Fakhar Zaman’s Novels

Dr.Fatima Hussain

 The English translations of Fakhar Zaman’s five celebrated Punjabi novels (sat Gwachey lok, Ik Maray Bandey Di kahani,Bandiwan, Bewatna,Kamzat) have recently been published  in one volume in India.

            His novels make a strong social and political statement which has taken the punjabi novel to new heights of social and philosophical concern. The writing is characterized by an irreducible plurality of meaning which is the result of the narratives’ associations, contiguities and cross references. The narrative often moves dialectically backward and forward, rejecting the tendency of both modernism and post modernism to homogenous historical time.

            The novels exemplify the schism within the writer with a nostalgic longing for the past, but who is also geared firmly towards the future, a writer caught between the darker aspects of life and the beautiful colors of its rainbow, a writer fumbling between the imagery of rural Punjab and the emotional turmoil associated with its urbanism and industrialization.

            Its no wonder, then, that at several instances, the text appears to be a derivative of the novelist’s own psychic economy, his own identity, never remaining a static construct, but continually evolving. The writing puts forth well defined characters, interweaving story lines, elements of surprise-all of which are ingredients of a good novel.

            The effortless fusion of the conscious and unconscious realm of experience beautifully transcends the rational and demonstrates Zaman’s inclination towards psychological surresilsm. His is an art full of variety and contradiction, tension and transcendence-an art that dares to look at human life under so many guises and from so many points of view .A strong element of existentialism can be discerned by the obvious aversion to conformism and to anything that impairs human freedom. In this aspect, the writings of Fakhar Zaman may be likened to those of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner. Yet its impossible to categorize his works. The writer continues to be an enigma; infect he constitutes a genre of his own.

            The novels had been banned for 18 long years by the dictatorial Pakistani regime, allegedly for being quintessentially vulgar. However, interpretation is embedded in the readers very Owen consciousness. The novels are no doubt radical; however the real reason for the ban lay elsewhere. The text indicates the strong leftist leaning of the author who tirelessly brings into focus the suffering of the marginalized, the corruption within the bureaucracy and politics. Time and again, the myth of an Islamic theocracy within Pakistan is deconstructed send a strident feminist stance is adopted. 

            Fakhar’s novels as a  stylistic study with the flavours of Punjab, are unrivalled. The 1^st reading leaves the reader spellbound. A 2^nd reading however sees a progression from the emotive response, to a less impassioned, more subatomic stance.                                                            

(Dr Fatima Hussain is  a well-known Historian   From Delhi University)

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