tribute
Delving into the unconscious
Hajra Masroor was very good in writing about the significant by arriving at it through the insignificant
By Sarwat Ali
Many fiction writers and poets as well are very prolific in the earlier part of their lives, but just give up writing altogether or their focus changes to non-fiction. 
Leo Tolstoy stopped writing after penning two great novels and later wrote about non violence, spiritual quests and moral imperatives. Shahzad Ahmed wrote good poetry but switched to translations and writing on psychology and physical sciences, while  Hajra Masroor gave up writing because she found raising children and running a home a more fulfilling experience after marriage.

Asmi’s world
A collection of journalistic articles as if someone has painted in broad strokes a picture of this 
country in the decades past
By Farah Zia
When S.M. Shahid, the advertising guru, the music buff and one of Saleem Asmi’s best friends, proposed to compile some of his journalistic writings in the form of a book, Asmi brushed aside the suggestion. He thought they were mere “journalistic pieces” that “did not deserve any serious reading” in Shahid’s own words.
So I thought when I got hold of the book “Saleem Asmi — Interviews, Articles, Reviews”. Having ignored it for a couple of weeks, I started reading, and it surprised and involved me in an unexpected way. It ascertained the worth of serious journalistic work such as Asmi’s in more ways than one. Unwittingly, a review exercise turned into one journalist looking at another journalist’s work, critically to begin with and ending up in wonder and awe at the possibilities of what is understood to be a frivolous profession.

Essay
How to write fiction
The great thing about this cat — the writing one — is that there are a thousand different ways to skin it. In fact, you don’t have to skin it at all — and it doesn’t even need to be a cat! What I mean, in the first instance, is feel free to dispute or ignore everything in this introduction or in the articles that follow. As Tobias Wolff puts it in his masterly novel Old School: “For a writer there is no such thing as an exemplary life … Certain writers do good work at the bottom of a bottle. The outlaws generally write as well as the bankers, though more briefly. Some writers flourish like opportunistic weeds by hiding among the citizens, others by toughing it out in one sort of desert or another.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

tribute
Delving into the unconscious
Hajra Masroor was very good in writing about the significant by arriving at it through the insignificant
By Sarwat Ali

Many fiction writers and poets as well are very prolific in the earlier part of their lives, but just give up writing altogether or their focus changes to non-fiction.

Leo Tolstoy stopped writing after penning two great novels and later wrote about non violence, spiritual quests and moral imperatives. Shahzad Ahmed wrote good poetry but switched to translations and writing on psychology and physical sciences, while  Hajra Masroor gave up writing because she found raising children and running a home a more fulfilling experience after marriage.

This should not be very surprising and seen as very predicable because many women give up whatever they are doing for home and children, but ironic in the case of Masroor as, in her earlier works she was rebelling against the themes and ethos associated with women in our milieu. The issues of segregation, joint family and life confined to the walls in extended families figured less in her works. The very subtle man-woman relationship as perceived by the women too was not that predominant; instead the lure or the temptation to experience a bigger world outside the high walls of the joint family system was much greater.

In the second or third decade of the twentieth century, Muslim women too had started to express themselves. A distinction had to be made between women in general in North India and Muslim women because this segment was more conservative and many social barriers like purdah and staying indoors mere more rigidly enforced.

European women had provided the prototype of being educated, enlightened and taking considerable interest in affairs outside the four walls of the house. It was about this time that the formal education of women was initiated in Northern India with the establishment of a women school at Aligarh by Sheikh Abdullah.

Women were not supposed to express themselves and their voices were not supposed to be heard let alone their faces exposed or their writings read by namehrams. All this was hedging at the limits of modesty and many a writer relished in the huge number of fan mail that they received.  This was both an expose of the rigidly enforced segregation and the human foibles that inevitably emerge.

Ismat Chugtai, who was from the first batch of girls students of that school, chose an independent career as a writer for herself and broke many a convention which had held back Muslim women’s intellectual growth. Another one among the writers was Hijab Imtiaz Ali who too had discarded many traditions of the Muslim ashrafia by indulging in activities considered to be strictly the preserve of men. She even flew an aeroplane when the machine itself was very rare.

