Feryal Ali-Gauhar is a culture heritage manager, writer, filmmaker, actor and teacher, working across areas ranging from history and theory of film and the theory and practice of political economy. Her work has been described as visual, poetic and lyrical – a far cry from the themes she addresses, which are startling and disturbing, laying the ground for her concerns as a human- and animal-rights advocate. Her first novel, A Scent of Wet Earth in August (Penguin 2002), was based on her second feature film (TibbiGalli, 1997), focusing on the lives of the inhabitants of Lahore’s ShahiMohallah. In No Space for Further Burials (2007), she creates a vivid landscape of beauty in a war-torn Afghanistan and peoples that forgotten place with characters who struggle against despair and neglect, rising to heroic heights of resilience. Her recent novel, An Abundance of Wild Roses (Canongate, 2024), links the spirits of hunted animals with men and women who struggle to escape predators that exist only as a construct in their minds. This novel and Gauhar’s work as a writer are being featured at this year’s Oxford Literary Festival in Oxford, UK.

In an interview with The News on Sunday, she reflects on writing as an act of resistance, the power of storytelling rooted in lived experience and how her mother’s life and values continue to inform her work. Excerpts:

The News on Sunday: Do you see writing as sculpting – removing material until a shape appears – or like weaving, where the pattern forms gradually as you work?

Feryal Ali-Gauhar: It’s more like architecture to me. Not weaving, because weaving is very two-dimensional; there’s a width and a length. Architecture is three-dimensional, and time and space are dimensions that are very difficult to handle in writing. I was trained as a filmmaker. I’ve never studied literature. I’ve never been taught the craft of writing. So I sort of lumber through it. But I know that you build the story from something you’ve imagined, which takes shape like an edifice with spaces inside and beneath the ground. Beneath the ground are possibly the backstories, the foundations upon which the story you’re telling rests. But the architecture that I subscribe to is an unending form – it’s a never-completed building.

I don’t have a process because I don’t think about it. It’s not an intellectual exercise for me. It’s not about craft. It’s not about fashioning something. It’s about relieving myself of many, many burdens.

TNS: Like catharsis?

FG: Not even that. It’s more like unravelling. If you use weaving as an analogy, it’s like unravelling the carpet. You know, like taking it apart, taking all the threads apart. Instead of putting them together.

TNS: And then putting them back together as a story?

FG: Yes, as a story. And it’s not just one story. Because, I mean, as a child, I used to [do this] before going to sleep. This was a nightly ritual. It was so quiet in the ’60s that you could hear the lion roaring in the Lahore Zoo. I used to imagine that the lion was roaring with the pain of loneliness. And it just seemed haunting to me. Then, if a car drove past, the lights would move across the walls in these massive bedrooms. And there I was, this child, 6 or 7, listening to this lion’s very lonely roar and watching the light hitting the walls and then moving. It was as if I were in a cubicle with its own volition. So, in my childhood, that room, my bedroom, was my circus; it was my arena. I used to imagine all these stories that used to play out because of the light falling on the walls, and I would see shapes in the plaster of the walls. The house I was born in, grew up in, and would probably be dying in, is now almost 200 years old. It had these uneven surfaces of plaster. So when the light fell on these surfaces, shadows would be cast. And I imagined them as animals inside the plaster, all telling their stories. I would make up conversations. I was a loner as a child, and I still am. And for me, the process of writing, I think, comes from just this very vivid imagination.

TNS: When did you realise that language is more than just communication?

FG: I must have realised it when I read the writings of my late mother, Khadijah MarsinaEbrahim. She was a brilliant writer, but unfortunately, this country never acknowledged her. Her novel was published during her lifetime. I want to republish it. She used to write poetry. I found her collection of poems after she died because she never shared them with us. She had a beautiful voice; and it was seamless: her speech, her communication.

TNS: You also dedicate An Abundance of Wild Roses to your late mother. Tell us a bit more about her influence on your work.

