By Umair Khan

Dawn , Jun 02, 2014

Author and translator Hameed Razi has recently published a new travelogue in Punjabi, Beijing Fer Milan Ge. Razi, who won the Masood Khaddarposh Trust award for his travelogue, Pindi taun Hiroshima Tak, has also written Punjabi short stories and translated the writings of Naguib Mahfouz and Milan Kundera. His travel writings are a crafty description of his perspective on a journey to China and Japan for professional training courses. The reader is spared technical details of the courses and instead provided with insightful observations of the writer about these countries, their people, museums, markets, educational institutes, etc.

These travelogues seem very close to reality which is not sacrificed at the altar of fiction. There is no wishful thinking of the writer where he transforms from a real-life character into something like a fairy-tale hero who is roaming around in exotic lands to steal the hearts of gorgeous women. Neither are these travelogues the musings of a young man ready to fall in love. Instead, they represent the observations of a mature person. They also underline the complex web of interactions among people of various nationalities who are participating in the same training courses.

The participants in these courses are from developing countries, most of which were under colonial rule for some time in history. There appear to be a lot of common problems that citizens of these countries face, such as low rate of economic growth, political instability, lack of professional education and the clutches of global financial institutions. These countries, although culturally diverse, prove to be quite similar in their politico-economic problems.

The narrative mode employed by Razi in these travelogues is influenced by the stream of consciousness style used by various 20th century literary writers in order to express their feelings and thought processes through a kind of interior monologue. While describing his observations, Razi keeps invoking his memories of past experiences to further clarify what he is seeing in the countries he is visiting. These are not only descriptions of external phenomena observed by the author during his travels but also his subjective impressions and opinions. In a way, the reader not only gets information about China and Japan but also gets to know the person who is narrating his experiences. Hence, in these travelogues, the author is very much “alive.”
The chapter on Hiroshima in Pindi taun Hiroshima Tak is a great piece of writing on the horrors and human losses of the nuclear bomb. We learns about this most tragic event through the callous narrative of historians who tend to reduce its trauma to statistics about lives lost and the reasoning behind the Truman administration’s use of the bomb. Seeing it through the eyes of a sensitive artist helps us connect emotionally with the victims of this horrible episode of human history. The sentimental appeal of the text brings forth the inner pacifist inherent in every reader.

These expertly woven storylines are also witty and occasionally funny. There have only been a few experiments of writing travelogues in Punjabi and Razi has done it exceptionally. With the rise of extremism in Pakistan, there is a greater need than ever to shift our national discourse from exclusivity to inclusivity that is tolerant of diverse cultural and linguistic phenomena. Our linguistic diversity has been considered a political threat. It is time we start celebrating it.