The Postcolonial Short Story

Contemporary Essays

Maggie Awadalla, Paul March-Russell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230313385
• eBook ISBN: 9781137292087
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book puts the short story at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies and questions what postcolonial literary criticism may be. Focusing on short fiction between 1975 and today – the period in which critical theory came to determine postcolonial studies – it argues for a sophisticated critique exemplified by the ambiguity of the form.

1

‘Times are different now’: The Ends of Partition in the Contemporary Urdu Short Story

Alex Padamsee

Violence is a total phenomenon, but it comes to us as a total fragment. Something terrible has happened and there is no plot, no narrative, only traces that lead nowhere. (Van der Veer 269)

When I now read descriptions of troubled parts of the world, in which violence appears primordial and inevitable […] I find myself asking, Is that all there was to it? Or is it possible that the authors of these descriptions failed to find a form – or a style or a voice or a plot – that could accommodate both violence and the civilized willed response to it? (Ghosh 62)

Introduction

If collective violence arrives without a narrative, what then might constitute a ‘civilized willed response’ in writing out its trauma? Almost half a century had elapsed before historians began to excavate the experiences of physical and emotional violence that accompanied, and long survived, the partitioning of India in 1947.¹ While they have established at least some of the contours of what was lost to official nationalist histories, there is a general agreement that the experience itself, the complex effects of Partition violence and its elusive language of trauma, have yet to find an appropriate mode of critical analysis (see Das; Pandey ‘In Defense’; Van der Veer). The recent rhetoric of disciplinary failure, however, has been marked by a common recuperative gesture. At the moment in which hermeneutic frameworks for witnessing seem either to fail or to require further interrogation, the social scientist and the historian of Partition often turn to the fictitious testimony of literature – and frequently to the Urdu short story (Das 47; Pandey Remembering Partition 200–3). More than any other literary genre in the subcontinent, it is this medium that has been called on to supply the missing words in the reconstruction of the effects of Partition.

The turn to fictional testimony is striking given that the recording of accounts by survivors of Partition drew directly on the example set by the recovery of memories of the Holocaust, a subject in which fiction as a whole had for so long seemed to be placed in doubt as a form of witnessing (Eaglestone; Franklin 1–19). At least some of the criteria that have marked out the Urdu short story as an irreplaceable medium for encountering the trauma of Partition stem from the mediating role of the language, spoken across religious and regional divides in North India. Indeed, the ability of the genre to stage continued dialogues not just across sectarian or nationalist borders, but across disparate linguistic regions, has made it a unique archive for interrogating the ideologies that underpinned Partition. Aijaz Ahmad has argued that it was through the ‘mirror of Urdu’, and primarily through the short story, that a sense of South Asian community and communication was held open across the political borders long after the last refugees were admitted to both countries (Ahmad 103–25). In Partition, the Urdu short story had found its most enduring and obsessively rewritten subject (see Memon ‘Partition Literature’). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it is the increasing self-reflexivity – and at times, opacity – of the Urdu short story from the 1950s onwards that most distinguishes its treatment of Partition among South Asian literatures (Palakeel 330; Saint 242). This textual difficulty constitutes a uniquely intensive reworking of the affective inheritance of Partition: in problematizing the form of the Partition story, Urdu writers anticipated the later emphasis in trauma studies on the importance of narrative and indeed its very possibility, in attempting to reflect, work through and understand the elusive effects of collective violence. Decades before historians had noticed the missing lexis of Partition in the founding narrative of the nation, the Urdu Partition short story had begun to articulate the traumatized absent spaces where those words might have been. Absence, in a sense, was its necessary subject, the paradoxically ‘willed’ narrative response that Ghosh could not find in other troubled parts of the world.

The shift from realism towards interrogating the medium itself is marked just a few years after Partition by Intizar Husain’s ‘An Unwritten Epic’ (Ek bin-likhi razmiya 1952). Husain turns the focus of his short story on to the act of writing itself, suggesting that any reliance on established forms – here, the epic novel – obscured, and so risked complicity with, the unprecedented violence of its subject. At the same time, the story illustrates the growing realization that a mode of address directed exclusively towards rendering a static, spectacular history of trauma missed the crucial ongoing experience of violence in the present. Recent critical studies have emphasized that it is never at the time of its event that the experience of traumatic violence is registered. Trauma, in this respect, has no past; it can only be felt in the present (see Caruth). In the middle of an initially graphic narrative, the writer-narrator of Husain’s story thus turns on his surviving warrior protagonist, now a poor migrant in Pakistan, and wishes him back to the scene of violence so that a coherent story can be told about him in his absence. The violence is at once ongoing, displaced and reconceived: ‘If novels and short stories got written this way,’ the narrator admits, ‘writers would be tried for murder every day’ (177). In the fragmented diary entries of the narrative that follow – standing in for the epic that fails to arrive – the absent experience of collective violence in South Asia had found its first fully self-reflexive form (see Padamsee). The achievement of Husain, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Bedi and others from this generation has, for scholars at least, been an overpowering one. For these critics, witnessing Partition in the Urdu short story both opens up and ends in a single post-Independence generation. But if, as Veena Das and others insist, Partition is a continually re-evoked, changing and intertwined moment in the experience of contemporary collective violence in South Asia, the question of absent experience first posed by these Urdu writers may preface a linked and ongoing written history of the South Asian present that cannot otherwise be registered (see Das 10–17; Datta; Pandey ‘In Defense’ 41–3). While historians reflecting on writing violence turn readily to the fictive testimony of the immediate post-Partition stories, it is this still evolving legacy in more contemporary Urdu short stories that has gone missing.

In particular, a renewed language of representation, steeped in the accents of Partition, begins to speak to a rapidly changing context of collective violence in the work of Urdu short story writers in the 1980s and 1990s. These stories point to a continuing trans-generational history of trauma whose evolution begins where most studies of the genre end (see Chughtai; Kumar Narrating Partition; Saint). One of the most striking formal and affective innovations of these contemporary narratives lies in their reconfiguration of the trope of absent address. Cathy Caruth argues that if we are to hear their testimony we need to listen to the repetitions in narratives of trauma less as a stranded monologue than as two distinct and mutually incomprehensible voices staging a ‘double-telling’ of an intimately shared history (7). The telling of trauma is in this respect intensely transactional, not just between victim and listener, but between the survivor and those absent others implicated in the original event. It is this restaged original dialogue, evoking an absent presence in its forms of address, which theorists of trauma had too often translated as a single traumatized self compulsively repeating an original wound (Caruth 4). Caruth, along with other founding figures in trauma studies such as Shoshana Felman and Dominic LaCapra, has been attacked for the potential of this insight to shrive the individual of wider (and especially, postcolonial) historical contexts and focus instead on an individualized linguistic confrontation with trauma (Craps 51–6; Craps and Buelens 1–11; Herrero and Baelo-Allue xix). Yet 40 years after Partition, this form of absent address is redirected in Urdu writing precisely to evoke its structural situation, its own founding circumstances in a South Asian continuum of historical rupture (see also Kabir). In Surendra Prakash’s ‘Wood Chopped in the Jungle’ (Jangal se kati hui lakriyan 1989), the narrator and his exiled community of woodcutters open yet another coffin by the riverside, only to find that what they saw ‘was no illusion – it was quite the right thing. It was my own corpse that lay in the coffin’ (163). Burying the South Asian past is no longer possible. The original traumatic event has been reconstructed as the absence of its narrator, compulsively chopping the wood by which he will be – has already been – crucified. Unmaking the past in the present, the ‘double-telling’ of the story enacts not just the impossibility of the original survivor’s history (Caruth 39), but the incomprehensible collective legacy of its inheritance.

As collective violence entered a new era of ‘routinisation’ in the 1980s (Pandey ‘In Defense’ 46), the narration of trauma in the Urdu short story begins to shuttle even more self-consciously between its past and present locations, its present and absent interlocutors. It is as if the polarities of experience between a wounded past and an amnesiac present had been rediscovered and recharged. The absent address, so crucial to understanding the testimony of violence, now becomes an important form of expression passed between the generation who had experienced Partition and those second-generation witnesses to whom its affects, and socio-political after-effects, were bequeathed. The crucified corpse in the coffin in Surendra Prakash’s story exemplifies not only an ongoing sectarian violence that must now at some level be ‘owned’, but the absent presence of an original traumatic loss that can no longer possibly be witnessed. That a second-generation, non-Muslim Indian writer chose to convey this traumatized experience in a language by then associated exclusively with Muslims, makes the relevance of absent address only the more urgent. That he chose to tell it through a Christian motif points us forward to the mutually incomprehensible ‘double-telling’ of the story he has inherited.

Passing it on

Comprising some of the first printed texts in South Asia in the early nineteenth century, the Hindustani (Urdu) short story had from the start appealed to a cross-communal audience, read alike by educated Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims across North India (see King; Metcalf; Pollock 805–911; Pritchett). These texts were often composite intertwining tales (qissa) that foregrounded the role of the storyteller. Though populist in orientation, they maintained a vital contemporary relevance, and at times dissidence, to the social contexts out of which they arose (see Oesterheld). In the late nineteenth century, politicized language movements began to divide Hindustani as a written form into the separate scripts of nagri and nastaliq, associated respectively with Hindi and Urdu, attempting at the same time to purify Hindi of its Perso-Arabic roots (see Dalmia).² The modernist twentieth-century Urdu short story was in part a direct critical response to these divisive energies.³ In Pakistan in particular, where from 1952 Urdu was problematically imposed by the state as the national language (see Ayres), Urdu writing has taken on the oppositional work of a dissenting minor literature. In India, it remains a marginalized forum for speaking within and beyond the nation (see Hansen and Lelyveld; Memon ‘Urdu Fiction’). In both countries, the long evolved role of the genre as a dissenting form critiquing social coercion and rupture has re-emerged in recent years alongside an urgently renewed appeal to its storytelling past.

The psychoanalyst Dori Laub has described a process of eliciting Holocaust memories in which testimony is less the retrieval of facts than ‘a genuine event, an event in its own right’, and one that neither witness nor listener ‘yet knows’ (Laub 67). In many contemporary Urdu Partition stories, rather than abandoning the story form altogether, it is the repeated performative action of telling and listening to incoherent stories that produces the unknown event. By telling these stories to an intimate but uncomprehending listener, and so restaging the absent address of the original trauma, the witness opens up their repetitive history to something new, an unprecedented knowledge. In part, this is a knowledge of its relevance to, indeed its alteration within, a changing history of others – and therefore its own dependence and vulnerability to change (Caruth 18–24, 37–9). At the start of his short story ‘The Refugees’ (Muhajirin 1987), Abdullah Hussein’s narrator states that ‘events don’t occur in a void, but are related to the great unknowns that flank them on either side’ (50). As with so many Urdu stories of the period, the one about to be told makes no sense on its own; it is the event of its retelling, emerging from between these flanking and absent ‘unknowns’, which creates its present meaning.

The story crosses between two moments of personal history, both of which are at once familiar and unprecedented. The first occurs one afternoon in 1940, when Aftab’s father, without warning or apparent reason, retires alone to his room and shoots himself; the second, 30 years later, when the son returns to the scene of suicide in his natal town, a place as remote and inaccessible to him as those left by the original ‘Muhajirs’, the designation inextricably associated in Pakistan with Partition refugees from India (68). Written at a time when General Zia-ul Haq’s ‘Islamization’ programme in Pakistan had exacerbated rather than contained the fissiparous tendencies of the state (see Jalal Democracy and Authoritarianism 61–2; Shaikh), the story situates itself between two prior moments of histori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Short Story and the Postcolonial
• 1 ‘Times are different now’: The Ends of Partition in the Contemporary Urdu Short Story
• 2 ‘Sheddings of light’: Patricia Grace and Māori Short Fiction
• 3 Unmaking Sense: Short Fiction and Social Space in Singapore
• 4 Vancouver Stories: Nancy Lee and Alice Munro
• 5 ‘And did those feet’? Mapmaking London and the Postcolonial Limits of Psychogeography
• 6 The Short Story in Articulating Diasporic Subjectivities in Jhumpa Lahiri
• 7 The Contemporary Egyptian Maqāma or Short Story Novel as a Form of Democracy
• 8 Topographies and Textual Negotiations: Arab Women’s Short Fiction
• 9 At the Interstices of Diaspora: Queering the Long Story Short in Caribbean Literature by Women
• 10 ‘They can fly’: The Postcolonial Black Body in Nalo Hopkinson’s Speculative Short Fiction
• 11 Threshold People: Liminal Subjectivity in Etienne van Heerden, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer
• 12 African Short Stories and the Online Writing Space
• Bibliography
• Index