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The Question of Identity, Captured

by the Pakistani English Novel
A number of Pakistani authors inevitably write about the meaning of
their nationalistic identity, belonging and immigration.
A view of the Karachi Literature Festival. Credit: Twitter
Sauleha Kamal

BOOKS
08/APR/2018

There is a scene early in Bapsi Sidhwa’s harrowing Partition novel, Ice-

Candy Man  (recently renamed Cracking India), where a character narrates
the story of the arrival of his Zoroastrian ancestors in India after they were
“kicked out of Persia”. They were, according to the narrator, initially turned
away by an Indian prince who told them there was no room for outsiders in
India. He sent them a glass full of milk to illustrate his point. In response,
Zoroastrians mixed a teaspoon of sugar into the milk, successfully
demonstrating that “the refugees would get absorbed into his country …
and with their decency and industry sweeten the lives of his subjects”. This
“smart and civilised” move impressed the Indian prince and he gave
Zoroastrians permission to live in India.

It is interesting that this story of a minority community’s experience with

immigration and assimilation is recounted in one of the first truly Pakistani
novels. Pakistan, indeed, emerged as an independent state primarily as a
safe haven for the Muslim minority of India. Since the country’s inception
in 1947, however, it has not only been faced with the task of defining its
distinct postcolonial identity that is different from a postcolonial Indian
identity, it also has had to separate its new identity from its Indian past.
Sugar has to be taken out of milk in order for it to become distinctly visible.

Pakistan’s emergence as a new state, thus, severed Pakistani English fiction

from its Indian antecedents. Born at a moment of intense trauma, caused by
Partition, and amid a heightened sense of nationalism subsequently,
Pakistani English fiction began its life with no lineage — or so it seems. It
is, therefore, important to note that the anglophone Pakistani novel –
defined here as any novel written by writers who self-identified as Pakistani
at the time of writing – is not simply an extension of the Indian novel, even
though the two are closely related.

The origins

Scholars such as Claire Chambers (writing in her 2015 book, Imagining

Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion,
Representations, and her 2017 book, Rivers of Ink), Muneeza Shamsie (in
her 2017 book, Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani
Literature in English, and her 1997 collection, A Dragonfly in the Sun: An
Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English) and Tariq Rahman (in his 1991
book, A History of Pakistani Literature in English 1947-1988) have traced
Pakistani novels back to Indian novels written by Muslim authors, most
notably Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi.

Ali was born in Delhi in 1910 and his work first featured in Angarey, a
1932 avant garde Urdu volume that carried short stories by leading
progressive writers of the time. He later migrated to Pakistan and became a
diplomat. Published in 1940, his novel offers a nostalgic portrait of Indian
Muslims in Old Delhi and their decline following their encounter with
British colonisers. It, however, can hardly be termed as the progenitor of
Pakistani fiction writing in English.

Where Ali wrote Twilight in Delhi as an Indian Muslim, the first generation

of Pakistani writers wrote with the awareness that they were no longer
Indian and sought to emphasise their new national identity. For a time,
therefore, the anglophone Pakistani novel continued to focus on how the
identity of the new country and its citizens was taking shape. Zulfikar
Ghose’s 1967 work, The Murder of Aziz Khan, attempts to map this cultural
transition as Pakistan grew into its adolescence. To do so, the writer
employs a dark tale of the unscrupulous Shah brothers plotting to exploit
the older, eponymous Aziz Khan — a stand in for traditional values.

Attempts to attach a history to the Pakistani novel based solely on a tenuous

religious link, and the temptation to define the Pakistani novel as an Indian-
Muslim novel, therefore, must be resisted. It is more rewarding, instead, to
examine the unique historical forces that led to the creation of Pakistan and,
thus, shaped the concerns of its English literature.

Themes of cultural hybridity and assimilation are expected in postcolonial

novels but what is specifically worth examining with reference to Pakistani
fiction in English is the anxiety around the identity of the Pakistani state.
Should this identity be predicated on a history of Islam and Muslims in the
subcontinent simply because religion predominantly figured in the
movement to create Pakistan?

Ayesha Jalal (writing in a chapter titled ‘The Past as Present’ in Pakistan:

Beyond the ‘Crisis State’, published in 2011) identifies the struggle for
Pakistan as the one to “define an identity that is both national and Islamic”.
This particular problem of negotiating between the national and the
religious was inevitable for a nation state whose creation was justified on
the basis of religious differences. The Two-Nation Theory that formed the
basis of the All-India Muslim League’s movement for Pakistan defined
nation on the basis of religion but, initially, only used this definition as a
bargaining chip. That Partition’s violence was carried out along religious
lines no doubt cemented the connection between Pakistani and Muslim
nationalism.

