Muneeza Shamsie On The Brave New World Of Pakistani Writing In English

Muneeza Shamsie is one of Pakistan’s indomitable writers. She is an eminent critic, a bibliographer, a literary journalist and a reputed editor. She belongs to a great lineage of activists, authors and academics that traces its roots to colonial India. Her mother, Jahanara Habibullah (1915-2003), published her memoir first as an English translation and later, in the original Urdu as ‘Zindagi ki Yadein: Riyasat Rampur ka Nawabi’. Noted feminist and writer Attia Hosain (1913-1998) was her aunt. Shamsie’s grandmother in Lucknow, feminist and activist Begum Inam Fatima Habibullah, was the author of a travelogue ‘Tassuraat-e-Safar-e-Europe’ about her journey to Britain in 1924.
The literary tradition in the family continues to date, reaching its heights with the emergence of Kamila Shamsie as one of the world’s leading authors and globally recognized faces. Muneeza Shamsie’s ‘Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English’ is considered to be the most important work on the evolution of Pakistani English literature. She is a regular contributor to prestigious newspapers, including ‘Dawn’ and ‘Herald’ and contributes as a Bibliographical Representative of ‘The Journal of Commonwealth Literature’. Ask her about the family tradition beginning from Attia Hosain reaching a peak with the global recognition of Kamila Shamsie’s works and she is quick to clarify that she looks at Kamila’s work as a mother rather than a critic. That is why in her book ‘Hybrid Tapestries,’ she asked someone else to write the section on Kamila. “However, I did write a nepotistic memoir-cum-critical essay on ‘Sunlight and Salt: The Literary Landscapes of a Divided Family,’ in which I wrote of the division of my family into three — between India, Pakistan and Britain at Independence, and looked at the links and differences between the Partition novels, ‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ (1961) by Hosain and ‘Salt and Saffron (2000) by Kamila.” 

 

In a broader context, Shamsie finds their respective careers as reflections of the trajectory of South Asian English literature. Attia Hosain, she says, grew up in Lucknow and started to write English fiction in undivided India at a time when there were only a handful of Anglophone fiction writers in the subcontinent, such as RK Narayan, Raja Rao, Ahmed Ali and Mulk Raj Anand. “She had to address many stylistic and linguistic issues to convey the true experience of her culture, gender and language in English. As such, her fiction made an important contribution to South Asian English writing and diaspora writing: she moved to Britain with her family in 1946. She went on to publish two works of fiction, a story collection, ‘Phoenix Fled’ and a novel ‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ (1961). Both books were well received, but did not reach a wide Anglophone readership, because at this point of time, the concept of ‘English literature’ was confined to the traditional Anglo-American norm.” says Shamsie.

The proliferation of South Asian English Literature during the 1960s saw a new and inclusive literary discourse that asserted that Anglophone literature from the Commonwealth and previously colonised countries were equal to any. “Then, there was the influence of the feminist movement, the civil rights movement in America and the voices of increasingly assertive migrant communities in the West. By the late 1970s and the 1980s, the writings of South Asian writers started reaching out to a much wider global audience. This included new post-independence writers living in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as the diaspora writers,” Shamsie says. As a result, new editions of Hosain’s two books were published by Virago Press in 1988, with an introduction by Anita Desai. The continuing interest in Hosain’s work led to a selection of her published and unpublished writings in ‘The Distant Traveller’ (2013), which was brought out to mark her centenary. The 2021 Virago editions of ‘Phoenix Fled’ and ‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ have introductions by Kamila Shamsie, whose trajectory was very different from Hosain’s. She was born and brought up in Karachi and has often said that she grew up ‘with a mother who was constantly typing away’ (as a freelance journalist and literary critic) and gave her free access to contemporary novels on her bookshelf. During family trips to London, she would meet Hosain, who showed great interest in the fact that Kamila had decided at a very young age that she wanted to be a writer. However, Hosain did not live long enough to see Kamila getting her first book published. Kamila studied creative writing in America and her MFA thesis became her first novel, ‘In the City by the Sea’ (1998). 

Meanwhile, Pakistani English fiction had started to draw increasing international attention since the 1980s. This included the novels of Hanif Kureishi, Bapsi Sidhwa, Adam Zameenzad, Nadeem Aslam, the creative memoirs of Sara Suleri and the short fiction of Aamer Hussein. Kamila added to this as a significant new young voice.  She was soon joined, at the turn of the millennium, by a dynamic group of young, talented and award-winning contemporaries, including Mohsin Hamid and Uzma Aslam Khan. Together with Kamila, they would take the Pakistani English fiction to newer heights as would the growing number of writers, who continued to emerge in rapid succession, getting critical acclaim. They include novelists Mohammed Hanif, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, H.M. Naqvi and Daniyal Mueenuddin. Over the years, Kamila continued to develop as a novelist, expand her literary horizons and address a wide range of issues in each of her seven novels: her eighth, ‘Best of Friends’, comes out in 2022.  Her novels have found new readers after they have been translated into several languages.
 

