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The Progressives were more or less a spent force by the mid-1950s, or at least had lost their earlier chokehold on the writers imagination. Half of their ideological battle had been won: the British had departed and the country was free, even if the freedom had come in the wake of much carnage and dislocation. The other half, the dream of a just, equitable and secular society, however noble, properly belonged as a generation of artistically better-informed writers was soon to find out to the realm of political and social action. For this generation, brought up on Dostoyevsky and Joyce, existentialists Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and such anti-novelists as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, sincerity and nobility and social usefulness had little place in a narrative art whose basic building block was fabrication.

Partition was thus perhaps the only major theme that inspired a sizable corpus of writing dealing starkly and unabashedly with a political issue. Few Urdu writers in India or Pakistan have since ventured to step into that domain so demonstratively and persistently. And where they have such as the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971, and in more recent times the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and of regionalism and sectarianism in Pakistan their writing has invariably suffered from overtness and overstatement, but gained through indirection, inwardness, suggestion, and a sense of distance.

A few exceptions notwithstanding, the Urdu short story up to the mid-1950s is structurally quite simple. Causality, seriality, the tripartite formula of beginning, middle, and end as popularised by E. M. Forster, an almost fanatical insistence on what is often termed unity of expression and effect, the surprise ending la Maupassant and O. Henry here the repertoire more or less runs out. Social reality, not the characters psychology, provides the inspiration for the writer and defines his calling. But in exposing contemporary social reality the writer almost always taints the fictional event and character with his own prejudices. There is little evidence as yet of a move toward either suppressing the writers point of view or cancelling the narrator altogether.

However, in at least one story by Manto, Phundne (Tassels; 1954), the narrators identity is wholly suspended. Using absolutely incredible events and characterisation that relentlessly shun the factual, Tassels at no point allows the writer to become the narrator. Thus both the character and events remain free from the writers intruding persona. The resulting reality exists in an eccentric and autonomous domain, and even though its elements could be recognised as social, their meaning is not necessarily socially determined.

The next logical step was to develop further the expressive possibilities inherent in both Tassels and a few other short stories by Askari and Ahmed Ali. This step was taken by what is called jadeed afsaana (the new short story).

Periodisation has never proved satisfactory in either literary history or in literary taxonomies. While a precise date for the emergence of the new short story cannot be given, as some of its elements sporadically show up in Manto and others, it can nonetheless be said that the new short story as a more pervasive genre is a phenomenon dating from the 1960s only. Although Intizar Husain, Enver Sajjad (Pakistan), Surendar Parkash, and Balraj Manra (India) are generally credited with ushering in the modernist phase of the Urdu short story, none except Manra actually started out with a recognisably modernist fiction. The other three came to it after a prolonged apprenticeship in the traditional mechanics of the craft.

The word modern might be best understood in this context as a synonym for post-realism. It undergirds a set of literary assumptions, viz., that there is an internal structure to reality beyond what meets the eye, and human nature is infinitely more complex than was assumed by Progressive writing. Realistic, thematic paradigms employed hitherto were equipped to deal with external reality only. A more flexible and inclusive paradigm is called for, if it is man in his infinite mystery that one wants to fathom. This new paradigm cannot put its trust unquestioningly in the techniques of realism; rather it must freely revise old notions of linearity, plot and character.

In Dujardins novel Les Lauriers Sont Coups (1887) Western fiction had found the narrative technique to plumb the depths of individual consciousness in the most spontaneous way yet: to let the consciousness narrate itself. The very first sentence lands the reader, directly and ineluctably, in the mind of Daniel Prince, the novels dandy protagonist.

If Dujardin was unknown to the Urdu writer, his successor James Joyce was not. He influenced some of the Progressives themselves. Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali and Askari had already employed interior monologue and stream of consciousness, though somewhat tentatively; however, in Urdu their use has become more or less synonymous with Qurratulain Hyder. Hyder, whose literary career dates from Partition or thereabouts, turned decisively towards a focused use of stream of consciousness only in the late 1950s, with her novel Aag ka Darya (River of Fire; 1959), which she wrote, as some Urdu critics believe, under influences absorbed from Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Other narrative devices, too, make their appearance at about the same time. Intizar Husain experimented more or less successfully with collapsing the seriality of time and staggering the linear chronology of events, to articulate, on the one hand, the powerful inner tensions of his protagonist, and to capture, on the other, the precise texture of the enchanted world of his childhood. His novel Basti (Town; 1979) offers a more refined treatment of this technique, already anticipated in a number of previous short stories, among them Dehliz (The Threshold; 1955), Sirhiyaan (The Stairs; 1955), and Kataa Hua Dibba (A Stranded Railroad Car; 1954).

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COLUMN:Urdu short story: the modernist phase (1950s and after) - Newspaper - DAWN.COM