Masud is the author of four acclaimed collections of short stories in Urdu. Most of his stories meticulously detail everyday feelings and sensations, but in ways that render them unfamiliar, uncomfortable and new. COURTESY SABEEHA KHATOON
“Destitutes Compound,” a story by Naiyer Masud, is about a young man who leaves his home after an argument with his father. After his only friend dies, the man concludes that it is time for him to return to his family. As he makes preparations for his homecoming, he realises that the children he met when he first arrived at the compound now have greying hair. When he returns, he learns that both his parents have passed away, but an old, blind grandmother still sits in the house’s entrance cracking betel nuts, just as she had when he left. The image of the grandmother rhythmically cracking betel nuts has stayed with me for years. To me, she symbolises time itself, resting still, awaiting our return.
Masud is the author of four acclaimed collections of short stories in Urdu. Most of his stories meticulously detail everyday feelings and sensations, but in ways that render them unfamiliar, uncomfortable and new. The narrator of “Ba’i’s Mourners” is consumed by a fear of brides when he learns of one who died from a scorpion bite before reaching her groom’s house. In “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire,” the narrator describes the complex sensations that old houses evoke in him—some sections of them make him feel afraid, while others evoke an eerie expectation that a distant desire will soon be fulfilled. “Dustland” features a narrator who experiences an uncontrollable attraction towards dust storms. Most of Masud’s stories are told in the first person. Sabeeha Khatoon—Masud’s wife, who was always his first reader and critic—told me, “When I read his stories, I felt I was the narrator. I never quite understood what was happening or why it was happening, but felt that I was experiencing the same emotions as the narrator.” Masud’s focus on sensations, rather than events, helps create this effect. For the most part, I find it hard to recall the plot of Masud’s stories, even immediately after reading them, but I can never elude the feelings they conjure.
Not all critics have praised Masud’s disregard for narrative. In 1994, partly in response to readers’ criticism that his stories, while enthralling, lacked kahanipan (storytelling) and were difficult to follow, Masud wrote “The Myna from the Peacock Garden.” This endearing tale is set in Lucknow, during the mid 1850s, when it was the capital of the state of Awadh. In it, the main character, Kale Khan, tends to the king’s mynas in the royal garden, and his young daughter begs him to gift her one of the birds. Kale Khan is reluctant, but eventually he succumbs to his daughter’s pleas and steals a myna from the king’s garden, knowing he will face dire consequences if his crime is discovered.
“The Myna from the Peacock Garden” is arguably Masud’s best-known story. It earned him the Saraswati Samman, one of India’s most distinguished literary awards. This story, however, stands apart in Masud’s oeuvre. Not only does it have a clear plot and plenty of kahanipan, but it is also set in a very specific place and time—during the last years of the rule of Wajid Ali Shah, the final nawab of Awadh. Masud explained in an inteview that he hoped this story would “offer a corrective to the bad reputation Wajid Ali Shah had acquired. Certainly, he had weaknesses but he had good qualities as well. I wanted to deal with him, Lucknow, and the culture of Lucknow in a story.”
Masud’s father, Syed Masud Hasan Rizvi, a renowned scholar of Urdu and Persian literature, had long being fascinated by Wajid Ali Shah, and collected many of the aesthete king’s works. Rizvi also owned several hundred books and manuscripts about nineteenth-century Awadh. Masud’s story was in large part inspired by his father’s research, and, in particular, by a poem that describes Wajid Ali Shah’s decorative birdcage and his affection for mynas.
Masud was born in 1936 in Lucknow, and lived there, in a house built by his father, for most of his life. His father chose to stay in Lucknow after Partition, even as most Muslim families in north India faced increasing pressure and discrimination, and many migrated to Pakistan.
Masud taught Persian literature at Lucknow University, from 1967 until he retired in 1996. In addition to his fiction, which earned him world fame, Masud also authored countless articles and radio features about the Lucknow-born marsiya (elegy) poet Mir Anis, and the city’s literary culture.
