The Dawn News - In review (2024)

So far, 2019 has already been the year of documentaries with the release of Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Leaving Neverland and The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann one after the other. Perhaps this reflects the rise of a culture where people demand ‘real’ stories rather than concocted ones fed to them over the years, or perhaps documentary-making is an art that is now being explored and understood. Whatever the reason, it is obvious that there are more subjects to make documentaries on, more filmmakers willing to make them and an eager audience waiting to watch them.

Within this new sphere, filmmaker and journalist Fahad Naveed has come out with his documentary Puff Puff Pak. Part of his master’s thesis for New York University’s news and documentary programme, the film premiered at the NYU News Doc Film Festival 2019 in February and had its first screening in Pakistan in April.

The film’s opening scene is one that we are all familiar with — a bustling Sea View decorated with flags of white and green on Independence Day. The crowd consists of either families or groups of males with many of them puffing away on cigarettes. From here the camera transitions to a group of boys and one of them poses with a cigarette in hand. Others with him ask if it’s alright for him to smoke on camera, a question that makes the posing boy try to evade the lens – but only to return with another pose that makes the audience erupt in laughter.

Puff Puff Pak is full of small moments of comedy that Naveed is able to establish with either his shots or his commentary. It follows Naveed’s own journey as a smoker — from his first cigarette as a teenager to his last one in New York. From living in an environment that almost encourages men to smoke, Naveed feels out of place in New York — a city that limits smoking socially, financially and even spatially. Shots of ‘no smoking’ signs outside his university come onto the screen with clips of a slightly upset Naveed trying to indulge his addiction in an ‘inconvenient’ environment.

A conversation with his mother, coupled with the challenges of smoking in New York bring with it a nagging urge to knock the habit. What becomes the watershed moment for Naveed, however, is finding out that his mother has cancer. The film documents Naveed’s journey of giving up smoking. He decides to quit before he visits Karachi in the summer of 2018, but being back in Pakistan rekindles his desire to smoke — his friends are smokers and cigarettes are cheap once more.

But what makes Puff Puff Pak stand out from being just another documentary on an unhealthy habit, is the connection Naveed is able to establish between smoking and gender narratives in South Asia.

Clips from the past – of muscled, handsome men climbing mountains and crossing rivers while smoking – are played, inculcating the idea that cigarettes are for ‘real’ men. Then the scene shifts and we see photographs of headlines deeming actress Mahira Khan scandalous for holding a cigarette in hand alongside Indian actor Ranbir Kapoor. Naveed delves into comedy again, combining his voiceover with short clips of news bulletins that dub the photograph a national scandal.

In his commentary, Naveed expresses his inability to explain to his professors why a woman smoking had whipped up such a frenzy. In Pakistan, smoking communities might still mostly feature men, but that is no longer the case in other parts of the world. Naveed mentions how in 1929, Edward Bernays convinced a group of women in New York to step out into the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue with cigarettes in hand.

This was part of a public relations campaign to increase the smoking sphere to include women such as Bertha Hunt. The campaign was a hit, establishing the cigarettes as ‘torches of freedom’ for women — a phenomenon that seems to have finally reached Pakistan.

In a society where judgements are handed – and sometimes meted out as well – to women as if the mere existence of female species is a bane for humanity, the mere act of smoking for women becomes synonymous with rebellion. Like Bertha Hunt, social activist Sadia Khatri and visual artist Samiya Arif are seen lighting their ‘torches of freedom’ in the documentary, as they talk about how the act liberates them and allows them to be ‘bad’ in a society that polices women in every aspect of their lives.

Puff Puff Pak ends with Naveed in the editing room. He shares how far he has come since his decision to quit smoking but also states how leaving behind his habit in Pakistan is like leaving a community. After all, with around 25 million people smoking their lives away, tobacco products are still relatively affordable in Pakistan.

But Naveed has stuck to his decision, for his mother more than anything else — a reason that tugs on the audience’s heartstrings. His shots of their relationship are relatable, much like the rest of his documentary. In fact, Naveed’s strength lies in opening up to the audience and taking them along on his personal journey.

Like his narrative, Naveed’s visuals are multi-dimensional. He uses animations, advertisem*nts and photographs alongside his shots — all designed to highlight his themes. Attention to detail is key, as proven by a range of montages emphasising specific scenes, particularly the shot of the teenage boy smoking in the first few minutes of the film and of Sadia Khatri smoking comfortably on a rooftop.

The first watch of Puff Puff Pak is enough to show that Naveed has a strong grasp of the art of storytelling. Where he falters is when he moves away from the personal, but even then, he manages to keep the audience hooked with his cinematography and holds their attention with ease till the closing credits. Strengths such as this present Puff Puff Pak as a refreshingly honest film — one that is successful in depicting a multi-layered narrative within the span of 27 minutes.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

“My head is like a rubbish heap: you have to sift through the muck to find a working toaster,” declares Abdullah K, the central character of The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack by H M Naqvi.

Much of Naqvi’s long-awaited second novel proves Abdullah K’s self-assessment correct and, as a result, makes for delightful reading. True to his word, the protagonist displays foibles and makes zany commentary that both entertain and inform the audience. While we are never quite lucky enough to find that toaster, we do come across several working parts in excellent condition that – if assembled – would make a splendid appliance.

Abdullah K (aka the Cossack) belongs to a rich business family, the members of which have fallen out with each other after their parents’ deaths. The third boy among five siblings, he lives up to most tropes that middle children are known for and is generally recognised among relatives, friends and acquaintances as someone who had potential but never lived up to it. He is living out his days like a depressed sloth in the family home – the Sunset Lodge – which he shares with his religiously conservative, unremarkable and highly unimaginative youngest brother and sister-in-law, Babu and Nargis.

Abdullah K’s “selected works” are, in fact, an autobiography that he begins to write when a series of events, starting from his 70th birthday, shake up his life and kick it into high gear — forcing him to decide whether to rise to the occasion or not.

What makes his account qualitatively different from other such accounts is its academic foundation. Abdullah K is a bibliophile; he has amassed a formidable knowledge in history, philosophy, religion and the arts over the course of his life and, now that the stage lights have started dimming over his time on this earth, he wants to share what he knows.

In addition, he is someone who sees his existence as inextricably woven into the historical fabric of “Currachee”. Dismayed at the way things have gone, the Cossack feels compelled to record those aspects of the city’s diverse and wonderful history that have slowly been erased from public memory — to set the record straight, as it were.

This book was years in the making and, to understand why that is significant, it makes sense to place it in the wider context of the author’s experience, global events and the rise of the Karachi novel.

Naqvi is one of the two celebrated Pakistani authors writing in English today (the other being Mohsin Hamid) who started out by showing literary promise, made a career in the financial sector in the United States instead, and then circled back to Pakistan and a writing life. This trajectory and its timing could have something to do with the post-9/11 realities of the United States: the year that Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was published (2007) was the same year that Naqvi returned to Pakistan. His first novel, Home Boy, which was published to critical and popular acclaim two years later, was set against the backdrop of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States after the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center had come down in a terrorist attack in 2001.

The trouble with being in Pakistan in those years was, of course, that the country was hit directly by the fallout — that is, the ‘War on Terror’. The decade following Naqvi’s resettlement in Karachi was fraught with violence and insecurity. This provided fertile soil for fiction and the period saw the rise of a particular kind of Karachi novel — one in which writers who lived in the city (or who identified with it) started producing work with a certain urgency to unpack the complexities of – and to find humanity in – a metropolis that increasingly seemed to have been lost to abductions, sectarian killings and suicide bombings.

Mohammed Hanif’s comi-tragic 2011 novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Bilal Tanweer’s 2014 novel-in-stories, The Scatter Here is too Great, and Shandana Minhas’s 2016 novel, Daddy’s Boy, come to mind as books that represented the inherent absurdity of what Karachi had become. In these same years, Karachi-based crime fiction also became ‘a thing’, with Omer Shahid Hamid leading the way with fast-paced novels inspired by real events and informed by his time in the police service.

Naqvi’s debut work on Pakistani migrants in the United States came about while other writers were seeking to understand Karachi’s contemporary realities. It is difficult to say if the book set him apart from the crowd or if it placed him just outside the realm of relevance. To be fair, Karachi played a limited but pivotal role even in Home Boy. But there was more to be done, especially now that Naqvi was based in the city. Looking back, it seems his interests already lay in a particular direction.

In a 2009 article for Forbes magazine, he recounted how he took his friends visiting from New York during one winter for a tour of Karachi. (A remarkably similar tour has made its way into The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack, starting with Jinnah’s mausoleum and concluding at a Hindu temple. Much of the book is, in fact, a city tour of sorts.) “The wonderfully complicated traditions that inform the cultural life of Karachi […] resist the retrograde orthodoxy emanating from the wars on the northern border,” he concluded in the Forbes piece.

This was the earliest indication of what the subject matter for his second book would be: a collection of essays on Karachi that would reach into the past to breathe new life into the present. He later referred to it on his website as “an initiative to revive a swath of downtown”.

The announcement that his next book would be on Karachi was received well. With the success of Home Boy, Naqvi had established his presence on the city’s literary circuit. He was a regular fixture at the annual Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) where he would draw crowds. In the evenings, he was regularly found writing (in his trademark attire: a fedora hat and unbuttoned shirt) at the Roadside Café — an establishment behind Boat Basin, Clifton, known for its uniquely authentic Karachi ‘burger’ vibe. (The café even put up a framed poster of Home Boy in homage to him at the table where he would often sit, and painted a huge mural of the novel’s cover image along the length of one of its walls. Fittingly, the café gets first mention on the acknowledgements page of Naqvi’s second novel.) Knowingly or unknowingly, he was developing an authorial legacy that was rooted in Karachi.

Times have changed, and so has Karachi, yet again. If Home Boy was a 9/11 novel, The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack has landed straight into an era characterised by the promised prosperity of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Already, the Karachi described in the book seems a thing of the past. There are no major turf wars going on in Lyari. The shops do not shut down at the drop of a hat anymore. In an age in which being topical is everything, will this novel still be able to resonate with readers?

Perhaps not, but then this work is not a typical candidate for mainstream consumption anyway. The prose and its arrangement are complex. There are over 180 footnotes. The narrative is bursting with details about the Karachi of yore – and ensconced within that picture are many ideas on religion, race, politics, food and much else – that would be discomfiting to the average reader.

Naqvi’s masterstroke is to create a narrator whom one cannot help but care about. Abdullah K’s sincerity, wit and large-heartedness will outlast all changes in sociopolitical context. He may have opinions that could spark public ire but then he also has a number of characteristics that protect him from it. He is old, rich and a loser. He carries a parasol when out in the sun. He loves children. He avoids conflict and business decisions. In other words, he is not a threat to anybody, including the reader. Ironically, that may turn out to be how Abdullah the Cossack disarms, and ultimately conquers, the Babus and Nargises of the reading world.

The writer is a former editor of Papercuts magazine and a co-founder of Desi Writers' Lounge.

This article was originally published in the Herald's April 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Having grown up in Lahore, Aysha Baqir is a self-confessed introvert who was taken to an anti-Zia protest by her mother. The protest served as a defining moment of Aysha’s life.

“A blind woman had been raped by her employer and his son and she was sentenced to jail and lashes,” remembered Aysha, while speaking at the launch of her book at the Lahore Literary Festival. Driven by a need to fight off the patriarchy silencing women, Aysha found herself on a journey where she lived and worked amongst the rural women of Pakistan and set up Kaarvan Crafts Foundation.

Aysha’s work with village women gave her a perspective free of preconceived notions of rural life. Much to her surprise, the women Aysha interacted had resilience built in them as a way of life. She witnessed a raw kind of love made on a foundation of sisterhood, humour and friendship – not too different from the urban women who had formed Aysha’s world.

Years later, having migrated to Singapore, Aysha found the time to look back upon all those moments, making her sit down and write — drawing upon the well of memories and experiences that defined her as a person. The result of those memories is a beautiful book called Beyond the Fields.

The story is set in the 1980s. Twin sisters – Zara and Tara – are growing up in a village. Their world turns upside down when one of the sisters gets raped. But the story Aysha manages to tell is much bigger. Tara and Zara serve as mirrors for societal expectations from girls and women.

The sisters’ tale is a comment on alternate reality for one of the sisters, if she decides to take control of her destiny. Tara character symbolises submission, silence and suffering — her role is merely to exist and serve. She gets kidnapped and raped, but the matter is brushed under the carpet with her marriage to a ‘respectable’ man. But the secret gets out with a newspaper clipping and her life – or her marriage – now is in jeopardy.

To save her sister, Zara sets off on a path to seek justice for Tara. On her journey, she discovers a network of men and women who support, educate, advise and eventually help her achieve her goal.

Though the narratives are different, both sisters are subjected to physical and mental trauma and have very few avenues for protection as a result of government decisions. This is where Aysha ties her own perspective on the draconian Hudood Ordinance with her experience of working with rural women.

The running theme of the novel is survival and Aysha aptly captures the varying struggles faced by women in our society. The rural women who have little besides their honour and the rural-urban migrants who end up oppressing their own gender to earn, both find a voice in this book. The sisterhood that exists beyond borders is an unspoken recognition of the universal fight against patriarchy. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of the book is the comparison between urban and rural women. Where poor rural women have a strong network of neighbours and family in times of their joy and sorrow, the city ‘begums’ live a lonely, isolated life — a luxurious but empty life, much like Tara’s.

Aysha, through these narratives tries to explore which woman is freer — the rural or the urban one? Is an urban woman with all her wealth, education and freedom less susceptible to the numbing force of patriarchy?

Ultimately, Beyond the Fields is a story of hope, the glorious possibilities of progress if a girl is given a fair chance at living her life as she wants. At one point in the novel, Zara wonders if she will ever go beyond the endless fields stretching out in front of her. Every girl at some point has asked herself if she can go beyond the realm of misogynistic and patriarchal fields laid out in front for her.

Aysha’s message is simple: there is life and so much more beyond the fields of despair.

The writer has been a columnist for The Daily Mail. She has worked as features editor at The Friday Times and assistant editor at Good Times.

Massive monochromatic hyperrealistic drawings of Pakistani women greet viewers at Ali Azmat’s show Larger than Life. Made with only charcoal on acid-free white paper, the works on display go up to almost seven feet. It is hard not to stand in awe of them.

Azmat has managed to handle each form, each layer and each texture in the paintings perfectly. From the softness of skin and the roundness of flesh, right to the fluidity of clothes, he has tackled each part of every image with intensity. His artwork immediately reminds viewers of illustrations found in Urdu-language pulp fiction digests. Every story in those digests is accompanied by a realistic drawing, often of a woman. Azmat manages to achieve the same elusive charm in his images as characterises the digest drawings.

Two other features of the works in the exhibition that stand out are their medium and their subject. The two could have easily made Azmat’s work appear raw and clichéd but he has successfully avoided that.

Use of graphite or charcoal, for instance, is often seen as a basic or initial step in the development of an artistic practice. Such dry mediums are usually used for making outlines of pieces of art because these are easy to erase and correct. Using them as the only medium for an artwork without the addition of any colour does not always work. In Azmat’s case, however, charcoal has allowed him to produce works that are both refined and mature. His drawing skills and his understanding of human form and anatomy have helped him invest his artworks with layers that make them a lot more than just one dimensional visuals. He, thus, successfully highlights themes of class, culture and social norms through his work.

Similarly, artists have employed women as muses for centuries to the extent that the idea of ‘male gaze’ emerged in the 1970s as feminist critics pointed out how a male perspective had resulted in the objectification of women in art and literature. In Azmat’s art, however, women seem to own the pages they are drawn on. He has often shown them as staring back at the audience, allowing them to assert the power and capabilities of the feminine gender — one that stands for far more than just a thing to gawk at.

The artist has also chosen to depict common women, those who have to face challenges at every step of the way in their daily lives. They are wearing no make-up. Their hair is tied casually and dark circles are often visible under their eyes. Looking at them one can easily understand what it means to be an ordinary woman in Pakistan.

Women in these artworks come from various age groups. One drawing shows two young girls, standing hand in hand, as they look out to the audience. It is Azmat’s attention to the curvature and shape of faces that helps his audience estimate the age of his subjects. Clothing and a few accessories shown in each image also often become indicators of age, social stature and even religious inclination of those painted.

The artist has drawn each image against a plain white background. The audience is given no context or history except for what is obvious from the figure itself. This, coupled with the lack of colour in the images, allows the audience to fully focus on the subject without any distractions. This perspective frees the viewers from their preconceived notions, enabling them to see the plight of each woman as she is — not with help from their own biased political and social lenses.

Azmat is able to capture his subjects as they are because of his own variegated life experiences. Born in Multan, he first studied art at the Alhamra Academy of Performing Arts, a non-elite art institution in Lahore. He then did his masters from the fine arts department at the Punjab University which, compared to the National College of Arts, usually admits students from the middle and lower middle class sections of the society.

Azmat has been drawing since 1998. His artworks usually depict women in a figurative style and he has used a lot of vibrant colours in some of his recent exhibits. The way he has drawn the images for Larger than Life with a minimalist ethos shows that he has returned to his earliest style — though, certainly, with a greater vigour and intensity.

The writer is a recent graduate from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.

This article was published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

A collection of sixteen short stories, Hijabistan is Sabyn Javeri’s second book after her debut novel Nobody Killed Her. Through the metaphor of the veil, Javeri explores the unspoken, the unlived and, perhaps ironically, the unfettered worlds of girls and women rendered invisible by a piece of fabric which secludes them while at the same time enables them to imagine and put into motion intriguing and unexpected notions of desire and fulfilment.

Tender at times, shocking at others, Hijabistan seeks to explore the unspoken nuances of what it could possibly mean to live beneath a layer of propriety constructed out of a gossamer thin veil which conceals women’s bodies while revealing their internal landscapes that are at once alien and familiar. Javeri boldly pushes the debate on challenging women’s confinement as seen from both within and outside the veil.

Hijabistan, published by HarperCollins India, was launched at the Karachi Literature Festival early this month. Here, in a brief conversation, the writer shares her views on the topic of hijab as well as on how the book came about.

Q. In an environment of increasing suppression for many women, we also see that there is a part of Pakistani society, including women, which seems to be quite open with its sexuality.Why did you feel it necessary to write about female sexuality within the context of the hijab?

A. For me, the hijab in these stories is not the physical garment but a metaphorical expression. It is the veil between men and women, between women and women, between women and society and most often between women and their desires. That may be sexuality or privilege. Very few of the stories actually have the hijab as a garment central to their theme; [it is central to two stories titled] Coach Annie and The Good Wife [but even in these stories] it is, again, what the hijab represents. It is this metaphorical interpretation of the hijab that I was interested in.

Q. Do you think the ‘voice’ employed in the stories is authentic or is it compromised by your perception of the lives of women who you may not personally have known and, instead, just imagined? Also, if the stories are based on women and girls you have known, to what extent did you fictionalise their lives in order to draw out the conflicts inherent in the fact that most people are sexual beings and that, in a society such as ours, many are forced to suppress that sexuality?

A. I am not speaking for the subaltern. Of course, like every one of us, my perceptions are influenced by my own experience, class and gender. One can try and be authentic but, to paraphrase [Indian literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri] Spivak, even anthropologists and sociologists often fail to do that.

Having said that, I also do not think fiction should be limited to ‘write what you know’. Imagination allows you to bring credibility to your work and dramatisation is a part of that effect. The stories [in Hijabistan], however, are not completely fictionalised either as I was working on a paper about the use of the veil as a metaphor in [pre-Partition progressive Urdu writer] Rashid Jahan’s fiction when the idea [to write the short stories] occurred to me. I began by collecting stories of women who wore the hijab and quickly realised it had little to do with piety. From there on I got thinking that the hijab does not need to necessarily translate into its physical meaning in the lives of the women around me. And that is when I took my research and dramatised it, eventually turning my findings into stories which had little to do with the original case studies.

Q. The Adulteress is one of the stories that possess a deeply authentic voice. To what extent do you relate to the protagonist in terms of the social class she appears to belong to?Is it easier to write about characters who resemble you?To what extent is the ‘imagining’ of the inner landscape of characters who feature in your stories fiction rather than a reportage of what is ‘known’ and ‘experienced’?

A. Deeply authentic would mean different things to different people but I am glad that you think it has an original or distinctive voice. I feel the most powerful tool a fiction writer has is her or his imagination. But I suppose many women writers and artists would relate to the frustration of the story’s protagonist at being creatively stunted, her talent underestimated and lost in the daily grind of everyday life.

In this story, the metaphorical hijab is concealing the woman’s talent, her creativity and most of all her self-belief. She is incapable of imagining an existence other than the one she is trapped in and writing stories allows her to lift that veil and experience another side to her personality, if only momentarily. In that sense, I think many women writers who do not come from privileged backgrounds may be able to relate [to the story]. But I do not think it is easier or harder to create a character who, like me, may be a writer and a mother [since] every story is a challenge in itself as much as it is pleasurable to write, oxymoronic as this may sound.

The writer is an actor, film-maker and human rights activist.

This article was published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Around 2012, on a visit with old college friends in the United States, I once found most of them animatedly discussing TV shows. As someone who did not watch much television then – I still am very selective – I was a bit surprised and asked them if they had stopped watching films. One friend paused to reflect and then told me that television was, in fact, far more interesting than most of the films coming out.

I was not convinced and it was only much later, once I tentatively dipped my toes in this new world (for me at least), that I began to understand my friend’s point. It was not so much that films had become worse, it was that television had changed. Series such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, among others, had managed to redefine what most had come to expect of television.

