less popular with, an average reader of the Urdu short story for two very basic and mundane reasons.
One is his heavy overlay of history and mythology as the basic backdrop for his stories. His vignettes belong to the erudite, the literati elite with a profound insight into history, which, in any case, is becoming an increasingly rare and esoteric commodity.
Secondly, he does not use the language familiar to Urdu short story readers. His narrative may be richly textured but his diction, like his sense of history, is more appealing to those well-heeled in both literature and history than to a layman. A short-story draws a reader to its theme like a magnet when the language is familiar. Farooqi’s turn of phrase wanders into an uncharted land. It is more forbidding than welcoming.
Teen Mulk ek Kahani (Collection of short stories)
By Dr Mohammad Muzaffaruddin Farooqi
Sadaf Publications, Chicago, USA Distributed in Pakistan by Zain Publications, A/8 Nadeem Corner, Block N, North Nazimabad, Karachi 74700.
Tel: (021) 667 9796, 664 5177
ISBN 1-56316-503-1
200pp. Rs250
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