Jahan Abad Ki Galiyaan
By Asghar Nadeem Syed
Sang-e-Meel, Lahore
ISBN: 9693534786
296pp.

Asghar Nadeem Syed’s latest novel, Jahan Abad Ki Galiyaan [The Streets of Jahan Abad] appears to be a fusion of fact and fiction, history and myth, reality and contrivance, simple description and convoluted narration, and politics and aesthetics.

As for blurring the borders of history and fiction, Syed utilises the same technique he first adopted in Tooti Hoi Tanaab Udhar [The Broken Rope is Out There] and then in Dasht-i-Imkan [The Desert of Probabilities].

While scanning the themes, settings, characters, notions of time and space and narrative styles employed in all three of Syed’s novels, one comes to realise that, at least in South Asia, history has acquired an absolute, godlike power. It is history that decides the course, limits and fate of everything — tangible and intangible, from socio-economic conditions to intellectual and imaginative spaces.

Diving deep into those Urdu novels whose major thematic concerns are anchored firmly in history — including Syed’s above-mentioned ones — one also begins to believe that history has not only been deterministic but brutal and lethal as well. Each story woven around any modern historical period of this region is soaked in blood —and ends up in sufferings, sorrows, griefs, agonies and some sort of absurdity. The question is who suffers all these pains and distresses?

Asghar Nadeem Syed’s newest novel blurs fact and fiction in musing over the lost years of Gen Zia’s dictatorship

It is true that, in most modern stories, commoners have been depicted as the sufferers, but here there is a travesty. The self of these commoners portrayed in these stories is usually as wickedly shallow as the poor-yet-lethal imagination of any dictator. So the sufferings of these commoners are depicted as more general, typical, and less truly felt, idiosyncratically existential.

Moreover, the characters of these South Asian historical novels experience almost the same set of tribulations: multiple displacements, uprootedness, a sense of loss and, eventually, a search for identity, an unending fight within their psyches caused by their ambivalent relation to modernity and the West, the enigma of creating unity in diversity, faltering resistance against the corrupt ruling elites, and of being nostalgic and modernist-progressive at the same time.

All these torments are not figments of novelists’ imagination, but rather a construct and product of history. However, history turns into a web, limiting the scope and choice of the novelists and determining the personality, identity and destiny of characters.

In Syed’s novel under review, there is a swift realisation that unflinching belief in history’s absolute, godlike power can become, at places, fatal for the art of fiction. So, in the last part of the novel, Syed seems to overturn the relation of history and fiction. Now, fiction or the literariness of world literature acquires the power to transcend history and its sole power to form the subjectivities of commoners.

To understand the import of this shift, we must throw a glance at the story of the novel.

An unnammed poet-professor is the narrator and protagonist of the story, which is set in Lahore and London. Events of the story begin to unravel on April 4, 1979, a day when Pakistan witnessed a most tragic event of its history: former prime minister and popular leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged. The same day the protagonist becomes a father to a son.

The juxtaposition of the events of birth and death is both ironic and tragic. The poet-professor, along with innumerable protesting journalists, writers and political workers is arrested, incarcerated and tortured by the dictatorial regime of Gen Ziaul Haq. As the courage ‘to speak truth to power’ entails real ordeals, Pakistanis writers — both progressives and modernists — were compelled to adopt an oblique and metaphorical kind of resistance.

There was a wave of translation of literature of the oppressed and the wretched of the earth. This was not just meant to lay bare the similarity of the structures of illegitimate dominance, but an implicit and pretty safe way of resistance. But the protagonist of Syed’s novel is accused of targeting the security establishment through the translated words of Turkish Nazim Hikmat and Chilean Pablo Neruda. In a political settlement, he along with many other political prisoners is forced to migrate to London.

The rest of the story unravels in the UK, which the protagonist perceives, on the one hand, as a former coloniser and, on the other, as a place where people from the Subcontinent keep pouring in to form ‘an undivided Hindustan’.

