Raza Naeem translates an essay by Rajinder Singh Bedi about the intricacies of his craft.
I apologise that in opening this subject I am going to have to pass through my own self. You will also forgive me because I too am just a unit of this vast mankind; that is why to understand everything it is important for me to understand myself.
What is the experience of writing a short story? How did I get addicted to writing short stories? If I and a few of my other friends became addicts, then why not others? Why don’t I sell candles in front of a church like some Fernandez?
Art does not spring forth in a person like sleeping. It’s not that tonight you will sleep and awake as an artist in the morning. We cannot say that so-and-so person is a born artist, but we can say that he has abilities which are very important, whether he is God-gifted or acquired them by practice. The first ability is that he feels everything more compared to others, for which on one hand he is praised and honoured, and on the other, suffers so much as if his skin has been ripped off his body and he has to pass through a salt mine. The second quality is that his work and mouth should resemble an animal which can separate food from the sand and earth while masticating. Then the thought should never appear in any corner of his heart that too much kerosene or electricity has been expended, or that whole reams of paper have been wasted. He should know that nothing is ever wasted as per some fundamental law of nature. Then he should be so recalcitrant as to always prefer the second impression over the first. Then he should listen the things away from his art. For example music; and should be able to know why the ustad has gone too far in his search for the sur today; have an eye for art and understand how in being wishy-washy, the contours have emerged with such beauty and vigour. If he possesses all these qualities then an ordinary issue remains in the end and which is that the editor who has returned his short-story is unqualified.
Art does not spring forth in a person like sleeping. It’s not that tonight you will sleep and awake as an artist in the morning.
Subsequently, anything can trigger off the process of short-story writing. For example, some passer-by throws off his turban or some such accident takes place over which the poor man has no control, and which makes him a victim of insecurity, and he decides in his heart to find his place somewhere in this uncooperative, pitiless world, that he has to become a somebody. It is true that until a man does not encounter danger, the powers of defence of which nature has a large treasure, do not emerge within him.
All these things happened to me in my youth and I am certain, give and take a few differences, must also have happened with other artists. Most people meet accidents and they become a victim of myriad problems, but it is merely coincidental that they turned in another direction rather than through the way of art. They were either flag-bearers in their particular work or gave themselves up to war. That is, following humiliation and one accident upon another, in order to do something and become a somebody, I tried to recite the ghazal like every Urduphile youth in his country, but could not reach a conclusion because I got married at a young age. Did you understand me? I had no beloved in front of me. If there was, I used to be rebuffed by being treated as a child. If she persisted, she was shown the door by my shoe-wielding wife. I had read that love is first-born within the beloved’s heart, so I kept quiet waiting for her and kept on doing so. I pursued the subjects of lovers’ separation and union, loyalty and betrayal, rival and censor in the manner of poets, but they all appeared fabricated and hollow to me. I saw that I was the censor myself. Rivals and black-faces dared not lurk even within a league of my house. This is the second clause of the unwritten marriage contract, as per which if the rival cannot be murdered, at least he can be sent to prison. There are very few people who can relate to a rival like Faiz Ahmad Faiz and are aware of its beneficial aspects. As if whatever education life gave in relation to the prevalent couplet, I remained crass ignorant in it. On the other hand, Madame Life gave me other problems by way of rectifying mistakes. For example problems of managing the household, employment, which were in no way lesser than the problems of love. Circumstances create such an inertia and a trembling in the body that even the torn warm coat manufactured by Maranja Maranja and Co. from Lahore’s Landa Bazaar could not save me.
Enough is enough. Now I will cease my talk, for what happened and didn’t happen to me after the ‘Warm Coat’, a few people know, rather they know more than myself about what didn’t happen.
There is no difference between a short story and a couplet. If there is, it is just that the latter is in short metre and the former in a long and continuous metre which goes from the beginning to the end of the story.
There is no difference between a short story and a couplet. If there is, it is just that the latter is in short metre and the former in a long and continuous metre which goes from the beginning to the end of the story. The novice does not know this and regards the short story as an easier art form compared to the couplet. Then in the couplet, particularly of a ghazal, you are addressing a woman but in the short story there is no such hindrance. You are talking to a man, so there is no adornment of language. A ghazal couplet cannot bear any roughness but a short story can do so; in fact having originated from prose, it should have a roughness, with which it can be distinguished from a couplet. If there is a place for a beautiful woman in this world, there is too for the rugged man, who attracts the woman precisely because of this. Although the decision does not rest with the woman, but even she does not like a man who walks like her even in imitation. Our critics have praised the short story, but via the path of the poem, not through the path of discipline, which derailed even the best short story writers, and those who were not derailed, were so influenced by this commendation that they loosened the nuts and bolts of their line by themselves.
It is agreed that the art of the short story demands greater practice and discipline. After all, a lot of qualities and powers are required to come to terms with such a long and continuous metre. Other forms of literature which also includes the novel, can be paid attention individually; but in the short story, both the part and the whole have to be kept together while proceeding. If its advance, alternate and the last ranks do not proceed together, this war cannot be won. After writing from start to finish, you can only return in order to add a word or cull two lines. I have not set up this relation of enhancement and addition thoughtlessly, because the reality is that in a short-story, enhancement is more important than addition. You will have to strike off those things which might be beautiful by themselves and dissolve the overall effect or stray away from the main idea.
