Rakhshanda Jalil - Nothing but the sea ahead: Intizar Husain (December 21, 1925- February 2, 2016)
Intizar Husain (December 21, 1925- February 2, 2016) passed
away in a Lahore hospital due to complications from pneumonia, high blood sugar
and a heart attack. The news is fresh and raw still, but with time, his loss
will prove to be irreplaceable — both to the world of Urdu literature and to
the India-Pakistan relationship. There is no denying that Intizar sahab’s
contribution as a storyteller is enormous, especially in the genre of Partition
narratives.
If Saadat Hasan Manto laid bare the ugliness of 1947 and its
immediate, brutish aftermath with the urgency of a field surgeon, Intizar
Husain probed those wounds ever so gingerly, peeling away layers from old
memories to reveal wounds that have still not healed and may never heal, at least
not when fresh wounds are repeatedly inflicted on skin that is still sore and
tender. And both countries — India and Pakistan — have lost a true friend, for
Intizar sahab remained till his last breath, I suspect, a wellwisher of both
the old homeland he never quite left and the new homeland he grappled to fully
understand his entire adult life.
I remember meeting Intizar sahab in his own basti during a
visit to Lahore many years ago and being struck by a singular fact: He looked
as much a stranger in a strange land there, in what had been his home for over
six decades, as he did on his frequent visits to India. Perhaps it was partly
due to the bemused, somewhat perplexed look he wore most of the time, a bit
like R.K. Laxman’s Common Man.
But it could well have been due to his ability to occupy the
smallest corner of a frame, again like the Common Man, and never the
centerstage. Not given to holding forth on any subject, least of all his own
writings, his worldview or his compulsions as a writer, Intizar sahab preferred
to be a quiet observer contributing little to the conversation that eddied and
flowed about him, even when the conversation was about him or his craft as a
storyteller. In fact, in my very first meeting when I went to interview him, he
told me he envied the writer of yore who wrote her books and died and no pesky
interviewers showed up asking her why she wrote something or what she meant by
it.
Nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013,
Intizar sahab has written five novels, seven collections of short stories, as
well as reportage, travelogues and prose essays and innumerable columns
spanning a long career as a journalist. The one overriding concern throughout
his literary career seems to be his near-compulsive need to revisit the past, a
past that was more syncretic and pluralistic than his present. In story after
story, he has chronicled the changes unspooling from a single cataclysmic event
— Partition — and has chosen to view the greatest cross-border migration in
recent human history as hijrat, the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina in
search of safe haven. At the same time, his oeuvre presents a haunting sense of
loss for a way of life that is irrevocably gone, coupled with an equally
poignant sense of regret. He seems to rue the possibilities that Partition
presented of building better lives, possibilities that were lost or frittered
away.
In Basti, the first of his great Partition trilogy (the
others being Aage Samandar Hai and Naya Ghar), he presents a Pakistan poised on
the verge of breaking off from its eastern arm. While seemingly a rambling
personal narrative, the novel makes several strong political statements, the
strongest being its questioning of the two-nation theory. The “idea” of
Pakistan, Intizar sahab seems to be telling us, was betrayed by Pakistanis
themselves, and not by their eastern cousins.
He is brutally honest in his
recounting of those early days of innocence and goodness and large-heartedness
of the new people in the new land united not so much by one religion but by a
common loss and the feeling of homelessness. Soon, to his dismay, the days
gradually grew soiled and dirty; the goodness and sincerity leached out and in
its place there was greed, corruption and intolerance.
The story of disillusionment is taken up even more strongly
in Aage Samandar Hai. Dipping between the past and present, moving seamlessly
between an India of his imagination and the one he visits, he draws upon
sources as diverse as the Panchtantra, Jataka Katha, Katha Sarit Sagara,
Mahabharata and the Vedas, as well as the equally ancient traditions in
Alif-Laila and the dastans. But everywhere — whether it is the hans-hansni
winging their way to Kailash Mansarovar or the weeping cat of Cordoba — the
idea of a home is paramount.
He seems to find a philosophical calm in the words of the
Buddha who said: “O monks, there is no peace in any birth and no settlement
remains settled forever and every home that is set up is set up to be abandoned.” As we struggle to cope with the loss of the greatest Urdu
writer of our times, we can only hope that Intizar sahab has finally found his
way home.
