Cover Story: Review of The Crow Eaters in Urdu

dawnbooksandauthors | 1 day ago

Reviewed by Asif Farrukhi

IT has a sense of an ending right from the beginning. Unlike most novels, The Crow Eaters by Bapsi Sidhwa opens with a death. The great Fareedon Junglewalla is all set for dying and will reach another level of glory through this passage. He is Freddy for short, we are told, in a style at once easy and familiar, as if we are being introduced to a friend. Then he is described in bold brush-strokes as a “strikingly handsome, dulcet-voiced adventurer with so few scruples.”

A promising, even inviting beginning. However, in the very next instance we are told of his death at 65, a “majestic grey-haired patriarch” who enters the community’s calendar of great men and women, and is a name invoked in all ceremonies performed inPunjaband Sindh. His death is not only of a distinguished individual but indicative of the slow but steady decline of an entire community beautifully captured in The Crow Eaters.

The end and the beginning chase each other as the novel proceeds. With the glimpse of the end, we are told that Freddy was “prone to reminiscence and rhetoric” in his prosperous middle years but by this time we are ready to enter the narrative of days to come and days already in the past. The end of the first chapter tells us that by such a time, Freddy was “free to face the future”. A future we face in the novel and having done so, will not be able to forget easily.

It was soon after its first publication that I read The Crow Eaters, a bit of an oddity then, a Pakistani novel in English and thoroughly enjoyable to boot. Since then, many editions have replaced the modest and simple original one and Pakistani novels have become fashionable. Yet The Crow Eaters remains at the top of the list, unique and delightful. Going through it once again, this time in Urdu, translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, I found it as engaging as ever. It was once impossible to imagine that this novel could exist in any other condition. But The Crow Eaters not only manages to survive transportation into another context through translation, but at the same time remains as readable as it originally was.

It is not only its language which sets The Crow Eaters apart but its entire approach. The author’s obvious affection for the community at the heart of the novel in no way prevents her from poking fun at its all too human foibles. The humour is irreverent but irresistible. The Pakistani novel, assuming that such a thing exists, is inclined to hold its head high among lofty and abstract ideals, being mindful of all possible Sacred Cows. But Junglewalla Sahib is a lovable old rogue and not a paragon of virtue. The full-blooded mother-in-law Jerbanoo, with her hilarious ritual of washing among the “dry-cleaning” Englishmen, is a scream. Her broken attempts at communication with London policemen are some of the funniest scenes in the novel. Some of that quirky humour is lost but it is wonderful how the novel’s great sense of fun comes across in the Urdu translation.

Humour saves The Crow Eaters from rhetoric and sentimentality, both common ailments found in the Urdu novel, and here it could learn a thing or two from Bapsi Sidhwa. This added value will certainly endear the novel to those who are approaching it for the first time and in a translated form. It is evident that Professor Memon has taken great pains over the translation and as is his method, tried to stay as close to the text as possible, even to the extent of being literal at times.

In her brief preface to the translation, Sidhwa says that she had the translation read out to her and fully endorses it. The approval was also echoed by Bano Qudsia, a very different sort of writer from Sidhwa. Yet Bano Qudsia manages to extract some elements of her particular brand of tassawuf from the novel, particularly in the character of Yazdi and his love-crazed majnoon-like actions. I could not help but wonder if Sidhwa tried to return the compliment by tracing out any degree of humour in Bano Qudsia’s Raja Gidh? I wish she could grant a leave of absence to Jerbanoo and ask her to take her cleansing ritual right in the midst of other straight-laced novels. What fun if Jerbanoo invited herself to a cup of tea in the coffeehouse at the centre of Intizar Husain’s Basti where his highbrow characters carry out their history-obsessed conversations!

With great aplomb and in a beautifully produced book, the veritable Junglewalla Sahib is among us again, without losing his Pickwickean gusto to chaste Urdu.

Interview

“Every act of translation is also an act of self-discovery”

—    Muhammad Umar Memon

You have been translating and introducing fiction writers from the world over, ranging from Milan Kundera to Carlos Fuentes. What attracted you to The Crow Eaters?

I read The Crow Eaters sometime in the 1980s; it was absolutely hilarious. I even recommended it to some of my students who found it equally entertaining. Hilarity aside, I was particularly struck by its stark portrayal of the Parsi community — and by a Parsi no less. The Parsis came out warts and all, but never strayed too far from the author’s endearing love for them and their foibles. I still remember the scene of Soli’s funeral where the touching humanity of his otherwise improbably insufferable father overwhelms the reader. My one standing complaint about our writers is that they seldom write about our minorities.

Did the style and the language of this novel pose any particular problems for you as a translator? Was it more or less challenging than some of the other books you have translated?

Indeed quite a bit. It is one of the two novels I’ve found very challenging to translate. Bapsi was transporting peculiar South Asian humour to the language of the Brits. Rehabilitating it back into Urdu was quite daunting. But Bapsi liked it when she had a friend read it to her. And Najeeba Arif, who read the draft, thought it was my best translation. Only I know where I’ve stumbled and goofed. You see, languages have unassailable boundaries. You need the agility and daring of a trapeze artist to negotiate successfully between them. But there are times when you take a fall.

There was some controversy when the original novel appeared inPakistan. Are you anticipating any reaction on the Urdu translation?

Frankly, it is a non-literary question. Why drag a work of imaginative literature into politics or ethics? I’d rather people just read and enjoyed the novel. There are plenty of “causes” to cry oneself hoarse over.

Do you have plans for translating any of the other Bapsi Sidhwa novels, particularly Ice-Candy Man?

At the moment, no. Dr Anwaar Nasir, the publisher, and Bapsi had both asked me to, but I said I needed time to think about it. I would like to finish some other projects first.

I’m grateful to Bapsi that she personally asked me to translate this novel. Every act of translation is, inherently, also an act of self-discovery. In the process you come to know your potentiality as much as your limitation.

Interview

“I hope all my novels will be translated into Urdu”

—    Bapsi Sidhwa

Readers of Urdu will finally be able to catch up with The Crow Eaters, one of the finest novels to have come out ofPakistan. I remember that when it was first published there was some bewilderment and even some resentment and anger. What kind of reactions are you anticipating from the novel’s new readers?

Many thanks for your kind words about The Crow Eaters.

It seems so long ago, but yes, there was some adverse reaction to The Crow Eaters to begin with. It was not until the book got glowing reviews in London that the reviewers in Pakistan looked upon it more kindly. A lot of Parsis were offended and there was a bomb scare at the Intercontinental when its self-published version was launched inLahore. It was the first novel ever written about the Parsis, and the community was not accustomed to seeing themselves fictionalised or made fun of. They certainly accept and love the book now.

Quite frankly, I am nervous about the novel’s publication in Urdu. I have no idea how a very different class of readers — and many more people read Urdu than English — will receive the book. After all, language does define who reads what. The more orthodox might find a lot to be peeved about — but of course this is pure conjecture.

In the brief introduction to the translation, you said that you had it read out to you. How successful do you think it is in capturing the spirit of the original?

As my friend Tariq Kureshi was reading the pages Memon Sahib had sent to me, we would both burst into laughter quite often, and at times also look at each other in awe of the translator’s skill in conveying so marvellously the linguistic subtleties within the book. After all, we’re dealing with two entirely different idioms.

Memon Sahib kept complaining that it was a very difficult book to translate. It probably was, but he has done the writing justice and I’m sure people are going to admire and appreciate his language and skill enormously. I certainly do.

What next after The Crow Eaters? Do you anticipate that this will lead to your other novels being translated into Urdu, especially Ice-Candy Man with its portrayal of Lahore on the eve of Partition?

I certainly hope all my novels will be translated into Urdu. After all, they’re all based inLahore. Even in my mind, as I was writing, I was translating into English from Urdu and Punjabi. That came naturally to me, and I realised almost at once how closely language, character and content are linked.

Decades after the publication of The Crow Eaters, how do you view it? Are you fond of it or do you feel that you have moved on?

I am still delighted with The Crow Eaters. Often, I chance upon passages that still make me laugh out loud. I remember laughing a lot as I was writing the book and being in a very good humour, for the most part.

I don’t think I will ever move ahead of The Crow Eaters. It will stay in its proper place and subsequent writings will maintain theirs.

Junglewalla Sahib

INTERVIEW: talkingbooks

From InpaperMagzine | 8th July, 2012

 

Ajmal Kamal is an editor, writer, publisher and bookseller. He edits the Urdu literary quarterly, Aaj

What are you reading these days?
For the last five years or so, my reading seems to have become more focused. It was a time when I encountered a vague idea in the course of a personal quest that all, or almost all, that is happening with us today as a society and as individuals members or groups of the society can be contextualised and understood in the perspective provided by what we have been writing and publishing ever since the printing press became an influential part of our lives.

Pakistan again

THE PAKISTAN CAULDRON

Author: James P Farwell

Pulisher: Pentagon, Rs 795

This is one more addition to the growing list of tomes that believe that Pakistan has already become a dysfunctional state, writes Anil Bhat

Elusive Enemies Books About the Pursuit of Al Qaeda

Illustration by Jesse Lenz; Photographs from http://www.muslm.net, via Associated Press

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed at his capture in 2003, left, and in a photo said to have been taken at Guantánamo in 2009.

By JONATHAN MAHLER

Published: July 6, 2012

More than a decade after 9/11, it seems safe to say, the global war on terror has been both an extraordinary success and a colossal failure.

1- THE HUNT FOR KSM

Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

By Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer

2- HUNTING IN THE SHADOWS

The Pursuit of Al Qa’ida Since 9/11

By Seth G. Jones

First the good news: Since Sept. 11, 2001, the day the war unofficially began, Islamic extremists have killed just a handful of Americans on United States soil, nearly all of them members of the military. Al ­Qaeda is in retreat. Through the use of covert intelligence, special operations and drone strikes, we’ve managed to take down or take out many of its senior leaders.

At the same time, our intelligence agencies have demonstrated an almost mind-boggling inability to work together. We invaded Iraq, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a long military campaign that claimed thousands of American lives and played right into the hands of our enemies by uniting Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency. We tortured prisoners, not only staining our nation’s reputation but surely swinging more young Muslims to the cause of radical Islam than any Qaeda recruiting video ever could. We are still fumbling with how to try captured combatants, and what to do with those whom we don’t want to, or can’t, prosecute.

“The Hunt for KSM,” an in-depth account of the pursuit and capture of the architect of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, gives us the war on terror at its best and worst. Here we have the story of dogged agents painstakingly cultivating intelligence and running down every semi-credible lead as they chase one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists across the globe.

We also have the story of the bureaucratic infighting that may well have delayed Mohammed’s capture and certainly ensured that the agents who knew him best — the ones most likely to be able to recognize when he was telling the truth and when he was lying — were nowhere in sight during the first three years of his interrogations in Pakistan and at a series of secret prisons.

At the center of this intragovernmental warfare are two familiar antagonists, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with their fundamentally different approaches to terrorism, epitomized by their reactions to 9/11. “The F.B.I., looking at the smoldering ruins in New York . . . reflexively asked: What happened?” the authors write. “The C.I.A. was far better at looking past the disaster that had occurred and asking the defining question of the period: What next?”

As turf wars go, it wasn’t much of a fight. In the wake of 9/11, when the need to prevent another attack was pretty much all that mattered, the C.I.A. instantly became America’s pre-eminent antiterror agency, and the F.B.I., with its years of hard-earned knowledge of radical Islam, was shunted aside. In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed the result was especially tragic, according to Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer, both former journalists with The Los Angeles Times; it meant that Francis J. Pellegrino, an F.B.I. agent who had been obsessively tracking Mohammed since the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, was essentially cut out of the loop.

When Mohammed was betrayed to the C.I.A. by an old friend and chased down to a safe house in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in early 2003, Pellegrino was asked to provide a list of questions to his interrogators, private C.I.A. contractors with no particular expertise in Al Qaeda. He declined. (“I don’t write questions,” he said. “I ask questions.”) The rest of the story should have been easy to predict: Mohammed provided his interrogators with a lot of bad information in order to get them to stop torturing him.

The two authors of “The Hunt for KSM” have reconstructed an almost decade-long clandestine manhunt in exacting detail, an undeniably impressive feat of sleuthing. Narrative velocity is not a problem either; from beginning to end, “The Hunt for KSM” moves along at the brisk pace of a good crime novel. Where the book falls short is in the depth and intimacy of its portraiture. McDermott and Meyer present a tantalizing cast of characters — most notably Pellegrino, a former accountant, and Mohammed, a modern-day Carlos the Jackal — but never quite bring us close to any of them.

The subtlety and imagination of the writing don’t always live up to the doggedness of the reporting, which can drain the emotional power from otherwise dramatic moments, as when Pellegrino finally finds himself sitting opposite his nemesis in an interrogation room at Guantánamo Bay. “Pellegrino thought K.S.M. might be the kind of guy you could sit down and have a beer with, if he hadn’t been one of the worst mass murderers in American history,” the authors write.

1- THE HUNT FOR KSM

Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

By Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer

2- HUNTING IN THE SHADOWS

The Pursuit of Al Qa’ida Since 9/11

By Seth G. Jones

Seth G. Jones’s “Hunting in the Shadows” provides a wider-angle view of the war on terror. Rather than zeroing in on the hunt for a single bad guy, Jones, a former senior adviser at United States Special Operations Command, seems determined not to leave any out. The result is exhausting, a seemingly endless rogues’ gallery of terrorists and their American pursuers since 9/11.

But if “Hunting in the Shadows” can at times make for slow reading, it is an important book, though less for the individual stories it tells than for the broader analysis Jones uses to frame them. As he sees it, the history of Al Qaeda’s war against the Western world can be best understood as a series of “waves.” The first started with the embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, crested on 9/11 and ended with allied forces striking back against Al Qaeda’s leaders in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. The second began in 2003, after the American invasion of Iraq, and ended when a growing number of tribal sheiks in Iraq turned on Al Qaeda. The third rose between 2009 and 2011, driven by the emergence of the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, and concluded with the killing of Osama bin Laden and several other Qaeda leaders last year.

Studying these waves, and the counterwaves that repelled them, can tell us a lot about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to fighting terrorism. Most fundamentally, we have learned the hard way that the war on terror isn’t really a war — that if we attempt to defeat Al ­Qaeda by deploying large numbers of conventional soldiers to foreign countries we are only likely to create a backlash of ­radicalization.

Instead, Jones explains, we should rely on “a light-footprint approach” that favors special operations and intelligence-­gathering. We should help local governments to establish basic law and order in unstable areas where Al Qaeda is threatening to grow roots. And we should wage our own propaganda battle against Al Qaeda, one that emphasizes the organization’s indiscriminate murder of civilians. The war on terror, Jones writes, “is a war in which the side that kills the most civilians loses.”

President Obama recently declared that victory over Al Qaeda was “within our reach,” and that the time had come to refocus the nation’s energy and resources on domestic affairs. Let’s hope he’s right. But if he’s not, and a fourth wave is still to come, he and his successors in the White House would do well to keep these lessons in mind.

Jonathan Mahler is the author, most recently, of “The Challenge: How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend the Constitution — and Won.”

Barack Obama: the Making of the Man by David Maraniss – review

BY ALEC MACGILLIS - PUBLISHED 20 JUNE 2012

Obama plays basketball. Photo: Getty Images

Barack Obama: the Making of the Man 

David Maraniss

As closely scrutinised as the rise of Barack Hussein Obama has been, there has always been one chapter in his life around which mystery has hung: his late teens and early twenties, which he entered as a fairly carefree lad who dreamed of basketball stardom and had a yen for good marijuana and exited as a dead-serious young man with an ascetic inclination and a churning political and racial consciousness propelling him into the public sphere. Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, published when he was 34, skips past this period, which encompassed two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, two years at Columbia University and two years of work in New York, prior to his pivotal decision, at 24, to become a community organiser in Chicago.

That gap is now filled for us, thanks to David Maraniss’s biography of Obama up to the age of 27, when he left Chicago for Harvard Law School. This carefully reported book offers revelations extending far into Obama’s disparate family past but its value lies above all in helping us to understand how it was that a sense of destiny awoke in a young man who, just a few years earlier, was being chided by his mother for suggesting that he might stay in Hawaii after high school: “Damn it, Bar, you can’t just sit around like some good-time Charlie.” The moniker was apt. Despite the dislocations of his childhood, what Maraniss describes as a “cycle of leaving and being left”, Barry had grown into a likeable and slightly aimless boy, who embodied the Hawaii imperative: “Cool head, main thing.” He showed few outward signs of struggle with his biracial identity, a reflection surely of both Hawaii’s relatively tolerant, multi-hued atmosphere and the acceptance of his grandparents, who’d long since overcome the shock of their teenaged daughter’s seduction by an older Kenyan man.

Maraniss, author of a 1995 biography of Bill Clinton, takes us forward as good-time Barry transforms into on-the-move Barack. We see him after a big high school basketball game when, despite being a second stringer, he finagles his way into the newspaper account with some finely honed quotes for the reporter. We see him at Occidental, where he gives his first political speech – an impromptu but well- received anti-apartheid riff – and discovers a worldly, intellectual bent in wide-ranging, substance-fuelled bull sessions with a bunch of classmates that includes several close Pakistani friends. We see him at Columbia, where, as he put it in an interview with Maraniss, he plunged “deep inside my own head . . . in a way that in retrospect I don’t think was real healthy”. Or, as Maraniss summarises it: “[He] conduct[ed] an intense debate with himself over his past, present and future, an internal struggle that he shared with only a few close friends, including his girlfriends Alex and Genevieve . . .”

The girlfriends! Obama had alluded vaguely in his memoir to a few white women he had dated prior to meeting Michelle Robinson; Maraniss not only fills in the picture for two of them, he has also got hold of their letters and journals. There are chuckles to be had at Obama’s pretentious letters to Alex McNear, in which he flits from Eliot to Yeats to Pound: “You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”

There is a more affecting story in the jour­-nals of Genevieve Cook, the hyper-perceptive daughter of an Australian diplomat whom Obama met after college. Cook captured her lover in terms that ring awfully familiar today. In their second month together: “His warmth can be deceptive. Tho’ he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness . . .” A month later: “I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart – legitimate, admirable, really – a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness . . . but I’m still left with this feeling of . . . a bit of a wall – the veil.”

Behind the veil, the transformation was taking another turn. Obama was moving toward a deeper grounding in black American identity, despite having for years made only fitful gestures in this direction. One of his Pakistani friends recalled the switch: “Barack was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity and his achievement was really an achievement of identity in the modern world. That was an important period for him, first the shift from not inter­national but American, number one, and then not white, but black.” Obama drifted from Cook, who documented the demise of the relationship in a remarkably prescient journal entry: “That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere.”

Where does Maraniss leave us? With even greater appreciation for the tensions at work beneath Obama’s equanimity; also with greater scepticism for Obama the author, as Maraniss reveals just how much Obama had contorted his (admittedly embellished) story in Dreams From My Father to dramatise his search for racial identity. Above all, one is left with a deeper understanding of why Obama, as president, continued to press his conciliatory line until long after it was apparent to all others that his opposition was set on ruining him. As Maraniss describes it, drawing connections, knitting things together, was for Obama no mere campaign trope but a matter of existential salvation. As he wrote to McNear at the age of 22: “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me . . . The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the classes]; make them mine, me theirs.” Obama affirmed this in an interview with Maraniss: “The only way my life makes sense is if regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hope and moral precepts that are universal . . . If that is not the case then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life.”

We are now watching as Obama grapples with adapting this mindset to today’s political reality. But thanks to Maraniss, we have a better sense than before of how he came to it in the first place.

Alec MacGillis is a senior editor at the New Republic

 

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