“I also attempted to preserve the distinct styles of each of the writers: the critical realism and dry humour of Sajjad Zaheer's observations, the poignant drama of Ahmed Ali's intensely symbolic prose, the boisterousness and up-tempo melodrama of Rashid Jahan's women and the ethical ambivalence of Mahmud-uz-Zafar's unreliable narrator,” the English teacher at University of Texas writes.
The members of the “Angaaray” collective wrote from their own sense that the problems among north Indian Muslims would remain vast and durable as long as meaningful critique was a distant horizon and that change would be only possible by forcing the issues out into the open.
The book created an important conversation about the nature of Indian society and the freedoms available to artistes to talk and write about their society openly.
So what was it, exactly, that was on fire, that smouldered in the minds of young Muslims under British rule, requiring this kind of provocation, turning authors into firebrands?
“For Sajjad Zaheer, the organiser of the collective, it seemed to be the limits placed on sex and desire and the hypocrisies that undergirded sexual and social conventions: the twin forces of colonialism and orthodoxy had made it impossible to love in anything other than the basest of ways, with every relationship reduced to a venal and exploitative relationship between the propertied and the propertyless, the
powerful and the vulnerable,” the book's introduction says.
Zaheer's stories frankly discuss both sexual desire and sexual repression to highlight the ways that religious and social restrictions unnecessarily damage the human psyche, and also to show just how rarely the rule makers followed their own rules.
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