Come, sit on these pages awhile to admire, ponder over, and sometimes get lost in the profound wisdom and hidden truths of these fleeting creations that Joginder Paul offers.
Bird in Flight, a volume of afsanche (flash fiction) by Paul, brings to you another facet of his artistry. These micro stories are slices of life that have been transmuted into sparkling gems of creativity. With such constraint on the use of words and so much abandon in meaning making, the reader is sure to feel the expanse of the artist's vision captured consummately within the confines of the brevity of the microfiction form.
Though known for his short stories and novels, Joginder Paul has been a pioneer of the afsanche form in Urdu literary writing. These short shorts are as much the reader’s as they are the author’s, and the translator’s, because they invite creative participation. And yet they have an autonomy that makes them experiences to be felt rather than narratives to be read―such is the genius of Paul’s musings.
Rashmi Govind was born in Chhapra, Bihar, into a scholarly family. She took her degrees in English at the University of Delhi, and in Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She taught English at Zakir Husain Delhi College for over four decades and has translated several texts into English from Hindi and Urdu.
The Song of the Loom, her translation from the original Hindi Jhini Jhini Bini Chadariya by Abdul Bismilla, has been published by Macmillan. She has translated Hindi short stories by Rajendra Yadav, Bhisham Sahni, Nirmal Verma and Anwar Qamar, and an Urdu one by Zaheda Hina, into English.
Joginder Paul (1925-2016) is a celebrated, and in many ways, a pioneering author of Urdu Literature. He is the recipient of many literary honors including the SAARC Lifetime Award, Iqbal Samman, Urdu Academy Award, All India Bahadur Shah Zafar Award, Shiromani Award and the Ghalib Award. He was also honored at Doha with an Urdu Adab World Award for contributing to creative writing in Urdu. His fiction has received a lot of critical acclaim and many Urdu journals in India and Pakistan have published special numbers on him.
Born in Sialkot in undivided India, the partition of the country led to Paul’s migration to Ambala. A life filled with transitions; his marriage led to another migration to Kenya where he taught English. Drawing on his experiences, he expresses the angst of being in exile in many of his works. Coming back to India in 1964, he started teaching at a college in Aurangabad, Maharashtra. Appointed as Principal the next year, he held the post for the next fourteen years before settling in Delhi for full-time writing.
Joginder Paul’s first story was published in the well-known Urdu journal ‘Saqi’ in 1945 while his first book of short stories in Urdu, Dharti ka Kaal (Land Lust in English) was first published in 1962. Over the years he published more than 13 collections of short stories, including Khula, Khodu Baba ka Maqbara and Bastian. Amongst his novels are Ek Boond Lahoo ki, Nadeed, Paar Pare and Khwabro. He has four collections of flash fiction (Afsanche), of which Parinday is one. Paul’s use of this form is known to have significantly enriched Urdu fiction.
