By the book: more thoughts on adaptation

[A version of my latest column for GQ magazine]

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This is an unusually busy time for movies based on high-profile novels. Deepa Mehta’s film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is finally ready, as is Ang Lee’s adaptation of another Booker-winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Meanwhile the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s marvellous The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been given cinematic life by one of my favourite directors Mira Nair, and Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqi are in the process of adapting Amitav Ghosh’s sprawling historical novel Sea of Poppies.

Naturally the release of each of these films will be accompanied by much hand-wringing and cries of “but...but...but...” by viewers who have read the books (and by some who haven’t read them but have mastered the enviable art of speaking knowledgeably about them nonetheless). Each of us will at some point morph into a version of the comic-strip goat who, after chewing on a roll of celluloid, says ruminatively to his companion, “The book was better.” Questions of faithfulness to the original will be raised, omitted passages will be bewailed, shock will be expressed at the casting of this actor in that role. Midnight’s Children in particular will be closely dissected, since Rushdie’s novel is nearly as much of an Unavoidable Baggy Presence for Indian Writing in English as Ulysses was for 20th century fiction; even a flawless film might easily be weighed down by unreasonable expectations.

Personally I try to judge movies based on what they achieve with their medium's techniques, rather than as slavish illustrations of literary works. But I confess to a flicker of trepidation about the adaptations mentioned above, because some of the things I most like about these books don’t seem easily translatable to film. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for instance, is marked by a distinctive first-person voice: the protagonist, a Pakistani man named Changez, addresses an unnamed American tourist in a courtly, almost ingratiating style. (“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.”) This narrative has a stylised, off-kilter quality that makes it difficult for the reader to know exactly what Changez’s intentions are (in an interview, Hamid told me the effect he was reaching for was “that you’ve walked into a darkened theatre and there’s one actor on the stage taking you through the play”) and what effect he is having on his listener - so that even the simple description of someone putting his hand into his jacket pocket is laced with the possibility that he might be reaching for either a business card or a weapon.

With Life of Pi, the potential pitfall is one that is especially relevant to the fantasy (or part-fantasy) genre: a book lets you imagine its characters and incidents for yourself while a film gives them immutable shape. (I mostly loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but its depiction of the flaming Eye of Sauron in the final sequences was problematic; presented as a roving, Twentieth Century Fox-style flashlight, Tolkien’s bodiless villain lost the chillingly abstract quality he - it? - had in the books.) Martel’s novel – about a teenage boy adrift on a lifeboat with a fearsome Bengal Tiger – gets much of its force from the irresolvable ambiguity of the narrative: is Richard Parker the tiger a real presence or is he an invention, a wish-fulfillment device that allows young Pi to focus his thoughts and survive a difficult ordeal? But the movie, by its very nature, has to literalise the book's central voyage, and if you see a large tiger on the screen once, it is difficult to be subsequently convinced of his unreality.

The adaptation that most intrigues me though is the Sea of Poppies one. Rizvi’s film is provisionally titled Afeem (19th century opium trade being central to Ghosh’s story) and anyone familiar with her debut Peepli Live knows she can bring the required sensitivity to this tale of people from various backgrounds journeying across the ocean, driven more by despair than expectation. ("Both Peepli Live and Sea of Poppies are stories about the psychological effects of migration," she told me during a recent chat.) But the most riveting thing about Ghosh’s novel wasn’t its plot – it was its use of language. Its lascar sailors (“who came from places that had nothing in common except the Indian Ocean”) speak a dynamic hybrid of tongues, made of words picked up from various countries, and the European characters who have been living in India for generations use phrases such as “He turned a ship oolter-poolter” and “It would never do to be warming the coorsey when there’s kubber like this to be heard”.

To my mind at least, such details work better on the printed page than on the screen (where, if not handled exactly right, they might too easily devolve into tedious slapstick). However this is, as always, dependent on the quality of the treatment, the casting and the performances. During our conversation, Rizvi mentioned that most of the script would be in Bhojpuri – something that is singularly appropriate for this book – and it was nice to read a blog entry by Ghosh expressing enthusiasm for the project. Authors aren’t always the best judges of movies based on their work, of course, but of the adaptations mentioned above Afeem sounds like the one that is most worth warming the multiplex coorsey for.

[Earlier posts about book-to-movie adaptations: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; notes from the Times of India lit-fest; A Kiss Before Dying; R K Narayan on a movie set]

Speaking for the tribes: Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon

The General and his son looked steadily at the official. At last, the son spoke. “How is it possible for us to be treated as belonging to Afghanistan? We stay for a few months and a few months in Pakistan. The rest of the time we spend moving. We are Pawindahs and belong to all countries, or to none.”

It isn’t often that someone has a debut novel published at the age of seventy-eight**, and the sheen of Jamil Ahmad’s achievement is barely dimmed when you learn that he wrote the first draft of The Wandering Falcon in the 1970s and returned to it recently at the prompting of his family. We should be glad that he did. If it’s true that every author has one book in him that he alone can – and should – write, this is a clear case. Ahmad used to work for the Civil Service in Pakistan and served as chairman of the Tribal Development Corporation, which gave him an insider’s view of the struggles of itinerant people living near the borders of nation-states. More importantly, he has the good writer’s empathy and talent for observation – The Wandering Falcon is extraordinary for its intimate chronicling of lives that are all but invisible to most urban, English-language readers.

Most outsiders think of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran mainly in terms of the political conflicts that they have recently been at the centre of – events that hinge on their identities as countries with manmade boundaries and modern systems of governance. But for the tribes who lived in and around these regions for centuries, codes of honour and discipline had nothing to do with such concepts as statehood and citizenship. In the past few decades, the lives of these people have seen wholesale changes, and Ahmad’s book is about the passing of an old world, its gradual replacement by a world of documents and stamps (not to mention greed and betrayal), and the many dreams that are crushed along the way. (“The pressures were inexorable. One set of values, one way of life, had to die. In this clash the state, as always, proved stronger than the individual. The new way of life triumphed over the old.”)

This isn’t to say that Ahmad excessively romanticizes the ways of tribal people, who can be brutal in dealing with those who break their internal laws. In fact, the haunting first chapter (excerpted in Granta Pakistan) is about forbidden lovers who flee their tribe and seek shelter at a lonesome military outpost, where they live with their little son for a few years. Ahmad’s description of the hostile land, the brief period of grace available to the family – and the inevitability of their eventual fate – is both restrained and vivid, and the chapters that follow tell other gripping stories: about a group of people forbidden from crossing a border with their thirsty herds; a first-person account by a man returning from Germany to his tribal homeland of Tirah; the plight of a Gujjar girl married off to a cold-hearted bear-trainer. These tenuously linked tales cover the shift from a truly communal existence – where a family could easily pick out its own animals from a joint herd after a large-scale migration – to personal circumstances so dire that people might lose all contact with children and siblings for decades.

The jacket description of The Wandering Falcon gives the impression that the book’s protagonist – indeed, its rootless falcon – is an orphaned boy named Tor Baz, but this is true only to an extent. The doomed lovers in the first chapter are the boy’s parents and he stays in the reader’s view as he grows older, his path intersecting briefly with those of the other characters; we come to see him as an anchoring figure. But around a third of the way through the book, he recedes so far in the distance that he no longer seems particularly important to the narrative. (His role in one of the most fascinating chapters “The Guide” seems like an afterthought.) And thus, the ending – with this eternal wanderer musing that perhaps it is time for him to settle down – has the feel of a forced attempt at a summing up.

