Stories, displaying tantalising glimpses of our glorious but uncertain world, produce a nuanced narrative that shifts our mind from the clamour, chaos and melodrama. They also creatively assert that no dichotomy exists between dream and reality and man cannot live on the external fringe of society. Poignant tales of the peripatetic life make it clear that human existence has not gone beyond the stage of survival. These points permeate all through and these qualities transform his writings into a riveting read and the fiction writer whose fiction would stay with us forever recently left the ephemeral world. He is none other than Intizar Hussain, equally admired in India and Pakistan and whose book was short listed for the Man Booker prize last year.
Intizar Hussain’s creativity maps new terrain as he adroitly installs the tenacity of human experience in public space with remarkable ease. His short stories, novels, criticism, travelogues and columns scoff at notions of stifling ideology and technology-mediated reality. Intizar Hussain (1925-2015) through the amazing sweep of his writings zeros in on what constitutes popular culture and remains with our collective consciousness to produce a tract against conformism and insensitivity. His stories especially widely acclaimed ones such as “Zard Kutta”, “Akhri Adami”, “Woh Jo Khoeye Gai” and “Kachuwae” accord greater value to ‘things that are lost’ as they are the perennial sources of his creative afflatus. He deliberately pulls the dominant discourse of his time – mimetic realism – apart and explores new configuration of the complexity of human relationship. He is perhaps the first fiction writer in Urdu who makes myths, archetypes, legends and folk tales the object of reinterpretation, subversion and creation of new myth by taking recourse to solipsistic questioning. Juxtaposing various patterns of things seen and of things thought about, Intizar Hussain creates a non-negotiable inner code to come to grips with a deep sense of dislocation. Dream, far from betraying nostalgic and wishful experience, indicates an undercurrent disquiet about the human relationship and ever-increasing anxiety about the saptio-cultural identity. His central motif-dream-enables his protagonists to repudiate feigned morality and the imperceptible quivering of selfishness found in human nature. Since universal truths have ceased to exist, his characters seek refuge in dreams and one of his widely known stories “Seedhian” (stairs) endorses it:
“Akhtar, I understand does not sleep at all. Till midnight he narrates the dream and then goes around in dream”.
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It is only artefact of the insatiable contemporary world that bends towards individual freedom, non-discrimination and equality and strong enough to push us in the right direction. It leads him the narrator to a world which never allows him to be cruel and greedy. For Intizar Hussain writing by its very nature tends to be deferential towards those in authority.
Intizar Hussain, having more than one hundred short stories, six novels, two travelogues, three plays, two biographies, scores of critical essays and ten other miscellaneous books to his credit, tries to explore various dimensions of a reality that has an unpredictable element that shapes our day to day reality. He makes it clear that time is semantic structure that defies categorisation but it lends conceptual and narrative support to patterns of temporal experiences. Intizar Hussain’s creative oeuvre remains the object of adoration and scathing criticism. His fiction is described as “Dooms’ day fiction” as he alludes to the past, not the actual one but the imagined past, and explaining his position in this regard, he asserts.
“People allege that I refer to the past frequently and present and future seem non-existent in my writing. They may have a point in it but for me past and present are not separate entities. As a result whenever I refer to the past present finds it way and for me that time only unveils the tales of human sufferance and I find myself surrounded by killings and hangings. I do not know which hanging took place in recent past and who were pilloried in the Mughal period. I cannot tell who were put to death in 1857 and for me death, ruin and anguish sum up human life since the dawn of the civilisation”.
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Eminent Urdu professor Gopi Chand Narang aptly observes Intizar Hussai’s fiction betrays the never ending conflict between human destiny and the external verities of life and subsequent sufferings and agony. For him past is a nuanced reality in which history, religion, culture, ethnic legacy, mythology, folklore, faith and superstitions draw breath simultaneously. In his fiction, Partition emerges a living embodiment of anguish and the writer is seemingly piqued at all pervading decline.
In Intizar Hussain’s death we lost a writer who had no idealised image of himself and his sensitive portrayal of the trials and tribulations of his characters put us on the way for self-discovery.