What you hold in your hands is the only anthology of creative texts written originally in English by Pakistani women, ever. This may come as a surprise, since from the creation of Pakistan in 1947, there has been a tradition of English writing by Pakistanis, and English has remained the language of government. The fanning out of migrants into the English-speaking diaspora, accompanied by the facility of travel and the growth of the electronic media, has provided an impetus to Pakistani English literature; it reaches a broad Anglophone audience but in Pakistan has a much smaller readership than indigenous languages and literatures, which are much more widely spoken and read.1 Thus, Pakistani women who employ English as a creative language live between the East and the West, literally or figuratively, and have had to struggle to be heard. They write from the extreme edges of both English and Pakistani literatures.
Although many of the writers included here are well known, the goal of this pioneering anthology is to reveal how Pakistani women, writing in a global—albeit imperial—language, challenge stereotypes that patriarchal cultures in Pakistan and the diaspora have imposed on them, both as women and as writers. In selecting stories for this volume, I have tried to include as wide a spectrum of experiences and voices as possible. Also, I made a deliberate attempt to include new, young writers. I gave preference to short stories, but I included some extracts from longer works, provided they could stand on their own; in some instances these were given titles specifically for the purpose of this anthology, with the permission of the author. In the call for stories, I did not specify the subject matter because I did not want preconceived parameters to limit contributors. I wanted to discover what their texts might yield. I wanted literary merit to be the prime criterion. I think this has given the collection its diversity.
Contemporary English writing by Pakistani women, which is the subject of this volume, began with Bapsi Sidhwa and the publication of her first novel, The Crow Eaters, in 19782; hers was also the first English novel by a resident Pakistani since Partition to receive international recognition, regardless of gender. However, the history of English-language fiction by Pakistani women, being a colonial legacy, must be looked at in the context of Indo-Anglian3 women’s writing in British India, which dates back to the late nineteenth century.
In traditional society, whether Hindu or Muslim, men and women were segregated. Women observed the veil—parda—and lived in the women’s apartments—the zenana—within an extended family. Toru Dutt (1856–1877), who is widely regarded as the first Indo-Anglian woman writer, was a glaring exception. Her Anglicized wealthy Brahman family had converted to Christianity, and her literary uncles were famous for their creative writing in both English and their native Bengali. She was educated in France, traveled to England, wrote an acclaimed poetry collection, and was the author of the Indian English and Indian French novels, Bianca or The Spanish Maiden (1878) and L’Journal de Mademoiselle Anvers (1879), both written by the time she was 21 and published after her death at that age. Dutt’s English poetry, as well as the work of a privileged milieu of Anglicized Indian men, emulated the Romantic English poets who, in turn, had been influenced by the copious translations of classical Indian texts—Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic—by British scholars in India.
In 1837, English replaced Persian, the language of the Mughal administration, as the language of government, but in the lower courts, Persian was replaced by vernacular languages. This led to a two-tiered educational system, English and vernacular, that persists in South Asia, perpetuating huge social schisms. English became the language of the Indian elite, a means of advancement and employment and of communication with the colonial rulers. Indian reformers such as the Bengali Brahman Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) also advocated English, believing it to be a window to new ideas, new technologies—and progress (Rahman 2002). Muslims, who identified more strongly with Persian—because it was the language of the Mughal court and thus a symbol of Muslim power in India—shunned English until the dynamic educationalist and reformer Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) galvanized public opinion among Muslims in favor of English. He inspired a social transformation, propagating reform among the Muslim elite who redefined their identity as modern Indian Muslims. His ideas were pivotal to the genesis and ethos of Pakistan (Jalal 2001).
After the establishment of the British Raj, when Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1858, British hubris and power in India were at their height. Among Indians, nationalist sentiment grew, which the vernacular press disseminated widely, although by the late nineteenth century, English-speaking Indians played a pivotal role in conveying this nationalist, Indian point of view to the British. Thus English became the “link language” in the political debate between the representatives of India and the Raj. Meanwhile The Indian National Congress was established in 1885, and then the Muslim League in 1905, to voice the concerns of India’s Muslim minority (Jalal 2001) in a new, unfamiliar, social and political order. The complex relationship between these two political parties spiraled into bitter disagreements, sometimes fostered by the colonial power. In 1947, this led to the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim homeland. The founding fathers of both countries—Gandhi and Nehru in India, Jinnah and Liaquat in Pakistan—had been educated in British universities, used English as fluently as a first language, and pressed the demands of their electorates in the legislatures of British India.
For much of the nineteenth century, the acquisition of English remained gender specific and education was largely restricted to vernacular languages for most Indian women. Reformist debates on women’s education “focused more on what and how much they should be taught, rather than whether they should be taught in English” (Mukherjee 2002). The gap between well-traveled Anglicized men and their cloistered mothers, wives, and sisters grew. Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), a poet, nationalist, and women’s rights activist, was the most celebrated Indo-Anglian woman writer of her generation. She belonged to a Hindu family closely associated with Hyderabad, a very large Muslim princely state that was the size of France. There, in 1881 her father set up one of the earliest schools for girls (Pernau 2002). Others followed suit. Instructors began to introduce English to their students, but among Muslims in particular, a secluded life in parda and private education, with or without the addition of some English, continued to be the norm for the well-born woman.
At the same time, Urdu, which came to be regarded as the language of Muslim identity, had its own reform movement. The earliest Urdu women’s magazine dates back to 1886 and was a platform for early women writers. They included the conventeducated, Muslim intellectual Atiya Fyzee (1877–1967), who migrated to Pakistan in 1947. She wrote beautiful English in her timeless book on musicology, The Music of India (1914), but she published her articles and a travelogue in Urdu in order to reach Muslim women with her liberal, egalitarian ideas. The women in her family were among the first Muslims to discard parda (Karlitzky 2002).
MUSLIM WOMEN WRITING ENGLISH FICTION
During the early half of the twentieth century, fiction writing by Muslim women in English remained a rarity. Among the few exceptions was Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), who grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) where she received a traditional education in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, and with the support of her husband, taught herself English and Bengali—now the national language of modern Bangladesh. In 1905, she wrote her first and only story in English, the 12-page “Sultana’s Dream” (Hossain 1988, The Feminist Press): one of the most radical of early feminist writings.4 She went on to write in Bengali and attack the parda system and traditional attitudes toward women. She set up schools for girls, but continued to observe parda to allay Muslim parents’ great fear that education would encourage their daughters to discard the veil. Other Indian women writers of English fiction in the early twentieth century included India’s first woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), and her sister, Alice Sorabji Pennell (1870–1951), a doctor. Both were educated in England and belonged to an eminent Parsi family that had converted to Christianity.
In 1921 women gained the right to be elected to the legislatures. Educated Muslim women began to discard parda and participate in political life. They included the Muslim League activists Jahanara Shahnawaz (1896–1979) and Inam Habibullah (1893–1974), my grandmother. Interestingly, my grandmother had a private education, learned English after her marriage, but used Urdu when she wrote a travelogue and children’s books. Shahnawaz, on the other hand, graduated from Queen Mary College, Lahore, and wrote an Urdu novel, but much later recorded her life and times in an English memoir, Father and Daughter (1963).
The presence of mission schools for girls in British India, where “progressive” families began to send their daughters, spurred the use of English for Hindu and Muslim women alike, since these schools taught entirely in English. However many families remained more conservative and feared that if young women were exposed to alien religious and cultural influences at these institutions and were not secluded, sexual and social anarchy would follow.
In her memoir, From Purdah to Parliament (1963), the bilingual writer Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah (1915–2000), a member of Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly and later, a diplomat, recalled the agitation in her family when her Anglicized father insisted she attend an English mission school, and her traditional mother, egged on by vocal relatives, opposed it bitterly. But a decision that caused such conflict in her home soon came to be the norm, Ikramullah notes:
In 1927, my going to an English school was looked upon with much disfavor and yet by 1947 every girl of good family was going to school. What my father had said had come to pass and in another twenty years’ time women were taking part in processions, had been to gaol, were working in refugee camps, and were sitting in legislatures and participating in international delegations. It seems incredible, but it has happened. (1998, 32)
In British India, English was the language of instruction in all universities. Ikramullah, Ismat Chughtai (1915–1991), and gynecologist Rashid Jahan (1905–1952), were among a small number of pioneering university-educated Muslim women of their time. Ikramullah, the first Muslim woman to earn her Ph.D. from London University, wrote Urdu fiction and English nonfiction5; Jahan and Chughtai, who became literary icons, channeled their extensive reading in English of British, European, and Russian literature into revolutionizing Urdu fiction.
However, even with the growth of writing in English by Muslim women, a major problem persisted: the lack of readership. There was little encouragement to write as well. Since many Anglicized intellectuals in India looked to England’s classical literature to define the literary style of English-language writing, they had little patience with the stylistic difficulties that contemporary creative Indo-Anglian writers, regardless of gender, had to grapple with: how to find a modern voice in English that would transpose the authentic experience of the subcontinent without pandering to Western exotica. These Anglophiles disparaged Indo-Anglian poetry and fiction, propounding the belief that Indians should not write creatively in English because they “could not get it quite right.” Muslim women with a sufficient command of English, who were few in number, suffered this dismissal acutely. Furthermore, while the work of nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian writers had emulated that of British writers, by the 1930s, Indians were expected to use English creative writing as a nationalist vehicle that would “explain” India to the British colonizers. Thus, in vernacular fiction, a truthful portrayal of harsh realities was acceptable and praiseworthy—but in Indo-Anglian creative writing, such writing became a betrayal.
In the pre-Partition years, the only English novel by a Muslim woman appears to have been the satirical Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Household (1944) by Iqbalunissa Hussain.6 She uses irony to comment on the power of the mother-in-law in an extended family and lampoons callous, self indulgent, and hypocritical men:
It is a well known fact that man is superior to woman in every respect. He is a representative of God on earth and being born with His light in him deserves the respect and obedience that he demands. He is not expected to show his gratitude or even a kind word of appreciation to a woman: it is his birthright to get everything from her: ‘Might is right’ is the policy of the world. (quoted in De Souza 2004, 508)
As the subcontinent moved toward independence, activists considered women’s emancipation an integral part of the freedom struggle. Jahanara Shahnawaz’s daughter, Mumtaz Shahnawaz (1912–1948), a Muslim League activist and a novelist, describes this very clearly in her only book, The Heart Divided (1959), which is probably the first South Asian English novel about Partition. She died in an air crash, leaving behind a first draft that was published unedited by her family. Despite many flaws and a narrative heavy with politics, reportage, and polemics, the book has great historical and sociological importance. The plot revolves around the love story of Habib, a young Muslim man in Lahore, and Mohini, a Hindu girl and a close friend of his sister, Zohra. Political divisions intensify the conflict of religion. At first, Zohra joins the Indian National Congress, while her sister Sughra is committed to the rival Muslim League. The two sisters attend the historic 1940 Muslim League meeting in Lahore:
‘Shall we sit behind the purdah?’ Zohra asked curiously.
‘Of course not,” said Sughra. ‘What made you think that?’
‘I just wondered.’
‘Lots of women sat outside at the Patna session and two of them addressed the open session.’ (quoted in Shamsie 1997, 37)
Through her characters, Shahnawaz debates independence, Partition, and the emancipation of women. She stops short of the Partition riots.
Widespread Partition riots occurred in August 1947 and led to cataclysmic violence and one of the great mass migrations in history. No one knows exactly how many people were affected, but many estimate that there were around ten million refugees and one million dead. This trauma, which marked the retreat of the British Empire and the birth of an independent India and Pakistan, continues to haunt both countries. Since Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were both perpetrators and victims of the horrors of Partition, this has led to a collective guilt that South Asians find difficult to confront. In politics this guilt has taken the form of India and Pakistan blaming each other for the resultant conflict, violence, war, and suffering from the time of Partition to the present day, but in South Asian English literature it has largely materialized in a tendency to sidestep ghastly details, which is why, compared to the magnitude of the event, novels about the Partition massacres are relatively few (Shamsie 2001).
In 1947, Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, the wife of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, called upon educated Pakistani women to help with relief work in the refugee camps: They came in great numbers despite virulent criticism and abuse from orthodox clerics who believed that women should stay at home. A one-time professor of economics, Khan motivated and galvanized educated women to focus on every aspect of women’s welfare, including female literacy. Her efforts spearheaded the women’s movement in Pakistan. But the emphasis on nation building in the newly created country meant that social activism was considered a more praiseworthy occupation for privileged, well-educated, English-speaking women than the reclusive act of writing fiction.
In his informative book, A History of Pakistani Literature in English (1991), Tariq Rahman shows that by the 1950s writers in Pakistan began to agree with “the prescriptive dictum that their work must have an extra-literary purpose, namely to ‘serve the society’ . . . this propagandist and chauvinistic view of literature was one which gained official support later.” By then, all English creative writing by Pakistanis was disparaged as pointless, elitist, and a colonial hangover. The paradox was that Pakistan’s English-language press flourished, but it was run and staffed by men; women reporters and editors were not even considered.
Author of a collection, The Young Wife and Other Stories (1958), Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah was the only woman writing English fiction of note during that era; her stories revolved around social pressures in the daily lives of women. Hamidullah (1918–2000) was also Pakistan’s first woman columnist. Beginning in 1948 she wrote for Dawn, Pakistan’s most important and influential English-language daily newspaper, but the day she commented on politics, she was hauled up by the editor and told she must not stray from “women’s issues,” in other words, domestic matters. She resigned and set up a magazine, The Mirror, a popular glossy that recorded social happenings. Few in Pakistan remember that she utilized it to write fearless political editorials, which led to a ban on the magazine in 1957. She challenged this ban in the Supreme Court and won (Niazi 1986), becoming the first Pakistani woman to win a legal victory for press freedom in the superior judiciary. In the late 1950s and 1960s magazines such as The Mirror, as well as Woman’s World and later, She, run by Mujib-un-Nissa Akram and Zuhra Karim, respectively, provided a platform for English-language writing by women.
In 1958, Pakistan experienced martial law for the first time, under the rule of General Iskander Mirza, soon followed by General Ayub Khan. Dissent was ruthlessly crushed, and the press was censored. None of this was conducive to English-language writing, which had a handful of practitioners and a tiny audience, unlike vernacular literatures, which had a long literary tradition, replete with rich metaphorical poetry that could be recited orally or set to music for popular songs.
Two events of great significance in Pakistan’s women’s movement marked Ayub Khan’s rule. Women activists persuaded Khan to defy the orthodox and promulgate the 1961 Family Laws Ordinance, with clauses that discouraged polygamy, regulated divorce procedures, and introduced a minimum marriageable age. Khan, who had little interest in fostering political freedom, established a quasi-democracy and held elections in 1964 to legitimize his rule. Fatima Jinnah, sister of the nation’s founder, stood up as his political opponent to widespread support and became the first woman in Pakistan to head a political party and compete for the position of the executive head of state. Ayub Khan won his election but was ousted from power in 1968.
