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PH »583397
A History of Pakistani
Literature in English
A History of Pakistani
Literature in English

Tariq Rahman

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VANGUARD
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without

prior permission in writing from the author and publisher

Copyright : Tariq Rahman, 1991

First Published in Pakistan by

Vanguard Books Pvt Lid

Lahore Karachi Islamabad Peshawar

Vanguard Books Pvt Ltd

Head Office: 45 The Mall Lahore Pakistan

Ph: 57783, 311064, Fax: 042-321680 Tlx: 47421 SCOOP (PK)

Branch Office: D-212, KDA 1 A, Stadium Road, Karachi

Ph: 423571,421564

Branch Office: Jinnah Super Market, Islamabad

Ph: 822443, 814452

Printed at Intikhab i Jadeed Press,

Abbot Road, Lahore

Title designed by Ashraf Kama]

ISBN: 969-402-031-X Hardback

969-402-030-1 Paperback
Dedicated to my wife

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jf<H3/ £2-0

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A
CONTENTS

1. Acknowledgements ii

2. Introduction 1

5. Pre-Partition Fiction 15

4. Ahmed Ali 29

5. The Nineteen Fifties 56

6. The Nineteen Sixties 71

7. Zulfikar Ghose 89

8. The Nineteen Seventies 110

9. Bapsi Sidhwa 125

10. The Nineteen Eighties 136

11. Poetry 149

12. Drama 188

13. Prose 200

14. Conclusion 216

Bibliography 236

15. Pakistani Literature in English 236

16. Pakistani Literature: Anthologies 252

17. Pakistani Literature Research Aids 280

18. Pakistani Literature Serial

Publications In Pakistan 285

Index 304
Naqsh Faryadi Hai Kis Ki Shokhi e Tahrir Ka

(Ghalib)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research is a frustrating experience in Pakistan. How very

frustrating it may be can be guessed by reading the following
account of my own experience. The idea of writing such a
history occurred to me in October 1982 when I had just returned
home to Rawalpindi after having completed my M.A.
in English literature from the University of Sheffield. 1 knew
nothing about creative writers who used English as their
medium and was helped by Mr. Eric Cyprian, then the editor
of the Friday magazine of the Muslim in Islamabad. In the
same month 1 met Mr. Ahmed Dawood who gave me some
other names and introduced me to Mr. Ikram Azam, a civil
servant, who presented me his books. In December 1982 I
went back to the University of Sheffield and started working
on my Ph.D. thesis which was on E.M. Forster. Pakistani
literature was shelved though I kept close links with the
students of African literature in English. This was easy
because my supervisor, Christopher Heywood, was also an
authority on African literature. One of the students of
African literature I met was B. Chandramohan from India.
With Chandra I developed an intimate personal friendship
and he supplied me with much useful material for this book
when 1 was back in Pakistan in April 1985.

The breakthrough in research occurred when I met Professor

Daud Kamal, then Chairman of the Department of
English at the University of Peshawar, and a good Englishlanguage
poet himself. He offered me a teaching position in
the University and I stayed in Peshawar as Associate Professor
till September 1987 when I moved to Muzaffarabad as
Professor of English at the University of Azad Jammu and
Kashmir. The two years I spent at Peshawar were academically
rewarding. The atmosphere of the Department was

ai
congenial and Mr. Nazir. the office assistant, took care of all
administrative matters. Both Daud Kamal, who became a
personal friend, and Dr. Aurangzeh Shah kept supplying me
with hooks and articles. Dr. Shah, whom I cannot thank
enough, gave me African fiction with unstinted generosity
out of his personal collection. The debt to Daud Kamal can
hardly be expressed in words and his sudden death in December
1987 in the United States where he was reading his
poetry, is a personal loss as well as a loss for the world of
Pakistani letters. It is a loss which cannot be made good because
he was not only a poet but one of the most decent men
I have ever met. He made the department of English a wonderful
place to work in and hated bureaucratic rules and pettiness.
That is a tradition which continues in Peshawar
thanks to Dr. Shah, the present Chairman, and I would like
to place it on record that research flourishes, or at least becomes
easier, in this kind of atmosphere.

The British Council in Peshawar was especially helpful.

It was through them that I imported research articles, reviews
as well as rare books from British libraries. The
American Center too helped me to procure some material
for which 1 thank the director of the Center.

The quest for the books, which came to about three

hundred and most of which were very obscure, took me to all
major cities of Pakistan. My two trips to Karachi and three
to Lahore (all at my expense) are especially memorable. In
these trips and elsewhere I met people who went out of their
way to help me. My thanks go especially to: Air Commodore
(retired) Inam-ul-Haq, Director General of the Quaid-eAzam
Library, Bagh-e-Jinnah, Lahore, who gave me many
books at his own risk and helped me in many other ways;
Professor Ahmed Ali, the famous writer, who welcomed me
at his Karachi residence and gave me books and research articles;
Professor Alamgir Hashmi who answered my questions
patiently and without whose bibliographies my work
would have been much more difficult than it was; Mr. Feroze
Shah Khan, my wife’s uncle in Lahore, who gave me access
to the material in the Punjab Public Library; Professor
Ismail Bhatti, the Chairman of the Department of English at

111
the University of the Punjab, who gave me some books in his
possession; Mr. Masood Hasan who gave me Khalid Hasan’s
books; Mr. Shahid Jalal who gave me Nasir Farooqi’s novels;
Mr. Barni the editor of Outlook; Mr. Abbas Hussain, lecturer
in English at Karachi University, who helped me in
procuring material from the different libraries of Karachi;
Mr. Anwar Mooraj, the well known columnist of Dawn, who
gave me a rare copy of his own book; Mr. Imran Aslam, the
editor of The Star (Karachi); Mr. Khalid Ahmed, editor of
the Friday magazine of The Nation (Lahore); Mr. Waqas
Ahmed Khwaja, a poet in his own right, and editor of Cactus
(Lahore); Mr. Sajjad Sheikh, Head of the Department of
English at Gordon College, Rawalpindi, for giving me two
rare books; Mr. Athar Tahir, also a poet in Lahore; Lt.Col.
Iftikhar Din Hasan and Major Azam Jafar, both personal
friends and the latter also my brother-in-law, for procuring
books.

I must record the fact that people were, by and large,

very helpful and hospitable in their personal capacity. Sometimes,
in their role as bureaucrats and officials, they were
not impersonal as officials are in the West but hostile and
obstructive. The Army Library in Rawalpindi, for instance,
did not allow me to sit in it. However, inspite of his superior’s
orders, an officer allowed me to take books out on his
name. The officer did not know me and 1 do not know his
name but this touching gesture must be thanked and
recorded with respect. Similarly the editor of the Business
Recorder in Karachi made a long distance call to Islamabad
to find out the address of Mrs. Zuberi who had a copy of the
poet Itrat Zuberi’s poems. Such gestures keep one from despairing
whereas the attitude of some officials and librarians
makes one inclined to give up in despair.

Among the writers who sent me their work or other relevant

material are, apart from the ones mentioned already,
the following: Professor Zulfikar Ghose, Mrs. Bapsi Sidhwa,
Mr. Hanif Kureishi, Mrs. Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah, Mr.
Anwar-ul-Haque, Mr. BiJal Ahmad Jeddy, Mrs. Jocelyn Ortt
Saeed, Mr. Sikandar Hayat, Mr. Haleem Brohi (Abdul

IV
Haleem Aziz) and Major General Shahid Hamid (retired). I
thank them all for their help.

I also take this opportunity to thank my foreign correspondents:

Professor Carlo Coppola who sent me his forthcoming
book on Ahmed Ali; Dr. C. Kanaganayakam of the
University of British Columbia who sent me his Ph.D. thesis
on Ghose; Dr. Feroza F. Jussawalla who sent me her excellent
study of Indian criticism; my friends Anjum Saleemi at
the University of Essex and Shameem Abbas at the University
of Texas at Austin who kept sending me whatever I required;
and Professor Sajjad Hussain who sent me his own
criticism from Dacca. Without these contributions this study
could not have been completed in three years.

Some parts of this book were published in an earlier version

in The Muslim, The Nation and Dawn (Karachi). Some
have been accepted for publication and will be published
soon in The Journal of Indian Writing in English (India), Review
of Contemporary Fiction (US), World Literature Today
(US), Frank (France) and Commonwealth Novel in English
(US). I thank the editors of these publications for allowing
me to publish modified versions of the articles which were
published by them or will be published soon.

In Pakistan, writing a book, unless it is for a degree or

profit, is generally looked at as a kind of eccentricity which is
not supported by any institution. Time and money for it have
to be one’s own and it is implied, though never stated, that
such an activity is irrelevant to one’s academic life. All that is
accomplished is, therefore, accomplished despite and not
because of the system. In these conditions I must thank Dr.
Tahir Hussain, the Vice Chancellor of the University of
Azad Jammu and Kashmir, for acceding to my request not to
make me the Chairman of the Department of English. This
gave me more time for my book than administration leaves
one.

Collecting all the source material for this study was very
different, as I have indicated already, from my Ph.D. exercise
in England. There were no adequately equipped libraries
nor any facility for international library loans. Also
there were no study leaves nor sabbaticals. All the time and
money for the trips to far-away Karachi and import of articles
with each page costing Rs. 10.00 and each book
Rs.300.00 in 1987 had to come from one’s own family. I say
family because it was my wife and parents who suffered most
from my devotion to this study.

I am lucky in having an exceptionally understanding wife,

however, who grudged me neither time nor the money which
could have gone elsewhere if the book were not constantly
demanding it like a dragon demanding the precious blood of
children. It would be futile to thank her for having prepared
a section of the bibliography for that is a very small part of
her total contribution in making this book possible. Her real
contribution lies in giving up almost all holidays and allowing
me to remain long hours in my library reading, writing and
then typing. I can hardly find words to thank her or my parents
who waited for my holidays but had to reconcile themselves
to the fact that I would not find time for them even
then. As for my children, Tania and Fahad, if they do not
call me the man who trespasses into their house at odd
hours it is only owing to the wisdom of my wife who had to
lay down the law about when not to be in the library. But for
this law they would not have known me from Adam.

TARIQ RAHMAN,
Rawalpindi, January 1990.

VI

lit .
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

References to sources will he parenthetically incorporated in

the text and the notes and denoted by the abbreviations
given below. Other obvious abbreviations such as Twilight
for Twilight in Delhi may also be used. For the sake of
’brevity the article may be left out in some titles but it will be
mentioned in the bibliography given in the end. For full
publication details of the books given below see the bibliography:

AM Arrival of the Monsoon

by Taufiq Rafat

B Borderline by Hanif Kureishi

BE The Beautiful Empire

by Zulfikar Ghose
BL My Beautiful Launderette

by Hanif Kureishi

BM Black Moods by Omar Kureishi

C Corpses by Mehdi Ali Seljouk

CE The Crow Eaters by Bapsi Sidhwa

CNA Confessions of A Native-Alien

by Ghose
Corpses Statement Against Corpses

Ghose with by B.S. Johnson

CS The Crocodiles are Here to Swim

by Khalid Hasan

CT Crump’s Terms by Ghose

EV Essays in Verse

by Shahid Suhrawardy
FLD Faces of Love and Death
by Nasir Ahmad Farooqi
FV First Voices

VII
HD The Heart Divided

by Mumtaz Shahnawaz
ICM Ice-Candy-Man by Bapsi Sidhwa

J The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie

JCL Journal of Commonwealth Literature

JI WE Journal of Indian Writing in

English Literature

JL A Judge May Laugh by M.R. Kayani

M The Murder of Aziz Khan by Ghose

MG A Mugs Game by Khalid Hasan

NH The New Harmony

O Outskirts by Hanit’Kureishi

Onions Give Us Back Our Onion

by Khalid Hasan
PE Pieces of Eight

PEN Pakistan P.E.N. Miscellany

by Ahmed Ali (ed)

PR The Prison House by Ahmed Ali

R Rice and Other Stones

by Khwaja A.Abbas

RB A Remote Beginning by Baud Kamal

RE Recognitions by Daud Kamal

SC Scorecard by Khalid Hasan

SD Scented Dust by Feroze Khan Noon

SK My Second in Kentucky

by Alamgir Hashmi

TD Twilight In Delhi by Ahmed Ali

WLWE World Literature Written in

English
YW The Young Wife and Other Stories

by Zaib-un-Nisa Hamidullah

Vlll

4
INTRODUCTION

There is a purist view of art according to which it would be

futile to categorize literature at all. According to this view
the best art, and literature is a form of it, transcends national
boundaries both geographical and ideological. As such it
would be paradoxical to speak of say, American and Russian
literature; either it is literature, an art-form of the purest
kind, or it is not. And from this point of view, with which
Henry James would have agreed but many others would not,
it appears chauvinistic to set out to study Pakistani literature
in English. This is what Zulfikar Ghose, an expatriate writer
of Pakistani origin, must have had in his mind when to my
question who, in his opinion, were the best writers from
India and Pakistan he replied:

I do not know enough of their work to have an

opinion. I must repeat that I despise labels.
Categories are for clerks in bureaucracies and have
nothing to do with art. The worst category invented
for writers is the nationalistic one, as though some
sort of literary Olympic games were in progress. A
writer is interested in the best literature wherever it
comes from, and a writer who makes a special place
in his reading for the works of his countrymen and
women has to be one who is more interested in a
who’s who type of gossip than he is in his art.1

Ghose’s acerbity of tone and the assertion that literature

must not be given critical attention for non-literary reasons
is, of course, justified. This has been done too often as we
shall see in the following survey of trends in the criticism of
Third World literature in English.
The problem of evaluation has assumed political rather
than aesthetic forms in Third World literatures to a degree
quite unprecedented in modern English literature. The
critical debate in the new literatures in English is, in the last
analysis, connected with colonialism. It was colonialism
which created cultural arrogance among European critics
and a corresponding sense of inferiority among the
colonized. Now, in a reversal of this pattern, the Europeans
tend to be patronizing and the Third World critics
chauvinistic and ethnocentric. The first issue which rises in
this connection is whether these new literatures are indeed
so different from English literature as understood
traditionally, as to call for different criteria of evaluation:

The problems referred to are aspects of a general

problem of evaluation. Is this new body of writing to
be judged as an extension of literature in English,
and by the international standards associated with it,
or does it, for cultural and linguistic and possibly
other reasons, require some quite different critical
basis? Readers of Transition will recall that the
correspondence columns for a long time carried an
argument about the ’impudent’ assumption by nonAfricans
that they could criticize African authors.2

But even if the literatures are distinctive wholes, and

certainly their themes and sensibility does support this view,
it does not follow that non-literary criteria should be used to
evaluate them.

Modern African literature came to be given critical

attention in the West in the 1950s. A number of reviews
were written by anthropologists whose interest was
anthropological rather than artistic. One critical term which
was often used was ’simplicity’. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart (1958) was said to be simple and the emphasis was on
the informative, as opposed to the artistic, value of the
novel. Keith Waterhouse, while referring to Achebe’s No
Longer at Ease (1960) said in the New Statesman:
We want a lucid, uncluttered account of the way life
is changing in these territories. We want sound,
competent craftsmen to put up the framework; later
when the chronicles of change are more or less
complete, some very fortunate writers indeed will be
able to fill the framework in, wallowing in the new
luxuries of characterisation, motivation, depth,
psychology and all the rest of it.3

This evolutionary view of creativity is based on the

assumption that the African is less sophisticated in his
response to reality than his Western counterpart. Others
argue that discrepant criteria should be used for evaluating
Western and African literatures because the African
sensibility cannot be expressed in Western literary forms.
This hypothesis is based on the assumption that there are no
universals, no possibility of transcendence of ethnocentric
ways of apprehension and, by implication, no such thing as a
classic -- a work of art which will appeal to people who do
not belong to the culture in which it was first produced. This
is an extreme interpretation of this culture-bound
hypothesis. Here is one of the most balanced statements of
this doctrine:

It is unrewarding, therefore, for the non-African

reader and critic to look at any of the three major
genres in contemporary African writing, the novel,
poetry, and drama solely from the perspective of
Western literary criteria and terminology. This is too
much like trying to force a glove with three fingers
onto a hand with five. Instead we must look at
African writing not only for whatever similarities
with Western literary forms may be, but also once we
have fully identified these for what is different, and,
therefore,African.4

This is only a roundabout way of saying that there can be

different evaluative criteria for different kinds of literatures
written in English: an assertion which can and has led to
critical anarchy in the past and which must not be accepted
without reservations. And one of these reservations is the
political one; to be precise, the nationalistic one.

Nationalism, again a consequence of colonization, has

been a major force to reckon with in the Third World. In
African countries too the slogan that literature should serve
the cause of nationalism has had its heyday. In the first
Congress of Negro Writers in 1956, for example, a delegate
exhorted African artists to ’try to look at art through
politics’.5 The Second Congress in 1959 held in Rome also
emphasized the political basis of art. In the last few years the
artists themselves have been less willing to tolerate these
prescriptive formulas and, as a consequence, the formulas
have lost their force. African critics are, however,
nationalistic and even question the right of non-Africans to
criticize African literature. This is merely a political conflict,
that between the colonizer and the colonized, which has
taken a literary form and is expressed in the idiom of
aesthetics rather than politics.

In the West Indies, the Guyanese magazine Kyh-over-al

(1945-1961) tried to ’stimulate a West Indian theory and
practice of literary and cultural criticism’.6 Another such
magazine, The Beacon (1931-1933), from Trinidad, insisted
that West Indian writing ’should utilise West Indian settings,
speech, characters, situations and conflicts’.7 In other words,
that it would not be imitative as it had been in the past. This
was all a part of an effort to create authentic West Indian
literature. But once such a literature was produced, the
critical response to it was in many ways similar to that
towards African literature. Very often certain themes,
prominent because of historical experiences, are accepted as
a criterion of value. Braithwaite, a famous West Indian
writer, makes the fragmentation of West Indian culture and
identity his major theme. And then this theme, or an
extension of it, become a critical standard:

Indeed this notion of estrangement from one’s

community and landscape becomes in Braithwaite’s
various critical articles or surveys of West Indian
writing the main” criterion for judging individual
Caribbean writers.8

Once again one notices the tendency to judge literature

in terms of ideas and themes related in some way or the
other to the experience of colonization.

And this tendency is also noticeable in the criticism of

Indian literature in English by Indians. I will pay more
attention to it because the cultural situation and the political
forces influencing Indian critics are very similar to those
which influence Pakistani critics. Thus, in order to
understand what literary criteria should be used to evaluate
Pakistani literature in English, it would be most relevant to
understand what criteria have actually been used by Indian
critics to evaluate Indian literature.

Indian literature in English, like the other new

literatures of the Third World, began as a consequence of
the confrontation of India with the West. However, it was
not a literature of protest but that of imitation in the
beginning. Henry Derozio (1809-1831), Kashiprosad Ghose
(1809-1873), Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1827-1873) and
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) were some of the
pioneers of Indian creative writing in English.9 But this
writing was more derivative rather than creative. Ghose and
Dutt, according to William Walsh, were ’low-toned versions,
the one of torn Moore, the other of the lesser, romantic
Byron’.10 And Aurobindo Ghose (1867-1924) ’wrote a
delicate kind of Victorian lyric in Love Songs and Elegies
(1898)’.11 Even Sarojini Naidu, famous though she was, wrote
merely meretricious pseudo-romantic verse in the style of
the nineties.

At first, barring encomiastic reviews, there was almost

no Indian criticism of this literature. Bhupal Singh, the
chronicler of Anglo-Indian fiction, did, however, add a brief
appendix to his book about some Indian writers of fiction.12
Singh’s book was published in 1934 and he has not
mentioned any writer who gained fame later. Criticism
began in earnest in the 1950s and K.R. Srinivasa lyengar’s
book Study of Indian Writing in English (1959) is one of the
first major studies of Indian literature in English by an
Indian critic. Narasimhaiah’s The Swan and the Eagle (1968),
R.S. Singh’s Indian Novel in English (1977) and Uma
Parameswaran’s A Study of Representative Indo-English
Novelists (1976), to mention only three studies, came later.
There are also a large number of research articles, some
sub-standard and others good, which are produced in India
or by Indians writing in Western journals. In other words a
lot is being written about Indian writing in English at
present.

The most important and balanced account of this

criticism and its concerns has been given by Feroza F.
Jussawalla in her book entitled Family Quarrels (1985). She
tells us that critics have been concerned more with the
nationalistic theme and variants of it than with other factors.
It was nationalism which led to the major debate in Indian
criticism whether literature can, apart from the question
whether it should, be produced in English at all. The other
main concern is with Indianness, the success a writer
achieves in creating literature with a genuinely Indian
quality. The manipulation of language to express Indianness
and the endorsement of nationalism implicit in such a
demand are also derived from nationalism.13

The choice of the English language, as I mentioned

above, has been one of the major problems of Indian
criticism. There are many levels and aspects of this problem.
At the most polemical level Indian critics object to the use of
the English language because, as Feroza Jussawalla
reproducing the argument of P.P. Mehta, puts it:

Indians write in English to impress the British, to

gain a wider readership international and national;
Indians want the world to see that nationalist India is
different; they distrust the vernaculars because they
are not universal languages, and because of their
Western education and Western models; they write
at the inspiration of Western writers.14
At a more sophisticated level, Indian critics have
invoked the extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypotheses
in their discussion of the possibility of using English to
convey Indian reality. The extreme version is an
interpretation of the hypotheses put forward by the
American linguists Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin
Lee Whorf (1897-1941). According to this:

There are no restrictions on the amount and type of

variation to be expected between languages, including
their semantic structures, and that the
determining effect of language on thought is total.15

It was claimed on the basis of this hypothesis that Indian

cultural experience, and by analogy any culture bound
experience, can only be communicated in the language in
which it is experienced by a person who speaks that language
as a mother tongue. In the 1960 the Whorfian issue became
important when a special issue of Indian Writing Today
referred to it in the editorial. The crux of the issue was
whether Indianness could be expressed in a foreign
language. Narayan’s standard, though inordinately simple,
English;16 Mulk Raj Anand’s use of indigenous
expressions;17 and Raja Rao’s syntactic deviations 1S have
all been attacked or praised by the critics more for success in
communicating Indianness, a nationalistic concern, than for
artistic validity.19

The writers themselves, or at least the best ones, were

more concerned about art than politics. R.K. Narayan had
the following to say about their use of English:

We are still experimentalists. I may straightaway

explain what we do not attempt to do. We are not
attempting to write Anglo-Saxon English. The
English language, through sheer resilience and
mobility, is now undergoing a process of
Indianisation in the same manner as it adopted the
U.S. citizenship over a century ago, with the
difference that it is the major language there but
here one of the fifteen.20

But language remained a major issue such as it is not in

African or Caribbean literature.21

Another major issue, also connected with nationalism, is

that of alienation and expatriation. Indian critics have felt
that expatriate (or Western) writers, Kamala Markandaya
and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for instance, are not capable of
representing Indian reality authentically. Uma
Parameswaran asserts that writers who are ’not as rooted in
Hindu culture as the native-talents or early writers lack an
Indian sensibility’ and their portrayal of Indian reality is not
competent.22 According to this ethnocentric criterion
Jhabvala and Markandaya’s understanding of India must be
faulty and their representation of Indian reality erroneous or
at least flawed. Indeed this is exactly what P. Balaswamy
argues in his criticism of Markandaya’s A Handful of Rice
(1966).23 And Jhabvala, inspite of her brilliant portrayal of
Indian life, has largely been found fault with because she is
unflattering to Indian and British alike. J.S. Lall in a review
of Jhabvala’s novel Heat and Dust (1975) said:

Mrs. Jhabvala’s marriage to an Indian is not an

automatic key to an understanding of India. This is
only partly a book about India. It hardly matters;
clearly it is written for markets that pay.24

This is not true for, though marrying an Indian does not

make one a novelist, talent does. And Mrs. Jhabvala has the
rare talent for portraying society realistically. Her novel The
Nature of Passion (1956), for instance, is one of those rare
works of fiction which contain deep insights into the minds
of Indians of different classes and backgrounds. Its theme is
that the nature of passion in India is compromise and it is
truthful yet sympathetic towards Indian ways of feeling and
thinking. The critics, it appears, are ready to praise only
those who are Indian nationalists, who are close and
sympathetic to Indian traditions and not those who are
objective, detached or fault-finding. To quote Jussawalla: /’

Traditionally, once a Brahmin crossed the seas, he

lost his position of status. Contemporary criticism
merely invokes a similar authoritarianism. The
concern with the effort to categorize writers as native
sons and expatriates is a function of a narrow,
brahmanical point of view.25

Probably the most chauvinistic criterion invoked for the

evaluation of literature is a writer’s attitude towards the
Indian leader Gandhi. The cult of Gandhi clouded literary
judgment so much that even R.K. Narayan was criticized for
his controversial treatment of Gandhi in Waiting for the
Mahatma (1955). It is, indeed, ’ironic that it is in the
treatment of Gandhism that critics have been most partisan
in their value judgments about literature’.26

The state of criticism in Third World literature in

English in general and that of Indian literature in particular
has been dealt with at such length to point out that the
nationalistic pitfall in particular and non-literary criteria in
general must be avoided in the criticism of any literature.
They have been avoided, or are at least less in evidence, in
Pakistani literature but only because there is very little
Pakistani criticism of this new literature in existence. Almost
the only area in which work does exist is in bibliography.
Since 1965 the Journal of Commonwealth Literature has been
publishing a brief note followed by a bibliography of
Pakistani writings in English and other languages. This
bibliographical note was written by Syed Ali Ashraf in the
beginning. Then Maya Jamil and later Alamgir Hashmi
started writing it. Unfortunately the note is hardly analytical
nor is it meant to be. What is worse is that it is also
incomplete since many publications in English are obscure
and it is almost impossible for anyone to keep track of all
that is being printed in the country. Book reviews are mostly
indiscriminating and full of cliches and praise. Hashmi’s own
book reviews, especially those which are published in foreign
journals, are free of these faults. However, as a critic even
Hashmi is impressionistic rather than analytical and
Pakistani criticism is still at a very unsophisticated level.

As yet no Pakistani university offers a course in either

Pakistani or even in African, West Indian and Indian
literature in English. However, recently the University of
Peshawar in its journal entitled The Journal of the English
Literary Club has been publishing the works of Pakistani
writers and even critical articles and reviews of these works.
Earlier, the University of Karachi used to publish Venture
which published some excellent articles on Pakistani
literature as well as English poetry. The Mirror, Pakistan
Quarterly, the weekend magazines of the English dailies and
institutional magazines too have been publishing short
stories and poems but very little criticism. The Nation
(Lahore) has, however, published several articles on
Pakistani literature in English and the Muslim and the
Frontier Post publish short stories. The Star, an eveninger
from Karachi, publishes humorous pieces and the Dawn
group of newspapers too publish reviews and occasional
poems. Perhaps the only journal in Pakistan which has been
a serious forum for debate about literary matters and has
published some of the most talented young poets of Pakistan
is The Ravi, the magazine of the prestigious Government
College, Lahore It was in The Ravi that the debate whether
Pakistani writers should use English for creative work was
carried on.27 And it was in the pages of this magazine that
many poets whose works will be dealt with in detail in the
chapter on poetry first achieved publication. The
Government College also publishes another journal entitled
Explorations. This is the product of the Department of
English of this college but it is not comparable with The
Ravi. University research journals hardly contain articles on
Pakistani literature in English and there is no equivalent of
the prestigious Indian academic journals such as the Journal
of Indian Writing in English.

Because of this lack of criticism the history of Pakistani

literature in English has yet not been written though such
histories exist for other Third World literatures in English.

10

A
This book is being written to fill this gap. This book is
historical as well as critical. It is this latter aspect of it which
is a source of its strength as well as weakness: strength
because criticism is always required to create the criteria for
evaluating creative writing; weakness because this criticism
is a product of my personal judgment which could well be
prejudiced, mistaken or erroneous. The mistake, however,
will not proceed from chauvinism at least. I have, therefore,
tried not to use non-literary criteria to evaluate literature.
Whether a writer is, in any sense of the word, nationalistic,
Islamic or traditionalist is of no relevance to the judgment of
his work. Pakistani literature is being studied not for
nationalistic reasons but simply because it too is one of the
«&. new literatures of the Third World written in the English
language. The definition of Pakistani, therefore, is loose
rather than strict; cultural rather than political. I have, for
instance, included several works of expatriate writers like
Zulfikar Ghose, Hanif Kureishi and Tariq Mehmood though
some of them do not even call themselves Pakistani but are
of Pakistani origin and their works are relevant to Pakistani
literature.

Some writers who have written prolifically have been

given no critical attention whereas others who have
produced only one slim volume of verse or a collection of
short stories have been commented upon. This has been
done for one of the following two reasons: either the writer
has not collected his separate writings in a single collection
or, and here my personal judgment comes in, I have not
considered the work worthy of critical attention at all. In the
latter case the work has been mentioned in the bibliography
and may be read and given a different interpretation by
some other critic. If a work does exist in the form of a book
and has not been mentioned in the bibliography it has not
been read by me and I would be most grateful if someone
makes it available. However, I venture to add that such
works will be very few indeed because I have made every
effort to read every important literary work written by
Pakistanis. I have confined myself to that part of the country
which used to be called West Pakistan till the separation of

11
Bangladesh in 1971. Logically the creative works of East
Pakistan till 1971 should have been dealt with but,
unfortunately, they could not be procured inspite of my best
efforts. It was because of this limitation that I decided to
limit myself to that part of the country which is called
Pakistan now.

This is a history and the arrangement is chronological. I

have started with pre-Partition fiction and then proceeded to
deal with the fiction of the fifties and so on till the late
eighties. Poetry, drama and prose have been given separate
chapters. Great literary figures too have been given separate
chapters. The conclusion sums up the themes of Pakistani
literature in English and attempts to compare this literature
with other Third World literatures.

It is hoped that this book will generate interest in

Pakistani literature and its criticism. It may also help the
common reader as well as the specialist of Commonwealth
or Third World literature in English to understand this new
literature in the English language. This knowledge is useful
not only for understanding the phenomenon of the rise of
new literatures in English but also for understanding the
nature of creativity itself. And that is a question which finally
transcends all labels and all questions of nationality.

NOTES

1. Tariq Rahman, ’Zulfikar Ghose: Interview’,

Viewpoint, (21 July 1988), 9-11.

2. Edgar Wright, ’Problems of Criticism’, JCL, 2 (1966),

103-112. Quoted from William Walsh ed. Readings in
Commonwealth Literature (1973), 56.

3. Keith Waterhouse, New Statesman, LX (17

Sept. 1960), 348.

4. Charles R. Larson, The Emergence of African Fiction,

56.

5. Ben Enwonwa, ’Problems of the African Artist

Today’, Presence Africaine (Paris 1956; special issue,
English edition), 179,

12
6. Reinhard W. Sander, The Thirties and the Forties’,
West Indian Literature ed. Bruce King, 48.

7. Ibid, 50.

8. J. Michael Dash, ’Edward Braithwaite’ in Bruce

King, op. cit. 210.

9. William Walsh, Commonwealth Literature (1973), 1-5.

10. Ibid, 2.

11. Ibid, 2.

12. Bhupal Singh, A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction

, (1934), 306-310.

13. Feroza F. Jussawalla, Family Quarrels (1985). See

chapters 3 and 4.

14. P.P. Mehta, Indo-Anglian Fiction: An Assessment

(1979). Quoted from Jussawalla, 26.

15. R.A. Hudson, Sociolinguistics (1980), 103.

16. For critics who find fault with Narayan’s English, see
Jussawalla, 70.

17. C. Paul Verghese, Problems of the Indian Creative

Writer in English (1972) criticizes Anand’s English,
101-102.

18. Romesh Mohan, ’Some Aspects of Style and

Language in Indian English Fiction’, in Romesh
Mohan ed. Indian Writing in English (1978) argues
that Raja Rao has created a special kind of Indian
idiom, 198.

19. See Jussawalla, 67-99 for a good summary of the

controversy over style.

20. R.K. Narayan, ’English in India: The Process of

Transmutation’, in Aspects of Indian Writing in
English ed. M.K. Naik (1979), 19.

21. Walsh ed. Readings in Commonwealth Literature

(1973),xx-xxi.

22. Uma Parameswaran, A Study of Representative IndoEnglish

Novelists (1976), 86.

23. P. Balaswamy, The Distorted and the Distortive

Mirror of Kamala, Markandaya’, Criticle (October
1977), 21.

24. J.L. Lall, ’No Heat, A Little Dust’, in The Illustrated

Weekly of India (February 8, 1976), 35.

13
25. JussawalJa, 153
26- Ibid, 173.

27’ Sate* ^^^ °” P°e^ and i* notes for this

14

I
PRE-PARTITION FICTION

Among the Muslims who started writing before the partition

of India in 1947, the most famous name is that of Ahmed
Ali. That is why a complete chapter of this book has been
devoted to his work. In this chapter I shall deal with the
writings of Ahmed Ali’s Muslim contemporaries, Feroze
Khan Noon, Mumtaz Shahnawaz and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas.
It is easy to see why the first two should have been included
in a history of Pakistani literature. Noon became a Prime
Minister of Pakistan and Mumtaz’s famous novel The Heart
Divided is one of the few responses in English fiction to the
creation of Pakistan from the Muslim Indian point of view.
But Abbas did not emigrate to Pakistan nor is he in any political
sense concerned with Pakistan. However, I have dealt
with Abbas because he represents a neglected aspect of
Muslim consciousness which found literary expression in
English before the Partition. This is the response to the
ideas of liberalism and socialism which were accepted by
some Indian intellectuals before the Partition and have receded
into the background in Pakistan now. Abbas’s work is
significant because it represents the liberal-socialist aspect of
the Indian Muslim consciousness which ought not to be ignored
in any historical survey of literature.

Feroze Khan Noon is better known for his autobiography

From Memory (1966) than for his fiction.1 His only attempt
at a novel, Scented Dust (1941) was also written for
sociological rather than literary reasons. He explains the reasons
for writing this novel in his ’Foreword’ to the book:

In February 1939, when I was on my way back to

England by sea, I met an American lady who asked
me if I knew of a book which would give her a bird’s

15
eye-view of India. She was particularly interested to
know of the life in the villages, the economic position
of the peasantry, our system of taxation, the condition
of our women, our religions, our politics, what it
was that prevented people from joining hands
against the British, our system of Government, the
place in it of the British officer, how he behaved towards
the people and what was the constitutional future
of India.

The 487 pages Noon has produced fulfil the American

lady’s desire adequately. Almost every aspect of life in India,
especially the life in the villages, has been dealt with
painstakingly. But whether that makes the book a good novel
is a question we can defer till the novel has been discussed.

The narrative revolves around the life of Ali, the son of

the headman of Jamalpur village. Ali is a student ’in his third
year at a college in Lahore’ (SD, 3) and resents his father’s
subservience to the Tehsildar and the English officer James
Lincoln. Ali is rude to Mr. Lincoln and says: ’We can tolerate
you as servants, but not as autocratic rulers’ (SD, 139).
While Lincoln assesses the revenue of the district, his wife
Dorothy visits the money-lender’s wife and discovers how
the villagers are kept in perpetual debt by most of the
money-lenders. Later Dorothy’s daughter dies and she returns
to England where she loses her mental balance. Mr.
Lincoln, now retired, finds that he cannot readjust to life in
England and returns to India. Here the narrative takes on
mystic undertones: Mr. Lincoln receives a mysterious call to
become the superintendent of a leper’s colony and goes
there with his orderly Sher Khan. Here Ali comes to visit
him and apologises. He says:

I misjudged you then because you were a paid servant.

But your coming here to do work in an honorary
capacity has captivated the heart of every Indian.
You have enslaved us with your kindness (SD,
487).

16

M
This might be moving but the novel as such is extremely
tedious, largely because of large chunks of purely documentary
material. In fact the narrative does not fulfil the demands
of a good novel from the literary point of view at all.
The story is merely a contrivance to enable the writer to describe
all aspects of Indian life. Thus the narrative is interrupted
by prolix digressions on peoples’ behaviour, the situation
in the fields, the manners and customs of villagers and
other matters. There are long conversations between the
Tehsildar and the Assistant’s wives Gulshan Ara and Chandravati
on Islamic laws about marriage and Hindu-Muslim
unity. Chandravati says: ’I should make it compulsory for
every graduate in our country to learn a little about Christianity,
Islam and Hinduism’ (SD, 281). In chapter V a college
teacher Mr. Goswami tells his Hindu students to eat
meat on the grounds that it is nutritious and Indians, by
eating it, would become ’a uniformly healthy race’ (SD, 293).
Lincoln’s orderly Sher Khan tells his employer all about his
religious beliefs. One of these beliefs is that there is an esoteric
order of saints who rule over the world. This belief is
made use of in the end when a weaver, who is reputed to be
such a saint, first disappears and then appears when Mr.
Lincoln returns from England to do altruistic work in India.

All these interruptions and detailed descriptions about

daily life in Indian villages detract from the literary significance
of the book. One cannot put in large undigested
pieces of sociological facts in a work of art without
endangering its artistic viability. However, the sociological
importance of the book -- it can hardly be called a novel - is
undeniable. It should be noted that Noon is objective and
unprejudiced in his recording of Indian life. Only at two
places he speaks of Islamic history or religion with the partisan
attitude of fundamentalist Muslims towards such subject.
In all other matters he acts with the disinterestedness of a
scholar. At places he does, however, romanticize certain aspects
of Islam but his interpretation of Islamic injunctions is
in harmony with the liberal and humanitarian ideas which
had become fashionable among educated Indians. For instance,
in the 19th century Muslim revivalists were inter17
ested in inculcating a vitalist ethos. They tended to counteract
the passivity and resignation of the mystics and talked
about action. Mohammad Iqbal’s philosophy of Khudi (ego;
selfhood) and his emphasis on action as a source of life and
dynamism can be understood in the light of this preoccupation.
Noon also endorses such an attitude while describing a
seaman’s conception of Islam:

The realisation that this great religion depended

mainly on action and not merely on belief had
dawned upon him (SD, 54).

Noon’s views about salvation too are liberal rather than

fundamentalist. Again while describing the sailor’s ideas he
says approvingly:

He knew that Islam was not only a faith but also a

morality, and that in accordance with Islamic tenets
everyone would be judged in accordance with his
conduct, no matter what his religious belief, provided
he believed in God (SD, 54).

The assertion that acts rather than belief is the basis of

salvation was, of course, one of the bones of contention between
the orthodox Muslims and the modernists in the
1940s. Another religious controversy was about the marriages
between Hindus and Muslims. According to orthodox
interpretations of the Quranic law such marriages were
taboo. However, in a discussion between students and their
lecturer, the narrator endorses the opinion that such marriages
should be encouraged in order to keep Hindus and
Muslims united in a free India. The narrator also discusses
the question of dividing India into a Muslim and a Hindu
country but this view is not put forward vehemently or to the
exclusion of other solutions. The tone of the whole book is
level-headed and unprejudiced. This, it must be added, is a
notable achievement considering that most discussions of
such subjects were to become more narrow-minded in Pakistan
later. The liberalism of Noon was as much the product

18
of his age as the anti-liberal prejudices of Pakistan after the
sixties. One aspect of accepting secular Western ideas in
pre-Partition India was a definite inclination to reject the
hidebound, the conventional, the religious and the fundamentalist.
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, the writer we shall consider
now, went even further than Noon and most others of
his contemporaries in rejecting the traditional. He became a
socialist and a nationalist.

Ahmad Abbas wrote two novels, a novelette, a drama,

two collections of short stories, two travelogues and one account
of journalism and the process of writing. Not all of
them need concern us here.2

Ahmad Abbas’s stories are about characters or events

which reflect some aspect of the Indian situation or ethos in
the conflict or its denouement. Mulk Raj Anand, the famous
Indian novelist, wrote in his preface to Rice that one of the
author’s favourite themes is the emergence of individualism.
Talking about ’Sparrows’ he said that Rahim Khan, the protagonist
of the story, was ’one of the first few men in our
modern short story who is shown attempting to be an individual
from within the gamut of the old feudal society and
failing in his attempt’ (R, 8). The character of Rahim Khan,
a brutalised peasant, is redeemed only by his tenderness for
sparrows. In ’The Umbrella’, the self-mocking narrator has a
similar tenderness for a European girl who is his travelling
companion on the top of a bus when it starts raining. The
narrator opens his umbrella and the girl sits next to him and,
he discovers later, picks his pocket. He can follow the bus in
a taxi and have her apprehended but does not do so. He explains
his inaction by saying: ’Didn’t I tell you this gentlemanly
temperament was the cause of my undoing perhaps
also the cause of the undoing of my country?’ (R, 143). The
narrator reveals himself ironically for it is not gentlemanly
forbearance but his sentimental nostalgia for the few moments
of sublimated and much romanticised sexual desire
for the girl which prevents him from taking practical steps to
recover his whole month’s salary. Such romantic attraction
for European and even Eurasian girls was part of the Indian

19
sensibility before the Partition and Abbas has brought this
out with humour and irony.

As a nationalist Abbas had great respect for Gandhi. He

had also transcended the prejudices of Indian sexual conventions
which were more than Victorian in their prudery, his
lack of respect for Indian values is made evident in the story
’Twelve Hours’. In this story an young woman Bina is sent by
the Communist Party to welcome an old revolutionary Vijay
Singh who is coming out of the jail only for twelve hours.
Vijay Singh is old and broken in health but he has been
Bina’s hero in the past. Bina takes her home for a night’s
rest before being re-arrested. As he tosses restlessly in the
next room she realises that he needs her sexually. She decides
to allow him to make love to her:

In a few hours she would try to compensate for all he

had missed so far. In her body, at least for a few
moments, Vijay Singh would get something that he
had been denied (R, 128).

The sense of the girl’s moral greatness -- a greatness

which would not have been comprehensible to the
traditionalists -- is conveyed without direct praise. The effect
is moving.

’Sylvia’ is another story about human greatness. In it the

nurse Sylvia decides to keep looking after her patients instead
of marrying a man who only wants a personal servant.
The story would have been sentimental if Sylvia’s fiance had
not been a selfish old bachelor. As it is, one discovers that in
a male-dominating society the choice is between different
kinds of bondages: to one man or to an organisation. This
insight into Indian society redeems a story which could have
been quite conventional otherwise.

Two other stories -- ’Flowers for her Feet’ and

’Reflections in a Mirror’ -- are on the hackneyed theme of
the courtesan. Since Lucknow was the great centre of sophisticated
prostitution in India, there were a great number of
stories in Urdu (such as Umrao Jan Ada)3 as well as some in
English about prostitutes. ’Flowers’ is unusual in that it is the

20
story of a prostitute who is made to dance on a sword and
cuts her feet. The end is, however, irredeemably sentimental.
She refuses to marry a devoted flower-seller because she
would be paralysed for life. The theme of the saintly courtesan
is a stock theme in Urdu literature and film and Abbas’s
treatment of the theme is not original. The other story is
hardly worth mentioning because it is about another stock
theme - that the courtesan in the Raja’s palace discovers
that she will be despised when she loses her looks.

Many of Abbas’s stories are about specific contemporary

events. One is called ’Saffron Blossom’ and is about the rise
of the poor Kashmiri people against the ruler’s oppressive
government. The story is narrated by an old woman whose
family has died in the struggle. The narrator has been skilfully
presented by the author. The fatalism of those who
have been crushed into acquiescence is brought out in the
narrator’s own remarks about the struggle and its tragic outcome
is made more effective through its being at one remove
from the actual scene of occurrence; because then we
feel the effect of actions and political events on uncomprehending
human beings. This is Abbas’s best political
short story and its literary merit lies in the presentation of
the narrator’s consciousness without obtrusive comment
rather than the theme itself. For here the theme is the familiar
one of oppression. It is true that the people being oppressed
are Muslims but Abbas, like a convinced socialist
and secular nationalist, had no religious prejudices as his
short stories about the partition of India demonstrate. As a
nationalist Abbas was against the partition and stayed back
in India. He is one of the few Muslims who wrote short stories
in English in which both the Muslims and the Hindus
and Sikhs are blamed equally for the killings during the partition.
Out of these stories ’Revenge’ and The Man Who
Did Not Want to Remember’ are noteworthy. The first is
based on the rape and murder of a Hindu girl by Muslims
and her father’s desire to avenge himself on a Muslim girl
whose breasts, he discovers just when he is about to stab her,
have been cut off by Hindus. And the second is about a man
who has lost his memory and does not want to regain it be21
cause all religious communities are equally guilty of atrocities.
These stories do not come up to Abbas’s best work
though his unprejudiced point of view does much to cornmend
them. However, they are better than Abbas’s novelette
on the same theme Blood and Stones (1947).

Abbas wrote a number of stories on the theme of socialism

too. His allegory ’Cages of Freedom’ from the eponymous
collection of short stories about birds caged by religions
and other capitalistic systems reminds one not of Orwell’s
Animal Farm (1945) but the less sophisticated medieval
allegories. Likewise ’The Miracle of Prajapur’, about
the birth of quintuplets to a poor couple who cannot save
them from death, has little literary merit. The other socialist
story ’Fathers and Sons’ is equally cliched and sentimental. It
would appear that Abbas’s treatment of the theme of socialism
in his fiction is a complete failure from the literary point
of view but this is not so.4 His novel Tomorrow is Ours redeems
it to some extent.

In the novel the heroine, Parvati Premchand, becomes a

dancing girl when her mother dies. Because of the low social
status of dancing girls her mother-in-law rejects her when
she marries Srikant, a doctor newly returned from Britain
but belonging to the feudal gentry of caste Hindus. Parvati
leaves him and earns her living by dancing. She also becomes
a socialist through Ajay and dances to help in the war effort
against German Fascism. One day while dancing there is an
explosion and her husband Srikant is wounded. She tends
him and he too goes to China to help fight fascism. The end

is optimistic but factitiously so:’ from the east a rosy dawn

was breaking, holding forth the promise of tomorrow’ (p.

197).

Even this novel does not deserve unqualified praise because

when any doctrines are presented in fiction the work
of art becomes simplistic, sentimental and shallow. The artist
tends to do away with complexity in order to emphasize the
desirability or validity of certain political views. This kind of
schematization does mar Tomorrow is Ours. Srikant, Ajay
and Parvati are much too good and stand for points of view
rather than individuals. However, having said this it should

22
also be pointed out that the novel does have literary value
notwithstanding its defects. The struggle of Parvati as an individual
against the hidebound conservatism and exploitation
of society is portrayed with skill. The novel is, indeed,
better than most other novels written by Indian Muslims before
the partition and deserves more attention than has yet
been given to it.

The third important writer of these days is Mumtaz

Shahnawaz. She was born Mumtaz Jahan, the eldest daughter
of Mian Mohammad Shah Nawaz, Member of the Legislative
Assembly, on the 14th of October 1912. Her parents
were more educated and Westernised than most other Indians
and she was educated at Queen Mary’s College, Lahore
at a time when most Indian middle-class girls were not allowed
to study or even go out of their homes except when
absolutely necessary. She passed her matriculation in 1928
and accompanied her parents to London in 1930. While her
parents attended the Round Table Conference she got a
poem published in The Spectator and met literary celebrities.
George Bernard Shaw is said to have quipped: ’You are a
diabolically clever girl. You won’t come to a good end’.5
Ironically, Shaw proved to be prophetic: She died in 1948 in
an aircrash in Ireland.

In 1942 Mumtaz joined the Muslim League. She is said

to have joined people inclined ’to the socialist ideology’
(HD, vi) and organised relief work for the workers and the
peasants. She also went to Bihar when Hindu-Muslim riots
broke out there in 1946 and helped the afflicted. In 1947 the
League clashed with the Unionist Party government in the
Punjab and Miss Shahnawaz was imprisoned. After the Partition
she founded the Women’s Volunteer Service and
helped the refugees in several ways. She also went to Kashmir
and helped evacuate the nuns of an American missionary
convent at great personal risk. Her famous novel
The Heart Divided was written ’between 1943 and 1948’
(Preface) though it was published posthumously in 1957.

The Heart Divided is the only major response to the

events which created the two states of India and Pakistan in
1947. It is, therefore, a political novel. The theme may be

23
said to be the renunciation of the idea of Hindu-Muslim
Unity and the acceptance of the idea of creating a separate
state for the Muslims called Pakistan. This theme is expressed
through the plot which consists of the changing relationships
of a Hindu and a Muslim family. It would be best
to give a brief summary of the novel to make this clear.

Mohini, the daughter of Sham Lai, a prosperous Hindu

falls in love with Habib, the son of a prosperous Muslim
called Jamaluddin. Both the young people believe in winning
independence for India and in Hindu-Muslim Unity.
Unfortunately the marriage cannot possibly take place because
it is against the religious prejudices of both the families.
The lovers are therefore alienated and this seems to be
a symbol for the estrangement of the Hindus and the Muslims
in the political sphere. After Mohini’s death, Habib’s
sister Sughra discovers that the Hindu ministries of 1936
were not fair to the Muslims so she too becomes convinced
of the validity of the Muslim League’s demand for a separate
homeland for the Muslims. The novel ends with the
following dialogue between Sughra and her husband:

’Henceforth we shall go forward together hand in

hand, towards our goal’

Towards Pakistan’ he said triumphantly (HD, 506).

The other strand of the novel concerns the acceptance of

socialism as the only philosophy which can ameliorate the lot
of the poor in India. This is delineated through the career of
the other sister of Habib, Zohra. She falls in love with a socialist
called Ahmad and helps factory workers into getting
some of their demands accepted. Ahmad is arrested and
when he is released Zohra marries him.

The value of the novel lies in the fact that it helps us to

understand the ferment of political ideas which created
Pakistan. The narrator remains unprejudiced, even more
unprejudiced than Noon’s narrator in Scented Dust, towards
Hindus. The narrative makes the point that Hindus and
Muslims did live peacefully together and could even fall in
love with each other. But it goes on to suggest that this was

24
the exception rather than the rule. That is why Habib and
Mohini’s families, inspite of their sincerity and liberalism,
cannot break away from the traditions of centuries of religious
and cultural estrangement. And that is why two countries
are required for these two religious communities.

This point of view, called the Two Nation theory, is officially

patronised in Pakistan and denied in India. Mumtaz
Shah Nawaz, like Noon, tells the reader that honest Muslims
and Hindus could be both for and against this view, a fact
endorsed by very few writers in Pakistan.

Thus the theme has not been sentimentalized as it was in

danger of being done and the novel remains an honest representation
of how people responded to the politics of India
in the crucial years between the formation of the Congress
ministries in 1936 and the partition of India.

There is, however, a great defect in the novel: a defect

which detracts seriously from its literary worth. This is that
the novel contains undigested chunks of purely historical
narration. These are out of place even for establishing the
background and must be considered irrelevant to the linear
progression of the fiction. For descriptions of historical
events and their causes shifts the reader’s attention from the
interaction of the characters with each other. The fault is, in
a way, the opposite of the way in which the Gordon Riots
are treated in Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge (1841). In
Dickens’s novel the historical events are given less importance
than they deserved. They are introduced rather too
late and seem to be an interruption rather than an organically
built-in event in the lives of the characters. In The
Heart Divided, the heart (India) is divided but the division is
not delineated with reference to the emotional lives of the
characters as much as it is an authentic part of history cornplete
with dates and names. However, the realistic and honest
treatment of the politics of India and the lack of distortion
of the truth redeems this novel from the charge of being
boring at places.

All the authors we have considered up till now were, in

their different ways, products of their age. They had grown
up under British rule and had developed an ambivalent atti- *.

25
tude towards the British and the values they represented. As
intelligent Indians they had accepted new ideas, which
meant Western ideas, from the British system of education
to which they had been exposed. They were nationalistic in a
religio-political sense of the word; they were inclined to liberal-humanitarian
rather than fundamentalist Muslim interpretations
of the world, and they were impressed by the
British ideals of progress and efficiency. Thus Abbas’s socialism
was as much a product of British ideas as Noon’s paternalistic
liberalism.

But not all Indians were intellectually independent like

Abbas and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz. Some were impressed by
the British and reacted by asserting the cultural superiority
of their creed or culture. Even Noon does this in a little
known collection of anecdotes entitled Wisdom from Fools.
The glorification of Islam here is little more than empty
boasting and belongs to the same order of propagandist
works as I.I. Kazi’s Adventures of the Brown Girl in Her
Search for God (1933). The Brown Girl finds Islam to be the
most perfect creed in the world. It is not that opinion which
is being discussed here. The point is that from the literary
point of view the book does not merit the praise given to it
by Amena Khamisani in her book Sind’s Contribution to English.
Such works reveal that the experience of being colonized
did make the Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, feel
small, contemptible and a trifle ludicrous. And works of cultural
assertion are an expression of the desire to boost the
national ego. This tendency has, unfortunately, given rise to
much empty boasting in all the colonies of the Western
countries. However, in Pakistani literature in English the
theme of cultural assertion, akin to that of negritude in
African literature, does not find expression in any significant
work (See Conclusion).

One reaction to harsh realities is escape. And in Urdu

literature this was the dominant literary mode in the ghazal.
In English too there was the love poetry of Shahid
Suhrawardy in the decadent nineties style and the works of
other Indian poets.6 But in fiction we have nothing worth
mentioning by any Muslim author except a collection of

26
short stories by Muhammad Habib entitled The Desecrated
Bones and Other Stories (1925). These stories are a strange
product of the Gothic imagination. There are only three stories
in this collection: ’The Desecrated Bones’; ’Spectre and
Skeleton’ and ’The Spider’s Web’. All of them combine the
supernatural with the lurid and are more like The Castle of
Otranto (1764) and Vathec (1786) than any other work.

In the first story, ’The Desecrated Bones’, a cruel feudal

lord unearths the skeleton of a man he has killed. The skeleton
haunts him till he atones for his sins and dies. In ’Spectre
and Skeleton’ the narrator’s wife, the widow of his friend,
keeps meeting her dead husband. And in the third story the
main character, a feudal lord, kills his wife in order to marry
a dancing girl who is the concubine of the Mughal King Akbar.
In the end the lord is hanged and the girl is incarcerated
in the harem of the king.

This is the only story which is worth reading. For the

struggle of the girl to be an individual in her own right in a
society which does not recognise individuality in women is
moving. And what is more is that Habib seems to understand
that he is writing about the cruel social mores of India
rather than a Gothic tale of horror. But one story can hardly
redeem the whole collection and Habib’s book remains a curiosity
of literary history which had no effect on literary
fashion. In Urdu, however, Mrs Abdul Qadir did write novels
and short stories very much in the Gothic style as Habib’s
stories were. But she had not been influenced by Habib
whose book is not available to the ordinary reader.

The most common theme of pre-Partition Indian Muslim

Urdu literature was nostalgia - nostalgia and the assertion
of past grandeur. The works of Hali, Iqbal and Akbar
Allahabadi were, in different ways, expressive of this theme.
In English too it did find expression and not only in the
works of mere propagandists. For Ahmad Ali’s famous novel
Twilight in Delhi had this as its central theme. For the works
of Ali, however, we shall turn to the next chapter.

27
I

NOTES

1. For biographical details read From Memory.

2. For details see bibliography.

3. Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva, Umrao Jan Ada

(1899).

4. These stories are from Cages of Freedom and Other

Stories.

5. A.A.K, ’Biographical Note’ in The Heart Divided

A.A.K. stands for Ashfaq Ali Khan. The preface has
been written by Jahan Ara Shahnawaz, the mother of
the author.

6. Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) is a case in point. See

William Walsh, Commonwealth Literature (p. 5).
Also see P. Lai, Modern Indian Poetry in English
(1969).

28
AHMED ALT

Ahmed All emerged on the Indian intellectual scene in the

late nineteen thirties as a writer of short stories in Urdu. He
came from a family of Muslim theologians and Imams
(leaders of prayers) in the Great Mosque of Shahjahan
(1592-1666) at Delhi. His father Syed Shujauddin was a civil
servant and Ali had to move with him wherever he was
posted. In 1919, however, Shujauddin died and Ali went to
live with his paternal uncle in the United Provinces. He attended
elementary school in Gurgaon and a missionary
school in Azamgarh. In the latter school he came in contact
with English and also started responding to Urdu poetry.
The feudal middle class of U.P was puritanical and regarded
sex as the greatest societal taboo. As poetry was intimately
connected with the expression of love and amorous feelings
and this was connected with sex, poetry too was regarded
with suspicion and hostility. At the same time it was also a
part of the urban culture and was a sign of upper middleclass
and aristocratic upbringing. This ambivalence towards
poetry, and love, led to a kind of tension and duplicity in the
Muslim middle-class culture of U.P. As it happened All’s uncle’s
family was more prudish than most so he found his interest
in Urdu poetry, which was all amorous being the
ghazal, under avuncular disapproval. As a reaction he started
cultivating English literature. He explains this as follows:

I remember attending science classes in Aligarh and

during Physics class I would be writing poems in English.
Urdu had been taken away from me because of
the great resentment people, my uncle’s family had
towards writing in Urdu. So I had to express myself
and I did it in this way. I could not express myself in

29
Urdu when I was young, so I had to express myself
somehow and English was all right for them.1

In 1926, when Ali was at Aligarh as a science student, he

came across Eric C. Dickinson, the Professor of English at
the University, and a poet himself. Dickinson was an enthusiastic
teacher and Ali was greatly influenced by him.
Through Dickinson he also met Raja Rao who became eminent
as a novelist later. He also met Mohsin Abdullah, a
modernist intellectual, and it was probably Abdullah who
persuaded Ali to leave Aligarh and switch over to English
literature at Lucknow University. At Lucknow Ali published
his first short story in English in the Lucknow University
Journal in 1929. In 1931 his one-act drama in English called
’Land of Twilight’ was produced. In the same year he received
his MA. and was appointed lecturer in English at the
University. His Urdu short story ’Mahavaton Ki Ek Raat’ (A
Night of Winter Rains) was also published in the literary
Urdu journal Humayun. He also met Sajjad Zaheer (19051973),
another modernist intellectual, and Lawrence Brander,
an English critic.

The most significant meeting was, however, with Mahmuduzzafar

(1908-1954) who was a Marxist. He was a most
unlikely person to be one being a member of the princely
family of Rampur and having been educated in English
schools in India and then at Oxford. However, at Oxford he
had been influenced by Marxism and when he came back to
India he indulged in symbolic revolutionary acts: he refused
to appear in the prestigious Civil Service examination and he
abandoned European clothes. For a person of his social
background this was indeed radical. Still, probably because
of the same background, the middle-class tolerated him and
his lack of conformity was considered an aristocratic young
man’s attempt at scandalising the bourgeoisie.

In 1932, however, he offended the middle class deeply by

publishing a collection of ten short stories entitled Angare
(Burning Coals). This collection contained stories by Ahmed
Ali, Rashid Jahan, Sajjad Zaheer as well as Mahmuduzzafar.
Zaheer’s story Jannat Ki Basharat (Vision of Heaven) in

30
which the protagonist, a Muslim clergyman Maulana Daud,
falls asleep and dreaming of a voluptuous houri of Paradise
ejaculates on the prayer mat, caused unpardonable offence.
This was no longer epater la bourgeois but an offence for
which the fanatics wanted to excommunicate the young men.
Both religious and cultural taboos about reticence in sexual
matters were broken and pandemonium broke loose:2

We were condemned at public meetings and in private;

bourgeois families hurried to dissociate themselves
from us and denied acquaintance with us, especially
Rashid Jehan and myself, and even Sajjad
Zaheer’s mother (a dear old lady) accused me of
spoiling her son. People read the book behind closed
doors and in bathrooms with relish but denounced us
in the open. We were lampooned and satirized, condemned
editorially and in pamphlets. Our lives were
threatened; people even lay in wait with daggers to
kill us.3 [ellipses are the author’s unless otherwise
indicated].

At last, bowing to public pressure, the British administrators

banned the book under Section 295-A of the Indian Penal
Code in 1933.

The authors responded by calling for the formation ’of a

League of Progressive authors, which should bring forth
similar collections from time to time, both in English and in
various vernaculars of our country’.4 This eventually led to
the formation of the All India Progressive Writers Association
(AIPWA), the first meeting of which was held on April
9-10, 1936 in Lucknow. Ahmed Ali contributed a paper entitled
The Progressive View of Art’.

In the same year Ali published a volume of twelve short

stories under the title of Shole (Flames). Not all the short
stories in this collection are either Marxist or proletarian as
defined by the AIPWA. In fact Ali refused to accept the dictates
of the authoritarian Marxists, such as Sajjad Zaheer,
about the definition of the term Progressive. He says:

31
I refused to accept their point of view that only
(stories about) the proletariat and peasantry were
progressive. I refused to agree. I said, and I remember
this very vividly, that this (AIPWA) was not a
political organization, that we were a writers association.
Our approach to life, to society, is through our
creative work, not vice-versa.5

And, having broken away from the Communists, Ali

started publishing fiction which followed no doctrinal formula.

In 1944 two other collections of short stories entitled

Hamari Gali (Our Lane) and Quaid Khana (the Prison
House) were published. The novel Twilight in Delhi had already
been published in 1940 in London and Ali was an established
literary figure. Some of the stories published in
these collections were translated into English by Ali himself
and published in a collection entitled The Prison House in
1985. It might be helpful to consider these stories first and
then move on to the novel.

The stories were, of course, available to critics even before

they were published in 1985. Carlo Coppola, for instance,
wrote an article on them in 1977 in which he said:

Ali’s best stories are those which are autobiographical

in nature, or which explore the internal workings
of his psyche. The less successful ones among them
are those in which he tries consciously or unconsciously
to demonstrate Progressive principles.6

Pakistani reviewers of The Prison House were less discriminating.

Alamgir Hashmi’s brief notice, however, is discriminating
and fair.71 will consider the stories in more detail
than any of the Pakistani reviewers has done in order to
understand Ali’s creative quality.

Four of these stories are written, for the most part, in

the realistic style. These are ’Our Lane’, ’Shammu Khan’,
’Two Sides of the Picture’ and ’The Man Accursed’. In another
two, ’In the Train’ and ’Remembrance of Things Past’

32
realism has been used as a narrative technique hut the allegorical
intention has been made explicit. The remaining four
stories ~ ’My Room’, ’The Prison-House’, ’The Castle’ and
’Before Death’, -- deviate both in technique as well as intention
from realism.

