And the World Changed Read online




  Published in 2008 by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016

  Collection copyright © 2008 by The Feminist Press

  Introduction, headnotes, and glossary copyright © 2008 by Muneeza Shamsie

  And the World Changed was first published in 2005 by Women Unlimited (an associate of Kali for Women).

  Page 382 constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  And the world changed: contemporary stories by Pakistani women / edited and with an introduction by Muneeza Shamsie.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55861-931-9

  1.Short stories, Pakistani (English) 2.Short stories, Pakistani (English)—Women authors.I. Shamsie, Muneeza.

  PR9540.8.A53 2008

  823’.010892870954910905—dc22

  2008009270

  Text and cover design by Lisa Force

  This publication was made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

  13 12 11 10 09 085 4 3 2 1

  EDITOR’S DEDICATION

  In loving mamory of my mother, Begum Jahanara Habibullah (1915-2003), who wrote her first book in her eighties and was 84 when it was published

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  Introduction

  Muneeza Shamsie

  1. Defend Yourself Against Me

  Bapsi Sidhwa

  2. Existing at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas

  Roshni Rustomji

  3. Mirage

  Talat Abbasi

  4. Jungle Jim

  Muneeza Shamsie

  5. A Fair Exchange

  Tahira Naqvi

  6. Daughters of AAI

  Fahmida Riaz

  7. Meeting the Sphinx

  Rukhsana Ahmad

  8. Rubies for a Dog: A Fable

  Shahrukh Husain

  9. Excellent Things in Women

  Sara Suleri Goodyear

  10. A Pair of Jeans

  Qaisra Shahraz

  11. Bloody Monday

  Fawzia Afzal Khan

  12. Kucha Miran Shah

  Feryal Ali Gauhar

  13. Impossible Shade of Home Brew

  Maniza Naqvi

  14. Staying

  Sorayya Khan

  15. Soot

  Sehba Sarwar

  16. Look, but with Love

  Uzma Aslam Khan

  17. The Price of Hubris

  Humera Afridi

  18. Runaway Truck Ramp

  Soniah Kamal

  19. The Optimist

  Bina Shah

  20. Surface of Glass

  Kamila Shamsie

  21. The Old Italian

  Bushra Rehman

  22. Variations: A Story in Voices

  Hima Raza

  23. Scar

  Aamina Ahmad

  24. And Then the World Changed

  Sabyn Javeri-Jillani

  25. Clay Fissures

  Nayyara Rahman

  Glossary of South Asian Words

  Acknowledgments and Permissions

  About the Author

  Also Available from Feminist Press

  About Feminist Press

  INTRODUCTION

  What you hold in your hands is the only anthology of creative texts written originally in English by Pakistani women, ever. This may come as a surprise, since from the creation of Pakistan in 1947, there has been a tradition of English writing by Pakistanis, and English has remained the language of government. The fanning out of migrants into the English-speaking diaspora, accompanied by the facility of travel and the growth of the electronic media, has provided an impetus to Pakistani English literature; it reaches a broad Anglophone audience but in Pakistan has a much smaller readership than indigenous languages and literatures, which are much more widely spoken and read.1 Thus, Pakistani women who employ English as a creative language live between the East and the West, literally or figuratively, and have had to struggle to be heard. They write from the extreme edges of both English and Pakistani literatures.

  Although many of the writers included here are well known, the goal of this pioneering anthology is to reveal how Pakistani women, writing in a global—albeit imperial—language, challenge stereotypes that patriarchal cultures in Pakistan and the diaspora have imposed on them, both as women and as writers. In selecting stories for this volume, I have tried to include as wide a spectrum of experiences and voices as possible. Also, I made a deliberate attempt to include new, young writers. I gave preference to short stories, but I included some extracts from longer works, provided they could stand on their own; in some instances these were given titles specifically for the purpose of this anthology, with the permission of the author. In the call for stories, I did not specify the subject matter because I did not want preconceived parameters to limit contributors. I wanted to discover what their texts might yield. I wanted literary merit to be the prime criterion. I think this has given the collection its diversity.

  Contemporary English writing by Pakistani women, which is the subject of this volume, began with Bapsi Sidhwa and the publication of her first novel, The Crow Eaters, in 19782; hers was also the first English novel by a resident Pakistani since Partition to receive international recognition, regardless of gender. However, the history of English-language fiction by Pakistani women, being a colonial legacy, must be looked at in the context of Indo-Anglian3 women’s writing in British India, which dates back to the late nineteenth century.

  In traditional society, whether Hindu or Muslim, men and women were segregated. Women observed the veil—parda—and lived in the women’s apartments—the zenana—within an extended family. Toru Dutt (1856–1877), who is widely regarded as the first Indo-Anglian woman writer, was a glaring exception. Her Anglicized wealthy Brahman family had converted to Christianity, and her literary uncles were famous for their creative writing in both English and their native Bengali. She was educated in France, traveled to England, wrote an acclaimed poetry collection, and was the author of the Indian English and Indian French novels, Bianca or The Spanish Maiden (1878) and L’Journal de Mademoiselle Anvers (1879), both written by the time she was 21 and published after her death at that age. Dutt’s English poetry, as well as the work of a privileged milieu of Anglicized Indian men, emulated the Romantic English poets who, in turn, had been influenced by the copious translations of classical Indian texts—Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic—by British scholars in India.

