Rajinder Singh Bedi, who turns 100 this month, escaped the critical stereotyping that mars his illustrious peers, thanks to his humanist realism wedded to his native soil, says Raza Naeem.
Rajinder Singh Bedi is universally regarded as one of the four greatest Urdu fiction writers in the second half of the 20th century. He completes this hallowed quartet along with his contemporaries Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chander and Ismat Chughtai.
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There are many reasons to read and re-read Bedi’s slim but compact oeuvre on the centenary of his birth this year. Though an exact contemporary of the three aforementioned writers, as well as scores of his comrades from the Progressive Writers Association (PWA), there is much that unites and distinguishes him from his illustrious peers.
Bedi’s oeuvre fell short of the sheer prodigiousness that became a hallmark of Manto, Krishan and Ismat’s works. Over a life spanning almost seventy years, Bedi wrote about 80 short stories spread across eight collections, one novella and two collections of dramas. On the other hand, if one considers the oeuvre of his three other illustrious peers, it is remarkable that he has achieved fictional immortality on the strength of this “meagre” output. Why? One reason is perhaps given by Bedi’s contemporary, Manto, in a letter addressed to the former, mention of which is made by Bedi in his essay on the “The Story-Writing Experience and Creative Problems of Expression” (translated specially for this issue of Kindle).
From the beginning of his writing career, Bedi distinguished himself from the style favoured not only by Premchand, the father of the Indian short story, but also his two prominent contemporaries—Krishan Chander and Manto.
The second reason for Bedi’s relatively meagre output in contrast to his contemporaries is his active involvement with the Indian film world. In the second half of the 20th century, it was a given for most of the rising young writers to associate themselves with the film industry, through writing lyrics, dialogues or screenplays. Manto, Krishan and Ismat dabbled in it too, as did prominent Progressive poets like Sahir Ludhianvi, Majaz, Ali Sarda Jafri, Kaifi Azmi and Majrooh Sultanpuri; but with Bedi, not only did he actively involve himself in more than a dozen art—or what he called “social”—films, but their modest success went on to solidify his reputation as the “father of Indian parallel cinema”.
From the beginning of his writing career, Bedi distinguished himself from the style favoured not only by Premchand, the father of the Indian short story, but also his two prominent contemporaries—Krishan Chander and Manto. A number of things stand out in his stories. First, he adopted the use of Indian mythological symbols as a distinctive trait in his fiction, as opposed to his contemporaries, coupled with metaphors. He uses this combination to devastating effect in order to combat superstition, outdated religious customs and the oppression of women in their name. Masterpieces like “Grahan” (Eclipse), “Rahman ke Joote” (Rahman’s Shoes) and “Apne Dukh Mujhe De Do” (Give Me Your Sorrows) are good examples of this craft.
Second, Bedi’s stories are rendered memorable by the plight of their heroines—women who are victimised by caste, feudalism, lust and patriarchy but also harbour sexual desire, in their myriad roles as lover, mother, wife, daughter and sister. In this respect, Bedi has created the immortal character of Lajwanti, in the title story of that name, in which the heroine, ravished by the animal passions of perfectly normal men motivated by religious fanaticism or sexual desire unleashed by the communal horrors of partition in 1947, refuses to make do with her fate as the abducted wife now forced to live life across the border in Pakistan. She wants to be rehabilitated and accepted back as a loving wife when she is repatriated, and hopes and expects her husband to listen to her tale of woe and resilience. Bedi, who has often been criticised for not writing “enough” about the horrors of Partition, seems to have produced his definitive artistic statement in this short story, which can rival its counterparts like Manto’s “Khol Do” (Open It), “Toba Tek Singh” and “Siyah Hashiay” (Black Margins) and Krishan Chander’s stories in the volume Hum Wehshi Hain (We are Savages).
Though a founder-member of the PWA, Bedi was not doctrinaire like Krishan Chander. He managed to preserve cordial relations with them, like Ismat Chughtai, without risking expulsion from their fold, as happened with Manto after 1947 in Pakistan. He has been described by critics as a critical realist rather than a socialist realist, with whom social protest is not registered very strongly so as to become a clarion call for revolution. Yet the ugliness of a decaying, moribund system is there for everyone to see. In this regard, Bedi narrates his visit to the Soviet Union,
I visited the Soviet Union. I am standing in the Writers’ Union giving a speech. I asked the writers a direct question. I said, “Please tell me you are the inheritors of such a great literature, when we read Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev you did not come proving their worth to us, they did so themselves. Today you are producing literature in an exact geometrical shape; that a girl and boy always fall in love because he has produced lots of steel in the factory, or that he brought phosphate ash and produced tons of grain by throwing it in the field. I said the literature you are presenting doesn’t impress us at all and you keep on publishing it.”
Some of his short stories also satirise the excessive attention to socialist realism which marred and tarred the work of other contemporaries. My favourite in this regard is his story “Aalu” (Potatoes), where the relationship of a dogma to the bitter realities of life such as a lack of basic necessities is fully explored.
Then Lakhi Singh told Basanto about the car drivers’ strike and why he didn’t bring the potatoes. Basanto sat with her head in her hands for a while. Then, looking at Lakhi Singh in an anguished manner, she said: “Why didn’t you oppose the strike?”
Lakhi Singh didn’t reply. Basanto began to curse the instigators of the strike, they who included her own Lakhi Singh and from whom, Bakshi had disassociated himself since he couldn’t live without potatoes. Lakhi Singh thought: “Basanto had always supported me like a good comrade but now she is renouncing me.” At that moment, Karnail appeared from the lane and began to cry upon seeing his father empty-handed. Basanto had been telling him to wait for his father’s return since morning. Seeing her son crying like this made Basanto even more acidic.
Lakhi Singh hadn’t expected this from Basanto. He sat holding his head in both hands and thought: “Has Basanto become a reactionary?”
In this regard, one may also cite one of his last-written stories “Chashm-e-Baddur” (Safety from the Evil Eye), where he described the work habits of the Soviet people compared to his Indian compatriots and their American counterparts.
Despite his satires on socialist realism and its straitjacketing of art and literature, Bedi firmly remained within the Progressive camp in its battles against the modernists and never broke away from it.
Despite his satires on socialist realism and its straitjacketing of art and literature, Bedi firmly remained within the Progressive camp in its battles against the modernists and never broke away from it. His painful depictions of the lives of the poor, impoverished and the hungry facing the depredations of capitalist “modernity” in stories like “Quarantine”, “Vitamin B”, “Zain-ul-Abideen”, “Sargaam ke Bhooke” (The Hungry of Sargaam) and “Bolo” (Speak) bear sufficient testimony to this.
The writer who had the greatest influence on Bedi’s craft was the Russian Anton Chekhov. In Bedi’s own words, “Chekhov had the greatest impact on me because he does not attempt to say a story. He converses with life and presents a slice of life before you in such a way that ‘I understand as if this is also the feeling in my own heart.’ In this way, Chekhov influenced me a lot.”
Bedi was born in Lahore on 1 September 1915 to a Sikh Khatri father and a Hindu Brahmin mother, who originally hailed from a village in Sialkot, the city of the famous poets Iqbal and Faiz. His earlier childhood is recounted with great humour in his two essays “Jab Main Chhota Tha’ (When I was Little) and “Aaine ke Samne” (Before the Mirror).
“Chekhov had the greatest impact on me because he does not attempt to say a story. He converses with life and presents a slice of life before you in such a way that ‘I understand as if this is also the feeling in my own heart.’ In this way, Chekhov influenced me a lot.”
His domestic environment was free of religious discrimination and very conducive to learning and literature, as both his parents had a passion for these pursuits. Young Bedi was very fond of reading and writing since his early days and passed his Intermediate exam from a Lahore college with flying colours. He wanted to study further but his mother’s illness and subsequent death, and then the death of his father dented his plans and immediately forced him to look for a job.
Like his late father, Bedi took a job in a postal department. The alienating, mechanistic and thoroughly unromantic nature of what the job must have entailed has been caricatured in Bedi’s early short story “Ghulami” (Slavery). After ten years, Bedi worked at the radio stations in Lahore and Peshawar.
