Abstract
Editors’ note
In this edition of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL 49:1; March 2014), we are proud to offer a Guest Editorial by the Pakistani fiction writer and journalist Bina Shah. Bina is a columnist and novelist who lives in Karachi; she is the author of six novels and short story collections, and has recently been appointed a monthly contributing op-ed writer for the International New York Times. Her interests range from literature and the arts to women’s rights, religion, society, and technology, especially in her native Pakistan. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is a fellow of the University of Iowa from its International Writers Program. In this editorial, she explores the issue of identity, and minority identity in particular, as it is represented in fiction by Pakistani authors.
Literature: The antidote to the Pakistani identity crisis
Anatol Lieven, in his nonfiction book Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011), outlines Pakistan’s diversity as both a great strength and a source of vulnerability for this 65-year-old nation. Made up of four provinces, with people of multiple ethnicities, languages, religions and religious sects, and races jostling for space and dominance over each other, the one characteristic that all Pakistanis hold in common is an identity crisis.
Pakistanis confront questions of identity on a daily basis, as the answers govern where they live, who their families are, where they go to school, what jobs or professions they undertake, who they marry, how they raise their children, and how they worship. But the superficial markers of identity handed out to Pakistanis at birth often prove inadequate. Formulating identity in Pakistan is a complicated process that involves great personal engagement as Pakistanis must navigate both matters of personality, involving the traits they are born with, develop and share with others — and society, which affects what groups they choose to identify with and stay involved with throughout their lives. As Edward Said writes in The World, The Text and the Critic (1984/1983: 16–24), these can be divided into familial and national bonds (filiation) and the ties that are voluntarily taken on (affiliation). Pakistanis develop both throughout their lives as a means of forming identity in a place where what you were given at birth does not satisfy all the adult needs for belonging.
Also, the easily identifiable markers of Pakistani identity — race, religion, family ties, social class — have always been sources of security for Pakistanis, but practised in that peculiar, claustrophobic South Asian manner that involves an overbearing need to interfere in the affairs of others’ personal lives, they often constrain and restrict independence and freedom. With so many expectations of thought, behaviour, and action imposed upon the Pakistani by her parents, extended families, and peers, financial circumstances, and societal bounds, being a Pakistani is often a feat of circus-like intensity that forces her to juggle the demands of society with her own personal desires and goals. More often than not, and in opposition to the usual norm in Western societies, the latter is sacrificed in favour of the former.
Robin Cohen argues that identity is fragmentary and culturally located, noting that any subject can assume “a number of possible social identities, depending on the situation” (Cohen, 1994: 245). This very dynamic operates in Pakistan, given its vast, shifting histories and religious contexts bearing on identity formation. Pakistani religious identity encompasses the great civilizations of the Indus Valley, pagan religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, Islam with the Arab invaders of the eighth century, and Christianity with the British incursion from the 1700s to the 1900s. India was ruled by Hindu kings, then Mughal Muslim kings, and finally the British, bringing great fluidity to our political identity. Pakistanis were Indians until 1947, when a hundred million Indians then became Pakistanis by way of geography, religion, and immigration; the country was further fractured when East Pakistan became Bangladesh in a bloody war of attrition that led to a humiliating defeat for Pakistan’s armed forces against India in 1971.
Out of this great tension between individuality and society, and the historical events of the twentieth century — the end of colonialism and the birth, among other national and regional constructs, of modern South Asia — the postcolonial literature movement emerged, shaped by more than a century of British rule over India and the trauma of Partition. It was a literary movement which helped both writers and readers to create a more sophisticated and complex understanding of modern South Asian identity than one proposed merely by psychology or sociology.
Post-colonial, post-Partition, and contemporary South Asian literature helped nations newly emerging from the shadow of imperialism and oppression to frame the questions of new identity, by reacting to the immediate discourse of colonialism, and by confronting issues of de-colonialization and political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated nations and their people. It was a global literary movement that carried on a continuous critique of texts with racist and neo-colonial undertones, as seen in the writings of Chinua Achebe, Isabel Allende, V. S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Derek Walcott, and Salman Rushdie.
Postcolonial literature has been criticized for being overly obsessed with the after-effects of colonialism, and for using English as the primary language of its discourse. But in South Asia, it has served as an important movement that has been vital in helping conflicting cultures to negotiate the minefields left in our minds — our identity crises, our inferiority complexes, our cultural vulnerability to the white man long after he has left our shores — and to help us arrive at a strong and positive sense of identity. Personal inquiry, progression and transformation, the space to observe the limitations and restrictions of history and society are more than hallmarks of postcolonial literature; they are requirements for its appeal, its strength, and its success. By using English, the oppressor’s language, postcolonial writers and South Asian writers have made English “their own”, moving from what contemporary Filipino poet Joel M. Toledo calls “writ[ing] not in English, but from it” (Toledo, 2011: 1; emphasis in original).
