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Mahim Maher

The University of Melbourne

2003

Pakistan, the Land of the (not so) Pure:

Writing Women, Family and Violence in

the Contemporary Nation-State

November 21, 2003

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Chapter One

Nation and Novel

“This blessed motherland … This nation is too young to take care of itself. It needs to be defended by strong control and discipline. It needs to be nurtured into strong patriotism. It needs to be civilized.”

(Mass Transit 12)

The nation “too young to take care of itself” is Pakistan and this nationalistic endorsement of

the army‟s role in defining it comes from a character in Maniza Naqvi‟s 1998 novel Mass

Transit. Col. Daoud, a decidedly neo-colonial retired army man, is engaged in a debate with

his brother-in-law, a retired civil servant called Rasheed Ali. Their conversation takes place

on Pakistan Day, the 23rd of March, which commemorates the day in 1940 when the “resolve

for a separate state for the Muslims of India” (Mass Transit 10) was made official.

But while Col. Daoud uses the rhetoric of “patriotism” to cloak a case for the violence

of martial law, Rasheed Ali is more preoccupied with the nation‟s current condition: “Each

year the same damn words, nothing changes … Forty-one years of Independence and

forty-one years of steadily increasing lies” (Mass Transit 10). The two men argue because they

cannot see that their perceptions of Pakistan couldn‟t be further apart; Col. Daoud treats the

nation as a definite but malleable entity, something that must be improved upon if necessary,

and Rasheed Ali is giving vent to his frustration at the lack of cohesiveness of the idea of the

nation.

In this heated conversation, Naqvi has captured the typical preoccupation Pakistanis

have with their nation. This drawing-room debate betrays the anxiety that marks Pakistan‟s

existence and survival as a nation. As Pierre Lafrance so aptly puts it: “Pakistan, in the way it

perceives itself, is the victim of an illusion, that it wrongfully believes that it exists, and will

sooner or later have to acknowledge its error” (Lafrance 338). Naqvi‟s two characters may

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not agree about what is to be done, but it is clear that they are both concerned for the future

of the nation even if one‟s stout pragmatism is tempered by the other‟s pessimism.

What the two men do have in common is their assumption that Pakistan is a nation.

Their nation is the “imagined community” as Benedict Anderson defined it insofar as “the

members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet

them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”

(Anderson 15). This is congruent with Gellner‟s 1983 defining condition for a nation,

according to which “[t]wo men [sic] are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each

other as belonging to the same nation” (Gellner 7, original emphasis).

The political idea of the nation is generally agreed to have emerged as a European

construct in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gellner attributes the rise of

the nation-state, via Max Weber, to the economic conditions produced by the industrial age

that “obliges its social units to be large and yet culturally homogenous” (Gellner 141).

Anderson takes a different view that the “birth of nationalism in Western Europe is coeval

with the dwindling–if not the death–of religious modes of thought” (Gandhi 104).

But what are we to make of a nation that was founded not out of economic conditions

or a dwindling of religious modes of thought but from an act of will on the part of an elite to

create a nation that supposedly achieved its force from one religion, Islam? While Anderson1

and Gellner‟s definitions of the nation are helpful, they offer only limited means for the

conceptualisation of a new nation-state like Pakistan, which is amongst other things a “rather

curious product of the post-war decolonisation process” (Jalal, The State of Martial Rule 1).

We can begin to gain a sense of just how “curious” or unique Pakistan is as a nation

by examining the ambivalence it invokes in Pakistanis themselves. As Rasheed Ali notes,

with equal measures of exasperation and nostalgia, the Pakistan of today is very different

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from the idea of Pakistan that its founders had imagined: “Where is that Pakistani nationality

that we created in forty-seven?” (Mass Transit 10). In his question we read an absence of a

present unified concept of nationality, or at least, we understand that while Pakistanis started

out with a nation in 1947 what they have today has metamorphosed into something entirely

different, something indescribable and elusive. Naqvi seems to have hit a sore spot: Can

Pakistan still be called a “nation” today?

Part of the answer to this question needs to be found by looking into the past. Several

scholars have examined the details of the political struggle that led to the creation of Pakistan

and the ways and means by which the leaders of the Muslim League pushed for a separate

state for the Muslims of undivided India. Ayesha Jalal has written extensively on the way

Islam (amongst other ideologies) was used to “[conceive] … a deep, horizontal comradeship”

(Anderson 16) amongst the Muslims to bring them to a sense of nationhood. She comments

on how precarious these imaginings were:

Pakistan, with its artificially demarcated frontiers and desperate quest for an officially sanctioned Islamic identity, lends itself remarkably well to an examination of the nexus between power and bigotry in creative imaginings of national identity. (Jalal, Conjuring Pakistan 74)

These Muslim leaders had to pull together a nation without a state, which required “an

improbable array of conjuring tricks, and some somersaults on the tightrope of historical

memory” (Jalal, Conjuring Pakistan 74). The scattered Muslim minority in India had to be

regrouped onto one political platform and be convinced to think of itself as separate from the

Hindu majority it had lived with for centuries. The notion of Muslim Ummah as Muslim

nation was used to achieve this. And Jalal has shown how certain versions of their separate

1 Anderson has commented on the Ummah of Islam and how languages like Arabic created “classical

communities … [that had] … character distinct from the imagined communities of modern nations” (Anderson

20). However, I am sceptical that these formulations can be applied to the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent.

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Muslim history were privileged in order to create a “sense of a coherent … imagining of a

„national‟ community” (Jalal 74).

What emerges is the strong feeling that Pakistan is still in search of its identity as a

nation. Many questions arise from this feeling of incompleteness: Is Pakistan, for instance, an

“unachieved nation” (Jaffrelot 7), a state without a nation? What do we make of the opinion

that while the Pakistani nation has been contested the state has been failing for many years

(Cohen 109)? Others have speculated on its future, conceding that while it had a strong

reason to come into existence, there is little to hold it together. These speculations are fuelled

by repeated national crises:

[D]isputes over Islamicization policy, ethnic and political riots in Karachi, controversy over Afghanistan policy, the Shia-Sunni divide, political murders, alleged involvement of state authorities in drug and arms trade, pressures of regional nationalism, the growth of competing sub-cultures like the „Kalashnikov culture‟, the failure of constitutional reform, political corruption of a feudal society, the dominance of the Pakistani Army over Pakistani politics and an enduring pattern of repeated military intervention in Pakistani politics. (Kapur 1)

Unlike most European countries, Pakistan was created, or founded, at a specific and

recent historical moment; as Duncan puts it: “Where I come from, companies, social clubs,

intellectual movements are founded; countries are the accidental results of rivers, seas,

mountains and the squabbles of forgotten kings” (Duncan 5-6). On the 23rd of March 1940,

the Muslim League formally decided to agitate for their own country, a nation-state for

themselves. The idea that had been “born in the mind of an eccentric student at Cambridge

[Choudhary Rehmat Ali], and taken up by a cold legal genius [Mohammed Ali Jinnah]

whose brilliant oratory turned the fear and confusion among the Indian Muslims into a

demand for land, and founded a country” (Duncan 6). The arbitrary division of the Indian

subcontinent into East and West Pakistan and India means that Pakistan as a nation-state did

not emerge as an organic entity (Jalal, The State of Martial Rule 277). This may explain why it

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has been called an “ideological state” based on a “trans-geographical concept” that was “a

response to the Muslim demand for political rights in an undivided India” (Shamsie M. xv).

Leela Gandhi has pointed out that independence from the British in India and the

subsequent formation of two separate nations is “plagued by anxieties of imitativeness, by

the apprehension that Indian [and Pakistani] nationalism [are] just a poor copy or derivation

of European post-Enlightenment discourse” (Gandhi 114). In part these apprehensions can

be allayed by Partha Chatterjee‟s claim that even though a postcolonial nation-state such as

Pakistan adopted the idea of nationhood as part of decolonisation, its very formation speaks

back to or questions these ideals: “It challenged the colonial claim to political domination,

[but] it also accepted the very intellectual premises of „modernity‟ on which colonial

domination was based” (Chatterjee 30). Independence was thus marked by contradiction,

which partly explains the claim that “the terms of Anderson‟s analysis do vitiate the

imaginings of nation-ness in colonies like India” (Chatterjee, in Gandhi, 114).

It is not within the scope of this essay to weigh the merits of the conflicted notions of

Pakistani nationhood. But for my purposes they point to the emerging effects of the

discrepancy between “the range of assorted imaginings that serve as official discourse on the

past” and “the narrative confusions flowing from tensions between the ideology of Muslim

nationalism and … the Pakistani nation-state” (Jalal, Conjuring 78). Jalal‟s work has provided

in some ways a model for this essay. She has highlighted through a reading of regional

counter narratives the failure of “a forty-seven-year-long officially inspired effort at

recording history to create any sense of a coherent, much less shared, imagining of a

„national‟ community” (Jalal, Conjuring 74).

