February 12, 2002

Hanif Kureishi is not a name unfamiliar to Pakistani readers of modern fiction. We may try and claim him as being partly our own, but such an assertion will not hold much water. While he was born to a Pakistani father, the fact that his birth took place in Bromley, England, that his mother was English and that he has spent all his life in the United Kingdom would imply that, despite carrying a typically Pakistani name and a dusky shade of skin, he belongs to Britain. Some might even cheekily add that Kureishi is as much part of modern Cool Britannia as its newly celebrated national, and hugely popular, dish — the Chicken Tikka Masala, an eccentric concoction of subcontinental antecedents.

Life in England was not always painless for Kureishi. The young Hanif was the only Asian in his school at the time when ‘Paki bashing’ became a vicious pastime for some of the alienated punks and skinheads. The ugliness soon arrived within his school walls. In an early interview Kureishi recollects, “Kids I’d known since the age of five began spitting at me and kicking me around.” Even his teachers were not above making racist digs, one of them used to refer to him as ‘Pakistani Pete’.

The other great influencing factor in his life appears to have been his father, Rafushaan Kureishi. Belonging to a refined and cultured family originally from India, Hanif Kureishi’s father left Pakistan in the late 1940s to pursue an artistic life of a writer in England. Real success did not come his way, limited as it was to two books published for children, on the history and geography of Pakistan.

By the time he was sixty, Rafushaan Kureishi, had completed some five or six novels, several short stories, and a few radio plays — all remaining unpublished. His passion for writing was financially sustained by, what his son describes as, ‘a dull, enervating civil service job’ at the Pakistan High Commission in London. According to Hanif Kureishi, his father had ‘left college without taking his exams, got a job and lived a life of frustration, but always with the hope that one day he’d become a writer’. His father’s obsession clearly made a marked impression on the young Hanif, who discovered at the early age of fourteen that he too wished to be a writer. The going was not to be easy. According to Hanif, his family elders in Pakistan were not impressed either with him or his father for following such ‘a notoriously badly paid and indulgent profession’ as writing. Once an uncle, he states, subjected him to an angry tirade, telling him, ‘You’re a fool, and your father’s a fool too, to encourage you in this.’ Nevertheless, the young Hanif persisted with his dream. After studying philosophy at the University of London, he supported himself by writing pornography under a female pseudonym and later by working as an usher for the Royal Theatre in London; hardly the kind of jobs that would have impressed his family members in Pakistan at the time.

Kureishi’s initial struggles were rewarded when he became the Royal Theatre’s writer in residence. His initial breakthrough came with “Borderline”, a play about immigrants living in London. It was Kureishi’s first efforts with film that brought him wider recognition. “My beautiful laundrette”, written in 1985, tells the story of a young Pakistani immigrant who opens a laundromat with his gay, white lover. The movie got rave reviews from critics on both sides of the Atlantic and Kureishi was even nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay.

Understandably, the largely conservative Pakistani community in Britain was not overly pleased by the portrayal of a young Pakistani male enmeshed in homosexual love against a backdrop of drug dealing. The resulting anger led to a spate of hate mail being received by the author from Asians in England. Unrepentant Kureishi then scripted his next film with a risque title of “Sammy and Rosie get laid”, which delved into the world of a racially mixed couple living in London during the Brixton race riots.

Kureishi achieved further success in 1990 with his first supposedly semi-autobiographical novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. The book was about the life of a young bisexual man, who is half-Indian and half-English, growing up in London. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. In 1993 he wrote a collection of stories, Love in a blue time, which contained a very successful short story called “My son the fanatic” (later turned into a film of the same name) about a Pakistani cab driver quite happily adapted to English society — even to the extent of befriending one of his regular fares, a local prostitute — who is shocked to discover that his son has become an Islamic fundamentalist. His second novel The black album, which came out in 1995, explored the painful, lonely, and confused world of a young man of Pakistani origin, who finds that he has to choose between his white lover and his Muslim friends.

