Mohammed Hanif’s new novel, Rebel English Academy, is a darkly comic and subversive reckoning with life under martial law in late-1970s Pakistan. The story begins after the execution of ousted socialist prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by army chief turned autocrat General Zia-ul-Haq. Disgraced intelligence officer Gul is posted to the sleepy backwater of OK Town, where he must quash protests by Bhutto’s heartbroken and angry sympathisers, some of whom are setting themselves on fire.
Meanwhile, at the Rebel English Academy, a tuition centre for basic English run by Sir Baghi and located within the compound of a local mosque, trouble arrives in the form of Sabiha. Her husband has died in a mysterious fire, her parents are political prisoners, and she carries a pistol and a defiant attitude. Baghi, beholden to the imam, reluctantly agrees to shelter her, and she becomes a student tasked with writing her life story as a witness to history.
The novel fuses slapstick comedy with the tension of a cat-and-mouse thriller, while confronting serious issues such as rape culture, media censorship and the suppression of dissent. Hanif reclaims hearsay and gossip as narrative tools that unsettle state-sanctioned truth. A sly polemic runs through the book against Pakistan’s cult of martyrdom, targeting corrupt military, religious and patriarchal power, and the instrumentalisation of the Qur’an for personal or political ends.
Characters Baghi and Molly serve as ideological counterweights: Baghi, a lapsed Marxist and gay man, is animated by doubt, while Molly embraces religious absolutism. Hanif’s tough feminism and willingness to violate taboos on faith make this a smart, taut and electrifying state-of-the-nation novel that confirms his standing as one of south Asia’s most unnervingly funny and subversive voices.
