Passage Through Time

Written by Ghazi Salahuddin • July 2010

5-1 Can a book offer different messages at different times? It seems Qurratulain Hyder's ‘Aag ka Darya' does.

Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus it was who famously said that one cannot step twice in the same river. What this thought affirms is that a river, ceaselessly flowing, also changes ceaselessly. It becomes a different river every moment.

But can a book you have once read will be the same when you read it again, after a long interval, particularly when it uses the analogy of a river as the symbol of continuity as well as change?

I am alluding, of course, to Qurratulain Hyder's ‘Aag ka Darya.' And this is not a review of the great Urdu novel but an attempt to share with you some of my thoughts and feelings when, in a metaphorical sense, I stepped into it the second time - after an interval of more than forty years. Yes, I was quite young and greatly enamored with the romanticism that I associated with the writings of Qarratulain Hyder when I first read ‘Aag ka Darya" in the sixties.

I have only a faint recollection of that encounter. Perhaps I felt overwhelmed by the very idea that I was reading a voluminous and well-known novel with apparently dense philosophical undertones. I began reading it, I remember, when I was traveling from Karachi to Rawalpindi by train, in an air-conditioned coupe. That also seemed a little romantic, reading a novel that recorded a journey through time in ‘Tezgam.'

However, I have read it again some weeks ago. In fact, I had decided to go back to ‘Aag ka Darya' soon after Qurratulain Hyder's death in August 2007. I would often think about the writer's own life and some controversies and emotions that were associated with her magnum opus. To me, this had some bearing on how we, particularly those of us who migrated from what is now India, relate to our pre-Partition heritage and define our emotional, cultural and intellectual loyalties to our present nationhood.

Why did it take me so many months to fulfill my resolve of reading ‘Aag ka Darya' one more time? I am not sure but it is possible that I hesitated because of the pain that I thought it could cause about some tragedies of our times. Anyhow, I have read the novel again and must confess that it was a very touching and thought-provoking experience. I felt that the novel's stature has just not been fully appreciated. The saddest thought is that not many readers of Urdu are likely to have access to this great work.

In a similar vein, I see it as a great tragedy that the works of great Urdu writers and poets are not universally appreciated. Qurratulain Hyder is one of them. So are, for instance, Iqbal and Faiz - and they are all Nobel Prize material. Partly, this is a reflection of the abysmally poor readership in Urdu, which denies our authors the potential thrust for global recognition. For instance, the two Muslim Nobel laureates in literature, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt and Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, are best-selling writers in their own countries. We are the sixth largest population of the world and Urdu is our national language and how many books of literary merit are sold and read in our country? Any realistic guess is sure to be totally heart-breaking.

The point, then, is to understand why it is important for the intelligentsia of a country to reach out to great literary expressions of its time. I need not go into examples of how great books of fiction have shaped and changed popular perceptions about issues and events. There are novels that tell the story of a period more accurately, in a sense, than a book of history. Creative writers - novelists and poets - have the gift of interpreting social change in a manner that would help their readers to come to terms with their own feelings and experiences.

‘Aag ka Darya' has a vast canvas. It covers almost the entire panorama of Indian - or South Asian - civilization. When I read it again, I kept wondering if I had really been able to understand its historical, cultural and literary references and nuances the first time I had read it. By and large, I felt that I was reading it for the first time. There was this sense of discovery and wonder. Also, I kept wondering if we have enough people in our society who possess the literary, cultural and historical knowledge to be able to fully appreciate ‘Aag ka Darya.'

Hence the forbidding thought: would ‘Aag ka Darya' finally run dry? Unfortunately, we do not have a good translation of the novel in English, though it would really be an immense enterprise. Qurratulain Hyder, it is said, would not let anyone else to do the translation. The translation she has herself done, titled naturally as "River of Fire" and published by the Oxford University Press, Pakistan, is not very good and seems to have been abridged.

A novel does not change in the sense that a river constantly changes. The words remain the same. But do meanings change with time? In this case, maybe, the question is whether a book can have a different message at different times? So, what has ‘Aag ka Darya' said to me in my second reading of the book?

First, let me tell you that the chapters that relate to the early twentieth century and to the partition and its immediate aftermath were able to draw a greater emotional response from me. The novel made me think, again, about the burdens we carry in the context of our identity and our relations with India and the immeasurable pain that the entire process has inflicted on so many people. I could identify with a number of characters in the novel and with their dreams and anxieties at different phases in the modern history of Pakistan and India.

Qurratulain Hyder wrote ‘Aag ka Darya' between August 1956 and December 1957 in Mauripur, Karachi. She was around thirty years old. Considering the breadth of the novel's plot and the research that must have gone into it, we can imagine that she was passionately involved with the task. The novel was published in 1959 - more than fifty years ago. A few years later, she returned to India from where she had migrated to Pakistan. The journey of her own life, thus, is intertwined with the story she had told.

‘Aag ka Darya' provides a very thoughtful basis on which to relate one's own feelings about the collective experience of living in South Asia during the tumult of our recent history. We have characters here who represent different points of view. There is, though, this overwhelming ambiance of a sense of loss and of nostalgia. Reading it once gain made me think about the power that a creative writer may possess to translate difficult ideas and themes into human encounters - encounters that we may identify within the context of our own emotions and thoughts.

In the novel's concluding part, Qurratulain Hyder writes about the early years of Pakistan. You will be astonished to see how perceptive she was in portraying the various shades of opinion and aspirations and deceptions that were invested in the state of Pakistan.

Just one example. One of her characters, Kamal, visits the then East Pakistan and feels very disconcerted by the attitude of some civil service officers from the western wing who were posted there in high positions. He is reminded of travelogues of British officers who were in Bengal in the eighteenth century. One of them tells him: "Rest assured, I will thank God when this region is separated from Pakistan - and will remain drunk for a week in celebration....."

Let me repeat that the novel was written between August 1956 and December 1957.