And the World Changed Read online

  Myths and stories are immensely important to gender roles. In the West, the feminist revolution led to the excavation of matriarchal narratives and legends portraying women. In Britain, Shahrukh Husain culled lore about women from the world over for a series of books for adults. In this volume, her story, “Rubies for a Dog,” which belongs to an Islamic tradition, revolves around a Wazir’s daughter who embarks on a long and dangerous quest across distant lands to avenge her father’s honor. Husain says:

  Fairy tales from the Islamic world are often stories of a quest which entail extraordinary courage, and often also include strong elements of wit and wisdom. The wazir’s daughter . . . represents redemption or delivery in one way or another. . . . The fairy stories which form such an important part of the heritage of India and Pakistan were shared with Iran and Afghanistan and may include paris, jinns . . . or they might simply be about human, though extraordinary, journeys. (Shamsie 2005, xvi)

  “Rubies for a Dog” is another example of the crisscrossing of linguistic, geographical, and cultural boundaries that were intrinsic to Islamic culture and are a part of modern Pakistani life.

  Interestingly, among the stories submitted for this anthology, only two revolved around arranged marriages, “The Optimist” by Bina Shah, and “A Pair of Jeans” by Qaisra Shahraz. I decided to include both because they complement each other and describe the crisis of immigrant Asian young women who, at the insistence of their parents, assent to this time-honored custom. The stories clearly reveal the conflict between first- and second-generation migrants and the desire of the older generation to cling to age-old traditions in an alien land. In “The Optimist” Bina Shah employs two different narrators, a Pakistani young man and his Pakistani British bride. He decides to marry her because he falls in love with her photograph, without any perception of her as an individual, or her world and her aspirations; she has accepted the marriage, reluctantly, under great moral blackmail.

  In “A Pair of Jeans” expatriate Qaisra Shahraz describes a daughter of Pakistani parents in Yorkshire, who, dressed in jeans, runs into her future in-laws: They have seen her only at social occasions in Pakistani dress. To them her boots and jeans symbolize all that is Western and decadent. Both stories reveal how the system of traditional arranged marriages has evolved and developed huge fissures under the pressures of modernity.

  In marked contrast “Runaway Truck Ramp” by Soniah Kamal takes a critical look at American notions of freedom and free choice through the love story of a white American woman and a Pakistani man in the United States. Both are aspiring writers but are so conscious of belonging to different cultures that they cannot look beyond confused notions of sexual mores.

  Kamal’s story has a very different rhythm to the contemplation of cultural duality and exclusion in “Variations: A Story in Voices” by Hima Raza (1975–2003). She combines poetry and prose to portray the solitude of a woman who reflects upon her thwarted relationships and that of friends and family, across generations, cities, cultures, and countries.

  Different cultures coexist with greater ease in Meatless Days (1989), a creative memoir by Sara Suleri Goodyear, who teaches at Yale University. She provides a lively insight into her dual inheritance as the daughter of a Pakistani father and a Welsh-born mother and knits together the public and the personal, past and present, across Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. Her first chapter from Meatless Days, “Excellent Things in Women,” reprinted here, revolves around the personality of Dadi, her paternal grandmother, but the kernel embedded within is the quiet presence of Suleri Goodyear’s mother and the spaces she negotiates. The whole is interwoven with small, telling glimpses of family life, particularly Suleri Goodyear’s relationships with her sisters Tillat and Iffat, who act as both foil and echo to her own personality. The unity of sisterhood across the patriarchal structures of family, nation, race, and creed is a familiar theme in women’s writing worldwide.

  Another U.S.-based academic of Pakistani origin, Fawzia Afzal Khan uses creative prose interspersed with poetry to universalize her experiences in the memoir, “Bloody Monday,” which contrasts the intense passions and fervor of a Muharram procession in Lahore and a bull-run in Spain with daily domestic life in the United States, but suggests a multitude of subtexts on gender and myth. Her use of poetry and prose creates a multiplicity of images that reflects her desire to cross boundaries and break down barriers.

