Basti

by Intizar Husain

  INTIZAR HUSAIN (b. 1925) is a journalist, short-story writer, and novelist, widely considered the most significant living fiction writer in Urdu. Born in Dibai, Bulandshahr, in British-administered India, he migrated to Pakistan in 1947 and currently lives in Lahore. Besides Basti, he is the author of two other novels, Naya Gar (The New House), which paints a picture of Pakistan during the ten-year dictatorship of the Islamic fundamentalist General Zia-ul-Haq, and Agay Sumandar Hai (Beyond Is the Sea), which juxtaposes the spiraling urban violence of contemporary Karachi with a vision of the lost Islamic realm of al-Andalus. Collections of Husain’s celebrated short stories have appeared in English under the titles Leaves, The Seventh Door, A Chronicle of the Peacocks, and An Unwritten Epic.

  FRANCES W. PRITCHETT has taught South Asian literature at Columbia University since 1982. Her books include Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics, The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah, and (with Khaliq Ahmad Khaliq) Urdu Meter: A Practical Handbook.

  ASIF FARRUKHI is a writer and a physician trained in public health. He is a frequent contributor to the English-language press of Pakistan and the author of seven short-story collections, two essay collections, and a monograph on Intizar Husain. He is the editor of Fires in an Autumn Garden: Stories from Pakistan, Look at the City from Here: Writings About Karachi, and co-editor of Faultlines, a selection of stories about the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, and has collaborated with Intizar Husain on the anthology Short Stories from Pakistan.

  BASTI

  INTIZAR HUSAIN

  Translated from the Urdu by

  FRANCES W. PRITCHETT

  Introduction by

  ASIF FARRUKHI

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  The publisher and the translator wish to thank Janab Adil Mansuri for generously providing the calligraphy that appears in this volume.

  Copyright © 1979 by Intizar Husain

  Translation copyright © 2007 by Frances W. Pritchett

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Asif Farrukhi

  All rights reserved.

  First published by HarperCollins India, 1995

  This revised translation first published by Oxford University Press India, 2007

  Cover image: Ali Raza, Door I, 2008; courtesy of the artist

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Intizar Husain, 1925–

  [Basti. English]

  Basti / by Intizar Husain ; translated by Frances W. Pritchett and with an introduction by Asif Farrukhi.

  p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-582-8 (alk. paper)

  I. Pritchett, Frances W., 1947– II. Title.

  PK2200.I57B313 2012

  891.4'3937—dc23

  2012029418

  ISBN 978-1-59017-582-8

  ebook ISBN 978-1-59017-597-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  BASTI

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Translator’s Note

  Notes

  Glossary

  INTRODUCTION

  AT THE beginning of Intizar Husain’s Basti—an Urdu word that refers to a human settlement of any dimension, from a few houses to a city—we see the world through the eyes of a child, and it is a paradise of brightly colored birds, playful animals, and luscious greenery. This paradise, however, proves to be short-lived. Soon Zakir, the protagonist and narrator of the book, is cast into a world of violence and uncertainty and regret and longing: the world of modern Pakistan. Images of burning houses and cities, of ash and smoke abound. Near the end of the book, this ongoing conflagration is glossed in words of the Buddha:

  Monks, just imagine a house which is burning on all four sides. Inside it some children are stumbling around, trembling with fear. Oh monks, men and women are children, stumbling around in a fiercely blazing house.

  This is followed by a line from the Quran that tolls through the final pages of the novel: “I swear by Time, man is surely in loss.”

  To contemplate the character and dimensions of that loss and find a new form to contain it, one that strikingly combines the historical past and present-day events, mythic lore and modernist experimentation, elements of both the oral and the written, and various sacred and secular traditions of South Asia—this is the triumph of Husain’s Basti.

  One of the most celebrated writers in South Asia today, Husain is the author of numerous collections of short stories, three novels, and two memoirs, as well as a translator of writers from Chekhov to Stephen Crane and Thornton Wilder. Born in 1925 in Dibai, a small town near the north Indian city of Aligarh, he prefers to abide by his grandmother’s custom of dating a life in relation to historical events, such as wars, plagues, and the rise and fall of nations and empires and their leading figures. By such a reckoning, Husain came of age as the British Raj was coming apart. His family belonged to the Urdu-speaking gentry, the ashrafiya, and his father, a convert to the Shiite creed, was a learned and religious man who was very much opposed to Western and modern ideas. Husain, his only son, was accordingly educated in a traditional madrassa as a child but later obtained a master’s degree in literature from Meerut College. By this time he had decided to become a writer.

