Abstract
Askari wrote only 11 stories, over a period of seven-and-a-half years, 1939-1947, each of them charged with his concern to demonstrate the significance of form over experience. His first collection, Jazirey (Islands, 1943), contains eight of the stories and an “Afterword” that enunciates his theory of fiction and constitutes a framework for understanding his fiction and critical view. Many of his stories are about Anglo-Indians, an atypical subject, especially for an Urdu writer.1 Even more startling are his first stories, written while he was still an undergraduate, about homoerotic impulses and the experience of loneliness. His dabbling with homoeroticism as a subject in short fiction could be an expression of his immediate affective state of mind or an astute experiment with a genre that lent itself so easily to new, risky themes. These questions will be the focus of the ensuing chapter.
Literature is universal because of its beneficence; but its roots/origins are national-cultural and inherent [in one’s ethos]. For instance, mangoes can be eaten with enjoyment anywhere in the world, but they grow only in India. The literature of any culture is worthwhile because it presents that element, the sensibility and ambiance special to it and which cannot be presented by any other community/culture in the world. And this distinctive sensibility is attained through immersing one’s spirit by living in that culture. If we want to create a niche for ourselves in world literature, it will be expected of us to provide something that only an Indian ethos can produce.
—Muhammad Hasan Askari in “Afterword” to Jazirey
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Notes
According to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, one of the reasons for the atypical development of fiction writing is the emphasis that the Indo-Muslim culture gives to poetry. If you ask an educated reader to name some of Urdu’s best writers, they will almost always name poets: Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Faiz, and so on. Rarely will anyone mention fiction writers. See Faruqi#x2019;s, Afsaney ki Himayat Men [In Support of the Short Story] (Delhi: Maktaba Jamia, 1982), 15.
See Mumtaz Shirin, “Urdu Afsaney par Maghribi Afsaney ka Asar” [Impact of the Western Short Story on Urdu], in Urdu Afsana Rivayat aur Masa’il, ed. Gopichand Narang (New Delhi: Educational Publishing House, 1981).
Muhammad Hasan Askari, ed., “Preface,” in Meri Behtarin Nazm (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1942), 2–3.
See Farooqi, “Introduction,” xxvii. Also see, Sanjay Seth, “Governmentality, Pedagogy and Identity, the Problem of the ‘Backward Muslim’ in Colonial India,” in Beyond Representation, Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity, ed. Crispin Bates (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).
See Muhammad Hasan Askari, “Afterword,” in Askarinama, Afsaney, Mazamin (Lahaur: Sang-e Mil Pablikeshanz, 1998), 159–74.
For a fresh look on the impact of Western education in India see Sanjay Seth, Subject lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Western education in India was characterized by instrumentalism where education was seen only as a means to secure government employment and material success. The engineered splitting of Urdu into Hindi and Urdu by making official the separate scripts and constructing/promoting distinct, albeit artificial (especially for Hindi), prose styles was a part of the colonial government’s intent to promote sociopolitical tension between Hindus and Muslims. Even though Urdu replaced Persian as the language of administration in 1836, for the sake of convenience of shared script, the new Hindi in the Devanagari script was promoted as a language by the policy of the British government. Urdu language was maligned for having a script that encouraged “ambiguity” and “deceit”; its literature was dubbed as “effete,” its literary style “florid” and “artificial.” Nevertheless, Urdu, because of its stronger literary tradition, continued to have an edge over the new Hindi in literary production for several decades.
Abbas Rizvi, “Muhammad Hasan Askari ke Afsaney: Ek Mutalia,” in the biannual Urdu journal Mukalima 5 (November 1999—May 2000), 519. “Askari sahib nau giriftaran-e shabab ki jinsi be rah ravi aur us se mutaliq digar juz’iyat se zyadah ashna nahin hain aur Firaq sahib ki rahnuma’i ke bavajud in mu‘amilat ki gahrayi se taqriban na vaqif hain.”
Geeta Patel, “Homely Housewives Run Amok: Lesbians in Marital Fixes,” Journal of Public Culture (2004), 144.
Usually, in Indo-Muslim societies, everyone successfully avoids public recognition of deviations from normative standards of behavior, sexual or other. The will not to know insulates the overarching social system from direct challenge. Even frequent and recurrent homosexual behavior does not matter in such societies as long as a man continues his family line and does not bring dishonor to the family. See Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s Islamic Homosexualities, Culture, History and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997). The book’s cross-cultural focus is refreshing.
Important monographs include: Helmut Bonheim’s The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982),
Valerie Shaw’s The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (London: Longman, 1983),
and W. H. New’s Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), which provides a much needed postcolonial perspective on the genre’s development.
Clare Hanson’s collection of essays, Re-Reading the Short Story (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), adds new perspectives to the debate. During the 1990s, Charles May published several books on the genre, in particular, The New Short Story Theories (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994). More recent is the excellent collection of articles,
The Art of Brevity, Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, ed. Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei (Columbia: South Carolina Press, 2004). In Urdu, an early, important collection of articles
Urdu Afsana, Rivayat aur Masa’il, ed. Gopichand Narang (New Delhi: Educational Publishing House, 1981), showcases the tradition and problems of the genre.
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s Afsaney ki Himayat Men (first published in 1982) is the only critical, theoretical book-length study in Urdu on the subject.
Susan S. Lanser, “Queering Narratology,” in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Michael Hoffman and Patrick Murphy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 389.
See Askari’s essay, “Krishan Chander,” first published in 1953 in the Urdu journal Saiyyarah, reprinted in Sheema Majid, ed., Maqalat-e Muhammad Hasan Askari (Lahaur: Ilm-o Irfan Pablishars, 2001). It was at the behest of Salim Ahmad who was Saiyyarah’s editor that Askari wrote a series of delightful sketches of the following writers—Manto, Krishan Chander, Ismat Chughtai, Miraji, and Ghulam Abbas. Askari was so evasive and reticent about himself, these essays capture some rare moments of his personality as well as those whom he describes.
I have drawn on the entries symbolism and aestheticism from Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
Muhammad Hasan Askari, Majmu‘a Muhammad Hasan Askari (Lahaur: Sang-e Mil Pablikeshanz, 2000), 68.
Mumtaz Shirin, ed., Zulmat-e Nimroz (Karachi: Nafis Akademi, 1990). The volume contains short fictions that the editor thought to be the classics of the genre. It also has a few nonfiction pieces, a play, and critical essays by Shirin, Askari, and Intizar Husain. The reappearance of Askari’s essay “Fasadat aur Hamara Adab” seems to have stirred some old controversies.
See Asif Farrukhi’s introductory piece, “Lahu ke Suragh,” in Zulmat-e Nimroz, ed. Mumtaz Shirin (Karachi: Nafis Akademi, 1990), 20.
Ajmal Kamal, “Naqqad ki Khuda’i: Askari aur Fasadat kaAdab,” Shabkhoon (February 1999), 34. “Yeh mazmun is liye kilidi ahmiyat rakhta hai ke ye nai riyasat mein Stalinism ki rah mein Askari ka pahla qadam hai aur pahle qadam ki larkharahat bhi is mazmun se ayan hai.”
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© 2012 Mehr Afshan Farooqi
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Farooqi, M.A. (2012). Fiction, Theory of Fiction, and the Critical View. In: Urdu Literary Culture. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026927_4
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