Annie At Her Best

Qurratulain Hyder, or Annie Appa as she is known to her friends, is about the most erudite woman around. She wears her erudition on her sleeves and offloads it in large dollops in her novels and short stories with didactic zeal. While regaling her readers with episodes from the past and the present, she wants to educate them on subjects like history, geography, religion (Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam), mysticism (both Sufi and Bhakti), rituals, eastern and western classical music as well as modern pop, poetry (Hindi, Urdu, English), flora and fauna. There is nothing in the world that Aunty Annie does not know and wants to make sure that her readers are impressed with her vast fund of knowledge. Most are.

River of Fire is Annie at her best. She spreads a vast canvas to paint on. She starts with Chandragupta and his minister Chanakya, deals with conflicts between established Buddhism and resurgent Hinduism, the advent of Islam, establishment of Muslim dynasties, arrival of European traders, dominance of the East India Company, English Nabobs with harems of Indian Bibis, their Eurasian offspring, the consolidation of British rule, upsurge of Indian nationalism, the Mutiny of 1857, the first and second world wars, the Congress party, the Muslim League, the Partition of India and Pakistan, the post-Independence era up to 1956. It leaves the reader breathless. Hundreds of characters come and vanish from the scene. What stays in the reader's mind are Hindu and Muslim families of Lucknow, Jaunpur, Moradabad and Varanasi bound by similar backgrounds and bonds of affection. "In Lucknow history is yesterday," asserts the author. It overtakes them and splits them apart. Some flee to England, some to Pakistan, some stay on in India where they cannot come to terms with the changed atmosphere; they cry in anguish. "Why did you forsake me, India!"

A melancholic strain of nostalgia for the days gone by runs like a refrain throughout the novel. It is aptly summed up by Toru Dutt's lines: 

O echo whose repose I mar 
With my regrets and mournful cries 
He comes...
I hear his voice afar, 
Or is it thine that thus replied?
Peace: hark he calls!—in vain in vain. 
The loved & lost, comes not again.

River of Fire could have been the most powerful historical novel of India but for some minor avoidable flaws. There are far too many passages which sound like so many words devoid of meaning. To wit: 

"The picture of the world was merely the Self which had been painted on the canvas of the Self. This was that pure existence, pure perception, pure life, the studio of the heart which contained all pictures, all imagination, where all images became one, where the same light kept passing through myriad-coloured glasses and all that which had been made with beauty and truth was a complete art-piece and a path, both for the creator and the beholder. And those who knew could understand."

This may be overlooked as expounding some abstruse aspect of Buddhist philosophy, but Hyder's penchant for depicting scenes is far too oftenstereotyped. She is not as close to nature as she sets herself out to be. Her dhak (flame of the forest) flowers in bhadon (season of the rains) when in fact it flowers for a few days around Holi. She puts the battlefield of Plassy in a mango orchard; in fact it was in a forest of palas (another name for flame of the forest). Her fair maidens sporting by river banks have magnolia petals dropping on their heads; there are very few magnolias in India and unlike American and European trees of the species have very sparse blossoms. Her hill partridges "coo"; in fact, hill partridges make calls which grate on the ears.

Hyder insists on translating her works into English herself: she is convinced she knows it as well as Urdu. So we have "thees, thou's" along with "yeah, yep, Omigosh and get lost". But no one dare tell Annie Appa that she should allow someone else to handle her fiction. She is the Subjantiwalli. If River of Fire does not become the rage in English that it is in Urdu, she'll have only herself to blame.