The dilemma of identity

Q&A/ Mohsin Hamid

Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, worked for several years as a management consultant in New York and now lives mainly in London.

His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, takes the form of a dramatic monologue addressed by a young Pakistani named Changez to an American tourist, and concerns the dilemma of identity as well as the mutual distrust between East and West.

Hamid arrived for the interview directly after registering at the police station, something he had to do because of his Pakistani citizenship.

It must be unnerving that the police station has to be your first stop at every city you visit here.

It's not very nice. I've been in India for five days, and I've spent several hours doing this. It's particularly incongruous because in the morning you're giving haazri at the police station and in the evening you're on the national TV network giving an interview.

I recognise it's a bureaucratic thing, but it shows the completely backward nature of Indo-Pak relations. At the official level, there's this "you are a criminal until proved innocent" approach to one another. And yet, the people I've met privately have all been extremely friendly.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about a man who gets increasingly defensive about his identity as a Muslim living in the US. How comfortable are you about your own identity?

More comfortable than Changez, but not entirely comfortable. Even for those of us who have never left our homelands, the forces of globalisation ensure that we're at least slightly uncomfortable with ourselves, slightly divided. What happens to Changez is not what happened to me in the US. But this doesn't mean I have no fissures inside me.

Why do we not hear more cosmopolitan voices such as yours coming out of Pakistan?

Well, from my generation we have Kamila Shamsie and Uzma Aslam Khan among others. Recently a number of young writers have been in touch with me and I think we will see a blossoming of Pakistani writing in the coming years.

You've written about your discomfort with the chest-thumping aspect of Indian nationalism. What about that most disturbs you?

The notion of jingoism is troubling to me. The official state policy of India used to have a humility associated with it and the abandonment of that for this "we are so great" and "India Shining" talk is disturbing.

There are a lot of good things happening here, but that shouldn't blind us to the fact that more than half of the country doesn't get enough food. That is "India Starving", and these glib pronouncements overlook this.

What aspects of modern Pakistan are you uncomfortable with?

In the Musharraf regime, the increasing desire to cling to power regardless of the political cost, and the decidedly undemocratic gestures in terms of undermining the judiciary and moving against the press. Musharraf could have laid the ground for a democratic transition in Pakistan, but that didn't happen.

What Pakistan needs is a conversation between all of its parts: between the secular progressive minority, the religious conservative minority and the vast, relatively moderate, pragmatic and quietly religious majority of farmers. And the army, which is a very important constituent and which must be engaged.

How do you divide your time between your writing and your decidedly un-writerly job as a consultant?

I work three days a week "" the rest of my time I spend writing. Consultancy is my primary source of income "" you need to pay the rent if you're writing a novel!

In India, many writers who have full-time jobs in unrelated professions are not taken very seriously as literary writers.

My question would be, "Do they want to be taken seriously?" Much of the writing in the world has the good sense not to try to be literary "" because "literary" at the end of the day is defined as books that sell very little! No one cares whether Harry Potter is literary or not; he reaches more readers than all of South Asian writing put together ever has.

Also, literary novels require a certain kind of mindset "" a psychological make-up that fits very poorly with the work-world. The mind best suited for the construction of very large and complex internal universes tends not to be particularly gregarious or social.

So how do you inhabit both worlds?

I do think about writing full-time. But the financial viability isn't the only aspect I have to consider. To be honest I'm a little frightened by the idea of living my life in my room by myself, just writing. At the end of the day, the fact that I have my time with my wife keeps me grounded, keeps me socially interactive. Similarly, I think families can do that, having your parents and families around, your social network in place.

Islam is often seen as a religion that lends itself to being misused to suit fundamentalist interests. Your views on this?

There are over a billion different Muslims. How do we generalise about a fifth of the world's population? The very effort to do so says more about the generalisers. Did you know that the number one talk-show host in Pakistan, Begum Nawazish Ali, is a transvestite?

Conservative politicians appear on his show, are grilled by him and even flirt with him. That is part of the complexity, which makes it unfortunate that many perceptions of the Muslim world are so one-sided. What do we call the young kids who are doing Ecstasy at rave parties in Lahore?

What do we call the fishermen who don't even know their prayers? It's such a diverse group of people. These attempted characterisations are problematic. It comes from the human need to look for patterns, to label everything.