Abdullah Husseinਅਬਦੁੱਲਾ ਹੁਸੈਨ

Abdullah Hussein (1931-2015), also spelled Abdullah Hussain, was a Pakistani Urdu novelist and short story writer from Gujrat in Punjab, best known for Udas Naslein (The Weary Generations), the 1963 novel widely regarded as a modern classic of Urdu literature. Born Muhammad Khan, he trained as a chemical engineer, worked in a cement factory, spent nearly four decades in London, and wrote fiction that returned again and again to rural Punjab, the Partition of India and the price of independence.

Early life in Gujrat

Abdullah Hussein was born Muhammad Khan on 14 August 1931 in Gujrat, a city in Punjab that was then part of British India and is now in Pakistan. His family had migrated from Bannu to Punjab in an earlier generation. His father worked as an excise inspector and later took up farming. Abdullah was the youngest of four children and his father's only son.

His mother died when he was only six months old, and he was brought up by his father and his eldest sister. His father was protective of the boy and kept him close, a bond that readers have often traced in the warmth of the father and son relationships in his fiction. He grew up in Gujrat and studied chemical engineering in Pakistan and Canada, a practical training that shaped the first half of his working life.

From the cement factory to fiction

After his studies Hussein worked as a chemical engineer, including a spell at a cement factory in Daudkhel in Punjab. It was there, while doing shift work, that he began writing what he first thought would be a short love story. The story kept growing, gathering characters, villages and history around it, until it became a full novel. He found his literary voice in his twenties, after his father's death, and the book that came out of those years changed Urdu fiction.

Why is Udas Naslein considered a classic?

Udas Naslein was published in 1963 and was an instant bestseller in Urdu. It won the Adamjee Literary Award, Pakistan's leading literary prize, in the year of its publication, and it has never been out of print since, running beyond its fortieth edition. Hussein later translated it himself into English as The Weary Generations, published in London in 1999.

The novel follows Naim, the son of a peasant, who marries Azra, the daughter of a rich landowner. The marriage joins two sharply different worlds, and the union is strained from the start. Naim fights for the British in the First World War and loses an arm. Invalided home, he is angered by the subjugation of his countrymen under the Raj and turns towards the opposition. Then Independence in 1947 sweeps his ideals away, as his Muslim family finds it is no longer safe in its home and must migrate to the newly created Pakistan.

Readers value the novel for more than its plot. It is also a record of rural Punjab, with loving detail about harvest ceremonies, bullock racing, village customs and the feudal order that was passing away. It carries the great events of the age inside an ordinary family's life: the First World War, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, the Qissa Khwani Bazaar massacre of 1930 and the protests against the Simon Commission. Few Urdu novels of the time held so much history and so much village life in a single story.

Later novels and stories

Hussein did not rush his later books. After Udas Naslein he published the short story collection Nasheb in 1981, translated into English as Downfall by Degrees in Toronto in 1987. His second novel, Baagh, appeared in 1982 and took Kashmir as its subject. Wapsi Ka Safar, a novel about the journey back, followed in 1984, and its story of Pakistani immigrants in Britain was later adapted into the film Brothers in Trouble (1995) by Udayan Prasad.

The novella Qaid appeared in 1989, built around Rajjo Mir, one of the strongest women characters in his work, a woman whose acts of vengeance follow the murder of her newborn child. Raat followed in 1994, and Nadar Log in 1996 took the 1971 war between India and Pakistan as its subject, following Sarfraz, a man posted in East Pakistan who becomes a prisoner of war. His later story collection Faraib appeared in 2012. In 2000 he published Emigre Journeys, an original novel in English about Pakistani immigrants in 1960s Britain.

Hussein was known for writing in the plain, sometimes rough speech of his characters, including regional slang and words that polite critics found coarse. He believed that cleaning up that language would betray the people he was writing about. He kept his distance from literary circles and from awards and publishing fanfare, and he once asked that Nadar Log not be reviewed for six months after publication, so that ordinary readers could judge it before the critics did.

Life in London and return to Lahore

In 1970 Hussein moved to Britain and settled in Clapham in south London, where he managed an off-licence. He lived in London for nearly four decades, from 1970 until about 2010, and the experience of migration fed directly into his later writing, above all Wapsi Ka Safar and Emigre Journeys. In his later years he returned to Pakistan and settled in Lahore, where he received the Kamal-e-Fun Award, Pakistan's highest literary honour for a lifetime of creative work.

Death and legacy

Hussein had been suffering from blood cancer for several years. He was taken to hospital in Lahore after his condition worsened, then brought back to his home, where he died on 4 July 2015, aged 83. His funeral prayers were offered at his residence in Lahore. He left behind a small body of work, only a handful of novels and story collections, but Udas Naslein remains in print and in reading lists as one of the great Partition novels, and his self-translation brought one of Urdu's finest novels to readers in English who would never otherwise have met it. For Punjabi readers, his books keep alive the villages, fields and customs of a Punjab that Partition divided.