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Give
Khyber a pass Tracking
the sound Appreciating
objects The
wooden look
President
Musharraf's proposal to change NWFP's name to Khyber has few backers.
Opponents say it just denotes a geographical opening that cannot give
identity to a nation or a race By
Rahimullah Yusufzai
The
usage of Khyber for naming institutions and infrastructures has become so
frequent that many people in the NWFP have become fed up of the name. It is
an over-used name that cannot apply to everything. But the trend continues
with banks, roads, educational institutions, business concerns and much more
getting named after Khyber. Khyber
has been proposed as the new name for NWFP in the past as well. But it failed
to gain acceptance and has now become one of the least preferred names for
the identity-less province. The President my have thrust the dormant issue
into the centre-stage by proposing Khyber to replace NWFP as the name of the
province. However, it is unlikely to win favour of majority of the people of
NWFP after having been outrightly rejected by major political parties. In fact,
the President's support for Khyber would make the proposed name even more
controversial in view of the controversies surrounding his person and
position. Political parties opposed to him have already rejected his
proposal. Most members of the Frontier intelligentsia and the common people
also cannot possibly identify with Khyber to represent their identity.
As
expected, the ANP has angrily rejected the President's proposal. It has been
the most vocal party to campaign for a change of NWFP's name and its
preferred new nomenclature has always been Pakhtunkhwa. Earlier, it would
have liked the province to be called Pakhtunistan but the controversies
attached to this name and the fact that it gives the impression of an
independent state in view of past propaganda made it politically incorrect.
Surprisingly, the ANP central president Asfandyar Wali Khan while rejecting
Khyber and preferring Pakhtunkhwa also expressed his willingness to accept
Afghania as the new name for the province. This was a concession and should
be taken seriously if those at the helm of affairs are sincere in resolving
this long-standing issue. Afghania,
as we all know, denotes the alphabet 'a' in Pakistan's name. Chaudhry Rehmat
Ali, and others who claim to have coined the name Pakistan, referred to the
NWFP as Afghania, or land of the Afghans. This should not be confused with
Afghanistan. The fact that a different word, ie Afghania, was used to
describe the abode of the Pakistani Afghans, or Pakhtuns, showed that
Chaudhry Rehmat Ali and others wanted to have a separate name than
Afghanistan for the province that was proposed to become part of independent
Pakistan. Those not conversant with the word Afghan ought to be reminded that
all Pakhtuns by race are Afghans and that is how they are still known in the
revenue and other relevant documents. In the
column denoting one's race, the Pakhtuns or Pashtuns continue to identify
themselves as Afghans. So Afghania in a way explains the identity of the
Pakhtuns, or Pakistani Afghans, who inhabit the NWFP. That the Pakhtuns make
up almost 80 per cent of the population of the settled districts of NWFP and
even greater if one were to include the Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(Fata) of the province should leave no doubt in the mind of anyone that
Frontier's new name should reflect the identity of the majority Pakhtun
people. Understandably,
the PPPP has also rejected the President's proposal to rename NWFP as Khyber.
To its credit, the Benazir Bhutto-led party has not changed its policy to
name the province as Pakhtunkhwa. The MMA,
which as the ruling alliance in the NWFP would be influencing the issue of
the renaming of the province, had constituted a committee sometime back under
the leadership of senior provincial minister Sirajul Haq to consult other
political parties and groups to reach a consensus on the new name for NWFP.
