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ISSN.1026-7026

E L F ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERARY FORUM

ANNUAL RESEARCH JOURNAL (HEC Recognized Research Journal)

Department of English

Faculty of Social Sciences and Arts

SHAH ABDUL LATIF UNIVERSITY, KHAIRPUR SINDH, PAKISTAN

Vol. No.13 Refereed International Journal 2011

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ISSN.1026-7026

E L F English Language and Literary Forum

ANNUAL RESEARCH JOURNAL Department of English

Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Sindh, Pakistan

EDITORIAL BOARD

Dr Ghulam Mustafa Mashori Editor-in-Chief Dr Ziauddin Khand Member

Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah Member

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr Zafar Iqbal Member

Dr Imtiaz Husnain (India) Member

Dr G.M. Hall (UK) Member

Dr J.L. Milton (UK) Member

Dr Estela Ene (USA) Member

Dr Wee Hock Ann, Lionel (Singapore) Member

Dr Kaplan M. Lindsay (USA) Member

Dr Paul Tench (UK) Member

Dr Thomas W. Meyer (USA) Member


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NOTES ON EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD • Dr Ghulam Mustafa Mashori Editor-in-Chief Associate Professor Department of English Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Pakistan

• Dr Ziauddin Khand Member Chairman Department of English Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Pakistan

• Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah Member Assistant Professor Department of English Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Pakistan

• Dr Zafar Iqbal Member Chairman Department of English University of Leads Lahore, Pakistan

• Dr Imtiaz Hasnain (India) Member Department of Linguistics Aligarh Muslim University Aligarh

• Dr G. M. Hall (UK) Member College of Arts University Wales Swansea

• Dr J.L. Milton (UK) Member Head of School of Applied Linguistics University Wales Swansea

• Dr Estela Ene (USA) Member School of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching University of Arizona

• Dr Wee Hock Ann, Lionel (Singapore) Member Associate Professor of English Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore

• Dr Kaplan M. Lindsay (USA) Member School of English George Town University, Washingtion D.C

• Dr Paul Tench (UK) Member Associate Researcher

Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, UK

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GUIDLINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS ELF Annual Research Journal is a HEC recognized journal published once a

year. Articles submitted to the Journal should be original contribution¸ and should not be under consideration for any other publication at the same time. If an article is under such consideration, authors should clearly indicate this at the time of submission.

Authors are entitled to 10 free off prints and a copy of the issue in which their articles appear. Copyrights in articles rest with the publisher. Articles should be typed on an IMB compatible word processor (preferably MS Word 2000, Adobe Page Maker 7) if at all possible, and the CD should accompany the typed script at acceptance stage. CD should be labeled with the title of the articles, the author’s name, and the software used.

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Length Articles of around 3500 words in length are preferred. It is not possible for us to

accept articles over 4000 words long. Please give a word count at the end of your article. Word counts should include tables and appendices, but may exclude the abstract and the list of references (APA).

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main headings, but do not underline subheadings. Do not use a numbering or lettering system for headings. Do not try to format your submission in the style of a published article. An international format of research papers is suggested.

The ELF Annual Research Journal is published annually by the department of English. All correspondence should be addressed to the Editor-in-chief ELF, Annual Research Journal, Faculty of Social Sciences and Arts, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Sindh Pakistan.

E-mail Editor in Chief: [email protected] ISSN 1026-7026 Subscriptions: Pakistan: Annual Rs.300 Foreign: Annual US $ 15 Copy right@ 2011: Reserved with the ELF Annual Research Journal Publisher: Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Printed by: Popat Press, Mall Road Khairpur Mirs Designed by: Hubdar Ali Mangi

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ISSN.1026-7026

E L F English Language and Literary Forum

ANNUAL RESEARCH JOURNAL Department of English

Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Sindh, Pakistan

CONTENTS

01. Personal Freedom in Conflict with Social Forces: Henerick Ibsen’s Ghosts................ 1 Irshad Ahmad Tabasum and Saman Khalid

02. English in non-native context: Distinctive features of Pakistani journalistic English........ 11 Behzad Anwar and Dr. Mubina Talaat

03. Siraiki Drama Programming on PTV: the Concept of ‘Backwardness’ through a Postcolonial Lens ...................................................................................................... 21

Nukhbah Taj Langah

04. Oxford English-Sindhi Dictionary: A Critical Study in Lexicography........................... 37 Zulfiqar Ali Shah and Dr. Ghulam Mustafa Mashori

05. Occupational Therapy as a Redress for Nihilism Based on Edward Albee’s Play ‘The Zoo Story’ .......................................................................................................... 47

Sehrish Firdous

06 Impersonality and “Four Quartets"............................................................................. 55 Dr. Muhammad Khan Sangi, Abdul Sattar Gopang and Dr. Ziauddin Khand

07. Willingness to communicate inL2: a perception of Pakistani University Students...... 65 Mumtaz Ali Mari, Habibullah Pathan and Ambreen Shahriar

08. Developing a Teaching Program for the Students of English with Low Ability in Writing......... 83 Dr.Ghulam Mustafa Mashori and Zulfiqar Ali Shah

09 A Review of “Moth Smoke” ........................................................................................ 97 Munazza Batool Tahir


VI

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 01. Irshad Ahmad Tabasum Assistant Professor of English Govt. Postgraduate College Khanpur District Rahim Yar Khan PhD Scholar of English Literature,University of Management Technology Lahore

02. Saman Khalid Assistant Professor of English,Govt. Gulberg College for Women Lahore PhD Scholar of English Literature,GC University Lahore

03. Behzad Anwar Lecturer Department of English University of Gujrat

04. Dr. Mubina Talaat Chairperson, Department of Humanities, Air University Islamabad

05. Nukhbah Taj Langah Department of English, Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan

06. Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah Assistant Professor, Department of English,

Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Sindh Pakistan

07. Dr Ghulam Mustafa Mashori Associate Professor, Department of English,


08. Sehrish Firdous A Postgraduate student, Department of English Language and Literature University of the Punjab Lahore

09. Dr. Muhammad Khan Sangi Assistant Professor,Institute of English Language & Literature University of Sindh, Jamshoro

10. Abdul Sattar Gopang Lecturer,Department of Curriculum Development & Special Education University of Sindh, Jamshoro

11. Dr Ziauddin Khand Professor and Chairman, Department of English,


12. Mr Mumtaz Ali Mari Lecturer at the Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur

Sindh Pakistan. Presently he is pursuing his doctoral studies in Applied Linguistics at Northumbria University, UK

13. Mr Habibullah Pathan Lecturer at English Language Development Centre Mehran University Jamshoro. Mr Pathan completed his M.Ed. ELT in 2009 from University of Glasgow, UK. Currently he is pursuing doctorate at the University of Glasgow. His research interests are SLA,

L2 Motivation and Language policy and planning

14. Ambreen Shahriar Lecturer at the Institute of English, University of Sindh. She did her first Master's in English literature from University of Sindh followed by her second Master's in Tesol from University of

Leceister. Presently she is pursuing her PhD at the Goldsmith University of London UK

15. Munazza Batool Tahir Project Head Cambridge Language Council, Bosan Road Multan

Personal Freedom in Conflict with Social Forces: Henerick Ibsen’s Ghosts

Irshad Ahmad Tabasum• and Saman Khalid••

ABSTRACT: The paper studies conflict between the personal freedom and the social forces in Henrick Ibsen’s Ghosts. The protagonist, Mrs. Alving, is a strange mixture of bravery and weakness which makes her true subject of this study. She bravely faces the bitterness of her married life and takes bold and socially sensible decisions. But she ultimately realizes the loss that her socially compromised life leads to. She may be worldly wise but her yielding to the disciplinary power of society makes her a cipher. She leaves her house as a protest against the disloyalty of her husband but fails to escape the social web and returns to the husband acting upon the counseling of parish priest. She conceals the debauchery of her husband for about twenty years and builds an Orphanage as his memorial to do away with any rumor about his past. She even sends her son away from the house to save him from the evil influence of his father. The mentally sick son, however, becomes as debauched as his father. So the son inadvertently turns out to be the ghost of his father. By her long and careful maneuvering Mrs. Alving is able to give a neat shape to things but the cause of personal freedom is negated during the whole process. So she fails to expand her vision beyond the perimeters of domesticity in patriarchal society and following the male discourse brings the long hateful comedy to its tragic end.

Key words: Conflict; Personal freedom; Social forces; Henerick Ibsen’s ghosts

INTRODUCTION

Henrick Ibsen’s Ghosts presents a constant conflict between the personal freedom and the social forces. This conflict rages in the internal as well as external world of its protagonist, Mrs. Alving. She finds herself enmeshed in the web of patriarchal laws. The web is too strong to be broken. So she fails to place her personal happiness above her need to be approved by society.

She lives within a conventional society and yet tries to be free of its conventions. Her assertive nature is normalized by “disciplinary power of society” • Assistant Professor of English Govt. Postgraduate College Khanpur District Rahim Yar Khan •• Assistant Professor of English Govt. Gulberg College for Women Lahore

Irshad Ahmad Tabasum, Saman Khalid / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 2

(Foucault 1979: 194). So, she is subjected to the power she tries to challenge. This maladjustment incurs a heavy loss on her. She allows herself to be socialized by the institutions of marriage and family. The institution of family is regarded as the main social factor responsible for controlling female body. The word family is derived from the Latin word femulus meaning household servants and slaves (Renzetti 1992: 135). Renzetti further illustrates the institution of family by commenting that “The notion of family was sanctioned by custom and law throughout most of the Western world, for a man’s family – his wife, children, and slaves – were like his material possessions, defined as his property” (1992:135-36). Many modern feminist theorists point out how the institution of marriage suppresses women. Fiona Tolan’s views how society exploits women under the sacred garb of marriage are worth quoting: "Marriage is an oppressive and exploitative economic arrangement which reinforces sexual inequality and binds women to domesticity” (2006: 321).

The world of Ghosts is permeated with patriarchal society. The institutions of family and marriage work as ISA, Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser 1971) in such a society. These institutions generate an ideology of subordination of female to male. As an individual, Mrs. Alving internalizes such ideology and acts in accordance with it. She tries to “create meanings within the institution of marriage and misrecognizes her place” (Klages 2006: 132) in it. She gets confused whenever she realizes the power imbalance enforced and upheld by the institution of marriage. Marriage becomes illusion for her when she comes to know about the adultery of her husband. She tries to free herself from the gender role imposed upon her but she is tightly woven into the fabric of family. She tries to revolt against the structure and social organization of marriage and family but she is not made of the stuff as Nora (Ibsen’s The Doll’s House) is made of. So she fails miserably and sticks to marriage and family. But both the institutions fail to bring her happiness and normal upbringing of her child. It is a grim social fact that Mrs. Alving is brought up in the patriarchal social set up where “the pink world of girls is inferior in many respects to the blue world of boys” (Macionis 1987: 356). Juddy Mann aptly remarks that girls are trained in such a way that they consider themselves intellectually inferior to boys. The institution of family implants various ideological hindrances for women for mental expeditions. We can trace this all the way back to Aristotle and the Greeks’ exclusion of women from the schools of medicine (1996: 94).

DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS

The very biological make up of Mrs. Alving places her in a society which considers females as inferior beings. She may not accept such inferiority by deserting her unfaithful husband but the power of social values compels her to come back to that husband. Such a return further ignites her sense of inferiority. She has to act and survive in a gender based society. Such a society is typified by “hegemonic struggle” (Fairclough 2010: 94) where female subject is torn between “discipline” (Foucault 1979) and free will. Mrs. Alving keeps on fighting against the hegemonic struggle of conventions and

Personal Freedom in Conflict with Social Forces: Henerick Ibsen’s Ghosts 3

traditions and tries to assert her free will but her “confession” (Foucault 1981) to the hegemony of marriage and family proves disastrous for her. It is the tyranny of tradition she hates the most yet it is the traditional thinking she clings to solve her problems. It is the irony of situation that her husband is unfaithful to her and she dislikes him for that, yet she is forced to live with him and hide his debauchery. At times she poses herself as a free person, but has to withdraw before the force of tradition. She may revolt against the male domination but her stay with a debauched husband reflects “implicit manifestation of ideological forces” (Gramsci 1971: 328) on her thinking. The conflict between her free will and these forces keeps on waging war in her heart and soul, rendering her the most pathetic person. She wants to save her son from the bad influence of her husband but the son turns out to be as debauch as the father. It is her tragedy that she longs for a healthy and pure life for her son but the son turns out to be an incestuous invalid. After deserting her husband she seems to believe that “she is free from mental coercion: she has been through the social shams of marriage and she has at last spoken” (Styan 1989: 21). By leaving the house of her debauched husband she feels “satisfied at having brought the long hateful comedy to a successful conclusion” (Northam 1973: 94) and by returning to him she feels that she has managed to seal off the consequences of initial disaster of her marriage. During this long and careful plotting she renounces individuality in the name of social discipline. She has to comply with the social standards she considers to be false. She tries to break away from the ugliness that underlies the façade of marriage, but the social discipline does not let her revolt against this filth. This discipline controls her thoughts and language. The social demand for a neat shape to things brings her into conformity with the social conventions.

Whenever conflict between free will and conformity to social values irritates Mrs. Alving she tries to “disrupt [her] restricted and marginalized position of the female subject” (Dobson 2006: 125). This disruption shows itself when she takes a daring step of leaving her husband. By acting upon the advice of parish priest, who represents religion as ideological state apparatus ISA (Althusser), she, however, returns to her husband and accepts “patriarchal definition of female subjectivity” (Dobson 2006: 126). So, she goes on playing the social game, but simultaneously she feels the need to work her way out to freedom. This is what makes her so restive. Her anxiety becomes so deep rooted that it starts nagging at her conscience. So, she wishes she had told the truth about Alving to his son. She does not want to stop here. She wants Regina and Oswald to disregard their blood relationship and come to any arrangement they please. And yet, in spite of all her restiveness and desire to create a world free of hypocrisy and deception, she is restricted to mere wishing. She herself becomes hypocrite by hiding the true nature of Mr. Alving. She becomes deceptive by creating his good image in the form of a memorial. These fruitless wishes, replete with hypocrisy and deception, in fact, indicate that “nihilism is fermenting beneath the surface in Norway as any where else” (Meyer 1985: 514). Mrs. Alving fails to bring things out into the open because she fears of what people will say. The domination of patriarchal values once again asserts its power. Fairclough’s remarks


about the position of a subject in the society aptly portray the present situation of Mrs. Alving:

Subjects are ideologically positioned, but they are also capable of acting creatively to make their own connections between the diverse practices and ideologies to which they are exposed, and to restructure positioning practices and structures. The balance between the subject as ideological effect and the subject as active agent is a variable which depends upon social conditions such as the relative stability of relation of domination. (2010: 91)

The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Alving is based on gender domination. So, her impulse towards freedom emerges as nothing more than verbal aspiration. No doubt she takes action when her personal freedom is in danger and reacts against the social norms. However, her own personal position on the margins as a woman is exposed when she has to withdraw and accept those norms. Here she emerges as the oppressed other of patriarchal culture. Michael Meyer rightly remarks that Mrs. Alving’s “dumb acceptance of convention leaves a devitalizing effect upon her…. Oswald is branded with disease, not because his father was a beast, but because Mrs. Alving has obeyed the immoral ethics of the society” (1985: 515-16).

Mr. Alving had been accepted locally as a pillar of society but was in secret a drunkard and debauch. He had seduced his wife’s maid, and had a child by her; and this child, Regina, is now in her turn Mrs. Alving’s maid. Mrs. Alving has been concealing the debauchery of her husband for about twenty years. She has estranged relations with her husband. But she keeps on living in such a situation just to save the good name of her husband. She negates “the cause of personal freedom” (Brown 1995: 60) when she tries to save the good name of her husband even after his death. “The inherent presence of this hierarchical opposition between man and woman at the core of Western philosophy and ontology is thus seen to relegate the female subject to roles defined by passivity or invisibility” (Dobson 2006: 122). She follows the counseling of the conventional pastor Menders and “endeavors to save Oswald from the horrors of the household” (Fergusson 1965: 110). Such counseling creates illusions not only for her but also for her son. “Counseling is indeed used to bring the insides of people’s heads into the domain of power/knowledge, but it is also a technique for asserting the value and individuality of the people in a society which increasingly treats them as ciphers.” (Fairclough 2010: 59). Her disadvantaged position as the female subject makes her duty bound to create a good image of her husband before her son. On the one hand she wants to save her son from the bad influence of her husband and on the other she does not want the son the listen to any rumor about the father. It is for this reason she sends her son away to school. After the death of Mr. Alving, she wants to get rid of Mr. Alving’s heritage in order to free herself and Oswald from any relation with Mr. Alving. She yearns for “the innocent


unconventional joy of life” (Fergusson 1965: 111) in the company of her child. She wants freedom, innocence, joy and truth and tries to seek them in the person of Oswald.

The construction of an orphanage with Mr. Alving’s money is the best way to conceal the sinful life of Mr. Alving. It may also quiet any rumors there may be of that sinful life and to seal off the past but the sinfulness of Mr. Alving shows itself in his own son. The ghost of Alving walks in his son when we hear sounds of secret sex-play from the dining room. It also implies that Mrs. Alving’s attempts to seal off the past have only made the present more complicated. Her surrender to traditional norms has made possible for a half-brother to play sex game with a half-sister in ignorance of their relationship. If Mr. Alving is disloyal in marriage, Mrs. Alving conceals this disloyalty. So, both of them are responsible for the condition leading the marriage of half brothers with half sisters. Mrs. Alving may despise conventionality but she sticks to it when she tries to keep up appearances. It is her utmost effort to hide true face of her husband from the society where he is regarded as a pillar. It shows that she is “already seized by a certain kind of masculine desire that mobilizes [her] discourse.” (Dobson 2006: 121). She resorts to remedies that have already been tried and have already failed. When she comes to know about Joana’s sexual relations with her husband, she sends Joana packing and we know the outcome of that. Joanna becomes a fallen woman in the eyes of Mrs. Alving. Mrs. Alving, however, shows some sympathy for Joana by giving her some money so that she could buy herself a husband. During the process Mrs. Alving forgets that she married a fallen man for money. She knows what comes of that sort of arrangement and yet she goes for the same sort of solution for Joana’s daughter, Regina. She cannot accept Oswald’s relations with Regina. Regina, like her mother, is financed so that she could be married off. The radical woman can still see only one way of acting and that is in conformity with the appearances that the society wishes to be presented with. Mrs. Alving may not like to be treated like a puppet but “she treats people as objects to be manipulated” (Northam 1973: 96). She, in fact, becomes a puppet and sacrifices herself and other women on the altar of family prestige. Such a pattern precludes her from facing all the facts and only enhances her “alienation as the female subject” (Dobson 2006: 122)

The construction of the Orphanage in order to hide the black deeds of Mr. Alving shows that Mrs. Alving is still willing “to sustain the social code” (Lloyd 2006: 138). But soon this social code is destroyed by the new events implying her inadequacy. She loses her grasp on the new things. The Orphanage is on fire. This is an external disaster, beyond the reach of Mrs. Alving’s capacity to control and organize. The physical destruction of the orphanage implies an end to her attempts to control. The pious institution, that was to bury for ever the depravity of Alving’s life and “bring a long and hateful comedy to its conclusion, is burning down. The sham adopted to placate the society has failed” (Bradbury 1991: 500). Mrs. Alving’s desire to submit herself to socio-cultural rules of the patriarchal society ends up in smoke. The flames rising from the Orphanage are threatening not only in physical terms but also in psychological terms. She


tries to “repress the abjection” (Lloyd 2006: 142) of adultery and establish cultural order in the form of the Orphanage. The smoke and flames of the burning Orphanage are looming and haunting the security and threatening the dissolution of that order. The misery is further multiplied when Oswald points to his forehead and says, “This illness I have got as an inheritance, it – it’s lurking inside here” (Ghosts III). Under the present situation the words “inheritance” and “lurking” imply more than their usual meanings. These words give a wider reference to Oswald’s disease when related to those ghosts of dead ideas by which society and Mrs. Alving have always been haunted. She may yearn to break away from conventional morality and still sticks to it. So, her subservience to the social values produces more horror than solace.

Instead of “accepting or recognizing transgression so that it can be articulated and understood in the social-symbolic realm” (Lloyd 2006: 145) Mrs. Alving observes the dictates of dead morality. That is why she sends her son away from the immoral influence of his father. She wants her son might grow up morally healthy. But the result is disease and the impossibility of health. She wants Oswald have some ideals but he has none. Her over-protective attitude towards the well being of her son shows that she is trying to maintain and protect the patriarchal order. She wants a healthy and joyful future in the form of her son. She postpones the real relationship of mother with child in order to preserve the ideals. Her beloved son has come home again as she planned but her subservience to traditional values gives her a mentally and physically diseased child. She is to survive in a “phallogocentric Western culture which subordinates and represses the feminine” (Klages 2006: 104-118). Giving birth to a child in such a culture becomes an act of social duty. This act creates some meanings for her in that culture. She acts in accordance with the meanings she understands. She tries to keep her son away from the evil influence of her husband and sends him away to become an artist. The artist, however, turns out to be crippled. So “every thing that Mrs. Alving has done for the best has emerged in disaster because of her partial surrender to a dead morality” (Gaskell 1972: 37).

Oswald’s sickness is so serious that he collapses within no time. He babbles: “Mother, give me the Sun” (Ghosts III). Here sun symbolizes happiness of life and light. The helplessness of Mrs. Alving reflects that she has never been able to give him the real happiness of life. The image of the sun means much more than the superficial happiness that Alving wanted and Regina has gone off to seek. The sun subsumes all these into something greater and more comprehensive.

Mrs. Alving has never been able to be true to her feelings, to her instincts, to her conscious knowledge that her morality was superior to the dead morality imposed by the society. She has accepted, with full awareness, the murk of social hypocrisy. From that betrayal of truth all the other betrayal flow (Northam 1973: 101).


She fails to get what she aspires and remains an inadequate and misguided woman. If Mrs. Alving had been true to her own feelings she would not have married Alving, or remained with him once married. Had she been true to her own sense of the genuine, she would not have decided to rectify the disaster of her life by preserving appearances in order to appease society.

Ibsen, like O’Neill, investigates the destructive power of the morality of ideals (Trilling 2005:16). This destruction pervades as the play proceeds. The complex situation of Mrs. Alving is clearly exposed when she represses the vital force of life before the ideal of domesticity. On the one hand she is deluded by a false kind of morality and on the other; she poses herself to be a liberal. Her liberalism persuades her to quit the world founded on deception and disloyalty. She gets ready to expose the real face of her husband. She even decides to find some kind of arrangement between Regina and Oswald. But the illusion created by ideology makes her oblivious of her objective reality and makes her a conformist. Everything ends contrary to her planning because her liberalism passes through the prism of social vales. The reversal to her expectations amounts to a condemnation of her. It is all because of the fact that she tries to adopt liberal ways without getting rid of conventional values. The essential characteristic of her person is ambiguity which makes her a strange mixture of liberal and conformist. She is strong enough to try to think for herself, but too cowardly to act in any other way than that required by the society she has been through. Her liberalism fails to assert itself because she fails to fully liberate herself from the influence social values.

In Ghosts, “society is presented as a coercive force” (Brustein 1965: 88) especially for woman. There is a constant conflict between the demand of the self and the society. That is why Mrs. Alving suffers a division between the self and the society. She is unknowingly pulled asunder in two different directions. She tries to please the patriarchal society. But she challenges the established rules of such a society because she also wants to a lead a life of her own. She leads a double life, straddling the divide; sometimes at ease with one role and sometimes the other. This duality of roles is, in fact, imposed by the society which acts silently but surely. The trap it lays for Mrs. Alving is one into which she and millions of other women have slipped without recognizing that it was a trap. The trap allures the victims to complete submission. The mystery of the trap lies in the fact that the victim fails to know that he/she is being trapped. There is, for example, nothing openly coercive about the decision when it comes to choosing a husband. Mrs. Alving knew fully well that “Alving was the best catch in social terms; and yet in that choice she subdued her own feelings to the criteria created by the society” (Northam 102). She may dislike her husband but finds social refuge under his roof. So she is consumed by this love-hate relationship and remains devoid of real love in life. Elaine Showalter in her well-known essay, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” (1988) tells us that women live a double life, as members of general patriarchal culture and also as a member of a sub-culture of women. They perceive themselves in a dual perspective, through the eyes of male historians and anthropologists and also as a unique individual


with whom only they themselves are familiar. The female cannot expand her world beyond the lines demarcated by the male.

