 

The Contemporary Urdu Short Story

A Review-Article

T T   O F, edited with an Introduction by

Muhammad Umar Memon, brings together in English translation twelve
contemporary Urdu short stories by a dozen post-Partition writers whose
work has been seminal in the original language on several counts but, as
Memon points out, has “received little or no attention in a Western
language.” The collection is part of the editor’s individual effort, and the
collective effort of the nine translators involved in the project, to combat
at least three distinct yet intersecting facts: that “the Urdu short story
remains largely unknown in the West”; that “few good translations are
available for the enterprising and discerning reader”; and especially that
existing English translations which are “both good and accessible” record
the development of the Urdu short story “only partially.” As Memon
observes in his Introduction, the previous representations of the genre
“concentrate, for the most part, on the works of a few old masters such as
[Sa‘adat Hasan] Manto, [Rajinder Singh] Bedi, Ahmed Ali, Krishan
Chandar, Aziz Ahmad, Ismat Chughtai, and Ahmad Nadim Qasmi, but
seldom venture into the hesitant, complex world of the contemporary
writer” in the language. The present volume is intended “to present the
texture and flavor of the modern Urdu short story, both as a daring
experiment and as a more refined heir to the traditional form” (all
quotations from p. ). Although Memon does not claim to be either
comprehensive or unbiased in his selection of material, The Tale of the
Old Fisherman succeeds remarkably in acquainting the uninformed
outsider with a substantial amount of brilliant Urdu short fiction
produced in the past four decades.
As a matter of fact, this anthology goes much further than Memon


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anticipates in his highly informative and persuasively argued historical

and critical Introduction. Clearly, the book makes the recent Urdu short
story eminently accessible not only to English-speaking audiences in the
West, but also to a large composite group of readers from the Indian
subcontinent who do not know the language at first hand, and have to
rely on translations either into their various mother-tongues or into
English in order to learn about contemporary Urdu writing. At the same
time, and equally significantly, this anthology holds Urdu short fiction up
to the scrutiny of Urdu readers and writers themselves, who can now see
it in its surprisingly revealing and attractive English form, much as
“outsiders” and “foreigners” tend to see it. Translation, after all, serves
not only as a window through which others look at us, but also as a
mirror in which we see ourselves face to face, on the outside and at an
irreducible distance. To look at a familiar Urdu short story in an exciting
new English version is to see it (at least momentarily) in all its freshness,
to perceive its distinctiveness and achievement with greater clarity, and to
experience its memorable effects again from unexpected angles.
The main reason why The Tale of the Old Fisherman succeeds as it
does is its double emphasis on quality. As far as the material itself is
concerned, Memon has exercised his taste and editorial skills admirably:
each of the twelve pieces—eleven short stories and one self-contained
excerpt from a novel—is energetic, innovative in its own context, and
quite interesting. So far as the translations are concerned, each piece is
presented in a highly finished literary form in English: although the
volume brings together the output of nine Pakistani, Indian, and
American translators working individually and in collaboration on twelve
different writers, and faithfulness to the original stories demands a variety
of voices and styles in the English versions, the collection as a whole
maintains a consistently high standard of quality.
To review what The Tale of the Old Fisherman accomplishes as a
whole, it is perhaps best to discuss the stories in some detail in the
chronological sequence in which they were first published and had their
original impact on Urdu readers in Pakistan, India, and elsewhere. Such a
reading strategy complements the arrangement of the stories in the
volume, where they are ordered alphabetically by their authors’ names, as
well as their discussion in Memon’s Introduction, where they are taken
up in various stylistic and thematic groupings so as to define a dialectic of
experimentation and conventionality. In the following account I would
like to reinforce Memon’s historical and critical perspective on the
individual writers and pieces by replaying the tension between
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conservation and innovation, continuity and rupture, along temporal

rather than ideological and aesthetic lines. I would thus like to indicate
how and why, in any given decade of the twentieth century, the modern
Urdu short story constitutes a heterogeneous “discursive space,” in which
multiple authorial styles and stances coexist and interact constantly,
without any one school or movement permanently displacing or erasing
another along a linear historical axis. In addition, I would also like to
supplement Memon’s discussion by broadening out the historical
dynamics of the Urdu short story, so as to include comparisons with
similar or dissimilar situations in other languages of the Indian
subcontinent. A comparative study is likely to deepen our understanding
and appreciation of the singular achievements of the contemporary Urdu
short story.

