Khan, Muhammad 1931–

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Khan, Muhammad 1931–

(Abdullah Hussein)

PERSONAL: Born 1931, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Ethnicity: "Pakistani."

ADDRESSES: Home—Lahore, Pakistan. E-mail—abdul [email protected].

CAREER: Worked as a chemist and chemical engineer in the cement industry, 1952–67; writer, 1967–. Also operator of a wine store in London, England.

AWARDS, HONORS: Adamjee Prize, 1963–64, for Udās nasle; World Urdu Literature award from an organization for the promotion of Urdu literature.

WRITINGS:

FICTION; UNDER PSEUDONYM ABDULLAH HUSSEIN

Udās nasle (novel), Naya Adarah (Lahore, Pakistan), 1963, translation by Hussein published as The Weary Generations, Peter Owen (London, England), 1999.

Nasheb (title means "Descent"), Qausain (Lahore, Pakistan), 1981.

Bāgh (title means "The Tiger"), Qausain (Lahore, Pakistan), 1982.

Sat rang (title means "Seven Colors"), Shaoor (New Delhi, India), 1982.

Nadi (title means "River"), Nusrat (Lahore, Pakistan), 1984.

Night and Other Stories, translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, Orient Longman (New Delhi, India), 1984.

Downfall by Degrees and Other Stories, South Asia Books (Columbia, MO), 1987.

Qaid (title means "Imprisonment"), Sang-i Mil (Lahore, Pakistan), 1989.

Nādār log (title means "The Dispossessed"), Sang-i Mil (Lahore, Pakistan), 1996.

Stories of Exile and Alienation, translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Émigré Journeys, Serpent's Tail (London, England), 2000.

Author (with Rob Buckler) of Brothers in Trouble, a television movie based on Émigré Journeys, broadcast by British Broadcasting Corp. on BBC2, 1996.

SIDELIGHTS: Muhammad Khan, who writes as Abdullah Hussein, was described by Muzaffar Iqbal in World Literature Today as "one of the best writers of the Urdu language." Hussein's fiction has appeared in Pakistan and India since 1962, but little of it has been published in English translation. The books available to Western readers include Night and Other Stories and Downfall by Degrees and Other Stories. The novel The Weary Generations, first published in Urdu in 1963, appeared in English, translated by the author himself.

In most of his fiction, Parvin Loloi pointed out in Contemporary World Writers, Hussein "explores the nature of exile and alienation." Alienation begins when the innocence of childhood ends. The maturing child loses a sense of identity and must create a new, adult self. The extent to which the child succeeds is the focus of Hussein's attention. Loloi summarized that "man can not be free … in Hussein's fiction, but what is important for him is the way his characters try to survive…. Hussein examines man's limits of endurance, through a stylized idiom, which is at once both eloquent and expressive."

Night and Other Stories contains three translations that Iqbal placed in "the first and most creative of his [Hussein's] writing." He added: "All three are steeped in a deep nostalgia that gives them a flavor of brooding." Two of the stories end in suicide, which Loloi identified as a frequent occurrence in Hussein's work, especially earlier writings. Iqbal noted, however, that "Hussein's major preoccupation is not physical death, but the process," and a story is as likely to end with the death of innocence as with the physical death of the character. At the same time, the critic pointed out, "Hussein does not let his characters fight in abstract realms," as many Urdu writers would. "His world is very concrete and real." Iqbal praised Hussein for the rich images and clear language that emerge from his stories, even in translation.

Udās nasle is Hussein's award-winning novel set in the years leading up to "the Partition" of India and Pakistan, a painful event that occurred by government decree in 1947 and extracted its toll from the population for many years afterward. In the same way that a character must lose its childlike innocence and mature into a new, adult identity, so did Hussein's native land. In the novel, published in English as The Weary Generations, the author "draw[s] parallels between the fortunes of his characters and the painful birth of the Muslim nation [Pakistan]," reported Aamer Hussein in the Times Literary Supplement. The plot involves a farmer's son, linked to the land and the status quo, and the daughter of a liberal, ostensibly nationalist, local personage but, according to his reviewer, the story served primarily as a vehicle for the author's more abstract theme. "Hussein's subject is the downward spiral of Indian morale, and the splitting of communities that weakened nationalism and led to Partition," the critic noted; he depicts "the onslaught of modernity, foreign influence and global warfare" in the sunset of British colonization, "and the displacement of peasants from the land. Beginning in rural backwardness … the novel ends in the urban squalor of the new Pakistan." To Aamer Hussein, the strength of Abdullah Hussein's writing in The Weary Generations "lies in the rich, sombre depiction of war, nationalist upheaval and exodus," all paid for in the currency of human suffering.

The author told CA: "My motivation for writing fiction is a desire to live more lives than the one of physical existence that I have on earth. I am influenced by my experience—of coming in contact with hundreds of different people every day and being fascinated by their diversity of life. As for other novelists, I may have been influenced by two among many—Dostoevsky and Faulkner. I do not choose the subjects of my novels; rather, they pick themselves. What I consciously do is find a structure into which the events and characters fit themselves. Out of the thousands of small details of life, a particular one jumps up and starts me off on a story. Why this and not any other, and how it establishes its own story line and characters, is a mystery to me. In the latter part of my writing career of forty years, my prose has tended to become austere, stripped of the unnecessary paraphernalia carried by language."