The Author as a Public Figure

Tanweer writes in English, a language that he thinks is key in turning the author into a public figure, by becoming the cultural anchor of most urban societies in South Asia. “Our previous generations knew Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, some Farsi or Arabic, but now, the younger generation is increasingly becoming mono-lingual. It’s great to have so much fanfare around English-speaking authors, but it marginalises regional languages, without which one does not get a window into other lives, other cultures,” he says. His own literary world was nourished by Urdu literature, and continues to be an integral part of it, even though he considers English as his language of performance.
The two come together in his role as a translator. “My work as a writer informs my work as a translator. When you translate, you are trying to create resonance with the original, but still bring a newness in the target language. It’s a challenge I enjoy, particularly since such wonderful things have been done to English by writers like (Salman) Rushdie,” says Tanweer, who is in the process of finishing his translation of Muhammad Khalid Akhtar’s Chakiwara Chronicles, a humorous Urdu novel set in Karachi of the ’50s.

Karachi is also at the heart of his debut novel of inter-connected stories, in which an unnamed flaneur trawls through the city, looking to forget his father’s memories, even as a bomb-blast ripples through it and leaves it bleeding and festering. Tanweer’s portrayal of Karachi is intimate and touched by a fair bit of nostalgia. “It’s difficult to hate a place where you have spent the largest part of your life. There’s something fantastically liberating about Karachi, yet something fantastically broken and dysfunctional, and for better or for worse, it’s my idea of home,” he says.

Yet, Tanweer finds it difficult to ignore the politics of the land or to lend it a touch of redemption in his writings. “I’m not in the publicity business and I don’t want to look at what the world thinks of us. For me, the key word is the lived experience. How should one confront a state complicit in so many things that are going wrong with the country? How does terror in a school affect me? What is my own reality? People in South Asia live with violence in the background. We always think of it as something that happens to other people. How do I, as a writer, react to it when it happens to someone like me?” says Tanweer, who had been a student activist during his days in New York’s Columbia University, even organising rallies to protest the imposition of Emergency in Pakistan in 2007 by General Pervez Musharraf.