esearch requires two things: time and money. If there is personal motivation, then it becomes a passion, as was in my case. But even if that is lacking, one still requires the other two. I had a PhD on EM Forster but had decided to do something new—write the first history of Pakistani literature in English. It was my hobby. How I wrote this book will tell you much about how research was done in my kind of subjects in the 1980s. So, here is the story.

I arrived in Pakistan on April 15, 1985, and the very next day started looking for a job and preparing to write my book. Hearing of the English-language poet Daud Kamal, I went to meet him in Peshawar. Daud Kamal was professor and chairman of the Department of English at the University of Peshawar. When I entered his office, I met a middle-aged, decent-looking man with peace and contentment on his face. He spoke in a gentle, unassuming manner talking about his poetry. His father had been the vice chancellor of the same university when my father visited it from PMA. Daud sahib had done his tripos from Cambridge and was delighted to hear that I had used the archives at King’s College in my doctoral research. By the time I took my leave he offered me a job.

“We will make it as attractive as possible,” he said. I said I would consider the offer. Then he asked me if I was married.

“I am and I have a daughter too,” I replied.

“Oh,” he said with a smile, “This means you will need a house and that is a problem in Peshawar with so many Afghan refugees.”

When I came home, I told Ammi (my mother) and Hana (my wife) about the prospect of an assistant professorship, which would soon (in four or five months) become an associate professorship, at Peshawar University. I thought both my mother and wife would immediately and emphatically reject any job in Peshawar. After all, there was a war going on in Afghanistan and Peshawar was swarmed with Afghans. But I had barely stopped speaking when both the ladies jumped up and said in unison that I should take up the job. I was incredulous. They even knew that associate professors were in NPS-19 and not in 17 as I was a lecturer for three months in Allama Iqbal Open University. I was convinced, and on September 1, 1985, drove off in my little Suzuki to Peshawar.

Peshawar provided me with all, except money, to pursue my hobby. There was a lot of time. All we had to do was to deliver some lectures which all, or at least most, of us did as faithfully as possible. For me, academic life, or at least the one I experienced, was the ideal life: a life of freedom—no hierarchy, no hurry, no fuss nor tension and no research, if one did not wish to pursue it.

It would be difficult to imagine how research was done in those days. Research articles and books, which I found from looking up in bibliographies of books which I could lay my hands upon, were imported through the British Council from England. I paid Rs 8 per page for the articles and Rs 300 per book, which I had to photocopy and return within a fortnight. The money came from my salary, which was quite inadequate to feed a family with two children; run a car that often made trips to Rawalpindi; and pay our bills. I bought myself a manual typewriter to type out chapters of the book though I was very slow and disliked this kind of labour since it cut into time I would rather have spent on reading and writing. For some time, Nazeer Lala (our departmental head clerk) did this work for me in the afternoon but mostly I had to do it myself. Later, I bought myself an electric typewriter which was much faster and required much less effort. The ease of adding and deleting information and sources, which we take for granted now, was still some years away.

For me, academic life, or at least the one I experienced, was the ideal life: a life of freedom—no hierarchy, no hurry, no fuss nor tension and no research, if one did not wish to pursue it.

Meanwhile, I went to many places for my research. Let me, however, briefly mention that no university had any course on Pakistani literature. Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, however, had people who wrote in English. So, I first visited Islamabad which was convenient for me because Alamgir Hashmi, a poet of English and also a writer on literature, lived there. I and Hashmi became friends and met several times. After this, I went to Lahore and Karachi.

My most arduous book-hunt was in Karachi. For this, I went by train in December 1986. A most memorable experience was my visit to a house in search of a book of English verse by Itrat Zuberi. The lady of the house told me it was somewhere in the garage, which was packed with termite-eaten books, covered with cobwebs and dead lizards. After hours of cleaning more than rummaging through dust-laden papers, I found the book. It was like looking for a pearl in countless heaps of sand.

In 1987, I joined the University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir in Muzaffarabad as professor and head of department. The latter position made me so busy that I was unable to write my book, which I had started in Peshawar. Therefore, I decided to request the vice chancellor to relieve me of the post of departmental head. As a professor, I would remain the senior-most faculty member but the head would be the next senior person. My colleagues simply refused to believe that I would relinquish power; even the vice chancellor was incredulous. Finding me adamant, he told me to wait till I had formally started the new master’s programme. This was to be an MA in Linguistics and English Language Teaching, and was the first of its kind in the country. In those days, we generally had literature degrees, though ELT had started. The vice chancellor possibly had thought that starting a new MA programme would take at least two years, and by that time I would get some sense in my head. I, therefore, decided to wait till the meeting of the Board of Studies to permit the launch of the new programme.

It went extremely well since it turned into a competition about “have you read so-and-so?” couched in the polite jargon of “I would add….” So, while books were added with a vengeance, no real objections were raised. In this process of “have-you-read-this?” the courses were fully approved. I left the headship immediately as my written request to do so got the vice chancellor’s approval, and the next senior person became the chairperson. Later, Sarfraz sahib took over as the head. According to my wishes he gave me no administrative responsibility; nor did I attend any meeting. If he wanted my advice, he would come and ask for it informally. As in Peshawar, I could choose the day and time of my lectures keeping at least one day free so as to go to Rawalpindi on the weekend. This gave me time to write my book and I finished it in June 1988. I had already been publishing extracts from it in the press which Najam Sethi, the proprietor of Vanguard Press, had read. He approached me for the book, which I sent him in the hard typescript form. There were no soft copies then.

The book took a long time to be published. It finally saw the light of the day in 1991. It was called A History of Pakistan Literature in English, and was dedicated to my wife since she had supported it both financially and emotionally. Later, it was published by the Oxford University Press, which brought out a reprint only last year. I am sure there are some courses requiring students to read it; otherwise it could not have stayed in print.

The writer is a faculty member at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.