II

The earliest story in the collection is Intizar Husain’s “The Seventh

Door” (“S≥tv≥ Dar,” ; translated by Javaid Qazi) and it represents, in
several respects, the most “conventional” position in contemporary Urdu
short fiction, in relation to which many writers of the subsequent decades
seem to situate themselves. It is a polished piece of formalist fiction that
focuses on the first person narrator’s childhood experience of loss of
belief, confusion, and change. However, the fairly simple plot has
multiple, complexly interrelated meanings which, on reflection, give the
story a great deal of depth. A mother and son live in a house where once
many pigeons made their home on a cornice. So long as the pigeons
flocked there, the woman’s family prospered, but once they abandoned
the place “misfortune and anxiety wracked our lives and the family
scattered to the winds” (p. ). Now only one female pigeon nests on the
cornice and the little boy accepts his mother’s repeated claim that the bird
embodies a “holy spirit.” But when the boy’s slightly older cousin Munni
visits them, she mocks his credulous acceptance of his mother’s account.
Munni forcefully argues that the pigeon must be a fairy, as in the tale
about King Bahram who unlocked a proscribed seventh door in his
magical palace to find a pool where pigeons dived in and turned into
enchanting fairies. Seduced by this alternative conception, the two
children decide to capture the solitary pigeon and test the myth, but their
clumsy efforts traumatize and drive away the bird. The loss of the pigeon
(and, with it, the loss of one or more “cherished beliefs”) alienates the
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cousins from each other, and leaves the boy struggling with
undecipherable forms of guilt, anguish, longing, and loneliness.
As even this partial summary should indicate, Husain’s story is
overlaid with several symbolic and figurative meanings, and clearly owes
something to James Joyce’s treatment of childhood and maturation in
Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At the same time, it
uses myth and folk material from the subcontinental context, establishing
a multivalent intertextual relationship with the Hindi, Urdu, Persian, and
Arabic narrative traditions. This combination marks an inaugural
moment in the historical and literary trajectory of the new post-Partition
Urdu short story (which Memon identifies as the “postrealist” jadµd
afs≥na). Husain’s broadly modernist and what now seems “conservative”
stance as a story-teller, however, is not a personal failing on his part, as
some of his more virulent critics have made it out to be. In a comparative
subcontinental perspective, Husain’s work often reveals a striking affinity
with that of many important writers of the s and s in other
Indian languages, such as Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati. A
resonant and interesting parallel, for example, occurs in the work of P.S.
Rege in Marathi, whose poetry and fiction (especially the novellas S≥vitrµ
and Avalåkit≥ of roughly the same period) draw on symbolism and
modernism, myth and tradition, craftsmanship and aestheticism in a
comparably distinguished way. In short, Husain’s artistic position in the
s is not unique, either to him or to the situation of Urdu fiction, but
is part of a widespread phenomenon across the subcontinent, which we
have yet to unravel in all its complexity and detail.
The four pieces in the anthology that represent the Urdu fiction of
the early s stand in sharp or extreme contrast to Husain’s
conservative aestheticism of the previous decade. Like other major
subcontinental languages, Urdu went through a phase of concerted
radical experimentation, aesthetic upheaval, and discursive innovation ten
to fifteen years after Partition (its first large-scale reaction to the disasters
and disappointments of “postcolonialism”). In Bengali, the early s
saw the emergence of the Hungry Generation writers; in Marathi, the
formation of a long-lasting “avant garde” (modeled on European
movements) and the first explosion of Dalit writing; in Hindi, the last
instances of G.M. Muktibodh’s drastic experiments in prose and verse;
and in Kannada, the new poetry of G.K. Adiga, the new fiction of U.R.
Ananthamurthy, and the new drama of Girish Karnad. (These
innovations, in turn, are not unlinked to a larger, international upheaval
at almost exactly the same time—the appearance of the Beat Generation
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in the United States, for example, and that of the antipoets and the
magical realists in Latin America and Europe.) In The Tale of the Old
Fisherman this crucial historical moment or phase is represented by the
work of Saleem Asmi, Khalida Asghar, Muhammad Umar Memon, and
Abdullah Hussein, and it turns out to be a “heterogeneous discursive
space” containing experimental as well as technically, socially, and
politically conservative writing.
Of the material from the early s, Saleem Asmi’s “Fire, Ashes and
Water” (“¥g, X≥k, P≥nµ,” ; translated by Faruq Hassan) is highly
experimental in technique and form as well as in its subject matter. The
story is told by three juxtaposed narrators, each with a different point of
view; they are differentiated stylistically and typographically from each
other in the text, but nevertheless yoked together quite violently into a
montage of interior monologues. The characters include three adults
(mother, father, ≥yah), and four children (Bajiya or Birjees, the elder sis-
ter; Sibbi, the elder brother; Salloo, their younger brother and one of the
narrators; and Saffo, a neighbor’s daughter and Birjees’s friend). The story
is a masterful, deeply disturbing narrative about aggression, exploitation,
perversity, victimization, injury, deviance, and sexual incomprehension in
a well-to-do Muslim household, told from the shifting double perspective
of children in the act of observation and adults remembering their child-
hood experiences. By suggestion, if not in explicit terms, the story deals in
terrifying ways with incest, cruelty, trauma, and social and sexual taboos,
moving from father-daughter and mother-son relationships to sister-
brother and son-surrogate-mother conflicts, mixing death and violence
with desire and power. Clearly, the children’s world Asmi creates is the
antithesis of Intizar Husain’s world of “childhood enchantment” in “The
Seventh Door.” As Memon remarks, Asmi’s piece is an unusually success-
ful extreme appropriation of the stream-of-consciousness technique from
the Anglo-Irish modernists (the other notable instance being Qurratulain
Hyder’s novel River of Fire (¥g k≥ Dary≥, , which also drew on
Virginia Woolf and James Joyce). In fact, Asmi’s piece is exceptional even
in a much wider Indian context: it is a tour de force compared to, say, B.S.
Mardhekar’s attempts at stream-of-consciousness in his fiction of the
s in Marathi, or Krishna Baldev Vaid’s similarly failed attempts in
Hindi in the s.
Abdullah Hussein’s “The Tale of the Old Fisherman” (“Jallµy≥nw≥la
B≥÷,” from Ud≥s Nasl®, ca. ; translated by C.M. Naim and Gordon
Roadarmel), the title piece of the volume and not a short story proper but
a self-contained excerpt from a full-length novel (the only excerpt in the
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book), is an equally complex and disturbing narrative but far less