FG: She was born in Cape Town to Gujarati Muslim parents and was educated at Kinnaird College, Lahore, and the London School of Economics, London. She was an extraordinary woman who lived her life according to her principles – she shunned wealth, she encouraged learning, compassion, sharing and integrity. And she lived with all of those.

Choosing to turn away from a life of privilege, she set up a home in Skardu almost fifty years ago, when there were hardly any roads leading to remote villages where she would walk and climb to visit women and children living in dire poverty. She was extremely well-read, very erudite, highly developed intellectually and extremely compassionate. These are values I hold in high esteem. Through this book, I pay tribute to her efforts to help those who others have left behind.

TNS: Your female characters often carry pain passed down from previous generations. What does it mean for you to write about that inherited sorrow?

FG: Actually, one of the reasons I chose not to have a child – when I was still able to and in a position to make a conscious decision after all I had been through – was this very phenomenon of generational trauma and how it makes us quite neurotic and how that neurosis doesn’t stop with us. It’s transferred to the children we bring into the world. And I just wanted to put a stop to it.

[For example] it becomes quite a neurotic relationship when the parents do not have a healthy or loving interaction [with each other], and children pick up on that. So, they don’t know how to build loving interactions in adulthood. And it goes on. They bring children into the world who also never learn how easy it is to be caring and kind – because releasing anger and sadness requires letting go of neurosis. So generational trauma is something that I was very aware of. For me, it’s almost visible when I see people, when I meet people and I see their dynamics in a kind of larger setting.

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TNS: In The Scent of Wet Earth in August, the opening scene focuses on the feel of one’s breath. What made you choose that moment to begin the story?

FG: I had been in a difficult marriage and the marriage, you might say, revealed to me the perils of committing oneself to someone one really doesn’t know. You may love them, but you don’t really know them. And things happen, which reveal to some extent who they are and who you are. They sometimes reveal themselves at a very, very high cost.

My work with the women in ShahiMohalla led to this film upon which the story is based. I interviewed them on my own – no funding. I don’t believe in the NGO model of picking issues like trends. I went myself. At the time, I was happily in my second marriage – my husband was a doctor, and through him, I learned about medicine, STDs and how women in ShahiMohalla had no real way to protect themselves from disease or violence. They had no power, no security.

I saw firsthand how women were used, abused and discarded. In one building, trafficked Bengali women lived in a single room. They called one another behn, barely surviving. No one spoke to these women. They were at the bottom of the hierarchy, unseen and unheard. I spent hours with them. Language wasn’t always necessary. I watched clients come and go, saw them struggle just to pay rent. One would step out to find a customer while the others made tea for me. I’d wonder if I was taking away from what little they had?

Despite everything, these women were kind and generous. Many had been abducted or abandoned; left with nothing. But they still had one another. And that, to me, was extraordinary. I have never known such unadulterated love as I experienced with them and with the khwajasera community there.

TNS: In An Abundance of Wild Roses, you suggest that home isn’t just a place but the shape that longing takes. How has your own idea of home changed over time?

FG: Home is where longing ends and where you feel safe. Unfortunately, I haven’t had that in many, manyyears.It is probably the greatest sadness of my life because I didn’t think that I would struggle with the kind of solitude that I find myself facing. It’s not just intellectual solitude, it’s also emotional solitude.

I don’t know how you would define comfort, but to me, it’s knowing you’re safe with another person. The houses where I was supposed to make a home were always as beautiful as I could make them with whatever resources I had. But no matter how much I built around me, the longing never ended – the longing to be fully embraced, to be accepted entirely, flaws and all. I had accepted their flaws, as long as they weren’t hurting me; but they did.

The hurt, the pain inflicted by someone else’s inadequacy, their insecurity leaves a mark. We like to say it doesn’t damage us, but I know with certainty that it does. These are scars that don’t fade. I believe everyone is worthy in their own way. But some relationships have a way of making you feel utterly worthless. The abandonment, the neglect changes you. In my case, it has pushed me away from the possibility of being abandoned again, from the risk of being hurt.