Submission to masculine desire mobilizes Mrs. Alving’s discourse. She has gone on living with her husband for years without recognizing that such submission of personal integrity to social demands could be critical and fatal. So, the consequences are not only fatal but also inescapable. She wavers and vascillates whenever the occasion demands a right decision from her. Her lack of courage plunges her into the society replete with the darkness of corruption

Oswald’s disease is the outward sign of the corruption and of its secretiveness, but it is not the only form of corruption. There is corruption of will, corruption of courage, corruption of integrity, of relationship – indeed a creeping invasion through many different veins and arteries of the play simultaneously (Brustein 1965: 85).

In Ghosts, the various streams of corruption move apparently independently and in unsuspected ways towards the one moment of dissolution. Mrs. Alving cannot fully preserve her integrity from that corruption. “Mrs. Alving may recognize that she married for the wrong reason” (Brustein 1965: 90), her actions constantly reveal that society continues to influence her ways of thought.

CONCLUSION

Ghosts portrays how society crushes the individual challenging its established traditions. Society is presented as a force which acts silently but surely. Mrs. Alving single handedly fights against the forces of society. But her fate shows that life is a hopeless hope and that the individual life is full pain and defeat. In spite of her defeat, Mrs. Alving remains a splendid woman. This impression comes from her personality and the way she tries to cope with the forces ready to annihilate her identity. She fights against the social forces without getting any help from any quarter of the society. She remains all alone in her effort to create a world of her own. She must have nerves and a will of steel to have conceived and carried out a plan of such complexity and long duration without losing heart. She struggles to control the events and shape them according to her own order. It is unfortunate that the turn of events overpowers her, though she never allows herself to be passively overwhelmed. She is indeed a strong woman. And we can only admire the direction in which her strength is constantly directed. “Misguided or not, she is always trying to see through pretence and hypocrisy to the truth behind it” (Northam 110). She often fails to get through, and she initially fails to act on the truth that she has discovered, but that is the direction her bent of mind and understanding lead her to. She hopes to create the possibility of a decent life. She tries her level best to materialize her hope. She also tries to stick to the truth of life. Her hopes, however, are dashed to the ground because social forces are too powerful to be challenged by an individual.


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Smith. London: Lawrencw and Wishart. Ibsen, Henrik. (1978). Ghosts: The Complete Major Plays of Henrik Ibsen. Trans. Rolf Fjelde.

Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd. Klages, Mary. (2006). Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. Lloyd, Moya. (2006). “Julia Kristeva (1941-).” Jon Simons. Ed. Contemporary Literary Theory

From Lacan to Said. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Macionis, John J. (1987). Sociology. New Jersey: Simon & Schuster. Mann, Juddy. (1996). The Difference. New York: Warner. Meyer, Michael. (1985). “Ghosts.” Ibsen A Biography. London: Penguin. Morley, D. (1980). “Texts, readers, subjects.” In S. Hall, et el. Eds. Culture, Media, Language.

London: Hutchinson. Northam, John. (1973) “Ghosts.” Ibsen A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Renzetti, Claire M. and Daniel J. Curran. (1992). Women, Men and Society. Boston: Allyan and

Bacon. Showalter, Elaine. (1988). “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”, Modern Criticism and Theory:

A Reader. 2nd Edition. Ed. David Lodge with Nigel Wood. Singapore: Pearson Education Styan, J. L. (1989). “Ibsen’s Contribution to Realism: A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881).”

Modern Drama in Theory and Practice Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tolan, Fiona. (2006). “Feminisms.” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Patracio

Wah. New York: Oxford University Press. Trilling, Lionel. (2005). “Eugene O’Neill.” Modern American Drama. Ed. Harold Bloom.

Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers.

English in non-native context: Distinctive features of Pakistani journalistic English

Behzad Anwar• and Dr. Mubina Talaat••

ABSTRACT: English used in Pakistan has undergone considerable change after getting rid of colonialism. Pakistani English has developed its own unique features. In this paper, some prominent grammatical and syntactic features of Pakistani journalistic English resulting due to the interference of the Urdu language have been discussed. These features may well exhibit characteristics which might be the result of simplification strategies or language interference. This study is an attempt to show that when English is used in non-native context, it diffuses and internationalizes, acculturates and indigenizes, and adapts and diversifies (Honna, 2003).

Key words: English in non-native context; non-native varieties of English; Pakistani English; features of Pakistani English; journalistic English

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this paper is to explore those distinctive grammatical and syntactic features of Pakistani English which occur regularly in Pakistani journalistic English and are quite different from those of Standard British English. These variations resulting from language contact situation have become the part of the linguistic system of Pakistani English (Talaat & Anwar, 2010). Pakistani English has its origin in the inception of colonization in the subcontinent. But now it has developed its own lexical, grammatical and syntactic features. The main reason of these changes is undoubtedly Urdu-English code-switching (Anwar, 2007). This study focuses on the influence of Urdu on the grammar and syntax of the English language. Kasanga (2002) found that code-mixing contributed a lot in the Africanization of English. The data analysis will reveal that the interference of Urdu is a regular phenomenon in Pakistani journalistic English. Urdu is unconsciously present in the minds of the Pakistani bi/multilinguals whenever they are writing or speaking English. Mostly the learning of English is highly influenced by the students’ mother tongues in Pakistan. Gut (2007) analysed the influence of L1 on the linguistic system of Nigerian and Singapore English and significantly observed that these two non-native varieties of English differ from Standard English. Second language varieties like Indian English, Pakistani English, Nigerian English etc. can be viewed as

• Lecturer, Department of English University of Gujrat •• Chairperson, Department of Humanities, Air University Islamabad

Behzad Anwar, Mubina Talaat / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 12

being characterized by “functional nativeness” in terms of two dimensions, namely, ‘range’ and ‘depth’ (Kachru, 2005).

METHODOLOGY AND DATA COLLECTION

This paper is an endeavour to explore the distinguishing features of Pakistani journalistic English. It examines some grammatical and syntactic aspects of the nativisation of English as a result of the contact with Urdu. This research is qualitative in its nature and the examples have been extracted manually from a large scale data of one month newspapers. It was a very laborious task to search and highlight only those grammatical and syntactic features which show innovations in Pakistani English and are quite different from Standard British English.

The reason for taking the newspapers as a source of data is that they provide a solid basis for linguistic studies. Newspapers are widely read than any other publication. Media brings into the public arena whatever is of public interest (Leitner, 1997). Newspapers have been a rich source of providing information from all the spheres of life. They contain all major text types, registers, or genres; there are factual and fictional texts, but also spoken-printed mode and a range of styles. That is why the data has been taken from Pakistani English newspapers.

Newspapers from all the four provinces of Pakistan have been taken to suggest that the distinctive grammatical and syntactic features are found everywhere in Pakistani journalistic English. These features are not specific to any particular newspaper. The selected dailies are regarded as the well-reputed newspapers in Pakistan. The data has been taken from the following English-language daily newspaper over the period of one month (September 2007):

1. Dawn (D)

2. News (N)

3. Frontier Post (F)

4. The Nation (TN)

5. Daily Times (DT)

6. The Post (P)

The unique grammatical and syntactic features of Pakistani English have been highlighted in bold form for the convenience of the readers and researchers.

English in non-native context: Distinctive features of Pakistani journalistic English 13

GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH

In this section certain grammatical features of Pakistani English have been presented. The grammatical description of the non-native varieties of English is a matter of immense interest for the last 25 years (Schneider, 2003). Specific grammatical and syntactic descriptions play an important role in the recognition of these non-native varieties of English. The non-native speakers of English may impose the grammatical usage of L1 on English and vice versa. Martin et al. (2003) found numerous changes of vocabulary and word grammar patterns in Panjabi due to interaction with English. Now we can proceed to the description of unique grammatical features of Pakistani English.

1. Quantifiers

Sometimes, influenced by Urdu, no distinction is made in Pakistani English between the use of quantifiers such as a great deal of/ a large number of, much/many, a few/a little, a large amount of/ a great number of etc. This feature is very common in other non-native varieties of English.

a) "We have better margin of profit on the sale of Chinese television sets and surprisingly there are genuinely little complaints about the Chinese television sets," Muhammad Nabeel of Kamran Electronics and other dealers in the Saddar market said. (September 12, 200 DT)

b) Nawa-e-Waqt group’s stall was attracted by a large amount of visitors while all the publications of the Nawa-e-Waqt were also given to the visitors. (September 4, 2007 TN)

c) They do much more complex things like providing home, shelter and insulation from outside dangers. (September 2, 2007 D)

d) Ozzy has sung a great deal of ballads during his career; some were respectable whereas others were awful beyond belief. (September 16, 2007 D)

e) Taliban or Mujahideens can be given all kinds of negative names but one thing is clear; they fight till death and they fight a large force with very little number. (September 21, 2007 D)

f) Each imported vial cost Rs1,800 to Rs2,000, which was also hit by economic constraints, he said adding that the issue of snakebite in Pakistan was 150 years old and there were little changes in its treatment over time.(September 18, 2007 D)

2. Adjectives

The wrong use of the comparative forms of English adjectives is very common in spoken English. This feature can also be found in written English because of the influence of Urdu. Here are a few examples:


a) The auspicious day was observed with a renewed pledge and determination to make the Air Force more stronger and more potent force to face any challenge. (September 7, 2007 P)

b) She said she would come back more stronger," said one of her lawyers, Abdul Wadud Khandaker. (September 4, 2007 F)

c) He went on to say that to kidnap Ghulam Nabi or any other lawyer who are being abducted by the secret agencies, would not make the lawyers movement weak but it would make it more stronger, and government this conspiracy would be made failed. (September 16, 2007 F)

d) The national interest should be more dearer to them and this means giving sacrifice. (September 6, 2007 P)

e) However, if the oil prices continue to be at the existing level or even more higher than there would be pressure on us to review the situation by the year-end, he maintained. (September 22, 2007 DT)

3. Plural Marking

Another significant grammatical feature of Pakistani journalistic English is plural marking. In Pakistani English there is a general tendency among Pakistani bilinguals to use a plural ‘-s’ suffix with a logically countable nouns.

a) We tend to believe in our fictions with a wink and nod and a touch of chutzpah whereas so many in those lands take their fictions so seriously that it is almost laughable. (September 1, 2007 DT)

b) We, Pakistanis, do not need any such political fictions as we are witnessing live dramas since March 9. (September 11, 2007 DT)

c) The lightings are done with due consideration of the place and its use. (September 04, 2007 N)

d) There are fixed ceiling and wall lightings in most of the house. (September 04, 2007 N)

e) The fishermen who are indebt are bound to sell either their entire catching of fishes, or of one specific commodity (mainly shrimps) to the loan-giver agent. (September 25, 2007 TN)

f) Our elders and betters, when they are not dividing up loaves and fishes, keep themselves busy fishing in troubled waters, when they should rather be pouring oil on them. (September 12, 2007 TN)


4. Omission/Addition of preposition/particle

Another interesting example is the translated use of prepositions in Pakistani English. Translation helps in the nativization of English (Yang, 2005). Most prepositions are direct mental translations of the approximate postposition of Urdu. Here are some examples:

a) Maqbool stressed on* the need to ensure focused development of universities in the Southern Punjab, support to new universities, funding for veterinary faculty and optimising the strength of the established universities. (September 14, 2007 TN)

b) Addressing journalists, Deputy Chairman Planning Commission Engineer Dr Akram Sheikh said the PM stressed on* the development of new roads, construction of bridges and infrastructure development that were the key to change the destiny of the people. (September 20, 2007 DT)

c) Café Vision is the highly acclaimed, broad-based chat show that allows teenagers to voice out* their opinions on current, reality based and social issues. (September 08, 2007 D)

d) Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain has asked the MQM Punjab Organising Committee (POC) to focus on southern Punjab and pick out* strong candidates for the coming general elections.(September 25, 2007 DT)

e) The incident happened after Muhammad Latif left his house to pick* his children from school around noon.(September 7, 2007 DT)

f) These buses or minibuses could pick* students from areas that fall on their routes and drop them to university. (September 02, 2007 TN)

g) And that needs to be bridged at once to cope up with the prowling terrorism now goring us so bloodily and which is becoming so lethal and so bloodier with every passing day. (September 10, 2007 F)

h) Many say that it has become a challenge for the town administration now to cope up with this situation, especially in the month of Ramazan in which one can expect more traffic problems in Saddar town. (September 14, 2007 N)

i) In four or five years Pakistan's debt-servicing liabilities may rise to the level of 10 to 12 billion a year with stagnant exports and continued splurge in consumption - the hard core of which is defence expenditures in order to cope up with the Indian Joneses. (September 03, 2007 P)

5. Genitive

The genitive or possessive forms of switched nouns are also used in Pakistani English. Here are some examples:


a) Spokesman for Parliamentary Affairs Ministry Asif Nang, meanwhile, said the Wolesi Jirga's decision on disbanding the anti-corruption commission was beyond its power. (September 02, 2007 F)

b) He said construction was started without the town nazim's permission and no objection certificate (NoC) from the Environment Protection Department. (September 13, 2007 DT)

c) Plot-owners protest against patwari’s fraud. (September 28, 2007 P)

SENTENCE STRUCTURE

Pakistani English shows some interesting divergence from Standard British English with reference to sentence structure. Here are some interesting syntactic features of Pakistani English which occur quite frequently in Pakistani newspapers.

1. Word Order

Pakistani bilinguals often exhibit different word order from Standard British English because of the interference of the first language. Here are two examples:

a) After getting free from all his responsibilities, as his all children were married, he once again decided to apply for a job. (September 5, 2007 N)

b) Chief Justice asked Attorney General to pool his all energies for the recovery of all missing persons. (September 22, 2007 P)

The use of “always” can be observed at sentence final position in the following examples:

a) He said the arrangements should also be monitored always. (September 18, 2007 DT)

b) We expect more games like this from our team. Whether they win or lose, they are our heroes and will be in our hearts always. (September 29, 2007 N)

2. Tense and Aspect

The use of Present/ Past perfect instead of simple past is a common practice among Pakistani bilinguals. Here are a few examples:

a) Last year the ITP had provided a fork lifter for managing smooth flow of traffic in Aabpara market, but this year no such facility has been provided, Shafiq Abbasi, Islamabad Anjuman Taajran general secretary, told Daily Times. (September 20, 2007 DT)


b) While speaking to reporters at a certificate distribution ceremony at the FIA HQs Islamabad High Commissioner Mark-Lyall Grant said "Last year 2,500 Pakistanis had applied for political asylum in Britain but all of them were rejected." (September 20, 2007 TN)

c) Last year, Asif and he had tested positive for the banned substance Nandrolone in an out-of-competition test conducted by the PCB in September. (September 08, 2007 TN)

d) Last year, the court had taken suo moto action on the murder of Shehnaz Fatima, a woman who according to the initial police investigation, was killed by the hired killers of a landlord-politician from Punjab's Okara district. (September 09, 2007 N)

e) The supply of gas from Gurguri and Shakardarra oil and gas fields run by Hungarian company MOL and the Oil and Gas Development Company to Punjab has already started three years ago. (September 09, 2007 D)

Sometime Present progressive tense is used with durational phrases in Pakistani English because of the influence of Urdu. For example,

a) We, Pakistanis, do not need any such political fictions as we are witnessing live dramas since March 9. (September 11, 2007 DT)

3. Conditional clause

Sometimes in Pakistani English the use of ‘suppose’ instead of ‘if’ can be observed. This feature is also because of the influence of Urdu. Here are a few examples:

a) Suppose Musharraf is re-elected and then his party is routed two or three months later in general elections? Where will his mandate stand then? (September 18, 2007 D)

b) Suppose the bridge was backed with historical evidence to show it as part of the Rama lore, would it be put up for demolition? (September 17, 2007 D)

c) Suppose she is not allowed even then her party would attract many voters. (September 11, 2007 F)

d) Suppose if a technical flaw disables you to communicate with the rest of the world, or your optic fibre is cut down, you are all alone on this earth in the middle of nowhere. (September 25, 2007 P)

4. Connectives

Sometimes, Pakistani bilinguals show variation in the use of correlated connectives because of the influence of Urdu. It is a common practice in Urdu to use


‘because’ and ‘therefore’ in the same sentence but in Standard British English it is avoided. This feature mostly occurs in speech.

a) Because such efforts are single-mindedly focused on ensuring that the Constitution as it now stands is compromised no further, therefore it validates, de facto, all the compromises that have already been incorporated into the Constitution. (September 25, 2007 N)

5. Double Intensifier

In all the non-native varieties of English direct mental translation of the approximate L1 lexical items can be observed. The use of double intensifier can also be observed in Pakistani English. This is also because of the influence of Urdu on English syntax. For example,

a) According to different Independent surveys the popularity graph of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto is very very high at this point in time, and this is what might bother President Musharraf. (September 18, 2007 F)

b) On the odd occasion when I tried to bite into a fully garnished hamburger, the liquid inside the two buns squirted and plopped into my shirt front in such gross quantities that I had to rise very very carefully from the table to move over to the 'gents' to clean myself up. (September 2, 2007 N)

c) "What you have done uptill now? asking for time and frittering it away, your are appearing before the Supreme Court and should come with very very remarkable achievement," Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry said, snubbing the officials. (September 20, 2007 D)

d) Whatever happened should be inspected from all angles because common sense says that no one would hit you with a cricket bat with full force unless he is either insane or something very very serious happened and led to an act of such intensity. (September 23, 2007 N)

6. Question forms

In some cases, Pakistani English may exhibit slight deviations in WH-questions. Here are a few examples where we can find that the subject-verb order is retained:

a) Why the (Pakistani) rulers are afraid of my return? (September 06, 2007 D)

b) Which batsman makes you more cautious when you are bowling? (September 09, 2007 D)

c) Why most suicide bombers and terrorists are Muslims? (September 12, 2007 F)


d) What you have done uptill now? (September 20, 2007 D)

e) Why we feel our ego at cloud nine soon after violating the traffic rules? (September 1, 2007 F)

f) Why we sense great deal of bliss after depriving off a poor man to his basic rights? (September 1, 2007 F)

g) Why no action was taken against people who hoarded wheat even at petrol pumps? (September 30, 2007 N)

CONCLUSION

The data analysis clearly shows that in a typical language contact situation the Urdu language brings about changes in the native variety of English. Grammatical and syntactic changes can be observed at various levels in Pakistani journalistic English. The findings of this study confirm that in describing the characteristics of Pakistani journalistic English, many of these grammatical and syntactic features are evident in other non-native varieties of English (Schmied, 1991; Bamiro, 1995; Thomas, 1996; Herat, 2005; Gut, 2007). Recently there has been a growing interest in the comparative study of World Englishes (Kortmann et al. 2004). Pakistani English, like other non-native varieties of English, differs widely from Standard British English.

REFERENCES

Anwar, B. (2007). Urdu-English code-switching: The use of Urdu phrases and clauses in Pakistani English (A Non-Native Variety). ESP World, Volume 17.

Bamiro, Edmund O. (1995) Syntactic variation in West African English. World Englishes, 14(2), 189-204

Gut, U. (2007). First language influence and final consonant clusters in the new Englishes of Singapore and Nigeria. World Englishes, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 346–359, 2007. Herat, M. (2005) BE variation in Sri Lankan English. Language Variation and Change, Cambridge

University Press, pp 181-208. Honna, N. (2003). English is an Asian Language: Some thoughts for action proposals. Retrieved from www1.linkclub. or.jp/-jafae/Englishes/sample%20in%20English.doc Kachru, Braj. B. (2005). Asian Englishes: Beyond the cathatnon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong

University Press. Kasanga, L. A. (2002). The 'local' and the 'global' in Es'kia Mphahlele's writing: a sociolinguistic

analysis of two autobiographical novels. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 15:2, 183 – 201

Kortmann, B., Burridge, K., Mesthrie, R., Schneider, E., & Upton, C. (2004) A Handbook of Varieties of English (eds.), vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Leitner, G. (1997). The sociolinguistic of communication media. In Florian Coulmas (ed.), Handbook of sociolinguistics, 187-204. Oxford: Blackwell.


Martin, D., Krishnamurthy, R., Bhadwaj, M. & Charles, R. (2003). Language change in young Panjabi/English children: implications for bilingual language assessment. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 19, 3, 245-265

Schmied, J. (1991) English in Africa. London: Longman. Schneider, Edgar W. (2003) The dynamics of new Englishes: From identity construction to dialect

birth. Language, 79 (2), 233-81 Talaat, M. & Anwar, B. (2010) The Impact of Urdu-English code-switching on Pakistani English,

Kashmir Journal of Language Research Volume 13 No.1 Thomas, L. (1996) Variations in English Grammar, in Graddol, D. et.al. (eds.), English: History,

Diversity and Change. London: Routledge, pp.222-258. Yang, J. (2005) Lexical innovations in China English. World Englishes, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp 425–436

Siraiki Drama Programming on PTV: the Concept of ‘Backwardness’ through a Postcolonial Lens

NukhbahTaj Langah•

ABSTRACT: The focus of this paper is on the representation of Siraiki culture in Pakistani media, as reflected through PTV drama serials. I will be adopting postcolonial approach to analyse the PTV programming, the key elements of which are connected to theorizing the representation of Siraiki as being a ‘backward’ culture. Critiquing such a misrepresentation of Siraiki culture in PTV drama serials, I indicate how the inferiority of this culture is highlighted as opposed to being acknowledged on this national television channel. I contend that the writers of the two plays discussed in this paper as representatives ofpostcolonial elites have used the symbol of patriarchy as a reminder of British colonisation while they also reflect on the neo-colonisation of the modern state of Pakistan. In order to show the other side of the picture, my argument also offers a brief overview of contemporary Siraiki writers, who resist these pressures imposed upon them by Pakistani society and media and aim at accentuatingtheir rich language and culture as reflected through their neo-nationalist emotions.

Keywords: Siraiki, language; veil; patriarchy; urban; identity; politics; Multan; traditions; folk culture; postcolonial

INTRODUCTION

In Pakistan, film, teledrama, theatre has not received the kind of attention that these disciplines have received in the rest of the world. This paper therefore analyses the representations of Siraiki culture as being ‘backward’ as depicted in PTV dramas. While South Asian culture is substantially concerned with language and culture being transmitted through language, media and film plays a dominant role in representing various languages along with developing the attitudes towards these languages in Pakistan.1Urdu and English dominates Pakistani television channels, particularly, news, teledramas, telefilms, advertisements, musical shows, religious programs and socio-political and cultural discussions and trendy talk shows. The state patronage is mainly given to Urdu language and regional languages such as Balochi, Pashto, Sindhi, Siraiki have only recently gained acknowledgement in the Pakistani media, primarily through private sector.

• Department of English, Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan

NukhbahTaj Langah / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 22

In case of Punjab, apart from Urdu and English privilege was given to Punjabi channels and programs and Siraiki was mostly spoken at home and was assumed to be inferior due to lack of recognition given to it by state before. As Siraiki was not taught in universities and therefore not seen as a language of administration and media. The political consequences of such state policies were that it was relegated to the status of a ‘domestic vernacular’.2 The private channels like ‘Rohi’, ‘Vasaib’ and low budget private film productions following Pashto cinema like RanjhanMaahi (produced by Ijaz Chandar2011) and SohnaSanwal (forthcoming production by ZawaarBaloch) are therefore recently becoming popular cultural productions and making Siriaki speaking people more identity conscious. More importantly, Siraiki drama and film are only recently being used as an expression of this resistance against the states linguistic policies.3 This effort also reflects the post-1971 collapse of the Urdu cinema and in post 1980s the popularity of Punjabi cinema being popularized in urban Punjab and cities being replaced by the vernacular cinema along the pattern of Pakhtun, Baluch and Sinhdi cinema.4 This phenomenon is termed as ‘regional linguistic revivalism’ by Akbar S. Ahmed who approaches it as follows:

The four recognized 'nationalities' of Pakistan were expressing themselves through their cinema. The growth of regional films coincided with an implicit rejection of Urdu as an imposed and external language. Thus regional linguistic revivalism encouraged the growth of the regional film industry in Pakistan.5

In the backdrop of such linguistic revivalism going on in case of Siraiki language and culture, I aim to apply postcolonial approach to critique the PTV productions of drama serials representing Siraiki culture. The key elements discussed in my analysis are connected to gender, for instance, various representations of female characters as metonyms of cultural oppression. Furthermore, I also critique how the concept of patriarchal values introduced by the British against Indians during the colonial era, has been used by postcolonial elites as a way of manipulating their backward subjects and as a means of their own enlightenment and incorporation within the modern.

