I picked up Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night while en route to Delhi, not without a little trepidation though that the Indian immigration authorities might go through my luggage and object to my carrying a book on Kashmir. Nevertheless, as I began reading the book, the rest of the three hours that it takes to fly to Delhi from Karachi passed by in a daze. A memoir, Basharat's matter-of-fact and honest account of life in Kashmir, the poignant accounts of the people he met, the journeys he went through, the constant fear, the sadness of seeing his land falling victim to decades of warfare, and the hope of azaadi,(freedom) were an eye-opener at the very least.

We meet on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Basharat instantly puts me at ease when I introduce myself as a Pakistani journalist and encourages me to talk in Urdu. He's soft-spoken, and has a surprising saaf lehja (clear accent) when speaking Urdu, a throwback to his days spent studying at the Aligarh Muslim University, and is a relief to hear after two days of trying to figure out what somvaar and mangalwaar mean.

So we sit down, with cups of tea, and start talking. "Was it painful," I ask, "writing this book?"

"It was difficult," says Basharat, "but the more difficult parts were about other people, not my story, because I used my personal story as an entry into the major themes and events that have had a huge impact on Kashmir. After I had done my reporting and I was writing, I had the feeling that I was among one of the more sheltered ones, you know, I was a middle-class kid, could get an education, and go out in the world. Then as a reporter you meet people who went through absolute brutalities, and lived with very little hope -- writing about those people, that was really hard. It didn't feel like I was writing about someone else, I mean whoever's mother they may be, they're still my own people. The nature of the relationship is that there is a sense of community, a sense of a collective self. When I was writing about Kashmir, it didn't matter whose family it was, it is my story, my history."

Basharat has been working as a journalist for many years now, most recently at Foreign Affairs as an Assistant Editor. It took him four years to write the book, as he continued to work throughout the period. So how has the book been received in Kashmir? "The reaction in Kashmir has been the best I could ever get. After the book was released, I came back from New York, where I'm currently based. It was released in Delhi and then we did a reading in Srinagar in a coffee shop where I hang out. More than a hundred people had turned up, all very young people, and that was the best thing that could have happened to me. It was a coffee shop packed with youngsters, all asking questions about writing, about the nature of Kashmiri writing, how different my framing would be from an Indian's or a Pakistani's, it was a really intense discussion, and then I would get these emails and get friend requests on Facebook from eighth-graders from Kashmiri schools. My barber asked me, 'I saw your picture in the local newspaper, what was it about?' When I told him about the book, he asked me if I had written about the incident with the bomb, which I had, the barber is a character in the book. So it was random people really stopping me on the street and saying "thank you." The best part was when I was coming to Delhi, during the security check at the Srinagar airport, which is a mess because you go through ten security checks. At one checkpoint, I took out my boarding pass, raised my hands, and this young Kashmiri security official frisked me, he sees my boarding pass and says, 'Basharat Peer? I love your book, it is our history'. He said this while he was wearing the uniform of the Indian state, because in Kashmir, the economics is such that it is heavily dependent on the state, and it's his job, but that was the biggest compliment."

"Did you receive any criticism for the role of the Indian state forces and the freedom fighters portrayed in your book?" I ask. "No not at all, because everyone knows the role of the Indian State. Pakistan is an abstraction for Kashmir, I still haven't been there! (Two weeks after the interview, Basharat did visit the country for the first time, albeit for a week). The point is that India and Kashmir have a very separate relationship; Indians read about Kashmir in the papers, they can visit, they have friends from there. It is like the Palestinian who lives in Israel, he knows the Israeli better than he knows the Palestinian who lives in Gaza. Indians always had a sense that this is happening. But I did expect hostility, because it is a critique of the Indian state. The book doesn't deal with Pakistan because I didn't deal with Pakistan, it's an abstraction for me but it does mention the training camps and the Pakistani cricket team. This is the story of the relationship that India has with the part of the Kashmir that it occupies."

"As a Kashmiri, what kind of solution do you see for the Kashmir dispute," I ask, since it is a topic he doesn't touch upon much in the book. "We basically want azaadi from both India and Pakistan. That's the desire, the aspiration. What might happen in real time, as real life is far more complex than collective desire, so there is a lot of talk about quasi-sovereignty and autonomous regions and soft borders, which seems sort of reasonable, but I don't know if even that is happening. Kashmiris are not happy with the status quo. As a journalist, for example, I would want to do a story about Karachi and Bombay, but while I can visit the latter easily, I can't go to Karachi or any of the really interesting places in Pakistan and write.

