Opening this volume of Hasan Manzar’s Urdu short stories in translation triggered in me that old reflex of turning away from anything labeled ‘Urdu writing.’ The words ‘Urdu literature’, or ‘Urdu poetry’ or ‘Urdu fiction’ instantly evokes school textbooks, where its best poets and writers, as in every language, lie embalmed. To be picked at, prodded, and learnt by rote, and very seldom to be enjoyed. For successive years from Class Six onwards, as sunshine outside classroom windows called out for a jail-break, as beyond Iftekhar Dyer’s filmi hairdo we would see the hockey field and beside it the church, up whose steps for Sunday evening Mass dirndled native Christian girls ran the gauntlet of preening male ducktails, it was with furious incomprehension that we turned back to the marsiya and qasida, to the arabesque laments of Mir and Dard. Ghalib was the sole exception, not his ghazals (which are difficult in Urdu, gleaming with such high Persian polish that it takes years of knowing the ghazal form inside out to see what Ghalib had achieved), but his letters, which I encountered in Class Ten, where lived and chattered an older version of the Karachi around me: burly Punjabis in charpoys, hot loo nights, the white chadars of mushairas, pigeon flights, mosques, the Bohra mothers of our friends knitting in embroidered swings slung from bedroom ceilings, the old courtesies of adab and lehaz trailing their ragged hems. But oh, the others! Even now, even after reading Manto and Chugtai and others, many others–modern Urdu literature is a vastly different beast than what was in my old schoolbook texts–I have to force down that first reflex of turning away, to then turn back with an adult gaze. So I opened Manzar’s book thinking for a second, Jesus! no, not creaky men with fez-es trapped in qafelas of bulbul-in-moonlight tropes…

Nothing of course, could be farther from the truth. Ever since Syed Jaffri & Co. founded the Progressive Writers Association in 1936, Urdu literature has always reserved a large space for political dissent and fight, a dissent which has continued down to this day against the Pakistan state and its ideologues. It was Jaffri, in fact, who penned a biting parody of Iqbal’s famous poem ‘Shikwa’ titled ‘Wazir O Ka Namaz.’ And speaking of satires, Urdu literature has a long tradition of it–mockery of the Mughal ruler Farruk Siyar, in fact, cost the 17th century ghazalist Mir Jafar Za Ali his head…

Hasan Manzar is a Pakistani Urdu writer, born in Uttar Pradesh on March 4, 1934. Partition saw his family migrate to Lahore, where after school and college, he attended King Edward Medical College. He did his postgraduate degree in psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh and later settled in Hyderabad in Sind as head of a psychiatry clinic. In between he led a varied life: Working in a Karachi hospital tending to the low-caste Sheedis of the Makran coast, as a surgeon on a Dutch merchant ship, followed by a stint at a Saudi Arabian hospital, and later in African bush country. This hash-slinging all over the place, he has said, gave him the ability “to consider every place my own, the wishes and longings of its people my wishes and longings, their struggle for independence my own struggle.”

It is this world that is in evidence in these short stories, 14 in all, brought out by Katha of New Delhi, and impeccably edited by Muhammed Umar Memon, professor of Islamic Studies, Urdu and Persian at the University of Wisconsin. Menon’s 35-page introduction provides the perfect opening to Manzar’s stories, detailing how they “stand out for experimentation with the widest possible range of subjects and for diversity of locale.” And indeed the settings and characters for these stories range from South Africa to Sindhi Hindus, from England to Pakistani women searching for brandy and not finding it since the “subha aur qabaa wale, those cloak and rosary men” had taken it in a raid. This reach is surprising for the reader used to thinking of Urdu prose and writing as being confined to provincial locales and stock characters; in fact, his characters transfer their money to Switzerland bank accounts just as easily as a maid kneading dough looks at a beggar boy. In this sense they read more like the typical South Asian English postcolonial writing than any commonplace, preconceived notion of ‘Urdu literature’.

But while the range is broad and wide, there is thematic consistency, as befits somebody who migrated through the landscape of horrors that was the 1947 Partition, and who later saw his hospital burnt down in the Sindhi-Muhajir conflict of the 1990s: Religious differences and conflicts, Hindus and Muslims, ethnic brutality, colonialism, nationalism, racism, and the lot of the common man and woman.

