Thammasat University students who are interested in South Asian literature, Pakistan, India, history, political science, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.
Grieving for Pigeons: Twelve Stories of Lahore is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:
https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/84187
Its author, Zubair Ahmad describes the people of the Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of life, history and culture of the Punjab.
Many of these may be found on the shelves of the Pakistan Corner on Underground Level 1 of the Pridi Banomyong Library.
Punjab is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising areas of eastern Pakistan and northwestern India. The boundaries of the region are ill-defined and focus on historical accounts.
The geographical definition of the term Punjab has changed over time. In the 1500s Mughal Empire, it referred to a relatively smaller area between the Indus and the Sutlej rivers. In British India, until the Partition of India in 1947, the Punjab Province encompassed the present-day Indian states and union territories of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, and Delhi and the Pakistani regions of Punjab and Islamabad Capital Territory.
The predominant ethnolinguistic group of the Punjab region is the Punjabi people, who speak the Indo-Aryan Punjabi language. Punjabi Muslims are the majority in West Punjab (Pakistan), while Punjabi Sikhs and Punjabi Hindus are the majority in East Punjab (India). Other religious groups are Christianity, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Ravidassia.
The Punjab region was the cradle for the Indus Valley civilisation. The region had numerous migrations by the Indo-Aryan peoples. The land was later invaded and contested by the Persians, Mauryans, Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Kushans, Macedonians, Ghaznavids, Turkic, Mongols, Timurids, Mughals, Marathas, Arabs, Pashtuns, British, and other peoples.
Historic foreign invasions mainly targeted the most productive central region of the Punjab known as the Majha region, which is considered the bedrock of Punjabi culture and traditions. The Punjab region is often referred to as the breadbasket in both India and Pakistan.
Grieving for Pigeons is characteristic of the writings of Zubair Ahmad, as an online description explains:
Zubair Ahmad holds an MA in English and Post Graduate Diploma in English Language Teaching from Punjab University, Lahore. He is a former Associate Professor of English literature from Old Islamia College and a passionate proponent for Punjabi language, literature and culture in Pakistan…He ran a non-profit Punjabi bookstore from 1997-2009 and reopened it last year. He now publishes and edits an annual magazine Baran Maah with England based writer Amarjit Chandan. Ahmad says of his literary journey, “Listening daily to my mother’s pre-partition stories, I was subconsciously born a writer. I dug that writer, found it and started writing stories that covered my life, the people, the surroundings and the city of Lahore. Lahore is in me and I am in Lahore”.
The book’s introduction, by its translator Anne Murphy, begins:
The stories of Zubair Ahmad invite us into a world of remembrance. That world is defined by the sights and sounds of Pakistan in the 1970s, yet it is also inescapably entangled with the trauma of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, which shattered the Punjab region into two, and with the memories that persist beyond it. The stories move back and forth between the yearnings of a young man for a life still to begin and the recollections of an older man struggling to come to terms with the past and its hold upon him. The constant slippage between past and present reminds us that time knows no boundaries, no lines that divide.
The stories are narrated in intimate terms, in the first person. Perhaps inevitably we wonder, are the narrator and the author one and the same? We cannot tell. There are, in fact, strong parallels between Ahmad’s own history and that of the narrator who speaks directly to us in the stories. Yet those parallels are invisible to us, as readers. In another form of slippage, the line between story and autobiography remains blurry and enigmatic. As in a dream, it is not clear how much is real and how much is imagined. Ahmad was born in Lahore in 1958, the child of Partition refugees from what was now the Indian side of Punjab. After finishing his high school studies, he felt restless, uncertain of the way forward. “A different kind of bird began to fly in me,” the narrator tells us in the story “Sweater.” That bird led the narrator—and the author—westward, to Italy. Several of the stories, “Dead Man’s Float” in particular, recollect the narrator’s experiences there, seeking a way to survive without documentation, living on the streets at times, among others who were also rendered as outsiders. After a year in Italy, Ahmad returned to Lahore, drawn back by memories and the affective hold of the city upon him. There, he studied at the University of the Punjab, completing a master’s degree in English literature and subsequently teaching at Islamia College Lahore for several decades. These two westward movements, first to Italy and then into the domain of English literature, suggest the capacious scope of his imagination. Even as his work is deeply embedded in the social and physical landscapes of Lahore and in the experience of the Punjabi community on both sides of the Pakistan-India border, it reaches out to engage in broader literary conversations. The city of Lahore is a tangible presence in Ahmad’s stories: its neighborhoods, its roads, its cafés, its landmarks, its histories. We thread our way through the narrow lanes of the old Anarkali market, thronged with people, we walk down the side of Mall Road, and we are introduced to Gol Bagh, a centrally located park (since renamed Nasir Bagh) and the site of important political protests and rallies…
Contestations over property ownership also gesture towards the violent disruption of Partition. Such conflicts, recounted in several of the stories, reflect the haphazard way in which refugees took up residence in houses available at the time. Such sites initially provided a safe haven but later became flashpoints for conflict, as competing parties sought to establish rights of occupancy. In this way, the violence of Partition echoes through Lahore’s neighbourhoods. With the exception of the final story in this collection, “Wall of Water,” Ahmad’s stories do not explicitly speak of that time. Yet in their treatment of time, trauma, and memory, they resonate with the lingering effects of Partition— a theme that I have taken up elsewhere. The legacy of Partition—the recursion of violence and the sense of alienation that we see in the stories— is acted out alongside ongoing political tumult in Pakistan, particularly protests against the government of General Ayub Khan, who ruled the country from 1958 to 1969. Prominent in a number of the stories is the narrator’s developing commitment to the progressive political ideas circulating within the coffee houses and tea stands of the city. “This was a time,” he tells us in “The Estranged City,” “when so many were caught up in the idea of revolution.”
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)