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Chronicles of our times

Last Updated : Jan 25 2013 | 2:49 AM IST

Pakistani writing in English is finding new and dynamic ways to chronicle the many different realities of the country.

“Good literature tells you so many things about other lives,” says Nadeem Aslam in his characteristic soft tone. We’re sitting on the lawns of Jaipur’s Diggi Palace, where the annual literature festival is being held, and the eloquent Pakistani author is talking about how his relationship with Latin America began when he read Marquez for the first time — and how “the 400 pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude made me deeply interested in the lives of millions of people in countries I had never visited”.

Aslam himself is part of a growing literary landscape —that of Pakistani Writing in English (PWE) — and the idea of literature opening gateways to other worlds and other people (or, equally importantly, showing that the “other” isn’t so unlike us) has become increasingly relevant here. While Pakistani Anglophone writers like Aamer Hussain, Kamila Shamsie, Uzma Aslam Khan and Mohsin Hamid have been around for a while, the publishing world is seeing the advent of exciting new names such as Daniyal Mueenuddin, Mohammed Hanif and Ali Sethi. In different ways, the work of all these writers reveals the heterogeneity of Pakistan, a country that is frequently stereotyped and tarred with a single brush by the international community. It also suggests that literature’s ability to help us understand and empathise is of vital importance at the present moment.

“Pakistani writing in English is one of the big stories in publishing right now,” says Chiki Sarkar, editor-in-chief, Random House India. “It’s grittier, blacker, more sardonic and more engaged than much of contemporary Indian writing in English.” This despite the fact that PWE hasn’t had a “Midnight's Children moment” — an instance of a single book opening the floodgates for a generation of writers. Instead, there has been a cluster of writers publishing and being acclaimed within a condensed space of time.

So what kinds of books are these authors writing? Don’t look for convenient categories here: the range of subjects and styles is as varied as can be. There’s Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a mordant political satire about the last days of Zia-ul-Haq, portrayed as a paranoid dictator who worries about assassins digging a tunnel beneath his room, obsesses about hidden meanings in verses from the Quran, and — in one poignant passage — reflects that he might be ruling a ghost country populated only by his bureaucrats.

Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel Burnt Shadows is a multi-generational saga that moves from Nagasaki in 1945 to Delhi in 1947 and, over the decades, to Pakistan and New York, examining the turbulence of a century where people have been repeatedly dislocated from their homes and where events from the distant past cast a long shadow over the present. Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil is set in Afghanistan (“Whatever happens there has reverberations in my country,” he says) though he’s also working on a contemporary novel based in Pakistan. Moni Mohsin’s Diary of a Social Butterfly is a collection of her newspaper columns that expose the insularity and self-absorption of Pakistani high society.

Inevitably, much of this literature is seen through a prism of topicality. As Shamsie puts it, “When a nation is viewed through as narrow a lens as Pakistan is these days (terrorist males, oppressed women), then merely chronicling the lives of individuals ends up being a political act, even if that isn’t the intention.”

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In reply to Chiki Sarkar’s question “Why is the current generation of Pakistani novelists so much more politically engaged than their Indian counterparts?”, Aslam says it’s difficult not to be politically engaged when you belong to a country that the world is so interested in — for the wrong reasons — and when you’re constantly being asked to define yourself. “Our history is more tragic than yours, more bloody, more horrific. We’ve been through turmoil for longer periods, and we can’t escape dealing with the big questions.”

But it would be a mistake to think that all these writers are political in some narrow sense of that word, or that their writing is driven by a rigid agenda. On the contrary, most of them agree that this would be a poor way to produce high-quality literature. They don’t deal in polemics; instead, the best of their work shows how good fiction — written with clarity, humour and sensitivity — can cast light on a country, its people and on the many little worlds that coexist within it.

For this, you need look no further than a book that has created a major buzz in literary circles, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a collection of outstanding short stories that move between poor people quietly eking out a living in the rural areas, bored nouveau riche youngsters snorting coke at Halloween parties in Islamabad, and a feudal society comprising landlords and servants playing games of one-upmanship.

For an Indian reader, characters such as the enterprising Nawabddin Electrician, a survivor in more than one sense of the word, are instantly recognisable. “I’ve often been told by readers that this or that character in the book could easily have been Indian,” says Mueenuddin. This is echoed by Moni Mohsin. “Diary of a Social Butterfly has struck a chord with my Indian readers,” she says, “not just because they are intrigued to discover that such people exist in Pakistan, but also because of how similar they are to ‘drawing room wallahs’ in India.”

