Fireflies in the Mist

by Qurratulain Hyder

Overview

One woman’s journey through the tumultuous and passionate birth of a new nation.

Championed by Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker, Qurratulain Hyder is one of the “must reads” of Indian literature. Fireflies in the Mist is Hyder’s capstone to her astonishing River of Fire, which was hailed by The New York Review of Books as “magisterial with a technical resourcefulness rarely seen before in Urdu fiction.” Fireflies follows the creation of modern day Bangladesh — from Indian province, to Partition, to the emergence of statehood — as told through the impassioned voice of Deepali Sarkar and others around her who live through the turbulence. Hyder perceptively and majestically follows the trajectory of Sarkar’s life — from her secluded upbringing in Dhaka to becoming a socialist rebel and to her ultimate transformation as a diasporic Bengali cosmopolitan — in the way that many of yesterday’s revolutionaries are slowly but surely ensnared within a net of class and luxury dangled in front of them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811218658
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/28/2010
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Qurratulain Hyder (1926-2007) is widely regarded as the grande dame of Urdu literature. To her fans and admirers she is popularly known as “Ainee Apa.” The Prime Minister of India said at her funeral, “With her unfortunate passing, the country has lost a towering literary figure.”

Editorial Reviews

In this blisteringly intelligent if structurally suspect novel, Hyder (1926-2007) explores Dhaka's turbulent 20th century and its violent transformations from a British-ruled Indian city to capital of an independent Bangladesh. The story centers on several students from Bengal's middle and wealthy classes, who in the late 1930s begin flirting with Marxism and dreams of freeing India from British rule. They are male and female, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and atheist, and their divergent family histories showcase a blended culture, the epitome of which is a crucial romance between Deepali, a daring Hindu girl, and Rehan, a suave, London School of Economics-educated Muslim rebel. Though their radical political gestures are less convincing than their mutual attraction, it is their political ideology, much more than religion or class bias, that defines their generation and separates it from the previous one. The novel is rich with historical and socioeconomic analysis, and though Hyder has trouble integrating everything into a cohesive narrative, the resulting story--clumsy, illuminating, challenging, digressive--begs to be savored less for its moving parts than for its sociopolitical commentary and Hyder's love for Bengal. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"A wonderful writer. She pairs enormous erudition with a careful eye to detail. Hers is one of the most important Indian voices of the 20th century."

Amitav Ghosh

"In confidently writing about India’s Buddhist and Hindu past, Hyder, a Muslim by birth, also provides an example of the secular literary culture of the subcontinent that has largely remained untainted by sectarian tensions."

The New York Review of Books

"Qurratulain Hyder has a place alongside her exact contemporaries, Milan Kundera and Gabriel García Márquez, as one of the world’s major living authors."

Times Literary Supplement

This English translation of a 1979 work written by the late Hyder (River of Fire), one of the most respected 20th-century writers in the Urdu language, is a complex, fragmented novel that describes both the complicated relationship between India and Great Britain and the formation of a country, Bangladesh, which was East Pakistan from 1947 to 1971. Hyder's intricate narrative describes a cross section of Indian families (Muslim, Hindu, and Christian), starting in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Her central characters are four young women from these families, with a focus on their heritage, talents, goals, and desire to see India free from Britain. Deepali, who is in love with a renowned Indian dissident, Rehan Ahmed, bears witness to the many changes occurring in India post-World War II. In a culture in which family honor is utmost and arranged marriages are the norm, the political and socioeconomical tumult these women face leads to family separations and exile; how they cope with loss, violence, and the shedding of political ideologies in the face of growing capitalism will shake their lives. VERDICT This book is not an easy read, but in its depiction of how an old order passes away and a new one emerges, it describes some fundamental truths. Recommended for readers interested in Indian culture.—M. Neville, Trenton P.L., NJ

Library Journal