Sin

by Wajida Tabassum

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A nymphomaniac nawab and his fiercely clever footman.
The awakening of a servant-child's passion.
A divorce fuelled by envy, illicit love and suppression.
A noble set to transform the history of royal marriages.

Set in Hyderabad's old-world aristocratic society of the 1950s, this stellar collection of stories resurrects and explores the work of Wajida Tabassum, one of the most prominent names in Urdu literature, an iconoclast and nonconformist often referred to as the 'female Manto'. In her lifetime, Tabassum's fearless portrayal of the realities of the society she lived in met with severe criticism from the so-called custodians of culture of the time, and she was reviled to the point that mobs set out to torch her publishers' offices.
Sin showcases Tabassum's boldest short stories, alongside the story of her own life, translated for the first time into English, in which she captures, in riveting prose, the spectrum of depravity among Hyderabad's elite, middle-class compulsions in the mid-twentieth century, and blurred lines of decency and decorum.
Featuring lascivious nawabs, lustful begums, cunning servants, and unfulfilled marriages marked by peculiar rituals and customs, this volume will surprise, intrigue and entertain readers in equal measure.

Release date: January 3, 2022

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 240

Sample

Translator's Note

‘Women have been called queens a long time, but the kingdom given them isn’t worth ruling.’

– Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1869)

For a woman, life in a traditionally conservative south Asian society has always been a fierce battle for purity.

In a drab, dimly lit, smoky bistro, she may be pictured as dishevelled and alone, licking rice from her greasy hands. Thick, murky streaks of curry run down her chin and stain her blouse. A messy table before her is the evidence of her sins – sins of hedonism and indulgence. But the visual belies her reality. She is still hungry and dissatisfied. Framed as either banal or brazen, forever shamed for her desires, she has been carefully placed between rapture and revulsion through the ages.

Wajida Tabassum’s voice is of and for these women. It breaks down the social confines of virtue that refuse women their right to possess the base elements of human nature – lust, envy, greed, wrath – and condemn them to lifelong rites of self-denial. The notions that imprison them cannot sustain pretence for long. Eventually, they often cast aside fears of jannat se jala watni – banishment from Paradise – a deeply instilled concern in orthodox households.

Their journey out of environs that revel in women’s submission and deprivation is the primary focus of Wajida’s stories that go against the grain with protagonists who claim and indulge in the primal. She is startlingly clear in what she portrays – all that is a sin to others is salvation to her women.

In the 1950s, Wajida’s work was viewed as explosive, unorthodox and impure. From a respectable, conservative, but poor home, Wajida Tabassum, in her early twenties, was reviled for her non-conformist, semi-erotic work. Old-fashioned Hyderabad Deccan saw her as an impure menace, determined to shock, lead women astray and tarnish the family name. When her stories – which she used to post in letters to newspapers and various magazines – began appearing regularly, they were noticed by the people in her hometown of Amravati.* Her relatives came together to bar her from writing and her correspondence began to be severely monitored at home. Despite these excruciating circumstances, Wajida persevered, writing and posting stories to newspapers and magazines. However, when further confronted by her enraged family, fear forced her to renounce some of her work. This was the time when Jilani Bano, Krishan Chander, Ismat Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto were established giants of Urdu literature. It was ironic that Wajida’s relatives and distant kin who were familiar with the bold and unconventional writing of other women writers had a rabid view of her own work and used Ismat’s writing – despite her fame and stature – as a jibe to knock Wajida’s progress.

As the stories flowed to the masses, she faced death threats and mobs took to the streets to torch the offices of her publishers. In staunch resistance, even though by now she faced abject poverty, Wajida wrote and chronicled debauchery in aristocratic homes and took on middle-class taboos with astonishing nerve and in lyrical prose. Other than her popular short story ‘Utran’ (Hand Me Downs) that was made into a television soap, Wajida Tabassum’s body of work remains an untouched jewel of Urdu literature. This is therefore the first volume of translations of her writing into English, containing nineteen intrepid short stories. These stories seek to capture the entire range of the realities of middle-class compulsions and the depravities indulged in by the social elite.

