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reviews The
legend of Malang Jan
Collision of the literary and
the mystery
reviews Title: The Gift Of
Possession Author: M. Athar Tahir Publisher: Tana Bana,
Lahore, 2012 Pages: 120 Price: Rs500 With the
internationalisation of the English language, the patent criticism of it
being the language of oppression has to be looked at anew. Language as a
product of culture was seen as alien to the local environment, construed as
foreign and not homespun. In the beginning, it was also seen as smothering
the authenticity of experience; that it was acquired, second-hand and
imposed. But in some of the poetry written in Pakistan, English seems to be
settling down and making a home like in ‘The Gift of Possession’. Athar Tahir works on his
craft very seriously. These poems are actually short and concise and thus
meant to be tightly structured. The valid recourse to such a form is through
the kaleidoscopic formation of images. These images may appear to be random
but are wilfully constructed so as to give more space and meaning to those
very few words that appear on the pages. This is invariably the way
poetry works but in some cases it is not central, rather neatly woven into
the flow of the narrative. Usually the description or the descriptive takes
control and the images help in unfolding, in balancing or even in holding
back the pedestrian smoothness of the narrative. It may lace another layer to
the meaning, the linear descriptive add-ons of ebb and flow. But in this
case, it is actually the images that stand on their own without either adding
to the force of the narrative or forming another layer. It may hold more meaning
than may appear on the surface as the images have to be felt and then put in
an order to give the semblance of a definitive form to the poems. Many of the
poems are very personal, or they refer to persons very close to the poet like
the father, daughter, sister, mother and it is the effusion of such
relationships that drop like ceramic pieces fully fired in the kiln of
life’s burning fire. Even some of the apparently
descriptive pieces (or with pretension of being descriptive) are held
together not by the passion of overblown imagery or a rhythm that helps it to
sustain a proper pace but by the embedded references and meanings that are
there in the images. These could be very personal or could also have more
objective ring of references to persons, figures, religious symbolism, ritual
or historical episodes like the collective civilisational loss of
Spain/Cordova. You had come where you had Always wanted to come Spurred by the childhood lure of the poets’ verse Lamenting the land won Loved for six centuries, called home Then lost All was silent for a long while Save the shadow shuffling As if of time “What rise. What fall” You murmured through the bruised silence. It all makes good mesh of
the subjective and the objective and probably it is the possession of this
fleeting moment, the epiphany of experiences that may also grade experience,
from the very profound to the ordinary. On the surface and objectively, it
may all seem very similar but boring into the subjective transforms it into
something rare to be valued for its own sake. This could be the gift that the
possession may bestow. This possession or the ability to possess is what adds
value and quality to the seemingly sameness of life’s ebb and flow. Some of the imagery also
comes from calligraphy and it is not surprising since Athar Tahir has had a
running involvement with calligraphy, its forms and the reference that
alphabets or words imply. The visual expression that overflows itself into
painting, the tying of a word to meaning against the multifaceted viewing of
a visual image is a paradox that can be the focus of many in these fields, as
it appears to be of Athar Tahir’s too. It is itself, solitary, not
alone, Equal among others, with a
role A position, a tone Giving, giving in, to a
syllable, a whole And What is a word? A mass or marks, Letters fashioned into a
horse, a face, a bird A rhythm of connections,
tasks A scream of shapes Another form of knowing The form that is avowedly
employed in most of the poems is the sonnet in all its three variations —
Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakespearean and coupled with it is the incursion
into the Japanese poetical form, the Haiko. The poets of Urdu and
Punjabi were struck by the similarities of the imagistic pattern of Haiko
with some of the contemporary forms in art and its resonating familiarity
with some of our traditional forms like the ghazal. In English, Athar Tahir has
exploited the form, discarding the narrative in the process to be in tenor
with the poems especially in this collection. Post-colonial literature
has added to the significance of English as a language that can have an
existence outside the territorial limits of England. The large number of
writings in India fully illustrates this point. The corpus of writings has
made the existence of English as legit. There has been immense pressure to
expose the writings of Pakistanis to the English speaking and reading world. Since the corpus of writing
in English is limited at home, the translations were much sought after and a
few translations have also been made and appreciated. But the original
writings in English, though on the increase, have relatively been few and far
between. The original writings in English from India in comparison have been
very large and may have been the impetus for looking anew at the prospect of
writing in English in Pakistan.
The
legend of Malang Jan Literature in any
society emerges within the greater backdrop of culture, economy, politics and
aesthetics. These are the underlying currents, which sublimate in the
semantic form of a creative piece. Literary criticism helps attain
understanding the dialectics of interface between world, text and the reader.
