Modern Urdu Literature: An Introduction

by Dr. Muhammad Umar Memon
Professor of Urdu, Persian, and Islam, 
University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Originally published as an introduction to  The Color of Nothingness the author's edition of Urdu 
short fiction, published by Penguin India. See review
 
 

Fiction in its limited Western sense and in two of its major forms-the novel and short story-is only a recent and borrowed phenomenon in Urdu. Its arrival may have been facilitated by a particular need of the British. Exceptionally rich in poetic creation, the pre-modern literary Urdu tradition offers few works of belles-lettres in prose that can compare favorably with modern notions of the short story or novel. It isn't exactly that Urdu lacked fiction of any kind. There was always 
the dastan, to be sure. But the dastan, until it was finally written down and printed in the nineteenth century, was an oral and anonymous composition, narrated by professional story-tellers for the entertainment of a feudal or metropolitan aristocracy, though often also for the amusement of the masses. More significantly, the dastan, because of its flair for exuberant fantasy and the supernatural, used plot and character in fundamentally different ways from Western fiction. 

Here, the intent and design was to prove or disprove, rather than to reveal, some truth about life. It referred all causality to supernatural rather than to human or natural agencies. It offered a different notion of time and its characters were unavoidably two-dimensional. Stripped of individuality, 
they were commissioned to personify abstract ideas. The dastan was thus a different-but by no means inferior-fictional possibility from the Western novel and short story.

Although artistically more refined works of fiction were still roughly a hundred years in the future, some transitional work had already begun to appear in the early nineteenth century. It was produced, not so much out of a sense of some intrinsic literary need, as in response to extraneous stimuli. The British, who by 1857 would come to hold uncontested sway over the balance of the territories of northern India, had sensed early on the wisdom to train their personnel in what they describe as Indian 'vernaculars'. To achieve this end, Fort William College was founded in Calcutta in 1800. Here Dr John Gilchrist, who headed the college, made the first concerted effort to enlist such men as spoke the choicest Urdu and to commission them to produce suitable materials for the instructional needs of young Englishmen.

The works produced at Fort William College, such as Mir Amman's Bagh-o-Bahar (Garden and Spring; 1801), and others outside its aegis, such as Rajab Ali Beg Surur's Fasana-ye-Aja'ib (Tale of Wonders; 1834), do not depart in any significant way from the old tradition of the dastan, except perhaps in length. And while its setting is contemporary, its contents in some respects new, and its dependence on supernatural incident practically nil, Pandit Ratan Nath Sarshar's Fasana-ye-Azad (Tale of Azad, serialized between 1878 and 1879 in Avadh Akhbar), too does not manage to break away entirely from the style of the dastan. Not until the novels of Deputy Nazir Ahmad would the prolonged courtship with the dastan finally appear to break off, only to be resumed again briefly in the works of Abdul Halim Sharar, a younger contemporary of Nazir Ahmad.

But Nazir Ahmad was motivated less by a creative impulse than by a concern for the moral education of his own children. As Muslim curricula offered regrettably little in the way of proper materials for the schooling of children and young adults, and none whatever for female education, he decided to write these himself. For greater effect, he turned to the form of the novel: a story with a plot-but nonetheless a story to teach, yoked inexorably in the service of morals. He wrote several novels. All share his unfailing touch for realism. The idiom is unpretentious, crisp, and close to every-day speech. Often his prose manages to achieve great evocative power. But ultimately, Nazir Ahmad's transparent didacticism only manages to subvert the notion of fiction as an autonomous realm.

With Abdul Halim Sharar, a journalist and pioneer of historical romance in Urdu, the world of Urdu letters begins to harken back to the dastan, or so it seems. He wrote out of a desire to rehabilitate Islam and sing its bygone glory .Muslims, in nineteenth century India, were on the retreat in practically all areas of their corporate life. Their pride had been badly hurt in the 1857 War of Independence which they had lost. Sharar's romances, of which he wrote many, flout every law of probability and play fast and loose with history .But this didn't deter the Muslims from loving them, mostly for their balming effect; their immense therapeutic potential. 