The first three realistic stories are in the best tradition of

such writing. In ’Our Lane’ scenes from lower middle-class
life of pre-Partition Delhi have been shown. The structural
device which gives unity to these diverse scenes is the geographical
locale: the street in which the actors live. The narrator
allows us to see these scenes through his consciousness,
and this consciousness is neither sentimental nor prejudiced.
For instance we are told that ’The air was ringing
with the shouts of Bande Matram and Mahatma Gandhi Ki
Ja’C (PH, 6). A less reliable narrator may have suppressed
this information in order to give the impression that Gandhi
was less popular than the Muslim leaders. And yet Ahmed
Ali shows that Gandhi was so popular that Mirza’s son, a
Muslim youth, defies the British Government at his behest.
The scenes in this story have been integrated in Twilight in
Delhi, a point which has been demonstrated by Coppola.8

One major defect of the story is that, instead of allowing

the disparate scenes to convey their own meaning as imagist
poetry does, he starts moralising in a cliched style. For instance
he shows a mad woman who has been raped by men
and is pregnant. And instead of allowing the scene to stand
on its own he says:

There are millions of people in our country who are

unaware of any reality other than eating, drinking
and dying (pp. 13-14).

But after this there is the symbolic image of mangy dogs

which reinforces the effect created by the scene and marred
by the rhetoric. In the best scenes Ali employs imagery again
to create effect. He describes a tree as follows:

In the waxing light of dawn its trunk stood out

against the sky; but in the fading light of sunset it was

33
slowly lost to sight and merged into the advancing
darkness(p. 12).

The tree is old and withered like the Delhi of Mirza and
the narrator.

In ’Shammu Khan’, the story of a wrestler’s sexual liaison

with an young woman called Buddho, the narrator does not
intrude as often as he does in ’Our Lane’. Sheikh Noor’s
spite, his own letch for Buddho, and his efforts to catch his
rival copulating with the girl are rendered with humour and
dramatic skill.

In Two Sides of the Picture’ aristocratic indulgence in

prostitution is presented. Here the conflict between the new
and the old has been dramatised effectively. Bashir, the
nephew of Mir Abbas, stands for the new order whereas Mir
Abbas himself stands for the old one. The case for Mir Abbas,
presented by the betel-leaf vendor is as follows:

’Degeneration’. People have no respect for their betters.

They care neither for position nor age. They
might insult you any moment. The worst of it is that
even children have ceased to show regard for their
parents (PH, 42).

But the narrator shows through incidents, and not

through empty rhetoric this time, that Mir Abbas and his
friends are upholders of reprehensible values and an exploitative
social system. They support the British Raj and
find ’a corpse’ and ’a blind woman and a disabled beggar’
(PH, 45). These images serve to convey the main theme that
Indian middle-class values were not to be looked at sentimentally.
Incidentally this theme is refuted by the major
theme of Twilight in Delhi as we shall see.

The Man Accursed’ is an unsuccessful story because the

protagonist merely asserts his emotions; the reader does not
feel the genuineness of them. At places Ali uses ellipses (...)
in order to suggest that the rest of the sentence is left unfinished
because language is inadequate for its utterance.
However, the device, which is apt in other places, seems un34
necessary here because what is being said is stereotyped and
not complex. Another such story is ’Remembrance of Things
Past’ which is not at all ’a Proustian deja vu’g as Hashmi
suggests but a nostalgic story in the romantic mode of popular
fiction. The device that a man receives a telephone call
from one of his many beloveds is capable of more interesting
developments than Ali has given it. And the love story, The
Man Accursed’ too is sentimental and not because the softer
emotions have been shown but because the presentation of
them seems false, contrived and not authentic. The narrator’s
language is artificial and his pose of a blase roue is
merely irritating in the end. His attempt to philosophise
about the cruelty of the world or to suggest that love is an
illusion, is one of the cliches of romantic love. As such the
use of ellipses is an affectation as it is in the other stories.

The story ’In the Train’ is, however, much better than
the stories just discussed. The journey is a familiar metaphor
for the flow of life but it does throw a fresh light on Indian
life as observed by a narrator. The conflict between those
who want India to be free and the feudal class is revealed
through the conversation. The imagery of burning wood in
the end is successful in evoking the idea that the old world is
being destroyed. But the end trails off into temporal continuity
given by time. There seems to be no message of hope,
however. But this is not a defect since there is no reason why
there should be hope after all.

But this is existential despair and this particular theme is

also presented in The Castle’ a story reminiscent of Kafka’s
famous story of that title which is surrealistic. The story is
about a metaphysical journey from the world of pain to the
world of illusion symbolized by the castle. But the castle does
not really exist and whatever hope there is comes from nostalgia.
In another allegorical story hope comes from nature.
This story is called ’My Room’ and nature is described in it
as a haven of refuge from life. This is symbolized by the
chasing out of the sparrows from the room by the narrator
and their taking refuge in the world outside the claustrophobic
room. The room is also the place of clash of ideas and
the forces of evil and good. This is symbolized by the dia35
logue between Lenin and Satan and other events. These
events occur in a dream which is an old device to present the
unusual. However, the story is really about the theme of rebellion.
Satan, the arch rebel, is a transmogrified form of
Ali’s friend Zaheer. As Coppola says: ’Zahir is the rebellious
leader of the Angare Group, fighting against a society which
is as oppressive as God’.10

The other surrealistic stories are ’The Prison House’ and

’Before Death’. These stories were probably influenced by
the modernist British writers, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
and T.S. Eliot. Ali wrote a book on Eliot later and referred
to his theory of impersonality in poetry in his book of verse.11
He must also have come into contact with the experimental
fiction of 1910-1930 through his study of English literature
and British friends. Thus these stories must be judged from
the criteria of experimentalist and not realist fiction. ’The
Prison House’ may be approached in various ways. Carlo
Coppola has followed the chronological sequence of the
narrator’s journey. This shifts the emphasis on temporality,
the logic of sequence and, by implication, spatiality. But, it
appears to me that the story takes place in a world where the
logic of time and space is deliberately confused. It is a story
about alienation: the alienation of a dark-skinned man from
those who are white; the alienation of the dark-skinned man,
the narrator himself, from his essential or true self. There is
also the minor, almost covert theme of the narrator’s
alienation from an ideal friend.

These themes are presented through thirteen major

scenes which construct a T.S. Eliot kind of a wasteland. The
first scene is from India with the people sleeping out of
doors. The second and the third are set in England and the
major image here is that of a dominant, Amazonian woman.
At first this is Annie, a barmaid in a public house, and then
it is Nanette. Then comes the image of an animal locked in a
cage. An Englishman talks to him calling him nigger but
promising freedom. Then come Clara and Kathleen, two
young women, one of whom hugs the narrator. Here the language
is evasive and one cannot make out what is meant.
The next scene is something of an enigma. In this John, a

36
soldier who died in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, is sought for
friendship by the narrator but they cannot be friends. This
episode with John, says Coppola, ’is interesting as one such
friendship which, like that of Aziz and Fielding at the end of
Forster’s.4 Passage to India, cannot ”take” because of John’s
role as a soldier or perhaps even an invader in India’.12

Considering that the friendship of Aziz and Fielding

might have been intended by Forster to express his own frustrated
homosexual desire for the love of Syed Ross Masood
(as I have tried to show elsewhere)’3, it is possible that this
quest for a friend is covertly homosexual. This is supported
by the fact that John is addressed by the Indian soldier who
kills him in the following words:

’O dear fair one, gently, bend gently down. Your Soft

white skin will become dirty’ (PH, 84).

This interpretation is, however, merely hypothetical but

it is a hypothesis which makes the scene and the narrator’s
lack of intimacy with women significant. Otherwise the scene
becomes pointless.

The scene after this also becomes meaningless unless it

is seen on the hypothesis that the narrator is alienated from
his true self which seeks an ideal friend rather than young
women. For this scene is about sexual play between youths
and maidens in spring which the narrator leaves to return
home. His home is like the prison house from which he sees
the outside world which is enjoying spring whereas he is
alienated from this world. He is like the handcuffed prisoner
who is being taken away by the policemen.

In the story ’Before Death’ the same technique is used.

Here, however, the narrator intrudes with many platitudes
about his past life. Amends of sorts have been made, however,
by presenting the symbolic tree in the beginning and
the end of the story. It is probably the symbol of hope, hope
in a universe in which there seems to be no justice and no
order. The absurdity of the universe is brought out by the
unrelatedness of the scenes. There is a clergyman whose
°nly argument in favour of God is the use of force. There is

37
the voice of God Himself but the narrator cannot respond to
it. And then there is a wasteland where there is nothing but
horror and emptiness. Then come scenes from the world of
phenomenal reality ~ an aristocrat talking about courtesans;
an army attacking - and they seem to be the same in value
to the desert. In the end there is an all-consuming fire which
the lonely narrator watches. He is the modern man who sees
all former doctrines of hope burning away and for whom
even hope symbolized by the tree is inaccessible.

These surrealistic or experimentalist stories suffer from

the defect of most such works: they require too much ingenuity
and yield too little pleasure. This is not to suggest that
the best works of Kafka, lonesco or Joyce do not repay the
cerebral effort which goes into understanding them. They
do, but most others who have written in this manner have
produced conundrums which will probably not become immortal
as classics. At least Ahmed Ali’s experimental fiction
will not; it is of historical interest alone.

His other stories have intrinsic value too though they are
best seen as the apprenticeship to the major novel Twilight
in Delhi.

Twilight in Delhi is based on the city of Delhi in the first

quarter of the 20th century. The main character Mir Nihal is
a successful Muslim gentleman past fifty but still vigorous
and healthy. He is the head of the extended family comprising
his wife; his dead brother’s wife Begum Jamal; her widowed
sister-in-law Anjum Zamani and her daughters Mehro
Zamani, and Masroor, a 13-year-old nephew. Mir Nihal has
three sons: Habibuddin, Shams and Asghar. His daughter,
Begum Waheed, lives with her husband in Bhopal. Shams is
married and lives with his father. In addition to these blood
relations there are servants: Dilchain the maid and Bundoo
the man. Then there are several hangers-on.

Mir Nihal has two hobbies: flying pigeons and making

love to his mistress Babban Jan. As the story progresses the
pigeons are killed by a cat and Babban Jan falls ill and dies.
Mir Nihal, tired and defeated by events, allows his son to
marry Bilqueece of whom he disapproves but who is loved
by Asghar. Soon after the marriage, however, Asghar be38
comes indifferent to his wife who dies of tuberculosis. Mir
Nihal becomes paralysed and has to bear the trauma of his
son Habibuddin’s death. Asghar falls in love again -- this
time with Zohra, his dead wife’s younger sister. This time,
however, he does not marry his beloved because her mother
marries her off to someone else. In the last scene Asghar is
found sitting ’stunned and stupefied’ (TD, 287) while Mir
Nihal ’lay on his bed more dead than alive, too broken to
think even of the past’ (p. 287), while night descends covering
up ’the empires of the world in its blanket of darkness
and gloom’ (TD, 288).

The narration of the story follows the techniques of realism

which had been brought into use in some of the short
stories just considered. This aspect of the novel, according to
Askari, can be called its ’non-artistic purpose’ of writing ’a
guide to Delhi for Englishmen’. The artistic purpose, according
to the same critic, is to write not ’the story of a few
individuals alone, but of a people, a city, a particular culture,
a period of history’.14 Both these purposes seem to be similar
and both are achieved through mimesis: the realistic rep;

resentation of the sub-culture of the middle class Muslims of

| Delhi in fiction.

The quality of the novel’s realism has been recognised by

i many critics. Lawrence Brander tells us that:

It offers fascinating historical pictures; of the great

Durbar when George V visited India in 1911, of early

i subversive activities against British rule, of the 1914

war as it affected India, of the horrifying influenza

; epidemic (when the crocodiles could not eat the

bodies in the rivers fast enough), and the serious uni

rest which the old house in the by-lanes of the old

city where the family of Mir Nihal lived... [saw]. It is

a picture of Indian combined family life even more
vivid than that of Bengali family life in the autobiography
 of Rabidranath Tagore.15

| This technique of alluding to recognisable historical

| events constitute what Alistair Niven, in a very perspicacious

39
I

article, calls ’The epic structure’ of the novel. According to

Niven these events have not been used ’merely as background
colour but in order that Ali may emphasize the cornplementary
nature of public and private affairs Other
events, such as the death of Mir Nihal’s p.geons and his giving
up flying are also symbolic: they foretell the defeat of a
certain traditional way of life- ,

The idea that Ali uses events as symbols of his personal

point of view about the downfall of Muslim m.ddle class life
has been noted and discussed by Coppola in his book on
Ali.17 Coppola begins with the scene in which Mir Nihal kuls
a snake who is frightening his pigeons. The scene symbol*^
Mir Nihal’s ability to deal with danger from outside His way
of life is also threatened by his own son Asghar who adopts
individualistic values -- marries according to his own choice
rather than that of the parents and wears English clothes --
which threaten his paternalistic ethos. After Babban Jans
death Mir Nihal’s authority is again threatened from the
outside in a symbolic event. A cat kills many of his pigeons
and Coppola sees in it ’a potent symbol Ah has used repeat.
edly in his short stories to represent cunning, stealth and
y .destruction.’18 He also identifies the cat with the British who
have ’succeeded in altering if not destroying these cherished
ways of life by introducing new ideologies and mores wmcn
Mir Nihal’s generation stands for. Similarly Mir Nihal s
paralysis, his wife’s blindness and the frustration of his hopes
are individual happenings which stand for the emasculation
and passing a\vay of a society.

Besides the use of events to evoke the life of Muslim

middle class Delhi, Ali has also presented that life in three

other ways: by reproducing the nearest equivalent of their

, linguistic idiom in English; by describing their ethos through

5 the behaviour and attitude of minor characters; and by narratorial

comments. f .,

To take these techniques one by one: examples ot the

first are found all over the novel when the narrator gives an
exact translation of an idiomatic Urdu phrase. For instance
Begum Jamal ’could shout, and if anyone interfered then
tears began to flow, breasts were beaten, and heaven and

40
earth made one’. The expression ’heaven and earth made
one’ is a literal translation of an Urdu idiom which is used -X
when great disturbance is caused. In the same way having
’five fingers in ghee’ for being in a privileged or prosperous
condition is the direct translation of an Urdu idiom. Some
words too are used in their Urdu connotative meanings. For
instance in the sentences ’she did not look a low-caste
woman but a fairy’ and ’then will he bring a fairy from Caucasus?’
the word fairy has been used in the Urdu sense of
someone very beautiful. This use is common in Urdu and J..
Persian poetry but does not exist in English. Ali’s use of--’-
these words and idioms give a foreign touch to the language
of the novel which adds to the quality of its realism.

In this context it may be mentioned that when Ahmed

Ali’s wife, BiJquis Jahan, translated the novel into Urdu as
DilliKi Sham in 1963, one critic said:

The language which was used to create an atmosphere

of romance, mystery, illusion, the moral and
spiritual fabric of the inherently Oriental characters
of the story has been reduced to a compendium of
idioms, slangs, colloquialisms, proverbiology and
cliche-dom [sic].20

But the same looked so natural to another critic that he

said the opposite:

It is only Urdu the language which could have depicted

the life of Delhi of a particular milieu more
naturally and more faithfully in which Twilight in
Delhi should have originally been written.21

This debate is part of the larger debate of how variant <

subcontinental English should be which Feroza Jussawala, ’-
the Indian critic, has discussed at length in her book on Indian
literature and its criticism.22 The debate assumes many
forms and becomes more political than literary in the subcontinent.
The point in this case is said to be that ’many of
the cultural nuances built into the Urdu language, which

41
cannot be conveyed into English except through clumsy
paraphrasing, footnotes, or a glossary, are effortlessly presented
in the Urdu translation’.23 The linguistic deviation
does, it may be concluded, present the ethos of the culture
the novel purports to portray. If this is the idiom which
African and Indian (I mean sub-continental here) writers
want to evolve -- something not as bizarre as the language of
’^. Amos Tutola nor as British as the idiom of V.S. Naipaul --
Ahmed Ali has given them a model of what may be
achieved.

Another way in which the ethos of Indian Muslims has

been conveyed is by making the characters quote poetry. As
Coppola points out:

It is a custom of long standing among Urdu-speakers

to quote lines of poetry copiously, appropriately, and
energetically in order to emphasize a statement, to
make a point in conversation, or to add elegance to
speech and writing.24

Thus it would be naive to look for existential despair in

Asghar’s reply to his friend Bari’s question as to where he
has been. He replies by quoting someone else’s couplet
which does not represent his real feelings but is merely an
elegant way of replying to any query:

Life has become a burden, the time is ripe for death.

The space of existence has shrunk into a narrow cell
(p.28).

The couplet is merely used for ornamentation and factitious

dramatization of commonplace disappointment in love.
The function of poetry was mostly rhetorical in Urdu
speaking culture and that is how it has been used by the
characters. The couplets are, therefore, cliches which substitute
a hackneyed formula for an intellectual response to a
given experience. But, of course, the couplets prefacing
chapters are intellectually relevant and emotionally evocative.

42
Most of the couplets used by the narrator express the
ethos of the Urdu-speaking middle class. And this class had
a distinct world view, a world view which was essentially romantic
in a decadent eighteen nineties way. Three qualities
can be discerned in this special world view: nostalgia, sublimation
of sexual feelings into vague aestheticism, and worldweariness.
A pose of wistfulness, ennui and jadedness cornplement
these three dominant qualities. And all these are
found in most of the verses quoted. For instance:

I’m the light of no man’s eye,

The rest of no one’s heart am I.
That which can be of use to none
- Just a handful of dust am I.

These kinds of couplets support the theme of regret for a

dying culture directly. The self pity in the poetry is, of
course, a reflection of the self pity which was a part of the
Indian ethos before the partition. Ahmed Ali’s novel has
been able to catch this aspect of Indian culture faithfully.

One aspect of the male-dominated Urdu speaking culture

which has not been revealed out of a false sense of
modesty by most other writers, but which has been revealed
by Ali, concerns the sexual emotion. As I have mentioned
above, sex was suppressed or sublimated. But, mainly because
women were in purdah (behind the veil), it took unusual
forms. It took, for instance, the form of celebrating the
beauty of boys rather than that of women in poetry. Thus the
down on the face (khat) became a conventional attribute of
the beloved. One reason for doing this was that in Iran,
where the ghazal had its genesis, boys did actually become
the beloveds of certain poets. The other reason was that
when Persian mystic poets started writing love poetry symbolising
the souls’ quest for merging with the Soul of God,
the symbol they chose for the beloved was that of a beautiful
youth rather than a woman. On the other hand the Indian
mystics, Muslims and Hindus, represented God as the lover
and the soul as the woman who desires union. As Urdu poetry
followed Persian fashions the beloved was addressed by

43
the male pronoun and had some of the physical attributes of
adolescent boys (such as khat). though it was often clear
otherwise that a woman was being referred to.25 This literary
fashion, and perhaps the absence of women, led to talk
between men becoming full of homosexual innuendoes.26
Ali, with relentless honesty, tells us about this aspect of Muslim
culture.

He tells us, for example, that when Asghar lives in

Bhopal as an adolescent youth, he was the beloved of men:

He had just to cast a glance and there were many

who would have given their lives to do his bidding. At
the least sign from him they would have done anything.
Then he was the bestower of favours; there he
was the loved one and not the lover. To be loved is
sweet, he thought, whereas to love is full of sorrow
and grief and pain (TD, 23).

We are also told that a man called ’Huzoor Ali was devoted
to him’ (p.23) and if Asghar had happened to look at
him kindly even ’once there had appeared such joy on his
face’ (p. 23). When Huzoor Ali invites Asghar to dinner and
Asghar ’refused and refused until the old man was brokenhearted’
(p. 24) the lover recites these lines:

Would to God that you

Might also fall in love and suffer

As I am suffering now.

This special kind of homosexuality in which the youth or

boy is sought as a female surrogate by the male is also a feature
of Greek, Persian and some Arab literature. To distinguish
it from the adult peer-group homosexuality common in
modern Western literature I have suggested elsewhere that
it should be called ephebophilia.27 It is this which was a part
of Indian Muslim culture and is not hypocritically dissembled
in Twilight.

At its noblest the love between man and youth is described

as a mystic or sacred emotion. Kambal Shah, the

44
mystic, tells Mir Nihal and his friends that the real cause of
the downfall of the Mughal empire ’was that they had separated
lover and beloved from each other by burying Mohammad
Shah between the graves of Hazrat Mahboob Elahi
and Hazrat Amir Khusro’ (TD, 146). The audience listens to
this with religious emotion because the two saints mentioned
are revered by all. At its most vulgar, of course, the nature of
the emotion is purely sensual. In ’Our Lane’, for instance,
Munno tells Aziz:

I had a cousin, the boy was rather handsome. It was

about ten years ago. I sort of fell out with him over a
kiss (PH, 21).

This is said seriously but most allusions to sexual feelings

of this kind are facetious. Sometimes there is open buffoonery:

As he [an old man] crossed Asghar, his stick unwittingly

touched the old man’s behind. At once he
turned round and remarked:

’I say, moon-bridegroom, even with an old man?....’

A eunuch who sat on the balcony just above in the
hope of some stray customer, clapped loudly in a
vulgar way and gave a loud guffaw (p. 79).

And sometimes the humour is more refined but, in fact,

behind the humour there is sexual flirtation as in the following
scene:

And the lovers found the opportunity of their lives. A

middle aged man quoted these lines to an young man
with arms open for an embrace,...

It is the day of Eid, my dear,

Ah come, let me embrace thee.
It is the custom and besides
There’s time and opportunity
...(TD, 134).

45
What is even more remarkable is that the narrator offers
no comment on these scenes. That makes Ahmed Ali one of
the few Indian writers who could reveal such tabooed areas
of Indian life without either falsifying reality or preaching ad
nauseam. However, unfortunately, Ali does offer platitudinous
comments of a moralistic kind at some places and this
flaw of his work must not go unnoticed.

To continue with the discussion of the quality of Ali’s realism

in Twilight, it has been noted that he presents the corporate
life through the minor characters who help to create
the illusion that one is in India, the land of the crowded
houses in which something is always going on. As Niven says,
the novel is full of ’servants, beggars and craftsmen’.2* In
fact no other novel catches the nuances of the Muslim culture
in Delhi as convincingly as Twilight. One can find out all
about the details which make a culture come alive in Ali’s
descriptions. And the descriptions are not as if they were a
part of a documentary, they form an organic whole and are,
therefore, artistically successful whereas those of Scented
Dust were intrusions. In this respect Twilight represents an
, aspect of Indian culture as successfully as Chinua Achebe’s
^t Novel Things Fall Apart represents African culture, a point
made by Anniah Gowda in an article.29

The novel evokes the culture of Delhi through describing

customs and ceremonies minutely and - says Brander - ’the
fine wedding chapter reads like an epithalamium in which
verse and prose alternate in wonderfully refreshing bridal
music’.30 Even the beggars are described and their songs
and mannerisms make them concrete presences and not just
another detail. When the writer comes to describe or allude
to the superstitions of the time he does so in a manner which
^ reveals his own beliefs. For instance, Kambal Shah, a Faqir
who visits Mir Nihal, is described as follows:

He was said to be high up in the mystical order although

no one knew his hidden spiritual powers, for
such faqirs never reveal themselves to human beings
(TD, 126; emphasis added).

46
•s

The italicized line seems to suggest that the narrator

shares in the belief of Mir Nihal and his friends. Since there
is no indication that the author was deliberately distinguishing
himself from the narrator in this instance, one may assume
that Ali too believes in this. On the other hand Mir
Nihal also believes that mercury can be converted into silver
but here the narrator shows his own scepticism by correcting
Mir Nihal’s credulity when he says: ’Yet no one really did it.
Still Mir Nihal believed in its truth and went on hoping
against hope’ (p. 128). This suggests that the narrator, and by
implication the author, had shed off some of the beliefs and
ways of looking at life of the Muslim gentlemen of U.P but
not all: a conclusion which will help us to understand the
theme of the novel.

The theme, the philosophical import of the novel, is

based on Ali’s subjective response to his moribund culture
and is, in the last analysis, sentimental and therefore, unsatisfactory.
For the theme is the passing away of Muslim civilization
in India. The narrator’s attitude towards this culture
is romantic. Yet Niven calls it classical:

Despite the rhapsodic treatment of Asghar’s love for

Bilqueece (Ali’s own wife is called Bilqueece), the
autumnal mood at the novel’s close, the griefstricken
regrets for the Mughal past and the frequent
opulence of his prose style, Ali writes less from a
romantic than a classical standpoint. He recognises
the immutability of the basic elements in human life.
Individual dramas come and go...Yet the denominator
remains the same in every age.31

Yet classicism in so far as it refers to a recognition of the

permanence of the change brought about by the passing of
time is perhaps the intention of the novelist. My contention
is that this intention has not satisfactorily been transmuted
into art. Other critics have, of course, criticised the novel.
Gowda thinks Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is superior:

47
Ahmed Ali bangs his fatalistic drum and suggests
that fate is to blame when things go wrong; Achebe
relegates the supernatural to the background and
shows tragedy to be consequent on the interaction of
social forces and human character.32

And Niven comes more close to my own interpretation

of the novel when he comments that ’Ali’s writing can be
charged therefore, with two permeating weaknesses: its tendency
towards a tired vocabulary and its sorrow for the past
which at times collapses into ineffective nostalgia’.33 This is
the point: it does not on’y collapse into nostalgia but the
purpose of the whole novel is to celebrate the nostalgic vision.
The novel is> therefore, sentimental and its sentimentality
is traceable to the romantic world view of the-Urdu
sneaking middle class of which Ali is a member.

As I have already shown, Ali did share the emotional attitudes

of this class. And a part of this attitude was to regard
the past as having been very grand merely because it was the
time of the domination of this class. This falsifies reality because
this Muslim grandeur was based on the exploited
labour of Hindu peasants in the final analysis and, to go further
into the past, in conquest and colonialism by the Muslims
the very thing for which the British are being blamed.
There is no justification for such empty rhetoric as one finds
towards the end of many chapters of Twilight. And it is not,
1 as Lawrence Brander contends, ’the raised rhythms of biblioU
cal English’34 everytime (though Brander’s own quotation
from Ali is indeed an example of appropriately used ’raised
rhythm’) it is used. Sometimes it is merely the Indian Muslims’
penchant for using high- sounding words:

For if it were not for hope men would commit suicide

by the scores, and the world would remain a
barren desert in which no oasis exists. On this tortuous
road of Life man goes on hoping that the next
turn °f the road will bring him in sight of the goal
(TD, 128).

48
Several such passages mar the book. Most of the ellipses
too suggest much more than is actually warranted by the situation.
For the situation in itself does not evoke the response
of inexpressible emotion which the ellipses seem to
suggest. The author hints at a profundity through them
which is not really there. The purple passages, the pseudophilosophical
dictums, and the incomplete sentences, point
out that the writer is relying on rhetorical devices in order to
evoke pathos for a civilization to which he responds for personal
reasons but which does not really deserve this response
from the reader.

It is indeed a fault of the writer’s understanding of India

that it should be so. And this is strange because Ali had the
reputation of being an iconoclast and a progressive writer.
After all in his short story Two Sides of the picture’ he does
show the cruelty and moral turpitude of people like Mir Nihal.
But in the novel not even Asghar challenges Mir Nihal’s
way of life except in trivial ways. He does adopt British dress
but exploits women, indulges in self-pity and loves emotionality.
Thus if the symbols of the cat and Babban Jan’s death
signify that a cherished way of life is passing away, we are
not told why it was cherished at all. This way of looking at
life is flawed and sentimental and Twilight is a flawed novel.
It is like the golden bowl of Henry James which has a crack,
and the pity is that most critics have not paid much attention
to the crack.

There is, however, another novel about the same civilization

which looks at it with the tough-minded honesty of the
artist who has transcended the emotional attitudes of his society.
The novel is by Auia Hosain, a modern Indian writer,
and was published in 1961. Properly speaking it does not fall
into the purview of this history at all but I will refer to it only
to prove that the Muslim middle class civilization of India
(this novel is about Lucknow) could be looked at with less
romance and falsifying nostalgia.

The novel entitled Sunlight on a Broken Column is about

the narrator laila’s life in a large joint family presided over
by her authoritarian grandfather Baba Jan. The narrator reveals
what it is like to be dominated by strong men and how

49
she was not allowed to marry an young man called Ameer.
Like women and children the servants too are dominated till
their humanity is crushed out. This is what Mir Nihal and
people like him also did but Ali romanticizes it by making
his opposition to Asghar’s marriage into a symbolic act and
investing it with emotional sympathy for the passing away of
a whole way of life. Laila has this to say about her ancestors
-- again people like Mir Nihal:

But since that time five hundred years ago when the
first of them had fought his way across the northern
mountains through the Khyber Pass to the refuge of
green valleys many marches south, their ghosts had
stood sentries over all action, speech and thought
(SBC, 39).

This is a unique indictment of Muslim civilization:

unique not because of its historical authenticity but because
it comes from one of the Indian Muslims who generally falsify
history by romanticising it as Twilight does.

Sunlight is a brilliant novel as William Walsh says:

This complicated and impressive novel keeps a number

of different themes smoothly in play and firmly
in order. The tense bitter girl Laila evokes in her
character and suffering a great section of life in the
Indian subcontinent which has been rarely heard of
from the inside - the woman in purdah.35

After the realism of Sunlight, Ali’s realism seems merely

surface realism: that is to say, it seems authentic as far as the
surface of life, the everyday details, are concerned. But when
it comes to communicating the spirit, the depth, the inner
side of a culture, it is inadequate and its inadequacy is that
of a fairy tale which ignores complexity. In a word, it is sentimental.

The other novel Ocean of the Night which was written after
Twilight but published in 1964 is not as good as the previous
one in anything. In fact it would hardly merit detailed

50
discussion but for the fact that such a discussion is made
necessary by the other critics who have praised Ali’s work
even when it does not merit such praise. This novel is the
story of Nawab Chakkan’s degeneration and ruin through
debauchery and drinking. The Nawab first transfers one of
his houses to Huma, his favourite courtesan, and then gets
infatuated with another dancing girl named kesari Bai.
Meanwhile Huma falis in love with a middle class lawyer
Kabir who reminds her of a certain Arjumand whom she had
idealised as an adolescent girl. Huma in turn is idolised by
an enigmatic youth who is called the Nameless One. In the
end the Nawab is ruined and is desperately in need of money
to pay off his debts. Huma, hearing of this, returns the deed
of the house to him through one of his drinking companions.
The messenger gets drunk and the Nawab never gets the
deed. In a moment of insanity the Nawab murders Kesari
Bai and then kills himself. Huma returns all the gifts of the
Nawab to his wife. This gives her peace and she finds the lost
ring given to her by the Nameless One, a symbol of contentment
and human affection.

Alistair Niven quite rightly compares this plot with 19th

century melodrama:

The melodramatic climax followed by Huma’s visit to

the Nawab’s widow, both women united in charitable
suffering, derives, whether Ali is conscious of it or
not, from the theatre of Pinero and Henry Arthur
Jones. Perhaps the chief surviving legatee of the surviving
19th century playwrights is the Indian popular

cinema.3*

The theme of the good prostitute is, indeed, a hackneyed

one and Ali’s treatment of it is stereotyped. The Nawab too
is a caricature. He is like the typical Nawab of the popular
myth about Lucknow: a drunkard, womaniser and squanderer
of wealth. His proteges Murad Ali and Namdar Hasan
are, again, stereotypes. They have not been individualized
except in a rudimentary way and cannot stand out on their
own as the minor characters of Twilight do.

51
There is, however, a mystic theme which could have redeemed
the novel if it had been treated with more skill. This
centres around the youth called Nameless One who gives
Huma the opal ring which has already been mentioned.
When Huma meets him she is reminded of Kabir. ’He could
have been his soul’ (ON, 73) she thinks. He makes Huma
see something quite strange in which the desire of the body
mingled with the yearning of the soul’ (ON, 79). And in the
end he appears to Kabir after Kabir has seen the phantoms
of Alauddin, Feroze Shah and Changez Khan discussing the
value of Love, Beauty and Movement (pp. 134-136). He tells
Kabir to find him in Friendship and Love and declares that
he is ’like Love, above caste and creed, social stigma and
barriers of religion and race’ (ON, 136). And Kabir thinks of
Zeb, a girl he had romantically adored when he was young.
The point about the youth being a symbol of transcendence
is clear enough. But the scene in which Kabir sees the phantoms
of Kings, the reappearance of the youth and his enigmatic
appearances and disappearances are not integrated in
the novel. The surface realism of the novel is much too tenuous
to incorporate these elements of the preternatural.
They seem to be grafted incongruously on a melodramatic
story of a stereotyped kind. Secondly, the writer has not prepared
the reader to suspend disbelief to the degree that
scenes which call for the response which one gives to the
preternatural should become acceptable. Had our sense of
the probable not been disturbed at all as in Forster’s A Passage
to India or had we been slowly and convincingly taken
into a world where the common sense does not function at
all as in the later part of R.K. Narayan’s The English Teacher
(1945), we could have accepted the extra-rational dimension
in Ocean. As it is, it is not convincing.

Lawrence Brander suggests that Ocean does not have

the colour and warmth of Twilight because it’ is set in Lucknow’
the culture of which was ’Only a pale simulacrum of
the Delhi culture’.37 This is not convincing because the culture
of Lucknow was in no way a factitious imitation of the
Delhi culture. And in any case the creative artist can make a
good work of fiction out of any kind of culture. After all At52
tia Hosain has written a good novel, Sunlight on a Broken
Column, based on the culture of Lucknow.

The fact is that Ahmed Ali’s creative gifts were limited.

His Twilight got much more critical attention than it merits
and its sentimentality was not noticed as much as its quality
of what I have called surface realism. Ocean was so defective
that it received attention only because Ali was already famous
and Pakistan did not have any comparable writer in
English. But the latest fantasy Rats and Diplomats (1986)
shows clearly that Ali’s creative powers were exhausted in
his very first novel. Briefly, this absurdist tale about diplomacy
purports to be an allegorical story about modern perceptions
of the world like lonesco’s famous The Rhinoceros’
or Kafka’s ’Metamorphosis’-- for the point is that like the
protagonist General Sourirada Soutanna, ambassador extraordinary
to Ratisan everyone in high diplomatic circles is
really a rat - and fails to be anything more than a fairytale.
What needs to be said, however, is that Ali is a good poet,
perhaps a better poet than a writer of fiction, and this has to
be pointed out in the interest of literary history. Another aspect
of his which falls outside the field of this history is his
remarkable gift for translating from several languages. He
has translated from Urdu, Malaysian and Chinese poetry
and to top it all even translated the Quran from the Arabic
into contemporary English. I cannot judge the quality of the
translations from the other languages but I have no hesitation
in saying that his translations from Urdu poetry deserve
to rank as creative poetry in English in their own right.38

NOTES

1. Carlo Coppola, ’The Writer’s Commitment, The

Writer’s Art: A Study of Ahmed Ali’, 33
(Unpublished typescript; this typescript will be
published as a book and I am most grateful to the
author for having made it available to me and having
permitted me to quote from it).

2. The biographical information given here has been

provided by Professor Ahmed Ali to the author in an

53
interview in December 1985. It is also given in Coppola,
chapter, 2.

3. Ahmed Ali to Coppola, 16 August 1972. Coppola, 37.

4. ’In Defence of ”Angare”’, The Leader (05 April 1933).

Coppola, 38.

5. Coppola,42.

6. Coppola, The Short Stories of Ahmed Ali’, Journal

of South Asian Studies, Vol. XIII: Nos. 1-2-3-4 (Fall
Winter - Summer - Spring, 1977-78),211-241 (235).

7. Asif Alam Farrukhi, ’A Progressive Decline?’, Herald

(March, 1986), 89-90; Zeno, ’A Writer Committed to
Progressivism’, Dawn (13 June, 1986); Alamgir
Hashmi, ’Ahmed Ali’, A book review of The Prison
House, World Literature Todav, 61:4 (Autumn, 1987),
679-691.

8. Coppola, ’Short Stories....’, 222-224.

9. Hashmi, 680.

10. Coppola, Short Stories 229.

11. Purple Gold Mountain, ’Foreword’ refers to the

impersonality theory of Eliot. See the chapter on
Ali’s poetry.

12. Coppola, Short Stories....232.

13. Tariq Rahman, ’The Homosexual Aspect of A

Passage to India’, Studies in English Literature,
(English Number 1984), 37-54.

14. Muhammad Hasan Askari, ’A Novel by Ahmed Ali’,

Makhzan [Lahore] (May 1949), 1-17 (4 & 5). Translated
by Coppola from Urdu.

15. Lawrence Brander, Two Novels by Ahmed Ali’, JCL,

(July, 1967), 1-8(1-2).

16. Alistair Niven, ’Historical Imagination in the Novels

of Ahmed Ali ’, JIWE, Vol. Ill: Nos. 1-2 (JanuaryJuly
1980), 5-11 (5).

17. Coppola, Study.... 104-106.

18. Ibid, 105.

19. Ibid, 105.

20. Quoted from David D. Anderson, ’Ahmed Ali and

Twilight in Delhi’, Journal of South Asian Literature,
(Spring-Summer, 1971), 81-86 (85).

54
21. Acquarius, Review in Morning News (Karachi); Ibid,
85.

22. Feroza F. Jussawalla, Family Quarrels, 41-132.

23. Coppola, Study, 114.

24. Ibid, 113.

25. Ali has mentioned the homosexual aspect of the

ghazal in his book The Golden Tradition, see
’Introduction’, 10. For the connection of mysticism
with homosexual imagery see Muhammad Sadiq, A
History of Urdu Literature, 25. Also see Encyclopaedia
Britannica,ls\amic Mysticism’ and Tariq Rahman,
’Boy love in the Urdu ghazal’ Paidika [Amsterdam]
2:1 (Summer, 1989), 10-27.

26. For an account of such conversations see P.N.

Furbank, EM. Forster.A Life. Vol.1 (London: Seeker
& Warburg, 1977), 85.

27. Tariq Rahman, ’Ephebophilia: The Case for the Use

of a New Word’ Forum For Modern Language
Studies, Vol.XXXVI: No.2 (April 1988), 126-141.

28. Niven, 5.

29. Anniah Gowda, ’Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and

Chinu Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’, Alien Voices ed.
A.K. Srivastava, 53-60.

30. Brander, 1.

31. Niven, 6.

32. Gowda, 54.

33. Niven, 9.

34. Brander, 2.

35. Walsh, Commonwealth Literature, 18-19.

36. Niven, 9.
37. Brander, 6.

38. Ali, The Golden Tradition contains his translations of

Urdu verse.

55
THE NINETEEN FIFTIES

The year 1950 saw the publication of the Pakistan P.E.N.

Miscellany edited by Ahmed Ali and having a prefatory note
by Shahid Suhrawardy on The Writer and His Freedom’.
Both Ali and Suhrawardy had started writing when democratic
ideals and liberalism had become the credo of most
Indians who wrote in English. In fact the new state of Pakistan
had been created by a liberal-democratic elite which
regarded democracy, freedom and egalitarianism as desirable
political norms. These norms were being threatened, or
were felt to be threatened, by the Russian version of totalitarian
socialism on the one hand and by Islamic fundamentalism
on the other. The latter was represented in Pakistan
by Maulana Maudoodi’s Jamaat-e-Islami. The Jamaat was
weak and it was discouraged by the Westernized bureaucracy,
but it did have a hold on some of the middle class
middle-brow intellectuals. Those who wrote in English, however,
did not support it and remained, on the whole, liberal
and unorthodox in religion like pre-Partition writers of English.
One article of liberal belief was that art should not be
necessarily committed to any specific ideology. This, as we
have seen, was Ahmed Ali’s stance with regard to the theory
of socialist realism in the nineteen thirties. And this is what
Shahid Suhrawardy proclaimed in unambiguous language:

Literature today in my view has thus struck a retrogressive

and unlikely path. It has reverted to didacticism
and the medieval moralities where good, as
conceived by the author, must always conquer what
he considers to be evil (PEN, 10).

56
He made it clear that, in his opinion, ’the norms of excellence
will remain the artistic endeavour towards perfect
expression, i.e. whether the writer like the painter has been
able to realise his conception satisfyingly with the help of
adequate technique’ (PEN, 11-12). This rejection of socialist
realism, which was taken over by the Urdu writers in Pakistan
especially those associated with the Tarraqqi Pasand
(Progressive) movement,1 should have created such experimentalist
or Modernist literature as the Halqa-e-Arbab-eZauq
created in Urdu. The Halqa too was against the dogmas
of the Progressives but it did create enough good literature
to be able to vindicate its stand.2 On the other hand
there was a dearth of good writers in English and what the
PEN publication shows is that no theory could have compensated
for lack of talent.

The editor of PEN has included a story by Saadat Hassan

Manto, a significant Urdu short story writer, in order in
make amends for the poor quality of writing in English. An
example of this writing is Syed Waliullah’s story ’The Escape’.
On the other hand there is some good writing too:
some poems of Suhrawardy himself and some of Mumtaz
Shahnawaz for example. The criticism too is about trends in
Urdu literature. Qudratullah Shahab tells us, for instance,
that ’Indignation; revolt; sex - these are the three dominating
passions of the Urdu short story’, and Manto’s story ’The
Insult’ supports his assertion. The other critical piece - N.M.
Rashed’s ’Some Urdu Poets of Today’ - too is about Urdu
writers. The reason for this neglect of English writers is obvious:
there is no significant writer whose work could have
been commented upon after Ahmed Ali.

However, in 1952, Elsa Kazi, the German wife of 1.1.

Kazi, a Sindhi intellectual and one time vice chancellor of
Sindh University, published a novel called Old English Garden
Symphony. The novel ostensibly has a musical structure:
the chapters are called themes and are divided into two
groups. Some chapters are also called ’Return to the Tonic’.
This musical metaphor is, in my opinion, wholly gratuitous
and pretentious. The protagonist Eric is a good musician but
that does not warrant the treatment of the novel as a piece

57
of music in words. The protagonist is an incarnation of all
middle class virtues and the novel lacks both characterisation
and an interesting plot. Moreover it is marred by long
passages of description. The narrator’s obtrusive moralistic
judgements are reminiscent of Victorian popular fiction and
its sentimental romanticism excludes it from the list of serious
literature.

On the other hand Zaib-un-Nisa Hamidullah’s The

Young Wife and Other Stories (1958) does deserve to be
treated as serious literature. Mrs. Hamidullah is the daughter
of Mr. Wajid Ali, a noted Bengali writer and advocate.
She was encouraged to write even as a girl and, thanks to
this encouragement, published two volumes of verse before
the Partition. These books, Indian Bouquet (1943) and Lotus
Leaves (1946), are romantic in the cliched Shelleyan style,
but they did encourage the writer to write more. In Pakistan
she became the editor of Mirror, a fashionable English magazine,
and published her short stories in this magazine. She
also travelled to the United States and published 60 Days in
America (1956), a travelogue, and some collections of verse.
The hook under consideration is her fifth and the only one
which does deserve detailed discussion.

In her book entitled Poems the author makes the following

comment upon her poetry:

That their social content is slight is something I am

aware, but not ashamed of. I have striven to serve
society, and particularly Pakistan, as a writer of
Prose. In my poetry it is emotion that holds sway,
and feelings that find utterance (’Preface’, 2).

This confession tells us that, contrary to Suhrawardy’s

ideas, some writers had started agreeing with the prescriptive
dictum that their work must have an extra-literary purpose
namely to ’serve the society’, whatever that may mean.
This propagandist and chauvinistic view of literature was
one which gained official support later but it had started
making itself felt even in the fifties. Even good writers reiterated
pious cliches like Mrs. Hamidullah. But in their case

58
they either did not know what they were doing or could not
differentiate between literature and propaganda and, being
sincere in their desire to serve their society, claimed that
their purpose was didactic. Mrs. Hamidullah was probably
one of these good writers. Her own short stories are not
propaganda but she does endorse certain values in a way
which does not detract from the literary significance of her
work. Even if she gave more significance to the social message
of her stories than their intrinsic literary qualities, the
fact is that they are significant because they have qualities
which enable them to transcend their normative purposes.

The collection comprises fifteen short stories. They can

be divided according to their themes or the technique used.
Two stones The Peepul Tree’ and ’Fame’ are ironical; two,
’The Young Wife’ and ’The First Born’, show the conflict between
the traditional values of the rural areas of Pakistan
and individualism; two ~ ’Motia Flowers’ and ’Wonder
Bloom’ - are related to the preternatural; and the rest are
about old age. The two ironical stories and the preternatural
ones have no social thesis but are, nevertheless, interesting
creative pieces. In The Peepul Tree’ and ’Fame’ there is a
surprise ending and one which has an ironical twist in the
style of some of the stories of Maupassant and O. Henry. In
the first one a childless woman taunted by everyone for being
barren, comes to the tomb of a saint and prays for a
child. In the last scene she comes back. She has had a son
but he is born blind. In ’Fame’ the bearer Aziz has been
foretold that his son will be famous before he is five years
old. And on his fifth birthday the boy is crushed under a car
and every newspaper carries the news about his death. In
both cases the ironical reversal is so unexpected and so
crushing that the reader is left with a vivid impression of the
tragic possibilities of existence. However, two stories are not
enough to label Mrs. Hamidullah an absurdist or even a
tragic writer like Hardy. Existential absurdism - the conviction
that the world is not controlled by a moral force and
that life is, in the final analysis, without meaning -- is a consequence
of loss of faith in God and in those values which
give the illusion of there being order in pre-modern cultures.

59
!

Mrs. Hamidullah is a Pakistani writer with religious faith

and with a nineteenth century conviction in the orderly
progress of society. She also seems to believe in the redeeming
possibilities of education and in the human intellect
all of which are liberal-humanitarian beliefs and come from
a world view which the absurdists (one thinks of lonesco and
Kafka) do not share. Mrs. Hamidullah is not an absurdist
nor does she have a profound tragic vision of life. She does
end some of her stories on a tragic note mainly for the sensational
impact of such endings. Her preternatural short stories
are undistinguished. ’Motia Flowers’ is a common romantic
tale of an young woman who has committed suicide
one night before her marriage. The young woman, who is
passionately fond of ’Motia Flowers’, has a faithful maid who
tells this story to Laila, an young bride who has just married
into the family. When the old servant dies she has Motia
Flowers in her hands which Laila shows to her husband and
tells him that ’this is the height of winter and Motia Flowers

only blossom in summer ’(YW, 56). In the other story of

this kind, entitled ’Wonder Bloom’, a Sindhi gentleman

shows his garden to a newly married couple. The wife, seeing
an unusual tree, asks him when it would bloom. The man
says he does not want it to bloom though the flower is of
exquisite beauty and there is only one other like it in the
whole of Sindh. The tree flowers only ’....when a young
woman, newly married and beautiful, is buried alive beneath
it....’(YW, 81). Hearing this from the host the husband
rushes away from the place. There is an element of the
Gothic romance in these short stories which, however, does
not qualify them for the praise which Poe’s short stories deserve.
On the other hand they are not completely fatuous either.

Zaib-un-Nisa Hamidullah’s claim to literary significance

lies in those short stories which have a social theme. There
are three short stories in which the conflict of the individual
with traditional mores and values is the major theme. In
The Young Wife’, The Paralytic’ and ’No Music Before
Mosques’ three people: the young wife Aliya, the old paralysed
officer and the boy Ali are in conflict with the authori60
tarian social norms of the male-dominating society, personal
desire and religious puritanism respectively. In all three
cases the individual fails but, except in the last instance, the
writer endorses the legitimacy of those values which give cohesiveness
to the social group rather than self realisation to
the individual.

In The Young Wife’ Aliya sees her father dominating

her mother and grows resentful against her mother’s passive
acceptance of male domination. When she gets married and
finds her husband in love with her, she seeks to break his
spirit and goes back home in order to punish him. Her husband
follows her after some delay and she overhears her father
saying:’ We men must never allow women to get the

upper hand, they should never be allowed to guess how

much we love them’ (YW, 21). She learns that ’there was
nothing undignified, nothing smacking of subjugation or
slavery in the relationship between her father and her
mother; it was the result of centuries of tradition and customs’
(p. 19). This makes Aliya settle down into her role as
the traditional submissive Punjabi wife.

In this story the writer falsifies reality through romanticizing

the traditional rehnionship ol the sexes in Pakistan.
Whereas there may have been acceptance of male authority
on the part of women in most Pakistani homes, this does not
mean that there was always happiness too. Nor, indeed, does
it imply that the resentful or rebellious individual did not
have a valid case at all. The story is marred by the writer’s
desire to be tendentious and the values she endorses, however
useful for permanence in marriage, are nevertheless
unjust -- a point which Mrs. Hamidullah ignores.

In The Paralytic’, however, Mrs. Hamidullah does not

distort reality in order to preach. The protagonist who has
been flirting with his assistant’s pretty wife and neglecting
his fat and ugly one realizes now when he is retired and paralyzed
that it is his ugly wife who really cares for him and not
the other woman. In the frustration of his selfish desire to
seek pleasure for himself he comes to realize that sincere
and lasting relationships are not based on individualistic selffulfilment.
The individual’s desires are castigated for their

61
selfishness and a convincingly higher ethical ideal is endorsed.
And what is more is that this theme is not presented
through words. It is conveyed by the action of the story,

In ’No Music Before Mosques’ the social group is represented

by an old man called Vilayet AH whose youngest son
Ali, a schoolboy, plays upon the flute when others are praying
in the mosque. The old man considers this sacrilegious
and beats Ali in order to make him desist. The boy hangs
himself on his favourite tree on the very day he stands first
in his matriculation examination. In this story Mrs.
Hamidullah follows the liberal tradition of Muslim intellectuals
in India and Pakistan who, following the poets of the
ghazal, accused the orthodox of being bigoted and inhumane.
The influence of Westernization merely reinforced this bias
but Pakistani liberals are apt to express their antipathy :o
religious orthodoxy in the idiom of the Muslim Sufis as well
as that of Western liberals. Mrs. Hamidullah writes.

No Music Before Mosques might not find favour with

the orthodox, and yet it is for them that it is written.
And it is my earnest hope that some day our over-orthodox
observers of the letter of religion will cometo
realise that there are many ways of praying; and tlat
the artist the writer or the musician who puts us
heart and soul into that which he composes and
dedicates it to the Great Creator, is offering prayers
up to his Maker just as sincerely as any maulvi \4io
kneels five times a day in the orthodox manner (YW,
6).

This is the language of the old controversy between sone

of the orthodox interpretations of Islam and some school: of
the mystics which did not forbid music and even dancng.
And Mrs. Hamidullah expresses the liberal view of Pakisfini
Westernized intellectuals in the language of religion ratier
than that of secular ways of thinking. But it is as a piec< of
fiction that the story should be judged and from that poin of
view it is wholly successful.

62
The conflict between All and his father Vilayet Ali’s puritanical
disapproval of music is poignantly depicted without
resorting to cliches or verbosity. One of the commendable
qualities of the story is that Vilayet Ali is not made inhuman.
It becomes clear that the author is against his puritanism but
not against him as a human being. A lesser writer, with less
insight into the force of social values and their role in peoples’
behaviour, would have blamed the man and turned the
story into a simplistic one of conflict between two individuals
one innocent and the other guilty. This is not so and we realise
that the writer transcends the complexity of human behaviour
and presents the case against restrictive social values
through the depiction of individual behaviour in the context
of dominant social norms.

Mrs. Hamidullah’s main interest is old age. No less than

five short stories deal with old people in one way or the
other. Here the writer has a definite point of view which accounts
for the similarity of theme in the stories. This appears
to be that regard for the old, kindness to them, and care for
them is a significant cultural value and should not be undermined.
Individualism and its concomitant values such as
freedom and greater mobility may undermine this value and
must be guarded against.

In the story ’Maa’ a prosperous middle class gentleman

with a Westernized urban wife falls ill and, in intense agony,
calls for his mother. His son fetches his grandmother from
the village and the sick man responds to her presence and
the intensely loving way she calls him Billoo. When he recovers,
the old lady, realising that she is no longer wanted,
returns to her village. In ’Cold Tea’ an old vendor of uneatable
papadoms discovers that his goods were bought by his
regular customer, an old lady, only out of charity. He returns
home dejected to a daughter-in-law who has never shown
any regard for him. However, the daughter-in-law has had a
change of heart and addresses him as father. Then instead of
serving him cold tea she gives him ’steaming hot’ tea ’just as
he loved it....’(YW, 38). In The First Fast’, a little girl, unable
to resist the temptation of sweets and cold lemonade,
breaks her first fast in the school. When she confesses this to

63
her mother she tells her not to reveal this to the grandmother:

Surprisingly her mother winked. ”The old do not understand

the young”, she said gently, ”your first fast
has given grandmother great happiness. Let us not
spoil her pleasure” (p. 62).

The other two stories The Old Woman’ and ’Old King
Cole’ are very similar. In both the old are left lonely and
frustrated by the young. In the first story, however, the old
woman has her sons and their wives around her. She is not
lonely in the literal sense but, being estranged from everyone,
she is psychologically lonely. The end is moving:

Sitting in the sun the old woman thought these

thoughts until her heart was full, and bitter tears for
all she had lost ran down her thin and wrinkled
cheeks. ”Look, look! grand-mother is crying, ”the
children laughed in glee, ”how funny she looks with
her nose all red” (p. 65).

In ’Old King Cole’ the old woman who is left alone by

her daughter -- and it is this daughter’s son who chants ’Old
King Cole’ and a merry old soul was he ...’-- remembers how
she had left her doting old father alone in order to join her
husband.

In all cases Mrs. Hamidullah’s point of view is that the

individual must not seek self-fulfillment if such a quest leads
to the breakup of personal relationships. The old may suffer
most from this assertion of independence by the young. In
Pakistan where the joint family system gives power and prestige
to the old, the conflict between the individualistic freedom
of the young and the domination of the older generation
was a debated issue. Most traditionalists agreed that the
joint family system was unqualifiedly good and that all talk
about freedom was heresy. They ignored the complexity ot
the issue, the possibility of there being a measure of good
and evil in all systems and the necessity of understanding the

64
issues actually involved. Mrs. Hamidullah has not tried to
conceal the fact that the older members of the extended
family often did control the lives of the younger ones. The
old woman of this story ’had still kept all the power in her
own hands’ and had kept ’a stern watchful eye on her young
daughters-in-law’ (YW, 63). But, now that she is suffering,
the reader is asked to extend his sympathies to her because
the suffering itself is genuine. In both stories there is the realisation
and even the acceptance of the idea that the old
should give place to the young. However, the higher ethical
values of a society are not individualistic for Mrs. Hamidullah.
She seems to suggest that with all the faults of the Pakistani
social values especially those pertaining to the old,
they do have redeeming features which cannot be easily
dismissed as conservative dogma.

In this she is right and her delineation of this conviction

in the form of literature is good. However, there is a streak
of sentimentality in Mrs. Hamidullah and this is evident, as
has already been mentioned, in The Young Wife’. It is also
there in ’The First Born’. Here she comes near to endorsing
a passive acceptance of bad treatment at the hands of inlaws.
The protagonist is an young woman who is treated
harshly by her mother-in-law when she is pregnant. She accepts
this ill treatment and wants a son in order to please
her husband and his family. In the end she does have a son
in the field because she refuses to rest even when the labour
pains start. And thus she redeems herself in the eyes of her
mother-in-law. The story is very realistic in its delineation of
Punjabi rural society but there is no implicit note of protest
against male-dominating values again. In a creative writer
who claims to write thesis-fiction this amounts to a romanticization
of values which cannot but be critically examined if
the literary work is to be saved from being falsified. The fact
is that Mrs. Hamidullah has not transcended the prejudices
of her society and this tends to come between her and her
perception of the truth about Pakistani society. This does
detract from the worth of her fiction but, in the final analysis,
the fiction is redeemed by its faithful characterization,
realism, lack of verbosity and terse,effective narration.

65
Mrs. Hamidullah is especially successful in depicting the
psychological aspects of situations. She is at her best in revealing
the anguish of the old and the very young. Likewise
she can plumb the depths of the mind of inarticulate rustics.
Her short story The Bull and the She Devil’ is such a work.
In this work of consummate skill Mrs. Hamidullah transcends
all unoriginal and popular concepts of love to touch
upon highly complex issues. Here a villager falls in love with
his wife and fails to understand his own complex feelings.
Feeling that he is being enslaved by her into expressing a
tenderness which he is shy of expressing, his frustrated feelings
change into cruelty. At last he beats his wife, murders
his elder brother and nephew and commits suicide. The
man’s sexual attraction for his wife is shown without prudery
and his mental condition is revealed without direct description.
The author comments as follows on the work:

Ghulam Qadir in The Bull and the She Devil is typical

of the egotistical, uneducated male who feels the
finer feelings of love rise in his heart and is afraid of
them. He is suspicious at [sic] the fact that his young
wife has awakened within him strange, hitherto unknown
emotions, and he fights these feelings with the
ferocity of a wild animal fighting for its freedom. He
seeks escape from growing love for his wife in harshness
and cruelty (YW, 5).

Mrs. Hamidullah has created art in this short story

reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence’s short story ’The Prussian
Officer’ another work of art dealing with the theme of the
transmogrification of sexual desire into cruelty. In a highly
squeamish society like Pakistan it takes artistic integrity to
write a story like this. Because of such stories it may be said
by way of summing up that Mrs. Hamidullah has created
good art; is the best writer of the fifties.

For Zahir H. Farooqi, the other writer of the fifties

whom we shall consider now, is not as good as Mrs.
Hamidullah.

66
Farooqi got a first class in B.A (Honours) and M.A. in
English literature from the University of Punjab. After that
he joined the Pakistan Foreign Service in 1949. The young
diplomat stayed in Italy, China and Australia in the 1950s.
The novel Love in Ruins is based upon his Italian stay. It was
written in the fifties and published in 1960.

Farooqi’s English is flawless and the novel is not marred

by inane moralism and sentimentality, the two major weaknesses
of Pakistani writers. The plot, however, is hackneyed:
Fred, the main male character, falls in love with Stella, the
daughter of his boss Mr. Gerald. Since Fred is married to
Anna and has a son named Cubby, he is caught in a moral
dilemma. Once Anna leaves him and goes to Florence with
Cubby, Fred comes to take her back to Rome. However, he
does not stop meeting Stella surreptitiously. At last Mr. and
Mrs. Gerald take steps to separate the lovers. They take
Stella away to Venice and Fred is allowed to be with her on
the last evening. In Venice Fred and Stella go rowing in a
Gondola and Fred drowns. Stella returns with her parents to
break the news to Anna. In the last chapter Stella sees a very
young man who resembles Fred. This is Cubby who has
grown up now. Cubby, now called Charles, wants to marry
Stella but she decides not to allow the youth to involve himself
into an unsuitable relationship. She leaves Rome and
disappears.

Except for the end which has something of the strange

fatalism of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Well-Beloved (1897)
in which the girl Avice appears thrice (as mother, daughter
and grand daughter) to the protagonist as the beloved, the
novel is based on a commonplace situation. However, Farooqi’s
treatment of the situation is not without merit. He
emphasizes the anguish of Anna when she is staying in Florence
with Cubby through the behaviour of the child. He
also presents the feelings of Stella and Fred without passing
simplistic moral judgements. The selfishness of Fred’s behaviour
does become apparent but the author does not wax
indignant in a way which would have made the book preachy
and not complex. As it is we are scrupulously introduced to
different ways of feeling so that any judgment which emerges

67
will be based on moral reflection and not simplistic formulaic
attitudes.

One important feature of the novel is the local colour.

Farooqi seems to be in love with Rome, Florence and
Venice and these cities are made to live through his pages.
One function of the vivid presentation of these cities seems
to be that they symbolize the hedonistic life of freedom in
the abstract. In their atmosphere of vitalist freedom one
feels that the lovers are being pulled towards gratifying their
wishes. However, against this libertarian ethos there is the
restrictive moral code of society. Italy has been used as a
symbol of sexual freedom by many liberal writers of the Victorian
and the Edwardian eras also. The most notable novel
which uses this symbol is E.M. Forster’syl Room With a View
(1908). His Wliere Angels Fear to Tread (1905), on the other
hand, uses Italy more ambivalently. It is symbolic of liberty
and vitalism but it is also malefic for women used to England’s
liberal-humanitarian, though restrictive, codes of existence.
D.H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl (1920) also uses Italy
in the same ambivalent way: a symbol of freedom in the beginning
and that of cruelty in the end. On the other hand
some Victorian and other homosexual writers have used
Italy as th<> synbol of homosexual love, the land of freedom
where sui \\ love could be obtained more easily than it could
in England. This legend persisted from the Renaissance but
Baron Corvo, the late-Victorian boy-lover, revived it again.
His Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1934) and letters seem
to regard Italy as the land of paederastic desire. Another
famous Victorian homosexual who used Italy in the same
way was John Addington Symonds. His book In the Key of
Blue (1893) taken together with his life make it appear that
he too invested Italy with the symbolic significance Forster
did: that is, that it was a land of an unrestricted way of life.
So that when Farooqi draws upon local colour for symbolic
significance he has tradition behind him.

But the writers mentioned above were in favour of undermining

the conventional values. Farooqi’s case is that no
matter what the temptation of the unrestricted way of life, it
is not to be succumbed to. Against this libertarian ethos of

68
the cities of Italy there is the counteracting force of unselfishness
and self-sacrifice: a force which does not break
the family but keeps it together in the interest of the children.
With this theme we are familiar in the works of Mrs.
Hamidullah and Farooqi manifests his Pakistani values in
this ostensibly exotic work. The desirability of values which
lead to permanence in relationships at the cost of personal
freedom is affirmed but not through verbiage or preaching.
It is presented dramatically in the parallel plot of Rina and
her fiance who is crippled but whom Rina does not want to
leave. This, as well as the qualities mentioned earlier, make
this book worth reading inspite of its hackneyed plot and
familiar theme.

To sum up, there is not much worth writing about in the

nineteen fifties in the field of English creative writing. Why
this should be so, inspite of the fact that the governments
were liberal and English did have high social prestige, can
only be explained on the theory that there simply wasn’t
much talent available. The nineteen sixties were more productive
as we shall see.

69
NOTES

1. For a brief introduction to the Progressive Movement

see Muhammad Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature,
534. See also J, Merek, ’Progressive Traditions
in. Contemporary Urdu Literature of Pakistan’, Proceedings
of the Fourth International Conference of
Asian and African Literatures ed. M. Galik, 219-226.

2. For a discussion of Modernism in Urdu literature

and the writers of the Halqa see, Sadiq, Ibid, 536576.

