An Elegant Revenge: A Rare Literary Find
Deeba Zafir
THE MADNESS OF WAITING: JUNOON-E-INTEZAR by Muhammad Hadi Ruswa Zubaan, 2018, 138 pp., 395
February 2018, volume 42, No 2

Abeautifully brought out book by Zubaan, Junoon-e-Intezaar could well be a collector’s item. Right from its black jacket cover and bits of Urdu calligraphy adorning its pages, along with the rare Urdu manuscript appended at the end, Junoon-e-Intezaar is a unique book in more than one sense. Krupa Shandilya, one of its translators, states in the Introduction that it was her fascination with the character of Umrao Jan Ada that set her on the search for the sequel to the novel Umrao Jaan Ada when she read about it in the earliest extant review of it. After a long and despairing hunt, she discovered a scanned copy on the Digital libraries India project, tracing the original document to the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad. Later with the help of her co-translator Taimoor Shahid in Pakistan, ‘thanks to the internet’, they were able to translate this rather slim novella in a matter of few months.Although much has been written about Umrao Jaan Ada, little is known or documented about a sequel. Shandilya considers Junoon-e-Intezar to be a part of the trilogy in which Umrao Jan Ada’s character develops from being that of a singer, to a poet and finally an author.

For Shandilya, Umrao Jan Ada’s charismatic character represents, ‘the multiple possibilities of artistic expression available to women at that artistic moment.’ Umrao Jaan Ada, who figures briefly as a distinguished singer in the incomplete novel Afsha-e-Raz, is developed as a full-fledged character, who is a serious rekhta composing Urdu poet in the eponymous novel that Ruswa wrote later. And in Junoon-e-Intezar, she dons the role of the ‘author’ who wishes to avenge herself by exposing the intimate details of Ruswa’s life, the man who made the story of her life public by publishing it.

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