The document provides an overview of Pakistani literature in English during the 1980s. It discusses: - The political context of the 1980s under General Zia-ul-Haq's regime and policies of Islamization. - Events including a 1984 referendum supporting Zia and the election and removal of Prime Minister Junejo. - The growing affluence of the middle class and increasing consumerism in cities, despite poverty remaining. - Short stories published in 1981 by writer Abdur Rashid Tabassum that show inventiveness but somewhat stilted English, touching on themes of humor, social criticism, and transcending religious prejudice.

1. The Nineteen Eighties
Pakistani Literature in English:

2. THE NINETEEN EIGHTIES
 The nineteen eighties began with General Zia-ul-Haq still ruling over Pakistan. The martial
law government had sought legitimization by exploiting the name of Islam. This does not
mean that the General and the Islamic parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami were completely
insincere about enforcing the laws of Islam as they interpreted them. It only means that they
did understand that Islam was an emotional issue and the people were inclined to respect it.
Thus, sometimes sincerely and sometimes for matters of policy, the name of Islam was
invoked by government officers, supporters of Zia-ul-Haq and others. Islamization meant the
introduction of certain cosmetic changes: the bureaucracy, which had always worn Western
dress, now started wearing the indigenous shalwar qamees; the banks declared that they
were doing away with the system of giving fixed profits and would allow their clients to
share in the profits and the losses; some new taxes (Zakat and Ushr) were said to have been
introduced; and symbolic buildings, like the Shah Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, were
constructed. Above all there was much propaganda about Islam especially from the state-
controlled T.V. and Radio. However, the structure of the constitution and the legal system
remained basically secular and there was no significant change in the country as far as
religious practice or the emergence of the Islamic man was concerned.

3.  In 1984 Zia-ul-Haq held a referendum in which the public was asked to decide whether it agreed
with Islamization and whether it sympathised with what had been done so far for this purpose. If
the answer was ’yes’ the General would remain the President of Pakistan and would carry on
Islamizing the country. The government, however, would be made by an elected Prime Minister.
But, since political parties were not allowed to contest the elections as political parties, the PPP
was excluded. In this election, which the major political parties bycotted anyway, Mohammad
Khan Junejo became the Prime Minister of Pakistan. His government did manage to remove the
martial law and did give some measure of freedom to the press. However, the social structure
remained the same and the armed forces remained powerful. All movements for holding
elections before five years, especially Benazir Bhutto’s movement against the government in
1986, either fizzled out or were made to fail. In May 1988, in a dramatic gesture, Zia removed
Junejo’s government. In July 1988 General Zia died in an aircrash and in November Ms Benazir
Bhutto was elected the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

4.  The middle class became more affluent than it ever was before. This was partly because of
the pouring in of Arab money from the oil rich Middle East. The Middle East had become rich
on oil revenue in the late sixties but during the seventies this wealth became phenomenal.
And, because the Arabs needed labourers and skilled people, they started hiring help from
abroad and payed generously. Many Pakistanis also went abroad and transmitted foreign
exchange which was spent on buying, among other things, such consumer goods as tape-
recorders, video cassette recorders, colour television sets and machinery. In 1979 the
Iranian revolution strengthened the Islamic revivalist movements everywhere including
Pakistan. At the same time the Marxist revolution in Afghanistan, militarily supported by the
Soviet Union, brought in American help to Pakistan which bolstered Zia-uI-Haq’s regime and
brought American aid to increase the total amount of money in the country. Thus, though
the poor remained poor and lacked even basic facilities, the upper and the upper-middle
class became much more prosperous than ever before. This being so the cities kept
expanding and consumerism increased too.’

5.  This new middle class was similar to the Victorian middle class in many important ways. It was,
for one thing, prone to expressing sanctimonious cliches as if they were great truths. Almost
every T.V. programme showed people who professed to serve the country whereas they were
simply earning their livelihood. Then, again like the Victorians, the middle class became very
nationalistic. The two cult figures of these chauvinistic Pakistanis were Mr. Jinnah and
Mohammad Iqbal and there were demands in the press that laws should be framed to punish
anyone who dared to say anything against these personages. This ensured that history would
be distorted and that the censorship was in the hands of the public from the fury of which
there was no refuge. The public also became very prudish, again reminding one of Victorian
Grundyism, and the frolic verses of the ghazal poets were tabooed as were all manifestations
of the instinct of sex.

