Reviewed by Huma Yusuf

Taiye Selasi’s debut novel, Ghana Must Go, is weighed down by expectation. Selasi was named by Granta magazine as one of the 20 most promising young British novelists, a once-in-a-decade forecast of literary prestige. Her book launch comprised a 21-city publicity tour. And since it coincided with the passing of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, it was littered with claims that newcomer Selasi would inherit Achebe’s mantle as the voice of Africa.

Selasi has contributed to the hype by identifying herself as ‘Afropolitan’ rather than African, emphasising newness and complexity over inherited identities. She coined the term in an earlier essay to describe those with “some unbreakable bond to some country or countries in Africa … a global perspective [and] a desire to effect change, however that manifests, in Africa for African people — in some way, somehow, at some point.” Selasi herself was born in London to a Ghanian mother and Nigerian father, raised in Boston, educated at Yale and Oxford, and currently lives in Rome.

The media fanfare surrounding Selasi and Ghana Must Go may bring readers to the book expecting deep insight into the contemporary African condition. But they will find themselves misled. At worst, the novel is a clumsy attempt at defining the outer boundaries of the Afropolitan identity that Selasi herself has coined. At its best, it is a universal tale of migration and family, which when divorced from overbearing identity politics can make for a touching read.

The novel tells the story of Folasadé Savage (Fola), who leaves Lagos for the United States, where she meets and marries a brilliant doctor from Ghana, Kweku Sai. Fola and Kweku have four children: the eldest boy Olu; twins Kehinde and Taiwo; and the precious baby, Sadie. The Sais are living out their high-achieving version of the American dream when Kweku loses his job, abandons his family, and abruptly returns to Ghana. The novel opens with Kweku suffering a fatal heart attack. His funeral reunites the remaining members of his family who have grown apart from each other and suffered individual, life-changing traumas, since his departure.

These traumas make up the bulk of Selasi’s tale. Each character’s story is involved and overwrought, making the novel at times seem soap operatic. Fola is still mourning her father, who was killed when she was a child in an anti-Igbo pogrom in Nigeria — the violent loss of her father making her husband’s spur-of-the-moment decision to leave her with four children even more cruel.

Olu, meanwhile, is struggling to live up to Kweku’s reputation as a surgeon in an effort to mitigate the latter’s poor performance as a father. He is also involved in a cross-cultural relationship with Ling, a Chinese-American woman whose father has pinned the worst stereotypes of African manhood upon him — a lack of moral backbone. “No respect for the family. The fathers don’t honour their children or wives … That’s why you have the child soldier, the rape,” says Ling’s father in an effort to explain why Africa remains “backward,” his assessment stinging in light of Olu’s own experience.

The twins have the most dramatic stories: having been dispatched in their early teens by Fola to Lagos to live with her half-brother, a drug dealer and pimp, they are still reeling from a childhood trauma that is heavily foreshadowed but revealed near the end of the novel. What is clear is that the trauma has left them damaged, both as individuals and siblings: Kehinde, a world-famous visual artist, is recovering from a suicide attempt and living in anonymity in a Brooklyn warehouse; Taiwo, a child prodigy turned law school dropout is recovering from a scandal following her affair with a married faculty member.

For her part, the youngest daughter, Sadie, suffers from more familiar self-image problems. She desperately wants to be more like her privileged, WASP college roommate, or at least as beautiful as her twin siblings who have inherited the features of their Scottish great-grandmother. Her self-hatred leads to battles with bulimia and questions about her sexuality.

No doubt Selasi’s goal is to cover the variety of African experience — across both the continent and the diaspora — through the complicated trajectories and debilitating quirks of her characters. But this is a lot of socio-political commentary to put on the shoulders of just one family.

As a result, Kweku emerges as the most interesting character. His story is simple: he escapes the desperate poverty of his childhood in a village in Ghana and succeeds in America, only to fail and return full-circle where he came from. Put another way, he leaves one family to make another one, but is eventually forced to leave that one too. Kweku’s trauma is that of the immigrant: the ability to no longer feel connected, or feel trapped; to move on; and to forgive oneself for abandoning the things that were meant to be integral to identity, existence and meaning: family, home, country. In telling Kweku’s story, and describing the terms of his relationship with his second wife in Ghana, Selasi is at her best, capturing nuanced emotions and inner conflicts with evocative prose.

Otherwise, Ghana Must Go suffers from the writing style. Selasi’s prose is overwrought, alliterative, loosely punctuated — excessive in every way. Here’s her describing Kweku’s slippers: “battered slip-ons, brown, worn to the soles. Like leather pets with separation issues, loyal, his dogs. And his religion, what he believed in, the very basis of his morality: mash-up cosmopolitanism asceticism, ritual, clean lines. The slipper. So simple in composition, so silent on wood, bringing clean, peace and quiet to God’s people the world over, every class and every culture, affordable for all, a unique form of protection against the dangers of home.” Prospective readers can only imagine what literary meanderings the treatment of the characters’ emotions entail.

That said, for those looking for a powerful take on the immigrant experience, and an occasionally poignant deconstruction of familial loyalty, Ghana Must Go is worth wading through.

Ghana Must Go

(Novel)

By Taiye Selasi

ISBN 978-0-670-9189-1

Viking, UK

336pp.

Reviewed by Muna Khan

Is it a memoir? A self-help book? A novel? All of the above? Or none of the above? Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? poses many questions, the hardest of which is for yours truly: how to attempt a review of a book that initially couldn’t find a publisher and then, when it did (after having an excerpt published in the magazine n+1), went on to become an international literary sensation, with reviewers like James Wood falling over themselves in their praise for Heti?

Our heroine, Sheila, a playwright, is recovering from a broken marriage and is struggling to write a play commissioned by a feminist Toronto organisation except that she doesn’t really know how to write about women because she doesn’t really know women. She encounters artist friends and hopes they can help her answer questions like, but not restricted to, how should a person be. Her friendship with Margaux forms much of the bulk of the story, a lot of which is conducted over email, and when they do become friends, Sheila records their conversations in a bid to learn about female relationships for she believes this will help her with her script.

Margaux isn’t the only relationship that Sheila has, though she is the most significant. We meet Israel, an artist with whom she has an affair (he is a better lover than an artist, she tells us) and through him she grows and explores herself, her limitations and how far she wants to go, sexually for example, but not just that. We also meet other friends Sholem and Misha, people at the salon where she works as a hairdresser and her analyst with whom she interprets her dreams. (Incidentally, her friends Margaux, Misha and Sholem are her real friends so the book is part real, part fiction, which makes it all the more interesting.)

While it is not a traditional novel with a linear narrative, it is not a distracting or an uneasy read nor is it a weird or a confusing one. The book has, however, been set in the form of a play, with acts as one would have chapters, so in effect you realise that you’re reading the play that Sheila was commissioned.

At the heart of this book is a tale of female relationships. Sheila did not have female friends and her relationship and crush on Margaux perplexes her at first because she hadn’t known female dynamics having only been obsessed with her husband thus far: “I supposed I didn’t trust [women]. What was a woman for? Two women was an alchemy I did not understand.” Margaux, however, is able to teach Sheila about boundaries when she shows her displeasure at her friend for buying the same dress as her, saying that she needs space, her own identity. This slight blip in the friendship causes some angst for Sheila but also allows her, even if by force, to look inward and find her own voice — who should a person be?

