It can be safely said that every decade in Pakistan’s history has been ‘radioactive’ in the sense that it has been full of action, incidents, and upheavals which few countries in the world can match. Which leads us to think why has there been so much focus on the 1970s?
The seventies were a very eventful decade, and it is good that someone has made an effort to document it. Though, the book is called Informal Cultural History of the Decade, it is only informal in the sense that it is not an account that could be called history in its pure academic sense, where a premise is laid and the events, as they occur, are put into a definite perspective to find out whether there is a certain pattern to the unfolding of the events.
As it is, these days there has been a shift from formal discourse to what the people are experiencing. The lives of ordinary people have been given weightage more than ever, so it would not be wrong to say that the focus of the current effort is more in tune with the changing times.
The people who have written about the decade or have been interviewed are not really leaders in the formal sense but cultural activists and agents who have worked through their forms to be expressive and, through it, are trying to bring about a change in society or set its direction right. So, it’s not political history as shaped by the decisions of the politicians or leaders but as seen and assessed in retrospect by people who are non-political but not really apolitical.
Generally, a liberal society was seen probably a hangover of the Raj. The classes or groups that led the struggle for independence were schooled in the academic and political norms of the colonial powers, and they met them, if not fully, at best halfway. Their lifestyle and the values that they espoused were surely a reflection of the values that were promoted and upheld by the colonial masters. Actually, the struggle for independence too was achieved through a certain order as perpetuated by the colonial masters.
The democratic principles that were upheld and honoured, so to say, were propagated and stressed upon by the colonialist. It was not really a total disruption of the system as it would have been if the struggle for independence had taken a violent and revolutionary form in the sense of being a total overthrow of the system. But it wasn’t, and the transition was smooth and orderly. But its consequences were such that migration took place on an unprecedented scale, and there was violence never seen before in history.
Despite all that, the veneer of the colonial values was seen as liberal in retrospective for after about three decades, before it started to wear off to an extent where the indigenous prejudices, values, behavioural patterns and mannerisms started to appear in a more decisive manner, resurfaced to assert themselves, as the ruling classes groomed in the post-colonial era took control of the reigns of power.
The same thing could be seen in India where just as the colonially nurtured elite started to age and be fazed out of the scene the local sensibilities began to pop up. It either became a debate and a struggle for the indigenous versus the acquired -- the upward thrust of Hindutwa being just one example that can be referred to.
India has had a continuous democratic process unlike Pakistan but the similarities are uncanny, and the layers that shake the upper crust should be looked into more closely and analysed than merely seen in the continuous working of a political system, as in India and the one fractured and in pieces put together in fits and starts as in Pakistan.
The 1970s were a particularly tough time for Pakistan as the state had been dismembered and a rump remained in place that insisted on calling itself Pakistan and carried the weight of the constructs that continued to pile on, ideologically. If the decade started with a new Pakistan, though truncated, it ended with the execution of its first leader under the new paradigm and no clear departure was seen by the analysts as they started to compare the beginning of another military regime to Ayub Khan’s tenure who had ruled a united Pakistan.
If any, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan poured a lot of water to wash away the liberal world as "the dark forces of communism" were feared to take over. As in the Soviet Muslim republics, Islam was the rallying point for freedom, similarly, in our country, the same interpretation of Islam was thrust upon the people to resist communism and Soviet occupation. It was the international forces that determined the sway of events and attitudes as they had in the past. The hangover of the Raj was put an end to by these drastic changes taking place on the world scale. And, doubly reinforced here.
The writers include Nilofur Farrukh, Amin Gulgee, Salima Hashmi, Salwat Ali, Fariha Ubaid, Fauzia Qureshi, Sibtain Naqvi, Sheema Kirmani, Shazia Zuberi, Shanaz Ramzi, Rumana Hussain, Aamna Haider Isani, Zurain Mumtaz, Khusro Mumtaz, Khursheed Hyder, Raza Rumi, Salman Asif, Saqi Ain Zaidi, Jamil Dehlavi, Zofeen Ebrahim, Zuhra Kureshi, I.H. Burney. Aquila Ismail, Ilona Yousaf, Hameed Haroon, H.M.Naqvi, Mohsin Hamid while interviews of Zubeida Mustafa, Nadeem, Zareen Ara Zardari, Javed Jabbar, Anwar Rammal, Rahat Kazmi, Sahira Kazmi, Marzi, Indu Mitha, Madeeha Gauhar, Khalid Ahmed, Arif Hasan, Marjorie Hussain and Anwar Saeed have been conducted.
Pakistan’s Radioactive Decade Edited by Nilofur Farrukh, Amin Gulgee, John McCarry
Publisher: Oxford
Pages: 448
Price: Rs3,500