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Literary Review
TRANSLATION
Questions of belonging
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`My Temples, Too is a powerful story, told in an idiom that is distinctively Hyder's.'
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HALF a century after Partition, its cataclysmic tales of tragic displacement continue to reverberate. Works by Manto, Bhisham Sahni and, more recently, Urvashi Butalia's still haunt popular consciousness in a subcontinent that is still grappling with problems of identity and belonging.
A literary event
It is in this context that My Temples, Too (Mere Bhi Sanamkhane, 1949) is an important literary event. Hyder, described as the grand dame of Urdu literature, has been credited with refining the form of the novel in a poetry-obsessed Urdu and has been compared to literary icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the epic historical sweep of her magnum opus Aag Ka Dariya (published 1959, translated as River of Fire in 1999 by Kali for Women). Born in Aligarh in UP in 1927, Hyder came from a family of intellectuals and was educated at Lucknow's Isabella Thoburn University, going on to a stint in London as a young sari-clad reporter for Fleet Street, before emigrating to Pakistan to join her family. She returned to India in 1962 and now lives and works in Noida, Delhi. Her novels and short stories are arresting for their complex examination of the cultural inextricability of the Hindu and Muslim cultures in terms of literature, poetry and music, and the forces of history like Colonisation, Independence and Partition as well as and sociological movements like abolition of Zamindari, and their conflicts with the flow of individual lives. Here, Hyder differs in her themes from feminist writers like Ismat Chugtai in that the feminist impulse is but one separate strand that is subsumed in the broader sweep of history, and also from the progressive writers group of Manto, Bedi, Bhisham Sahni and Chugtai in her refusal to stay leftist and her nostalgia for the aristocratic zamindari life.
Stately and gracious world
My Temples, Too evokes this very world, the stately, gracious Lucknow of nawabs and Coffee House conversations. It tells the story of young Rakshanda Begum, the idealistic editor of the progressive Muslim magazine "New Era", of Peechu, her elder brother, Vimal, their friend and radio correspondent, Kiran, the young journalist, Salim, the upwardly mobile doctor, Ginnie Kaul and Diamond. The "Gang" gets together all the time at Ghufran Manzil, "the dilapidated house of (Rakshananda's) forefathers...a silent reminder of past splendour. They loved to talk. They felt that the cultures and literatures of the world belonged to them, that they were the rightful owners of all civilization... They wanted to learn and do things. They were heart-breakingly young and enthusiastic".
Politics intrudes
This dreamily idealistic, Nehru's autobiography and Confucius quoting world is destroyed by the politics of the day, as a mounting feeling of futility and a sense of impending doom creeps in. "Everybody seemed to have changed, or so it appeared to Rakshanda who noticed a group of Muslims on a wayside platform looking strangely scared. There they are, she thought bitterly, strangers in their own country." Writing his dispatches from Delhi, Kiran sadly observes, "It's terrible to think that today it is almost a crime to be a Muslim in Delhi, the Delhi of the Great Mughals, the Delhi of Nizamuddin Aulia and of Ghalib..."
My Temples, Too is a powerful story, told in an idiom that is distinctively Hyder's, in its syncretic fusion of an innately Indian "centuries of Hindu - Muslim cultural inextricability" style, which simultaneously takes cognizance of western thought and ideas. If the novel disappoints at all, it is in comparison to Hyder's magnum opus, River of Fire, that magnificent novel that successfully weaves together 2500 years of Indian history from the fourth Century BC to post-independence India, through four major characters that are common to each epoch. And if the English translation of My Temples, Too sometimes reads a trifle jerkily (unlike River of Fire, where the smooth seamlessness of the narrative is impressive despite its myriad and many-layered complexities) it is nevertheless a literary milestone for every English language reader, hitherto shut out by, as Kamal of River of Fire writes "the emotional<243>
and psychological block" against Urdu.
My Temples, Too, Qurratulain Hyder, translated from the Urdu by Qurratulain Hyder, Women Unlimited, p.182, Rs. 250.
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
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