It turned out that she was being rash. I am referring to Ismat Chughtai’s summation of Qurratulain Hyder following the publication of the latter’s second novel in the early nineteen fifties. Ismat had asserted that “the star that had emerged on the literary horizon with all the promise of becoming a Sun dazzled so strongly in one place that it lost all its splendour.” Chughtai wrote this before ‘Housing Society’, before ‘Agle Janam Mohe Bitiya na Kijo’ and above all before ‘Aag ka Dariya’ were written. She also wrote this before Hyder’s gradually expanding sweep harmonized the dichotomies of History and Past, Civilisations and personal identities, stream of consciousness and feminism and nostalgia into a meta-historical plane where no Urdu writer has ever reached.

Through many a desolate month of the English winter the County library at Oxford provided me nourishment and succour by allowing me access to Qurratulain Hyder’s novels and short stories. Reading works like ‘Roshni ki Raftar’ and ‘Patjhar ki Aawaaz,’ titles which resounded with movement when all around me was depressingly still, I was doubly reassured. My own nostalgia for a warm home was echoed by the nostalgia for the lost world that resounds in all her works.

In the Urdu world Hyder is called Aini aapa although she might as well be called Annie Aapa (indeed, this was the nickname by which she was addressed by her friends and family). The sophisticated, highly intellectual world she conjures up, a cosmopolitan space where Houseman coexists with Nazrul and folk songs of Chittagong come together with jazz numbers, was a world that I terribly wanted to be a part of. It was a world where one could be a world peace activist and an IPS officer, a high Talukdar and a radical journalist. By arriving at Oxford I imagined I had joined that forbidding world.

Nostalgia in Hyder’s writings is very different from the nostalgia one encounters in that other giant of contemporary Urdu fiction, Intezar Husain. Husain’s restlessness is more inchoate, the migration/hijrat he portrays has roots in pre-historic and mythical times, thus the constant appearance of the Budhha, the Jataka tales and even characters from the Puranas and from Islamic history in his works. His pastoral/idyllic world is pre-modern and even sometimes anti-modern. For Hyder the modern world, as well as modernity, is very much the home ground and what she laments is the passing away of a modern syncretic culture which had pre-modern and historical antecedents. In a word, Hyder’s quest and her gaze is distinctly historical and therefore politics, whether voluntary and individual or collective and party led, is the terrain on which her quest rests. For Husain, history and politics are both implicated in a modern world which he would rather eschew. Husain disdains the intellectual for the very nature of their being whereas Hyder disdains them for their shortcomings and their irrelevance while accepting the essential Nobility of their enterprise.

But Hyder begins her literary career at a time and place when the syncretic culture she would celebrate has already been heartbreakingly demolished by partition and the attendant massacres. While she constructs the contours of that shared space between Hindus and Muslims during the two hundred years of Nawabi rule in Awadh, and even celebrates it, it is already and always pre-figured by the destruction it is going to face hereafter. The dialectic is dynamic and inescapable in all her works. She starts by celebrating something that she knows is doomed, has already been shown to be doomed, yet it is so deeply absorbed in her being and in so many others around her that despite its demolition, she yet finds it impossible to negate it in its entirety.

Again and again, in all her works, she returns to this question of the syncretic high culture that was formed in Lucknow. She wants to know whether the Hindu Kayasth friends who shared her worldview, her language and her aspirations were already doomed to a separation because they did not, for instance, share each other’s kitchen. Were there already faultlines in this syncretism and this commonality that tore the ground beneath our feet in 1947 and thereafter? Faultlines which we could not see or chose not to see?

