Pakistan

Introduction

The year 2022 was very productive for Pakistani English literature and also marked the second birth century of Urdu journalism and the third birth century of the Punjabi poet Syed Waris Shah (1722–1798). There were new novels by established writers Mohsin Hamid, Moni Mohsin and Kamila Shamsie, accomplished debut novels by Aamina Ahmad, Dur-e-Aziz Amna, Yasmin Corderey Khan, Taymour Soomro and Athar Tahir; new poetry collections by Moniza Alvi, Zaffar Kunial, Ejaz Rahim and John Siddique and a skilled first collection by Ahmad Rashid; critically acclaimed dramas by Waleed Akhtar, Asma Dar, Iman Qureshi and Ambreen Razia; important life writing by Roopa Farooki, Syed Ali Hamid, Moniza Hashmi, Sorayya Khan, Shahbaz Taseer and Lynette Viccaji; significant translations of Saadat Hasan Manto, Muhammadi Begum and Waheeda Tabassum. There was a wide range of important anthologies including travel writing and incisive non-fiction by Farooq Paracha, Tariq Rahman and Waleed Ziad.

Among Pakistans’ UBL Anglophone awards, Zulfikar Ghose received the Excellence in English World Literature award, Osman Haneef’s The Verdict for debut fiction, Saman Shamsie’s Where the Rivers Meet for children’s fiction and Iftikhar Malik’s The Silk Road and Beyond for non-fiction. Zain Saeed’s first novel Little America received the Karachi Literature Festival Getz Pharma Fiction award; Saher Hasnain’ story “Children Always Come Home” won the Abdus Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction; Saira Mahmood’s essay “A Pakistani Woman Comes of Age” won the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women; Sana R. Chaudhry’s translation from the Urdu of “My Dear Teacher” by Julien Columeau won India’s Jawad Memorial Prize.

Usman T Malik won a World Fantasy Award for his story “#Spring Love #Pichal Piari” and another for his collection Midnight Doorways; the latter also won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Ignyte Award and the Locus Award. Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali was shortlisted for a Foreword Indies Book award; Sophia Khan’s story “The Kite” was shortlisted for the regional (Asia) Commonwealth Prize. Zaffar Kunial’s poetry collection England’s Green won the Whyndam-Campbell Award and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot award; Iman Qureshi’s play Ministry of Lesbian Affairs was shortlisted for the George Devine Award. In non-fiction, Muhammed Mujtaba Piracha’s Property Taxes and State Incapacity in Pakistan received the inaugural Bloomsbury Pakistan Book Prize and John Siddique’s Signposts of the Spiritual Journey received the Janey Loves Platinum Award.

Siddique’s fifth poetry collection SO: Selected New Poems 2011–2021 includes timeless spare poems such as “Perspective”, “Night Time” and “Between Bridges” which employ the symbolism of nature and landscape to comment on human life. While “Gathering” captures his paternal family’s migration at Partition from India to Pakistan and Britain, poems such as “Another Somme” and “Another Somme (August 1939)” refer to his English forbears in World War I and World War II, respectively. The whole is framed by “Emissary” and “Orpheus as a Child”, asserting the therapeutic power of words and music, respectively.

In Moniza Alvi’s tenth collection Fairoz, an intricate narrative poem, a British Pakistani family of three Muslim women, a self-empowered mother and her two daughters Fairoz and Annat are abandoned by her husband. Alvi cleverly welds the imagery of folk tales, legends and lore, to enhance her narrative: she also employs to great advantage the insidious power of the internet to play with the imagination. The quest of the unhappy teenage Fairoz for understanding, meaning and self leads to her online contact with a young man, the 25-year-old Tahir, a radicalised religious extremist.

Zaffar Kunial’s second collection England’s Green skilfully plays on words, their sound and images to incorporate dualities. The collection’s two sections, “In” and “Out”, suggest a game of cricket, a sport central to Kunial’s poem “England”, linking his British and Pakistan inheritance. In “Green”, his contemplation of his English mother’s grave, his memories of family life and its verdant location includes a reference to a green paper hat — which his father associates with Pakistan’s flag. Illuminating the hidden, or unspoken, is central to this sophisticated collection; in “Foxglove” the resonance of the letters “gl” remind him of English and Urdu words. Several poems engage with family history or with literary texts; Kunial often incorporates descriptions of the English countryside too, while “Ings” provides particularly spectacular images of the Lake District.