experimental than Asmi’s story. In style and technique it seems
“conservative” and closer in quality and effect to Intizar Husain’s
story—the piece blends the literary and the folk, the realistic and the
fantastic, the literal and the symbolic, without surface pyrotechnics. But
at the same time it is an extremely daring narrative, for it retells the story
of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of  in the form of an old, illiterate,
poor fisherman’s rambling eyewitness account, given to a group of later
visitors to the garden. Hussein captures the monumentality and tragedy
of the event with impeccable precision, imaginatively accommodating fact
to fiction with an intricacy that makes Salman Rushdie’s treatment of the
same event in Midnight’s Children, for example, seem disconcertingly
tame and superficial.
In contrast, Khalida Asghar’s “The Wagon” (“Sav≥rµ,” ca. ;
translated by Memon), considered a classic modern short story in Urdu,
is unmistakably experimental and “avant garde” in its narrative strategy
and overall impact. It is an abstractly psychological story that has a
powerfully hallucinatory effect on the reader even in translation. It
unfolds as a condensed allegory of modernization and of urban experience
in the nuclear age, depicting a city on the Indian subcontinent as an
incomprehensible, uncontrollable, unpredictable, ominous, and
ultimately primordial environment whose citizens become victims of
processes which they cannot detect or name. The story, written more
than twenty years before the Bhopal Union Carbide accident in  and
the Chernobyl reactor meltdown in , imagines with terrifying
suggestiveness the effects of a large-scale industrial or technological
catastrophe on an ordinary individual’s life and on the life of an entire
city or region. It is a perfectly controlled verbal and imaginative
experiment in fantasmagoric story-telling that has only increased in its
“prophetic powers” with the passage of time. It is, again, a story that
constitutes a narrative pole opposite to that of Intizar Husain’s work in
the previous decade, as well as Abdullah Hussein’s prose produced at
almost exactly the same time as Asghar’s.
Muhammad Umar Memon’s “The Dark Alley” (“T≥rµk Galµ,” ;
translated by Faruq Hassan) perhaps occupies the middle ground between
these two apparent extremes. It is a fascinating reworking of some of the
themes of Munshi Premchand’s most famous Hindi-Urdu short story,
“The Shroud” (“Kafan,” ca. ), as well as a tenacious exploration of the
whole nexus of cultural issues that arise in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Indian subcontinental situations with conflicts between religious
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belief and secularism, tradition and modernity, Muslim or Hindu