  In 1837, English replaced Persian, the language of the Mughal administration, as the language of government, but in the lower courts, Persian was replaced by vernacular languages. This led to a two-tiered educational system, English and vernacular, that persists in South Asia, perpetuating huge social schisms. English became the language of the Indian elite, a means of advancement and employment and of communication with the colonial rulers. Indian reformers such as the Bengali Brahman Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) also advocated English, believing it to be a window to new ideas, new technologies—and progress (Rahman 2002). Muslims, who identified more strongly with Persian—because it was the language of the Mughal court and thus a sym
bol of Muslim power in India—shunned English until the dynamic educationalist and reformer Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) galvanized public opinion among Muslims in favor of English. He inspired a social transformation, propagating reform among the Muslim elite who redefined their identity as modern Indian Muslims. His ideas were pivotal to the genesis and ethos of Pakistan (Jalal 2001).

  After the establishment of the British Raj, when Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1858, British hubris and power in India were at their height. Among Indians, nationalist sentiment grew, which the vernacular press disseminated widely, although by the late nineteenth century, English-speaking Indians played a pivotal role in conveying this nationalist, Indian point of view to the British. Thus English became the “link language” in the political debate between the representatives of India and the Raj. Meanwhile The Indian National Congress was established in 1885, and then the Muslim League in 1905, to voice the concerns of India’s Muslim minority (Jalal 2001) in a new, unfamiliar, social and political order. The complex relationship between these two political parties spiraled into bitter disagreements, sometimes fostered by the colonial power. In 1947, this led to the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim homeland. The founding fathers of both countries—Gandhi and Nehru in India, Jinnah and Liaquat in Pakistan—had been educated in British universities, used English as fluently as a first language, and pressed the demands of their electorates in the legislatures of British India.

  For much of the nineteenth century, the acquisition of English remained gender specific and education was largely restricted to vernacular languages for most Indian women. Reformist debates on women’s education “focused more on what and how much they should be taught, rather than whether they should be taught in English” (Mukherjee 2002). The gap between well-traveled Anglicized men and their cloistered mothers, wives, and sisters grew. Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), a poet, nationalist, and women’s rights activist, was the most celebrated Indo-Anglian woman writer of her generation. She belonged to a Hindu family closely associated with Hyderabad, a very large Muslim princely state that was the size of France. There, in 1881 her father set up one of the earliest schools for girls (Pernau 2002). Others followed suit. Instructors began to introduce English to their students, but among Muslims in particular, a secluded life in parda and private education, with or without the addition of some English, continued to be the norm for the well-born woman.

  At the same time, Urdu, which came to be regarded as the language of Muslim identity, had its own reform movement. The earliest Urdu women’s magazine dates back to 1886 and was a platform for early women writers. They included the conventeducated, Muslim intellectual Atiya Fyzee (1877–1967), who migrated to Pakistan in 1947. She wrote beautiful English in her timeless book on musicology, The Music of India (1914), but she published her articles and a travelogue in Urdu in order to reach Muslim women with her liberal, egalitarian ideas. The women in her family were among the first Muslims to discard parda (Karlitzky 2002).

  MUSLIM WOMEN WRITING ENGLISH FICTION

  During the early half of the twentieth century, fiction writing by Muslim women in English remained a rarity. Among the few exceptions was Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), who grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) where she received a traditional education in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, and with the support of her husband, taught herself English and Bengali—now the national language of modern Bangladesh. In 1905, she wrote her first and only story in English, the 12-page “Sultana’s Dream” (Hossain 1988, The Feminist Press): one of the most radical of early feminist writings.4 She went on to write in Bengali and attack the parda system and traditional attitudes toward women. She set up schools for girls, but continued to observe parda to allay Muslim parents’ great fear that education would encourage their daughters to discard the veil. Other Indian women writers of English fiction in the early twentieth century included India’s first woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), and her sister, Alice Sorabji Pennell (1870–1951), a doctor. Both were educated in England and belonged to an eminent Parsi family that had converted to Christianity.

  In 1921 women gained the right to be elected to the legislatures. Educated Muslim women began to discard parda and participate in political life. They included the Muslim League activists Jahanara Shahnawaz (1896–1979) and Inam Habibullah (1893–1974), my grandmother. Interestingly, my grandmother had a private education, learned English after her marriage, but used Urdu when she wrote a travelogue and children’s books. Shahnawaz, on the other hand, graduated from Queen Mary College, Lahore, and wrote an Urdu novel, but much later recorded her life and times in an English memoir, Father and Daughter (1963).