Ejaz Rahim’s new collection Charlie Hebdo looks at prejudice and violence, tolerance and spiritual contemplation. Rahim extends this to engage with Islam and Christianity, Greek and Hindu mythology, Buddhist scriptures and Sumerian legends. The whole is framed by the 16-part title poem which provides the beginning to the collection and the book culminates in the 10-part “Dante Alighieri: An Encounter”. Nishat Wasim’ s first collection, Listen to the Wind, moves seamlessly between past and present, comparing changed worlds and realities. The title poem contemplates the unheeded warning of time to come: “Listen to the wind/listen hard//For it whispers of the mushroom cloud”. Others such as “Hallelujah” celebrate mountain landscapes; “What More Can a Girl Want” tells of a young woman’s discovery of self after surviving a dreadful marriage; “East and West” considers the complexities of migration.

The distinguished journalist Ahmed Rashid’s accomplished first collection, This Side of the River: Poems, provides rare insights into the 1970’s conflict in Baluchistan. Life and death permeate the book. “Part I: Early Poems (1964–1970)” opens with “A Poem for Ayesha”, an elegy for a beautiful young woman killed in a car accident; “In Dry Places” revolves around the poet’s dying grandmother; while “All I Wish For” expresses longings for a freer, more meaningful and egalitarian world. These poems become a prelude to “Part II: Selected Poems (1971–1984)”, which begins with “Winter Morning”, describing Baluchistan’s spectacular mountainous landscapes, where freedom fighters savour the morning air, then hear helicopters overhead and see armed troops marching down the slopes, across the river and the trees, looking for them. Ahmed’s empathy for the freedom fighters also emerges in “Children’s Playground”: “Oh my children of a heroic people/Flowers still sprout on our barren slopes/And only you recognise the forty kinds/Of grass that grows wild and free/. Nobody can destroy your/Playground of mountains and rivers”. Rashid contemplates human life and nature too: “Marking Time” considers a fighter’s awareness that he might be killed while the words of the title poem, “We have been waiting this side//Of the river for days”, become a metaphor for the choice the fighters have made.

After a long silence in Covid times, 2022 saw the publication of acclaimed dramas by British Pakistanis: PWord by Waleed Akhtar, Noor by Asma Dar The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs by Iman Qureshi and Favour by Ambreen Razia.

The year was particularly productive for Pakistani English fiction. Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel, the dystopian The Last White Man, begins with horror and confusion of Anders, a white man in a white majority country: he wakes up to discover he is brown. His friends and acquaintances no longer recognise him; his clients no longer trust him. He has become a nameless, dark-skinned Other. The novel’s skilful exploration of colour, ethnicity and race includes the nuanced relationship between Anders and his girlfriend Oona. Soon more and more people start changing colour. Through its portrayal of Oona’s mother and others who are convinced these changes are a foreign plot, the novel makes a telling comment on the rise of fascism, right wing authoritarianism and online disinformation. Meanwhile, Anders’s dying father must also learn to overcome his prejudices to bond with his newly-coloured son.

Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel, Best of Friends, set in 1988 Karachi and 2019–20 London, revolves around Mariam and Zehra, close friends since their childhood at an elite Karachi co-educational school, though from very different families. Mariam’s rich business family is headed by her ruthless grandfather The Patriarch; while Zahra’s father, a celebrated journalist is at odds with the military authorities. Mariam and Zahra’s growing up coincides with the demise of the military dictator, General Zia ul Haq, and the election of Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister, embodying hope for democracy and the empowerment of women. But Mariam and Zehra are caught up in a terrifying misadventure with a classmate, Hammad, and his dubious friend, Jimmy. Decades later, both men turn up again in the lives of Mariam and Zehra in London and put their friendship to the test. By then both women are British citizens. Mariam is a millionaire and venture capitalist; Zahra is a famous activist campaigning for civil liberties.