A brief spell of democracy preceded another period of martial law. There were two wars with India. The refusal of the military and some West Pakistani politicians to accept the election results of 1970 led to brutal civil war in 1971 and the loss of a large portion of the country—East Pakistan—which declared its independence as Bangladesh. In December 1971, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto assumed power in a truncated Pakistan where he held the majority vote. In 1977 General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto, and tried and executed him. Zia-ul-Haq ushered in a new era with religious extremists as his allies, ruthlessly pushing aside the liberal, modernizing precepts of the nation’s founders.
As part of his campaign to “Islamize” society, Zia ul-Haq introduced the 1979 Hudood Ordinance, which did not differentiate between rape and adultery. He also passed new blasphemy laws. Both the Ordinance and the blasphemy laws victimized the weakest and most vulnerable—women and minorities. All this, together with blatant miscarriages of justice, provoked educated, professional women in Pakistan, particularly lawyers, welfare workers, and journalists. They formed the legendary Women’s Action Forum and came out into the streets to protest. Pakistan’s English-language press provided them with strong backing, and some of Pakistan’s finest women journalists emerged during this decade. Still, it took three decades to pass a watered-down Women’s Protection Bill in 2006, which was full of compromises for fear of alienating Pakistan’s right-wing lobby and clerics (who were defeated in the 2008 polls).
Despite political restrictions, in the 1980s a university education became the norm for many young women from professional families in Pakistan, and a number of careers opened to them, including ones in the civil service. At the same time, in Pakistan’s low-income groups, education remained—and still remains—a privilege, not a right, regardless of gender, but boys were and are far more likely to be sent to school than girls, although schools for girls have grown and expanded, particularly in urban areas. The disadvantages of the tiered educational system, inherited from colonial times—one in English, the other in Urdu, and a third in provincial languages—created schisms in society that have been continuously and fiercely debated since 1947, but Zia-ul-Haq’s attempt to do away with English as the medium of instruction met with great resistance. Instead, the demand for English grew: It became the language of global power, global knowledge, and the new electronic media.
In 1988 Zia-ul-Haq died in a mysterious air crash, ushering in an era of civilian rule. In 1989, Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) was elected Prime Minister and became the first Muslim woman to hold that office anywhere in the world. Bhutto campaigned while pregnant with her first child. When her second child was delivered, she became the first elected leader of a modern nation to give birth while in office. Her assertion of womanhood while serving as the executive head of state in a conservative patriarchal country was an important milestone for women everywhere. Bhutto used English to great advantage in her writings, and her posthumously published book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and The West (2008), has received much critical praise.
Today an increasing number of upper- and middle-class families in Pakistan have allowed their daughters to receive the same educational opportunities as their sons. Several women have graduated from prestigious international universities and a large number of careers are now open to them. At the same time Pakistanis from the most impoverished regions have had close contacts with relatives in the diaspora. The dynamics of this interchange have profoundly influenced Pakistan and Pakistani migrants in the West, rich or poor—a theme that emerges quite clearly in Pakistani English literature.
Meanwhile in the West, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the anti-Vietnam protests, the civil rights movements in the United States, the student revolution in Europe, and the feminist revolution impacted English literature, as did the presence of increasingly assertive migrant communities. Soon it was apparent that some of the most important new English writing was coming from Britain’s erstwhile colonies where women’s writing forged new narratives that challenged both imperial and patriarchal myths.
The beginning of this century has seen women firmly assert themselves in Pakistan as leading English-language editors, journalists, and publishers. In turn, publishers have begun to actively seek out new writers of Pakistani English fiction and poetry, many of them women, almost all of whom are represented in this anthology.
AND THE WORLD CHANGED: THE AUTHORS
This anthology developed as a consequence of two previous ones that I put together. The first, A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English (Oxford University Press, 1997), a collection of poetry, fiction, and drama, was a retrospective commissioned to celebrate Pakistan’s fiftieth anniversary. This volume was the first to bring together English-language writers living in Pakistan and in the diaspora. It also raised issues of identity: Did diaspora writers of Pakistani origin “qualify” as Pakistani? My answer was, unequivocally, yes. To explore this further, I put together a second collection of fiction and nonfiction, Leaving Home: Toward a New Millenium: A Collection of English Prose by Pakistani Writers (Oxford University Press, 2001), which looked at issues of home, homeland, and belonging through Pakistan’s diverse experiences of migration.
An anthology on English-language writing by Pakistani women seemed the next logical step, but only emerged after my chance meeting with the Indian publisher Ritu Menon at a 2004 Sustainable Development Conference in Islamabad. She suggested the book. A year later, at the next Islamabad conference, I handed her the completed typescript on disk. I was delighted at the warmth with which the people in India received the collection, and to find that, subsequently, in Pakistan, Oxford University Press reprinted the same version twice. At the request of The Feminist Press I have altered the original compilation to replace most of the novel extracts with short stories from the same authors. In this version, I have also included the work of the young Pakistani American writer, Bushra Rehman. New headnotes for the American edition introduce the authors and the texts, and in some instances, I have quoted the insightful comments that the authors provided me in my correspondence with them.