70
THE NINETEEN SIXTIES

The nineteen sixties witnessed the rise of the middle class in

Pakistan. In 1958 General Mohammad Ayub Khan, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army, ousted President
Iskander Mirza and imposed martial law in the country.
Initially the army was successful in controlling some outward
manifestations of overt forms of corruption, but eventually it
started ruling the country dictatorially with the co-operation
of the elitist Civil Service of Pakistan. The salaries and powers
of military officers and Civil Service officers were enhanced.
This in itself contributed to the rise of the middle
class. The friendship of the U.S. too was a contributing factor:
many middle class young men aspired to go to the U.S.
and some actually did. The Americans established military
bases (e.g. Badaber, near Peshawar) and American goods
and money came into the country. Another factor was the
stability Ayub Khan’s dictatorship provided to the emerging
entrepreneurial class of Pakistan. Money was invested in the
cotton and textile manufacturing areas and in the large
cities. Thus a new managerial class, a professional class and
an industrial working class was produced. The cities started
expanding and more consumer goods were imported than
ever before. A new anomalously modern city Islamabad was
created; new public schools for the sons of the rich were
opened; the army expanded and became more ostentatious.
The rural working class, however, remained poor and exploited.
The urban working class, though more mobile and
free in theory, remained miserable because there was
scarcity of employment at the lowest unskilled level. This
created more disparity, or rather made it more obvious, in
the lifestyle of the unskilled labourer and the upper class
Pakistani. However, there was surprisingly little awareness

71
of this problem among the workers and very few intellectuals
wrote much about it. No doubt Faiz Ahmad Faiz, more because
of his notoriety as a communist in the Rawalpindi
Conspiracy Case, than for the contents of his leftist Urdu
verse, was considered a great socialist intellectual but his
verse was hardly made the inspirer of political action nor
was it available to the ordinary reader. The Progressive
Movement was producing nothing significant and there was
no other literary movement of a radical kind. Indeed, the
regime did not tolerate demands for a just distribution of
wealth, more regional autonomy or religious fundamentalism.
It did, however, tolerate and even promoted a certain
frivolous type of liberalism: the type which confined itself to
pretentious talk about European intellectual ideas, drinking
alcohol in the clubs and not segregating men and women in
parties. It was, after all, the era of the teddy-boys and girls
who wore tight-fitting clothes, pointed shoes and, in the case
of boys, long hair.1 The English writers, who neither belonged
to the Progressive Movement nor the Halqa-e-Arhabe-Zauq,
were liberal in this shallow sense. And, from this
point of view, the typical representative of this aspect of
Pakistani society and English fiction written in it is Nasir
Ahmad Farooqi.

Farooqi was born in Lahore in 1930. He received his education

in Lahore and then in the United States. In 1961 his
first novel Faces of Love and Death was published. This was
commented upon by Pakistani critics and others. The French
critic Jean Rossi, recalling Farooqi’s sojourn in Paris opined
that it was likely to be the most talked about novel from
Asia’/ However, Rossi was writing a blurb and not an academioreview.
As such this opinion may not be taken too seriously.
After all during the sixties Ruth Prawer Jhabwala,
Manohar Malgonkar, Kamala Markandaya were writing
novels in India which are now classics. And it was in 1961
that Attia Hosain’s famous novel Sunlight on a Broken Column,
which has been mentioned already, was published. The
masters of Indian fiction - R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao for
example - were active and there were many Indian novelists
like Farooqi. So it was not that Rossi could not have found

72
more interesting novels than Faroriqi’s among Asian fiction
but that Farooqi was probably a personal friend of the critic.

Farooqi was, however, a brilliant man and enthusiastic

too in the bargain. He formed the Afro-Asian Book Club
which published creative work from Turkey, Sri Lanka,
Africa and Pakistan. The venture was praiseworthy and it
was unfortunate that it was allowed to fail. Khalid Hasan, a
Pakistani writer, tells us in an article on Farooqi that a
highly placed bureaucrat, Altaf Gohar, became antagonistic
to Farooqi which aborted this venture. He also informs us
that the main villain (Heera) in Farooqi’s other major novel
Snakes and Ladders is based on Gohar.3 Between these two
major novels Farooqi published several plays, a collection of
four short stories and a novelette entitled Sadness at Dawn
in 1967. Farooqi now lives in Europe and does not publish
any more.

Faces of Love and Death is based on the lives of the upper

middle class people in Pakistan during the late fifties.
The lifestyle of the sixties, however, seems to have been Farooqi’s
real model. In any case the difference is not so great
as to be noticeable in all except sartorial matters. The protagonist,
nicknamed Nick, is a member of the upper middle
class. Annie, the daughter of a feudal lord from Oudh
(India), is a writer of Urdu short stories in Karachi. Ahmad,
the other main character, is from the Sindhi working class.
However, he has risen to the top ranks of the C.S.P. and has
thus entered the elitist social circle of Nick’s family. Annie
loves Nick Sheikh but Nick is so undependable that, when he
has gone as a reporter to Korea and China, she comes to
depend on Ahmad for advice and help. Later in London
Ahmad proposes to marry Annie though, as she knows, he is
already married. Nick leaves Annie in anger and falls into
debauchery. Before he leaves, however, Annie would have
conceived a child by him had she not heard the news that
Ahmad’s plane had crashed in Switzerland. As it is he feels
cheated and falls into debauchery and gambling in France.
Eventually he returns to Pakistan and discovers that Annie,
who has married a Bengali industrialist Nizam, has given
birth to a deformed child. The child is operated upon but he

73
dies. Annie tries to make him give her another child but he
does not In the end Annie dies and Nizam, Ahmad and
Nick discuss her life and its repercussions on them at the

airPF^ooqi’s novel is written in the realistic manner but

there is°aLttempt to create an -^.^SSSTSi
Annie herself her deformed child and the characters all
ind for something more than themselves and constitute
aenallegoS aspect of the novel through their symtxjhc
value Unfortunately the novel fails to be a successtui alle^
thougSls a realistic novel it is somewhat more^successful
Let us consider the realistic aspect,of henovel fi ret

Nick the narrator, does give a faithful picture ot the pretentfousniss

of the upper middle ^_^J^ ^
Western ways speak English, discuss European ideas and
drinfSidk has tPhe following to say about his conversation
with Annie:

I would tell her all the city gossip and scandals. And
h we would break into some serious discussions
like the merits of Sartre over Gide, and the latest in
French and Italian movies (FLD, 19).

At another place he tells us that his own social class was

no longer as powerful and affluent as it used to he:

We were no longer the rich working class [he means

the powerful government officers class] that had
been born to rule, and enjoy our leisure, get books
from Foyles in London, and spend the evenings at
the club playing tennis and discussing Maugham or
T.S. Eliot (p. 42).

This is only partly true because, out of snobbery, the narrator

is incapable of telling the whole truth. For instance,
realkyi falsified when the narrator gives the impression
ha everybody discussed Eliot and imported books from
Paris Se was no uniform ethos in that class and rt was
rare to find people who talked in the way Farooq, describes.

74
Nor, indeed, did they dance except in bohemian circles. The
narrator alludes to European poets and intellectual ideas,
even when affecting contempt for pseudo-intellectual fashions,
because he is an intellectual snob. His love of figurative
language and lack of intellectual clarity also come from his
snobbery. His review of Annie’s novel is an example of both:

I reviewed the book for the Herald, and ended the

article by saying that Annie has gone into the flower
garden of memories where instead of roses she finds
an unwholesome greenery. But through it all she
emerges singing, dancing, weeping, weeping, as if a
stranger becoming forgotten (p. 20).

Such pseudo-literary language is that of the intellectual

snob. Such a narrator is, obviously, much too unreliable to
present reality because he will distort it out of his love for
show off. This love of show off makes him substitute his own
idea of how people behave for their actual behaviour. That is
why there is so much name-dropping, pseudo-intellectual
cliches, clever talk and mannerism. The novel presents the
myth of high society rather than high society itself. The
characters play out social roles and are not complex but
stereotypical.

One aspect of high society -- its snobbery and pretentiousness

~ does, however, come through. During the fifties
and the sixties (and for that matter even now) Islam, democracy
and socialism were discussed at different levels in Pakistani
society. Most of these discussions were ill-informed,
pretentious and vague. Farooqi writes about such a discussion
about Islam in politics in this novel. The civil servants,
pretending to be the intellectual aristocracy of the country,
write articles in a fashionable magazine. The editor publishes
only those which do not embarrass the government (of
Liaquat Ali Khan) and the ’smart set’ echo these erudite articles.
When the government discovers Jinnah’s allusion to
Islamic socialism in a speech, everyone starts coining new
definitions of it:

75
The social set, ever ready to jump on any intellectual
band wagon, hurriedly read through the English
translations of the Quran, and generously quoted the
phrases that spoke in terms of equitable distribution
of wealth (p. 58).

This is an indictment of the ’social set’, but Nick’s own

views about socialism are even more inane:

’No’, I said. ’But really, Auntie, socialism doesn’t

make the rich poor, and throw away human values. I
saw in America a working example of socialism, of
new labour values, of human dignity. I read in a book
by the editor of Harper’s Magazine that if Russia is
moving towards socialism, America is past socialism,
it has already been through socialism. Now what is
wrong with such values for Pakistan’ (p. 103).

Nick, however, is never seen ironically nor is he corrected.

The author does not appear to have discovered that
the narrator’s views are untenable; that he indulges in
rhetoric; that, in simple words, he is a snob.

One aspect of this snobbery is the attempt to create a

symbolic dimension in the novel. The allegory is probably intended
to be social and political. Annie is probably meant to
symbolize the decadent intellectual aristocracy of West Pakistan
(though at one place she is equated with the EarthMother).
Nizam stands for the industrial bourgeoisie and
the deformed child is the political situation of Pakistan before
1958 when parliamentary democracy was done away
with. Ahmad belongs to the C.S.P, the elitist service which
has failed to administer the country in the interest of the
public, and is a symbol of this elite. And on this reading Nick
is probably the intellectual younger generation which should
have helped to give new vitality to the state but has become
disillusioned and impotent. The evidence to support this
reading comes from overt references to this effect in the
text.

76
For instance, Annie tells Nick about her child in the following
abstract and metaphorical manner:

Nizam was born in East Pakistan, but is too English

in his attitudes, I was born in Oudh but had too much
of the Convent in me. We loved and intercoursed in
an artificially created foreign environment, and really
it had nothing to do with Pakistan. There was nothing
indigenous about our love, about our senses. We
didn’t procreate our child, we procreated a bastard
(p. 112).

At another place the narrator says that: ’The child was

born deformed because of the vagueness of its complicated
inheritance and the distance from its indigenous roots’ (p.
140).

The child dies on ’that fateful Tuesday in the first week

of October, 1958’ - probably not a coincidence but in some
way symbolizing the end of parliamentary democracy and
the beginning of martial law in Pakistan - and it is on this
night that Nick refuses to give Annie another baby because
he, representing the younger generation, is impotent. In the
end Nick sees a vision of ’Annie blown up to immortal dimensions’
and he says that he sees ’the little children of
Mother Earth left with a legacy to sire children who would
not be deformed’ (p. 204). These hints convey the impression
that the events and the actors are meant to stand for
something beyond themselves; that they are symbols. But
these symbols seem to be imposed from the outside. The
novel is too slight to be able to contain them. It is, of course,
factitious to tell the reader that Annie’s child is deformed
for political reasons: it fails to convince. It only makes the
symbolic dimension embarrassingly pretentious.

Unfortunately the characters are so little developed that

the novel cannot be said to be a good realistic novel too. The
gambling scenes, however, are powerfully and authentically
drawn. They remind one of Dostoevsky’s short story The
Gambler’ but are not plagiarised. They introduce the reader
to an aspect of the gambler’s psychology which is not always

77
made apparent -- the desire to live dangerously in order to
escape from other problems. The writing in these sections is
not marred by pretentiousness but has that toughness which
comes out of understanding of what is being portrayed and
the intellectual strength to portray it. Apart from this and a
few other graces the book is a failure.

The short stories ’Younger then Spring Love’, ’Ah! No,

my Love’ ’Money in the Bank’ and The New Messiah’ are
all failures except the last one. ’The New Messiah’ is redeemed
by its irony. It is about the rise of a new religious
leader in India whom the British tolerate because they want
to create differences among the Indians and exploit these
differences to keep ruling over them. The tone is controlled
and the rise of the Messiah is narrated in a skilful way. The
story is in bad taste because it may offend the Mirzais
(Ahmadis) whose spiritual leader appears to have been caricatured
here. That, however, is a moral not a literary issue.
From the literary point of view the story is better than the
other stories in this collection. The novelette Sadness at
Dawn is totally without literary value.

The novel Snakes and Ladders deserves consideration.

The plot is not different from that of Faces of Love and
Death. Here the protagonist and narrator is a Nick-like
character whose name is Sonny Ahmad. He is the son of a
high ranking I.C.S. officer and has been educated in the
West. His friend Abu, of similar background, also joins the
C.S.P. The female character most like Annie is called Mona
here. The Ahmad-like character is Heera. However, Heera
is painted much blacker than Ahmad ever was. In fact the
narrator has a personal vendetta against Heera over the
possession of Mona which gives dynamism to the plot.

Heera is the son of the head gardener of the college

where Abu, Sonny and Mona are educated. He is egotistical,
opportunistic and power hungry. He seeks power through
entering the Civil Service of Pakistan. Meanwhile Sonny
goes abroad and comes back to edit a newspaper in Lahore.
Here he finds Mona, divorced by her husband Babu AH, living
with her daughter Nina. Heera is on terms of easy familiarity
with Mona and Sonny discovers that Nina is, in fact,

78
Heera’s daughter. Sonny has a passionate love affair with
Mona and persuades her not to let Heera give his name to
her daughter. Finally, with the help of Mona’s cousin
Brigadier Zafri and Sonny’s friend Abu, they win Mona over
from Heera who is very powerful now being the speechwriter
to the Cabinet. Heera commits suicide which, the
court of inquiry finally concludes, is occasioned by his
removal from this seat of power (He is appointed Ambassador
of Tahiti).

The novel has all the weaknesses of Faces but its

strengths are all its own. The narrator is as fascinated by
great names in books, famous places in the West and famous
people as Nick is. And he is just as pretentious and just as
big a snob. The discussions too are pseudo-intellectual and
verbose. The reality presented is, for these reasons, falsified,
as it is in the other novel. But having said all this, we must
come to the novel’s strengths.

Its great strength is its exposure of the power-hungry bureaucracy

of Pakistan. Heera, who stands for this bureaucracy,
rises through chicanery, calculated selfishness and
ruthless opportunism. He conquers the upper middle class
with its own tools of selfishness and elitist prerogative. He
uses the latter in his own interest when others are in power
and, when he is powerful himself, he uses it to gain more
power. Sonny, who seeks to break the pattern by not joining
the C.S.P. is symbolically something of an iconoclast. Heera
takes away his beloved, his position in society, and seeks to
dominate him completely. This reversal of roles in the fortunes
of Heera and Sonny reveals the naked power of the
elite administrative services of Pakistan. This aspect of the
book is admirable. Even if Farooqi’s own antagonism to
Altaf Gohar, a highly placed civil servant during the sixties,
is at the back of this portrayal of the C.S.P, the fact remains
that the portrayal is powerful. What does detract from the
power of this portrayal is the author’s insistence that Abu,
who is also from the C.S.P, is not like Heera. In realistic
terms there is, of course, no doubt that individuals are good
and bad everywhere. But if a character is being used as a
symbol of a class the novel must be true to the truth-value of

79
the symbols. And in this case the C.S.P. is the symbol of a
powerful and corrupt oligarchy. Now if the C.S.P. is also
shown to be good the symbolic value of the work is decreased.
Then, for some reason, Farooqi romanticizes the
takeover of the country by the army in 1958. Colonel Zafri is
the honest military officer while the civilians are generally
corrupt. This is, once again, a confusion between Zafri the
man and Zafri the army officer, the symbol of the martial
law in the novel. And Farooqi mixes up the realistic and the
symbolic aspect of his novel so that neither is very satisfactory.
These things do detract from the worth of the novel
but, in the last analysis, it must be conceded that Snakes and
Ladders is Farooqi’s best novel and approaches the better
Pakistani novels in English.

After Mrs. Hamidullah we have to wait for seven years

for a collection of short stories which is worthy of being
given critical attention. This is Ayesha Malik’s collection
called Wlieels - the full title is The Wlieels Go Round and
Round - which was published in 1966. The collection has
five short stories introduced by the famous poet Faiz Ahmad
Faiz. Faiz does not call them short stories. This is how he
describes them:

I am happy to commend to the discriminating reader

this collection of Ayesha Malik’s refreshingly unusual
prose writings. They are unusual because, the beautifully
finished tribal legend of Badame excepted, they
are too uncontrived to be called short stories in the
conventional sense. Nor would character studies or
descriptive sketches be an adequate title, because
these pieces have been written in depth and are
more than one dimensional (Preface).

Faiz is quite right since the conflict which distinguishes a

short story is often undeveloped. However, the prose legends
are not without value. They all relate to the North West
Frontier Province, the land of the Pushto-speaking Pathans
who are excellent fighters and have a long tradition of independence
and martial values. In this sense they are folk

80

LI
[

tales and impressions about the Pathan society. However,

the first piece entitled ’Summah’ is the character sketch of a
beggar woman who has the detachment of a saint whereas
another one called The Abbasind’ is about a boy’s close
emotional relationship with the river which flows through his
valley.

The Wheels Go Round and Round’ is, however, a short

story, a long short story, in the traditional sense of the term.
It is, in fact, one of the best short stories about the Pathan
villager who comes to the city of Peshawar to work. The
youth, Gullai, brings his village ethos with him and this ethos
emphasises personal rather than impersonal relationships.
Within a short time the people of the city, including students
from his own village, become his companions. He knits the
isolated individuals of an urban area into a supportive cornmunity.
This is certainly the best short story, even better
than the legend ’Ba-Da-Me of the Sanzal Valley’. The latter
is merely a conventional tale of romance and violence of
which Pathan folk tales are so full. The girl Badame kills
herself when her lover Inzar Gul is shot dead. Tribal values
which are against romantic love make a Romeo and Juliet
type of tragedy of the ordinary romantic love affair of two
young people. The redeeming feature of the legend, as indeed
of all Ayesha Malik’s work, is that neither sentimental
rhetoric nor glib moralistic cliches mar her work. The work,
however, is not enough to include her among the significant
English short story writers of Pakistan.

Another short story writer is H.K. Burki. He has published

only eight short stories in his collection Saqipur Sacred
(1969) with which we will be concerned now. The stories
generally have a protagonist who struggles against moral or
social forces of some kind while being in a temporarily unstable
state of being. The guiding values are humanitarian
and the writer transcends the prejudices of his society. For
example in ’Some Men are Brothers’ he refutes the Pakistani
myth that all Sikhs are cruel and treacherous. The protagonist
Banta Singh, commissioned to betray and kill his
friend Gulab, a Muslim postman, allows him to escape to
Pakistan. This, however is not as important as Banta Singh’s

81
struggle against the forces, both internal and external, which
urge him to kill his friend. The representation of this conflict,
the initial weakness of the human mind against invidious
forces, and the final triumph of the better part of human
nature, is done with artistic skill.

In the other stories too the progress of the protagonist

from a state of vagueness to one of action; from instability to
some form of stability is the focus of attention. Sometimes
the protagonist finds stability in what he morally condemns.
Vakeel, the young man in The Mirror Cracks’, resists the
evil suggestion of Mirza to join his gang of hoodlums and
terrorists. But circumstances do force him to choose between
what he regards_as good and what he considers evil.
This occurs when he finds himself wilh money and, instead
of going back to his village, goes instead to a prostitute. In
’Indian Summer’, the~state of stability which is achieved is in
the nature of self-discovery. Nasir. who does not realize that
he is getting old, discovers that he has been deceiving himself
when he has a misadventure in rowing. Stability here is
in the fact of discovering the self. Another short story
’Skyland’ has a real journey in the first part. The protagonist,
a boy, wants to discover the world. The symbol of the
unknown here is the horizon. But when he travels he finds
that the quest is an illusory one. An old man tells him that:
’Beyond that line of trees stands another line and another
and another, take my word for it’ (SS, 80); and the boy finds
stability in coming to terms with this disillusioning reality
just as Nasir has to accept the fact that he is no longer
strong.

Possibly the most sensitive working out of the quest motif

is to be found in The Roundabout’. This is an allegory in
which Rehmat, the protagonist, finds himself in a state of
vagueness, disequilibrium and movement. He finds that even
motion - in this case running in circles -- does not satisfy
him. At last he finds his wife Mirium in bed and she tells him
that:

82

L.
All your life you’ve been striving to get here and now
that you have finally arrived you want to leave. Don’t
you see there’s nowhere else to go? (p. 68).

She adds revealingly:

’It’s all in your head, this craze for reason, for inquiry,
Mirium explained gently. ’That’s what comes
of your starving the heart and seeking equilibrium’
(p. 68).

This time the author’s point of view is clearly expressed:

the contemporary insistence on perpetual motion as a state
of being prevents a person from achieving stability, finding
his true self and making serious existential choices.

Heroism, that is to say, the capacity to struggle against

injustice, is an important value in Burki’s fiction. As already
mentioned, it is endorsed in ’Some Men are Brothers’. We
also find it in The Gardener’ and ’Saqipur Sacred’. In both
these stories sincere men are ready to take great personal
risk so as to help human values to prevail. In the former
story the protagonist spares no effort to make two rival
tribal communities live in peace in his village. In the latter
work, the school master is the heroic figure. He is ready to
sacrifice all his worldly goods in order to ensure that the destroyers
of the tower of Sufi Shah are punished for this sacrilege.

The tower which Sufi Shah builds is useless from the

commonsensical, utilitarian point of view. That is why the
headman is against it. It is, however, a symbol of a world in
which value is not measured in materialistic or utilitarian
terms. Sufi Shah, condemned for his eccentricity, does not
act according to the utilitarian standards of the world of rational
self-interest. He wants to do something for a reason
which others find incomprehensible: perhaps he enjoys activity
for its own sake. Thus, when he builds a tower he is
condemned by the Headman. After his death people start
worshipping Sufi Shah’s grave and the Headman starts collecting
all their donations in order to enrich himself. When

83
the school-master objects to this, the Headman gets the
tower blown up by dynamite. The symbol of a world different
from one’s own is either misused or obliterated. This is
a particularly powerful condemnation of utilitarian values
and the people who hold them. And this condemnation is a
much needed corrective to the newly emerging consumer
values of the middle class in the cities of Pakistan during the
nineteen sixties.

Mehdi Ali Seljouk is another writer who published fiction

in the sixties. Seljouk came from a large Muslim state in
south India called Hyderabad. This state was ruled by the
Nizarn who was one of princes of British India and had the
title of His Exalted Highness. After independence Mr.
Nehru’s government abolished all princely states. Hyderabad,
which had an army, offered resistance which was
crushed by military force. Seljouk was then in his teens and
claims to have fought against the Indian military. Finally he
managed to escape and lived in a slum in Karachi. In 1959,
however, he published a long poem entitled My Goddess: A
Devotional. In 1966 a collection of short stories called
Corpses followed. The author calls them fiction rather apologetically:

Since most of you have taken the stories of massacres

and pogroms I have listed above as fiction,
you might as well take these individual stories to be
fiction too (C, 13).

Before coming to the stories it might be worthwhile to

understand Seljouk’s prejudices. In the ’Preface’ he vituperates
against the Hindu conquerors of Hyderabad in an uncontrolled
manner. His tirade reminds one of D.H.
Lawrence’s similar tirade against the medical authorities of
the British Army who had examined him medically to determine
whether he was fit for going as a soldier or not in
the novel called Kangaroo (1923). Mehdi, the adolescent
boy, lost his friends and suffered personally in the war. He
came to see the Indians as monsters of iniquity. This is, of
course, a normal reaction and one can only sympathise with

84
the sufferer. However, whereas even hysterical vituperation
is understandable in individual victims of aggression, it is not
pardonable in a writer. Raw, subjective reactions to events
do not always make good art. Not even D.H. Lawrence can
quite succeed in making that diatribe in The Kangaroo
appear anything more than what it is - impotent fury. And
this inspite of the fact that I awrence makes the narrator,
who is a persona of Lawrence, speak after being humiliated.

Seljouk gives a false impression of all Hindus because of

his personal reaction to some of them. He forgets that many
rulers of Hyderabad were as unjust to Hindus as he felt the
Hindus were towards the Muslims. Even all this would have
been tolerable if only he were not a writer. But because he is
one and carries his personal feelings into his fiction, his work
suffers from it. One typical reaction to Seljouk’s work is this
review of Corpses:

The incredible enormity of Seljouk’s hubris, ’ancient

mariner’ zeal, and oozing, paternal concern for humanity,
all seething on the burned flesh of his torture
at Indian police hands, recorded in the affected journalese
of Corpses, must cause the failure of the book
even as a tract.4

One agrees with this judgement but with some qualifications.

This criticism does not take the stories individually
into consideration and Seljouk is not so bad as not to merit
some attention. It is true that Seljouk’s story-telling follows
the anecdotal pattern, the conflict is not presented with sufficient
skill and the total effect is, to use a metaphor, one of
thinness. However, some stories have the mark of what the
author could have developed into if he had continued writing.
There is a strangely disturbed kind of creative intelligence
at work: one which it would be unjust to overlook but
one which is far from perfect.

Seljouk’s favourite theme seems to be the struggling of

one main character against circumstances. The circumstances
always defeat the individual who dies but, in some

85
ways, the individual sometimes transcends the pettiness of
his life. In ’The Judge’, the judge dies when he discovers
photographs of his wife dancing in the nude; in ’The Father’
the father dies when his youngest son, like the elder brothers,
becomes a cripple; in ’The Sinner’ a paederast is denied
burial in a saint’s tomb and so on. There is nothing unique
about these anecdotes. However, The bandit’, though
marred by uncalled for tirades against India, is a powerful
story. The sufferings of the refugees from India living in the
slums of Karachi are portrayed with pathos. The clerk who
becomes a robber because he has to feed himself and his
daughter is a familiar version of Robin Hood but his suffering
and death do not seem hackneyed. There is originality
and power in the way they are described. And the same kind
of power exists in The Mountaineer’. The part of the story
which deals with the splendid isolation of the captain of the
team which is climbing the Rakaposhi is written with Conradian
skill. One is reminded of Conrad’s lonely naval captains,
perhaps with as great defects as Captain Whalley of
The End of the Tether’, when one reads about the Captain
who defies man and Nature and falls to his death in proud
isolation. Like Conrad’s Lord Jim the Captain too transcends
his reputation. It is a story about the alienated twentieth
century man, or perhaps a man with a temperament
which makes him a stranger to other men, and it is a good
story. It is unfortunate that Seljouk did not often write in
this manner.

Some other writers who started publishing in the sixties

and the details of whose published work can be found in the
bibliography are Ikram Azam and Sagheer Husain. The latter
was an army officer who died in the 1965 War with India
and what he published, and what his friend Ikram published
after his death, is obviously juvenilia. He might have improved
if he had lived longer but nothing can be said with
certainty about that. Ikram still produces reprints of his
published novels as well as new novels.

Another work which was published in the sixties was the

novel Bewilderment to Sublimity (1969). This, like S.M.
Ayub’s novel Shall We Meet Again, is so badly written that it

86
does not deserve attention. However, the idea of Abdul
Qayyum Khan Arif s Bewilderment is interesting: it is of a
world state which opens an academy for the political training
of the rulers of the future. But the language is bureaucratic,
the hero is a stereotyped bright young man who is too good
and colourless to be true, and the plot is rudimentary and
uninteresting. Another such book is Saeed P. Yazdani’s collection
of short stories called The Seduced. The stories in this
collection, unlike most Pakistani fiction, are explicit and
even obsessed with sex. However, they are sub-standard
from the literary point of view. The only short story which
does distinguish itself is ’My Date’. It was also given the
Adamji Valiji Award (1965) but I doubt if it is original. The
way of life, speech and cultural patterns seem to be lifted out
of an American story though I have not yet found the original
(if indeed there is one). This judgment seems to be very
uncharitable but the story is so different from all the other
ones that the suspicion that it is plagiarised does enter the
mind. On the other hand the story might represent what
Yazdani, who later committed suicide, was moving towards.
However, the fat girl who does not find love and succumbs to
the advances of hoodlums till a middle-aged hotel owner
gives her security and love, has skill and force. The names
are Pakistani but, as I have said already, the girl as well as
everyone else behaves just like Americans and the country in
which the drama is going on seems to have American values
and norms.

All the works of fiction mentioned here in passing do not

seem to me to be of much literary value. However, in the interest
of literary history they have either been mentioned
here or in the bibliography. The best novelist of the sixties is
Zulfikar Ghose but he deserves a complete chapter to himself.

87
NOTES

1. For detaiUs see the boots on Pakistan given in the

bibliography. .

2 Printed on the jacket otf the novel itself.

3. Hialid Hasan,tawwrand 156.
4 T. Wignesan, ’[Pakistani Novelists, JCL, 5 (July,

1968), 120.

88
ZULFIKAR GHOSE

The Murder of Aziz Khan, published in 1967, is the most significant

novel about Pakistan’s social reality in the nineteen
sixties. Its author, Zulfikar Ghose, was born in Sialkot in
1942 but is now settled at Austin (U.S.A) where he is Professor
of English at the University. Ghose does not call himself
a Pakistani in the political sense but his work owes much to
his being born in a land which he had to leave later.1 He is,
therefore, one of the most significant writers in this history
of Pakistani literature in English. His relations with Pakistan
(and India) - from Sialkot he emigrated to Bombay ~ are
ambivalent and he complains about not having been given
critical recognition as follows:

I have not been back to India or Pakistan for twentythree

years. Neither country has given me the slightest
recognition. But this has nothing to do with writing.2

This chapter will attempt to make amends by giving

Ghose his rightful place in Pakistani English-literature. Before
coming to his major novel about Pakistan, The Murder
of Aziz Klian, however, I will relate Ghose’s fiction with his
two major themes: alienation and deracination. This is important
because these themes are so perennial in Ghose’s
fiction. And that is probably so because he became an exile
after leaving the land of his birth. Thus, like V.S. Naipaul
from Trinidad, Dom Moraes from India and others, Ghose
is the exile, the intellectual alienated from his society and his
work should be seen in the light of that consideration.

Ghose’s consciousness of being in exile is expressed in

the light of his autobiography, Confessions of a Native-Alien.

89
The theme of exile has also been noted by earlier critics.
Kanaganayakam, for instance, has written a doctoral dissertation
in which he has dealt with this theme at length. In an
interview of Ghose Kanaganayakam makes three important
points about this aspect of Ghose’s relationship with the
subcontinent. First, that Ghose’s consciousness of exile produced’
a need to create a model of what...[he has]...left behind
or lost in order to explore the possibility of creating a
new identity’ in the earlier fiction; second that Ghose’s
changes in the narrative modes ’are not the result of technical
legerdemain so much as a consequence of the complex
perception of exile’; and third that ’the idea of home
whether it appears as a farm, a ranch, a man-made paradise,
or an Arcadian village, remains a central preoccupation and
a unifying force’.3

Before considering alienation and deracination, however,

I will define the terms as I will use them. Deracination
is being used for rootlessness: for the feeling that one is not
permanently embedded in a community, a social group, or
part of a whole, in cultural, ethnic and historical terms.
Alienation is being defined in terms of psychological symptoms.
A person who feels as if he is alienated from a society
feels as if he is a stranger in it. He is the outsider, the alien,
even if he is not treated by others as if he were one. He may
suffer from what Seeman calls ’powerlessness, meaninglessness,
normlessness, isolation, and self-estrangement’.4 Selfestrangement
or self-alienation needs further elaboration: it
is, according to Karen Horney, the condition of a man who is
’oblivious of what he really feels, likes, rejects, believes, in
short, what he really is!’.5

Alienation, in the sense of being so different from a society’s

mores as to be a stranger to it, is a distinctive feature
of the urban middle class in most of the colonies of the
West. Tt is this kind of alienation which George Woodcock is
talking about in the following comment on R.K. Narayan’s
fictional city of Malgudi.

...the sickness from which all the citizens of Malgudi

suffer, and which their mediocrity reflects, is the

90
mid-twentieth century alie-nation of the Indian middle
class.6

However, the urban elites have made an eclectic culture

through selection of congenial features from their indigenous
cultures as well as from the West. Thus, individual
members of these elites do not feel deracinated or psychologically
maladjusted. So the writer of fiction has to look for
signs of alienation among those who have not accepted the
elitist sub-culture.

In Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope (1960), for instance,
the protagonist Ramaswamy’s quest for spiritual satisfaction
is a measure of his alienation from Western values
represented by his wife Madeleine. And Anita Desai’s Bye,
Bye, Blackbird (1971) ’offers a complex sense of alienation,
human separateness, and crisis of identity in the portrait of
Sarah Sean, an English woman married to an Indian’.7 Such
problems form one of the major themes of Ruth Prawer
Jhabwala’s fiction too. And they are the major theme of both
V.S. and Shiva Naipaul’s fiction about the Trinidadian who
goes abroad and becomes an alien in the country of exile
while finding himself different from his family at home.

It would not be out of place to give some biographical

details about Ghose. He belongs to a Muslim, Punjabi family
of Sialkot with the name of Ghaus. The first two letters represent
a phoneme which is not known in English. The name
which he took up (Ghose) rhymes with rose and the’gh’ is
pronounced as the English /g/ phoneme. It is, however, aspirated
in Hindu names in Indian languages. Sialkot was becoming
an industrial city in the thirties, but its values were
rural and traditional. This meant that Ghose lived in an extended
family in an agricultural environment in which things
seemed static, there was consensus about social mores and
values, and permanence rather than change, seemed to be
the chief quality of life. At the age of seven he went to bornbay,
a metropolitan city with a Hindu majority, the antithesis
of Sialkot. Rapid change was its most important feature.
Then there was anonymity and a sense of aloneness rather
than one of belonging to a community. There were different

91
religious communities: Hindus, Parsis, Christians, Sikhs and
Muslims. And to make matters worse it was a period of religious
conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims, something
which must have caused apprehension in Ghose’s family.
The change of name belonged to this period and it was
useful too.

Ghose is a common Hindu name familiar to anyone

who has been to Calcutta, while we are Muslims. But
the India before independence was a time of cornmunal
hatred; we found it convenient to be known as
Ghause among Hindu communities and Kliawaja
among Muslims.... And I prefer it. It is half Muslim,
half Hindu, half Pakistani, half Indian. I have no religious
convictions and I do not know whether I should
call myself the former. The name however, sums up
the conflict, emphasizes the feeling of not belonging
(CNA, 6).

In 1952 Ghose’s family left Bombay and went to England.

Ghose attended Sloane School, Chelsea and then Keel
University where he studied English and Philosophy. In 1963
he received a special award from the E.C. Gregor Trust for
the poems published in The Loss of India. After that he went
to Austin where he is nowadays (1990).

The theme of deracination exists in the poems too but

they have been considered separately. It is the major theme
of the autobiography which is of interest as an introduction
to the dominant mode of his apprehension of reality. His
emphasis shifts to impermanence rather than to permanence
in human existence and the phenomenal world. This state of
mind which some mystics and philosophers inculcated is antithetical
to the rationalistic, empirical attitude of mind
which Ian Watt connects with the rise of the particularistic,
individualistic fiction of social-realism.8 Thus Ghose’s three
novels The Incredible Brazilian: The Native, The Beautiful
Empire and A Different World do not fall in the pale of realistic
fiction even when the surface story does have a plot and
the events are arranged in a logical sequence. The underly92
ing idea used in them, which makes them transcend realism,
is that of transmigration of souls. And this idea would naturally
appeal to a person who is conscious of being a visitor,
so to speak, in the world: a person who is more conscious of
the impermanence of the phenomenal world than its permanence.

The autobiography expresses the theme of the writer’s

consciousness of his having no cultural roots and being an
alien in England as well as in Pakistan and India which he
toured as a reporter in the nineteen sixties. The autobiography
is an honest picture of the growth of a creative talent
which has no tradition to fall back upon. In this kumtelroman
the protagonist like Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (1915) gropes his way to a metaphysical
reason for being. At the same time, he is struggling
against a tradition which would commit him to another way
of life. Stephen is in conflict with Irish nationalism and Roman
Catholicism while Ghose is fighting against the cultural
and religious norms of Punjabi families: against his father’s
idea that he would continue the family business. In Ghose’s
case the balance is tipped against the family because he is
living in England and studying English literature and philosophy.
At Keele he meets a number of girls but even with
them no permanent relationship is built up. He remains the
outsider in the University. Later he becomes a sports reporter
and the visit to the subcontinent is described under
the title The Native Abroad’. The title of the book, as well
as the title of the chapter, reveals the spirit in which Ghose
comes back to the land of his birth.

The themes of rootlessness and alienation now become

obsessive and are reiterated explicity. Commenting on a
sleeping man he says:

It is his earth. He is an Indian. Because he has

nowhere else to go, he belongs to the earth and one
day he will never rise from it (CNA, 139).

93
And again:

And if you do not have the sense of rootedness to

one country and have to make a choice because you
need to make a choice, because you’re tormented by
not belonging then what is there to choose? Look,
look at this world and despair. This search of mine
can only lead to a pocket of isolation (CNA, 139).

The pathos of this acute sense of being alienated from all

cultures is expressed powerfully without becoming sentimental.
The reiteration which may have marred a piece of fiction,
brings out the growing young man’s insistent need for
belonging. However, the very fact that he does not belong
makes him a good critic of the culture of the subcontinent.
He realizes that although conversation in the middle class of
the subcontinent is morally high-sounding and pompous, the
society is very materialistic. He comments:

It’s [his bitterness] worth the whimper of a man who

accidentally comes upon a poem of yours and,
meeting you, asks why didn’t you study engineering.
The most important thing in India is money and you
should see how they make it (CNA, 139).

It is interesting to note that Salman Rushdie and

V.S.Naipaul’s criticism of the lack of truth in the subcontinent,
the urge fur vertical social mobility and other negative
features is essentially the same.g

The autobiography ends on a note of worldly despair.

Ghose returns to England to find his father’s business ruined
and his family scattered He has to face the family’s accusations,
and, what is worse, his own guilt - the guilt of having
done nothing to save his father’s way of life; a guilt similar to
Stephen Deadalus’s guilt in Ulysses (1922) for not respecting
the wishes of his dying mother. However, he has decided to
write and this commitment to art in the midst of worldly
failure is once again closely related to Stephen Deadalus’s
exile from Ireland in order to commit himself to art.

94
Ghose writes:

Thus stripped of vanity, thus humiliated with want,

sorrow, dejection, the hurt that comes from seeing
people around one unhappy, the cruel abstract
words, root one to literature, to the purity of purpose
that cannot come in a life of unrestricted satisfaction.
The war poet, to write his poems, had to be dying in
the trenches; and any poet must go out with his neck
bared to what sharp edges of life he finds
(CNA.138).

That may be an erroneous generalization but its value

lies in indicating the intensity of the writer’s urge to find
roots in existence. He has been denied the roots furnished
by living in a culture whose ethos is the dominant ethos of
one’s social group and he does not have a religious and ethical
tradition which he can call his own. So now he is creating
the roots which will give him a sense of belonging, he will become
an artist: a twentieth century creative writer who is in
some way ’the eternal outsider’.

The condition of being cut off, alienated, from society is

presented in Crump’s Terms which is Ghose’ trenchant criticism
of Western society. The protagonist Crump is a school
teacher whose wife Frieda, with whom he enjoys vacations in
France, eventually leaves him to go to East Berlin. The only
apparent reason for this defection is that her mother had left
her husband and the children to live her own life when she
was a child in South Africa. Crump keeps living an empty
and thoroughly disillusioned life of teaching and going
through the motions of living an active life. He delivers lectures
on the hazards of consumerism to his pupils and points
out that Western society equates happiness with the possession
of more and more consumer goods. This leads to an increase
of wealth among the capitalists who create artificial
demands by aggressive advertising. Thus all values and education
become functional and life becomes empty. Human

95 JI(<JS|

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relations suffer in such a state of living and people lose faith
in cultural traditions, values and one another. He says:

Europe is dying and its people play games at being

alive. That’s all my knowledge has made me understand
(CT, 220).

The idea that everybody is, somehow, unreal is at the

centre of this book. The characters are self-alienated: they
do not know what they really want, they act like strangers to
their selves, and their personalities never become clearly defined.
Frieda is so remote from the reader that she never
emerges as an identifiable individual and Crump, in spite of
his lecturing, remains vague. The gestures of human beings
in this novf’l seem to be like those of lifeless puppets. They
do not have intimacy, and love between husband and wife is
reduced to copulation. The book reflects an inordinately
nightmarish condition of a society in which human beings
have become alienated from one another as well as from the
essentialist conception of what is truly human.

The Incredible Brazilian is about the life of Gregorio

Piexoto da Silva Xavier in the sixteenth century. It is a time
of change, colonization, and lawlessness. Gregorio loves the
rumbustiousness of his society and crosses the Amazon jungle
without getting killed like the others with him. He lives
through sumptuous luxury and debauchery as well as cruel
deprivation; in a palace with naked Negresses; and in a jail
where depraved men subject him to sodomy; in squalor and
in splendour. And his zest for living is reflected in all these
conditions and in the number of adventures he has. His hold
on reality seems to be strong but this is the impression we
receive from the colourfulness and hurry of the narrative.
Gregorio is not the man who will settle down and develop
roots; he breaks his roots with his father’s farm, with his ancestors’
way of life. And this restlessness makes him an alien
in a culture in which he appears to be fully participating.
This impression is strengthened in Gregorio’s adventures in
the nineteenth century recounted in The Beautiful Empire.
Here Gregorio runs away from home as a boy and joins the

96
Brazilian army which is fighting against Paraguay. After several
adventures in the company of a Negroid friend called
Alfredo, he comes to England to see his parents, his mother
has died and his father’s mind has been unhinged by sorrow.
He returns to Brazil with an adventurer called Mr. Hoffman
in order to export rubber to the world. They settle down at
Minaos, as do other European adventurers, and start exporting
rubber. They use the most barbarous ways of exploiting
the natives: Mr. Hoffman, for example, obtains his
rubber plantation through the help of an unscrupulous
Brazilian named Lopez Gama who gives infected clothes and
beads as presents to the Indians. Within a fortnight the
whole village dies of disease and the narrator tells us:

With a sickening sensation in the pit of my stomach,

I realized now that I had been as innocent as the Indians.
I had thought that the presents had been only
presents, that perhaps they were a prelude to some
sinister development. The Indians, knowing so much
of death from the creatures of the jungle, did not
know that the most fearful of the beasts was invisible:
a deadly, contagious disease (BE, 132).

The rubber plantation, obtained by these ruthless means,

make the capitalist entrepreneurs of Manaos fabulously rich.
•But their lives are shallow, their personalities flawed and
their relationships are, therefore, weakened. Gloria Singleton,
who loves Gregorio, also hates him because she considers
him responsible for the death of her parents. Gloria, who
marries Alfredo, finally contrives to have Gregorio arrested
for having murdered an Argentine soldier when defending
the mistress of the Paraguayan dictator. He is sent to Rio de
Janeiro as a prisoner and the novel ends in a moment of
heightened awareness of the possibility of redemption:

...and I felt as if I were being enfolded by the arms of

a beautiful mistress, with the bitter knowledge within
me that her embrace would be my death (BE, 383).

97
This is a curious ending because a prisoner condemned
for murder would not he so r-sponsive to the beauty of a
city. But Gregorio is tesp<*nsKc not to a city in space and
time but to an abstraction’ the idea of Brazil; of a perfect
home which he c;\n call his *wn. And this is not available to
him because he is an alien in all the possible homes he could
have made in the nineteenth century.

The twentieth century is even less successful in offering

him a home. For in A Different World, the account of Gregorio’s
life in the twentieth century, he is as homeless as before
but even more unhappy than ever. His parents die and he is
estranged from his brother and sister. At the intellectual
level too he is alienated from the main currents of Brazilian
thought being neither a communist nor even a fascist. The
irony of the situation is that whereas the government considers
him a radical and he becomes famous among young
socialists as a great leader, he joins the forces of the government
in the end to prevent the abduction of a visiting
American dignitary by the socialists. In this existence, too,
coincidences and misunderstandings prevent him from establishing
a happy personal bond with anyone. He remains a
rootless alien in the twentieth century too. But now he is tortured
by the military regime and is more alienated from his
fellow men than he ever was before.

In all these novels Gregorio is also conscious of not really

belonging to his environment. In The Beautiful Empire
he takes a ride after his wife’s death and finds an old man in
the village who says he knew him:

”A man lives once, twice, who knows how many

times?” He said. ”You are a man who has possessed
the world and you will return to it and possess it
again. What you think you know is only a fraction of
all that there is in your mind” (BE, 321).

This idea of being in some essential way alienated from

all given cultures while hankering for one, as a corollary of
this alienation, is the major motif of the trilogy. It forms
what can be termed the mystic dimension of the novel. For

98
this unexplained hankering for the unseen, whether the idea
of home, of Brazil or of an immanent deity is mystical and
the fiction becomes in many ways like the mystic fiction of
such people as Edward Carpenter, the Victorian Cambridge
don who became a mystic, and some modernists.

This conclusion does not, at first sight, appear to be true

for Ghose’s recent novel Don Bueno. Here the son always
kills the father who has left him in childhood. However, if we
consider that the events which culminate in the parent Don
Bueno’s death are based on highly unlikely coincidences and
that the very betrayal of the sons by their father is insufficiently
motivated, we will come to the conclusion that the
novel is not based on a realistic apprehension of life. What
we have is, in fact, the non-realistic or surrealistic family
saga such as one finds in Garcia Gabriel Marquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). In One Hundred, for instance,
we have rainfall for years: a whole village suffers
from amnesia and then we discover that all these events
were recorded in a book of fate. Such kind of fatalism governs
Don Bueno too. Here too the pattern of occurrences is
not based on phenomenal reality. This, as I have said earlier,
is the consequence of looking at the world like an alien with
awareness of impermanence rather than permanence
on the one hand and hankering for some permanent pattern
in time and space on the other. The permanence is in the fatalistic
repetition of predetermined events. The impermanence
is in the outlook of the Don Buenos themselves. They
look at the world with the eyes of aliens. They do not have a
permanent home nor do they seem capable of maintaining
bonds with people. The last Don Bueno even rapes his devoted
daughter. They are of a community but still not really
a part of it. And they find some unity only in this fatalistic
pattern which governs their lives.

The idea of the fatalistic pattern is to be found in the

novels A New History of Torments and Figures of Enchantment.
The pattern in these novels is formed by coincidences
hut the illusion of there being a controlling overall pattern, a
Programme, is conveyed as in Don Bueno.

99
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100
and looks like Mariana. The ending, however, is ironic.
Mariana goes away abandoning Frederico on the island. The
wishes come true but do not bring happiness and the last
wish becomes a cruel joke. The ending of Torments too is
ironic. For the land of Oyarzun, the legendary land found by
Jason, is fast becoming a jungle again.

Like Don Bueno these novels too have a pattern but the
pattern is illusory. Just as the homes do not allow the protagonists
to settle down and develop roots so also the patterns
of fate seem to determine lives but do not allow man to
be anything more than the plaything of a capricious fate or
rather coincidence. The pattern too gives no permanence; in
fact the illusion of normal cause and effect which make prediction
possible in ordinary lives are also lost. In this sense
the pattern does not give that kind of satisfying fatalism
which religious societies possess but that other kind of stupefying
determinism which does not presuppose the existence
of any directing intelligence behind it.

The preternatural determinism of Torments is not a

prophecy come true but a cruel joke made possible by unusual
events. The parallels with the Greek hero Jason’s quest
for the golden fleece reinforce the irony of the contemporary
Jason’s quest for a promised land which turns out to be
artificially constructed and becomes worthless. The last
words of the novel reflect an awareness of the absence of a
pattern directed by an intelligence: ’Here dreams and the divinity
that resided in them, were only silent shadows’ (p.
303). In Figures the ending is even more ironic. The universe
is absurd, there is no verity of any kind and no moral order.
The nihilism of the world-view of the author is conveyed
through the images of life being carelessly left to rot away.

The rushing water knocked some of the stingrays

onto the sand where they flapped helplessly until the
next wave submerged them again. There would inevitably
be some who would be flung too far out to
make it to the water again and that accident of na101
ture had no other consequence than to add to the
decomposing matter on the beach (p. 256).

The novels we have been considering are not meant to

be realistic novels. The surface narrative, however, does follow
a logical chronological sequence. This is, of course, part
of the illusion that Ghose sets out to create for his protagonists:
the illusion that there is order of some kind in the
world. But his aim is to create surrealistic, or para-realistic
fiction. And this he has tried to do in his novel Hulme’s Investigations
into the Bogart Script. Ghose explains the writing
of this novel as follows:

Hulme ’s Investigations into the Bogart Script began by

itself. I just found myself writing it one day. I soon
realized that what I was trying to produce was a text
which was not based on the preconceived ideas,
which was not trying to put forward the writer’s
views, which did not have a story or plot, but which
was still fiction.10

Alamgir Hashmi, one of the reviewers of the novel,

wrote that ’...this new novel marks an advance in story telling
and gives all he touches a contemporary focus’.” Hashmi
fails to prove this assertion in his review and I am afraid I
cannot agree with this judgement at all. Ghose is aiming at
something seriously though Hashmi seems to have been
taken in only by the meretricious deviations from the ordinary.
Ghose remains at his best when he does not leave the
sequential narrative altogether. And his masterpiece in this
style, in the realistic style to be precise, is The Murder of Aziz
man.

The Murder of Aziz Klran is, in the author’s words: ’a

solid, straight-forward novel’,u and it is that and much more
notwithstanding the patronising remarks Ghose has made
about it. It is, in fact the only important work of fiction representing
the social reality of the emergence of primitive
capitalism in Pakistan in the nineteen sixties. The textile industry
was among the first to come up. The rural areas of

102
Lya’;pui (now Faisalabad) and the area between Lahore and
Mulian passed into the hands of industrialists. About these
industrial changes -- it can hardly be called a revolution --
there is no work of imagination either in Urdu or English
which can compare in quality with Ghose’s novel.

The protagonist, Aziz Khan, is the owner of seventy

acres of agricultural land in Kalapur (a fictional name for
what seems to be Lyallpur) which he farms with the help of
his two sons Rafiq and Javed and his peasant labourers. The
land around his estate is bought by the Shah brothers ~
Akram, Ayub and Afaq -- who want to create an industrial
empire based on cotton for themselves. They offer to buy
Aziz Khan’s land also but he refuses to sell. Ayub, having
been a gangster in his native Bombay, decides to destroy
Aziz’s pride as well as his family. He gets his chance when
his younger brother Afaq rapes and murders a peasant girl
near Aziz Khan’s land. Ayub and Akram bribe the police to
arrest Rafiq for the crime and, inspite of his innocence,
Rafiq is hanged. Afaq is sent to England where he is followed
by Ayub’s wife Razia who is sexually infatuated with
him. Razia discovers that Afaq ha^ a girl friend. Pamela, and
leaves him in indignation. Back in Pakistan she accuses Afaq
of having assaulted her and Ayub promptly disowns him thus
securing the property for his children (Akram being sterile
because of venereal disease). While this is going on Aziz
Khan’s wife falls ill and he takes a loan of 2,000 rupees for
her treatment. The security for this is Javed’s dowry and,
failing that, his land. Javed is murdered by assassins hired by
Ayub and Aziz Khan’s wife dies of grief. As the debt is not
paid, the Shah brothers seize Aziz Khan’s land and he is
seen walking around the fence which now surrounds it.

This summary of the plot is necessary to understand the

nature of Ghose’s achievement in this novel. Firstly, Ghose
has tried to point out that capitalistic industrial progress is
based on ruthless exploitation, \kram, the eldest brother,
exploits people by tricking them into giving him money to establish
his factory. His younger brother Ayub exploits them
by smashing the worker’s union so that they cannot get their
rights. And Afaq, who does not produce wealth yet but

103
merely consumes it, exploits women. The common characteristic
of the brothers is that they want personal gratification,
the satisfaction of their ego, rather than the good of the
community. Akram sees money as a symbol of this gratification
and is the archetypical capitalist, the kind of exemplar
who is shaping the values of the Pakistani society in the
making:

Akram in the eyes of these people, who admired his

ruthless methods, was not only a Pakistani enjoying
his freedom creatively; he was the Pakistani in whose
type the successful citizens of the country would be
moulded (M, 23).

The real motivation of the Shah brothers’ lust for possession

is not the profit incentive. That is merely the rationalization
of the irrational desire to gratify their egos. But
the desire is so irrational that Ayub tells Akram that what
they really want is not Aziz Khan’s land but to humiliate
him:

At first we had economic reasons for wanting his

land. And then, gradually, we realised we were
fighting against the pride of one man. And our own
pride, our own honour were in question (M, 283).

In Afaq this irrationality produces aggression of which

his reckless driving is a manifestation. And it is this which
makes him a rapist and a murderer: his ego is so monstrously
inflated as to make him take his pleasure outside
the boundary of not just law but even humanity. He wants
the greatest power upon earth - that of taking away life.

But such individualistic desires are incompatible with the

extended family system in Pakistan. Individualism is inimical
to the concept of the supportive family unit. The novel
communicates the theme of the disruptiveness of capitalistic
individualism by ending with the estrangement of the Shah
brothers. The Shah family splits up into three nuclear families
as a direct result of predatory individualism. The family

104
which did not want to split up -- that of Aziz Khan -- is destroyed
so that only Aziz Khan himself is left in the end. And
the implication is clear: that the new philosophy, capitalistic
individualism, is going to disrupt the extended family system
of Pakistan. It will produce isolated and egotistical individuals
in the end who will not he bound to their cultural roots.

This brings one to deracination, a theme to which attention

has been given earlier and which is one of the major
themes of Murder. The Shah Brothers, the major disrupting
influence in the life of rural Punjab, have come from India
and have no cultural roots -- probably had none in India either.
Aziz Khan, on the other hand, loves his land and the
permanence of the agricultural way of life:

In Aziz Khan’s mind was the vegetative hopefulness

of belief in a fixed order, almost a fatalism which approved
only of the sort of routine repetition of which
the sun’s daily rising and setting were the archetype
(M, 53).

And when he is defeated and his land is taken away from

him, we have the beginning of the cultural uprooting of human
beings during industrial revolutions. This aspect of industrialization
has received no attention in Pakistani literature
in English though Anita Desai, in her novel The Village
By the Sea (1982) and Kamala Markandaya in Pleasure City
(1982) have written about the effects of industrialization on
coastal communities.

The novel shows a deep understanding of the Pakistani

way of life. The corruption of the government officials and
the way of thinking of minor characters is authentic. Faridah,
the wife of Akram, for instance, represents the vulgar
acquisitiveness of Pakistani middle class women for gaudy
clothes and jewellery:

’Vas there any pink?’ Faridah asked. ’Pink?’ Mr.

Feroze Khan asked. ’Begum Sahiba\ I have each and
every culler for your sootability, pink, saalmun red,
turkwise, emmaruld green, purple, midnight blue,

105
dusk grey, haje, pee green, the cumpleet range, Begum
Sahiba, the cumpleet range. Fiaz and Nassirn
came hurrying hack with rolls of material (M, 104).

Nor is this all, for Hussain, the money lender who ruins
Aziz Khan, displays all the petty cunning of the small businessman.
In the following scene, for instance, he pretends to
he ill so as to avoid repaying Rafiq a debt of two thousand
rupees:

’Father was wondering’, Rafiq began, but Hussain

hastily interrupted him, ’Hai, Amma-jit why did I
have that cuppa cha, oooooh!’

He pressed a hand to his stomach and groaned.

’Oooooh! Three bucks I paid the dahcterr, and he
said, drink milk, and hyere I go, so carried off seeing
my brother, I go and drink tea. Vhat I doing to myself,
Amma-ji, throwing good money like that and not
taking advice? Oooooh!’ (M, 76).

The scene is not only authentic but also hilarious in the

bargain, inviting comparison with Dickens.

It will be noted that Ghose has deviated from the conventional

spellings of English words in order to represent
’accents and modes of speech’ (Murder, notice in the beginning)
of different characters. This may be a successful
method of creating what Taufiq Rafat calls the ’Pakistani
idiom’.13 Ahmed Ali has tried to create such an idiom in
Twilight in Delhi as has been discussed in detail already.
And, to take an Indian example, R.K. Narayan has adapted
the rhythms of South Indian languages to give the distinctive
quality of Indianness to his novels. Amos Tutola, the African
novelist, is considered the most innovative or outrageous
user of deviant English in his novels. But Tutola is consistently
deviant in his use of English whereas Ghose generally
writes impeccably correct English and uses deviation from it
to stand for a character’s lack of sophistication or some
other quality which cannot be conveyed except in the vernacular
which that character would ordinarily use and for

106
which English is a metaphor. Thus Faridah’s vulgarity comes
out more strikingly in the travesty of English she uses and,
since the petty shopkeeper immersed in making money
speaks the same kind of English, we get a rough estimate of
Faridah’s moral stature.

Murder is a successful novel about Pakistan not only hecause

it deals with some of the problems of Pakistani society
in the sixties, but also because it concerns itself with a philosophical
theme. This theme is the philosophical one of the
integrity of the self: the ability of the ego to be itself despite
external pressure. And it concludes that the ego can be invaded,
can be broken by external circumstances. For Aziz
Khan, though he is still alive when the book ends, is not the
same man who allows himself to feel the sensation of being
firmly rooted in his land and his family in the beginning of
the novel. However, the ego has resisted acquiescing to pressure;
it has not bowed even if it has broken and this is an
important conclusion. For the conclusion of Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty Four (1949) is that the ego can acquiesce, can
bend to brutality, and not even love is strong enough to save
it from that fate. Against the pessimism of Orwell the optimism
of Ghose is a more attractive, and equally plausible,
existential stance.

Ghose has written one other novel and a major short

story about India. The novel is called Contradictions (1966)
and the short story, The Zoo People’. Both are based in India
but the setting is unimportant. The literary value of both,
and they are slight, lies entirely in the ideas they present. In
the short story the characters are two old ladies one of
whom dies in India. The other one tries to puzzle out her
relationship with life, of which India is a symbol, and reaches
no logical conclusion. In the end she watches the sun rising
upon a landscape which merely asserts existential nihilism
and loneliness:

Absolute barrenness was a reality with which she

now felt a sympathy. There were rocks and rocks:
each, whether a pebble or a boulder, was a complete,
homogeneous, self-sufficient mass of creation,

107
magnificently aloof, without ancestry and without
progeny (Corpses, 204).

This prompts references to E.M. Forster’s famous Malabar

Caves in A Passage to India which disrupt communication
and break off human relationships. And also it reminds
one of the ending of Ghose’s own novel Figures of Enchantment
which has been quoted earlier.

In Contradictions too the use of India is symbolic. But

here India is used as the symbol of Utopia ~ of a country
which can satisfy the imagination of those who can see the
world as one mystical whole. Christopher, the civil servant,
who cannot, goes back to England cut off from human relationships.
His wife Sylvia, who can apprehend in a non-rational
way, comes back to India with Harding, a writer. This
theme is similar to that of the Brazilian trilogy; in fact is an
earlier and less sophisticated blueprint of it. For the idea of
Brazil as a mystic unity, as a Utopia for the imagination
which wants to apprehend the unity behind the diversity, is
the major theme of the trilogy.

And this is a theme I have connected with Ghose’s own

experience of having left Pakistan (Sialkot) and settled
abroad. This experience has been considered central in
shaping his creative sensibility and it is in this way that ons
can argue that his work owes much to the subcontinen:.
Apart from this Ghose can hardly be labelled a Pakistani
writer. First of all he despises labels and categories but, even
more important than that is the fact that his best fiction
makes art of themes which are universal: themes which belong
to the human experience, especially the experience of
the twentieth century man, and which belong to world literature
and not just to Pakistani literature. However, notwithstanding
the fact that all labels are misleading at best and
falsifying at worse, we shall include him among Pakistani
writers not only because he has written about Pakistan but
also because his exile from Pakistan has probably contributed
towards making him aware of the major themes of
his work.

108
NOTES

1. Tariq Rahman, ’Zulfikar Ghose and the Land of His

Birth’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, [New Mexico]
9:2 (Summer, 1989), 179-187.

2. C. Kanaganayakam, ’Zulfikar Ghose: An Interview’,

Twentieth Century Literature, 32:2 (Summer, 1986),
169-186 (180). This will be subsequently referred to
as ’Interview’. Also see Kanaganayakam’s thesis entitled
’Paradigms of Absence: The Writings of Zulfikar
Ghose’, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (University
of British Columbia 1985).

3. Interview, 172.

4. M. Seeman, ’On the Meaning of Alienation’, American

Sociological Review, XXVI (1967), 753-758.

5. Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 111.

6. George Woodcock, ’The Great Commonwealth Novelists:

R.K. Narayan and V.S. Naipaul’, Sewanee Review,
LXXXVII, 1 (Winter, 1979), 1-29 (19).

7. Bruce King, The New English Literatures: Cultural

Nationalism in a Changing World, 193.

8. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel.

9. See Rushdie’s novels and Naipaul’s Among the Believers

(1981) and India: A Wounded Civilization
(1977).

10. Interview, 177.

11. Alamgir Hashmi, ’Tickling and being Tickled a La

Zulfikar Ghose’, The Ravi, Vol.71, No.2 (1982), 36.

12. Interview, 174.

13. Taufiq Rafat, Towards a Pakistani Idiom’, Venture,

(Dec, 1970), 60-73.

109
THE NINETEEN SEVENTIES

The nineteen seventies began with the martial law regime ol

General Mohammad Yahya Khan in power. In 1968 Ayur
Khan had started what the government called the ’Decade o:’
Reforms’. Paradoxically, this brought out the students anc
other dissident forces against him. These forces gradually
came under the main control of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a politician
from Sindh and the ex-Foreign Minister of Ayub. The
political situation deteriorated so much that in March 196’
the Commander-in-Chief of the army, General Yahya, got
the opportunity to impose martial law. Ayub Khan resigned
and the new government clamped down upon all political activities
for some time,

However, political activities were permitted again and

Sheikh Mujeeb-ur-Rahman emerged as the leading politic;:!

leader from Bangladesh, then called East Pakistan. Tlu

people of East Pakistan resented not having been given as

much representation in the government as their larger nurrbers

warranted. They also resented the snobbery of the offcers

of the Civil Service of Pakistan and military officers

from the Western Wing. Mujeeb played upon the East Patistani

intelligentsia’s consciousness of having been exploited

and demanded provincial autonomy through his famous SK

points. In December 1970 elections were held in Pakistan.