The paucity of poetics in
different languages of Gilgit-Baltistan stems essentially from the fact that
the regional languages lack required devices and discourse of literary
criticism to analyse literature. Engaging with the text and discovering the
structural foundations of indigenous literature through modern literary
theories can produce the poetics of literature. ‘Malangaey Samutarih’
(collection of Malang) is an important book in the history of Shina
literature. It is a collection of Shina poems written by a renowned Shina
poet Malang Jan. Most of the poems in this collection were published along
with Persian poems in the book ‘Gulzaray Malang Jan’ in 1960. In the absence of common
Shina script, Malang Jan had to rely on the Persian script with alphabets
that were chosen not on scientific but on experimental basis. ‘Malangaey
Samutarih’ is compiled, translated and edited by columnist Israr-ud-Din The
prolegomena is written by linguist and researcher Shakeel Ahmed Shakeel and
prefaced (tafreet) by poet Zafar Waqar Taj. The preface is not one of
encomium; rather it unearths inherent paradoxes and contradictions in Malang
Jan’s art and life. Despite contradictions in his personal life the forte
of Malang lies in the use of similes, metaphors and other literary figures to
express romantic sensibilities in the everyday language. A salient feature of
the foreward is Israr’s analysis of semiotics of Shina language and
literature and how the semiotic universe contributes to the formation of the
legend of Malang Jan. An analysis of the time and
space of Malang’s poetry helps us to identify the factors that determined
pathways of thought of Malang and his qalam. Malang Jan was trained in
Persian mysticism, which had great cultural and literary influence on the
region of Gilgit-Baltistan. Malang’s fancy takes flight from realm of
humans and attempts to grapple with metaphysical issues at times. For Malang
his love of Yurmas and related experiences are related to greater
metaphysical realm in which heaven conspired against him and his pen. He
says: Qalam yayain kagazay sath, Khayal bujin Yurmasay sath, Falak nachain Malangay sath, Zulum thain hazar rangay
sath. Malang was born into the
age that witnessed destruction of old order and emergence of a new society.
In other words, we can say that he stands at a transitional period in which
the traditional society finds itself caught in the assortment of challenges
posed by modernity. Malang tried to preserve
old sensibilities in new forms of poetry. For that he resorted to Persian
classicism. As a result, the spirit of his Shina poetry seems imbued in
Persian poetic body. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to include his Shina
poetry under the rubric of Persian classicism. Though, the form was
Persianised, the sensibilities in his poetry remained typical of Shina
language. Malang Jan should be seen as a modern Shina poet instead of a
pre-modern poet. Hailing from the region of
Puniyal in Ghizer, Jan introduced mellow words in Puniyali Shina dialect: Pakeeza han tu yunayjo Ghulab sharam thaey
muckhayjo Chinali maey jilayjo Lai shaili bulbulayjo He produced his poetical
works when the local princely states came under the rule of the British
Empire and latter the region of Gilgit-Baltistan merged with Pakistan. It was
a gradual exposure of the region to outside influence in which Persian has
lost its relevance and Urdu and English become dominant mediums. Most of his poetry is
written in Persian, but ascendance of the latter two languages caused sudden
uprooting of Persian language from the land of Gilgit-Baltistan. It created
literary disconnect from Persian literary traditions. The process of cultural
atrophy of the region of Gilgit with Persian cultural centres in Central Asia
and Afghanistan started with the closure of traditional routes that provided
window for cultural interaction. However, Shina poetry of Malang has survived
in the cultural memory of the masses, because of its strong organic links
with the oral culture. The book signifies a
qualitative shift in terms of rigorous work on content and accompanying
critical studies. Italian artist, Biliana Tzovina has made two beautiful
paintings of Malang Jan for the title and inside pages of the book. A seamy
side of the book is the repetition of some sentences in a single essay and
faint similarity of ideas express by the commentators in the first three
essays. There is no doubt about the quality of analysis in the three essays
about life and work of Malang Jan by three different authors. Nevertheless,
one feels that these sometimes supersede and anticipate Malang Jan’s
poetry. The printing quality of the
book is also compromised, different fonts are used for Shina and Urdu script.
