Ijtemaai Tahzeeb Aur Afsaana

Collective Civilization and Fiction

I remember a day when a milky streak appeared across the sky over Lahore. Upon closer inspection, a round object could be seen moving at a great altitude. The long milky streak was its tail. Rumors quickly spread through the city that Sputnik was passing overhead. However, the very next day, newspapers published a denial, clarifying that the round object was not Sputnik, but a jet plane.

Had this round object appeared over our hometown of Dibai, people would have called it the sign of the hen’s egg and declared it an omen of the Day of Judgment. In the mosque where we used to pray, someone—who knows who—would occasionally hang a poster announcing the imminent arrival of Doomsday. It proclaimed that first, the sign of a hen’s egg would appear in the sky; then, a hen would speak like a human, and finally, the world would end. Such things were an everyday occurrence for us. Once, the woman who owned the tamarind tree complained that her tree was not bearing any pods. There was a neem tree in the neighboring house. She decided to marry her tamarind tree to that neem. The tamarind was draped in a red bridal shawl, and a traditional floral wreath (*sehra*) was tied to the neem. The entire neighborhood was invited to the feast. And just like that, the wedding took place. The following winter, the tamarind tree bore an abundance of long pods.

There was only one tamarind tree in our neighborhood, so the address of the tamarind woman’s house was obvious. But do not assume that the other houses lacked identity. A house without a tamarind or neem tree would have a pigeon loft. A house without a pigeon loft would have an Imambargah. There was one empty house that had no distinguishing mark at all, yet everyone knew it—because jinns lived there. It was as if every house in our neighborhood was a distinct individual. We were completely oblivious to the concept that houses could have numbers. Whitehead once wrote about a squirrel that could not keep count of its young. According to him, the human invention known as counting marks the exact point where the frontier of civilization begins. Squirrels have never crossed this frontier.

You could say that the people of our settlement had not yet crossed this frontier of civilization either. In that world, the interconnected relationships between things had not been severed. Their boundaries blurred and melted into one another. They could not be separated and counted individually. Here, even the dividing line between the animate and the inanimate had not yet been drawn. Trees were treated like people, and shadows were considered residents of the houses. A severed kite drifting away was a major event, and if a squirrel ever stood its tail up and let out a sharp, whistling shriek, it would cause an absolute uproar.

I often think that the imagination which gave birth to the *Alif Laila* (The Arabian Nights) must have been nurtured and cultivated in a very similar atmosphere. Today, we cannot even accurately name its creator or creators. One might simply say that all the Arabs, or rather an entire civilization, authored it. When the relationships between all things are so deeply intertwined, how can the fiction writer sever his ties with the rest of creation? In the bygone era I am speaking of, all the manifestations of social life were interconnected—the manifestations of social life and the manifestations of nature alike. Man shared a friendship with trees and a companionship with animals.

Shabha ba-haal-e-sag main yak umr sarf ki hai

Us ki gali ke sag ne kya aadmi-gari ki

[I have spent a lifetime of nights living the life of a dog;

What profound humanity the dog of her alley has shown!]

This couplet belongs to the very poet who once accused the dogs of his neighborhood of unwarranted trespassing, drafting an entire case against them in a *masnavi*. This speaks of an era when man’s brotherhood extended to other creatures as well. Blossoms and flowers, trees and stones, beasts and birds—all played an active role in our religion, our festivals, our fairs, our affairs of love, and our tales of war and peace. I can attest to this from personal experience: in my childhood, I never once touched a neighborhood tree or a potted plant in our home after dark. We had grown up hearing from our elders that trees rest at night. If you touched them, their sleep would be disturbed, and they would become restless. Furthermore, even though sparrows had built nests in the wooden beams, hollowing them out prematurely and causing dirt to fall from the ceilings, no sparrow’s nest was ever destroyed. In those days, plants and trees were not mere decorative objects in a house, nor were the sparrows seen as illegal squatters. They were all considered honorable members of the household.

For a fiction writer born into such a society, it was entirely possible to depict a man in the guise of a tree or reincarnated as an animal. He could present a monkey writing elegant calligraphy one moment, and delivering a profound philosophical discourse on the transience of the world the next—and despite all this, still be considered a realist. In the traditional *dastans* (epics), humans, animals, plants, and minerals do not constitute separate fraternities; rather, they are different classes within a single, unified brotherhood. The further back in time you go, the more cohesive and intertwined this brotherhood appears in fiction. It was so deeply interwoven that the fiction writer himself could not be distinguished from the rest. In ancient societies, there was fiction, but there were no fiction writers.

