Ali Pur Ka Aeeliعلی پور کا ایلی

About the book

Ali Pur Ka Aeeli is Mumtaz Mufti's account of the first part of his life, told as the story of a young man called Aeeli growing up in the small Punjabi town of Alipur and then in Lahore. It was first published in Urdu in 1961, and readers took it for a novel. Thirty years later, in the 1991 edition, Mufti admitted it was his own life, the first volume of his autobiography, and the book's reputation only grew.

The book is long, 1,188 pages in its first edition, and it has no tidy plot. Instead it follows Aeeli through boyhood, school, first love, clashes with his father, and questions about God, sex and society that will not leave him alone. It is now regarded as one of the great autobiographical works in Urdu, and the best known of Mufti's books.

ਕਹਾਣੀ

Aeeli is a boy of Alipur, a small town in Punjab, and the book opens on his childhood there: the lanes, the school, the mosque and the house where his father rules. His father stands for authority and tradition, and the boy's struggle with him runs through the whole book, a quarrel between a son who wants to ask questions and a father who wants obedience.

As Aeeli grows, the book follows him through his schooldays in the towns of Punjab and then to Lahore, where he studies philosophy and economics. He falls in love, he argues with his teachers and his friends, he reads Freud and the European thinkers, and he tests every rule his world gives him, about religion, about women, about desire. Nothing is hidden: the book's honesty about the body and about doubt is what made it famous and what still startles readers.

The story does not end in triumph. It ends with a young man still searching, and the search continues in the book's sequel, Alakh Nagri, where Aeeli the lover becomes a devotee. Mufti himself described the two books as the two halves of his life: in the first half he discovered woman, in the second he discovered Qudrat Ullah Shahab, the writer and mystic who turned him towards Sufism.

Why it caused a stir

When Ali Pur Ka Aeeli appeared in 1961, Urdu readers had not seen a book quite like it: a life told without varnish, with its desires and doubts on the page. Mufti hurried it into print so it could be considered for the Adamjee Literary Award that year, and the book was presented as a novel, since the prize had little time for autobiographies. The prize was judged to belong to Jamila Hashmi's novel Talash-e-Baharan instead, and the book became famous, in Ibn-e-Insha's phrase, as the one that did not win the Adamjee Award.

Critics called Mufti a psychological realist, a writer who looked at the inner life the way other writers looked at the outer world. The book's refusal to fit the shape of a novel also drew criticism, and Mufti took thirty years to agree with the critics who said it did not meet the demands of novel writing. That argument is part of the book's fame: it is a life that refused to be a novel, and a novel that turned out to be a life.

Is Ali Pur Ka Aeeli a novel or an autobiography?

It is both, and that is the honest answer. Mufti published it as a novel in 1961, with a hero called Aeeli who is plainly Mufti himself, and readers read it as fiction for thirty years. In the 1991 edition he revealed that it was the first part of his autobiography, and the sequel, Alakh Nagri (1992), is openly the second part. Readers today should take it as a life told in the shape of a story: the events are Mufti's own, told with a novelist's freedom.

From Freud to Sufism

The book is also the record of a mind changing. The young Mufti was a religious sceptic, shaped by Freud, Havelock Ellis, Alfred Adler and Dostoevsky, and his early stories shocked conservative readers. In later life he came back to Islam through Sufism, under the influence of Qudrat Ullah Shahab, and his later books, above all Alakh Nagri and his account of the Hajj, Labbaik, tell that second journey.

Ali Pur Ka Aeeli sits at the hinge of that change. It is the book of the sceptic and the lover, written before the turn, and that is why it reads so differently from the books that followed it. Together the two volumes tell one story: a man who challenged every taboo of his time, and then gave his life to faith.

ਲੇਖਕ

Mumtaz Mufti was born Mumtaz Husain on 11 September 1905 in Batala, in the Punjab of British India, the son of Mufti Muhammad Hussain. He was educated in Mianwali, Amritsar and Dera Ghazi Khan, and graduated in philosophy and economics from Islamia College, Lahore, in 1929. He worked as a schoolteacher and a civil servant, joined All India Radio, and after Partition in 1947 moved to Pakistan, where he worked for the Pakistan Air Force and Radio Azad Kashmir.

His first published fiction, the story Jhuki Jhuki Ankhen, appeared in 1932. Besides the two autobiographical volumes he wrote short stories, travel writing and essays, including Labbaik, his account of the Hajj. He won the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 1986 and the Munshi Premchand Award in 1989, and died in Islamabad on 27 October 1995, aged 90.

ਵਿਰਾਸਤ

Ali Pur Ka Aeeli is still read and argued over, and it set a pattern for honest autobiographical writing in Urdu. His son Uxi Mufti set up the Mumtaz Mufti Trust after his death, and there is a road named after him in Multan. Readers who finish Aeeli usually go straight to Alakh Nagri, its second half, and to Labbaik, the pilgrimage book that closes the journey the two volumes begin.