Probably Hajra Masroor was the second generation of Muslim women writers and a great deal of the path had been cleared by pioneers like Rashid Jehan and Ismat Chugtai.

Born round 1920, three of her many sisters were into writings they earned and nickname of the Bronte Sisters of Urdu fiction.

It was also the time that Marxism became popular and seized the imagination of many a creative writer and the entire slant of fiction was determined by the understanding of society seen through the prism of Marxism.

In the beginning, it was a very broad-based movement and attracted quite a few adherents. It remained very vibrant as long as it stayed broad based but the moment it started to become prescriptive in a puritanical sense it started to see dissidence and even rebellion within its ranks.

And then there was the revelatory reading of Freud. Delving into the unconscious too had become a favourite theme with writers and some tried to combine the two. This heady mixture of Marxism and Freudian libido pouring down the pen of a woman was bound to be iconoclastic and explosive.

Though, as time went by, this sensational Hajra Masroor gave way to a more steadied person, intent on looking at life in a wholesome way. She lost the bite and the sting though she continued to reveal hidden aspect of our social existence which was shocking at times. 

Since three of the sisters wrote, the critics have been prying to find similarities between the works especially between Khadija and Hajra. Since both shared a common home and relatives and the traditions of Lucknow and since both were inspired by socialist realism the truthful depiction of the lives as lived by the characters was one of their quests. 

The realistic descriptions of landscape, both physical and social, were dominant in the writings of both but the treatment and development of the situation was different. Masroor,  in her later writings was relatively low-key and she wrote realistically about the problems faced by the Muslim families in the third decade of the twentieth century but it was not infused with a larger than life aspiration to change the world through the enthusiasm of the main characters. It was rather more descriptive and worked subtly in building slowly on observations about things that seemed inconsequential and unimportant, but were significant in understanding the ethos of a people. She was very good in writing about the significant by arriving at it through the insignificant.

Masroor was well-known even before migrating from Lucknow to Karachi and then Lahore after independence and was very close to the set of writers that adhered to this ideology like Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi and also helped him in editing Naqoosh.

Masroor published her first collection of short stories, Chirkey and was followed by another collection Hai Allah.  Sub Afsaney Meray, combining short stories from her six collections, was published in the 1990s.

She also wrote some plays and a collection was published as Woh Log with a preface and introduction by Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Imtiaz Ali Taj respectively. She wrote the story and script for Suroor Barabankvi’s first movie, Aakhri Station, which she based on her own work Pagli.

 

 

 

 

 

Asmi’s world
A collection of journalistic articles as if someone has painted in broad strokes a picture of this 
country in the decades past
By Farah Zia

When S.M. Shahid, the advertising guru, the music buff and one of Saleem Asmi’s best friends, proposed to compile some of his journalistic writings in the form of a book, Asmi brushed aside the suggestion. He thought they were mere “journalistic pieces” that “did not deserve any serious reading” in Shahid’s own words.

So I thought when I got hold of the book “Saleem Asmi — Interviews, Articles, Reviews”. Having ignored it for a couple of weeks, I started reading, and it surprised and involved me in an unexpected way. It ascertained the worth of serious journalistic work such as Asmi’s in more ways than one. Unwittingly, a review exercise turned into one journalist looking at another journalist’s work, critically to begin with and ending up in wonder and awe at the possibilities of what is understood to be a frivolous profession.

The book seems as if someone has painted in broad strokes a picture of this country in the decades past — drawing inspiration from its history, culture, literature, politics and journalism  itself. It is like a compressed high-quality short-course that ought to be made mandatory for students of journalism and working journalists alike. And we must thank S.M. Shahid for having made this possible.

Saleem Asmi must be breaking the path for the coming generation of journalists while doing profile interviews, art and film and book reviews of the kind that he did. This is foundational work that all of us then built on; only one feels, with a hint of sadness, that instead of taking it forward we let those standards of excellence erode.

