Over the top

Raat yuun dil mein teri khoi hui yaad aai
Jaiseay wiraanay mein chupke se bahaar aajae

Last night, your memories came back to me, as though
Spring stealthily should come back to wilderness

Like cooling drops of dew, a few lines of poetry became succour from the summer sun.  To celebrate the centenary year of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s birth, a collective of civic groups based in Ahmedabad, India, organized a reading of the poet’s work. Sadiq Noor Pathan, a published poet and program executive at the local All India Radio station, began with a recording of Faiz reciting his work.  Playing a 1980s recording of Ashaar,Tanhaai , and Bol, Pathan introduced us to the gentle and powerful quality of South Asia’s leading modern Urdu poet’s verse in the poet’s own voice.  First his lyrical lament of solitude, and a few seconds later, his call to speak up for one’s convictions filled the small room on second floor of St Xavier’s Social Service Society building where about 25 of us had gathered.

Pathan began chronicling Faiz’s life recounting a few stories from his father Sultan Mohammad Khan’s dramatic life. He narrated how an encounter in a mosque with an Afghan officer, who got impressed with the teenager’s fluency in English, opened up opportunities that otherwise may not have come by for Faiz‘s father, born to a poor farmer in Sialkot near Lahore.  Faiz grew up in privilege in Sialkot where his father returned from England to practise law, and received the best of education in Urdu and English in the 1920s.With a handful of anecdotes, Pathan traced milestones from the poet’s life, his education at Government College Lahore, first job teaching literature at a college in Amritsar, a three-year stint in British army during the Second World War, and his meeting, and later, marriage to Alys George, an English socialist who was on a visit to her sister’s house in Kashmir.

Beginning with a verse from Faiz ‘s first collection of poem Naqsh-e-Fariyadi (The lamenting image), (phrase which Faiz’s predecessor Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’ begins his first collection of verse Diwaan-e-Ghalib with) , Pathan invited those listening in to join him in mapping the poets’s oeuvre; romantic verse written between 1928-1935 as well as his more publicly-engaged verse of later years.  He shared stories about the poet’s life in a mix of Urdu, Gujarati and Hindi, and a few from those listening took turns to recite and sing.

Professor Abid Shamsi , who taught Pathan as professor and Head of Department of English at St Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad, recited Subh-e-Azaadi (The dawn of freedom); in the poem, Faiz’s refuses to settle for freedom that had come accompanied with violence of the 1947-communal riots in India and Pakistan. His views brought him much criticism in newly-independent Pakistan:

Ye dagh dagh ujala ye shabgazida sahar,
Wo intezaar tha jiska, ye wo sahar to nahin

This blemished light, this night-devoured dawn
Is surely not the dawn we waited for

Faiz’s refusal to settle for wounded freedom, tyranny, and inequality seems relevant in contemporary India, where access to entitlements is contingent on wealth, a city or a rural setting, gender, and frequently, a person’s surname. It especially resonated in Ahmedabad, a severely ghettoized city of Gujarat where following the communal riots of 2002, basic freedoms  such as where one may live, work, or send one’s children to school hinge on religion.

Ghulam Farid, Pathan’s peer who recently retired from government service, next sang the ghazal Gulon mein rang bhare, Faiz’s refrain to his beloved – freedom – from Zindan Naama (Prison Letters):

Maqaam, Faiz, koi raah mein jacha hi nahin
Jo  qu-e-yaar se nikle, toh soo-e-daar chale

No place appealed to us anywhere on the way, Faiz,
Leaving the loved one’s lane, we turned to the gallows

Here, Faiz forsakes any middle-ground when it comes to his beloved, i.e., his freedom. He talks of leaving qu-e-yaar ,his beloved’s lane, and heading to soo-e-daar, the spot where he may be executed. He declares he would rather die than give up his freedom to speak and write.  Writing from Montgomery prison in Punjab, when he was jailed for four years from 1951-1955 on charges of plotting to overthrow Liaqat Ali’s government, Faiz here invokes both freedom from injustice, and his freedom to write when the government had banned his work from being published or recited.