But while the unevenness of Tor Baz’s part in the narrative is a minor weakness, it doesn’t take away from the quiet, unshowy beauty of Ahmad’s writing and the wisdom of his insights. I think The Wandering Falcon works best if it’s read in the same way that one would read Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a collection of separate stories about the many faces of modern Pakistan, with occasionally recurring characters. Ahmad's book is a fine addition to the growing body of English-language writing set in the region.

** Perhaps Ahmad could get a blurb by the 95-year-old Khushwant Singh, proclaiming “this author is a young talent to watch”.

[Did a shorter version of this for The Sunday Guardian. Some earlier posts about contemporary Pakistani writers: The Reluctant Fundamentalist and a long conversation with Mohsin Hamid; outtakes from a story about Pakistani writing in English; Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes; Musharraf Ali Farooqi's translation of the Hamzanama; Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows; Bapsi Sidhwa's Lahore anthology]

Quick notes on Granta Pakistan

[Did a version of this for the Delhi-based Sunday Guardian newspaper]

A shout-out for Granta magazine’s new Pakistan special.


As a big admirer of contemporary Pakistani writing in English, I was very pleased to see the line-up of contributors to the issue – Mohsin Hamid, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Kamila Shamsie, Mohammad Hanif, Aamer Hussein and Nadeem Aslam, among others. So pleased, in fact, that I sat down and read some of it on a PDF file (something I rarely do) because the hard-copy version hadn’t arrived yet. It’s a good mix of fiction, reportage, poetry, nostalgia - and even artwork, courtesy a visual essay that showcases the work of artists like Ayesha Jatoi and Imran Qureshi (not to mention the book’s dazzling cover, created by a truck artist).

The pieces are very varied and it’s impossible to discuss them all, so I’ll mention a couple that I really enjoyed. The shortest story in the collection, Mohsin Hamid’s “A Beheading”, is also the most startling, perhaps because it taps directly into the deepest fears of an artist (specifically a writer) trying to live and work under a repressive, intolerant regime. If you’ve read Hamid’s fine novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (my review here), you’ll remember his use of a deliberately theatrical, non-realist narrative – a first-person account by a Pakistani man addressing an American tourist. “A Beheading” does something similar to induce a very real sense of claustrophobia and dread.

The sense of terror in Mohammad Hanif’s “Butt & Bhatti” takes longer to emerge, but when it does it packs a punch. What begins as a droll story about a policeman (named Teddy Butt) who has fallen madly in love with a nurse (Alice Bhatti) soon becomes something darker, with far-reaching repercussions. In the process, it makes telling observations about the relationship between violence and love, and between poetry and gunfire. It’s all done very funnily, as you’d expect from Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes. (He’s the sort of writer who will, right in the midst of a description of riots and violence, throw in a caustic sentence like “Newspapers started predicting ‘normalcy limping back to the city’ as if normalcy had gone for a picnic and sprained an ankle.”)

I also liked Kamila Shamsie’s “Pop Idols”, about experiencing Pakistani pop music as a teenager in the late 1980s through the emergence of bands such as Vital Signs, against the background of the changes in the country’s political climate. (“Watching the video of ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ today,” she writes, “I’m struck by the void that must have existed to make pretty boys singing patriotic pop appear subversive.”) Based on what I've read so far, these pieces aren't about stereotyping a nation, or losing sight of the many coexisting realities that make it what it is - they are about using high-quality writing to create a sense of a people, a place and a society. I look forward to finishing the collection.

(More on this book soon. Meanwhile, here are some old posts about Pakistani writers and their work: outtakes from a story about Pakistani writing in English, a long conversation with Mohsin Hamid, a Q&A with Daniyal Mueenuddin, notes on Musharraf Ali Farooqi's translation of the Hamzanama, on Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows, Bapsi Sidhwa's Lahore anthology)

Paging Pakistan: outtakes from a story about Pakistani writing in English

Slightly atypical post, this, probably best seen as a storehouse. I recently did this story for Business Standard Weekend about the interesting developments in Pakistani Writing in English (PWE) – or Pakistani Anglophone Writing (PAW) if you prefer. But even the generous word-length (1600 words) wasn’t enough to fit in all the responses that came in from the writers I had contacted. So here, by way of supplementing the article, are the full texts of their replies. Am using the questions I asked as anchoring devices and putting the authors’ responses beneath them – apologies if this makes it look like a round-table discussion, which it wasn’t!

There’s been a big buzz around the debuts of Daniyal Mueenuddin and Mohammed Hanif, as well as upcoming titles by Ali Sethi and others. Are we seeing a blossoming of Pakistani writing in English – something similar to what happened in Indian writing in English in the mid-to-late 1980s?

Kamila Shamsie: Yes, and no. A blossoming, yes. But I don't see any particular basis for comparing the trajectory of PAW (Pak Anglophone Writing) to that of IAW. I don't think there's been “the Midnight's Children” moment in quite so dramatic a way. Instead we've had a cluster of writers publishing and being acclaimed within a condensed space of time. Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and I had our first novels out quite a while ago, and Aamer Hussein's first short-story collection was published in the 1990s. So I think we need to guard against the sense that there was a void until 2-3 years ago which is suddenly crammed full of books that people are talking about. Not only was there not a void, but also we're still at the point where two books of “notable” fiction by Pakistani writers in one year seems momentous. That suggests this “blossoming” still has a very long distance to travel.

Having said that, more is going on with PAW than is often suggested in the various articles about “Moonlight's Children” which tend to trot out the same 4 or 5 names. For instance, last year Shahbano Bilgrami's In Dreams was longlisted for the Man Asia Prize and Shandana Minhas' Tunnel Vision was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers prize. But both these writers were published in India rather than the UK or US and that means they often get left out of the conversation. (Not to be nepotistic, but you might also want to take a look at a book called As The World Changed, edited by Muneeza Shamsie – my mother – and published by Women Unlimited a couple of years ago. It's fiction by Pakistani women and gives a sense of the breadth of PAW as being much wider than often acknowledged.)

Aamer Hussein: I don't read everything that comes out from South Asia and I'm more interested in translations or in Urdu when I do. So I'm wary of talking about blossoming, but it's nice to see how many varieties of fiction are available, and how much attention India seems to give their neighbours' literature, how open they are to our fictions.

Nadeem had a first book out in ’93, Kamila in '97 and Mohsin in '99. Was the boom, then, a question of more titles from them in the 21st century, or more award nominations, or more panels called Pakistani Writing Today (in '97 it was Bapsi Sidhwa, Sara Suleri and me)? They've been writing for a while, and their books haven't really come out in a cluster.

Azhar Abidi: My impression is yes, there is certainly an increasing recognition of Pakistani writing in English as a counterpoint to Indian writing in English but whether that’s a blossoming or not is hard to say. It may just be a temporary phenomenon, but in any event, does it really matter whether the writing is in English, Urdu or Bengali? The writing should be good. It should stand on its own feet no matter what language it appears in. That ought to be the real measure of blossoming, don’t you think? And on that measure, Urdu literature has matured and ripened for over two centuries, but it’s a canon that’s hardly known in the West or even in our own countries for that matter. The two countries have a long and noble literary tradition. It’s not as if there was nothing there before people started writing in English.

Has there been an increase in writing that is chronicling the many faces of modern Pakistan – the different rungs of its society, life in various parts of the country? Have you been following the work of contemporary Pakistani writers?

