Chitre's view

Dilip Chitre, who translated Hamid Dalwai’s Indhan into English (as Fuel), has written a brief preface titled ‘Translator’s View’. This post includes edited excerpts from the original text of the preface- 


I took up the challenge of translating Hamid Dalwai’s Indhan not just because the author who died twenty-five years ago, was a close friend but also because this short novel is a modern Indian masterpiece tackling the complex theme of contemporary communal strife in our midst. It is a novel of global or, as I still prefer to use the more classical adjective, universal relevance.

 … 

A work of art is the centre of its own universe, the prime source of its own gravity, a system by itself. What has always fascinated me about Hamid Dalwai’s Indhan is the explosive energy it contains in its compact size.
Barely one hundred and fifty pages of prose, seven chapters in all, and no reader would suspect that this is a work of epic proportions. It invites compulsive re-reading because its racy narrative makes one miss the intricate details, the depth of social awareness, and the disturbing world-view embedded in it.

Set in the area of Chiplun in the Konkan region of Maharashtra, Indhan was published in the mid-1960s and it depicts the same period in India’s history, less than two decades after the partition of the subcontinent into two modern nation-states that have been continually in conflict since.
The narrator and protagonist of Indhan is a Marathi-speaking Muslim. He comes through in his narration as someone who has evolved into an atheist, a humanist, a liberal, a socialist, and a political activist negotiating relationships with a family, a community, and a society that operate on levels conflicting with his own values and perceptions. His compassionate but critical passage through a hectic personal experience of latent communal tensions culminating in a riot – and its aftermath – is what the novel records.

A successful work of fiction enables its reader to identify and temporarily adopt the various points of view employed by the author-narrator. The author of any literary work of art, I imagine, is a meta-narrator who invents the narrator’s voice and tone first and then invents the voices and tones of all the other characters the narrative encompasses. The narration of Indhan is in the first person. It is, from the outset, a subjective point of view and therefore creates a subjective perspective. But since the real author of the narrative, Hamid Dalwai, is not the fictional protagonist himself, the reader must remain aware of this fine artistic distinction and understand the author’s creative distancing act crucial to comprehending the work as a whole. The author Hamid Dalwai, in other words, is not the first person narrator of the novel- but his inventor.

…

One of the striking features of Indhan is that its narrator’s name is never revealed in the text. He refers to himself as ‘I’ and others address him not by his name but as ‘you’. He refers to his family in terms of his subjective relationship with them. His father is simply ‘Father’ or ‘my father’; his brother’s wife is simply ‘Bhabhi’; and his brother is ‘my brother’. At a further distance are characters he interacts with : Janardan, Sumati, Isaak, Harbarao, Jaitun and a few others from his personal past and present. A majority of the other characters are observed from a greater distance or reported about through the characters narrator himself interacts with, such as Sudam’s daughter-in-law, the Parit woman, the Bania’s wife, Lakshumi  and so on.

The main ‘scene’ where most events and incidents take place is again not named but simply referred to as ‘my hometown’, ‘the town’, ‘our hometown’ et cetra. However, the author has described the landscape and the regional cycle of seasons so unmistakably that Marathi readers will have no difficulty in placing it on the Konkan coast and near Chiplun- the author’s hometown in real life. Non-Marathi readers of this translation- Fuel in English- can easily locate Konkan and Chiplun on the Arabian Sea coast of Maharashtra.

Indhan also defines through references and other clues in its narration to the historical period in which it is set. The narrator has left his hometown for Mumbai about three or four years after India became independent in 1947.

The Partition of India in 1947 is one of the key time-markers used in the narrative. The narrator has spent fifteen years away from his hometown and the narration stresses this long period of absence from home. This acts as a marker between his early life and memories of the hometown and the changes and continuities he perceives on his return.

More than fifteen years after 1947 places the story in the early 1960s. Indhan was first published in September 1965. This is its first translation into English and it is being published 37 years after the original arrived in Marathi.

…

I first read Indhan when it was published in 1965. I reread it several times over the years. I was convinced that it was a modern literary classic ranking beside the best work of Dalwai’s younger and older Marathi contemporaries such as Bhau Padhye, Bhalchandra Nemade and Baburao Bagul. All four of them ushered in a new Marathi fiction in the 1960s. Each of them has made a distinctive contribution towards making the contemporary Marathi milieu perceptible and intelligible to itself through works of literary art.

But what sets Dalwai apart even among his peers is the fact that he is a Muslim Marathi writer (through a professed non-believer himself) and the first to illuminate the household and community life of Marathi Muslims ‘from within’. He is not a communal partisan. He is a modern liberal humanist with a deep social commitment.

He is neither a friend of the Hindus nor an enemy of the Muslims. He is someone who is aware of the contemporary world and the many issues it still has to settle with the plurality of traditions it is heir to. He mirrors a conflict that is not yet resolved thirty-seven years after he wrote his little literary masterpiece.

