Qurratulain Hyder – it is as if she were an oracle

10 July 2009

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It is not a coincidence that Qurratulain Hyder, grand dame of Urdu literature, is remembered whenever we are faced with crises of state and society. Hyder was not just a fiction writer but a chronicler, for her sense of history remains unparalleled in the annals of South Asian vernacular literature. Her magnum opus “Aag Ka Darya” (AKD) was written and published in the highly contested milieu of the post-partition Indian subcontinent, when the new nation states were re-writing their historical discourses. In Pakistan, AKD was a sensation right from the time when it was published in the late 1950s. The controversy it created remains pertinent despite the passage of five decades.

Hyder’s nuanced and highly sophisticated vision was not easily apparent to officialdom or to state-sponsored literary critics in Pakistan.

She writes in her introduction to the 1988 edition of AKD about one such critic who raised a storm: “Siraj Rizvi was somebody about whom it is said (I don’t know how true it is) that he tried once to gain favours in a personal matter from a Brigadier who was appointed at that time [1959] as a sort of ‘Literary Overseer’ under Martial Law. Siraj Rizvi had published a long and very improper essay against my novel, which was published in the daily Jang, Karachi (in which he had also revealed that the author was the real niece of the Indian Communist Dr. Rasheed Jahan)…”

Hyder was neither a communist nor a spoilt bourgeois woman as rival factions of the Urdu literati would like one to believe. Ironically, over time she grew allergic to discussions on AKD and would always refer to her later writings, which were neither scanty nor any less important. However, AKD remains the most popular of her novels as its various pirated and ‘official’ versions continue to appear. The sheer humanity of her vision struck the Pakistani reader, as this was in sharp contrast to what the state wanted him/her to believe. For Hyder, insider and outsider divisions were irrelevant. She was more concerned about identifying the ceaseless cycles of greed and hate that disrupt the world’s beauty and lead us to destroy civilizations. Such a scrutiny was also the thinking man’s vision.

A friend in Karachi, Mohsin Sayeed, reminded me of a passage in the novel when one of the English characters, Cyril Ashley, while traveling on a steamer to East Pakistan encounters an army officer. The scene is quintessentially Hyder. The ambience, the pace of the steamer are almost palpable. The army officer of a united Pakistan turns around and tells Ashley that he would celebrate the day West Pakistan got rid of the Eastern wing. This scene was set in the 1950s when the independence movement for Bangladesh was nowhere in sight.

This was a decade and a half before our country’s President shamelessly wrote of the East Pakistanis as not being ‘martial’ enough, and prophesied that perhaps they would separate one day. By 1971, the prediction made by one of Hyder’s semi-fictional, semi-real characters came true. Not surprisingly, there was a silence on this side that continues to haunt us.

Our critics have not examined and unpacked AKD written by a young woman, barely thirty, who had a masterful intimacy with historical cycles. Hyder was a grand chronicler in Urdu no less than was Tolstoy in Russian. AKD, for its canvas, historical consciousness and characterization, surpasses most novels written in any language. It deals with the plight of the human condition in the Indo-Pakistani setting from the 4th century BC to the 1950s. Starting with the Mauryan Empire under Chandragupta, it traces many eras, with characters disappearing and re-appearing in different guises pitted against the broad strokes of History and Time.

The narrative of this novel encapsulates the convergence of the Greek, Vedic, Buddhist, and Persian eras, as well as the Bhakti movement and the much later hybridization of the British and the Indian periods. This is the part where Hyder is at her best. The identities of fiction writer, sociologist, historian and a cultural commentator merge as she ventures to explore the dynamics of feudal aristocracy, as well as the origins and evolution of a colonial middle class.

The modern Kamal, an Indian who becomes a Pakistani, is where Hyder collates the reactions of her entire generation. Kamal, a migrant in Karachi notes six decades ago:

“Islam! Islam has had a rough ride here. If the Pakistani team begins to lose at cricket, Islam is endangered. Every problem in the world is ultimately reduced to this word Islam. Other Muslim countries resent the fact that the sole contractors of Islam are these people from Pakistan. Everything is being upholstered with narrow-mindedness. Music, art, civilisation, learning and literature, are all being viewed from the perspective of the Mullah. Islam, which was like a rising river whose majestic flow had been augmented by so many tributaries to turn it into a cascading force, has been reduced to a muddy stream which is being enclosed from all four sides with high walls.” (Translation by Khalid Hasan).

Thanks to the late Khalid Hasan we have these translations of Kamal’s anguish. When one reads Hyder’s character as he attempts to understand a new nation-state and a fractured society, the results are chilling. The seeds of Islamism and its hideous manifestations had been sown long before the barbarism of today, which is its ripened and bitter fruit. This passage from AKD is sadly fresh and relevant: “The joke is that those who raise the slogan of Islam with the loudest voices have nothing to do with the philosophy of this religion. The only thing they know is that the Muslims ruled Spain for 800 years, that they ruled Bharat for a thousand years, and the Ottomans kept Eastern Europe subjugated for centuries.”

A popular leader of the new televisual pulpit indulges in this fantasy-laden discourse and has an immense following. Perhaps, this is why when Kamal questions the hegemonic-imperial worldview of Islam, many of us can relate to it. “Apart from imperialism, no mention is ever made of Islam’s great humanism, nor is it considered necessary to speak about the open-heartedness of Arab seers, Iranian poets and Indian sufis. There is no interest in the philosophy of Ali and Hussain. Islam is being presented as a violent religion and a violent way of life.”

In these passages, Hyder also foresees the Mohajir identity and how politically explosive it was. This was of course much before the rise of Mohajir politics. There are references to militarism when the characters recount how the new Islamic state was going to find a saviour in the form of a military ruler. The ultimate capture of Pakistani state-power by the military was also hinted at. It is as if Hyder were an oracle. When one thinks of a twenty something Convent educated aka English medium girl attacked by the literati of that age for being devoid of a political ideology, one’s amazement is boundless.

The great contemporary poet Fahmida Riaz told me that in her novelette, Sita Haran – a modern adaptation of Sita’s ordeal in Hindu mythology – Hyder had pointed out the brewing ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka. As we witnessed later, there was a decades long war and bloodshed years after Sita Haran was written. Fahmida Apa was as wonderstruck as I was when I returned to Lahore and picked up my dusty copy of the novelette and re-read it.

Being a timeless writer, Hyder will live through her writings. It is a shame that befitting translations of her works have not yet seen the light of print, save a few. Hyder’s own translations do not do justice to her extraordinary talent. But I am sure there will come a time when her universality will be acknowledged globally, for she was a woman who transcended time and man-made boundaries.

Ainee Apa, you are sorely missed in this time of despair.