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sibgakhan · #4 Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Aag Ka Duriya (River of Fire),(1959) - Qurratul Ain Hyder

Aag Ka Duriya (River of Fire), her magnum opus, is a landmark novel that explores the vast sweep of time and history. It tells a story that moves from the fourth century BC to the post-Independence period in India and Pakistan, pausing at the many crucial epochs of history. Aamer Hussein in The Times Literary Supplement wrote that River of Fire is to Urdu fiction what One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Hispanic literature.However, Aag Ka Darya is a novel written from the point of view of those Muslims who lacked faith in the democratic temperament of Indian society and migrated, her own family being one of them. Thus Aag Ka Darya missed the strong and deeply rooted mainstream India Muslims line of thought by which the non-migrant Indian Muslims confidently decided to remain a part of Indian society - the line of thought that had developed from the time of Ameer Khusro and continued to be the central idea of Indian society during Mughal period and culminated in the thoughts of personalities like Darashikoh to APJ Abdul Kalam and the novel broadly portrayed those Indian Muslims who inherited the psyche of Aurangzeb regime - this is reflected in her sentences in Aag Ka Darya like 'Indian Muslim lived in India but his heart remained in Hejaz' failing to appreciate that Pakistan was only the idea of those Muslims who wanted a Muslim majority state - this section represented by the character of Kamaluddin. But for this superficial and erroneous understanding of the history of Indian thought and her limited vision the attempt was artistically praiseworthy ,and it opened a window to the Indian history in the writing of fiction and became very popular among the migrants whose dilemma it depicted. Thus it is essentially a novel written from the point of view of the believers of Pakistan and depicts their agony in detail, specially towards the climax of the novel. But for this shortcoming Aag Ka Darya would have been an extraordinary novel. However, after Mirza Hadi Ruswa and Premchand she is most well known novelist of Urdu language.

It is believed that due to her high stature in social circles no criticism about her vision emerged although she was not infallible.Eminent Urdu novelist Paigham Afaqui has pointed out in his well appreciated article 'Aag Ka Darya - chand sawalat' that because she wrote Aag Ka Darya at an early age and because she was encircled by those who did not stay back in India at the time of partition she could not appreciate the point of view of those who did not migrate - and her observation in the novel depict picture of Indian Muslims in a wrong way and thus her criticism of Indian Muslims requires review. After this article of Paigham Afaqui, she indeed reviewed such content and deleted in the English translation of the novel.