Yes, these were TV serials but they defied the usual safe (or worse, banal) content one normally associated with the idiot box. These were gritty, visceral dramas that often contained raw language, graphic violence, mature themes and did not come with feel-good morality tales wrapped up in 30-minute or one-hour slots. As importantly, and unlike the television of the past, their production values rivaled those of feature films. The one thing common to them all: they were produced and aired on subscription-based cable channels such as HBO, Showtime and AMC et al, which freed them of the constraints of traditional TV broadcast censorship.

Something similar has been happening around the world with the rise of the streaming service Netflix. International audiences now have access to content from around the world that would likely never make it to mainstream TV channels. But with Bandersnatch, the first full feature-length offering from the team of Black Mirror – the ‘anthology’ that began life as a Channel 4 series in the UK and that draws inspiration from an American show, The Twilight Zone, aired in the 1950s and 1980s – another breakthrough seems to have been made as far as small screen content is concerned. It is the world’s first ‘interactive’ film in the sense that viewers constantly have to choose actions that impact which direction the story will go.

Before I go any further, it is important to understand that it is impossible to watch Bandersnatch on a ‘normal’ television screen. You need the ability to make ‘choices’ – either through a mouse or a trackpad or a joystick – so a computer or a smart TV is the minimum requirement. For one thing, this upends the idea of the TV viewer as a passive receptor of what is presented — which may not be to the liking of those who use television merely as a form of zombie escapism.

But what it also does is open up myriad ‘pathways’ in the story. There are five possible main endings (with some variations) but the ways of getting to them are estimated to be in the millions, a no doubt daunting figure. What is actually mind-blowing, aside from the sheer conceit of the project, is the fact that each of the choices you make as you go along seem to meld seamlessly into the narrative. The very scope of the writing and filming is awe-inspiring.

So what is Bandersnatch about? Well, on the surface it is about a young man Stefan (Whitehead) in the London of 1984. He wants to develop an interactive computer game based on a choose-your-own-adventure novel written by a troubled and controversial genius. As he gets deeper and deeper into designing the game, he discovers that his own sense of reality is being warped. Is his mentor, the young programming whiz Colin (Poulter) guiding him or leading him on? Is his father Peter (Parkinson), who he lives with, really his father or a scientist secretly monitoring him? Is his therapist Dr Haynes (Lowe) trying to help him overcome his childhood trauma about his mother or controlling him in cahoots with his father?

But on another level, this film – extended episode? – is actually about the interaction between free will, control and the burden of technology, a recurring theme in the Black Mirror series. No matter what your choices, the storylines inexorably move towards certain predetermined outcomes. And, in some of them, Stefan begins to suspect that ‘his’ choices are not his at all but that he is being controlled by an external power. He is, of course, since that external power is the viewer. But how independent are the viewer’s choices as well? In one scene Stefan actually resists the choice I selected for him in order to assert his own control over his destiny.

But what does all this amount to? You can spend hours going down various rabbit holes of narrative – even when the narrative ostensibly ends, the show rewinds its way back to a particular position and allows you to make other choices to see other pathways if you so wish – but the ending increasingly seems predetermined no matter what you try. It does not help that every possible ending is distasteful and troubling. Does this mean that fate is stronger than will? Does this mean that nobody really has full control over what they do? At some point in the back and forth – there is really no given runtime – I was merely trying to find a pathway that would give me a different, happier ending. And when I stopped after about two and a half or three hours, it was because I was tired, not because I was satisfied about where I had got.

In comparison, I recalled playing the multiple-pathway game The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on an Apple IIE in 1984 with a school friend. We had gone into the text-only game without having read the novels on which it was based and had no clue what the narrative was. Significantly, that game – in the vein of the off-kilter Douglas Adams books it was based on – also announced that we had to discover the aim of the game ourselves. It was like trying to divine a narrative, with multiple choices along the way. It took us forever (I think at least six months to a year to figure it out) but, unlike in Bandersnatch, there was a sense of exhilaration every time we managed to make progress. Here, I felt intrigued but never exhilarated.

I have always liked the work of Charlie Brooker, the Black Mirror co-creator and the writer of this film. His work is always thought-provoking and, even though Black Mirror has stayed away from Brooker’s comedy roots, there are often sly jokes thrown in (1984, geddit? One pathway also puts Netflix itself front and centre of the narrative and there is one pathway here that is Tarantinoesquely extravagant as well).

But Bandersnatch is the sort of cerebral and visual pyrotechnics that you admire more for its technical adroitness and its concept than for its emotional heft. It will not make you think about how it has changed your life but it will long be remembered for being a breakthrough in entertainment programming.

The writer is Editor Magazines for Daily Dawn.

This was originally published in the Herald's February 2019 issue under the headline 'Remote control'. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The dearth of good Pakistani fiction in English can be viewed as an effect of publishers being based elsewhere. Pakistani English-language authors trying to get published by our corporate literary overlords – in India, the United Kingdom and North America – will inevitably write works that cater to the tastes these foreign publishers serve. In turn, privileging accessibility makes writing bland.

As the globalised publishing industry becomes increasingly hom*ogenous, the beacon of light – of fresh, innovative, unheard voices – as always will come from local, independent publishers. Mongrel Books, a Karachi-based independent press, is on its third publication, Saints and Charlatans. A collection of short stories by first-time author Sarim Baig, it maps out the constellation of lives that populates the Punjabi locale of Rampura.

The book begins with the voice of a young unnamed narrator of a story titled Bougainvillea. He is a resident of a local orphanage and idolises arm-wrestling champion Rustam. When his hero falls ill, he conjectures that salvation lies in saving the fallen Rustam by retrieving a lost orange cricket ball. To do this, he must brave the monstrous sprawling purple bougainvillea vine that guards an abandoned house in the neighbourhood. In reaching for the glowing gold orb, he uncovers sins yet unbeknown to him. We read the story through his voice and, at the end, as his perceptions of Rustam and all he holds true are shattered, so are ours. Baig’s particular brand of magic realism strikes a balance between style and substance that compels one to read on.

The characters Baig portrays become increasingly complex as the narratives progress. He does this through experimental narrative forms: offering varied perspectives, jumping back and forth in time, telling different versions of the same tales through different characters. In his writing, there is an element of oral storytelling that imitates the society it originates from, thus offering a distinctive local flavour. There is always innocence to be lost, tragedy to be uncovered and cracks to be formed that let the light in as you turn a story around over and over again.

And what of those who fall off these beaten paths, who never have the birthright to be on them to begin with?

Much like the usual depictions of Pakistani life that we are used to consuming through art, anecdotes and the news, Baig’s narrators concern themselves with depicting the male experience but the author is mindful of this flaw and complicates their narratives in order to overcome it. Consider the harmonium player, who earns his livelihood by doing what he must, peddling grief and selling songs, the unnamed narrator of Bougainvillea and the coterie of souls in The Third One from the Left: they all exhibit a male-centric world view. One might be left to wonder how we have raised a generation of men by pounding bravado into them, believing the stifling, linear routes to success that we dictate will produce honourable lions and not anxious children desperate for meaning outside of ticked checkboxes. And what of those who fall off these beaten paths, who never have the birthright to be on them to begin with? We vilify them for taking respite at shrines, we tell them happiness lies elsewhere, not here but in some ambiguous ‘there’.

The Third One from the Left is almost a treatise on this subject. It is loosely structured around a central character, Bubloo Bismil Hijazi, and a cohort of lost souls ranging from Bubbly the long haired school boy, Jami the Salman Khan-idolising tailor’s apprentice and the bristly Cheeka. They all congregate at Jojo’s snooker club and regularly discuss ‘getting out’ of the country. As time slips by, modernity surges through Rampura unchecked and KFCs replace corner stores. The story slows down now and then to offer an insight into the characters. Some promise their lovers they will run away with them and end up murdering them instead, inexplicably so; some resign from structured life and become dervishes at a local shrine; some work steady jobs quietly through the years and some attempt to leave the country with varying degrees of success. The epilogue follows one such man, Jira, who is being trafficked to Malaysia through Karachi with the promise of a future “bright like the sun”. He enters a container along with other young men like him and they share stories of how they got there. We stay with his perspective as time becomes indistinguishable in the dark container. The occupants of the container soon yell to tell others to piss elsewhere or that their ears are being eaten. Bodies stumble, the floor becomes gooey and we move into Jira’s memories of snooker clubs and the Shalimar Gardens, Lahore until we later learn of their fate.

Baig tells the story of such young men whose stories were highlighted in news headlines earlier this year after a spate of human smuggling episodes ended in death. In January of this year, Pakistan’s ambassador to Greece wrote to the foreign office in Islamabad about the huge number of cases of human smuggling occurring from areas like Mandi Bahauddin and Gujranwala. The letter was written right after the bodies of 20 Pakistanis had come back home from the Mediterranean Sea where their boat, destined for Europe, had drowned.

The dreamy, ungraspable trajectories of Baig’s stories are fictional but remain concerned with the real issues plaguing our country. They are attempts to imagine what those stories would look like outside sterile news reports. This is why a nation like ours needs local English fiction — to use it to tell our stories to each other instead of selling them as headlines or poverty p*rn to a Western audience. For there are so many stories to be told.

While this collection suggests how much untapped potential there is in local writing, it also contains many silences. It merely echoes whispers of the lives of all the women who are supporting characters in these male-centric narratives. Women are only relevant because they happen to have powerful fathers or because they are murdered by their unhinged lovers or are somehow unhinged themselves. Their stories remain hidden in the realm of wild purple bougainvillea vines — who will draw them out?

This was originally published in Herald's June 2018 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a former staffer of the Herald

News of making a sequel to A Quiet Place (which raked in $50 million on its opening weekend) was doing the rounds before I had even bought tickets to see the film. That’s planning and determination for you, I thought. But after watching the 90 minutes of smartly edited suspense, I thought maybe it’s not unthinking monetary ambition but the pleasure of job satisfaction. There’s big heart behind this horror film.

Directed by John Krasinski (of The Office fame) and written by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Krasinski himself, the film has thrilled audiences. Earning $22 million by its third weekend since release, the film financially sits behind major horror flicks The Sixth Sense ($24 million in 1999), I Am Legend (2007), Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic World (2015) and It ($29 million in 2017).

A Quiet Place is a horror film so far as it is a story about terrifying monsters as much as Spielberg’s sci-fi Jurassic Park. But it explores more than just the fear factor: relationships among characters are as real and fleshed-out as in a drama, and its themes centre on parental love, self sacrifice and staying 'human' while avoiding death-by-monster.

What may puzzle you are the opening scenes which lay out an apocalyptic, noiseless world, bare of people and very much like life in the wild country despite being set in the near future. The plot follows one family, the Abbots, and their course of surviving among inhuman predators.

The monsters even sort of look like the CGI-augmented Dilophosaurus of Jurassic Park, but I’ll leave it to you to judge which creature would be more terrifying if it inhabited your world. Moreover, the creatures are blind and hunt by sound — they have bionic hearing and are stealthy because they are super fast, so fast that in the first couple of attacks you aren’t too sure what they look like. They come out of nowhere, emerging within seconds, and their prey as good as vanishes before your eyes. As the film progresses, the suspense only builds up, and the predators are revealed nearer and nearer in the camera frame. Until, towards the end, you see one in full view. And it’s not pretty.

The family has charted and marked out safe places and paths (with what looks like white chalk powder) in the abandoned countryside of what is now upstate New York, where they reside. They have codes and have devised plans (strings and strings of bulbs around the house to call for help, though none seems anywhere close) for emergencies and attacks — as much as they can. The violence and sense of impending danger come across palpably as a jarring contrast to the quiet and gentle inner life of a family who express their emotions through sign language and facial expression; they walk barefoot even outdoors in order to avoid making any noise.

The action hits you smack in the face at the outset. You may be taken aback for a few moments, thinking you have witnessed the climax scene already. How will this now unravel, you think. Flashbacks only? So, yes, that should prepare you for the numerous shocks and starts in the rest of the nearly dialogue-less story. It’s all about the tenacity for survival.

The themes in the movie are treated almost in the language of symbolism due to the absence of uttered lines. But despite stripping the film of spoken conversation, the story is told simply through the Abbot’s minimalistic existence. Lee and Evelyn (Krasinski and co-star and wife Emily Blunt) and their two children (Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds) live a domestic life oppressed by the strain of guilt, anger and fear, after witnessing the youngest of their family snatched by the monsters only feet away from them. The primary focus apart from survival is parenthood, and more so, a father who is misunderstood by his daughter. Despite their dire and lonely circ*mstances, Evelyn home-schools her children, and in one touching scene is teaching her son mathematics shortly before he is called off by his father to accompany him to gather supplies out in the monster-ridden wilderness.

The silence is expanded by one main character, Regan the daughter (Simmonds), who is deaf. And it adds poignant realism that Simmonds is in fact hearing-impaired. She delivers a spunky performance of a strong-willed and angsty teen, sensitive to everything her dad says.

How do we retain our humanity when almost every aspect of daily life is dictated by the struggle to survive, stay safe and avoid unspeakable horror? A Quiet Place gives audiences some quiet suggestions.

The writer is a journalist working with daily Dawn.

The idea of love remains as mysterious and obscure today as it always has been. Owing perhaps to its many forms and manifestations, love defies a definitive description. The only thing certain about it is its glorious uncertainties.

American poet and writer Sylvia Plath celebrated love’s uncertainties in her lone novel The Bell Jar as her protagonist looks at the person she could possibly fall in love with. “That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket,” she wrote.

To seek ceaseless change is not specific to lovers though. It is one of our most human characteristics. Even when we strive to maintain order around us and discipline ourselves to the extent of regimenting our day-to-day lives, we still feel a subliminal attraction towards chaos and madness — as is manifest in ideas of monotony, routine and boredom. When there is nothing left to explore, that is when the serpent starts to eat its own tail in the hope of finding something new and exciting.

Contrary to this is the idea of repetition – a cyclical continuity – often found in mystic love. It suggests that there is nothing finite about love, especially one that is of a spiritual nature. That is perhaps the reason why repetition forms the core of many mystic rituals such as chants, prayers and worship practices. The idea behind the repetitive motion linked to these rituals is to internalise their essence as a means of attaining a state of ecstasy that leads to wisdom and redemption. By doing the same thing over and over again, the mystics, indeed, aim to break away from the routine, the mundane and the orderly. Like those in love, they are in search of the “change and excitement” that helps them “shoot off in all directions”.

Creative processes offer similar possibilities of freedom from routine and order through the very act of repeating some mundane activities — such as moving a paintbrush across the canvas, striking a stone with hammer and chisel to carve out a statue, beating and moulding a piece of metal to create a sculpture. By continuously repeating the same gestures and strokes, an artist aims to create something new. Repetition sometimes is so important to the artistic process that failure to maintain a certain rhythm and pattern of repetitive movements may have a serious impact on the nature and quality of the work produced.

In Amin Gulgee’s work, repetition comes out as a simultaneous manifestation of love, spirituality and creative genius. His latest work, displayed at his eponymous gallery, has taken metallic materials and turned them into sculptures, installations and calligraphy through countless repetitive strokes of his tools. These works mainly consist of beautifully crafted Arabic huroof (alphabets or letters), created with such detail that they automatically attract attention. These letters are shown to be breaking away from scriptures, textbooks and other contexts — becoming free-flowing forms that assume identities of their own. Alluding to the spiritual in a fantastical and striking manner, they seem to be levitating as if in ecstasy. And yet they are connected to, and intertwined with, other parts of the works in an almost musical fashion.

Independent curator Zarmeene Shah has drawn some interesting parallels between spirituality and the yearning for discovery in an essay, Into Seven, that works as a sort of preface to the show. “There is a different … movement of space [here],” she states. This movement is “somehow mystical [and] spiritual in its evocations” and “is also present in the recurring reiteration” that the artist has engaged in while creating these works. This reiteration, Zarmeene concludes, is a “search for the one through the many”.

Like many of Gulgee’s previous shows, this exhibition was more of an experience than only a presentation of artwork. One was welcomed by an interactive performance, Declaration of Love, as one entered the gallery. Dark-hued glass bottles were arranged in a line on a table along with pieces of paper and pens. The visitors were expected to write a secret confession/declaration of love and insert it into one of the bottles. Gulgee was to destroy all the bottles later by burning them to ashes — alluding to the mystic love that burns inside and consumes the lover before the message of love can even reach the beloved.

This experience was echoed inside the gallery where a larger-than-life assemblage – an installation consisting of a carpet made from charcoal pieces – was littered with Arabic letters cast in copper. Spread about randomly, some of the letters were almost concealed under the charcoal. A few calligraphic sculptures were placed on the carpet in an orderly fashion. Their bases were very small, but they could balance by virtue of their composition and crafty welding.

One could also see beautiful copper screens made of letters, except they were created like drawings. The perforated letters cast a calligraphic shadow on the wall behind them, making the screens look translucent, like a spirit, visible and invisible at the same time.

Gulgee created the same effect with another screen, built as a vertical solid copper rectangle. Letters cut out of it had left behind negative spaces, turning it into a see-through sculpture.

The show also featured an engaging video work. Projected on one of the gallery walls, it featured an evocative soundtrack played on a rebab and showed Arabic letters in black appearing on a white background in such a way that the whole background eventually became black, and white letters started appearing on it — until the background became white and the letters black again. This cyclical repetition was perhaps meant to explore the mystic notion of the oneness of the human experience, of our internal darkness and illumination originating from the same source.

The exhibition was not just a sensory but also a spiritual experience that nourished ideas of love and devotion by establishing connections between beauty, secrecy, pleasure and mysticism through fantastical manipulations of the calligraphic forms. The work on display not just amused the viewer, but also pushed the boundaries of calligraphy itself, transforming it into a mystical exercise that aims to attain ecstasy in more ways than one.

Calligraphy as an art form has mostly remained limited to paper and scrolls but Gulgee has successfully transported it into three-dimensional sculptures and even added a fourth dimension through the video work. These changes inspire both fascination and awe.

This was originally published in the May 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Airports, like humans, are all about time and space. They are also about taking off, levitating, leaving the land and floating in the air. Like dreams. And as our dreams describe our (often hidden) character, an airport discloses the characteristics of a city or a country.

A busy airport – such as Heathrow in London – reveals the global importance of the land it belongs to: how that land becomes a meeting point for travellers from across the world. They stay there briefly, encounter people from nationalities they have never seen before and often engage in small talk with utter strangers. Dubai, the city state, is one such international meeting ground — just like its own international airport.

This holds true in terms of art too.

With its annual art fair becoming a prominent event on the global cultural calendar, Dubai has become an import centre of art in the Middle East. The 12th edition of Art Dubai this year invited 105 galleries from 48 countries, showcasing a wide range of works from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and many other regions.

Repeating the annual pattern, this year’s fair was divided into ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ sections. A new section, ‘residents’ was also, however, added this year.

An important feature of the ‘modern’ section was an exhibition, That Feverish Leap into the Fierceness of Life, that featured five artist groups in five Arab cities across five decades. It showcased the work of artists belonging to Cairo, Baghdad, Casablanca, Khartoum and Riyadh. The artworks – especially those from the 1960s and 1970s – reminded the viewers of an artistic language that was distinct for each artist due to its local connections but was still comprehensible across continents due to its contents.

The exhibition had its genesis in a quote from the 1951 manifesto of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art. It reads: “If we fail to fulfil ourselves through art, as through all other realms of thought, we won’t be able to make that feverish leap into the fierceness of life.” Taking a cue from these words, the curators made a Herculean effort to fulfil the viewers through art that did help them make that feverish leap.

The exhibition served as a significant documentation of the formal, conceptual and cultural approaches of various artists who sought to find a local idiom — apparently rooted in the genre of ‘naïve’ art. The majority of the work on display suggested the featured artists identified with a ‘vernacular’ purity and primitiveness of expression.

In terms of their style, imagery and technique, the displayed artworks suggested that their creators were not just conversing with their own part of the world, once described as the Third World, but also with other regions through a visual vocabulary that had many layers to it and yet had many shared elements. One could, thus, recognise features of some Indian paintings appearing on canvases from Egypt and formal issues found in work from Pakistan being visible in artworks from Jordan.

In his work displayed at Art Dubai, Rana commented on the history/practice of orientalism by dismembering various paintings that carry typical orientalist imagery.

The ‘modern’ section also included a show by a large number of Pakistani artists: Rasheed Araeen, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, Ismail Gulgee, Ahmed Parvez, Sadequain and Anwar Jalal Shemza. Displayed at Grosvenor Gallery, the exhibition featured some of the most unusual works by Shemza, Akhlaq and Gulgee. In the same show, Araeen’s geometric constructions revealed his long-term engagement with a formal language rooted in the history of image-making in Muslim cultures.

After years of living in oblivion, Araeen is now being given his due recognition and respect and is becoming a part of many important international art events. He was also represented at two other galleries in the ‘contemporary’ section of Art Dubai. Grosvenor Gallery had a special booth for his work, primarily showcasing his paintings that explore geometry, and Aicon Gallery presented his minimal structures, along with works of some other Pakistani artists. These structures with painted parts linked his imagery to op art that employs optical illusions.

Two galleries from Karachi also had their booths at Art Dubai this year — each featuring a single artist: Muzzumil Ruheel at Canvas Gallery’s booth and Muhammad Zeeshan at the one by Sanat Initiative. Ruheel showed “a body of work that talks about the pauses; the time between two words or sentences”. The artist’s interest in language and its opposite – silence – was evident in the way he composed his imagery in subtle shades of dark grey letters.

Zeeshan, on the other hand, “addresses the construct of originality. Or the fascination with authenticity, that becomes a fetish.” His works looked identical and were described as copies of each other but were priced differently, mocking the consumerist craziness of the art market. The artists critiqued how the sellers and buyers of art are more concerned about artworks being ‘real’ and ‘fake’ as opposed to being interested in images, ideas and the issues explored.

An analysis of the notion of originality and authenticity is a permanent feature of Rashid Rana’s work too. He does this analysis through his highly sophisticated imagery that embodies many aspects of our sociopolitical circ*mstances. Issues such as identity, tradition and the changing fabric of society constitute prominent elements of his art.

In his work displayed at Art Dubai, Rana commented on the history/practice of orientalism by dismembering various paintings that carry typical orientalist imagery. Exhibited at Leila Heller Gallery, his artefact also challenged the convention of ‘painting’ since it was in the digital genre. This interplay of imagery and medium allowed the artist to deconstruct the edifice of tradition at various levels.

A number of other artists at Art Dubai approached the tradition of image-making in various other manners. Aisha Khalid’s works at Zilberman Gallery, for instance, illustrated the artist’s attempt to create a sense of space by manipulating the possibilities of geometry. A similar effect of infinite space was also aimed at by Waqas Khan (at Galerie Krinzinger). His small work on paper engaged spectators due to its intricate marks. Entangled in the web of his marks, the viewers would experience immensity in tininess.

Galerie Krinzinger displayed some big names from the art world — such as Marina Abramovic, Maha Malluh and Sudarshan Shetty. The last one of these artists has also been reflecting on the idea of tradition, using a sophisticated pictorial diction. For his work displayed in Art Dubai, he selected a broken china tea set and redid it by adding pieces made of wood where the china had gone missing.

Shetty’s carved wooden carpet was exhibited at Leila Heller Gallery. With its corner slightly turned, it looked like a woollen rug and could be seen as a symbol of transformation in tradition due to political, cultural and commercial reasons.

Pakistani artists Hamra Abbas, too, explored the theme of tradition and modernity through a carpet which, in many ways, is a quintessential representative of our tradition. She created a work, titled Please Do Not Step: Loss of a Magnificent Story, connected to flying carpets that recur in old tales featured in the Thousand and One Nights. Displayed at Lawrie Shabibi gallery, this text-based work in marble was placed on the exhibition floor, with visitors walking on it. References in her text include “a flying carpet personified, its possible transformation into an aeroplane and the scattering of migrants around the world’s oceans”. The text was shaped in such a way that it looked like “a magic carpet zooming into space”.

Another artist from Pakistan, Abdullah M I Syed (who also has created flying carpet installations in the past) invoked the link between art and money by using dollar bills as the material to compose his geometric forms. For a number of years, Syed has been utilising currency notes for his works on paper, installations and performances. His work at the Aicon Gallery was a continuation of the same sensibility/style.

Anish Kapoor, an Indian artist, treated the theme of tradition in a different way — by liberating it from a fixed culture or location. His large disc with deep blue hues enthralled the spectators with its illusion of infinite space. Both its circular form and pigment invoked popular Indian pictorial practice but it was stripped from an easily identifiable address or interpretation.

Kapoor’s work was displayed at Galleria Continua along with works by Ai Weiwei, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ahmed Mater, Daniel Buren and several other celebrities of contemporary art. The sculpture by Ai Weiwei, an entangled wooden handcuff, demonstrated the distance between openness and captivity and the difference between freedom and restrictions. It was a perfect reminder of the situations and conditions people have to face in countries going through political turmoil where various modes of state repression are also pervasive.

Political turmoil, a familiar feature in countries once called the Third World, indeed, affects artists in multiple ways, as was obvious from the work of Afghan artist Lida Abdul at Giorgio Persano gallery. She recreated the unceasing war her country has witnessed through 80 framed photos initially “belonging to an Afghan passport photographer”. These conveyed how “war affects the expression of men, women and children over a span of twenty years”.

With its annual art fair becoming a prominent event on the global cultural calendar, Dubai has become an import centre of art in the Middle East.

Art Dubai 2018 emphasised the importance of having an artistic centre that is expanding and consists of diverse practices and different projects such as the Abraaj Group Art Prize (won this year by Beirut-based contemporary artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan). Several Pakistanis – including Hamra Abbas, Risham Syed, Huma Mulji Basir Mahmood – have been among its past winners and runners-up but this year no Pakistani artist even entered the competition. This, however, was compensated by the fact that Rashid Rana was a part of the jury for this year’s prize.

A Pakistani judging artworks from various parts of the wold suggests something important — that Dubai continues to break boundaries and borders when it comes to art and ideas.

The writer is a Lahore-based artist, art critic and educator.

This was originally published in the April 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Steve Coll’s new book picks up where he left off in Ghost Wars, published in 2004. Together, the two volumes are more than a 1,500-page thick opus on futility, confusion, misplaced hopes and serious errors. Despite the resources and commitment that the administrations of American presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and now Donald Trump have put into the war in Afghanistan, the pieces just do not fit. The demons would not fall in line regardless of critical policy adjustments — from democracy building to seizing, holding and handing off parcels of real estate to the Afghan National Army; from counterterrorism to counternarcotics to counter-insurgency; from campaigns against al Qaeda to campaigns against the Afghan Taliban; and from coddling Pakistan to bashing it.

Afghanistan remains a quagmire for the US troops that cannot succeed without good Afghan governance, capable Afghan national forces and a strong partnership with Pakistan. All these factors have been consistently lacking. Washington keeps looking for an exit strategy but this pursuit only increases the resolve of its opponents. Badly conceived and poorly executed wars – and no country’s record since Vietnam is worse on this score than the United States’ – do not usually end well.

Doing nothing wasn’t an option after the 9/11 body blows to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But, as Coll recounts, the US military campaign in Afghanistan went awry very quickly. The initial US air strikes were directed against typical conventional warfare targets instead of focused on an unconventional campaign to decapitate the leadership of al Qaeda and the Taliban. As the leaders from the two organisations were fleeing from Kabul and Kandahar, the best chance of inflicting a knockout blow was lost with insufficient boots on the ground and inadequate firepower.

Whatever help Pakistan’s troops might have provided in rounding up fleeing Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda leaders evaporated when Pakistan-based jihadists attacked the Indian parliament building in December 2001, which shifted Rawalpindi’s attention to counter the mobilisation of Indian troops along Pakistan’s eastern borders. It is remarkable that this daring attack and the prolonged crisis it prompted are missing from Coll’s otherwise detailed account. Was this a masterstroke to loosen the noose around the necks of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders or a random occurrence? Either way, the prospect of another war in the Subcontinent so soon after Kargil shifted Pakistan and the Bush administration’s focus away from the Tora Bora cave complex where many al Qaeda leaders were then holed up. Al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders would live to fight another day. Pakistan would help initially with capturing the former but not the latter.

Truth be told, the prospects of a quick and decisive US victory in Afghanistan were never great. The Afghan campaign was under-resourced from the start. Even if the al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leadership had been decapitated, Afghan politics would have devolved, in the many years to follow, into a bad movie script, featuring sectarianism, warlord-ism, double-dealing and corruption. Coll makes an utterly convincing, but unstated, case that this demon-infested landscape has been beyond Washington’s ability to handle — although the Trump administration is giving it one more go.

Washington never recovered from its confusion over war aims, lingering over plans to defeat al Qaeda as the Afghan Taliban revived themselves. The Bush and Obama administrations were particularly ill-suited to succeed for separate and overlapping reasons. Quickly after sending the US expeditionary forces to Afghanistan, the Bigfoots in Bush’s national security team turned their attention to Iraq, with disastrous effects on both campaigns. When dollar-releasing spigots were subsequently opened in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the money disappeared into well-greased Afghan construction projects and creative accounting schemes like the Pakistan military’s Coalition Support Fund.

The Obama administration tried to pick up the pieces in Afghanistan but could only demonstrate US leverage by having “skin in the game”. Obama’s commitment was limited. He was too much of a clear-eyed realist to project the success of US counter-insurgency campaigns in critical Afghan districts. He was willing to invest in preventing collapse but not to tilt at windmills.

The Obama administration’s carefully parsed war aims were to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates”, which presumably included the Afghan Taliban. There were, however, insufficient resources and commitment to defeat them, and negotiating with them has so far proven to be a bridge too far. Obama softened his war objective to reversing the Taliban’s momentum but this, too, came across as the coining of new terminology with no effect.

The baton has now been passed to the Trump administration, which basks in the reflection of its own convictions, but what matters the most are stubborn facts on the ground. What does Washington have to show for around 140,000 deaths and 17 years of war in Afghanistan? The answer is: one policy re-examination after another, the massive futility of trying to work closely with Pakistani interlocutors and being lost within mazes of the Taliban’s making.

How much treasure – with “blood” drainage now limited – has Afghanistan been worth to Washington? The answer so far is that it is worth enough to avoid a humiliating withdrawal but not enough to pour sizeable contingents of US troops back into Afghanistan or to act aggressively against the Afghan Taliban’s safe havens on Pakistani soil.

The question of how much Afghanistan is worth applies no less to Pakistan than to the United States — with the answer being no less blurry. The Bush and Obama administrations spent years trying to offer carrots as well as sticks to influence Pakistani choices in Afghanistan but to no avail. Team Trump, as well as the Pentagon, the United States Intelligence Community and Capitol Hill, have clearly stopped performing this balancing act. They have concluded that Pakistan’s military and intelligence services – notably the enlarged Directorate S focusing on leveraging Afghanistan’s ever-receding endgame – remain committed to “success” even at exorbitant costs that now include another rupture with Washington. What can one say about Pakistan’s national security policies when relations with Afghanistan are deemed to be more important than relations with the United States? And what can Washington do about this?

Not much, apparently. More penalties seem headed Pakistan’s way without the prospect of a meaningful course correction by Rawalpindi towards Afghanistan and India. Pakistan’s national security establishment appears stuck between a rock and a hard place. Even if we assume that Rawalpindi has possibly acknowledged that its once-prized militant assets have become its vulnerabilities, then what? Pakistan remains weighted down by its investments in anti-India jihadist groups dating back to the expulsion of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. Band-Aids such as placing temporary restraining orders on militant leaders after high profile attacks on Indian soil or by “mainstreaming” these militant groups into Pakistani politics would not fix these problems.

Developments along the Afghan border could also be deeply troubling. Pakistan’s erstwhile assets have greater scope for mischief-making when Washington’s footprint and ambitions are eventually curtailed in Afghanistan. Washington, however, can at least extricate itself from the Afghan morass if it is willing to accommodate the staying power of the Afghan Taliban and the advent of more fearsome competitors for power within Afghanistan. Pakistan’s extrication – assuming it is sought – will be far harder.

Perhaps these messes will be described in Coll’s third volume — assuming he has the interest and persistence to write it. But one suspects he might have already had his fill of retelling an endless litany of intrigues, manoeuvres and missteps.

There are many important nuggets in Coll’s reporting based primarily on US sources. (The subtitle of this book, therefore, deserves to be its title.) He concludes that Pakistan’s military and intelligence services did not know about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts in Abbottabad. He believes the Obama administration tried seriously to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, but his account suggests there were far too many loose ends in this process for it to have a reasonable hope of success.

There are no heroic figures in this volume. Instead, we find the US political leaders, senior military and intelligence officers and diplomats trying to slog their way against heavy odds. Afghan leaders, especially Hamid Karzai, appear as the worst of the lot.

Pakistan’s military and intelligence officers come across as gifted in the art of deception that Washington has been far too willing to accept. In a rare summary judgment, Coll concludes, “The failure to solve the riddle of I.S.I. and to stop its covert interference in Afghanistan became, ultimately, the greatest strategic failure of the American war.”

Washington never really figured out workable plans for Afghanistan. It is doubtful they existed. More than a decade and a half after committing troops to this war, the US military has a modest footprint to counter the Taliban and other groups likely to be far worse. If this outcome appears unworthy of the costs incurred, it seems to be all that is on offer.

The writer is co-founder of the Stimson Center.

This was originally published in the April 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

"Since childhood I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them,” said a visibly moved Guillermo del Toro while accepting his Golden Globe for Best Director early last month. “Monsters, I believe, are the patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing and living,” he added.

The Shape of Water may be the first film for which the Globes have recognised the Mexican film-maker, but he has explored the theme of monsters over an illustrious 25-year career. From Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) to Pacific Rim (2013), del Toro’s love for magically strange worlds has been abundantly clear.

His latest film takes us back to the 1960s. Here we meet Elisa Esposito (Hawkins), a mute woman who works as a janitor at a secret government lab in Baltimore. Her otherwise mundane life changes when an amphibious creature is brought into the facility for experimentation — and she ends up falling in love with it. The monster, Elisa feels, does not view her – without a voice – as an incomplete person.

With this fairly straightforward premise, del Toro manages to tell a surprisingly nuanced story about class, race and love. Above all, this is a film about disability and what it means to be human. Hawkins’ sure-footed portrayal of Elisa truly brings home this point. At the beginning of the film, Elisa appears to be meek and closed off, but as her love for the monster grows, she becomes more and more fearless. Hawkins communicates all this and more through her body language alone, without any dialogue to assist her.

The only time we see Elisa speak – or rather sing – is during a dream sequence. As she fantasises about communicating with the monster sitting across her at her dining table, the lighting in the room changes and the scene transforms into an old Hollywood style film set. A fade-to-black later, the imagery is in black and white, and Elisa is dressed for the occasion in a beautiful gown. She starts to sing “You’ll Never Know” from the 1944 film Four Jills in a Jeep. The result is a surprisingly moving scene. This is just one of the places where del Toro masterfully uses music to elicit emotion from the audience. It is no wonder then that the film’s soundtrack has been collecting accolades, including the Golden Globe for Best Original Score by composer Alexandre Desplat.

The dream sequence is only one of the ways del Toro gives homage to old cinema — Elisa also lives in an apartment atop a movie theatre. When the monster breaks out of her apartment one evening, she finds him standing mesmerized in front of a film screen.

Del Toro’s film-making, while being uniquely his own, also reminds one of works by other masterly film-makers. One of these is French film-maker Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (2001) which used a preponderance of the colours green and red to set a certain fantastical look.

The Shape of Water similarly uses green throughout the film. The monster is green. The restrooms and labs that Elisa and her friend clean are green. When Elisa goes to work, her clothes are green. She starts donning a red jacket and red shoes only after the monster starts living with her — red clearly symbolising hope and passion. It is this attention to detail that makes The Shape of Water such a magical cinematic affair.

On one level, del Toro appears to be critiquing the American dream. In one scene, Giles (Jenkins), Elisa’s friend and an artist who paints advertisem*nts, illustrates a happy, white-collar family enjoying red jello for an ad. His employers tell him to make the family look happier, and to change the colour of the dessert. “Green is the colour of the future,” he is told. Discerning viewers would later notice a similar scene featuring the lab’s resident baddie, Richard Strickland (Shannon), and his family. As his wife presents him with green jello, and his children attempt to interact with him, Strickland is too preoccupied with thoughts of capturing the monster to enjoy a warm family moment.

Del Toro plays with these analogies and metaphors throughout the film. This is most poignant when we learn that Giles is hom*osexual, and see him be humiliated by a heterosexual young man he has a crush on. This motivates Giles to support Elisa’s seemingly bizarre love for the monster. The ‘love is love’ message here is loud and clear.

The Shape of Water manages to provide all this commentary without ever feeling melodramatic or losing its ability to find comedy in the absurd. As the award season picks up steam and we move closer to the Academy Awards, this Oscar hopeful is not one to be missed.

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Soha Ali Khan’s The Perils of Being Moderately Famous, written by the youngest daughter of silver screen royalty Sharmila Tagore and Nawab Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, is neither a sordid tell-all airing the Khan family's dirty laundry, nor is it a meaningful excursion into the world of Bollywood glamour and folly. It is also not about the hard work that goes into being a ‘working actor’. It is, essentially, a sanitised, over-edited, and frankly pointless book.

Khan admits as much, telling us she doesn't really know why she's writing this book and doesn't really know where it's going, but that she wants to be "relevant enough to be discussed" (it can’t be easy, after all, being Kareena Kapoor’s sister-in-law if fame is what you’re after). If you weren’t paying attention to Khan before this, there is no need to start now unless you’re in a giving mood.

That said, if this space of pointlessness had to be taken up by anybody, I'd rather it be by a woman with a disarmingly self-deprecating sense of humour than, say, some super hardcore Homeboy Romeo who writes with unexamined prejudices about whor*s and drugs in an attempt to be more Bukowski than Bukowski. Khan is surprisingly charming, if a little superficial, as she takes us through the highlight reel of her life — the ancestry (her mother Sharmila was related to Rabindranath Tagore), the college years, the travel adventures, the dating shenanigans, the One, and, finally, the baby.

This is not to say she doesn’t have her tone-deaf moments. Early on in the book she insists that there was "never really a sense of being flush with wealth" while growing up. In the same breath, she talks about her dad’s jaguar (“PAT1”) and maids laying out freshly laundered clothes every morning, and waxing nostalgic over her could-have-been title of “Nawabzadi”. She also later mentions annual six-week vacations to London. Still, Khan has the grace to acknowledge more than once the opportunities and experiences open to her because of her family connections and background.

Khan speaks most affectionately of Rang de Basanti and Khoya Khoya Chand as her favourite films, for different reasons. The first brought her credibility as an actor, and had a far-reaching impact on people (called the ‘RDB effect’ apparently, where people felt they could fight for justice).

The second was the most challenging role for her, and she briefly mentions months of preparation to ‘get into the skin of the character’. The trouble is, Khan gives us very little information on how she prepared for the roles, what the process was like, what kind of adventures happened on- and off-set, how she grew personally and professionally during all of this. I suppose that level of substance might unnecessarily weigh down Khan’s twittering flight of fancy.

There are a couple of other little nuggets in this book, mostly related to her mother, which may make you think her mother should have written a book. One that stood out comes up in the fourth quarter of this smooth, pacy, family-friendly romp. Khan is getting ready to go off to Balliol, and her mother sits her down for an all-purpose chat. Including a sex talk, where her mum, refreshingly, says it’s alright to have sex without getting married, and that sex can create a sense of emotional intimacy that is not as real as it feels. “…‘You may think you’re in love but you may not be.’ Those three sentences seemed to take the wind out of her and I thought for a second she was going to cry but she got up, straightened the bedcover and said, ‘You’re also going to have to learn to make your own bed.’”

Wait, what? Took the wind out of her? Why? She didn’t actually love her husband? They got married because of sex-feelings? Was there someone else, an old flame, a memory kept alive by the air in her breath? Did Khan ask? What’s the lowdown on the fam here, Khan?

There are other moments that stand out: a naked run through a desert, blindfolded tourism of Paris, a mean text actually sent to the person it was about, pregnancy, attempted burglary, born-again Christians, and so on. But by the time I sat down to review this book a week later I’d already forgotten most of what happened and had to re-live the ordeal of reading it (albeit with faster page-flipping this time).

If you’re looking for a funny, autobiographical book written by a female actor, I’d recommend Bossypants by Tina Fey. If you’re looking for a book about the struggle for normalcy in an actor’s life, maybe you could try Little Girl Lost by Drew Barrymore. If you’re looking for something light and intermittently amusing, maybe a palate-cleanser between your Rankines and your Solnits, or a counterpoint to Austenistan, then The Perils of Being Moderately Famous isn’t terrible. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s not awful, in case a copy of it found its way into your hands.

Tariq Khosa has written a bold and revealing book. It is bold because it takes many myths surrounding Pakistan’s evolving security narrative head-on. It is revealing because his is the account of an insider who has worked with the law enforcement apparatus of the state for the past four decades at many levels.

The Faltering State, as the title suggests, epitomises Pakistan’s unfinished struggle against the forces of violence – terrorism, extremism and religious militancy – that have pushed the country to the brink of a disaster. Based on its author’s extensive and practical knowledge of how the administrative machinery has been manipulated by the ruling elite of the country to serve its parochial interests over the decades, the book paints a picture of Pakistan’s security landscape where the rule of law and the writ of the state have been grievously undermined. “Pakistan is not a failed state, but it is definitely a frail state despite a strong and resilient society,” Khosa notes.

Why has Pakistan faltered? Khosa lists many factors. These include: 1) The state’s failure to recognise that there are “no pro-state or anti-state” elements among those who pursue a violent agenda; 2) The deep state’s role in “creating the non-state actors” and its failure to see that these “militants are likely to unravel the state of Pakistan if we continue like this”; 3) The failure of the state to undertake investment in the justice system which is a “precondition for resolving disputes, guaranteeing the security of contracts and ensuring that that people look to the state and not to outside interest groups for social, economic and political protection”; 4) The lack of political will which has turned the National Action Plan against terrorism and extremism into a National Inaction Plan.

The combined effect of all these factors has been the erosion of the power of the state and Pakistan’s dangerous drift towards lawlessness. Khosa boldly asserts: if Pakistan has become a faltering state, it is due to its own internal failings. “… no non-state actor can exist without support from visible or invisible state element and certain external players. A vigilant state and society can certainly defeat their nefarious designs. The counterterrorism National Action Plan was, essentially, the manifestation of national resolve to not only do away with the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban but [also] to eventually undertake surgical strikes against widespread militancy from our polity,” he observes.

Notwithstanding the claims about the effectiveness of such military operations in recent times as Zarb-e-Azb and Radd-ul-Fasaad, there are few signs that the state is actually displaying the much-needed unified resolve to launch surgical strikes for eliminating militancy from the country. As long as the state continues to accept unlawful demands by a handful of agitators bent upon making mischief to have their way, this resolve will keep showing massive cracks.

As highlighted by the Faizabad sit-in protests in November 2017, rather than defending the rights of millions of citizens, the federal government caved in to accept unreasonable demands by a couple of thousand religious protestors. The officials – including those from the security and intelligence agencies – signed an agreement with the small but religiously charged mob that is widely believed to be nothing but an instrument of state surrender. The capitulation, in fact, started even earlier than the agreement was signed. The protests that went on for 20 days, during which religious extremists not only blocked the main artery linking Islamabad with Rawalpindi but also used foul language against the superior judiciary of the country and clashed violently with the law enforcers, represented the ultimate failure of the Pakistani state to curb those who are flouting its writ. Ironically, the “deep state” seemed to be encouraging these violent elements rather than discouraging them — many of them were given one thousand rupee bills by a senior officer in uniform as travel money to return home.

