A WRITER, after a silence of about 51 years, has now chosen to speak out. Perhaps, the kind of recognition and applause he won for his one work entitles him to do so. However, he has made one little mistake.
At times, it so happens in literature that one single piece of writing, say, a short story, ghazal or novel stands out in a way that the rest of the author’s work is overshadowed. He is then known by that single piece of writing. One such instance is that of Mahmood Hashmi, who is known solely because of his one book, Kashmir Udas Hai, a collection of four reportages depicting the situation in Kashmir during the fateful days of 1947-48.
The book was published in 1950, winning instant recognition. As some parts of the book had already appeared in Mumtaz Shirin’s journal Naya Daur, sensitive readers and critics were ready to give it a warm reception. The two critics, Mohammad Hassan Askari and Mumtaz Shirin, who mattered most at the time, were foremost in praising the work. Though he had been writing since the early ’40s, it was now that he found himself in the ranks of the most representative writers of Pakistan.
Perhaps, Mahmood Hashmi had the realization that while writing his reportages, he had reached the highest point in his career. He felt content with what he had achieved. And that was the end of the creative writer in him. So Kashmir Udas Hai was followed by a long period of silence, almost half-a-century. During these long years, the author was absent from the literary scene. Soon after, he went into oblivion, but his work refused to go with him. The Kashmir problem lingered on with no solution in sight. This helped the book to retain its relevance.
What added to its value is the fact that during these 50 years, no one from among those writers who, in their patriotic fervour chose to write on the situation in Kashmir, was able to write, in prose or in poetry, something significant enough to rival Kashmir Udas Hai. The work stands unchallenged to this day. The author, on the other hand, had managed during this period to settle in London, in complete isolation from his work.
It is now after his 50-year-long barren period that the writer has cared to look back at his estranged masterpiece, and found to his pleasant surprise that it is still treated as a significant piece of writing in relation to Kashmir. This gave him renewed confidence and he chose to speak. So, the new edition of the book carries with it a postscript, where he is seen gloating over the compliments he received intermittently from different quarters for his work.
But as stated above, while doing this, he has made a little mistake. Along with the new edition of Kashmir Udas Hai, he has brought out one more volume, a collection of his pre-Partition writings under the title Yeh Shair-o-Afsana Nawis. Perhaps, he hopes that in the good company of Kashmir Udas Hai, this volume, too, will be able to win the same kind of warm reception. I doubt if it will be so.
Kashmir Udas Hai has already been burdened with a long postscript. It can hardly afford to bear an additional burden of critical articles written during the years before Partition. By the way, both these books have been published by Al-Faisal, Lahore.
I don’t mean to say that the articles included in this volume have no literary value. They may or may not be rated as valuable pieces of literary criticism. But their historic value can hardly be questioned. These articles, with the exception of one which has recently been rewritten, tell us much about the literary scene during the ’40s. But the fact is that these critical writings failed to establish him as a critic. All his literary reputation owes itself to his four reportages with no reference to his earlier writings. They are the outcome of a great experience he had undergone during 1947-48. He found himself, along with Kashmir, engulfed in a critical situation demanding from him the mettle of a writer. He rose to the occasion and absorbed the whole situation in a creative way.
One fine morning, he somehow managed to escape from the troubled land into the jungles of Tararkhel. There, he sat down to record what he had seen and suffered. No writing table. No neat and clean sheets of paper. He just sat under a shady tree of Tararkhel and began recording the historic moments in the troubled land, as he had lived them.
What has been recorded may be seen as a document. But it is at the same time more than a document, a piece of art. Mumtaz Shirin compared this writing with Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, a portrait of the city during the rise of Nazism in Germany. One may also be tempted to compare it with Koestler’s Dialogue with Death. But in Urdu, we can hardly refer to any writing, at least in contemporary literature, which runs parallel to it.
A WRITER, after a silence of about 51 years, has now chosen to speak out. Perhaps, the kind of recognition and applause he won for his one work entitles him to do so. However, he has made one little mistake.