Much has been made of the first two interviews in the collection — with Faiz and Josh — and rightly so because there are new insights and one feels being reintroduced to the two poets in a refreshing way. The introduction of his interview with Faiz only shows Asmi’s objectivity as a journalist. And that sense of him being mercilessly truthful when it comes to his courage of conviction continues throughout the book.

Personally, I equally enjoyed the third interview with Malka-i-Mausiqi Roshan Ara Begum that was conducted in her haveli in Lala Musa. It’s an endearing account of someone who “relishes being a woman, a wife and a mother, as much as she relishes being the undisputed queen of music.” Once again, Asmi’s knowledge of raags, various schools, notation in Eastern classical music and a clear sense of the greatness he was confronting makes it a sheer pleasure read.

One thing the book has not done is to mention the exact date of the publication of each article. It casually says “Most of these write-ups first appeared in The Herald and a few other publications between 1978 and 1995”. This becomes a serious handicap for the reader who can make wild guesses about the possible time of the appearance of the article. In some cases it is easier because of an overt reference but not so in most others. For instance, the reader does not get to know when exactly was the Pakistan Institute for the Study of Film Art set up, where he got to see so many of Satyajit Ray’s masterpieces.

Meeting “the old rascal” is always colourful and equally so here. But what Khushwant Singh had said about the Indo-Pak relations sometime in the 1970s is a sad reminder of how we have not moved an inch from that time on. Note the ever similar message when he says: “I do hope, however, that something will be done to speed up normalisation. There should be exchange of newspapers and journals. Then, there is a wide field in which we can exchange goods. This should be done immediately…”

The selection of articles is remarkable; it is not just the breadth and scope but an affirmation of the very fact that we have had singers and dancers and artistes of all sorts in our midst who were respected and acknowledged by the mainstream media. The interview with dancer Madam Azuri in her “shabbily-kept, two-room apartment in a crumbling Pindi hotel” is instructive in how the society has transformed over decades.

Madam Azuri recalls opening a dance school in Rawalpindi in 1948 when all the maulvis of the town “stood up against me… They delivered sermons in mosques and spread as much venom against me as they could…” Sounds familiar. But what Azuri did to avert the agitation may not sound as familiar today. She did a stage show for the maulvis at Jadoo Ghar, “gave them a lecture on the divinity and dignity of the dance. They liked the performance and the agitation was called off.”

The six articles on artists including Ghulam Rasool, Ahmed Pervez, Jamil Naqsh, Bashir Mirza, Haji Sharief and Mansur Saleem defy the modern notion that journalists must not attempt writing on art or that art criticism is the preserve of artists alone. That Asmi was inclined towards art must have been an added advantage but all of these come across as thorough, journalistic, readable pieces.

The benefit of hindsight the book offers is immense. The author’s description of meeting Faiz in 1956 as a student when he was invited to the Karachi University is also an indirect comment on today’s politically-illiterate students, hankering after individual goals in their respective elite private institutions.

The book reviews picked for this collection are a joyous and fulfilling read, almost commanding one to go pick a Qurat-ul-ain Hyder before it’s too late.

All in all, it has been a joy to be in the company of Saleem Asmi. What a giant of a journalist, one must say.

Saleem Asmi — Interviews, Articles, Reviews

Compiled and published by S.M. Shahid

Pages: 194

Price: Rs 500

Email: shahidsm34@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

Essay
How to write fiction

The great thing about this cat — the writing one — is that there are a thousand different ways to skin it. In fact, you don’t have to skin it at all — and it doesn’t even need to be a cat! What I mean, in the first instance, is feel free to dispute or ignore everything in this introduction or in the articles that follow. As Tobias Wolff puts it in his masterly novel Old School: “For a writer there is no such thing as an exemplary life … Certain writers do good work at the bottom of a bottle. The outlaws generally write as well as the bankers, though more briefly. Some writers flourish like opportunistic weeds by hiding among the citizens, others by toughing it out in one sort of desert or another.”