  The presence of mission schools for girls in British India, where “progressive” families began to send their daughters, spurred the use of English for Hindu and Muslim women alike, since these schools taught entirely in English. However many families remained more conservative and feared that if young women were exposed to alien religious and cultural influences at these institutions and were not secluded, sexual and social anarchy would follow.

  In her memoir, From Purdah to Parliament (1963), the bilingual writer Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah (1915–2000), a member of Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly and later, a diplomat, recalled the agitation in her family when her Anglicized father insisted she attend an English mission school, and her traditional mother, egged on by vocal relatives, opposed it bitterly. But a decision that caused such conflict in her home soon came to be the norm, Ikramullah notes:

  In 1927, my going to an English school was looked upon with much disfavor and yet by 1947 every girl of good family was going to school. What my father had said had come to pass and in another twenty years’ time women were taking part in processions, had been to gaol, were working in refugee camps, and were sitting in legislatures and participating in international delegations. It seems incredible, but it has happened. (1998, 32)

  In British India, English was the language of instruction in all universities. Ikramullah, Ismat Chughtai (1915–1991), and gynecologist Rashid Jahan (1905–1952), were among a small number of pioneering university-educated Muslim women of their time. Ikramullah, the first Muslim woman to earn her Ph.D. from London University, wrote Urdu fiction and English nonfiction5; Jahan and Chughtai, who became literary icons, channeled their extensive reading in English of British, European, and Russian literature into revolutionizing Urdu fiction.

  However, even with the growth of writing in English by Muslim women, a major problem persisted: the lack of readership. There was little encouragement to write as well. Since many Anglicized intellectuals in India looked to England’s classical literature to define the literary style of English-language writing, they had little patience with the stylistic difficulties that contemporary creative Indo-Anglian writers, regardless of gender, had to grapple with: how to find a modern voice in English that would transpose the authentic experience of the subcontinent without pandering to Western exotica. These Anglophiles disparaged Indo-Anglian poetry and fiction, propounding the belief that Indians should not write creatively in English because they “could not get it quite right.” Muslim women with a sufficient command of English, who were few in number, suffered this dismissal acutely. Furthermore, while the work of nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian writers had emulated that of British writers, by the 1930s, Indians were expected to use English creative writing as a nationalist vehicle that would “explain” India to the British colonizers. Thus, in vernacular fiction, a truthful portrayal of harsh realities was acceptable and praiseworthy—but in Indo-Anglian creative writing, such writing became a betrayal.

  In the pre-Partition years, the only English novel by a Muslim woman appears to have been the satirical Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Household (1944) by Iqbalunissa Hussain.6 She uses irony to comment on the power of the mother-in-law in an extended family and lampoons callous, self indulgent, and hypocritical men:

>   It is a well known fact that man is superior to woman in every respect. He is a representative of God on earth and being born with His light in him deserves the respect and obedience that he demands. He is not expected to show his gratitude or even a kind word of appreciation to a woman: it is his birthright to get everything from her: ‘Might is right’ is the policy of the world. (quoted in De Souza 2004, 508)

  Thanks to her supportive husband, the Mysore-born Hussain learned English and graduated from college in 1930, two years before her eldest son (507). She went on to work for the education and welfare of women.

  As the subcontinent moved toward independence, activists considered women’s emancipation an integral part of the freedom struggle. Jahanara Shahnawaz’s daughter, Mumtaz Shahnawaz (1912–1948), a Muslim League activist and a novelist, describes this very clearly in her only book, The Heart Divided (1959), which is probably the first South Asian English novel about Partition. She died in an air crash, leaving behind a first draft that was published unedited by her family. Despite many flaws and a narrative heavy with politics, reportage, and polemics, the book has great historical and sociological importance. The plot revolves around the love story of Habib, a young Muslim man in Lahore, and Mohini, a Hindu girl and a close friend of his sister, Zohra. Political divisions intensify the conflict of religion. At first, Zohra joins the Indian National Congress, while her sister Sughra is committed to the rival Muslim League. The two sisters attend the historic 1940 Muslim League meeting in Lahore:

  ‘Shall we sit behind the purdah?’ Zohra asked curiously.

  ‘Of course not,” said Sughra. ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Lots of women sat outside at the Patna session and two of them addressed the open session.’ (quoted in Shamsie 1997, 37)

  Through her characters, Shahnawaz debates independence, Partition, and the emancipation of women. She stops short of the Partition riots.

  Widespread Partition riots occurred in August 1947 and led to cataclysmic violence and one of the great mass migrations in history. No one knows exactly how many people were affected, but many estimate that there were around ten million refugees and one million dead. This trauma, which marked the retreat of the British Empire and the birth of an independent India and Pakistan, continues to haunt both countries. Since Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were both perpetrators and victims of the horrors of Partition, this has led to a collective guilt that South Asians find difficult to confront. In politics this guilt has taken the form of India and Pakistan blaming each other for the resultant conflict, violence, war, and suffering from the time of Partition to the present day, but in South Asian English literature it has largely materialized in a tendency to sidestep ghastly details, which is why, compared to the magnitude of the event, novels about the Partition massacres are relatively few (Shamsie 2001).