It is for us as readers to pursue the somewhat under-researched form of diaspora interviews, in which writers in dialogue with critics and academics enrich our reading with brilliant new insights.
Finally, a sincere thank you to Professor Susheila Nasta for inspiring the Creative Lives interviews project at a memorable meeting of the core partners of the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2017 that also included Professors Frank Schultz-Engler, Avtar Brah, Klaus Stierstorfer, Janet Wilson and Annalisa Oboe. We are grateful to Alexandra Watkins, the first Project Manager of the Creative Lives initiative, and one of its first interviewers. Thank you also to Susheila Nasta for assisting with the permission process to include her interview with Romesh Gunesekera in this book. Last but not least, we are very grateful to all our interviewees and interviewers for accepting our invitation to contribute.
A note on the introductions
The introductions to each of the interviews have been written by the editors in collaboration with the interviewers. Two exceptions are the interviews with Romesh Gunesekera and Neel Mukherjee, which were originally published in the journal Wasafiri. Here, the editors’ introductions precede the original prefatory notes by the respective interviewers, Susheila Nasta and Anjali Joseph. The third is the interview with Sungchuk Kyi, for which the interviewer, Ruth Gamble, has written the introduction.
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1 In the Creative Lives project, the term “diasporic” includes those who are settled outside their homeland as well those who have returned to the homeland after spending a substantial period abroad.
2 Vietnamese Australian scholar Anh Nguyen (2019) has shown how diasporic communication has been transformed by social media, which have “brought new possibilities for creating and sharing histories, memories, identities, and diasporic communities, both on and offline”.
Genres, Languages, Voices:
Rukhsana Ahmad in Conversation with Maryam Mirza
Photograph of Rukhsana Ahmad copyright 2021 by Anna Morrison
Born and raised in Karachi, the highly regarded playwright, fiction writer and translator Rukhsana Ahmad moved to London in the early 1970s. In 1991, with Rita Wolf, she co-founded Kali Theatre Company which specializes in presenting plays by women of South Asian descent. She was also a founding chair and trustee of the South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive (SADAA). A collection of short stories, The Gatekeeper’s Wife and Other Stories (2014), features the experiences of the British Pakistani community as well as those of characters living in Pakistan; the range of backgrounds is diverse—the title story, for example focuses on Annette, the British wife of a Pakistani man in Lahore. A somewhat similar pattern had characterized the novel The Hope Chest (Ahmad 1996), with its interactions between upper middle-class Rani, Ruth who meets and supports Rani in a London hospital, and Reshma, the daughter of Rani’s family’s gardener—instances of Rukhsana Ahmad’s interest in those bridges that “transcend family, class and faith”, which she discusses in her interview.
Rukhsana Ahmad has written numerous plays, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominee Song for a Sanctuary (1990), the Susan Smith Blackburn International Prize finalist River on Fire (2000–01) and Mistaken …: Annie Besant in India (2007–08), which toured the UK and India. She has also adapted several novels and short stories into plays, such as Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero and Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s “Kali Shalwar”. Her original screenplays include Cassandra and the Viaduct (1996) and The Errant Gene (2002). We Sinful Women, Rukhsana Ahmad’s ground-breaking translation of Urdu poetry by Pakistani women, was published in 1991; she has also translated Dastak Naa Do, an Urdu novel by Fatima Altaf (1927–2018), published under the title The One Who Did Not Ask (1993), thus making available in English this fine novel about the way the protagonist Gaythi, from an extensive, wealthy, Muslim upper-class family in pre-partition India, has to come to terms with change.
Here she discusses her prolific and multifaceted creative life with Maryam Mirza, in an interview conducted by email in January–March 2018.
The interviewer Maryam Mirza is Assistant Professor in World Literatures in English at Durham University, UK. She received her PhD from Aix-Marseille University, and her first monograph Intimate Class Acts (2016) was published by Oxford University Press. She is currently working on her second monograph, provisionally entitled Resistance and Its Discontents in South Asian Women’s Fiction (under contract with Manchester University Press).
Maryam Mirza (MM): Ms. Ahmad, who / what would you say are your main literary influences?
Rukhsana Ahmad (RA): I’m afraid it’s difficult to be precise about what these might be. I started reading fiction at a very young age in both English and Urdu without much supervision and have loved innumerable books at different stages of my development. Some were great, some mediocre and some forgettable. I read more fiction than non-fiction until I became a full-time student of English literature at Karachi University. At that point, my reading in Urdu began to slip but I had, by then, learnt to love Manto, Krishen Chander and Ismat Chughtai’s work;