On a fine, cold November afternoon, I am sitting at a restaurant with Naila Khan, a friend from Dhaka, who is showing me proofs on her laptop of a book of stories in translation.

The book is called Lost Tales From a Bygone Era and the author was her grandmother, Rahat Ara Begum (RAB), who lived and wrote in Calcutta, wrote in Urdu though she was fluent in Bengali, published in Lahore, and died in 1949 in Chittagong. Her stories fell out of print as she wasn’t claimed by either India or Pakistan; Urdu, her language of choice, is hardly read in Bangladesh and, as a consequence, her stories were unavailable to the younger members of her family.

It wasn’t until 1993 that her stories were rediscovered by an academic in Delhi; a short selection of these was published, which another of her granddaughters, the poet Sadaf Saaz, handed to me in Islamabad in 2014. I wrote about the book for these pages in Dawn, asking for a translation to be made available for a new generation of readers in Bangladesh, and for her stories to be reprinted in Pakistan, where an interest in the work of lost writers, particularly women, was being rekindled.

Her family took note of my suggestion and took the first project of translation in hand; we had several meetings on my visits to Dhaka, but the pandemic limited my participation in the project, to which I contributed one translation and also the title of the volume. Now, after about a decade of gestation, Lost Tales From a Bygone Era, edited by Naila’s sister Lubna Marium, will be published in Dhaka next month, with biographical information and memoirs by family members as well as essays by critics.

How much has society changed, especially for women, since RAB wrote her stories? Naila muses. She’s only recently discovered Pakistani television dramas; she observes that they often rework, in modern garb, the themes that women writers of the 20th century explored, such as the tangled skein of marital and familial relationships and the suffocating oppression that women endure.

Are writers like Umera Ahmed, whose name we often see as the scriptwriter of several of these serials, influenced by their foremothers?

Rahat Ara and her contemporaries wrote in what was then seen as a literary vein, I say; but then progressive contemporaries such as Ismat Chughtai introduced a tougher vein of Marxist-inspired social realism to Urdu fiction. And the following generation, with Qurratulain Hyder in the forefront with other significant names — including Nisar Aziz Butt, Khadija Mastur and Jamila Hashmi — took fiction out of the inner courtyards and into the wider world of politics and history in a variety of stylistic flourishes in some of the most significant fictions of Urdu literature that often challenged the hegemony of male writers.

Other home truths were left to popular writers such as Razia Butt, whose work was often serialised during her lifetime; it is her influence I see on many of the women writing popular novels and scripts today.

Butt, too, extended her range in her long career, I tell Naila; I recommend that she watch Dastaan, based on Butt’s novel Bano. It deals with the grand themes of Partition in epic mode; and in common with writers of a more literary bent on both sides of the border, such as Jyotirmoyee Debi in Bengali, Amrita Pritam in Punjabi and Jamila Hashmi in Urdu, with the fate of women separated from their families during the riots.

As I silently remember the many novels and stories in South Asian languages that deal with Partition, I recall a conversation I had with my friend and fellow-lover of fiction, Francesca Bettochi, an expert in Hindi who is also proficient in Urdu, over supper earlier in the week.

She’s discovered the work of A.R. Khatoon, the doyenne of popular writers, and has read through several of her novels. Most recently, the one she has most enjoyed because of its intrepid heroine, the eponymous Chashma; this novel, too, is set against the backdrop of Partition and its aftermath in the new nation of Pakistan.

Naila pauses as if she has read my mind. Then she tells me a story she heard in Quetta, where she spent some time in her childhood, from M, a man who was a faithful employee of her family. When the chance was given to abducted women on both sides of the border to return to their families, M went in search of his sister. He found her. She had married a Sikh and had a new identity, which she was not prepared to renounce. She was a Sikh now. Her future lay with her family.

I tell Naila how abduction is at the centre of several of the stories I mentioned. In Pritam and Hashmi’s fictions, the heroines, like M’s sister, refuse to leave their husbands. In the serial Dastaan, however, and the novel from which it derives, Bano escapes her Sikh captor with her son, only to face a brutal future of rejection and abuse in the country she had dreamed of reaching.

In Amina Nazli’s brief story ‘Aakhir Vo Kaun Tha?’[Who Was It After All], the heroine Maryam’s captor is also a protector who allows her the choice to leave him, but the dilemma of return is left unresolved when she is told by a guard that her husband has remarried and will not take her back. Is fiction then true to life, or life true to fiction? We wonder.

Naila makes a WhatsApp call to her sister in Dhaka. Lubna confirms that Rahat Ara’s work is to be reprinted in an omnibus edition in Urdu, in Pakistan, the country that is now the home of the language to which she remained faithful. So we end our conversation on a note of reconciliation: Naila’s grandmother’s stories return, in her language of choice in the country where her books remained in print for several years, and in translation in the country in which she was laid to rest, where she can be discovered by a new generation.

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

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 17th, 2024