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overview art literature language Editorial
Culture lost is culture perhaps Pakistan, since the beginning, has been in a state of petrification with the fear of a cultural invasion almost overrunning the defenses of its ideological territories — from India and the West By Sarwat Ali The Pakistani culture is forever under threat. If one pays heed to the alarming voices raised from certain quarters, this situation of permanent embattlement finds Pakistan on the losing side, with not enough being done to safeguard the essentials of its culture. Usually societies or
countries which are weak worry endlessly about the contours of their
cultural identity. The unequal relationship with other more powerful
competitors creates a situation of insecurity. Pakistan over the decades has
sought to shield the particularity of its culture under the garb of ideology
and this has led to the fabrication of an abstract concept of a Pakistani
culture premised on two counts. One, since Pakistan was carved from the
larger unit of the Indian subcontinent, everything in the new country had to
be different from India, and two, the regional cultures especially that of
the five federating units were perceived to be militating against cultural
homogeneity. This cultural homogeneity, too, was an abstract concept crafted
more in the nature of an ideal culture which the five federating units were
supposed to follow and uphold. If the new country had resolved its political problems with the promulgation of a constitution that clearly defined the relationship of the federating units with the federation, then culture or even an ideology-based culture would have ran its natural course. But, in the context of the failure to settle political issues in a political manner, the onus was shifted to ideology and a culture based on it to resolve these issues. This led to the trumpeting of the role of an ideology-based culture with the result that it started to sound hollow and distractive after a while. The dismemberment of the country clearly underscored the failure of a policy where culture was supposed to substitute for the resolution of political problems. As it is, our cultural strength comes from its diversity and not from its homogeneity. The culture of the Muslims in India carried the baggage of a transnational religion that originates in one area and is then transported to other regions. The same issues must have been faced by the transportation of Buddhism from India to Japan and China and of Christianity from Palestine to Europe. Even the early Muslim culture was very heavily mediated by Iranian, Turkic and Mongol influences. The initial conquerors and settlers here were from these areas but gradually, over centuries, some kind of assimilation was arrived at from a position of strength. Since the Muslims were the ruling religious group, though in a minority, they established linkages with the majority on their own terms. The Sufis were the ones who brought about a synthesis between the tenets of faith and the local traditions. They interacted with the common people and spoke in their language. They ate with them and invited them into the inner sanctum of their hospices. They wrote in the languages spoken and written by the people and they chanted the same tunes as them. They created a cross religious culture based on humanism, evolving a workable prototype that facilitated a continuum between ishqe majazi and ishqe haqiqi, hence providing a greenhouse cover for the plants of the arts to flower. Some Sufi orders were more prone to this interaction while the others were wary of losing their identity altogether. But in all gradations of the faith, practices and orders, the humanistic ideal stood the tallest. It was on the basis of humanism and the ordinary concerns of a person of flesh and blood that poultice of solace and contentment was offered. The Sufis appealed to others as healers and friends and not as scholars talking down from the pulpit. But this sulah-e-kul was thrown into a tailspin by the establishment of European hegemony and the ushering in of an order where brute force and self-belief in religious ideology was displaced by numerical strengths of communities. This drove a petrifying spear of insecurity through the Muslim community and they started to work on the construction of an identity from a position of weakness. Pakistan was created to counter that insecurity but, since the beginning, it has been in the state of petrification with the fear of a cultural invasion almost overrunning the defenses of its ideological territories from India and the West. It is feared that the cultures of both these perceived enemies is powerful enough to not only change our culture but of also corrupting it, making the people wayward and immoral, away from our culture into a culture that is pleasure-loving and basically epicurean in nature. Culture is something which is dynamic and changes all the time. In the past centuries, our culture has assimilated and changed beyond belief. The clothes we wear, the language we speak and the food we eat is very different from what was practiced before the coming of the Europeans to India. The subjects that we studied, the systems of government that we mouth so often as ideal and the system of thought and feelings are all conditioned by the system of education that we adopted two centuries ago. And in today’s world, which is becoming smaller by the minute due to the technological breakthroughs, the insularity of culture has become a dangerous sport to follow. There is just no way that we can seal our borders and live the life we want to because ideas that travel through technology cannot be stopped, censored and curtailed. A living culture of the people relishes in the creativity of the arts giving them aesthetic satisfaction and elation through the sublimation of their own desires and ambitions; while the ideological abstract culture based on ideology pontificates and sermonises. People have to see their own image in the cultural projection of their country — in painting, music, literature, film and drama — and not a rarefied sketch of an ideal culture without the hue of local habitation and a name.
