Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing

Aroosa Kanwal, Saiyma Aslam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138745520
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351719858
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing forms a theoretical, comprehensive, and critically astute overview of the history and future of Pakistani literature in English. Dealing with key issues for global society today, from terrorism, religious extremism, fundamentalism, corruption, and intolerance, to matters of love, hate, loss, belongingness, and identity conflicts, this Companion brings together over thirty essays by leading and emerging scholars, and presents:

• the transformations and continuities in Pakistani anglophone writing since its inauguration in 1947 to today;
• contestations and controversies that have not only informed creative writing but also subverted certain stereotypes in favour of a dynamic representation of Pakistani Muslim experiences;
• a case for a Pakistani canon through a critical perspective on how different writers and their works have, at different times, both consciously and unconsciously, helped to realise and extend a uniquely Pakistani idiom.

Providing a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to cross-cultural relations and to historical, regional, local, and global contexts that are essential to reading Pakistani anglophone literature, The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing is key reading for researchers and academics in Pakistani anglophone literature, history, and culture. It is also relevant to other disciplines such as terror studies, post-9/11 literature, gender studies, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, human rights, diaspora studies, space and mobility studies, religion, and contemporary South Asian literatures and cultures.

Part I

Reimagining history

The legacy of war and Partition

1

‘All these angularities’

Spatialising non-Muslim Pakistani identities

Cara Cilano

The reality of minority status animated the idea of Pakistan, a decolonising movement intent on securing a homeland for India’s Muslims. From the moment of the term’s coinage, ‘Pakistan’ already hinted at what has since become a significant challenge: how to spatialise or territorialise a nationalism itself subject to contested views of the role of Islam in the nation’s identity. Chaudhary Rahmat Ali’s pamphlet, ‘Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?’, first published in January 1933, introduced the term ‘Pakistan’ into the many anti-colonial discourses gaining purchase in South Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the first clause of his pamphlet, Rahmat Ali coined the term as an acronym for the territories that would, in part, eventually make up West Pakistan: ‘PAKISTAN by which we mean the five Northern units of India viz: Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sind, and Baluchistan’ (1933: n.p.). The term also means ‘land of the pure’, a definition that neatly connects space and concept (here, religious identities).¹ Within this neat connection lies an irony: the territories encompassed by Rahmat Ali’s term were Muslim majority so while, in the grander context of the British exit from South Asia, Muslims were a minority in relation to Hindus, in the space (partially) identified as Pakistan, the minority-majority ratios swung in a different direction. The minorities were the non-Muslims. And, as the process of decolonisation accelerated after the Second World War, this idea took on increasingly concrete dimensions, culminating in the actual territorialisation of Pakistan into a new nation bisected across the north of the South Asian subcontinent. Consequently, the minority-majority ratios, especially in what became West Pakistan, tilted even more in favour of the Muslim majority.² Thus, the physical reality of Pakistan added new dimensions to the reality of minority status, especially in spatial terms.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s speech to the Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947 takes on added prescience in this spatially oriented context. Jinnah assures his soon-to-be fellow Pakistanis that they ‘are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan’ (Jinnah 1947: n.p.). These lines encapsulate a founding spatial vision for Pakistan not only in terms of the actual physical existence of temples, mosques, churches, etc., but also in terms of mobility. Non-Muslims, in this vision, would be free to move about cities and villages to get to their respective houses of worship. This vision is at once both descriptive, insofar as it captures the everyday lived experience of people currently inhabiting the territories that would shortly become Pakistan, and prescriptive in that Jinnah and members of the Muslim League were highly cognisant of the need to ensure the safety of minorities throughout the decolonising process. Earlier in this address, Jinnah says:

[I]‌n the course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community – because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalees, Madrasis and so on – will vanish.

(1947: n.p.)

Jinnah adds dimension to the ‘angularities’ of majority and minority interactions by parsing out differences within each group. This effort to embody abstractions with reference not only to religious groups but also to ethno-regional ones subtly identifies the spaces these abstractions occupy and in which they move. In other words, geometrically, the vanishing of angles suggests an inductive wholeness wherein the edges of difference lose visibility. In predicting that the sharp corners of these ‘angularities’ will vanish, Jinnah also offers an image of an idealised, cohesive, near-homogenous view of national identity. Significantly, though, when taken alongside the spatial vision I have identified, this homogeneity does not align with the markedly shifted political relations that came about via the demographic homogeneity caused by Partition’s migrations (Rahman 2012: 303). Speaking in the abstract on 8 November 1945, nearly two years before Pakistan’s creation, Jinnah noted, for instance, that neither Hindus nor ‘anyone else’ would experience ‘social barriers of any kind’ in the ‘Muslim state’ of Pakistan (Jinnah 1945: n.p.). Nonetheless, politics and the power wielded through them did change dramatically upon the establishment of Pakistan due to the ongoing and heightening tensions between a conceptualisation of Muslim nationhood and an Islamic state. The angles sharpened.³