6.  These conditions cannot be said to be congenial for the production of good
literature but literature, being a mysterious creation, does not necessarily
suffer, at least as far as the writing of it is concerned, because of public or
governmental repression. Thus one can hardly suppose that it was the
dominance of conservative and reactionary ways of thinking which prevented
the emergence of a great literary masterpiece. That such a masterpiece did
not appear in Pakistan is just one of the facts of literary history which cannot
be explained fully in terms of political history alone.

7. Famous Writers
 Literary masterpieces about Pakistan were written, however, outside
Pakistan. Salman Rushdie, the writer of some of them, is not a Pakistani and
his work has only been referred to in the Conclusion. Besides him Ghose,
Sidhwa and Javed Qazi also kept publishing in the eighties. And another
literary artist, Adam Zameenzad, who emerged in the eighties is a novelist
and will be considered in this chapter. This chapter will, therefore, be
devoted to the short stories of Abdur Rashid Tabassum and the novels of Tariq
Mehmood, Mahmud Sipra, Adam Zameenzad and Mehr Nigar Masroor.

8.  Tabassum’s collection of short stories is called A Window to the East and was
published in 1981. It contains eight short stories. The last prose item ’the Last
Word’ is not a short story nor is it in any way worthy of consideration. The
other stories too are not of great merit but do require some critical attention.
There is, inspite of the rather stilted English, an inventiveness which
bespeaks of a potentially powerful imagination at work. This is most in
evidence in ’Greatest of the Great’, ’Amir Baksh Seeks a Wife’, ’Fire of Hell’
and ’A Miracle at Work’.

9.  ’Greatest of the Great’ is a story of a Punjabi peasant who starts revering his
goat as a saint. The goat has helped him to catch a thief and has, in his
opinion, brought him luck. Even his marriage is brought about by the goat and
both wife and husband continue to worship it till it dies. The only appeal of
the story is in its humour which is engaging and genial. Humour is also found
in ’Ameer Baksh Seeks a Wife’ but here the humour does not remain as
genial; in fact, it becomes grim. The narrator tells us about his subordinate
Amir Baksh who breaks his engagement whenever he gets a rise in salary and,
consequently, status. The narrator exposes the greed and snobbery of Amir
Baksh and his family with consummate irony. In the end Ameer Baksh loses his
job and no one wants to marry him. There is no moralising, which has become
a part of even good Urdu dramas presented on the T.V. in the eighties, but the
savage exposure of Ameer Baksh makes the story a successful sociological
criticism of the snobbish aspects of the Indian and Pakistani arranged
marriage system.

10.  ’Fire of Hell’ is a light-hearted comedy in which the girl mistakenly sends
messages to an young man under the erroneous impression that she is sending
them to her brother. When she gets down from her train in Karachi and meets
the young man and his mother, the latter accuses him of having ensnared her
son. The girl’s parents, equally irate, arrive to take her away but the boy
telephones the girl’s uncle who arrives in time and persuades the parents to
allow the couple to get married.
 ’A Miracle at Work’ is a comical anecdote about a peasant named Maujoo who
is taken for a saint by a passing mayor. The mayor sees Maujoo from the
window and, when he comes to the door, Maujoo has disappeared. The Mayor,
who has no children, sends his wife to stay with Maujoo. She conceives and
Maujoo becomes famous. The cause of Maujoo’s disappearance is simple; he
has got up to water a plant and is not visible whenever he is observed.

11.  This tradition was not as prejudiced towards the Hindus as people in Pakistan tend to be
nowadays. Tabussum’s own story ’The Insane’, for instance, is similar in its theme to H.K.
Burki’s ’Some Men are Brothers’. The theme is that of the transcendence of personal
relations over religious prejudices. The narrator, a Muslim, risks his own life to shield a Hindu
friend from the murderous wrath of bigoted Muslim fanatics. When this friend, Ram Nath,
manages to escape to India he dies protecting a Muslim from Hindu fanatics. Ram Nath’s
daughter gets married with the money brought back to India by her father and writes to the
narrator all about her marriage and her father. The tone of quiet, matter of fact loyalty to
personal friendship makes the story a moving one.
 In the ’Man With Dusty Shoes’ another kind of heroism is endorsed. A widow’s far-off relative
returns to buy a large plot for her son. The end takes us to the realm of the supernatural for
the man Ibrahim has been dead for twenty years. This sudden twist, reminiscent of some of
O’Henry’s stories, is not an unknown feature of similar anedotes about the supernatural in
Pakistan. The ’Rainbow’ is a tale of incompatibility between a man and his wife after a love-
marriage. The point seems to be that one finds out so less about the future spouse before
marriage that love-marriages are not any more successful than arranged ones.

