Rebel English Academy: A Subversive Masterpiece Confronting Pakistan's Troubled Past
Mohammed Hanif, one of south Asia's most unnervingly funny and subversive literary voices, returns with a novel that solidifies his reputation as a master of dark political satire. Rebel English Academy is a blisteringly intelligent and electrifying work that reckons with life under martial law in late-1970s Pakistan, following the execution of socialist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
A Tale of Authoritarian Siege and Resistance
The story unfolds in the aftermath of Bhutto's death at the hands of army chief turned autocrat General Zia-ul-Haq. Disgraced intelligence officer Gul, known as "Piston" among his peers, finds himself posted to the sleepy backwater of OK Town—a punishment assignment where he must create his own entertainment and mission. His task involves quashing protests from Bhutto's heartbroken and angry sympathisers, the "jiyalas," some of whom are setting themselves on fire in desperate acts of protest.
Meanwhile, trouble arrives at the door of Sir Baghi's Rebel English Academy, a tuition centre for basic English tucked within the compound of the local mosque. Imam Molly brings an unexpected visitor: Sabiha, a young widow whose husband has just died in a mysterious fire, whose parents are Bhutto loyalists and political prisoners, and who carries both a pistol and a dangerous attitude. Baghi, beholden to Molly in multiple ways, reluctantly agrees to shelter her, insisting she must live as a student and write what the other students write, while remembering she is "a witness to history."
Narrative Innovation and Political Critique
Hanif employs a clever structural device, threading Sabiha's first-person "homework" chapters through the main narrative. In these sections, she recounts her tragic life story and names her perpetrators, creating a powerful testimony against enforced silence. The novel brilliantly reclaims hearsay and gossip from the margins of formal politics, making them integral to its narrative engine and demonstrating how they can unsettle the monopoly of state-sanctioned truth.
Running through the book is a sly but devastating polemic against Pakistan's pervasive cult of shahadat, or martyrdom. One character, cheekily named Shahid (the Arabic word for martyr), is keen to capture his own self-immolation on video, while the perpetually lustful Gul pretends to be a soldier "bored in the trenches, ready for martyrdom" to lure women to his bed.
Ideological Counterweights and Complex Characters
The novel presents Baghi and Molly as ideological counterweights defined by secular and religious convictions respectively. While Molly embraces a kind of religious absolutism, insisting that "my only politics is Allah," Baghi is animated by doubt, dismissing religion as the "opium of the masses" and seeing his mission as liberating countryfolk from the "twin yokes of capitalism and feudalism." Hanif presents both characters as far from exemplary, using their uneasy accommodation to gesture toward the limits of ideological purity and the necessity of compromise.
Hanif's critique is multibarrelled, targeting corrupt power in all its forms—military, religious, and patriarchal—while also questioning the gift of salvation such institutions claim to proffer. His feminism is tough and purposive, and on matters of faith he is unafraid to violate taboos or flirt with heresy. Particularly striking is his exploration of how the Qur'an is instrumentalised, whether by Zia treating it as an oracle in Hanif's debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, or here by Molly using it to justify taking a second wife, cloaking the exploitation of a vulnerable young widow in the language of righteousness.
The Academy as Site of Rebellion
The Rebel English Academy itself becomes a potent symbol of resistance. For its founder Baghi, it is where "rebels of tomorrow" are made: children who, while learning English, are taught to doubt and question; who would be "armed with a language that would pretend to serve power but in the end would smash it." This canny, insurgent spirit courses through Sabiha's story and every page of Hanif's remarkable novel.
Rebel English Academy fuses slapstick comedy with the tension of a cat-and-mouse thriller while doing the serious reckoning work of a state-of-the-nation novel. It powerfully confronts rape culture, media censorship, and the suppression of dissent with unflinching honesty. Crackling with incendiary themes and theses, this account of life under authoritarian siege is fiercely local in its Pakistani setting yet incontestably universal in its concerns, both harrowing and mutinously entertaining.
Following Hanif's Booker-longlisted debut A Case of Exploding Mangoes and his subsequent novels addressing violence against women, religious minorities, and the war machine, Rebel English Academy confirms his standing as one of contemporary fiction's most vital and provocative voices. This funny, subversive, and brilliantly constructed novel is undoubtedly a sure-fire Booker contender that will resonate with readers long after the final page.