Kamila Shamsie: The urban centres and the upper-middle class are chronicled to a disproportionate extent because most of the Anglophone writers come from those worlds. (Of course, it is possible to step out of the world you've grown up in). I haven't read all my contemporary writers, but I've certainly read Hanif, Mohsin, Nadeem, Uzma Aslam Khan, Aamer Hussein – am looking forward to Daniyal M's collection (I've read the stories that were in the New Yorker).

Aamer Hussein: Yes; writers like Bina Shah, Shandana Minhas and others are chronicling varied aspects of Pakistani life – and writing for a Pakistani or South Asian readership rather than primarily for publication abroad. Bina, a brave and lovely writer, often sets her work in the less than affluent areas of Karachi, and, in one case, largely in the slums. But most Anglophone Pakistani writers I know of live abroad. I'm no expert, but I feel that in general rural or small town Pakistan doesn't figure largely in English-language fiction. It did, however, in Nadeem Aslam and Moni Mohsin's first novels.

Moni Mohsin: There clearly are more books by Pakistani authors being published in the West now than say ten years ago and yes, most of them are focused on chronicling life as it exists today across a wide spectrum of Pakistani society.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi: I have read Mohammed Hanif's novel and I know that some people criticised it in Pakistan because they felt that it made Zia-ul-Haq less of a villain than he was. But no good writer can write about a character without bringing his own humanity to reflect in his characters. So those who criticize Hanif for making Zia more human are actually complimenting him. I have also read Daniyal Mueenuddin's story "Nawabdin Electrician" and it reminded me of the Urdu writer Abul Fazl Siddiqi, who wrote about these subjects with great mastery. As to the increase in English-language writing that is chronicling modern Pakistan, this may be true at one level but it may not necessarily be a good thing because it reflects poorly on the absence of good Urdu instruction in schools and a general indifference towards our cultural language.

Nadeem Aslam told me that if you come from a country which has a tragic history, and which often finds itself in the news for the wrong reasons, you can't avoid being politically engaged – there's a constant need to explain, to reexamine, to correct misperceptions. Do you share this feeling?

Kamila Shamsie: Oh, you can avoid anything! I'm very interested in Pakistan's history and politics, and in exploring that in fiction. So I do. But if you read Aamer Hussein – who I think is an extraordinary writer – you'll see that very often he takes another route, highlighting the quieter domestic lives of characters – often women. In some of his stories the grand politically involved figures are men on the periphery of the story and it's in the internal and domestic sphere that the stories find their charge. And I think that's also a very necessary component of writing.

There's also a very fine writer called Imad Rehman who grew up in Karachi before moving to the US for university, and staying on there; his short story collection I Dream of Microwaves – very funny – is largely about Pakistani migrants to America, and engages with American history – the migrant dream – far more than Pakistan's history.

I think of Pakistanis as my audience as much as any other nation, so I don't think in terms of correcting misperceptions or explaining, as though my audience is the world outside Pakistan (that I save for any journalism that I undertake for papers in the UK or US or Europe). But when I examine Pakistan's history and politics in my writing I know that for some people the effect will be to shatter misperceptions, and that's an outcome I'm very happy with. It's just not the reason why I write what I write.

But when a nation is viewed through as narrow a lens as Pakistan often is these days (terrorist males and oppressed women), then merely chronicling the lives of individuals rather than stereotypes ends up being political, doesn't it, even if that isn't the intention? perhaps the climate makes it impossible for Pakistani writing to be viewed unpolitically from the outside.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi: Political engagement has to be defined by each writer for himself or herself. For me, translation of our literary classics is an act of political engagement to stop what is happening to our language and cultural heritage. I have zero interest in writing about 9/11 or Afghanistan but that does not mean that someone who wants to write about these subjects is indulging in an idle exercise. A good writer can make every subject valid and interesting.

Urdu writing is equally strong, engaged and completely secular, but somehow there is an impression, particularly in the West and now also being spread in India, that those who write in the English language are somehow more engaged and better writers than the Urdu fiction writers or those who write in the regional languages of India.

Moni Mohsin: Politics, in my view, is a broad church. Any novel that deals with power structures, however obliquely, is to my mind political. You don’t have to have a terrorist or a prime minister as your protagonist to be politically engaged. And nor do you have to come from a country that has had a turbulent history to write political books. For instance, novels such as The White Tiger and Q&A are unambiguously political.

Although my book, The Diary of a Social Butterfly, appears a light-hearted comedy, its underlying intent is serious: it satirises the insularity, self absorption and frivolity of a privileged stratum of Pakistani society. Even the political disengagement of my subjects is a political statement. But when I write I don’t set out deliberately to challenge my readers’ misconceptions or even explain myself or my society. My starting point is always people – people and stories, which I try and tell as honestly and directly as I can.

Aamer Hussein: As a young writer, I felt compelled to write about Bangladesh, the Gulf War, military rule, the Indian Muslim heritage and partition, albeit obliquely at times. Now, I think that my political engagement is reflected in the ordinary lives and day-to-day activities I write about; but I've become ever more interested in history and its effect on the present. Obviously, I wouldn't want anyone to dictate a political agenda to me, or to feel obligated to let terrorism or fundamentalism hijack my fiction. If I wanted to make overt political statements I'd turn to journalistic pieces, which I rarely write, as I think writers often make asses of themselves when they do. But each one of us his or her own unique way of bearing witness to our times, however small our canvas, whether we use sepia or colour, bold strokes or muted colours.

But I think we should be judged on individual strengths, not necessarily as spokespeople for a 'troubled and misinterpreted' nation. That's like some people who saw Arundhati Roy primarily as a Syrian Christian Malayali voice.

Azhar Abidi: I wouldn’t be surprised if Pakistani writers were getting more political in their writing. A similar thing happened in Latin America, where authors like Fuentes, Manuel Pueg, Bolano and others wrote about the experience of living under dictatorships. Political novels were extremely influential in elevating Latin American literature in the West. It’s quite possible that something similar happens in Pakistan with its unfortunate share of dictators and mullahs.

But I’m afraid I don’t share the view that you can’t avoid political engagement. I don’t want to be the spokesperson for a country, a religion or a people. I have no right to it and I think there is a great risk of misrepresentation.

Have you encountered Indian readers (or readers from any other country) who tell you that your books gave them a new perspective into Pakistani society or the lives of Pakistani people? Do you see literature making a difference in terms of how the international community views Pakistan?

Kamila Shamsie: Yes – both Indian readers and American readers have made that comment on a number of occasions. So literature can play some small part in changing people's views, but it's not going to be more than a small part. Far, far more people get their views from news reports than novels.

Moni Mohsin: The Diary of a Social Butterfly has struck a chord with my Indian readers, not just because they are intrigued to discover that such people exist in Pakistan but how similar they are to ‘drawing room wallahs’ in India. And of course literature, as arguably the most honest and persuasive form of communication that there is, has the capacity to change minds, win hearts and above all, make people understand the complexity of the human condition. I don’t see why Pakistani fiction should be an exception to that general rule.

As a Pakistani author writing in English, is it easier to get published if you're living in the West than if you're in Pakistan? And is that changing now? What is the publishing scene like in Pakistan currently?

