The Lost World
It could well be a world of dinosaurs and behemoths, an age when jinnat and turnfeet
roamed freely on this earth, when gods and goddesses went about unmolested across land
and water or romped in the skies playfully determining the fates of mere mortals, a world of
myth and magic, wizardy and enchantment. In the beginning it is none of these. Intizar
Husain's early tales (Galli Koochey, 1952, Kankari, 1955) and the novella Din, 1960, are
scrupulously realistic in presentation, theme and characterization. Yet he is evoking there a
world lost, one that has become a tale merely, retrieving it bit by bit from the debris of its
destruction, causing it to rise briefly, whole and healed again, its streets and lanes teeming
with life, its main square and shops, its wrestling arenas, its roofs, its walls, its courtyards all
peopled once more and bristling with rivalries, gossip, the arrogance of youth and the pride
of a healthy body, disclosing at times the shared feeling of barely-suggested, almost
articulated, love, at others, the impetuous friendship that brooks no insult, real or imagined,
without repaying it in a celebrated and exemplary manner.
That age, that life of Intizar Husain's childhood and adolescence haunts him, pursues
him across the border. In his adopted land he recreates around himself the life of the
settlement he has left behind, and as time passes, he returns to it again as a pilgrim,
physically, to discover that it survives spasmodically only and uncertainly, like a wounded
creature which cannot express its pain and is doomed. Wounded himself, Intizar turns to
record this misery and tries to discover some universal imperative, some operative logic out
of his sense of bewilderment at this "tearing away of skin from the grain of wheat," or "the
parting of flesh from nail"1 (“Doosra Gunah” 380).
In one of his most remarkable early tales, "Eik Bin-Likhi Razmia" (An Unwritten
Epic), completed, according to the date given at its end, on June 1, 1950, the narrator/writer,
before he has been drawn irretrievably to the cares of the world, writes at length about his
idea of creative restoration. Since it seems pertinent to Intizar's own mode of writing at this
stage, and perhaps later as well, the passage is quoted here in full:
I can't understand why living things should be written about. I write about corpses of
things. The alive, the actually existing objects have a tangibility about them. How
can you possibly write about them? There stir in them neither ambiguous shades nor
suggestive shadows. They are fit for reportage or political verse, but not for poetry
or fiction whose subject can never be the actual, tangible, living object. So I am
distressed when I am confronted with these objects. It must have been a rather
simple critic who suggested that a writer must always keep a window open while
writing. Whoever advised opening a window in a windstorm? In fact, it puzzles me
how people can write with their eyes open. My eyes are shut when I write. When the
subject seeps into and fixes itself in my imagination, then it is that I am ready to
write. As long as it is before me, it does not become for me a living idea. In Qadirpur
I could never have imagined Pechhwa as a character in a story. Migration to
Pakistan snapped my ties with Qadirpur and its land and people became but a tale
for me. It never mattered to me whether Pechhwa was alive or dead--for me he was
as good as dead anyway. Out of sight even a mountain ceases to exist. Believing him
dead I began to write, but now he walks before my very eyes, a living creature of
flesh and blood, and the character inhabiting my imagination has vanished like the
proverbial horns from the ass's head. He has robbed me of my novel's main
character.2 (in Janam Kahanian 158-159)
Though expressed in a strain quite distinct, the idea is not much different from
Wordsworth's vision of poetry as "emotions recollected in tranquility." However, the view
will find another extension in Intizar's later fiction where the experience "re-collected" may
pertain to earlier lives and existences spanning centuries of transmigrated selves. Here, it is
limited to the first and, possibly, the most intimate perceptions of a consciousness wrenched
from its surroundings irrevocably to find nourishment in an alien soil. When sustenance is
not forthcoming, or when there is a fear that the nutriment offered may stultify growth and
perhaps render survival impossible, the instinct "to be" fends for itself. A creative artist
looks inwards then for recovery and rejuvenation.
So the earliest stories are really sketches suggesting the tales that lie behind them,
dependent for their superb rendering on immediately threatened memory, which evoke
Qadirpur, Intizar's fictional simulacrum of his birthplace Debai in District Buland Shehar,
U.P., with a sure touch for detail. In the recounting and recreation is evident an artistic
handling of material—economy of expression, picking out of only the essential facets to
highlight a point-of-view, a character or experience, an understanding of the dramatic
moment and the use of understated emotion. The language, colloquial, natural, pruned with
deft tact, already marks out Intizar as a prose stylist of rare distinction in our literary history.
In the hands of a creative artist the language of ordinary men and women can acquire an
exciting vibrancy. In Intizar's early tales, irony, color and urgency combine to unfetter the
potential of a tongue not often used with the wit and competence, not to add intimacy, it
deserves from its writers. On occasion Intizar falters. A notable example is the two-part
Dastan, where he repeats the idiom of the classical romance writers and is cut off from both
the socio-linguistic context of his earlier years, which he knew at first hand, and the
experience of character it generated for him. Striving to exist in textual limbo he betrays
himself and his vulnerability as well. It is a world, at least at that stage and in the manner he
approached it then, beyond his ken.
"Eik Bin-Likhi Razmia" is a tale apart. In style and technique, it shows Intizar
experimenting with innovative procedures. The narrator introduces us to Pechhwa, a
celebrated exponent of the lathi, a bamboo stick, in village fights and the apparent
protagonist of the tale, to others of his group, and members of the opposing band as well.
Among them all Pechhwa stands out, the bravest and the cleverest. He is the most skillful in
the use of the lathi, an article that acquires in his possession of it a personality of its own. He
keeps it always well-oiled and shiny and with it has performed marvelous feats. This
creature of legend throws his support passionately behind the movement for the creation of a
separate homeland for the Muslims of India—only to be disillusioned, to be shorn of his
romantic and legendary aura, when his wish is turned into reality, quite unexpectedly for
him. There is confusion, to begin with, whether his native village is part of the new country
or not. He puzzles over how it is possible that despite all his efforts and campaigning, and
the support of his friends, he finds himself suddenly besieged by hostility in his own land.
One by one, the Muslims of the locality leave for Pakistan. Pechhwa continues to believe he
can establish his own Pakistan in his native Qadirpur.
The narrative now takes the form of journal entries. It brings us into contact with the
narrator who was one of the first to migrate to the new country from Qadirpur and is
struggling to complete his novel about Pechhwa. We find in him a writer distracted from his
creative project, self-consciously reflecting upon the imaginative process that has been
interrupted. Meanwhile, he informs us that Pechhwa too has come to Pakistan. Pechhwa’s
meeting with the narrator is a kind of wedge driven between him and the re-created world of
the imagination. The narrator is prompted at this juncture to express his thoughts about the
stalling of the creative process in the face of the physical presence of objects and persons
(the passage quoted above). Divorced from his environment, Pechhwa is a reduced figure, a
humiliating shadow of himself. As the narrator struggles to recover his creative powers and
to keep the insistence of daily cares at bay, Pechhwa, wondering how he could make a
living, flitting from one pathetic scheme to another, crumbles before him as a character. The
new country is not kind to the migrant hero. Unhappy, uncertain, he is forced out of it by the
hostility and hypocrisy of self-righteous authorities representing the government of the new
land. He refuses to remain at their mercy and departs for his native land. Weeks later arrives
news of his death. He has been strung to death from a limb of the papal tree where he had
once raised the flag of the country that was still a dream at the time. The narrator meanwhile
gives up the pretence of becoming a writer as he manages the allotment of a flourmill to his
name and looks forward to a comfortable income from it.
A harrowing tale! And though Pechhwa could not become the hero of the "epic" that
was never written, and the narrator had at one stage even mused that the poor fellow had
been reduced to merely a pawn on a chessboard—"how can such a person become a hero of
a novel?" he had asked—he still emerges as a stout-hearted and tragic figure in a life as
truncated and incomplete as the one that gets narrated—while the other one, the one that the
aspiring writer set out to write, was perhaps never much of a tale anyway, and in the end it is
probably best that it never gets written. What we have is a story of man's weakness and
failure before circumstances undetermined by him and, possibly, accidental entirely. It
manifests, too, a parallel theme of gradual decline from an awareness of another's pain to a
succumbing before the drab, desensitizing tyranny of one's ordinary needs and common
cares. Compelling though it is in this, it is equally, if not more, impressive in the selfreflexive way in which the narrator deals with his material. It is as much a tale of human
suffering as one about the making of such a tale. Its interest therefore extends beyond the
overt theme to the underlying manipulation and handling of the strands that comprise that
theme even to the employment of the literary trope of reality taking over the fictional tale.
Yet it maintains that human interest which is vital to the restorative work in which
Intizar Husain is engaged. Qadirpur lives in the memory of a writer who himself has fallen
prey to the ravages of the new locale. Between one waste and another he attempts to recreate imperfectly, intermittently, fully conscious of constraints and failings. Yet it is the
artist alone who can give the illusion of perfection where none exists. For this, in order to
preserve it, to give it immortality, he must destroy life even if it be his own. "Eik Bin-Likhi
Razmia" then is an allegory of the story-teller. Before our very eyes the respectability of the
narrator fritters away, his judgment loses credibility. In the first part of the tale we tend to
put our trust in him, follow his characters and their traits with his eyes. With the beginning
of the journal entries the whole criterion of judgment is upset for us. It sows in us the seeds
of doubt. By the end of the tale it is the narrator who is demolished completely, while that
one character he could not make a hero in the epic he never wrote is resurrected anew as a
more emphatic presence than he ever was for us. This is the success of that crafty
narrator/writer, who sacrifices himself and his credibility to give life to his character—not as
a plain, two-dimensional construct seen through another’s eyes, but as a person present
before us, complex and simple, vulnerable and courageous at the same time.
But once a succumbing to the imperatives of circumstances takes place, the tale
seems to be saying, return to a prelapsarian state is no longer possible. Here one may begin
to sense the strength of Intizar Husain, the artist, who always deprecates and underplays his
artistry and pleads a pristine innocence in the telling of his tales. Is he not somewhat like the
narrator of this tale? To use another vivid metaphor coined by him to illustrate the mystery
of the creative process, is it the same golden wasp that entered its knobbly little house of
dried clay that now comes out of it in such splendor? As Intizar writes: "A tale no doubt is
the golden wasp's itsy-bitsy home, but if the insect coming out of it is not more beautiful
than the one that made it, it is either not that golden insect's home at all, or no revelation
whatsoever dawns upon this tiny creature"3 (“Anjanhari ki Gharyya” 226). By the time of
the writing of "Eik Bin Likhi Razmia", characters have begun to take a life of their own.
Intizar's experience of them is not merely translated or recorded for us in a sketch that
faithfully depicts his impression of one person or the other. An imaginative treatment
converts these individuals into characters who snap into a world that does not need
validation from the creator's argument, but grows out of, and responds to, determinants that
lie within its own frames of reference.
The culmination of this period of Intizar's writing is reached with the publication of
the short novel Din (Day) in 1960. In an interview by Asif Farukhi, Intizar puzzles over why
"Eik Bin-Likhi Razmia" has been accorded so much attention by certain writers, notably
Mumtaz Shirin and Mohammad Umer Memon, while Din has been, in a way, ignored.4
There is no doubt that Din is a splendid tale, told with great restraint and skill. In many ways
it marks the apogee of Intizar's art and it is arguable that he has never been able to reach that
level again in his fiction. Though he has gone on in other directions, and been engaged in
interests that appear far more impressive for the personal and the sub-textual philosophical
justifications he advances to bolster them, there is no longer the charm of the well-told tale
that draws the readers around him. Here it is evident in all its vibrancy—the simplicity of
narration, the magical re-creation of the countryside and its life with just the barest,
necessary details, the sustained focusing of attention on the story itself, no hectoring, no
passing of judgments, a process that duplicates, as effortlessly as possible, the natural. The
work that has gone into it does not obtrude upon the story where the slightest change of
expression and modulation of tone is noted, but without any false note, without any
digression, drawing attention to itself or offending a discriminating taste.
In all this, and the unhurried pace of his narrative, Intizar appears indebted to the
western aesthetics rather than to the oriental. His descriptions, characterization, the texture
of his tale, may remind one of Turgenev's Father and Sons or of Gogol's “Taras Bulba” and
stories from Evenings in a Village near Dikanka—perhaps also of Flaubert's art of bare
suggestion and understatement. Obvious parallels may also be found in Chekov. But there is
probably nothing like it in Urdu literature prior to Intizar Husain. One could argue that in
some stories by Wajida Tabassum or Ghulam Abbas a similar economy of expression and
restraint is witnessed, but neither writer shows a comparable range of feeling and suggestion
nor nearly the same level of accomplishment as Intizar does in Din.
There is great delicacy in the handling of material. The undercurrent of attraction
between Zamir and Tehsina in an atmosphere of teeming suspicions and repressed emotions,
an environment fraught with precious notions of right and wrong tested continually by
practical and selfish considerations, an artificially exaggerated sense of one's social standing
which, rather than the merits of a situation, determines the making of a decision—all this is
treated with a cultured and controlled withdrawal of authorial and discursive interference in
a way that the intensity of the unexpressed becomes almost unbearable. At the same time
there is an acute sense of dislocation, the past gradually detaching itself from the present and
floating away into the nothingness of empty space, crumbling into memory, a familiar
concern with Intizar, as the ancestral haveli is abandoned and the families move to the new,
fashionable house built by Zamir's father. Told strictly from Zamir's point-of-view, the story
reaches its denouement against the backdrop of the civil suit brought by the creditors of the
lad's deceased grandfather to recover their loans from the sale of the mortgaged haveli. The
suit succeeds and the haveli is to pass into other hands, as also Tehsina, her momentary and
innocent delight at finding a caring soul in Zamir snuffed swiftly and without sympathy by
the boy's mother through a withering innuendo at finding her dopatta straying from her head.