Mujeeb’s Awami League got the maximum votes with

Bhutto’s Pakistan’s People’s Party following. However, the

polling had been on provincial lines and Mujeeb’s voters

were mainly from the Eastern Wing while Bhutto’s weie

from the West. Yahya’s government, knowing that Mujetb

was not acceptable to the West, refused to allow him to form

the government in the Centre. The government further ajgravated

the situation by refusing to concede Sheikh Mu110

jeeb’s Six Points. In March 1971 the Awami League declared
Bangladesh to be an independent state and Yahya ordered
the army to take military action to suppress the rebellion.
Mujeeb’s followers, who had formed a military force of their
own and were being given military training in India, fought
with determination and Bangladesh became a battlefield. In
1971 November the Mukti Bahini, Mujeeb’s armed force,
helped by the Indian army fought and defeated the Pakistan
Army and forced it to surrender. Yahya had to resign and
Bhutto formed his government in Pakistan.1

Bhutto ruled till July 1977. He was accused of having

rigged the national elections of 1977 by the opposition parties
who started demonstrating against his government. In
July 1977 General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the chief of the
army staff, overthrew the government and imposed martial
law. Bhutto was subsequently convicted on a charge of murder
and hanged in April 1979. Zia-ul-Haq ruled Pakistan
throughout the late seventies as an authoritarian martial law
administrator. He encouraged religious fundamentalism,
right-wing politicians and made the army more powerful.

Because of Zia’s rightist policies the seventies were

characterised with the rise of an intolerant kind of nationalism.
One aspect of this nationalistic spirit was to denounce
the continued ascendancy of the English language. However,
the middle class had expanded and had become even more
affluent than it was in Ayub Khan’s days. This class was sceptical
of government propaganda and insisted on teaching
English to its children. This too was a result of the government’s
ambivalence towards English. For, though English
was denounced publicly, the Government was aware of the
rising importance of English in the world and did not really
seem sincere about replacing it by Urdu. This resulted in the
reversal of schooling policies and English remained the language
of prestige and higher education as well as the language
of administration. Creative work in English remained,
however, as less in demand as ever and not much of it was
produced within the country.2 Zulfikar Ghose, as we have
seen, continued to write abroad and those who wrote in
Pakistan remained obscure.

Ill
The first creative writer we must consider now is Raja
Tridiv Roy. He was born in Rangmati on 14th of May, 1933.
Actually he was the ruler (Raja) of the Chakma tribe which
lived in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. In 1951 he went to qualify
for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn but his father’s death brought
him back to his tribe in 1953 as the new chief. He was one of
the few Bengalis to have chosen to stay back in Pakistan after
the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. In Pakistan Tridiv
Roy was made the Minister of Minorities’ Affairs (being a
Buddhist himself) in Bhutto’s government. He also held the
portfolio of tourism and, when Zia come into power, he was
retained as an ambassador.

Raja Tridiv Roy has published two collections of short

stories: The Windswept Wahini and They Simply Belong, both
in 1972. The former contains thirteen and the latter eighteen
prose items not all of which can be defined as short stories.
Some are descriptive essays, sketches and anecdotes while
others are folk tales. Still others are Buddhist myths or stories
and anecdotes based upon Buddhist ideas. The short
stories dealing with contemporary life are generally love stories.
Associated with these are stories featuring a playboy
who indulges in smart, frivolous conversation with women
and is quite heartless without being any the less charming.
These stories have a scintillating humour of their own which
lies in the witty remarks of the narrator or the playboy hero.

In They Simply Belong the following prose items fall into

the category of descriptions: ’Bud of Love’; ’Nepalese Vignettes’;
’March hare’s Quest’; ’Echoes of the Past’ and ’The
Call of the Sea’. Among the Buddhist myths and stories
based on Buddhist values there is much of interest. First of
all the stories are interesting in themselves and secondly
they illustrate values which belong to a very high order of
morality. What lends them more charm is that Tridiv Roy, a
Buddhist himself, neither preaches nor turns propagandist.
He affirms the values of peace, gentleness and detachment
through the actions of characters without intrusive proselytizing
and without invidious comments about other people’s
beliefs.

112
V

Among the most moving stories are ’The Recalcitrant

Fountain’ and To Err is Human, to Forgive Divine’. In the
former the father, a ruler, believes that the drought in his
land will end only when either he or his son is killed in order
to propitiate the gods. The ruler wraps himself up from head
to toe and the son kills him. The ruler’s self-sacrifice is conveyed
strikingly in this Buddhist legend. In the other story an
young man who wants to kill his wife for having fornicated
with a rival before marriage, is persuaded to forgive her by a
Buddhist monk who has had a similar experience.

The Prayer Wheel’ is a story which falls between the

Buddhist stories and the love stories. The setting is contemporary,
and as is usual in Tridiv Roy, cosmopolitan upper
class. A woman is the narrator and her fiance is the typical
witty, smart, rich young man who is the hero of most love
stories. The girl meets a Buddhist in the hotel who gives his
name as Prodhan-Vikram Jan Prodhan. He is from Nepal
and tells her that he had loved her when he was an young
man in an earlier incarnation because of which he had to
suffer being reborn. Now. he tells her, he will obtain nirvana
i.e. escape the cycle of birth and death. The narrator, who
has begun to love him, does not believe all this till she sees a
vision of herself as Prodhan’s beloved. Next morning Prodhan
disappears.

The love stories are hardly imbued with Buddhist values.

In most of them there is the rich young man who talks brilliantly,
very much like a modern Oscar Wilde, to girls who
listen to him while keeping up an equally witty repartee. In
the end the two have to separate and the girl, who has declared
her love by now, is left sighing. The man is not presented
as a villain but is rather unscrupulous in matters of
love and, more often than not, something of a playboy.

The playboys too may be either just romantic young

men, the ones who are sorry for separating from their
beloveds, or obviously hedonistic characters who intend to
fornicate with the girls and leave them to begin with. Such a
protagonist is found in The Pater and Patrimony’, The
Misogamist’ and ’Lalbahadur’. These stories are irrepressibly
funny and remind one of P.O. Wodehouse at places. In

113
the first two stories the protagonist is a rich man whereas
Lalhahadur is a working man. However, in their completely
unscrupulous zest for living they are quite similar.

Raja Tridiv Roy has not written deeply serious or first

rate fiction. However, he has created in his playboys Khoka,
Kahey and Lalhahadur characters who are interesting to
read about. He is a master of the English language and creates
humour in narration and dialogues through this master)’.
In sheer invention he is refreshingly original and gives
much pleasure, which, of course, is one of the main purposes
of literature, a purpose which the increasingly utilitarian and
puritanical reading public of Pakistan finds subversive. It is a
pity, however, that Tridiv Roy’s theme of unrequited love,
hackneyed in any case, should have been repeated in every
short story. One wishes the gift of humour would have been
combined with different plots if not with the creation of a
new fictional world like that of Wodehouse.

The WJiite Tiger of Viringa (1976), a collection of short

stories by Bilal Ahmad Jeddy, who writes for the Dawn
newspaper even now, is not very well known. Perhaps one
reason for the lack of attention is that short stories in English,
however good, are not paid much attention in Pakistan
anyway. And another is that Jeddy’s choice of title is inappropriate.
When one reads about tigers and sees an irate
tiger, a smoking tank, a huge killer shark, and a man and
woman embracing passionately on a maroon and green
cover, one assumes that the book is about hunting, romantic
adventure and adolescent thrill. To confirm this impression
the jacket of the book promises the reader ’Adventure,
Fighting, Sport’ and, after quoting some scenes from the
book, goes on to say:

Tense situations like this are guaranteed to keep you

on the edge of your chair and turning the pages as
fast as you can read.

Moreover a review of the book, one of the two to be

published, is indiscriminating and praises the book for being
adventurous.3

114
In view of all this it is easy to underestimate Jeddy’s
short fiction. In fact, behind the straightforward raciness of
the narration, is a concern not so much with the linear progression
of events hut with values. The exterior is obviously
that of a boys’ adventure or a thriller but the stories do take
us to the complex realm of the unknown in behaviour. This
interest in the unknown is not merely Gothic or frivolous
and this constitutes the strength of the fiction.

There are only eight stories in this collection. Out of

these two are about incidents of unusual bravery in war; two
are about man-eating beasts which are eventually killed; one
is about a mother and her son’s abortive attempt to escape
to Pakistan from the Indian Kashmir, and the others are on
disparate themes.

Ostensibly the two stories about bravery in battle, ’The

Switch’ and The Miracle’, are the usual stories about heroism
one finds so often in Pakistani popular fiction in the
wake of the 1965 war. Such an interpretation seems inescapable
in the light of the following remarks in the
’Preface’.

The two stories depicting the courage and superiority

of the Pakistan Army personnel over its traditional
enemy may seem somewhat incongruous in the light
of the result of the 1971 war.

But he goes on to assert, with the conviction of faith, that

the Pakistan army was defeated in 1971 only because of foreign
intervention and ’quislings and fifth columnists’. Yet,
inspite of the disappointingly commonplace views expressed
here, Jeddy has produced work which transcends narrow
chauvinism as, surprisingly indeed, the author himself apparently
does not.

In The Switch’ the protagonist, Captain Ata, is left

wounded in no man’s land temporarily occupied by the enemy.
He puts on an Indian NCO’s uniform and shoots those
who man the machine guns in an Indian platoon which is
waiting to ambush his own men. In The Miracle’ a certain
soldier called Khuda Dad, a deserter from the armoured

115
^ natrolling to a place where an Indian tank
C°rP5 g°1 league ed He starts one of the tanks and, with
thetTp of his mates, shoots at all the tanks and incapaci’^rKeredients

of the plot are similar: a Pakistani solA-

A is himsSf in India and, taking advantage of the situadief
In Indians This is the stuff of romance and, indeed,
T’ t behind the narrative is romantic. But the stones
the spint beh-n0 ^ ^ ^ Indo-Pak.stan

transcend ordina y found ^ u cd M L ^

WarS-fXn?^0 Jv, (1983) in important ways. Firstly, the landiqU1

Sif de crSe and not emotive. Secondly , there are no
guage is descrip Pakistan army as one finds in, say,

hnarTSnvVTKy the?e are no tirades against Indians such,

016 t the popular stories Urdu Digest and others have been
as mar thepop ^ h wg are m the pres.

SpeW1of§ what amounts to a miracle, there is no attempt at

enCernatural explanation or even gloating. One simply finds
SUPr?a^e which purports to explain things m terms off
3 ne cause and effect. This confers a certain distinction
mUnn the s cries though they do not succeed in saying anyS

di^ fr°m ^Hat Othef PakiSUiniS Ve Sa m°re

inVl li°UTShe Price of Freedom’, which has been written os•hlv

to remind us ’that the Long Night of tyranny and

tensibly_to rem Occupied Kashmir is not yet

^TpSS thereTmore bitterness against India The

over (Preface) tn ^ ^ ^^ rf a ^ hn,

varrhm ”r’i who is a^ested for having helped the Pakistani

Ka Thus some sympathy, the degree wh,ch the artist
CaUT for such a narrator’s point of view, is justified. But the
7^ has more than that amount of sympathy and does beme
partTsan. Moreover the plot that the man’s wife die
while t$ng to escape to Pakistan along with her son, is

haC jfddfhas a way of bringing the preternatural in his stories

 In the other stories this has been done cautiously arncl
tivp nrnceeds alone rationalistic lines. In The PU
^geTH^Motl’d Baksh’ no a,«emp, has be.n

116
made to rationalize the events. Baksh works for two months
in Karachi to feed a destitute woman. He does not go to
Arabia but when his village friends come back they claim to
have seen him performing his pilgrimage in Mecca. It is only
fair to add that such anecdotes are in common circulation in
Pakistan.

’The White Tiger of Viringa’ and The Marine Man

Eater of Mauri’ are the principal short stories of this volume.
At one level they are stories about shooting (shikar) of
the kind for which Jim Corbett has become famous. In both
a man-eater is stalked and killed by desperate men. In the
former the man-eater is a tiger who has robbed his killer of
his wife and child. In the latter it is a shark which has eaten
many villagers and the narrator kills it because of the love of
a sensual girl. Both the man-eaters are freaks: the tiger is
white, its body is disproportionally long and its paws are
much too small. The shark can remain still in deep water
whereas other sharks have to move about to avoid suffocation.
It is of diabolical cunning too.

But, whereas the stories are interesting even as tales of

adventure, their real significance seems to be different. They
are about man’s confrontation with the unusual. The unusual
happens to be evil in this case and both the tiger and the
shark become symbols of iniquity like Ahab’s white whale in
Moby Dick (1951). The element of the unusual is pronounced
in both the stories but in the ’White Tiger’ it has an
element of the Gothic, the preternatural also. The tiger is
born after the death of an English captain who is averse to
the feline family in all forms. This captain kills a Sadhu’s
tiger and is, presumably, born as a tiger himself.

The element of the unusual keeps the reader curious. It

has another purpose too: that of taking the reader into the
world of the unknown. In this extra-rational world the human
spirit is in conflict with the world of evil. At this metaphysical
level, the story is rewarding. In the ’Day of the
Kestrel’, the same conflict is reduced to an amoral attempt
at existence. The kestrel, keen on hunting other birds, is
brought down by hunters. In his world everyone is killed if
one does not kill and Shikra struggles against this fact of life

117
and waits for the next day with hope. The story is
metaphorical and pleasing only at this level. ^

Jeddy’s point ot view seems to be tnai r << >

!sd^ate~^HS
-trt^^-^:^1.^^

theSe:lohrfrS,oTSr worthy of no.ice is Yunus

S^h^olSion o? short stories «» ^
nnhlished in 1974 These stories were published, we are loiu

&^^5^^^

^^^^.^H^Sfe

^nfE,~^^

ED Uh Bv Han^i’The background in most of them ,s not

Pakistani hut the slories provide interest.ng insights in some
a pects of human life and are important Yunus^ S;ud EnalUh
is tl-iwless and his writing is free from the ordinar)
lakisLfTauhs of moralising and being pretentiously

*^^^^^g&

^t«^=^SS

r^^^s^^^^
^^^srs^r^^

°en ler Bailey who loves Nina. She simply does not th.nk extence^;
good enough to be continued. Yet, as long as she
does exist she means to deny herself no pleasurable ensa
tion. in conformity with this pomt ot -ew she goes to th
town to fetch more bottles of liqueur. A little later the
cano erupts and everyone dies.

118
Nina’s dead body lay there, lonely in death as it had
been in life. Serene and beautiful, actually in death
far more beautiful. Someone covered her with a
white sheet. Nina died unwept, unsung, and
unashamed (p. 18).

Nina is not the pseudo-heroic figure Pakistani middle

class literature presents. She dies defying conventional
morality and never repents of fornication and drinking.
However, Nina is not heartless. She would have married the
young man vho commits suicide out of a sentimental desire
to impress her. She is not like that young man. She believes
that the universe is absurd .md this robs her of the desire to
continue to exist. Her heroism is anti-heroic: it merely consists
in asserting the will to exist as long as pleasurable existence
is possible in a meaningless and indifferent universe.

The short stories with a Pakistani background have sociological

themes. In ’The Devil’s Choice’ the problems of
refugees from India are depicted with striking realism. An
young man who does not get a job finally accepts an illegal
one out of desperation. In ’God Be With You My Darling’
the theme is the tyranny of feudal chiefs on which a number
of popular T.V. plays - ’Varris” and ’Dahliz’5 -- were also
shown in the late seventies and early eighties. In this story
the chief of a tribe gets a man’s daughter abducted but the
man kills her before she is taken away. A journalist who has
seen all this happening writes a story about it but the editor,
intimidated by the chief, refuses to print the story. The story
is slight and much better stories on this theme are available
in Urdu.

’Death By Hanging’ is the story of a man who assassinates

a political leader who is a toady of the British government.
This would not have made a good short story but, because
the author shows the conflict between values in the
English judge’s mind, the story rises to a higher level. In the
end, however, the judge hangs the accused and the
’beginning of the end of His Britannic Majesty’s Government
had surely started’ (p. 143).

119
’A Friendly Foreigner’ is a commonplace short story of a
wife who is about to get seduced away from her husband.
’Elaine’ and ’Insomnia’ are introspective pieces of a modernist
kind. However, they do not seem to read as authentic
pieces of interior dialogue or the flashback technique.
’Fidgety’ is, on the other hand, a hilarious story of a car
which sees the narrator’s one dependable and numerous undependable
girl friends. The car has been endowed with human
characteristics and the humour is not irksome.

On the whole Yunus Said can keep the narrative interesting;

the conversation of his characters is neither stilted
nor pseudo-intellectual and the conflict is often well developed.
In some stories the interest shifts to the life of the
mind but, though the technique has been used to excellent
effect by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the
Lighthouse (1927), it fails to be anything but an affectation
here. There is, however, the promise of a development
which has not yet been brought before the reading public.

It is surprising that the writers of English fiction have not

shown any reaction to the politics of Pakistan in these eventful
years. The 1971 war, for instance, is a major event on
which almost nothing significant has been written. Mehr Nigar
Masroor in her novel Shadows of Time has, however,
touched upon it. Among short story writers the author wrote
a story entitled ’Bingo’ which was published in the late
eighties in Pakistan (The Frontier Post) and abroad (Short
Story International, New York).6 As the author’s short stories,
of which over seventy have been published, have not
been published in the form of a collection they cannot be noticed
in this history. However, this story may be mentioned
as an exception because it is radically different from the ordinary
Pakistani response to the 1971 war. To bring out the
difference of outlook between this story and most Pakistani’s
outlook it would be best to quote from the ’Preface’ of The
White Tiger of Viringa in which Jeddy voices the ordinary
man and the Pakistani intellectuals’ opinion about the war.

But to anyone capable of some thought, it cannot but

be obvious that the traumatic events of 1970-71; the

120
brain-numbing barrage of false propaganda: the
flooding of the country with quislings and fifth
columnists to mislead-a part in revolt, the unprovoked
attack with the help of the limitless and highly
sophisticated weaponry of a super power, and castiron
guarantees by it of intervention should the attack
run into difficulties could not have been resisted
by even the world’s best armies

In ’Bingo’ the political opinion expressed is that West Pakistani

officers, mostly of the armed forces and the administrative
services (especially the C.S.P), had been treating the
people of Bengal with contempt and had been insensitive to
the hatred build up as a result of this neo-colonial attitude.
Thus, the people of East Bengal could not be blamed for
trying to declare their determination for more autonomy.
Since this struggle for autonomy was not dealt with suitably,
the Bengali separatists won over many people to their side
and Bangladesh was declared independent. All this political
background is not given in the story but is necessary to understand
it.

The story begins in the Pakistan Military Academy

where two cadets, Safeer who is from West Pakistan, and
Tajussur, an East Pakistani, are under training to become
commissioned officers in the army. The narrator is Safeer
and he is obtuse, jealous of Tajussur and contemptible of all
Bengalis. To make fun of his Bengali companion he calls him
’Bingo’. The youths get their commission and are posted to
East Pakistan. Soon they are sent on military operations, ostensibly
to discover the hiding places of the Mukti Bahini
guerrillas, but actually to kill anyone who might be suspected
of being, in Pakistani terms, a rebel. Safeer, being blinded by
propaganda and insensitive because of his military training,
believes that all those Bengalis who hate the West Pakistanis
are guilty of treason and should not be shown any mercy. He
kills several Bengalis and rapes their girls. But one day, while
killing Bengalis, he is taken prisoner and a major from the
Bangladesh army passes the sentence of death on him. He
undergoes a psychological crisis and understands that the

121
Bengalis too were fighting for what they considered worth
preserving. At this juncture he is taken out of the prison and
taken home by Tajussur, who is now an officer in the
Bangladesh army. At Tajussur’s home Safeer understands
the essential humanity of the Bengalis, falls in love with
Taiussur’s sister, and becomes more understanding. However,
a captain of the Special Services Group breaks into the
house and kills Tajussur’s sister and Tajussur They go back
but by this time Bangladesh is free and the Pakistan Army

has surrendered. , ..

In this story the author has expressed his sympathy with

the cause of the Bangladeshis through irony. The narrator,
Safeer, is an army officer who is meant to be condemned as
the dupe of West Pakistani propaganda and whose msensitivity
is revealed by his contempt for Tajussur. The language
used reflects the narrator’s mental condition. In the beginning
the prose is abrupt, blunt, unimaginative and obtuse. It
appears that the man who is uttering the words is unable to
communicate, nor is he able to feel, the softer emotions oi
life The narrator is alienated from Tajussur, who is a
friendly, quintessential^ human person, and is also alienated
from his essential humanity. After the crisis Safeers language
changes. It becomes more expressive, more colourful
and more flowing. This change symbolises Safeer s newly
born capacity to ”establish contact with the reality outside
him and with the best part of himself. Now Safeer is no
longer alienated from his own essential humanity, he can
sympathise with the Bengalis and does not look down upon
them and Tajussur. In fact his love for Tajussur’s sister is a
metaphor for his own fondness for Tajussur which he has
not understood or expressed so far. But, political systems
being based on force and hatred, the end .s full ot violence
and disillusionment. . ,

This story is radically critical of West Pakistan, attitudes

as well as official policy in the 1971 crisis. Most other people,
while they were critical of the government, based their criticism
on the fact that the government was not efficient, in
this story the point of view is that Bangladesh should have
been granted autonomy if most of its people wanted thai122
This conclusion is radical and this story has been mentioned
for that reason.

Akhtar Tufail is another writer whose collection of short

stories The Vale of Tears was published in the seventies. Unfortunately
his language is full of solecisms and his stories
are not well written. They are, however, unusual in so far
that the protagonists are either blasphemous or have
stopped believing in orthodox Islam. This is rather unusual
for Pakistani fiction though it has hardly been used for artistic
effect. It just seems to be the result of the writer’s own
rebellious scoffing at religion. Sajjad Sheikh, one of the
teachers of the writer in Gordon College, Rawalpindi, sums
up the main features of Tufail’s short stories in his preface
to the book as follows:

Irrespective of the class or position, his characters

endeavour to solve the enigma of life; they question
the validity of hitherto accepted norms of society,
meet with frustrations and consequently philosophize
and suffer. Very often they do not understand themselves,
and even, at times, fail to express their feelings
and thoughts in a diction distinct from the
writer’s.

The faults of the stories are however so grave that the

writer’s rebellious individualism, forceful though it is, cannot
redeem the stories which do not come up to even the modest
standards of Pakistani short fiction written in English.

The best writer of fiction in the seventies, however, was

Mrs. Bapsi Sidhwa. She continues to produce novels and
they are so good that she deserves a chapter to herself.

123
NOTES

1. For a personal account of the Bangladesh crisis see

Siddiq Salik, Witness to Surrender. Safdar Mahmood’s
Pakistan Divided (1984) is sympathetic to Pakistan.

2. For background information on the eighties see

Pakistan in the Eighties ed. Wolfgang Peter Zingel --
et.al. This also helps to understand Zia’s regime.

3. Gul Hameed Bhatti, ’A Ferris Wheel Ride’, The

Herall [Knrachi], (May, 1977).

4. For some extracts i’mm Vision see Ten Years of Vision

ed. Yunus Said.

5. Written by Amjad Islam Amjad.

6. ’Bingo’ Part 1, The Frontier Post, (30 May, 1986) and

Part 2, P.P., (6 June, 1986); Short Story International
[New York], Vol.II, No. 64, (October, 1987), 111-124.

124
8

BAPSI SIDHWA

Mrs. Bapsi Sidhwa is a Parsi. The Parsis came from Iran

when the Muslims conquered that country and Islam replaced
Zoroastrianism as the dominant religion. The Parsis
live in secluded communities of their own and believe in
Zoroastrianism. They settled down mostly in Bombay and
Karachi and moved to Lahore and other major cities of the
subcontinent. They are generally businessmen and little is
known of what goes on within Parsi communities by most
Pakistanis and Indians. Mrs. Sidhwa has brought us close to
this unknown community in the novel The Crow Eaters
(1978).

In the eighties she wrote two more novels: The Bride and
The Ice-Candy-Man, both available in Pakistan and abroad
as very few other Pakistani novels are. Mrs. Sidhwa, who was
born in Karachi and lived later in Lahore, is now writing fiction
and teaching at Harward. She has three children and is
a social worker in addition to being a novelist.

The Crow Eaters and The Bride are good examples of realistic
fiction in Pakistan. Her novels suggest that she possesses
the perception, the moral courage and the unsentimental
approach to reality which makes it possible for anyone
to write good realistic fiction. In The Crow Eaters, for instance,
she could have sentimentalized her own religious
community, the Parsis. She tells us about Fareedoon Junglewalla
(Freddy), a Parsi businessman who carves out a financial
empire for himself in the Indian city of Lahore. The
other characters, Freddy’s wife Putli, his mother-in-law jerbanoo,
his friends the Aliens, his children, and several other
minor characters are drawn with considerable skill. Freddy,
with his business acumen, his unscrupulousness, and worldly
tact is ably brought to life. The narrator portrays his charac125
ters not through direct description but through their interaction
with other people. And the protagonist has been given
human dimensions in all their complexity in the same manner.
Jerbanoo, the most outrageously hilarious character in
the novel too has never been described from the outside.
Her behaviour and conversation reveal her character. For
instance:

Sometimes her remarks were India-personal, Indiainsulting:

’Why you not wear long gown? Silly frock.
It shows you got a terrible leg’. ’Why you not have
bath! Wa’or bite you?’ ’You sit, and drink tea cup
every two minutes. Mind demon of laziness make
your bottom fat’(CE, 317).

Jerbanoo is sketched with a Dickensian energy and

quality of looking at the world. She actually defecates on the
carpet of the Aliens to spite them and her son-in-law even
thinks of murdering her. She is larger than life but does not
become a caricature or abstraction. This is true for the other
characters too. Freddy is probably the most rumbustious
character in any Pakistani work of fiction with the exception
of some of Ghose’s characters. But even Ghose’s protagonists
in the Brazilian trilogy are less convincingly real than
the disreputable Freddy. It would not be excessive to claim
that Bapsi Sidhwa’s character portrayal is the best among
Pakistani novelists.

The novel is comparable in some ways with Ruth Prawer

Jhabvala’s Get Ready for Battle (1962) and Esmond in India
(1958). As in Jhabvala’s novels the pursuit of wealth brings
out the worse in people, especially when they are in domestic
conflict. So in The Crow Eaters Jerbanoo is selfish, cantankerous
and malicious and Freddy, whom she opposes, is
equally selfish, hard and even cruel. This kind of conflict
among worldly characters is a part of Jhabvala’s novels. But
in many works of Jhabvala there is a person with unworldly,
almost saintly qualities. In Get Ready For Battle it is Sarla
Devi and in Esmond it is Ram Nath and his son. In the Crow
Eaters such a person is Yazdi, one of the sons of Freddy. He

126
too renounces the world of middle class comfort and hecomes
a wandering philanthropist. But Yazdi does not have
the inclination towards the life of monastic poverty which
Jhabvala’s characters have. He leaves the kind of life he associates
with his father because hi^ father has hurt him
deeply by fornicating with his beloved Rosy Watson, an Anglo
Indian girl whom he wants to marry. Thus Yazdi’s vow of
poverty is at best a romantic gesture and is a measure of the
beastliness of Freddy’s methods rather than an expression of
the desire to renounce the world.

Bapsi Skiliwii brings her gift of irony to support the

theme that worldly success, for whatever it may be worth,
can be won by worldly people. In fact those who are great by
worldly standards, as Freddy is in the end, are almost certainly
devoid of those qualities which go to the making of
saints. It is because they are not really saintly that they rise
in the world and go to the pinnacle of earthly success. In this
novel Freddy, his other son Billy, and Jerbanoo are all strong
personalities and achieve success in their various ways. All of
them dominate people, manipulate them and, in one way or
the other, control the events of the daily lives of the people
around them. Putli (puppet in Urdu) is manipulated by her
husband and mother; Yazdi is broken up because he is refractory
and Billy, imbibing his father’s values, becomes a
domestic tyrant. But in spite of the grimness of the theme it
is presented with humour. Sometimes this humour is created
by the surface irony of statement:

’But I cannot wallow in the luxury of this palace!’

cried Yazdi, with a sweep of his hand accusing their
modest flat. ’I cannot eat a bellyful and sleep between
silken sheets when my brothers have nowhere
to stay!’ ’What silken sheets?’ (CR, 228-9).

But at the thematic level the irony is more complete. For

Freddy and the strong characters of the novel, successful
though they are in worldly terms, live a life of eternal conflict.
For them personal relations are, in fact, a kind of battle.
And this is ironical because the unexpressed aim of their

127
manipulation of human beings is to create secun y by ehirun3
the thrrat which can come from other md.viduals for
Almfelves Yet this security they can never have because it
is founded on domination at home and adulation of those m
greater power. The novel ends on the latter note:

F-iredoon said softly, ”We will stay where we are let

Hindus Muslims, Sikhs, orwhoever, rule. What does
it matter! The sun will continue to rise and the sun
continue to set in their asses !” (CE, 354).

And it may be supposed that, at least in the most important

aspects of life, a man who depends for his eminence and
power on adulation of the powers that be cannot: be^said to
be independent On the other hand the security of the saintly
character depends entirely on his convictions and state o
mind. And this state of mind depends so little on external
events and worldly rulers that no one can change it. 1 hus, m
the last analysis, the irony is that real stability is not possessed
by the worldly but the unworldly; by those who do not
think that life is a battle.

Although Mrs. Sidhwa has had the rare courage and

honesty to have written about the Parsi community m this
unflattering way, the community stands symbolically tor any
ffoup of people of any belief. It is really about human nature
as it is expressed in certain social contexts. And this gives it
huln Sntficance. However, she has successfully evoked
the life of Lahore in the early part of this century as Alamg
Hashmi, in his excellent review of the novel, points out as
follows:

Bapsi Sidhwa writes from a deep historical consciousness.

Her evocation of a part of Lahore lite as
lived in the first half of this century is convincing and
charming to me as a Lahorite myself. She herselt
grew up in Lahore and makes her home there; tne
first-hand knowledge of it certainly lends credence to
the irony, as it arises out of a deep understanding 01
the place and people and their ways.1

128
All this underlines the fact that Bapsi Sidhwa has the observation
and the knowledge which is necessary for creating
a work in the realistic mode of writing. But, as I said earlier,
it is her honesty and intelligence which makes her work realistic.
For without honesty one falsifies facts out of a desire
to support some theory. Generally people falsify reality for
the sake of their creed, their community or their social
group. If Bapsi had not been so stringently honest she would
have presented only the best aspects of the Parsi community
thus creating a propagandist work and falsifying reality. Also
one needs acute intelligence otherwise one simply does not
understand the truth and falsifies reality only because of lack
of perception. Bapsi does have the intelligence which makes
her transcend propaganda and romantic myths to go to the
core of events and phenomena. And it is this creative quality
which she uses in her second novel The Bride.

The Bride is a story of conflict of values in one particular

area of Pakistan. A conflict which serves as a metaphor of a
similar conflict in the rest of Pakistani society as well.
Qasim, the protagonist, is from the tribes of the Northern
Areas of Pakistan. He adopts Zaitoon when her parents are
killed in the Partition. When she grows up he marries her off
to Sakhi, a youth from his own tribe whose values are very
different from his city-bred wife’s. When the girl is being
brought to Sakhi’s tribe by her father, the old man stops for
one night in an army camp in which Major Mushtaq’s orderly
falls in love with the girl. Sakhi sees her being helped
in the way by the orderly and starts suspecting his wife from
the very beginning. He is inordinately jealous, as is everyone
else in his tribe, and keeps a close watch on her. She runs
away, is raped in the way, and would certainly have been
killed by Sakhi and his friends if major Mushtaq had not
saved her life.

The sub-plot, constituted by Major Mushtaq’s flirtation

and sexual adventure with Carol, the American wife of his
friend Farrukh, parallels the main plot. In a sense it is an
ironical obverse of the melodramatic intensity of Zaitoon’s
adventure. In both the plots the woman infringes her hus129
band’s moral code and leaves him -- temporarily in the case
of Carol -- and eventually gives herself to another male. But
there the similarity ends. The emotion the main plot evokes
is that of pathos, whereas the sub-plot evokes the emotion of
bathos. The kind of feeling we associate with the sordid,
pusillanimous, rather trivial incidents of adultery. The former
is on a more intense scale of living, whereas the latter is
pedestrian. The former has the quality of romance and adventure;
the latter of musty bedrooms. And yet those who
have tried to romanticize the moral codes of strongly maledominated
societies will be disappointed. For Bapsi Sidhwa’s
novel is anti-romantic. She makes it quite clear that the values
of Sakhi and his tribe may appear to be heroic but they
lead to much unhappiness for women, children and dissidents.
The women are worse than slaves for the code of
honourable behaviour demands unquestioning devotion to
the husband from them. And, of course, if they are even suspected
of being unchaste they pay with their lives. Such a
system of values is nothing but a cause of unending misery
for those who happen to be born in communities which adhere
to them. Sakhi’s mother probably gives us the point of
view of the sensitive woman in such societies when she says:

Honour! she thought bitterly. Everything for honour

and another life lost! Her loved ones dead and now
the girl she was beginning to hold so dear sacrificed.
She knew the infallibility of the mountain huntsmen
(p. 109).

The narrator is, however, unbiased like a consummate

artist. That is why the tribesman and his relatives are presented
with deep understanding. He is, of course, violent and
aggressive but the society rather than the individual seems to
be responsible for the way these personal traits are used. It
must therefore be granted that in the fictional representation
of reality through an unbiased narrator, The Bride is as
good a novel as The Crow Eaters. However, the latter appears
more humanly significant. This may be because it creates
a world in microcosm and involves the reader in this es130
pecially created vision of life. There are many characters
whose ordinary lives are depicted and in whom one sees all
the adjustments, changes, follies and redeeming graces
which give what may be called colour in life. In The Bride
there is much action which diverts attention from human
beings. For instance there is the Partition with all its killings
and displacement of human beings on both side of the border
of India and Pakistan. In the end there is Zaitoon’s flight
across the mountains. Here, although one’s sympathies are
with the girl, the senses are blunted in so far as much attention
is diverted to the chase itself. The element of suspense
makes the craving for the conclusion so dominant that attention
has to be withdrawn from the human beings themselves.
Thus both the writing and the reading pick up momentum
and the extra details which create the illusion of life are
missing. The Crow Eaters, on the other hand, is an account of
a way of life, a kind of saga like The Forsyte Saga (1922) of
Galsworthy, in which the details accumulate till we feel we
are living with fictional characters. There may be disagreements
among critics as to which of the two novels is better
but my opinion is that The Bride is a less pleasurable, and
possibly a less enduring, work of fiction than The Crow
Eaters.

The most recent novel, The Ice-Candy-Man (1988), is

perhaps even better than The Crow Eaters. In this novel the
emphasis is not on representing phenomenal reality though
the narrative technique remains, as far as the progression of
chronological events is concerned, predominantly realistic.
The work is a response to the traumatic events of the partition
of India in 1947 and Bapsi Sidhwa has also used surrealistic
techniques, somewhat like Salman Rushdie, to make it
an adequate symbol for the effect of external events on human
beings. There is, for instance, exaggeration to the point
of grotesqueness. The Ayah is a voluptuous woman who is
Wooed by too many men: the Ice-Candy-Man, the
Masseur and a Pathan called Sharbat Khan. Even the
mdelicate is exaggerated so that it is foregrounded in the
style of Rushdie and Marquez. For instance Bapsi Sidhwa’s
Narrator, a little Parsi girl called Lenny, says:

131
we all ingest the same nourishment, I fall
ST To a med^y of winds: the. doctor’s magnificent
asleep.toameaj.yi Slavesister’s muted

Touting? ”band’s bass bubbling, and

5SI5 and my high-pitched and protracted eeeeeeps

(p. 236).

• A Urate is however, juxtaposed with the serious,

The indelicate is, no^ei, J l ti nor is meant to
even with the^pc, *o that 1* not «£ rf them
be. It serves other arnstic p p fi .„ the novd F

be to enhance the element mood m domi

real life is an organic whole m wni dTh while the

nate but others are never fuJy ex eluded. 1^ and ^

Sikhs are murdermg the MuJuns tn t J ^ ^^

Muslims are killing the Hindus an Ufe ^

other tr^^«^&?^tta5i trivial and ludiconveyed

through, tw tions aiso serve a symcrous

personal detaite. ^he «& of a distortlon of

belie purpo^ hey make on g^ ^.^ ^£se di$t?r.

normal life>as.^ ° . behaviour, minor idiosyncrasies,

.X&^S ”in the case of Lenny’s brother Ad.s

fascination with her body.

^^r^fls^’SijS
£»^^-5Sl

sr^r^rareir^c^

219--220).

This is only a minor excess but it is symbolic of the major

excesses which occurred during the Partition. The element
of absurdity, of there being something unnatural in life, ’s
one of the devices used by the novelist in order to make one
conscious of a change in the normal way of living which calls

132
for a probing into the nature of reality deeper than logical
commonplace narrative can give us.

The narrative at the level of the story itself is fairly

commonplace: Lenny’s Ayah, who is a Hindu, is abducted by
the Muslims and raped. Somehow she falls into the hands of
the Ice-Candy-Man who makes her a dancing girl and marries
her. Lenny’s godmother gets her rescued and sends her
to India. Ice-Candy-Man ’too, disappears across the Wagah
border into India’ (ICM, 277) in pursuit of her.

The story is of little significance in this sophisticated

symbolic novel about the effect of external events on the
human psyche collectively and individually. In order to understand
this, attention should be paid to the narrative and
other techniques used in the novel. The narrator’s consciousness
filters the events for us. It is, of course, a child’s
consciousness which is always cognizant of the immediacy of
sensation. This is adequately conveyed through the use of
the present tense. Symbolically it also suggests that what is
being said is true about human nature itself and not only this
particular series of events. The sense of immediacy also
makes us conscious of the child’s world of immediate sensations,
daily patterns, which are destroyed rudely through the
intrusion of external events in such a manner that she learns
about the perversity of passions. She also learns that all passions,
whether religious or amorous are capable of bringing
out the best as well as the worst in human beings. The religious
sentiment can lead to fanatical hatred and killing of
the Hindus in Lahore and the Muslims in the Punjab of the
Sikhs. Her friend Ranna’s story is the most harrowing account
of what atrocities are perpetrated by human beings
upon human beings when they are induced to remove the restraints
of civilised life through external events or political
propaganda.

One major theme appears to be the constancy of desire

and its lack of moral legitimacy. Ice-Candy-Man changes
into a religious man and finally into a poet and a pimp. But,
regardless of these transmogrifications, he pursues Ayah
constantly. But before calling this constancy by some good
name it should be remembered that he does not mind giving

133
Ayah unhappiness and disgracing her in the eyes of others
and in her own eyes. His desire is constant but the man’s
personality changes and the external events, the HinduMuslim
riots in this case, bring out the worse in him. In
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) the lack of restraints
bring out the worst in Mr. Kurtz whose actions become
morally indefensible and who dies looking at his own
moral disintegration with horror. Perhaps the main theme is
that moral good and evil are in eternal conflict in the human
psyche and external events serve to bring out the evil if they
are evil themselves just as they may bring out the good if
they are good. The passions themselves are permanent but
they are not expressed permanently in the same way. They
are expressed in the way the external world makes it conducive
for them to be expressed.

In this way, without a word of protestation or preaching

and without histrionics, Bapsi Sidhwa has written one of the
most powerful indictments of the riots during the Partition.
Before this novel there was almost nothing in English except
some works of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and some short stories
of H.K. Burki and Tabussum about these riots. There was, of
course, much that was good in Urdu literature2 and other
languages but in English there was only Khushwant Singh’s
Train to Pakistan (1956) about the Partition. Now there is
this novel which shows the human personality in stress as a
result of the Partition and shows a society responding to
such a catastrophic event in the way societies do react:
through sheer indifference, gossiping, engaging in the trivial
and the malicious, making love and, as if through magic,
killing, raping and going insane. This aspect of reality is often
lost in novels which deal only with surface reality. Thus,
through her deviation from the methods of traditional realism,
Bapsi Sidhwa has written a truly authentic, multi-dimensional,
novel about the Partition. This is one of the best
works of Pakistani fiction and one of the good novels of this
century. Bapsi Sidhwa is still writing and it is hoped that she
will produce fiction which will make Pakistani fiction in English
compare with the rest of good Third World fiction in
this language.

134
NOTES

1. AJamgir Hashmi, ’Review: The Crow Eaters’, WLWE,

Vol.20 No.2 (1981), p. 376.

2. See conclusion for Pakistani literature dealing with

the Partition.

135
THE NINETEEN EIGHTIES

The nineteen eighties began with General Zia-ul-Haq still

ruling over Pakistan. The martial law government had
sought legitimization by exploiting the name of Islam. This
does not mean that the General and the Islamic parties such
as the Jamaat-e-Islami were completely insincere about
enforcing the laws of Islam as they interpreted them. It only
means that they did understand that Islam was an emotional
issue and the people were inclined to respect it. Thus, sometimes
sincerely and sometimes for matters of policy, the
name of Islam was invoked by government officers, supporters
of Zia-ul-Haq and others. Islamization meant the introduction
of certain cosmetic changes: the bureaucracy, which
had always worn Western dress, now started wearing the indigenous
shalwar qamees; the banks declared that they were
doing away with the system of giving fixed profits and would
allow their clients to share in the profits and the losses; some
new taxes (Zakat and Ushr) were said to have been introduced;
and symbolic buildings, like the Shah Faisal Mosque
in Islamabad, were constructed. Above all there was much
propaganda about Islam especially from the state-controlled
T.V. and Radio. However, the structure of the constitution
and the legal system remained basically secular and there
was no significant change in the country as far as religious
practice or the emergence of the Islamic man was concerned.

In 1984 Zia-ul-Haq held a referendum in which the public

was asked to decide whether it agreed with Islamization
and whether it sympathised with what had been done so far
for this purpose. If the answer was ’yes’ the General would
remain the President of Pakistan and would carry on Islamizing
the country. The government, however, would be

136
made by an elected Prime Minister. But, since political parties
were not allowed to contest the elections as political parties,
the PPP was excluded. In this election, which the major
political parties bycotted anyway, Mohammad Khan Junejo
became the Prime Minister of Pakistan. His government did
manage to remove the martial law and did give some measure
of freedom to the press. However, the social structure
remained the same and the armed forces remained powerful.
All movements for holding elections before five years,
especially Benazir Bhutto’s movement against the government
in 1986, either fizzled out or were made to fail. In May
1988, in a dramatic gesture, Zia removed Junejo’s government.
In July 1988 General Zia died in an aircrash and in
November Ms Benazir Bhutto was elected the Prime Minister
of Pakistan.

The middle class became more affluent than it ever was

before. This was partly because of the pouring in of Arab
money from the oil rich Middle East. The Middle East had
become rich on oil revenue in the late sixties but during the
seventies this wealth became phenomenal. And, because the
Arabs needed labourers and skilled people, they started
hiring help from abroad and payed generously. Many Pakistanis
also went abroad and transmitted foreign exchange
which was spent on buying, among other things, such consumer
goods as tape-recorders, video cassette recorders,
colour television sets and machinery. In 1979 the Iranian
revolution strengthened the Islamic revivalist movements
everywhere including Pakistan. At the same time the Marxist
revolution in Afghanistan, militarily supported by the Soviet
Union, brought in American help to Pakistan which bolstered
Zia-uI-Haq’s regime and brought American aid to increase
the total amount of money in the country. Thus,
though the poor remained poor and lacked even basic facilities,
the upper and the upper-middle class became much
more prosperous than ever before. This being so the cities
kept expanding and consumerism increased too.’

This new middle class was similar to the Victorian middle

class in many important ways. It was, for one thing,
prone to expressing sanctimonious cliches as if they were

137
great truths. Almost every T.V. programme showed people
who professed to serve the country whereas they were simply
earning their livelihood. Then, again like the Victorians,
the middle class became very nationalistic. The two cult figures
of these chauvinistic Pakistanis were Mr. Jinnah and
Mohammad Iqbal and there were demands in the press that
laws should be framed to punish anyone who dared to say
anything against these personages. This ensured that history
would be distorted and that the censorship was in the hands
of the public from the fury of which there was no refuge. The
public also became very prudish, again reminding one of
Victorian Grundyism, and the frolic verses of the ghazal poets
were tabooed as were all manifestations of the instinct of
sex.

These conditions cannot be said to be congenial for the

production of good literature but literature, being a mysterious
creation, does not necessarily suffer, at least as far as the
writing of it is concerned, because of public or governmental
repression. Thus one can hardly suppose that it was the
dominance of conservative and reactionary ways of thinking
which prevented the emergence of a great literary masterpiece.
That such a masterpiece did not appear in Pakistan is
just one of the facts of literary history which cannot be explained
fully in terms of political history alone.

Literary masterpieces about Pakistan were written, however,

outside Pakistan. Salman Rushdie, the writer of some
of them, is not a Pakistani and his work has only been referred
to in the Conclusion. Besides him Ghose, Sidhwa and
Javed Qazi also kept publishing in the eighties. And another
literary artist, Adam Zameenzad, who emerged in the
eighties is a novelist and will be considered in this chapter.
This chapter will, therefore, be devoted to the short stories
of Abdur Rashid Tabassum and the novels of Tariq
Mehmood, Mahmud Sipra, Adam Zameenzad and Mehr
Nigar Masroor.

Tabassum’s collection of short stories is called A Window

to the East and was published in 1981. It contains eight short
stories. The last prose item ’the Last Word’ is not a short
story nor is it in any way worthy of consideration. The other

138
stories too are not of great merit but do require some critical
attention. There is, inspite of the rather stilted English,
an inventiveness which bespeaks of a potentially powerful
imagination at work. This is most in evidence in ’Greatest of
the Great’, ’Amir Baksh Seeks a Wife’, ’Fire of Hell’ and ’A
Miracle at Work’.

’Greatest of the Great’ is a story of a Punjabi peasant

who starts revering his goat as a saint. The goat has helped
him to catch a thief and has, in his opinion, brought him
luck. Even his marriage is brought about by the goat and
both wife and husband continue to worship it till it dies. The
only appeal of the story is in its humour which is engaging
and genial. Humour is also found in ’Ameer Baksh Seeks a
Wife’ but here the humour does not remain as genial; in
fact, it becomes grim. The narrator tells us about his subordinate
Amir Baksh who breaks his engagement whenever he
gets a rise in salary and, consequently, status. The narrator
exposes the greed and snobbery of Amir Baksh and his family
with consummate irony. In the end Ameer Baksh loses
his job and no one wants to marry him. There is no moralising,
which has become a part of even good Urdu dramas
presented on the T.V. in the eighties, but the savage exposure
of Ameer Baksh makes the story a successful sociological
criticism of the snobbish aspects of the Indian and Pakistani
arranged marriage system.

’Fire of Hell’ is a light-hearted comedy in which the girl

mistakenly sends messages to an young man under the erroneous
impression that she is sending them to her brother.
When she gets down from her train in Karachi and meets
the young man and his mother, the latter accuses him of
having ensnared her son. The girl’s parents, equally irate, arrive
to take her away but the boy telephones the girl’s uncle
who arrives in time and persuades the parents to allow the
couple to get married.

’A Miracle at Work’ is a comical anecdote about a peasant

named Maujoo who is taken for a saint by a passing
mayor. The mayor sees Maujoo from the window and, when
he comes to the door, Maujoo has disappeared. The Mayor,
who has no children, sends his wife to stay with Maujoo. She

139
conceives and Maujoo becomes famous. The cause of Maujoo’s
disappearance is simple; he has got up to water a plant
and is not visible whenever he is observed.

These stories are lighthearted and anecdotal. They are

written from the point of view of the sceptic, generally
someone who is Westernized in ideas in the context of Pakistan
and enjoys the superstitions and gullibility of the villagers.
In ’Fire of Hell’ the values endorsed are liberal and
Western and the parents with their sense of outrage are
merely figures of fun. Tabussum belongs to the liberal intellectual
tradition of English writing in Pakistan which was begun
by Ahmed Ali.

This tradition was not as prejudiced towards the Hindus

as people in Pakistan tend to be nowadays. Tabussum’s own
story ’The Insane’, for instance, is similar in its theme to
H.K. Burki’s ’Some Men are Brothers’. The theme is that of
the transcendence of personal relations over religious prejudices.
The narrator, a Muslim, risks his own life to shield a
Hindu friend from the murderous wrath of bigoted Muslim
fanatics. When this friend, Ram Nath, manages to escape to
India he dies protecting a Muslim from Hindu fanatics. Ram
Nath’s daughter gets married with the money brought back
to India by her father and writes to the narrator all about
her marriage and her father. The tone of quiet, matter of
fact loyalty to personal friendship makes the story a moving
one.

In the ’Man With Dusty Shoes’ another kind of heroism

is endorsed. A widow’s far-off relative returns to buy a large
plot for her son. The end takes us to the realm of the supernatural
for the man Ibrahim has been dead for twenty years.
This sudden twist, reminiscent of some of O’Henry’s stories,
is not an unknown feature of similar anedotes about the supernatural
in Pakistan.

The ’Rainbow’ is a tale of incompatibility between a man

and his wife after a love-marriage. The point seems to be
that one finds out so less about the future spouse before
marriage that love-marriages are not any more successful
than arranged ones.

140
Tabussum’s short stories are free from sentimentality
and moralising. However, they are not of high intellectual
calibre nor are they very well written. They do not compare
with the best short stories by non-English speaking writers
either in Pakistan or elsewhere. Tabussum may give us better
work in the future though he does not seem to have written,
or at least published, anything in the last few years.

Mahmud Sipra, on the other hand, does not seem to

have the potential to produce anything but a thriller like
Pawn to King Three (1985). This novel has all the ingredients
of Western popular fiction: sex, intrigue, violence, high
commerce and ostentation.

The novel starts with the partition of India in which Adnan

Walid, a child of four, is found by a British colonel in a
compartment where everyone is dead. Adnan grows up to
love Farah, the daughter of Rani Ali who is the sister of a
powerful Pakistani banker called Sawal Ali. Rani manages to
separate Adnan and Farah through force and fraud. Adnan,
however, becomes a big shipping magnate through the help
of an Arab billionaire called Sheikh Wudud. The vendetta
between Adnan and the family of Sawal Ali is carried on like
a game of chess. The writer introduces all that can be
thrilling. Adnan, for instance, smuggles the ingredients of an
atomic bomb to Pakistan and is arrested. In order to avoid
going to prison he becomes a candidate for the prime ministership
of Pakistan. When he is about to succeed, he is killed
by Hoki, the bodyguard given to him by Sheikh Wudud. This
happens because the Sheikh’s hand has been forced by the
other Arab chiefs whose efforts at making an atomic bomb
have been stymied by Adnan. In the end Adnan’s son is
shown playing with his grandfather Major Walid. Both the
Major and Adnan’s wife Farah - he does marry her after all
- discover that Adnan had become a freak, an emotionally
dead man, after the traumatic experience of his childhood.

This last moment recourse to the psychology of the abnormal

does not redeem the story. Adnan is, in fact, a onedimensional
character like the characters of Ian Fleming or
Harold Robins. Such characters are normally devoid of loyalty
and are given to heartless manoeuvring and spectacular

141
success in business, sex and war. The novel has no literary
value and will not have a place in Third World literature.
However, it may succeed if it is turned into a motion picture.

Another example of had writing, but not the kind of bad

writing which thrills immature readers, is Tariq Mehmood’s
novel Hand on the Sun (1 %”*). The author came to Britain in
the early sixties and got his schooling in Bradford, the Yorkshire
city with a large Pakistani working class population. After
school he became involved with radical political groups
and, as a result of disturbances in 1981, he was put on trial.
He conducted his own defence and was acquitted. This novel
was published as a result of these experiences. But this admixture
of autobiography is no guarantee of the literary
merit of the work of art as we shall see. First, in order to
make criticism easier, I shall give a brief summary of the
novel.

Jalib, the protagonist, is a working class immigrant from

Pakistan. His parents have come to Britain in search of a
higher standard of living. The novel begins with Jalib’s exposure
to the prejudice of the British working class children.
He learns to react to this aggressively and has his first fights
with his school companions. This pattern, once established,
continues after school when jalib and his friends find themselves
unemployed. They come in contact with a disgruntled
socialist called Hussain, a political agitator named Ghulam
B. Azad (’slave be free’ in Urdu), and a Sikh freedom
fighter, Dalair Singh. Two events enable these disgruntled
immigrants to establish a sense of solidarity and emerge as a
militant force. The first is the march of the British National
Front in Bradford and the other is the arrest of Azad when
he leads a strike in his factory. Azad is threatened with deportation
and Jalib, his girlfriend Shaheen, and friend Mohan
demonstrate against this possibility till the authorities
decide not to deport him. On the personal level Jalib remains
frustrated because Shaheen is forced to marry a man
of her parents’ choice. But on the political level he finds satisfaction
in the spirit of resistance which he has created. The
novel ends somewhat precipitately when the movement is

142
still strong but the novelist adds to it the postscript that it
was sabotaged.

This summary does not bring out the shortcomings, and

they are serious ones, of the novel as a work of art. If a work
of art aspires to be authentic; aspires to have a powerful effect
even on those who do not agree with its point of view; it
must transcend the level of prejudice and propaganda. Its
narrator, or the persona the author has created to express a
point of view can be subjective; can express any point of view
or feeling however prejudiced, irrational or anti-social it may
be. However, the implied author must appear to dissociate
himself from the persona and must not appear to be as prejudiced
as the persona. But, when the narrator, expressing
the author’s point of view manifests the same kind and degree
of prejudice as any ordinary Asian youth brought up in
Britain, the reader loses his faith in the work of art. Then
one starts confronting the author’s version of reality with
one’s own. This brings the reader down to the polemical
level, the level at which the author has written his book. The
reader stops sympathising with the narrator and instead
quarrels with him. And when the novel becomes a rational
argument between the reader and the writer, the latter has
little ground to assert that Britain is as horrible a country as
the writer makes it out to be. After all whatever incidents of
a racist nature occur in Britain occur only at the level of irresponsible,
malicious or frustrated individuals. They occur, as
it were, in spite of the system not because of it. In some
other countries, as in Nazi Germany and South Africa, the
system itself is to blame. It is the law which is supposed to
ensure that injustice is done towards some religious or ethnic
group. This injustice is a part of the system whereas in
Britain it is a deviation from the norm. That the experience
of the narrator may have predisposed him to distort reality
so that the deviation appears to him as the norm is possible.
But then the narrator must be distanced from the implied
author who must appear to be disinterested. As this has not
happened the unity of the work of art has been vitiated by
the acrimony of the debate between the reader and the
writer.

143
In products of art the bitterness of the narrator is often
made the quality of a consciousness made bitter by negative
experiences. That is the kind of narrator Farrukh Dhondy
has in his short story ’The Bride’.2 He is an English working
class youth called Tony. He has grown up in a locality where
he has heard only malicious stories about Asians. And then
he falls in love with an Asian girl called Jaswinder. She is,
however, lured away by a Pakistani boy called Junaid.
Jaswinder cheats Tony out of emotional and sexual
fulfillment by making him her brother through the Indian
custom of Rakhi. She commits suicide later but, in a
preternatural manner not explained in the story,
compensates him by giving him her expensive jewellery.
Tony, inspite of his stereotyped prejudices, transcends the
world of squalor and hatred because of the genuineness of
his emotions. The pathos is powerfully evoked through
narrating the story in Tony’s own restricted working class
dialect. The impression that the human soul is trapped in a
squalid, morally brutalising sub-culture is conveyed by Tony
when he swears, uses the cliches of resentment and hatred
for Asians and yet has a tremendous capacity for tenderness
which his outward behaviour belies.

Jalib is not like Tony nor is there any good Englishman

as there are in Desai’s Bye, Bye Blackbird, another novel
about the immigrant Indian in Britain. The book is like J.P.
Clark’s America, Their America (1964) in which, according to
Walsh, Clark ’Flays America and the Americans so totally
and with such consuming fury that in the end the energy of
his writing becomes a vapid routine’.3 The same can be said
about Tariq Mehmood’s novel.

Adam Zameenzad, who has lived in Pakistan and

worked there, has unexpectedly produced the best novels
which are being considered in this chapter. His first novel
The Thirteenth House (1987) got the David Higham’s award
and his second novel My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore
(1988) is equally brilliant. They are both profoundly moving
political novels. The major theme is that arbitrary and evil
political forces crush innocent people in the Third World.
The first novel is based on Pakistan and Zahid, the

144
beautiful wife JamiJa and daughter Azra have been abducted
and only his retarded son is allowed to stay with him. All this
happens because he trusts a spiritual guide, a certain Shah
Baba, who robs the house when he discovers that the narrator,
the I, a rich man’s son, is in Zahid’s house. And he is
tortured by the police because the police kill his friend
Shamsie, a leftist, in his house. The symbol which describes
the politics of the country is the skeleton of a boy in whose
orifices insects go in and out freely. Zahid sees this (p. 153)
and becomes like this: ’the flies that kept moving in and out
of Zahid’s living holes seemed happy enough with him’ (p.
202).

In Hena the African children, Matt, Hena, Golam and

Kimo, go out to find their cousin who is a catamite in a big
city. In the way they see starvation and the killing of guerrillas
who claim to be fighting the army to bring food for the
people. The soldiers also resort to torture and cruelty and
the children are on the verge of starvation themselves when
General Dnomo takes a fancy to Hena and makes her his
concubine. So ’Hena the Whore’ starts giving charity to others.
But charity is no solution and the children go back to the
village and die.

The narrative devices are unique and contribute to the

powerful effect. In the first novel the narrator dies and acts
as the omniscient narrator suggesting that the world of the
spirit merely records events. This gives the existentialist
meaning that in this absurd universe all values are produced
by human beings. In the second the narrator’s consciousness :

is naive, in fact obtuse and simple, and events are refracted

through it. So if they are so appalling even when seen by one
who does not understand them, how very abominable they ’

really must be gives the book more force. The metaphysical

meaning of the second novel is like that of the first. It ends *

with Kimo’s death and Matt comes to him in a vision:

The time has come for you to take over’, says Matt. e

’You are now the Earth; and the Earth is yours (p. °

217). r>
145
Being dead in the Third World is the only source of
hope.

The last novelist we will consider in this chapter is Mehr

Nigar Masroor.

She was born in Lahore before the Partition. Her father,

Mian Abdul Aziz, was a writer who espoused liberal ideas.
She studied at Queen Mary’s and Kinniard Colleges at Lahore
and became an activist in the cause of women’s emancipation.
She was antagonistic to martial law and the rise of
fundamentalism in Pakistan as much as she was against extremist
Hinduism in India. She died of cancer just before her
novel was published in 1987. This brief reference to her
ideas is helpful in understanding her novel Shadows of Times
which is a political novel in many senses of the term.

The novel begins in 1883 ’the year of the Ilbert Bill’,

which would have allowed Indian magistrates to try European
subjects’ (p.l) and ends in 1977 when Pakistan is under
a reactionary military government. Geographically it moves
from Calcutta to Delhi, Lucknow and then Lahore. The
characters are Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims and the saga covers
several generations. In the beginning the kind-hearted
doctor Keshab and the liberal I.C.S. officer Manilal are the
heroes of the liberal Indian middle class. However, as the
urge to fight for India’s freedom becomes stronger, fundamentalist
Hindus and Muslims also become involved in the
struggle. Manual’s only son Amlok becomes a terrorist and
dies in the partition of the Bengal in 1905 after having murdered
Englishmen. Eventually the focus is narrowed down to
Farhan, a Muslim freedom fighter, who falls in love with a
Hindu woman and fathers her two children. Later he has to
marry a Muslim woman in Lahore and his daughter Maheen
inherits the legacy of his divided loyalties. Just as a major
Muslim character goes back to India in Qurrat ul Ain Hyder’s
Aag Ka Darya (1958), Maheen understands how
Farhan had to go back to India:

She had hated him for dying in India, she now began
to understand the deep desire that drove him back to

146
•

revisit the soil which was his own and his ancestors

(p. 428).

This last act of her father’s, which appeared as treachery

earlier, now assumes a purely emotional psychological significance.
Farhan is, after all, a Muslim League activist and
an admirer of the Quaid-e-Azam so that it is not his loyalty
to Pakistan which can be questioned. What is true, however,
is that he cannot help his emotions and love for his past and
his Hindu beloved makes him the casualty of the Partition
rather than its beneficiary.

Maheen commits suicide by walking into the river Indus

near Nowshera. She is dying of cancer and chooses ’to mingle
for ever with the soil and sun I love so much’ (p. 437).
The point seems to be that Maheen chooses to merge with
the Indus, the life blood of Pakistan, and travel throughout
the length of the country. This symbolic act makes her support
the two-nation theory in the end though she does understand
the emotional cost of the Partition for many people.
In this way the theme of this novel is similar to that of
The Heart Divided - for this novel concedes the point that
the partition of India was necessary but also understands the
suffering which was caused. However, all this does not make
the novel a good work of art. The defects are that the novel
contains large undigested chunks of historical narrative; the
characterisation is very weak and the plot is loose and unintegrated.
There are many crude devices, such as the love-affair
of foster siblings and coincidences of an improbable
kind, and the story, or rather the different stories, are melodramatic.
The author is more interested in political and historical
ideas than in the characters as such. However, surprisingly,
the book is not uninteresting and the impression of
the flow of life and the close relationship between politics
and life is brilliantly conveyed.

Besides the short story writers and the novelists mentioned

above, there were a number of minor writers whose
works have not been mentioned. Two story writers who do
deserve mention are Javed Qazi and Athar Tahir. However,

147
since both of them have not published collections yet, their
work cannot be dealt with in detail.

NOTES

1 See Akmal Hussain, Strategic Issues in Pakistan’s

Economic Policy (1988) for details See Zmgel &
Lallemant eds. Pakistan in the 80s Ideology, Regionalism,
Economy, Foreign Policy (1985) also.

2 Farrukh Dhondy, ’the Bride’ in Trip Trap (1982).

3’ William Walsh, Commonwealth Literature, 4U.