Moni Mohsin’s “Social Butterfly” novels are celebrated for their wit and skilled hybrid English. Between You Me and the Four Walls: The Social Butterfly Bulletin covers January 2014 to December 2022; its tone is set from the first with Butterfly’s complete disregard for the terror attack in Karachi while she records her experience of Dubai and its wonders. Sometimes comments on political events such as the Kashmir crisis or Imran Khan’s election as Prime Minister infiltrate into Butterfly’s consciousness but her focus remains her hectic social life, her chatty comments on Janoo, her too-serious Oxford-educated husband, Kulchoo, their son, and relatives, friends or acquaintances; then comes the Covid pandemic with its restrictions and confusions.

Zain Saeed’s riveting second novel The Year of Sound and Heat reflects his love for Karachi, a city of contradictions where violence and disorder are offset by humanity, bonds of friendship, memory, humanity and belonging as the narrator, Jogi, an aspiring writer, recalls the idealism, hopes and tragedies of 2007, embodied by the exiled Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan and her death. Power and politics run through Haroon Khalid Akhtar’s second novel The Liar’s Truth, the memoir of an erstwhile-banker-cum-once-popular politician, Arsalan, now a vilified, condemned man in jail. The novel blends the real and surreal, the possible and impossible, to make a witty comment on narrative, history, autobiography and fiction in the digital age.

2022 saw several critically acclaimed first novels. Aamina Ahmed’s The Return of Faraz Al conjures up, with great skill, the reverberations of buried emotions and secrets. In Lahore, 1943, Faraz Ali, the 5-year old son of Firdous, a courtesan in the Red Light area, is forcibly taken away by the family of his affluent biological father Wajid and adopted by “respectable” relatives. Faraz becomes a well-regarded police officer though few know his origins or his paternity. One day, Wajid, now a senior government official, asks him for a favour: to investigate/cover up “an accident” — the murder of a girl in the Red Light area. To provide insights into Faraz, the Sandhurst-educated Wajid and others, the novel moves seamlessly across history, from pre-Partition India and World War II to the Ayub and Bhutto eras in Pakistan and the 1971 war. Faraz’s police duties in the Red Light area open out memories of the past and lead to his quest for Firdous and his sister Rozina — now a beautiful film actress.

The suppressed and unspoken are central to Taymour Soomro’s accomplished first novel, Other Names for Love, revolving around a powerful landowning family in Pakistan where modernity and westernization co-exist with age-old traditions. In rural Abad, Rafik has developed the vast family property from “a jungle” into prosperous farmland and insists his 16-year-old Karachi-educated son Fahad spend his summer holiday there and take up his responsibilities. Fahad had wanted to spend his holidays at their London home, with Sorayya his mother. As friction between father and son grows, Fahad’s friendship with a local boy, Ali, develops into an attraction. Rafik’s inability to cope with this is interwoven with many other realities Rafik refuses to face, as he is confident of his social and political position among the famous and powerful. In this incisive novel, Fahad’s move to London, where he eventually becomes a famous novelist, also embodies the changes both Britain and Pakistan have witnessed over the decades.

The fiction writer and award-winning poet Athar Tahir’s first novel, The Second Coming, is divided into “Earth”, “Air”, “Water” and “Fire” and imbued with the symbolic and metaphorical to tell of the inner void and aspirations of the Pakistani narrator, an elderly Oxford-educated, retired civil servant. Drawn to a much younger woman, a Thai academic, his friend and tourist guide, he follows her through a sequence of journeys across Thailand which reveal cross-cultural similarities and differences and capture his complex emotions. The historian Yasmin Corderey Khan’s riveting first novel Edgware Road tells of Alia, a young Oxford academic and child of divorced parents brought up by Suzie, her English mother, but with visits to Khalid, her charming, loving but mysterious Pakistani father. His sudden death impels her to find out more. The narrative alternates largely between the 1980’s and 2003 as it recreates Khalid’s breaking away from his privileged Pakistani family to pursue a chequered career in Britain, including that of a croupier at the Playboy Club. Good Intentions by Kassim Ali captures another aspect of British Asian life. Nur, a young journalist, the son of Pakistani taxi driver in Birmingham, reveals his secret to his family: he wants to marry Yasmina, a Muslim girl, but he adds “She isn’t Pakistani, she is Sudanese. She is Black”. The reconstruction of Nur’s relationship with the beautiful and intelligent Yasmina throws many insights into the issues of migration, colour, race, ethnicity and faith in their respective lives and families.

