Thesis Summary - the Annual of Urdu Studies

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252 • THE ANNUAL OF URDU STUDIESPrakashan 1986); Shani, K≥l≥ Jall (Delhi: Akshar Prakashan 1965/NationalPublishing House 1986).In view of the authors’ openly expressed secular if not irreligious outlookand their leftist leanings, the categorization of them as “Muslims”can only refer to their Muslim family background and cultural affiliation.The writers’ critical intellectual distance, however, is taken to qualifythem as important “participant-observers” of their own social and religiouscommunity.The study is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introductionto the complex question of Muslim identity in India, pointing tothe fact that Indian Muslims are a heterogeneous and highly diversecommunity. The term “identity” as used here is based on E.H. Erikson’sconcept of “subjective experience of continuity,” 1 the role-and-interactionmodel of sociology, 2and Erving Goffman’s three-fold typology ofidentity as social, personal and ego identity. 3 The writers are then introduced.Although not viewing themselves as a distinct group, they areunited in challenging the distorted picture of a Muslim identity definedexclusively on religious grounds. Chapter 2 gives a short summary of eachnovel. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with content and themes, focusing on thefactors that emerge as constitutive features of Muslim identity as well ason the political, social and economic circumstances that, according to thewriters, have posed a threat to this identity in the recent past. Two mainidentity-related phenomena can be distinguished in the novels: an externalmenace to identity due to general developments in Indian society, andan internal process of identity change within the Muslim community.Hence the separation into an outer (ch. 3) and an inner world (ch. 4).Chapter 5 deals with the symbolic and metaphorical representation ofboth shattered and preserved identity in four specific novels. Chapter 6 isdevoted to questions of literary aesthetics and narrative technique, i.e.narrative structure, point of view, style and language. Against the backgroundof the Hindi-Urdu controversy, the section on language combines1 Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers, New York 1967 (1959).2 Krappmann, L., Soziologische Dimensionen der Identität. StrukturelleBedingungen für die Teilnahme an Interaktionsprozessen, Stuttgart 1973; Berger, P.L./Luckmann, T., Die gesellschaftliche Konstraktion der Wirklichkeit. Eine Theorieder Wissenssoziologie, Frankfurt a.M., 1980.3 Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Englewood Cliffs,N.Y., 1963.
ULRIKE STARK • 253an analysis of the authors’ individual literary language with the content-relatedquestion of how language is depicted as a central identityfactor in the novels.The novels clearly attest to the existence of an identity crisis amongIndian Muslims. The partition of India and the foundation of Pakistan in1947 are shown to be a crucial turning-point and traumatic rupture intheir experience of continuity, resulting in individual suffering, the breakupof families, the sudden loss of social status, and political disorientation.While the Muslims remaining in India are depicted as the realvictims of Partition, those who migrate to Pakistan meet with disappointment,since Pakistan cannot fulfill the dream of a new homeland,even though it may provide security and material comfort. The youngerwriters are concerned with the difficult historical legacy of Pakistan: thestigmatization of Muslims in India, due to persistent suspicion of theirnational loyalty, is seen as one of the gravest consequences of Partition.Deeply resentful of this mistrust, the authors challenge it by assertingtheir genuine commitment to India and emphasizing the Indian Muslim’sright to his hereditary homeland.The majority of the writers express a pessimistic view of society, seenin the protagonist’s social failure and the lack of a happy ending. In anumber of novels a “frustrated young man” serves as a paradigm for theprocess of disillusionment that Indian society underwent soon afterIndependence. Frustrated hopes and a thorough disappointment with thepolitical and social structures of postcolonial India lead this characterfrom committed idealism either to resignation or into the hands of thefundamentalists. Those novels that in the tradition of progressivist writingdeal with the living conditions of the Muslim proletariat show an onlysubdued social-reformist optimism. With Marxist ideology no longerregarded as a path to salvation, the writers demand reforms from withinthe Muslim community and stress the need for education if social conditionsare to be changed. The struggle for jobs, economic resources, andpolitical dominance fought between castes and religious groups appears asan up-to-date variant of the class conflict. It leads to a continuous fragmentationof Indian society into different interest groups, a processperceived as dangerous. In this context, the novels aim to show thatHindu-Muslim conflicts, seemingly motivated by religion, are, in actualfact, part of this larger power struggle.The frustration with the political establishment and the deep lack ofconfidence in the state expressed in the novels is very pervasive in modernHindi literature and does not reflect a specifically Muslim viewpoint.
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Thesis Summary - the Annual of Urdu Studies

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