Soon she will be married off to a good-for-nothing cousin to whom she had been promised
when still a child by her late father. Zamir too is to leave so that he may find a job to
supplement the family income. It all ends on a doleful note: "The haveli, which was a
fragrance from the past, began to vanish slowly from his mind like a dream. Now (the
impending) journey occupied him."5
For all its virtues, the novella has serious problems. It reads like a story about dead
people. Not only is it depressing in its total effect, there is a current of hopelessness running
through it, a deep, unfathomable despair behind the observant and sensitive narration. As if
that were not enough, the young and old all seem to acquiesce in submission to norms to
which they have been born, however harsh they may be in their denial of expression to
intimate feelings of affection or antipathy. They are all slaves to convention. The entire
permissible range of their emotion is allowed expression only within set routines and
practices. There are emotions, quite natural otherwise, whose existence is not admitted let
alone tolerated at any level. And against this system of inhibitions and evasions there is no
rebellion. An inner state of resignation infects almost all the characters of Din.
Perhaps one could make an exception of Barri Appa here. For a while she refuses to
leave the haveli, and is opposed to the building of the new house all along. But hers is a
helpless sort of resistance, and even though she is unwilling to the end, she has no option but
to join the others when the actual shifting takes place. Zamir and Tehsina, on the other hand,
though much younger, lack the spirit to express the least disagreement on any issue. As far
as they are concerned it is unthinkable to demur on any matter the elders may have decided
for them. Not so much their failure to secure in each other's company solace or love, but the
total lack of effort on their part to try to deflect or thwart the hostility that surrounds them
disconcerts the reader. They shrivel and wither into themselves with the first expression of
displeasure at the happiness that they have only just begun to find in each other's company.
Without a word they give up. This acceptance of the tyranny of the mundane is horrifying.
A system that turns living human beings to mere flesh and blood robots, no matter what its
virtues in terms of the protection it offers to those adhering to it, is to be shunned rather than
celebrated.
In a note titled "About my characters," Intizar questions the whole idea of striving to
break out of a received system with a desolating thought: "Had Tehsina wept what would
she have got, or Zamir, what would he have achieved had he declared himself?" He goes on
to add, "I did not advise them at all in the matter. Zamir's decision is quite his own. I had no
say in the matter. I am not Zamir."6 Intizar appears to be working out of a deep sense of
despair; the futility of existence, the absurdity of human endeavor, are the premises from
which his tales spring. But he passes in this novella no judgment on the matter. As an artist
he has no other choice. It salvages the tale and allows it to breathe freely. And one would do
well not to compromise its superb simplicity by reading into it some pre-determined
symbolic signification.
II
Despite strict adherence to the life-like in the early tales, despite the gradual maturity
of technique and expression which achieves an unstrained narrative poise in Din, there are
signs already that Intizar is finding the circumgyrations of reality disorienting, that he is
beginning to sense presences beyond the physical margin of things, within them too, but
distinct from their perceived shapes, informing them with a pertinence other than the
ordinary and the familiar. Superstitions common among the people and floating fragments
of folk and religious lore appear in his stories from the very beginning as necessary and
natural to their surface and subliminal contexts. References to Ayodhya, Ramchandra's
birthplace, from which he was exiled through the machinations of a hostile stepmother, the
expectation of disinterring a cauldron containing hidden treasure buried below the
foundations of a house or under a tree in the yard, superstitions regarding shadows trailing
man in metamorphosed shapes, the evil or good influences emanating from trees, plants,
birds and animals, the miraculous properties of the replica of Imam Husain's standard, the
allam, form part of the weave of the tales lending them a mysterious, bewitching quality--as
if one peering into the dark were at the threshold of some forbidden disclosure.
This strain, flickering in "Ayodhya" and "Rah Gaya Shauq-e-Manzil-e-Maqsood"
(An unslaked longing for the destination), runs through "Satwan Dar" (Seventh Door) and
"Patt Beejna" (Firefly), finding its most accomplished expression in the last three tales of
this collection, "Jungle", "Maya" and "Kankari" (Pebble). It surfaces again in Shehr-e-
Afsoos (City of Sorrow), 1962, in "Dehlez" (Threshold), "Seerrhiyan" (Stairs) and "Kana
Dajal" (One-eyed Antichrist), but by this time Intizar is interested in these matters in a more
central way.
"Satwan Dar" is the earliest among the tales that deal with the first, disturbed
recognition of the erotic in an adolescent, and in it Intizar creates around this theme a
nimbus of presences, flitting, rustling shades and lights, beyond the physical. It heightens the
mystery of the narration, lending its final movement a nuance of expectation and
astonishment. The tale begins with the uncoiling of a familiar sentiment associated with
pigeons, and is told from the perspective of an adolescent whose mind registers, at this
stage, all that he sees and feels as strange and miraculous, responding to the phenomenon of
existence with a sense of awe, and has not yet learnt to dissect experience with the cold
scalpel of logic and doubt. Pigeons, according to popular tradition, are pure and sacred, their
presence a mark of blessing for the place where they gather and nest. Harming them in any
way would result in bringing pain and sorrow upon the aggressor and his household in
return. These are birds of peace and goodwill, to be found most often under the interstices of
high roofs, in nooks, crannies, and on ledges out of the reach of predators of all kind, and
most often perhaps around the sunlit domes of mosques and shrines, or under their cool,
dark, silent cupolas, gurgling and muttering words of prayer in some unknown sacred
tongue.
Out of this mingling of fact and sentiment is born the superstition that pigeons, or
some of them at least, are not birds but wise and pious men who have, through their virtue,
acquired the ability to transform themselves into this innocent shape. Intizar begins "Satwan
Dar" with the assumption that his readers are familiar with these ideas. The first few pages
of "Zard Kutta" (Yellow Dog), a much later tale, actually deal directly with a saintly person
of this kind, Shiekh Usman Kabootar (pigeon) as he is called, and show him changing from
one form to the other and back again. Out of her veneration for it then, Amman Jee refers to
the lone white pigeon that is left on the high ledge of her room in "Satwan Dar" as Syed
Sahab, and she believes, as good, god-fearing women of her time and age would, in the
physical actuality of the transformation. A large flock of its companions took flight when
one of their number was shot down by a chhota chachha in the family, but this one chose to
stay on. The trouble is it is a female! And could it then have a male title?
The narrator/protagonist, a mere boy, has never bothered to consider this difficulty.
It is only when Munni enters the scene that his complacent, complete little world is
challenged. And until she arrives he merely accepts what his Amma Jee tells him. Munni,
who is a cousin he is meeting after a lapse of some time, is about the same age as he, but
being a girl she appears taller, a little older, from his shy observatory behind his mother's
shoulder. She also appears to make him conscious of his rather soiled clothes and unwashed
face. But though she is a child herself, she is confident enough to cross the gulf created by a
temporary break in social intercourse, a break that has bred in the boy an acute
consciousness of unfamiliarity and shyness, without appearing awkward or self-conscious.
She succeeds so well that, despite his initial timidity, the lad is soon showing her his
collection of treasures--the red and blue pencil, his drawing colors, cowries. The pigeon and
its nest she notices on her own, and is, of course, delighted with it. As the bird is startled into
flight at Munni's exclamations of joy and surprise, she proposes immediately that they
should try and capture it. "No...it is Syed Saab," mumbles the boy in alarm. Munni laughs,
one of the very few of his characters Intizar allows to do so, and disabuses the lad of his
misconception. She does not deny the possibility of transformation, but leads him into
another world altogether, one of magic and fantasy: "Crazy Khan," she says, "how can a
female pigeon be a Syed Saab? It is a fairy surely!"7
She reminds him of the tale of King Bahram, and here lies the key to the
understanding of the main story as well. More significantly, it provides us with one of the
metaphors by which Intizar seeks to explain, perhaps even to justify, his meanderings in
various directions in his fiction. The tale itself recurs in several variations and
approximations.
"There was a prince, wasn't there?" she says, "The white genie had given him the
keys for the seven doors of the palace and cautioned him, ‘open whichever door you
will except the seventh.’ And the prince unlocked each of the six doors every day,
looked inside and locked them up again until, at last, he grew weary of them. One
day he began to wonder why the white genie had forbidden him to open the
seventh—he should at least see what mystery lay behind it. So what did he do? He
opened the seventh door...and as he entered, he was amazed at what he saw—a wide
pool of glittering water, and fair, lovely pigeons, fluttering, descending on it, diving
in the water to be transformed into fairies...and there among them was a green fairy
whose clothes the prince concealed while she bathed. And she stands in the pool
naked, that green fairy with her long wet hair, begging him for her clothes, but the
prince refuses." ("Satwan Dar", Janam Kahanian 339)
This is enough to jog the lad out of his ethereal illusion of a transformed Syed Saab
and bewitch his sense into a different plane of consciousness. Now the story forks into two
paths running side by side, each following its complications, but so necessary to each other
that neither may be traversed without implicatory intimations of the other. As the children
plan to catch the bird, they are already moving into forbidden territory. There is an
undefined emotion that they are striving to experience, an unexplained complicity between
them that they wish to capture and wrestle into understanding. All unknown to them, their
innocence acquires at this stage a luminous, spiritual quality, highly desirable and highly
elusive, but possible only when it comes unconsciously, without apparent need or desire. It
can be experienced, then, only retrospectively, as a burning node of memory and no more.
And it is these nodes that Intizar conjures up in his tales again and again and they have
become for him the compulsive concern of his aesthetics.
So the door of the room is now closed, and with a tall bamboo stick swung and
tapped against the wall, the bird is displaced from its nest till it falls down exhausted. The
boy seizes it at once and at Munni's instance brings it in the light by the door. He becomes
conscious of a strange sensation that carries him to the brink of an experience unknown to
him before this: "A warm, throbbing thing lay in my hands—timid, bewildered, star-like
eyes, the palpitating, fiery craw, soft, smooth feathers with a kind of electricity running
through them. I don't know why my heart began to thump and pound and my grip relaxed.
The bird fluttered out of my hands and at once took off. 'You let her go?' Munni looked at
me in disdain" ("Satwan Dar," Janam Kahanian 341).
The bird is gone never to return. The high cornice in the room is cold and desolate
the next morning. A partly slaked, and so greatly fueled, desire to capture and feel the bird
in their hands now forces them to look for it all over the place—on the roof of their house
and on adjoining roofs, on electricity poles and wires, in the leaves of the tamarind and the
neem, on the tower of the distant, high temple. It is all futile. They become suddenly very
quiet. Munni accuses him again of letting the bird go, and before they know it, they are
scuffling and wrestling with each other. The narrative continues, "...all at once, I don't know
why, my heart began suddenly to pound and a tingling sensation ran through my body. In
my hand again, it seemed...the palpitating, fiery craw, soft, smooth feathers with a kind of
electricity running through them...I lost my grip. She shrugged me off and moved away to
one side..." ("Satwan Dar", Janam Kahanian 344).
Munni waits a bit, then calls him a "boor" and goes away. The lad, it seems, is
stunned by the experience and makes no move whatever. In the end, he is left with a
dreamlike vision of Munni's departure and the unsettling prospect of the cold, desolate nest
of the pigeon that has flown away greeting him in the half light of dawn. The theme tale of
sexual awakening here achieves a partial consummation with the surface narrative or frame
tale about pigeons, but the incompleteness of the union is itself a sign of the failure of will,
as much of the writer as of his two main characters, a feature that appears to pursue Intizar
throughout his world of fiction. At the point the two tales touch, a brief, sharp insight strikes
home. But there is withdrawal afterwards and the feeling is explored no further. The seventh
door is just pushed open and suddenly shut tight again for fear the white genie may return
and turn in wrath upon the transgressing prince, or perhaps because of a greater fear of the
luring and forbidden unknown.
Here is a reserve not peculiar to this tale alone but inherent in the half-told folk story
that provides the decoding formula for this and many other fictional narratives in Intizar.
One may ask, for instance, what happens next after the prince refuses to return the clothes to
the green fairy? It is an incomplete story ending at a tantalizing, but unsatisfactory (and
unsatisfying) juncture. And the dissatisfaction is only marginally less in the theme tale
where the two children awaken to the pleasure of physical sensation that heralds the loss of
innocence (flying away of the white pigeon) forever, and is to take them into adulthood.
These two experiences, or stories, providing the decoding formula and the theme
respectively, are framed strangely by a negative one that is, as already noted, only partially
pertinent to them. How, or why, the pigeons were disturbed and driven away initially, or
why one remains behind till it too is frightened away by aggressively curious children is all
irrelevant to the stories within. It may provide interesting reading, but the interest it excites
is certainly digressive, and that too in a way that takes us far afield from the areas the
narrator distinguishes by his emphasis as significant to his narration. But it does help in
building up the atmosphere and prepares us, indirectly, for an appreciation of the wonder
and magic that lies at the heart of the experience of crossing the boundary between the
permitted and the forbidden. The initially released suggestions, dealing with the sacredness
associated with pigeons, are skillfully transformed into a cluster of approximating responses
to the first experience of the sensuous—thrilling, in that the suggestions are not fully
explained or explainable, exciting, since the margin between the sacred and the profane, the
permitted and the disallowed is not very clear.
The sexual awakening could very well be the consciousness gained by Adam and
Eve in that first moment in which they become aware of their nakedness. And their
transgression is the paradigm for all infractions of the circumference that law, morality,
divine decree or personal discipline draw around human consciousness. In "Hissar"
(Circumference), which appears in his 1985 collection Khemey sey Door (Beyond the
Encampment), Intizar's narrator refers to the view that ascribes the failure of the ascetic
exercises of his father and Bande Ali to their omission to draw a circle around themselves.
There is a reference also to the "ancient Indian philosopher" who said that people of
understanding should be like the tortoise—“[t]he tortoise", writes Intizar, "who has a
circumscribing shell on its back which protects him from sorrow and pain." Ingrained in
these stories and parables is the idea of betrayal, but the stepping beyond may open up for
man the seventh door or lead him to the hell of personal or collective suffering in expiation.