Recreating this mood of defiance, Pathan next played a recording of Noor Jehan singing Mujh se pehle si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang (Do not ask of me, my beloved, that same love), recounting an anecdote where the singer sang the verse at a state function defying the government’s ban on reciting the jailed poet’s verse.  This evocative verse, one of Faiz’s most well-known and loved works that later appeared in a film as well, voices his dilemma of reconciling romantic love for his beloved with a deeper engagement with the region’s socio-political reality. In her book ‘100 Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’, Dehradun-based translator Sarvat Rahman deftly describes this transition in Faiz’s thought and work. ‘From the depth of his poetic being, imbued with sufi ideals of Hafiz and Rumi and all the great Urdu poets, came to him the awareness that his earlier quest for the beloved, and his later one for social justice for all humanity, are of the same nature. Both demand of him his utter devotion and, ultimately, the sacrifice of his life. He gives them both the same visage to begin with,’ writes Rahman.

Pathan played a clip of Bollywood great Dilip Kumar speaking about Faiz. Reciting Mauzooe-e-sukhan (Subjects of verse) slowly, with pleasure, the actor concludes Faiz to be the greatest poets he has encountered in what he describes as his limited mutayala(reading) and mushahida(observation).  We then listened to accounts from letters Faiz wrote to his wife Alys from jail where he describes the beauty of the climbers and the sky he could see from his barrack window, the lyricism of perhon ki shaakhon pe thaki chaandni (moonlight resting wary on tree-tops) , and the music in his defiant Aaj bazaar mein paa-ba-jolan chalo (walking through the markets, chains around our feet).

Pathan concluded with a few lines from Intisaab (Dedication), one of Faiz’s last verses, a call-of-arms to the stone cutter, the courtesan, the factory worker, the postman.  The reading went on half hour longer than scheduled. When we stepped out, the sun had become shade.

~ Anumeha writes for Tehelka magazine. anumeha.yadav@gmail.com

By Amit Julka

Art: David Lester

There is hardly any poet who talks about his beloved in a manner that makes her seem like a real person; just as imperfect and prone to the vagaries of life like the rest of us. Walter Allen once remarked that the heroines in the novelsof Charles Dickens were always under the spell of constipation. In a similar vein, stand up comedian Raju Srivastava once remarked that female leads in Indian movies have never been depicted in a manner that suggests that they too, like other people, are subject to the outcomes of our digestive machinery.

The constant neglect of these ‘lesser than rosy themes’ in our poetry has completely dehumanised the beloveds in our poetry. It is in this context that I would like to introduce you to Sheikh Baqir Ali Chirkeen, an Urdu poet like no other. Chirkeen, as he is commonly known, is one of the lesser known greats of Urdu poetry. Born in Barabanki (near Lucknow) in late eighteenth century, Chirkeen’s poetry focuses on those aspects of life which his contemporaries  generally refrained from. His boldness earned him the wrath of the literati of those times; had it not been for a few brave souls, his works would have been lost a long time ago.

To give an example of his unusual talent, here is Chirkeen taunting his beloved,

“Chirkeen se munh chhipaoge bait-ul-khula mein kya,
be-parda ho gaye kahaan, phir raha lihaaz”
A rough translation would be,
(Why do you hide your face from Chirkeen in the lavatory?
Having seen you in that state, what’s the use of modesty now?)

My first encounter with Chirkeen was through a casual mention by a friend, which led me to launch a frantic google search. Disappointingly, even google, the eternal saviour, did not yield much. Frustrated, I gave up. Soon, the name of Chirkeen receded to the back alleys of my cerebrum. Months passed. Then one fine day, while I was on one of my Purani Dilli jaunts, I decided to visit Nizamuddin Dargah. For those unfamiliar with Delhi, Nizamuddin is one of the most eclectic places in the city. It is a confluence of three strands running through India’s Muslim culture. Apart from the dargah, which is the symbol of India’s vibrant Sufi culture, it is also home to the headquarters of Tableeghi Jamaat, an organization that aims to cleanse Indian Islam of all of its local ‘innovations’ and keep believers away from sin and kufr. Right opposite the headquarters of the Jamaat is the grave of the person who represents the most non-pious strand of Indo-Islamic culture, popularly known as Mirza Ghalib.

