Brief thoughts on Ismat Chugtai’s Tiny’s Granny and Qurattulain Hyder’s My Aunt Gracie
Two writers who really impressed me recently are Ismat Chugtai and Qurratulain Hyder. I am referring to their stories, Tiny’s Granny and My Aunt Gracie. I am not exactly talking of their style of writing which is extremely cluttered as mine is sparer and functional. Not that I don’t enjoy how they pile on detail after detail. I do but it is just not my kind of writing as I grew up on Beckett in his seeming lack of plenitude and Joyce who is more careful even in his richness. These two just write pell-mell and haphazardly but they too know where they are going. What appealed to me most was their ability to rejuvenate me regarding the picture they painted of India, and secondarily Pakistan.
From the time I was a child and grew up in Thiruvananthapuram, where I spent most of life, I was aware that there are many Indias to be narrated and not just the majoritarian one dished out to me in textbooks that seemed to leave me out in the cold as there was a conflict of interest between the inside and outside worlds, in me, but my way out was to escape into an imaginary Western world conjured up for me by books. But at the back of my mind was this problem of how to deal with this world in which I actually live and these two writers have shown that unlike me they had the gumption to catch the bull by the horns instead of sitting and trying to write pale imitation Enid Blyton stories and novellas. They dealt with their India instead of the literary India of the majority, one which belonged to Nehru, MK Gandhi, Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Toru Dutt, Aurobindo, Vivekananda etc.
But there are other streams and tributaries too that make up the ocean that is India. There are the successors of writers like Ambedkar who include Daya Pawar, for example. This also includes Periyar, Ayyankali, Poykayil Yohannan and more recently people like Yogesh Maitreya.
There are writers like Basharat Peer.
But none of them solve my issue of finding forebears or ancestors for my experiences. I don’t find them in writers like Raja Rao or R K Narayan or Ruskin Bond or Mulk Raj Anand anymore. In fact, I don’t find ancestors. They are probably there in regional literature and it is my ignorance but this ignorance can be turned to my advantage by creating a fictional world that is true to my experience. The problem is that I am more a metafictional writer, literally, and can write something like this saying I want to write about it, than something that actually portrays that world, and this is what holds me back and not not finding my predecessors.
This is where as a parallel these two writers helped me in their verisimilitude to their India which, as I am a kind of half-baked deconstructionist, interested me precisely due to what it does not contain or include. In brief, they concentrate so much on what mattered, obviously, intensely, to them, that they erase or marginalize or silence exactly the opposite of those things the majoritarian writers had erased and marginalized and silenced, of theirs (Ismat’s and Qurratulain’s), in their so-called masterpieces, which apposite attempt comes across not as any conscious act of revenge but as something natural and spontaneous which is why it succeeds so beautifully.
My Aunt Gracie deals with Mumbai and Lahore, and class and gender, as well as Muslim and Christian worlds. There is also UK, Goa, Pune, Lucknow, and the theme of an interfaith marriage, dealt with with beautiful sensitivity. The settings themselves fascinate as they are familiar yet suggest a different cartography and topography. An example is the vital appearance of the church in Thane at the end where the protagonist searches for the nanny of her focusing who has turned into her aunt (hence the title My Aunt Gracie) by circumstances of history larger than the lives of individuals and the polyglot nature of the text.
In Tiny’s Granny, the theme of the sorrows of old age if extremely poor and of the rape of a minor apart, again the ending with its fairy tale reward to the old woman, and slight touch of magical realism, and also the whole fabulist style in some parts with the atmosphere which cannot be recognized by the author — or can it? — of a ghetto is what fascinates. In a Beyonce video I watched there were only ‘blacks’, presumably all ‘African Americans’, whether done consciously or not, and in this there are only ‘Muslims’. This strikes me, may not others, forcefully, as an example of a peculiar kind of realism, that the world she grew up in (Ismat) as a child probably only contained them and that is why she writes so fluently of them. Take the passage where the things contained in Tiny’s Granny’s pillow is described. There is an excess that is clearly not realistic as no pillow can hide so many things — or can it? — but it is the miniature world portrayed there of the mohalla that is intriguing. And it is this mohalla, one we would call in my world an area or quarter, that holds my interest the most of which a kind of parallel, similar and dissimilar, familiar and defamiliarized hence unfamiliar, making strange and making the strange within comprehension, that has to be created by me afresh if I want to be a good fiction writer.