The four sections in this volume deal with dark, debauched and tragic aspects of life and are structured on the theme of the ‘deadly sins’, namely lust, pride, greed and envy. Sensually treated accounts of jealousy, desire, injustice and suppression, they signal a theatre of discontent with clever charades of symbolism. Wajida captures the power of the subliminal and the subconscious with precision and subtlety. Themes of impotence, powerplay, betrayal and abandonment run through most of the stories. They almost serve as quiet metaphors for the downfall of the nobility.

The story of her life in her own words, ‘Meri Kahaani’, written when she was twenty-four, forms the centre of this volume. It provides insight into her work and is an exquisite testament of a bold and original writer.

Stories such as ‘Hor Upar!’ came under heavy fire from critics for the unapologetic depiction of a Begum’s revolt against her husband’s drunken sexual escapades with maids in the palace. Spurned and lustful, she appoints a young boy to massage her. Her gharara, a garment stitched between the thighs, is soon replaced by a lehenga, a long skirt, a signal for him to move upwards, past her knees. The scene in which his hands gradually ascend, causing a slow rise to the crescendo, bears a subtle resemblance to one in Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf. The Begum’s refusal to acknowledge any threat of censure forms the rest of the story.

In her stories, Wajida Tabassum employs nuance to a limited degree – just enough to create an explosion. ‘Tauba Tauba’ is a tale built around an expression of coyness and purity as its title suggests. The writer takes an atypical view of its perception and impact, and we see the two-word expression eat away at the virility of the protagonist from his childhood. His first arousal was sudden as a little boy. The story is spun around a cold marriage and the boy’s guilt and inner conflict, increasing as he grows older. In its climax, Wajida uses notes of smell, sweat, a worn-out sari and a broom as subliminal clues to identify the void in him. She defines it as his quest for rawness and an escape from the net of ‘Tauba Tauba’.

Despite all the social chains, Wajida surprises her readers with her own fearlessness. She navigates the darker, seamy alleys of her imagination and craft with tales such as ‘Rozi ka Sawaal’, ‘Chhinaal’ and ‘Ladki Bazaar’.

‘Chhinaal’ and ‘Ladki Bazaar’ are forceful indictments of societal excesses towards women, whereas ‘Rozi ka Sawaal’ is as visceral as it is desperate in the squalor of an indigent sex district. However, its women cling to their individuality and their dreams. Shalu, a feisty character in the story, and a personal favourite, is a girl who fights to woo her customers in the hope of acquiring a home of her own. Her character is perfumed with an innocence amid the perilous circuit of her world. The untarnished purity of her fantasy is evident in her fresh and unjaded voice. Even the tricks she turns are not more than little white lies.

The destiny of age-old symbols of patriarchal sway - in this instance a nose ring - changes hands with immaculate pluck in ‘Nath ka Ghuroor’. Young Sharafat Dulhan is encumbered with an ill-tempered, cold and impotent Nawab Wajahat. Born into a religious family, she has been raised only to surrender. A docile girl’s transformation into a woman in command and completely cognisant of her physical needs as well as her status, the story navigates alarming twists and aspects of misogyny perpetrated by older women on their younger counterparts. Deliciously scandalous events create a new woman who seals her place and power in the royal clan. She also trades the husband’s defeat with her emancipation from celibacy and childlessness.

‘Lungi Kurta’ is another deft metaphor for cold wrath and revenge. The tale is wrapped around garments. A new, happy bride who finds herself caught amid and then betrayed by a mere exchange of clothes makes her own, lethal move.

Perhaps the most tragic story in this collection is ‘Kaalay Baadal’. For most, it will be interpreted as a couple’s greed for more money. For me, the adamant possessiveness cast in the wife’s deep, consuming love for her husband manifests in the tragic fate of their child.

