Newline Punjabi Novel
got International Award
written by Nain Sukh
Khalid Mahmood (Pen name Nain Sukh) is advocate by profession and his novel Madhu Lal Hussain , Lhore di Vel is a latest work. Newline has already published his three books. His books are available at Readings
MADHO LAL HUSSAIN – LAHORE DI VEL (NOVEL)
Nain Sukh’s novel, Madhoo Lal Hussain, covers the historical, cultural, social, and literary life of Lahore from the sixteenth to twenty first century. The novel documents the human situation in a unique manner under the colonial period followed by the post-partition period of Lahore. The novelist assimilates the history of four hundred years and then draws its memorable picture in a creative manner. The novel focuses not only on the conflict between secular and fundamentalist forces in this region’s history of the last four hundred years, but also highlights contemporary forms of the clash.
Nain Sukh has written a successful novel by employing the stream of consciousness technique imaginatively by mixing events of the past with the contemporary situation. Due to its language, theme, technique, and craftsmanship Madho Lal Hussain can be termed as a topmost work of fiction in Punjabi published in Persian script. Though terse in reading, Madho Lal Hussain is indeed very valuable in its depiction of the history and cultural richness of Lahore.
An introduction to the novel
This novel tells the story of a painter named Hussain, who teaches at the National College of Arts, Lahore, and of a social worker Mahboob ul Haq, an employee of Green and Clean City which is a non-governmental organization. Both of them are modern incarnations of Madho Lal Hussain. They together make a couple who have witnessed the execution of Mansur bin Hallaj in the fire burning at the shrine of Madho Lal Hussain. On the 23rd of March, they bear witness to the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh and they remember the death of Dulla Bhatti with the traditional praise songs for him.
In 2005, the festival of Basant was banned and it led to a darkening of the skies above Lahore. This colorlessness became the basis of this narrative. Then in 2011, an American spy named Raymond Davis killed two residents of Lahore, a strange event whose impact on the cultural psyche of Punjab remains unexamined. On the surface, the narrative spans from 2005 to 2011 but it is not limited to the contemporary era. Informed by the longue durée of Punjab, the story traces the evolution of the cultural self and tries to uncover a tolerant, multi-layered, syncretistic and pluralistic past.
In telling the modern homoerotic tale of Hussain and Mahboob, the ur-text or the protonarrative of the novel, the source of inspiration, has beenHaqeeqatul Fuqra (The Reality of the Mendicants), the 16th century biography of Madho Lal. The legend of Madho Lal Hussain is a communal love story, now almost half a millennium old, in which a Muslim Sufi saint and a Hindu Brahman boy create a conjoined self through their love for each other. In the era of the Mughal king Jalal Uddin Akbar, when the court-appointed religious authority of Makhdoom Ulmulk Maulan Abdullah Sultanpuri is supported by Mirza Nizam Uddin as the executor of the royal will at Sheikhupura Fort and the magistrate of Lahore Malak Ali is always ready to serve, the powers of this officialdom are challenged by Madho Lal Hussain and Dulla Bhatti who are patronized by the same saint. In this story of forbidden love between Shah Hussain, a Muslim saint and Madho Lal, a Brahman Hindu boy, the will of the people is shown to be in conflict with the royal decree.
Madhu Lal Hussain: A Celebration of Lahore is a novel based on the life story of Shah Hussain and Madho Lal, two historical figures of Punjab whose life stories are preserved in Haqeeqatul Fuqra (The Reality of the Mendicants) as well as through the communal folklore. The novel tells the story of the rulers and the ruled of Punjab, the masters and the serfs, the exploiters and the wretched of the earth, the two dominant elements constituting the local longue durée. The historical characters of the Mughal e Azam, Nauratan, Chaudhries, and officiating and officious Mullahs create the dominant cultural group which continues to the modern times, through its connivance with all types of colonizers. Trying to cope with the exploitative powers of this group are the sons and daughters of the marginalized: the son of a prostitute who becomes a painter, the son of Ahmedi parents who falls in love with a Muslim man, the communists, the social workers, the nerdy, book-loving revolutionaries, the provocateurs, and the agitators of the masses, all recent incarnations of historical figures of resistance.
The characters that populate this narrative also populate Lahore and Punjab: the jogis, the mendicants, the artists, the communists, the right-wingers, the left-leaners, and the faqirs whose love does not subscribe to the ideology of procreation, the accursed share of the popular economy. This novel is a study of Lahore, specifically, and Punjab, generally, as it has been structured throughout the centuries by everyday struggles of the ordinary people and the long historical structures that have conflicted and collaborated to create the modern cultural self of modern Lahoris.
News about the Novel and Radio Program
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