In the *Alif Laila*, notice how casually beautiful sorceresses cast spells on their lovers, transforming them into dogs or deer. Princes walking through enchanted forests glance back over their shoulders and are instantly turned to stone, only to be restored to human form when a courageous princess procures golden water and sprinkles it over them. In *Fasana-e-Ajaib*, a parrot falls from a tree, hits the ground, and rises to its feet as a man. The protagonist, Jan-e-Alam, transmigrates from a human form into the body of a monkey, from a monkey into a parrot, and from a parrot back into a human.

That era has passed, vanishing alongside those squirrels, severed kites, and married or unmarried trees. Today, the world of us wretched souls has become so narrow that man is imprisoned within his own species. He can neither step out of this prison of his own volition, nor invite anyone else in. We now live in a world of statistics. Strict boundaries have been drawn around things. The frontier of civilization has been erected all around us. The radio and newspapers serve as the sentinels of this frontier; their sole duty is to immediately publish a denial the moment any piece of news threatens to turn into a myth.

The story of crossing the frontier of civilization is not merely about the fact that I once lived in a small town and have now moved to a city. To be perfectly honest with you, the radio and newspapers have infiltrated our little settlement as well. Once, when I returned home after completing my education, I saw that the streets where I had left municipal kerosene lanterns burning were now illuminated by electric lights. The shops that once relied on mustard oil lamps now had both electricity and radios. A library had opened in the *Chhoti Bazariya* (small market), which received numerous English, Urdu, and Hindi newspapers from Lahore and Delhi. And just last month, I saw in a dream that the dusty, gravel-strewn road of the *Chhoti Bazariya* has now been paved with coal tar.

In Lahore, where I now live, the clean, straight, gleaming roads are so heavily armed with buses that neither one's footsteps can wander nor one's imagination can stray. The buses keep the feet from wandering, and the advertisements keep the imagination from straying. These advertisements—inside the buses, outside on the walls, across the facades of shops, atop high-rise buildings—block the gaze from every possible vantage point. When I read the newspaper in the morning, advertisements are wedged between the news. When I go to the cinema at night, I must read advertisements before watching the film. And when the esteemed literary journal *Naya Daur* arrives, my eyes are drawn to a heading in the table of contents: Advertisements, listed right after the poems, ghazals, short stories, and essays.

In truth, we have crossed the frontiers of civilization through the medium of these very advertisements. Everyone in our village knew that furniture made of *sheesham* wood was beautiful and durable. My own experience confirmed this. A slingshot made of mango wood never lasted long, nor did it make a decent *gilli danda*. However, a slingshot made of *babool* wood was quite good, and it made an excellent *gilli*—and if one managed to get a slingshot made of *sheesham*, well, praise be to God! We were not convinced of the merits of *sheesham* and *babool* through advertisements. Behind this conviction lay the experience of generations. And because we had a direct relationship with trees, this ancestral experience had seamlessly become our personal experience. But the notion that Coca-Cola is the best of all beverages? There is no generational experience behind this, nor have we ever tried to test the claim ourselves. We have attained this enlightenment solely through advertisements.

Such is the power of advertisements that if a company were to decide today to commercialize slingshots, it could make them as popular as cricket. After all, if a soap can become wildly popular simply because of an announcement that the actress Suraiya washes her face with it, why couldn't a *sheesham* slingshot achieve the same popularity through an ad claiming that a certain famous cricketer used it to hunt green pigeons in his childhood?

Advertisements launch an assault on the heart and mind, laying siege to the intellect. They are armed with modern psychological weaponry against which no defense holds, forcing the heart and mind into an eventual surrender. The inevitable consequence of this was that the things we had embraced through ancestral experience and the testimony of our senses lost their value in our eyes. They were replaced by things imposed upon us through the psychological coercion and violence of advertising. What advertisements have achieved through force and coercion, modern education has accomplished through peaceful means. In other words, modern education can be seen as an advanced, pacifist form of advertising. Here, too, ancestral experience and the testimony of the senses play no role. In the very land from which this gift of modern education came to us, there lived a man named D. H. Lawrence, who argued that modern education is entirely superficial. Its true worth, he suggested, is no more than the shoes we slip onto our feet.

We wander about carrying a wastebasket of thoughts and ideas on our heads, completely oblivious to the dark continent that dwells within us. Alfred North Whitehead referred to these as inert ideas. He argued that culture is fundamentally about the activity of thought and a receptiveness to humane feeling. What does it have to do with a random collection of information? A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. Regarding colleges and universities, he observed: In the schools of antiquity philosophers aspired to impart wisdom, in modern colleges our humbler aim is to teach subjects.