Thus, my focus in this paper is on the case of Punjab where Siraiki presents an example of one of those languages in Pakistan whose speakers are struggling to reinforce their political identity, more visibly since 1970s and more strongly in the year 2011.Within the context of Punjab, I critique the emphasis on Siraiki culture through the production and broadcast of PTV dramas focusing on Siraiki culture since 1980s. I begin my discussion by focusing on the thematic and symbolic concerns of the two Urdu teledramas as primary sources in this paper. The first one is titled, ‘Pyas’ written by AsgharNadeem Syed and the second one is titled ‘Chunri’ and is written by Siraiki writer Syed MohsinGillani. I contend how the neglect of Siraiki language rights and the exclusion of this language from Pakistan’s linguistic policies are directed against the

Siraiki Drama Programming on PTV: the Concept of ‘Backwardness’ through a Postcolonial Lens 23

popularity of Siraiki culture in Punjab. In the last section of the paper, I also briefly review two literary dramas written by Hafeez Ahmed to offer a comparison of how Siraiki culture is depicted in Punjab’s media discussed in earlier sections and how it is engrained within Siraiki nationalism in the works of contemporary Siraiki creative writers.

‘BACKWARDNESS’: FEUDALISM OR RELIGIOSITY?

Based on Siraiki people’s spiritual beliefs and the ill-treatment of feminine gender, Pyaasis a PTV drama serial produced in the late 80s which launches with the images of Shah Rukn-e-Alam’sshirne in Multan, showing hundreds of disciples, including burqa(veil) clad women, visiting it. The play revolves around the lives of two families: Qadeer Khan’s family represents the feudal culture, whereas, Shah Sahib’s family represents the religious culture commonly practised amongst the Syed families residing within the Siraiki region. As rich landed elite and much respected feudal family of the region, women in Qadeer Khan’s family are always in purdah – or seclusion – meaning keeping them at home and minimizing their interaction with publicfrom birth till death.6 In other words, this gives men complete authority over their movements and actions.7 Veil – understood both as covering their entire body and face when they go out and being in seclusion - becomes a way of controlling their sexuality, while Khan himself remains promiscuous and polygamous.8Purdah is a strong symbol in this play in which except Qadeer Khan himself, his wife and daughter can only interact with their female servants. 9 Despite the access to literacy that Khan gives to his only daughter, Seema, she remains his property, possession and sub-ordinate. She is not allowed to do post-graduation in a university and even if he allows her to have history tuitions at home, he suspects that her tutor (Shah Sahib’s son) has the potential to of encouraging her to dispel her private sphere and enter a public sphere.10 Young Seema becomes a stereotypical example of an ‘upper class woman’ who is prevented from establishing her individuality and identity:

The upper class women’s access to literacy is not hindered by lack of resources but due to the traditional, archetypal role-models portrayed in religious teachings, textbooks, popular culture and media, all of which emphasise that women must be confined to the domestic domain. (shirin, p. 4)

These values created for his women by Khan are actually an amalgamation of religious values and local taboos and traditions. It is part of his feudal mentality that he does not expect his daughter to break the norms, symbolizing honour, which have been followed by the women belonging to his family for generations.

In this play, the symbols which reinforce this idea of his wife and daughter being marginalized are his daughter watching her distorted image in broken pieces of


mirror, wishing to free her caged birds and her insistence on leaving the boundaries of her house to get fresh air.11 The precious jewellery that she inherits from her mother metaphorically symbolizes their shackled lives because they cannot disobey this man by wearing it or even by wearing any decent clothes at home. Consequently, Seema wants to escape from these physical and psychological restrictions and liberate herself from the silence of bearing her father’s self-imposed male chauvinism.12 In order to escape these sad realities of her life she relies on her literacy and spends most of the time day dreaming and writing poetry, which almost turns into an act of dairy writing for her.13 Thus, there seems to be a subtle battle between modernity and tradition here and Qadeer Khan and his daughter represent this paradox.

In fact, Qadeer Khan has turned into a demi-god and runs this small estate in which humiliating his first wife and daughter, he has also imposed his second wife upon their already cursed lives.14His second marriage represents his dissatisfaction with his first wife and his desire for a male heir, a typical patriarchal attitude prevailing in Siraiki culture. Thus, against the wishes of his first wife, he has married a dancing girl who lives in a separate house with her greedy brother and aunt. Despite his earnest love for her, she cannot bear any children and seems to be more interested in acquiring his land and property and returning to her profession after this target is achieved.

Qadeer Khan’s two wives and his daughter are his property and the two houses reflect the duality of his personality. One thing that all these women in Khan’s life have in common is that their havelisand houses become the symbol of their colonization by a man who never approves of them crossing the boundaries that he has set for them. They have to be clad in veil and cannot leave the house alone as he fears that they might take some liberties if he is lenient with them. On the one hand, he restricts his first daughter from the freedom of being pictured, dressing well, wearing jewellery, going to academic institutions and most importantly, and detains her within the four walls of her house where she can only remain distorted and feeling ambiguous about her identity; she is neither liberated in her dressing nor in behaviour. 15The patriarchal set up of the society creates taboos for her, which become worse than Shari ‘at laws when she is even deprived from possessing agricultural property as her father decides to transfer all his property to his second wife.16 In fact, she fears that her father might bully and bury her in the same room where he has buried other servant girls in his house. On the other hand, Qadeer Khan’s second wife symbolises everything he fears his daughter might do for her emancipation. She loves to dress up, cannot give up her profession of singing despite her husband’s ambition of upgrading her class; transforming her into a khan zadi(wife of a feudal elite). Paradoxically, she lusts for his property and achieves the target of dumping him after she he transferred his orchards and lands in her name. Her character stands parallel against Khan’s obedient daughter and his first wife who is pious and submissive middle aged woman who initially turns to religious rituals to save herself and her daughter from being dominated by her husband.17 This duality in his life ends when his


second wife rejects his authority and flees to Lahore to start a new life whereas, his first wife, fatiguedby her absurd authorityturns mad.18She wretchedly confines herself within a dark room in his house and feels split between sanity and insanity, life and death, real and imaginary, physical and spiritual.

This paradox persists through a parallel plot in this play which focuses on Shah Sahib’s family. Apparently, spiritual beliefs become a focus as opposed to the feudal system of Qadeer Khan’s family in this plot; however, there is a sense of split between the spiritual and physical values here too. Shah is not only a religious scholar and rohaniasra (spiritual support) for his disciples but as part of his spiritual commitment, he has also sacrificed his youngest son by giving him away to a faqirresiding at Shah Rukn-e-Alam’s shrine for years. In some ways, like Qadeer Khan, Shah too dominates his wife by repressing her protest against this decision and sticking to his religious vow.Shah gave away his third child, his son and proudly believes that he has reached the height of religious experience. Paradoxically, such belief in piri-muridi, shrines and so called religion reflects the double standards maintained by Siraiki culture, as Shah’s ultimate motif behind giving away his son becomes a deliberate gesture of preserving his family’s name and honour as a fervent religious family. Moreover, his wife seems to be against this decision and in this context, like Qadeer Khan, Shah also pushes her into a state of silence over this matter.

Most interestingly, there is another aspect of Shah Sahib’s personality and spiritual commitment too: all his clientele is females who wish to escape from their family feuds, seek blessings for bearing child or a happy married life are identified as ‘possessed’ by Shah. Most of them are low caste, illiterate, marginalized women visiting Shah Sahib for blessings and cure.19 Shah releases them from their hysterical state by giving them amulets or hitting their feet with a wooden stick, after which they are unable to even walk home. While, such an action might be regarded as Violence Against Women (VAW) for educated people, he regards this as a positive gesture by saving these women from evil spirits and blessing them. Once again the duality of Shah Sahib’s religiously rich life reflects through the fact that some of his female disciples also seem to be his ex-lovers as sometimes occasionally suspected and expressed by his wife.

Paradoxically, his son Ashraf regards such beliefs as jihalat (illiteracy) and resists such beliefs by trying to find his brother. Ashraf is Shah Sahib’s educated son who represents hope and modernity as a teacher of history in university and also tutors Qadeer Khan’s daughter, Seema. He does not believe in tradition, feudalism and fake religiosity to which both these families in particular and Siraiki culture in general adhere. His father might be a rohaniasara for common illiterate clientele but Ashraf cannot relate to his religious beliefs despite his family’s long tradition of piri-muridi. Following this ideology of rejecting submission to traditional values, he also rejects the idea of inheriting his family’s religious profession and becoming his father’s gadinasheenwhile also rejecting


civil service and refusing to believe that it can enhance his social status. He is critical about Qadeer Khan’s feudalism and critically comments that unfortunately his students of history (Seema, Khan’s daughter) cannot disentangle themselves from the history of their families and traditions. In some ways, he becomes a mediator between the feudal and religious pressures that surround these two families by tutoring Qadeer’s daughter and prompting her to stand up for her basic human rights, including marriage and emancipation.

As exemplified through these two families, both, feudal and religious traditions depicted in this play reflect the two aspects of the Siraiki culture and stand paradoxically against the modern and rebellious younger generation symbolised first through Seema, then Ashraf and finally Shah Sahib’s son who has turned into a faqir. It is however important to emphasize here that the nature of rebellion in these three cases is different as they are rooted in different discourses. Seema and Ashraf are rebelling feudalism and religiosity and choose modernity intentionally. Whereas, Shah Sahib’s third son rebels by becoming a faqir and yet remains fixed within the tradition of folk or Sufi Islam which is being critically observed by the author of this play.

Thus, AsgharNadeemSaeed seems to create a tussle between tradition vs. modern and spiritual vs. material desires operating within the Siraiki culture through this play. These double standards ironically reflect through Shah Sahib’s third son’s split state of mind as he experiences identity crises after his father donates him to a clan of faqirsat the shrine when he was very young. Consequently, he struggles to find his true self, his identity and his real objective in life. He seems lost between ishq-e-haqiqi and ishq-e-majazi; resists falling in love with a poor girl who is regarded ‘possessed’ by his own father and has now escaped from her father who is aiming to sell her to an older man by forcing her to marry him. In fact, Shah sahib’s third son represents the ‘marginal people’ and contradicts the extreme religious notions that his father has been promoting all his life. Turning almost into an intricate combination of diwanaor faqir- a combination of majn¯un (in ‘Arabic poetry embodying love-madness’) and majz¯ub(‘enraptured and bewildered person, inspired and seized by God’); mast (‘or intoxicated by God’s love and is oblivious to worldly considerations’); diw¯anaor madman and faqiror poorman; Malang or qalandar, this young man, rejects the girls proposal of marrying him and continues his endless journey of discovering his true self.20 With this conflict between physical and spiritual existence, he represents a holy fool commonly identified in Islamic mysticism as someone who is confused about his religion along with his physical and spiritual existence. His state of mind can be analysed applying Frembgen’s approach when he defines this paradoxical nature of religious beliefs as follows:

Through breaking social taboos and transgressing boundaries of normalcy, these (apparently usually involuntary) clownesque personae give other people reason not only for amusement, laughter, gossip, anecdotes, and narratives, but also food for thought opening doors to


the mind. Thus, they inspire people to reflect about the inherent paradoxicality of human life, as if they would slip so-to speak into the role of modern Muslim Dadaists embodying a type of antibourgeois. Similarly to artists, they demonstrate individual creativity in transgressing rules and structures which contribute to their ‘living’ and personalized charismatic features. People try to make sense of the madman’s utterances, interpreting them as explanations of the inexplicable’. In some ways his faqiri seems to challenge the normal order of state, authorities and hierarches. He represents otherness by not being part of the normal society and due to their deep spiritual experiences.21

In this regard it is significant to add words about the agency of the faqir--- along the lines of quote of Frembgen above, where the figure of faqirturns into a modern trope used to define certain ‘traditional’ positions. In this context, like Shah Sahib’s eldest son, Ashraf, this son too rejects his fake religious beliefs and challenges the ‘normal order of state, authorities and hierarches’. Despite representing ‘otherness’, his character in this play challenges the fact that this ‘otherness’ is created by his own father and he remains marginalized like the women in the play just because his culture has created these social hierarchies for him.

Unlike his father who gives blessings and amulets to poor women to heal them from their mental and personal traumas, his faqir son also represents an artist who aims to break through the limitations that his father and his religion have imposed upon him. The intoxicating drinks that he drinks in the company of other faqirs at the shrine and their singing and dancing provide him a relief from the ‘psychic closure’ of the religious culture to which his Syed family belongs and AsgharNadeemSaeed critiques. While Asghar aims to portray the backwardness of Siraiki culture by critically observing its rural or Sufi culture as represented in the character of this faqir vs. Urban Islam. This is also the point where I want to problematize and theorize the concept of ‘backwardness’ associated with Siraiki culture in this paper. As indicated earlier, through negative treatment of women grounded in a male dominated society, AsgharNadeemSaeed, depicts the backwardness of the Siraiki culture in this play. This is the same sense of backwardness which is explained by Alastair Pennycook as the backwardness associated with the colonized, the women, inferior communities which are dangerous and as indicated earlier, the binaries of masculine and feminine which colonization has created.22 This sense of ‘backwardness’ is also somewhat similar to the concept of backwardness elaborated by Frantz Fanon in terms of the relationship between the backwardness of black people vs. white, their ethnicity and spiritual backwardness. 23Along the same lines, there is a sense of backwardness associated with the folk Islam which is being depicted through the example of Shah Sahib’s son who is adopted by the clan of faqir’s headed by ustaadSanwal. Just as the earlier anthropologists and orientalists depicted the Muslim


societies along ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture or along ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ divide: for Punjabi elite to which AsgharNadeemSaeed belongs, the rural Islam or folk Islam represent the ‘low’ Islam, it is ‘superstitious’ and ambiguous as personified in the character of this budding faqir. This concept of rural Islam stands parallel against ‘urban’ Islam which is ‘textual’ , ‘reformed’ thus ‘high’ or actual Islam (Gellner,1992). These binaries indicate that Pakistan as a modern nation-state has inherited such a modernist approach towards the construction of its society and citizenship. Consequently, the Pakistani nationalism deplores anything that is being regarded as ‘regional’, ‘local’ or belonging to other ‘linguistic’ units.

Such are the complications of the neo-colonial state where the language and cultural differences accompanied by economic differences have complicated the relationship between Lahore and Multan, the subjects residing within these cities and this relationship is again based on dualities (Ngugi, pp. p. 21-2). An example of these dualities is the episode emphasizing the artistic side of thefaqirwho has raised Shah Sahib’s son is highlighted. This faqirnamed UstaadSanwal reflects the paradox of human nature that has been mentioned by Frembgen above, while also emphasizing the collision between religion and art in this play. 24As a matter of fact, the symbols related to folk traditions and art raise more questions in this play as compared to giving answers; these are the questions about spiritual vs. artistic freedom.25UstaadSanwal, who is also an ardent folk singer, is invited to perform in Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore, while he remains, an outsider and stranger26 for them due to his culture, language and attire, creating‘dialectic between the self and the other’.27 Clad in his traditional ascetic attire, representing his folk culture in Alhamara Arts council (a government institution run by Punjab government) in Lahore presents a paradox of the backwardness and cultural richness of the region to which this faqirbelongs. It is a paradox because for the Siraiki people, UstaadSanwal represents culture and identity, whereas, for Punjabi elite, his art can only be fetishized. His performance requires space, content and audience and a goal whose end could be instruction, pleasure or both to leave a ‘reformative effects’ on the audience, however, in this scene, there is no indication of such effects on the Punjabi audience becasuse their response is absent from the play and we are only shown Sanwal performing on stage. This turns Sanwal’s character into as an object or the strange and the exotic belonging to the other culture. This ‘strange encounter’ between the Siraiki folk singer and the Punjabi audience turns into an ambiguous confrontation, 28 reminding us of Sarah Ahmed’s query:

how do encounters with the one whom we already recognise as a stranger take place at the level of the body? To what extent do strange encounters involve, not just reading the stranger’s body, but defining the contours or boundaries of the body-at-home, through the very gestures that enable a withdrawal from the stranger’s co-presence in a given social space? 29


Turning almost into an object which has travelled from elsewhere and marketed and sold in Lahore, his ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ creates an imaginary boundary between himself and the consumer audience, which is also the boundary between Siraiki and Punjabi as two distinct culture and identities.30 Thus, his language of performance turns him into an exotic body for the audience in Lahore.31In this ‘encounter’ – ‘‘meeting, but a meeting which involves surprise’ -32 something has happened but we have ambiguously failed to understand it (Bhabha). The audience have watched Sanwal’s body perform and his emotions are involved in this performance, yet, we lose track of things as ‘what happens is not spoken and yet becomes a transparent form of communication’.33 In fact, like the women being demoted by Qadeer Khan and Shah Sahib, Ustaad Sanwal and the Punjabi elite watching and listerning him oddly reflect ‘apartness’ which becomes more intense when the writer of this play also decides to keep his audience invisible and silent, this also remaining silent over this encounter himself.34 Furthermore, as indicated in my discussion on the tradition vs. modern discourse of Shah Sahib’s son, his guru is not understood in Alhamra hall by the Punjabi(modern Pakistani) subjects as unlike them, he is grounded in a different traditional discourse to which the urban audience cannot relate.As a result of such a conflict of ideologies, we see PTV approach reflecting through AsgharNadeemSaeed’s writing: for a Lahore based writer the Siraiki cultural forms are ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘folk’ based and ‘superstitious’ and therefore ‘backward’. However, such an approach misses the fact that the folk’-based practices have their own interpretation how they link themselves with certain living traditions.35

Furthermore, an interesting issue in relation to my discussion on Ustad Sanwal’s performance is his mixed accent in particular and that of the other characters in general; the mixture of Siraiki, Punjabi and Urdu throughout his musical performances of mystic singing or SufianaQalam in this play, reflects the pressures of multilingual Pakistani society and the power relations between languages. While set in a completely Siraiki speaking setting of Multan city, the writer of the play decides to make all the Siraiki characters speak Urdu or mix Siraiki-Urdu or Siraiki –Punjabi, thus imposing linguistic techniques of code switching (switching from one language to another) and code mixing upon the actors. While code switching involves rapid succession of a language during the course of a single speech, code switching, code mixing involves ‘lexical items and grammatical features from two languages’ appearing within one sentence. 36 The play thus intricately involves ‘multiple techniques of translation’ for audience of three different languages from Pakistanwhile also involving the paradox of depicting the Siraiki culture and yet not allowing the characters to communicate in their mother languages.37

The only positive aspect of this performance episode thus is that this artist gives voice to his language, culture and identity, breaking the silence that the Pakistani society and government imposes upon the Siriaki language and culture by not giving it due importance is society in general and on national channels like PTV in particular.38While


the state performs power by being able to bring a Siriaki artist to perform in Lahore, the power of the artist is to perform in front of the audience which don’t speak his language and whose response is suppressed by author of the play.39 Hence there is no indication whether the audience are welcoming or expelling this stranger.40 Thus, the entire exercise of performance creates a space which becomes a magnetic field of tensions and conflicts as the ambiguity of why was it necessary to send Ustaad Sanwal to Lahore in the play remains unrequited.41

BACKWARDNESS AND TRADITIONS: VANI

I have so far presented a detailed discussion on a PTV play which typically depicts Siraiki culture as being backward. In the discussion that follows, I suggest that this stereotyping has continued in the recent plays with slightly revised approaches to the same ideas of backwardness, as for instance in a recent drama serial titled, Chunri. Focusing on the years old tradition of vaniin this play, this time, a Siraiki writer named Syed MohsinGillani once again specifically sheds light on the state of women belonging to ‘backward’ Siraiki speaking regions. Vani is a tradition practised in rural areas of South Punjab, and some parts of Sindh and Balochistan, where if a man murders someone, as a penalty, his daughter is compelled to marry a man from the murdered man’s family, regardless of their age or social differences. The tradition of vaniis particularly associated with Siraiki region in this play. Vanidenotes ‘most enduring enemies of a woman’s dignity and security are cultural forces aimed at preserving male dominance and female subjugation—often defended in the name of venerable tradition’.42

The story of this play revolves around the life of a young girl called Saloni who is tied in the tradition of vaniin her childhood when her father murders his wife’s ex-lover who is harassing her and turns mad. After this incident, Saloni’snikahtakes place with the elder brother of the murdered man, who is about 40 years older than the girl and it is decided by the panchaitthat she will officially start living with him when she turns eighteen. The local landlord takes her into his custody and in order to protect herself from vanishe ends up marrying his son temporarily until she is tired of fighting the social taboos and commits suicide. The plot gets more complicated when punchaitdemands the hand of the landlord’s daughter after Saloni’s death as continuity of the vanitradition imposed upon Saloni. The writer of this play hopes to change this taboo through the symbolic death of his protagonist and the play ends when to resist the ridiculous tradition of vani, Saloni commits suicide and as symbolized through the final decision of the villagers at the end that they will abandon this tradition.

As compared to the earlier play, Pyaas, in this play, vanitoo becomes a strong symbol voicing the positioning and role of women in Siraiki culture where patriarchal attitudes have turned them into a marginalized group.43 The duplicity of male chauvinism is emphasized as in Pyaasbecause like Qadeer Khan, the wadera(a local land lord) in this play too has several wives: one is his first wife, who has died and left a son, the second is


his ultra-modern educated and cunning wife and her westernized daughter, who despises his son from the first marriage and aims to economically and emotionally destroy this wadera; and the third is an uneducated, simple woman in the village who cannot bear children but loves and looks after this man with her heart and soul.

REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN SIRAIKI LITERATURE

My brief discussion on the second play indicates that PTV drama serials have aimed at stereotyping Siraiki culture and traditions as being backward and also used this example as a tool for entertaining the audience in Punjab. However, the Siraiki culture and traditions should be seen within the broader rural/urban divide and kinds of cultural tags given to Siraiki culture which relate them with the broader discussion of state-modernity project that the state took upon itself.The discussion in the following section succinctlyfocuses on the fact that when it comes to the representation of Siraiki identity and culture in literary genres such as teledrama serials written by contemporary Siraiki writers or the works of creative writers in general, the image of Siraiki culture is contrasting. Despite the fact that Siraiki writers too feel cognisant about the issues such as, women rights, gender roles, their main objective is representing the richness of the Siraiki culture and expressing their association with this region.

Such emotions are clearly evident in my comprehension of Hafeez Ahmed’s play titled, ‘Echoes of Jungle in Cities’.44 The plot of the play in general revolves around the life of a girl named Rohi, who lives in a remote village within the Rohi desert with her parents and brother. Her life is restricted to her house and her friend’s house where they can chat occasionally. Like Qadeer Khan, her brother represents the male chauvinism of the local people as he feels insecure about her interaction with men visiting this desert as tourists. Paradoxically, he spends days interacting with various criminal gangs and chasing girls. This also reflects the Siraiki youths identity crises along with deteriorating law and order situation in the region. Bitten by a snake one day, Rohi is driven to the hospital by a man visiting from the nearby city (presumably, Bahawalpur) along with her parents. While recovering in the hospital, she falls in love with this man and ends up marrying him against her brother’s wishes.

In general, this play depicts the Rohailas as being strictly restricted within their cultural and traditional boundaries, they find urban values corrupting their traditional practices, rural culture and fear that their women might elope with these outsiders. Just as Qadeer Khan thinks about his daughter Seema in Pyaas. Like Shah Sahib’s son, Ashraf, Rohi’s brother represents the angry young man belonging to Siraiki culture, who is over-protective about his honour as indicated through his concerns for his sister. At the same time, he is angry, rebellious and wants to break the oppression of his culture. He thinks joining city gangs means progression, avenging norms, becoming urbanized and feeling free to be with any woman that he desires. His sister Rohi and her decision of marrying an urban man represents female emancipation, just as Seema decides to marry Ashraf at


the end of Pyaas. Binaries such as tradition vs. modernity, rural vs. urban, dominator vs. dominated, man vs. women reflect through the plot of this play which ends in the acceptance of modernity like the two PTV serials discussed above.

