Shujaat Bukhari was leaving his office in Press Enclave in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk when he was shot at. He is in a critical condition, police said.
Shujaat Bukhaari is the editor of newspaper Rising Kashmir. (Picture courtesy: Twitter/Shujaat Bukhari)
Veteran journalist and Rising Kashmir editor Shujaat Bukhari was shot dead by unidentified gunmen outside his office in the heart of this Jammu and Kashmir capital, police officials said on Thursday.
Bukhari, who was leaving his office in Press Enclave in the city centre Lal Chowk for an iftar party when he was shot, officials said.
The two policemen who were guarding him are also injured, they added.
source: http://www.hindustantimes.com / Hindustan Times / Home> India / by PTI, Srinagar / June 14th, 2018
RICH DIET: A handwritten cookery manuscript containing a glimpse of the menu from England’s first Indian restaurant has sold for $11,344 (Rs 7.6 lakh) at a London book fair.
It refers to dishes like “pineapple pullaoo” and “chicken currey” from the Hindoostane Dinner and Hooka Smoking Club, opened in 1809 at Portman Square, London, by Sake Dean Mahomed, whose roots lay in Bihar.
“This is the first known record of a priced menu from Britain’s first Indian restaurant – at a time when printed menus were rarely available,” said Brian Lake of Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers in London, which sold the volume at the ABA Rare Book Fair to an American institution last month.
The manuscript, titled Receipt Book 1786 on the front, also contains handwritten recipes and receipts. It includes a two-page “bill of fare” from Hindoostane, listing 25 Indian dishes with prices.
These include makee pullaoo (1.1.0 pounds), pineapple pullaoo (1.16.0 pounds), chicken currey (0.12.0 pounds), lobster curry (0.12.0 pounds), coolmah of lamb or veal (0.8.0 pounds), together with breads, chutneys and other dishes.
It ends by noting that there are “various other dishes too numerous for insertion”.
Towards the end is a recipe “to make a curry powder”, attributed to Lord Teignmouth (1751-1834), who was governor-general of Bengal between 1793 and 1797 and later became a patron of Mahomed’s restaurant.
Mahomed went bankrupt in 1812, and the eatery struggled on as Hindostanee Coffee House under a new management before disappearing in 1833.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> India / PTI / June 04th, 2018
In the heart of Hazratganj, at the cut which turns into Lalbagh, stands a large bank. The cars and two-wheelers parked there spill onto the road. There are vendors, mechanics, and just people waiting to go back into the bank when the clerk beckons them. The atmosphere looks like any bland public sector office.
However, a few steps into the compound will lead you to a large colonial-era house. The exterior is yellowing, the plaster is coming off but the sheen of its wooden door frames is intact. The windows, too, retain the same glass, broken at several places but reflecting, literally, the charm of what the house must have seen through the years.
Called No. 2 Mall Road by the family that lived there and generations after it, the house did not belong to ordinary people. It was the abode of one of the finest writers Lucknow has produced.
Author Attia Hosain was born in that house in 1913 and lived there for the first 19 years of her life. Traces of the house are found in her only but much acclaimed novel, ‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’. It is also part of the Masters’ in English syllabus at Delhi University.
“The front part was my grandfather’s domain — a big study filled with books. Here he entertained visitors. The rear part of the house was my grandmother’s domain. Behind the house was a garden. There was a second house, called the small house, but in fact two stories high, and each of the children had their own rooms,” says Shama Habibullah, Attia’s daughter, now 75 years old. She is a filmmaker and lives in Mumbai. She spent a large part of her childhood there.
The house was sold to government in 1956. Attia’s older brother sold it because zamindari was abolished and no one had the means to maintain a house of that size. Besides, he was nominated for foreign service and had to leave India. “No matter how much we miss it, at that time, selling the house was the best solution and it was the right thing to do,” says Shama.
Eighty-six year-old Shahid Mushir Kidwai was born in No. 2 Mall Road in 1929. “I lived there for the first 10 years of his life. I used to go to La Martiniere College from there,” says Kidwai, the son of Attia’s eldest sister. Attia khala is special to him. “She loved me dearly. When my mother was carrying me, she felt it would be a daughter but Attia khala said she would have a son. When I was born, Attia khala was delighted.”
Kidwai vividly remembers Attia’s wedding in 1933. “Her husband Ali Bahadur Habibullah’s family lived across the street in Hazratganj. He was my aunt’s son. We used to have lot of fun running across both houses. It was a beautiful wedding.” Many characters in Attia’s stories are people Kidwai saw in his childhood. “From a servant we had to a pet dog, many have figured in her stories on some form or the other,” he says. Not only the family, but several homeless and destitute people lived in that house, that had exquisite Carrara marble floors. “After it was sold, whenever my mother, her siblings or their children passed by that side in Ganj, they never looked at the house. Such was the pain of losing it,” he says. “It is a period piece. It could have been a heritage building. Now, there is a garbage heap in front of it. People spit against the walls. It is sad,” says a family member.
Attia left India in 1947 when her husband was sent on an assignment to England. However, they never knew they wouldn’t come back. “The Partition of India was a major setback to her. She was distraught. She didn’t want to see the pain of partition in India. Hence, she stayed in Britain.
But Lucknow never left her,” says Shama. There is a poem, The City, by CP Cavafy. That best describes her bond with Lucknow, she says. The memories of Lucknow that Attia instilled in Shama are what brought Shama back to India. In the 1990s, when she was not in the best of heath, there were restrictions on her food. However, during a trip to Lucknow, she asked for kebabs and they did her no harm. Instead, she gained healthy weight and felt much better. “It wasn’t disease but the atmosphere that made her unwell. The atmosphere of Lucknow cured her,” says a member of the family.
Attia died in January 1998 in England.
In 2013, Shama and her brother filmmaker Waris Husein organized a small function to mark her centenary year. That was their last visit to Lucknow. There were films, book readings and recordings at the event. About the house, Shama says, “The house is a symbol of a Lucknow kept alive only in writings and memories. Attia took these memories to the world. She made the story of her displacement a story of everyone else.”
Attia’s works Phoenix Fled, 1953 Sunlight on a Broken Column, 1961 Cooking the Indian Way, 1967 Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction, 2013 (Chapters from an unfinished novel and unpublished stories)
The last work The last literary piece Attia created was not written but recorded by her. It was for a compilation called “Voices of the Crossing”. It was about the impact of Britain on writers from Asia. Due to ill-heath and failing eyesight, Attia recorded the chapter “Deep Roots” and it was transcribed and printed in big fonts for her to verify. She spoke of Partition in it. “This can be termed her last work,” says Shama
Shakespearean Urdu at BBC Attia was a born actor, Shama says. Working for the Urdu Service of BBC in England, Attia was once playing Lady Macbeth. The iconic dagger scene, Shama says, is one she can never forget. “Khoon, khoon”, she went. This was Shakespearean Urdu I was listening to on BBC.” She adds in the same breath that it was unfortunate that AIR, in 1995, could not record her when she visited Lucknow. “My mother and I went to AIR for a possible recording show but they said their tape recorder wasn’t working!”
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> News> City News> Lucknow News / TNN / January 17th, 2016
Attia Hosain, writer: born Lucknow, India 20 October 1913; married Ali Bahadur Habibullah (one son, one daughter); died London 23 January 1998.
The people who came to see Attia Hosain honoured at a book launch a few weeks ago could have been forgiven for expecting a subdued and fragile old lady. After all, Hosain was 84, had had a long and turbulent life and for years had been in poor health. The launch demanded nothing of her but that she sit on stage as a sort of icon and accept the homage of her admirers, while her daughter – the film producer Shama Habibullah – read from one of her mother’s early World Service pieces.
But Hosain was not one to sit back passively letting encomiums wash over her. Despite her physical difficulties, she immediately engaged with her audience, vividly sharing her emotions and memories. Her indomitability and eloquence swept problems aside, with a degree of hauteur and a magnificent sense of style.
