Author: Break with the past - Qurratul Ain Hyder
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books5.htm
The taxi pulls into the U-shaped Sector 27 of NOIDA (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), a recently developed suburb of Delhi, across the Jumna. A Pakistani needs a visa to be able to visit NOIDA, even though it is only about ten kilometres from the Indian capital’s city centre. NOIDA is located outside the limits of Delhi state. The blocks of flats in NOIDA where quite a few middleclass Delhi-walas have shifted in the recent years were built about 15 or 20 years ago. Until 1947 there was virtually no habitation where NOIDA is now situated, only some katchi abadis and stretches of partly cultivated land.
Here on the first floor of one of the blocks of Sector 27, lives the celebrated Urdu writer, Qurratul Ain Hyder Annie to her family and to her close circle of friends. She has not been in the best of health for the past few years. Mercifully, she appears to have recovered fairly well from a mild stroke. However, but for Rehana, her young, caring and intelligent companion, she would be somewhat helpless and quite lonely. Annie has made Delhi her home. It was here in the Karol Bagh area she had lived for sometime with her mother, Begum Nazar Sajjad Hyder, and her brother, Mustafa Hyder, before Partition. Delhi has again been her home for many years since her return to India from Pakistan in the early 1960s. However, she has travelled quite a lot, both within India and abroad.
In the years since her return, Annie has been engaged in a number of assignments. In Bombay, where she resided in the initial years, she served on the editorial staff of The illustrated weekly of India, with Khushwant Singh as editor, and with the prestigious cultural magazine Imprint. For a while she even wrote scripts and dialogues for films. In Bombay she was in the company of celebrated progressive writers, such as Krishen Chander and his wife, Salma, Ismat Chughtai, Ali Sardar Jafri, Azmi and a host of younger writers and poets, including Jan Nisar Akhtar’s son, Javed Akhtar, at the time a budding writer of scripts, stories, lyrics, and dialogues for films.
The introduction Annie wrote for Javed’s collection of poems, Tarkash, evokes the memory of the silent suffering of Safiya, Javed’s mother a sister of the poet Majaz. It also takes one back to the elegant, quiet part of Lucknow, Fyzabad Road, close to the famed Isabella Thouburn (I.T) College, where her renowned parents Yaldram and Nazar Sajjad had built their home. For Annie the journey from Lucknow’s Fyzabad Road to NOIDA has been a long and exciting one. While still at school in Lucknow, she had written some of her earliest short stories which instantly drew the attention of some senior writers and well known critics.
Now at the end of some five decades full of hope and not without moments of despair, she has emerged as the most renowned and possibly the most important contemporary personality in the field of Urdu literature. She has been the recipient of India’s most prestigious literary award, Gyanpith, given yearly to one out of scores of writers of the dozen or so national languages listed in the Indian constitution. Her eminence as a writer has also been recognized by literary and cultural organizations all over the world.
While a collection of Annie’s earliest work, mostly short stories, dealing with the somewhat light-hearted felicitous and somewhat semi-westernized lifestyle of the upper middle class urban Muslims had already been published by 1947, it was only after Partition that she developed into a major creative writer. Extremely sensitive to the trauma which came in the wake of Partition and particularly affected the environment to which she belonged, she developed a brooding, nostalgic view of life.
In the words of the historian and social scientist, Prof Aijaz Ahmad of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Partition meant a sudden violent break with the past and with ancestral homes and history for which the writer was not prepared. Since the future was going to be vastly different from the inherited past, the past had to be reconstructed, recaptured and its meaning reconciled with. Hence nostalgia was a totally necessary conscious element of creative art. Qurratul Ain Hyder accepted all that with utmost sensitivity.
Her post-Partition work, as Prof Gopi Chand Narang, points out, emerged as the trend setter. Annie’s structurally complex novel Aag ka darya, dealing with the break and continuity of the cultural life in the subcontinent, proved to be a masterpiece of the demands of a new approach to the creative art. Prof Narang believes that Annie’s work (to borrow a term from E.M. Forster) is a study of “life in values” rather than of “life in time”.
Since her return to India about which she has never had any regrets Annie has been almost incessantly immersed in this study and depiction of “life in terms of values”. Her novel Gardish-i-rang-i-chaman yet another masterly work - and her autobiographical Kara-i-jahan daraz hai (on the third volume of which she was working when I met her last) are evidence of her preoccupation with the revolution in the values of life.
Annie is perhaps the only full-time contemporary writer of Urdu. She has hardly any other occupation in life. When I called on her during my recent visit to Delhi she was busy working on an illustrated history of her family, going back to several generations both on her paternal and maternal side. She has put together an unbelievably large collection of photographs salvaged from nearly forgotten private family archives in Delhi, Aligarh, Lucknow, and most of all, Nehtor. She has traced her ancestry going back to nearly two hundred years ago.
I came away wondering whether the present no more exists for Annie. Her social life is restricted because of her health problem. She has hardly ever been reconciled to what can broadly be described as the ‘establishment’ of the writers’ community. It was the same when she was in Pakistan. Urdu to which she is passionately attached has been ‘hijacked’ in post-Independence India, to quote her, and is being transformed into Hindi. The Indian society is also being gradually transformed. Will she be able to reconcile herself with all the transformation? To be honest, she finds such questions irrelevant. What preoccupies her is her writing, and whatever she is going to write next.