My first introduction to Professor Waqas Khwaja was in the hallowed library of the Punjab University English Department, where I came across Mornings in the Wilderness (Sang-e-Meel, 1988), a selection of readings from Pakistani literature by Khwaja, who also wrote its introduction. At that time, I was working on writing a dissertation on Pakistani poetry in English. Khwaja’s introductory essay was the most articulate in that he was the only critic to have identified a theoretical framework in the backdrop of the creation of Pakistani literature in English.

A leading poet, Khwaja has now been living in the United States for the past three decades, where he teaches Literature at the Agnes Scott College.

Khwaja strongly believes that literature cannot ever be apolitical, and even the assertion of apoliticality is itself a charged, political statement. He believes that a writer has both an "estrangement" from and an "intimacy" with the society that shapes his creative work. Excerpts of an interview with him in Lahore follow.

The News on Sunday: To start at the beginning, how did you come to literature?

Waqas Khwaja: I think it started at [school in] Saint Anthony’s where I was exposed to a lot of poetry and fiction. They taught us a lot of literature. We read all sorts of poets and novelists. I remember, I must have been in junior cambridge, one of my science teachers, a wonderful man, asked us what we enjoyed about physics, and based on that, he told us to go to the library and pick a book related to that. And I remember that I pulled out a book which was a narrative about the achievements of great innovators of physics. So even back then I did not pick out a book about the phenomenon of electromagnetic fields or relativity, but a story about how these great physicists achieved what they achieved.

TNS: Was there a specific moment when you realised you were going to be a poet?

WK: I think, yes. I remember that I had to write a poem on an otter. One of the couplets in it was "Suddenly the boat turned into the water/ And out in its place came an otter". I read it to my father, and he said "Wouldn’t ‘smiling otter’ sound better?" and I thought wow. This is what language does. I think that was when I knew I was going to be a poet.

TNS: There is an assumption in our classrooms that literature is a subject for girls, not for boys. Did you face any such biases when you were a student opting for literature?

WK: I think we have to be careful about the terminology we use. If we call young women girls, and I have seen university professors calling PhD students "bacha", we are doing them an injustice. There is, of course, a bias here. We are a patriarchal society. So, there is the sense that if a man studies a profession like Law, for example, that is desirable because he has to support a family. Similarly, if a woman opts for literature, that is also considered fine. These biases are at work.

Having said that, when I look back now, I think I always had this affinity for literature. There is this spark in you telling yourself that this is what you should be doing. Nobody put out that spark in me. And I can see how some people could be discouraged. Luckily, nobody discouraged me.

I remember that when I wanted to learn about quantum physics, I did not read a science textbook. I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. I wanted to learn about time, so I read Stephen Hawking.

I think Hawking is a metaphor for our times. He would have been a vegetable, and in our country he would probably have been reduced to begging and been kicked around and told that he was cashing in on his disability. But, this man is the greatest mind alive. And look at the technology that makes it possible for him to function. So the metaphor is that we are a disabled age. In the context of gender relations, women are disabled. In terms of colonialism, the former master has disabled us. And you have to somehow find a way to work with these disabilities. And Hawking is not just a scientific mind; he is an imaginative and poetic mind.

TNS: I have the impression that most of our early endeavours in English came in the form of poetry. Shahid Suhrawardy, Taufiq Rafat and Kaleem Omer, for example were writing poetry. There was fiction and drama, but a lot of that has not come down to us. Was there a reason for this preference for poetry at the initial stages of a Pakistani English literature?

WK: I think it is deceptive to say that, for starters. Growing up, we were not introduced to any Pakistani writers at school. We were reading poetry, fiction, drama, everything. But there were no Pakistani writers. We were not aware of any Pakistani writers in English. I think Pakistani departments of English are still very reluctant to include Pakistani creative writing in the curriculum. So, to me, the framing of that is misconceived. A lot of us who were reading literature were reading a lot of fiction. But we were reading fiction that came from outside, not from inside. We didn’t know what was being written by Pakistanis.