Moni Mohsin: I don’t think it is easier to get published in the West than in Pakistan. In my view the competition is much stiffer in the West. Publishing as an industry is not particularly evolved in my country as yet. There are no agents, publishing houses are few, the number of English books published every year is small, sales are tiny and marketing is rudimentary. But then nor do we have masses of submissions.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi: it is perhaps easier to be published as a writer of foreign origin in the US, Canada and UK, and I will explain the reasons in a second. But for every Pakistani or Indian writer writing in English published here, there are hundreds who are rejected. So if you apply the law of averages on the writing population in these western countries you will find out that Pakistani or Indian writers have more or less an equal chance.

But the reason why writers of foreign origin are sought in these markets is that they bring a different kind of story, a different family dynamic, a slightly different voice which maybe exotic but also not monotonous. One has to be a little clear headed about these things. Publishing is an industry in the West. If these stories were not liked and did not sell, the publishers would not give the time of day to any Pakistani or Indian writers. As long as these stories sell and people want to read them, they will be published. Demographics also play a part. South Asians are a growing population group in Canada and they are also a big and growing group in the US and UK. That also creates a market opportunity for a publisher of a South Asian writer. If he or she is successful then there are long term rewards for a publisher.

India has many English language publishers and a growing market in both regional languages and English. I believe there is a lot of interest in books in Pakistan as well but there is no major trade publisher presence. I have heard that Penguin is planning to open up shop in Pakistan so they must have done their numbers and seen a good fat business opportunity. Currently OUP Pakistan is the only game in town who is professionally organised. There are hundreds of smaller publishers who publish but are not well known, not well-distributed and therefore not very successful. Sang-e Meel Publications in Lahore is quite big but they need to organize themselves on a more professional level. There is also Ferozsons who published many of my favourite childhood reads including the "Dastan-e Amir Hamza". I think that as publishers establish themselves in these territories, the other apparatus will follow, including literary agencies, editors and not to forget the creative-writing schools. (May God save us from the devil!)

Kamila Shamsie: I think it's just a fact of logistics that if you're living in a country where there's a dynamic publishing infrastructure it's easier to tap into that than if you're outside it. Of course the Internet does make it much easier for people in Pakistan to look up agents and publishers, make email enquiries etc – but that doesn't compare to the information you get about submitting manuscripts if you're on a creative writing course, or know someone who can suggest how to go about finding an agent, or can go to literary festivals and hear writers and publishers talk about such matters.

The publishing scene in Pakistan for Anglophone fiction is pretty dismal – so actually right now the most promising publishing market for Pakistani writers is in India. A number of very fine Pakistani writers have found publishers there, and I know Indian publishers are on the lookout for Pakistani writing.

Aamer Hussein: I don't know much about the publishing world; I've never been picked up by a commercial press, and have done about five books with Telegram – a small literary imprint – since the late 90s. I think I already answered the publishing question in part. But OUP, Sama and Alhamra in Karachi and Lahore are producing fine new work, often unpublished elsewhere. My own collection Turqoise was actually composed of stories that had come out in Pakistan first, in a volume called Cactus Town; Insomnia was published almost simultaneously here and there.

Are you concerned about the voices that have been calling for the removal of books by Pakistani authors from Indian bookstores? I'm told that in case there's a trade shutdown in the future, there would be serious repercussions for the distribution of books by many Pakistani writers...

Moni Mohsin: I am concerned but I hope better sense will prevail. After all, if Indian readers should know one thing about the Pakistani authors who have made a splash there recently, it is this: all of them condemn extremism and terrorism.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi: yes, this is a big worry. Trade-ban threats have been flying and if Pakistan reciprocates and shuts down Indian imports, then book imports will naturally suffer. There was a report about the Karachi Book Fair 2008 published in the Dawn of Dec 27: the Indian books made it there but the Indian publishers couldn't. That was very sad and it happened even without an official bans or anything being publicly declared. If things deteriorate further, even the books might be stopped.

What happens to the Pakistani writers published by Indian publishing houses if the trade stops between India and Pakistan? Wouldn't it be ridiculous that a Pakistani writer's books whose subcontinent rights are held by Random House India or Penguin India are embargoed as Indian goods and cannot be distributed in Pakistan? This is not only a loss to the publisher but also to the Pakistani author who will probably sell more copies in Pakistan.

One possible solution is that Pakistan writers do not sell subcontinent rights to Indian publishers, only Indian rights because today it is Pakistan and India, but tomorrow it could equally be India and Bangladesh, in the same scenario. Another solution is that South Asian publishers should find partner publishers in all countries who can take over publishing of a title in the event of such developments.

Yet another solution is that in the event of an embargo of any kind the rights to a title for the country where it cannot be sold will revert to the author until things normalise.

The best solution is, of course, peace.

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Also see these related posts: interviews with Daniyal Mueenuddin and Musharraf Ali Farooqi, and a lengthy conversation with Mohsin Hamid. And, of course, the Business Standard story is here.

And some context on the writers above: Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel Burnt Shadows is a multi-generational story that moves from Nagasaki in 1945 to Delhi in 1947 and, over the decades, to Pakistan and New York, examining the turbulence of a century where people have been repeatedly dislocated from their homes and where events from the distant past cast a long shadow over the present. Moni Mohsin’s Diary of a Social Butterfly is a collection of her newspaper columns that playfully expose the workings of Pakistani high society. Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s The Adventures of Amir Hamza, an outstanding 950-page translation of the epic Dastan-e Amir Hamza, was one of the publishing events of 2008, and he’s currently working on a 24-volume translation of the magical fantasy Tilism-e Hoshruba. Aamer Hussein is the author of numerous short-story collections including Turquoise and Insomnia. Azhar Abidi wrote Passarola Rising and has a new book out called Twilight.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: an interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin

To the cynical eye, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s back-story might read like a very imaginative publicist’s attempt to make an author sound interesting. The son of a Pakistani father and an American mother, he grew up in Lahore, went to boarding school in Massachusetts at age 13, and returned to Pakistan a decade later to help his aging father safeguard an ancestral property that was in danger of being taken over by crafty managers. After spending seven years more or less alone on this farm – 10 hours from Lahore by rough road – living a life that was very different from the one he had known in the US, he went back and studied law at Yale; threw up a job at a large New York law firm to return to Pakistan and write stories that were eventually published in The New Yorker and Granta; and now lives with his wife at the same farm, taking the occasional break for book tours and literary festivals.

It takes a while to realise that not only is this saga entirely true (and Mueenuddin himself quite matter-of-fact about it) but also that his short-story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders really is worthy of the buzz it has created in the literary world – a rare thing at a time when every new book is sold to us as being, in the language of the jacket blurb, “an extraordinary achievement”, “a work of uncommon depth”, “an essential book” or some combination of all these.

The eight stories in this collection shed light on the many faces of contemporary Pakistan, from poor people quietly eking out a living in the rural areas to bored nouveau riche youngsters snorting coke at Halloween parties in Islamabad; from the jet-setting upper class who think nothing of going off to Paris for a quick holiday on whim, to a feudal society comprising landlords and servants playing games of one-upmanship. But no synopsis can convey the richness and fullness of Mueenuddin’s writing, which is elegantly descriptive without ever coming across as self-conscious or as trying too hard. His prose brings to life such protagonists as the enterprising Nawabddin Electrician, a survivor in more than one sense of the word, an upwardly mobile young girl named Husna, trying to bridge the class divide by becoming the mistress of an elderly landlord, and the young couple Leila/Lily and Murad in the moving “Lily”, an outstanding portrait of the many crests and troughs of a relationship (and a story that also has perceptive things to say about people's complex relationships with their own selves).