Homi Bhabha‟s work on nation and narration addresses, albeit through a different

discourse, the discontinuities revealed when the nation is treated like an idea “whose

cultural [or religious] compulsion lies in [its] impossible unity … as a symbolic force”

(Bhabha 1). It would seem that the Pakistani state has struggled to maintain the idea of the

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Islamic Republic of Pakistan “as a continuous narrative of national progress” (Bhabha 1). But

if we keep in mind the way that Pakistan was conceived and created and how the state

desperately kept forcing its official discourse and versions of history into circulation, we can

begin to see where the strain started to show. The monolithic mould of Islamic and

nationalistic rhetoric could not square the circle of what Bhabha calls “the cultural

temporality of a nation [that] inscribes a much more transitional social reality” (Bhabha 1).2

This ambivalence between the social life of the nation and the discipline of social

polity is at the heart of Bhabha‟s argument. Cultural temporality and social consciousness are

displayed in the nation “as it is written” (Bhabha 2), and I take this concept as my point of

departure. He suggests that writing the nation “contests the traditional authority of those

national objects of knowledge … whose pedagogical value often relies on their

representation as holistic concepts located within an evolutionary narrative of historical

continuity” (Bhabha 3). My intention in this essay, then, is to study the nation of Pakistan

through its narrative address.

To encounter the nation as it is written involves examining the form of the novel,

which speaks the nation‟s “disjunctive narrative” (Bhabha 311). This is not to lose sight of the

nation as an imagined community; the disjunctive narratives of the nation overlap with

official discourse and the two do inform each other. The novel is, after all, as Timothy

Brennan points out, “a composite but clearly bordered work of art that [is] crucial in

defining the nation as an „imagined community‟ (Brennan 48), a form that “narrativize[s] the

civil imaginary” (During 143). Bhabha‟s extended discussion on the liminality of the nation

and the temporality of culture articulates the interstitial space from which minority

discourses emerge. One of the ways these are manifest are in counter-narratives of the nation

that can “continually evoke and erase its totalising boundaries – both actual and conceptual –

2 My intention here is not to explain away Pakistan‟s problems that stem from largely complex economic,

political and social tensions. What I am interested in could be called the effect of the discrepancy or discontinuity

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disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which „imagined communities‟ are given

essentialist identities” (Bhabha 300). To study the nation in this way is to uncover the “easily

obscured, but highly significant, recesses of the national culture from which alternative

constituencies of peoples and oppositional analytic capacities may emerge” (Bhabha 3). This

is where I would like to assert a particular focus on Pakistani women writers, as one group

who form an alternative constituency.

Nira Yuval-Davis has commented on how “constructions of nationhood usually

involve specific notions of both „manhood‟ and „womanhood‟” (Yuval-Davis 1). Men

(especially in Pakistan) are traditionally considered the ideal citizens of a nation. And when

we define citizenship as “a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community

… [a]ll who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the

status is endowed” (Marshall 28, my emphasis), we begin to see that Pakistani women are

not necessarily treated as full citizens of their “imagined community”.

Yuval-Davis has specified five ways in which she claims women relate to the state:

the first is as biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities; the second is as

reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups; the third is as central participants

in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture; the fourth

is as signifiers of ethnic/national differences; and the fifth is as participants in national,

economic, political and military struggles (Yuval-Davis 7).

Unfortunately, all these tend to fuel notions of womanhood that serve exclusionary

purposes with the result that women are relegated to the margins of the body politic. While

women are integral to national processes as biological producers of the nation and the

symbolic bearers of its culture, they are on the other hand not considered part of the public

realm “even though their centrality to the nation is constantly being reaffirmed” (Kandiyoti

37).

between official discourse and lived reality.

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The justification of the exclusion of women in Pakistan from being acknowledged as

full members of the public realm comes in part from a misinterpretation of Islam.3 This belief

is buttressed by the perception that the private realm is not politically relevant; the rule of the

father persists on the home front. Because of their ultimate meaning, Yuval-Davis holds that

religions “can become some of the most intractable and inflexible symbolic border guards of

specific collectivity boundaries and cultural traditions” (42), which in part explains the role

that cultural Islam plays in keeping women confined to the margins of the body politic.

A subset of imagining the nation is imagining the women of the nation since they are

the symbolic carriers of its culture. Yuval-Davis shows, via Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983),

how “cultural traditions and (re)invention of traditions … are often used as ways of

legitimising the control and oppression of women” (Yuval-Davis 46). Implicit in this

statement is the work of the perpetuation of official discourses of the nation. State and

patriarchal forces are complicit in inscribing women in certain ways which are necessarily

discontinuous from the social reality of women. This produces another fissure in the

“seamless” narrative of the nation; the real lives of women are a subset of cultural

temporality that render the position of women “ambivalent” within the collectivity. Women

can thus be members of the “imagined community” who “might share the myth of common

origin of „the community‟” but do not share “important hegemonic value systems with the

majority of the population in sexual, religious and other matters” (Yuval-Davis 71). This

condition can afford them a position from which to contest “the traditional authority of …

national objects of knowledge” and can contribute to studying the nation through a narrative

address that questions the “„totalization‟ of national culture” (Bhabha 3).

The subject of this essay is therefore the work of Pakistani women writers. I am

interested in exploring the counter narratives they offer to the master narratives of the

3 ‘Asma Barlas‟s book Believing Women’ in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an is an

excellent exploration of these issues.

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Pakistani nation. I have chosen four novels, Kamila Shamsie‟s Kartography (2002), Maniza

Naqvi‟s Mass Transit (1998), Qaisra Shahraz‟s The Holy Woman (2002) and Feryal Ali Gauhar‟s

The Scent of Wet Earth in August (2002) because they represent a sufficiently wide spectrum of

women‟s writing. All recently published, they offer a contemporary perspective on Pakistan.

All four books have in common strong female protagonists, young women born and brought

up in Pakistan. It is significant to mention this because Shamsie, Naqvi and Shahraz all reside

and work outside Pakistan, in Massachusetts, Washington and London respectively. I treat

their novels as a negotiation of the “large and liminal image of the nation … [that] is a

particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of

it and the lives of those who live it” (Bhabha 1).

Kartography is Kamila Shamsie‟s third novel, and like the previous two is set in the

metropolitan centre of Karachi. As the title suggests, the chief metaphor of the novel

concerns maps and location. Raheen, the protagonist and narrator, has to work through her

relationships with her soul mate Karim and her father Zafar against the backdrop of Karachi.

The city symbolises many things for Raheen, but most importantly her identity; we

encounter her first as a thirteen year old and through the course of the novel follow her

growth into adulthood against the changes in the city.

Raheen and Karim are separated when Karim‟s father moves his family to London

because of the increasing violence in Karachi. This separation sets in motion Karim‟s

obsession with mapmaking in an effort to gain control over his shifting world. Raheen, who

remains in Karachi, must emerge from her partially insulated world into the real Karachi that

Karim is trying to map from London. While Karim tries to deal with his “exile” from the

Karachi he loves so much, Raheen finds she has to come to terms with its history in order to

understand her own emerging identity. In this sense Kartography is preoccupied with spatial

and temporal themes. Kartography also examines partition from India in 1947 and the War of

1971, when Pakistan was partitioned again. Shamsie accomplishes this by working the

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narrative in two threads of time, the present and 1971, when Bangladesh separated from

Pakistan after a bloody civil war. Raheen‟s father, Zafar, was engaged to Karim‟s mother,

Maheen, in 1971. But because Maheen is Bengali and anti-Bengali sentiment peaked during

1970-71, Zafar decided not to marry her. Kartography, then, is also an exploration of how

Raheen and Karim must come to terms with the events of 1971 as its outcomes affect their

lives in the present. Their love story is set against the backdrop of the history of the nation.

Mass Transit is also set in Karachi but not the same Karachi of Kartography. As its

overarching metaphor suggests, Karachi is a city of mass transit, a metropolis of movement,

arrivals and departures, home and belonging. Safina, a young development specialist,

returns to Karachi after living in the US for a long time. The novel is about her negotiations

with the condition of exile and the impossibility of return to the homeland. Like Raheen in

Kartography, Safina faces and ultimately fails to overcome the challenge that marks the

tension between individual and society. Mass Transit, like Kartography, grapples with

narrating the elusive character of the city and in doing so resolves little of the contradictions

inherent in its structures but manages to glimpse them. Class conflict, ethnic violence, and

political agitation are just some of the facets of city life that play out in Naqvi‟s narrative.

The third novel, The Holy Woman, is a complete departure from Kartography and Mass

Transit. It is Qaisra Shahraz‟s debut novel and has since been followed up by Typhoon

released this year. While the other three novels I have chosen for this essay are more

postmodern in form, The Holy Woman is a romance novel. It is also the only novel of the three

that is set mostly against a rural backdrop in the interior of the southern-most province of

Sindh. Shahraz has taken the plot of a conventional romance and has used draconian

“Islamic” traditions to create its conflict and crisis. Its heroine, Zarri Bano, is the eldest

daughter of a wealthy landlord, Habib, who forces her to marry the Qur‟an and become a

shahzadi ibadat to keep the land in the family when his son and heir dies.

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Because The Holy Woman is a romance novel it contains a critique of rural patriarchal

traditions that draw much of their power from religious rhetoric. This critique is embedded

in the “tussle between modernity and tradition in a feudal family” (Newsline December 2001)

and thus highlights the dilemma of the nation at large. It draws on notions of honour or izzat,

the proper or acceptable modes of behaviour for women, and plays these against the

conflicting desires of Zarri Bano and her suitor Sikander.

The Scent of Wet Earth in August is the most bleak of the four novels and is set in the

near slum neighbourhood of Kucha Miran Shah, the red light district of the Shahi Mohalla of

Lahore that has seen better days. The Scent of Wet Earth in August, in contrast to The Holy

Woman, is an aborted love story that takes place between a young girl called Fatima, the mute

daughter of a prostitute, and a shy young apprentice priest, Mohammed Shabbir.