  He made a beginning as a poet and a critic, but then turned to fiction, writing his first stories in response to the terrible ordeal of the 1947 partition of India, in which millions of people were driven to leave their homes and up to a million died, and the new state of Pakistan, itself divided into noncontiguous western and eastern sectors, emerged. In response to a radio transmission from the noted critic Muhammad Hasan Askari, a mentor for the budding writer, Husain left his native town in India and moved to Lahore, the traditional center of Urdu cultural life, in West Pakistan. There he worked as a journalist, as he does to this day, immersing himself in the literary life of the city and rapidly making a name for himself as a writer of short stories (a first collection came out in 1952 and was followed by another in 1955). These stories, like those of Husain’s great contemporary Qurratulain Hyder, focused for the most part on the search for roots after the disruption of partition, while also displaying a remarkable degree of formal invention. In the hands of Saadat Hasan Manto and others, the Urdu short story had already attained a high level of maturity and sophistication; Hyder and Husain extended this tradition.

  Husain’s first stories might be described as Chekhovian. Increasingly, however, he was drawn to the work of twentieth-century European masters like Kafka, even as he began to explore a wide variety of traditional South Asian narrative forms, some very ancient. These included the interlinked animal tales from the Sanskrit Panchatantra; the Jataka tales of the Buddha’s endless cycle of births; and Persian dastaans, those epically vast sequences of loosely linked stories, full of chivalry, romance, magic, and trickery, recounting the exploits of legendary heroes like Amir Hamza. Equally at
home in these European and Asian traditions, Husain came to read The Metamorphosis through the lens of a dastaan in which a prince is turned into a fly, and the dastaan in turn through Kafka. His new style—critics spoke of it as a turn toward symbolism—contributed to a larger shift in Urdu fiction, as the naturalism of an earlier generation of left-of-center progressive writers, with its emphasis on the squalid details of poverty and oppression, was replaced by a search for more imaginative and challenging approaches to the depiction of reality. Many writers believed that more than two-dimensional realism was needed to depict the vast social changes that had come with independence.

  Husain’s remarkable 1962 work, Din aur Dastaan (Daytime and Dastaan), marks a crucial turning point in his career. The book is in two distinct parts, each quite unlike the other apart from their common connection to the 1857 uprising against British rule. (The British have traditionally referred to this as the Great Mutiny because it began with a revolt of Muslim soldiers, but historians now commonly see it as a full-scale war of independence.) The first part of the book, “Daytime,” is a novella in the vein of Turgenev, a writer whom Husain has translated: It is a study of unrequited love as well as a sympathetic and conventionally realistic portrayal of the north Indian “gentry” in decline during the years immediately before partition, and a brilliantly sustained evocation of a long-lost past full of decaying mansions, dark rooms, superstitions, beliefs, and rituals, that revolves around half-realized and unarticulated love, various journeys and farewells. The dastaan that follows, called “Roaring Water,” is something else entirely. This may well be the only instance of a modern Urdu writer working in this fantastical genre, and it stands as a precedent for later works in a similar vein by Salman Rushdie and John Barth, among others. Here tale within tale unfolds, stories of adventure and romance that are all based on folk beliefs about 1857. Both “Roaring Water” and “Daytime” confront the political and social legacy of that war—which gave rise to questions of personal and collective identity that are still very much alive today—but they do so in ways that are not just unlike but irreconcilable. Husain, who has described himself as the last remaining soldier of 1857, thus implies that history alone cannot take the measure of this foundational conflict, the precursor to many later ones. It must be imagined and imagined again.

  In 1971 Pakistan suffered a new crisis and a new division. Political tensions between the country’s western and eastern sectors came to a head when a political party from the more populous but economically deprived east triumphed in national elections, a result that the military government, based in the west, then refused to recognize. The illegitimate and brutal military response of the Pakistan army led the east to declare independence, after which India intervened and war erupted on both eastern and western fronts. Pakistan suffered a humiliating defeat, and the former East Pakistan emerged as the current state of Bangladesh. Husain, like many intellectuals in West Pakistan, was not fully aware of the savage nature of the army’s operations in the east, and initially he viewed these events as a crisis of the nation-state. In 2005 I conducted an interview with him in which he remarked that “the immediate sociopolitical situation of the country” impelled him to write, continuing:

  All at once I felt that 1947 had again come alive within me. That whole period before and during 1947 came back to me so sharply and intensely that without thinking what I should do with it, without planning to make it into a novel . . . I just went on writing and writing. After that I put the pen down; after that the news began to come. East Pakistan had fallen. When . . . some months had passed, I again picked up the pen and looked at what I had written . . . [and] the form of the novel began to take shape in my mind and my imagination.

  The novel was Basti, Husain’s first, a work central to his oeuvre, in which the complications of historical perspective and the mixture of fabulous and realistic styles that he had tried out in Din aur Dastaan are fused into a new unity. Husain has always been inclined to see the present in the past and the past in the present, but nowhere else in his work is this tendency articulated as dramatically as in Basti. This fuels the sense of urgency and emergency that marks the book, the appalled prophetic fervor it takes on as its proceeds, but also its dreamy passages, those moments when time seems suspended.

