Output details

Another Gulmohar Tree

Research content/process:

Another Gulmohar Tree is the story of a Pakistani writer/journalist and his English wife, an illustrator. It examines choices made within a marriage against the backdrop of artistic Karachi and the cultural scene of the 50s. It depicts, through its protagonists, the changing trends in the arts: from left wing activism in literature to a liberal nationalist aesthetic, and in the plastic arts from a neo-traditionalist idiom to American-inspired action painting. The story was in part inspired by the careers of a real-life couple. However I wanted to avoid direct biography so I immersed myself in their writings and drawings respectively (including a work in Urdu of illustrated poems for children) to give my fiction the texture of the period. I also studied the work of women artists of the time, e.g. Agha and Rahim. The long central section evokes, impressionistically and iteratively, the cultural life of Karachi in the late 50s and early 60s, in particular the art world, in a way that no other work of fiction I know of in English does. The novella also addresses the role of women in the economic systems of a dynamic and changing post-colonial capital city, and the conscience of the writer in a military regime. The introductory chapter interweaves traditional folk-stories both as a metaphor for the collaboration of the protagonists in producing illustrated literature for children, and as an example of allegorical writing in a dictatorship. It might have made creative sense to place these fables within the text, but I decided to place them at the start, to cast a metaphoric light on a realist text, and leave the reader to make the connection between the fable and the period piece while altering the balance of both.