148
10

POETRY

An Indian English poet P. Lai sent out a questionnaire to

seventy five Indian poets to find out why they wrote in English.1
Most of the poets said that they found it quite natural
to express themselves in this language.2 This contoversy is
familiar to Pakistani poets and their readers too. Taufiq
Rafat, an eminent Pakistani poet, says ’Only that writing can
survive which has deep and firm roots’3 and thinks that such
writing is possible in English. Riaz Hassan, an academic,
thinks that Pakistanis should fall back upon traditional romantic
poetry for these roots:

Here in Pakistan we are in a position to offer two

things first, a romanticism as deeply embedded in
our literary natures as classicism is in the West. Second,
a variety of metrical forms, which, to the best of
my knowledge, has never seriously been engrafted to
the English language by anyone.4

But another poet and critic, Khalid Ahmad, asserts that

the ’romantic emotion has become a stereotype; its expression,
unless it can be anti-romantic, makes the gorge rise’.5
The other participants in this debate - Mahbub Ghani,
Alamgir Hashmi, Shuja Nawaz, Tariq Yazdani Malik and A.
Aziz Butt - ” are mostly poets themselves and agree that poetry
may be written in English in Pakistan even if they disagree
about other things. The view that such poetry may not
be taken seriously is held by extreme nationalists and
parochial supporters of indigenous literatures who are opposed
to the existence of English in this country.

But language, at least in its creative aspect, can transcend

politics and many Pakistanis keep writing in English

149
II

nevertheless. The aim of this chapter is to give a historical

account of poetry written in the English language by Pakistanis
from pre-partition days till the present.

To understand the development of Pakistani poetry in

English it is necessary to understand the tradition of the
ghazal in the subcontinent. The ghazal is essentially lyrical
poetry on the themes of love, fate, man’s relationship with
God and eroticism. It consists of couplets bound to each
other in a regular pattern of rhyme and rhythm but having
different themes. The ghazal is available on at least two
planes: one of romantic love between the poet and his
beloved, who is always addressed by the masculine pronoun,
and the other of divine love. The symbols used in the ghazal
are conventional and its theme of unrequited love makes it
plangent and melancholy in tone.7

In India the ghazal had become decadent, effete and nostalgic.

The symbols had become cliches and the formulaic
rhyme and rhythm were a strait-jacket which prevented
originality of expression. The essentially romantic; self-pitying
sensibility of the ghazal-poet had become the distinctive
feature of the ethos of the Indian Urdu-speaking Muslims. It
is in this ethos that the first Muslim poets of note Shahid
Suhrawardy and Ahmed Ali started writing. Thus
Suhrawardy has much in common with the poets of the
ghazal though he may also have been influenced by the early
Yeats and aesthetes of the 1890s as Syed Ali Ashraf contends.8

Suhrawardy wrote verse from 1911 to 1937 when he

published his Essays in Verse. After that he translated Lee
Hou-Chou’s Chinese poetry into English jointly with Lin
Yih-Ling.

Suhrawardy’s poems have been included in The New

Harmony, an anthology of Pakistani poetry in English published
in 1970. Here is one of his representative poems:

O Friend, if now,
When every look of yours
Strews sparks of loveliness,
In happy mood,
150
Like warm guests at a feast,
We suddenly take leave
of brimful oft-repeated cups,
Nor know the anguish nor the dull
despair

of Implacable fateCD
Friend, if the hour would strike now
--As strike it musiAnd
you gathering your heavy hair,
Shaking intoxication from your brow,
Trample my longing in the dustAnd
not turning once
Walk your triumphal way
To-day....(NH, 9).

In this poem, and indeed in several others, the ’Friend’ is

similar to the conventional beloved of the ghazal: the friend
is indifferent, fickle, insouciant, and voluptuously beautiful
as the beloved (referred to as the ’friend’) in the poetry of
Ghalib (1798-1869), Mir (1722-1810) and Momin (18001851),
the masters of the classical Urdu ghazal. The images
of the beloved shaking intoxication from the brow; the guests
drinking in a feast; the beloved walking triumphantly away
ignoring lovers who are lying in the way are all to be found
in the ghazal.

Suhrawardy is a master of such poetic devices as meter

and rhyme and, especially in his later poems, his ’language
becomes simpler, more straightforward, hence more direct
in its impact’.9 The themes of romance and frustrated love
are used with modernist cynicism and irony and obliqueness,
rather than direct appeals to the emotions, are depended
upon for effect. An example of this later work is ’The Old
Man’s Song’ of which some lines are as follows:

Around your innocence

A net I laid
Pieced out of bits
of vile experience:

151
It ends as follows:

My pride is soothed.

They say, an old man’s pride,

When all things go,

Is his sole preoccupation.

Others will hold your hands;

Others will kiss your mouth:

I am content to know

That technical skill

Still

Outbids the insolence of youth (F.V, 63).

The attitude of the poet in these lines is altogether different

from that of the ghazal-poet: whereas the ghazal-poet
abases himself before the beloved, the poet triumphs over
her in this poem. The diction is more mattrr-of-fact and the
tone is slightly cynical, mocking and not sentimental in the
decadent style of the verse of Ernest Dowson and the poets
of the nineties. Structurally and in sensibility the poem owes
more to the modern age than either the ghazal or the/I/z de
siecle tradition in English poetry. In a word Suhrawardy is
moving towards modernism.

The same movement away from the stereotyped emotionality

of the ghazal is found in Ahmed AH and, indeed, in
the Pakistani tradition of poetry in English.

Ahmed Ali published eight poems in 1960 under the title

of Purple Gold Mountain. Later he brought the total up to
sixty but the collection, the title of which remains unchanged,
is still awaiting publication.10

Carlo Coppola, a critic who was drawn to All’s work because

of his novel Twilight in Delhi (1940), has paid attention
to the political themes of All’s poetry. He concludes that the
latter poems reflect ’a maturation process in Ali’s poetry insofar
 as the relationship between art and politics is concerned’.11
This maturation has been achieved, at least partly,
by distancing the emotion through the deliberate artifice of
using Chinese imagery.

152
Close by the desert
Under the brown hills
Where the Ya Na River flows
Lies my home.

Are the opening lines of a poem which, on the deeper

level, is about the partition of India in 1947 and Ali’s migration
to Pakistan. However, Taufiq Rafat is right when he
says that Ali’s poetry is influenced by three literary traditions:
the English Romantic tradition; the Chinese lyric tradition
and the Urdu literary tradition.12 And it is from this
third tradition that ’his basic poetic world view emerges’.13
However, Ahmed Ali has expressed his romantic ghazal-sensibility
in a distinctively modern idiom. After all he is much
influenced by T.S. Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of art.
His poetic theory is as follows:

Poetry is transmutation of metaphor into imagery.

This transference is both cathartic and symbolistic,
and imparts to private emotion impersonality.14

Thus AJi expresses the poet’s alienation from his society

through the image of a pigeon flying in the sky:

Across the vast, unending sky

A pigeon plies its way
Towards the setting sun.

I stand and watch it fly,

Alone.

The other predominant themes are those of nostalgia, a

sense of loss and the consciousness of loneliness. These are
all, of course, the stock themes of the ghazal but Ahmed Ali
has expressed them through techniques which save them
from sounding facile, derivative or sentimental.

Another poet who is so original that he appears almost

like a freak in Pakistani English poetry is Itrat Husain Zu153
beri. He was born in Meerut, India in 1910 and migrated to
Pakistan where he taught at the university level. He had a
Ph.D. in English literature and wrote on seventeenth century
literature and especially on Metaphysical poetry. He died in
1964 at Windsor, Canada and some of his poems were published
posthumously in 1974 by Saida Zuberi under the title
of Poems. These poems were written between 1945 to 1964
and, inspite of being better than many other poems which
came to be known, are neither available to the general
reader nor well known. However, Zuberi’s poems deserve to
be known better and have a deserved niche in the history of
Pakistani English poetry.

Zuberi seems to be influenced by the Metaphysical poets

as well as the modernists. His language is abstruse and, like
that of the Metaphysical poets, cerebral and anti-romantic.
The imagery, again like Donne’s, is drawn from the natural
sciences.

But can I measure the space between your face and mine?

It is like uncurled tendril of the vine,

In the stillness of your body I’ve felt the hush

Of the Universe, and heard in your breasts the planets rush

(Poems, 11).

Some poems have modernist echoes. For example:

And memory of Spring echoing like a horn,

Knows the misery of negation in the Selfhood of pain.

In Thy blessed state of Time,

O Lord, send my roots a little rain (p.10).

But it is only the casual echo and the complexity of the

language which makes the poems appear similar to the
works of contemporary British and American poets. Zuberi’s
concerns seem to be metaphysical. His themes are Being,
Death and the nature of Love or Experience. Here is a
poem about Death and Experience:
154
0 bleeding heart, listen,

1 have no desire to escape

The pure white ring of the immortal bone.

There no life is
In the narrow pass
That never was.

In this enchanted circle no corals are made.

No soaring wings, no singing strings

In half-light.

No wild love, no moonlit thighs

In dim twilight.

No Grecian faces, No Aeolian worship

In dead of Night.

Only the wind moans and sighs

In the desolation of the broken circle.

(The Broken Circle’) (p. 2).

Zuberi is unique in that he has gone to the Metaphysical

poets rather than the Romantic and the ghazal poets for inspiration.

The poets who followed Ahmed Ali and Suhrawardy

were inspired by contemporary Western rather than oriental
traditions. For one thing almost everyone started writing vers
libre and for another the tone became more cynical, less
plangent, less sentimental -- in a word, closer to Western poetry
of the twentieth century. The minor poets, however,
continued to turn out inane travesties of the ghazal in large
quantities. Some of them also wrote pretentious imitations
of would-be avant garde verse. All these poets and their work
has been left out of this account.

Like Pakistani writers of fiction and drama the poets too

did not respond in any significant way to political and historical
changes in Pakistan. Some ’patriotic’ verse was, to be
sure, written but it was bad. On the other hand several Urdu
poets ~ Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sahir Ludhianvi, Zaheer Kashmiri
- wrote frankly committed socialist poetry. Some of it is

155
merely propagandist -- as is the work of the Marxist Progressive
Writers Movement of the thirties,15 -- but the work of
Faiz has created a new idiom in Uulu poetry by using the
conventional symbolism of the ghazal to express radical political
themes. This kind of change did not occur in English
poetry anil if the romantic tradition was abandoned, it was
abandoned in favour of modernist not social realist verse.
Most of the Fnglish-language poets were, however, liberalhumanist
in values and their poetry does reflect this stance.
That is another reason, as a critic suggests, that the Islamic
fundamentalists and Zia’s martial-law-backed government
did not encourage these poets in general and some of the
more outspoken among them in particular.16 The major
themes of Pakistani poets remain the conflict between tradition
and modernity, the alienation of the artist from Pakistani
as well as Western society, and a private response to
external reality.

The best English-language poets of Pakistan have been

published in the following anthologies: First Voices (1965);
The New Harmony (1970); Pieces of Eight (1971); Word/all
(1975) and The Blue Wind (1984).

Shahid Hosain, one of the few poets singled out for attention
in one of the reviews of First Voices?1 has a powerful
poem in ’Karbala’. The poem begins with a historical account
of the martyrdom of Husain, the grandson of the
prophet of Islam; develops into an incantatory chant and
ends with an ironical perception of the indifference of the
modern mind to metaphysical sources of inspiration. The
image of cars waiting for the procession of mourners to pass
through is an ironical comment on the inability of the utilitarian
mind to understand passion:

When the tenth day ends

The watching cars edge slowly through the crowd

Dispersing without passion in the night;

Incurious, their lights

Wash over people sleeping in the streets

Their noisy and perpetual resting place (FV, 28).

156
Shahid Hosain, like Taufiq Rafat whose work will be
considered soon, uses both symbols and logical narration to
convey meaning. Some of his poems tell a sto- v. An example
of such a poem is ’A Speculation’, a poem which tells a story
about vengeance in the Punjab. The men from one village
kill their neighbours from another one and the poet speculates
on how vengeance will follow. The theme, that life is
carried on by women who create while men only destroy, is
presented through the story itself. According to Kevin
Ireland, a reviewer, ’Shahid Hosain makes some attempt at
self-discovery and an interrogation of aspects of the life
around him’.18

But self-discovery -- the major theme of ’The Oriental

Poet Comes to Tuscany’ called an ’impressive achievement’
by A.G. Stock in his review of The New Harmony - ’” is one
of the major themes of many other Pakistani poets. And one
who has used it with great distinction is Zulfikar Ghose. In
Ghose’s case self-discovery takes the form of a quest for cultural
roots and identity. The poet, born in Sialkot, lived in
Bombay before emigrating to England in his adolescence as
we have already seen. But this fact influences his fiction only
indirectly; it influences the poetry directly. In England he felt
cut off from his roots and an alien. This consciousness of deracination
and alienation forms the core of his poetry in The
Loss of India (1964) and Jets of Orange (1974). In later collections,
The Violent West (1972) and A Memory of Asia
(1984), the sources of Ghose’s inspiration are less autobiographical.

One of the best poems about a poet’s consciousness of

having been torn away from his cultural roots is ’Across India:
February 1952’. This is a conglomeration of childhood
memories of a journey from Bombay to Delhi by car. The
memories are presented as clearly seen images:

Our ’39 Buick descends the Western Ghats.

The sky behind the peaks is the last of Bombay.
Delhi is nine hundred miles north.
The jungle is brown this February.
The thin beasts scratch the ground.

157
Father, the eagles are quiet on the eucalyptus tree.
We seem to be going round and round.

The first avenue out of the jungle has trees

That are green with parrots. The mud-houses

Have cracks filled with cow-dung and straw.

The sun drives like a cog-wheel against my skin (TJ, 1).

The cumulative effect of these details - the brown jungle,

the cracks full of dung and the sun as an instrument of
torture - is to reinforce the sense of desolation and violence
which informs the poem. In some of these poems Ghose
uses Sialkot and his grandfather as symbols of permanence:

But my grandfather lives where he was born.

In Sialkot, building houses, carving wood.
His beard dyed with henna and his turban
crumbling among the wrinkles of his forehead,
He is my one image of permanence, stubborn,
Despite his sons that home is where you build (LI, 4).

Sialkot, however, is not romanticized for Ghose is aware

of the tyranny of social and religious conventions in Pakistan:

There was a cow, too. As I slept, it trod,

Upon my fears and cakes made of its dung,

The cow’s hooves become the symbol of the fixity of the

agricultural, rural way of life which does not tolerate individualistic
departure from tradition.

...he [grandfather] said,

Passing the barber’s, ”Let’s rest from this heat.

What needs cutting? Your manhood or your head?”
The razor replaced the cow’s feet (LT, 6).

158
Ghose is the only English poet from Pakistan to have
written moving and highly accomplished poems on the
Hindu-Muslim riots ol the Partition. A good poem on this
theme is The Body’s Independence’. Tt begins with a lesson
in human anatomy in the school. The chart and (he lesson
create the illusion that the body is independent of external
events -- exists, as it were, in its own right. Then the narrator
falls ill and discovers that the body is dependent on internal
events (disease). And finally comes the major ironical discovery
that external events, based on ideological ideas in this
instance, affect the body most:

”The heart is free!” people cried. What if truth

Runs out like blood? We have our independence.”
The blood of India ran out with my youth (LI, 11).

The last line connects the theme of communal violence

with the major themes of the poet’s consciousness of deracination
and alienation.

Ghose has written poems with political and social

themes too but in these he responds to Western rather than
Pakistani problems. Most of the poems are, therefore,
against war, against modern industrial civilization and articulate
that sense of loss of traditional values and a sense of
community which one finds in Western literature since 1910.

In the poems of the later collections Ghose becomes

more complex in style. This is paralleled in his moving away
from the realistic mode of narration of his novel about Pakistan
The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) to the experimentalism
of Hultne’s Investigation into the Bogart Script (1981). In an
interview Ghose said that his later poetry has been influenced
by his reading of Theodore Roetkhe, Stevens
Williams, Eugene Guillevie from France, Nucanor Parra
from Chile, Yehuda Amichai from Israel and Vasco Popa
from Yugoslavia.20 Partly for this reason, partly because
Ghose’s work is not readily available in Pakistan, Pakistani
critics have not given it due recognition. It should, therefore,
be pointed out that Ghose is comparable to the best practitioners
of verse in Pakistan. His early poetry, some of which

159
has been reproduced in A Memory of Asia, is of undeniable
value in understanding the response of the sensitive expatriate
artist to the loss of his cultural roots and social identity.

The loss of social identity is one of the themes of the

major Pakistani poets. Maki Kureishi, an academic at
Karachi University, has used this theme with sophistication
in her poetry. In some poems this theme is expressed explicitly:

...I, middle-aged fidget

with make-believe; you, homesick and not

eager to come home, are foreign everywhere.

Live European,

stay haunted by the image of

that makeshift geography we share (W, 40).

But it is when the theme is dramatised that we get poems

of outstanding power. One such poem is ’kittens’ which
owes its force to the deliberate flatness of tone which, being
at odds with the meaning, creates such forceful irony that
the reader is shocked into a new awareness.

My relatives say: Take them

to a bazaar and let them go
each to his destiny. They’ll live
off pickings. But they are so small
somebody may step on one
like a tomato.

Or too fastidious to soil

a polished shoe will kick it
out of his path. If they survive
the gaunt dogs and battering heels,
they will starve gently, squealing
a little less each day.

The European thing to do

is drown them. Warm water
is advised to lessen the shock.
160
They are so small it takes only
a minute. You hold them down
and turn your head away.

Then the water shatters. Your hands

are frantic eels. Oddly

like landed fish, their blunt pink mouths

open and shut. Legs strike out.

Each claw, a delicate nail

paring, is bared.

They are blind and will never know

You did this to them. The water
recomposes itself.

snagged

By two cultures, which

shall I choose? (W, 48-49).

This is a good example of working ’from precise details,

finely circumstantial’21 which is a virtue of good writing.
Maki Kureishi has other virtues too: she can express emotion
without histrionics or sentimentality and she is a subtle
psychologist. Poems like ’Gracious Lady’ and ’Marriage’ are
studies in psychology. The first studies the artificiality of
fashionable society which leads to loneliness in the end; and
the second is about the strong bond of marriage without the
illusion of romance. In both the imagery supports the theme
and the diction is precise and unpretentious. Unfortunately,
Maki Kureishi has not published enough poetry to compare
with, say, Taufiq Rafat. However, what she has published is
of high quality; in the words of Daud Kamal ’exquisite’.22

Kaleem Omar, another poet represented in the anthologies,

has published sufficient work, though not all of as high
a quality as that of Maki Kureishi, to merit attention. He expresses
emotion through an ironical dryness of tone, a number
of symbolical details and direct narration. This technique,
similar to that of Taufiq Rafat, has been used in ’The
Point of Departure’. The narrator comes back to Karachi af161
ter three years and describes his trivial engagements in detail
when in reality he is looking for love:

All this -- when the truth of the matter is,

That I am sick for the sound of one soft voice,
To call my name and mean it (NH, 29).

The emotion is personal: the soft voice the poet is hankering

for is that of his father whose death has been a .g eat
trauma for him. A number of poems express this loss
through nostalgic details

I came here first with father. He is dead now.

The worms that hooked his flesh,
No longer smell. He thought 1 was lost once,
On that first trip, and I heard his large voice,
Echo and call tUl I was safe...(W, 52).

Kaleem Omar’s poems on political themes -- ’March

1972’ and ’It did not really happen’ -- are unsatisfactory
Both of them record the response of the poet tothejevents
which led to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. Ihe re
Tponse fails to transcend the ethnocentric prejudices of
Pakistanis but what is more relevant is that the language and
the techniques used fall short of Omar’s own^st Poems
Notwithstanding these occas.onal lapses, Omar s poetry
intelligent and sensitive. His best poems are so goodUh
Taufiq Rafat once said: ’Kaleem Omar is arguab\ytheftnert
poet writing in Pakistan today’. Th.s was said in 9M before
Daud Kamal and Alamgir Hashm, published then: major
work. And even then Taufiq R.fat himself and Ghose-.YM
written more and better poetry than Omar. Th.s judgenjen
of Rafat, out of modesty perhaps, was erroneous. Anotn.
one which proved to be wrong was his prognostication that
’Adrian is the fastest improving poet in Pakistan andUjne
most likely to challenge Omar’s position at the top..
Adrian wrote is neither of the high quality one deman
from the very best poets in Pakistan nor so much in voiu

162
as to deserve the encomiums Taufiq Rafat -la^rded him at
the outset of his career.

Adrian’s sensibility is Western rather than Pakistani. His

themes, like those of Ghose’s later poems, are unfamiliar to
Pakistanis. The imagery too is unfamiliar: ’I have seen the
stars retire on their old age pensions’. He too, like Ghose
again, expresses the theme of the expatriate poet’s search
for identity, but his verse is cerebral and fails to convince the
reader of its authenticity. At places he is prosaic:

No use pretending. I came to this one-acre slab,

Of land without a bonus-voucher or a guarantee.
My books are gagged, my nationality’s dissolved.
This is no land to die in (PE, 30).

Other poets who were published in prestigious anthologies

but failed to publish enough work of high quality are
Salman Tariq Kureishi, Mansoor Y. Sheikh and Nadir Hussain.
Both Salman and Sheikh are members of ’Mixed
Voices’, a forum for poetry and creative writing in Karachi.
Both were represented in The Blue Wind though Kureishi
had appeared in Pieces of Eight earlier also. At his best
Salman Tariq Kureishi is very good. For example in
’Attitude’ the dead mouse is a symbol of unfamiliarity, the
unknown, death itself. It takes one away from everyday reality
and disorients the mind:

Like that time you entered a room somewhere, and turned

on the light,

To see a dead mouse, dead many days,

Its eyes mere sockets, reeking behind the door.

After shaking the mind’s equilibrium by making it confront

an unexpected, pleasant reality, the poet suggests that
this is what we must expect from life anyway.

As I said, something seems to do it always

Glad to be home, you open the door
and wonder where you are (PE, 38).

163
Mansoor Y. Sheikh’s poems are terse and accomplished.
He has a feeling for language and a gift for conveying
meaning through \ isn.il imagery.

What abandon

filling these pools of stone

where jewelled finders

once caressed the!i own reflections:

moon-bathed pavements

where you can still

sense a footfall

or an occasional sitar crescendo

from the bedchamber.

Yet they do not take you

through the inflexions of time

to where the music swells and nights falter (BW, 22).

He is also the author of a book entitled In Search of

Form. However, he has not yet done enough work to be said
to be one of the few eminent poets of Pakistan.

Another poet who has published some good poems but

cannot be said to be among the best is Nadir Hussein. His
’Door’ and ’A Wedding’ are in the modern tradition:

Door, we will break you down

And march towards the future.

But who, then, will shield us from

The curious stares of the world?

And if we fail to reach our

Goal, who will step aside and

Let us regain our sanctuary? (PE, 32).

The other poets who have contributed good poems to

the anthologies (and other magazines) but have not produced
sufficient work to merit separate attention are: M.K.
Hameed, Shuja Nawaz, A/izul Hakim, Syed Ali Ashraf and

164
Tariq Yazdani Malik. Malik’s ’Islamabad ’W is worth quoting:

...down Embassy

Row the diplomats assemble in the Dacca-grass

lawns for the unending ritual of cocktail parties.
In the daytime the natives feast on their
unintended magnanimity, but the servants
must learn to squat on imported water closets
and the fruit sellers a little Russian (NH, 44).

But such isolated poems are also to be found in the

weekend magazines of the daily papers: The Dawn, The
Pakistan Times, The Muslim, The Nation, The Frontier Post
and other magazines published from time to time.

The poets who deserve detailed and separate attention

are Taufiq Rafat, Daud Kamal, and Alamgir Hashmi. Taufiq
Rafat, born in Sialkot in 1927, has been writing poetry in
English for a long time. He was first represented in First
Voices and a reviewer gave him begrudging praise when he
said: Taufiq Rafat is the most nearly lyrical. He has many
good lines, but cannot resist fancy and quaintness’. The reviewer
of \’ew Harmony complimented him with less reservations
and that of Wordfall not only praised him but also
quoted from his work.24 Pakistani reviewers were encomiastic:
Jamal Rasheed called him ’Pakistan’s doyen of English
poetry’25 and Iftikhar Ahmad devoted an article to his work.
26 Taufiq Rafat is not only a poet but a good critic as well and
his articles on Pakistani poetry in English are well worth
reading. He has written a play in English and, more importantly,
translated two works of Punjabi poetry into English
verse. His collection of published verse Arrival of the Monsoon
(1985) has been praised by reviewers.

Taufiq Rafat shows maturity in his early published work.

In First Voices, for instance, there is a poem on the factitiousness
of the city civilization. This theme is expressed in
different ways as it is in the following poem entitled
’Kitchens’.

165
Kitchens were places
we grew up in.

...Discussions
centred on primaries:
births, deaths, marriages,
crops, Mother
presided
contributing only
her presence, busy
ladling, ladling.
Noise

was warmth

Chromium and formica

have replaced the textured

homeliness of

plaster, teak.

Everything is clean

as a hospital.

The surrealistic clock,

where once the

eloquent

grandfather swung,

Clicks forward, stiffly.

We are deferential

to the snap

pleasures

of electric toast,

and take
our last gulps standing up (NTT, 24-25).

The point is clear enough: that the suburbs of Pakistan

are full of people who are alienated from the supportive lifepattern
of rural communities and who hanker after the
warmth and closeness of that way of life.

166
Taufiq Rafat is also a poet of love. Bui the love poems
eschew the cloying emotionality of the had ^hazal. Such poems
are lyrical and this one - ’The Time to Love’ - has deliberate
Shakespearian echoes. The function of these echoes
seems to be to underline the contrast between Renaissance
freedom and spontaneity and the inhibitions and schematization
of the present puritanical way of life in Pakistan. The
poem deserves quotation:

The time to love

is when the heart says so.

Who cares

if it is muddy

august

or tepid April ? Love

is a country

with its own climate (FV, 52-53).

Taufiq Rafat relies both on logical narrative and imagery

to convey his meaning 1 le never falls into the common error
of minor Pakistani poets of using vague, rhetorical words
and cliches to express himself. In some poems he narrates a
story and becomes prosaic on occasions. For instance in The
Boy With the Bashed-in Skull’, if the lineation is changed,
the verse will read like prose:

I was in the surgeon’s office

to discuss my son’s forthcoming
operation, when the doctor,
a friend, explained his dejection.
Yesterday, he said, there was
an explosion in the Walled City.
A flying brick bashed in the skull
of an eighteen year old boy (W, 20).

About this kind of poetry Graham Hough, after quoting

from Ezra Pound, says: ’there does not really seem to be any

167
reason at ail why this should be regarded as vei <e’ ’7 And indeed
Taufiq Rafat calls this poetry on the stiencih of the
spatial arrangement of lines rather than anything else. But,
of course, there is an economy of words, a richness of concrete
images and a purposeful control over emotions which
creates what may he called a poetically powerful effect on
the reader. This effect is, however, that of good prose but,
perhaps, the very distinction between poetry and prose is
based on premises which are being questioned nowadays. In
some poems, notwithstanding the structural features, .•the
work in question is undoubtedly poetry because of the power
of the lines to evoke a haunting sense of the inexpressible.
Taufiq Rafat’s best poems do convey this sense of the mystery
of life. One such poem is ’Mr, Nachiketa’ in which the
story starts as an ordinary anecdote about a man who
promises to give away everything he owns. Soon it develops
into a version of the great myths because the man gives his
son to Death. And then the conversational flatness of the
tone is abandoned and the concentrated, intensely haunting,
suggestive incantations of mysticism take its place;

I will be running somewhere behind you,

but you will not hoar me call.
There will be not h ing there,
nothing before, and nothing after,
Nothing. Nothing at all (AM, 188).

Such suggestiveness is only one aspect of the best of

Taufiq Rafat’s poetry.

Baud Kamal, the poet I shall consider now, also writes

suggestive poetry. Kamail was born in Abbottabad, a small
town in the northern hilly region of Pakistan, and got his
schooling from Burn Hall, a prestigious school on the model
of the British public schools. He died in December 1987 as
Professor of English at the University of Peshawar, which he
joined as a lecturer after his tripos from Cambridge, He has
published three collections: Compass of Love (1973), Recognitions
(1979) and A Remote Beginning (19X5). He has also

160
translated the poems of Ghalih, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and
Muneer Ni;izi from Urdu into English.

Baud Kamal’s style is quite different from that of Taufiq

Rafat. Whereas Rafat mostly uses logical narrative to convey
meaning, Daud Kamal generally does not. Instead Daud
uses images which are not linked with each other by connecting
words, The images do, however, convey meaning
when the reader links them together and understands their
symbolic significance. The following poern illustrates his
imagist style aptly:

FLOODS

How does one forgive

the treachery

of blind rivers

and water-buffaloes

dissolving in the mud?

At the army relief-camp,

the bride-to-be

covers her head

while her parents

look the other wax- (RE, no pagination).

In this poem the image of the water-buffaloes caught

helplessly in the muddy water is the key for the parallel situation
of human beings in the following stanza.

This style makes for a terseness which does not allow the
poems to become sentimental. Such a danger existed because
Daud Kamal’s major themes are nostalgia and a sense
of loss. These are, of course, romantic themes but they have
been used to create good poetry because the poet has been
careful to avoid spuriousness of emotion, cliches and sentimentality
Here is a wholly successful poem on the theme of
unrequited love;
16?
NIGHT-BRIDGE

That was
another pain--
silhouettes in water.
I have answered
my inquisitors.

Virgin forest

of what could have been. ,

Moonburst

on thighs of snow months

and years.

I have paid

the toll (RB. 24).

Da iid Kamal’s sensibility has much in common with the

poets ol the Gha:ul.

He ^ays.

...I do belong to this cultui o - the Urdu culture -- the

culture of , ultivated Muslims in the subcontinent. I
may not be deeply versed in Urdu poetry, but I have
inherited love for the classics Mir, Ghalib, Dard, Zafar
etc --1 can’t disown the tradition. My feelings are
deeply rooted in this culture but of course, I write in
English.28

Like the ghazcil-poets Daud too enjoys the voluptuousness

of tender emotions, the soft melancholy of regret and
the subtle pleasures of nostalgia. But he is one of the few
modern poets who have successfully written evocative poetry
of this type in the modern idiom.

What Kamal wants to achieve is a certain inner dimension,

an esoteric level of meaning available to the more

170
For me, a poem is a subterranean creature; it has a
pre-existence at the subconscious (or is it the unconscious?)
level. The agony is in extracting it from
those depths and in giving it a shape.29

In the last analysis his poems are about communication,

the authenticity of the artist’s private world of feeling and
the validity of emotion itself in a world which seems to be
indifferent to it.

These words too

are a kind of bridge,

but whether they bring

me to you or you to me,

tomorrow’s mirror will not bear (R,n.p).

He has not written the poetry of commitment but his liberal-humanitarian

world-view becomes manifest in several
poems - the following one for instance:

WATER-CARRIER

More patches on his clothes

than on the empty goatskin
slung across his shoulder.

Like all the rest

he waits his turn
at the municipal tap.

Twice a day delivering water

at the nearby mosque

and not a single prayer (RB,31).

But such poems are rare: for here the thought is clearly
expressed through logical narrative. Generally, as has been
said in the beginning, he expresses it through apparently un171
connected images. This style is, in a way, antithetical to that
of Taufiq Rafat and has its own hazards: thus whereas Rafat
can be prosaic, Daud can be obscure and unintelligible.
About this feature of his poetry a reviewer once said:

Indeed, it would appear that most of the outstanding

poems are those that depend less on intensity of imagery
and more on having something significant to

VI

express.

This judgement is not clearly worded: for poems employing

only ’intensity of imagery’ - to use the reviewers’
words - may also have something very significant to express.
What could be said is that, sometimes, such poems do become
obscure by the very fact that too much is meant to be
condensed through disparate images which the reader may
not be able to interpret to form a coherent theme in his
mind.

Having said this it must be added that Baud’s obscurity

does not arise from pretentiousness: that is to say, from the
desire to be inaccessible or fashionable. Nor does it arise
from confusion. It arises, instead, from his faculty for thinking
in terms of symbols and images. It is this non-rational
apprehension of reality which makes him a poet in the first
place and it is this which has made his best poems so evocative
of that sense of mystery which is a pan of the poetic experience.
To quote a critic:

He comes nearest to creating that secret language of

the soul we find in the works of the Arabs, which
speaks through the things it names rather than the
mimicry of the ratiocinative process.31

Aurangzeb Alamgir Hashmi, who has lived a good deal

abroad, graduated from the Government College Lahore,
and then completed his M.A. in English literature from the
University of the Punjab. He later went to the United States
and has been associated with several universities over there
and in Switzerland. He started publishing poetry in the sev172
University of the PunjaK 11.- later w< nt to the United States
and has been associated with several universities over there
and in Switzerland. He started publishing poetry in the seventies
when he was at the Government College. When his
poetry appeared in the college journal, the Ravi, a critic
Shuaib Bin Hasan commented on it as follows:

From pastiche to poetry, from an affair with language

and technique to an affair with the day-to-day
experiences is Alamgir Hashmi’s development and
achievement to-date.32

The critic’s tone is patronising because Hashmi was a

student when these poems were published first. The fact is
that, in certain ways, Hashmi’s early poetry is better than his
later one. In the latter he is complex, obscure and avaunt
garde in a pretentious manner whereas in the early one he is
evocative and expressive.

Hashmi published his first collection of poems entitled

The Oath and Amen in 1’’76. This was followed by America is
A Punjabi Word (1970); My Second in Kentucky (1981); This
Time in Lahore (1983); Neither Tliis Time/Nnr That Place
(1984) and Inland and Other Poems (1988). He has also published
in the anthologies published by the QuaM-e-Azam Library,
Lahore; in several poetry magazines published in
Pakistan and abroad and, more importantly, in The Blue
Wind.

Hashmi has complete mastery over the English language

and is fully conversant with the contemporary Western poetic
tradition. He expresses emotion obliquely and without
maudlin emotionality. A good example of this is his poem
’Grandmother’ which begins as follows:

I know when your children stranded you ,:, •

and went out to live by themselves

you preferred to stop breathing.

Then everyone came to pay homage

and carry you like a bride

...where your husband lay

173
This is in the best tradition of Maki Kureishi and Taufiq
Rafat: laconic, terse, original and intelligent. Yet the desire
to avoid being facile and commonplace, which makes for the
strengths of Hashmi’s best poems, also makes him substitute
complex abstractions for narration and striking imagery.
This makes his latter poems highly cerebral and obscure.
This was noticed by Janet Powers Gemmill, the reviewer of
Oath and Amen who says:

Hashmi’s poems are seldom kinesthetic; they do not

move us to feel, but rather to think. Their movement
is away from concreteness, even when the poem is
provoked by sensory experience

She then goes on to assert that Hashmi ’cannot fully escape

the thought mode of the Urdu tradition’ and that his
poetry has its roots ’in the Persian-Urdu literary tradition’.33
Another critic, reviewing My Second in Kentucky, also writes:

’Then’ is a poem that conjoins elements of the two

forms, the epigrammatic allusiveness of the ghazal
with the idea of the English love poem, M

I think these conclusions are the result of lack of familiarity

with the ghazal in the languages in which it is written.
Some of Hashmi’s poems are, no doubt, about unrequited
love, but his beloved is modern and Western not medieval
and oriental. Hashmi is not at all influenced by the ghazal or
by any other oriental tradition of poetry. The ghazal, for one
thing, rests for meaning on conventional symbolism whereas
Hashmi’s symbols are private as are those of Western poets.
As for Hashmi’s obscurity and his ’abstract metaphors’, they
are not borrowed from the ghazal but are influenced by the
West. He wants to eschew the cliched and the obvious and
this makes him fall back upon the ’abstract metaphor’.When
this style succeeds he produces powerful and original poems
and when it fails he produces brain-teasers.

Hashmi’s favourite themes seem to be the impact of the

unusual - an event, a personality, death, intense emotion 174
Hashmi’s favouritr themes seem to he the impact of the
unusual ~ nn event, a personality, death, intense emotion on
the mind. And the response of the latter takes us into the
secret areas of the psyche. His range, like that of Taufiq
Rafat, is very broad and he hit- product d a numbei of poems
on many subjects. Some of his best poems ire moo* rn
adaptations of myths -- generally in order to score ;i p> int
through the discrepancy between appearance and reality. An
excellent example of this ironical device at work is ’Ulysses’
in which the hero puts wax in his enrs and goes by the Sirens
in the belief that he won’t hear th< >r fatal song The Sirens
do not choose to sing at all and tl^- complacent IVTO goes
triumph,!ntly by:

Ulysses could not hear their silence,

and thought he alone did not hear them.
When for a fleeting moment he saw
their throats rising and falling,
their breasts lifting,

their eyes in i-’ars,

and their lips half p;u ted.

he believed

they were accompaniments to the air

which died unheard around him.

CODICIL

So waving to them,

triumphantly he turned and sailed on (SK,18).

The theme of the complacence of heroism, securely fortified

in its ego, is successfully symbolized by Ulysses and no
empty words are used to express it.

This is what Hashmi’s good poetry can be. As for the bad
one, Roger Ireland describes it as follows:

Those poems that are least effective are the less controlled
and allusive, where the reader has to work
overtime, but with little prospect of enlightenment....3’1
175
It is that kind of poetry in which ’the imagery seems
forced, as if the poet had tried too hard for an idea’.36 But
Hashmi need not work ’too hard for an idea’ as his good poems
show. His obscurity seems to he the result of deliberate
straining after effect. And surely Hashmi will be the better
poet if he purges his poetry ruthlessly of all that is pretentious,
abstruse and merely fashionable.

Hashmi has been associated with the poetic circles of

Lahore. As I have already mentioned he began by publishing
in The Ravi, a maga/ine in which several talented poets from
Lahore have published. 77;.• Ravi published a special issue
on English poetry written by Pakistanis in 1968 and again in
1974.37 Among those represented in these issues were
Hashmi, Taufiq Rafat, Kaleem Omar, Khaled Ahmed,
Yesmine Kaikobad, Mahbub Ghani, Tariq Masood Khosa,
Athar Tahir, Waqas Ahmad, Shuja Nawaz, Naveed Rehman
and many others. The other poetic circles in Lahore are: the
Quaid-e-Azam library group which has published several anthologies,’8
and the Cactus group which has pnHjshed one issue
under that title and Another one in 1988 under the editorship
of Waqas Ahm;id Khwaja.30 Hnshmi is also associated
with Margalla Voices, a literary i ircle is Islamabad. The
main figure of this circle is Ikram Ayam, a civil servant who
has organised the meetings of this circle. One member of
this group, Raja Changez Sultan, has published some good
verse recently.40 Among the poets of Lahore there are several
who have published good verse. One of them, Waqas
Ahmad Khwaja published his first collection of verse called
Scattered Flowers in 1970. This, being juvenilia, is important
only in so far as it helps us in understanding Waqas’s development
as a poet. The poems in this collection usually
rhyme and are puerile imitations of romantic verse. His next
collection, Poems, published in 1979 shows a marked improvement
in technical sophistication as well as the expression
of themes. The unsophisticated rhyming has given place
to vers libre and the poet uses language colourfully and
powerfully. His tone is slightly cynical, not maudlin as it was
in the youthful verse of the 1970s, and he has developed a

176
style has become modernist, abstruse and slightly cerebral at
places. In this he is like the other good English-language poets
of Pakistan. Here is one of the poems from the 1979
collection:

The streets deserted in curfew hours are paced only by ise or

marionettes and generations ;cially

await effacement. Over narrow lanes to be

buildings crowd in conspiracy emptying

their bowels in the city -- the colours of spring are bluff and

the bougainvillea clinging

to walls bring blood in its veins...only the khaki

and green are true - lords and fathers of institutions! ration

The butterflies between the brows have withered (p.3).

self)

The poem of which the lines quoted above are an excerpt

is called ”April 77” and is a response to the political reality
of Pakistan - governmental repression. The poet has Jrse> a
conveyed his meaning through the juxtaposition of the life- d been
furthering images of spring and the images of death, decay notion
and destruction. The theme that the soldiers, themselves 5ns °f
symbols of malevolent authority, have imposed a lifelessness iat t^6
over natural vitality, is conveyed through these concrete im- straitages.
There are several such poems in this collection as well
as the latest collection entitled Six Geese From a Tomb at
Medum (1987). ’Section 113’, ’The Sculptor’ and ’Wall’ are
successful poems of this sort in this collection. They all contain
social criticism but not in a propagandist or obtrusive
form. The ’Wall’, for instance, is probably about the indifference
of ordinary people to the social and political horrors
which are perpetrated while they go about their daily business.

This is the wall, they say

where people were lined up daily,

week after week, year after year.

177
They were not made to face the wall
but stood with their backs to it.
They were not blindfolded.

...It is said

all this was being prepared while we laughed

and argued and went about our business (p.69).

’The Sculptor’ combines narrative with imagery to convey

the theme -- that the artist cannot convey the truth without
either failure or worldly success which is another form of
failure, being nothing but a waste of spurious compliments,
money and fame.

His figure, crouched low, was to express

all the horror of beggar camps:

He succeeds in his efforts to express his private vision in

his art and is publicly acclaimed. The poem goes on to conclude:

...The applause

was

tremendous. The tea lavish.

Back in his room later

he was never lonelier,
substance eluded him merely
leaving a rhythm in his head.

In his misery he left nothing

behind but a pyjamas’ cord (pp. 16-17).

There are love poems in both the later collections. Some

have been called sonnets though they do not have all the
formal features of sonnets. However, they are enjoyable and
much poetic technical skill has gone into their composition.

178
She slumbers in the splendours of the sunset lush
sparkling rose gold; and truant odours venture
through soft air; gazing wide eyed I’m one
with her, glows musk and all! and feel the mellow
melting of my body;....(p.54).

Waqas has a gift for the beautiful or striking phrase or

the image combined with moving words. This is especially
useful in love poems where an emotional response is to be
evoked:

You came with the chenar in your face.

slightly drunk of bashful darknesses

alone with the indifference of landscapes (p.34).

In some of the later poems there is a note of desperation

and pain. In the folowing poem the beginning says:

Teach me treachery (just enough to deceive myself)

and I forgive you.

This ironic desire for learning treachery is, of course, a

cover for deep desire, strong emotion which has indeed been
betrayed. The end expresses the strength of this emotion
through deliberate violation of Pakistani conventions of
prudery and linguistic taboos. The point seems to be that the
feelings are much too powerful to be contained in any straitjacket
of conventions or restricted by laws.

Part to these lines as you have parted to my love

part with lust, with nothings for me,

not left-overs from last night,

part and be penetrated

where your flash is still my flesh.

Tonight know the cool

struggle of dark roots

again (p.49).
179
Waqas has been publishing in poetry magazines and in
the anthologies of the Quaid-e-Azam Library. He is also the
editor of another issue of Cactus which has been published
under the title of Mornings in the Wilderness (1988). He is a
promising poet who has already written some good poetry
and who is likely to produce more such work in the future.

Another promising poet who lives in Lahore and has

been writing on literary issues is Athar Tahir. He is well
known among Lahore’s English-language poets because he is
associated with the publications of the Quaid-e-Azam Library.
His academic background is brilliant: he wac educated
at Oxford (Oriel College) and was published in an Oxford
journal even as a student. He has not published a collection
°f his own so far and under ordinary circumstances his work
w«Uld not have been considered in this history. However,
Athar Tahir has published poems in many national and foreign
magazines and it would not be fair for this history to exclude
his work from consideration. To sum up then, his style
1S rtiodernist, somewhat complex and oblique. The best poems
are richly suggestive and enjoyable even though cerebral.
The less successful ones are brittle and far too complex
to be easily understood. As Athar Tahir is still writing and
only in the beginning of his career as a poet, it is to be hoped
that he will produce much good verse in the years to come. It
W’U then be time to give a less tentative and more comprehensive
view of his place as a poet in Pakistan. Here I shall
°nly quote some of his poems which appeal to me:

MAPLE II

At Autumn’s pass

’O Maple

you blush

You flush and hold

or ruffled, scatter

and he was younger than you, you say,

and more full of life. Following you uninvited

to parties.
180
He was an embarrassment to
your adolescence. Now a life
time later, each gone separate
ways, this you recall i\>r contact.”

Hina Faisal Imam (nee Baber Ali) and Jocelyn Ortt

Saeed have good poems to their credit too. Hina’s themes
and tone are generally romantic though she writes experimentalist
verse too. Mostly ^he begins with a commonplace
theme: loneliness, l^ss of lo\e, nostalgi.i poverty human anguish
~ and i:ives it a new vitality through her imaginative
use of language an<l, in some cases, literary allusion. Here,
for instance, is the use of the second device:

Let us walk, you and I

when dawn splashes
a pebble in the lake.

Let us walk in deserted street

and the footpath
like cracked tongues
bring you to the inevitable
question (Wet Sun,74).

The allusion to Eliot’s famous ’Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock’ is the key to the theme of the poem which is nostalgia
and a sense of loss. In the following po< m the themes
of nostalgia and lost love are expressed with simplicity:

Friends came and

talked about you as

if there is nothing else.

And I wear my solicitude ~

the peace of knowing you.

It is romantic to think

I have no regrets.

You expected me to be

shy-east.
When I could not hide myself,

You excused, and I wonder if

181
You remember -- the willow and
the stream (p.51).

The above poem is moving because it is unpretentious

and direct. Some of Hina’s poem are failures because they
attempt to be abstruse and intellectually ambitious. Her
other failing is that she has not used imagery effectively.
However, she is still writing and has the potential to give
good poems.

Jocelyn writes romantic poems which are in the tradition

of folk songs at their best. The diction is simple, unpretentious
and the best poems are lyrical and enjoyable. Here is a
good poem:

I will go where no road goes

and the road will go with me:
I’ll greet you in the sunrise
when the sunset sets me free.

I will dream in the fields of green

till their ears grow gold in me

till you appear to harvest grain ’

grown in the desert sea.

This poem was first published in Wliere No Road Goes

and has been reprinted, along with other good poems, in Selected
Poems (1986). Jocelyn’s themes are love, human feelings
and she is often sentimental and romantic. This sentimentality
of approach prevents her work from being intellectually
tough and rising to the level of the best that is written
in Pakistan. Among other poets who are not among the best
practitioners of verse in Pakistan but have written some
good poems nevertheless I would mention the names of G.
AHana, Alvi and Imran Aslam. Allana, despite his fame and
the encomiums lavished on fncence and Echoes and The Hills
of Heaven (1980)42, is no more than a sentimental versifier.
His major theme is that spiritual realities are hidden from
the empirically-minded modern man. But this theme, which
has been used by good writers in the West to produce mas182
terpieces, has produced nothing but otiose verse in Allana.
Imran, on the other hand, is modernist, elusive and, like the
co-author of the book August Puddles (1975), complex and
ironical. The co-author, Nazir Kamal, has produced brainteasers
which are pretentiously difficult. However, Imran has
several good poems to his credit.

There is very little politically inspired poetry in English

which cannot be said to be merely propaganda, except for
the work of Mahmud Jamal in Silence in a Gun’s Mouth
(1984). Jamal was born in Lucknow in 1948 and emigrated to
Pakistan. In 1967 he went to Britain and was the co-ordinator
of Trabadour Poetry Readings from 1972 to 1975 in
London. He has published an excellent translation of Urdu
poetry in 1985.

Most of the poems of Silence express the Third World intellectual’s

consciousness of having been cheated by the very
education he has acquired. This sense of outrage is expressed
in anger and the threat of violence:

Caught in the web of your language

and the clamour of your definitions,

printed, broadcast, microfilmed, copied,

I resort to silence

I resort to guns

I resort to action (p.48).

Here is a disillusioned poem for Pablo Nerudo, the poet

of Chile:

You asked for silence,

for flowers to bloom, perpetual love.

There are no flowers blooming

only a castrated comrade carrying a flower

between his thighs (p. 16).

The poems are, as Hashmi says, poems ’of protest and
pain’.43

There is hardly any epic or any other kind of long poem

in English though there have been attempts at writing some.

183
1

The first such attempt was that of Mchcll \H S< Ijouk whose
My Goddess (1959) was written in ’honour of a lady’ whom
the poet loved ’insanely and wholeheartedly’.44 The poem is
full of difficult words and is unreadable. A.R. Tahassum’s
The Horizon Speaks (1980) is sentimental and its theme is
that of reforming the world through the force of love. This is
a continuation of the revolutionary theme expressed by the
poet in Revolt of the Slaves (1937). Howev’ r, there the theme
was expressed through socialism whereas here it is sloppy
and somewhat like the less authentic passages of Carpenter’s
Towards Democracy (1907). The third major epic is on the
theme of the dryness of the source^ of cultural revival in the
modern world. The symbol to express this is the desert and
the book is entitled Manhunt in the Desert (1979). The author,
a Pakistani called Akhter Ahsen, is a psychologist and
is very well read. Unfortunately, the book falls short of the
standards of good poetry and is tedious.

Despite Bruce King’s statement that in Ceylon and Pakistan,

writing in English came to an end when the national
governments adopted other official languages’.45 Pakistanis
are producing a lot of poetry. (It may be pointed out in the
interest of historical accuracy that in Pakistan the language
of administration and the university remains English). There
is no equivalent of the Indian Poetry Workshop of Calcutta
under the auspices of which ’nine-tenths of Indian poetry in
English after 1958 has been printed’.46 Most poets publish
their poems in the weekend magazines of Pakistani dailies.
Some get collection1; published privately and reviewed from
friends.

It is only when one reads the scores of collections of substandard

verse that one comes to appreciate the quality of
the achievement of those poets who have been given critical
attention in this chapter.47 For, though the good poets too
have not written as much as the poets of India and Africa,
what they have written is comparable in quality to their
work.48

184
NOTES

1. P. Lai .ed. Modern Indian Poetry in English (Calcutta:

Writers’Workshop, 1969).

2. Ooi Boo Eng, ’Indian Poetry in English: Two Views’,

JCL, Vol.ix: No.l (August, 1977), 10-20.

3. Taufiq Rafat, ’Towards a Pakistani Idiom’, Venture.

ed. Syed Ali Ashraf, Vol. 6: No.l (December, 1970),
60-73 (p.73). The number in the parenthesis refers to
the page from which the words have been quoted.

4. Riaz Hasan, The Writing of English Poetry in Pakistan’,’

Ravi, Vol. LXI: No.3 (September, 1968), 9-11
(p.10).

5. Khalid Ahmed, ’No Muse is Good Muse’, The Ravi,

ibid, 16-25 (p. 19).

6. Mahbub Ghani, ’Poetry and Nationality’, The Ravi,

Tbid,44-50; Shuja Nawaz, The English Poet in Pakistan’,
ibid, 28-30; Tariq Yazdani Malik, ’Anglo-Pakistani
Poetry’, Ibid, 55-62; A. Aziz Butt, ’Our Young
Writers’, Ibid, 12-15; Alamgir Hashmi, The Basic Issue’,
The Ravi (May, 1973), 20-28.

7. Muhmmad Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature, second

revised and enlarged edition (Karachi: Oxford
UP, 1985), 14-34.

8. Syed Ali Ashraf, The Poetry of Shahid Suhrawardy’,

Venture, op. cit, 45-53.

9. Ashraf, 52.

10. Ahmed Ali, Purple Gold Mountain (London:

Keepsake Press, 1960). The expanded virion of the
book is in the author’s private collection and
references are to this collection.

11. Carlo Coppola, The Poetry of Ahmed Ali’, JIWE,

Vol.HI: Nos. 1-2 (1981), 63-76 (p.69).

12. Taufiq Rafat, ’English Poetry in Pakistan’, Pakistan

Quarterly, XVII:2 (Summer, 1970), 53.
13. Coppola, 73.

14. Ahmed Ali, ’Foreword’ to Purple Gold Mountain.

15. Sadiq, 534.

185
16. Tamal Rasheoi, ’English V rs> Writing and the
Political Plight of Pakistan’s 1 ”\poverishei’ POCK’,
Far Eastern Review, (2 August 11*64), 32-34.

17. Kevin Ireland, ’English Verse on Asian Soil’, 7CL, 5

(July, 1968), 113-115.

18. Ibid.

19. A.G. Stock, ’Pakistani p<.et’. ICL, VI: 1 (June, 1971),

132-134 (p. 133).

20. C. Kan.iganayakamm ’/ulfikar Chose: An

Interview’, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 32:
No.2 (Summer, 1986), 169-186 (p. 184).

21. Anthony Thwaite, Taufiq Rafat, Maki Kureishi,

Kaleem Omar’, review of Wordfall in TLS, 13 (18
March 1977). 294.

2^ T,iri>i Rahrmi’i, ’Inter iow with D<>ud Kamnl’, The

Nation (19 June l”«7),iv.

23. Taufiq Rafat. ’( ’ntemponry English Verse in

Pakistan’, TTic Rwi, Vol70 (Dumber, 1980), 6-14
(p.7)and(p.!3).

24. Ireland, 114; Stock, 113; Thwaite, op. cit.

25. Jamal Rasheed, 33.

26. Iftikhar Ahmad, ’Idiom and Vision ~ II: the Poetry

of Taufiq Rafat’, The Pakistan Times, (30 April
1982).

27. Graham Hough, ’Free Verse’ in Twentieth Century

Poetry eds. Graham Hough and P.N. Furbank
(Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1975;
this edition, 1979), 122-123.

28. Tariq Rahman, op. cit.

29. Saleem Ur Rahman, ’An Interview With Daud

KamaP, The Pakistan Times ^’> September, 1985).

30. Raymond Tong, ’D-iud Kamal: A Remote Beginning:

Poems’, British Book News (April, 1986), 246.

31. ’The Blue Wind: A Review’, Iron, 46 (1985), 69.

32. Shuaib Bin Hasan, ’Pakistani Practitioners of English

Verse’, Ravi: Special Issue, Vol.65 (1974), 53-71
(p.70).

186
33. Jane’ Powers Gemmill, ’Hashmi’s Poetry of Double
Ron’-’, New Literature Review, No. 8 (1980), 60-62
(60&61).

34. Simon Garrett, CRNLE Reviews Journal, 2 (1’’82),

72-73 (p.73).

35. Roger Ireland, ’Alamgir Hashmi: This Time in

Lahore’, Wasafiri, (Spring, 1986), 33.

36. Gemmill, 62.

37. Vol. LXI: No. 3 (September, 1968); VoT.65 (1974).

38. Next Moon. ed. Athar Tahir (1984); A Various

Terrain, ed. A. Tahir (1986); The Inner Dimension,
ed. A Tahir (1987).

39. Cact,, f. ed. Waqas A Khwaja (1985).

40. Raja Changez Sultan, Thirteen Ways of Look nig at a

Non><id (n.d).

41. Athar Tahir,A Voyuge Om (1981), 23 & 29.

42. Allana was made ’Honorary Poet Laureate Anthologist’

by United Poets Laureate International.
See Incense and Echoes, ii. Also see viii-xv of the
same book for encomiums lavished on Allana’s
books.

43. A. Hashmi, ’Appendix: Pakistan’, JCL, Vol.XX: No.2

(1985), 160.

44. My Goddess, vii.

45. Bruce King .ed. Literatures of the World in English,

14.

46. B. Rajan, ’India’ in King, Ibid,93.

47. Collections of poets whose work does not deseve

critical attention are given in the bibliography.

48. Carlo Coppola, ’Recent English Poetry from

Pakistan’, in Pakistani Literature, ed. Alamgir
Hashmi (1987), 89-96, says that Pakistani poetry
’rates equally in quantity with the K’st that has been
produced in India...’(p. 89).

187
11

DRAMA

There has always been a lack of good drama in Muslim cultures.

Most people would agree that this is, at least partly,
because orthodox Islam has considered the theatre sinful.
Either for this reason or for some other the theatre did not
develop in Pakistan till the coming of the television and the
Urdu T.V. play in the late sixties. Anwar Enayatullah, in an
informative article tells us that Urdu drama was patronised
by Wajid All Shah, the ruler of Oudh (1847-1856).’ After
1947 several amateur groups started performing in Pakistan.
Among others he mentions:

...the Karachi Arts Theatre Society, the Avant Garde

Arts Theatre, The Drama Guild, and St. patrick’s
Dramatic Society -- all from Karachi, Alhamra
Drama Group of Lahore, The Pindi Play House,
Rawalpindi, and the Drama Circle of Dacca, East
Pakistan, 2.

These groups have mostly produced Urdu plays and in

the nineteen sixties, when Enayatullah wrote his article, it
appeared to him that they had ’infused the Pakistani theatre
with new vigour’.3 This vigour was transferred by dramatists
writing in Urdu to the production of plays for the T.V. but
even these plays are didactic, full of middle class values of
sexual prudery, nationalism and sentimental sympathy for
the oppressed. As for English plays they were hardly ever
performed even in the universities and colleges after the rise
of middle class puritanism in the seventies and are not written
either. In any case the lack of interest in drama has been
as old as the beginning of the history of English writing itself
and one can hardly blame the rise of puritanism for it.

188
Bef<”e the Partition F-vei Rahamin’s drama Daughter
of Ind (1937) is probably the only item of this genre worth
memioning. Malti, the daughter of an Indian gardener falls
in love with an Englishman Graham and saves his life while
dying in his place The play is romantic. Likewise Ahmed
All’s one-act play The Land of Twilight’ is extravagantly
romantic and lacks dramatic merit. It is being mentioned
only in order to keep the historical record accurate.

In Pakistan dramatic production remained poor. Nasir

Ahmad Farooqi is among the few who have tried their skill
at the art of writing drama. His play in three acts, The
Naked Night’, was intended to be a drama of ideas. According
to the author:

The Vaked Night is a probi into the futility of this

exi*; -nee. It challenges the \ .’idity of a certain mode
of Ji1 ing. Is seeks us synthesis. The progression of
knowledge md ide^s leads to ni”re problems, to
more unknown uncharted routes. ’I he journey must
contini”-. 1 he artist, as any otln-r h;<»’binger of ideas,
must p- ’ <-h on mis jou/ney. In the nature of things
there > an be no other en-1 to it.4

The play .ispnes to ^ei”>us intellectual ^tature. Farooqi

has the philosophy of existential il.’spair as well as the idea
of existence being a quest for meaning in mind. His protagonist
Nick is the philosopher -- the artist - who undertakes an
absurd journey with the heroine, Sarah, to discover the
essence of existence. They perish and the epitaph is spoken
by more worldly-wise characters: ’Life is a problem to which
the only solution is death’ (p.61).

However, the play is a failure: it is so full of pseudo-intelle>

tu-il inanities that it can only exasperate the discriminating
reader or viewer. Nasir Farooqi’s love for show-off,
which has marred his novels ha- ruin- d tl>c play.

Ikram Azam too has vitten son>< plays. Unfortunately

they are chauvinistic and f,n>ify reali’v crossly. 1 have mentioned
them in ihe bibliography, (julzar Ahmad Khan’s
Slaves of lime too has not been given critical attention.

189
However, since it is about the Partition, it could have been
one of the few response to that traumatic event in literature
if only it had not been written in pretentious imitation of poetic
drama and if the theme of people being the slaves of
tradition had not been superimposed upon the major theme
of the gratuitous violence which came into the wake of the
partition of the Punjab.

In the nineteen sixties an English play called The Thing

was produced by Yunus Said, the short story writer, in
Karachi with considerable success. It was written by Sayeed
Ahmad who was much influenced by the works of the absurdists.
Whereas Farooqi’s The Naked Night’ pretends to be
surrealistic but fails in the attempt, ’The Thing’ does not. It
does convey the idea that the universe is absurd and life is
doomed. As in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954), the characters
wait for something which the author calls ’the thing’.
The philosophy of existential pessimism has been presented
effectively though, were it not for the directions of Yunus
Said, the play may not have been able to hold the attention
of the uninitiated Karachi audiences. About Yunus Said’s directing
and the impact of the play it would be best to quote
Anwar EnayatulJah:

Yunus Said’s direction of this difficult symbolic play

was imaginative and his handling of an all-amateur
cast admirable. Unlike most of our directors, Yunus
Said used music to enhance certain effects of the
stage. Even the suggestive set was designed in rather
unusual way [sic]. In spite of its complex symbolism
and an uncommon technique (uncommon by Pakistani
standards) with little action on the stage. The
Thing broke new grounds on the Pakistani stage.5

Notwithstanding occasional successes there is no significant

Pakistani dramatist in English till the advent of Hanif
Kureishi in the nineteen eighties. Kureishi was ’born in London
of an English mother and Pakistani father’.6 His father
came to England from Bombay, like the parents of Zulfikar
Ghose and married an English woman. Hanif was brought

190
up in London and in a clearly written essay entitled ’The
Rainbow Sign’ he tells us about his life there. He tells us
evocatively but not sentimentally about the emotionally
hurting experience of having grown up in a society where
Pakistanis (and other Asians) came to be despised. The first
reaction of the young boy was to deny his Pakistani self -- a
common enough reaction among minorities, especially
among ex-colonial subjects, as V.S. Naipaul has brought out
in his own case in Enigma of Arrival (1987). Kureishi writes:

From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was

ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it. I
wanted to be like everyone else (BL, 9).

Then the militant British National Front started beating

up Pakistanis whom they derogatively called ’Pakis’. One of
Kureishi’s friends - the one who becomes Johnny in the play
’My Beautiful Laundrette’ -- joined this movement. Kureishi
became more isolated and emotionally withdrawn. For some
time he came to admire the militant Black Muslim Movement
whose leaders were Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm
X. This movement became violent and even more narrowminded
than the white fascists. In disgust Hanif Kureishi
turned away from the rhetoric of this fanatical reaction.

He was angry and disgusted with Britain and thought he

would find the kind of society he was looking for in Pakistan.
He came to Karachi for this purpose and discovered that
Pakistani society was hypocritical and unjust. In the second
part of his essay, sub-titled ’Pakistan’, he has recorded his
impressions about this country. The new regime’s emphasis
on ’Islamization’ has been commented upon as follows:

Islamization built no hospitals, no schools, no

houses; it cleaned no water and installed no electricity.
But it was direction, identity. The country was to
be in the hands of those who elected themselves to
interpret the single divine purpose. Under the
tyranny of the priesthood, with the cooperation of

191
the army, Pakistan would embody Islam in itself
(BL,19).

