{"id":70949,"date":"2026-02-10T21:25:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T02:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/articles\/life-in-auto-fiction\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T17:17:45","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T22:17:45","slug":"life-in-auto-fiction","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/articles\/life-in-auto-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in auto-fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Moazzam Sheikh<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The News: Feb 21, 2010<\/em><\/p>\n

Bhubhul

\n By Farzand Ali

\n Publisher: Pakistan

\n Punjabi Adabi Board, Lahore

\n Pages: 348

\n Price: Rs 80<\/em><\/p>\n

A family friend once posted a video on Facebook: Kids butchering English nursery rhymes. “Punjabi” was implied at the beginning. This reviewer thought of Caliban’s tragicomic words: The red plague rid you \/For learning me your language!<\/p>\n

The fact that these children shouldn’t be made to suffer English when the emphasis should be on mother tongue does not enter our soft heads. Shamefully our feudal elite has kept us ignorant of our colonial history, our ability to understand our current misery is clipped, colonial rule is confused with other imperial experiments, distorting our self image. Tragic consequences: Punjabi is not taught and most Pakistani Punjabis deem it beneath them to read it, owing to inferiority complex, discontinuity with native literature, and incarcerated mentality.<\/p>\n

Aijaz Ahmed criticised Jameson over his thesis that all third world literature is national allegory, accusing western literary theorists of having almost no knowledge of non-European languages, thus relying solely on cosmopolitan writers in the West and making assumptions about literatures such as written in Malayalam. Aijaz has a point but he’s off. This reviewer feels Jameson’s thesis holds water: the third world literature has no choice but to pass through colonialism since it affects every aspect of life. Whether Ustad Daman drinks tea or Coca Cola, his drinking habits pass through colonial experience in Bhubhul, an ignored Punjabi novel, published in 1996.<\/p>\n

Farzand Ali’s novel is auto-fiction comprising two parts. One belongs to Gogi the narrator. The second part revolves around Ustad Daman, the people’s poet and explores our narrator’s intellectual development. The novel masterfully paints Gogi’s life among a family of landless farmers. In elegant prose:<\/p>\n

(All dwellings burn down when one catches fire. In the small village of ours lived only raheks. All raheks had built huts . . . Also, raheks weren’t really living but paying penance.All the huts stood connected to each other. Here a wall was shared, there a covering. No one could claim a solid or not-so-solid a roof. We called a ceiling made with straw dug into midgety earthen walls our lean-to. None of the raheks owned a piece of land of their own.)<\/p>\n

Without clichés the author depicts poverty, power dynamics, friends, loves, daring young girls, hunger. One of interesting characters is Chacha Landu who falls in love with a married woman Hoshaan, who leaves her kids and husband behind, lives with Landu, then returns, devastating him. The novel often challenges our borrowed Victorian notions:<\/p>\n

(She had a strong and attractive body.\"\"<\/p>\n

Her husband’s body appeared to be weak, lacking in muscles.<\/p>\n

In response to Naji’s addressing me as “little one,” I asked, “Bhabhi, do I look little to you?”<\/p>\n

“You look many things to me,” she smiled without inhibition.)<\/p>\n

Found in these lines is the lack of inhibition a la Heer and celebration of sexual feelings, eroded by convent education. Farzand can insert sorrow so smoothly; it haunts you for a long time. Zohra and Gogi fall in love. Gogi’s parents want a vatta-satta arrangement. Gogi wants to rebel but Zohra’s idea of love is different:<\/p>\n

(“Remember, Gogi, I used to kiss your mouth . . . Do you know why?”<\/p>\n

Almost weeping, I said, “Because I seemed a little boy.” She laughed involuntarily in response to the way I said it. She spoke again, “Remain still for a moment peacefully. I need to kiss your forehead.” Then she kissed it with such love it elicited tear from my eyes . . . I checked my forehead, where still lingered sweat drops owing to the heat of her lips.<\/p>\n

The one inside me grew melancholic one more time.)<\/p>\n

The protagonist is neither a hero, nor anti-hero. He seizes moments sometimes and sometimes moments defeat him. Throughout he remains, as per Daman’s advice, connected to people, not fame or critics. This reviewer was struck by Farzand’s ability to introduce varied emotional experiences at will. The reviewer found himself laughing out loud on the simplest of humour. The poet hires a tonga and persuades the driver to go through a one-way street; the cop’s on duty. The driver is asked to tell the cop that the wrestler Bholu’s father is aboard only to hear the cop has in fact seen Bholu’s father. As the tongawala relays the cop’s reply, Ustad Daman says that your cop is naïve for wrestlers require more fathers.<\/p>\n

On another occasion, sudden sadness! The reader is aware Ustad Daman’s health is declining; he’s hospitalised. His organs are dying. Gogi is depressed. Daman’s all tubes. Governer Jilani pays a visit and the poet doesn’t even stir. Suddenly the news of Faiz’s death arrives and Ustadji yanks out all the needles and goes to the funeral uttering these words in extreme pain:<\/p>\n

(“He was my friend. I have to go.”)<\/p>\n

Daman passes away a few days later.<\/p>\n

Toni Morrison makes a distinction between writers: one who maintain status quo and those who challenge it. Farzand and Daman stand beside Morrison. In a quintessential scene, Gogi makes up a couplet protesting the treatment meted out to the weak. The arhti hears of it from his crony, has Gogi brought before him. For Gogi this is the moment: do or die (a moral death). Summoning up the courage he recites expecting a thrashing. Instead he is taken to meet Ustad Daman, whose own history mirrors Farzand’s. A literary friendship begins.<\/p>\n

Intizar Husain sees colonialism as an era of discontinuity setting in motion a process of alienating people from themselves. In the first phase a mentally colonised elite is created; second the middle class mimics the habits of the elite and gradually the lower strata catches up. He also points out that western experience of fiction writing is mainly a phenomenon of eye and ear experience. Reading Bhubhul was so refreshing for his art relies on the indigenous technique of rasa where different moods anchor the prose and mise en scène.<\/p>\n

The novel is memorable because it fictionalises a literary figure and allows its readers a peep into an intellectual’s evaluation of events such as military coups. Among other charms one is the appearance of characters from our cultural world, from Faiz to Madam to Allauddin, who once shows up when in need of money. Ustadji borrows the money from Heera Mandi.<\/p>\n

My only disappointment seems that we never witness any conversation of note between the two about colonialism, especially for a man extremely educated, involved in the freedom struggle, with friends like Nehru and Faiz, knew languages, jailed, and tragically lost his child and his non-Muslim wife due to the British, though he’s astute enough to draw an embarrassing comparison between his arrest under colonial rule and Bhutto government Perhaps it falls on the next generation to build on what Farzand has given us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":70950,"template":"","language":[],"class_list":["post-70949","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles\/70949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/articles"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=70949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}