Tales from this World and Others: Mrs. Abdul Qadir and Urdu Horror Fiction

Word Count: 3026 | Reading Time: 11 min

“Chhotī Khāla reminds me of Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s stories- The City of Corpses And Other Terrifying Tales, and The Melody of Death and The Death of Count Ilyas, by Ms. Hijab Isma’il [Hijab Imtiaz Ali]!” Amna whispered to Dinky.

“Who was she?” Dinky asked quietly.

“Who?”

“Mrs. Abdul Qadir and Ms. Hijab Isma’il?”

“Oh Dinky Winky! But we shouldn’t give such morbid references for Chhotī Khāla…”

–Chandni Begum, Qurratulain Hyder

This brief exchange between two young women from Qurratulain Hyder’s final 1990 novel, Chandni Begum begs us to ask- why does Amna cite these two women authors for readily available “morbid references”, and why does Dinky not know of them? Hyder’s nod to these two women and their enduring legacy as writers who towered over all others in the genre of horror fiction also subtly hints that they have fallen out of public reading memory.

Dinky’s befuddlement at hearing these names however is in stark contrast to the enormous reputations that both women possessed in the niche but flourishing field of horror fiction writing in Urdu. Already by the 19th century, all kinds of sensational potboilers had begun to be translated into Urdu from several European languages via English. As both translations and novel reading habits picked up steam, translations- and soon imitations- of penny dreadfuls from England brought scenes of urban chaos laced by the grotesque and the unseemly to Urdu readers. C.M. Naim writes about a great example of this- George W.M. Reynolds’ 1844 city mystery novel, The Mysteries of London, a classic cocktail of crime, horror and seediness of the London underbelly.¹ Reynolds’ novel was published as a highly successful series of translations titled Mysteries of London [Asrār-i Landan] beginning in the 1890s. As C.M. Naim notes, the raging success of Reynolds in the Urdu print world stood opposite to his humdrum critical reputation in England, and points to other routes and genres through which something like “world literature” was shaping, apart from the top down trickle of British educational policies. Mysteries of London (as well as other European iterations such as the 1842-3 French, Mysteries of Paris) were such a resounding hit that they spawned similar series about South Asian cities, such as The Mysteries of Rawalpindi (1901), The Mysteries of Lahore, The Mysteries of Delhi (1903), among several others in a matter of years. The Mysteries series is only one example out of the near-industrial publications of translations and/or original writings that focused on violent, suspenseful and unreal aspects of human life. While we can’t say that horror fiction in Urdu can be placed within this particular genre of Mysteries, elements of suspense, the unnatural, the uncanny and the terrible connect to the two in more ways than one. After all, Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s works continued to be advertised and praised for their “mysterious” [pur asrār] quality.

Such salacious books must have flooded the Urdu book trade because noted litterateur Imtiaz Ali ‘Taj’ (1900-1970; Hijab Imtiaz Ali husband) translated a whole book of French short stories by Maurice Level (1875-1926), to counter what he called “those cheap examples of literature…which are published often in English newspapers of low quality”. He instead wanted to provide a better model for writing about the terrible and the awful. In fact, Hijab Imtiaz Ali (née Isma’il), Imtiaz Ali ‘Taj’ and Mrs. Abdul Qadir decidedly wrote and published horror fiction and/or sensational fiction in order to produce good examples of writing in these genres which would boast of “a closer link to life”, to quote ‘Taj’. Consequently, ‘Taj’ published his aforementioned translation under the title Terrifying Tales [Haibatnāk Afsānay] in 1943 from Lahore, following the footsteps of his wife, Hijab Imtiaz Ali, who had already published Dead Body and Other Terrifying Tales [Lāsh aur Dūsray Haibatnāk Afsānay] in 1933, The Death of Count Ilyas and Other Terrifying Tales [Count Ilyās kī Maut aur Dūsray Haibatnāk Afsānay] in 1935 and The Mummy House and Other Terrifying Tales [Mummy Khānah Aur Dūsray Haibatnāk Afsānay] in 1945, all published from Lahore as well. The intent was to counter translations of poor, pulpy addictive fiction- and to provide a balance between haibat and haqīqat, between terror and reality.

