'There's nothing Urduish about Urdu. Urdu is about the world the writer is living in': Rakhshanda Jalil

Editor and translator Rakhshanda Jalil's new anthology begins with a story by one of the four pillars of the modern Urdu short story: Krishan Chander (right). (Images courtesy Rakhshanda Jalil and via India Post / Wikimedia Commons)

Supreme Court Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia ruled on a peculiar case earlier this year. A former municipal council employee in Patur, in Akola district of Maharashtra, had objected to a new signboard on the municipal office building. The reason for her complaint: the signboard had information in Urdu letters in addition to the Marathi writing on top. Delivering his judgment in the Varshatai W/o Sanjay Bagade vs State of Maharashtra case on April 15, Justice Dhulia had said: "Before us is a fellow citizen who has taken great pains to take this matter twice to the High Court and then twice again before this Court. What the appellant thinks may also be the thinking of many of our fellow citizens. These need to be addressed. (17.) Let our concepts be clear. Language is not religion. Language does not even represent religion. Language belongs to a community, to a region, to people; and not to a religion. (18.) Language is culture. Language is the yardstick to measure the civilizational march of a community and its people. So is the case of Urdu, which is the finest specimen of ganga-jamuni tahzeeb, or the Hindustani tahzeeb, which is the composite cultural ethos of the plains of northern and central India. But before language became a tool for learning, its earliest and primary purpose will always remain communication."

A similar attempt to break the unfortunate and unfounded equivalence of religion with language is also at the heart of a new anthology of Urdu stories, selected and translated by Rakhshanda Jalil.

Titled 'Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?', the book is a collection of 16 stories by 16 older and established non-Muslim writers of the modern Urdu short story. The book is a kind of sampling menu with by noted writers like Krishan Chander, Mahindar Nath, Sarla Devi, Gulzar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Mahindar Kapur Mehtab, Ramanand Sagar, Renu Behl, Devendra Satyarthi and Deepak Bundi, among others.

Rajinder Singh Bedi. (Image source: Amarjit Chandan Archive via Wikimedia Commons)

Over a phone call, Jalil explained that the subtitle - Stories by Non-Muslim Urdu Writers - made her cringe, but was necessary to make the point that Urdu was never exclusive to Muslims, just as Hindavi or Hindi was never just the language of Hindus or Punjabi of Sikhs, etc. "This is not a new debate: For 100 years this thing has been going on that Urdu was the language of Muslims. In the early 1900s, this was already a debate, and it's only gained a ferocity and a toxicity in recent times. Munshi Premchand switched from being an Urdu writer to being a Hindi writer," she said.

Jalil has, of course, previously edited anthologies like 'Urdu: The Best Stories of Our Times (2023) and 'Neither Night Nor Day: 13 Stories by Women Writers from Pakistan' (2007). But the selection here was informed by a different kind of mission: to challenge widespread misinformation that characterizes Urdu as the language of Muslims.

Looking at the writers Jalil picked for the book, though, it seems that some of the damage has already been done - and perhaps good, young - less-known - non-Muslim short story writers are in short supply currently. As it stands, of the 16 writers whose works appear in the book - no writer is repeated - 14 were born pre-Independence. Barring Renu Behl and Sarla Devi, the writers are all men. And most of them trace their origins back to undivided Punjab. Exceptions include Deepak Budki, who was born in Kashmir. Krishan Chander was born in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, and his younger brother Mahindar Nath and sister Sarla Devi in Wazirabad, now in Pakistan - but of course they were a Punjabi family from Gujranwala in undivided Punjab. Two of the writers represented in this collection, for example - Krishan Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi - are already hailed as being among the four pillars of modern Urdu short fiction, along with Saadat Hassan Manto and Ismat Chughtai. "The bulk of the good writing, frankly, was happening then... I'm able to find more contemporary Urdu non-Muslim poets, frankly, than prose writers," Jalil offered.

Having said that, there's much to love about these writers and these stories themselves. Many of these writers wrote in Punjabi or Hindi as well as Urdu. In all of their writings, there's a sense of the biggest issues and events of their times being crystallized in the short format. But simultaneously, there's also a timelessness. A resonance with the contemporary moment - the concerns in these stories are also among the major concerns of our times.

The collection opens with a story by greatest-of-all-time Hindi and Urdu short story writer Krishan Chander (Rajinder Singh Bedi's story gets the second spot) and ends with a hard-hitting piece by Gulzar. Both have a contemporary resonance, even decades after they were first published.