In particular, Masud’s scholarship explores how Lucknow became a literary centre under the patronage of various kings, while the Mughal courts in Delhi declined. Naturally, many readers associate Masud with Lucknow. Yet, I believe that his stories possess a vision simultaneously larger and smaller than his native city.
Lucknow, of course, does show up in Masud’s fiction. Its artisan culture features in many stories: the glass worker in “Sheeha Ghat,” the chikan embroiderer in “Ganjefa,” the perfume maker in “Essence of Camphor.” In “Interregnum,” a mason carves designs of fish into the facades of buildings. Fish designs just like these were once the emblem of Awadh, and they adorn Lucknow’s Asifi Imambara, as well as the frontages of many buildings in the neighbourhoods of Chowk, Ashrafababad and Aminabad. Whenever I spot a fish on an old Lucknow building, I inevitably think of the mason in “Interregnum.”
I am, however, uncomfortable with tributes that bind Masud to Lucknow. They form part of a larger tendency to read South Asian authors, particularly those who write in Indian languages, as windows into a distinctive local culture. This approach misses the essence of Masud’s fiction. His Spanish translator, Rocío Moriones Alonso, once noted that Masud’s stories show us that the universal can be found in the extreme local. The blind grandmother cracking betel nuts in “Destitutes Compound” might be an undeniably Lucknavi—or at least north Indian—character, but the sensation she evokes is that of motionless time and placelessness.
Moreover, Masud was in many ways a global writer. He was a professor of Persian, a former global language, and a translator of Persian and English into Urdu. His own works in Urdu were translated into many languages. A few years ago, I found a Spanish translation of a collection of Masud’s stories in Mexico City, in a bookstore called Libreria Gandhi. As I sat rereading “Essence of Camphor,” I realised that Masud might have hardly left his native city, but he travelled more widely than most who board a transcontinental flight every year. One of his most commendable accomplishments is that, through his stories, he ultimately expanded Urdu’s reach. And he did so precisely at a time when the language—as well as its speakers, readers and writers—faced harsh political pressure, and many in India actively sought to restrict and confine it.
I had the pleasure of knowing Masud during the last decade of his life. By then he was ailing. Nonetheless, it was not hard to see how his writing reflected his lifestyle. He owned several books about crafts, and his home was decorated with pieces of art he had created. Masud once told me that he often was afflicted by “craft spells” and described how, two decades earlier, he had become obsessed with making wood and clay sijdegah—small tablets used by Shia Muslims to rest their foreheads on during prayers. He made many sijdegah and gave several dozen away to friends and relatives. Some of them, however, are still lying around his house, and his son, Timsal Masud, offers namaz on one of them every day.
Masud’s writing style echoes the rhythm and meticulousness of his craft projects. His prose stands out for its precision and unhurriedness. Muhammad Umar Memon, his English translator, once said that “there is absolutely nothing arbitrary or rushed” about Masud’s “verbal choices.” The unhurriedness of his prose also helps create the sensation of motionless time that permeates his stories.
More than a decade ago, Masud suffered a stroke that left one side of his body paralysed. Later, a series of fractures further impeded his mobility. Not being able to leave the house with ease, however, did not seem to concern him. Even before falling ill, he left only sparingly and reluctantly. “This is the only place where I can write,” he remarked. “I’ve never written anything outside of my home.” Even while his imagination spanned great distances, Masud’s home is undeniably present in his writing. The neem tree, the entrance, the staircase and the garden of Masud’s home show up in various stories, as do the people that inhabited the place. Home to three families, Masud’s house was never a quiet library, but rather a place filled with the noises of a full life: the laughter of children, the clatter of cooking pots, the azan from nearby mosques, the singing of visiting beggars, the unceasing traffic and the voices of people going about their daily lives.
Masud passed away on 24 July 2017, at the age of 81, with his wife and son at his side. A few days later, I asked Sabeeha Khatoon how long it had been since her husband had stepped outside the house. Maybe three years, she responded. I told her that in the seven years I had been his daughter-in-law, I had not seen or heard of him ever leaving his home. “Well, he went to Delhi to receive an award,” she said. “I think it was 2007.”
“I believe he briefly attended a Muharram procession. It must have been after that trip to Delhi,” his oldest daughter intervened, but she could not recall exactly when. Neither woman seemed surprised at their inability to remember.
The day after the panjum ki majlis, which commemorated the fifth day after Masud’s death, I visited his grave. He rests next to his mother and father, in a cemetery only a few blocks away from his beloved home. When the wind blows, white flowers from a nearby tree fall and decorate Masud’s grave. As I stood in the cemetery thinking of the life and death of a great artist, I was overwhelmed by the sensation that I was standing in one of his stories.
ISABEL HUACUJA ALONSO is a professor of South Asian history at California State University, San Bernardino.
source: http://www.caravanmagazine.in / The Caravan / Home> Books – Literature / by Isabel Huacuja Alonso / August 18th, 2017
Naiyer Masud. Photos courtesy of Muhammad Umar Memon
Muhammad Umar Memon, who has translated Naiyer Masud’s stories, on the labyrinth of his fictional universe.
Naiyer Masud (1936-2017), who passed away in Lucknow on July 24 at the age of 81 after protracted illness, was one of the greatest Urdu short story writers who has been extensively translated into several languages, including English, Finnish, French and Spanish.
Masud was born on November 16, 1936 in Lucknow. His parents came from families of physicians (hakims). His father, Syed Masud Hasan Rizvi Adeeb, was a professor of Persian at Lucknow University and a famed scholar of dastaan. He was the elder brother of noted Urdu satirist Azhar Masud. In 1965, Masud joined Lucknow University as a professor of Persian where he remained till his retirement in 1996.
Masud’s four books of short stories — Seemiya (The Occult), Itr-e-Kafoor (Essence of Camphor), Taus Chaman ki Maina (The Myna of Peacock Garden) and Ganjifa (Card) — cemented his reputation as the master of the unsaid who created a maze, a labyrinth in his stories that held the reader captive to their narrative wizardry, their illusory spell.
Masud also translated a few short stories of Kafka as well as some Persian stories into Urdu. He also wrote critical and biographical accounts of Mir Babar Ali Anees (1803-1874), Yagana Changezi (1884-1956) and Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869). He was awarded the Padma Shri for Literature and Education in 1970. He was also honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award for Urdu in 2001 and the Saraswati Samman in 2007.
In this interview, critic and short story writer Muhammad Umar Memon, professor emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has translated Masud’s stories into English — (The Occult, Penguin Books, 2013) and Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories (Penguin Random House, 2015) — talks about Masud’s enchanting fictional landscape. “His fiction invites you to enjoy the labyrinth for what it is and, if possible, become it — something like the complete fusion or identity of the observing subject and the observed object,” says Memon. Excerpts from an interview:
SHIREEN QUADRI: In Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories (Penguin Random House, 2015), you mention about your first encounter with Naiyer Masud’s fiction in the late 1980s and how you were stunned by Seemiya, his first collection. You talk about his stories as “fragments of consciousness suggestive in their fractured imagery of some presence somewhere in the beyond”. Could you share your initial impression of this encounter and how it has evolved over the years?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: That first impression, which I perhaps share with most of his readers, persists.Take, for example, some images that occur with rare economy of description in most of the stories of Seemiya, but only in fragments, revealing a little of themselves at each occurrence, such as the ubiquitous lone fragment of the mysterious cloud, the curios mentioned in passing in the opening story, “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire”, and then repeated with additional details in practically all the others, with their relatively detailed treatment in the third story, “Snake Catcher”; or the young woman fleeing from the sexual advances of the narrator which is touched upon lightly in the first story, then again in the third, but occupying a substantial part of the fourth and eponymous story of the collection where her flight ends in drowning. More tellingly, however, it is the opening paragraph of “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire” and its verbatim retrieval as the closing part of the last story, “Resting Place.”All this creates an overwhelming impression of some sort of inherent interconnectedness and of what lies in between as somehow being an organic part of a continuum. Yet all five stories of the collection preserve their autonomy. While they do not yield any sense of spatial or chronological continuity, or closure, they do leave the reader with two dominant impressions: that (1) the author is dealing with a continuum, and (2) it can be viewed only in fragments.
