WRITERS in days gone by were fortunate in having the freedom lost to us. They had the freedom to write in accordance with their own lights. The listeners and the readers in the time of Mir and Ghalib were humble and open-minded. They had no ideology and no theory of poetry to recommend to their favourite poets. They listened to them with an open mind and judged the verses on the basis of their literary merit. In this they were solely guided by their taste.
Now we are living in different times. The genuine reader of literature is a vanishing breed. The newly born breeds, whom the poor writer is faced with are critics, mediamen, and a crowd of intellectuals and semi-intellectuals. They all are seen bent upon dictating the poor writer and prescribing for him the way he should think and write in accordance with their ideological thinking or some nationalistic notions. It requires on the part of the writer a deep faith in his own creative experience to refuse to toe their line and take the risk of being unpopular with them.
I have been provoked to write all this after reading Khalida Husain’s newly published novel, titled as Kaghazi Ghat. One may wonder, how this discussion is related to this novel. Let me explain.
Khalida Husain has been writing since the early sixties. It was during those years that she emerged as a short story writer with an intensely subjective bent of mind, which found its expression in a symbolic diction. That was the time when the Urdu short story had taken a new turn. Getting rid of realism, hitherto so popular with us, it took to a different mode of expression, somewhat abstract and symbolic. This new kind was branded as Tajridi Afsana, abstract short story. This mode of expression was most suited to the kind of experience Khalida Husain (then known as Khalida Asghar) had brought with her. Hers was a world steeped in subjective feelings. It seemed so natural with her to internalize everything exterior that found a way in her story. So among her contemporaries, she was most successful in writing this kind of story. She wrote brilliant stories carrying with them echoes from Kafka and Camus.
These stories in no way meet the above-mentioned demands made in the name of social reform, or revolution, or patriotism. They could not. The very sensibility, which had given birth to these stories, could not afford to reconcile with such demands. Not that these stories lack in the awareness of the socio-political realities of our times. Her story Sawari (Wagon as translated by M.U. Memon) can well be understood and interpreted in the background of the socio-political situation of our times. But the mode of expression in these stories will not allow them to accommodate such a situation in a realistic way.
But now the story writer seems to have yielded to these demands which, after all, have an attraction. The novel speaks of this change in attitude.
Khalida Husain was hitherto known exclusively as a short story writer. It is now that she has ventured into the novel. Kaghazi Ghat is her first novel published by Dost Publications, Islamabad.
The novel may be read as the portrayal of the sad plight of women in our society. Here is a bunch of girls, highly educated, highly cultured, sensitive, and belonging to the elite, living in an idealistic world they are seen talking of all fine things including literature. In their idealism they think of contemporary writers as romantic figures belonging to some other world. But with each of them, marriage comes as a catastrophe, resulting in the crash of their idealistic world.
Along with fictional characters we see a few actual figures appearing with their actual names. Taking a cue from this situation one may feel tempted to discover an autobiographical touch in the novel. But it is so normal in the kind of fiction Khalida writes. We have only to see if the novelist has been able to convert a factual situation into a fictional mode in a convincing way. What, however, is disturbing in the novel is the intrusion of contemporary events in an abrupt way. The detailed references to the war of 1965 and to the events in East Pakistan in 1971 don’t fit in well in the scheme of the novel. They may rather be seen as a discordant note in the novel. As said before, Khalida’s fiction has a very different temper. It can hardly afford to accommodate the kind of patriotic outpourings we find in her novel.
Apart from this discordant, note the novel is a fine piece of writing and has a flavour very different from the one found in contemporary Urdu novels. The world portrayed is typically a female world. Only occasionally we come across a male character. The few male characters, mostly ugly husbands, appear to be an anomaly in this otherwise beautiful world.
WRITERS in days gone by were fortunate in having the freedom lost to us. They had the freedom to write in accordance with their own lights. The listeners and the readers in the time of Mir and Ghalib were humble and open-minded. They had no ideology and no theory of poetry to recommend to their favourite poets. They listened to them with an open mind and judged the verses on the basis of their literary merit. In this they were solely guided by their taste.