Those qualities must have stood her in good stead. She was born in 1913 into an aristocratic family in Lucknow – a city that is a byword for Muslim scholarship and culture. From her father she inherited a keen interest in politics and nationalism. From her mother’s family of poets and scholars she drew a rich knowledge of Urdu, Persian and Arabic. Her knowledge of English came from an English governess, and subsequently as one of the few Indian girls at an English medium school. She was the first woman from her background to take a degree at Lucknow University.
From early on she was a communicator, first through feature articles for Indian papers, the Pioneer and the Statesman, and membership of the radical Progressive Writers’ Movement. The fiction came later, as a result – she recently speculated – of politics and dislocation.
In 1947, when India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, Hosain was in London with her husband, who had been posted the year before to the High Commission. The division of the two countries and the separation of two religious communities caused her great pain. Immensely proud of her heritage as both a Muslim and an Indian, she chose to remain in England and bring up her daughter and son – now the film director Waris Hussein – on her own. The change brought her a career as a regular broadcaster with her own women’s programme on the BBC World Service and a new perspective.
But the sense of damaged cultural roots never fully died away. “Here I am, I have chosen to live in this country which has given me so much; but I cannot get out of my blood the fact that I had the blood of my ancestors for 800 years in another country.” It was that, she said in her last piece – to be published in an anthology later this year – that drove her to write.
In 1953, Chatto and Windus brought out her book of short stories Phoenix Fled. Eight years later came Sunlight on a Broken Column, an evocative and carefully detailed novel which traces, via the story of young Laila, a society in transition. It was over 20 years, however, before the book was widely recognised. Brought out of oblivion by Virago in their splendid Modern Classics in 1988, it re-established Attia Hosain in the public eye and gave her a platform which she embraced with zest.
– Naseem Khan
source: http://www.independent.co.uk / Independent / Home> News> Obituaries / by Naseem Khan / February 05th, 1998
Muslim women who were at the forefront of the nationalist and feminist discourse in the country, during and after the independence movement, were eventually overlooked or excluded from the mainstream narrative.
MWF exhibition featured 21 Muslim women who contributed to nation-building during and after the independence struggle. Credit: Khushboo Kumar
New Delhi:
Most Indians today may not be aware that the national flag was designed by a Muslim woman, Surayya Tayabji, an active member of the Indian National Congress. Jawaharlal Nehru assigned this task to Tayabji, and it was her idea to replace the symbol of the charkha used and popularised by Mahatma Gandhi with that of Ashoka Chakra at the centre of the flag. Tayabji felt that the charkha, a symbol of the Congress party, might appear partisan.
Narratives like this – often forgotten or lost in public memory – were the central theme of a colloquium that was organised by the Muslim Women’s Forum (MWF), an organisation engaged in the advocacy of Muslim women’s rights. Titled ‘Pathbreakers: The Twentieth Century Muslim Women of India’, the colloquium held in partnership with UN Women showcased the achievements of 21 Muslim women in various spheres of public life during and after the independence struggle.
Other women who featured in the exhibition included Saeeda Khurshid, Hamida Habibullah, Aziza Fatima Imam, Qudsia Zaidi, Mofida Ahmed, Zehra Ali Yavar Jung, Razia Sajjad Zaheer, Tyaba Khedive Jung, Atiya Fyzee, Sharifa Hamid Ali, Fathema Ismail, Masuma Hosain Ali Khan, Anis Kidwai, Hajrah Begum, Qudsia Aizaz Rasul, Mumtaz Jahan Haider, Siddiqa Kidwai, Attia Hosain, Saliha Abid Hussain and Safia Jan Nisar Akhtar.
The speakers participating in the discussion talked about the need to reclaim the lost narratives of Muslim women and take control of their representation.
Speaking on the occasion, Seema Mustafa, an Indian print and television journalist, pointed out that these women would not fit even the current stereotypical representation of hijab-clad, oppressed and orthodox Muslim women, who need a messiah to rescue them. Mustafa, in her keynote address, said that these women had broken barriers and challenged patriarchal order in their time; they followed Islam in its liberal spirit, refusing to be shackled by societal norms. Most of them abandoned the purdah system, she said.
Speakers panel for the session ‘Recognising and Nurturing Pathbreakers’ at Muslim Women’s Forum colloquium. Credit: Khushboo Kumari
Stereotypes in modern India
The speakers insisted that the reality was and still is that Muslim women, just like women belonging to any other socio-cultural group in India, do not constitute a monolithic, homogenous entity. They come from diverse backgrounds and subscribe to varying ideologies. Muslim women have been and still are writers, teachers, artists, scientists, lawyers, educators, political workers, legislators in parliament and in assemblies. The speakers said clubbing them under the generic rubric of backwardness was a misrepresentation.
As the regular use of terms like triple talaq, halala and purdah has come to demonstrate subjugation of Muslim women, Islam has acquired the status of the most oppressive religion for women, the speakers said. Muslim women have become an object of pity.
Commenting on Islam and feminism, Farida Khan, former dean of education at Jamia Millia Islamia and former member of the National Commission for Minorities, pointed out that gender oppression is common to all religions. “Why should Islam have the burden of taking on feminism?” asked Khan. She further explained that Islam should be perceived and understood in the social and historical context of the day. Every religion has to and does evolve with time.
Referring to the exhibition, Khan said, “It makes me sad to think that you need to have an exhibition and you need to project these women in a country where they should be well known, where they should be part of the mainstream, where everybody should know their names and know the work they have done.”
Gargi Chakravartty, former associate professor of history in Maitreyi College and author, said, “Muslim women’s political and social contributions in the pre-independence period during the major Gandhian movements or in the field of spreading education, or in the sphere of literary activities, cannot be erased from history.” She shared many anecdotes that came up in her own research about largely unknown Muslim women who have extensively worked among the poor throughout the 20th century and still continue to do so.
An eminent speaker at the colloquium, Rakshanda Jalil, recently wrote a book A Rebel and Her Cause on the life of Rashid Jahan. Jalil spoke of the inspiring life of Jahan, who was a doctor, writer, political activist and member of the Communist Party of India.
Farah Naqvi, member of the Post-Sachar Evaluation Committee (Kundu Committee) 2013-2014, summed up the purpose of the colloquium and the exhibition. “This colloquium is a response. There is a nostalgia about it. But it is not just about the nostalgic nawabi Muslim. It has a political purpose, the colloquium, which is that you cannot allow any one strand of history to be obliterated from this country. Any strand. It could be Muslim women today. It could be someone else tomorrow,” Naqvi said.
Questioning if Muslim women needed to be forced into a separate constituency, Naqvi said it was indeed a tragedy that these women’s contributions were not a part of mainstream knowledge – and that reflected failure on the part of Indian historiography.
Naqvi also pointed out that the undercurrent of the entire exhibition was nation-building because they were “also responding to a moment when Muslims are repeatedly being told that they are ‘anti-national’”. She further explained that against such a background, the Muslim community in general should not take the bait of proving that they are ‘good’ nationalists. Instead they should take pride in the achievements they have made in their respective spheres of work – especially for those who stayed on in India after the Partition.
Wajahat Habibullah, India’s first chief information commissioner and the son of Hamida Habibullah, one of the 21 women featured in the exhibition, talked about Partition and how it divided his family. He said, “It is necessary to remember and nurture the memories of all those Muslim women who then very consciously, despite family pressure and contradictions within the family, opted clearly to be a part of India”.
Contribution to literature, politics and education
The exhibition showed how extensively Muslim women have contributed in the spheres of politics, literature, education and social work.
Many like Saeeda Khurshid, founder of the Muslim Women’s Forum, actively campaigned for the Congress party. Hamida Habibullah was the the president of the Mahila Congress. Few like Aziza Fatima Imam, Fathom Ismail, Anis Kidwai, Siddiqa Kidwai and Qudsia Aizaz Rasul were members of the parliament and legislative assemblies for years.
Rasul was also the only Muslim woman member of the constituent assembly.
