Ship of Sorrows: Of Hyder-ite whims and griefs

Quratullain Hyder’s second Urdu novel Safina-e-Gham-e-Dil, translated as Ship of Sorrows by Saleem Kidwai, paints a rich canvas of the elite society of Lucknow, a thriving centre of culture in colonial India. The main characters see themselves as proud inheritors of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, but are both limited and unravelled by social constraints as Partition approaches, not affecting them materially as much as rending their personal relations and selves asunder.

Hyder’s technique has often been compared to that of the British Modernist, Virginia Woolf. The stream of consciousness narrative and the imagist richness of the prose are strikingly similar, and comparable in their exquisite beauty. Many lines carry a simple, elegant profundity. Others are incredibly sensuous. Chapters are written in different voices, evidencing the investment in the formalistic invention symbolic of Modernism. A sense of nostalgia and loss is also common, although the causes, for one were the Great War of Europe and the concomitant decline, and, for the other, they were the cultural and social loss of the Lucknow elite that climaxed with the Partition of India.

The similarities with Woolf do not end here, and possibly arise from a similar social location for the two authors, albeit in starkly different cultures. Both had fathers who were intellectuals and writers invested in social causes. Leslie Stephen, father of Woolf née Stephen, historian, professor, atheist, was an Abolitionist. Hyder’s father, Syed Sajjad Hyder, “Yildirim”, poet, humourist, wrote strongly for women’s rights. Both grew up in the intellectual atmosphere cultivated by their parents, with a set of friends around them that included from among their own generations the leading writers to be, intellectuals, civil servants, and artists. Woolf belonging to a previous generation of women, lamented the lack of educational opportunities at school or college, Hyder and her women friends were among the first women in India to attend university.

For both writers, this background often affected their choice of subjects, and this is particularly pronounced in Hyder’s second novel. Following on from her first (pre-Partition) novel, Mere Bhi Sanamkhane that Hyder herself translated as My Temples, Too, in Ship of Sorrows, Hyder writers about her own milieu that she knows best. She includes a character of the writer, Anne Hyder, that appears to be largely autobiographical, whose father, called Abbajan in love and devotion, but never named fully, retains the penname of her own father, “Yildirim”. Major historical writers of the time are peripheral characters, as they were part of Qurratulain Hyder’s own life. Attia Hosain is not just the acclaimed beauty of the city but also a wonderful writer in making. Sajjad Zaheer, the author-editor of Angarey, who is Banney Bhai to the players in our story, is imprisoned, as in life.

The main protagonists include senior British and Indian civil servants, such as Elmore Rexton and Riyazuddin, members of Lucknow’s aristocratic families (both Hindu Kayastha and Muslim Sayyid), many of whom are Oxbridge-educated and well-travelled in Europe. One of these, the author-narrator’s brother, Ali Hyder, exhibits propensities for armed revolution in line with his Marxist-Leninist beliefs (predating Naxalism), working with the peasants in his own feudal estate of Gopalpur, only to be caught and sentenced for two years by his childhood friend, the Englishman Elmore Rexton. There is also the other cousin, Raza Miyan, who chooses to remain feudal, maintaining the legacies of Wajid Ali Shah. There are also self-made outsiders, such as Poonam Maheshwar Visharia, who have prospered through English education.

Those on the inside are part of a subculture that is suffused with high Urdu poetry but also with all contemporary and classical Western references, many of the young (men) are trying to write Modernist imagist poetry, one even trying to correspond with W. H. Auden, albeit without much success, while others such as Mira Nalini Rajvansh are writing poetry in Hindi for the famous Hans.

The full set of friends has whimsical traits that they exhibit as they move between their various homes in Lucknow, the feudal estates elsewhere in UP (such as Gopalpur on the Ramganga) or the hill retreats in Mussourie. They delight and guffaw together on a Laurel and Hardy, play party games and get drunk enough to get into brawls with each other. Their dresses are commented upon by local high society magazines.

And yet, none of this is uncritically portrayed or valorised by the prescient Qurratulain Hyder. Characters such as the outsiders Riyazuddin (civil servant from the Punjab) and Maheshwariya (civil servant from a humble background in Bihar) are often scathing in their verbalised or thought critique of the lifestyles of these elite. Their decadent romanticisation of their lives, which includes even a sentimentalist appreciation of the mortgages to their feudal mansions, is given either a withering cold shoulder or a full lambast. Still, here too the situation is more complex than one may glean off the surface. A Mira Rajvansh contemplates in great sadness that a Riyazuddin from the Punjab cannot recognise the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb of Lucknow where a Temple Trust is set up and maintained by the ancestors of Ali’s nana abba.

What ties all of Haider’s characters together, despite their different starting points, are the notes of grief perpetually playing in the backdrop. Even as many of these culture-vultures may delight in the fragrance of the mogra, it is as if not just these “lilies that fester…” All the characters are subject to the whims of history and politics, and are largely shaped by them, even as they may have more power than most to shape history itself. This becomes a common refrain: “Politics would never leave him, or others, alone. Politics had ruined life” (40); “God… wanders around in sorrow because of the world he has created” (47); and “we are being pushed from one darkness to another. Life is an unending chain of jails, concentration camps, and refugee camps (217). The last is only a later stage in the evolution of this historical grief as the novel’s action moves in time towards Partition and beyond it, a theme that seems to become ever more relevant in our own time as readers of New India.

Partition does not become so much a matter of life and death for these elite, but that does not mean it does not affect them. There is loss of property. Aashiana, the house of the narrator’s family, is burnt. Families and friendships are rent asunder as some migrate to Pakistan and others stay behind. One sibling such as the narrator may cross the border, while the other, the erstwhile romantic-revolutionary, Ali, may stay behind. Psyches are destroyed, broken. There have always been the social pressures that have prevented romantic alliances beyond caste and community among even among these high society friends. One could argue that these damages are much less than what the ordinary folk of the time who migrated on bullock carts and foot had to bear, but this is damage nonetheless. Those who went over among our protagonists might have simply hopped over on a Dakota plane, but as Ali says: “despite you and me the country was partitioned. The soul was sliced deeply, with something sharp.” Even the British Elmore who lauds the British victory in the War and laments the end of Empire, and has fulfilled his duty by having sentenced his friend Ali to imprisonment, is haunted by his inabilities to stand by his friends and do justice by friendship, or for his love for the native Mira. A reference to E. M. Forster, enforces this crisis of friendship vs state.

Haider followed this novel with her magnum opus Aag ka Dariya that she transcreated as The River of Fire, with a sweep of millennia of South Asian history. This novel works more closely with the immediate in her life, but gives us a sense of her apprenticeship and awareness of a larger (international) history too: “you have left, but there will be more caravans of the living, there will be more fighting, more victories… You and I were of those caravans that came from the valley of the Volga, that built the churches of Europe and adorned Cordoba. You had even composed the Blue Danube. When you tried to kill me, you forgot that attempts had been made to kill me in Qazvin. I was burnt again and again on the cross all over Europe, but I continued to live. Together we planted the Gardens in Babel, painted the caves of Ellora. You played the flute in Mathura, and I tempted you into stealing butted. I commiserated with the Virgin Mary on the death of her son, and washed his feet with my hair. You have forgotten that you are the son of Mary. You and I are the eternal souls of life. We are the collective strength of humanity” (224).

Elsewhere, the author-narrator actively reflects on her own writing and her observation on her father’s papers seems to reflect her own attempts adequately: “He saw life’s endless beauty, its sorrows and joy.” It is this that Saleem Kidwai has made us see in his wonderfully graceful and smooth translation of the novel that straddles the realms of beauty and grief most judiciously.