However, Hanif Kureishi is not critical of everything in

Pakistan. He is one of the few Western-educated intellectuals
who have realised the social and psychological significance
of the joint-family system in Pakistan and India. He is,
of course, aware of the negative aspects of this system: the
tyranny of the old over the young; the pressure to conform;
the lack of freedom, but he is aware of the positive side also.
And this is what he has to say about the latter:

The family scrutiny and criticism was difficult to

take, as was all the bitching and gossip. But there was
warmth and continuity for a large number of people;
there was security and much love. Also there was a
sense of duty and community of people’s lives genuinely
being lived together, whether they liked each
other or not -- that you didn’t get in London. There,
those who’d eschewed the family hadn’t succeeded in
creating some other form of supportive common life.
In Pakistan there was that supportive common life,
but at the expense of movement and change (BL,22).

This analysis is unusually perceptive since condemnation

and approbation, of Pakistani as well as British culture, are
mostly indiscriminating ~ even less indiscriminating than
V.S. Naipaul’s condemnation of India (and Trinidad) in his
writings. Kureishi is equally truthful when he writes that
The Pakistani middle class shared the disdain of the British
for the emigre working class and peasantry of Pakistan’ (BL,
29). A writer who can see through the vices and pretensions
of both the British and the Pakistanis is certainly qualified to
write imaginatively about the human situation. And this he
has done in his plays.

The play The King and Me’ is about the empty urban
existence of a married couple whose idol is Elvis Presley,
nicknamed The King’. The cult of Presley is no more than a
device to shield themselves from the barrenness of their life.

192
The plight of urban people in Western societies has been
presented with imaginative insight. The couple do not have a
supportive common life and the enthusiasm which would
have gone into conventional beliefs and rituals now goes into
the cult of Elvis Presley. The end is like that of E.F. Albee’s
play Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962). In Albee’s play
the frustrated husband deliberately destroys the fiction that
the couple has a grown son who is expected home. In Hanif
Kureishi’s play the husband, Bill, ’moves around the flat,
ripping down the pictures and putting all the stuff in a big
plastic dustbin bag’ (O,42). After this inconoclasm Bill invites
his wife to begin to face reality. He says:

He hasn’t done us any favours. So he’s out. (Pause)

my back hurts. Can you rub my back or something.
I’ve done something to it. I feel like an old man.
(Pause) Marie. (Pause) Marie. You can open your
eyes now (O,43).

Another short play also performed at the Soho Poly

Theatre, London, on 8 June 1980 was Tomorrow-Today’.
Once again it is about the problems of Western industrialized
countries. This time the drama consists entirely of dialogue
between two schoolboys who have an overdeveloped
desire for sensation. The desire is so morbid that one of
them sits by the motorway to see the cars drive out at high
speeds in fog and meet with accidents. They also want
money and are driven to petty crime. The important thing
about the play, however, is the feeling that there is affection
and human decency at the bottom of all the apparent dehumanization.
The two boys fight and then make up as follows:

Bill: Wouldn’t have touched you. Jesus. Didn’t want

to. Jesus. You can’t push people about and not expect
them to smash you off them. (Pause) Oh come
on. Don’t make a song and dance. You’re okay really.

Ben: I’m not.

193
Bill: Leave it alone. (Pause. Bill walks away from
Ben, who’s coughing).
Ben: Gis a fag Bill (O.22).

Hanif Kureishi portrays squalor and frustration as a deviation

from the norm. The norm remains decency and the
desire for relationships based on affection.

The play which gives its name to Playscript 102 is

’Outskirts’. Like Tomorrow-Today’ it is about the life of two
schoolfriends Del and Bob who grow apart. They too take to
petty crime and then to racist violence. This culminates in
their beating up an old Pakistani man near the motorway.
When Bob grows up he is not trained to get a good job and
has to endure the frustration of being unemployed. The frustration
of the unemployed in a culture where the work-ethic
has always been strong can lead to loss of self respect; a fact
which comes out clearly in the following scene when Bob
tells Del:

I won’t work now. Won’t give in. It’s all bloodyminded

defiance now. They’ve buggered me long
enough. I won’t do anything for them. I hate them. I
really hate them. (Pause) There’s....there ’s this cafe
we meet in. Boys. The lads. At the back there’s a
long table with an oil-cloth on it - not fashion:
age (0,76).

These people are at the outskirts, as it were, of the affluent

society. But they are not monsters. Bob’s mother saves
enough to buy him a guitar when her income is so less that it
is difficult to exist. The boys too have strong emotions but
they present a rough exterior for fear of being hurt and because
that’s a part of the English working class ethos.

In this play some of the scenes have been placed in the

past whereas others are in the present. This flashback technique,
also used in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman
(1949) which has a similar theme, has been used successfully
by Kureishi. The play ends on a scene from the part in which
Bob says: Til probably kill myself when I’m thirty’ (O, 88).

194
The point made in the previous scene is that he and the
other people around him are emotionally dead even before
that.

’Outskirts’ was received well by the critics. One of them

wrote:

Kureishi’s play has been likened by the Warehouse’s

artistic director, Howard Davies, to Edward Bond’s
’Saved’, though to be strictly fair ’Outskirts’ lacks the
remarkable toughness, the sheer lack of compromise
and the lyricism that characterises Bond’s early cause
celebre. What it has in common is a detailed and
even loving depiction of lower-class life, the importance
for people to shore up the ruin of modern life
with emblems of hope and beauty, the contrary pulls
of family life, the bond of (male) relationships, the
innate and casual violence of urban life.7

Now we come to plays which are concerned with Pakistanis

living in Britain in particular and with the theme of
race relations in general. ’The Mother Country’ is the first
play in which immigrant Pakistanis are introduced.

Set in London, it is about Hussein and Imran, a

Pakistani father and son, and Joe, an English dropout.
Hussein is making a lot of money - from a shop
and from rotten flats for which he charges high rents.
Making money is part of his way of hitting back at
the anti-coloured society in which he is marooned.8

His son Imran reads E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India

(1924) and tries to establish a relationship with Joe, an English
youth who hates his National Front friends. In the end
Imran moves over to his father’s position. The play is an indictment
of the Pakistani entrepreneur and indictment becomes
even more virulent in ’Birds of Passage’. In this play
some South Londoners have to sell their house to a Pakistani.
Critics have compared the basic situation to that of

195
Chekov’s characters in The Cherry Orchard’. One of them
comments:

I am not going to press any comparison with The

Cherry Orchard except to say that with Kureishi as
with Chekov you cannot tell where (if anywhere) the
author’s sympathies lie. Apart from the general excellence
of its dialogue, the play’s great strength is
that it tells a true tale offering equal comfort to
Asian activists and little Englanders.9

The author’s sympathies lie, it is clear, with those who

suffer. Hanif Kureishi is far too committed to expressing the
truth to conceal the fact that Pakistani businessmen are opportunists
and exploit people irrespective of their colour and
creed. In all his major plays, including My Beautiful Laundrette,
the unscrupulous, exploitative Pakistani businessman
has a role to play. And in every case we are given to understand
that good and evil are not the monopoly of any ethnic
group.

’Borderline’ is the first play in which Pakistanis living in

Britain have been introduced as main characters. The play
deals with the problems of the expatriate Pakistani in
Britain. A theme which has been dealt with by Tariq
Mehmood in his novel Hand on the Sun. But Mehmood’s
novel, as we have seen, is not a product of art. Let us see if
Kureishi’s plays are.

The play revolves around the lives of Amina, the grownup

daughter of Amjad and Banoo, and Haroon, the son of a
Pakistani hotel owner. The two are in love and fornicate
freely. Amina’s father wants to marry her off to a Pakistani
young man of his choice. This conflict between the traditional
authoritarianism of Pakistani parents and the Western
ethic of individual self-fulfilment lies at the centre of the
plot. However, an equally important theme is the conflict between
the young Pakistanis and the racist British youth.
They meet in offices and form groups to offer resistance to
the aggressive militants of the British National Front.

196
The sub-plot consists of the exposure of an young Indian
youth, Ravi, to the Asian community in Britain. He comes to
stay with a friend only to discover that the friend would not
offer him the traditional hospitality he could count on in India.
In the end Amina’s father Amjad dies and her mother
goes to Pakistan. Amina and the others are left behind in
Britain and the last scene shows them preparing themselves
for a confrontation with the racists. Amina is aggressive and
here her father’s voice on the tape acts as a corrective. He
says:

Let me say...there are a few bad Englishmen. Some

who are uncompassionate. But most are good. Most
have treated me respectfully. The law, when it is upheld,
is good here....(B,42).

This is the voice of balance and sanity which is always

present in Kureishi’s plays: a reminder that fanatical likes
and dislikes are exaggerations and can only be indulged in by
seeing the world unrealistically. In the end the play upholds
humanitarian values. Yasmin tells Amina not to burn down
the hall where the racists are having their meeting.

Yasmin: I am afraid we might relish it too much.

Amina: We’re afraid to leave the area. People want

revenge for all that.

Yasmin: Retaliation is a necessity sometimes. But

some of us think it’s a luxury. Put that back (B,4243).

They mean to resist aggression but not by violence. And

this is an edifying end for a bitterly realistic play.

Hanif Kureishi’s masterpiece so far is certainly ’My

Beautiful laundrette’. It is a poignant assertion of the power
of genuine love. According to the author love can even exist
in an atmosphere not conducive to it and when it does, human
hatred and pettiness which create these problems are
exposed as what they really are and can no longer pretend to
be anything noble. In this play a Pakistani youth Omar has
197
just been given work by a rich uncle in a laundrette and
Johnny, who has been with the British National Front since
school, is unemployed. Omar invites Johnny to work for him
and Johnny accepts because he is fond of Omar. The two
youths fall in love and drift into a sexual relationship. The
sexual relationship, because of which the play has been denounced
so much, is explained as follows by the author:

The relationship between the two of them had to be

intense so that Johnny is convincingly torn between
the lads and Omar. There wouldn’t have been the
same pull if it had just been a friendship so the gay
aspect is there to heighten that tension and flowed
from the action. I’d often written about two close
male friends and friends said, ’You’re really writing
gay plays’, so I thought why not go the whole hog?’10

The sexual aspect of the relationship remains in the

background, however. The genuine feeling of comradeship
and personal loyalty which they have for each other is redemptive
for both. It saves Omar from feeling vindictive towards
English people and helps Johnny to transcend the
racism and hatred his companions have for Pakistanis.

The Pakistani prejudice that the English are ’not human’,

they are cold (B,93: Pakistani student’s words to
Johnny), is proved to be as erroneous as all prejudices are
when Johnny saves Salim from an attack by his old companions
at great risk to himself. The last scene celebrates the
victory of personal relations over hatred and prejudice.
Johnny and Omar, who have both fought on the same side,
are in the laundrette.

Omar and Johnny are washing and splashing each

other in the sink of the back room of the laundrette,
both stripped to the waist. Music over this (BL,111).

In this play, as in all others, Hanif Kureishi presents his

own faith in the benign potential of human nature. His point
is that behind the frustration, prejudice, squalor and violence

198
one witnesses in human societies, there are redeeming featurtts
such at; tenderness, love and the desire for peace. This
faith in redemption may be too optimistic in view of the violence
of human history and everyone may not agree with
Hanif Kureishi. However, whether one agrees with him or
not, Hanif Kureishi remains the best playwright of Pakistani
origin and the only one who has created art, as opposed to
polemics or tendencious propaganda, about the theme of the
Pakistani immigrant in Britain.

NOTES

1. Anwar Enayatullah, ’Theatre in Pakistan’, Pakistan

Quarterly, 12:4 (1964), 54-59 (p. 54),

2. Ibid, 56.

3. Ibid, 55.

4. Farooqi, The Naked Night, 63.

5. Enayatullah, 58.

6. Hanif Kureishi’s biographical details have b< < n supplied

to me by his literary agent IvK Sheila Lemon in
1985, Also see ’The Rainbow Sign’ in My Beautiful
Laundrette.

7. Steve Grant, Not Yet a Master....’, Time Out, (24

April--30 April 1981), 14,

8. R.S. Marrott, ’The Mother Country’, The Stage and

Television Today (31 July 1980).

9. Irving Wardle, ’Us, Them...and Those’, The Times

(17 September 1983). Another critic who has drawn
the Chekovian parallel is Eric Shorter in ’Birds of
Passage’, The Daily Telegraph (16 September 1983).

10. Stephanie Billen, Takiing Britain to the Cleaners’,

Theatre List, (1-14 November, 1985), 3.

199
12

PROSE

In her book Sind’s Contribution to English (1975), Amina

Khamisani has included the names of all those who have
used the English language to write on such diverse subjects
as economics, history and Islam. I have not followed this approach
not only because it would make this chapter very
long and tedious but also because I feel that one should include
only prose with some of the distinctive qualities of literature
in this history of literary writing in the English language.
In other words belles lettres, creative writing in prose
which does not fall into the realm of the short story or the
novel proper can legitimately be included in prose. Biographies
are rather difficult to classify. Some biographies, like
Feroze Khan Noon’s From Memory (1966) and Shaista
IkramulJah’s From Purdah to Parliament (1963), do have literary
qualities which can hardly be ignored in any historical
account of the development of prose in India and then in
Pakistan. For instance, both Noon and Mrs. Ikramullah have
written simple, unpretentious English and their style is refreshingly
different from trie rhetorical style of most nineteenth
century and early twentieth century Indian writers.
But, apart from this brief notice, I shall not concern myself
with biography as such. I have, however, given a list of biographies
and memoirs published in Pakistan or written by
Pakistanis in the bibliography. Most of these accounts have
been written by politicians, generals and other eminent men.
Writers have hardly ever published biographies in English so
we lack such candid accounts of the development of the
writer and the creative artist as we find elsewhere. As we
find, for instance, in Joyce’s fictionalised accounts of his torturous
quest for finding artistic integrity: A Portrait of the
Artist as A Young Man and even Ulysses. And, coming to

200
more explicit accounts, J.R. Ackerley’s relentlessly honest
account of his homosexuality in My Father and Myself (\968)
and Christopher Isherwood’s slightly fictionalised treatment
of the same theme in Christopher and His Kind (1977).
Coming to Third World literature in English one finds biographical
accounts by: Mugo Gatheru, Child of Two Worlds
(1963), Zulfikar Ghose, Confessions of A Native-A lien; Shiva
Naipaul, Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984) and Finding the
Centre (1984); V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (1987)
and Adewale Maja-Pearce, In My Father’s Country (1987).
All of these accounts are distinguished by their desire to be
true, to delve deep into the personality. And in some the desire
has produced masterpieces of not only biography or selfanalysis
but literature in the broadest sense of the word: that
is to say, a record of that creative writing which is of human
significance and which gratifies our imagination and the intellect
simultaneously. This kind of writing has not yet been
produced by Pakistani writers with the exception of Ghose’s
book, which has been dealt with in detail, and some other essays.

Excluding biographies and prose works which fall into ;

some other discipline, we are left with prose essays, usually ;

written by journalists, and other casual writings. This too ^

presents the problem of choice for there is a proliferation of >

such works. Fortunately the job has been made easier by ’

Maya Jamil’s article entitled ’Prose of Humour’.1 In this ar- ticle

Maya Jamil has traced out the history of humorous l

prose from the time of the brothers Mohammad and ’

Shaukat Ali’s famous paper Comrade which began publication

from Delhi in 1911.

The Comrade was a political paper, its raison d’etre being

anti-British politics. Thus one finds much ridicule of the
I.C.S. Commissioner whom Forster called a minor deity, in a s

series of humorous articles entitled Phantom Figures. The

use of wit and irony in order to criticize the government or
the social system became the single dominant tradition of
journalistic writing and literary prose in Pakistan. Maya
Jamil has made the point that most of our good writers - P

Anwar Mooraj, Omar Kureishi, M.R. Kayani and, above all,

201
Khalid Hasan -- have been using laughter as ’a safety valve’
in order to retain their sanity.2 This is, of course, one of the
oldest traditions of the prose essay going back to the eighteenth
century: to Sir Roger de Coverley and Swift. However,
one of the first good writers of prose in undivided India,
at least among the Indian Muslims, was not a humorist.
He was a liberal-nationalist and his work is worthy of mention
because there are very few instances of such unprejudiced
writing in the subcontinent. His name was Khwaja
Ahmad Abbas and his writings have been dealt with already
in the chapters on fiction. Here we are concerned with his
travelogue Outside India (1938) in which he describes his
impressions of the world which he toured as the special correspondent
of The Bombay Chronicle.

Abbas’s style, like that of Mrs. Ikramullah, is unpretentious

and direct. He avoids rhetorical flourishes as well as
cliches. His ideas are those of a liberal humanist, and, what
is even more remarkable, of a genuinely just and reasonable
person. For instance he opposes Japanese glamourization of
the army as well as Hitler’s jingoism. He condemns colonial
oppression but, and this is remarkable, is one of the few
Muslims to have condemned the oppression of the Jews by
the Nazis. Abbas is against British imperialism even to the
point of being prejudiced and he attacks capitalism, especially
American capitalism.

His work is worth reading not only because of his direct

style but also because it is one of the best sources for understanding
the development of Muslim liberalism in pre-partition
India. For it is liberalism of some kind which informs
the journalistic prose pieces of most Pakistani writers of English
prose.

Among the first of these writers is Omar Kureishi, the

man who is famous as a cricket commentator. Kureishi lives
in Karachi and still writes occasionally for the Karachi newspapers
The Dawn and The Star. His first published book containing
his prose pieces is entitled Black Moods. This deals
with the life of Karachi during the fifties (it was published in
1955). His second book entitled Out to Lunch covers the
years between 1956 and 1958. Omar Kureishi’s talents as a

202
commentator were recognised by many people and Khalid
Hasan’s article ’Give Me Omar Kureishi Any Time’ bears
witness to that. His prose, on the other hand, has never had
much critical attention. It does, however, deserve such attention.

In the preface to Black Moods Omar Kureishi says:

By tackling certain very real problems (albeit with

satire and a little facetiousness) I have tried to suggest
in this book that this feeling and sense of cornmunity
is lacking in Pakistan (p. iv).

He seems to suggest that The indifference of the public

to social problems’ (p. v) is the main source of underdevelopment
in Pakistan. There is, of course, the other point of
view that governments deliberately cultivate such an attitude
so that the class they support remains in power. However,
the literary quality of the writings is not affected by this political
stance. The book is ’an attempted documentary on
frustration’ according to its author and this frustration has
been expressed with the humour which comes of complete
command over the language. Omar Kureishi uses ironical
devices and sustains the flippancy of expression he begins
with throughout his best essays. In his essay entitled
’Common Man’, for instance, the humour is sustained. He
tells us that he goes out to look for the mythical common
man in whose interest all the politicians and officials claim
to be labouring. Such a man, he reasons, would have received
the blessings of ’science, technology and natural resources’
(BM, 8).

The field was thereby considerably narrowed. That is

to say I ruled out my Chaprasi (peon), one Ruknuddin
by name, who certainly did not fit into this category
(p. 8).

He goes on to exclude rickshaw drivers and petty shop

keepers. Finally ’Karachi’s most distinguished black-mar203
keter’ (p. 9) turns out to he the man he is looking for. He is
the one, it turns out, who has received all the benefits said to
have been given to the common man.

In some pieces like ’Rain’ and ’For the People’ the irony
is not sustained. The writer starts lamenting about the
problems in a direct and emotional manner. It should be
added, however, that this failing is rare. On the whole Omar
Kureishi’s humour is delightful and his irony consistent.

The other prose writer who is worthy of note is also from

Karachi. His name is Anwar Mooraj and he is an executive
in a business firm nowadays (1988). His contributions to the
English papers of Karachi were collected by him in a book
entitled Sand, Cacti and People (1960). Mooraj has complete
command over the English language, a fact which accounts
for the kind of humour he creates. For it is a humour dependent
not on the situation, not on events and caricature,
but the manipulation of words. He is also conversant with
German and has the sophistication of wide reading and
travel as well as urbane bringing up. All this makes his prose
rich in allusion and polished, even, at times, factitiously urbane.
At its best, however, it is genuinely witty. For instance
the book’s foreword is called ’forewarned’ and Mooraj tells
us:

Sand, Cacti and People was born in the smoky atmosphere

of the Karachi Press Club whilst the author
was discussing chess openings with almond-eyed
players eating toffees and toffee-eyed players eating
almonds (p. 4).

The author’s use of irony is faulty. Instead of keeping the

surface meaning discrepant from the real one throughout a
piece, he starts condemning the social problems of Karachi
in a straightforward manner. However, the humorous turn of
phrase is still there and one can read his work not only for
its humour but also as an example of good prose ~ some of
the best written in Pakistani newspapers whose standards
are far from satisfactory even by the lax standards of journalism.

204
Another writer of English prose from the province of
Sindh is Haleem Abdul Aziz. He has published the following
books:

Nothing in Particular (1967), Nothing in Earnest (1967),

Solo (1968), O Bartender (1968), The Decayed (1968), Pop
Writings (1975) and several items on Sindhi literature in English.
He now writes in Sindhi for the most part though he
has also written earlier in Urdu.

Haleem’s style is a mixture of standard English and

Pakistani slang. The slang has been deliberately used for
humorous effect at places.

Why is it, O’ bartender, that only a female of the

species does the doing? Or do the dousing? (Pop
Writings, 6).

Most of his humour comes from witty references to sex.

Since the taboos on sex are officially so stringent in Pakistan,
smutty allusions are a part of men’s conversation in the
country. They provoke much laughter and, since Haleem was
obscure, could not be banned by the regime. In any case it is
only now (during Zia’s Martial Law), and then very rarely,
that books are banned on grounds of being indecent in Pakistan.
So Haleem has passages such as this in Pop Writings:

Is there any difference between satisfying one person

and satisfying a thousand persons? Never mind the
thousand, but why refuse me? That is why I prefer
prostitutes to chaste women. What are we to do with
their chastity? Lick it in the heavens? And suppose
licking is prohibited in the heavens then? (p. 7).

And:

A lady with a principle is like a lady with a stick --

not a good sight, you will agree. Women should have
no principles (p. 44).

205
Get drunk and go to somebody else’s wife, not to
your’s, - yours’ will ask you ’why are you so
late?’...(p. 42).

The other main source of humour in Pakistan is politics

and Haleem, true to this tradition, makes fun of dictators
here.

I am a dictator. Once a dictator, always a dictator. I

just refuse to get off. I have to have a better man
first. Meanwhile I stink, --1 mean meanwhile I stick
(p. 9).

There are many such witty passages. Unfortunately not

all Haleem’s work comes up to the high standards set by the
best humorists. He cannot sustain his irony, his themes are
limited and at places his wit degenerates into clowning.

Haleem did not become well known even in Pakistan.

This was only because of bad luck because Justice Malik
Rustum Kayani, who also did not write better than Haleem,
became famous. He gave speeches which were enjoyed
enormously by the upper middle class audiences of educated !
people. People laughed and applauded the speaker throughout
the speeches and a legend was created. These speeches
have been reproduced in four books: Not the Whole Truth
(1962); Half Truths (1966); Some More Truth (1971); A Judge
May Laugh (1961).

M.R. Kayani first started becoming famous as a speaker

when, as the president of the West Pakistan C.S.P. Association,
he started making speeches on the annual dinners of
this body. These speeches, collected together in Half Truths,
are mostly about matters which Kayani took seriously: the
salaries of the C.S.P. officers who, in his view, deserved to be :
made financially so secure that they should be above temptation.
In 1958 General Mohammad Ayub Khan became the ;
dictator of Pakistan. The judiciary was in danger of being !
relegated to an inferior position. Now Kayani started ’
speaking in favour of the independence of the judiciary. He ’
also spoke about the sacrosanct nature of the rule of law ’

206
though he was the Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court
and Ayub Khan had abrogated the constitution.

In a prefatory article called ’Background’, the editor of

Some More Truth has written in detail about Kayani’s views
about all the subjects mentioned above. Details of his relations
with Ayub’s government have also been made available.
In view of this it would be merely repetitive to go into
details about these things here. It should, however, be mentioned
in passing that Justice Kayani must have had great
moral courage to have expressed his dissident views in public.
In the end Ayub Khan thought it best to appear to accommodate
Kayani’s criticism. In his foreword to Not the
Whole Truth Ayub says:

These are entertaining essays and make delightful

reading. But, if, at places, they tell something more or
less -- than the ’whole truth and nothing but the
truth’, the fault, as always, is not of the judge but indeed
the witness.

But Ayub Khan does make it clear that he does not find
himself in ’agreement with the views of Mr. Justice Kayani’.

As for the literary merit of these speeches, one would be

forced to conclude that they are neither as witty nor as hilarious
as they must have sounded to their audience. Without
the spell of an accomplished speaker’s mannerisms and
voice they lose their charm. Justice Kayani is at his best
when he directs his satire against himself:

Gentlemen, it is nine years and a day since I joined

this court as a judge. It was the 1st of April, as Mr.
President has pointed out, and considering that it
was the 1st of April, I have not at all done badly (Not
the Whole Truth, 5).

His humour, however, falls flat in print mostly because it

is based on typical reactions to stereotyped references such
as the 1st of April. Another ingredient of his humour is the
irreverent anecdote. These anecdotes are neither very funny

207
nor original in themselves. But they do give a certain verve
and colour to the narrative. Irony is used hut it is rarely used
effectively nor is it sustained. As such Kayani will have to
give place to such masters of humour as Khalid Hasan.
However, for his moral courage, his ability to laugh at himself
and his refusal to become pompous or arrogant, Justice
Kayani must be remembered with affection and respect.

In Khalid Hasan we have the greatest writer of prose,

especially of humorous prose, in Pakistan. He has got four
books to his credit: A Mug’s Came (1968), The Crocodiles are
Here to Swim (1970), Scorecard (1984), and Give Us Back
Our Onions (1985). All of these contain essays which have
appeared in the newspapers. But, says Hasan, ’since newspapers
are perishable and, quite rightly, used to wrap fish’
(Onions, ’Author’s Note’) he has published them as a book.

Khalid Hasan’s style has some characteristics in common

with Omar Kureishi’s and Mooraj’s: there is the use of understatement,
irony, and paradox in order to highlight the
society’s pretensions. But in Hasan all these are carried to a
higher level of sophistication and is sustained in all the
books except Scorecard which comprises biographical
sketches of some eminent, or at least memorable, Pakistanis.
One reason why Khalid Hasan’s essays give so much pleasure
is that he is so confident in his use of English that he
does not have to bother about being considered wrong. This
allows him to expand, to innovate, to play with words and to
create a kind of Wodehousian language which can serve all
the purposes of a master of humour. Justice Kayani also
played with words in his speeches but it was as follows:

And in any case, if you don’t get damages, the other

man will, and it will give you practice in the difficult
law of torts, which is tortuous in any case, torturous
quite often, and whether after negotiating these two
difficult adjectives, you will succeed in proving that
the defendant’s conduct was tortuous, is a matter of
your luck with the judge (JL, 73).

208
Khalid Hasan, on the other hand, plays with them without
resorting to easy puns and the unsophisticated man’s
enjoyment of shades of meaning which Kayani sometimes
displays and which, no doubt, audiences enjoy. But Khalid,
more original and inventive, uses slang and typical
pompously bureaucratic expressions like Wodehouse in order
to make his writing come alive. For example:

I should never have stuck my tongue out at that cop

on duty when he blew a whistle at me for no reason
atalI(CS, 119).

And:

He swallowed once or twice, lit a battered cigarette,

looked at me as if he were a partridge 1 had just
downed with a shot-gun and said, ’All right. What is a
moot? ’It means a conference, meeting’, I answered
triumphantly (MG, 36).

Khalid Hasan’s English expression is clear, unpretentious

and humorous without being clownish or coarse. He is
one of the few writers who knows how to make creative use
of English. He is also interested in the use of English in
Pakistan as the following articles ’The Queen’s English’,
’Whither English’ and ’The Queen’s English, Local Style’
suggest. In the first two irony has been used to point out the
defects of Pakistani English and the last mentioned suggests
remedies. In ’The Queen’s English’, the implied author
translates the journalistic and bureaucratic cliches used in
Pakistan to an Englishman.

’...What about exhort?’ ’Appeal’. Then why exhort?’

’How should I know?’ I said (MG, 37).

In ’Whither English’ two Pakistani professors (the title is

used loosely for lecturers and those below professorial rank
in Pakistan) talk to each other in the diction of eighteenth
century ’high poetry!’

209
A: Good morrow, worthy mentor. How dost thou
fare this goodly morn?

B: I am fit as a fiddle by the grace of the Almighty.

(CS, 121).

In ’The Queen’s English, Local Style’ he tells writers to

stop using cliches, proverbs and too many adjectives. The
ending is, as usual, hilarious:

I need not point out the benefits of the measures I

suggest, but one thing I promise. Ministers, leaders,
bureaucrats and the like will be silenced instantaneously
because without their cliches, they won’t
have a leg to stand on which, I must confess, is as
good a cliche as any (Onions, 223).

Pakistani English is bad for reasons which have been

given elsewhere. And Khalid Hasan attacks those attitudes,
those psychological problems, which have made it so bad. In
this he is not alone but he has written so much and so well
that he deserves to be called the champion of good English
prose in Pakistan.

As we have seen before the nineteen sixties saw the rise

of the already prestigious Civil Service of Pakistan, the
C.S.P, into a partner of the army in ruling Pakistan. It is not
the one sided view of Justice Kayani but the essays of Khalid
Hasan which give one an idea of how this elite came to be
regarded by the most intelligent members of the educated
class in Pakistan. The C.S.P. officers were generalists: that is
to say, they could be asked to do different kinds of work
without being qualified to do so. In his ironical style Hasan
comments:

They have ungrudgingly worked as administrators,

economists, development planners, acting ViceChancellors,
atomic scientists, bankers, broadcasting
experts, newspaper publishers, intelligence chiefs,
family planners, even fire brigade chiefs. And what

210
has this ungrateful nation given them in return? (CS,
13-14).

In Onions four brilliant articles make fun of the C.S.P.

These are ’Let’s Legalise C.S.P’; ’Homage to C.S.P’; ’Playing
Hockey the C.S.P, Way’ and ’C.S.P, the Sphinx that Never
turned to Ashes’. Without anger and invectives we are told
that senior civil service officers have been promoted till the
service has become a burden on the exchequer; that even after
the changes Mr. Bhutto brought about - he changed the
name of C.S.P to District Management Group - they are elitist,
snobbish and powerful; that they are anti-populist and
even colonial in their attitude towards public service. Here
are some specimens of Khalid Hasan’s humorous satire
concerning the C.S.P:

Additional Secretaries used to be completely unheard

of. Perhaps there were one or two, but nobody
had ever seen them. This has since been remedied
(Onions, 182).

It is my view that we require a new set of M.L. regulations

to make the offence of criticising a civil servant
punishable with death or 34 years of hard
labour, and preferably both (Ibid, 183).

It is common knowledge that when something is

banned, it goes underground. That is exactly what
has happened to the C.S.P. So if anyone like a secretary
general is reading this, I say let us legalize the
scoundrels and I promise to have them all smuggled
out to India in one week. I have the connections
(Ibid, 184).

Though I have never asked my good friend Dr. Atiya

Enayatullah if she really is the author of the immortal
observation (if Dr. Salam is so bright, why is he
not a C.S.P.), in the late 1960s, practically everybody
believed she was (Ibid, 191).

211
And this is not the end. Every article contains something
fresh, something original, something interesting and it is expressed
in such a way that reading it is a pleasure.

In Onions and Scorecard Khalid Hasan has described aspects

of intellectual life in Lahore. He has done this in his
colourful and highly interesting biographical notes on eminent
people. His book Scorecard contains the biographical
sketches of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Altaf Gauhar, Noor Jahan and
Saadat Hasan Manto among others. These sketches are free
from the ordinary Pakistani faults of biography writing: that
is, they are neither falsely sentimental nor malicious. They
are, in fact, written with a deep and sympathetic understanding
of the complexity of people’s characters and do not
presume to pass conventional judgments. Thus though Saadat
Hasan Manto is condemned for his alcoholism by the
press in Pakistan but Khalid does not do that at all. Similarly
Altaf Gauhar, although it is made clear that he did hanker
after power, is understood rather than just reviled.

In writing about such characters as Sardar Mohammad

Sadiq and Chacha F.E. Chaudhry, Khalid Hasan has caught
the essence of the colourful life of journalists, men-abouttown
and the coffee houses of Lahore. Sardar Sadiq was an
institution by himself: ’Everyone knew him and took his
presence in Lahore for granted much as one takes for
granted the General Post Office building or the Nila Gumbad’
(SC, 126). He spent his time on the Mall Road and
talked to anyone he could find. Political jokes originated
from these talks. Khalid Hasan describes his alleged campaigning
for Ayub Khan as follows:

He would say: ”The Civil Service of Pakistan is on

our side. The Police Service of Pakistan is on our
side. The armed forces are on our side. The patwaris
are on our side. The 22 families are on our side. That
leaves you with the people. You can have them. We
have no need for them at all. Thank you.” (SC, 134).

212

I
F.E. Chaudhry is another colourful character. He was
the photographer of The Pakistan Times and was called >.A.

’Chacha’ (uncle) by everyone. He would lend money to impecunious

journalists and then tell people that he ’has been tiar
robbed’ (Onions, 73). And these are only two of the many
colourful characters who throng the pages of Onions and
Scorecard. Through them one can understand the bonhomie,
the wit and the frivolity which went to make the cultural life
of Lahore. It can be said, indeed, that Khalid Hasan has
written a lively cultural history of the Pakistani intelligentsia
living or connected with Lahore. This, I believe, is the first
time this has been done in English and it is no mean
achievement.

Among the less interesting but mentionable prose works

are Bilquis Sheikh’s / Dared to Call Him Father (1978) and
Tahawar Ali Khan’s Man-Eaters of Sunderbans (1961). The
latter is in the tradition of Jim Corbett’s Maneaters of Kumaun
(1944) and other tales of hunting (shikar in Indian English).
Tahawar Ali Khan tells us how he shot tigers in the
jungles of the Sunderbans. The episodes themselves are interesting
but what makes the book worth reading is its clear
and unostentatious prose. The author is not pretentious nor
does he boast of possessing superhuman courage and
strength. In fact the author’s confession of human fear gives
the book an air of verisimilitude and makes it more enjoyable.

The second book / Dared to Call Him Father is worth

mentioning only because it is the only example of a Pakistani
Muslim woman having deliberately converted from Islam to
Christianity. The narrator claims to belong to an aristocratic
family of Pakistan who converts to Christianity and finds
real moral improvement as well as peace. The description of
the hostile reaction of her family and friends in Pakistan is
full of pathos. However, the book has been written with
Richard Schneider and we have no means of finding out
whether the language is Bilquis’s own. This makes it impossible
to comment on the literary quality of the work.

A number of essays, articles and columns keep appearing

in the daily papers, magazines and journals. Sometimes

213
they are collected together to make a book. Columns by
’Onlooker’ (Hasan Abbasi), for instance, appeared under
the title of Over a Cup of Tea (n.d). They are mainly political
and are not distinguished for their stylistic quality. The political
ideas expressed are, for the most part, quite similar to
other educated Pakistanis and not in any way as original as
those of such radical writers as Eric (later Ejaz) Cyprian
who has not been dealt with in more detail because his reviews
and articles are not available in the form of a book.

Other writers whose works have not been discussed because

they are not available in the form of a book are: Zeno
(Safdar Mir); N.A. Bhatti who writes ’Grassroots’ in The
Muslim; Ahmad Hasan who writes ’From Islamabad With
Love’ in The Muslim; Omar Kureishi and Imran Aslam who
write in The Star (Karachi); Pervez Kazi who writes ’Kehva
Khana and other articles in The Frontier Post; and many
other occasional contributors to the papers. I have referred
to those writers only whose prose is humorous, unpretentious
and lively. There are, of course, many excellent writers
of academic prose, research articles and papers whose prose
is comparable to the best kind of writing in this genre. This,
however, I have not touched upon at all.

In conclusion it may be said that though most Pakistanis

write ungrammatical, pretentious, cliche-ridden prose which
is tedious to read there are exceptions too. The work of
these exceptional Pakistanis has been dealt with in this chapter
but the chapter remains incomplete since not all of them
have published collections of their work. For a keen student
of Pakistani literature, especially prose, in English it would
be necessary to read the daily papers, especially the weekend
magazines, and the eveninger The Star.

214
NOTES

1. Maya Jamil, ’Prose of Humour’, Venture ed. S.A.

Ashraf( 1966), 54-59.

2. Maya Jamil, 56. Here Mrs. Jamil is quoting Omar

Kureishi’s Black Moods.

215
13

CONCLUSION

Now that this survey of Pakistani literature in English is over

it is possible to determine in what way this literature differs
from the other Third World literatures written in English
and literatures written in other Pakistani languages i.e.
Urdu, Sindhi, Pushto, Punjabi and Baluchi. In order to do
I this it will be necessary to carry out a brief survey of the

I major themes and techniques of these literatures.

i Such a survey must necessarily simplify much that is

I complex; condense much that needs explication, and focus

’ on major themes to the exclusion of others. As for literatures

in Sindhi, Pushto and Baluchi, I shall have to refer to

other critics’ opinions since I cannot read literature written
originally in these languages. Other literatures being referred
to have been read in the languages in which they have
been originally written but even then some inevitable distortion,
mainly because of simplification and condensation,
does make this chapter unsatisfactory. An example of simplification
is the very use of the term African literature. That
such a term is ’thoroughly inadequate for use in discussing
the many different contemporary literatures of modern
Africa,” is a point which can hardly be disputed. However,
for the sake of convenience it would be best to call it that
and, for the same reason, accept three broad traditions in it.
These are, according to Gakwandi, ’South African, Anglophone
African and Francophone African’.2

In South African literature, mainly fiction, the major

theme has been race and the conflict between the whites and
the blacks. Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy (1946) is an important
early expression of this theme. The protagonist, Xuma,
comes to the white man’s city only to become a victim of the
exploitative system of the whites. Doris Lessing’s short story

216
’Hunger’ is also based upon a similar situation3 - an young
African’s urbanization. Ezekiel Mphalele, a South African
writer, tells us that the racial situation in that country is so
acute that almost all significant literature is influenced by it.4
In Alex La Guma, a South African later in exile in Cuba,
racial exploitation is seen in a Marxist perspective. In A
Walk in the Night (1968) the system is shown to be at fault. It
dehumanizes Michael Adonis, a black African, as well as the
white policeman Raalt. In the end both become murderers,
the one through having been unjustly deprived and frustrated
throughout his life and the other through having had
too much power. Alex La Guma blames the dehumanizing
system; a system created because of colonization in the first
place.

Resentment against colonial injustice is the theme of

Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy (1966) and, even more importantly,
changes in the traditional way of living and thinking.
The latter is the major theme of Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart. The novel ’is archetypal of the entire breakdown
of traditional African cultures under exposure to the West’.5
Wole Soyinka’s powerful play Death and the King’s Horseman
(1975) also expresses the same theme. The Horseman’s
refusal to commit ritual suicide upon the death of the king is
a reflection of the weakening of the traditional way of life
because of the presence of the Europeans though they are
not shown overtly influencing the Horseman’s decision.
James Nguigi’s A Grain of Wheat (1967) and The River Between
(1965) are also about the conflict of values in a
changing society. But Nguigi also shows another aspect of
the African response to colonialism ~ resistance. In Weep
Not Child (1964) and A Grain of Wlieat the Mau Mau
movement in Kenya has been shown in a sympathetic light.
Josiah Mwangi Kariuki’s ’Mau Mau’Detainee (1963) gives a
moving personal account of the experiences of some
Kenyans in detention camps which help us to understand
Nguigi’s attitude towards the movement.

Resistance sometimes took the form of freedom movements

and led to independence. Peter Abrahams’s novel A
Wreath for Udomo (1956) is based upon such a movement.

217
The protagonist, Udomo, brings about a successful revolution
against the colonial government. However, the end is
ironic because Udomo loses his integrity, betrays his friend,
and is killed in a coup. Claude Wauthier, a critic, pointed out
the parallels between the novel and the events in Ghana.6
Abrahams’s novel This Island Now (1966) is also political. It
is about a coup against a corrupt dictator in the Caribbean
islands. But the leader of the coup, who comes into power
after the natural death of the dictator, becomes a dictator
himself. And, ironically enough, out of the best possible motives
too. This combines the theme of struggle with the
theme of disillusionment with politics in particular and postindependence
African life in general.

This theme occurs in many major novels. Chinua

Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966) is about the opportunism
and unscrupulousness of Nigerian politicians. Chief
Nanga, a politician, is as morally bankrupt as the corrupt
army officers described in Eddie Iroh in his novel of the Biafran
War Toads of War (1979) and by Achebe himself in
Anthills of the Savannah (1987). The depth of squalor of
Nigerian society created by such rulers is evoked by the
symbol of human excrement in Wole Soyinka’s novel The
Interpreters (1965). In this novel, as D.S. Izevabaye cornments,
a group of individuals react ’against a corrupt society
in which actions and events seem meaningless’.7 One of the
strongest indictments of corruption in contemporary Africa
is Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet
Born (1969). In this ’The senses of the reader are vigorously
assaulted to the point of being numbed by the persistent imagery
of decay, putrefaction and death’.8 The point of this
imagery is the condemnation of the system which makes it
appear that, at least at present, there is no hope of redemption.

In a way this disillusionment with contemporary Africa is

the reverse of pride in Africanism. One effect of colonialism
was that a consciousness of inferiority was produced in many
Africans. There was also a reaction to this and Africans
came to assert their distinctive African identity. The clearest
statements about this ethnic or cultural assertion are to be

218
found in the writers of Francophone Africa. The students of
French-speaking areas met in Paris in the early 1930s and
’laid the groundwork for the first modern African literary
movement: negritude’.9 Negritude meant many things as
Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier’s description makes clear:

In Senghor’s poetry all the familiar themes of Negritude

appear one by one: the pervasive presence of
the dead and their protective guiding influence upon
the living (’In Memoriam’, ’Night of Sine’); the devastation
of ancient Africa and its culture by white
Europe (’Paris in the Snow’); the harsh rigidity of the
modern West and its desperate need for the complementing
qualities of Africa (’New York’); the warm
triumphant beauty of African woman (’You Held the
Black Face’).10

The poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor, about which these

comments were made, has many themes associated with
negritude. However, in the broadest sense of the term, novels
celebrating the African way of life also come into this
general category. Camara Laye’s novel A Dream of Africa
(1966) is a novel of negritude because ’African cultural values
have been so thoroughly woven into the novel’s form
that the result is a kind of assimilated presentation of
African values, African traditional life....’11. In this sense
Amos Tutola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) too is a novel
of negritude. It is, after all, based on oral literary
techniques12 and operates within ’a traditional metaphysical
system’.13 Many other novels which celebrate the African way
of life also express aspects of the theme of negritude. The
assertive, sometimes chauvinistic, literature of ’black consciousness’
in Africa and the Caribbean also expresses a
variant of the theme of negritude.

The theme of negritude and all other themes are connected

with colonization and Africa’s response to it. This, I
believe, is a major distinctive feature of African literature.
However, African literature ~ especially African fiction -- is
also different from mainstream English literature in tech219
niques. According to Larson, most African novels ’are almost
totally devoid of characterization -- especially character
introspection and character development”4 They also do not
have much dialogue. However, they do have much local
colour (anthropological material) which has been on the decrease
in the Western novel. It must, however, be noted in
the end that the African novel is changing.

Situational plots are being replaced by works which

concentrate on character individuality. Description,
and treatment of time and space are becoming more
typically Western. Experimentation tends now toward
Western techniques which replace the traditional
conscious or subconscious incorporation of
oral literary materials into the text. 15

Caribbean literature, like African literature, also owes its

major themes to the impact of colonization. It should be remembered
that:

The major historical facts endured by the Caribbean

peoples were dismemberment, exile, eclipse and, for
many, slavery, with the result that they lived destitute
and inarticulate in a political, social and cultural
void.16

However, in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries,

this literature did not reflect the racial experience of the
people who had produced it. It was merely imitative like Indian
literature in English. Francis Williams, an eighteenth
century Black Jamaican, wrote Latin verse.17 Distinctively
West Indian literature came to be written from the 1930s
onwards and was recognised by Western critics as a separate
literary entity in the early 1950s. According to Alfred H.
Mendes, a writer, two major factors contributed towards
making this literature authentic. These were:

...the first World War where a large number of us

had been abroad, ...and ...the Russian Revolution.

220
Those, I think, wre the two events in our lives at that
time which drove us into writing about our islands.18

In other words the West Indian writers were influenced

by political events in one way or the other. The Beacon, a
Trinidadian magazine, denounced the Crown Colony form
of government and was leftist in politics. A number of West
Indian writers, therefore, write with a high level of political
consciousness and were inspired by the historical events
which had shaped West Indian societies. One of these events
was the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. In this rebellion the
black peasant farmers rose against the traditional white
landowners,-- the ex-slave owners ~ and 439 people were
killed or executed by the militia. This event is reflected in
V.S. Reid’s novel New Day (1949) as well as in other literary
works.

After the thirties there were many changes in the attitudes

of the West Indians to class and colour. The traditional
forms of agricultural life, based on sugar production
by slaves, also underwent changes and urbanization became
a problem. George Lamming’s classic In the Castle of My
Skin (1953) deals with these changes. The boy in this novel
becomes alienated from the village community as he enters
another way of life. The themes of alienation and dispossession
became central in West Indian literature. One major
theme, connected with these ones, is the desire to escape. In
Samuel Selvon’sv4 Brighter Sun (1952) the protagonist leaves
the sugarcane area to settle down in a multi-racial suburb
where he has to make new adjustments. In V.S. Naipaul’s
novels the main character generally wants to escape from
the dominant joint-family: in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961)
it is Mr. Biswas who wants to escape whereas in The Enigma
of Arrival (1987), it is the young Naipaul who wants to escape.
In his brother Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies (1970) once
again the joint-family clan is powerful and individuals who
are ambitious want to defy it; to escape from it even if it is to
the underworld of crime. Like his elder brother, Shiva
Naipaul too escaped from Trinidad as he has described in
Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). This desire to escape,

221
generally to England, was a consequence of colonization.
For the culture of the Caribbean islands -- which was in any
case eclectic and lacking the stability of tradition -- had
nothing to offer to the young who succumbed to the myth of
Britain; the idea that they would have to escape from their
islands to make their career and, as it were, enter the modern
world. In the world they escaped to they found themselves
to be aliens ~ another perennial theme of this literature.

This consciousness of being an alien, in exile, is very old

indeed. Jean Rhys’s early novel Good Morning, Midnight
(1939) is about a woman who has no cultural roots and is
aware of her deracination. Rhys’s major novel Wide Sargasso
Sea (1966) is about the cultural alienation of the white Creole
people who are not acceptable either to the white Europeans
or the blacks. In recent years other themes such as the
theme of ’black consciousness’, have also been expressed in
literature. This theme is connected with the assertion of
one’s indentity.

But identity has itself been a major concern of West Indian

writers. According to Michael Gilkes ’it was Mittelholzer
who first raised the question of psychic imbalance and
the resultant angst of identity -which is the most central and
urgent theme of West Indian literature.”9 This theme, like
most others, owes its origin to the history of the West Indies.
The mixture of races, slavery, and the desire to escape from
the islands have made its sensitive people conscious of not
having a cultural identity. This theme may be seen as a part
of the other themes already discussed and are all ultimately
connected with the experience of colonization.

Indian literature in English does not have the same preoccupations

as either West Indian or African literature. Almost
the first noticeable quality of Indian literature is that it
does not break as sharply from the past as the other new literatures.
It is not only that the first Indian writers merely
imitated Western models (so did West Indians) but also that
they carried over much from their indigenous literatures to
their English writing. This is especially obvious in poetry
where the romantic tradition of the Urdu ghazal was ex222
pressed in English. The novel and the short story in their
modern Western form did not exist in India. Nevertheless
there were folk tales and stories in verse which were seen as
being the prototype of modern fiction. However, both Urdu
and English fiction was created in the nineteenth century
and bears the impress of the ideas of the age.

These ideas are philosophical and political: liberalism,

democracy, socialism and freedom. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas,
as we have seen, accepted all these ideas and wrote much
that is tendencious and propagandist. Mulk Raj Anand, one
of India’s best novelists, based his novels on socialist ideas
and produced some good novels. In Untouchable (1933) and
Coolie (1933) he does succeed in entering into the consciousness
of working class characters and making them
stand out as characters in their own right and as emblems of
their class.

The dissemination and acceptance of some Western

ideas did bring about changes in values, especially among the
intellectuals, and alienated them from most of their countrymen.
Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope (1960) is one
of the novels which deals with this alienation. The protagonist,
a Brahmin, is alienated from his Indian as well as his
wife’s French culture. But in Raja Rao the alienation is
hardly a product of external circumstances, it is purely intellectual.
In Anita Desai’s novel Bye, Bye, Blackbird the young
Indians living in Britain are forced by external conditions to
recognise that they do not belong to that culture.

Indian novelists have focussed attention on the changing

values in Indian society. The theme of the conflict between
the traditional and the modern is present in the fiction of
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Kamala Markandaya and R.K.
Narayan. Jhabvala’s novels in particular record this conflict
because they are so realistic. In Esmond in India (1958), as
in many others, she shows an amazing degree of insight into
the Indian character, the values of Indian society and the different
effects of Westernization among different types and
classes of Indians. Kamala Markandaya’s Two Virgins (1974)
and Pleasure City (1982), to give only two examples, are also
about the impact of city values, Western values, on tradi223
tional rural cultures. In the former a girl leaves her family to
go to the city bringing disgrace to them and in the latter
Rikki, the youth from a fishing community, changes when he
comes in contact with Europeans. In the case of Narayan the
changes are not easy to see. The surface gives the illusion of
being unchanging, placid, and permanent. However, conflict
with alien values does bring about change. In The Vendor of
Sweets (1967), for instance, Rajan’s son returns from America
with such changed ways that he is totally incomprehensible
for his father. But in Narayan tradition is strong and
does, somehow, contain innovation and change. For this reason
some of his novels give the appearance of being allegories
of Hindu myths. The real concerns of Narayan’s fiction
are not sociological but metaphysical. In this sense he
preserves and continues that which is quintessentially traditional
and mythical in Indian Hindu literature.

There is hardly the same response to political events and

history in Indian literature as there is in the other Third
World literatures in English as we have seen already. How•4
ever, Gandhi’s movement and its effects on ordinary people
are shown in several works such as Raja Rao’s Kanthapura
(1938) and Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma (1955). And
the events of the Partition are imaginatively responded to in
Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956)

In Pakistani literature in English there is even less response

to history than there is in Indian literature. For instance
there is hardly any standard work of the imagination
dealing with Jinnah’s impact on the Muslim masses before
the Partition. There are, of course references in some works,
but not the same response as one finds towards Gandhi. In
autobiographies, such as Shaista Ikramullah’s From Purdah
to Parliament (1963) we do get a glimpse of the way Muslim
Leaguers responded to the personality of Jinnah.

However, the point I want to make is that there is little

response to political events and that is different from
African and West Indian literatures. To substantiate this
claim further I will refer to the political events which led to
the Partition. There are only three novels which refer to
them: Mumtaz Shahnawaz’s The Heart Divided Mehr Nigar

224
Masroor’s Shadows of Time and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-CandyMan.
In the former two they have not been integrated in the
imaginative part of the work whereas in the last one they
have been. However, in ihe last one the focus is more on the
human personality and the changes induced in it as a consequence
of external events. Thus the events given more attention
are the ones which affect the lives of ordinary people
and these are the Hindu-Muslim riots. In a way Sidhwa’s
novel is the only major response to these riots in Pakistani
literature in English. Before its publication there was nothing
significant at all. There were, to be sure, some works of
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, and some short stories of Burki and
Tabussum in the liberal-humanist vein. But these were in no
way comparable to the Urdu short stories of Saadat Hasan
Manto (Toba Tek Singh’); Ahmad Nadim Qasmi
(4Permisher Singh’); and Ashfaque Ahmad (’gadarya’) and
poems on the subject in Urdu and Punjabi.

There is still nothing dealing with the philosophy of the

Partition in a serious way except Mehr Nigar Masroor’s
Shadows of Time. In Urdu too there is such a work: Aag Ka
Darya (1958). And this novel does not deal with the violence
of the Partition but with its advisability. It sets out, in fact, to
question the necessity of that historical event. The novel
shows the flow of time and in the end Abul Mansoor Kamaluddin,
the symbol of Muslim occupation of India, migrates
to Pakistan. However, Champa Ahmad, the heroine,
stays back in India - an act which questions the wisdom of
the Partition. This thesis was not acceptable to the Pakistanis
but Qurrat-ul-Ain Hyder, the novelist, has written a
philosophical history - something which only Mehr Nigar
has been able to do yet in English.

The other great event in Pakistan’s history was Ayub

Khan’s imposition of martial-law in 1^58. This event could
hardly be without repercussions in all fields. However, there
is only a flattering description of some efficient army officers
in Nasir Ahmed Farooqi’s novel Snakes and LaMers and
hardly any response to the rule of the army in the rest of
English writing in the country. Only some journalists, among
Pakistani writers at least, have deniizrated the army rule in

225
obscure pieces of writing. But nobody has mentioned one of
the most heinous acts of Ayub Khan’s government: the persecution
of political dissidents. It is, once again, Qurrat-ulAin
Hyder who has written about the torture and death of
Hasan Nasir, a member of the Communist Party of Pakistan,
in Lahore in her novelette entitled Housing Society (1977).

In 1964 Ayub Khan defeated - the opposition said by

rigging -- Fatima Jinnah (Jinnah’s sister) in the elections. After
this armed men, said to have been sent by Ayub Khan’s
sons, killed people in Karachi and set houses on fire. This
incident too goes unrecorded in English literature though
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the famous leftist Urdu poet, wrote a
poem about it. The 1965 war between India and Pakistan is
referred in short stories and plays which are chauvinistic.
Most works in Urdu are also chauvinistic to the extreme.
The Urdu Digest published a number of puerile, vainglorious,
anti-Indian stories and essays and even good writers did not
condemn this trend. Most of this work, like Jeelani Kamran’s
’Lahore Gives Evidence’, needs no comment. However,
when one finds that even Intizar Husain, whose work is
normally good, could succumb to the national hysteria, one
is saddened. His short story ’The Trench’ is an example of
sentimentalism. In this a Pakistani man does not fill up his
trench even after the cease-fire till he finds a dead rat, symbolical
of the putrefaction of the nation’s aspirations, in it.
For a serious writer to be endorsing the kind of jingoism
which does not want such a wasteful war to end ~ and one
must not forget that it was Pakistan which attacked the Indian
Kashmir first - is not art but chauvinism; not artistic integrity
but propagandist enthusiasm. In English too there
were stories like Altaf Gauhar’s ’The Last Azan’ which were
meant to be propagandist. But these were the products of
minor writers and not of the better ones. The better ones did
not respond at all to this war.

While Urdu literature towed the official line and English

literature was silent, Sindhi writers wrote anti-war literature
somewhat similar in values to the poetry of the First World
War and humanitarian writings about war in general. Shaikh
Ayaz, a famous Sindhi poet, is sympathetic towards both the

226
people of India and Pakistan during the war. In his poem to
Narayan Sham, a Hindu poet, he says:

Ah! this war...

Come forward Narayan Sham!

Same hopes we have

And same fears

And same abhorrences,

Expressing in the same tongue...20

This may be taken as a poem about Sindhi nationalism

or about anti-war humanitarianism with both the poets being
the upholders of humanity rather than nationalists.

During the 1971 war Pakistani writers once again manifested

their inability to respond truthfully and imaginatively
to a great human tragedy. There is hardly anything sympathetic
to the Bengalis (my own short story ’Bingo’ is negligible).
One of the more balanced accounts of the war has been
provided by Siddiq Salik in his book Witness to Surrender
(1977) which was first written in Urdu and translated by the
author himself. In this West Pakistani atrocities are mentioned
but in less detail than Bengali atrocities. The experience
of the Pakistani prisoners of war in Indian P.O.W.
camps has also been recorded by the same author in his
book entitled The Wounded Pride (1984). However, the wars
did not inspire books of protest against war in general nor
works of the calibre of Eric Maria Remarques’s,4// Quiet On
the Western Front (1929); Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of
Courage (1895); Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell
Tolls (1940) and A Farewell to Amis (1929); and African fiction
about war (such as Eddie Iroh’s novels which have been
mentioned already).

The martial-law of General Zia-ul-Haq was resented by

liberal and leftist intellectuals in Pakistan. However, the resentment
was expressed in occasional poems in English and
in short stories of a symbolic kind.21 There was no major response
to this great event by Pakistanis writing in English.
Even the hanging of Bhutto, the ex-prime minister of the
country, did not produce any response in English. In Punjabi,
227
on the other hand, Fakhar Zaman wrote a novel based on
the last days of Bhutto in prison. This novel is, however,
available in the excellent English translation of Khalid
Hasan under the title of The Prisoner (1984).22 It may be
added here that both Indian political events and Pakistani
ones upto and including General Zia’s martial law were responded
to by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (1981)
and Shame (1983). The latter becomes surrealistic and presents
monsters in a monstrous and improbable world in a
symbolic attempt to present the monstrous condition of
Pakistani politics under Zia! However, as Rushdie is an expatriate
writer of Indian origin and not a Pakistani, we cannot
include his work in Pakistani literature in English.

Literature in the provincial languages is generally more

politicized than either Urdu or English literature. One major
theme of Sindhi literature, for instance, is Sindhi nationalism.
In ’New History’, a Sindhi short story by All Baba, a
mother tells her son that Rajah Dahir, the Hindu ruler
whom the Arab conqueror Muhammad Bin Qasim had defeated
in 712 A.D. and established Muslim rule in Sindh, was
a hero and a martyr and not a monster of iniquity as the
books of history suggested. Another aspect of this nationalism
was a fraternal feeling for the Hindus living in Sindh.
Amar jaleel’s short story Sard Lash Jo Safar expresses this
theme touchingly. In this story a Sindhi Hindu youth keeps
reading the works of the Sindhi mystic saint Shah Abdul
Latif Bhittai while Muslim fanatics bent upon violence approach
his house. In Sindh nationalism was a reaction to
what Sindhi leaders described as the domination of refugees
from India and Punjabis. It was this kind of nationalism
which existed in Bengali literature before the creation ot
Bangla Desh. In English there is no evidence of this kind of
nationalism at all. This is probably because the English writers
are city-dwellers and are members of the middle class
with less interest in the provinces.

Being city-dwellers they also failed to understand the

problems of the rural areas. Even those who have written
about the villages - Zaib-un-Nissa Hamid-ullah. Burki and
Ghose - have written about the Punjab (or, in the case of

228
Aisha Malik, about the Frontier Province) and then not too
specifically. Mrs. Hamidullah’s main focus of interest in her
stories is the conflict between tradition and modernity and
not the problems of the rural areas. Ghose’s The Murder of
Aziz Khan is about the rise of the industrialist and the disruption
of the individualistic way of life of the small landholder
in some areas of the Punjab. Most other short stories
take the village as background though the themes do not
necessarily pertain to the rural way of life. In Sindhi’and in
Urdu there are many plays and stories condemning the feudal
system and the values which go with it. Jamal Abro’s
Sindhi short story ’Seendh’ (hair-parting) shows how a sister
is killed by her brother on the suspicion of adultery. The
great feudal lords tyrannize their peasants in ways which are
a perennial inspiration for anti-feudal literature in languages
other than English. In fact, whereas the tradition of resistance
is very strong in other Third World literatures as well
as in Pakistani literature, it hardly exists in English.

That is why there is hardly much socialist literature in

English though the tradition of Faiz, Zaheer Kashmiri and
Sahir Ludhianwi was well known and even admired by English
writers. And that is the reason why there is not the
same reaction to corruption and poverty as one finds in
African literature and in Pakistani literature in other languages.
It is, however, difficult to agree with Fahmida Riaz
that:

Pakistani literature continues to be the literature of

resistance. Perhaps one day it will become the literature
of struggle. However, one should remember that
literature is a mirror of struggle more than it is its instrument.23

But even if that is not entirely true, it may be conceded

that Pakistani literature in English is less politically aware or
committed than literatures in other Pakistani languages.

This gives the impression that Pakistani literature in EnIglish

owes nothing to colonization. That is not true. Al-%

’though there is little direct reference to colonization and al229

most no tradition of resistance or anti-colonialism, there is
i f the equivalent of what may be called negritude. This is confined
to an awareness of a great heritage which has now
been lost; a consciousness of departed glory; and a sense of
powerlessness. The reaction to this was not so much an assertion
of cultural identity as nostalgia and fatalistic despair.
This was the main theme of the ghazal from 1857, the date
of the Indian mutiny, and its tone too. And it is this which
one finds in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi. One of the major
themes of the nationalistic poetry of the pre-Partition days
was romantic idealization of the past, Muhammad Iqbal, the
famous Urdu and Persian poet from Sialkot, made this one
of the major themes of his own philosophical poetry. He
idealized the Muslim past, especially the militaristic aspects
of it, and waxed lyrical about Muslim conquests in his famous
poem Shikwa (Complaint). In fact Iqbal’s answer to
the problem of colonization was a glorification of men of action,
of war itself and a corresponding condemnation of fatalism
and mystic withdrawal from the world. This was one
of the reactions, just as withdrawal was another, to the cornplexes
created by the experience of colonization. However,
Iqbal has had almost no influence on English writers and his
vitalist philosophy was in no way reflected in the works of
even those who felt the same compulsion to praise tradition
at the expense of innovation. The theme of tradition versus-?
modernity is one of the themes of the Pakistani short story \
in English and even of Pakistani poetry as we have seen earlier.

Most modern literatures including Urdu literature have

reacted to Victorian prudery and writers like D.H. Lawrence
have, in his essays and in the novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover
(1928), asserted the thesis that sex is not only natural but
should be given a sacramental significance in a healthy society.
This special lawrentian twist is not to be found in Urdu
literature at all. The liberal argument that it is natural and
one should be uninhibited about it has, however, inspired
the writings of Asmat Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto.
However, the liberals and the pre-Partition Progressives did
give a moralistic twist to their emphasis on sex: they argued

230
that they were showing this aspect of life so as to make people
aware of it and disapprove of it. On the other hand the
medieval poets -- Mir Taqi Mir, Hakim Momin Khan
Momin, Ghaiib - did have erotic verse in their collected
works but they were not apologetic nor did they pretend that
it was there for some social purpose or edification. Thus
there was a conflict in the minds of the writers between the
rising middle class prudery of modern Pakistan and latitudinarian
liberal values.