Then, he set up his own publishing house by the name of Sangam Publishers Limited on Nisbet Road in Lahore. It was doing very well until the Partition intervened and his family moved to Ropar to live with his brother, while he stayed on in his house in Lahore’s Model Town. When his office and warehouse were torched after being ransacked, he migrated to Ropar and then shifted to Shimla. During his stay there, he and his brother, putting their own lives in extreme danger, rescued many Muslim families and shifted them to safe locations.
Like his late father, Bedi took a job in a postal department. The alienating, mechanistic and thoroughly unromantic nature of what the job must have entailed has been caricatured in Bedi’s early short story “Ghulami”.
He then shifted to Delhi and after a long struggle, obtained another radio appointment and became associated with Jammu Radio. But he soon resigned in protest against government policies and went to Mumbai. He stayed there for the rest of his life, and following the deaths of first his wife and then his son (in an accident), he had a severe attack of paralysis. He passed away on 11 November 1984.
As has been mentioned before, Bedi did not write as prodigiously as some of his other prominent counterparts and contemporaries. But when he shifted to Bombay, he flourished in its film industry and in his 35 years spent there he wrote the screenplay, scenes and dialogues of some 17 films, including directing some of them. Almost all of these films proved to be high-quality, quaint and memorable, however never proving to be box-office hits.
Granted that Bedi did not have a rebellious childhood and youth like Manto and Chughtai, and was married off when he was just 19; nor did he commit to an ideology like Krishan Chander. But what he lost in these two departments, he gained in the high, refined quality of his oeuvre. Many critics recognise him as the second-best Urdu fiction writer after Manto.
Ek Chadar Maili Si (A Sheet So Dirty) established Bedi as a household name in Urdu fiction. It is Bedi’s great Punjabi novel, a love letter to his ancestral land, chronicling a dysfunctional middle-class Punjabi Sikh family in a patriarchal milieu.
I want to return to Bedi’s novel Ek Chadar Maili Si (Such a Dirty Sheet), published in 1962, which further established Bedi as a household name in Urdu fiction. It also revealed him to be true to his Lahori, Punjabi roots. It is Bedi’s great Punjabi novel, a love letter to his ancestral land, chronicling a dysfunctional middle-class Punjabi Sikh family in a patriarchal milieu.
In the initial part of the novella, we are introduced to a couple, Tiloka and Rani, who are living in a typical Punjabi/subcontinental extended family. Rano (as she is referred to by her Punjabi nickname throughout the novella) is a determined woman who will suffer the repeated, violent beatings of Tiloka, but will also stop at nothing to stand up for what is right and rightfully hers. Despite her independent nature, she voluntarily submits to the travails of the extended family, bearing Tiloka four children in the process, suffering the insults and taunts of her mother-in-law and constantly fearing for her eldest child, the girl named Bari. Tiloka is involved within the racket of an influential family in the village, the Chaudharys, who trick nubile jatrans visiting the village temple into spending the night at the former’s home only to be divested of their modesty.
The second part of the story begins when Tiloka is murdered by the brother of a young jatran who is found raped in the village. Fearing she would be thrown out of her house and her daughter bartered off to the lowest bidder, Rano settles for a second marriage—the ancient Punjabi custom of chadar dalna (covering with a sheet, which gives the novella its name)—with Tiloka’s younger brother Mangal, a ne’er do well like his murdered brother, but who had been suckled by Rano since he was very young, and who would often step in to protect her from his brother’s wrath. Mangal was against the marriage, not only because he considered Rano as his mother but also because he lusts for Salamtay, a Muslim lass.
Despite the scenes of violence throughout the novel, there is a secular tone to it; Bedi, the reformer laying bare the nexus between patriarchy and an equally patriarchal religion and its so-called custodians (whether Hindu or Muslim) in the oppression and exploitation of women.
Amid very moving scenes of violence and tenderness, both Rano and Mangal are married. Bedi’s craft is to depict the particular and the mundane details of the evolving relationship between Mangal and Rano as they both gradually try to understand each other, first as husband and wife and then as conjugal partners.
In the following lines, Bedi has summarised the plight of Rano and thousands of her ilk:
May God never bear a daughter even to an enemy! She grows just a bit older, her parents push her to her in-laws, the in-laws become upset, they roll her towards her parents. Oh when this ball of cloth becomes wet with its own tears, it’s not even capable of rolling.