Despite being critical about the rural traditions of Rohailas (local people living in the Rohi desert), their low literacy rate, and ill-treatment of women, the play is intentionally set in the locale of the Rohi desert, which represents both, a territorial resource and geopolitical symbol belonging to the Siraiki region. Thus, the most crucial symbol in Ahmed’s play is the choice of the Rohi desert itself which portrays writer’s nationalistic emotions in relation to his motherland. He therefore personifies his female protagonist as Rohi.Unlike the oppressed characters of Seema and Saloni as discussed through my discussion on PTV plays, the protagonist of this playsymbolises both, motherland and mother culture of the writer. The character of Rohi thus indicates that based on Indian nationalism, established on linking women's bodies with culture and to be protected (ParthaChatterjee), Siraiki nationalism in Pakistan also follow the same pattern. Despite being critical about the taboos practised in Rohi, the author also hopes for a change and is more optimistic as compared to AsgharNadeemSaeedand Gilani, who have intertwined the complications of feudalism, religiosity and social taboos in Siraiki culture far more intricately and pessimistically.

A similar ambition of representing Siraiki region and history through literature is evident in the novels and poetry of many contemporary Siraiki writers like Ahmed Hamdani (Multan Di Var), ShabeerHasanAkhtar (MalohiSudaSuhagun),Aslam Ansari (BerivichDariya), and AslamJaved (SutSerai).45All these writers aim to represent their cities and territory as a symbol of the nationalism and for giving geopolitical importance that they give to their motherland. It is also evident that some writers despite using English as a foreign language stick to their objective of representing their region and rich culture from nationalistic point of view. For instance Aslam Ansari sets his play ‘Lotus and the Sandwaves’ in the time of Alexander’s invasion of Multan. Instead of creating folk vs. modern, Ansari highlights the historical and folk connotations of Siraiki culture which seem to be preserved within the romance of the two protagonists of this play whose love remains unrequited like the other folk and legendary characters belonging to the Siraiki region. His protagonist Neelphul shuns away the advances of a Greek soldier because she finds his language alien and hates his preoccupation of her motherland. Like Rohi, Hafeez Malik’s protagonist, Neelphul too represents, motherland (maadharti), mother language (MaaBoli) and nationalistic emotions expressed by the author. She also represents Siraiki culture and history because she has a role to play during the historic invasion of her native city, Multan.46


CONCLUSION

In the three sections of this paper, I have tried to raise the following questions: Firstly, was it necessary for both these PTV writers, Saeed and Gillani to depict the darker side of the Siraiki culture, creating its stereotype image of being backward and rural for the audience in Punjab? Secondly, was it unfair on the part of these writers to base such themes on a culture which already faces repression in Pakistan? Finally, how successful were these writers in creating an image of a culture when they had already distorted its originality by replacing its regional language with the national language, Urdu?

On the one hand, in Pyaasand Chunri,we see the negative depiction of women suggests that despite the independence of the country, the attitudes towards oppressing and colonizing women have not changed in the Siraiki culture. The differentiations that colonial encounters created between the coloniser and the colonised are persisting in the relationship between genders and they are not allowed to comingle within this culture.47 The oppression of women through veiling is a practice which also associates Siriaki culture with Muslim practice of veiling with seventeenth century Arabia as also identified by Mernisi, thus also representing this culture as being fundamentalist.48Women are thus seen as naqs-e-aql (stupid) by birth and someone who can tempt men to do wrong doings, someone who cannot protest against the psychological or physical abuse by father (Qadeer Khan) or spiritual mentor (Shah Sahib).49It is also significant to note that the two plays were written in two different times, and the optimism in the later and the pessimism in the former, as depicted by the authors has also to do with the ways the national discourse in both cases was defined within their respective political eras; the first represents the Zia regime of religious/scriptural tendencies; the pessimism in the first shows a lack of agency expected from the traditional Siraiki culture and different nominators/symbols like presenting religion in ‘static’ fashion was part of the regime agenda and the other play of latter period reflects hope. However, the optimism in the second gives some agency to the local traditions through the transformative character of the Siraiki culture/traditions.However, it is also significant to note that such a treatment of women can be exemplified not only in Siraiki region but also in various rural parts of all the provinces of Pakistan as also portrayed in many plays of BanoQudsia (Punjab) and Noor Ul Huda Shah (Sindh).

On the other hand, Siraiki writers like Hafeez and Ansari represent women bodies diversely; asmetonyms of ‘redefining traditional culture’ and preserving cultural authenticity, ‘affirming identity in relation to another cultural group’ (e.g., non-Siraiki groups) and ‘maintaining social cohesion’ or as symbols of the progress of the Siriaki society.50

Siraiki critics have argued that it was the establishment’s policy to either use Urdu language in these dramas programs or generally create the impression that Siraiki as a dialect of Punjabi.51 The current situation seems to be however different as along with the discussions on the representation of Siraiki language speakers in the Parliament, the acknowledgement of Siraiki as an independent language and ethnic identity in Pakistan;


the creation of a Siraiki province; Siraiki folk music and the recent interest in Sufism against the background of ‘war against terror’ also seems to be gaining a lot of attention in contemporary music programs like Coke Studio.52However, the popularity of Siraiki language still depends on private TV channels rather than state controlled TV channels like PTV Network.

NOTES 1Schiffman, Linguistic Culture & Language Policy, 148-172. 2Tickoo, ‘Kashmiri, a majority-minority language: an explanatory essay’, 323-326. Here, a similar situation is discussed with reference to Kashmiri language too. See which has no status---is spoken at home only or in marketplaces---‘the more oppressed they will feel and the more intense will become their desire for a separate political status…’. 3Jafferi, ‘Regional Flicks get Real’, http://tribune.com.pk/story/212334/regional-flicks-get-real/ (first accessed on 14 September 2011) 4 A. S. Ahmad,‘Bombay Films: The Cinema as Metaphor for Indian Society and Politics,289-320 5Ibid.,317. 6http://www.umass.edu/wost/syllabi/spring06/hoodfar.pdf, 6 (first accessed on 16 September, 2011). 7Moghadam, Gender and National Identity: Women and Politics in Muslim societies, 88. 8Mernissi,Beyond the veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. 46. 9Zubair, ‘Finding A Voice: Literacy Use Among Siraiki Women’, 2, 13http://bzu.edu.pk/jrlanguages/Vol-2%202002/Shirin%20Zubair-1.pdf (furst accessed 15 September, 2011). Shirin has quoted a subjects interview here, which reflects the same scenario. Following is an excerpt from an older woman s’ interview: I must have been eight or nine when I started observing purdah... purdah was so strictly observed that even the air of the (male) servants was not allowed inside the houses, tongas were covered with curtains... if you go out and about you stay sane...I’m beginning to lose my sanity (Interview notes 25/10/97) 10 Ibid, . 3 11Ibid. 12Ibid.,12. 13Ibid., 6-10. 14Mernissi, 48. 15Ahmed, 307. 16BanuaziziThe Politics of social transformation in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, 416 17Shirin, 10. 18 Ahmad, 307 19Smith, p. 4 20Frembgen, ‘Divine Madness and Cultural Otherness: Diwanas and Faqirs in Northern Pakistan’, 236-7 21 Frembgen p., 245. 22Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism, 61-2. 23Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination, p. 5. 24Thiong�o, Pen Points, Gun Points and Dreams,p. 69 25Ibid, 15. 26 Ahmed, Strange Encounter: Embodied Othersin post-coloniality, 37. 27Ibid, 15. 28Ibid., 115. 29Ibid, 38.


30 Ibid., 116 31Ibid., 117. 32Ibid. 33Ibid, 38. 34 Ibid. 35Moraghi, 36Muysken,Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing, 1. 37Naficy, An accented cinema: exilic and diasporic filmmaking, 3. 38Ngugi, 28. 39Ibid., 39. 40 Sara Ahmed, 4. 41Ngugi, 40. 42Brunch, ‘The Intolerable Status Quo: Violence Against Women and Girls’, 43 http://www.unicef.org/pon97/40-49.pdf (first accessed on 6th September 2011). 43Chaudhry, ‘Violence Against Women – A Case Study’, 669-671. 44 Khan, Koi Shehreen Jungle Kookda 45Akhtar, MalohiSudaSuhagan; Ansari, BerivichDuriya; AslamJaved, SutSerai 46Langah, Resistance and Poetry: Islam , Ethnicity in Postcolonial Pakistan 47 S. Ahmed, p. 1-12 48Mohanty and Russo, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.67. 49Moghadam, . 87 50 Weiss, ‘The Consequences for State Policies for Women in Pakistan’, 412 51Dhareeja, SiraikiVasaib, 190-194 52 For some of the links to these songs see: Ni OothaanWaalehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55-ExedKAr0, Manzil e Sufi, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxFaUIxezkc, IthNaheen, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYKtKRRyf9Y, SighraAaweenhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuIg9NGAnVc

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Oxford English-Sindhi Dictionary: A Critical Study in Lexicography

Zulfiqar Ali Shah• and Dr. Ghulam Mustafa Mashori••

ABSTRACT: Oxford English Sindhi Dictionary (2010) is the latest addition in the bilingual dictionary making in Sindhi. OESD is based, in its English text on Concise Oxford English Dictionary (9th Ed). It gives the meaning of the headwords through the Sindhi translation of the original meaning descriptions. The pronunciation of English words is given in IPA as well as in Sindhi. Few earlier English dictionaries attempted to present English pronunciation in Sindhi characters (Shahani: 1940; Yadgar: 1988; Kifayat’s: 2004; Pirzada: 2007). In this paper, we examined in the light of the science of modern lexicography the organization and presentation of lexical items with particular reference to the question of pronunciation and the description of meaning. We found some weaknesses of the dictionary on the part of pronunciation. It may cause problems for the learner to use this dictionary. The revised version of the IPA is suggested to use in the dictionary.

Key words: Bilingual; Lexicography; Pronunciation; Microstructure

INTRODUCTIION

Lexicography as a science has two distinguished areas of enquiry and operation. One is its practical area of dictionary making, and other its theoretical aspect of dictionary research. (Jackson, 2002) Practical lexicographer goes through different phases of dictionary making and compilation. And the work of a theoretical researcher is to point out merits and demerits of existing dictionaries in the light of set principles and guide lines for practitioners in the field.

Sindhi is a language originating in the Sindh province of present day Pakistan, and is spoken by over 40 million people in Pakistan and India and by a large Diaspora community around the world. Sindhi belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family (Jennifer Cole. 2005). It is spoken in eight different countries of the world. It stands number 43 in Ethnologue list of 9606 world languages (Ethnologue 2012).

Many bilingual English-Sindhi dictionaries were compiled and produced before and after the independence of Pakistan i.e.1947. Oxford English Sindhi Dictionary is one • Assistant Professor Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Pakistan •• Associate Professor Department of English Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Pakistan

Zulfiqar Ali Shah, Ghulam Mustafa Mashori / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 38

of them which is produced by Oxford University Press, Karachi in 2010.The present study is an in depth critical analysis of this dictionary.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Much work has been done on the descriptive analysis and interpretation of existing dictionaries the world over. Two of the great names in the pioneers of such tradition are those of James Augustus Henry Murray The Evolution of English Lexicography (1900) and Mathews, Mitford M (1933) A Survey of English Dictionaries. The most recent developments in this connection are 'English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History' (Cowie, A.P:1999) and 'The Oxford History of English Lexicography' (Cowie, A.P:2009). Another important work is A Comparative Review of Two Monolingual Dictionaries of the English Language by Rek-Harrop. J (2010). 'The lexicography of English: from origins to present' (Béjoint, Henri: 2010) is also a useful addition in this tradition.

Howard Jackson (2002) pointed out the following components which form the microstructure of a dictionary:

• Spelling

• Pronunciation

• Inflections

• Word class

• Senses

• Definition (meaning description)

• Examples

• Usage

Sekaninova (1993) as quoted in Klapicova (2005) emphasizes following parameters for the construction of an entry in a bilingual dictionary:

a) phonetic information

b) grammatical component

c) stylistic parameter

d) lexical equivalence

e) lexical stability

f) lexical-semantic connection potentiality

g) context applicability.

Oxford English-Sindhi Dictionary: A Critical Study in Lexicography 39

Steiner (1984) has suggested some guidelines in order to evaluate a dictionary whether monolingual or bilingual. The dictionary should be according to the principles of the science of modern lexicography. It should specify the area and its audience or users. He emphasizes the utility of the dictionary either for general use or for specific use. The lexicographer's claims made should be compared with the actual content of the dictionary. The purpose of the dictionary should also be examined whether it is for learning a language, for translation or for something else.

Besides, Zgusta, L. (1971), Béjoint, H. (2000), Landau, S. I. (1984/2001) form a very sound basis for the descriptive method of a dictionary research.

A heuristic checklist is developed by Abu-Risha (2003) for the entries and information in a bilingual dictionary. It shows what a learner expects or needs to find in a learner's dictionary:

A. Semantic Information:

• Definition • Lexical Relations (Synonyms and/or antonyms and/or semantic field) • Formality and Technicality (formal, informal, slang, colloquial, and

register) • Collocations, idioms and fixed expressions • Illustrative examples showing the actual grammatical usage of the word

B. Grammatical Information:

• Parts of Speech • Verb Argument Structure • Grammatical use in sentences

C. Morphological Information:

• Derivational forms of lexemes • Inflectional forms of lexemes • Pronunciation (with special reference to BrE and AE) • Variation (Variation of usage or spelling in the various Englishes:

British, American, New-Zealand, Australian, Canadian, etc.)

METHODOLOGY

There is a clear distinction in the research methods used in natural science research and in a social science one. There are many research methods to obtain data in social science research as in the fields of Language, Linguistics and Literature. Social science research is basically qualitative and unobtrusive (Webb et al.:1966). This


research is qualitative and descriptive in nature (Nunan: 1992) and (Silverman: 2000). Descriptive research provides information about conditions, situations, and events that occur in the present situation (Educational research: UNESO). According to Richards et al (2002) descriptive research is an investigation that attempts to describe accurately and factually a phenomenon, subject or area.

The research tools used in this study are 'content analysis' and 'document analysis'. Content analysis is the intellectual process of categorizing qualitative textual data into clusters of similar entities, or conceptual categories, to identify consistent patterns and relationships between variables or themes. Qualitative content analysis is sometimes referred to as latent content analysis. This analytic method is a way of reducing data and making sense of them—of deriving meaning. It is a commonly used method of analyzing a wide range of textual data, including interview transcripts, recorded observations, narratives, responses to open-ended questionnaire items, speeches.

'Content analysis is an accepted method of textual investigation…In content analysis, researchers establish a set of categories and then count the number of instances that fall into each category' (Silverman:2001).

In qualitative research, content analysis is interpretive, involving close reading of text. Qualitative researchers using a content analytic approach recognize that text is open to subjective interpretation, reflects multiple meanings, and is context dependent (e.g., part of a larger discourse). This entry describes how qualitative content analysis is used and how to use it well. Content analysis is ' A method of analyzing the contents of documents that uses quantitative measures of the frequency of appearance of particular elements in the text. The number of times that a particular item is used, and the number of contexts in which it appears, are used as measures of the significance of particular ideas or meanings in the document (Victor.J: 2006).

Document analysis according to the Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods (2008) is 'the standard approach to the analysis of documents focuses primarily on what is contained within them.' In this frame, documents are viewed as conduits of communication between, say, a writer and a reader-conduits that contain meaningful messages.

OXFORD ENGLISH SINDHI DICTIONARY

Oxford English Sindhi Dictionary (henceforth OESD) came out in 2010 and is published by Oxford University Press, Karachi. It is a good addition in the tradition of bilingual dictionary making in Sindhi. It spreads over almost 2100 pages. Though few popular English Sindhi Dictionaries were present in the scenario, there was a persisting need for a good dictionary in the field.


This dictionary is the directed adaptation of Concise Oxford Dictionary. As mentioned on the front matter of the dictionary English text is taken from Concise Oxford Dictionary, (9th edition).

COMPONENT PARTS OF THE DICTIONARY

The dictionary is well divided into three parts, i.e. front matter, back matter and the middle matter containing main entries.

1) Front Matter: The front matter covers the title page inside and outside the book. A detailed list of contents is given. Editorial board and compilers names have been listed. A publisher's note is followed by a preface by the editor. Then, instructions for the use of dictionary are give in detail spreading over six pages. It points out the peculiarities of Sindhi pronunciation and there representation in the dictionary.

2) Middle Matter: Middle matter includes main entries in the dictionary. Average 30 words per page, the dictionary covers well about more than 60000 words.

3) Back Matter: It includes some grammatical explanations. Some encyclopedic information follows, in which abbreviations; scientific terms, punctuation marks and symbols for proof reading are described.

As this dictionary depends for its entries and semantic details on Concise Oxford Dictionary, our main focus of enquiry in present study is the presentation of meaning and pronunciation. Meaning equivalents and pronunciation are the two main problems its precedent bilingual English Sindhi dictionaries face.

Microstructure of the Dictionary: The microstructure of the dictionary goes in the series of spelling, pronunciation in IPA, grammatical information, pronunciation in Sindhi, grammatical information in Sindhi, and meaning in Sindhi. A typical entry example is:

Spelling: Both British and American system of spelling is introduced in this dictionary. An American spelling is given as main entry mentioning it as American as for center p.271 and the same variation is mentioned with the British spelling of the headword as with centre (US center) p.272. Few other examples are:

comply /k´mpl√I/ v.intr. (-ies, -ied) with ا/ ِء<Eع ط ه) (اڳئن ، و ڻ) ا ئب <

complied with herconditions ئئ را ط س had no choice but to comply

ه ( ئ واه ئ ) و اِء ئن ڳ


Cheque (US check) p. 289 Favour (US favor) p.632 Favourite (US favorite) p.632 Framboesia (US frambesia) p.691 Groyne (US groin) p.776 Glycerine (US glycerin) p.745 Harbour (US harbor) p.798 Metre (US meter) p.1097 Vigour (US vigor) p.1987

The main entry or headword starts with a small case alphabet while all proper nouns start with the capital ones. Some examples;

Breeches Bible

Breton

Calamity Jane

Cajun

Calabar bean all entries on p. 236.

Great Divide (p.767)

Oxford Movement p.1248 etc

MEANING DESCRIPTION

As mentioned earlier, translations of word meanings as given in the original COD meanings are given. Both translation equivalent and definition methods are implied.

Translation equivalent:

and definition as,

gist /dZIst/ n ڙ: ا ، >، ا ڳئ

giraffe: /dZIrA˘f/ ن ر ڳ ۽ اڳ ئ ڙ ئ اوڳئر آن ڊ ڻ ن نن ئرا داغ ۽ ا وچ ۾ آ ۽

ر ئ ئن ڊ ئ ۾ ن، د ن


In the main entry, there are the lexical items whose all senses are presented separately, as

Coax (2 senses) Cob (2 senses) Cockle (3 senses) Fawn (2 senses) Post (3 senses)

PRONUNCIATION

The system of presenting pronunciation of an English word is based on the older version of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). All modern English dictionaries i.e., OALD, Cambridge, Longman, give pronunciations in the revised version of IPA i.e. 2005. The learner who is familiar with OALD or any other modern English dictionary will find it confusing to read the correct pronunciation of an English word.

The IPA symbols used in this dictionary are compared with IPA system in other modern dictionaries as under:

IPA IN OESD

IPA MODERN (2005) WORD PRONUNCIATION

IN OALD PRONUNCIATION

IN OESD a Q cat, fan kQt, fQn kat, fan √I aI fine faIn f√In E e pen pen pEn ´˘ Œ˘ girl gŒ˘l g´˘l E˘ e´ hair he´ (r) hE˘

Instead of /e/ it gives /E/ as for send, or self.

Instead of giving well known symbol of /Q/ in the words like ‘cat’, the dictionary provides /a/ for this double vowel sound. This feature runs through out the dictionary, and is certainly misguiding.

The English diphthong /Œ˘/ for the sound occurring in the words like ‘girl’ and ‘thirst’ is wrongly given as /´˘/. It is actually an old system. Now all English dictionaries represent this sound with the IPA symbol of /Œ˘/. The recent developments in English phonology also suggest the same (Roach. P, 1983; Cruttenden, 1994; Crystal. D, 1987).

Pronunciation of English sound /Œ˘/ in Sindhi is completely misleading. For example, the pronunciation of two English words ‘gurn’ and ‘gun’ appears as same as /

/ on page no.781 & 782 respectively.


In the Sindhi characters these pronunciations are totally misguiding. In the following table we will illustrate with more examples how a misguiding pronunciation is given which is identical with completely a different lexical item:

WORD PRONUNCIATION IN SINDHI burn; bun ب

ton; turn; tonne tough; turf

verdict وڊ verge وج verb وب

verbal وب virgin و virtue و word وڊ work وכ world و

These are few examples to clarify that the present dictionary uses an outdated

version of IPA system. This system may be in use for the description of Cardinal Vowel System but is not used for Transcription or for Dictionary Pronunciation. Though based on Concise Oxford Dictionary, this dictionary will be of less use for the learner who refers most modern dictionaries.

The system given by original version of the Concise Oxford Dictionary has been adopted without giving any second thought to it to make the dictionary updated.

Sindhi section of Pronunciations: To give pronunciation of English words in Sindhi characters is very difficult. However, editors have certainly done a good job. In many respects they are successful. But in the pronunciation of few English sounds they have committed blunders. For example, for the English sound of /N/ there is a Sindhi letter given, which is absolutely a different sound. This sound comes in words like ‘sing’, ‘thing’, ‘think’ and in ‘dengue’. When one sees the pronunciation of these and such like words one will be disappointed to find their substitute in Sindhi as /ڱ/, which is not an appropriate sound especially when fully released. An Arabic diacritic mark of ‘mad’/ Ê / or

/ /may have been used over/ن/ to represent this sound. For example when we pronounce

word ‘dengue’ it will never be / ڱ as the dictionary says (p454). Few more examples /ڊwith this mispronunciation are as under:


WORD PRONUNCIATION GIVEN

Adjunct <ڱ ا (p.22)<

Building ب (p.218)<

Bank ڱ >(p.126) ب

Bunk بڱ (p.222)

Junk ڱ (p. 950)

Prink ڱ (p. <1379 )

Priming ائ (p.1778)

Sing (p.1639)

Sink ڱ (p.1641)

Tonga ئڱ (p.1855)

tongue (p.1855)<

The English sound /T/ is represented with Sindhi letter /ٿ/ which never is the

right symbol. /ٿ/ is completely different sound and English sound /T/ is completely different.

The Sindhi pronunciation of word ‘gigolo’ is given as / Ýç×eژ / (p.735) where as it

is without Ý sound as / ç×e ژ /. It is certainly the mistake of proof reading.

Some mistakes in pronunciations: In addition to the mistakes in few important sounds of English and their counterparts in Sindhi as mentioned above, there are few other mistakes here and there in the dictionary. In the following table, we will cite few mistakes of the pronunciations which will illustrate this feature of the dictionary more clearly:

WORD PRON.IN OESD IN SINDHI PRON.IN OALD (7TH ED) Bird Pronunciation missing

bunch ب b√ntS

flow ِء fl´U

situation ئ sItSueISn

turf tŒ˘f

virtue و vŒ˘tSu


CONCLUSION

Oxford English Sindhi Dictionary aims to fulfill the gap and dire need of the Sindhi learners of English for their general and pedagogical purposes. It may be useful for the learners from secondary to higher level of education for their understanding and using English language. The most important and challenging feature of an English Sindhi dictionary remains to give pronunciation of English words in Sindhi besides providing meaning. We may conclude from above discussion that OESD fulfills some basic needs in this connection. It will be a useful source for students as well as for teachers of English language. But in some aspects, it lacks authenticity, error free accurate information, and the user friendly attitude. It needs to be up to date and accurate in many respects particularly in pronunciation. It may use the up dated version of IPA, and correct the Sindhi portion of the pronunciations. Diacritic marks may be used to provide correct pronunciation of English words in Sindhi. These suggestions may be incorporated in the revised editions of the dictionary which is very much needed.

REFERENCES

Bejoint, Henry, (2000) Modern Lexicography: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ibid (2010).The Lexicography of English: from origins to present London: Oxford University Press Cole, Jennifer. (2005). 'Sindhi' in Strazny, P (ed.) Encyclopedia of Linguistics. New York:

Routledge Cowie, A. P. (2009).The Oxford History of English Lexicography Gloucestershire: Clarendon

Press, UK Ibid (1999). English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History. London: Oxford University

Press Davies, A. & Elder, C. (2006) The Handbook of Applied Linguistics Malden: Blackwell Publishers Hornby A.S. (ed.) (2005) Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. 7th ed.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, H. (2002) Lexicography, An Introduction. London: Routledge Klapicová, E. H. Composition of the Entry in a Bilingual Dictionary Retrieved February 07, 2012

from http://www.google.com.pk/ Languages of the World. Retrieved February, 11, 2012, from

http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size Lillo,J.(2010) 'Francesco D' Alberti Di Villanuova's Renewal of Bilingual Lexicography' International Journal of Lexicography, 23 (189–205) Linda, S. (2001) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press Mugglestone, L. (2002) Lexicography and the OED: pioneers in the untrodden forest London:

Oxford University Press Richards, J.C et al (2002). Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

London: Longman Pearson Silverman, D. (2001) Interpreting Qualitative Data London: Sage Publications Webb, E., Campbell, D.T., Schwartz, R.D. and Sechrest, L. (1966). Unobtrusive Measures: Non-

Reactive Research in the Social Sciences Chicago: Rand McNally & Co

Occupational Therapy as a Redress for Nihilism Based on Edward Albee’s Play The Zoo Story

Sehrish Firdous•

ABSTRACT: The stains of nihilism are often found in the twentieth century American literature, asserting the worthlessness of life, mostly generated by the indifferent behaviour of the society. This research paper ventures to probe into the idea that the Occupational Therapy offers numerous redressing effects to this existential nihilist stance. Occupational Therapy enables the recluse and crestfallen to work constructively and fruitfully in order to promote the feeling in them that life is not utterly insignificant.

Keywords: Occupational Therapy; Nihilism; Materialistic American Society; Incentive For Life; Edward Albee; The Zoo Story; Religion and Occupational Therapy;

Community Mobility; Healthy Life

INTRODUCTION

Critics have often pointed out the themes of an indifferent materialistic world, abandoned and unheard individuals, social outcasts, and most importantly the influence of Existential Nihilism in Edward Albee’s works, but seldom have we come across any remedy for such heart-rending conditions. Lack of incentive surely makes life worthless and breeds the feeling of existential nihilism to such an extent that they capture the whole personality of an individual, who ultimately becomes an embodiment of hatred for life. Raymond A. Bellioti writes in his book What is the Meaning of Human Life?, “Existential nihilism holds that….human life is at its core meaningless because the cosmos is purposeless”(31). Edward Albee too deals with the same idea in his play The Zoo Story, in which the protagonist Jerry appears to be a victim of existential nihilism, created by an utterly indifferent and materialistic society, i.e. the modern American society. Lucina P. Gabbard states in the journal Edward Albee’s Triptych on Abandonment, “Jerry became the prototype of American youth, unheard by the government and abandoned”(14). Jerry dwells upon the idea that his abandoned existence is purposeless, and instead of having such a recluse and un-endurable life he deems it better to get rid of it once and for all. As Lucina P. Gabbard puts it, “The purpose of his entire plan of action was death, the alternative to a loveless life” (20). The idea of life being insignificant might be mitigated by proposing to these individuals the redresses offered by the Occupational Therapy. Lucina P. Gibbard states, “The Zoo Story presents

• Postgraduate Student, Department of English Language and Literature, University of the Punjab, Lahore

Sehrish Firdous / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 48

Albee’s vision of suffering humanity crying for help” (20), and this help is what Occupational Therapy provides.

The World Federation of Occupational Therapists provides the following definition of Occupational Therapy: “Occupational Therapy is, as a profession, concerned with promoting health and well-being through engagement in occupation” (n.pag). While reading the play we come to know that Jerry himself wanted to do some good work in order to achieve self-satisfaction, as he said “I think I might be doing some good in that tormented house”(13). Wilma L. West writes in the journal Occupational Therapy: Philosophy and Perspective, “Occupational Therapy extends its contribution to community health, planning preventive medicine as well as to achieve treatment” (1708). This article delves into the prerogatives offered by Occupational Therapy.

NIHILISM IN ALBEE’S PLAY THE ZOO STORY

Following the trend, the contemporaries of Albee too held the Existential Nihilist approach and their work is generally referred to as the Absurdist theatre. Akin to Albee, the work of more or less all these authors depict that at the core of things there is a confrontation with a void, man has to confront the feeling that any sense of purpose in life is irrelevant, and setting a certain goal and striving towards it is a fallacy. But the mysterious part of Albee’s work is that no remedy of this existentialist nihilist position is offered, as Carolyn E. Johnson writes in an article “The Zoo Story: In Defense of Albee”, “Albee wrote about the mystical secrets of life without presenting any kind of solution”(n.pag). And this unresolved ‘solution’ is what we find embodied in the Occupational Therapy. Jerry, the protagonist of The Zoo Story led a shabby life, deprived of family, friends, and every other thing that one could own. His lack of interest in life , justified by his environment, is apparent by the comment which he made while comparing his condition with Peter’s family life, “I’m not married to two parakeets, or whatever your setup is. I am a permanent transient, and my home is the sickening rooming house”(18). Thus for such a person it is necessary to deliberately indulge himself in some sort of activity to avoid the stage of mental depression, which otherwise is sure to follow. Gill Richmond writes in “Enhancing Self-Efficacy in managing major depression”, “Occupational Therapists have a major role to play in alleviating the deprived occupational and social experience associated with depression, and in the prevention of further episodes” (34).

One of the finest examples of the use of Occupational Therapy by a character in English literature is found in Toni Morrison’s Jazz, in which the protagonist Violet at the verge of her disastrous marriage life gathered her courage to fight back. She did not collapse even after encountering a lot; infidelity at the hands of her husband, miscarriages followed by a craving mother hunger, and shame of being named as ‘Violent’ instead of ‘Violet’ because of her own outrageous acts. It was all possible because she compulsively worked as a hair-dresses, met various people and tried not to compartmentalize herself

Occupational Therapy as a Redress for Nihilism Based on Edward Albee’s Play The Zoo Story 49

from her community, as the novel says, “these women… are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down” (27). Thus we as readers find that Occupational Therapy do helps the dejected individuals, like Jerry, to elevate their spirits.

THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY FROM OTHER SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

Viktor Frankl developed the idea of “Logo-therapy”, which at the first glance appears similar to the idea, of finding some incentive in life propagated by the Occupational Therapy. Frankl states in his book Man’s Search for Meaning that “We can discover the meaning in life in three different ways: by creating a work or doing a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone, and by the attitude we take towards unavoidable sufferings” (176). But the basic difference in both the schools of thought is that in the Logo-therapy ‘struggle’ is the basic incentive for every individual, whereas the Occupational Therapy includes the idea of ‘promoting health’ by engaging individuals in activities. Marg Foster writes in Occupational Therapy and Physical Dysfunction, Principles, Skills and Practice that “Occupation and activities can be used in a variety of ways to overcome dysfunction and promote health in body and mind” (60). Thus the Occupational Therapy falls in the area of medical sciences whereas Logo-therapy lacks this connotation.

If we talk about the medical sciences then we find that the Physical Therapy also holds the idea of ‘promoting health’, but Wilma L. West writes in her research article “Occupational Therapy: Philosophy and Perspective” published in The American Journal of Nursing that “While the creative and manual arts and the skills of self-care are used in Occupational Therapy, in physical therapy and physical agents as heat, light, water electricity, and ultrasound, among others, are used to aid in the restoration of physical function” (1709). Hence there exists a difference between the Occupational Therapy and the physical therapy as well. Elizabeth June Yerxa writes in the article “Authentic Occupational Therapy” that “choice” is what differentiates the Occupational Therapy from the other schools of thought. She says that “Occupational Therapy has been unique, historically, because of the client’s participation in his own treatment. Choice has been encouraged in the client’s selection of media, his unique interaction with our media, and most importantly, in setting the objectives for his treatment program” (5). Thus when an individual’s own “will” is incorporated into the process leading him or her towards health and stability, then no doubt, the output is more positive as compared to the outcome of those processes which just compel the individuals towards following a certain pattern which they think would impart health to them.

This element of “choice” or to exercise one’s own will is what the protagonist of The Zoo Story, Jerry, missed in his life. The utterly materialistic American society did not allowed Jerry to achieve what he wished. By occupying Peter’s bench, Jerry gained an


opportunity to exercise his will power and it provided him with satisfaction, as he told Peter “You have everything in the world you want; you’ve told me about your home, and your family, and your own little zoo. You have everything and now you want this bench”(24). And this is one of the main reasons why he burst out outrageously when Peter resisted giving him his bench, because he could foresee his will being crushed, as he said “Don’t you have any idea, not even the slightest, what other people need?”(24). Therefore the ‘choice’ which the Occupational Therapy claims to provide to such individuals, could really prove helpful in promoting mental health, and therefore providing the satisfaction of a ‘need’ being fulfilled to such individuals.

RELIGION IN OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY, AS AN ASSUAGING FORCE

The Zoo Story, first staged in 1959, belongs to the era of the post-World-Wars, which were the harbingers and the nurtures of the spirit of nihilism. Karen L. Carr writes in The Binalization of Nihilism: Twentieth-Century Responses to Meaninglessness that “One of the most striking features of Post-World-War-I religious thought is its exploitation of the experience of meaninglessness as the basis for Christian apologetics”(1). The massive destructions made by the World Wars compelled the masses to reject the notion of God and to believe that life at its core was hollow and worthless. Thus the nihilists believe in the “Death of God”, as Austin Cline writes in “Nihilism and Christianity of God Theology” that “Like Nihilism and Existentialism, the idea of ‘Death of God Theology’ is a trend or mood in the modern theology” (n.pag). The reason behind it is described in “The Guide to Nihilism” as following: “The religious believing they hold a monopoly on truth, are compelled to force everyone else to believe the same thing they do, which means conflict is inevitable. Nihilism and religion cannot co-exist because the believers cannot allow it” (n.pag.).

In The Zoo Story, Jerry’s nihilistic existence led him away from religion as he said “God who, I’m told, turned his back on the whole thing some time ago” (17). Religion is the comforting source for every individual which provides him with “hope”, which is the most integral component for survival in the world, and when this ‘hope’ is absent, collapse of one’s personality is sure to follow. Occupational Therapy acknowledges the importance of religion and faith as a component partaking in the development of one’s constructive personality. This idea has been supported in Occupational Therapy with Older people, as it is written that “Occupational Therapists value the spiritual dimension of occupation and also acknowledge the importance of spirituality as part of their holistic, client-centered approach”(201), therefore “Occupational Therapy recognizes the importance of faith in healing”(201). Thus, Jerry’s nihilistic position could have been mitigated by the comfort provided by the support of religion, which is one of the most important healing activities offered by the Occupational Therapy. Joanne E. Farrar writes in “Addressing Spirituality and Religious Life in Occupational Therapy Practice” that “Physicians, psychiatrists, and nurses are being trained in the therapeutic use of spirituality, religion and contemporary medicine to


maximize wellness” (n.pag). Thus talking to a depressed person about religion and the divine entity of God, could provide him or her with a shelter against the harsh realities of life. Jerry’s lack of faith in God, apparent by the contemptuous tone he adopted while talking about God, dragged him more and more towards pessimism. Occupational Therapy proclaims that such pessimism could be transformed into optimism if he could realize the element of hope offered by religion. As Phyllis Ehrlich writes in “Religion-What Do Your Patient Need?” that “Research has found that patients who use their religion and/or spirituality to help with coping or healing do better than those who do not (American Journal of Health Studies 19(1) 2004, 62-67” (n.pag).

THE ACTIVITIES OFFERED BY THE OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY

Umpteen useful activities are offered by the Occupational Therapy to its clients. Sheena E. E. Blair and Clephane A. Hume write in Occupational Therapy and Mental Health, “The health promoting value of purposeful participation in activity has been well documented in text books on Occupational Therapy and is inherent in the concept of self-actualization”(20). One of the most important activities offered by the Occupational Therapy is Community Mobility. Its focus is that a healthy life is not merely a matter of independence but of inter-dependence. In Jerry’s case too we find that a major reason of his predicament was the ‘lack of communication’(3), which he attempted to overcome, as he said “But once in a while I like to talk to somebody, know all about him”(6), but he did not succeed. Thus his basic need was “to understand and just possibly be understood”(17), which was possible by adopting inter-personal and social skills. Secondly, the American Occupational Therapy Association states that Occupational Therapy ‘determines the person’s goal and ensures that the goals are being met’ (n.pag). Jerry had no sense of achievement in life, his only feeling was that “What is gained is loss”(17). But if he had set some aim for himself and had strived towards it persistently without caring for the failures, the case might have been different. Even at the end of the play we find that the struggle he underwent in order to have Peter’s bench, provided him with a sense of achievement, as he said “I’m on your precious bench and you’re never going to have it for yourself again”(23). Thus, this practice of Occupational Therapy might have proved salubrious for Jerry as well. Marg Foster writes in Occupational Therapy and Physical Dysfunction: Principles, Skills, and Practices, “Occupational Therapy was founded on the belief that occupation and activity are instrumental in achieving and maintaining health”(59). The third advantage, which the American Occupational Therapy Association proclaims, is to “improve the person’s ability to perform daily activities”(n.pag). Jerry was not very well in performing his daily chores, as at the very beginning we find him “not poorly dressed, but carelessly”(1), his “fall from physical grace”(1) might have been compensated by the activities offered by Occupational Therapy. Another vital service offered by it is the “evaluation of client’s environment i.e. home, workplace” (n.pag). Jerry’s environment created a depressing ambiance, i.e. “a laughably small room”(9), “two picture frames, both empty”(9), etc. It


might have been better for him, as Occupational Therapy offers, to change his atmosphere in order to gain a positive effect.

THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY MOBILITY

Jerry’s recluse condition compels the reader’s mind to point out its statutory parallel i.e. the ‘Solitary Confinement’, which is defined by The Macmillan Dictionary as “a punishment in which a prisoner is kept alone, separated from other prisoners’ (n.pag). It is the worst form of torture because lack of human contact might lead to nervous breakdown and other psychological problems. Jerry’s dialogues act as a mirror to reflect and replicate his despaired psyche, as we find him saying, “What I mean is; animals are indifferent to me….like people”(14). His highly materialistic society appeared to him a jail, “with everyone separated by bars from everyone else”(20). C. W. E. Bigsby states in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama, that Edward Albee had “awakened himself to the desperate isolation of people…like animals in a zoo, denied access to other animals and hence denied both self-definition and consolation”(258). Further, Rose A. Zimbardo states in the journal Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, that “The truth about human relationships that Jerry recognizes is that men are islands irrevocably cut off from one another”(12). Thus asserting that social communication and interaction are very important for a healthy existence. To known and to be known not only socially but psychologically empowers the individual. Our surroundings make us what we are, and to act positively we must establish relationship with our society, which is possible mainly through communication. Peter Wolfe writes in the journal The Social Theatre of Edward Albee, “The search in both cases is one, of identity through community”(251). It is quite clear that the redresses offered by the Occupational Therapy appear pretty valuable and effective in Jerry’s case.

CONCLUSION

Hence we can say that the inter-disciplinary approach and reading often appears to be very useful, and it broadens our approach. Although the Occupational Therapy follows a rather scientific method but it doesn’t appear awkward to apply it on Literature and avail ourselves with its advantages, because mainly the focus of both these disciplines is the same, i.e. the individual. Therefore, Occupational Therapy helps the individuals like Jerry to recognize their abilities, offering them the opportunities to work productively and overcome the feelings of utter dejection, which ensures the position of existentialist nihilism. Jerry’s existentialist nihilist stance is clear from his tone while uttering Peter’s words “Oh My God!” (27), i.e. his tone was “a combination of scornful mimicry and supplication”(27). But the indispensable suggestion over here is that God Has created a bounteous world, and has bestowed man with umpteen abilities. And man, instead of idle wasting his qualities, must utilize them positively, as the Occupational Therapy recommends, in order to live a life of “great pleasure, great satisfaction” (The Zoo Story, 24).


WORKS CITED LIST

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Belliotti, Raymond. A. What is the Meaning of Human Life? Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Print.

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Blair, Sheena E. E., Clephane A. Hume. “Health, Wellness and Occupation.” Occupational Therapy and Mental Health. Ed. Jennifer Creek. London: Churchill Livingstone, 2002. Print.

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Occupational Therapy Evidence in Practice for Mental Health. Eds. Cathy Long and Jane Cronin Davis. U.K. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006. Web. 28th Oct, 2011.

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Wolfe, Peter. “The Social Theatre of Edward Albee.” Prairie Schooner 39.3(1965):248-62. Print.

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Zimbardo, Rose A. “Symbolism and Naturalism an Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story.” Twentieth Century Literature 8.1(1962): 10-17. Print.

REFERENCES

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Story.” Journal of Shaanxi Institute of Education (2007): n.pag. Web. 30 Oct. 2011.

Impersonality and “Four Quartets"

Dr. Muhammad Khan Sangi• Abdul Sattar Gopang•• and Dr. Ziauddin Khand•••

ABSTRACT: In his poem ‘Four Quartets’, T S Eliot has tried to give a kind of philosophic cum artistic summary of his various social concepts and beliefs in these quartets. From various angles this long poem of four sections has been commented upon by critics. Many critics have found the Eliot’s proclaimed characteristics of impersonality in the poem. The masterly use of language plays very important role in bringing forth the desired meaning in a situation especially describing an abstract phenomenon. This observation shows that Eliot has tried to present a bygone time or persons in their own typical surroundings. This masterly skill of Eliot has been a great means of success to achieve the impersonal tone in his poetry throughout these fragmented poems. In this poem, the account or subject matter may be personal, but it is the way of presentation that makes it personal or impersonal as defined by Eliot. Hence, if we look at the way things have been talked about in the “Quartets”, the impersonal tone is more obvious than the personal. This paper aims at analyzing the poets proclaimed concept of ‘impersonality of poetry’ and his skill to achieve it in his peculiar way.

Keywords: Poetry; Impersonality; Four Quartets; TS Eliot; concept; belief; language

INTRODUCTION

Eliot considered “Four Quartets” his masterpiece (Domestico: 2010), as it draws upon his knowledge of mysticism and philosophy of life. It consists of four long poems, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, each in five sections or movements. The five sections are said to be symbolically representing particular elements like air, earth, water and fire; and they also suggest Christian holy days - Ascension Day, Good Friday, the Annunciation and Pentecost respectively (Sexton. 279). Although they resist easy characterisation, they have many things in common: each begins with a reflection on the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical, and on its relation to the human condition. Talking about the subject matter of the poem, Rees (64) remarks that the essential focus or unifying idea, of the Four Quartets is describing eternal reality which the poet tries to search through mortal time. He says that Eliot has tried to give a • Assistant Professor, Institute of English Language & Literature,University of Sindh, Jamshoro •• Lecturer, Department of Curriculum Development & Special Education University of Sindh, Jamshoro ••• Professor, Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur

Muhammad Khan Sangi et al. / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 56

kind of philosophic cum artistic summary of his various social concepts and beliefs in these quartets.

DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT

A reflective early reading suggests an inexact systematic approach among his various discussed social concepts; they approach the same ideas in varying but overlapping ways, although they do not necessarily exhaust their questions. “Eliot proclaims that the Four Quartets are straightforward, told in the simplest language possible” (Bellin: 2003). However, Bellin argues whether the poet’s claim of simplicity i.e. acceptable or not. He quotes a few other critics who agree on the point that because the subject matter in the Quartets is not an ordinary thing, so the language used to describe such ideas mostly avoids simplicity. Dallas (193) gives her opinion, with special reference to “Four Quartets”, about Eliot’s consistency with his poetic standards in the practice of his own poetry.

She writes that T. S. Eliot’s in his prose and plays or poetry has maintained an increasingly developed understanding and usage of the doctrines that an indivisible association is found there between form and substance in his work of art. She has specially written about the association between Eliot’s critical thoughts and poetic practice. She compares the content and structure of different poems especially of the “Quartets” and finds an appropriate correlation in them and says that development of the form of the poem is very much in accordance with the theme and thought running in the poem. (Dallas, 194).

IMPERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

From various angles this long poem of four sections has been commented upon by critics. Many critics have found the Eliot’s proclaimed characteristics of impersonality in the poem. The relationship of mater and form of any poem is considered very significant to show artistic expertise objectively. Fussel (212) finds a correlation between the content and the form of this long poem. He says that the structure of “Four Quartets” as compared to its subject matter is both a innate and expected consequence of techniques and concepts formerly used by Eliot and, at the same time, exceptional not only in Eliot’s own poetry but also in the entire English literary tradition. However Fussel is also of the opinion that in the “Quartets”, what we are offered to view is not what every individual can perceive on his own but it is rather ‘the eyes of a single personality’ that shows us what we see. Even then the critic concludes that such is the skill to develop the theme that a reader feels himself as the part of the experience. His poetic works are a kind of externalization of aesthetic and emotional images mixed together with explanation and annotation by the interpreting understanding, a combination of personal contemplation and open public dialogue (Fussel. 213). He further says that the structure of Four

Impersonality and “Four Quartets” 57

Quartets is outcome of the poet’s experience, which is artistically developed by intellectual analysis and the depiction of emotional state.

Fussel also talks about Eliot’s concept of ‘unification of sensibilities’ but with a mixed comments of achieving it. He says that the theme and style of the poem correlate with each other and they are developing side by side (214). He means to say that in comparison to Eliot’s early works, the poem “Four Quartets” shows a delay resolution of the unifying devices, which the poet does on purpose. He says that Eliot knows the limitations of the modern man to understand the universal realities not so easily, therefore, first of all, he had to take to direct description of his religious thoughts and, then, by describing the concept of incarnation, Eliot achieves the union of the opposites in the “Quartets”. Dallas (6, 7) writes in detail Eliot’s use of opposite images to describe the opposite universal forces at work. She quotes lines from the different sections of the “Quartets”, which simultaneously mention life and death, cold and heat, haze and light, dead, and living and the beginning and the end. All this is to depict impersonally the dual effects of the subtle universal laws. The poet, here, requires the intelligence and concentration of the reader to feel and understand the undertone of the message of the poem.

Written between 1935 and 1942, they mark the end of Eliot's major poetic achievement. As a poet, Eliot was by no means prolific. So much greater his merit of creating, in quite a few great poems, an imaginary world which has haunted poetry ever since. If he has not got whole shelves of books to boast of, he is, in exchange, an accomplished master of concentration and ambiguity. “We have seen him as an innovator, as a difficult poet, a magician of the understatement. “The Four Quartets” are his last feat of magic” (Vianu). The effect is mystifying. “Soothing is the first attribute that comes to mind in connection with Eliot's “Four Quartets” (Vianu). If anything, then, these soothing Quartets are first and foremost poems of the mind. Emotion mastered, love reconsidered, sensibility dissected by serene thought. The masterly use of language plays very important role in bringing forth the desired meaning in a situation especially describing an abstract phenomenon. According to Bellin, Eliot has adequately used most of the language tools, which has made it possible for him to pronounce his mental feelings agreeably although, the poet has been denying his mastery over the adequate use of words. Bellin further says that such a paradoxical use of language can well be seen in Burnt Norton-the redemptive power of language and the distaste for language:

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness (li. 137-142)


Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. (li. 149-153)

Bellin (2003) quotes Hay who comments, “One critic proposes that the poem uses a "stream-of-consciousness method...though whose consciousness is a crucial question" (Hay; 161); and he swiftly proclaims that in the poetry produced at some later stage, the perception and consciousness are clearly Eliot's own (Hay 161). In case of the “Quartets”, the poet’s consciousness and the quality of the Quartets’ impersonality come under question. Bellin, then, quotes Thompson who suggests finding out a certain formula as to read the “Quartets” impersonally as desired by the poet.

POETIC TECHNIQUES OF DEPERSONALISATION

Melaney (151) appreciates Eliot’s mastery over the use of befitting language in “Quartets”. With particular reference to the “Quartets”, he says that Eliot usually enjoys adopting a style of expression that facilitates him to put forward abstract and theoretical proclamations as crystal clear and indisputable truths. The illustration of the time paradoxes in this poem is so strong that it constitutes a kind of poetics for the young poets especially regarding the use of the appropriate language. Boaz (32), by quoting Ruth Berges, says that Eliot wanted to write in a manner which will help us see what the poet inteds to make his readers feel about his mental thoughts in the same way as they are occurring in his own mind. And this is possible only through the use and application of a language that should be most befitting to convey the poet to the readers not only aurally but visually too.