Now I will say something alarming and it is that the Urdu language has not yet progressed to the extent of understanding or accepting a delicate art like the short story as it should be understood or accepted. To understand this point, just turn back and see that in every aspect you have emphasized diction a bit too much. If we illustrate this act graphically, after Mir, Anees and Ghalib till Dagh, it will be seen to come down. It seems that we have read Fasana-e-Azad merely as a short-story or novel. We compared it with Vanity Fair. We described Agha Hashr as the Indian Shakespeare, which reveals that we have read neither of the two and if we have, we could not differentiate. This is why when as an examiner at the Poona Film and Television Institute, I asked a candidate: “Who are your favourite writers?” he replied without batting an eyelid, “I like only two writers, sir! Gulshan Nanda and Shakespeare!”
The Urdu language has not yet progressed to the extent of understanding or accepting a delicate art like the short story as it should be understood or accepted.
Once Humayun and Adabi Dunia, both journals were quick to commend Fayyaz Mahmud and Ashiq Batalvi, and today we ourselves do not even mention these poor souls. We have encouraged the force of narrative in the short story so much so that literature aside, we have harmed the writer himself. Among the creative problems of expression in the short story, the biggest problem is of abstinence, but our clamorous know-alls call it descriptive modesty. We still rack our brains over presentation of dastaans, philosophy and historical events in relation to the characters of today or tomorrow. I have nothing against racking the brain, because we will do that come what may, since that is our second nature, but I am pained at the moment we describe only an orator, historian or philosopher as a short-story writer.
The short-story is not indigenous. We wrote jataka tales, the katha of Sarat Sagar and took these to the West where they made the story into an art, experimented countlessly with form, which we have no shame in utilizing. Leave aside the art of the short-story, to evaluate any art,it needs to be known and understood at the international scale. There is no isolation here. There are no borders of countries and nations, as long as you don’t speak of Manto as Maupassant and myself as Chekhov. Although it is possible that I like myself being spoken of as (Yasunari) Kawabata. How would you feel if I say that Ram Lal and Joginder Paul are the Heinrich Boll of India and Quratulain Hyder, Han Suyin? I also do not object to this on the condition that compatriots of Han Suyin name her as the Quratulain Hyder of their nation.
What rigging! It seems Urdu is becoming eponymous. One of Boll’s characters, who is a judge, says: “In a case like this, there is nothing called justice, because the criminals do not demand for it. This is a dictatorship in which individual expression and habit are an anachronistic matter.”
We have encouraged the force of narrative in the short story so much so that literature aside, we have harmed the writer himself.
Only after an awareness of the surroundings on the aforementioned practice and international scale can the short story be mastered, and when this happens, it becomes part of the writer’s reflexes. Not only can the material for the short story be obtained from your unintentional matters, but on every turn and corner, the short stories seem to be scattered and they are so abundant that the writer’s hands can be severed while gathering them. Anyway, after mastering the experience of short-story writing, the writer obtains that golden touch of the Greek mythological character Midas. The only difference is that the Indian short story writer merely touches gold, and it becomes a story. There is nothing to be worried about, not because after obtaining so much gold, Midas too died famished.
In the process of writing a short story, to forget and remember both processes go together. Probably this is the reason that PhDs and D.Litts holding grand degrees cannot write a good story, because they are afflicted with the disease of not forgetting. I point towards a mental tardiness which Manto wrote to me about in a letter: ‘Bedi! Your problem is that you think too much. It seems that you think before writing, while writing and even after writing.’ I knew that Manto meant: my stories have less story and more labour. But what to do? On one hand I had to obtain iron from art and on the other from language. The people of the language turned out to be so unkind that they didn’t even spare (Muhammad) Iqbal. Someone asked, ‘When you met Iqbal what did you talk about?’ Came the reply: ‘Nothing. I kept saying “Yes sir, yes sir” and he kept saying “Oh yes, oh yes.”’ Now circumstances are relatively easier because we do not have to go very far for authentication. Just the other day, Dr Narang was saying to me that a movement has begun in Pakistan which does accept the European language of Shaukat Siddiqui and Quratulain Hyder as chaste Urdu. However I took advantage of Manto’s criticism and gradually forced out the hand from the story, but what to do about the fact that it reappears from here and there. That style of stylessness towards which Manto pointed, can only be had after being buried in the earth, in the words of Mir. But the same stylessness and writerly restraint which created much pleasure in Manto and Krishan Chander also created distaste. Due to Manto’s criticism, my condition was like that woman who wants to be possessed and ruined, and then also wants to avenge it. When I saw carelessness in some of Manto’s stories, I wrote to him, ‘Manto! You have one bad quality which is that you neither think before writing nor while writing and not even after writing.’
Subsequently my correspondence with Manto ended. Later I got to know that he did not take so badly to my criticism as to my saying that will I write tosh when I haven’t experienced anything beyond marriage. Then the marvel that not only do I drink buffalo’s milk, but have also kept one. How could I tell him that if the camel is related to the Muslim, the cow to the Hindu, then a Sikh could also have a similar relation with something.
A short story is a consciousness, a feeling which cannot be created in anyone—it can certainly be had by hard work, but even after obtaining it, man is dependent upon prayer.
A short story is a consciousness, a feeling which cannot be created in anyone—it can certainly be had by hard work, but even after obtaining it, man is dependent upon prayer. Some excess matter also makes its way into him due to the direction of the digestive process and some other (matter) due to some other mental madness. The only comforting thing is that the story hasn’t yet reached the editor’s hand from our own. We can enhance and add to it and if that is not enough, we can tear and dispose of it. If Hemingway can extract a mere ninety-six pages of material after writing five-hundred, why can’t we do so too?
Many excellent short stories have been written in Urdu. If they are few and far between, that is because in fulfilling our own and other’s demands, we don’t see that we are losing our faith, don’t know that we have become the prisoners of our own image.
(This essay was read as the presidential address at the seminar on ‘The problems of creative use of language in Modern Urdu Literature’ at the Jamia Millia Islamia)
