Intizar Husain is the most important modern short story writer in Urdu. This volume gathers together fifteen of his stories, all drawing imaginatively upon the rich narrative traditions of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist mythologies. The volume also includes an introduction and an interview with Husain.

A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memories

Literature & Fiction

Bhalla, Alok

Husain, Intizar

Adil, Vishwamitar

Short Stories & Anthologies

Oxford University Press

Contemporary

Written in 1979, Basti is considered as one of the finest works on the theme of partition. Intizar Husain offers deep insights into the psychological and emotional aspects of the 'historic' event's impact on human lives through the emotional journey of Zakir, the main protagonist of the novel. In an interview published alongside, the author looks at partition in contemporary sense.

Basti

OUP India

A man scours the town he left fifty years ago for some modest evidence of past joys. Javed, who has returned to Lahore from East Pakistan, won’t speak of what he witnessed in his time away. In her dreams, an old woman boards a train full of dead ancestors. A sage who cannot control his anger must seek out a butcher for redemption. Mahaban, once the home of monkeys, is now a city filled with human beings. Sheherzad, who once told Emperor Shaharyar one thousand and one stories, is now an old woman who has forgotten her fantastical yarns. The fifteen stories in The Death of Sheherzad ably represent Intizar Husain’s oeuvre, defying narrative tradition and exploring the past, specifically the Partition of India, as a means of unraveling the present. He imaginatively revisits a syncretic, tolerant, pluralistic past to analyze why the tide turned so irreversibly. Questioning everything—faith, violence, society—Husain probes the horrors of Partition in a manner as oblique as it is trenchant. Imbued with dark wit and literary brilliance, these stories at once shock, agitate, and entertain.

The Death of Sheherzad

Seagull Books

An NYRB Classics Original Basti is a beautifully written reckoning with the tragic history of Pakistan. Basti means settlement, a common place, and Intizar Husain’s extraordinary novel begins with a mythic, even mystic, vision of harmony between old and young, man and woman, Muslim and Hindu. Then Zakir, the hero, wakes to the modern world. Crowds gather. Slogans echo. Cities burn. Whether hunkered down with family or furtively meeting to exchange news with friends in cafés, Zakir is alone in a country lost to the politics of loneliness.

Basti (New York Review Books Classics)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

NYRB Classics

Armaenia Editorial

•Features two novellas by a supreme story-teller and writer of Urdu prose\n•Day, a realistic story, is a meditation on the trauma of migrations\n•Dastan, a traditional tale of wonder, is a lyrical narrative of adventure, magic and grace\n"Published by Niyogi Books, the translation of the two novellas is executed so unassumingly by these adepts that the language doesn't become an obstacle, it rather facilitates the original and captures the highly nuanced narative world of Intizar Sahad in a masterly fashion." - The Hindu, Friday Review, 18 May 2018.\n"The two novellas included here attest to Husain's sharp observational skill and gift for transforming the everyday into the magical." - Mint, Saturday, 19 May 2018.\nIntizar Husain is the finest writer of Urdu prose and the most brilliant story-teller of the post-partition generation. The two novellas, Day and Dastan (Din Aur Dastan), his favorite texts, show his versatility and fictional inventiveness. Day, a realistic story, is a meditation on the cruellest of events to have scarred our times - migrations. When people are forced to move to new homes or new geographies, they only recall a mix of uncanny facts, streets lost in sad nostalgias, fantasies of lovers, parables of simple things, or an unending romance about a possible life and a world. While physical geographies are redrawn, moral landscapes become so bewildering as to leave one emotionally paralyzed. As in Intizar Husain's other work, India's partition haunts the tale like an inexplicable shadow.\nIn contrast, Dastan is a traditional tale of wonder. Its language is lyrical and exaggerated; its narrative, obsessed with action, weaves dreams and adventure, heroism and mercy, beauty and love, magic and grace. It is located in another time of turmoil and uncertainty when mysterious forces cause havoc in nature, and societies rise up suddenly to avenge old wrongs. The 1857 war of independence is prophesied by a mysterious faqir; rivers suddenly break their banks; an old haveli is left desolate; a princess weeps beside a fountain; a parrot shows a soldier the road to take; and hope of political change is fatally lost. Intizar Husain is neither a social critic nor a preacher; he is a story-teller - a supreme one.

Day and Dastan: Two Novellas

Zaidi, Nishat

Literary

Niyogi Books

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