The Novel

by Steven Moore

  A quieter talent is on display in the valedictory Valeh and Hadijeh (1750), which bids a fond farewell to the glories of Persian literature amidst tumultuous changes in Iran. A writer named Shams al-Din Faqir (d. 1769) was living in India when a fellow Persian exile, Ali Quli Khan Valeh (1712–56), asked him to write up the story of his tragic love for his first cousin, Hadijeh Sultan. Faqir tells us he had been yearning for a virgin topic to play with—“Oh, for an unpierced pearl of fancy; oh for a story yet untold”113—and welcomes Valeh’s request for a modern romance, not one like those of Gurgani, Ferdowsi, or Nizami: “Like last year’s almanack is the story of Ves and Raaman, the fire of Ferhod, the love of Majnun. Why talk of them, why sell old merchandise?” (24). Instead of setting his tale in the vague past, Faqir tells his story in the historic present: Valeh and Hadijeh were living in the Persian capital of Isfahan when an Afghan robber-chieftain named Mahmud captured the city in 1722. Though the cousins had been raised together and intended to marry, Hadijeh is forced to marry an ugly Persian turncoat favored by Mahmud. How ugly? “His face was like the sole of a camel’s foot, his body crooked as a scorpion, his form and gait were like a frog’s, his speech was like the barking of a cur, his teeth were like crooked spikes of iron, his lips were like a camel’s, and his breath smelt of rottenness” (39). Because they’re cousins, V & H can still keep company after her marriage, so they chastely share their misery. But Valeh starts to go a little crazy—he steals a pair of her shoes to fetishize, and then kidnaps her dog as a surrogate—and following further upheavals in Iran—the Afghans were driven out but there were further invasions by the Turks and Russians, a dictatorship under Nadir Shah, and decades of civil war for the rest of the century—Valeh decides to go into exile. After wandering in the desert like Majnun, he boards a ship for India. Fourteen years later, he receives a letter from Hadijeh, which is even dated (ah 1160; i.e., 1747), chastising him for his long silence and reaffirming her love. In a transport, Valeh writes back, praising her as his god, swearing he wrote a hundred letters during that time (postal service between India and Iran must have been really bad), and then reunites with her in a vision. This is the story Faqir wrote in 1750; Valeh then added some poetic commentary in the margins of the manuscript and pasted in fragments from Hadijeh’s letters, and when he died six years later the novel was sent to Hadijeh, in whose family it remained until our Persian translator acquired it.114

  The story of children raised together, destined for marriage but separated by cruel fate, is a traditional one, so the contrast between this romantic topos and its realistic, politicized setting must have struck the first Persian readers as unusual. Hadijeh is described with the same metaphors as earlier Persian heroines—she is as beautiful as “a moon of fourteen days,” etc.—and Valeh self-consciously follows in Majnun’s mad footsteps; the effect is like a contemporary novel featuring an aristocratic couple playing at Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming. And reading Valeh’s poetic comments on the story has a curiously avant-garde feeling, like any number of modernist novels in which characters step outside of the narrative frame and comment on the story. While the author claims the story of Valeh and Hadijeh is utterly realistic—in the final chapter Faqir insists “their love-sorrow is no fancied tale, for I have seen it with my eyes” (117)—it can also be read, as the translators encourage in their notes, as yet another Sufi allegory of the union of the wandering soul with the divine. Or it can be read as a mockery of Islam: Valeh not only refers often to Hadijeh as his idol (a Persian cliché, but half the Quran criticizes idolatry) and claims that she is his Kaaba, his Mecca: he also gives her dog the name “Friend of the Friendless,” which the shocked translators annotate thus: “One of the names of God which the faithful are forbidden in the Koran (vii. 179) to apply to any but God. Here Valeh applies the sacred name to the dog, which is regarded as unclean” (128 n33). How Faqir escaped beheading for that fierce blasphemy, I don’t know. In his rapturous letter to Hadijeh near the end, Valeh adds in a note: “may I be an unbeliever in the religion of the enlightened, if there be a god save Hadijeh alone. . . . when an angel bade me cry on God’s name, I cried ‘Lady God.’ ‘Oh Lady God,’ and again ‘Lady God’ ” (103). A Sufi would insist that Hadijeh and Allah have fused into one, but there are enough unorthodox sentiments to suggest kind Hadijeh has displaced, not joined, the stern Islamic god. Faqir does end his novella by addressing Allah to explain that “in all I write I write but of thee” (118), but whether he’s sincere or providing cover for his iconoclastic views is hard to say. In time of war, some write in code, and in its updating of classic Persian romance in a modern setting, Valeh and Hadijeh feels like both a nostalgic rearguard action and an avant-garde foray, not a bad achievement in any era.

