What happens when, working hands in glove with the Western cannon, someone is bent on quantifying the subaltern’s plight? What happens when a fiction writer grapples with the need to resist the western gaze and questions the so-called yardstick measuring the post-colonial condition? What is it to walk through a layered story that peels off the obvious and looks into what lies at the pit or ‘core’ of a post-colonial Subject?

Mirza Athar Baig’s writings embody the predicament of such happenings. He turns ‘our’ everyday life into something that’s both a pleasure to read and a training to approach (postcolonial) literature as a political act. In case someone is scared away by the severity or seriousness of the matter, it is Baig’s comic realism - rather than, by now, the cliched magical realism - that rescues one from despair. To make the deeply tragic bearable, it is the comic touch that enables one to go through the tale laden with twists and turns - of all kinds.

Ghulam Bagh (Slave Garden) is considered to be Baig saheb’s magnum opus. Very different in terms of scale, setting, plot and theme, his new novel also brings home the need: to excavate, re-write, and reclaim the indigenous self(s) lying hidden in plain sight.

The main protagonist, Khafeef Makhfi (real name Sultan Zaman) is from the landholding elite. He deals in peanuts. A self-proclaimed intellectual, he contributes his views on parapsychology to two magazines (ironically) named Israr and Ramooz. He is also a research assistant for a French man, whose name sounds like Urdu’s fla’n fla’n, which could mean anybody/anyone or our inevitable need for a ‘Western’ reference to affirm our existence. It is hard to tell if the narrator takes pride or rather indulges in the self-deprecating humour as he takes on the role of becoming the foot/pen soldier in the service of the western thinker. Maybe, he is part serious, part comic in keeping with his inherently self-contradictory position, that is, the way his apparent (professional/pragmatic) self and the inner/indigenous self come to terms with each other.

As Baig peels off the mental ecology of a post-colonial mind, and as the reader goes through the ordeal, the navel-/novel-gazing experience forces one to confront the absurdity and futility of the Western cannon. A sense of loss ensues as one sees the cannon doing what it does.

Some intriguing characters complement Khafeef Makhfi’s tale. One is Muhkam Din (the dominated path/way of life), who accompanies the protagonist since page one. Then there is his brother, Hakim Din (the dominant/ing path), a school teacher. And there is Makhfi’s driver who symbolises/manifests military might.

The story is set in motion with a playful exchange between Khafeef Makhfi and Muhkam Din. Other characters pop up to reveal what’s behind the calcified surface of the dominant thought circulating around in the formalised spaces of knowledge(and power). There is a hierarchy of characters just as there is a hierarchy of power, from top to bottom, from the global to the local.

On the top is a French (Western) intellectual. Next in line in the post-colonial state, is the local feudal elite following the western elite. There are also others playing their part. One of the women Khafif Makhfi is romantically/intellectually entangled with is Ji Ji ( aka of Gloria Jeans ). On the one hand, Makhafi provides (raw) data to his research master, the French man; on the other hand, he feeds Ji Ji with ideas to help her build up her profile/career as she writes into existence the lives of indigenous women from a white feminist persepective, playing to the gallery.

At the heart/bottom of the hierarchy is arzal naslein (the wretched generations). If Abdullah Hussain wrote about the post-Partition udaas naslein (“weary generations”), Athar Baig looks deep(er) into the pit, and the pit inevitably looks back at him (to draw on Nietzsche’s famous line). As you get to see the frustration and pain of confronting what it is to talk about the subaltern, you feel not only the pain of their experience but, also, importantly, how the subaltern subvert the dominant gaze and the prevalent knowledge-power systems, offering potentially liberating ways of being and thinking.

Criticising the White gaze does not mean being trapped into a binary of homogenised categories: the ‘East’ and the West. Instead, it is as important to think with the indigenous as it is crucial to get along with new thinkers, such as Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, who are also calling for restoring the damaged mystery and non-linear senses of the planet — our home.

These were some of my thoughts while going through the novel. There are things you experience yourself as you read the layered story, things you can’t lay down on a simple descriptive plane.

On a critical note, I did wonder about the need for brevity in art and literature as I read through the long novel. As an example, take the novel’s long title, Khafeef Makhfi ki Khawab Beeti: Bhayanak Mawaraey Amoomi (Paranormal) Waqeaat pr Mabni Yad-dashtein. How much of it could have been left for the reader’s imagination? Is it intentional? Part of Baig’s comic realism?

While quantitative methods ( prevalent in disciplines such as as Psychology, and across social sciences) reduce the real in ways like two plus two apples equals four; someone (like Mirza Athar Baig and the thinkers and I mentioned above) might see the need to describe what the apples smell and look like; who grows the apples and who has those picked up and put on his table.

There is a scene somewhere in the midst of the novel. A musalli (‘lowly’ convert to Islam) summons five black dogs as if out of nowhere. It is an impressive depiction of the vibrant real. The experience might look like something magical, but when it turns out that that is the way things are, it becomes a case of comic realism. What appears to be out of the ordinary for someone quantifying and objectifying the para-psycho-social reality of the marginalised, is totally normal to many on the ground.

Towards the end of the scene, the musalli named Sava (the Green) requests Khafeef Makhfi (Sultan Zaman) again and again to hire him to roast peanuts. The scenes, bodies, and spaces like this are an exciting intellectual puzzle. If one were to interpret peanuts as a symbol, Sava’s request sounds like an appeal to expose the westernised elite to the indigenous gaze.

Khafeef Makhfi ki Khawab Beeti

Author: Mirza Athar Baig

Pages: 968

Price: Rs1,200

The reviewer is pursuing a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, USA