What stunned me was the deliberate attempt of the author to suppress the links that would — or, might — have restored the fragments to their logical place in the continuum. The resulting jolting effect makes it difficult to grasp the ultimate meaning of the work; perhaps the reason why one is hard pressed to articulate for oneself or explain to others with any degree of confidence and precision what a given story is about — what it means.
Nor can one dismiss these stories as so much mumbo jumbo and move on. They just don’t let you move on. They haunt you. You are hooked. Nothing like this arresting quality is seen anywhere in Urdu fiction, where you are completely taken, without knowing, ironically, what has taken you.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud’s four collections of stories — Seemiya, Itr-e-Kafoor, Taus Chaman Ki Mayna and Ganjifa — establish his reputation as possibly the greatest Urdu short story writer. He has been variously described as a “realist of the strange” (by Amit Chaudhuri) and as a “poet’s storyteller” (by Agha Shahid Ali). What place do you think he occupies in the legions of Urdu writers whose works have been embraced and appreciated by the wider world?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I’m not sure about the perimeters of this “wider world”. Do you mean the territories of South Asia or the whole world? Frankly, I don’t think too many Urdu fiction writers have received much recognition outside the South Asian subcontinent. They became known mostly on university campuses with departments of South Asian Studies after some of their work became available in translation, but not among mainstream Western readers. I think Saadat Hasan Manto and Naiyer Masud are comparatively better known outside South Asia. Essence of Camphor, one of the two books of Masud’s stories I published in the US, received many good comments in Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other US newspapers and magazines, and was later translated into Finnish, French and Spanish. But I doubt it sold more than a couple of hundred copies in the US. As for within South Asia, Masud is generally considered the finest Urdu fiction writer today, without progenitor or progeny.
The Vice President, Mohammad Hamid Ansari presenting the Saraswati Samman Award 2006-07 to Dr. Naiyar Masud at a award function organized by K.K Birla Foundation, in New Delhi on March 05, 2008.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Seemiya, a collection of five interlinked stories, which you translated into English (The Occult, Penguin Books, 2013), is more like a novel in stories. They have no discernible plots, their terrains are unidentifiable, the characters that inhabit them have no names. While these stories are autonomous, they coalesce in unexpected ways, with certain images recurring in more than one story. Tell us about your understanding and appreciation of his first collection which, in many ways, cemented Masud’s reputation as a master of the form?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I have already given some idea of both my appreciation and the tenaciously illusive nature of The Occult in the answer to one of your previous questions. However, let me add a little more: The jolts that throw the reader in a vortex of incomprehensibility are the result of paring down to as much as one-tenth the draft of a work from its original length. Why does he do that? Two examples, in his own words:
“(1) Once a thing is brought into existence, it continues to live in some form or fashion even when it is removed from the scene. For example, you are sitting on this sofa; you then decide to get up and leave. You are not on it anymore, and yet your presence will be felt, to some extent at least, however obscurely or intangibly. But that other sofa, just brought in from the store, on which no one has yet sat, cannot be the same as the one you had sat on. It is necessarily different. One cannot describe this difference in words, but one can feel it, subliminally.
(2) There was this woman who was an accomplished cook. A certain dish that required only four ounces of ghee she’d cook with two-and-a-half pounds of ghee, removing the extra when it was done. But the dish tasted very special and retained the flavour, the essence of the finest dish from the table of the nobility.”
What he tries to do, then, is to retain the aura of the excised portions in those that he does keep. Never mind the suppression of details pertaining to the event being described, something reminiscent of their erstwhile existence will be felt in the retained parts. His job is to craft a language which will convey this veritable existence in its equally veritable absence. He elaborates it further: “Take, for example, the phrase ‘nisvānī badan kī khushbū’ [scent of a woman’s body] or ‘qadmoñ kī āhat’ [the sound of footfalls suggestive of a presence]. They occur once or twice in my work at most, yet nonetheless seem to pervade it.”