Illustration: junkola.com

Anyway, coming back to my story, it was on one of these random walks to Nizamuddin that Hazrat Chirkeen, like the elusive Khizr decided to reveal himself to me. On my way to the dargah, I had decided to make a quick stop at the Ghalib Academy, adjacent to the mazaar. While I was rummaging through the pile of books on Ghalib, something caught my eye. And there it was, inscribed in bold, red font – Deewan e Chirkeen. I could not believe my eyes. After numerous trips to the Urdu Bazaar which had yielded nothing, I found the master in the house of another master! Anyway, I digress.

Returning to Chirkeen’s poetry, it generally evokes two kinds of reactions. The first is outright disapproval, and this behaviour is generally observed amongst those who consider themselves civilized and above all sh*t. Then there are those connoisseurs of filth (like yours truly), who relish the not-so-nice mode of expression. However, both of these groups commit some fundamental errors. According to Shamsur Rehman Farooqi, a famous critic of Urdu poetry, when it comes to Chirkeen’s poetry, people confuse its form for the content. According to Farooqi, the so-called ‘obscenity’ is not in the poetry per se; rather, it is in the mind of the reader. Thus, in Farooqi’s view, terms such as ‘uncivilised’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘obscene’ are themselves subject to interpretation.

To sum it up, love him or hate him, or even ignore him, Chirkeen is as Chirkeen does. Though grounded in matters seemingly mundane and real worldly, he’s at the same time detached from its allure. He’s not concerned with glory or popularity. In his own words,

Tere ghar se jo ab ke jaoonga,
Mootne bhi kabhi na aaonga
(Having left your house once and for all,
I won’t even come back to pee.)

By Amit Julka

There are some poets who speak of revolution, some who speak of love’s misery, some who are concerned with life, and then, there is Mirza Ghalib. Ghalib, or Mirza Nausha as he was sometimes called, is for me the poet of frenzy, the poet of madness. The frenzy of ishq (love), the frenzy of being, and the frenzy of fana (self annihilation).

Before I write further, I think I should add a disclaimer that I am no expert on Ghalib (Besides God, I doubt if there ever was one!), but merely an aficionado. Hence, some of my thoughts might be written from a very personal and a subjective point of view. But then, writing objectively and dispassionately about Ghalib is itself an insult to his poetry and what it stands for.

After I had learnt Urdu, I made the Himalayan blunder of starting off with Ghalib. I say blunder, because after reading his poetry, others’ simply paled in comparison. The Ghalibean world was a veritable crucible of human emotions, and as much as I wanted to spread my net of awareness, the meaning of his poetry proved to be an elusive Anqa (a mythical phoenix-like bird) that I could never catch. There were verses which were deceptively simple, and then there were some which took months to reveal their true glory. One verse particularly stands out,

Aate hain ghaib se yeh mazameen khayaal mein,
Ghalib sareer-e-khama nawa-e-sarosh hai.

A crude translation would be:
(These themes come to mind from the world unseen,
Ghalib, the scratching of the pen is the voice of the heavenly angel)

In typical Ghalibean fashion, this verse took two torturous months to reveal itself to me.

Besides his poetry, what endeared me to Mirza was his personality. From what I infer through his letters, he comes across as a man with whom you could talk about the mysteries of the universe whilst at the same time have a conversation about the pretty girl (perhaps a saqi) you saw at a bar yesterday. Ghalib seemed to effortlessly straddle both worlds at once, and that is something which is very rare amongst poets indeed.

In matters of love, it was the vahshat (madness, frenzy) which makes Ghalib stand out. In fact, one of the most potent expressions of Ghalibean love can be found in the movie Dil Se, especially the song Satrangi Re, which reminded me of his sher on Laila-Majnoon,

Mana’-e-vahshat-e-kharaamiha-e-Laila kaun hai
Khana-e-majnoon-e-sahra gard be darwaza tha.

(Who was there to forbid the wild ‘walking’ of Laila,
There were no doors to the house of Majnoon, the desert wanderer)

This love of ‘Ghalib’ was at once personal and universal. It was ishq-e- mijaazi (mundane love) as well as ishq-e- haqiqi (true love, one for the creator). Although a man of faith, he was never a man of religion. Like countless Sufis before him, he recognized no distinctions of caste or creed. His poetry resonates with this message of universality. In one of his verses, he beautifully describes the relation of the Kaaba to its erstwhile idols.

