IN CONVERSATION
Remembrance of things past
R.V. Moorthy
Intizar Husain: Coming to terms with the past...
Born in India in 1925,
INTIZAR HUSAIN migrated to Pakistan in 1947 and has been living in Lahore ever since. A much-loved master storyteller, he has published eight collections of short stories, four novels (Basti and Chand Gehen being the most well known) besides numerous travelogues and translations. A journalist by profession, he draws upon the rich oral narrative tradition of the Indian subcontinent, on sources as diverse as the Katha Sagar, Puranic lore, Sufi legends, Jataka Tales, kissa-kahani and dastangoi, as well as his own training and experience as a veteran newspaper man. A collection of his short stories, Circle and Other Stories, translated by Rakhshanda Jalil, has recently been published by Rupa and Co.
Never wasteful with words in his writings, Intizar Husain is clearly uncomfortable fielding questions about his craft, the recurring metaphors of memory and migration, the lack of ideology therein. In this conversation with RAKSHANDA JALIL, he asks ruefully, why can't a man just tell his stories and be done with it? Ghalib, he insists, was a lucky man because no one thought of grilling him over the whys and hows of his ouvre!
THERE is a clear preoccupation with the past in much of your writing. Why is that? Is the past more meaningful to you than the present, or are you perhaps compelled to examine and re-examine it to reach a better understanding of the present?
Past and present are not watertight compartments for me. When I go into the past, the present follows. When I think of the present it appears to be a drama of the absurd. I search for meaning in it but I can't find any. So, I go into the past and search for what once had meaning for me. In story after story, I try to retrieve the past and make sense of the brutal and shameful parts of it. But what saddens me is that that which I had run away from in the past is in my present too. It is there, still there.
And the future? Don't you look ahead?
The future lies in between the past and the present.
Your short stories do not have a conventional linear narrative with clearly defined beginning, middle and end. Is that a storyteller's device, or is it how a story `reveals' itself to you?
I travel so much between the past and present, you see, that I cannot write conventional stories nor tell them with any degree of chronological sense. I have one foot in the past and one in the present when I am telling my stories. Moreover, the old tradition of oral narratives as exemplified in the dastaans has always attracted me. I love the way the storytellers of yore would sit down with a guchcha (tangled skein) of stories and simply launch forth — ek kahani ke pet me se doosri nikal padti thi (one story would come tumbling out from the belly of the previous one). Where's the need for stories to have beginnings, middle or even end?
You are among the handful of Pakistani writers who have written about East Pakistan. Is that a wound that has healed somewhat or is it, like the Partition, something that continues to torment?
For people of my generation 1947 was the greatest hadsa (trauma). The explanation offered for those horrific riots was that because Hindus and Muslims are different from each other, they were therefore enemies. But when the same madness gripped East Pakistan that theory collapsed. The two-nation theory that had been the driving force behind the successes of the Muslim League and the splicing of India and Pakistan into two proved to be false when Muslim was butchering Muslim in what is now Bangladesh. The sad, ironic thing was that the Muslim League was born in Dhaka and that is where it died too. The fall of ideals and their hollowness is perhaps the most painful thing imaginable. What saddens me today is that we do not learn from our past, and that is why history repeats itself over and over again in a futile meaningless cycle.
Rakhshanda Jalil is Visiting Fellow at the Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Millia, working on a Pakistan Studies Project.
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