I have deemed it appropriate to content myself with references to Britain's D. H. Lawrence and America's Whitehead, and have deliberately avoided citing Pakistan's Allama Iqbal in this context. What would be the point? Some progressive critic would inevitably bring up his supposed regressiveness, or some English professor would declare that Iqbal harbored an inherent prejudice against modern sciences and contemporary civilization.

The truth is, if information remains disconnected from the senses, and if thoughts and ideas fail to become part of one's bloodstream—that is, if thought and feeling fail to unite—then such knowledge remains dry and barren; it never transforms into wisdom. It lacks the generative power to let one thought birth another, or to produce new colors and fresh fragrances through its union with practical life. Nazeer Akbarabadi was hardly a formally educated scholar, but he was undoubtedly a sage and a man of profound wisdom. You can gauge his academic poverty by the fact that during his lifetime, neither had Mr. Freud made his appearance, nor was the era enriched by the *Capital* of Mr. Karl Marx. Forget Muhammad Hasan Askari; this man was less formally educated than even Professor Mumtaz Hussain. Yet, it was this very poet who gave us that deeply insightful manifesto known as *Aadmi Nama* (The Book of Man). However, since this poet is the spokesperson for all of creation, one should consider both *Aadmi Nama* and *Hans Nama* (The Book of the Swan) as integral parts of this manifesto.

Noble minds like Whitehead have raised the question: why must education and culture be exclusively associated with reading and writing? Incidentally, I too am tempted to ask: who is truly cultured? The college student who can read a Coca-Cola advertisement printed in English, or the peasant boy who sits on the back of his buffalo, grazing it while playing the flute? This question might raise the suspicion that I am trying to turn Coca-Cola into a mocking symbol of modern civilization. Rest assured, it is not my intention to tease today's civilized man by invoking Coca-Cola, the way one might irritate a conservative old man in the neighborhood by mentioning lentils or eggplants.

Let us rephrase the question: is the truly educated person the degree-holding youth who has read all the works of James Jeans but, upon looking at the starry night sky, cannot point out Jupiter? Or is it the illiterate peasant who can look at the stars and tell exactly how much of the night has passed? In an era when the stars were used to determine earthly directions and the time of night, travel was perhaps the greatest medium of education. The princes and merchants' sons of the *Arabian Nights* bear witness to this truth. How mentally immature they are when they first set out on their journeys! Yet, after enduring ever-new perils and a continuous succession of physical and spiritual trials along the way, they are utterly transformed. They return speaking words of wisdom, revealing the traces of uncharted lands and the hidden secrets of the universe.

In those days, both travel and staying at home held educational value. Even the daily labor a person performed within their community had an educational aspect to it. When an artisan worked as a tailor, a gardener grafted two plants together, a potter used his fingers to shape wet clay on a spinning wheel, or a foil-maker beat silver and gold into thin leaves, this labor not only earned them a livelihood but also—in the words of F. R. Leavis—provided their moral and aesthetic training. Their daily toil doubled as a creative pursuit. It was an era when labor was an art form, and everyday speech was literature. In those days, elderly grandmothers would narrate long tales into the night, and the listeners would undergo an experience that we remain deprived of today, even after reading the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*. Back then, great literature did not reach the masses filtered through the lectures of professors or the opinions of critics. It was transmitted through the warmth of the human voice, infused with the storyteller's own creative passion. In that era, poetry and fiction were not confined to books; they were the warmth of the spoken word.

But this was true of a time when the connections between things were intact, and life was not divided into isolated compartments. Earning a livelihood was not mere drudgery, and times of leisure were not strictly separated from working hours. Simply put, it was a cohesive society. The machine loosened the nuts and bolts of this society, and modern education scattered its relationships to such an extent that everything is now disconnected from everything else. Today, the functioning of society is less creative and more mechanical. This marks the beginning of cultural decline. When the creative process in everyday tasks halts or slows down, it should be recognized as a symptom of cultural decay. T. S. Eliot identified the growing disregard for the culinary arts in England as a sign of its cultural decline. We find ourselves in the exact same situation.