This conflict can be seen in many English writers though

there is almost nothing in the short story which can compare
with Asmat’s ’Lihaf (a story about lesbianism) and Manto’s
more outspoken works. There are, however, bawdy references
in the modern Western style in Sidhwa’s novels. Her
Ice-Candy-Man is especially bawdy and full of humour too. It
is not erotic nor is Zulfikar Ghose’s The Murder of Aziz
Khan. However, in this novel there are references to sexual
acts and tabooed expressions as in many modern novels. In
the other novels of Ghose there is even more sex though it is
never meant to be pornograhic in intent. Sex has been used
as a major theme only by Hanif Kureishi in ’My Beautiful
Laundrette’. But even here the focus of interest is not the
homosexual relations between two youths but the redemptive
possibility of human love; the idea that love can make
people transcend racial hatred. However, homosexuality is
shown and that makes the work less inhibited than most
other works of Pakistani literature written in English.
y Perhaps the experience of colonization has affected English
writers ideologically. Their world view is not medieval
or Islamic. It is anthropocentric, secular and, in some sense
of the word, liberal. This liberalism is not expressed politically
nor is it a matter of sharply defined philosophical reasoning.
It is merely a more or less vague consensus of opinion
about the desirability of democracy in politics, some less
than orthodox version of Islam in religion and some kind of
mixed economy in the system of distribution of wealth.
Along with this goes, in varying degrees, some concern with
the eternal values and some romanticism of outlook. Among
the values which have started to dominate the middle class

231
recently, nationalism has won acceptance, though it has not
found adequate expression in good Pakistani literature in
English, in the last few decades.

Philosophical themes, like the rise of the individual and

alienation from all cultures, find expression in both fiction
and poetry. However, the poetry, which is mostly apolitical,
is full of philosophical and abstract themes. Fiction is
preoccupied with social relations but it would be misleading
to compare it with the best works of Jhabvala or Jane
Austen. The average writer produces what in another country
would be called pulp fiction and has been referred to only
because there is so little good fiction.

Why Pakistani fiction in English is not politically sophisticated

or even realistic is -- to hazard a theory -- partly because
there was no strong political tradition in Indian literature
in Urdu as well as English and anti-colonialism, which
created the states of Pakistan and India, did not find corresponding
literary expression. English writers remained concerned
with romanticism and with the ability to write good
English in the beginning and this continued to be the tradition
of minor writers in Pakistan. Unfortunately, there were
hardly any major writers so that a distinctively new literary
tradition did not emerge. One reason for this could be that
there has never been any encouragement of creative work in
English in Pakistan either at the official level or at the publicone.
Even Pakistani universities have never given attention
to this literature and the best Pakistani writers have had to
settle abroad or, at any rate, publish abroad. Thus Ghose
lives in Austin and is supported by the University there;
Bapsi Sidhwa lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is supported
by Harward and Hanif Kureishi lives in London.
Daud Kama) was published by Peter Dent in England and
Alamgir Hashmi got published in the United States. Athar
Tahir too gets published abroad and, among short story
writers, my own short stories were published in The Short
Stor\- International (New York). In poetry alone we have got
some anthologies in which the works of good poets such as
Tautiq Rafat, Maki Kureishi, Shahid Hosain and Kaleem
Omar have been published. There is almost no forum for the

232
drama and hardly any for the short story though some weekend
magazines do accept short stories sometimes. But all
this does not fully explain why great literature has not been
published in English in Pakistan so far. After all the regional
languages too have not been encouraged but still the literature
which exists in them is less pseudo-intellectual and artificial
than most of the products of those who write in English.
Perhaps there is no fully satisfying explanation except
that the great writers in English are yet to emerge on the literary
scene.

This survey cannot, of course, make great writers emerge

all of a sudden. But it can make readers, ordinary readers as
well as critics, aware as to where Pakistani literature written
in English stands at present. And this awareness might shift
more attention to creative writing in Pakistan. Then Pakistan
too might have literature which can compare with the
best in Third World literatures in English. As yet, except
some good poetry and the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa and Zulfikar
Ghose, we do not have anything to compare with the
best that is being written elsewhere. If this survey can at all
contribute towards bringing about this literary efflorescence,
1 will be amply rewarded.

233
NOTES

1. Charles L. Larson, The Emergence of African Fiction,

66.

2. Shatto Arthur Gakwandi, The Novel and Contemporary

Experience in Africa, 1.

3. Doris Lessing, African Stories (1964).

4. Bruce King ed. Literatures of the World in English,

165.

5. Larson, 63.

6. Claude Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of

Modern Africa, 158-159.

7. D.S. Izevabaye, King. op. cit. 146.

8. Gakwandi, 87.

9. Larson, 168.

10. S.H. Burton & C.J.H. Chacksfield African Poetry in

English, 125.

11. Larson, 171.

12. E.N. Obiechina, ’Amos Tutola and the Oral Tradition’,

Presence Africaine, No.65 (1968), 58-78.

13. Berenth Lindfors, ’Amos Tutola’s TelevisionHanded

Ghostess’, Ariel, II, No.l, 68-77. Quoted
from Readings in Commonwealth Literature ed.
William Walsh, 142-151 (151).

14. Larson, 17

15. Ibid, 279.

16. Hena Maes-Jelinek, ’Wilson Harris’ in West Indian

Literature ed. Bruce King, 182.

17. Anthony Boxill, The Beginnings to 1929’, Ibid, 32.

18. Clifford Sealy, Talking about the-Thirties’, interview
of Alfred H. Mendes in Voices, 1,5 (December 1965),
5.

19. Michael Gilkes, ’Edgar Mittelholzer’, West Indian

Literature op. cit. 96.

20. Fahmida Riaz, Pakistan: Literature and Society

(1968), 34.

21. See Hashmi’s poem This Time in Lahore’ in This

Time in Lahore (1983), 10 and my short stories The
Rajah With the Two Faces’, The Muslim (2 April,

234
1982) and ’The Lead Gatherer’, The Muslim, (15
November, 1986).

22. The Prisoner: A Novel trans from the Punjabi by

Khalid Hasan (] 984).

23. Fahmida Riaz, 124.

235
14

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. PAKISTANI LITERATURE IN ENGLISH:

Only novels, collections of short stories, plays, prose writings

and collections of verse are listed in this section. Except it
obvious, and in the case of poetry, the literary genre to
which a work belongs is indicated in square brackets. The
words ’no information’ mean that the copy seen by the author
liives no information about publication.

Aamir, Abdul Ghaioor.

My Celestial Dreams Rawalpindi: Waqas Publishing

House, 19.S5.

Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad,

Tomorrow is Ours [novel] Bombay: Popular Book

Depot, 1943.

Invitation to Immortality [play] Bombay: Padma Publications

Ltd, 1944.

Rice and Other Stories Bombay: Kutub Publishers

Ltd, 1947.

Blood and Ston’es [novel] Bombay: Hind Kitabs Ltd,

1947.

Outside India: The Adventures of a Roving Reporter

[prose] Delhi: Half Publishing House, 1938.
Cages of Freedom and Other Stories Bombay: Hind
Kitabs Ltd, 1952.

Ahmad, M. R..

Zindagi [short stories] Lahore: Privately Published,

n.d.

236
Ahmad, Akbar S.,

More Lines: Selected Poems, Karachi: Royal Book

Company, 1980.

Ahmad, Sayeed,

The Thing [play]

Ahsen, Akhter,

Manhunt in the Desert: The Epic Dimensions of Man,

New York: Brandon House, 1979.

Alavi, Irene,

On the Touchstone of Life. Karachi: Ma’arif Ltd,

1971.

AH, Ahmed,

Twilight in Delhi [novel] 1940; Bombay: Oxford University

Press, 1966.

Ocean of the Might [novel] London: Peter Owen Ltd,

1^64.

Purple Gold Mountain, London: Keepsake Press,

I960.

Purple Gold Mountain [expanded version].

The Prison House: Short Stories, Karachi: Akrash
Publishing, 1985.

Rats and Diplomats [novel] Karachi: Akrash Publishing,

1986.

All, Hina Babar,

Wei Sun, Lahore: Indus Publications Ltd. 1983.

ed.Inspirations: Journal of Poetry, Vol.II, No. 1
(Winter, 1986). Lahore: The Quaid-e-Azam Library,
ed Inspirations: Journal of Poetry, Vol.111 (Summer,
1987). Lahore: The Quaid-e-Azam Library. [See also
under IMAM, Hina Faisal].
AH, S. Amjad, ed.

Poetry Supplement: Pakistan Quarterly XVII: 2

(Summer, 1970).

237
All, Nusrat,

My Heart Under Your Feet. Karachi: Itrat Ali, 1975.

Allana, G.,

Incence and Echoes, Karachi: AJ-Barkat Publishing

House, n.d.

At the gate of Love: Poems of Spiritual Love, Lahore:

Ferozesons, 1978.

The Hills of Heaven: Selected Poems, Karachi: Royal

Book Company, 1980.

Anvery, FA.,

...and twilights whispering, Karachi: Privately Published,

1987.

Arif, Abdul Qayyum Khan,

Bewilderment to Sublimity [novel] Lahore: Ferozesons

Ltd, 1969.

Ashraf, Syed Ali, ed.

The New Harmony: An Anthology of Pakistani Poetry,

Karachi: Department of English, University of
Karachi, 1970.

Ayub, S.M.,

Shall We Meet Again [novel]

Azam, Ikram,

Pious Sins and Other Stories with Sagheer Husain;

Rawalpindi: M.Z.A. Khan, 1964.
Farewell to Love: A Short Novel, Rawalpindi: University
Book Depot, 1962.

The Valley of Pines & The Rainbow of Life [novels]

Rawalpindi: Muzaffar Mahmood & Sons, n.d.
Three Novels, Islamabad: Margalla Voices, 1986.
[reprints all the three novels].

Sons of the Soil: Some Poems, Short Plays, Stories and

Articles, Rawalpindi: London Book Company, 1974.

238
The Martyr and Other Plays, Lahore: Ferozesons Ltd,

n.d.

Shadows by Moonlight [plays and poems] Rawalpindi:

Muzaffar Mahmood & Sons, 1969.

Plays and Stories, Rawalpindi: Nairang-e-Khayal

Publications, 1988 [reprints of plays and stories listed

above].

The Exploiters [novel] Islamabad: Margalla Voices,

1986.

Two Floating Eyes, Rawalpindi: Mavra Publications,

1976.

Tip-Toeing Into My Heart, Rawalpindi: English Book

House, 1978.

Poems: 1982, Rawalpindi: Privately Published, 1982.

Three Voices: Daud Kamal, Hamid Khan and Ikram

Azam, Rawalpindi: Nairang-e-Khayal Publications,

1985.

Futurism! Spring Again!, Rawalpindi: Variety Book

Stall, 1983.

Poems for You, Rawalpindi: London Book Company,

1981.

Aziz, Abdul Haleem,

Nothing in Particular, Hyderabad: Privately Published,

1967.
Nothing in Earnest, Hyderabad: as above, 1967.
Solo, as above, 1968.
O’Bartender!, as above, 1968.
The Decayed, as above, 1968.
Pop Writings, as above, 1975.

Baber, Zahir,

Audible Silence, Rawalpindi: Z.B. Associates, 1985.

Bhurgi, Abdul Kadir,

Heartaches, Karachi: Ferozesons Ltd, 1985.

239
Burki, Hamidullah Khan,

Satjipur Sacred and Other Stories, Rawalpindi: National

Publishing House, 1969.

Chaudhry, VVaqar ilussain,

Strav Thoughts, Faisalahad: Oirtas Puhlishinu House,

1984,

Chaudhry, Zafar A,

Mosaic of Memory [prose] Lahore: Privately Published,

1985.

Ebrahim, Zubie,

A Necklace of My Thoughts, Lahore: Wajidalis, 198.1

Far had, Danish,

EcdysLs, Lahore: Cosmopolitan Publications, 197.1

Phoenix, Lahore: Cosmopolitan Publications, 1974.

Farooqi, Nasir Ahmad,

Faces of Love and of Death [novel] Lahore: Privately,

1985.

The Naked Night: A Play in Three Acts, Lahore: Maktaba

Iqdam, 1965.

Sadness at Dawn: Four Short Stones and a Novelette,

Lahore: Watan Publications, 1967.
Snakes and Ladders [novel] Lahore: Watan Publications,
1968.
ed Under the Green Canopy [see under anthologies].

Farooqi, Zahir M,

Love in Ruins [novel] London: VVinterson, I960.

Chani. Mahbub.

Manhood’s New Wa\\ Lahore: Privately Published,

1975.

240
Chose, Zulllkar,

The Contradictions [novel] London; Macmillan, 1966.

Confessions of a Native-Alien, London: Routledge,

1965.

The Loss of India, London: Routledge, 1964.

Jets from Orange, London: Macmillan, 1967.

The Murder of Aziz Khan [novel] London: Macmillan

1967.

The Violent West, London: Macmillan, 1972.

The Incredible Brazilian: The Native, New York: The

Overlook Press, 1972.

The Incredible Brazilian: The Beautiful Empire,

[novel] London: Macmillan, 1975.

The Incredible Brazilian: A Different World, [novel]

London: Macmillan, 1978.

Crump’s Terms [novel] London: Macmillan, 1975.

Hulme’s Investigations into the Bogart Script [novel]

Austin & New York: Curbstone Press, 1981.

A New History of Tonnents [novel] London: Hutchinson&

Co.Publishers, 1982.

Hamlet Prufmck and Language [Criticism] New

York: St. Martin’s, 1978.

The Fiction of Reality [Criticism] London: Macmillan

Press, 1983.

Figures of Enchantment [novel] New York: Harper &.

Row Publishers, 1986.

Statement Against Corpses; Stories with B.SJohnson.

London: Constable & Co. 1964.

Don Bueno [novel] 1983; London: Black Swan, 1984.

A Memory of Asia: New and Selected Poems Austin:

Curbstone Publishing Co. 1984.

Habib, Muhammad,

The Desecrated Bones and Other Stories Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1925.

llamid, Shahid,

Disastrous Twilight [prose] London: Leo Cooper with

Seeker Warburg, 1986.

241
Hamidullah, Zaib-un-Nissa,

The Young Wife and Other Stories, Karachi: The Mirror

Publications, 1958.
Lotus Leaves, Lahore: The lion Press, 1946.
Indian Bouquet; 60 Days in America [prose] Karachi:
The Mirror Press, 1956.

The Flute of Memory, Karachi: The Mirror Press,

1964.
Poems, Karachi: The Mirror Press, n.d.

Hasan, Irshad Ul.,

The Walls of Glass, Lahore: Omega paperbacks 1978.

Hasan, Khalid,

A Mug’s Game [prose] Lahore: Sh. Ghulam Ali &

Sons, n.d.

The Crocodiles are Here to Swim [prose] Lahore: Privately

Published, 1970.

Scorecard [prose] Lahore; Wajidalis Ltd, 1984.

Give Us Back Our Onions [prose] Lahore: Vanguard
Books Ltd, 1985.

Hashmi, Alamgir,

The Oath and Amen, Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co.

1976.

America is a Punjabi Word, Lahore: Karakoram

Range, 1979.

My Second in Kentucky, Lahore: Vision Press, 1981.

This Time in Lahore, Lahore: Vision Press, 1983.

Neither This Time/Nor That Place, Lahore: Vision

Press, 1984.
edPakistani Literature [see anthologies].

ed. Worlds of the Muslim Imagination [as above]

Inland and Other Poems Islamabad: Gulmohar, 1988.

Hassan, Riffat,

:,; My Maiden, Lahore: Feroze Hassan, n.d.

242
Haque, Anwar-Ul,

Aeolina, Karachi: Razi Printers, 1969.

Pierian Springs, Karachi: Razi Printers, 1978.
Secunder Zulqamain, No information, 1979.

Haq, Inamul,

Recollections, Lahore: Wajidalis, 1984.

Poems, Persons, Places, Lahore: The Quaid-e-Azam

Library, 1986.

Hayat, Azmat,

Write Roses and Red, Rawalpindi: Ferozesons Ltd,

1982 [Fiction & Poetry].

Hosain, Shahid,

ed. First Voices; Six Poets from Pakistan Karachi: Oxford

University Press, 1965.

Hussain, Sagheer,

The Martyr Speaks [poems, essays & stories] ed.

Chaudhry Noor Hussain, Zohra Azam & Ikram
Azam; Gujranwala: Chaudhry Noor Hussain, 1970.
Pious Sins and Other Stories with Ikram Azam;
Rawalpindi: M.Z.A. Khan, 1964.

Ikrantullah, Shaista,

Behind the Veil [prose] Karachi: Pakistan Publications,

n.d.

From Purdah to Parliament [prose] London: The

Crescent Press Ltd, 1963.

Jamal, Mahmood,

Silence Inside a Gun’s Mouth, London: Kala Press,

1984.
Jeddy, Bilal Ahmad,
The Wliite Tiger of Viringa and Other Short Stories,
Karachi: Syed and Syed, 1976.

243
Kamal Daud,

The Compass of Love Karachi: Privately,.,1973.

Recognitions, Devon: Interim Press, 1979.

A Remote Beginning, Devon: Interim Press, 1985.

Three Voices (see under anthologies).

The Blue Wind (see under anthologies).

Kamal, Nazir and Imran Aslam,

August Puddles, London: Community Relations

Commission, 1975.

Kasim, Sofia,

Feelings, No information given.

Kayani, Malik Rustum,

Half Truths [prose] Lahore: Pakistan Writers’ Cooperative

Society, 1966; Third Edition, 1976.
Some More Truth [prose] Lahore: Pakistan Writers’
Co-operative Society, 1977.

Not the Whole Truth [prose] Lahore: Pakistan Writers’

Co-operative Society, 1962; sixth edition, 1977.
A Judge May Laugh and Even Cry [prose] Lahore:
Pakistan Writers’ Co-operative Society, 1983.

Kazi, Elsa,

Old English Garden Symphony: A Novel With Twelve

Themes, Exposition, Development and Recapitulation

[novel] Karachi: A.K. Brohi, 1952.

Wisdom in Verse, Lahore: Publishers United Printing

Press, 1970.

Temptation - A Drama ofSind Life

Celestial and Terrestrial Echoes.

Kazi, 1.1.,

Adventures of the Brown Girl in Her Search for God

[short story] London, 1933; Hyderabad: Sindhi Adabi
Board, 1979.

244
Kazmi, Asad,

Poetic Pearls, Lahore: Feroze Sons, 1975.

Khan, Guizar Ahmed,

Slaves of Time: A Drama (Lahore: Privately Published,

n.d.

Khan, Mohammad Asghar,

Generals in Politics [prose] Lahore: Vikas, 1984.

The Lighter Side of the Power Came [prose] Lahore:
Jang Publications, 1985.

Khan, Muhammad Musa,

Jawan to General: Recollections of a Pakistani Soldier

[prose] Lahore: East and West Publishing Co. 1984.

Khan, Sikandar Hay at,

Sweat and Sighs, Lahore: Mavra Publications, 1984.

Moans at Midnight, Lahore: Mavra Pub. 1986.

Khan, Tahawar Ali,

Man-Eaters of Sunderbans [prose] Lahore: International

Publishers, 1961.

Khwaja, Shamim Sharif,

Poems, Lahore: Privately Published, 1980.

Khwaja, Waqas Ahmad,

Scattered Flowers, Lahore: Private, 1970.

Poems, Lahore: Kitabistan, n.d.
Six Geese From a Tomb at Medum, Lahore: Sang-eMeel
Publications, 1987.

ed. Cactus: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature, Lahore:

Writers’ Group;

Mornings in the Wilderness: Readings in Pakistan Literature,

Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1988.
[The first two books appeared under the name of
Waqas Ahmad].

245
Kureishi, Omar,

Black Moods [prose] Karachi: Jaykay Publications,

1955.

Out to Lunch.

Kureishi, Hanif,

Outskirts and Other Plays, London: John Calder,

1983.

Borderline [drama] London: Methuen Press, 1981.

My Beautiful Laundrette and the Rainbow Sign

[drama] London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 1986.

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid [drama] London: Faber

& Faber, 1988.

Soaking up the Heat [drama].

Luther, Abdur Rauf,

Shock and Shriek, Lahore: Mubarak Ali Publishers,

1977.

Uncontrolled Island, Lahore: Mubarak Ali, 1977.

Epic of Faith, Lahore: Dilshad Sons Publishers, 1981.
Sweet Hope and Beads of Pearls, Lahore: Yusuf Ali
Publishers, 1981.

Cradle to Cross: Jesus Christ, Lahore: Yusuf Ali Publishers,

1982.

Lotus of Love Lord Buddha, Lahore: Shelley Publishers

Ltd, 1983.

Ladder of Spiritual Love, Lahore: Yusuf Ali, n.d.

Pakistan Bewails Muslim’s Moral Death Lahore:
Yusuf Ali, n.d.
Ali Divine-Inspired Soul [no information].
Mahmood, Tariq,

Hand on the Sun [novel] Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1983.

Malik, Aisha,

The Wheels Go Round and Hound [short stories] Lahore:

Enfine Book Centre, 1966.

246
Masroor, Mehr Nigar,

Shadows of Time [novel] Delhi: Chankya Publications,

1987.

Mazari, Wall Khan,

First Currents, Karachi: Privately published, n.d.

Mooraj, Anwar,

Sand, Cacti and People [prose] Karachi: Greengrove

Press, 1960.

Mujtaba, Ghazala,

The Burning Bud. New York: Vantage, 1980.

Nizamudin, M,

Green Leaves, Karachi: Fulbright Publications, 1966.

Noon, Malik Feroze Khan,

Wisdom From Fools [short stories & prose] Lahore:

Rai Sahib M. Gulab Singh & Sons.

Scented Dust [novel] Lahore: Gulab Singh & Sons,

1941.

From Memory [prose] Lahore: Privately, 1966.

Canada And India [prose] London: Oxford

Univ.Press.

Onlooker (Hasan Abbasi),

Over a Cup of Tea [prose] Karachi: Offset Press, n.d.

Omar, Kaieem, ed.

Word/all: Three Pakistani Poets Karachi: Oxford University

Press, 1975.
Pataudi, Sher All Khan,

Quest of Identity [prose] Lahore: Al-Kitab, 1984.

Qayum, Qazi Abdul,

The Mystic Path Lahore: Privately published, 1970.

247
Ratal, Taufiq,

The Arrival of the Monsoon: Collected Poems 1947-78,

Lahore: Vanguard Books Ltd, 1985.

Rahamin, Fyzee,

Daughter of Ind [drama] Bombay: New Book Coy,

1937.

Rahman, Tariq,

Poems of Adolescence Rawalpindi: Cezan Books,

1979.

Ran a, L.T,

Kismat Lahore: Ferozesons Ltd, 1985.

Rchman, Attiqur,

Sip Slowly [prose] Rawalpindi: Army Education

Press, n.d.

Roy, Raja Tridiv,

The Windswept Wahini [short stories] Lahore: Ferozesons

Ltd, 1972;

They Also Belong [short stories] Rawalpindi: National

Publishing Houses, 1972.

Saeed, Jocelyn Ortt,

Between Forever & Never, Lahore: Lion Art Press,

n.d.

Where No Road Goes, Lahore: Lion Art Press n.d.

Rainbow of Promise, Sargodha: Privately published.

19(>4.
Selected Poems, Lahore: Nirali Kitaben. 19S(>.

Said, Yunus,

Death b\ Hanging and Other Stories, Karachi: Falak

Publishers Ltd. 1974.

ed. Ten Years of Vision [prose & miscellaneous]

Karachi: Vision Publications. 1963.

248
Pieces of Eight: Eight Poets from Pakistan, Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 1()71.

Saved, Matlub ul Hasan,

Songs and Satires Karachi: 36 Saleemi, 1975.

Scljouk, Mehdi All,

M\ Goddess: A Devotional Poem, London: Duckworth,

1959.
Corpses [short Stories], London: Duckworth, 1966.

Shah, Saadullah,

Blinking Stare Lahore: Zia-e-Ahad, n.d.

Shahnawaz, Jahanara,

Father and Daughter [prose] Lahore; Nigarishat,

1971.

Shahnawaz, Mumtaz,

The Heart Divided Lahore: Mumtaz Publications,

1957.

Shami, Parwaiz,

Poems: Patriotic A Personal Karachi: Privately published,

1975.

Sharif, Sa’d,

Police Sendee Academy to Alipur Special Jail [prose,

poems] Lahore: Privately published, 1974.

Sheikh, Bilquis,

/ Dared to Cull Him Father [prose] with Richard

Schneider; Virm’nia, Lincoln: Chosen Books Publishing
Coy, 1979.

Sheikh, Mansoor Y,
In Search of Form: Poems Karachi: Time & Tide
Publications, 1978.

249
Sherifa.

I Some Times Wonder Rawalpindi: 1986.

Siddiqui, Maajed,

The Soul of Wit: Short Poems, Rawalpindi: Apna

Edaara, 1985.

Sidhwa, Bapsi,

The Crow Eaters [novel] Lahore: Privately published,

1978.

The Bride [novel] 1983; London: Futura Macdonald

& Co, 1984;

The Ice-Candy-Man [novel] London: Michael Joseph,

1985.

Sipra, Mahmud,

Pawn to King Three [novel] London: Michael, Joseph,

1985.

Suhrawardy, Shahid,

Essays in Verse Cambridge Univ. Press 1937. Dacca:

Pakistan P.E.N, 1962.

Sultan, Raja Changez,

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Nomad & Other Poems

Rawalpindi: Subah Publications, 1986.

Tabassum, Abdul Rashid,

A Window to the East: Short Stories New York: Vantage

Press, 1981.

The Horizon Speaks: Poetry, Devon, Ilfracombe:

Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd, 1980.
The Revolt of the Slaves (1937).
Tahir, Athar, ed.

Next Moon: Five Pakistani Poets Lahore: Quaid-eAzam

Library Publications, 1985.
ed. A Various Terrain: An Anthology of Pakistani English
Poetry, Lahore: QAL, 1986.

250
ed. The Inner Dimension, Lahore: QAL, 1987.

Taufail, Akhtar,

The Vale of Tears Rawalpindi: Privately published,

n.d.

Vinal, Kelly,

Nefarious Pandemonium (no information).

Viqar, Arif,

Karachi Karachi: Privately published, 1983.

Walter, T J,

The Kidnapped Boy [novel for children] (no information).

Yazdani, Saeed P,

The Seduced [short stories] (no Information)

Zameenzad, Adam,

The Thirteenth House [Novel] London: Fourth Estate,

1987;

My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore [Novel] London:

Fourth Estate, 1988.

Zuberi, Itrat,

Poems Karachi: Saida Zuberi, 1974.

251
15

1.2. PAKISTANI LITERATURE:

ANTHOLOGIES

(title-wise arrangement)

The Blue Wind: Poems in English from Pakistan. Budleigh:

Salterton: Interim Press, 1984.

Cactus: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature, eci. Waqas Ahmad

Khwaja, Lahore: Writers Group Publication, 1985.

Chelsea: 46: World Literature in English. (New York, 1987)

[Contains work by Ha.shmi, Ghose, Ali and Javaid Qazi].

First Voices. Sir Poets from Pakistan, ed. Shahid Hosain,

Karachi: Oxford UP; 1965.

The Inner Dimension ed. Athar Tahir, Lahore: Quaid-eAzam

Library, Publications, 1987. (These publications will
be abbreviated as Q ^P).

Inspirations: A Journal of Poetry. Vol.2 (Winter, 1986) ed.

Hina Faisal Imam (nee Bal>er Ali), Lahore: QLP, 1986.

Inspirations: A Journal of Poetry. Vol.3 (1987) ed. Hina Faisal

Imam, Lahore: QLP, [988.

Inspirations: A Journal of Po^tn: Vol.4 (1988) ed. Hina Faizal

Imam. Lahore: QLP. 1988.

The Journal of the English Literary Club. Peshawar: Dept. of

English, the University of Peshawar, 1985, 86 & 87. (poetry
fiction and criticism by Pakistanis].

252
Mornings in the Wilderness: Readings in Pakistani Literature.
ed. Waqas Ahmad Khwaja. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1988.

The New Harmony, ed. Syed All Ashraf, Karachi: Dept of

English, the University of Karachi, 1970.

The New Quarterly: Pakistan Literature. Vol. Ill, No. 1

(January, 1978) .ed. K.B.Rao and guest edited hy Alamgir
Hashmi (fiction etc).

The New Quarterly: Pakistan Poetry. Vol. Ill; No. 1 (January,

1978) edited as above.

Next Moon: Five Pakistani Poets, ed. Athar Tahir, Lahore:

OAL, 1984.

Pakistani Literature: the Contemporary English Writers, ed.

Alamgir Hashmi, Islamabad: Gulmohar, 1987 [reprint of The
new Quarterly of 1978].

Pakistan Quarterly: Poetry Supplement, ed. S. Amjad Ali;

XVII:2 (Summer,’1970).

Pearls. Lahore: Caravan Book Mouse, 1981 [Poems by Javaid

Faiz, Nabila Gul, Shahzada Tahir and Farkhanda Butt].

Perspective. II: 1 & 2 (1968), Introduced by Taufiq Ratal

[poems by six poets].

Perspective. VI: 1 (1972).

Pieces of Eight: Eight Poets from Pakistan. Intro. Yunus Said,

Karachi: Oxford UP, 1971.

Ravi: Special Issue. Vol. 65 (1974) [See all issues for poetry
and criticism by Pakistani writers].

253
HI Ten Years of Vision, ed. Yunus Said, Karachi: Vision Puhlica*

|l II tions, 1963 [Urdu literature in translation, criticism and EnI

11III glish literature].

! HI Three Voices: Daud Kamal, Hamid Klian, Ikram Azam.

j || |r| Rawalpindi: Nairang-e-Khayal Publications, 1985.

flj || |l I Under the Green Canopy: Selections from Contemporary CreH

II HI ative Writings of Pakistan, ed. Nasir Ahmad Farooqi, Lahore:

I llllli Afro-Asian Book Club, 1966 [Urdu and English literature

and criticism].

• || A Various Terrain: An Anthology of Pakistani English Poetry.

• j|| ed. Athar Tahir, Lahore: QLP, n.d.

^^ In I Venture: Special Issue on Pakistani Writings in English, ed.

• I Syed Ali Ashraf, Vol. 6: No. 1 (December, 1969) [Poetry and

9 HI criticism].

I HI Voices Old and New. Lahore: The American Center, 1974

I I [American and Pakistani verse].

H in

I | Wordfall: Three Pakistani Poets, ed. Kaleem Omar. Karachi:

• I Oxford UP, 1975.

I | The Worlds of Muslim Imagination, ed. Alamgir Hashmi, IsH

| lamabad: Gulmohar, 1986 [Urdu and other literatures in

• | translation, criticism and English poetry].

| | Note: Anthologies of verse published abroad containing po|

II j ems by Pakistanis which are represented elsewhere have not

1 I been listed.

254
1.3. PAKISTANI LITERATURE:

CRITICISM

Ahmad, Iftikhar.

’Idiom and Vision’ -- 1: Pak Times (24 April 1982).

’Idiom and Vision -- 2: The Poetry of Taufiq Rafat’,
Pak Times (30 April 1982).

Ahmad, Khalid.

’No Muse is Good Muse’, Ravi, LXI:3

(Sept, 1968), 16-25.

Two English Poets’. Rev. America is a Punjabi Word

by Hashmi in Pak Times (14 Dec 1979).

’Bapsi’s First Novel’. Rev. The Crow Eaters by Bapsi

Sidhwa in Pak Times (17 Nov 1978).

’Salman Rushdie’s Novel’. Rev. Midnight’s Children

mPak Times (12 March 1982).

Ahmad, Rukhsana.

’Bouquets and Bricks’. Rev. This Time in Lahore by

Alamgir Hashmi in Inside Asia [London] (June-Aug,
1985), 54-55.

Ahmad, Sultan.

’Gentle Songs of Gentle Woman: Begum Hamidullah’s

Poems on Love and Life’. Rev. The Flute of
Memory by Zaibunnissa Hamidullah in The Leader (3
June 1964).

Ahmed, Zafaryab.

’The Novel Comes Naturally to Me’. Interview of

Bapsi Sidhwa in Viewpoint (25 Feb 1988), 21-22 &
32.

Amanuddin, Syed.

Rev. The Blue Wind in World Literature Today LIX:2

(1985), 322. *

255
’Private and Public’. Rev. The New Quarterly .ed.
K.B.Rao and Hashmi in CRNLE Reviews Journal \
(1981), 22-23,

Pakistani Literature .ed. Hashmi in World Lit Today,

61:3 (Summer, I987),494.

Anderson, David I).

’Contemporary Pakistani Literature’, Pak Q, 12:2

(1964), 13-18.

’English Writing in Pakistan’, Scintilla, 5 (1964), 4651.

’Pakistani Literature Today’, Literature East and

West, 10:3 (1966), 235-244 [Similar to the previous

two item.s].

’Ahmed Ali and Twilight in Delhi: the Genesis of a

Pakistani Novel’. Muhfii 7:1&2 (1971), 81-86.

’Ahmed Ali and the Growth of a Pakistani Literary

Tradition in English’, WLWE, 14: (1975), 436-449.

Anjum, A.R.

Rev. Wordfall in Explorations, IV:2 (Winter, 1977),

71-72.

Anwar, Sayved.

’A Collection of Short Stories’. Rev. The White Tiger

of Viringu by Jeddy in Dawn (8 July 1977).

Ashraf, Syed Ali.

The Poetry of Shahid Suihrawardy’, Venture, VI: 1

(1969), 45-53.
’Enulish Poetry in Pakistani’, Vision, 16:2 (1967), 1924.”

’Rafat, Taufiq’, in Contemporary Poets. First edition

.ed. Ros;ilie Murphy. London: St. James Press, 1970.
’The Study of English Literature’, Commonwealth
Literature .ed. St James Press, 137-143.
Aveling, Harry.

Treasure Chest’. Rev. The Worlds of Muslim Imagination,

.ed. Hashmi ’mAsiaveek (10 May 1987), f>l.

256
Azam, Ikram

’The Role of Writers and Poets in the war’, Pak Rev,

14(1966), 32-33 & 38.

’The Sphinx of Poesy: Zeb-un-Nisa Hamidullah Pak.

Rev.XVU:4( 1969), 34-37,

’Daud Kama!: A Loner’, Viewpoint (2 July 1981).

BJ.

Rev. The Blue Wind in Kunapipi, VI:3 (1984), 118121.

Bhatti, Gul Hameed.

’A Ferris Wheel Ride’. Rev. The Wtiite Tiger of

Viringa by Jeddy in The Herald (May 1977), 28.

Billington, Michael.

’Birds of Passage’. Rev. Birds of Passage by Kureishi

in The Guardian [UK] (16 September 1983).

Bold, Alan.

’In the Tracks of the Golden Beast’. Rev. A New

History of Torments by Ghose in TLS (10 September
1982), 981.

Bose, M.

’India’s Witching Hour’. Rev. Midnight’s Children in

South [London] (March 1982), 56.

Brander, Laurence.

’Two Novels by Ahmed Ali’, JCL, 3 (July, 1967), 7686;

’Ali, Ahmed’, Contemporary Novelists 3rd edition, .ed.

James Vinson. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982,

19-21.

257
Brooks, David.

An Interview With Salman Rushdie’, Helix

[Australia] 19/20 (1984), 55-69.
Brownjohn, Alan.

’Cosmic, Comic, Casual, Careful -- New Poetry’. Rev,

Recognitions by Daud Kamal in Encounter, L1H:5
(November 1979), 77.

Butt, Aziz A.

’Our Young Writers’, Ravi, LXI:3 (September 1968),

12-15.

Butt, M.N.

’An Anthology of High Quality’. Rev, The Worlds of

Muslim Imagination by Hashmi in The Nation (4
September 1987).

Campbell, Ewing.

Rev, Hulme’s Investigations into the Bogart Script by

Ghose in The Pawn Review, V( 1981-82), 156-57.

Chinweizu.

’Decolonising the Mind’, South (Jan. 1983), 19-21.

Chohan, Musa Javed.

’Dialogue with History’, Ibid, 24-26 [interview with

Salman Rushdie].

Cooke, Judy.

’Roast Cat’. Rev. Crow Eaters by Sidhwa in New

Statesman [UK] (19 September 1981), 23.

Coppola, Carlo.

The Poetry of Ahmed AliV/H^, VIII: 1-2 (1981), 6376.

The Short Stories of Ahmed Ali’, Studies in the Urdu

Chazal .ed. Muhammad Uirujr Memon (1978), 211242.

’Recent Urdu Poetiry from Pakistan’, New Quarterly

111:1 (Jan. 1978), 103-112; Rev. This Time in Lahore

258
’A Novel by Ahmed All’ by Muhammad Hasan
Askari translated from the Urdu by Coppola in
Makhzan [Lahore] (May, 1949), 1-17.
’The Writer’s Commitment, The Writer’s Art: A
Study of Ahmed Ali’ [forthcoming as a book].

Cosh, Mary.

’Fiction’. Rev, The Crow Eaters by Sidhwa in Times

(18 September 1981).

Couto, Maria.

’In Divided Times’. Rev. Ice-Candy-Man by Sidhwa

in TLS (01 April 1988), 363.

Grace, Jim.

’Pop Goes the Bubble’. Rev. The Crow Eaters in Sunday

Times (5 October 1984).

Craig, Patricia.

’Junglewalla & Co.’. Rev. Crow Eaters by Sidhwa in

TLS (26 September 1981), 1057.

Cruz, Isagani.

’Poet’s Pleasure’. Rev, This Time in Lahore by

Hashmi in Asiaweek [Hong Kong] Vol.10: No.40 (5
October 1984) 62.

Cunningham, Valentiiie.

’Nosing Out the Indian Reality’. Rev. Midnight’s

Children in TLS (15 May 1981).

Davendra, Kohli.

’Landscape and Poetry’, JCL, 13 (April 1979), 54-70

[on Ghose’s poetry].

Dentoit, Marietta.

’Nineteen Poems by Baud Kanial translated into

German’, Unpublished Course Work submitted to
259
ie University of Sussex for the Degree of M.A.

ontainss a useliiillfiHffliHFul introduction].

lita.

m Oriental I ^^^^antasy’. Rev. Midnight’s Children in

he Booff: Revie2ss\’.’.-’.’.’.’-’~w [New Delhi], ”Vol. VI: 1 (July-August

Wl), 32-36.

tonamy.

ev. Twilight inxaaauamme- Delhi by Ahmed Ali in The Spectator

I November 1” ’’’”’’”EJEgg^O).

Leon.

hinker, Vol.l::2rrZZZIZ2 (Nov. 1976), 4:5 [refers to Hashmi’s

setry].

an Pierre.

’he Artistic J mm mimDurney in Salman Rushdie’s Shame’,

7LWE, 23:2 (L_ -984), 451-463.

ev. The Innem** Dimension .ed. Athar Tahir in Pak

imes(l3May 1987).

lah, An«war.

Tieatre in Pal^-••: istan’, Pak Q, 12 :4 (1964), 54-59.

damgir Hash i i ••mi’ New Poems’. Rev. This Time in

ahore bey Has?; =;;;•; s;s....V.limi in Viewpoint, XI: 10 (17 October

»5), 27”;

’oetry o*f Rich Texture’. Rev. A^fy Second in Kentucky

f Hashrrii in \~ ’-”’’”’’”’’^”^Sewpoint, VII:24 (1982), 30.

urence S.
ev. Rer-apnitir: : :;... uimm.^f ty Daud Kamal in World Lit Toii
T” I fir | 11minium• i 180-181;

ev. Thg GoUffZ^’wimmHiMtsn Tradition by Ahmed Ali in Books

broad (:30 Apamim il 1973).

260
Farmer, Penelope.

’Unhappy .’” ”Sojourn’. Rev. The Bride by Sidhwa in

South, No.4 ~*- 1 (March 1984), 46.

Farrukhi, Asif A.

’A Progress- -<ive Decline’. Rev. The Prison House by

Ahmed AJi in Herald (March 1986), 89-90;

’Human R^ .;ng«i Have Turned Human Beings Into

Rats and Pigs’, Herald (March 1986), 116-119,

[Interview c if Ali].

Feinstein, Elaine.

’Quest for IZZZZZZ’ ”Moots’. Rev. Ice Candy-Man in Times (11

Feb. 1988).

Ferres, John F. & 1” ””Martin Tucker.

Modern Cc*”-^” «•••». mmonwealth Literature New York: Ugsgar,

1977. 4 - 20 & 422.

Galvan Reula, J.F.

’Los cien anos de soledad de Salman Rushdie:

Shame’, [Sm :i!i!!iiini|[ir iiijjanish] Revista Canada de Estudlos Inglises,

(April isiiiiiii: liiil 1984), 119-137.

Garett, Simon.

’From Bici ilturalism to Unity’. Rev. My second in

Kentucky iru^^mm^mw CRNLE Rev Journal, 2 (1982), 72-73.

Same in ^ [New Zealand] No. 14 (April, 1982), 64.

Gemmill, Janet Po»-,,,„, „„„„-wers.

’Hashmi’s •••••HIM^oetry of Double Roots’. Rev. The Oath
and Amen by Hashmi in New Literature Review

[Australia] 8 (1980), 60-62.

Rev. The ( tnth and Amen in Journal of South Asian

Literature, ’’ VVT-I (1981), 244-47.

Same in Ex:^=;;;;~^=~llplorations VI:2 (1979), 28-31.

261
Ghani, Mahboob.

’Poetry and Nationality’, Ravi LXI:3 (Sept 1968), 4450.

Ghayur, Nuzhat.

’Daud Kamal -- the Consummate Poet’. Rev. A Remote

Beginning by Kamal in Pak Times (14 March).
’Dreams Blossom/Only in Wakefulness...’ A Remote
Beginning’, JELC (1984-85), 165-167 [as above].
Reprinted in Muslim (11 April 1986).
Rev. My Second in Kentucky in JELC (1983-84), 18586.

’Hope is a Torn Banner’. Rev. A Remote Beginning

Muslim (27 June 1986).

Taufiq Rafat: Thirty Years in a Book’. Rev. Arrival

of the Monsoon by Rafat in JELC (1987), 65-76.

Glen, Janie.

’Hanif and His Beautiful Laundrette’ [Interview of

Kureishi] in The Frontier Post (6 Feb 1987).

Glover, Stephen.

’Recent Fiction’. Rev. The Crow Eaters in Telegraph

(11 Sept 1981).

Gooneratie, Yasmine.

’Door to the Islamic World’. Rev. The Worlds of

Muslim Imagination .ed. Hashmi in Muslim (27 Feb
1987).

Gordon, Giles.

’Parallels: Birds of Passage’. Rev. Birds of Passage by

Hanif Kureishi in The Spectator (24 Sept 1983).

Gowda, H. H. Anniah.

’Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Chinua Achebe’s

Things Fall Apart, Alien Voice: Perspectives on cornmonwealth
Literature .ed. A.K. Srivastava Lucknow:

262
Atlantic Highlands, 1981; Same in The Literary HalfYearly,
XXI: 1(1981). 11-18.

Grant, Steve.

’Not Yet a Master’. Rev. Outskirts by Kureishi in

Time Out (24 April 1981), 14.

Gray, Paul.

’A Passage to Pakistan’. Rev. Shame by Rushdie in

7wH?(14Novl983).

Greening, John.

Rev. The Blue Wind in South West Review [UK]

No.23( 1984), 38-39.

Guptara, Prabhu S.

’The Growing Edge’. Rev. America is a Punjabi Word

by Hashmi and Recognitions by Daud Kamal in
CRNLE Reviews Journal, No.l (1980), 85-89.

Hanquart, Evelyne.

Rev. The Bride by Sidhwa in Afram Newsletter [Paris]

No. 18 (1984), 72 [in French].

Haq, Kaiser.

’Pakistani Patriarchs: Salman Rushdie’s Shame’,

Fonn [Dacca], No.3 (Autumn, 1984), 77-86.

Harris, Wilson.

Womb of Space: The Cross Cultural Imagination

Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood
Press, 1983 [refers to the fiction of Ghose]

Harrison, Bernard.

’Short Notice’. Rev. Recognitions by Daud Kamal in

Use Of English [Scotland] XXXI:1 (1981), 88.

263
Hasan, R.

’Pioneering Literary Scholarship’. Rev. Commonwealth

Literature by Hashrni in The Nation (17 July
1987).

Hasan, Shuaib Bin.

’Pakistani Practitioners of Verse’, Ravi Vol.65:

(1974), 53-71.

’A Good Literary Journal’. Rev. JELC (1984-85) in

Pakistan Times (21 Nov 1985).

Hashmi, Alamgir.

The Basic Issue’, Ravi (May, 1973), 20-28.

’Bapsi Sidhwa, The Crow Eaters’. Rev. WLWE, 20:2

(Autumn, 1981), 373-376.

’Tickling and Being Tickled a La Zulfikar Ghose’.

Rev. Hulme’s Investigations into the Bogart Script by

Ghose in Commonwealth Novel in English 1:2 (1982),

156-65.

Same in Ravi LXXI:2 (1982), 32-38;

Rev. Hulme’s Investigations...in World Lit. Today,

LVI:3( 1982), 574.

Rev. Hulme’s Investigations...^ Kunapipi, 111:2

(19811), 169-70.

’Crow Eaters and Others’, Rev. Crow Eaters in

CRN IE Reviews Journal (May, 19«1), 46-48; Same in

WLWE, XX:2 (1981), 373-76.

’Buddha’s Last Diaper: Our Poetry’, Explorations,

VIF:2(Winter, ]980), 1-8.

Same in Sun and Moon: A Journal of Literature and

Art [Maryland], No. 12.

Rev. A New History of Torments by Ghose in World

Lit Today, LVII[:1 (1984), 167-168,

Rev. Don Bueno by Ghose in World Lit. Today, 59:1

(1985), 158. Same in Nation (3 Oct 1986) as ’Ghose’s

Masterpiece’.

Rev. The Bride bv Sidhwa in World Lit. Todav,

LVIIL4 (1984), 1)67-668,

264
Rev. Hand on the Sun by Tariq Mehmood in World
Lit. Today, LVIII:2 (1984), 327-328.
Same in Nation (7 Nov 1986) as ’Imperialist Rebound
in Racist Democracy’;

The Novelist’s Rejuve-nation: Ahmed Ali and His

Work’,

Rev. Flats and Diplomats by Ahmed Ali in Nation (22

Jan 1988).

Rev. The Prison House by Ahmed Ali in World Lit

Today 61:4 (Autumn, 1987), 679-87.
Rev. Figures of Enchantment by Ghose in World Lit
Today (Winter, 1987), 184,

Rev. A Remote Beginning by Daud Kamal in World

Lit Today 61:1 (Winter, 1987), 164.
’Reviewing a Review: From the Editor of The Worlds
of Muslim Imagination: A Response’, The Star (14
May 1987).

’Pakistani Literature in English’, 1 & 2 Viewpoint (24

& 31 March 1988).

’Pakistani Literature in English: 1986: Gradual Relaxation’,

Viewpoint, (14 April 1988), 27-28 & 30.
’Pakistani Literature in English’, The Nation (12
February 1988) [a shorter version of the three preceding
items].

The Literature of Pakistan’, WLWE, 2:1 (1986)

[Contains a selected bibliography].
Commonwealth Literature: An Essay Towards the Redefinition
of Popular Counter Culture, Lahore: Vision
Press, 1983.

The Commonwealth, Comparative Literature and the

World: Two Lectures, Islamabad: Gulmohar, 1988.

Hashmi, Beatrice.

’A New History of Torments’. Rev. In Swiss Scene

[Zurich], 11:9 (Sept, 1984), 35.

Hassan, Riaz.
’English Poetry in Pakistan’, Pak Q, 17:11 (1970), 6568.

265
’More Pakistani English Poetry’, Ravi, Vol. 65:2

(1975), 72-74.

Hobsbaum, Philip.

’Ghose, Zulfikar’, Contemporary Poets .eds. Vinson, J

& Kirkpatrick, D.L. London: St James Press, 1980 &
1985, 544-546 & 295-296.

Hollington, Michael.

’Salman Rushdie’s Shame’, 43:3 (Sept. 1984), 403407.

Hosain, Shahid.

’Ironic Song: The Poems of Taufiq Rafat’, Ravi,

LX1: 3 (Sept, 1968), 5-8.

Hussain, Ross Masud.

Poetic Power’. Rev. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Nomad and Other Poems by Raja Changez Sultan in
Muslim (24 Oct 1986).

Hussain, Sajjad S.

The Literature of Pakistan’, The Commonwealth

PEN: An Introduction to the Literature of the British

Commonwealth .ed. A.L. McLeod. New York:

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1961. 142-166;

’Pakistani Poetry in English’, Pak Q, 17:2 (1970), 7273.

Imam, Hina Faisal.

’Romance and Religion in Hnshm’i’s Kentucky’, JELC

(1984-85), 171-73;
Same in Crosscurrents [New Zealand] 1:1 (1986), 6162.

Iqbal, Anwar.

’I Borrowed My Expressions [sic] From the East’

Muslim (18 Nov 1983) [Interview of Salman
Rushdie].

266
Iredale, Roger.

’Rev. This Time in Lahore by Hashmi in Wasafiri

[London] (Spring, 1986), 33.

Ireland, K.

’English Verse on Asian Soil’. Rev. First Voices in

JCL, 5 (July, 1968), 113-115.

Jabeen, Mussarat.

Rev. The Prison House by Ahmed Ali in Muslim (18

April 1986).

Jamil, Maya.

’A Study in Literary Influences’, Pak Q, 7:3 (1957), 813.

’Indian and Pakistani Writers of English Fiction’,

University Studies, 1:1 (April, 1964), 61-68.

’Prose of Humour’, Venture, VI: 1 (1969), 54-59.

A Squint at the Truth. Karachi: Shahab Art Printers,

1979 [A collection of papers, articles and reviews].

Jha, Rama.

’An Interview with Ahmed Ali’, The Hindustan Times

Sunday Literary Supplement (2 Feb 1983).

Jussawalla, Feroza.

’Rushdie’s Shame: Problems in Communication’,

Studies in Indian Ficiton in English .ed. Balarama
Gupta. Gulabarga:/WE Publications, 1987, 1-13.

Kama), Nazir.

Rev. My Second in Kentucky by Hashmi in Muslim (5

March 1982).
Rev. Neither This Time/Nor That Place by Hashmi in
Asiaweek, Vol.11: No. 10 (8 March 1985), 50.

267
Kamran, Gilani.

Rev. This Time in Lahore in Explorations (1984), 9697.

’Cultural Metaphor’: The Worlds of Muslim Imagination!

Rev. Worlds of Muslim Imagination .ed. Hashmi
in The Nation (19 March 1987).

Kanaganayakam, C.

’Paradigms of Absence: The Writings of Zulfikar

Ghose’, Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, University
of British Columbia, 1985.

’Zulfikar Ghose: An Interview’, Twentieth Century

Literature, Vol.32: No.2 (Summer, 1986), 169-185.

Kemal, Helida.

Rev. .4 Memory of Asia, WLWE, 26:1 (1986), 199-201.

’Pakistani Literature in English’. Rev. Pakistani Literature
.ed. Hashmi in Dawn (13 March 1987).
’Poems for a Parched Land’. Rev. Arrival of the Monsoon
by Taufiq Rafat in The Star (15 May 1986).

Khamisani, Amena.

Stud’s Contribution to English. Hyderabad: Institute

of Sindhology; University of Sind, 1975.

Khwaja, Waqas Ahmad.

’Anthology of Contemporary Muslim Writings’. Rev.

The Worlds of Muslim Imagination in Pak Times (10
April 1987).

Killim, Siddiq.

’The Role of a Writer in a Developing Society’, Ravi,

Vol.LXlIl:! (Dec, 1970), 13-16.

King, Bruce.

’From Twilight to Midnight: Muslim Novels of India

and Pakistan’, Worlds of Muslim Imagination .ed.
Hashmi, 243-259.

268
Rev. Commonwealth Literature by Hashmi in Research
in African Literatures, 18:2 (Summer 1987),
220-222.

Kohli, Davendra.

’Landscape and Poetry’,/CL, XIII:3 (April 1979), 5470

[On Ghose’s Poetry].

Kumar, Anita S.

’Twilight in Delhi: A Study in Lyricism’, Indian Literature

(March-April, 1976), 25-38.

Kureishi, Hanif.

’Mocking Liberal Taboos’, Inside Asia [London] 7

(1986), 37-39 [Interview].

Kureishi, Maki.

’English Poetry in Pakistan’, Pak £>, 17:11 (1970), 6971.

Lane, Steve.

Rev. Recognitions by Baud Kamal in Iron. No.28

(1980), 46.

Larson, Charles R.

’Third World Writing in English’, World Lit Today,

LVI:3 (1982), 476-477 [Comments on Hashmi].

Latif, Nargis.

’A Novel on Parsi Life’. Rev. The Crow Eaters in

Viewpoint, (24 September 1978), 31.

Lieven, Anatol.

’Tis a Pity it is Lahore’, Rev. Ice-Candy Man by Sidhwa

in The Literary Review [London] (March 1988)

22.
269
Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin.

Rev. A Memory of Asia by Ghose in CRNLE Reviews

Journal, 1 (1986), 22-25.

Lovelock, Yann.

Rev. The Blue Wind in Iron, No.46 (1985), 69.

Majeed, MA.

’Role of Our Poets in the War’, Pak Review, XIV:2

(1967), 649-664.

Malik, Tariq Yazdani.

’Anglo-Pakistani Poetry’, Ravi, LXI:3 (1968) 55-62.

Marriot, R.B.

The Mother Country’. Rev. Hanif Kureishi’s play in

The Stage and Television Today, (31 July 1980).

Mathur, O.P.

Rev. Commonwealth Literature by Hashmi in JIWE

XIII: 1(1985), 89-90.

Me Caflery.

Rev. Hulme’s Investigations...by Ghose in The American

Book Review, IV:2 (Jan-Feb, 1982), 6.

Me Duff, David.

’Recent Poetry’. Rev. The Blue Wind and This Time

in Lahore by Hashmi in Stand, (1985), 72-79.
’New Poetry’. Rev. Neither This Time/Nor That Place
by Hashmi in Stand, 28:1 (Winter, 1986-87), 59-67.

Me Gale, Frank.

Rev. My Second in Kentucky by Hashmi in Orbis

[UK] No.49 (Summer, 1983), 57.

Michener, Charles.
’The Pickling of Time’. Rev. Midnight’s Children in
Newsweek (20 April 1981).

270
Mohammed, Faqir.

’Salute to ”Lotus Leaves”’. Rev. Lotus Leaves by Z.

Hamidullah in Film Star (9 June 1947).

Mukherjee, Meenakhji.

’Ghose, Zulfikar’ in Contemporary Poets .ed. James

Vinson; second edition. London & New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1975, 541-543.

Narayan, Shymala.

’Midnight’s Children’, The Literary Criterion, 18:3

(1983), 23-32.

Naslund, Alan J.

Rev. America is a Punjabi Word by Hashmi in

Thinker, IV:3 (1980), 18. Same in Explorations,
Vol.7:2 (Winter, 1980), 73-75.

Nasrullah, Nusrat.

’A Writer is Born’. Rev. The Crow Eaters in Morning

News (6 October 1978), 1.

Omar, Kaleem.

75 America a Punjabi Word! An Assessment of

Alamgir Hashmi’s Poetry’, The Star, (4 July 1985).

Padmanabhan, Manjula.

’Pure Spice’. Rev. The Crow Eaters in Parsiana

[Bombay], 111:1(1981), 30-31.

Parameswaran, Uma.

’ ”Lest He Returning Chide”: Saleem Sinai’s Inaction

in Salman Rushdi’s Midnight’s Children’, The Literary
Criterion, 3 (October 1983), 34-45.

Pattanayak, Chandrabhana.

’Interview With Salman Rushdie’, The Lit Criterion, 3

(1983), 19-22.

271
Polls, Michel W.

’Zulfikar Ghose -- Only Pakistani to be Published in

US’, India West (8 April 1972), 12-21.

Powers, Janet M.

Rev. Neither This Time/Nor That Place in Journal of

South Asian Literature 22:1 (Winter-Spring, 1987),
248-249.

Pritchett, Frances W.

Rev. The Worlds of Muslim Imagination in Annual of

Urdu Studies [US] 6 (1987), 134-135.

Qazi, Javaid.

’A passage to Pakistan’, Chelsea 46: World Literature

in English (New York, 1987).

Rafat, Taufiq.

’Towards a Pakistani Idiom’, Venture, 6 (1969), 60-73.

’English Poetry in Pakistan’, Pak Q, 17:2 (1970), 5164.

’Four Young Poets of Pakistan’, Perspective 6:1 (July

1972).

’Contemporary English Verse in Pakistan’, Ravi

Vol.70 (Dec. 1980), 6-14.

’Not Subjective Enough’. Rev. Selected Poems by Jocelyn

Ortt Saeed in The Nation (8 May 1987).

Rahman, Mujib Ur.

Rev. The Blue Wind in JELC (1983-84), 176-184.

’Silhouettes in Water’. Rev. A Remote Beginning by
Daud Kamal in The Nation (17 Oct. 1986). Same in
JELC (1984-85), 168-170.

Rahman, Salim Ur.

’An Interview with Daud Kamal’, Pak Times (6 Sept.

1985); Same in JELC (1984-85), 72-74.

272
Rahman, Tariq.

’Politics in the English Novel About Pakistan’, Muslim

(22 Nov. 1985).

Bapsi Siclhwa: A Literary Achievement’, Muslim (9

August 1985).

The English Short Story in Pakistan’, Muslim (13

Sept. 1985).

’Alienation and Deracination in the Works of Zulfikar

Chose’, JELC (1984-85), 109-120.
’Noon as a Writer’, Nation (31 Oct. 1986).
’Khwaja Ahmad Abbas as a Writer’, Nation (14
Nov. 1986).

’Ahmed AH as a Writer’, Nation (28 Nov. 1986).

’Habib and Mumtaz Shahnawaz as Writers’, Nation
(12 Dec. 1986).

’Zaib-un-Nisa Hamidullah as a Short Story Writer’

Nation (9 Jan. 1987).

’Zahir M. Farooqi and Nasir A. Farooqi as Writers’,

Nation (16 Jan. 1987).

’Two Short Story Writers of the Nineteen Sixties’,

Nation (30 Jan. 1987).

’Humorous English Prose by Pakistanis’, Nation (13

Feb. 1987).

Reprinted with notes as ’English Prose by Pakistanis’,

JELC (1987), 97-105.

’Rootlessness: of Ghose as a Writer’, Nation (13

March 1987) [similar to the JELC (1984-85) article].
’Short Stories of M.A. Seljouk and Yunus Said’, Nation
(20 March 1987).

’Bapsi Sidhwa as a Novelist’, Nation (17 April 1987)

[Reprint of the Muslim article cited above].
’Two Writers of the Eighties: Tabassum and Sipra’,
Nation (15 May 1987).
’Race Relations in Pakistani emigre literature’, Nation
(5 June 1987);

’Interview with Daud Kamal’, Nation (19 June 1987)

Reprinted in The Frontier Post (18 Dec. 1987).
’Pakistani Drama in English’, Nation (24 July 1987)
’Ahmed Ali as a Poet’, Nation (28 Aug. 1987).

273
’Commitment to Truth’. Rev. The Jaguar Smile by

Rushdie and An Unfinished Journey by Naipaul in

Frontier Post (4 Sept. 1987).

’Pakistani English Poetry: A Survey’, JIWE (July,

1988) 27-44.

’Zulfikar Ghose and the Land of His Birth’, Review

of Contemporary Fiction ix:2 (Summer 1989), 179187.

’Daud Kamal as a Poet’, Nation (18 March 1987).

’Bapsi Sidhwa’s Third Novel’. Rev. Ice-Candy-Man in

Dawn (3 June 1988) also in World Literature Today

(Autumn, 1988).

’Pakistan’, Frank [France] 10 (Autumn, 1988), 106115

[an introduction to Pakistani Literature in Urdu

and English].

Rasheed, Jamal.

’English Verse Writing and the Political Plight of

Pakistan’s Impoverished Poets’, Far Eastern Economic
Review (2 August 1984), 33-34.

Riemenscneider, Dieter.

’History and the Individual in Anita Desai’s Clear

Light of Day and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
’, WLWE, 23:1 (Winter, 1984), 196-207.

Ringer, J.B.

’People and Camels’. Rev. America is a Punjabi Word

by Hashmi in Pacific Quarterly [New Zealand] VI:2
(1981), 236-37.

Rudman, Frank.

Rev. The Crow Eaters in Spectator (18 October 1978),

25.

Sadeque, Najma.

’A New Female Novelist’. Rev. The Crow Eaters in

Dawn (12 October 1978).

274
Said Yunus.

’English Poetry in Pakistan - 1’, Perspective 111:2

(1969), 29-33.

Sanghvi, Malavika.

’Without shame: Interview with Rushdie’, The Illustrated

Weekly of India (25 March 1984), 20-22.

Sarwar, Ghulam.

’Aamir’s Celestial Dreams’. Rev. My Celestial Dreams

by Aamir in Frontier Post (30 Jan. 1987).

Shamsie, Muneeza.

’The Poetry of Exile’. Rev. This Time in Lahore by

Hashmi in Dawn (11 July 1986).
’Bapsi Sidhwa’s Third Novel’, Dawn (3 April 1987).
[Not a review of the novel but a biographical account].

Sheikh, Shahid Rahim.

Rev. The Oath and Amen by Hashmi in Explorations

IV: 2 (Winter, 1977),76-77.

Shorter, Eric.

’Birds of Passage’. Rev. Birds of Passage by Kureishi

in The Daily Telegraph (16 Sept. 1983).

Siddiqui, B.

Rev. The Beautiful Empire by Ghose in World Literature

Today, LI (1977), 159.

Singh, Bhupal.

A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford

Univ. Press, 1934.

Singh, Sushila.

’Shame: Salman Rushdie’s Judgement on Pakistan’,

in Studies in Indian Fiction in English .ed. Balarama
Gupta, 14-24.

275
Spurting, John.

’Shame about the Jackets’. Rev. Ice-Candy-Man in

Observer (7 Feb. 1988).

Stock, A.G.

’Pakistan’s Poets’. Rev. The New Harmony, JCL VI: 1

(June 1971), 132-134.

Rev. Wordfall in JCL XIII: 1 (Aug.1978), 84.

Stoerck, Beatrice.

