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Muslims in Diaspora: Negotiating Identity in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers
South Asian Review, 2020
This paper explores the challenges Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers face while negotiating their identities in diaspora. The immigrants, whose individual and social lives were guided predominantly by religion back at home, face an ontological problem when they encounter the secular Western culture in Britain, which destabilizes and threatens their individual and collective subjectivities in diaspora. As a result, they find themselves in what Homi Bhabha calls "unhomely" space. To make the "unhomely" space homely, the immigrants adopt different strategies, but all their efforts to find home in diaspora turns out to be an impossible enterprise leading them to disillusionment, disintegration, and despair. Examining various strategies used by the immigrants in the novel, I argue that the Pakistani immigrants in Maps try to negotiate their cultural and religious identities either by retaining their preconceived subjectivity or by reconstructing and readjusting it in the context of a new society and culture, and the difference in their attitudes toward the host culture stems from their different subjectivities formed in the homeland, the nature of their migration, their memory of home, and the desire for a community based on similar religious and cultural values.
Amitava Kumar, through his travelogue writing, Husband of a Fanatic, tried to find out the real barrier that inhibits the communities of people from having a harmonious and peaceful coexistence. Amitava Kumar had to face many predicaments on marrying a Pakistani Muslim woman. After these experiences, he travelled through different parts of India and Pakistan, to get a close look at the conditions of the minority and the majority segments in society. Besides gaining an understanding of the condition, the aim of the travel project was to establish a space for himself and his family. The book, Husband of a Fanatic can be considered not merely as a journey but as his way of self-discovery. Key Words: Religion and Society, India and Pakistan, Geographical Border, Marriage, Love
2011
This article proposes readings of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) as a novel offering multiple critiques on the situation of Muslim immigrants in Great Britain. The novel relates how the Pakistani immigrant community deals with the murder of the lost lovers referred to in the title and the challenges the honour killing poses to their religious beliefs. The main characters of the narrative, Kaukab, Shamas and Suraya represent conflicting perspectives on life in the diasporic community and on coping with the tragedy. By focusing on the setting and the atmosphere created in the novel and by connecting it to the intersections of gender and religious identities, this article aims to point out the ways in which Aslam’s novel gives the reader insights into its Pakistani immigrant community and offers different interpretations of this community. By subversively reconfiguring the patriarchal society, the novel exerts manifold criticisms of the Muslim immigrant community as well as of the failing multicultural British society.
South Asian Diaspora, 2017
Masculinity, as Bhabha writes in an essay which takes its title from a taunt repeatedly thrown at him by his father ('Are You a Man or a Mouse?'), 'is the "taking up" of an enunciative position, the making up of a psychic complex, the assumption of a social gender, the supplementation of a historic sexuality, the apparatus of a cultural difference' (1995, 58). Maps for Lost Lovers, Aslam's 2004 novel, centres on a fictitious lower-class Muslim-Pakistani diasporic community in northern England and the exploration of cultural difference in the text often entails drawing a sharp dividing line between 'Western' values and Islam, where the former is ostensibly equated with individual freedom, personal fulfilment and happiness for both the sexes and the latter, particularly in its fundamentalist manifestations, with repression and tyranny. This contrast becomes especially stark when the narrator catalogues the atrocities carried out in the name of religious ortho-doxy by the immigrant community against its female members. In this article, I address Aslam's ambiguous representation of British-Muslim masculinities and aim to tease out the various, sometimes contradictory, strands of his portrayal of male identities, to evaluate the ways in which it not only complicates the Islam-West and orthodoxy-modernity binaries but
Book Review Naveeda Khan. 2012. Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan.
ass that makes it a suitable representation of illnesses of various types. Following the writings of Deleuze and Derrida, there has been a heightened interest in using figures of animality to model different kinds of sociality and relationship. This edited volume is a novel addition to that body of literature and will appeal to a wide range of scholarly disciplines.