Those are the usual and expected venues for remembering Dickens, where the worlds of grime-stricken want and edge-dwelling humanity are matters of history. Contemporary Pakistan provides more proximate parallels, the Oliver Twists and David Copperfields of then scattered on its streets of now. Like the unknown testator of Dickens’s novel Bleak House, who leaves multiple and varying wills and engenders the court case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce among hopeful heirs and then their inheritors, Pakistan’s is a contested and confused legacy. Dickens’s Bleak House was a caricature of the convoluted machinations of Britain’s justice system — the aged, creaking, and largely ineffectual twists and turns that made lives and futures turn on legal absurdities.
On Dickens’s 202nd birthday, 66-year-old Pakistan is entwined in its own version of Jarndyce: a long-passed founder and multiple versions of Constitutions, each with its own history of suspensions, abrogations, and many complex questions. Like Dickens’s creaking Court of Chancery’s, Pakistan’s ineffectual institutional mechanisms — the Parliament’s limp legislation, the lower court systems tangled messes of tribulations — provide only an agonizing semblance of action.
Reality, a gruesome mess of religious distortions mixed with anarchic megalomania, remains untouched by their actions, which in the trend of Dickensian absurdity is no action at all. One set of starched waistcoats meets another across polished tables on which arrangements of roses and tuberoses sit attentively, perfuming only the air of important decision makers. These images of pristine calm and pontificating men are then broadcast into the television sets of stale and smoky hovels, where children crouch around dried pieces of bread, drag broken toys up and down sewer-stenched streets. On the boxes, the sagas continue; one group of solemn beards with black and green turbans talks to another with orange and striped turbans. Their bobbing heads are to produce peace. In the leftover moments, the screen flickers to shots of a donkey race, held by the ocean in an effort to save culture. The men and women in the hovels don’t pause to consider this, or to listen to the latest tidbit about an ongoing treason trial. Indeed, Pakistan’s now is a Dickensian one.
In Dickens’s Britain, the Court of Chancery was reformed. The novel Bleak House and its depiction of how ineffectual, confusing, and laborious the provision of justice via the Courts of Chancery had become, resulted in the passage of the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, which created a common court. The effect was a simplification of the systems of pleading and the procedures surrounding litigation. The mirror which Dickens had presented, one of ossification and ineptitude, of a brutish bureaucracy unaffected by the weight they wrought on ordinary lives, of a justice system that provided no justice, felt real enough and urgent enough to spur shame and action.
And here, of course, is where the Pakistan of now differs from the British reading public of Dickens’s then. No reflection of the absurdity of the present — the profusion of bobbing bearded heads, the arbitrary appointment of this man and that cleric as the arbiters of a democratic nation’s future — seems to spur or scare into action. Instead of reforming the court or changing the system, Pakistan is set to turn into depths of depravities unknown even to the most hapless of Dickens’s characters.
In the language of Bleak House, the conflict of varying testaments and differing wills will not be resolved. Instead a grand bonfire of the Constitution and the Courts is set to commence, a complete conflagration that will annihilate both the property at issue and the conveners that sat so long in indecision, peopling the farce whose fools inhabit what is indeed, a very bleak house.