Mariam Pirbhai’s Isolated Incident, set mostly in Toronto, combines the public and personal and begins with an attack on a mosque. The main protagonists include the university-educated young woman Arubah Anwar. She is deeply attracted to Kashif, a young man involved with charity work at the Islamic Centre. Kashif’s mother is in hospital with cancer. There, Kashif forms a friendship with her fellow patient, Franklin Snyder, a white policeman, and seeks his help to investigate another mosque attack — and massacre. Through its characters, the novel challenges both casual official attitudes to such hate crimes and biased histories taught in the classrooms. In Dure Aziz Amna’s first novel, American Fever, the teenager Hira is on an exchange scholarship in America from Pakistan when she coughs up blood: she has tuberculosis. The novel reconstructs her life in an upwardly mobile, middle class Urdu-speaking family in Rawalpindi where Hira was educated at an all-girls school and it explores the many adjustments that she and her American host family in Oregon, particularly their daughter Kelly, must make to understand each other. Hira’s life assumes another dimension when she develops a “digital” relationship with a young Pakistani man in New York, introduced to her by her mother on Facebook.

2022 saw some really significant life writing. Moniza Hashmi’s invaluable Conversations with My Father: A Daughter’s Memories of Faiz Ahmed Faiz provides insights into Hashmi’s celebrated father and family life through his letters to her and her response to them today—four decades later. Shahbaz Taseer’s compelling memoir Lost to the World: A Memoir of Faith, Family and Five Years of Terrorist Captivity tells of his kidnapping and captivity in North Waziristan by the Uzbeks and their Taliban allies — and finally his miraculous escape. The award-winning medical doctor and celebrated novelist Roopa Farooki’s memoir Everything is True: A Junior Doctor’s Story of Life, Death and Grief in A Pandemic is written in the second person but developed from her daily jottings, incorporating hospital and family life during the first forty days of Covid lockdown. The prologue and epilogue, however, focus on Farooki’s sister, Kiron, who died of breast cancer shortly before Covid. Farooki’s sense of personal loss and memories of Kiron, skilfully interwoven into the narrative add to its power and also reveal how Kiron’s illness impelled Farooki to join medical school. The memoirs of artist, curator and fashion designer Osman Yousefzada, The Go Between: A Portrait of Growing up Between Different Worlds, tells of his Pashtun family which had migrated to Birmingham but continued to observe the customs and segregation of Pakistan’s Swabi district to which they belonged. His father was a carpenter but Yousefzada’s mother, a skilled seamstress, set up her own clothing business, which Yousefzada was permitted to frequent and meet women customers until he reached puberty — he thought of himself as a “go between” the world of men and women. He describes the increasing religious extremism that develops in the all-male mosque following Pakistan’s engagement with the Mujahadin in Afghanistan. He writes of his fascination for daily British life, despite the endless bullying at school by white classmates. He becomes a delinquent too but also has specific supportive teachers and his life changes when leaves for university in London.

The distinguished academic Lynette Viccaji’s memoir Bubbles pays tribute to her mother, Charlotte Eva “Bubbles” Donoghue. Reconstructed through family history, personal memories, and extracts of her mother’s diary and letters, Viccaji also creates a vivid portrait of Pakistan’s Anglo-Indian community to which she belongs. She incorporates pre-Partition Lucknow where Charlotte was brought up and captures the unusual circumstances which led to her Christian father, a widower and government servant, to migrate to Pakistan in 1947. Viccaji points out that in that uncertain time Charlotte never completed school but did secretarial training and started working at 16, though her quest for books and knowledge continued. Viccaji brings to life Pakistan’s then-capital, the cosmopolitan Karachi, in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She introduces church activities, parish life and Charlotte’s passion for music, which her granddaughters Zoe and Rachel — both famous performers today — would inherit. Viccaji also tells of her beautiful mother’s difficult marriage, which she ended finally, took Lynette their only child with her and ensured she joined Karachi’s best educational institutions.