art In a region that has been a melting pot of races, religions, languages and customs throughout centuries, it seems irrelevant, if not outrightly absurd, to talk about purity of culture. According to American art critic, Thomas McEvilley, India was a postmodern country before the invention of postmodernism. Hence, in our region, diverse influences and impacts have shaped the way people lived and expressed their creative activities or responded to their practical needs. In art too, a multiplicity of trends, styles, techniques and traditions contributed to construct an indigenous vocabulary which, like our language Urdu, is a combination of several entities in a unique formulation. Thus, what we now have as art from Pakistan is not a precise, monolithic or clearly-defined visual practice but a structure in which it is difficult to distinguish vernacular elements from outside influences. If traced, some of these
influences can be linked to early invaders of Indian subcontinent, beginning
with the Aryans to other races and rulers who came from different parts of
Central Asia, Middle East and Asia Minor till the Mughals. Although these
were alien forces, with the passage of time their customs were adapted into
the ‘local’ culture. For example, Greek art and Persian miniatures
became part of our greater cultural heritage and were assimilated in
Gandhara sculptures and Mughal miniature painting. This course continued in
the colonial period too. Today no one questions the existence or origin of majority of our cultural practices unless these are connected to West. For us the West, instead of a geographical boundary, is an idea that encompasses diverse, often contradictory, components. Due to our colonial past, the West has been equated with England, which expanded to other regions like Europe and North America. However certain countries, such as Latin American nations or Russia, though totally immersed in the European civilization, do not fall in our description of the West. Thus we have a specific notion of the West, especially in the context of art and culture. Being a postcolonial society, we seek a relationship of love and hate with civilizations that represent our former masters. Several of our artists and cultural theorists stress the need to evolve an art form that is distinct from the West but, at the same time, want it to be recognised in the mainstream art which incidentally is located in the West. So while wanting our art to have an indigenous flavour and rooted in history, we are anxious for it to be received in world art centres and our artists to exhibit in major galleries and museums in the US and European capitals. This may appear dichotomous but is actually a logical construct. Actually, we wish to conquer the West through our past, since we cannot compete with it in the present and certainly not in the future. To have an art form that represents our heritage and offers something unique to the art world is an understandable motive; it is this urge that popularised the movement of miniature painting in Pakistan which eventually became the most successful art export from here. However, art does not always flow in a direction determined by its makers, users or analysts. Often it surprises all. Thus the movement of miniature painting in Pakistan, after surviving for a few years as a sign of identity, is slowly transforming into something unexpected. For instance, many artists who were trained as traditional miniature painters are exploring other forms, such as sculpture, installation and conceptual art. This probably is in response to the demand for contemporary art which is keen to concentrate on new arenas, having exhausted the usual sources. Hence in recent years, an attention to Chinese art, to be followed by Indian art, is witnessed in all the important art centres around the world. But along with miniature painting, which is moving in the direction of contemporary art (connected to the Western aesthetics), a number of artists in our surroundings have freed themselves from the question of ethnic divide between the East and the West. For them, debates like these are a residue of the past, which portray the lingering habit of imagining a perfect East in comparison — and competition — with a pure West. One realises the world is not separated in such clear boundaries. Presently, several practices from the West, in the day-to-day expressions and food, have been absorbed in the East. Similarly, the current art in Pakistan, or for that matter from other countries, is fast losing its connection with a particular place. For example, a painting by Mohammad Ali Talpur or an installation by Hasnat Mehmood, could be from any part of the world. Their concerns may relate to this region, their language is transnational and contemporary. So is the case with many other artists in our midst who are producing work, without getting into this distinction between the East or the West. Yet, for some, the question of an independent identity of Pakistani art remains pertinent. They force and tempt to revert to acquire local roots in art in order to have an individual identity as opposed to the West. Interestingly these sermons in favour of indigenous art are usually delivered in English — like the medium of this article!
