Some Unexplored Areas in the History of Urdu Fiction
When we look at the histories of Urdu literature written in English which are commonly used as standard reference books and which form the main basis of information for all those who do not read Urdu (see references), the history of the Urdu novel in the nineteenth century is confined to four outstanding names: Nazir Ahmad, Ratannath Sarshar, Abdul Halim Sharar, and Muhammad Hadi Ruswa.
By CHRISTINA OESTERHELD
Rambabu Saksena mentions some of the other authors of original novels or adaptations of Bengali and English works (Sajjad Husain, Nawab Syed Mohammad Azad, Jwala Prasad Barq, Hakim Muhammad Ali) in passing (Saksena 1996 [1927]:355-378). Shaista Bano Suhrawardy Ikramullah's Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story (1945) still included the 'minor' writers later left out by Muhammad Sadiq (Sadiq 1964; 2nd ed. 1984). It seems that, in the process of canonizing the history of Urdu literature, a very rigid selection took place resulting in a landscape of a few peaks surrounded by a void, or a few islands in an otherwise empty sea. This picture is reflected in the curricula of Urdu courses at colleges and universities in India and Pakistan.The scene presented in studies of the Urdu novel written in Urdu is much more differentiated. The most detailed survey of the development of the Urdu novel available so far is Yusuf Sarmast's Bisvin sadi men urdu naval (The Urdu novel in the Twentieth century, 1973). In other works the so called 'minor' writers are often simply mentioned without going deeper into any of their works. Asif Farrukhi has recently seized upon this fact. His concern is to rescue such 'minor' authors and their works from oblivion and to provide fresh access to the history of the Urdu novel, one not obliterated by an outdated critical approach and by an over-emphasis on the influence of English literature and English education (see Saughàt 1993:84-89).
Farrukhi's article highlights one of the main deficiencies in the study of the Urdu novel. However, his approach, too, is centred on authors understood to have contributed in their own way to 'high' literature that is to a novel of literary merit. The time is certainly overdue to pay more attention to lesser known authors and to analyse their ways of handling the new format of the novel and dealing with the ideological issues figuring so prominently in the late nineteenth century. What remains outside the orbit of research on such authors is the vast and widely unexplored realm of the pulp novels produced strictly with an eye to the commercial main chance. The two fields do of course overlap. There is a lot of formulaic writing in 'serious' reformist writers, and many of their works were also commercially successful. Within the framework of a larger project dealing with a new assessment of literary histories of nineteenth-century India, I have started to look into some of these lesser known novels.
A study of novels produced as commodities for mass consumption could focus on the following aspects: 1. the production process; 2. the sociology of readers; and 3. the structure of the works produced and the ideologies transmitted by them. The structure of the novels produced in both fields and the literary techniques, the leitmotifs, and topoi used in them have to be analysed in the broader context of narrative traditions available to the Urdu writer of the time. So far, links have been drawn from longer prose romances (dastan) to the novel. Shorter narratives such as tales, fables, anecdotes, and witticisms have hardly ever been studied in the context of the development of the novel, though they seem to have contributed much more to the short popular novel than the dastan. Therefore, at present I am studying qissas (tales) and collections of short narratives, summarized in Urdu as lata'if and naqliyat, which were published in great numbers from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century and are still available on the market in cheap editions.
This is also a case study of the process of marginalization of three genres: until the end of the nineteenth century, qissas, lata'if, and naqliyat appeared in costly, well-produced editions, and the latter constituted an integral part of standard works of Urdu literature such as Azad's Ab-i hayat (The Water of Life, 1880) and Hali's Yadgar-i Ghalib (Memoirs of Ghalib, 1897). Today, however, short narratives of this type are to be found mainly in textbooks for schools and in chapbook editions for the barely literate. Both studies will hopefully contribute to a fuller and more differentiated picture of Urdu fiction in the nineteenth century. *
References
Saksena, Ram Babu
A history of Urdu literature
London, 1927
Sadiq, Muhammad
A history of Urdu literature
London: Oxford University Press, 1964
Schimmel, Annemarie
Classical Urdu literature from the beginning to Iqbal
In: A history of Indian Literature Vol. 8: Modern Indo-Aryan literatures, pt. 1; fasc. 3, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1975
'Hairat^ hai yah å'^na: Urd¨ naval k^ dåstån' (An Astonishing Mirror:
The story of the Urdu novel)
In Saughàt, 1993: 84-89.
Dr Christina Oesterheld teaches Urdu at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany. A recent publications from her hand includes:
Oesterheld, Christina and Claus Peter Zoller (eds) 'Of Clowns and Gods, Brahmans and Babus: Humour in South Asian literatures', New Delhi: Manohar, 1999.
E-mail: n40@ix.urz.uni-heidelberg.de