This freedom is the challenging perk of the non-job. If you are a tennis player any weakness — an inability, say, to deal with high-bouncing balls to your backhand — will be just that. And so you must devote long hours of practice to making the vulnerable parts of your game less vulnerable. If you are a writer the equivalent weakness can rarely be made good so you are probably better off letting it atrophy and enhancing some other aspect of your performance.

Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can’t do. The mass of things that lie beyond their abilities force them to concentrate on the things they can. “I can’t do this,” exclaims the distraught Mother-Writer in People Like That Are the Only People Here, Lorrie Moore’s famous story about a young child dying of cancer. “I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue. I do the careful ironies of daydreams. I do the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built …” From the sum total of these apparent trivialities emerges a fiction which succeeds in doing precisely what it claims it can’t.

Or take a more extreme example:Franz Kafka. Was ever a writer so consumed by the things he couldn’t do? Stitch together all the things Kafka couldn’t do and you have a draft of War and Peace. The corollary of this is that what he was left with was stuff no one else could do — or had ever done. Stepping over into music, wasn’t it partly Beethoven’s inability to conjure melodies as effortlessly as Mozart that encouraged the development of his transcendent rhythmic power? How reassuring to know that the same problems that afflict journeymen artists also operate at the level of genius.

A spokesman for the former, I have written novels even though I have absolutely no ability to think of — and no interest in — stories and plots. The best I can come up with are situations which tend, with some slight variation of locale, to be just one situation: boy meets girl. Other things — structure and tone — must, in these severely compromised circumstances, take over some of the load-bearing work normally assumed by plot. The same holds true for certain kinds of non-fiction, those animated by — and reliant on more than — the appeal of their ostensible subject matter.

This is another lesson: you don’t have to know what kind of book you are writing until you have written a good deal of it, maybe not until you’ve finished it — maybe not even then. That’s the second sense in which the cat doesn’t have to be a cat. All that matters is that at some point the book generates a form and style uniquely appropriate to its own needs. Why bother offering readers an experience that they can get from someone else? The playwright David Hare once claimed that: “The two most depressing words in the English language are ‘literary fiction’.” Remember this: literary fiction does not set a standard that is to be aspired to; it describes a habit of convention that people — writers and readers alike — collapse into, like a comfy old sofa.

Which, surely, is not such a bad place to be. Except, for writers, the sofa should always be an extension of the desk. Reading is not just part of your apprenticeship; it continues to inform, stimulate and invigorate your writing life — and it is never passive. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recalls her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, rereading Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, “trying to see how it worked”. To see how Styron got away with it is the more interesting question in my and Martin Amis’s view. (Styron’s novel was, for Amis, “a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey”.)

There’s a lesson here. One’s reading does not have to be confined to the commanding — and thereby discouraging — heights of the truly great. Take a look also at what’s happening on the lower slopes, even in the crowded troughs. We tend to think of ambition operating in terms of some ultimate destination — the Nobel Prize or bust! — but it also manifests itself incrementally, at the level of pettiness. To read a well-regarded writer and to find the conviction growing in yourself that he or she is second- or third-rate, that, in Bob Dylan’s words, “you can say it just as good”, is both encouraging and, if acted upon, a niggling form of ambition. (If it is not acted upon it becomes simply corrosive.)

As with ambition so with practicalities. It’s a daunting prospect to sit down with the intention of writing a masterpiece. If it has any chance of being realised that ambition is best broken down into achievable increments, such as I will sit here for two hours, or 500 words or whatever. Keep these targets manageable and you will feel good about your progress, even if that progress is, inevitably, measured negatively.

The satisfactions of writing are indistinguishable from its challenges and difficulties. It is constantly testing all your faculties and skills (of expression, concentration, memory, imagination and empathy) on the smallest scale (sentences, words, commas) and the largest (the overall design, structure and purpose of the book) simultaneously. It brings you absolutely and always up against your limitations. That’s why people keep at it — and why it’s far easier to give advice about writing than it is to do it.

    —Geoff Dyer

 

 

 

 

 

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