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Stories to Tell: Rakhshnada Jalil tells the motivation behind the collection

By Anjana Rajan
Updated Friday, 09 September 2011 16:09:28 - IST (UTC +5:30)

A good storyteller is unlikely to be short of friends, or at least of a group of people gathered curiously around. But if the story told is so distressing as to repel its listeners, then it is up to the narrator to find a way to keep them hooked. Sometimes, try as we might to get away from the moment of recounting, the story itself lodges in our minds and remains a troublesome memory. In Rakhshanda Jalil's “Release and other stories” (HarperCollins) that recently hit the market, we find a range of storytellers: those who attract an eager audience, those whose words send shivers down the spine, and others who are in the confessional mode. But whatever the fictional listeners may feel, it is the reaction of her readers that is uppermost in the mind of the author.
Rakhshanda, a known translator from Urdu and Hindi, an editor and copyeditor as well as author and co-author of a number of non-fiction titles, admits to being completely “nervous” about the reaction to her debut collection of short stories. “The fact of the matter is I'm terrified at the reception they'll get,” she says. “Fiction is close to the skin — not autobiographical, but close to the skin.”
The stories, points out Rakhshanda, currently Senior Associate Fellow and Associate Editor, Social Change (the journal of the Council for Social Development), are mostly about Indian Muslims. Rakhshanda is neither talking here of the “good friend or the villain's sidekick or the good cop” made famous by Hindi cinema, nor of the “hijab wearing, gulab throwing” caricatures found in Bollywood's Muslim socials. “It's been a lifelong concern to bust the stereotype,” she says, adding it has always disturbed her that millions of people across India are assumed to be “cut from the same cloth.”
But while it worries her that “they are all viewed with one monochromatic lens,” she also emphasises that her primary aim here is telling stories and not putting across a social message. “It's not a command performance,” she clarifies, “but after I'd written a few stories it occurred to me I was writing about people in the mainstream.” And people in the mainstream belong to different communities. “Essentially, these are stories of middle class India,” she says. Strangely for a country where diversity is the norm, the Muslim segment of this middle class “never gets noticed.”
This segment has urban concerns and English education. Their sedate lives revolve around white-collar jobs, expensive vacations, individual ambitions and preserving their reputation in society. “Their very ordinariness is interesting for me,” says the author.
Writing stories about Indians in India, no matter how anglicised they may be, requires a particular command of the English language. Indian writers in English sometimes write immaculate English, finding the right word and turn of phrase for every situation without sounding like essayists. Others sprinkle their prose with the mother tongue of their protagonists, and even treat their English syntax with an Indian language sensibility. “I would say I belong to the latter category,” says Rakhshanda. “I have a very idiosyncratic way of constructing my sentences.”
The first story in the collection has an Indian feel. Its third-person narrator has a conversational and intimate rather than a distant and descriptive tone. “It was in the qissa tradition,” affirms Rakhshanda. Her long innings as a translator and her recently submitted PhD thesis (“late in life”) on the Progressive Writers' Movement all helped her develop as a writer. “I was using Urdu texts to build my stories. So, in a sense, these three-four years have been a good training for me to use the resources of another language to tell a story in another language that is in a sense alien,” she says. “My own parameters to begin with would have been O. Henry or Maupassant or Somerset Maugham. So it's fun how one can use that sensibility and marry it with this acquired sensibility.”
Founder of Hindustani Awaz, an organisation that aims to popularise Hindi-Urdu literature and the culture of syncretism known as the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, Rakhshanda says she may, “having tasted blood,” come out with more works of fiction in the future. (Curtsy: The Hindu)
(Rakshanda Jalil in New Delhi Photo by Rajeev Bhatt)

Tags: Anjana Rajan Rakhshanda Jaleel, Stories

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