It was in this context that Mrs. Abdul Qadir too began a career that is worth repeating here.² Mrs. Abdul Qadir was born into a very religious and literary family in 1898 A.D. in Jhelum district of undivided Punjab. Her father, in her own words, was a “famous and well-known scholar” who had the power to issue fatwas and had authored several books on religious subjects. Qadir describes her mother as a religious woman who was “devoted and abstinent and would regularly offer tahajjud prayers”. She had only one sister, who too was married into the family that owned the very active Firoz Press based in Lahore. She describes her education as an intensive one, where she learned Urdu and Persian, apart from Qur’an lessons. Qadir describes her childhood as an unusual one, where she had no interest in playing games, or any companions, and would usually just sit and wonder about her own existence and pasts- something that, she says, gave her restlessness and “strange and weird dreams” at night. She also describes herself as really fascinated with travel, and with the desire to expand her knowledge through the company of learned men. At the age of 10, she was inducted into the Naqshbandī line of Sufism to begin what she calls “spiritual education”, something which was unfortunately interrupted when her teacher died. She was married off at the age of 14, and soon became mother to 2 daughters and 3 sons. Her husband tragically passed away and she relocated from Jhelum to Lahore, where, thanks to the diverse intellectual, religious, and literary circles of her oldest son, Zafar, Mrs. Abdul Qadir enjoyed a highly active and rich social life. Additionally, Qadir describes Zafar as taking after her, particularly in his love for travel, and she traveled all over the subcontinent into far and remote places and she says: “it was the result of this tourism that manifested itself in the form of short story writing”. She initially hesitated in publishing her short stories, worried that Muslims would criticize her, the tragic death of her mother unexpectedly released her partially from deference to social conventions and thanks to Zafar, she published her first collection, The City of Corpses and Other Terrifying Tales [Lāshoñ Kā Shahr Aur Dūsray Haibatnāk Afsānay] in 1933, which according to her editor sold out in a record time of 1.5 years, and according to the afterword by Shaukat Thanvi, had already sold 4 editions by 1943. This was followed by The Sound of Bells and Other Tales [Sadā-yi Jars wa Dīgar Afsānay], quickly establishing herself as the prime name in this field. As the editor of The Sound of Bells and Other Tales [Sadā-yi Jars wa Dīgar Afsānay] says: “Mrs. Abdul Qadir has become very well-known in the world of literature because of her terrifying stories”. Her writing was interrupted however by the Second World War, as all three of her sons and one of her daughters joined the army, and the eldest daughter got married, and Qadir was gripped by grief and loneliness, restricting her writing to correspondence with her children. With the end of the war, however, Qadir resumed her writing and published her third short story collection, The Nun [Rāhibah]. Much later, Qadir wrote and published her only novel, Takht Bagh.

Qadir’s work is precisely situated at the intersection of the real and the unreal that ‘Taj’ charts out in his preface, something that is captured in the term māfauq al-fitrat or roughly, the “supernatural”. I have elsewhere looked at the complications that this term presents for writing the history of prose genres in Urdu literature and the new levels of experience that it offered to Urdu readers beyond what was already available in the market.³ However, here I want to focus on another important catch-all term haibat and its popularization in the Urdu literary sphere (almost all the titles above have haibatnāk in them!). The word haibat originally from Arabic, connotes a complex set of affective triggers, and most closely corresponds to the idea of “sublime” and the “awful” in English and European Romanticism. Haibat is a response to something that is impressive and terrible in its beauty or proportion, something that excites the mind in a dubious mix of negative and positive feelings, where one can quickly crossover from one dangerous terrain to another. Therefore, while we may categorize Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s fiction as “horror” for the sake of a convenience, it is this fine line of encountering the awful that more closely describes the vivid worlds she creates.

This is perhaps why Urdu literary critics and reviewers described Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s short stories as unprecedentedly new. For instance, Shaukat Thanvi explains his surprise when he found out that Qadir’s short story “Rākshash” [Monster] was originally written in Urdu “And then the plot is so great that even though it is an original short story, it seems to be the translation of a western masterpiece” The surprise is not just about the quality, but also about themes, which were unprecedented in Urdu. Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz for example compares Qadir’s “style of writing” to Edgar Allan Poe, a comparison that makes complete sense given themes of loneliness, alienation, the morbid (to use Amna’s word) and the non-human- or to use Begum Shahnawaz’s term the emphasis on “the mind-boggling” [muhayyir al-’uqūl]. In fact, it is shocking that with all the recent discussions on networks of world literature and Urdu’s place in it, Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s work and its resonances with non-South Asian horror and sensational fictions hasn’t been given its due.

Most of Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s stories play with this idea of terrible beauty. In this sense, landscape and atmospheric ethos are key in her short stories. “Shagūfah”, for example, takes place in the pristine mountains and vales of Amarnath. “Sudden Calamity” [Balā-yi Nāgahan] similarly plays out in the twists and turns of impregnable valleys of Kafiristan (now Nooristan). In both cases, the geographies of both these places in very real terms triggers and moves the plot and is a major cause for the precipitation of the events as they transpire. In fact, every story by Mrs. Abdul Qadir takes place in some scenic landscapes across India, whether it is rural Kashmir in “The Tutor’s Secret” [Mu’allim kā Rāz] and “Lāshoñ Kā Shahr” [City of Corpses], or the Punjabi countryside in “Monster” [Rakshash] or the hills of Meghalaya in “The Skull” [Kāsa-yi Sar]. As one can tell, these landscapes are depopulated, rural and in their isolation, highly animated with non-human life forms. In several of these stories, protagonists from urban settings encounter the terrible in this rural isolation which draws them into a world of enchantment or ‘tilism’. A good example is in “Sudden Calamity” where Haider who works as a trader of timber lands up in Kafiristan but is so taken in by Jawan Bakht and his mysterious tribe and most interestingly, the location of his secret valley that he agrees to convert to his tribe so that he can acquire the secretive, heavily guarded route to the valley which is only revealed to those who belong to the tribe. Frequently then, Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s stories are about travelers who do not or cannot return from a world of enchantment, spells, secrets, and devastatingly terrible beauty.

