ABSTRACT
Joginder Paul (1925–2016) is known primarily as a fiction writer in Urdu while his substantial non-fiction has remained overshadowed. But Paul’s creative output is best understood when his fiction is read alongside his non-fiction. It is illuminating to see how he transforms his life’s experiences into stories as well as philosophical cogitations, presenting in wonderful ways how real life can translate unobtrusively into narrative life writing. For instance, while he writes an entire novel on the impact of migration on memory, he also creates a “Self-obituary” where he sees himself as repeatedly birthing and dying with each physical “migration” that he undergoes. This coalescing of ideas of birth and death, politics and geography, migration, and transmigration, the real and imagined, creates an entirely unique body of writing that shifts seamlessly between fiction and life-writing. It is fiction replete with actual inexplicable events of history, geography, politics and culture reconfigured in the lives of his characters, peopled with the living as well as the dead, with man and animal alike, where demarcations are easily transcended. In Paul we begin to accept how writing is simultaneously, particularly for him, the process of giving birth and embracing death, and of how a legacy can be processed continuously.
