Intizar hussain biography of williams
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The Sea Lies Ahead
Ebook453 pages7 hours
By Intizar Husain
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About this ebook
In 1947, young Jawad Hassan gives up his ancestral home in India and his fiancee Maimuna for a dream country founded by Jinnah. And even though the newly created state of Pakistan is thronged by a huge number of zealous Muslims ready to lead from the front, the rapid breakdown of law and order in Karachi makes many, like Jawad, retreat into reminiscences of their past in undivided India. The second in Intizar Husain's acclaimed trilogy, The Sea Lies Ahead takes up the story of Pakistan where the first novel Basti (1979) ended: poised on the verge of breaking off from its eastern arm. This is a novel about those muhajirs, the author himself among them, who went to the promised Land of the Pure and were met with mistrust, prejudice and apathy. Equally, it is a rich portrait of the new culture of urban Pakistan fostered by people who came from the countless towns and hamlets in and a
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The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951)
Amidst the clamorous turbulens, turmoil and tumult of the Partition, Basti sits in a sombre, solemn, albeit ruptured, landscape. At the outset, the reader encounters a mythic, almost mystic echo-chamber of voices of a reminiscing history professor, Zakir, the novel’s protagonist. Sleep brings to him dreams of a world passed and in passing, he wakes to a new homeland, a new settlement, a new basti. Cloaked in sheets of nostalgia, displacement and ruptured continuities, Zakir’s tomorrows are taken care of by his yesterdays. Zakir notes, “I am on the run from my own history, and catching my breath in the present. Escapist. But the merciless present pushes us back again toward our history” (Hussain 68). He who remembers lives unaccommodated. For Zakir “the outer world had already lost its meaning” (Hussain 46) and it was not very often that he breathed “the air of his own time” (Hussa
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Let me give vent to a feeling of jealousy brewing in me for long. As we all know, independent India and Pakistan were born at one and the same time. But the problem of a national identity is peculiar to us alone. I as a Pakistani writer feel envious of my contemporaries in India, who may have other kinds of problems but were never seen perturbed about their national identity, sydasiatiskt land is going to complete its fifty years in the coming year, but the problem of identity with us is still there.
Allow me to look at the problem as it cropped up among the writers and soon turned into a subject of controversy. Those were early days of Pakistan when urdu writers were seen on both sides of the Divide enjaged in writing about the the human miseries caused by the holocaust coming in the wake of Partition. A few writers with their zeal for sydasiatiskt land , felt disturbed to see that writers in Pakistan too were writing with the same attitude towards Partition and the subsequent situation, wh