Nowhere is this technique more compelling than in the texts that employ a modicum of linear narration, where elliptical transitions of space (from staircase to vineyard) or time (from early twilight to darkness) reflect the shifting emotions of the first person narrator, and remind the reader of a sequence of miniatures, or of an unfolding scroll, in which we see the same character in different places at different times of day. While translating these texts, I have also been reminded, over and over, of their similarity to Mughal and Pahari miniatures: their dwelling on heroines both indoors and out, lazing, playing music, hunting and on landscapes in which bright animals are presented against a richly-coloured background, with the deliberate use of flat or limited perspectives which allow us to view different scenes and heights simultaneously, letting the eye dwell on sky and sea, hilltop and foothill, branch and thorn-bush. They are also generically unusual, as the prose poem was not very common in Urdu at the time in fact they refuse to be contained within generic boundaries, ranging from formal verse-like structures to loose ribbons of prose swathed across the page. Hers are nevertheless original works firmly located in the sphere of her own linguistic and cultural imagination. She may have also been influenced by The Songs of Bilitis, the work of Pierre Louys, an author she was reputed to have liked. Straddling the genres of prose poem and, with their fragments of narrative and dialogue, what is now termed flash fiction, they employ a linguistic register that combines a classical, Arabic- and Persian-inflected lexicon with a syntax of colloquial intimacy and startling lucidity. The luminous, sensuous texts translated here are taken from a 1993 reprint of one of her least known works, Adab-e zarreen (Gilded Letters), which was first published in 1936. When she died at the age of about 90 (some said 96) at the end of the last century, her entire oeuvre, which included plays, poems, essays and translations along with her long and short fictions, had been constantly reprinted in new de luxe editions for about a decade. But she was more prolific as a writer of short fiction, of which she produced several collections: her part-playful, part-romantic approach continued to endear her to a large public. Though her output of full-length fiction was sporadic, she produced at least three novels: Zalim Muhabbat (Cruel Love), which focuses on a triangular love affair between a man, his fiancee, and his foster brother and childhood companion: Andhere Khwab (Dark Dreams), in which a psychoanalyst races the roots of a young woman’s hysterical fantasies of strangualtion and her obsession with alcoholic men to her childhood fixation on her alcoholic father and, later in her career, Pagalkhana (Madhouse), a futuristic anti-nuclear novel. In 1936, she married fellow-writer Imtiaz Ali Taj, moved to Lahore, took a pilot’s licence, edited two magazines, and ran a publishing company with her husband. One of her interests was in psychoanalysis: forbidden loves and convention-defying desires are at the core of her fictions, particularly the later works, which feature hysterical heroines, alcoholic heroes, suppressed homeorotic and even incestuous longings, observed and chronicled by a first-person narrator who is, herself, a poet and writer struggling to develop a fictional narrative and explore the sensibility of its characters.
#Urdu poem with word sangam free
Influenced by the writer Yildirim who was well known for his free translations of Turkish fiction, Hijab broke new ground in setting her tragic and sometimes Gothic love stories in imaginary landscapes at times reminiscent of the Eastern Mediterranean and at others of South India, where she grew up exotic backdrops often served to disguise her subversive intent, which was to chart the lives of educated, priviliged Indian Muslim women whose destinies were circumscribed by the rigid rules of class and clan. Hijab Ismail (later Hijab Imtiaz Ali) came to the attention of the public in 1932 with the publication of a collection of three novellas entitled Meri natamam muhabbat (My Unfinished Love).
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