Throughout my reading of this novel, I felt that Zakir is
embroiled in a dynamic, frenetic and contradictory world where Husain threads together
nostalgia, fragmentation and the idea of ruptured continuities, making it a
retelling of a Modernist tale, just like that of T.S. Eliot in ‘The Wasteland’.
Like T.S Eliot’s ‘The
Wasteland’ where the World War 1 is the nucleus of the reader’s attention, the Pakistani
Partition of 1947 becomes the center of the novel’s impressionistic landscape
which highlights an important feature in the novel; a cultural and human crisis
taking place in not a village, a community, a home or a city but a Basti.
Through his literary devices, Husain avoids graphic reportage on the
psychological and physical violence central to Partition and thus, the
political chaos at one level is interiorized by the protagonist, Zakir making
him fragmented and dissociated in his engagement with his surroundings. He
almost becomes a male counterpart of Eliot’s Marie ‘Hold on Tight. And Down we went. In the mountains, there you feel
free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.’ where her
state of mind becomes our focal point in contextualizing the happenings of
World War 1. It is important to note that as a migrant, there is an intense
feeling of alienation, isolation and emptiness that Zakir feels which can be
reflective of Intizar Husain’s psyche itself where he wasn’t a firebrand
renegade like other luminaries in Urdu (Manto, Qurutulain Haider, Ismat
Chughtai etc) but a man who found home in the new discourse on modernism or ‘jadeediyat’.
As a child, he remembered empty houses rather than the pillaging and looting of
major cities and thus, the focus of Basti looks at larger questions of ‘tehzeeb’
or ideas of deeply failed passive, apathetic paternal figures.
The modernist element in Husain’s work finds even more
traction on closer analysis. Where there is an appropriation of the mosque
through empire in Basti, there is a lack of religion and belief in the
Wasteland and ‘where the dead men lost
their bones’ (Wasteland), the Muslim itinerant engages in an obsession with
graves (kabar) which can be then seen as a problematic narrative of Muslim
history.
An important feature of the novel is that it does not
apportion blame on any party and becomes a narrative that neither noisy nor
polemical in nature. It becomes a question of what fiction becomes in 1947 and
1971 where it looks at the duplicity and failure of culture and what kind of
engagement this text has with the South Asian perception of History. It’s mood
of melancholy and rampant use of mythology becomes a reflection of modernism-
where there is a need to move back to the classical past and to the origins of
humanity. In Basti, there is a great inspiration from the Ramayan and the
Mahabarata in the idyllic space of Rupnagar (Parindey) whereas in Eliot’s
Wasteland you have the inspiration of Sanskrit (Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata). Another way this can be viewed is a
returning to the glory days of the Muslim past and can be seen in Basti (The
Khilafat Movement) and Woh Joh Kho Gaye (Garnata).
In Basti, ‘Shiraz’ becomes not only the Bloomsbury group
where the friends become Forester, Woolf and Eliot but a place where modernist
concerns are voiced- ‘mera baap mera baap nahi hai’ which looks at notions of
the lack of assertion, reproduction and essentially a sterile narrative. This
highlights an extended modernist effect which lies outside the English canon.
Through the eyes of Husain, we see that there is a dissonance with the Basti
where it has not only become an ‘Azab’ but a place where people are voiceless
and to a certain extent nameless (Woh Joh Kho Gaye and Shehr-e-Afsos).
‘This
is the way the world ends
This
is the way the world ends
Not
with a bang with a whimper’
(The
Hollowmen)- T.S Eliot
very beautifully written and analyzed.
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