And the World Changed Read online

  In 1947, Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, the wife of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, called upon educated Pakistani women to help with relief work in the refugee camps: They came in great numbers despite virulent criticism and abuse from orthodox clerics who believed that women should stay at home. A one-time professor of economics, Khan motivated and galvanized educated women to focus on every aspect of women’s welfare, including female literacy. Her efforts spearheaded the women’s movement in Pakistan. But the emphasis on nation building in the newly created country meant that social activism was considered a more praiseworthy occupation for privileged, well-educated, English-speaking women than the reclusive act of writing fiction.

  In his informative book, A History of Pakistani Literature in English (1991), Tariq Rahman shows that by the 1950s writers in Pakistan began to agree with “the prescriptive dictum that their work must have an extra-literary purpose, namely to ‘serve the society’ . . . this propagandist and chauvinistic view of literature was one which gained official support later.” By then, all English creative writing by Pakistanis was disparaged as pointless, elitist, and a colonial hangover. The paradox was that Pakistan’s English-language press flourished, but it was run and staffed by men; women reporters and editors were not even considered.

  Author of a collection, The Young Wife and Other Stories (1958), Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah was the only woman writing English fiction of note during that era; her stories revolved around social pressures in the daily lives of women. Hamidullah (1918–2000) was also Pakistan’s first woman columnist. Beginning in 1948 she wrote for Dawn, Pakistan’s most important and influential English-language daily newspaper, but the day she commented on politics, she was hauled up by the editor and told she must not stray from “women’s issues,” in other words, domestic matters. She resigned and set up a magazine, The Mirror, a popular glossy that recorded social happenings. Few in Pakistan remember that she utilized it to write fearless political editorials, which led to a ban on the magazine in 1957. She challenged this ban in the Supreme Court and won (Niazi 1986), becoming the first Pakistani woman to win a legal victory for press freedom in the superior judiciary. In the late 1950s and 1960s magazines such as The Mirror, as well as Woman’s World and later, She, run by Mujib-un-Nissa Akram and Zuhra Karim, respectively, provided a platform for English-language writing by women.

  In 1958, Pakistan experienced martial law for the first time, under the rule of General Iskander Mirza, soon followed by General Ayub Khan. Dissent was ruthlessly crushed, and the press was censored. None of this was conducive to English-language writing, which had a handful of practitioners and a tiny audience, unlike vernacular literatures, which had a long literary tradition, replete with rich metaphorical poetry that could be recited orally or set to music for popular songs.

  Two events of great significance in Pakistan’s women’s movement marked Ayub Khan’s rule. Women activists persuaded Khan to defy the orthodox and promulgate the 1961 Family Laws Ordinance, with clauses that discouraged polygamy, regulated divorce procedures, and introduced a minimum marriageable age. Khan, who had little interest in fostering political freedom, established a quasi-democracy and held elections in 1964 to legitimize his rule. Fatima Jinnah, sister of the nation’s founder, stood up as his political opponent to widespread support and became the first woman in Pakistan to head a political party and compete for the position of the executive head of state. Ayub Khan won his election but was ousted from power in 1968.

  A brief spell of democracy preceded another period of martial law. There were two wars with India. The refusal of the military and some West Pakistani politicians to accept the election results of 1970 led to brutal civil war in 1971 and the loss of a large portion of the country—East Pakistan—which declared its independence as Bangladesh. In December 1971, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto assumed power in a truncated Pakistan where he held the majority vote. In 1977 General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto, and tried and executed him. Zia-ul-Haq ushered in a new era with religious extremists as his allies, ruthlessly pushing aside the liberal, modernizing precepts of the nation’s founders.

  As part of his campaign to “Islamize” society, Zia ul-Haq introduced the 1979 Hudood Ordinance, which did not differentiate between rape and adultery. He also passed new blasphemy laws. Both the Ordinance and the blasphemy laws victimized the weakest and most vulnerable—women and minorities. All this, together with blatant miscarriages of justice, provoked educated, professional women in Pakistan, particularly lawyers, welfare workers, and journalists. They formed the legendary Women’s Action Forum and came out into the streets to protest. Pakistan’s English-language press provided them with strong backing, and some of Pakistan’s finest women journalists emerged during this decade. Still, it took three decades to pass a watered-down Women’s Protection Bill in 2006, which was full of compromises for fear of alienating Pakistan’s right-wing lobby and clerics (who were defeated in the 2008 polls).

  Despite political restrictions, in the 1980s a university education became the norm for many young women from professional families in Pakistan, and a number of careers opened to them, including ones in the civil service. At the same time, in Pakistan’s low-income groups, education remained—and still remains—a privilege, not a right, regardless of gender, but boys were and are far more likely to be sent to school than girls, although schools for girls have grown and expanded, particularly in urban areas. The disadvantages of the tiered educational system, inherited from colonial times—one in English, the other in Urdu, and a third in provincial languages—created schisms in society that have been continuously and fiercely debated since 1947, but Zia-ul-Haq’s attempt to do away with English as the medium of instruction met with great resistance. Instead, the demand for English grew: It became the language of global power, global knowledge, and the new electronic media.