communitarian identity and cosmopolitan Western education, humane
values and empty ritual, immediate feeling and mediating dogma. It is a
sustained psychological, social, and broadly cultural probing into the
nature of death and blasphemy, religious institutions and the business of
living, and rites of passage and the experience of passage itself. “The Dark
Alley” strikingly dramatizes the situation of secular modernity in a
conservative small-town Muslim social milieu with courage, insight, and
sensitivity, often unraveling problems that have become publicly
dangerous once more in the three decades since the story was written.

III

The foregoing discussion suggests that during the s and s Urdu
fiction writers came to occupy a variety of positions with regard to
material, strategy, technique, and narrative construction. As Memon
argues in his Introduction, each of these positions went beyond the
insipid, mechanical “social realism” of the earlier Progressive writers. In
my historicist reading of The Tale of the Old Fisherman, the dialectic of
innovation and conventionality entered a new cycle around , one that
appears to have come full circle in multiple loops towards the end of the
s. Some of the repetitions, variations, and radical alternations
involved in this process become visible when we turn to the more recent
material in the anthology.
Two stories first published around  once more define at its
maximum the divergence between the “experimental” and “conventional”
modes of story-telling. Of the pair, Enver Sajjad’s “Scorpion, Cave,
Pattern” (“Bi±±^∑, ı≥r, Naq¶,” ; translated by Frances W. Pritchett) is
the radically innovative one in narrative strategy and authorial stance: it
takes several pages out of an Alain Robbe-Grillet nouvelle roman in
French, and transposes them with great freshness, verve, and imaginative
complexity on the palimpsest of contemporary Urdu. At the other end,
Iqbal Majeed’s “Two Men, Slightly Wet” (“Då B^µg® H∑’® Låg,” ca. ;
translated by C.M. Naim) is a relatively conventional story—again, at
least at first glance—about an accidental encounter between two strangers
seeking shelter from unexpected rain on an ordinary city afternoon. After
much resistance and discomfort on the protagonist’s part, the two men
strike up an acquaintance that becomes the occasion for the protagonist’s
self-definition and self-discovery. What makes the story subtle and
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unusual is its quiet but suggestive interweaving of the themes of

