November 05, 2006

“Are you going to waste yourself around this kitchen stove? Why don’t you write?” said Razia Butt’s father to her one day when he found her engrossed in housework.

“The year was 1959 and I was living with my husband who was posted in Peshawar. My father, who also lived in Peshawar, used to visit me once or twice a week in the mornings. It was that day when he commented on my wasting myself in household chores that I realised that my life had more to it. After my marriage, I had forgotten all about my writing,” says Razia Butt, the writer of popular Urdu fiction. The next day Razia’s father brought her some clean sheets of paper along with a pen and lots of encouragement to write. Yet it was many, many days later that she picked up that pen and wrote a seven-minute drama script for the Peshawar Radio station, one for which she also earned a seven rupees royalty. For Butt this was a turning point. She never looked back after that day.

An extraordinary academic achiever since her school and college days, Razia Butt had stood first in her primary school examinations followed by the middle, matric and intermediate exams. “We lived in Peshawar and since there were no extracurricular activities for girls there, my sisters and I, after finishing our schoolwork, read literary magazines or whatever other reading material we could lay our hands on. Our father wanted us all to shine in one field or the other,” reminisces Butt.

Fortunate to have had a father who stood his ground in the face of family pressure against the education of girls, Butt feels lucky to have finished school and college at a time when educating girls was considered unconventional, unnecessary and a mark of undue freedom. Butt also received a lot of encouragement from her teachers. The essays she wrote would be read aloud in class for their perfect orientation and beauty of thought. “A teacher once awarded me hundred out of hundred on an examination essay, which didn’t go down too well with the school’s principal. But my teacher stood her ground and said if she had, had the authority she would have given me hundred and twenty out of the total hundred,” says Butt. “Well, I guess my writing was of very good standard always,” she adds.

She got her first short story published in Hoor, a magazine of no small repute, in 1944. Off and on she would write something and send it to one magazine or the other. Rejection never came her way. Later she also tried her hand at writing plays for the radio, which were much appreciated. Then came marriage and with it both her pen and paper went into silent hibernation, till the time her father jolted her out of her reverie. “I certainly did not miss the writing. I was too involved in adjusting to my new life,” says Butt without an iota of regret in her voice. The only link with literature that was to remain with her for the many years that followed were the summarised plots of English novels narrated to her by her husband who was very fond of reading them. Interestingly Butt never complained about the literary vacuum for she never felt she was sacrificing her talent for something as mundane as housework. “I was never frustrated because I was aware of my responsibilities. Moreover when I did restart my writing years later, I faced no problem,” she says.

Later, when finally she did take up the pen, Butt deliberately organised her day around her husband’s office schedule. She would send her husband to work, do the daily household chores and then sit down to write from 11:00am onwards. “To this day I have followed this routine and I simply cannot write apart from these hours,” says the author. “My husband never had any problems with my writing but the one rule he strictly wanted me to adhere to was to write when he was not around. And I happily adjusted and moulded my schedule to that.”

Adjusting to the challenges of life for Butt has been a habit. She has allowed life to take its course and she has successfully carried out the role of wife, mother, grandmother and now great grandmother along with a successful career as a much read Urdu novelist. “When I observe, see or hear something that touches my heart, I keep it in my mind. I build a plot around it and then the story keeps on developing in my head. Once when it is complete, I put it on paper. And the writing part is very easy,” says she. The novelist in her admits that her writing “is a gift from God” and thus she knows “exactly where to place which sentence or word”. Amazingly, taking a break from writing does not matter so much to her. Whether it is a six-hour break for doing the housework or a six-month vacation like the time she stopped writing to prepare for her daughter’s wedding, she can always pick up the pen from where she had left it as the story, complete to the last sentence, stays with her in her mind. “I can start from the very sentence I have left months ago and easily write to the end,” says Butt. All she needs to do is to jot down the well-crafted sentences and save them in a register which she always keeps handy. Thus she keeps building around the words that come to her in the course of a day’s domestic activity. Butt has a total of 51 novels and more than 350 short stories to her credit apart from the many short plays she has written for radio.

Prolific and highly popular, she admits to a personal trait: “I’ve never been a very public person. It might be because of my daughters. My husband and I have been very protective of them and thus I never attended any literary gathering like other writers do. I have always respected the privacy of my family unit.” Nevertheless, she has enjoyed the fan following and the autobiography that she recently wrote stands as a testimony to just that. “Many people wanted to get to know the person behind the author and I also wanted to tell my life story. There are things in my autobiography that my children might not have agreed to reveal to the public but I said why not, these are facts.”

Razia Butt was an adamant supporter of the Pakistan Movement and her autobiography makes interesting reading for anyone who wants to know what their forefathers went through for the sake of this country. Written in the most effective of styles, the drama of Partition, as told by Butt, who was an eyewitness to some of the most amazing and also some of the most dreadful events of the independence movement, is a truthful account to be cherished by generations to come.

An active imagination has been a part of Razia Butt’s personality as far back as she can recall. From cooking up stories for her younger brothers to keeping her daughters busy building imaginative characters, Butt has always enjoyed her creativity. The muse in her has also never allowed anyone to disturb her thought process or her writing. Never has she changed the draft of a novel’s plot, or a choice of words, nor has she ever succumbed to criticism by any other person. “I do listen to what others have to say about my writing but I never change what I have decided to write,” she says. “Whenever I come across anything that seems interesting — it might be an event, a newspaper report or a changing trend in society — I start thinking about it and then write it down.”

Razia Butt has never idealised a particular style. “I have read the great authors of my time, been impressed by their writing styles but I have never felt the need to copy. My style is simply my own and I see no change in my earlier or new writings.”

Of late Butt has been branded as a novelist who only writes about love and romance. “This,” she says, “is not completely true. Yes, my heroines are mostly beautiful and perfect in many respects but my romances also include some issue or the other. I feel that life is all about love and since my novels and their characters have been inspired by real, feeling people, love and beauty cannot be missed out.” Nevertheless, she does admit that most of her earlier writings were written when she was young in years and had no or very little exposure to matters of the outside world. Thus writing romances came more naturally to her. However, Butt’s novels like Vehsee, a powerful psychological drama or Bano, that exposes the Partition drama to its fullest are ample proof of her creative genius. Appreciation and acclaim for Butt also came when her novels were made into films by Pakistani directors. Naila and Saiqa were adapted for movies that consequently broke records at the box office. However, Butt has not always been so lucky and regrets that some of her best works have been badly twisted and made into movies by the local directors simply for commercial gain. Still, she believes that it is important to forgive and forget in life. Thus she continues to write about love. She keeps no record of her creative endeavours or her awards as she does not place the worth of her books on awards. She says, “To me what truly matters in the end is how people would remember me.”

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)