  Maniza Naqvi’s story, “Impossible Shade of Home Brew,” is an assertion of diversity as unity. The rich multicultural fabric of Lahore, its street life, old traditional buildings, and colonial monuments provide a vivid contrast with touristy Epheseus in modern Turkey. In both these cities, however, the intermingling of East-West narratives, literature and lore, and the theme of “twins” and duality becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s subversion of gender definitions and gender roles.

  Talat Abbasi has written many intense, feminist stories set in Pakistan, which have been extensively anthologized and used as texts in the United States. Her poignant and haunting tale of a mother and her handicapped child, “Mirage,” reprinted here, won first prize in a BBC short story competition and explores with great honesty a dimension of pain that is seldom discussed.

  In the last decade, Pakistan has been strongly affected by political events in neighboring Muslim lands, including the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the politicization of religion, exacerbated by Western rhetoric of Crusades, and the clash of civilizations. Humera Afridi’s story, “The Price of Hubris,” set in New York on 9/11, and Bushra Rehman’s, “The Old Italian,” which takes place in Queens, New York, in a working-class, diverse immigrant neighborhood, both touch on ideas of religion, identity, and otherness.

  With great clarity, another contributor, Feryal Ali Gauhar, brings to light the disadvantaged lives of the poor in Pakistan, due to powerlessness and an inequitable legal and social system in her poignant story, “Kucha Miran Shah.” She portrays the ancient tribal custom of killing of women in the name of honor, a victimization sanctioned by a village jirga—an informal gathering of village elders (men) who mete out a rough-and-ready punishment—and which exists in rural areas as a parallel system to the laws of the state and its courts of law. Aamina Ahmad further explores the diminished rights of the poor in “Scar,” where a young maidservant is falsely accused of theft and has no recourse to justice.

  The works of major novelists such as Sidhwa, Suleri Goodyear, and Kamila Shamsie have created important landmarks in Pakistani English literature, regardless of gender. Sidhwa, who wrote her first two novels in virtual isolation in Pakistan because she had no other contemporary English-language writers there, made an enormous breakthrough with the international recognition her novels have received. Suleri Goodyear’s creative memoir, which employed the techniques of a novel and divided chapters according to metaphor, was another milestone, as was the quality of her prose. The thirty-five-year-old Kamila Shamsie has published four critically acclaimed novels of remarkable diversity, breadth, and vision so far; her fifth novel will be published in 2009. Her story, “Surface of Glass,” though an early work, makes an incisive comment on Pakistan’s stratified class system and the circumscribed life of a servant woman, who believes her enemy, the cook, has put a curse on her.

  Kamila Shamsie speaks for many aspiring young writers in Pakistan when she says that she had great difficulty as a child placing Pakistan within a literary context because at school in Karachi, she had no exposure to English literature beyond that of the United States and England. This changed when she read Suleri Goodyear and then Sidhwa as a teenager, but she had to go all the way to college in the United States to discover the wider world of English writing—and her own voice.

  The critical acclaim that Shamsie and another young writer included here, Uzma Aslam Khan, have received, has generated tremendous interest in the possibilities of a literary career among a younger generation. An increasing number of young, published writers have given readings in schoo
ls and colleges, and have conducted creative-writing workshops, which were rare in Pakistan until recently. Aslam Khan, who grew up in Karachi during the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, vividly captures a sense of the city’s festering violence in her story “Look, but with Love,” which simmers quietly with an undercurrent of desperation and ethnic tension. Her work also comments on gender roles in Pakistan.

  In 2004, the British Council in Pakistan held a nationwide competition for students as part of the “I Belong International Story Chain” project, to select five writers for a creative workshop in Karachi, conducted by Kamila Shamsie. Nayyara Rahman’s story, “Clay Fissures,” was one of the winners. Though a student work, it has been included for its originality, its promise, and its vision of the future.