It is obvious from this particular instance that the Pakistani state has not learnt any lessons from its failed approach towards militancy and that it continues to dangerously swing between appeasem*nt and control of the militant elements. The most detrimental consequence of this oscillation has been demoralising among the law enforcement organs of the state, especially the police.

Khosa discloses that this demoralising has been going on for decades. He recalls the time when he picked up a group of men armed with Kalashnikovs during late night patrols while working as superintendent of police in Quetta in 1981. They belonged to the Hezb-e-Islami of Afghan militant leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who at the time was fighting against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Khosa was asked to release them immediately. The orders for their release came directly from General Ziaul Haq.

It is on the basis of such incidents that he points out: “Following 1979, Jihad became an instrument of state policy as non-state actors were inducted in one militant organization after another … The architect of this policy was none other than the military head of the state. We, the functionaries of the state, were required to look the other way. The resulting erosion of the state’s authority led to the nation paying a heavy price in terms of gunrunning, drugs, targeted killing, and organized crime, including violent extremism. People tend to blame the police for disorder and violence without delving into the root causes of large-scale violence and militancy in society.”

To effectively deal with the menace of armed militancy in the country, Khosa proposes a four-point national agenda: “One, adherence to the rule of law that guarantees individual rights and freedoms, equal opportunities to realize the national potential by creating an environment for social stability, and economic development. Two, ensure social justices so that all citizens live with dignity and honor, irrespective of their caste or creed. Three, achieve the tolerance so critical to building harmony through unity in diversity. Four, institutions must take precedence over individuals, irrespective of rank and authority.” He further emphasises: “The ascendancy of rule of law, a culture of tolerance and justice is vital for national security.”

The most interesting chapter of the book is the one that deals with the trial of those suspected to be involved in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. In his revealing account, Khosa mentions certain facts on the basis of which he concludes that the “entire state security apparatus must ensure that the perpetrators and masterminds of the ghastly terror attacks are brought to justice”. Despite his plea, we know that the perpetrators of Mumbai attacks and their masterminds have been allowed to go scot-free.

The most important conclusion Khosa draws in his book can be summed up in his warning that the nation must not become complacent while dealing with the dangers of militancy. Because if we do, “the demons of militancy can unravel the state of Pakistan”.

This article was published in the Herald's January 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

In a country that is starving, art will never be on the carte de jour. But beyond the dietary abstinence lies a rather ruinous conundrum. What is the purpose of art? Why bother with it at all? Undeniably, art and literature often slip off into the indiscernible and unintelligible; into places where we simply cannot follow. All too weary of this, the Paris Review asked the novelist, William Faulkner: “Some people say they cannot understand your writing, even after they have read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?” Faulkner snapped back: “Read it four times.” A glib response; but does repeatedly engaging with the works of seminal writers and artists aid our understanding of its underlying purpose? The folks over at the Jamil Naqsh Museum certainly think so.

Of course, one hesitates to use the term ‘museum’ since it tends to lend an air of antiquity to the work on display and Jamil Naqsh’s art in anything but antique. The abstruse painter has dominated the artistic landscape of Pakistan for over half a century, honing a distinctly evocative style which is now on display, in all its sensual glory, at the sleekly purpose-built Jamil Naqsh Museum in Defence Housing Authority (DHA), Karachi.

Designed by Jamil Naqsh’s son, Cezanne Naqsh, the compound houses the white pastel coloured museum and a residential space, for Cezanne himself, partitioned by a central courtyard. Dr Faridoon Sethna, a trustee of the museum, hopes that the museum will help “provide the younger generation with a place which inspires them to do something similar in the field of art”. Indeed, simply entering the space triggers a sense of awe at the unrelenting magisterial canvases which adorn the walls. The selection at the museum comprises of artworks from Jamil Naqsh’s personal collection which also include works by his daughter Mona Naqsh and the original trailblazer himself, Shakir Ali. Since the space houses Naqsh’s work from the sixties up to the 20th century, viewers get a rare glimpse into the evolution of Naqsh’s work and an even rarer glimpse into the man himself.

Stripped of his familial anchorage following the partition of the Subcontinent, Jamil Naqsh found himself desperately trying to forge a new personal identity while simultaneously trying to rediscover his past; elements which would soon come to shape his art. The union of a traditional miniature style with a more contemporary abstract approach gave birth to a hybrid form which would eventually dominate his oeuvre. But Naqsh is no one-trick pony. While his female nudes hearken back to the works of Lucian Freud and Jean Ingres with their unabashed nature, his jarringly wormy calligraphy seems to be invoking the disquieting style of Jean Michel Basquiat rather than the words of God.

Amidst his archetypal reincarnations of pigeons and women, Jamil Naqsh’s cubist set of paintings at the museum provide a welcome change of pace. As Cezanne Naqsh points out, his father considers his cubist series as a homage to Picasso, a detail which one can hardly miss. Despite the varying style, with Jamil Naqsh there is always something to be said. Uncompromising and alluring, his art has always had the rare gift of drawing us in before forcing us to retreat, if only momentarily.

Hence, when the guest of honour at the museum’s inauguration, Senator Aitzaz Ahsan, in a characteristically dull speech, pontificates that Naqsh is a source “of pride for our nation” since his art showcases Pakistan’s “traditions and talent”, one must ask the question, is that it? Surely artists must aspire to loftier ideals than this. Although, in the senator’s defence, he did go onto state that he was by no means an art critic — not that anyone in the crowd suspected otherwise. Truly stimulating art, in Emerson’s opinion, compels us to confront our own neglected thoughts and perhaps therein lay its purpose. To dispel our cloak of practiced apathy and to regularly help reignite our senses and to this end, the collection at the Jamil Naqsh Museum dutifully serves its purpose.

It reminds us that Jamil Naqsh, like Faulkner, must be revisited from time to time. We mustn't descend into a state of despair or ridicule if the ideas on display slip through our fingers upon first viewing. We must re-engage. Linger a little longer. co*ck our heads from one side to the other. Admiration does not always necessitate understanding. Naqsh recognises this, as we all must. His work unapologetically floods us with a whole host of answers, leaving us to decipher what the questions might have been.

Osama Siddique’s Snuffing Out the Moon is an elaborately structured novel of epic proportions. So it is not surprising that, in recent interviews, the author has cited Qurratulain Hyder as a writer he deeply admires. Here, I must lay my cards on the table as a reviewer: I have not read Hyder’s Aag Ka Darya. I also have not read British author Edward Rutherfurd’s Sarum or any of American writer James A Michener’s epic sagas that chronicle the history of one specific region through many eras, as Snuffing Out the Moon does.

I make this admission to acknowledge that I am restricted in my ability to examine how Siddique draws from the tradition of a very specific kind of epic novel. Now, Snuffing Out the Moon is not a standard work of historical fiction, but even if it were, my unfamiliarity with Aag Ka Darya should not hinder me from writing about this debut novel.

Did I mention that this novel is very elaborately structured? Let me explain: its 400 or so pages are subdivided into five ‘books’ (‘The Book of Illusions’, ‘The Book of Omens’, ‘The Book of Ardour’, and so on). Each ‘book’ is further divided into six chapters. Each chapter is dedicated to a different time period. In the first, third and fifth books, the chapters move chronologically. The chapters in the remaining two books are in reverse chronological order. Each book begins with two epigraphs — one by a Western poet (like Shelley, Auden or Yeats) and one by a South Asian poet (like Ghalib, Iqbal or Faiz).

The novel begins in 2084 BC and ends in 2084 CE. Along the way, we visit monks in late fifth-century Gandhara, observe political intrigues develop in British-ruled India and learn about corruption in Pakistan’s contemporary legal system.

Expectedly, the novel presents the reader with multiple protagonists and storylines. That its individual plots do not cohere into a broader storyline has been pointed out as a shortcoming in some reviews, but it is not something that I necessarily have a problem with in itself. After all, it is not as if Proust meticulously planned In Search of Lost Time in accordance with German critic Gustav Freytag’s plot pyramid, and there are plenty of novels that are admired especially because of their episodic narratives (for example, Even S Connel’s Mrs Bridge) or fragmentary quality (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway).

A few other reviewers – Aditya Sudarshan of The Hindu in particular – have pointed out that its characters are not fully fleshed out. This, again, is not always an indication of failure. The Booker Prize winning The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, for instance, is full of flat characters. And I mention this book in particular because despite many, many differences, it has some stylistic commonalities with Snuffing Out the Moon. To get the obvious ones out of the way, both have titles that refer to the same celestial body, both are conceit-driven and both rely heavily on very formal prose. So here is my concern: Snuffing Out the Moon, despite all its ambitions (and perhaps because of all its ambitions), feels somewhat lifeless. The lack of coherence in the novel as a whole could have been saved by vivid characterisation. Lack of vivid characterisation could have been saved by a striking prose style. And the lack of a striking prose style could have been saved by a coherent story. But, unfortunately, all three left me wanting in this book.

Here are a few examples to illustrate my point:

In the first few pages of the novel, we are introduced to one of its many protagonists: Prkaa. He is atop a tree, spying on Sthui, a dancer. Siddique writes: “The girl paused mid-step. Arms akimbo, her weight resting on her bent right leg with her left foot hovering above the ground insouciantly.” A few lines earlier, we had been told that she wore metal bracelets and that her hair was tied in a bun that hung on one side of her head. Any discerning reader would recognise this as an allusion to the bronze Dancing Girl statue of Mohenjodaro.

A few hundred pages later – and this is hopefully not a spoiler – Prkaa discovers the bronze statue itself and Siddique (somewhat needlessly) states that this statue was lost till 1926 when it was discovered by a British archaeologist. The very beauty of historical fiction is that it brings figures from books and museums to life for the reader. But the novelist wastes the opportunity to do so here.

The Sthui we see in the novel is not much more than the Sthui we see in the statue. Instead of developing her character, the writer emphasises her mysteriousness and attractiveness. In the first book, at the end of a chapter, he writes: “Like a jungle spirit – willowy, brisk and evasive – she skipped through the wet vegetation, her dress clinging to her shapely frame, her hair undone…” And when she does stop to look back at Prkaa, “her gaze was wistful”. Towards the middle of the novel, there is an unusual and somewhat feverish passage in which Prkaa addresses Sthui in his mind: “Where do you seek your colours, Sthui? ... You are not just a dancer who moves in rhythms of weary convention to please the deities … Who are you, Sthui?”

I ask the same question.

Later on in the novel, three yakshas (nature spirits) try to tempt a young monk. Granted, they are spirits, but we get the same physical descriptions that we got for Sthui. One spirit is “a pretty girl in yellow” while another a “comely, dusky damsel in blue”. It is unfortunate that this novel can travel through millennia and take us from the Bronze Age to a future time of human colonies on various moons of the solar system, but still struggles to balance out the depiction of male and female members of the cast as human characters.

The prose is another concern. Around five years ago, I interviewed Siddique over the phone regarding a cover story about Pakistan’s judicial system for Newsline magazine. I distinctly remember that, while transcribing the interview, I pressed pause on the tape and told a colleague that I was so in awe of Siddique because he was the first person I had interviewed who spoke in perfect sentences. This polish, this perfection, that I so admire in him as a speaker is something I feel works against him in the novel. Formality can be wielded deliberately (as The Luminaries does to emphasise that it is a pastiche of the Victorian novel). Here, it creates a sense of distance between the reader and the world(s) of the novel.

When Prkaa meets his childhood friend Motla, he calls him, “O spherical friend of mine”. Admittedly, this is one of the main concerns of historical fiction: how to capture the naturalness of dialogue without making it sound too contemporary. But often in the historical sections of this novel, the balance is skewed too much in favour of old timey-ness.

Elsewhere, there is an unevenness in how Siddique captures a character’s voice through free indirect speech. For example: “Rafiya Begum felt more elevated at that moment than she had done for quite a long time. God Bless Shagufta Parveen! Not just because of her respected father, who was indeed a fine man, but for her own resolve and the quiet, unassuming diligence with which she had taken up her cause. Especially for her empathy. The Merciful One was finally smiling down on her. How else could things have happened so fortuitously?”

That short exclamatory phrase obviously represents Rafiya Begum’s thought process, as does the reference to God’s magnanimity. But everything else is written so formally that it feels disconnected from the character.

But it would be wrong to end the review without acknowledging that Siddique does provide moments of levity in the novel and that there are characters that jump from the page. I could read an entire novel about Sikander-e-Sani and Mirza Ferasta Beg, two bickering swindlers living during the time of Emperor Jahangir’s rule. Then there is Billa aka Billa Bantian Wala aka Babu aka Saleem Pistol (and so on…) who likes to visit his lover in Hotel Stylish Dreams and gift her QMobile phones to win her affection (I am sure you can tell that this is not from the Mohenjodaro or Taxila sections of the novel).

Any of the six eras presented in the novel could serve as compelling stories on their own. It is the structuring and juxtaposing of the disparate narratives that undermine the novel’s strengths. Ultimately, Snuffing Out the Moon is tremendous and ambitious and imperfect. And, in a way, a debut novelist should aspire to have all three of these qualities.

This article was published in the Herald's December 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a former assistant editor of Newsline and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the John Hopkins University.

"They deserve recognition,” Christiane Fladt begins her book, the first in-depth attempt to highlight the lives of high-altitude porters from the Shimshal region of Hunza, Gilgit-Baltistan. The volume aims to present a “complete picture of Shimshali ambitions and achievements” and, as her narrative suggests, these porters and their accomplishments have received little recognition or reward. These men live a life of constant peril.

The book – bold, necessary and informative – opens with a crisp introduction which gets straight to the point. No funny anecdotes, no whimsical descriptions of the subjects and no flowery quotes on mountain climbing. In a nod to its author’s place of origin, it is written in a true matter-of-fact German manner.

For someone whose lived experience is far removed from that of the porters, in terms of gender, language, nationality, religion and probably much more, Fladt has written a remarkably well-informed book. The information has been painstakingly gathered through extensive interviews over the course of several years, making her work a unique addition to the minimal literature available on Pakistani high-altitude to date.

The book taps into the mountain tourism narrative of Pakistan through untold stories and paints a vivid portrait of several legendary Shimshali porters in its individual chapters. These include Rajab Shah, Meherban Shah, Aziz Baig and a number of other notable climbers. Each chapter differs in tone as Fladt lets the protagonists lead the readers through detailed accounts of both their successes and their losses. She also explains at length the method of selecting the porters for inclusion in the book: only those who have climbed above 8,000 metres have been covered in detail. The author, however, has made mention of a few others as well, like Tafat Shah, one of the pioneers of the profession in the Shimshal region.

Guided by a writing style that is straightforward yet engaging, Fladt relates the tales of each porter, tying the narrative together using various themes related to mountain tourism in Pakistan. Most of those interviewed do not climb for glory or a sense of adventure, but out of necessity. Lack of economic opportunities in their remote valley offers few other livelihood options. Many continue climbing well into old age, in order to provide for their families.

One critical problem common among older porters is memory loss, the author finds. Mohammad Ullah’s climb of Gasherbrum-1, one of the most difficult mountains to climb in Pakistan, has “faded in his memory”. Nor can Qurban Mohammad recall the precise years of his various rescue missions to Nanga Parbat and Broad Peak. Many other porters have similar gaps in their memory. This loss is made especially poignant for Rajab Shah and Meherban Shah, who both lost sons to traumatic deaths on the mountains. It is, indeed, problematic that the history of local mountaineering is being slowly erased with their fading memories. Fladt’s account ensures that at least some of it is saved from permanent loss.

The book’s most exciting parts present the almost conflicting perspectives of different porters on the same climbs. “It is intriguing to compare how one and the same event is recorded by two different characters,” says Fladt, while commenting on some of the noteworthy differences. It is interesting how she reconciles these differences, even taking up the monumental task of putting together the story of Pakistan’s first-ever bid to climb the world’s tallest mountain, Everest, a failure recalled differently by the different people involved in the adventure. But such is the nature of oral history and memory — they are moulded by the life and time of each narrator.

To her credit, the author has painstakingly provided cross references while handling conflicting accounts. Her own critical voice is audible throughout the book. Some of the stories that appear improbable are followed up and contextualised. Not much is accepted at face value — something that is thoroughly refreshing. She pulls no punches while making comments, yet she leaves it up to readers to decide which story they deem probable and which they do not.

Weaving in her own perspective as a foreign woman also allows the author to provide critical insight into how foreigners perceive Pakistani mountaineers. Her self-reflections enable the readers to see how she went about dealing with the porters and their stories. If someone does not turn up for an interview at the appointed time and place, she does not bother recording their story. If they are not interested in having a chapter written on them, then neither is she.

Her narrative is also peppered with interesting observations the porters make about their experiences climbing with mountaineers of different nationalities. Often, they bluntly state their opinions without political correctness. When Meherban Shah is asked about his experience working with the Japanese, he remarks, “too much rice, only rice”. Another porter, Amin Ullah Baig, similarly finds French food to be “something really strange”. The porters describe the Russians as having “superior climbing potential” and view the Japanese as hard, exacting employers. The Germans are seen as “emotional” (which could mean angry, according to Fladt) but are appreciated due to their strong climbing skills.

The porters are also shown to have little say in their inclusion for a summit bid — the attempt to scale the actual peak, as opposed to only carrying loads to higher camps. Farhad Khan, for instance, was prohibited from going past a certain point in 2005 by a Japanese team, and Hazil Shah was not allowed to summit Gasherbrum-II in 1997 by an Iranian group.

Although the author does not address the issue of competition between Balti and Shimshali porters in detail, she touches upon it in an interview that includes the mention of a rescue mission on Nanga Parbat where the Baltis apparently declined to touch the body of a deceased climber, leaving a Shimshali porter to handle it alone. It would have been interesting to read more about the incident, since all the Balti porters I have known have been nothing but extremely respectful towards human life and death.

Overall, Fladt has produced a comprehensive and engaging book on the personal and collective histories of local porters as well as the social and economic issues they face. She also offers a broad picture of the area they come from — its people, culture, way of life, history and geography. It even includes an account of the day-to-day lives of those herding yaks in the high pastures of northern Pakistan.

Exciting and well-researched,And Death Walks with Them presents a compelling narrative. As the writer herself puts it in the introduction, “To read or not to read is the reader’s prerogative; however, writing the book was worth the effort.” I am certain her efforts will be highly appreciated by the mountain tourism community of Pakistan.

This article was published in the Herald's December 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Earlier in the year, I was invited to the launch of a literary review titled The Aleph Review at the home of its publisher and editor-in-chief, Mehvash Amin. In the midst of a conclave of the Lahore Cantonment’s towering, old trees, a warm, spring breeze, and the whiff of a sticky sweetness from hundreds of flowers, Amin launched the Review, an anthology of English literature by Pakistani poets spanning the history of the country and its breadth of skill — ranging from poetry to interview to humor to prose.

Intrigued by the freshly-minted, glossy-paged Review in my hand, I delved into Taufiq Rafat’s seminal essay titled ‘Defining the Pakistani Idiom’. Rafat is featured on the cover of the Review, dedicated to him as the ‘Father of the Pakistani Idiom in English Poetry’ and, on a personal level, as Amin’s late mentor. Rafat’s ‘Pakistani idiom’ uses image-filled language to demonstrate a Pakistani sensibility. Esteemed academic Shaista Sirajuddin, whose essay ‘Taufiq Rafat’s Use of Language’ is in the Review, describes Rafat’s ‘Pakistani idiom’ as including “images which, while fresh and vivid, are carefully modulated to ensure that the overall effect is one of the ordinary and familiar, so that the writing steers clear of romanticism and conventional poeticising.”

“If you record your experiences in poetry while being true idiomatically to your own surroundings, there is a veracity and truthfulness to the writing,” Amin says about what Rafat taught her as her mentor during her days studying English literature at Lahore’s Kinnaird College for Women. Truthfulness, a certain honesty in the pursuit and subsequent execution of what one loves, is the driving force and standout quality of the Review. Poets both old and new breathe life into pages upon pages of poetry. Not only do the likes of Adrian Hussain and Ilona Yusuf make an entrance, but one discovers newer stars like Kyla Pasha and Afshan Shafi. In a line from Shafi’s poem ‘What They’re Looking for in a Girl’ – “some require the sleek and wondrous /textile of her to be not unlike/ a kind of molasses /where one desires the July concertina /of her bruised and rambunctious aspect /more than the manner of her manner” – she speaks to women in a way few can outside the ‘Pakistani idiom’.

Moving on to prose, the Review does not have as much fiction as it does poetry, but it makes up for it with attention to diversity of form with an assortment of essays, fiction, humour, screenplays, reportage, and even an obituary. In the fiction section, Zulfikar Ghose makes an entrance. In memoirs, Soniah Kamal's ‘A Love Story, Too’ about a Pakistani woman who proposes to her love interest after meeting him on the internet is sharp and witty, with simple, effective language and storytelling that grips the reader. Shahbaz Taseer ’s ‘The First Phone Call’ about the first (and then believed to be the last) moment he spoke to his family after being kidnapped is moving in the most visceral way. He writes: “At this moment I found a strange strength … ‘I fear no man, I only fear you. I beg from no man, I only ask from you,’ I intoned. It’s funny how strong you can stand in the face of tragedy when you feel God is with you. I believed with all my heart that He was with me… ”

This is a literary review but a love of art is running parallel. Much like the writers, the featured artists range from the renowned to the upcoming: Anam Hummayun to Saeed Akhtar to R M Naeem to Noor Mahmood. Amin’s mother, Jamila Masud , was an artist and sculptor, and Amin believes the artwork in the Review “corroborates the story alongside which it was placed”. The Review is a textual and visual treat; it brings lovers of words as well as art together in an ode to creativity. “The Review is my way of encouraging young people – what I was decades ago – to be printed alongside published authors. I hope that encourages them to write and avoid the circumambulating journey that I had to take to get to exactly the point that I started from.”