Sin, like people, has shades and facets. ‘Faakhta’ is an aspect in the psychology of greed that is not acquisitive but aspirational. It is a simple sense of longing. Psychologists call it a ‘greed for love’, seen as the mere presence of the object of love in the beholder’s mind. Maina, a free-spirited, self-assured young girl with little regard for convention and societal sanction, is the axis of the story. She disregards the context of the man she eyes and his benign association with her. A woman’s defiant gaze of attachment and the social boundaries she pushes for it guide the story.

Similarly, ‘Dhanak ke Rang Nahin’ depicts the many forces of envy. The story became immensely popular at the time of its publication. The undercurrents and strains of relationships, the familiar ordinariness of the central male lead and his bonds with the people around him possibly resonated strongly among readers as vital dynamics in the experience of their lives.

In much the same way, the unmistakable realism of ‘Talaq, Talaq, Talaq’ and its resonance with developments around the issue of women’s rights in present-day South Asia suggests that the world hasn’t changed all that much since it was written.

Most of Wajida Tabassum’s women belong to or are located in conservative, demanding households. Wajida sets them free to feast on their desires and emotions. Her language is fine-drawn - the artistry with which she weaves the layers of denied, smothered feelings is as forceful as the ultimate implosion, usually one of shattering voltage. The stories are landscapes of shifting passions and, in the end, the triumph of the self.

The idea to translate Wajida’s work into English came from my desire to reach to a wider audience the voices of Wajida’s women, their silent despair and their eventual detonation. Like Wajida, her women are rebels who liberate themselves. Unafraid of judgement, opinion and even desertion, they chase their freedom with a stubborn passion.

I selected these stories* because they, like a deep, profound alto, struck the gut and reverberated in the heart. As women who have been conditioned to be stoic and accepting on the most part, we are on a perpetual quest to find our voice and the courage to express what we really feel. In my journey as a journalist, I have come across many women confined by the same strife and limits as Wajida – bereft of a mission or ambition, they exist in the haze of misery, numb and silent. Wajida’s furious persistence in the pursuit of equality for the women in her stories connects with stunning precision to the dilemmas that confront women in modern times. Challenging patriarchal power structures to find a definitive balance can only emerge from similar conviction and grit.

However, this translation is also a labour of love. Wajida spoke not just to a small voice in me but also to the context of most women, privileged or not. It was challenging, as one had to be true to her emotions, those of the characters and their stories. In doing so, I have adapted the elaborate descriptive aspects of the stories so that the force of their rendition remains undiluted for readers in English. The hope is that, through this translation (and hopefully more to come), Wajida Tabassum and her oeuvre will find space in mainstream culture as a powerful commentary on socio-political predicaments in the times that we live in and serve the cause of gender justice with the vigour of a cannonball, so that the shells that imprison women may be cracked wide open.

Reema Abbasi

Karachi, 2021

1



Chhinaal

Fallen Venus

Sabir, the spoilt scion of a wealthy family, first saw her at a friend’s wedding. Agra’s Gauhar Jaan was to perform the mujra, a common rite of celebration and a testimony to grandeur in stately homes. The poetic bows, tinkling of anklets, twirls against golden drapes were seals of splendour.

For days on end, a battle raged in his mind. ‘How can I lose my heart to a nautch girl who serves hearts and bodies? How?’

‘This Agra girl, my God, she has my heart in a knot,’ he would say to his friend Anwer over and over again.

Finally, Anwer took him for a round of the brothel. A perfect setting where literary descriptions of nautch abodes came alive – a madame, a tutor, musicians, seated on ivory sheets, against plush, velvet bolsters.

Gauhar Jaan, a vision, of exquisiteness and conceit, knew the art of seduction. She teasingly slipped out of his gaze and walked over to the jeweller waiting with all his gems on exhibit. She picked up pieces with disdain and put them aside as if they were acerbic fruit, until her interest lingered on a ring.

‘Dear, I have had it with your whining for a ring. Do you like this one? Take it,’ said the madame, Baiji, giving her prized patron Akbar Seth an indulgent glance.

‘Take it. Only diamonds for these fingers,’ Seth encouraged.

‘I am not so worthy,’ sighed Jaan with rehearsed innocence.

‘My dear, a thousand rupees are mere pittance compared to. . .