12.  Tabussum’s short stories art free from sentimentality and moralising.
However, they are not of high intellectual calibre nor are they very well
written. They do not compare with the best short stories by non-English
speaking writers either in Pakistan or elsewhere. Tabussum may give us better
work in the future though he does not seem to have written, or at least
published, anything in the last few years.
 Mahmud Sipra, on the other hand, does not seem to have the potential to
produce anything but a thriller like Pawn to King Three (1985). This novel has
all the ingredients of Western popular fiction: sex, intrigue, violence, high
commerce and ostentation.

13.  The novel starts with the partition of India in which Adnan Walid, a child of four, is found by a British
colonel in a compartment where everyone is dead. Adnan grows up to love Farah, the daughter of
Rani Ali who is the sister of a powerful Pakistani banker called Sawal Ali. Rani manages to separate
Adnan and Farah through force and fraud. Adnan, however, becomes a big shipping magnate through
the help of an Arab billionaire called Sheikh Wudud. The vendetta between Adnan and the family of
Sawal Ali is carried on like a game of chess.
 .The writer introduces all that can be thrilling. Adnan, for instance, smuggles the ingredients of an
atomic bomb to Pakistan and is arrested. In order to avoid going to prison he becomes a candidate
for the prime ministership of Pakistan. When he is about to succeed, he is killed by Hoki, the
bodyguard given to him by Sheikh Wudud. This happens because the Sheikh’s hand has been forced
by the other Arab chiefs whose efforts at making an atomic bomb have been stymied by Adnan. In
the end Adnan’s son is shown playing with his grandfather Major Walid. Both the Major and Adnan’s
wife Farah - he does marry her after all - discover that Adnan had become a freak, an emotionally
dead man, after the traumatic experience of his childhood.

14.  success in business, sex and war. The novel has no literary value and will not
have a place in Third World literature. However, it may succeed if it is turned
into a motion picture.
 Another example of had writing, but not the kind of bad writing which thrills
immature readers, is Tariq Mehmood’s novel Hand on the Sun (1 %”*). The
author came to Britain in the early sixties and got his schooling in Bradford,
the Yorkshire city with a large Pakistani working class population. After school
he became involved with radical political groups and, as a result of
disturbances in 1981, he was put on trial. He conducted his own defence and
was acquitted. This novel was published as a result of these experiences. But
this admixture of autobiography is no guarantee of the literary merit of the
work of art as we shall see. First, in order to make criticism easier, I shall give
a brief summary of the novel.

15.  Jalib, the protagonist, is a working class immigrant from Pakistan. His parents
have come to Britain in search of a higher standard of living. The novel begins with
Jalib’s exposure to the prejudice of the British working class children. He learns to
react to this aggressively and has his first fights with his school companions. This
pattern, once established, continues after school when jalib and his friends find
themselves unemployed. They come in contact with a disgruntled socialist called
Hussain, a political agitator named Ghulam B. Azad (’slave be free’ in Urdu), and a
Sikh freedom fighter, Dalair Singh. Two events enable these disgruntled immigrants
to establish a sense of solidarity and emerge as a militant force. The first is the
march of the British National Front in Bradford and the other is the arrest of Azad
when he leads a strike in his factory. Azad is threatened with deportation and
Jalib, his girlfriend Shaheen, and friend Mohan demonstrate against this possibility
till the authorities decide not to deport him. On the personal level Jalib remains
frustrated because Shaheen is forced to marry a man of her parents’ choice. But
on the political level he finds satisfaction in the spirit of resistance which he has
created.

16.  The novel ends somewhat precipitately when the movement is still strong but the
novelist adds to it the postscript that it was sabotaged.
 This summary does not bring out the shortcomings, and they are serious ones, of
the novel as a work of art. If a work of art aspires to be authentic; aspires to have
a powerful effect even on those who do not agree with its point of view; it must
transcend the level of prejudice and propaganda. Its narrator, or the persona the
author has created to express a point of view can be subjective; can express any
point of view or feeling however prejudiced, irrational or anti-social it may be.
However, the implied author must appear to dissociate himself from the persona
and must not appear to be as prejudiced as the persona. But, when the narrator,
expressing the author’s point of view manifests the same kind and degree of
prejudice as any ordinary Asian youth brought up in Britain, the reader loses his
faith in the work of art. Then one starts confronting the author’s version of reality
with one’s own. This brings the reader down to the polemical level, the level at
which the author has written his book. The reader stops sympathising with the
narrator and instead quarrels with him.

