A little dying world

The Pakistani author Daniyal Mueenuddin speaks about the countrys feudal make-up, its transformations and the role of women in that society.

The back flap says this is a collection of short stories about feudal Pakistan. Is this how you want the book to be seen?

Its a fairly accurate description. Most of the people in my stories are tangentially related to feudalism. The only non-feudal characters are the ones in Our Lady of Paris, who are industrialists, and those in A Spoiled Man, again industrialists.

Pakistan is such a feudal country that any story we write has its connections to feudalism in some way. I have tried to represent both the lower feudal classes and the urban feudal classes. I dont know much about the world of the urban middle classes in Pakistan. Thats a lacuna in my writing.

What is your understanding of feudalism?

Feudalism is a system in which a small minority owns the majority of the agricultural land or large estates and in which the people who work are bound to it [the minority], not just financially but in all aspects of their lives. Its a complicated relationship between the landowner and the worker.

Then Pakistani feudalism has some specific qualities: the landowner has the power to shape or determine the voting patterns of people working on his lands; there is often a very brutal relationship between the landowners and the peasants, as in parts of Sindh province. The involvement of the police is quite new: their role is maintaining the sovereignty of the landowner.

However, this system has its positive sides too. There are landowners who act in a benign way. They go to the weddings and funerals of the lower classes and loan money when it is needed. This ensures that a relationship is created between all the stakeholders of the farm. Such a relationship creates obligations and rights. However, owing to the disproportionate power of the landowner, obligations and rights become skewed.

Among social scientists, there is a running debate on whether feudalism is still alive in Pakistan.. How would you approach this question?

I havent travelled much in Pakistan and do not have many friends from the feudal classes. Its a question of how you define feudalism. Some landowners have seigneurial relationships with the people working on their lands. In Sindh, there are big properties. But the large estates have been broken up either by land reform or by landlords transferring land to their heirs or dependents. In the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan, feudalism is more tribal.

From your profile at the end of the book, you seem to be a representative of the feudal class yourself. How important was your background in writing these stories?

In my upbringing, education, my view of the world, the power that I own, and the position I have in society, I am not a representative of this class. I run my farm [in Khanpur, south Punjab] like a business. I have consciously pulled away from the techniques, methods and attitudes of the landowning class. The regular salaries that I pay on my farm are three times the salaries in that area. I do not commit corruption and I pay extremely high bonuses to my staff. Also, I demand that my managers maintain careful accounts and run the farm in a professional, efficient and modern way.

My background was very important to the writing of these stories. The first thing that a writer must ask is: What shall I write? And the answer is: Write about what you know. I have spent more time on the farm than anywhere else in the world. First, as a child. Then, when in high school and college, I used to visit regularly in the summers; and from the age of 24 to 31, I have lived uninterruptedly on the farm.

Whatever role I am playing on the farm, whether as a business manager or as a feudal landlord, and it is my wish to be seen in the former role, I have spent a lot of time there. I have friends there, my employees and business partners, and I know about them, which is why I can write about them.

What was your purpose in writing these stories?

I am not a political writer, therefore, my purpose is to write the finest stories that I am able to write, given my abilities. I dont enjoy reading political literature, fiction or poetry. I think political writing is a limiting factor because when you have a political bias, it endears those who support you and alienates those who dont.

Life is much more nuanced than a cruel landowner beating his manager for sport. I know feudal people and that is why I write about them. I dont have a political agenda, I am not trying to eliminate or to support feudalism. But I believe that one has to enter the sensibility of the character and have empathy with it.

Turgenevs Sportsmans Sketches, one of my favourite books of short stories, moved Czar Alexander II so much that he wept over the stories. Russia was going through a liberal phase at that time. Historians say that this book was behind Alexanders decision to liberate serfs in 1861. Fiction has a limited ability to bring change; perhaps satire has more power.

Are these stories based on personal experiences or on a specific family, for instance, in the case of the Harounis?

