learnt Urdu
just in order to be able to read Ibne Safi.
In this article I intend to make some suggestions
on Safi’s literary merits, too, but let me just add that the functional value of his work is
immense. Even the worst of his opponents have had to admit that Safi's
writing is among the best samples of Urdu prose with its choicest
vocabulary, brevity, clarity of expression and almost an unsurpassed
lyrical fluidity. To maintain such quality in over 250 books
(approximately 40,000 pages of printed prose!) is not an ordinary
achievement.
Then their is the panorama of themes. No other
writer in Urdu can claim to have presented so many diverse venues of the
human world and the human thought in his or her work.
There are those colonial hill stations,
post-colonial mega cities, Amazonian forests, glamorous five-stars,
plague-ridden ghettos, mountain tribes, town-dwelling citizens….as his
characters move in and out of various situations we are carried with them
to look at places all of us cannot possibly visit in one lifetime, (as
well as places, some of which could never have existed on this planet.)
Yes, that sounds like James Bond, except that the similarity ends there.
Ibne Safi had already published fifteen books when the first Bond novel
appeared. And then, of course, the canvas of Bond's world is moderated by
the sad fact that Ian Fleming could write only thirteen books about his
master seducer.
It is indeed no exaggeration but quite an
understatement that for a very large number of his readers, Ibne Safi's
novels were windows into such concepts of human thought as Freudian
psychology, Jung, Confucius, Nietzsche, anthropology, art, Picasso, debate
against racism, political economy, international affairs, modem
technology.... in fact, the novels were handbooks of "all you need to know
but nobody taught you at school." In that way they still remain very good
tools for cultural orientation and uplifting of young readers.
The moral dimension of his novels is also worth a
note here. The three major characters. Faridi, Hameed, Imran, are
presented with irresistible glamour, nevertheless they keep restraint over
their sexual desires. I know friends who admit that they were 'saved' from
several 'vices' in their tender age predominantly because of these
characters, whom they had idolized.
The question of his literary merit is still
unsettled, but it seems as if the tables have already started tilting in
his favour. One obvious reason is that those who used to read his novels,
hiding themselves from their elders under bed-sheets, are now well into
their forties and fifties. They are teachers, professors, writers and
parents. But they are also old friends of Safi's like Dr Abul Khair Kashfi,
one of the few senior critics of that generation to be still writing
today. The sum total of the positive bias of these people is that some of
the prejudices against Safi have been lifted but an open acknowledgement
of his literary greatness remains to be seen.
I think that the issue is deeper. It has got to
do with our literary values, and the way we have come to understand our
own literature. Why is it so, I would like to ask, that a critic like
Waqar Azeem deplores the pathetic vulgarity (according to him) of Raees
Ahmed Jaffri and gives him a place in his book (Dastaan
Say Afsanay Tak) at the same time forgetting even to mention Ibne Safi, whose output
was definitely larger than Raees Ahmed Jaffri?
In my opinion the tradition of modem literary
criticism has been established on very apologetic lines in Urdu. Until
late nineteenth century, the dominant form of fiction in Urdu was dastaan.
Then came Hali, Azad and Nazeer Ahmed. For better or worse they declared
that the entire bulk of the classical Urdu fiction is worth being burnt
the hero in one of Nazeer Ahmed's novels actually does that. What came to
replace this classical tradition of Urdu dastaan writing was the
westernized novel, and later, the short story. From Nazeer Ahmed down to the
novelists of our own time, everyone has accepted the western forms as
consummation devoutly to be pursued. Our "histories of Urdu literature"
are single-track narratives, hypothesising an evolution of Urdu fiction
from dastaan to novel to the short story.
The Urdu critic seems to be saying this: the more
your novels conform to the western format (as if there was a western
format), the more high evolved your novel is. Some of us would perhaps
remember how Qurat-ul-Ain Hyder's Aag Ka Dary was hailed as the Ulysses of
Urdu literature. It seems as if the Urdu writers have all accepted their
western counterparts as standards.
All, save one - Ibne Safi, who was once asked by
someone why doesn't he write the way Earle Stanley Gardener writes. Safi's
reply to this was: "Do you have the gal to go and ask Stanley Gardner why
he doesn't write the way Ibne Safi does?"
Although he knew quite well that all he had to do
in order to win literary acknowledgment was to prove his equivalence with
Doyle or Christie, he stubbornly insisted that his writings do not conform
to any western genre, nor does he have a. predecessor in any foreign
writer. Whatever else he might or might not have been Ibne Safi is to me a
breeze of the fresh air of confidence against an atmosphere of suffocating
apologeticism.
The final question is: if the western detective
fiction was not a source of inspiration for Ibne Safi, then what was? Any
reader of Ibne Safi will answer this one without taking five seconds of
waiting time: Talism-e-Hoshruba, the classical Urdu dastatn as Ibne Safi
had admitted in several of his prefaces and in both of his
autobiographical essays. And this should answer everything. Ibne Safi
became virtually inconceivable for the modern Urdu critics because the two
belonged to different traditions. Ibne Safi was in a way reconstructing
the genre of dastaan for modern times. The intellectual forefathers of the
modern critic had done away with that genre a century ago, throwing it into the flames of Toba tun Nasuh.
From the point of view of the modern critic, Ibne Safi must have had been
burnt, in the seed form, into the same flames that took the lives of his
elder predecessors. That he was alive and flowering into a garden was not
a fact to reckon with.
The secret of his unparalleled popularity also
becomes explicable then. He was popular because the source of his
inspiration was the dastaan, the genre that was familiar to the masses of
this land since a long time - he was not trying to initiate some foreign
form.
A greater question for us to think about is this:
are we willing to look back through all these hundred-and-some years, and
find out what was there in the lost traditions of classical eastern
literature - the baby we threw away along with the water? "A
reconstruction of literary thought in the East" sounds like a good idea,
doesn't it?
