Dislocation of South Asian Families in a Foreign Land: a case of Architectural Anxiety

Abstract

Pakistan’s emergence on the literary vault can be noticed through the considerable critical acclaim Pakistani writers writing in English are receiving worldwide. Among such writers with divergent interests and experiences is Nadeem Aslam, one of the most widely acknowledged Pakistani writer writing in English, who from the slums of Pakistan, to the Pakistani immigrant families, has attempted to assess the living standards of the oppressed in his fictional world. This paper explores, on the one hand, how political oppression and colonial anxieties become haunting in the form of ghosts, specters and seething presences and on the other, how the horror of oriented other figures prominently in Nadeem Aslam’s fiction. Pakistani fiction has not been explored from this perspective previously. Every aesthetic, architectural or structural movement has a smear of past on its face.