Reading *Qissa Chahar Darvesh* (The Tale of the Four Dervishes) makes one realize how much our *dastarkhwan* (dining spread) has shrunk and how colorless it has become. There are so many dishes whose names now survive only in ancient tales. Some of these we might have tasted in our childhood at a grand wedding, during a Muharram gathering, or at a *Koonday* ceremony, but today, we have forgotten even their taste. Economic hardship alone cannot be the reason for this. Elaborate feasts are still arranged, but how much variety do they actually offer? A mere *Murgh Musallam* (whole roasted chicken) does not make a feast. Even cats have a taste for *Murgh Musallam*. And who could have faced harder times than Shah Jahan, who, while imprisoned, was permitted to choose only a single type of grain for his meals? Shah Jahan’s royal cook chose the chickpea. The reasoning behind this choice was that he could prepare sixty different dishes from this single ingredient. The Taj Mahal was built during the era of such cooks. If I may, I would like to recall a vendor from my neighborhood who sold *besan ka halwa* (gram flour sweet) during the days of the riots, calling out:

*Musalmano na ghabrao shafa'at barmala hogi*

*Parho kalma Muhammad ka khareedo halwa besan ka*

[O Muslims, do not despair, intercession is assured / Recite the Kalima of Muhammad, and buy this besan halwa]

I did not doubt this spiritual truth then, nor do I doubt it now. But alas, this vendor would put too much sugar in his *halwa*, and his gram flour was adulterated. Perhaps that is why, ultimately, we had to leave the Taj Mahal behind.

The Taj Mahal could only have been built in the era of a cook capable of preparing sixty dishes from a single chickpea. That era was the zenith of our culture. It was during this same period that we were forging a new language. The creative process is an all-encompassing phenomenon. It begins in shops and kitchens, and culminates in laboratories and art galleries. It stems from everyday conversation and social etiquette, ultimately reaching its pinnacle in fiction and poetry. If the collective functioning of a society is not creative, then creative activity cannot thrive in its literature either. I envision the short story as a flowerbed that sprouts organically from the soil. A story may well be as fantastical as the *Arabian Nights*, but its roots are always embedded in everyday life and the collective consciousness. In our daily lives, the current of the creative process has stagnated. This is not limited merely to our dining spreads; whether it is our clothing, our sports, our handicrafts, or our professions—in every single activity, the creative impulse has slowed down. When such a situation arises, it becomes incredibly easy for an alien culture to invade and overpower it.

If a nation's creative faculties are intact, then even if elements of another culture infiltrate, they are assimilated and become part of the national culture. Had cricket found its way to us during the era of our cultural integrity, it would have simply been an addition to our repertoire of sports. But we live in an age where *chaat* has been divorced from the traditional green leaf and is now sold in ceramic dishes, and traditional sweets have been separated from their leaf-bowls. Earthen pitchers and fragrant *khus* screens have vanished from the cities, replaced by thermoses and air coolers. The bonfires whose trembling flames once gave birth to luminous tales in the dark of the night have been extinguished. We now live in the world of the electric heater, which emits neither sparks nor smoke.

In such an era, the rise of cricket could only result in a tragedy where Rustam-e-Zaman Gama Pehlwan, having lost his wrestling match against time itself, retreats to hide in a grove of date palms across the Ravi River, while kite-flyers remain in the city only to endure taunts and penalties. An era like this can produce cricketers like Fazal Mahmood and Kardar, but it cannot produce literary giants like Mir Amman and Nazeer. In other words, we might be able to defeat the MCC on the cricket pitch, but we cannot rival D. H. Lawrence in literature. As for self-deception, many of our elites still cling to the ignorant claim—treating it almost as an article of faith—that the Urdu short story is on par with the Western short story.

Anyway, my point was that when the integrity of cultural life is compromised and a cohesive society ceases to exist, it inevitably impacts the short story. The short story then ceases to be a vessel for collective consciousness, and its appeal is no longer universal enough to achieve widespread public acceptance. In our history, stories possessing this quality were born in times when our society was cohesive. During the eras when the great *dastans* (epics) were born, society was so deeply interconnected that strong bonds existed not only between man and man, but also between man and external nature. Even fifty years ago, when Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar was writing *Fasana-e-Azad*, society remained somewhat cohesive, even though these bonds were beginning to fray.

*Fasana-e-Azad* features characters from diverse social backgrounds—from nawabs to grass-cutters, and from noblewomen to innkeepers. Yet, despite these class differences, a bond exists between them. They are all products of the same environment. The shadows of rationalism are beginning to fall, but they still share the same beliefs and superstitions. There is a sense of unity even in their follies. Thus, the novel serves as a representative of a collective cultural life, and through it, a collective consciousness. By the time we reach *Mere Bhi Sanam Khane*, this cultural integrity and unity have vanished. Here, we do not see the entire society, but rather a specific faction of it. This group is so disconnected from the rest of society that the novelist can easily isolate it and present it so seamlessly that it feels complete in itself.