literature A body of literature resembles a crop, a plant, a garden, a tangle of wild weeds; it is for the most part dependent upon the soil it grows on. It is also shaped by the kindness of seasons and harshness of weather, the many subcultures that guide its growth, survival, and even decline. Just as technology, and now globalisation, has affected what we grow and what and how we eat, the literature of Pakistan cannot remain immune from local changes and outside influences, the fluctuating trends of readership, their maturity (or the lack thereof generally speaking), political awareness, education, and push and pull of market forces. Most in Pakistan may not
know but the colonisation of the Americas by the white invaders of Europe
affected the cuisine of India as well. If it weren’t for the Portuguese
introducing chillies to South Asians, Khalid Toor would not have written his
wonderful novel Mirchi and I would not have had the opportunity to review it
for these very pages. Literature cannot remain indifferent to global changes. The larger question should be: how do larger, global changes insert themselves into a particular region or language’s literature. How are we to understand the difference between great novels produced by the Spanish-speaking writers from South American countries and the not-so-exciting world of novels produced in Pakistani languages? Both regions have suffered at the hands of imperialism, colonisation, racial humiliation, client-state status, military dictatorships and so on. It wouldn’t be too unfair to suggest that Pakistani novelists have somewhat failed to both manipulate the local socio-political issues of great international importance and show that they are willing to wrestle with events and movements taking place globally that would impact the lives of ordinary Pakistanis. Is the market to blame? Or the writer and her fragile imagination? Or the history? If we agree that literature is a byproduct of its culture, then no literature can ever become static unless you ascribe to a racist/orientalist view. But can literature become stagnant? There has been a cold war raging between the gods at the Nobel Prize’s literature committee and the American literary establishment. Some at the Nobel maintain that American writers are too insular, too local, too self-absorbed; there are those within the American literary community who concede the point as in the case of David Foster Wallace calling John Updike a great male narcissist. There are many who obviously contest the characterisation per se. Without turning the issue into a black and white situation, the larger point is well-taken. There may be genuine reasons for that but that’s a different debate. The country that has been the largest force behind the phenomenon of globalisation has not produced literature that maps what the state does in the name of her people. So how are we to understand if and when globalisation would affect/influence Pakistani literature? Is it by the sheer increase in number of those who now write in English? There is no denying that more and more people are drawn to exhibiting their literary talent in English. But, then, how come there is no comparative native English language cinema in Pakistan? Are the two markets that different? There is no disagreement that contact with the British Empire brought a new consciousness to native writing. But the reverse was also true. What scholars refer to as Arabic Frame Tradition has been ascribed to the tales of Panchatantra, which originated in India around the second century. The extinct work survived because it was translated into Arabic and it is through Arabic literature that the Frame Tradition entered European literary culture. This was way before globalisation. There have been studies about the influence of Arabic literature on Chaucer’s literary corpus. Part of it had to do with his travels into Spain and contacts with the Arabs. The last century was a century of displacement, mostly of people from the colonised world having to move to wherever a better future beckoned them. This has created a permanent culture of displacement, even disorientation. Whether essentially local or with a pretension of global sensitivity, Pakistani literature has reflected that. Those who are left behind also experience a sense of dislocation because of the empty spaces left behind by the dear ones. What further compounds the problem is our client-state status and our educational system, which results in a multi-tiered sense of devaluation. A boy whose mother tongue is Punjabi is forced to study Urdu in dilapidated conditions. He begins to devalue the language and culture of his parents. By the time he abandons Urdu-centric education in favour of English, he once again goes through the painful process of devaluing the culture and language he thought his state wanted him to embrace. This again could have produced literature worthy of international attention. If by globalisation we mean the kind of changes that come with it — such as the suicide of