Sukrita Paul Kumar/Jeelani Bano
Prelude
Sukrita Paul Kumar’s dialogic interactions with Jeelani Bano are from her book, “Conversations on Modernism” with leading Urdu and Hindi writers from South Asia. The Beacon wishes to thank Kumar and Aditi Maheshwari of Vani Prakashan , publishers of the book, for permission to reproduce this conversation.
Sukrita Paul Kumar
Padma Shri JEELANI BANO has served as chairperson or principal advisor for a variety of non-governmental organizations that address systemic inequalities based on gender and the vulnerability of young people. She has also been on the Urdu advisory panel of the Sahitya Akademi as well as the National Book Trust. Her five novels, eleven short story collections, several books of poetry and screenplay of a film directed by Shyam Benegal have won her multiple awards, including the Maharashtra Urdu Academy Award, the Qaumi Hali award from the Haryana Urdu Academy, as well as literary awards in Pakistan and Qatar. Bano’s professional intent has always been revolutionary: born to an orthodox family, she was also influenced by the Progressive Writers frequenting her poetically inclined parental home; her own inclination has pursued social justice and the preservation of Urdu – especially the Telegu-inflected Dakhini Urdu. Bano’s books have been translated into a number of Indian languages, English, German, Norwegian, and Russian; she is herself a translator of Malayali short fiction. She has travelled to Tajikistan, Pakistan, Russia, and Uzbekistan for literary events, and is acknowledged as a stalwart of contemporary Urdu writing in the subcontinent.
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On the Creative and the Critical
SUKRITA: I found your story “Main” (“I” in English) fascinating – the loss of identity experienced by the protagonist and expressed so pointedly coheres with my definition of the modernist sensibility. And that specific experience acquires universal significance and meaning. It appears to be the story of each one of us existing in the contemporary milieu. Though the cause and explanation for this feeling may differ, we seem to end up with a similar consciousness on one level or another. Your other writing does not project this aspect of modern life significantly, but in “Main” you’ve presented a displaced character very convincingly. What is the source of this concern? Did you pick up on this theme from your general observation of modern life or is it related with any actual personal experience? Would you like to talk about the inspiration for this story, which is so different from your usual thematic concerns?
JEELANI BANO: It is very difficult for a writer to say where she or he may have found a certain story. It’s possible that out of thousands of stories floating around, one particular story decides to come to me, on its own. And then I may own it, but to be able to say from where I acquired it becomes a puzzle for me too. Sometimes one may not pick up a whole story but just a part of it, maybe just one snippet from an actual event. I think I can relate “Main” with something that happened years ago. I remember a visiting relative who casually made a comment to my mother – about a one-and-a-half year old infant playing in front of them. She said the child couldn’t be hers since he did not resemble her at all. I was touched by the reaction of the child – who howled and protested and wanted those words taken back. The incident triggered a chain of ideas in my mind. I said to myself, “Suppose a mother disclaims her child, what’s likely to happen to the psyche of the child?” It might create a crisis of identity, with which he’d have to live all his life. At times mothers may make such statements in anger, and create a permanent feeling of insecurity in a person. There are occasions when one has a strange feeling of not belonging to the people around one or to the place one has apparently lived all one’s life. What can one attribute this experience to? Everything gets to be so negative and unreal and all one is actually trying is to locate, to connect with one’s self. Throughout one’s life.
S: The beauty of that story is that a very broad abstract concept has acquired a specific shape and context. ‘Modern’ does not mean people in the past did not experience reality in this way. But a certain crisis of culture, the scepticism and cynicism following the First World War, did give rise to some fundamental philosophical questions regarding human existence. When I examined Urdu fiction, I noticed this phenomenon presented in the late 50’s and 60’s. The modernist sensibility projects itself in the ‘new story’ then. But somehow one doesn’t witness the writer’s exploration or search for new forms of expression. Perhaps retaining the old forms is a symptom of a conservative desire to remain with tradition. Have you ever felt the need to break the conventional form?