It is also set apart from the other three novels because Gauhar has constructed the

novel around and drawn its details from the shadowy margins of society. The Scent of Wet

Earth in August examines the counter-family instead of the traditional family unit. All its

characters, the poor, priests, prostitutes and hermaphrodites, are people who are usually

denied a complete existence in mainstream society. While the plot is a simple telling of the

accidental way Fatima and Mohammed Shabbir come together, the novel‟s strength lies in its

portrayal of the lives of the most marginalised in society. Its critique of society and its

suffocating norms lies in the richness of Gauhar‟s metaphor and description.

These novels are, in a way, a reaction to and hence product of the persistent

normalising pressure of official hegemonic discourses. They challenge the monolithic

moulds of state-imposed identities and speak back to the dominant discourse. They not only

narrate the patches and scraps of the quotidian, but also present Pakistan from the

perspective of the marginalised, which means they include both the view from the centre,

which they critique, and a view from the periphery. This is not to suggest that any novel

written by any Pakistani woman will necessarily offer a critique of the nation. However, it is

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important to recognise that this sudden recent influx of writing by women, who are

well-educated but too young to have witnessed Partition, might be part of an emerging

trend. The problems that Pakistan faces today are so complex and have such far-reaching

repercussions that narratives must find a way of addressing their effect on the nation. As I

will show, three of these four Pakistani women writers are not necessarily interested in

portraying a particular unified image of their nation. Their narratives grapple with problems

of the nation which are reflected in the form of their novels. During comments on this

phenomenon in terms of the fading away of the realist style. He argues that since the

founding of the modern state “literature has operated in different social spaces than

nationalism, employing different signifying practices” where nationalism is defined as a

“battery of discursive and representational practices which define, legitimate, or valorise a

specific nation-state or individuals as members of a nation-state” (During 138).

None of the four novels that are the subject of this essay have so blatant an agenda.

Kartography insists on taking apart the past, uncovering the crimes of ordinary Pakistanis

who became monsters during the fever of 1971. Mass Transit speaks of the way the

nation-state grows unfamiliar and distant to its own kind. It is not about the romantic figure

of the exile, but rather the easily despised figure of the woman who chooses to leave because

she could not assimilate or was rejected by her own society because she is tainted by the

West. The Scent of Wet Earth in August rejects mainstream society to discover those who have

been forgotten by it. With the exception of The Holy Woman none of these novels valorise the

nation or its members. They are, as During suggests, engaged with a different social space,

the ambivalent one which Bhabha described, where the interstices between the performative

and the pedagogical exist. Taking this space as my cue I have organised my essay around

these novelists‟ overarching concerns: women and nation, city and nation and violence and

nation.

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Chapter Two

Women and Nation

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“Alongside our land, our wives and daughters, our izzat – our honour – is the most precious thing in our lives. We never ever compromise on the issue of our women and our izzat! No matter what age we live in; no matter what the world outside dictates; no matter what evil lies outside our door.”

(The Holy Woman 37)

“The Land” is the physical embodiment and requisite of the nation, and in Pakistan‟s case it

was land hard won from the British and the Hindus. Intrinsically important to the formation

and sustenance of the nation is the maintenance of what Edward Said calls the “hierarchy of

family, property and nation” (Said 94). These three constructs form the basis of the

framework for Shahraz‟s The Holy Woman and Gauhar‟s The Scent of Wet Earth in August. Both

novels are fundamentally involved with geographical and symbolic location: in The Holy

Woman it is quite literally the land owned in the rural village of Chiragpur in the interior of

the province of Sindh and in The Scent of Wet Earth in August it is place as in the suffocating

and decrepit neighbourhood of Kucha Miran Shah in Lahore‟s Shahi Mohalla.

The Holy Woman is a conventional romance novel whose conflict is centred on the

land. It follows a familiar structure: the heroine, Zarri Bano, the daughter of the wealthy

landowner Habib, and the hero, Sikander, fall in love at first sight, there are seemingly

insurmountable obstacles to their union, and then, through external and internal

transformations, these obstacles are removed so that they can rightfully be brought together.

On the other hand, The Scent of Wet Earth in August does not even pretend to try to bring total

closure to the plot. As an anti-romance it is diametrically opposed to The Holy Woman in more

ways than one. Its “heroine” or protagonist is the mute Fatima, the daughter of a prostitute

(unlike Zarri Bano, the beautiful and educated daughter of a wealthy landowner) and its hero

Mohammed Shabbir is a struggling apprentice priest, a far cry from the suave and handsome

Sikander. The Holy Woman is set in the vast expanse of rural Sindh, with fields and large

palatial villas, while The Scent of Wet Earth in August is set in a slum-like inner city

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neighbourhood of Lahore. The Scent of Wet Earth in August is an impossible romance novel; its

hero and heroine fall in love by fluke and mostly out of desperation, they consummate their

love within the plot, but are not able to legitimise their union even though an illegitimate

child is its outcome. All the conventional plot devices are discarded or subverted in this

novel.

As we have seen, the land is of paramount importance in The Holy Woman. For Habib,

Zarri Bano‟s father, the land is “accumulated and paid for by the sweat and toil of [his]

forefathers, down the centuries by different generations” (Holy Woman 66). He is a Sindhi

wadera or landowner, and as we can see from his father‟s words quoted at the beginning of

this section, there is an intimate connection between land, women and honour or legacy. But

the continuation of the legacy of Habib‟s lands and heritage threatens to be severely

disrupted when his heir and only son, Jafar, dies. This crisis of inheritance forms the crux of

the novel and provides the romance plot with its conflict. Habib and his father, Siraj Din,

resurrect an ancient tradition when they decide that Zarri Bano is to inherit their land by

becoming a shahzadi ibadat (princess of worship) or holy woman. This would automatically

prevent her from marrying and ensure that the land would remain in the family.4 As a holy

woman, Zarri Bano would take the veil and devote her life to studying the Qur‟an. This news

comes as a blow to Zarri Bano who has just met and fallen in love with Sikander who wants

to marry her.

When Zarri Bano begs Habib not to force her to become a shahzadi ibadat because she

wants to marry Sikander and lead a “normal life”, he silences her by misinterpreting this

desire as wanton sexuality, a subject usually taboo between fathers and daughters in

Pakistan: “What you are trying to say is that you want a man in your life” (Holy Woman 85).

Habib takes advantage of Zarri Bano‟s inability to articulate her sexuality by “cheapen[ing]

4 Some landowning families solve this dilemma by marrying their daughters within the family or within the clan.

This practice has its own disadvantages however.

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and degrad[ing] marriage and what it stood for, insulting both her and the essence of her

womanhood, by his underlying insinuation that what she really craved was a man‟s presence

in her life” (Holy Woman 86). Zarri Bano is so ashamed and mortified that she capitulates to

her father‟s dictate and takes the veil.

This demonstrates, amongst other things, how those who hold dominant or

hegemonic positions of power, such as Habib and Siraj Din, work to maintain their positions

in the collective. In The Holy Woman, the men exercise control over their land and women by

(ab)using ancient tradition and religion. Women are constructed as “authentic voices” who

are perceived as “the true representatives” of the “fixed, essential and unitary constructs of

cultures, identities and groupings” (Yuval-Davis 45). Zarri Bano is posited as the “authentic

voice” in this case and must carry the “burden of representation” since she is “constructed as

the symbolic [bearer] of the collectivity‟s identity and honour, both personally and

collectively” (Yuval-Davis 45).

When Sikander hears of this news he storms into her house and asks why she has

broken off their engagement. We can see how far Zarri Bano has interpellated the patriarchal

value system when she stands her ground:

“Sikander Sahib … I am still a microcosm of my clan, a daughter of a wealthy and a very powerful zemindar. 5 Our family, behaviour, social etiquette is dictated by a code of ethics and customs particular to my clan – that you, as an outsider from another social group, cannot begin to understand. I am a part of that whole and that is where I belong. I cannot cut myself off for you from that whole, it is not that simple!” (Holy Woman 126)

Essentialised and fixed hegemonic identities are consistently reinforced by those in power to

keep women in the disenfranchised margins of the nation. In Zarri Bano‟s case the injunction

against her marriage prevents her from ever having children and thus her father and

5 Zemindar or landowner.

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grandfather have controlled her body and reproductive capabilities and removed her choice

in these matters.

Zarri Bano assumes her new role and the jilted Sikander marries her younger sister

Ruby out of revenge, and their son Haris is born soon after. Habib comes to regret the

decision that has destroyed his family; he loses Zarri Bano and his wife, Shahzada, who feel

nothing but loathing for him. He and Ruby die five years later in a stampede while the family

is on Hajj or pilgrimage in Mecca. Their deaths allow Shahraz to conveniently dispose of the

two hindrances to the union of the lovers; with Ruby dead Sikander is free to marry Zarri

Bano, and with Habib dead the symbol of patriarchal oppression no longer hangs over the

daughter. Soon after their deaths Sikander asks Zarri Bano to marry him for Haris‟s sake but

she refuses: “Now it suits everybody [that we should marry]. I am asked to fall in with

everyone‟s wishes … Five years ago, my life was turned upside down. I surrendered then”

(Holy Woman 368). But Zarri Bano eventually gives in when she feels “a new weight of

responsibility falling on her shoulders” (Holy Woman 385) for the orphaned Haris. She agrees

to marry Sikander on the condition that she is not expected to perform any conjugal duties.

Thus, the heroine capitulates to the patriarchy once again. The first time it was to ensure the

continuation of the patriarchal lineage in the form of the land and, the second time it is to

assure the upkeep of the same, Sikander‟s lineage, in the form of Haris, his son, who

embodies the law of progeniture.

