Granta 112: Pakistan - or does Pakistan have a literary scene?

Voices from Pakistan

Reading the Granta Publication on Pakistan - a collection of fiction and non-fiction works by Pakistani writers - I was reminded of an event on Pakistani literature I attended a couple of years ago. It was a talk at the Asia Society in London with three new rising literary stars from Pakistan: Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie and Daniyal Mueenuddin.

At one point, the moderator commented on the recent rise of the Pakistani literary scene. The garrulous Ms Shamsie pounced excitedly on the subject stating how and why it was Pakistani-English writers' time in the sun. After she had gabbed on for a while, Mueenuddin, who had been remarkably taciturn throughout the evening, suddenly quipped that to say Pakistan had a literary "scene" was an exaggeration. If it existed, he certainly hadn't come across it. The room erupted into embarrassed titters and Ms Shamsie looked decidedly put-out.

After reading the Granta collection, I am inclined to agree with Mueenuddin.

The first sign of a lack of a vibrant literary scene is that all the three above-mentioned rising stars appear again in the collection. Obviously, the editor of the collection wasn't exactly spoilt for choice.

But more curious is the strange uniformity of voice that emerges from the collection. Barring two pieces - Leila in the Wilderness by the British-Pakistani Nadeem Aslam and Butt and Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif - the rest seem so stridently liberal. Don't get me wrong. I have no sympathy for fundamentalists. But how can all the writing arising out of a country so steeply diving towards fundamentalism sound so confidently, one-sidedly liberal?

Of course, the writers acknowledge that Pakistan is the gripped by a violent Islamization movement. But they can clearly see whose fault it is: Zia, America, Jinnah, military and ISI. And they can clearly see who all are affected by it: everyone. But how have the writers remained untouched by the phenomenon? Are they untouched by it? It is the absence of the voices from the middle that strikes me as strange.

Could the uniformity of voices be a result of the rather similar background of all the writers? Either, they moved to Britain or the US early on in life (Nadeem Aslam, Sarfraz Mansoor) or they all seem to belong to the incredibly privileged Pakistani elite. Ms Shamsie writes of visiting her cousins in London every summer and Aamer Hussein of spending childhood summers at Hyde Park. Daniyal Mueenuddin's family still owns huge farmlands in Pakistan. And Fatima Bhutto, well we all know where she stands in the Pakistani social hierarchy. Almost all of them have had long exposure to Western universities and cultures.

How representative are they of the culture they write about? Moreover, do the writers in such a collection need to come from diverse backgrounds?

Either way, writers with very similar backgrounds and attitudes becoming representative of the country's literature reek more of a clique than a literary scene. Of course, if you are inside the clique, it often appears like a scene to you, which may explain Ms Shamsie's enthusiasm.

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Here's an interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin in which is comments on how most of his peers do not have access to rural Pakistan, where his own stories are set. Perhaps, that is why he holds different views on the existence/non-existence of a Pakistani literary scene.

The Orientalism Paradox: Or do everything I write, I write to prove the British as bastards?

How about we settle for mutual critcism

Andrew is writing a book about British travel accounts of Egypt in the nineteenth century. I am reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is all about how prejudiced, supercilious and ill-advised such seemingly-innocuous nineteenth century British accounts of the East were. Together, that should have made for a rather volatile session over coffee last week.

But we are civilized people so we didn’t explode. We just grimaced.

Now, here’s why I love and hate Syed at the same time.

Said's argument is not simply that the West criticises the East based on prejudice, poor information, and with the intention to dominate. His argument is that all criticism of the East by the West will always be based on prejudice, poor information and the intention to dominate because it already arises from the position of the dominant. If you are already the stronger one, you will want to maintain that position – and hence, everything you say will be to that end, and hence suspect.

Conclusion: Until the West is a dominant force around the world, it has no business criticising the East. Thus, the Middle East, India and China are free to behave the way they want. Voila!

For a wonderful account of how this frees us Indians of any responsibility, read Girish Shahane’s latest column on Yahoo.

Unfortunately, as much as I love Syed, he has created a peculiar problem for me.

If I believe Syed’s argument that everything lies in positioning, then don’t I come to Britain from a position of victimhood, that of poor little Ms once-colonised-Indian-me. And can a victim ever be objective about the oppressor? And if not, wouldn’t all my criticisms of Britain always be based on prejudice, poor information, and the intention to prove the British as absolute bastards? And thus, automatically invalid?

Only, I’d like to keep my right to criticise Britain – its horrible food, labyrinthine bureaucracy, piss-all weather and an obsession with peculiar creatures like Katie Price – and be taken seriously.

So Syed will have to retire to the back end of my book shelf. I'll reserve my right to criticise anything and everything about Britain. And Andrew can write all the travelogues he wants about Egypt.

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From the horse's mouth himself:

Ms Rich visits India: Or why we Indians are not achieving spiritual nirvana

There are principally three things that people in the West associate with India. First, of course, is its poverty. There is no running away from that. Second is Indian cuisine, or curry food as it is popularly called here. For all its accomplishments, it is lamb curry and paneer tikka that our great civilisation will be forever remembered for. The third, peculiarly, is spirituality.

I was reminded of the third today when I came across the book Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich, an American journalist. According to its reviews, the book is about how – overwhelmed by her fight with cancer, loss of job, and having her Manolo Blahniks chewed by her cat – Ms Rich decides to move to India in order to master Hindi. What follows is, quite naturally, her spiritual self-discovery in Udaipur (with some divergences into the science behind learning a whole new language). The book has just arrived in England, even though it was launched in America last year, where it quickly (and dare I say, predictably) made it to Oprah’s list of summer reads. And if Eat, Pray, Love is anything to go by, there will be a film to follow in a couple of years.

Ms Rich is not alone. I’ve met several people over the last couple of years for whom India represents some kind of mysterious spiritual awakening waiting to happen. The notion is further aided and abetted by a whole Eastern spiritual industry comprising massage parlours, yoga classes, meditation centres, healing foods, and of course, books about spiritual journeys to India.

I once asked one such spiritually-minded Canadian, what exactly he meant by wanting to visit India to experience its spirituality, in what way did he think that Indians were more spiritual than the rest of the world. What I gathered from his incoherent mumble was Indians are “non-materialistic unlike the west”.

Now, let me get one thing clear. It is rather difficult to be materialistic when there isn’t much “material” to go around. Just because a lot of poor people make do with whatever they can, doesn’t mean that given the opportunity – that is money and access to shiny goods – they won’t give in to material pleasures. They will, and they are in increasingly larger numbers, if my last trip to Inorbit Shopping Mall in Mumbai was anything to go by. I don’t think my Canadian friend would have found much spirituality-in-action there.

Sometimes I wonder if celebrating India’s supposed spirituality is West’s way of dealing with its poverty. Because they can’t understand how people can continue to live, work and thrive in such deprived conditions, they make themselves believe that Indians must have some kind of super-human spiritual armour to keep them going. Indians don’t have money because they simply don’t care for it – they are too busy enjoying spiritual nirvana.

Now I lived for twenty-three years in India, but let me assure you, I wasn’t enjoying any spiritual nirvana. Nor could a single person out of my extensive network of friends and family be strictly described as spiritual. Yes, they pray to God quite diligently, but mostly it is a tit-for-tat arrangement: I’ll pray, and you nust get me that seat in an engineering college/job/pay packet/car and whatever else is the latest at Inorbit Shopping Mall. That is not spiritual, non-materialistic, meditative or other-worldly in my dictionary of self-attainment.

But still women like Ms Rich arrive in India and promptly achieve enough self-fulfilment to write books on it. Perhaps, we Indians are just not trying hard enough!

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Here is a trailor to my favourite spiritual journey through India, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited.

In Colchester - Or my hunt for Blyton's England

Retina fatigue waiting for you in Colchester

Sid & I discovered the ugliest garden of England in Colchester a couple of weekends ago. I mean, sure, purple, yellow, blood red, pink, and white are lovely colours individually. But together in close vicinity – under the sharp summer sun – and in strange geometrical combinations...uhhmm.. not such a great idea.

Of course, that leads us to the question, what were Sid and I doing in Colchester – a little townlet (as I call it) in Essex – anyway?

We were in Colchester to in pursuit of Enid Blyton’s England that had me so obsessed as a child. I read my first Blyton in fourth grade – it was one of the Secret Seven series – and was hooked. I polished off secret sevens, famous fives, five find-outers and whatever else that came with Blyton’s name on top and little English boys, girls and dogs inside: cycling, swimming, camping, caravanning, having adventures and eating exotic things like lemon tarts & macaroons.

Now, you have to be a shy 8-year-old in a godforsaken coal town called Dhanbad in India to understand why their macaroon-fed, adventure-filled, nature-soaked lives would have me so overwhelmed. The only adventure my sisters and I ever got in Dhanbad was taking the school bus (which considering the frightening state of the bus, the road, the traffic and the coal dust-filled air should have been enough).

And thus I arrived in England with visions of cream teas, jam tarts, seacoasts, town-squares, butcher shops, constables on their bicycles and lots and lots of little sun-browned English kids running about busily solving mysteries. Imagine my horror to find it filled with Starbucks, kebab shops, Tescos, Arabs at Harrods, Katie Price, and fat English girls stuffing themselves at McDonalds instead.

But I wasn't to be vanquished that easily. In search of Blyton's England, Sid and I started touring around UK in buses, trains and cars - stopping at quaint-sounding towns and villages.

No, I haven’t found my Julian, Dick, Anne, George, Timmy & Kirrin Island yet, but I am glad for my trips. And yes, Tesco and Katie Price-inspired fashion still rules. But hidden in the din, I also did find myself sipping cream tea on a rainy afternoon in Carlisle; or sharing thoughts with a farmer's wife in her B&B in Haltwhistle in Cumbria; or watching ponies peacefull graze by the side of the roads in gorgeous New Forest; or walking along the wind-swept, bleak coastline of the fishing village of Blakeney chomping on the best crayfish sandwich, I ever had; a or lazing about in a hidden sunny seabeach just outside of Swansea; and of course, the coming face-to-face with the ugliest garden of England in Colchester.

Blyton's England or not, the visits were totally worth it.

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Nostalgia trip

Hilary Mantel's Anne

I wonder if I would have been as gripped by Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I just finished reading, if I wasn’t woman, more importantly, a married woman. After all, if I am truly honest, it wasn’t Mantel’s rags-to-riches account of Thomas Cromwell’s life that kept me going through the 650 pages without a stop. No, it was Mantel’s deliciously monstrous image of the husband-stealing Anne Boleyn that had me obsessively turning over the pages.

For those who spent 2009 on Planet Pluto, Wolf Hall was last year’s Man Booker prize winner. It is a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, an English commoner who rose to become Henry VIII’s closed confidante as he conspired to replace his ageing, dumpy wife, Catherine of Aragon, with the bootylicious Anne Boleyn. As a fall-out of this tricky wife-swapping, England broke ties with Catholic Rome, reformed the Anglican Church and accredited Protestantism in England.

Mantel remained faithful to the chronology of the actions and events. However, she let loose her imagination when giving personalities to the different characters. And boy! Is her Anne Boleyn evil? She is cold and calculating about sex, deadly in exacting revenge, grasping about wealth (read: palaces, jewellery, and titles, especially if they belonged to Catherine of Aragon) and a master at scheming. In short, she is your Grade A Mistress-From-Hell. Even King Henry VIII is a tinsy-bit scared of her. It is almost as if Mantel wants you to be standing there cheering when Boleyn meets the guillotine (for which, by the way, we will have to wait for the sequel. This novel ends with Anne’s second miscarriage and the general souring-up of Henry and Anne’s sex life.)

Strangely, Mantel even takes away credit from Boleyn where it is due. Most accounts of Boleyn – especially, if they arise from the feminist cauldron – tend to present her as a refined woman, genuinely concerned about the corrupt Catholic clergy, knowledgeable in international diplomacy, and generous towards her sister Mary. (Apparently, Anne granted her sister a life-long pension despite the fact that she was a former mistress of Henry VIII.) However, Mantel reduces Anne’s erudition to her merely passing some of William Tyndale’s writings to Henry VIII, and her experience in international diplomacy to a dinner and dance with the French King. Mantel’s Anne was a belittling bitch to her sister and she gives credit of Mary's pension to Thomas Cromwell's interjection.

To insult to injury, Mantel introduces Jane Seymour – for whom Henry VIII so spectacularly dumped Anne – as a rather simple, sweet soul with a generous heart. So good eventually won over evil, and all was well in the world again.

Why would Mantel do that? I believe she did it in order to provide maximum pleasure to her married, female readership. Can there be a purer, sweeter pleasure than in encountering the perfectly hateful “other woman” and then see her receive her comeuppance in form of beheading? After all, if Sid ever dumped me for another woman, I wouldn't be able to imagine her as anything but purely evil, and nothing short of her severed head would satisfy me. In fact, make that two ;-)

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You can buy Wolf Hall on Amazon here.

Quibbling over Kipling

The BBC News today carried an article about Rudyard Kipling and his ambivalent Indian legacy. It was accompanied by an audio clip of the journalist in conversation with Kipling’s biographer Andrew Lycett and the Indian novelist Arvind Adiga on the subject.

The article was spurred by the reluctance shown by Mumbai Municipal authorities in converting the bungalow in which Kipling was born into a museum in his honour. Yes, Kipling was an imperialist. But he also introduced India as a legitimate subject for English literature. Shouldn't that be acknowledged?

Adiga’s response is quite apt: most Indians think of Jeffery Archer when they think of English authors. They don’t think Kipling. The general Indian reader is neither very discerning nor very political. Besides, the India that Kipling wrote about – a world of forests, animals, villages and mysticism – is fast disappearing. So Indians simply don't spend that much time thinking about Kipling and his connections.

I tend to agree with Adiga. The Raj lives on in the minds of Britons much more than it does in the minds of Indians. For most of them, the matter is simple: Raj was something that happened in the past, it was taken care of by our grandfathers (with great dignity may we add), so what is the next Bollywood film release please…

And yet, there are two very good reasons why the bungalow shouldn’t be converted into a museum dedicated to Kipling.

First, we Indians make the tackiest museums ever. As the former editor of the Around Town section of Time Out Mumbai, you can take it from me in written. Kipling would squirm inside his grave at the offerings of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation in his honour.

Second, the bungalow in question lies in the heart of the leafy compound of Sir JJ School of Arts, an institution associated with some of the greatest Indian artists. A Kipling museum will sit there completely without context. His connection to that bungalow is tenuous: he lived there for a few years in his childhood. On the contrary, the connection that many Mumbai artists have with the institution is far deeper and meaningful. If the bungalow has to be converted into a museum – how about a public space for Mumbai artists?

As for Kipling, we can put a plaque: Also, Kipling was born here.

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Here's a wonderful travel piece by AA Gill on how if you are searching for the Raj, don't go to India.

Snark by David Denby

Reviewers of David Denby’s book Snark, published last September, were not kind to him. The 65-year-old’s suggestion that nastiness in the garb of humour was taking over the American public sphere found few supporters in the American or British media. They criticised Denby for not defining snark clearly enough, for being biased in his criticism, for mixing his arguments, for carping, or for simply being a bore.

However, few reviewers discuss the validity or not of his initial premise.
I got attracted to the book precisely because it seemed to ask interesting questions – is the media becoming mean, personal and unconstructive in its attempt to amuse? When you have millions and millions of websites to compete with, is getting nasty the easiest and quickest way to gain attention? Does internet encourage our nasty side through its anonymity? Can nasty and cynical humour lead to anything constructive? And what does this mean for the public sphere where attitudes, tastes and policies are formed? All avid internet users must have asked themselves these questions at some point or the other.

I think they were relevant questions to raise, and courageous ones too, considering that questioning humour amounts to immediately branding yourself as the party spoiler. The problem is that Denby failed to build his case. He spent too much time separating irony and satire from its venomous variant and too little on its scale, reach and effects. He extrapolated a few examples – Maureen Dowd, gawkers, campus website – to America’s national conversation, which is hard to accept. But the case he builds against these examples are valid.

Maureen Dowd’s vicious humour seems to serve no purpose other than caricaturing her subjects without any attempts to examine their humanity or intentions. What higher purpose can a Gawker site serve other than carp, if its philosophy is “nothing was as it seemed and nothing can really change” (pg 70) – as one of its former writers explained. What can a Gawker Media piece contribute to the public debate if its owner “is not interested in think pieces, unless they are rants” (pg 71). As for Campus site, it is an example of internet anonymity at its worst. Unfortunately, Denby does not prove that these examples are symptomatic of what is happening in America as a whole.

But if Denby’s book sparks generates introspection in other forums or inspires others to examine the subject more cogently – it might be a success still.