  INDIAN FICTION

  The 17th and 18th centuries were a fallow period for the Indian novel, which is especially disappointing after its stunning achievements in the Middle Ages and the innovations of Pingali Suranna at the end of the 16th century, which should have revitalized it. An anonymous Tamil writer of the 17th century produced the Madanakamarajankadai, evocatively if not accurately translated as The Dravidian Nights Entertainments, but this is merely an old-fashioned frame-novel. Prince Madanakamaraja of Mahendrapuri falls in love with two women depicted in a painting. His minister locates the two ladies, and tells them a dozen adventure stories about princes before he marries one to his prince and keeps the other for himself. Nothing new here. Sometime during the first half of the 18th century, a superbly educated young man named Viśveśvara wrote an imitation of the paronomastic, metaphor-mad novels of Subandhu and Bana written over a thousand years earlier. Entitled Mandāramañjarī, it concerns a prince named Citrabhanu and how he came to glimpse for the first time the girl of the title; but it is merely a series of descriptive tableaux generating endless similes drawn from the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of Hindu philosophy, grammar, and myth. It’s obviously a linguistically complex work, but the only English translation is atrocious, so it’s difficult to say whether Mandāramañjarī is an homage or a parody of the 7th-century Sanskrit novel, but either way it adds nothing new to the genre.

  And there’s the rather pathetic, anachronistic Citracampu by Baneśvara Vidyalankara (1744), which celebrates an ideal king in the person of a maharaja of Vardhamana named Citrasena. The novel opens with the king observing all the sacred rites and displaying the qualities of the kings in India’s ancient myths and epics. After hearing of the approach of a rival king, Citrasena and his army ride out to prepare for battle on the Bengal plains. Then he has a long dream, occupying the bulk of the short novel, in which he is escorted by a goddess named Prema-Bhakti on a tour of India’s holy sites, where they perform the appropriate rites and discuss the finer points of Vaisnavite Vedantism.115 The goddess gives Citrasena her blessing and the king wakes in the morning to the sound of music. The devout king first performs the morning rituals and then relates his dream to his advisors, who congratulate him on his good fortune.116 India in 1744 was a mess, torn apart by centuries of warfare, overrun by European traders, and only decades away from the British takeover. Instead of confronting these realities, Baneśvara (like Viśveśvara) retreated into a dream of old India, the India of the classic epics, a land of holy sites and rigorous religious devotion. Instead of building on Suranna’s innovations, or even incorporating elements from the Persian adventure novels popular in India at the time, he too went back to the novels of Bana and Dandin for inspiration. The result is old-fashioned, reactionary, irrelevant, and naïve. (Citrasena died two years after this battle, not having accomplished much of anything.) Since I haven’t read the novel, I shouldn’t judge it so harshly, but Subandhu’s translator Louis Gray, who did read it, shrugs it off: “it offers but little of interest” (42).

  Muslim writers in India, in a similar rearguard action, adapted and translated old Arabian and Persian fictions into Urdu, the language of the Islamic community, though with better results. For example, Mir Amman of Delhi
took an old frame-tale narrative entitled Qissa Chahar Darvesh—which he attributed to the Sufi poet Amir Khusro (c. 1253–1325) but which probably originated later in Turkey—and reworked it into A Tale of Four Dervishes (Bagh o Bhahar [literally, Garden and Spring], 1803).117 Stripping from it the verbal flourishes of its earlier Persian and Urdu incarnations, giving it an elegant, mathematical structure, Mir Amman transformed this cautionary tale about the disappointment of love into a fascinating study in epistemology, dramatizing the uncertainty of knowledge and the deceptiveness of appearances in a series of baffling and complex tales within tales. “I was so bewildered at what was going on around me that nothing he said made any sense,” a character exclaims during one episode (112), speaking for the reader at many points in the novel. While Mir Amman keeps his readers on the edge of their seats, his characters succumb to existential despair at the incomprehensibility of the world and the unreliability of anything other than the inscrutable will of Allah.