Having said that, I was certainly reading a lot of Urdu fiction as well. And, this was not prescribed. I was reading on my own. At home, I had access to Shafiqur Rehman, Ashfaq Ahmed, Patras. There was this huge tome of the Alif Laila Wa Laila (Thousand and One Nights).There were Urdu magazines that I borrowed from my cousins and read. I became familiar with the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza through these magazines. Now if we look the work of Marquez, we appreciate magic realism. If we look at the Dastan, we say oh well what is this? But the Dastan is the original magic realism. I wish, stylistically, we had been aware of that because the Dastan idiom is very close to poetry, and that would have allowed us to experience another dimension.

There was fiction available in English. Zulfikar Ghose was writing fiction long before we attribute him for writing Murder of Aziz Khan. There was Nasir Farooki and his Afro-Asian Book Society, and these people discussed post-colonial issues. They were publishing fiction. So, it is not like there was no fiction in English. I think we privilege poetry over fiction because the poet is considered to be the intellectual of his times.

TNS: You talk about how you were exposed to English literature at school and Urdu literature at home. How did that shape your consciousness? Was there a conflict?

WK: At St. Anthony’s, I was often given a beating by the Irish brothers for speaking Urdu. In Senior Cambridge, I took Easy Urdu. So, overall, there was definitely a bias against the indigenous and a preference for the foreign. I opted for Urdu in my Bachelors and had an excellent professor Meerza Riaz at the then Government College. But for Ghalib I had to take tuition. Somebody recommended Shohrat Bukhari, who was an excellent professor. He helped me a lot in understanding Urdu poetry.

I went on a Rotary Fellowship. I had resigned from the Income Tax Group after successfully clearing the Civil Services examination. I had to do this so that my family could be satisfied, and then I would say that look I’ve done this for you, now I am going to do what I want. There my professor handed me a course on Victorian Literature to teach. That was where I realised that I did not really know where I came from, and who my people were. I told my professor that I was going back because I wanted to discover my own culture and literature. He told me to complete my degree and then go back, but I told him that I had to go back and I left it there and came back in 1982. That was when I established the Writers’ Group with Mehmood Gillani. We would gather sometimes at Gillani’s bookshop ‘Alpha Bravo’ and sometimes at my home.

We had only one rule: whatever texts were brought for discussion, nobody could say that the work was "too good" or "too bad". We had to engage with the text. Kishwar Naheed was a regular at these meetings. Intizar Husain often came. Shoaib Bin Hassan came occasionally. Osama Siddique was there. Athar Tahir would come. M. A. Niazi was another regular. There were writers who were writing in Punjabi, Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto. Once a very senior Urdu writer came with his entourage. As was the spirit of our group, the members raised critical issues with the story that he read. He went away complaining that I had insulted him. Anyway, I also met some very interesting people at this time.

I was practicing law at the time. I was married. I would teach a morning course at the Law College, come to office around 9am, work, then pick up my daughter and drop her home, and then go back to work and prepare for the next day’s cases. In between, I could find two hours to do my writing. One day, a shabbily dressed man walked into my office, he introduced himself as a distributor of law books that he was selling. He handed me the books. Mind you, this conversation was entirely in Punjabi.

When he was leaving, something pulled me to him. So I asked him what he does and he said "nothing, I just write poetry". I asked him to recite some of his work, and he recited "Allah Mian thallay aa". This was my first introduction to Saeen Akhtar. I was blown over. After that I would meet him every other day for hours. He introduced me to Ustad Daman’s work. He had been Daman’s disciple, and had some very rare photos of Daman.

One day he brought another shabbily dressed man, and introduced him as the principal of Faisalabad College, Ali Arshad Mir. He was also a poet. He is a big name, but at the time I did not know him. Ali Arshad said, "I am your servant, your choorha". My mind was blown. Here we were talking of parity and rights, and here comes a man who says "I am your choorha". But, then, that is the culture that we treat as choorha, and distance ourselves from that. I realised I had to write about that and you can find the mention in my poetry.

