I remember there was a chapter in our Urdu book “اکبری کی حماقتیں” which was taken from Deputy Nazeer Ahmad Dehlvi’s most famous literary work, Mirat-ul-Uroos, which used to be an essential part of women’s dowry in the subcontinent. This writing introduced a new genre of fictional writing in Urdu and Hindi literature. Mirat-ul-Uroos by Deputy Nazir Ahmad is widely regarded as the first Urdu novel. But it is more often taught than it is loved today. The words of the book have not changed, but the reader has. It is often criticised that the book did not age well.
Somehow, it’s an odd thing to criticise a book for not aging well. The term “has not aged well” implies two different complaints which are not the same.
The first is related to taste. Some books get old because they reflect a now-familiar style — a style that no longer exists: constant moralising, characters designed to present an argument, plots that are meant to deliver a moral. It is an aesthetic decay, and it’s not hurting anybody. We are just done reading! The second objection is regarding morals: that the book’s verdict on gender, class, or power seems too narrow or unfair in current times. That’s far more complicated, and it raises the question of whether those values that the author didn’t have the chance to question in his time frame can diminish a work.
Nazir Ahmad’s novel is at the intersection of both. It tells the story of two sisters, Akbari and Asghari. Akbari is too careless, too vain, and too poorly educated, and she ruins her marriage and her relations with her in-laws. Asghari is a literate, thrifty, and tactful woman who keeps her house so well that she saves her sister’s reputation. It is said to have been written by Nazir Ahmad to put the case for educating girls in a society that, by and large, denied them this education, and he was rewarded for it by the colonial government. At the time, for women to read and reason was a truly reforming gesture.
What is the basis for our standard? The kind of argument that takes the form of the norms of the day: Nazir Ahmad was pushing against a wall, and it’s not fair to blame him for not constructing another house. However, this is not quite as simple as it sounds. He did not have a lot of people supporting him, and when it came to educating women, things were already heating up. When standards are what they were, it is easy to compress a time period into a single tone. If judged by present standards, it does not fare so well. It makes reading a “prosecution” and it doesn’t educate anyone because a verdict is imposed before the book is even opened.
A more useful test is comprehension of the narrative on which the work was built. The novel suggests that education is important mainly because it yields better wives, daughters-in-law, and household managers. Asghari is not a person; she is portrayed as a model. Akbari is not a person; she is a warning. The book does not presume to ask if the world these women are to serve is a fair world, or what Asghari may wish to achieve beyond success in it. Compare it with a novel that doubts its own narrator: this one doesn’t doubt the narrator, so the reader’s only reading material is the lesson.
So the point here is not to accept or reject a piece of writing, or give a judgement on whether it’s good or bad. The thing that matters is to sit with it and absorb the argument and narrative it offers.