|
Literary Review
Voices from the city
|
Karachi could be Mumbai's lost twin and, like Mumbai, has had its share of violence and upheaval. Yet, the city by the sea has also provided voice to many women writers, says ANURADHA KUMAR.
|
KARIM, in Kamila Shamsie's latest novel, Kartography, makes maps of his home city — as a symbol of longing both for his home and for his childhood friend, Raheen. The gesture is symbolic because Karachi is a city that has never been mapped. Strange, for Karachi as a city had almost similar beginnings as Bombay, yet still remains little written about; much of what passes through is lost in the mist of violence and mystery that has been Karachi's lot in recent decades. Like Bombay, Karachi too went through a series of metamorphoses; indeed Karachi could almost have been Bombay's lost twin. Following the tragic fact of Partition, Karachi, once less than an hour away by flight, now seems as far as if it is in another universe.
In its initial 220 years, starting from the 20-25 huts of fishermen (1728 AD), it developed into a city of 4,50,000 inhabitants by 1947, the year Pakistan was founded. But there has been a phenomenal increase in population during the last 50 years, mainly due to the influx of refugees after Partition and migration since then. Karachi has proven a haven for migrants to a new nation now in its 55th year.
Karachi, as legend has it, derives its name from the story of the well-loved "Mai Kolaichi" (Aunt Kolachi or Qalachi). Mai Kolachi was the wife of Sanwal, a fisherman, who went missing in stormy seas after having ventured out all on his own . None of the other fishermen had been willing to accompany him. Despite Mai Kolachi's pleas, they refused to go and find him. Undaunted, Mai Kolachi took a boat and went to find her husband. The rough weather caught her too and a great wave pushed her towards the beach. Sanwal too had met with a similar fate. He had been pushed toward a settlement whose local leader was Ghulab Khan. It was here that Mai Kolaichi was reunited with her husband. When they returned, the now-proud villagers renamed the settlement as Kolachi's Village and she was made the head of the settlement. Some opposed it, for, a woman as village head was an affront to its men. Despite the opposition, Mai Kolachi remained the head of the village.
In the late 1990s Pakistan's first woman premier, Benazir Bhutto, also from Karachi, was so charmed by the long-forgotten legend of Mai Kolachi that to honour her, a road link bypass was constructed and named after the remarkable Mai. As another story goes, in 326 BC, the naval fleet of Nearchus, Alexander's naval commander, passed through this land. The port was then called Krokala. Alexander's fleet was on its way to the Euphrates via the Indus delta. But even then the creek was also called "Woman's Harbour", or "Ladies Pool" as it was ruled by a woman at that time.
Looking outwards, seeming a part of Pakistan and yet away, it is little wonder that Karachi has afforded a haven for the writer. Sindhi literature has flourished but Karachi has also spawned an impressive collage of women's writing in Pakistan.
Like Bombay, Karachi's recent past has been violent. For a brief period in the early 1990s, it was Asia's murder and violence capital, with armed brigands scouring the city, settling scores against one another for imagined and remembered slights with their Kalashnikovs and Molotov cocktails.
All of Kamila Shamsie's novels are set in Karachi. Shamsie, a third generation Pakistani writer, was born in Karachi in 1973 and is now based in the U.S. But to love a city, as Shamsie says is to love it "with its warts and problems. Its more than fair share of problems adds to the desire to love it more and learn more about it." Karachi is Shamsie' s city by the sea. In the City by the Sea that happens to be her first novel, Shamsie brings the Karachi of the early 1970s to life with her mention of tyrant presidents, strikes, and arbitrary arrests of political opponents. It is set in the time just after Bangladesh happened but before the generals took over the country imposing martial law, during a time when a kind of flawed democracy was in place, yet optimism existed like a balm. With all its contradictions and charm, Karachi is recognisable.
Shamsie's second novel, Salt and Saffron, is more ambitious. It is the saga of the Dard-e-Dil family, divided by the Partition, united by the eccentricities of each individual member. The novel also gives voice to alternative views — of relatives who chose to remain back in India, and those move or remain in Pakistan, yet wistful of what turns life could have taken. Shamsie does not question the existence of Pakistan, but Salt and Saffron reveals a bit of the genuine pain that is always associated with Partition. Shamsie's great-aunt, Attiya Hussain, chose to remain in Lucknow after Partition, though part of her family left for Pakistan. Later she moved to London where she published her book Sunlight on the Broken Column.
Kamila Shamsie's Kartography is also a novel set in Karachi and is also about political violence. Karim and Raheen are childhood friends growing up rich and comfortable while the city and land around them remains constantly on the edge of riot and despair. The bloody civil war of 1971 — which ended with Bangladesh as a sovereign state — forms the background to the novel. Faced with violence and corruption in her beloved home-city that is Karachi, Raheen also discovers what people, even those closest to her, may be capable of. Shamsie hints at the cruelties of the civil war and how these in a way still exercise their influence on Pakistan and the patterns of its development.
Shamsie comes from an illustrious literary family. Attiya Hussain was a grand aunt. Her mother, Muneeza Shamsie edited A Dragonfly in the Sun, an anthology of post-Partition Pakistani writing; and her grandmother, Jahanara Habibullah wrote a memoir of life in Rampur.
The influence of an earlier generation is evident in Shamsie's work. While Chugtai or Atiya Hussain draw on the fossilised Muslim aristocracy of a pre-partition India, Shamsie's characters are drawn from the close-knit, narrow world of Karachi's old feudal elite.Bapsi Sidhwa was born in Karachi, nine years before independence and the formation of a new nation. She moved to Lahore when still a child. As a young girl, Sidhwa witnessed first-hand the violence of Partition, in which seven million Muslims and five million Hindus were uprooted in the largest, most terrible exchange of population that history has known.
This violence is poignantly described in Sidhwa's third novel — Cracking India — published in other countries as Ice-Candy-Man. Considered by many as the most moving and essential book on the Indian partition, it is told from the awakening consciousness of an observant eight-year-old Parsi girl, Lenny, when the violence around her threatens to collapse her idyllic world. The issues dealt with in the book are as numerous as they are horrifying. The thousands of instances of rape, and the public's subsequent memory loss that characterises the Partition are foremost. In the hatred that has fueled the political relations between Pakistan and India since that time, these women's stories were practically forgotten. As Sidhwa writes, "Despite the residue of passion and regret, and loss of those who have in panic fled — the fire could not have burned for... Despite all the ruptured dreams, broken lives, buried gold, bricked-in rupees, secreted jewellery, lingering hopes... the fire could not have burned for months..." (Ice-Candy Man, p.149) Sidhwa repeatedly condemns the dehumanising impact that religious fanaticism played in promoting mob mentality, separation, and revenge during the Partition.
Sofia Shafquat, another Karachi-born author who, like Shamsie after her, also moved to the U.S., wrote The Shadow Man, her only novel thus far, that was likened to "Thelma and Louise without the gunfire".
Karachi has also provided a voice to several women poets; most prominent among these have been Sophia Ahmed and Attiya Dawood. Attiya Dawood's is a voice from the villages of rural Sindh. A voice filled with pain and anguish, depicting the deprivation and oppression women experience everywhere. Born in 1958, Dawood has written poetry in Sindhi and Urdu since the 1980s and an English translation of her poems, Raging To Be Free has been published.
Like Sidhwa, Attiya too strives to bring women's issues of the Indian subcontinent into public discussion. Sidhwa recalls her fascination with the "fallen women", victims of Partition who were put up in a rehabilitation camp near her childhood home in Lahore. Many of them were victims of rape and torture. It was then that realisation dawned that "victory is celebrated on a woman's body, vengeance is taken on a woman's body. That's very much the way things are, particularly in my part of the world." (quoted in Graeber). In addition to being a poet, Attiya is an activist and associated with the Women Action Forum. While working towards publishing a book of essays and articles on women's issues, she also organises workshops on women's issues in Pakistan.
Anuradha Kumar is Assistant Editor, Economic and Political Weekly.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
