AS a student of literature, and more recently of literary histories, I have long been tempted by the idea of exploring ideas through literature. I attempted that first with the idea of revolt in the poetry produced in Urdu in the immediate aftermath of the Revolt of 1857. I tried that again by exploring the idea of protest in the work of the Progressives. It was tempting to explore both the idea of India and of nationhood as reflected in Urdu literature.

I found there was much in both Urdu prose and poetry that dwelt on the idea of a nation, much of it was written in moments of crisis, whether it was in response to the atrocities of the colonial oppressor or the horrific genocide during the Partition or every time the threat of war loomed on the horizon. But much of it was concerned with the here and now, the immediate and topical; it was almost necessitated by a hair-trigger response to a threat perception. I looked for something that explored the idea of nationhood in a larger, broader, more panoramic sense. I found nothing could serve my purpose better than Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire) written by Qurratulain Hyder.

Aag Ka Darya, written in Urdu in 1959 and transcreated into English by Hyder herself some 40 years later, traces the trajectory of the Indian people from the Mauryan period to modern times. Aag Ka Darya is, to my mind, a classic instance of Imagining India, an India from ancient times to the modern age, an India which as I shall attempt to show is changing yet constant.

Putting four sub-stories into one composite whole, this magnum opus portrays an immense and complex smorgasbord of cultures and identities while remaining true to the spirit of liberal humanism that was the hallmark of both Hyder’s writing and her personality. Hyder published the Urdu version when she was a mere 28 years old and in it not only does she present 2,500 years of Indian history, but more importantly, gifts us — perhaps unwittingly — with a timeless metaphor for imagining India in the form of a ceaselessly flowing river.

Through it she also shows how history is a continuum, a coming together of many small rivulets and tributaries that together make one sweeping river. Somewhere, she also rebukes those who go looking for important and not-so-important bits and pieces of history for they fail to see its totality. The River of Fire is the River of Time, and time, like the river, any river or a river anywhere known by any name, is by its very nature ceaselessly flowing. Those who stand, or live beside its banks, occasionally watch it pass by; but very few stop to listen to its wordless story. The river urges those who stand on the banks to travel with it; some do and some don’t. Even those who travel on the river do so only for a short while; then they must either get off or drown.

Some travel on the river on barges big and small, modest and stately; some succeed in travelling a short distance, while some are carried off on strong currents and are lost forever within its waters. And while men and women carry on with the business of their lives, while wars are waged, empires rise and fall, Time is flowing too as ceaselessly as the river. One can neither hold it nor ride it; one can however try and hear it as it passes by in the soft ripples of the waters.

Before we look at Hyder’s River of Fire, it might be interesting to first look at the metaphor of the river itself and how it has served Indian poets and writers down the ages. The mystically inclined Amir Khusrau spoke of love as a river:

Khusrau darya prem ka, ulti wa ki dhaar, Jo utra so doob gaya, jo dooba so paar Oh Khusrau, love is a river, it runs the other way He who jumps in it drowns, and who drowns, gets across Invoking the River Ganges to bear witness to the arrival of those from other lands who set up home here, the revolutionary Urdu poet Iqbal asks:

Ai aabrood-i-Ganga woh din hai yaad tujhko Utara tere kinare jab caravan hamara O waters of the Ganga, do you remember that day When our caravan had stopped beside your bank?

The river, for the poet, becomes both Time and Witness to Time. By the time Hyder decided to use it as the title of her epic, both the darya and the Aag Ka Darya had become accepted metaphors in the Urdu lexicon. Jigar Moradabadi had already written his famous ghazal which ended with these lines:

Yeh ishq nahi aasan, bas itna samajh lije Ik aag ka darya hai aur doob ke jaana hai Love is not easy; however it is enough to understand / That it is like a river of fire and you must drown in it However, it was Hyder who wrenched the metaphor from its philosophical-mystical mooring and located it in an altogether different, sui genesis context. Hyder reinforces the sense of continuity borne by her central motif — that of the river — in several other ingenious ways all through the book. Everywhere in the River of Fire, the adage holds true — the more things change, the more they remain the same. Characters keep reappearing in different guises but with the same names in episodes spanning several thousand years.

We first encounter Gautam Nilambar, a final year student of the Forest University of Shravasti in a spot not far from the Buddhist vihara at Jetvan. As he is waiting to cross a swollen river, he sees Kumari Champak, the daughter of the Chief Minister, and is inexorably drawn towards her. Soon he meets a motley set of dramatis personae: the princess Nirmala, her brother Hari Shankar, and the low caste milkmaid Sujata. The time is 150 years after the Buddha, the place is Shravasti in the Bahraich region, and the river is the Saryu.

Hyder uses her characters to make several sweeping statements about the time: about Shudras converting to Buddhism and thus incurring the wrath of the powerful Brahmins; about the prejudice against the newly emergent Buddhism from orthodox Brahminism. Gautam, Champa, Nirmala, Hari Shankar, Sujata will reappear in many reincarnations as the novel hurtles across the centuries. They will be accompanied by a motley cast of characters bearing the same name in each reincarnation — Englishmen called Cyril Ashley, coachmen called Ganga Din, maids called Jamuna, and so on. Kumari Champak becomes Champavati, the Brahmin girl, then Champa Jan the courtesan in Oudh; she resurfaces as Champa Ahmed. Somewhere these are manifestations of a syncretism, the Ganga-Jamuni culture as it was called. These reincarnations are handled imaginatively and make for an interesting sense of continuity.

Excerpted with permission fromQurratulain Hyder and the River of Fire: The meaning, scope and significance of her legacy(LITERARY CRITICISM)

Edited byRakhshanda JalilOxford University Press, KarachiISBN 978-0-19-906295-9255pp. Rs495