Southasian literature, in its many voices, languages and avatars, retains an underlying warp and woof of cultural connectivity. Each country of the Subcontinent has its own political and emotive narrative and its own unique stories to share. Linguistic histories, colonial experiences (or resistance to them), and traumas such as Partition and conflict have fermented and matured the writing of each of our countries and societies. The Empire left – but left its language, literature and genres behind. The phrase, 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy' first came into use via the linguist Max Weinrich. In a linguistically diverse set of cultures, the Queen's English asserted a hegemonic sway.
While Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) was a watershed that impacted how the world viewed Southasian writing, the author's magical prose also transformed the way this writing looked at itself. Although some critics categorised it as a valorisation of the 'post-colonial exotic', Pico Iyer's famous essay 'The Empire Strikes Back' described it as 'a call to free spirits everywhere to remake the world with imagination', opening up 'a new universe by changing the way we tell stories and see the world around us.' The voice of Saleem Sinai, Rushdie's main character, reclaimed the spoken sounds of the Bombay streets into English literary usage. The sinuous stylistic flow also reflected the texture and grain of Urdu, which is an important part of Rushdie's literary inheritance.
The Urdu tradition, in the footsteps of Saadat Hasan Manto and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, mirrored both a determined social commitment and a strong sense of comic subversion. Pre-Partition Urdu was a secular, agnostic language, one capable of both the most brutal irony and the highest romanticism. It was used by Munshi Premchand, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Krishna Chandar, by Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat Chughtai and Ghulam Abbas, in the syncretic linguistic tradition of Urdu/Hindustani. Post-1947, Hindi was shorn of its Urdu and Hindustani traces and influences, and was immensely the poorer for the loss. During the 1950s, as Pakistan entered into cycles of military domination, restrictions on free expression led to a heightened sense of symbol and metaphor. As Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote,
If the bloodied pen has been snatched from my hand,
I will bear the sorrow
and dip my fingers in the blood of my heart …