‘The heart, stomach and backbone of Pakistan': Lahore in novels by Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid

Abstract

Although much research has been undertaken on Indian cities, particularly Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/Kolkata and Delhi, Pakistani urban environments have not been subjected to anything like the same degree of scrutiny. There exists a long and rich history of artistic and textual interpretations of the city of Lahore, but this body of work has gone largely unappreciated in academic scholarship. To redress this critical gap, the article examines fiction by two diasporic authors from the Pakistani Punjab, Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid, for their representations of Lahore as a postcolonial megacity which is crucially important to the nation and the Punjab, and which interpenetrates with and is cross-fertilized by its Punjabi rural hinterland.

Keywords:

• Lahore
• Pakistani Punjab
• Heera Mandi
• Mohsin Hamid
• Bapsi Sidhwa
• Pakistani literature

Notes on contributor

Claire Chambers is a Lecturer in Global Literature at the University of York, where she researches and teaches modern writing from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers and the forthcoming monograph Representations of Muslims in Britain, and her research has been supported by grants from HEFCE, the AHRC and British Academy. Claire has published widely in such journals as Postcolonial Text, Crossings and Contemporary Women's Writing, and is co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Notes

1. However, it should be noted that Hamid returned to live in Lahore in 2009, which may affect the future trajectory of his fiction.

2. The main scholarly monographs on Lahore are Glover (2007) and Suvorova (2012).

3. Both of these incidents, the nuclear race and the Indian parliament attacks, are foregrounded in Hamid's fiction: 2001, 88–92; 2007, 121, 126–127, 143.

4. This term comes from a neglected novel by Markandaya (1982). Heera Mandi is also referred to as a ‘Pleasure District’ in the subtitle to Louise Brown's book The Dancing Girls of Lahore (2006).

5. For further discussion, see Grosz (1990), Butler (1993) and Chiesa (2009).