Sharifa Hamid Ali founded the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), with the likes of Sarojini Naidu, Rani Rajwade and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and was involved in its work alongside others like Masuma Hosain Ali Khan and Hajrah Begum – who also founded the National Federation of Indian Women.
These women actively worked with the poor and marginalised sections of society, trying to improve their access to health and education.
Zehra Ali Yavar Jung, who was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1973, worked to improve the condition of women detainees in Hyderabad’s prisons and presided over a women’s workshop that trained and provided employment to destitute women. Fathom Ismail helped in opening rehabilitation clinics for children suffering from polio. Anis Kidwai worked tirelessly in refugee camps after Partition.
Surayya Tayabji and the Indian national flag displayed at the MWF exhibition. Credit: Khushboo Kumari/The Wire
Mumtaz Jahan Haider, who was appointed the principal of the Aligarh Women’s College in 1937, worked for women’s education her entire life.
Sharifa propagated legal reforms for Muslim women, including raising the age of marriage and drafting a model marriage contract ‘nikahnama‘.
In the field of literature and arts, these women won multiple awards. Razia Sajjad Zaheer, the recipient of the Nehru Award and Uttar Pradesh State Sahitya Academy Award, wrote novels like Sar-e-Sham, Kante and Suman. Anis Kidwai recieved the Sahitya Kala Parishad Award.
Attia Hossain used to write for Pioneer, Statesman and Atlantic monthly and wrote several novels, most notably Sunlight on a Broken Column and a short story collection Phoenix Fled. Aliya Fyzee wrote Indian Music (1914), The Music of India (1925) and Sangeet of India (1942) with her husband.
Qudsia Zaidi wrote and translated books for children, with Chacha Chakkan ke Draamae among the most loved ones. She also founded Hindustani Theatre in 1954, the first urban professional theatre company in independent India.
Khushboo Kumari has a BTech in information technology and is pursuing an MBA in marketing from MICA, Ahmedabad. She is an intern at The Wire.
source: http://www.thewire.in / The Wire / Home> History> Religion> Women / by Khushboo Kumari / May 30th, 2018
Shazia wanted a create a book where you feel like cooking what you see
Bengaluru’s Shazia Khan, runner-up at Masterchef 2, is out with her book What’s On The Menu
It may be easy to cook from a recipe off the Internet, or cook watching a YouTube video. But how do you know, for example, which biryani recipe to pick from the hundreds that pop up?
And therein lies the charm of a cookbook — you will go for the recipe that comes from a person you know, or whose food you are familiar with or are a fan of.
That is the logic that drove Bengaluru’s Shazia Khan, runner-up at the Masterchef India 2 series a few years ago to write What’s On The Menu? “When I started cooking, I was an amateur. I learnt from cookbooks. I wanted to write my own after Masterchef, which would feature cuisines of the world, and use easy ingredients — something that a beginner or an expert could cook from,” says Shazia smiling the smile that she was noted to flash, even under all the pressure of the TV show. “I also wanted generation-old recipes to be treasured. I wanted it to be a pictorial because it is only when you see good food that you feel like cooking.” Shazia’s food has been made more gorgeous looking by photographer Saina Jaipal.
She agrees the book is a “hotchpotch” of recipes. The book takes you through salads, soups, and sections dedicated to vegetarian, chicken, mutton, seafood, and desserts. An introductory section teaches you how to put together masalas and chilli oil and other such ingredients necessary for the dishes.
Food is something that always brought people together in her large joint family where Shazia grew up as one among seven siblings.
“Food was always a celebration and it spread a lot of happiness — something that rarely happens today among people.”
Shazia admits that food has taken on new avatars. “There is surely a food revolution. With the Masterchef craze, awareness is high. With everyone Instagram-ing food pictures, food has gone viral. People are more confident now to try new recipes. It has gone beyond being just a three-time meal. It is about being more creative and food presentation is gaining more importance.” Exposure is huge, as is availability. “When I started cooking, I didn’t even know what zucchini was. Today you will get three colours of bell peppers in your neighbourhood market.”
Having all along cooked for family and friends, it was her sons who egged her on to try for the Masterchef series. “It has almost been four years since, and I’ve done a couple of TV shows, YouTube videos and demos. I take private classes for individuals. I run summer camps,” she says, talking of the endless possibilities of what one can do these days in the food business. Shazia, who is also involved in the family-run education business, is a member of the board of management at Delhi Public School (Bengaluru/Mysuru). She hopes to start a culinary school, because “going abroad to study culinary arts is very expensive. I want to make it a finishing school for women, so they can get employment opportunities and placements as home cooks using their training. I mean who wouldn’t love to have a trained cook at home!” she says.
Kitchen talk
* Three things you will find in my kitchen: Cheese for sure! Cooking chocolate, and eggs.
* What I love eating: Thai, because it bursts with flavours.
* What I love cooking: Modern Indian food — not twisting its taste but presenting it in a different way. My tandoori chicken roulade is a good twist to the whole grilled chicken, using the French technique to make it more healthy. My grilled semolina with mushroom is nothing but the uppit presented to look like breadsticks, with mushrooms thrown in for a twist.
* When I eat out: My husband is not a big foodie. He loves Indian or Chinese. But when we are travelling, I love to experiment, try local cuisine, learn dishes and pick up recipes.
Pumpkin and peanut subzi
Shazia shares this recipe of a subzi from her book What’s On The Menu that her father-in-law enjoys, made in his village near Mandya, in Karnataka:
(Serves: 4 to 5 )
Ingredients
Vegetable oil – quarter cup
Onion – 2, (finely diced)
Ginger paste – 1 tsp
Garlic paste – 1 tsp
Tomato – 2,
( finely diced)
Red chilli powder – 1 tsp
Coriander powder – 1 tsp
Turmeric powder – half tsp
Fresh coriander leaves – 3 tbsp,
Pumpkin – 600 gms,
(peeled, chopped &
cubed)
Salt to taste
For the Peanut Masala
Peanuts – 100 gms, (dry roasted & skin removed)
Garlic – 10 cloves
Long, dry red chilli (Kashmiri) — 8 (dry roasted)
In a pan, heat oil. Add onions and fry till golden brown. Add ginger-garlic pastes and fry for a minute. Add tomatoes, chilli powder, coriander powder, turmeric powder, coriander leaves and fry till the tomatoes become so. Add the pumpkin cubes and sauté. Add salt and cook till the pumpkin is so and done. Coarsely grind the peanut masala ingredients and add to the cooked pumpkin. Garnish with coriander leaves and serve with hot akki rotis and ghee.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Food / by Bhumika K / Bengaluru – April 16th, 2016
In an unique initiative, Yenepoya (deemed to be university), has undertaken a comprehensive study of the mushrooms present on the Derlakatte campus.
The study, which was conducted over a period of six months, has yielded rich information on the macrofungal resources of the campus. About 60 species of mushrooms have been observed on the campus, out of which about 40 have been described in the book. Out of the 40 species published, 12 species are edible, 12 species are medicinal, two species ectomycorrhizal and one species is parasitic. Two species which are rare and known to be poisonous are also recorded.
The information was documented in a ready reference book titled ,‘Macrofungal resourcesof Yenepoya University’. Yenepoya chancellor Abdullah Kunhi released the book at a ceremony held on the campus on Tuesday, in the presence of vice-chancellor M Vijayakumar and registrar G Shreekumar Menon. The book is dedicated to M Abdul Rahiman, former vice-chancellor, Kannur and Calicut Universities.
Yenepoya is the first educational institution in the region to initiate such a study of mushrooms on the campus. Though mushrooms play a unique role in the ecosystem, importance is always given to only flora and fauna, said sources. Yenepoya has initiated other similar studies to document the flora and fauna of the campus too.
The study of macrofungal life on the campus was undertaken by a research team led by K R Sridhar, Dr N C Karun and Dr Bhagya B Sharma from June-November 2016.