farmers in India — those are bound to be reflected in literature. If globalisation means easy access to information via internet, it will be felt in literature. My contention is that English literature and those written in local languages will absorb the fallout from globalisation differently. One main reason is the pull of the market force. Sometimes consciously and at other times unconsciously a writer will succumb to it. The issue at heart is how one writes. The majority of those who write in English in Pakistan suffer from a huge disconnect. To produce sophisticated works of literature, they need to repair that disconnect and it is not easy. For those who choose to write in native languages, the challenge lies in thinking grand and setting international standards, for if they continue to fail in doing so, the reader, due to globalisation of market forces, will have easier access to those works which define the international standards. This will require expanding the canvas, experimenting with newer themes, and flirting with the language itself. If my recent interaction with Pakistani writers is any indication, the signs are bad. Two examples will suffice. On my last trip to Lahore, I shared a remarkable new French novel, Zone, by Mathias Enard (translating which into English is nothing short of a miracle). Each sentence is a mile long, packed with history and sentence fragments. When I mentioned this to a noted Urdu writer, he simply put it away saying he had no interest in such novels. The other, more disheartening, example is that of a young Punjabi writer who hasn’t produced much fiction and nothing that merits the arduous labour of translation but keeps asking me to translate his short stories into English, not knowing what good would it but do to him or the cause of Punjabi literature. With regards to writing in English, I felt Samina Choonara’s review (Jan 1, 2012 ) of The Wandering Falcon and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti was spot on. language It is feared that our culture is so influenced by the English-speaking world and Bollywood films that our young people do not speak the correct Urdu. For this the supporters of Urdu recommend that Urdu be taught, especially to students of the English-medium schools, until the bachelors’ level. Also, it is feared that if
we do not improve our English we will lose out in the race for markets and
jobs in this globalised world. This makes the supporters of English argue
that English be taught at all levels up to the masters’ level. Then there
are bouts of moral panic, when the cry goes up that children should be
taught Arabic — or Chinese or Persian or French or what have you. As for the languages of Pakistan — apart from Urdu, that is — only Sindhi is taught at all levels but only some jobs are available in it. There is some visibility of Punjabi, Pashto, Saraiki, Balochi and Brahvi. But this is part of ethnic politics and hence not always the medium of instruction at the school level. Pakistan has about fifty other small languages which are ignored as they do not have any kind of power. These languages are dying; their speakers are ashamed of using them; and they have no power to preserve them. The fate of these languages does not register with our urban middle class. The major language concerns of the middle class in Pakistan are Urdu and English. It is true that English is a major influence on Pakistan’s urban culture and precisely the result of our ruling elite’s policy of privileging English. It is still the language of the administration, higher judiciary, officer’s corps of the armed forces, university education, elite media and so on. It has tremendous cultural capital — it opens the doors of elitist international bureaucracy. Is it any wonder then why people are ready to sell their grandmothers to learn the language? The elite of wealth and power (through subsidised schooling in some armed forces institutions for their own dependents) learns English because state policy privileges them. The rest have to make real sacrifices to pay through the nose to acquire it — and are fooled by the so-called ‘English-medium’ schools in every street. Given these conditions it is pointless to imagine that the elite will not use English words in Urdu when they are speaking spontaneously under natural conditions. This is called code switching and it is common all over the world. There are instances of switching in the middle of a letter from the medieval age in Norman French from French to English. Likewise, in India, switching between Persian and Urdu (called Hindi then) was common. Amir Khusrau and many other famous people have written couplets of which one line or even half a line is in Persian and the other in Urdu. There are even couplets in three languages (the third being Pashto in some cases). This was considered a literary style and is much admired by the same purists who condemn the younger generation for putting in words of English even in casual conversation in Urdu. Turning to the much-touted cultural