Chander's story, 'The Generous One', is about a big burly fellow named Daani who eschews a life of crime and riches to work in an Iranian cafe where his meals are free. He has battled hunger all his life, and his only desire is to eat to his heart's content every day. Rather unexpectedly, he finds a kindred spirit in a girl who narrowly escapes being sold off by her brother. Hunger has also been a driving force in her life. After he meets this girl, Daani's desires morph and grow in different directions. But if Daani and the girl are brought together by their shared experience of hunger, they are also torn asunder by an experience that is peculiar to their material circumstances. By the time the story ends, it's hard to tell madness and dreams apart. Among the stalwarts of the Progressive Writers Movement in Hindi and Urdu, Krishan Chander wrote 'Daani' roughly 50 years ago. Yet, the story is deeply moving even in 2025.

The final story by Gulzar is about an uneasy moment of coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in a locality during Dussehra / Muharram time, as the key protagonists try desperately - and unsuccessfully - to avoid a communal riot.

In a phone interview, Jalil explained what she was trying to do through this book, how she selected the writers and themes for this anthology, and what really is so Urdu about these stories. Edited excerpts:

The subtitle of the book clarifies that the 16 writers in this selection are non-Muslims Urdu writers. Just looking at the index, one can see that most of the 16 writers in this selection were born before 1947, whether it is Krishan Chander or Rajinder Singh Bedi or Devinder Satyarthi. Only Deepak Budki and Renu Behl were born after India gained Independence. And of course, Gulzar, who was born in 1937, continues to write today. Was there some struggle around picking more contemporary non-Muslim Urdu writers for this selection?

The bulk of the good writing, frankly, was happening then. In my introduction, I mentioned the others I was not able to include for various reasons. But as you are saying, if one is to go by chronology, then indeed almost all of them are writers born before 1947. Among the ones that I have not included, the most obvious name is Premchand. Then there's Upendranath Ashk, Fikr
Taunsvi whose real name was Ram Lal Bhatia, Kashmiri Lal Zakir, Prakash Pandit, Balraj Mainra... But again they were all older.

I'm able to find more contemporary Urdu non-Muslim poets than, frankly, prose writers. (Urdu) Poetry is still being written in large numbers by non-Muslims. I'm not able to find a commensurate number among prose writers, if one is to go by post partition. My criteria was not the partition or the age of the writers. My criteria was the concerns, the topics, the themes. Now that you point out to me, and of course it occurred to me as I was writing the introduction, that a great many from an older generation. But when I sat down to put together this collection, I was not looking at the age of the writers.

One more thing, this is not a new debate: For 100 years this thing has been going on that Urdu was the language of Muslims. In the early 1900s, this was already a debate, and it's only gained a ferocity and a toxicity in recent times... Premchand switched from being an Urdu writer to being a Hindi writer. He learned the Hindi script; initially, while he didn't know the script, somebody would come and write for him.

So, there has been a growing concern that who does Urdu belong to.

Some of us saw our grandparents reading the newspaper in Urdu. So, for us, there's first-hand experience of how Urdu is not linked to a particular religion. To mark 200 years of Urdu newspapers in India, CM Naim had written an article explaining how the earliest editors came from different faiths and different regions even.

Yes, the first editor was a Mr Harihar Dutta from Kolkata (in 1822 Dutta founded the paper Jam-i Jahan-Numa, which was edited in its earliest years by Munshi Sadasukh Lal). Two of the largest Urdu papers are owned by non-Muslims: Milap and Punjab Kesari, they have the largest circulation as of now.

You mentioned that a very important selection criteria for you were the themes. Could you elaborate on that? Krishen Chander's story on Daani, for example, is about people who're forced to sleep on the footpath. It has a certain contemporaneity to it, and a resonance beyond the Muslim experience. For us who're reading it in English translation, it could also have been written in any language. So, what were you looking for in terms of the themes?