17.  And when the novel becomes a rational argument between the reader and the
writer, the latter has little ground to assert that Britain is as horrible a
country as the writer makes it out to be. After all whatever incidents of a
racist nature occur in Britain occur only at the level of irresponsible,
malicious or frustrated individuals. They occur, as it were, in spite of the
system not because of it. In some other countries, as in Nazi Germany and
South Africa, the system itself is to blame. It is the law which is supposed to
ensure that injustice is done towards some religious or ethnic group. This
injustice is a part of the system whereas in Britain it is a deviation from the
norm. That the experience of the narrator may have predisposed him to
distort reality so that the deviation appears to him as the norm is possible.
But then the narrator must be distanced from the implied author who must
appear to be disinterested. As this has not happened the unity of the work of
art has been vitiated by the acrimony of the debate between the reader and
the writer.

18.  In products of art the bitterness of the narrator is often made the quality of a
consciousness made bitter by negative experiences. That is the kind of narrator
Farrukh Dhondy has in his short story ’The Bride’.2 He is an English working class
youth called Tony. He has grown up in a locality where he has heard only malicious
stories about Asians. And then he falls in love with an Asian girl called Jaswinder.
She is, however, lured away by a Pakistani boy called Junaid. Jaswinder cheats
Tony out of emotional and sexual fulfillment by making him her brother through
the Indian custom of Rakhi. She commits suicide later but, in a preternatural
manner not explained in the story, compensates him by giving him her expensive
jewellery. Tony, inspite of his stereotyped prejudices, transcends the world of
squalor and hatred because of the genuineness of his emotions. The pathos is
powerfully evoked through narrating the story in Tony’s own restricted working
class dialect. The impression that the human soul is trapped in a squalid, morally
brutalising sub-culture is conveyed by Tony when he swears, uses the cliches of
resentment and hatred for Asians and yet has a tremendous capacity for
tenderness which his outward behaviour belies.

19.  In products of art the bitterness of the narrator is often made the quality of a
consciousness made bitter by negative experiences. That is the kind of narrator
Farrukh Dhondy has in his short story ’The Bride’.2 He is an English working class
youth called Tony. He has grown up in a locality where he has heard only malicious
stories about Asians. And then he falls in love with an Asian girl called Jaswinder.
She is, however, lured away by a Pakistani boy called Junaid. Jaswinder cheats
Tony out of emotional and sexual fulfillment by making him her brother through
the Indian custom of Rakhi. She commits suicide later but, in a preternatural
manner not explained in the story, compensates him by giving him her expensive
jewellery. Tony, inspite of his stereotyped prejudices, transcends the world of
squalor and hatred because of the genuineness of his emotions. The pathos is
powerfully evoked through narrating the story in Tony’s own restricted working
class dialect. The impression that the human soul is trapped in a squalid, morally
brutalising sub-culture is conveyed by Tony when he swears, uses the cliches of
resentment and hatred for Asians and yet has a tremendous capacity for
tenderness which his outward behaviour belies.

20.  Jalib is not like Tony nor is there any good Englishman as there are in Desai’s Bye, Bye
Blackbird, another novel about the immigrant Indian in Britain. The book is like J.P. Clark’s
America, Their America (1964) in which, according to Walsh, Clark ’Flays America and the
Americans so totally and with such consuming fury that in the end the energy of his writing
becomes a vapid routine’.3 The same can be said about Tariq Mehmood’s novel. Adam
Zameenzad, who has lived in Pakistan and worked there, has unexpectedly produced the best
novels which are being considered in this chapter. His first novel The Thirteenth House (1987)
got the David Higham’s award and his second novel My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore
(1988) is equally brilliant. They are both profoundly moving political novels. The major theme
is that arbitrary and evil political forces crush innocent people in the Third World. The first
novel is based on Pakistan and Zahid, the beautiful wife JamiJa and daughter Azra have been
abducted and only his retarded son is allowed to stay with him. All this happens because he
trusts a spiritual guide, a certain Shah Baba, who robs the house when he discovers that the
narrator, the I, a rich man’s son, is in Zahid’s house. And he is tortured by the police because
the police kill his friend Shamsie, a leftist, in his house. The symbol which describes the
politics of the country is the skeleton of a boy in whose orifices insects go in and out freely.
Zahid sees this (p. 153) and becomes like this: ’the flies that kept moving in and out of
Zahid’s living holes seemed happy enough with him’ (p. 202).