When cultural integrity has faded away, a fiction writer must struggle immensely to become the voice of the collective consciousness. They must delve into the depths of the inner life to discover which emotions, ideals, desires, and inherited archetypes remain shared, connecting one individual to another despite the fragmentation of cultural life and emotional behavior. One of these shared elements is the heritage of the past. Even if the present becomes disjointed, this heritage remains preserved in the collective memory in the form of remembrance. By insisting on the past, the writer does not mean—or at least should not mean—that bygone days should be brought back. The past never returns. What is lost cannot be retrieved, but it can certainly be remembered.

D.H. Lawrence, who placed such great emphasis on primitive life, was not naive enough to believe that a bygone era could return. The reality aligns with what F.R. Leavis wrote in this regard: it is essential to insist upon what has been lost so that it is not entirely forgotten. If we are to build a new system, we must remember the old one. If we forget the old system, we will no longer know what is worth fighting for. Eventually, a day will come when we grow weary of the struggle altogether and surrender to the machine. The point is that even the mere concept of henna-dyed fingertips is valuable; it keeps the drop of blood visible in the heart and sustains the idea of beauty in the mind.

However, even if a fiction writer manages to capture the collective consciousness in this manner, their story may still lack a collective appeal. It is entirely possible for a novel to follow this path and become a representative of the collective consciousness, yet fail to achieve the widespread popularity of *Alif Laila* or even *Fasana-e-Azad*. The truth is that for such popularity to exist, society must sustain the process known as moral and aesthetic cultivation. In our society, this process has come to a halt. As a result, we no longer possess our own standards for evaluating things, distinguishing between good and evil, or differentiating between beauty and ugliness—or, at the very least, we have lost faith in our own standards. Now, we simply deem beautiful whatever the liberated ones declare to be beautiful. For instance, if women in Western countries bob their hair, the women in our society will also cut their long locks, believing it enhances their elegance. Under these circumstances, a contemporary poet cannot earn the seal of public approval by reciting a couplet like:

Neend uski hai, dimagh uski hai, raatein uski hain

Jis ke bazoo par teri zulfein pareshaan ho gayeen

[Sleep is his, peace of mind is his, the nights are his,

Upon whose arm your disheveled tresses rest.]

Our entire society has lost faith in the concept of feminine beauty upon which this couplet is based. Meanwhile, the imported concept of feminine beauty that has taken its place has not yet been fully embraced. It remains merely a fashion trend; it has not yet permeated our hearts and minds. The imagery of bobbed hair has not yet taken deep enough root in the collective imagination to weave a tapestry of similes, allusions, metaphors, and stories around it. Mentioning it does not evoke a complex, layered chain of meanings, nor does it touch the deeper corners of our inner life. When foreign customs and foreign paradigms of thought and feeling are adopted merely as fashion, the intricate and multi-layered modes of expression—rooted in the customs and paradigms forged by the national culture—lose their impact. These are the very modes through which a writer or poet gains access to the inner life of their society. Consequently, the metaphor itself is lost, leaving behind nothing but a dry treatise on the theory of metaphors.

To give their voice a mass appeal, fashionable poets and fiction writers resort to a mode of expression born out of the tradition of advertising. Words are utilized only insofar as they depict the superficial aspects of life. They may momentarily provoke the surface of our emotional lives, but they lack the vitality to create a resonance within the soul or to stir the intricate web of dreams, similes, memories, and inherited archetypes buried deep within.

Such treatment of language not only ruins the language itself but also dulls our emotional life. The language loses its capacity to articulate complex spiritual experiences. Meanwhile, the cultivation and refinement of emotional life come to a standstill, leaving behind nothing but the clamor of superficial sentiments. Thus, when a writer or poet attempts to create serious literature, they must wrestle not only with the language but also with the prevailing literary tastes and comprehension of the time.

This treatment of language forces us to view things through a very specific lens. It is this kind of perspective that has bestowed upon Urdu the Islamic historical novel and the romantic short story. When history was viewed through this lens, the Islamic historical novel was written. When this perspective was applied to contemporary life, romantic realism was born. Furthermore, a common advertising technique is to negate the prevailing perspective and popular modes of thought, writing a catchphrase that makes a passerby stop in their tracks and stare at the poster in surprise. A certain style of fiction was born out of this very approach.

Very well, I won’t call this kind of short story promotional fiction; instead, I will call it the neatly trimmed hair of a sophisticated lady. The only superiority modern fiction claims over classical fiction is its use of new techniques. Mir Amman neither knew how to play cricket nor was he familiar with the new techniques of short story writing. As for *Tilism-e-Hoshruba*, it is truly like the long, flowing tresses of a beloved—longer even than the night of separation—even though Muhammad Hasan Askari tried to give it a French cut as well. These classical writers were unacquainted with modern fictional techniques. However, they were intimately familiar with the ways of their society, its customs of love and hate, its superstitions and beliefs, and its religion—in short, the entirety of its external and internal life. It was on the strength of this profound familiarity that they wrote their *dastans*.

