Is Generation Zia Writing South Asia’s Best Fiction?

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Is Generation Zia Writing South Asia’s Best Fiction?​

Man Booker Prize shortlisted author Mohsin Ahmed with his book ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ in London in Oct. 2007
It’s interesting to note the different place Partition holds for India and Pakistan. For India, Partition - a traumatic event in 1947 that created today’s Pakistan and India out of British India – is still a terrible historical mistake, but Pakistanis obviously think about it differently.

At a Friday session at the Jaipur Lit Fest, Urvashi Butalia, director of the publishing imprint Zubaan, kept coming back to the question of Partition and how it’s shaping recent Pakistani writing – only to be told that it’s not.

“For us ‘47 isn’t the big date,” said writer Kamila Shamsie. “Neither is ‘71.”

(The latter year is when East Pakistan split off from West Pakistan to become Bangladesh, and while it may not inform Pakistani writing that much, it is shaping new novels from Bangladesh, such as “The Golden Age,” by Tahmima Anam).

For a long time Partition, Ms. Shamsie said, has been a conversation Pakistanis her age feel forced to have with Indians before they can move on to more interesting topics.

“We’re the Zia generation, so for us it’s Afghanistan, the Soviets and the start of jihad mentality,” said Ms. Shamsie. “If you look at my generation of Pakistani writers that defines much more the nation that we grew up in.”

General Zia ul-Haq is the president who injected a much greater degree of orthodox Islam into Pakistan’s public sphere, in particular into schools and the legal system. If Zia brackets new Pakistani writing on one side, then 9/11 has the same weight on the other side.

One of the most noted of the Gen-Z novels is Mohammed Hanif’s “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” which is based around the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed General Zia. Other recent novels that have painted a vivid picture of the country are Mohsin Hamid’s “Moth Smoke,” published in 2000, about a young man who returns to Pakistan and falls into heroin addiction, and his next novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” about a man who leaves America after the Sept. 11 attack on the Twin Towers. H.M. Naqvi’s “Home Boy,” meanwhile, is about the experience of three young Muslim men in Manhattan after the attacks.

Ms. Shamsie was speaking at a session that was called “Two Nations, Two Narratives,” and at least some works after Independence from Indian and Pakistan focused on the split, offering different perspectives on the massive migration that saw millions die as Muslims moved to Pakistan and Hindus to India.

But the march of time and the receding of Partition is affecting Indian writing as well. Increasingly, writing on both sides of the border have become discrete bodies of work, shaped by very different concerns and diverging histories.

The themes that shape Pakistani writing are politics, conflict and fanaticism— themes that help ensure an overseas audience as well. The attacks rarely figure in recent Indian writing though, which deals more with class, caste and other divisions that have continued to cleave India in spite of its economic growth.

Pakistan’s dramatic history—and its intertwining with events in the United States—may be why it’s producing more interesting fiction writers these days than India is, according to William Dalrymple, one of the festival’s organizers.

“As recently ago as the 1997 New Yorker photograph of writers of South Asia there was one author from Sri Lanka and not a single writer from Pakistan,” said Mr. Dalrymple in an interview ahead of the festival. “Now in many ways the most interesting fiction out of South Asia is coming out of Pakistan.”