As she carries on with her friendship and develops more intense feelings for Margaux (not of the sexual variety), and perhaps less for Israel, Sheila learns more about herself and she reveals her insecurities more. She writes with a candour very few could so eloquently; at times it is hilarious, other times the reader will feel sadness, perhaps even pity, often empathy because one will almost always understand what is it is like to want to know how a person should be like. Because surely one has considered this — who am I really? — even if for a fleeting moment. Heti has attempted to answer it in the construct of a novel without it falling into the awful territory of navel-gazing or heavy-duty philosophy.

This book has garnered a lot of attention among female readers, and been compared to the television serial Girls though I didn’t quite understand the similarities unless it’s the incessant questioning of the main protagonist Hannah or the stream of consciousness which she veers off into. But I find Hannah vapid whereas Sheila is genuinely interested in her art and growth. With all the women’s cheerleading it has received it, I’d hate for it to be slotted as a ‘women’s only’ book. It should be seen as brave and insightful, and a clever way of presenting a novel.

How Should a Person Be?

(Novel)

By Sheila Heti

Harvill Secker, US

ISBN 9781846557545

306pp.

Amar Sindhu is a Sindhi-language poet and teaches philosophy at Sindh University, Jamshoro.

“Men distance themselves in autobiographies that are ‘success stories and histories of the era’, focused on professional lives while women’s life writing emphasises personal and domestic details and describes connections to other people,” writes feminist scholar Estelle Jelinek in the introduction to Women’s Autobiography, Essays in Criticism. She goes on to say that men aggrandise themselves in autobiographies while women seek to authenticate themselves in stories that reveal self-consciousness and a need to sift through their lives for explanation and understanding. “Men shape the events of their lives into coherent wholes characterised by linearity, harmony and orderliness. Irregularity, however, characterises the lives of women and their text which have disconnected, fragmentary patterns of diffusion and diversity.”

Jelinek also challenges the fixed lens of social goals, material success and power through which personal narratives are seen. Unlike mainstream scholarship, Jelinek values the cracked format, discontinuity of language and lack of historical coherence of women confined to private spaces. An autobiography or a memoir is a travelogue of one’s past, an attempt to trace the footprints of experiences which are woven in the life of a writer and it makes a great difference in both social and literary terms when the autobiography is written by a woman. A woman’s writing about her own being is socially and culturally taken as her body in public, which has always been seen through a different lens than a man’s body. Therefore, to expose one’s personal life is not yet common. The first thaw of this frozen compliance was observed when Simone De Beauvoir came up with the memoirs of her unconventional life, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. “By writing a work based on my own experience I would recreate myself and justify my existence. At the same time I would be serving humanity: what more beautiful gift could I make it than the books I would write,” De Beauvoir said.

This is the reason behind the lack of sufficient autobiographies written by Sindhi women writers. There is hardly an autobiographical account by a woman that reveals the subjective depth and emotional heights present in the memoirs of Shabnum Gul, My Sunflower. The author of many books, both of poetry and short stories, Gul appeared as a playwright in 1989 on the Sindhi literary scene and the same year she wrote her first short story. Her first collection of poetry, Akhri Lafz (The Final Word), appeared in 1993, Unjantal Shehr jo Naqsho (The Map of an UnknownCity), a collection of short stories, came out in 1995 and Muhnjo Sooraj Mukhe (My Sunflower), a memoir, is her latest book. However, Lehran jo Geet (The Song of Waves), a collection of radio plays, Tanha Pal (Solitary Moment), another book of short stories and a comparative study of western poets and Shah Bhittai are under publication.

Though knowing that to pen a memoir or to make public the accounts of a personal life is a difficult task for a woman writer and that the merging of the public and the private may play mayhem in the social life of any famous woman, Gul didn’t hesitate to write about the emotional and psychological up and downs in her life. However, she admits that some aspects of her life are still untouched in the book.

The memoirs revolve around her two children and the sensitivity of family relationships is very much central to the text. My Sunflower is not well-planned; essentially, the sudden death of her newborn baby and the suffering in its aftermath pushes Gul to write her daily accounts. The trauma causes Gul to hallucinate, suffer from insecurity and fury, and feel detached from world of realities. “Whenever I saw toys or children I felt bursts of pain which would sweep me away into a state of oblivion. At that time I begin to write my feelings as a mother who has lost her world of hope, world of stars, of moon, clouds and fairies.”

When after six months Gul conceives another child, the long period of depression and anxiety begins all over again. Being all alone, confined to an apartment with restricted movement, Gul again psychologically connects to world of phantoms, fears and fantasies. “I was divided into the past and present and was afraid of losing the second child too,” she says.

In the opening chapter of My Sunflower Gul portrays herself suffering the symptoms of a  breakdown during her second pregnancy. Reading the entire account one starkly feels the absence of youth, of the touches of love and of follies in the text. But this seems to be a result of a conscious attempt by Gul as sensual and sentimental love is still considered a no-go area for women in Sindhi literature. Instead, to highlight the prohibited and profound emotional sentiments and intimate relations, Gul uses the figure of a mother as a metaphor to decipher insecurities, fear, distress, infuriation and annoyance within family relations which push children to pessimism.

“I found insecurity lurking behind [my mother’s] eyes throughout her life,” Gul writes. “We missed her in her presence. She was a dreamer. She was restricted from continuing her studies and had to face many traumas and turmoil in her life. She felt a sense of rejection and threat because at that time people received daughters with reluctance. I saw many creative aspects in my mother; she was a tremendously good singer; her art work was amazing. Unfortunately, whatever she dreamt of for her life she couldn’t translate into reality but I was able to do it with my writing. In this manner, I fulfilled her dreams.”

Childhood becomes a curse when a child has to be a silent spectator to an unhappy relationship between the father and the mother. Similar was the case of Gul’s childhood. She writes, “the wounds of childhood turn into scars in adulthood.” Having witnessed mistrust and fractured relationships, Gul’s dream revolves around the ideal concept of home: “I feel love for an imaginary home that was in my thoughts since my childhood. I had a romantic concept of my room, a sanctuary for my wandering thoughts. In the rough weathers of my life, I felt the importance of the home where I spent my childhood, as a strong pillar facing blows of winds and rainstorms. I wanted to save it at any cost from thunderstorms. I love happy homes where children can feel safe and secure. This is a reason I have a soft spot for all homes, whether they are the homes of dreams which reside in the eyes or real homes standing on earth.”

At the peak of pessimism, to dream is the only way for Gul to strengthen herself and to lead her life. Therefore, she never gives up dreaming and seems ever ready to pay the cost: “I am not the realistic one but live in dreams … for me, my eyes are only to dream … but this is the age to be realistic, it doesn’t suit to dream … knowing that there is only pain for dreaming eyes.”

For Gul, words are not mere terms to fascinate minds but the real motivators and builders of broken faith and fractured beliefs. Words are her power. Her words and writing gives her confidence which she wants to transfer to her daughter: “The pessimism in my life is the byproduct of the environment around me,” she says, admitting that the act of dreaming pushes her to a world of splendour and beauty.