The novelist Sorayya Khan, daughter of a Dutch mother and a Pakistani father, spans Holland, Austria, Pakistan and the United States in her memoir We Take Our Cities With Us and makes an illuminating comment on history and time. The book reveals the background to much of her fiction. Khan’s reflections of her school years in Islamabad, which included the tumultuous national and international events of 1979, has clear links to her novel City of Spies. Khan’s exploration of her Pakistani family history includes her grandfather’s migration in 1947 from Amritsar to Lahore where his address gave the title to Khan’s Partition novel, 5 Queen’s Road. Khan’s memoir also captures the images which led to her first novel Noor about the 1971 civil war. Her narratives about her marriage to a Pakistani academic in America, her personal life and her American-born children, incorporate her exploration of her mother’s Dutch heritage.

Today there is a growing interest in the little-known narratives of Indian soldiers in World War II who became prisoners of war. Syed Ali Hamid’s biography, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan: Pursuits and Experiences as Prisoner of War, tells a particularly unusual tale of a young army officer (Pakistan’s future Foreign Minister) who was captured at Bier Hiachem in 1942, attempted to escape in Italy and fought off the suffering of incarceration, food shortages and being moved from camp to camp from North Africa to Italy and Czechoslovakia, by learning four languages — French, German, Italian and Russian — and discovering the work of Descartes, Nietzsche, Plato and others. The whole is framed by his privileged early life and his post-war appointments on the staff of the two Viceroys and the first Governor General of Pakistan, respectively.

A different ambience emerges in Rashid Rao’s translation of Ghazala Jahangir Rao’s Urdu novel Clara: A Sepoy’s Story of Love and War: From India to Italy, in which Khilafat, the narrator, slips away from his very poor family to enlist as a sepoy in the British Indian army to fight in World War II. By chance he comes to know Clara, an Italian girl, before he and his comrades are captured in North Africa, moved as prisoners-of-war to Italy and try to escape there. The descriptions of the relationship between captor and captive as humans rather than the brutal Other and the help, shelter and protection that Italian families, including Clara’s, provide escaped Indians like Khilafat in the post-Mussolini era, make a riveting read.

In 2022, the many noteworthy translations of Urdu fiction include Khushdil Kiratpuri’s The Adventures of a Soldier, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi; The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories by Hajra Masroor, translated by Tahira Naqvi; and Hiroshima and Other Stories by Ibn-e Sa’id (the pen name of journalist M. H. Askari), translated by Shama Askari. The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto: Volume I—Poona and Bombay, translated by Nasrene Rehman, is the first in her invaluable sequence of fluid, nuanced translations of the incomparable Manto’s bold, incisive, timeless fiction. The book includes an informative introduction on Manto too. Sin: Stories by Wajida Tabassum, skilfully translated by Reema Abbasi, pays tribute to a strongly feminist Urdu writer who lived in Hyderabad Deccan (India) and was once vilified for writing on subjects that were considered “societal taboos” but provides rich insights into the intensely personal lives of men and women, their needs, desires and hopes.

Among translations of life writing, the empowerment of women is central to Muhammadi Begum’s Urdu autobiography A Long Way from Hyderabad: Diary of a Young Muslim Woman in 1930s Britain, which consists of entries from 1 January to 6 September 1935, translated by her daughters, Zehra Ahmad and Zainab Masud, and published by her granddaughter Amena H Saiyid. She was a 24-year-old married woman in princely Hyderabad when she received a scholarship to St. Hugh’s at Oxford: her supportive husband Syed Jamil Hussain took leave from his government appointment in Hyderabad and moved to Oxford too to work in development studies; she was already pregnant by then and was at university when her first child was born. The book dispels many stereotypes and provides a fascinating insight into pre-war India, Britain and Europe.

Muhammadi Begum is among the forty-five women writers to be included in the pioneering anthology Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women, co-edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma, which includes both translations and Anglophone contributions from many lands including the Ottoman Empire, South Asia and Indonesia. This remarkable collection challenges concepts of traditional Muslim women as “immobile” virtually imprisoned figures and spans journeys across many countries and continents. Divided into “Travel as Pilgrimage”, “Travel as Emancipation and Politics”, “Travel as Education” and “Travel as Obligation and Pleasure”, the book provides fascinating insights into the political and social interactions between women in different lands ranging from Halide Edibe, Zainab Cobbold and Shams Pahlavi to three Begums of Bhopal, Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain and Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah.