The message is clear: Even an educated woman like Zarri Bano will always decide to

do what is best for the family unit. The romance novel is “a simple recapitulation and

recommendation of patriarchy and its constituent social practices and ideologies” (Radway

210). Zarri Bano does voice her opposition to patriarchal pressure, but this resistance is only

vocalised so that it can be assimilated or rewritten in agreement with the discourse it protests

against and subsequently discarded. Shahraz comes up with some fantastic obstacles to the

union of the lovers but manages to find a way to circumvent them and make the logic of her

19

plot seem palatable and wholly acceptable. As Radway points out, the romance novel

provides an account “of a woman‟s journey to female personhood as that particular psychic

configuration is constructed and realized within patriarchal culture” (Radway 138, original

emphasis). Romance novels are manifestations of a utopian and conservative vision of

women in society, and the discourse itself “actively insists on the desirability, naturalness,

and benefits of [a woman‟s] role by portraying it not as the imposed necessity that it is but as

a freely designed, personally controlled individual choice” (Radway 208).

Radway has pointed out that romance novels attempt to explain processes commonly

experienced by many women within structures of domination. Since they are specifically

aimed at women readers they assume a horizontal sisterhood, which I take as a subset of

Anderson‟s “horizontal comradeship” which helps conceive the nation as an imagined

community “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail”

(Anderson 16). Zarri Bano shows some understanding of the women‟s collective when she

says that she had mistakenly convinced herself “that as an educated, urban, upper-class

woman, [s]he was different from those „poor‟ women, lower down the strata of our society,

who had to do as they were told” (Holy Woman 171).

Shahraz‟s neat closure in the form of the union of the lovers, despite seemingly

insurmountable obstacles, makes good use of the wish fulfilment of romance. Romance

masks or makes palatable the discourses that serve to oppress women and keep them

marginalised. The core issue is the mythic connection men feel with their land; the land is

their birthright and in turn, through the law of progeniture, they must ensure the

continuation of that legacy. The nation‟s survival is posited on the protection of the land.

However, the law of progeniture can only be enforced through the control of the biological

reproducers of the nation, women. In addition to this, in a nation like Pakistan, founded on

Islamic principles, religion can be used to sanction the protection of the land. One

20

manifestation of this is the invention of the shahzadi ibadat tradition, which persists till today

in many parts of rural Pakistan.

When Zarri Bano‟s mother, Shahzada, protests her husband‟s decision to make Zarri

Bano a holy woman, she expresses the heart of the matter: “This is not the Emperor Akbar‟s

time. It is the twentieth century – it cannot happen” (Holy Woman 67). The Holy Woman

examines many themes relevant to Pakistan‟s nationhood but when Shahraz writes about the

resurrection of an ancient tradition in this day and age she is capturing the essence of the

nation‟s dilemma; the tussle between modernity and feudalism that has plagued it for a long

time. In fact, the story of The Holy Woman so closely mirrors the state of affairs in Pakistan in

this sense that it can serve as an allegory for the nation.

Pakistan was placed under martial law between 1977 and 1988 by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq,

who believed he was the “overseer of Pakistan‟s Islamic destiny” (Talbot 209) and that

Islamicisation was the key to the country‟s “three-decade-long search for stability and

national unity” (Talbot 210). As part of this Islamicisation drive, the Hudood ordinances

introduced Islamic punishments laid down in the Qur‟an and Sunnah based on the Law of

Evidence for sexual crimes that was enacted by Zia‟s Presidential Ordinance in 1984.

According to these laws, women who had been raped could be punished by flogging for

adultery (zina) while their assailants could go unconvicted. The dictatorship ended in 1988

when Zia was killed while on duty when his plane was blown up.

I contend that The Holy Woman is an allegory for the nation because Habib is in some

ways remarkably similar to Gen. Zia. Both men exploit their position of patriarchal power by

drawing on ancient Islamic customs to curtail the rights of women. Both men die under

circumstances that in popular belief accord them martyrdom (Zia while on duty and Habib

on pilgrimage) that absolves any injustices they may be guilty of.

Jonathan Culler has commented on how national narratives have plots that are

especially pertinent to the imagining of a nation insofar as they “symbolically represent the

21

resolution of national differences” (Culler 24). It certainly appears that The Holy Woman

desperately tries to achieve this in a narrative that brings together the rhetoric of the land and

hegemonic discourse through the sanctioning or wish fulfilment of a romance plot. As a

model for the “real” Pakistani woman, Zarri Bano cannot admit having a sexual persona in

marriage, which is achieved by presenting her as concerned with religious purity. The ideal

romance symbolically represents or confirms “the inevitability and desirability of the entire

institutional structure within which those needs are created and addressed” (Radway 138).

The Scent of Wet Earth in August, however, radically disavows any interaction with the

dominant paradigm. Its strength lies not so much in its uncomplicated plot line, but in its

evocative portrayal of life in a slum set in an inner city neighbourhood. Narrating the nation

in terms of place takes on different meaning in this novel; this background is very different

from the rolling fields of The Holy Woman, there are no feudal landlords exercising control

over the population, the people who live in Kucha Miran Shah all lead equally desperate

lives and the only thing that holds them together as a collective is the place they live in.

Gauhar is unapologetic in her portrayal of those who live “at the edge of existence” (Wet

Earth 179). The city becomes the cesspool of degradation in the novel, the place where

wholesome values are corroded by the grind of a daily struggle. Lahore is the “dying city”

(Wet Earth 2), at its peak during the time of the Mughals but since spiralled into decrepitude.

Thus we encounter the disjunctive narrative of the nation in this novel through the grounded

realities of the social life of Kucha Miran Shah, realities which are not accorded space in

dominant national narratives but constitute the daily life of millions of its citizens.

Fatima was rendered mute at a young age when a jealous lover attacked her mother‟s

face with acid when she was carrying her baby. Fatima‟s world is therefore a silent one. Since

she would not make a good prostitute as a mute girl, her mother, a prostitute called Mumtaz

Bano, gives her up to Shamshad Bai, Raunaq Jehan and Pyaari Begum, three prostitutes who

live in the crumbling Begum Haveli right opposite Masjid-e-Mahbubia. Fatima lives with

22

these three mothers and her life consists only of cooking, cleaning and running errands for

them.

Almost all the characters in this novel carry some mark of their harsh living

conditions. Gogi, the gentle hermaphrodite, had to stop earning a living through prostitution

and start teaching dancing after he was brutally raped and sodomized with a bottle. Parveen

Nak-kati, who just sits in the sun all day long and probes into every one else‟s affairs, had her

nose cut off by her husband. Pinky is being trained by Mumtaz Bano to be sold to someone in

the Arabian Gulf as a prostitute. Farzana, Fatima‟s elder sister, runs off with her taxi driver

boyfriend to escape her mother‟s ploy to sell her to a stranger in the Gulf. Aatishbaz Aaliya is

a washed up circus act. She had to join the circus when the Pakistani soldier who married her

in Iraq dumped her in Clifton after stealing her passport and money. Naeem, a young orphan

who was taken in to work in the mosque by Moulvi Basharat, who runs Masjid-i-Mahbubia,

dies from malnutrition and we suspect he was being sexually abused by the priest. They

represent an odd, grotesque set, the dispossessed and marginalised of society, or “alternative

constituencies of peoples” (Bhabha 3).

These people live in Bazaar Sheikhupurian that is famous for two things: “the women

who strung themselves out along the carved wooden balconies, and the hand-crafted leather

jootis which would be displayed in the harsh light of 200-watt bulbs … [p]assing men

assessed the shoes as they did the women - there was enough on display to please all ages

and all types” (Wet Earth 10). As this description shows, Gauhar does not romanticise any

aspect of the lives of the prostitutes or the place they live in. Most of her critique is couched in

strongly subversive metaphors that bring together the holy and the profane. For instance

when Raunaq Jehan (who incidentally also wears dentures) is putting on lipstick she

picked out a tube with golden stripes and twisted it until the soft, maroon tongue resting inside emerged. As she held it to her pouting lips, the maroon tongue toppled off like the minaret of an ancient mosque.

23

„Berra gharak! The bloody thing‟s broken,‟ she said. (Wet Earth 20)6

This is a barely disguised jibe at Islam and its uselessness or redundancy in a neighbourhood

like Kucha Miran Shah where it has been unable to offer any solace to its inhabitants.

Gauhar‟s message is that religion has been corrupted and perverted by those who stake

themselves out as its gatekeepers. It now lies in the hands of neighbourhood ruffians like

Bobby and Billoo who ogle over pornographic pictures of women with “brassiered breasts

like the domes of Wazir Khan‟s mosque” (Wet Earth 41). When Mohammed Shabbir and

Fatima finally consummate their love it is in the backroom of Darbar Qasim Shah, a shrine,

which was the only place Mohammed Shabbir knew which could give them some privacy.

This is how Gauhar launches her scathing critique of the official or hegemonic

projection of Islam, which she achieves through a portrayal of what Bhabha calls a much

more transitional social reality. Islam is supposed to bring together all members of society as

equals and was the founding ideology of the nation, but as we see here, it has done little to

serve the dispossessed of this society.