From “About a Burning Girl”, here’s a sample of Mueenuddin’s talent for pithy yet evocative pen-portraits: a passage about Mian Sarkar, a briskly efficient Jeeves figure in the complicated world of the Pakistani judiciary.

So far as I am aware, Mian Sarkar wore a cheap three-piece suit and a pair of slightly tinted spectacles of an already outmoded design on the day that he emerged from his mother’s womb. When he leaves the office in the evening, exactly at five, he doesn’t turn a corner or get into a cab or a bus, he simply dematerializes. No one knows even what quarter of the city he lives in, much less his address...Before speaking he clears his throat with a little hum, as if pulling his voice box up from some depth where he secretes it for safekeeping. His greatest feature, however, is his nose, a fleshy tubular object, gorged with blood, which I have always longed to squeeze, expecting him to honk like a bus.

That would be a fatal act! There is nothing connected with the courts of Lahore that he has not absorbed, for knowledge in this degree of detail can only be obtained by osmosis. Everything about the private lives of the judges, and of the staff, down to the lowest sweeper, is to him incidental knowledge. He knows the verdicts of the cases before they have been written, before they even have been conceived. He sees the city panoptically, simultaneously, and if he does not disclose the method and the motive and the culprit responsible for each crime, it is only because he is more powerful if he does not do so.

I met Mueenuddin briefly at the Jaipur lit-fest and then again in Delhi. Excerpts from our conversation:


As a young man, you returned from the US to manage the family farm and lived alone there for many years. Was the change in lifestyle difficult?

Well, my father was in his late 70s at the time (there was a big age difference between him and my mother), and there were powerful managers who were threatening to take over the farm, so the choice was between losing the property and moving back to Pakistan. It was difficult, yes: my Urdu was good but I spoke no Punjabi, which was the language in which most of the legal dealings were conducted, and I had to pick it up on the job, so to speak. There was an element of personal danger too – these were powerful people I was dealing with, including a Member of Parliament.

It was a lonely life, but there's a stillness to living alone that I grew to love – I wouldn't do it now, but it was fine back then.

Did you develop your writing skills during this period?

Yes, there was a lot of solitude for reading and writing, as you can imagine – I wrote a lot of poetry and read endlessly. But also, I wrote hundreds of letters – there was no telephone, I had to travel to Lahore for that every week – and I kept carbon copies of all these letters; I still have them with me. They helped develop my sense of narrative. It was richer than diary writing, because the tone and focus of the letters changed depending on whom I was writing them to. If I wrote to my mother, I would downplay the danger. If I wrote to my American girlfriend, I would make the place seem really attractive, to entice her to come across and meet me. It added up to a construction of different narratives.

Also, I spent a lot of time observing the people around me – I observed how things worked, the crooked deals, the power-mongering, how people found ways to get around the law and transfer land in their own name. There aren't many people who have the ability to write and who also get to see the things that I have – to live that kind of life over a period of time. I suppose that helped.

Your stories show a dynamic, heterogeneous side of Pakistan, a country that often finds itself stereotyped. Do you see yourself as a political writer, correcting misperceptions?

No, that's not what I was thinking about when I wrote the stories. I do agree that it's important to highlight the diversity of the country – the international media shows only the most negative images of Pakistan – but I'm not very political myself, and in general I object to the idea of writers being too political. It gets them a readymade audience, of course, but I also think it also takes something away from the writing. That’s one reason I think Zola sucks, by the way, despite his great appeal for young people.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so critical of this but, well (shrugs, looks wry), I am!

In general, I don’t think art should be political. Picasso’s “Guernica” is a brilliant political work, but what makes it so successful in my view is the artist’s horror at what has been done to his people, and that’s almost a personal thing. I prefer to write from a human perspective, to observe and to not be judgemental – which is something that political writing invariably ends up being.

Even so, with the attention being given to In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, you’re inevitably going to become a spokesperson for your country. Are you comfortable about that?

A “bloviator”, you mean? (Laughs) No, I most certainly don’t want to be a spokesman for Pakistan. My hope – and of course, practically speaking I know this won’t happen – is to be left alone, to not be seen as representing one position or another.

I know that writing and publishing a book is a very public act, and I have to resign myself to that, but personally for me, writing is my play. It’s something I have enormous fun doing, I don’t have to try too hard or get worked up over it – this is probably not a reflection of my skill so much as of my approach to writing. And I hope it stays fun. One thing I dread is that it might become harder for me to do.

It’s interesting that you say it’s such fun, because your stories give the impression of being carefully polished over time, looked at again and again until you’re perfectly satisfied with them. Do you make several drafts?

Oh yes, multiple drafts for every story. The polishing, the careful craftsmanship, is something I owe to the reader. I mean, if a guy makes a car you don’t expect the wheels to fall off when you take it for a drive. Writing is no different. The least I can do is to write the story as well as I possibly can. If people are spending their time and money on the book, I owe it to them.

But that doesn’t take away from the joy. What I meant about the writing being fun is that I sit down and do it and enjoy it, and if I’m not in the mood I don’t do it and I don’t worry about it. I can’t understand this idea of people getting a whiff of the “midnight oil” and then sitting down to work. I can’t write unless I have a song in my heart. And I’m perfectly okay with not writing anything at all for six months if I don’t feel like it.

Is the short story your chosen medium or are you also looking at longer-form writing now?

Well, I have written a story that's around 110 pages long – it's a work-in-progress – and I'm now working on a novel. Different forms of writing have different disciplines...there's a cliché about everyone starting out with poetry, then moving to short stories and then – once you realise you've failed at both! – working on a novel. But seriously, I think that as you gain in confidence you become more extravagant. A short story has a fixed narrative line – it's like an artillery shell, which is fired out, goes up and lands at a fixed point – but a novel can be more discursive. And I’m looking forward to long-form writing now, because I’m keen to carry on telling the stories of some of the characters who appear in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. People like Husna, for instance (from the title story) – her story ended on a downbeat note but I want to see her triumphant in the next aspect of her life. I’d like to try and emulate what Proust does – bring unexpected turns and trajectories in a character’s life over time.

Since you mention Husna, she’s an example of a person trying to bridge the class divide, by making herself indispensable to a rich landlord. However, by the story’s end, she has been “put in her place”, so to speak. Are class struggles and upward mobility big issues in Pakistan, as they currently are in India?

Well, the class divide is really the human condition, isn’t it? In each strata of society, the complexities are the same. Thankfully for the world though, the majority of people are more or less content with their place – they aren’t in a desperate rush to “better” themselves (and I do put “better” in quotation marks). But Husna is an outlier, she isn’t content. She could have married a nice boy and settled down, but she doesn’t want to.

In another of the stories, “A Spoiled Man”, there’s a character who becomes a victim of lack of understanding of foreigners – people who, with the very best will in the world, end up causing damage because they fail to understand the circumstances of Pakistani lives. And there’s no getting away from that cultural disconnect. One thing I admire about Henry James is that he so precisely described the ways in which different cultures don’t understand one another. Of course, he did this in the context of British and American relationships, and you might think those cultures are relatively close to each other...but then, as Dylan Thomas put it, they’re up against the barrier of a common language!

Anyway, to get back to what I was saying...for me, one of the more interesting aspects of writing is trying to personify different voices; trying to capture the many ways in which people completely fail to understand one another.

That sounds bleak, but there’s a warm, humanist quality to these stories.