JB: I have no problem with the existing forms. As you said, in Europe there was a lot of philosophical cultural activity in the early twentieth century. We’ve been influenced by western thought too. But I would not say that there was any dearth of experimentation in Urdu. And, I don’t think that the changes in our literature were entirely due to what happened in the west. We have always had our own philosophical base and we have had our own style of literary expression. I often resist the idea of reading, for instance, particularly when I’m in the process of writing fiction myself. It disturbs my frame of mind; the world of the book I may be reading interferes with the world I am in the process of creating> I regard it very important to retain the authenticity of the universe, the characters that I am creating. I hate to have any external shadow cast on them. I’d think no writer likes the idea of having anything superimposed on her or his own creation. If the work is to be original and not imitative, she’d better be able to safeguard her own world of her own fiction. I have been engaged in a lot of experimentation, too. I don’t believe one has to necessarily conform to the existent patterns of short stories. I think any new story comes with its own style. We do not pre-plan its structure or style. The style is dependent on the nature of the content. The story told is not an event reported by the writer. It acquires the identity of a short story only when it is contained in its style, traditional or modern. My story “Ashtray main sulgatahua cigarette” (“A cigarette burning in the ashtray”) is the story of an ordinary woman burning perpetually like a cigarette, with no one to listen to her, not even her husband. She’s not a person to him but a domestic entity to look after his home and fulfill his physical desires. Her husband is a heavy cigarette-smoker and she’s shown in the story to liken her existence with that of the cigarettes being smoked and discarded by the male at will…
S: The experience of womanhood is central to the next question I want to pose to you. As a woman writer of Urdu in a rather conservative society, what kind of problems do you face? What kind of self-consciousness has been created in you because you are a woman? Do you feel alienated in the men’s world of writing and publishing? Are you conscious of having avoided certain themes because you are a woman? What kind of constraints have you laboured under as a woman writer? What are the encroachments on your freedom?
JB: I have never curbed myself, or not written on a particular theme because I am a woman. Nor have I ever thought of my gender as a limitation. I’ve always felt free to give expression to whatever I have been gripped may respond has not bothered me. But when I started writing I did face discomfiture. I belonged to a very conservative family from a feudal society of Badayuni, especially on my maternal side. My father was a scholar, a poet in Arabic and Persian, and was liberal enough to want his daughters to feel free. But my mother was very orthodox and she imposed a lot of restrictions on our movements. She followed purdah and one could not go unescorted anywhere, nor could one face a male visitor without purdah.
I started to write when I was about ten years old. Since my father was a poet, there used to be lots of poets visiting us. I remember how I used to wonder for long hours about how one could create anything original. I used to look at the poets with great reverence – Josh, Jigar, Sagar Nizami, Shakeel Badayuni, Qatil Shifai. I used to think of them as unusual beings who may have come from strange distant lands. When I started writing seriously and sending my work for publication, there was a lot of resistance from my mother. She thought no one would marry me as I was beginning to correspond with men in the publishing world. Indeed, I owe a lot to my father who let me go on. And then I got married at a rather early age, that is, immediately after my Intermediate. My father was keen to marry me to a person with literary taste, who’d not object to my writing. I had already published a book when I got married to Anwar who chose to marry me primarily because of my involvement in writing. I have been writing for the past 26-27 years and he has been very cooperative and understanding. I have been writing consistently throughout. I have no hurdles on the domestic front.
As for the social aspect or the literary world, I do have a complaint… about being neglected by the Urdu literary world. When I was young I used to hear, “Oh, in spite of being a woman, she writes well!” This is objectionable – the way one is put into a separate category of ‘women writers’. As it is in big social get-togethers in our society, in literature too a separate enclosure seems to have been created for women. Temperamentally I do not anyway like to socialize too much with other people – writers in particular. I notice that in their so called literary meets, there’s talk about everything but literature. I don’t fit in such meetings. And perhaps that’s why my name doesn’t figure when they pass names around for awards etc. There’s a lot of politicking involved in that. I remain out of it.