Academics are by now quite familiar with how Salman Rushdie and other Indian writers have accomplished this feat, but perhaps aren’t aware that similar attempts have been made in Pakistani English novels over the decades. For the purposes of this examination, we can call it a kind of “reverse colonization” of the English language (see Bennett, 2007: 38–9). In her essay “Whose Pakistan? Whose Picture?” (first presented at the Karachi Literature Festival 2013 and subsequently published in the Dawn Herald), academic Zahra Sabri argues that the famous Indian writer Professor Ahmed Ali wrote his 1940 English novel Twilight in Delhi (1994/1940) in such a way as to make the reader able to “actually touch and feel the texture of the Urdu behind the English words”. Sabri contends that Ali does this by using an English that is “strange or quaint upon first reading” but in fact uses phrases and words that closely follow a literal translation of Urdu phrases and idioms, such as “You have made my life a misery; I get neither rest nor peace” which mirrors the Urdu phrase “Tu ne mera jeena haraam kiya; na sukh hain na chain” (Sabri, 2013: n.p.).
Bapsi Sidhwa, the godmother of Pakistani writing in English, takes this a step further by rendering the peculiar phraseology and idioms of the Parsi community, with their roots in Indian Gujarat and Persia, into an English dialect that any Pakistani reader could easily identify as belonging exclusively to that demographic group. Colourful phrases abound in Sidhwa’s The Crow Eaters, the tale of Faridoon Junglewalla and his exploits, in passages such as this:
Yes, I’ve been all things to all people in my time. There was that bumptious son of a bitch Colonel Williams. I cooed to him — salaamed so low I got a crick in my balls — buttered and marmaladed him until he was eating out of my hand. Within a year I was handling all traffic of goods between Peshawar and Afghanistan! (1999/1978: 12)
Anyone who has spent any time with members of the Parsi community will recognize this style of dialogue, that skims and skips between the heights of Anglo-Indian education and the depths of Gujarati earthiness.
Sidhwa’s reverse colonization of English has in turn inspired a younger generation of writers to attempt something similar. For instance, Mohammed Hanif — whose second novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011) traces the life of a Punjabi Christian nurse living and working in modern-day Karachi — captures the vernacular of the Punjabi Christian community, the Bollywood influenced, oath-laden talk of Karachi’s police forces, and the flowery language of the Anglo-Indian Christian clergy. Hanif uses his journalist’s ear to listen to the way each of these communities speak to each other, and faithfully to fashion a kind of transliteration which mangles the English language, rather than a translation that captures its spirit and renders it into grammatically pure English. This allows him to come up with sentences such as Joseph Bhatti’s instruction to his daughter: “These Muslas will make you clean their shit and then complain that you stink” (2011: 1) (using the colloquial South Asian derogatory term for Muslims that never makes its way into “proper” English writing), or phrases like “Ortho Sir” (2011: 2) (in the vernacular, “Sir” added on to any name or title turns it into an honorific, like a Knight of the Round Table).
This technique of reverse colonization of the English language is usually done to create an intentionally humorous effect in Pakistani English writing. Pakistanis who are multilingual, fluent in English and Urdu as well as their own regional languages of Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Balochi, and Seraiki (to name but a few of them) derive great amusement from the transliteration of Pakistani phrases into English described above. Phrases like “Don’t jealous” and “Look but with love”, often found painted on the backs of trucks and buses all across Pakistan, have entered the Pakistani–English lexicon and are now found everywhere, including as the titles of chapters in Shandana Minhas’s 2008 novel Tunnel Vision and on ironic T-shirts made by fashion designers to appeal to bilingual urban hipsters. They remind wealthy Pakistanis of their lesser-educated brethren’s perilous grasp of the English language, but not in a way meant to evoke feelings of superiority. Instead, there is a distinct fondness for this kind of linguistic appropriation in the recognition of how uniquely Pakistani it is.
