Willing representatives: Mohsin Hamid and Pakistani literature abroad by Zain R Mian

mohsin hamid writerIn 2010, the UK magazine Granta published its only Pakistan issue. The magazine’s
cover was decorated by an artist from Karachi, Islam Gull, and celebrated a Pakistan that seldom travels
far from our borders. There were no explosions, beards, or ominous men with guns at their back, but
only natural scenes of lakes, tigers and birds. Flipping through, one could have been impressed. The
contributors were diverse enough – 19 in all – with a good mix of ‘international’ and ‘local’ voices. A
flaw, if there was one, was never particularly noticeable: out of the 18 pieces of poetry, fiction and
reportage, just three had been written in local languages.

Admittedly, Pakistanis writing in English have had it good for almost two decades now, long before the
2010 issue of Granta was produced. However, surprising though it may now seem, English literature
classrooms have historically not wandered outside the boundaries of British or American writing, and
certainly not in any substantial way before the 1970s. If Pakistani literature in English now has some
global importance, this has happened very much within living memory – with the creation of a World
literature canon starting in the 1960s, the setting up of postcolonial studies as an academic discipline in
the 1980s and the collapse of the twin towers in 2001.

Of the present crop of renowned Pakistani writers in English, most of whom came of age in the early-to-
mid 2000s, Mohsin Hamid is perhaps the most famous. Writing regularly for publications like The New
Yorker, The New York Times and The Guardian, and with internationally acclaimed novels like The
Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West to his credit, Hamid has established himself as an authority
figure on Pakistani culture and politics. Together, Hamid’s rise and the publication of Granta**: Pakistan,
form a window into the development of ‘Pakistani literature’ as a category abroad, subject to its own
selective politics and institutional pressures.

Hamid’s writing really took off in the post-9/11 era, when the world once again became obsessed with
the Middle East and a static idea of ‘Islamic civilization’. This obsession, mixed with fascination and
terror, was more than anything else a desire to know ‘the Muslim’ and the possible dangers he could
pose. The Reluctant Fundamentalist stoked this desire and thus launched Hamid to the stature of a
literary celebrity. The novel’s protagonist, Changez, promised entry into a world where, in academic
Peter Morey’s words, “conclusive lessons about Islamic radicalisation [would] be forthcoming”. At the
same time, Changez played with and frustrated the idea that his real thoughts could actually be known.
Supposedly a believer in American ideals, he always acted overly formal with his interlocutors,
appearing calculated, and even devious.

Changez was well received by English readers and academics, because his dubious character allowed
readers to re-enact and discuss both postcolonial hybridity and the wider context of Islamophobia in the
2000’s. At the same time, few have taken seriously, the appeal of a character like Changez; the image of
a dangerously Eastern or ‘Muslim’ inscrutability inadvertently relies on a one-dimensional image of
Muslim religiosity that broadly typifies Hamid’s work.

Exploring the many worlds of Mohsin Hamid’s fiction, the reader finds little room for a nuanced Muslim
subjectivity. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, like much of Hamid’s writing, is obsessed with the image of a
Muslim man’s beard and how this could signal latent danger or radical conservatism. True, Hamid’s
writing is at times self-reflexive on this point, but this is usually not the case. In his first novel Moth
Smoke, for example, the main character Daru sits alone in the cinema when a man approaches,
prompting Hamid’s protagonist to immediately note his “thick black beard”. Predictably, this man turns
out to be a “fundo” just as Daru had expected “from the moment [he] saw him”.

‘Fundo’, short for fundamentalist, is an important category, used indiscriminately by Pakistan’s elite
Anglophone class to describe any person with deeply or sincerely-held religious beliefs, and certainly
anyone who chooses to keep a beard for reasons of this sort. ‘Fundos’ litter Hamid’s fiction: there are
few, if any, religious characters that are not either ‘dangerous’, or at least thought to be so. True to
form, Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia has its own violent and coercive “university
organisation”, which the main character “grows a beard” to be able to join.

These patterns continue in A Beheading, Hamid’s short story contribution to the Pakistani Granta, in
which the protagonist is a nameless first-person narrator who is, it seems, randomly attacked,
kidnapped, and eventually beheaded. Interestingly enough, the assailants in this story are not just
unknown and dangerous, but also entirely un-decodable, speaking not even “Arabic or Pashto” but what
the narrator can only compare to “f***ing Chechen”. Like the majority of dangerous figures in Hamid’s
fiction, these strange, malevolent men are coded as religious: the protagonist, in trying to receive
forgiveness, can’t remember how to say his prayers. Yet he wishes he could. “I’d ask them to let me
pray,” he says. “Show them we’re the same.”