Although my focus relies upon Jinnah’s spatial vision, my purpose is not to gauge the (in)sincerity of Jinnah’s secularism. Rather, the point is to analyse how textual representations of non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan in fictive and non-fictive texts help produce the spatialisation of Islam (as inclusive of but not wholly coterminous with Islamisation) and help shape the lived spaces and mobilities of these minorities alongside those of the majority. With primary reference to three novels, Saad Ashraf’s The Postmaster (2004), Sorayya Y. Khan’s Five Queen’s Road (2009), and Nadeem Aslam’s Season of the Rainbirds (1993), I examine the fictive portrayals of non-Muslim characters’ abilities to occupy and move through space with specific reference to significant events and dynamics in Pakistani history, namely the 1947 Partition and the slow burn of de-secularisation in Aslam’s depiction of Pakistan in the 1980s, to develop in spatial terms Sadia Saeed’s arguments regarding how the Pakistani state produces appropriate citizens by producing inappropriate ones – that is, non-Muslims (2007: 133).⁴

By taking a spatial turn – that is, by attending to the territorialisation or spatialisation of Islam in Pakistan – I extend Saeed’s analysis of how the Pakistani state inflected and took shape from ‘a new definition of the national community by equating the nation with Islam’, a move that, in Saeed’s view, led to the ‘construction of new social imaginaries’ (2007: 133). I am interested in how these imaginaries take material form, especially with respect to minority mobility. Jørgen Ole Baerenholdt’s term ‘governmobility’, which he describes as a form of regulation that ‘works through bodily, technological and institutional forms of self-government, which are enacted relationally and embedded in systems’, highlights the spatial materialisation of such social imaginaries (2013: 29). The concept of governmobility captures how the connectedness of representation and space work along with lived experience. In working with representations to grasp lived spaces, I deliberately turn to both imaginative and government writings, not just to scrutinise textual hierarchies, but also to initiate dynamic analyses that refuse to fix the spatial aspects of representation as unchanging or mimetic. As Doreen Massey argues, the long history of fusing representation to spatialisation, thought of as the antithesis of temporality, encourages a flattening of both in contrast to the dynamism of time rather than productive efforts to grapple with representing space-time (2005: 27–28). Instead, through reading texts of varying provenances together, I consider representation and space as connected ‘in a continuous production’ – a mutual production, even (Massey 2005: 28). With respect to my goals here, time in the sense of specific historical events, including Partition and the following decades through to the 1980s, thus matters a great deal to how representations and space are mutually constitutive.

Not long after the emergence of the nations of Pakistan and India on 14 and 15 August 1947, respectively, the two new governments realised that the mass migrations accompanying their nations’ creation affected property, the lived spaces of everyday lives. According to Joseph Schechtman, in early September 1947, the governments of both nations thought that those who had departed would return, and so agreed upon the ‘unconditional and automatic restoration of property to returning refugee-owners’ (1951: 407). Yet, before that month was through, the governments of Pakistan and India recognised that return was unlikely (Schechtman 1951: 407). Consequently, policies for distributing evacuee property sprang up. Pakistan was in particular need of such policies for, as Ayesha Jalal points out, it ‘ended up with twice as many evacuee properties than Muslim migrants abandoned in India, creating a deep vested interest in the acquisition of evacuee properties by those with political connections’ (2014: 44). Rather than focus on returnees, then, Pakistan and India turned their bureaucratic efforts to finding space for their new compatriots. The initial anticipation of return, which readily demonstrates what Kavita Daiya identifies as a fetish in much migrant literature (2005: 185), as well as the deals and entitlements accompanying the distribution of evacuee property, appear again and again in South Asian English-language Partition fiction. The Muslims in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) entrust their possessions to their Sikh neighbours, for instance, while Lenny’s family promises to safeguard their non-Muslim neighbours’ items in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988).

That the house next door to the main family’s home in Sidhwa’s Cracking India, abandoned by non-Muslims departing for India, becomes a rehabilitation centre for abducted women begins to illustrate how literary representations spatialise the presence and absence of non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan. Lenny’s Hindu nanny Ayah stays at this ad hoc centre temporarily as Lenny’s godmother arranges for her return to her family in what is now India. Notably, Ayah’s ‘rescue’ comes about through the godmother’s efforts, though the novel does reveal that Lenny’s mother and aunt also manage to locate and return other abducted women apparently outside of the state-sanctioned mechanisms for doing so.⁵ And the centre’s guard is a stalwart and intimidating Sikh (1988: 288). Through its function as a haven for abducted women – one protected by a non-Muslim male – this space avoids appropriation into any evacuee property disbursement plan, as though it existed, for some short span of time, outside the state’s workings (though not the state’s patriarchal mandates). The un-narrated mobility which Lenny’s mother and aunt possess goes even further, hinting at the possibility of spaces wherein non-Muslim minorities can act purposefully and in resistance to the threatening forces that would otherwise violently impose majority identifications on non-Muslim female characters. That both spaces with their attendant confinement or mobility exist coextensively illustrates how the assertion of a dominant definition of Pakistani identity – one characterised in Sidhwa’s novel as masculinist and violent – becomes starkly visible in relation to attempts to occupy and move through the spaces of the new nation while bearing the brunt of the former’s force.

