The News On Sunday: What are the dominant spiritual and intellectual questions forcing you to write? And what are your views abut the aesthetics of fiction.

Aslam Sirajuddin: Fiction is all about wonder and amazement. It is about what you wonder and what you would want others to wonder and marvel at. To write fiction is to convey one's fascination with the mystery we call the universe and man's place in it.

Then there is the tenuous problem of nothingness, which underlies the whole being of all the populace of our immediate environment, and here the problem of nothingness is not just the philosophical existential one of Sartre. Nothingness here is palpable. You have it in your head, in your heart, home and hearth, and no one has to tell you that you have it in your pocket too. Ah, the profound paradox of the palpability of nothingness.

Then there is specific to ours and other such warp-time societies the pernicious question of gender discrimination. It is only here that ferocious feudal wrath is let loose upon a young woman just for marrying of her own will.

This absurdly all-pervading spectacle of insensitivity is a ringing theme of contemporary fiction. But astrophysics, philosophy and other disciplines can only help transform your bewilderment into wonderment. But ultimately, a writer concerned with man's predicament, has to travel from the macro to the microcosm of the human heart and spin his yarn round it. And he has to grapple with the why and wherefore of this stark callousness.

Ten thousand years of man's chronicled history is a history of man's savagery towards his kind and the planet earth. A contemporary writer of fiction can't be comfortable with just chronicling his times. He has to take man's ingrained callousness head-on-and for that he has to travel back and forth in time. Unbeknown to it, nature too is self-destructive. Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis -- it plays havoc with itself. But it is indifferent, whereas man, the most evolved of all phenomena, causes havoc in conscious cold blood.

In the context of environment and class system, Karl Marx wrote in 1873 that human societies march not only along the diverse roads of development but also of decline and destruction. Man's malevolently malicious misdoings pose a great threat to all forms of life on planet earth. In fact, if every there is a weapon of mass destruction it is man itself. So, no wonder that about three years ago, Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest scientists of all times, posed a question to mankind. "In a world that is in chaos, politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"

I wish as a write I had raised this question. That is the nucleic question which a fictionist can evade at his own peril, and this question is inextricably linked with the romantic notion of man which has to be effectively dislodged.

TNS: You sound quite disillusioned about the goodness of the human heart. Is it mandatory to dislodge the romantic construct in fiction? And why?

AS: Yes, how to dislodge the romantic construct of man, it's the question that a fictionist confronts today. The most dangerous thing to do is to make oneself believe in the eternal goodness of the human heart. It is sentimentalism at its worst, brazen and bizarre. What a contemporary Samir (tale-teller) needs to do first and foremost is to dislodge the age-old romantic notion of man. It is a construct which only a fictionist can deconstruct.

In other countries, the sentimentalist attitude towards man has long been given the bad name (Kitsch), and as Milan Kundera tells us, is considered the supreme aesthetic evil. In fact, the great Dostoyevsky set the trend. Kafka left a personal imprint on it. Then Sartre and Camus explored it. Gunter Grass's Tin Drum is an enduring effort in this context. At home, Intizar Hussain and Enver Sajjad stand out. But, whereas the former shows various signs of influences, the latter is bold in his ingenuity.

TNS: What are the prime sources of inspiration for you?

AS: My inspirations are numerous. The Holy Quran has divinely ingrained nuances of creativity. A single verse can keep one inimitably in its spell for life. Then there have been the Holy Bible, Marxism, Vedic Hymns, Buddhist Jatakmalas, Dialogues of Plato, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, diverse folk tales and mythologies. In fact, this is and should be the sustenance and enduring source material of every writer of fiction. Coming closer to our times, Fyodor Dostoyevsky has been a great source of inspiration. If one is a serious student of fiction, one can, while reading him, experience epiphany and feel the presence of all the muses of the arts close to the point of his pen. If there was a writer to touch the reader's sensibility emphatically, it is Dostoyevsky.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is another great writer of our times. But the multi- dimensional perplexity of life as charted by Dostoyevsky in such novels such as, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Possesed, The Idiot and above all Notes from the Underground, elude the great Colombian. The closest Marquez every came to portray triumphantly the perplexity of human existence was in Autumn of the Patriarch.

TNS: How do you explain the intense complexity of your writings?

AS: When such varied trends join, complexity naturally comes along and that should be the only way for it to enter one's body of fiction. Complexity is an undeniable fact of life. It lives with one at home and stares one straight in the eyes when one steps out. In fact, it is a character in its own right. So who can stop it from becoming a character of fiction or fiction itself. That's why the fiction which lacks complexity lacks character too.

