Dozakhnama - Rabisankar Bal

A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:
Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:

support the site

Dozakhnama

by
Rabisankar Bal

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Dozakhnama
Author:	Rabisankar Bal
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2010 (Eng. 2012)
Length:	533 pages
Original in:	Bengali
Availability:	Dozakhnama - US
	Dozakhnama - UK
	Dozakhnama - Canada
	Dozakhnama - India
	দোজখনামা - India

Conversations in Hell
Bengali title: দোজখনামা
Translated by Arunava Sinha

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : creative presentation of the lives and works of Manto and Ghalib

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Asian Review of Books	.	9/4/2013	Caitlin Dwyer
Biblio	.	5-6/2013	Tabish Khair
Hindustan Times	.	20/7/2013	Shahrukh Alam
Indian Express	.	18/5/2013	Paromita Chakrabarti

From the Reviews:

"While at times slow, Dozakhnama rewards the patient reader with beautiful sentences and a narrative structure that enacts the value of storytelling. (...) This isn't strictly a historical novel, although it's centrally concerned with India's literary and political past. It prefers to linger on poetry and descriptions of women's eyes, rather than the hard facts of history." - Caitlin Dwyer, Asian Review of Books

"Dozakhnama celebrates the freedom to tell stories that are not anchored in individual, sequential histories. It rejects ‘authenticity’ for dreams: the plot of the novel allows for layers of interpretations. (...) In adopting an unanchored voice, the author may even have been making a larger point about the universalism of literature. Dozakhnama seeks to free storytelling of sole individual’s imprints. It is trying to map the collective ethos of a cultural tradition: Ghalib, Mir and Manto are mere pegs." - Shahrukh Alam, Hindustan Times

"Arunava Sinha has done a commendable job with the translation of Bal's book which came out in 2010 in Bengali. It flows seamlessly, retaining the flair of the original, the Urdu nazms and phrases often left untrammelled, a luxurious read if you can afford the time. (...) While one is suitably impressed by the mingling of oral and documented history and imagination, some of the meanderings feel dated and sorely test one's patience. Not always the labyrinth you would enjoy being lost in." - Paromita Chakrabarti, Indian Express

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

The most famous writer of Urdu short-stories, Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) only published one novel (بغیر عنوان کے -- yes, titled: 'Untitled'), but in Dozakhnama Rabisankar Bal imagines him having completed a much larger-scale work. The narrator is given this unpublished manuscript by a friend, told that it is: "The dastan of Manto sahib's dreams. Take it, see if you can have it published".
As the friend explains, it is not strictly-speaking a novel, it is:

A dastan. What you people call a novel. But you know what, a dastan is not exactly a novel. In a dastan the story never ends, whereas a novel has a beginning and an end.