The year saw several important anthologies in English including Art, Violence and the State: In the Killing Fields of Karachi, edited by Adeela Suleiman and Mariam Ali Baig. Sometimes a Greenness Grows: Poems from the English Department of Karachi University, edited by Huma Shakir and Nishat Wasim, is a significant compilation of poems by the university’s academics across decades ranging from the Maki Kureishi (1927–1995) to Mona Hassan, Faisal Nazir and Aamna Motala. Tales from Karachi: Vol 1, edited by Taha Kehar, is an accomplished anthology of poetry and short stories which began as an online project and captures different dimensions of Karachi life by new and established writers. Pakistan Left Review: Then and Now, edited by Nadir Cheema and Stephen M Lyon is an important historical work, which is given context by informative essays by Cheema and Lyon, Salima Hashmi and Rehman Sobhan, among others. The book includes reprints of all five issues of the journal The New Left Review edited by Aziz Kurta and published from 1968 to 1970, capturing that idealistic era which saw vast public protests in East and West Pakistan against Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship. The collection includes interviews with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Maulana Bhashani, an open letter to Bhutto from Tariq Ali, Sobhan on the economies of East and West Pakistan, Iqbal Khan’s essay “Has the Revolution Arrived in Pakistan?”.

The year saw several important works of criticism including Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: Critical Essays on Literature and Culture, edited by Waseeem Anwar and Nosheen Yousuf. This collection explores the term “transculturality” to look at “cultures, literatures and media in global worlds including issues of identity, nationhood and ‘contact zones’” in South Asia (Anwar). Divided into seven sections, it moves across languages, literary forms and indeed historical links often forgotten or eclipsed today. The many incisive essays include Bill Ashcroft and Waqas Khwaja on transcultural humanities, Minoli Salgado’s exploration of Sri Lankan literature, Areeba Tyab and Kashif Jamshed’s examination of the Persian dastaan and Greek epic traditions and Anisur Rahman’s illumination of Urdu’s rekhti poetry. The many other essays in the collection range from Nosheen Yousuf’s exploration of transculturality and South Asian women’s fiction, Rukhsana R Chowdhury’s enquiry into Bengal’s Urdu writers and Ali Usman Saleem’s examination of post-1988 Pakistani Anglophone Fiction. There are several articles on Partition too.

Amina Yaqin’s Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Women’s Writing throws new insights into the tradition of Urdu women’s writing. The assertion of equality, gender and self by Pakistani women poets, ranging from Ada Jafri and Zehra Nigah to Fehmida Riaz, Kishwar Naheed and Sara Shagufta, is given further context within the history of Urdu women’s poetry and the Progressive Writers movement. Yaqin also challenges colonial concepts of zenana “illiteracy” and discusses literary, purdah-observing poets such as Ze Khe Sheen, thus contradicting popular notions that literary activity was confined to courtesans and Mughal princesses.

Aamer’s essay collection House of Treasures: Perspectives of Urdu literature describes his Anglophone education and his subsequent discovery of Urdu literature across three decades. He covers Faiz’s poetry, the fiction of Quratulain Hyder and many others ranging from Intizar Hussain and Abdullah Hussein to Hijab Imtiaz Ali and Rashid Jahan. He explores specific texts and related issues including that of language and his recent resolve to write Urdu fiction. M. R. Kazimi’s Light and Letters: Cultural Essays spans valuable insights into literature and the performing arts, ranging from Urdu writers to western classics.

2022 saw many incisive works of non-fiction including Yasser Kureshi’s Seeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan, Zoha Waseem’s Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi and Ali Khan’s Cricket in Pakistan: Nation, Identity and Politics. The columnist and political analyst Nadeem Farooq Paracha’s The Reluctant Republic: Ethos and Mythos of Pakistan provides a very fine analysis of a changing national rhetoric in Pakistan and the contradictions that have appeared over a period of time, alongside discussions on pre-modern and modern societies in both Europe and South Asia and related concepts of economics, industrialization, faith, nation and nationhood. He devotes considerable space to “propagandist” national narratives in history books and curricula. Throughout, his discussions are followed by personal anecdotes on how national socio-political events influenced or were perceived by individual citizens. The impact of military rule and the derailment of the political process is central to the narrative as is East Pakistan breaking away in 1971.

