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Qurratulain Hyder Passes - An Enigmatic Icon
temporal
Qurratul Ain Hyder, Annie Apa to many, recipient of Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan died today in a Delhi hospital.
She was iconic, erudite, well read, intelligent, somewhat aloof and arrogant, when I met her many moons ago but had mellowed down lately. She was equally well versed in both English and Urdu. Born into an elite UP family where both of her parents were writers she began writing at age 11.
She wrote short stories, novels, travelogues and did translations: she was most known for her magnus opum novel Aag ka Darya which she translated into English as River of Fire. Praising the creativity of Qurratulain Hyder, Prof Aziz states that books like Kaar-e-Jahan Daraz Hai amply show her firm grip on history.
The [London] Times Literary Supplement wrote that "[River of Fire] is to Urdu fiction what A Hundred Years of Solitude is to Hispanic literature. Qurratulain Hyder has a place alongside her exact contemporaries, Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as one of the world's major living writers."My friend Raza Rumi met her in Noida, some years ago and wrote this:
She recounts how her parents were born at least a hundred years before their time. Her father's liberal outlook and her mother's love for the arts were the inspiration for Ainee to devote her life to writing. She never got married; it was quite evident that she could not have met a man capable of complementing her. I suppose the rich inner universe makes up for the 'loneliness' syndrome in exceptional individuals.Ainee is fluent in the language of music; she co-authored a book on Ustaad Barray Ghulam Ali Khan and in her heyday, played the piano and the sitar with equal ease.
We talk about her discovery of the first subcontinental novel written by Hasan Shah in 1790 - The Nautch Girl - which she translated in 1992. She is angry that no one bothered until she unearthed the manuscript from the Patna Library. We drift back into lost eras and she remarks that Dara Shikoh was a 21st century man. Small wonder that he was beheaded in the 17th century, I respond.
Her foreword to Javed Akhtar's poetry collection Tarkash is an eloquent narration of some of the reasons for the divide. I will go into these factors in a separate article.
The world of literature will miss her physical presence. Her words, indeed as words that come from the heart, shall resonate with us for a long time
Qurratulain Hyder Passes - An Enigmatic Icon
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Raza
URL
August 21, 2007
12:46 PM
Temporal
Thanks for this piece. It is a sad day indeed.
I'd quote from an old piece in the Outlook India:
The product of a liberal, culturally elite, Muslim upper-class--as much at ease with Christopher Isherwood and cucumber sandwiches as with revolutionary Urdu poetry--by all accounts, Hyder has been no halcyon either in her personal or her professional life; the seas, rather, have rocked in her wake! At a time when contemporary Urdu literature was steeped in leftist concerns, Hyder, scandalously for some, wrote not about the proverbial peasant and plough but about her own privileged milieu and the destruction of its graceful composite culture. This stirred up a storm. The great Urdu troika of the Progressive Writers movement--Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishen Singh Bedi and Ismat Chugtai--scoffed at her as a renegade and the voice of a feudal bourgeoise; Chugtai even nicknamed her "Pom Pom Darling" in cruel parody. But Hyder's corpus is humbling, and by '57, with the publication of Aag ka Darya--a seminal novel which sweeps confidently over 25 centuries of history, from Chand-ragupta Maurya to Bahlol Lodhi and Wajid Ali Shah upto post-partition India and Pakistan--her position as a pathbreaking Urdu writer was undisputed. "
says it all
Raza
Aaman
URL
August 21, 2007
12:53 PM
Raza, perhaps you can do a follow-up piece for us - let us memorialze her greatness.
temporal
URL
August 21, 2007
03:15 PM
raza:
and i second aaman:)
(and if you have 'turkash' translate the perceptive passage from ms hyder's forward that deals with her interpretation of the maladies of partition)
PH
URL
August 21, 2007
03:33 PM
For various reasons, I've put off buying Aag Ka Dariyah. This reminds me that I shouldn't wait anymore.
"I suppose the rich inner universe makes up for the 'loneliness' syndrome in exceptional individuals. "
Well said, Raza.
Jawahara
URL
August 21, 2007
03:59 PM
I remember meeting her as a child when she visited Allahabad (we were very distantly related) to visit her cousins who lived there. She was quite eccentric :-) but oh so fascinating, and she became my vision of a writer. A great loss for the world of literature.
Raza
URL
August 23, 2007
05:39 AM
Aaman and Temporal: I will soon write a subsequent post on Ainee Apa. Mayank's post was a lovely sequel to this moving piece.
temporal
URL
August 28, 2007
07:52 AM
a really moving tribute to Annie Apa HERE
SA
February 10, 2008
08:57 AM
Hello, Temporal. Thanks for this great post. It is very poignant and well written.
I am looking for a copy of The Street Singers of Lucknow and Other Stories - even an e-copy would do. Sterling Publishers listed a paperback on their site, but it's currently out of print. The ones on Amazon, etc., are beyond my budget. Do you know where I can find a copy? I would be very grateful for any help with regard to this. Thank you very much :)
commonsense
February 10, 2008
10:27 AM
I met her once too...she was a bit grouchy! But who would grudge such a magical writer for being a bit grouchy, especially after meeting me!
I remember once when the local All India Radio was interviewed her. The interviewer kept trying to get her first name right, but since it was quite a mouthful, kept tripping on it, producing a different sound each time. Until she decided, enough is enough, and stuck to "Kurtul-Jee"!
Mayank has somewhere put a picture of her grave being dug up...a haunting image...
Daagh
February 12, 2008
07:59 AM
Qurratulain Haider (Kur-tul Ji)'s world was rend apart by the horrible and disastrous Partition of India 1947. This tearing up was a civilisational loss and from that micro level, it reached and touched and tormented individual lives. Kur-tul Ji's entire corpus of writing is a lamentation for that historic, civilisational and personal loss ~ and a yearning that some day., man may overcome this emotion of exclusivity and learn to respect diversity.. not only to respect but also to appreciate it., i.e.
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