Iran News: Urdu writers’ books are finding
a new audience through translations of Safi’s Jasusi Duniya and
Imran series of crime-thrillers since his death in 1980. Visiting
from Pakistan, where Safi migrated during Partition years, his son
Ahmed talks to Shana Maria Verghis about a dad who wrote four novels
a month and inspired Javed Akhtar to create Mr. India’s villain and
Gabbar Singh
There was a curious paradox in the life of
Ibne Safi, pseudonym of Allahabad-born writer Asrar Ahmed, who
migrated to Pakistan from India after Partition. Safi, who
apparently made a club of Indian fans, before he crossed the border,
wrote Urdu commercial fiction set around the world, on themes like
romance, mystery and suspense. But till he died in 1980, he never
stepped out of Pakistan.
In fact, his son Ahmed Safi, an engineer by
profession and one of the late writer’s seven children, said he even
found it trying to travel from Karachi, where he lived, prolifically
churning pennyfarthing or ‘anna’ novels if you like, (the first was
less than a rupee), featuring the James Bond or Green Hornet-like
Imran and the duo of Colonel Faridi and Captain Hameed of his Jasusi
Duniya series.
The estate Safi’s offspring inherited,
includes over 245 mystery novels and five collections of
miscellaneous writings, including poetry.
Chennai-based Blaft was the first Indian
publisher to approach Safi for a translation into English, of the
Jasusi Duniya books.
Random House has already done one Imran
book through a separate translator that wasn’t so hot. They will
release another this year titled Dangerous Man by a new translator.
Meanwhile, Blaft tied with Westland on four Jasusi Duniya novels,
The Laughing Corpse, Poisoned Arrow, SmokeWater and Doctor Dread.
The last is also the name of an American criminal mastermind who
makes frequent appearances in different books. The Jasusi Duniya
novels, were translated by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, whom readers might
identify as a force in Pakistan’s Urdu scene. Faruqi did not have an
easy time, we were told, because puns in Ibne-e-Safi which sometimes
mix couplets from Ghalib or Mir, can sometimes elude an English
translation.
The locale of Safi’s novels ranges from
“somewhere in Hindustan,” to different parts of the world. Ahmed
Safi recalled one of his brothers and he were going to watch the
classic Lee Marvin starrer called Shout at the Devil, when his
father said he would join, “because the book he was writing then,
was set in the same locale as the movie. Zanzibar!” The Zanzibar and
other places of his book, some totally made up, were all
manufactured from Safi’s favorite writing place. His bed. “He wrote
in a sideways slump. And he never used the table,” his son recalled.
Ahmed Safi had brought along novels by
another popular Urdu writer, now 80 and coaching students at
Allahabad University, Ibne Sayid, whose Romani Duniya series of
romantic fiction was as popular here and in Pakistan as Ibne Safi’s
books were.
The story of how Ibne Safi the writer was
born, according to Safi’s son Ahmed, is that, “Someone at a literary
convention said the market was more for sexually-explicit books and
there wasn’t any mystery. My father said he would see what he could
do. His first book, Dil-e-Mujrim was inspired by Victor Gunn’s
Ironsides’ Lone Hands.” Gunn was the nom de plum of British novelist
Edwy Searles Brooks (18882-1965), who wrote a thriller series
featuring a protagonist name Ironsides Cromwell.
In those days, the books marketing route
was mainly through AH Wheeler bookstalls at railway stations in
Pakistan, where you picked a quick read. AH Wheeler no longer exists
there.
Ahmed said if he saw one in India, he would
photograph it for the historical connection with his father’s books.
He continued, “The only advertising he did was a spot in Daily Jung,
when a new novel came out. We will use it to release a collection of
his poetry this year.”
In his lifetime, Ibne Safi comfortably
supported his large brood and prodigiously wrote four novels each
month. But his mindwork took a toll. In 1961, Ahmed shared that, his
‘Abbu’ suffered a bout of schizophrenia and did not recover till
1963. He explained, “The ailment has different manifestations.
Sometimes a patient gets violent. Sometimes not. But they go into
seclusion and don’t talk. That is what my father did.” Safi was
cured with medicine and electric shocks. In those days there was no
such thing as counselling.
When his Dead Mathwale was launched in 1963
by Lal Bahadur Shashtri in Allahabad, it was a signal he was back in
business.
But his doctor advised him to write only
one book a month. A psychologist told Ahmed later that, “When
creativity oozes in a flood, sometimes the brain goes numb and
indicates that the person go on without it, until it recovers”
Safi, who liked his kebabs and tikkas,
didn’t drink and only smoked between religious fasts. Keeping to
himself, it seems he was, “not one for groups.” Hence he was away
from political parties and literary communities.” An academic study
of his writing came out in a Urdu book called Psycho Mansion. It is
the name he conjured for a mental asylum beneath whose building,
Imran in the series, runs an office. Psycho Mansion noted that Ibne
Safi dealt with issues like politics, psychology, et al, suggesting
this could be why he was popular across the classes.
Safi, when asked, whom he would place
himself next to on bookshelf, had replied, “I wouldn’t be on a
bookshelf, but under a pillow.”
http://www.ibna.ir/vdceex8znjh87wi.1kbj.html
