ABSTRACT
“The Slump” was first published in Urdu as “Manda” in 1961 in Joginder Paul’s debut short story collection Dharti ka Kaal (translated into English as Land Lust in 2019). The stories in this collection came out of Paul’s Africa experience. He is, perhaps even today, the only Urdu writer to have written fiction based on life in Africa of those days. Paul had to migrate to India after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Very soon after, in 1948, as a pre-condition to his marriage, he undertook an arduous journey across the seas to Nairobi, Kenya. There he lived an experience-rich life but remained, almost always, a social insider-outsider in numerous ways. The 14 years he spent in Nairobi sharpened his sensibilities variously – his progressive ideals and empathies became more pronounced and lay entirely with the locals; he observed all the communities that made up Nairobi of those times with an equally sharp eye and pen; his personal feelings of being an exile and a migrant became more definite. In “The Slump” Paul locates his story within a privileged Club and takes a satirical look at the social divides and the economic disparities so imbued within that multi-racial scenario.