Yenepoya has striven to make its 32 acre campus into an eco-friendly zone. The institution has undertaken various measures for greening the campus with different landscapes like lawns, arboretum, bamboo thickets, medicinal plant garden, areca plantation and acacia grove. The campus includes a large rainwater harvesting pond, roof water harvesting facilities, waste water treatment and recycling plant, vermicompost unit and solar power generation facility. The university carries out a regular environmental audit of the campus and has an eco club for students. It is hoped that these activities will inculcate a love for nature among the students who study here, and inspire them to act as brand ambassadors for nature conservation in their future life.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Mangalore News / by Kevin Mendonsa / TNN / May 23rd, 2018
Independence and partition of India brought massive transfer of populations. Movements of refuges were on predictable, communal lines. There were just a few cases where the communal movements were in the ‘wrong’ direction. To that microscopic group of mavericks belonged Mohammed Yunus who, forsaking wealth and family prestige, left his ‘native Pakistan’ for India and turned out to be of much help to the Indian Muslims.
Yunus is so intimately identified with the erstwhile North West Frontier Province or the NWFP – now Khyber Pakhtun Khwa that it may come as a surprise to many that he was not a Pathan! Born in 1916 in Abbobtabad, his father Haji Ghulam Samdani was an extremely wealthy man owning rights over vast tracts of forest and agricultural lands in Punjab, Kashmir and NWFP. One of the biggest government contractors of his time, he owned most of the legendary ‘Qissakhwani Bazar’, the nerve center of Peshawar.
Samdani was a Mughal whose great-grandfather had migrated and settled down in Baramula, Kashmir in the latter half of the eighteenth century. One of the first from among Muslims of the region to have received western education, Samdani settled in Peshawar as a military contractor in the 1880s and never looked back. He was personally contacted by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan to bail out the MAO College after the institution was in the financial doldrums following a huge defalcation by Shyam Bihari Lal, a confidante of the founder. Apart from emerging as the wealthiest man of the NWFP, Samdani struck roots in the Pashtun area through his philanthropy and marriages including in the famous Charsadda family of the ‘frontier Gandhi’ Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Indeed Yunus was the son of that mother and thus a ‘maternal Pathan’. Some space has been devoted to the family details as this has a bearing on what Yunus made of his future life.
Mohammed Yunus
After an early education in Peshawar in an opulent but deeply religious atmosphere Yunus was dispatched to Aligarh to study in ‘Minto Circle’, more correctly the AMU Boys High School from where he passed the High School examination in 1932. He thereafter joined the Islamia College on a suggestion of its former Principal H. Martin (who was then Pro Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University and is remembered as the coauthor of the famous “English Grammar and Composition” by Wren and Martin). Martin had astutely sensed that Yunus with had the right background to play a major role in the public affairs of that province at a future date. Even in his teens in Aligarh he was witty and quick with repartee which lasted a lifetime. Thus when Gandhiji visited the University in 1931, Yunus somehow clambered up the stage of the Students’ Union with an autograph book in hand. The Mahatma with a frown asked him why he was not wearing khadi to which the Peshawar lad replied without batting an eyelid that he was wearing his school uniform and obtained the coveted signature. What the young Peshawari had not disclosed was that there was no objection to the uniform being made of khadi!
Freedom struggle
He passed B.A from Islamia College, Peshawar. During the college days he was associated with the khudai khidmatgar (God’s servants) movement of the ‘frontier Gandhi’ with its emphasis on non violent resistance to the Raj, its emphasis on service of he poor and social reform. Soon after College he emerged as a prominent political activist and main spokesman of the movement who was an informal representative of Ghaffar Khan with whom he had become related (in the ‘oriental fashion’) with the marriage in 1935 of his elder brother Yahya with the only daughter of the great man. Yunus emerged as a major face of NWFP in rest of the country representing the province in Congress forums and espousing the cause of its economic development. He hosted Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah during their tour of the area and was equally active in Pashto-speaking areas across the Durand line i.e. in South Afghanistan.
He also fought shoulder to shoulder with the National Conference in the Kashmir valley for involvement of people in governance. Yunus was incarcerated in the Quit India movement (1942) and was released only three years later. His reminiscences of prisons were later published in Urdu as Qaidi ke Khat (letters of Prisoners). Following his release he worked zealously against the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan. In 1946 elections an overwhelmingly Muslim electorate elected a Congress government in the province under ‘Doctor Khan Sahib’ the elder brother of the frontier Gandhi (NWFP was the only province where the dominant community, whether Hindu or Muslim, had voted against the sentiments of the relevant community elsewhere). The government did not survive for long as the aristocrats of the province engineered large scale defections.
Yunus decided to move over to Kashmir to be at the forefront of the agitation against the Maharaja.
Independent India
On the eve of the independence, disgusted with the volte face of the ‘blue blood’ of his community and the communal frenzy he heeded the advice of Nehru and his daughter (with whom he had grown so close as to be almost a member of the family) and decided to make the ‘divided India’ his home. In doing so he was foregoing considerable a fortune – the estate of Haji Ghulam Samdani, which despite its devolution to more than a dozen offspring, was substantial. Nehru offered him appointment in the Indian Foreign Service keeping in view the fact that his proclivity to call a spade a spade would not take him high in politics. Over the years he was envoy in Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq, Spain and Algeria and served twice in the Ministry of External Affairs. In 1971 he was appointed Commerce Secretary – a position he held with great distinction till his retirement in 1974.
After his retirement he was the founder-Chairman of the Trade Fair Authority of India, a position he held till 1977 and again from 1980 till 1985 when he was nominated as Member of the Rajya Sabha for a period of six years. In 1974 when the Muslims of India were restive about the restoration of the ‘minority character’ of the Aligarh Muslim University and the then Education Minister, Prof. Nurul Hasan had made it a ‘progressive’ versus reactionary’ affair Mrs. Indira Gandhi nominated him on the Executive Council of the University where he articulated the aspirations and views of the majority of Aligarh community. It is not intended here to give a ‘low down’ on his professional achievements but mention must be made of the great institution that he built in the form of Pragati Maidan – not only a landmark in the heart of Delhi but clearly among the worlds most prolific and efficient organizers of industry specific fares. The layout, the design of the halls, the infrastructure, carefully planned trees and shrubs all bear a testimony to his loving planning and eye for details. Above all, the initial team of personnel that he handpicked turned out to be a coordinated, well-oiled machine of highly motivated professionals. The traditions and operating procedures laid down by him and his pioneer associates survive to this day and make the ITPO – the rechristened version of the TFI – a vibrant institution. Following a setback in his health Mohammed Yunus lived an increasingly sheltered life with increasingly limited mobility finally succumbing to the inevitable in 2001.
The curious reader could well ask whether what has been stated is all there is to his life or there is something special that earns him the right to be remembered a decade after his death and perpetuate his memory beyond his immediate family. The questions are natural and they deserve an answer – the answers are all in the affirmative.
There are three main reasons why Yunus deserves to be remembered by the country generally while the Indian Muslims need to be particularly aware of his life and time. These ‘reasons’ have to do with his specific achievements and traits and are: An extraordinarily forthright and brutally honest personality, standing by the Muslim community without any political agenda or ulterior motive and a great institution-builder. His ‘baby’ presently called the India Trade Promotion Organization having already been briefly referred, the rest of this piece is devoted to the first two feathers to his cap.
