Where Gabbar
Singh and Mogambo came from
By Srinath Perur | Place:
Mumbai |
Poisoned Arrow - 110 pages, Rs200
Smokewater - 116 pages, Rs200
The Laughing Corpse - 116 pages, Rs200
Doctor Dread - 188 pages, Rs250
Ibne Safi
Translated by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Blaft/Tranquebar
The word prolific just about begins to
describe the hugely popular Urdu writer Ibne Safi. In a not very
long life — he was born near Allahabad in 1928, died in Karachi in
1980 — he produced 241 detective novels, a film script, and a pile
of short stories, essays, articles and poems. Blaft and Tranquebar
now bring us four books from the Jasusi Duniya series featuring
Colonel Faridi and Captain Hameed.
The setting is an imaginary coastal city
somewhere in the Indian sub-continent. This is a vibrant city of
nightclubs, cafes and bars, with a bustling expat population and
embassies where plots are hatched. Here young women may drive, ride
motorcycles and be active members of the police force; they may also
smoke, dance or wear Western clothes and continue to be respectable.
The city has mansions and knighted industrialists, and for a measure
of realism, even a slum.
This city has attracted two new
inhabitants. One is Dr Dread, a shadowy American villain who
expresses himself through poisons — his victims might bloat up
grotesquely and die, or be paralysed, or even find themselves
tearing off their clothes in public. The other is Finch — a
diminutive former circus performer of boundless agility who
frequently disguises himself as a monkey and startles passers-by by
asking for a cigarette. Finch has an old score to settle with Dr
Dread. These four books see their respective gangs loose in the
city, fighting each other and unleashing general nefariousness —
abduction, extortion, blackmail, drugs, espionage, human
trafficking. Desperate victims and hapless officials usually turn to
the ace detective Colonel Faridi.
The aristocratic Colonel Faridi lives in a
mansion with his hounds and snakes, his permanent house-guest and
sidekick Hameed, and the odd damsel in distress. He is an expert at
armed and unarmed combat, ratiocination, criminology, the art of
disguise, and the use of gadgetry. He is refined and disciplined,
will consume no intoxicant, and is impervious to the charms of women
(to the constant disappointment of the delightfully named Inspector
Rekha Larson). In short, Faridi is depressingly perfect, and the
reader can rely on him to prevail in the end.
The books are brought alive by Hameed —
lazy and whimsical with an outrageous sense of humour. Faridi
usually has to drag him out of bed to set him to work, but Hameed is
capable of extending himself when the need arises. Hameed, much to
Faridi’s annoyance, keeps a pet “billy goat” named Bhagra Khan that
he adorns with tie and felt hat and recites ghazals to. This starts
a fad, and for a while the city is infested with similarly attired
goats. “Many respectable persons gave up wearing ties and felt
hats,” we are told. Hameed’s weakness is women, something that both
the villains and Faridi use to their advantage. But Ibne Safi’s
moral code will allow Hameed no more than effusive flirtation.
The Urdu originals, when they came out in
1957, were priced at 12 annas (around Rs30 in today’s money). These
books cost much more, and it is not difficult to see why. The
inspired translations by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi surely took much
longer per book than the week or two Safi must have spent on them.
(At the time he was putting out two novels a month.) These books are
printed on quality paper with the original cover-art framed in
tastefully gaudy colours. But fun as they are to read, they are not
particularly satisfying as detective stories: plot developments can
be arbitrarily motivated; there are long stretches of inane
dialogue; there are convenient coincidences, hasty endings. Three of
the books are just over a hundred pages in length and are over in a
flash. Seen purely as pulp fiction, the books come close to being
worth less than the paper they are printed on. It might have helped
in this regard to combine the books into two volumes, or even one.
But the value of these books today might
lie elsewhere. We can see in them the origins, or at least the
foreshadowing, of some of the conventions of popular Hindi cinema of
the 1970s and 80s: the heroes pitted against grand criminals; the
extravagant action scenes interspersed with comedy and light
romance.
The screenwriter Javed Akhtar credits Ibne
Safi with teaching him the importance of having larger-than-life
characters such as Gabbar Singh and Mogambo. The books also put us
in touch with the tastes of a newly independent sub-continent, one
disposed to easily accept a foreigner as a crook and to see the West
as morally lax. And in the marvel of speculative cosmopolitanism
that is the city of Faridi and Hameed, these books from the past may
even allow us a glimpse of our future.
http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/review_urdu-pulp-fiction-where-gabbar-singh-and-mogambo-came-from_1564148
