I met Intizar Husain, one of the most celebrated Pakistani fiction writers, in March 2004. President General Pervez Musharraf had embarked upon cricket diplomacy and Indian team was to visit Pakistan to play a series of matches. Friendship and warmth was in the air as a joint statement issued by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and President Pervez Musharraf on January 6, 2004 in Islamabad had contained an explicit assurance by Pakistan that it would not allow territory under its control to be used for anti-Indian activities.
I was asked by Hindi daily ‘Amar Ujala’ to go to Lahore and do a series of interviews with prominent persons from different walks of life on how they viewed the future of India-Pakistan relations. As I was also working as a freelance correspondent for Deutsche Welle’s Hindi Service, I also planned to do a longish radio feature.
Immediately after checking into Hotel Holiday Inn on Egberton Road, I headed for Alhamra Cultural Complex that was just a few minutes’ walk from there. A seminar of South Asian writers was going on and I asked those present if Intizar Husain was attending it. When the session ended, I was introduced to him and he asked me to come to his house the next morning. My meeting with him has stayed with me even after 11 years as I have his books which I continue to read and re-read.
I have not been able to understand why Pakistan as a nation has failed to do what Intizar Husain as a writer has so successfully done – search for a wholesome, holistic, sub-continental identity that does not exclude anything or anybody, an identity that remains true to the hoary past and its religious, cultural and literary traditions, and yet is firmly rooted in the present.
When the Partition took place, Intizar Husain was 22-years-old. Born in Dibai in Bulandshahar district of Uttar Pradesh, he was educated at Meerut College. In the course of our conversation, he told me that during one of his India trips, he felt like visiting his old college and went there. When the Principal came to know about his presence on the campus, he called a meeting and felicitated him. Later he complained that had he informed about his visit, the college could have organised a bigger event in his honour. To this, Intizar Husain’s reply was: “This is my college. It’s like my home. I don’t feel the need to inform anybody if I feel like visiting my home.”
This is the quintessential Intizar Husain – equally at home in Pakistan and India. Similarly, he is equally at ease with the Persian-Arabic literary traditions of Alif Laila and dastaans and the ancient Indian art of story telling as found in the Buddhist Jataka tales in Pali, the Sanskrit texts of the Mahabharata, Kathasaritsagar and Panchatantra and the colloquial language that he imbibed in his hometown Dibai. No wonder that, among other things, he was also accused of writing Sanskritised Urdu! To him, the Jataka tales appeal because animals and human beings co-exist in them peacefully and are always in dialogue with one another.
Hindi readers are familiar with his works like “Basti” and “Naya Ghar” (novels), and “Kachhue” (collection of short stories in the style of the Buddhist Jataka tales). All the three books have been published by Radhakrishna Prakashan. Now, HarperCollins Publishers have brought out English translation of another of his important novels “Aage Samandar Hai” as “The Sea Lies Ahead”. It has been translated by well-known Urdu scholar and translator Rakhshanda Jalil who has also written a very informative introduction wherein she opines that in “Basti”, Intizar Husain “has depicted the migration as hijrat, an experience akin to the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina in June 622 AD and therefore an experience that transcends human sufferings.” “Aage Samandar Hai” is the warning that President Ayub Khan had given to voters, implying that they were sure to drown if they voted for his rival Fatima Jinnah, younger sister of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah? The novel depicts the urban violence of Karachi and takes the story of “Basti” further.
Intizar Husain edited an anthology “Pakistani Kahaniyan” (“Pakistani Short Stories”) to showcase Pakistan’s literary achievements in 50 years since 1947. In its introduction, he wrote, “Sometime after the establishment of Pakistan, the question of the identity of Pakistani literature came up … If we were a different nation (from India) then what was our national and cultural identity? Where did we trace the beginnings of our history?
We could certainly trace it from the advent of Muslims in the subcontinent, but how about the eras before that? Wasn’t the ancient period a part of our history? What were our relations with Muslim history and its traces all over India? Where were our roots?”
He found answers to these questions. One wishes that Pakistan could do this too.
