2020. 3. 2. 14:40ㆍ카테고리 없음
This review was originally published on February 21, 2018 and is being republished today as a tribute to Muhammad Umar Memon, who passed away in Lahore on June 4, 2018.Everything that is restricted to us as children, whether by our own abilities or by an external force, becomes an object of fascination. This is what happened to me with Urdu literature. Till today, the dwindling weeks of summer vacations in my grandparent’s house are etched in my memory. And with it, the frustration at my own deplorable Urdu reading skills, which ensured I could read a page if I concentrated hard, but never use to fluidly read books one after the other.My grandfather was a professor of History, deeply entrenched in his university life. My grandmother was a more nuanced personality. She was a devoted mother and an introverted housewife by day.
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But she had been the reformer in her family, fighting for her own education, taking a stance against the burqa and ensuring her daughters were raised exactly as her sons.It was only as an adult that I found out that she had also been a secret radio presenter, and a prolific Urdu writer and poet in her own right. Little of what she wrote saw the light of day, except for a few pamphlets circulated among relatives. However, their house was filled with papers, books and more significantly, Urdu books, which even while lying all around, were never truly within my grasp.It was here that I first learnt the names of Urdu writers such Qurratulain Hyder, Manto and Ismat Chughtai among many others. As I grew older, I tried to find English translations of many of their Urdu writings. Barring a few, I mostly failed. With time, English literature became my first obsessive love, and with age, I had torrid affairs with other academic disciplines. Somewhere my childhood infatuation with Urdu literature was lost, obscured by my own inability and the lack of translations available.
Muhammad Umar MemonThe Greatest Urdu Stories Ever ToldAleph Book Company, 2017A few weeks ago, I came across The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told, selected and translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, with the names of authors familiar to me, but whose writings were still unknown. The 25 stories cover a range of themes concentrated both on the self and the world, including sexuality, identity, religion, nationalism and Partition. Some of them follow the realist tradition while others are unique, with elements of the supernatural and shifting narratives.The compilation begins with an almost hallucinogenic story by Naiyer Masud, in which a young man tries to understand the strange realms of desire and fear, found in crumbling buildings and in mysterious women. Hyder’s Beyond the Fog probes into the human need to belong and of discovering the realities of belonging.
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Premchand’s The Shroud is a sardonic commentary into the discrimination faced by the oppressed, even in their death. Sajid Rashid’s The Fable of the Severed Head is an eerie tale about the delusions of a higher purpose, and how well-meaning individuals are radicalised.The stories in this volume are not limited to male writers or perspectives. They amplify the voices of women and highlight issues pertaining to their experiences. Of Fists and Rubs by Chughtai examines the terrain of illegal abortions. The story unravels softly to a point, making the reader wonder where it is heading.
Suddenly the descriptions of an act lash out. They are as repugnant as the gleeful apathy and cruelty of the woman narrating them.In Ghulam Abbas’s Aanandi, a Municipal Council decides to expel the Zanaan- e bazaari, the prostitutes from the city, and create a new settlement for them because their presence is “an unsightly and intolerable stain on the skirt of humanity, nobility, and culture.” By the end, this new settlement transforms into a thriving city, Aanandi (City of Bliss). The most “beautiful, most vital, most commercially crucial point in the city is the very same market place where the Z anaan-e bazaari live”. The Municipal Council of this respectable city, mulls over the stain of prostitution. Abbas pushes his readers to introspect on the position of women in a society that uses and then dictates the terms of their existence.
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Muhammad Umar Memon. Credit: TwitterZakia Mashhadi’s The Saga of Jaanki Raman Pandey finds its Hindu protagonist, despite being a married father of two, convert to Islam and marry a Muslim divorcee Raushan Ara, in the name of love. It raises deep points on patriarchy, religion and conversions.