Forgotten Texts of Our Lives

In South Asia, one of the most harmful legacies of colonialism has been the gradual loss of intimacy with the traditions of one’s own soil and culture, history and literature, which are always changing and evolving. The evolution and change reflect a continuum. Colonialism seriously disrupted that continuum. The Urdu writer Intizar Husain loosely refers to the period of colonialism as the era of discontinuity. This fact of gradual loss is truer, and more tragic, with respect to the anglicised class, and of the class that dreams itself as anglicised, which ended up in the driver’s seat after the colonialists left.

And thus it is that students in Pakistani schools have ample opportunity to read and understand Shakespeare’s plays and poetry as part of their curriculum, whereas a work like Heer by Waris Shah reaches people in distorted forms through ‘‘folk wisdom’’ or movie versions, which are often grossly off the mark. For example, the most quoted and sung verse from Waris Shah’s Heer, ‘‘doli charh deyaan maariyaan Heer cheekaan (Heer cried as she mounted the bridal palanquin),’’ is not from any of the reliably authentic versions of the epic. It was perhaps a late addition made some two hundred years later by a petty scribe or poet. But only a handful of people who happen to be serious readers of classical Punjabi are aware of this.

During my last trip to Lahore I listened in awe to one of my nephews as he discussed Dickens’s David Copperfield in great detail. I was impressed and a bit disturbed. He is only twelve years old and goes to one of the elite schools of South Asia. When I in turn told him that the countless translations of The Arabian Nights had had a tremendous impact on British literature and that Dickens’s fiction was a departure from the literature of his time partly due to this influence, he seemed uninterested. It is safe to assume that if I were to engage him on the subject of an important Pakistani writer or a work of classical Punjabi, say, Puran Bhagat, he would be at a total loss, a fault not entirely of his own making. I myself was pleasantly surprised to learn recently that the neighbourhood of Icchra in Lahore is named after Puran Bhagat’s fictional mother.

Only ten years ago I could go on and on about Kafka and not be able to say a word about Naiyer Masud or Bano Qudsiya. This is the situation all over the country.

Qurratulain Hyder, the winner of the Jnanpith Puraskar in 1991, points out in a preface to another anthology that ‘‘Indian literature of the 19th century was largely an extension of Victorian literature.’’ With the passage of time, our educated classes found it easier to relate to the social and psychological landscape of the Western metropolis than to their own culture. Rather like the protagonist in Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful novel Shadow Lines who, among other things, is fascinated by the stories about London his cousin Tridib tells him. Indeed, he knows the entire landscape of the house he has never visited before and demonstrates that to May (who loves Tridib) when he visits her. (Of course, Bengal was the first place in India to be fully colonised, militarily and culturally. So the reverse Orientalism of Shadow Lines serves as poetic justice.) Yet the reverse swing (unlike in cricket) is achieved in the end at a far higher cost than realised: at the cost of a crippling disconnect. This is a serious problem which affects all aspects of our lives in South Asia, from education to politics, from the status of women to social justice for the disadvantaged. The postcolonial era should have been an era of overcoming the disconnect. Most South Asian governments, however, have neither the intention nor the imagination to fix this problem. It is, then, up to the individual to take up the task.

Extracted with permission from Penguin India