All the women included in this volume have been educated in English, which remains the language of instruction in universities and the best secondary schools in Pakistan. Many of the writers went to the mission schools and colleges that were established in colonial times, although other prestigious private schools teaching in English have also emerged. These institutions are the training grounds for resident Pakistani English writers. Some of these writers belong to families where English is spoken at home as a dominant language. While there is comparatively little working-class literature in English from Pakistan, or indeed any South Asian country, migration to the English-speaking diaspora has introduced that dimension. In these countries Pakistani/South Asian migrants do not belong to the mainstream, regardless of income, education, or class. Their voice and that of women migrants in particular belongs to a minority struggling to be heard. Among the writers included here, there is another category: those women who have attended a variety of English schools in different countries because of relocations due to their parents’ professional assignments.
In this anthology, the authors have been arranged in chronological order based on their birth years to reveal the development of women’s writing in English across two generations and also to create a sense of historicity. Their stories reflect similarities and contrasts between avoidance of and engagement with a changing world.
The decision to include creative work written in English—and not to include translations—highlights a language acquired by Pakistanis as the result of the East-West encounter. By including only these English-language texts, this collection is set apart from other Pakistani literatures. Almost all the writers included here live, or have lived and been educated, in Pakistan as well as a country in the West. Their choice of English as a creative vehicle has highlighted this duality, and their work is often multilayered. In most instances no clear signals emerge from the texts to indicate which authors are residents of Pakistan. Sometimes, the writers who live in Pakistan explore themes of migration to the West; often the writers who have left Pakistan set their stories in their homeland. Both groups present stories of reclamation, a charting of territory across two worlds. All their work is united by their sensibilities as women of Pakistani origin writing in English.
After I had assembled this collection based on my interest in literary quality, I wanted to explore whether there were any links among the works that I accepted for the volume. What relationship did so many well-traveled women have with Pakistan? How did the acquisition of English as a creative vehicle influence their responses? The recurrent theme of quest, in many different guises, emerged very strongly as a recurring thread in many of the contributions. I found that a number of the themes in the stories, and several of the authors, had crossed paths at one point or another.
Opening the anthology is a moving story about the Partition riots, suffering, and forgiveness, “Defend Yourself Against Me,” by famed novelist Bapsi Sidhwa. In 1947, Sidhwa, who is Parsi, was a child but she has retained memories of the fires and the violence in Lahore where she lived; in her writing, Sidhwa gives equal space to communal violence on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border without sentimentality. In “Defend Yourself,” which is set in Houston, the Pakistani-Christian female narrator encounters an old childhood friend, who is Muslim, from Lahore. The other characters are Hindu and Sikh, and the story thereby represents the three main groups who savaged each other during Partition. The plot folds back into the past to reveal a great horror, drawing particular attention to the silence of women as victims of war and conflict.
Following Sidhwa is the Karachi-born Roshni Rustomji, who also belongs to the Parsi community. In her memoir “Existing at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas,” Rustomji observes Partition as Hindu friends leave and Muslims from India enter her childhood city. Her narrative of adaptation in a world rife with prejudice and conflict stretches across several countries and six decades from Partition in August 1947 to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007. Throughout she retains a sense of herself as a woman who will never belong to the mainstream but who regards every country in which she has lived as her homeland—her desh—and identifies with its suffering.
There is a direct link between the sensibilities of women writers in Pakistan and the stories they have written about Pakistan’s minorities, such as Christians, Hindus, and Parsis, because both they and their subjects belong to marginalized groups whose rights can be easily eroded. Representing another minority experience is Sorayya Khan’s story, “Staying,” about a Hindu businessman who chooses to remain in Lahore, despite the Partition riots. Khan looks at the importance of August 1947 by moving beyond the political rhetoric that has defined India and Pakistan to portray events as they must have appeared at the time. The story also comments on the claim of geography—rather than religion, politics, or ideology—and highlights the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and the burning desire of the latter to occupy the space vacated by the former.
These are among the themes that I have also explored in my story, “Jungle Jim,” set shortly after Partition in a former princely state in India. “Jungle Jim” tells of empire, colonialism, prejudice, and division, and links up three events, which radically changed social structures—the two World Wars and Partition. The story also looks at the huge gap that developed in colonial times between Indian men’s Anglicized lives and the cloistered worlds that women continued to occupy.
Later in the anthology, stories by Sabyn Javeri-Jillani and Sehba Sarwar explore the repercussions of the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan. In “And Then the World Changed,” Javeri-Jillani encapsulates the relatively carefree mood of a multicultural neighborhood in post-Partition Karachi. The 1965 war with India alters that ambience and divides the community, laying the ground for the urban warfare of later decades, while “Soot,” by Sarwar, moves beyond the wars and hostilities that have so bitterly divided India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh for sixty years, and shows the Pakistani narrator’s growing interest in learning more about India and Bangladesh and her concern with the deep poverty that all three nations share.
The permeability of languages, countries, and culture runs through the work of several writers represented in this volume. While living in England the expatriate Rukhsana Ahmad was so disturbed by events in Pakistan during the period of martial law under Zia-ul-Haq that she began to write articles protesting conditions in Pakistan for The Asian Post in London, thereby launching her writing career. Her story, “Meeting the Sphinx,” questions the certainties of history, words, and narrative in British academia through the relationship between a white, distinguished Egyptologist and a feminist of Asian origin who challenges his assumptions.