Yes and no. There is no family like the Harouni family in real life. However, there are two characters who are closely drawn from life: Nawabdin Electrician and Saleema. They are drawn from real characters whom I knew well and whom I then animated and gave a story.

One wonderful thing about writing, and this is one of my favourite moments, is when a character comes alive and behaves in unpredictable ways. In Anna Karenina, Voronsky comes home after confronting Annas husband and shoots himself. Regarding this scene, Tolstoy wrote that he was horrified but also recognised that it was the right thing for Voronsky to do.

What explains the title of your book, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders?

The title is taken from the beginning of Elizabeth Bishops poem Varick Street, where she talks about other places, other desires. One thing that I like about the story in the collection with the same title is the strange lives its characters lead, which are tangentially related to each other. I have tried to show that every characters life is meaningful, interesting and important, be it Nawabdin or Sohail or K.K. Harouni.

In your stories, feudalism is an all-encompassing system, remarkably self-sufficient and knowledgeable with respect to the defence of its class interests, especially women. Is this true or is it, as Lily, one of the central characters in your book, says, a little dying world?

To say that the feudal world is a comprehensive world is correct, according to my impression. One of the characteristics of feudalism is that neither the overlords nor the underclass challenges their place in the system. On my farm, I am amazed at the degree to which the workers are, if not entirely, resigned because that would suggest dissatisfaction and embrace their place within it. They dont question their position not just because of their low education but also because feudalism by definition is a system where the inhabitants are conservative in the broader sense of the word.

Resistance to innovation is massive, and my own experience has shown that workers will sabotage innovation. Feudal systems are fundamentally stable. They are vulnerable when the underclass gets educated and is exposed to the wider world, thus finding that it isnt inevitable that it holds the position it does. Television also has a big influence.

Lilys phrase, which you quote in your question, is in relation to Murad Talwans father who is hapless and hopeless. He is an inefficient feudal. Pakistans feudal system is changing. Old brown sahibs are being subsumed because they do not know how to defend their interests. A new class of overlords is replacing the former overlords, who are politicians, more local, and live near the lands they own. So what Lily said about the little dying world is true. Just because that class is dying doesnt mean that feudalism is dying.

I now want to come to the women in your stories. And they are strong: Saleema, Zainab, Husna and Lily, all want to partake of the attractions of the feudal world, want to be loved, to enjoy their alcohol and sex even while being bound to the worst form of patriarchy yet are crushed by it and want to change things, but in the end fall hapless victims to it. Are women that weak within this feudal world you recreate?

I read somewhere that 50 per cent of Pakistani women are clinically depressed. Womens position in Pakistan is not an ideal one, and theres room for improvement. The women in my stories and their trajectories seek to better themselves by impressing upon men. That they fall victim to the feudal system eventually is an aspect of the stories that I failed to recognise when I wrote them.

Yes, there is a sameness in these stories, and thats the biggest flaw in my book. We have to realise that the story is not without an ending but is incomplete without it [the ending]. The resolution of these characters was the only one I could reach at the time I was writing them. Perhaps it would have been better not to write at least three of these stories or include some other stories in the collection.

In the real world of Pakistani feudalism, there are strong women too, like Mukhtaran Mai, who hails from the same region that provides the setting for your stories. They stand up against the worst form of patriarchy and feudalism. Your stories do not have room for such women.

There are strong women in my stories. For example, Lily is a strong woman, as are Mrs. Harouni in the Paris story, who is a mother, and K.K. Harounis daughters in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, who are minor characters. Husna, in the same story, is also a strong woman, its just that her circumstances are very bad. But they are women who show strength.

Why dont I write about an exceptional woman? I taught for a semester in the U.S., and when students brought me the stories they had written, I used to tell them, It is not plausible. Implausibilities occurring in life seldom work in fiction; real life and fiction seldom go together. Mukhtaran Mai would be an exception, not the rule. Hers was an unusual case because it was taken up by the Western press. There are many cases in my area of brutalised and raped women going to the police, receiving more beatings and being raped again.

Similarly, in your stories, the men, even enlightened ones, seem least interested in saving the feudal world from collapse by introducing some semblance of human dignity and justice into it.

