From reluctant initial steps towards finding its own idiom as well as a politics that picks itself up and graduates from abject apologia to informed introspection to bold questioning, the Pakistani novel has taken important strides in desirable directions. Having assessed and reconciled to an appreciable extent their own identity while living on foreign shores,
Pakistani writers are now engaging much more self-assuredly with how the world – essentially the West that controls trade, aid, and publishing – often chooses to define and stereotype us. Also, how such categorising and judgmental behavior often hides behind veneers of noble intentions, political correctness or old-fashioned duplicity.
Finally, how it all reveals the ignorance, insecurities, paradoxes, and at times, agendas, of those who categorise and judge. The Inn from Maniza Naqvi comes to us as an excellent representative of this advanced phase of political consciousness and contestation in Pakistani fiction.
It’s a novel that meets the necessary criteria of a good read, but more importantly it provokes questions and provides insights that can only be offered by someone with nuanced multi-cultural sensitivity, which Naqvi fully possesses.
