Love in time of Partition

Abdullah Hussein is arguably one of the greatest practitioners of Urdu fiction in the 20th century. In fact, opinions of critics and readers are divided over who should be considered the greatest practitioner of the genre — Qurratulain Hyder or Abdullah Hussein. Hussein himself repeatedly acknowledged Hyder’s status as the undisputed master of Urdu fiction, which is not simply an act of humility but a statement of fact. In terms of both range and complexity, breadth of vision and stylistic versatility, Hyder certainly has an edge over Hussein.

The interesting thing is that they wrote their masterpieces — Aag ka Darya (Hyder: River of Fire) and Udas Naslein (Hussein: The Weary Generations) — quite early in their careers (for Hussein, it was his debut novel), and their reputation was built and sustained largely on the basis of these works, irrespective of the fact that both of them went on to produce substantive corpuses. Both the novels also belong to the genre of historical fiction. A third monumental work in this genre, Kai Chand the Sar-e Aasman (The Mirror of Beauty), written by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, was added a couple of years ago, which holds its ground strongly with the other two works. A fascinating fact about all these three works is that they were translated into English by their own authors in an amazing bilingual feat of self-translation. The first two were translated after a gap of about four decades between the original Urdu and the English translation. The third one was translated soon after its original composition. The strategies of translation adopted by these writers are different, resulting in the re-writing of the original in significant ways, so that the translated versions merit attention as independent works, destined to share the universe with a doppelganger with which they have a curious relationship.

The Weary Generations was first published in England by Peter Owen Publishers in 1999. The current edition under review contains a note by his daughter, Nur Fatima, and a contextual essay by Raza Naeem at the end of the book. The novel has an arresting beginning that immediately arouses the curiosity of the reader. A man on a horseback, holding aloft a leaking jar of honey in his hand, had staked out a large tract of land.

A British officer, a member of aristocracy, was severely wounded during the 1857 Mutiny and was saved by Roshan Ali Khan, a clerk in the district collector’s office in Rohtak. He was rewarded by a large tract of land that he could cover in 72 hours, marking out the boundaries with the leaking honey from the jar. The village he thus founded came to be called Roshanpur which is the setting of the novel. From a petty clerk, he became Roshan Agha, the undisputed lord of his area through British patronage. The story revolves around his family, and the Beg family who were descendants of the Mughals. The protagonist, Naim Beg, is from the second family. He is a member of the nascent “middle class,” a status he gains through English education in Calcutta, urban upbringing, and military service. His father has been imprisoned for having the strange hobby of making firearms simply for pleasure, and Naim has been living with his uncle, Ayaz Beg, an employee in the railways, in Calcutta. Having spent 12 years in Calcuttaand passed his senior Cambridge, he returns to his father’s house to live, along with his mother and his father’s second wife and her baby. Some members of the British ruling class appear in the narrative, as do some figures of the independence movement like Gokhle and Annie Besant. On his railway journey from Delhi to Roshanpur, Naim witnesses how an Indian peasant who had accidentally climbed on to a first class compartment when the train was leaving station was ruthlessly kicked by a white man, which led to the peasant’s death, an event that had a parallel in Mahatma Gandhi’s experience in South Africa, and had profound impact on Naim’s mind. The First World War breaks out and young, able-bodied villagers were forced to join the British Army. Naim goes off to fight in Belgium, then to East Africa, where he loses an arm. He is the only war-surviving soldier from his village and is given a medal and 10 acres of land. He is drawn to the movement of Independence raging around the country and is sent to prison for a spell. He marries Azra, of the Roshan Agha family. Azra’s family does not support the marriage since Naim is not from the same class and has chosen the life of a peasant in the countryside. There is love between them for a while, but eventually they drift apart. Naim is again caught mobilising workers against the British and spends more time in prison. He loses his acreage, his father dies, and after many vicissitudes, Naim has to move in with Azra’s family. When Partition happens, finally Naim and Azra go their separate ways: Azra and her whole family arrive safely in Pakistan. Naim and his brother Ali, the only remnants left of their family, join the long, arduous walk from Delhi to Pakistan.

Ambivalence seems to characterise both the hero and the heroine in the novel. Naim seems to suffer from some existential angst which makes him act like an outsider, an observer rather than a participant, in any situation. He is devoid of any compelling drive, or zest for life, what the French call joie de vivre. Whether in his life as a peasant, as a soldier in war in Belgium and East Africa, as a committed party worker entrusted with the task of mobilising workers, Naim seems half-hearted and detached, as though he has some premonition of the futility of all this. Even he does not seem driven enough to make his marriage work, and allows his relationship with Azra to drift. Azra, too, does not seem clear about her commitments. The barrenness of their relationship is further symbolised by the lack of any children. Characterisation does not seem to be a strong point in The Weary Generations. Many of the characters stay as shadowy figures without a pulsating, throbbing presence. The most intensely drawn figure, Niaz Beg, raw and aggressive, seems inconsistent and unconvincing. That said, there are some extraordinary scenes of beauty and lyrical charm. Hussein’s power of evoking the rural milieu and the lush countryside is great. Along with the human drama, the novel raises some tough questions about history, the nature of politics, Indian Independence that led to the vivisection of the country and unimaginable fratricidal violence. These questions will continue to resonate in the mind of the readers long after they have finished reading the novel. The translation by the author is lucid, interspersed with Urdu words that have not been glossed or italicised. The section “P.S.” at the end of the novel provides a helpful context, even though Nur Fatima’s reminiscences mention Hussein’s death year as 2016 instead of 2015. It is such an avoidable editorial lapse, considering the fact that if the piece is being written in May 2016, it surely cannot report a death that would happen in the month of July of that year!

Throughout the novel Naim Beg is constantly pulled away by some invisible hand, frustrating his personal sense of honour and duty, leaving him at the end of the novel as an unnerved, unfulfilled hero.

The writer is a professor at the department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia