07-08-2006, 06:07 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Difficulties of discussing culture in Pakistan </b>
Khaled Ahmedâs A n a l y s i sÂ
Culture is difficult to discuss but it helps if you have someone delicately guiding the mind in the right direction. Of course the best discussion will be a kind of approximation till we have discussed culture a lot and have learned to filter out indoctrination while considering how societies live. The main problem will always relate to the necessity to look exclusively at what is on ground rather than what ought to be. After 1947, the Pakistani mind has done itself a lot of harm by becoming less creative and by becoming more prescriptive.
GEO (13 June 2006) discussed culture with federal minister for culture Mr Jamali, actress-producer Ms Samina Peerzada, filmstar Reema Khan, cultural administrator Mr Khalid Saeed Butt, historian Ms Dushka Syed, artist Mr Jamal Shah, singer Mr Ibrarul Haq, and an assorted audience. Minister Jamali said that Pakistani culture was a mixture of regional cultures, which included religion. He conceded that no state policy on culture had existed before 1975 when the great poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz formulated it in a study for the PPP government of prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Surprisingly, the culture minister was far less constipated and apologetic over culture than most government representatives. The most revolutionary statement came from him: that Pakistani culture was a part of the mosaic of regional cultures, and that religion formed just a part of it. This is where the rub is, actually. Hinduism is mostly expressed through culture whereas Islam is a transformational creed that feels polluted if mixed with an overarching cultural grid. Ideologies are transformational and Islam has been reduced to an ideology although some important modernists like Abduh and Rashid Rida tried to take it out of public life. Islam will have its own totalitarian culture, if that is possible, but it will not be a part of culture which it regards as an accretion.
Mr Khalid Saeed Butt, who was one of the founders of the Pakistan Arts Council, said that the arts were not culture but a part of it. Ms Samina Peerzada extended the definition a little by saying culture was how people chose to live (rehna-sehna). Jamal Shah pointed to the collective response of the people to their environment. Ms Dushka Syed said that as a historian she noted that culture did not remain static but was subject to change.
Mr Butt was right about the arts, especially the non-functional ones; but they do form a part of culture. A âpeopleâs perspectiveâ tends to exclude their elitist origins but that is unrealistic. The truth is that elitist structures in architecture later become symbols of mass culture. Painting, sculpture and architecture cannot live without the patronage of the rich, but they do register with the common urban man. In this respect the arts cannot be excluded from a discussion focusing on the masses. Ms Peerzada and Mr Jamal Shah were both right because they were abstract enough. There is nothing wrong in not being too clear when discussing culture. âClarityâ is the attribute of the religious fundamentalist who sees paganism in culture. Ms Syed actually saved the discussion by saying that culture did not possess the eternality of religion and was changeable.
Filmstar Reema Khan said that the governments in Pakistan had failed in formulating good culture policies and were even more lax in implementing them. She said that Pakistani film and drama were not reflective of real Pakistani culture. Ms Peerzada said that âwe did not know the culture of the common manâ, yet if the state tried to enforce any culture it would not be right. She said culture was destroyed by fashion, implying that fashion was outside culture. She said karo-kari was not culture.
Most of us are wrong about cinema in Pakistan. Like Indian cinema, it has been a part of our culture. Most of us refuse to accept that 90 percent of the time the common man is deriving entertainment out of culture. Unless we accept that culture is entertainment all discussion is useless. Reema, Samina and Jamal Shah are all entertainers and thus form part of the purveying machinery of our culture, just like Bullhe Shah and Shah Hussain of the past. Film is our culture like literature, and the film can be based on fantasy just like literature. No one in India breaks out into song and goes around dancing in the fields, but the Indian film would be nothing without the culture of song and dance. We must however understand that film âindustryâ in Pakistan has to die because it is next to Bombay, just as European cinema had to die because of Hollywood. Fashion is a part of culture; so is tragically karo-kari simply because a part of our society lives according to it.
