“This tale is steeped in the colours of the East and its connection to the conventions of Urdu literature is so deep,” writes Ghulam Abbas in his introduction to his short novel Jazeera-i-Sukhanvaraan (1941), “that… I myself begin to doubt that this is my work, for the

truth is that it isn’t purely my own writing; I took the basic idea from a satirical text by the French writer Andre Maurois.”

Translation, adaptation or a case of inspiration? I asked myself as I read this exquisitely crafted text. Abbas doesn’t mention the name of the novel that inspired him. And since I hugely admire Ghulam Abbas’s stories, I didn’t think that a writer of his calibre would claim sole authorship of a work that was either plagiarised or a mere translation.

The premise of the story isn’t complex. An intrepid sailor embarks on a sea voyage with an equally bold woman as his companion. He finds himself on the eponymous island (I have rendered it as ‘The Island of the Literati’). Here they find a colony of writers who have meticulously preserved the linguistic refinements of the Delhi and Avadh courts, and the cultural values they upheld before the brutal suppression of these courtly ways by the British in 1857. The Sukhanvaraan writers have fled the new world of the Raj.

On their voyage, our protagonists were informed that there was no British mission or embassy on the island. On arrival, they discover that not only language and heritage have been preserved, but that the architecture, town planning, and the interiors of Muslim India, along with cuisine and other cultural motifs, have been meticulously recreated.

Abbas, writing near the end of the Raj, is subliminally concerned with the rise and fall of the British Empire, and the devastation it wrought on Mughal and Avadhi culture. His description of the island’s culture made me decide to consult the text that served as Abbas’s model. A little research yielded an online edition of a novel translated as A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles, which I decided to read alongside its Urdu sibling.

It was, at first, a disconcerting experience: several sentences and even paragraphs seem to echo Andre Maurois directly while others interweave Abbas’s own insights, perceptions and improvisations. When the protagonists of the Urdu version arrive on the island, Abbas’s historical engagement with his subject far exceeds that of Maurois, whose story of his exiled ‘Articoles’ had no direct political implications.

At the heart of Abbas’s text is an exploration of the riches of a culture diminished by the onslaught of colonial modernity. Verses from Urdu proliferate like calligraphic ornamentation on the pages of the novel, giving Abbas a chance to display a gift for poetic pastiche that isn’t, to the best of my memory, to be found in any of his other stories.

When in one sequence the narrator, who claims no poetic gift, indulges in a miniature digression about a verse by Ghalib, exploring its Sufi components, Abbas’s own immersion in Urdu literature overtakes his narrative; it is his voice, not the narrator’s that we hear.

Yet, it adds more mirrors to this intricately mirrored text, which indicates that a culture cannot be replicated in isolation from its lived realities, but is also inflected by his own fascination with a bygone world, eclipsed by historical exigencies over 80 years before the voyage.

In both novels — which we can describe as non-fraternal twins — the literati are dedicated to the art of the word, and do not soil their hands with any form of labour, or burden their minds with financial concerns.

These are the responsibility of the lower ranks: the ‘Madah’ in Abbas’s version, and of the ‘Beos’ in Maurois’s version, who have acquired wealth in power while volunteering to remain subservient. The latter are beginning to show signs of unrest: a rebellion might be brewing, as the credo of the literati of art for arts’ sake appears increasingly decadent to the younger generations.

Abbas’s novel adapts Maurois’s central idea to a cultural milieu that moves beyond his fascination with Urdu to a philosophical question: can art survive in a void? The Sukhanvaraan are voyeuristic, even parasitical, cannibalising each others’ lives for the purpose of their art; they fall in love, commit adulterous acts, cause themselves suffering in order to understand better the pangs of separation, in a parody of Persian and Urdu poetic modes.

But then, devoid of all their North Indian courtly contexts, in which the masnavis they venerate were written — with their contingent historical traumas — they are compelled to borrow from the memories and experiences of the visitors they entertain in virtual imprisonment, which masquerades as hospitality.

When one of the island’s inhabitants falls in love with our heroine Naushaba, the Sukhanvaraan decide to let their guests/prisoners go. By this time, the narrator has, himself, begun to write: not courtly love poetry, however, but at first a journal, and then an account of his journey and his stay on the island.

Like Maurois, Abbas seems to conclude with the belief that art produced as self-indulgent pastiche, or to follow conventional techniques of prosody, has the value of a glass butterfly.

So: translation or adaptation? Jazeera-i-Sukhanvaraan has elements of both, and ultimately the resemblance of its frame to its model balances the differences between the two.

However, I don’t think I’d have enjoyed the original without Abbas’s version; he excels in his use of several registers of language, and in adapting the story to a Subcontinent poised for independence. The adaptation — which commences and concludes as a kind of co-authorship — has overtaken the original.

Above all, Abbas’s creation of an artificial though almost authentic replica of a 19th century courtly milieu leaves the reader as wonderstruck as it did the author, who had read Urdu literature deeply and widely, when he rediscovered the hold it had on his imagination.

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 12th, 2024