When Fatima and Mohammed Shabbir fall in love, Gauhar sends the message that

even priests are capable of having affairs with prostitutes (or at least their daughters). This

critique achieves further depth when we discover that not only is Moulvi Basharat a

paedophile, but that he is notorious in the rest of the neighbourhood, which he exhorts to

pray five times a day. The lecherous Dilawar, who peddles an all-for-two-rupees cart in front

of the mosque, sneers at Mohammed Shabbir‟s piety: “„Everything in this bazaar is cheap‟

women, young girls and bearded boys like you, you bloody gaandu’7 … Gaandu … serving Allah

during the day and that bacha-baaz8 Basharat at night” (Wet Earth 31). We learn that even

6 „Berra gharak‟ or „damn it‟.

7 „Gaandu‟, a swear word that roughly translates as „faggot‟.

8 „Bacha-baaz‟ or „child molester‟, someone who is „fond‟ of children.

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Mohammed Shabbir, who was taken in by Moulvi Basharat when he was 11 years old, was

sexually abused by him for a long time.

Gauhar thus reveals a world where no form of traditional, stable social structure can

be found. While The Holy Woman was centred on the traditional family unit, The Scent of Wet

Earth in August barely holds together a counter-family: Fatima‟s biological mother gives her

up and she is raised by three other prostitutes. The only two things that bind together the

community are the crumbling, sewer-clogged neighbourhood and some form of self-interest

that spurs survival; the wretched people of the neighbourhood need priests to assure them of

hope and the priests need people to assure them of reason for their life.

Amidst all this bleakness, when Fatima and Mohammed Shabbir fall in love we begin

to hope that the message of the novel is that love can flourish even in such a slum and we

begin to champion their union. Love would be their escape from an existence that scrapes

around for survival. But Gauhar is not interested in achieving neat closure for the lives of

those who live in Kucha Miran Shah. Real life in places like Bazaar Sheikhupurian presents

more of a dystopia. Shortly after Fatima and Mohammed Shabbir sleep together Fatima is

locked up when Raunaq Jehan and Shamshad Bai suspect she has aided her sister‟s

elopement. When they discover she is pregnant Raunaq Jehan attempts a home abortion with

strips of bamboo that she has poisoned with spider webs. Fatima doesn‟t even whimper

when Raunaq Jehan attacks her body “[a]s if she knew that this was just punishment for

having loved and dared and desired” (Wet Earth 212). Loving and desiring are a luxury in a

place like Kucha Miran Shah. Fortunately the abortion is unsuccessful and the women

speculate what is to be done when the baby is born. Shamshad hopes that it is a girl: “[t]here

was always a possibility that Allah could turn this whole business around and bless them

with a girl” (Wet Earth 221). These values could hardly be further from those we encounter in

The Holy Woman where a son is a man‟s most precious possession. Gauhar presents a

completely different social reality, one in which daughters are valued instead of sons.

25

Shamshad hopes for a daughter for Fatima, “[a] precious girl child who would grow up into

a sought after women in this bazaar, and who would care for them and for her stricken

mother” (Wet Earth 212).

Miraculously the child survives but when it is born Raunaq Jehan takes the baby boy

while Fatima is still asleep and leaves it at the door of the mosque. When the baby is

discovered a mob accuses Basharat of unislamic behaviour and he is so enraged at the

accusations that he orders the unsuspecting Mohammed Shabbir to kill the screaming baby

with a brick. The mob and Basharat are just about to do so when Fatima rushes in and saves

her child. It is only when Mohammed Shabbir sees her wildly claw the baby out of Basharat‟s

hands that he realises that the baby is their child. He stumbles away with the brick in his

hand screaming that the baby is his. Bobby and Billoo shake their heads: “Moulvi paagal ho

gaya hai, he‟s lost his mind, let him be” (Wet Earth 281).

Mohammed Shabbir‟s inability to claim his own child and marry or legitimise his

union with Fatima shows how weak he is; he becomes a symbol for the impotence of Islam in

being unable to alleviate the misery of such people. Even Fatima, who tries to rise above the

filth by seeking love, is denied the socially sanctioned protection of marriage that would have

at least granted her “womanhood”. The tragic ending, the birth of their illegitimate child and

their separation, leaves Fatima and Shabbir worse off than they were before they fell in love.

Gauhar‟s message, it seems, is that love is meaningless in places like Kucha Miran Shah

where the harshness of reality cannot be ameliorated through fantasy and romance.

From these studies of romance, women and the nation, I would now like to turn to a

slightly different version of location. In the next section I will examine Kartography and Mass

Transit, novels preoccupied with place in terms of the city of Karachi.

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Chapter Three

City and Nation

“No, I don‟t want your nihari and your lassi, and I don‟t want to hear your pseudo Karachi old shehr shit routine…spare me the descriptions.”

(Mass Transit 49)9

It is significant that both Shamsie and Naqvi have chosen to centre their narratives on

Karachi; it is the largest city in Pakistan with a population of approximately fifteen million

people.10 It was the oldest municipality in undivided India, made the capital of the province

of Sindh in 1937 and the capital of the new nation from 1948 to 1967, when it was replaced by

Islamabad, whose symbolic name and geographical location in the Punjab embody the

ideology of a nation unified by ancestral land and shared religion. Karachi is home to the

most diverse ethnic and religious cross-section of society, which has often been the cause of

massive civil unrest and violence. These conditions were exacerbated in the late 1980s, which

is the timeframe for Kartography and Mass Transit, when “[t]he breakdown in Karachi [was]

most importantly, a national tragedy, not solely a provincial mess” (Noman 176). Karachi,

therefore, has almost always been widely regarded as a microcosm of the nation, which

explains why Shamsie and Naqvi have chosen to narrate the nation through the City.

Throughout their two novels the narrative focus shifts between the two protagonists and the

City in order to enact a “discursive reconfiguration of the relationship between Self and

Nation” (Rege 342-76). The identities of the protagonists are transformed through their

strong reactions to their environment and the pressures it exerts on them. And as I shall

show, the response both protagonists have to the city are startlingly similar.

9 Nihari is a rich curry and lassi is a yoghurt drink. Shehr means city.

10 Conducting a census has always posed a problem due to the flow of refugees through Karachi.

27

Nevertheless, Mass Transit is markedly different from Kartography in a few respects: its

narrative is much more fractured, and while it is mostly narrated from the protagonist‟s point

of view, “the tale is also crisscrossed, in very postmodern fashion, by the clashing points of

view of various other characters” (Afzal-Khan 828). The protagonist of Mass Transit, Dr.

Safina Ali, “a reliable, soft-spoken Asian woman, a development specialist who the donor

agencies preferred” (Mass Transit 18), returns to Karachi after living in the US for a long time,

expecting to be able to pick up where she left off. However, this does not prove an easy task

and Naqvi highlights the dissonance between the individual and the City through her

fractured narrative. The prologue, for instance, appears to be in the voice of the City

interwoven with Safina‟s mother‟s embittered and bewildered response to upper-class

excesses, which come as a repressed response to society after her husband‟s death in jail. The

first chapter is taken over by excerpts of the letters that Safina‟s cousin, Kamran, would send

her from Karachi. These letters helped keep her “involved and enthralled with a place from

which she had removed herself years ago” (Mass Transit 1).

The novel opens with Safina‟s grandmother‟s funeral that brings her back to Karachi,

which she usually only ever visits for the month of Muharram or for weddings. The novel is

named Mass Transit because it works as a metaphor for travel, which brings people together

or takes them away from each other. “The trouble with this town,” Safina muses to herself at

one point, is “its transit system. Everyone was in a compartment … everyone remained

isolated” (Mass Transit 147). It is this sense of isolation and alienation that lies at the heart of

Safina‟s relation to the metropolis, and is the feeling she tries to overcome throughout the

course of the novel. At one point Safina‟s mother says that “[s]ubways lull the passengers

into believing that they live in integration” (Mass Transit 71).

When Safina returns for her grandmother‟s funeral she is still fascinated with Karachi.

On previous trips she used to take photographs of the city and sell them to international

magazines. Even though she lived in Washington and was mostly absent from Karachi, “it

28

was never so, for a moment, from her [because] [s]he gathered enough memories and

photographs on each successive visit to recreate it and live amongst it thousands of miles

away” (Mass Transit 1). But the photographs can only provide her with frozen,

two-dimensional snap-shots of life in the city. They can hardly do justice to the day-to-day

reality which can only perhaps be known if actually experienced. The photographs allow

Safina to project whatever perceptions she wants, onto her image of Karachi, which would

not have been possible if she had come face to face with it. Thus, Karachi is a distant,

idealised place for Safina, who is not aware of its cultural temporality at all.

Safina‟s grandmother, Begum Selma Ali, has bequeathed the family house to Safina

and Kamran, her cousin, in equal proportions. When Safina comes back for the funeral she

decides she wants to stay in Karachi, renovate the house and make her life there. Kamran,

who has been living in Karachi all along, begs her to sell her portion of the house so he can

sell his and make a life for himself elsewhere, because Karachi “terrifies” him; as he explains

to her: “I live in its reality, and I want to escape” (Mass Transit 67).

Safina refuses to sell the house and makes attempts to reassimilate into society. But

this will prove more difficult than she imagined. Even Begum Selma Ali‟s house represents a

rebuke: “Safina was oblivious to the decay [of the house], her history here enveloped her,

creating for her the safe cocoon which insulated her from the ugly reality” (Mass Transit 38,

my emphasis). Her grandmother‟s house is one of the many homes that hastily departing

Hindu merchants and families had abandoned for India at the time of Partition, and were

used to house the millions of Muslims who flowed over the border to Karachi. From the

outside, the house looks like a haveli or grand mansion, but from the inside it is a tenement,

divided into portions for four families.