If the editor wanted in this way, he should have followed it consistently
throughout the book. But there is no consistency even in inconsistency. Even
the font size of Shina poetry is varying, making it a difficult read. The efforts of editor and
publisher have exerted great efforts in maintaining the quality of content,
but they have failed to maintain quality in designing and publishing. Beauty
of ‘Malangaey Samutarih’ is marred by blunders in design. Despite all
this, the effort is laudable for the reason that it introduced literature
from margins to the literary mainstream by rendering poetry of the founding
father of modern Shina poetry into Urdu. The writer is an
Islamabad-based columnist. azizalidad@gmail.com Title: Malangaey Samutarih Publisher: Shina Language
and Culture Promotion Society,
Gilgit, 2012 Edited and translated by:
Israr-ud-Din Israr Price: Rs 200
Collision
of the literary and the mystery It takes skill and
hard work to ground a murder mystery in a literary terrain. A few careless
pages will tilt the balance, disturbing the harmony. Anu Kumar has chosen a
risky path. Not only the book is written in a literary register, it employs
techniques which have to do with the chronology of events, competing voices
and points of view even if they are all being spat out by a narrator. Her
characters are not simple. They approximate political or historical
signifiers. ‘It Takes a Murder’ is
her third novel and uses the murder of Gautam Singh Dogra as a feint to stir
into action the many mini stories crisscrossing each other that lend witness
to the small insignificant hill station called Brooks Town. At the centre of the story
is the fair-skinned Charlotte, an outsider brought to the town by Robert
Hyde, a Britisher who remained behind after partition and connected to hemp
business gradually gone limp. It is through Charlotte, an outsider in
multiple senses of the word, that we get to know a cast of characters as
diverse as India herself. The tiny town where
everyone knows something about the other is presented by Anu Kumar as a
microcosm of India. Or any other state with a strong penchant for a national
myth. The murder of Gautam Singh Dogra is not placed at the heart of the
novel, indeed the novel too doesn’t begin with the tragic incident. It
opens on the sorrowed note hinting at the rift between Charlotte and her
daughter Maddy who left, now phoning her mother about the news of her big
acting career break. This is the literary in
Kumar that prevents her from even mentioning Dogra’s tragedy in the first
chapter, even though a servant’s is. The focus instead shifts to another
man, the mystery man, introduced as the “Man on the Boulder” who flits in
and out of her life, now exchanges teasing words with Charlotte as she’s on
her way to school, where she teaches drama. It is through him that the reader
hears of Dogra, as if sarcastically. I believe I need to
highlight here a subtle difference between detective fiction and a mystery
narrative. In the former a detective or a composite thereof is central to the
propulsion of the story. It is through his/her strategies, missteps,
intelligence, good luck, inner workings of the mind that a crime is solved.
The crime itself may become secondary. In the latter, props crucial to the
mystery take precedence over the detective and the crime. In ‘It Takes a Murder’
the detective is a minor character and never able to solve the crime. Not
just that, he locks up an innocent man, a poor rickshaw puller, who might
have been in love with Asha, the daughter of the murdered man. It is obvious
that the writer is more interested in social issues. With one stroke, the
author has highlighted rampant injustices meted out to the poor of South Asia
and the politics of class issues. Anu Kumar has condensed
most important aspects of Indian history, the British, the economics, the
Sikhs, Parsi immigrants, Muslims, Hindus, the Kashmir episode of 1948, the
murder of Indira Gandhi, the demolition of Babri Mosque, the rise of right
wing Hindu fundamentalism, Hollywood and Hindi cinema and so on. Anu Kumar understands that
history is best understood in a non-linear tradition, that there are multiple
beginnings and ends. Jumping back and forth in time keeps the reader alert
and it fits with the overall structure of the story. The reader learns about
the upheavals of other characters of the town through Charlotte’s ability
to acquire information, which can come to her only in a fractured continuity.
It is true that in a work
of fiction everything is a reflection of a writer’s own anxieties and every
major character an extension of the self. Charlotte is no exception, not only
in that she is a writer but Anu is an astute student of history. The
fair-skinned Charlotte is not only an Indian Christian, she is an outsider,
literally, just as how a writer ought to be, measuring powerful players vs
events of history from the sidelines, just like the stranger sitting on the
boulder. Charlotte is an
intelligently constructed metaphor for modern India. Just to think of who (a
Britisher) marries and brings Charlotte to the town, who (a rightwing Hindu)
gets Charlotte pregnant, and who (Soumen) is in love with her, not to mention
other minor flirtations along the way, it become clear that Charlotte is a
composite of modern Indian sensibilities. Anu set up a daunting task
for herself by allowing a collision of the literary and the mystery, and
while she clearly showed where her preference lay, I feel she could have laid
off a bit on the tightly and neatly jigsaw puzzle she created and then felt
compelled to solve. This element to her story is contradictory to the essence
of her novel: that human or national history is not neat and tight, though
she hints at the unreliability of memory, as is exhibited when Dogra
confronts Charlotte in her office about the positive portrayal of Muslim
rulers in Indian text books. Anu Kumar’s other
strength lies in her ability to create believable characters, demanding our
empathy. Whether they appear in the guise of an unfaithful wife, an angry,
rebellious daughter, or a local bigwig, their three-dimensionality helps us
understand Charlotte’s reality. This strategy is a gamble too, as the
energy Anu Kumar spends on building these figures could’ve been spent on
Charlotte instead, probing the inner recesses of her mind, but that’s her
prerogative. She has chosen the collective over the personal. (If memory
serves me right, it is in this sense that this novel operates on a different
level compared to her previous novel Letters for Paul.) She pulls off the gamble
successfully because her writing is restrained as a rule, capable of hitting
various mood notes as per the demands of the situation and regardless of the
size and importance of the characters; she treats them with due humanity.
Kerketta’s character is a good example of her craftsmanship as despite his
borderline buffoonery the reader can empathise with his humanity, and despite
Charlotte’s writerly trickery gets him in trouble, the reader refuses to
see her as a charlatan. She remains a complex being, made up of choices good
and bad, contradictions, and longings. On a given day she could be anyone of
us. Moazzam Sheikh’s Cafe Le
Whore and Other Stories is due this summer Title: It Takes a Murder Author: Anu Kumar Publisher: Hachette India,
2012 Pages: 282 Price: INR 350 |
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