Personality
Yunus had a unique personality which cannot be forgotten by anyone who came in contact with him. He was quite ‘direct’ in his conversations, something which Asians generally lack. This can be illustrated with a few anecdotes. In his autobiography Persons, Passions and Politics (1980, Vikas) he recounts the time he was Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs and had to deal with the local (British) representative of the Commonwealth Graves Commission and his Boss a pompous ex Brigadier of the British Army who had arrived from London ostensibly to inspect the various war cemeteries run by the Commission but really to express displeasure about Yunus’s refusal to accede to some unreasonable request of the local representative. The Brigadier, a typical ‘Colonel Blimp’ was an arrogant foul-mouthed character still carrying hallucinations of ‘Pax Britannica’ with a disdain for the former ‘subject races’. In any case, the senior officer showed his displeasure to Yunus and asked him not to repeat ‘senseless arguments’ and added to good measure that India was being ‘more mulishly unreasonable’ than Germany and Italy were during the last war. Yunus calmly heard the man and politely asked, “is there anything further you gentlemen wish to add before I give my final response’. The imperious ‘Colonel Blimp’ responded with disdain, “I am not interested in your last responses; I want the bloody thing done by tomorrow morning before I leave for home”. Our man than spoke, “You bunch of grave-diggers, how dare you compare my country to the fascists! Leave this very instant, or I will throw both of you out of this window!” He writes, “they made themselves scarce in no time; I started to laugh, and laughed uncontrollably”.
This author knows of a similar episode on the authority of a very eminent personage (a very venerable civil servant, now in his 80s who in the best tradition of the bureaucracy is loathe to be identified; for the initiated, the narrator was then a Joint Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat). In early 1975 the Prime Minister called a meeting to discuss the ongoing agitation against amendments made in the AMU Act 1n 1965 and for declaring the University a minority institution. The meeting was briefed by the Education Minister who explained that the agitation was being fomented by ‘reactionary elements’ within the University academics who did not wish the ‘progressive forces’ to lead the institution up the path of ‘growth and academic excellence’. Yunus, one of the invitees, interjected to ask the Minister to explain who the ‘reactionaries’ were. The reply was that they were the ones who ‘raised the bogey of Islam’. Yunus abruptly cut short the Minister and said “and Prime Minister, progressives are those who eat and drink during the month of Ramadan, do not offer Namaz and drink alcohol in the evenings in the privacy of their houses while discussing how best to further the agenda of the Minister!”. There was startled silence in the room with the Prime Minister barely stifling a smile started to furiously doodle on a pad.
Yunus increasingly acted as behind the scene spokesman of Muslims in the corridors of power with no personal ambition or even projecting himself in the public. His role in highlighting indiscriminate demolitions of houses of Muslims in the name of ‘slum clearance’ in old Delhi is not too well known but is acknowledged by, of all the persons, the ‘bulldozer man’ Jagmohan in his Rebuilding Shahjahanbad . This author is personally aware of cases where he took victims of police atrocities to the Prime Minister at a time when doing so (during the emergency) ran the risk of detention without trial. His vigorous espousing the cause of Aligarh academics and students for restructuring the governance charter of the AMU is not fully appreciated. Many who were active those days now concede that with a champion like Yunus they knew they had someone from the ‘establishment’ on their side and this prevented them from developing a negative attitude towards the secular Indian State. What is more, his transparent sympathy – and empathy – made the members of Muslim middle classes look to him as the honest broker faithfully projecting their grievances without any personal vested interest. This resulted in many a simmering discontent to escalate into public agitations.
A handsome man, not very tall but an overpowering presence, he could be assertive and polite at the same time; Yunus had an endearing personality with a propensity to laugh at himself. His fund of jokes and funny anecdotes was virtually inexhaustible. He was a great motivator of men and a good judge of character. He bore personal losses with great courage and fortitude (as was evident when his only offspring Adil Shaharyar died suddenly). The personality of Yunus can be summed up by narrating a personal experience of this author. In a function of the Delhi AMU Old Boys Association both he and Yunus arrived late and occupied the last row as the proceedings were well under way. The Organizers ran to escort Yunus to the front with our man saying that he should not move for three reasons: First seeing him people will get up and disturb the speaker, Prof Moonis Raza (VC Delhi University); Second as a late comer he was in the right place, the last row, and; (turning to me) yeh bechara bhee late aya hai soche ga mujhe saza milee or Yunus ko jaza yanee aage jagah milee!! (The sentence is not very easy to translate, but it should run something like “This poor chap (the author) is a late comer, too, if I shift to the front he will think that while he is punished Yunus is being rewarded for being late – the real pun lies in the rhyming of the words ‘saza’, ‘jaza’, and ‘jagah’ which cannot be translated).
source: http://www.twocircles.net / TwoCirlces.net / Home> Articles> Indian Muslim / by Naveed Masood for TwoCircles.net / June 09th, 2011
Naiyer Masud. Photos courtesy of Muhammad Umar Memon
Muhammad Umar Memon, who has translated Naiyer Masud’s stories, on the labyrinth of his fictional universe.
Naiyer Masud (1936-2017), who passed away in Lucknow on July 24 at the age of 81 after protracted illness, was one of the greatest Urdu short story writers who has been extensively translated into several languages, including English, Finnish, French and Spanish.
Masud was born on November 16, 1936 in Lucknow. His parents came from families of physicians (hakims). His father, Syed Masud Hasan Rizvi Adeeb, was a professor of Persian at Lucknow University and a famed scholar of dastaan. He was the elder brother of noted Urdu satirist Azhar Masud. In 1965, Masud joined Lucknow University as a professor of Persian where he remained till his retirement in 1996.
Masud’s four books of short stories — Seemiya (The Occult), Itr-e-Kafoor (Essence of Camphor), Taus Chaman ki Maina (The Myna of Peacock Garden) and Ganjifa (Card) — cemented his reputation as the master of the unsaid who created a maze, a labyrinth in his stories that held the reader captive to their narrative wizardry, their illusory spell.
Masud also translated a few short stories of Kafka as well as some Persian stories into Urdu. He also wrote critical and biographical accounts of Mir Babar Ali Anees (1803-1874), Yagana Changezi (1884-1956) and Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869). He was awarded the Padma Shri for Literature and Education in 1970. He was also honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award for Urdu in 2001 and the Saraswati Samman in 2007.
In this interview, critic and short story writer Muhammad Umar Memon, professor emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has translated Masud’s stories into English — (The Occult, Penguin Books, 2013) and Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories (Penguin Random House, 2015) — talks about Masud’s enchanting fictional landscape. “His fiction invites you to enjoy the labyrinth for what it is and, if possible, become it — something like the complete fusion or identity of the observing subject and the observed object,” says Memon. Excerpts from an interview:
SHIREEN QUADRI: In Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories (Penguin Random House, 2015), you mention about your first encounter with Naiyer Masud’s fiction in the late 1980s and how you were stunned by Seemiya, his first collection. You talk about his stories as “fragments of consciousness suggestive in their fractured imagery of some presence somewhere in the beyond”. Could you share your initial impression of this encounter and how it has evolved over the years?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: That first impression, which I perhaps share with most of his readers, persists.Take, for example, some images that occur with rare economy of description in most of the stories of Seemiya, but only in fragments, revealing a little of themselves at each occurrence, such as the ubiquitous lone fragment of the mysterious cloud, the curios mentioned in passing in the opening story, “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire”, and then repeated with additional details in practically all the others, with their relatively detailed treatment in the third story, “Snake Catcher”; or the young woman fleeing from the sexual advances of the narrator which is touched upon lightly in the first story, then again in the third, but occupying a substantial part of the fourth and eponymous story of the collection where her flight ends in drowning. More tellingly, however, it is the opening paragraph of “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire” and its verbatim retrieval as the closing part of the last story, “Resting Place.”All this creates an overwhelming impression of some sort of inherent interconnectedness and of what lies in between as somehow being an organic part of a continuum. Yet all five stories of the collection preserve their autonomy. While they do not yield any sense of spatial or chronological continuity, or closure, they do leave the reader with two dominant impressions: that (1) the author is dealing with a continuum, and (2) it can be viewed only in fragments.
What stunned me was the deliberate attempt of the author to suppress the links that would — or, might — have restored the fragments to their logical place in the continuum. The resulting jolting effect makes it difficult to grasp the ultimate meaning of the work; perhaps the reason why one is hard pressed to articulate for oneself or explain to others with any degree of confidence and precision what a given story is about — what it means.