Nonetheless, Safina is full of nostalgia for the romanticised past of the house as it was

when her grandmother was alive. She decides to renovate her grandmother‟s cherished gole

kamra (round drawing room) with “the crystal Viennese chandelier”, “thick, cream-coloured

29

raw silk drapes”, “[p]eriod furniture” and silver snuff boxes (Mass Transit 25) where

countless dinner parties were held. Safina is enamoured of its mosaic tiled floor, which she

cleans herself on her hands and knees. Its design is a metaphor for the new existence she is

trying to master, pieces that will make a whole.

Renovating her portion of the old house becomes one pet project and when she meets

Dr. Taufeeq, one of Kamran‟s acquaintances, who runs a clinic in a slum area, she decides

that she will go and work there. She “spend[s] time explaining to [the women who come to

the clinic] about basic hygiene, nutrition, [and] cleanliness” (Mass Transit 145). This project,

like the house‟s renovation, is an attempt to “authenticate her existence” (Afzal-Khan 828) in

Karachi, the city she must get to know again.

Several things happen which ultimately lead to Safina‟s breakdown. They all

essentially represent her rude reckoning with the cultural temporality of Karachi. Safina is

devastated when Kamran points out the epistemic violence she enacts when she takes

pictures of people in the city without asking their permission: “Did you take a close look at

those eyes? This man seems ready to tear you apart” (Mass Transit 113), he says, pointing to

one photograph. This is very similar to the admonishment she gets from Dr. Taufeeq, who

also forces her to come face to face with her blindness to what is around her:

“[The women at the clinic] tolerate you because you are a guest here. But your words are unacceptable. How do you think it looks to them when you speak of spacing children? Did you even register it in your mind when they asked you … if you were married? … What gives you the right to lecture on hygiene? Do you know what it means not to have gutters and nallies and sewers?” (Mass Transit 162)

The last incident that finally causes Safina to break down is a fire in the lower portion

of her house. The old man who lived there boarded up his portion of the house because he

becomes paranoid that his young wife, Shaheen, is having an affair with someone from the

30

upstairs portion of the house. When Shaheen‟s gas stove explodes she is therefore trapped

inside and get burned so badly that she dies shortly after. Just before she dies she grips

Safina‟s arm and asks her: “[W]hy didn‟t you come to find out about me when the windows

disappeared? … You know so much, didn‟t you wonder what happened to me?” (Mass

Transit 165).

And thus the novel that opens with a funeral ends with a funeral. Safina packs her

bags and takes her mother back to Washington after selling her portion of the house. Her

decision is propelled by her sense of guilt that she is in some way complicit in Shaheen‟s

death. Because she could not see beyond the Karachi that she wanted to see, her blinkered

vision made it possible for her to criminally ignore the lives of those around her. After

Shaheen‟s death Safina rapidly develops an aversion to the city and cannot help but feel

suffocated when she stands in the courtyard. She expresses her panic and withdrawal: “It‟s

too chaotic for me here, I‟ve lost my balance … I need to get away” (Mass Transit 184). We are

reminded at this point of the chilling end of the prologue when the City says to her: “And so,

Safina, there is no redemption, no redressal, there is no way back” (Mass Transit xiv).

Mass Transit ends bleakly as Safina has not been able to come to terms with the city or

live with its contradictions. This was mostly the result of the nostalgic and romantic way way

she perceived Karachi, a view which clashed with the actual reality of the city. The two views

are so vastly different that Safina could not find a way to reconcile herself to them. She

recognises her failure to do justice to the actual character of the city but is unable to combat

her guilt and shame for having such a skewed vision. Naqvi emphasises that the realities of

Karachi can only be ignored at a heavy cost.

The same disparity runs through the narrative of Kartography, which also explores a

young woman‟s relationship with the City. As its title suggests, maps and mapmaking

provide the predominant symbol in Kartography, which charts the lives of Raheen and Karim

against the backdrop of Karachi. The metaphor of mapping organises the novel; cartography

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is more than just a means to navigate a city, it comes to represent Raheen and Karim‟s

profound (mis)understanding of Karachi. Insofar as they live there, with fifteen million other

people, they know the city as a unit; from the city arises the “progressive metaphor of

modern social cohesion” (Bhabha 294), out of many one. But even though Raheen and Karim

live protected lives in the posh neighbourhoods of Defence, they cannot help but

acknowledge the Janus-faced character of their city. Cracks begin to develop in their holistic

image of the city as Karachi defies any totalising definition. Raheen and Karim‟s privilege

does not allow them to shut out the poverty, ethnic strife, corruption and degradation that

sweep the city. At one point they are delighted that school is closed because of a curfew in

the city. When Raheen‟s father chastises them they hastily respond together in a jumble of

incomplete sentences that “it‟s not … [t]hat [they] want more people to die or anything …

[b]ut it wouldn‟t hurt if things remained … [t]ense … just long enough for exams to be

cancelled” (Kartography 5). This piece of dialogue comically expresses their simultaneous

awareness and self-interest.

Eventually the closest shave Raheen has with violence is when she and a friend, Zia,

are shot at while driving around at night. In abstract terms this scene shows “the distracting

presence of another temporality that disturbs the contemporaneity of the national present”

(Bhabha 295). The problem is that Raheen and Karim come to glimpse the cultural

temporality of Karachi, but they cannot “know” it until they experience it first hand, which is

unlikely to happen. The result is that their relationship with the world they live in is marked

by ambivalence; how can they say they love Karachi when they hate certain aspects of it that

make them deeply uncomfortable and trouble them?

Karim is the first to react to this ambivalence by turning to maps as his way of

venturing beyond an insulated elite existence; “[h]is desire to establish control over the

shifting world in which he does, and doesn‟t live increases his obsession with the certainties

of „mappings‟” (Kirkus Reviews 882). This newfound fascination is also an omen of his

32

imminent separation from Karachi and Raheen when his family emigrates to London.

Raheen also shares Karim‟s love and fascination for Karachi but she has a different reaction

to it. Her relationship with the city is marked more by ambivalence and conflicted emotion

than the urge for objectification and distance. While even she has had the same protected

upbringing as Karim, she experiences Karachi in a more sensory way, even if being so up

close to it makes it difficult for her to negotiate its contradictions. She maintains a link with it

through memory and experience:

I‟d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promised „Guaranteed no cockroach‟, and, yes, there‟d still be those bottles of creamy, flavoured milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani. (Kartography 111)

We see how Karachi‟s identity has left a mark on hers when she describes rain in Boston,

where she is at college, as “ricocheting off the ground with the speed of bullets from a

Kalashnikov” (Kartography 113).

The map metaphor is closely connected to the eventual romance that develops

between Raheen and Karim, which is inextricably bound up with Karachi. Their parents have

been friends for a long time (Raheen‟s father was engaged to Karim‟s mother at one point)

and the children have been inseparable since the crib. Thus when Karim develops an interest

in cartography, it becomes the first thing that he has not shared with Raheen, and it marks the

onset of their alienation from each other that is exacerbated by his departure for London. As

Raheen and her parents drive Karim and his parents to the airport to see them off, Raheen

says she desperately wants some reassurance from him that their friendship and love will not

disintegrate. But Karim is “too busy looking at streets” to pay attention to her, “whispering

street names … drawing a map of the route [they] were taking from his house to the airport,

his pen veering off course every time [they] braked” (Kartography 110). When he leaves she

33

loses “the ends of [her] sentences” and the “antidote to [her] loneliness” (Kartography 111).

Raheen and Karim are undisputably in love, but it is a love that “existed because it had

always existed, because it didn‟t know how not to exist … [but] wasn‟t going to be enough to

keep [them] together for anything longer than an idyllic afternoon” (Kartography 217). Their

romance doesn‟t quite reach resolution because they have grown so far apart, physically and

emotionally. They loved each other before they were fourteen, but that was also when they

did not have to contend with the way the city was changing around them.

While in “exile”, Karim battles his feelings towards Karachi through his uncle‟s

weekly supply of Dawn which has articles “detailing the dead” (Kartography 133); he locates

on his map of Karachi the places where people have died as a way of mourning their deaths.

Raheen has been writing him regularly in an attempt to keep their friendship alive, but when

he snips up her letters and sends them back as a collage she writes back furious:

Well, Mr. Sitting-in-London, aren‟t you just so humane! Those of us who still live here don‟t have the luxury of being compassionate from a distance. We go on with our lives because we like the façade of maintaining some kind of sanity. When we laugh, that‟s defiance. So don‟t you tell me about the graves you mark on that map. (Kartography 133)

Their physical separation is very hard for Raheen to bear; she feels that maps had “become a

symbol of everything that had gone wrong, so inexplicably, in [her] relationship with Karim”

(Kartography 179). Karim points out that, like the maps of Strabo and Eratosthenes, maps

mean for him a way of illustrating stories “about helping someone hear the heartbeat of a

place” (Kartography 181). They were his way of negotiating his exile from the city and people

he loves so much: “Do you know how hard your heart beats when you‟re lost?” (Kartography

181), he asks Raheen.

34

Raheen, however, is never really won over by Karim‟s desire to identify with Karachi

through cartography and it only makes her feel as though she is “locked in the four walls of

some elite members-only enclave” while he has a “bird‟s-eye view” of the city (Kartography

179). Karim‟s vision of the city is thus similar to Safina‟s. What Raheen is reacting to is the

frustration of “the near-impossible task of reconciling a received ethos with a changing

objective reality unsympathetic to its ambivalent stance toward modernity” (Pasha 35). When

she, Karim and Zia meet a car thief who tells them he has to resort to stealing to survive, she

remains silent because “[t]here was nothing [she] could say to [him] without it being

condescension or a lie” (Kartography 175) because of her privileged and protected life.

