And the World Changed Read Free

confront. In politics this guilt has taken the form of India and Pakistan blaming each other for the resultant conflict, violence, war, and suffering from the time of Partition to the present day, but in South Asian English literature it has largely materialized in a tendency to sidestep ghastly details, which is why, compared to the magnitude of the event, novels about the Partition massacres are relatively few (Shamsie 2001).
    In 1947, Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, the wife of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, called upon educated Pakistani women to help with relief work in the refugee camps: They came in great numbers despite virulent criticism and abuse from orthodox clerics who believed that women should stay at home. A one-time professor of economics, Khan motivated and galvanized educated women to focus on every aspect of women’s welfare, including female literacy. Her efforts spearheaded the women’s movement in Pakistan. But the emphasis on nation building in the newly created country meant that social activism was considered a more praiseworthy occupation for privileged, well-educated, English-speaking women than the reclusive act of writing fiction.
    In his informative book, A History of Pakistani Literature in English (1991), Tariq Rahman shows that by the 1950s writers in Pakistan began to agree with “the prescriptive dictum that their work must have an extra-literary purpose, namely to ‘serve the society’ . . . this propagandist and chauvinistic view of literature was one which gained official support later.” Bythen, all English creative writing by Pakistanis was disparaged as pointless, elitist, and a colonial hangover. The paradox was that Pakistan’s English-language press flourished, but it was run and staffed by men; women reporters and editors were not even considered.
    Author of a collection, The Young Wife and Other Stories (1958), Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah was the only woman writing English fiction of note during that era; her stories revolved around social pressures in the daily lives of women. Hamidullah (1918–2000) was also Pakistan’s first woman columnist. Beginning in 1948 she wrote for Dawn , Pakistan’s most important and influential English-language daily newspaper, but the day she commented on politics, she was hauled up by the editor and told she must not stray from “women’s issues,” in other words, domestic matters. She resigned and set up a magazine, The Mirror , a popular glossy that recorded social happenings. Few in Pakistan remember that she utilized it to write fearless political editorials, which led to a ban on the magazine in 1957. She challenged this ban in the Supreme Court and won (Niazi 1986), becoming the first Pakistani woman to win a legal victory for press freedom in the superior judiciary. In the late 1950s and 1960s magazines such as The Mirror , as well as Woman’s World and later, She , run by Mujib-un-Nissa Akram and Zuhra Karim, respectively, provided a platform for English-language writing by women.
    In 1958, Pakistan experienced martial law for the first time, under the rule of General Iskander Mirza, soon followed by General Ayub Khan. Dissent was ruthlessly crushed, and the press was censored. None of this was conducive to English-language writing, which had a handful of practitioners and a tiny audience, unlike vernacular literatures, which had a long literary tradition, replete with rich metaphorical poetry that could be recited orally or set to music for popular songs.
    Two events of great significance in Pakistan’s women’s movement marked Ayub Khan’s rule. Women activists persuaded Khan to defy the orthodox and promulgate the1961 Family Laws Ordinance, with clauses that discouraged polygamy, regulated divorce procedures, and introduced a minimum marriageable age. Khan, who had little interest in fostering political freedom, established a quasi-democracy and held elections in 1964