Media Coverage April 09, 2006
 EXCERPTS: The East-West encounter
April 9, 2006
By Muneeza Shamsie
Pakistani English fiction is still very new as a body of work, although individual writers are widely read. But perhaps this is changing, as more and more Pakistani English writers are honoured in Pakistan and are short-listed for, or win, international literary awards. They include novelists Nadeem Aslam, Uzma Aslam Khan, Mohsin Hamid, Bapsi Sidhwa, Kamila Shamsie and Adam Zameenzad. Their work reflects many different dimensions of Pakistani life but the history and attributes of Pakistani English literature are very different from other Pakistani literatures because it is a product of the East-West encounter and reaches out to an Anglophone readership beyond Pakistan.
Of course, Pakistani English literature shared a common history with Indian English Literature until 1947. In the newly created Pakistan, the most significant English language writer was Ahmed Ali (1908-1994). He had already published his great classic Twilight in Delhi in 1940, which described the rhythms of life — birth, marriage, death — in a Muslim household, against the backdrop of George V’s Coronation Durbar in 1911, intertwined with reminiscences of Mughal Delhi and its destruction by the British in 1857. Ali, who was known as a radical Urdu short story writer, chose English to write his first novel because he wanted to present the subcontinental view of the colonial encounter — and its publication by the Hogarth Press in London was held up because its British printer thought the novel seditious.
By using English as a creative vehicle, Ahmed Ali was entering into a dialogue with his country’s British rulers. His aim was similar to that of political leaders who also used English as the language of debate: to make themselves — and the voice of their country — heard in the language of power.
In that era, South Asian English language writers were intensely involved in the independence struggle. In Lahore, Mumtaz Shahnawaz (1912-1948) evolved from a Congress activist into a Muslim League activist. Her only novel, The Heart Divided (1959), provides a detailed account of Independence and Partition, though it stops short of the Partition riots. She died in 1948; leaving behind a first draft, which her family published unedited 11 years later. Hers is possibly the first English South Asian novel to have been written about Partition and is therefore of great academic interest, but it clearly needed revision; its many shortcomings include a laborious text, weighed down by poorly integrated politics and history. The object of the novel was the same as Ahmed Ali’s: to convey a socio-political message, to an Anglophone audience. This self-consciousness runs through early Pakistani English fiction, much of which is hugely flawed.
By the 1950s, writers in Pakistan began to agree with the “prescriptive dictum that their work must have an extra-literary purpose, namely to “serve the society” (Rahman 1991 p. 58).
This attitude probably hampered the development of creative English language writing by Pakistanis, because the British with whom English language writers could conduct a dialogue with, as “a social purpose”, had left. British publishers had limited interest in work from Britain’s erstwhile colonies. In Pakistan, English remained the language of a small privileged elite, often regarded as “irrelevant”, although English remained a national language. An English language press flourished too, but was read, censored and thus manipulated, by those in the corridors of power.
In 1967, The Murder of Aziz Khan, by Zulfikar Ghose, an expatriate writer in Britain, became the first cohesive novel, in modern English, by a writer of Pakistani origin. In the preface to the 1998 OUP edition, Ghose says that during a brief trip to Pakistan, “the perception of a paradise lost to a vicious combination of business, greed, a military tyranny’s lust for power” suggested the plot. Following a linear narrative, he depicts Pakistan’s crude, new capitalism of the 1950’s and the displacement of agricultural communities. The novel describes the tussle between ruthless industrialists, the Shah Brothers, and Aziz Khan a poor, but proud, traditional, Punjab farmer, over his land. He is systematically destroyed and his son, though innocent, is accused, tried and condemned for rape and murder, while the guilty man, the rich, spoilt Afaq Shah, bribes his way out ...
The novel remains his only work set in Pakistan, but his subsequent novels received little cognizance in the country because he settled in Texas and wrote about South America, the continent to which his wife belonged. For decades, Ghose was deliberately excluded from discussions on Pakistani English writing, or discussed only as the author of that one novel, because there existed this notion, that in order to “qualify” as a Pakistani, a writer must either live in Pakistan or write about it.
This problem also occurred with other expatriates such as Tariq Ali and Adam Zameenzad who grew up in Pakistan and migrated to Britain as adults ...
Adam Zameenzad is another expatriate writer who repeats this pattern of a first novel written about Pakistan, and then transposing his experience of it into another country then linking the whole with a “big book” about universal themes of migration, identity, and a quest. Zameenzad won the 1987 David Higham Award for his first novel, The Thirteenth House, an overtly political book, which provides a vivid and incisive portrait of power and powerlessness, extreme wealth and great poverty in the 1960’s ...
The historical novels of the Pakistan-born Tariq Ali are also a clear example of literature, which is written with the intention of reaching the widest audience possible to convey important, forgotten historical information, through an enjoyable story line. Better known as a filmmaker, political analyst, Ali was exiled from Pakistan in the 1960’s for his Marxist student politics and became a leader of the 1968 student revolution across England and Europe. His universalism was later reinforced by his interest in Islamic history and today he is in the forefront of the global movement against the war in Iraq.
In the 1990’s, he began a series of novels about the encounter between Islam and Christianity to dispel the ignorance being bandied around, about Arab history, in the western media, during the First Gulf war. His three “Islam” novels — about the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492, the Crusades, and the last days of the Ottoman Empire respectively, provide a fascinating insight into the past and a Muslim world more enlightened than it seems to be today. But he writes of poor governance as their downfall. There is also a lot about multi-ethnicity, religious tolerance, identity and belonging, decadence and decline, which finds strong echoes in modern Pakistan.
Ali has written two novels about the legacy of Communism in Europe, which present a worldview, a grand sweep of 20th century history to reveal that no country can, or does exist in isolation today.
Meanwhile in the late 1970’s, fuelled by the egalitarian, liberal ideas of the 1968 revolution, the civil rights movement in America and the feminist revolution, a new literary discourse developed in western academia which highlighted the vibrancy and quality of English language writing from the Commonwealth; the canons of English literature were no longer restricted to Anglo-American writing. All this was also linked to the presence of increasingly assertive migrant communities in the West.
But in Pakistan, the publishing industry was in the doldrums. English language writing had far too small a readership to attract publishers. The brief flourishing of Pakistani English language poetry during the 1970’s also suffered a setback, due to a new, puritanical martial law and the attempt to do away with English altogether, as a medium of instruction in Pakistani schools.
In this barren climate, Bapsi Sidhwa in Lahore, self-published her first novel The Crow Eaters in 1979. The fact that her main protagonist, Freddy Junglewalla, spoke English at home and fraternized with Raj officials, enabled Sidhwa to employ his inaccurate quirky English, to increase the comedy. She also made a rather witty comment about the relationship between the colonial rulers and their Indian subjects. Freddy might need to “butter and marmalade” Raj officials to further his business interests, but when he sets his house on fire, in order to claim the insurance and murder his mother-in-law, the fire department and public spirited British fireman, effect a rescue with an efficiency, unknown in narratives describing post-Independence Pakistan.
The novel received some notice in the local Press, but it was not until its publication in 1980 by Jonathan Cape that it received widespread attention: it also made history as the first post-Partition, English language novel by a resident Pakistani, as well as the first major Parsi novel, to receive international recognition; its ribaldry was also rare for subcontinental fiction. Sidhwa found herself being accused by many Parsis for holding her small, tightly knit community to ridicule.
The notion that English language writing by Pakistanis should act as a publicity vehicle for the country, to enlighten foreigners and a wider Anglophone audience, continues to be a common perception. More recently there have been angry and resentful responses to Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid for his portrayal of the drug culture of Lahore, and to Maps for Lost Lovers, about a poor Muslim community in Britain. However, much has changed since the colonial era and to modern Pakistani English language writers, English is neither an alien nor a foreign language, but simply the one in which they can express themselves best.
In the 1980’s, a strong and vocal feminist movement came to fore in Pakistan, to protest against laws discriminating against women in the name of religion. Sidhwa was already a committed feminist by then. Her second novel, The Bride, explores the huge differences between tribal and urban culture in Pakistan ...
In 1988, Sidhwa wrote her third novel Ice-Candy Man, reprinted as Cracking India and made into a haunting film “Earth”. The novel was also the first in Pakistan to be written in the multilingual cadences of Pakistani English. The narrator, a canny English speaking Parsi child, happily switches from one language to another, the way that bilingual Pakistanis do. At the same time, she acts as interpreter for an Anglophone audience. The novel remains the only Pakistani English novel to focus on the Partition riots ...
Sidhwa’s fourth novel, The American Brat, looks at a different, more contemporary migration — of educated, Pakistani professionals to the West in the 1980’s. Sidhwa’s story about the adaptation of Feroza, a naive Parsi girl from Lahore to America, weaves in anecdotes and drawing-room gossip in Pakistan about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s trial and execution and the rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan which made it first target the two most vulnerable groups in Pakistan: women and minorities. This causes Feroza’s parents to feel so threatened that they send their teenage daughter to America.
Ziaul Haq’s martial law and its attempts to “Islamize” Pakistan, along with the country’s involvement in the Afghan war, marked a radical change in the country. Sara Suleri’s elegant creative memoir Meatless Days, a tale of love, reclamation and loss, revolves around her sister Ifat and their Welsh born-mother, both victims of hit-and-run accidents
The interweaving of the public and private is integrated into the text with remarkable skill and Suleri’s reclamation of her Lahore childhood is also a reclamation of a Pakistan that ceased to exist under Ziaul Haq. National and international politics, newspaper headlines, the very history of Pakistan are described as an integral part of the character and characteristics of her journalist father, Z. A. Suleri. The background to politics, society and social structures also becomes particularly important for her to understand and therefore cope with why and how, the death of her sister Ifat, remains unsolved ...
Suleri, who teaches at Yale, moves her narrative with great ease between different cultures and countries, knitting them together. The Pakistani-born Rukhsana Ahmad, who migrated to Britain after her marriage, has a strong political commitment as an Asian, a Briton and a woman. She explores psychological violence imposed upon women by rigid gender roles. Her novel The Hope Chest draws parallels between the lives of Rani, a Pakistani girl and Ruth, a British girl. All three are made to believe by their mothers that they should have but one aspiration: marriage and children ...
In 1991, the 24-year old Nadeem Aslam published a first novel, Season of the Rainbirds, about the loss of innocence and a small Punjab town, overtaken by bigotry and violence during the 1980s. The novel, which received great critical acclaim and two literary awards, revolves around the murder of a corrupt judge in a small Punjab town ...
The author, who was born into a family of writers and communists in Gujranwalla, imbued with the politics and literature of dissent, moved to England at 14. Forbidden love and the complicity of the community in the abuse of power and religion runs through both his novels. His second novel Maps for Lost Lovers is immensely important because it treats Pakistan and England as one contiguous space where people intermarry, visit, escape to, or disappear from.
In 2001, Feryal Gauhar Ali published her moving novel The Scent of Wet Earth in August, based on her film “Tibbi Galli”, about life in the red light area. In a world where avarice, artifice, lechery and broken lives, exist side by side with piety and innate human decency, she provides a sensitive portrayal of Fatima, the mute but beautiful daughter of a prostitute. She falls for Shabbir, a young maulvi’s apprentice, at the nearby mosque ...
The 1980’s and 1990’s saw the explosion of urban violence in Pakistan’s overcrowded cities, particularly Karachi, fuelled by the easy accessibility of guns and drugs. The era spawned three talented young Pakistani novelists who have all won or been short-listed for major literary awards: Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and Uzma Aslam Khan. They were educated in Pakistan and the West, grew in the 1980’s, and were young adults in the 1990’s. There are many interesting parallels between their multi-layered novels.
In Trespassing by Uzma Aslam Khan, Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid and Kartography by Kamila Shamsie, the plot revolves around a love story, but one of the two protagonists, has migrated or spent many years away, while the other has remained in Pakistan. This initiates a tension, discourse and dialogue about society, migration, and belonging ...
There has been a great flowering of Pakistan English fiction in recent years and interesting work has been published by Zeeba Sadiq, Musharraf Farooqi, Bina Shah, Sehba Sarwar and Maniza Naqvi among others. Pakistani English fiction, is neither literature of isolation, or social disengagement, but has engaged in some of the most crucial issues and held up an unflinching mirror to Pakistan across the decades.
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