But complexity has its own pitfalls. No writer can afford his complexity to ring hollow. So, it always has to be to be mind-deep and never skin-deep. At the same time, it is never just labyrinthine; it has to be woven in the texture of one's yarn. Needless to say that it is not an easy task. To do that you have to invoke a myriad of muses. And mostly you have to raise and re-invent your own muse.

TNS: Does a writer have some other obligations too? Isn't he bound in some sort of a social contract?

AS: A true writer of fiction who has sold his soul to writing, ultimately ends up signing a new fictional contract of which social contract is just a clause. As has been said above, man's capacity to cause misery to others is immense. If at all, how can mankind rein in its own cruelty? Perhaps this is the ultimate question a writer of fiction has to confront. Obviously he can't answer it. But, if he does not even explore it, the ghosts of the betrayed contract shall soon come to haunt him, and one should remember that ghosts are hard taskmasters.

TNS: Majority of our conventional critics believe that fiction is just plain story telling. Comment

AS: Fiction has more to it than mere story telling. And it is a test and perhaps the ultimate test that a writer should be considered and deemed as writing fiction, even when he is not doing plain story-telling. It is a telling task. For, to achieve that, he has to fathom the well-springs of his whole being, the being of others, the being of his milieu, the jocularity of history, the paradoxes of his times and the imbroglio which is philosophy and of course the mind-boggling pervasiveness of cybernetics.

TNS: Finally an oft-repeated question. Why do you write fiction?

AS: Honestly I don't know. But perhaps the great joy of writing fiction lies in the fact that it is an expression of supreme freedom. Though the aesthetics of fiction, in fact of all art, is moulded by the spirit of one's age, but its mode and content can never be mandated.

Kulyaat Ahmed Mushtaq

By Ahmed Mushtaq

Publisher: Sang e Meel Publications

Year of publication: 2009

Pages: 270

Price: Rs 350

Ahmed Mushtaq was a leading poet who expressed himself in the ghazal at a time when ghazal was criticised for being dated.

The main genre of our poetical tradition ghazal started to lose its sheen with the experimentation that started with naturi shairi in the nineteenth century and then was continued with Iqbal who made nazm his most favoured genre of poetical expression.

When English literature was introduced as a subject in the early twentieth century, ghazal again came under attack as the likes of Arnold and Browning were introduced in academic disciplines in the subcontinent. The severest attack on the ghazal was unleashed by the Progressive Writers Association that looked at a very close relationship between the art and socio- economic conditions in society. To them the ghazal represented a sensibility that was too deeply imbued in a feudal worldview which they saw as backward looking and retrogressive.

But despite all these attacks the ghazal continued being written incorporating within its stylised structure and form the changes that were taking place in the sensibility of the poets of the times. There was a revival of sorts of the ghazal after initial onslaught of the Progressive Writers Association and it reappeared with new vigour. Since then it was gained ground and has re established itself as a formidable form of poetical expression.

In Pakistan, there have been quite a few good ghazal poets with Nasir Kazmi and Ahmed Mushtaq leading the pack. At a time when the literary landscape was riven with the rigid division on ideological lines, Ahmed Mushtaq kept himself aloof from this factional infighting and concentrated on striving for authenticity in his poetry. Despite all the stylisation of the form, the contemprienity of sensibility is quite striking.

Usually in the latter half of the nineteenth and then the twentieth century, the changing physical landscape made the poets to include that in their idiom. The new technological intervention, which was changing the social realities, was used as imagery to denote a changing sensibility as well. Ahmed Mushtaq did not resort to this; instead he sparingly used the diction not usually associated with the ghazal, but his sensibility nevertheless was contemporary because the attitudes, behaviour and the whole approach to life were undergoing a change. This was reflected in his poetry which did not rely on the obvious signs and signals of change.

The imagery was not abstract and not stylised either; it was more evocative of the physical surroundings that the poet found himself in. The metaphor was more yielding to description than being symbolic, which was the hallmark of the traditional ghazal. Yet Mushtaq retained the suggestiveness of the traditional poets as the description was not about the entire incident, or an event or a detailed construction, rather an evocation and he made it possible by exercising restraint. One of the best literary qualities about him had been this restraint; to say and then stop before diluting the experience with volubility. What one found in terms of emotional content in his poetry was not the ebullient action or the violence of the current experience but what the experience or action had yielded. It was the residue of experience that preoccupied him and formed the parameters of contemporary sensibility.

