Mirza Athar Baig

Mirza Athar Baig (Mirzā At͍har Beg, born 1950), who is today regarded as one of Pakistan's most important novelists, attracted surprisingly wide public attention in 2006 with his first novel Ghulām Bāgh (The Slave Garden). Although the novel is not an easy read, it went through five editions within a few years, and its popularity among young people culminated in young men re-enacting characters from the novel. How did this phenomenon come about?

Mirza Athar Baig was born in March 1950 in a small town south-west of the metropolis of Lahore. He grew up in a teacher's household full of books, which he devoured during the holidays. His parents were language teachers, but since a US-American organisation had donated scientific equipment to the local school, the family occupied itself with all kinds of scientific experiments. Father and son observed the course of the planets with a telescope, examined specimens under the microscope and built radios and other technical devices. In this way Baig developed a rational, scientifically oriented approach to the things of life early on. In addition, his father's religious attitude, inclined towards the mysticism of Sufism, prepared the ground in him for a tolerant, cosmopolitan outlook.

His interest in the perceptible world and in technical apparatus led Baig to begin studying engineering, but he soon abandoned it because he was disappointed by the purely financial motivation of his fellow students and the exclusively functional orientation of the course. His engagement with questions of religious philosophy and with Marxist and existentialist ideas finally led him, alongside his B. Sc., to the study of philosophy. After three years at a rural college without any real teaching of philosophy, Baig moved to the renowned Government College University in Lahore, where he taught from 1970 to 2010, most recently as head of the Department of Philosophy. Despite his retirement, he continues to offer courses there.

The Literary Work

Alongside his teaching, Baig wrote scripts for around 15 television series and more than 50 television plays and short stories, which appeared in 2008 in the collection Be afsāna (Without a Story/Non-Story). His literary breakthrough, however, came only with his first novel. Decisive for the success of this work was surely above all the charismatic main character Kabīr Mehdī. Kabir is a freelance journalist planning a great novel. The stunningly beautiful Zuhra feels drawn to Kabīr, whose sharp mind and rhetorical abilities give him power over others. His fundamentally ironic attitude further heightens the impression of superiority and intellectual arrogance and unsettles his interlocutors. Thus a main theme of the novel already becomes apparent in the relationships of these characters: that of power and manipulation.

Further plot lines deal with Zuhra's search for her roots in her father's home village — he came from one of the lowest castes — with the events at a shrine in Kabir's village, with the efforts of foreign diplomats to obtain the notes of the German archaeologist Hoffmann, who had researched the ruins of the Ghulam Bagh, after his death, with the fatal flight of a young couple from Zuhra's caste, and with many intrigues on the most diverse levels.

The socially critical tendency of the novel is, in contrast to the critical-realist novels of earlier authors, more subtle, in part wrapped in surrealism. Besides the inhumane power of the Pakistani upper class, the power gradient between East and West is also a theme of the novel. The title itself points to a colonial past, and the novel repeatedly emphasises the condescending, patronising behaviour of Western agencies, journalists and diplomats. Alluding to the title of the novel, the author said: "Nothing is our own; no thought, no intellect born out of us and here. It's all borrowed and rings hollow. We live in a slave garden."

An important reason for the surprising success of Ghulām Bāgh lies in the youthful main characters, who offered themselves as a projection surface for the numerous frustrations and longings of young people in Pakistan. Kabīr and Zuhra resist the overpowering ruling class, and thus in a certain sense also the generation of their parents. Zuhra and Kabīr live out their sexuality against the resistance of Zuhra's family and Kabir's rivals – this too is surely a moment of identification, a delegated wish-fulfilment in a society in which sexuality is strictly regulated. Like every novel, Ghulām Bāgh opens up a space of freedom, and in this case it is probably a space in which young Pakistanis of the urban middle classes can recognise themselves particularly well.

