A Promised Land by Khadija Mastur| #WomenInTranslationMonth Special

Let’s continue with the celebrations of WomenInTranslation Month! Here is another great recommendation of a work written in Urdu and translated to English!  

A Promised Land by Khadija Mastur is translated from Urdu to English by Daisy Rockwell.

Srilal Shukla in his Hindi novel, Raag Darbari, satirically took on the might of the post-Independence Indian bureaucracy and its circular, never-ending red tape. A Promised Land is not satirical but an incisive, feminist critique of Pakistan after Partition. The novel proffers a critical look at Pakistan post-Independence and how the hopeful visions for the country’s future and betterment crumbled. They were overshadowed by a corrupt bureaucracy.

It begins with the Partition’s aftermath, in the Walton Refugee Camp. This is where the novel, Aangan or The Women’s Courtyard ended with the protagonist Aliya working in the very same refugee camp. But this story is not about Aliya. It is about Sajidah. She lives in that camp with her father.

Like Aliya, Sajidah also believes in drawing her fate. In the earlier part of the novel, Sajidah remembers a folktale her mother used to narrate to her in which the youngest daughter of a king refuses to admit that the King decides her fate. She asserts that she is capable of making her fate. Sajidah identifies with this youngest daughter.

Although she wants to do just that, she is aware of the fate of single women in her society. Sajidah wants to break free from those constraints but she knows that for her survival, she needs to belong to a family; to a husband.

Talking Of Muskaan by Himanjali Sankar

6th September is when 2 years ago in 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled on Section 377 and decriminalised homosexuality.

Hence, today’s book review is about the YA novel, Talking of Muskaan.

It is insightful YA novel that explores the issue of bullying and homosexuality in high school. In doing so, it also speaks about class, an entitlement that comes with class, the need for better support systems for students to understand and gauge their identities.

The events around the death of a young and successful actor in the past months have brought to the limelight the stigma around mental health. It is important to start conversations around this to understand each other’s well-being. It is also imperative to acknowledge how society’s own rigid ideas around class, caste, gender and success can mar an individual’s mental state. To begin a conversation, we should also work toward creating equal spaces for everyone.

The novel begins with Muskaan’s best friends Aaliya, Rashika, Srinjini, Divya and Subhojoy being summoned by their school Principal. They are informed that Muskaan had attempted suicide and was hospitalized. The Principal tries to understand through them, about what could have been troubling Muskaan.

The story then reels back to five months earlier to flesh out the characters of Aaliya, Subhojoy and Prateek, along with unfolding the events that led to Muskaan’s suicide attempt. The rest of the novel is only seen through these three characters. The reader does not hear Muskaan’s viewpoint. The reader only hears about Muskaan and her thoughts through these characters. Aaliya and Muskaan are good friends. Prateek is a rich kid with a rich father who liked Muskaan but she rejected him. Prateek later gets put off by her quiet nature.

The Space Between Us

Paradoxes and contradictions are a part and parcel of this ever-on-the-move,pseudo-dreamlike city called Bombay rechristened to Mumbai. And one of the large and growing paradoxes of the city is the way in which the woman of the middle class comes into close contact with the woman of the low class vis-a-vis the great necessity of the elite/middle class called the servant. This necessity though great is hardly ever really talked about except in slandering the people who fulfil that necessity or when they put forward their demands regularly which are dismissed on an equally regular basis.

Taken from: http://lmtribune.com/blogs/cultured/article_e6277e92-40a9-11e1-817f-001a4bcf6878.html

The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar explores this very paradox which is ubiquitous but never acknowledged. Quite a paradox within a paradox, eh? So what exactly is this paradox? To state it clearly, the rising middle class or those well established ones always hire a maid/servant (full time or part-time) to do the many chores while they are busy hurrying to offices or catching up on other important tasks like catching up on the latest conniving traps of the new saas (mother-in-law) on the block or going golfing/kitty parties and other some such silly stuff. So while the middle class will never otherwise really come in contact with the low class thanks to the rise of gated communities which makes sure that the ugly side of any place let alone a city is never revealed and is conveniently obliterated in the mind, they come in contact with them through the maids who become (usually of the women thanks to the never changing stereotypes of the roles of men and women!) great companions and friends sharing their lives and worlds which in any other situation would be unthinkable.

The novel elaborates quite evocatively on such a scenario with a touching prologue that captures so vividly the mental state of any city dweller at some point or the other: the need to just run away from all your problems, hoping that the city disappears and while you sit at the sea, hoping it will wash away your sorrows/frustrations etc. The story charts out the individual lives of two women who are world apart: Sera, a rich Parsi women who has had her own share of unhappiness in her married life and Bhima, the maid who works in her house and whose world is falling apart constantly even as she perpetually struggles hard to keep it all together. The story opens with Bhima’s granddaughter, Maya, getting pregnant- from a man whose identity is revealed at the end-which again though temporarily shatters Bhima’s world and all her hopes for Maya and her education which she thought of as her ticket out of the vicious hell of being a maid. Sera and Bhima share a fragile, precarious camaraderie which cuts across class and the usual stereotypes about how a relationship should be between a master and servant. Both have been there for each other in times of need-Bhima when Sera had to heal from her husband’s abuses and Sera when Bhima needed her while her husband was in hospital and other cases. Though they share a a good womanly friendship which is also seen in Sera’s daughter-Dinaz’s fondness for Bhima, the relationship is fraught with the several hesitations and doubts and stereotypes too.

The story weaves its way through Maya’s pregnancy while constantly going into flashbacks into Sera’s and Bhima’s life which work as good reminisces and a way to show how their lives merged and then into the present which stands like it always does with a lot of uncertainty while also being happy in its own small ways and then into the end which reveals the father quite un-dramatically like one of those mundane things you suddenly become aware of like how to chip vegetables or what exactly does a Bachelor’s degree mean or some such dross things that makes up what is called life. And then comes…oh wait…u need to find this on your own so go read it..

It is definitely worth a read as it is a poignant story because of its subject and the jarring clash of two worlds which brings fore jarringly the worlds we conveniently ignore-the struggles Bhima goes through just about everyday for basic necessities is something that would make us the people sitting cushioned in their AC rooms faint. The novel can be bogged down with over use of metaphors and similes but on the whole it is quite an engaging read.

The title, The Space Between Us, is quite appropriate as it questions the space that divide across class, shows how it can be reconciled or perhaps not. It challenges, questions, experiments with it, putting more questions forward but never answering any of them. That is for us to do.

A Dystopian Future

Written in 1949, Orwell’s last book, ‘1984‘ is a well known classic, featuring prominently in most, usually all 100-books-to read-lists. The novel is unquestionably Orwell’s masterpiece. A definite must read because of the brilliant ideas presented in the novel along with the lucid narrative and uncomplicated writing and plot.

Taken from themodernworld.com

‘1984‘ is set in well the year 1984 in London where the state brutally controls everything-from your relationships,language, thoughts and memories-literally everything! This bleak aspect is immediately impressed upon the reader when the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith is introduced. The government is the ubiquitous Party along with the founder, Big Brother, whose omnipresence is one of the tools with the Party to control the people through fear. Winston is a sort of a quiet rebel against the Party. He knows that the Party is controlling them and falsifying history yet he doesn’t know how to rise up against this subtle oppression and constant surveillance. His first step in a small rebellion is writing a diary, his second step is falling in love with a Party member, Julia-something which isn’t allowed. His last step of rebellion is meeting up with another Party member, O’Brien, who Winston thinks about rebelling too. What perhaps the readers think might actually become a one man showdown with the Party doesn’t come to pass as the Party with all its might suppresses Smith into complete submission and acceptance of its ideology.

A prominent dystopian novel, ‘1984‘ will shock us even today because those ideas of control and tweaking public opinion are relevant today too and are quite applicable in all forms of government till today. The ideas are unnerving and one shifts uneasily in one’s seat while reading the novel, but this does not take away from the fact that the ideology Orwell puts forward is bloody brilliant! Orwell was perhaps inspired by the totalitarian regimes of the 1940s’, the Stalin regime later on and even the British Labour Party’s policies during WWII. However, reading this novel as only an allegory of the Stalinist brutality or an anti-communist tirade or future-predicting sci-fi novel is a grave mistake. The reader must acknowledge that the ideas manifested are quite universal and relevant and that Orwell did not intend to solely malign Communism or predict the future but to provide its readers a sort of a warning about the direction the world societies were heading towards and therefore why it what important to not let such blatant control of humanity ever take place.Its so easy to say that ok, ‘Animal Farm’ was an allegory for the Russian Revolution, so ‘1984‘ is for Stalin but that is hardly the main purpose of the novel.

This marvellous novel of ideas is not a conventional one with a traditional plot, climax and perfect ending in place. It is a speculative novel wherein Orwell envisages the world of 1984 rather pessimistically, using his imagination to invent new technologies and languages. The whole novel more or less focuses on presenting an ideology and thus many dialogues are simply a way to exchange ideas of some ideology. This makes for a fascinating read and one just cannot resist when it comes to comparing Orwell’s fictional future with the real world as so many ideas are very much applicable even today.

No wonder this book figures in those silly 100-books-to-read lists!