What is interesting in Manzar (who has published five volumes: Rihai, Nadeedi, Insan ka Desh, Sooi Bhook, and the last in 1991, Ek aur Aadmi) is that despite the ‘hot’ themes, their treatment is ‘cool’–the narrative voice is even-tempered and restrained, one that delights in suddenly stepping away from the main action to dwell on something else, to remember old songs or watch waves and take detours–which, though, as has been pointed out by critics, can be distracting and harmful to the narrative structure. It is a voice that is evident in the story reprinted here, about the increasingly empty homes of the middle and upper middle classes in South Asia–a literal, geographical and developing generational divide–as children leave their parents for ‘abroad.’ Yet the approach is indirect, seamless and unhurried– tales that pick up momentum, in a contradiction of sorts, from the very casualness of their voices. Manzar’s influences have been, by his own admission, Ghalib, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekov, Premchand (of course), Gorki and Tagore, and perhaps what he learnt from them is that sorrow is better expressed in a conversational tone rather than an extreme one.

What I really wanted to read was Manzar’s ‘Bangladesh’ short story. More than we in Bangladesh perhaps care to know, understandably trapped in an initial national reflex of another sort, Pakistani Urdu writers have dealt with the topic of Bengalis, East Pakistan and 1971 in complex ways in their work. One outstanding such short story, among others, for example, is Masud Ashar’s ‘Of Coconuts and Chilled Beer Bottles,’ published in another of Memon’s edited volume of contemporary Pakistani Urdu writing titled The Tale of the Old Fisherman. It takes a leaf out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as a group of West Pakistani men accompanied by East Pakistani Bengalis take a riverboat journey into the Sunderbans, a trip which slowly disintegrates into a nightmare realization of cultural, social and ethnic differences. It is a fascinatingly layered tale, hallucinatory in its impact. There is Mustansar Husain Tarar’s celebrated 1997 novel Rakh (Ashes), which sold in huge numbers, won Pakistan’s novel of the year award, and received Pakistan’s premier literary prize, the one lakh rupee Prime Minister’s Award. Though set in the 1990s, though flashbacks, the narrative moves back to 1947 and examines religious intolerance, fundamentalism, exploitation of women and children, racism (based on skin colour), ethnic and sectarian conflicts, and the state ideology of war. The protagonist’s brother, Murad, joins the army, is posted in East Pakistan, and witnesses the brutalities of 1971 even as Pakistani generals carouse and party. How can Muslim slaughter fellow Muslim, he wonders, and then escapes to Pakistan with an adopted Bengali daughter Shobha, and ekes out an existence as a schoolteacher in Karachi. And this is a bestselling Urdu novel….

Manzar’s story titled ‘A Man’s Country’ unfolds some time in the late 1960s onwards. It is told from a West Pakistani sailor’s eyes, on board a merchant ship–a microcosm of Pakistan–where the crew is from both the wings. Mobinurahman is the Bengali sailor, the butt of a casual racism, seen by the roistering, drinking, woman-in-every-port West Pakistanis as short, dark, and humourless. He is an anxious man, far from his cyclone-ridden Bengal, penny-pinching in order to provide for a clutch of relatives dependent on him. Why can’t he have fun, bury his worries in song and bar women, they wonder, and it is in the gaps of this incomprehension that the old West Pakistani view of East Pakistani Bengalis is laid bare, and the awakening realization by the protagonist that the Bengalis regarded them as “what the blacks of South Africa thought of the whites who were few in number but controlled everything in their country–the government, the army, the navy, the air force.”

But Manzar does not stop here. Years after the birth of an independent Bangladesh, the narrator decides to enlist on board a ship again, and is floored on seeing Mobinur in the shipping office:

“’What brings you to Karachi?’

‘Coming to sign on a ship,’ he (Mobinur) finally responded.

‘But you have your own Bangladesh now, don’t you?’ I spluttered, as crudely and inappropriately as the Hindus and Sikhs in India, I hear, used to say to Muslims, You have your Pakistan now. Why don’t you go there?

Almost vengefully I asked him, ‘You didn’t go to Bangladesh?’

He ignored the mercilessness of my tone and said, ‘My Bangladesh right here.’

‘What?’ I asked.

He repeated his answer, as if explaining something to an ignoramus. ‘My country–this office, this work, right here.’”

Has independence, Manzar is asking, changed the lot of the common Bengali, who is leaving his liberated land behind in droves for the slums of Pakistan, looking for work and a life.

Is it a question that we should be asking too?

Khademul Islam | 22 Nov 2008 |The Daily Star