Speaking about the start of the poem, Brown (2003) says that the imagery of the rose garden takes the readers along with the poet. He says that the world created by the poet becomes the imagined world of the readers, it is all because, good poetry always produces phenomenon to fulfill and portray its own inter-personal invitation.” This is the relation between the poem and the readers, not between the poet and the readers. The poet has to be an observer as before the composition of his poem so he has to remain after its composition. This is what is skillfully done by Eliot in his “Quartets”.

To come back to the late summer of Burnt Norton, the poem goes on with memories of youth silenced by the lullaby of elderly thoughts. There is a “trilling wire in the blood”, and this blood still sings below “inveterate scars”. But the old wars are “long forgotten”, or, in Eliot's words “appeased”. A “still” point is mentioned. It reminds the reader of the prayer to the silent sister in “Ash Wednesday”:

“Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still ...”


He reiterates, time and again, “all is always now”, and it looks difficult for him to forget what he wants to forget i.e. “the loud lament of the disconsolate fantasy”. They are all there in a poem which, though is determined to forget certain things and events (old ideal of Ash-Wednesday), has not yet performed this task of forgetting things. Obstinate recollections of old troubles and excitements enliven it:

Quick now, here, now, always – Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after ...

It is not only memories that hurt the poet, but also his struggle with the words, which should express them. In Burnt Norton, serene as the tone may be, peace of mind is wishful thinking, and the poet's words reveal a restless mind trying its hand at relaxation, but ...

“Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still”.

East Coker (1940), title of the second quartet, is the name of a Somerset shire village. T.S. Eliot desired that, at the time of his death, his body should be cremated, and the ashes buried at East Coker. Which his second wife dutifully accomplished. This place was visited and inhabited by Eliot’s ancestors also. That is why we find the start and the main theme of the poem as, “In my beginning is my end”, reversed later into “In my end is my beginning”. “The specifically literary twist here is that the simple revelry of the imagined ‘rustic’ men and women is largely rendered in the words and spelling of a probable ancestor of the poet – Sir Thomas Elyot” (Brown: 2003).

In daunsing, signifying matrimonie – A dignified and commodious sacrament. (178)

This observation shows that Eliot has tried to present a bygone time or persons in their own typical surroundings. This masterly skill of Eliot has been a great means of success to achieve the impersonal tone in his poetry throughout these fragmented poems.

The main space of Burnt Norton is, however, the “still point of the turning world”. Imaginary or not, who cares? Fact is that deep below, at the bottom of the poem, stillness and restlessness coexist. The poet has described here his past, his life philosophy, his achievements, his wishes and disappointments. A dynamic view of life has been mentioned in poetic style. A number of universal contrasting ideas have been


put together in fantastic antithetical statements. Vianu, speaking of such opposite facts, says, “They sadly go hand in hand, with Eliot inertly watching”:

“Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die”.

A tendency of detachment and aloofness encompasses certain sections in the “Four Quartets”: in “East Coker” where Eliot puts the metaphor of Christ, the wounded surgeon, in “The Dry Salvages”, where he mocks augury, in “Little Gidding” where he transforms German dive-bombers into the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit. Bottum (1995) confirms this wave of detachment in the quartets and says that this lack of involvement starts off as a final point in Eliot's desire to turn his knowledge and experience into metaphorical symbols. The development of the performance of an artist, Eliot wrote when he was younger, is ‘a continual extinction of personality." To him the poet is not experiencing his experiences here; he is only standing self-consciously outside experience in order to watch himself experience. In the “Four Quartets” the self- conscious poet stands outside his temporal experiences in order to find in them a metaphor for the temporal facts he has not experienced.

And all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

THE PERSONAL VIEW

But here the views of Stevens (2004) are slightly different. He says, though, in poems like Prufrock and “The Waste Land”, Eliot is considerably successful in applying his theory of impersonality, “but it is certainly Eliot’s own voice that we hear in the later poetry such as “Four Quartets”.” Stevens is of the opinion that the poet, in Quartets, has become subjective and speaks personally of his own life experiences. He does not find the element of detachment but rather a strong presence of the poet’s personality in the “Quartets”. Finally, Stevens says that “Four Quartets”, being a religious affirmation, gives way to certain discursive and expository elements that we do not find in his earlier poems.

OVER ALL IMPRESSION

Any how according to many other well reputed critics, Eliot has, in the “Quartets”, used the kind of images and symbols, that like “The Waste Land” and “Prufrock”, bring forth the poet’s inner thoughts in an objective manner. Eliot has shown great skill of using characteristic images to expose very abstract concepts in the


“Quartets”. Rees (65) is of the view that it is the use of images that has helped Eliot relate and yoke together the opposite themes in the quartets. He writes that the poet has shown great mastery over the use of the depiction of his feelings through very suitable and befitting images. He points out to the images of ‘river’ and ‘sea’, which represent the concepts of the temporal mutability and eternity respectively.

Esty (2003) is of the opinion that Eliot’s striving after objective style is a successful attempt to bring forth the intended impression of the poem impersonally. He says that the poet’s effort to make inner voice surrender to outer authority paves way for the artistic impersonality in his poem. For Esty the poetic techniques of Eliot are a practical show of his critical canons.

Dennis Brown (2003), talking about the psychological effects of the Quartets, experiences, “My own feeling is that the most powerful passages are those which engage the reader in an epiphanic experience which creates a ‘transitional area.” He speaks about the reader’s involvement in feeling the poet’s thoughts and says that the musical and the therapeutic effects while the description of times hold grips of the reader and engages their mind to be one with the poet. Brown calls this Eliot’s genius.

Morris Weitz (1952) opines on the use of several symbols in Eliot’s poetry. He especially takes the symbol of rose garden and says that Eliot has used the symbol of rose garden at several places in his poetry to depict the temporal experiences, which exhibit the immanent character of the ultimately real.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind

Weitz is of the opinion that though the critics have defined the symbol of rose garden with different connotations, the essential meaning has the double impact – rose garden as an actual place and the symbolical use of the poet’s worldly experiences and their possible relation with the Absolute. He writes that the concepts of ‘eternal’ and ‘temporal’ have very well been portrayed by the poet in the symbols of the rose garden (Weitz:1952).

These “Quartets” are termed as a death and life effort with the words and their meanings. Here it is stated that Eliot is not giving preference to how to say out the things but he is more concerned with what to say. It is actually extracting out the emotion from the poet’s mind in its entirety in the shape of words. In doing so, though, the poet tries his best to put forward everything in the best possible way, the occasional lack of befitting words must not impede the true expression of the ideas especially in an impersonal way.


“That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter”.

“The irony falls back on the reader who sees nothing but poetry in the poem” (Craven:2004). In the above quoted lines of the poem, Eliot seems to be talking modestly of his own genius. His critics are of the view that the “Quartets” do not exhibit only the sublimity of his poetic thoughts but his technical aspect is also at its heights in the “Quartets”. Craven further says that the readers are compelled to work through ‘the traditional suspension of disbelief’ while going through this poem. This again tells us Eliot’s skill of involving the readers to feel, understand and interpret his poetry in an objective way. However, according to Roger Bellin (2003), Karl Shapiro and George Orwell hold contrary views. Bellin reports that Shapiro “accuses the “Quartets” of ‘the complete abandonment of poetry’ (247), and Orwell insists similarly: "Perhaps what we need is prayer, observance, etc., but you do not make a line of poetry by stringing those words together." Bellin also quotes Thompson’s opinion saying that a careful reading of the “Quartets” reveals the poem personalizing "the poet as a protagonist" in order, in reading, to "participate in his struggle" (Thompson 83).

THE USE OF BEFITTING IMAGES

Talking about the use of adequate images in “Four Quartets”, Vianu refers to “Ash Wednesday” and says: “Ash-Wednesday is not far behind…. We feel we are drifting together with the poem on the waves of a whimsical sea. Our life, like anybody's, is a “drifting boat with a slow leakage.” Here the learned critic understands the feelings of the poet who is trying to convey his thoughts. He speaks of horrors in a blank voice. We do hear about wailings, withering, wreckage, unprayable prayers, failing powers, wastage, primitive terrors, and “sudden fury” One thing, however, is changed, and this change makes all the difference. “Eliot is no longer trying to terrify. He shuns away his anger and revolt. He tries to look resigned” (Vianu). Sexton (280) has pointed out Eliot’s making of Cross in the “Quartets”. “the four quartets respectively concern ‘the way up’, ‘the way back’, the way forward’ and ‘the way down’ as spoken of by Eliot in “Dry Salvages III. We first see these four directions in “Burnt Norton II”. With these directions or movements in mind Sexton finds the traces of the making of Christian Cross in the poem. This shows a subtle way of portraying religious images in an objective way upholding the poetic concept of impersonality.

Eliot, the literary critic, repeatedly put aside from him the “flights of abstruse reasoning”. Of course, literary critics will go on dissecting the philosophy of the “Quartets”. Eliot's wish was that poetry should be felt before it was understood. This is one of the reasons why these quartets should be handled carefully. We must learn to protect the fleeting feelings they delicately outline. Philosophy may have had a part in


these poems, but only as a discipline of mind. The main thing is that these “Quartets” reveal something unique in Eliot's poetry: a warm directness. This evidence of attachment to man and life in Eliot's creation can hardly be stressed enough. Reading these lines, we realize why Eliot hated those critics who called him learned and cold. The more the poet writes about indifference, peace of mind, “detachment” and so on, the more attached he feels to everything. His former ties to the world were grumbling. He kept feeling hurt and howled out. This new attachment is spiteless; it is generous and warm. The warmth of a poet who hides in his poetry, a heart for all seasons. In his own words:

“music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts”.

Danby (79,80), evaluating the over all impact and feeling of the “Quartets”, says that here the poet makes the reader move along with him for the full satisfaction of the three dimensional experience while reading the poem. He means to say that Eliot’s poetry is so encompassing that it leaves nothing go unfelt. In spite of several difficulties, the poet is successful in ‘turning a whole generation of readers’ to experience the feelings. Danby is stating here the corresponding accord between Eliot’s criticism and his poetry. “They also practice what they preach” (p.80). Towards the end of his article, Danby speaks about Eliot’s mastery of imagery. He says that the poet is quite capable of finding and using such comprehensive images that exhibit the complexities of the poet’s mood. “They are used as objective correlatives to feelings or thoughts (Danby: 84).

Although many critics have found the “Quartets” in keeping with the poet’s concept of impersonality, Melaney (148), like Stevens, parts his way with the rest of the critics. He writes, “His (Eliot’s) canonization as a literary icon has prevented his readers from considering his poetry as a record of personal change.” He says that the subject matter of the “Quartets” is not wholly in accordance with his critical canons. Here we find a great deal of his autobiographical account that makes the poem a personal life sketch. The account or subject matter may be personal, but it is the way of presentation that makes it personal or impersonal as defined by Eliot. Hence, if we look at the way things have been talked about in the “Quartets”, the impersonal tone is more obvious than the personal.

CONCLUSION

Eliot has tried his best to practically demonstrate his critical jorgan of impersonality in this poem. Although most of the things discussed here are essentially quite abstract in their nature, the poet has tried to objectify them with the help of befitting phrases, images, metaphors and events. However converting personal feelings into impersonal expression is at times a challenging task, that is why somewhere some of the critics have pointed out the poet's departure from the concept of impersonality. Thus,


apart from the observations of a few critics, most of the poem seems in conformity with Eliot’s concept of impersonality. The intended abstract idea of time has been presented in such an objectified manner that the reader feels one with the feelings of the poet while going through the poem.

REFERENCES

Bellin, Roger. The Seduction of Argument and the Danger of Parody in the Four Quartets. <http://alum.hampshire.edu/~rb97/eliot.html> 29-10-2005

Boaz, Mildred Meyer. Aesthetic Alliances in Poetry and Music: T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and “String Quartets” by Bela Bartok. Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No. 3. (Jul. 1979).

Bottum, J. What T S Eliot Almost Believed. First Things, Vol. 55. (Aug. 1995). <http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9508/bottum.html> 20-4-2006

Brown, Dennis. Literature & Theology, Vol. 17. No. 1, March 2003 Dallas, Elizabeth S. Canon Cancrizans and the Four Quartets. Comparative Literature, Vol. 17, No.

3. (Summer, 1965). Fussell, B. H. Structural Methods in Four Quartets. ELH, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Sep. 1955). Domestico and Pericles Lewis The Modernism Lab. http://modernism.research.yale.edu/

wiki/index.php/T.S._Eliot. 14-09-2010 Melaney, William D. T. S. Eliot’s Poetics of Self: Reopening “Four Quartets”. Alif: Journal of

Comparative Poetics, No. 22 (2002). Thes. PhD. (Abstract). Columbia University. 1980. Sexton, James P. Four Quartets and the Christian Calendar. American Literature, Vol. 43, No. 2.

(May, 1971). Stevens. <http://ieas.arts.unideb.hu/faculty/materials/usliterature.doc.> 19-10-2005 Vianu, Lidia. T.S. Eliot -- An Author for All Seasons, Bucharest University Press, 2002 Weitz, Morris. Modern American Poetry. <http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/

a_f/eliot/norton.htm> 8-10-2005

Willingness to communicate in L2: a perception of Pakistani University Students

Mumtaz Ali Mari• Habibullah Pathan•• and Ambreen Shahriar•••

ABSTRACT: Willingness to communicate has generally been defined as the intention to initiate communication when an individual has opportunities to do so in a given situation across variety of contexts, including public speaking, small meetings, large meetings and group discussions as well as different types of audiences, such as friends, strangers and acquaintances (McCroskey and Bear, 1985). The (n = 100) students of the Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University Khairpur, Sindh, Pakistan participated in this research which aimed to examine the perception of Pakistani university students’ willingness to communicate in English as a foreign language. Statistical analysis package for social science (SPSS 17.0) was used to conduct a descriptive analysis of the data. Besides that, Pearson correlation was also used to measure the relationship of the aforesaid variables. Based on the self-report administered questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, the findings of the study suggest that participants’ willingness to communicate in English as a foreign language was neither high nor low. Results further demonstrated that students, at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, were more willing to communicate with friends rather than with strangers and acquaintances and their competence level was high whilst communicating with them. Results also showed that participants’ willingness to communicate in English with friends was statistically significantly correlated with strangers and acquaintances. However, interviews suggested that most of the participants were hesitant, nervous and anxious while communicating in English. Based on these findings, suggestions for future studies with regards to Pakistani educational contexts have also been mentioned along with limitations of the study.

Key words: Willingness to communicate; English as a foreign language; competence level

INTRODUCTION

Being willing or unwilling to communicate in an L2 can be a key issue in the domain of second language research. There may be a host of other factors that cumulatively influence a person’s willingness to use a second language. Therefore, potential linguistic and non-linguistic outcomes of language learning which include

• Lecturer at the Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Sindh •• Lecturer at English Language Development Centre Mehran University Jamshoro ••• Lecturer at the Institute of English, University of Sindh

Mumtaz Ali Mari et al. / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 66

motivation, attitude, language learning strategies, learning anxiety amongst others (Dörnyei, 2005) have been placed at the heart of second language research for over 50 years (Gardener, 2009). Recently, L2 researchers have drawn attention to learners’ decisions to communicate in an L2 when they are presented with the opportunities to do so (MacIntyre et al, 1998; MacIntyre, 2007).

It seems reasonable to argue that students may have more focus and more desire to learn those skills that aid them in meeting their future goals, for example an engineer learning design or building skills. Similarly, the goal of language learners, specifically in societies where the mode of every day communication is not in English, may be to learn it for communication purposes inside or outside the classroom. Pakistan is also one of the countries where English is not used for everyday communication. The interest, desire and motivation, which could be both instrumental and integrative, that students have for learning spoken English has an overriding impact on the overall educational system of the country. In the past the aim of language learning seems to have been the mastery of the structures of the language which is an approach still present in some parts of the world including Pakistan. Many Pakistani EFL learners can be seen to be eager to communicate in English. However, despite their hard work and keenness, many of them seem to have been unsuccessful in meeting their goal. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the perception of Pakistani university students’ willingness to communicate in English as a foreign language.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN PAKISTAN

Pakistan is a multilingual and multicultural country where a number of regional languages are spoken including Punjabi, Sindhi, Balouchi, Brohi, Hindhko and Siraiki among others. Though the national language of the country is Urdu, English enjoys a profound influence from the most affluent citizens to the most deprived amongst the slums or rural areas of the country. English is an official language of the country and is widely used in all major government run industry and private sectors i.e. bureaucracy, military, media, judiciary, commerce, and research at the highest level. This status of English is inextricably connected to the need of Pakistan as a developing country to gain and access the latest knowledge of science and technology. The craving to achieve excellence in English for a successful life is not only confined to urban and city elites, but also is deeply rooted in the air force and naval branches of the country (Rehman, 2005). The supremacy of English is, therefore, not only restricted to the aforementioned sectors, but it is generally regarded as the language of excellence, leading to a bright and successful career in the country.

English is the language of knowledge, technology and primarily as the only source of international communication. “English, the primary vehicle of international communication even among non-native speakers, is a passport to international cultural and cosmopolitan citizenship” (Haque, 1983:07) hints towards the strong position

Willingness to communicate in L2: a perception of Pakistani University Students 67

English occupies internationally. This increasing excellence that English enjoys in Pakistan, can be gauged from the fact that the former government of Pakistan, led by General Pervez Musharraf, essentially valued English to be the most important prerequisite for the development of Pakistan’s economy in the global market (Mahboob, 2009). General Musharraf further mentioned that the government was fully motivated and implemented the policy to teach English at primary level in all schools. The current government has equally understood its significance and has continued the policy of last government. Although the decision to teach English at a primary level seems to be a very popular and encouraging step to make learners aware of the scope and significance of English, one should not altogether neglect the problems and challenges this decision has presented. These include insufficient resources to train (or retrain) teachers, both in pedagogy and language, the extreme dearth of relevant local research and the shortage of qualified teachers with relevant training. All of these are serious problems, potentially affecting the process of enforcing this decision and increasingly threatening a failure to achieve intended results (Mahboob, 2009).

The exposure to English has become so heightened that parents, students and aspiring members of the professional middle class in Pakistan, have begun to position English as a language of power and a pathway to a lucrative career not only in Pakistan but also internationally. It could be said that Pakistani students have primarily taken English for instrumental reasons such as pursuing a bright career, reading advanced technical literature, coping with university classes and accessing information from international books and journals (Mansoor, 1993). Pakistani students’ interest in English is justified from the very fact that English is used in the world bureaucracy, media, commercial organisations and research to such an extent that its status as an international language can no longer be denied (Crystal, 1999). This argument is convincingly supported by the fact thatlanguage achieves global status when it develops a “special role that is recognised in every country” (Crystal, 1999:02). This status can either be attained by making it an official language of the country or giving it aspecial priority in the country as a foreign language.

Today, English continues to hold this status in more than seventy countries as well as many other countries giving English the special status (McKay, 2002). The use of English in Pakistan is so frequent that it is taught in almost every private and public school in the country. The demand for English has become so frequent that throughout the country, advertising boards show institutions claiming to teach spoken English and other skills for passing all kinds of examinations and interviews (Rehman, 2001). However, it remains unclear how these centres teach English proficiency in three or five months crash courses. Although the status of these English centres, schools and even colleges can be questioned, the extreme shortage of local research concerning how English is being taught and learnt by students, has further left the overall situation in the dark.


Today, the realities on the ground in Pakistan do not seem to be encouraging because students face a host of problems ranging from the availability of relevant material to updated techniques of teaching and learning English from primary to university level. There are a number of serious aspects of language learning and teaching left unanswered and serious attention is required on questions such as how English is used, taught, and learnt by University students. Therefore, this research will hopefully prove to be significant contribution to the current literature due to its focus on the learners’ problems relating to different communicative contexts in L2 which is the first of its kind to be carried outspecifically in Pakistan.

RELEVANCE OF WTC IN AN L2 PAKISTANI CONTEXT OF ENGLISH AS FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Why does this model have relevance in the Pakistani context of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), in which the mode of daily interaction with speakers of English is extremely limited and hardly possible? From schools, colleges and universities to thestreets and shopping malls, people have very limited opportunities to interact with any foreign speakers or to converse in English with their counterparts. English is sometimes used as a language of contact in offices and education institutes including civil bureaucracy and administration (Shamim, 1993). However, most do not interact in English. The form of this contact is mainly written, people hardly speak English for communication purposes. People have many problems using English for communication and interaction purposes. English is generallyrestricted to the classroom where teachers use it for lecturing and even then,that lecture would be purely related to academics. No chance whatsoever is given to students to speak in English. English is significant as a school, college or university subject in Pakistan, specifically as it is language of “power and domination” (Shamim, 2008:235). Recently, teachers and policy makers in Pakistan seem to be caught by society’s demand for improving thecommunicative skills of students in English. Furthermore, English is considered to be the primary vehicle for heading towards modernisation, scientific and technological development, and economic growth for the advancement of both thecountry and self (Haque, 1993; Rahman, 2002; Shamim, 2007).

Many Pakistani students are preoccupied with theassumption that learning much of the grammatical rules/structure, memorising a wide range of vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and translating sentences from L1 to their L2 will make them acompetent leaner. These activities could be seen asvery effective for improving proficiency, but with regards to communication with people across the globe, it may be difficult and unrealistic. The growing interest in learning English has been targeted by most of the privately run English medium schools as well as language learning streets in Pakistan. The quality of those English medium schools and language learning centres casts doubt on the way these are being operated in the country. The increasing interest of students in learning English tends to indicate that they feel a need to acquire competence in English as a means of communication.


To improve English for communication purposes, one has to use language which is very rare in Pakistan and almost impossible in the less developed areas. Shah Abdul Latif University is situated in one of the least developed cities of Pakistan where most of the students come from rural backgrounds. Their competence in English is almost zero and large class sizes further minimise their chances of communicating orallyin the class which potentially threatens their performance across the country when they compete at the national level. The background of the students has a strong role to play, sincestudents have had hardly any exposure and chances to communicate in English in their locality. They may be willing to communicate in English, but perhapsthe scarcity of chances and exposure made them hesitant and less willing to communicateto different kinds of audiences and in avariety of contexts.

In addition, Pakistani L2 students are very cautious about the fear of negative criticism from others. In many tasks, specifically designed to engage L2 learners in oral communication, the fear of negative evaluation by others make students hesitant and question:

a. What will others think?

b. What will others assess?

c. How will others react?

Having been overwhelmed by such thoughts, Pakistani university students may seem to surrender to the evaluation of the public towards their activities specifically based on WTC in English. They are seen to be under asound assumption of how others will perceive them if they cannot speak English properly. This is why WTC is potentially relevant and of paramount importance in the Pakistani EFL context. This study, therefore, investigated how willing Pakistani University students were to communicate in English as foreign language.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The concept of “Willingness to Communicate” (WTC) was originally developed and introduced in first language (L1) communication with specific regards to talk or speech (McCroskey & Baer, 1985). In the second language (L2) context, it was adapted and extended by MacIntyre et al (1998) by conceptualising a heuristic model which integrates various linguistics, psychological and social variables as constitutive influences that may affects one’s willingness to communicate and L2 use. It arguably seems difficult to define willingness to communicate because it is relatively a new construct in L2 (Yashima, 2002:54). However, it can be conceptualised to define as an intention or probability to initiate oral communication when he/she is free to do so in L2 (MacIntyre et al., 1998). Kang (2005:291) further argues that this intention or readiness to engage in communication “may vary according to the interlocutor (s), topic, and conversational context, among other potential situational variables”.


Yashima (2002:54) argues that trends in L2 teaching and learning has been shifting towards communication, both as a necessary process and a goal of learning a L2. This has also been further supported by MacIntyre et al (1998: 547) when they argue that the ultimate goal of L2 learning should be to engender in language students the willingness to use language for communication purposes. When communication becomes the eventual goal of language learning and teaching, then questions such as communication ‘with whom’ and ‘for what’ are worthwhile to beaddressed through research. As a result, WTC has come to occupy an increasingly important place in the second language acquisition process, because itmaydetermine to whom students would like to communicate or converse with in L2 in different contexts.

