CM Naim, professor of South Asian languages wrote – in the 200th anniversary of the publication of the first Urdu modern newspaper, Jam-i Jahan-Numa – that the influence of Urdu among non-Muslims has been undergoing a tragic decline in the 21st century. A language, he argues, that had once been a space for the inclusion of diverse cultures has now been cornered in particular religious echelons. He concludes, “There is not a single non-Muslim essayist, literary critic, literary researcher, or fiction writer of significance in Urdu.” This mournful outlook toward a contemporary discourse on Urdu is being felt equally by writers like Rahman Abbas, Rakhshanda Jalil, and Noor Zaheer among several others.
Dastan-e-Ishq
Rahman Abbas’s 2024 novella On the Other Side, translated from the Urdu by Riyaz Latif, takes language and twists it into a rhythmic tale of love, passion and writing. It follows the first-person narration of a writer who’s attempting a biography of Abdus-Salam Kalshekhar. The book reads like a diary or a journal of the unnamed writer/narrator who is collecting details of Salam’s life. Moved by his experiences of love and desire, Salam had planned a seven-volume “Saga of Passion” before his death. The narrator investigates the Dastan-e-Ishq, the three volumes out of the planned seven Salam could complete in his lifetime. But what the narrator discovers through people known to Salam and his diaries reveals a whole other narrative beyond the pages of the volumes.
At 142 pages, the book does justice to the story and in fact, goes beyond. Books in which one of the characters attempts a biography (of a real person or otherwise) are generally expected to be longer with a finished picture of the subject. Abbas has no such plans with Salam’s character. Through the narrator, he reveals to the reader that which is enough and lets the mystery around the fictional writer persist. With shorter sentences and questions from the narrator trying to solve the puzzle of Salam’s life, the author has created an immersive maze. The tone is resonant of the witty, tongue-in-cheek style of Julian Barnes’ 190-page Flaubert’s Parrot, where a doctor attempts to write a biography of Gustav Flaubert.
Salam is an English teacher at a school “where a great deal of emphasis was laid on instilling and expanding religious values”. He finds his time in a classroom worthwhile, but feels like a misfit. His poetic indulgences are not fancied by his colleagues, and are taken to mean something radically unusual by his students. He is sharp-witted, sociable, and enjoys being lured by his lust for women. The first pages of the novella prepare the reader with an exciting, rounded character that Abbas carries forward until the very end. Salam can be unconventional with his opinions on matters of religion and language but his dedication toward the pursuit of passion makes him no different from the female colleagues who sit in the staffroom discussing “the most luscious orgasms.”
A place for Urdu
What seemed central to the novella was its purpose to find a place for Urdu in contemporary times. In a poetry event, occurring later in the book, we find the senior colleagues creating a furore over the use of Urdu in poetry to be those like “kafirs” and disrespecting religious sentiments. Reading this through the scholar Naim’s aforementioned reference to the disappearance of diversity in Urdu does make one wonder if the association of the language with one religious group has led to its deprivation from capturing the beauties of life.
Salam’s pursuit of his passion with various women and his encounter with love in its different forms is at the heart of what Urdu literature is moving away from. The questions keep the reader invested and curious – why has such whitewashing of the language happened? What makes Urdu literature today in India “utterly deprived of colourful exuberance, freshness and heady moods of love and sex”? Is it more to do with Hindu state censorship, capitalism, or a mix of an increasing Hindutva nationalist state? Or something else?
Increasingly, Indian publishers are blatantly boxing fiction into explorations of “caste prejudices”, “right-wing uprising”, “leftist revolt”, “gender discrimination” and the like. Reducing fiction to these categories fails to capture the expanse of a novel. In fact, it can burden the author. More than being a work about patriarchy, caste prejudice, and so on, Abbas’s novella is in fact a love story, a lust story and a romance. It brings language and its subject – the narrator, Abdus-Salam, and the reader – into a conversation with each other. There is an exchange of ideas, of care for each other, and unresolved dilemmas of life, which make a romance what it is.
On The Other Side brims with lust, “riddled with perplexity”, and makes the lovers want to “become the water raining from the skies.” Abbas’s writing of romance is as alluring as André Aciman’s. His understanding of the compulsions of desire is maddening like that of Ananda Devi’s characters in Indian Tango. He writes about the hunger for physical and emotional belonging to an erotic subject as deliciously as Yukio Mishima’s protagonist in Thirst for Love. It’s a literary romance that deserves all the praise it gets.
It is fascinating how the novella pays attention to the identity crisis of being a Muslim in India today. The binary of the good and bad Muslim is explicitly presented during poetry recitals – “I am a Muslim. My dream is to make good Muslims out of people…” says a senior trustee of the school. The political binary that was created post-9/11 in the US to separate the good, anxious, supporting-the-State practitioners of Islam from the bad terrorists has infiltrated even theological spaces. Throughout the story, we find Salam trying to overthrow the “erroneous decrees” that sustain this binary.
The myriad art forms of Urdu have now withdrawn to the religious sphere. Salam admits, “He Himself decrees his books written, Himself decrees them read, and Himself hears them.” Or the politics of desire, the “forbidden” spaces and rules that are flouted and cradled to those in power resembling the “good”. The author charts the purification of language and the desire to segregate the character of being a good or a bad Muslim in contemporary times. Unfortunately, the reader does not get enough of these two, which are really what makes Abdus-Salam a character worth spending your time with.
Rahman Abbas’s novella is a sad, engrossing and yet hilarious book. It is one of those books where brevity succeeds and endures in the reader’s mind.
Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata, as a Junior Research Fellow. He also posts about books on Instagram and X.
On the Other Side, Rahman Abbas, translated from the Urdu by Riyaz Latif, Penguin India.