  Reflecting on the texts included in this anthology, I have become particularly fascinated by how one story touches upon or fleshes out ideas in another, creating a flow, a unifying cycle that reveals many dimensions of Pakistani life through the perspective of women.

  I have found that Sidhwa’s description of the Partition riots in her story, “Defend Yourself Against Me,” is reflected in Sorayya Khan’s Partition story, “Staying,” and in Rustomji’s memoir account, “Watching from the Edges,” which links Partition to the divisions and suffering she has seen across the world. In Uzma Khan’s story, “Look, but with Love,” the painting of a voluptuous woman in an all-male subculture has obvious associations with male myths about prostitution and red-light districts, which Feryal Ali Gauhar attacks in her story. The sexual exploitation of women implicit in Ali Gauhar’s narrative becomes explicit in Fahmida Riaz’s “Daughter of Aai,” while the recourse to magic and superstition in a village finds an echo in very different stories by Kamila Shamsie and Tahira Naqvi. Kamila Shamsie’s and Tahira Naqvi’s portrayals of a maidservant and a middle-class woman, respectively, revolve around a crisis of self, as does Humera Afridi’s “The Price of Hubris.” My story of a postwar migration to Britain and the intermarriage between an Indian and an Englishwoman in British India provides a contrast with the cultural commingling in Sara Suleri Goodyear’s “Excellent Things in Women,” about her Welsh-born mother and Pakistani grandmother, which also contains the composite history of Pakistan within it. The interpretation of history is central to Rukhsana Ahmad’s story, “Meeting the Sphinx,” set in multicultural Britain, while Fawzia Afzal Khan’s “Bloody Monday” gathers up popular culture and religious ritual across three continents to make a comment on gender and sexuality. Maniza Naqvi takes this a step further in “Impossible Shade of Home Brew” to question gender definitions altogether, and also explores parenthood and loss, themes which are equally central to Talat Abbasi’s “Mirage.” Prejudice and division of culture and gender run through two stories that describe the Pakistani experience of “America”: Bushra Rehman’s “The Old Italian” and Soniah Kamal’s “Runaway Truck Ramp.” On the other hand, “A Pair of Jeans” by Qaisra Shah and “The Optimist” by Bina Shah describe cultural misunderstandings between people ostensibly from the same community. Hima Raza’s “A Variation in Voices” describes bridges that cannot be crossed, and the poignant “Scar” by Aamina Ahmad centers on the impermeability of class barriers. The stories of Sehba Sarwar, Sabyn Javeri-Jillani, and Nayyara Rahman reflect a younger generation’s desire to think back on historical divisions, nationhood, and identity. I included Shahrukh Husain’s mythical “Rubies for a Dog,” about a daughter’s determination to prove herself equal to a son, for its transcendent symbolism. The amassed texts also reveal two sets of mothers and daughters: Rukhsana Ahmad and Aamina Ahmad in Britain; myself and Kamila Shamsie in Pakistan.

  This anthology testifies, with its variety of voices, that Pakistani women writing in English have come a long way since their pre-Partition ancestors. Today Pakistani women write creatively in English because that is the language in which they wish to express themselves; theirs is a literary tradition that has been long in gestation and is finally coming into its own. They no longer work in virtual isolation. They draw on the traditions of other English literatures as well as the vernacular languages of Pakistan. They are a part of the new world literature in English that gives voice to experiences beyond the traditional canons of Anglo-American literature. In this anthology their stories describe a myriad of experiences to reveal the richness, complexity, and multiculturalism of Pakistani life—and the wider world with which it is so inextricably linked.

  Muneeza Shamsie

  Karachi

  March 2008

  NOTES

  1. The official languages of Pakistan today are Urdu and English, but provincial languages, such as Balochi/Brahvi, Pashto, Punjabi, and Sindhi, are also important. There is also a host of minor languages.

  2. The Crow Eaters was self published in 1978 and then was published by the British publishing house, Jonathan Cape, in 1980.

