constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

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It is the story of those who have always been pawns in other people’s wars. Beginning
with
the struggle of the people of India against the British Raj, this is the story of love
and marriage
between two people of totally different social backgrounds, which
crumbles
almost as soon as it took place. Thus symbolically it reflected the unbalanced
marriage between the British and t heir Indian Empire – both unions ultimately ended in
the parting of ways. “The couple’s marital quarrels symbolize the contradictions,
disillusionment and cynicism underlying the Indian fight for freedom and by inference,
the future problem of Pakistan” (www.peterowen.com/pages/fiction/weary.htm).
Naim, son of a peasant, marries Azra, the daughter of a rich land owner. When Naim
was fighting for the British during the first world war, he loses an arm. He returns back
home, invalidated; and is disturbed at the subjugation of his countrymen under the Raj
and aligns himself with the opposition. His ideas are, however,
swept away after
independence in 1947, when he realizes that as Muslim, his family
is no longer safe in
their Indian home and they must migrate to the newly created Pakistan.
Abdullah Hussain’s characters are rooted in the hard ground,
in the sun baked
merciless plains, in lush green farms, in the aspirations and miseries of the folk
people
who have loved and hated each other, lived together, tied with the bonds
of destiny and were separated (Pervaiz, 2000:http/www.amazon.com).
The author, through his plot, characters and themes in the novel
has reminded the
readers that by turning this century’s raw and agonizing
events into moments of
collective epiphany …… history and story are, in many languages, is the same thing
(http/www/peterowen.com/pages/fiction/weary.htm).
Although this novel is interspersed with great lyrical outburst and powerful descriptions
of domestic and public experience, they all came filtered through a certain set of
ideologies of history, politics, social and economic change that could be called
‘middle
class values’. It is the middle class values that constrains the hero to grow
freely as a
character even within his own ideological parameters. He is often forced to live his life
where he has to abandon his true class affiliations, at times hiding behind a peasant
masquerade but always straitjacketed by family, history and English education. ‘Oddas
Naslein’ thus is about the historical origins of tensions in the Indian sub-continent, about
the desire for freedom, about moral
courage, about growing up amidst the crisis, about