Waseem Anwar
Waseem Anwar’s erudite and thought-provoking review of Tahira Naqvi’s latest oeuvre, a novel called The History Teacher of Lahore.
This short review on Tahira Naqvi’s The History Teacher of Lahore is an attempt to survey her style of writing in English that is impacted divergently by her experience and experiment. Currently a Clinical Professor at the New York University, Naqvi is basically a Lahore-grown translator of great Urdu writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, Munshi Premchand, Ismat Chughtai, Khadija Mastur, and many others in the ancestry. After her various short story collections, including her most famous Attar of Roses, Naqvi’s History Teacher is her debut novel in English. She has dealt with the linguistic, cultural, syntactical, and narratological vicissitudes over decades to develop a style of her own that echoes her local talent through her global training, call it translating-retranslating.
History Teacher deals with a story of the past revived for the present. Gripped with nostalgia, the novel raises questions about how, around the 1980s, our Pakistani culture got putrefied as well as petrified because of the gestapo-type rule levied by a General. We all know that the said General later on exploded in his plane along with the mangoes he was carrying for his foreign friends. The unnatural efforts of the General to Islamize a society through despotic means are related in History Teacher in terms of the consequences that such impositions bear upon generations to come.
Arif Ali from Sialkot, trying to realize his dream of being a history teacher in Lahore, is the product of those turbulent times. Despite a sincere patronage from his erudite mentor Kamal and his (un)holy wife Nadira, Arif’s mission to resist the false histories prescribed as nationalistic textbooks for his students carries him through different self-sacrificing trials. His romance with Roohi amid the treacherously blasphemous and dangerously clamorous environment is the only coloured streak in the turbid black-grey waters that the novel describes within its flowing account of events. In many ways, but with a different context, the descriptions in History Teacher are no less than those depicted in Qurratulain Hyder’s Aag ka Darya or River of Fire, representing the atrocities of the partition of the Indian sub-continent. Anyhow, the story of Naqvi’s history teacher is the post-Partition story of every Pakistani who struggles against pretense and hypocrisy. Bound by geographical cum ideological restrictions or tied by the exilic and diasporic flights that tether the imagination of many who want to see their beloved country more as a homeland than as a so-called holy-land, History Teacher unfolds layers of evocative reverberations, making us read the novel in English but think in Urdu or other local and connecting languages.
An expedition backwards, History Teacher becomes an alarming post that keeps us warning constantly about then and now and, thus, about the malice involved in de-historicizing a history itself
History Teacher begins and ends in flashbacks, good as well as bad. Many a times this cinematographic technique defines the narrative style of Naqvi, which otherwise stays simple and sound. Cross-referenced with allusions; historical, literary, philosophical, as well as poetic, Naqvi’s writing invites the readers to contemplate upon their surroundings through Socrates, Sartre, Tagore, Eliot (T. S.), Ghalib, Jalib, Iqbal, Faiz, Josh, Bullah, and many others. The commonality somehow draws on developing a defiant discourse for countering the craftiness of political, religious, social, or academic demigods whose spuriousness interprets facts to their vested interests. There are many incidents, picked from the early Islamic eras as well as their later developments, be it the sacred-secular tussle between Shahjahan and Aurangzeb during the Mughal period or the hostile sectarian divide and majority-minority discriminations of today’s times that truncate Pakistan. Such a palimpsestic cross-referencing is enriched with wisdom-based injunctions that powerfully engage a serious reader to find spaces for mediating the critical alertness with blissful meditation. That there are no chapter titles but just philosophical and poetic renditions, help the readers advance their journey along numbers 1 to 22. The journey is fluent though heavy with atmospheric toxicity, which is the main theme of History Teacher. Loaded with such heaviness of heart yet an awareness of opinion, the readers cannot escape to ponder upon upcoming obstacles, asking: Why? This being a metaphysical and ontological query, the narrative of the novel poses solid contentions to what is normally taken for fatalistic failure. The will to question is the strength of Naqvi’s narrative for it highlights the ordinary through extraordinary means; internally poised but externally piercing if not satiric or sardonic. It is the ‘why’ of the novel that foregrounds readers’ cognizance towards self-realization in the light of their past-present regulatory growth.