Muneeza is considered to be an authority on Pakistani-English literature and her contribution in promoting Pakistani-Anglophone literature has been immense. She finds the recent literature from Pakistani-Anglophone writers highly optimistic. It’s A Brave New World for Pakistani English Novel. “It seems to be going from strength to strength. The growing number of award-winning Pakistani  English writers is not confined to fiction writers, it also includes dramatists such as Hanif Kureishi, Rukhsana Ahmad and Ayad Akhtar and poets ranging from Moniza Alvi, Imtiaz Dharker, Zaffar Kunial and Shadab Zeest Hashmi,” says Muneeza. Due to the facility of travel, the internet and global trajectories, the sharp dividing lines between the diaspora and resident Pakistani English writers have blurred which, in turn, gives Pakistani English literature a much broader scope. “It is no longer the literature of the elite confined to the subcontinent, but includes writing by migrants in the Anglophone diaspora from many different walks of life,” she says.
    

Though poetry has been the oldest form of literature, since Victorian times, the novel has replaced it as the dominant genre in Western Literature. Pakistani English novel has received global recognition and acclaim, but Pakistani English poetry couldn’t receive such acceptance and recognition even though the country has produced great poets in Urdu and other languages. “Anglophone fiction is more widely read than poetry anyway … and Urdu poetry has the great advantage of having a strong oral tradition so that it reaches millions in the way that English poetry does not,” says Muneeza, adding that contemporary Pakistani English poetry developed much before fiction. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Taufiq Rafat, Kaleem Omar, Adrian Hussein, Maki Kureishi and Salman Tariq Kureishi and others forged a new voice in Pakistani English literature. But, at this time, creative writing in English was mired in a nationalistic debate as many people felt it was no longer ‘relevant” since English was a colonial language and the colonials had left.

Of course, much has changed since. In recent years, the Patras Bokhari Award has been awarded to Pakistan-resident poets such as Athar Tahir and Ejaz Rahim. Tahir’s award-winning collection, ‘The Last Tea’ is written entirely in haiku. Tahir is counted among the contemporary Pakistani English poets who are exploring and employing different poetic forms within a contemporary context. Both Adrian Hussein and US-based Anis Shivani have been experimenting with the sonnet form. Another US-based poet, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, who frequents Pakistan, writes ghazals and qasidas in English.  So, there is actually a lot going on. There are also collections about the Partition by Waqas Khwaja and Moniza Alvi.  Alvi and Dharker, the Lahore-born expatriate poets, are now major figures in mainstream British poetry; Dharker is the only poet of South Asian origin to have won the prestigious Queen’s Medal for poetry in Britain. “I think the limited public response to Pakistani English poetry could be rectified if more publishers were willing to publish and promote Pakistani English poetry. They don’t because there are not enough readers. So, it’s a vicious circle,” says Muneeza.

Pakistani English literature is considered to be a subdivision of Postcolonial literature. Like all other regional literature around the world, its primary goal was to represent local culture and indigenous stories. But things are not quite simple as globalisation has completely altered the relationship between the people of different nations and cultures. “I was highly sceptical about this idea of ‘pure local representation’ and my argument is that contemporary Pakistani English literature has crossed the national boundaries and barriers of identity and it doesn’t or can’t really represent purely indigenous aesthetics. There is a difference between literature and propaganda and I am not sure what the term ‘indigenous aesthetics’ implies or who defines such a category,” says Muneeza.
 

The issue of indigenous aesthetics, says Muneeza, takes the critical narrative back to the narrative around ‘a Pakistani idiom,’ which was very popular during the 1960s. “At that point of time, the discussions on the ‘idiom’ encouraged Pakistani English poets to express the experience of their homeland, instead of trying to emulate nineteenth-century British writers. But the problem was that this discourse on idiom excluded Pakistani writers who wrote of experiences other than ‘ethnic’ and so we ended up marginalizing Zulfikar Ghose, not to mention Pakistan-based writers whose work had a broader dimension,” says Muneeza.

In later years, of course, even Rafat, a leading figure in the discourse on ‘idiom,’ agreed that ‘indigenous aesthetics’ did have its limitations. “Everything has its time and place. I don’t think literature can be reduced to classifications such as ‘indigenous aesthetics’ or indeed those ‘crossing barriers of identity and nationality,’ which seems a rather uncertain phrase to me,” says Muneeza, who is optimistic about Pakistani writing in English diversifying into different literary genres and reaching a wider public in Pakistan through translations into Urdu and other local languages. 

(Aurangzeb Wattoo is a poet, columnist, critic and editor of The Prelude. He can be reached at aurangzeb.eng@iub.edu.pk)