Ashraf’s novel The Postmaster (2014) focuses on the absence of non-Muslims in the distribution of evacuee property to highlight the failings of the state’s efforts to consolidate a national identity through spatial allocation. Ashraf’s novel effectively fictionalises Jalal’s critique of Pakistan’s handling of evacuee property:

A psychology of looting and disregard for the rule of law took hold of the ruling coterie in Pakistan early on. The initial gold mine was the allotment of properties abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab and, subsequently, also in Sindh.

(2014: 57–58)⁶

The Pakistan to which Ghulam Rasool, Ashraf’s protagonist, migrates reflects this debased approach to spatialising national belonging for the new Pakistanis. After having served with distinction in British India’s civil service, Rasool opts to join Pakistan’s service and in his new role is responsible for reassigning evacuee properties in Lahore (2004: 293). Believing he has received ‘honest answers’ from a refugee from India about the place the latter inhabited prior to migrating, Rasool allots the man, referred to as Sheikh Mohammed, ‘a bungalow near the university grounds which has recently been abandoned by a Sikh engineer who had migrated to India’ (2004: 293). Happening upon the house by chance, Rasool stops to greet the refugee, who has rifled through the previous owner’s possessions choosing for himself and his wife the finest clothes, jewellery, and houseware (2004: 294). Without compunction, Sheikh Mohammed tells Rasool:

It seems that [the Sikh engineer] had a daughter who was to be married soon because we found her jewelry and her trousseau in a large steel trunk. It is a strange coincidence that the clothes fit my wife perfectly and the jewelry too looks good on her, just as if everything was made for her.

(2004: 294)

Rasool understands then that Sheikh Mohammed was ‘an uneducated and corrupt individual devoid of sensitivity who felt no qualms about grabbing and using the wealth of others as his own’ (2004: 295). The episode leaves Rasool ‘wondering how people like the Sheikh and his progeny would build and run the new state of Pakistan’ (Ashraf 2004: 296).

Significantly, the refugee’s ability to establish his status in Pakistan requires the occupation of the Sikh’s space and the donning of his family’s possessions. Indeed, in claiming the betrothed daughter’s trousseau and jewellery, Sheikh Mohammed’s wife metaphorically even wears the identity of the departed daughter. Subtly, then, Ashraf’s novel also implicates the gendered aspects of spatial occupation in the sense that the purloined finery which Sheikh Mohammed’s wife enjoys marks her as a woman whose honour remains intact through the migration process, in high contrast to the female characters who inhabit the temporary shelter – another abandoned property – in Sidhwa’s novel. The disbursement of evacuee property hinged upon connectedness and patronage, as Ashraf’s novel and Jalal’s historical commentary suggest, as it physically located new Pakistanis. Such locatedness, however, required not only movement across the newly created border but also the incorporation of non-Muslim residential spaces to the point of erasure. Even while the Pakistani government established units such as the Evacuee Trust Property Board, whose aim was to preserve properties left by non-Muslims, the fictional portrayals of the handling of evacuee properties ask readers to recognise the lived experience of the places’ reframing within the Pakistani nation.⁷

Khan’s Five Queen’s Road (2009) also attempts to portray minority absence as foundational to the establishment of belonging for those characters deemed appropriately Pakistani. As a minority still resident in Lahore after the creation of Pakistan, the character Dina Lal gauges both belonging and displacement through the occupation of space. The protagonist purchases a grand home at Five Queen’s Road, initially as a direct rebuke to the British. Conceding his own complicity with empire building, for ‘He had profited from the railway lines expanding across his village land’ (2009: 15), Dina Lal nonetheless has ‘had enough’ by the time 1947 rolls around; Radcliffe’s cartographic ‘etchings’ spur Dina Lal to ‘teach [the British] a lesson. On this side of the lines’ in Pakistan (2009: 15). Spatial occupation, for Dina Lal, is an assertion of legitimacy: he is ‘Like the country, land of the pure, just born’ (2009: 25). Anti-colonial resentment translates into national belonging. Dina Lal’s invocation of Pakistan as ‘land of the pure’ is not about religious identity but, instead, appears to refer to the British departure from the subcontinent.

Khan’s novel highlights the futility of Dina Lal’s anti-colonial sentiments as the violent realities of Partition and its aftermath for Pakistan’s minority populations bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Reimagining history The legacy of war and Partition
• Part II 9/11 and beyondContexts, forms, and perspectives
• Part III The dialectics of human rightsPolitics, positionality, controversies
• Part IV Identities in questionShifting perspectives on gender
• Part V Spaces of female subjectivityIdentity, difference, agency
• Part VI Shifting contextsNew perspectives on identity, space, and mobility
• Part VII Unsettling narrativesImagining post-postcolonial perspectives
• Part VIII New horizonsTowards a Pakistani idiom
• Index