Fire In Her Belly

Khushwant Singh calls her the "most erudite woman" he's ever known, Times Literary Supplement hails her as one of the world's major authors alongside Marquez and Milan Kundera, and AliSardar Jaffri says he can think of no other Asian woman of her literary stature. Yet, Aini Apa, as Hyder is popularly known, waves away the legacy of her years dismissively, too tired perhaps to telescope her crowded life—as a writer, a child broadcaster with AIR, illustrator, journalist and visiting professor at many foreign universities—for a newcomer. "What's there to tell?" she asks abruptly, "I've written about all of it."

Hyder wrote her first two sentences when she was six and she was able to evoke, the story goes, a definite image of a station with coolies running about with lanterns in the dark. But even if Hyder had not followed up this infant flair with novels, short stories and Kar-i-Jahan Daraaz Hai—a voluminous semi-fictional autobiography that goes back to when her ancestors first arrived in India from Central Asia and progresses up to her own days—there would still have been plenty to tell about this unusual woman with a Renaissance sensibility, named after an early 19th century Persian poet executed for non-conformism.

The product of a liberal, culturally elite, Muslim upper-class—as much at ease with Christopher Isherwood and cucumber sandwiches as with revolutionary Urdu poetry—by all accounts, Hyder has been no halcyon either in her personal or her professional life; the seas, rather, have rocked in her wake! At a time when contemporary Urdu literature was steeped in leftist concerns, Hyder, scandalously for some, wrote not about the proverbial peasant and plough but about her own privileged milieu and the destruction of its graceful composite culture. This stirred up a storm. The great Urdu troika of the Progressive Writers movement—Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishen Singh Bedi and Ismat Chugtai—scoffed at her as a renegade and the voice of a feudal bourgeoise; Chugtai even nicknamed her "Pom Pom Darling" in cruel parody. But Hyder's corpus is humbling, and by '57, with the publication of Aag ka Darya—a seminal novel which sweeps confidently over 25 centuries of history, from Chand-ragupta Maurya to Bahlol Lodhi and Wajid Ali Shah upto post-partition India and Pakistan—her position as a pathbreaking Urdu writer was undisputed. "I introduced the modern college girl factor into Urdu fiction," says Hyder, typically reductive about herself. But Amir Husain, professor of Urdu at SOAS, London, puts it differently. "She has an unparalleled historic imagination. Modern Urdu literature," says he, "begins with Qurratulain Hyder."

Sadly though, until last year, when Kali for Women published The River of Fire, the English translation of Aag Ka Darya (now also being published in the US, UK and Norway), and more recently, A Season of Betrayals, a translation of two novellas—Hyder stood in danger of being forgotten by an increasingly monolingual, English-speaking Indian middle-class. The loss would've been irreparable, because apart from the absolutely fascinating canvas of her writing, Hyder embodies in her person the very essence of the ganga-jamni tehzeeb, the confluence of Indo-Muslim culture, that she so deeply cherished and which today is cynically dismissed as the nostalgist's dream.

"There was a time when people were embarrassed to display religious zeal, but now we've made culture into a political problem," says Hyder disgustedly. In '91, when she was honoured with the Jnanpith, Hyder spoke of herself as "a little bird which foolishly puts up its claws, hoping that it'll stop the sky from falling". Of course, the sky did fall, and Hyder's watched with sadness the "culture of hatred" that's displaced it; but her writing, always imbued with a rich aural legacy—Streborg's Faery Waltz, nautanki percussionists in Kalyanpur, snatches of sufi and bhakti songs, phrases from Faiz and Kalidas and Eliot—has continued to point to a myriad layered world, a lived composite reality of high and folk culture that no fundamentalist impulse can erase. Born to progressive parents (both writers), intellectual and personal freedom, coupled with a fierce pride in her

Muslim identity, was an easy inheritance for Hyder. Her parent's home was a vibrant turnstile of writers, poets and thinkers; and women's emancipation, says she, was "a family motto" for both Sajjad Hyder, who wrote under the pen-name Yildirim (Turkish for thunderbolt), and Nazar Sajjad, a feisty woman who lobbied for the education of Muslim women, held signature campaigns against polygamy and became an accomplished photographer even inpurdah.

Armed with the insouciant security of this background and her education at Lucknow's famed Isabella Thurbourn College, Hyder burst upon the world in her 20s. Her corpus had widened to include the condition of tea-garden workers in Sylhet, the tawaifs of Avadh, the emotional disjunctures faced by a post-partition generation and the failed terrorist movement of Bengal in Aakhir-e-Shab Ke Humsafar—a book interestingly triggered off by two separate incidents: seeing Benazir Ahmed, a radical who'd once swum the Padma with both his hands handcuffed, sitting isolated and forgotten in the lawns of Dhaka university in the '70s, and a meeting with a man who carried a tin of 555 and wore a sharkskin sherwani, but who, as Faiz later told her, had once been a fellow revolutionary in jail!

Speaking outside the pale of her formidable intellect, Hyder's friends remember 'Annie' with humorous and helpless affection as, well, "just Annie". Her bed always spilled over with books, her cupboard with unusable gadgets. She was beautiful and reportedly conscious of it; she refuses to be photographed now that she is, to quote her, "a horror show"! There were many suitors, one promising interlude with Urdu writer K.A. Abbas, yet she never married. Khushwant, under whose editorship she worked in The Illustrated Weekly, carps that Hyder, "like T.N. Seshan never smiles". But Bachi Karkaria who was then a fledgling reporter in the same office says that though Hyder could be a "person of extremes" and she and Khushwant were always at loggerheads, Hyder could also be "like a giggling schoolgirl" full of witty doggerels and wicked sobriquets. Other friends like Sultana Jaffri, Sayida Hamid and Krishna B. Vaid vouchsafe that there was never one like Hyder to argue, yes, but also enjoy a laugh, even at herself. What none deny is that she's always been wonderfully and inimitably colourful. For instance, back in the '50s, when Hyder was a young 'sari-reporter' in Fleet Street, fresh out of Pakistan, she got a by-line for her very first story in The Daily Telegraph because during the queen's coronation, she resourcefully tracked down and interviewed not only a woman who'd pierced the queen's ears, but Mrs. Henry Holland, who was Oscar Wilde's daughter-in-law and the Queen's beautician!

In '61, Hyder left the BBC, but instead of going to Pakistan where her family was, she came back to India. Though she still visits Pakistan, where her brother is a highly placed official, Hyder's feelings about Pakistan and India, especially in the late '90s is something of a mystery she fiercely refuses to speak off: "It gives me the spooks", says she, "just don't write about it."

That's a sentiment one has to respect. Because, now at 82, though considerably weakened by two strokes, Hyder's writing the third volume of Kar-e-Jahan Daraaz Hai and is putting together a photographic social biography that starts in 1899 and will cover a 100 years. And despite the betrayals and travesties of Time, Hyder still holds on passionately to her ideal of the ganga-jamni tehzeeb.