The city, as an object of inquiry, is increasingly being engaged by novelists who attempt to analyse the social but who seem to be weary of structural social science explanations. Much of this literature is about change—post-colonial cities in the throes of urbanisation as it were. The novel, it appears, allows for peeling out the layers that constitute these cities in a language that evokes a strong sense of time and place.
Karachi Raj is the latest addition to this growing list. Set in twenty-first century Karachi, it explores the city through the lives of its residents over a one-year period. In this debut novel, Anis Shivani makes an impressive attempt to develop a range of characters who represent Karachi in its myriad avatars.
The novel has four central characters—a working-class man, Hafiz; his intellectually oriented sister Seema; Claire, an American anthropologist doing field work in Karachi; and Ashiq, a middling historian. The first three characters are rooted in the netherworld of Karachi—the basti, a space which represents the so-called non-modern and the under-developed in a sea of hybrid modernity.
Each character’s story is enlivened by their encounter with people and places which gives the book a sense of hustle not quite unlike the rhythm of the city it sets out to capture. Shivani engages with the familiar trope of class, but without essentialising his characters’ actions to this analysis of society. Thus, while Seema’s understated affair with her professor Ashiq introduces her to the world of the nouveau rich, Shivani does well not to describe her impressions of this world only through the prism of class. Seema’s annoyance with Ashiq’s materialistic sisters cannot be seen entirely as a result of their class difference, but as a result of their incessant chatter that simply bores her. On the other hand, class difference for Shivani seems to exist in everyday moments of seeing and acting, such as the ability of rich people to nonchalantly proclaim—“One of the great pleasures of Karachi is to park on the road like this and allow yourself to be oblivious to other people”, while completely missing out the details of their surroundings.
Through Claire, Shivani explores the impenetrability of society in Pakistan, pointing to the multiple ties, solidarities and endless negotiations that constitute life in the basti. Yet she is constantly aware of her inability to be “native enough”.
The third central character Hafiz represents in some ways the gritty underbelly of the city. Hafiz represents the people on whose feet the city runs, yet who never see themselves as such caught as they are in the humdrum of life.
Finally, Shivani’s fourth central character, Ashiq, is a quintessential academic. Through him the story reflects a host of ideas and values at play in the book—religious fundamentalism, consumerism, the bureaucratic culture of the university, the marginality of an academic to society.
Through these thick narratives, Shivani sketches a compelling story of a city, which on one hand is being transformed by global capitalism and yet on the other hand remains the same in myriad ways. While Karachi Raj misses out on building a unique sense of history about the city, which could have been the backdrop to the lives of its inhabitants, Shivani’s powerful literary style and impressive ear for dialogue is sure to keep the reader deeply engrossed in the novel.