Banned Urdu short-story collection now in English

New Delhi: A collection of Urdu short stories which was banned in 1933 after it created a firestorm of public outrage for its bold attack on conservative Islam and British colonialism is now available in English. Young writers Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-uz-Zafar, all eager to revolutionize Urdu literature, penned the collection “Angaaray”, which was first published in 1932.The writers were inspired by British modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as well as the Indian independence movement. Instead, they invited the wrath of the establishment: the book was burned in protest and then banned by the British authorities.'All but five copies were destroyed by police, two of which were sent to London where they were held in the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collections. This translation was made possible by the efforts of two scholars who tracked down those remaining copies and published them more than fifty years later,' the book's introduction says. Nevertheless, “Angaaray” spawned a new generation of Urdu writers and led to the formation of the Progressive Writers' Association, whose members included, among others, stalwarts like Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hassan Manto, Munshi Premchand and Faiz Ahmad Faiz.Translated into English for the first time by Snehal Shingavi, “Angaaray” retains the crackling energy and fiery polemic of the original stories. This edition, published by Penguin Books, also provides a compelling account of the furore surrounding this explosive collection. According to Shingavi, in translating “Angaaray”, he has tried as much as possible to keep to the spirit of the original text (by which he means its angry, fiery, polemical and sometimes vulgar character) more than he has tried to maintain the original semantic units of the Urdu prose. “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, thepowerful 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.Jahan's two pieces in the collection - ‘In the Women's Quarters' (‘Parde ki Peechhe') and ‘Seeing the Sights in Delhi' (‘Dilli ki Sair') - are concerned with the problems women face, especially how modern conveniences and medicine make women's lives worse than better.She drew her own experiences as a gynaecologist to give an account of the social, sexual and medical problems faced by the women she treated.The contempt that Mahmud-uz-Zafar had for the so-called ‘liberal-minded' Muslims is clear in his story ‘Virility' (‘Jawanmardi'), where modern ideas do not enable new circuits of sympathy but rather collapse back into more routinised patterns of spousal abuse and neglect.Ali's stories in the collection turn primarily on the condition of women: poverty, domestic abuse, sexual desire and longing experienced by widows, and the cruelties that women endure in everyday life.