Now that the talk of the town centres around Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitava Ghosh, Githa Hariharan and Arundhati Roy, many people in the subcontinent have forgotten two outstanding novelists who dominated the literary scene for nearly two decades after Independence. Ahmed Ali and Attia Hosain's genre of writing may not be replicated by today's novelists, but their powerful and creative representation of change, decay and uncertainties in a given historical context should inspire upcoming novelists. Their characters were real for they mirrored the anxieties of a generation faced with stark choices before and after Independence. The author's personal dilemmas and predicament were reflected in the portrayal of individuals and families who debated the contemporary situation, discussed their preferences and plotted their trajectory in accordance with their ideological predilections. In the end, they did not just produce a novel or two but wrote insightful social histories.Ahmed Ali, born a year after thetransfer of capital from Calcutta to Delhi, published his novel Twilight in Delhi in 1940. It is a delicate and highly sensitive summation of the histories of a city that has changed its mood, character and personality for centuries. It depicts, moreover, "the decay of a whole culture, a particular mode of thought and living, now dead and gone already right before our eyes". Didn't Mirza Ghalib say: Shama har rang me jalti hai sehar hone tak.
Yet the city ravaged by the Marathas, the Jats and the British during and after the 1857 revolt was the city of Ahmed Ali's dream. Here "dwelt the chosen spirits of the age," wrote Mir Taqi Mir. It was, in Ahmed Ali's words, "the embodiment of a whole culture, free of the creedal ghosts and apparitions that haunt some of modern India's critics and bibliographers chased by the dead souls of biased historians of yesteryears".
Ahmed Ali would have preferred to live and die in the city of Mir and Ghalib. But that was not to be. He could not return to Delhifrom Nanking where he was on a deputation from the government of undivided India. He fretted and fumed at the Delhi airport but was not allowed to disembark. In just a few moments, his Indian identity was snatched away from him and he was forced to languish in Karachi, a place that was alien, remote and distant for a pucca Dilliwallah like him.
Attia Hosain, who died a few weeks ago at the age of 84, was a consummate stylist with the sensitivity to encompass wide-ranging human emotions in a sentence or two. Her novel and collection of stories, commented Anita Desai, "are delicate and tender, like new grass, and they stir with life and the play of sunlight and rain. To read them is as if one had parted a curtain, or opened a door, and strayed into the past". Her only novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, first published in 1961, is a classic insofar as it illuminates, quite perceptively, aspects of a feudal society trying to come to terms with the changes. There is tension in the air as UncleHamid and his son Saleem discuss their conflicting ideas.
"No one seemed to talk anymore, everyone argued...It was as if someone had sneaked in live ammunition among the fireworks. In the thrust and parry there was a desire to inflict wounds. Even visitors argued. A new type of person now frequented the house. Fanatic, bearded men and young zealots would come to see Saleem; rough, country-dwelling landlords and their courtiers' would visit my uncle."
Here and elsewhere in the novel the prose is exquisite, delicate and charming. It is, in the words of Anita Desai, the literary equivalent of the miniature school of painting in India, introduced by the Mughals. Equally, Attia Hosain's novel and short stories reveal a rare sensitivity to the changes taking place in Awadh society, to the imminent decline of the feudal order and the confusion and insecurities of those who had to come to terms with the rapidly-changing world around them. "Hundreds of thousands of families were faced with the necessity ofchanging habits of mind and living conditioned by centuries, hundreds and thousands of landowners and the hangers-on who had lived on the largesse, their weakness and their follies. Faced by prospects of poverty, by the actual loss of privilege, there were many who lost their balance of mind when their world cracked apart. Others retired to anonymity in their villages. This was the end my uncle had prophesied. This was the end our theories and enthusiasm had supported. Like death and all dissolution it was an end easier to accept with the mind than as a fact."
Attia Hosain knew her social and cultural milieu better than most. She came from a taluqdari family of Awadh and was privileged to study at La Martiniere School for Girls and Isabela Thoburn College in Lucknow. She was the first woman graduate from the taluqdari families. Her feudal background did not deter her from taking part in left-wing activities and attending the first Progressive Writers' Conference and the All India Women's Conferencein Calcutta in 1933. She moved to London in 1947."Events during and after Partition are to this day very painful to me. And now, in my old age, the strength of my roots is very strong; it also causes pain, because it makes one a `stranger' everywhere in the deeper areas of one's mind and spirit except where one was born and brought up".
Ahmed Ali and Attia Hosain were brought up differently, and yet they had so much in common. Both were attached to liberal, composite and eclectic traditions, the hallmark of Delhi and Lucknow's social and cultural life. Both were wedded to a humanistic world-view which was free of bigotry, intolerance and sectarianism. Both were uneasy with and anguished by the Partition of the country which destroyed the civilisational unity of the subcontinent; indeed, they belonged to a generation that has lived with its heart in pieces. And both died in a country that was not their own. If they had exchanged letters, they would probably have written the following to eachother:
rahi nagufta mere dil me daastan meri
na is dayar me samjha koi zabaan meri
How could I tell my tale in this strange land?
I speak a tongue they do not understand.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