No less strong is the element of identification in the case of the hero of his second novel Ṣifr se ek tak (From Zero to One. Adventures of an Estate Manager's Son in Cyberspace), published in 2009. The author described the content of the novel as follows: "Deals with a world, even stranger! The world as it was transformed during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty first century. I have tried to understand it through the almost picaresque adventures of a software engineer with an oppressed feudal background."

This sentence already hints at what lends the thoroughly tragic events of the novel a tragicomic dimension and in some respects makes it a picaresque novel: the picaresque nature of many actions and experiences, above all of the first-person narrator Zakī, but also of his elder brother S͍anā'ullāh.

The plot of the novel can be summarised as follows: two young men travel together from their village to the big city of Lahore: Faiẓān, the son of the local big landowner, and his school friend Zakī, the son of the estate manager. Zakī remains connected to Faiẓān's world in many ways, but at the same time, despite poor starting conditions, becomes a gifted computer specialist and gets to know the city in all its facets. When he not only falls in love with the wrong girl but also gives Faiẓān the idea of exposing the machinations of the landlords, a dramatic campaign of revenge begins.

The novel teems with bizarre minor characters and adventurous incidents. The use of terms from computer language and the virtual world leads to amusing effects of alienation, and the insertion of transcribed telephone calls and chats lends additional authenticity to the character of Zakī. At the same time, these elements make clear how much Zakī's world, which at times seems so exotic, is part of our modern communication society. It should be emphasised here that the novel was written for a Pakistani audience, not with a view to marketing in the West — a criticism often levelled at English-language works from India or Pakistan. There can therefore be no question of an intended or unconscious exoticisation of what is depicted in this novel.

Underlying the whole is an unmistakable ironic distance. The author himself describes his method as "comic realism", a method that encompasses all varieties of the comic from humour to satire. Baig questions established assumptions, caricatures fashionable ways of thinking and exposes the powerful to ridicule.

As in the author's first novel, language itself becomes an important theme, and the problems of interpersonal communication form an important component. Zaki is a self-reflective character who becomes aware of his self-deceptions in the course of the plot.

Both novels reveal the critical potential of postmodern literature, although Baig also ironises postmodern theory – after all, nothing is sacred to him. There is no trust in metanarratives of any kind. The questionable nature of many values and concepts is openly displayed. The final solution of all problems, which Faiẓān sees in the exposure of the very last criminal against the common good, is of course dismissed as completely absurd. Nevertheless, the novel unmasks the distinguished upper class in its striving for power and money and in its contempt for humanity, and exposes the repulsive macho behaviour of the young men of this class. Yet Zakī, too, is not free of guilt, especially in his behaviour towards the socially inferior Gāmo and in his claim of possession over Zulaikha, but also in his arrogance towards Faiẓān, whom he skilfully manipulates.

In summary, one can say that with unbridled joy in storytelling the author has succeeded in creating a fascinating picture of society, in which complex characters, vivid depictions of milieus, surprising effects and twists, and much irony and verbal wit combine into a great reading pleasure. Despite their subversive power, irony and laughter cannot stop the dramatic events of the novel. They do, however, help the protagonists to mobilise their inner strength to stand up to all adversities – the emancipatory power of education and knowledge, which is beginning to show the established powers their limits.

The author has since written two further novels. Hasan ki surat-i hal. Khali jaghen pur karo (Hasan's Situation. Fill in the Blanks) appeared in 2014. His fourth novel Khafīf Makhfī kī khvāb bītī (Khafif Makhfi's Dream Worlds) was published in Lahore in 2022.

Christina Oesterheld

Published in German

Von null bis eins. Abenteuer eines Gutsverwalters im Cyberspace. Translated from Urdu by Christina Oesterheld. Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag 2022

Published in English: Hasan's State of Affairs. Translated from Urdu by Haider Shahbaz. HarperCollins India 2019.

Literaturforum Indien e.V.

Mirza Athar Baig

The Literary Work

Published in German

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