either. What gets registered is a general feeling of outrage over the book's publication. It were as if Jawaid had strayed into a territory he should rather have stayed away from.
Living people need to know their history. It is through a consciousness of the past that one is able to perceive one's place in the present and determine the course of one's future. Literary movements are already too few in Urdu, those that have been seminal in fundamentally altering the literary outlook of writers still fewer. Although by no means a literary movement, the HAZ has nevertheless been a tremendous literary force in the lives of some of the most important Urdu writers of modern times. Yet it never occurred to anyone to produce—before time and neglect had placed all records beyond possible recovery—a book detailing the story of the HAZ's genesis, its literary charter, and its difficult, meandering course through four and a half decades. Now, finally, when Yunus Jawaid has produced just such a book, what is offered is not appreciation but the worst kind of cavilling.
To fully appreciate the magnitude of the injustice, a brief racapitulation of the book's contents is necessary. It will demonstrate, we hope, (1) the importance of the HAZ as a veritable literary institution and its role in moulding the literary outlook of at least two generations of writers, and (2) the tremendous energy that Jawaid has expended in piecing together from diverse sources a highly readable account of the HAZ.
In the Preface and Introduction, Jawaid stresses the need to produce a credible history of the HAZ. He also describes the problems he had to face in unearthing material for his history, particularly when the HAZ never owned even an inch of office space where its documents could be housed. Jawaid tells us how he approached several former HAZ office-bearers for records, how a few helped, and how most created all kinds of difficulties and jealously held back whatever scrap of information they had.
Chapter one deals with the literary-historical background, beginning with the movement launched by Sir Syed right up to the third decade of the present century, to the emergence and speedy growth of the Progressive Writers' Association (henceforward, PWA) in 1936. The HAZ formally announced its birth in 1939. This has given rise to the wrong assumption that the HAZ was launched deliberately to counter the literary outlook fostered by the PWA. In a way, as Jawaid argues, the Progressives^-notably among them Ali Sirdar Ja'fari~are themselves to be blamed for this gross misrepresentation. The HAZ writers stood for experimentation in the form and content of literature. The Progressives, on the other hand, went with gusto for the production a "socially-aware" writing, even if that meant subordinating their creativity and imagination to a few fixed formulas. Thus they quickly dubbed the HAZ writers as "retrogressive" and "decadent."
The Progressives' distaste for the HAZ may also have had another source. French Symbolists, such as Mallarme, and late Romantics, such as Baudelaire, were anathema to the Progressives. But these same authors commanded much respect and admiration from some of the early members of the HAZ. It may well be that the Progressives transferred to the HAZ as a whole the distaste they felt for a few.
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