Despite the scenes of violence throughout the novel, there is a secular tone to it; Bedi, the reformer laying bare the nexus between patriarchy and an equally patriarchal religion and its so-called custodians (whether Hindu or Muslim) in the oppression and exploitation of women. Bedi’s novel also becomes a tale of redemption and hope in the end as Rano’s daughter is claimed as bride by the young man who had murdered Tiloka to avenge his sister’s honour. True to form, Bedi does not advocate “an eye for an eye” or a radical upheaval of village society for the sake of the liberation of its women; but enters deep into the psychology of every character to make a case for an end to the politics of violence, and for forgiveness.
Bedi does not advocate “an eye for an eye” or a radical upheaval of village society for the sake of the liberation of its women; but enters deep into the psychology of every character to make a case for an end to the politics of violence, and for forgiveness.
Ek Chadar Maili Si can be compared to other novels by Bedi’s contemporaries in terms of the completeness of its message and its compactness of form. I believe that had Bedi written this novel and nothing else, he would still have been immortalised in Urdu literature. One cannot say the same about the novels of his peers Ismat Chughtai and Krishan Chander, who wrote numerous novels.
Interestingly, Bedi’s novel was filmed on both sides of the border; despite his own wish to do so, he himself failed to film it. Pakistan filmed it first as Mutthi Bhar Chawal (A Handful of Rice) in 1978, followed by the Indian attempt in 1986. Both are fine, sensitive films true to Bedi’s spirit. Both the films helped garner new admirers for the novel and Bedi’s work; however, Bedi was not particularly impressed with Khushwant Singh’s English translation of the work I Take This Woman, although he admired the novel’s Punjabi translation.
One of Bedi’s most important but neglected non-fiction pieces Haath Hamaray Qalam Huay (When Our Hands Were Severed) also deserves to be read today for its sheer honesty and confessional force (or farce). It is no less than Bedi’s mea culpa, recounting his own struggles between lies and truth, art and life.
“I don’t know what I wanted to write, what I have actually written. But whatever I have written is with complete honesty and effort. Maybe that’s why the wish to write remains still.”
On his hundredth birthday, Rajinder Singh Bedi seems to have comfortably escaped the critical stereotyping which has hitherto marred—and continues to mar—the work of his contemporaries: Manto caught between Partition and sex; Krishan Chander a prisoner of his commitment to socialist realism and class struggle; Ismat Chughtai forever condemned to be the chronicler of the women of the Indian Muslim middle-class. Bedi has achieved this distinction because of his humanist realism wedded to his native soil. I close this tribute with Bedi’s own words regarding the relationship between pen and paper:
This is also true that the major part of my life has been spent in writing, that is thinking about writing, understanding and then sometimes writing. Writing has never been travail for me. In the very beginning, it seemed that I should put every experience and thought on paper, but gradually the hold of artistic consciousness became stronger. Sometimes this hold was so hard that for months, I was unable to write a short story. Often it has also happened that the pen didn’t stop, despite my best efforts. There is not such a simple battle between the conscious and the unconscious that there be an occasion for bloodshed on the sheet of paper, but a struggle is always going on still. The same analytical question of Hamlet’s meaning what to write and what not to?
And then what is a short story? This question has kept changing with my stories. Like sometimes I thought of narrating a story to a child; so I wrote “Bhola”; then if I had to write the tale of today’s Sita through a child, I wrote “Bubble”. The child and the story had a great relation, has one today and will have one in future because it is the wish of the story-writer to listen to a story which forces him to write. The technique keeps changing. Yes, sometimes I have also wished to examine the upheaval spread all around me, so I wrote “Where is the funeral?” and when I saw an atmosphere of fear and crime prevail, I wrote “Bolo” (Speak). In other words, even writing less I have written 80 stories in 45 years and still wish to write. Picking the pen in my hands, I fix my gaze at the paper and think that someone had written:
Write something on the yellowed paper in black words, sometime
Just like that burn the paper by writing with your gaze, sometime
Meaning the relation between pen and paper still exists and I will definitely write…
I don’t know what I wanted to write, what I have actually written. But whatever I have written is with complete honesty and effort. Maybe that’s why the wish to write remains still.
Note: All the original translations from the Urdu are mine.