Muhammad Umar Memon
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud’s fictional landscape is like a labyrinth. In the introduction to Collected Stories, you write that his stories seem to pull the readers into the centre of a vortex — at once provocative and inaccessible. You wrote: “Even while failing to understand his stories, one is unable to walk away from their haunting ambit. Somehow they seem to retrieve for the reader a part of their memory buried deep in the liminal folds of consciousness otherwise preoccupied with the more immediate problems of mundane existence.” For a reader, what is the best way to approach Masud’s stories?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: The “best way” is also indicated in the continuation of the passage you have quoted, viz., “It is a part that needs to be discovered, patiently, more through feeling and introspection than by reason. The moment reason is engaged, what it sees is a formidable scrambling of logical coordinates, always leading back to the same labyrinth, never reconstituting into a discernible [and complete] entity.”
You see, although one could say, everything, however ineffable and vague, carries a sub-stratum of “meaning”, meaning ultimately has to do with “ego”, the desire to grasp and be done with the claustrophobic labyrinth, not to dangle permanently in a worrisome state of incomprehension. But what is the meaning of an object d’art, a painting, a symphony, a nocturne? Why can’t we enjoy it for its own sake? Let it generate its diverse epiphanies in the reader’s imagination. For it is emblematic of nothing beyond itself, and so is Naiyer Masud’s fiction. If we continue the quest for meaning, it would be like the attempt to get out of the labyrinth, while his fiction invites you to enjoy the labyrinth for what it is and, if possible, become it — something like the complete fusion or identity of the observing subject and the observed object. I might also add here that it is the limitation of any grouping of written words with their inevitable consecutiveness that raises our expectation, the necessity for it to have meaning. If somehow a story such as “The Colour of Nothingness” could be converted into a painting, with all its events simultaneously present on the surface of canvas, would we still approach it with the same expectation of meaning as we would in its written form?
SHIREEN QUADRI: What is your mental portrait of Masud based on your interactions with him over the years? Could you trace for us the world Masud came from and how it influenced his fictional landscape?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I’ve met him only once, by accident, in Delhi, for a few hours, in the company of his friends. It was difficult to talk to him much, certainly not about his work. My only contact with him was through correspondence and occasional telephone calls. I have no mental image of him except when I think of him during the last half a dozen years of his illness, the painful image of a bedridden, frail man who had gradually severed his contact with the world sails through the mind. He had stopped writing altogether during this period, whether due to physical inability (the stroke had more-or-less paralysed his right side) or, even if he could write, he was determined not to. I do have a theory about it, but it is difficult to articulate it with clarity. Perhaps a kind of affront to his pride compelled him to deny the world all those scintillating gems he could have given it, to get even with Providence in as incomprehensible a way as unfolds in his fiction. He was a very gentle person, a paragon of rare subtlety and what we call “sha’istagi” in Urdu, who hurt no one, extremely reserved, immensely confident but least demonstrative of it.
That said, what I have gathered of his background is common knowledge. He grew up among books and in a cultured family. An extremely well-read man who was keenly aware of the sophistication and achievements of his native Awadh, in arts, in sports, and everything in between. Bygone Lucknow — once palpably real — was now a place in memory. Even in stories which are not time-and-place-specific, their locales nevertheless are redolent of the aura of Lucknow — in the dilapidated wall of a building, in a crumbling mihrab.
SHIREEN QUADRI: How were Masud’s stories received by the Urdu world and his contemporaries?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: He was writing already from his early years, but he didn’t publish anything until 1970s. “Nusrat” was his first published story. It came out in his friend S.R. Faruqi’s literary magazine Shab-Khoon. Interestingly, when he gave it to him to look at, he didn’t say he wrote it. He said he had translated it. I do not recall Urduwallahs taking much notice of or getting excited about his stories initially. Once I asked S.R. Faruqi what he thought of Masud’s work, his reply left me dumfounded. “They don’t go anywhere,” he said. (In a way, it was a very intelligent, indeed a very perceptive remark: not going anywhere yet making the pursuit worthy of every effort was precisely the point).
