Hedayat Came, Saw and Conquered India

Sadi had said about his popularity in Iran in these words: Mulk-i-Ajam Girafte Be Tigh-i- Sukhanwari (He conquered Persia by the sword of his poetry). All great men of literature have left behind indelible impressions on sands of time and swathes of land and thus human beings universally stand indebted to them. Hedayat was one such man of literature who came to India, saw the subcontinent and captured the various hues and colours of Indo-Persian culture in his writings. The Blind Owl, Sampingue and Lunatique, etc, reflect and refract Indian life and ethos in modern Persian fiction. The visit of Hedayat to India and the reception of Indian culture and society in his writings have indeed contributed to the scope of Indo-Persian studies in the broader field of Iranian Studies. Very little has been written on Hedayat’s connections with India, his alignment with poets and philosophers of Indo-Persian literature, response of Indian scholars of Persian Studies to the stay of Hedayat in Mumbai or his reception in Indian literature. These areas of research and findings tend to open new vistas as far as Hedayat Shenasi is concerned. There is a need to discuss how much India contributed to expand the horizon of Hedayat as a fiction writer of modern Iran. India and Iran have always enjoyed literary contact since 6th century AD and Hedayat was a golden-link (Silsilat-uz-Zahab) in that historical and literary continuity. Again it is to be noted that though Persian studies is on the decline in the Indian sub-continent, nonetheless, the admirers of literature have shown belated interest in translating the major writings of the Hedayat in Indian languages and literatures such as Urdu, Bengali, Hindi and Malyalam and thus they have opened a new vista of translation studies with regard to Hedayat and Iranian Studies. The speakers of the panel shall make an attempt to deliberate on the themes: (1) India-Reflected and Refracted in Hedayat’s The Blind Owl by Marta Simidchieva; (2) Hedayat in Harmony with the Savants of Indo Persian Literature by Syed Akhtar Husain; (3) Reception of Sadegh Hedayat in India by Md. Arshadul Quadri and (4) Indian Motifs in the Works of Hedayat by Nadeem Akhtar. The topics listed above fit into the proposed panel wherein the speakers shall graphically prove the Indian connections of Hedayat and show that Hedayat Came, Saw and Conquered India.


Presentations

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Since time immemorial India has been a land of poets, writers and philosophers who have given the best of literary expressions and philosophical thoughts to the people at large. Medieval and modern India has produced poets of Persian literature who are famous for their unique thoughts and expressions that have uplifted humanity from the abysmal ignorance. Amir Khosrow, Urfi, Ghalib and Iqbal are a few to name who can form an amicable, congenial and compatible company with Hedayat. Their Persian writings and Hedayat’s thoughts and literary expressions suggest that all level headed men think in similar fashion in the annals of history. The concept of death so vital in the writings of Hedayat is reminiscent of the concept of death in the poetry of Mirza Ghalib. The mode of expressions of Hedayat with respect to the fall of the Rajjaleha and the mode of expressions of Iqbal with regard to the collapse of dictators offer a striking similarity. In this paper an attempt shall be made to show that Sadegh Hedayat is not a stranger amongst the Savants of Indo Persian literature. All great men in history think in like manner and fashion.

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Hedayat visit to India in the year 1936 resulted in the publication of his seminal work The Blind Owl. The book is a mirror that depicts Indian motifs in its literary perspective.
The towns of India like Kengri, Bombay, Benaras and Somnathpur are mentioned in his writings such as Sampingue, Lunatic and The Blind Owl. The Indian motifs enrich the writings of Hedayat and rendered it exotic among the Persian readers in Iran and abroad. The serpent, yogi, temple, temple-dancer, poisonous-wine, starving-beggar, lotus flower, snake charmer, anglicized Bengali girl and colonial cities of the sub-continent are some of the prominent motifs in the writings of Hedayat. Though they constitute the ethos of every day Incredible India but their fabrics go into the making of fascinating tapestry of Hedayat’s fictions.

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This paper explores the role accorded by Hedayat to India in the emergence of modern Iranian literary culture and artistic sensibilities. Its starting point is my contention that The Blind Owl is not only a work of fiction, but also a literary manifesto—a parable about Iranian cultural reform, which examines issues of continuity and change, and the nature of the transition from classical Persian to modern Iranian literature and art.
Historically, India under the Raj, and the Iranian expatriate communities living there, have been important conduits of novel ideas, and a source for the “rediscovery” of the Iranian pre-Islamic past (e.g. through the Zoroastrian rivayats), vital for the construction of an Iranian national identity (see, e.g. M. Bonakdarian and M.Tavakoli-Targhi). In literary terms, the mythical image of India, formulated in the 18th c. by early Orientalists like Wilkins and William Jones, and developed further by philosophers like Fichte and Herder, left a lasting imprint not only on early Romantic poets and writers like Novalis and Schlegel, but also on Modernists writing in the interwar period (e.g. T.S. Eliot). In Europe, the mythos of India and of the shared Indo-European past provided authors with an alternative antiquity--distinct from the Judeo-Christian tradition, more ancient than the classical Greco-Roman civilization, exotic and yet presumably kindred in nature-- and thus a serviceable point of departure from the established aesthetic “givens”. In India, according to Amrit Ray, modernizing elites utilized the European image of India to their own cultural ends, and in their own nation-building endeavours.
I situate the image of India in The Blind Owl within the force-field between these two poles, taking into account three important factors, which shaped Iranian cultural attitudes to the Subcontinent during the early decades of the 20th c.: The adversarial rhetorics of the Bazgasht movement against the “Indian style”; the reality of the Indo-Iranian cultural interactions in the early modern period; and the mythos of India, formulated by early Orientalists, and refracted through trend-setting European literary works. Given the impact of Hedayat’s masterpiece on Iranian cultural consciousness, this analysis may provide additional observations to the robust scholarly discourse on the shaping of Iranian literary modernity.

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Half a century has passed by and in this period Sadegh Hedayat is one of the profusely translated writers of Iran. His fame has traveled beyond the frontiers of his country after his death in 1951. Though he had lived in India for two years, but at that time the writers and scholars of the subcontinent paid little heed to him and deplorably failed to give him a warm reception in the Indian literary society. After his demise lukewarm attention has been paid to him and some of his writings have been translated in Bengali, Hindi, Malyalam and Urdu languages. The Bengali rendering of Hedayat by Sobur Khan, the Hindi translation of Hedayat by Mukesh Kumar and special issue on Hedayat published by the Saar-Sansar and Bufe Kur in Urdu by Ajmal Kamal deserve a critical assessment to show the reception of Hedayat in Indian literature. The paper shall also show the lack of whole hearted response to Hedayat in the Indian subcontinent owing to a number of reasons.