April 13, 2008

The Government College University in Lahore is fast developing into a hub of scholars and writers, who have found here a forum for discussing problems pertaining to literature and other branches of knowledge. Last month, a seminar on the topic of language, literature and culture was held here. Distinguished Indian scholar Dr Gopi Chand Narang arrived from Delhi and made precious contributions to the discussions that took place. A seminar on the topic of psychology and literature was also held under the auspices of the department of psychology. Among the participants were two literary critics, Prof Shamim Hanafi and Prof Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai who had also come in from India. Their active participation in the discussions turned the function into an Indo-Pak seminar.

The names of Freud and Jung have been much in currency in the world of modern Urdu literature. But it was for the first time that modern Urdu intellectuals and critics found themselves face to face with those who exclusively deal in the domain of psychology. This confrontation led to an Urdu critic remarking that professors of psychology should not make intrusions in the psychological study of literature as this job fits well with literary critics.

Our literary intellectuals and critics have served modern psychology by inculcating the ideas of Freud and Jung in the intellectual world of our society, more than scholars and professors of psychology have done. Historically, modern Urdu literature owes its existence and development to two giants — Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Marx’s entrance was staged into our literary world with the blessings of the great poet Allama Iqbal and enjoyed the backing of a great socio-political movement. But Freud enjoyed no such backing. He staged his entry with the sheer force of his thundering ideas.

Soon Marx and Freud emerged as two super powers opposed to each other. During the late 1930s and ’40s, young writers had no option other than joining one bloc of the Progressive Writers’ Movement or the other bloc of the Freudian school of thought. Like Marx, Freud too was a great revolutionary in his own way. As a matter of fact he, with his theory of the unconscious, was a far greater threat to our traditional concept of man and to our morality, which has been inculcated in us by culture and religion.

D. H. Lawrence had explained it better when he said that we all carry on our heads baskets brimming with high ideas, ideals, and concepts, knowing not that within us we carry a ‘Dark Continent’. This Dark Continent being buried deep within us is a great unknown. And a number of writers chose to study man and his behaviour in a Freudian way, to peep into the Dark Continent, and to explore the unknown to whatever extent possible.

This is how Freud influenced our literature, particularly fiction. The story writer is seen probing into what happens in the inner self of an individual and how it influences his behaviour in life. The Progressives condemned this kind of fiction and verse calling it unhealthy subjectivism, a way of escape from the realities of life.

This criticism failed to check the popularity of the Freudian way of thinking. In fact, a challenge to Freud came from his own camp. After almost a decade or so of Freudianism it was revealed to our writers that Freud’s is not the last word in modern psychology, but that there is another giant who has gone a step further.

Credit should go to Mohammad Hasan Askari and Dr Ajmal for introducing Jung and his theory of collective unconscious to the Urdu literary world. He advanced the concept of collective unconscious and in contradiction to individual’s unconscious behaviour, the theory of racial behaviour pattern. Thanks to Jung’s study, all those dastans, mythologies, supernatural tabs, religious legends and rituals which had been dismissed by modern minds on the basis of newly imported rationalism, regained a new meaning altogether.

So this was how modern psychology found its way into Urdu modern literature and influenced our outlook. One may even say that under its influence we find a new angle of vision emerging. But in recent decades because of the emphasis on socio-political consciousness, this angle of vision seems to have been eclipsed. The seminar at GCU has served the purpose of bringing it back into the limelight. On the whole, it was not just an academic exercise on the subject of psychology, but a purposeful seminar which will hope- fully revive our literary world’s involvement in new thoughts and ideas.

The seminar ran in three sessions. In the opening session two lectures were delivered on the subject by two eminent critics, Shamim Hanafi and Suhail Ahmad Khan. The next two sessions were devoted to discussions equally debated upon by writers and psychology professors. I don’t find myself in a position to recollect all what was said and reproduce it in the limited space of this column, but we should hope that the organisers will take care to collect everything that was read and spoken and compile it all in a volume for the benefit of others.