Angaaray, which was banned in India for its bold attack on the hypocrisy of conservative Islam in 1932, has been translated into English for the first time. Snehal Shingavi tells Karan Bhardwaj how the explosive book revolutionised Urdu literature and gave birth to the Progressive Writers’ Association

First published in 1932, Angaaray, a slim volume of short stories created a firestorm of public outrage for its bold attack on the hypocrisy of conservative Islam and British colonialism. Inspired by the British modernists like Woolf and Joyce as well as the Indian Independence movement, the young writers who penned this collection — Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-uz-Zafar — were eager to revolutionise the Urdu literature. However, they invited the wrath of the establishment; the book was burned in protest and then banned by the British authorities. Nevertheless, Angaaray spawned a new generation of Urdu writers and led to the formation of the Progressive Writers’ Association, whose members included stalwarts like Chughtai, Manto, Premchand and Faiz. Decades later, the book has been translated into English (Penguin India) for the first time by Snehal Shingavi, an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. In this interview, he tells us more about the content and why it became a cult book.  

How did you come across AngaarayIJ

When I began my graduate research at UC Berkeley, the story of the origins of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association appeared in several articles. All of them made mention of the fact that the reason that they had all come together in the 1930s was a result of Angaaray and the book’s censorship by the British Government of India. But for all of this mention of Angaaray, I couldn’t find much writing about it while I was researching other writers who wrote in the same time period like Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, RK Narayan, Bhabhani Bhattacharya and others. This of course made me very interested.

In the mid1990s, two scholars (Khalid Alvi and Shabana Mahmud) both tracked down copies of Angaaray and published the original Urdu texts. I was lucky enough to find copies of both books during the course of my research and thought that it would be an important text to make available to others who wanted to read it.

How did you retain the essence of the text while translating it into EnglishIJ

I’ve translated the entire text of the original. I’ve also added some notations to explain things that might not be clear in English (for instance, the shifts between Qur’anic Arabic and Urdu in a few of the stories). The most important thing for me, though, was to preserve the feeling of the original text in modernised English.  And that’s harder to do when translating colloquial speech from Urdu to English, because there are certain things that don’t translate easily or well. So I could not simply translate sentence-by-sentence, but had to treat the paragraph as my unit of translation. It’s a process I call hydraulic translation, because what it meant was that a word here might be dropped and another word might be added later so that the overall feeling could be preserved and otherwise awkward sentences could appear smoother.

How do you find the textIJ Is it really explosiveIJ

I think that it is a historical document, so it’s hard sometimes for modern readers who have been exposed to a number of things that are more transgressive to be shocked in general. But there are still certain parts of it that are quite shocking. Sajjad Zaheer’s story, A Vision of Heaven, is semi-pornographic. Mahmud-uz-Zafar’s story Virility describes a man who smiles as his pregnant wife is dying. I think that the collection continues to be explosive.

Why did the British have to ban the bookIJ Why were they conforming to MuslimsIJ

The British had a number of strategies that they used to govern India, but the one they relied on most heavily was pitting different communities against one another. This was necessary for them since the British forces in India numbered about 1,00,000 while there were more than 250 million Indians. One of the easiest ways for them to do this was to create an impression that there were two distinct communities (Muslim and Hindu) with very different social and cultural outlooks that were supposed to be antagonistic to one another. In order to accomplish that feat of social engineering, they supported the most conservative elements in both Muslim and Hindu communities.

The book was critical of both conservative elements within the Muslim community as well as of the corrosive effects of British imperial rule in India. One of the stories, A Vision of Heaven, contains a scene about a Muslim cleric having an erotic dream about the afterlife and waking up while ejaculating on the Quran. So, it necessarily antagonised two powerful constituencies. What’s interesting about this is that the British used Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code to confiscate all of the copies of the book (except for a few which they saved in the British library). Section 295A criminalised speech which had the possibility of “outraging the religious feelings of any class …or (attempting) to insult the religion or religious beliefs of that class.” It’s a law that is still on the books in India and has been used, for instance, to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

What kind of impact it had thenIJ

The literary impact is hard to assess because of the British ban on the book, but it definitely had a social impact. There are a few references here and there to the excitement that people felt when they read it. It did, certainly, anger several orthodox Muslim readers who petitioned the British to have the book banned. At the same time it also emboldened Indian writers to challenge the policies of British colonialism. Writers from all over the country joined the All India Writers’ Association as a way to protest the British censorship policies. It was a group of writers who were committed to using art as a tool to help social change and justice come about, and in the heady days leading up to Independence, every young artist wanted to be a part of something like that. Through the 40s and 50s, though, it was probably the most important literary association in the region, and the most important and influential writers of the time were members.

What relevance does Angaaray hold in contemporary timesIJ

It’s important first of all for its literary experimentation. It was one of the first time that writers in Urdu were attempting things like free indirect discourse, stream-of-consciousness, unreliable narrators, rapid oscillations between the voices of different characters without the use of punctuation, and even montage. It showed that such kinds of experiments could be put to important uses in Urdu fiction as well. But it is even more important as a document of Muslim social history. One of the worst features of contemporary discourse globally is how narrowly Islam is understood, usually as a monolithic religion with very little internal democracy. What Angaaray shows is just how rich the debates were in Muslim circles about what had happened to the religion when it was in the exclusive hands of conservative forces, and how that affected all parts of Muslim society in north India. I think that the book is an important reminder of just how deeply and seriously Islam is felt, believed, and critiqued by its own practitioners.

Do you think the sensibilities of people have changed with timeIJ

Of course, but one should not be quick to say that things have uniformly improved. I think that we are shocked by different things now than readers were in the 1930s, but we are still capable of feeling shock.

How far do you think the works of Virginia Woolf and Joyce influenced the thinking and literature of the mutineers of colonised IndiaIJ

Influence is a hard thing to measure. Certainly, Ahmed Ali and Sajjad Zaheer were reading Woolf and Joyce, but these were not the only things that they were reading. Certainly they had read the British modernists, but they were also reading French writers in translation, Russians, as well as the Urdu classics. Ahmed Ali, for instance, had a deep knowledge of Urdu poetry. So while the influence of the British modernists is definitely palpable, it would be a mistake not to notice just how ecumenical they were in their reading.

What kind of impact it had on the literary movementsIJ How did it change the rules for the Urdu literatureIJ

Angaaray was the opening salvo in the conflict between Indian writers and the British colonial authorities. In this conflict, its importance cannot be understated. It convinced hundreds of writers that they could use their talents to strengthen the movements against colonialism, sexism and exploitation. But interestingly, the dominant mode of writing in Progressive Writers’ Association (both in India and later in Pakistan) was not modernism but social (and socialist) realism. It would take almost two more decades before modernist experimentation would become more prominent in both Hindi and Urdu literature. I can’t speak for the other languages.

What could you analyse about the personalities and political thinkings and leanings of these writersIJ

I’m impressed at their courage and in awe of their daring. They were incredible fighters. Rashid Jahan is by far the most courageous of them all. If you read the new biography of her that Rakhshanda Jalil has written you cannot help but be inspired by the depth of her commitment to justice. But they were all tireless advocates for women’s rights, workers’ rights, cultural freedom and social justice.  Some of them were communists. Ahmed Ali flirted with the idea but was never convinced.