“What I did know … [about Zafar] only fed a thesis: He’d seemed self-made, came from nothing, but how far can that go? How feasible is it? Was he a working class boy who had overreached? Lived beyond his psychic means? — to take some words from his notebooks.

“The imaginary ideal human being, the one I believed I could conceivably be, is an unreachable person whom I could only wish to be, unreachable in any circumstance.”

— Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

In conversations stretching over a decade with my wife, who happens to be from a hyper-literate Bangladeshi family, I often asked her, “Where is the great Bangladeshi novel in English?”

Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know is analysed as a study of the effort to transcend limitations of class, race, religion and gender by South Asian writers

There has been a veritable onslaught of notable Pakistani fiction in English, but Bangladeshis are conspicuous by their absence. We all know who the familiar names in Pakistani fiction are, but I was dying to know what would be the take from the other side on historical events unfolding with lightning speed.

Zia Haider Rahman’s novel In the Light of What We Know (2014) comes from a man on a mission, a man welcoming the enormous burden of expectations. It’s as if he has tried to cram into one novel what numerous (imaginary) Bangladeshi writers would have been publishing over the last 15 years — had they existed. His novel is a belated compendium of, and addition to, the various novelistic discourses that have come into existence in the first decade and a half of the new millennium as a result of the new global realities, fictional realms toward which Pakistanis have been some of the foremost contributors.

The novel — a 500-page, meandering, eternally digressive, no-holds-barred encounter between the sciences and the humanities — is narrated in the form of a confession by Zafar, an Oxford-educated Bangladeshi born in Sylhet but raised in England, who is trained in mathematics and has been by turns a financier, a lawyer, and a development expert working to reform the Bangladeshi NGO sector. Zafar finds his way to Afghanistan in 2002 in the wake of the first phase of the American war, trailing his ex-girlfriend Emily Hampton-Wyvern, an English aristocrat who is the central female figure in the novel.

The confession takes place in 2008 when Zafar, after a long absence, shows up at the South Kensington home of his old friend (the unnamed narrator) and fellow Oxonian, an elite Pakistani whose grandfather was once ambassador to the US, whose father is a Princeton and Oxford scientist, who finds himself at the fulcrum of inventing exotic financial instruments (credit default swaps and the like) as a New York financier in the 1990s and 2000s, and who is also a possible target of criminal prosecution for said innovation.

Rahman himself has a background that might be an amalgam of his two protagonists, having been educated at similar elite institutions, and having worked in finance and the law in Western capitals. But it is interesting — as I will explain — that he chooses the elite Pakistani as the confessor and the demotic Bangladeshi as the confessee.

The novel, in the vein of Laurence Sterne’s delightful Tristram Shandy, is relentlessly digressive with plenty of footnotes, intriguing epigraphs to grace each chapter, and discussions about any number of intellectual matters — from Poggendorff’s Illusion to Macaulay’s Minute, from Wittgensteinian conundrums to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development — that one hopes are the subject of conversation amongst civilised people.

At first, Rahman as a novelist — especially because the climactic events in Afghanistan, when Zafar and Emily’s prolonged dissatisfaction with each other comes to a head, are withheld until the very end — seems to be positioning himself in the role of confessee: of biological shortcomings, of transparent mixtures of ideas that perhaps ought to be kept secret and separate, and of emotional turbulence (it is inevitable that in the end he resorts to the notion of rage for Zafar, because it is not something a novelist of his social standing can avoid) amidst the coolness of intellectual endeavour.

And it is the agglomeration of preceding subcontinental novelists, particularly Pakistanis, who seem to be doing the listening (as I have noted, the confessor to the Bangladeshi protagonist, he of lower-class origins who has risen all the way to the top, is a Pakistani born to the elite).

So it is Mohsin Hamid, say, who might be listening in on Rahman’s notions of the global novel’s brief, how and why it works, where it falls short, how it handles audience and reception, when to acknowledge the self-doubts writing this kind of novel creates. But eventually it becomes more than the self-

conscious articulation of narrative philosophy. Rahman is interested, above all, in constituting an ideal subcontinental character, a persona equally at ease in all the different worlds of class, race, religion, and gender coexisting today.

In essence, the novel is a transgressive confession of a hyper-intellectual South Asian to his Western auditors about what we have been up to, oh, these last three or four decades, since we became integral parts of the Western intellectual machine, ensconced in the academy and professions, absorbing the canon in the humanities and sciences, but also doing new stuff with it, our own stuff, a thrilling blend of mysticism and rationalism, intuition and reason, art and science.

Rahman has taken the idea of the ‘native informant’, a concern for every writer using an adopted language, and turned it on its head. He’s saying, look, I know what I’m supposed to be doing, given my publishers and their ideological interests, and I can play that role, but I’m also smart enough to explode the idea at its core and end up accomplishing the opposite of the naïve (or native) informant’s function.

All South Asian writers must confront the debilitating posture of the native informant, and all, to the extent that they are good writers, subvert it, but Rahman takes it far. If, while supposedly playing native informant, he also elaborates an original ideal of the South Asian at ease with all of today’s populist and elitist conflicts, then he has taken his novel to a transcendent dimension.

What about the idea of conversation for the sake of conversation? We had this in a certain kind of European novel, but it is mostly a lost tradition in both the novel and in life. Who speaks any more of intellectual riddles — which can have life-and-death ramifications — in this age of social media and populist fiction? Who writes novels in the vein of Dostoevsky and Meredith and Conrad and Mann anymore, and who converses like that in ordinary life? Well, shouldn’t someone?

In his notebooks — part of the arsenal of confessional materials at the narrator’s disposal — Zafar deploys not just real quotations, but also made-up ones such as ideas creatively attributed to Winston Churchill. Autobiography has a difficult time denying its fictionality, but the novel, traditionally, has sought to give the appearance of not being fictional, a subterfuge that creates the levels of irony from which truth — discomforting and alien — may peek through.

In Rahman’s novel this appears in the contest between the scientific and humanistic discourses (the idea of the two cultures elaborated by C.P. Snow and other typically conservative academics), so that we have huge chunks of scientific information, explained or half-explained, and likewise large blocks of aesthetic rumination, such as the theory of the novel (or autobiography), put in contest with each other.

Both discourses merge in the ideology of development, a major preoccupation of the novel, in that it is supposed to be both scientific (based on the science, or pseudo-science, of economics) and improvisatory (based on ground reality). Another word for development is postcolonialism, which is also Rahman’s major theme, à la Naipaul or Greene, the conditions under which colonisers and the colonised (such as in modern-day Afghanistan) rationalise their actions.

Discourses which at first seemed merely digressive, put in for the sake of ornamentation, begin to converge and feed off each other, sharpening definitions. This encyclopaedic narrative derives its morality from the enlightenment project of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. A narrative of this kind brings to the fore its manifold subjects in the process of pursuit, appearing as realities because spoken of explicitly, not constrained by the domestic novel of manners.

As with Zafar and the Pakistani narrator, there is a similar intellectual relationship between the narrator and his academic father. Personal issues of the most intimate sort are likely to be, in this relationship, sorted out via metaphorical implications of scientific theorems.

The narrator and his parents posit cosmopolitan sophistication and ease of transference between cultures that is a tad idealised; I know from experience that even in the highest reaches there are greater frictions than Rahman is prepared to allow. But again, Rahman’s brief is to construct an ideal South Asian character-type, not afraid to retell the West the intellectual tradition of tolerance, magnanimity, and imagination — in short, liberality — it is rapidly losing touch with.

It is inevitable that in a novel of this kind there should be an aristocratic white female, the aim of the protagonist’s deepest emotions and solicitude, who turns out to be cold and empty. This has been a staple for South Asians writing the global novel, familiar from all the well-known instances, and I have noted this in prior criticism. Here it is Emily, liberal to the core, seeking a positive role for herself in a world with rapidly shifting realities.

Rahman acknowledges the extent to which Emily is a metaphor for a West terrorised by its own intelligence/power, unable to find clarity. As Zafar notes, “Emily stood for something, she rescued me and condemned me in the same gesture … Emily was England, home, belonging, the untethering of me from a past I did not want.”

