THE WORLDS WE LOST

EDITOR’S NOTE

There is a delectable change in the air, a shortening of daylight, a mist waiting to cloak us in the evening, a cooling of the blood, an anticipation of new birds in the horizon.  AamerHossain joins us in our quiet thoughts, inviting us to “move fluidly across invisible frontiers”.Farah Ghuznavi helps us step back and release our creations to the powers that be. And, we are delightfully reminded by Tagore of our intimate equation with Mother Nature, as translated by DrFakrulAlam. Breathe in, read up, enjoy the romance of this moment.

MUNIZE MANZUR

Every few years, a book comes my way by a writer whose work has been forgotten, mislaid or undervalued. My own great-uncle, Rafi Ajmeri, was a short story writer of great promise whose early death and peripheral location erased his name from the literary map.  I was having a conversation about literature, language and location with my poet-friend from Dhaka, SadafSaaz, when she mentioned that her grandmother, too, had been a writer of short fiction who died young. In Bengali, I assumed, but no: RahatAra Begum wrote in Urdu; what's more, she produced several volumes of stories before her very early date, in her late thirties, in Chittagong shortly after independence.

RahatAra Begum was in fact mentioned by ShaistaIkramullah, the pioneering scholar of modern Urdu fiction, in her PhD dissertation which was later published in book form. (Both were Calcutta-born writers of Urdu prose, and I was later to find they were related.) But unlike Ikramullah's work, which has been republished, Rahat's seemed to have disappeared. Did she, I wondered, write about the lives of the Calcutta middle class, as Ikramullah occasionally did? Was the milieu she wrote about Hindu, Muslim or mixed?   

Then Sadaf told me she had located an edition of her grandmother's stories, reprinted in India in the 90s. The poet Ahsan Akbar carried it to London for me, and for several days I read, riveted.  Apart from a beautifully lucid prose style and a flowing narrative technique, the stories were also distinguished from the Urdu fiction of the time by their sense of location and by their refusal to conform to the prevalent Progressive fashions of the decade. They range from a near fairy-tale in which the milieu of a Prince's court could, at first glance, belong to the Arabian Nights, but on closer reading is set in a slightly romanticised version of a subcontinentalNawab's palace, to a story about a marriage of convenience that takes place entirely in the North of England and is narrated by an Englishwoman called Queenie. While the first story is steeped in Sufi fable, the second seems to be inspired by Western models.

Inevitably, Rahat is concerned with the lives of women, particularly (but not exclusively) young married women looking for an identity within the restricted choices available to them.  And in her exploration of women's lives, she turns to the society she probably knew best: that of Calcutta. Her gaze is detached but compassionate; Hindu and Muslim middle-class society is described with equal attention to detail. (By writing about Bengali Hindus in Urdu, she is performing an act of cultural translation, and bringing to the language a world with which it is not familiar; but there is no spurious exoticism or desire to explain in her stories, which bring alive middle-class Calcutta mores with the lightest of touches.)

But this selection is limited to only a few stories that the author wrote. There are many more to be found and reprinted. Was she lost to our generation because no country could ultimately claim her as its own? She spend much of her life in pre-partition West Bengal, chose to write in Urdu because she loved it, but also remained close to the Bengali language and its traditions (she translated Tagore). She is buried in what is now Bangladesh, but her books are most likely to be found in Pakistani libraries because several of them were published in Lahore. Ironically, the fact that her writings belongs in different ways – geographical, cultural and linguistic - to three countries, and bypasses the politics of nationalism, has alienated us all from her legacy.  Where once we translated works between our languages - my mother and her sisters devoured Bengali novels in Urdu versions - we now depend entirely on English as the link language and losing the nuances and subtleties that are far more effectively transferred from one South Asian language to another. It is, perhaps, time to return to the effortless vernacular multilingualism of our ancestors and the rich traces of a shared heritage which allowed us to move fluidly across invisible frontiers.