Three disparate pieces of fiction in Punjabi, Spanish (translation), and Urdu, with an avowedly non-linguistic but kindred affinity, have been chosen as the subject of this review
‘The Prologue with Lazaro’s extensive protest against injustice is addressed to a high-level cleric, and five of the eight masters in the novel serve the church. Lazarillo attacked the appearance of the church and its hypocrisy though not its essential beliefs, a balance not often present in following picaresque novels.’
Chalta Purza (Lazarillo de Tormes)
Author: Anonymous
Translator: Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman
Publisher: Ilqa Publications, 12-K, Main Boulevard, Gulberg-2, Lahore
Pages: 150; Price: Rs.150/-
Shaheed (KahaniaN Tay Novelette)
Author: Nain Sukh
Publisher: Readings, 12-K, Main Boulevard, Gulberg 2, Lahore
Pages: 216; Price: Rs.300/-
Biscope Din
Author: Anwer Zahidi
Publisher: Fiction House, Lahore, Haiderabad, Karachi
Pages: 144; Price: Rs.200/-
Fiction is a popular genre of literature. Admittedly writers of fiction too like their peers in other domains of literary writing, express their own individual awareness to life through their work and apply their special technique to those things that seem vital to them, and in the process, they tend to produce a social document which encapsulates their ideas, feelings, emotions and judgments of human beings they describe including themselves. Thus they exhibit for future readers what they regarded as of vital importance in their own day.
Viewed in this context, three disparate pieces of fiction in Punjabi, Spanish (translation), and Urdu, with an avowedly non-linguistic but kindred affinity, have been chosen as the subject of this review.
Chalta Purza (Lazarillo de Tormes)
A specimen of maiden picaresque fiction, Lazarillo de Tormes, is a 16th century Spanish novel of an anonymous origin. Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman – himself a versatile creative writer, critic, and translator – has rendered it into Urdu under the banner of Readings Classic.
The epilogue to the book spells out its raison d’etre proclaiming that a picaresque novel seeks to portray the life of a youthful but lowly rogue or knave involved in a rigmarole of misadventures, anecdotal in character, interweaving the loose ends of a tenuous plot. The protagonist here happens to be a commoner, ever ready to undertake risks of sorts besides facing natural calamities and misfortunes with unmitigated temerity. He does not have any lofty ambitions either and his primary interest lies in self-glorification.
The picaresque novel projected a knave who would employ trickery and subterfuge with impunity in order to realize his ignominious ends. The hero of this novel is a youthful trickster engaged, as it were, in a battle of self-preservation by fraud and frolic. The work typifies these characteristics of a novel of this kind: idolizing of a rascal; false autobiography structure; determinism as the structure of such a novel is always ‘open’ with little possibility of evolution for the story; moralizing and pessimistic ideology; satiric intention and itinerant structure; and realism and naturalism.
‘The Prologue with Lazaro’s extensive protest against injustice is addressed to a high-level cleric, and five of the eight masters in the novel serve the church. Lazarillo attacked the appearance of the church and its hypocrisy though not its essential beliefs, a balance not often present in following picaresque novels.’ The translator has rendered his job pretty adroitly by retaining the intrinsic verve of the original text in the translated version with a marked idiomatic elan.
‘The themes of Nain Sukh’s fiction are varied but life specific. Social, political, cultural, and moral issues in their variegated enormity do crop up in fiction when we assume that literature aims to clarify and develop experience whereto it causes something to happen in the mind of the reader as well as the writer besides its secondary function which is to afford delight.’
Shaheed
Nain Sukh is advocate Khalid Mehmood’s pen name. He is a noted Punjabi poet and fiction writer with books like TheekriyaN, Uthal Pathal (short stories), Madho Lal Huaain (Lahore di Vel) (novel), and Kikar tay Angoor (poetry) to his credit. His latest is Shaheed (KahaniaN tay Novelette). He also earned a Canadian literary prize viz., the Dhahan Prize for Punjabi Literature 2015, for his novel Madho Lal Hussain., which is a non-chronological, impressionistic depiction of the historical, cultural, social and literary life of Lahore from the 16th century to 21st century, thus weaving 400 years of history into ‘a creative and memorable tapestry’
Nain Sukh’s Shaheed contains four short stories titled Shaheed, Margalla, Fort Munro Gang Rape, and Chmbay di Booti besides a novelette captioned Japphi. In the context of his creative work, it would be instructive to deduce from one of his interviews that with his over 20 years of experience of law he had met hundreds of people and partaken in their life stories and histories enabling him to weave together many of them into his personal reflections and writings.
The themes of Nain Sukh’s fiction are varied but life specific. Social, political, cultural, and moral issues in their variegated enormity do crop up in fiction when we assume that literature aims to clarify and develop experience whereto it causes something to happen in the mind of the reader as well as the writer besides its secondary function which is to afford delight. In the line of this argument Nain Sukh, who has chosen to express himself in his mother tongue, seems to coalesce experience and perception into a fictive entity of a populist dimension whence his appeal as a fiction writer.
Biscope Din
Anwar Zahidi is a veteran writer, his creative forte being poetry and fiction. The instant book, dedicated to the memory of the celebrated Urdu fiction writer late Mansha Yad, comprises thirteen of his short stories alongwith the author’s foreword and introductory notes by renowned litterateurs Dr. Anwaar Ahmad and Dr. A.B. Ashraf.
The title of the collection evokes nostalgia. In the initial decades of the evolution of cinema in the sub-continent, biscope was a colloquial appellative for an early movie projector. The writer seemingly correlates it to the objectivity of his past as borne out from the tendentious titles of the stories: Fault line, GaliyoN may Gum, Ilm-e ghaib, Down memory lane, Baykar ka qissa, Biscope din, Ra’en basera, Khwab sa din, Puranay kaghazon may, Pas-e deewar, Ta’air-e shab, Z Haal-e masti, and Khail khatm.
Anwar Zahidi has an observant eye. He possesses the knack to empathize what is purely impersonal by engrafting it to the actualities of his own experience. The workaday themes of his stories readily conform to contemporaneity in its multiple manifestations and implications. This direct connection between literature and the ‘social situation’ also accounts for its universality.
‘The workaday themes of Anwer Zahidi’s stories readily conform to contemporaneity in its multiple manifestations and implications. This direct connection between literature and the ‘social situation’ also accounts for its universality.’
Dr. Anwaar Ahmad and Dr. A.B. Ashraf have both eulogized the art of Anwar Zahidi as a fiction writer. The former opines that the writer has a creative language which facilitates him to create an ambience suited to the adequacies of his narrative while the latter thinks that Anwar Zahidi’s subjects relate to the life of common people, their habits and habitats, their pains and ponderings, and their fears and fantasies. ‘To give delight to the reader, and to clarify and develop experience in the reader’s as well as the writer’s mind, are the primary functions of literature. The other subsidiary functions are propaganda, release and es
