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comment The historical
division of society in South Asia on caste lines is now an acknowledged
sociological, political and economic fact. Caste, however, as a literary or
social discourse does not, for several reasons, form a part of the
predominantly Muslim culture of Urdu. Nor has there been much academic
exploration of the role caste plays in the life of South Asian Muslim
communities as against others. As far as the Urdu literary
writing is concerned, it has traditionally focused exclusively on the lives
and concerns of conquerors, their cohorts and their descendants, who
typically prided themselves on their real or perceived foreign origins. Even
after modern, socially-committed writing began in Urdu around the 1930s,
caste as a variable for social exploration was largely ignored in favour of
economic class. The professional
interpreters of religion, on the other hand, as well as conservative Muslim
social and literary critics, usually deny even the existence of caste
divisions among South Asian Muslims. This is done in the face of an abundance
of evidence to the contrary. Since the “social reformers” of both the
religious and less-religious types came from the upper castes of the Muslim
society — Syed, Mughal, Afghan and Shaikh — they seem to have retained
all the traditional prejudices and preferences of their castes. They strictly
kept as their goal the well-being of the people of their own background in
competition with their non-Muslim counterparts, and as such singularly failed
to acknowledge, let alone try to address, the inequality in the Muslim
society on caste lines. If anything, they actively supported the existing
caste hierarchy. There were thus no such movements among Muslims as those
initiated by Jyotirao Phule and other reformers in the Hindu society. In recent times, we have
been witnessing a revival of interest in the prose writings belonging to the
later half of the 19th century or before, but the celebration of the
so-called “indigenous literary masterpieces” — especially the dastan—
has been distinctly marked by an utterly uncritical acceptance of their form
and substance. This revival of interest seems to have strong revivalist
tendencies as its active proponents seem to glorify not only the literary
quality of these writings but also the worldview and attendant social and
moral values upheld by the writers and their contemporary readers or
listeners. So far there has hardly been any discernable dissenting voice that
dares to read these texts — their style, content, concerns and language —
with a modern critical perspective and point to the significant prejudices
inherent in them on the basis of religion, gender, class and of course caste.
Every language is supposed
to be a unique way of looking at and interpreting the world. If one takes a
close look at its lexicon, however, Urdu is found to have certain strong
biases common with languages of at least the northern part of the
subcontinent. As the matters of the
language are decided by the power-wielding sections of a linguistic
community, we can find innumerable expressions revealing a deep-seated belief
in the caste hierarchy as a social organising principle. Examining the
collections of common expressions and sayings, one cannot fail to sense the
contempt on the part of linguistic decision-makers for those stigmatised at
birth for the fact of their lower caste background. Those forced to live a
life of misery as a result of the society’s adherence to unjust laws and
customs, are considered mean, foolish, criminal-minded, open to all kinds of
abuse and so on. Names of many of the lower
castes are used as terms of abuse: cobbler, vegetable vendor, meat-seller,
sweeper and so on. But some of the choicest insults have been reserved for
the community of weavers of cloth. This traditional hatred for julahas might
have been further enhanced by the fact that they participated in the revolt
of 1857 and threw the loyalty of the Muslim elites into question which had
disastrous consequences for the latter in the years immediately following the
mutiny. However, if they are to be
used as data for socio-political analysis, expressions and phrases revealing
a certain mindset current in a language at a certain point in time have to be
examined with caution. In many instances such expressions seem timeless to
the extent that it is difficult to pinpoint with any accuracy the
circumstances under which they might have been invented and adopted into the
lexicon. In the case of a literary creation, on the other hand, one could see
it in the perspective of the place and time of its writing and publication. In order to point to a few
trends with regard to caste that have been prominent in the Urdu prose
literature, I have selected some passages from old and new writings that are,
in my view, relevant to the subject as they reflect some firmly-held beliefs
on the part of writers and their readers or listeners. I begin with an
episode in Tilism-e Hoshruba, one of the many dastans loosely connected to
each other with the over-arching tale of the fictitious character Amir Hamza
and his adventures of war and conquest. Such dastans used to be told by a
professional story-teller or dastan-go and his audiences exclusively
comprised royalty and the nobility — including those who aspired to be a
part of the higher social circles if only as lesser beings. With the introduction of
the printing press such oral texts started to be brought out as published
books. One of the earliest of these publications was the one-volume Dastan-e
Amir Hamza, committed to writing by Ghalib Lakhnavi and published in 1855. It
gained a lot of popularity and was read and rendered into other languages in
different parts of the northern subcontinent. Maulvi Ghulam Rasool of Punjab,
for example, composed his Amir Hamza in Punjabi poetry based on the 1855 Urdu
text. The successive volumes of
Tilism-e Hoshruba began to be published from the turn of the century and went
on till the 1920s. In a sub-plot to the adventures of Amir Hamza, his
grandson Shahzada Asad, at one point in volume one, finds himself captured by
the female ruler of a city in the Tilism and is imprisoned in a garden where
there are many other prisoners working as gardeners to earn their food. The prince is invited by
the gardeners to join them so that he could also eat at the end of the day.
