“Pakistani writing in English has a much wider perspective than most people credit it for”

AURORA: WHAT WERE THE INFLUENCES THAT TOOK YOU ON THIS VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY?

MUNEEZA SHAMSIE: Books were always central to my family life. In a sense, we lived in an anglicised world, even though we were in a bilingual home. My father, Isha’at Habibullah, was sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight and came back to India at age 20, during which time he visited India once when he was 18 – between Oxford and school. My father belonged to a taluqdar (landowning nobility) family from Oudh. His father was the vice-chancellor of Lucknow University and his mother was a women’s rights activist. In fact, it was exactly 100 years ago that my paternal grandmother, Begum In’am Fatima Habibullah, visited her sons in England. She wrote a book about it: Ta’ssurat-i Safar-i Yurup (Impressions of a Journey to Europe). On board a ship, my grandparents met a Turkish gentleman who was rather disparaging about Indians; although my grandfather became rather annoyed about it, my grandmother started to ask him about the Turkish feminist movement. When she arrived in England, the gentleman sent her a whole lot of books about the lives of Turkish women, which she read avidly – supporting the narrative that is now coming out, that there was a much longer tradition of literacy among Indian women, than the British narrative provided. My grandmother became Lucknow’s first woman municipal commissioner. She set up many schools and did a lot to promote welfare. She also joined the Muslim League. She was the one who proposed the resolution that there be a women’s wing of the Muslim League. My father’s family was very anglicised. The Habibullah brothers were known to be a bit eccentric; they were very angrez. My father, having been a communist during his Oxford years, became a lawyer; and, much to my grandfather’s dismay, he joined the Imperial Tobacco Company in Calcutta which he loved. He came to Pakistan after Partition and played an important role in setting up Pakistan’s corporate sector. In those days, one had to negotiate one’s way through colonial times with the British, which was not always easy. In Pakistan, he was the chairman and MD of the Pakistan Tobacco Company.

A: What about your mother’s side of the family?

MS: My mother, Begum Jahanara Habibullah, belonged to the princely state of Rampur. Her family had mutinied; they descended from a ruler called Najib Khan Rohilla, who played an important role in history.

A: Did the whole family join the Indian Mutiny in 1857?

MS: Well, one of them joined the mutiny, and as the relatives say, they all became guilty by association. The family fort was invaded, the brothers were captured, strung up and hanged, and the rest of the family had to flee. Eventually, the British decided that they had treated this family unfairly – they were restored to favour and given land. My maternal grandfather became the chief minister of Rampur. As a result of the mutiny, many writers and painters from Lucknow and Delhi fled to Rampur and it became a great cultural centre. The Rampuris were great patrons of the arts. My maternal grandmother was from Delhi; she belonged to the princely family of Loharu. My mother was educated in Urdu, Arabic and Persian. She and her sister discarded purdah in their teens because my khala had contracted TB and an uncle suggested she go to Switzerland. To do this, my grandfather decided to take his daughters out of purdah, leaving the rest of the family aghast. In Switzerland, my khala was completely cured, after which she and my mother were taken on a grand tour of Europe. My mother has written about this in her memoirs. When they returned home, they became part of the entire social world of British India.

A: How did your parents meet?

MS: They met in Mussoorie, India. My father was posted in Lahore but he often went to Mussoorie in the summer. My father loved reading and he wanted to read the classics at Oxford, but my grandfather insisted he do law. He continued to read the Iliad in Greek until his dying day; the book was always by my father’s bedside. He taught my daughter Kamila (Shamsie) about Greek mythology at the age of three, delighted that his little grandchild was so enchanted by it. The novel Home Fire is Kamila’s reconstruction of Antigone’s story. He would have been so delighted! I grew up in a bilingual home where everybody loved books. Although I went to an English-medium school, my mother was very keen that I should not forget Urdu. Every morning before school, a maulvi sahab came to teach me the Quran. I learned to write Urdu on a takhti (slate) which I loved. Why aren’t children nowadays taught to write Urdu on a takhti? It would make it so much more exciting! After kindergarten, I went to another school. In those days, the British presence was very strong and the school I went to had only recently started to admit local pupils; the rest were angrez. I don’t know what the issue was, whether it was me or the school, but I started doing badly and didn’t want to go to school anymore. In the end, my uncle, Sahibzada Mohammed Yaqub Ali Khan, my mother’s only sibling in Pakistan, advised her to send me to boarding school in England.

A: How long were you at school in England?

MS: Nine years. I did my A-levels there. I took A-level history, chemistry and biology. I wanted to be a scientist but my father said that there were no women scientists in Pakistan!

A: When did your interest in reading deepen?

MS: The interest began for a very simple reason. Growing up in England, I was terribly aware that the world I inhabited did not exist in any of the books I read. Yes, there was The Jungle Book, and I loved it because it had characters with names like Baloo and Sher Khan. But with whom could I share this with? The school was full of colonials. So the reading began because my world did not exist in the books I read. However, I knew that there was such a thing as desis writing in English. My aunt Attia Hosain, married to my eldest chacha, published her first collection of short stories, Phoenix Bled, in 1953, and Sunlight on a Broken Column in 1961 – the book she is best remembered for. Her son, Waris Hussein, is a film director and her daughter, Shama Habibullah, is a film producer.

A: Were there any writers who evoked this anglicised world in English or Urdu?

MS: Qurratulain Hyder did. But it was only when I came back from England that I discovered that world. One of the reasons for my interest in Pakistani English literature was because I grew up in England, so I was aware of this way of thinking of yourself as English and everybody there reminding you that you aren’t while everybody here reminded you of another culture that you left behind.

A: How old were you when you came back to Pakistan?

MS: I was 19. Before that, I spent a year at Queen’s Secretarial College in London. The curious thing is that exactly 50 years later, I went to London to judge the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and we stayed in a hotel located just a few houses from Queen’s.

A: What did you do when you came back to Pakistan?

MS: In those days, no one sent their children to be educated abroad with the idea that they would stay on. You came home and contributed to your country; if you didn’t, you were considered unpatriotic. When I came back, I started working for the Belgian Embassy. I also discovered writers like Ahmed Ali, Kaleem Omar and Adrian Husain. They were writing in English and creating worlds I didn’t know about. After I married, I didn’t want to go to coffee parties; they were so boring! I was always reading and my friend, Naz Ikramullah, encouraged me to write. Her mother, Begum Ikramullah, took me under her wing and introduced me to Urdu literature. She introduced me to all sorts of books and also encouraged me to write.

A: When did your literary career begin in earnest?

MS: It began on a completely nepotistic note. A lot of foreign films were being shown in Karachi and some were directed by Waris Husein. When I went to England, I asked Waris for an interview – he had won a BAFTA for Edward and Mrs Simpson in 1979. The interview was published in the Morning News. I then interviewed Begum Ikramullah’s daughter, Princess Sarvath El Hassan of Jordan, which was published in Dawn. The next morning, Zubeida Mustafa rang me up to ask whether I would like to write for Dawn. I nearly fell off my chair; I was so bowled over. That changed everything. I became a feature writer for the newspaper. I was sent here and there and I loved it. It got me out of my enclosed world and opened up a new one. Then, Muhammad Ali Siddiqui discovered I liked to read and he started giving me book reviews to write for Dawn. Hanif Kureishi, who I coincidentally interviewed again recently, was one of my earliest interviewees, as was Deborah Moggach. Gradually, my work began to focus entirely on literature.

A: Was that when you started to focus on Pakistani English literature?

MS: I was following it from the beginning. It was one of the reasons why I started publishing anthologies. Everyone had forgotten the debate about why desis should not be writing in English.

A: When did this debate start?