“In the ugliness of life, I always tried to find aspects of beauty. The dreams which are killed under the dark shadow of senselessness and suppression and preserved in morgues, these dreams under dead eyes give me an incentive to write. I like dreams. They float into eyes and like the lotus, seem beautiful. Under the silken flounce of eyelashes flicker these dreams as beams giving testimony of life. But when snatched from the eyes, these dreams disappear and in the perturbed lines of the eyes they remain as an unexpressed twinge. And I longed to read unsaid words. They took me to the depths of pain where, drowning, I couldn’t find the shore.”

Photo by Mohammad Danish Khan

By Asif Farrukhi

On May 22, the winner of the Man Booker International Prize for 2013 will be announced. What makes this award of special significance for us this time is that one of our own, Intizar Husain, is among the nominees. Husain is the first Urdu-language writer to be nominated for what has become one of the leading literary awards, rivalled only by the Nobel. Previous winners of this biennial award, which considers a writer’s entire body of work, include Chinua Achebe, Ismail Kadare, Philip Roth and Alice Munro.

The organisers of the prize recognised that there was “nothing familiar or expected” about the list this time and said that “anyone who could have guessed even five of the 10 novelists who have just been revealed as the finalists deserves a mass cap-doffing from the wider reading public.” A bag of surprises or a collection of wonders, the finalists for the 2013 prize comprise U.R. Ananthamurthy from India, Aharon Appelfeld from Israel, Lydia Davis and Marilynne Robinson from the US, Vladimir Sorokin from Russia, Yan Lianke from China, Josip Novakovich from Canada, Marie NDiaye from France, Peter Stamm from Switzerland, and of course, Husain. So what exactly does he have in common with this diverse, international group?

The spokesperson of the Booker Foundation said that this year the judging panel’s choices show a taste for modernism rather than conventional narrative: “The judges were interested in novelists who push the form,” she said. It was also noted that many of the novelists are fascinated by cultural migrants. Political and social migrations have been Husain’s stock in trade from the very beginning but I couldn’t help recall how some critics remarked on the publication of Basti that it was not really a novel, missing out on how Husain was literally pushing the form to accommodate his experience.

I began to read through whatever I could find of the other finalists. At one time, I realised that Josip Novakovich was the same author whose stories I carried with me while doing relief work after the 2005 earthquake, as if the mood of the stories matched the grim and shattered landscape I saw around. The broken lives of men and women caught in the civil war in Yugoslavia inform the powerful and moving stories in Infidelities, chronicles of a woman looking for her rapist in every man she meets, a boy taking on the sickening stance of a soldier, the grim memory of a father’s death, tortures in the past and uncertainty in the present. English is an acquired language for Novakovich, yet his short fiction is some of the most amazing work I have seen in this form and I long to lay my hands on his one and only novel to date.

“Ideally, prose isn’t written — it simply happens,” wrote Vladimir Sorokin describing how he came upon the method for the composition of his fascinating novel Day of the Oprichnik. The future turns out to be the past, cruel and despotic, as a recurrent Ivan the Terrible and his dreaded police define a dystopic Russia in the days to come, marred by an authoritative absolutism which rings true for other dictatorships in the world.

A young boy wandering through Europe after he lost his family, his community and a whole way of life in the Holocaust, Aharon Appelfeld leant Hebrew and began to write in the newly acquired language. I first read about him in Philip Roth’s Shop Talk. Roth prefaces the conversation with pithy comments, calling him “a displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own,” and pointing out the “uncanny prose realisation of the displaced mentality.” He goes on to remark: “As unique as the subject is a voice that originates in a wounded consciousness pitched somewhere between amnesia and memory and that situates the fiction it narrates midway between parable and history.” The long story I read, entitled ‘No Stranger Can Understand This,’ seemed to be tinged with melancholic sadness.

The novels of Marilynne Robinson proved to be an easy search as I picked up copies of Gilead and Housekeeping in the used bookstores I frequent. The recipient of major awards in the US, I found her to possess a steady moral vision matched by great sensitivity of language. Cool and enigmatic Lydia Davis turned out to be a real discovery for me as I literally devoured her Collected Stories in which the longest story is a few pages and the shortest barely a line, yet compact and rich, poetic in the way only fiction can be. Even in the first reading, I was tempted to translate her, rather reclaim her for my language and context as she displays an affinity for not so much parables but the hikayat in the Arab-Persian tradition, secular versions of the Jataka tales devoid of the Buddha’s saving grace, hence more stark and bleak. Davis is also known as a remarkable translator and her recent version of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary has received rave reviews. I long to read her version alongside Askari’s celebrated Urdu translation, comparing the two and moving from one language to the other to acquire a deeper understanding.

A remarkable discovery for me was Marie NDiaye, a French writer with African roots. Her novel Three Strong Women was one of the last books to come my way, but what held me spellbound was her short fiction. Her translator Jordan Stump responded to my request by sending me a soft copy of her collection of short fiction, All My Friends, due to appear this month. NDiaye moves between the European and African roots of her experience with remarkable ease. In the few pages of a story like ‘Revelation’, she succeeds in compressing the poignant anguish of a mother whose child cannot be managed at home while in her novel she explores lives and relationships on a larger scale.

Two stories and an essay were enough to convince me that Yan Lianke was a formidable presence, a writer of great force and critical relevance. I am glad that I have the experience of reading all of his major novels to look forward to. A single short story in the New Yorker was all that I read of Peter Stamm, a sensuous tale of a young couple that come across an older man in the bus, a man whose presence is unsettling and who could be the author of the story. In an interview appearing with the story, Stamm termed this as his favourite story in the collection We’re Flying, saying that it was always his goal to make literature out of ordinary people’s lives and that short stories were important to him as a writer. “I like reduction, concentration, clarity,” he concluded.

Ananthamurthy’s fascinating novel Samskara I read many years ago and later on was privileged to see, at the author’s invitation in Berlin, the Kannada film with Girish Karnad in the lead. Intizar Husain is clearly in the company of great fiction writers, some of the greatest of our day and age, and while reading them, I hankered to go back to his fiction and read it with a renewed sense of discovery. The discovery of these amazing writers will remain with me for a long time and I will be as ready as the next person to be surprised by the name of the winner.

The writer wrote the introduction to Intizar Husain’s Basti for the edition published by the New York Review of Books and has edited a special issue of the literary journal Duniyazad to mark the Man Booker International Prize 2013 finalists.

Reviewed by Salman Rashid

There are endless names shining through the annals of the Great Game that raged during the 19th century. Most of them are British and a few of them Germans who worked for the East India Company and later the government of India. On the other side of the divide are the names of some Russian stars.

Lost in the glare of these famous personages are not a few ‘natives’ who served British interests in this region. Since that was a time of limited knowledge about the great knot of towering peaks and high passes in the mountainous region comprising the Western Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, exploration and map-making was of the utmost imperative.

Natives — Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs — trained in the art of surreptitiously measuring distances, keeping notes and drawing charts were let loose in high Asia. They travelled in the guise of mendicants and pilgrims and were collectively known to their British masters as pundits. Their work supplemented that of British explorers.