The disobedience of Eve and Adam led them, and mankind, to a new awareness about
themselves and the worlds they were born into; the betrayal of the people of Kufa allowed
Husain to achieve a memorable martyrdom (again a higher consciousness) in the cause of
what he believed was just and right. But our first parents were thrown out of paradise for
their transgression and the Muslim world mourns yearly the wrong done to Husain, the
Shi'ite sect striving to atone for it by remembering it annually in majaalis of lamentation and
processions of collective self-flagellation. There is, therefore, an ambivalence to such lapses
which fascinates a mind uneasy about their causes and repercussions, and leads it to a
journey of discovering recurring patterns in the known history and daily affairs of men and
women and, through this process, some meaning in existence. Acquiring sexual
consciousness is the most basic, the most compelling of these patterns. The idea of lapse
leading to insight or knowledge is inherent to it as also the concept of migration from one
self to another. With it is associated guilt as well, and fear of punishment or evil
consequences. But other implications, like betrayal and treachery, are not entirely unrelated.
A problem arises, however, when an attempt is made to step back after the line is
crossed, when the violation is a hesitant entry into unexplored, forbidden territory followed
by a quick withdrawal to the safety of the circumscribed fold. With Intizar this is customary
behavior. To understand this, it is important to recall the story of King Bahram, incomplete
in "Satwan Dar", look at the variations of it in a much later tale, "Sooyyan" (Needles),
appearing in Akhri Aadmi (Last human being), 1967, and recall the theme of unfulfillment
that is an almost permanent feature of Intizar's fiction. "Sooyyan" offers not only a play on
the theme of King Bahram, who is replaced in this re-telling by princess Gulshan-e-Khoobi
(Garden of Virtue), but, by doubling the narrative to include both a male and a female in the
genie’s recurring method of ensnaring, yet another version of a royal prisoner’s
predicament.
By this time, Intizar had taken up the story-within-a-story manner as a regular
stylistic device, but the subsidiary decoding narrative of "Satwan Dar" becomes in its recasted form in "Sooyyan" the circumscribing tale itself. Now it is the princess Gulshan-eKhoobi who is held in his castle of the seven chambers by a genie. Her complaint of
loneliness touches the genie's heart and he hands over to her the bunch of keys to the seven
rooms. Six of the rooms she may open and explore, but regarding the seventh he places
upon her an interdiction. If she dares to open it she will bring only disaster upon herself.
And the princess is happy enough with the six and the amazing sights they have to offer
until the effect of the prohibition begins its subversive work upon her mind. Then she is
restless beyond reason and can find no peace until she opens the seventh chamber. There she
finds a man lying as if dead. But overcoming her fear she touches him and finds that needles
are stuck in his body all over.
She has nothing much to do, and one diversion may be as good as another. Thus she
begins the extremely delicate task of drawing needles out of the body one by one. The
activity, that in the beginning seems to have no meaning, no purpose whatever, gradually
acquires an interest all its own. The tips of her fingers are scratched and pricked in the effort,
blood seeps from them, but she continues with the thought that the work gives her both
pleasure and pain. She recognizes that the task is absurd and yet she goes on.
Here Intizar inserts the other variation on the theme. Wondering how the body had
come to be in this unique state, Gulshan-e-Khoobi is reminded of the tale her nurse used to
tell her about the prince who had been imprisoned by a genie. And he too was lonely. So the
genie pitied him, and gave him a bow and arrow, and told him that the castle had four
quarters, in three of which he could hunt and ride as he pleased, but not in the fourth. There
he would ride only at his peril. The prince ignores the prohibition and comes across a deer
that is "lovely like a woman." He follows it but loses his way and finds himself in a
wilderness. A voice out of the vast nothingness beckons him and he rides on, but loses sense
of the voice as well. In a wasteland he comes upon a river, and bending to slake his thirst he
sees two bare white arms reaching out to him. He hesitates, and as he draws back, falls
down in a faint. When he comes to, he is in the castle again and the genie is towering over
him mad with fury. The genie then causes needles to be pierced into his skin all over his
body and locks him up in a room.
Gulshan-e-Khoobi wishes to believe she has found the prince, but she is aware also
that what she has heard was merely a tale. As she nears completion of the task she has set
herself, she finds the body beginning to acquire the warmth of life. Her own body undergoes
a simultaneous change and a glow spreads over her skin. It is as if she is drawing out her
own numbing needles even as she pulls them out from the stranger's body. But in the end
she too falters. When there is just one needle left, and that in the stranger's brain, she pauses,
wondering whether she should go on. Suddenly apprehensive, she abandons her work. At
this moment the genie returns and his wrath knows no bounds. He flogs her mercilessly and
takes away the keys, never again to be moved by her tears or plaints.8
The paradigm of failure emerges once again. All the three stories from popular lore
that Intizar has recouped falter at the very margin of unknown territory. The foot is raised to
cross the threshold but the step is never taken. Gulshan-e-Khoobi loses courage when she is
almost through with her task and the last needle is never drawn out. The prince of the castle
of four quarters hesitates when those bare arms stretch out to him from the waters of the
river in the wilderness. Bahram Khan's story is in any case never fully told, but the boy of
"Satwan Dar" draws back too at the critical juncture and Munni is lost to him. Is this a
parable of the real? An analogue of a psychological loss of nerve? A culturally-determined
perception? An allegory of failure embedded in human destiny? However it is approached,
this trope of a dream never fulfilled, or unfulfilled desire existing as an impossible dream of
perpetual longing, is feature worth noting in Intizar’s fiction.
And there are scores of instances from Intizar's tales that may supplement these
examples. It seems he is obsessed with defeat, but it appears to be a failure of the will that
causes it and not any outside factor. His tales are repeated enactments of this debacle, and as
time goes on, he loses the capacity to see what goes on around him but relies more and more
on repeating parables from ancient lore to illustrate the state of modern man. In the event,
the present moment is snuffed out by the weight of centuries just as all struggle or hope is
strangulated by his despairing view of life. Intizar can travel into other ages and epochs but
rarely in his own. Traveling, which may be a means to success and fame, may also, as he
himself acknowledges,9 lead to disaster and destruction. The white genie of the past has him
in his thrall, and though he has pushed open the seventh door now and then, he has refused
to take the vital step that will release him from his captivity. They all falter in his tales,
whether it is Pechhwa or the narrator himself in "Eik Bin Likhi Razmia", or Zamir and
Tehsina in Din; whether it is Abu Qasim Khizri in "Zard Kutta" or Prince Azad Bakht of
"Kaya Kalp" (Metamorphosis), or the narrator's father and Bande Ali in "Hissar." Like Og
and Magog in "Raat" (Night) and "Woh jo Dewar na Chaat Sakey" (Those who Could Not
Lick Away the Wall) his characters appear to be engaged in an absurd activity. But this is
because of the failure at a personal level, not because it is prescribed by some outside force
or imposed upon man as a condition of existence. Personal weakness or failure may itself be
a condition of existence, but man often struggles against it and even finds ways to trounce
over it. Intizar's perception demolishes the premise of existence by subverting the idea of
struggle in showing that it is always futile. It is a desolate thought, and regressive in the
extreme, as his own later fiction testifies, but it is a tendency, as we have seen, which
appears very early in his writings, though at that stage, it must be said, there are factors
which deflect attention from it by highlighting the human and dramatic interest of the tale.
That he chose to succumb to the depressive and retrogressive elements rather than
take up the healthier and sturdier strains evident in his writings from the beginning, is partly,
at least, an indication of his own weakness. He appears never to have come to know the
world to which he migrated as intimately as the characters and landscapes of his early years.
As a consequence, it would be futile to expect him to write about it in the same evocative
way or with the same immediacy that he displays in his early stories in the realistic mode.
But there are fair grounds for believing that he faltered at the threshold, that he never really
made an effort to become, perhaps resisted becoming, intimate with his changed
environment. Like Gulshan-e-Khoobi, even though his fingers bleed in drawing the needles
from the numbed body of the stranger that is his new land, he hesitates when the last one is
to be drawn and foregoes his chance, and his right, to be free.
These needles are related to the historical past of the land, but the memories of his
childhood and youth are his own tormentors. They do not allow him the freedom to
experience his new environment, and though there can be no creative work without drawing
upon memory, it is never simply memory recovered. An imaginative treatment that
reorganizes and relocates it in the sensibility of the present is equally essential to it. Intizar
looks backwards to past ages and epochs in endeavoring to understand the great upheaval
that led him to leave, like millions of others, the land of his birth. But he takes no step
forward. His memories become the needles that are stuck in his body—when the last one is
left waiting to be drawn out he relapses into doubt, becomes penitent as if the act of picking
the needles of memory were a sacrilege of some kind, or fearful that the task completed he
would have nothing more to do. It appears that he has become conditioned to his labor in the
same way as Og and Magog, and though he tries to find diversion and escape occasionally,
he neither can, nor indeed anymore wants to, get rid of it. When there is fear then that
personal memories may end, he takes upon himself the burden of the collective
consciousness of the human race. In the present too he sees a repetition of the injustices of
the past and a fulfillment of past failures He makes as if the stories, myths and legends of the
past are all in some way his personal experiences and begins to recount them for his readers.
The idea finds pertinent expression in "Raat" and "Woh jo Dewar na Chaat Sakey".
For Og and Magog there is no way out. Much that they may want respite, or escape, they are
doomed like Sisyphus to perform a task that is absurd and unending. In the final analysis,
nothing can prevent them from striking out with their tongues at the wall—not tiredness, nor
lack of sleep, nor indeed the painfulness of the task. Even their swollen and bleeding
tongues hanker after it. And yet, though the wall may become wafer thin, they will never be
able to breach it, for at the moment the possibility of breaking through it becomes imminent,
they become complacent, sure of success, and lie back for a wink of sleep. By the time they
regain consciousness the next night, they have slept through the whole day and the wall is as
strong and thick as ever. Again and again the process repeats itself, and yet they are helpless
before it. There is no way they can summon just that last act of will which may at once end
their ordeal and bring down the wall as well. The affliction laid upon them—the arduous
task, and the momentary diversion they allow themselves at the crucial juncture so that it
becomes an unending cycle of meaningless activity, meaningless precisely because it is
without end—has become a habit, a bending of expectation to the routine and its
performance. Their prayer at the end of "Raat" may well be one which Intizar too is making
through them: "O God! Enough is your unending and painful night for us. Protect us from
the evil of the day and turn away from us the mischief of light"10 (“Raat” and “Woh jo
Dewar na Chat Sakey” both in Qissa Kahanian 129, 355). But the difference may be an
important one. The ordeal of Og and Magog is laid upon them by a force outside and above
them; Intizar takes upon himself as his own punishment that which he alone has prescribed
for himself. Indeed it is symptomatic of the deep injury partition and its displacements have
caused him. He has shut tight his eyes to the present, "whoever advised opening a window
in a windstorm," he argues, and feeds upon the darkness that has enveloped his past.
Intizar’s absurdist existential position stems from a horror similar in nature and import to the
one that produced in Europe Albert Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe and Samuel Beckett’s
bleak vision articulating the destitution of modern man in what came to be known, through
Martin Esslin, as the Theatre of the Absurd.
III
The blurring of the boundary between dream and reality, the little understood
mystery of sexual awakening in adolescence, and the labyrinth into the past which memory
charts for the self striving to discover meaning and truth are psychologically related themes.
In later Intizar they are subsumed in that vast process which continually relocates the self in
epochs and ages long past, and in the tales (fictions) which constitute for us those lost times.
Not to be ignored, also, is the affinity between motifs of recovery at the three identifiable
stages—the immediate and fractured past, the first shiver of erotic stimulation and the lost
worlds of earlier ages—all of which can be recalled only in that ambivalent area between the
real and imaginary as approximations of the original happening. The writer, by being
displaced from his physical environment, is set adrift from all three referents of his
individual and collective identity, and is it not natural that in attempting to retrieve them, or
their emotional register, he strives to discover also the causes of this dislocation?
Writing fiction for Intizar is not just a dreaming back into existence the worlds of the
past, but also a reliving of the sense of desertion that has taken place in each age and epoch,
experiencing all over again the betrayal that has pursued man through various turns and
stages of history, whether that betrayal or desertion occurs within or outside a person.
Sometimes, it is an act suffered at the hands of a confidant or an associate, as in the tales
about Kufa and Kerbela—"Khwab aur Taqdeer" (Dream and Destiny), "Murda Rakh" (Cold
Ash), "Khemey sey Door" (Beyond the Encampment), among others—but it could be, often,
the result of a personal failing, so evident in those tales about adolescent sexual experience,
or in the Jataka kahanis "Pattey" (Leaves), and "Kacchuey" (Tortoise), as also in the
recounting of ancient Hindu fables of "Brahmin Bakra" (Brahmin Goat) and "Poora Giyan"
(Perfect Wisdom). It should be kept in mind that Intizar's early fiction prefigures the course
it could, and does take later on, but it is doubtful whether the direction it took was indeed an
imperative of the kind of aesthetic that he argued into existence along the way or merely an
escape route for a writer who had come to an impasse in terms of subject, form, and
language, and who perhaps allowed himself to follow the easier and well-rutted way rather
than strike out on his own into unexplored territory.
A prose style that successfully captures the ease of native speakers of the language,
their unselfconscious originality of expression, the discriminating modulations of their tones
without giving an impression of excess, is the most striking achievement of the tales of his
first phase which begins with Galli Koochey and ends with Din (1962). Linguistically, he
has nothing new to offer thereafter. There is, in addition, in his better work, a pure,
uncluttered, realism that distinguishes this period of his writing. Though they appear to be
written in the associative style, popularly, and inexactly, known as the stream-ofconsciousness, that is essentially digressive, the narrative structures comprising a tale are
subjected to enough authorial control to produce the effect of a well crafted, occasionally a
superb, piece of fiction. This balance between the illusion of digressive narration and the
restraint of artistic necessity is the other major success of Intizar at this time. Later fiction
will repeat this success perhaps occasionally, but will never be able to surpass it.
