Banning Basant: The baby and the bathwater

The strategy to ban Basant, a socio-culturally important entertainment for many, leaves one wondering: whose failure is it?

Photo by Rahat Dar
Photo by Rahat Dar

A man is holding a thread in his hands, his eyes fixed somewhere in the sky. The other man next to him, too, has his eyes on the kite, which is missing from the frame of the picture. With the permission of my respondent-friend, I took the picture out of their old family album back in 2018 and have kept it in my diary (journal). Sometimes leafing through the field notes, I have touched the materiality of the picture, the realness of what was an everyday feature of the rooftops in the Old City of Lahore. There is a boy, too, in the background of the two men; sitting, absorbed in the paraphernalia of the kite flying. He reminds me of the children who would play marbles in the streets, be that in a metropolitan like Lahore or a village beyond. With the winds of change, and the onslaught of urban modern forces, what used to connect the old, the young and the children with the ground, what used to connect them with the sky, is gone.

There is nothing natural about what has gone missing. There are large-scale sociopolitical, historical and economic forces and processes that have eroded what defined the cultural landscape of the land. The embodied sense of being connected with the earth and the sky is replaced with screens of all kinds. Cut off from what is around us, our eyes tend to unsee what we have/ had; we stare into a world driven by forces someplace else, the forces benefitting from the erosion of the local cultural practices, from the festivals, such as Basant, that bound people to one another, that turned rooftops (of the historic district of Lahore, and the beyond) into a partitioned huge surface, like a playground – rendering the sky with colours of all kinds of playfully moving things called kites.

Photo by Rahat Dar
Photo by Rahat Dar

My friends from androon shehr (the Inner/ Old City) tell me how until the 2000s, the rooftops constituted the urban space for them to nurture the familial, neighbourly ties; how the rooftops and kite flying were an exit from the confines of the walled spaces. There are streets that used to be known for making and selling kites. There are stories of how many a woman prepared kites at home and their sons, brothers and husbands sold them at the shops. There are stories of how the ever-expanding and modernising Lahore has stolen the everyday spaces where they could breathe in the feeling of a free sky.

When I am back home in Lahore from Austin, I encounter a city increasingly shaped and defined by the endless, ruthless traffic; and a thick layer of noise and dust; I encounter the vision of Lahore as the “Paris of Pakistan”, a “world-class” city in the making, that engulfs the neighbouring small towns, villages and the countryside. I wonder: what is planned in all this, and what really is the source of death and destruction of all sorts. And I wonder, as to how a kite festival has come to be synonymous with a death festival, and what else could be a concrete example of the idiomatic “throwing the baby out with the bath water”.

When I am back in the city, I see how the real of issue of takhreebkari (the destruction of a whole way of life), the continual re-making of the city, the all-encompassing forces of urbanisation goes unbridled. The death of basic means of life, the food basket speared over hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural lands is being converted into cement-fields through another development project, the Ravi River Front, resulting in the death of a whole ecology of life, impacting both the human and the non-human, but the supreme judicial body gives it a go-ahead despite sane voices, including the High Court, disapproving the same.

What I am doing here is not as much arguing for or against the River Ravi Project as I am trying to think out loud how to make sense of it all – the mobilisation of the law-and-order tropes to ban or un-ban something deemed a danger to human population.

Photo by Rahat Dar
Photo by Rahat Dar

Of course, no death can be trivialised. It is something no one will disagree on. But some deaths are problematised and channelised in a way that, rather than fixing the root cause, those in the echelons of power tend to cut the branches, or, worse, root out the whole trees of an age-old tradition. It is horrible to see how the use of a dhaati (metal) wire or thread dipped in lethal chemicals by kite flyers cuts short the life of many a commuter. But rather than going after those involved in making and using such a material, the state resorts to banning a festival. The strategy to criminalise certain population groups, or activities is a known strategy to govern and discipline and control the population, and reveals the skewed thinking of the state and those running the state machinery. When a woman was raped on the Motorway in the city at night, a high-level police official had asked as to why a woman had come out on the road alone late at night. Such a way of thinking was also echoed by many when a woman was subject to sexual harassment at what is now the Greater Iqbal Park. When one hears such a thinking, one tends to question the state institutions’ strategy to ban Basant, a socio-culturally important entertainment activity for many, altogether. Seeing those at the helm of state affairs not come up with more nuanced understanding of the socio-culturally complex issues and put a full stop to an old tradition such as kite-flying, one can’t help asking: is it the failure of the festival or that of the state machinery to do its job properly?


The writer is pursuing a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Texas,  Austin, USA

Banning Basant: The baby and the bathwater