[Keynote address at the 16th Karachi Literature Festival, 7 February 2025.]
First of all, let me express my deep appreciation to the organisers of the 16th Karachi Literature Festival 2025 for their kind invitation to participate in this year’s gathering.
In particular, I am grateful to Mr. Arshad Saeed Husain, Managing Director, Oxford University Press, for suggesting that I give this Keynote address.
My association with OUP goes back to the 1970s, when its then MD Anthony Moggach and I collaborated on the Oxford Historical Reprint series. Since then, OUP has published four out of my 23 books, the first being in 1977.
It has hosted me at various Karachi LitFests, and do so again this year.
The theme for this year’s KLF is Narratives from the Soil. No one would argue that we modern Pakistanis are all sons and daughters of the same soil. But of which soil?
My country has been the victim of political mathematics. It was born of division, in 1947 when the provinces of Bengal and Punjab were truncated.
It has been added to, with the accretion of the states of Khairpur, Bahawalpur, Kalat, and also Dir, Swat, and Gilgit-Baltistan.
It has been subtracted from, in 1971 with the detachment of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
And its population multiplies at a frightening rate every year.
But unlike India which is the constitutional sum of its parts, we are disparate parts of an ideological whole.
We are the only country of its size whose borders – even after 78 years of independence - have not yet been legally formalised or accepted by our neighbours (except Iran). Take Sir Creek in the south, the Pak-Afghan boundary in the northwest, and Azad Jammu & Kashmir and Aksai Chin in the north.
So, which is the territory I should call my motherland? Which is the soil that I should be ready to defend and if need be, prepared to lay down my life for?
Which corner of my geography will be ‘forever Pakistan’?
Does the soil of whatever constitutes Pakistan yield a narrative?
Yes. It does.
It speaks through the ancient Petroglyphs incised in the rocks of Hunza or Haldeikish in Gilgit-Baltistan.
It speaks in the Indus Valley script impressed in clay seals and pottery shards.
It speaks in the voice of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka through his fourteen Edicts inscribed on rocks in Mansehra, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
It speaks through the stone forts and palaces, gateways and mosques left by rulers determined to be remembered by posterity.
It speaks through memories of a shared past and the realities of a fractured present.
Over the past fifty years, Pakistaniyat (if I may coin such phrase) has become, like Punjabiat, an international phenomenon. Go to any country in the world, navigate every sea – cross Canada, the U.K., the U.S.A., Australia, even Trinidad & Tobago - and you will be aware of Pakistaniat – and more specifically, Punjabiat, Sindhiat, Pathaniat, and Balochiat.
With Punjabiat and Sindhiat, Pathaniat, and Balochiat, the bond is linguistic, cultural.
With Pakistaniyat – the connection is broader. It is a defensive ethnicity, a claim to identity, the need to remember what we were before we became ‘the other’.
Nowhere is this truer than in the writings of Pakistani authors and poets, whether resident in Pakistan or scattered in an extended diaspora.
Some of us have deliberately chosen to express ourselves in English - a foreign tongue, a dialect alien to the Lingua Persia and Lingua Arabica that had conquered our Lingua Indica. It was a voice unheard here until the 17th century.
This new idiom, rapidly adopted, enabled writers in English, wherever they were, as Muneeza Shamsie pointed out in her seminal work Leaving Home (2001), ‘to perceive themselves in universal terms, yet identify with Pakistan.’
Since conquests began, empires left not only their stamp on the history of their colonies, they moulded the shape of local tongues. Following the conquests of Asia and Egypt by Alexander the Great, Greek became the standard language of the rulers. For example, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra’s first language was Greek, just as the Quaid’s preferred tongue was Lincoln’s Inn English, not Kathiawari Gujrati.
Greece taught Greek to the Romans. Rome taught Latin to the Britons. Britain taught us English. They also taught us to look down on our vernacular tongues.
Today, no less than in the two centuries before 1947, mastery of English continues to be an important step to success. It is the language of governance. It is the ladder into the attic of the upper classes. And it is the IELTS, the passport to migration.
This morning, I was reading Hanif Kureishi’s compelling memoir Shattered (2024). His physical plight reminded me of the earlier emotional trauma of isolation he experienced as a Brit-Pak youngster. In ‘We’re not Jews’, he describes being taunted for being a Wog and a Sambo.
As a youngster studying in London, I too like Kureishi was called Sambo by a fellow student. I silenced him by suggesting that his being a Jew, I thought he would have been more compassionate.