As noted earlier, the tales appearing in Kankari (1955) are already touched by the
supernatural—and despair, failure. These features become increasingly insistent with the
passage of time. Historical, religious and popular stories that lurk in the background as a
subtle influence, or as interpretative paradigms attain centre space. Creativity and creative
exploration loses out to repetition. The language loses the vigor of common speech and
becomes literary, turgid, unconvincing. Intizar becomes a narrator of myths, the word used
in the widest sense to include folklore and religious legend as well, a mythographer,
somewhat like Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch writing the "Key to all
Mythologies," a task arguably as futile and fruitless as in the context of that novel. The
creative writer appears to give way to the social scientist, or that wise old man who has
forgotten how to feel.
With the writing of Dastan (1960) occurs the first major departure from the real, the
world of specific locale and demonstrable logic. Though the cities of Delhi and Bareli are
mentioned in this mini romance-epic, and Calcutta and Peshawar among others, though the
rivers Jamuna, Ganges and Narbadi too find mention and a number of other streams and
streamlets, these are merely names and referred to in a generalized way. The descriptions
could apply to almost any or no place in particular. The language becomes stilted, no longer
faithful to the speech of identifiable people, nor are the themes those of direct experience but
stylized renderings within a literary convention:
"Friends, Delhi discommoded us greatly. The highways from Bareli to Delhi bear
witness to how like a tempest we rose from Bareli and like a windstorm sped
towards Delhi. Forests were pummeled under the hooves of our horses, mountains
pulverized. Our lashkar, pounding mountains and pathways, stamping under foot
woods and orchards and meadows, rose like a squall over Delhi. But the roads to
Delhi became like a beloved's tresses, long and raveled. The Mughals deceived my
eminent master. Daily we girded ourselves expecting battle and each evening
ungirded again. Defeat was writ on the forehead of this unhallowed city..."11 (Dastan
in JK 528)
Samand Khan, the narrator within the frame narration of Hakim Jee in the first part,
"Jal Garjay" (Waters Roar), takes us through a world where fantasy and fact are inseparably
woven and neither can be known from the other. There are legends of past kings—the story
of Sher Shah Suri's fantastic tower in the middle of a desert that once quaked like a heart,
and was brought to peace when a spear thrown by the mighty Shah pierced through its
shifting sandy centre; there is the dark and mysterious tale of the black river whose waters
roar like thunder, causing brave warriors to lose heart and jump to their doom in them, and
past this, the familiar devastated city (wasteland) of epic and romance, its streets deserted,
its houses destroyed, its palaces desolate and in ruins.
No dastan would be complete without a pretty princess, and, sure enough, Samand
Khan meets one—she, who by her very name, Gulshan-e-Khoobi (literally, the Garden of
Virtue), can be identified with the convention of dastans, a conventional figure in a
conventional setting. Like Tristan and Iseult, or perhaps unlike them at this stage, the two
sleep with a naked sword in-between till the time comes when the love between them grows
unbearable. But Gulshan-e-Khoobi is prevented from consummating this love in wedlock by
a vow she made when her city and her palace were laid waste by invading forces. She had
resolved then to join herself in matrimony only to the knight who would avenge the murder
of her father and brother and liberate the city from the tyranny of the foreign enemy. No
authentic champion could with honour ignore the challenge after this information is
provided to him, in this case by none other than the lady of his desire. The night of the
declaration is the last Samand Khan and Gulshan-e-Khoobi spend together. In their sorrow
at the impending separation and in expectation of the days when they shall be at last
reunited, they forget to place the naked sword between them. Such is the irony of the tale,
such the small neglect they allow themselves. The symbol of chastity is no longer between
them and, perhaps, Intizar is making a slight concession to the real at this point. Next
morning, Samand Khan rides away to fulfill the condition (ironically, after the event) that is
to win him the hand of Gulshan-e-Khoobi in marriage, and at this point ends the first part of
Dastan.
As would have been noticed, Intizar has moved away from realism to the world of
romance and epic, and his characters are theatrical figures who represent the larger part of
the classical prose tradition in Urdu fiction. I am not sure if the imitation appears much more
than an eccentric period piece, a patching together of episodes from various epics and
romances, or whether it can at all sound, and appear, credible to a contemporary audience.
But divested of a living context, the tale does read a bit thin in its no land, no place, or all
lands and all places, perspective. Not to add that the stereotype of character itself remains
uninteresting when it is treated with the earnestness of suspended discrimination. The
narrative can acquire large gestures and ostentatious flourishes but, without wit, there is
nothing that releases it from the blandness of mere ornamentation.
That is where this dastan lurches and staggers. Its narration is unrelieved by wit and
humor. The generative impulses behind it have no loci, no identifiable locale—or one that is
too generalized for a reader's or listener's emotional engagement with it—and so fail to
provide the deep structure that could resonate the text to life. There is consequently little or
no room for reflexivity within the various levels that a text may be able to activate. The
generalizations make only the broad paradigms possible. There is the journey, and there is
the hero undertaking the journey, and things happen to him on the way, and maybe he learns
something from them and is the richer for the experience at the end. That last point is
important. He may learn nothing, be no richer in the worldly sense, or taste disaster. Awe,
amazement and surprise may be the essence of his experience of what he sees and endures
during his journey. In the process the boundary between the marvelous and the mundane is
erased, and there is a parable in every extraordinary happening, appropriately vague, and for
this reason, attractive in a superficial way, but on closer reading crumbling in a mass of
contradictions that destabilize the premises of the text.
The familiar adage,” Traveling leads to triumph and success," may be not literally
true in Intizar Husain’s fiction, though a realization of a sense of loss may be itself a kind of
success or victory, even if the idea comes dangerously close to moralistic sophistry. One
fears in tales with a structure of this kind an "insidious intent," the writer, very quietly,
slipping into the role of the great teacher who preaches nothing directly but talks in riddles
and parables. Inevitably, a lesson of fortitude in the face of adversity, and stoic submission
before what is by Divine Will fated, is integral to this paradigmatic structure. In this there is
little room to laugh at the self or doubt the absolute verity of proffered significations. Life
escapes as those little messages are fastened on and secured. The narrator, in short, becomes
too gullible, too complacent about his characters, not letting them exist beyond the twodimensional view he has of them. We need to consider if the sacrifice really is made toward
a greater end.
By itself, Intizar's Dastan, comprising the two sections "Jal Garjay" and "Ghorray ki
Nida" (The Horse’s Call), is hardly worth serious attention. But it manifests four clear
strains that find fruition in Intizar's stories later on, and they may be identified at this stage.
A concern for the past glory of Islamic history, and a sense of its ruination before the
onslaught of an alien civilization, forms the basis of each of the two sections of this dastan.
To withstand the threat is developed the legend of the wondrous horse that is gifted by a
green-robed rider to king Haider Ali of Mysore in a dream. On waking up, Haider Ali finds
the horse grazing in a nearby field and, calling out to Ali, the Prophet’s companion and sonin-law, for support, leaps upon the animal. He wins many a famous battle on its back, and on
his deathbed, bequeaths it to his son Tipu Sultan warning him never ever to mount it without
first calling out to Ali for help. And the horse proves as true of mettle for him as it did for
his father. But, betrayed by his advisors, and roused suddenly from slumber one day by the
imminence of battle, Tipu for once forgets the advice and loses his life as a result. The
miraculous horse escapes. Around it grows another legend. Whoever will track down this
horse and ride it to battle, will rid the land of alien forces.
An obsession with the idea of betrayal, whether related to the tragedy of Kerbela or
surfacing at other periods of Muslim history, and the belief that the sacrifice of Husain and
the martyrdom of Ali were not in vain, is another prominent strain in Dastan. The idea that
the martyrs will lend their support across the gulf of centuries to the faithful, however, is
treated with skepticism in some of Intizar's later stories.12
I have already suggested above two other themes, running just below the surface of
the narration. In the choice of parable and fable as a mode of expression, one may discover
the methodology of moral instruction. Intizar adopts this device in the tradition of saints and
wise men of old, and his later writings show him assuming precisely that posture. Finally,
the notion of submission to a pre-determined pattern harmonizes very well with his interest
in and re-telling of the Buddhist Jatakas. Gautama Buddha's doctrine that all life is anguish
and man, because of the lure of the physical world, is bound to suffer it generation after
generation unless he can eliminate all greed, all desire and remain perfectly still at the centre
of the moving wheel, for then only will he be able to break the cycle of recurring birth, death
and re-birth, appears to synchronize with that quiescent chord in Intizar's thinking.
As early as 1959, Intizar Husain argued that the writers of a defeated civilization
tend to cut themselves off from the present and live in the past, like those Japanese soldiers
who concealed themselves in the jungles during World War II and, on being rescued a
decade and a half later, were found still to believe that the war was not yet over. This is
exactly what he is doing himself, though he would want others to live in the past without
severing their connection with the present13 (“Ijtema’aey Tehzib aur Afsana” in Allamatoon
ka Zawwal 21). Explaining himself further, he says, that he is not really a writer of tales but
a foot-soldier from the lashkar that was routed in 1857:
I just live in the city in the guise of a writer. I know the war is over so I don't quarrel
with the steam engine. But yes, some passengers were lost in the confusion and I go
about looking for them. In short, what is this writing of tales but a search for the lost
ones, an attempt to discover the fire of old? But if we come to this, then we cannot
confine ourselves to 1857 alone. The seeker may go further back, to the plains of
Kerbela, and beyond, to the battle of Badr for that was the first fervor and passion
(fire) of our history—it is from there that all our fires are lighted. ("I T..." 21)
Intizar here very clearly associates himself with the historical experience of Islam
alone. This was written at a time when Mohammad Hasan Askari was formulating for the
creative writers of the newly created country his concepts of Islamic and Pakistani literature,
and Intizar was a close friend and associate of his. Much that he may argue now that Askari
had a broader and more eclectic view of the matter, or that his idea has fallen prey to the
biased and narrow-minded attitudes that infect our life today14 (Harf-e-Man-o-Tu 88-89),
the self-imposed, easily flaunted, limitation of point of view is evidently accepted without
misgiving in the passage quoted above, which hardly suggests the possibility of recognizing
an imaginative empathy with, let alone any influence from, cultures, civilizations and
historical experiences other than Islamic.
From the very beginning of his career, Intizar Husain placed himself in opposition to
the Progressive Writers Movement, which, with reference to one of its leading proponents,
Safdar Mir, he describes as "ideological barbarism"15 (Harf-e-Man-o-Tu 87-88). No wonder,
he attempts to construct an alternate contextual justification, but it goes to his credit that he
recognized the inadequacy of this early formulation and moved on to a more ample, far
more inclusive view of the influences that invade his creative consciousness. The seed
which grew into this larger consciousness can be located in one of his very early tales,
"Ayodhya", written in 1948 and published in his first collection of short stories in 1952. The
protagonist there is unnamed but he could very well be the writer himself, for like him he
too has left his native land and migrated to the newly carved out Muslim country. The
trauma of separation from his birthplace is too recent for him to ignore it and any small
event can trigger off a whole chain of memories. As it is, disappointment at not finding the
sesame candy chips (re'orrian) of the right crispness and flavor is enough to lead him to
reminisce about the Ramchandi variety he used to have in Meerut. This brings to his mind
fragments of the life he has left behind and memories of Ramesh, his closest friend.
It is obvious that the theme of migration fascinated Intizar from the very beginning,
and even at that stage his mind related it to the interplay and ambivalence of both faith and
betrayal:
...and what is the relationship of faith to migration. The last word stuck in his throat.
Who was he then—immigrant, fugitive, deserter, refugee? He really liked the light
and ordinary word 'deserter' best...but stumbling across these contradictions his mind
leaped to another idea—banbaas, banishment to the woods—this seemed to him
very sweet. So he was a wood-dweller in banishment, the Raja Ramchandra of his
times...this too is strange, this bond between brothers. It has always created conflict.
He remembered the story of Joseph and his brothers and thought the whole conflict
was caused by claims that Hindus and Muslims were brothers...16 (“Ayodhya” in JK
17).
Ramesh and he were like brothers, and now they were on opposing sides of the
border. Initially both felt betrayed, and it was so because they loved each other, because
each felt incomplete without the other. With the passing of time the accusations are probably
directed inwards, at and within themselves, rather than against each other, or perhaps there is
a numbing of the conscience and they are desensitized to the personal lapse in each that
divides them. Like the followers who deserted Imam Husain in "Khemey sey Door" they do
not remember their own act of desertion any more—the narrator no less than his friend
across the border. It is the turning away of the other alone that is remembered. "A person's
soul is his Ayodhya," says the narrator near the conclusion of the tale, "It's splendor and
happiness depends on others, and the others never hold out to the end" (79-80).
At this stage there is no attempt to confine the frame of reference to the cultural and
historical experience of Muslims alone. The banishment of Ramchandra, at the instance of
his stepmother and, Intizar would have us believe, his stepbrother, provides a metaphor that
is used to suggest the enforced exile of the narrator. The problem is that the migration of the
narrator appears in the tale to be entirely volitional, so that one is not very sure how the
proffered metaphor can retain its pertinence in these circumstances. However, if one were to
look carefully at the remark quoted above, it would appear that, from Ramesh's point of
view, he too has been banished from the Ayodhya that is the narrator's soul leaving it in a
state of darkness and desolation. We may probably be expected to assume that Ramesh's
soul is his own Ayodhya, and the narrator's absence has devastated it, but the narrative itself
does not provide us with any clue to support or reject this view. The sentimentality of the
tale notwithstanding, and the problems of working out the implications of the governing
metaphor, it is significant in that it draws upon an essentially sub-continental legend to
describe and depict the inner condition of a Muslim protagonist. There does not seem to be a
reservation here about the kind of experiences or cultural metaphors a Muslim writer may
justifiably use.
