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The Murder of Aziz Khan

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Offering a rare glimpse of Pakistan not long after partition, this tightly plotted work remains one of Zulfikar Ghose's most well known novels.

The story involves the wealthy and powerful Shah brothers who conspire to destroy a land holder named Aziz Khan who has refused to sell his property to them. The novel works on many levels, but certainly it is the story of a culture in transition, a new way eclipsing an old way. Resplendent with striking images of Pakistan, the sociological matter is rich: modernization clashes with tradition, economic progress and industrialism obliterate time-honored values. The Shah brothers represent the new order, avaricious, devoid of scruples, shrewd manipulators of the economic process. On the other hand, Aziz Khan symbolizes the tradition, the land, and the stolid character at the heart of the old culture. Ghose writes: "And these seventy acres, this piece of earth, this world of Aziz Khan, did not appear to him as land, as a property with a market value. It was a sufficiency of existence. So that nobody could take the land away from him without first taking away his existence."

Interestingly, it is the youngest Shah brother, Afaq, whose seemingly random act of violence against a teenage peasant girl sets the story into motion. Afaq remains one of the most interesting figures in the novel. Like the bedtime story he tells in the opening chapters, he is the monkey who is always running away from disaster. Indeed, this image foreshadows Afaq's actions for the rest of the novel.

One of the truly exceptional qualities of this book is the author's style. Ghose maintains a straightforward narrative in this novel, but in some passages, the philosophical questions seem beyond the intellectual range of the characters and this situation gives the author's style some of its unique qualities. Aziz Khan's story is tragic because though he is a master of his land, he is not a master of language. Ghose writes the following:

Now a monument himself though no one had come to look; an inscription in a dead language; a hieroglyph the new literacy did not care to interpret. . . . Had his tongue been as competent as his hands. . . .

Yet beyond the specific circumstances of a land holder in the Punjab, Ghose grapples with larger issues of language and meaning. Often interweaving subtle and complex insights about the philosophical problems of language into his storytelling, Ghose frequently makes the novel's conventions, that is to say, its form, serve the needs of his style.

In The Murder of Aziz Khan one of the key themes has to do with the human consciousness and its relationship to the past, the present, and the future. Memory serves to order experience and this order is what we call Time. Yet objects have a way of defying human ordering. In this novel, objects take on a kind of menace. Like massive boulders creating rapids and whirlpools in the river of Time, places and landscapes refuse to be ordered and in fact, distort, divide, and disrupt our perception of the flow of things giving the novel a resonance and depth that is not often found in Fiction.