Amin, who has been editor of English-language magazines Libas and Hello! Pakistan, says she would write fiction any time she had outside of her work and raising her children, but did not know how to publish or sell her writing until a friend forced her to send it to journals. She hopes to fill the gap: “Prose is definitely preferred over poetry. Poets can only hope to be published in literary journals, or getting their chapbooks published. The Review is very indulgent about poetry, and hopes to project good poets!” In a literary world in which few established writers make time for mentorship, Amin’s idea is a noble one that appears to originate, in part, from the influence of her own mentor Taufiq Rafat.

The Aleph Review has come to us at a time when established writers appear to be doing well but younger ones have no mentorship, no place for publishing new writing in Pakistan apart from poor-quality publications printed once every few years that no one bothers reading, and no chance of hoping to turn any sort of writing talent into a tenable profession. With Mehvash Amin at the helm of The Aleph Review, one hopes her talent, the quality of the Review, and her will to create a haven for those who love to write and those who love to read brings forth a new age of writing.

At the moment, Amin and her team are busy compiling a second issue. It will have a lot of what made the first one special; and more: more languages (a graphic story translated from Urdu and Punjabi mahiyas), more colour and more writers from South Asia and the world.

A previous version of this review stated that Soniah Kamal's 'A Love Story, Too' falls under the Review's fiction section. Kamal's story is a memoir and a work of non-fiction. We apologise for the error.

This essay must start with a qualification: it offers only a selective overview of developments in modern and contemporary art in Pakistan. Here, the term ‘modern’ is used for the art produced between the middle of the 20th century and the beginning of 1990s; after that ‘contemporary’ art comes into vogue. Modernism largely avoids engagement with the immediate and the present.

Rather than focusing on specific social circ*mstances or engaging with current events, modern art offers metaphoric and transcendent alternatives to the real world. Its materials and mediums seek permanence. By contrast, contemporary art is immersed in the immediate and the present. Unlike modernism, it offers no transcendence but instead engages with existing conditions. It is often ‘post-medium’ as ‘contemporary’ artists usually employ diverse materials and techniques that include ephemeral and time-based mediums.

Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1894–1975) enjoyed a long and productive career and stands out as the first prominent modern Indian Muslim artist. He studied at the Mayo School of Art in Lahore circa 1911 and began painting early in his life. He forged a distinctive style and grounded his art in the ideas of Urdu writers and poets. By the 1920s, under the influence of poet Muhammad Iqbal’s pan-Islamic ideas, he started basing his paintings on consciously Islamic and Mughal aesthetics. His influential publication – Muraqqa’-i Chughtai (published in 1928) that illustrates the poetry of Mirza Ghalib – marks this shift. Chughtai and Iqbal possessed a cosmopolitan Muslim imagination during the first half of the 20th century when independent nation states in South Asia and much of the Middle East had not yet materialised. But while Iqbal’s later poetry and philosophy is characterised by dynamism, Chughtai’s artistic ethos is marked by introspective stasis. His early paintings are set outdoors or in simple architectural frames, illustrating Hindu mythological figures. By contrast, his later paintings are set in arabesque interiors in which female figures are covered in elaborate, stylised layers of clothing. These paintings are not based on a particular narrative but create an aesthetic universe akin to the one conjured by classical Urdu ghazal.

Chughtai was over 50 years old in 1947 but, while he remained an admired figure, he had no prominent disciples in the newly created Pakistan who would follow in his artistic footsteps. Pakistani art needed a new formal language that could better express the challenges of mid-century modernity and decolonisation. For a fully modernist artistic practice to emerge, Pakistan also needed a restructuring of its art schools and exhibition venues since a large number of art teachers, students and curators had left for India after Partition.

At the time of its creation, the country faced a difficult landscape for fine arts. Even Lahore – that at the time had two schools for art instruction, the Mayo School of Art and the Department of Fine Arts at the Punjab University – was in a poor shape because of the departure of many art instructors and students. Karachi virtually had no art scene before 1947 and there was not a single art school in East Pakistan.

Key institutional developments took place over the next two decades. The Mayo School of Art was upgraded to the National College of Arts (NCA) in 1958, a move that facilitated a greater focus on the teaching of modern art. During the tenure of Shakir Ali (1916–1975) – first as an instructor in painting from 1952 to 1961 and then as principal from 1961 to 1969 – NCA became an incubator of modernism in West Pakistan. At the Punjab University, expressionist painter Anna Molka Ahmed (1917–1995) became the head of the Department of Fine Arts and held the post for many years, organising numerous exhibitions during the 1950s and publishing many catalogues on emerging artists. In Dhaka, Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) founded the influential Institute of Fine Arts in 1948. Artistic societies and arts councils emerged in many cities. These included the Arts Council in Karachi, the Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore and the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Rawalpindi that artist Zubeida Agha (1922–1997) headed for 16 years beginning in 1961. When scholar and historian Aziz Ahmad noted in 1965 that the “Westernized elite of Pakistan takes its modern art seriously”, he was also commenting on the evolving reception of modern art in the country over the previous 17 years.

Zainul Abedin, one of the best-known artists at the birth of Pakistan, played a key role in promoting art across the country, especially in East Pakistan. He studied painting at the Government School of Art in Calcutta from 1933 to 1938 and then taught there until 1947 before moving to Dhaka. His work first attracted public attention in 1943 when he produced a powerful series of drawings on the famine in Bengal. As the founder principal of Dhaka’s Institute of Fine Arts, he soon turned it into the best art school in Pakistan. Not only was his art practice exemplary for his students, he was also respected for his administrative skills which he judiciously exercised to promote art and crafts in both wings of the country. After Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, he came to be regarded as the founding figure of modern Bangladeshi art.

His practice was divided between modernist experimentation and depiction of folk and tribal elements in East Bengal’s culture. As Badruddin Jahangir has pointed out, Zainul Abedin avoided painting “pictures of Muslim glory” like Chughtai did. He, instead, portrayed peasants and bulls from rural Bengal. Human beings and animals in his work appear as labouring bodies and heroic figures engaged in struggle. He also recognised the need to create a rooted modern high culture because the Bengali bhadralok (middle class) high culture of those times was seen as Hindu culture and was thus disapproved of by the West Pakistani ideologues. He argued for and practised a “Bengali modernism” based on folk themes, abstracting them into motifs characterised by rhythm and arrangement of colour and pattern.

Other artists from East Pakistan active during 1950s and 1960s include Quamrul Hassan (1921-1988), SM Sultan (1923–1994), Hamidur Rahman (1928–1988), Mohammad Kibria (1929-2011), Aminul Islam (1931-2011) and the pioneering modernist sculptor Novera Ahmed (1939-2015). A lively artistic exchange then flourished between the eastern and western wing of the country despite political tensions. Exhibitions in one wing featured works from the other wing and artists travelled frequently between the two parts of Pakistan.

Zubeida Agha’s solo exhibition of provocative “ultra-modern” paintings in 1949 “fired the first shot”, as noted a critic who marked it as a key event in the emergence of modernism in the country. She was Pakistan’s first properly modernist painter. Her enlightened family had encouraged her early interest in art in the 1940s. She was deeply struck by the modernist painter Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) who had died young in Lahore and whose unconventional life and art have become the stuff of legend. Apart from her work as the director of Rawalpindi’s Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zubeida Agha was involved in discussions and plans for setting up a national art gallery and a national art collection.

She led a mostly reclusive life. Her engagement with modernism was a focused, lifelong endeavour, forged through her study of Greek philosophy, classical Western music and mysticism as well as her fascination with the urban. Her later paintings move between depiction and abstraction and are characterised above all by decorative motifs in dazzling colours. Yet the very richness and surfeit of her ornamental aesthetic create a modernist effect — of a reflexive alienation. Unlike the flattened picture plane of Chughtai’s watercolours, her “third dimension” is seen as a modernist artistic structure in which the dynamism and balance of elements express ideas, tonalities and moods.

Ahmed Parvez (1926–1979), who spent a decade in the United Kingdom starting from 1955 before returning to Pakistan, also developed a dynamic language of colourist abstractions. In contrast with the contemplative compositions of Zubeida Agha’s work, however, his explosive forms mirror his volatile existential dilemmas.

The decades immediately after independence saw important political developments take place that would come to shape modern Pakistani art. Soon after, Pakistan’s founding, military-bureaucratic-industrial establishment concentrated in the western part of the country started following unwise policies that alienated East Pakistan. As a Cold War ally of the United States, Pakistan also suppressed leftist intellectuals and activists. But repression alone cannot fully explain why Pakistani artists disavowed realism and adopted modernism. A major reason was that modernism helped them express subjective and social predicaments in a more complex manner than was possible through realism.

Some early modernists such as Shakir Ali were also leftist political activists. He began his artistic training in 1937 in Delhi and joined the J. J. School of Art in Bombay in 1938 as a student. By then he was also contributing progressive Urdu texts to literary journals. He later studied and worked in London, France and Prague for many years. There he was associated with socialist youth groups. His mentoring and personality were decisive in inspiring a generation of students and fellow artists who emerged on the art scene between the 1950s and 1970s. These include figurative cubist painter Ali Imam (1924–2002), Anwar Jalal Shemza (1929–1985) and Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999).

Shakir Ali’s modernism was restrained and disciplined. He focused his work on exploring form and composition rather than on narrative and drama. Birds, cages, moon and flowers became symbols in his paintings for human finitude and its transcendence through imagination. He remained immune to jingoistic motivations as is clear from his refusal to assume a nationalist stance during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan. Indeed, the lives of Zubeida Agha, Shakir Ali and many key artists of the generation that followed them, including that of Zahoor ul Akhlaq, are marked by an enigmatic silence on many issues of public importance. Their works were giving shape to an artistic project aimed at exploring visual allegories for ethical and social dilemmas more deeply than was possible through public debate in that era.

During the 1960s and 1970s, calligraphic modernism formed an increasingly influential mode of expression though Hanif Ramay (1930–2006) had started reformulating calligraphy to express abstract ideas as early as the 1950s. Iqbal Geoffrey (born in 1939) developed an expressionist calligraphic practice, accompanied by a playful Dadaist performative persona, during his stay in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1960s. Anwar Jalal Shemza, who was also a noted Urdu writer, moved to the United Kingdom during the mid-1950s and developed an important body of abstract calligraphic work. Inspired by Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, Arabic calligraphy and carpet designs – his family had earlier been involved in the carpet business – he worked out his aesthetic mode of expression over the course of a disciplined career. His Roots series, executed in the mid-1980s towards the end of his life, exhibits remarkable formal restraint as it expresses the anguish of an expatriate. Jamil Naqsh (born in 1938 and now based in London) has also created numerous abstract calligraphic paintings apart from his signature figurative oeuvre.

But the greatest practitioner of calligraphic modernism is Pakistan’s most celebrated artist Sadequain (1930–1987). His rise to extraordinary fame commenced in 1955 when he exhibited his works in Karachi with the support of Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a liberal patron of arts. Sadequain soon received many prestigious government commissions. A large number of murals he executed between 1957 and his death have reinforced his myth as a suffering but heroic artist. His gigantic 1967 mural at Mangla Dam, titled The Saga of Labour, is based on Iqbal’s poetry and celebrates humanity’s progress through labour and modernisation.

During a residency at Gadani near Karachi in the late 1950s, Sadequain encountered large cactus plants whose vertical, leafless and prickly branches formed silhouettes suggestive of calligraphic forms. He subsequently moved towards an imagery that contained exaggerated linear features drawn like cactus plants. His self-portraits and murals evoke a sense of movement and dynamism that mark his most significant works of the late 1960s, including his 1968 paintings based on Ghalib’s poetry. His residence in Paris during the 1960s was also formative in his artistic development. A 1966 series of drawings he made in France depicts him in his studio with his severed head and in the company of female figures. The drawings associate Sadequain with transgressive Sufis such as Sarmad (whose head was cut off on the order of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1661) and with Picasso’s drawings and prints from 1930s on the mythos of the artist and the model.

Sadequain charted a unique artistic trajectory. He remained close to the state that promoted calligraphy during the Islamisation of the 1970s and 1980s yet he exhibited aspects of transgressive Sufism through his persona. His star status also allowed him to address an audience wider than the urban elites. As Lahore-based artist Ijaz ul Hassan (born in 1940) has aptly noted: “[Sadequain] never hesitated to glorify the inherent strength and creative spirit of man, and his ability to build a better world … [He] was the first to have liberated painting from private homes and transformed it into a public art … ”

Other modernists have also broken new ground. Rasheed Araeen, who was born in Karachi in 1935 but moved to London in 1964, has been producing art based on constructivism and geometry while at the same time being active against racism and inequality. Race and inequality have formal value as well as social significance in his art. In 1987, he founded and began editing Third Text, a journal that offers an important global critical platform for writings on modern and contemporary art. In recent years, he has engaged more closely with artistic and intellectual developments in Pakistan.

Karachi-based artist Shahid Sajjad (1936-2014) was a pioneer sculptor in carved wood and cast metal. His work continues to influence subsequent practitioners of these genres across Pakistan. A R Nagori (1939-2011), who taught art at the Sindh University, Jamshoro, addressed marginalisation and inequality in expressionist paintings that depict symbolic facets of aboriginal communities in Sindh and the surreal excesses of General Ziaul Haq’s regime. Zahoor ul Akhlaq created drawings, paintings and sculpture that have left deep and formative impacts on numerous artists working today. And Imran Mir (1950-2014) was one of the first few to systematically investigate geometric forms in painting and sculpture.

Many of the latter-day modernists were still actively producing art during the 1990s even though modernism had begun to transition to contemporary art by then.

Contemporary art practices emerged in the context of specific political, economic and global developments: the rise of Islamist politics since the mid-1970s, the emergence of feminist activism during the 1980s, the restoration of an unstable democracy (in 1988-1999), the privatisation of state-owned businesses under direction from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the accelerated growth of mega cities, the migrations of skilled and unskilled workers abroad in large numbers, the arrival of global satellite television in the early 1990s, the advent of Internet and liberalisation of media, and the impact of foreign artists, curators, biennials and residencies. As these developments stirred and agitated the artistic community in Pakistan, some artists found the formal and thematic framework employed by their modernist predecessors as inadequate. Pakistani art practice had been primarily easel-based oil or watercolour painting or sculpture till the early 1990s. Its formal modes were also focused on landscapes, calligraphic abstraction and regional, historical figures and symbols.

Contemporary artists wanted to address social concerns more directly than was possible with the languages of modernism. They were also intrigued by the artistic potential of new mediums and technologies. These motivations are evident in the work of artists who are making increasing forays into mediums previously marginal to art in Pakistan such as performance and video. Sculptor Amin Gulgee has created a regular platform to support performance art in Karachi. Hurmat Ul Ain and Rabbya Nasser have done a number of collaborative performances. Photography has matured as an important medium for artistic expression. While Arif Mahmood has pursued a subjective lyrical approach in his photos, Nashmia Haroon and Naila Mahmood have documented social and spatial inequities in their photography. Others such as Sajjad Ahmed, Aamir Habib, Amber Hammad, Aisha Abid Hussain, Sumaya Durrani, Anwar Saeed, Mohsin Shafi, Mahbub Shah, Zoya Siddiqui and Iqra Tanveer have extensively employed lens-based montage, staging, manipulation and conceptual approaches. Bani Abidi, Sophia Balagam, Yaminay Chaudhri, Ferwa Ibrahim, Haider Ali Jan, Ismet Khawaja, Mariah Lookman, Basir Mahmood, Sarah Mumtaz, Aroosa Rana, Fazal Rizvi and Shahzia Sikander have used video and new media as key modes for their artistic expression.

A representative selection of diverse contemporary artworks can be viewed in the catalogue of the Rising Tide exhibition curated by Naiza Khan in 2010 and in Salima Hashmi’s more recent book, The Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art (published in 2015).

A major contributor to the growth of contemporary art is the evolution of an art school culture that has proliferated in recent decades. Many innovative contemporary artists today are either former students of the NCA, the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS), Karachi, and the Beaconhouse National University (BNU), Lahore, or they are teachers at these institutions.

During the last few decades, faculty at the NCA has included such accomplished artists and art teachers as Bashir Ahmad, Naazish Ata-Ullah, Jamil Baloch, Colin David, Salima Hashmi, Muhammad Atif Khan, Afshar Malik, Quddus Mirza, R M Naeem, Imran Qureshi, Qudsia Rahim, Anwar Saeed, Nausheen Saeed and Beate Terfloth. While miniature painting had been taught at the NCA for decades, by the 1980s under encouragement by Zahoor ul Akhlaq — who was interested in the miniature’s underlying structure — its pedagogy converged with other aesthetic frameworks. The NCA has consequently produced notable New Miniature artists from the 1990s onwards. These include Waseem Ahmed, Khadim Ali, Ayesha Durrani, Irfan Hasan, Ahsan Jamal, Aisha Khalid, Hasnat Mehmood, Murad Khan Mumtaz, Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Wardha Shabbir, Madiha Sikander, Shahzia Sikander, Aakif Suri, Saira Wasim and Muhammad Zeeshan. Their work ranges from meticulously rendered figures and repeated floral and decorative motifs on vasli paper to unorthodox sculptures and large scale installations.

The other change brought about by the NCA is an expansion of artistic activity beyond the issues and concerns of big cities and the likes and dislikes of their elites. Being a state institution, it admits a diverse student body that cuts across rural and urban divides and other distinctions based on class, province and ethnicity. Many contemporary artists trained by the NCA come from different parts of Pakistan but they have made Lahore their home. A number of them – Noor Ali Chagani, Imran Channa, Shakila Haider, Ali Kazim, Waqas Khan, Nadia Khawaja, Rehana Mangi, Usman Saeed and Mohammad Ali Talpur – employ in their works a rigorous and repetitive mode of expression pioneered by Zahoor ul Akhlaq and the recently deceased former NCA teacher Lala Rukh (1948-2017). While Zahoor ul Akhlaq investigated the tension between geometry and narrative at a structural level, Lala Rukh was steadfastly committed to her spare, minimalist practice on diverse and unorthodox materials.

The simultaneous proliferation of art schools has also created a competitive environment in which teachers and students are more willing to experiment than ever before. The work of many BNU graduates employs innovative conceptual strategies and digital technologies. Salima Hashmi served as the founding dean of its School of Visual Arts & Design from 2003 till recently. Its faculty members have included David Alesworth, Unum Babar, Sophie Ernst, Malcolm Hutcheson, Samina Iqbal, Ghulam Mohammad, Huma Mulji, Rashid Rana, Ali Raza, Razia Sadik and Risham Syed.

The IVS, founded in 1989, has had a notable art faculty that includes Meher Afroz, Roohi Ahmed, David Alesworth, Elizabeth Dadi, Saba Iqbal, Naiza Khan, Naila Mahmood, Samina Mansuri, Asma Mundrawala, Nurayah Sheikh Nabi, Seher Naveed, Muzzumil Ruheel, Sadia Salim, Gemma Sharpe, Saira Sheikh, Adeela Suleman, Munawar Ali Syed, Omer Wasim and Muhammad Zeeshan. Its teachers and students experiment with diverse forms, structures and materials while focussing on Karachi’s complex urban issues such as identity, labour, infrastructure and public space. Established a decade after the IVS by artist Durriya Kazi, the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Karachi has also trained many active practitioners of contemporary art.

Some artists trained at these institutions have brought traditional mediums in conversation with diverse non-traditional materials and approaches. Akram Dost Baloch in Quetta and Abdul Jabbar Gull in Karachi, for instance, work with carved, constructed and relief sculptural works. Ehsan ul Haq, Mehreen Murtaza, Seema Nusrat and Ayesha Zulfiqar have made conceptual multimedia installations. Many others – such as Sana Arjumand and Jamal Shah in Islamabad, Numair Abbasi, Moeen Faruqi, Madiha Hyder, Rabeya Jalil, Unver Shafi and Adeel uz Zafar in Karachi and Rabia Ajaz, Nurjahan Akhlaq, Fahd Burki, Fatima Haider, Sehr Jalil, Ayaz Jokhio, Madyha Leghari, Zahid Mayo, Imran Mudassar, Abdullah Qureshi, Kiran Saleem and Inaam Zafar in Lahore – have been committed to drawing, painting and printmaking in abstract, expressionist, figurative and narrative modes.

Increased opportunities for higher education as well as residencies and workshops abroad have allowed artists to learn and practice new skills. Karachi-based Vasl Artists’ Collective (part of the Triangle Arts Network) has initiated important residency programmes since its founding in 2000. Recent ventures by Karachi’s Sanat Gallery and Saba Khan’s Murree Museum Artists Residency are also notable initiatives. The Lahore Biennale Foundation has supported a number of prominent and innovative public art projects. The move towards exhibitions curated around a theme – by such curators as Aasim Akhtar, Hajra Haider Karrar, Adnan Madani, Zarmeené Shah and Aziz Sohail among others – is another recent development that is prompting artists to explore new ways to create and showcase their works.