Ahmad also published We Sinful Women (1991) a collection of Urdu feminist protest poetry that she translated in English to great acclaim. The volume included the work of Fahmida Riaz, who had authored Pakistan’s first book of feminist poetry in 1973, thereby opening a new dimension for women writers. Though Riaz only occasionally writes in English, she wrote “Daughters of Aai” specifically for this volume: It is a haunting tale of innocence, sexual abuse, and the resourcefulness of women in a Pakistani village. She shows that in Pakistan’s peasant cultures, women perform hard labor and do not observe parda or the veil, unlike “respectable,” wealthy, or urban women.
Tahira Naqvi, who lives in the United States, writes English fiction and, like Ahmad, has also translated Urdu feminist writing, particularly the fiction of Ismat Chughtai, the pioneering and uncompromising pre-Partition writer. Naqvi’s translation of Chughtai’s 1940 novel Tehri Lakeer—later translated into English and published by Women Unlimited in India and The Feminist Press in the United States under the title The Crooked Line (2007)—includes an introduction in which Naqvi draws parallels between Chughtai’s fearless portrayal of female sexuality and Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering work, The Second Sex (1949). The influences of Chughtai and the other Urdu women writers that Naqvi has translated have seeped into Naqvi’s English writing. Her story, “A Fair Exchange,” explores with great subtlety the complex psychological and sexual compulsions that impel a well-educated woman in a traditional but professional family to misinterpret her dreams and resort to superstition. Naqvi’s use of suggestion to express repressed, unidentified, and chaotic emotions strongly echoes themes in Urdu women’s fiction.
Myths and stories are immensely important to gender roles. In the West, the feminist revolution led to the excavation of matriarchal narratives and legends portraying women. In Britain, Shahrukh Husain culled lore about women from the world over for a series of books for adults. In this volume, her story, “Rubies for a Dog,” which belongs to an Islamic tradition, revolves around a Wazir’s daughter who embarks on a long and dangerous quest across distant lands to avenge her father’s honor. Husain says:
Fairy tales from the Islamic world are often stories of a quest which entail extraordinary courage, and often also include strong elements of wit and wisdom. The wazir’s daughter . . . represents redemption or delivery in one way or another. . . . The fairy stories which form such an important part of the heritage of India and Pakistan were shared with Iran and Afghanistan and may include paris, jinns . . . or they might simply be about human, though extraordinary, journeys. (Shamsie 2005, xvi)
“Rubies for a Dog” is another example of the crisscrossing of linguistic, geographical, and cultural boundaries that were intrinsic to Islamic culture and are a part of modern Pakistani life.
Interestingly, among the stories submitted for this anthology, only two revolved around arranged marriages, “The Optimist” by Bina Shah, and “A Pair of Jeans” by Qaisra Shahraz. I decided to include both because they complement each other and describe the crisis of immigrant Asian young women who, at the insistence of their parents, assent to this time-honored custom. The stories clearly reveal the conflict between first- and second-generation migrants and the desire of the older generation to cling to age-old traditions in an alien land. In “The Optimist” Bina Shah employs two different narrators, a Pakistani young man and his Pakistani British bride. He decides to marry her because he falls in love with her photograph, without any perception of her as an individual, or her world and her aspirations; she has accepted the marriage, reluctantly, under great moral blackmail.
In “A Pair of Jeans” expatriate Qaisra Shahraz describes a daughter of Pakistani parents in Yorkshire, who, dressed in jeans, runs into her future in-laws: They have seen her only at social occasions in Pakistani dress. To them her boots and jeans symbolize all that is Western and decadent. Both stories reveal how the system of traditional arranged marriages has evolved and developed huge fissures under the pressures of modernity.
In marked contrast “Runaway Truck Ramp” by Soniah Kamal takes a critical look at American notions of freedom and free choice through the love story of a white American woman and a Pakistani man in the United States. Both are aspiring writers but are so conscious of belonging to different cultures that they cannot look beyond confused notions of sexual mores.
Kamal’s story has a very different rhythm to the contemplation of cultural duality and exclusion in “Variations: A Story in Voices” by Hima Raza (1975–2003). She combines poetry and prose to portray the solitude of a woman who reflects upon her thwarted relationships and that of friends and family, across generations, cities, cultures, and countries.
Different cultures coexist with greater ease in Meatless Days (1989), a creative memoir by Sara Suleri Goodyear, who teaches at Yale University. She provides a lively insight into her dual inheritance as the daughter of a Pakistani father and a Welsh-born mother and knits together the public and the personal, past and present, across Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. Her first chapter from Meatless Days, “Excellent Things in Women,” reprinted here, revolves around the personality of Dadi, her paternal grandmother, but the kernel embedded within is the quiet presence of Suleri Goodyear’s mother and the spaces she negotiates. The whole is interwoven with small, telling glimpses of family life, particularly Suleri Goodyear’s relationships with her sisters Tillat and Iffat, who act as both foil and echo to her own personality. The unity of sisterhood across the patriarchal structures of family, nation, race, and creed is a familiar theme in women’s writing worldwide.