But what has happened in recent years to Pakistan’s minorities — religious, ethnic, linguistic — is anything but funny. Seized by a tsunami of religious obscurantism, Pakistan has turned on the very communities that make up its diverse social and cultural fabric. Religious militants, the Taliban, and orthodox sects inspired by Salafi and Wahhabi ideologies imported from Saudi Arabia have, over the last 30 years, conducted a bloody civil war upon the Shia and Ahmadis and now Pakistan’s poorest Christians. This war threatens to destroy the nation and what it has always claimed to stand for: a tolerant Muslim nation in which religious and ethnic minorities had a rightful place and sanctuary.
Only relatively recently did historians unearth the famous address of Pakistan’s founder Muhammed Ali Jinnah, in his speech to the Constituent Assembly in Karachi on 11 August 1947, three days before the creation of Pakistan:
You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state. (see Wolpert, 1984: 337–9; Jillani, 2013: n.p.)
This statement was quickly covered up by the religious right and its sentiments seem closer to fiction than anything being produced by Pakistan’s writers today.
The story of how Jinnah’s secular speeches were hidden from the public and Jinnah repackaged as a religious leader who intended to create Pakistan as an Islamic republic (Jillani, 2013: n.p.) will no doubt show up one day in a work of fiction about the complicated man who led the creation of Pakistan and paid for it with his life. But this episode of Pakistan’s history, distorted and deliberately kept from the Pakistani people by leaders who wanted Jinnah’s secular, Western values to be erased from the records, is probably at the root of Pakistan’s identity crisis. Tensions between ethnic groups had always existed in Pakistani territory, but the hijacking of Pakistan’s secular, minority-protecting identity made possible the muscling in of the religious right that followed, and that impacted on all aspects of life in Pakistan.
The two most significant religious struggles are longstanding. Middle Eastern Sunni–Shia tensions, fuelled by Saudi Arabia and Iran’s proxy war, found fertile ground in Pakistan for decades, as adherents of right-wing Sunni ideology clashed with the Shia populations, in Lahore and in Karachi of the 1970s and 80s. In recent years, violent attacks have spread, affecting other Shia Muslim religious minorities; bomb attacks on Ismailis, Bohras, and other previously untargeted groups have all taken place, Shias in Balochistan have been singled out on public transport and executed by religious militants, and a vicious ethnic cleansing pogrom has occurred there against the Shia Hazara ethnic group.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s vendetta against the Ahmadis, begun in the 1970s in order to pander to the religious right, has also stretched on for decades, and has become institutionalized in a way that many Pakistanis find abhorrent but few know how to root out from the system. Most symbolic of the prejudice against them is the fact that, in order to obtain a Pakistani passport, applicants must sign a statement that they believe Ahmadis are not Muslims and their religious leader is a false prophet. This institutionalized prejudice has resulted in many Ahmadis having been forced to emigrate from Pakistan to Canada, the US, and UK, and other more welcoming countries, while the ones who remain in Pakistan saw a Taliban bomb attack on a Lahore mosque in 2010 which killed over a hundred people from their community.
Attacks on the Christian communities have also occurred, with the most ferocious being the bombing of a Catholic church in Peshawar in September 2013; two suicide bombers exploded their vests just as the congregation had finished Sunday Mass, killing 80 worshippers, mostly women and children. Added to the mix are riots and pogroms that have taken place in Christian villages and neighbourhoods, typically after an accusation of blasphemy against a hapless Christian inhabitant. One of the most notorious of these was the case of Aasia Bibi, in which the Christian woman was accused of blasphemy after a spat with other Muslim women in the village; following from this, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated for his publicly aired views that the blasphemy laws were discriminatory and needed to be repealed. Another notorious anti-Christian incident was when Rimsha Masih, a 14-year-old domestic worker with mental disabilities was accused of burning pages of the Qur’an by a mosque cleric, who was later found to have himself placed the pages of the Qur’an in amongst garbage the child was burning, in order to stir up anti-Christian sentiment.
Amidst this chaotic backdrop, Pakistan’s English-language novelists have struck decisive, determined blows for religious tolerance and diversity by writing novels that acknowledge the existence and importance of Pakistan’s minority groups, and by recording the prejudice these groups have suffered since Partition. As mentioned, Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Crow Eaters (1999/1978) introduced Pakistani and international readers to the Parsi community, laying bare its quirks and foibles, while showing their centrality to Punjabi village life even though they have always been characterized as an elite community living on the margins of Pakistani society in a privileged, Westernized existence. Sidhwa’s later novel Ice-Candy-Man (1988) examined the interplay of religious and ethnic groups in Lahore at the time of Partition, this time using the outsider Parsi status of Lenny, its child narrator, to unblinkingly portray the violence that broke down relationships across racial and religious lines in Lahore of the late 1940s.
