Post Colonial English Language Writers

William Dalrymple October 16, 2008

At Partition in 1947, the writers of India were, like everything else in South Asia, divided in two. The madness of the situation was wonderfully satirised by the Pakistani Urdu writer, Sadat Hasan Manto, in his brilliant short story, Toba Tek Singh, which tells of a fictional plan by India and Pakistan to divide their Hindu, Sikh and Muslim lunatics between them. The story ends with a Sikh inmate of the Lahore asylum lying down between the border posts of the two divided countries: “On one side, behind barbed wire, stood together the lunatics of India and on the other side, behind more barbed wire, stood the lunatics of Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”

In the literary partition, of those writing in the former colonial language of English, Nehruvian India got Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and RK Narayan, while Jinnah’s Pakistan got the now little-known Ahmed Ali, whose great book of Muslim melancholy, Twilight in Delhi, is an unmatched portrait of the life of the mixed Hindu-Muslim culture of pre-Partition Delhi: the pigeon flyers and the poets, the alchemists and the Sufis, the beggars and the tradesmen. Published just before the war, the book had electrified the Bloomsbury set, and at the insistence of E. M Forster and Virginia Woolf had been published by the Hogarth Press. When the book came out, Maurice Collis wrote in Time and Tide: “It may well be that we will not understand India until it is explained to us by Indian novelists of the first ability, as it was that we understood nothing of Russia before we read Tolstoy, Turgenev and the others. Ahmed Ali may well be the vanguard of such a literary movement.” Ali’s pre-war fame was however somewhat eclipsed by the bombing of the Hogarth warehouse during the blitz, and Ali’s subsequent disappearance from the literary scene.

When I went to search him out in Karachi in 1990 while researching my book on Delhi, I found that Ahmed Ali, now in his eighties, was not a happy man. He had not wanted to come to Pakistan, he told me, and was now shunned by his foster-country: “I was always against Jinnah,” he said. “Pakistan is not a country. Never was. It’s a damned hotchpotch. It’s not your country or my country. It’s a country of a damned bunch of feudal lords, robbers, bloody murderers, kidnappers… “ The outburst spluttered out into silence, before he added quietly: “They’ve never accepted me in Pakistan, damn it. They don’t publish my books. They have deleted my name.”

Ali’s lot was at least happier than that of Pakistan’s pre-eminent Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who spent most of the end of his life in Pakistani prisons, and whose two most remarkable works, Dast-e-Saba and the Zindan-Nama were products of his period of imprisonment and focus on his life behind bars. He died in Lahore in 1984, shortly after receiving a nomination for the Nobel Prize.

This suspicion of writers on the part of Pakistan’s establishment, the pervasive atmosphere of military censorship, and the lack of support and encouragement for the arts had a numbing and stultifying effect on Pakistani writing. By the early 1980’s India clearly had a far more effervescent literary scene, both in different south Asian languages– especially Bengali, Hindi and Malayalam—as well as in English. The success of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and its Pakistan-set successor, Shame, highlighted the disparity: here was an Indian Muslim, some of whose family had migrated to Pakistan, writing loving celebrations of India’s lively diversity, while satirising Pakistan as a culturally-challenged land of mad generals and venal politicians.

The success of Midnight’s Children did more than liberate Indian writing in English from its colonial straightjacket. It also gave birth to a new voice, one that was exuberantly magical, cosmopolitan and multicultural, full of unexpected cadences, as well as forms that were new to the English novel but which were deeply rooted in Indian traditions of storytelling. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, followed four years later by Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things only added to this impression of extreme literary inequality between the two divided countries: an artistically barren Pakistan contrasting with India’s infinite literary fecundity. Rushdie’s prediction that “Indians were in a position to conquer English literature” seemed about to be vindicated.

In the famous 1997 New Yorker photograph of hot young writers from the Subcontinent, there was one Sri Lankan- Romesh Gunasekara- but otherwise all the writers were from Indian or Indian diaspora backgrounds. There was not a single Pakistani in the group- and with good reason: in 1997 there was still virtually no interesting writing coming out of the Islamic Republic, in any language. Ahmed Ali had just died, and while its most prominent Urdu writers Manto and Faiz had also long passed away, no new generation seemed to be coming up to replace them. The only English-language Pakistani writer to meet with any real success in the 1980’s, Bapsi Sidwa, the Parsi author of The Crow Eaters and Ice Candy Man, had by the end of the 1990’s chosen to emigrate to Texas. Nor were there the burgeoning bookshop chains and publishing houses in Pakistan which had begun to provide Indian writers with a platform and a means of financing themselves.

A decade on, however, the case is strikingly different, and something very remarkable is clearly happening in Pakistani writing. The irony is that the same jihadi outrages and military interventions that have held Pakistan back so badly in its political life, and which censored its early poets and novelists, have now provided an embarrassment of riches for its more recent writers, who thanks to General Zia, Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, have seen their nation move from the periphery to the very focus of world geopolitics.

Last year’s Booker shortlist contained a Pakistani writer for the first time, and an exceptionally talented one at that: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was unquestionably one of the most witty, accomplished and thought-provoking novels of 2007. The story tells the parable of its hero’s post 9/11 radicalisation, as Changez, a Pakistani working as a successful management consultant on Wall Street, finds himself caught between, on one hand, his love of New York and his infatuation with an American girl, and on the other, his hatred of American Islamophobia, ignorance and its bigoted foreign policy. The book was a remarkably tightly-controlled, cleverly-constructed and psychologically penetrating novella which received ecstatic reviews, instantly becoming a New York Times bestseller.