  After reaching the age of 40 without producing a son, Azad Bakht, the king of Turkey, is tempted to abdicate and become a religious recluse, and goes one night to a cemetery to meditate. There he spies four dervishes, each of whom has been directed there by a veiled rider in green clothes with the promise their hearts’ desires will be granted. (This is Khizr, a legendary Islamic figure who aids lost travelers.) Concealing himself, Azad Bakht listens as the first dervish, formerly a merchant from Yemen, tells how he once loved and lost a mysterious princess of Damascus. The second, a Persian prince, tells us a similar tale about a princess of Basra. The king then returns to his palace and has the dervishes brought to him, and the next day narrates a long, four-part story about a merchant of Nishapur who kept his brothers in cages while his dog wore a jewel-encrusted collar. (This so outraged the king’s sense of propriety that he almost killed the vizier who told him this until, years later, he learned there were excellent reasons for this inversion.) Azad Bakht then asks the third and fourth dervishes to tell their exotic sob stories, at the conclusion of which the king learns one of his neglected consorts has given birth to his son, which delights the king even though (for reasons too complex to explain) he has to share the baby with the king of the djinn, who compensates him by restoring to the four dervishes their lost loves.

  In the unsettling world of this short novel, nothing is what it seems, and no one can be trusted (especially relatives and authority figures). A man might be a woman in disguise (and vice versa), strangers are kinder than brothers, a beautiful girl turns out to be a statue, and an empty landscape reveals an army of djinn after a little “solomon-collyrium” is rubbed on the eyes. Although the novel is not factually realistic—the geography is fanciful, and all nationalities follow Urdu manners and customs—it is psychologically realistic. Like Captain Delano in Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” the king and each of the dervishes seems traumatized by the realization that benign appearances can conceal malign evil, which the happy ending doesn’t allay. Mir Amman concludes the novel with the feeble hope his god will “grant the wishes of all those who are in despair” (154), and what little the author tells us about himself in the prologue suggests he was well acquainted with despair.118 Like all authors, he plays god in his novel: he is the veiled rider in green who promises happiness, he’s the king of the djinn who restores lost loves, and he’s the one who rubs solomon-collyrium in our eyes so that we may behold his exotic tale of romance and intrigue, perhaps a brief respite from our own moments of despair.

  There’s no epistemological uncertainty or despair in the most popular and influential Urdu novel of this era. The Adventures of Amir Hamza (Dastan-e Amir Hamza) originated in Arabia perhaps as early as the 11th century, grew over the centuries after it was taken over by honey-tongued Persian storytellers (who called it the Hamzanama) and expanded further when Iranian expatriates took it to India in the 16th century, incorporating local legends and folktales along the way, and shaping it into a novel. Urdu translations followed—including a lackluster version in 1801 by one of Mir Amman’s colleagues at Fort William College—and in 1855 the long-handled Navab Mirza Aman Ali Khan Bahadur Ghalib Lakhnavi published what he called a translation, apparently a compilation of various Persian and Urdu versions. Lakhnavi’s edition was reprinted in 1871 by Abdullah Bilgrami, who touched it up with some recent poetry and ornate prose flourishes. But this enhanced edition is not substantially different from the version(s) circulating at the end of the 18th century, so that and its unabashedly premodern nature make it a suitable conclusion for this chapter.

