December 16 marks the occasion when East Pakistan became Bangladesh, a separate and independent country. A huge body of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, discusses the reasons and events leading up to the creation of Bangladesh and what happened in its aftermath. But most of it is in English or Bengali.
In Urdu, a few non-fiction works explore the issues related to the tragic events of 1971. Urdu fiction, it is believed, could not come up with the kind of response that we find in the shape of short stories written in the wake of 1947 riots and massacres.
But the notion is only partially true as the debacle of 1971 did influence some of our writers deeply. Mas’ood Ash’er, it is said, became a short story writer because of the tragic events that took place in 1971 in former East Pakistan.
Intizar Hussain, Ibrahim Jalees, Mas’ood Mufti, Umm-e-Ammara and some other short story writers were deeply inspired by the human tragedy and wrote some moving pieces.
Shahzad Manzar’s Nadya kahan hai tera des and Jameel Usman’s Jilaa vatan are two collections of short stories that include many short stories written specifically with former East Pakistan’s situation as background.
Urdu novelists, too, have reflected on it, though the novels depicting the issue are not as many as one would have wished. Altaf Fatima’s Chaltaa musaafir (1981) was the first Pakistani Urdu novel whose theme was the fall of East Pakistan.
Tariq Mahmood’s Allah megh de (1986), Razia Faseeh Ahmed’s Sadyon ki zanjeer (1988) and Salma Awan’s Tanha (1989) followed suit.
In the 1990s Tariq Ismail Saagar’s Luhoo ka safar and Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s Raakh depicted the same theme.
Muhammad Hameed Shahid’s novella Mitti Aadam khaati hai (2007), too, tells the tale of some characters set in former East Pakistan. Though Abdullah Hussain’s Nadaar log (1999) has some scenes and characters set in East Pakistan and one finds Maulana Bhashani, too, in it, the novel has too big a canvas to paint the issue in full details and so many other aspects have sort of overshadowed the Bangladesh issue.
But most of the short stories written against the backdrop of 1971 debacle remain buried in the literary magazines. Some have been included in collections of short stories but finding the individual stories published in any form or shape is not easy for the ones who want to read the stories written on a specific theme.
Anthologies come in handy in such situations. Therefore, those who wish to read Urdu short stories written in the wake of 1971 would be delighted that an anthology of such stories has been published. Titled Zameen zaalim hai and edited by Dr Basheer Mansoor, it includes 22 short stories by some well-known Urdu short story writers such as Intizar Hussain, Razia Faseeh Ahmed, Ibrahim Jalees, Mas’ood Mufti, Rasheed Amjad, Farkhanda Lodhi, Jameel Usman, Shahzad Manzar, A. Hameed, Akhter Jamal, Mas’ood Ash’er, Agha Suhail, Umm-e-Ammara, Ahmed Zainuddin, Ghulam Muhammad and some others.
Dr Basheer Mansoor had been teaching Urdu at Peshawar’s Qurtuba University. These days he is teaching at Government Post-Graduate College, Talagang, district Chakwal. He has collected some moving and saddening pieces of Urdu short stories written on the theme. And one of the reasons for his apt job is the fact that he holds a PhD on The impact of Fall of Dhaka on Urdu prose, conferred on him by Punjab University.
He has taken full advantage of his study and, as put by Dr Moinuddin Aqeel in his intro to the book, “has been able to put together an anthology that is not only first of its kind but also reflects Dr Basheer Mansoor’s commitment to nationalistic themes.” Dr Aqeel has in his intro beautifully summed up the works of Urdu fiction written with a political and social background.
Dr Basheer Mansoor says in his preface that “the Urdu short stories written on the tragedy of fall of East Pakistan are scattered either in literary journals or in the collections of short stories, except for the two collections, one by Intizar Hussain and the other by Mas’ood Mufti.
“When I tried to collect them in one volume I realised their number was quite high and only a few selected ones could be presented in one volume. Maybe, in future, the remaining pieces too will be published in a separate volume”.
He further says: “These short stories don not present only our nationalistic or political point of view but also cover the human aspect of this tragedy”.
Published by Izhar Sons, Lahore, the book definitely fills up a gap and can be very helpful to the students of literature working on similar themes. However, the names of the books or periodicals from where these stories have been taken are missing. The compiler could well have added them for the curious readers who may wish to dig more of the same for themselves.
Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2015