The core focus of my paper is centered on how the Pakistani Anglophone literary tradition

originated and evolved. However, a clarification of the term, “literary tradition” is essential in

order to comprehend the full meaning of my paper. The word “tradition” carries several

meanings and interpretations. In Pakistan, too, it has been mulled over on various occasions

regarding what it means. “’Tradition,’ and even what the term signifies, remains an open

question, a debatable and problematic issue raised as early as the 1960s by one of the foremost

poets of English literature in Pakistan, Taufiq Rafat” (Khan and Anwar 15).

Tradition, derived from the “Latin noun traditio describes the handing over of an item or an idea,

while the English tradition refers to a social or cultural institution that is handed down from the

past” (“Tradition”). Literary tradition, then, is simply the literary culture of a society that has

been passing down from one generation to another. However, this definition can seem to imply

that a literary tradition is a thing of the past that is unchanging and fixed. This definition

coincides with Hasan Askari’s view of tradition – that tradition is something that exists as an

unchanging standard because standards that change with time are not standards but rather trends.

In my paper, the idea of tradition is fixed in the sense that there is a tradition of Anglophone

writing that exists and will continue to exist as is. However, within this tradition, literatures

develop and evolve with time. Even when Eliot, in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1982)

claims that tradition, if it is just “handing down … following the ways of the immediate

generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively

be discouraged” (37), he still does not negate the assumption that tradition exists as something

fixed that can be handed down; he instead claims that if this handing down is direct and

repetitive, then it is better if tradition is discouraged. Thus, he incorporates the idea of the

“historical sense” in his definition of tradition:

 It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which … involves a perception, not

only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to

write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole

of the literature … has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This

historical sense … is what makes a writer traditional. … No poet, no artist of any art, has

his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his

relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for

contrast and comparison, among the dead. (Eliot 37)

In this view given by Eliot, having a presentness of the past is the carrying forward of tradition –

and thereby his definition does not contradict Askari’s view of tradition being fixed. Eliot only

suggests how tradition should be adopted.

Keeping in view all of these major definitions of tradition, I would like to clarify what is meant

by tradition regarding the topic of this paper. In the simplest sense, by tradition I mean

continuity. I neither cohere to one strict definition provided by a single critic nor make any

overarching generalizations about what tradition means in general. However, for the purpose of

this paper, tradition refers to the continuity of a certain literary standard. There is no question

that tradition exists – Anglophone writing itself is a tradition. This paper is only concerned with

a third world literature that exists within this tradition: the Pakistani Anglophone tradition of

literary writing. This paper attempts to explore how this tradition originated and developed, and

the purpose is not to make a claim about what tradition means in Pakistani Anglophone writing

but rather to acknowledge that this tradition exists and trace how it began and evolved with time.