"Most people want independence. There was a time when Kashmiris really wanted Pakistan, and then they got to know Pakistan. We knew what India is, but we didn't know what Pakistan is. The way Pakistan destroyed the secular groups, used the Jaamat-e-Islami for their own agenda, etc. However, one thing people always acknowledge is that Pakistan has supported Kashmir all along. But the way things look in Pakistan… my cook who was watching Geo TV in Kashmir incredulously asked, 'this is Pakistan?' So the way things are, this is not an option- there is still a lot of goodwill for Pakistan, there is no animosity or hatred, as opposed to the relationship with India which has been brutal and bitter. "

Following the release of the book and the book tours that follow, what else is this soft-spoken Kashmiri planning for the future? "I've just been travelling, doing readings, writing some pieces on post-Mumbai Kashmir, Obama, etc. But I'm really thinking about what the next book should be and on the process of deciding. If you let me in Pakistan for six months, I would love to write about what this invisible and abstract yet constant presence in my life has been about."

Zulfiqar Ghose is disturbed to see all-imposing structures of identity but happy to stay in the classifical mould while he experiments with his narrative from the sub-continent whose work is a conscientious depiction of different cultures, but, in the literary sense, he has never shown any concern to claim his roots and the place of his origin. After more than twenty-five years of topsy-turvy recognition, he has descended into an involuntary anonymity because his agent has recently refused to publish his latest novel, calling it not suave enough for contemporary readers.

Writers writing about the Empire, the postcolonial diaspora and migrant issues often unreservedly express their cultural predicaments but Ghose is a different case. Born in pre-partition Sialkot, educated in the colonial educational system in Bombay, Ghose emigrated to England with his family and ended up living in Texas, Austin where he taught creative writing and lives with his Brazilian wife. This seems an incredibly adventurous and culturally tenacious progression and opens out the writer to incorporate and release the east-west dichotomy. Hanif Kureshi and Tariq Ali never lived in Pakistan but once they walked into the western literary domains, their writings became reflective of post-partition Pakistan. But Zulfikar Ghose's critical reception both at home and abroad has been moderate whereas postcolonialism has paved way for a literary community engaged in adding to the literatures of the east and the west. However, Ghose's truthful and conscious disclaimer about his origins indicates the problematic relationship between biography and author. Ghose's writings are wary reminders of the fact that a writer's involvement with any context or culture should not be made an issue of critical debate. In other words, 'text' should be the primary and the context a peripheral reality. It is indeed contestable as why Ghose relinquishes his legitimate claim to nostalgia that arises out of one's geographical dislocation.

Ghose belongs to that rare group of writers who neither resist nor accept any category but critique the pitfalls of preferring biography to literature. Ghose has experienced migration and multiculturalism and responded to each experience but this does not liberate him to concretize his actual social identity. The result: Ghose neither applied for US citizenship nor ever showed any enthusiasm about his Pakistani links. This type of neither-outsider, nor-insider is a unique but vulnerable literary vantage that often makes his work unintentionally elitist and extra-peripheral. Either the writer is shaped by the western experience or is the one who shapes the western experience. Ghose appropriates these alternatives. Confessions of a Native-alien (1965) is the formative book in which the writer explains the complexity of association with one or more predominant cultural patterns.

"We were leaving two countries, for in some way we were alien to both and our emigration to a country to which we were not native only emphasized our alienation from the country in which we had been born. This distinction between the two countries of my early life has been the schizophrenic theme of much of my thinking: it created a psychological conflict and a pressing need to know that I do belong somewhere and neither the conflict nor the need has ever been resolved. I know that many other Indians and Pakistanis suffer from this conflict and I think that this is one unconscious motive why so many Indians and Pakistanis have come to live in England--the immediate motive, of course, being an economic one; for the English, when ruling India, gave us the last chance in our history to live together. If I wanted a nationalist label, I would call myself an Indo-Pakistani."

Despite these avowed 'Confessions' Ghose has not altogether ignored South Asia and Pakistan. Ghose's first Novel The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) is a tightly-knit story about the horrors of feudalism and the plight of a simple farmer living in the sun-baked plains of central Punjab. The novel is written in the first person and does not anticipate the writer's intensions to complicate the narrative but offers an undulated commentary on Pakistan's political ideology and the inadequacy of the masses, which also indicates Ghose disillusionment with a particular ideology and locale. It is in The Triple Mirror of the Self'(1992) that Ghose disentangles the knot holding on the relationship of author and biography in fiction. The word 'triple' is the tripartite dimensions of the work of art; author, biography and fiction. The Triple Mirror of the Self is a collage of disparate constructs; Cervantes' picaresque, Marquez's magic realism and Joycean epiphanies.

