Showing all 7 books
Intizar 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 favourite 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 ...
The history of Delhi has been told and retold many times. Often the intent is to use history as an ideological tool for staking a claim to the present of the city. In Intizar Husain's retelling, it is the tale itself that becomes delectable. A popular recital that highlights the forgotten nuances of the story, Once There Was a City Named Dilli, is a celebration of the people and culture that made the city unforgettable. Fortis, walled cities, bazaars, diwan ...
Sharing Intizar Husain’s unique understanding of Muslim identity in the Indian subcontinent, the fifteen stories in this volume draw freely and imaginatively upon the rich narrative traditions of Hindu and Buddhist mythologies. Husain uses these sources to reflect upon religious faith and identity, historical truth and moral delusions, power and the endless failure of reason. Stories like ‘The Jungle of the ...
The stories in this collection are drawn from the rich oral narrative tradition of the Indian subcontinent, on sources as diverse as the Katha Sagar, Puranic lore, Sufi legends, Jataka tales, Kissa-kahani and dastan, as well as Intizar Husain's own training and experience as a veteran newspaper man. In story after story he seeks to retrieve the past, to see it better, to understand it, may be even learn from it. Taken together, they cover a gamut of emotions -- ...
The kind of crisis that the Second World War -- with its moral horror, its barbarism and its death camps--has been to the West, partition has been to South Asia, Intizar Husain's Novel Basti, considered one of the finest works written on the theme of partition, recalls and re-evokes the story of Pakistan, from partition until the loss of Bangladesh. Originally written in Urdu and first published in 1979, Basti poignantly captures the tragic succumbing of ...