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Intizar Husain’s Call to the Grave: Literary Pilgrimage, Unreality, and Transmodern Perception

In: Asian Review of World Histories
Author:
Alan Johnson Professor, Department of English, Idaho State University Pocatello, ID USA

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https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7710-9836
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Abstract

This essay argues that Pakistani writer Intizar Husain’s short story “Morenama” (A chronicle of the peacocks), written originally in Urdu in 2002, uses the framework of pilgrimage and the South Asian–Persianate qissa genre to describe transmodern ways of apprehending the narrator’s traumatic displacement following the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent. The essay claims that the narrator’s post-Partition visits to the tombs of spiritual saints and epic battlefields in India offer pluralistic, transmodern ways of seeing and thinking beyond the horizon of European modernity. Husain’s depictions of graves and ghosts through “rememory” accommodate temporal and spatial perceptions that counter Western modernity’s positivistic ways of knowing and representing reality. Although the narrator’s return to familiar places fails to diminish his homesickness, the depiction of that journey as at once real and imagined – the narrative insistently blurs the distinction – decenters modernity’s distorting vision and thereby revivifies marginalized places.

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