French author pushes past boundaries — writing in Urdu

LAHORE, Pakistan: Frenchman Julien Columeau came to Pakistan at the age of 30 as a humanitarian worker, but a knack for languages and love of books have made him one of the country’s most innovative Urdu novelists.
Writing mainly historical fiction with a prose described as vivid and forceful, critics say that Columeau, now 41, has injected fresh life into a scene considered to have grown stale.
His works have featured at the country’s most prominent literature festivals with three novels published and more in the pipeline.
Originally from Marseilles, Columeau left France to study Hindi in India in 1993, but quickly grew disillusioned with the “clerical” form of the language he was being made to learn and switched to Urdu two years later.
“I learned it on my own — by then I was conversant in Hindi so there was a book which was about how to transliterate Urdu to Hindi,” he told AFP.
“Then I was practising my reading. After about one year I was able to read books,” he said.
He later moved to Pakistan with the International Committee of the Red Cross where he worked primarily as a translator in troubled areas.
Columeau’s first Urdu short story, Zalzala, or “earthquake,” came out after the catastrophic quake of 2005 and was set between a girls’ school in Pakistani Kashmir and an apartment tower in Islamabad.
But it was when he turned his attention to Pakistan’s iconic 20th century poets that Columeau came into his own as an Urdu writer.
He became fascinated with 1950s poet Saghar Siddiqui, who fell into ruin and destitution and acquired a saint-like following among common people before his early death.
“I wanted to explore why he became a malang (a wandering mystic) despite the fact he was a successful poet and wrote songs for movies,” Columeau said of his first novel, “Saghar.”
“I used the gaps in his biography in order to construct my own fiction.”
His second book on vagabond street poet Mira Jee was positively reviewed by 90-year-old Intizar Husain, widely seen as the greatest living Urdu writer, who is hailed for his works around partition and the 10-year of Zia-ul-Haq.
Husain told AFP Columeau’s prose was a break from Urdu literature’s usual euphemistic style.
“His expression — it goes beyond what we normally say,” said Husain.
Over the past decade or so, Pakistani English-language writers have become increasingly prominent and have helped expose their country on the world stage with works like Mohsin Hamid’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” — which became a Hollywood film — and Mohammed Hanif’s “A Case of Exploding Mangoes.”
Urdu is renowned for its beauty and poetry, but its literature has diminished in recent years and become primarily the domain of Pakistan’s less visible lower-middle classes.