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review
Essay
review Iqbal — like
Manto — is a highly contested territory. People with differing — even
clashing — political, religious, literary, cultural, linguistic and social
standpoints are seen insisting on the supremacy of their own reading of Iqbal
to the exclusion of all others. Can we say that it happens
with all landmark literary figures? I don’t think so. Take, for example,
Ghalib, who immediately preceded Iqbal in the not-so-long line of the greats
of Urdu poetry, going by the canon defined by those self-appointed literary
and cultural middlemen — the critics. Fortunately for him, what Ghalib
stands for is not as hotly debated as is the case with Iqbal. All the critics
not happy with the modernisation drive in Ghalib could do in his case is to
invent a false and utterly arbitrary binary. As common readers of Urdu
poetry, we are often demanded to choose between him and Mir — for no
fathomable reason whatsoever. Iqbal is another matter. As
Pakistanis we have posthumously appointed him as our “national” poet,
“a pillar of the state that came into being in 1947 “as a result of the
Partition of the British Indian empire. This appointment burdens not just us,
readers and citizens, with a huge responsibility while independently trying
to discover him as a poet or a political thinker, but indeed Iqbal himself. I
have commented in detail elsewhere how the officials running the government
controlled Iqbal Academy have no hesitation in admonishing the poor Allama
when he seems to be out of line with the obscurantist political and cultural
agenda despotically imposed during the dark period of General Zia’s Martial
Law. Such myopic insistence on the exclusivity of the officially-sanctioned
interpretation of Iqbal has left little room for an independent assessment of
his work both as a ground-breaking poet and an important political ideologue
of his time. One possible way of looking
at Iqbal is to view him in the context of the identity politics that began in
British India in the aftermath of the Company’s rule in 1857 among what was
to later reify as “Hindu”/ “Muslim” social consciousness. The
phenomenon called — in the view of some, erroneously — the Bangal
Renaissance had a strong revivalist drive in it from the beginning as it
imagined a lost “golden period” in the ancient Indian civilisation that
gradually slid downwards and decayed during the period of “foreign rule”
— i.e. the so-called “Muslim rule” — and the “Hindus” (read
Brahmins and other upper castes) had the task before them to revive the past
glory. In a fascinatingly complex
two-way process of defining the “self” in response to the “other,” a
matching mythological golden past was invented by the “Shurafa” Muslims
who were then trying to come to terms with their loss of courtly power to the
new colonial rulers. Not only did the myth glorified the immediate past but
sought to eulogise all the invaders and conquerors that bore Muslim names. However, there were two
problems. Like the “Renaissance Hindus,” these “nish’at-e sania
Muslims” did not have the courage to hold the British responsible for their
respective “downfalls.” So, on the ‘Muslim’ side it was attributed to
‘Allah’s will’, and the fault was sought (and found) in that since the
Muslims had abandoned the “true path of Islam” therefore they were
punished by the providence with the loss of political power. As advancement in
communication technology made it possible by the late 19th and early 20th
century for Muslim Shurafa to sense the existence of other parts of the
world, including those under the weakening domination of a “Muslim”
Ottoman Empire, a convenient myth of the “Muslim Ummat” was invented
(later it was to be Islamised or Arabised as “Ummah”). The Turkish “Khilafat,”
which was on its last legs, came handy to the Shurafa for their local project
of promoting a sense of a global victimhood among Indian Muslims. The faults that were
identified among the Indian Muslims — found responsible for the general
decline — included the features of the local, dargah-centred forms of lived
Islam that had developed through the preceding centuries independent of the
power play taking place among the invading, conquering and ruling Shurafa at
the top. Here the nish’at-e sania myth-making project encountered the
second problem. Not only did the local,
converted, basically rural Muslims belong to lower castes, they were required
to remain on the lower rungs of the social ladder in the revival scheme.
