Writing as a Means to Create a New History (You Know, Without Those Damn Brits.)

I wanted to bring something up that I know wasn’t an assigned reading for the class, but I found it to be quite interesting and might help us all understand the role of writing/journalism during Partition. My presentation assignment included many essays, but the second essay is the one I would like to comment on. It is called “Papa and Pakistan” by Sara Suleri and she recounts her father’s political involvement in the creation of Pakistan, that is, his odd obsession with Jinnah, his views on creating a strictly Pakistani history that leads to a Pakistani nationalist identity, and the trials and tribulations that he had to endure to have his voice heard (at the time he was a journalist for various Pakistani newspapers, and during the struggles of establishing their government, his critiques earned him jail time).
I found this story interesting because it brings up the question of how to establish a history of a nation that was newly created. It seems as though Suleri’s father regarded the birth of Pakistan as a match to the divine creation of a people as he worshipped Jinnah as a God among mortals, bringing the promise of a new identity, a new history of a new nation, pure in its form. To quote from her essay: “Consider Papa, growing up in a part of northern India known as Quadian, born in 1913 when his father was approaching sixty, first seduced by poetry, and then by history. What else could he do when he met Jinnah but exclaim, ‘Amazing grace!’” (22). Here, we get a brief psyche reading of Papa. His father has grown old by the time he is born, reflecting the past information she gives about his relationship with his father (earlier in the essay she remembers asking him what he remembers about his father and all he comes up with is he was pious and liked to ride camels) and adding to the fact that he did not know his father at all. Since Papa was “seduced by history” he finds Jinnah as the man to create a new history, a Pakistani one, written in the tongue of Pakistan and not English, as “English is the language of history” (). Her father worships Jinnah as a god, replacing his actual father figure with his image in politics, and writes a novel titled, My Leader, which earns him attention from Jinnah himself, expressed upon a letter that he keeps forever. She explains: “The book gave Pip [Papa] some fame, but—even more—it gave him what in the years of my formation was referred to only as ‘The Letter’ to this day it remains the one object in Pip’s home that he has ever loved” (24). The letter provided so much encouragement to her father that he leaves for England (with Jinnah’s blessing) to lobby the “Pakistan Cause” (24) and his presence among the politicians earned him recognition as he stood out from the “bulging hand of [the] Hindu counterparts, who had monopolized the scene for decades” (24). He believes that he is a voice that needs to be heard, as he has had his confidence augmented by the attention he received from Jinnah. The way she portrayed her father’s confidence was nearly god-given as she quotes her father further: “At that time I was the lone Pakistani correspondent in Britain—‘Pakistani’ before Pakistan, because I didn’t attend any of these gatherings without raising the issue of the Muslim struggle for Pakistan” (24). He wanted a nation in which he can become what he solely is, a Pakistani man with a Pakistani history. He felt that through his journalism, his novels, his political involvement was writing the beginnings of a history that was not to be ignored by the leader of the creation of a Pakistani nation (Jinnah) and by those who hold the nations fate in their hands (the British).
I find that this is important because there is a parallel between writing down the history of a developing nation as well as writing a history down as a citizen deciphering the lines between what a person identified themselves before they became a new inhabitant of a brand new nation.