These ghazal poets made it clear, after all these decades -- actually a century and a half -- that the relationship between a sensibility and a form was not static and not only defined in cut and dried manner. It also signified the very important aspect that change if any had to be viewed from the parameters of a given tradition. Change was not something that was finished and waiting to be introduced in a definitive manner and style. Nor was there a model of change that was applicable to all societies at all times to come. Change had to grow from within a society even if the idea of change has been imposed from the outside in the form of a dominant influence or political subjugation of the people by another people.

Actually after the creation of Pakistan and a separation of heritage between the poets of India and Pakistan Urdu ghazals, it was fascinating to find the differences and similarities that were thrown up in the course of these decades. The poets of both the countries lived in very different circumstances, tapping different sources of inspiration, breathing in an air that had smelled differently and it more than ever illustrated the relevant vibrance of a poetical form -- for understanding, analysing and even making change comprehensible. It was not always that art responded to objective changes -- it could be that the objective changes were brought into the focus of comprehensibility through the criteria that art had developed over the ages.

Faiz had really made the ghazal -- especially in his later phase -- as an authentic form of expression of the progressive thought. It was for change as indeed it was against the status quo. It could express new ideas and social patterns and structures of thought; it could call for rebellion as indeed it harboured the traditional languorous hedonistic laidback outlook. It had reached a stage were it could face the various critical labels that were flung at it.

Of two poets who were primarily responsible for rehabilitating the ghazals, Nasir Kazmi has been much eulogised and admired but Ahmed Mushtaq has been neglected. Now a collection of his works has been published which at least gives the opportunity of assessing his work and gauging the extent of his contribution to Urdu poetry.

I have just received a well-produced book on Urdu-Hindi controversy and Urdu script recently published by the National Language Authority. Titled Urdu Zaban aur Urdu Rasmul Khat, it is a collection of some very important articles written on linguistic controversies that arose during the past half a century. The book has been compiled by Professor Fateh Muhammad Malik whom we all know as a great supporter of Urdu. The basic idea of the book is that only the present script of Urdu can fully represent the sounds that occur in it.

Kamran Ahmad's book launch

With the publication of his book Roots of Religious Tolerance in Pakistan and India -- it was launched in Lahore on the last day of June -- Kamran Ahmad has joined the small group of intellectuals and scholars who still believe that some factors can be discovered in the South Asian history which can serve as the foundation of religious tolerance in the region.

Kamran Ahmad has studied clinical psychology as well as philosophy and religion from California, USA. His association with the civil service has taken him to more than thirty countries. He has been actively contributing in promoting gender sensitivity and religious tolerance through training and experiential sessions. Besides studying religious scriptural texts from around the globe, Kamran Ahmad has also been involved in various mystical traditions, including some from South Asia, over the past 25 years.

The dedication of his book "to the screams of a small child in Turbat who, in 1992, was burnt alive in the name of God," was the motive for writing book.

Ahmad says the South Asian region is presently known for its religious fanaticism, but there were many tendencies in the psyche of the region that made room for peaceful co-existence between followers of different religions for many centuries in a way that may be unparalleled in any other part of the world. A number of factors, especially the domination of two major formal religions Brahmanism and Islam that came for trade, have suppressed those tendencies. These tendencies which have roots going back to thousands of years have not vanished completely. They still are an integral part of the collective psyche of the subcontinent.

Ahmad's book is an insightful effort to explore whether these roots can be drawn upon and strengthened now to counter the growing aggressive religious fundamentalism.

The author believes that folklore is the best source of information regarding the tension between the two religions and the indigenous pluralistic mindset. It can also lend us to a deeper understanding of the factors that contributed to a relatively more tolerant and harmonious coexistence of different faith traditions in the region.

Heer Damodar has been selected for a detailed analysis in the book as it is one of the most popular folktales of Punjab and because it is deeply rooted in the socio-cultural history of the region.

I find it hard to say with any considerable certainly to what extent the learned author has succeeded in discovering ways to promote harmony in our ill-fated region but his analysis and insights into the mindset of the people of the subcontinent are simply superb.

Established in 1950, the Institute of Islamic Culture is the oldest centre of research and publication on Islamic culture and related subjects, especially history, philosophy and literature in the country. The institute was founded by a group of eminent scholars. Housed in the spacious Narsingh Das Gardens, opposite the Governor House in Lahore, the institute has a library with more than twenty thousand books.

However, due to acute shortage of funds, the institute had not been in a position to look after its library properly for the past quarter of a century. Now the Punjab Education Minister Mujtaba Shuja-ur-Rahman has come to its rescue. On his directive, the Punjab Library Foundation has provided the library with new furniture and modern library facilities that have greatly helped in restoring its past glory. Many writers, teachers and students have expressed their gratitude to the minister for his assistance.