Mushtaq Bilal
Bapsi Sidhwa (1938-2024) was the acclaimed author of beloved novels including, Ice Candy Man, An American Brat and The Crow Eaters. Born into a Gujarati Parsi family, she spent a majority of her life in Lahore, a city that features prominently in her works, before moving to Houston ,USA. Bapsi passed away on 25 December, 2024 leaving behind an indelible mark in the annals of Pakistani literature in English. Her legacy will live in the lives of countless writers and academics who continued to be inspired by her work. Garothman Behest to Bapsi’s Ruvan.
The following is an excerpt from Mushtaq Bilal’s book-length collection of long-form interviews with Pakistani English fiction writers, ‘Writing Pakistan: Conversations with Pakistani English Fiction Writers’, published by HarperCollins (2016). This excerpt first appeared in The Aleph Review, Vol. 1 (2017).
You have often dealt with Partition in your fiction. According to Ayesha Jalal, Partition turned Indians—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs—into religious bigots. Although the lives of Parsee characters in your novels are affected by it also, they do not become religious fundamentalists. How and why do you think they were able to resist becoming hostages to their religious identities?
Because Parsees are only 120,000 in the whole world. They are a tiny community. So they had not had a chance to become religious bigots. If they were a big community, two or three million, they would have become bigots as well. In the Parsee community we do have bigots. It’s a question of numbers. And you are quite right that Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs did turn into religious bigots, but they were not so always. Before the British arrived, they were very tolerant of each other. I remember my parents telling us not to discuss anyone else’s religion ever and not to hurt religious sentiments of others, because they are precious to them. The Parsees had a strong sense of identity among themselves and they did get involved in Partition in the sense that they helped a lot of Hindus escape from Pakistan. We kept the goods of our Hindu and Sikh neighbours in our godowns, and they all thought that they would come back and collect them, but they never did get the chance. My mother and aunt would take gallons of petrol to a place near the canal on the Mall road, where there was a place for Hindu refugees. They helped in whatever way they could because, after all, human compassion is common to all mankind.
So what you are saying is that were it not for the small size of their community Parsees would have also become religious bigots during Partition?
Oh, yes. Very easily. Even now in our community, we have terrible bigots. Now that we are in America, our children are marrying non-Parsees and these bigots don’t let their daughters’ children become Parsees. If the sons marry out of the community, their children are allowed to become Parsees. But then who wants to become a Parsee if one’s mother is not a Parsee? It is still strange that in this day and age they are doing this rubbish.
When you first started writing, who were your primary audiences? Have your audiences changed since you first published The Crow Eaters in 1978 or are they still the same?
You know, I wrote very secretly because I thought if any of our friends—mine or my husband’s—from our community got to know that I am writing they would make fun of me by saying that Bapsi could not write anything other than romance. So I wrote secretly and I never thought about who would read my writing, because if I had done that I would have become very self-conscious. And after the book was published, my mother said that people were saying that I had written about her. Then when she told my brother, Minoo Bhandara, about the book, he said, “No, she has written a very good book,” and then my mother said, “Alright, then it’s OK.” She worshipped my brother. All mothers do. And then when the book was published, I did want it for an English audience because it was written in English. So, when at last it was published in Britain, it got its proper audience. In America it got a different audience. And then the book was accepted in Pakistan. In India it had a very good audience too.
You wanted the book to be read by an English audience. Was it a way of writing back to the Empire?
No, no, no. Nothing so fanciful. I didn’t go to school even, let alone college. I went to Kinnaird College before I got married like all Pakistani girls go for two, three years. So, education of that nature was not part of my upbringing. Whatever I wrote, came from within me. I do believe there is such a thing as inherited memory that kicks in and writes for you. I wrote whatever came from within me without being self-conscious.
Do you think your audiences have changed over time or are they still the same?
My audience has changed. I wish I was translated more. If I had been an Indian my books, especially The Crow Eaters, would have been translated into Gujarati and Marathi and many other languages. But so far, thank God, it has been translated into Urdu as Junglewala Sahib by Muhammad Umar Memon. The more it is translated, the more people will read it. It is for all people for all times.
In An American Brat, Feroza Ginwalla—a young Parsee girl—moves to the US as an immigrant. The US houses the third largest population of Parsees, after India and Iran. What kind of cultural impact has immigration to the US had on the Parsee community?
Under British rule, Parsees were always favoured and so they became West-ward looking. Parsees have, in a way, adapted to America legally, but they have not become part of American society. They have kept their identity very strong. In Houston, we have a relatively big Parsee community of 650 and we have a Zoroastrian centre built there with the contribution of the community. And it is a very active Zoroastrian centre. People go there to learn about Parsee religion and every month there is some religious function going on. We have kept a strong identity but, like I said earlier, our children are marrying out of the community. My book, An American Brat, is about this issue and how much unhappiness this causes, because one of my daughters did marry a non-Parsee and she went through a very, very hurtful period and because of that I went through a lot of hurt and I wrote this book out of that hurt.
So, there are autobiographical details in your book too?