attack by Bollywood, I have found no real credible evidence of the use of Hindi words in Urdu. There is anecdotal evidence but no hard evidence. Besides, the languages we now call Hindi and Urdu were one language till the 18th century. From 1750 onwards, Urdu poets Persianised it, purging 4,000 words of Sanskritic and local Indian origin from it. Then from 1802 onwards, identity-conscious Hindus Sanskritised it by purging it further of well-known Arabic and Persian words. These processes created modern Urdu and Hindi — and thus they have drifted apart (for evidence see my book From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History OUP, 2011). Now, if some commonly shared words of these languages are, in fact, used by our younger generation it is only what usually happens in lexically close languages when the political forces pulling them apart are relaxed. But I doubt very much that these forces are actually weakened. Indeed, they are so strong that only a few words of Hindi if used in Urdu by our children cause such uproar that it confirms my belief that such forces are bent upon keeping these two sister languages apart both in India and Pakistan. But if they do come together it will be a welcome reversal of their past of antagonism and alienation. Now to the concerns of the ordinary people of Pakistan who remain voiceless. Languages are connected with power as I have argued in several of my publications. The real policy of our urban ruling elite, therefore, is to privilege English and then Urdu. Such prevailing attitudes have a negative effect on Pakistani languages. Sindhi is quite secure as it is taught at all levels and Sindhi nationalism will keep supporting it. Punjabi is not taught officially as a medium of instruction but it is a large language and will survive. Seraiki too will survive because of the resurgent Seraiki identity in politics and especially if there is a province to support it. Hindko too will get a lease of life if there is a Hazara province. Pashto is a widely-spoken language and is used by the Taliban in Afghanistan and FATA. It too will survive. But other languages of Pakistan have only a few activists — that too voiceless. These, about fifty-five very small languages of Pakistan, mostly spoken in Northern Pakistan, are under tremendous pressure. The Karakorum Highway linking these areas to the plains has placed much pressure on these languages. In Karachi, the Gujarati language is being abandoned, at least in its written form, as young people seek to be literate in Urdu and English. A crucial aspect of teaching children in their mother tongue is to overcome the cultural shame associated with the traditional indigenous cultures and communities. This can be done by teaching all children, including those from the elite, through their mother tongue. Some local language activists are teaching these languages to children but the state offers no support despite UNESCO’s clear policy statement. It still does not agree that if a child is taught through the mother-tongue, he not only learns to value his own community and culture, but also learns other subjects better than those who are taught in English or Urdu from childhood. So, if we really do want the plurality of our culture to survive globalisation, we should begin with the mother-tongue — go on to teach Urdu through films, recorded masterpieces of the language and drama; and then teach English again through the same methods. We do need English but other countries, such as European ones, teach it as a second language and crash courses for diplomats, scientists and others who need this international language. There is no need to create a language-based elite in our country by confining English to only a small elite at the expense of the pluralist cultural and linguistic traditions of Pakistan. What
would you have? Let us think of a
few names at random, Harun al Rashid, Shah Jahan, Ishaq Mosuli, Amir Khusrau,
Tansen, Behzad, Mansur, Mutanabbi, Hafiz, Ghalib — all artists or patrons
of art. Were they also plagued in their time by cavillers, or denounced as
purveyors of sin, perverters of faith, corrupters of public morality?
Perhaps, but their detractors, if any, are now dead as dust, nameless as
ghosts. Now suppose for a moment that the kings and nobles and peoples of
old had paid ear to these nameless ghosts rather than to their great
music-makers, their painters and poets and dreamers of dreams. In event of
such a calamity what is it that you could hold up today as our cultural
heritage? There may be a small minority among us who are as vengeful towards
the dead as they are towards the living, who would be as glad of a past
without Mansur, and Shah Jahan and Tansen as they would be of a present
without, let us say, Chughtai and Roshan Ara Begum and Ghulam Ali Khan.
Their number must be small and they do not greatly matter. There are others,
however, who do matter. These would not deny the past its Haruns and Mamuns
and Shah Jahans, its music and painting and poetry and other splendours.
They only insist on denying these splendours to our own present. Music may
have been good food for the Abbasids but for the Pakistani of today it is
deadly poison. Painting may have done no harm to the Mughals and the
Iranians but its votaries today are dreadful delinquents. Culture is an
adornment, a thing of pride, so long as it is confined to the page of
history; in the living present it is a thing of shame, a cloak to hide the
dagger of nefarious designs. Perhaps somewhere at the bottom of this perversity there may be an unconscious modicum of sense. There is no doubt that in the confusion of values that prevails among us today a great deal of trash is allowed to masquerade as art of culture. There is much grotesque caricature of the fabulous Mughal Court, much debasement of beautiful folk legends, much flippant, perversion of national history, much bad music, bad cinema, bad painting, and bad literature. All this should be condemned. It corrupts public taste and therefore also corrupts public morals. It perverts values and debases the intellect and is, therefore, truly subversive. In the incoherent outpourings of the anti-culture partisans, however, this modicum of sense rarely comes to the surface. For them there is little to choose between a reverential melody sung by Roshan Ara Begum and a demonstration of lascivious hip swinging, between a Chughtai and Zainul Abedin and a poster of Yakke Wali, between a serious cultural organization and a coterie of charlatans. This is precisely what makes the blind, indiscriminate hate-campaigns against all cultural activity and all art so harmful. In the commercial world of today bad art needs no patronage. Only good art does. An unscrupulous charlatan knows how to pick his way about in the social maze of self-interest and greed. A genuine artist is not even interested in doing so. Anti-art and anti-culture campaigns, therefore, do not inhibit bad art or debased cultural pursuits; they only promote them at the expense of the good. This is one consideration. The other consideration is that our today will sometime be our posterity’s yesterday. The main pride of all ours yesterdays is what the great builders and musicians and painters and poets of old bequeathed to us, thanks to the patrons who looked after them. Today you and I are the only patrons the artist has left and the artist is a part of you and me. What is it that we propose to leave behind in our turn, apart from Kabaddi and gulli-danda which we did not invent any way. The choice lies between the love and ecstasy, the passion and the pain of the genuine artist and the hate, ignorance, and callousness of his many adversaries. What would you have? An excerpt from Culture and Identity: Selected English Writings of Faiz published by Oxford University Press
And there we go, discussing the impact of globalisation on culture as if globalisation had just come about or as if culture was something static. Culture in all its manifestations — from simple acts of living, eating, dressing up and speaking a particular language to its higher forms like arts, literature, music — has always been influenced by forces from outside. Culture must grow and culture must resist. There is no clean break as the debate around globalisation fears; there is continuity and there is resilience. For us in Pakistan, this fear has come in an already petrified setting. For a good part of our history, we have remained engaged with devising and manufacturing a Pakistani culture. Owing to the peculiar circumstances of Pakistan’s creation, we have always remained wary of the onslaught of an Indian culture at the state level. As Sarwat Ali writes in his overview, states like us that are weak “worry endlessly about the contours of their cultural identity. The unequal relationship with other more powerful competitors creates a situation of insecurity.” We obviously moved towards ideology and religion. Our version of cultural identity was devoid of pleasures like music, dance or other art forms. Additionally the ‘Pakistani’ culture sidelined the regional and ethnic cultures because they militated against “cultural homogeneity”. Therefore, is globalisation trying to weaken this version and giving us an enriched and permissible version instead? What about the customs violative of human rights like honour killings etc? Are they changing too? For us West is the yardstick that we must guard against now. This Special Report is about — what is our culture that we say we are losing but we have not lost so far. How strong are the outside influences in arts and literature and language and music etc. How much of it can we save? Should there be artificial attempts to save it? Or is there something inherently resilient and is bound to survive? We also wanted to see what is the strength of our culture that we are sending to the outside world? Faiz Ahmed Faiz told us many things about culture. Those are as true today as they were when he wrote them. It’s just that the influences from all sides have accelerated with the advances in technology. We only want to record how much we have absorbed and with what results.
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