  In 1988 Zia-ul-Haq died in a mysterious air crash, ushering in an era of civilian rule. In 1989, Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) was elected Prime Minister and became the first Muslim woman to hold that office anywhere in the world. Bhutto campaigned while pregnant with her first child. When her second child was delivered, she became the first elected leader of a modern nation to give birth while in office. Her assertion of womanhood while serving as the executive head of state in a conservative patriarchal country was an important milestone for women everywhere. Bhutto used English to great advantage in her writings, and her posthumously published book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and The West (2008), has received much critical praise.

  Today an increasing number of upper- and middle-class families in Pakistan have allowed their daughters to receive the same educational opportunities as their sons. Several women have graduated from prestigious international universities and a large number of careers are now open to them. At the same time Pakistanis from the most impoverished regions have had close contacts with relatives in the diaspora. The dynamics of this interchange have profoundly influenced Pakistan and Pakistani migrants in the West, rich or poor—a theme that emerges quite clearly in Pakistani English literature.

  Meanwhile in the West, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the anti-Vietnam protests, the civil rights movements in the United States, the student revolution in Europe, and the feminist revolution impacted English literature, as did the presence of increasingly assertive migrant communities. Soon it was apparent that some of the most important new English writing was coming from Britain’s erstwhile colonies where women’s writing forged new narratives that challenged both imperial and patriarchal myths.

  The beginning of this century has seen women firmly assert themselves in Pakistan as leading English-language editors, journalists, and publishers. In turn, publishers have begun to actively seek out new writers of Pakistani English fiction and poetry, many of them women, almost all of whom are represented in this anthology.

  AND THE WORLD CHANGED: THE AUTHORS

  This anthology developed as a consequence of two previous ones that I put together
. The first, A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English (Oxford University Press, 1997), a collection of poetry, fiction, and drama, was a retrospective commissioned to celebrate Pakistan’s fiftieth anniversary. This volume was the first to bring together English-language writers living in Pakistan and in the diaspora. It also raised issues of identity: Did diaspora writers of Pakistani origin “qualify” as Pakistani? My answer was, unequivocally, yes. To explore this further, I put together a second collection of fiction and nonfiction, Leaving Home: Toward a New Millenium: A Collection of English Prose by Pakistani Writers (Oxford University Press, 2001), which looked at issues of home, homeland, and belonging through Pakistan’s diverse experiences of migration.

  An anthology on English-language writing by Pakistani women seemed the next logical step, but only emerged after my chance meeting with the Indian publisher Ritu Menon at a 2004 Sustainable Development Conference in Islamabad. She suggested the book. A year later, at the next Islamabad conference, I handed her the completed typescript on disk. I was delighted at the warmth with which the people in India received the collection, and to find that, subsequently, in Pakistan, Oxford University Press reprinted the same version twice. At the request of The Feminist Press I have altered the original compilation to replace most of the novel extracts with short stories from the same authors. In this version, I have also included the work of the young Pakistani American writer, Bushra Rehman. New headnotes for the American edition introduce the authors and the texts, and in some instances, I have quoted the insightful comments that the authors provided me in my correspondence with them.

  All the women included in this volume have been educated in English, which remains the language of instruction in universities and the best secondary schools in Pakistan. Many of the writers went to the mission schools and colleges that were established in colonial times, although other prestigious private schools teaching in English have also emerged. These institutions are the training grounds for resident Pakistani English writers. Some of these writers belong to families where English is spoken at home as a dominant language. While there is comparatively little working-class literature in English from Pakistan, or indeed any South Asian country, migration to the English-speaking diaspora has introduced that dimension. In these countries Pakistani/South Asian migrants do not belong to the mainstream, regardless of income, education, or class. Their voice and that of women migrants in particular belongs to a minority struggling to be heard. Among the writers included here, there is another category: those women who have attended a variety of English schools in different countries because of relocations due to their parents’ professional assignments.

  In this anthology, the authors have been arranged in chronological order based on their birth years to reveal the development of women’s writing in English across two generations and also to create a sense of historicity. Their stories reflect similarities and contrasts between avoidance of and engagement with a changing world.

  The decision to include creative work written in English—and not to include translations—highlights a language acquired by Pakistanis as the result of the East-West encounter. By including only these English-language texts, this collection is set apart from other Pakistani literatures. Almost all the writers included here live, or have lived and been educated, in Pakistan as well as a country in the West. Their choice of English as a creative vehicle has highlighted this duality, and their work is often multilayered. In most instances no clear signals emerge from the texts to indicate which authors are residents of Pakistan. Sometimes, the writers who live in Pakistan explore themes of migration to the West; often the writers who have left Pakistan set their stories in their homeland. Both groups present stories of reclamation, a charting of territory across two worlds. All their work is united by their sensibilities as women of Pakistani origin writing in English.

  After I had assembled this collection based on my interest in literary quality, I wanted to explore whether there were any links among the works that I accepted for the volume. What relationship did so many well-traveled women have with Pakistan? How did the acquisition of English as a creative vehicle influence their responses? The recurrent theme of quest, in many different guises, emerged very strongly as a recurring thread in many of the contributions. I found that a number of the themes in the stories, and several of the authors, had crossed paths at one point or another.

