Pre-Partition Pakistan had a tradition of writing in English, but only in recent years have Pakistani English fiction, poetry, and some drama started to come into their own. The
Over a dark and quiet empire
alone I fly-and emvy you,
two-headed eagle who at least
have always yourself to talk to.
– Andrei Voznsensky
Whatever the concerns of
Abandoned Temple
A brambly thicket of blackberry canes
squats, a votary, before it.
Another autumn slowly ticks away.
Veils of mist smile on nervously
at this victim of unmoving grass.
As Indian writing in English gains global recognition, assumptions about a singular “Indian” sensibility overlook class, gender and socio-political nuance in contemporary literary works
A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English
Selected and edited by Muneeza Shomsie
Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1997
hardback xxxi + 599 pages
If, as Edward Said says in Representations of the Intellectual, "…for most exiles the difficulty consists not simply in being forced to live away from home, but rather, given
Arundhati Roy’s 'The God of Small Things' exposes the limits of Western criticism that flattens Southasian literature into exoticism, moral lessons or comparisons to Rushdie – exposing, too, the gaps in understanding between Southasians themselves