TNS: Your characters, like Fatimah, for example, often feel like they don’t belong. They’re away from home;even from themselves. Do you think that feeling of exile is something many people experience, even if in small ways?

FG: Yes, I live it every day. I feel like I don’t belong in this country either. But my alienation comes from something deeper – the rapid, profound changes in the country’s cultural psyche. I mean, just look at the Plaza cinema [in Lahore]. I still see its gates in my mind, but the cinema itself is gone. Or how, as a young girl, I captained multiple sports teams. We didn’t have a soccer ground at Lahore American School, so I’d lead my entire team, with our coach, across the canal to Aitchison College to play. This was before the Zia era – somewhere between 1974 and 1977.

We used to jog down the canal in our shorts, in our uniforms, at 15 or 16, and no one batted an eye. It was completely normal. Not that everyone else was running around in shorts, but there was no sense of moral outrage, no judgment. Nobody was throwing acid at us. We’d just run across the canal, play soccer and jog back to change.

It’s not the shorts I miss. It’s the openness of the mindthat’s gone. I struggle to find people I can have a meaningful conversation with. So the choice is between solitude and stupidity; obviously, I’d rather be alone.

TNS: How do you explore the idea of women’s agency in your writing, particularly in relation to societal structures?

FG: Women do not subvert, I believe. Women are imprisoned. They live in a state of disability and their consciousness of being in that prison, or the lack of that consciousness, is what makes the difference. When I was married into a Pakhtun family, a Syed Pakhtun family, I used to protest that the tradition of paying a bride price demeans the humanity of a girl who is being married into a family.

And my sisters-in-law would be aghast. They would say that there was no honour without a bride price. Meaning the monetisation of that transaction, the objectification of it, was very much a part of their consciousness.

Years and years and years later - I’m still in touch with my in-lawsand very close to them - they now understand, because their experiences in their own lives made them realise that they cannot be objectified and branded non-human and powerless. Their agency cannot be taken away from them.

TNS: An Abundance of Wild Roses is deeply rooted in real-life experiences and locations. Could you share some insights into how your research and time in the region shaped your characters?

FG: The characters in my book grew out of the women I lived with during the time that I was trying to understand the phenomenon of the very high incidence of female suicide in the Northern Areas. The beliefs of the older generation become clearer in [the writing of this]story.It is important to understandissues of mobility, issues of acceptance in male territory.

In the village where I lived, there was a massive cliff right in front of us – part of the Karakoram, the Black Mountains. It had what looked like a doorway carved into the rock, towering 200 feet high.

The cliff itself stood 1,000 feet above the valley where we were. I climbed up, and, relying on a trick I had learned for measuring trees (I love nature, so I had picked up this method). You count the steps by looking at the top of the tree, then glance between your legs at the tree behind you. If see the top, you can measure the height of the tree by counting the paces it has taken to get that view from the ground.

That doorway, 200 feet tall, was known as ChartoikaDarwaza. Chartoi was the meeting point of four glacial streams, which came together to form a larger rivulet that flowed into the river.

It was an unusual place, not just because of the streams, but because it was also believed to be the doorway to the Castle of Stone and Ice, the home of legendary spirit beings. Women were forbidden from going there. They couldn’t even be seen near it. They weren’t allowed to wear red. They weren’t allowed to eat red chillies. Even aubergines – brinjals, eggplants – were off-limits because they were said to be the food of the fairies – the Periting.

You build the story from something you’ve imagined, which takes shape like an edifice with spaces inside and beneath the ground.

These fairies were women, females, and human beings who forbade other women from enjoying these delicacies.They also took over the minds and hearts of men.The men become obsessed with these spirit beings. So there was this parallel war going on between the women on earth, which I call Zamin-par, and the women above the earth, which was Zamin-upar. It was women warring with each other for the affection of men, which is what we do.