  When Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s superb English translation of the Lakhnavi/Bilgrami version appeared in the fall of 2007, most reviewers called it an epic, and name-checked the Iliad and Odyssey, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, Beowulf and The Song of Roland, Le Mort d’Arthur and Orlando furioso. While flattering, this is wrong. The Adventures of Amir Hamsa lacks both the gravitas of an epic and its function as the foundational myth of a nation, not to mention the artistry of those earlier literary epics. ’Twould be unseemly to admit into their august company a work with passages like this:

  Aadi presently felt an overpowering urge to empty his bowels, since he in his bovine greed had eaten several maunds [= 82 lbs.] of fruit. He took himself to the royal toilet chamber and began attending to nature’s call. The ill-starred king of Egypt had hid in the toilet for some reason, and he was soon sunk up to his head in Aadi’s ordure. Realizing that he would have no refuge there, he caught hold of Aadi’s testicles and hung from them for dear life. Feeling the terrible pain in his balls, Aadi jumped up and ran out of the chamber without washing himself, dragging the king of Egypt along with him. He ran raising a great hue and cry, shouting, “Terrible is the effect of this city’s air and water that it causes a man to excrete men!”119

  The Adventures of Amir Hamza is an epic only in the modern sense of something big and bold, like a Hollywood extravaganza or a fantasy trilogy. Better to think of it as a communal adventure novel, closer to the many-authored Oriental bazaar of The Arabian Nights (as a few other reviewers noted) than to a true epic, or—to be culture-specific—as the comic sidekick to the noble Persian epic Shahnameh (which is an authentic epic and had a huge influence on Hamza). But this downgrade takes nothing away from its achievement. This entertaining novel doesn’t celebrate a nation; it celebrates the imagination, glorifying the artist’s ability to create a world that rivals, if not exceeds, the real one. The epic hero of this novel is not Amir Hamza but “the gazetteers of miscellanies, tale-bearers of varied annals, the enlightened in the ethereal realms of legend writing, and reckoners of the subtle issues of eloquence [who] gallop the noble steed of the pen through the field of composition, and spur on the delightful tale” (59).

  The novel glorifies the exploits of one of Muhammad’s uncles, Hamza bin Abdul Muttalib (569?–625), a warrior and huntsman who resisted his nephew’s newfangled religion at first but later converted. But his name and manner of death are the only historical aspects of the tale; it is merrily unmoored from history and abounds in anachronisms, most glaringly regarding the existence of Islam decades before Muhammad dreamed it up. The novel begins a generation before Hamza’s birth with an elaborate, 60-page prologue predicting the birth of an Arabian hero who will some day rescue the Persian king Naushervan from his enemies.120 After Hamza’s birth in Mecca, the novel alternates between there and the capital of Iran, Ctesiphon (now a ruined city 20 miles southwest of Baghdad), until he comes of age, then follows him on various adventures from India to Greece. The longest section takes place in the magical land of Qaf, where for 18 years he fights giant demons called devs and gets engaged to several peris (beautiful wingéd fairies), earning him the Wrestlemaniac moniker “the Quake of Qaf.” Like all romantic protagonistsin the Middle East, he accumulates many wives and generates many sons during the course of his adventures, most of which involve slaughtering countless infidels. He finally suffers a gruesome death at the hands of a woman, who then rips him open and devours his heart,
but who escapes punishment by converting to Islam.121

  Although nominally about Hamza, much of the novel’s appeal comes from its supporting cast. You’ve already met Aadi Madi-Karib, a hulking ex-bandit whose gargantuan appetite provides many laughs (and some shocks: several times he rapes young girls, which results in their death). Hamza befriends several warrior-kings from other lands, who convert to Islam and help with his ethnic cleansing of unbelievers (who are considered almost subhuman in this novel). Two of Naushervan’s viziers, the wise Buzurjmehr and the evil Bakhtak, connive most of the political intrigues in the novel. But the real star of the show is Hamza’s resourceful companion Amar Ayyar, “the Father of Racers, the Lord of Mischief-mongers of the World, the King of Dagger-Throwing Tricksters” (135), beloved by the narrators (who regularly lavish praise upon him) and whose antics are often hilarious. Hamza himself is so predictably noble and valorous that the narrators realized they needed a large, colorful supporting cast to keep their story lively: the list of characters at the back of Farooqi’s translation occupies 14 pages. The narrators overdo it in the second half, introducing too many indistinguishable evil devs and human giants, but the huge cast insures a parade of fresh faces.