Khaled Ahmed - An escape from ideology
What put off his fired-up-by-communal-riots contemporaries in the newly created Pakistan was his frequent reference to Hindu mythology and fables extracted from such ancient classics as the Panchatantra.
Pakistan ’s
literary personality number one has always aroused resentment at home and
admiration abroad. Through his modern technique — absorbed when he was reading
Western literature — which employed fables and rejected mythologies and
religious symbols of extreme suffering and martyrdom, he produced a gloss on
the Pakistani experience that, to his conservative and leftist compatriots,
appears extremely unpatriotic and effete. In 2007, more mystified than offended,
Pakistan
gave him the third highest civil award, Sitara-e-Imtiaz, in deference to his
international repute.
Pakistani novelist Intizar Husain was awarded the French
honour, Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Officer of the Order of
Arts and Letters), this year by Ambassador Philippe Thiébaud at a hotel in Lahore . After Manto, he
is the best-known Pakistani writer in the world. What kind of fiction does he write? In his own critique of
literature in Dawn earlier this year, he wrote: “One big difficulty with our
modern fiction is that it has developed a love for an intellectualised mode of
expression. Perhaps it started with the emergence of the trends of symbolism
and abstraction in our short story. Firstly, these trends had an intellectual
attitude inherent in them. In addition, those were the years when Sartre was
very much in vogue in our literary and intellectual circles. We discovered that
a philosophy known as existentialism was associated with his name. This came to
stay as an added charm to his literary reputation and it worked well with us.”
Intizar writes unpretentiously — an idiom that he spoke at
home in Dibai, a village in Uttar Pradesh, has become the way of saying things
in his work. What he shuns additionally is all ideology that hands down
judgements and threatens civilisation. In his short speech of acceptance, Intizar
traced his literary lineage to Meeraji, Manto and Muhammad Hasan Askari, all
averse to mixing art with political ardor and who were often equated, barring
Askari, with licentious paganism by their straitlaced leftist contemporaries.
What he shared with the three was their nexus with the Western literary
tradition and their passion for translation
Of the five novels and hundreds of short stories Intizar
wrote, one titled Basti was competently translated into English by Frances W.
Pritchett and published by The New York Review of Books and later by HarperCollins
in India .
Had Manto survived, he could also have become familiar to readers of English
instead of being posthumously “discovered” by the West in translation. Manto didn’t have an interpreter like our enviably bilingual
Muhammad Umar Memon editing the Journal of South Asian Literature in the United States ,
who took out a special issue on Intizar and later translated many of his short
stories. Both Pritchett and Memon were lucky for Intizar. Memon succeeds in
conveying the tough “internal” language Intizar speaks through his characters.
Some Pakistani men of letters are dismayed by his
imperviousness to nationalism and revolution. After 1947, Lahore ’s left found him cold. He stood aside
when the progressive writers’ domination of the literary market imposed tenets
of extreme political arousal. The right found him flaccid to their demands of
ideology. The new writers thought his Urdu was funny. When India-centric
nationalism peaked, friends found Intizar walking around in his personal bubble
of nostalgia about his old home in “enemy” India .
Memon provided the key to understanding the inner world of
Intizar in his classic paper, “Shi’ite Consciousness in a Recent Urdu Novel:
Intizar Husain’s ‘Basti’” (1989). Intizar harks back to the utopia left behind
in 1947 through his hero named Zakir — which means “one who recalls” — and
makes him experience the post-1947 dystopia of Pakistan . Basti was a rebound from
the trauma of the state’s breakup in 1971. He was to write his next rebound
novel, Naya Ghar, after the equally depressing “consolidation” of the state by
General Zia-ul-Haq.
Intizar absorbed Dibai’s dialect in his Urdu fiction, making
it intimate and outlandish at the same time. When he visited his ancestral home
some years ago in Dibai, he was shocked to find it so small. What put off
his fired-up-by-communal-riots contemporaries in the newly created Pakistan was
his frequent reference to Hindu mythology and fables extracted from such
ancient classics as the Panchatantra. In his collection of short stories
Sheherzad Kay Nam — the maiden whose storytelling created the Arabian Nights —
he deployed an aggressive defence against the ideological onslaught that
emasculated literature in Pakistan and caused the ideologues to froth at the
mouth. Why doesn’t good literature come out of the martyrdom of extremists in Afghanistan and Kashmir ?
Intizar’s characters reply: “But haven’t you read the
history of the Muslims?” In Panchatantra, geedars (jackals) dunked themselves
in false colours to appear as lions and presumed to produce a regimented
society with stiff laws, but are discovered as geedars and not the kings of the
jungle they pretended to be. He applies the geedar simile to the progressives
who wanted to usher in revolutions and to the fundamentalists who wanted to
induct literature into jihad. Somehow, “geedar” is extremely pejorative in
Urdu, as the English “jackal” can never be.
The rightists wanted him to produce moral (maqsadi) literature.
Intizar’s fables were nothing of the sort. Helplessly, he appeals to Sheherzad
of the Arabian Nights, who just told stories without moral lessons and in so
doing saved the daughters of the realm from being put to death. After the king
stopped the practice of killing his brides and took her as his queen, she
simply dried up. Intizar’s Panchatantra birds, Kalila and Dimna, talk about
ravens who taught other birds the savage art of trampling on the rights of
others in imitation of human beings.
One story the ravens tell of the hummingbirds taking on the
ocean portrays the hubris of the state when it takes on adversaries it can’t
begin to confront. Defeat is selected and suffered, but its fallout envelops
only the underprivileged, who take to the streets shouting the very slogans
that prescribe unequal wars that crush them. Intizar mourns his own drying-up
because he can’t tell stories with a moral ending. He escapes into the
landscape of his memory and scans a civilisation that is no more, towns and
streets that report life as lived by true human beings now divided by national
frontiers. Is he living in fantasy, is he adopting escapism as literature?
He thinks it is better this way because if he wasn’t
dreaming, he would be hauled up from his little dream village for not
possessing a passport with a visa stamped on it. His monkeys of Mahaban are
violent and grotesquely imitative. They want to be what their nature doesn’t
allow. These civilisational monkeys have come to a bad end in Pakistan .
Intizar Husain, with his Panchatantra under his arm, dreads drying-up because
no one wants to hear the stories he gives birth to.
The writer is with ‘Newsweek Pakistan