The committee became dormant when the ANP, PPPP and other parties showed lack
of interest in its work by arguing that it was a futile exercise in view of
the fact the NWFP Assembly had already passed a resolution recommending
Pakhtunkhwa as the new name of the province. The NWFP
chief minister Akram Durrani has recently said that the committee would
resume its work and try to arrive at a consensus on the issue. Ironically,
Durrani as a JUI-F MPA in the previous assembly had proposed Pakhtunistan as
the name for NWFP. Now he says he and his MMA colleagues would have no
objection if a consensus was reached on any new name, including Khyber. The sad
part of the President's preference for Khyber as NWFP's new name is his usual
lack of consultation with stakeholders, including pro-Musharraf political
parties and politicians, while making his proposal. That has been style of
working and he expects everyone to follow him once he has made a proposal or
undertaken a policy shift. Besides, his lack of awareness for historical
facts, including the one concerning Afghania being the chosen name for NWFP
in the coining of the word Pakistan, is also a matter of concern. He should
have known that Pakistan would be technically incomplete as far as its name
is concerned if there was no province by the name of Afghania. Also, Afghania
would be the least controversial of all the proposed names and would be
acceptable to most parties and peoples if it was explained to them that its
stands for the 'a' in the word Pakistan. Khyber,
as everyone should know, is the name of a pass, or 'darra' as it is called in
Pashto and Urdu. As the famous poet-politician Ajmal Khattak says in one of
his musical Pashto poems, Khyber is more than just a pass as it links my
Afghan and Pashtun people across mountains. Khyber Pass has thus been applied
as the name for the tribal region that provides access from Afghanistan and
rest of Central Asia to South Asia. That is the reason for it to become
legendary as the route for conquerors, adventurers, traders, scholars and
commoners. It is true that Khyber is the most famous of numerous other
passes, such as Nawa, Arandu, Khapakh, Pewar, etc that provide access to
Afghanistan into present-day Pakistan but it is just a geographical opening
that cannot give identity to a nation or a race. Balochistan
hasn't been named after the famous Bolan Pass or Sindh after Mehran. Renaming
NWFP after Khyber doesn't confer an identity to the province peopled by
majority Pakhtuns. It would have to be Pakhtunkhwa or Afghania in keeping
with the aspirations of a proud people with a glorious past.
Since its
beginning, film music has been one of the most eclectic musical forms in the
subcontinent By Sarwat
Ali The
death of Naushad Ali has provided an occasion to look back and assess the
contribution and role of film music both in terms of its specifics and its
larger social impact.
The
radio was a popular platform for the broadcast of film music. Radio Pakistan,
without any policy stricture, played film music, while in India the policy of
All India Radio of not promoting film music had to be bent, on immense
popular demand, to permit broadcasts under the caveat of Vivat Bharati. But
before that, film music had been broadcast from Radio Ceylon, its exclusive
claim to a wide listenership. The
records, first the seventy-eight rpms, were not that affordable -- they were
accessible but the ordinary man in the street could not afford a record
player, and then the hassle of keeping and maintaining the discs was too
complicated. These records were quite fragile, needing a great deal of
protection from the heat and dust. This changed a great deal when the
cassette revolution shook the world. Cassettes were cheaper, one hour of
music meant about twenty songs and that too in just twenty or twenty-five
rupees, and these cassettes did not demand much attention and maintenance.
Cassette players, too, became progressively cheaper and easier to handle than
the old gramophone player. Film,
too, was a cheap form of entertainment, especially in the urban centres, and
despite all the taboos involved Indian cinema drew enough crowds to become
the second largest film industry in the world. But it can be safely surmised
that the people listening to film music were far in excess to those who
actually went and saw the films. The film song appealed on its own merit,
without recourse to the situation of the film or on whom the song was
picturised. It may
appear simplistic to stress that the popularity of film music rested
exclusively on its musical potential, for many songs became roaring hits
because of being picturised on leading men and women who commanded huge
followings, or some because of the striking situation in the film. Even if
most people did not go and see the films, many did, spun yarns and gossiped
about the film to their friends and family, which only helped the deprived
ones to place in their own imagination the song in a certain context, hence
helping in increasing its listenership. For the
ordinary listener this placing within a certain context was of crucial
importance. Most people understand music through the words or the lyrics,
thinking its musical rendition to be a mere interpretation of the text. The
situation in the film provided yet another context to them. The pure
abstraction of the classical forms was narrowed down and made more concrete.
The strength of music per se is its abstraction, because it defies any
designative connotation, but in case of more popular forms of music a certain
reductive intrusion is desirable. Film, more than any other medium, provided
this external reference with great deal of facility. Film
music evolved to be the most eclectic of the forms in a musical environment
that took pride in the purity of the form. It lent itself to music from all
over the world -- be it the classical symphonies of the western tradition, or
the samba and tango dance tunes of Latin America, the jazz of United States
and the pop music that spread like wild fire all over the western world after
the second world war. In the
early phase of subcontinental cinema the classical forms were abridged so
that their compositional part could be highlighted to fit in the time slot
allocated to a single film song. Since these songs were also marketed
separately, the technological limitation of the seventy-eight rpm record,
too, happened to be the determining factor in the duration of the song. It
settled down to one aasthai and two antaras, with a couple of interval
pieces, all adding up to about three minutes of music. The
founding fathers of film music, like Jhande Khan, R.C Boral, Panna Lal Ghosh,
Ghulam Haider and Punkaj Malik, and the second generation -- Anil Biswas,
Khem Chand Prakash, Khurshid Anwar, Firoz Nizami and Naushad -- served film
music to the best of their creative abilities. This was the new platform
which had endless possibilities. It catered to popular music and popular
taste, avoided pure abstraction, heightened the dramatic conflict of the film
and did not really have to conform to the many limitations that classical
music imposed on itself. It was also extremely well-paying. It attracted
talented composers and singers, as other options of creating and performing
were on the decrease. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, the
princely states were beset with their own problems of scarce resources. Despite
the wholesale borrowing from sources all over the world, the composers were
creative enough to melodiously indigenise the tunes. S.D Burman, Shanker
Jaikishen, Salil Chaudry and C Ramchandar had no qualms about seeking music
inspiration from any source, but they had the ability to create music that in
its final form was very local and very familiar. The foundation of our music,
the melody, was never lost sight of and many of the tunes which originated in
other parts of the world sounded very subcontinental is the finished product. The
large-scale importation of music from foreign sources became all too obvious
as the indigenisation of this external source was found inadequate.
Compositions from the two countries -- India and Pakistan -- were remixed and
presented as original for the success of the film. The more
popular form these days is the music video, where, unlike films, a ready
connection is missing between the lyrics and the visual imagery. Even in film
music the exotic locations and the large number of dancers do not tally the
contents of the song with the situation. It could be that we are on the
threshhold of another form of music necessitated by technological
breakthrough, as indeed was the case with the advent of talkies.
Collectors'
items will soon be pricey enough for everyone to want them By Asha'ar
Rehman
The
happenings around him provided Chiragh, right until his last flicker, with a
reason to vent his spleen on the new values. These also provided him a nice
base to pose as a relic from the past and enhanced sales. With him gone and
another baba having kind of replaced him, the change as usual is afoot. The
old Post Office, perhaps the only one to have commanded an obituary in the
dear old The Pakistan Times in the 1980s, is all but forgotten. A couple of
bookshops on Temple Road have gone without an obituary marking their demise
-- or a change in location or intiqal. As a consequence of a legal judgement,
the book shops have been wound up, as has been a seed shop. The Regal has
been completely taken up by eaters of all kind and perhaps it is because of
this exceptional passion for food that the old samosa shop has survived -
albeit under a new name. No marks
for guessing what this new name is. Where nostalgia overwhelms everything
else in the realm of culture, it has to be Yaaden while previously it was
plainly Regal Corner. A new signboard is in place, red shining irritatingly
in the heat of May, leaving the onlooker craving for no more. Yaaden sports
no Atif Aslam taking his peculiar dip into the ocean of music; only a burger,
its mouth wide open and the red once again oozing out in a most seductive
fashion. Inside,
there are no burgers to be had. It is just a marketing stunt carried out in
aid of the samosa. The interior, that has remained more or less the same over
years, is complimented by the presence of two young Sikhs, who as per
tradition, preclude smoking. A gentleman walking by smiles meaningfully as he
walks past the restaurant, and returns a few minutes later. The way he is
looking around, he is possibly here to collect or recollect chunks from his
memory. Of course... I can recognise him from the days when this joint served
as a poor alternative to the real samosa shop 30 yards away. Then Karim
Bakhsh went around as Karim Bakhsh and was yet to be cut down to KB. The
change was as usual afoot but it took time. The
change comes fast. Having transcended the Hall Road and Patiala Ground, I
find a crop of vendors selling electronic gadgets from a distant not too
distant past. Cassette players from the 1980s and even the 1990s, as if they
have been put through an artificial aging process to add to their value. The
working ones which look younger have been sorted out from the ones competing
with each other for collectors' attention. There are no guarantees that these
hasty old-timers can still play. In the words of their equally unkempt and
genuinely aging present owner, "those who have the eye, buy. Buy them
today or you will be paying a bigger sum for these tomorrow." Ask
around and the feeling is that today nostalgia is drawing more and more
people to the antique shops, whose number has risen steadily over time. The
salesman of odd items on Nisbett Road tries to dispel this impression as he
says that the visitors to his shop had thinned numerically, and not only
physically, in recent times and that he was mulling a change in business
himself. But what good is a salesman who doesn't complain of a drop in sales.
That this particular one has ample reason to stay put is evident from the
pride he a few minutes later displays in showing me a register bearing the
business cards of all kinds of people. He adds mine to the list and promises
to let me know as soon as he gets hold of the gadget I had told him I was
looking for: an old gramophone player so many collectors seem to be searching
for these days. The next
few minutes the unhappy salesman spends on establishing just how antique and
how very inaccessible the machine has become. There is at least one gentleman
standing in the queue ahead of me in the register and there are surely others
on his record as having requested for the same gramophone. "There has
been a whole series of people who have come here wanting a gramophone after a
local paper published a picture of one lying with a kabaria here. Someone had
put it there by mistake. It wasn't meant to be sold. I know since it is my
business to know. But if you are really interested I can get you one. It is
going to cost you around Rs 12,000 or more." The old
and the aging man pretending to run a similar business a few shops down the
street, is oblivious to the new realities around him. He wants to know which
make the buyer is interested in, as if the word gramophone itself is not
specific enough in the times we have fast arrived at. The price he sets is so
offensively anti-culture, Rs 500 to Rs 800, at which rate everyone will soon
be a collector, given that even at a few thousand rupees per piece.the record
appears to be outselling its original sales.
A
substitution of material can make art of an object By Quddus
Mirza Spanish
novelist Javier Marias, in his book 'Your Face Tomorrow', writes about how
the world is comprised of replacements. People occupy each other's place,
physically as well as in the realm of feelings -- as when a broken
relationship is substituted with another one. Yet the one who fills the
vacated position, in actual space or in the emotional arena, is not
necessarily aware of his or her predecessor.
Young
sculptor Humaira Abid attempts something similar -- to turn reality into art.
For this, she has picked a simple and direct method: replacing the material
associated with an object with wood and metal. In her ongoing exhibition at
Canvas Gallery in Karachi, a number of wooden sculptures (same pieces that
were earlier displayed at Rohtas Gallery Lahore) were initially derived from
natural, organic and ordinary objects. Besides
replacing the usual material with another substance, it is the choice of
images and the manner of creating these forms, that make her work different
from most sculptures being created now. Humaira relies on a basic formula:
instead of seeking some kind of stylisation in her work, she is keen to
construct realistic images in the hard wood. In doing so, she deliberately
preserves the original grains and shade of the wood. Thus, to a viewer, the
very naturalistic shapes of small bundles, irons, locks and keys are easily
presented as sculptures. In addition to this, she joins some parts, executed
in metal, with the large wooden pieces.
Humaira
uses ties in her other works too. In one piece the ties are wrapped around an
egg-like shape. In another piece she sticks real bullets in an egg sculpture
fabricated with multiple jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The bullets immediately
suggest violence, but in connection with Abid's other works (especially the
'Iron ladies') the bullets can be read as symbolising the male gender. Hence
an object, when put in another context, adjusts its meaning/purpose. This
treading between reality and its replica is seen in a number of works. A
large egg is cut in two halves with the hands of a man and a woman (built in
metal) trying to reach one another. It seems that Abid is aiming for a
narrative with the juxtaposition of opposites, but these sculptures do not
appear as resolved or focused as was her previous body of works.
An
identical effect is achieved in another work on display at the Canvas
Gallery. Here small handbags are chiselled in wood. If in the larger,
plant-like piece, the reality is convincingly transformed into somewhat
abstract shapes, the handbag sculpture deceives viewers with its change of
material into solid wood. The maturity in capturing the details of the
handbags is visible in her other work, too, and is crucial in making her work
convincing and exciting. This absolute transmigration of material or idea
keeps viewers engaged visually, emotionally and conceptually. Yet, on
the whole, the present exhibition is more important for the maker than the
spectators, because it leads to various choices and paths for the artist, who
has taken up the hard job of being a sculptor. The multiplicity of ideas and
strategies indicates the openness in her approach, which could otherwise be
described as a confusion.
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The
easiest way to stay out of controversy while trying to coin a name for
anything and everything concerning the North-West Frontier Province is to
settle for Khyber. President General Pervez Musharraf has just done that by
proposing Khyber as the new name for the province. 
It
is true that the ruling PML has announced support for the President's
proposal and the party's provincial chief Amir Muqam, also a federal
minister, has termed Khyber an appropriate name. Another federal minister,
Aftab Sherpao, who is head of his own faction of PPP, has also come out in
support of Khyber despite the fact that he had earlier backed Pakhtunkhwa as
the new name for NWFP. In any case, pro-Musharraf politicians and parties
would have little choice but to support his policies. It is another matter if
such support would be transient and dependent on his stay in power. 
It
is stating the obvious that film music has been one of the most popular, if
not the most popular, form of music ever since its inception during the last
seven decades. To many the only music to which they were exposed had been
film music and it has become their benchmark for assessing all other kinds of
music. Film music has always been there, in the sense that one did not really
have to go looking for it, as has been the case with other forms of music.
Radio was probably the cheapest means of listening to film music. One radio
set was enough for the entire household or a shop or some another similar
outfit and listening to it was almost free. Nobody except a miniscule number
paid its license fee. 
Lawrence
Road Lahore. I am standing where Chiragh would have his rehri in the last few
years of his life. The News on Sunday carried his obituary celebrating a
self-acclaimed chikkar-cholay wala from Bartania times or the British days.
And boy, did he lace his fare with the invective! At the end of each of these
sprees, he would remind his customers, who were more his audience, how he had
struggled along in the face of modernity encroaching upon his space from all
sides. 
Probably
in a similar way, art-making is a form of rearrangements. It shuffles ideas,
images and materials. Creative individuals try to alter the existing
appearance or perception of an object by changing its colour, scale,
substance, function and meaning. This process of transformation happens at
all levels, but only when a total metamorphosis is attained, do viewers sense
the emergence or presence of an artwork. This takes place on a psychological
level too, when an act of successful modification compels its audience to
forget the existence of the actual materials and forces them to look for or
at a new entity -- the art. Due to this phenomenon, when we set our eyes upon
Mona Lisa, we do not discover pigments glued with oil on the surface of
fabric, but a lovely woman, with a smile that has enticed for more than 500
years. Or, for that matter, when we see a dance performance, we do not focus
on the limbs and their movements, but we experience something unique: The
dance. This is possible only because of the capacity in art to turn one's
attention from the actual existence of things. Any film goer cries, laughs,
loves and hates the perpetually moving pixels of different shades of light
being projected on the huge screen installed in a cinema hall.
Her
chosen forms, such as plants, hands, eggs and buds -- some enlarged but all
in solid substance -- suggest issues of beauty, femininity and violence,
three subjects which may appear separate but are deeply inter-related, in our
surroundings and in her art also. One of the most important images in her
exhibition is an iron made in wood with its functional side covered with a
miniature painting. Humaira has been using this item to denote the theme of
identity as a woman. In Hindi the word for iron -- istri -- is the same as
'wife'; so Humaira plays on the duality of meaning by making miniatures with
naked women (surrounded by men's ties) on the flat portion of this household
item used to press clothes. If on the one hand the link between wife and
performer of domestic chore is indicated, at the same instance the
association of naked female flesh with the men's ties signifies all kinds of
bonds and obligations forced upon a woman by a male-dominated society. 
Perhaps
the latest sculptures are attempts to create art with minimal intervention
from the sculptor. But she comes across as more convincing when the intention
of the artist is clear and the execution of work -- to some extent --
effortless. This quality is achieved by two separate schemes in two of her
works from the present exhibition. Firstly, in a large combination of
different pieces, one can read the origin of some organic forms, like plants
and leaves. But Humaira deals with the familiar subject of nature in such a
way that her sculpture invokes a range of responses. These pieces, each with
twisted forms, give the illusion of being human characters along with
maintaining their links with the botanical world. This plurality infuses an
interesting dimension into her sculptures. 