Quttarrulain Hyder's legacy

SPEAKING VOLUMES

My first glimpse of Qurratulain Hyder, known to close friends as "Aini Appa", was memorable. She had just finished decimating the ego and the verse of a young Urdu poet with polite but devastating effect. She wore a blue silk kurta; her red-dyed hair and her way of cocking her head to a side when she wanted to examine you gave her the air of a highly intelligent parakeet.

I didn't know then that Qurratulain Hyder was one of the best-known Urdu writers of her generation. But "Aini Appa" was often pointed out as one of the great literary figures of her time, and we were secretly proud that she had chosen to settle in Delhi after leaving Pakistan in 1951. Last week, she died in Delhi at the age of 80. She was one of the city's more laurelled citizens, recipient of the Jnanpith, the Sahitya Akademi award, a Padma Shri and a Padma Bhushan.

By the time I met her, she had outgrown Ismat Chugtai's stinging nickname "" Chugtai had dubbed Hyder, who came from a background of privilege, "Pom Pom Darling". Hyder said in response that one could expect no less of a Chugtai than the behaviour of a Genghis Khan, and continued writing her books.

Her novel Aag ka Dariya ""Rivers of Fire "" is a classic of 20th century Indian literature. Aag ka Dariya was first published in 1959, just after martial law was announced in Pakistan, but it would take almost half a century before Hyder decided to do a "transcreation" into English.

Many of us "discovered" "Aag ka Dariya" relatively late "" in the 1990s. I loved the epic sweep of Hyder's imagination, which laid claim to over 25 centuries of Indian history. The central character, Gautam Nilambar, appears in different guises at different epochs of Indian history, from the Mauryan era, the early days of Buddhism, all the way to the time of the Mughals and the East India Company and Partition. It was her way of placing Partition in context, of acknowledging the savagery that tore the country apart while setting it against the vast backdrop of history.

Many have called Aag ka Dariya a masterpiece, but this was not entirely the case. Hyder's writing style could be abrupt; she was not her own best translator, and caught up in her grand vision of history, she often neglected style and characterisation. The imaginative assurance of Hyder's vision still takes my breath away; but reading the book today, its flaws remain just as sharp as its virtues.

In this, she was not alone. One of the writers whose life overlapped with hers wrote a similarly flawed epic. Kamleshwar's Kitne Pakistan? (translated less controversially, but perhaps less plaintively, into English as Partitions) had an equally daring idea at its heart. In his attempt to understand Partition, he created a fictional, unnamed adeeb, whose business it is to witness, judge and analyse Partition in the light of history as it unfurls from the time of Gilgamesh to the age of the Mongols all the way up to Hiroshima. It makes for equally compelling, but sometimes bumpy, reading.

To us, viewing their novels from a distance, it is fascinating that both these authors, faced with one of the most searingly unforgettable events of the 20th century, would invoke Time as the central protagonist, and history as the only possible witness to an event such as Partition.

As with other Indian classics, from Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third to Rahi Masoom Reza's A Village Divided, Qurratulain Hyder's Rivers of Fire remains largely unknown to readers outside India, though she used some of the techniques of, say, magical realism, long before Salman Rushdie did in Midnight's Children.

The lack of global recognition for her ambition and literary audacity may not have surprised Qurratulain, though. One of the works she translated was a novel called The Nautch Girl by Hasan Shah, written in 1790. Hyder claimed this was the first original novel from the subcontinent, and that Shah, rather than imitating Western writers, arrived spontaneously at the form. If her contention is correct "" it needs to be researched "" then many might make the claim that the novel is not an "imported" form at all.

Like Shah, her work is well-known and well-loved here, but invisible to the outside eye. If she were here today, Qurratulain Hyder would argue that it was enough, however, to do the work and to know that it would make a difference. Rough though it is, I can bet that generations of readers will find their way to Rivers of Fire and Hyder's works. As Hyder understood so well, in the end, time is the only critic that counts.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com  

The author is Chief Editor, EastWest and Westland Books. The views expressed here are personal