Remembering Hamid Dalwai, and an age of questioning

- Dilip Chitre

This article was published in Indian Express on 3 May 2002. Published here with the permission of Vijaya Chitre

Hamid Dalwai

It is now 25 years since Hamid Dalwai died of progressive kidney failure at the age of 44. In the past one quarter of a century, his legend has survived and grown as a remarkable Indian social activist of Muslim origin. Denounced as an infidel by self-styled Islamic religious authorities, he braved their invective and serious threats to his own life and to his family, championing modernisation, liberalisation, and integration of Muslim communities in India so that they could take their own place in a pluralistic, secular Republic of India.

Hamid Dalwai Dalwai’s focus was on the secondary status of women in Indian Islam. The abandoned victims of oral divorce moved him to launch a campaign for reforms in Muslim personal law, and he believed that a uniform civil code was the only answer to guarantee fundamental human rights to all Indian women.

Dalwai was born in a Marathi-speaking Muslim family on the Konkan coast of Maharashtra. He outgrew the segregationist attitude of his family and his community and joined, while still at school, the youth wing of the Socialist Party — the Rashtra Seva Dal. Moving later to Mumbai, he joined Ram Manohar Lohia’s faction of the socialist party as a full-time worker.

When Hamid Dalwai realised that his Hindu colleagues’ vague liberalism and secularism offered no solution to the problem of modernising Indian Muslims, he devoted himself to educating Muslim opinion from within. Out of his discussions emerged Muslim Politics in Secular India, now a classic When he realised that his Hindu colleagues’ vague liberalism and secularism offered no solution to the problem of modernising Indian Muslims, he decided to devote himself to educating Muslim opinion from within the Muslim community. He travelled all over India to meet Muslim leaders, religious as well as social and political, and had discussions with them. Out of these discussions and his observations and perceptions came the little book Muslim Politics in Secular India that has now become a classic. I was associated with the English version of the book, which I verbalised in English as Hamid Khan (as I used to call him) dictated the contents to me in his chaste, lucid Marathi.

But my friendship with Hamid Khan dated much earlier. I knew him as a Marathi creative writer six years older than me. In 1954, the then aspiring Marathi novelist Bhau Padhye and the upcoming short story writer Hamid Dalwai came to see my father, Baburao Chitre, founder-editor of the Marathi literary magazine Abhiruchi. I had just published a few review articles in the Marathi weekly Mouj and had my first poems accepted for publication by the literary monthly Satyakatha in which Hamid’s early short stories had begun to appear. But Hamid sacrificed his enormous talent for the sake of reforming and modernising Muslims. His only two published literary works in Marathi are Laat (The Wave) — a short stories collection — and the short novel Indhan (Fuel).

Hamid could not bear the obscurantism which made members of his family and his community to cling to obsolete beliefs and medieval ways of thinking in the contemporary world. He believed they were refusing to participate in the making of a forward-looking pluralistic society enriched by many traditions that transcended a single religious world-view.

Indhan is Hamid’s only novel. It is a deeply perceptive view of small-town life in rural Konkan and the inter-communal tensions it contains. While Jotirao Phule and Bhim Rao Ambedkar, in the 19th and the 20th century respectively, launched their modern egalitarian struggle against the pernicious, anti-humanistic caste system, Dalwai focussed on a similar aspect of Islam that divides mankind into believers and infidels and divides the world between an area of peace where all who dwell are believers and an area of conflict where infidels resist the message of Allah.

Both Brahminical Hinduism and fanatical Islam are iniquitous social ideologies that implicitly encourage intraspecific aggression in the name of spiritual uplift. As categories, ‘dharma’ and ‘adharma’ are identical to ‘dar-ul-Islam’ and ‘dar-ul-Harb’. It could be argued that Krishna, anticipating the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), taught Arjuna the doctrine of ‘jihad’ in both its spiritual and this-worldly aspects. Perhaps this is why modern Brahminical fundamentalists talk just like the Shia Ayatollahs of Iran and the many Sunni mullahs in the mixed world of Islam.

The language of the Q’uraan is, however, Arabic and not Turkish or Persian. Hence the conflicts within the supposedly homogeneous Dar-ul-Islam. South-Asian and South-East Asian Muslims are peripheral and inferior to these two conflicting ethnolinguistic groups in the Islamic world. This, too, is similar to the conflicts within the Hindu world. When it comes to the crunch, fundamentalism does not flinch from proclaiming a ‘jehad’ or a dharmayuddha. They become equally severe against their own species and indulge in genocide.

Indhan’s narrator is a Muslim whose rational, liberal, pluralistic, democratic view of society separates him from both the Muslim and the Hindu characters who are the dramatis personae of the story. His compassion for his family and community does not blind him to the flaws in their thinking and their knee-jerk reflexes to situations. He has a larger sense of society that includes the Hindus but those Hindus, too, are by and large communal and regard the Muslims as ‘others’.

Indhan was first published in 1965, 18 years after partition and 15 years after it proclaimed itself a sovereign secular democratic republic. It was also the year in which India had a war with Pakistan. Its historical ethos contextualises this novel and makes it, 25 years after its author’s untimely death, a classic of Marathi and pan-Indian fiction.

The dark clouds that have surrounded not only our republic but all its South Asian neighbours at the beginning of the 21st century poignantly bring home to us the fact that literature outlives the crisis of civilisation it depicts, if it dares to see through it.