Mere Bhi Sanamkhane, inadequately translated as My Temples, Too was one of the first outcomes of that quest. Published first in 1947 it is a precursor, in many ways, to the majestic River of Fire. It describes the Lucknow of the Dilkusha gang comprising Ginnie and Diamond, the siblings Peechu, Polu and Roshi and Kiran and Glamour Boy and Longinus. Friends who have grown up together in or around Ghufran Manzil, the city residence of poetry-loving Kunwar Irfan Ali (the exact literary precursor to the Nawab Saheb of Baitar in ‘The Suitable Boy’), who participate in Nationalist activities by cultural fundraising and through the magazine which Roshi edits, called The New Era. It is the world of Jaddan Bai of Calcutta, of Gohar Jan of Alfred Theatrical Company, of Ustad Faiyyaz Khan and Harcourt Butler where there is ‘birdsong in the pines and the nightingale sang in the roses.’

There are ‘liberals and fire-eating revolutionaries and mild scholarly left-wingers, vegetarians and pacifists’ in this lot who ‘mostly wore rough handloom cotton and sang Tagore’s songs and write about realism in literature.’ The novel deals with the coming of age of these idealistic (and idealized) characters, the end of their emotional and political innocence as partition shatters their lives, literally and figuratively. Although the cast of characters is very wide and includes middle class personages such as the aspiring poetess Shehla Rehman, Salim the self-made Doctor, servants such as Shola Pari and Gainda, and the Anglo-Indian world, it is the aristocratic protagonists who get the fullest treatment and who occupy the central part of the story. Khurshid, Roshi’s impoverished and communist cousin, for instance, appears at the beginning but he is already pre-marginalised in the narrative, already packaged, already in love with Roshi and then he disappears only to reemerge at the end in a wholly different avatar, as an officer in the Pakistani police. None of his struggles, truths or choices are dealt with in any detail.

My Temples, Too by and large restricts its gaze to those ‘native men and women in dress suits and flowing Saris, celebrating the New Year with tremendous gusto, singing English songs, wearing paper caps, drinking. The English were about to quit India, but they would remain behind in the form of these strange creatures.’

Framed by a Houseman quote in the beginning about how ‘life to be sure is nothing much to loose, but young men think it so’ the novel moves towards its denouement as the romantic lives of the characters falls apart. Roshi loves Longinus, that is Salim the upstart, but he ends up marrying her orthodox cousin Qamar Ara. Peechu joins the IPS and gets himself transferred to Assam because of his doomed love for Christabel, the English wife of his friend Hafiz, before losing his life in riots at Delhi. Kiran, the idealistic journalist is dejected when Ginni Kaul, his beloved, chooses to marry a rich man from Bombay and meets his end at the hands of the tribal invaders in Kashmir. ROshi herself becomes benumbed with all this grief and loses her mind.

As opposed to the dynamic and evolving world of these friends, the political transformation happens off-stage and is conveyed to us in staccato fashion. All the major action of partition is condensed in two or three pages each, which appear and disappear almost at whim. On page 127-28 Partition arrives as having already occurred and all the havoc it wreaked on Lucknow are summarized in two pages. Kiran writes,

“Apart from the new emotional adjustments, we will have to decide how we are going to divide our culture. For instance, we must decide what is Hindu music and what is Muslim music, what is Hindu dance…”

Again, on p157 all the madness and carnage of Delhi is summarily shortened in a couple of paragraphs.
“The Prime Minister is reported to have requested the Defence Minister(wrote Kiran) to include Muslim officers as well in the military police that is stationed in Delhi. But as usual nobody paid heed to him.”

Rather than looking at ‘Mere Bhi Sanamkhane’ or My Temples Too as a finished work on its own terms it might be more worthwhile to see it as a template for many of the major concerns that would mark Hyder’s writing hereon. There is the Nawabi world and its young cosmopolitan offshoots, there is the forlorn and (always) emotionally frustrated heroine, the caddish outside lover, the Anglo-Indian world of Rose Queen and her cinematic aspirations, the asides into Ancient India including Hindu and Budhhist motifs that were to majestically flower in ‘Aag ka Dariya’ and a search for the limits and potentialities of that ‘inextricably linked world of Hindus and Muslims’ and its coming apart.

