ABSTRACT
Intekhab Hameed Khan, a well-known academic, scholar-critic, and Joginder Paul’s erstwhile colleague in Aurangabad, revisits his time with Paul (who was the principal of the college where Khan was a young lecturer) as well as comments as a reader-critic on the fiction that Paul wrote. Khan speaks of how the ultimate process of creating fiction was almost a mental and physical wrench for Paul, of his unswerving belief in the need to check the details of a story, of the meticulous attention required for its minutiae, and Paul’s devotion and focus to its microscopic concerns. Speaking of real-life characters in Paul’s fiction, Khan says that Aurangabad, the city of Sufis and saints that the writer loved deeply, was of crucial importance in determining the tone and texture, the sociocultural ambience of his creative vision, particularly during his stay there and what many consider to be the most fecund period of his creative efforts. The conversation also focuses on the different literary movements in Urdu literature and Paul’s location in these particularly with reference to the writers who inhabited those spaces, with reference to the specific use of language as well as Paul’s fictional idiom and work with abstract, philosophical, even absurd ideas and elements in his fiction, extending them to Paul’s concerns with ‘meaning’ and ‘context.’