Mir was not teaching me formally, but I learnt a lot from him. He introduced me to the depths of Punjabi literature. He would take me to very simple roadside eateries. He was a truly great man. I called him and Akhtar to my house once. He had to go to the washroom, and I pointed out the toilet to him. He went and came back and refused to go to the toilet. He went outside to the park and sat down to pee. Now these were lessons I was learning. I had learnt to think of this as obscene and vulgar. And I was now beginning to realise that there was vulgarity and obscenity in the fact that I had come from these people and had now been taught to look down on them.

This was the background. My outlook changed. I became affianced with these people. But, I think I belong to a transitional generation. I am a transitional man. I have become less intolerant of myself and of others than I would have been at one time.

TNS: This leads to my next question. There is a bias in many of the English Departments here in Pakistan against Pakistani literature in English. Some wonderful work has been done at the Punjab University and FC College, and also at the International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English at Kinnaird. But, there are other places where the departments insist that literature from England, or from the English-speaking West, is the only literature we need to study. Is that because we are in transition?

WK: One problem is that in Pakistan, the English departments are not literature or comparative literature departments. I don’t think this issue is why Pakistani literature in English is being excluded because one way or the other, it will always be a subsidiary of this ‘mother’ literature. So why don’t we move to comparative literature?

Another phenomenon I have seen in Pakistan is that departments of English have become departments of linguistics. So, if you do not have expertise in literature, you study the language. I think you study the technical part because you do not have good teachers of literature.

So if we have a department of comparative literature, it would allow the possibility of reading literatures at par with each other, without one being a subsidiary of the other. Whether that is possible given the administration, and the people at the helm of affairs, I’m not sure. And this had led to issues of identity. Now I don’t think our self-actualisation as a people cannot occur in English. If we include regional literatures, we can begin to talk about self-actualisation. We have to look at the society as a whole. There are differentiated views and alienated sensibilities in society, which drive society forward. So, to me, the issue is not about Pakistani literature in English but the exclusionary policies that keep out even regional literatures.

There is an economic component we cannot ignore. So, if our writers in Punjabi, Sindhi, Urdu are not getting rewards, why would they write?

TNS: The writer today needs academics to theorise and provide criticism. Is there a lack of connect between the writer and academia?

WK: There was a time when if a writer’s work was taken up by academia, the writer would think of his work as dead. There is such a thing as "people’s sensibilities". Somehow these sensibilities have now been diluted. The academia does not regard these.

At the beginning of the 19^th century, when English literature was not studied as a discipline, they studied the Classics. As a discipline, very interestingly, it began in Scotland. It was Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, who played a key role in instituting this discipline -- he thought reading English literature would make Scots better at business.

TNS: There has been a profusion of degrees in Pakistan over the past two decades. There are many PhDs, local and foreign. You are a part of American academia. How do you look at this phenomenon?

WK: In terms of the Humanities, it has been a disaster. Higher academia is about developing certain competencies. Critical reading of a text is the very basic skill that starts at school. Now, in Pakistani academia, people do not develop critical skills even till the MPhil/PhD level, and you can still get a degree, that is a disaster. The second aspect is that if the trainers themselves do not have the proper training, the scholarship and accreditation produced will be debatable. The idea of PhD is not that you become the owner of all knowledge, but that you develop the habit of intense and critical enquiry, and the ability to draw conclusions. That is why our academia has lagged behind.

Let me tell you an anecdote. I was on a sabbatical in 2007 so I was here as a curriculum consultant. I had to resign after a short while because I realised that the MPhil/PhD degrees being awarded were not rigorous in either the critical reading or the required language skills. In frustration, I asked a very dear friend, a senior professor of literature, who was a member of the high level committee: "What is this? What are you people doing?" He said "Khwaja sahab, we are throwing PhDs in the market. It will sort itself out." It does not work like that. The positive side is that now a lot more scholarships are available for literature students.

Elsewhere, the market would expose fraudulent scholarship. In Pakistan, however, unfortunately, such scholarship, if it can be called that, survives.