September 5, 2004

AN unassuming, non-obtrusive man who would be lost in a crowd without anybody noticing that a giant had walked this way. Simple and casual but very relaxed, clad in kurta pyjama and a jhola slung over his shoulder, he is a literary giant. He has dominated the field of Hindi fiction for decades and is one of the most influential writers in India today. He takes time out from the session of papers during a conference and sits back on a bench besides the flower-beds in the Alhamra Hall at Lahore to smoke his cigarette without much ado.

He sits back and enjoys talking about fiction, the confusion immediately after partition, his admiration for Manto, his excitement at being in Lahore, his new novel enigmatically titled Kitney Pakistan (How Many Pakistans?) so much so that I, a staunch admirer of his short stories, dwell on these while he keeps harking back to the novel. We strike middle ground and our conversation runs into a second and third session.

Kamleshwar was born in a small town called Manpuri near Kanpur in 1932. He lost his father at an early age and his mother had to work hard to bring him up. He says that this instilled in him respect for labour and the ability to smile in the face of adversity. He did his masters from Allahabad University in 1954. He started his career as a journalist at an early age. He wrote one of his best-known stories “Raja Nirbansia” at the age of 22 and went on to acquire a reputation as a skilled storyteller and a fine writer. Stories such as “Qasbay ka admi”, “Dewa ki maan”, “Raatain”, “Mass ka dariya”, “Us ki jheel” followed, establishing Kamleshwar as a household name in Hindi fiction. In her preface to an anthology of Indian fiction, Qurratulain Hyder paid him a rare but well-deserved tribute:

“Kamleshwar is a pioneer of the New Story Movement which began in the mid-fifties. The New Story concerned itself with the genuineness of experience and the degradation of human values. Kamleshwar, who is today one of the leading writers in Hindi is known for his readable style. He does not use an artificial or contrived “literary Hindi” and writes about the ordinary lives led by ordinary people in small towns and suburbs”

Kamleshwar went on to acquire an even bigger reputation as a media-man. A number of successful films were made on his novels (“Aandhi” is the first name which would come to most people’s minds) and he wrote several scripts for India’s film industry. He made a very successful transition to the smaller screen and was associated with the Indian TV since almost the very beginning of TV in India. History with all its colourful dramatis personnae becomes a long drawn court case in Kitnay Pakistan as the Babri mosque remains a living issue. The novel went on to win prestigious literary awards. It was termed a novel with a “cosmic vision” by the eminent critic Professor Gopi Chand Narang while Shamim Hanafi read it in line with “national allegories” being written these days. He regards it as a futuristic creation, an inner landscape with the combination of history and meta-history.

When I ask him to reflect back on his long and eventful career as a fiction-writer, it is to the partition that he returns, “when I look back at my earlier stories, then this was the period when India had won its freedom and along with it came the creation of Pakistan. It was a period of turmoil. Radcliffe drew a line and one fine morning some people became Pakistanis. But literature does not recognize such boundaries. I understand that there was a political exigency because of which this happened and I accept it. The real question came up that on both sides of the borders we need welfare and prosperity of our people because they have been through shock and pain. We wanted that period of shock to come to an end. Those writers who came to India from the other side — from Punjab and from Sindh — this was reflected in their poetry and fiction too.”

This is the aftermath of partition. But I am keen on his part of the story. Kamleshwar goes back to his ancestral town. “It is a small town between Agra and Etah. So I feel that there are two “buzurgs” whose hands are on my shoulders. These are Amir Khusrau and Nazeer Akbarabadi. Or perhaps the other one is really Ghalib. So I have grown up in their shadow.” He recounts that he belongs to a “kaisth” family with traditional roots in Persian and Urdu.

He recalls that his formal schooling began with a pandit and a maulvi coming to teach him. He was asked to dip a pen and write the “alif” on a takhti. “So it is with this tradition that I started my career. This influenced my thinking and my later work.” He talks about his long story “Lautay Huey Musafir” which is set in a small mohalla of his home town.

“Nothing much happened in our town. There was no attack, no abuse. Nobody said anything to each other.” He recounts that the people who lived in this mohalla were Muslims who worked as craftsmen. They were tailors, watchmakers, circus performers, makers of musical ornaments. Somebody came and whispered that you have to go to Pakistan. In the dead of the night the whole mohalla reached the junction. But there was no train for them. Those who were supposed to take them to Pakistan never showed up.

These poor people stayed at the junction, waited and then were dispersed all over. They never came back to the original basti. They had to take up different jobs, so the glass-bangle maker started pulling a rickshaw. After about a decade when a tube-well division opened up in the town some of them trickled back as daily wage labourers. Those who were children came back as young men.

“They were the travellers coming back. And this is what I mean, that there should not be a division among people’s hearts. There should be no parting in our love, in our understanding and our civilization.”

Kamleshawar is very clear in pointing out where the schism occurred. “Savarkar coined the term of the Hindutva as something distinct from Hindus.” This term has further created a group within a group and this is the kind of separatism which he finds disturbing. “In this novel too my theme is that how far can you go in reducing the space for man? How much further can you go dividing up people and creating smaller and smaller pieces? How many more borders between man and man?” It is politics which has created these distances, he says.

A commentary on the Babri mosque runs through the novel. “If Babar wanted to, he could have easily demolished the Krishan janam-bhoomi in Mathura which is only 50 kilometres away from his capital in Agra. Why did he need to travel all the way to a place where Ram is supposed to have been born. But these are mythological characters. These myths are being turned into history. This leads to the confusion, and you can read in the “Babarnama” that Babar had asked Humayun to refrain from cow-slaughter. Tulsi Das wrote his Ramayana in the very Ayodhya and he does not say that the Ram janam-bhoomi has been turned into a mosque.”

Kamleshwar refers to the great Tusli Das and says that literature bears testimony and it can tell where exactly the Hindutvadis have usurped mythology as history. “This history is being used to create a Hindu hegemony and this very element is being opposed in India by none other than Hindus.”

In order to accommodate such diverse themes, he had to break open the framework of the novel. “I had to go deep into Indian culture and dip into the waters flowing underground. “I had to explore the civilizations which came to us from Central Asia. This was a large civilizational belt and I wonder why it was attacked again and again. Europe had not even been introduced to civilization when these cultures were prospering in our part of the world. They had taken a firm root in our earth. So when a museum is attacked in Baghdad, I feel sad as much as I would if it had been a museum in Lahore or Mathura. It is here that our entire history lies and these are the moving fingers which paint, draw and write epics. If this skill is lost, can we survive?” Kamleshwar asks taking a deep puff from his all but extinguished cigarette.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)