This does not mean that all is well and wonderful in Pakistan’s art scene. A major issue is the near-absence of rigorous exposure to the study of humanities, social sciences and critical theory. This ultimately limits the intellectual growth of art graduates. For example, many young artists continue to simply quote historical motifs and artistic fragments from the past in their compositions. Others replace original motifs in ancient works with contemporary images or juxtapose them with commodity visuals. Rarely are these attempts groundbreaking. They are symptomatic of an inadequate critical ability to meaningfully engage with the history of art — a necessary part of finding one’s path as an artist. A deeper understanding of Indic art, miniature painting and western art movements may offer students more fundamental lessons pertaining to scale, structure and finesse in formal terms (of which Zahoor ul Akhlaq serves as an earlier exemplar) as well as those concerning the social significance of such artistic concerns as patronage, circulation, address, narrative, history and economy. It does not help when graduating students triumphantly sell their work during degree shows. This reinforces the notion that market success is the primary measure of an artwork’s value rather than the process of research and investigation and the inevitably awkward initial grappling with complex aesthetic and social questions.

A related problem is the absence of robust platforms for intellectual debate. The few journals on art or culture that exist in Pakistan have been unable to frame key issues in ways that engender serious discussion. Even these journals have not been published regularly. Two of them – Sohbat published by the NCA and Nukta Art issued from Karachi – folded recently, leaving in their wake an even more impoverished discourse on art. Online journal ArtNow: Contemporary Art of Pakistan has thus assumed great significance as far as reviews and criticism of contemporary art in Pakistan are concerned.

This is partly addressed by graduate programmes at the NCA, led by Lala Rukh earlier and Farida Batool at present. The focus on the study of humanities at the undergraduate level at the recently founded Habib University in Karachi and the announcement of a new undergraduate cultural studies programme at the NCA offer grounds for optimism. A critical mass of engaged writers and theorists on art and culture may emerge in the years to come.

Democracy was restored in Pakistan in 1988 but it brought little relief to Karachi. Throughout the 1990s, the city had a severely depressed economy and experienced deadly violence between the government and identity-based political groups. But Karachi is also remarkable for its ever-proliferating commercial energy and its ceaselessly vibrant visual culture. The rise of popular urban aesthetics during the 1990s in the city needs to be situated against this background. Initiated by the art practices of David Alesworth, Elizabeth Dadi, myself and Durriya Kazi, this development is sometimes referred to as “Karachi Pop”. Its aesthetics bypass fidelity to national or folk authenticity and deploy informal urban objects and popular images to create photographs, sculpture and multi-media-based works that explore cinematic fantasy and everyday desire. Other artists who have similarly worked extensively with urban and media-popular cultures include Faiza Butt, Haider Ali Jan, Saba Khan, Ahmed Ali Manganhar, Huma Mulji, Rashid Rana and Adeela Suleman.

Many contemporary artists have worked on the complex ramifications of the post-9/11 era. Sensitive portraits of young madrasa students by Hamra Abbas in her work God Grows on Trees (2008), Rashid Rana’s digital photomontages that bring opposites together in perpetual tension and Imran Qureshi’s Moderate Enlightenment miniature paintings (2006-08) as well as his large scale installation at the Sharjah Biennial (2011) are among the most thoughtful works in this regard. 9/11, however, has also resulted in the production of many one-dimensional works that serve little purpose other than manifesting how global terrorism has eclipsed other important issues that contemporary art ought to have been investigating.

Feminism, too, has been a major theme in contemporary art. During the 1980s, feminist artists and poets emerged as the most vocal opponents of Zia’s Islamisation policies. Artists and activists Salima Hashmi and Lala Rukh have played a major role in this opposition. Since then many other artists have employed various modes of expression and genres to explore feminist themes and ideas. Naiza Khan’s art has explored the materiality of the female body since the early 1990s; Aisha Khalid’s paintings have investigated the liminal status of the female body trapped within decorative and ornamental motifs; Farida Batool’s photographic work critically locates the vulnerability of the ludic female body in urban space; Ayesha Jatoi has made striking interventions on public monuments that display military hardware; Adeela Suleman’s early work with decorated cooking utensils highlights the dangers women motorcycle riders face; Risham Syed has utilised embroidery and fabrics to highlight the disjunction between genteel domesticity and violence in public spaces; and Rabia Hassan’s videos draw attention to the rampant objectification of women’s bodies in Pakistani commercial cinema.

Globalisation’s impact on contemporary art has also been significant. It has reconfigured the relationship between home and diaspora through ease in foreign travel and developments in communication technologies. Home and diaspora now exist in much closer proximity than was the case in the past. Many Pakistani artists have migrated abroad but they are producing artworks on themes and subjects that directly or indirectly link them to their home country. One of the most prominent among these expatriates is Bani Abidi. She has lived in India and Germany but continues to tackle fraught issues of identity and everyday life in Pakistan. Huma Bhabha, who developed her career primarily in New York, has created a series of apocalyptic prints based on photographs from Karachi titled Reconstructions (2007) and Seher Shah (now based in India) has explored haunting afterimages of exposure to Mughal and British colonial imagery. Other artists living abroad include Mariam Suhail and Masooma Syed (both based in India), Mariah Lookman (who resides in Sri Lanka), Saira Ansari, Rajaa Khalid, Saba Qizilbash and Hasnat Mahmood (who live and work in the United Arab Emirates), Humaira Abid, Anila Qayyum Agha, Komail Aijazuddin, Ambreen Butt, Khalil Chishtee, Ruby Chishti, Simeen Farhat, Talha Rathore, Hiba Schahbaz, Shahzia Sikander, Salman Toor and Saira Wasim (all based in the United States), Farina Alam and Faiza Butt (based in London), Khadim Ali, Nusra Latif Qureshi and Abdullah M I Syed (who have lived in Australia) and Samina Mansuri, Tazeen Qayyum, Amin Rehman and Sumaira Tazeen (who have migrated to Canada).

A more direct engagement of art with the enormous issues of social justice in Pakistan is also developing amongst contemporary artists. By making site-specific interventions (instead of creating discrete art objects such as paintings and sculptures), some artist collectives are investigating social processes and relations in modes that venture beyond the dominant ways of artistic expression. The Awami Art Collective in Lahore has done projects in public spaces that critique sectarianism and destructive urban development. Karachi-based Tentative Collective has focused on making interventions in subaltern communities of the city. And the archival and research-based work by Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani analyses how large-scale inequality is being structurally entrenched on the physical and socioeconomic margins of Karachi.

This essay was completed before two major art events – the Karachi Biennale curated by Amin Gulgee and the Lahore Biennale – have transpired. One hopes and expects that these ventures will distinctively and positively transform the trajectory of contemporary art in Pakistan in the months and years to come.

Some of the experimental contemporary art work has been supported by Vasl, Gandhara-Art and the Lahore Biennale Foundation. But to continue to flourish, it urgently needs sustained and substantial support from state and private cultural organisations for research and production. It also requires prominent, large-scale, not-for-profit, intelligently curated spaces for its display. Private collectors spend large sums of money to acquire a single artwork but do not seem to comprehend the long-term value of incubating investigative artistic practice and scholarship that do not immediately yield shiny trophies for private possession. Grants through applications adjudged by juries coupled with ongoing mentorship through a research process can encourage young artists, curators and researchers to begin such investigations. Existing museums can also create spaces for contemporary projects and programmes to foster non-commercial art. This will have the additional advantage of placing experimental work in a critical dialogue with the existing museum collections.

Pakistan is a vast and diverse country. Its social and cultural dimensions, in which rapid transformations are transpiring not always peacefully, remain highly under-examined. Apart from the undoubtedly urgent and highly visible issues of violence and political and media scandals, a whole host of other processes are unfolding rather silently. These include dramatic changes in rural and urban ecologies; the rise of new informal economies and labour practices; the capture of natural resources and economic development by crony capitalism; the disastrous state of education and other human development indicators; growing sectarianism and a simultaneous scripturalisation and mediatisation of religion; the tensions and collaborations between linguistic groups and the formation of new ethnicities; the complex traffic between folk authenticity and televised popular cultures; the transformative spread of social media technologies; the reconstitution of social hierarchies in emerging digital and biometric infrastructures; and marked changes in familial structures and sexual mores — just to notate a few. Only a few artists are addressing such issues and that too only tangentially.

Committed contemporary art practice, its thoughtful curating and incisive criticism and scholarship on it can provide unrivalled insights into these consequential developments. These diverse analytical and creative perspectives will view Pakistan not through the lens of narrow exceptionalism but by developing comparative insights with reference to the adjoining regions of South and West Asia as well as to the larger Global South. But for that to happen, many aspects of contemporary art need to be reoriented towards research and process. The existing strengths of Pakistani contemporary art – its commitment to rigorous studio practice and object-making – need to be brought into a sustained critical conversation with other academic and creative disciplines.

An earlier version of this article was originally published in the Herald's August special issue celebrating 70 years of Pakistan. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is is an Associate Professor in Cornell University’s Department of History of Art.

It is a fact not so easily known, thus rarely acknowledged, that the British colonial project in India at one moment turned into an excavation of India’s pasts. This excavation was aimed at exploring the arrival of various ‘foreign’ people, cultures, religions and politics into the Subcontinent. After all, the Indian peninsula had been the site of commercial, political and military incursions by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the Timurids since 1498. Surely, one reason for the excavation was that, as the latest foreigners to arrive in India, the British wanted a justification for their own arrival. The other reason is tied to the way in which the British saw themselves as heirs to the Romans.

Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, the year Great Britain lost 13 of its colonies in America. All six volumes of the book came out by 1788 to tremendous acclaim and sales. A central theme in Gibbon’s work was his quest for historical linkages between Pax Britannica – the period of British-dominated world order – and Pax Romana.

He provided the foundational stone for a theory that sought to legitimise British colonial enterprise as a successor to a great empire of the past that brought a long era of peace and prosperity for Europe in its wake. Even more influential, I would argue, is his exploration of the relationship between race and politics within the context of the Roman experience. This relationship was immediately employed in legitimising the British conquest of India.

The British formally began their imperial project in India in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey. In 1783, William Jones arrived as a sessions judge at Fort William in Calcutta. Over the next decade, he founded the new science of philology that combined linguistics with human migration patterns and mingling of races across the Indo-European region. He linked ancient languages and prehistoric migrations to the long history of foreign arrivals into India, a process that would culminate in the advent of the British presence in the Subcontinent. He came up with a story that linked Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages via a “common source” that “no longer existed”. This “common source” was “conquerors from other kingdoms in some very remote age”.

By the early 19th century, a new generation of British officers became scholars of India’s pasts. They imagined themselves as latter-day Alexander the Greats, amassing accounts of geographies, peoples and objects that connected India to the Greeks, and by extension to the Romans, of the past. Alexander Burnes, James Tod, Richard F Burton and Edward B Eastwick were most prominent among them.

They travelled between Kabul and Bombay and collected manuscripts, coins and copper utensils in order to establish how India came under Greek influence through Alexander the Great’s conquest of the northwestern parts of the Subcontinent. Their research focused on Greek and Roman trade with India, Alexander’s conquest and the remnants of his armies that stayed back in the areas he had passed through.

They also looked into migrations from the Central Asian Steppe into the Subcontinent and the relationship of all these developments to the evolution of languages, cities, religions and polities. The journals of the royal Asiatic societies of Bengal and Bombay published their findings on the presence of the Arya, the Indo-Parthians, the Indo-Bactrians and the “White Huns” in the Indian subcontinent — communities that had hints of a common Eurasian ancestry.

By the middle of the 19th century, a new generation of British historians took up the project of collating this ‘raw’ data into historical treatises. H M Elliot and M Elphinstone were the forerunners in this generation. They were followed by Vincent Smith, Stanley Lane-Poole, Alexander Cunningham and R B Whitehead, among others. As the British colonial project expanded geographically – from Calcutta to Delhi, from Madras to Bombay and from Lahore to Peshawar – it delved deeper and deeper in time as far as excavation of India’s pasts was concerned.

The roots of the Sanskrit language, the genealogy of the Aryan race, the origins of the Subcontinent’s indigenous “tribes” and the etymology of names of places show up regularly in the huge reams of colonial speeches, journal articles, travelogues, district reports, histories and commentaries of that era. Nestled in the middle of this project – and first highlighted in the middle of the 19th century – is the question of Muslim arrival in India.

The East India Company defeated the Talpur Mirs in 1843 at Miani and conquered the princely state of Sindh. The conquest was cast as a corrective to the Muslim conquest of India — a move to emancipate the Hindus from the clutches of foreign Muslim rule going as far back as the early eighth century. Centred on the delta of the Indus river opening into the Arabian Sea, Sindh comprised a series of ports and large tracts of dry, desert-like terrain.

The state was a borderland for the East India Company at the beginning of the 19th century, though in contemporary maps it is surrounded by other parts of the Subcontinent such as Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab and Balochistan. Indus, uncharted by the company till then, offered an upstream link from Bombay to Lahore, the capital of Ranjit Singh’s Sikh kingdom. Through the deserts of Thar and Balochistan, Sindh linked India to the Durrani court in Kabul.

The company envisioned it as a necessary buffer between its long-established Bombay Presidency and Afghanistan (as well as French and Russian interests in Central Asia and Iran). More importantly, its scholar-warriors had already discovered that it was in Sindh that Muhammad bin Qasim had defeated the polity founded by the “White Huns” – remnants of the Indo-Bactrians – in 712 and pushed the Hindus of India into a millennium of domination by the Muslims. This discovery was immediately put to political use.

Edward Law Ellenborough, governor-general of the East India Company at the time, dramatically brought back the “gates of Somnath” temple from Kabul to show to the Hindus that his company was there to counter Muslim tyranny. In his declaration of 1842 to “all Princes and Chiefs and People of India”, he announced that the return of the spoiled remains of the temple to India avenged “the insult of 800 years ... the gates of the temple of Somnath, so long the memorial of your humiliation, are become the proudest record of your national glory”. Ellenborough’s political strategy was to cast the company as a rectifier of the historical harm the Muslims had inflicted on Hindus. It mattered little that the “gates” had little to do with Somnath.

Charles Napier, a veteran military commander of imperial wars in Europe who was chosen by Ellenborough to conquer Sindh, was a deeply religious man. He had just arrived in India when he launched his campaign in Sindh.

He was convinced that the company had become beholden to commerce and had shied away from its divine mission. He saw the ‘liberation’ of Sindh from its despotic Muslim rulers as his Christian duty. He called the Talpurs the “greatest ruffians” and “imbeciles” who possessed “zenanas filled with young girls torn from their friends” and treated the women in the harem “with revolting barbarity”. The Talpurs, he said, were even prone to enjoying occasional “human sacrifice”.

Napier’s annexation of Sindh on February 17, 1843 was hailed by the British as a heroic event. Some of them likened it to the Battle of Plassey, the founding moment of British rule in India: “Since Clive’s glorious victory at Plassey there has been nothing achieved by native or European troops in India at all to compare to it,” wrote one. It was in his victory that stories about the advent of British rule in India – portrayed as the return of the long displaced and dominated Indo-European races – and those about the origins of Muslim rule in the Subcontinent, presented as domination by a foreign religious power, converged.

British quest for Muslim ‘origins’ in India subsequently shaped the historical consciousness of native historians trained at University of Calcutta, Aligarh Muslim University, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and Osmania University. Shibli Nomani (1857–1914), Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958), Syed Sulaiman Nadvi (1884–1953), R C Majumdar (1888–1980), Mohammad Habib (1895–1971) and B D Mirchandani (1906-1980) are some of the key historians who grappled with the question of Muslim arrival in the Subcontinent as they endeavoured to find a nationalist response to colonial historiography.

Writing in journals such as Calcutta Review, Muslim Review, Islamic Culture and Indian Historical Review, many of them found their efforts to come up with an anti-colonial history clashing with colonial narratives about Muslim rule in India. They struggled to weave Muslim history into a nationalist narrative, given that Muslim rulers in the Subcontinent had been shown by colonial historians to be despots of foreign origin who had demolished countless Hindu temples during their conquests and reigns.

Central to the argument about Muslims in India being religious invaders from outside was a particular text — Chachnama. It entered, in bits and pieces, into colonial historiography in the early 19th century. From Elliot to Elphinstone and Smith, the British historians writing on the history of Islam in India treated Chachnama as a book of conquest. Originally written in Farsi around 1220, it was a self-proclaimed translation of an eighth century Arabic history of Muhammad bin Qasim’s campaign in Sindh. It describes events that preceded his conquest as well those that happened during his stay in this part of the world — a period stretching roughly over 60 years.

In the writings of Indian nationalist historians such as Sarkar and Majumdar, Chachnama and the figure of the outsider Muslim loomed large. Sarkar’s lectures on Indian pasts – as well as his histories of Mughal India – took their cue from British historians and argued that India’s conquest by “foreign immigrant” Muslims differed fundamentally from all preceding invasions because of Islam’s “fiercely monotheistic nature” — something that contrasted with polytheistic religious practices of pre-Islam India. Majumdar’s treatment of the “Arab Conquest of Sind” presented the Muslims as conquerors by disposition who inevitably cast their covetous eyes on India after conquering Spain.

In contrast, a generation of Muslim scholars emphasised historical connections between Arabia and India that predate Muhammad bin Qasim’s arrival. Nomani highlighted those connections in his biographies of the Prophet of Islam and other key figures of early Islam. Between 1882 and 1898, he produced a wide variety of historical essays on the early Muslim state in India, highlighting the earliest links between the two regions. Nadvi and Abdul Halim Sharrar wrote histories of Sindh in the early decades of the 20th century in the same vein. Habib, a Marxist historian, forcefully argued in his 1929 essay Arab Conquest of Sind that Muslims arrived in India not as conquerors but as settlers.

These Muslim historians, however, could not get past Chachnama’s categorisation as a book of conquest. Even after 1947, historians working across South Asia and the United Kingdom have produced further investigations into the history of Muslim pasts in Sindh, treating this ancient text the way the colonial historians did. U M Daudpota, Nabi Bukhsh Khan Baloch, Mubarak Ali, H T Lambrick and Peter Hardy have all written numerous articles and books on Chachnama. They all agree that Sindh’s military conquest by Muhammad bin Qasim heralded Muslim arrival in India.

Yet this ‘origins’ narrative was based on the false categorisation of Chachnama. It reads unlike any other history of conquest written in Arabic or Farsi at the time. It incorporates much that is of little relevance to Muhammad bin Qasim’s invasion and occupation of Sindh. It is less a history of the eighth century and more a political theory for the 13th century. Its claim to be a translation of an earlier Arabic text is, in fact, meant to evoke the memory of nearly 500 years of Muslim presence in Sindh as an era of cohabitation and accommodation.

It offers a history of both land and sea links between ports in Sindh and Gujarat – such as Daybul, Diu and Thane – and the Arabian ports of Aden, Muscat, Bahrain, Dammam and Siraf. It draws upon texts in Farsi, Pahlavi and Prakrit that explore thousands of years of connections between Oman and Yemen on the one hand and Sri Lanka and Zanzibar on the other. In Chachnama, these relationships span trade, marriages, settlement, languages and customs and they render it impossible to create and maintain a dichotomy between the Muslims and the Hindus as being merely rivals.

The book has been deliberately misappropriated and misread by British colonial historians since the early 1820s. They changed the “other” with the “outsider” in their work and a history of belonging became a history of exclusion.

John Jehangir Bede’s doctoral dissertation, The Arabs in Sind: 712-1026 AD, was written within this academic context. Submitted to the University of Utah in 1973, the thesis remained unpublished until Karachi’s Endowment Fund Trust for Preservation of the Heritage of Sindh (EFT) printed it earlier this year.

We do not know why Bede never published his work. Notes on the dust jacket of the book state that all attempts to trace his family or career were largely unsuccessful. The only thing we know is that he worked with Dr Aziz S Atiya, an influential historian of the Crusades, and that his work has been cited and expanded upon by historians such as Derryl MacLean, Mubarak Ali, Muhammad Yar Khan and Yohannan Friedman in the 1980s and 1990s. How are we to read this dissertation in 2017? One possible way is to see what the history of Muslim origins in India, as well as the historiography detailed above, looked like in 1973.

Bede starts his dissertation by reflecting on the fact that the history of Sindh has received little contemporary attention. He observes that this is because there have been relatively few textual sources for this history and that historians have been “generally subject to preconceived prejudices mainly colored by the religious outlook of particular authors”.

Instead of treating the Muslims as religious invaders, he explores an economic basis for their conquest of Sindh by examining a variety of sources, earliest of which date to the middle of the ninth century. In his last chapter, Commerce and Culture in Sind, he draws upon travelogues, merchant accounts and poetry from the ninth and 10th centuries to argue that there once existed an interconnected Indian Ocean world in which Sindh was a pivot.

Bede also subverts the colonial historical narrative that projected British arrival in India as being diametrically different from Muslim arrival in the Subcontinent. He instead states that the history of the Arab conquest of Sindh is quite similar to the history of its British conquest in 1843. “… there is a striking similarity between the Arab administration of Sind and the British administration in India a thousand years later,” he comments.

Bede’s work enters our world as an artefact or an object. It is inert — a frozen specimen from an earlier era of history writing. Its inertness prompts us to look at EFT which has brought this object into the world. EFT is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation dedicated to preserving the “artistic, tangible and intangible heritage” of Sindh. It seems to be doing salutary work in conserving, maintaining and preserving various archaeological sites in Sindh.

The book is part of its publications programme that publishes older, unavailable scholarly writings besides commissioning new works. I, however, see the re-publishing of older scholarship without new, updated, critical introductions as an ill-advised move. This is particularly so for Bede’s work because, being previously unpublished, it has not gone through necessary scholarly review and debate. The Arabs in Sind, thus, appears as a new text to an ordinary reader who has no idea where to place it in scholarship on Sindh or how to understand its contents.

The practice of publishing old texts is common in Pakistan; British-era district gazetteers and other colonial texts are routinely reprinted as de facto introductions to the history of the Subcontinent. The unwholesome after-effect of this is that colonial biases and frameworks remain uncontested and widely popular. There is neither any attempt to decolonise our history nor is there any awareness of what violence colonial knowledge practices have wreaked on writings about our pasts.