Some years later, however, Intizar appears to have been drawn towards a more
central interest in Islamic history, the lore and legends surrounding it and, more particularly,
the Shi'ite rites and rituals. Without giving up any of these interests, but without allowing
himself also to be ruled entirely by them, he came in time to acknowledge the rich cultural
influences, oriental and sub-continental, to the exclusion of the occidental, which determine
his inner landscape, and strives to express them all in his tales. In his interview with Asif
Farrukhi in 1984, Intizar Husain insists in calling himself an "Alif Laila Man", which for
him does not represent any narrow view of religion or culture and is, in fact, the crowning
achievement of the Muslim imagination. He notes that here the Muslims "appear to step out
of Arabia and spread over the entire cosmos...(they) have presented in their fiction the idea
that they wish to explore every bit of created space and experience, that they are striving to
discover what it contains, the people who inhabit it, and the kinds of cultures and worlds
they live in..."17 (Harf-e-Man-o-Tu 89).
The occidental represents for him the outsider who has invaded his land to destroy
its peace and serenity, who pillages and robs the people of all they hold dear, their language,
dress, customs, their metaphors, their images and beliefs. Jealously, he picks up the
shattered fragments of this lost world and pieces them lovingly together, and since it is a
recovery of ancient myths and lore in their originality, the farangee, the foreigner, does not
appear in them. He is a physical calamity, and in the life of the mind or the spirit he can be
erased without a trace—and so perhaps also the wound of partition and migration. In his
anxiety to cancel the memory of the white man's influence upon this land, Intizar forgets that
the Aryans, upon whose myths he extensively draws, the Greeks and the Muslims were no
less alien to this country when they raided it than the Occidentals. Thus, a patch of prejudice
remains which disfigures his aesthetics somewhat and lends his ideas a duplicitous air.
To continue, however, if the farangee represents the treacherous outsider, the Kufans
are the archetypal traitors. Their betrayal of Imam Husain at Kerbela remains for them a
perpetual reproach. In "Khwab aur Taqdeer" Intizar takes us to the days immediately
following the betrayal. Kufa is in the thrall of the brutal son of Ziyad who arrives one day
wearing a black head-dress, riding boldly his tall horse to the High Palace. His arrival marks
an abrupt end to the Kufan's vigil for the Imam. A reign of terror is unleashed. No dissent is
tolerated and those who protest are eliminated without mercy. As fear strikes the hearts of
the Kufans, they become inevitably implicated in the crime and the tyranny.
The tale is told by Mansoor bin Nauman, one of the four companions (the others are
Abu Tahir, Haroon-bin-Sohail, and Ja'afar Rabi'i) who have apparently succeeded in
escaping from the city. They realize immediately that they can appreciate once again the
cool fresh taste of the water they are carrying with them. Mansoor tells us that even the food
in Kufa has lost its taste since the terror began. He takes us back to Ibn-e-Ziyad's arrival and
describes the horror of the ensuing days. For a time the friends live as if they were deaf and
dumb, until the oppressive atmosphere forces them to plan an escape.
Then the hold of the land becomes apparent. Ja'afar feels that he is born of the dust
of Kufa and cannot bring himself to leave it; Haroon-bin-Sohail too finds the proposed
separation painful, for though he is originally from Medina, he has spent his youth in the
streets of Kufa. But Mansoor quotes a saying of the Prophet and decides the issue for them
all: "when your land becomes narrow for you, travel forth from it." And indeed, their fears
have made the land "as narrow as a mousetrap" for them.
Their escape does not solve their problem. Once outside the walls of Kufa, they
cannot decide where to go. When Medina is proposed as a possible destination, Haroon-binSohail muses, "And if Medina too has become Kufa?" Maybe all cities have become
treacherous. What about Mecca? Mansoor suggests that is where they should go. But they
are destined never to reach this city of peace. Perhaps it doesn't exist any more, or if it does,
has itself fallen prey to the treachery of the times. Who knows? The next morning all four
find themselves back at the gates of Kufa. There appears to be no other choice for them but
to re-enter it18 (“Khwab aur Taqdeer” in QK 137-143).
The themes highlighted here are, yet again, those of migration and betrayal.
Suspicion, uncertainty, a kind of holding back of total commitment dooms all efforts of
escape from the very beginning. The courage to stand up to tyranny and proclaim the truth
as one believes it seems to be lacking in the companions. Their peregrinations into futile
argument reflect a disinclination for any positive act their desperate situation demands. They
are, therefore, no less implicated in the crime of betrayal than those who make no effort to
turn their backs on it. Not that there are no vocal objectors. Intizar mentions at least two,
Abu Manzar and Qais bin Mashar, who are murdered for speaking out against the
oppressors. But their protests are nullified by the silence of the majority. They are personal
acts of integrity, perhaps even of heroism, but of no consequence in the collective sense.
Intizar seems to be saying that a Kufa lies within as much as it lies outside us. We may
migrate from the one that lies outside us, but can we escape the city within? His fiction
attempts to explore ways and means to answer perhaps this very question.
The city here may be equated with the metaphor of betrayal. After all it is his own
Kufa (Debai, Qadirpur) whose indelible impressions Intizar carries in his memories. In the
context of the partition of India, it is the city that deserted him by forcing him out, by being
left behind, while he migrated to the new land. Or did he indeed forsake it himself for some
ignis fatuus of a land of peace? Now, like the wandering companions of "Khwab aur
Taqdeer," he has no hope of finding rest in either one or the other. In the new land, where he
has no roots, no ties to bind him, no memories except that of a recent desertion, the guilt of
having abandoned his own city will poison his life. Cities flourish on the faith of their
citizens and betray only when their inhabitants have become dissociated, alienated, that is,
treacherous, themselves.
IV
Intizar's search for some grain of wisdom behind the catastrophe of the division of
the sub-continent and the migration that occurred in consequence, leads him to rummage
through myth and legend, history, religious lore and recurring patterns of story-telling to
uncover similar events in other eras, other ages, so that he may find solace in remembering
and recounting archetypal parables of betrayal and metamorphosis, of faith and helplessness,
of submission and recovery, of physical alienation, destruction and recuperation. In the
process he makes a strange discovery—that he, as writer/narrator/individual, has lived
through it all in flesh and blood, in his earlier existences, his former lives, through ages,
millenniums and eons of migration and transmigration. It is all fated, and is to be suffered
with quiet fortitude so that he may achieve the awareness of all-past in the all-present, and,
perhaps, cease to be an individual merely, a compaction of personal desire and greed, and
live and breathe in the heart of all creation as so many tales and stories, parables, fables, and
riddles. He can say with confidence, "the tale I tell is ultimately a challenge to my own
self"19 (“Naye Afsana Nigar ke Nam” in QK 182; see also 179), but this is not a perception
lightly gained.
Exploring, recovering, the closed world of private myths and memories, he registers
currents of popular belief and legend that are more widely shared and travel to him from the
vast ocean of life heaving and rocking around him. He sets out to trace them to their source
only to discover that they form part of his subconscious. The process of recovery thus is an
enlargement of consciousness, an acknowledgement of the vast unknown of which an
individual is a mere detail continually struggling to realize itself in identifiable forms, but
each succeeding form forced by distinctive physical necessity to forget, push away from
active memory, its earlier manifestations and live out its immediate destiny. Recovery of
past selves would be indeed, in this sense, a threat to the apparent personality or self of the
moment, a dispersal and distribution of it into its component shades and aspects, a sort of
recognition of affinity with the individually undistinguished currents running through
various parts of the ocean of unconsciousness, neither routinely perceived nor understood as
such, yet impinging, impressing upon, sliding by, pushing against, sometimes even partially
merging with the consciousness of location in particular time. Intizar Husain perceives
individual lives, his in particular, thus, as journeys within the ceaselessly heaving ellipses of
time past, present, and future, immanent and always imminent, without a linear beginning
and so without a linear end.
In a published letter addressed to India's Balraj Menra, he writes:
In my distress I roam across lands and epochs. Long I wandered in Ayodhya and
Kerbela to find out, that when decent people migrate from their settlements, what do
they endure, and what befalls also their abandoned homes. Rambling in this way I
drifted into the Jatakas of Mahatama Buddha and was struck dumb with awe. My
God! What a world of phenomenon is this where man flourishes at the same time in
innumerable forms and epochs without end! Within a shoreless all-time, in his many
splendored garbs, the shoreless self of man (emphasis mine)...I have forgotten my
past existences; only from here or there I remember sometimes an incident or
two...20 (“Naye Afsana Nigar ke Nam” in QK 179)
He believes that there is "a great cemetery within us, where untold presences lie buried as
yesterdays. I am ridden by a passion," he writes, "to blow upon them the magic breath of a
tale and rouse them from their sleep to absorb them in this tiny, winking present of mine"21
(183).
This, however, also presents a problem: if the "untold presences" are merely
retrieved en masse and thrown at the reader as so many episodes related to each other in
some limited and accidental way in their narrative structure and theme, they are not thereby
"rouse(d)...from their sleep" for the reader. Such connections may be registered at the level
of conversation, but there is a mere anecdotal quality in this that chokes their potential for
growth and sabotages the process of developing these tales, or episodes, into a story. In a
way, they remain transient, and hence somewhat without depth, as only the spoken word of
the moment can be—not by choice, or even potentially, but because of the limitation of the
mode of address. The written word also may have its constraints and shortcomings, but it
makes reflection, consequently, the process of evolution of thought, feeling, and action
traceable and hence verifiable. Oral discourse may do this, if ever, in a very restricted way
and, something that negates the idea of traceable evolution altogether, only in a sporadic and
ephemeral manner. A certain randomness, a lack of conscious artistic editing and control in
its use, is associated almost inevitably with the spoken word, unless it is rehearsed again and
again over a period of time so that excess, imprecision and irrelevancies are combed out and
only the most effective and efficient elements of discourse retained, or, alternately, every
rendition becomes a new act, in a new setting, in a new temporal context each of which
conduces to a variation of stress or emphasis, elision, circumvention, or addition to suit the
occasion for political, social, or ideological reasons. Oral everyday conversation is not
carried on normally with any thought to its preservation or retrieval for examination and
review, and the variables of digression are too numerous to allow sustained foci of evolution
through discussion on all speech acts and matters raised in the exchanges. Works of art,
whether oral or written, seek to overcome this apparent unseemliness by giving language a
more permanent form, an aesthetic, philosophic, or moral discipline, eliding out of it all that
appears to be merely irrelevant to the artistic vision. Even digressions, pertinent and
impertinent, annoyingly intrusive or exasperatingly disruptive, may be used as a tactic or an
imaginative maneuver to create an experiential correlative, fragmentary and pluralistic in
nature, or to draw attention to the disparate elements in the creative work and follow their
variegated exfoliations.
But in a world consciousness where all times and events (or narratives) are present
all at once, the developmental model of apprehension of the world and its reality may not
work very well. In fact, even in a sequential spatio-temporal perception of the world, the
dialectic of gradual, linear development is impossible to sustain without ignoring
innumerable, individualized, currents and cross-currents, the stalling and regressions, which
are so much a part of perceived reality but which may defy the organization of neat
categories, systems, and resolutions. There may be other ways of understanding the world
and its “history” than the “historical” in the sense of causal and sequential. The mundane,
ephemeral, quality of the spoken word, its presence and meaning expiring as soon as it is
uttered, may offer a more suggestive view of the world we inhabit than the binaries of logic,
philosophy, and grammar within which we struggle to capture it. Writing, then, a text that
replicates the lapses and the mundane quality of ordinary speech without attempting to
subordinate it to an aesthetic design or an ideological framework may, paradoxically, be a
more radical intervention in the discourse and practice of art than the pretension of operating
out of high philosophical and theoretical ideals of received conventions and reasoning. But
while Intizar appears to be implying all this implicitly, his tales are not quite affianced to
this view as he advances in them often a linear view of history, and one that is in a state of
perpetual decline having become unmoored from its past, particularly since the European
colonization of India. While in some of his stories he suggests that this sense of rupture from
the past may have dated from the time of the betrayal of Husain, the prophet Mohammad’s
nephew, at Kerbala, in others he takes it back to the exile of Rama, ordered by his father
Dasaratha, at the instigation of his stepmother, Kaikeyi, or, yet again, more radically, to a
failure of “god” at the time of the first great flood that destroyed almost the entire life from
the planet. So, the two temporalities of the world, the linear, causal, sequential on the one
hand and the elliptical, durational, non-spatial that defies these categories on the other, are at
times both present in the same story in Intizar’s writings. Here too, Intizar Husain may be
bringing his readers to the heart of the paradox of existence, the illusion of living in a
temporal and spatial reality in a transcendental no-time, no-space/all-time, all-space
consciousness.
The differentiation between oral and written discourse, thus, is brought up not to
privilege one over the other in the artistic or moral sense, but only to emphasize that the two,
though they share certain qualities and features, belong to different orders of experience and
approach, which in turn influence and determine their forms, aims, and effects. Bringing
folkloric elements into writing may be seen as a strategy of hybridizing the forms and their
effects on the audience/readers. Folklore is distinguished from common everyday
conversation and exchange of news and stories in that it too represents a filtration (or
distillation) of language and narrative through repeated oral “revisions” or retellings, the
latest version carrying within it implicit and explicit markers of earlier redactions. Such
retellings occur in written texts as well, though, questions of authorship and originality are
more pertinent to written texts than to oral renditions. Further, the experience of an audience
of a folktale is very different from that of a reader of written text. The first is an auditory and
visual experience, for folktales are often also partly performed in the process of their telling,
and there may be audience interaction with the storyteller/performer as well; the second is
essentially a silent experience of reading words off the page, the narrative performed, if at
all, in the head of the reader imaginatively, with the ability and freedom to pause, reflect, go
back and re-read, or flip ahead several pages to find out how matters turn out in the course
of the text or story. A writer who chooses to use elements of oral storytelling in his/her
written work needs to keep in mind the latitudes and norms that condition the reading of
written texts. In the final analysis, the use of folklore in Intizar often may not be justified by
the structural framework within which it is imprisoned, but it may have its pertinence
nonetheless. Those narratives of Intizar that deal with recovery of conglomerate anecdotal
parables of the past ("Kashtee", "Kacchuey", "Pattey", "Daswan Qadam", "Doosra Gunah",
"Poora Giyan", "Brahmin Bakra", "Zard Kutta", among others) sometimes fail to go beyond
the level of ordinary educated oral discourse. There is a flitting from one anecdote to the
other, or back and forth between them, that can be easily accepted at the level of oral verbal
exchange but which falls short of constituting a sustained aesthetic experience, oral or
written. What is missing?
