“INDIANS write in English to impress the British.” So goes a quote by Feroza Jussawalla, a literary critic, in Tariq Rahman’s republished volume A History of Pakistani Literature in English (1947-1988) (originally published in 1990 by Vanguard). In recounting the words, Rahman is referring to a core dilemma that undergirds much of Pakistani (and, before Pakistan existed, Indian) literature in English: can the language of a colonising power ever be considered a form of authentic expression? Rahman does not present us with an easy answer to this thorny dilemma, but he does provide a lucid and evocative journey through the many attempts to tackle it. Read in contemporary Pakistan, where questions of what is ‘really’ Pakistani continue to resonate, Rahman’s book is a testament to the age and genealogy of the inquiry.

Rahman begins early, with pre-Partition fiction and an evaluation of the very well-known author, Ahmed Ali, best known for his novel Twilight in Delhi, to his lesser known contemporaries, Firoz Khan Noon, Mumtaz Shahnawaz and Khwaja Ahmed Abbas. Together these voices present the diversity of views that existed among Indian Muslim authors at a time when their political fate lay suspended between the colonial India of the present and the Pakistan of the future. Like contemporary Pakistani writers, these authors struggled with the question of who their audience was. In one iteration of this, Rahman presents an excerpt from the foreword to Noon’s novel Scented Dust (1941) in which the writer describes the book evolving from an encounter with an American lady while on a ship to India who had wished for a book that would give her a “bird’s eye view of India”.

The vexing task of distillation that lies beneath this recounting is the separation of which portions of any postcolonial literary creation are inspired by presenting such context to the colonist versus those aimed at fomenting a literary resistance that makes the colonial subject visible. In a more recent fictional reiteration, the dilemma appears in Mohsin Hamid’s celebrated novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), whose narrative device is a conversation between a Pakistani man and a Western interlocutor. Rahman’s work permits the contemporary reader to connect these long separated narratives, some of which have been forgotten or foregone by the burdens of history.

A word must also be said on the way Rahman arranges his chapters. Some, such as the ones on Ali and Bapsi Sidhwa, are framed around the work of particular authors and their contemporaries that he feels are particularly notable in the construction of the canon of Pakistani literature in English. Others focus on particular time periods, such as the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, presenting a fascinating intermix of how politics, class and literary production in English are interrelated.

In some cases, this enmeshing reveals how authors have tried to justify or elevate culture or tradition. In the chapter on the ’50s, for instance, Rahman discusses Zaibunissa Hamidullah’s short story ‘The Young Wife’, in which Aliya, the protagonist, sees “her father dominating her mother and grows indignant at her mother’s passive acceptance”.

When she herself marries, she refuses to give in to her husband and seeks to “break his spirit” by returning home to her parents house. Here, she overhears a conversation between her father and her husband who has come to convince her to go home. “We men must never allow women to get the upper hand,” the man says to his son-in-law.

None of this of course is particularly surprising; what comes next is. Aliya now realises that “there was nothing smacking of subjugation or slavery in the relationship between her father and her mother it was the result of centuries of tradition and custom”. So enlightened, she settles into her role as a submissive Punjabi wife. As Rahman points out in his astute critique, ‘The Young Wife’ is an attempt to romanticise tradition and make unequal relationships palatable by ensconcing them in literary narrative; the heroine’s surrender is an idealisation and prescription to female readers.

With the ’60s, there are new occlusions; Pakistani literature in English finds itself a lesser cousin of a more burgeoning literary scene in India. It also finds itself faltering in relation to the greats writing in Urdu; Manto and Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the recent present. Some frustration on this account appears in the fact that an English literary compilation of the time includes a story by Manto. In later chapters on Zulfikar Ghose — who confesses that “I have not been back to Pakistan for 23 years” — and Bapsi Sidhwa, Rahman visits the theme of exile and belonging. Political tumult or a lack of recognition sentences some writers to a permanent state of longing for homelands that politics has riven and time transformed. Chapters on poetry, drama and prose pay homage and record the contributions made in these genres. Accounts such as those of Rahman are labours of love and diligence, an effort to create a canon for a literature whose origins, in their inextricable connection to colonialism, are deemed forever illegitimate. In doing so, he reveals a panorama of struggle and resistance, frustration and creation that has too often been obscured. Unlike the estimation of poet Fahmida Riaz (quoted in the book’s conclusion) who has said that “Pakistani literature continues to be the literature of resistance. Perhaps one day it will become the literature of struggle”, Rahman’s is a more trenchant and specific critique.

He notes in the last pages of his book that Pakistani fiction in English is “not politically sophisticated”, its liberalism is “not expressed politically nor is it a matter of sharply defined philosophical reasoning”. It is an expected condition since there is “little encouragement of creative work in English at the official level” or at the public or university level, forcing most writers to live and publish abroad.

It is a melancholy end to what is an enriching account; Rahman says it best himself in the last paragraph of the book: “this survey cannot make great writers emerge all of a sudden”. While that may indeed be the case for writers, Rahman’s work of literary history provides Pakistani readers with a carefully woven work that connects a neglected past to an ambiguous present whose careful consideration may produce a more hopeful future.

The reviewer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

A History of Pakistani Literature in English: 1947-1988

(LITERATURE)

By Tariq Rahman

Oxford University Press, Karachi

ISBN 978-0199402717

376pp.