Even less known were the munshis (clerks) who travelled with British civil servants, diplomats and explorers. They were rarely mentioned by their employers and are almost entirely forgotten now. Mohan Lal was one such — though were he alive today, he would take serious exception to being labelled a munshi.

In fact, Lal was much more than that; he was a diplomatic officer. From a princely Kashmiri family, Lal was recommended by his father to the civil servant Charles Edward Trevelyan who had a hand in the establishment of the PersianCollege at Delhi. The young Lal was sent there to learn English as a supplement to his fluent Persian. The idea was that he should then be attached to the civil service. Travels in the Panjab, Afghanistan, and Turkistan, to Balk, Bokhara and Herat, and a visit to Great Britain and Germany are Lal’s accounts of his travels, first published in 1846 and now republished.

As the narrative progresses, one realises that Lal was a person of gumption and diplomatic skill with a sharp understanding of human nature. Once done with his education, he was inducted into service and in December 1831 set out on a protracted and meandering journey through Punjab and Afghanistan into Bokhara and Herat. Though he does not state this, his mission, like that of his British co-travellers, none other than Alexander Burnes and Dr James Gerard, was to collect intelligence. This ranged from economic and commercial to geographical and military matters. In the 500-plus pages, Lal only once lets on about his map-making ability, though in Afghanistan he keeps an eye open for the military strength of the various forts and the passes that can or cannot be negotiated by artillery.

Lal comes across as an elegant person who was appalled by having to travel as a poor man in ragged clothes in order to avoid being robbed. This was a very real threat after crossing the SulemanMountains into Afghanistan. No journey between any two points was free of the fear of lurking robbers. If it was not outright armed robbery, it was the arbitrary levying of custom duties. And those who practiced neither, kidnapped the young and the old to be sold into slavery.

In his early 20s, Lal was a good looking young man, as evinced by the book cover, and was found attractive by men. In one instance he tells us that he refused to speak to the man who made an advance. Rather quaintly, he writes that the chief of Haibak (near Qunduz) “has a few evil habits, which I cannot describe minutely. He shuns the love of females”. But in Mashad, Lal is won over by the ruler’s “boy” with his “white cheeks and ruby lips”.

Lal’s first journey ends in 1834. Early the following year, Lal is despatched on a trip to survey the commerce and trade of Bahawalpur, Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan and Shikarpur. It is at the end of this investigative trip that he receives instructions to reach Hyderabad where Alexander Burnes was embarking on his river trip, ostensibly to deliver presents to Maharaja Ranjit Singh but in reality to explore the navigability of the Indus River.

And so it is back into the maelstrom that Afghanistan was becoming in a bid to replace Amir Dost Mohammad with Shah Shuja who was more amenable to British interests. But all diplomatic endeavours failed and seven years later, in 1841, the disaster of Kabul took the lives of many important Company men. Among them was Burnes, cut to pieces in his home in Kabul even as Lal valiantly tried to defend him. The price was imprisonment and the lingering uncertainty of a violent death for our hero.

But Lal makes it back to India. Here he is duly accorded laurels for his role with the Army of the Indus in Kandahar, Ghazni and Kabul. It was, however, his diplomatic endeavours in Kabul as well as his courageous attempt to save the life of his friend and travelling companion that wins him the unremitting gratitude of the government of India.

Lal does not mention the debauched lifestyle of Burnes in Kabul. In fact, he makes a spirited defence of the attack on Burnes’ character by Charles Masson, a deserter of the East India Company army who was in Kabul shortly before the debacle.

Upon his return to India, Lal must certainly have submitted a detailed report of the affairs in Kabul but he does not permit his readers even a peek into that. Once done with his report writing, he applies for an 18-month leave to travel to Britain. Not only is that sanctioned, but in Britain our hero is feted by nobility and royalty alike. His travels finally end in 1846.

Travels in the Panjab, Afghanistan and Turkistan draws remarkable parallels between the Afghanistan and Uzbekistan of the early 19th century and today. Ahmed Shah Abdali may have united that conglomerate of chiefdoms, each at the throat of the other, to give them the name of Afghanistan. But within five decades of his death, the mutual distrust and hatred of the chiefs had returned the country to its state of city nations, each ruled by its own warlord and brigand chief. Even today, Hamid Karzai is known as the ‘mayor of Kabul’. Those who dream Pakistan’s foolish dream of ‘strategic depth’ will be well served by a reading of Mohan Lal’s travelogue.

The reviewer is a travel writer. His last book, The Apricot Road to Yarkand, was published in 2011.

Travels in the Panjab, Afghanistan, and Turkistan, to Balk, Bokhara and Herat, and a visit to Great Britain and Germany

(Travelogue)

By Mohan Lal

Sang-e-Meel, Lahore

ISBN-10: 969-35-2596-5

528pp.

Reviewed by Adam Abdullah

Journey through Pakistan is written as an actual road trip from Khyber through Punjab to Karachi and then Quetta, making various stops along the way to indulge passionately in trivial details and descriptions of peoples and cultures, their traditions of hospitality and the mundanities of their everyday life. Along the journey, the text frequently takes on a romanticised tone, falling into fantastical descriptions of places and people. It is at such pauses that the authors create a trancelike setting where the reader is free to navigate and create his own alternate reading of the places.

The book begins with a brief historical outline of the lands in and around Pakistan, and how invasions and migrations have marked their history and geography. It gives an overview of the events that have contributed to how the land and its people came to be, from the cultured settlements of the Indus Valley to Buddhist enlightenment in Taxila and around; the invasions of Alexander, the Huns, the Persians, the Ghaznavids and the Mughals, followed by the British, and finally the charismatic souls who went on to become the founders of the modern state. The book lists all these details in an attempt to explain the convergence of diverse peoples and the resultant cultural exchange, and to account for semantic similarities and differences and other aspects of human culture that have always transcended political boundaries. Within the well-established realities of ethnic and linguistic divides, the book details accounts of life in frontier towns, shedding light on some very obscure settlements and customs. The influence of a rapidly globalising world on ancient, introverted societies and their transition, especially those of the younger members of the communities, and its effects on the vernacular lifestyle is also touched upon lightly. Thankfully, rather than a detailed analysis on paradigm shifts, the authors, Duncan Willetts, Mohamed Amin, Graham Hancock and Asif Noorani, illustrate the transformation via anecdotes and individual events, which makes for a more intimate reading.

Sometimes, the reader is taken off track and shown glimpses of community life as rapid flashbacks before the journey is resumed again, leaving the reader in a haze of incomplete memories and unrequited expectations — aspects that are so characteristic of a fleeting road trip.

Northwards into Gilgit, the book takes us to the mystical world of the Kalash and their rituals, and we see polo matches being played between various Balti tribes. Inscribed on the gates of the central polo ground in Gilgit is the proud proclamation: “Let other people play at other things; the king of games is still the game of kings.”