Seventy years after Partition, it is about time that readers and writers in Pakistan rethink and reimagine their histories. The past requires analysis in the light of new questions and new critical frameworks. We cannot be held hostage to British narratives about Muslim arrival in India as religion-inspired invaders from Arabia.

Rethinking and reimagining Sindh’s past – especially concerning the era starting from Mohenjodaro and ending in Muhammad bin Qasim’s arrival – is crucially relevant to Pakistan’s history precisely because it will help us determine whether we came here from outside on a divine mission or whether our story is more complex than British colonial historians, as well as our own state-sponsored histories, have us believe.

We need to expand the primary sources of our history and Bede’s treatise offers helpful information on this count. We need to encourage the study of languages such as Sanskrit, Pahlavi, Farsi, Arabic, Sindhi and Gujarati in which these sources were written so that we do not end up misreading and misinterpreting them as we did in the case of Chachnama. These studies can enable our students to look at medieval pasts in all their complexity. We also need to equip our institutions to promote new methods of researching and writing history.

We need all this to stem the erasure of nuance and diversity in historical accounts, a practice that started with colonial historiography and continues in our postcolonial present. The last footnote in Bede’s dissertation offers a strong rationale for working against this erasure.

The note pertains to a paragraph that praises “the successors of the Arabs” who “though Muslims themselves, wisely maintained a tolerant attitude toward their non-Muslim subjects”. What subsequently changed, Bede argues, was the attitude of the later Turkic rulers. The note itself reminds us that “roughly one-fourth of the entire population of Sind was non-Muslim” in 1947. This proportion has continued to decrease since then. The population of Hindus in Sindh was roughly six per cent as per the 1998 census. This should trouble all of us who care for a diverse Pakistan.

Just as Sindh’s past cannot be reduced to the history of one community, one sect or one faith, so should we aim for an inclusive present for the province — as well as for the country.

This was originally published in the Herald's August 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a historian at the Columbia University in New York.

I used to love Wonder Woman. In the postmodern world of ambiguity and ideological confusion (which includes the world of comics), Wonder Woman (aka Diana Prince) remained – refreshingly – modernist. She represented the old-school superhero – old-fashioned and irony-free – fighting the good fight of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’.

Conceived by a psychologist and his wife during World War II, she was meant to be a feminine equivalent to the ultra-masculine Superman. Like Superman, her origins were traced outside the human realm. Like Superman, she represented “all that is good” and fought to protect humanity from destructive forces.

Unlike Superman, she did not have a deep love for human civilisation – the “man’s world”, as she saw it – or meaningful bonds with people (although later writings and rewritings added complexities to her character). Wonder Woman had all the beauty, compassion and nurturing qualities of an ‘ideal’ woman — and all the strength, wrath and condescension of a god.

She was hailed as a feminist icon. However, while she faced many of the same issues ordinary women confront in their daily lives – undermined, harassed, patronised, demeaned – at no point would she get into debates about ‘what feminism means’ or ‘what feminism looks like’.

Wonder Woman was not seeking equality – after all, who would want to be equal or complicit in a system that encouraged “war, hate, greed and lust for power” – because she was certain of her superiority.

“Oh, you stupid girls,” is how she would address women of the world. “Think! And free yourselves! Control those who would oppress others!”

What I loved about her growing up was the moral clarity, staunch anti-war stance, uncompromising ideals and the resulting childlike naivety that was compensated for by superhuman strength. Even her weapons were ‘moral’: anyone ensnared in her Lasso of Truth, for example, was forced to speak the truth.

Given this backdrop, I was disappointed to learn that Israeli actor Gal Gadot would play the latest adaption of the superheroine. Now, I understand the symbolic relevance of selecting a Jewish actor to play a superheroine fighting the Germans in Europe during World War I.

And my issue isn’t even that she is Israeli, as there are many Israelis that are thinking citizens, critical of their state’s policies. But Gadot, who repeats the state narrative, line to line, isn’t one of them. As someone who speaks highly of her time in the Israel Defense Forces – and even posed for Maxim’s shoot of Israeli soldiers (and who does that serve?) – she glamourises an occupation that affects women and children. It promotes a brand of unthinking, uncritical feminism — a feminism that is merely fashionable (i.e. surface).

One of the biggest problems with selecting her to play the role is that some have started conflating Wonder Woman with Gadot, propelling her as a role model for women and girls everywhere. But because this is a film review, not a political discourse, I’m going to separate Wonder Woman (the film) from Gadot (the person) and I hope others are able to do the same.

The film follows Diana of Themyscira as a young child – the only child – in an island ruled by a multi-ethnic, multilingual tribe of warrior women called the Amazons. The Amazons were created by the gods to instill love in the hearts of men and restore peace on Earth during a time of great disorder. They were successful for a while, but men (“easily corruptible”) enslaved them once they returned to their old ways, under the influence of Ares, the god of war.

Zeus and the other gods engaged in a ferocious battle with Ares, but each was killed off one by one by the god of wrath. Diana, “sculpted from clay and given life by Zeus”, was gifted to the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta (Nielsen), as a last wish.

The Amazons led a rebellion to free themselves of man’s tyranny and have since lived on a remote “Paradise Island”, cut off from the outside world. They live in fear that one day Ares will return and destroy their way of life. They are xenophobes and isolationists — but for good reason.

Man finally arrives (or crash-lands) on the island in the 20th century and with him comes war. An American pilot named Steve Trevor (Pine) accidentally discovers Themyscira when his plane crashes off its coast. He is saved by Diana (now a young woman), but the German cruiser that follows Steve to the island prepares assault. In an intense battle that follows, the sword-wielding, horseback-riding Amazons defeat the invaders, but not without heavy casualties.

Under the duress of the Lasso of Truth, Steve reveals his true identity – an American intelligence officer working for the British – and informs the women about the war “to end all wars”, which seems to have no end in sight. Diana knows she cannot stand by while innocent lives are lost. She leaves the island with Steve to join the fight against the Germans, aided by a team of multinational mercenaries. They are also helped (sort of) by Steve’s secretary: Etta Candy (Lucy Davis).

In the world, Diana learns about the strange customs and rules that govern human lives: the uncomfortable clothes women wear in the name of fashion (“how can you fight in this?”); the concept of time and watches that the civilised structure their lives around (“you let this little thing tell you what to do?”); and even discovers romance through her evolving relationship with Steve.

More disturbing for her are the realities of politics, modern warfare and weaponry. “What kind of weapon kills innocents?” she asks. She learns that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not as clearly defined as she thought and there are no clear-cut heroes and villains. “Everyone’s fighting their own battles,” says one character.

In terms of acting, there are some hits and misses. Pike is immensely likeable in his role as the wily intelligence officer. And without giving away any spoilers, we have one really great villain in the form of Ares.

However, Davis’ character, who is supposed to add humour and serves no real purpose other than helping the script move along quickly, is just … bizarre. Fit women are heroes and fat women are the butt of jokes? Where’s the feminist message in that? Gadot is a fairly average actor when it comes to well, acting, but somehow still manages to be convincing in her role — possibly because she looks the part. Or because Wonder Woman isn’t known for strong displays of emotions.

The film could do with a sharper script and some better one-liners, but as an action film primarily, it is thoroughly enjoyable. As someone who does not typically like fight scenes – confused herds of nameless, faceless men flailing around in moments of utter chaos and quick movement – I found myself thinking these were the best parts of the film. They are executed with utter precision and clarity — a bit like the superheroine’s world view.

This was originally published in the Herald's July 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a former staffer of the Herald.

The question of women’s position in society has figured in Pakistani English fiction since independence in 1947. It is reflected in the works of early writers such as Zaibunissa Hamidullah, Bapsi Sidhwa, Sara Suleri and Zulfikar Ghose. In recent times, writers such as Talat Abbasi, Mohammed Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie and Uzma Aslam Khan have also directly and indirectly tackled the same question in their fiction.

Female characters in the works of these writers often highlight the various values, customs and traditions that shape a woman’s life in our society. An assessment of changes in the portrayal of these characters over decades, however, requires their evaluation in the context of what several literary and gender theorists call a feminine consciousness — that is, their reaction and response to their familial, social, political and economic contexts, among other things.

Women in early Pakistani English fiction were shown either as cogs in the wheels of the patriarchal system or as targets of various forms of patriarchal oppression.

As with 19th century British and American fiction represented by the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin and George Eliot, Pakistani fiction writers in the second half of the 20th century drew upon moments of suppression — when female characters/protagonists questioned the nature of patriarchal customs and traditions surrounding them but were not allowed to get away with their questioning.

Such characters, like the ones Zaibunnisa depicted in her short stories, The Young Wife and Other Stories (published in 1958), either had to die or obey their oppressors.

We can argue that a feminine consciousness is not entirely absent in them even when it gets suppressed. By showing them within the context of their restrictions and dilemmas, the writers seem to suggest that in their suppression exist traces of a nascent resistance.

The Sweetness of Tears is a gripping narrative attempt to understandand navigate through multiple religious and national identities thatexist simultaneously within individuals living in exile.

In contrast, Talat’s short stories, Bitter Gourd & Other Stories (published in 2001), portray mostly working-class women who not only question social norms and their position within the domestic and the public spheres, but also break out of patriarchal suppression in their own unique ways. The resistance that was nipped several decades ago has now become a visible and active rebellion.

Feminine consciousness, thus, has been a recurring theme in Pakistani English fiction, though its treatment has differed in different eras. Its exploration is also not restricted to women writing about women, as is traditionally thought, but extends into the writings of some of the celebrated male novelists like Hanif and Hamid.

In their respective novels, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti and Moth Smoke, one finds women not as exploited minorities or as passive subjects but as the very embodiment of spiritual and political change, which results from a unique feminine consciousness.

This essay traces the presence and portrayal of that very change in a select number of Pakistani novels. Since studying the subject in the whole gamut of Pakistani fiction in English is too vast an undertaking to fit into the limited space below, the essay restricts itself to looking into only some of the 21st century novels whose writers and female characters are not necessarily feminists but they do have a consciousness that is uniquely feminine.

Two recent novels, Nafisa Haji’s The Sweetness of Tears (published in 2011) and Sophia Khan’s Yasmeen (published in 2015), probe the feminine consciousness of their protagonists by putting them face-to-face with their moral and social circ*mstances as well as with the need for human bonding and interdependence.

The transnational journeys that their female characters undertake are aimed at healing the wounds inflicted by toxic masculinity and violent politics — both at the personal and collective levels.

This healing reflects an aspect of feminine consciousness that, according to a Romanian professor of gender studies, Camelia Borca, seems to have the capacity to “develop its own traditions, values and compensations” even when the “values and strengths” of women as “a politically suppressed group” may remain unacknowledged.

The negation of this unacknowledged cultural, political and psychological energy possessed by women is deemed by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung and many other theorists as one of the core reasons for our individual and collective wounds.

In the poignant portrayal of Jo’s and Deena’s characters, Nafisadepicts women straddling the contrasts between their inner and outerworlds.

The two novels significantly depart from most other works of Pakistani fiction in terms of their locale. While most other writers depict their characters within a Pakistani context, Nafisa and Sophia delve into a feminine consciousness that emanates from a search for identity by protagonists born and raised abroad. The offspring of expatriate Pakistanis living in the United States, young female characters in these books embark on missions to find their roots through gruelling emotional journeys across borders.

The Sweetness of Tears is a gripping narrative attempt to understand and navigate through multiple religious and national identities that exist simultaneously within individuals living in exile. Nafisa weaves a story of faith colliding with the lived experiences of her protagonists and she tells it with a keen sense of style, adorned with a prose that makes myriad references to the Psalms, Christian hymns and Urdu poetry.

One of her central characters is Jo March — a young American woman who has studied Urdu as a foreign language at university. Raised as an Evangelical Christian, she is fired by a missionary zeal to transform the world.

The other main character is Deena. Living with her Sunni husband in California where she teaches Islamic studies at a university, she was born in a Shia family that had migrated from India to Pakistan after Partition.

Jo believes she is following her calling when she starts working as a translator for American security agents interrogating terrorists in custody at various detention centres around the world. Her faith in her cause is shaken by the violence that underpins the very nature of her work, as well as by her nagging doubts that some of the prisoners she helped interrogate might have been innocent.

She finds herself straddling different worlds where boundaries between the victim and the victimizer get blurred. She quits her job after two years and takes up work with an organisation that is seeking to protect the legal rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Jo is simultaneously exposed to the unsettling truths of her personal life. She discovers that she is the daughter of one Sadiq, a Pakistani who was once in love with her American mother, Angelica. When Jo meets Sadiq, he tells her the story of his life but it makes little impact on her. Only when she meets Sadiq’s mother, Deena, does she realise the pain and suffering of her paternal family.

Deena was tricked into marrying Sadiq’s father who later committed suicide, leaving his young wife to endure Deena was tricked into marrying Sadiq’s father who later committed suicide, leaving his young wife to endure abuse at the hands of her in-laws in Karachi.

Nafisa uses the narrative technique of a story within a story to tell the readers about Deena’s family, her troubled relationship with her influential in-laws and of her love for her childhood neighbour, Umer. Her liberation comes at a heavy price: her son is taken away by her in-laws and she has to migrate to America to forge a new life along with Umer.

In the poignant portrayal of Jo’s and Deena’s characters, Nafisa depicts women straddling the contrasts between their inner and outer worlds. This exposes them to various forms of exclusion — that is, divides created by sectarian identities, power relations and social hierarchies as well as violent conflicts.

Along with the feminine consciousness that Nafisa so beautifully depicts, she also very sensitively brings forth the subject of ‘exiles from the feminine’ (as in the case of Sadiq). In the postscript to the book, she explains why such an exile is important to explore:

“The conversation with my brother made me sad. It made me feel guilty about my access to a treasure of collective memories and sense of self that he and my male cousins were denied. It gave me a perspective of the balance of power between male and female that is far more complex than the one that typically defines women as victims. I saw, for the first time that gender imbalance can be as painful for men as it is oppressive to women … [When] male and female are out of balance in any context, personal or public, everyone suffers. This was something … that I tried to explore in the character and story of Sadiq, who is traumatically severed from his mother and her world of song and stories — left adrift, alone, out of balance and dangerous to anyone in his path. In the same way he is cut off from the existence of his daughter, his biologically feminine legacy to the world. Sadiq is a man twice exiled from the feminine.”

Nafisa’s depiction of the pain and repercussions of being exiled from the feminine confirms Jung’s assertion that our personal and collective wounds have their origin in the absence of the feminine consciousness.

Yasmeen, on the other hand, concerns itself solely to the idea of feminine consciousness. Brilliant and courageous for a debut novel, it tells an intricate tale of a daughter’s quest for her absent mother.

Beautiful and charming, Yasmeen suddenly disappears, leaving behind her heartbroken husband, James, and their emotionally troubled daughter, Irenie, who becomes obsessed with her mother’s absence. All her efforts in maintaining the illusion that Yasmeen is still present in the house do not help her relationship with her father who is a professor of the classics at an American university. Their interaction is marked by silence and monosyllables and barely involves any conversation.

Irenie then finds letters Yasmeen wrote to one Ahmed — who she was in love with in Pakistan before marrying James and leaving for the United States. Forced to unpack the enigma of her mother’s life, the young girl leaves her home in Crawford to live with Yasmeen’s family in Islamabad where she meets Ahmed’s son, Firdaus.

He used to deliver Yasmeen’s letters to his father, away from his own mother’s jealous eyes. After his father’s death, he sent those letters to James. Firdaus also reveals the riddle of Yasmeen’s disappearance: she died in an accident along with Ahmed.

Yasmeen had rushed back to Pakistan from the United States to meet Ahmed in a hospital in Islamabad where he was lying terminally ill. The meeting miraculously brought him back to life and Yasmeen drove him out of the hospital in a car before they met a fatal accident on the road. Irenie’s discovery of her mother’s secret life constitutes an intimate family drama, complete with its obsession with family ties, especially the mother-daughter relationship, in a cross-cultural context.

The story is told through a feminine point of view. Irenie’s quest for truth and closure glows with an archetypal intensity that takes one into the depths of a daughter’s longing for her mother. It also offers readers a feminine understanding of a woman’s love for a man she cannot marry — a passion that she carries into a future life with another man. Whether that is a precursor to another forbidden relationship – between Irenie and Firdaus – is a possibility the book hints at, again, from a feminine angle.

Mohammed Hanif’s second novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, not only taps into the religious and ethnic marginalisation of its protagonist, Alice Bhatti, but also attempts to understand her character in the framework of feminine marginalisation. The two frameworks of marginalisation together define the contours of her life as a female Christian nurse at Karachi’s Sacred Heart Hospital.

Alice is the daughter of a sweeper, Joseph Bhatti, who ensures that she receives a good education. But growing religious intolerance in Karachi and the predatory nature of her social surroundings are not her only, or at least the biggest, concern. Her greatest problem is her striking beauty and the consequent sexual harassment she faces from the doctors, patients and their relatives — among others.

The character of a Muslim weightlifter, Teddy Butt, plays a foil to all that Alice is: he has a masculine and imperceptive outlook in contrast to her compassion and humane consciousness. The two meet in a psychiatric ward where Alice is attacked by the patients and is ‘heroically’ rescued by Butt.

Soon afterwards they fall in love and get married. Through their marriage, Hanif portrays the conflict underlying gender relations and conjugal politics that bring out the best and the worst in the two characters: Teddy is unbearably possessive and starts doubting the fidelity of his beautiful wife. He acts in the typical masculine way of snubbing and controlling the other while deliberately not looking at the facts. In Hanif’s words:

The feminine consciousness is all but absent in most of Mohsin Hamid’swork.

“His heart sinks at the thought that from now on not only is he responsible for his own sleep, he is responsible for hers as well. He watches her face closely. She is back in some dream, smiling. He thinks that this married life is not fair. He is responsible for her sleep but has no control over her dreams.”

It is clear that he does not acknowledge honesty in Alice’s personality. In fact, he casts her existence in his own psychological modelling, which is unreliable and toxic: unknown to his wife, he has been leading a secret double life of a police informant and agent provocateur.

Hanif brings the riot-ridden, turbulent Karachi to life through Teddy’s character and juxtaposes his callous criminality to Alice’s courage and willingness to not give up on her humanity even in the most inhuman of times.

When victims of deadly shootings are brought to the Sacred Heart Hospital, she pays great attention to their care in spite of inadequate equipment at her disposal, her insensitive colleagues and her troubled personal life.

It, therefore, comes as no surprise when, in the novel’s most symbolic moment, she manages to save the life of a newborn baby left for dead. The child’s incredible recovery is attributed to her supernatural powers and people start to relate the whole incident to the Christian legend of Madonna and the child.

Towards the end of the novel, Alice is killed by her enraged and jealous husband but it is important to note that the story does not end in tragedy but with the symbolic rebirth of the rescued child and the consciousness of feminine legacy (shown through legends of female sainthood surrounding Alice’s death).

Critic and editor Muneeza Shamsie, in her remarkable new book Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English (published in 2017), has interpreted Hanif’s novel as a story of “hapless people overtaken by the events beyond their control”.

But Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is also about consciousness that only women come to possess after having gone through various forms of oppression and marginalisation as part of their everyday existence. As in Alice’s case, she not only protects and nurtures the underdog, but also refuses to become cynical and bitter in the toxic and predatory environment around her. She does not change anything but hangs on to what she has in order to heal the world around her.

She not just manages to avoid cynicism and embitterment caused by masculine authority, but also protests against it by engaging herself with the suffering human beings around her — an engagement that ultimately overshadows her husband’s murderous masculinity. Through the heroic life of an ordinary woman and its heart-wrenching portrayal, Hanif certainly has highlighted the need to acknowledge and imbibe the feminine consciousness in order for us to live peaceful lives.

The feminine consciousness is all but absent in most of Mohsin Hamid’s work. Female characters in three of his novels exist only at the periphery of his narrative world and are overshadowed by the stories of his male protagonists.

It is possible to argue that his subject matter does not demand an in-depth exploration of female characters, even though some of them, such as the pretty girl in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (published in 2013), have the potential to have allowed that exploration.

But Hamid’s engaging debut Moth Smoke (published in 2000) strikingly sheds light on the possibility of female agency through Mumtaz’s character. From the tiny glimpses of her character that he shows in the novel, we come to know that she is an educated woman who is not happy with her husband. She learns to deal with her unhappy married life by chronicling the lives of prostitutes and others on the social margins under a pen name, Zulfikar Manto.

Married to a rich businessman, Aurangzeb alias Ozi, and eventually smitten by his best friend Daru, Mumtaz exposes the subterranean stratum of Pakistani society where the rich, like her husband, can get away with murder but where the hapless, like Daru, are left to account for the sins of the high and the mighty. This is how Muneeza writes about Mumtaz’s character in Hybrid Tapestries:

“… Mumtaz also has a secret identity: she is the fearless and famous journalist, Zulfikar Manto. Through her pseudonym, Hamid provides an intertextual engagement with Saadat Hasan Manto but [attempts] to subvert gender roles and patriarchal literary narratives of Urdu literature in which men, not women, are considered bold chroniclers of the unfortunate — prisoners, prostitutes, drug addicts ….”

Muneeza then quotes from Moth Smoke to add to her argument regarding the subversion of gender roles:

“I wrote about things people didn’t want seen, and my writing was noticed. Zulfikar Manto received death threats and awards … I was finding myself again and I was being honest about things I cared for passionately … Childbirth had hurt me inside, and I was finally starting to heal.”

Mumtaz’s character is very convincing in its portrayal of women’s lives in the wealthy-class setting. She feels betrayed by the revelation of Ozi’s dual nature which is different from what she experienced during their time together in New York, away from their traditionally feudal family structure and its customary misogyny.