MS: Post-Partition. The thought process was that one wrote in English to impress the angrez, but now that they were gone, why write in English? When Ahmed Ali’s wife translated his novel, Twilight in Delhi, into Urdu, many people felt it had been restored to its natural language. Indeed, Ahmed Ali introduced all kinds of new things in his English prose. He used Urdu words, he translated Urdu poetry. He captured the sounds of Delhi and the subcontinent in English. All this is appreciated now, but it wasn’t then and he was criticised for it. Ahmed Ali made quite a dent as an Urdu writer, but he also wrote in English to convey an alternative view of India to the British. He didn’t write for the British. In Twilight in Delhi, which was published in 1940, he wrote about the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the 1928 epidemic, among other things. It was fascinating. I reread the book during Covid and the kind of resonance it had was extraordinary. It was a very anti-colonial narrative.

A: How do you respond to the criticism that English is anelitist language?

MS: Are we saying that people who lead elite lives have no right to express themselves? If someone comes from the elite and writes in Urdu, you don’t object. Why criticise an elite person writing in English? Furthermore, elitist or not, in the context of English world literature, you are writing from the margins and filling in gaps. Especially in the diaspora, you have authors writing in English about their family experiences and the working class experience. John Siddique writes about his father walking across the Punjab during Partition and the immigrant experience in England. Zaffar Kunail is a highly awarded poet. His father was a Pakistani Kashmiri – he came from a family of bricklayers and he evokes that world. Pakistani writing in English has a much wider perspective than most people credit it for. Remember, there is a difference between what is read in the West and what we read. Some of the books that are rejected by a British publisher will be accepted by a publisher in India or Pakistan. In India, the tradition of writing in English developed faster than in Pakistan, but it is coming to be accepted here as well. We don’t ask the younger generation why they aren’t writing in Urdu, yet in the sixties and seventies, Pakistanis writing in English had to face this question.

A: Shouldn’t these books be translated at least?

MS: Of course they should. Aamer Hussein, who wrote in English all his life, started writing Urdu stories and translating them into English. Mohammad Hanif is very strong in both languages and has translated his books into Urdu. A lot of our writers are bilingual. Harris Khalique writes in three languages; Punjabi, Urdu and English. Osama Siddique writes fiction and non-fiction in English and Urdu; I am fascinated by bilingual writers. You ask them what it is that makes them express themselves in a particular language and they tell you it’s because one language offers them one thing and the other language something else.

A: When was your first book published?

MS: In 1999. It was A Dragonfly in the Sun, an anthology of English literature published by OUP. It brought together 44 writers of Pakistani origin writing in English. The anthology was my introduction to the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) and put me in touch with a more academic environment. I also started writing for the Literary Encyclopaedia and I am now their area editor. In 2004, I became the bibliographer for Pakistan for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, now known as Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. My predecessors included people such as Maya Jamil, Alamgir Hashmi and Syed Ali Asha. All this expanded my horizons. My second anthology, Leaving Home, was a collection of prose. The book covers the Pakistani experience of leaving home from a wider perspective – during Partition, into the diaspora, and from the rural areas into the cities. My third book began as a conversation with Ritu Menon, the Indian publisher of Women Unlimited, about a book on women. This became And the World Changed. To my amazement, the US edition of the book won the Gold IPPY Award and the Bronze Foreword Award. In 2017, I published Hybrid Tapestries, which was an exploration of the development of Pakistani English literature.

A: What is next?

MS: I am working on a new anthology called In the New Century; it is a follow-up to A Dragonfly in the Sun. I already have 84 writers on board; it goes from 1997 to 2017.

A: Looking back at your contributions to Pakistani English literature, what does it feel like?

MS: Well, I am just working away. It all is a bit amazing. It takes me by surprise, especially when there are moments like going to London for the DSC Prize and staying down the road from where I had done my course at Queen’s 50 years ago. I still think to myself – who could have imagined this future?

Muneeza Shamsie was in conversation with Mariam Ali Baig.For feedback: aurora@dawn.com