  The novel begins lyrically, describing a pre-partition world in which Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim traditions and visions both peacefully coexist and transform each other. We hear a child wondering innocently about first and last things, and the stories he is told by the Hindu priest and the Muslim mullah in response to his questions:

  “Maulana, when will Doomsday come?”

  “When the mosquito dies, and the cow is free of fear.”

  “When will the mosquito die, and when will the cow be free of fear?”

  “When the sun rises in the west.”

  “When will the sun rise in the west?”

  “When the hen crows, and the rooster is mute.”

  “When will the hen crow, and when will the rooster be mute?”

  “When those who can speak fall silent, and shoelaces speak.”

  “When will those who can speak fall silent, and when will shoelaces speak?”

  “When the rulers grow cruel, and the people lick the dust.”

  After one “when” a second “when,” after a second “when” a third “when.” A strange maze of “whens”! The “whens” that had passed away, the “whens” that were yet to come.

  This questioning child is the hero of the book, Zakir (a common Islamic name meaning “he who remembers” and sometimes carrying an additional sense of “he who narrates or recites”), who lives in the fictional town of Rupnagar, literally “beautiful place.” The boy Zakir forms an attachment to his cousin Sabirah (meaning “patient” or “enduring”), the nature of which remains alluringly ambiguous. They play together as children, digging a hole in the ground which they then call their grave, though Sabirah is taken aback when Zakir suggests they follow up by playing wedding. After drifting apart, they meet again when Sabirah is a nubile young woman and Zakir a student in Meerut. Sabirah asks Zakir if he will check out a book from the library for her, and as they chat shyly he inquires if she has read the nineteenth-century historical romance Paradise on Earth (Firdaus-e-Bareen, which has also been translated as Paradise of the Assassins), an enormously popular tale about a youth so devoted to his beloved that in order to please her he joins the dreaded sect of the Assassins. Thus longing and foreboding and literature are linked in these tentative exchanges. They come to an end with come with partition, however, since Sabirah remains in India. Later in the book, Zakir will receive news of her from a Hindu friend, and his father will even urge him to write to her, a proposal that he mulls over. She remains for all that inaccessible, a memory that haunts the pages of the book.

  The novel now jumps forward to the early seventies and the intensifying conflict between West and East Pakistan (while also counterpointing this with passages that evoke the euphoric sense of possibility that people felt in the first days of the newly founded Pakistan). Zakir lives with his parents in Lahore, where he teaches history. His mother is worried about family members in the east and asks worriedly about the news from Dhaka, news that either doesn’t come or is not to be relied on. Much of the book’s action takes place in tea shops (not unlike the Cairo coffeehouses, or maqhas, described by Naguib Mahfouz), where Zakir meets a group of friends who argue and tease each other and try to make sense of the violence outside. The critic Muhammad Umar Memon has described Zakir’s friends as “shorn of physical traits and particularizing details,” and it is true they are a collective presence, a kind of chorus commenting on events, themselves “swathed in an eerie half-light,” that they are hard put to understand and helpless to control. All they can do is talk, a reflection of the powerlessness of intellectuals but also of the people as a whole.

  Things spin out of control, the news becomes even more intermittent and unreliable, and the sense
of isolation at the center of the book grows ever greater. Passages from Zakir’s diary (a private forum by definition) describe the slide into war, while interior monologue plays an increasing role in the book, and a note of delirious, perhaps prophetic, fervor enters in. As the gunfire and sloganeering continue, as everything is falling part, Zakir’s father dies. Wandering aimlessly, Zakir finds himself in the cemetery:

  He sat down beside the grave, thinking that when he came to himself he would say the Fatihah. He was still unable to catch his breath, and his body was trembling. The sound of firing could be heard. The sound of slogans too, but they were hardly slogans any more. Now they were a torrent of ferocious, inhuman yelling. And why was there this smoke? . . . So much had already burned, so much was burning. So many buildings had already been destroyed, so many were about to collapse. He crawled and crawled, trying to come out from under the rubble. He felt that he was not all in one piece. Am I myself or the rubble of myself? “What a building has sorrow destroyed!” Am I in pieces? Everything around me is in pieces. Time too . . . . I’m wandering, broken up—through what times?

  With his mind moving in anguish between present and past, Zakir tries to view the convulsions of modern Pakistan in light of the Shiite experience of defeat, persecution, and endurance, but it is only to envision the city around him as Kufa, the city which betrayed Imam Husain. (That nowadays Shiites are targeted for killing in Pakistan only adds to the ironies of this passage.) He keeps wandering through desolate lanes, offers prayers in a mosque devoid of other worshippers, and is warned: “Don’t speak, for fear you might be recognized.”

  When a man can do nothing, what is his responsibility? Zakir and his friends wait in the café, defeated, it seems, before defeat. And yet defeat is not total, and introspection can perhaps lead to true self-reckoning and even hope. As Zakir explains: