I had two fascinating English language teachers in secondary school. The soft and skinny Mr Maya Das, who taught us for four years, and the hard and hefty Ms Catherine Val D’Eremao, who would grill us when Mr Das was away. Even after 30 years, I cherish those moments when Ms Val gave us lessons on Wordsworth and Keats. She also believed that we were lagging behind the rest of the world because we did not give due importance to the English language. To her, using English in all walks of life was the panacea for most of our intellectual and social ills. Perhaps, she was an ideational predecessor to none other than our arch thinkers of the present day, Dr Tariq Rehman and Khaled Ahmed. They sincerely believe that adopting the English language is the key to our becoming modern and a precondition to our intellectual development. Still, sometimes I am perplexed at how the Chinese, Japanese, French, Germans, and to an extent Turks, could develop without English; and why was a person like George W. Bush elected twice as the most powerful man on the planet by those who mostly speak English as their native tongue?
Once, Ms Val said that those of us whose parents’ know the language must only speak English at home. I came back from school and shared her view with my father. Without even raising his eyes from the book he was reading, he said, “Well, I am not sure if that is a good idea. Learn as many languages as you can but not at the cost of your own.” He knew many languages himself and was truly bilingual when it came to literary writing or film-making. But for his time and age, there was nothing unusual about that. This doesn’t imply that all his peers were multilingual, but there were quite a few people in the art and literary circles then who were. They did not just have the facility to hold a conversation in multiple languages, but more importantly, had the ability to write with ease in more than one.
Things have changed since then. I would rather say they have been made to change in a certain way. On the one hand, there is much hue and cry about teaching English to children and the youth while on the other hand, the language divide is being firmly entrenched across our state and society. I do not wish to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it seems that the selective promotion of English, latent and overt, is not directed at culturally modernising Pakistan and expediting its intellectual development, but at ensuring the exclusion of the majority of people from participating in making decisions that affect their lives. In Pakistan, English is the language that brings power, prosperity, privilege and prestige for a few. If that were not the case, all children going to schools would be imparted similar education. How ironic that the affairs of the state are run in a language that is either not taught at all or not instructed properly to 80 per cent of our children who make it to school. Half of those of school-going age spend their time on the streets and on farms or in shops and factories. The gulf between the two linguistic worlds has widened so much that less of my bucolic demeanour and more of my grounding in Urdu initially made some literary editors and critics think that I must have attended a madressah or a purely Urdu-medium school.
When Books&Authors asked me to relate my experience of writing and publishing in both Urdu and English, with an occasional verse or two in Punjabi, and a few lines here and there in Persian, they were not the first to be intrigued by the possibility of someone using more than one language for creative expression. It is somehow becoming rare to find a person composing poems in both Urdu and English. Or, for that matter, writing fiction, non-fiction or drama in more than one language. Curiously enough, bilingualism does not capture so much attention if one is writing in two vernaculars, such as Sindhi and Urdu, or Seraiki and Balochi. It becomes exotic when English is the other language in which you write. Because the affluent urban Pakistani finds it hard to believe that someone can write in English and a vernacular at the same time. What a pity!
There is no denying the fact that English expands our horizons and exposes us to what is being thought, felt and said globally. How would have I enjoyed classic and contemporary English writing and high-quality translations of world literature into English, from Polish to Arabic to Malayalam, if I had not known the language? In my own case, sometimes I shed all my baggage of history and tradition, sensibility and supposition, syntax and idiom, and feel liberated when writing in English. But if you have also grown up with Mir, Ghalib, Iqbal, Anis, Bulleh Shah, Manto, Bedi and Ismat, and then find yourself surrounded by the works of Munir Niazi, Najm Hosain Syed, Shaikh Ayaz, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousafi, Asad Mohammed Khan, Jaun Elia, Fahmida Riaz, Nasreen Anjum Bhatti, Kishwar Naheed, Iftikhar Arif and Intizar Husain, what you cherish is not the language and an international audience but the quality of writing and the ecstasy it fills you with.
It is worth mentioning that our accomplished English-language writers and poets, Ahmed Ali, Taufiq Rafat, Daud Kamal and Alamgir Hashmi to name a few, are all multilingual and fully abreast with the diverse shades of our local literature. Ahmed Ali was in fact a major Urdu-fiction writer as well as one of the pioneers of South Asian English fiction. Here, distorting my favourite Mark Twain quotation, I would say that I also have never let my English schooling disturb my Urdu education. English to me is what Persian was to my literary predecessors. Most of them used it for creative expression and some did really well.
Nevertheless, one must appreciate that writing in English brings instant international acknowledgement, even if you are a poet from Pakistan in this age of fiction and prose. In addition to recognition, imagine the temptation of a wider market for new Pakistani fiction writers. In the short run, they benefit from English being a language of the bigger global or regional markets but in the long run, when it comes to achieving and sustaining high literary status, both locally and internationally, the test for them is much harder. For one, English writing from Pakistan (from those of us who live here) has a very limited local readership. We essentially write for a non-Pakistani audience. If we take the recent example of the booming private television industry in the country, we see that not a single English-language private channel could survive. And secondly, unlike what some English-speaking Pakistanis would like to believe, there is so much interesting literature being produced in Urdu, Punjabi, Seraiki, Sindhi, Balochi and Pashto, etc., that in terms of literary worth, a significant number of exceptionally talented writers of these languages, particularly of Urdu, will continue to challenge the relatively small number of English writers. To be able to rub shoulders with the best among their contemporaries internationally, our English poets and writers need so much more. Therefore, it makes me sceptical when new English writing from Pakistan is seen as archetypal for the literature being produced here. It may well be good for some of us who write in English, but it does not at all reflect the richness and depth of Pakistani literature. English is just one of the languages in which some of us Pakistanis write — a language spoken, read and understood by very few in our country. Pakistani English literature must not be awarded the sole representative status. Not yet. And travelling the length and breadth of the country tells me that it may take forever and a day for English to become Pakistan’s prime language of creative expression.
However, with this realisation I will continue to write in any language that comes to me naturally, be it Urdu, English, Punjabi or any other. Forms, themes, emphases and treatment may differ from one language to the other, from one idea to the other, from one instant to the other, from one place to the other. There is nothing unusual or rare about writing creatively in more than one language or using multiple dialects if we look at our own Perso-Indo-Gangetic literary tradition. Being monolingual is a recent phenomenon in our part of the world which some of us have not subscribed to. When it is about writing poetry, I may be first called a poet, then an Urdu poet and then an Urdu poet who also writes in English. After all, for a poet, paramount is the poem and not the language in which it is written.
Harris Khalique’s latest collection of Urdu verse, Melay Mein, the second impression of Ishq ki Taqveem Mein and the revised and expanded edition of his English poetry collection Between You and Your Love have been published recently. He is currently working on a book of essays.
