Holy Kickbacks of the Ganj-topia

Waseem Anwar

Anwar dissects social and political satire in Sarmad Sehbai’s novel The Blessed Curse.

With a powerful propensity towards absurd amusement that even supersedes his usual satiric and sarcastic modalities, the pleasantly epicurean Pakistani writer Sarmad Sehbai’s 2024 debut The Blessed Curse (reprinted this year in Pakistan) exploits various literary devices to underscore human instinctual weaknesses.  Using techniques of parable, fable, allegory, parody, travesty, the mock-epic, humour, irony, bathos, the burlesque, hyperbole, caricature et al, Sehbai makes his readers realize where they stand as a nationwide group of people.  In this context, he initiates his euphemistically oxymoronic stance on human debauched egotism right in the title, The Blessed Curse.  The oxymoronic title makes us wonder how a curse may be blessed or how someone’s blessings may prove to be a curse. Invective in spirit, Sehbai’s adamancy in TBC to develop sense out of nonsense or shape sense as nonsensical results in a slapstick representation of sociocultural and political rituals, so that they repeatedly occur as an epically inventive stock-situation.

TBC is a blend about some real-unreal-surreal and factual-fictional-fantastic elements.  Though it prompts its readers to connect to works like Aesop’s fables or Geoffery Chaucer’s 1930s magnum opus fabliau, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, TBC specifically introduces us to a Chauntecleer-like cocksure protagonist who justifies all his phallic ventures in the light of the Sufistic declaration: “Even obscenities uttered by a saint, are words of God”.

Nawabzada Noor Mohammad Ganju, the son of a Nawab and the bald heir to prophetic enlightenment, gets his “mind swelled” like a “porcupine” because of his “erotic probes” that are based on his desire to see his wife naked.  As time passes, Ganju’s desire becomes an uncompromisable obsession.  His frustrated longing transforms into a nightmarish fantasy, so that his paranormalities manifest into ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ comic concoctions.  Psychoanalytically deep, Ganju’s unfulfilled dreams become the major reason for his lust to control everything around.  The astute reader will get clues to Sehbai’s advancement of a story already touched by many, such as Pakistani writer Mohammad Hanif in his 2008 A Case of Exploding Mangoes, something that the Global Literature Professor at York University, Claire Chambers, identifies as “a dystopian backdrop with plenty of dark Punjabi humour.”

Sehbai dedicates the novel to his mentor Taufiq Rafat, who had “exorcised our colonial ghosts by giving the English Language a native hue and a local habitation.”  TBC is thus designed within the framework of what Bilal Tanweer calls “twentieth-century iconoclasts like [Saadat Hassan] Manto … [along with] … Jean Genet.”  An Urdu and Punjabi poet, and a playwright who holds the modern Sufistic style by temperament, Sehbai generically uses the theme of forbidden ‘fruit’ as his expressive innuendo.  The novel is based on the author’s personal travels for years to lands where shrines and temples would impress piety but conceal the hypocritical façade of imposters posing as saints.  Humorously caustic, TBC exploits a fairy-tale flair of the oriental qissa and kahani or dastan induced by tilism (stories full of mysterious meanderings).

Sarmad Sehbai with 'The Blessed Curse'

It also echoes of the local jadoo along with universal magical trickeries, be they Hosh Ruba-ish, Firdous-e-Bareen-ish, Harry Potter-ish or Avatar-ish in style.  It entails to the fantastical East-West combo of Hollywood culture that produces Aladin or The Arabian Nights as enchantments.  Hence, the simple storyline about human power hunger gets tinged with both divinity and erotica where the sacred-secular is positioned with sexuality for the provision of some pleasurable engagement.  A representation of crooked totalitarian systems, TBC addresses human over-reaching, of patriarchal manipulative essays to control through phallic privileges.