Post-Partition, this meant a conflation of Muslim and Pakistani identities.

The Muhajir (Muslim migrants to Pakistan from India), thus, based their
sense of belonging to the new country on religion and embarked upon a
quest to dissolve themselves into the national framework like the sugar in
milk in Sidhwa’s story. Cara Cilano of Michigan State University (in her
2013 book, Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English: Idea, Nation,
State) refers to this process as “representations of unity through a shared
Muslim identity carried over from Muslim to Pakistani nationalism”. The
question remains, however, whether equating the Pakistani nation with the
Muslim nation fully encompasses the Pakistani identity. If so, why does the
Pakistani novel continue to fixate on identity?

Interestingly, the originators of Muslim nationalism in India belonged to

the class of English-educated ‘mimic men’ whom the colonial state once
imagined as its gatekeepers. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a British loyalist who
called the First War of Independence in 1857 a mutiny, encouraged
Muslims to study English, seeing it as a tool necessary for their
advancement within British-ruled India. He also spoke in the late 19th
century about Hindus and Muslims being “two nations” after the Indian
National Congress failed to address Muslim concerns. Later, another highly
educated man, the poet Allama Iqbal, would take up the cause of Muslim
nationalism and crystallise the idea of a separate nation for Indian Muslims
in a 1930 speech.

The consequent movement for Pakistan was one that simultaneously

opposed British rule and emerged out of colonialism. Such a history would
inevitably raise questions about identity. The same applies to the
anglophone novel written in South Asia.

Priyamvada Gopal of the University of Cambridge notes that the emergence

of the subcontinent’s anglophone novel out of colonialism has meant that it
has “returned repeatedly to a self-reflexive question: What is India(n)?”
The anglophone Pakistani novel, in turn, has fixated on the question: ‘What
is Pakistan(i)?’. This latter question, however, is more complicated than its
predecessor for it bears not only the burden of a foreign language but also a
confusion over religious nationalism and an anxiety about a severed past
that involves “‘othering’ the national self from the rival neighbour India”
— as Amina Yaqin of SOAS, University of London, has described it in the
book Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in
South Asia.

Muneeza Shamsie has written about what she calls “Duality and Diversity
in Pakistani English Literature” in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing in
2011. “Pakistani English literature shares with other South Asian English
literatures a regional dynamic as well as a long colonial history, but the
Pakistani imagination is also linked to the wider Islamic world.” The
Islamic connection, thus, only partially encompasses the idea of Pakistan.

To understand this, it is important to examine the minority rights discourse

that preceded the creation of Pakistan. Leaders of the All-India Muslim
League did not take an exclusivist approach to the protection of minorities.
This explains why, after Pakistan was created, Muhammad Ali Jinnah
declared, “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to
go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of
Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has
nothing to do with the business of the State.”
 Jinnah. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A little less than a decade from the moment Jinnah made this famous
declaration, the 1956 constitution renamed Pakistan as an “Islamic
Republic”, bringing religion right back into the business of the state. This
confusion over the separation of religion and the state certainly complicates
the possibility of equating Muslim nationalism with Pakistani nationalism
as has been argued by some theorists.

Pakistani novelists, therefore, had to negotiate what Jalal terms the

“twilight [zone] between myth and history”. It was inevitable that the
literature that emerged from such a history would be focused on identity.

A postcolonial discomfort

The anglophone novel in South Asia emerged out of the colonial encounter.
Postcolonial criticism, therefore, has dedicated a lot of time and ink to the
question of whether anglophone postcolonial writing is truly postcolonial,
written as it is in the language of the colonisers. Feroza Jussawalla,
professor of literature at the University of New Mexico, claims in her 1985
book, Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English:
“Indians write in English to impress the British … they write at the
inspiration of Western writers.”

Other critics, too, have documented this discomfort with English language
in the postcolonial context. Tariq Rahman, in his excellent history of
anglophone Pakistani literature, recounts these debates but offers no
resolution to this particular issue. Looming in the background of all this, of
course, is the spectre of Thomas Macaulay’s oft-quoted 1835 Minute on
Indian Education that became the basis for the English Education Act in
India. He sought to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour,
but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. While it is
tempting to see the very existence of English writing in the postcolonial
state as evidence of the success of Macaulay’s mission, such a move would
be something of an oversimplification.

