Intezar Hussain

Recently, a very learned friend called me up and said yaar Intezaar, you have copied this new story verbatim from Thomas Mann. I said, my dear, you have read every tiny morsel of western literature, wish you had read something from India too.

Then I explained that when I had read this story in Bangalore, where Girish Karnad was present, they said oh this is like Hayavadan. It turned out that Thomas Mann, myself and Karnad were all thieves because we had all stolen the idea from Betal Pacheesi.”


— Intezaar Husain, at a seminar in Delhi last week.

I first discovered Intezaar Husain quite by chance, almost in the same manner that he discovered the fecund treasure troves of Ancient India.

It was a novel called Basti hidden inconspicuously in my father’s shelves. As I read through its poignant world of migration, memory, nostalgia and loss I underwent an unconscious transformation in my sensibility, one that can best be called Intezaarian.

One of the best novels in modern Urdu and arguably the finest on Partition, Basti derives its uniqueness from its combination of many different narrative traditions that include Jataka tales, Persian family genealogies and the modern existential strand.

The emotive appeal of the loss of homeland, love and roots is played out against the eerie political atmosphere of sixties Lahore and the transformation of Pakistan is measured by the closing of nightclubs and the disappearance of the wandering poet Nasir Kazmi.

When he is asked how he began writing, Hussain’s stock reply is that he learnt it from his Nani Amma.

Via her, he receded further back, into the 1400 years past of Islamic history, thence to Ancient India, to Panchtantra, Betal Pacheesi, Kathasaritsagar and eventually, the source from which all stories flow, the Jataka tales. His stories came to reflect the world of Markandaya Rishi as well as medieval Tota Maina ki Daastaanein.

Our critics, he says, told us a lot about Kalidas and Tulsidas and Meerabai but could never quite accord the status of literature to this enormously rich fictional tradition.

The loss has entirely been ours. Since then the Budhha, who remembers his past lives, and the contemporary Indian, who has lost his memory, have been the twin poles of his fictional journey.

From the very beginning Husain’s decision to employ Hindi/Hindu/Budhhist words, themes and concepts into his work raised the hackles of a vocal and influential section of Pakistani society. His only response is, “See, they think I am a Kafir whereas I think they are a Kafir.”

I asked him, when I met him recently, why he had migrated. On a mere whim he said, following his preceptor and guide Mohammed Hasan Askari who had sent a radio message asking him to come to Lahore. Neither did anyone else in his circle migrate out of some idealistic mission. And does he regret it?

This he says, with typically astute clarity, is a part of a wider question, whether it was right for Pakistan to be formed. Both are now more than 50 years old and now belong to the Historians’ jurisdiction.

And India and Pakistan? Well, they are like those mythical characters Gog and Megog, condemned to licking a wall away all night, which springs back whole in the morning. They will make peace only to fight again. But then he is a pessimistic man.

http://web.mid-day.com/entertainment/news/2004/september/91817.htm