Having settled in a modest flat in East London with one Sindhi Kadir Solangi, he begins to navigate the lives of South Asian expatriates, especially of Pakistani politicians, intellectuals and literati. While describing the routine life of expatriates, he delves deep into the past and recent history of Pakistan. This results in sometimes lengthy political analysis. The novel tells in detail not only what was going on in Pakistan in the 1980s and but also unveils the blueprint of the future course of the history of Pakistan, which was being imagined, debated and settled in London.

Though there are few mini-stories, including that of Jasmine — single mother and sex worker whom our poet-professor allows to share his flat and who is killed by her own son — the main story of the novel is woven around how Gen Zia’s martial law regime transforms Pakistan’s political, religious, educational landscape.

The novel is ruthless in revealing how a breed of trader-politicians was introduced to combat ideological politics, how the real-estate business emerged as a mafia at the cost of real economic activities, and how the film industry was ruined by introducing a mix of sexual vulgarity and typical feuds from rural Punjab.

Uncompromisingly, the novel also lays bare the crookedness and gimmicks of Pakistani politicians during their stay in London, especially Sindhi feudal lords. The whole saga of Benazir Bhutto’s coming to Pakistan and then to power has also been powerfully narrated. The novel doggedly exposes how a nexus between journalism and capitalism was evolved, and how illiterate businessmen-turned-newspaper-owners capitalised on political and sectarian differences.

There is also mention of Urdu Markaz London, established in 1981 by the Third World Foundation as a Trust. Run by Iftikhar Arif as its honorary secretary, it was dedicated to the education and research for the development of Urdu language and literature, and soon became a hub of literary activities. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ahmed Faraz, Saqi Farooqi and many other Pakistani and Indian Urdu writers frequented the Markaz.

The novelist terms the Markaz as the place where the elite class of Pakistani writers and intellectuals would meet and exchange ideas on Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz, and avoided discussing any other social, political and literary issue. In the novel, some serious observations have been made about the mode of resistance Pakistani politicians, writers and intellectuals were employing abroad and at home. References to Urdu and global literature and littérateurs keep appearing in the novel.

There is a sort of disappointment in the protagonist about the kind of resistance literature produced in response to dictatorial rule, including that of Gen Zia. Curiously, out of this disappointment sprouts a notion of the literariness underpinning world literature. This epiphanic moment comes when the protagonist happens to meet Deepti, a Calcutta-born Bengali Kathak dancer.

Though he had some intimate moments with Jasmine, it is Deepti who the poet-professor identifies as his ultimate soulmate. The idea of soulmate is so traditional, general and cliché-ridden that it doesn’t fully cover the nature of the relationship that gradually develops between these two characters — a Pakistani-Muslim-poet-translator and a Bengali-Hindu-Kathak dancer.

The truth is that they both realise the expansiveness of their souls; they are not just ravenous for bodily pleasures, but also indulge in experimenting with aesthetic ecstasies, which are prone to becoming transpersonal and even transcultural and, finally, becoming just human.

Having embraced the artistic zeitgeist, a bedrock of world literature, they come to create an amalgam of poetry and dance. The protagonist composes a new sort of poetry, which might be termed transculturally progressive. Deepti performs to his poetry. They perform in India, winning exceptional applause. They make people believe that it is art that can bring people together, and enchant them into disenchantment with all sorts of isms, including racism and nationalism.

Finally, they reach Lahore, where the Goethe Institut has arranged their performance. In the meantime, the protagonist’s book of poetry has been published by an Indian publisher and the book-signing ceremony is also to be held after the performance.

The protagonist has to endure a conundrum about the legitimacy of his extramarital relations with Deepti. The moment he comes to know that his wife in Lahore has sought khula (separation) to wed his cousin, he breathes a sigh of relief and gets rid of his guilt-motivated inner conflict.

But what about his son? While he is signing the books, an eleven-year-old boy comes towards him, holding up his book for him to sign. When the child tells him his name, the poet-professor, now widely acknowledged and a celebrity on his own soil, is left dumbfounded. It is his own son.

His son, and the happenstance of their meeting, epitomises the agonies and trauma of the years of Gen Zia’s martial law.

The reviewer is a Lahore-based critic, short story writer and Professor of Urdu at the University of Punjab. His most recent publication is Naey Naqqad Ke Naam Khatoot. He tweets @NasirAbbas65

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 6th, 2023