For one, the discipline of art is absent. There is in them a randomness which, if it
were a product of conscious design, could well be seen as an artistic device, but presented as
it comes, accidentally, it robs the tale of sustained aesthetic interest. In "Kashtee," Ark, (QK
164-176), for instance, three tales of the flood from three different cultures are narrated
consecutively in brief fragments with the loose ends hanging in a rather untidy manner. So
Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh, Noah and his family, Manuji and Markande, are all knit in and
out of the narrative, not always with relevance, for reference to some episodes disturbs
attention from the theme to other areas not exactly appropriate to it. Gilgamesh's journey to
find Utnapishtim, for example, is quite unrelated to the flood sequence, as also the recalling
by Manuji of the time when Vishnu appeared on earth as a dwarf and claimed, on promise
of three strides of land from an oppressive Raja, the entire universe, and yet Intizar records
them for his readers. There is, additionally, a recounting of a brief tale about his own
experience of travel by Hatim Tai at the end which has hardly anything to do with the rest of
the stories. A suggestion that perhaps he is the narrator of the three legends is vaguely
present no doubt, but it is not confirmed by the tenor of the rest of the narrative which veers
from one point of view to another, from the first person to the third, with reckless abandon.
In fact, the point of view is shifted too quickly and too frequently to support the conclusion
of a singular and consistent narratorial voice. This multiplicity of narrative voices may be a
deliberate ploy to disorient the reader, but the didactic tone of the story suggests a less
disruptive intention. The multi-plot pluralism of the story, however, articulates into its own
ramifications.
The end, in these circumstances, is bound to be forsaken in the middle of nowhere,
and this is indeed what happens. There is no apparent way in which all three, or perhaps
four, tales can be resolved into a satisfactory conclusion of sorts, nor is there an attempt to
convey underlying implications or provocative suggestions beyond the surface adjacencies,
overlaps, or intersections. Intizar terminates the narrative with a segment from the Manuji
episode. The whole process of the compulsion to find ever-larger expanses of water had
started with a plea from a fish the size of a little finger for protection. But this little fish had
the propensity to outgrow within one night any container, pool, lake, river or ocean, where
Manuji placed it, till of course there is Divine intimation of a flood and Manuji plays the
role of a Noah or Utnapishtim from here onwards. But now, at the close of the tale, the fish
that couldn't help growing bigger and bigger, is nowhere to be found. The tale concludes
with the depiction of the uneasy mental state of the group of survivors riding the waves with
Manuji when they fail to see any trace of the fish: "Worry surrounded them and doubt
caught up with them. They thought of the remotest of things but the mystery could not be
unraveled. To and fro the boat rocked and on all sides waters roared" ("Kashtee" 176).
This doesn't seem to help the readers very much to whom the writer, with all his
windbag of voices for narrators and actors, appears to be in tangles as much as the narrative
itself. Obviously, there is something supernatural about the fish from the start, and yes, it is a
reincarnation of the god Vishnu, but why does it ask Manuji for protection anyway? And,
when Majuji, has provided that “protection” and tries desperately to keep up his
ministrations as the fish grows uncontrollably bigger and bigger before his eyes, why is he
divinely warned of the flood? Why, then, at the end, does the fish/god-in-fish-form vanish?
The tale occurs in several versions, the most prominent found in the Mahabarata and in the
Matsya Purana, but in all available versions the fish reappears, as it has promised, during
the flood and saves Manu, with the seven sages and the seeds he had been advised by the
fish to bring along with him in the ark that he was also instructed to build in anticipation of
the flood, to start the world anew. So Intizar misses out on a lot of details here which could
have been highly evocative and suggestive had he included them in his story. But the failure
of the fish to reappear is the one point he seems to be making for his readers, and this
conveys a sense of abandonment of humankind by the god (Vishnu, in this case) as the flood
rages and his assistance is most needed. It underscores the sense of bewilderment and
betrayal of humankind at a critical juncture of its early history and collapses it with the
current state of affairs in which too the world as known, united India, has come apart and the
survivors are riding the waves of a terrible flood with no sign Divine assistance anywhere.
The predominant feeling is one of confusion, unless one discounts the existence of a
written text and treats the narrative merely as oral discourse that is not meant or retrievable
for examination. Such an illusion would be difficult to sustain, or justify, in the presence of
recorded signs and frameworks that are before the reader and to the meanings and
suggestions of which the reader is responding, to begin with, anyway. It is as if the writer
has come to a stage where he does not know what to do with the material, how to make it
work, or to convey something more than that it exists unexamined and unexplored.
Too much is being attempted in "Kashtee," and the problems that are described here
are not peculiar to it but typical of all Intizar Husain stories, some of them already referred
to above, where the burden of the past smothers the narrative to death. Somehow, that
"magic breath of a tale" that Intizar talks about "blowing" upon the dead bodies of the past
in order to resurrect them is not there. And this magic breath, what is it if not the
imaginative treatment an artist gives to its creative enterprise—that reflective association
with experience before it is transmuted into a work of literary art?
An ineffable atmosphere of this ruminative alchemy envelops and infuses a work of
art, so that always it is both product and process, art and artistry, and, in their conjunctions,
more than either. In Intizar Husain, the mental procedure that makes the connections and
sets up the conclusions is very often too obvious when he attempts to bring to use tales of
the past to emphasize parallels between them or their current pertinence. Narratives and
narrative structures do not evolve out of each other, but rather one is trained to the other.
Thought marks the stages of movement, but it seldom turns into reflection that can
transform movement into the talisman or the epiphany of realized art. The laxity associated
with the common spoken word is transferred to the written text and the effect is not benign.
As seen earlier, it was not so in early Intizar. Only when he attempted to bring the rumbling
weight of unexamined wisdom of the past to his tales did he lose his affinity with his
narratives. Ironically, his excuse for bringing this baggage to them is quietly reversed by the
actual effect. Instead of being subsumed by the experience of past epochs he asserts he is
reliving, he stands in helpless isolation to it, a raconteur more than ever and seldom more
than this. Perhaps that is the point—and he constructs his narratives out of this sense of
disconnectedness, this isolation, always in his spirit, yearning for that union with the past
that has ineluctably passed and is always in a state of perpetual regress. The implicit
didacticism of his stories, however, does not appear to sustain this reading, but, even if it
did, the narrative itself is unable to persuade us to this conclusion.
That takes us to a more fundamental difficulty—the inadequacy of the form of the
short story as Intizar writes it, this being his major literary genre of creative expression, to
contain the value or weight he attempts to assign to it. Failures at the level of treatment,
process, and relevance pale before this most major of flaws. Tales like "Kachhuey",
"Pattey", "Kashtee", "Poora Giyan", "Brahmin Bakra", are too heavily loaded with episode
and unexplored thematic possibility for a short story. It is like attempting to write a history
of the universe in one line, which could be done if the right technique is devised for it, but
not in the manner of these later short stories where several versions of truncated legend and
learning are flung at the reader in quick succession and the result is left to chance, hoping
the volley would have had its impact anyway. In any case, the striving to present a cosmic
moral drama, or an epochal progression of transmigrated selves, in a genre that is by nature
restricted and restrictive in scope has a trivializing effect, as if a vast epic were being
adapted television. The possibilities are obviously diminished, and unless a writer
recognizes this, he may not be able to extend the parameters of the form or medium he is
attempting to exploit.
Interestingly, while charting the process of composing an apparently less
complicated, overtly realistic tale, "Katta Huwa Dabba" (The Disengaged Bogey), Intizar
betrays his anxiety to pack an extravagant load of significance, not only in outwardly
symbolic narratives, but in all his stories in general. He takes pains in this article, titled
"Kahani ki Kahani" (The Story of a Story), to advertise the point that "Katta Huwa Dabba"
is no ordinary tale. "...Its a kathha (fable)," he writes, quoting Nasir Kazmi the poet, and
goes on to expound the fable in minute detail for his readers. If one were to accept this
exegesis by the author, that would be the end of the story itself. All neatly explained with a
Quod erat demonstrandum at the end, one would be justified in relegating it to some remote
corner of memory for it can no longer be enjoyed as immediate experience. This is the
hazard a writer runs in talking about his own work. The work itself may have much more to
commend, or damn, it. By stifling it with the weight of a self-expounded version, Intizar
goes a long way in killing it altogether. And, as if that were not enough, he attempts to
condition or determine the reading of his whole work by confiding in us quite innocently, "I
would have surely noted how beliefs and superstitions enter this story and what shapes they
take, but I fear I would have to mention my other tales for, with me, this is a continuous
process..."23
"Katta Huwa Dabba" has enough to offer without the prompting at the reader's
shoulder by the shadow of the author. On the surface, it is the story of a person (Manzoor
Husain) who, despite wanting to, is unable to relate to his friends an incident from his past
which he remembers and forgets and remembers again, even as he now resolves to recount it
and is either prevented because of their interruptions from telling it or, when they finally get
interested, does not know how to begin losing the thread altogether in the process. When he
finally brings himself to the decisive moment of narrating it, he finds that his friends are no
longer there to hear him. The tale never gets told as far as the characters in the story are
concerned, but fragments of it, comprising ultimately the whole incident, are disclosed to the
reader by interspersing the ongoing dialogue between the friends with a mapping of
Manzoor Husain's recovery of it as immediate experience in his consciousness. Inevitably, a
shifting, two voiced narrative is needed to carry the tale across and Intizar manages it with
considerable success for the most part, except that the point of view poses some minor
difficulties,24--unless we accept the idea of a third person omniscient narrator who may enter
into any consciousness and take whatever shape it likes at any time. But the narrative pattern
suggests that Intizar may not have intended this, for the narration more or less faithfully
proceeds from Manzoor Husain's point of view. There are a couple of lapses if we accept
that view, but that may be too many in a story that is hardly twelve pages long!
Primarily, however, the tale ceases to interest the reader as soon as he is allowed
access to Manzoor Husain's mind and learns of the incident that the character is never able
to share with his friends. It is a complication resolved and therefore demystified, demeaned.
The sense of loss it carried in remaining unarticulated is mitigated at once, its air of mystery,
and hence its capacity to captivate, shattered. And, since Manzoor Husain recovers the
memory of the lost experience in its entirety, in all its minute details, his excuse later that it
has slipped from his mind does not ring true. Perhaps he too has become aware that it has a
special personal significance which others might not be able to share with him, or which he
may be unable to communicate in his recounting. That would have made sense if the tale
ended there. But he returns to Mirza Sahab's house some time after the meeting has broken
up, resolved to tell his story. Now there is no one there, for the Mirza and his companions
have gone for their isha'a prayers. By this time, Manzoor Husain's predicament has come to
have only a subsidiary interest for the reader, who already knows his tale, and cannot share
with him fully his sense of unease at being unable to narrate it. He may also be wondering if
the experience is worth sharing in the final analysis.
The matter, however, of the tale that never gets told, treated also in "Neend" (Sleep)
and "Lambba Qissa" (Long Story), or the fear that it may be garbled in its telling or lose its
significance, is of considerable importance to the world of man. In his "Kahani ki Kahani",
Intizar attempts to deflect attention from it and accord centrality to the idea of travel, its
various modes and the disruptive implications that new means of travel, like the railway
train, have brought with them. This also is touched upon in "Katta Huwa Dabba", but
without being treated as more than a foreground conversational topic of the moment, beyond
which the internal journey of Manzoor Husain, and his failure or inability to talk about it,
occurs and acquires for the reader a more compelling interest. "Katta Huwa Dabba" may be
a fable after all, but it has to succeed at the level of narration before it may assume that
status, and then we may discover that its fabulous allegories are less a matter of intended
suggestion than the reader's caprice. The revealed intent damns the tale with its bias and it
does not help that this strain is only of peripheral import in the structure of the narrative. But
it does highlight the somewhat disorganized way in which miscellaneous items of narration
are brought into one tale, diffusing rather than concentrating its effect. The fault is more
obvious in his retelling of jatakas and ancient legends, where the passing from one to the
other on the frail thread of a stray association creates a cobwebby collocation of stories that,
precisely because of the random connections, has the effect of blurring the theme, or themes,
rather than allowing them to emerge with clarity.
One after the other images race before the reader's eye, and as long as he allows
himself to be ruled by the narrator's logic, they appear to be moving towards some point of
emphasis, a denouement of a kind. When no resolving perception or disturbing shift of
appreciation occurs by the end, he goes back to see if the telling itself was the signification
of the tale. That is where he is disenchanted of the narrator's logic, for he discovers its slight
and wandering character. The true value of narrated episodes is often bartered to score a
point that will lead to the recounting of the next episode, and all the narrative units now
appear to be strung together without that urgency that must be present to bind them into an
artistic whole. "Kachhuey", "Pattey" and "Kashtee" may be cited as examples of this kind of
failure. It is a debasement of that process of telling a story within a story which, at a much
larger scale, has been used so well in works like The Thousand Nights and One Night. But it
is perhaps here that we may find an answer to the problem Intizar may have run into. In
work of a larger scale, gradual development of theme and character is possible with space to
gain the reader's confidence and sympathy. The intermingled tales no longer appear to be
brought together just anyhow, but provide multi-layered reverberations through the entire
enterprise. In a shorter work, structured to tell many tales, the evolutionary process, and
therefore the sense of conviction, is cut out. The echoing reflexes become so many jarring
images and sound patterns squabbling for attention.
