Street Singers of Lucknow and Other stories

by Qurratulain Hyder

With Introduction by Aamer Hussain. Translated by author herself.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, India

228 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Qurratulain Hyder was an influential Indian Urdu novelist and short story writer, an academic, and a journalist. One of the most outstanding literary names in Urdu literature, she is best known for her magnum opus, Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), a novel first published in Urdu in 1959 from Lahore, Pakistan, that stretches from the 4th century BC to post partition of India. Popularly known as "Ainee Apa" among her friends and admirers, she was the daughter of writer and a pioneer of Urdu short story writing Sajjad Haidar Yildarim (1880–1943). Her mother, Nazar Zahra, who wrote at first as Bint-i-Nazrul Baqar and later as Nazar Sajjad Hyder (1894–1967), was also a novelist and protegee of Muhammadi Begam and her husband Syed Mumtaz Ali, who published her first novel.

She received the 1967 Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu for Patjhar Ki Awaz (Short stories), 1989 Jnanpith Award for Akhir-e-Shab Ke Humsafar, and the highest award of the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 1994. She also received the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 2005.

Reviews

[Ghufran]

Casually purchased two books in World Book Fair, Pragati Maidan. One was titled 'Representative Stories of Qurratulain Hyder' and other was 'Ek Ladki Ki Zindagi'. So much impressed with her writing. Gonna find 'Aag Ka Dariya' and finish it soon.

[Khyati]

I will be grateful to the city of Lucknow for introducing me to the works of Qurratulain Hyder. My first read of the author was My Temples, Too and there’s no looking back. Her writing is magical and so is her command on delivering multiple voices narrative.

These stories have a common theme of partition, describing the painful struggle of protagonists with fragmented chronologies.

Each story provides a historical sketch of the place it is set in; be it the ancient town of Kerala, hill station of Sylhet (Bangladesh), artistic Lucknow or newly formed Karachi. With this authentic background, she depicts the life of liberal and privileged Muslims of pre-partition era and this is what is truly magical. She transports the reader to a golden era of feudal Muslim respectability; a rare oddity of those days.

Another aspect of her writing is irrelevance of longevity. In “Beyond the Speed of Light” and “Confessions of Saint Flora of Georgia” the author deftly experiments with time travel and magical realism. No where I was confused regarding the ongoing; rather it was amusing to read about a scientist time travelling back and forth to ancient Egypt during war with Israel and skeletons of two priests travelling whole of France to attend a magnificent dinner.

In the title story and The Missing Photograph, the struggle of art lovers is heartbreaking. I loved the cinematic portrayal of the characters and the social satire and melodrama these stories offered.

Qurratulain Hyder was a gem; her writing is culturally rooted and provides a rich historical context. These 9 short stories are just a glimpse of her prowess as a writer and translator; the real treasure is her novels.

[Poonam]

I loved these three stories - Street Singers of Lucknow, The story of Catherine Bolton, Honour. They both trace the rise and fall (mostly fall) trajectory of people in pre-Independence and Independence days. A Night on Pali Hill, a mild horror story, and Beyond the speed of light were good diversions.

Even though I read it in English and not original language, I was happy to have read it.

P.S: There was a literal translation of 'godhuli bela' as 'cowdust hour' - is this correct?

[Shabnam]

For a translation I felt every word - I could almost hear the author's voice narrating it to me in Urdu as I read each story under the dull morning skies in Hyderabad.
There is a thread of pain that stretches across all the stories in this anthology, unrequited love, injustice in desi society, deep veins of misogyny. What ties this thread together is the beauty with which these stories are described, the references to the same-old and the brand-new, both striking deep in each story.
Or maybe I'm just too drunk typing this.

[Sonali]

“The European tourist arrived. Probably he was a documentary filmmaker or an anthropologist or a journalist looking for Communist guerillas in the bush. One can never know what drives people to come to strange, faraway places. What do they find? What happens to them when they get back or return? Whatever becomes of them all over the world? What is happening to people all over the world?”
— Qurratulain Hyder

Such an immense joy to discover Hyder’s work, even if it’s beyond my reach in the original Urdu. I loved these stories, with their subtle nostalgia, political satire and reflections on the arbitrariness of life, the fading away of fortunes and continued oppression of the poor after the Partition. It also surprised me how many genres she experimented with - ranging from the spooky to the autobiographical and science fiction.