Book Review

Muhammad Umar Memon, Ed. and Trans. The Color of Nothingness:
Modern Urdu Short Stories.  New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1991.
pp. xxx + 193.  Indian Rs. 65.00
 

This anthology starts off somewhat like a classical
Hindustani recital.  Tentative, rambling, yet inviting the
reader to wander into the interior of the concert hall.  The
editor's scholarly introduction provides an overview of the
literary and historical milieu: the narrative tradition of
dastan, the arrival of the British, the Progressive Movement,
the Partition of India in 1947.  The editor denounces the
influence of socialist realism and pronounces his modernist
commitment to a psychological approach which "preserves the
integrity of literature as an autonomous domain."
     The sequence opens with various singers still found
groping for direction.  A literary identity.  Reading through
Zamiruddin Ahmad's "Sukhe Sawan," Intizar Husain's "A
Stranded Railway Car," Khalida Husain's "Millipede," one can
hear a range of stray tunes.  Inviting.  Experimental.  A
sense of the past and the present.  Of course, the
seriousness of the endeavor is never absent, yet the stories
continue to be elusive.  A native reader of similar stories
in Malayalam, I can see the same obstacles of culture at work
in the fiction of Urdu writers from India and Pakistan.  The
fictionalized experience is lost in translation during the
struggle to transcend the boundaries of culture.  For
instance, the eroticism that the characters in the three
stories grapple with appears in English perfunctory, almost
suppressed.  The cultural reality is such that sexual
interaction is muted, seldom allowed to define itself.  We
seem to catch the writers in a sly attempt to evade their
responsibility to explore sexuality.  Instead of dramatized
details of emotional life, we hear nothing but whispers.
Having only hinted at a "taboo" the writers wander away into
the realm of the unconscious, providing an abstract,
unsubstantiated experience.
     An important work in many ways, Husain's "A Stranded
Railroad Car" tells the story of a group of villagers who are
telling each other stories about travel.  Journey narratives.
Mirza Sahib says that the train has taken the magic out of
journeying.  "There was a time when kingdoms fell and
governments toppled by the time you reached where you were
going."  The story is also about the nature of memory.
Narration.  The men who gather at Mirza Sahib's portico
survive by telling stories, but Manzur Husain's story of a
quiet obsession for a woman is struggling to take shape.  He
remembers the lovely face of a woman he met in a train long
ago.  Our knowledge of the night is limited: "The train
rushed through the tunnel with piercing noise and reckless
speed.  The dark water below rose up in gentle waves to kiss
the tracks.  His lips quivered, his fingers throbbed with
sweet warmth."  While the others recount the myths about how
a sage got the British to dig up the rail lines, Manzur is
struggling with his memory.  The story that he listens to
tells him about the British who didn't listen to the people.
They laid the railway track on sacred land with the result
that the train refused to budge an inch.  As the anti-
colonial myth is being created, Manzur's taboo story about
his sexual desire freezes up his language.  Similarly, the
narratorial hesitation we encounter in Ahmad's "Sukhe Sawan"
also stems from a sense of erotic unfulfilment.  His middle-
class house-wife heroine reflects on her twenty-year marriage
and one morning she comes to an awareness of the loneliness
and boredom resulting from her condition.
     A clear, energetic tempo sets in the collection only
when the reader enters the postmodern world of Quarratulain
Hyder.  Her story "Confessions of St. Flora of Georgia" grabs
our attention for its confidence, the depth of the history
that has enabled her to create literature, and for the
clarity of her voice.  St. Flora and Father Gregory Orbeliani
are two ghosts who abandon their seventh-century tombs and
resurrect themselves into the latter half of the twentieth
century.  They have one year to wander all over the Western
world and to respond to the changes that have taken place
with the victory of Christendom.  St. Flora tells us how she
grew up as a daughter of the Byzantine Ambassador to the
Imperial Court of pre-Islamic Iran.  After many a forlorn
bids for conjugal bliss, Flora was forced to enter a Greek
Orthodox convent where she attained spiritual fame for self-
flagellation and healing which made her a saint, almost.
She also becomes a passive witness to the rise of Islam and
she recounts the acceptance her convent received from
Muslims: "At sunset they would stop, face in the direction of
Mecca and perform their ritual sunset prayers.  When they
passed by our convent, one of them greeted us, saying, `O
Followers of Prophet Eesa, the Spirit of Allah, peace be upon
you.'  In response, we would hold the lantern aloft to light
their way until the caravan had faded in the evening mist."
St. Flora also becomes a victim of modern history.  After
many miracles performed through her intercession, she was
going to be canonized on 25 November 1921, but a week before
the date, the Communists had closed down her convent.
     As the two ghosts wander all over the Cold War Europe
and visit the United States during the last days of their one
year resurrection, the solemnity achieved early on lapses
into farcical comedy.  At this point, the plot and the
historical situations offer no surprises in spite of the
masterful use of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium."  The ghosts
are touched by the sight of their ancient city preserved in
verse by an Irish poet.  The take on New York City
consumer culture, Christian Dior and Jacqueline Onassis
almost wrecks the story.  Nevertheless, as a fiction about
postmodern reality, the inter-connectedness of our
experience, the merger of the First World, Second World, and
Third World, the intricate weaving of histories, Hyder's
story (as well as her other works like River of Fire)
deserves closer attention.  She could very well be our next
Mahfouz.
     Writing in an earlier Penguin anthology of new writing
from India, Adil Jussawalla said that modern Indian writing
often reflects "the petty bourgeoisie's present inability to
find a dynamic role for itself in a society which is slowly
transforming itself from the semi-feudal to the capitalist.
Wedged between the class that employs it, the broad mass of
peasants and the growing urban proletariat, it can only
torment itself with its own contradictions or turn on itself
in fury of self-destruction."  Hasan Manzar's "Emancipation"
and Naiyer Masud's "The Color of Nothingness," "Khalida
Husain's "Millipede,"  Iqbal Majeed's "The Parasite,"
Surendra Prakash's "Jippizan" illustrate middle-class
anxieties.  As modern narratives they conform to European
literary conventions in terms of layering of character,
language, epiphanies, irony.  The editor mentions Kafka,
perhaps alluding to his own story, too Kafkaesque and out of
place in the collection.
     Anwar Khan's "Artistic Finesse," Balraj Komal's "The Man
Who Jumped Wells," Ali Imam Naqvi's "The Vultures of the
Parsi Cemetery" read like fables, yet they seem to capture
the essence as well as the particularities of the
subcontinent much better than the more complex psychological
stories.  Certain unique facets of life in the community are
powerfully captured.  Life of the mind is indeed their
preoccupation, too.  In Komal's story a renowned well-jumper
is challenged by a stranger to a well-jumping contest.  When
he arrives at the proposed well, he finds yet another
stranger.  This stranger is planning to kill himself by
jumping into the well.  The well-jumper argues about the
meaning of life while the stranger counters the arguments and
makes his case about the futility of life.  The well-jumper
asks him to postpone his suicide so that he can practice for
the contest.  The request is granted, but the jumper's
calculations fail.  His body bangs against the inside wall of
the well and he drowns, making the stranger open his eyes.  I
wish there are more stories of that nature.  Why should our
stories sound as if they were written by Europeans?

By Thomas Palakeel

Qurratulain Hyder's translation of the first Urdu  novel The Nautch Girl by Hasan Shah
River of Fire has a US Edition from New Directions
also see the author's  Street Singers of Lucknow and Other stories

go to Urdu front page