21.  In Hena the African children, Matt, Hena, Golam and Kimo, go out to find their cousin who is a
catamite in a big city. In the way they see starvation and the killing of guerrillas who claim to be
fighting the army to bring food for the people. The soldiers also resort to torture and cruelty and
the children are on the verge of starvation themselves when General Dnomo takes a fancy to
Hena and makes her his concubine. So ’Hena the Whore’ starts giving charity to others. But
charity is no solution and the children go back to the village and die.
 The narrative devices are unique and contribute to the powerful effect. In the first novel the
narrator dies and acts as the omniscient narrator suggesting that the world of the spirit merely
records events. This gives the existentialist meaning that in this absurd universe all values are
produced by human beings. In the second the narrator’s consciousness :
 is naive, in fact obtuse and simple, and events are refracted through it. So if they are so
appalling even when seen by one who does not understand them, how very abominable they ’
really must be gives the book more force. The metaphysical meaning of the second novel is like
that of the first. It ends * with Kimo’s death and Matt comes to him in a vision: The time has
come for you to take over’, says Matt. e ’You are now the Earth; and the Earth is yours (p. °
217).

22.  Being dead in the Third World is the only source of hope. The last novelist we will consider in this
chapter is Mehr Nigar Masroor. She was born in Lahore before the Partition. Her father, Mian Abdul
Aziz, was a writer who espoused liberal ideas. She studied at Queen Mary’s and Kinniard Colleges at
Lahore and became an activist in the cause of women’s emancipation. She was antagonistic to martial
law and the rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan as much as she was against extremist Hinduism in
India. She died of cancer just before her novel was published in 1987. This brief reference to her
ideas is helpful in understanding her novel Shadows of Times which is a political novel in many senses
of the term.
 The novel begins in 1883 ’the year of the Ilbert Bill’, which would have allowed Indian magistrates to
try European subjects’ (p.l) and ends in 1977 when Pakistan is under a reactionary military
government. Geographically it moves from Calcutta to Delhi, Lucknow and then Lahore. The
characters are Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims and the saga covers several generations. In the beginning
the kind-hearted doctor Keshab and the liberal I.C.S. officer Manilal are the heroes of the liberal
Indian middle class. However, as the urge to fight for India’s freedom becomes stronger,
fundamentalist Hindus and Muslims also become involved in the struggle. Manual’s only son Amlok
becomes a terrorist and dies in the partition of the Bengal in 1905 after having murdered Englishmen.
Eventually the focus is narrowed down to Farhan, a Muslim freedom fighter, who falls in love with a
Hindu woman and fathers her two children. Later he has to marry a Muslim woman in Lahore and his
daughter Maheen inherits the legacy of his divided loyalties. Just as a major Muslim character goes
back to India in Qurrat ul Ain Hyder’s Aag Ka Darya (1958), Maheen understands how Farhan had to go
back to India:
 She had hated him for dying in India, she now began to understand the deep desire that drove him
back to revisit the soil which was his own and his ancestors (p. 428).

23.  This last act of her father’s, which appeared as treachery earlier, now assumes a purely emotional
psychological significance. Farhan is, after all, a Muslim League activist and an admirer of the Quaid-e-
Azam so that it is not his loyalty to Pakistan which can be questioned. What is true, however, is that he
cannot help his emotions and love for his past and his Hindu beloved makes him the casualty of the
Partition rather than its beneficiary.
 Maheen commits suicide by walking into the river Indus near Nowshera. She is dying of cancer and
chooses ’to mingle for ever with the soil and sun I love so much’ (p. 437). The point seems to be that
Maheen chooses to merge with the Indus, the life blood of Pakistan, and travel throughout the length of
the country. This symbolic act makes her support the two-nation theory in the end though she does
understand the emotional cost of the Partition for many people. In this way the theme of this novel is
similar to that of The Heart Divided - for this novel concedes the point that the partition of India was
necessary but also understands the suffering which was caused. However, all this does not make the
novel a good work of art. The defects are that the novel contains large undigested chunks of historical
narrative; the characterisation is very weak and the plot is loose and unintegrated. There are many
crude devices, such as the love-affair of foster siblings and coincidences of an improbable kind, and the
story, or rather the different stories, are melodramatic. The author is more interested in political and
historical ideas than in the characters as such. However, surprisingly, the book is not uninteresting and
the impression of the flow of life and the close relationship between politics and life is brilliantly
conveyed.

24.  Besides the short story writers and the novelists mentioned above, there were
a number of minor writers whose works have not been mentioned. Two story
writers who do deserve mention are Javed Qazi and Athar Tahir. However,
since both of them have not published collections yet, their work cannot be
dealt with in detail.