When Karim returns to Karachi after being away for eight years, a friend‟s father is

picked up by intelligence agencies at the instigation of the father of another friend. When the

reality of Karachi‟s corruption comes right back to his doorstep, Karim panics and takes the

next flight out: “I can‟t stay here. I don‟t understand this place. I don‟t want to” (Kartography

266). As Karim decides to leave he asks Raheen to come with him to live anywhere else. It is

the “desperation, the craziness. The stench from the newspapers” that he will not be able to

take any more (Kartography 296). But Raheen reminds him that he has shown her “that it‟s not

so simple to leave a city behind” (Kartography 297). Ironically, Karim‟s project has resulted in

his self-imposed exile and Raheen‟s “repatriation”. Raheen realises that Karachi was always

an abstraction for Karim who “lacked the heart to make it a reality” (Kartography 297).

In a moving section right at the end of the novel, Raheen writes Karim a letter in

which she tries to woo him back to Karachi. She shows how she has come to understand

Karachi as a “dual” city, one in which there are “no simple answers” (Kartography 331). This

section underscores the difference between the way Raheen and Karim perceive Karachi and

try to come to terms with it. Karim‟s maps struggled to give order and to view the city at

arm‟s length, but they excluded “the streets with no names”. But Raheen, who preferred to

experience Karachi first hand and to navigate it through memories, comes to understand that

35

her love for it was a “child‟s kind of love”, limited and selfish (Kartography 332). She has

learnt her lesson; she knows she must be brave enough about things that terrify her (violence,

poverty, the past) and “be intimate with [her] intimates” (Kartography 332). Shamsie does not

attempt to reconcile Raheen and Karim towards the end of the novel. We never know for sure

whether they come together or not. What we see instead is Raheen‟s first real reckoning with

violence.

At the end of the novel, Raheen and her friend Zia take the car thief‟s brother to a

government hospital because he has been shot. There has been so much violence in the city

that they overhear a doctor devastatingly remark that in order to deal with the shortage of

blood they will have to “[s]crape it off the walls of the operating theatre” (Kartography 327).

Raheen donates blood for a man who has been shot and because of her help the doctors say

he will survive. The man‟s mother meets Raheen and thanks her, but her gratitude is tinged

with despair. She says she thinks Raheen‟s blood has gone to waste because another bullet

will surely find its way to her son‟s heart because of the inescapable violence in the city.

However, if that happens, the mother says it will mean that Raheen‟s blood (in her son‟s

veins) “will be spilled on the streets of Karachi” (Kartography 328). This symbolic gesture thus

signals the resolution of Raheen‟s crisis; in giving blood she becomes identified with the

community of the city in both benevolence and violence. The only way Raheen can overcome

her ambivalence is by facing what she fears and has been protected from. Karim‟s inability to

do so is why he leaves; but when Raheen donates her blood in the very thick of violence she is

letting violence transform her self through its “experience of pain, passion, terror and … even

healing” (Mehta 377-379). Both alienation and violence infect and cleanse the individual and

the nation-state, and fracture and reform mythic imaginings of a unified “Pakistan” or

“Karachi”.

36

But alienation is not the only effect of violence explored in the novel. It figures

prominently in Raheen‟s growing sensitivity to Karachi, but as I shall show in the next

section it is also significant for the nation at large.

Chapter Four

Violence and Nation

“We have a right to Pakistan, and it is a right of blood, we gave blood for it.”

Altaf Hussain (b. 1953), founding leader of the Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (MQM)11

„Sindh mein hoga kaise guzara, adha hamara adha tumhara‟ „How can we co-exist in Sindh? Half is ours, half yours‟

Muhajir chant12

Altaf Hussain‟s words show how the Muhajir collective identity has been cast in mythic

proportions with reference to Partition in 1947. And the Muhajir nationalistic chant quoted

above sums up their frustration over the inability of ethnic groups in Sindh to peacefully

co-exist. As Ian Talbot points out, two insurgencies in particular have threatened the unity of

the Pakistani nation: the “subcontinent‟s only successful post-independence secessionist

movement, the breakaway of East Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign

state in 1971” (Talbot 252) and the challenge of Muhajir nationalism to the post-1971

Pakistani state. These two struggles have claimed thousands of lives (mostly in Sindh and

Bangladesh) and have since made Karachi one of the most violent cities in South Asia.13

11

As quoted in Jalal 83. 12

Newsline 28 March 1994 p. 27 as quoted in Talbot p.234. The Muhajirs are the Muslims who migrated from

India to East and West Pakistan during Partition (between 1947 and 1951). Their collective identity is summoned

on the premise of language, Urdu. The Muhajirs are different from the Muslims who were already living in the

areas that became Pakistan. 13

In the city of Karachi alone, snipers killed 1,113 people in 1994. By 1995, Karachi had become the most

dangerous city of Asia, with a murder rate that reached 2,095 (Adeel Khan 228).

37

On the 15th of April 1985, a young Muhajir girl called Bushra Zaidi, who was a student

at Sir Syed Girls‟ College, was run over by a Pathan bus driver and killed. This sparked an

angry student demonstration, which was brutally repressed by the police and escalated into

Karachi‟s first major ethnic riot that claimed at least a hundred lives (Gayer 2003).

Kartography opens a year after this incident and Mass Transit is set in 1988, which partly

explains the urgency with which their protagonists, Raheen and Safina, struggle to come to

terms with the violence of the city. Kartography and Mass Transit are also set in the aftermath

of the Afghan jihad, which brought to Karachi a flow of arms and drugs that gave birth to a

culture of ultra-violence amongst the city youth, for whom “Russian TT-pistols became the

hottest commodity in town” (Gayer 3).

It is no coincidence, then, that the two novels set in Karachi are unavoidably

preoccupied with the theme of violence, which becomes the catalyst for the eventual

transformation of the protagonists. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Raheen and Safina

battle a profound sense of helplessness and alienation with regard to the city they live in.

Both novels follow a remarkably similar trajectory; the two protagonists are made aware (by

external forces) of the protected upper-class lifestyle that has constructed their identities. As

members of the upper class, which has traditionally been the ruling class of Pakistan, Raheen

and Safina would have been brought up with a value system consonant with the hegemonic

state discourse, which is in tension with the actual reality of the rest of the nation. Once they

realise the schism between the two systems, they attempt to salvage their identity; in Safina‟s

case she chooses to abandon Karachi and moves back to Washington but Raheen is more

successful because she decides she must face the contradictions and live through them no

matter how painful they are.

Their feeling of alienation from society at large is a result of two things; they have

lived comfortable, upper-class lives and thus have never really had to face or suffer the

violence in the city. Their alienation would have been alleviated had they shared the burden

38

of violence with other members of society. And second, their protected lives have given them

a sense of complicity in the violence, which increases the distance between them and the

person on the street who suffers. Shamsie makes a clear reference to Bushra Zaidi‟s death

right at the beginning of the novel when Raheen says “[n]one of what was going on in

Karachi made much sense to [her] – not since last year [1985] when that girl was killed by a

speeding bus” (Kartography 11). But we also gain a sense of her emotional distance from this

violence when she says, “there was nothing [they] could do about the nation‟s problems”

(Kartography 11).

When Shamsie focuses on the Muhajir/Sindhi ethnic conflict and the short but bloody

war of 1971 through the life of her protagonist and her family, she “fuses the world inside the

novel with a world outside which is bounded by the potential nation” (Culler 23). A

significant portion of the novel is dedicated to detailing the different ethnic positions as part

of Raheen‟s gradual awakening to reality. At one point Raheen overhears her father‟s friend

Asif, a Sindhi landowner, say, “Muhajirs will never understand the way we [non-Muhajirs or

Sindhis] feel about land” because “[t]hey all left their homes at Partition. No understanding

of ties to a place” (Kartography 39). We can sympathise with the thirteen-year-old‟s confusion

and bewilderment over the importance of ethnic loyalties and divisions precisely because the

very people who are prejudiced are her parents‟ friends, the benevolent aunts and uncles she

has grown up around.

To make matters worse Raheen has to contend with a dark family secret that is rooted

in racial and ethnic prejudice: in 1971, her father was engaged to Karim‟s mother Maheen,

who is Bengali. But anti-Bengali sentiment wore him down in 1970-71 and he broke off the

engagement and married her best friend Yasmin. This is especially difficult for Raheen to face

because she loves Karim and her father deeply and it is unthinkable for her that her father

was racially prejudiced. This ambivalence is exacerbated when Karim‟s parents divorce;

Karim tries to place the blame of the break-up of his family on Raheen‟s father‟s

39

abandonment in 1971. It is only much later that she discovers that the two sets of parents,

Karim‟s and hers, had forgiven each other and moved on. As her mother‟s friend Laila says

to Raheen: “[I]f you hold everyone accountable for what they said and did in ‟71 hardly

anyone escapes a whipping” (Kartography 278).

