Composition December ’64

Balraj Manra was a pioneer of avant-garde modernist writing who changed the course of Urdu literature with a handful of innovative, hybrid texts that were published in small, independent literary journals in the sixties and early seventies.

It is hard to classify Manra with any more specificity. The best we can do is pay attention to his contradictions: a writer who stopped writing fiction at the young age of thirty-five; an Indian citizen who frequently wrote for Pakistani journals; a Marxist who detested social realism; a prose writer who was often mistaken for a poet; an avid reader of European literature who considered himself a writer and thinker of the Third World.

In 1964, Manra published “Composition December ’64.” The ‘composition,’ as Manra preferred to call it, is an abstract presentation of several disconnected stories and ideas: descriptions of Delhi's literary coffeehouses, commentary on communist politics, song lyrics, notes on modernity, and overheard dialogues. The text does not move from sentence to sentence, right to left (in Urdu), top to bottom. Instead, it is scattered across the page without any consideration for the protocols of continuous prose.

From 1964 to 1971, Manra published another six compositions and four short stories. These texts rely on surrealist imagery and formal experiments that challenge the way prose is visualised on the page. Due to their inventive narrative structures and visual forms, Manra’s stories and compositions opened a new path in Urdu modernism, at a time when, according to critic, Shamim Hanfi, "poetry and prose were still strictly distinguished in Urdu literature, and before any strong or stable avant-garde tradition had appeared.”

—Haider Shahbaz

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