In her invaluable interview for Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi’s edited volume, Delicate Impressions [Nuqūsh-i Latīf], Mrs. Abdul Qadir attributes a central role to landscapes, ruins, old buildings, and pastures. In response to the question about whether she considers plot or character more important in short-story writing, she says: “The plot of my stories form themselves on listening to the stories of ruins in the language of ruins”. Similarly, when asked about things she has actively done in order to acquire her present style of writing, she again invokes ruins: “I simply pen down those inspirations which I experience while sitting in broken ruins and old monuments”. Again, when questioned about the future of her writing, she says: “My stories are born in desolate temples and old tombs, and then intensify in the arms of regions which would make heaven’s gardens jealous and in heaven-like valleys- and because of this, they are itinerants and what do itinerants have to do with the future and programs”. Qadir’s rather self-dramatizing aside, her stories are then moved by a visceral, immersive experience of historical ruins and natural landscapes, as opposed to attention to realistic descriptions of places.

While the term ‘haibat’ on the one hand is governed by these landscapes which are its primary motor, it is as importantly hinged on a subjectivity that is precisely open and malleable to feel the movements of these landscapes. In this sense, Mrs. Abdul Qadir is truly a writer of Gothic fiction, and in her worlds, terribly beautiful landscapes and terribly beautiful women collide with very sensitive, lachrymose, and melancholic men. A subject in mourning is another standard feature of Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s fiction- the lead character has either already experienced some great loss or pain, or his experience of “haibat” produces in him grief akin almost to sickness. Thus, this is a world of languishing souls, withering bodies and highly sensate experiences of loss or grief to the point that some stories often blur the line between encounters of horror and those of psychological terror. The highly suggestive open-ended conclusion of “Sudden Calamity” is a case in point. The protagonist Haider tells the narrator that after his (accidental) betrayal of Jawan Bakht, it is prophesied that he will be killed by a tiger. The claim seems far-fetched until the moment that the narrator’s son jokingly draws a tiger on a wall in Haider’s house- the next day, the tiger drawn on the wall is nowhere to be seen, and Haider has been mauled to death by what could possibly have been a tiger. Already by this time, Haider has been wasting away and has become a goshah nashīn– a recluse, again a characteristic shared by almost all male protagonists across Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s stories. What are we to conclude then- was Haider killed by a real tiger or a tiger of his imagination and guilt, which finally caught up with him? A similar play on guilt plays out in “The Tutor’s Secret”, where Husnat is withering away after having accidentally killed a snake who can transform into a man. “The Skull” offers a wonderful example, where Khalil reaches the terribly beautiful hills of Meghalaya after experiencing the loss of his mother, and ends up being too easily drawn into contemplation of death amid the melancholic atmosphere of the Khasi Hills. Are these then real demons or demons produced out of guilt and/or encounters with the absolute uncanny? Mrs. Abdul Qadir’s short stories continuously blur the lines between the psychological and the supernatural, which is another reason why perhaps the ascription of the term “horror” doesn’t do full justice to her work.

I have discussed in detail in my other essay how Qadir’s fiction went against several other more dominant tendencies in Urdu fiction, such as reformism and realist writing, and in this sense represents a very unique and interesting chapter from the annals of Urdu literature. However, here in conclusion, I would point out how important Mrs. Abdul Qadir is for the category of world literature itself. Qadir’s short stories, as we have seen above, represent ways to understand reality and literature that resemble global tendencies such as the gothic, the romantic and of course, horror. In this sense, Qadir’s short stories represent a melange of literary styles and registers that are as exciting as they are new. They range from romantic and gothic tendencies on the one hand (like Poe), to bodily horror (akin to Mary Shelley, particularly her story “Shagūfah” with its plot about an experiment to resurrect the dead gone horribly wrong) to tales of life-consuming and devastating love from a poetic tradition closer home, as well as her tale within a tale within a tale narrative structure which reminds one of oral tradition. In addition to that, Qadir’s stories set in uniquely South Asian geographies thus represent a global transformation in the genres of gothic fiction and horror that pushed its boundaries beyond England and Europe, and for allowing her diverse readers to experience more worlds than one in her stories. Qadir’s work however are only the tip of the iceberg- only if we were to move beyond the somewhat narrow canon of “modern” Urdu literature (often thought of as the PWA), could we really uncover the many ways in which Urdu has been a part of the diverse global traffic of books.