Born in Lucknow at a time when the Taluqdari culture was at its zenith, Aini aapa’s father was a well known Urdu writer but she herself was educated at the famous Isabella Thorburn college where she received a highly anglicized education. At home with European high culture as well as with India’s philosophical traditions, Aini aapa was every bit a Nehruvian in ethos and world view. Yet, she had also intimately seen the rural world of Eastern Uttar Pradesh and was intimate enough with the ‘shagird pesha’, the servant establishment which ever surrounded her aristocratic household. She was therefore, equally at home with the rustic and the folk as she was with high literature and her writings show an easy switch between the two worlds.

‘Aag ka Dariya’, her masterpiece, inadequately translated as River of Fire tells the story of India from the ancient times to the modern. It is, in one sense, the story of time itself. Beginning with the Buddha and his revolution, it jumps to the early medieval era and tracks the life of a soldier adventurer who then turns into an Anglo-Indian cast aside of the eighteenth century before getting reborn as Gautam Nilambar, a nationalist-communist Kayasth in mid-twentieth century Lucknow. It then becomes the story of as well as a metaphor for modern India by including the careers and lives of Kamal and Champa, people who grow up together but cannot live together. Not all their communism, not all their humanitarian solidarity can prevent their country from being riven apart by the basest of passions. Not all their education or camaraderie can provide them personal happiness. Civilisational misfortune blends into existential helplessness as characters are buffeted about and countries loose their plot. Eventually, faced with rejections and insults Kamal, the staunch Nationalist, crosses the river of fire and migrates to Pakistan.

I have used the word Nehruvian to describe Aini aapa’s historical and political concerns with good reason. Aag ka Dariya is a discovery too, a discovery of philosophical and existential continuities in the Indian civilization. Read sometimes as the story of the Indo-Muslim identity, at others as the story of partition and most usually as a philosophical account of time itself it is, most properly, a delineation of the Indian civilization and its ethos. It is a voyage of discovery, in a similar fashion as the more famous quest of that title. Said sometimes to be inspired by Herman Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha,’ because of the overweening presence of Buddhist thoughts and ideas, it is an attempt to explore the ‘essence’ of India, one where its Indo-Muslim part takes a stronger centre stage. In charting out the terrain of India Aini aapa, like Nehru before her, takes recourse to the same texts and the same markers that had been excavated, essentially, by the Orientalist enterprise in India. Vedanta and Upanishads, the privileging of Budhhism, Farabi and Ibn-e Seena, texts and individuals that had been, so to say, conceded by the early interrogators of India and of Islam. Hers is an India of the English speaking even if it shines forth in Urdu.

What rescues her works from becoming an exposition of the Nehruvian project is her deep interest in popular culture. Not just folk songs and ritualistic religious practices, but also ‘nautanki’ and early cinema. No other writer, to my knowledge, has so explored the impact of the new technological forms of entertainment as Aini aapa. Her stories and books are littered with characters who give up their life to follow their passion for Gauhar Jaan or for Sulochna or Madhuri. Bioscope, traveling theatre companies, singing ladies, Aini aapa delves into passions that made these worlds as also passions which made them resoundingly popular.

Aini aapa was unique in Urdu fiction for the kind of cosmopolitan spirit she could bring to her writing and she also stands out for the way she could plumb the emotional and psychological depth of her characters. She was also a feminist, but one whose belief in the essential equality of men and women was tempered by the equality of the existential dilemmas they faced. She migrated to Pakistan initially but deeply fazed by the society she saw there, the greed and flippancy which she satirized in works such as ‘Housing Society,’ she returned to India and devoted herself entirely to the pursuit of letters. She translated and reported on a wide variety of things, especially during her stint with the Illustrated Weekly of India where she was a sub-editor under Khuswant Singh, and traveled widely. She was the most supreme investigator of what briefly came to be known as ‘communal relations,’ which Urdu fiction, or indeed Indian fiction, has ever known. Her passing is the passing of confidence in the life-transforming ability of letters.