In his early phase, Ghose was influenced by post-World-War-II writers and later on by Amazonian myths that made his protagonists wander in the labyrinth of rainforests and anthropomorphic worlds. Ghose sense of history is very strong but rarely bothered by the blurring of personal histories and locales and his narratives seamlessly switch over from one cultural set to another, thus making a chain of world cultures.

It is in the phrase 'native-alien' that we can find Ghose's consistent concern with the eruptible nature of a conflict between perception and cultural realities. Pakistan, India, British India, Britain, and the USA are all part of his mental and fictional perception but none of these locales claim any permanence in his imaginative forays. His landscapes consist of dusty arid plains of the Pakistani part of the Punjab, colonial metropolis of Bombay, the English heaths, Brazilian forests, the Amazon and the ranches of Texas. On using such variegated topography, Ghose does not claim any singular location. By virtue of this structural pattern, Ghose incurs exclusion from the familiar coloniser-colonised spectrum. Three volumes of The Incredible Brazilian is evidence of Ghose's multicultural narratives. Ghose has translated his experiences in a variety of genres and narratives, which include poetry, realist novel, short story, picaresque and magic realism. The Native (1972), The Beautiful Empire (1975), and A Different World (1978) - are the narratives of a generic protagonist, (like Conrad and Kafka) Gregorio; he is the personification of Ghose's own peripatetic fictional and real life - native, outsider, traveller and observer. Gregorio like Conrad's hero Marlowe experiences different moral and metaphysical problems. Brazil becomes the centre of all colonial tensions and every gone-by locale appears and disappears whether it is England, Bombay, Pakistan, or Texas. Like Conrad, Ghose realised that culture has the inherent tendency to destroy man's essential innocence and this contact carries enormous stakes. In Figures of the Enchantment (1986), Vivado, the underworld dream merchant says, "people crave for an alternative world to the one in which they live. They'll go any distance to see if it isn't to be found somewhere." Here lies the crux of Zulfikar Ghose's fiction and life. The urge and desire for the 'alternative' is not only unavoidable but has the seeds of creativity and destruction. In order to grasp and feel this 'world' a writer may trample upon any locale and space for his share of reality. A writer belongs to every place and to no place. Reference to place and locale may ensure a writer's place in the bibliomaniac-publishing world but to transcend the narrow constraints of culture and locale is the primary call. This might even cost the writer to lose readership because the readers are also split across race and prejudice.

Although known much for his fiction, Ghose began his career as a poet. His early poetry is prototypically postcolonial as the poet is overwhelmed with the notion of man's unending quest in the form of geographical dislocation. The loss of India (1964), Jets from the Orange (1967) and The violent West (1972) are his early volumes and many poems are shot from the perspective of an itinerant, grappling with every new arrival and emergent destination. In literary sense, his poetic persona often negotiates with the shifting perspective and the image of 'Jet' conveys the writer's personal unsettlement in a world expanding dangerously because of over-communication. The image of travel/journey and flight convey a dizzying array of locales, which the poet will be visiting.

The poem Decomposition is a telling piece of Ghose's literary initiation; he sees himself as a 'brain-washed' eastern, a reductive 'fossil', of the cultural skeletal joined by South Asian, British, American and Latin American realities. In Geography Lesson the poet, metaphorically flying on a 'Jet' sees the earth from different angles and heights as his perception waxes and wanes, alternatively, until he sees the earth from a relatively close angle and discovers the horrors of human conflicts.

Often, Ghose is disturbed to see all-imposing structures of identity but happy to stay in the classical mould while he experiments with his narrative form with great care. His education in English and European classics made him adhere to the rules of writing, bordering on conservatism and experimentation. He is painfully aware of his own dwindling recognition to the extent of rejection. "We are living in an age in which the artistic values have diminished, disappeared altogether. The publishing industry is dominated by executives who are concerned only with the bottom line. Their responsibility to a culture has diminished. They have become corporate industries. Journalism is interested only in the new and trendy done by the young. For the older writer, if there is no specific market, then there is no publishing interest," said Ghose in an interview.

Rizwan Akhtar is a PhD

In this climate of internecine militancy do I dare to talk of art? What can art do for us? Why do we need the arts?

