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Q&A comment The Editor Muse
in the museum 100 years of theatre
Q&A The News on Sunday: When
was the storyteller in you born? Nadeem Aslam: I never
wanted to be a writer; but I always wanted to write. The instinct to tell
stories was always there – not just putting words down on paper but
actually expressing yourself. I was also attracted to think of an audience,
to the fact that someone will read those words. My father’s side of the
family was quite out of the Left field, say bohemian. But my mother’s side
of the family was very conservative, so much so, that some of my uncles
won’t allow hanging a picture on the wall if it had a human figure in it.
Yet, I was encouraged to draw and paint on my father’s side. There was a
tension among one’s family members, and it was hard to decide who was
right. The wonderful thing, however, was that one discovered an entire
spectrum of opinions which is a great bearing to a writer. You learnt that
there isn’t one way to being an uncle! I am just saying that in an
extended family, and a close-knit family at that, it was wonderful to learn
that lesson early on. I just recently discovered
about myself that my instinct was always to say, ‘I am Shamim Sahiba’s
nephew’ or ‘I am Muneer Sahab’s cousin’ or ‘I am my mother’s
son.’ I start with others and move back to myself. I always begin with
other people: ‘I am someone’s neighbour, someone’s brother, etc.’ My
description of me always includes other people. This is a very anti-novel
thing! Nowadays, you are often told you are in the centre, and everything
else is secondary. For me, my relationships with others are the most
important thing in my life, and that is where these stories come from. One
thinks: ‘Let me understand your pain, your inadequacies; let me understand
what you are going through and how you came to hold these opinions.’ The storyteller was born
simply because I wanted to put in words the things I saw around me, for
myself. But, of course, as you grow up, you realise there’s somebody out
there who will read them too. I had my first story printed in ‘Imroz’
when I was twelve on a children’s page. I don’t know where it came from.
It was called Riyaazidan or ‘The Mathematician’ about a poor child who
couldn’t do his maths like I had trouble with maths too. TNS: How did the first
novel ‘Season of the Rainbirds’ assemble? NA: That came out of my
memories because when we went to England, I first went to the University and
then dropped out I didn’t finish the degree in Biochemistry because I
wasn’t interested in the sciences. I began writing my novel, instead, and
for that I drew on my memories of Gujranwala. One of the instincts behind
that book was for me to put on page all the things I had been missing. I was
poor and couldn’t afford to come back to Pakistan — it cost 500 pounds
to return to Pakistan when I didn’t even have 5 pounds — and that would
go on for the next decade or two. TNS: Why did you want to
come back to Pakistan? NA: I love how the air
feels here. I love how the people look here — they look like me. In
Pakistan, I am not afraid of making a mistake. If I make a mistake in the
West, people would say, ‘He’s that way because he’s Pakistani’, and
through me Pakistan gets a bad name. I just wanted to be near people who are
like me. Coming back to Pakistan now, I keep saying, ‘I am hungrier in
Pakistan; I sleep deeper in Pakistan.’ I am fully alive that a connection
has been made. I used to think, ‘I’ll never see a pipal leaf again or a
parakeet; I’ll never hear the sound of bulbul again.’ Of course, the
moment I came back after 20-25 years, everything just fell into place. I
could recognize the sound of people — the draik flowers — I just smelled
the exquisitely beautiful Persian lilac ad I was back in my childhood! I
wanted to come back because this is the land of Faiz and Noorjehan. When I went to England at
the age of 14, I was traumatised by the fact of racism. Up until then, if
someone didn’t like me, it was based on his or her interaction with me.
But racism means someone could look across the room without any interaction
with me and decide he doesn’t want anything to do with me. But it was easy to get
over racism: I knew that some of the world’s greatest singers, writers,
thinkers, poets, political leaders had come from my part of the world, so
when they said we are inferior because of where we’d come from, my
repartee would be: ‘You don’t know what you are talking about!’ Of
course, I was a child then, and later on as I grew older, I realised racism
exists in Pakistan too. Ask the Shi’ites here; ask the Hazaras here, the
Christians and the Hindus, if racism exists in Pakistan? It was us who were
doling it out. It was us who made sure that the sweeper who came to clean
our house, his plate was kept separate. During my initial 15 years, I
wasn’t aware of it because it was done so unconsciously by the people
around me, and because I was not on the receiving end. I had to be exposed
to it myself to be able to talk about it. TNS: What was so special
about your childhood that you would want to relive and recapitulate it in
your novel? NA: Part of me is now
British. I have lived in England for three decades. I used to live in the
north of England but now in London. I miss the north — it’s a very hilly
area where at the end of every street, there’s a hill whereas London is
quite flat. Whenever I am in London for a while, I want my hills. Pakistan is a place where
turning around in any corner, one hundred memories well up. And that’s
about where you have your fond memories that might spark off. This can be
true about London too — as I would spend more and more time outside
London, London would become that place for me. All of it has to do with
love. Derek Walcott, the great West Indian poet who won the Nobel Prize,
wrote a wonderful thing. He had come from a small island in the Caribbean,
and he would write about the white tourists who would come to the islands as
a place for a brief relaxation and would not connect with the place in any
meaningful way. He said: ‘Islands can only exist if we had love in
them.’ For me a city or a place does not exist until I have fallen in love
with someone there. So, Lahore exists for me because I love someone in
Lahore! After 35 years in England,
my mother still says: ‘Today it’s very cold here.’ She means as
opposed to Pakistan. In other words, she’s still comparing England to
Pakistan. Immigration can be a terrible thing. My parents miss their family
here, the way I would if I had to leave them behind and go elsewhere — the
way any number of Pakistanis who are labouring in Dubai or driving taxis do.
The fact of migration exists even within Pakistan. Talk to a rickshaw wallah
— it is possible that he’s from a village nearby. Paradise is the place
he left behind even though it may only be 200 miles away! TNS: Is it the characters
you’ve known who impel you to write? Does what you write ever get too
close to being autobiographical? NA: My first point of
reference is always me. In many ways, at the deepest and most basic level,
all the characters are me. And then you add other layers — my memories and
my interaction with other people generate the possibilities within the
fiction. If you say something interesting to me, tonight I will put it down
in my notebook. Something happens tomorrow, I’ll make a quick note of that
happening. I carry my notebook anywhere I go — that’s the habit I’ve
had since I was about 20. So now I have more than a 100 notebooks in which
any number of interesting things and ideas are recorded. In ‘The Blind Man’s
Garden’, there’s a character of a blind man. He is a religious man, an
observing Muslim. During a moment of panic, he has crisis of pain and does
something terrible. As he moves through that moment of panic, he immediately
begins to realise that that was a mistake. And for the rest of his life he
regrets what had happened and how he can make up for it. In order to make
this character, Lohan, I needed stories about religion, about what happens
when you have a crisis, when you are full of acute fear. For regret, I
needed stories about emotions, memories, regret. I went to my first notebook
and looked at the first entry to see if any of this was usable for Lohan’s
character — that first note which is 20-25 years old. So, in a way, I
began writing the blind man’s character 30 years ago because some of the
thoughts in it are from there. This is how I make my characters. Everything
I had ever been through went on to make Lohan, as it were. TNS: How do you start with
your stories — at any particular point of entry? NA: You must understand
that I am still learning how to write, how to examine my life, and also to
examine the process through which my books appear. Sometimes an image comes
to me and I begin to explore it or a character may begin a novel that hooks
up with other characters, etc. I realised only two-three years ago that all
those answers were wrong, that I really haven’t understood how I work. For
me, it’s always the subject matter. I wanted to write about Afghanistan,
so I wrote ‘The Wasted Vigil’. I wanted to write about female
infanticide, so came ‘Leyla In The Wilderness’. I wanted to write about
honour killings and migration, so I wrote ‘Maps For Lost Lovers’.
Likewise, I wanted to write about what happened to Pakistan in the last 10
years during the war on terror, so I wrote ‘The Blind Man’s Garden’. TNS: Could you take us
into ‘The Blind Man’s Garden’?’ NA: We’ve lived in an
extraordinary decade, beginning with 9/11 and ending on the Arab Spring. I went to find a story
that could best articulate my feelings about this decade. A writer doesn’t
tell you what to think; a writer tells you what to think about. There are
two young men in ‘The Blind Man’s Garden’, and they are foster
brothers who are in love with the same woman. (I wanted to write about young
people because Pakistan is a very young country). When fighting begins in
October 2001, Mikail and Geo go to Afghanistan to help the wounded, and
there something terrible happens to one of the two and the other has to make
his way back. The rest of the story is about him making his way back to
Naheed who’s waiting for him, and towards the end of the novel, they meet.
And when they meet, Naheed utters what for me is the key line of the story:
‘I haven’t seen you for 479 days, I feel like I’ve seen 479 wars.’
It’s a love story and a war story.
comment A female figure
with her bowed head covered in a dupatta, crying silent tears of anguish and
misery, has become a In some sense, these plays
are a realistic comment on the limited choices available to women, but they
borrow too heavily from a patriarchal culture, at times exaggerating the
truth, and finally settle for maintaining the status quo. Far too often,
they are defined by story lines where sisters are out to steal their
sisters’ husbands, second marriages occur like dengue outbreak and men
deem women guilty for everything. So what happened to the
once-strong television drama content? While it’s believed to have
technically advanced exponentially, how it did it stoop to such a
stereotypical depiction of women and who is to blame for it? Going beyond
the obvious links, which remain the writer and the director, one is
sometimes forced to think why do these independent women, who have exercised
the bold choice of acting in television serials, bow before the
retrogressive content and not assert themselves. A nexus between the plays
and the women’s magazines called digests is believed to be responsible for
the current trend. Senior artiste Bushra Ansari thinks there is a class of
women with whom these digests resonate very well; they idolise women who
sacrifice, women who have a typical eastern Islamic outlook, and who don’t
laugh too loudly. “Digests paint such women because it is this type of
women who read the digests. Such women, it is presumed, are liked in society
because they don’t have an opinion of their own and suit the menfolk. This
is a vicious circle based on male chauvinism. Mostly, these plays are
written by women who earlier wrote for the digests.” Pakistan has seen a
re-emergence of television plays in the past few years, with television
actors becoming household names; “Humsafar” received an unprecedented
response. Despite all this, they continue to preach a set of values which
emerges from a perception of what will be popularly accepted instead of
diversifying and creating something different. It is not about blatantly
promoting women rights as an agenda, but more about accepting responsibility
that comes with having such a wide audience, a majority of which is
illiterate. It is about showing a broader frame of human experience. At times, one feels art is
not imitating life where, unlike the plays, women are making quick strides
of progress. So how do other women
actors look at the phenomenon? Samina Peerzada, who has been in the field
for decades, points out: “We have created a captive audience over a period
of some years. Now we can experiment and try new stories. When you don’t
have an audience, you go into stereotypical representations to attract them.
This is the right time for us to create a new identity for our women. It is
important to make them independent thinking people through the medium of
theatre or television.” Women directors can take
the lead. Ace director Mehreen Jabbar accepts her role when she says, “It
is the responsibility of writers and directors to also inform and educate
and portray a wide variety of human characters. And there are several of
them. Empowered women do not exist in the rich classes only; there are many
of them in the middle and lower classes, doing hard work and supporting
families.” Somewhere in this search
for popular acclaim, producers, writers and directors seem to have fallen
into a rut — of trying out the same formula over and over again, creating
the same kind of stories, showing the same type of women. Thus, it is not
simply about educating an audience but also developing our literature. As
Bushra Ansari puts it, “In the past few years, we have not developed our
literature.” Understandably, there is a
commercial dimension. “Unfortunately, a lot of things are driven by rating
and what is perceived to be successful with the audience,” says Jabbar.
“So, according to the producers or the channel, if you depict a tolerant
wife or mother, that will resonate better with the audiences.” Modern, thinking,
independent- and open-minded women lose out amid such stereotypical
representation. Dressing up in jeans inevitably means an egotistical
personality and loose morals. This jeans-clad woman will usually be shown in
a negative light, ultimately accepting her past mistakes as well as the
status quo. Such representation points out to men that such women must not
be tolerated; being concerned about women’s honour is a legitimate reason
for controlling them. Pakistani drama now needs
to move beyond this and show the new woman too who, regardless of the
popular narrative, exists within our society facing her own breed of
challenges. Ansari says, “Girls having their own opinion show a healthy
mind, whereas in TV plays women who express their opinion are often
divorced. This is something that bothers all of us. I think channels are
responsible for all of this because writers write for them.” At the same time, we also
need to show men who are accepting of this woman, who don’t necessarily
condemn this ‘modern’ woman, and as Samina Peerzada puts it “depict a
man who is not the enemy but a friend, a companion and a partner.” Our stories have lost some
of their realistic touch. Bushra Ansari points out: “They are very unreal
at times; they are catering to those who are illiterate, who will in turn
act in the same way shown.” This has to be a
collective effort on the part of producers, directors and writers to change
the existing trends and tell captive stories without making women the
helpless sufferers that they are shown to be.
This month marks
seventeen years since the death of one of Pakistan’s greatest journalists,
the editor Razia Bhatti. She died suddenly in March 1996 of a brain
hemorrhage. Razia was an amazing
editor and a pioneering journalist. In addition to this she was a very
compassionate human being and a truly great friend. I knew Razia’s name
before I met her; she was the editor of the Herald, the hard-hitting yet
stylish news monthly produced by the Dawn group, PHPL. After I contributed a
couple of pieces to the magazine, I was offered a job on the editorial team
and that was when I first met her. Razia was a giant in
journalism but in person she was a petite, unassuming woman: modest, down to
earth and very, very kind. Her manner may have been understated but the
strength of her professionalism and the clarity of purpose in her work was
astonishing. When I joined the
editorial team, Razia informed me the first commandment in the office was
“Thou shalt not bore.” Dull copy or pontificating had no place in her
magazine. Then, despite my inexperience, she sent me off on a reporting
assignment to Karachi’s troubled Shah Faisal Colony. That’s what Razia
always did, assure her staffers that she was confident they could take on
challenging assignments and help them make sense of their material. In that office I met all
the famous Herald bylines of the day: Ameneh Azam Ali, Zahid Hussain, Rehana
Hakim, Samina Ibrahim, Talat Aslam, Sairah Irshad. This was a fun office,
full of talented, intelligent people but really the glue holding them
together was Razia: her journalistic vision as much as her style of
leadership. She led by example, and she made everyone in the team feel
valued, birthdays marriages and births were always marked lovingly and
generously. We ate a lot, joked a lot, and spent long hours making sure
every page (every comma, every caption) of the magazine was up to Razia’s
high standards. 1988 was an eventful year
for Pakistan and its journalists: the military ruler General Zia ul Haq
suddenly dismissed the Prime Ministe But in the summer, the
long shadow of General Zia still obscured the vision of many. The Herald
management was perhaps one of these. Our cover story “Countdown to
Confrontation” had a cover featuring Bhutto and Zia face to face, both in
stark profile. This cover was stopped at the final printing stage. Another,
a bland one without any picture of Bhutto, had to be provided at the last
minute. From then, the pressure on Razia increased sharply and finally she
was told that it was essential she “support” certain government policy.
Of course she did not and she had to leave, and several of us decided to
leave with her, in protest and solidarity. Which is when we decided
to start our own magazine: a journalist-owned venture, an independent news
magazine: Newsline. It was an uphill task yet
the Newsline proved that professional journalists could take a stand if they
wanted to. It was a measure of Razia’s reputation and personal goodwill
that so many well-known writers and big names — I A Rehman, Eqbal Ahmed,
Lawrence Lifschultz, to name but a few— supported the venture and often
wrote without payment. It was a huge privilege to
have known a journalist of such integrity and courage as Razia Bhatti. She
left us far too soon and she is still much missed. Best wishes Umber Khairi caption Photo by Abro Khuda Bux.
The
Lahore Museum is having a show “Woman O Woman”
(which will remain open till March 31, 2013) to celebrate the
International Women’s Day. The show comprises artefacts, statues and
paintings from the Museum’s own collection. A number of paintings by
Amrita Sher-Gil, B.C. Sanyal, Zainul Abedin, A. R. Chughtai and Shakir Ali
are displayed as well. Next to works which have women as a subject are
paintings by important female artist like Anna Molka Ahmed and Zubeida Agha. Here, women are portrayed
across civilisations, cultures and periods, and in different roles — from
a vehicle for fertility to a symbol of courage, motherly love, romance and
divinity, and much later as embodiment of beauty and attraction. This is
mainly because women have mostly been rendered by male artists as an
extension of their own concept of womanhood, rather than as an independent
and equal gender. It is not surprising the
women are painted, sculpted and drawn much more than men in the history of
art. The man, instead of focusing on his body, was more attracted to his
‘Other’; so the female form emerged as the main motif in the aesthetic
tradition across centuries and cultures. Yet this concentration on women was
not devoid of its political and social dimensions. Since man started to
dominate from an early stage in human history, his mode of making the woman
— mother, sister, wife, lover, daughter or stranger — was considered the
valid, if not the sole, scheme. This practice extended
from the realm of visual art into cinema where male directors and producers
showcase women as signs of love, lust and longing. It is ironic that in our
culture, the treatise for a woman on how to live an ideal married life was
written by a man, Maulana Ashraf Thhanvi, the author of“Baheshti Zewar”,
a book that was considered an essential component of a Muslim girl’s dowry
till some decades ago in India and Pakistan. In literature, women were
compelled to adopt male names or some connection with the male to get their
creative expressions accepted; George Eliot in English and Bint-e-Nazr in
Urdu are just two examples. With the twentieth century
came the rebellion and, like in other spheres, women artists claimed their
rightful place and became a significant part of visual arts. In our country,
during the military dictatorship of Zia ul Haq, subjugation of women was
done in the name of religion and morality. Female representation, especially
the nude, was prohibited. To retaliate
against this code of conduct, women artists exhibited frequently in
private galleries. In their pursuit, a particular emphasis was put on the
portrayal of woman’s naked body. A number of female artists (Sumbal Nazir,
Salima Hashmi, Nahid Raza) deliberately used this image as the emblem of
gender and the freedom of expression. It was indeed a courageous endeavour
since it invited a great level of hostility from the state and some sections
of the public. Ironically, their efforts to express their rights and voice
— in the form of naked female body — echoed the male fascination with
female nude. On the surface, a painted figure of Sumbal Nazir could hardly
be separated from a canvas by Jamil Naqsh or a painting by Colin David, on
the same theme. Thus, even in their strive
against male dominance, some of our female artists were forced to adopt the
vocabulary devised and preferred by male artists. This was soon realised and
soon the practice was abandoned. After that, we enjoyed a period in
Pakistani art in which difference of genders became a minor detail, as
artists were pursuing other issues. Feminism in art, too, is now appreciated
and approached for its academic significance and value only. In this
context, the exhibition at the Lahore Museum offers a rare
opportunity to see women
and their presence in art, with a fresh view, even if we are looking at the
Mother Goddesses made five thousand years ago or a sculpture of Athena, no
less than thousand years old.
100 years of theatre As part of
Kinnaird College’s centenary celebrations ‘Echoes: Bazghasght’ was
staged on the premises of the college. When an institution is one hundred
year old, the celebration is a recount of the salient features, some
milestones and those remarkable individuals who helped in founding and
establishing the institution. The pageant was as if a
continuation of the two presentations made earlier, on the 50th and then on
the 75th year celebrations. The main symbol of the pageant was the tree
emphasising continuity of life interspersed by a few scenes from three
productions, ‘Anarkali’, ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and ‘Insect
Play’. The colourful production
was augmented by the very discreet use of live music by Rutti Cooper, Zara
Zafarullah, Gaitee Joshua, Moin Khan and Sabir Khan. The presentation at the
50th anniversary was conceived and produced by none other than Mrs Najmuddin.
Of all the colleges, particularly women colleges in the country or what was
known as northern India, Kinnaird College has been quite consistent in
staging plays over its long history. The venue where the
pageant was held has been named Hladia Hall after Hladia Porter, the first
teacher to have valued the importance of theatre. She took it to a more
serious level and it was under her supervision that plays started being
staged more regularly by the 1940s. The baton of this
initiative was taken over as a challenge by Mrs. Najmuddin who then set it
up on more professional lines. As a tribute to her contribution, the
dramatic society of the college is now called the Najmuddin Dramatic
Society. Farrukh Nigar Aziz,
another theatre luminary, had actually organised a number of theatre
festivals in the 1960s and 1970s and had called them the Najmuddin Theatre
Festivals — as a tribute to her commitment to theatre. One production of
‘Oedipus’, directed by Mrs Najmuddin with Ishrat Ghani playing the leading role is still
remembered by many for its outstanding thespian qualities. These colleges which were
modelled on the institutions in Britain had vibrant societies that promoted
extra-curricular activity, including debating and theatre. All the
missionary colleges and those set up by the government known predictably as
government colleges, made an extra effort to promote theatre as part of
their extra-curricular activity to broaden the base of education and to
groom graduates as well rounded personalities. Muslims in the
subcontinent were against the formal education of girls but gradually with
the establishment of Aligarh, particularly its girls’ section, despite
strong opposition, even militant at times, this taboo had started to erode
at the edges. Kinnaird, the most
prestigious college, had very few Muslims girls even till Partition, and it
was only after 1947 that the numbers increased to fill in the slots vacated
by the departing Hindus and Sikh girls. For Muslim women going to
college, performing arts were probably the last option that the families
wished their daughters to take up. Kinnaird College, being
the vanguard institution, decided to have a more enlightened approach, and
thankfully has persisted with it despite nationalisation and a growing
conservative environment. It has produced many women who have gone on to
make a name for themselves in fields that were not considered to be the
preserve of the so-called respectable women. Over almost half a
century, the reins of the theatre in the college have been in the steady
hands of Perin Cooper Boga. She, along with Kauser Sheikh and Shama Salman
Khaliq, nurtured theatre, making it more diverse and vibrant. Though Perin
Cooper has had a penchant for dance and dance-like movements, it has been
balanced by the conceptual design of the production, especially in the hands
of Kausar Sheikh, Munawwar Malik and Shama Salman Khaliq. Graduating from the usual
fare of Shakespeare (Tempest, Merchant of Venice) and a few other classics
(School Of Scandal, Dr Faustus), the list of plays done has been both long,
impressive and required formidable directorial and acting talent for its
execution. Plays like Blackout, Cross Purpose, Caucasian Chalk Circle, Venus
Observed, Insect Plays, Our Husbands Have Gone Mad, Pygmalion, Ivory Door,
Black Rain Falls, My Fair Lady, Anarkali, Ring of Recognition (an adaptation
of Shakuntala) have demonstrated a wide enough range and maintained a quaint
balance between classical and modern theatre. It has also ventured into
original plays with Where Have All the Flowers Gone, an anti-war play based
on the writings of Sara Sulehri, Fauzia Mustafa, Sofia Jabeen, Feryal Gauhar
and Aila Munir. Many of the alumni have
gone on to contribute to the performing arts after graduating. Yasmin Taj (Tahir),
Naveed Rehman (Shahzad), Shamim Ahmed (Hilali), Muneeza Faiz (Hashmi), and
Madeeha Gauhar to name only a few. caption Photo by Aleena Younas.
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common feature of Pakistani drama. While the patience level of these women
characters must be applauded, one cannot help but get frustrated by their
inability to stand up for their rights. 
