Hardly a week had passed since the death of Fahmida Riaz that we lost another writer of outstanding merit and talent – Altaf Fatima – who died at the age of 90 in Lahore on November 20, 2018.
Fahmida and Fatima belonged to the crop of writers who emerged on the literary scene in the 1960s. Fatima was almost 20 years older than Fahmida and had gone through the pangs of Partition. Both migrated from Uttar Pradesh in India to Pakistan. Fatima settled in Lahore, Punjab, and Fahmida in Hyderabad, Sindh.
Their writings reflect their diverse experiences. Fatima was a Pakistani nationalist whose novels and short stories had a patriotic and religious flavour whereas Fahmida was beyond any nationalistic or religious overtones; she was an internationalist steeped in leftist and progressive politics. But Fatima had her own charisma and style that was reflected in her characters, especially girls and women who deviated from a subdued existence and tried to challenge the norms and values of their family and society. But we’ll come to her characters shortly. First, let’s examine the ambience in which she grew up.
On her maternal side, Fatima belonged to the extended family of Maulana Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi. Fatima’s maternal uncle Syed Rafiq Hussain was a renowned short-story writer who explored the interaction between animals and humans. Just like Fahmida Riaz wrote about Muhammad Khalid Akhtar in Ajmal Kamal’s ‘Aaj’, Altaf Fatima wrote about Syed Rafiq Hussain in the 45th issue of ‘Naya Daur’ (June 1968), edited by Qamar Sultana and Jameela Hashmi. This particular issue of ‘Naya Daur’ has a special section on Syed Rafiq Hussain, with written accounts on him by Altaf Fatima and other writers – including Akhtar Husain Raipuri – and also a few of his short stories.
Altaf Fatima has written about how she spent her childhood in the company of intellectuals such as Ali Abbas Hosseini and Syed Masud Hassan Rizvi (father of Nayyar Masud). This upbringing gave Fatima a headstart. When she moved to Lahore, she pursued degrees in Urdu literature and education, and retired as a professor of Urdu. Just like many other writers of her age, she was a victim of nostalgia, which seeped into her fiction. Unlike Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Krishan Chander, she wasn’t interested in balancing her narrative by highlighting the atrocities committed by all sides.
For example, her seminal work ‘Dastak Na Do’ – translated into English as ‘The one who did not ask’ – is a good novel about the decade preceding Independence. It depicts a glorious past in united India and portrays Hindus and Muslim coexisting peacefully. However, only Muslims are shown as victims of violence at the time of Partition. The novel conveniently ignores the wide spectrum of atrocities committed by all sides, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Although this is a weaker aspect of her writing, her strength lies in creating strong female characters.
Gaythi in ‘Dastak Na Do’ is a good example of a strong female character. In pre-Partition India, Gaythi is a little girl who befriends a Chinese Muslim boy who peddles household items on his bicycle. He looks after her when she falls from a tree and breaks her leg. She keeps seeing him despite her family’s condescending attitude towards him. Liu Chu, whose Muslim name is Safdar Yaseen, reminds readers of the eponymous character in Tagore’s ‘Kabuli Wala’ who moves from Afghanistan to Bengal and befriends a little girl there.
Both the Kabuli Wala and the Chinese boy miss their own families and find some solace in the little girls who come into their lives in a distant land thousands of miles away from home. Gaythi rides her bicycle on roads, expresses her love to a cousin without any reservations, and defends her straightforwardness when her unrequited romance becomes known to her family. Altaf Fatima makes Gaythi leave her home when she is frowned upon by her family and becomes the target of their disdain. Gaythi fails in her exams and shows no remorse about it by saying that it is a personal matter, and failing and passing exam doesn’t matter much to her.
‘Chalta Musafir’ (The Ever Traveller) is another brilliant novel by Altaf Fatima that chronicles not one but two partitions in the Subcontinent. The events from the 1940s to the 1970s are delineated in ‘Chalta Musafir’. But if you compare it with ‘Aakhir-e-Shab Ke Humsafar’ (translated as ‘Fireflies in the Mist’) by Qurratulain Hyder – another novel set against the same period – you find a distinct contradiction between how both writers approach the same decades. While Qurratulain Hyder was a ruthless observer of events with formidable erudition, Altaf Fatima seems to sympathise with her Bihari characters.
One of the first major Hindu-Muslim riots took place in Bihar and Altaf Fatima writes about a landlord family led by Mubashshir, who is known as Syed Sahib. The entire family is as gentle as the aristocracy can be. Syed Sahib is an activist of the Muslim League and devotes his life to serve his people. His son, Muzammil, also follows in his father’s footsteps. They maintain good relations with other Muslims who belong to the Congress. Syed Sahib carefully arranges his only daughter’s marriage to a family in Amritsar, which he reckons will fall in Pakistan.
The strongest point of Altaf Fatima in ‘Chalta Musafir’ is her delineation of the family that had to migrate first from Bihar to East Bengal and then, in the aftermath of the 1971 war, to West Pakistan. Just like Gaythi in ‘Dastak Na Do’, Naseeba is a strong female character in ‘Chalta Musafir’. But somehow, both Gaythi and Naseeba succumb to social pressure and marry men they don’t particularly like. It reminds one of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Paro in ‘Devdas’. Paro also ends up marrying an older man and Altaf Fatima does the same with Gaythi and Naseeba.
The weakest point of ‘Chalta Musafir’ is that the only victims of violence are depicted to be Biharis, first at the hands of Hindus in Bihar and then at the mercy of both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis in East Pakistan. Despite their flaws, both ‘Dastak Na Do’ and ‘Chalta Musafir’ offer a fine depiction of events during the most crucial periods of our history.
In addition to her other two novels, ‘Nishaan-i-Manzil’ and ‘Khwabgar’, Altaf Fatima also wrote dozens of short stories that have a traditional patriotic parlance. For example, her stories written against the backdrop of the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971 can be likened to Madam Noor Jahan’s eulogies for our soldiers.
A short story titled ‘Marg-i-Mohabbat’, published in ‘Naqsh’ in 1966 edited by Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi, narrates some of the events in the 1965 war. Another story titled ‘Tameer-i-Nau’, written after the 1971 war and the separation of East Pakistan, gives us hope to rebuild Pakistan, but doesn’t talk about the role that West Pakistan played during the military operation in East Pakistan. Similarly, ‘Saat Sau Chhiyasi’ (786), a short story written in 1971 and reprinted in the golden jubilee number of ‘Mehvar’ at Punjab University in 2011, gives us a one-sided narrative.
Altaf Fatima published various collections of short stories, such as ‘Wo Jisey Chaha Gaya’, ‘Dewaren Jab Girya Karti Hein’, and ‘Tar-i-Unkaboot’. All these collections are available online and ought to be read by anyone interested in Pakistan’s history. She gives her own tilt to historical events. This must be complemented by reading other writers such as Qurratulain Hyder and Zahida Hina.
The writer holds a PhD from the
University of Birmingham, UK and works in Islamabad.
Email: mnazir1964yahoo.co.uk