Pride & Prejudice in Pakistan

Austenistan
Edited - Laaleen Sukhera
Bloomsbury
xi+179
Rs 350

There's a scene midway through Saniyya Gauhar's The Mughal Empire, one of the seven short stories that make up this collection of Jane Austen fan fiction set in Pakistan, that is a neat parody of the conversation between Elizabeth and Darcy at the Netherfield ball in Pride and Prejudice. To jog the memories of readers not familiar with P&P — Darcy has asked Elizabeth to dance, and is attempting to engage her in conversation. She, oblivious to Darcy's incipient attraction and angry for various reasons, gives offhand answers. Until, Darcy, finding a neutral subject, asks, "What think you of books?" It's a comic scene, with an underpinning of romantic intensity so characteristic of Austen.

In The Mughal Empire, Gauhar's protagonists are called Siraj Khan and Kamila Mughal. He's interested in her, she's not because, though a successful lawyer in London, he is far down the social rung from her, the daughter of an industrialist. They've been wheedled into dancing at a mehendi, and he, looking for things to talk about, asks what her hobbies are. "I love reading," she answers, confessing that Jane Austen was her favourite. At which those around them start to rib her about P&P and Darcy, and, a male friend quips — "Mr Darcy has done more to ruin marriages than any other man in history." His wife tells him to shut up because he hasn't read the book, but he's undeterred. "I saw the movie," he replies.

Indeed, Austen's appeal, 200 years after her death, is no longer limited to her novels. The film and TV adaptations of her novels have got her a new generation of fans who may never have read her novels. It's perhaps what makes her such a favourite of fan fiction writers; P&P is among the top 30 books on Fanfiction.net, with some 430,000 entries reworking the entire novel or parts of it.

Stories inspired by Austen, set in Pakistan, thus, should not come as a surprise. There's also much truth in what Caroline Jane Knight, Austen's fifth great niece, says in her foreword — that Pakistani society has "far more in common with Jane's world than modern western" society. For instance, like with modern Pakistan, money and lineage were of utmost importance in Regency-period Britain, and making a 'good' marriage the only respectable way a woman could hope to make her way in the world. But first, you must get your head around seeing Fitzwilliam Darcy transposed into Faiz Dar or Faisal Dayyan.

Only half the stories in the collection are based on Austen. The rest are themed loosely around issues one finds in her fiction: the precariousness of a woman's 'reputation'; the predicament of being single beyond 'marriageable' age and what happens to love beyond marriage. These are unexceptional stories. Of greater interest, to Austen fans, are the stories based on the novels, where the writers show much ingenuity in channeling the original plots into a different time and space. Gauhar, for instance, has Kamila Mughal and Siraj Khan echo the words of Elizabeth and Darcy in The Mughal Empire. But Kamila is not Elizabeth, she is Miss Bingey, the woman who was thwarted in her hopes to marry Darcy. Inversions such as these add a new dimension to the original and make this collection a rewarding read. Strictly for fans, of course.