Tragedy of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in anglophone Pakistani literature

ABSTRACT Among the very few Pakistani Anglophonic literary instalments that quintessentially make the tragedy of Bhutto their central subject, Tariq Ali’s BBC play The Leopard and the Fox (2007), Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame (1983/2008) and Raza Ali Hasan’s poetry collection Sorrows of the Warrior Class (2015) pose two important questions: Why did the promise of progressive change in Pakistan, symbolised by Bhutto’s political career, fail? Was the military coup d’état against him a local affair or a deliberate imperial intervention? Ali’s hedging, ambivalent two-faced portrayal and Rushdie’s ridiculing and merciless caricaturing of Bhutto lead Hasan to a third way to judge Bhutto’s moral compass and political actions in the wider context of the Cold War.