ulfikar Ghose, an American writer of Pakistani origin breathed his last on June 22. Ghose’s writings are not larded with appraisals of British colonialism. The story of his literary itinerary is not so simple since his work defies categorisation and ethnic pigeonholing. As a writer, he suffered from neglect and lack of academic attention because he was not a mouthpiece of political and national systems. As a writer and a critic, he remained preoccupied with aesthetic design, artistic autonomy and style and paid only incidental attention to the subject matter. On the contrary, most postcolonial writers adore context and embark on self-valorising projects of redeeming indigenous history and culture. This was an approach for which Ghose did not show much concern.

Born to a Muslim family in Sialkot in 1935, Ghose moved to Bombay in 1942 witnessing the horror of Partition he wrote about in his autobiography Confession of a Native-Alien (1964). The hyphenated identity box of native the flip side of the alien, or mutually exclusive, defines Ghose’s fictional and real trysts with outposts of exile and homelessness; an exilic self is often forced to show familiarity with surroundings a condition Ghose questioned, becoming an “inward-looking apolitical”, one who valued transience over permanence. So, the question of the writer’s identity haunts him to no end. Samuel Beckett, a lifetime influence on Ghose, was of the view that an artist is ‘from nowhere’ therefore context, background, and biography are yardsticks of secondary nature.

Ghose emigrated to England in 1964, readily internalising the literary penchant of the times and collaborated on a collection of short stories Statement Against Corpses (1965) with BS Johnson; met the poet Ted Hughes, who at that time was a local sensation, and benefited from a poetic ambience loaded with Romantic lyric poetry of Dylan Thomas, and anti-modernist verse of Larkin of the swinging ’60s. He imbibed European masters and eulogised their craft for entreating language and style instead of subject matter. It was a milieu of European avant-garde whipping off lingering effects of Victorian complacencies. Ghose was neither excited by contemporary postcolonial critical practice which offered a plethora of jargon as the postcolonial imagination bogged down in cyclic reclaims of history and culture. Ezra Pound’s Make it New steered his imagination. He received afflatus from stalwarts of literary modernism such as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Flaubert, Conrad, TS Eliot and Proust. In a lecture at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville titled, On Being a Native Alien: The Question of a Writer’s Identity, he reiterated two of Proust’s phrases when he declared, “Quality of language and the beauty of an image are the heart of great writing”. Similarly, in Hamlet, Prufrock and Language (1978), Ghose, stressing great emphasis on the word ‘speak’ in Hamlet, suggested that a literary work was invented to “test relationships between language and reality”. Obviously, he envisioned a ‘correspondence’ between language and reality. Though never spelt out clearly, for Ghose postcolonial writers’ teleological obsession with colonial injustice as a subject matter weakened the connection between language and reality. Formulaic fiction such as the post-9/11 novel attracts a wide readership but Ghose did not jump on the bandwagon of the war-on-terror plots. Blown over, offbeat, sorting the welter of imaginative dispersion, he followed his path adventurously moving from one context to another.

Conversely, Ghose’s first two novels, The Murder of Aziz Khan (1969) and The Contradictions (1966), were about colonial India and Pakistan, a nation plagued by feudal politics whose rural backwaters were corrupted by capitalist greed. But those were times Ghose was measuring out ins and outs of a peripatetic creative career. South Asia and Pakistan did not disappear from his imagination. However, he eschewed slipping on narcissistic nationalism obviating the famous ’80s controversy by Frederic Jameson that all Third World literature’s texts are national allegories. In Beckett’s Company (2008), Ghose says, “the English had their own whore: the great cow India.” Not apologetic he was heedful to the politics of Empire, however, in search of an alternative form, wandered in other directions to produce his exegesis of colonialism. And despite calling himself a native alien in 1991, after a gap of twenty-eight years, he visited Pakistan. In his essay Going Home, he wrote about an “incomplete statue of fasting Buddha” at the Peshawar Museum, as “an image of amazing contradictions”. There is no political understatement in this image of an amputated Buddha, which a Pakistani reader will love to invoke. Tangentially, Ghose asks readers to stop expecting authors to be the purveyors of public taste. In In the Ring of Pure Light: Lectures on Language and Literature (2011), he seconds Vladimir Nabokov’s advice to show “kindness to authors”.

Therefore, in England, he produced some deeply experimental works as the focus shifted from realist mode to a meta-fictional mode, from South Asia to Europe. Nabokov in a parodic mode, Proustian subjective narration, and Kundera’s gaze on the female body all resonated in Ghose’s work. In Crump’s Terms (1965), the protagonist is a boring cynical English teacher whose students prevail upon him with a counter-discourse of dirty English slang; language breaks down. In the meta-fictional Hulme’s Investigations into the Bogart Script (1981), language is again a concern by showing the desecration of the human body reduced to a sexual object. Ghose sees language as a plot, within the plot of his fiction, an organic aesthetic and like Nabokov largely indifferent to the 20^th-Century revolutionary events. In an interview in 1986 with C Kanaganayakam, Ghose says “why not have a text that is simply a structure of language”, and still a fiction. Ironically, modernity made us believe that language, like knowledge, is also absolute. Ghose’s design was monumental but perhaps not in sync with the zeitgeist of his times.

In pursuance of this design, he migrated to Texas in 1969 where he was offered a teaching position at the University of Texas-Austin. From The Incredible Brazilian (1972), onwards an incredible transformation sustained his plots. Americas and Amazonian jungles became Ghose’s fictional loci. In Figures of Enchantment, Don Bueno, The Triple Mirror of the Self, A New History of Torments, and in The Brazilian Trilogy, Ghose captures trails of colonial Portuguese, slavery, malfeasance, and terrorism of the 1970s employing magical realism, carnivalesque, picaresque and fantasy. The eponymous protagonist Gregorio “witness the most significant events that have shaped the destiny of Brazil”. Ghose shows the impact of colonialism, corruption, capitalism, and exploitation throughout. However, with each historical epoch, his language turns the tide against typical historical/ realist fiction. Consequently, politics in Ghose is not a cause, only a corollary.

To all intent, the fictional protagonist Hulme embodies Ghose’s poetic manifesto “language equals vision […] the cunning jargon-mongers […] misinterpret the vision who sit in professional chairs, not the poets”. The poet kept his faith in poetry’s language. In an interview with Bruce Myers published as an appendix in Selected Poems (1991), he stated that his poems were ‘precise’ not ‘exotic’. He found exoticisation a method by which the non-Western writers enchant Western readers, an ingratiating approach. Although, in The Loss of India (1964), Jets from Orange (1967) and A Memory of Asia (1984) history, geography, colonialism and migration were his thematic concerns.

In 2015, I had the opportunity of meeting Ghose at the then Department of English at the Punjab University where he came for a talk. His demeanour was relaxed, but a wave of self-distancing conceit was felt after he answered questions minimally. He had a partially hairless scalp, the walrus moustache, greyish sideburns, the persona of an outsider peeping inside.

Ghose took academia’s inattention rather lightly. Like Kafka, Ghose is a beautiful failure. In A Conversation with Zulfikar Ghose (1989), Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbock say that “Ghose’s work is dismembered and unavailable to readers as a whole”. But his unpublished works are with the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas at Austin and who knows the posthumous gems may dazzle the sparse contingent of his readers. Muneeza Shamsie was kind enough to share with me Ghose’s wife Helena de la Fontaine’s email message that “his transition was smooth, and he did not suffer”.

The writer is a poet based in Lahore. His first collection of poems Lahore, I Am Coming, 2017, was published by Punjab University Press