A wary walk on a barbed footpath
These stories translated from the original Dakhni Urdu are an introduction to Wajida Tabassum’s body of work
Wajida Tabassum is barely known outside Urdu literary circles. Her bestknown short story Uttaran (Cast-Offs) — about the vindictive fury of unequal female friendships and the weaponisation of sex — has appeared in translation in English in several anthologies. It was made into a soap opera in 1988. And most famously, it was adapted by Mira Nair for the first half of her 1996 film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. The plot: Shahzadi Pasha and the daughter of her wet-nurse, Chamki, grow up together, exceedingly aware of the difference in their status. The spoilt Pasha revels in deriding the prettier Chamki, who is condemned to wear her hand-me-downs. The night before Pasha’s wedding, a resentful Chamki sleeps with the groom as payback. After the wedding, between peals of laughter, she tells Pasha, “All my life, I have lived with your cast-offs. Now you too will forever live with something I have used.”
Tabassum wrote explosive semi-erotic stories in Dakhani (best known as the Hyderabadi dialect of Urdu, although its variations are spoken across the Deccan states). The stories are set in the declining aristocratic world of Old Hyderabad or around middle-class morality in a society shifting after the annexation of the princely state. Tabassum’s women use sex and guile to navigate oppressive domestic spaces. They swear often and freely, their conversations are ribald; sex and desire plainly laid out.
Tabassum “is startlingly clear in what she portrays — all that is sin to others is salvation to her women,” writes Reema Abbasi, a Karachi-based journalist who has translated 19 of Tabassum’s stories and an essay for the first time in English — Sin is a collection of some of her boldest work.
Tabassum, one of the highest-paid writers of her time, began writing in the late 1950s and produced 27 books over three decades. As her stories “flowed to the masses, she faced death threats and mobs took to the streets to torch the offices of her publishers,” Abbasi writes.
In Hor Upar! (Up, Further Up!), my favourite story in the collection, a wife settles the score with her philandering husband by beating him at his own game. Pasha Dulhan simmers like an ember at her husband’s sexual liaisons with the maids and the flagrant display of his infidelity: “Every man strays but mine throws it in my face. He says, ‘Why ask if you know?’” Tired of fighting, she engages a young boy from the kitchens to massage her feet, egging him on to move up her legs until “there was no space left to go ‘up, further up’ anymore.”
This is a good translation. For the most part, Abbasi is able to capture the essence of the stories — especially their grand settings and emotional landscapes. Though the feverish urgency between the characters, here and elsewhere, is somewhat diluted, the stories retain mischievousness and are quite smutty even in translation. Not all the stories are sexual. Many take on different shapes of love — sweet, unconditional, co-dependent, self-sabotaging. Faakhta (The Dove) is a romantic story about a woman using domesticity to win over a man. Dhanak ke Rang Nahin (The Rainbow has No Colour) is about a single, middle-aged man and his encounter with love.
At the heart of Sin is Meri Kahaani (My Story), an essay Tabassum wrote at 24, four years into her writing career, in 1959. It’s a portrait of the writer
Sin
Wajida Tabassum; translated by Reema Abbasi 240pp, ₹499; Hachette India as a self-assured young woman and, I think, requisite reading for writers in general. Deftly she delineates the beginnings of her life and love for fiction (“People called me a witch and a black cat, which sank my sense of self” and so, growing up, books became “a refuge and my friends”). She also defends her work, comments on her peers, articulates the fear of insignificance and reveals her dreams.
Tabassum found success quite early. Her stories were widely published in Shama, the popular Urdu film and literary magazine. In the post-Partition years, many women writers, including Tabassum, were influenced by Ismat Chughtai’s portrayal of middleclass women in domestic spaces. Chughtai had been bold, Tabassum was brazen. Although she lived in purdah for many years, she did not skirt around the sexual excesses, escapades and exploitation of her characters.
Tabassum claimed that she wrote what she saw, that her work was an honest depiction of the injustices around her. But it outraged many stalwarts of Old Hyderabad, who dismissed it as lies, pornography, defamation. Eventually, Tabassum moved to Bombay, a culture hub of the 1970s, where film and literary circles coalesced — Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ali Sardar Jafri, Krishan Chander, Akhtar ul Iman, were among the many who worked at this confluence. writing screenplays, dialogue, lyrics.
In Bombay, Tabassum wrote ghazals, nazms and modern fiction. I found sublime examples of each, hiding online. Sin is a starting point, an introduction to Tabassum’s mysterious body of work that is beautiful, important, effervescent and waiting to be rediscovered. It’s what Tabassum wanted:
“I dream. The mind travels to a distant future, towards a time when the stories will be read and remembered as works of literature. In this fierce chase, I have also felt a double-edged sword hanging over my heart. If it fell, my work would die. These years were hostage to this fear and mine was a wary walk on a barbed footpath. I could not perish,” she wrote in Meri Kahaani.