Abdullah Hussein, who has died aged 84, became known to the anglophone literary world when his novel The Weary Generations was published in London in 1999. An elegant saga of India’s struggle for freedom from British rule and the subsequent partition of the country, the novel came at a time when two Booker prize winners – Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy – had paved the way for the enthusiastic reception of writers from the Indian subcontinent, as had the phenomenal success of Vikram Seth.
Hussein’s novel, published in the aftermath of the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, also echoed the surge of interest in the Raj and Britain’s colonial history that had begun nearly two decades before. What few critics in the UK observed at the time was that The Weary Generations was the author’s own translation – or, more accurately, rewriting – of his first novel, Udas Naslain, published in 1963 and now one of the most celebrated Urdu novels.
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