It’s perplexing to be taught that an creator whose inventive dexterity permeates by varied literary genres, movies and print media is hardly acknowledged past being the one who gave a break to Amitabh Bachchan, wrote scripts for Raj Kapoor and in addition contributed a weekly column, Final Web page and Azad Qalam to a well-liked weekly the Blitz that appeared in English, Hindi and Urdu. It intriguingly summarizes the story of the famend bilingual creator, journalist and filmmaker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-1987), whose huge inventive opus comprising 74 books, over 100 quick tales, eleven novels, three performs, 40 scripts of movies, two travelogues, an autobiography, three biographies, greater than 2000 journalistic items both forged apart or are missed.
Regardless of having a powerful ideological dedication to Marxism and being enormously influenced by Leo Tolstoy (1814-1910) and Maxim Gorky (1892-1936), Khwaja Ahmad Abbas closely drew on the well-known American liberal thinker John Rawls (1921-2002), who propounded the speculation of justice. He talked a couple of society the place free residents have equal rights and work for an egalitarian system. He juxtaposed Rawlsian ideas with Nehruvian socialism in his writings, and his characters communicate a language of tolerance and mutual respect.
No critical try has been made to spell out his oeuvre with crucial acuity as fiction criticism in Urdu refers to his works, together with his trail-blazing voluminous novel Inquilab cursorily. Felicitous appreciation eludes the celebrated author, and it peeved Abbas enormously. He took exception to it by revealing a way of disappointment and delineating his function of writing, “For creator and critics Khwaja Ahmad Abbas neither writing a novel nor creation of literature is past his capability. Filmmakers assert that his characteristic movies are mere documentaries. He produces journalistic works by the digicam. It isn’t the creation of artwork. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas says I make use of all doable strategies no matter I wish to convey, typically by writing Final Web page and Azad Qalam for the Blitz. Recurrently I write articles for newspapers and periodicals, and at occasions I pen down a brief story or a novel. At intervals, I produce a documentary, direct my movie, or write tales or dialogues for different filmmakers. Nevertheless, all of them bear out my issues for humanity. I wish to assert that a right away and powerful sense of connectedness permeates life’s inner, private, psychological, exterior, social and financial facets. No matter occurs on this planet and society influences the actions and pondering of a person.”
Abbas appears fairly forthright as textual evaluation avoidance-prone Urdu critics hardly look past Premchand, Manto, Bedi, Ismat Chughtai, Intizar Hussain, and Qurratul Ain Haider, and all writers, no matter their awe-inspiring inventive prowess, who didn’t make it to the literary canon, largely stay unexplored. Eight years in the past, throughout Abbas’s centenary, famous creator Syed Saiydain Hameed organized seminars and performs and printed a commemorative quantity. Nevertheless, it’s left to the celebrated critic professor Irtiza Karim to compile all his writings, besides journalistic items, into eight volumes with a powerful sense of analysis acumen and tutorial rigour. In his astutely written preface, Irtiza Kareem factors out that Abbas’s oeuvre is a useful and unceasing asset of common literature and has contributed immensely to the classics. With out common literature, belles-letters shall be dried out. Widespread literature has huge enchantment, however the restricted readership critically constrains elitist literature.
Irtiza, a perceptive fiction critic, took pains in placing collectively all his writings, excluding his columns and movie scripts; the primary three volumes comprise quick tales (together with 39 tales that aren’t part of any one of many collections of quick tales), eleven novels are unfold over fourth, fifth and sixth volumes, biographies and travelogues type the seventh quantity, and the final quantity carries his three performs. The volumes acquaint the readers with the wonderful vary of thematic range and refined use of a number of narrative and journalistic methods by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas.
Irtiza Kareem seeks to find the creator within the bigger perspective of social, political, financial, cultural, linguistic and non secular sensibilities that held sway in twentieth-century India. In line with him, the standard instruments of criticism are hardly measured to judge Abbas as he units in movement a nuanced trilateral dialogue amongst elemental human predicament, social consciousness and energy. Even his weekly column on well timed subjects, Azad Qalam, transcends ephemerality and attains an abiding presence. Irtiza quotes a column, Nayee Sita, Nayee Zulekha, Nayee Mariam, that appeared in 1964. It reads: At this time, all of them got here out, marching hand in hand alongside the streets of Bombay-Sita, Savitri, Ayesha, Khadija, Marry, Salma, Sohini, Juliet, Padmini, Laila, Leela, Lily, Mohini, Mehmooda, and Margret. Mill-serving Maharashtrian ladies dressing in nine-yard sarees, Workplace-going ladies, stenographers, typists, clerks, ladies working within the plastic factories, ladies working in drug items, Bidi and biscuits-producing ladies are all there. Saree, frock, shalwar, trimmed hair, some placing bindi on brow, some with lipstick, some having bangles, some having marriage or engagement rings, some carrying a new child baby, however all of them carry revolutionary crimson flag! Each coronary heart is stuffed with new hope, ardour, and the slogans of the brand new ladies of India are on every lip: Finish worth rise, give equal rights to working ladies, scale back the worth of cooking gasoline, nationalize oil firms, arrange crèches for working ladies and withdraw restriction on married ladies.” The excerpt articulates Abbas’s concern, and one tends to agree with Irtiza, who factors out that the calls for are but to be met. A delicate portrayal of such points makes the creator extra related within the market-driven economic system.
Irtiza Kareem did effectively to compile the works of Kwaja Ahmad Abbas, whose writings betray a powerful dedication to liberal, progressive and humanist beliefs which might be nonetheless beliefs of our fragmented and fact-free world.
Shafey Kidwai, a bilingual critic, is a professor of mass communication at Aligarh Muslim College