It was mooted by TV host Hamid Mir that if the language of India was Hindi why wasnât the language of Pakistan Pakistani? Ms Syed replied that once the language of the Muslims of India was Persian, then it was the camp language called Urdu, but Urdu had the advantage of assimilating words from its environment. She said Bollywood in India still used Urdu in its films. Hamid Mir said Japan did not abandon its language while pursuing modernisation, why had Pakistan not given up English? Jamal Shah said the Japanese were proud people while Pakistanis were not able to take pride in their cultural heritage of language. He said the Japanese had their values intact, while Pakistanâs values were absent and the country was bankrupt while facing external cultural invasion. He said Pakistanâs corruption was eating up Pakistanâs values like termites.
Hamid Mir got it wrong when he said that the language of India was Hindi. Strictly constitutionally, yes, but the constitution has not been followed because the provision regarding Hindi in it is unrealistic just as Pakistanâs is about Urdu. The language of India is not Hindi. It is not even a link language. English more likely is the language of India and that is why it may progress further than China. The Japanese and the Chinese as well as many âAsian Tigersâ of Southeast Asia suffer from the handicap of not knowing English. Japanese traditional culture is based on the suppression of women. In that regard it is good that Japan is under the assault of the âAmerican cultureâ of globalisation. Globalisation favours the minorities and women by weakening the sovereignty of the state. Culture keeps changing. Ms Syedâs remark was apt: culture changes accretively. The pants in Iran came only in the early 1900s but now Iranian peasants wear pants while the ayatollahs sport flowing robes. In Pakistan, dhoti is still current. In Pakistan, like Iran, Islam threatens culture because Islam is a transformational ideology as opposed to culture which is cumulative and accretive. One requires revolution, the other evolution. Some cultures do tolerate levels of corruption.
Ms Samina Peerzada did not agree with Jamal shahâs insertion of corruption into the subject and said that the people were not corrupt although they could be ignorant (anjaan). Mr Ibrarul Haq said that he could test a governmentâs attitude towards culture from the level of taxation it imposed on entertainment. In this respect all governments, by imposing high taxation (65 percent), were against culture. Dr Khalid Saeed Butt said that with each government the policy on culture was changed.
All governments of the world tax entertainment as if it was something they did not want, like cigarettes. But in third world countries the aping of the West is wrong in this regard. Entertainment is not big money in Pakistan. If you tax the cinema heavily the tax is passed on to the cinema-goer and it finally registers as a punishment and a disincentive. The rich no longer go to the cinema. In the West entertainment is big money and cinema-goers have money in their pockets. (Hollywood actresses, looking for wealth, marry mostly singers.) The state is a culture-killer if it regards entertainment as being outside culture. It should import films from India and not stop Pakistani actors from going to India. After all, half of Hollywood is people who went from Europe and Australia and New Zealand. Importing Indian films will get rid of the anti-Pakistan slant in them.
Minister Jamali defended himself against criticism for importing Indian films by saying that the government had allowed import of six Indian films because they were historical and belonged to that part of culture that Pakistan shared with India. (A bearded boy in the audience was later to ask why Pakistan had not drawn a line separating Pakistani culture from Indian culture after 1947?) He said it was not the governmentâs policy to import Indian films but the fact was that Pakistani cinema halls were closing down, leaving the masses without important collective entertainment. He said cinemas in Pakistan had come down from 1400 to 200 without the import of Indian films. He said the video shop had taken over and the investors had run away from the film industry. The minister also said that in the past policies were dominated by security concerns which tended to suppress culture, but now freedom had come back.
If we lock India out we will have no culture at all because what is supposed to be our culture is slowly dying under Talibanisation. Our reliance on the culture (read entertainment) of India has been furtive since General Zia put the squeeze of tashakhus on us, and which the MMA will reinforce if it comes to power. (Thankfully, after that the world will attack under Chapter Seven sanctions and the MMA will go away into Tora Bora.) Our cinema is trapped in the bad odour created by our confusion over culture. We are not alone in this. Muslims all over the world are in this quandary. Stalin inflicted the same kind of doubt on the Russians. It took them 70 years to shake off a regime that sat in judgement on culture.
A bearded boy said that cultural invasion out of globalisation was a challenge, but Pakistan could survive as a separate country only after separating Indian culture from Pakistani culture. One singer-musician in the audience said that old ways of entertainment were being destroyed and chimta and ghara were gone in the face of pop music which was foreign to Pakistani culture. He complained that Pakistanâs great singer Mehdi Hassan was being medically treated free by India and not by Pakistan. One lady in the audience said that Pakistani films portrayed a culture that was not Pakistani and therefore had to be banned. On this Reema Khan said that she had stopped acting in such movies.
The plea for realism in cinema is funny. And Reema was hypocritical. Who will watch movies that show Pakistani life as it is? One will have to ban an entire corpus of national literature too so that a culture-without-fantasy can be born. Cinema of realism can run side by side with masala movies, but the masses will watch pure escapist entertainment. There is nothing wrong with that.
Hamid Mir interjected by asking questions about how a Pakistani heroine in a film became wet under rain and was then made to dance. He said culture needed total safai (cleansing) while pointing quite irrelevantly to the fact that Pakistani culture was dominated by the culture of sazish (conspiracy). Ms Peerzada joined in by saying that since Sirajudaulah conspiracy was the way of life of Muslims and today the conspiracy was based on the rumour that Islam was in danger. Ms Dushka Syed said that now there was fresh breeze in the air in Pakistan. One girl in the audience objected strongly to the use of English greeting hai! in TV plays while the common man said salam. She herself kept slipping into English while trying to speak Urdu.
Hamid Mir was not the host with âinformed neutralityâ and like all of us dived in without thinking too much. (Who thinks about culture, anyway?) The safai he wants is actually safaya , thanks to the beauty of Urdu idiom. When it comes to culture everyone thinks like Stalin, Imam Khomeini and Mullah Umar, or like our morose and unsmiling chief rabbi Mufti Munib. Religion is also a part of our culture and therefore Mufti Munib too is a part of us, but beware of letting him become an arbiter of what our culture should be! What we need is safai of our minds rather than the safaya of our culture. Imagine a committee formed in Islamabad to carry out Hamid Mirâs reform!
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Check matrimonial column and you will know elite culture.
Khaled Ahmedâs A n a l y s i sÂ
Culture is difficult to discuss but it helps if you have someone delicately guiding the mind in the right direction. Of course the best discussion will be a kind of approximation till we have discussed culture a lot and have learned to filter out indoctrination while considering how societies live. The main problem will always relate to the necessity to look exclusively at what is on ground rather than what ought to be. After 1947, the Pakistani mind has done itself a lot of harm by becoming less creative and by becoming more prescriptive.
GEO (13 June 2006) discussed culture with federal minister for culture Mr Jamali, actress-producer Ms Samina Peerzada, filmstar Reema Khan, cultural administrator Mr Khalid Saeed Butt, historian Ms Dushka Syed, artist Mr Jamal Shah, singer Mr Ibrarul Haq, and an assorted audience. Minister Jamali said that Pakistani culture was a mixture of regional cultures, which included religion. He conceded that no state policy on culture had existed before 1975 when the great poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz formulated it in a study for the PPP government of prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Surprisingly, the culture minister was far less constipated and apologetic over culture than most government representatives. The most revolutionary statement came from him: that Pakistani culture was a part of the mosaic of regional cultures, and that religion formed just a part of it. This is where the rub is, actually. Hinduism is mostly expressed through culture whereas Islam is a transformational creed that feels polluted if mixed with an overarching cultural grid. Ideologies are transformational and Islam has been reduced to an ideology although some important modernists like Abduh and Rashid Rida tried to take it out of public life. Islam will have its own totalitarian culture, if that is possible, but it will not be a part of culture which it regards as an accretion.
Mr Khalid Saeed Butt, who was one of the founders of the Pakistan Arts Council, said that the arts were not culture but a part of it. Ms Samina Peerzada extended the definition a little by saying culture was how people chose to live (rehna-sehna). Jamal Shah pointed to the collective response of the people to their environment. Ms Dushka Syed said that as a historian she noted that culture did not remain static but was subject to change.
Mr Butt was right about the arts, especially the non-functional ones; but they do form a part of culture. A âpeopleâs perspectiveâ tends to exclude their elitist origins but that is unrealistic. The truth is that elitist structures in architecture later become symbols of mass culture. Painting, sculpture and architecture cannot live without the patronage of the rich, but they do register with the common urban man. In this respect the arts cannot be excluded from a discussion focusing on the masses. Ms Peerzada and Mr Jamal Shah were both right because they were abstract enough. There is nothing wrong in not being too clear when discussing culture. âClarityâ is the attribute of the religious fundamentalist who sees paganism in culture. Ms Syed actually saved the discussion by saying that culture did not possess the eternality of religion and was changeable.
Filmstar Reema Khan said that the governments in Pakistan had failed in formulating good culture policies and were even more lax in implementing them. She said that Pakistani film and drama were not reflective of real Pakistani culture. Ms Peerzada said that âwe did not know the culture of the common manâ, yet if the state tried to enforce any culture it would not be right. She said culture was destroyed by fashion, implying that fashion was outside culture. She said karo-kari was not culture.
Most of us are wrong about cinema in Pakistan. Like Indian cinema, it has been a part of our culture. Most of us refuse to accept that 90 percent of the time the common man is deriving entertainment out of culture. Unless we accept that culture is entertainment all discussion is useless. Reema, Samina and Jamal Shah are all entertainers and thus form part of the purveying machinery of our culture, just like Bullhe Shah and Shah Hussain of the past. Film is our culture like literature, and the film can be based on fantasy just like literature. No one in India breaks out into song and goes around dancing in the fields, but the Indian film would be nothing without the culture of song and dance. We must however understand that film âindustryâ in Pakistan has to die because it is next to Bombay, just as European cinema had to die because of Hollywood. Fashion is a part of culture; so is tragically karo-kari simply because a part of our society lives according to it.
It was mooted by TV host Hamid Mir that if the language of India was Hindi why wasnât the language of Pakistan Pakistani? Ms Syed replied that once the language of the Muslims of India was Persian, then it was the camp language called Urdu, but Urdu had the advantage of assimilating words from its environment. She said Bollywood in India still used Urdu in its films. Hamid Mir said Japan did not abandon its language while pursuing modernisation, why had Pakistan not given up English? Jamal Shah said the Japanese were proud people while Pakistanis were not able to take pride in their cultural heritage of language. He said the Japanese had their values intact, while Pakistanâs values were absent and the country was bankrupt while facing external cultural invasion. He said Pakistanâs corruption was eating up Pakistanâs values like termites.
Hamid Mir got it wrong when he said that the language of India was Hindi. Strictly constitutionally, yes, but the constitution has not been followed because the provision regarding Hindi in it is unrealistic just as Pakistanâs is about Urdu. The language of India is not Hindi. It is not even a link language. English more likely is the language of India and that is why it may progress further than China. The Japanese and the Chinese as well as many âAsian Tigersâ of Southeast Asia suffer from the handicap of not knowing English. Japanese traditional culture is based on the suppression of women. In that regard it is good that Japan is under the assault of the âAmerican cultureâ of globalisation. Globalisation favours the minorities and women by weakening the sovereignty of the state. Culture keeps changing. Ms Syedâs remark was apt: culture changes accretively. The pants in Iran came only in the early 1900s but now Iranian peasants wear pants while the ayatollahs sport flowing robes. In Pakistan, dhoti is still current. In Pakistan, like Iran, Islam threatens culture because Islam is a transformational ideology as opposed to culture which is cumulative and accretive. One requires revolution, the other evolution. Some cultures do tolerate levels of corruption.
Ms Samina Peerzada did not agree with Jamal shahâs insertion of corruption into the subject and said that the people were not corrupt although they could be ignorant (anjaan). Mr Ibrarul Haq said that he could test a governmentâs attitude towards culture from the level of taxation it imposed on entertainment. In this respect all governments, by imposing high taxation (65 percent), were against culture. Dr Khalid Saeed Butt said that with each government the policy on culture was changed.