It is this fictional background against which Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa wrote his Umrao Jan Ada (the name of a fictitious Lucknow courtesan; 1899)-the first true novel in Urdu, more in the sense of fundamentals than in refinements. For Ruswa, hasn't fully managed to suppress the didactic element, yet this element is least intrusive or jarring. What Ruswa has managed to achieve is considerable: a sense of character with distinct selfhood; a keen understanding of the mechanics of good fiction. He tells his story skillfully; he gives it a well-constructed and coherent plot which develops according to known causality; and he also knows how to enliven the work with dialogue full of subtlety, wit, and humor .

During this period there is scarcely anything even remotely resembling the short story in Urdu. It appears and develops as a discrete genre only with Munshi Premchand (1880-1936 ), the first professional short story writer in Urdu. But even in Premchand, the notion of fiction as an autonomous domain is relentlessly subordinated to a notion of fiction as an instrument of protest, reform, and redress. As much is already clear in his very first short story 'Duniya Ka Anmol Ratan' (World's Priceless Gem; 1905). In the pervasive, syrupy romanticism of the period, it set the tone for a new kind of literature, at once socially more aware and aggressively patriotic. There was perhaps some inevitability about all this. Premchand's India was groaning under the pressure of two formidable forces: the British Raj, and her own decadence represented by the rapacity of the rich and the religious dogmatism of the upper-caste Hindus. The British could not brook the slightest expression of patriotism on the part of their Indian subjects. Certain acts of theirs, such as the partition of Bengal and the exceptional harshness demonstrated by General Dyer in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh incident, could have only cut deeply into the soul of any self-respecting Indian national. Premchand's own first collection of patriotic tales, Soz-e- Vatan (Burning Love for the Country; 1907 ), written under the pseudonym of Nawab Rai, was considered so seditious and inflammatory by the British that not only did they extract a humiliating apology from the author but also had him surrender the unsold copies of the work, 500 in number, which were then publicly burnt. 

The enemy from within proved even more insidious. It assumed different forms: as the rich it sapped the poor financially, as the upper-caste Hindu it taught acquiescence to fate as a religious duty.

Politically, Premchand joined the Non-cooperation Movement of M. K. Gandhi and resigned his job as Sub-deputy Inspector of Schools. In other spheres he sought reform through literature, which he embraced primarily for its cathartic value. Of the Russian masters-Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gorky- whom he had read avidly, he felt especially close to Maxim Gorky for his sensitive treatment of the poor; the down-and-out of Russian society.

Could it have been avoided? Perhaps not. Being the product of a different time and fictional poetics, Premchand could not have envisaged an autonomous role for literature. Such a role had not yet informed either the creative consciousness or the critical theory of fiction of his time. However, there is enough evidence to suggest that in his later work, such as in his short story 'Kafan' (The Shroud; 1936)-a masterpiece of wry humor and biting irony subsumed by a dispassionate, objective narrative style-he was moving decisively towards just such a poetics of fiction. His limitations aside, Premchand's chief contribution lies in helping the short story emerge as a discrete narrative genre. He was also able to give it a more expansive range of topics and, more importantly, finalize as a dialectical necessity its impending break with the cloying romanticism of his time, best exemplified by such writers as Sajjad Hyder Yildirom and Niaz Fatehpuri.

Premchand's discovery of rural life and its conflicts as potential fictional subject matter opened new possibilities for many of his contemporaries. Under his influence, Pandit Sudershan, Ali Abbas Husaini, AkhtarOrainvi, SuhailAzimabadi, UpendtaNath Ashk, and Hayatullah Ansari produced a number of short stories focusing on life in rural India.

The joint legacy of Ruswa and Premchand was enriched by the publication, in 1931, of a collection of ten short stories, Angare (Red-hot Coals) by a group of four young writers: Ahmed Ali (b.1912)-the future author of the celebrated English novel Twilight in Delhi, Sajjad Zaheer (d. 1973), Rashid Jahan (d. 1951), and Mahmuduzzafar (d. 1954)-all from the urban upper-middle class, and all highly educated. Angare strove for an alignment of literature with the contemporary socio-political reality of India. At a deeper level, however, because the writers were well read in Western fiction...
 

To be continued soon: