JESUS AND MARY COLLEGE, DELHI UNIVERSITY

ENGLISH HONS III YEAR: PARTITION LITERATURE

BASTI BY INTIZAR HUSAIN

BACKGROUND TO PARTITION LITERATURE IN URDU: PART II

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ISLAM

The classroom discussions on Basti had made it evident that Intizar Husain’s position as a
Shia Muslim and several allusions to Islam in the text, require you to pay attention to the
history of Islam. Here are a few relevant things that will help you understand the text. You
can delve deeper in the history of Islam by following the books mentioned in the
bibliography at the end.

Islam is a major world religion promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 7th
century CE. The Arabic term islām, literally “surrender,” illuminates the fundamental
religious idea of Islam—that the believer accepts surrender to the will of Allah. Allah is
viewed as the sole God—creator, sustainer, and restorer of the world. The will of Allah, to
which human beings must submit, is made known through the sacred scriptures, the Qurʾān
which Allah revealed to his messenger, Muhammad. In Islam, Muhammad is considered the
last of a series of prophets (including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and Jesus),
and his message simultaneously consummates and completes the “revelations” attributed to
earlier prophets.

From the very beginning of Islam, Muhammad had inculcated a sense of brotherhood and a
bond of faith among his followers, both of which helped to develop among them a feeling of
close relationship that was accentuated by their experiences of persecution as a nascent
community in Mecca. The strong attachment to the tenets of the Qurʾānic revelation and the
conspicuous socioeconomic content of Islamic religious practices cemented this bond of
faith. In 622 CE, when the Prophet migrated to Medina, his preaching was soon accepted, and
the community-state of Islam emerged.

Mecca, Arabic Makkah, ancient Bakkah, city, western Saudi Arabia, is located in the Ṣirāt
Mountains, inland from the Red Sea coast. It is the holiest of Muslim cities. Muhammad, the
founder of Islam, was born in Mecca, and it is toward this religious centre that Muslims turn
five times daily in prayer. All devout and able Muslims attempt a hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca
at least once in their lifetime. The city’s religious importance greatly increased with the birth
of Muhammad about 570. The Prophet was forced to flee from Mecca in 622, but he returned
eight years later and took control of the city. He purged Mecca of idols, declared it a centre of
Muslim pilgrimage, and dedicated it to God. Since then the city has remained the major
religious centre of Islam.

Kaaba, also spelled Kaʿbah, is a small shrine located near the centre of the Great Mosque in
Mecca and considered by Muslims everywhere to be the most sacred spot on Earth. Muslims
orient themselves toward this shrine during the five daily prayers, bury their dead facing its
meridian, and cherish the ambition of visiting it on pilgrimage, or hajj, in accord with the
command set out in the Qurʾān.

The early history of the Kaaba is not well known, but it is certain that in the period before the
rise of Islam it was a polytheist sanctuary and was a site of pilgrimage for people throughout
the Arabian Peninsula. The Qurʾān says of Abraham and Ishmael that they “raised the
foundations” of the Kaaba. The exact sense is ambiguous, but many Muslims have
interpreted the phrase to mean that they rebuilt a shrine first erected by Adam of which only
the foundations still existed. The Kaaba has been destroyed, damaged, and subsequently
rebuilt several times since. In 930 the Black Stone itself was carried away by an extreme
Shiʿi sect known as the Qarmatians and held almost 20 years for ransom. During
Muhammad’s early ministry, the Kaaba was the qiblah, or direction of prayer, for the Muslim
community. After the Muslim migration, or Hijrah, to Medina, the qiblah briefly switched to
Jerusalem before returning to the Kaaba. When Muhammad’s forces conquered Mecca in
630, he ordered the destruction of the pagan idols housed in the shrine and ordered it cleansed
of all signs of polytheism. The Kaaba has since been the focal point of Muslim piety.

Medina, Arabic Al-Madīnah, formally Al-Madīnah al-Munawwarah (“The Luminous City”)

or Madīnat Rasūl Allāh (“City of the Messenger of God [i.e., Muhammad]”), is an ancient
Yathrib, city located in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia, about 100 miles (160 km)
inland from the Red Sea and 275 miles from Mecca by road. It is the second holiest city in
Islam, after Mecca.

Medina is celebrated as the place from which Muhammad established the Muslim community
(ummah) after his flight from Mecca (622 CE) and is where his body is entombed. A
pilgrimage is made to his tomb in the city’s chief mosque.

Hijrah, also spelled Hejira or Hijra (“Migration” or “Emigration”), Latin Hegira, is the
Prophet Muhammad’s migration (622 CE) from Mecca to Medina in order to escape
persecution. The date represents the starting point of the Muslim era. The term hijrah has also
been applied to the emigrations of the faithful to Abyssinia (later known as Ethiopia) and of
Muhammad’s followers to Medina before the capture of Mecca in 630.

The most-honoured muhājirūn, considered among those known as the Companions of the
Prophet, are those who emigrated with Muhammad to Medina. They are praised in the Qurʾān
for their early conversion to Islam (sābiqah) and for the subsequent hardships they endured in
Mecca, which forced them to migrate to Medina. The Qurʾān describes the muhājirūn as
being of a higher status before God (9:20) and states,

As for those who emigrated for the sake of God after having been persecuted, We will
provide them with a fine abode in this life; yet better still is the reward of the life to come, if
they but knew it (16:41).

The muhājirūn remained a separate and greatly esteemed group in the Muslim community,
both in Mecca and in Medina, and assumed leadership of the Muslim polity, through the
caliphate, after Muhammad’s death. As a result of the Hijrah, another distinct body of
Muslims came into being, the anṣār (“helpers”); they were the Medinese who aided
Muhammad and the muhājirūn. The anṣār were members of the two major Medinese tribes,
the feuding al-Khazraj and al-Aws, whom Muhammad had been asked to reconcile when he
was still a rising figure in Mecca.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islam

PARTITION LITERATURE AND THE IDEA OF HIJRAT

Like everything else written during and about this period, migration too has been viewed and
interpreted in different ways. As in the depiction of Partition-related violence, some writers
catalogue the horrors witnessed on the way and the difficulties in finding safe refuges on the
other side of newly-demarcated borders; others depict it as hijrat, an experience akin to the
Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina and therefore an experience that transcended
human sufferings.

Still others view it as salutary experiences with the potential to draw lessons from past
mistakes. Intizar Husain, one of the finest chroniclers of the long-term “effects” of the
Partition has repeatedly drawn our attention to the possibilities that the Partition presented but
were lost or frittered away. He talks of how, suddenly, almost by accident, it allowed writers
like him to “regain” a great experience – the hijrat, which has a unique place in the history of
the Muslims. Yet, he says, “And the great expectation we had of making something out of it
at a creative level and of exploiting it in developing a new consciousness and sensibility –
that bright expectation has now faded and gone.

Source: Husain, Intizar. The Sea Lies Ahead. Tr. Jalil, Rakhshanda. Collins India, 2018.
 JADEEDIYAT (MODERNISM) IN PAKISTANI URDU FICTION

Progressive realism, with its ‘life-like’ characters and essentially social and political
concerns, was the dominant narrative mode during the 1930s and 1940s. In the aftermath of
Partition, creative writers had to confront a completely altered social landscape with
thousands of refugees displaced from their secure existence in search of shelter, livelihood
and a new identity. A representation of the resultant feelings of despair, loneliness and
alienation required a somewhat different narrative strategy. It was in this context that the Nai
Kahani in Hindi and the Jadeed Afsana in Urdu emerged as the representative modernist
form.

The trajectory of jadeediyat (modernism) in Pakistani Urdu fiction needs to be distinguished

from its Hindi and Urdu counterpart in India. While literature in independent India was not
subject to any severe censorship by the State, which in fact supported civil liberties zealously,
the Urdu writer in Pakistan was severely constrained by the Liaqat Ali Khan and Ayub Khan
regimes. The Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association and the Communist Party of Pakistan
were banned and the Urdu writers in Pakistan found themselves at a dead-end after the
Partition. Many of them were progressive writers and found it extremely difficult to accept
the critical and unnatural break. For them, a common cultural North Indian identity, centred
to a very large extent on the Urdu language, was a civilizational identity that had retained its
hold for centuries.

In the context of Partition narratives, from both sides of the border, Aijaz Ahmad has drawn
attention to how since Urdu was identified neither with any region nor with any religious
community or political persuasion, Urdu writers tended to see themselves and their works as
a “condensation of the civilization as a whole”.58

But to posit such a civilizational identity went contrary to the very logic of the creation of
Pakistan. In the initial phase immediately after Partition, the progressive writers in Pakistan
continued to write stories on Partition from a secular humanist perspective. But after the
Pakistani State came down heavily on the All Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association
(APPWA) during the mid-1950s, many of these writers just stopped publishing any of their
works.

The disintegration of the Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Forum was also hastened by internal
dissensions. As in the case of the IPWA, the APPWA also adopted a rigid attitude towards
the State and the role of literature in the revolutionary struggle. This predictably led to a split.
According to Hafeez Malik, “The dissidents led by Hasan Askari, and Saádat Hasan Manto
turned in disillusionment to art for the sake of art, and eventually succeeded in winning over
a number of young writers to their literary theory.”58

Sajjad Zaheer, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Pakistan, and Ahmad
Nadeem Qasmi, the secretary of the APPWA, launched a sharp and vitriolic attack against the
policies of the Pakistan Government. The critique of the class character of the Muslim
League-led government and the call for socialist literature was evident in progressive journals
like Savera, Naqush and Sang-e Meel. This in fact led to the quick demise of all Left and
secular formations. Both Sajjad Zaheer and Faiz Ahmad Faiz were imprisoned in the Lahore
Conspiracy case in 1951 and the Communist Party of Pakistan was banned in 1954. The
APPWA was declared a political party in 1958 and Ayub Khan forcibly sold off the assets of
Progressive Papers Limited, the funding organization of the Association. Hafeez Malik
writes: “Some writers prudently accepted new positions in the semiprivate organizations
supported by the government, while the die-hards continued to eke out an existence through
the sale of their literary works.”60

The progressive, secular stance could not be countenanced by a newborn Pakistani State
when Pakistan had been created on the basis of an exclusive religious cultural and national
identity. The new generation of Urdu writers wrote an alternative script in which at one end
of the spectrum shared traditions were cast in an abstract allusive form, and at the other end
Partition was re-labelled as the birth of Pakistan, a memorable and defining moment for
which thousands of Muslims had been martyred. According to Aijaz Ahmad, “This shift in
ideological mooring was much clearer in Pakistan, already by 1957, where the state had
played a direct role in suppressing the Left intelligentsia….”61

Source: Prakash, Bodh. Writing Partition: Aesthetics and Ideology in Hindi and Urdu

Literature. Delhi: Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd, 2009.

Bibliography

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1994. Print.

Hawting, G.R. The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History.

Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Armstrong, Karen. Islam: A Short History. Modern Library, 2002.

Boer, De. The History of Philosophy in Islam. Dover, 1907.