Naiyer Masud (1936–2017)

Masud writes in Urdu, and is a past winner of the Saraswati Samman, an award for outstanding writing in a native Indian language. Despite this, and his translation into English, he is not well-known outside of India.

Snake Catcher is a collection of 11 fairly short stories (20-40 pages). They are garnered from a number of sources, including previously untranslated pieces. It is always tempting to discuss writers within a cultural context, such as comparing Masud to other Indian writers, but there is far more similarity between these stories and the metaphysical puzzles of Borges and Eco, among others. Masud's prose is steeped in Sufism, and, as the introduction points out, more concerned with states of being than in describing actions. In the title story, which was probably the outstanding one of this collection for me, a village snake catcher treats his victims by categorising their bites by the type of snake that gave them. His new apprentice draws his awareness to the subjectivity of these categories and, by extension, causes him to doubt their realities. Stripped of his certainties, he loses his ability to treat the afflicted, and even begins to doubt (as do we, the reader) the difference between a snakebite and the fear of one. We begin to wonder if he has only ever been treating the idea of a snakebite. The lack of trust in 'reality' precipitates a decline in the snake catcher's relationship to the world he lives in. Indeed this is a recurring theme in all the stories. Realities become questioned, as do the characters' relationships to them.

The tone is undoubtedly downbeat, even frightening. Whereas the writers I mentioned above share a playfulness when they manipulate their realities, Masud's characters are thrown into mind-numbing terror as their certainties crumble. It reminded me, in this sense, of Sadegh Hedayat's horrifying The Blind Owl. Masud's writing is no less disturbing. If 'philosophical horror' was a genre, this would be up there with the best of them. The ideas he writes about are familiar from philosophies such as Zen and existentialism, but I have never seen them twisted into such a terrifying vision of life before. This is a genuinely excellent collection from one of India's hidden gems.… (mer)