Review: At Home in India by Qurratulain Hyder
A new anthology of Hyder’s work includes profiles of some eminent Urdu women writers, the actress Nargis, short stories, and extracts from her memoirs about growing up in an elite north Indian Muslim family
“How much can a spider perched on a wooden bark gobble up in five hundred years, if he eats all day, a bit at a time?” Qurratulain Hyder, one of Urdu’s most prolific writers, wondered in her expansive memoir, Kar-e Jahan Daraz Hai. In her lifetime, Hyder consumed centuries worth of stories and presented them, bit by bit, to her readers. Her most famous work, Aag Ka Darya (1959) is the story of the subcontinent spanning 2,500 years, starting from the Indus Valley Civilization to Partition. A new anthology, At Home in India, edited and translated by Fatima Rizvi and Sufia Kidwai, focusses on her writings which encompassed the tectonic shifts of India in the 20th century.
Hyder had an illustrious career, and she wrote for most of her life. Her first story was published in a children’s magazine when she was 11 in the late 1930s. River of Fire, her translation of Aag ka Darya came in 2003, a few years before her death. She won several of the most prestigious literary prizes including the Sahitya Akademi and the Jnanpith awards, and received the Padma Bhushan in 2005. She grew up largely in Uttar Pradesh and moved to Pakistan after Partition. Then, frustrated with the country, she moved to London where she worked as a broadcaster for the BBC briefly before returning to India. She lived in Bombay for 20 years and retired in Noida. She worked as a journalist, never married, and is regarded, for her fiction and non-fiction, as the “grand dame of Urdu literature.” Her life was as fascinating as her writing — and although much of it is lost in translation (the limitations and flatness of the English language make it difficult to contain the intricacies of Urdu), At Home in India is a perfectly curated gold mine of a book.
This new anthology contains extracts from Hyder’s memoirs about her growing up in an elite north Indian Muslim family and about Partition, and its aftermath. There are profiles she wrote of some of the greatest Urdu women writers and of the actress Nargis. These essays also offer snapshots of film and literary scenes, most enjoyably of Bombay in the 1960s and 1970s (when Hyder worked as a journalist in the city). A selection of short stories complement the non fiction themes of the book. Also included are two interviews Hyder gave in the early 2000s.
The essays from the three-volume Kar-e Jahan Daraz Hai (translated in the book as As The World Turns) are archival treasures first serialised in two literary magazines, Aaj Kal in India and Nuquush in Pakistan, in 1972-73. Hyder wrote it as a family saga, a portrait, in stunning detail, of upper-class north Indian Muslim life and its transformation through the tectonic shifts of the mid-20th century. This community consisted of some of the wealthiest and most influential families of Uttar Pradesh: rich jagirdars and big landowners, who had retained their generational wealth despite the fall of Muslim hegemony under the British after the destruction of Awadh in 1857; a smattering of erstwhile royals; and the new Muslim elite who prospered by joining the British civil services, were educated abroad, and later emerged as India and Pakistan’s most important intellectuals and political leaders.
Hyder’s parents were both writers. In 1937, when Mohammed Ali Jinnah began strengthening the Muslim League through mass mobilisations for a separate Muslim state, his close friend the Raja of Mahmudabad, on a visit to Mussoorie, asked Hyder’s father, Sajjad Hyder Yildirim, for help. The family connections were incredible: an aunt who was a Mughal princess, an uncle who had been the wazir of the last emir of Afghanistan, the son-in-law of the poet Daagh, Chaudhary Zafarullah Khan, who would go on to become Pakistan’s first foreign minister, Anwar Jamal Kidwai, who founded the prestigious mass communications research centre named after him at Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia, and the powerful-for-centuries Suhrawardy family that produced numerous influential people including Princess Sarvath El Hassan, who married the then crown prince of Jordan in 1968. Hyder drops these names casually. The context is provided in footnotes but not always. And while it is impressive and interesting to read about forgotten famous people, it feels a bit too puffed up in places.
Hyder’s family home was in Nehtaur, a small town near Bijnor where her ancestors had lived since at least the 14th century. The excerpted essays are set here and elsewhere in UP, and Dalanwala, a posh mixed locality in Dehradun where they lived for a few months every year. Ashiana, their home in Dalanwala “was like a fairy-tale house” where “each room contained a world in itself.” Her uncle had bought the “designed for Europeans only” Alexandra Palace Hotel and turned it into his family’s residence. But because “for more than 70 years this place has been witness to impiety and sin,” the women in the family went first to get it properly cleaned and purified, showing up with a pitcher of water and a copy of the Quran.
Hyder is a master of detail. But her descriptions do a lot more than show the richness of the setting. They are not limited to Persian rugs and family portraits painted by European artists (although there is plenty of that too). What stands out are the pieces of historical information present when she describes, for instance, everyday objects or habits. In the essay about her childhood, Hyder writes of her half-German cousin’s dolls and picture books which were superior to her own playthings from London as “technologically, Germany was far advanced compared to England.” She describes old families using flower-patterned round bowls and long spoons, which “were in use across Azerbaijan and China, and the Mughals introduced them here. They are only used in Chinese restaurants now.” She writes of sons and daughters of feudal families going to study at prestigious universities abroad only to return as raging communists, and how traditions of Muharram were practised widely by Hindus (as it turns out, continue to be by a few). There are memories within memories, for instance, her uncle telling her about the events of the 1857 Uprising that he had heard from relatives who had lived through the time. Some of the details are quite, quite funny (this is set in wild, loquacious UP after all):
“The hottest rumour in town was that Hitler hadn’t committed suicide, he had disguised himself and come to Moradabad! He was believed to be residing in Dewan Bazaar. During the Uprising of 1857, there was a rumour in Moradabad that a very simple mendicant had come from Iran with one lakh Ghazis and entered Delhi. With the strength of his powers the cannons of the English had turned to water. It was rumoured that this rebel army had left for London via Constantinople, to arrest Queen Victoria.”
When Hyder was emerging as a writer, Ismat Chughtai wrote an essay about her titled Pompom Darling: “After much deliberation, I started a long letter of advice to Qurratulain,” she wrote, adding, “I asked her to clarify how long she would continue to be obsessed with Shosho and Fofo and Bharatnatyam and take dips in the swimming pools of Savoy de Lamar. Why don’t you come out and see what lies in the outside world? How long will you circle the same point? Will you continue to give rides on a merry go round all your life? Won’t people become dizzy?” Chughtai suggested Hyder “throw away the thick Persian carpets,” and live instead in a small flat in a city like Bombay. She wanted her to find a job at a school or newspaper office and make coffee because “by god, making coffee is a thousand times easier and a more interesting occupation than wrangling with these ‘charming bores.’”
Eventually, that is what Hyder did.
At Home in India does not include her early writings save one, nor makes any particular note of them. The pieces here are from her middle years when she was active as both a writer and a journalist.
The short stories are about love, different kinds of love, featuring socialites, actresses, broke musicians, tourists... set in Bombay, Dalanwala, a circus... These are followed, as a kind of bridge between fiction and the memoir section, by a novella, Jilawatan (The Exiles), about the many ways in which one experiences loss of home. The story, through various characters traces the journey of a composite Hindu-Muslim culture in northern India to relationships and feelings fractured by Partition. It opens with the friendship between Khem and Kishwari, a Hindu and a Muslim girl, growing up at a time when “nobody had heard of the Muslim League yet.” But the idea of a separate Muslim state soon catches on just as Hindu nationalism crystalised. A college professor is struck by his students’ escalating calls for freedom, not just from British colonisation, but from “slavery of 1,000 years” since Muslim rulers first came to India. Muslim families are divided on the issue of Partition, their loyalties are questioned by both sides, those who choose to remain behind face hostility from Hindu friends and even harassment from the police.
The Muslim experience of Partition is often ignored in Indian public discourse. In Kar-e-Jahan, written after decades of deliberation, Hyder was able to recount, more dispassionately, the events leading up to Partition. She documents it all. Painful events are interspersed with practical details and logistics of the project. She writes about rich Hindus and Sikhs, living in what would later become Pakistan, buying lands in India; of Muslims, who planned to migrate, selling some of theirs; of Hindu and Muslim district officials anxiously listening to discussions on the Shimla negotiations on the radio at the then posh Bulandshahr Club; of the communist support for a separate Muslim state; the desolate emptying out of the Muslims from Dehradun; the stabbing of Anis Kidwai’s husband Shafi Ahmad in Mussoorie; the fall of the landed gentry; and the rise of a new crop of Muslim communities such as weavers who were able to emerge as successful traders; and later, the establishment and ramifications of the Custodian of Enemy Property for India after the 1965 war. She writes too of personal letters exchanged between Pakistanis and Indians mostly to relay the news of the death of friends and acquaintances, the mail routed through third countries when relationships between the two nations soured.
After Partition, Hyder and her family moved to Karachi but eventually she grew unhappy “in a society radically different to the one that she had been uprooted from,” Rizvi writes in an introduction to the anthology. Jilawatan, Rizvi thinks, perhaps “provides an early indication of Hyder’s own situation in Karachi as that of being in a state of exile.” The story is haunting, quite evidently coming from the piercing, burning pain of fresh wounds. The immediacy of its setting and writing makes it seem far more personal than the extracts from her memoir. In the story, after Partition, Kishwari is frustrated with her father for being so tied down to India that he willingly suffers humiliations and hostilities instead of moving to Pakistan. She herself struggles, unable to find work because “the uprooted, penniless sharnarthi girls, Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan, were being given preference,” which she thinks, “was only logical and just...” Other women from rich Muslim families are downsizing their household staff, a decay is setting in. They begin with selling silver utensils to stay afloat, and then gold ornaments, to delay the inevitable deep downward spiral of their circumstances. The story moves from Uttar Pradesh to London, the former friends run into each other, their political differences irreconcilable for Khem. “You are Pakistani, you should not say namaste,” she tells Kishwar.
Hyder briefly moved to London before returning to India permanently in 1961. At Home in India does not delve into the reasons why Hyder left Pakistan. But the move had something to do with the storm caused by the publication of Aag ka Darya in 1959. By this time, Pakistan, under Ayub Khan, had turned into a dictatorial regime with widespread censorship, a place where “one is not allowed to even bark,” Hyder had said. Urdu critic Shamim Hanafi said the novel was seen as a work of Hindu philosophy and one that portrays Muslims as weak.
In Bombay, Hyder worked at the Film Division of India making documentary films and writing scripts, then in advertising, and later as a journalist, all the while writing fiction, working on her memoir, and other pieces. In At Home in India, this period comes alive in some of the profiles that she wrote of other writers. An essay on Wajida Tabassum, the Dakhani writer who wrote wild, quite erotic, stories, is just as much a profile of the cosmopolitan newsroom of The Illustrated Weekly of India under Khushwant Singh where Hyder worked. There are also essays on writers such as Rashid Jehan, who wrote radical feminist stories in the early 20th century, Anis Kidwai, who was also a politician whose activism and writing focused on Partition and rehabilitation of its victims, the Pakistani writer Khadija Mastur, who was known as “the Bronte sister” of Urdu literature for her exploration of themes of women’s roles and social hierarchies, and Attia Hosain, the London-based writer whose 1961 semi-autobiographical novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, was recently featured on a prestigious list of books by Commonwealth writers of the last 70 years.
In the profile of Nargis, written after her death in 1981, Hyder writes about the power, beauty and the tragedy of other Hindi film actresses. These included Sulochana, the silent film star of the 1930s, who, in her heyday, earned more than the governor of Bombay and Leela Chitnis, whose pairing with Ashok Kumar ensured a film’s success in the 1940s. Later, Hyder notes, at a party celebrating Kumar being awarded the Padma Shri in 1962, nobody recognised Chitnis, “an elderly, dusky-complexioned lady, dressed in a black sari, sat in a corner, looking a picture of grief.”
Grief is a recurring theme in the book, particularly the temporality of grief. Hyder tries to reconcile with change and life’s contradictions. “humanity is progressive, else Adam would still be roaming the jungles” she writes. But, at the same time, “a wild brute lurks inside man’s subconscious.”
Hyder writes about trips back to north India. In 1967, she received a letter from an aunt who held the family’s belongings when they left for Pakistan in a hurry. She asked if Hyder would like to collect her family’s things, but there was no space in Bombay for all the trunks and bundles of family heirlooms, personal items, prized possessions. Auctions were being held for the belongings of the bankrupted and ruined taluqdars and zamindars of Awadh. “Auction everything but crockery and cutlery,” Hyder wrote back. She visited her aunt anyway, and walked over the the auction house looking at books and magazines, a portrait of her mother that “Abbajan had commissioned an English artist to paint in Dehradun in 1936,” chinese-silk dressing gowns; Turkish overcoats; tattered lace bedcovers; gold-embroiled doilies “and many such articles were bundled together like a squirrel’s nest as the saying goes.”
In 1973, she travels from Moradabad to Mahmudpur Ma’afi in an Uttar Pradesh Transport minibus with her princely cousin. Then, they hail a cycle-rickshaw. “We once came here in cars with pardas or in carts enclosed by curtains,” she writes.
“Baji, this entire land once belonged to us,” her cousin said.
“This land doesn’t belong to you, it did not belong to your ancestors... In all of UP, in fact, in all of India, a new crop of skilled artisans has now come into being,” she told him.
She writes about havelis falling apart, the 300-year-old, massive, but now deserted, ancestral qilas and kothis of her once flourishing feudal family.
In 1974, she travels to Dehradun and finds that her family home had ceased to exist, replaced by a new kothi, even the orchard had been chopped down. But as she leaves, she notices, the nameplate still standing.
Imam Ali, the founder of the Shiite faith and son-in-law of the prophet Mohammad, had said “the duration of being part of this temporal world is no more than the sneeze of a goat.”
Hyder writes, “Outside the plaque bearing the name ‘Ashiana’ is still there, as it used to be. In the light of the setting sun I take a photograph of this plaque, but can one ever photograph the sneeze of a goat?”
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.