I do not wish to go into a discussion of what is art, or what distinguishes art from non-art. (There are no exact rules by which we can tell what is art from what is non-art). From whatever we learn from our elders at home -- and later at school -- we tend to believe certain artefacts, paintings, urns or buildings to be works of art. Later, when we grow up we begin to question our assumptions, not just because we want to defy our elders but because the works do not appeal to our sensibilities. "Why?" we ask, "is it art?" What we mean to ask is "Why is it good art?" The answers often do not satisfy us. Defining art is as troublesome as defining a human being.

We know we cannot measure the works of art as we measure distances but when we become more discerning in our tastes we develop our own rating scale for artistic quality. We know we cannot be art critics so we say, modestly, "I don't know anything about art but I know what I like."

Generalizations about art are, on the whole, easy to disprove. If we agree with the premise that a work of art must be made by man (which does not necessarily mean that we deny or do not care about the works of art created by nature, such as flowers, shapes of trees, startling sunsets) we have an easier path to tread. We are now talking about tangible things, architecture, visual, plastic and fine arts and all their off-shoots.

At every stage of history we are struck, again and again, by the leap of the imagination by which a Sophocles, a Da Vinci, a Shakespeare, a Ghalib or a Picaaso turns his craft into works of art, works which lift us out of the mire of our existence and enable us to experience divinity. Who can look at Alhambra's 'Court of Lions' in its stilted arches of extravagantly complex shape, and not gaze at it with wondering eyes -- or look at the symmetry and exquisite proportions of the Taj Mahal and not be struck by its weightless elegance?

An artist transfers an image which is in his mind on to paper, (if he is a painter), or bricks and mortar, (if he is an architect). We admire what he has created not because we can understand the process in terms of a transfer or projection of the image from the artists' mind, but because it stimulates our imagination. We look at it or, in the case of music, hear it, year after year; it still stirs us and ennobles us.

I do not think that you can make the arts popular by pumping money into them. Let me give you an example. There has never been a dearth of artistic activity in England but those involved in creative activities have always moaned that they do not receive the backing and the financial support that they need. The Tory Government often came under fire for reducing the grants they gave to the arts.

Towards the end of the last century the Tories introduced the lottery in England. It took off in a big way. Suddenly there were millions on tap. No one expected the lottery to produce such abundance but it did. During the eve of John Major's stewardship it was announced that some of the surplus from the lottery fund would be channelled to preserve art and heritage. A proportion of the lottery money was allocated to the arts and the government, rather smugly, cut back its Arts budget.

There was a huge noise. Why was the government ridding itself of the responsibility of financing culture? Why was everything being left to the lottery? Accusations were flung from every quarter, from Dudley Doomsday Society, to the Wolverhampton Wildlife Club. The Tories could only have been relieved when they were toppled.

The New Labour's plans for utilising the lottery money were imaginative. Provinces, which had always moaned that the major slice of a subsidy always went to London and that only a trickle was diverted towards them, were appeased by generous promises. The plans stipulated that within the next two or three years there would be more galleries, museums, concerts halls, theatres, not only in London but all over the country. The new century, it was declared, would see an artistic cornucopia in Britain.

A brief glance at the list of annual grants to be made was enough to satisfy every art organisation in the country: The Lowry Centre in Salford would get £41 million, Stoke-on-Trent concert hall £14 million; Milton Keynes Arts complex £19 million; Walsall museum and art gallery £15 million … the list went on and on.

No one was left in any doubt that arts were at last going to be given a powerful shot in the arm. Every provincial town and city was going to benefit -- and all this from the first phase of the lottery. The plans envisaged that all kinds of artistic activity (from origami to oratory) would be in the offing.

The critics were quick to point out that all the money was going to be spent on new buildings and renovations and there would be little, if any, left for grants to companies that already existed but were hard pressed to mount productions. What was the use of having all these great new temples to the Arts with no money to put anything on or inside them?

************

And what of the unsuspecting public upon whom all this Art was going to be sprung? The English have always been known to prefer football to the theatre. Could they now be expected to give up their customary ways and dig deep into the artistic goodies on display?

But all these musings are a far cry from our own set-up in which those in authority only pay lip-service to the arts for fear that they would, otherwise, be judged as philistines.

We need the arts because they make us wonder and because they humanise us. But for art -- in whatever form -- music, architecture, poetry, drama, painting, we would be like ants crawling away throughout our existence. Will there be a blossoming of the arts if we injected millions into our galleries and museums? I doubt it.

What the arts need is priority, being taught openly and unashamedly to the young so that they can begin to comprehend that schools must not be blown away and that books are not for burning.

The identity and depth of a nation can only be gauged by its cultural expression. This can only come about through the arts.