Chronicles of the ordinary and the bizarre

Ratna Raman

This is an extraordinary translation by Haider Shahbaz of an unusual novel written by Mirza Athar Baig, a professor of Postmodern and Post-Colonial Philosophy at Government College University, Lahore. Baig is credited with doing avant garde work in contemporary Urdu.

Baig’s remarkable account of Hassan’s State of Affairs reveals a studied ease with the Occidental literary tradition, and a keen awareness of related fields of painting, art, music, science, medicine, philosophy and film. This is put to succinct use in the novel that comprises of twenty-one sections, each of which can be individually read as a complete story, although a winding narrative links each section to the next and leads towards a conclusion.

Baig’s narrative in the geographical landscape of modern Pakistan showcases the impact of Occidental exposure and control upon the lives of the characters in the narrative. The landscape of the novel and its characters recall the evocative and all too familiar world of the subcontinent. The first chapter chronicles the birth, childhood, adulthood and death of Hassan, the titular hero of the novel. Significantly, Hassan’s life is linked with the political, social, public, private and cultural lives of a host of characters, who oscillate between theatre workshops, junkyard, nursery, park and crematorium. They lead anonymous, inconspicuous and intense lives that oscillate between the ordinary and the bizarre.

Irshad Junkman and Jabbar Collector, two central figures in the narrative, live in a bizarre junkyard and collect all manner of strange objects. Jabbar collects odds and ends ranging from ticket stubs to all manner of body secretions of great leaders and Irshad houses all these collections at his junk complex, which is connected to a nursery and a cemetery. Irshad and Jabbar are visited by John Shakespeare, the official agent of the Guinness Book of Records, who documents all manner of claims.

Interlinked to this story is a group of motley screen play writers and directors of the Masquerade Company, attempting to make a surreal movie titled The Film That Cannot Be Made.

Hassan is cursed with displaced sightseeing, a condition in which he gazes out of a moving vehicle, focuses on any object or scene and then wanders off into an interior world of the imagination. By providing him this unique perspective and then killing him off in the very first chapter, Baig stretches the ability of the narrative to a hitherto unachieved dimension.

This is not detective fiction and Hassan is also not really the hero of this tale. The surreal landscape of the novel allows acceptance of Hassan’s being eased out of the narrative. Subsequently, we are introduced to a host of other characters, each of whom is introduced to us as the object of Hassan’s gaze. Multiple characters with different lives and roles go about their lives with identical names such as Anila, Safdar Sultan, Saeed Kamal.

The overlapping of names expands our understanding of multitudinous lives and contributes to a new understanding of a cross-section of densely lived lives. Each section is punctuated with snippets of information about theatre, art, cultural practice and medicine. And this welter of information enables the reader to engage with greater clarity through the narrative.

The narrative uses metaphor, parody, satire, humour, sketches, dialogue and the vocabulary of the camera to great effect. The play with words charms even though this is a translation. There is also a sustained attempt to get the reader to understand how ordinary life has been impacted as a result of colonialism.

The book examines how countries such as India and Pakistan negotiated with older cultural practices and older systems of knowledge when thrust into postcolonial times, with new demands and newer learning. Baig continues to ask uncomfortable and searching questions in each section about political unfreedom, corruption, censorship, overreliance on technology, the dangers of generic medication, the significance of literature, film and language, among others.

The older romantic tradition that featured an able protagonist with a graspable future is now officially over. Baig leads the reader into an altogether different direction, pushing himher to think, assess and understand this complex, new world. Were Bertolt Brecht to be reborn as a novelist and asked to identify an impactful novel that could serve as a thinking person’s teaching text, Hassan’s State of Affairs would be among the first books chosen.