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changes of both Pakistan and Britain in both 1914-1915, and
1929-1930. While Quayyum and Najeeb represent Pashtun men’s
ambivalence towards WWI, with a focus on their strong sense of
national allegiance and involvement in civil disobedience, Vivian, as an
Englishwoman, provides a different perspective from which to
examine British and Pakistani politics. Through her, the novel reveals
in particular the relevance of the women’s rights movement to local
and global politics. Vivian, her father, and best friend all support the
Great War so zealously that Vivian betrays her beloved Tahsin; her
father expects her to “join the mobile nursing units at the Front”
(Shamsie, 2014c: 52), and Mary’s brother dies of wounds. This is a
collective memory of WWI shared by many British people, but, as
Rajender Kaur points out, through the story of Quayyum and the 40th
Pathans, Shamsie’s novel “participates in revaluations of the ‘Great
War’ by addressing more than a few of the blind spots in the collective
memory of the British” (2014). It foregrounds “the heavy toll paid by
thousands of Indian soldiers who fought for the Allied cause as part of
the British empire” (Kaur, 2014). Less noticed by critics of the novel is,
however, Vivian’s feminist motivation to join the war. Like her friend,
Mary, who “had transformed so rapidly and completely from the
suffragette who smashed windows, to this zealous supporter of the
war” (Shamsie, 2014c: 33), Vivian wants to prove that women are as
“indispensable” as men in times of war (37). As a daughter and the
only child in the family, she desires to meet the expectations of her
father, who once declared that “[a] daughter nursing in a Class A
hospital was almost as fine as a son going into battle” (35). The novel
highlights how the Great War in Europe parallels not only the
independence movement in Peshawar but also the campaign for
women’s suffrage in London. This parallelism is not merely a
chronological coincidence. Rather, the national and other local
movements in Peshawar and London for political independence and
gender equality, respectively, have affected and conditioned, albeit in
opposite ways, the British Empire’s transnational involvement in the
Great War. A close correlation between local and global politics is thus