And the World Changed (5 page)

This anthology testifies, with its variety of voices, that Pakistani
women writing in English have come a long way since their pre-Partition ancestors. Today Pakistani women write creatively in English because that is the language in which they wish to express themselves; theirs is a literary tradition that has been long in gestation and is finally coming into its own. They no longer work in virtual isolation. They draw on the traditions of other English literatures as well as the vernacular languages of Pakistan. They are a part of the new world literature in English that gives voice to experiences beyond the traditional canons of Anglo-American literature. In this anthology their stories describe a myriad of experiences to reveal the richness, complexity, and multiculturalism of Pakistani life—and the wider world with which it is so inextricably linked.

Muneeza Shamsie
        

Karachi
        

March 2008
        

NOTES

1
. The official languages of Pakistan today are Urdu and English, but provincial languages, such as Balochi/Brahvi, Pashto, Punjabi, and Sindhi, are also important. There is also a host of minor languages.

2
.
The Crow Eaters
was self published in 1978 and then was published by the British publishing house, Jonathan Cape, in 1980.

3
. The English-language writing by South Asians has been known as Indo-Anglian, Indian English, or South Asian English. I am using the older term “Indo-Anglian” to describe pre-Partition work and thus distinguish it from the modern, post-Partition term, “Indian English,” which excludes Pakistani English literature, whereas South Asian English is the collective term for the work produced in the independent countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.

4
. In “Sultana's Dream,” Hossain reverses gender roles in a futuristic country, Ladyland, which is ruled by women. Her spare, terse prose was years ahead of its time, as was her description of a world where people can harness energy, travel by air, and use solar missiles.

5
. Ikramullah's groundbreaking doctoral thesis on Urdu fiction was written in a modern English and published as
A Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story
(1945); One of its most remarkable features is
the sensibility that Ikramullah brings to her critical assessments, as a woman. She also devotes a chapter each to women novelists and women short story writers, including Rashid Jahan.

6
. Iqbalunissa Hussain's birth and death dates are unknown.

WORKS CITED

De Souza, Eunice, ed. 2004.
Purdah
. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. 1988.
“Sultana's Dream” and Selections from The Secluded Ones
, edited and translated by Roushan Jahan. New York: The Feminist Press.

Ikramullah, Shaista Suhrawardy. 1998.
From Purdah to Parliament
. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Jalal, Ayesha. 2001.
Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850
. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel.

Karlitzky, Maren. 2002. “The Tyabji Clan—Urdu as a Symbol of Group Identity.”
Annual of Urdu Studies
17: 187–207.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. 2002.
The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English
. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Niazi, Zamir. 1986.
The Press in Chains
. Karachi: The Royal Book Company.

Pernau, Margrit. 2002. “Female Voices: Women Writers in Hyderabad at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.”
Annual of Urdu Studies
17: 36–54.

Rahman, Tariq. 1991.
A History of Pakistani Literature in English
. Lahore: Vanguard.

———. 2002.
Language, Ideology and Power
. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Shamsie, Muneeza, ed. 1997.
A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English
. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

———. 2001. “At the Stroke of Midnight.”
Dawn Books and Authors Supplement
. Karachi, April 14.

———. 2005. Introduction.
And the World Changed
. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.

DEFEND YOURSELF AGAINST ME

Bapsi Sidhwa

Bapsi Sidhwa (1938– ) is the author of five novels, which have been translated into many languages. She was born in Karachi and brought up in Lahore. Stricken with polio at a young age, she was educated at home until she was 15. She later graduated from Kinnaird College, Lahore. She married at 19, did social work, and represented Pakistan at the 1974 Asian Women's Congress. Sidhwa also served on the Advisory
Committee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Women's Development from 1994 to 1996. She has taught in the United States at Columbia University, the University of Houston, Mount Holyoke College, and Brandeis University; and in England at the University of Southampton. She moved to the United States in the 1980s and lives in Houston. She is the 2008 winner of Sony Asia TV's South Asian Excellence Award for Literature.

Sidhwa's first novel,
The Crow Eaters
(self published, 1978; Jonathan Cape, 1980), pioneered contemporary English fiction by Pakistani women. It was also the first major novel about the Parsi community, the ancient but small religious minority of Zoroastrians to which Sidhwa belongs. The novel's ribaldry was also rare for South Asian English fiction. Sidhwa went on to write
The Bride
(Jonathan Cape, 1983);
Ice Candy Man
(Heinemann, 1988; later published as
Cracking India
, Milkweed, 1991), which was made into a film
Earth
by Canadian director Deepa Mehta;
An American Brat
(Milkweed, 1993), which was performed in 2008 as a stage play in Houston; and
Water
(Penguin Books India, 2006), which was adapted from Deepa Mehta's screenplay of that name. Sidhwa has also edited an anthology,
City of Sin and Splendor: Writings on Lahore
(Penguin Books India, 2006). Among the many honors she has received are the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award in the United States, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in Pakistan, and recently, the Italian Premio Mondello award for
Water
.

