Contents · 5 sections · 3 min
Hyder in Four Ideas
the essentialsThe river of time
History as a flowing river in which the same souls reappear across the ages — continuity beneath catastrophe.
A shared civilisation
The Ganga-Jamuni culture — the fusion of Hindu and Muslim, Persian and Indic — as the true inheritance of India.
The tragedy of Partition
Partition as the breaking of a civilisation, not only of a country.
Modernist form
Stream of consciousness, shifting times and voices, collage of history and fiction — in Urdu.
Qurratulain Hyder — known affectionately as Ainee Apa — was one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century in Urdu and one of the most important in any South Asian language. In novels, novellas, stories, travelogues and a vast family chronicle, she wrote about history, time, memory and identity, and above all about the composite Indo-Muslim civilisation of north India — the “Ganga-Jamuni” culture of Hindus and Muslims, Persian and Sanskrit, Awadh and Delhi — and its shattering by Partition. Her masterpiece, Āg kā Daryā (“River of Fire”, 1959), follows a group of characters reincarnated across two and a half millennia of Indian history, and is often called the greatest Urdu novel. She received the Jnanpith Award (1989), the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Bhushan.
Life
Qurratulain Hyder was born on 20 January 1927 in Aligarh, into a distinguished literary family: her father, Sajjad Haidar Yildirim, was one of the first modern Urdu short-story writers, and her mother, Nazar Sajjad Haidar, was a pioneering woman novelist. She grew up in a cultured, liberal household in Aligarh, Dehradun and Lucknow, studied English literature at Isabella Thoburn College and Lucknow University, and began publishing stories as a child.
In 1947 her family migrated to Pakistan, first Karachi, then Lahore. She worked as an information officer for the Pakistani government and travelled in Britain as a journalist for the BBC. Her novel Āg kā Daryā (1959), with its vision of Indian history as a continuous, shared civilisation and of Partition as a catastrophe, was attacked in Pakistan as an argument against the very idea of the state. In 1961 she returned to India, settling in Bombay, where she worked as a journalist and managing editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India (1964–68), and later in Delhi and Noida. She was a visiting professor at Aligarh, Jamia Millia Islamia and universities in the United States. She never married. She died in Noida on 21 August 2007.
Works
Her first novels, Mere Bhī Sanamkhāne (“My Temples Too”, 1949) and Safīna-e-Gham-e-Dil (1952), portray the young, Westernised Muslim aristocracy of Lucknow on the eve of Partition and its disintegration. Āg kā Daryā (1959) is her masterpiece. Ākhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar (“Fellow Travellers in the Night”, 1979), which won the Jnanpith, is a novel of revolutionary idealism and betrayal in Bengal from the 1940s to the creation of Bangladesh. Kār-e-Jahā̃ Darāz Hai (“The Business of the World Goes On”, 1977–2003) is a vast “non-fiction novel”, a chronicle of her own family over many generations. Gardish-e-Rang-e-Chaman (1987) traces the descendants of the courtesans and nobles of 1857; Chāndnī Begum (1990) portrays the decline of the feudal order.
Her novellas and stories are equally admired: “Sītā Haran” (“The Abduction of Sita”), about a Sindhi Hindu woman refugee drifting through relationships after Partition; “Housing Society”, a satire of new money in Karachi; “Patjhaṛ kī Āvāz” (“The Sound of Falling Leaves”, Sahitya Akademi Award, 1967), the monologue of a woman looking back on a life of loves and losses; and “Agle Janam Mohe Bitiyā Na Kījo” (“Don’t Make Me a Daughter in My Next Life”), about the exploitation of two sisters who are singers.
Style and ideas
Hyder brought modernist techniques — stream of consciousness, shifting narrators and time frames, collage of history, myth, documents and fiction — into Urdu, and is often compared to Virginia Woolf. Her subject is time: the continuity of a civilisation beneath its upheavals, the persistence of souls and cultures, and the losses inflicted by history. She saw Indian civilisation as a synthesis to which Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and the British all contributed, and Partition as its tragic sundering. Her prose moves between elegant Urdu, Persian, Hindi and English, reflecting the cosmopolitan culture she described.
Legacy
Hyder is regarded as the foremost woman novelist in Urdu and one of the great novelists of India and Pakistan. Her own English “transcreation” of Āg kā Daryā, River of Fire (1998), brought her to a wider readership.
In conversation
- Āg kā Daryā — “the river of fire”: history as a flowing, burning current through which we all must cross.
- Ganga-Jamuni tehzīb — the shared culture of Hindus and Muslims that her work mourns and celebrates.
- Ainee Apa — the affectionate name for the grande dame of Urdu fiction.
Curiosities
did you know?- She migrated to Pakistan in 1947, published Āg kā Daryā there in 1959 to controversy, and returned to India in 1961.
- She translated Āg kā Daryā into English herself as River of Fire (1998) — a ‘transcreation’.
- She won the Jnanpith Award in 1989 for Ākhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar, and the Padma Bhushan in 2005.
- She worked as a journalist, as managing editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, and for the BBC.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can one novel contain a civilisation’s history?
- What was lost at Partition beyond land and lives?
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