He rejects the preposterous idea out of hand, saying “God forbid, I can’t
bring myself to this ‘mali-pun’. You may continue with your menial work
and count me out.” He then tries to pluck fruits from trees and drink water
from streams, but since they are all magical, his self-righteous attempts at
satisfying his immediate needs prove fruitless. In the evening the prince
watches the gardeners exchange garlands with the Queen’s maids for trays of
food and eat to their hearts’ content while he is forced to go to sleep on
empty stomach. This principled moral stand
against the infamy of working with one’s hands to earn one’s living —
although in this particular case it was nothing more horrifying than picking
flowers and making garlands for the Queen who apparently wanted to provide a
pretext of an honest day’s work to her prisoners — must have touched an
empathetic chord among the typical listeners of the dastan, i.e. the Muslim
shurafa or members of the upper caste elite. The colonial set-up had
entrenched itself by now and the aftermath of the 1857 had raised a question
for some of them to think of the unthinkable. The story, however, is meant
not to further disturb them with a reality check but to provide relief
through an agreeable use of imagination. Therefore, the next day the enraged
prince beats up the maids, removes their clothes and snatches food from them.
So now he is able to eat all the delicious royal food without having to
undergo the unthinkable while those who worked the whole day for their meal
are deprived of it. Later he is arrested for his riotous behaviour and taken
to the Queen who duly falls in love with him and offers him food in exchange
of his amorous attention.
The
voice in the middle Razia Butt was the
voice of the middleclass woman writer. Born in Rawalpindi in 1924, Butt
started writing in her teens and became famous when she turned one of her
short stories into a novel called Naila. Butt went ahead and wrote
51 novels and 350 short stories. Bano,
Dastaan, Najia, Saeqa, Chahatein Kaisey and Naheed are considered her best
works. She also wrote many radio plays.
Some of her novels were adapted for big screen like Naila and Saiqa.
Razia Butt passed away on October 3, 2012. She was 89. “Her stories were those
of common women” — Munnu Bhai Razia Butt’s stories
mostly revolved around middle class and lower middle class women. Writings
about women i n Pakistan mostly represent glamour and the upper class; Butt
was popular because she wrote mainly about the lower strata. To rate a novel, in my
view, is to read about the moral standards present in the society and that is
why I believe that she was a writer of the people who lived in mohalas, at
street level. Butt’s stories were those
of common women that is why these were mostly carried by women’s
digests. Her stories will always
have an impact — Amjad Islam Amjad There are two parallel
sides of literature in our country. One is considered high brow and
international while the other is considered local literature: based on social
issues of the majority of the population which is middle and lower middle
class. Razia Butt was an icon of
local literature which was widely carried in digests. She was the best among
those writers because her stories contained social situations, feminism and
romanticism. That is why they were popular among readers and that is why
films and dramas were made on those stories. As a person, Razia Butt was
a very decent lady and down to earth. She represents the chain of women
writers in Pakistan’s history in which we have Zubaida Khatun, AR Khatun,
Bushra Rehman, Hameeda Jabeen and, I believe, Umaira Ahmed is also from the
same tribe. Razia Butt’s stories will
always have an impact because they are socially relevant and such stories
will continue to be written in various forms and in various times. Without any doubt,
the most popular writer of the society — Ata ul Haq Qasmi It is very strange that
many sections of society have different parameters of weighing literature;
unfortunately those people with “high standards” do not believe Razia
Butt to be a good writer— like some do not believe Habib Jalib to be a good
poet. But I believe that literature should be weighed only for literature’s
sake. Razia Butt, without any doubt, was the most popular writer of the
society which she represented. Se always represented human feelings and she
tried to describe those feelings in different situations. She wrote on women
issues and normal people, and her stories will be remembered in that section
of society for a long time. I consider her to be one of
Pakistan’s remarkable writers — Bushra Rehman I started reading Razia
Butt in college. Her novels were very popular and my friends and I would
discuss her stories and characters. I do regret that she was not given her
due by the intellectual and literary circles of the country and they termed
her work as just “popular.” As a person, Razia Butt was
calm and quiet. Writing was her passion and her writings proved to be a
guideline for the youth of its time. I consider Razia Butt to be one of the
country’s great and remarkable writers.
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