On the Other Side

Rahman Abbas won India’s highest literary honour, the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 2018 for his fourth Urdu novel, Rohzin. He has also won four state Sahitya Akademi awards for his novels. Rahman is the author of ten books, including six novels. When his first novel was published, Islamists had accused him of spreading obscenity through his work and had filed a case against his novel. He was forced to resign from his job at a Muslim institution. Rahman fought a court trial for over ten years and was acquitted in 2016 of the obscenity charges. Rohzin has been translated into German, English and Hindi, and received the prestigious LitProm Grant managed by the Swiss and German governments. It was also longlisted for the JCB Prize and shortlisted for the Muse India 2023 GSP Rao Translation Award. On the Other Side was originally published in 2011 under the title Khuda Ke Saaye Mein Aankh Micholi and won the Maharashtra State Urdu Sahitya Academy Award. Rahman lives in Mumbai.Abdus-Salam Kalshekar’s only aspiration was to publish his Dastan-e-Ishq, a seven-volume ‘Saga of Passion’, before his death. While Salam could only complete three volumes, an author sets out to write a novel about Salam, unveiling the fifty-three diaries about the latter’s past amours that consume the saga. It also reveals a certain beloved whom Salam could never bring himself to write about. While Salam's life unfolds a world that is riddled with patriarchy, caste prejudice, religious intolerance and exploitation in the name of faith, the deeper conflicts of love and abandonment are revealed in this expertly crafted narrative, now available in an English translation.‘Love and hatred, romance and flirtations, fake and genuine . . . all so bluntly portrayed . . . a seemingly voluminous narrative written with stunning precision . . . Rahman Abbas’s novel [is] a masterpiece. The tongue-in-cheek humour succeeds in artistically camouflaging this harsh and audacious account concerning a community that is more known for sher-o-shairi’‘We warm instantly to Abdus-Salam Kalshekar, irate schoolteacher and insatiably amorous adventurer, who is the unlikely hero of Rahman Abbas’s novel On the Other Side. Kalshekar compels our attention as he negotiates his unconventional way through a conservative Bombay Muslim milieu, quarrelling with God and summing up his fellow human beings in cruel, impatient judgements. Books nest within books in Rahman’s adroitly constructed narrative, which takes the form of an extended report by an unnamed writer who is researching Kalshekar’s life, to write a novel about him. This maverick, meanwhile, is caught in the act of composing a multi-volume autobiographical testimony to his various love affairs and passionate encounters. Like a painter, Rahman vividly conjures up his protagonist’s ethos, with its intimate religious fears and bold secular transgressions. The red thread that stitches the book together is Rahman’s inquiry into the art of fiction, its role in contemporary Urdu literature and, by implication, in the India of the troubled present. On the Other Side is a loving, lavish, deeply compassionate portrait of an individual, a community and a society caught up in processes of rapid, disorienting transition’‘An astonishingly modern voice, one that needs to be read to understand the crosscurrents in contemporary Urdu fiction’‘At its heart, On the Other Side is a love story—or, rather, a story about passion. Humorous and philosophical in equal measure, the strength of this book lies in its unabashed portrayal of human relationships’‘Told through the absorbing and poignant journey of self-discovery of Abdus-Salam in the city of Mumbai, On the Other Side is a searing tale of the complexities of human psyche and an exquisite treatment of the beguilingly engaging paradoxes of Indian Muslim life, a masterpiece of universal importance!’'This novel is bold on the grounds of its theme, and complex on the grounds of its narrative technique . . . Abdus-Salam’s character, despite his scattered temperament, dishevelled state and stained thoughts, makes a lasting impression on the readers’ minds by virtue of his peerless sacrifice. There is no doubt that amid the surge of ordinary novels, this novel is successful in creating its own space and identity as an unconventional, distinct work’'Salam Bin Razzaq, Sahitya Akademi Award-winning author‘It brings to mind Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea by virtue of its brevity, but it will be remembered for years in Urdu literature for its theme. It is a major novel of recent years’‘Through this novel, Rahman has bequeathed a unique character to Urdu fiction. To shape a distinctive character is an immense literary feat, which he has accomplished admirably. Rahman’s novel embraces the political, religious and societal characters of contemporary society with such proficiency that there is no trace of stagnation or repetition even for a moment. This novel is an important literary achievement’'The novel is short, but the conversations it initiates are big . . . and the domain of its thought and vision even larger, which compels us to reflect upon the structure of the novel as well’