In an article that Hamid wrote after returning to Lahore after his own stint as a consultant in Manhattan for several years, he hints at some of the reasons that have led to this Pakistani literary renaissance. He wrote that he was particularly struck by “the incredible new world of media that had sprung up”:

I knew, of course, that the government of Musharraf had opened the media to private operators. But I had not until then realized how profoundly things had changed. Not just television, but also private radio stations and newspapers have flourished in Pakistan over the past few years. The result is an unprecedented openness…. Young people are speaking and dressing differently. Views both critical and supportive of the government are voiced with breathtaking frankness in an atmosphere remarkably lacking in censorship. Public space, the common area for culture and expression that had been so circumscribed in my childhood, has now been vastly expanded. “The Vagina Monologues” was recently performed on stage in Pakistan to standing ovations.

Now, as a result of this opening up, within the next few months a whole raft of other Pakistani novels and short story collections are due to appear, all of which have already caused considerable pre-publication stir in the publishing world.

The most striking Pakistani debut so far this year has been A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif, which made this year’s Booker Longlist. The novel is something quite new in South Asian fiction: an entertaining and darkly comic political thriller which is also a thought- provoking satirical farce attacking the brutality, stupidity and hypocrisy of Pakistan’s military dictators—and which, not surprisingly, has yet to find a Pakistani publisher brave enough to take it on. Rooted in Hanif’s own experiences, first as a Pakistani air force cadet, then as a political journalist—he was until recently the head of the BBC Urdu service—the book demonstrates some of the virtues which are coming to distinguish the new Pakistani writing. Like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which it in some way resembles, it is intelligent, witty and street-smart without being narrowly urban or elitist; pacey and exciting without being sensational; and showing an enviable humour and lightness of touch without succumbing to the sub-magic realist tricksiness which blights so much of the new Indian fiction.

The plot of Exploding Mangoes revolves around the assassination of President Zia on the 17th August 1988. Two narrative threads are artfully interwoven: one involving the narrator, Captain Ali Shigri, a young air force officer who is arrested and threatened with torture by the ISI after the disappearance of his best friend and room mate in a stolen airforce plane; and the other involving a gloriously fictionalised General Zia. Hanif has great fun sketching in the despot’s growing paranoia and superstition, his desperate searching for guidance in randomly consulted passages from the Qu’ran, his dreams of winning the Nobel Prize and problems with severe rectal itch, as well as his difficulties with his forceful Begum who suspects he is having an affair with a curvaceous Texan TV journalist. The book is especially remarkable for its darkly comic wit, as Hanif recalls a period of history when the Americans were doing all they could to support the jihadis in Afghanistan, and when the CIA thought that arming and training Zia’s mad Islamists was really brilliant strategy.

Nadeem Aslam, an ethnic Pakistani now living in England, has also produced some remarkable work. The Wasted Vigil, his new novel, interweaves the stories of a diverse group of characters who gather at the house of Marcus Caldwell, an English widower living in Afghanistan. It is a remarkable piece of work, as the interwoven lives collide in the memories of the ruined house, and is if anything even more beautifully written than his much-acclaimed Maps for Lost Lovers. Several critics bemoaned its absence from the Booker longlist. The Wasted Vigil’s Afghan denouement is also shared by Kamila Shamsie’s forthcoming Burned Shadows, to be published in March 2009, an ambitious narrative which moves its characters from Hiroshima to 9/11 via Partition and the creation of Pakistan, and is said to be much her strongest and most confident and compelling book to date, weaving themes of war and exile, “lost homelands and the impossibility of return.”

Next summer will also see the publication of Other Rooms, Other Wonders an astonishing collection of tales by Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose short stories in the New Yorker have already been included in Salman Rushdie’s Best American Short Stories and been nominated for a National Magazine Award. His wonderfully witty and moving debut, Nawabdin Electrican, reveals a writer who seems to combine the intimate rural rootedness and gentle humour of an of R.K Narayan with the literary sophistication and stylishness of Jhumpa Lahiri. Perhaps the strongest resemblance of all, however, is to late nineteenth century Russia, for Mueenuddin’s wry, humane, and humourous appreciation of rural life, seen implicitly from the point of view of the landlord, depicts a world surprisingly familiar from “A Month in the Country” or “Sketches from a Huntsman’s Album,” but with the action transposed from the Russia steppe to the Pakistani Punjab.

Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by wholly believable and completely realized ordinary rural folk, generously sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness – Nawabdin bumping on his old cycle with his “whippy antennas and plastic flowers swaying” “his peculiar aviator glasses bent and smudged” and “hammer dangling like a savage’s axe”; or at home with his twelve daughters “jumping on him” his face “an expression of childish innocent joy, which contrasted strangely or even sadly with the heaviness of his face and its lines and stubble;” or at work on his “signature ability, a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of electric metres, so cunningly done that his customers could specify to the rupee note the desired monthly savings.” Mueenuddin’s Pakistan is visually beautiful—there are wonderful sketches of the landscape with its wide banyan trees and mango orchards, its sugar cane fields and the sound of “water running through the reeds in the canal”—but it is also brutal and savage: men are killed, women are abducted and taken to the Karachi brothels, while the police beat the innocent and helpless, and the powerful trample on the poor.

Other Rooms, Other Wonders is quite unlike anything recently published on the Indian side of the border, and throws the gauntlet down to a new generation of Indian writers. For the first time in this part of Asia, there is now serious competition out there.

William Dalrymple’s new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for History and the Vodafone-Crossword Indian book of the Year prize.