Conversations on Modernism. Sukrita Paul Kumar. Vani Prakashan. Imprint of Vani Book Company Daryaganj New Delhi. August 2020. Pp 190
S: Regarding the ‘award culture’ that occupies a large space in our society today, what do you think, does that help build standards of literary production? Excellent work is being produced in Hindi and Urdu. Would you say that awards are given fairly, without biases of any kind?
JB: Our critics suffer from ‘groupism’. Each established critic seems to have built up her or his own coterie of writers. They patronize only those of their own group. I have never played to their egos, nor have I ever joined any group. Why would they pay attention to me then? I figure in no books. Our literary scene is full of politics. The writers are like bonded labour. God knows why they go on writing! I ask myself why I keep writing all day. I am not going to receive either material gain or appreciation. Then there’s the category of evaluators, who are going to make a business out of the writer’s production and labour. I am busy writing in my frenzy but someone else is going to measure its worth and cash in on it. He might raise the work to the heavens in praise or condemn it to hell. He’s the one to create its market value, tears it to pieces or gets it an award. You are no longer a part of your work. The writer, in our society, is totally bypassed. You must have noticed that in literary functions the writer generally occupies a back seat. The honoured guest will either be a minister or some chairperson of some academy. In such functions prescriptive speeches are made: “The writer should write for her race, for her nation”. Ironically – given how uncertain writers themselves are of their function – the speaker always feels authorized to play the role of a guide to the writer. The writer appears a non-entity.
S: Elsewhere, the writer seems to be much more concerned with the political and the social scene. Here the reader and the writer don’t seem to be in communication. The writer seems to be functioning rather isolatedly. Even established writers do not easily step in actively on social, moral, or political issues.
JB: I think the writer is not given a chance to do so.
S: Maybe writers need to reach their readers directly, without dependence on the “middlemen”, the critics who have their own vested interests in promoting or demolishing a writer. The standards that ought to be maintained in literature can be totally dismissed in the political mire. The writer must build a direct rapport with her audience…
JB: But as writers we have neither sources nor resources. The writer has no control even over media. Tell me, do you see any worthwhile literary programmes on television? If there’s a programme it’s managed by non-writers and the popular item is ‘humorous mushairas’. Morning T.V. programmes have a feature on some societal personality. Have you ever seen a literary figure, a Marathi, Hindi, or Telugu writer? Actually classical musicians are given much more time on T.V. or radio than writers. The fee offered to a musician is much higher, too. A writer is given no importance.
S: But then the increase in the number of literary awards also means that literary activity is being given importance. But I’d say what’s required is a genuine critical examination of literary works, awards do nothing to build a critical tradition. If the awards are given in with a partisan outlook, indiscriminately, this does more harm than good to the cause of literature. Time remains the finest test for excellence in literature. But awards do play a role in drawing attention to a work of art.
JB: As far as I am concerned, awards have no value and I do not write for any appreciation at all. There was hardly any literary award in this country when I began writing.
S: Do you think that feminist criticism replaces one bias with another or would you say that there is a need for re-consideration of female perspectives in a literary work?
JB: Of course there’s a need for this reaction. I don’t think we have anybody working in that direction in contemporary Urdu literature. I wish we had. I do feel there’s a need to examine female writing differently. I don’t go by the belief that men and women receive experience in the same way. There is a difference and we have to give each its place. There’s a distinct female perspective in literature and art. It’d certainly be wrong not to acknowledge that fact or to dismiss it.
S: How would you define ‘modernism’? And how do you compare post-independence Urdu fiction with pre- independence?