These were the things that happened to me and to so many people around me. These were the issues that bothered me. So yes, there are autobiographical details in An American Brat. The novel reflects my feelings about what happened to my daughter. But it is still fiction, a story, because I am a storyteller and not a writer who writes for some cause. As a storyteller, you have to entertain your reader and if my ideas fit into it, I tell the story. Part of An American Brat was turned into a play and Stages Repertory Theatre, in Houston, performed it for a month and a half. It was a very funny play, and people wanted another theatre company to produce it again. They paid me good money, they brought beautiful artists, and it was a very successful play. You write to entertain, but that book reflects the experiences of both my daughters.
You have been living as an immigrant in the US for the last three decades now…
Well, I have not lived three decades in the US During the last three decades, half the time I was in Pakistan. My mother was ill, and I was nursing her. First my husband came to the US He didn’t live in the US any longer than me. I would be going back and forth, from the US to Pakistan, because my daughter, Parizad, lived in Lahore and my son and my other daughter lived in Idaho and occasionally I would go see them too. I can’t leave Pakistan. You don’t leave the country you belong to. I couldn’t, at least.
Has the experience of living as an immigrant in the US had an effect on your literary and cultural sensibilities?
Yes, An American Brat reflects that change to a certain extent. But my writing has always been based in the subcontinent, either in Bombay or in Lahore. I didn’t move [to the US] as a young person. I didn’t move until I was in my mid-thirties and then I spent a lot of time in Lahore again. So, you cannot say I have lived in America as an immigrant for that long. As an immigrant I was never a fit, I was always a misfit. To this day, I don’t understand American people. I am still happier with my Parsee crowd and my desi friends. Most of my friends are still Lahoris. I belong to some American institutions, writers’ institutions and things like that and, of course, I have lived with other writers. The experience of living in the US has changed and enriched me. Any other culture enriches you to a certain extent. But I wish I had moved to the US when I was younger. I would have adapted better. Young people adapt better.
So even after having spent several years in the US, you still haven’t been able to adapt to the American way of life.
No, of course, not. I don’t know their cooking. I don’t know how they think. I don’t understand their holidays.
When you self-published The Crow Eaters in 1978 it was not received well within Pakistan. But after it was published in the UK and got favourable reviews and won literary awards, people within Pakistan also changed their opinion. Why do you think postcolonial peoples like Pakistanis continue to look at themselves through the colonizer’s gaze?
Naturally, the colonizers have always held the position of power and prestige, and English has always been a prestigious language. But English is not our language. It is the language of the British. So, when they praise something written in English there is a greater chance of approval. Urdu writers will not be praised by the English unless they are translated into English. Because of my polio I never did learn Urdu and so I could only write in English. I spoke Gujarati, Urdu, Punjabi in the house and very little English, but I wrote in English because that was the only language I was taught to read and write in by my private tutor, Mrs Penherow, who was an Anglo-Indian lady. I wrote in English and because I had read so much and because I wrote very carefully, I wrote well, and the English loved it and Americans too. So, I got accepted.
Literature produced in English by writers who belong to countries which once were part of the British Empire—such as India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, South Africa—have invariably been termed as New English literature, Commonwealth literature, and most recently, postcolonial literature. How do you see these labels?
These [labels] are used by colleges and universities to give a particular literature course a name, that now we are going to teach writings which are not by Shakespeare or Milton or by American authors but by some other authors. Actually, it only makes a difference in colleges. It doesn’t make any difference, I think, to the average reader. The average reader enjoys reading a good story. I found this happening in Britain with respect to The Crow Eaters. Many people read it and when I would meet somebody they would say, “Ah, you are the writer of The Crow Eaters.” People there read it for the fun of reading a good book. They didn’t read it as a colonial book or a postcolonial book or Commonwealth literature. These labels are used by colleges to put literature into little pigeonholes. Then there are prizes given to Commonwealth writers. I was twice a judge for Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and this also gives us a category. And this is not a bad thing.
So, do you find these labels encouraging? Or are they condescending?
No, I don’t find them either way. I think they are necessary because you have to put things in some sort of a place. There is American literature, British literature, African literature, and Indian subcontinental literature, which includes Pakistan and Bangladesh too. So, you have to put things in their place, and it doesn’t matter if it is a good story. It gives these books visibility in colleges and schools and that’s a good thing.
You have mentioned that you like the fictions of Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai. What kind of impact has the works of these writers had on your literary oeuvre?
I read them much later in life. I did not read Indian or Pakistan authors until much later. I liked Manto because his style was simple and straightforward. I like Ismat Chughtai even more, because she is more complex and funny. I read her works in English translation and I enjoyed her more. But I didn’t learn anything from them. They did not have any influence on my writing. My writing was influenced by the authors I had read in my youth and books like The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, which I found very funny. I read it five times before I was 18. I was influenced by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and V. S. Naipaul’s and Mark Twain’s novels. I would say I was influenced to a certain extent by most of the writers I read without realizing it.
Mushtaq Bilal is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. His collection of interviews with Pakistani English writers was published in 2016 by HarperCollins, India.*
*Author bios from archival pieces are reprinted as they first appeared. They may not reflect the current status of the author.
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