Well, I strongly believe that one thing an artist is not allowed to do is to despair. We all have our own dark nights of the soul, but if you take bleakness and desperation far enough, you basically have nothing to say: you might as well just say “Fuck it!” And writers are entertainers, no different really from the guy who juggles or blows fire out of his mouth. We’re all looking for an audience, and no audience will accept a narrative that’s utterly dark. Even if you look at someone like Kafka, whose work is seen as so pessimistic, within his darkness there is the lightness of humour – he’s very funny! There’s an affirmation present there. I don’t think unremitting negativity works.

You’ve mentioned Proust and Henry James, and your stories are written in a cool, classical style. Has most of your reading been from the 19th century?

I have to admit I’m lazy – which means that I mostly read writers who have been winnowed by time, rather than seek out new stuff. That’s probably been one of my failures – not reading enough contemporary writing.

What's your favourite story in this collection?

The longest one, "Lily", probably because it's the one I wrote most recently. As they say, the most recent child is the dearest one. It's also reassuring to have done something very recently – it lets me know that I'm still a writer!

(A version of this conversation appears in this week's Tehelka)

Festival notes 6

Some final scrapings from the Jaipur-fest barrel:

People loved Aamir's Ghajini because it laid everything on so thick – it's like eating vada pao and tikki. Incidentally, everyone talks about it being a Memento copy but hardly anyone pointed out that the scene with the blind man is a straight lift from Amelie

(Chetan Bhagat, discussing popular taste and in the process revealing that he watches French films)

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You can be a magpie when you write in English. If I were writing in Bangla I don't know if I would have been allowed to use non-Bangla words

(Tahmima Anam)

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I like my friends! They call me a gregarious hermit.

(Vikram Seth, in reply to Sonia Faleiro asking if he was a solitary writer who wasn't too keen on making friends)

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Before coming here, I was told that pleasure was one of the characteristics of Hinduism. Well, we certainly had a lot of that here!

(Scottish poet Meg Bateman, discussing the weeklong "Found in Translation" workshop for poets in Neemrana)

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More Nadeem Aslam:

I'm told that it's a good time to be a Pakistani writer – people are interested in your work. Well, I feel the opposite: I'd much rather that my country wasn't burning and my books didn't sell.

I find it very difficult to define people in terms of a religious or nationalist identity. I have 51 first cousins – yes, I know, that's the BJP's nightmare! – which means that right since childhood I've known 51 different ways of being a human being. One cousin is a non-believer, another is devout, one is happily married, another is divorced, another is unhappily married but sticking to the marriage...I can go on and on and on, there's a whole spectrum right there.

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And on a completely unrelated note, two blog posts I recently read and enjoyed: Scott Adams' very moving post about his beloved cat Sarah; and Roger Ebert on...many different things, including parthogenesis, the Donald Duck family tree, and the mathematics of the hereafter.

Festival notes 2: Diaspora Lite with Kunzru, Anam, Aw and Aslam

The term “Diaspora writing” has become something of a cliché in any discussion involving authors of south Asian origin who are settled outside their home countries. Implicit in its use is the assumption that these “Diaspora writers” must be angst-ridden, torn between cultures and at all times preoccupied with questions of identity. This is, to say the least, a simple-minded assumption. To some extent it might hold good for first-generation immigrants, but there are many younger writers who don’t much care to be straitjacketed and who think of themselves as citizens of a shrinking, multi-cultural world – their thoughts and feelings influenced by too many factors to count.

As a books journalist long jaded by the D word and the banalities surrounding it, I would normally have stayed very far away from the Jaipur festival’s panel discussion “Defining Diaspora”. But the panelists – Hari Kunzru, Tash Aw, Tahmima Anam and Nadeem Aslam – were all dynamic, interesting writers and I had a feeling they would bring a lightness of touch to the topic. This proved to be the case.


As moderator, Kunzru began by asking his co-panelists to identify why they might have been chosen for this session. “Well, I’ve done Double Diaspora,” joked Tash Aw, explaining that he was of Chinese ancestry but that he and his family had stayed in Malaysia long enough for him to think of it as his own land, and that he currently lived in London.

He was starting to elaborate when a deadpan Kunzru interjected. “Just a minute,” he said, “let’s make this as simple as possible for the audience. Why ‘Diaspora’?”

“Okay,” says Tash, “Chinese origin...”

Whereupon Kunzru holds up his index finger and goes “One!”

“...grew up in Malaysia...”

“Two!”

“...and now live in London.”

“Three! There you go!” says Kunzru.

The “One, two three” format was repeated for the other participants and it perfectly set the tone for a discussion where the authors joked about the widespread tendency to label them (“Why are we lot up here, and expected to orientate our lives around this word? Why not Ian McEwan?”) but also found time to reflect on their personal journeys and the journeys of their families. The soft-spoken Nadeem Aslam, one of my very favourite speakers, described how he had shifted from Pakistan to northern England at the age of 14 and now thought of himself as a British Pakistani. “But as a writer, my only nationality is my desk.” He mentioned that his English had been of the “This. Is. A. Cat variety” when he left Pakistan (where he had studied in an Urdu-medium school), but subsequently developed enough to become his principal language of expression: “I could have written in Urdu but I would have been nervous about the quality.”

Nadeem also movingly discussed how and why his parents’ feelings towards their adopted country were different from his. “Even after living in England for so many years, they discuss the weather by saying, ‘It’s quite cold here today, I wonder what it must be like there’ - the ‘there’ being Pakistan. And I can understand why that is. It’s much easier for me – I had my parents with me, in England. But they had left their parents behind, and that made such a difference to how they felt about life in the new place.”

Kunzru’s life has followed a somewhat different trajectory: the son of an Indian (Kashmiri Pandit) father and a British mother, he has lived most of his life in England and is more “English” than Nadeem is. But he recalled that when he was growing up he would often be asked “Where are you from?” and that he soon learnt that the expected answer was not, for example, “Bedfordshire”; the question was code for “Who had sex to make you?”

This was followed by banter about exotic book jackets – the sort which feature hennaed hands, saris and flowers - which, again, have the effect of labeling South Asian writers and giving the impression that they can only write about certain things, and in a certain way. Tahmima Anam recalled how one of her publishers had homed in on a jacket with a woman in a pink sari... for a book where the protagonist was a widow who only wore white. “When I pointed this out to them, they said, Don’t be so literal!”

“I get houses on stilts,” Tash Aw quipped. “Maybe we should set up an Anti-Orientalising Jacket Collective!” replied Tahmima.

Despite the panelists’ agreement about the D-word being restricting, they had different views about the role that their home countries play in their writing. Kunzru’s last (and in my view, best) novel My Revolutions doesn’t have an India connection at all (which is something I had discussed with him during our panel the previous day). In a similar vein, Tash Aw said that he didn’t feel any particular responsibility towards Malaysia when he wrote his novels, but Tahmima admitted that she felt a strong responsibility to Bangladesh, “perhaps because there are so few writers there who are presenting the realities of the country. I’m not saying that I want to write a history textbook but I do have political stakes”.

I spoke with Nadeem Aslam later and I think he feels the same way about Pakistan. More on that soon.