Why do some learners seek to communicate in L2 while others tend to avoid it? Whysome students even after studying English as a language for many years are still unable to communicate in L2? Why dosome students with minimal linguistic knowledge seem to communicate in L2 whenever asituation occurs? Why aresome others despite having a high linguistic competence, unwilling to communicate in English? These are not simple questions to answer when we take into consideration the various related factors including, amongst others, individual, social, linguistic, cognitive and situational. Therefore, MacIntyre et al (1998) made an attempt to integrate linguistic, communicative, cognitive, individual and social psychological variables to interpret one’s WTC in L2. MacIntyre et al (1998) argue that there are a host of potential variables affecting individuals’ WTC to agreater extent. These include:

• the degree of acquaintances between communicators

• the number of the people present in the communication

• the formality of the situation

• the degree of evaluation of the speaker,

• the topic of discussion

We may say that these factors can exert a greatamount of influence on the communication ability of aperson’s WTC because every person has generally different tendencies to areinfluenced by different sorts of communication settings. One may argue that learners’ WTC is not only restricted by conditions, asoutlined above, it may vary ‘considerably over time and across situations’ (MacIntyre et al, 1998:545). In addition to that the use of language may also determine and influence the ability to communicate in different communicative contexts particularly when there are different kinds of audiences (MacIntyre et al, 1998). It could bearguedthat individuals may encounter a number of potential threats when they choose to communicate in L2 instead of L1. As a result this could affect considerably one’s ability to communicate in L2.


As outlined above, WTC was applied to L2 in themid-1990s and research on WTC with regards to L2 gained real momentum in thelate nineties. MacIntyre and Charos (1996) extended the scope as well as therange of WTC by applying it to research communication in the domain of second language acquisition (L2). They broadened the MacIntyre (1994) structural model of WTC by adding motivation, personality and context as possibly relevant predictors of both WTC and the frequency of communication in L2. This was further extended when MacIntyre et al (1998) developed and proposed a comprehensive version of willingness to communicate in L2. They presented aheuristic model of WTC and integrated linguistic, communicative and social psychological variables to elicit one’s WTC in anL2 setting. By drawing upon the previous studies of WTC with regards to L1 communication, this heuristic WTC model did not restrict and limit itself as a personality trait. MacIntyre et al (1998) argued that it would not be necessary to limit WTC as a personality trait and took theview that situational variables exercised widely significant influences on the willingness of anindividual to communicate in L2. They divided situational variables into transient and enduring factors which separately influenced anindividual’s WTC in L2. The personality of thelanguage learner, the social context in which they live, intergroup attitudes between second language groups and native speakers, general self-confidence of the learner as well as thelearner’s motivation are allidentified as enduring factors. In contrast, situational influences are recognised as thelearner’s desire to communicate with a specific person and the self-confidence thelearner feels in aspecific situation (MacIntyre et al, 1998). They further classified situational influences as a transient that are solely dependent on the specific context in which aperson functions and operates at a given time.

Fig-1: Heuristic Model of Variables Influencing WTC (MacIntyre, Clément,

Dörnyei, and Noels, 1998: 547)


As shown in figure 1, six categories are referred to ‘layers’ and each layer containsadifferent heading. The first three layers are ‘Communication Behaviour’, ‘Behavioural Intention’ and ‘Situated Antecedents’. These three layers are further subdivided into different subheadings i.e. ‘L2 Use’, WTC’, Desire to Communicate with Specific Person’ and ‘State Communicative Self- Confidence’. The first three layers represent situational influences on WTC at agiven moment in time, whereas the other three layers, ‘Motivational Propensity’, ‘Affective-Cognitive Context’ and ‘Social and Individual Context’ represent enduring influences on the L2 communication process. It was therefore hypothesised that layers which were placed at the top had more immediate influences; whereas the layers placed in the bottom had distant influences on the WTC (MacIntyre et al, 1998).

Research into WTC in L2 could not attainany significant development until the publication of the pyramid model designed by MacIntyre et al (1998). The publication of MacIntyre et al.’s model has inspired various scholars and researchers to focus on L2 communication in different settings across the globe (Baker and MacIntyre, 2000; Yashima, 2002; Kim, 2004; Yashima, Zenuk-Nishide & Shimizu, 2004). Although it could not be denied that this model has been developed fairly recently, researchers have devoted a considerable amount of attention to describing and testing various aspects of this model since its publication in 1998. However, the amount of research with regards to L2 is still limited and language and communication researchers are making significant contributions to literature and continue to inspire further research in the field. It could therefore be said that the conceptual diagrammatic model of WTC was “a starting point” to inspire future research “towards the ultimate goal of language learning: authentic communication between persons of different cultural backgrounds” (MacIntyre et al, 1998:559).

Baker and MacIntyre (2000) conducted a study in Canada where they investigated the role of gender and immersion in L2 communication. The participants of the study were immersion and non-immersion students from Canadian high schools who speak English astheir mother tongue and learn French as a second language. The results suggested that immersion students compared to non-immersion were more willing to communicate and had lower anxiety as well as greater perceived competence which led them to communicate in French more frequently.

MacIntyre, Baker, Clément, and Conrad (2001) conducted a study in a relativelymonolingual environment involving as many as 79 respondents from the 9th grade from a junior high school located in eastern Canada. They investigated the WTC of the 9th grade French immersion students. They examined the WTC of the respondents in four major skills of L2 pedagogy, speaking, writing, reading, and comprehension inside or outside the classroom aswell as looking at the social support they receive from friends, parents and teachers. Gardner (1985) stated that orientation was the key component of


motivation for language learning. MacIntyre et al (2001) therefore included five of the substantial language learning orientations in his study which were based on the previous study conducted by Clément and Kruidenier (1983). The findings revealed positive and consistent correlations between students’ five orientations of language learning (i.e. travel, job related, friendship, increased knowledge, and school achievements) and their WTC in French as a second language. In addition, results suggested that social support for language learning (particularly friends) proved to be high for language-learning orientation. Respondents found friends, as an audience, more attractive interlocutors because their anxiety level was likely to be thelowest and self-confidence highest when they conversed with them in French.

MacIntyre et al (2002)later conducted a study in which the effects of the language, sex and grade on the WTC, anxiety, perceived competence, frequency of communication in French, motivation and attitude were investigated. The respondents were from the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades at a small junior high school students in a late French immersion programme. The results demonstrated that girls were more willing to communicate than boys and students of the 8th and 9th grades were not only more willing, but also communicated more frequently than their juniors in grade 7th. Furthermore, it was found that student’s WTC was higher in English, their mother tongue, and lower in French, being as it was their L2. It was further found that the WTC, language anxiety, communication frequency, and perceived competence were positively correlated which demonstrated that those students who were motivated tended to be more willing to communicate and had both higher perceived competence and lower anxiety.

Clément et al (2003) conducted a study in which the participants were Francophone and Anglophone students from the University of Ottawa. They attempted to merge WTC and social context models into one model in order to examine whether or not contextual factors have an impact on L2 communication for both types of students. The findings of their study suggested that Francophone students, who were in the minority, had low ethno-linguistic vitality and were not only more willing to communicate in English, but their L2 confidence was also higher. They further argued that since Francophone students were in the minority, it was expected that the context would provide them with greater opportunities for L2 group contact and more chances to use L2. It therefore seems reasonable that when a minority group is in the midst of the majority, they have greater chances and a wider platform on which to use L2. However, it may also be taken into consideration that the maximum use of L2 could increase thelevel of pressure among the interlocutors.

THE PRESENT STUDY

The research into willingness to communicate in the L2 was established in the United States and very little was initially known in other contexts (Asker, 1998:162). It was the publication of the MacIntyre et al (1998) pyramid shaped model which actually


inspired various scholars and researchers towards WTC across the globe i.e. in Japan (Yashima, 2002, Yashima, Zenuk-Nishide & Shimizu, 2004; Hashimoto, 2002) in Korea (Kang, 2005, Kim,2004) and in Canada (Baker and MacIntyre, 2000). The researchers mentioned above have investigated a number of factors which seem to have directly or indirectly affected WTC such as, motivation (Hashimoto, 2002) social support (MacIntyre et al, 2001), attitude (Yashima, 2002), perceived communicative competence (Hashimoto, 2002) and communication anxiety (Baker and MacIntyre, 2000).The following research questions have therefore been developed to fill the gap in the existing literature in Pakistani contexts.

Q.1 What is the perception of Pakistani University students’ willingness to communicate in English as a foreign language?

Q.2 What are the relations among Pakistani university students’ WTC with friends, acquaintances and strangers?

RESEARCH SITE AND PARTICIPANTS

This study was conducted at the Shah Abdul Latif University Khairpur, Pakistan. Khairpur is located in one of the most remote areas of the country where the students have meagre and almost non-existent opportunities for learning English as a foreign language. The meagre number of chances for learning EFL has created a greater intensity among students to learn it. Therefore, undergraduate and postgraduate students of the department of English willingly participated in the study because they generally assumed during the data collection procedure that they were going to discuss the problems related to communicating in English. The total number of the participants in the study was 100. The 100 participants for this study were from both the under and postgraduate levels. Though the medium of instruction of the students was either in Sindhi, the regional language, or Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, the medium of instruction in the department was English. The age of the students ranged from 18 to 22 years. Many, if not all of the students were from the very underdeveloped areas of the region where they had hardly any opportunity to speak or write in English.

PROCEDURE

Prior to collecting the data, the researcher requested permission from the head of department to conduct this research. After being granted permission by the head of the department, the researcher personally went to six classes of the department briefing them about the nature of the research and asking them if they would like to participate in this study. It was explained to students that this research is completely voluntarily and there would be no obligation to participate. The students of the department of English were the major target participants for this study. After one week of announcement, 100 students from different classes had volunteered and given their consent to participate in the study. When the required number of students was obtained, the consent form was distributed


among participants containing a detailed description about confidentiality and every student was assured that confidentiality of data would be observed throughout this research. Then, the questionnaire was distributed among the participants of the study for quantitative data collection.

Fifteen students were randomly selected for interview. Prior to the start of the interview, every participant who was selected was thoroughly informed about the purpose of the interview so that if they would like to withdraw from it at any stage, they would be allowed to do so. Pseudonyms were given to every participant so that their true identities would remain unknown. Each interview was conducted in one of the quiet classrooms of the English department and each interview took approximately 20 minutes. Students were informed about the nature and context of the present study for the interview so they were able to answer questions properly. At the end of the every interview, the participant was allowed to ask any questions.

RESEARCH INSTRUMENT

This study employed both quantitative and qualitative research methods through using questionnaires and conducting interviews. Although there may be pros and cons of using a questionnaire in research, Perry (2005) argued that using questionnaires in research had two main advantages, they are useful for collecting data from large numbers of participants in a short time and are economical to use. Dörnyei (2003) also argued that a questionnaire is time, effort and resource efficient when it comes to comparing it with other instruments of research. With this in mind, to achieve the purpose and scope of the study, questionnaires were employed as the primary source so that data could easily be collected from a large number of participants in a comparatively short span of time.

1. Willingness to Communicate: In order to measure and assess the Pakistan university students’ willingness to communicate in English in the specific contexts of public speaking, talking in meetings, group discussions, and interpersonal conversation, twelve items (Cronbach’s alpha = .94) were taken from McCroskey (1992). The receivers of information in this context were strangers, acquaintances, and friends. The participants in the study, were to be asked to choose a percentage of time ranging from 0% to 100%, this would reveal theparticipants’ willingness to communicate in each case.

RESULTS

Pakistani University Students’ perception of willingness to communicate in English

As can been seen in table 1.1, the responses indicated that most of the students were very willing to communicate in English (M= 53.22). They were more inclined to communicate in English with friends and acquaintances rather than with strangers. Furthermore, they seemed to prefer communication in small groups rather than public


speaking orlarge meetings. As can been seen in table 1.1, the participants were most willing to “Talk in a small group of friends in English” (M=65.91). , whereas they found to be least willing to “Talk with a stranger while standing in line in English” (M= 40.75).

Table-1: Descriptive Statistics of students’ willingness to communicate in English

WILLINGNESS TO COMMUNICATE IN ENGLISH MIN MAX MEAN SD 1-Talk in a large meeting of friends in English 0 100 58.11 31.531 2-Talk with a friend while standing in line in English 0 100 56.78 31.235 3-Present a talk to a group of friends in English 0 100 65.89 27.636 4-Talk in a small group of friends in English 0 100 65.91 28.705 5-Talk in large meeting of acquaintances in English 0 100 47.67 30.709 6-Talk with an acquaintance while standing in line in English 0 100 52.00 26.887

7-Present a talk to a group of acquaintances in English 0 100 50.30 28.336 8-Talk in a small group of acquaintances in English 0 100 55.72 28.796 9-Talk in a large meeting of strangers in English 0 100 44.76 28.606 10-Talk with a stranger while standing in line in English 0 100 40.75 28.321 11- Present a talk to a group of strangers in English 0 100 47.00 25.262 12-Talk in a small group of strangers in English 0 100 53.80 25.987

TOTAL 53.22 7.812 As seen in table 1.2, there was astatistically significant correlation in students’

WTC with friends, strangers and acquaintances.

Table-2: Correlation in students’ WTC between friends, strangers and acquaintances

CORRELATION R P WTC (Friend and Stranger) 0.283* 0.00 WTC (friend and acquaintance) 0.266* 0.00 WTC(stranger and acquaintance) 0.443* 0.00

* Correlation is significant at 0.01 level (2-tailed)

The figure 1.2 further highlighted that there was a significant difference between the students’ level of WTC when they initiated communication with friends and strangers. As can been in figure 4.1, 61.6% of students were willing to communicate in English with friends, whereas 46.5%participants were willing to communicate in English with strangers.


The difference between stranger and acquaintance is noticeably low. Overall, 51.4% students were willing to communicate in English with acquaintances.

Fig-2: Students’ perception of WTC in English

DISCUSSION

The objective of this study was to investigate the WTC of Pakistani English language learners in a setting and context where English was taught, learnt and used as a foreign language.The findings indicated that students in Pakistan had neither a high nor low willingness to communicate in English. Many, if not all students showed the desire to communicate in English wherever they had been provided opportunities. The total mean score from 100 Pakistani university students’ was 53.2 and twelve out of fifteen participants, in interview, made it clear that they would like to communicate in English. It was also observed in the interviews that almost every single student wanted to use English for communication, both inside or outside the classroom. However, students had limited opportunities to speak in English which disappointed them considerably about their language usage ability. There was also a statistically significant correlation in students WTC with friends, strangers and acquaintances at the 0.01 level, suggesting that participants were willing to communicate in English. As could be seen in the Table 4.1, the majority of students were willing to communicate with friends (61.6%) in English, followed by acquaintances (51%) and strangers (46%). As cited in the literature review, the degree of acquaintance between communicators, the number of people present in the communication, the formality of the situation, the degree of evaluation of the speaker, and the topic of discussion, collectively, has a strong impact on the WTC of individual (MacIntyre et al 1998). We could see that participants in this study were more willing to


communicate with friends because their degree of acquaintance with interlocutors was very intimate and strong. If students are unwilling to communicate in English with strangers, as findings suggest in this study, it could be largely owing to the lesser degree of acquaintance with communicators. It was also discovered that participants were more willing to initiate communication with a small group of friends (M= 65.91), and seemed to avoid communicating in public with a friend or friends (M= 56.78). This indicated students would like to communicate in English with friends but preferably with very small groups. As MacIntyre et al (1998) argued that number of people present in the communication and the formality of the situation could affect a person’s WTC. The number of people present in the communication could sometimes cause the speaker unexpected anxiety that they might be unable to communicate in English properly. This may also have cultural implication that students’ WTC increased in private and it decreased when they were in public even with single friend.

These findings suggested that the familiarity of the audience could encourage students to communicate in English more. The more distant the audience was, the less willing students were to communicate in English. As various researchers (McCroskey & Bear, 1985; McCroskey & Richmond, 1990) have argued, an individual’s WTC could be affected by a host of factors including the familiarity of audiences.Similarly, MacIntyre (1995) also stated that audience had a profound impact on the performance of the individual. Pakistani university students showed that a familiar audience could be a significant factor in enhancing their WTC in English. MacIntyre et al (2001) conducted a study in a Canada in which participants found friends, as an audience, attractive interlocutors. This is not only restricted to Pakistani university students, a study conducted by Cetinkaya (2005) in a Turkish context indicated that students were somewhat willing to communicate in English and their WTC increased when they communicated with friends. Cetinkaya stated that Turkish students were more willing to communicate with friends or acquaintances than with strangers. On the whole, Pakistani university students' seemed to have a slightly higher WTC (M= 53.2) in comparison to the WTC of Turkish college students (M= 47.88).

LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

This study has several limitations which will be carefully addressed. Firstly, data was collected from the students of the Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan, and findings could only be generalised to this group. Making any further generalization from this study may not seem to be possible. This is because, Khairpur is one of the less developed cities of Pakistan and situations in other larger cities could possibly be different in terms of educational facilities in the institutes. The poor and rural background of participants could be a strong factor which seems to prevent further generalization. Therefore, it may not be appropriate to generalise to all university students of Pakistan.


Secondly, this study has only targeted the WTC of students’ speaking; the questionnaire did not consider their listening, writing and reading skills. Finally, the questionnaire contained some situations which students might not have experienced before in their real life. Therefore, answers to some of the items in the questionnaire may be greatly based on the thorough understanding of the participants.

SUGGESTION FOR THE FUTURE STUDIES

The suggestions are made solely on the basis of the limitations of the current study. It is highly suggested that it would be of benefit to test Pakistani university students’ WTC in fully developed cities of the country where students are from rich backgrounds and institutes are fully equipped with modern day needs and requirements. A questionnaire is generally considered to be an effective instrument for collecting a broad range of data in a relatively short span of time. However, it sometimes seems difficult to address the target issue properly. Therefore, qualitative research instruments, including in depth-interviews or classroom observation, are suggested to further enrich and supplement the target issue.

Research activities, in Pakistan, specifically in the discipline of the EFL context are almost non-existent. Therefore, a lot is required to test for a host of factors related to students’ WTC in English. These factors include:

• Gender comparisons

• Examining the relationship between willingness to communicate in L2 and actual use of L2

• Willingness to communicate in L2 and L2 language learning achievement

• Comparisons between introvert and extrovert learners’ willingness to communicate

• Studies of classroom activities in specific situation and with particular person, i.e. pair work conversation, task-based group work, and class-fronted discussion.

Future studies could also investigate willingness to communicate in English when they encounter different persons with different level of proficiency, for example, beginner vs. advanced level.

CONCLUSION

The research aim of this undertaken project was to investigate the perception of Pakistani university students’ willingness to communicate in English with friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The one hundred target participants of this study were from the Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University Khairpur, Pakistan. SPSS (17.0)


was used for analysing the quantitative data drawn from questionnaire and meaning was condensed from interviews taken from fifteen students.

Language use in an EFL context, to a larger scale, could refer to using language for real communication purposes and needs. Students who are taught English as a foreign language often seem to complain that they lack the suitable environment and opportunities for using English for authentic communication. This generally seems to be one of the major causes of the L2 learners’ low willingness to communicate in the target language. The findings of this study suggested that participants were somewhat willing to communicate (M= 53.22), but interviews showed that the majority of the students felt nervous to a greater degree. It was further found that students seemed to be more willing to communicate with friends rather than with strangers and acquaintance. The most common problem that students encounter for communicating in English is the lack of an authentic communication environment and opportunities for using language. This is what MacIntyre et al (1998) argued, that the ultimate goal of second and foreign language learning should be to “engender in language students the willingness to seek out communication opportunities and the willingness to actually to communicate in them” (p. 547).

It is, therefore, seriously recommended that teachers, policy makers and course designers should concentrate on designing courses which could maximise the chances of involving L2 students into real communicative activities and provide them with more communication opportunities for language use.

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Developing a Teaching Program for the Students of English with Low Ability in Writing

Dr. Ghulam Mustafa Mashori• and Zulfiqar Ali Shah••

ABSTRACT: The teacher of writing to the students of English with low or undeveloped ability is entirely justified in questioning whether the materials and methods he has at his disposal teach anything more than grammar manipulation which happens to be in written form, because he knows that the ability to write a logical paragraph involves more than just the ability to write a grammatical sentence. Writing topic sentences, supporting statements, and conclusions, and having them blend together cohesively, are intellectual and logical skills, rather than specifically linguistic ones. There is no theoretically sound reason to wait for a student to acquire advanced English proficiency before starting to write in English freely. In fact, because learning to write takes practice, the sooner we start teaching free writing skills, the sooner our students will be able to write well. This paper develops a writing program that can be most effective if coordinated with grammar instruction and enough classroom practice. Sample tasks, written in simple English, have been offered to suggest ways to teach students to write a sentence, to organize a paragraph in chronological order, to use chronological order to connecting words, to write with frequency adverbs, to add additional explanatory information, to write a topic sentence, and to begin to have an appreciation for variety and style.

Key words: teaching method; free writing; ability; grammar; paragraph structure

INTRODUCTION

This is on the basis of my experience of teaching writing for so many years that I frequently encounter students with low learning ability. Most of them are so blocked and incapable to write even a single sentence in English. Facing such students is always a challenge for any teacher of ELT. Students with very poor academic background always get embarrassed with some thing a bit above their supposedly low level of writing English. The teacher of writing then can play a pivoted role by imparting the required skill on the basis of his training, experience & knowledge. A writing program that I am going to suggest will be helpful to a variety of contexts particularly where the students • Associate Professor, Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Pakistan •• Assistant Professor, Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur Pakistan

Ghulam Mustafa Mashori, Zulfiqar Ali Shah / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 84

always live in a fear of grammatical and syntactical accuracy and can not develop their skill of writing English fluently.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE

The language skills which are taught to low-level ESL students, writing seems to be the most difficult, for a number of reasons (White and Arndt, 1991; Leki, & Carson, (1994).While teachers of grammar, reading, conversation, and listening comprehension have texts and materials of varying quality which they can use in their classes, teachers of writing are at a loss. The low-level writing teacher usually finds that all he has at his disposal are pattern practice tasks, grammar tasks, and controlled writing tasks. These tasks typically provide practice in carrying out various kinds of syntactic manipulations on the sentence level, manipulations such as assigning or changing verbal tense, placing or moving adverbs, and making subjects and their verbs agree. Sometimes these tasks give students the opportunity to “personalize” an essay by having them substitute facts and experiences from their own lives for information in a pre-written model essay. While these tasks are of value in giving students practice in sentence writing, the writing teacher is entirely justified in questioning whether these exercises serve any function beyond grammar manipulation which happens to be in written form. In other words, it seems that we should be asking ourselves if our attempts at teaching composition skills really teach composition, or whether we are simply providing written practice in grammar.

Johns, (1990) and Leki, & Carson, (1994) argue that it is necessary to make the distinction between written grammar and has mastery of the syntax and the common vocabulary of the language, will not necessarily be even a fair writer. The ability to write a clear, concise, logical, and convincing paragraph or essay involves more than just the ability to be able to write a grammatical sentence; it also requires knowledge of acceptable English rhetoric. It follows, then that a set of well-written sentences will not necessarily form a well-written paragraph. Bhatia, (199) Bosher, (1998) and Johns, (1990) suggest that the skill of weaving sentences together into a unified whole requires training and practice, not only for the ESL or EFL student, but for native speakers as well.

At this point, we would be quite justified in asking whether low-level EFL/ESL students have the ability to execute this kind of language manipulation. Traditionally, developers of ESL materials have thought that they did not. Many textbook writers and teachers have believed, and still do believe, that writing skills, per se, are best reserved for students with at least an intermediate proficiency in the language. Moreover, texts like Mary Lawrence’s ‘Writing as a Thinking Process’ are designed to teach the kind of real writing skills which I have been referring to, but they are not suitable for low-level ESL students because of the complexity of the language required. Is it then, possible or even desirable to teach free writing skills to low-level students? Some authors have taken the

Developing a Teaching Program for the Students of English with Low Ability in Writing 85

paucity of texts designed to teach these skills to be indicative of our inability to do so ( Kiniry, & Rose, 1993). I prefer to think, however, that it is both possible and desirable.

As argued by Swales and Feak (1994), writing skills require training and practice. There is considerably more involved in writing than just being reasonably proficient in the language. While speaking and listening are skills which either first or second language learners can acquire simply from exposure to the language, writing, like reading, requires specific training because neither is entirely linguistic.