We exit Khyber Pakhtunkhwa via the Karakorum Highway and enter Rawalpindi, where one is never more than a few hours away from a trip to any of the Galiyat and Kashmir. Down the motorway to Jhelum and the Rohtas Fort, and then to Lahore, the melting pot of cultures ancient and modern — upscale shopping districts rub shoulders with old street bazaars and the lingering air in the Mughal monuments attracts as many tourists as do the tantalising spices of its modern food streets. Out of Lahore and onwards, by fields and plantations and rural hovels down Punjab, occasionally stopping at roadside tea shacks and diners, where truckers flaunt their multicolored beauties as they sit back for an invigorating round of tea before resuming their strenuous journey. Sometimes, we make an impulsive detour and follow a secluded path that leads to a remote village where we are met with pleasant curiosity, “and, of course, because the afternoon is hot, you must have tea.” Then to the land of the saints, Multan:

“With four things rare Multan abounds,

Dust, beggars, heat and burial grounds.”

Further down the highway that traces the meandering Indus River we see smaller rural settlements, with crumbling brick walls, worn walkways and twisting streets: “Here tall houses of great antiquity throng together, their steep roofs and trellised wooden balconies almost touching above the narrow cobblestone lanes … behind you, in the early evening, fluorescent lights glow and car engines throw up their familiar din; ahead of you is another world where the 21st century does not intrude …. broad courtyards that you stumble across, where ragged children play by firelight among slumbering buffalos.” As evening draws in, silhouettes of boats and fishermen navigating the Indus appear against the fiery sky. One can create whole stories out of the brief, teasing, almost provocative fragments of rural imagery the authors throw their way.

Onwards to Hyderabad, Thatta, and then Karachi: an evening at the Clifton beach brings the day to a mesmerising end, where the tourist either spends the blue hour gazing longingly at the receding ocean waves or rushes off towards the frenzied atmosphere of the nearby amusement park, no longer present, where insanity and short-lived merrymaking helps him momentarily forget the fatigue of travel.

We then depart for Balochistan, stopping at Lasbela and Kalat, then Quetta, and from there travel to Ziarat: serene lakes, terraced valleys, aromatic forests and vertical cliffs that afford stunning panoramic views of acres of untouched terrain. Finally, we make our way to the Chaman border and visit the treacherous KojakPass, where our journey comes to an end.

What I found impressive was the ease with which the authors slide smoothly from a bird’s eye view down to the street level, examine the intricacies of communal life and bazaars for a while, and then gently swoop up again to resume the journey, the sights and sounds resonating in the reader’s mind. Catchy couplets and quatrains are sprinkled selectively onto the text and provide for delightful indulgence, transforming the reading experience from merely informative to richly imaginative. Of special note are various verses by Kipling who provides unique observations on life on the frontier — hospitality, aggression, fraternity and the trivial moments of mirth that punctuate an otherwise formal and structured societal order. It is such poetic retreats that help bind the text together as a captivating account. Was it not for these brief, sporadic sketches on life, the book would have been just another travelogue centered around superficial descriptions of cultural routines, traditional cuisine and a tourist-specific itinerary. These detailed indulgences, however, tone the book down to a human scale, drawing the reader into the random happenings. At one instance the authors paint an almost magical picture of a camel caravan trudging along a mountain road guided by scrawny human figures, the dust clouds creating a surreal silhouette that signals its arrival in advance.

The book has a small turn-off: it was quite impossible to overlook the numerous small errors in the text, given that the book is a revised edition. Nevertheless, Journey through Pakistan is a rich and enthralling experience.

Journey through Pakistan

(Travelogue)

By Duncan Willetts, Mohamed Amin, Graham Hancock and Asif Noorani

Liberty Books, Karachi

ISBN 978-1-904722-58-8

245pp.

Reviewed by Umair Khan

IT is often said that literature has a universal language and its appeal cannot be constrained within geographical boundaries. It is this phenomenon that gave shape to Surkh Phoolon ki Sabz Khushboo, a quasi-anthology highlighting a cross-section of Urdu and Japanese literature compiled by Khurram Sohail. The title of the book is symbolic. The colours red and green represent the colours on the flags of Japan and Pakistan respectively, thus providing the reader’s imagination an amalgamation of Japanese and Pakistani literature.

One is surprised to discover that these two nations can be so interested in each other’s language and literature. Even among academics, we hardly come across people in Pakistan who can be considered experts on the Japanese language and literature. Yet this book introduces us to several luminaries of Japan and Pakistan who have dedicated their lives to the study and understanding of the other country’s language, literature, history and culture.

The book begins with a poetic article by Professor R. Gamo about Sakura flowers. The article compares the traits of the flower with the characteristics of Japanese soldiers of old times — their loyalty, bravery and willingness to sacrifice their lives for the nation. Reading between the lines, we can see the glorification of the old Samurai ways and the pride the Japanese have in their military heroes in much the same way Pakistanis feel about their past.

Surkh Phoolon ki Sabz Khushboo covers an exhausting range of topics. The themes of the articles meander through artistic grandeur, aesthetic marvel, cultural impact and architectural beauty of an old temple to the moral lessons and social symbols of Japanese folklore. Various articles also discuss the history of the Urdu language in Japan, its teaching and issues in its development.

There is also a whole section on Japanese poets and fiction writers and a discussion on the merits and demerits of their works. Another section contains Urdu translations of leading short stories from Japanese literature and yet another contains excerpts from Pakistani literature, including the writings of Qurratulain Hyder, Fatima Surayia Bajiya, and Kamila Shamsie, that have references to Japanese society. The book also outlines the history of fine arts in Japan and its impact on their society. The last section of the book contains 20 columns by several Pakistani journalists published in various newspapers that somehow discuss Japan.

Languages play a crucial role in the development of ties between nations. If we look at the years immediately after the formation of Pakistan, we see that one of the main factors responsible for Pakistan allying itself with the US and UK internationally was the fact that their language, English, was spoken by the educated elite of our country, which is still the case. Pakistanis and Japanese know very little about each other’s history, culture and literature. The main reason behind this lack of awareness is a lack of knowledge of each other’s languages. Meaningful diplomatic and useful commercial relations can also not develop in this scenario.

If there is an institution in Japan that is trying to bridge this gap, it is the department of Urdu studies at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The former head of this department, Professor Takeshi Suzuki, points out that Japanese universities faced many problems during the 1960s in keeping the teaching of Urdu alive. Neither were they adequately helped by the government of Pakistan nor were they encouraged by private publishers in Pakistan through good quality books and teaching material. In spite of this, they did not abandon studying and teaching Urdu and have produced scholars who have played the role of cultural ambassadors for Pakistan in Japanese society. Professor Takeshi is one such expert. Talking about the issues they had to face in selecting Urdu textbooks for Japanese students, he expresses concern over the rampant mistakes in Urdu textbooks published in Pakistan and says that such a scenario would be unthinkable in Japan. This provides an important insight into the seriousness with which nations take the syllabi and textbooks designed for educating their children.

As opposed to Japanese, more students in Pakistani universities study the Chinese language. Moreover, Pakistanis are exposed to friendly references to China and famous travelogues such as Ibn-i-Insha’s Chaltay ho to Cheen ko Chaliye.

The book also discusses the influence of Japanese literature on Urdu literature, especially the Urdu translations of one of the most popular genres of Japanese poetry — haiku — and the experiments of Urdu poets to create and adopt this form in Urdu with indigenous and contemporary themes. Dr Zafar Iqbal discusses the Japanese tradition of creating literary pieces firmly embedded in the social and cultural aspects of Japanese life rather than promoting philosophical theories as the ancients Greeks used to do.

