Review of 
Shaukat Siddiqi's God's Own Land: A Novel of Pakistan

Translated from the Urdu by David J. Matthews; Kent, England:
Paul Norbury Publications/UNESCO Collection of Representative
Works, 1991, hb. pp. 245.

This novel's English title, God's Own Land: A Novel of Pakistan, suggests its identity as a national allegory, a term popularized by Fredric Jameson in his 1986 essay "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Jameson's essay theorized that all "third world" literatures are necessarily allegories of the collectivity and of nation-formation, which make them uninteresting to the First World readers who prefer literary renderings of the private as opposed to the public experience.  In a well-known critique of this theory, the Urdu writer Aijaz Ahmad exposed Jameson's own first world biases and attempted to trace a sophisticated genealogy of third world literature, Urdu novel in particular--Ahmad's In Theory (1992) provides a sophisticated critique of a series of similar positions about representing the non-Western experience.

Though I agree with Aijaz Ahmad's arguments, I have also come to believe that national allegories as defined by Jameson do exist.  The novel under review is one of them. Besides, I am convinced that even a mediocre socialist-realist novel, a non-allegorical genre, could be easily converted into a national allegory by marketing it as such. By providing a suggestive title (God's Own Land) and a blunt subtitle (A Novel of Pakistan), the translator and UNESCO have framed Khuda ki Basti as an allegory about Pakistan's nation-formation, forcing an allegorical reading
from readers who have no access to the original.

Set in the years immediately following the creation of Pakistan, Siddiqi's novel portrays a series of characters, mostly underclass, deprived, possessing only a vague understanding of the new nationhood.  Among the two main strands of this inchoate narrative, the story of Nausha's
family has some formal clarity and interest, mainly on account of its domestic focus.

The novel begins in greed and murder and ends in revenge, and a vague suggestion about the indefatigable nature of idealism is made at the end.  None of the characters or situations in the novel are deeply felt or realistic, even though the translator claims that Siddiqi "portrayed life as it really was."  The domestic strand of the narrative is centered around Nausha.  First we see the
boy while he is initiated into theft by Niyaz, the junk-dealer who is to emerge as the villain, Mr. Greed of this allegory.  The boy's widowed mother and his sister Sultana roll beedis at home to make a living.  Niyaz lusts after Sultana who is often described as "fresh" and "lovely".

The moment Niyaz learns about how life-insurance can yield rich rewards, he begins a scheme which would earn him wealthy and status in the new society.  He marries Nausha's mother, starts work on poisoning her with the help of a quack who came over from India during Partition.  As planned, Niyaz claims a huge amount from the insurance company and he establishes himself in a villa.  Through bribery and scheming, he is able to amass more wealth through government contracts; he characterizes well the new class of swindlers who begin to gnaw at the roots of the young nation.  In the meanwhile, he also skillfully turns his step-daughter Sultana into his mistress.  Nausha himself has run away from home early on, but he shows up toward the end of the novel to avenge his mother's blood; he knifes Niyaz to death, consequently exposing his sister to yet another series of calamities, but alas, the idealist Ali Ahmad marries her and adopts Niyaz's child.

The second narrative strand of this novel appears to be an attempt to capture the sense of futility and collective anxieties about the public experience of the new nation; this part is centered around idealists like Ali Ahmad, Safdar Bashir, Dr. Zaidi, and of course, Salman, a middle-class youth who turns down the lower-class Sultana when she pleaded desperately for his love and protection while Niyaz was invading her home.  Salman opts for a life of idealism and joins the founders of the secular Skylark Society to uplift the conditions of the poor.  The new order of things in Pakistan eventually destroys the Skylarks and breaks Salman's determination, leading him to a compromise that brings him nothing but a loveless marriage, persecution, corruption, and exposure to Western decadence.  The two narratives develop in a parallel structure, but neither brings out the conflicts involved in a clash of the private and the public.

Had he seen this translation of Siddiqi's Khuda ki Basti, Aijaz Ahmad would have been able to add one more level to his critique of Jameson's theory: the ability of the First World cultural institutions to provide a frame of reference that could nudge a flawed non-Western novel into becoming a national allegory.  In an allegorical reading of this novel, it is possible to interpret the shapelessness and superficiality of the narrative as expressions of the chaotic process of nation-building.  If it weren't for David J. Matthew's terminally flawed translation, God's Own Land: A Novel of Pakistan would have passed as a bona fide allegory of a nation's growing pains.  The truth is that the translator has no feel for the language of fiction.  He may be following the orthodox approach of "literal-translation" which might be all right for translating an esoteric religious tract, not for a work of fiction.  Besides, an English translation of a novel marketed in this manner certainly deserves a much more serious introductory essay than the glib "preface" which has nothing substantial to say about the novel or the novelist other than the claim that its television adaptation is "a well deserved tribute to one of the finest modern Urdu writers."
 
 

Qurratulain Hyder's translation of the first Urdu  novel The Nautch Girl by Hasan Shah
River of Fire. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998. US Edition from New Directions
also see the author's  Street Singers of Lucknow and Other stories