Unmarriageable(108)

As I read and reread Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet and every other character ceased to be English – to me, they were Pakistani. That I was imagining characters and scenarios in a Pakistani setting was nothing extraordinary. Ever since I could remember, I’d been engaging in literary transference/transplantation/translation from one culture to another. Growing up on English literature, I taught myself to see my daily reality reflected in my reading material, while plumbing its universal truths in search of particulars. Not just particulars in food and clothing, which were easily recast – dupattas instead of bonnets, samosas instead of scones – but rather in thematic content and characters’ emotions. Thus Jane Bennet became just another Pakistani girl watching out for her reputation by being reticent instead of flirtatious, and her sadness at being spurned is no different from anyone’s anywhere. In reading English literature through a Pakistani lens, it seemed to me that all cultures were concerned with the same eternal questions and that people were more similar to one another than they were different. As Alys Binat says in Unmarriageable, ‘Reading widely can lead to an appreciation of the universalities across cultures.’

But Valentine Darsee says, ‘We’ve been forced to seek ourselves in the literature of others for too long.’ In Pakistan there are seventy-four living languages, and Urdu and English are both official state languages. However, English, and a good accent, remains the lingua franca of privilege and opportunity. As an adult, I came across Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ (1835), in which he sets the colonised Subcontinent linguistic policy for creating ‘a person brown in colour but white in sensibilities’. It was then that I realised what the origins were of the emphasis in the Pakistani educational system on learning English and English literature at the cost of exploring our indigenous languages and literatures. History has made it such that my mother tongue, for all intents and purposes, is the English language. I wanted to write a novel that paid homage to Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice, as well as combined my braided identification with English-language and Pakistani culture, so that the ‘literature of others’ became the literature of everyone. Therefore, Unmarriageable.





NOTES AND RESOURCES





Dilipabad is a fictional town in Punjab, Pakistan, created by the author.

The play Ismat Apa Kay Naam, ‘In Ismat Apa’s Name’, was performed in Lahore in 2012. The author’s setting it in 2001 is intentional.

For a list of books, authors, films, and people mentioned in Unmarriageable, go to the author’s website, soniahkamal.com.

Charity Organisations in the Novel for Which Nona Bakes

Edhi Foundation (Edhi.org): a social welfare organisation which also saves abandoned infants by placing ‘cradles’ outside their offices for the babies to be put in.

Darul-ul-Sukun (Darulsukun.com): a welfare organisation for people with disabilities.

Depilex Smileagain Foundation (depilexsmileagain.com): an organisation that provides acid-attack survivors with medical care, rehabilitation, and opportunities.

Literacy Organisations Mirroring Jena’s Venture

Developments in Literacy (dil.org): an organisation that educates and empowers underprivileged students, especially girls.

The Citizens Foundation (tcfusa.org): a charity group that educates and empowers underprivileged students.

Jane Austen Literacy Foundation (JALF) (janeaustenlf.org): a foundation that supports literacy through volunteer programs, and funds libraries for communities in need across the world.