Harmer (2003 and 2004) maintained that reading involves much more than knowledge of the language. A reader must also be able to recognize shapes of words or letters, concentrate the focus of his eyes on a word, phrase, or sentence, and move his eyes from one side of the page to the other. He must also be able to see a relationship between a word, phrase, or sentence as pronounced and a symbol on paper, follow the logic of a passage in order to extract the meaning, and anticipate, both linguistically and intellectually, what is coming next so as to speed up his reading rate. Reading, then, involves not only linguistics abilities, but also visual, intellectual, conceptual, and psychological abilities and strategies. Since there are many native speakers of English who cannot read, but no normal individuals who can read but not speak, it should be clear that reading involves more than just linguistic proficiency.

Similarly, in addition to linguistic ability, writing involves the muscular coordination entailed in handwriting Byrne, (1988) and Prior, (1994). Paragraph or essay writing requires knowledge of the rhetorical rules of the language and of paragraph and essay structure. For English, these rules involve knowledge of topic sentences, supporting sentences which elaborate on or explain the topic sentence, and concluding statements. In this connection, Reid (2000) & White (1987) suggest that the writer must know that the supporting statements can serve any of a number of logical roles within the paragraph or essay, such as chronological order, cause and effect, process, comparison, contrast, and description. Furthermore, writing entails knowing the difference between a generalized and a specific piece of information. And last, the writer must know how to decide what is necessary to support his topic sentence and what is extraneous.

The above list of abilities necessary to mastering writing skills is not meant to be exhaustive. Nevertheless, I believe that it does point out the extent to which non-linguistic factors are significant in learning to write. Because these abilities are intellectual and logical rather than specifically linguistic, there is no theoretically sound reason to wait until an ESL student has mastered all or even most of the complexities of the language before we proceed to teach these free writing skills. In fact, because learning to write takes long practice, there is reason to believe that the sooner we start teaching free writing, the sooner our students will be writing well.


Teaching basic writing skills, then, does not necessitate high target language proficiency. The essential organizational structure of paragraph and essay writing can be taught as soon as students can write reasonably acceptable simple sentences. While not absolutely necessary, coordination between the grammar program and the writing program would be desirable. As students acquire mastery of more complex sentence structures, then, these sentence types could be incorporated into the writing program. Once students have learned to write sentences with subordinate clauses, for example, the writing program could reinforce this newly acquired grammatical knowledge by teaching students how subordinate clauses can be used as sentence connectors and semantic transitions between and among sentences in a paragraph. Similarly, coordination of grammar and writing would facilitate teaching students how to make structures parallel. It seems, then, that if we can devise a writing program which can teach basic writing skills to low-level ESL students, we will not only be teaching writing, but also reinforcing the grammatical structures which the students have learned and showing practical applications of those structures in writing.

THE TEACHING METHOD

For students of low ability, training in free writing can begin at the sentence level (Leki, & Carson, 1994).Before a teacher can expect to be able to teach basic paragraph structure, including topic sentences, supporting statements, and conclusions, the students must be able to write a sentence on a piece of paper. For students whose native language is written in a non-Roman alphabet, handwriting lessons may be required. Beyond handwriting lessons, students should receive practice in sentence writing. This kind of training could entail written grammar tasks of various kinds. For example, the teacher could use a form of pattern practice in written form, having the students write their answers. These tasks could involve simple grammatical substitutions or making changes in sentences, such as tense or number. Alternatively, the teacher could provide a task in which the students answer questions on paper. The essential point to bear in mind at this level of writing is that the students should be made aware of what a sentence is, what it looks like on paper, and how to write one.

Mashori (2003) used a number of kinds of tasks to teach sentence writing to Shah Abdul Latif University under graduates. For a very low- level class a task like the following might be appropriate.

Task I— copy the following paragraph on a separate sheet of paper and use the correct form of the verb be in the present tense.

My name____Bilal. I___ a Pakistani. I____from Khairpur, and my language___Sindhi. I___19 years old. Habib___my friend. He__not Paistani; he____from Syria. He is a Syrian. His language ____not Sindhi; it _____Arabic. He____20 years old. etc.


Notice that the sentences are written in paragraph form, and there are blanks throughout. The students simply need to copy the sentences and provide the correct form of be in the present tense.

In Task II, the students are required to provide, for each question, a yes-no answer in a complete sentence, and then write a statement if their answer was “no”.

Task II— Answer these questions using complete sentences.

Example: Is Bilal from Pakistan?—No, he is not from Pakistan. He is from Syria.

1. Is Bilal from Syria?

2. Is Bilal’s language Arabic?

3. Is Bilal 19 years old?

4. Is Habib 20 years old?

5. Is Habib Bilal’s friend? etc.

Once students have learnt how to write simple basic sentences, they can begin to write these sentences in paragraph form. Task III, for example, provides a good deal of control in paragraph structure, but not in the information conveyed. Students can be instructed to simply answer the questions in full sentence form and then write them down in a paragraph, making sure that they can make the first sentence. If each student can be assigned a partner, each can then interview the other (thereby practicing question formation) and then write a simple paragraph about his partner.

Task III— Write a paragraph answering the following questions:

1. What is your name?

2. Where are you from?

3. What is your language?

4. How old are you?

5. What is your occupation?

6. Where are you now?

7. Is this your first trip to Pakistan?

Now, ask your partner the questions at the top of this task. Write a short paragraph about your partner.


Task IV provides students with a dialogue which contains only one speaker’s part, and they are asked to write the other speaker’s part. To complete this task, students must be aware not only of how to write a sentence or question, but also of semantic appropriateness.

Task IV—Write Ali’s part in the following conversation:

Ali:………………………………………………….

Nasir: My name is Nasir

Ali: ……………………………………

Nasir: I am from Multan. Where are you from?

Ali: ……………………………………………………..

Nasir: Yes. I am a student at the BZU. Are you a student here?

Ali:………………………………………

Nasir:: I’m twenty years old. Are you hungry now?

Ali:……………………………………………………………………….

Nasir: That is fine. Let’s go to the cafeteria.

Now, write a short paragraph about Ali, using the information in this conversation.

Notice that in Task IV a student cannot write Ali’s part until he has read Nasir’s responses. Once he has written Ali’s responses, he will have four piece of information about Ali. He will know where Ali is from, if Ali is a student at the BZU, that he is hungry, and, probably, Ali’s age. Equipped with this information, written in first person dialogue form, the student will then be able to write a short three or four sentence paragraph, in the third person, about Ali.

Task V teaches the student this first kind of logical paragraph organization—chronological order.

Task V—copy this paragraph and write the verbs in the correct form.

I (get up) ____every morning at 8:00. First, I (wash)____my face. Then, I (brush)___my teeth. The first thing then is offering Sallaat Next, I (eat)___breakfast in the cafeteria. I always (have)__eggs, toast, and tea. I never (drink)__coffee. Finally, I (look for)___my books, (put on)__my coat, and (walk)__to the BZU. Now, write by telling what Ali does in the morning.

Ali gets up every morning________________________________


This task functions on a number of levels. Very superficially, it is an task in subject-verb agreement. The first part provides practice in making verbs in the present tense agree with the first person subject pronoun. “I.” When this part of the task is completed, students then go on to write a comparable paragraph about Nasir, a paragraph which provides practice in third person subject-verb agreement. This task involves more than simple mechanical syntactic manipulations, however. The students are also made aware of some of the devices which we use to convey chronological order. They learn, for example, that the order of presentation of the sentences is important—that the order, in fact, represents the order in which the activities are carried out. They also learn that in paragraphs of chronological order in which there is a sequence of events, the verbs referring to those events are all in the same tense and chronological order structure words, such as first, second, third, then, next, after that, and finally, are used to help clarify the sequence for the reader.

Equipped with this knowledge of the basic structure of a paragraph written in chronological order, students can then write their own paragraphs. Given a set of questions like the following they can write about themselves or, as this task directs, they can interview a partner and write a paragraph about him.

Task VI—Ask your partner what he does every evening and write a paragraph that answers these questions:

1. When do you arrive at home every evening?

2. What do you do first?

3. Then what do you do?

4. What time do you do after dinner?

5. What do you eat for dinner?

6. What do you do after dinner?

7. What time do you go to bed?

8. How long do you sleep?

While this task seems to have a good deal of structural control, it should be pointed out to the students that the questions only provide guidelines for the organization of their paragraphs. The essential point for them to realize is that the real structure come not from the questions which are asked, but rather from the inherent logical relationships which obtain among the various activities-in this case, the order in which the activities take place. If students adhere to the imposed guideline of writing down the events as they occur and insert chronological order structure words, they not fail to produce structurally acceptable paragraphs.


One notable characteristic of student written paragraphs structured in chronological order is that they frequently sound more like lists of events or schedules than real paragraphs. One of the reasons for this particularly unnatural sounding quality is that, in their zeal for maintaining strict chronological order, students frequently leave out details and explanations. What they need to learn is how to “flesh out’ their time schedules and provide more information about each particular activity which they relate.

In Task VI, for example, questions # 5 and # 8 do not further the strict chronological order. What the student eats for dinner and how long he sleeps at night, rather than conveying sequence, provide additional information about activities which do form part of the sequence. These two questions were inserted to have the students begin to learn how to make their paragraphs in chronological order more interesting. They also learn that if they want to provide information explain an activity in the sequence, that information must be presented at the time the activity is mentioned, and before they go on to the next activity in the sequence.

Task VII and VIII provide experience in “fleshing out” chronological order paragraphs. Before students attempt to complete Task VII, frequency adverbs should have been presented.

Task VII—Write Akhtar’s part.

Bilal: I always eat dinner at 8:30 in the evening. When do you always eat dinner?

Akhtar:I_______. Where____________?

Akhtar: I usually eat in the cafeteria, but I sometimes go to a restaurant.

Do you always eat at home?

Akhtar: No, What do you usually order in the restaurant?

Bilal: I usually order Chicken Karhai because I like it. I never have fish. What do you usually order?

Akhtar: I________,but I never order____________becasue____________

Bilal: Sindhis often eat mushroom-vegetables. Do you ever eat mushroom dinner?

Akhtar:Yes, I___________,but I seldom have_________

Bilal: I like coffee very much. Do you usually drink coffee with your dinner?

Akhtar: No, I never__________.I always________.


This task, which is a dialogue with one speaker’s part missing, gives students practice in writing sentences with the adverbs always, usually, often, practice in writing sentences with the adverbs always, usually, often, sometimes, seldom, and never. After practicing writing sentences with frequency adverbs, students are then prepared to write their own paragraphs, as in Task VIII.

Task VIII—Write a paragraph about what your partner eats at Supper time. Be sure to answer the following questions:

1. When does your partner usually eat at supper?

2. Does he/she always eat dinner at that time?

3. Where does he/she usually have dinner?

4. Does he/she always have supper there?

5. What does he/she usually eat at supper time?

6. What does he/she never eat at supper time?

7. Does he/she often drink coffee with supper?

8. Does he/she usually drink milk?

9. Does he/she ever drink tea?

10. What does he/she usually to after supper?

Since the students now know one method of adding explanatory information to a paragraph of chronological order and how to use frequency adverbs, the paragraphs resulting from the answers to Task VIII will be more varied and interesting than earlier ones.

Up to this time there has been no instruction in how to write or use topic sentences. Because most of the paragraphs which students have been writing up to this point have been strictly chronological, it has not been necessary to teach this very important device of English writing.

The topic sentence can be considered to be the backbone of the paragraph. It is usually (but certainly not always) the first sentence of the paragraph and tells the reader what the topic of the paragraph is going to be. The topic sentence is more than just an introductory sentence, however. It also guides the writer and the reader through the discussion which follows. It is the topic sentence which sets the tone and the focus of the paragraph and holds the supporting sentences together.

Instruction in writing topic sentences should focus on two important points. First, students should be made aware of the introductory function of the topic sentence.


They should learn that the sentence should be direct, straight-forward, and clear; there should be no question about what the main idea of the paragraph is going to be. Second, students should learn the unifying function of the topic sentence. Topic sentences should bear a clear relationship to all information conveyed in the paragraph. And conversely, all information in the paragraph should serve to elaborate on or explain the topic sentence. Any sentence or part of a sentence which is extraneous and does and does not meet these criteria should be eliminated.

I have found two successful ways of teaching students the function of a topic sentence. One, as exemplified by Task IX, is to give students several unrelated paragraphs without topic sentences and to have them write a topic sentence for each. If the teacher first goes through several comparable sample paragraphs with the class and suggests possible topic sentences for each, the students, after reading the sample paragraph in Task IX, for example, should be able to write a topic sentence such as” I had experienced an unforgettable Journey to Kallam in the last summer”

Task -IX

--------------------------------------- I once took with a group from my hotel to the mountains near Kalam gave me wonderful memories. Before we started the hike, the sunlight was shining brightly. When we went into the woods it was quite dark, like the sun was no longer in the sky. We felt that we were walking in hallways because the trees so big and tall that they prevented sunlight from coming through. It was absolutely quiet and silent, like a sad grim night. In the distance, we heard some birds cackling and some turkeys gobbling as if they didn’t want us to be in this place. Also, small brooks were bubbling here and there. Although the weather was extremely hot, the water of the brooks was almost too cold to touch. After hiking four miles, we became exceedingly tired. We felt we had accomplished a great journey.

Another way to teach students the function of the topic sentence is to give them several possible sentences and to ask them to choose the one which best expresses their own feelings. Task X, for example, asks students to write a paragraph about what they usually do on Saturday. The task asks for present tense (to indicate habitual activity), chronological order, and frequency adverbs. The task then offers four possible topic sentences which students could choose and includes the option of writing their own if none of the suggestions is suitable.

Task -X—Write a paragraph that tells what you usually do on Saturday.

1. Use present tense.

2. Use frequency adverbs—always, usually.


3. Use chronological order—first, then, next, afterwards, in the morning, in the evening, in the afternoon, before lunch, after dinner, after breakfast …

Possible topic sentences:

1. I never work very hard on Saturday.

2. I always work hard on Saturday.

3. I always relax on Saturday.

4. Saturday is always a busy day for me.

Most of the students have no difficulty with this kind of task, and if a student should choose a topic which is inappropriate in terms of what he later writes, the error can be easily recognized and corrected.

One theoretical teaching principle which is rapidly gaining popularity is spiralization (Hyland, 1998). Spiralization is a process by which a body of material is taught, allowed to live in the student’s minds for a period of time, and is then re-taught, usually with more elaborate and complex explanations. Spiralization is especially appropriate for the kind of writing program which I have been outlining. Since new writing skills build on previously taught skills, it is an especially sound pedagogical practice to go back to the foundation periodically to see that it is still stable.

Task XI was designed as a review of chronological order and topic sentences, and as a vehicle for introducing the notions of variety and style in writing. The task consists of a chronological list of activities and a paragraph, in chronological order, relating those activities. The students’ task is to improve the paragraph.

Task XI—Saturday:

10:00—get up

10:15—get dressed

10:30—eat breakfast

11:00—clean my room

12:00—have lunch

12:45—go shopping

2:00—play tennis

4:00—take a shower

4:00—take a nap


5:00—eat dinner

6:00—write a letter

7:00—watch television

10:00— go to bed

Now, read the following paragraph. How can we improve it?

Saturday is always a busy day for me. First, I always get up at 10:00. Then I always get dressed at 10:15. Then I eat breakfast at 10:30. After that I always clean my room from 11:00 to 12:00 then I always have my lunch at 12:00. Then I go shopping at 12:45. Then I always play tennis from 2:00 to 4:00. Then I always take a shower from 4:00 to 4:30. Then I take a nap from 4:30 to 5:00 then I eat dinner at 5:00. Then I write a letter at 6:00. Then I always watch television from 7:00 to 10:00. After that I always go to bed at 11:00

A quick reading of the paragraph in task XI reveals a strict adherence to chronological order, almost to the point of absurdity. The essential problems with the paragraph are the lack of explanatory, additional information, redundancy in using both then and a time expression in the same sentence and the overuse of the transitional expression then and the frequency adverb always.

Improvement of this paragraph should be a class-oriented task rather than a student-oriented task. The lesson could be most profitable be undertaken by having the teacher read the paragraph to the class, accentuating the redundancy and the repetitious style. By the time the teacher has finished reading the paragraph, most students will have grasped how tedious and repetitious it is, and the teacher can then ask students to state what they think is wrong with the passage. As a group, the class can then make suggestions for improvement. Throughout the discussion of improvements, the teacher should encourage students to eliminate some of the redundancy and to vary the placement of some of the temporal adverbs. The teacher should also suggest other forms of transitional expressions that could add variety and should remind the students that it is not necessary to mention the specific time of every activity. For example, the teacher could encourage the students to rewrite the paragraph into something like the following:

VERSION 2

Saturday is always a busy day for me. I always get up at 10:00. Then I get dressed. At 10:30 I eat breakfast. After breakfast I clean my room for an hour. At noon I have lunch. Then I go shopping. From 2:00 to 4:00 I always play tennis I take a shower. Then I take a nap. I always eat dinner at 5:00. After dinner I write a letter. Then I watch television. At 10: At 1:00 I go to bed.


While this paragraph is still not the most impressive we have ever seen, it is a vast improvement over the original plan. This improvement can be attributed to a reduction of redundancy, a shift in the placement of adverbs of time, and an elimination of the specific time of every activity, allowing the chronological order to convey the sequence. With encouragement, some explanatory information such as what the writer eats for breakfast, where he goes shopping, what he eats for dinner, and which television programs he watches can be added. Finally, if students have already been taught how to combine simple sentences with conjunctions, the style of the paragraph will be even better. Consider the following improved paragraph:

VERSION 3

Saturday is always a busy day for me. On Saturday I get up at 10:00 and then get dressed and eat breakfast. I usually have toast and coffee, but sometimes I have eggs, too. After breakfast I clean my room which is not common in Pakistan and then go for shopping. I like going to the main town,. I like going to main town, but sometimes I go to neighborhood stores. From 2:00 to 4:00 I play tennis. After tennis I take a shower and then take a nap. At 5:00 I eat a light dinner, and then I write a letter. Afterwards I watch the comedies on television. At 10:00 I go to bed before12:00.

There is nothing in this improved paragraph which students do not already know. By simply reinforcing the idea of chronological order, minimal redundancy, explanation and elaboration, and variety in the use and placement of transitional expressions, a teacher can get students to write this kind of paragraph.

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this paper has been to demonstrate how real writing skills can be taught to EFL/ESL students whose mastery of English is limited. Several different kinds of sample writing tasks, all requiring minimal syntactic and vocabulary knowledge, have been illustrated and discussed. These tasks run from those which teach students how to write simple sentences to those which require that students vary their styles to make their essays more interesting and readable. While each task has its own goals, the tasks themselves are sequentially ordered to encourage maximum transfer of skills from one task to the next. The common goal of the task is, of course, to teach students to write reasonably interesting and well organized paragraphs which contain topic sentences and logically ordered supporting statements.

Although the tasks presented here have only concentrated on topic sentences and chronological order, similar kinds of tasks can be used to teach other logical semantic relationships such as cause/effect and comparison/contrast. As the writing program proceeds, students will need additional practice in writing practice, in writing appropriate topic sentences and in “sticking to the topic”—especially in maintaining focus and avoiding including extraneous, unnecessary information in their writing. If a writing


program, such as the one which has been outlined here, can be implemented and we can expect to see rapid progress in students’ writing performance well before they reach the advanced proficiency levels. Their writing will be organized, meaningful, and varied, and they will readily see applications for new grammatical knowledge in their writing ability.

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A Review of “Moth Smoke”

Author: Mohsin Hamid Copyright Date: 2000

Publisher: Penguin books (pp247) Munazza Batool Tahir•

Darashikoh Shehzad, Aurangzeb and Mumtaz a fairly unfair modernity triangle hinged with their very own self-centered corners while on display for the space between the three corners was nothing, but fake and hollow modernism which has become very much a part of this society in the wrong sense of the word.

Modernity is a twofold evil, when refer to both mind and appearance. Folks obsessed by this term strive to show it in their cuts and acts rather than facts. For them, land cruising honking, remix rap music, sleek and short outfits exposing physiques at the best, puff of cigarette or snuff of hash, branded stuff and least bothering elders is what modernity is all about in this era. It is undoubtedly an evil if one can afford, and I think everyone of us knows well what it takes to afford such luxuries in an underdeveloped country, Pakistan. Tempted to these snobberies, the lower class in struggle to be modern loses its dignity, self-esteem and also chastity to make tracks on detracks.

Mohsin Hamid, a journalist and lawyer, has well-presented these modern era caricatures in his novel “Moth Smoke” modifying further the horrible aspects of society by providing his readers of personalities like Raider, a happy going banker with Epicurean philosophy “Eat, drink and be happy” and the young boy Shuja who was trying his hunches to initiate steps into this world of senseless so-called modernity which has been characterized by Mohsin Hamid as a special feature or I must say pseudo-pride of elite class. The novel provides an insight into the fact that economy constructs and deconstructs, which flashes G.B.Shaw’s vision as stated in ‘Major Barbara’, “Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty”------ a statement embodying the economy instability pictured by Mohsin Hamid. To a common reader unknown of the glass screen sheathing the filth of this society, the excessive use of drugs and the casualty of Mumtaz’s extra-marital affair strikes astoundingly. Mumtaz, a literary infidel, managed to maintain balance in the game playing tactfully well with her words, Daru’s emotions and Ozi’s unawareness. Daru, no less tired to win this game but his fragile conscious brought down his defeat with shame. Upright head was Ozi, a flawless player who knew well when and where to play the right move. He deliberately let his strings loose upon Mumtaz for ultimately he was well aware of the fact that his competitor stood no match for him.

Mumtaz, what I feel actually was fantasized by Keats’ philosophy of escapism as well as she was fond of being pampered and cared, which when deprived from her on

• Project Head Cambridge Language Council Bosan Road Multan

Munazza Batool Tahir / ELF Annual Research Journal 2011 Vol.13 98

the birth of Muazzam resulted in dejection as the new born was an unwanted creature for whom she approved for the sake of her husbands’ ecstatic state of being a father. Critics may regard Mumtaz as ‘monster’ but this monster was fed up of monotonous life and wanted a change for her and thus the writer has rightly portrayed psychology of a dissatisfied, frustrated modern wife. As a first attempt she started writing under the mask name of Zulfiqar Manto but it only had watered her imagination. Her thirst for change in reality remained same to which Daru fell a victim. To many, Daru is a man symbolizing inferiority complex but lets not forget the root to this complex. Was he himself the cause? Was that Ozi or Mumtaz? Was that his bank manager? No, I strongly say it was this society full of unemployed, dissatisfied human beings all the time hovered by unequal economic distribution.

There is a magical display of words at instances, which cannot be overlooked by the reader. One highly acclaimed of my personal liking is the spot where Mumtaz describes what it is actually to share a secret: “Secrets make life more interesting. You can be in a crowded room with someone and touch them without touching, just with a look, because they know a part of you no one else knows. And whenever you’re with them, the two of you are alone because the you they see no one else can see.”

Description provided about one of elite’s overdosed sensuous parties made Daru comment: “A lot of skin is on display” is exactly what today’s showbiz and expensive dress designing is all about. Nuclear explosions, wherever discussed in this novel are nothing but a topic to discuss over a cup of tea or a pastime meal gossip. This society likes nuclear power but with the hypocritical view of not being exposed.

The masterly woven thread of symbolism runs its beads throughout the novel. The most symbolic is of the power disconnectivity at Daru’s place for not paying the bill. The darkness in Daru’s house reflects the darkness prevailing his entire life. Moreover, the image of moth and smoke is immaculately effective and three-dimensional where at times Mumtaz is moth burnt away by Ozi’s careless attitude, or Ozi is moth fired away by the infidelity of his wife and disloyalty of his friend, or Daru puffed away into the flames of passion leaving behind nothing but gloom and smoky atmosphere.

Reading about Darashikoh Shezad I recalled Amjad Islam Amjad’s Poem “Self-made Logo ka Almiya” from which some lines I would like to quote here aptfully describing the tragedy that befalls on the poor genius Daru:

“Roshni mizajon ka kya ajab muqaddar hay….. Umr kaat dety hain Aur apny hissey key phool banty hain…… Kesi kesi khuwaish ko qatl kerty jaty hain…. Fasl-e-gul key aakhir mey phool inn key khilty hain Inn key sehn mey sooraj dair say nikalty hain”

But Daru could not survive even to smell the fragrance of bloomy flowers and to enlighten his mind from the early dawn.

00 title other pages i-vi - salu.edu.pk elf... · issn.1026-7026 e l f english language and...

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