For a generation that has not been introduced to Urdu writing early in life, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi is a godsend. Staying clear of the much-lauded Progressive Writer’s Movement, he is a rare Urdu writer who unabashedly expresses his love for William Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy. Of course that does not prevent him from waxing eloquent on Amir Khusrau, the Bhakti movement and even the Quran. His latest book, The Sun That Rose from The Earth is a gently-unfolding story of India that was, the people we were, and the melting pot of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb that was Awadh. In many ways, he paints with his pen; keeping the strokes gentle, the light mellow. Excerpts:
The Mirror of Beauty is a tough act to follow. How difficult is it to let go of past success when crafting the next work?
Well, actually, The Mirror of Beauty is a sort of Act II. The stories in the present book are anterior. I wrote the first four during 1999-2001. The last story (‘Time Compression’) I wrote in 2011. At that time I was also translating the Urdu novel into English.
In many ways, the stories led to the novel. The success of the stories brought in requests and suggestions about other stories that I should write in that strain. One suggestion was Nawab Mirza Khan Dagh. But I immediately realised that his mother was a more fruitful subject for fiction. And the more I thought about her, the more was I persuaded that she needs a full scale novel. I needed to give her depth and a bit of mystery, I thought. For there was no apparent reason for her to become the woman that she did become. So I invented all the background detail of Rajputana, Kashmir and Farrukhabad. Should the novel be liked better than the stories, then this would be a case of the Persian proverb coming true: The painter draws the second picture better than the first one.
The Sun That Rose from the Earth is much more than mere nostalgia. Certain couplets throw some light not just on the economy but the social fibre of the times. For instance, Shaikh Nasikh's words on Cawnpore. Based on your experience here, what is the most abiding feeling about the society around 1857? We know quite a bit about kings and viceroys, very little about lesser mortals....
I’m glad you appreciate the fact that these stories (or the novel) sprang from any kind of nostalgia. Actually, the stories are about the ‘lesser mortals’, mortals who are immortal but who have, and can have no place in history, given the nature of historiography. These stories try to look at the culture and the society from within, not from outside, or from above. I have no illusions about the dire state of India from the middle of the 18th Century, especially after the death of Muhammad Shah in 1748. India was no longer a paradise, as observed by Amir Khusrau. But it was still a golden bird, and it was being systematically plucked and plundered, not by its rulers, but by the colonial power. As Amartya Sen has said, India was a manufacturing country up until the 18th Century. We were brought up to believe that India was no good. It had no industry, no scientific agriculture, no wealth production.
But society and culture were not so moribund as even so-called sympathetic historians never tire of telling us. India, even up to 1857, was a place worth living; a place where the pursuit of philosophy, literature, Sufism, the Hindu Bhakti culture, medicine were all normal and desirable activities. There was less poverty, less disease, less tyranny. There must have been something there, as Fanny Parkes observed in the 1820s, that the people in the Nawabi territory across the Ganga didn’t want to cross over to the English side where there was ‘peace and prosperity’ and Cornwallis’ Permanent Settlement was in force. A ‘settlement’ that, historians are forced to recognise now, brought impoverishment, increased rural indebtedness and decreased productivity. The Berlin Wall was before us until a few years ago and the people flocked to West Berlin from East Berlin in spite of the Wall. The Ganga was no Berlin Wall, but no one wanted to come to Allahabad and settle there by just crossing the river.
At one place you quote a verse from the Quran about poets. But Sufism is to be understood through poetry. How does one explain the anomaly?
There is no real anomaly there. That verse of the Quran has often been quoted as a device to score a point in debate. Actually, Amir Khusrau settled this issue when he said that the Quran was the repository of all wisdom, and the Prophet once observed, ‘Indeed, there is wisdom in some poetry.’ There is another interpretation that Khusrau follows.
According to it, the Prophet said, ‘Indeed, there is wisdom in poetry.’ Anyway, the place of poetry was always secure in Islamic culture. Its value enhanced even more when Islam came to India and was influenced by Hinduism where most of its scripture is in poetry.
Also, it’s rather simplistic to say that Sufism is to be understood solely through poetry. There has been much Sufi thought woven into poetry, but one need not be a student of poetry to understand Sufism. It is, though, true that most Sufis use poetry in their discourses and in their formal prose much the same way as I use poetry in these stories. Poetry, one must remember, was the power that informed all life in those days.
In recent times Urdu authors are moving away from the shadow of Progressive Writers’ Movement. Is it time to bury the ghost completely?
Well, the Progressives had their day. They wrote a lot of bad stuff and some good stuff. But there’s no ghost to bury. Each generation must read the literature of the past in the light of its own perceptions. What is disappointing, though, is the shallow, un-analytical way some of us are still writing about the Progressives. I fear their message may be lost in the mindless, conventional chatter that is being poured out today in the name of evaluation and revaluation.
Finally, as an Urdu author and critic, you draw sustenance from the works of William Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy. How much has their writing impacted your thought process, your choice of expressions?
I think Shakespeare, as also some others, taught me how to be bold with ideas and words. Hardy’s view of life stuck with me for a long time. Now it seems somewhat simplistic to me, but he wasn’t alone in the way he looked at things.
The Greek tragic writers, for sure (whom I read later and found more profound than Hardy), the Hindu view of the world as The Cosmic Sport — the leela of the gods — all this influenced me to some extent. But outside the non-Urdu and non-Persian writers, I have loved Shakespeare unreservedly. He Can Do No Wrong. With the exception of Rumi, I know none other who gets into the realm of words and possesses it from within.