Kureishi’s inspiration for his early works seems largely drawn from the racism and class divisions that he experienced in his younger years. From this early period of his writing career, Kureishi established his reputation as a provocateur. Not only did his work probe into the once obscure world of the British Asian immigrant culture — exposing it, sexual warts and all, to the open gaze of public view — but by doing so he also challenged the complacent British stereotyping of Asian immigrants and the local attitudes of racial intolerance and ingrained class distinctions.

Using his screenplays, he brazenly thumbed his nose at Britain’s prevailing Thatcherite orthodoxy with vivid images of cultural revolt: an interracial male gay kiss (“My beautiful laundrette”) and scenes of inner-city streets ablaze (“Sammy and Rosie get laid”). And, in doing so, he raised the ire of those in England averse to immigrants, as well as, traditionalist members of British Asian communities.

In his more recent works there was a noticeable departure from his usual lively style. Gone were the picaresque stories with colourful leading characters, invariably Asian, pursuing everything from fame to money, women and religion. Kureishi’s new phase of writing began to closely mirror the predicaments he seemed to be facing in his own life, and his third novel Intimacy, which came out in 1998, became mired in controversy.

The novel took the form of an extended meditation of a self-absorbed white Englishman, totally bored with his married life, as he embarks upon deserting his wife and his two young children for his mistress. Some critics loudly hailed it as Kureishi’s best book to date. Others believing it to be a thinly veiled account of Kureishi’s own break-up and infidelity, lambasted the writer for ‘exposing personal pain for literary gain’ and accused him of producing a work of personal diatribe rather literature. The cruelty perceived in parts of the novel had upset many who believed it had been directed at his former partner.

Soon afterwards it was the turn of Kureishi’s family members to angrily take issue with him. It was sparked off by an interview Hanif Kureishi had given to promote Intimacy, in which he had maintained that he had grown up a tiny two-up two-down house in Bromley, had a “cloth-cap, working-class” grandfather and a mother forced to work in a shoe factory. While it may be fashionably chic in New Labour’s Britain to lay claim to a working class pedigree, Kureishi’s sister furiously rebutted her brother’s profession to lowly origins.

In a letter to The Guardian newspaper Kureishi’s sister, Yasmin, described her brother’s claim to their family’s working class roots as being patently fictitious. Instead, she recalled a pleasant semi-detached house down a quiet cul-de-sac, a grandfather who owned three furniture shops and a mother who took a part-time job for three months to pay for Yasmin’s ballet lessons.

In a cutting aside she further rejected her brother’s claim, made in the same interview, that he was close to his ‘father who was proud and delighted by the success of his book Buddha of Suburbia.’ Instead, according to Yasmin, their father had been angered by Hanif’s depiction of him in the semi-autobiographical novel his son had written. Yasmin insisted that their father ‘felt Hanif had robbed him of his dignity, and didn’t speak to Hanif for about a year’. This family quarrel led one commentator to acidly note that, ‘Kureishi seems to have fallen into the trap of putting too much life into his fiction, and too much fiction into his life.’

Hanif Kureishi appeared to be unremorseful. Soon the theme of self-absorbed dissatisfied middle-aged men leaving their partners in pursuit of younger women permeated most of his newer work — such as Midnight all day, a collection of short stories, and “Sleep with me”, his most recent play. According to one literary critic the world of Hanif Kureishi’s prose appeared to have shrunk to the size of his personal concerns.

Almost as if in reply, Kureishi recently retorted: “I think the writer’s job is to tell stories that worry about how we live. That worry about the kind of people we are, the kind of values we have and what we might do. Human life has to be thought of and contemplated and worried about over and over again.” But he does appear to have taken heed of his critics. In his latest work Gabriel’s gift, Kureishi has significantly altered his literary disposition. The moody middle-aged self-absorption of the recent past seems to have been jettisoned in favour of a brighter and breezier style. While lacking the youthful vibrancy of The Buddha of Suburbia, the sunnier new style does invite us to welcome Kureishi’s latest transformation.

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