Pakistan’s Wars: An Alternative History by Tariq Rahman is a remarkably well-researched book by a distinguished academic, who had once served in the army’s elite armoured corps before he resigned and became “a conscientious objector” to war. The book spans Pakistan’s conflicts with India since 1948 and Pakistan’s later engagement with wars in Afghanistan. His “alternative” perspective explores how and why specific and significant decisions to go to war were made and by whom, and the aftermath of these decisions. His invaluable chapters “War and Gender: Female”; “War and Gender: Male” include the role of women such as doctors and nurses, as well as the suffering of war-widows and war-orphans and the disabled; he looks too at psychological casualties such as clinical depressions, hallucinations and terror. He deals with comradeships and displays of humanity towards “the Other” among warring armies and he urges peace, not conflict.

Waleed Ziad’s ground breaking Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and the Indus combines history, anthropology and religious studies to tell of the highly educated scholar-saints of the Naqshbandi-Mujadiddi Sufi order, who became significant figures from the Indus to Central Asia “through a shared Persian cultural-linguistic tradition and historical memory” (Ziad). He explores the life and times of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d 1624) who founded the Mujaddadi order and how his successors spread his ideas. The particular focus on the 18th and 19th century challenges the colonial narratives of the Great Game and aims to “offer a new way of conceiving sovereignty in the Muslim world prior to the twentieth century” (Ziad). Ziad is also the author of In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandhāran Shrines, which explores the history of rare antique copper coins in the Hindu Kush.

Among international literary journals, the online multi-media French publications AngLES: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World brought out a significant multi-media special issue, Naya/New Pakistan, edited by David Waterman and Paul Veyret. This begins with a video recording by the co-authors, a spectacular photographic essay by both and Dewi Hadin-Waterman and leads up to a detailed, thought-provoking interview with Mohsin Hamid by Veyret. The collection includes two essays on Hamid in which Ajeesh A. K. and S Rukimini explore hybridity in Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, while Maelle Jeannniard du Dot looks at Hamid’s portrayal of Pakistan in Moth Smoke. Many of the articles also look for insights into today’s Pakistan through specific texts. These include Ana Ahsraf’s analysis of Uzma Aslam Khan’s Geometry of God, Rizia Begum Laskar’s exploration of Moni Mohsin’s witty Butterfly Diaries, Madhurima Sen’s examination of Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography and Mushtaq Bilal’s exploration of Mohammed Hanif’s novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti.

In Pakistan, online resources include Aleph, which continues to provide a platform for significant creative writing, essays and art by new and established writers of mostly of Pakistani origin, though it includes those from other countries too, while Prelude, which covers literature, society and politics, also shared a leading article on Pakistani women writers with Outlook India. Among established critical journals, it was good to see The Ravi, Pakistan Perspectives and the newer publication The Journal of Contemporary Poetics continue to provide a platform for important research and studies.

In the Pakistani press, the print and online newspaper supplements The News International: Literati and Dawn’s Books & Authors remain a major resource. The latter’s literary columnists include Claire Chambers, Zulfikar Ghose, Mehr Afshan Farooqi, Aamer Hussein and Harris Khalique, among others, while Dawn’s main magazine supplement Eos carries extracts from acclaimed new creative work as lead stories, including the winners of the ZHR Writing Prize and The Abdus Salam Award.

From this it can be surmised that 2022 was especially rich for Pakistani English literature, particularly fiction, poetry, drama and life writing; it was also good to see a focus on topical issues such as women’s writing and to see a new interest across different genres on the largely forgotten narratives of Indians in both World Wars.

The year also saw many losses. The distinguished journalists (both brothers) Imran Aslam (b 1952) and Talat Aslam (b 1955); Afra Bokhari (b 1938), Urdu short story writer; Zulfikar Ghose (b 1935), novelist, poet, critic, essayist and academic; Sara Suleri Goodyear (b 1953), academic and memoir writer; Dr Mehdi Hasan (b 1937), journalist, academic and media historian; Sultan Arshad Khan, musicologist; Sayeed Hassan Khan (b 1930c), columnist, freelance journalist, independent filmmaker, social activist and political analyst; Bushra Rehman (b 1944), politician and Urdu fiction writer; and Farhad Zaidi (b 1931), distinguished journalist and editor. They are deeply mourned.