Even in the marriage situation, the affection of the man becomes a war between his mother and his wife. So I think the consciousness of being imprisoned makes a difference because only then can you try to step out of that door that patriarchy shuts upon us.

TNS: You explore the distressing phenomenon of female suicides in Gilgit-Baltistan in An Abundance. What led you to take on this subject?

FG: I was aware of this issue since my mother had devoted the last twenty years of her life to the health of mothers and children in Baltistan. However, this issue of frequent suicides by young women was prevalent in the districts north of Gilgit having a mixed population of Sunni Muslims and Ismailis. In 2014, I was invited by the then chief minister of Gilgit-Baltistan to investigate what was happening in the villages north of Gilgit. I took on the challenge to understand this disturbing phenomenon and went to live in a small village, Hamardas, which became the site of my story, Saudukh Das, The Plain of a Hundred Sorrows. I spoke to many young women and their mothers and grandmothers;and to the friends and relatives of those who had taken their lives.

I had known of many sorrows which afflict the lives of men and women throughout the country, but here, the matter of choosing death over life needed to be addressed urgently. Despite my efforts to discuss this issue with the Aga Khan Foundation through its Development Network and Rural Support Programme, I did not make much headway.The issue was constantly swept under the rug. It was as if I was challenging the very ethos of development, of the chosen path to development. Well, I am still doing that, and the book is one of the ways in which I hope to hold up a mirror in order to reflect our own images in it.

TNS: Your work often examines power – who wields it and who suffers under it. But you also create characters resisting in quiet, almost imperceptible ways. How do you define writing as a form of resistance?

FG: I think when you conceive of your characters and the story that they’re playing out, you’re trying to say something about how you see the world. All writing is autobiographical. It has to be. Because you’re bringing yourself to that page, right? You cannot write from somebody else’s experience. You are only creating what you have to produce from your own sensibility, from whatever you may have experienced.

If you believe there’s a need to build a front of resistance, you find a way to do it. Some take to the streets. I’ve done that too – been part of the women’s movement, been in prison twice. Others choose other tools; writing is one of those.

I don’t know if my writing is born from my political sensibility, but I can’t separate the personal from the political. Whatever I feel deeply has always resonated with my political thinking. That includes fighting against child marriage. Girls should have the chance to grow into themselves before becoming tools in someone else’s life – before they’re expected to procreate and bring another being into the world. That’s my personal belief, but I’ve made it a political cause by actively working to ban child marriage. Sindh has passed a law, but the Punjab is still lagging behind.

Patriarchy runs deep in both men and women in our culture. Undoing it – replacing it with progressive thinking – is incredibly difficult.

TNS: But do you see any progress happening?

FG: We’re living in a warped time. If you measure progress in terms of the cultural significance of how women present themselves, I have seen young girls wearing tights and cropped tops, sipping coffee by the side of a public road and being obviously stared at by men passing by; even the server. If that is supposed to be progress, I have my serious doubts. At the same time, how are you going to measure a woman who is in an abaya and a hijab; going to work, earning a living, supporting her family?Because she’s in an abaya and a hijab, does that mean that she’s regressive? I question that as well.

Women have always been cultural signifiers. Across the world, how we dress, how we present ourselves is shaped by what society expects from us; the roles we are meant to play. Take the women in tights and a cropped top, sipping coffee in a cafe. They feel privileged enough to not care about the male gaze – because they have the power to ignore it. That privilege extends beyond just clothing; it reflects our position in the broader structure of power, in the glass ceiling we navigate.

It’s something the West has struggled to understand. Why is it that India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan had women prime ministers long before the US could even imagine Hillary Clinton running for president? So we must look at who these women prime ministers were: Sheikh Hasina, Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto. All these women come from privilege – powerful husbands and fathers. America is not a feudal society. Female contenders for leadership have to come from the grassroots or middle class.

TNS: Pakistani writers often find themselves writing for an international audience that wants a certain kind of story coming out of Pakistan. Do you feel that tension?

