ABSTRACT
This interview on Joginder Paul with Nizam Siddiqui, the eminent poet-critic-translator and another stalwart of the Urdu literary scene, is an important document about Paul’s creative universe as also the role he played in nurturing ideas and young talent. Siddiqui’s sharp comments on Paul’s writing and philosophy tie him up to the pegs of world literature while locating him within the Urdu literary universe. The interview highlights how Paul’s first collection of short stories, Dharti ka Kaal/Land Lust, put the spotlight on an African consciousness, propelling the Urdu readership and its creators to an acknowledgement of a world of hitherto unheard-of postcolonial custodians such as Frantz Fanon, Du Bois, and others. While speaking of Paul’s role in his growth, he traces his own journey as a modern critic through what he calls new age of creativity and postmodern trends. Siddiqui goes on to elaborate on Paul’s ideas of abstraction in his fiction, also of what he calls ‘story-ness’ or ‘kahanipan’ in them, does a comparative analysis of Nadeed with the Mahabharata, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the plays of Sophocles, pegging the novel across a tremendously wide canvas of world literatures, and ends with a comment on his afsanche. In the course of the interview, Siddiqui coins a few terms very specifically for Paul, injecting into his reading of a writer a philosophical depth and width not seen before.
