Zulfikar Ghose and Cosmopolitan Authentication

Abstract

Attention to Zulfikar Ghose routinely involves commentary on his refusal to make the focus of his writing any locale that can be readily identified with his own authentic or authenticating background as a person from South Asia. He has not avoided South Asian settings entirely. The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) is a plainly realist novel set in Pakistan, and Ghose’s early poetry and his autobiographical Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) notably deal with his early life in South Asia and the perils of incorporation into a new culture. In this sense Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock’s claim that Ghose has entirely ignored the experience of exile or immigration is not quite true,³ and nor is it the case that his early work refuses to idealize the land of his birth. In fact Confessions of a Native-Alien offers South Asian material in a way that accommodates Western readers, teaching them about the geography and culture of both Sailkot and Bombay. It also approaches childhood with considerable nostalgia, though this is filtered through some wariness about the violence associated with claims to a secure national identity, perhaps inevitable given his material is British India in the 1940s. It was with the 1970s Incredible Brazilian trilogy (hereafter the Brazilian trilogy), made up of The Native (1972), The Beautiful Empire (1975), and A Different World (1978), that Ghose significantly left South Asian topics behind.

‘The Portuguese when they discovered Brazil thought it was India. They had simply lost their way, as I may have mine.’¹

‘What is so human about novelists is that they never give up hoping that their next book will make them very rich.’²