As for modern techniques, what we consider new here are methods that have already become clichéd and commonplace in Western fiction. If Saadat Hasan Manto's technique is considered the new technique of the short story, then what exactly is the old technique? The reality is that we are treating the mere ABCs of Western fictional technique as the ultimate pinnacle of the craft. But I argue that even if I were to master the technique of James Joyce's *Ulysses*, what use would it be to me unless I harmonize it with the cultural life of my own people? Unless I use it to gain access to the inner depths and the very soul of my nation, it is worthless. Joyce wrote a novel; he was not putting on an acrobat's spectacle. When a short story severs its connection with collective culture and its wellsprings, then, despite all its modern techniques, it becomes nothing more than an acrobat's trick or a cheap advertisement.

Therefore, any writer today who genuinely wishes to write a short story must understand not only that fiction is rooted in collective culture, but also that if cultural integrity is compromised, a true short story will never achieve widespread acceptance. Newspapers report that there are still a few Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungles since the Second World War, believing that the war is still raging and that they are on the front lines. When two cultures clash, the writers of the defeated culture find themselves in a position much like those Japanese soldiers. Their connection to the present is severed, and they live entirely in the past. I admire the disposition of those soldiers, but I would suggest one crucial amendment: a person may live in the past, but they must do so while remaining grounded in the present. In other words, I want to transform the attitude of those Japanese soldiers into the attitude of D.H. Lawrence or Allama Iqbal.

If, for the sake of clarity, I were to frame this as a personal matter, I would say: Sir, how did I ever become a short story writer? I am merely a soldier from the defeated army of 1857. However, I have not gone into hiding in the jungles of Nepal. Instead, I live in the city as a writer. I know that the War of 1857 is over, which is why I do not wage war against the steam engine. What I do, however, is search for the travelers who were lost in that great upheaval. In truth, I do not merely write stories; I search for the lost, and I seek out the embers of a bygone fire. But once the search for this bygone fire begins, the quest cannot remain confined to 1857. A seeker can trace it all the way back to the battlefield of Karbala, and even further back to the Battle of Badr, for that is the primordial fire of our history. It is from that very fire that all our hearths have been kindled.

It is this specific kind of connection to the past that distinguishes a true short story writer from both the hiding Japanese soldier and the author of Islamic historical novels. The hiding Japanese soldier is unaware that the war has ended, and thus he remains imprisoned in a single era. He can neither step forward into the present nor journey further back into the past. The short story writer, on the other hand, knows that the war is over. Therefore, his connection to the past is not limited to a single era; it evolves into a relationship with the entirety of history. The purpose of this connection is to ensure that the experiences of past generations and the consciousness of bygone eras are woven into modern sensibilities.

Thus, if a Pakistani short story writer forges a connection with 1857, the tragedy of Karbala, and the Battle of Badr, it means that he is striving to infuse the newly developing consciousness of his nation with a thousand years of Indo-Islamic cultural experience and nearly fourteen centuries of historical awareness. This is a relationship where the past, the present, and the future form an interconnected brotherhood. After all, the present is not some delicate red velvet mite that one can simply pinch and place on the palm of one's hand. It always manifests itself accompanied by the grand procession of the past and the future, marching before and behind it.

Collective Civilization and Fiction

I remember a day when a milky streak appeared across the sky over Lahore. Upon closer inspection, a round object could be seen moving at a great altitude. The long milky streak was its tail. Rumors quickly spread through the city that Sputnik was passing overhead. However, the very next day, newspapers published a denial, clarifying that the round object was not Sputnik, but a jet plane.

Had this round object appeared over our hometown of Dibai, people would have called it the sign of the hen’s egg and declared it an omen of the Day of Judgment. In the mosque where we used to pray, someone—who knows who—would occasionally hang a poster announcing the imminent arrival of Doomsday. It proclaimed that first, the sign of a hen’s egg would appear in the sky; then, a hen would speak like a human, and finally, the world would end. Such things were an everyday occurrence for us. Once, the woman who owned the tamarind tree complained that her tree was not bearing any pods. There was a neem tree in the neighboring house. She decided to marry her tamarind tree to that neem. The tamarind was draped in a red bridal shawl, and a traditional floral wreath (*sehra*) was tied to the neem. The entire neighborhood was invited to the feast. And just like that, the wedding took place. The following winter, the tamarind tree bore an abundance of long pods.

