Conquering regional barriers through literature

Karachi
Dominated by intense political and economic differences, resulting in trade as well as communication embargoes, the South Asian region consisting mostly of third-world countries has more often than not found itself in choppy waters.
The English-language South Asian literature, though not properly developed in a few countries, has however played an important role in adding an element of sanity with respect to cross-border relationship of masses, otherwise easily influenced by state-built narratives of nationalism.
In a Karachi Literature Festival session, titled ‘The English-language literatures of South Asia: Do they interact with each other?’, on Sunday, authors and publishers belonging to Pakistan, India and Bangladesh discussed the impact literature has played as a means of unity in their respective countries. The session was moderated by prominent Pakistani writer Muneeza Shamsie.
HM Naqvi, the Pakistani writer who won an award for his book ‘Home Boy’, started off the session with an anecdote to explain how literature bridged relations.
Asked to introduce a Malayalam author at the launch of the writer’s book during his visit to the Sharjah Literary Festival, Naqvi, who had absolutely no knowledge of either the author or Malayalam literature, politely aired his apprehension, but to no avail.
Baffled by the task, he somehow managed to introduce the writer and asked for the author’s permission to read an excerpt from his book, a job he claimed he was utterly bad at. By the time he got done, the author lauded his reading and claimed that it added life to his writing.
Answering the moderator’s question regarding the role publishing has played in introducing South Asian writers in the country, acclaimed Indian publisher, writer and broadcaster Ritu Menon disappointingly added that India and Pakistan could not exchange printed material sans piracy or smuggling, as there was no trade policy to overlook the exchange.
Not completely agreeing with Ritu, Naqvi claimed that we could still find a number of Indian authors in Pakistan, to which she replied that the versions found in both the countries were different, whereas those books were available only because they were printed by publishing houses in the West.
“We can find a book written by Arundhati Roy (Indian author of the renowned novel ‘The God of Small Things’), but we cannot find Sethu (the Malayalam author Naqvi referred to earlier) in Pakistan,” she added.
Citing an incident where Arundhati fought to get one of her books published in India before it was published abroad, although her books had been bought by a publishing house in the US as well as the UK, Ritu said the book could not be found anywhere else except India.
She stressed the need for all the countries to strengthen the culture of co-publishing books until a formal policy was chalked out.
Sadaf Saaz, an English-language poet from Bangladesh, while speaking about the newly developing English-language literature in the country, said that at a time when India was experimenting with its literature in the language, Bangladesh did not have even a small readership of English.
It was decades after 1971 that the country started an exchange of printed material, that also according to the Commonwealth charter. It was after the country’s population started making use of the internet that things got better.
Commenting on whether poetries of the countries had been able to carve out a readership for themselves, Naqvi said there were hardly any contemporary English poets in Pakistan. Ritu and Sadaf were also of the opinion that much experimentation had to be done with regard to English-language poetry in South Asia.