All governments of the world tax entertainment as if it was something they did not want, like cigarettes. But in third world countries the aping of the West is wrong in this regard. Entertainment is not big money in Pakistan. If you tax the cinema heavily the tax is passed on to the cinema-goer and it finally registers as a punishment and a disincentive. The rich no longer go to the cinema. In the West entertainment is big money and cinema-goers have money in their pockets. (Hollywood actresses, looking for wealth, marry mostly singers.) The state is a culture-killer if it regards entertainment as being outside culture. It should import films from India and not stop Pakistani actors from going to India. After all, half of Hollywood is people who went from Europe and Australia and New Zealand. Importing Indian films will get rid of the anti-Pakistan slant in them.
Minister Jamali defended himself against criticism for importing Indian films by saying that the government had allowed import of six Indian films because they were historical and belonged to that part of culture that Pakistan shared with India. (A bearded boy in the audience was later to ask why Pakistan had not drawn a line separating Pakistani culture from Indian culture after 1947?) He said it was not the governmentâs policy to import Indian films but the fact was that Pakistani cinema halls were closing down, leaving the masses without important collective entertainment. He said cinemas in Pakistan had come down from 1400 to 200 without the import of Indian films. He said the video shop had taken over and the investors had run away from the film industry. The minister also said that in the past policies were dominated by security concerns which tended to suppress culture, but now freedom had come back.
If we lock India out we will have no culture at all because what is supposed to be our culture is slowly dying under Talibanisation. Our reliance on the culture (read entertainment) of India has been furtive since General Zia put the squeeze of tashakhus on us, and which the MMA will reinforce if it comes to power. (Thankfully, after that the world will attack under Chapter Seven sanctions and the MMA will go away into Tora Bora.) Our cinema is trapped in the bad odour created by our confusion over culture. We are not alone in this. Muslims all over the world are in this quandary. Stalin inflicted the same kind of doubt on the Russians. It took them 70 years to shake off a regime that sat in judgement on culture.
A bearded boy said that cultural invasion out of globalisation was a challenge, but Pakistan could survive as a separate country only after separating Indian culture from Pakistani culture. One singer-musician in the audience said that old ways of entertainment were being destroyed and chimta and ghara were gone in the face of pop music which was foreign to Pakistani culture. He complained that Pakistanâs great singer Mehdi Hassan was being medically treated free by India and not by Pakistan. One lady in the audience said that Pakistani films portrayed a culture that was not Pakistani and therefore had to be banned. On this Reema Khan said that she had stopped acting in such movies.
The plea for realism in cinema is funny. And Reema was hypocritical. Who will watch movies that show Pakistani life as it is? One will have to ban an entire corpus of national literature too so that a culture-without-fantasy can be born. Cinema of realism can run side by side with masala movies, but the masses will watch pure escapist entertainment. There is nothing wrong with that.
Hamid Mir interjected by asking questions about how a Pakistani heroine in a film became wet under rain and was then made to dance. He said culture needed total safai (cleansing) while pointing quite irrelevantly to the fact that Pakistani culture was dominated by the culture of sazish (conspiracy). Ms Peerzada joined in by saying that since Sirajudaulah conspiracy was the way of life of Muslims and today the conspiracy was based on the rumour that Islam was in danger. Ms Dushka Syed said that now there was fresh breeze in the air in Pakistan. One girl in the audience objected strongly to the use of English greeting hai! in TV plays while the common man said salam. She herself kept slipping into English while trying to speak Urdu.
Hamid Mir was not the host with âinformed neutralityâ and like all of us dived in without thinking too much. (Who thinks about culture, anyway?) The safai he wants is actually safaya , thanks to the beauty of Urdu idiom. When it comes to culture everyone thinks like Stalin, Imam Khomeini and Mullah Umar, or like our morose and unsmiling chief rabbi Mufti Munib. Religion is also a part of our culture and therefore Mufti Munib too is a part of us, but beware of letting him become an arbiter of what our culture should be! What we need is safai of our minds rather than the safaya of our culture. Imagine a committee formed in Islamabad to carry out Hamid Mirâs reform!
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Check matrimonial column and you will know elite culture.