Go vaan nahin, vaan ke nikaale hue to hain,
Kaabe se un buton ko bhi nisbat hai door ki

(Though they aren’t there, they have been expelled from there,
With the kaaba, even those idols enjoy a distant relationship.)

Today, on the 15^th of February, 142 years have passed since the death of Mirza Ghalib. However, his poetry has an appeal which is probably even more potent than it was during his own time. Probably this is because his poetry is reflective of the inherent nature of man itself. There is no human emotion that is left untouched in the Ghalibean universe. Love, misery, being, non-being…Every admirer of Mirza has a reason to keep coming back to him. In his own words,

Ganjina-ey maani ka tilism usey samjho
wo lufz jo Ghalib merey ash`ar mei`n aaway

(It’s a talisman of the treasury of meanings,
That word, ghalib, which happens to occur in my verses)

By Bilal Ibne Rasheed

Part of this interview was published in The News on Sunday

Anis Shivani is the author of the short story collection, Anatolia and Other Stories (2009). The collection had been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award (2010) and one of the stories–‘Dubai’–was awarded Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize (2010). He has just finished a novel, The Slums of Karachi, about an American anthropologist conducting fieldwork in Pakistan. To learn more about Shivani and his works, click here.

BIR: What was the inspiration behind combining vast stretches of time and space in a single volume of short stories?

Anis Shivani

Shivani:  The point I’m making by bringing together apparently different scales of time and space is that similar concerns inform the progress of civilization everywhere.  I’m contesting the sense of parochialism, which elevates quotidian reality as absolutely unique truth, a fetishization of the trivial if you will, in American realist fiction.  Ram, the undocumented worker in contemporary Dubai, has the same desire for integration as does Noah, the Jewish trader in Ottoman Turkey.  The sense of state repression felt by Jim Hosokawa at the Japanese internment camp in ‘Manzanar’ is no different than that experienced by the censored Bahai novelist in ‘Tehran’—their means of response may be different, dignified quiescence in the case of Jim, terrorism in the case of the Bahai, but the motivating impulse is the same.  It’s all too easy to ascribe various degrees of exceptionalism to one’s own society; upon reflection, the human condition has a universality that bridges all temporal and spatial divides, and by putting together such a vast spread in one book I wanted to make that point rather vigorously.

BIR: Although your characters come from a variety of cultures and time periods there is a similarity among them: most of them are uncomfortable with the societies they live in, they resent the kind of people around them and yet they are not frustrated to the extent of taking any radical decisions. What were your motives in constructing characters like these?

Shivani:  I think this may reflect my concern with the unwinding of the liberal consensus in recent times.  Torture, other positively medieval practices, have made an explicit comeback.  The Western countries are choosing security over freedom.  In the East, benevolent authoritarianism, rather than the open democracy we thought was in the offing after the fall of communism, seems to be ascendant.  Where is a free-thinking person to go?  This may be a momentary condition.  In the long run, I still believe cosmopolitan democracy will prevail all over the world—and this time, the instigation will likely come from the East, rather than the West.  The Bahai novelist in ‘Tehran’ does take a radical decision; the art conservator acts similarly, by stealing the Watteau painting; Noah in ‘Anatolia’ gives up any inclination to pursue something serious with the daughter of the Muslim merchant; so these characters do implement strategies of defence, radical to the extent their conditions and upbringing allow it.

BIR: How much of Anis Shivani the critic is critical of Anis Shivani the fiction writer?

Shivani:  It is very difficult to be Anis Shivani the fiction writer when you’re also Anis Shivani the critic.  I’m extremely harsh on all my fiction—although I have a special fondness for Anatolia, because this book is where my confidence first emerged full-bloom.  What you have to do to write fiction is let go of the internal censor at the time of composition.  Later you can squabble with your own choices, but when you write it must almost be as if you were taking dictation from a higher source, and your ego, the critical sense, must be completely in suspension, as you go with your better instincts.

BIR: Did you travel to places like Dubai and Tehran before writing about them? Or did you rely on books and other sources for information about places like these?

Shivani:  I didn’t travel to any of the places depicted in the book.  I never went to the sites of any of the Japanese internment camps, and my experience of Indiana—in the story ‘Gypsy’—is extremely fleeting.  I’ve never been to Turkey or Iran or Dubai, and you might be surprised to hear, even India.  I read the histories, looked at pictures, studied the art of the different places and eras, and used my imagination.  I’d rather not become too constrained by the sense of reality.  In future novels, I want to take up Russia immediately after the fall of communism, Afghanistan in the seventies, East Pakistan at the time of the civil war, Malaysia in the nineteenth century—all these projects have been percolating for a while, but I don’t think I want to visit any of these places.  The reigning writing dictum holds, ‘Write what you know.’  I say, ‘Write what you don’t know.’

BIR: Among all the characters in Anatolia and Other Stories which one did you feel the most challenging to create?

Shivani:  Hmm.  I think perhaps Jim Hosokawa in ‘Manzanar.’  It took a while before I could execute his peculiar blend of reticence and extreme self-confidence.  That’s as far as the psychology goes.  As far as setting individual development within a specific geographical milieu, I might have to say Noah in ‘Anatolia.’  I had to get just right how a cosmopolitan traveller like Noah might feel toward his Ottoman friends.  Despite his Jewish faith, he had to feel a great sense of belonging to the empire as well.  Then also the lead character in ‘Gypsy.’  I had to do it without simplifying gypsy culture to the series of clichés it generally is in the public imagination.

BIR: Some of your stories deal with immigrants who usually are more comfortable in their adopted societies and countries than the natives. What was the inspiration behind exploring this paradox?

Shivani:  Yes, this is an important point and thank you for pointing it out.  In the age of globalization—we should really take it back, in America, to the opening of the doors of immigration in 1965—the cliché about the immigrant being less educated or sophisticated than the majority of those in the host culture no longer holds true.  Yet ethnic writers continue to feed the publishing industry with stories of immigrants having difficulty ‘adjusting’ and ‘assimilating.’  Assimilating to what?  It’s the host culture which often stands to benefit from the immigrant’s greater ingenuity.  Even when ethnic writers like Jhumpa Lahiri give us immigrants at the professional level, the learning is one-way, the hierarchy of intelligence and accomplishment is clearly established.  This is a false picture of reality, and this kind of writing only exists to comfort bourgeois readers who want to believe in American exceptionalism.  The natives, in fact, are getting pretty stupid; their time on the world stage may well have come and gone, though most don’t realize it yet.  They’re seeking escape in any number of emotional tyrannies, while immigrants at every socioeconomic level are seeking freedom, more desperately than ever.  And today middle-class immigrants don’t just give up everything and move to the host country, but maintain links back home.  The paradigm has changed, but writers have generally refused to keep up with it.

BIR: What is the difference between good writing and bad writing in your opinion? (I am talking about fiction, of course).

Shivani:  Good writing expects a lot from the reader, and the writer delivers by creating a convincing alternative world, shaking the reader’s assumptions in the process.  As a result of good writing, the reader is changed—if only slightly.  Bad writing leaves the reader where he was.  It replicates existing assumptions and beliefs, so that the reader feels comforted and valued for who he already is.  Good writing may come packaged in very conventional style; bad writing may be embodied in apparently experimental style.  If it indulges the reader’s prejudices, it’s not good writing.

BIR: You are very critical of many of the contemporary writers. Who do you think knows the craft of fiction writing well? And whose style do you admire the most?

Shivani:  Orhan Pamuk is in my view the world’s leading writer; his writing will be read a thousand years from now, when people try to understand this important early juncture in human civilization.  No other writer is as secure about his origins and materials; Pamuk is the least defensive writer today.  Salman Rushdie’s verbal energy is inexhaustible, and he has a way of addressing the reader at many different levels of complexity at the same time, so that one finds endless replenishment—full-fledged allegories one had missed—upon each rereading.  J. M. Coetzee has perfected restraint and economy, a shrewd parsing of the emotional life which leaves the reader no escape route; his books are endless lessons in style for the apprentice writer.  V. S. Naipaul has written some very great books, and although he doesn’t indulge in stylistic exuberance, he wants to get to the bottom of the human experience.  At a somewhat lesser level, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis (though not in his recent books), Don DeLillo, John Updike, Kenzaburo Oe, and Ismail Kadare each have a lot to teach about tackling contemporary reality.

BIR: You have used many foreign words in your stories. What do you think about its impact on the texture of English language? And what about the readers who do not understand these foreign words? Don’t you think the employment of foreign words can be detrimental to the interest of the reader? Is there any political comment you want to make by adhering to this practice?

Shivani:  Yes, thank you for noting that.  This was very intentional.  I find it offensive that American readers are expected to make the effort to learn common usages in certain languages, but not in others.  There’s almost a hierarchy of languages in place, and that needs to be brought down.  Hindi/Urdu is spoken by about a fifth of the world’s population.  Chinese by another fifth.  Spanish by a very large proportion, and Arabic by yet another large chunk.  Writing in English should be liberally sprinkled with these languages—more than I did in Anatolia.  If the writer is good, the sense will be obvious from the context, and the experience will have been enriched.

BIR: You consider the MFA system ‘a closed, undemocratic medieval guild system that represses good writing.’ Why? And do you have any alternative to this?

Shivani:  No great writers can come out of a system where one teaches mostly delusional people who think they can actually ‘learn’ to be writers by sitting in a workshop and undergoing peer humiliation (or instruction) and having the instructor go through their short stories (not novels, of course) with a red pen and slash off adverbs and adjectives and incorrect dialogue tags.  Not only can students not benefit from this system, but instructors generally destroy themselves by engaging in the mass delusion.  You cannot teach, in this organized manner, without it having a serious eroding effect on your own originality.  The system has come into being for a number of reasons, mostly because of the loss of the value of the humanities and social sciences (and this has to do with the severing of these arts from effective practice in the political realm; that is, it’s a failure of democracy), which has pushed students into creative writing programs instead of more substantive pursuits, and because of the self-reinforcing nature of the pyramid scheme, which keeps growing on its own failures.  None of the writing produced under MFA auspices will have any lasting value.  I find it remarkably insecure of established, moneymaking writers that they will, without fail, choose to take that writing position at some prestigious university, even at mid-career.  It’s not that they need the money.  Why are they unable to say no?  To afford more expensive dance and music lessons for their children?  More sumptuous vacations?  The alternative is to be on your own and establish a loyal readership by writing outside the bounds of the system.

BIR: How should one learn the craft of fiction writing?

Shivani:  By first living a little.  This means not jumping to graduate school and then teaching in writing programs while one drafts a novel for ten or fifteen years.  Without experience of the business or political worlds, for example, how can one write?  There is so much domestic fiction in America today because this is all writers have experience of.  Too much experience, beyond a certain point however, is also destructive.  One needs to absorb all the classics and learn ways of writing that the masters have demonstrated, and read so much that no one style leaves a strong enough influence.  Out of this constant back and forth between experimenting with one’s own style and sifting through a multitude of influences, a unique form of expression will emerge.  That’s what the fiction writer needs to discover.

BIR: Are there any autobiographical elements in your fiction?

Shivani:  At a very general level, all my characters are autobiographical, but in another respect none of my characters are autobiographical.  They reflect my sense of alienation or outsiderness, the discomfort with established ways of doings things and the inanities and hypocrisies of society, but beyond that the specifics are entirely made up.  I would say that my fiction is much less autobiographical than other writers I typically encounter.  Elements specific to my biography have not yet made their way into my fiction, and perhaps never will, in a direct manner.

BIR: When should we expect your novel to be published? And please tell us something about it.

Shivani:  I hope some publisher snaps it up as soon as it is offered, which should be in a few weeks; I’m just putting the last touches to it.  It’s called The Slums of Karachi, and takes place in my imaginative rendition of Karachi’s Orangi Pilot Project (OPP).  I bring in a character similar to Akhtar Hameed Khan, the founder of OPP, but again only in an imaginative sense, not anything literal.  There’s a female American anthropologist living for a year in the colony, and her section of the novel is in the form of her diary—not fieldnotes per se, which would be too boring if presented in authentic style, but her emotional life.  Then there are two young characters, Hafiz and Seema, who follow different paths as they try to make it in the world; Seema is very bright and goes to Karachi University, while Hafiz has a difficult time holding on to his manual jobs.  I want to show in this novel how Karachi—and Pakistan by extension—is both changing rapidly, and yet in many ways not changing.  Cultural change is very slow, despite appearances.  Globalization is effecting everything (this takes us back to your question about the immigrant often being smarter than the native).  Gender relations are changing, and class is more fluid.  Opportunities are wider, yet the system resists too much change too quickly.  It is this grind in which Hafiz and Seema are caught.  The most important thing about the novel is the city of Karachi itself as the lead character, the physical sense of it which determines the relations among the characters, shapes the outcome.  I hope that this is the first novel in English that gives the sense to a reader unfamiliar with Karachi what the city is really like.  Although, here too, imagination plays more of a role for me than strict verisimilitude.

BIR: You seem to be very dissatisfied with current American fiction which according to you is in a ‘dismal state.’ Why do you think this is so?

Shivani:  The arts in general are in dismal shape.  It’s because a certain necessary energy and vibrancy has gone out of the culture.  It is as true—even truer perhaps—for poetry as it is for fiction.  It holds true for music, for painting.  If the political culture is dead for a very long time—more than three decades now in America—then this is bound to have an effect on the arts.  It has become a safety-oriented society, with taboos on risk and adventure, and the fiction reflects that.  The other side of it is that the publishing industry is in a fine state of equilibrium (we might also call it denial), so that the voices who could or do address the vast postmodern dislocation going on in the country (mostly because of globalization) are marginalized, and readers are made to believe, through the operation of prize committees or New York Times reviews, for example, that the safe domestic fiction of a few court-appointed writers is as good as it gets.  The independent publishing scene is not yet a serious threat to the established industry.  Perhaps that will change with the profusion of technological change.

BIR: In one of your pieces you wrote, ‘There is too much writing, so overwhelming in volume that the most committed reader can’t keep up. The little good writing gets drowned out.’ How can a committed reader locate this ‘little good writing’?

Shivani:  This comes from experience, and a lot of trial and error.  If one is firmly grounded in the classics—the masters who plunged the depths of human emotions, instead of writing superficially and inauthentically—then over time one learns to distinguish the good from the bad.  One must not be swayed by the publicity machines that establish false reputations and instant canonizations.  This is one of the most pleasurable activities of a writer/reader, in fact—to learn to distinguish good writing from bad, to acquire more and more confidence in one’s ability to do so.  There is no easy way, and there are almost no contemporary critics on whom one can rely to make such distinctions.  So it has to be an individual process.  The volume of writing may indeed be of unimaginable magnitude—yet very little of it is worth reading.  One learns not to waste time with the trivial.

BIR: There is a certain romanticism associated with fiction writing which is not to be found with criticizing or theorizing fiction. There are full-time novelists and full-time poets but not many full-time critics. Why do you think this is so and how will it effect the future of American fiction?

Shivani:  I think this can change.  I’m doing everything I can to make criticism sexy, to romanticize it.  But you have a very important point, and there are a number of institutional reasons for that.  The rise of poststructuralist theory has meant that critics who could speak to general audiences are no longer found.  There is ‘criticism,’ but it’s a black art, limited to the initiated, performed in elite academies to wiped-out audiences, readerships of the fellow mesmerized.  It’s also a question of the culture as a whole having become dumber than it was thirty, forty years ago.  Sure, there are many newspaper reviewers, but their tastes accord with mass taste—they are not critics by and large.  Criticism ought to be a very romantic endeavour, no less worthy than writing fiction or poetry.  It requires huge imagination and mental resources, a great deal of daring if it is to make an impact.

BIR: You have often criticized the awards and prizes for writers for their inherent politics and dynamics, but your website mentions the awards and nominations you have won. Do you think you and your character, Simone Carpentier, in the story ‘Go Sell it on the Mountain’, resemble in this regard? Like Simone you are ‘part of the system, and yet so outside it, such a critic.’

Shivani:  I hadn’t thought of comparing myself with Simone, but that’s not a bad analogy.  She doesn’t care about the system, yet it comes pleading for her.  I think the best stance for writers has always been oppositional.  There is a difference between plying one’s trade honourably and without expectation of reward for many, many years, and eventually being recognized by a few fellow writers with similar ambitions, versus dedicating your whole career to earning fellowships and awards and residencies and what-have-you, building a resume in other words, to land a good teaching job.  That milking of the system for personal benefit is a whole another thing, not worthy of true writers.

Richard Boyle on travel, travellers, tourists, and everything in between.