All this changed with the publication of his first collection (Seemiya). Now everyone in Pakistan and India was talking about him, I mean the Urduwallahs. Critics, such as Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman, Muzaffar Ali Syed, and Safdar Mir praised his work in newspaper columns, but they didn’t venture a formal critical assessment. It appears they were smitten by his style. Anyway, today he ranks as the foremost author of Urdu short stories. Without a doubt, his is the most original voice in Urdu letters.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud is among a clutch of writers who broke away from the conventions of Urdu short fiction — the linear development of the story and the sequential structure of the plot — and charted a new path: the abstract. The social realism of Progressives (Manto, Chughtai, Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi et al) and the symbolism of Modernists (Surinder Prakash, Balraj Manra, Ghyas Ahmad Gaddi, Joginder Paul, Balraj Komal et al) gave way to mimetic realism, the new way of capturing the multi-faceted reality which reflected that post-1970 Urdu writers had a more nuanced, complex notion of reality. Kafka, whom he also translated into Urdu, had a great influence on Masud. Could you talk about what possibly shaped his fiction and gave it a new direction?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: While one’s background and milieu may play a part in shaping the character of his writing to some degree, style, ultimately, is the result of an innate element of one’s personality. The circumstances of Ghalib’s life are well-known. Could someone else have with identical circumstances produced Ghalib’s kind of poetry? Background and milieu cannot account for the imaginal world and ways of a writer, nor could this illusive “element” be explained rationally.
A man of undemonstrative feelings, Masud had deep roots in and intimate knowledge of the vanished culture of Lucknow, most clearly visible in his story “The Myna from Peacock Garden”. But even in stories where the locale and time is deliberately obscured, the details and ambience betray his intimacy with that culture. This is as much as one can say. What, however, unfolds within the confines of this knowledge is pure imagination, a working out of one’s unique personality and illusions and what have you.
However, in his several dozen letters to me, he often names Ghulam Abbas as his main influence, while many others (Azim Beg Chughtai, Rafiq Husain, Kafka, Poe, Emile Brontë, Dostoevsky) may have worked only as models. Kafka’s influence on him has been often grossly overrated. Although he thinks that Kafka and Poe have a lot to give, he is not sure whether he has consciously come under their influence. Let’s just say that Masud has consciously followed Ghulam Abbas and creatively assimilated Kafka. Whatever he learned from these writers helped him craft a style uniquely his —a style which is as deceptively simple as it is hard to imitate.
SHIREEN QUADRI: You also wrote somewhere that Masud’s narratives work as a reminder against completion and closure. In a very interesting analysis of his stories, you wrote once that in Masud’s stories “one experiences things in dynamic movement, not as objects with fixed perimeters, in a state of repose or quiescence. So one cannot be done with them and move on. Circularity has no terminus. Finishing one of his stories does not bring the expected comprehension and completion. What it does bring is a continual engagement with the unsaid and the ineffable, preserved in memory. It is like walking into a well-maintained living room, but no one greets you. You wait for hours, but no one appears. And you cannot leave because you vaguely feel a presence that you cannot see or name.” Are Masud’s narratives also a reminder against the quest for meaning? How deeply are they also enmeshed in dreams and disillusionment?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Dreams — yes; disillusionment — with qualification. In fact, his very first published story “Nusrat”, according to his admission, is a transcription of a dream he had. Disillusionment is a fact of life, any life. So, to that extent, it is there in his stories. But it has nothing to do with the author’s disposition or pathology. Masud is mature enough to not allow disillusionment to become a dirge of what once was and is no more. When the word “morbidity” or “decadence” is used to characterise his work, he vehemently takes exception to it. He knows how good that culture was and it is a shame it didn’t last, but he also knows that one must move on to the future and its teeming possibilities. Thus, a fictional recapitulation of that culture is merely a recording and not an act of mourning.
As for completion and closure, answering just this question in an interview, he expressed his dislike of the dramatic ending, adding,
“Even as a child I found it repulsive. A story’s end shouldn’t be dramatic. Which means the story should not give the impression that it has ended, that all is finished and done with, that nothing remains. The other reason could be that even after I’ve finalised a story, I seem to want to continue writing it, or if not it per se, then a fresh one along much the same lines. […] I do intend for my story to give the feeling that it has not ended, that rather what has ended is the specific episode around which it is woven. Although the short stories in Seemiyā were not written in the sequence in which they appear in the book, they illustrate my point well. You will notice a particular connectedness, a certain coherence and affinity flowing through all of them.”
SHIREEN QUADRI: Your contribution to the promotion of Urdu works has been immense. A professor emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, you have translated numerous works of Urdu fiction, including the works of Masud. You also served as editor of the Annual of Urdu Studies (1993-2014). Tell us about your association with Urdu literature. Who are some figures of Urdu literature you admire?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Well, as a Memon from Rajkot, my mother tongue is Memoni and/or Gujarati, but I was born in Aligarh, where my father was a professor at the university, and grew up among Urdu speakers. I always loved Urdu, but I wasn’t thinking of a profession in Urdu. I did my graduate and post-graduate work in Arabic and Islamic Studies. After a Ph. D., I was offered a joint appointment in two separate departments at the University of Wisconsin to teach Arabic in one and Persian in the other. A year later, I was offered to take over Urdu as well and move to one department. I gave up teaching Arabic. Since then I have worked only in Urdu, but I have taught courses on Islamic religion and culture, literatures of Muslim Societies, and Sufism throughout.
Who do I admire? In fiction, surely some of the writers I have translated. In criticism: first and foremost, Muhammad Hasan Askari, next, S.R. Faruqi, and, finally, Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman.
SHIREEN QUADRI: What memories do you have of Aligarh, where you were born, and Karachi, where your family moved to in 1954? Tell us about some of your early literary influences.
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Plenty. And the memories of Aligarh seem to be more real than those of the ten years I spent in Karachi. The funny thing is: whenever the image of Aligarh flashes across my mind, the place seems to exist in its own independent space, without even a tentacle stretching into India or Pakistan. In a way, it is more real than the two countries. It is my “Toba Tek Singh.” I haven’t been to Aligarh since 1954 and I’m dying to visit it before my time is up. But politics has a way of thwarting even the most innocent wishes. Even though I’m a US citizen for over 30 years now, I couldn’t get the Indian visa.
Anyway, being the youngest of six children, five of whom having already left Aligarh, I grew up with a father half a century older than myself and always absorbed in some book, I went through a lonely and uneventful childhood and always carried a vague feeling of some unnamed sadness, which has dogged me throughout my life. I did have some friends though. I played the games then common among Indian boys (cricket and gilli danda), stole mangoes, guava and other fruit from university orchards on the way back from school, and enjoyed swimming. So, it was just another ordinary life. I went through many of the same boyhood and adolescent experiences as
other boys.
Out of my entire fifteen years in Aligarh — excluding a few summers which we spent in our ancestral hometown Rajkot in Kathiawar, Suarashtra (the same place where, I believe, during the waning days of the British Raj, the Ali Brothers spent some time in jail on sedition charges), where my parents owned a house — the nights of 1947 stand out in memory. Partition took place while we were summering in Rajkot. When the time came for us to return to Aligarh, my mother stayed behind because of a scheduled minor foot surgery. On the way back, Father left my sister and me at the Delhi railway station and went to attend a meeting in the city which had been planned earlier and Abul Kalam Azad had insisted that he attend it. My father thought a railway station would be safer. My sister and I rode a rollercoaster of veritable fear during those two or three hours alone on the railway platform.