My South London landlady was more elliptical in her prejudice. One day, she complained about the West Indian bus conductors. I reminded her that I too was black.
“Oh no,’’ she replied. ‘You are not black. You are what I would call Off White!’
Which brings me to the radical admission that we Pakistanis – whether mono or hyphenated – write in what should be described as Off White English.
When my first book – a catalogue of miniature paintings in the Lahore Museum - was published in 1977, my mentor the art scholar Dr. William Archer (a retired ICS officer) contributed a Foreword. It took the shine off it when I noticed he had mentioned that I had written it in ‘unimpeachable English’.
His wife – Dr. Mildred Archer (also an art-scholar at the then India Office Library) – remonstrated. ‘’Don’t you think that is a bit condescending?’’
Bill replied: ‘’My dear, I wouldn’t want anyone reading Aijaz’s name to think that his book was written in babu English.’’
Applied to writers in English like myself, we can write perfect 24 karat English but if our names are Salman Rushdie or Hanif Kureishi, Bapsi Sidhwa or Kamila Shamsie, or for that matter Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh or Vikram Seth, we will be assayed as being 23 karat.
As the Indian matinee hero Dilip Kumar once said of the singer Lata Mangeshkar, our voices reek of ‘dal, bhaat’ (curry and rice).
Does Pakistan have a collective narrative? Yes. The magisterial works by Dr. Tariq Rahman and Muneeza Shamsie prove to us that there is. Read Dr. Rahman’s A History of Pakistan Literature in English up to 1990 and Muneeza Shamsie’s evaluation twenty-seven years later, published by OUP as Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English.
Our novels, our poetry, our short stories, our tell-all memoirs, our understanding of being ‘the other’ confirm that we have , after over seventy years, matured as a literary community.
Today, there are 251 million of us Pakistanis. But by writing in English, we are conversing within a minority. As one Indian linguist put it: ‘What Banerjee says, only Chatterjee understands’. Over 200 million of our compatriots cannot read or understand what we have to say about ourselves, or about them.
In another 25 years, there will be 380 million of us. We will be more populous in 2050 than Indonesia, Brazil, Russia and the United States. That is an enormous potential readership, provided that they are able to read – whether in English, Urdu or any regional language. Remember that the 18th Constitutional Amendment of 2010 has devolved higher education into the exclusive domain of the provinces. The Higher Education Commission stands emasculated. The English language may be the only adhesive holding us together.
During the next few days, there will be discussions in the KLF 2025 on every gamut of our literary persona. One in particular – Pakistani-Bangladesh relations: A Reset is scheduled for Sunday morning. It is an overdue reminder that we were once siblings, Indian by origin, before in 1971 we became residual Pakistanis and unshackled Bangladeshis.
The late Kaleem Omar – a Pakistani poet once published by OUP – wrote of that painful excision, when in March 1971, the military began its Operation Searchlight against the Bengali nationalist movement:
A northwester blew one March….
April, May, June – the months
Telescoped into December.
The trouble is that I remember.
We should also not forget that there was a time once when the Indo-Pak border was porous, allowing Indian writers, scholars and artistes to visit their counterparts in Pakistan freely.
Over the last five years or so, an almost impenetrable saffron curtain has descended, from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. We are like distant divorcees, able to meet anywhere except in each other’s homes.
In this context, I would like to read a poem I wrote some years ago, regretting this brutal divide:
There was a time
When Time evoked tomorrows.
Today, it speaks only of yesterdays.
Where has the promise gone
of fraternité sans frontières?
Where are the tears we shed,
the blood to irrigate an earth,
once yours, now mine,
once mine, now yours?
Why must my only view
of you be through
the barrel of a gun?
Why must I search for you
in the debris of a divided sun?
How long will this daily suicide last?
Will we have separate heavens there, as well,
or find ourselves sharing another common hell?
We live in our separate heaven, in what will hopefully be ‘forever’ Pakistan.
If by the close of Karachi LitFest 2025 on Sunday night, you and we have understood Pakistan better and more sympathetically, we have succeeded. If not, there is always the prospect of the 17th Karachi LitFest next year, and hopefully many more thereafter, dedicated to projecting as this one does, Pakistan at its intellectual best.
And who could give you a better, parallel insight than Mr. Asghar Nadeem Syed?
I have spoken to you in imitative English. He will speak to you on behalf of our majority, in unimpeachable Urdu.
But why stammer I, when he is here to sing?
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN |
