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What is it about Pakistan that stirs a writer’s literary inclinations? It sits, after all, next to India, a country that has inspired writers such as E.M. Forster, Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul. In comparison, Pakistan has been less of a muse, its past entangled with its neighbours’ and its own identity perpetually in flux. In recent years, however, Pakistan has gained increasing significance.

If readers in the West have suddenly become interested in literature from and about Pakistan, it is because the country has been the centre of much controversy. Pakistan's history has been rife with conflict since the nation's inception in 1947. But in the past three decades, the political discord within the country has become a global concern. From Zia ul-Haq’s Islamization of the state to the threat of the Taliban, the nation has become synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, both often perceived as being mutually exclusive. Pakistan continues to be linked with the Taliban, a concern for the U.S. and the Western world. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 likewise raised alarm worldwide when it dealt a harrowing blow to who many saw as the country’s lone hope for democracy.

The country’s growing political importance has resulted in increased news coverage, and has also coincided with the publication of several books by Pakistani authors, propelling Pakistani literature written in English into the spotlight. In January 2009, critics doted on up-and-coming writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, comparing In Other Rooms, Other Wonders to the works of Chekov. That same month, the organizers of India’s Jaipur Literary Festival highlighted literature from Pakistan. In February 2009, The Guardian published an article on the rise of Pakistani authors, juxtaposing it to the country’s decline. Two months later, Kamila Shamsie delivered her fifth novel, Burnt Shadows. In May, NPR featured a radio segment on Pakistani writers.

Despite the attention Pakistani writers have received lately, it has been no meteoric rise. Veterans such as Bapsi Sidhwa and Hanif Kureishi have been writing for quite some time with Kureishi chronicling the Pakistani immigrant experience during the Thatcher era in Britain, and Sidhwa writing about the tenuous relationship between Pakistan and India post-partition.

The recent crop of writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, Mohammed Hanif and Nadeem Aslam (just to name a few) may not be the Rushdies and Lahiris of the literary world just yet, but their names are now being recognized in the literary milieu.

So when Kamila Shamsie published Burnt Shadows, she found herself in good company. During the release of her last novel, Broken Verses in 2005, being a Pakistani writer was a lonelier affair. Her 2009 publication places her amidst a roster of literary talent from the subcontinent. “It’s been a slow-growing process with me where there was no dramatic moment where you suddenly said, ‘Oh, they’re noticing me!’ This one is getting more attention than the ones before and it’s nice. America’s a place where I spend a lot of time. I went to university there so it is like my third home. It’s nice to go back there and have people talk about it,” said Shamsie during a visit to Toronto at the Harbourfront Centre in May to promote her new book.

Pakistani writers, like their Indian counterparts, have similar thematic concerns, often writing about the self and the nation. Some are preoccupied with the memories of Partition, the War of 1971 or the Islamization of the state. Others write about the immigrant experience, chronicling the history of Pakistanis that continues with migration and exile. Almost all of them explore issues of identity, hybridity, home and exile. Above all, they collectively counter the singular representation of Pakistan, revealing the nation’s multiplicity.

Many of the writers live in the diaspora. Part of it, Shamsie argues, has to do with the state of the publishing industry in Pakistan. There are far more Pakistani writers out there than the ones readers know but they’re just not being read. The current condition of Pakistan’s publishing industry is partly to blame. Plagued with a lack of readership and piracy, publishing houses cannot be sustained by the desire to publish literature alone. “Pakistani fiction in English can only go so far unless there's a local publishing infrastructure,” said Shamsie.

Censorship is also part of the problem. “Publishers are nervous about publishing anything they see as controversial,” she added. Mohammed Hanif first tried to publish A Case of Exploding Mangoes in Pakistan before re-directing his attention to publishing houses abroad. Critically acclaimed by the western media, it was received with considerable reluctance by Pakistani publishers. They worried about the consequences of publishing a book that dealt with the mysterious death of Zia ul-Haq, the general whose military rule and policies in many ways defined the shape Pakistan eventually took.

As a result of increased news coverage, Pakistani authors are often called upon by the media to comment on Pakistani issues. Authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie accept the invitation, but with caution. “I think all of us try to resist the idea that we’re a spokesperson. I’m very happy to comment on Pakistan as someone from there, but I’m not representing the people of Pakistan because they’re too varied to represent and I have no business representing them.

“One of the really nice things about the fact that more of us are now publishing is that it means the burden is slightly less. Because about seven or eight years ago, I felt more pressure. After 9/11, one newspaper would call one of us and the other would call another. You felt like you kept having to say, ‘Look there are many different views, there are many different aspects and here’s one of them.’ When you read the books, you’ll see that [they] are so different. They’re showing you such different worlds between Daniyal Mueenuddin’s rural world to my Karachi world to Mohsin’s Lahore to Hanif ’s military world. There’s enough variety that you would start to see that the idea of a representation just isn’t possible.”

It’s worth noting then, that fiction has provided a space for Pakistani authors to renegotiate general misconceptions about the nation. It has allowed Mohsin Hamid to tackle a weighty topic like Islamic fundamentalism in a tightly packaged novel called The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Kamila Shamsie to show that being Pakistani does not mean being anchored to one place in Burnt Shadows.

Perhaps this is another reason why Pakistani literature written in English is burgeoning. These authors have something important to say about Pakistani society, but their writing also holds a certain universality that has otherwise been overlooked by the media’s generally one-note coverage of the nation.

BY MISHAL CAZMI / PUBLISHED IN THE FALL ISSUE 2009