Who took away the kites?

The spots of colour against the sky, the strings held in the hands of regally dressed noblemen are present in Mughal miniatures painted in the 1700 and 1800 hundreds. They are present too in works of art depicting Lahore centuries after this, and in photographs that capture the magic of Basant.
But since then someone came and stole the kites. Snatched them out of the hands of children and plucked them out of the sky. The pictures of laughter on rooftops were replaced by images of small boys locked up behind bars because they had been caught flying a kite. Then the squares of paper, adorned with spots or geometric patterns, themselves vanished as the shops selling them were closed down.
The millions of workers in the informal sector involved in the kite business, many of them women, lost livelihoods. ‘Master’ craftsmen from the Walled City, known for producing kites with the most perfect balance, found themselves unable to bring in food to put on family tables. Some today run ‘paan’ shops, others drive rickshaws but most keep in their homes some of their best creations, telling tales to grandchildren who have never seen a kite soar or felt the tug at the string as it lifted away, of the days when politicians and industrialists visited them to buy the best.
Their kites have not felt the touch of the spring breeze for nearly half a decade.
A ban imposed at the time barred them from the city, on the basis of deaths caused by razor-sharp twine, coated with chemicals, becoming wrapped around throats and killing people. These deaths were gory; horrifyingly so. Most of the victims, tragically, were children. But it was the illegal twine that caused these deaths.
The twine had been banned. The focus should have been on implementing it.
The same mistake has been made this year with thePunjab government banning kite flying during the annual spring youth festival in the city again this year. A brief lifting of the ban had been proposed but was put aside after reports that ‘chemical twine’, as the lethal string has been labelled, was being sold. The government’s inability to enforce the law against this has not been commented on. As a result, a sad, lone kite, often home-made from discarded shopping bags, occasionally takes to the sky from a katchi abadi in a brief act of defiance – and a reminder of the glory kites once brought to Lahore.
To see a glimmer of that glory, children and teenagers turn to the images from Gujarat in India put out on their social media sites. The festive flying of millions of kites, the raising of paper lanterns when they are done, the girls in yellow in cities of Indian Punjab where the festival is also marked seems now to be almost a mystical thing. Few young people realise how much it was a part of an age-old tradition in Lahore.
We know the tradition was not murdered only for practical reasons linked to the loss of life. A long campaign underlay what happened. The campaign suggested that Basant, the only secular festival on our calendar, unlinked to any religious occasion, was somehow un-Islamic and therefore ought not to be encouraged.
The idea that kite flying was a waste of time was tied up into this notion. The music, the joy, the celebration of entire families together, the women clapping along as a kite contest took place was painted as an almost immoral act.
Apparently under this interpretation of our religion, enjoyment of any kind is a sin. The growth of intolerance that has created so many difficulties in our society is linked to the expansion of such thinking. It is extraordinary to see how far it has spread. The media has played a huge role by using the grotesque kite-string deaths not only as a human tragedy but also to further a right-wing ideology.
People like the late Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer made an effort to combat this by insisting on celebrating Basant at his own house. There are few willing to the same or to speak out on the need to save the integral culture of a city and the people.
But we badly need this culture. We desperately need it. We need it to combat the hatred and obsession with religion that has pervaded every aspect of life in our society. We also need to give people something to celebrate, something to enjoy and something that unites essentially across class.
While it is true Basant had in the last decade been highly commercialised, it remained an indigenous festival, rather than a borrowed one such as Valentine’s Day, which, presumably as a result of globalsation has also come to bring in big economic gains to many. The loss of tourism with the closing down of Basant has taken away rupees from the pockets of hotel owners, restaurants, kite-makers, tour guides and the many others who were involved in a festival that was being seen as one of the most important as the world. It is a pity we have pushed it off the map and as a result isolated ourselves still further in a world from which we seem to be shrinking further and further away.
Acts such as the indefinite ban on YouTube simply contribute to this, cutting off from the rest of the globe. This narrowing of vision does not help us at all. We need to broaden what we look at and how we look at it. In so many ways, Basant brought the world closer to us. It also brought people across the country closer and helped bridge that gap between social class which threatens to cut us in two or more parts.
Yes, the rich flew larger kites; they played music on huge stereos, the hired bands and expensive restaurants brought in catered food. But even so, a smaller kite flown by a skilled child from an abaadi could cut one of theirs and somehow introduce a sense of equality and a sense that wealth could be overcome even if the two people who held the string of their kites lived in entirely different worlds.
We have more reason than ever before to revive Basant. It holds the key to developing an identity which ties us in to the Subcontinent, where we belong, rather than to the Middle East towards which we have started to look for inspiration and ideas.
We are turning into a kind of colony. The reports about seminaries funded from abroad and the permits given to hunt houbara bustards testify to this. We must take pride in our own culture, in our own past, in our own standing in the world.
The festival and the sport of kite flying must of course be made safer. In the congested city of today, sharp twine presents a danger. There are many ways of going about this, but each one of these options – holding the event in open spaces, restricting it to certain portions of the city, and enforcing the ban on chemically treated string – are all better than banning what was for centuries a festival of the people. It must be restored to them.
The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.
Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com