strangeness, alienation, suspicion, openness, friendship, mystery, and
understanding, and generally its play on the knowledge and ignorance of
social types, varieties of experience, and multiplicity of perspectives that
marks any encounter between “the self” and its “Other.”
The sharp qualitative and affective differences between Sajjad and
Majeed’s stories are substantially modified by Masud Ashar’s “Of
Coconuts and Chilled Beer Bottles” ( “∆≥b aur Bµ’r kµ º^an≈µ Båtal,” ;
translated by Memon). In my judgment this piece, along with Saleem
Asmi’s “Fire, Ashes and Water” from a decade earlier, is technically and
culturally the most complex and fascinating story in the collection. Ashar
uses Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a palimpsest to narrate and
dramatize a group of West Pakistani men’s encounter with the landscape
and life of East Pakistan (or Bangladesh). Ashar’s story has a fantas-
magoric structure and quality which, in retrospect now, would classify
easily as a very significant experiment in magic realism well before the
genre became commonplace and fashionable in the international literary
world. The men from Pakistan—careless, irreverent, inebriated, and even
callous, basically out to have some boisterous fun as close friends—under-
take a riverboat journey into the Sundarbans area with their Bengali-
Muslim host. In the course of the journey they discover not only their
own and their eastern counterparts’ insensitivities and peculiarities, but
also the unnerving complexity of cross-cultural interaction within what
was supposed to be the “same” (but geographically fragmented) national
community called “Pakistan,” as well as the insurmountable, surreal,
nightmarish hyperreality of social differences and cultural incomprehen-
sions. Ashar’s admirable accomplishment lies in his ability to articulate
and bring alive the most intangible “themes” in his narrative, and to
compress them effortlessly into a narrative that has no comparable paral-
lels for density, weight, and range in, say, Hindi or Indian-English fiction
that I can think of (including such complex works as G.V. Desani’s All
About H. Hatterr and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses).
Toward the end of the s, experimentation appears to take a
different turn in Muhammad Salimur Rahman’s “Siberia” (“S≥’b®riy≥,”
; translated by Wayne Husted, Memon, and Ursula LeGuin), which
is an intricately worked out political allegory of life in bureaucratic and
middle-class Pakistan under General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. Here Rahman
employs the method of constructing a systematic parallel between a
relatively well-known narrative situation (say, Solzhenitsyn’s accounts,
from Cancer Ward to The Gulag Archipelago) and a little-known one
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(Pakistan in the late s, or more generally under postcolonial military