Nonetheless, Shamsie makes it a point to very carefully present both Sindhi and

Muhajir points of view and works her critique of the dominant and hegemonic discourse

through Raheen, who is yet undecided where her loyalties lie. Her father is a Muhajir but she

is unable to blindly identify with him even if he often defends the Muhajirs:

“We can‟t be blamed if some – mind you, some – of us came from areas with education systems that made us qualified for office jobs instead of latrine-cleaning, which is the kind of job you seem to think immigrants should be grateful for.” (Kartography 223)14

Shamsie shows that it is a luxury of the elite to squabble about ethnic alliances at

dinner parties. Fenton defines ethnic identity as “a communal and individual identity

expressed as an idea of „our people, our origins‟ which clearly varies in the intensity with

which it is felt and expressed” (Fenton 114). Muhajir, Sindhi and Bengali can be further

defined as “provisional ethnicities”, which Fenton says are specifically those which are more

than tacit but whose “mobilization is occasional and contingent” (Fenton 115). I take the

Muhajir and Bengali ethnicities as provisional because they are so for the neo-colonial classes

that invoke them selectively in Kartography.15 For example, in a scene from 1971, Asif

demonstrates that his prejudice against the Bengalis is limited to class. In an unthinking

move, Asif slaps a Bengali waiter when he spills a drink on Laila‟s sari: “Halfwit Bingo!” he

14

According to the 1951 Census, the Muhajirs were 7 million in the newly created Pakistan, including 700,000 in

East Pakistan. In West Pakistan, they were 6.3 million out of 33.7 million, one-fifth of the total population

(Jaffrelot 15). In 1984, Karachi was inhabited by 3.3 million Muhajirs (Jaffrelot 33). 15

This is not to suggest that the Muhajir and Bengali ethnicities are provisional all over Pakistan. In other places

they are what Fenton calls “totalising” as in they “pervade all or almost all spheres of life” or “nil or tacit” as in

having very little social significance (Fenton 115)

40

says, “Go back to your jungle.” When the others nudge him that Maheen is present he says to

her apologetically: “I got angry, can you blame me? No hard feelings, OK, Maheen?”

(Kartography 183).

Raheen learns very early on that as Runty tells her, “everyone wants everyone in their

family to marry same to same” (Kartography 74), an ethos that is testament to how deep ethnic

divisions run in Pakistani society. It is unbearable for Raheen when Runty tells her “[w]ith

Karim, you can‟t tell at all. That‟s he‟s half-Bengali … But … if one day you decide [he] is

husband material, what will Daddy say to that?” (Kartography 74). Runty makes very clear

that marrying “same to same” doesn‟t mean the “same tastes in movies and books”, what

clearly matters is the “background. Class, sect, ethnic group” (Kartography 74).

It is significant that Shamsie invests so much time in exploring ethnicity, for “Pakistan

appears to be an unachieved nation precisely because of the persistence of ethnic identities

which may even be described as „nationalities‟” (Jaffrelot 7). I mentioned earlier on that many

critics perceive Pakistan to be an ideological state because it was founded for Muslims

irrespective of ethnicity or class. But that was in and leading up to 1947. The 1971 East

Pakistan imbroglio, when Bengali Muslims wanted nothing to do with Pakistan, came as a

rude shock to West Pakistan and shattered the myth of unity. After that, “serious qualms

about the integrity of the country” developed, and “these doubts resurfaced after months of

bloodshed in Karachi and other urban areas of Sindh and the failure of the authorities to

control the situation” (Ahmar 1045).

Ethnic violence flies in the face of the nation‟s “fantasy of wholeness … that moment

of transcendence free of all contradictions … that threaten[s] the economy of wholeness that

ideological abstractness often requires” (Mehta Ethnicity, nationalism and violence in South Asia

1998). When Shamsie shows Raheen questioning her father and painfully trying to come to

terms with the many contradictions she faces because she lives in Karachi, she is offering a

critique of the hegemonic dominant state discourse that presents Pakistan as a unified nation.

41

The reality of conflicting loyalties and years of violence also critiques the modern state‟s

attempts to “fashion citizens after its own image” which backfires because it actually “invites

the formation of adversarial nationalities that resist its centralizing and homogenizing

tendencies” (Mehta 377-379). As Valentine Daniel so aptly points out, “[t]he nation-state has

proved to be a blatant narcotic” (Daniel 155).

It is important to briefly mention at this point that ethnic violence is only one of the

many types of violence that has affected society in Pakistan. Insofar as Mass Transit contains

an allegory of the nation it offers a critique of state violence. Safina‟s father Humayun died

twenty years earlier when he was a 27-year-old. He was a doctor at a medical campus, a poet

and a student leader and was picked up in a midnight raid “[f]or his poetry”, treason and

alleged “[s]ubversive activities” (Mass Transit 18). Humayun died in jail supposedly from a

heart attack and Ameneh, Safina‟s mother and Humayun‟s wife, was never able to see the

body. Because of this she has never been able to attain emotional resolution over his death

and her only consolation is that she “[has] his grave” (Mass Transit 33).

This story bears an uncanny resemblance to the death of populist leader Zulfiqar Ali

Bhutto, who was prime minister from 1971 to 1977. He appointed Gen. Zia-ul-Haq as chief of

army staff, but later on Zia overthrew the Bhutto government and sent Bhutto to jail. Bhutto

was given the death sentence and was hanged despite international outcry. However, he

allegedly died after being tortured in jail and it was only his body that was hanged for public

show in 1979. I believe that Naqvi has wittingly or unwittingly drawn parallels from this

political reality in the case of Humayun. Ameneh is fashioned in the image of Bhutto‟s wife,

Nusrat, and Safina in the image of Benazir. We also begin to strongly suspect that Naqvi‟s

sympathies lie with the PPP (Pakistan People‟s Party) that was started by Bhutto and taken

over by Benazir when Rasheed Ali exclaims with glee, “Yes, yes…Gone, blown to bits…he‟s

dead, exploded. Oh God, thank God!” upon hearing the news of Gen. Zia‟s death in a plane

crash in 1988, the year the novel is set in.

42

While state violence is prevalent in society, most lives have been lost in ethnic clashes

as a reaction to the totalising pressure applied by the dominant discourse to maintain the

cohesion of the nation-state. As Asif says:

“Muhajirs loved being called Muhajirs. Loved the religious connotation of that word, linking them to the Muslims of Mecca who immigrated to Medina with the Prophet. It wasn‟t that you weren‟t welcome – it’s just that you would have died rather be absorbed.” (Kartography 224, my emphasis)

As a writing of the nation, Kartography is attempting to make sense out of the

senseless. It is at once eulogy and elegy to the city. But unlike the nation-state for the Muslims

of the Subcontinent that “promise[d] to bring forth order out of disorder, mold form from

that in which form is absent” (Daniels 154), Shamsie‟s novel does not attempt to sterilize the

pain of the violence that is part of its history. It ends with the death of the father of Raheen

and Karim‟s friend Zia, who dies while protecting Karim from a bullet.

Raheen and Karim‟s relationship stands for many things in Kartography: their

separation is a symbolic re-enactment of the separation of East and West Pakistan in 1971,

though their parents hope that with their children‟s birth the burden of the mistakes made in

1971 will be eased. This is why Raheen and Karim‟s love labours under the burden of the

past. Their love exists, but is impossible; as Zia says to Raheen, “You lost him before any of us

were born, back in 1971” (Kartography 277). Their love/friendship can thus be read as a

metaphor for the nation. In particular, Shamsie uses it to force a reckoning with the terrible

things that happened in 1971 when the unity of the nation was shattered when Muslim

fought Muslim. Raheen‟s father writes Karim‟s mother just after their children are born to ask

forgiveness for abandoning her:

43

How can Pakistan be when we have so abused [the image of itself as a place that was created to safeguard the rights of the Muslim minority] – first by ensuring the Bengalis were minimized and marginalized both politically and economically, and then by reacting to their demands for greater rights and representation with acts of savagery? (Kartography 312)

When Karim leaves for London, Raheen says that their ensuing separation allowed both of

them to remember “or re-imagine – [their] friendship as something mythic, something fated,

[and yet] something waiting to be renewed and transfigured into a more adult version of

itself” (Kartography 214). We could read these words with optimism, as an indication that

despite Pakistan‟s terrible history, somehow there will come a time when it will outgrow the

clutches of its distant, mythic past and come to terms with itself as it is in reality.

As I have argued, Kartography and Mass Transit depict through the metaphors of

maps, transport and now violence, the replacement of Raheen and Safina‟s “mythic” or

romantic illusion of the city with one more discordant, that is “found in those moments and

contexts” in which they come face to face with “an unobliging ontic reality (Daniel 51). They

must recognize cultural temporality and reimagine the nation in a way that enables a

different relationship between the Self and the Nation.

44

Conclusion

In this thesis I have shown how The Holy Woman attempts a desperate squaring of

patriarchy, religion and people, in reinforcement of the dominant project of the state in

Pakistan since its inception, to produce a cohesive, unified Islamic nation. Shahraz‟s

innovation is to use the form and ideology of romance to mitigate the position of women in

such a state. In contrast, the novels of Gauhar, Naqvi and Shamsie engage with the processes

of cultural temporality to show how a schism has opened up between official imaginings of

the nation and a lived social reality. This gap is partly manifest in the ambivalence, alienation

or oppression of individuals in society and partly in the form of popular ethnic conflict and

(military and police) state violence. This is the interstitial space from which these novels

emerge to narrate the nation. The position of women can be used for conservative or

45

subversive ends, and the female protagonists of all these novels are marked by class and

ethnicity as surely as by gender; further each must bear the burden of colonial, national and

religious histories. The female authors of these novels are themselves inscribed with complex

identities, as tertiary educated, English speaking, global as well as national subjects. Their

work by no means exhausts contemporary possibilities for writing a future for Pakistan

through engagement with its past and present, and I have not tried to extract a coherent or

representative narrative from their diverse stories. But they do show some of the ways in

which Pakistani writers have taken up the challenge of articulating themselves, both

politically and individually.