At the same time, Mueenuddin speaks for many of his fellow writers when he says, “I don’t want to be a spokesman for a country or a cause. My hope is to be left alone to write.” Eventually, each author must define his own terms of engagement. Canada-based writer and translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi — whose The Adventures of Amir Hamza, an outstanding 950-page English rendition of the epic Dastan-e Amir Hamza, brought this medieval classic alive for a new audience — says, “I have zero interest in writing about 9/11 or modern politics, but for me translation of our literary classics is an act of political engagement to stop the eroding of our language and cultural heritage.” Farooqi is currently working on a 24-volume translation of the magical fantasy Tilism-e Hoshruba.

Nor is it the case that all these authors are targeting Western readers: many, like Bina Shah or Shandana Minhas, are writing mainly for a Pakistani or South Asian readership rather than for publication abroad. And as Shamsie points out, some writers like Shahbano Bilgrami (In Dreams) tend to get left out of the conversation because they weren’t published in the UK or US. “The publishing scene in Pakistan for Anglophone fiction is pretty dismal,” she says, “Right now the most promising market is in India — I know Indian publishers are on the lookout for Pakistani writing.”

Therein lies a potentially disturbing tale, as the echoes of political tension between India and Pakistan start to be felt in cultural circles. There was a real possibility last month that Pakistani authors living in other countries wouldn’t be able to make it to the Jaipur festival because of passport complications; festival co-director William Dalrymple had to seek intervention from the Indian Council of Cultural Relations. And Aslam has been advised to stay away from Mumbai because of the Shiv Sena — which, in its usual polite way, “requested” a bookstore to take titles by Pakistani authors off its shelves recently.

Sarkar, who has published Hanif and Mueenuddin in India, affirms that sales of books by Pakistani writers haven’t been affected so far. “If anything, recent events have heightened interest in Pakistani writing — it’s becoming more fashionable.” But there is the always-present danger that trade between the two countries might be affected. “In that scenario,” asks Farooqi glumly, “what happens to the Pakistani writers who are published by Indian publishing houses and whose distribution rights in the subcontinent are held by those publishers? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if their books were to be embargoed as Indian goods and boycotted in Pakistan itself?”

Musharraf Ali Farooqi

“Translating our classics is an act of political engagement”

Mohammed Hanif

His book is a political satire on the last days of a paranoid Zia-ul-Haq Kamila Shamsie

Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows moves from Nagasaki and Delhi to Pakistan and NY Moni Mohsin

“Readers are intrigued at how... these people are similar to the drawing room wallahs in India”

“People say that it’s a good time to be a Pakistani writer. Well, I feel differently — I’d much rather that my country wasn’t burning and my books didn’t sell!”

-Nadeem Aslam

“There’s no competition between us, as there tends to be with many Indian writers — we’re all in the same team. That’s probably because it’s a small circle; if Nadeem’s book does well, it draws attention to Pakistani writing in English and I stand to benefit as well.” -Daniyal Mueenuddin “My political engagement is reflected in the ordinary lives and
day-to-day activities I write about; I wouldn’t want anyone to dictate a political agenda to me, or to feel obligated to let terrorism or fundamentalism hijack my fiction” -Aamer Hussain

In other words, while it’s a truism that strife-ridden times and places produce high-quality art (another Pakistani writer, Azhar Abidi, likens the growth of PWE to developments in Latin American literature, where authors like Fuentes and Llosa wrote about the experience of living under dictatorships), it’s also true that literature is among the first casualties when international relations break down. “After all, far more people get their views from news reports than from novels,” says Shamsie wryly.

For now, the best that these writers can do is to go on quietly plying their trade: as Aamer Hussain poetically puts it, “Each of us has his or her own unique way of bearing witness to our times, however small our canvas, whether we use sepia or colour, bold strokes or muted colours.” The best that we readers can do is to engage with their books and use them to supplement what we read in newspapers and hear in speeches made by posturing politicians.

COMING TITLES
THE WISH MAKER
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ANOTHER GULMOHAR TREE
Aamer Hussain
A novella set in London and Karachi, about a Pakistani writer married to an English illustrator, and told from both perspectives

TWILIGHT
Azhar Abidi
As a middle-aged woman struggles to reassure herself of her son’s commitment to the family and its customs, Pakistan faces turmoil, with General Zia bent on imposing orthodox Muslim law

THE STORY OF A WIDOW
Musharraf Ali Farooqi
In a Karachi neighborhood, a recently widowed mother of two grown women tries to settle into her new life

A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES
Editor: Mohammed Hanif
Publisher: Random House
PAGES: 323
Price: Rs 395