One of my favourite travel writers, who happens to belong to the Indian diaspora, is Oxford-born Pico Iyer, the son of Brahmin Raghavan N Iyer, a philosopher and theosophist, and the religious scholar Nandini Nanak Meht. I have met Pico twice – in 2006, when he came to Sri Lanka to write a feature on the country’s political situation for Time magazine, and in 2008, when we both participated at the Galle Literary Festival.

Pico has written a number of travel books, many of them concerning Southasia, including The Lady and the Monk (1992), Falling Off the Map (1994), Cuba and the Night Quartet (1995), Tropical Classical (1998), Global Soul (2000) – ‘an astonishing and amusing view of the globalisation of East and West, as the author beholds how cultures fuse without completely losing their identities’ – Video Night in Kathmandu (2001) – ‘on the often bizarre effects of Western influences on the Far East’ – Sushi in Bombay, Jetlag in LA (2002), and The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008).

Of all his writings, what captured my attention most was a perceptive quotation from his Foreword to Wanderlust (2000), a collection of travel writings: ‘We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.’

Another quotation that caught my eye was a comment on the difference between tourist and traveller: ‘Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveller”, perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t. Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home”, while a traveller is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo” – or Cuzco or Kathmandu. It’s all very much the same.’

These quotations inspired me to search for other quotable views on travel down the centuries. For instance, an early commentator on the subject was philosopher Lao Tzu in the 6th century BC, whose ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step’ has become a classic, and has even resulted in a modern rendering – ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance’ – by an unknown wit. Lao Tzu was also responsible for other pithy quotes such as ‘The further one goes the less one knows’ and ‘A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving’.

The Roman poet Horace, writing in the last century BC, had doubts about the value of tourism: ‘They change their clime, not their frame of mind, who rush across the sea.’ On the other hand, St Augustine of Hippo opined four centuries later: ‘The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.’

Moving forward to the 17th century, Francis Bacon in his Essays explains the difference between young and old travellers: ‘Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.’

The latter part of the 18th century was called the Age of Johnson, so it is not surprising that Samuel Johnson was responsible for several memorable travel quotes as reported by his biographer, James Boswell, in his Life of Johnson. One concerns the need for the traveller to be mentally well-prepared: ‘So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge’, and, ‘A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.’ However, my favourite Johnson quote – and the world’s it seems – is ‘Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see,’ which was written about the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

The 19th century was fertile. ‘It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar,’ declared Henry David Thoreau in 1854, not realising that 150 years later, that’s exactly what some people would find worthwhile. Francis Kilvert, Welsh vicar and diarist, derided his countrymen (and some countrywomen too I suppose) when he wrote in 1870: ‘Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists, the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.’

Robert Louis Stevenson confessed in Travels with a Donkey (1879): ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ However, Stevenson’s best-known quote is ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is labour’ from Virginibus Puerisque (1881).

The 20th century began to produce references with meaning for the contemporary traveller. For example, Noel Coward’s ‘But why, oh why, do the wrong people travel, when the right people stay at home?’ is a sentiment well understood today.

Since the 1960s, there has existed a belief that personal growth should ideally be gained in travel, but as George Moore comments in The Brook Kerith (1916), ‘A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it’.

‘Travel broadens the mind’ is a proverb dating from the early 20th century. GK Chesterton’s 1921 comment on it is a significant travel quote, too: ‘They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind.’

Katherine Mansfield revealed her need for ultimate planning when she wrote in her diary in 1922: ‘Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.’

Antoine de St Exupery’s ‘He who would travel happily must travel light’ rubs shoulders well with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Let your memory be your travel bag’. Henry Miller’s ‘One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things’ harmonises with Marin Buber’s ‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware’.

My penultimate reference, by Nancy Mitford from The Pursuit of Love (1945), is prejudiced and chauvinistic, so it must stand on its own: ‘Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’

Which leaves me to reveal what I think is the most succinct travel reference of all time: ‘No matter where you go, there you are.’ Despite its currency, the origins of the phrase are uncertain. Possibly it was resurrected in modern times from Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (c.1440): ‘So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere. You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for wherever you go you are burdened with yourself. Wherever you go, there you are.’ Perhaps it was engendered by the spirit of the Sixties. Carl Franz’s People’s Guide to Mexico (1972) contains the phrase, for instance.

— Richard Boyle is a contributing editor for Himal Southasian.