Nor can one dismiss these stories as so much mumbo jumbo and move on. They just don’t let you move on. They haunt you. You are hooked. Nothing like this arresting quality is seen anywhere in Urdu fiction, where you are completely taken, without knowing, ironically, what has taken you.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud’s four collections of stories — Seemiya, Itr-e-Kafoor, Taus Chaman Ki Mayna and Ganjifa — establish his reputation as possibly the greatest Urdu short story writer. He has been variously described as a “realist of the strange” (by Amit Chaudhuri) and as a “poet’s storyteller” (by Agha Shahid Ali). What place do you think he occupies in the legions of Urdu writers whose works have been embraced and appreciated by the wider world?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I’m not sure about the perimeters of this “wider world”. Do you mean the territories of South Asia or the whole world? Frankly, I don’t think too many Urdu fiction writers have received much recognition outside the South Asian subcontinent. They became known mostly on university campuses with departments of South Asian Studies after some of their work became available in translation, but not among mainstream Western readers. I think Saadat Hasan Manto and Naiyer Masud are comparatively better known outside South Asia. Essence of Camphor, one of the two books of Masud’s stories I published in the US, received many good comments in Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other US newspapers and magazines, and was later translated into Finnish, French and Spanish. But I doubt it sold more than a couple of hundred copies in the US. As for within South Asia, Masud is generally considered the finest Urdu fiction writer today, without progenitor or progeny.
The Vice President, Mohammad Hamid Ansari presenting the Saraswati Samman Award 2006-07 to Dr. Naiyar Masud at a award function organized by K.K Birla Foundation, in New Delhi on March 05, 2008.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Seemiya, a collection of five interlinked stories, which you translated into English (The Occult, Penguin Books, 2013), is more like a novel in stories. They have no discernible plots, their terrains are unidentifiable, the characters that inhabit them have no names. While these stories are autonomous, they coalesce in unexpected ways, with certain images recurring in more than one story. Tell us about your understanding and appreciation of his first collection which, in many ways, cemented Masud’s reputation as a master of the form?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I have already given some idea of both my appreciation and the tenaciously illusive nature of The Occult in the answer to one of your previous questions. However, let me add a little more: The jolts that throw the reader in a vortex of incomprehensibility are the result of paring down to as much as one-tenth the draft of a work from its original length. Why does he do that? Two examples, in his own words:
“(1) Once a thing is brought into existence, it continues to live in some form or fashion even when it is removed from the scene. For example, you are sitting on this sofa; you then decide to get up and leave. You are not on it anymore, and yet your presence will be felt, to some extent at least, however obscurely or intangibly. But that other sofa, just brought in from the store, on which no one has yet sat, cannot be the same as the one you had sat on. It is necessarily different. One cannot describe this difference in words, but one can feel it, subliminally.
(2) There was this woman who was an accomplished cook. A certain dish that required only four ounces of ghee she’d cook with two-and-a-half pounds of ghee, removing the extra when it was done. But the dish tasted very special and retained the flavour, the essence of the finest dish from the table of the nobility.”
What he tries to do, then, is to retain the aura of the excised portions in those that he does keep. Never mind the suppression of details pertaining to the event being described, something reminiscent of their erstwhile existence will be felt in the retained parts. His job is to craft a language which will convey this veritable existence in its equally veritable absence. He elaborates it further: “Take, for example, the phrase ‘nisvānī badan kī khushbū’ [scent of a woman’s body] or ‘qadmoñ kī āhat’ [the sound of footfalls suggestive of a presence]. They occur once or twice in my work at most, yet nonetheless seem to pervade it.”
Muhammad Umar Memon
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud’s fictional landscape is like a labyrinth. In the introduction to Collected Stories, you write that his stories seem to pull the readers into the centre of a vortex — at once provocative and inaccessible. You wrote: “Even while failing to understand his stories, one is unable to walk away from their haunting ambit. Somehow they seem to retrieve for the reader a part of their memory buried deep in the liminal folds of consciousness otherwise preoccupied with the more immediate problems of mundane existence.” For a reader, what is the best way to approach Masud’s stories?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: The “best way” is also indicated in the continuation of the passage you have quoted, viz., “It is a part that needs to be discovered, patiently, more through feeling and introspection than by reason. The moment reason is engaged, what it sees is a formidable scrambling of logical coordinates, always leading back to the same labyrinth, never reconstituting into a discernible [and complete] entity.”
You see, although one could say, everything, however ineffable and vague, carries a sub-stratum of “meaning”, meaning ultimately has to do with “ego”, the desire to grasp and be done with the claustrophobic labyrinth, not to dangle permanently in a worrisome state of incomprehension. But what is the meaning of an object d’art, a painting, a symphony, a nocturne? Why can’t we enjoy it for its own sake? Let it generate its diverse epiphanies in the reader’s imagination. For it is emblematic of nothing beyond itself, and so is Naiyer Masud’s fiction. If we continue the quest for meaning, it would be like the attempt to get out of the labyrinth, while his fiction invites you to enjoy the labyrinth for what it is and, if possible, become it — something like the complete fusion or identity of the observing subject and the observed object. I might also add here that it is the limitation of any grouping of written words with their inevitable consecutiveness that raises our expectation, the necessity for it to have meaning. If somehow a story such as “The Colour of Nothingness” could be converted into a painting, with all its events simultaneously present on the surface of canvas, would we still approach it with the same expectation of meaning as we would in its written form?
SHIREEN QUADRI: What is your mental portrait of Masud based on your interactions with him over the years? Could you trace for us the world Masud came from and how it influenced his fictional landscape?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I’ve met him only once, by accident, in Delhi, for a few hours, in the company of his friends. It was difficult to talk to him much, certainly not about his work. My only contact with him was through correspondence and occasional telephone calls. I have no mental image of him except when I think of him during the last half a dozen years of his illness, the painful image of a bedridden, frail man who had gradually severed his contact with the world sails through the mind. He had stopped writing altogether during this period, whether due to physical inability (the stroke had more-or-less paralysed his right side) or, even if he could write, he was determined not to. I do have a theory about it, but it is difficult to articulate it with clarity. Perhaps a kind of affront to his pride compelled him to deny the world all those scintillating gems he could have given it, to get even with Providence in as incomprehensible a way as unfolds in his fiction. He was a very gentle person, a paragon of rare subtlety and what we call “sha’istagi” in Urdu, who hurt no one, extremely reserved, immensely confident but least demonstrative of it.
That said, what I have gathered of his background is common knowledge. He grew up among books and in a cultured family. An extremely well-read man who was keenly aware of the sophistication and achievements of his native Awadh, in arts, in sports, and everything in between. Bygone Lucknow — once palpably real — was now a place in memory. Even in stories which are not time-and-place-specific, their locales nevertheless are redolent of the aura of Lucknow — in the dilapidated wall of a building, in a crumbling mihrab.
SHIREEN QUADRI: How were Masud’s stories received by the Urdu world and his contemporaries?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: He was writing already from his early years, but he didn’t publish anything until 1970s. “Nusrat” was his first published story. It came out in his friend S.R. Faruqi’s literary magazine Shab-Khoon. Interestingly, when he gave it to him to look at, he didn’t say he wrote it. He said he had translated it. I do not recall Urduwallahs taking much notice of or getting excited about his stories initially. Once I asked S.R. Faruqi what he thought of Masud’s work, his reply left me dumfounded. “They don’t go anywhere,” he said. (In a way, it was a very intelligent, indeed a very perceptive remark: not going anywhere yet making the pursuit worthy of every effort was precisely the point).
All this changed with the publication of his first collection (Seemiya). Now everyone in Pakistan and India was talking about him, I mean the Urduwallahs. Critics, such as Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman, Muzaffar Ali Syed, and Safdar Mir praised his work in newspaper columns, but they didn’t venture a formal critical assessment. It appears they were smitten by his style. Anyway, today he ranks as the foremost author of Urdu short stories. Without a doubt, his is the most original voice in Urdu letters.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud is among a clutch of writers who broke away from the conventions of Urdu short fiction — the linear development of the story and the sequential structure of the plot — and charted a new path: the abstract. The social realism of Progressives (Manto, Chughtai, Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi et al) and the symbolism of Modernists (Surinder Prakash, Balraj Manra, Ghyas Ahmad Gaddi, Joginder Paul, Balraj Komal et al) gave way to mimetic realism, the new way of capturing the multi-faceted reality which reflected that post-1970 Urdu writers had a more nuanced, complex notion of reality. Kafka, whom he also translated into Urdu, had a great influence on Masud. Could you talk about what possibly shaped his fiction and gave it a new direction?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: While one’s background and milieu may play a part in shaping the character of his writing to some degree, style, ultimately, is the result of an innate element of one’s personality. The circumstances of Ghalib’s life are well-known. Could someone else have with identical circumstances produced Ghalib’s kind of poetry? Background and milieu cannot account for the imaginal world and ways of a writer, nor could this illusive “element” be explained rationally.
A man of undemonstrative feelings, Masud had deep roots in and intimate knowledge of the vanished culture of Lucknow, most clearly visible in his story “The Myna from Peacock Garden”. But even in stories where the locale and time is deliberately obscured, the details and ambience betray his intimacy with that culture. This is as much as one can say. What, however, unfolds within the confines of this knowledge is pure imagination, a working out of one’s unique personality and illusions and what have you.
However, in his several dozen letters to me, he often names Ghulam Abbas as his main influence, while many others (Azim Beg Chughtai, Rafiq Husain, Kafka, Poe, Emile Brontë, Dostoevsky) may have worked only as models. Kafka’s influence on him has been often grossly overrated. Although he thinks that Kafka and Poe have a lot to give, he is not sure whether he has consciously come under their influence. Let’s just say that Masud has consciously followed Ghulam Abbas and creatively assimilated Kafka. Whatever he learned from these writers helped him craft a style uniquely his —a style which is as deceptively simple as it is hard to imitate.
SHIREEN QUADRI: You also wrote somewhere that Masud’s narratives work as a reminder against completion and closure. In a very interesting analysis of his stories, you wrote once that in Masud’s stories “one experiences things in dynamic movement, not as objects with fixed perimeters, in a state of repose or quiescence. So one cannot be done with them and move on. Circularity has no terminus. Finishing one of his stories does not bring the expected comprehension and completion. What it does bring is a continual engagement with the unsaid and the ineffable, preserved in memory. It is like walking into a well-maintained living room, but no one greets you. You wait for hours, but no one appears. And you cannot leave because you vaguely feel a presence that you cannot see or name.” Are Masud’s narratives also a reminder against the quest for meaning? How deeply are they also enmeshed in dreams and disillusionment?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Dreams — yes; disillusionment — with qualification. In fact, his very first published story “Nusrat”, according to his admission, is a transcription of a dream he had. Disillusionment is a fact of life, any life. So, to that extent, it is there in his stories. But it has nothing to do with the author’s disposition or pathology. Masud is mature enough to not allow disillusionment to become a dirge of what once was and is no more. When the word “morbidity” or “decadence” is used to characterise his work, he vehemently takes exception to it. He knows how good that culture was and it is a shame it didn’t last, but he also knows that one must move on to the future and its teeming possibilities. Thus, a fictional recapitulation of that culture is merely a recording and not an act of mourning.
As for completion and closure, answering just this question in an interview, he expressed his dislike of the dramatic ending, adding,
“Even as a child I found it repulsive. A story’s end shouldn’t be dramatic. Which means the story should not give the impression that it has ended, that all is finished and done with, that nothing remains. The other reason could be that even after I’ve finalised a story, I seem to want to continue writing it, or if not it per se, then a fresh one along much the same lines. […] I do intend for my story to give the feeling that it has not ended, that rather what has ended is the specific episode around which it is woven. Although the short stories in Seemiyā were not written in the sequence in which they appear in the book, they illustrate my point well. You will notice a particular connectedness, a certain coherence and affinity flowing through all of them.”
SHIREEN QUADRI: Your contribution to the promotion of Urdu works has been immense. A professor emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, you have translated numerous works of Urdu fiction, including the works of Masud. You also served as editor of the Annual of Urdu Studies (1993-2014). Tell us about your association with Urdu literature. Who are some figures of Urdu literature you admire?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Well, as a Memon from Rajkot, my mother tongue is Memoni and/or Gujarati, but I was born in Aligarh, where my father was a professor at the university, and grew up among Urdu speakers. I always loved Urdu, but I wasn’t thinking of a profession in Urdu. I did my graduate and post-graduate work in Arabic and Islamic Studies. After a Ph. D., I was offered a joint appointment in two separate departments at the University of Wisconsin to teach Arabic in one and Persian in the other. A year later, I was offered to take over Urdu as well and move to one department. I gave up teaching Arabic. Since then I have worked only in Urdu, but I have taught courses on Islamic religion and culture, literatures of Muslim Societies, and Sufism throughout.
Who do I admire? In fiction, surely some of the writers I have translated. In criticism: first and foremost, Muhammad Hasan Askari, next, S.R. Faruqi, and, finally, Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman.
SHIREEN QUADRI: What memories do you have of Aligarh, where you were born, and Karachi, where your family moved to in 1954? Tell us about some of your early literary influences.
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Plenty. And the memories of Aligarh seem to be more real than those of the ten years I spent in Karachi. The funny thing is: whenever the image of Aligarh flashes across my mind, the place seems to exist in its own independent space, without even a tentacle stretching into India or Pakistan. In a way, it is more real than the two countries. It is my “Toba Tek Singh.” I haven’t been to Aligarh since 1954 and I’m dying to visit it before my time is up. But politics has a way of thwarting even the most innocent wishes. Even though I’m a US citizen for over 30 years now, I couldn’t get the Indian visa.
Anyway, being the youngest of six children, five of whom having already left Aligarh, I grew up with a father half a century older than myself and always absorbed in some book, I went through a lonely and uneventful childhood and always carried a vague feeling of some unnamed sadness, which has dogged me throughout my life. I did have some friends though. I played the games then common among Indian boys (cricket and gilli danda), stole mangoes, guava and other fruit from university orchards on the way back from school, and enjoyed swimming. So, it was just another ordinary life. I went through many of the same boyhood and adolescent experiences as
other boys.
Out of my entire fifteen years in Aligarh — excluding a few summers which we spent in our ancestral hometown Rajkot in Kathiawar, Suarashtra (the same place where, I believe, during the waning days of the British Raj, the Ali Brothers spent some time in jail on sedition charges), where my parents owned a house — the nights of 1947 stand out in memory. Partition took place while we were summering in Rajkot. When the time came for us to return to Aligarh, my mother stayed behind because of a scheduled minor foot surgery. On the way back, Father left my sister and me at the Delhi railway station and went to attend a meeting in the city which had been planned earlier and Abul Kalam Azad had insisted that he attend it. My father thought a railway station would be safer. My sister and I rode a rollercoaster of veritable fear during those two or three hours alone on the railway platform.
Later we took the train to Aligarh which arrived safely, but we subsequently learnt that the next one did experience some trouble and a few lives were lost. I said, “the nights of 1947”. Although communal incidents were relatively few in the university area, our neighbourhood on the fringe of it lived in constant fear of a sudden attack and had therefore mounted a big searchlight atop the roof of Manzur Sahib’s house, which is where we were to gather in case of an assault. One morning we were awakened in the wee hours and rushed to Manzur Sahib’s. It was a brutally chilly night. I recall I was shivering down to my bones. There was no time to put on anything warm. An overcoat was just hurriedly thrown over my sleeping clothes and off we went, with me still in my slippers. Luckily the night passed without any incident.