Later we took the train to Aligarh which arrived safely, but we subsequently learnt that the next one did experience some trouble and a few lives were lost. I said, “the nights of 1947”. Although communal incidents were relatively few in the university area, our neighbourhood on the fringe of it lived in constant fear of a sudden attack and had therefore mounted a big searchlight atop the roof of Manzur Sahib’s house, which is where we were to gather in case of an assault. One morning we were awakened in the wee hours and rushed to Manzur Sahib’s. It was a brutally chilly night. I recall I was shivering down to my bones. There was no time to put on anything warm. An overcoat was just hurriedly thrown over my sleeping clothes and off we went, with me still in my slippers. Luckily the night passed without any incident.
As for my early literary influences, well, none, or if there were any, I was not conscious of them. In Aligarh, I enjoyed reading children’s magazines, Khilona and Phulwari and, later, detective novels, such as Ibn-e-Safi’s monthly Jasoosi Duniya and Imran series. Reading of literature didn’t begin until we moved to Pakistan. I did read a lot of books and even wrote some stories, the idea of becoming a professional writer was far from my mind.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Your latest translated work, The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told (Aleph, 2017) brings together the works of 25 Urdu writers who are masters of the form, including Abdullah Hussein, Asad Muhammad Khan, Munshi Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Intizar Husain, Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Rajinder Singh Bedi and many others. In your wonderful introduction, you mention that their stories carried within them “the embryo of some of the future developments of the form”. What triggered this collection and what were your overriding concerns behind their selection?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: You seem to think that the book was planned, that there was a conscious design behind the selection. At the risk of disappointing you, the story is far simpler. Selection, while it may appear to be the result of a conscious act, is, for me at any rate, merely a reflection of who one is, and it takes a while to evolve into one “who one is”. From that point forward, selection is merely following a course predetermine by one’s nature and personality. It just happens. You don’t have to be conscious of it. I never translated a story that I didn’t like, and I never translated a work to meet the demands of a definite publishing project. I didn’t care whether a translation ever got published. This is the reason why I find it difficult to design a book according to the demands of a publisher. The credit for The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told really goes to Simar Puneet, my editor at Aleph. It was her idea and gentle persuasion that made it possible, with my part in it being very little. I only selected stories from my published work and revised them.
SHIREEN QUADRI: What are you working on next?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: There is no next, not in English anyway. After retirement in 2008, I decided to stop further translation into English. Half a century in the US had slowly affected my ability to write proper Urdu. Henceforward I will do all my work in Urdu, I told myself. I have since written very little in English, except for a few columns for the Karachi-based newspaper Dawn. When R. Sivapriya, a former editor at Penguin, asked me to translate Manto, I remember my initial reluctance to accept her offer. She persisted, I gave in.
In the past nine years, I have translated into Urdu a variety of writing from Arabic, but mostly from English: about a dozen novels, a few short stories, a work on Sufi metaphysics, articles on the nature of Islamic culture in al-Andalus, Islamic philosophy, etc. Currently I’m collaborating with a friend on translating a book about the nature and myths surrounding the transmission of Greek science and philosophy into Islamic civilisation and Islamic contribution — grudgingly acknowledged, if at all — to the making of the European renaissance. The work is proving to be quite arduous as it involves advanced mathematics and astronomy. So my courtship with English now appears to have effectively ended, although I might revise some earlier work and reprint it.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Who are some of the contemporary writers in Urdu (poets, novelists and short story writers) we must watch out for?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: This is a difficult question. I really haven’t kept up with the Urdu fictional production in the past two or three decades. There are, of course, many new writers, but I haven’t read their work critically to make any predictions about their promise. Although among the older contemporaries Ikramullah, Asad Muhammad Khan, and Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman are quite well-known to Urdu readership; their work needs to be introduced to a much wider reading public. In poetry, however, I will mention two names: Asif Raza and Riyaz Latif. Their work breaks new ground and is indicative of an entirely fresh poetic sensibility in Urdu. The former lives in the US and the latter was also here until recently. I know them personally and have enjoyed reading their poems immensely. Luckily, Asif and Riyaz write enviably good English and have translated their poems into English. I hope they will be published soon.
source: http://www.thepunchmagazine.com / The Punch Magazine / Home> Interview – Profile / by Shireen Quadri / July 31st, 2017