Sohail [Harouni], for example is a wimp. He is not going to try to do anything to adhere to the norm. Murad Talwan is more likely to change the system. He is a decent, intelligent and sophisticated person and not a brute. You will recall that at the end of that story Lily foresees Murad as being rich and using power for desirable ends.

Through Sonya, the American wife in A Spoiled Man, I have tried to show the ways in which people from the upper class try to help and do good but end up doing harm. In Pakistan, it is very dangerous to be a bleeding-heart liberal. One must work for change, but it can be dangerous. I have realised that its very important to be a realist even while working on my own farm. However, there are a number of apathetic men in these stories.

So, is this world, which you have shown maintaining its vice-like grip in Pakistan well into the 1990s and post-9/11, likely to collapse? How will it hold on to its privileges in modern-day Pakistan?

It is collapsing. Pakistan is about to go through a tremendous upheaval. I am not an expert on the topic but I have talked to experts and read books by experts. Feudalism is not going to survive. At times of revolution, the existing system will be submerged by the new power coming in. However, these questions are better addressed to a political scientist.

Can feudalism ever reform itself or is it doomed to extinction, as in the now-industrialised countries?

In the crudest way, feudalism is a way of defining large economic inequalities among different classes in society. If there is a redistribution of wealth in Pakistan either due to land reform or industrialisation, the feudal system will be weakened.

For a collection of stories on feudalism in Pakistan, there is a remarkable lack of exploration of the exploitative ties that bind the landlord and the peasant, that is land, and of how institutionalised religion nourishes these ties.

I have described the way these characters are tied to each other economically and socially. I havent really explored the role of the mullah because I dont know much about it.

Who are your literary inspirations? Any South Asian influences amongst them?

I read lots of books at the same time, but the writers I read again and again are Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce and Tolstoy. There is something about the Russian world that is similar to what I am describing in my stories.

Among South Asians, there are Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif and Nadeem Aslam, who know this world very well and are writing about the same things I am writing about. For example, Hanif and Nadeem lived in Okara and Gujranwala respectively until they were 14 or 15. There is also the young Pakistani novelist Ali Sethi.

However, I dont have a strong connection to South Asian literature, and the only other writer I can cite in this respect is Saadat Hasan Manto, who was a brilliant writer. In fact, I write the same way Manto does, and there is a similarity in style and the way in which we approach our subjects. Despite what the publishers have put on the promotional blurb, R.K. Narayan has never been an inspiration, and I wouldnt have chosen to cite him.

What is your opinion about the recent explosion of Pakistani writing in English, people like Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie and Ali Sethi?

I think its fantastic. We are reinforcing and helping each other. Theres no competition amongst us because if Hanifs book sells, it is more likely that our books will also sell, because in this way interest in Pakistani literature will grow. There is a virtuous circle of selling, publishing and writing, which is leading to a renaissance.

Why is this explosion in Pakistani writing taking place? We are all living in very fractured and pressured times. In times of crisis, people tend to look more closely at the world around them. Some of the new Pakistani writers are a bicultural part of the diaspora and it enables them to look around with a critical eye, creating a nostalgia, which gives the impulse to write.

As opposed to most of the Pakistani writers mentioned above, you prefer to live in Pakistan. Is that a conscious choice and does it give you any advantages/disadvantages over your more diasporic peers?

I choose to live in Pakistan because I love it, I love living here, my family and friends live here and because I write best in Pakistan.

The advantage is that I am constantly surrounded by stories and introduced to new types of situations, and thus to new stories. The disadvantage of choosing to live in Pakistan is that I am not living with the English language, that is, not surrounded by people speaking English in general. More specifically, this implies that I am cut off from the vernacular, the ability to communicate in innovative variants of English, for example, the way it is spoken in New York.

Please tell me about your forthcoming work and projects.

I am writing a novel set in Pakistan. The characters are somewhat similar to Lily, but more urban with rural threads. Then there are some stories that are set abroad, and I plan to publish them.