Chronicling Partition with Intizar Husain

For Urdu novelist Intizar Husain (1925 – 2016), Islamic culture was not monolithic. "What a purely Islamic culture would be, I don't have any idea", he remarked in an interview, "It is this Indian Muslim culture of which I am a product and which has shaped the history of which I am a part". Born in the former United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh), Husain studied Urdu literature at Meerut College and moved to Lahore in 1947 to edit Nizam, the official publication of the Progressive Writers' Movement (a literary organisation founded in the mid-1930s). Husain's decision to migrate to Pakistan was not conscious; rather, it was an impulsive act borne out of a need for work and a desire to be part of Lahore's flourishing literary culture. At the time, he was unaware that a return to his hometown would be impossible.

Husain's sequence of novels – he insisted they were not a trilogy – deal with various periods of turmoil in the history of Pakistan. The first novel, Basti (1979), is a portrayal of post-Partition reality against the backdrop of the 1971 War of Independence; The Chronicle (1987) is set during General Zia-ul-Haq's rule between 1978 and 1988; the third novel, The Sea Lies Ahead (1995), deals with the situation of muhajirs (Muslims who migrated from India to Pakistan after Partition) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period characterised by increased ethnic conflict and religious extremism.