As hinted above, the simple story of TBC circles around Ganju’s macho-gang that embarks on a wondrously philtred mission, embodying the search for a male potency-enhancing rooster.  The divans of prostitutes and the buzz of divine-birds juxtaposed, and the carnal ingredients of masculinity challenged, the narrative recurs as a bizarre militaristic venture, or a sex-war that tastes the test of its own rout every now and then.  Ganju’s chauvinistic pleasure, and in a way his confusingly misogynist-womanist predispositions to get his bed “jolted with militant thrusts” remains the primary illusion to develop the TBC plot.  The appearance of a heavily moustachioed General through the telephone speaker symbolically reframes Aladin’s fabulous jinni, always there to set the control of history correct.

The entire phallic battle, infiltrated with a strong derogation for womanhood as mere frailty, begins at Ganju’s matrimonial couch, while his unconsummated desire to view the nakedness of his peacefully dying but dignified wife along with his gluttonous craving for glitzy whores like Lilly Khanum keeps his heroism split.  Lilly’s end is somehow destined by her acid-defaced face, which adds to the darkness of the narrative through its vindictive sense of humor.  Ganju’s consistent consultation with his coterie of power-hungry menfolk, his own as well as his daughter’s unwanted dynastic marriage, the ridiculous rural ritual of Kharmasti as sodomy with she-donkeys, efforts to procure foreign financial aid from the Arabs and Americans for saving a country, and Ganju’s final remorseful Mecca-yatra, his “Labaika Labaika, I Am Here I Am Here”, are some key episodes that chain the picaresque plot of TBC.  As a cyclically libidinal closure of its Freudian-Lacanian insightfulness, TBC focuses on the potential-patriarchal maneuvers that circulate around the “Haveli … Bab-e-Mussarat,” or “Abode of Happiness” during the era of “Ganj-topia,” an “Age of Golden Rule”.

In the novel, the chapter titles are sardonically meaningful, some being “Nazrana – the Holy Kickback”, “Gharjawai – the In-House Groom”, “Fall of the Priapus”, “Naked in a Hammam]”, “Mr Halal “Satjug” (Hindu Yugas/ Golden Age],” the Age of Truth”, “The Last Bath”, “Divine Buzz” “Breaking News … Celestial Channel”, and so on and so forth.  Bawdy and voluptuous, TBC is about our private body-parts and their needs, always making their hush-hush presence felt, through how they relate to our virility and our sexual practices. TBC also circles around hakims, hemorrhoids and other mysterious anatomy, our essential medicinal sturdiness in the garb of our sexual robustness.  Here and there, a trilingual mix of English with Urdu-Punjabi jargon, of words borrowed from our folkloric wisdom, makes for communal consistency, enriching the spontaneity that TBC’s cross-cultural flavor promotes in the light of Rafat’s “native hue” and “local habitation.”

TBC’s story about the search for a significant “potion” gets grossly melodramatized to result in an outlandish conclusion.  We are uncouthly informed at the end that each rub on ‘Pir’ Ganju Shah’s outsized penis torturously results in an epic enlargement that is exhibited even through his final abode, his grave; the whole weight of his body has to be “shifted from his torso to his groin”.  All this graphic description is reflective of what Sehbai picks as his major theme: “the greedy [sexual as well as political] beast in us”.  That TBC is above all about our diminishing “into a midget”, though mainly about our gluttonous natures, our hunger for power and dirty politics for control, is a message that highlights the dialectical link between blessings and curses, thus The Blessed Curse.

That the curse in TBC transmogrifies into an unaffordable abuse, while the blessing turns out to be a blasphemous bump, the theme is vivid through all 25 short chapters of TBC.  The novel condenses the quest for phallic superpower to call for a scornfully exaggerated operation.  It carries us through the gigantic economic, militaristic, and religious state apparatuses that talk about righteousness while veiling the absurdity of our thirst for domination.  Whether TBC re-invents Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Aristophanes’ Birds, Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, or Hanif’s Exploding Mangoes, it does point at human hamartia and hubris, the obstinate choices we mistakenly or obsessively make, emanating as our fascistic tendencies to rule others by hook or by crook.

