Book Review: Parveen Talha,A Word Thrice Uttered: Stories on Life’s Realities

We rarely acknowledge the value of works of fiction as important documents of social and cultural history. This is partly because we valorise ‘fact’ as verified truth, independent of an individual’s subjective perception and we treat fiction as an act of an individual’s imagination whose ‘facts’ may or may not conform to documented reality. Yet, fiction, particularly when it relates to a specific time and place in history, is a richer source of gathering historical information about that place and time than any ostensibly ‘fact’-rich document can provide.

There is also a problem that when history is written it is generally attracted to the grander, larger narratives in which rulers and political and military leaders and noblemen play the major role. While a corrective to this approach was attempted by bringing the ‘subaltern’ into the picture, the focus shifted to the other extreme of looking primarily at peasants, Dalits, working class members and their role in the class struggle. Very rarely have we documented histories of ordinary people—of housewives, of maids and nannies, family retainers, the chaiwallas, young people of modest origins aspiring to be doctors or engineers, junior government officials at the lower end of the hierarchy and such others of similar backgrounds. We know even less of these almost ‘classless’ people when they are a part of Muslim families which chose to stay back in India after partition or were members of the now vanishing Anglo-Indian community.

It is this gap in our experiential understanding of the last generation or two that Parveen Talha fills in a compilation of short stories titled A Word Thrice Uttered published by Niyogi Books in the mid-2017. Parveen Talha is a natural chronicler of her generation and of the generation immediately before hers. She writes of the world of Mofussil India, mainly Lucknow and other towns and cities of Oudh, as it evolved after partition over the next few decades. As a former civil servant and as a Muslim who grew up in the unique syncretic culture of Oudh, the much celebrated ‘Ganga Jamani tehzeeb’, she has a very gently, evocative Civil Lines perspective of people and their lives.

Few outside the Indian sub-continent would understand what a Civil Lines perspective could mean. Civil Lines, like the Cantonments, were constructed by our erstwhile colonial rulers as an enclave for British expatriate civilian officers, their staff and included those Indian members of the colonial administration who had made their way into the higher rungs of the administrative hierarchy. While being connected to the traditional city in many different ways they were different from the rest of the city in terms of density, civic infrastructure, amenities, urban design and architecture. Over the years they acquired a distinct identity of their own and as the local Indian part of the population within Civil Lines areas grew they developed, socially and culturally, into a very interesting mix of colonial traditions and mores with the native, vernacular traditions of the older settlements.

Those families who grew up in Civil Lines areas, especially after Independence imbibed much of this uniquely syncretic culture. In Parveen Talha’s case, there are two separate syncretic traditions coming together—that of the traditional Hindu–Muslim intermingling which gave Oudh in general and Lucknow in particular, its very distinctive grace and elegance in language, in aesthetics, in the Arts and architecture, in music and poetry and this is then combined with the modernist, liberal education traditions of the Anglophonic world of the Civil Lines. It is this which giver her voice its very distinctive quality.

The characters in Parveen’s stories, all obviously (or so it seems) based on real-life characters, she would have interacted with at different stages of her life and career, are all modest people of the kind that all of us encounter and interact with in our everyday life. Yet we know little of what goes on in their lives, the sacrifices they have to make, the struggles they have to go through to make ends meet or to try and keep up with a better lifestyle they had had in a gentler past, their aspirations and their secret yearnings, their loves and betrayals—and it is this that she captures in a palimpsest of Awadh. In her simple, seemingly artless prose, she also manages to convey the lazy, quiet serenity of mofussil life and despite the grind and struggle of everyday living her characters have to go through, they have in them that innate gracefulness, gentleness and nobility (even when they are heartless and cruel) which made Lucknow and Awadh so different from the rest of India.

Parveen’s prose is simple and unadorned, almost Kiplingesque in its plainness. It is unpretentious and tries to tell a plain tale as plainly as possible without becoming boring and banal. It is this which makes it a valuable document of social history.