Pakistan’s Christian communities, their experiences, traumas, and the second-class citizenship meted out to them by Pakistani society have also been explored in Pakistani English writing. Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011) is a love story between a Christian nurse and a Muslim police tout, which goes into graphic detail about the prejudice borne of both racism and sexism that Alice, a hospital nurse, endures with feisty courage and almost preternatural grace. My own novel Slum Child (2010) follows the adventures of Laila Masih, a Christian child growing up in a Karachi slum, whom I’ve often thought of as Alice Bhatti’s younger sister, in spirit if not literally: Laila displays the same kind of feistiness as Alice, the same refusal to change who she is or how she speaks or thinks in the face of a large, disapproving society, even as she must navigate it as a member of a beleaguered minority. Nadeem Aslam’s Season of the Rainbirds (1993), which won the Betty Trask Award, is notable for its portrayal of the illicit relationship between a Muslim Deputy Commissioner and his Christian live-in lover, an arrangement which threatens to upset the entire balance of the village portrayed in the novel, similar to so many villages in Punjab where Christians and Muslims live together in uneasy proximity.
Newcomers to the literary scene have also attempted to capture the diversity of Pakistan in their novels. Omar Shahid’s The Prisoner (2013), a fast-paced thriller set in Karachi, takes an insider’s view of the criminal gangs and the police who battle them for dominance of the largest city in Pakistan. One of his main characters is a Christian inspector called Constantine, about whom Shahid said in an interview, “religion is an issue, but it does not loom as large as one might have thought from the outside”. Shahid told me that Constantine does not “tout his Christianity”; instead he portrays the character as defensive about it, in a manner that is true to life for Pakistan’s Christians today (Shah, 2013: n.p.). On the other hand, in Shazaf Fatima Haider’s How It Happened (2013), the archetypal Shia Sayed family is portrayed in brilliant comic relief contrasting with the desperate grandmother who wishes to have her progeny married off in traditional arranged marriage style. Haider describes the rituals of the conservative Bandian community through the eyes of 15-year-old Saleha as cause for merriment, perplexity, and frustration, but overall as traditions that have an unshakeable place in the wider ambit of Pakistani society.
And then there’s Maniza Naqvi’s A Matter of Detail (2007), which instead of recording the everyday travails of existing communities stands as testament to a community that once existed in Karachi, but no longer — the Bani Israelis, or the Jews of Karachi. Her story of a Karachi businessman, Hajee Rueewallah and his two wives, the first, Hajra Bai, from the Bani Israel community, and their five children, won Naqvi the coveted Patras Bokhari Award in English literature from the Pakistani government. The novel is seen as a celebration of “a remembered Karachi of idealized diversity” (Cilano, 2013: 149) and of “tolerance and love as potent antidotes for fear and silence” (Amazon, 2013: n.p.). But according to Naqvi, her true intention was never to present people
as outside the whole of society or as apart or different but rather as essential […] The motivation was purely love. By trying to capture Hajra Bai as any of our mothers or grandmothers I tried to make her indispensable to her family but [also] to us. (personal communication, 7 October 2013)
Political upheaval has been South Asia’s legacy for the last 60 years, religious and political powers at times working together and at others in opposition to each other, and both always at odds with civil society. These multiple transitions, some slow, some rapid, have left a great impact on the region’s inability to coalesce as a group, or for people within each South Asian nation to live in peace and tolerance, but South Asian literature has served as a salve to ease the pain: it has reflected, predicted, and documented these transitions, and helped writers and readers alike to process and come to terms with them. The other vital function of South Asian and postcolonial literature — to tell stories, to allow artists and writers to express their creative powers and make their voices heard in the canon of global literature — coexists with, supplements, challenges, and strengthens the first.
But in the end it is this love — the “matter of detail” Naqvi writes about — that Pakistan’s novelists display for all of its people: Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish. All of Pakistan’s ethnicities, with their quirks and inconsistencies, paradoxes and contradictions, jostle for space on the page, clamouring to tell their stories in their myriad languages. This literature is powerful enough to heal Pakistan’s identity crisis, if it is allowed to flourish. As Naqvi says, “Only fiction can attach us emotionally. ‘Facts’ objectify to an extent. Fiction comes from the heart and intends to appeal to the heart” (personal communication, 7 October 2013). It is a heart that is big enough to accommodate the multitudes that each Pakistani contains within herself, and Pakistan’s English-language novelists, operating from the heart, have chosen the perfect canvas on which to portray them in all their shades and hues.