Sometime in the 1950s, at a lunch with friends in Karachi, where she had moved with her mother from Lucknow after Partition, Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007) snapped at an interlocutor. “Roots do not necessarily grow perpendicularly downward into the soil,” she said in response to his discourse on the importance of forging a national identity. “They are usually entangled within one another.”
The remark, which appears in A Tilt in Time, a new translation of selections from her multi-volume biographical work Kar-e-Jahan Daraz Hai (Immense is the Work of the World) by Fatima Rizvi, is emblematic not only of Hyder’s feelings towards the division of the subcontinent but also of an entire generation’s, uprooted from both sides of the border after the British departed in 1947.
As she wrote in her novella The Exiles, also translated by Rizvi and included in an earlier volume titled At Home in India, “We are the unfortunate generation of our country who grew up in a time of enormous conceptual confusion.”
Profound and prescient, Hyder’s sentiment haunts the subcontinent more than seven decades later. As nations continue their onward march towards monoculturalism and political narratives shaped by religious extremism, the vestiges of the syncretic spirit that had once held the subcontinent together are waning with alacrity. In the process, much more than material history is being lost.
As historian Manan Ahmed Asif showed in his pioneering study The Loss of Hindustan, “the invention of India” and by extension, of Pakistan and Bangladesh destroyed the premise of a multi-faith society and culture with shared modes of living, feeling and being in the world.
Intangible losses
“The Exiles is one of those stories where she talks about the intangible experiences of loss that people went through during Partition,” says Rizvi on a video call. A professor at the department of English and Modern European Languages at Lucknow University, she has brought Hyder’s legacy into contemporary focus with her recent erudite yet elegant translations of the writer’s fiction and non-fiction work. Rizvi’s latest, A Tilt in Time, is subtitled Partition and Pakistan: A Mid-century Memoir and ends with Hyder’s decision to move back to India with her mother after living in Pakistan for a little over a decade as “mohajirs (immigrants)” from Uttar Pradesh.
In the years she spent across the border, Hyder kept up a breathlessly peripatetic life, moving between East and West Pakistan on multiple professional projects as well as spending some time in London in between as a journalist. Her writing style, she said herself, reflected the chaos of her life. The fluidity of her thoughts, the whimsical jump-cuts punctuated by her acerbic humour, are strewn all over A Tilt in Time. “As a writer, she is digressive,” Rizvi agrees. “In this volume, she mostly digresses to philosophise, not philosophies she had picked up from earlier philosophers, but (to offer) her own view of things.”
Many, indeed, were Hyder’s opinions—on society, religion, gender and the lives of the people she was surrounded by. As a feminist, she was touched to the quick by sexism, especially when such attitudes disrupted her professional growth. Yet, she also had a gift, rare among great authors, of presenting “herself as a comic or laughable figure, a person easily beguiled, with little or no understanding of the practicalities of human life,” as Rizvi writes in her introduction.
Despite her light-heartedness, Hyder was uncompromising in her need to protect her privacy. If a steady stream of table-talk, with gossipy bits thrown in, was her default mode, she remained steadfastly elusive about delving into her own life, especially the trauma of Partition. “These elisions are by design. Hyder wants the world to perceive her as she would like to be perceived,” Rizvi says. “She writes about all the people around her, they are part and parcel of her life. But she definitely does not want the limelight to fall on her. That was, I think, a part of her being, her sensibility, her nature.”
An identity of her own
The result of this approach was a peculiar book, described by the writer as “a biographical non-fiction novel.” The closest cousin of this genre is auto-fiction, though, unlike its contemporary practitioners, Hyder maintained a studied reticence about her inner life and feelings. “She’s constructing an identity for herself because she wants people to perceive her as a strong woman, perhaps at times a woman wronged,” Rizvi adds.
One of Hyder’s bugbears in all the years she lived in Pakistan pertained to the duty that was imposed on her by her government job to help craft a “pure and unadulterated Pakistani heritage”. This mission required her to travel to East Pakistan from time to time, ostensibly to make documentaries about different music and dance forms practised in the region. But each trip made her realise the futility of trying to create a single, cohesive cultural identity for a nation that was irredeemably diverse—despite the unifying principle of the Islamic republic hanging on the common thread of religion. Serio-comic episodes of Hyder’s endeavour find mention in A Tilt in Time, including her desperate attempts to mobilise young women from East Pakistan to apply to work as stewardesses at Pakistan International Airlines.
The absurdity of these projects become sharper considering the milieu in which Hyder grew up. Born in Aligarh to Syed Sajjad Haider and Nazar Sajjad Haider, both highly regarded progressive Urdu writers, she not only imbibed values of syncretism but also, as Rizvi emphatically says, of cosmopolitanism.
A voracious reader, she met some of the luminaries of 20th century literature—Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden and Mulk Raj Anand, among others—as well as politicians like Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad during her time in Pakistan and travels abroad. She got to know internationally famous actors, artists and diplomats to boot.
Carving out a singular cultural identity was never going to be possible for a personality as multifarious as hers—adept at writing with as much felicity in English as in Urdu, trained to play the sitar as well as the piano, a talented painter and sculptor, and widely travelled reporter.
Fiercely independent, Hyder could well have lived off the favours of the charmed circle of friends and family who surrounded her. Instead, she took much pride in being a “working woman”. She financed her foreign trips with her own income, and when advised by well-wishers to take up opportunities to publish her work in English abroad or get a scholarship to spend time at a foreign university, claimed to be too indolent to do so.
During the height of the controversy that brewed around her iconic novel Aag Ka Dariya (The River of Fire, published in Urdu in 1959), Hyder adamantly refused to use any influence to squash a spiteful, personal invective against her in a magazine. On the contrary, she took great pains to stop the publication of an overly sympathetic counter-praise scheduled to run in another periodical. At no point during her illustrious career, did she allow herself to take advantage of her parents’ reputation, though she did benefit much from the wide network of friends she cultivated.
It is tempting to ascribe Hyder’s decision to return to India to her innate love for the country. But it wasn’t as simple. “When she decides to go back to India in 1960, Pakistan is on the verge of martial law,” Rizvi says. “I don’t think she was valorising India by going back because she knew that the syncretism she valued had all but gone.”
Instead, her decision to come back, Rizvi believes, was prompted by the fact that Hyder “could (live) anywhere in the world.” She could have been in Europe, in Britain, in the US or in Canada, where many of her friends moved. India was one of the many places she could make herself at home in. A citizen of the world, Hyder was at home everywhere and nowhere.