There is a moment in Mohammed Hanif’s new novel where Baghi, founder of a cut-rate English tuition centre in Rawalpindi watches a Himalayan quack hawk libido supplements to a crowd of labourers on the morning after erstwhile PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging. Grief hangs in the air like smoke. The country is in shock. And yet here they all are, jostling for aphrodisiacs. Baghi wonders about a nation “where even on a day like this, when death hangs in the air, people are still interested in finding aids for their libido.” That sentence is the novel’s thesis statement, epigraph, and punchline rolled into one.
Rebel English Academy is Hanif’s fourth novel, and it confirms what the previous three established: there is no writer working in English anywhere in the Subcontinent operating at this frequency. Further afield, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 come to mind, but the more accurate comparisons are Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and Monty Python’s Life of Brian—that same readiness to fire the satirical cannon at every sacred cow simultaneously, to find genuine hilarity in martyrdom, organised faith, political devotion, and the self-serious revolutionary left, without sparing anyone.
One of the novel’s more enjoyable flourishes is Sabiha Bano’s voice, woven throughout as a series of English homework essays Baghi assigns her.
The novel opens on the night of Bhutto’s execution in April 1979 and spirals outward. At its centre is Baghi, a gay former Mazdoor Militia Marxist expelled from the party for reasons both political and sexual, now teaching English—to whomever will pay fifty rupees—out of a rented room in Rawalpindi’s OK Town, a name that perfectly captures the city’s cheerful indifference to its own grimness. The plot kicks into motion when Sabiha Bano, daughter of an imprisoned communist organiser, arrives at his door on the run and in need of shelter. Baghi, comprehensively failed by every ideology he ever believed in, finds himself harbouring a fugitive while two forces close in: AD Malang, a local police officer of sulphurous moral flexibility, and Captain Gul, a military intelligence officer tasked with monitoring political agitators who has in the meantime, a great deal else on his mind.
One of the novel’s more enjoyable flourishes is Sabiha Bano’s voice, woven throughout as a series of English homework essays Baghi assigns her. She opens her first: “I humbly begin this treatise in the name of the most merciful and the most vengeful, creator of all things minor and major.” She refers throughout to her father as “esteemed father” and to her mother’s “famously beauteous” eyes. This overblown diction, bumping up against the rawness of what she is actually describing—poverty, a father jailed for union organising, a mother holding everything together—is one of the book’s great running jokes, and also its most quietly devastating strand.
Baghi’s childhood friend and landlord is Maulvi Rafique, known since boyhood as Molly—a rising star of what Hanif calls the “spiritual marketplace”, a storyteller who gets the crowds. After Friday prayers, his congregation pesters him with questions like what it means “when it says in the book that women are your fields and you can enter them from any direction you wish to.” Molly’s sermons promise the chance to share “a heavenly abode with seventy-two beautiful ladies who never fart or menstruate and whose orgasms last for eight hundred years.” On the street corner stands the Himalayan quack: “He sells dreams of perpetual erections. Molly sells eternal salvation.” Hanif places these two pitchmen side by side and lets you notice that the product is basically the same.
Bhutto’s jiyalas—the term for his most passionate devotees, the true believers who wept and rioted at his death and have been arguing about it ever since—are treated with similar affection and mockery. They dispute endlessly whether he walked to the gallows on steady feet, head held high, or was draped across two policemen’s armpits. The specific choreography of his death has become a theological question, each version reflecting what the teller needed martyrdom to look like.
This world, Hanif notes, “is not a Chekhov story.”
Captain Gul is the novel’s greatest comic creation. He dreams of riding in the back seat of an official Indian Ambassador car with Indira Gandhi—the woman who midwifed the partition of Pakistan in 1971—and he would like to “sleep a bit more, spend some more time in this dream, sort Mrs Indira Gandhi out for good.” Awake, he browses a confiscated videotape: “red-assed monkeys jumping from one tree to another with an English man speaking in a godlike voice,” saying “these creatures are more human than we’ll ever know,” before the footage abruptly cuts to two hippies fornicating under waterfalls. Then comes the rape video. “Captain Gul feels horny and then rages at feeling horny.” He tells himself he wants to save the girl, to avenge her honour. He is, the narration tells us with perfect flatness, in love.Hanif is doing something very uncomfortable here, and he knows it.
The “Bermuda Triangle” scene shows a satirist at the peak of his powers. Gul is on the phone with a woman he has been sleeping with, who informs him in precise detail that he deployed Bengal famine statistics to distract from his erectile dysfunction, named her vagina the Bermuda Triangle, spent their entire relationship lecturing her about its oceanic mysteries, and when he finally managed an erection in the morning, couldn’t find the Bermuda Triangle. Pakistan’s macho military men, Hanif is telling us, are afflicted with a severe case of performance anxiety.
The communists fare no better. Baghi’s expulsion resolution from the Mazdoor Militia found him guilty of being “an individualist, a native informant, also an ordinary fifty-rupee police informer, a deviant, a cock-gobbling closet counter-revolutionary.” That individualism heads the charge sheet tells you everything about their priorities.
This world, Hanif notes, “is not a Chekhov story.” No rustic glamour, no panting horses, no enigmatic woman carrying a small dog. Just a painful birth, a miserable life, and death arriving long after it’s due. To read Hanif without understanding Punjabi culture is to read him with the sound turned down. His prose is soaked in that culture’s irreverence, its love of the bawdy, its refusal to treat decorum as a substitute for seriousness. This is what separates him from the dreary, well-behaved school of South Asian fiction in English, the kind that mistakes politeness for depth and restraint for wisdom. Hanif has no interest in any of that.
India and Pakistan have contested the battlefield and the cricket pitch for decades. In English-language fiction, Pakistan is currently thrashing India, and the margin is largely Hanif.