How to relate to Emily? And all that she stands for? How does one do it?

That, actually, is what South Asians have been up to, and if this particular novel plays on the ‘rage’ or the excess of emotion with which South Asian men (often in the rational/scientific pursuits) have been credited — or miscredited — then that is to fully reckon with the competing discourses of terror/ideology and see what results.

The narrative often explores what is this self — or multiplicity of selves — that is being constituted in the course of living out different discourses, and if it is stable or evanescent. To wonder about the nature of this self is the primary task of the novelist today. It is a way of processing, but also exceeding, politics by avoiding ideological commitment — i.e., an aesthetics of perpetual incompletion (Sternian digression).

It is apt then that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (the limits of provability in formal axiomatic theories) is a leitmotif throughout Rahman’s novel. The book ends with a picture of Einstein and Gödel on a pathway in Princeton, their backs towards us so that we can’t tell who is who, though the nostalgia for a time and place of pure intellectuality is palpable.

Even if the novelist does not shy away from Jamesian subjectivity (the entire novel indulges in minute definitions of inter- and intra-class relations), and even if we are left with no doubt about the final confrontation between Zafar and Emily, Rahman seems to be explicitly inserting prevalent discourses only to suggest that our understanding is always incomplete.

My thoughts so far are relevant to all the novels South Asians have been producing lately, but just to recap some of Rahman’s aims:

a) He has pushed hard against the boundaries of the novel by not hiding the various discourses (contemporary finance, development economics, mathematics and physics) competing for supremacy today; it is not easy to stretch the definition of the novel, but Rahman has tried;

b) he may have written one of the concluding acts to the familiar novel of terrorism by subcontinental writers, by shifting the terrain to a different reality, directing it to the deep ideas (or roots of ideologies) propelling human subjectivity; and

c) he gives the impression of addressing the West from an emotionally secure posture, blanketing the Western narrative machine with his own unvanquished authority, feeding into its desperate desire to be told news of its own darkest secrets: the self-created financial disaster, or the recent wars of revenge and passion.

I began by mentioning that I have rued, over 15 years, the lack of a Bangladeshi novel in English dealing with the stuff Pakistani and Indian writers have been addressing prolifically. I have also had many conversations with my wife — she being a Bangladeshi born in Dhaka, and me being a Pakistani born in Karachi, both of us not long before the two ‘wings’ sundered apart — about the war of 1971, and the tenor of those conversations follows that of many such conversations between Zafar and the narrator, the narrator and his father, the narrator’s father and others, Zafar and others.

Zafar spends two years of his childhood in Bangladesh, his happiest years, extracted suddenly from his English upbringing and taken to his real mother in Sylhet, and we are told that he is the offspring of rape by a Pakistani soldier. The Bangladesh mass killing is a persistent preoccupation, and while Rahman does seem to be delivering himself of an obligation in doing this, we can see that colonial discourse is no different whether it is American or British or Pakistani in origin (as is clear from the military and intelligence higher-ups Zafar encounters in Islamabad). Intellectual honesty (i.e., the certainty of uncertainty) is the only way forward.

The 1971 war was not a regional or local problem then, and nothing that happens today, in a world driven forward by incompletion, really is.

Postscript: I could easily have argued the opposite of each of my points above; the text certainly gives me enough ammunition to do so. The competing discourses, I could have asserted, do not add up to a coherent critique of empire. Likewise, the failed relationship with the elite white girl reiterates a major trope of subcontinental novels, the idea that no matter how high the ambitious desi may ascend the rungs of meritocracy, the pure flower of white aristocracy shall remain denied to him; pre-empting miscegenation at that level is presumably comforting to a Western readership. I could also have claimed that the Bangladesh war is not meaningfully integrated and that it is there only gratuitously, a cheap assertion of the novelist’s identity. Finally, I could see Rahman as trading on his privileged status, articulating a pathologically insecure obsession with minute details of class, not subverting them but reinscribing them to a Western audience’s pleasure. After all, in the end we do get an enraged Zafar — when little in his background would suggest this — reiterating the driving force of the contemporary terrorism novel.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 16th, 2016