An anthology of Urdu short stories translated into English is rare enough these days. An anthology of 20th century Urdu short stories written by writers mostly based in Bihar and translated into English is almost unheard of. That is why Nameless Lanes , translated and edited by Syed Sarwar Hussain, deserves attention.
Nameless Lanes contains 18 stories by Urdu writers based for much or all of their life in places like Patna, Kako, Gaya and Bhagalpur. Of these, I knew one well and had heard of two. All the others are new even to me, a writer from Bihar. It redounds to Syed Sarwar Hussain’s and his Singapore-based publisher’s credit that such an anthology has been published at all, along with the required introductions to the authors and their works.
Like all anthologies, this is a mixed bag of stories, some of which appeal more than others. They also range from stories that are closer to the traditional dastaan form in sensibility and stories that are entirely modernist in ethos, as well as many in between.
There are stories that are deeply located in a particular ethos and stories that reach out, beyond place, province and language, to the entire world. Of course, I need hardly point out that both options are legitimate ones.
Important voices
One cannot really generalise about such an anthology, and yet its stories can be used to question many implicit generalisations about small towns and writing from small towns. Above all, the erroneous assumption that such writing hardly exists — an assumption that runs through not just post-colonial Anglophone criticism but can also be encountered at times in official bhasha circles with their inevitably metropolitan prizing or ignoring of the rest.
It might enlighten many a post-colonialist to take a look at Ghyas Ahmad Gaddi’s Baba-Log in this anthology. It is a quintessential story of the kind of colonial/imperial hybridity that post-colonialists often champion, except that the Old Uncle of this story goes beyond many of their notions of hybridity. Ghyas Ahmed Gaddi was one of the names I had encountered before, as — for personal reasons, for he was married to my aunt — was the Gaya-based writer and editor, Kalam Haidari.
Haidari’s story Nameless Lanes , which gives the anthology its title, is an excellent version of the modernist story in a small-town setting, informed by a progressive sensibility.
It is less a story than a deceptively controlled ramble through the more decrepit lanes of a town like Gaya during which the reader encounters various stories and senses an understated indignation at a society that disallows so many other stories.
Ilyas Ahmed Gaddi’s Ajayib Singh is a simple but effective tale, about a lonely Sikh truck driver in Chotta Nagpur and his sad-humorous choice between the ‘tribal’ woman he wants to marry and the dilapidated truck he adores. Shakila Akhtar’s A Yard-long Shroud is a stark narrative of contemporary wretchedness that reminds one of both Premchand and Ismat Chughtai, while Mohammed Mohsin’s The Mysterious Smile is a psychological character sketch of a girl who smiles at the news of death.
Taking us up into the hills, Qamarul Tawheed’s Pine Cottage delves into the mixed feelings that a daughter and an early-widowed mother have for the same man, and the inadvertent betrayal that it culminates in — all of it narrated, intriguingly, in the voice of the ghost of the dead father-husband.
There are other stories that are worth a read, though some strike me as less successful, either because they are overtaken by the angst that is always a lurking danger, especially for intelligent people in small towns, or they are hobbled by the inability of English to fully replicate the more high-flown passages of Urdu prosody.
But in general, this is a welcome publication, and one can only hope that bigger and richer publishers will show as much initiative. We need more translations, especially from the less metropolitan parts of India.
The writer is a poet, novelist and critic based in Denmark.