Being a conquered and converted lot, they had never tasted power in the past,
so it was difficult for them to feel the loss of it the way the Shurafa felt
it. The Muslim revivalist
project, being entirely North India centric, demanded them to shed all local
colour in their culture and religion in favour of a mythical “pristine”
Islam which was nowhere to be found, to adopt the Urdu language as their
“mother tongue” even though they could not converse with their mothers in
it, and, in short, acquire a specific kind of “national spirit” based on
a “supa-territorial” religious identity as defined by the North Indian
Shurafa. The two famous poems by
Iqbal, translated anew in the volume under review, are located at that point
in the formation of the “Muslim” identity in India. Read together, they
seem a more dramatic, nuanced and sophisticated variation on the theme of
Altaf Husain Hali’s 1879 Musaddas Madd-o Jazr-e Islam. It is a little known
fact among Urdu literary world that Hali’s poem inspired the famous Hindi
poet Maithili Saran Gupt to compose a long poem, titled Bharat Bharati
(1912), on the decline and need for revival of the ancient Indian
civilisation. The translator is a
“Bombay Muslim” as described by Nile Green in his book Bombay Islam.
Bombay, being a busy port city, brought together such diverse Muslim and
other migrants from its oceanic and continental hinterlands as could not have
been experienced by North India. Enriched by living in this land of
diversity, Dalvi brings freshness to his approach towards Iqbal. When the first of Iqbal’s
two poems translated in the volume, Shikwa, came out and recited by the poet
to a literary gathering in Lahore in 1909, Dalvi informs us, it “enraged
Hindus and Muslims alike. By isolating individual phrases or couplets, Iqbal
has been criticised as divisive of his fellow countrymen.” It even invited
fatwas of blasphemy from the Muslim clergy. Iqbal wrote the sequel, Jawab-e
Shikwa two years later and read it out in a proper public meeting near Mochi
Gate in Lahore; it resulted in the collection of a lot of chanda (donation)
for the Turkish cause. However, compared with Hali’s Musaddas, one may find
a rich ambivalence in Iqbal’s twin-creations as, after all, Iqbal came from
a recently converted clan, even if an upper-caste one. Dalvi has set out to make
this new translation as a personal journey and found that “it would be
worthwhile… to place these poems in the context in which they were written,
and be conscious not to attribute meanings in the light of later events.” I
find it exciting that he did not allow his unfamiliarity with the Urdu script
to come in his way and used the Nagri version accompanying the earlier
English translation done by Khushwant Singh. His is a daring attempt to
render these important and evocative cultural texts into contemporary
language. “Accepting the obvious, that English is neither Urdu nor Persian,
there is also a paring down of language and vocabulary…” As someone who has read and
reread the two poems in Urdu as well as in their English renderings, I find
Dalvi’s attempt at living and translating them anew almost as insolent and
heretical as, allegedly, was Iqbal’s in Shikwa. And as inspiring, since it
is conscious of being yet another, personal reading of the greatest poet Urdu
has produced in the twentieth century.
Fundamental
questions I first met Harris
Khalique in London when he was a student at the London School of Economics,
and worked part time as a translator, at the BBC Urdu Service. He was
obviously not a professional translator and took up the assignment only to
earn some pocket money, but I noticed that his translation was smooth,
idiomatic, and most appropriate for the target audience.
One evening, sitting in the
BBC cafeteria, after work, he recited to me a Punjabi poem, written in the
style of a kafi. The next evening he read an Urdu ghazal, and on the weekend
he came up with some English poems. His articulation was so perfect in all
three languages that I was obliged to ask him how he managed to remember all
that stuff by heart, and recite it so flawlessly, with all the rhythmic
stresses and pauses in tact. “Easy” he replied with a smile, “it’s my
own poetry.” So, the part time
translator was in fact a full time poet. I further realised it when I saw his
collection of poems: Between You and Your Love (2004), which was in fact his
third collection of English poems. He had already published three Urdu
collections by then, but his magnum opus perhaps was Ishq ki Taqveem Mei
(2006). It has been reprinted in 2012 along with his latest Urdu collection
Mailay Mein He had never written a
foreword for any of his books, as he was of the opinion that poetry speaks
for itself. This time however, on the insistence of the publisher perhaps, he
has written a short foreword in which he says, “It seems that every fresh
crop of writers in our country, in their youthful earnestness and enthusiasm,
raise some fundamental questions as if they are being raised for the first
time. One relates to the relationship between literature, society and
politics. Speaking of poetry, of course it could only be appreciated on its
aesthetics and poignancy. But poetry is inspired by both the anguish within
and the larger human struggle being waged outside. To me, these two are
complementary and not contradictory to each other.” Mailay Mein is divided into
four sections and each section is, very innovatively, preceded by a couplet
from Mirza Ghalib. The first section seems to reflect the “anguish
within” and the second section represents the “larger human struggle
being waged outside”. The third section is devotional poetry and the last
section is reserved for ghazals , which the poet admits, is not his forte
but, being an Urdu poet, he had to perform the ritual of composing a couple
of ghazals for his new book. What is strikingly unique
in the poetry of Harris Khalique is that most of his poems are built on the
pattern of a short story: there is a certain set-up, a protagonist, a series
of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and the hero’s relentless struggle
to overcome them. Be it the character of Sazawar Bibi, who started her
struggle in the previous volume and carried it through the present
collection; or be it the formidable character of Ghulam Azam Musalli, who,
with his flat nose and thick lips, and irritating pimples in his sweating
loins and armpits, faces the tragedy of the death of his only child, but
can’t even mourn it properly, as he has to attend the landlord the early
next morning. Same is the story
of Nazeer Alam the singer, who spent a lifetime, learning and mastering the
subtleties of ascending and descending notes of classical raags, but only to
realise at the end that there is nobody to appreciate his art. Contemporary urban
experience and its anguish is a unique feature of this poetry and looking at
this latest work of Harris Khalique’s, one could safely conclude that no
other contemporary poet in this country has this range of themes and lexicon,
from pure tradition to extremely modern. The Rush They anticipate a jam
ahead, on the chaotic city’s long, old, central road; buses, cars, rickshaws, a little short of the ‘Old Exhibition’, dash into the poor little streets, ruthlessly choke them, put to test, their graciousness; sweetmeat sellers, to prosperous looking or young married girls, at the top of their voices, offer to sell, on half the
price, the sesame sweet, make the eardrums reverberate. The street dwellers, sickly but clever kids, struggling for space in their parents’ small homes, shrink and shrivel, diminish each day, grow shorter; with the dawn of day step into the street, perpetually rolling their eyes, craving, looking for
marbles, chasing kites, spinning
tops, sprinkling joy, with their laughter. Daunted by raging vehicles, claiming their streets, on that day then, when they play their games, their only yield is loss, defeat is all they gather. (Translated by Yasmeen
Hameed) If a story takes
place, as we are told stories do, then who or what does it take that place
from, and why is an acquisition verb—take—necessary to describe the
activity of stories? Maybe it’s an unfair, literalizing question. Not all
figures of speech need to be prodded for accuracy (although shouldn’t a
phrase relating to stories, which are made of language, have some passing
precision?). Stories would keep taking place whether or not we worried about
what it meant for them to do so, or worried about what stories actually did
instead. But if we poked at this strange phrase, which suggests a theft of
setting in order for narrative to occur, we might also deduce that if a place
is taken for something to happen in it, then this taking must happen at a
specific time (that’s what the word “happen” asks us to believe,
anyway). The verb “take” presumes duration, implies a moment (unless we
take a break from time
or
take the opportunity to no longer experience time, options that are
difficult, at best, to secure, unless we die). It is this specific time that
is meant to concern us when we encounter what is likely the most well known
(i.e., terrifying) story opener of all: once upon a time. Imbedded in this innocent
phrase, which I would like to prod for the rest of this paragraph until it
leaks an interesting jelly, is a severally redundant claim of occurrence,
perhaps the first thing a reader, or listener, must be promised (reader:
consumer of artificial time). For the sake of contrast, to look at a more
rigorously dull example, the opener “I have an idea” does not offer the
same hope, or seduction, or promise (particularly if I am the “I”). Even
the verb is static and suggests nothing approximating a moment. Time is being
excluded, and look at all the people already falling asleep. “Once upon a
time” is far more promising (something happened, something happened!). We
might need to believe that the clock is ticking before we begin to invest our
sympathies, our attentions, our energy. Fiction has, of course,
since dropped this ingratiating, hospitable opener in favor of subtler
seductions, gentler heraldings of story. But it is rare not to feel the clock
before the first page is done, a verb moving the people and furniture around
(whereas “having an idea” does not allow us to picture anything, other
than, possibly, a man on a toilet). The physical verbs are waiting to assert
themselves, to provide moments that we are meant to believe in, and verbs,
traditionally, are what characters use to stir up the trouble we call
fiction. Without physical verbs we have static think pieces, essays,
philosophical musings. There is no stirring, because generally there is
nobody there holding a spoon. This will be an interesting distinction to
remember. Maybe this is as it should
be, since Proust said the duty of the literary artist was to tell the truth
about time. Aside from blanching at the notion of duty, which is one of the
required notions to blanch at, it seems clear to me that Proust’s edict,
interpreted variously, has served as a bellwether for most thriving
traditions of fiction (which held true, of course, before Proust articulated
it). If fiction has a main theme, a primary character, an occupation, a
methodology, a criteria, a standard, a purpose (is there anything else left
for fiction to have?), it would be time itself. Fiction is the production of
false time for readers to experience. Most fiction seeks tobecome time.
Without time, fiction is nonfiction. Yes, that’s arguable—we have Borges,
Roussel, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Robbe-Grillet, after all, among others,
to tell us otherwise, and it is in part their legacy, their followers
(witting or not), whose pages will be shaken here until we have something
that counts for a portrait of this anti-story tradition. One basic meaning of
narrative, then: to create time where there was none. A fiction writer who
tells stories is a maker of time. Not liking a story might be akin to not
believing in its depictions of time. It sounds facile to say
that stories occur, but it is part of the larger, relentless persuasion that
time both is and envelops the practice we call story. We cannot easily
separate the two. Yet if time is the most taken-for-granted aspect of fiction
writing, it would seem precisely like the good hard wall a young, ambitious
writer would want to bang his head against, in order to walk and talk newly
in the world of fiction (that’s still the desire, right?). To the writer
searching for theobstacle to surpass, time would look plenty worthy a hurdle.
If something must be overcome, ruined, subverted in order for fiction to stay
matterful (yes, maybe the metaphor of progress in literary art is pretentious
and tired
at this point(there’s time again, aging what was
once
such a fine idea)), then time would be the thing to beat, the thing
fiction seemingly cannot do without, and therefore, to grow or change, must. Time must die. John Haskell is among an
intriguing new group of writers chiseling away at the forms of fiction
writing without appearing exhaustingly experimental (read: unreadable).
Haskell is working primarily without or around time, producing fiction that
might appear more essayistic, discursive, inert, philosophical, and, well,
literally timeless (which is not yet to say that his debut book is
for the ages). Yes, I said “inert,” because things do not have to
move to be interesting. Think mountain. Think dead person. Think thought. I
say “think,” because Haskell is a thinker, and although he writes often
about film, you could not film what he writes. I Am Not Jackson Pollock
contains some story like moments, but it is primarily a new kind of fiction,
one that, curiously, hardly seems interested in fiction at all (which is not
to suggest that it reads autobiographically—the opposite is true, which
makes a great case for secret-keeping). Haskell might be indebted to Borges,
but not in the way most so-called imaginative writers are. There’s no
obsession with infinity and worlds within worlds, no conceptual masterminding
at work to showcase a stoner’s tripped-out, house-of-Escher mentality, not
much that would qualify as being made up. Haskell is more interested in using
modest, unassuming forms of nonfiction, as did Borges or Sterne (albeit
Haskell does not perpetrate extravagant untruths): the essay, the report, the
biographical sketch, the character analysis (this last is Haskell’s
favorite, from
real people like Glenn Gould and Jackson Pollock, to film characters like Anthony
Perkins’s innkeeper in Psycho, to Topsy, the first elephant executed by
electricity). Haskell does not write characters so much as he writes about
them, and it is this willful instinct toward exposition that is so curiously
distinctive and unusual in the story-driven world of most new fiction. A fair question here might
be this: where is the fiction in this, if these “stories” of Haskell’s
refuse story and then faithfully essay to supply information, respectable
information, analysis, and reflection, just as nonfiction might? And one fair
answer might be: John Haskell’s primary fiction, overriding his entire
project, the place where his fiction is located, is precisely in his puzzling
gesture of calling these pieces fiction in the first place. He is
fictionalizing his genre. Or, in other words, his fiction is genre itself.
Haskell is not an artist in a particular genre, he is an artist of genre. — Ben Marcus
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