review
1-9-7-1
Sarmila Bose’s book on the Bangladesh war aims to contextualise and humanise the war by examining specific instances at the ground level, while gaining insight into the conflict as a whole
Dead Reckoning
By Sarmila Bose
Publisher: Oxford 
University Press, 2011
Pages: 240
Price: Rs 725
 
By Sarwat Ali

Water journey
Wusatullah Khan’s reporter diary is filled with his sharp, effective, unorthodox style 
By Ajmal Kamal
Sailab Diary
By Wusatullah Khan
Publisher: Pakistan Study Centre, 2011
Pages: 320
Price: Rs 400

Essay
Articulation

Words are powerful. Specific words and combinations of words are the keys that will unlock realms that seem closed off. Find your words that accurately describe what you are attempting. If you don’t find the right words at first, keep trying new ones. You will locate the keys that fit and unlock the door. Find the words that can communicate to others the feats that you are trying to realize. Perceived by the business-friendly government of the United States as consumers rather than citizens, we are not encouraged to speak. In fact, we are persuaded not to speak, because articulation poses a threat to corporate interests.

review
1-9-7-1
Sarmila Bose’s book on the Bangladesh war aims to contextualise and humanise the war by examining specific instances at the ground level, while gaining insight into the conflict as a whole

Dead Reckoning
By Sarmila Bose
Publisher: Oxford 
University Press, 2011
Pages: 240
Price: Rs 725
 

The events of 1971 and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh has been a nightmare for Pakistanis. Despite many fault lines in its creation, the dismemberment after 24 years since its foundation has made many to think and rethink about what happened during the tragic events that led to the killing and migration of the people and capitulation of hundred thousand troops.

Usually in such cases the lines are very firmly drawn, the positions taken are very hard. As the evidence and events are turned over in the mind it becomes more hardened and then sacrosanct with the passage of time from which it is difficult to escape. Any other reading of the events and history is taken as treason or betrayal.

Sarmila Bose in her research and analysis of the situation that led to the creation of an independent country has tried to creep under the cover of the Meta narrative to discover many secondary narratives that had lain buried under the burdensome weight of a tendentious reading and building of the case for an independent country.

Bose’s argument might be received with more credibility or with less suspicion as she is herself a Bengali and seen to be sympathetic to the cause of Bangladesh. At the same time, she has impeccable credentials to conduct her research and arrive at an analytical understanding that might have escaped the awnings of prejudice than in case of people who opted to take sides at the very outset. She is a Senior Research Fellow in Politics of South Asia at Oxford.  She has also been a journalist in India and combines academic and media work.

While Sisson and Rose in War and Secession, Pakistan, India and the Creation of Bangladesh addressed the diplomatic and policy issues at the macro level, Bose turns her gaze on how the conflict was played out among the people at the ground level and focuses on the civil war inside the territories of East Pakistan — between those who wanted independence for Bengalis and those who believed in preserving the unity of Pakistan. She examines particular events or areas in depth, using multiple sources of information including the testimony of all parties to build as complete a picture as possible. It aims to contextualise and humanise the war by examining specific instances at the ground level, while gaining insight into the conflict as a whole.

As it often happens, the things as they unfold in history are not the results of premeditated decisions or the outcome of events as envisaged on the drawing board. More often than not, it is the sequence of events and the instant/knee jerk reaction that determine the course of history. One thing may lead to another due to the decisions taken in the heat of action, with the eventual outcome being totally different or very extreme compared to what even the hardliners had initially foreseen. After conducting the research, which was extensive, Bose was satisfied that there were no pre-meditated policies implemented through the various actions taken. It was more an outcome of events as they unfolded during the course of that year.

There was hardly any talk of an independent country when the elections were announced in the country. The main parties, particularly the Awami League did not contest the election on this basis; instead in accordance with democratic dispensation it wanted greater autonomy in the running of the Eastern wing of the country. Pakistan had been under army rule for more than a decade; the extreme centralisation of authority was always resented, often questioned and a few times violently protested against. The concept of one man one vote and numerical majority which had being laid to rest in Pakistan resulted in disconnect between the will of the majority and the centres of power. As the former was in Eastern Wing and the latter in the Western Wing, the first election in the country was supposed to resolve this discrepancy and realign the will of the majority with the centres of power.

But the results were not accepted and the ensuing violent protests hardened positions. Even then as the research shows the aim of the struggle was not to gain independence but to find a solution within the framework of one country. There were many sub layers; many intermediary positions that were floated or were advanced and could have been benefited from. There was no military unanimity as to how the problem was to be solved. Among the people themselves, many ethnic mixes, diversities and hues did not sit well with the movement taking on an extreme tone.

For most movements, particularly of hate, to be successful there is much that is demonised and always cast in black and white. The army and the Punjabis were cast in a black villainous role while the rest were anointed as fair and lovely with no sub strata to mitigate this growing uniformity in the way things were being perceived. Bose unravels the situation as it built up and discovers many layers that if properly exploited would not have resulted in the hardening of positions to the extent of being unbridgeable.

She not only analyses the past but also the way politics shaped up in independent Bangladesh. By examining the consequence of that movement and independence she points to the flaws in the struggle and its perception to achieve maximum advantage through an armed struggle. The revulsion against Indian occupation, the disenchantment with the founding fathers and their violent deaths so soon after the creation, and the dominant influence of the armed forces in running the country placed the democratic process on the back burner thus nullifying the slogan of majority being determinant of its destiny.

Everything looks rational and orderly in retrospect but actually the heat of the moment determines the choices to be made. The saddest aspect of it all is that people above all suffer the consequences and become its primary casualty.

 

Water journey
Wusatullah Khan’s reporter diary is filled with his sharp, effective, unorthodox style 
By Ajmal Kamal

 

Sailab Diary
By Wusatullah Khan
Publisher: Pakistan Study Centre, 2011
Pages: 320
Price: Rs 400

What is it that joins us as a nation? Various answers are given to this intriguing question by our intellectuals, politicians and, lately, TV talk show hosts who call themselves “anchors.” Our history of numerous small and large groups of people trying to become a nation — more precisely, a nation state — has rendered some of these answers less convincing. For instance, after 1971 it takes a certain amount of audacity to say that it is religion (as a part of the so-called Pakistan ideology) that binds us together — although audacity does not seem to be in short supply here at all; there still are city-dwelling sages who believe that a rabid sense of indignation against the latest blasphemy on the part of the West or local agents thereof can work well as a national glue. Another, somewhat romantic, theory that is thrown up every time we are hit by something either like a 1965 war or a 2005 earthquake is that at such times we manage to become a nation.

But the trouble is that if it takes a disaster to bring us to some kind of unison, we’ll need one or another at all times — not that we are deprived of them most of the time. I read Wusatullah Khan’s Sailab Diary with this curiosity, and, apart from other ways I found it a rewarding experience, it confirmed some of what I had been suspecting for some time. It showed me that those feeding us with their pretty theories about our existence as a mass of people forming a nation in the contemporary sense may be a little out of touch with reality; perhaps they lack a first-hand knowledge of the conditions in which majority of Pakistanis are forced to live, about what changes have occurred on the ground in our small towns, villages and urban slums, and how people know that they have to fend for themselves as much in times of disasters as they do otherwise.

Wusatullah toured almost the entire length and breadth of the country hit by the recent devastating floods on a reporter’s assignment from the BBC. The journey took him a little over three months —from  August 7 to October 16 2010 — during which time he kept his listeners and web-readers updated on a daily basis on what he went on discovering. The entries of his diary of the floods have now been collected in a volume and make engrossing reading. Khan has a keen eye and does not hesitate to sense and record in his sharp, effective style what is unfamiliar and cannot be safely put away in one of the already existing boxes of perception. He is also armed with just the right amount of cynicism which saves him from being sentimental and losing the precious observation.

“I did not see the scenes of people’s mass migration at the time of India’s Partition, only heard about them from elders. But after reaching the bridge on the Chenab River, I felt as if it was a shoot for a Partition film.”

Reading his diary felt like discovering how far away our villages and small towns are located from our big urban centres, both in terms of geographical distance as well as the so-called national perception of how a large part of the nation actually lives and what it has to go through. From Khan’s observations one gets a sense of how large this gap of perception in fact is between the real people living in villages (and unauthorised urban slums) and the even more real, more equal people who rule, manage, help and/or exploit them.

“City-dwellers can hardly understand why villagers cannot leave home without their cattle. How are they to be explained that a cow, a goat or a buffalo is a villager’s saving bank account. When in need, he would sell one of his animals; it’s like the way we use ATMs to draw money. People living on riverbanks are not agriculturists but cattle-raisers by their nature. Therefore, at several places, people refused to leave home because the boatman wasn’t willing to take their chickens and other animals on board. They refused even if the boatman was willing, because the government was only assuring to provide food and shelter to people, but no shehri babu had any idea how important the animals’ need of fodder and shelter was. From the flooded parts of Layyah, about three lakh humans and four and a half lakh animals reached safe places by the efforts of the people themselves or with outside help. But those animals got only sixty thousand bails of fodder, with the result that within a week they lost half of their weight and their bones started showing.”

As their counterparts living in the slums of our ever-expanding cities, these villagers (in fact they are the same people, and so are their methods of finding their meagre place in a world hostile to them) have learned the hard way that although they can increasingly demand and sometimes even grudgingly given what is their due from public resources, they have to take care of themselves, disaster or no disaster.

“The kind of use of the intermediate technology that I saw during this seven-hour-long water journey, I had never seen before. Five empty oil barrels are tied together with a rope and a himacha (a large cot woven with baan) is fitted on top of them — you have a boat, carrying two goats, a child and a man! A wooden board tied to two tubes of tractor tyres — another boat is made. If a man is travelling alone, all he needs is a tube or a jerry can as a personal boat. Two people sitting on a small log of wood, using their hands as rows to propel it.”

What joins us are certainly not the ideological goals already set by Iqbal and Nasim Hijazi (two favourites of our latest small-time saviour, Zaid Hamid) but perhaps the greed of our ruling classes as a result of which most of our politics has been reduced to that of land — urban and agricultural — and which makes us not one but two nations: one that makes disasters happen, and the other that has to suffer and overcome them.

“According to Ashu Lal, a prominent Saraiki poet in his early fifties, until his childhood days Sindhu devta was given such respect that nobody dared to urinate in its flowing water. But afterwards people used the pickaxe of greed to banish the river from its place and injured it so deeply that it went mad. It was deprived of its course. If it wanted to flow towards the west, it’d be stopped by fields and granaries, if it changed its direction to the north, hamlets wouldn’t let it pass, if it wanted to flee southwards, roads, an abundance of small dams and the dog of corruption would come in its way. How much patience could the river have! So one day Sindhu, in its bid to save its life, grabbed the limitless human greed by its collar and dragged it in its forceful surge. But a river is not quite as cruel and inconsiderate as humans. The same Sindhu has brought with itself new, rich earth from the mountains. Soon there would raise bumper crops from this fresh, fertile earth; the wounds would heal and humans would again be on their old ungrateful way.”

This book, to me, defines what Pakistani literature should be treating as its concerns. Ideally, we expect our fiction to be doing this, and there are examples of such fiction. But the genre that Wusatullah Khan’s employs is just as well-suited for this purpose.

 

 

Essay
Articulation

Words are powerful. Specific words and combinations of words are the keys that will unlock realms that seem closed off. Find your words that accurately describe what you are attempting. If you don’t find the right words at first, keep trying new ones. You will locate the keys that fit and unlock the door. Find the words that can communicate to others the feats that you are trying to realize. Perceived by the business-friendly government of the United States as consumers rather than citizens, we are not encouraged to speak. In fact, we are persuaded not to speak, because articulation poses a threat to corporate interests.

Public schools, when facing severe budget cuts, removed most departments of fine arts, music, theatre, and language curricula. Government support for the arts is almost nonexistent. This has engendered a civilization which is not only afraid of artistic expression, but also one in which many consider artistic expression a subversive activity.

In the commercial arena, language is dumbed down, commodified, and cheapened. What do “Think different,” “Just do it”and“The real thing” really mean? Mostly we are encouraged to be happy solipsists, mired in the desire to buy endlessly obsolescing products sold by a very small number of the same corporations that call the shots on a global level. Because of this and for reasons of participation, survival, and resistance, it is important to learn how to articulate effectively and often.

Articulation is expression, communication, speaking, pointing, verbalization, clarification, and enunciation. Articulation is a stroke on the canvas, an eloquent gesture, a harmonic chord, a lucid description. Articulation is ultimately the attempt to make something clear. It is the grammar of all expression and is it very difficult to do well. Articulation is the opposite of doodling. Pablo Picasso said, “Creativity is first of all an act of destruction.” A necessary tool in the creative act, articulation is an aggressive, expressive act in defiance of death itself. Articulation is born from the attempt to create bridges from the realm of private suffering to the outside world. From the heat of experience, you signal to others. Fuelled by thought and feeling, its objective is clarity.

Words and sentences articulate but so do many sorts of actions and inaction. The irritations of daily life and the aggravations of social and political difficulties are frustrations that can be harnessed and transformed into the energy necessary for expression and articulation. Aim for clarity even in an atmosphere of insecurity and change. Life is imperfect. The nagging annoyances and frustrations, the aches and pains of living, can either eat you alive or you can use them to advantage. Aggravation and anger can be harnessed into useful energy in service of expression. The process is alchemical. You can transform the random frustrations into poetic shapes that may inspire others. I concentrate my frustration, my random feelings, my fear, and my anticipation and put it to work in the art of articulation. The frustration generates a storehouse of energy useful in locating the necessary stubbornness and courage, patience, and energy for creative expression. The transformation is a kind of spiritual alchemy. The more that you can manage to be specific, the more articulate you will be. After all, you are not just generating energy; you are crafting and articulating the energy into communication, into art.

The most important ingredient in articulation is specificity of action, word, and sound. The specificity of your articulation must match the specificity of the playwright’s words. To signal in the face of the ephemeral is an act of heroism. The pointing, the signalling, is what matters. If you cannot find the words to describe what you are attempting, point at it. When you can point articulately in a specific direction, others will know where you are headed. They will help you in the journey. The pointing is the point.

The choreographer Mary Overlie studied for several years with an elderly ballet teacher she referred to as “Miss Hamilton.” Already in her late thirties by the time she began her work with Miss Hamilton, Mary was not at all interested in a career in ballet. The study nonetheless informed Mary’s post-modern sensibilities. The aging Miss Hamilton ended her days ill and fading from life n a hospital, but she insisted that Mary visit her regularly to continue the instruction. In the hospital room, Miss Hamilton watched Mary dance and corrected her verbally. When she could speak no more, could only blink her eyes and move her fingers, Miss Hamilton still insisted that Mary dance. She taught right up to the moment of her death. She signalled life in her dying. Invested in the continuity of ballet, Miss Hamilton pointed until her last breath.

 In the theatre, articulation encompasses far more than the words. It is signs, symbols and, particularly, metaphor. You point to something by finding metaphors for it. The metaphor carries the meaning. The metaphor allows the receiver to fill in with their imagination. I like to think of metaphor as a truck. Originally it was an Ancient Greek word meaning “transfer.” Meta implies “a change” and pherein means “to bear, or carry.” Thus, the word “metaphor” itself means “a transfer of meaning from one thing to another.” The truck, the container, the metaphor, or the carrier, transports the meaning. In the theatre, we use metaphor to articulate what is most difficult to express or painful to realise. During a solar eclipse when you want to look at the sun, knowing that staring directly at it will ruin your eyes, you use a piece of cardboard to protect the safety of your eyes and watch the reflection of the event on the cardboard. A metaphor functions in this manner. It allows us to look at intense issues without burning our eyes. Metaphor is pointing indirectly in order to look at something directly. It is an articulate use of misdirection. But also metaphor adds deeper, more subtle and complex levels of meaning. A great metaphor is an articulate metaphor.

 

An excerpt from And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World by Anne Bogart

 

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