Book Review : Between Clay and Dust

by Sumana Mukherjee

This is a book to be savoured like a fine single malt

 

 

I

t is a truth rarely acknowledged that subcontinental society has a peculiar predilection for marginalisation. It celebrates the mainstream and pushes out of sight all those who don’t fit in. The triggers can be multifarious and arbitrary: Gender, profession, age, wealth (or, more correctly, the lack of it) can all contribute to a gradual irrelevance as times and trends change. The silences of the sidelined contain rich pickings for a novelist attuned to the nuances. With The Story of a Widow (2009), Musharraf Ali Farooqi showcased his remarkable sensitivity to the unspoken; the same keen empathy permeates every page of his slim new novel Between Clay and Dust.

If the 2009 novel centred around a modern 50-year-old upper middle-class Karachi woman who rediscovers her sense of selfhood after her husband’s death, in Clay and Dust, Farooqi focusses on a whole inner city civilisation threatened by Partition and its consequent upheavals. That endangered social order is embodied in two fading professionals, champion pahalwan Ustad Ramzi and redoubtable courtesan, Gohar Jan. In the twilight of their lives, suddenly rendered insignificant by changing fashions, the two forge an unworded alliance of pride, dignity and compassion as they separately battle common concerns about their legacy, their homes, their relationships with their nearest and, yes, with hardlining religion and endemic corruption. 

Farooqi’s spare prose, his deliberate understatedness makes his work as much about what it doesn’t say as what it does. Like Widow, it could be considered almost banal in its narrative and stylistic simplicity, but that would be a gross miscall: The book works like an ache in the heart, evoking cultures and values that, while not necessarily perfect, represented something larger than the self; their replacements, by contrast, are small and mean. 

Triumphantly for a Pakistan-born author, Clay and Dust is not defined by Lahore’s Heera Mandi or the city’s wrestling pits; the events that unfold here could well find a home in Delhi, a typically low-key Farooqi reference to the huge cultural heritage shared, and frequently ignored, by the two countries. Though Clay and Dust wears its research lightly, the investigation of the two streams of art in their sunset days is never found wanting: The pages come alive with the grunts of the trainee pehelwans and capture the last echoes of Gohar Jan’s sitar. A story that purports to be about decay resounds with the stuff of life. This is a book to be savoured like a fine single malt. 

A last word about the cover art: In an area of Indian publishing that has seen consistent improvement, this book, one of Aleph’s first productions, just raised the bar higher with its matte dun colours and evocative visual.

To order, call 111-11-7323 or visit http://www.libertybooks.com

Food Prints: A research on Pakistani cuisines

Shanaz Ramzi is an extraordinary person. She wears many hats and wears all of them well. She writes on a wide variety of subjects and does a good job. She works for a TV network, which is trying to branch out into print as well. She edits its publications and looks after the network’s PR. She attends weddings, engagements, valimas and birthday parties, has a wide circle of friends, and what is more she runs a household efficiently. More than anything else she happily baby sits two cuddly grandchildren.

Pakistan on the Brink by Ahmed Rashid: review

By Duncan Gardham

3:58PM BST 24 Apr 2012

As Britain desperately tries to rescue some pride from its imminent withdrawal from Afghanistan, the best-case scenario may be that we leave behind a less stable and more corrupt version of Pakistan.

The vision of that country painted by Ahmed Rashid, one of the leading analysts of the “Af-Pak” relationship, is not an encouraging one. “Pakistan is now considered the most fragile place in the world… It is the most unstable country and the most vulnerable to terrorist violence, political change or economic collapse,” he writes in his latest book,Pakistan on the Brink.

Befitting way to bring Faiz alive – Reviewed by Rakshanda Jalil

WHILE Urdu literature itself is rich with many diverse genres and styles, sadly the tradition of critical literary biographies is missing. What we have are largely hagiographical accounts of: great writers, with little or no attempt to place their life and work in a larger perspective. Fortunately, a new breed of scholars, often not from conventional academic backgrounds, are doing a fine job of accessing Urdu texts and writers and placing them before a wider audience by using English as a link language.

What is more, by adeptly juggling the opposing demands of literary criticism and popular taste, they are making Urdu texts and writers accessible to a more diffuse audience, one that might relish Urdu literature but is (a) either unable to read it in its original, or (b) is not confined to classrooms or the world of academia.

One such writer is Ali Hashmi, a doctor and a practising psychiatrist who also happens to be the grandson of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. In this biography of Faiz, who was undoubtedly the most powerful poetic voice to emerge from the subcontinent, Hashmi writes with an unpretentious ease and unassuming affection for his subject. As he says:

“Writing a biography is never easy. The writer naturally begins with an opinion about his or her subject and this colours the material he chooses to present, whether negative or positive. Remaining impartial is an admirable goal but rarely possible in practice. …If one has a personal or family connection to one’s subject, avoiding the pitfalls outlined above can become all the more difficult.”

Hashmi sets out to provide a “bird’s-eye view” of the poet’s life, describe some of the high points of his life and work and simultaneously provide a historical framework for both his major literary works as well as Faiz’s ideas and ideals. Underlining the narrative is Hashmi’s own admiration, not as a loving grandson but as someone who similarly cherishes those very same ideas and ideals. Faiz described himself as a ‘humanist socialist’; and, indeed, this book gives ample testimony to that description.

The idea of social justice remained dear to Faiz all his life. While it illuminates his entire poetic oeuvre with translucent shafts of light, his prose works too are hard-hitting and passionate, urging his readers to find common cause against injustice, exploitation and a host of social and political issues. Faiz wrote, prolifically and compellingly, on the events that shaped the destiny of the sub-continent: The night-bitten dawn that came after the dark night of the Partition, the assassination of Gandhi, the bloodbath in East Pakistan, etc. He wrote, with equal passion and a sense of profound sorrow and solidarity for events across the globe: Palestine, Namibia, Chile and the awakening in Africa and Asia.

While Hashmi touches on all this as he attempts to place Faiz in his time and age, his greatest strength as a biographer is also by virtue of his birth. He makes full use of the wonderful oral archive available to him through his mother and aunt – Faiz’s daughters Salima and Muneeza — as well as other accounts of Faiz’s close friends and comrades.

Divided into two roughly equal parts, The Way it Once Was comprises a biographical section written by Hashmi and a selection of poems translated by Shoaib Hashmi who, incidentally, is the poet’s son-in-law.

The translations, which Shoaib Hashmi freely admits are “an act of self-indulgence”, are accompanied by the originals in Devnagri script, making these 52 poems accessible to bilingual readers. But what makes this book a collector’s delight are rare photographs, news clippings and letters culled from the collection at Faiz Ghar in Lahore. Taken together, they reveal an altogether different side of the poet’s persona, the human being behind the Great Poet. His gentle face, with those large limpid eyes, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes smiling, open a window into his soul like no words can.

(Rakhshanda Jalil has completed a study of the Progressive Writers’ Movement; she blogs at http://www.hindustaniawaaz-rakhshanda.blogspot.com)

To order, call 111-11-7323 or visit http://goo.gl/eXVPh

I’ll Do It My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan by Christina Daniels

In contemporary Indian cinema, Aamir Khan has always taken the lesstrodden path, and also delivered box-office hits. Known for his selection of films, he has constantly re-invented himself, and re-defined the approach to filmmaking within the Hindi film industry over the last two decades.