Indeed, an examination of postcolonial anglophone South Asian literature

reveals that it is not simply a product of the kind of Indians Macaulay
sought to create. Many postcolonial anglophone writers are not engaged in
mimicking their colonial masters. The rich South Indian tapestry in
Arundhati Roy’s 1996 novel, The God of Small Things, and Vikram Seth’s
charming desi matchmaking saga, A Suitable Boy (published in 1993), are
just two of the many books that prove this contention.
It is apparent that these writers understand the fact that “to be Anglicized
is emphatically not to be English”, as postcolonial theorist Homi K Bhabha
observes in his book, The Location of Culture, which came out in 1994.

Anglophone writers do act as interpreters, albeit in the other direction. They

are not the “vehicles for conveying [Western] knowledge to the great mass
of the population”, as Macaulay had imagined but they are certainly
vehicles for communicating South Asia to the West and the rest of the
English-speaking world.

This is why it is common to see words and phrases from indigenous Indian
languages in anglophone South Asian literature, always accompanied by
their translations. Here is one example. Sidhwa writes, “She calls him Jan:
life.” Implicit in her translation of ‘Jan’ is the fact that the writer is not
writing for an audience of Urdu-Hindi speakers alone.

Nearly a decade after Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man, Mohsin Hamid frames The

Reluctant Fundamentalist literally as the speech of a Pakistani man
addressed to a Westerner (an American, to be exact). That this dialogue
with, and for, the West that has become an integral part of the postcolonial
anglophone novel is evidence that postcolonial writers continue to act as
interpreters for outsiders and, thus, participate in the Macaulay project,
though in a very different way from what he had originally intended.

It is, therefore, not surprising then that Ice-Candy Man remembers Partition

from an insider-outsider perspective: children within a minority
community. Many anglophone Pakistani novels that precede and follow this
novel offer a similar perspective through the eyes of migrants to and from
Pakistan.

The diasporic concepts of “‘home’, ‘nationality’ and ‘exile’” that Paromita

Deb identifies in her 2011 paper, Religion, partition, identity and diaspora:
a study of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man, have recurred as major themes
in many anglophone Pakistani novels. Their framing, however, has changed
according to a changing sociopolitical landscape.

Hanif Kureishi (in his 1990 book, The Buddha of Suburbia, and 1998
book, Intimacy), for instance, explores the familiar form of cultural
disconnect felt by those straddling two cultures as the first wave of
Pakistani diaspora lived out their lives in the United Kingdom. Bina Shah’s
2001 novel, Where They Dream in Blue, chronicles an attempt to know a
possibly unknowable Pakistan as her young Pakistani-American
protagonist, Karim Asfar, follows his identity crisis to Karachi. Plagued
with concerns about having a hybrid identity, he wonders about his fellow
hyphenated Americans: “Were they Americans, or Pakistanis? Where did
they belong? Who owned their loyalties? When the Gulf War erupted,
should they have supported the Iraqis, because they were Muslim, or
Americans, because they were born in America?”

Identity and assimilation

The same themes continue in contemporary Pakistani English fiction but

here, questions of identity and assimilation have been complicated by
changes in global politics in the years immediately following 9/11.

Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (published in 2003) offers a window into

the consequences of the Gulf War through a family drama, but it contains a
moment where its young Pakistani protagonist Daanish returns home after
years at an American university (and is consequently ‘othered’ by his
countrymen). He envies his love interest and co-protagonist, Dia, who, by
virtue of having lived in Pakistan her entire life, remains “fully Pakistani”.

Mohammed Hanif’s darkly humorous A Case of Exploding

Mangoes (which came out in 2008), a satire on militarism and American
influence in the Cold War era told through General Zia-ul-Haq’s
assassination, is also aware of the contemporary ‘Af-Pak’ facet of
Pakistan’s identity. It features episodes where American diplomats rub
shoulders with Pakistani officials and Afghan freedom fighters in
Islamabad.

After 9/11, there has also been a shift from questions around immigration
and assimilation to ones around migrants returning ‘home’. This is evident
in Hamid’s 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and H.M. Naqvi’s
2009 novel, Home Boy. Both these books ask whether assimilation is even
desirable.
For The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Changez, the question comes to a head
when he experiences a loss of self during a visit home from New York,
where he has been living for years. He finds himself mistaking, at first, the
“enduring grandeur” of his family home for shabbiness – just as an
American would. For him, to think about his home in this way is shameful
for it suggests that he is becoming a foreigner in his own land. As he
dreams “not of Erica”– his girlfriend and a stand in for America in the
novel – “but of home”, it becomes apparent that sooner or later he will have
to choose between the two.