This is glaringly evident in a tale like "Kachhuey"25, where stories from the
Buddha's former lives are strung together on a moral, or instructional string, and which does
not appear to find its theme till we reach its last part. The jatakas--stories of the various
births and re-births of the Buddha each making a moral point--on which it is based, take us
through a miscellaneous series of the Buddha's past incarnations--as parrot, myna, monkey,
tree, offspring of a witch and Brahmin, and Raja's minister. It is not until we reach the last
incarnation that the metaphor of the title is picked up and developed. True, it has
implications for the other narrated jatakas, but only in an indirect way. The attempt to make
it the central metaphor of the entire tale comprising of crawling episodes and sub-episodes,
themes and sub-themes, a floating debris of information and folklore, even of man's state in
the world, is a familiar Intizar Husain device to dupe the reader into believing that a simple
solution exists or is possible. It fences in the world of the narrative in a feeble way and is
successful only in highlighting the chaos and confusion of the mass that is being forced into
circumscription. If, the idea is to underscore the point that life, or experience, is such a
jumble that it can be only understood in a partial manner by taking one shared strain at a
time and letting the other implications hang about like so many threads come apart, it
discloses an unfortunate lack of aesthetic judgment about the effect of such untidiness on the
work itself.
The metaphor of the tortoise forms part of the jataka where Lord Buddha is born in
the house of a courtier and grows up to be a minister of the king. The king is extremely
talkative and the Bodhisattva resolves to remedy this by making him realize the evil of many
words. He gets his opportunity when it is reported one day that a flying tortoise has crashed
into a courtyard of the palace. When the king asks him how the marvelous event came
about, he answers that it is the result of talking too much and narrates the story of that poor
chelonian. He tells the king that the tortoise lived in a pond by the Himalayas and there he
became friendly with two geese. When the water in the pool dried up, the geese decided to
fly away to their home in the hills and invited the tortoise to join them. Since he could not
fly, a method was devised to carry him. He was advised by his two friends to hold a rod by
the middle in his mouth, while they held the ends in their beaks and would be thus able to
convey him to their home. But he was warned not to try and speak for then he would
obviously fall and there would be no way to save him. As they flew over a city the children
below beheld the spectacle and shouted at him. The unfortunate tortoise could not contain
himself for anger, but the moment he opened his mouth, down he fell and landed in the
palace courtyard. Viddayasaagar, who recounts the jataka to Gopal, ends it with a moral:
"Dear friend, we bhikshus (beggars) are tortoise and yet far from our journey's end. He who
speaks unseasonably is bound to fall. You saw how badly Sunder Samdar fell so that he
could never rise again."26
There are a number of elements (unexamined questions) in the tale, though only one
is related to the moral. But I wonder if the adduced wisdom could possibly find pertinence
in respect of the other jatakas contained in "Kacchuey". It could, probably, be applied to the
stories of the two parrots and of the myna, in one of which the parrot, and in the other the
myna, suffers because of inopportune remarks, but it may have no relevance at all to the
jatakas of the monkeys, the Tarwar (Cassia auriculata) tree, and the witch and the Brahmin,
where the themes are quite extrinsic to the idea of excessive or unseasonable speaking. It
will be noticed also that the jatakas of the parrots and the myna emphasize dissimulation, or
diplomatic evasion of direct comment, as a survival strategy rather than stress silence for its
own virtues. The Bodhisattva who takes up the Raja's service in the witch and Brahmin
jataka is, on the other hand, far more loquacious than anyone else in the tale and ends up in
the ruler's place! That tale itself is loosely constructed and it is not clear what the narrator is
attempting to say through it.
Then there are sub-tales of Sunder Samdar and Gopal too in "Kachhuey". Sunder
Samdar is smitten by the lady Sawad (Savour) and abandons, ultimately, his bhikshu friends
for her. Gopal lasts a little longer, so that he can hear the story of the tortoise and the
condemnation of Sunder Samdar. But when an old childhood friend brings him news of his
father's death and tells him that his mother, his wife and the throne await his return, he too is
unsettled. And he contemplates a flower, and in it the mutability of the world. As he sees a
fresh bud unfold in the morning where only the day before another had withered and died,
he too is on his way. Viddayasaagar is left all alone.
Not really, though. He has his memories, jogged to life by the miracle of nature in
efflorescence, responding perhaps also to the subliminal suggestion in the falling away of
his companions. He comes across a tamarind tree and is amazed he didn't notice it before
wandering through the vast jungle all these years. And it reminds him of his own land, and
the huge, thick-leaved tamarind of his youth, its fruit, the long lines of parrots that alighted
there and fluttered and chattered on its limbs. Slowly, the lost world comes back to him, the
racing chariots, squirrels peeping through the leaves, a chameleon—
...from some hole, a tongue like twin needles in a red mouth, darting into sight
suddenly and vanishing, and in his body a wave of fright rustling. And yes,
Kaushambi. Under this tree, in the half-light of evening she met him as a stream
meets the ocean...Recalling it, he felt a sweetness melting into him. Consider, he had
tasted the sap of the moon-plant. 'Vastu Giyan' (Wisdom of the material), he
murmured in his heart and was immersed in a deep sense of Peace. ("Kacchuey",
102)
One wonders if this is Intizar Husain recalling his past or Viddayasaagar--the
parallels to earlier, partly-autobiographical, tales of the writer are so obvious. The world for
him has changed for ever. He is looking for the highest wisdom (Uttam Giyan) and wanders
far and wide in his search in the forest of Urdblu, remorseful at having allowed his senses to
take pleasure in the beauties of nature, making himself see the world again as a great fire pit,
just as Tathagata had made them see it, burning, burning all the time, slowly consuming
everything. He sits in meditation now under the pipal now the bunyan, crying "Shanti!
Shanti! Shanti!" all the time. And there under the bunyan he feels as if a tiny floweret were
budding in his heart; he sees in his mind's eye the same tamarind tree of old. He believes he
has at last found the truth: "This, that there is a forest and a tree for every man and woman
which is their own. Nothing is to be gained by him who wanders in another forest even if
there is a bodhi tree there. Whatever is to be found will be found under the shade of one's
own tree." ("Kacchuey", p. 103)
But Viddayasaagar is caught in doubt once more. Is this truth or illusion? He
wonders whether "the rod is still between his teeth or has slipped away. In this uncertainty
he had one foot in the forest of Urdblu and the other lifted towards his own tree. And in the
vast fire pit flames raged all around." ("Kacchuey", 103) So the end of the tale curls back on
itself struggling to resurrect the metaphor of the tortoise and the fire pit.
V
It is the writer's eagerness to put all and everything in the tale that ultimately
destroys it. The rather loose relationship between the various narratives, the unheeded
thematic significations, the random logic, are all conspicuous and detract attention from the
well-written and potentially powerful parts. But Viddayasaagar's momentary apprehension
of a personal truth appears to be in accord with Intizar's own view about the autochothonous
treasure hoard of tales from which a writer borrows, as he expresses it by recounting a story
from The Thousand Nights and One Night in his introduction to Qissa Kahanian.27 A man
in Cairo is directed in a dream to go to Isphahan where it is promised he will acquire
enormous riches. Owing to an accident on the way he is arrested and brought before the
Qazi in Isphahan. When he cites his dream as a defense, the Qazi recounts a similar dream
of his own, but this time the directions are to go to Cairo. The man returns to his own city
and suddenly realizes that the signs the Qazi described actually point to his own backyard.
He digs under the tree indicated by the clues in the dream and comes upon the promised
treasure. The moral, of course, is that we may travel anywhere in search of wealth and riches
but we are likely to find them only in our own home or homeland. This is Viddayasaagar's
achieved insight too, but the fable of the tortoise subverts it, and perhaps in his slipping back
into uncertainty we may have a hint of Intizar's own reservations about the moral of the two
stories. This further scrambles the reading of "Kachhuey", but if it is true that Intizar has
come to question the personal perceptions of the man from Cairo and Viddayasaagar, he
may not be, as far as the argument of the tale is concerned, quite justified in doing so.
There is fine irony here. The problems of "Kachhuey" are reflected in "Pattey", in
"Brahmin Bakra" and "Poora Giyan" and in "Kashtee". Intizar's forays into myth and
legend--I think he may still be struggling with the question, "which is home?"--without
finding a centre in his own immediate experience, or concentrating in examining and
investigating his themes with the single-mindedness of an artist, lead him to display
artificiality as art, and confuse superficial treatment with creative transformation. We must
remember that these are re-tellings of old tales. Intizar appears to have run out of material,
and directions. And except for what he remembers and recreates from his childhood, he
appears to lack experience and understanding of character as well. The re-telling of jatakas,
myths and legends may be only a device to conceal this deficiency. Although, in his
interview with Asif Farrukhi, Intizar notes his coming into contact with Hindu rites and
customs early in his childhood,28--it is uncertain if he has absorbed this material sufficiently
to deal with it independently without becoming self-conscious or strained. The facility and
control he displays in dealing with experiences, beliefs and superstitions of his childhood
and early youth, accentuate difficulties that become evident when he attempts to step
beyond that world.
This is not to say that none of his experiments with ancient lore are successful. Tales
which concentrate on exploring a particular theme work far more effectively. Where
multiple strains are brought together, the limitation of the genre and, perhaps, the writer's
complaisance fail to do justice to them. Of metamorphic tales, all re-tellings, "Kaya Kalp",
"Aakhri Aadmi" and "Daswan Qadam" (Tenth Step) are realized artistic and moral
experiences; "Nar Nari" (Man, Woman) is a failure, and it is poor handling that destroys an
otherwise provocatively disturbing tale. All four tales mentioned deal, in one way or the
other, with the problem of identity, its loss, its discovery, its transformation. "Daswan
Qadam" and "Nar Nari" offer two rare instances in Intizar of a happily ending story. All four
employ the method of fable and allegory.
In "Kaya Kalp", Prince Azad Bakht, who enters the white genie's fortress to rescue
the Princess, vacillates, once he is there, succumbing to the illusion of temporary comfort
and security and pays the penalty by losing his identity. Intizar charts the process with great
skill as day by day Azad Bakht retails his freedom and velour without realizing that it is
irretrievable until it is already too late. Initially, it is the Princess who, blowing upon him the
breath of her magic words, changes him into an ordinary house fly to protect him from the
genie returning home in the evening. He protests briefly against this, but the Princess' tears
soften his heart and he falls for her charms. Thereafter, there is no hope of escape. The
Princess turns him into a fly every evening and brings him back to human form each
morning after the genie has left. Gradually, the form and nature of the fly take over
completely and the Prince, incapable of resolve, loses his human identity altogether. One
implication is that once a decision is taken, its repercussions follow with inevitable certainty.
In this it carries the quiescent and fatalistic streak of Intizar's early fiction without change or
revision. But the writer's ability to tell a story and build up dramatic tension remains
unimpaired. One may read the tale as an allegory of the white man's imperialistic
domination of India, but I wonder if that will enhance its value in any way. And the allegory
actually doesn't work out convincingly in its details.
A similar transformation occurs in "Aakhri Aadmi" in which Intizar takes us back to
the Biblical times to re-enact for us the first defiance of the Sabbath. The entire city
population is converted into monkeys as a punishment and it is the gradual metamorphosis
of the protagonist, Al-Yassaf, the one who had devised the trick to circumvent the Sabbath,
that the tale dramatizes. Both tales succeed because of the discipline Intizar imposes upon
himself in leaving out unrelated details from his narration and concentrating on the story
itself. Neither of them is burdened by too much learning or wisdom.
This control is evident in "Daswan Qadam" as well, though that is a more difficult
story to handle considering the number of episodes Intizar is bringing together in it. It occurs
in his last collection of short stories, Khemey sey Door, published in 1981, and affirms
Intizar's continued interest in the re-telling of ancient tales. In its structure, as also in some of
its episodes, it is indebted to portions of the Mahabharata, where attending rishis and priests
comfort and console the exiled king, Yuddhishtra, in his adversity by recounting to him
uplifting tales of heroism and velour which deal with misfortunes and calamities similar, in
many cases worse, than his own. This is the setting of "Daswan Qadam" and Rishi Birahdas
is the comforting raconteur, who narrates to Yuddhishtra, sequence after sequence, the tale
of Raja Nal, interspersed with the exiled Pandava's questions, his reservations and
comparisons, and draws parallels with the stages of the exiled king's despair and sorrow.
The setting and the tale supplement each other and it is, even for Intizar, inescapable that the
story that Birahdas tells must be an uplifting one. Thus, even though a double perspective
involving a binary narrative is present throughout, the shared purpose holds the story
together.
"Nar Nari" is an enigmatic tale. Though Gopi Chand Narang makes much of it in his
otherwise thoughtful article, "Naya Afsana: Allamat, Tamseel aur Kahani ka Johar"29 (The
New Story: The Art of Symbolism, Parable and Narration)--and perhaps he has the original
story in mind rather than Intizar's rendering of it--it is worth recalling more for its faults than
for its strengths. The story itself is lifted from Beitaal Pacheesi, where it is one in a sequence
of twenty-five and is told, like most others in the series, in its bare elements and poses a
problem at the end to be answered or solved by Raja Vikramadittya to whom the tales are
narrated.30
The original story may be summarized as follows: A washerman's son falls in love
with a girl he sees near the temple of the Devi and vows, that if he succeeds in making her
his wife, he would present his head as a thank offering to the goddess. He sues for her hand
in marriage through his father and a close friend and his suit is accepted. The marriage takes
place and the couple live in peace and happiness for a time. Then one day, the girl's brother
arrives with an invitation to a ceremony in her ancestral village. Husband, wife and brother
set off for the village, but on the way, the husband espies the Devi's temple and remembers
his vow. Bidding his companions to wait for him while he offered a brief prayer at Devi's
altar, he takes leave of them and enters the temple. Once inside, he salutes the Devi and
fulfils his vow as with his sword he knocks off his head from his body. When his wife's
brother comes looking for him and finds him in this state, he fears that he might be taken as
the murderer of his brother-in-law, and to quell all doubts he too takes up the sword and
slices off his own head from his trunk. Now two headless bodies lie before the Devi's altar.