There was only one tamarind tree in our neighborhood, so the address of the tamarind woman’s house was obvious. But do not assume that the other houses lacked identity. A house without a tamarind or neem tree would have a pigeon loft. A house without a pigeon loft would have an Imambargah. There was one empty house that had no distinguishing mark at all, yet everyone knew it—because jinns lived there. It was as if every house in our neighborhood was a distinct individual. We were completely oblivious to the concept that houses could have numbers. Whitehead once wrote about a squirrel that could not keep count of its young. According to him, the human invention known as counting marks the exact point where the frontier of civilization begins. Squirrels have never crossed this frontier.

You could say that the people of our settlement had not yet crossed this frontier of civilization either. In that world, the interconnected relationships between things had not been severed. Their boundaries blurred and melted into one another. They could not be separated and counted individually. Here, even the dividing line between the animate and the inanimate had not yet been drawn. Trees were treated like people, and shadows were considered residents of the houses. A severed kite drifting away was a major event, and if a squirrel ever stood its tail up and let out a sharp, whistling shriek, it would cause an absolute uproar.

I often think that the imagination which gave birth to the *Alif Laila* (The Arabian Nights) must have been nurtured and cultivated in a very similar atmosphere. Today, we cannot even accurately name its creator or creators. One might simply say that all the Arabs, or rather an entire civilization, authored it. When the relationships between all things are so deeply intertwined, how can the fiction writer sever his ties with the rest of creation? In the bygone era I am speaking of, all the manifestations of social life were interconnected—the manifestations of social life and the manifestations of nature alike. Man shared a friendship with trees and a companionship with animals.

Shabha ba-haal-e-sag main yak umr sarf ki hai

Us ki gali ke sag ne kya aadmi-gari ki

[I have spent a lifetime of nights living the life of a dog;

What profound humanity the dog of her alley has shown!]

This couplet belongs to the very poet who once accused the dogs of his neighborhood of unwarranted trespassing, drafting an entire case against them in a *masnavi*. This speaks of an era when man’s brotherhood extended to other creatures as well. Blossoms and flowers, trees and stones, beasts and birds—all played an active role in our religion, our festivals, our fairs, our affairs of love, and our tales of war and peace. I can attest to this from personal experience: in my childhood, I never once touched a neighborhood tree or a potted plant in our home after dark. We had grown up hearing from our elders that trees rest at night. If you touched them, their sleep would be disturbed, and they would become restless. Furthermore, even though sparrows had built nests in the wooden beams, hollowing them out prematurely and causing dirt to fall from the ceilings, no sparrow’s nest was ever destroyed. In those days, plants and trees were not mere decorative objects in a house, nor were the sparrows seen as illegal squatters. They were all considered honorable members of the household.

For a fiction writer born into such a society, it was entirely possible to depict a man in the guise of a tree or reincarnated as an animal. He could present a monkey writing elegant calligraphy one moment, and delivering a profound philosophical discourse on the transience of the world the next—and despite all this, still be considered a realist. In the traditional *dastans* (epics), humans, animals, plants, and minerals do not constitute separate fraternities; rather, they are different classes within a single, unified brotherhood. The further back in time you go, the more cohesive and intertwined this brotherhood appears in fiction. It was so deeply interwoven that the fiction writer himself could not be distinguished from the rest. In ancient societies, there was fiction, but there were no fiction writers.

In the *Alif Laila*, notice how casually beautiful sorceresses cast spells on their lovers, transforming them into dogs or deer. Princes walking through enchanted forests glance back over their shoulders and are instantly turned to stone, only to be restored to human form when a courageous princess procures golden water and sprinkles it over them. In *Fasana-e-Ajaib*, a parrot falls from a tree, hits the ground, and rises to its feet as a man. The protagonist, Jan-e-Alam, transmigrates from a human form into the body of a monkey, from a monkey into a parrot, and from a parrot back into a human.

That era has passed, vanishing alongside those squirrels, severed kites, and married or unmarried trees. Today, the world of us wretched souls has become so narrow that man is imprisoned within his own species. He can neither step out of this prison of his own volition, nor invite anyone else in. We now live in a world of statistics. Strict boundaries have been drawn around things. The frontier of civilization has been erected all around us. The radio and newspapers serve as the sentinels of this frontier; their sole duty is to immediately publish a denial the moment any piece of news threatens to turn into a myth.

The story of crossing the frontier of civilization is not merely about the fact that I once lived in a small town and have now moved to a city. To be perfectly honest with you, the radio and newspapers have infiltrated our little settlement as well. Once, when I returned home after completing my education, I saw that the streets where I had left municipal kerosene lanterns burning were now illuminated by electric lights. The shops that once relied on mustard oil lamps now had both electricity and radios. A library had opened in the *Chhoti Bazariya* (small market), which received numerous English, Urdu, and Hindi newspapers from Lahore and Delhi. And just last month, I saw in a dream that the dusty, gravel-strewn road of the *Chhoti Bazariya* has now been paved with coal tar.

In Lahore, where I now live, the clean, straight, gleaming roads are so heavily armed with buses that neither one's footsteps can wander nor one's imagination can stray. The buses keep the feet from wandering, and the advertisements keep the imagination from straying. These advertisements—inside the buses, outside on the walls, across the facades of shops, atop high-rise buildings—block the gaze from every possible vantage point. When I read the newspaper in the morning, advertisements are wedged between the news. When I go to the cinema at night, I must read advertisements before watching the film. And when the esteemed literary journal *Naya Daur* arrives, my eyes are drawn to a heading in the table of contents: Advertisements, listed right after the poems, ghazals, short stories, and essays.

In truth, we have crossed the frontiers of civilization through the medium of these very advertisements. Everyone in our village knew that furniture made of *sheesham* wood was beautiful and durable. My own experience confirmed this. A slingshot made of mango wood never lasted long, nor did it make a decent *gilli danda*. However, a slingshot made of *babool* wood was quite good, and it made an excellent *gilli*—and if one managed to get a slingshot made of *sheesham*, well, praise be to God! We were not convinced of the merits of *sheesham* and *babool* through advertisements. Behind this conviction lay the experience of generations. And because we had a direct relationship with trees, this ancestral experience had seamlessly become our personal experience. But the notion that Coca-Cola is the best of all beverages? There is no generational experience behind this, nor have we ever tried to test the claim ourselves. We have attained this enlightenment solely through advertisements.

Such is the power of advertisements that if a company were to decide today to commercialize slingshots, it could make them as popular as cricket. After all, if a soap can become wildly popular simply because of an announcement that the actress Suraiya washes her face with it, why couldn't a *sheesham* slingshot achieve the same popularity through an ad claiming that a certain famous cricketer used it to hunt green pigeons in his childhood?

Advertisements launch an assault on the heart and mind, laying siege to the intellect. They are armed with modern psychological weaponry against which no defense holds, forcing the heart and mind into an eventual surrender. The inevitable consequence of this was that the things we had embraced through ancestral experience and the testimony of our senses lost their value in our eyes. They were replaced by things imposed upon us through the psychological coercion and violence of advertising. What advertisements have achieved through force and coercion, modern education has accomplished through peaceful means. In other words, modern education can be seen as an advanced, pacifist form of advertising. Here, too, ancestral experience and the testimony of the senses play no role. In the very land from which this gift of modern education came to us, there lived a man named D. H. Lawrence, who argued that modern education is entirely superficial. Its true worth, he suggested, is no more than the shoes we slip onto our feet.

We wander about carrying a wastebasket of thoughts and ideas on our heads, completely oblivious to the dark continent that dwells within us. Alfred North Whitehead referred to these as inert ideas. He argued that culture is fundamentally about the activity of thought and a receptiveness to humane feeling. What does it have to do with a random collection of information? A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. Regarding colleges and universities, he observed: In the schools of antiquity philosophers aspired to impart wisdom, in modern colleges our humbler aim is to teach subjects.

I have deemed it appropriate to content myself with references to Britain's D. H. Lawrence and America's Whitehead, and have deliberately avoided citing Pakistan's Allama Iqbal in this context. What would be the point? Some progressive critic would inevitably bring up his supposed regressiveness, or some English professor would declare that Iqbal harbored an inherent prejudice against modern sciences and contemporary civilization.

The truth is, if information remains disconnected from the senses, and if thoughts and ideas fail to become part of one's bloodstream—that is, if thought and feeling fail to unite—then such knowledge remains dry and barren; it never transforms into wisdom. It lacks the generative power to let one thought birth another, or to produce new colors and fresh fragrances through its union with practical life. Nazeer Akbarabadi was hardly a formally educated scholar, but he was undoubtedly a sage and a man of profound wisdom. You can gauge his academic poverty by the fact that during his lifetime, neither had Mr. Freud made his appearance, nor was the era enriched by the *Capital* of Mr. Karl Marx. Forget Muhammad Hasan Askari; this man was less formally educated than even Professor Mumtaz Hussain. Yet, it was this very poet who gave us that deeply insightful manifesto known as *Aadmi Nama* (The Book of Man). However, since this poet is the spokesperson for all of creation, one should consider both *Aadmi Nama* and *Hans Nama* (The Book of the Swan) as integral parts of this manifesto.