FG: No, I don’t really. There are serious issues with that kind of writing because it’s not organic. It’s not rooted. You don’t go to Anarkali for cardamom-flavoured tea at a Starbucks – because there is no Starbucks in PuraniAnarkali. There are just khokas. If you don’t know that, then you start running into these contentious areas – how much license do you have to create a counter-reality? Is it that you just don’t know the reality, so you imagine it that way?

BabsiSidhwa had asked me to review Ice Candy Man when it came out – I think Heinemann published it. I have great reverence for her, but I was appalled when, in one scene, she had her character – the cook – ride his bicycle home to Kasur, crossing the River Ravi. But Kasur and the River Ravi are in two completely different directions. You can’t cross the Ravi to get to Kasur. I brought it up with the publisher because I was going to review the book, and they said, “Well, that’s poetic license.” But how wrong can you get your geography? That’s the thing – you can get away with a lot, but what you’re really getting away with is your own ignorance about the material you’re dealing with.

I wouldn’t find that acceptable for myself. I would do my homework. But international publishers don’t care. As long as you’re churning out stories that tickle their fancy and satisfy the theme of the day, they’re fine with it. Because, after all, it’s an industry. Books need to sell. Luckily, my life doesn’t depend on writing. I don’t even see myself as a writer; I do so many other things. Writing is something I squeeze in in my work. My day job is entirely different. If I never wrote again, I’d still be able to earn a living.

But for writers who write for a living, even if they aren’t financially dependent on it, they do have a responsibility. At the very least, they should do their homework and know the lay of the land where they situate their story.

TNS: Do you find contemporary writers staying true to authentic storytelling, or do you see a shift towards a more stylised approach?

FG: This effort is so visible – this desperate bid to come across as profound, as thoughtful. But none of that actually happens. If you truly understand your subject, you don’t need to try so hard. If it comes from the heart, there’s no effort involved. If what you’re writing is deeply felt, if it’s organic;it just happens. It’s natural. It can come to you in a dream or while you’re out on a walk. I never know how a book or a story is going to end. Most of the time, there is no ending. But suddenly, it just comes to me in the middle of the night. I have no idea what part of my brain is working at that hour, but I don’t sit there calculating: what kind of impact will this have? It just is.

TNS: Do you think literature should disturb, unsettle and leave the reader restless?

FG: Yes, absolutely. Good literature – any art or creative work – should make the audience ask themselves questions prompted by the questions within the work. Your writing, your creative endeavour, doesn’t need a conclusion. Nothing has to be neatly tied up with a bow at the end. What matters is that it sparks thought, that it lingers with the reader or the viewer – whether it’s a book, a film or a piece of performance art. Reaching a fixed conclusion is pointless because every person brings their own mind and experiences to the process. The work should be evocative and inspire them to ask their own questions.

TNS: Can creative writing be taught, or is it something a writer must discover on their own?

FG: I guess there are no rules as such. I’ve never studied creative writing, so I don’t know what the advantage is. I don’t know the value of MFAs, and honestly, I wouldn’t want to be a part of that. I’ve never subscribed to any set notions – none of this is an exact science anyway. You create your own rules.

An MFA is beyond comprehension for me. It’s probably the easiest degree to get. The best thing you can gain from a creative writing programme is connections – agents, publishers, whatever. But writing itself? You can do that on your own. You don’t need to be taught.

I think all disciplines function within certain confines, but if you don’t believe in those, why bother? Do you think Dostoevsky ever attended a creative writing course? Some of the greatest writers in the world never did. Some of the best don’t even bother with literary festivals.The ones I admire – like JM Coetzee – detest literature festivals. They avoid them like the plague, and I understand why.

TNS: Why do you think that is the case?

FG:We all do what we think is good. If the organisers believe in what they’re doing, they should keep at it. There are all kinds of things happening, so it’s not about sitting in judgment. You just take a step back and decide whether you want to be part of it or not. These kinds of events have become the norm for cultural representation and entertainment across the country. With cinemas shutting down, there’s nothing else. A circus hasn’t come to town in ages, so this is another way of keeping people engaged.