For Naqvi’s Chuck, a similar choice appears in a darker manner after a

night of casual misadventures lands him in hot water with the authorities in
the post-9/11 panic. He is transformed into an object of suspicion, is
dehumanised and told he has no rights because, “You aren’t American!”
When he chooses to return home at the novel’s close, he is in a state of
psychological anguish, crippled by “fear and terror”.

The early English novels of India and Pakistan shared many similarities —
take the shared thematic concerns over Partition in Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy
Man, Khushwant Singh’s 1956 novel, Train to Pakistan, and Attia Hosain’s
1961 novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column. The trauma of 9/11 brought a
major shift for Pakistan – and its literature – away from its South Asian
links as its Islamic identity and strategic location have embroiled it in what
has become a prolonged campaign against Islamic militants in Afghanistan
as well as in its own Pakhtun regions.

The country’s public perception in the wake of this fight has very much
shaped its literary and cultural discourse. Cultural theorist Claire Chambers
notes this change while talking about Granta magazine’s 2010 Pakistan
issue. “[It] adds to a sense of publishers and academics moving away from
the fashionable Indo-chic of the 1980s and 1990s towards grittier, post-9/11
‘renditions’ of Pakistan as the eye of the storm in the war on terror,” she
writes. That this grittier post-9/11 rendition should come from writers who,
as Chambers says, citing Muneeza Shamsie, “neither have hyphenated
identities nor can be considered Pakistani exiles, but write in liminal
positions between West and East”, is not simply coincidental.
The anglophone Pakistani novel has always been on a quest for identity,
belonging and immigration. It follows, then, that these concerns are adapted
to the contemporary moment by the contemporary Pakistani novel in
English to the extent that Cara Cilano reads an end of nationalism in
Kamila Shamsie’s ambitious novel Burnt Shadows that travels from Japan
to India to Pakistan to Afghanistan and to the United States.

It appears, however, that the Pakistani English novel advocates something

beyond nationalism, not because it is opposed to nationalism but because it
finds itself outside of nationalism. It amplifies the notions of othering so
that sugar no longer dissolves in milk. The question is no longer about
“getting absorbed into [a new] country”. Attempts to dissolve outside of
Pakistan, too, have ended in failure, as is clear in The Reluctant
Fundamentalist and Home Boy. It is debatable whether attempts to re-enter
Pakistan and get reabsorbed into its fabric can be successful but these
‘return home’ novels certainly attempt it. This moment of returning home
with an insider-outsider perspective, however, may be short-lived — as is
clear from some recent works of fiction.

The contemporary wave of anglophone Pakistani fiction, bolstered by a

thriving publishing industry in India, is marked by what Bilal Tanweer calls
a local reference point. Take, for instance, the crime thrillers written by
Omar Shahid Hamid, a Karachi-based cop who started writing novels
during a sabbatical. He has drawn on his personal and professional
experiences to paint, among other things, an up-close picture of the war
against terrorism played out on the streets of Karachi.

With The Diary of A Social Butterfly (published in 2008) and its sequel

(published in 2014), Moni Mohsin has deftly penned irreverent satires of
high society life in Lahore. Tanweer’s own tumultuous love affair with
Karachi in The Scatter Here is Too Great (that came out in 2013) attempts
a Calvino-esque immortalisation of a city. Legal academic Osama
Siddique’s foray into fiction, Snuffing Out the Moon, is an ambitious tour
through the history of the land we call Pakistan — starting from 2084 BCE
Mohenjodaro, moving through present-day Lahore and ending in an era
about 70 years from now.
These novels – fragments of various identities in the country, snapshots of
different moments in time – signal an era in which Pakistani writing is
happy to investigate the country itself, and its competing narratives, on its
own turf rather than from the outside in. With Partition over 70 years in the
past and the pull westward dulled in the polarised, anti-immigrant climate
of a Trump-led United States and an increasingly xenophobic United
Kingdom, interest in questions of immigration and assimilation has
diminished in the Pakistani novel in English.

As the space for hybrid identities shrinks, so does the proclivity among
writers towards being citizens of nowhere and everywhere — water lilies,
rooted but able to float, as Hamid puts it in his 2014 collection of
essays, Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New
York, and London.

Literary theorist and philosopher György Lukács noted in his 1920

book, The Theory of the Novel, that selfhood is home for the soul. He
described the novel as an attempt to regain home in order to recover
selfhood. True to its form, the Pakistani novel in English continues to
pursue selfhood and home. This pursuit, however, is moving away from an
exploration of identity in terms of immigration and assimilation and
towards an exploration of identity – in all its multitudes – in the indigenous
context.

Sauleha Kamal is a fiction writer, essayist and academic researcher. She

tweets at  @Sauliloquy1 

This article was  originally published  on Herald.

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