Pakistani Writing in English
hima...@mos.com.np
If you didn't know about Pakistani writing in English, read this anthology.
Reviewed by Shobhana Bhattacharji
When Himal asked me whether I would like to review an anthology of Pakistani
writing in English (PWE), I agreed immediately. There was a comfortable feel
to the term as it seemed to suffer from familiar baptismal problems; Indian
writing in English is equally jaw- cracking. And the possibility of
discovering new writers was more than exciting. After all, except for the
high-profile Bapsi Sidhwa, Hanif Kureishi, Zulfikar Ghose and Sara Suleri, in
India we hardly hear of other PWE. For one thing, Pakistani books are
impossible to get in India. Judging by the way the Pakistani Oxford
University Press stall at the World Book Fair in Delhi earlier this year
remained empty because customs would not release its books, the
non-availability of Pakistani books is clearly more than a marketing
oversight. It is hardly surprising, then, that we do not know much about the
development profile of PWE. This is why Muneeza Shamsie's "Introduction" is
so interesting. PWE, she points out, has been around for a long time but it
has not been greatly encouraged. Rising costs and book piracy are among the
reasons Pakistani publishers will not risk taking up PWE, which, in any case,
has a limited readership. Meanwhile, American and British publishers cannot
seem to find a slot for it in their own print programmes. The 1970s spurt in
PWE poetry was eclipsed at the end of the decade with the martial law regime
trying to get rid of English. There were a few literary journals like The
Ravi, The Pakistan Quarterly and Vision, that published some creative
writing, but now, except for She, Pakistani newspapers and magazines hardly
publish any PWE. Until very recently, PWE was not even on the academic
syllabi. Clearly, Indians are not the only Subcontinentals who are ignorant
about PWE. Fortunately, precisely because PWE is relatively unknown, one can
break the cardinal rule against reviewing anthologies and comment on the
contents of A Dragonfly in the Sun.
Confrontations My initial disappointment at seeing the NRP (non-resident
Pakistanis) biggies in the collection quickly evaporated as I renewed my
acquaintance with Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man whose chapters on the
Partition riots are included in this volume. As always, any account of these
riots reduces one to helplessness: Why did they happen? What motivates
communities to such inhuman orgies of cruelty? Shamsie says that Sidhwa's
novel is the only account of the riots in PWE so far. Which is amazing, and
reminds one of the view of some that India still has to produce the
definitive novel on Partition. Let those who want to believe this continue to
wait, but meanwhile they could have a shot at Khushwant Singh's Train to
Pakistan and the recent translations of Krishna Baldev Vaid's Steps in
Darkness and The Broken Mirror. Sidhwa's book is in the same category. In any
case, the definitive book about Partition would probably be a collection of
fiction and non-fiction from both countries, and not any single volume on the
subject by just one side. This anthology has several pieces on
confrontations: between West and East Pakistan, between Pakistan and
emigrants to the west, between married partners, and so on. The most powerful
are those about huge issues. For instance, Tariq Ali's The Shadows of the
Pomegranate Tree, is a novel about the 16th-century confrontation between the
Moors and the Christians in Granada which he wrote after seeing the world's
abysmal ignorance about the Arabs during the Gulf War. Though I am
uncompromisingly committed to the necessity and power of history, the extract
from this novel left me with mixed feelings. The cross-versus-crescent
rhetoric broadcast by the West over the media, beginning around the time that
Ayatollah Khomeini initiated the revolution in Iran and becoming almost
hysterical during the Gulf War, had made several of us very angry. It all
sounded as if we were back in the medieval Crusades. We wished that someone
would educate the Christian West about their visceral and ignorant reactions.
Still, what is it about our present which makes even a Marxist like Tariq Ali
revert to a form of "roots" and assert an aspect of Islamic history? Why are
the most rational amongst us allowing ourselves to think in terms of hostile
confrontations of religions? Isn't that exactly what religious
fundamentalists would like to show - that all of us are motivated by
religious identities?
Prose, lovely prose Other prose works which I liked immensely include
extracts from Ahmad Ali's Twilight in Delhi, Zaib-un-Nissa's The Bull and the
She Devil, Tariq Rahman's short story, Bingo (apparently Pakistani slang for
Bengali), and Shamsie's own Shahrazad's Golden Leopard. These range in time
from pre-Partition days to the present, and in content from politics to the
complex and eventually murderous confusion of physical desire, to the always
terrifying business of unequal treatment of siblings by a parent which is
evident to the victim but not to anyone else who might be able to prevent the
child from going mad. The prose is varied, inventive, moving, as is the
language throughout the anthology. The editor's word limit prevents me from
raving in like style about the poetry in Dragonfly. Like Indian writing in
English (IWE), PWE is low on drama. Shamsie has taken the trouble to include
extracts by two dramatists who live overseas - Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful
Laundrette and Rukhsana Ahmad's feminist Song for a Sanctuary. In contrast to
a tight form like the sonnet's, an anthology has an awesome range of
possibilities and is likely to displease many because it has necessarily to
leave out someone's favourites. However, the relative unfamiliarity with PWE
has made Shamsie's task less likely to raise readers' hackles than, say, an
anthology of Romantic poetry. This "essentially retrospective" selection
covers, as Shamsie says, a wide range of "good, representative poetry,
fiction and drama which has appeared or been accepted for publication". It
is, then, intended to give a chaska (taste) of PWE. And it succeeds. A
Dragonfly in the Sun is part of "The Jubilee Series" which, (email zindabad!)
Shamsie explained, is a commissioned set of OUP Pakistan books on 50 years of
Pakistan's history, sociology, literature and so on. Shamsie, understandably,
concentrates on writers of the last 50 years but she has also included
writers born before Partition. The history of India and Pakistan is
inevitably linked. So how does she define 'Pakistani'? Quite simply, as those
who chose Pakistan after 1947 and those who are "Pakistani by marriage"!
Bangladesh is represented by several Bengali writers from pre-Par-tition,
post-Partition and pre- and post-Bangladesh periods, and the trauma of 1971
is recorded in stories like "Bingo". Among other good things in the book are
headnotes about the authors (though Shamsie has omitted many birth dates), a
glossary, no italics for non-English words, no standardisation of spellings
for these (as a result the Hindi Paatth Shala or school becomes Part Shala,
and Hriday or heart becomes Riday which is as it would sound to a non-Hindi
speaker), a bibliography, and an index. A nice addition to my vocabulary has
been "literary journalist", the professional description of Shamsie on the
dust jacket. She told me that this is how the British Council introduced her
about a year ago and she has decided to stick with it. The book is priced
rather high by Indian standards. Nevertheless, once the scheduled paperback
version is out, I hope it will be widely available. In India as well.
S. Bhattacharji is Reader, Jesus and Mary College, Delhi, and Associate
Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.
[The above book review appears in the 1998 September issue of Himal, the South
Asian Magazine. <http://www.himalmag.com>]
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