Deep topographies in the fiction of Uzma Aslam Khan

Abstract

This article examines the novels Trespassing (2003) and The Geometry of God (2008) by Pakistani author Uzma Aslam Khan, and specifically her deployment of a complex symbolic apparatus constructed from prehistory, geography and history. Drawing on the fossil‐rich soil of northern Pakistan and the Arabian Sea coastline in the south, Khan delineates a deep topography for Pakistan as a source of emotional and symbolic re‐rooting. Aligned to vernacular sources of longing and desire, this deep topography offers a mode of being a “real Pakistani” alternative to Islamicist self‐fashioning strategies. This process of re‐rooting must be seen as a response of a post‐Partition generation of Pakistani cultural producers to the upheavals and migrations of 1947. Analysing it thus helps us redirect Partition Studies towards modes of explication of the relationship between memory, forgetting, and remembering specific to Pakistan.

Keywords:

• Uzma Aslam Khan
• Pakistan
• prehistory
• history
• geology
• Partition Studies

Notes

1. See “Swakat’s Fashion”. The Indian handicrafts enterprise FabIndia even hosted an exhibition in 2009 on showcasing the ajrak as part of an Indian textile heritage.

2. Uzma Aslam Khan, email to author, 13 Feb. 2010; see also ⟨http://www.koel.com.pk/noorjahan.htm⟩.