       One difficulty the narrator has is that he does not read Urdu -- but he is curious enough that he hires a teacher to teach him the language, Tabassum Mirza. When actually learning the language quickly proves more than he has patience for he suggests instead that she should read it out to him, translating as she goes, and he will write it down. Dozakhnama, a novel written in Bengali, is thus presented as, in large part, a translation from the Urdu -- with yet another layer of translation added in this, Arunava Sinha's English version. As the narrator tells Tabassum, after all: "Life is a sort of translation" ..... Presented as a Conversations in Hell -- though the novel, while dialogue-heavy, isn't simply a back and forth of conversation --, Tabassum's reading out her on-the-fly-translation also returns the novel to (or re-emphasizes) its oral origins (even if that is, of course, again lost in the written form in which readers find it).
       Dozakhnama is a double-life story -- that of Manto ("the novel matches his life perfectly", the man who gives the narrator the manuscript insists) and that of Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), the poet best-known for his Urdu ghazals (though he also wrote extensively in Persian). The novel proper -- the one attributed to Manto -- begins with a sort of brief introduction by Manto, dated 18 January 1955 -- the day of his death. He notes how often he imagined having conversations with Ghalib, and now that: "I am in my grave too" he is: "sure Mirza will talk to me". The setting is hell -- dozakh, hence: Dozakhnama, 'Conversations in Hell' or 'hell-epic' -- and the two writers do then share their life-stories with each other.
       While there is some conversation, and Manto and Ghalib do constantly address each other, the novel shifts more slowly from one character to another, chapters more or less alternatingly completely dominated by one or the other, recounting specific episodes and experiences from their respective lives, or speaking about their own work. In between, the original narrator also occasionally interrupts; at one point, the project is interrupted for a few months when Tabassum gives birth (and the narrator spends two weeks institutionalized because of his heavy drinking -- finding also: "I was losing interest in translating Manto's novel"), while earlier he also hits a kind of block, wondering why Manto hadn't written a seventh chapter ("He had only jotted down a few points, adding 'This can be written later. I feel no interest in writing this chapter now.'").
       The end of both writers' careers and lives are marked by defining events in Indian history: Ghalib by the 1857 Mutiny and its failure ("It's true that I lived another twelve years after 1857, but I did not care to talk to anyone" -- indeed: "The next twelve years were just a question of surviving, alive but lifeless"), and Manto by Partition and the horrors that came with it in 1947, with Manto moving to Pakistan (and finding: "I was done for after moving to Pakistan"). Before these times, too, they endured a variety of suffering and hardship, struggling always to devote themselves to their art, with Manto's addiction to alcohol compounding his problems ("My pen wouldn't move without a drink", he admits). Manto says that: "I never found my place in Pakistan", but neither man ever finds a place or situation that offers much of a hold for very long; both led truly unsettled lives.
       At one point there is a 'Translator's interpolation', which explains the inclusion of a bit that Manto wrote before he returned to the story proper, reflecting on this undertaking -- including the observation that: "Sometimes I wonder whether this is really turning out to be a novel about Ghalib's life". It certainly is that, and equally a novel of Manto's own life, related in all its varied stages, with Manto recounting some of his stories as well, much as we get many of Ghalib's couplets and other poetry (with almost all the chapters also having a couplet-epigraph), most presented in the original language (mostly but not only Urdu) as well as (mostly) in English translation.
       Manto is presented as very much a writer-from-experience -- to the extent that:

if I have to tell the story of my life, I have to talk about many other people. Bombay made me learn about all these people. I knew all the characters in my stories; not just knew -- I had actually lived with them, they were companions of my soul. Whatever I wrote, all ... all of it was personal, all of it about things that I had seen and heard and known for myself.

       (Aside from family and many casual acquaintances, his friend, The Crooked Line-author Ismat Chughtai, also figures quite prominently.)
       The Ghalib of this novel is then an odd-man-out in Manto's writing, a figure Manto never knew; he is a fictional creation, based only what Manto knew and read of his life and work. (Manto does note that he also wrote a film script based on Ghalib's life -- but dismisses it as: "nothing but fraud, the whole world of films is fraud".) It is a full-life story Manto offers here -- as full as his own -- but by the end he has Ghalib tell Manto that: "I no longer care to tell stories from my own life. The more of myself I can erase, the more peaceful it is" -- and, indeed, even his poetry is much more distanced from experience than Manto's so very based-on-real-life fictions, a tension that also serves the novel well.
       Bal does rely heavily on the facts of both authors' lives, as well as their writing, and this makes for fine biographical fiction, not least because they were interesting figures living in interesting times and circumstances. Still, one might have wished that the afterlife would have been more freeing, the characters not so focused on what had been but rather on potential and the abstract; early on, Ghalib even tells Manto: "I confess that there are no truths in my life, everything is a story, a dream, a novel", and it would have been interesting to see Bal embrace this more fully.
       Dozakhnama is an impressive work, presenting these two figures (and their work) very well, and doing so quite creatively, including with the quite substantial framing device -- even if its 'conversations' remain just a bit too earth- and life-bound, rather than coming truly from the depths of hell.

- M.A.Orthofer, 31 October 2024

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

Dozakhnama:

Vintage Books India publicity page
HarperCollins India publicity page
Day's Publishing publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

Ayesha Jalal on Saadat Hasan Manto's Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide, in The Pity of Partition
See Index of Indian literature
See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

Bangla-writing author Rabisankar Bal (রবিশংকর বল) lived 1962 to 2017.

- Return to top of the page -