History of Pakistani English Drama

1. Submitted to
Miss Naima Minhas
Submitted By
Munazza Liaqat

2. There has always been lack of good
drama in Muslims culture.
Most people agree that this is because
orthodox Islam views dramatic
presentation as suspect.
Theatre did not develop in Pakistan until
the coming of television and the Urdu TV
drama in the late sixties.

3. Anwar Inayat Ullah in the an informative
article states that Urdu drama was
patronized by Wajid Ali Shah, the ruler of
Oudh (1874-56). After 1947, several
amateur theatre groups started performing
in Pakistan. Among others he mentions:
… the Karachi Arts Theatre Society, the
Avant Garde Arts from Karachi, Alhamra
Drama Group of Lahore, The Pindi Play
House, Rawalpindi and the Drama Circle of
Dacca, East Pakistan…

4. Theatre/Drama groups have mostly produced Urdu
plays and in the nineteen sixties, when Enayatullah
wrote his article, it appeared to him that they had
“infused the Pakistani theatre with new vigor”. This
vigor was transferred by dramatist writing in Urdu
to the production of plays for the TV but even
these plays are didactic, full of middle class values,
of sexual prudery, nationalism and sentimental
sympathy for the oppressed. As for English plays,
they were hardly ever written or performed even in
the universities and colleges after the rise of
middle class Puritanism in the seventies.

5. In any case, the lack of interest in writing plays
in English has been as old as the beginning of
the history of writing in English itself in the
subcontinent, and one can hardly blame the
rise
of Puritanism for it. Before Partition, Fyzee
Rahamin’s drama Daughter of India (1937) is
probably the only item of this genre worth
mentioning.

6. This drama is relevant Ahmad Ali’s one act
play The Lord of Twilight (1929) is
extravagantly romantic and lacks dramatic
merit.

7. In Pakistan, dramatic production remained poor. Nasir
Ahmad Farooqi is among the few who have tried their
skill at the art of writing drama. His play in three acts,
the Naked Night (1965), was intended to be a drama of
ideas. According to the Author:
The Naked Night is a probe into the futility of
existence. It challenges the validity of a certain mode
of living. It seeks its synthesis. The progression of
knowledge and ideas leads to more problems, to more
unknown (and) uncharted routes. The journey must
continue. The artist, as any other harbinger of ideas,
must perish on this journey. In the nature of things,,
there can be no other end.

8. the play aspires to serious intellectual
stature, Farooqi has the philosophy of
existential despair as well as the idea of
existence being a quest for meaning. His
protagonist, Nick, is the philosopher-artist
who undertakes an absurd journey with the
heroine, Sarah, to discover the essence of
existence. They perish and the epitaph is
spoken by more worldly-wise characters.

9. “Life is a problem to which the only
solution is death” (Faroowqi, 1965: 61).
However, the play is a failure. It is so full of
pseudo-intellectual inanities that it can only
exasperate the discriminating reader of
viewer. Nasir Farooqi’s love for showing
off, which has marred his novels, has
ruined the play. Ikram Azam two has also
written this type of play.

10. There is no significant Pakistani dramatist in English until the advent
of Hanif Kureishi in the nineteen eighties. Kureishi was ‘born in
London of anb English mother and Pakistani father’. His father came
from Bombay and married an English women. Hanif was brought up
in London and in a clearly written essay entitled, ‘The Rainbow Sign’,
he tells us about his life there. He tells us evocatively but not
sentimentally about the emotionally hurting experience of having
grown up in a society where Pakistanis (and other Asians) came to
be despised. The first reaction of the young boy was to deny his
Pakistanis self --- a common enough reaction among minorities,
especially among ex-colonial subjects, as V.S. Naipual has brought
out in his own case in Enigma of Arrival (1987). Kureishi writes:
“From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It
was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone
else.”

11. The Rainbow Sign
The King and Me 1980
Tomorrow Today
Outskirt
The Mother Country

12. The Foot Hold
Foot Hold is a marvelous existentialist play
with great pyshcoanalytical elements of the
society and a blend of mysticism.
Information on Existentialism in The
FootHold is available on:
http://www.slideshare.net/naimaaa56/exist
entialism-59624505

13.  The Guilt
(A three act play on the agonies of the
Pakistani Stage and its legends written
as aliving memory of the king of Pakistani
theatre Mastana)
The Last Metaphore
(A Post Modern Pakistani Play)

14. In all the play, Hanif Kureishi presents his own faith in
the benign potential of human nature. His point is that,
behind the frustration, prejudice, and violence one
witnesses in human societies, there are redeeming
features, such as tenderness, love, and the desire for
peace. This faith in redemption may be too optimistic in
view of the violence of human history and everyone
may not agree with Hanif Kureishi. However, whether
one agrees with him or not, Hanif Kureishi remains the
best playwright of Pakistani origin and the only one
who has created art, as opposed to tendentious
propaganda, about the theme of the Pakistani
immigrant in Britain.