Saturday, July 2, 2011

Qurratulain Hyder

The cover, badly reproduced Education Book Company, of original Urdu novel called Co-Travelers of the End of Night (Aakhir-e-Shab Ke Hum Safar) has the signature Hyder. She painted herself. May be she was great painter, may be not but the cover looks as professional they used to be. Or as they are. This is only a tidbit from her creativity.

Today's Urdu daily Roznama Rashtriya Sahara has a full page article on Qurratulain Hyder by Farooq Argali in his series on Pride of Women (Fakhr-e-Khawateen). The front page anchor for the article created a flutter-will the author be able to do justice to Anny Apa-that was her nick name. Or Annie-as they would call her in the English journalism circles. Somebody reminded her that Annie is an anagram of inane-they sole cross-word puzzles, these English journalists, when they are not bringing the governments down. But Anny Apa was anything but inane.

Your poor Alig did not get a an opportunity to say salaam to her but it was known that she was not an easy person to get along with. That is just as well. The reason is that the amount of research and physical work that went into creating her work was stupendous. It can give inferiority complex to a main stream research worker in history and archeology.

So coming back to the article under consideration-the author proved the suspicion to be wrong in the middle of the first paragraph. Here are his words:
Here a unique professional Muslim women was born who with her extra ordinary intelligence, knowledge and creativity divulged, in her novel and story writing, such a wide ranging historical, social and political understanding and understanding of human awareness and insight that in the subcontinent no other community could produce a person like her.
(To be finished.)