ASIF FARRUKHI’S COMMENTS ON INTIZAR HUSAIN’S WORK ON THE OCCASION

Basti has been particularly well-served by Frances Pritchett who translated it into English and this has contributed to its success internationally. However, it has over-shadowed Husain’s other novels. In fact, Basti can be seen as the first book in a triptych which continues with Naya Ghar, originally published as Tazkarah, and Aagay Samandar Hai. The backdrop of the past is constant but it is the present which keeps changing in these novels — Lahore which is witnessing death by hanging with the feverish interest of a bemused spectator and Karachi marred by ceaseless violence which cannot be fully understood by the main characters until it moves on to overtake and ultimately destroy them. The sea which is mentioned in the title fails to provide any refuge.

EVERYTHING is new. The world is newly created and freshly designed, as seen through the eyes of a child in the opening scene of Intizar Husain’s Basti. It is a paradise of brightly coloured birds, playful animals, and luscious greenery. Like all paradises, it does not last for long. It recedes into memories. Soon Zakir, the protagonist and narrator of the book, is cast into a world of violence and uncertainty, regret and longing; similar to Pakistan today. Images of burning houses and cities, of ash and smoke abound. Towards the end of the book, this ongoing conflagration is glossed in the words of the Buddha: “Monks, just imagine a house that is burning on all four sides. Inside it some children are stumbling around, trembling with fear. Oh monks, men and women are children, stumbling around in a fiercely blazing house.”

This is followed by a line from the Holy Quran that tolls through the final pages of the novel like a powerful reminder: “I swear by Time, man is surely in loss.”

To contemplate the character and dimensions of that loss and find a new form to contain it, one that strikingly combines the historical past and present-day events, mythic lore and modernist experimentation, and elements of both the oral and the written, as well as various sacred and secular traditions of South Asia — this is the triumph of Basti and its distinguished author.

One of the most celebrated writers in South Asia today, Husain is the author of numerous collections of short stories, three novels, and two memoirs, as well as a translator. He wrote his first stories in response to the terrible ordeal of the 1947 Partition, in which tens of millions of people were driven to leave their homes and many died as a new state emerged. Husain left his native town in India and moved to Lahore, now the centre of Urdu cultural life in Pakistan. There he worked as a journalist, as he does to this day, immersing himself in the literary life of the city and rapidly making a name for himself as a short story writer.

Husain’s first stories might be described as Chekhovian. Increasingly, however, he was drawn to the work of 20th-century European masters like Kafka, even as he began to explore a wide variety of traditional South Asian narrative forms, some of which were ancient. These included the interconnected animal tales from the Sanskrit Panchatantra, the Jataka tales of the Buddha’s endless cycle of births, and Persian dastans. Equally at home in these traditions, Husain came to read The Metamorphosis through the lens of a dastan in which a prince is turned into a fly, and the dastan in turn through [the lens of] Kafka. His new style — critics spoke of it as a turn towards symbolism — contributed to a larger shift in Urdu fiction, as the naturalism of an earlier generation of left-of-centre Progressive writers, with its emphasis on the squalid details of poverty and oppression, was replaced by a search for more imaginative and challenging approaches to the depiction of reality.

Husain has always been inclined to see the present in the past, and the past in the present. He tried to juxtapose the realistic and the fabulous styles in Din Aur Dastaan. However, it is in Basti that the complications of the historical perspective and various styles fuse into a new unity; this is why it is considered the central work in his oeuvre and the most sustained.

With his mind moving in anguish between the present and the past, Zakir tries to view the convulsions of modern Pakistan in light of the historical experience of defeat, persecution, and endurance, but it is only to envision the city around him as the treacherous city of Kufa. He keeps wandering through desolate lanes, offers prayers in a mosque devoid of other worshippers and is warned: “Don’t speak, for fear you might be recognised.”

When a man can do nothing, what is his responsibility? Zakir and his friends wait in a cafe, defeated, it seems, before defeat. Yet defeat is not total, and introspection can perhaps lead to true self-reckoning and even hope. As Zakir explains: “The thing is this, Irfan, that defeat, too, is a kind of trust. But, today, in this country, everybody is accusing the other and will still be tomorrow; today everyone is trying to prove his innocence, and will still be tomorrow. Somebody must bear this trust. I thought I might just as well.”

These words ring true today as much as when Intizar Husain first wrote them. It seems that nothing has changed. If anything, Zakir is more of a victim in today’s Pakistan as the Shia are being targeted in the country, adding a greater poignancy laced with irony to the situation depicted by the novelist.

The challenge of Basti is to read it not as a handmaid to history or the valet of ideology, whether political or aesthetic, but precisely as a novel, one that mixes different narrative modes with extraordinary skill to describe a crisis that is as spiritual and universal as it is national.

Basti has been particularly well-served by Frances Pritchett who translated it into English and this has contributed to its success internationally. However, it has over-shadowed Husain’s other novels. In fact, Basti can be seen as the first book in a triptych which continues with Naya Ghar, originally published as Tazkarah, and Aagay Samandar Hai. The backdrop of the past is constant but it is the present which keeps changing in these novels — Lahore which is witnessing death by hanging with the feverish interest of a bemused spectator and Karachi marred by ceaseless violence which cannot be fully understood by the main characters until it moves on to overtake and ultimately destroy them. The sea which is mentioned in the title fails to provide any refuge.

Intizar Husain is first and foremost a fiction writer. He is no less important as a literary critic. He steers clear of theoretical discussions, but this reticence brings him closer to the text. He delves into cultural experiences and offers an astonishingly wide range of books and writers that he has chosen to comment upon.

Another aspect of his literary reputation is that of a playwright. His plays have been staged successfully, an occurrence which is rare in Pakistan. He has commented upon the changing cultural scenario through his regular newspaper columns, with two sizeable selections from these already published in book-form.

Taken together, these columns give the impression of a rich and varied chronicle in which all major contemporary writers are visible through glimpses or vignettes, with their opinions and attitudes marked and preserved as a unique record.

Rich and multi-layered, immersed in tradition but still contemporary, this is the voice of Intizar Husain, unique and foremost in a rich medley of voices, speaking out to Pakistan and the world beyond.

Asif Farrukhi is a fiction writer and critic