dictatorships), paying close attention to the details of daily life and to the
fine-tuned evocation of circumstance and atmosphere. For readers
discovering Rahman’s story at a considerable distance from its location,
his most startling invention is the introduction of heavy snow on a
subtropical landscape, which transforms the whole setting into a bitterly
cold, inhuman gulag of the imagination.
The general heterogeneity constituted by the stories of the s in
this collection is, in turn, altered significantly by the material from the
next decade. In some respects Hasan Manzar’s “The Poor Dears”
( “B®±≥r®,” ; translated by Memon) is, for me, one of the most unex-
pected and rewarding pieces in the anthology, because it suddenly en-
larges the thematic scope of the fiction represented here. It is the first-
person narrative of a Muslim immigrant from the Indian subcontinent to
England, who has an attractive English girlfriend, a house, and an endear-
ing housekeeper in London. The story unfolds around his visit (after
many years), not only to India and Pakistan but also, in the same imagi-
native stretch, to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Thailand. In the course of his
complicated and unusual journey, the protagonist experiences discovery
and re-discovery, alienation and difference, empathy and
engagement—from the Angkor Wat monument and Sri Lankan Buddhist
maª^s to the cathedral dedicated to St. Francis Xavier and a
“congregation” performing a Meera b^ajan in Pakistan. It is a sensitive,
savvy, “synthesizing” account of the kind of intellectual and emotional
journey which the new postcolonial immigrants in the West constantly
undertake, but which few manage to write about with so much skill in
the other Indian languages. I find Manzar’s fiction far “truer” and more
“honest” than, say, some of Bharati Mukherjee’s clever fantasies about
subcontinental immigrants in The Middleman and Other Stories and
Jasmine, and more nuanced, sympathetic, and agreeable than some of
Rushdie’s fabulations in The Satanic Verses. Mainly because of its casually
articulated sanity, Manzar’s story may well carry more weight than the
dazzling and ambitious work of some of his famous contemporaries in
Indian-English fiction.
While Manzar’s story in the final analysis innovates on theme as well
as form to produce a geographically wide-ranging narrative that covers
half the globe, Zamiruddin Ahmad’s “Purvai—The Easterly Wind”
( “Purv≥’µ,” ; translated by Memon) accomplishes much the same
within the very narrow circle of domestic life in north India. It is a
marvelously achieved piece of social and psychological realism, which
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focuses not only on the drama of the various characters’ situations but
also, more rivetingly, on the effect of those exchanges on their minds.
There are surprising parallels between “Purvai” and Joyce’s “The Dead,”
which remain pleasurable because of the differences in setting, situation,
and character which Ahmad plays with throughout his narrative. In this
story he gives us an average more-or-less middle-class Muslim home in
post-Partition India, an urban nuclear family (the couple in their early
thirties, their only son not quite a teenager yet), the burden of routine
household chores and family responsibilities which is carried mostly by
the woman, and especially her frame of mind as a housewife held in
tightly by the net of love, sexuality, and desire within a monogamous
marriage. Her accidental non-encounter with an “old flame” in the
town’s main street (he is now a distinguished public figure in Pakistan, on
a rare visit to north India) arouses her deeply and inexplicably. But her
arousal and the nonfulfilment of desire are not causes of
unhappiness—instead, they lead to a new subliminal self-recognition on
the part of the woman, her unaware husband, and of course the reader. It
seems to me that the story effectively displaces the familiar patrilineal,
polygamous vision of the world in order to explore female sexuality
within the possibilities of a matrilineal, polyandrous alternative vision in a
bold and highly nuanced way. With Ahmad’s story we move back
towards the technically “conventional” but thematically innovative
position we encountered much earlier in the work of the s and s,
enacting a historical return without repetition.
In one final contrast, Surender Parkash’s “Wood Chopped in the
Jungle” (“Jagal s® K≥ªµ H∑’µ Lak∞iy≥,” ca. ; translated by Sagaree S.
Korom) is another instance of rejuvenated high experimentalism in
contemporary Urdu, although now the points of intertextual reference
have changed significantly. If for Asmi around  the texts and
techniques of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were a source of overflow,
and for Enver Sajjad around  those of Alain Robbe-Grillet were vital
points of departure, then for Parkash around  and later the sparks of
ignition may have been in Latin American magic realism, especially Jorge
Luis Borges’s Labyrinths and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels and short
stories. Parkash’s difficult, obscure story about a crucified male reminds
me of both Borges’ and Garcia Marquez’s “mythmaking” narratives,
particularly the latter’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,”
which is itself reminiscent of modernist myths of the sacrificed fisher-king
and the hanged god in The Golden Bough and The Waste Land. What is
particularly interesting about Parkash’s story in this context is that it has a
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strong strategic and affective affinity with Khalida Asghar’s “The

Wagon,” written some twenty-five years earlier. What is pertinent
historically in a comparative Indian context is that both Asghar and
Parkash reveal strong similarities with “experimental” and “avant garde”
writers in other Indian languages who, during the same period (from the
late s to the late s), have cultivated almost identical fictional
terrains in terms of technique, style, theme, and form. The best parallels I
can offer are, of course, Doodhnath Singh’s “Chorus” () in Hindi
and Vilas Sarang’s “Rabbit” () in Marathi, which can be analyzed
closely on a continuum with Asghar and Parkash’s fictions. Like Asghar
and Parkash, Singh and Sarang have helped give the “experimentalism” of
modernity a new edge in contemporary South Asia.

IV

In conclusion, as I suggested earlier, The Tale of the Old Fisherman

brings together a dozen remarkable post-Partition Urdu short stories in
English versions of a high quality. The anthology provides an outsider or
an uninitiated reader (like me) with a substantial quantity and range of
material in its selection of stories, as well as a strong critical and historical
orientation towards modern Urdu fiction in its Introduction. The book
as a whole succeeds in achieving its stated objectives, and goes beyond
them to stimulate its various kinds of potential readers into rethinking a
number of vital issues raised by the modern literatures of the Indian
subcontinent. Perhaps most significantly, it opens up for writers and
critics in other Indian languages both a new area of literary experience,
and a new domain of comparative studies, in which, say, Urdu, Hindi,
Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, and Indian English literatures can be read
and discussed critically, from now onwards, in each other’s liberating
contexts.