Joginder Paul refuses to age as a writer. The luminosity of his mind and the richness of his imagination has been enriching Urdu fiction for more than 50 years. And it could be said without any fear of contradiction that no other fiction writer of our times has written so innovatively and out of the depths of his being as Joginder has done. Born in Sialkot (Pakistan) on September 05, 1925, it is a pity that the Muslim friends of his family had to persuade his elders to leave their land of birth in 1947 to save their lives from the communal riots preceding and following the partition.
The freedom brought in its wake unparalleled killings apart from forcing some 150 million people to leave their hearths and homes from one side to the other. Joginder Paul's family found itself in Ambala.
The carnage and unparalleled exodus of 1947 still shames all who pride on the sub-continental civilisation. In a land where even hattiya (killing) of snakes and insects is not permissible by the majority of its inhabitants, the human life became so easily dispensable overnight. The very thought of this 'madness' benumbs me.
Joginder Paul is a writer who has felt this massive dislocation and disorientation in the lives of the migrants in his writings. He has taken human tragedy as an indivisible episode warranting no squaring off the onus of madness between the two communities whose rioters went berserk all of a sudden and relapsed into primitive free-for-all.
Joginder Paul is going to be 80 on September 5. He was only 22 on the eve of freedom. After living a hard life in Ambala he went to Kenya where he served in the Ministry of Education for 14 years.
After his return to India in 1964, he joined S.B. College in Aurangabad as Head of the Department of English. A year later, he was appointed principal of the same college. He resigned in 1978 and moved with his family to Delhi where he could devote more time to his writing.
Joginder Paul has to his credit three novels, many short stories and 'short short' stories. It is a genre which he has enriched more than anyone since Hyder Baksh Hyderi's Tota Kahani in the first decade of the 19th century.
Recently his novel 'Par Pare' has been widely acclaimed as a novel on a theme which no Urdu writer even cared to look at. Set against the backdrop of Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a place known as Kala Pani, where criminals and rebels of the British Raj were made to reside as a form of punishment, the story finds this place free from any hangover of communal consciousness and tensions. He pulls off a beautiful novel out of this milieu.
Maulana Fazl-i-Haq Khairabadi, author of Baghi Hindustan and Maulana Jafar Thanesri, along with scores of leaders and scholars have made this Island famous. Joginder Paul went to Andaman Islands only to see the lives of the descendants of this population of 'unwanted' convicts and tried to feel the atmosphere of the place and the life of the off-springs of the 'cast aside' convicts. It appeared to him incredibly saner and humane.
Joginder Paul has successfully developed a habitat for his characters who are not conscious of what they look like. They are proud of their humanness and living as if nothing happened to their ancestors except that they made their off-springs a little wiser than the average mass of the mainland population.
A MASTER CRAFTSMAN: Joginder Paul is a master craftsman. Even though he has once served as President of the All India Progressive Writers Association (Urdu), he doesn't take sides on behalf of those who have nothing but mediocrity in their works inspite of their progressive leanings. He is for the primacy of Artistic Canons and experiential integrity in whatever one writes.
Joginder Paul thinks that a writer's ideological position doesn't necessarily make his writings worthwhile but it is the ability of the writer to make his/her work an effective transmitter of the values he/she believes in. And the more a writer uses his craft effectively, the more it is likely that the work of all could be satisfying.
Joginder Paul's novel Khwab Rau (Sleep Walkers) is perhaps one of the best novels on the partition. He discusses the scars of partition in Karachi's Mohajir community and discovers Moulvi Deewane Sahab - now a resident of Karachi, travelling without any visa to his home town, Lucknow, at will, as a sleep-walker. He sees during this sleep-walking that every street and square of his town, Lucknow, is peopled by all those who were once alive - or by the ones who have migrated - enjoying the same pre-partition hustle and bustle in the bazaars. It is the same pre-partition life he had left behind.
Moulvi Sahab returns from his nostalgic journeys to Karachi when he is awake. Aptly titled 'Sleep Walkers' and published by Katha Perspectives, new Delhi, Joginder's craft is at its best in this work. Its English translation has been done by Sunil Trivedi and Sukrita Paul Kumar.
This is an essential reading for anyone who would like to see the difference a creative writer could make to a theme attempted by many writers. The book has introductory articles by Dr Wazir Agha and Dr Qamar Rais. They have done full justice to Joginder Paul's important work.
SHORT STORIES: Now, I should discuss another book which comprises English translations of Joginder Paul's stories entitled "Stories of Joginder Paul", published by National Book Trust, India in 2003 and translated by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Naghma Zafar.
Comprising 17 short stories entitled The Demon, Dera Baba Nanak, Back Lane, Green House, Ambush, Khodu Baba Ka Maqbara, Without Graves, Harambe, Doves, The Spell, Looking Back, Dadiyan, The Migrant, The Dying Sun, Eighteen Adhyaye, Stink and A Flock Bird. They are possibly the most representative selection of Joginder Paul's life-long odyssey of story-telling.
The readers are enthralled by the beautiful translation of Sukrita Paul Kumar, who is right when she says that she had the "confidence of knowing them (The Stories) inside out".
Sukrita Paul Kumar is herself a poet and painter. She is a Ph.D. in English Literature and Joginder Paul has every reason to be happy to have Sukrita as his intellectual descendant. She is a marvellous lady. She has done a lot to render her father's representative fiction into English.
Her mother, Krishna Paul, also an English teacher, has rendered Joginder Paul's almost all stories into Hindi. Joginder Paul should be proud of the fact that no other Urdu short story writer has been blessed with such a mother-daughter team and it is this team which has made Joginder Paul one of the most translated Urdu short story writers of our times. It has been translated in almost all Indian languages besides Russian, Norwegian, Italian, Danish and Czech.
Dr Qamar Rais well-known Indian critic, has aptly written about Joginder Paul's art: "Each new work by Joginder Paul, be it a novel or a short story, is a new incident, the expression of a fresh experience.
Common to all his writing are the feelings of love and compassion for all people, a comprehensive insight into contemporary issues as well as a grave concern for the sufferings of masses. Joginder Paul easily perceives, explores and comprehends far-reaching cultural and psychological truths in the everyday, ordinary events of life".
I would like to add one further observation to Dr Qamar Rais's summing up: "Joginder doesn't let any viewpoint emboss itself on his stories. The milk of human kindness flows so spontaneously from his characters that one could possibly concede that Joginder's restructuring, of reality is so organic as to sound dramatically natural. That's why he is fiction writers' fiction writer. A marvellous person who ensures his presence his stories to prove some of the post-modernist postulates true."
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