Taken together, these are not stories certainly about Muslims, by Muslims, for Muslims. The impulse really was to bust this persistent stereotype that Urdu is about Muslims, that it is somehow yoked to Islam. Now the story about wells (Balraj Komal's Well is the 12th story in the collection) is a story about a man who likes to jump across wells because the tapwater has put an end to the need for wells. So wells are just lying about and a man in the city decides to start jumping across wells as a hobby, and he becomes a champion-jumper across all wells. There's another story - by Rajinder Singh Bedi - where a man is attracted to a woman, and initially, he just sees her as an attractive young woman. By the time the story ends, he sees her as a woman trying to raise a specially-abled child. So we see a movement from voyeurism to humanism in one story, you know. These concerns are wide-ranging and they are, if anything, drawing from society and the world we live in. Also these are not dated. Even Sarla Devi's story, which again addresses stereotypes about the other, about how people from one religion view another, these stereotypes have not gone away. Sarla Devi's story was very problematic for me personally... but it's there in black and white. She puts it down. But these stereotypes are still around. She wrote the story a long time ago, but things haven't changed for the better.

So if in one word I want to say what is it that I was looking for, then that's diversity. I was trying to say that there's a diverse range of concerns. Renu Behl is talking about female foeticide. Deepak Budki is talking about what happens to the homes and the material possessions of the Kashmiri Pundits when they have been forced to leave the Valley and go to the plains: first the lock is broken, then somebody enters, and it's steadily pillaged and eventually set on fire - like destroy all evidence. Gulzar talks about how festivals used to be an occasion for joy and now you look towards festivals with trepidation. And again, there is no dated quality to this because every year when Ram Navami or Ramzan or Muharram comes around, and there's talk of processions, there's also that feeling that: Oh my God, I hope there is no communal conflagration.

A follow-on question from this: What is so Urdu about these concerns? If the idea was to pick thematically stories that capture social realities and concerns, then there are any number of stories in other Indian languages that do that just as well. You mentioned how Munshi Premchand started writing in Urdu and then switched to Hindi. Also, many writers in this selection wrote in Punjabi as well as Urdu. Their concerns would not have changed. So, what is so Urdu about this collection?

That's the point. Whose language is it. And why do people have this stereotypical notion that Urdu is either the language of love and romance or the language of revolution? No, it isn't. It is the language of the world that the writer lives in. And that changing world could be Partition one day, it could be abducted women the next day, one day it could be female foeticide, another day it could be communal outrages, or it could be something as absurd as a man who wants to jump across wells. So by asking me what is so Urdu about it, actually you're answering it for me.

There's nothing Urduish about Urdu. Urdu is about the world the writer is living in - that is my thesis.

Image credit: Simon & Schuster.

For those of us who are reading these stories in English, are there any Urdu nuances or flavour that we are missing out on in the writing here?

Something is always loss... After 20-odd years as the translator, I work on the assumption that loss in the act of translation is inevitable, whether it's prose, it's poetry, what have you, reportage, memoir, anything. So I work on the assumption that loss is inevitable. But I also work on the assumption that were it not for translations, how the bereft we would be if we hadn't read world literature, we'd not read Maupassant, and we'd not read the social masters, and we'd not read the Greek classics like the Odyssey and the Iliad in translation. How bereft our world would have been, and how narrow? So cross-fertilization is essential.

You've got 16 writers in this collection. Are there specificities in their writing that we are not able to appreciate fully in translation. For example, Krishan Chander and Sarla Devi who were siblings but perhaps move slightly differently through the world because of their genders. Or even Sarla Devi and Renu Behl who were born decades apart? And they would each have their own writing styles, their quirks and preferences?

Yes, there's a huge difference, in that Renu Behl's Urdu is very inflected with Punjabi. She writes in the Urdu script, but there's a great deal of Punjabi words coming in. Some I've retained, some I haven't. But when you read it in the original, it is a very Punjabi-inflected Urdu. Sarla Devi's Urdu is very bol-chaal ki Urdu, of the everyday. Her brother - and she has two brothers in this collection, Mahender Nath and Krishan Chander - Mahinder Nath is also not very pedantic, it's bol-chaal ki Urdu. Krishan Chander - who is by far the finest craftsman, if you can say that, who doesn't have a day job - he's a writer, he earns his living by his writing and has had the time and the leisure to hone his craft. He uses words differently. Like a  great master craft. There is a difference in the vocabulary, in the crafting of the story.

I can't have a pavement dweller and a city person sounding the same, so I'm mindful of that in any text that I translate. Increasingly for me, the context is very important, so I will not have archaic or difficult words in the mouth of a beggar woman or a pavement dweller. And the person writing it - Krishan Chander - has also not put difficult words in their mouths.

