Rahman Abbas
Rahman Abbas (Raḥmān ʿAbbās), born on 30 January 1972 near Ratnagiri on India's west coast and a resident of Mumbai since childhood, is a major figure of the young Urdu novel. Alongside modern Urdu prose, his influences include the works of Gabriel García Márquez, George Orwell, Milan Kundera and Ben Okri. Rahman Abbas's novels are written for an Urdu-reading audience. They are steeped in the spirit of Urdu poetry and abound with allusions to regional political and cultural events.
Rahman Abbas is a strongly politically engaged writer who champions tolerance and secularism. His novels repeatedly address the growing influence of fundamentalist groups and the loss of an open, strongly regional Indo-Islamic culture. In his books, the humorous and the grotesque combine with raw, at times shocking realism, and local colour with a style that gives linguistic expression to the search for cultural identity and the sense of life of young Indians in a globalised world. A recurring motif is love in all its forms, from platonic-intellectual affection to sexual intercourse, but above all forbidden love — still an explosive subject, particularly in South Asia.
Works
Rahman Abbas has so far written five novels. In 2004 Nakhlistan ki Talash ("In Search of an Oasis") appeared, which brought him an accusation of obscenity and a court case that lasted ten years and cost him his job as a college teacher. Ek Mamnua Muhabbat ki Kahani ("Story of a Forbidden Love", 2009) deals with the development of a highly gifted young man into a violent Islamist terrorist. Khuda ke Saaye men Ankh Micholi (2011) addresses the social pressures that can drive a free spirit to despair.
Rohzin (2016) is an urban novel that portrays the megacity of Mumbai through several interwoven narrative strands and techniques of magical realism. For Rohzin, Rahman Abbas received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018, India's highest literary honour. It was the first of Rahman Abbas's novels to be translated into other languages: into German (Die Stadt, das Meer, die Liebe, Draupadi Verlag 2017) and into English (Penguin India 2022).
The first three novels were published as a trilogy in 2013 (Tiin Novels, Arshia Publications). Besides novels, Rahman Abbas also writes literary-critical essays.
His most recent novel, Zindiq ("Heretic"), published in 2021, is for now available only in Urdu, though it had already reached its third edition there by June 2022. The novel originated in the author's fear that current political developments in India could lead to a dictatorship comparable to National Socialist Germany. See: review in E+Z (Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit) (in German).
Almuth Degener
Published in German
- Die Stadt, das Meer, die Liebe [The City, the Sea, the Love]. Novel. Draupadi Verlag, Heidelberg 2017. Translated by Almuth Degener. (in German)
Review: Diya Kohli in the taz (15 August 2018) (in German)
Excerpt
Readings with Rahman Abbas: see Readings (in German) (2018 reading tour).
Further Links
- Rahman Abbas on Wikipedia
- Rahman Abbas in the Grenzgänger programme (in German)
- A. Degener: The Mumbai Riots in Rahman Abbas's Novel Rohzin (IZSA 6, 2020)
- The author reads from "Rohzin" (YouTube)