In its three brief pages, A Beheading captures the tendencies in Hamid’s representation of the Muslim
and the ‘fundo’. Religious men are imposing and cunning, even terrifying. In the story, they do not have
any identifiable reason for attacking the main character, nor do we get a real sense of why they have
come to be the way they are. There is little room for these descriptions, which is partly the point: in
most of Hamid’s stories and novels, religious belief (and the beard in particular) has little other function
than as shorthand for signalling possibly-hidden Islamist sympathies or terrorist leanings.

It is strange that the fiction of an author typically held representative of a country with nearly 200
million Muslims – an ostensible ‘Islamic Republic’ no less – furnishes little nuance in relation to this
religion. Islam in Hamid’s fiction is tritely homogenous, and the tensions it implies are those produced in
relation to ‘Western modernity’ and the interpretations of liberty and individualism associated
therewith. This does not mean that Hamid is himself an unqualified flag-bearer for these ideals,
especially as The Reluctant Fundamentalist also critiques capitalism as another form of fundamentalism.
At the same time, though, Hamid’s fiction gives us no real sense of Muslim existence apart from the oft-
repeated associations with the war-on-terror and the clash-of-civilisations thesis.

Part of the problem is that Hamid has achieved success as an international author through the
publishing centres of New York and London, with the support of pertinent political currents, and a global
audience to which he has tailored his writing. Unfortunate as it may be, contemporary literature from
the so-called ‘third world’ is often picked up and read, especially by casual readers, for the ‘authentic’ or
‘true’ view it gives of political crises in these places. These books are read less for their literary or
aesthetic value and more as reportage revealing the ‘real’ conditions of a place and its people. Given
that the spike in interest in Pakistani literature post-9/11 resulted from our involvement in the war on
terror, these perspectives mean that Hamid’s limited engagement with what it means to be a Muslim
makes him more appealing to the wide readership. It makes him more likely to be published, and
reviewed, and to be considered for international prizes.

It is not surprising that Hamid’s most successful novels have also been his most topical ones: The
Reluctant Fundamentalist, released in the context of the war in Iraq, and Exit West, published during the
international refugee crisis, were both short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Still, Hamid’s rise to fame
has obviously not been a simple matter of selecting the right book for the right moment. With his
growth as a writer has come not just a more assured command over style, but also, and more
importantly, a profound understanding of the English publishing world and the Anglophone universities,
both of which have been integral for opening his work to non-Pakistani audiences.

It is not controversial to say that Hamid’s first novel has been his least well-known. Moth Smoke focused
on the lives of several people living in Lahore: its plot revolved around the main character Daru’s
relationship with an old friend, Ozi, and his wife, Mumtaz. Hamid’s setting was local, and so was his
conflict, to a degree. The plot unravelled mostly in Lahore as the novel criticised the habits and
prejudices of the city’s upper classes. However, though it was well received and appreciated by the likes
of Anita Desai and Jhumpa Lahiri, Moth Smoke never became the massive cultural event Hamid’s future
books would be. This would start only a decade later, when massive fanfare would greet The Reluctant
Fundamentalist in 2007.

It was with his second novel that Hamid became a renowned ‘Muslim’ and ‘Pakistani’ novelist, at the
same time as his rootedness in Lahore began to fade. Hamid’s new novel gave up the resolute Lahori
focus of his earlier work and instead became equally attentive to both Lahore and New York, Pakistan
and the US, ‘the Muslim’ and ‘the West’. It was at this point that the author’s language changed too:
acutely aware of his reception abroad, Hamid wrote a book that spoke directly to an American audience,
engaging them in conversation. “Do not be frightened by my beard,” says Changez, “I am a lover of
America.”
By his third and fourth books, Hamid was well on his way to becoming much more than a Muslim or a
Pakistani novelist. At this point it had become clear that to be canonised as a great, world-renowned
author, he had to further supersede the relative rootedness of his earlier works. To be famous within
the newly ascendant category of a ‘global author’, his concerns needed to be wider, grander and
responsive to developments and politics that spoke to audiences in the US and UK. Effectively, his
writing needed to interest the North American publishing industry, its casual readers and attentive
universities.

The politics of How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid’s third novel, were not identifiably Lahori or
Pakistani, but avowedly ‘South Asian’ and ‘Asian’. Focusing on a nameless protagonist – you – the
novel’s plot unfolds in an unnamed ‘Asian’ city and country. In this way, Rising Asia’s politics and
aesthetics rely on the idea that all people and places in Asia are interchangeable and can be spoken of
generally – sans the specificities of language, religion, and culture – since they share the experience of
development (or underdevelopment) on an increasingly neo-liberalised continent.

