(Qurratulain Hyder passed away on 21 August. Mahmood S. Farooqi remembers this remarkable Urdu writer, humanist and feminist, who in a world torn apart by communal violence and Partition, sought out and celebrated the syncretic history and culture of the subcontinent.)

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. She had concluded 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.

To say that Aini aapa was an aristocratic writer should not cast an aspersion on her actual, aristocratic, past. She was deeply concerned with history, particularly as it swept up the life of individuals. Again and again, she returns to India’s syncretic past, especially as she lived through it in the pre-independence Lucknow and tries to analyse the causes of the deep fissure that was to tear apart that unity at partition. The tragedy of partition haunted her fiction writing from the start, so even as she celebrates that syncretic culture, from the very beginning she knows it to be doomed. The past therefore becomes a suspect figure, it becomes an existential noose around her protagonists’ ideals and beliefs.

Born in Lucknow at a time when the Taluqdari culture was at its zenith, Qurratulain Hyder’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 Javed 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 Javed, the staunch Nationalist, crosses the river of fire and migrates to Pakistan.

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 a belief in an India which is hard to imagine today. 