JB: When claims of being ‘new’ or ‘modern’ are made for the latter fiction, I’d like to pause and consider how any literary work can be absolutely new or modern. It can change the old a little but it cannot be totally new. Styles of storytelling do change along with time. In Urdu, one does see evidence of changes in style and content in the short story. But I can’t go along with the claim that in the 60’s the story changed into something absolutely new. If anyone tried to make a total break with the tradition of the story, she ceased to produce a story. The narrative did not have the elements that make a story, nor did it reach its readers. But any short-story written at any time, if it is good, is a new story: it has not been written earlier and that is why it’s fresh. If it had existed earlier it need not have been re-written. Our society has been changing. We do not have the same kind of problems today that we had, say, ten years ago. Our feelings, our thoughts are changing and the world is getting smaller. The content of our short stories too is thereby changing. The stream of time keeps flowing and changing directions and our sensibility goes along with it; so does its expression in art. I don’t think any one period stands out distinctly as ‘modern’ or entirely different.
S: Would you say that there’s any ‘progress’ in literature? With more specialized disciplines in ‘knowledge’ available to us, have we got a firmer grip over our existence and if so, is it reflected in art?
JB: No, I don’t think there’s any such thing as ‘progress’ in literature. The ’60s short story in Urdu acquired a rather peculiar feature in the name of ‘modernity’: the story lost its ‘story-ness’, recoiled into a strange insular world that people could not understand. It’s a different matter if I write a story and keep it with myself but if I write and ask others to read it – well, some kind of communication has to be established. The story is between you, the reader, and me, the writer. Reading it does not necessarily mean that you like it. But if part of it has remained with you, then the story has meaning for me as well. If you do not retain any part of it and return the entire story to me, then that story is meaningless for me as well. If the story does not have the capacity to reach anyone then it is not worth its existence. It’s important for a story to have the element of ‘story-ness’. Its narration should attract attention and it should be absorbing.
S: When you read other writers, have you ever felt that you wished you could write like anyone of them? Have there been any writers whose influence you may have wanted to shake off?
JB: Camus used to impress me tremendously. And I read Gorky when I was quite young. I felt very moved by The Mother. Chekov, too, impressed me a lot but I have never felt I should write like anyone of them or be like them. You know, sometimes I get so deeply involved in my stories it’s almost as though I get entangled in a snare. Even in the night, I’m haunted, and when I get down to my domestic chores in the morning, the world of my writing casts a heavy shadow on everything and I desire absolute isolation. When I was writing my story “Cultural Academy” I met the character called Usha in a dream at a get-together in which somebody introduces her to me. She did not respond to me. In the morning – believe me, it was a strange experience dealing with her in my writing, having seen that character in the dream.
S: At times perhaps the world of fiction is more real than the world in which one actually has to operate in.
JB: When I am involved in a story, I am very mechanical in my ‘actual’’ world. When I am totally submerged and ridden with tension I go to the kitchen and do things that have nothing to do with the story.
About this matter of what is ‘real’ – my writing itself has to tell me how real it is. I don’t go by any other voices. When I was writing my recent novel on bonded labour I had thought of delineating Salim in one way, but after I had written a part of the book I realized it had.acquired a different colour. The character wanted to be different from how I had conceived him. I generally give in when such a clash occurs.
S: Thank you so much for making the reality of your fictional world available to us.
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A well-known poet and critic, Sukrita Paul Kumar was born and brought up in Kenya. She was formerly the Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at Delhi University. An ex-Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, she was an invited poet at the International Writing Programme, Iowa, USA & Hong Kong Baptist University. Honorary faculty, Durrell Centre at Corfu, Greece, she has been a recipient of many prestigious fellowships and residencies. Her recent collections of poems are Country Drive, Dream Catcher, Untitled and Poems Come Home (with Hindustani translations by Gulzar). Amongst her critical books are Narrating Partition and Conversations on Modernism. Her translations include the book Nude, poems by Vishal Bhardwaj and the novel, Blind. A guest editor of journals such as Manoa (Hawaii) and Muse India, she has held exhibitions of her paintings. Many of her poems come out of her experience of working with the homeless, the street children and Tsunami victims.
Further extracts from the book in The Beacon Conversations on Modernism: Extracts
Sukrita Paul Kumar in The Beacon In Transit
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