Reviews
Of Mysteries
That Refuse to Die
Antara Das
Poisoned Arrow, Smokewater, The Laughing
Corpse, Doctor Dread
Ibne Safi, translated by SR Faruqi
Blaft, with Tranquebar
Rs 295 each Most, if not all, artists savour
the idea of living in perpetuity. Their work, they fondly hope, will
remain interesting even when they are not around. If that truism works,
then Ibne Safi, a prolific and popular writer of Urdu crime fiction who
passed away in 1980, would have been a happy man today. Even as the
activities of the alleged CIA operative Raymond Davis unravelled
recently in Pakistan — where the Allahabad-born Safi had migrated to in
1952 — the blogs came alive, with young people quoting from his novel
Aadha Teetar, which described how foreign intelligence agencies
functioned in that country.
“Among booksellers, Ibne Safi’s books were
known as ‘currency notes’,” says Ahmad Safi, Ibne’s son and an engineer
by profession, here in Delhi to launch a set of four of his father's
novels, translated into English and published by Blaft Publications in
association with Tranquebar. His body of works is extensive: around 125
novels in the ‘Jasusi Duniya’ series dealing with the exploits of
Colonel Ahmad Kamal Faridi and his sidekick Captain Sajid Hameed and
another 120-odd books dealing with Imran, the blundering buffoon who is
actually a secret service chief. Through the 1950s and 60s, people in
India and Pakistan used to queue up at the local ‘anna library’ to
devour the latest mystery on offer; his books were also available in
Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu.
The English translations (Poisoned Arrow,
Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Doctor Dread) deal with the
one-upmanship between an American criminal Dr Dread and his diminutive
bęte noire, Finch. The covers are but improved and modified versions of
the original, with the front-cover surprisingly flaunting a quote from
AQ Khan (of the nuclear racketeering infamy). The plots are woven out of
tales of intrigue, kidnapping, murder and blackmail in the upper
echelons of society, though, as Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Safi’s
translator, points out, the plot as well as the police methods and
detection practices appear rather dated at times. The language presents
no such problems, Faruqi says, as formal Urdu changes very slowly. A
literal translation of an idiomatic tongue, however, can throw up
strange sentences like “Sir, you can cut off my tongue. But I am not a
philosopher like you.”
There have been efforts, of late, to locate
literary merit in these works. A recent publication called Psycho
Mansion has its writer Khurram Ali Shafique excerpt around 40 passages
from Safi’s books that stand apart due to their sheer literary value.
Rakesh Khanna, founder and publisher, Blaft, feels that Safi’s works are
ideal candidates for postmodern studies of popular culture pursued in
universities. “Research done in the American universities seems skewed
towards Sanskrit texts and diaspora writers,” Khanna says.
Further translations will depend on how the
four titles do in the market. As sales of Agatha Christies and Erle
Stanley Gardners show, the demand for old-fashioned police procedural
never really disappears, points out Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO, Westland.
With Ahmad Safi open to Bollywood adaptations —these are 245 readymade
scripts, he says — a fresh lease of life is always around the corner.
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