Dareechah-e-Nigaarish
Dareechah-e-Nigaarish
Toronto, ON
Canada
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Sajjad Zaheer: Modern Urdu Fiction Writer
Sajjad Zaheer (1905 - 1973)
دریچہ اِس سیکشن میں سجّاد ظہیر کی فکشن میں سے کچھ اقتباسات یہاں اپ لوڈ کرے گا جیسے جیسے وقت اجازت دے گا
(طلعت افروز، ستمبر 20 سنہ 2021)۔
سجّاد ظہیر کی شخصیّت اور فن کے بارے میں کچھ مضامین نیچے درج ہیں۔
Sajjad Zaheer and Progressive Writers’ Movement
Dawn Features October 2006.
Referencing the 41st Edition of Irt.iqa magazine, Karachi 2006.
Only that literature will meet our criteria whose thought process invokes within us a passion for freedom, an appreciation of beauty, a constructive spirit, and awakens within our souls the light of life’s realities; literature that moves us, creates a turmoil and turbulence, makes us restless, does not put us to sleep since it would be akin to death if we sleep more.
Thus Munshi Premchand defined the objectives of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in his presidential address at the movement’s first congress held in 1936. The standard bearer of this movement was Sajjad Zaheer, a scion of nobility who renounced the advantages of his birth to work for the cause of the downtrodden. Celebrations of his birth centenary beginning in 2005 have revived some spirit of the time and good men who are still there have tottered to the aid of the Party.
The 41st edition of Irtiqa magazine, Karachi is devoted to Banney Bhai, his pet name, and the Progressive Writers’ Movement that he founded. It is a document of considerable interest for the present day reader who can find a great deal of thoughtful material on the life and work of Sajjad Zaheer as well as a candid discussion on the course of the movement, its achievements, drawbacks and its likely future. The issue presents a selection of the papers that were read at centenary conferences and seminars in the subcontinent. A brief account of the proceedings of the conferences held in Karachi and Lahore as well as in India has been covered for the issue by Jamal Naqvi.
Sajjad Zaheer saw in literature that force which could bring about a qualitative change in the life and thought of the people since it anticipated the profound and the deep unseen as well as the surface tensions springing from the font of ambition that not only make men dream but goad them to their realisation. But that in effect meant changing the aesthetics of art which some thought to be inflexible. Sajjad Zaheer who believed in scientific thinking that changes with new discoveries and does not remain wedded to old concepts saw no harm if literature could give a helping hand in social transformation. Why should this be so abominable, asks Dr Muhammad Ali Siddiqui since the artist has never been unconcerned about the form and content of his creation and its relevance to society. A piece of literature is after all a narrative. It is saying something. It is an expression. It is not therefore possible for art to be dumb. Sajjad Zaheer like other progressive thinkers wanted literature to be alive to the human situation and its needs. What was so unliterary in that?
Wasn’t that that the Greek and Roman writers of yore sought in their tales of the gods and goddesses and hasn’t that been the motive in religious texts and hymns and dirges that embody the classic tradition? And nobody seems to have any quarrel with that.
Irtiqa magazine contends that Sajjad Zaheer with time’s passage has become a leading symbol of the movement and its unending struggle for its ideals. He will continue to inspire others to join the caravan. That may be true, yet, it is a fact that the movement wilted which Ashfaq Saleem Mirza, in his essay on its rise and fall, blames on the excessive optimism of our armchair revolutionaries while Dr Qamar Rais sees it not so much as a reaction to the inflexibility and extremism of the doctrinaires as to the changes that came at the end of the colonial rule when it was thought that a number of objectives of the movement had been achieved and the nationalist governments banned the PWM and jailed its leaders leaving others disenchanted and prone to pursue writing in the spirit of their own creative urges and bent of mind.
Sajjad Zaheer’s centenary celebrations after years of the demise of the Soviet Union serve as a reminder that neither has history ended nor the class struggle ceased. The subjugated masses of Asia, Africa and Latin America do not see the realisation of their dreams in the nightmare of globalisation. Closer at home the voices of men like Sajjad Zaheer are beginning to echo more resoundingly as the rude sight of corporate plunder is bared to even the dim-eyed on the street. In any case the clouds of dust from the debris of the Berlin wall seem to be settling down making the vision of the dazzled and the dazed clearer. The success of Left parties in South America and reassertion of the progressive politics even in Western Europe and signs of renewal of stirrings in the Non-Aligned Movement as was seen at the Havana summit are developments that should not surprise anyone. What should be more worrying for the sages of statecraft and movers and shakers of our world is the sight of a supine mass of humanity that does not rise to claim its rights and where the intellectual class plays the courtesan.
