A
man who wrote 245 books, created two popular crime series, spawned a
generation of imitators, and discovered Zeroland. The phenomenon of Urdu
crime writer Ibne Safi
Karachi waited eagerly in November 1963. Banners and posters went up
around its poky lending libraries, and word spread beyond the border to
the north Indian heartland. It was the return of Ibne Safi, prolific and
popular Urdu crime writer, from the depths of a mental breakdown that
had lasted three years. With him returned, between the lurid covers of
the slim volume of Daerh Matwaalay, the much-loved Ali Imran, a goofy,
rich and spoilt young man, who is actually X-2, chief of the secret
services of an unspecified country somewhere in Hindustan.
If
you were an Urdu reader in the subcontinent in the 1960s, three years
would have been too long to wait for your fix of Ibne Safi. In his
28-year-long writing career, Asrar Ahmed aka Ibne Safi (1928-1980) wrote
245 books, at the astonishing rate of two-three a month; and the strain
of his productivity led to his mental collapse in 1961. Priced at 9
aanas, the novels were devoured by readers from Karachi to Kanpur, from
schoolboys who would slip them between textbooks, away from the eyes of
disapproving parents; and mullahs who would queue up at bookshops at the
launch of every new book; to a certain 14-year-old in Meerut, Surendra
Mohan Pathak, who hid himself in a cowshed near his home to read the
contraband volumes.
If, like Mohammad Hanif, a teenager in Hyderabad, Pakistan, in the
Sixties, you could not afford a new novel, you could get your hand on a
grubby dog-eared copy through a network of aana-libraries, which loaned
the books for a few aanas each. “On days a new novel would release,
people would pay up to Rs 5 per hour to read them. And simply stand
there and read. It was like an addiction,” says Hanif, now an IT
professional in Kuwait. Proof that the addiction survives is in the Ibne
Safi novel that he still takes to bed every night, and the exhaustive
website that he runs on the crime writer (ibnesafi.info).
Earlier this week, in the hope of adding to his Indian readers, the
Chennai-based Blaft Publications and Tranquebar Press brought out
English translations of four novels of the Jasoosi Duniya series: Doctor
Dread, Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Poisoned Arrow. Last year,
Harper Collins released Hindi translations of a set of Imran novels; and
Random House India translated another Imran novel in English.
Ibne Safi was born in Nara village, Allahabad, in 1928, to a family of
landlords, and grew up into a precocious reader of epic fantasies like
Tilism-e-Hoshruba, and the adventures of H. Rider Haggard. As a young
member of the Urdu literary circle of Allahabad in the 1950s, he wrote
poetry, wore his hair long, dabbled with communism and worried about the
smut that had swamped popular literature of the time. At a gathering of
poets and intellectuals, when someone claimed that nothing but sex could
sell in Urdu, he decided to start a homegrown crime series to disprove
that thesis. In 1952, at the age of 24, he wrote Dilaer Mujrim,
featuring Inspector Faridi and his sidekick Hameed, the first of the 120
novels in the Jasoosi Duniya series. (Not all his plots were homegrown;
he admitted to lifting from English writers.) The same year, he left
with his family for Pakistan, where he would live the rest of his life.
He
was as much of a phenomenon in India as in Pakistan. An abiding memory
of his son Ahmed Safi is of his father working through the night. “I
remember him lying on a bed, on his left, propped up on a pillow, and
writing. The paper he would write on was held by a clipboard, beneath
which was a sheet of carbon paper, and another blank page. When he had
finished, the carbon copies of an entire novel would be mailed to
Allahabad to his friend Abbas Hussaini, who published them there, almost
simultaneously,” says Ahmed, a mechanical engineer in his 50s in
Karachi. “His Indian readership was bigger than in Pakistan, and his
books were translated into Hindi and Bengali.”
By
the 1960s, Ibne Safi was a brand. And like any famous brand, he spawned
a library of knock-offs. “A lot of people stole characters from his
series and started writing novels based on those. This happened mostly
when he was ill for three years (1961-63). They came up with similar
names. Enn Safi, Ibban Safi, Naghma Safi, Najma Safi and many such Safis
surfaced,” says Ahmed. “My father once wrote in a preface, ’You can be a
successful mystery writer in Urdu but you’d have to declare my father as
your parent to do so.’” Magazines like Mujrim, Tilisme-Jasoos and
Jasoosi Panja took his idea, but could not run too far with it. Though
his plots were simple, he also showed the way to more serious writers.
“My first impulse to write about crime came from reading him,” says the
grandee of Hindi pulp fiction, Pathak. “He picked up the idea of a
police procedural, because, obviously, there were no private detectives
in India or Pakistan. In fact, they didn’t exist till a couple of years
ago.”
Ibne Safi’s sleuths were impeccably moral men, driven by a strong sense
of nationalism, a long way off from the amoral, realistic universe of
Pathak’s criminals. There was Colonel Faridi, an immensely wealthy
aristocrat who studied criminology in Oxford, and whose passion led him
to join the police force. He lived in a palatial home, drove Lincolns
and Aston Martins, and was unmoved by the attractions of the many femme
fatales that crossed his path. Imran was his bumptious alter ego whose
ludicrousness was a camouflage for his real identity. According to
Shamshur Rahman Faruqi, who has translated the four novels for Blaft, it
was the kind of fiction that “instantly appealed to the instinct of the
average middle-class Muslim (and Hindu) in India and Pakistan”. Both
come together in one novel Zameen ke Badal, where they go in search of
the mysterious country of Zeroland.
The world of Ibne Safi, peopled by a cast of quixotic characters, and
exotic locales, though, is hardly revelatory about the times he lived
in. “He never wrote about the local thana and its setting. It was
modeled on Scotland Yard,” says Pathak. The novels are usually set in an
unnamed country, which could either be India or Pakistan, where a
jangbaaz foreign power (strong suggestions of America) sets traps for
his crime-busters, and where they take on larger-than-life baddies with
monikers as flamboyant as their crime: Gerald Shastri, scientist and
scholar who invents a method to turn men into gorillas; Sing Hee,
half-Mongolian, half-Chinese, who can dodge any bullet with ease; Humbug
the Great, a spy with a hump, whose mission is to foment a revolution in
Imran’s country.
Filmmaker Mahmood Farooqui, a fan of the writer, remembers it as a
curiously modern world. “There was nothing orthodox about it. It was
about a high-end life, about night clubs and cafes with names like
Arlechhino, attractive Anglo-Indian women and men in felt hats. What,
indeed, was a felt hat?” he says. For a reader in a small town in India,
a Technicolor world had been switched on.
In
the last few years, Pakistan has seen a revival of Ibne Safi’s works,
with many critics insisting that he be re-evaluated as a mainline
literary icon. Faruqi is not too convinced, and finds in his writing
neither the sophistication of plots nor of detection. Pathak agrees, but
adds of the man who wrote untiringly from his house in Nazimabad,
Karachi, “What he taught me was how to say it well, how to make a simple
line sparkle with wit. No one had done that before.”
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-return-of-x2/779736/1