With Exit West, Hamid has expanded the premise of Rising Asia yet further, by giving us the story of
Nadia and Saeed, two lovers caught in the destruction of their city by militants. In Hamid’s fourth and
latest novel, strange, portal-like doors make the whole world’s borders porous: you can now escape to
safer places, though the First World will eventually be just as inhospitable as home is now. In his latest
book, Hamid is not talking about Lahore, Pakistan, or even Asia specifically, since the novel’s initial logic
distinguishes only vaguely between the East and the West. As is the case with Rising Asia, the reader
does not get any sense of localised politics nor the diverse kinds of actors that differentiate Lahore from
Delhi, Delhi from Kabul, or Kabul from Aleppo. This kind of writing also has connections with how ‘the
Muslim’ never takes a detailed form in Hamid’s work. Like these increasingly generalise-able cities, the
category of ‘the Muslim’ matters more for the distinction it makes against ‘the West’, rather than for
any internal tensions or conflicts it could reveal.

Especially with his last two books, Hamid has increasingly rejected local politics, histories and literary
influences, preferring instead to focus on internationally relevant discourses. He has increasingly
positioned himself as a ‘global’ author by tying both the content and form of his fiction to prevailing
world events, and by making his writing more current, accessible and appealing to both specialised and
relatively popular audiences in North America and Europe. In his creation of nameless countries and
cities, and his use of broadly homogenising categories like the fundo, Asia, East, and the West, he
promises publishers and casual readers writing that requires little previous knowledge or cultural
expertise to understand. For academics, he creates novels easily assimilable by a range of disciplines and
for a variety of purposes, since local geographies and histories no longer remain barriers to entry.
As an individual, Hamid is perhaps entitled to write the fiction he sees fit and to tackle the issues he
values. And yet, it is also unethical to ignore, that to be read outside our borders is a privilege to which
only certain writers have access. A look at the Pakistani Granta is proof enough: most of the writers
published, and even the few translators present, are those educated and based abroad, or who have at
least spent more than a significant portion of their lives in Europe or North America. The point here is
power: the individual merits or demerits of English writers notwithstanding, it is really not debatable
that they benefit from their generally upper or upper-middle-class status, which allows them to travel to
and enter Western language publishing systems directly, to forge connections that help their name and
work spread farther and wider.

There is also the question of influence: it is unreasonable to assume that elite education and extended
stays abroad do not shape one’s outlook or art. Like Hamid, many of Pakistan’s internationally renowned
authors bear the stamp of their experiences in the stories they choose to tell, who the stories are about,
the kinds of characters they create, and in what, for them, counts as real conflict and not ‘ideology’. The
Pakistani Granta reflects this bias too, as a disproportionate number of stories are standard fare:
immigrants abroad, Islamic violence, and the antagonism between tradition and modernity.

Contrary to what a certain brand of intellectuals may argue, Pakistan and its people look very different
in its many local languages, which cannot be subsumed by English. This is not parochialism, but an
acknowledgement of how the diversity of class, caste, kinship and religious viewpoints shape the texture
and value-systems of the languages people have grown up speaking. People’s values and their social and
historical experience give meaning to their language.

In Pakistan, the difference between our English stories and those in other languages can be quite stark,
because English remains elite and inaccessible, often acquired at the direct expense of Urdu, Punjabi,
Pashto, Sindhi and Balochi, etc. People from economically modest, ‘traditional’, or rural backgrounds
seldom have access to it, while many of our most popular English novelists, on the other hand, do not
have deep fluency in local languages or their literatures. Is it defensible, then, that the stories of about
200 million citizens be told by such an insignificant minority, and one that claims a singular Pakistani
experience in English, the most elite language of all?

Insofar as the most prominent of our writings abroad are not deeply rooted in the immediate concerns,
politics, and languages of the vast majority of Pakistanis, the charge that English writing is not really
from Pakistan is perhaps warranted. Nonetheless, the situation is improving and some English-language
writers have produced novels that open up an otherwise-limited canon: Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s
Between Clay and Dust, Dr Osama Siddique’s Snuffing Out the Moon, and Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi
are some excellent works of this kind, as has been the writing of Mohammed Hanif. This distinct body of
work is generally produced by the subsection of writers proficient in traditions besides English, though
there is still a general bias towards Urdu at the expense of other languages.
Unsurprisingly, however, novels like those mentioned above have as yet been unable to reshape the
dominant definitions of Pakistani literature abroad: their excellence and availability in English does not
mean they generate significant debate or discussion outside South Asia, and they often fail to reach the
shelves of international bookstores, not to mention university syllabi. Under these conditions, it is vital
that our most prominent writers move from politics of individualism to one of collective responsibility.
Now especially, suggestions that we write only for ourselves will not do.

At the very least, English writers involved in the global literary market need to forge new relationships,
making their personal connections and institutional resources available to those from other languages
and backgrounds, to those whose politics and concerns differ from theirs. This is certainly a difficult task,
as much a social and political project as it is a literary one, made more precarious by how writers, like
the rest of us, are not inclined to work against themselves. And yet if they do so, and if we can
practically encourage the instruction and integration of various literatures and languages across social
classes, it is possible that the Pakistan written in English will become more circumspect, and less sure
that it knows itself.