Tell us about the literary history aspect as well. You've written about the Progressive Writers Movement in Urdu in the past - is there a continuity between that research and the current selection?

The Progressive Writers Movement, I studied in my PhD... I was very curious about the movement. People have looked at it in a tangential sort of way: They know there was a progressive movement in literature. But what was the glue that brought together diverse people to form a movement, one of the largest movements - we've not had anything (like that) in the literary world since. So my curiosity was the reason why I chose to do it like a PhD. And then, eventually, it came out as a book.

So, Krishan Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi are people I encountered there. The whole idea of the progressive movement was that literature should be a reflection of society and that it should be socially engaged or socially purposed. So you can't afford to say that, listen, I want to talk only about my hurts.

So the story like the person who jumps across the wells is a modernist story. It would not fit into the progressive movement. That is away from a larger engagement with society, and would be considered not in keeping with progressive ideas... So these are not like the stories I had looked at earlier, but as a writer, as a translator, you can't say "I'm not looking beyond my can". You can't paint yourself in a corner.

So I am curious about evolving literary trends. I am curious about new trends that came through cross-fertilization. Stream of consciousness was very big in the 1930s-40s, so how was the Indian writers using stream of consciousness for example? These are things that actually came to the Urdu story from the West. They came through writers who were the bilingual.

The interior monologue, the stream of consciousness technique, the one person having a flashback moment. So while Premchand was writing stories from the turn of the century, he in turn was also influenced by the Russian masters... the Urdu story itself was fairly new and many of these things came from cross-fertilisation.

Devendra Satyarthi is also said to have been influenced by the Russian masters, from the Soviets, is that right?

Yes, he was a very active member of the Progressive. While he later went into folk tales and collecting folk songs, in his early days he was a very active member of the Progressive Writers Movement, and an associate of Manto and the others. Manto has written a story about him as well.

Sathyarthi is a wonderful example of somebody who finds his own space, which is in the folk area, which is people's words transmitted through the generations. It could be in the form of folk tales, folk songs or just, you know, idioms. And he travelled the length and breadth of the country. He would spend a long time with forest dwellers, with the indigenous communities, gathering these stories.

You come with a background of scholarship in this area. The collection has an introduction in the beginning and brief writer bios at the end. In-between, the stories follow one after another without comment or footnotes of any kind. Tell us why you decided to not put any background information on the stories - when they were written, stylistic elements to notice, thematic engagements - and writers throughout the book.

I like to write long introductory essays where I give some sort of context. Not just to justify my own choices as an editor of that volume, but to talk about how these disparate people come together. You would think that Deepak Budki and Devender Satyarthi and a Rajinder Singh Bedi don't have a lot in common, but when you put them together between the covers of a book, this diversity that I keep coming back to, I think that comes out.

And, with anthologies, my sense is readers don't read them from in a chronological order from first to last page. I think readers dip into anthologies when it suits them, according to their leisure. So if you have multiplicity of voices and concerns, it actually helps. You can read a story, put it away, pick it up again, read another story. It's not a novel where you need to concentrate. It's not a novel with a narrative arc which you need to follow and concentrate on.

The subtitle of the book - Stories by Non-Muslim Urdu Writers... tell us about that.

I'm 62 years old. For somebody of my generation to use words like Muslim or Non-Muslim (was uncomfortable). I was told that 'Whose Urdu is it Anyway?' is enough. But I think we live in a time that demands from us to not just make a point, but to hammer it home, and not with a hammer, but with a sledgehammer or something bigger and stronger. So it was not easy for me to have a subtitle like this - it still makes me cringe, but I felt this is something I needed to say. This is a point that needed to be made. And by just saying whose or whose Urdu is it anyway, I wasn't entirely sure if the intent and purpose behind asking that question (was fulfilled). That is not a rhetorical question that I'm asking. It is a question which clearly has an element of community or religion behind it. Which is why that awkward, clumsy subtitle - something that I'm not comfortable with but I still have felt I have to use.

Why this selection in 2025?

Oh, there's no scientific point... Urdu is willing to be embraced by anybody who wishes to own it and say, listen, I'm interested, I'm done with translations, and I now want to read the script. Urdu makes no distinction. You spend thousands of rupees on a maths tutor for your kids, why can't you engage your tutor to come home and teach them Urdu? It's just a question of that little desire, that little extra willingness to put in that time to learn.