We know that the first claim to fame for Syed Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973) is the founding of the Indian Progressive Writers Association (PWA), followed by being the first secretary-general of the erstwhile Communist Party of Pakistan, which resulted in him serving a prison term for more than four years in Pakistan.

In 1935, in London, he drafted the manifesto for the PWA with M.D. Taseer, Mulk Raj Anand, Pramod Sengupta and Jyoti Ghosh. None other than the leading writer of Hindi and Urdu Munshi Premchand translated that manifesto into Hindi. In 1936, the left-leaning and anti-colonial writers from across British India gathered in Lucknow to formally launch the PWA in India, along with a literary movement that was called the ‘Progressive Movement.’

The progressive movement enriched our languages and their creative output in a very short span of time. Later, the movement faced some valid and some invalid criticism from a purely artistic and aesthetic point of view. Undoubtedly, some of the poets and writers belonging to PWA took to using propagandist language and sloganeering for the emancipation of the working class, while compromising on the quality of art and the need of an art piece to be aesthetically sound.

Irrespective of the criticism it bore and some sloganeers within its ranks, the movement produced a galaxy of the finest poets — from Faiz Ahmed Faiz to Shaikh Ayaz to Ali Sardar Jafri — and outstanding fiction writers, such as Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander and Ismat Chughtai. There is a large number of progressive writers in many of our languages who all left indelible marks on our collective aesthetic and literary sensibility. The movement also significantly influenced theatre and filmmaking in the Subcontinent.

Coming back to Sajjad Zaheer, his literary contribution is as impressive as his organisational capabilities and the cultural and political activism he remained committed to all his life. With a command over multiple languages, he wrote fiction and translated from global literature, offered literary criticism of classical Urdu and Persian works, penned his insightful memoirs and became one of the pioneers of prose poetry in Urdu. Sajjad Zaheer was among the first translators to introduce Rabindranath Tagore, Voltaire and William Shakespeare into Urdu.

Although Noor Zaheer shares the broad outlines of the same political ideology and their progressive literary bent, she is not simply saying the same things that her parents did. What distinguishes Noor’s writing from her parents’ is a clear introduction of native feminism into her fiction.

Sajjad Zaheer’s wife Razia Sajjad Zaheer (1918-1979) was an essayist, fiction writer and translator of definite merit. She started contributing short stories to magazines at a young age and left us with at least seven collections of fiction and 40 books of translations into Urdu, including Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo. When young, my first introduction to the works of Razia and Sajjad Zaheer was through their translations of Brecht and Voltaire. I still remember how gripping and powerful they were. That encouraged me to read their other translations and original work.

Enter Noor Zaheer — another impressive writer and translator from the Zaheer clan, the daughter of Razia and Sajjad Zaheer. It was a little more than 10 years ago that I chanced upon some short stories by Noor Zaheer. Some of us in Pakistan were familiar with the works of her academic and historian sisters, Najma and Naseem, and actor-director sister Nadra. But I, at least, had no idea about Noor’s work. It came as a pleasant surprise that Noor had kept her parents’ tradition of literary writing and translations alive, along with carrying forward their spirit and passion for creating a classless society.

With more than a dozen books of original writing and translations in English, Hindi and Urdu, besides dramas and screenplays, to her credit, last year Noor Zaheer came out with a new collection of 21 short stories in Urdu, titled Siyani Diwani [The Wise Fool], published by Maktaba-i-Daniyal, Karachi. The title of the book is taken from a story in the collection with the same title. It is about a nonconformist woman in a conservative Muslim family, married to a beastly man.

The story is a beautiful rendition of how the woman prevails upon the harsh realities of her life with incomparable grit and grace. But while her husband remains respected in the community, the term ‘diwani’ is made a suffix to her name instead. There are other stories in the book which capture the lives of common people, particularly women, in Indian society. I am not commenting further because the book has been duly reviewed by Dawn.

Although Noor shares the broad outlines of the same political ideology and their progressive literary bent, she is not simply saying the same things that her parents did. What distinguishes Noor’s writing from her parents’ is a clear introduction of native feminism into her fiction. To me, she cannot simply be labelled in general terms as a ‘Marxist Feminist’, who wants an end to the subjugation of women and labour. One is not very fond of these categories to define the whole oeuvre of a writer anyway.

Writers with a broad range, like Noor, develop different concerns, if not leanings, across the length of their writing careers. However, at this stage of her writing, one may consider that Noor espouses a native feminism that she has kneaded into the purely native struggle against social oppression on the basis of both caste and class.

Thinking of the Zaheers, I somehow remember the lines from the Irish poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh: “This seed is potent as the seed/ Of Knowledge in the Hebrew Book/ So drive your horses in the creed/ Of God the Father as a stook.”

The columnist is a poet and essayist. His latest collections of verse are Hairaa’n Sar-i-Bazaar and No Fortunes to Tell

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 24th, 2024