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.Born in 1925 in Dibai, a small town near the north Indian city of Aligarh, he prefers to abide by his grandmother’s custom of dating a life in relation to historical events, such as wars, plagues, and the rise and fall of nations and empires and their leading figures.By such a reckoning, Husain came of age as the British Raj was coming apart.His family belonged to the Urdu-speaking gentry, the ashrafiya, and his father, a convert to the Shiite creed, was a learned and religious man who was very much opposed to Western and modern ideas.Husain, his only son, was accordingly educated in a traditional madrassa as a child but later obtained a master’s degree in literature from Meerut College.By this time he had decided to become a writer.He made a beginning as a poet and a critic, but then turned to fiction, writing his first stories in response to the terrible ordeal of the 1947 partition of India, in which millions of people were driven to leave their homes and up to a million died, and the new state of Pakistan, itself divided into noncontiguous western and eastern sectors, emerged.In response to a radio transmission from the noted critic Muhammad Hasan Askari, a mentor for the budding writer, Husain left his native town in India and moved to Lahore, the traditional center of Urdu cultural life, in West 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 writer of short stories (a first collection came out in 1952 and was followed by another in 1955).These stories, like those of Husain’s great contemporary Qurratulain Hyder, focused for the most part on the search for roots after the disruption of partition, while also displaying a remarkable degree of formal invention.In the hands of Saadat Hasan Manto and others, the Urdu short story had already attained a high level of maturity and sophistication; Hyder and Husain extended this tradition.Husain’s first stories might be described as Chekhovian.Increasingly, however, he was drawn to the work of twentieth-century European masters like Kafka, even as he began to explore a wide variety of traditional South Asian narrative forms, some very ancient.These included the interlinked animal tales from the Sanskrit Panchatantra; the Jataka tales of the Buddha’s endless cycle of births; and Persian dastaans, those epically vast sequences of loosely linked stories, full of chivalry, romance, magic, and trickery, recounting the exploits of legendary heroes like Amir Hamza.Equally at home in these European and Asian traditions, Husain came to read The Metamorphosis through the lens of a dastaan in which a prince is turned into a fly, and the dastaan in turn through Kafka.His new style—critics spoke of it as a turn toward symbolism—contributed to a larger shift in Urdu fiction, as the naturalism of an earlier generation of left-of-center 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.Many writers believed that more than two-dimensional realism was needed to depict the vast social changes that had come with independence.Husain’s remarkable 1962 work, Din aur Dastaan (Daytime and Dastaan), marks a crucial turning point in his career.The book is in two distinct parts, each quite unlike the other apart from their common connection to the 1857 uprising against British rule.(The British have traditionally referred to this as the Great Mutiny because it began with a revolt of Muslim soldiers, but historians now commonly see it as a full-scale war of independence.) The first part of the book, “Daytime,” is a novella in the vein of Turgenev, a writer whom Husain has translated: It is a study of unrequited love as well as a sympathetic and conventionally realistic portrayal of the north Indian “gentry” in decline during the years immediately before partition, and a brilliantly sustained evocation of a long-lost past full of decaying mansions, dark rooms, superstitions, beliefs, and rituals, that revolves around half-realized and unarticulated love, various journeys and farewells.The dastaan that follows, called “Roaring Water,” is something else entirely.This may well be the only instance of a modern Urdu writer working in this fantastical genre, and it stands as a precedent for later works in a similar vein by Salman Rushdie and John Barth, among others.Here tale within tale unfolds, stories of adventure and romance that are all based on folk beliefs about 1857 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]