Rakhshanda Jalil - Joginder Paul (1925–2016) was the gentlest storyteller of the Partition
“I have suffered every
single one of my stories. I have experienced them in such a way that my
characters often appear to be nothing but reflections of my own being. Even
when I am no more, I am sure I will remain alive by virtue of my characters.
The grain of life is the same, after all. And if it is so, where do people go
after they have lived through their own lives?... I went on slipping naturally
into the open so that I may realize the desire of my own life in the lives of
others.”
This was Joginder Paul
writing about his short story collection Khula(Open),
published in 1989. His death on April 23, 2016, marks the passing of an era in
the short history of the modern Urdu short story.
With his debut
collection of short stories, Dharti ka Kaal (The Famine of
the Earth, 1961) and his very first novel Ek Boond Lahu Ki (A
Drop of Blood, 1962), Paul began his writing career when the great age of
the progressive writers was on the decline. Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Singh
Bedi, Ismat Chughtai and Krishan Chandar – the four pioneering writers of the
Urdu short story – had levelled the ground and laid sturdy foundations. The
genre of the short story, which had grown from a seedling in the early days of
the progressive movement, had become a force to reckon with in contemporary Urdu
literature by the time Joginder Paul’s name began to be taken in literary
circles.
Born on September 5,
1925 in Sialkot, Paul came to India during Partition. A 14-year stint in the
Ministry of Education in Kenya was followed by a teaching spell in Aurangabad.
Delhi claimed him as its own in 1978 and he spent the rest of his life here,
writing and reading.
The recipient of many
awards, such as Urdu Adab Award, Modi Ghalib Award, Shiromani Urdu Sahityakar
Award and the All-India Bahadur Shah Zafar Award, Paul is best remembered for
his novels Ek Boond Lahu ki and Nadeed, as well as
novellas Amad-o-Raft, Bayanat, and Khabrau.
Of these, Khabrau, translated as Sleepwalkers for
the Katha perspectives series, is one of the most searing testimonies of those
who “survived” the Partition and lived their lives as waking ghosts.
Not just in anger
But unlike the
progressives who wrote in white heat about the Partition, there is a gentleness
in Paul’s tale. Throughout there is a compassion, a sense of complete empathy
with these troubled, night-walking souls who are lost while still at home in
their hard-won homeland. Khabrau is unlike any other partition
story for its absence of anger and moral outrage; it tells the story of those
who have been uprooted from their beloved Lucknow and transplanted in Karachi
but cannot leave behind their memories of their homes and streets and chowks.
The scent of the mangoes of Malihabad torments them.
Paul is also well
known for his use of the afsanchey, or the very short, short story.
Their compactness and brevity allows no scope for ambiguity. Taking a quick,
piercing look at the world, he drives home his point in no uncertain terms in
haiku-like stories titled Parkinson’s Disease, Death, One
by One, Kargil, and Living Happily Ever After.
Paul revisits the
terrain of dislocation and displacement when he talks of the high noon of the
Punjab militancy. In a short story named Akhri Paath(The Last
Lesson), he takes us to a land where fear stalks. Armed assassins are sent
to kill a village headman who has been counselling those Sikhs who have chosen
the wrong path of insurgency to come back towards a normal peaceful life.
“Is this any life?”
Santa and Banta – the
archetypal comic duo who have been immortalised as the Abbott and Costello of
modern India through countless jokes – are here transformed into two hired
guns. One is a trigger-happy tough nut, the other plagued by doubts. If blithe
wilful ignorance is one way of retaining one’s sanity in a world suddenly gone mad,
surely asking questions must be the other way?
Santa rues a world
where asking questions means showing fear, and showing fear is a sure way of
getting killed: “Is this any life? One’s own people have become such strangers
that no one even steps forward to try and speak a little sense and make others
understand.” An argument breaks out between the two as they are on their way to
kill the village headman causing their motorcycle to skid and both end up lying
injured and broken on the road.
As they lie there,
dying in the middle of the road, Santa gathers his broken breath and whispers,
“Bantaya, many gods have put the human race on the wrong path!”
Not all of Paul’s
ouvre is about the partition and its tragic, long-term consequences. His
concerns are about the here and now as much as they are with a past that
shattered peaceful co-existence. A childless woman who suffers at the hands of
her suspicious husband; a homeless boy searching for a better future; an old
man revealing the secrets of his marriage to his wife of many years; the truth
behind a mysterious little tomb; a middle-class family travelling by train and
facing undue harassment by various petty officials – these and many other
vignettes make Paul’s vast and varied body of work a delightful repository of
modern Urdu afsananigari.