It is by satirically identifying our deviations, diversions and delinquencies that TBC reminds us of our capacities to assess ourselves.  Now, august or aghast, it is the readers’ responses that can best determine TBC’s final message forwarded by Sehbai through his almost decade-long research on [un]holy saints.  Like a [yeasting] yogi or a sensual-sexual giant of the cardinality, Sehbai foregrounds deep-layered truths about our essence.  However, let us not forget that based on Freudian-Lacanian studies, the signature and significance of the phallic stage in humans, an effect of some repressed castration complex, projects itself through phobia, perversion, or both.  If TBC is to be understood within the framework of our actual biological and psychological givens, our libidos, the myths about our being might be the best way to interpret the secretive areas of our bodies that portray our (in)visible bawdy selves. 

A Note about Satire

In the 17^th and early 18^th Centuries, when the British political system grew antagonistic towards its citizens, many of the writers started writing social and political satires, among them the famous Irish priest and pamphleteer, Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver’s Travels became popular as a fictional travelogue—a work that John Gay describes as being admired from the “cabinet council to the nursery.”  Abundant in numbers, some later examples of such comic-satiric-allegorical subgenre within the trajectory includes George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm, a dystopian commentary on the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Soviet Union had to survive under the Marxist-Leninst ideologies of Joseph Stalin.  Such parabolic reviews of oppression have been a universal means for writers worldwide to examine human collective catharsis through possible camouflaged modes.  Even during the Greek times, the Comedy maestro Aristophanes wrote about forty plays on such themes, his most identified being Birds, Frogs, and Clouds.  One can also mention William Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser or Macbeth, or Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus that exhume human over-ambitiousness for authority as a topic.  Many other writers, like Erasmus, Kafka, Voltaire, Gogol, Beckett, Genet, Cruikshank, Fo, Buñel, Dali, Huxley, Heller, Shirazi, Sa’di, Youssef, to name a few, used satire as a common agency to suggest caveats for conditions where our human acts emanate through fascistic means, by mistake or by obstinate choice, touting them to be heavenly ordained.  In its origin, a satire is a rhetorical literary device that ridicules wrongdoings, leading to the implication that a satirist is an inverted moralist.  Morals or no morals, the multifunctional genre of satire identifies our deviations and diversions to remind us about our faculties of correctness. 

Sarmad Sehbai, The Blessed Curse. Toronto, CA: Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd., 2024. 272 pages. Price: CAD $ 22.95. AND, Sarmad Sehbai, The Blessed Curse. Lahore, Pakistan: Aks Publications, 2025. 266 pages. Price: Rs. 3,000/-. 

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Dr Waseem Anwar is Professor of English and Director ICPWE (International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English, https://www.kinnaird.edu.pk/icpwe/ ) at Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore.  He has been at FCC and GC universities in the capacity of Dean (Humanities) and Chair (English).  Recipient of Fulbright award twice, for doctoral studies in 1995 and as Visiting Scholar in 2007, Dr. Anwar served as the President of the Pak-US Alumni Network (PUAN) and Fulbright Alumni Association.  A Gale Group American Scholar, he also received the Punjab Education Department “Salam Teacher Award – 2004” and Pakistan Higher Education Commission “Best Teacher Award – 2003.”  He is a Lifetime Member of the South Asian Literary Association (SALA), USA, and has been on its Executive Committee for three times.  Apart from being on the Advisory and Editorial Boards of several renowned research journals, and publishing scores of articles, his credit includes books, “Black” Women’s Dramatic Discourse (2009), the South Asian Review (SAR 2010 - special issue on Pakistani creative writing in English), and very lately Transcultural Humanities in South Asia (Routledge UK, 2022,  https://www.routledge.com/Transcultural-Humanities-in-South-Asia-Critical-Essays-on-Literature-and/Anwar/p/book/9780367483715 ). He is also the founding Editor in Chief of the journal of English studies, JELLS at FCC university.