Japanese culture avoids intellectual speculation and instead focuses on emotions and concrete thoughts. Human emotions in Japan found their expression in visual arts like painting and sculpture. The role philosophy played in Europe was played by literature in Japan. Professor Raees Alvi discusses the magical combination of subjective perceptions and objective reality in Japanese poetry. He also ponders upon the question of whether literature can be translated or not. His conclusion is that not only can it be translated but that it should be. It is a constructive and cognitive undertaking and results in higher awareness at a collective level.

By compiling this volume on the celebration of 60 years of Pak-Japan diplomatic relations, Sohail has not only rendered a great service to literature but also mounted a commendable effort to bring the people from the two countries together. The book contains articles dating from 1936 to the present day. There is only one thing that might not satisfy the curiosity of the readers: the sources of original publication of some of the articles are not mentioned. Other than that, the compiler and the publisher deserve appreciation for making such a rare project possible.

Surkh Phoolon ki Sabz Khushboo

(ANTHOLOGY)

By Khurram Sohail

Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore

ISBN 969-35-2586-8

398pp.

Hassan’s talent is discussed along with his paintings. “In art,” he says, “I am taken by common things. A plant dangling from a crevice can be breath-taking; a bud more solemn than a marble dome; a common gesture more monumental than pious truths.”

Travelling through the pages I see him inspired by things carrying no romance with them — tomatoes, papayas, mangoes. And then I come to a stop. I am in the thick of trees — sisham, anar, Himalyan oak, kikar, amaltas, jaman. Hassan informs us: “I have been doing landscapes or rather pictures of trees. All of them about the un-pampered common species on the roadside or in some neglected backyard. A visibly dead laburnum bursting into life with a riot of yellow showers, a grand old juniper dying next to a lake, an invincible wild beri tree with fresh shoots sprouting from limbs that were ruthlessly chopped the previous season …” He then talks about the social significance of all this. But at the moment I am in no mood to listen to this as I am under the spell of the trees. Unfortunately, we are living in a barren age in which the ancient relationship between man and nature has broken down. We now stand estranged from the trees who had been our best friends from time immemorial.

So it is heartening to find that when the trees in our land are under the constant threat of deforestation and nature is estranged from man, there is an artist who is in communion with the trees. “I cannot say I am not infatuated by nature,” he adds. “There cannot be a better companion in an estranged world.”

The book also recalls how the 1980s were very difficult times for Ijaz. It was during these years that he decided to devote all his time to painting. Recounting this experience, he says: “I am painting nature so that you can smell each plant and every landscape and recognise the species of each tree … Share the experience which each tree has gone through, the agony of its gnarled branches or the ecstasy of its majestic growth.”

What is admirable in particular is that Hassan remains faithful to the truth of the trees. The difficulty with modern painters is that in their love for abstraction they deprive things of what D.H. Lawrence calls their ‘thingness’. The trees, the shrubs, the flowers should appear as they actually are. If the painter has discovered some symbolic meaning in it let it come out. Ijaz is also aware of the symbolic significance of trees he is trying to paint. After all, in those very years he was involved in a political struggle, a fight for survival in the face of a cruel dictatorship. Under these circumstances the tree known as kikar appears to communicate to him something related to his own situation: “I find the sad agonised appearance of the kikar at one level symbolic of our trials and at another level expressive of our common nascent strength.”

There is also a series of his paintings under the title ‘Cling on to the tree and hope for spring’, a translation of a line from Iqbal — “Paiwasta reh shajar sai umid-i-bahar rakh”. Here the tree stands as a symbol of hope. Trees, and in general nature, serve for the artist as a refugee and inspiration. They give him courage to stand resolute and hope for the best.

Reviewed by I.A. Rehman

For more than 20 years, Ardeshir Cowasjee diligently functioned as his country’s honorary conscience-keeper. Week after week he beamed his search-light on the wrongdoings of the custodians of state power in Pakistan and their collaborators in various fields — their insatiable greed, their shamelessness, and their contempt for law and good manners. The result was a stream of scintillating columns in Dawn that not only offered the readers information but also regaled them with thoroughly enjoyable writing.

In this relentless record of political scams and shameless corruption, as Amina Jilani has put it, political leaders, government ministers, generals and judges were as pitilessly and fearlessly exposed as land grabbers and petty thieves. Many of the stars in his rogues’ gallery were driven to despair but found themselves unable to do anything. Most of them saw safety in preferring discretion to valour. Even the Supreme Court that hauled Cowasjee up for contempt chose not to press the issue. His success in censuring the various regimes Pakistan has had to suffer was unmatched by his peers.

He could do all this because he could smell a rat from a mile off and had no inhibition going after those tainted by corruption regardless of their rank or reputation. His intrepidity was sustained by his respect for truth, and his command over facts. He used every possible means available to him to dig out stories of corruption and abuse of authority in the name of management. A stickler for detail and precision, he liked to quote from official records — orders, memos and letters — to nail the culprits. “We must read to remember,” he once wrote, and he religiously followed the rule. He read widely, he kept reading, and he remembered what he read. He also had leading jurists, lawyers and subject specialists on call to reinforce his gut reaction to scams. In time he became free of the need to search for the issues that needed to be taken up; all the information he needed travelled to him as more and more people recognised in him a forum of redress where nobody’s plaint was dismissed without a hearing.

Cowasjee’s strength also lay in his total allegiance to Mohammad Ali Jinnah and an unshakable faith in his vision of a secular Pakistan. He often recalled, on the nation’s independence day and the Quaid’s birth anniversary, what Pakistan was meant to be and what it had been turned into by opportunists and self-seekers. He valued this belief and often referred to the inspiration it provided Zoroastrians who became famous for their public service, respect for law and charity. But his outlook on politics and governance was completely secular. That is why he was unsparing in his criticism of “the lethal mixture of state and religion” in the Objectives Resolution that ensured that “bigotry and intolerance would flourish.”

In his columns, Cowasjee covered vast areas and took up issues as they came. In some cases he was appalled to such an extent that he kept returning to them, such as Asghar Khan’s complaint against the involvement of the then army chief and head of the ISI in the rigging of the 1990 election or the storming of the Supreme Court by PML-N leaders (of which fate had made him an eye-witness) or the activities of the land-grabbers and disposers of Karachi Port Trust lands. Where corruption was an issue, Cowasjee did not spare any institution or individual. Bureaucrats were easy targets as their crimes had been in public debate for decades. The high priests of the media too were pulled up, for their greed and spinelessness, both. The military also came under attack, especially the naval officers involved with ports and shipping. He could write “the man who rides the rickety Pakistani omnibus has not forgotten or forgiven the wide reach of the military’s leading brass who have in the past proven to be as greedy and grasping as the political classes. Contemptible (sic) of all but themselves, they have willingly or unwillingly never been at a loss to flaunt their corrupt ways.”

But it is politicians on whom Cowasjee poured sizzling scorn. For denouncing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto he had more than one reason and he found much against Benazir and Zardari to go after them mercilessly. The Sharifs, apart from getting lambasted for misdeeds, tickled his robust sense of humour (see the list of laws/declarations Nawaz Sharif might have issued after the adoption of the 15th amendment). To denounce the two mainstream parties he used an especially broad brush: “Is there any objective non-party person in Pakistan who will deny that both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, their cohorts, their governments were corrupt to the core and collectively responsible for the robbery and plunder of this country and its people?”