That the novel invites a historical context as enriching as the literary history of South Asian Pakistan itself becomes another way of connecting the History Teacher readership to its author’s writing style. Without amplifying ourselves as pure post-, de-, or anti-colonialists, one finds the glimpses of great authors of the past who had recorded South Asia in their own manner for their orientalist or non-orientalist reasons. E. M. Forster and his A Passage to India, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Raja Rao and his Kanthapura, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India find a good stylistic overlap when it comes to peeping through Naqvi’s simplistic lens of passaging through today’s Lahore. Additionally, though very rarely, Naqvi’s expression, when dealing with women characters and their thinking aloud, echoes mild strokes of Virginia Woolf’s articulation without exactly falling into her complex ‘Stream of Consciousness’ trajectory. Overall, works like Abdullah Hussain’s Uddas Naslain (Melancholy Generations) and Sartre’s Age of Reason intersperse to address the pessimistic-optimistic oxymoron, awarding an opportunity for the readers to reflect overwhelmingly, without losing sanity.
Naqvi’s Lahore offers a justified elemental locale that leads us through Bagh-e-Jinnah to Lawrence Gardens and then to many surrounding friendly as well as unfriendly and hostile environs. An expedition backwards, History Teacher becomes an alarming post that keeps us warning constantly about then and now and, thus, about the malice involved in de-historicizing a history itself. Amid such alarming oscillations, God’s benevolence waves at us to learn our lessons and be tolerant with greater consciousness. From Heera Mandi to its skirting vicinities, be they Sheesh Mahal, Mozang Road, or Joseph Colony, the descriptions in History Teacher open avenues for us that we might not have walked through. In crux, the cross-sectioned narrational nuances of History Teacher ask us to translate our cultural cum linguistic bearings without distorting the origin we belong to, be it English thought through Urdu or the vice versa. Whether its art, society, cricket, architecture, or music, or even our confusing educational systems and their politically prescribed curricula, history wants us to stay honest, at least about our abodes, which in the case of History Teacher is Lahore. Let Lahore be the rooted Lahore, pre- and post-Partition Lahore that coalesces a traditional aura structured by a profound amorphousness of reminding us about some ancestral contemporaneity, the Lahore of Pran Neville, Ahmed Ijaz, Bapsi Sidhwa, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Syeda Arfa Zehra, Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Kelsey Hoppe, and many before and after. Perhaps the final message of Naqvi’s History Teacher is that to be untruthful to one’s soil and its carved chronicles, to translate it unfaithfully, is to deface one’s own self and, thus, an unpardonable sin.
Dr. Waseem Anwar is Professor of English and Director ICPWE (International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English, https://www.kinnaird.edu.pk/icpwe/ ) at Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore. He has been at FCC and GC universities in the capacity of Dean (Humanities) and Chair (English). Recipient of the Fulbright award twice, for doctoral studies in 1995 and as Visiting Scholar in 2007, Dr. Anwar served as the President of the Pak-US Alumni Network (PUAN) and Fulbright Alumni Association. A Gale Group American Scholar, he also received the Punjab Education Department ‘Salam Teacher Award 2004’ and Pakistan Higher Education Commission ‘Best Teacher Award 2003.’ He is a Lifetime Member of the South Asian Literary Association (SALA), USA, and has been on its Executive Committee for three times. Apart from being on the Advisory and Editorial Boards of several renowned research journals, and publishing scores of articles, his credit includes books, Black” Women’s Dramatic Discourse (2009), the South Asian Review (SAR 2010—special issue on Pakistani creative writing in English), and very lately Transcultural Humanities in South Asia (Routledge UK, 2022, https://www.routledge.com/Transcultural-Humanities-in-South-Asia-Critical-Essays-on-Literature-and/Anwar/p/book/9780367483715 ). He is also the founding Editor in Chief of the journal of English studies, JELLS at FCC university.
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