[Reader-list] river of fire..transcreated

[Lehar ..]

On requests from many friends.. who believe as many of
us do, that this one book encompasses and reveals
India in its true ethos from Mauryan past to its
present post partition predicament, the story of the
reincarnation of its 3 main charecters.. Gautam,
Champa and HAri..from the fourth century B.C. to the
1940s

a kaleidiscope into India's soul..with little details
like the beerbahutis of Shravasti's buddhist gurukuls
and the Tantra- Sufi marriage in Bengal..and the the
use of the word 'abbe' being a term of the 'uncouth' 
turkish traders..!

River of Fire is to Indian fiction what A Hundred
Years of Solitude is to Hispanic literature.
Qurratulain Hyder has a place alongside her exact
contemporaries. Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, as one of the world's major living writers"--
The London Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis: 
This novel, set in India, spans the period from the
fourth century B.C. to the 1940s
http://www.kalibooks.com/titles/fiction/fict-title01.htm

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnInquiry.asp?srefer=&isbn=0811214184

An interesting review..A tribute to India's Sanjhi
VIrasat..for those who want an exicting and un
put-downable crash course into India's soul.. dont
miss this..

synopsis:

It was the season of beerbahutis and rainclouds,
sometime in the 4th century B.C. In a cool grotto,
Gautam Nilambar, a final year student of the Forest
University of Shravasti, chances upon Hari Shankar, a
princeling yearning to be a Buddhist monk. He falls in
love with the beautiful, sharp-witted Champak. And
thus begins a magnificent tale that flows through
Time, through Maghadan Patliputra, the Kingdom of
Oudh, the British Raj and into a Time of Independence.


This fiery river of time flows along the banks of
their lives in a continuum of history, keeping them
together, keeping them apart. The story comes full
circle in post-Partition India when the pro-tagonists
meet again and mourn the passing of their lives into
meaninglessness, of their friends who have left for
Pakistan and what remains of their country. 

I came away marveling at the novelist’s ability to
encompass, even in a brief excerpt, the great
historical narratives of our tradition: Buddhism,
Hinduism; the coming of Islam, the age of the great
Mughals, the arrival of the British, the 1857 War of
Independence, the two World Wars, the horror of
partition and so much that followed in the
post-Independence India and Pakistan

Set during four Indian epochs (the classical, the
medieval, the colonial, and the modern post-national),
the novel is a meditation on history and human nature,
tracing four souls through time. Each section is
linked by characters who bear, in every period, the
same names: Gautam, Champa, Kamal, and Cyril. Gautam
(appearing first as a student of mysticism at the
Forest University of Shravasti in the 4th century
B.C.E.) and Champa (throughout embodying the enigmatic
experience of Indian women) begin and end the novel;
Muslim Kamal appears mid-way through, as the Muslims
did, and loses himself in the Indian landscape; and
Cyril, the Englishman, appears later still

As the novel opens, we see Gautam Nilambar come out of
the Forest University of Shravasti in the Fourth
Century B.C. Very quickly Gautam emerges as the
central character. The young man’s artistic
sensibility is self-evident. He gathers friends and
lovers and admirers around him even as the
Chanakyanian political forces trap everyone, but
Gautam gets to be the last man standing, grieving for
the dead. Literally, this thread runs unruptured
throughout the novel, and the same story is repeated
with a different setting and different historical
context, not unlike a massive reincarnation story in
which all the characters come back to life eager to
start acting out the same drama from their previous
lives and previous chapters. I think of this bold plot
structure as the most remarkable achievement of this
novel, and for obvious reasons, the element of
fictional incarnations makes the novel uniquely
Indian.  

In the first episode, Gautam comes across two bathing
beauties in the river and he feels love for one of
them. Soon he meets Hari Shankar, a prince who yearns
to be a monk, but he appears masqueraded as a Yavana.
It was to avoid waging wars that Hari Shankar was now
taking up the saffron robe. 