  Opening the anthology is a moving story about the Partition riots, suffering, and forgiveness, “Defend Yourself Against Me,” by famed novelist Bapsi Sidhwa. In 1947, Sidhwa, who is Parsi, was a child but she has retained memories of the fires and the violence in Lahore where she lived; in her writing, Sidhwa gives equal space to communal violence on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border without sentimentality. In “Defend Yourself,” which is set in Houston, the Pakistani-Christian female narrator encounters an old childhood friend, who is Muslim, from Lahore. The other characters are Hindu and Sikh, and the story thereby represents the three main groups who savaged each other during Partition. The plot folds back into the past to reveal a great horror, drawing particular attention to the silence of women as victims of war and conflict.

  Following Sidhwa is the Karachi-born Roshni Rustomji, who also belongs to the Parsi community. In her memoir “Existing at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas,” Rustomji observes Partition as Hindu friends leave and Muslims from India enter her childhood city. Her narrative of adaptation in a world rife with prejudice and conflict stretches across several countries and six decades from Partition in August 1947 to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007. Throughout she retains a sense of herself as a woman who will never belong to the mainstream but who regards every country in which she has lived as her homeland—her desh—and identifies with its suffering.

  There is a direct link between the sensibilities of women writers in Pakistan and the stories they have written about Pakistan’s minorities, such as Christians, Hindus, and Parsis, because both they and their subjects belong to marginalized groups whose rights can be easily eroded. Representing another minority experience is Sorayya Khan’s story, “Staying,” about a Hindu businessman who chooses to remain in Lahore, despite the Partition riots. Khan looks at the importance of August 1947 by moving beyond the political rhetoric that has defined India and Pakistan to portray events as they must have appeared at the time. The story also comments on the claim of geography—rather than religion, politics, or ideology—and highlights the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and the burning desire of the latter to occupy the space vacated by the former.

  These are among the themes that I have also explored in my story, “Jungle Jim,” set shortly after Partition in a former princely state in India. “Jungle Jim” tells of empire, colonialism, prejudice, and division, and links up three events, which radically changed social structures—the two World Wars and Partition. The story also looks at the huge gap that developed in colonial times between Indian men’s Anglicized lives and the cloistered worlds that women continued to occupy.

  Later in the anthology, stories by Sabyn Javeri-Jillani and Sehba Sarwar explore the repercussions of the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan. In “And Then the World Changed,” Javeri-Jillani encapsulates the relatively carefree mood of a multicultural neighborhood in post-Partition Karachi. The 1965 war with India alters that ambience and divides the community, laying the ground for the urban warfare of later decades, while “Soot,” by Sarwar, moves beyond the wars and hostilities that have so bitterly divided India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh for sixty years, and shows the Pakistani narrator’s growing interest in learning more about India and Bangladesh and her concern with the deep poverty that all three nations share.

  The permeability of languages, countries, and culture runs through the work of several writers represented in this volume. While living in England the expatriate Rukhsana Ahmad was so disturbed by events in Pakistan during the period of
martial law under Zia-ul-Haq that she began to write articles protesting conditions in Pakistan for The Asian Post in London, thereby launching her writing career. Her story, “Meeting the Sphinx,” questions the certainties of history, words, and narrative in British academia through the relationship between a white, distinguished Egyptologist and a feminist of Asian origin who challenges his assumptions.

  Ahmad also published We Sinful Women (1991) a collection of Urdu feminist protest poetry that she translated in English to great acclaim. The volume included the work of Fahmida Riaz, who had authored Pakistan’s first book of feminist poetry in 1973, thereby opening a new dimension for women writers. Though Riaz only occasionally writes in English, she wrote “Daughters of Aai” specifically for this volume: It is a haunting tale of innocence, sexual abuse, and the resourcefulness of women in a Pakistani village. She shows that in Pakistan’s peasant cultures, women perform hard labor and do not observe parda or the veil, unlike “respectable,” wealthy, or urban women.

  Tahira Naqvi, who lives in the United States, writes English fiction and, like Ahmad, has also translated Urdu feminist writing, particularly the fiction of Ismat Chughtai, the pioneering and uncompromising pre-Partition writer. Naqvi’s translation of Chughtai’s 1940 novel Tehri Lakeer—later translated into English and published by Women Unlimited in India and The Feminist Press in the United States under the title The Crooked Line (2007)—includes an introduction in which Naqvi draws parallels between Chughtai’s fearless portrayal of female sexuality and Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering work, The Second Sex (1949). The influences of Chughtai and the other Urdu women writers that Naqvi has translated have seeped into Naqvi’s English writing. Her story, “A Fair Exchange,” explores with great subtlety the complex psychological and sexual compulsions that impel a well-educated woman in a traditional but professional family to misinterpret her dreams and resort to superstition. Naqvi’s use of suggestion to express repressed, unidentified, and chaotic emotions strongly echoes themes in Urdu women’s fiction.