Tahira Naqvi ‘The History Teacher of Lahore’: Polarising chapter from Pakistan

Maninder Sidhu

WHEN an overtly factual tale is set in the turbulent Eighties in Lahore, there is no mistaking the General and the totalitarian regime mentioned in the book. Obviously, Tahira Naqvi’s debut novel ‘The History Teacher of Lahore’ fictionalises the infamous military rule of General Zia-ul-Haq. Interestingly, Zia-ul-Haq was born in Jalandhar, educated at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and commissioned from the IMA, Dehradun, in pre-Partition India. In a military coup d’état in 1977, he seized power from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto not long after his elevation as Chief of Army Staff. The deposed PM was subsequently executed and Islamisation of Pakistan accelerated under martial law.

The toxic legacy of General Zia has served as the political backdrop of significant satirical works of fiction. Salman Rushdie’s ‘Shame’ and Mohammed Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ are famous for engaging caricatures of Zia and the conspiracy theories related to his death in an air crash. Fatima Bhutto’s ‘Songs of Blood and Sword’, which recounts the oppressive regime of Zia in the process of tracing the history of four Bhutto generations, is a personal response to Pakistan politics. Naqvi’s political novel is a realistic addition to these inventive romans-e-clef and memoirs.

Tackling history bottom-up rather than top-down, the story rests on the thoughts, happenings and events in the life of Arif Ali, a school teacher-cum-poet. Mentored by a charismatic activist, Kamal Ahmad, Arif’s faith in multiculturalism resonates with the liberal fair-mindedness of his friend and colleague Salman Shah, Salman’s fiancée Zehra Raza, school principal Dr Khan, and a few others.

The repercussions of desecularisation through imposition of the Sharia law — floggings, coercive blasphemy laws, incarceration of rape victims under hadd punishments, Shia-Sunni rivalry leading to sectarian violence, intolerance of non-Muslims, including the Ahmadis, distortion of history in school textbooks — are folded into the story, creating the required ethical tension.

The theme of saving lives of endangered Christian children from elimination is episodically portrayed. The loosely integrated detours in the writing at places are attempts to highlight the callousness of the system. The cultural shift from ‘Khuda Hafiz’ to ‘Allah Hafiz’ marks the change of Pakistan from a Muslim state to an Islamic dictatorship.

Given the pedagogical concerns of the young characters — teaching, learning, falsification and re/writing of history — the novel aims to reach and caution young readers against ‘the fiends masquerading as righteous men’ in fundamentalist societies. All 22 chapters are fastidiously introduced through apt quotes, largely from the philosophical works of Jean Paul Sartre. The linear, straight-forward style maintains a somber tone, bereft of humour, irony or metaphorical nuance. Hence, when Kamal states, ‘I hate professors who are fossilised… who don’t make you laugh or think’, the reader surmises that this one time he’ll have to focus on the latter.

Poetry is upheld as the spire of hope, both for revolution as well as romance. The spirit of Urdu/Punjabi poetry, through mention of and excerpts from Ahmad Faraz, Habib Jalib, Bulleh Shah and Sialkot legends Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, is scrupulously pitted against the specious logic of divisiveness. At the cost of creating a clichéd dramatic situation, the love story of Arif and Roohi too progresses through epistles and poetry, and so does Arif’s passion for justice:

The yearning for revolution will rouse the dewdrop in the wine

You will see the ocean surge

The tiny fleck will shake the world

You will see the lightning blaze in the

heart of every stone

Naqvi portrays a historical and culturally vibrant Lahore under a ‘shadow of death’. Her account, thus, becomes an ominous symbol of what religious autocracy can do to a multi-ethnic society.