“Boom” is the word invariably used whenever contemporary Pakistani English fiction is mentioned, not only in the Anglophone world but also within Pakistan. With Pakistani writers like Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, Mohammed Hanif, Nadeem Aslam and Daniyal Mueenuddin getting published in the United States, the United Kingdom and India, contemporary Pakistani English fiction is gaining increasing attention through literary prize juries, research scholars, and general readers.
This “boom” in Pakistani English fiction seems to be a function of the country’s pivotal position in the so-called War on Terror.
Muneeza Shamsie observes a relationship between Pakistan being “at the centre of geopolitical conflict” and the simultaneous “flourishing of new cultural expressions in music, art and literature”. Daniyal Mueenuddin thinks “there must be Lithuanian writers who are not getting the attention they deserve because their country is not in the news”.
However, one might consider words like “boom” and “flourishing” as overstatements because, as Kamila Shamsie points out, “even the most engaged readers in Pakistan would be hard-pressed to name more than a dozen writers from Pakistan writing English-language novels”. Importantly, the few contemporary writers who are generally considered “Pakistani” in the Anglophone publishing world are not just “Pakistani”.
For example, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, Mohammed Hanif, Nadeem Aslam and Aamer Hussein are all British nationals. Writers like Bapsi Sidhwa and Daniyal Mueenuddin are American nationals, and Musharraf Ali Farooqi holds a Canadian passport.
Another significant fact that belies the notion of a “boom” in and “flourishing” of Pakistani English fiction is that there is not a single publishing house in Pakistan that specialises in publishing English fiction. Although Ilqa Publications, a Lahore-based publishing house, has recently started publishing English fiction, most of their titles are only reprints of the already published novels of Bapsi Sidhwa, Tariq Ali and Uzma Aslam Khan.
The debate surrounding the misnomer of “boom”, however, should not make one inattentive to the fact that English fiction produced by Pakistani writers in recent years remains one of the most politically engaged bodies of contemporary literature. “The Pakistani writers,” according to the well-known publisher Sonny Mehta, “are addressing [the political] change and what’s happening in the world today. There is something completely contemporary in this writing.” Whether there is a “boom” or not in Pakistani English fiction, the fact remains that it has certainly gathered serious attention in the Anglo- American publishing world as well as within Pakistan.
As a result of the geopolitical position Pakistan has come to acquire in the contemporary world, especially post-9/11, it has become virtually impossible to write about Pakistan without making it a political statement.
Most contemporary Pakistani writers of English fiction – Hamid, Shamsie, Hussein, Aslam, Khan, Hanif – seem to be cognisant of the political undertakings of their fictions. However, writers like Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Daniyal Mueenuddin insist that their writings are not overtly political.
As a student of contemporary literature, my own position is informed by a postmodernist way of looking at things in that I tend to see everything from one’s sexual orientation to one’s religious beliefs to one’s creative expressions as political undertakings. Since Pakistan has come to acquire a highly volatile position in contemporary international politics and has an extremely unstable domestic political climate, it has become very difficult to talk or write about Pakistan, whether in fiction or in non-fiction, without taking sides. Therefore, I am particularly interested in how Pakistani English fiction writers articulate, implicitly or explicitly, their political stances vis-à-vis both domestic and international issues.
Most Pakistani English fiction writers writing today continue to shuttle between Pakistan – the country of their birth – and their adopted homes in regions like North America and the UK. This continuous to-ing and fro-ing between Pakistan and the West enables these writers to have a world view, as is shown in the interviews in this collection, which is at once cosmopolitan as well as Pakistani.
Travelling between Pakistan and the West has also equipped this batch of Pakistani writers to look at how Pakistan is stereotyped in the West and also how the West is stereotyped in Pakistan and why it is important to undo these stereotypical and formulaic representations of both.
In the introduction to her collection of interviews with contemporary British Muslim writers titled British Muslim Fictions, Claire Chambers writes that “there has long existed high demand for author interviews as resources to supplementing understanding of contemporary literature”. On a personal level, my interest in interviews with fiction writers stems from the fact that these interviews can be regarded both as an art form, as one can see from The Paris Review interviews, as well as a valuable research tool, as is manifested so aptly by Chambers’s collection.
A vast majority of general readers and academics in Pakistan tend to assume that Pakistani writers producing English fiction consciously address and/or appease the West in their works and contribute to stereotypical representations of Pakistan.
The question of whether or not this is the case leads to productive tensions in the field of postcolonial literary studies. It also shows that there exists a huge gap between the expectations of Pakistani readers of English fiction and the works of Pakistani writers because most of these writers, in their respective ways, are trying to problematise and complicate the commonly held stereotypical views about Pakistan. If we were to assume that Pakistani writers are addressing the West we would also have to take into account the possibility that these writers could also be addressing Pakistan – its state, religious institutions and civil society.
Dovetailed with the assumption of Pakistani English fiction writers addressing the West, or Pakistan for that matter, is the issue of representation, which raises a number of questions. Are these writers consciously representing Pakistan or a certain section of Pakistani society or culture? Are these writers engaged in a sort of a project of rewriting the contemporary social history of Pakistan from the point of view of the marginalised? Is it possible to produce literary fiction in English about Pakistan in this day and age and escape the responsibility of representation?
In his review of Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon, which is a story about the Baloch people, Bilal Tanweer writes about reviewers’ expectations of Pakistani English fiction. According to Tanweer, readers are looking for answers to questions like, “why are people in tribal areas going over to the Taliban, why are they this way, and well, how are they anyway, and why don’t we know anything about them in the first place – and like, why aren’t they on TV?’ Tanweer, who is visibly frustrated with this trend, then goes on to state that “fiction from Pakistan is not supposed to have artistic engagements – it’s required to provide information, not an experience”.
While I understand why Tanweer is apprehensive about what might be called the anthropologising of Pakistani fiction, I do not share his concerns that conversations about Pakistani fiction need to shift to “the questions that are usually asked of fiction: plot, narrative techniques, characters, voice, etcetera”. Unlike Tanweer, whose approach is more prescriptive, I resort to a descriptive way of looking at Pakistani English fiction and am more interested in exploring the reasons why Pakistani English fiction is looked at more from an anthropological point of view and less from an aesthetic one.
This anthropological gaze cannot be divorced from the politics of literary production and it tells a great deal about the kind of globalised, interconnected, and yet highly volatile world we have come to live in. Whether or not they like it, Pakistani English fiction writers are, in fact, shouldering a burden of representation. Tanweer was disappointed with the kind of reviews Ahmad’s book garnered but that was the case too with the reviews of his own novel The Scatter Here Is Too Great: critical reception focused more on the violence of Karachi and less on Tanweer’s portrayal of it.
Excerpted with permission from Writing Pakistan: Conversations on Identity, Nationhood and Fiction, Mushtaq Bilal, HarperCollins India.