’New Fiction by Zulfikar Ghose’, Explorations V:2

(Winter, 1978), 64-70;

Reprinted in Abraxas [Wisconsin] 18 & 19, 3-8;

Rev. The New Quarterly .ed. Hashmi in Explorations,

VI: 1 (1979), 81-83;

Same in WLWE, Vol.XIX:! (1980), 113-115.

Sukthankar, Narayan.

’Life and Times of Freddy Junglewalla’. Rev. The

Crow Eaters in Times of India (28 Sept. 1981).

Tahir, Athar.

’Pakistani English Poetry and Taufiq Rafat’, Pak

Times (I May 1986).

The Struggling Ravi’. Rev. of Vol. LXX Ravi in Pak

Times (4 Sept. 1981). [Comments on Shuaib Bin
Hasan’s Prose].

Teja, Soorya.

’Poetic Voices from the Subcontinent’. Rev. The

Oath and Amen by Hashmi in The New Quarterly 11:2
(April-July, 1977), 131-134.

Thomas, T.K.

’And Inner Things’. Rev. Wordfall in Asiaweek (20

May 1977), 54.

276
Thorpe, Michael.

’India and Pakistan’. Rev. Crumps Terms by Ghose in

English Studies, LVIII:! (1978), 51-52.
’Currrent Literature 1977; in Commonwealth Literature’.
Rev. Wordfall in English Studies LX:1 (1979),
67.

Rev. Commonwealth Literature by Hashmi in World

Lit Today, LVIII:2 (1984), 333.
Rev. This Time in Lahore by Hashmi in The Toronto
South Asian Review, 111:3 (1984), 83-85.

Thwaite, Anthony.

’Colliding Continents’. Rev. Wordfall in TLS (18

March 1977), 294.

T.M.A.

’Literary Journal’. Rev. JELC (1987) in The Frontier

Post (I April 1988).

Tong, Raymond.

Rev. A Remote Beginning by Daud Kamal in British

Book News (April 1986), 246.

Twilight in Delhi.

Rev. The Pioneer (24 Nov. 1941);

Rev. The Bombay Chronicle (2 March 1941).

Rev. Sunday Observer (12 Jan. 1941).

Rev. The National Herald [Lucknow] (15 Jan. 1941).

Rev. The Goan World [Goa & Bombay Monthly]

(September 1941).

Vassanji, M.G.

’A Conversation with Zulfikar Ghose’, Toronto South

Asian Review, 4: (1986), 14-21.

Wade, Rosalind.

Rev. A Different World by Ghose in Contemporary

Review [London] Vol.CLXXXIV (April 1979), 217.

277
Walsh, Jill Paton.

’Contributions to the Memory of the Empire . Key.

The Crow Eaters and Desai’s Clear Light of Day in
South (March 1981), 50-51.

Wardle, Irving. .

’Us, Them...and Those’. Rev. Birds of Passage in The

Times (17 Sept. 1983).

Warren, Bill.

’Books’, Austin American-Statesman (17 December

1972), 35-38 [On Ghose].

Watson-Williams, Helen

Helen’ An Antique Land: Salman Rushdie’s Shame’,

Westerly: A Quarterly Review, 29:4 (Dec. 1984), 37-45.

Wentnk, Linda.

’Pakistani Literature’, Encyclopedia of World Literature

in the 20th Century. Revised edition, .ed.
Leonard S. Klein. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing
Co. 1983, Vol.3, 457-461.

Wignesan, H.M.

’Pakistani Novelists’. Rev. Corpses by Seljouk and

Ghose’s Contradictions in/CL 5 (July 1968), 119-120.

William, H.M. . .

Rev. Commonwealth Literature by Hashmi in

CRNLE Reviews Journal, 2 (1984), 119-120.

Williams, Haydn Moore.

Rev. Explorations, Vol.7: Nos.1-2 (1980) in CRNLE

Reviews Journal, 2 (1981), 92.

Wilson, Keith.

’Midnight’s Children and Reader Responsibility,

Critical Quarterly, 26:3 (Autumn, 1984), 23-37.

278
Wordsworth, Christopher.

’A Grand Tour’. Rev. Figures of Enchantment by

Ghose in The Guardian (27 Feb. 1986), 23.

Zaman, Hameed.

’Ali, Rushdie, Sidhwa: No Parasites on Western Literature’,

Third World International [Karachi] IX:6
(October 1985), 18-20.

Zeno.

’A Writer Committed to Progressivism’. Rev. The

Prison House by Ali in Dawn (13 June 1986).

279
16

1.4. PAKISTANI LITERATURE:

RESEARCH AIDS

Accessions List - Pakistan. Library of Congress, Washington

(Available in the American Centers in Pakistan for the

year).

Accessions List -- Pakistan: Annual List of Serials. (July 1970

issue contains a list of all journals; July 1972 issue lists journals
as well as bibliographical information about them).

Accessions List. (1973 onwards) Govt. of Pakistan, Ministry

of Education Dept. of Libraries and Archives.

Among Worlds: An Introduction to Modern Commonwealth

and South African Fiction. Erin, Ontario: Press Procepic,
1975 [Contains a brief discussion of Ahmed Ali, Ghose and
Mehdi Ali Seljouk].

Bibliography of German Literature on Pakistan upto 1974.

[English and German] Hamburg; Deutch Pakistanischen Forum,
1975.

Bibliography of Asian Studies, ed. Estella S.Bryant. Ann Arbor,

Michigan: Association for Asian Studies, 1981
[Published serially].

’Bibliography of Pakistan Books’ by A. Moid in Pak Quarterly

(Spring, 1957), 60-64.

Books from Pakistan 1958-1978. Karachi: National Book

Centre, 1968 [Ninth publication recorded in 1978].

280
Catalogue of Learned Books. Karachi: University of Karachi
Library, [1973 and 1974 issues].

Commonwealth Literature Periodicals. Compiled and edited.

Ronald Warwick London: Mansell, 1979 [useful for the periodicals
of the fifties and the sixties].

Critical Writings on Commonwealth Literatures: A Selective

Bibliography to 1970, with a list of theses and dissertations.
Compiled by W.H. New. Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1975.

A Dictionary of Literature in the English Language from 19401970.

Compiled and edited by Robin Meyers. Oxford: Pergamon
Press, 1981 [Contains entries on Ali, Ghose and Ved
Mehta].

English Language Publications from Pakistan: A Guidelist.

Karachi: National Book Centre, 1966 [See sections in
’Biography’ and ’Language and Literature’].

English Language Periodicals from Pakistan: A Guidelist.

Karachi: National Book Centre, 1967.

English in South Asia: A Bibliographical Survey of Resources.

by Narindar K.Aggarwal. Gurgaon: Indian Documentation
Service, 1981 [On Language issues],

The Far East and Australasia 1986. 17th ed. Europa Publications
Ltd, 1985 [See ’Pakistan’, 776-811].

A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English .ed. Harry

Blamires . London: Methuen, 1983 [Brief notes on Ahmed
Ali and Ghose].

Guide to Current National Bibliographies in the Third World.

G.E. Gorman and M.M. Mahoney. Oxford: Hans Zell, 1984.
’Pakistan’, 220-30.

281
Hashmi, Alanigir, (Also see JCL Bibliographies for his contributions).

’A Select Bibliography of Pakistani Literature in English’,

A Sense of Place: Essays in Post-Colonial Literatures,
ed. Britta Olinder. Sweden: Gothenburg University,
1984. 111-116;

The Literature of Pakistan’ [with a select bibliography]

WLWE, 2: 1 (1986).

JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH
LITERATURE BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Syed AH Ashraf, ’Pakistan’, JCL, No. 1 (Sept, 1965), 70-72.

’Pakistan’, JCL, 2 (Dec, 1966), 80-84.
’Pakistan’, JCL, 4 (Dec, 1967), 87-89.
’Pakistan’, JCL, 6 (Jan, 1969), 88-92.
’Pakistan’, JCL, 8 (Dec, 1969), 75-79.
’Pakistan’, JCL, 10 (Dec, 1970), 109-114.
’Pakistan’, JCL, VI:2 (Dec, 1971), 99-103.
’Pakistan’,/CL,VIII:2 (Dec, 1973), 144-147.

Maya Jamil, ’Appendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, X:2 (Dec, 1975),

147-150 [Covers 1973 and 1974].
’Applendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, XI:2 (Dec, 1976), 131133.

’Appendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, XII:2 (Dec, 1977), 133135.

’Appendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, XITI:3 (Apr, 1979), 1720.

Alamgir Hashmi, ’Appendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, XIV:2 (Dec,

1979), 108-112.

’Appendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, XV:2 (Dec, 1980), 151156;

’Appendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, XVI:2 (Feb, 1982), 141152;

’Appendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, XVII:2 (1982), 138-149;

282
’Appendix 1: Pakistan’, JCL, XVIII:2 (1983), 148156;

’Appendix 1: Pakistan”, JCL, XIX:2 (1984), 121-128;

’Appendix 1: Pakistan”, JCL, XX:2(1985), 160-170;

’Appendix 1: Pakistan”, JCL, XXI:2 (1986), 148-156;

’Appendix 1: Pakistan”, JCL, XXII:2 (1987), 112-123.

KUNAPIPI BIBLIOGRAPHIES (SIMILAR TO

THOSE GIVEN IN THE JCL)

Alamgir Hashmi, The Year That Was -- Pakistan’, Kunapipi,

3:1(1981), 46-48;

The Year That Wa.s -- Pakistan’, Kunapipi, 4:1

(1982), 156-159;

The Year That Wais -- Pakistan’, Kunapipi, 5:1

(1983), 119-121;

The Year That Wais -- Pakistan’, Kunapipi, 6:1

(1984), 91-94;

The Year That Wais -- Pakistan’, Kunapipi, 7:1

(1985), 116-118;

The Year That Wais - Pakistan’, Kunapipi, 8:1

(1986), 113-115.

Macmillan Guide to Modern World Literature, by Martin

Seymour-Smith. 3rd edition. London: Macmillan, 1985. See
’Indian and Pakistani Literature’, 716-37.

MLA International Bibliographies. See from 1968 onwards.

Modern Commonwealth Literature: A Library of literary Criticism,

ed. John Ferres and Martin Tucker. New York: Frederick
Ungar Publishing Co. 1977 [Contains excerpts from the
writings on Ghose],

The National Bibliography. Karachi: National Book Centre

[List of books published from, 1947-1961].
283
Pakistan Book News. Rawalpindi: Pakistan Publications
Bookshop [Monthly since October 1968],

Pakistan: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Books and Government

Publications with Annotations 1947-1980. Islamabad:
Islamic University, Institute of Islamic History, Culture, and
Civilization, 1981.

Pakistan Year Book ed. Rafique Akhtar. Karachi: East and

West Publications, 1978 [15th edition published].

References Sources on Pakistan: A Bibliography ed. A.H. Siddiqui.

Karachi: National Book Centre, 1968.
A Select Bibliography of Periodical Literature on India and
Pakistan 1947-1970 by Pervaiz Cheema. Islamabad: National
Commission on Historical and Cultural Research, 1978.

South Asian Civilizations: A Bibliographical Synthesis, by

Maureen L.P. Patterson. University of Chicago Press, 1981.
[See ’Literature of Pakistan’, 480].

Star and Crescent: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of

Pakistan 1947-1957. Compiled by G.B. Moreland and A.H.
Siddique. Karachi: Institute of Public and Business Administration,
University of Karachi, 1958.

Status of Bibliography in Pakistan, ed. A. Usmani. University

of Karachi Library, 1966.

Subject Collections Compiled by Lee Ash et al. New York &

London: R.R. Bowker Co., 1978.

284
17

1.5. PAKISTANI LITERATURE --

SERIAL PUBLICATIONS IN PAKISTAN

Ariel .ed. K.M. Larik; Dept. of English, University of Sind,

Jamshoro (started in 1982).

Combat. Karachi weekly (started in 1975; no longer published).

Cactus .ed. Waqas Ahmad Khwaja Lahore (irregular).

Dacca University Studies (appeared occasionally. See till

1970).

Dawn (weekend magazine) Karachi.

Enterprise. Karachi monthly (started in the sixties; no longer

published).

Explorations. Government College, Lahore (started in 1975).

Herald. Karachi; Pakistan Herald Publications.

The Journal of the English Literary Club. Peshawar University,

Department of English (yearly; started in 1982-83).

Life and Light: A Rational Quarterly in English .ed. M. Rahman.

Dacca: Tarun Pakistan Publishers (in the sixties).

Mirror. Karachi monthly, (no longer published).

Morning News. Karachi: Literary page on Tuesdays.

285
The Muslim. Islamabad: Friday magazine contains literary
material.

New Values Dacca University, Dept. of English (Appeared

occasionally in the sixties).

Outlook. Karachi: Publishers Combine. (Started 1973 --

ceased 1974).

Pakistan Quarterly. Karachi: Quarterly (no longer published).

The Pakistan Review. Lahore: Ferozesons; monthly (no

longer published).

The Pakistan Times. Lahore (contains literary material in the

Friday magazine).

Perspective. Karachi monthly (no longer published).

Pakistan Digest, ed. Ameen Tareen, Karachi monthly.

Quarterly Critique, Lahore, University of the Punjab, Dept. of

English (This will be published under a new name in 1990).

The Ravi, Government College, Lahore. Scintilla. Karachi

quarterly (no longer published).

She, ed. Mrs. Zohra; Karachi (no longer published).

Sind Quarterly. Karachi (not much relevant for English literature).

The Statesman. Karachi, (no longer published).

Sun. Karachi. Daily with weekly literary page (no longer

published).

Tempo. Karachi, (no longer published).

286
University Studies. University of Karachi (irregular: no longer

published).

Venture. University of Karachi, Dept. of English (no longer

published).

Viewpoint. Lahore, ed. Mazhar AH Khan (weekly).

Vision. Karachi monthly (no longer published).

287

TT’
2. BACKGROUND STUDY

Classics of mainstream Western literature are not listed

even when they have been mentioned in the text. Third
World literature written in English has, however, been mentioned
with dates. Criticism and books contributing towards
an understanding of Pakistan have been listed with full publication
details. This list is selective and leaves out a number
of books which might be listed in a comprehensive bibliography.

Abrahams, Peter,

A Wreath for Udomo (1956).

This Island No\v (1966).
Mine Boy (1946).

Adiebe, Chinua,

Things Fall Apart (1958).

No Longer at Ease (1960).

A Man of the People (1966).
Anthills of the Savannah (1987).

Advani, T.H. & M.U. Malkani .eds.,

Modern Short Stories of Indian Life. Karachi: The

Educational Publishing Co. 1942.

Ahmed, Jalaluddin,

Art in Pakistan, Karachi: Pakistan Publications, 1954.

Ahmed, Mohammed,

My Chief, Lahore: Longman Green & Co. 1960.

Akare, Thomas,

The Slums (1981).

All, Ahmed,

ed. Selected Short Stories From Pakistan: Urdu Islamabad!:

Pakistan Academy of Letters, n.d.
288
The Golden Tradition: An Anthology of Urdu Poetry,
London: Columbia University Press, 1973 [Contains
an introduction to the Urdu ghazal and translations
from major poets].

’The Progressive Writers’ Movement In Its Historical

Perspective’, Studies in the Urdu Ghazal and Prose
Fiction, ed. Muhammad Umar Memon, South Asian
Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison Publications
Series Publication No.5, 1975.

Amadi, Elechi,

The Concubine (1966).

Anand, Mulk Raj,

Untouchable (1935).
Coolie (1936).

Two Leaves and a Bud (1937).

Th<? Village (1939).

Anwar, Ghulam Yaqoob, trans.

Kafian Shah Hussain. Lahore: Majlis Shah Hussain,

1966. :- ;;

Armah, Ayi Kwei,

The Beautiful One are Not Yet Born (1968).

Ather, Khalid,

Azadi Ke Bad SindJii Adab Ka Irtiqa [Urdu] Karachi:

Mehran Publishers, 1984.

Azain, Ikrann. trans.,

Poerm From Fab,. Rawalpindi: Nairang-e

Khyal Publications, 1982,

Azini, S. Vi<|ar .ed.,

Pakistan: Modern Urdu Short Stories. Islamabad:

R.C.D. Cultural Institute, 1981.

289
Bakht, Baidar & Derek M.Cohen,.eds. & trans.

The Price of Looking Back: Poems of Kishwar Naheed.

Lahore: Mustafa Waheed Book Traders, 1987.

Banuazizi, AH & Myron Weiner .eds.,

The State Religion and Ethnic Politics: Pakistan, Iran

and Afghanistan. Lahore Vanguard Books Ltd, 1987.

Burton, S.H. & C J.H. Chaksfield,

African Poetry in English: An Introduction: Practical

Criticism. London: Macmillan International College
Editions 1979.

Chowdhary, S.S.,

/ Was a Prisoner of War in Pakistan. New Delhi:

Lancer International, 1986.

Cohen, Stephen P.,

The Pakistan Army. New Delhi: Himalayan Books,

1984.

Dar, BA. trans.,

What Should Then Be Done O’People of the East: English

Rendering of Iqbal’s Pas Chih Bayad Kard Ay
Aqwam-i-Sharq. Lahore: Iqhal Academy Pakistan,
1977.

Desai, Anita,

Where Shall We Go This Summer (1975).

The Village By the Sea (1982).

Bye, Bye, Blackbird (1971).

Cry the Peacock (1963).

Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978).

Desani, G.V.,
All About H. Hatterr: A Novel (1948).

Dhondy, Farrukh,

Trip Trap (1982).

290
Ekwensi, Cyprian,

Jagua Nana (1961).

EnayatuIIah, Anwer .trans.,

This Also Happened: An Anthology of Pakistani Short

Stories. Karachi: Saad Publications, 1986.

Eng, Ooi Boo,

’Indian Poetry in English: Two Views’, JCL, IX: 1

(August 1977), 10-34.

Evans, Herbert,

’Recent Writings on Pakistan’, Central Asian Review,

15(1967), 148-159.

Farooqi, Nasir Ahmad,

Spring Moon: Selections from the Contemporary Writings

of Nigeria. Lahore: Afro-Asian Book Club, 1966.

Fernando, Lloyd,

’The Social Imagination and the Functions of Criticism

in Asia’,/CL, X:3 (April 1976), 53-65.

Figueroa, John J. ed.,

An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English.

London: Heinemann Educational Books in Association
with the Open University, 1982.

Gakwandi, Shatto Arthur,

The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa.

London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1977.

Galik, M. ed.,

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on

the Theoretical Problems of Asian and African Literature.
Bratislava: Institute of the Slovak Academy of
Sciences, 1983.
291
Gardezi, Hassan & Jamil Rashid .eds.,

Pakistan: The Unstable State. Lahore: Vanguard

Books Ltd, 1983.

Gatheru, Mugo,

Child of Two Worlds (1963).

Grass, Gunter,

The Tin Drummer [De Blechtrommel] (1959).

Gupta, Balarama S. ed.

Studies in Indian Fiction in English. Gulbarga: JIWE

Publications, 1987.

Hasan, Khalid trans, from the Punjabi.,

The Prisoner: A Novel by Fakhar Zaman. New Delhi:

Allied Publishers, 1984.

Homey, Karen,

Our Inner Conflicts. London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1946.

Hosain, Attia,

Sunlight on a Broken Column. London: Chatto &

Windus, 1961.

Hough, Graham & P.N. Furbank .eds.,

Twentieth Century Poetry. Milton Keynes; The Open

University Press, 1975; edition used, 1979.

Hudson, R.A.,

Sociolinguistics. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980; edition

used, 1986.

Hussain, Akmal,

Strategic Issues in Pakistan’s Economic Policy Lahore:

Progressive Publishers, 1988.

292
Ikramullah, Shaista, ’The Role of Women in the Life and
Literature of Pakistan’, Pak Review, LV (Jan. 1959),

14-26. J

*r

Iroh, Eddie, V

Toads of War (1979).

lyengar, K.R. Srinivasa,

Study of Indian Writing in English. Bombay: Popular

Book Depot, 1959.

Jabbar, Javed,

Snapshots: Reflections in a Pakistani Eye. Lahore:

Wajidalis, 1982. ;.

\l

Jalibi, Jameel, Pakistan:

The Identity of Culture. Karachi: Royal {*•’

Book Co. 1984. ” R

Jamal, Mahmood .trans.

Modern Urdu Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1986.

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer,

The Nature of Passion (1956).

Esmond in India (1958). .

Get Ready for Battle (1962). ,,<

A Backward Place (1965). ;

Like Birds, Like Fishes and Other Stories (1963). ’” \

An Experience of India (1966). ’ t

A Stronger Climate: Nine Stories (1968). ; >

A New Dominion (1972). :

Heat and Dust (1975).

How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories

(1976).

In Search of Love and Beauty (1983).

293
Kamal, Daud,

Selected Poems of Faiz in English. Karachi: Pakistan

Publishing House, 1984.

Karim, MA..,

Man Being What He Is. Dacca: Polwell Publishers,

1968.

Kariuki, Josiah M,

’Mau Mau’ Detainee: The Account by a Kenyan

African of His Experiences in Detention Camps 19531960.
London: Oxford Univ.Press, 1963.

Khan, Atiquzzaman,

Dream Image. Dacca: Pioneer Publishers, 1968.

Khan, M. Asghar,

The First Round: fndo-Pakistan War 1965 Lahore:

Taseer Publishing House, 1978.

Khan, Mohammad Ayub,

Friends Not Masters: Political Autobiography Karachi:

Oxford UP, 1967 [Probably by Altaf Gauhar].

Khan, Mohammad Musa,

My Version: India-Pakistan War 1965. Lahore: Wajidalis,

1983.

Kiernan, Victor,

Poems by Faiz; London George Allen & Unwin,

1971.

Kemal, Yashar,

The Wind From the Plain. Lahore: Afro-Asian Book

Club, n.d.
Killim, Siddiq,

The Role of a Writer in a Developing Society’, Ravi,

LXIII.-l (Dec, 1970), 13-16.

294
King, Bruce .ed.,

Literatures of the World in English,, London: Routledge

& Kegan Paul, 1974,

-.ed.,

West Indian Literature., London: Macmillan International

College Edition, 1979.

The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in

a Changing World. London: MacmiLlan, 1980.

La Guma, Alex,

In the Fog of the Season V End (1972).

A Walk In the Night (1962).
The Stone Country (1967).

Lai, P,

Modern Indian Poetry in English. Calcutta: Writers

Workshop, 1969.

Lamming, George,

In the Castle of My Skin (1953).

Larson, Charles R,

The Emergence of African Fiction. Indiana: Indiana

University Press, 1971.

Laye, Camare,

A Dream of Africa ((966).

Less ing, Doris,

African Stories. London: Michael Joseph, 1964.

The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975).

Hoyd, Fernando,

The Social Imagination and the functions of Criticism

in Asia’,./CL, X:3 (April, 1976), 53-65.
295
I

Mahmood, Safdar,

Pakistan Divided, Lahore: Ferozesons, 1984.

Maja-Pearce, Adewale,

In My Father’s Country: A Nigerian Journey London:

Heinemann, 1987.

Malik, Hafeez,

’The Marxist Literary Movement in India and Pakistan’,

Journal of Asian Studies, 26 (1967), 649-64.

Markandaya, Kamala,

A Handful of Rice (1966).

The Golden Honeycomb (1977).
Two Virgins (1974).
Pleasure City (1982).

Marquez, Gabriel G,

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

Matshoba, Mtutuzeli,

Call Me Not a Man (1979).

Mayo, Katherine,

Mother India. Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1927.

Mehta, P.P.,

Indo-Anglian Fiction: An Assessment. Bareilly:

Prakash Book Depot, 1977.

Mehta, Ved,

Daddyji, Mamaji (1984).

Memon, Muhammad Umar,

’Pakistani Urdu Creative Writing on National Disintegration:
the Case of Bangladesh’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 43:1 (1983), 105-127.

296
Milton, Daniel & William t,

A Treasury of Mo4Hfr°rd’eds’

New American Libn Asian Stones- New York: the

kry of World Literature, 1961.

Mohan, Romesh .ed.,

Indian Writing in L

1978. nglish. Delhi: Orient Longman,

Moniruzzaman, M. with Sh

Poems. Dacca: Poet’11^ e’fl/»

V Pakistan, 1968.

Mookerji, Tapati,

Murder Needs a Sta\

bay: Jaico Publishing and Six Faces °fEve bornt

House, 1963.

Mujeeb, M,

The Indian Musll

Manoharlal Publish^- 1967^ Delhi: Munshiram

ts Ltd, 1985.

Mumtaz, Khawar & Farida \;

Women of Pakistan**”*^

Back. Lahore: Vans, Tw° StePs Forward, One Step

bWd, 1987.

Mumtaz, Khwaja Haniecd,

An Anthology of Ka:.

vately published \9\imiri Verse- Muzaffarabad: PnKashmiri

into Englisj7 [translated from the original

Munir, Muhammad.

From Jinnah to Zia.

1979 Lahore: Vanguard Books Ltd,

Nagi, Anis .trans.

Modern Urdu Poem

maliat 1974 From Pakistan. Lahore: JaNaik,

M.K. .ed.

Aspects of Indian Wr\

Ian 1979 1S m English. Delhi: Macmu297

Nairn, C.M. & Denis Sinor.

’The Consequences of Indo-Pakistan War for Urdu

Language and Literature: A Parting of the Ways?,
Proceedings of the XXVII International Congress of
Orientalists, eds. Denis Sinor et al Ann Arbor, Michigan
13-14 August 1967, Wiesheden: Harrowitz, 1971,
386-87.

Naipaul, Shiva.

Fireflies (1910).

A Hot Country (\983).

Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth, Stories and Pieces (1984).

Naipaul, V.S.

A House for Mr. Biswas (1961).

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companions (1963).

The Mystic Masseur (1957).

A Bend in the River (1979)

The Mimic Men (1967).

India: A Wounded Civilizatiori(1977).

Guerrillas: A Novel (1975).

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981).

Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (1984).

The Enigma of Arrival (1987).

Namjoshi, Suniti,

The Conversations of Cow (1985).

Naqvi, Tahira & Leslie Fleming,

The Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto Lahore:

Vanguard Books Ltd, 1985 [Introduction by Fleming
and Short Stories translated by Tahira].

Narasinihaiah, C.D.,

The Swan and the Eagle: Lectures on Indian Writing

in English. Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies,
1968;

’Indian Writing in English: An Area of Promise’,

JCL, IX: 1 (August 1977), 35-49.

298
Narayan, R.K.,

Swami and Friends (1935).

The Dark Room (1938).

The English Teacher (1945).

Waiting for the Mahatma (1955).

The Financial Expert (1952).

A Horse and Two Goats and Other Stories (1965).

The Maneater of Malgudi (1961).

The Sweet-Vendor (1967).

The Painter of Signs (1977).

Malgudi Days: Short Stories (1972).

A Tiger for Malgudi (1983).

Nguigi, James,

Weep Not Child (1964).

The River Between (1965).
A Grain of Wheat (1967).
Petals of Blood (1977).

Niazi, Zamir,

Press In Chains. Karachi: Karachi Press Club, 1986.

Niven, Alistair,

’An Introduction to Indian Fiction in English’, Review

of National Literature (India Issue) 10: (1979),
44-58.

Nyamfukudza, S.,

The Non-Believer’s Journey (1980).

O mot so, Kole,

The Combat (1972).

Oyono, Ferdinand,

Houseboy (1966).

299
irameswaran, Uma,

A Study of Representative Indo~Engli$h Novelists.

Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976.

iton, Alan,

Cry, The Beloved Country (1948).

Presence Africaine, Special Issue, English edition

(Paris, 1958)

oetor, Raja,

Forever Life. Lahore: Afro-Asian Book Club.

ifat, Taufiq,

Qadir Yar: Puran Bhagai. Lahore: Vanguard Books

Ltd, 1983.

Bulleh Shah: A Selection, Lahore: Vanguard Books

Ltd, 1982 [Translated from the Punjabi into English].

hman, Matiur .ed.,

Second Thoughts on Bangladesh. London: News &

Media Ltd, 1979.

o, Raja,

Kanthapura (1938).

The Serpent and the Rope (1960).

The Policeman and the Rose: Stories (J1978).

id, V.S.,

New Day (1949).

ys, Jean,

Good Morning, Midnight (1939).

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).
tz, Fahmida,

Pakistan: Literature and Society (1986).

30’0
Rizvi, Hasan Askari,

The Military and Politics In Pakistan. Lahore:

Progress Publishers, 1974. *••••

Rushdie, Salman,

Midnight’s Children (1981).

Shame (1983).

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987). ?”

Sadiq, Muhammad,

A History of Urdu Literature. 1964; second revised

and enlarged edition. Karachi: Oxford
Univ.Press,l985. ^

Sadullah, Sufia,

Hundred Verses of Mirza Gfialib. Beaconsfield: Darwin

Finlayson Ltd, 1965 [Translated from the Urdu
into English verse]. .„,„„” Gj

Salik, Siddiq,

Witness to Surrender. Karachi: Oxford Univ.Press,

1978.

The Wounded Pride: Reminiscences of a Pakistani

Prisoner of War in India 1971-73. Lahore: Wajidalis,

1984. [This book was written in Urdu in 1974 and

translated into English by a couple called Mukhtar

and Arzmia]. Selvon,

Samuel,

A Brighter Sun (1952).

Shackle, Christopher,

Hasham Shah Sassi Punnun. Lahore: Vanguard

Books Ltd, 1985 [Translated from the Punjabi].

Shaikh, Sajjad,

Selected Short Stones of Ahmed Nadeem Qasrni Islamabad:

National Book Foundation, 1981
[Translated from the Urdu].

301
»

Siddiqui, M.I.,

Die to Live: A Selection of Short Stories Based on the

1965 Indo-Pakistan War. Lahore: Wajidalis, 1983.
[Translated from the Urdu].

Siddiqui, Kalim,

Conflict, Crisis and War in Pakistan. London:

Macmillan, 1972.

Singh, Khushwant,

Train to Pakistan (1956).

Singh, R.S.,

Indian Novel in English. Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann,

1977.

Soyinka, Wole,

The Interpreters (1965).

Death and the King’s Horseman (1975).

Srivastava, A.K. .ed,

Perspectives in Commonwealth Literature. Lucknow:

Atlantic Highlands, 1981.

Tutola, Amos,

The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952).

Verghese, C. Paul,

Problems of the Indian Creative Writer in English,

Bombay: Somaiya Publications, 1971.

Walsh, William,

A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature.

London: Chatto & Windus, 1970.
Commonwealth Literature. Oxford Univ.Press, 1973.
Readings in Commonwealth Literature, Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1973.

R.K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation, London:

Heinemann, 1982.

302
Wauthier, Claude,

The Literature and Thought of Mode Africa London:

Pall Mall Press, 1966.

Waterhouse, Keith,

[Referring to Achebe’s No Longer at Ease] in New

Statesman, LX (17 Sept. 1960), 348.

Watt, Ian,

The Rise of the Novel (1957).

Zaman, Fakhar,

The Prisoner (see under Hasan, Khalidfy

Zaman, Mukhtar,

Students’ Role In The Pakistan Movement. Karachi:

Quaid-e-Azam Academy, 1978.

Zingel, Wolfgang Peter & Stephanie Zingel ,Aye Lallement

.eds.,

Pakistan in the 80’s; Ideology, Regional* Economy,

Foreign Policy. Lahore: Vanguard Bootk8 Ltd, 1985.

303
INDEX

AagKa Darya, 146,225

Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad, 15, 19-23, 26, 134, 202, 223, 225

Abdullah, Mohsin, 30

Abrahams, Peter, 216, 217, 218

Abro, Jamal, 229

AbsLird/Absurdism, 37. 53, 59, 60. 119, 132. 145, 189, 190

Achebe, Chinua, 2, 46, 47, 48, 55, 217, 218

Ackedey, J.R, 201

Acquarius, 55

Adventures of the Brown Girl in Her Search for God, 26

African Literature in English, 2-4, 8, 26, 42, 73, 216-220, 224.

227, 229

African Poetry- in English, 234

African Stories, 234
Afro-Asian Book Club, 73
Ahmad, Ashfaque, 225
Ahmad, Iftikhar, 165, 186
Ahmad, Khalid, 149, 176, 185
Ahmad, Sayeed, 190
Arisen, Akhtar, 184
AIPWA. [See Progressives].
Alauddin, 52
Albee. E.F., 193

Alhamra Drama Group (Lahore), 188

Ali, Ahmed, 15, 27, 29-55. 57, 106, 140, 150, 152-153, 155,

185, 189,230

Ali, Hina Babar [See Imam, Hina Faisal].

Ali. Muhammad, 201
Ali, Shaukat. 58, 201
AJi. Wajid,

304
Alienation (includes self-alienation, deracination themes), 8,
36, 37, 86, 89, 122, 153, 156, 157, 159, 166, 221, 222, 223,
232

All Quiet on the Western Front, 227

Allahabadi, Akhar, 27

AHana, G, 182, 183, 187

Alvi, Irene, 182

America is a Punjabi Word, 173

America, Their America, 144

American Literature, 1

American Sociological Review, 109

Amichai, Yehuda, 159

Amjad, Amjad Islam, 124

Among the Believers, 109

Anand, Mulk Raj, 7, 13, 223

Anderson, David, 54

Angare, 30, 54

Angare Group, 36

Anglo-Indian fiction,

Animal Farm, 22

Anthills of the Savannah, 218

Ariel [Canada], 234

Arif, Abdul Qayyum, 87

Armah, Aye Kwei, 218

Arrival of the Monsoon, 165

A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists,

Ashraf, Syed Ali, 9, 150, 164, 185, 215

Askari, H, 39, 54

Aslam, Imran, 182, 183,214

Aspects of Indian Writing in English. 13

August Puddles, 183

Austen, Jane, 232

Avant Garde Arts Theatre (Karachi), 188

Ayaz, Sheikh, 226

Ayub, S.M, 86

Azam, Ikram, 86, 176, 189

Aziz, Abdul Haleem, 205-206

305
B

Baba, Ali, 228

Balaswamy, P, 8, 13

Baluchi Language and Literature, 216

Bangla Desh War (1971 Indo-Pakistan War), 12, 110, 111,

115, 120, 121, 122, 124, 162, 227, 228

Bamaby Rudge, 25
The Beacon, 4, 221
The Beautiful Empire, 92, 96-97, 98
The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet born, 218
Beckett, Samuel, 190
Beier, Ulli, 219
Bengali Literature, 228
Bewilderment to Sublimimity, 86, 87
Beyond the Dragon s Mouth, 201, 221
Bhatti, Gul Hameed, 124
Bhatti, N.A, 214
Bhittai, Shah Abdul Latif, 228
Bhutto, Benazir, 137

Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali. 110, 111, 112,211,227,228

Billen, Stephanie, 199
Bilqueece, Ali,
Black Moods, 202, 203, 215
Black Muslim Movement, 191
Blood and Stones, 22
The Blue Wind, 156, 164, 173, 186
The Bombay Chronicle, 202
Boxill, Anthony, 234

Brander, Laurence, 30, 39, 46, 48, 52, 54, 55

Brathwaite, E, 4, 13
The Bride, 125, 129-131
A Brighter Sun, 221
British Book News, 186

British National Front, 142, 191, 195, 196, 198

Burki, H.K, 81-84, 134, 140, 225, 228
Burton, S.H., 234
Butt, A. Aziz, 149, 185
306
Bye, Bye, Blackbird, 91, 144
Byron, G.G. Lord, 5

Cactus, 176, 180, 187 |

Cages of Freedom, 28 J

Caribbean (or West Indi^n) Literature, 4, 5, 8, 220-222, 224 I

Carpenter, Edward, 99, 1^4 *

The Castle ofOtranto, 27 ’ f

Chaksfield, C.J.H, 234 [

Changez Khan, 52 |

Chatterjee, Bankim Chart,jra 5 !;

Chaudhry, F.E, 212,213 ’J

Chekov, 196, 199 ?.

The Cherry Orchard, 196 !

Child of Two Worlds, 201 t

Christopher and His Kind, 201 <*

Chugtai, Asmat, 230, 231
Clark, J.P., 144
Colonial/ ism (themes etc -, 2, 4, 5, 26, 48, 96, 121, 191, 202

211,217,218,219,220/222,229,230,231,232
Commonwealth Literature^ ^3 28 148

Compass of Love, 168

Comrade, 201,

Confessions of a Native-Al[en^ 39 93.94 201

Congress of Negro Writers 4 ’’

Conrad, Joseph, 86, 134

Contradictions, 107-108
Coolie, 223

Coppola, Carlo, 33, 36, 37 40 42 53 54 55 152 185 187

Corbett, Jim, 117, 213

Corpses, 84, 85

Corvo, Baron, 68

Couto, Maria,

Coverley, Roger de, 202

Crane, Stephen, 227 .

Critical Quarterly,

Criticle, 13

307

- ^,
CRNLE Reviews Journal 187

The Crocodiles ae Here to Swim, 208

The Crow Eaters, 125-129, 130, 131, 135

Crump’s Terms, 95-96

CSP, 71, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 110, 121, 206, 210, 211, 212

CSP Association, 206

Cyprian, Eric (Ejaz), 214

Daedalus, Stephen,

Dahir, Rajah, 228

Daily Telegraph, 199

Dard, Mir, 170

Dash, Michael J, 13

’Daughter o find’, 189

Davies, Howard, 195

Dawn, 10, 54, 114, 165, 202

Death and the King’s Horseman, 217

Death by Hanging, 118-120

Death of a Salesman, 194

The Decayed, 205

Dent, Peter. 232

Derozia, Henry, 5

Desai, Anita, 91, 105, 144

The Desecrated Bones and Other Stories, 27

Desire and Pursuit of the Wliole, 68

Dhondy, Farrukh, 144,, 148

Dickens, Charles, 25, 106, 126

Dickinson, Eric C, 30

A Different Wodd, 92. 98

Die to Live, 116

Dilli Kl Sham, 41

DonBumo, 99 101

Donne, John, 154

Dostoevsky, 77

Dowson, Ernest, 152

Drama Circle of Dacca, 188

The Drama Guild, 188

308
A Dream of Africa, 219

Dutt, Michael Madhusudun, 5

Eastern Review,

Elahi, Hazrat Mahhoob, 45

Eliot, T.S, 36, 54,74, 153, 181

The Emergence of African Fiction, 12, 234

Enayatullah, Anwar, 188, 190, 199

Enayatullah, Atiya, 211

Encounter,

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 55

Eng, Ooi Boo, 185

The English Teacher, 52

Enigma of Arrival, 191, 201, 221

Enwonwa, Ben, 12

Esmond in India, 126

Essays in Verse, 150

Expatriate/Expatriation (themes etc.), 1, 8, 9, 11, 160, 163,

196, 228
Explorations, 10

Faces of Love and Death, 72-78, 79

Family Quarrels, 6, 13, 55

A Farewell to Anns, 227

Faiz, Ahmad Faiz, 72, 80, 155, 156, 169, 212, 226, 229
Far Eastern Reivew, 186

Farooqi, Nasir Ahmad, 72-80, 189, 190, 199, 225

Farooqi, Zahir H, 66-69

Farrukhi, Asif Alam, 54

Fascism, 22, 98, 143, 191,202

Feroze Shah, 52

Figures of Enchantment, 99-101, 108

Finding the Centre, 201

Fireflies, 221

First Voices, 156, 156

309
Fleming, Ian, 141

For Whom the Bell Tolls, 227

Forster: A Life,

Forster, E.M., 37, 55, 68, 108, 195, 201

The Forsyte Saga, 131

Forum for Modern Language Studies, 55

’From Islamabad With Love’,

From Memory, 15, 28, 200

From Purdah to Parliament, 200, 224

The Frontier Post, 10, 120, 124, 165,214

Furbank, P.N, 55, 186

Galik, M, 70

Gakwandi, S.A, 216, 234

Galsworthy, John, 131

Gandhi, M.K, 9, 20, 33, 224

Garrett, Simon, 187

Gatheru, Mugo, 201

Gemmill, Janet Powers, 174, 186, 187

George V, 39

Get Ready for Battle, 126

Ghalib, Mirza, 151, 169, 170, 231

Ghani, Mahbub, 149, 176, 185

Ghazal, 26, 29, 43, 55, 62, 138, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156,

167, 170, 174, 222,230

Ghose, Aurobindo, 5
Ghose, Kashiprosad, 5
Ghose, Zulfikar, 1, 11, 12,87,89-109, 111, 126, 138, 157-160,

162, 163, 186, 190, 201, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233
Gide, Andre, 74
Gilkes, Michael, 222, 234
Give Us Back Our Onions, 208, 210-212, 213
Gohar, Altaf (also spelled Gauhar), 73, 79, 212, 226
The Golden Tradition, 55
Good Morning, Midnight, 222
Gordon Riots, 25
Gowda, Anniah, 46, 47, 55

310
A Grain of ’Wtieat, 217
Grant, Steve, 199
Gregor, E.C,
Guillevie, Eugene, 159

Habib, Muhammad, 27 . ’\

Hakim Azizul, 164 i-t

Half Truths, 206 . |

Hali, Altaf Hasan, 27 r

Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq, 57, 70, 72

Hamari Gali, 32

Hameed, M.K, 164

Hamidullah, Zaib-un-Nissa, 58-66, 69, 80, 228, 229 .

Hand on the Sun, 142-144, 196 . ,

A Handful of Rice, & [

Haq, General Zia-ul-, 111, 112, 124, 136, 137, 149, 156, 205, *

227 ’

Hardy, Thomas, 67
Harris, Wilson, 234

Hasan, Ahmad, ,

Hasan, Khalid, 73, 88, 202, 203, 208-213, 228, 235

Hasan, Shuaib Bin, 173, 186
Hashmi, Alamgir, 9, 32, 35, 54, 102, 109, 128, 135, 162, 165,

172-176, 183 185, 186, 187, 232, 234

Hassan, Riaz, 149, 185 ’’

The Heart Divided, 15,23-25,28,147 ’ ’

Heart of Darkness, 134

Heat and Dust, 8
Hemingway, Ernest, 227
Henry, O, 59, 140
Herald, 54, 124
The Hills of Heaven, 182
A History of Urdu Literature, 55, 70, 185
Hitler, Adolf, 202
The Horizon Speaks, 184
Horney, Karen, 90, 109
Hosain, Attia, 49-50, 53, 72

311

V
Hosain, Shahid, 156-157, 232

Hou-Chou, Lee, 150

Hough, Graham, 167, 187

Houseboy, 217

A House for Mr Biswas, 221

Housing Society, 226

Hudson, R.A, 13

Hulme ’s Investigations Into the Bogart Script, 102, 159

Humayun, 30

Husain, Adrian, 162, 163

Husain, Intizar, 226

Husain, Sagheer, 86

Hussain, Akhtar, 118

Hussain, Akmal, 148

Hussain, Nadir, 163, 165

Huxley, Aldous,

Hyder, Qurrat ul Ain, 146, 225, 226

The Ice-Candy-Man, 131-134, 225, 231

I Dared to Call Him Father, 213

Ikramullah, Shaista, 200, 202, 224

The Illustrated Weekly of India, 13

Imam, Hina Faisal, 181, 182

Incence and Echoes, 182, 187

The Incredible Brazilian, 92, 96-99, 126

India: A Wounded Civilization, 109

Indian Bouquet, 58

Indian literature in English, 5-9, 41, 42, 149, 220, 222-224,

232

Indian Novel in English, 6

Indian Writing in English, 13
Indian Writing Today, 1
Indianness, 6, 7, 106
Indo-Anglian Fiction: An Assessment, 13
Indo-Pakistan War, 115, 116, 226
Inland and Other Poems, 173
The Inner Dimension, 187

312
The Interpreters, 218

In the Castle of My Skin, 221

In the Key of Blue, 68

In My Father’s Country, 201

In Search of form, 164

lonesco, Eugene, 38, 53, 60

Iqhal, Muhammad, 18, 27, 138, 230

Ireland, Kevin, 157, 186

Ireland, Roger, 175, 187

Iroh, Eddie, 218, 227

Iron, 186

Ishaguru,

Isherwood, Christopher, 201

lyengar, K.R. Srinivasa, 6

Izevabaye, D.S, 218, 234

Jahan, Bilquis, 41, 47

Jahan, Noor, 212

Jahan, Rashid (also spelled Jehan), 30, 31

Jaleel, Amar, 228

Jamaat-e-Islami, 56, 136

Jamal, Mahmud, 183

James, Henry, 1, 49

Jamil, Maya, 9, 201,215

Jeddy, Bilal Ahmad, 114-118, 120

Jets of Orange, 157

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 8, 72, 91, 126, 223, 232

Jinnah, Fatima, 226

Jinnah, Mohammad Ali, 75, 138, 147, 224

Jones, Henry Arthur, 51

Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 12, 54, 88, 185, 186, 187

Journal of the English Literary Club, 10

Journal of Indian Writing in English, 10,54, 185

Journal of South Asian Literature, 54

Joyce, James, 36, 38

A Judge May Laugh, 206

313
Junejo, Mohammad Khan, 137
Jussawalla, Feroza, 6, 9, 13, 14, 41, 55

Kafka, Franz, 35, 38, 532, 60

Kaikobad, Yasmine, 176

Kama}, Daud, 161, 162, 165, 168-172, 186, 232

Kamal, Nazir, 183

Kamran, Jeelani, 226

Kanaganayakam, 90, 109, 186

Kangaroo, 84, 85

Kanthapura, 224

Karachi Arts Theatre Society, 188

Kariuki, Josiah Mwangi, 217

Kashmiri, Zaheer, 155. 229

Kayani, M.R, 201,206-208

Kazi, Elsa, 57

Kazi, II, 26,57

Kazi, Pervez, 214

’Kehva Khana’, 214

Khamisani, Amena, 26, 200

Khan, Ashfaq All, 28

Khan, Gulzar Ahmad, 189

Khan, Liaquat Ali, 75

Khan, Mohammad Ayuh, 71, 110, 111, 206, 207, 212, 225,
226

Khan, Mohammad Yahya, 110, 111

Khan, Tahawar Ali, 213
Khosa, Tariq Masood, 176
Khusro Hazrat Amir, 45
Khwaja, Waqas Ahmad, 176-178, 187
King, Bruce, 4

Kureishi, Hanif, 13, 109, 184, 187, 234

Kureishi, Maki, 11, 190-199, 231, 232
Kureishi, Omar, 201, 202-204, 208, 214, 215
Kuresihi, Salman Tariq, 163
KJry-over-al,

314
La Guma, Alex, 217

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 230 j

Lai, P, 28, 149, 185

Lall, J.S, 8, 13 !

Lallement, Zingel,

Lamming, George, 221

Larson, Charles R, 12, 220, 234

Lawrence, D.H, 66, 68, 84, 85, 230 i

Laye, Camara, 219 •

The Leader, 54 «

League, Awami, 110, 111 {

League, Muslim, 23, 24 f

League, of Progressive Authors, 31’ j

Lee Hou-Chou, ;•

Lemon, Sheila, 199 j

Lenin, Vladimir, 36 4

Lessing, Doris, 216, 234 ,!

.Liberalism (liberal-humanism, liberal etc.), 15, 26, 56, 60, 62,

68, 72, 140, 146, 156, 171, 202, 223, 225, 230, 231 !

Lindfors, Berenth, 234

The Literary Criterion,

The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa, 234

Literatures of the World in English, 187, 234
The Loss of India, 92, 157
The Lost Girl, 68
Lotus Leaves, 58 ”

Love in Ruins,
Love Songs and Elegies, 5
Lucknow University Journal, 30
Ludhianvi, Sahir, 155, 229

Maes-Jelinek, Hena, 234

Mahmud, Safdar, 124
Mahmuduzzafar, 30
Maja-Pearce, Adewale, 201

315

V
Makhzan, 54

Malcolm X, 191

Malik, Ayesha, 80

Malik, Tariq Yazclani, 149, 165, 185

Malgonkar, Manohar, 72

A Man of the People, 218

Man-Eaters of Sunderbans, 213

Maneaters of Kumaun, 213

Manhunt in the Desert, 184

Manto, Sadat Hasan, 57, 212, 225, 230, 231

Margalla Voices, 176

Markandaya, Kamala, 8, 13, 72, 105, 223

Marrott, R.S, 199

Martial Law, 71, 76, 77, 80, 110, 111, 136, 137, 146, 156. 205,

225, 227, 228

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 99, 131

Masroor, Mehr Nigar, 120, 138, 146-147, 225
Masood, Syed Ross, 37
Mass-Jelinek, Hena,
Mau Man Detainee, 217
Maudoodi, Abul Ala,
Maugham, Somerset, 74
Maupassant, Guy de, 59
Mehmood, Tariq, 11. 142-144, 196
Mehta, PP, 6, 13
A Memory o/’Asia, 157, 160
Mendes, Alfred H, 220, 234
Merek, J, 70
Midnight’s Children, 228
Miller, Henry, 194
Miller, Jordon Y,
Mine Boy, 216
Mir, TaqiMir, 151, 170,231
Mirror, 10,58
Mirza, Iskandar, 71
Mittelholzer, 222, 234
Mixed Voices,
Moby Dick, 117
Modern Indian Poetry in English, 28, 185

316
Mohan, Romesh, 13 I

Momin, Hakim Momin Khan, 151, 231 I

Mooraj, Anwar, 201, 204, 208 §

Moore Gerald, 219 |

Moore, torn, 5 *

Moraes, Dom, 89 \

Morant Bay Rebellion, 221 t

Morning News, 55 *

Mornings in the Wilderness, 180

Mphalele, Ezekiel,

Mrs Dalloway, 120

A Mug’s Game, 208

Muhammad, Elijah, 191

The Murder of Aziz Klian, 89, 102-107, 159, 229, 231

The Muslim, 10, 165, 214, 234, 235 L

My Beautiful Laundrette, 191, 196, 197-198, 199,231 ”I

My Father and Myself, 201

My Friend Matt and Hena the Wljore, 144, 145 [;

My Goddess, 84, 184, 187 JS

My Second in Kentucky, 173, 174

Naidu, Sarojini, 5, 28

Naik, M’.K, 13
Naipaul, Shiva, 91,201,221

Naipaul, V.S, 42, 89, 91, 94, 109, 191, 192, 201, 122

The Naked Night, 189, 199

Narasimhaiah, 6

Narayan, R.K, 7, 9, 13, 52, 72, 90, 106, 109, 224

Nasir, Hasan, 226 i

The Nation, 165, 186 U

Nationalism, 1, 4, 6, 11, 19, 21, 26, 138, 149, 188, 202, 228,

230,232 ’;’

The Native, 92
The Nature of Passion, 8
Nawaz, Shuja, 149, 164, 176, 185
Negritude, 26,219,230
Neither This Time/Nor That Place, 173

317

-_•_ v
Nerudo, Pablo, 183

New Day, 221

The New English Literatures, 109

The New Harmony, 150, 156, 157, 165

A New History of Torments, 99-101

New Literature Review, 186

New Statesman, 2, 12

Next Moon, 187

Nguigi, James (Wa Thiongo), 217

Niazi, Muneer, 169

Nineteen Eighty-Four, 107 , •

Niven, Alistair, 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 51, 54, 55

No Longer at Ease, 2

Noon, Feroze Khan, 15-19, 26, 200

Nostalgia (theme), 27, 35, 43, 48, 49, 153, 162, 169, 170, 181,

230

Nothing in Earnest, 205

Nothing in Particular, 205
Not the Wlwle Truth, 206, 207
The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa, 234

The Oath and Amen, 173, 174

O! Banender!, 295

Obiechina, E.N, 234

Ocean of the Night, 50-52

Old English Garden Symphony, 57

Omar, Kaleem, 161-162,176, 186,232

’Onlooker’ (Hasan Abbasi), 214

One Hundred Years of Solitude, 99

Orwell, George, 22, 107

Our Inner Conflicts, 109

Out to Lunch, 202

Outside India, 202

Over a Cup of Tea, 214

Oyono, Ferdinand, 217

318
Pakistan Divided, 124

Pakistan in the Eighties, 124, 148

Pakistan: Literature and Society, 234

Pakistan P.E.N. Miscellany, 56, 57

Pakistan Quarterly, 10, 185, 199

Pakistan Times, 165, 186, 213

Pakistani Idiom (Third World deviant English), 6-8, 13, 14,

40-42, 106, 109, 122, 185, 205,209-210

Pakistani Literature, 187
The Palm- Wine Drinkard, 219
Paraeswaran, Uma, 6, 8, 13
Parra, Nucanor, 159
Partition Literature, 21, 23, 24, 131-134, 135, 147, 153,. 159,

190, 224, 225

A Passage to India, 37, 52, 54, 108, 195

Pattanayak, Chandrahhanu,
Pawn to King Three, 141
Phantom Figures, 201
Pieces of Eight, 156, 164
Pindi Play House, 188
Pinero, Arthur Wing, 51
Pleasure City, 105, 223
Poe, Edgar Alan, 60
Poems (Hamidullah, Mrs), 58
Poems (Khwaja), 176
Poems (Zuheri), 154
Pop Writings, 205
Popa, Vasco, 159

A Portrait of the A rtist of the Artist as a Young Man, 93, 200

Pound, Ezra, 167
Presence Afrcaine, 12, 234
Presley, Elvis, 192, 193
The Prisoner, 228, 235
The Prison House, 32, 54
Progressive/s (themes, movement, literature), 31, 32, 49, 57,
70, 72, 156, 230
Problems of the Indian Creative Writer in English, 13

319
Proust, 35

Punjabi (language & literature), 165, 216, 225, 228

Purple Cold Mountain, 54, 152, 185

Pushto (language & literature), 216

Qadir, Mrs, Abdul, 27

Qasim, Muhammad Bin, 228
Qasmi, Ahmed Nadim, 225
QaziJavaid, 138, 147
Quaid Kliana, 32
Quaid-e-Azam Library, 173, 180
Quaid-e-Azam Library Group, 176, 180
Quaid-e-Azam Library anthologies, 173

RafatTaufiq, 106, 109, 149, 153, 157, 161, 162, 163, 165-168,

169, 172, 174, 175, 176, 185, 186, 232

Rahman, Saleem-ur, 186
Rahman, Sheikh Mujeeb ur, 110
Rahman, Fyzee, 189
Rahman, Tariq, 12, 44, 54, 555, 109, 120, 121, 122, 186, 227,

232,234
Rajan, B, 187
Rashed, N.M, 57
Rao, Raja, 7, 13, 30, 72, 91, 224
Rasheed, Jamal, 165, 186
Rats and Diplomats, 53
The Ravi, 10, 109, 173, 176, 185, 186
Readings in Commonwealth Literature, 12, 13, 234
Recognitions, 168
Red Badge of Courage, 221
Rehman, Naveed, 176
Reid, V.S, 221

Remarques, Eric Maria, 227

A Remote Beginning, 168, 186
Review of Contemporary Fiction, 109
320
\1

\>

Revolt of the Slaves, 184 |j

Rhys, Jean, 222 }.

Riaz, Fahmida, 229, 234, 235 I

Rice, P

The Rice of the Novel, 109 t

The River Between, 217 V

Robins, Harold, 141

Roetkhe, Theodore, 159

A Room With a View, 68

Roy, Tridiv, 112-114

Rushdie, Salman, 94, 109, 131, 138, 228

Russian literature, 1 «

Rusva, Mirza Hadi, 28 »

Saeed, Jocelyn Ortt, 55. 70, 185

Sadiq, Sardar Muhammad, 212
Sadness at Dawn, 73, 78
Saeed, Jocelyn Ortt, 181, 182
Said, Yunus, 118-120, 124, 190
Salam, Ahdus, 211
Salik, Siddiq, 124,227

Sand, Cacti and People, 204

Sander, Reinhard W, 13

Sanghwi, Malavika,

Sapir, Edward, 7

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, 7
Saqipur Sacred, 81

Sartre, Jean Paul, 74

Scattered Flowers, 176

Scented Dust, 15, 24, 46

Schneider, Richard. 213

Scorecard, 208,212,213

Sealy, Clifford, 234

The Seduced, 87

Seeman, M, 90, 109

Selected Poems (Jocelyn), 182

Seljouk, Mehdi Ali, 84-86, 184

321
Selvon. Samuel, 221

Senghor L, 219

The Serpent and the Rope, 91

Sex (including homosexuality etc), 37, 43-46, 54, 55, 57, 66,

68, 87, 103, 112, 129, 138, 141, 142, 144, 188, 198, 205,

230, 231

Sewanee Review, \ (’9

Shadows of Time, 120, 146-147,225
Shah, Mohammad, 45
Shah. WajidAli, 188
Shahab, Qudratullah, 57
Shahjahan, 29
Shahinawaz, Jahan Ara, 28
Shahnawaz, Mian Mohammad,
Shahnawaz, Mumttfz, 15, 23-26, 57, 224
Shakespeare, W .’Ilk m, 167
S/ialf We MeetAga’ui, 86
Sham, Narayan, 22?
Shame, 228
Shaw, Bernard, 23
Sheikh, Bilquis, 213
Sheikh, Mansoor Y 163,164
Sheikh, Sajjad, 123

Short Story International, 120, 124,232

Shorter. Eric, 19”)
Shujauddin, Syed,
Siddiqui, M.I, 11 ’>

Sidhwa, Bapsi, 123, 125-135, 138, 225, 231, 232, 233

Silence in a Gun ”s Mouth, \ 83

Sindhi (language & literature), 205, 216. 226, 227, 228, 229
Sind’s Contribution to English, 26, 200
Singh, Bhupal, 5, 13
Sinah Khushwant, 134, 224
Singh R.S, 6
Sipra,,Mahmud, 141-142
Six Gees.? From a Tamb at Mcdum, 177
Saty Days in America, 58
Slave* of Time, 189
Snakes ;end Ladders. 73, 78-80, 225

322
Socialism (socialist, Marxism themes, etc), 15, 19, 22, 23, 24, ’ |

30, 31, 32, 56, 72, 75, 76, 98, 13?, 142, 155, 156, 184, 221, ;

223,226,229 |,

Sociolinguistics, 13 ;

So/0,205 t

Some More Truth, 206, 207 f

Soyinka, Wole, 217, 218 «

The Spectator, 23 \

St Patrick’s Dramatic Society, 188

The Stage and Television,’Today, 199 ,

The Star, 10, 202, 214 fj

Statement Against Corpses, 108 j j

Stock, A.G, 157, 186 |. !

Strategic Issues in Pakistan’s Economic Policy, 148 j,

Studies in English Literature. 54 [•

Study of Indian Writing in English, 6 i,;

Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists, 6 . |

Suhrawardy, Shahid, 26, 56, 57, 58, 150-152, 155, 185 ’ j .

Sultan, Raja Changes, 176, 187 (•

Sunlight on a Broken Column, 49-50, 53, 72 ?(

Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction, 13
Swan and the Eagle, 6
Swift, Jonathan, 202
Symonds, John Addington, 68

Tabassum, A.R, 134, 138-140, 141, 184,225

Tagore, Rabindranath, 39

Tahir, Athar, 147, 176, 180-181, 187, 232

Ten Years of Vision, 124

Theatre List, 199

They Simply Belong, 112-114

The Thing, 190

Third World Literature in English, 1-9, 10, 11, 12, 134, 142,

183,201,216-224,229,233
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Nomad, 187
Things Fall Apart, 2, 46, 47, 55, 217
This Island Now, 218

323
This Time in Lahore, 173, 187, 234

Thwaite, Anthony, 186

Time Out, 199

Times, 199

Times Literary Supplement, 186

To the Lighthouse, 120

Toads of War, 218

Tomorrow is Ours, 22

Tong, Raymond, 186

Towards Democracy, 184

Train to Pakistan, (34, 224

Transitions, 2

Trip, Trap, 148

Tutaii, Akhtar, 123

Tutola, Amos, 42, 106, 219, 234

Twentieth Century Literature, 109, 186

Twilight in Delhi, 27, 33, 38-49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 106, 152,

230

Two Nation Theory, 25, 147

Two Virgins, 223

Ulfyses,94,2Ql

Ullyses, 175

Umrao Jan Ada, 20, 28 .

Untouchable, 223

Urdu Digest, 116,226

Urdu Language and Literature, 20, 21, 26, 27, 29, 30, 41, 42,
43, 53, 55, 57, 70, 72, 103, 111, 119, 134, 139, 150, 151,
153, 155, 156, 169, 170, 174, 183, 188, 216, 223, 225, 226,
227, 228, 229, 230, 232

The Vale of Tears, 123

A Various Terrain, 187
Vathec, 27
The Vendor of Sweets, 224

324
Venture, 10, 109, 185,215

Verghese, Paul, 13

Viewpoint, 12

The Village by the Sea, 105

The Violent West, 157

Vision, 124

Voices, 234

A Voyage Out, 187

Waiting for Godot, 190

Waiting for the Mahatma, 9, 224

Waliullah, Syecl, 57

A Walk in the Night, 217

Walsh, William, 5, 12, 13, 28, 50, 144, 148, 234

Wardle, Irving, 199

Wasafiri, 187

Waterhouse, Keith, 2, 12

Watt, Ian, 92, 109

Wauthier, Claude, 218, 234

Weep Not Child, 217

The Well Beloved, 67

Westerley,

West Indian Literature, 13, 234

Wlieels, 80-81

WJiere Angels Fear to Tread, 68

WJiere No Road Goes, 182

The Wliite Tiger of Viringa, 114-115, 120

Wlio is Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 193

Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 7

Wet Sun, 181

Wide Sargassso Sea, 222

Wignesan, T, 88

Wilde, Oscar,

Williams, Francis, 220

Williams, Stevens, 159

A Window to the East, 138-140

The Windswept Wahini, 112-114

325
Wisdom From Fools, 26

Witness to Surrender, 124,227

Wodehouse, P.G, 113, 114, 208, 209

Woodcock, George, 90, 109

Woolf, Virginia, 36, 120

Word/all, 156, 165, 186

World Literature Today, 54

World Literature Written in English, 135

The Wounded Pride, 227

A Wreath for Udomo, 217

Wright, Edgar, 12

Yazdani, Saeed P, 87

Yeats, W.Y, 150

Yih-Ling, Lin, 150

The Young Wife and Other Stories, 58

Zafar, Ba’hadur Shah, 170

Zaheer, Sajjad, 30, 31, 36
Zaman, Fakhar, 228
Zameenzad, Adam, 138, 144-146
Zeno, 54,214

Zingal, Wolfgang Peter, 124, 148

Zuheri, Itrat Husain, 153-155 //’
Zuberi, Saida, 154 / ?

326
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