Walls as Transcultural Structures: Space and Place in Anglophone Narratives of Lahore

Abstract

This research examines walls as transcultural structures of space and place in Anglophone narratives of Lahore. Lahore is the capital city of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab. Writings on Lahore deal with the tropes of walls in various ways, showing these to be physical, social, political, cultural and even linguistic. Walls can be seen as a metaphor for the partition of India. India was divided into the present India and Pakistan in 1947. Writings on Lahore portray the effects of this momentous event upon the people of the region. Taking up Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ (1955), Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988) this section examines how these writers have shown walls in various forms. Walls are seen in the form of physical displacement of people who had to migrate from one place to the other and their nostalgic remembrance of their hometowns and cities. Walls also become veils, standing as an image for the silence that accompanied the trauma of personal and collective loss, especially suffered by women who were kidnapped or raped during the riots of the Partition. This section of the research shows that Partition literature of Lahore reflects walls as hegemonic structures of division and segregation as well as frontiers of shelter and protection. Walls and veils go together: both work on the dynamics of control, isolation and invisibility. Taking up Louise Brown’s The Dancing Girls of Lahore (2005) and Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke (2000) this section of the thesis examines the operation of walls and veils in the lives of the women of Lahore, whether these women are the prostitutes of the brothel quarters or members of the elite class of the city. I argue in this section that women are bound by the constricting walls of social norms and patriarchal traditions. Working in conjunction with walls and veils is the medium of the gaze, which not only controls, checks and monitors its subjects but also attempts to render them invisible, thus zeroing down their very identity. This section addresses marginalised and stigmatised communities such as prostitutes and transvestites, who constitute other, more far-reaching connotations of walls, veils and borders. In the Lahore writings walls do not always function as structures of division, control and segregation; they can also be seen as points of transcendence or convergence. This section studies Rudyard Kipling’s ‘On the City Wall’, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Haroon K. Ullah’s The Bargain from the Bazaar (2014). Through careful readings of these literary texts, I link the structure of walls with the act of translation. Linking translation and walls, my research concludes that while walls have symbolic values and contain both positive and negative connotations, they also, in their very structure, articulate our need to recognize differences and to accept them as part of the wider diversity of the world. In the current global conflict following the 9/11 attacks one cannot entirely do away with walls. We need, therefore, not to remove walls but to allow for a translation or bridging of cultural and religious differences. The key concepts of partition, gender and identity form the core of this research. This research thus examines the inter-related connotations of walls, veils, space, place and the body, and aims to meet the need for an extensive study of literary representations of walls as both dividing and connecting factors.