Rebel English Academy by Mohammed Hanif

Mohammed Hanif’s fourth book, Rebel English Academy is an excoriating but often darkly funny and sometimes outrageous look at Pakistan in the late 1970s. It opens with the hanging of the Prime Minister – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – following the declaration of martial law. Hanif sets the action in a small town known as OK, where there is a resistance movement in which people are seemingly committing suicide as a form a protest and which promotes the idea that ‘Bhutto Lives’.

The English Academy of the title is run by Baghi, a former radical, atheist and homosexual, who has set himself up in the local mosque. Baghi’s world is thrown into disarray when the Imam, Maulvi ‘Molly’ Rafiq, asks him to hide Sabiha, the second wife of a man who has died in a fire. Baghi immediately realises that Sabiha is going to ‘ruin’ his sanctuary. At the same time Captain Gul of the security services has been exiled to OK and has been asked to stop the suicides and root out the resistance. But Gul has problems of his own. He a reputation for his sexual adventures, has left a pregnant woman behind in another town, and soon finds himself embroiled with the Commanding Officer’s daughter.

Rebel English Academy is bawdy, irreverent and sometimes violent. Many of the character backstories are dark and traumatic. Captain Gul, for example, is both threatening and hapless. Baghi has been tortured in the past and is just trying to lead a quieter life but teaching English in itself is a form of resistance. Sabiha’s story, which she writes as a kind of assignment for Baghi, as a young woman growing up in Pakistan in the 1970s, is particularly bleak. But Hanif focusses on the resilience of his characters (even Gul to some extent) and their ability to keep living despite regime change and despotism.

Rebel English Academy uses dark comedy and a cast of flawed characters to shine a light on the rise of authoritarianism in Pakistan. By virtue of being so over the top, Hanif manages to make palatable what might otherwise have been unpalatable while he takes readers deeply into the craziness of life under an authoritarian regime.

Rebel English Academy by Mohammed Hanif

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8.0/10