The judiciary too attracted his attention. He once lamented that the Quaid, while stipulating that the first and paramount duty of any government was the maintenance of law and order, did not envisage “the deterioration of the judiciary of his country,” but his comments on the institution varied with the fluctuations in its fortunes. He repeatedly chided the judiciary for keeping Asghar Khan’s petition in cold storage for long years, cut Justice (retd) Tarar to size by tearing one of his judgments (one of the only two he wrote as a Supreme Court judge) into pieces, exposed judges who grabbed plots or were caught in land scams, went into raptures over the judgment in the Judges case, ridiculed the process of selecting judges, and at the same time, was also prepared to hail the judiciary’s triumph.

Referring to the accountability of judges, Cowasjee advised Ayaz Amir not to despair of change and to follow Bernard Levin who wrote, after the Birmingham Six episode, “Lords Bridge and Lane must go, not because of dishonesty but because they consistently perpetuated injustice.” He concluded: “At this point in time, however great the provocation, however good the reason, I can hardly write and say that Chief Justice Mohammad Afzal Zullah and Justice Mohammad Naeemuddin must go, but one can hope that with perseverance, good luck and with a lot of good fortune thrown in, by the time Ayaz’s maker is ready to receive him, he may be able to write and have printed in Dawn his opinion that for specific and justifiable reasons ‘Chief Justice Mohammad Whoever and Justice Mohammad Whoever must go.’” A generous hedging of his bets notwithstanding, the hard-boiled pragmatist too could sometimes indulge in wishful thinking.

From Cowasjee’s columns one learnt quite a few things that might have remained unknown to most people, like the proposal the then army chief and head of the ISI took to prime minister Nawaz Sharif about raising funds for covert operations from the drug trade. Cowasjee does not tell us whether the matter ended with Sharif’s veto. There is much more that we learn of the ways in which those in power disposed of the property of the people.

It is difficult to suppress the feeling that though Cowasjee often criticised Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf, he preferred military rulers to civilians. In September 2001, he countered Nawaz Sharif supporters’ glee at Musharraf’s perceived discomfort by posing the question: “Is his [Nawaz’s] wooden expression not invariably a sign that nothing has penetrated his head?” Saying that “so far Musharraf has taken the right decisions,” he declared: “people must support him rather than instigate riots against what he has done whilst keeping the interests of Pakistan firmly in his mind.”

But a few months after Musharraf’s assault on the judiciary in 2007, Cowasjee sounded disappointed. “Many of us considered him to be the best of worst available to lead the country,” he wrote, and concluded: “Whatever good he has done will be interred with his bones.” A year later, he expressed confidence that “we can still refloat” as “Pakistan’s second Ataturk is in command. The fact that he is a general of the army is no impediment.” While Cowasjee did sometimes take military rulers to task he apparently could not bring himself to denounce military coups.

Cowasjee sometimes used for the people the same wide brush that he employed for sweeping the irresponsible and corrupt politicians into the dustbin: “They are all the same. Some come on horseback, some via the stuffed ballot box and manipulated votes cast by illiterates who vote for symbols with their feet.” Asking people to accept responsibility for their plight he reminded them, “we have cast our ballots, we have brought in and acquiesced with corrupt and inept governments, we have welcomed in military ‘great redeemers’ with flowers and ladoos and then seen them off with scorn, as we have the politicians. We, all of us, are not worthy of being citizens of Pakistan.” He obviously had little respect for elections — Pakistan style. As one of the prominent advocates of accountability before elections, he proposed a referendum to enable the president to delay the polls for 15 months or so after Benazir’s second government was thrown out in 1996.

Pakistan’s democrats, and some were always around, were sometimes intrigued by Cowasjee’s observations. For instance, he reprimanded those who had criticised the dismissal of the Benazir government in 1990. Defending Ghulam Ishaq he wrote: “The gross public speculation against his doing so came to naught. His [the president’s] detractors said he was backed by the army. But should he not have acted in concert with the wishes of the most organised party in the land? Are the generals not Pakistanis who too can think?” That sounds like justifying the military’s intervention in politics.

On another occasion Cowasjee surprised his readers by offering simplistic solutions to complex problems. For instance, he asked the Musharraf regime to “disqualify and debar every man and woman who held elected office from 1988 to 1999 from henceforth holding any elective office ever again.” If the regime did not follow this advice, “history will hold it responsible for the accelerated disintegration of what is left of this country.”

Politics, especially democratic politics, was Cowasjee’s Achilles’ heel. While taking note of his lack of fervor for democracy one should avoid criticising him for not being what he never claimed to be. He was probably cast in the mould of the captain of a ship who reigned supreme not only over the crew under him but also over the waves of the ocean stretched endlessly before his eyes. He had imbibed the British traditions of order, legality and discipline, a system in which the best one could do for the people was to be a benign patriarch to them. Besides the champions of democracy, especially its beneficiaries, failed to offer a model of governance that Cowasjee could consider an advance on his colonial experience.

The view from his ivory tower did not extend beyond the few thousand rascals who had captured the commanding heights of politics, economy and bureaucracy. Strange though it may seem, there is little in this collection about the honest labour of millions of Pakistanis who have struggled against prohibitive odds, nor about the battles the illiterate public has fought to overthrow dictators and usurpers of power and create space for persons of goodwill, like Cowasjee, to write what they choose.

This Cowasjee reader also offers some captivating images of what Karachi used to be and quite a few fine portraits of its builders. He also introduces us to some great teachers. One of them, Dr Maneckji Nusserwanji Dhalla, has left for us many gems of wisdom, such as: “Intolerance and bigotry and dogmatism are the bitterest enemies of religion upon earth. They make religion a tyrant, a persecutor, a veritable daeva, the demoniac perversion of religion … Sectarian bigotry is as bad as inter-religion bigotry. Bigotry stifles reason and the bigot, in his frenzy, is out to force all to believe what he believes.” In addition, Cowasjee offers a large number of insightful sketches of his dear departed, written with both affection and understanding.

Thus, if the shenanigans of pseudo-democrats have not destroyed your faith in democracy, and the wickedness of the vile you meet in Cowasjee’s menagerie has not eaten up your belief in the inherent nobility of the human person, you will find in Cowasjee a splendid companion to help you not only laugh away your miseries but also to find the courage to say what needs to be said. There is much merit in his storytelling. For example, his narration of his driver’s arrest and detention and his interrogation in the Altaf Gauhar affair will do credit to an accomplished writer of short stories.

Cowasjee was right in arguing that columns become dated when the time in which they are written passes, but the editors of this collection were also right that they “will prove to be a window into the relevant period of our history.” Vintage Cowasjee will not date.

Vintage Cowasjee: A Selection of Writings From Dawn, 1984-2011

(Columns)

Foreword by Amina Jilani

SAMA Publishing, Karachi

ISBN 978-969-8784-79-7

800pp.

