Angaaray
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The ban
Reading in Sin
If sexual explicitness caused the most outrage in the early phase of book bans in India, there was a point after which it became almost entirely about religion
Arpita Das owns an indie publishing house, Yoda Press, and an indie bookstore, Yodakin, both based in New Delhi
BY Arpita Das 5 May 2012
Five years after the publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, another book was released and immediately banned by the Crown even without any registered protest. This was Sajjad Zaheer’s Angaaray, and the point of contention was a story in the collection which depicted a maulvi having erotic dreams when he should have been praying. Zaheer was a founding member of the Communist Party in India and Pakistan, Progressive Writer’s Association and Indian People’s Theatre Association later in a career that was nothing short of revolutionary. His short story, which caused his entire collection to be banned, was ironically critical on some of the same registers as Mayo’s Mother India. Unlike her, however, he was not an outsider but merely a radical.
Ten years after the publication of Angaaray, book protests were becoming more and more public events, as seen in the widespread outcry against celebrated Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf (The Quilt). Charges of obscenity were levelled against the short story and the author was summoned by the Lahore High Court in 1944 ‘to defend her motivation in writing something so palpably aimed at attacking the traditional Indian social fabric’. The offensive bit in the story referred to a young girl being awakened at night to witness what appeared to be repeated sexual encounters between her aunt and a female attendant, the act camouflaged only by a ‘lihaaf’. Unlike Angaaray, which remained banned for many decades after its publication, Lihaaf won its case in the Lahore High Court. Chughtai’s lawyer won the day by arguing that the story made no explicit reference to sexual activity or lesbianism. An absurd if comical epilogue to the incident ensued when the editor of the journal in which the story was first published, and which received numerous letters of complaint against it, withheld those letters from publication in the journal till Chughtai was married on the grounds that only then could she be ‘exposed’ to such a frank discussion on sex.
Banned Urdu short-story collection now in English
Press Trust of India | New Delhi
May 9, 2014
A collection of Urdu short stories which was banned in 1933 after it created a firestorm of public outrage for its bold attack on conservative Islam and British colonialism is now available in English.
Young writers Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-uz-Zafar, all eager to revolutionize Urdu literature, penned the collection "Angaaray", which was first published in 1932.
The writers were inspired by British modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as well as the Indian independence movement. Instead, they invited the wrath of the establishment: the book was burned in protest and then banned by the British authorities.
"All but five copies were destroyed by police, two of which were sent to London where they were held in the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collections. This translation was made possible by the efforts of two scholars who tracked down those remaining copies and published them more than fifty years later," the book's introduction says.
Nevertheless, "Angaaray" spawned a new generation of Urdu writers and led to the formation of the Progressive Writers' Association, whose members included, among others, stalwarts like Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hassan Manto, Munshi Premchand and Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
Translated into English for the first time by Snehal Shingavi, "Angaaray" retains the crackling energy and fiery polemic of the original stories. This edition, published by Penguin Books, also provides a compelling account of the furore surrounding this explosive collection.
According to Shingavi, in translating "Angaaray", he has tried as much as possible to keep to the spirit of the original text (by which he means its angry, fiery, polemical and sometimes vulgar character) more than he has tried to maintain the original semantic units of the Urdu prose.
"I also attempted to preserve the distinct styles of each of the writers: the critical realism and dry humour of Sajjad Zaheer's observations, the poignant drama of Ahmed Ali's intensely symbolic prose, the boisterousness and up-tempo melodrama of Rashid Jahan's women and the ethical ambivalence of Mahmud-uz-Zafar's unreliable narrator," the English teacher at University of Texas writes.
The members of the "Angaaray" collective wrote from their own sense that the problems among north Indian Muslims would remain vast and durable as long as meaningful critique was a distant horizon and that change would be only possible by forcing the issues out into the open.
The book created an important conversation about the nature of Indian society and the freedoms available to artistes to talk and write about their society openly.