As for my early literary influences, well, none, or if there were any, I was not conscious of them. In Aligarh, I enjoyed reading children’s magazines, Khilona and Phulwari and, later, detective novels, such as Ibn-e-Safi’s monthly Jasoosi Duniya and Imran series. Reading of literature didn’t begin until we moved to Pakistan. I did read a lot of books and even wrote some stories, the idea of becoming a professional writer was far from my mind.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Your latest translated work, The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told (Aleph, 2017) brings together the works of 25 Urdu writers who are masters of the form, including Abdullah Hussein, Asad Muhammad Khan, Munshi Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Intizar Husain, Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Rajinder Singh Bedi and many others. In your wonderful introduction, you mention that their stories carried within them “the embryo of some of the future developments of the form”. What triggered this collection and what were your overriding concerns behind their selection?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: You seem to think that the book was planned, that there was a conscious design behind the selection. At the risk of disappointing you, the story is far simpler. Selection, while it may appear to be the result of a conscious act, is, for me at any rate, merely a reflection of who one is, and it takes a while to evolve into one “who one is”. From that point forward, selection is merely following a course predetermine by one’s nature and personality. It just happens. You don’t have to be conscious of it. I never translated a story that I didn’t like, and I never translated a work to meet the demands of a definite publishing project. I didn’t care whether a translation ever got published. This is the reason why I find it difficult to design a book according to the demands of a publisher. The credit for The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told really goes to Simar Puneet, my editor at Aleph. It was her idea and gentle persuasion that made it possible, with my part in it being very little. I only selected stories from my published work and revised them.
SHIREEN QUADRI: What are you working on next?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: There is no next, not in English anyway. After retirement in 2008, I decided to stop further translation into English. Half a century in the US had slowly affected my ability to write proper Urdu. Henceforward I will do all my work in Urdu, I told myself. I have since written very little in English, except for a few columns for the Karachi-based newspaper Dawn. When R. Sivapriya, a former editor at Penguin, asked me to translate Manto, I remember my initial reluctance to accept her offer. She persisted, I gave in.
In the past nine years, I have translated into Urdu a variety of writing from Arabic, but mostly from English: about a dozen novels, a few short stories, a work on Sufi metaphysics, articles on the nature of Islamic culture in al-Andalus, Islamic philosophy, etc. Currently I’m collaborating with a friend on translating a book about the nature and myths surrounding the transmission of Greek science and philosophy into Islamic civilisation and Islamic contribution — grudgingly acknowledged, if at all — to the making of the European renaissance. The work is proving to be quite arduous as it involves advanced mathematics and astronomy. So my courtship with English now appears to have effectively ended, although I might revise some earlier work and reprint it.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Who are some of the contemporary writers in Urdu (poets, novelists and short story writers) we must watch out for?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: This is a difficult question. I really haven’t kept up with the Urdu fictional production in the past two or three decades. There are, of course, many new writers, but I haven’t read their work critically to make any predictions about their promise. Although among the older contemporaries Ikramullah, Asad Muhammad Khan, and Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman are quite well-known to Urdu readership; their work needs to be introduced to a much wider reading public. In poetry, however, I will mention two names: Asif Raza and Riyaz Latif. Their work breaks new ground and is indicative of an entirely fresh poetic sensibility in Urdu. The former lives in the US and the latter was also here until recently. I know them personally and have enjoyed reading their poems immensely. Luckily, Asif and Riyaz write enviably good English and have translated their poems into English. I hope they will be published soon.
source: http://www.thepunchmagazine.com / The Punch Magazine / Home> Interview – Profile / by Shireen Quadri / July 31st, 2017
Humra Quraishi at Hyatt Regency’s TK’s restaurant in New Delhi Photo Sushil Kumar Verma | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
Humra Quraishi mulls over her long friendship with the Dagar family
She’s had the courage to live in and report from the violence torn Kashmir Valley, but the memories of grief stricken mothers and orphaned children leave her struggling for weeks after she returns to the Capital. When you meet Humra Quraishi, journalist and author, it’s not difficult to figure out how come she’s such a combination of the hard and the soft. She’s the lady in whose home meat has always been cooked, but who doesn’t taste it beyond the shorba (gravy), and who “can’t see raw meat”.
Meeting us at TK’s, the Oriental cuisine restaurant at the Hyatt Regency in South Delhi for lunch and a chat, Humra, she who has lived alone in a conflict zone, is nervous! Because, comfortable as she may be with the pen, she says she’s no good with chopsticks. But never mind. Chef Amit Rohilla, who has designed the new menu for TK’s, has everything under control. Not only are there forks available for desis like us, he also has a line up of vegetarian delights for our guest.
True to her varied colours, Humra’s two latest books are from two ends of the spectrum of human experience. While one is a coffee table book on the Dagars, known as the first family of Dhrupad, the other is a novel, “Meer” (Rupa) set amid the Kashmir conflict.
As Chef Amit personally sees to the dishes being cooked at the live grill fronting our table, the conversation shifts between the melody and malady of human existence. That a novel should have eventually emerged from her years of covering Kashmir is not surprising. But a history of classical music and musicians?
“Dagars & Dhrupad” (Niyogi Books) is the result of a relationship that began over three decades ago. “I heard them (the Dagar Brothers) in the early ‘80s in the home of the ambassador of Qatar to India,” she explains. Remarking she’s not an expert –– “not on anything” –– Humra says she nevertheless found it was “something that touched your soul.”
She began meeting Ustads Faiyazuddin and Zahiruddin Dagar at their residence in Delhi’s Nizamuddin. Over the years, in that simple, welcoming flat, she met various members of the clan spread over different parts of the country, and a number of newspaper interviews were published.
“One day I was clearing all my papers. I thought, I have so much material, I could do a book. Then I asked Wasif (well known vocalist Ustad Wasifuddin Dagar, son of Faiyazuddin). He said he would have to ask his mother.”
A plate of vegetable yakitori, with tri-coloured bell pepper, cottage cheese and onion, accompanies this warm tale of a close knit family. Not only did the ustad seek a go-ahead from his mother, his sisters and his students too, he left the author free to interact with them. After all, as she points out, “Once you do a book you have to look at all possible details.” However, she adds, “The forte of the book is the pictures.”
The entire family, says Humra, beginning with the elders Faiyazuddin and Zahiruddin sahab, have an air of affectionate simplicity. “They didn’t seem the sermonising type. I’m not into frilly things. And they never gave the impression they were top musicians. Then it took off,” she recalls of her easy friendship with the family.
The ustads explained the music to her and their manner of speaking and “rahan-sahan” was “very simple”, so she became a part of this large hearted family.
Like music, cooking too is a technical subject but also intimately related to the emotions. As with music, so with food, Humra reacts with the heart.
The vegetable gyoza with chili yuzu dressing is delicious, particularly because of the serving system at TK’s, where customers choose the ingredients from a counter and watch the dishes being prepared right at the table. The aromas and smoky air are reminiscent of a family kitchen.
At home, mentions Humra, she is happy with her “very basic U.P.-type khana.” Hailing from Lucknow, she says besan ki roti, bhindi ki sabzi and a bowl of kadhi…these are “the ultimate” in culinary ecstasy.
Meanwhile, seared cottage cheese, broccoli, asparagus, snow peas, with Thai basil and coriander sauce vie for attention alongside Okonomiyaki pancake, tonkatsu sauce and wasabi aioli. One more superb dish served up by the chef is Kaki-age (shredded vegetable tempura) sushi roll.
TK’s also offers an array of non-vegetarian dishes which have recently made it to the menu: There is Lat ma kai chicken, Oriental Wasabi prawn, chicken tsukune, among others, but we are happy with our choices.
Humra has dedicated the book to Begum Mehmooda Dagar, Ustad Wasifuddin’s mother, because without being a performer, she has been the mainstay of the family.
As for that adage about a family that eats together, it certainly applies to the Dagars too.
The author relates a charming tradition that remains unbroken, by which, after any concert or function (including the launch of this book), everyone comes home to have dinner, no matter how late the hour.
When Humra protested that it would be difficult for her to get home, she was told she would be escorted, which she duly was.
Music, food and love. The perfect chord!
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> MetroPlus > Table for Two / by Anjana Rajan / January 13th, 2016
