کباڑ خانہ: ردی میں بک جانے والی ہر چیز ردی نہیں ہوتی
مرزا اطہر بیگ
Artwork by Ishibashi Chiharu
Listen to the original read by the author:
Considering Pakistan’s sociopolitical atmosphere—torn between colonial Enlightenment values and a vicious interpretation of Islam—and the annoying demand on creative artists from Pakistan to write narratives that “correctly” and “realistically” represent our society, Mirza Athar Baig’s novel Hassan Ki Soorat-e-Haal (Hassan’s State of Affairs, HarperCollins India, 2019) is nothing less than a revelation. A novel that blurs the line between world and national literature, here is a fiction that wears its hybridity—rather than its ethnicity—on its sleeve. It dares to ask the question: Is Pakistan surrealist? Or is surrealism Pakistani?
Mirza Athar Baig has provided crucial doses of formal provocation and theoretical nuance to the field of contemporary Urdu literature. He has written three novels and a collection of “anti-stories,” all of which have managed to impress critics while also becoming best-sellers for his publishers, an impressive feat in a country with a diminishing Urdu literary culture. The increased curiosity in Pakistani literature in Western publishing spheres, especially since 9/11, has done little to foster an interest in vernacular literature, whether in Urdu or in other regional languages of Pakistan. In fact, Western interest in English-language literature from Pakistan has adversely affected the creativity and imagination of the literary scene, conferring critical awards and financial benefits on a narrow field of themes and subjects.
Mirza Athar Baig's writing is a key reason behind the recent revival of interest in Urdu literature. His original and experimental writing has variously been described as “playful,” “unique,” and “postmodern” in the local and international press. However, as Mirza explained in an interview: “The ‘modernity’ we have in our parts of the world is a vastly different sociohistorical process than western modernity, out of which the so called post-modernity evolved. What sort of ‘post-modernity’ would bloom out of our ‘modernity’? Something is laughable about it but a lot is poignantly serious. There should be a different name for it, and the name is Hassan Ki Soorat-e-Haal.”
Mirza Athar Baig has provided crucial doses of formal provocation and theoretical nuance to the field of contemporary Urdu literature. He has written three novels and a collection of “anti-stories,” all of which have managed to impress critics while also becoming best-sellers for his publishers, an impressive feat in a country with a diminishing Urdu literary culture. The increased curiosity in Pakistani literature in Western publishing spheres, especially since 9/11, has done little to foster an interest in vernacular literature, whether in Urdu or in other regional languages of Pakistan. In fact, Western interest in English-language literature from Pakistan has adversely affected the creativity and imagination of the literary scene, conferring critical awards and financial benefits on a narrow field of themes and subjects.
Mirza Athar Baig's writing is a key reason behind the recent revival of interest in Urdu literature. His original and experimental writing has variously been described as “playful,” “unique,” and “postmodern” in the local and international press. However, as Mirza explained in an interview: “The ‘modernity’ we have in our parts of the world is a vastly different sociohistorical process than western modernity, out of which the so called post-modernity evolved. What sort of ‘post-modernity’ would bloom out of our ‘modernity’? Something is laughable about it but a lot is poignantly serious. There should be a different name for it, and the name is Hassan Ki Soorat-e-Haal.”
Mirza Athar Baig is one of the most important contemporary writers in the Urdu language. A veteran professor of postmodern and postcolonial philosophy at Government College, Lahore, Baig announced his entry into fiction with avant-garde works that completely reshaped the field of contemporary Urdu fiction. He is the author of three novels, a collection of “anti-stories,” and more than a hundred plays for television.
Haider Shahbaz has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the translator of Mirza Athar Baig's Hassan's State of Affairs (HarperCollins India, 2019). He was the 2016-17 Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia, and received an ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) Travel Fellowship in 2016 for his work on Baig’s fiction. He lives in Lahore.