[A few more thoughts about the Diaspora thing in this old post about Rishi Reddi's book Karma and Other Stories. And an earlier post about Aslam's quiet eloquence here]

Final notes on the Amir Hamza epic, and a conversation with the translator

[Warning: very long post. But no more on the Hamza epic after this]

I don’t think much of phrases like “important/essential book” or “one of the year’s most significant publishing events” (pompous, best reserved for jacket descriptions written by the marketing divisions of publishing houses), but more than once I’ve been tempted to use them for The Adventures of Amir Hamza, Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s outstanding 950-page rendition of the epic Dastan-e Amir Hamza (an earlier post here). As the first complete English translation of a medieval classic that has been in danger of neglect, this is a landmark work in its very conception – invaluable to students of Islamic heritage and Arabic literature – but the excellence of its execution makes it a fantasy-adventure that can be relished by readers from all backgrounds.


The Hamza tales, which evolved over hundreds of years through a tradition of oral narratives, are about the exploits of the eponymous hero, who was based on a real-life figure. The story proper begins with the wise Buzurjmehr, a vizier to the Persian emperor Naushervan, discovering that the latter’s life and throne will be protected by a young man hailing from the city of Mecca. Using his clairvoyant powers, Buzurjmehr (who is a Vidura/Merlin/Gandalf figure in this book) determines the identity of this infant and has him raised under his supervision. On growing up, Hamza achieves everything that he has been prophesised to do, and a lot more besides; but when he falls in love with Naushervan’s daughter Mehr-Nigar, things begin to get complicated. Further, much to the frustration of Hamza’s friends and his beloved, there is a long, enforced separation when he must travel alone to the magical land of Qaf to help defeat a rebellious band of demons. In the meantime, his companions (led by the irrepressible Amar Ayyar, prince of tricksters and the epic’s most colourful character), stay behind on earth and pit their arms (and wits) against numerous enemy forces.

But these are just the bare bones of the plot, and they don't convey the sweeping vibrancy of this epic, its Arabian Nights-style richness of characters and incidents, and the bawdy humour that runs through it. Nor do they suggest the consistently high quality of the prose in Farooqi’s translation. In a disarming Preface, he describes escaping into the world of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza as a child, his reacquaintance with it years later, and the peculiar dream that led to his taking up the intimidating task of translation. His passion for the work, and his personal stake in it, are on view throughout.

Farooqi never compromises on the dastaan flavour, which is so crucial to the effect of a story that has come down over many generations. Each chapter has a florid opening that supplies a metaphor for the story-telling process (“The fingers of ancient scribes straddle the provident dark reed, galloping their mount in the sphere of rhetoric...the dove of the stylus trills its notes inside the vestibule of the page”). A shift in the narrative is typically marked by a sentence like “Now let me tell you of Amar Ayyar...” or “Hear a few words about Bahram Gurd...” and you can almost hear the storyteller at a Mughal-era campfire saying the equivalent lines in Urdu. When a Prophet or some other venerated figure is mentioned, there is a phrase of exaltation in parentheses (“peace be upon him!”), and numerous other stylistic devices simulate the oral storytelling tradition. And yet, despite all these devices, The Adventures of Amir Hamza is consistently engaging for a modern reader – it’s exciting, funny, heroic, irreverent and moving in turn – though reading it with little prior knowledge of context is a bit like being introduced to the Mahabharata through a full-blown translation rather than a gentler medium like an Amar Chitra Katha comic or a granny’s tale.

Scattered notes

– There are passages where the principal characters demonstrate their essential natures over and over again, or participate in encounters that read like repeats of earlier incidents (this is especially true of the first two-thirds). Book Two, for instance, features the running motif of Amar using some trick or the other to foil the enemy’s plans; when provisions dry up, he looks around for a new fort to which his army can move, uses his ayyar disguise to secure this fort, and then resumes the defence against Naushervan’s troops. This carries on for some time, creating a minor sense of déjà vu, though there is enough new in each episode to maintain one’s interest.

– There is similar repetition (and no great subtlety) in the many passages where Hamza, facing a mighty foe in single combat, invites him to deal the first blow and then, after dodging it, slashes the enemy in two (“like a raw cucumber, with not a single fibre connecting the two parts”) with his sword – thus “freeing the avis of his soul from its corporeal prison” and sending him to Hell. (Note: anyone who dies fighting Hamza or his men necessarily goes to Hell.)

– At one point a frustrated Bakhtiarak, one of Hamza’s many enemies, says, “Verily Amar spoke the truth when he claimed that the chosen of God can neither be killed nor imprisoned. Each time heavenly succour comes to their aid, the Creator of this Universe sends them relief, and none may torment them.” It’s easy to understand his frustration. Only rarely (at least until the final few chapters) does one get the sense that Hamza or Amar Ayyar are in genuine danger. On the occasions that they don’t succeed in using their own prowess to get out of trouble, they receive divine help: Prophets appear to forewarn them, or to bestow magic stone tablets that will advise them what to do at every step during a particularly hazardous mission; when Hamza’s sword uncharacteristically fails to cut through a monster’s hide, the Prophet Khizr materializes and blithely kills the creature himself; and several times, Ayyar is saved by the deus ex machina of a Naqabdar (“Veiled One”) who appears out of nowhere. Really, when you add this wealth of celestial aid to the fact that Hamza is already the greatest warrior of the age (and Ayyar the greatest trickster of the age, capable of fooling people by assuming any shape or appearance), you find that the dice is heavily loaded against the bad guys (or the infidels as they are more properly known). No fair fight, this.

But Bakhtiarak’s speech is also interesting because it highlights the lack of complexity in the negative characters. The impression one gets is that the villains (that is, Hamza’s antagonists) know that they are the bad guys and that God Almighty is firmly on the other chap’s side; but they continue trying to defeat him because, well, that’s what they are around for. This is a reminder that the Dastan-e Amir Hamza is a snowballing oral myth passed down through the generations by people who are convinced of the supreme rightness of Hamza’s cause and the unquestioned villainy of anyone who opposes him. Naturally, this means that there is little scope for nuance in the portrayals of Hamza’s adversaries (except, of course, the ones who realise their folly in time, convert to the True Faith and join his camp). After all, even the conversations between the villains have been made up by Hamza groupies, so to speak.

– As I’ve mentioned before, the epic is extremely ribald in places, and doesn’t shy away from cheerful references to human excrement and bodily functions in general.

– William Dalrymple has a review of The Adventures of Amir Hamza here. While I agree that the epic is “a reminder of an Islamic world the West seems to have forgotten, one that is imaginative and heterodox”, I’m not so sure about it “mocking male misogyny”. In my view the tone is sometimes misogynist in a more straightforward way. There’s a disturbing scene where Aadi, one of Hamza’s companions, a gluttonous and lustful general, rapes a 12-year-old virgin from the enemy camp, inadvertently killing her in the process. Though Hamza initially rages about the crime and threatens to have Aadi put to death, he forgets about the whole matter surprisingly fast when told, “Just imagine that in the same way Your Honour took a fortress by storm, he too forced open a citadel of virtue!” (Aadi, though never a likable character and often an object of ridicule, continues to be described as a “dear companion of Hamza” till the very end.) I suppose it’s possible for a modern mind to imagine that the episode is some sort of commentary on the evils of conflict, or military conquest-as-rape, but this would be another case of imposing the moralities of our own “enlightened age” on a work that was very much the product of its own time. I don’t think this passage holds up to being interpreted as ironical or tongue-in-cheek.

However, a few other passages do. One character I found interesting in this context is Aasman Peri, whom Hamza marries after he travels to Qaf. When she asks him how she compares in beauty with Mehr Nigar, his beloved on earth, he unthinkingly replies, “You cannot even hold a candle to the charm of Mehr Nigar’s maids”. Whereupon she gets angry and yells that he shouldn’t think too highly of himself just because he’s the Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, the progeny of Prophet Ibrahim and what have you, and they start battling each other with daggers right there in the bedroom, in a scene that makes Hrithik and Aishwarya’s sword-fight in Jodha Akbar look like the nuzzling of a pair of lovebirds.

Eventually Aasman Peri’s father appears and berates her for fighting her husband thus, but she doesn’t give in: she repeatedly uses her powers and influence to delay Hamza’s return to earth, eventually stretching his stay in Qaf to 18 years, and causing him much anguish. She’s certainly an example in this book of a powerful, strong-willed woman, and despite her constant hindering of Hamza’s mission, she isn’t an unsympathetic figure; the eventual meeting between her and Mehr-Nigar is a gentle, affecting one. (Incidentally, the Hamza-Aasman Peri story also reminded me of Arjuna’s trysts with the lovelorn princesses Chitrangada and Ulupi during his yearlong exile in the Mahabharata.) Hamza’s mourning for Mehr-Nigar late in the book is equally affecting, and as the story draws to a close it gets progressively darker, the jingoistic heroism of the earlier chapters being replaced by a slightly more measured, even melancholic tone.

A conversation with Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Farooqi is based in Canada and is currently working on a novel and a picture book, as well as on The Urdu Project, an online resource for the study of the Urdu language and literature.

In India, epics like the Mahabharata are not just available in a huge variety of translations but there are also several modern revisionist tellings. Why have Islamic epics like the Dastan-e Amir Hamza not been similarly preserved?

There is no excuse for us not to have worked on this very important classic. Forget about translations, even a proper, annotated Urdu version of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza is not available. Recently, Indian scholar, author and critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi published three volumes of his monumental study of this dastan, which I acknowledge in my book. He addresses both the single-volume version, the one that I have translated, and the larger, 46-volume version which was published by the Naval Kishore Press between 1883-1917. It is the first time in the history of this dastan that a proper, informed, and methodical study has been made of its various facets. We cannot be thankful enough to him for this work. Until recently, Gian Chand Jain's Urdu Ki Nasri Dastanen was the only book of substance that documented many of these dastans and their writers and story-tellers.

As far as India is concerned, there's also a political dimension to this neglect. Along with the geographical divide of 1947, a communal divide of the joint Indo-Muslim cultural heritage also came about. A mindset was allowed to develop which slowly distanced young Indians from those aspects of their culture that reinforced an integrated Indo-Muslim identity. But it would be reckless to assume that this policy alone was responsible for killing these dastans. What have all the Pakistani state-funded learned bodies done to preserve this literature in the 60 years they have been in existence? In the end it boils down to one thing: whether we are comfortable with and proud of our cultural identity. Our intellectual inquiries are informed by it. Without knowing – or making an effort to know – who we are, there will be no intellectual and scholarly effort to reclaim our joint heritage.

But if such an effort is made, we would find that the "sanitised" versions of our cultural identity thrust upon the people of the Indian subcontinent, first by their colonial rulers and then by their own governments, do not hold up to close scrutiny. That would be the first step in any renaissance of our literary classics.

Are there other similar Islamic epics that are waiting to be rediscovered or translated?

I prefer to use the term "Indo-Islamic epics." There are scores of these dastans that have never been translated. Gian Chand Jain's book has a detailed list of this literature and its history in the Indian subcontinent. I am currently working on the translation of the magical fantasy Tilism-e Hoshruba, which was recently made into a TV serial by the Sagar Arts in India. Bostan-e Khayal is another book that is equally important. Both these were the favourites of Mirza Ghalib, too.

I'm curious about the orthodox, strident tone of the passages where Hamza and his friends subjugate various people and make them convert to the "True Faith". This seems at odds with the large doses of iconoclasm that runs though the book. How would you explain these seemingly contradictory aspects?

Every adventurer and conqueror out to win renown has the same concerns and preoccupations as Amir Hamza. His goal is to subdue enemies and triumph against the threats and challenges that face him. It is true that Hamza and his companions do wholesale conversions, but what is also very obvious is that Hamza is doing this in the service of Naushervan, the Persian emperor who is himself a fire-worshipper and an infidel, and who does not convert.

When we look at Hamza's complete situation, we see that these conversions are clearly a medieval warrior's attempts to win allegiance. Once an adversary converts, the threat is neutralised, Hamza can leave him behind and move on to meet his next challenge knowing that his back will be secure. Looked at in this way, there is no real discrepancy between these passages and, say, the unholy pranks played by Amar Ayyar.

The tone is very bawdy in places – is that partly because of the way these stories have been passed down through the generations, through the oral-narrative tradition?

I believe the Hindu epics also had an oral component, but as far as The Adventures of Amir Hamza is concerned, some of its tone could well be a function of the oral storytelling tradition as you suggest. The Urdu language is itself replete with humorous expressions, which have also been celebrated in our poetic tradition.

In paintings from the Hamzanama, there is repeated mention of Hamza's arch-enemy Zumurrud Shah. Why is this character not included in your translation?

The Dastan-e Amir Hamza had many variants. The story of Amir Hamza's arch-fiend, Zamarraud Shah or Laqa, was part of the longer, 46-volume Hamza epic. You can think of the longer Hamza version as a collection of many independent fantasy adventures, which employ the main characters from the basic Hamza legend. The fantasy component in that book is much larger and more detailed than in the single-volume version by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami, which I have translated. Adventures and characters were incorporated into the oral legend, both before and after the book came out.

Islam tends to be seen globally as a restrictive, conservative religion. Do you believe epics like this one can help expose readers to a more dynamic aspect of the medieval Islamic world, and thus help bridge the cultural divide between East and West?

Some people read the Foreign Affairs. I keep myself politically updated by watching Hollywood action movies. They used to have Russian villains. Then for a short while I saw Japanese villains because their cars were selling better than the US autos. Now we have beareded Arabs waving kashnikovs. I am not too worried. If the Chinese do not adjust their currency, soon the bearded Arabs will be replaced by the evil Chinese businessman. And if India maintains its annual growth rate an Indian villain would not be too far behind. The role of the global villain keeps changing according to the political agendas and motivations of the major powers, and it is silly to think that the current western political narratives on Islam will have a long life. You cannot fool everyone all the time, I firmly believe in that.

A book like The Adventures of Amir Hamza can certainly be used in building bridges, because it is as fat as a brick! But jokes aside, I don't think we can throw books at people in any kind of cultural dialogue just to prove that we are liberal. Any kind of dialogue or consensus between peoples and cultures should be built on mutual respect and the traditions of tolerance and co-existence. Once that atmosphere is created books like The Adventures of Amir Hamza would certainly have a positive influence, and would be read for the right reasons.

What would those reasons be?

For its value as a great example of storytelling, a vibrant part of world literature, and as a cultural record. A book can be a part of the composite picture of a culture, but I do not believe that a single book, or merely books, can represent it. I think in the 20th century we grew increasingly distant from our literary culture. That is why we have produced so few good works of literature. It is precisely because of this atmosphere that the publication of The Adventures of Amir Hamza in English translation sounds like a big deal. In a vibrant literary culture, these occurrences are routine. This was the case in the late 19th and early 20th century in India, when the Naval Kishore Press and many independent presses published important literary titles in the thousands.

[A version of this interview appears in this Sunday’s Business Standard]