In “Defend Yourself Against Me” Sidhwa brings together a group of expatriates of South Asian origin with an apparent commonality of language and culture, but as the story unfolds the reader learns that these people belong to different religious groups: Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh. Using a Pakistani Christian narrator named Joy, Sidhwa develops themes that run through most of her work: minority identity and multiculturalism. Sidhwa looks at the dimensions of human compassion, the will to survive, and the capacity to forgive. In the sidelines of this story, when Sidhwa introduces Kishen's white American wife, Suzanne, she further comments on adaptation, mutation, and change that encompass both the migrations of 1947 and the movement of South Asians into the diaspora.

• • •

“They are my grandparents,” says Kishen. I peer at the incongruous pair mounted in an old frame holding an era captive in the faded brown and gray photograph. I marvel. The heavy portrait has been transported across the seven seas; from the Deccan plateau in India to the flat, glass-and-aluminum–pierced horizons of Houston, Texas. The tiny sari-clad bride, her nervous eyes wide, her lips slightly ajar, barely clears the middle-aged bridegroom's ribs.

“Your grandfather was exceptionally tall,” I remark, expressing surprise; Kishen is short and stocky. But distracted partly by the querulous cries of his excited children, and partly by his cares as a host, Kishen nods so perfunctorily that I surmise his grandfather's height cannot have been significant. His grandmother was either exceedingly short or not yet full grown. I hazard a guess. She could be ten; she could be eighteen. Marketable Indian brides—in those days at least—wore the uniformly bewildered countenances of lambs to the slaughter and looked alike irrespective of age.

We hear a car purr up the drive and the muted thud of Buick doors. The other guests have arrived. Kishen, natty in a white sharkskin suit, tan tie, and matching silk handkerchief, darts out of the room to welcome his guests loudly and hospitably. “
Aiiay! Aiiay! Arrey bhai
, we've been waiting for you!
Kitni der laga di
,” he bellows in a curious mix of Urdu and English that enriches communication between the inheritors of the British Raj, Indians, and Pakistanis alike. “I have a wonderful surprise for you,” I hear him shout as he ushers his guests inside. “I have a lady friend from Pakistan I want you to meet!”

I move hesitantly to the living-room door and peer into the hall. Flinging out a gleaming sharkskinned arm in a grand gesture of introduction, Kishen announces: “Here she is! Meet Mrs. Jacobs.” And turning on me his large, intelligent eyes, beaming handsomely, he says, “Sikander Khan is also from Pakistan.”

Mr. Sikander Khan, blue-suited and black-booted, his wife
and her three sisters in satin
shalwar kameezes
and heavy gold jewelry, and a number of knee-high children stream into the living room. We shake hands all around and recline in varying attitudes of stiff discomfiture in the deep chairs and sofas covered,
desi
style, with printed bedspreads to camouflage the stains and wear of a house inhabited by an extended Hindu family.

Kishen's diminutive mother, fluffed out in a starched white cotton sari, smiles anxiously at me across a lumpy expanse of sofa and his two younger brothers, unsmiling and bored, slouch on straight-backed dining-room chairs to one side, their legs crossed at the ankles and stretched right out in front. Suzanne, Kishen's statuesque American wife, her brown hair falling in straight strands down her shoulders and back, flits to and fro in the kitchen. As comfortable in a pink silk sari with a gold border as if she were born to it, she pads barefoot into the room, the skin on her toes twinkling whitely, bearing a tray of potato samosas, fruit juices, and Coke, the very image of dutiful Brahman wifedom. A vermilion caste mark spreads prettily between her large and limpid brown eyes.

I know her well. Her otherworldly calm and docility are due equally to her close association with her demanding and rambunctious Indian family, and the more private rigors of her job as a computer programmer in an oil corporation.

I make polite conversation with Mrs. Khan's sisters in hesitant Punjabi. They have just emigrated. The differences from our past remain: I, an English-speaking scion of Anglican Protestants from Lahore; they, village belles accustomed to drawing water to the rhythm of Punjabi lore. They know very little English. Tart and shifty-eyed, their jewelry glinting like armor, they are on the defensive; blindly battling their way through cultural shock waves in an attempt to adapt to a new environment as different from theirs as only a hamburger at McDonald's can be from a leisurely meal of spicy greens eaten in steamy village courtyards redolent of buffalo dung and dust-caked, naked children.

Observing their bristling discomfiture and the desultory nature of the conversation, Sikander Khan moves closer to me. He is completely at ease. Acclimatized. Americanized.

Our conversation follows the usual ritual of discourse between Pakistanis who meet for the first time on European or American soil. He moved from Pakistan eleven years ago, I two. He has a Pakistani and Indian spice shop on Richmond uptown, I teach English at the University of Houston downtown. Does he have U.S. citizenship? Yes. Do I? No, but I should have a green card by December. Mr. Khan filed his mother's immigration papers two years ago: They should be through any day. One of his brothers-in-law will bring Ammijee. It will be his mother's, Ammijee's, first visit to the United States.