Gautam, sophomoric philosopher, artist, lover of
beauty, is only too willing to take away Hari’s burden
and marry Champa. Next, we see Gautam at work in the
studio, trying to dance, to paint. His desire is to
create beauty and “to capture in clay and stone the
mystery of human form.” He names his creation
“Sudarshan Yakshini--Tree Spirit, Good to Behold”, but
his dreams for life and art are to be rudely
interrupted by an invasion of Shravasti by an upstart
named Chandragupta Maurya. As Gautam remains in denial
of the political forces that were about to wipe away
his beloved kingdom, he asks his artist friends: “Why
must they drag me into their conflict?” Gautam’s
question is in fact the central question of this
novel. “Why must they drag me into their conflict?”
Throughout the novel we will hear echoes of this
anguished cry of the innocent bystander, although in
later episodes few have the clear understanding to ask
the question. 

Many years after Chandragupta’s invasion, Gautam, his
fingers crushed in battle, no longer able to sculpt or
paint, becomes a wandering performer who curses all
those who makes swords and arrows. 

Once, during a performance Gautam and Champa meet. The
beauty who was the model and inspiration for his
“Sudarshan Yakshini” had become a matronly old
mistress of a minister after she was captured by the
invading army. Princess Nirmala also met with a
similar fate, but she became a Buddhist nun. If it
weren’t for the spiritual path he chose, Prince Hari
himself would not have died in peace as Brother Hari
Ananda of Jetvan Vihar. 

This beautifully written first episode ends when
Gautam swims across Saryu and in effect drowns. 
Truly, he becomes part of the great flux, emerging
down river, nearly two millennia later, in the name of
Syed Abdul Mansur Kamaluddin, a vilayati, a foreigner,
from Persia. Not unlike Gautam, Kamaluddin is a
thinker and a writer. The only difference is that he
doesn’t mess around with clay or stone. In fact, we
read a sizable chunk of his personal memoirs that
captures the nostalgic longing he was bringing with
him to India from the heart of the Islamic culture.
Kamaluddin finds employment and patronage and
affection from princess Bano and love from Champavati
who is fated to elude him.  About Champa, he writes in
his journal in a unique, highly cultured vilayati
perspective: 

These Hindu women have a charm of their own. They are
faithful, shy, docile. They worship their husbands as
demigods and touch their feet in obeisance every
morning. They put the man on a pedestal and sing songs
in his praise. That’s how it ought to be. We developed
this Cult of the Lady in Hispania and introduced the
concept of romance and chivalry into the rest of
Europe--gallant knights fighting in honor of their
ladies and young poets singing lutes on moonlit nights
while the lady sat on trellised balcony. Here the
roles are reversed--man is the beloved, the woman
pines for him and is forever waiting for him.” 

Against the backdrop of Kamaluddin’s Indianization,
the novelist cheerfully outlines the story of the rise
of various Islamic rulers, particularly of Sikander
Lodi whose rise to power in 1489 causes Kamaluddin’s
flight into a private life of loss and nostalgia,
triggering deep within him a new search for meaning,
an essential motif in the novel. He says, “I have seen
the passing of a great and liberal civilization in my
own lifetime, here in India.”  

In his private life, Kamaluddin marries a shudra woman
who is renamed Amina Bibi, and they live happily
bringing up their children until history catches up
with Kamaluddin in the year 1525 when Babur defeats
Ibrahim Lodi and establishes the Mughal Empire.
Inevitably, Kamaluddin gets caught in the crossfire of
this power struggle because his son happened to be
working as an architect for the Mughal. 

The story makes its final shift from the 19th to the
20th century rather too abruptly, and 
again, we see for the last time, a whole new
configuration of characters, as always united by
leftist politics, intellectual kinship, art, music,
poetry, theater, not to mention their fuedal or upper
class origins. Again, Gautam, Hari Shankar, Nirmala,
and Champa come together as friends at college. Also
on the scene are Kamal, Amir, Tehmina, and several
other young Muslims and Hindus.

As expected, once again, Champa emerges as a beautiful
young woman ahead of her times. Gradually, the
possibility of partition becomes obvious. The narrator
says, “There was yet another aspect of the new
nationalist movement that was making its presence
felt--some people had openly begun talking of Ancient
Hindu Culture and the Glory-that-was Islam. How was
Indian culture to be defined? Was it a ruse for Hindus
to enslave the Muslims? Could “real” Indians only be
Hindus? Were Muslims unholy intruders who should be
treated as such?”  

The fact that Kamal Reza, very likely a descendant of
Syed Abdul Mansur Kamaluddin of Persia and a shudra
woman, turns out to be the most emotionally Indian of
all characters makes the dilemma of Partition truly
complex. So is the bewilderment Gautam and Hari have
about the breakdown of their friendship with Kamal,
which embodies the cultural ambivalence prevalent in
the post-Partition subcontinent.  

At the very end, we are once again brought near
“Sudarshan Yakshini,” in the company of scholars from
Europe and America. Gautam and Hari are also reunited
after so many years of globe-trotting, but Kamal
passes up the chance to meet with them. All Gautam and
Hari can say about the rupture of such a great
friendship is this: “Kamal was oversensitive, an
incorrigible, fanatical idealist. He was let down by a
relentless world. Something within him has died..

embodying the dillemma of many post Independence
Indians..

contd on 

http://www.shelterbelt.com/RELIT/URDU/riverfire.html

And Amitava Kumar refers brilliantly to the book while
commenting on the failed Agra summit:

I want to conclude with a passage that I like very
much, in Quarratulain Hyder’s novel River of Fire. In
those pages, as in the rest of the book, a different
kind of complexity of culture is announced. This is a
long passage, but I think it deserves to be quoted it
in full: India was moving from crisis to crisis. As if
the Bengal famine were not enough, communal politics
had snowballed. One Sunday afternoon the students’
gathering was larger than usual. That day all the
newspapers had published Mr Jinnah’s two-nation theory
in detail. Kamal turned towards Champa. “I hear,
Champa Baji, that you have also become a follower of
Mr. Jinnah?” 

“No,” Champa replied coolly, “when I was a student in
Banaras, I heard of Vir Savarkar and Mr. Jinnah. I was
once told that I had no claim on Kashi because I did
not put the caste mark on my forehead and my mother
said her prayers to Allah in Arabic instead of
worshipping Lord Shiva. And therefore it followed that
my culture and my loyalties were different. I
countered by asking, ‘Have you read Ghalib’s Persian
Ode to Banaras?’ I was told that Persian was a foreign
language. This was very heart-breaking. So I could
have said to myself, why not Pakistan...? But I
didn’t. Frankly, I am quite confused by all this. “I
used to sing Jana Gana Mana under the tricolour at
Besant College, and I often felt that I was considered
an outsider under that flag.” 

“Have you ever realised,” Professor Banerjee mused as
he watched a little sparrow sitting on a branch of the
seemal, “that Hindu-Muslim riots were unknown before
the arrival of the English? There used to be big,
full-dress wars, but they were waged by rival
political powers who happened to be either Hindu or
Muslim. Of all the Mughal Emperors, Aurangzeb had the
largest number of Hindu generals in his army.” “Sir,
in my district the peasants still sing the ballad of
Rana Beni Madho Singh, who died fighting for his queen
and country. The queen in this case was Begum Hazrat
Mahal. As a child, I remember seeing his
great-grandson who came riding on an elephant from his
garhi to ours. He always spoke in dialect and was a
quaint relic of the past. Special food was cooked by a
Brahmin rasoia and he ate separately in our
mardan-khana. All that was a part of peaceful
co-existence,” Kamal said sombrely. Here in Hyder’s
prose, we get a history of mixing and mutual
engagement. This understanding escapes a cardboard
cutout sense of culture. I like the passage not only
for its passion, but also for its clarity: when we
reach the last line of the extract I have quoted here,
we are being informed not only of an existence that is
well-imbricated, but also shaded in with violence and
discrimination. 

I like the passage not only for its passion but also
for its clarity: when we reach the last line of the
extract I have quoted here, we are being informed not
only of an existence that is well-imbricated, but also
shaded in with violence and discrimination. If there
is a recognition here of the material history of the
British in India, there is also an honest and cutting
appraisal of our more homegrown injustices. 




------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- 
I have learned so much from God 
That I can no longer call myself a Christian, a Hindu,
a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew. 
The Truth has shared so much of Itself with me 
That I can no longer call myself a man, a woman, an
angel.. 
Love has befriended me. 
It has turned to ash and freed me 
Of every concept and image my mind has ever known. 
- Hafiz, Persian Sufi 
Organised religion is the prop of a man who has not
found his Self/ God within. 
- Shaheed Bhagat Singh 

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