Another U.S.-based academic of Pakistani origin, Fawzia Afzal Khan uses creative prose interspersed with poetry to universalize her experiences in the memoir, “Bloody Monday,” which contrasts the intense passions and fervor of a Muharram procession in Lahore and a bull-run in Spain with daily domestic life in the United States, but suggests a multitude of subtexts on gender and myth. Her use of poetry and prose creates a multiplicity of images that reflects her desire to cross boundaries and break down barriers.
Maniza Naqvi’s story, “Impossible Shade of Home Brew,” is an assertion of diversity as unity. The rich multicultural fabric of Lahore, its street life, old traditional buildings, and colonial monuments provide a vivid contrast with touristy Epheseus in modern Turkey. In both these cities, however, the intermingling of East-West narratives, literature and lore, and the theme of “twins” and duality becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s subversion of gender definitions and gender roles.
Talat Abbasi has written many intense, feminist stories set in Pakistan, which have been extensively anthologized and used as texts in the United States. Her poignant and haunting tale of a mother and her handicapped child, “Mirage,” reprinted here, won first prize in a BBC short story competition and explores with great honesty a dimension of pain that is seldom discussed.
In the last decade, Pakistan has been strongly affected by political events in neighboring Muslim lands, including the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the politicization of religion, exacerbated by Western rhetoric of Crusades, and the clash of civilizations. Humera Afridi’s story, “The Price of Hubris,” set in New York on 9/11, and Bushra Rehman’s, “The Old Italian,” which takes place in Queens, New York, in a working-class, diverse immigrant neighborhood, both touch on ideas of religion, identity, and otherness.
With great clarity, another contributor, Feryal Ali Gauhar, brings to light the disadvantaged lives of the poor in Pakistan, due to powerlessness and an inequitable legal and social system in her poignant story, “Kucha Miran Shah.” She portrays the ancient tribal custom of killing of women in the name of honor, a victimization sanctioned by a village jirga—an informal gathering of village elders (men) who mete out a rough-and-ready punishment—and which exists in rural areas as a parallel system to the laws of the state and its courts of law. Aamina Ahmad further explores the diminished rights of the poor in “Scar,” where a young maidservant is falsely accused of theft and has no recourse to justice.
The works of major novelists such as Sidhwa, Suleri Goodyear, and Kamila Shamsie have created important landmarks in Pakistani English literature, regardless of gender. Sidhwa, who wrote her first two novels in virtual isolation in Pakistan because she had no other contemporary English-language writers there, made an enormous breakthrough with the international recognition her novels have received. Suleri Goodyear’s creative memoir, which employed the techniques of a novel and divided chapters according to metaphor, was another milestone, as was the quality of her prose. The thirty-five-year-old Kamila Shamsie has published four critically acclaimed novels of remarkable diversity, breadth, and vision so far; her fifth novel will be published in 2009. Her story, “Surface of Glass,” though an early work, makes an incisive comment on Pakistan’s stratified class system and the circumscribed life of a servant woman, who believes her enemy, the cook, has put a curse on her.
Kamila Shamsie speaks for many aspiring young writers in Pakistan when she says that she had great difficulty as a child placing Pakistan within a literary context because at school in Karachi, she had no exposure to English literature beyond that of the United States and England. This changed when she read Suleri Goodyear and then Sidhwa as a teenager, but she had to go all the way to college in the United States to discover the wider world of English writing—and her own voice.
The critical acclaim that Shamsie and another young writer included here, Uzma Aslam Khan, have received, has generated tremendous interest in the possibilities of a literary career among a younger generation. An increasing number of young, published writers have given readings in schools and colleges, and have conducted creative-writing workshops, which were rare in Pakistan until recently. Aslam Khan, who grew up in Karachi during the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, vividly captures a sense of the city’s festering violence in her story “Look, but with Love,” which simmers quietly with an undercurrent of desperation and ethnic tension. Her work also comments on gender roles in Pakistan.
In 2004, the British Council in Pakistan held a nationwide competition for students as part of the “I Belong International Story Chain” project, to select five writers for a creative workshop in Karachi, conducted by Kamila Shamsie. Nayyara Rahman’s story, “Clay Fissures,” was one of the winners. Though a student work, it has been included for its originality, its promise, and its vision of the future.
Reflecting on the texts included in this anthology, I have become particularly fascinated by how one story touches upon or fleshes out ideas in another, creating a flow, a unifying cycle that reveals many dimensions of Pakistani life through the perspective of women.