  3. The English-language writing by South Asians has been known as Indo-Anglian, Indian English, or South Asian English. I am using the older term “Indo-Anglian” to describe pre-Partition work and thus distinguish it from the modern, post-Partition term, “Indian English,” which excludes Pakistani English literature, whereas South Asian English is the collective term for the work produced in the independent countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.

  4. In “Sultana’s Dream,” Hossain reverses gender roles in a futuristic country, Ladyland, which is ruled by women. Her spare, terse prose was years ahead of its time, as was her description of a world where people can harness energy, travel by air, and use solar missiles.

  5. Ikramullah’s groundbreaking doctoral thesis on Urdu fiction was written in a modern English and published as A Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story (1945); One of its most remarkable features is the sensibility that Ikramullah brings to her critical assessments, as a woman. She also devotes a chapter each to women novelists and women short story writers, including Rashid Jahan.

  6. Iqbalunissa Hussain’s birth and death dates are unknown.

  WORKS CITED

  De Souza, Eunice, ed. 2004. Purdah. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

  Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. 1988. “Sultana’s Dream” and Selections from The Secluded Ones, edited and translated by Roushan Jahan. New York: The Feminist Press.

  Ikramullah, Shaista Suhrawardy. 1998. From Purdah to Parliament. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

  Jalal, Ayesha. 2001. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel.

  Karlitzky, Maren. 2002. “The Tyabji Clan—Urdu as a Symbol of Group Identity.” Annual of Urdu Studies 17: 187–207.

  Mukherjee, Meenakshi. 2002. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

  Niazi, Zamir. 1986. The Press in Chains. Karachi: The Royal Book Company.

  Pernau, Margrit. 2002. “Female Voices: Women Writers in Hyderabad at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” Annual of Urdu Studies 17: 36–54.

  Rahman, Tariq. 1991. A History of Pakistani Literature in English. Lahore: Vanguard.

  ———. 2002. Language, Ideology and Power. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

  Shamsie, Muneeza, ed. 1997. A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

  ———. 2001. “At the Stroke of Midnight.” Dawn Books and Authors Supplement. Karachi, April 14.

  ———. 2005. Introduction. And the World Changed. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.

  DEFEND YOURSELF AGAINST ME

  Bapsi Sidhwa

  Bapsi Sidhwa (1938– ) is the author of five novels, which have been translated into many languages. She was born in Karachi and brought up in Lahore. Stricken with polio at a young age, she was educated at home until she was 15. She later graduated from Kinnaird College, Lahore. She married at 19, did social work, and represented Pakistan at the 1974 Asian Women’s Congress. Sidhwa also served on the Advisory C
ommittee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Women’s Development from 1994 to 1996. She has taught in the United States at Columbia University, the University of Houston, Mount Holyoke College, and Brandeis University; and in England at the University of Southampton. She moved to the United States in the 1980s and lives in Houston. She is the 2008 winner of Sony Asia TV’s South Asian Excellence Award for Literature.

  Sidhwa’s first novel, The Crow Eaters (self published, 1978; Jonathan Cape, 1980), pioneered contemporary English fiction by Pakistani women. It was also the first major novel about the Parsi community, the ancient but small religious minority of Zoroastrians to which Sidhwa belongs. The novel’s ribaldry was also rare for South Asian English fiction. Sidhwa went on to write The Bride (Jonathan Cape, 1983); Ice Candy Man (Heinemann, 1988; later published as Cracking India, Milkweed, 1991), which was made into a film Earth by Canadian director Deepa Mehta; An American Brat (Milkweed, 1993), which was performed in 2008 as a stage play in Houston; and Water (Penguin Books India, 2006), which was adapted from Deepa Mehta’s screenplay of that name. Sidhwa has also edited an anthology, City of Sin and Splendor: Writings on Lahore (Penguin Books India, 2006). Among the many honors she has received are the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award in the United States, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in Pakistan, and recently, the Italian Premio Mondello award for Water.