It is this gory scene that confronts the wife when, vexed with being left unattended,
she follows her brother and husband to the temple. Apprehensive of slanderous accusations
and beside herself with shock and grief, she picks up the still freshly stained sword and is
about to kill herself when the Devi steps down from her altar, praises her for her fidelity and
offers to fulfill one wish of hers. The girl asks for the life of the two men and the Devi grants
her the wish bidding her to put head to body in each case. Still traumatized by the sight of
the dead bodies, the girl is flung now to the other extreme of feeling. In her consternation
and excitement she mismatches the heads and the trunks. Before she realizes what has
happened they rise before her, whole and healed. And now begins their quarrel, for each
claims the girl as his wife. To whom does she belong? asks Beitaal the narrator. To the body
with the head of her husband, answers Vikramadittya, for, he argues, things are recognized
by that which is superior in them, and in limbs and organs it is the head which is the most
significant.31
This is the version, generally recognized to be the original one, that appears in
Buitenen's Tales of Ancient India. In Mazhar Ali Khan Villa's rendering of it in Urdu,
produced for Fort William College, Calcutta, in 1804, the couple are accompanied by the
husband's friend and not by the wife's brother. It is probably Villa's tale that has been
developed by Thomas Mann in his nouvelle The Transposed Heads.32 Mann, however, does
not only give it extended treatment, but also follows the difficulties the protagonists run into
after the transposition has been effected. Pursuing the idea that now it is no longer possible
for any one of the characters to live in isolation from the others he rounds off the story in a
way that appears artistically as well as morally right--the male characters, at the end of his
nouvelle, kill each other with mutual consent so that Sita, the wife, can perform Sati on their
pyre and the three combine into one essence. The rounding off itself may have arrested the
continually unfolding suggestiveness of the story, but it is a rather well knit work and
apparently there are no loose ends showing.
Intizar uses the Buitenen rendition--retaining even its names--and so perhaps the
older version as it appears in one of the several editions of Katha Surt Saagar. Unfortunately,
he doesn't realize the potential of the suggestions that are present in the story as it is told
there. The presence of the brother in that version opens up a number of powerful, disturbing
and difficult areas for exploration. Intizar doesn't seem to be inspired by the possibilities in
this direction. Although, like Mann, he too is interested in the predicament of the
protagonists after the shuffling of heads has taken place, but by curtailing the focus of his
narrative to two characters only, he forfeits the opportunity of creating out of an ancient tale
a new and memorable one. At the very beginning, soon after the two men have come back
to life with their heads transposed, he packs off Gopi, the girl's brother, and never gives a
thought to the struggle he might be going through to come to terms with his new and
unfamiliar trunk. His interest centers on the difficulty that the wife, Madan Sundri, and her
husband, Dhawal, are facing in making love to each other because of a half-articulated fear
of incest that has grown between them from the moment they realize that a mismatching of
heads has occurred. And he finds for them a straightforward solution. "Fool!" says the rishi
they consult to Dhawal, "What is this doubt in your mind? One thing alone you must
remember: You are man, she woman. Go and do your work."33
One feels let down. Is this all man and woman are made for? Is the problem of
identity no more than the getting rid of a guilt about copulation? Does it not matter whether
one copulates with a husband, sister, brother, father, mother or friend as long as the
distinction of sexes remains? How does Gopi fit into all this? Or doesn't he? It is an untidy
tale Intizar makes of it. The unexamined possibilities, the unexplored themes, the simplistic
treatment, the confused argument, all of this is illustrated here.
Not these re-tellings from ancient texts, but it is tales like "Dehlez" and
"Seerrhiyyan" which work best, tales where superstition and popular lore impinge upon
immediate experience without becoming too obvious. In early Intizar Husain there was a
better sense of this, a better appreciation of the limits and possibilities of the short story.
Later, he probably ran out of themes and subjects that had filtered into his bloodstream, or,
perhaps, came to view the everyday as absurd, ordinary and repetitive without an
aesthetically or ideologically acceptable cultural, religious or historical context to give it
sense and meaning. He had to, in a way, reinvent the past and his migration into it to make
his fiction happen. So he busied himself with defining and re-creating the elusive referents
and perspectives, and became so engrossed in this process that the sense of the present was
lost to him. And even then, the meaning that emerged was one of despair and loss and pain.
The only subject that Intizar treats with perfect composure and competence is the
recovery of the experience of his childhood and youth. Then his language sparkles, his
characters come to life and the tale could keep one awake nights. There he is unmatched.
But when he attempts to deal with his immediate environment, he suddenly loses
understanding of character and is cut off from the brilliant resonances of his language. The
themes become thin, derivative, as in the story titled "Intizar", for instance, which is clearly
modeled, without acknowledgement, on Becket's Waiting for Godot. He seeks refuge from
this bleakness in the re-telling of ancient tales and legends, narrating them too as if they
were his own creations, and endeavors to give them a further significance by employing a
stilted, literary, or arcane idiom. The device is not particularly successful and serves to make
prominent what it was devised to conceal. Perhaps he has attempted to write too much too
soon. And, perhaps, he has never truly attempted to understand enough of the environment
to which he migrated to be able to write about it. The problem of discovering one's
antecedents, of defining oneself, is important only if one knows intimately one's immediate
environment also, so that the results of the discovery can enter into a reflexive relationship
with the imperatives of the undead present. More pertinently, to interest us, it requires also
of the writer a familiarity with, or at least an impelling curiosity to find out about, the details
of the mental, spiritual, or physical region where he is attempting to locate himself or his
characters.
In this context, Intizar's remark that he learned the art of story-telling from his own
naani-amman (grandmother) and his suggestion that he does not care too much for Western
masters of fiction, so idolized by his early contemporaries, is both deceptive and revealing.34
To tell a story the way his grandmother did would mean, not simply that he recognizes there
is a child in every man and woman, but that he considers his audience as no more than
children while he plays out the role of the wise old man expounding parables and riddles to
them. That attitude, so evident in a number of his stories, already estranges us from the tale.
Without the treatment and understanding we associate with the learning process, no tale
would satisfy the evolving perceptions of an individual through life. But the lurking desire
to instruct destroys it for us even before the flaws of treatment and understanding become
apparent. Intizar, on the other hand, has not remained entirely innocent of Western masters,
notably, Joyce, Chekov, Becket, Lawrence, Goncharov, and shows their influence in his
early work. It would have been worthwhile if his turning away from them meant a discovery
of his own voice. Unfortunately, it led only to a falling back upon Oriental models of fiction,
the more extended ones at that, like The Thousand Nights and One Night, The Mahabharat,
the Jatakas of Mahatama Buddha, Kathha Surt Saagar, without modifying them to suit his
much shorter stories, or refining out of them, and out of his reading of fiction generally, a
method and form of his own. He finds his way into the region of myth and legend, but does
not reflect upon them enough to develop the language and mode of address that will
resurrect them for us.
Intizar's enterprise, when he leaves the world of his childhood and youth, takes us
into amorphous areas with which he is not fully conversant. He ends up with the usual
platitudes and dilemmas. There is no striking perception, no distinctive placement of his
sensibility anywhere. This may be an accurate reflection of his concern as a writer—the
rootlessness that seems to be the fate of modern man, the striking out into unknown
territory, the stepping beyond known frontiers—but the indeterminacy of the locale, both
spiritual (psychic) and physical, and the vagueness of his relationship to it are not necessary
adjuncts to this mental engagement, and are actually an impediment to the telling of a
compelling tale. More importantly, there is in Intizar no acceptance or affirmation of
rootlessness but an anxiety to recover roots and fix his characters in them so that a sense of
displacement may be avoided. But we detect a disinclination to pursue perceptions through
their various ramifications and their, perhaps, inevitable conclusion or conclusions. It may
be laziness which prevents the writer from realizing himself and causes the amorphousness
and vagueness we find in his later fiction. As in his tales, he opens the seventh door, but
loses heart at the threshold, never venturing beyond it. In the final analysis, the process of
re-telling that he engages in may express no more than a regressive desire of the man-child
to return to the womb.
Notes
1. Intizar Husain, "Doosra Gunah," Shehr-e-Afsoos, 1973, in Qissa Kahanian, Volume Two
of his collected short stories, (Lahore, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1990), p. 380, where the
metaphors are used in a slightly different context but the theme of migration forms an
important part of the background.
2. Intizar Husain, "Ek Bin Likhi Razmia," Galli Koochey, 1952, in Janam Kahanian,
Volume One of his collected short stories, (Lahore, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1987),
pp.158-159. References to Intizar Husain's tales, except when a tale is first quoted from, will
henceforth be mentioned parenthetically in the text, the name of the volume of collected
stories where it occurs appearing after it with the relevant page number or numbers at the
end.
3. Intizar Husain, "Anjanhari ki Gharyya," Kankari, 1955, in Janam Kahanian,
p. 226.
4. Asif Farrukhi, Harf-e-Man-o-Tu, interviews with major contemporary writers (Karachi,
Nafees Academy, 1989), pp. 75-109. Intizar was interviewed on September 25, 1984.
5. Intizar Husain, Din, 1960, in Janam Kahanian, p. 522.
6. Intizar Husain, "Apney Kirdaroon Key Barey Mein," in Janam Kahanian, p. 751.
7. Intizar Husain, "Satwan Dar," Kankari, in Janam Kahanian, p. 338.
8. Intizar Husain, "Sooyyan," Akhri Admi, 1967, in Janam Kahanian, pp. 721-727.
9. Intizar Husain, "Kahani ki Kahani," Kachhuey, 1981, in Qissa Kahanian, p. 399.
10. Intizar Husain, "Raat," Kachhuey, in Qissa Kahanian, p. 129; see also, "Woh jo Dewar
nan Chaat Sakey," Shehr-e-Afsoos, in Qissa Kahanian, pp. 355-362.
11. Intizar Husain, Dastan, 1960, in Janam Kahanian, p. 528.
12. See particularly Intizar Husain's "Second Round," Akhri Admi, in Janam Kahanian, pp.
707-720.
13. Intizar Husain, "Ijtema'aey Tehzib aur Afsana," in Allamatoon ka Zawwal (Lahore,
Sang-e-Meel Publications, Second Edition, 1989), p. 21.
14. Asif Farrukhi, Harf-e-Man-o-Tu, pp. 88-89.
15. Ibid., pp. 87-88.
16. Intizar Husain, "Ayodhya," Galli Koochey, in Janam Kahanian, p. 73.
17. Asif Farrukhi, Harf-e-Man-o-Tu, p. 89.
18. Intizar Husain, "Khwab aur Taqdeer," Kachhuey, in Qissa Kahanian, pp. 137-143.
19. Intizar Husain, "Naye Afsana Nigar key Naam," Kachhuey, in Qissa Kahanian, p. 182;
see also p. 179.
20. Ibid., p. 179.
21. Ibid., p. 183.
22. Intizar Husain, "Kashtee," Kachhuey, in Qissa Kahanian, pp. 164-176.
23. Intizar Husain, "Kahani ki Kahani," Shehr-e-Afsoos, in Qissa Kahanian, p. 403, and
generally, pp. 398-403.
24. On two occasions, at least, Shuja'at Ali's and Mirza Sahib's inner thought process is
revealed to the reader which would not be possible if the story is told from the point of view
of Manzoor Husain. See, "Katta Huwa Dabba," Shehr-e-Afsoos, in Qissa Kahanian:
"Shuja'at Husain pushed his cane stool back a little without any reason..." (Emphasis mine),
p. 205; and "Mirza Sahab wished to press the stem of his hookah between his lips, but his
hand was arrested where it was..." (Emphasis mine), p. 209.
25. Intizar Husain, "Kachhuey," Kachhuey, in Qissa Kahanian, pp. 85-103. The story
paraphrased here occurs on pp. 98-99.
26. Ibid., p. 99.
27. Intizar Husain, "Chulhey ke Aas Pass," prefatorial article in Qissa Kahanian, pp. 14-15.
28. Cf. note 17, supra.
29. Gopi Chand Narang, "Naya Afsana, Allamat, Tamseel aur Kahani ka Jauhar," in
Mehrab, a series of compilations of selected and unpublished writings, (Lahore, Qausain,
1985), pp. 275-319. "Nar, Nari," is discussed in Part IV of the article, pp. 288-295.
30. Information about the original Beital Pacheesi, which was in Sanskrit, is provided in
Mazhar Ali Khan Villa's translation, Beital Pacheesi, Gohar Naushahi, ed., (Lahore, Majlise-Tarraqqi-e-Adab, 1965), in Appendix "Jeem", pp. 192-194, where, identifying the Sanskrit
manuscripts that preserve it, he states that "(t)he original Beital Pacheesi is lost..." and goes
on to mention Shaminder's Barhat Katha (circa. 1050 A.D.) and Som Dev's Katha Surt
Saagar (between 1063 A.D. and 1088 A.D.) as important sources of the tale as we know it.
Other versions and manuscripts are also mentioned. The most pertinent English rendering
for our purpose is J. A. B. Van Buitenen's Tales of Ancient India (New York, Bantam
Books, 1961), where eleven of its twenty-five tales are included.
31. This summary follows the Van Buitenen version quoted above.
32. Thomas Mann, The Transposed Heads, A Legend of India (New York, Alfred K. Knopf,
1941).
33. Intizar Husain, "Nar, Nari," Khemey sey Door, 1985, in Qissa Kahanian, p. 458.
35. Intizar Husain, "Chulhey key Aas Pass," in Qissa Kahanian, pp. 12-13.