People, especially the young, are starved for social spaces. A lot of them just go to these festivals to be around other young people. Now they’re even serving food. These are just cultural phases. In the ’70s and ’80s, it was all about funfairs. You don’t hear about those anymore. I remember when Rafi Peer’s Theatre was around – everyone went. It was open to all. No tickets, the first of its kind. Then came the Sufi festivals, which I think were the best. They did what they were meant to do – entertain.

Now, it’s literature. And I do wonder, how many people attending these festivals have actually read the books being discussed? And how many moderators have actually read the books they discuss?

TNS: Which writers or literary traditions have had the greatest influence on your work?

FG: My first exposure was to Russian writers – Maxim Gorky, thenDostoevsky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Turgenev and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky remains my favourite.

As I got older, I started making my own choices, though my mother’s influence was always there. We read Pearl S Buck, Hemingway and Faulkner, among other American writers. James Joyce came much later, but I found his stream-of-consciousness style challenging to read. But of all writers, I hold the South Africans in the highest esteem. You can’t beat JM Coetzee, André Brink, Richard Rive and Nadine Gordimer, with whom I had the honour of working as a UN Goodwill Ambassador.

I think that good writing or good art comes from deep suffering, even if the writing is humorous.Because humour always has a sad edge, there’s always a part where there’s the bruising and the hurt.

TNS: Many writers talk about a story that keeps calling them back. Is there an idea or a project that lingers in your mind, waiting for the right moment to be told?

FG: My publisher has the first rights to my next book, and they wanted a brief description. I had to put something together quickly – I hadn’t thought about another book. Right now, I’m in the process of wrapping up one phase of my life and stepping into what I consider the last phase. I feel very fortunate to be moving back to the home where I was born. It’s in the cantonment – the house originally built for the parish priest of the Church of St Mary Magdalene. I’ve always had a deep connection to that church. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the cemetery at the back, fascinated by the tiny graves of infants who died in a cholera epidemic. Their mothers – young women, no older than 19 or 20, maybe 23 – were buried nearby.

Inside the church, there were plaques commemorating those who fell in various wars, mainly the 1857 War of Independence (or the Mutiny, as the British called it). But I wasn’t interested in those. I was drawn to the gravestones of these young women and their babies, to the idea of women who tried to make homes far from home. It made me think about the women in my own family. My mother was a migrant, too.

The book – or at least the idea of it – is about the generations of women in my family, starting with my great-grandmother. The thread that runs through these stories is the life of Mary Magdalene. Because, really, who was she? There’s no definitive understanding. She’s often considered the fallen woman – yet she was the only one who stood by Jesus Christ as he died. She was condemned and labelled immoral, yet she became his Companion. His only female Companion.

I’m taking her story – the unresolved mystery of who she really was – and weaving it into the lives of the women in my own history. Because women have always been boxed into these two extremes: either the Sati Savitri, the virtuous woman, or the vamp. There’s no in-between. That’s why I turn down all the serials offered to me, no matter how lucrative. It’s astonishing how much money is being made off bad scripts and ordinary actors, but that’s another story.

This book, though – it’s a massive undertaking. I need to go to India, back to my ancestral village. I need to go to Cape Town, where my mother was born. I need to trace my father’s grandmother, my great-grandmother, on his side. Their stories are incredible. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m even capable of writing something this big. But it’s an idea. I’ve always been drawn to archives, to historical records. So, for now, I’m preparing to spend a lot of time in the archives in Peshawar and here. We’ll see where it takes me.

TNS: What are you working on next?

FG: I will be writing a pictorial book on the ancient rock carvings which I had digitised while serving as advisor for the cultural heritage management of DiamerBasha Dam. As for my next creative work, it is a film about a murder and the nine different stories that stem from it. It’s called A Single Life.

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The interviewer is a staff member