Will the cabaret ever return to the Fortress of Islam?

Islamabad diary
In the beginning, when Pakistan was born, there was Islam – the demand for Pakistan based on the notion of Muslim separatism – and there was the cabaret. Karachi, our most open and cosmopolitan city, had its share of cabarets and no one seemed to mind.
Faith and Subcontinental hedonism co-existed happily. There were the pulpits from which came thundering speeches, and lurid expositions of the fate awaiting the sinner. And there were the bars which opened regularly in the evenings.
In Lahore at the Falettis regular floor shows were held, the performances advertised with photos in the Pakistan Times, then the leading paper of northern Pakistan. And clubs like the Gymkhana and the Cosmopolitan in Lawrence Gardens – this was before patriotism arrived and it became Bagh-e-Jinnah – and hotels echoed to the sound of laughter as evening fell.
This never made Lahore less of an Islamic city. Partition had just happened and blood had flowed down the rivers of Punjab, and millions had been displaced from their homes and there was a mad scramble for the enticing properties left behind by the fleeing Hindus and Sikhs, masters of the commanding heights of trade and commerce.
But life went on and even as the Constituent Assembly thought fit to stray into the realm of theology by passing the Objectives Resolution – instead of focusing on framing a constitution the leading lights found it more attractive to wrestle with Islamic theory – cabaret shows went on, bars remained open and ladies dressed up in their finest for matinee shows in movie houses. And the faithful attended the congregational prayers on Fridays and observed the fast in the holy month of Ramazan and Pakistan was no worse for this juxtaposition. The Zahid had his realm and the Rind his own kingdom.
Saadat Hasan Manto could be prosecuted for obscenity. But there was no bar on his getting a drink if he wanted one and had the money to afford it. The great Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Sahir Ludhianvi could cross over to India, and that was our loss. Climate change is hitting the world now. Our climate change occurred then, because the mood engendered by all our talk of Islam and ideology was not supportive of the arts of civilisation. Philistinism was thus in the air but apart from the usual suspects, assorted holy fathers and the like dealing in salvation and things divine, no one called for the shutters to be pulled down. So the cabaret shows went on.
Political democracy may have been imperfect in those days, what with no constitution being framed and governments coming and going and Punjabi feudal politicians and India-returned Urdu-speaking bureaucrats – a fatal combination – averse to the idea of giving the Bengalis an equal place at the table, but there was a greater degree of social freedom…for those of course who could afford it.
You could drink what you wanted and if your means were not too slender and you were inclined that way and had a touch of decadence about you, you went to the cabaret. Or to see a bit of dance or listen to a song you went to Heera Mandi in Lahore, or Napier Road in Karachi, or to the much lowlier Qasai Gali in Rawalpindi’s Raja Bazar…all dead places now, the life fled from them.
Then came the Ayubian dictatorship but with it also came an efflorescence of poetry. The regime went about putting a straitjacket on politics but poets like the great Faiz and Habib Jalib said what they had to say before enthusiastic audiences. There was no straitjacketing of morality, little of the hypocrisy that passes for the social mores of the republic today. Ustad Amanat Ali Khan could bring out his harmonium and sing to the stars in front of his house in Heera Mandi and Habib Jalib could sit on the pavement outside Pak Tea House on the Lower Mall with a bottle in front of him.
It is ironic that the first glimmerings of reaction came with the advent of Pakistan’s merriest dictator, Gen Yahya Khan who was overly fond of the bottle and more than partial to feminine company. As an early sign perhaps of feminism on the march, many were the lady visitors who flocked to the Presidency in those bygone days.
One of them was the actress Tarana who was made to wait at the gate before being let in after word from inside. On her way out the same guards who had earlier stopped her gave her a smart salute. Being from the performing arts, and from Heera Mandi to boot, she could not resist taunting them about their belated politeness. “Madam”, said one of the guards, “before you went in you were Tarana. Now you are Qaumi Tarana.” It could well be apocryphal but it is a nice story.
With the army’s defeat in the east, there was a public reaction against drinking and related ‘vices’ much stoked by such outfits as – you’ve guessed correctly – the Jamaat-e-Islami. Our defeat was caused by drinking and womanising, bellowed the zealots and the guardians of ideology, with nary a word about the political discrimination which had fuelled bitterness and alienation in East Pakistan. Small wonder, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto set out to write a constitution he couldn’t help filling it with references to Islam. And in 1974 he went a fateful step further in amending the constitution to declare a particular sect outside the pale of Islam.
It is another irony of fate that a free-acting soul himself he put a ban on alcohol in a futile attempt to appease the mullahs out for his blood in the election-related agitation against him in the long summer of 1977. Gen Zia built on the foundations that Bhutto laid, further banning alcohol in 1979. It is the peculiar fate of the Pakistani people that they are being converted and reconverted to Islam all the time or they see alcohol banned and re-banned all the time.
But this much would have to be said for that evangelising general. He never shut down the Murree Brewery as he could have easily done and during his tenure police were under no instructions to conduct midnight raids or ‘chappaas’ on private parties where much drinking would occur. Flogging was a device very much in use during his regime but it was meant primarily for the suppression of politics not the suppression of ‘vice’.
Gen Musharraf faced no significant political opposition during the first two years after his takeover. And the press was largely on his side, especially the English language press some of whose leading pillars felt that the dawn of liberalism had arrived. He could have changed things and reversed the tide of evangelism. But he missed his chance. Or probably he did not think along those lines. Content with the substance of power he thought it not worth his while to enter the lion’s den and challenge the many hypocrisies raised in the name of Islam. Moreover, encouraged by his principal adviser, Tariq Aziz, he soon fell into the lap of the Chaudhrys and that was the end of his Kemalism.
So can the cabaret, which I obviously use as a metaphor, make a comeback in the broad spaces of the republic? Not under this democracy because it is too afraid – afraid of every passing thing, afraid of anything bold. And the heartland of this democracy, Punjab, is too hidebound and conservative. Flyovers it can build; loosening social bonds is not its cup of tea. Karachi can show the way, provided the MQM clears some of the confusion from its politics.
The local elections have shown that the MQM cannot be eliminated from Karachi. Its mass base is too strong. But the Rangers’ operation has shown that the days of the TT pistol and tortured bodies thrown in gunny bags is also, for the most part, largely over. Karachi needs a fresh start which the MQM can give…provided it thinks seriously of reinventing itself not as the party of terror but of the city’s rebirth.
The trick is to open up the city and revive ‘entertainment’ in all its forms…make of Karachi a Las Vegas or a Dubai, and the world will flock to its door.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com