I HAVE before me a collection of short stories where the story writer Mubeen Mirza, while writing his foreword, informs us that he belongs to a generation of writers who matured during the decade of eighties.
Frankly speaking, I am not aware of such distinctive features of the eighties which may compel us to treat writers maturing during those years as a generation of writers distinct from their predecessors. What I know is the fact that the group of writers, who, prior to them, had been recognized as a distinct generation of writers owed their distinctiveness to some new trend or some new mode of expression and not to the decade in which they had come to maturity. The new group of short story writers, that emerged during sixties, was indebted for its distinctive position to a newly discovered mode of expression different from the realistic mode of expression which flourished in our fiction during the thirties, the forties and the early fifties.
The story writers appearing in the later decades of the century were a bit unlucky. They did not carry with them the glamour of some new trend or some new mode of expression to boost them up. However, they hated to be seen in continuation of their predecessors. They nurtured a desire to be recognized as a distinct generation of writers.
However, their counterparts in India fared a little better. They, at least, were enthused with a new anger and had the guts to put up a fight to their seniors. Critics in particular were their target. They were angry with them for their preoccupation with theories such as structuralism and post-modernism. They seemed to treat these theories as their sokans. These critics failed to appreciate their fiction because of their preoccupation with barren theories imported from the West. Such was their thinking. They were assertive, furious and wrote fervently.
A few of them, for instance Mohammad Ashraf, succeeded in writing something worthwhile, which brought for them much praise from the very critics who stood condemned in their eyes.
I came across these angry young writers, though no more young, in the seminar on short stories held at Aligarh University. They seemed to have come there on a mission, each lending support to the other. They were one in condemning the critics and in appreciating each other’s work. Their contemporaries in Pakistan lack this fervour, this sense of solidarity and this kind of courage to fight for their cause. In consequence, they have failed to make their presence felt on the literary scene. But now one soul from among them has come out taking upon himself the responsibility to plead for the cause of a generation, if it really exists.
Mubeen Mirza has been writing short stories since the eighties. It is after about 25 years of writing that he has chosen to bring out his first collection titled as Khauf Kai Asman Talay, which has been published by Academy Bazyaft, Karachi. But, as his long foreword suggests, he does not intend to be acknowledged as a short story writer alone. He, in addition, seems intent to play the role of a spokesman and an interpreter for his generation. His foreword is an ambitious attempt to provide for this generation’s works a perspective as wide as our globalized world is. I am in a fix whether to talk about him as a short story writer or as an ideologue for his generation.
As a short story writer, he deserves compliments for his accomplishment in this fine art of story writing. The collection includes some fine stories which can be admired both as exquisite pieces of short fiction and as expression with a fineness of the awareness of contemporary human situation. It is a situation fraught with the dangers of violence and terrorism. We have here the portrayal of a terror-stricken city. Even when nothing noticeable is happening and things seemingly appear normal, people feel terrorized. Terror has gone deep in them. In a shift from urban to the rural, we find to our horror that the rural world too is not free from violence and terror. It has its own legacy of fears, and terror rooted in the age-old feudalism.
Even in stories which appear purely love stories, something creeps in which reminds us in a shocking way of the violence that is dominating our lives. In one story, it finds expression in male chauvinism which turns blind to the sensitivities of loving, and uses religion for its own benefit.
But while reading these stories, I, at no stage, felt the need to refer to the foreword. It may well serve as a perspectives for the stories written in our cruel times. But where are those stories?
I HAVE before me a collection of short stories where the story writer Mubeen Mirza, while writing his foreword, informs us that he belongs to a generation of writers who matured during the decade of eighties.