Syed Nomanul Haq is a former scholar-in-residence at the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and is Advisor of the Social Sciences and Liberal Arts Program at the IBA Karachi. He is general editor of the Oxford University Press book series, Studies in Islamic Philosophy and recently shared the Waldo Leland Prize of the American Historical Association

In recent years, the social sciences appear to have dominated both the literary and linguistic studies of Urdu, at least in terms of the volume of writings and their documented prestige. Reigning supreme in the academy have been the social sciences as a discipline that is determining the very nature of inquiry into literature. Note again that we are here talking about a relatively recent phenomenon, for in its fullness this discipline itself arose out of the complex vicissitudes of the human intellectual and social history since the 19th century, now with its defined borders and its own turf, rapidly cast it seems in the furnaces of the industrial world. And in the general run of things, in the wider world of the Urdu-language media, literary periodicals, and lightweight magazines, it is not so much the discipline but the concerns of the social sciences kind that are defining more and more the framework of explications, explanations and analyses. So typically, it is now way more likely that the learned scholar of Urdu, the one operating in the international arena, has a much better grasp of seminal writings in the field of the social sciences than of humanistic discourses. Expect more familiarity now with the likes of Marx and Weber and Durkheim, along with their bountiful harvest reaped over the last two centuries or so, than with the writings of the kind we have received from I.A. Richards or Frank Kermode. Expect no more than a cursory familiarity with the literary deliberations of a Coleridge or a T.S. Eliot. And worse, do not expect the newer critics to have cultivated a friendship with the reflections, mind-boggling reflections, of Ghalib’s mentor Bedil. Here one would hardly dare recall the thrust generated by personages such as Qudama ibn Ja‘far, being too far away as they happen to be, sitting in the frozen cultural chambers of medieval Baghdad: to expect an acquaintance with the Qudama tradition would be just too much to ask.

But the most conspicuous manifestation of the rule of the social sciences in an expanding empire is the shedding of the linguistic burden. It seems that the critic is no more required to pay attention to source languages — to classical Arabic, Sanskrit and Persian. Sometimes, though such instances are few, the contemporary critic happens to be rather unrefined even in the object language itself. This does make conceptual sense. The interest now lies in social relations, in urban pressures and politics, in demography and kinship, in migration and diaspora, in the dislocations wrought by the construction of massive dams and highways, it lies in colonial machinations, in post-colonialism, in emerging city ghettoes. Yes, the interest has shifted from its gaze on imagery, metaphor, idiomatic structures, diction, stylistics, rhythm, rhyme and prosody. No more are we talking much about the autonomy of an alternative cosmos created by a poet or a story-writer — a cosmos with its own laws, its own grammar and its own atelier of meaning-creation; a cosmos that resembles this given cosmos of ours, but does not represent it in any non-complex linear manner. We are blurring the distinction between resemblance and representation.

Yet, it ought to be admitted that the social science approach has opened many new vistas for us. We are asking new questions, creating new synergies with many other disciplines, making the study of literature accessible to a much larger number of young people, now unencumbered by protracted phases of language preparation. But what is particularly important here, the newer approach has made us engage in the process of real life in order to understand literary works. Indeed, contemporary Urdu fiction or latter-day poetry cannot be fully grasped without this engagement. Without a context other than that of literature itself, we cannot explain the difference between Iqbal’s treatment of the Mosque of Cordoba and Spain on the one hand, and Ghalib’s treatment of steam engines and Calcutta on the other. To explain literature, we sometimes have to go outside the realm of literature.

So we have here mixed blessings. An apt imagery here is that of a glare. The social sciences have engendered a glare that makes certain objects much clearer, even some dramatic unseen objects compellingly visible — but it does so at the cost of obscuring many others. This glare needs to be reduced in its intensity. A good case in point is the wonderful body of work on cities. From Ajmal Kamal’s rich volumes on Karachi many years ago to Mehr Afshan Farooqi’s ongoing researches on Allahabad and Kamran Asdar Ali’s recent reflections on Pakistan’s urban ethos and its creative drift, we have received much illumination from these crisp works.

Entering sometimes into the discussions about cities is this question of the Urdu language, the Urdu language as it is moving in our times. But this is a subject that is yet to be fully developed, and I anticipate that when it is looked at in earnest it will tend to undermine the glare we are talking about.

The question of the Urdu language as it is going through changes seems to be a highly complex one. On the one hand, it involves a consideration of commercial industries and new technologies; but then, on the other hand, it brings into focus, or ought to bring into focus, profound philological issues. In this endeavour, the social scientist needs the participation and aid of those trained in humanistic, text-based disciplines, trained in languages particularly — the participation and aid of those who have a touch with poetry, who savor a Hafiz and a Ghalib, those who are, so to speak, ghazalised. This latter expertise, becoming more and more rare by the day, is conspicuously absent from the discourses on the daily urban changes and reversals Urdu is going through.

Let’s look at the phenomenon: what happens frequently these days is that an Urdu word is incorrectly appropriated by Bollywood; then the same word, now in its incorrect meaning or unlawful usage, returns back to Urdu and becomes part of the language in a widening environment of linguistic anarchy. I say “incorrectly” and “unlawful” with the presupposition that there must exist an entity called standard Urdu. This back-formation evidently fascinates the social scientist, but for the philologist it may mean a reduction of semantic nuance or an invasion into the rhythms of Urdu. Take the case of the word shuru‘at, an infrequently occurring plural of shuru‘ (inception or beginning), now deployed to replace the word ibtida’ or to substitute for the singular form which is standard Urdu idiom. So now, living as we do in the shadow of Bollywood, we say, “kam ki shuru‘at karte hain” rather than the standard “kam shuru‘ karte hain” or “kam ki ibtida’ karte hain”. This is not a romantic lamentation for “old” Urdu; it is in fact a scientific observation. Note that two things are happening here: one, that the semantic range of Urdu is being reduced; and two, that by making light of it and calling it ‘a process of life’ as some people do, we block a consideration of the role played by commercial industries in our daily lives.

There are many such examples, but let me take just one or two more, rather hilarious and ubiquitous ones. Thus, sometimes what happens is that an English word enters Bollywood and is used in a non-English idiom. Then the non-English idiom carrying the English words travels back to Indian/Pakistani English, such that it makes no sense to the English speaker. A case in point is the word “tension” — it entered the Mumbai vocabulary in the expression, “tension mat lo” and has now undergone a back-formation into English to appear both in speech and writing literally as “don’t take tension”. “Taking tension” is a meaningless expression in English.

Much else has been happening to Urdu in our days. For example, the difference between “mukhtalif” (different, adjective) and “farq” (difference, noun) has been obliterated. So instead of saying “these two things are mukhtalif,” people now say, “these two things are farq.” That is, using a noun when logically and syntactically there should have been an adjective. But most intriguingly, the second Urdu word in its English translation has travelled back to Urdu and we hear expressions such as “ab is ki awaz change hai” = “now its sound is farq”. Is this only a process of life? Or are we impoverishing the semantic scope of Urdu? And are we violating the idiomatic autonomy and phonetic sovereignty of the language? We must remember that it is one thing to import foreign words into a language, something that happens all the time; and quite another to invade its idioms, as it seems to be happening under commercial terror. We need to diffuse the social science glow to see of all this, significant as it is — significant in order for us to explain ourselves as dignified cultural beings.