Sajjad Zaheer (1905 - 1973)
Progressive Urdu novel "London kee aik raat" by Sajjad Zaheer, one of the founders of the Progressive Writers Movement of the 1930s in British India۔
Sajjad Zaheer’s Urdu novel London ki Ek Raat [A Night in London], written in 1935 and first published three years later, depicted the angst of the young men (and the underground revolutionary youth from upper class Indian families) who, angered by repressive British policies in India, engaged in anti-imperialist activities while in London.
This review is by Dr Madhu Singh, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Modern European Languages at the University of Lucknow.
London ki Ek Raat has recently been published for the first time in an English translation, as A Night in London. The translator is Bilal Hashmi. A partial translation by the Urdu scholar Ralph Russell is available online.
The year was 1935, and India was struggling to break free after almost two centuries of British domination. Indian nationalism of various hues had charged the imagination of the elites and the masses alike. Ideas of socialism and revolution were in the air. Influenced by Marxism and inspired by the success of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, writers in India were shifting their earlier Gandhian stance in favour of a more revolutionary ideology.
Strong nationalist feelings had begun to emerge in literature, reflecting - according to the Urdu scholar and communist Ralph Russell - an empathy for the poor and a questioning of existing customs as well as desire for liberation from foreign rule and indigenous elites (Russell 1999:70). The novels written during this momentous period in Indian nationalism played an important role in imagining and embodying the radical vision of anti-colonial nationalism, though the ‘nation-centredness’ of this new generation of Indian novelists was tempered by a cosmopolitan outlook and experience.
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Not all the young men who arrived in London were politically charged. Many preferred to spend their time in leisurely pursuits and often stayed back in Britain for unreasonably long periods. Quite a few of them, as depicted in this novel, studied for the Indian Civil Service examinations with dreams of being collectors or magistrates of some province back home.
From the 1870s, universities such as Oxford and Cambridge had begun to admit Indian students. Some became, in Kipling’s mocking phrase, more English than English, while others arrived at a stage of political awakening and alienation through which they became articulate and ardent champions of Indian freedom (Trivedi 2007). Besides being a centre of their educational aspirations, London (and Paris, too) had become known for its vibrant cosmopolitan and intellectual culture.
Born into an upper class family of Lucknow in 1905, Sajjad Zaheer, was one of the pioneers of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in India - a movement which dates from a meeting in November 1934 at the Nanking Restaurant in Denmark Street, close to both Bloomsbury and Soho. He spent almost a decade in Britain, gaining a master’s degree at Oxford and then embarking on a career in law at Lincoln’s Inn. All this was amid the furore caused by the publication in 1935 of a collection of short stories, Angare [Burning Embers]. Zaheer had co-authored this volume with his friends Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan, and Mahmudulzafar. The book was banned by the United Provinces state government in India for having ‘hurt the religious susceptibilities of a section of the community’. Dubbed inflammatory in nature, Angare was a critique of the culture and community from which the authors’ sprang and of Indian society in general.
In London, Sajjad Zaheer came into contact with several leftist writers and intellectuals and was influenced by socialist thought. London ki Ek Raat was Zaheer’s second work of fiction, a novelette of a hundred and fifty pages, and was written in Urdu in spite of his English education and his grounding in European literary traditions. It was an experiment in fiction writing that adopted a variety of avant garde European styles and techniques and was also the first novel to display the ideologies and aspirations of Indian youth in the political context of India.
In his foreword to the novel, Sajjad Zaheer modestly stated:
This book can hardly be called a novel or a story. If you wish to see one aspect of the life of Indian students in Europe you may read it. The greater part of it was written in London and Paris, and on the ship returning to India. That was more than two years ago. Now when I read through the manuscript I hesitate to send it to the printer. (Russell 232)
Written under the influence of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, it captured - as the title suggests - the events of a single evening in London. On a broader level, it recreated the life of Indian students in London who spent time in cafes and coffee houses in and around the Bloomsbury area, smoked cigarettes, discussed Marxism and socialism, criticised British imperialism, condemned racism, entered into affairs with white girls and lived lavishly on money sent to them by their affluent families back home.
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The Bloomsbury area is abuzz with students and intellectuals, artists and poets and visitors from all over. The clock says it’s ten past six in the evening. At Russell Square underground station, Azam waits for his girlfriend, Jane, who has promised to come but hasn’t. Newspaper vendors shout headlines: ‘Jobless Workers Assemble at Hyde Park’, ‘Ten British Soldiers Stop Ten Thousand “Natives” from Violence’, ‘A British Soldier Hurt and Fifteen Natives Die’ … . Distressed at the plight of Indians (natives!) back home, his mind strays towards his country.
