title: Basti (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Intizar Husain
description: &ldquo;In graceful prose, Husain conjures the unceasing wonders of early childhood and the social rhythms of small-town life.&rdquo; &mdash;Ratik Asokan, <i>The Nation</i> <br><br>&ldquo;This brilliant novel from Intizar Husain, one of South Asia&rsquo;s greatest living writers, should finally end the scandal of his relative obscurity in the West.&rdquo; &mdash;Pankaj Mishra<br><br>&ldquo;Intizar Husain is the most important writer of fiction in Urdu, the strangely homeless language produced out of interactions between the vernacular of north India and those of the Islamic Near East, Persian and Arabic in particular. In <i>Basti</i> he has produced a novel of epic ambition: a swirling storm of historical moments, scriptural traditions, and ancient mythologies, all harnessed around the convulsion of India&rsquo;s partition along religious lines. By taking us through the internal life of his protagonist, Zakir&mdash;&lsquo;He who remembers&rsquo;&mdash;Husain performs an act of civilizational memory and provides us with the fragments of a culture&rsquo;s history that modernity has firmly set on the road to oblivion.&rdquo; &mdash;Aamir R. Mufti<br><br>&ldquo;The uncharitable might say that but for the past, Intizar Husain would not have had a future. But truth to tell, the man who blends the personal with the impersonal, specific with the universal, actually has the past much to thank for. Be it drawing generously from the Jataka tales or the Panchatantra fables or even the layered Shiite tradition or the more modern existentialism, his tomorrows have been taken care of by yesterdays. Yet Intizar Husain does not live in the past, so much as he draws from it. His nostalgia is not comforting, there is that disquiet air that runs through his works, and <i>Basti</i>, arguably the finest novel on Partition, is no different. Distance in time often diminishes emotion, but in Husain's case it only serves to distil it: what goes away is the peripheral, what is retained is the essential.&rdquo; &mdash;<i>The Hindu</i>
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  # BASTI
  
  
  INTIZAR HUSAIN (b. 1925) is a journalist, short-story writer, and novelist,
  widely considered the most significant living fiction writer in Urdu. Born in
  Dibai, Bulandshahr, in British-administered India, he migrated to Pakistan in
  1947 and currently lives in Lahore. Besides _Basti_ , he is the author of two
  other novels, _Naya Gar_ (The New House), which paints a picture of Pakistan
  during the ten-year dictatorship of the Islamic fundamentalist General Zia-ul-
  Haq, and _Agay Sumandar Hai_ (Beyond Is the Sea), which juxtaposes the
  spiraling urban violence of contemporary Karachi with a vision of the lost
  Islamic realm of al-Andalus. Collections of Husain’s celebrated short stories
  have appeared in English under the titles _Leaves_ , _The Seventh Door_ , _A
  Chronicle of the Peacocks_ , and _An Unwritten Epic_.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANCES W. PRITCHETT has taught South Asian literature at Columbia University
  since 1982. Her books include _Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics_