At the Alhamra

I went to the Lahore Literary Festival at the Alhamra last week and it was fun. I can’t say I imbibed any great thoughts or came away with any startling insights into this or that. And I certainly wasn’t going to attend any session on Afghanistan, with the usual experts in attendance. But seeing so many eager and bright and good looking faces milling around having a great time was bracing, like a tonic. My 14-year old kid Shehryar said to me, “Baba, you should have brought me here yesterday too.”
Mope, mope, mope – we have an excess of it here, moaning and pulling long faces and talking forever, and not very originally at that, of politics and Pakistan’s ‘existential’ crisis. Strategy, mercifully, is a word less thrown about these days than it used to be. Fortress of Islam, mercifully again, is less heard of than before, a kind of embarrassment now sticking to its usage. But there are some other words and phrases we would be better off without: paradigm shift, the national narrative, on the same page and of course the current chestnut, existential.
Our cities are dull. There are no regular concert halls here. We don’t have a national symphony orchestra. Opera is unknown in these parts and even our own Hindustani classical music has fewer listeners and doesn’t get the airing it should. So when something like a literary festival takes place, bringing people out of their homes and into a public space, and our ‘existential’ crisis for a moment is forgotten and the mind turns to other things – even if there is some pretention and make-believe involved in this – it is to be welcomed.
The pretension comes from trying to invest even the pedestrian and ordinary with profound significance. But this happens. When you are dealing with anything literary or cultural, and usually culture with a capital C, some dressing up, some made-up profundity, is inevitable.
But the important thing is that under the pressure of the event we start thinking of other aspects of life, different from what passes for the usual in our monument to hypocrisy and false piety, the Islamic Republic. And those other things are art and literature and music and listening to intelligent, well-read people talking. I was invited to a session on Ardeshir Cowasjee where I was just able to mumble a few words, without adding to anyone’s knowledge of the man. But the person conducting the discussion was the historian Ayesha Jalal and it was a joy seeing her keep everything tight and controlled, not letting the discussion wander or allowing anyone to get too wordy.
I couldn’t help wondering how it would be if we had one or two people like her imparting some flair and understanding to what is in danger of becoming our number one public nuisance (after the uncontrolled mosque loudspeaker), our interminable TV talk shows.
Now of course the crowd at the festival, for the most part, was LUMS, Kinnaird, upper-crust Lahore, the boys and young men smart, the girls and young ladies very attractive – if I could be forgiven the cliché, a feast for the eyes. There’s a Zadie Smith line appropriate to the circumstances: “…Having picked up my photographer father’s habit of ogling the beautiful, I know… how it can be painful to gaze upon a beautiful human who can never be yours.” Mind-blowing, isn’t it?
There, admission made and I can be easy. But this wasn’t a fashion event and this wasn’t an empty-headed crowd. These were young people, and the not-so-young, who were very obviously, you could see this in their faces, involved and engaged – interested in the event, and standing patiently in long queues to gain admission to the various sessions. And because most of the sessions were full many would be politely turned away. But there was no jostling, no pushing and no shouting. There was no police at hand, only the young organisers showing the way and with a minimum of effort keeping things in order.
Why was this? Quite simply because these were educated people from educated backgrounds, from the right not the wrong side of the tracks, upbringing and privilege (and culture) showing in the way they were dressed, the way they spoke, the way they conducted themselves.
In this republic we insist on calling Islamic, this class of people is a minority, indeed a tiny minority, not representative at all of the whole. No one will call this a healthy state of affairs. No society is egalitarian, egalitarianism one of the oldest of human pipedreams. But in any society worth the name, the uneven distribution of wealth apart, there are some common currencies, in use across the community: education and culture, or at least a modicum of culture. Not so in Pakistan where the apartheid in vogue is multi-faceted and the trenches dug as a result very deep.
The crowd at the Literary Festival and the annual Tablighi congregation at Raiwind…these are different worlds and there would be no meeting point between them. Walking in the courtyard of the Alhamra, the whole complex by common consent Nayyar Ali Dada’s architectural masterpiece, I couldn’t help thinking that the smart women there were moving about freely, and at their ease, because they were in a protected environment. Were they to choose to step out on the Mall and start walking down towards Hall Road they wouldn’t be able to do it because the traffic would come to a stop and passersby would gape and gawk.
It was not always like this but this is what the onslaught of piety to which Pakistan, very consciously, subjected itself these past 30-odd years has brought about. Besides, we chose consciously to raise high our walls of apartheid. Why on earth do we still have multiple systems of education? Of all our national shames none is worse than this.
And this is not because of any Taliban. Education and public health were not our priorities right from the start. The Taliban have come only now. We dug the social trenches long ago. And we are still not committed to filling them because in the political system we have created there is no incentive for the ruling classes to invest in health and education. We used to pay lip-service to social justice. Now we don’t do even that.
So what should we do? Give up altogether? No, all the more reason to have such gatherings where the focus, whether fully or partially, is on other things, on books and music and culture. If in the process a light is shone on the deep social divisions of our society that too is for the good if it leads to any kind of soul-searching.
The left in Pakistan is in any case dead, left parties little better than tombstones in a cemetery. The PPP, into other things, has stopped even mouthing the mantra of social justice. The ideological spaces are dominated totally by parties of the right: the right as in the PML-N, the far right as in the PTI and the religious parties, the extreme right as in the Taliban. Even if the opportunity for a different discourse is provided by a corporate-backed literary festival, seize it with both hands and make the most of it. Koi toh ho jo doosri baat kare. Let there be someone speaking a different language.
Tailpiece: The first day of the festival was rounded off by a Kathak performance by Naheed Siddiqui and four of her pupils. The music was Raag Aiman and the beat, the taal, went on for half an hour, the effect overpowering, majestic and mesmerising. Then Naheed to wild applause said being a Punjabi and strongly attached to her culture – or words to that effect – she would be dancing to the beat of a song of Bulleh Shah. And the spell was broken, the Bulleh Shah just not going with the previous Aiman.
Tailpiece Two: To my shame I have to confess that only now am I discovering the greatest sarangi player of his time, the great Ustad Nathoo Khan. Go to YouTube via proxy and among other gems you will find a Raag Tilak Kamod which will break your heart.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com