His thoughts are soon interrupted as his friend Rao, a law student, walks out of the station. Both head towards the local pub for a glass of beer before making it to the party hosted by their friend Naim ud din who is pursuing a PhD. At the pub they encounter the conflicting nature of the public’s response to India: the unequivocal support to the cause of freedom by a couple of British factory workers and also a drunkard’s arrogance and racism towards Indians seen in the derogatory remarks made towards Gandhi.
At Naim’s party , the gramophone plays loud music and young men and women dance to its tune. Over innumerable glasses of wine and lemonade, cups of tea and coffee, and amid spirals of cigarette smoke, heated discussions cover a variety of topics ranging from women’s freedom in European societies compared to the status of Indian women, alienation from one’s culture and tradition among the Indians living in England, the gradual decline of British imperialism, anti-colonial and anti-imperial nationalism and resistance, socialist revolution and communism. Ideological differences become evident and scores are pursued through lively argument.
All the while, the host Naim finds convivial company in an English woman, Sheila Green, and falls deeply in love with her. It is their first meeting. Much to his anguish, Sheila Green confides her love and admiration for her Indian friend and lover, Hiren Pal, a final year medical student who left for India eighteen months previously to fulfil his commitment towards his motherland. She has lost contact with him and is heartbroken. Soon after the loud music, dancing and brawling is interrupted by an angry landlady and the party disperses.
In the second part of the novel, while the guests depart Sheila Green stays back at Naim’s request. Through long flashbacks into her past, Naim - and the readers - become acquainted with a long and passionately romantic prequel to her story, of the time she and Hiren spent together in a small Swiss village. This is quite different in tone to the first part of the novel and is apparently autobiographical in nature. As Sheila’s story comes to an end, Naim tries to console her. Then, as morning approaches, she puts on her hat and coat and says goodbye to her host. Naim returns to his armchair and sits there motionless. ‘The fire had gone right out, and the room was getting colder and colder. The watery light of morning like a thief on tiptoe, began to steal in through the window’ (Russell 258).
Sajjad Zaheer’s son-in-law and biographer has suggested Zaheer, while in London, did indeed develop an interest in a young lady and has suggested that he based the character of Hiren Pal on his own experience. As with Hiren, Sajjad Zaheer too was influenced by Marxist and socialist teachings. For young radical nationalists like Hiren - and Zaheer - idealism was not ‘an indifference to material things, the religious life, devotion to God, but the fight in this world against greed lust and the power to oppress and tyrannize over others, the fight against ignorance and stupidity and deceit, the fight to awaken the sleeping melodies which a man cannot hear unless he has a generous heart and an alert mind and a healthy body’. The latter part of the novel is significant in its use of modernist techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue in Sheila Green’s romantic flashbacks of her passionate relationship in Switzerland. It also focusses on Hiren’s deep rooted commitment to the nationalist cause which even his love for Sheila could not diminish. His mission in life transcended his love for her, for he believed that the there were things in his life more important than love.
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London ki Ek Raat can be seen as one of the earliest examples of anti-colonial, anti–imperialist nationalist writing. At the core of the novel lies a deep ideological thought process that aimed at social transformation and national liberation. Hiren’s passionate critique of the Indian society at large is an appropriate example of this spirit:
When a nation is enslaved, when eighty percent of its people cannot get enough to eat, when sickness and disease and epidemic are so rife that a really healthy man is hard to find, where education is confined to handful of people, where even children look like faded flowers, where in most faces you can read hunger, starvation, poverty, distress, idleness, stupidity , ignorance—and in the rest a repulsive sort of prosperity—in such a country to look for idealism would be the height of stupidity.
Sajjad Zaheer’s London navigated between ‘the houses of European modernism and his burgeoning political radicalism’ and forged ‘a global transnational vision’ and may be remembered for its radical departure from the then current trends in Urdu literature.
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Aur bhi gham hain zamane mein mohabbat ke siva
Raahatein aur bhi hain vasl ki raahat ke siva
Mujh se pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang.
(There are other sufferings in the world besides love,
There are other pleasures besides the pleasures of union.
Do not ask from me, my love, for that love again.)
London ki Ek Raat has recently been published for the first time in an English translation, as A Night in London. The translator is Bilal Hashmi. A partial translation by the Urdu scholar Ralph Russell is available online.
Dr Madhu Singh is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Modern European Languages at the University of Lucknow.
Dareechah-e-Nigaarish
Toronto, ON
Canada
talat