I have found that Sidhwa’s description of the Partition riots in her story, “Defend Yourself Against Me,” is reflected in Sorayya Khan’s Partition story, “Staying,” and in Rustomji’s memoir account, “Watching from the Edges,” which links Partition to the divisions and suffering she has seen across the world. In Uzma Khan’s story, “Look, but with Love,” the painting of a voluptuous woman in an all-male subculture has obvious associations with male myths about prostitution and red-light districts, which Feryal Ali Gauhar attacks in her story. The sexual exploitation of women implicit in Ali Gauhar’s narrative becomes explicit in Fahmida Riaz’s “Daughter of Aai,” while the recourse to magic and superstition in a village finds an echo in very different stories by Kamila Shamsie and Tahira Naqvi. Kamila Shamsie’s and Tahira Naqvi’s portrayals of a maidservant and a middle-class woman, respectively, revolve around a crisis of self, as does Humera Afridi’s “The Price of Hubris.” My story of a postwar migration to Britain and the intermarriage between an Indian and an Englishwoman in British India provides a contrast with the cultural commingling in Sara Suleri Goodyear’s “Excellent Things in Women,” about her Welsh-born mother and Pakistani grandmother, which also contains the composite history of Pakistan within it. The interpretation of history is central to Rukhsana Ahmad’s story, “Meeting the Sphinx,” set in multicultural Britain, while Fawzia Afzal Khan’s “Bloody Monday” gathers up popular culture and religious ritual across three continents to make a comment on gender and sexuality. Maniza Naqvi takes this a step further in “Impossible Shade of Home Brew” to question gender definitions altogether, and also explores parenthood and loss, themes which are equally central to Talat Abbasi’s “Mirage.” Prejudice and division of culture and gender run through two stories that describe the Pakistani experience of “America”: Bushra Rehman’s “The Old Italian” and Soniah Kamal’s “Runaway Truck Ramp.” On the other hand, “A Pair of Jeans” by Qaisra Shah and “The Optimist” by Bina Shah describe cultural misunderstandings between people ostensibly from the same community. Hima Raza’s “A Variation in Voices” describes bridges that cannot be crossed, and the poignant “Scar” by Aamina Ahmad centers on the impermeability of class barriers. The stories of Sehba Sarwar, Sabyn Javeri-Jillani, and Nayyara Rahman reflect a younger generation’s desire to think back on historical divisions, nationhood, and identity. I included Shahrukh Husain’s mythical “Rubies for a Dog,” about a daughter’s determination to prove herself equal to a son, for its transcendent symbolism. The amassed texts also reveal two sets of mothers and daughters: Rukhsana Ahmad and Aamina Ahmad in Britain; myself and Kamila Shamsie in Pakistan.
This anthology testifies, with its variety of voices, that Pakistani women writing in English have come a long way since their pre-Partition ancestors. Today Pakistani women write creatively in English because that is the language in which they wish to express themselves; theirs is a literary tradition that has been long in gestation and is finally coming into its own. They no longer work in virtual isolation. They draw on the traditions of other English literatures as well as the vernacular languages of Pakistan. They are a part of the new world literature in English that gives voice to experiences beyond the traditional canons of Anglo-American literature. In this anthology their stories describe a myriad of experiences to reveal the richness, complexity, and multiculturalism of Pakistani life—and the wider world with which it is so inextricably linked.
Muneeza Shamsie
Karachi
March 2008
NOTES
1. The official languages of Pakistan today are Urdu and English, but provincial languages, such as Balochi/Brahvi, Pashto, Punjabi, and Sindhi, are also important. There is also a host of minor languages.
2. The Crow Eaters was self published in 1978 and then was published by the British publishing house, Jonathan Cape, in 1980.
3. The English-language writing by South Asians has been known as Indo-Anglian, Indian English, or South Asian English. I am using the older term “Indo-Anglian” to describe pre-Partition work and thus distinguish it from the modern, post-Partition term, “Indian English,” which excludes Pakistani English literature, whereas South Asian English is the collective term for the work produced in the independent countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.
4. In “Sultana’s Dream,” Hossain reverses gender roles in a futuristic country, Ladyland, which is ruled by women. Her spare, terse prose was years ahead of its time, as was her description of a world where people can harness energy, travel by air, and use solar missiles.
5. Ikramullah’s groundbreaking doctoral thesis on Urdu fiction was written in a modern English and published as A Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story (1945); One of its most remarkable features is the sensibility that Ikramullah brings to her critical assessments, as a woman. She also devotes a chapter each to women novelists and women short story writers, including Rashid Jahan.
6. Iqbalunissa Hussain’s birth and death dates are unknown.
WORKS CITED
De Souza, Eunice, ed. 2004. Purdah. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. 1988. “Sultana’s Dream” and Selections from The Secluded Ones, edited and translated by Roushan Jahan. New York: The Feminist Press.
Ikramullah, Shaista Suhrawardy. 1998. From Purdah to Parliament. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Jalal, Ayesha. 2001. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel.
Karlitzky, Maren. 2002. “The Tyabji Clan—Urdu as a Symbol of Group Identity.” Annual of Urdu Studies 17: 187–207.
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. 2002. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Niazi, Zamir. 1986. The Press in Chains. Karachi: The Royal Book Company.
Pernau, Margrit. 2002. “Female Voices: Women Writers in Hyderabad at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” Annual of Urdu Studies 17: 36–54.
Rahman, Tariq. 1991. A History of Pakistani Literature in English. Lahore: Vanguard.
———. 2002. Language, Ideology and Power. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Shamsie, Muneeza, ed. 1997. A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
———. 2001. “At the Stroke of Midnight.” Dawn Books and Authors Supplement. Karachi, April 14.
———. 2005. Introduction. And the World Changed. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.