She feels stifled and confined in her role of a socialite housewife and suffers from severe guilt for not actualising her creative potential that is being squandered away under the pretence of her family engagements and motherhood.

It can be argued that Mumtaz has a unique feminine consciousness rather than a feminist approach to her life. She utilises that consciousness while exploring the underworld and the lives of the people living at the margin of the society. She also employs it in exposing the double standards of her husband and his family. When she finally leaves Ozi, it is obvious that she is also leaving a whole system of emotional and mental oppression that women experience under a patriarchal system.

Bina Shah in her novel A Season of Martyrs (published in 2014) and Sabyn Javeri in her novel Nobody Killed Her (published in 2017) have also explored feminine consciousness, though more in its political manifestations than in the familial and social ones.

They have tried to underscore the need for creating historical fiction by fictionalising, and hence recreating, prominent female politicians. This attempt has helped the two writers to highlight women’s contribution and their approach to the world of politics and social change.

But whether within a political context or in the personal sphere, all the female characters discussed above shatter the preconceived notions of tradition and familial ties while at the same time offering new possibilities of love and companionship. They bring to the fore new social and personal understandings that help forge new bonds and relationships.

Their feminine consciousness propels their curiosity and pushes them away from the rut of their everyday existence into journeys of self-discovery. They surmount various forms of entrapment and terror in that process, opening up possibilities that exist beyond the fixed ideals of feminism and the ideas of freedom borrowed therefrom.

These characters find the truth about their identity, not to renounce it but to reclaim it with a renewed understanding of who they are, as well as of the joys and tragedies that have shaped them. Whether conceived by male writers or by female ones, they contribute to a more grounded understanding of the feminine existence in not only its social, political and personal manifestations, but also in emotional and intellectual ones.

It is likely that literary explorations into these characters will one day lead to an even bigger probe into emotional landscapes that usually go unnoticed. In turn, this probe may result in a more inclusive creative consciousness that allows writers and readers to embrace the world of the other — beyond merely the feminine or the masculine.

This was originally published in the Herald's June 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a former junior fellow of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In one of his ghazals, Mirza Ghalib provokes us in the dancing sparks of his poetic craft:

This provocation, rich in its cosmic thrust and embodied as it is in a telltale wit and a commanding grip on the Urdu idiom, served as a philosophical inspiration for Faiz Ahmed Faiz — a young incarcerated Faiz.

Writing the preface to his poetry collection Dast-e Saba (Hand of the Breeze) from Hyderabad’s Central Jail in 1952, Faiz pondered on this verse, and in the course of his explication articulated the core literary doctrine of those we call progressive writers —

“Had Ghalib been living in our own times, in all likelihood some critic would have shouted out saying that he has insulted children’s games; or that he seems to be a supporter of propaganda in literature — since issuing an instruction for the poet’s eye to see a river in the drop is explicit propaganda.

“A poet’s eye is concerned, so would the censure go, with beauty and beauty alone … and this business of seeing or showing rivers in drops may well be the trade of a philosopher or a sage or a politician; it is not the calling of a poet …

“But fortunately or unfortunately, the art of poetry (or any art for that matter) is not children’s sport … A poet or a writer must not only see the river in the drop, he is equally required to make others see it. And more, if Ghalib’s ‘river’ is taken to mean the totality of life and the cosmic system of all that exists, then the writer too is himself a drop of that river.

This means that in partnership with innumerable other drops, on his shoulders falls also the responsibility to set and determine the direction of this river, its flow and figure, and its destination.”

Faiz was a ranking member of the All Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association that held its first meeting in 1947 at the YMCA Hall in Lahore, with Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi serving as its secretary.

But before steering into factual history, let us attend to the pithy and eloquent pronouncement of Faiz — a pronouncement that constructs for us the very philosophical backdrop against which the checkered story of progressive writers is played out.

So here we have a theory of literature that pulls poetry, or any creative writing for that matter, down to earth and makes it an agency to serve a pragmatic function in society. In more crude terms – rather, frank terms – one can say that Faiz’s poet has been charged with the task of being an activist. He or she has the burden not only of seeing but also of showing.

If a creative act is not aimed at setting the direction and determining even the end, the telos, of that grand social system of which it is a part, then that act is lame, irresponsible, indulgent at best.

This is the crux of the matter, the grand picture, in the dramatic and intriguing story of the Progressive Writers’ Movement.

But this is the grand picture, the mural. We begin to see complexities of details when we work on a miniature.

One complicating element of these details is expressly ideological — the changes to be brought about by progressive writers had to be on Marxist lines; in the case of Faiz, more specifically on Marxist-Leninist lines.

Another complicating element is the stated discomfort of the Progressive Writers’ Movement with the Urdu literary tradition. The tradition was considered to be decadent, indulgent, and obscurantist, taking flights of fancy that left the ordinary, economically suffering human being behind on the earth, bewildered and oppressed.

If the tradition had turned putrid, what is the source of inspiration then?

The answer defines yet another central determinant of progressive writing — new inspiration has to be sought in the modern writings of the West, not only English writings such as those of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but also French writings such as those of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and, of course, among others, Russian writings such as those of Gorky and Chekhov.

The Progressive Writers’ Movement operated in a doctrinal triangle whose three nodes were pragmatism, Marxism, and a western orientation. The seeds of all this are to be found already in that fateful collection of nine or so Urdu short stories, Angare (Burning Coal) that was published in Lucknow in December 1932. Written by four young authors – Syed Sajjad Zahir, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar – this collection created a massive outrage.

It defied all tradition viciously: cultural, moral, literary, linguistic. One of its contributors, Ahmed Ali, owns up: “It was the first ferocious attack on society in modern [Urdu] literature … It was a declaration of war by the youth of the middle class against the prevailing social, political, and religious institutions.”

Indeed, with its Marxist leanings, Angare did radiate intense heat — the civil and religious establishment was simply outraged. India’s Urdu as well as English press was crowded with angry condemnations.

The All India Shia Conference in Lucknow called it a “filthy pamphlet” and demanded that the “book be at once proscribed”. One newspaper found nothing “intellectually modern” in the volume “except immorality, evil character and wickedness”.

There was a flurry of fatwas of abomination; donations were solicited to take the matter to the court; and more, demands were heard for stoning the authors to death and executing them mercilessly through hanging by the neck!

And then, barely three months after the publication of this accursed work of fiction, on March 15, 1933, Angare was banned by the government of the United Provinces — all but five copies were destroyed. Of the five remaining copies, three were delivered to the Keeper of Record in Delhi, and two were sent to His Majesty’s Government in London.

It is this scandal of short stories wherein lay the germs of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Less than a month after the banning of Angare, a detailed statement from the authors drafted by Mahmuduzzafar was published in the newspaper The Leader.

This was an impassioned statement bearing the title, “In Defence of Angare. Shall We Submit to Gagging?” It argued for the significance and moral urgency of the stories in the volume, and included a “practical proposal” — namely, “the formation immediately of a League of Progressive Authors”.

Following this, on April 10, 1936, the All India Progressive Writers’ Association came into being in Lucknow, perhaps the most powerful and decisive Urdu literary movement of the 20th century. Zahir was its motive force, flanked by his comrade Ahmed Ali.

Despite periodic denials by the association, as well as by its Pakistani variant, that it had nothing to do with any political party, its link with the Communist Party of India (CPI) remained unveiled. It was this very CPI that voted in 1948 for the establishment of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) and sent Zahir to Lahore for this purpose.

One here recalls the notorious Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case — the conspiracy led by Major General Akbar Khan in 1951 to overthrow with Soviet backing the government of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan.

In March of that year an order was issued by Governor General Khawaja Nazimuddin for the arrest of Akbar Khan and of two pro-Soviet progressive writers whose support he had enlisted — Zahir and Faiz. They were sent to prison after an in-camera hearing; finally in 1953, a guilty verdict was pronounced.

We see literature and politics enmeshed in this story. Indeed, the same year in which Faiz was arrested saw the Pakistan government’s declaration that All Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association is a political party.

This is not surprising, for in the manifestos of All Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association numerous unmistakable political statements and demands were made — for example, the demand to recognise the People’s Republic of China, and the resolve to “take full part in international struggle for peace”.

But now that the association had formally lost its non-political status, and some of its major figures had been arrested, it suffered both huge organisational and literary losses. Then, in 1954, the CPP was outlawed.

Finally, in 1958, the assets of the Progressive Papers Limited that funded the CPP were sold by Pakistan’s first military dictator Ayub Khan. It was PPL that owned the newspapers Pakistan Times and Imroz. All Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association was no longer economically viable.

In recent years both Indian and Pakistani associations of the progressive writers have been subjected to many scholarly studies. Among these, the most comprehensive and the most recent is Carlo Coppola’s Urdu Poetry 1935-1970: The Progressive Episode (published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, in 2017). This work is extensive and detailed in its narration of factual history, but one wishes it had more literary analysis in the formal sense.

Given the importance and vitality of critic Muhammad Hasan Askari’s evaluation and critique of the progressive writers, the work by Mehr Afshan Farooqi is certainly most valuable — it was published by Pelgrave Macmillan in 2012 in New York under the title Urdu Literary Culture: Vernacular Modernity in the Writing of Muhammad Hasan Askari.

The many fine English translations of Askari’s writings by Muhammed Umar Memon are indispensable in understanding Askari’s intellectual thrust.

In an indirect way, of a high value also is Kamran Asdar Ali’s Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan 1947-72 (published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, in 2015). And I have personally benefitted a great deal from Shabana Mahmud’s work on Angare from which I draw some of my material here.

But how does one evaluate the literary creations of the progressive writers? There was a time when their associations embodied a galaxy of shining stars, taking into their fold practically anybody who had any claims to Urdu literature — indeed, Askari, its most bitter nemesis, was also in its fold in his early career.

It was only after the arrest of Faiz and the weakening of the All Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association that one finds evaluative voices rising.

It is at this time that an important analytical distinction between Progressivism and Modernism – Taraqqi Pasandi and Jadidiyat – is fully articulated.

We know that two of the three pioneers of modern (jadid) Urdu poetry, Miraji and Noon Meem Rashed, did not embrace the progressive writers’ associations; Faiz being the third who did.

But all three are poets of a high order.

The three nodes of the progressive triangle I identified– pragmatism, Marxism, and a western orientation – proved to be both a boon and a bane for the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Pragmatism can suggest meaningful themes, but it often compromises creative freedom, making a work of art formulaic.

Does one not frequently feel that Faiz is at the height of his virtuosity when he is a sheer poet, unshackled, boundless? When he talks of shadows, mirrors, doors and paths, the edge of the moon, unencumbered by any immediate concern to change the society?

Compare this to the pragmatic Faiz speaking about the puss from wounds and the flesh of the worker and flinging the crowns of kings. The world of poetry prefers the unshackled Faiz.

As for the other two nodes, there is hardly a better guide for us than Askari. About the partisan criticism of All Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association, he says, “All art is essentially healthy …

When talking about man, literature and literary criticism should at least use language that reflects the vitality and exuberance of human existence in its fullness, not economic philosophy” (as translated by Muhammed Umar Memon).

Recall that the cry “art for art’s sake” was ridiculed by the progressive writers as being ethically decadent (in a sense Faiz does the same thing in his preface to Dast-e Saba I have quoted).

Here is Askari’s corrective: “I shall vehemently deny that the concept of ‘art for art’s sake’ is an ethically decadent concept ... The concept is … not so much a disengagement from morality as it is pursuit of a new kind of morality … The final touchstone of art [is] … purely aesthetic” (as translated by Muhammed Umar Memon).

Regarding the western orientation of the progressive writers, again I have found no guide who surpasses Askari. His position has been elegantly expounded by Farooqi from whom I construct the following account.

First, Askari points out what may be called sovereignty of cultures — western writings and Urdu writings come to pass and move in two different incommensurable cosmologies, so an Urdu writer cannot emulate English or French writings.

Second, he makes an empirical observation — those progressive writers who have drawn their inspiration from western wrings have but a superficial understanding of western literature.

And finally, he examines Urdu and western languages philologically and articulates their differences, telling us, for example, that Urdu is elaborately descriptive in its temperament, lacking analytical prose, yielding only passionate narration; Urdu is not suitable for subclauses or strings of adjectives; Urdu does not admit of distances between an object and its attributes, between nouns and their adjectives.

What is the result? Even after decades of imitation, the progressive writers have failed to produce western-style prose.

“Urdu will grow only in the glow of its own tradition.”

Translation of Ghalib’s verse and Faiz’s text is by Syed Nomanul Haq

This article was originally published in the Herald's May 2017 issue with the headline "River in the drop". To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a professor and advisor of the social sciences and liberal arts programme at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi.

Indian authors writing in English were the rising stars of the anglophone literary world in the 1990s, notes Muneeza Shamsie in the preface to her groundbreaking and exhaustive book, Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English.

At the time, she writes, many in Pakistan would ask her why there weren’t any English language writers in Pakistan. But, contrary to general perception, Muneeza recalls, she was “meeting and writing about Pakistani-English authors all the time”.

This disconnect between perception and reality served as a catalyst of sorts for A Dragonfly in the Sun, the 1997 anthology she went on to compile. The anthology included the works of several writers of Pakistani origin living abroad, raising important questions of “identity and belonging”. In Hybrid Tapestries, Muneeza addresses those questions and defines what it means to be a “Pakistani” writer: “anyone who claims that identity,” she argues.

She asserts early on in her remarkably well-organised, thoughtful and extremely readable book that Pakistani English literature is unlike other Pakistani literatures in that it is a “direct result of the colonial encounter”.

She uses a “historical trajectory” to trace the development of Pakistani English literature: the starting point of the trajectory are the “founders” of Pakistani English writing — writers who became Pakistani at the time of the Partition, whose writing cannot be separated from the “colonial encounter”. She, however, avoids using what she refers to as the “academic labels” of postmodern and postcolonial.

Muneeza is also ever mindful of the “cultural intermingling” and the “hybrid influences” that have resulted in the “tapestry” of a complex, if not complicated, history of English literature in Pakistan.

English may have been introduced to South Asia by British imperialism but those writing in it wanted to challenge the narratives of the Empire. Pre-Partition writers of fiction and poetry in English were, thus, faced with the formidable task of “finding the true expression of the subcontinent in the English language, which did not, or seemingly could not, accommodate the nuances of South Asia and its many cultures”.

Hybrid Tapestries is divided into two sections: Pioneering Writers and Developing Genres. The former includes Atiya Fyzee-Rahamin (1877-1967), Shahid Suhrawardy (1890-1965) and Ahmed Ali (1910-1994) – who all started writing much before 1947 – and Zulfikar Ghose, Taufiq Rafat and Sara Suleri — who embarked on their literary careers immediately after Independence.

Muneeza contextualises their work with the ideological and political reality of the times and places in which they lived and worked. She does this, in part, not just to provide a historical account but also in order to “convey the measure of their struggles and their successes”.

In a detailed section on Ali, Muneeza discusses many aspects of his diverse body of work: his Urdu short stories, English plays, fiction and poetry, and his translations of Chinese poetry.

He wanted to go beyond subcontinental sounds and words to convey the essence of traditional Indo-Muslim culture in which poetry plays an important role — in conversation as well as in songs of both celebration and of mourning.

She praises the “courage” of his undertaking: his attempt to translate the vernacular of one language into another while shouldering the burden of writing in the language of the coloniser.

Ali’s first book in English, Twilight in Delhi, was published in 1940 and traces the decline of the upper-class Muslim merchant Mir Nihal and his family, and the parallel waning of Mughal Delhi. Muneeza states that, though Ali’s writing is, at times, “stylized” and “flowery”, he is undoubtedly the “forefather” of modern South Asian writers. “[He] prefigured the more successful linguistic strategies of several post-Independence writers, including Salman Rushdie,” she notes.

Muneeza portrays all those included in the section on Pioneering Writers with the same painstaking approach that she employs in the appraisal of Ali’s life and work. In this respect, Hybrid Tapestries is an invaluable resource for researchers and academics.

But it is also a pleasurable read: the small but significant details about writers bring their personalities to life.

Muneeza, for example, draws a fascinating portrait of Atiya, who was possibly the first Indian-Muslim woman to publish a full-length novel. A firebrand, revolutionary in her politics and radical in her views, she was muse to both Allama Iqbal and Maulana Shibli Nomani. She attended Maria Grey, the London teacher training college, on a scholarship in 1906 and married artist Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin who adopted her family name into his in “a rare assertion of gender equality for that time and age”.

The second part of the book, Developing Genres, comprises five sections: Poetry, The Novel, The Short Story, Drama and Literary Non-fiction. In the section on poetry, Muneeza chronicles how the early Pakistani poets, such as Ghose and Rafat, were succeeded by a “new generation” of poets, including Athar Tahir and Waqas Khwaja.

She mentions a multilingual literary forum of Pakistani poets called Mixed Voices. It was set up by Adrian A Husain in Karachi and was attended by poets like Maki Kureishi and Salman Tarik Kureshi, among others. Despite the sense of community fostered by such gatherings, however, English poetry, she points out, has “continued to exist on the margins of Pakistan’s intellectual life and its academic circles”.

The section on the novel is a thorough examination of the evolution of this genre in Pakistan. Muneeza explores the implications of writing from or about the difficult place that Pakistan has come to be and analyses how the “brutalization of Pakistani society against a backdrop of geopolitics” has profoundly influenced the early works of Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie and Uzma Aslam Khan.

Her subsequent discussion of the writers, who made their debuts between 2000 and 2011, paints a detailed picture of the many changes that fiction has undergone in Pakistan. According to her, new talent such as Azhar Abidi, Mohammed Hanif and H M Naqvi, among many others, has ensured that questions about otherness, historical identity and belonging remain more relevant to Pakistani novel writers than ever before.

And now, thanks to Hybrid Tapestries, one can find answers to some of those persistent questions.

This article was originally published in the Herald's June 2017 issue under the headline "The book of genesis". To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is an author and poet whose work has appeared in international publications such as Ploughshares and Granta

Saket Chaudhary’s Hindi Medium is about the comparative importance of English and Hindi languages in class-conscious India. But it begins in Punjabi. And, to be exact, inside Batra’s Garments, a small tailoring shop at Delhi’s Chandni Chowk.

The elder Batra is apprehensively taking measurements of teenaged Mita (Saba) who wants him to make a low-back dress she saw in an international fashion magazine. With his son, Raj (Khan), looking on, the tailor does not think that a risqué – he calls it “modren” – dress is appropriate for a middle-class Indian girl like Mita and decides to make his own alterations.

As she worries about her ‘perfect’ dress being ruined (she is a bit of a fatalist, in general, as we learn later), Raj (clearly smitten) eassures her that he will personally make her a “same-to-same” design. He delivers on his promise.

Fast forward 15 years, the tiny tailoring shop is now a sprawling business concern (‘fashion studio’) and Raj is its smooth-talking proprietor. He is also a dutiful husband to Mita, just as determined to fulfil her every demand and cater to her every whim as he was when he was younger, even abandoning his clients midway through a big sale if he has to for her sake.

Despite financial success, a loving home and a happy marriage, Mita – the anti-Anjali of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham ... – wants to move out of Chandni Chowk and move up in “society”. More than anything, she wants her daughter – five-year-old Piya (Dish*ta) – to get admission into one of the top schools in Delhi.

We all know that class is not just about money. It is largely about a certain kind of education, among other things. And the mark of that education in our part of the world is the ability to speak proficiently in English — with extra marks for a refined accent. Mita’s desperation to get Piya admitted to an English-medium school is really a manifestation of her own desire to be accepted in, and gain access to, a section of society that has kept her out. As Raj notes, “English is not a language in India, it’s a class.”

The Batras move into a rich neighbourhood and throw a large party, but Raj’s poor command over English and his etiquette keep causing cracks in the image Mita wants to build. The guests – aloof, exclusionary and secretly insecure – are not unforgiving of these slip-ups.

As the nouveau riche (that one social group everyone enjoys taking a guilt-free dig at), the Batras find themselves in an odd position where they are not accepted by the rich and are not owned by the poor: they are imposters in both worlds.

But Raj and Mita, the devoted parents that they are, remain unfazed (or are further motivated) by the ridicule. They are willing to go to any length to ensure that Piya goes to a top-ranking English school. They visit a temple, a mosque and a church to enlist divine help for their cause, hoping some god may listen to their prayers. They are pragmatists, after all.

We root for the Batras throughout because we understand that – although they go about things in an overly earnest way – they really just want what everyone wants: a better life for their children.Upwardly mobile and ambitious, the Batras also live in the fiercely competitive world of ‘India Shining’.

Children are enlisted in primary school boot camps that may as well be boot camps for participation in The Hunger Games. Parents queue up in long lines before the crack of dawn to ensure that their children get into the top nursery schools. Even invitations to kitty parties are decided on the basis of which school a child goes to.

How hard a middle-class family has worked to get where it is does not matter. It is certainly not enough. And when honest means do not help people get what they want, some are forced to use bureaucratic connections and corrupt practices to get to the place others have already occupied by virtue of their birth.

Hindi Medium shows how India’s much-celebrated mobile middle class keeps hitting barriers. It may have the right atmosphere for its rise but that rise exacts a high price in terms of time, effort and even self-respect.

The film may be accused of showing crude stereotypes of the rich, but its portrayals are not entirely inaccurate. In fact, a lot of things hit too close to home. Some of us have gone to schools where we were instructed not to speak in Urdu, where people were repeatedly made fun of for their accents or pronunciations.

Overall, Hindi Medium is a wonderful film with great performances by all cast members. Saba proves that she is currently one of Pakistan’s best young actors, if not the best. The film’s major flaw is that it runs on far too long. The second half becomes tedious and the characters get increasingly hackneyed towards the end.

The film, nevertheless, makes us laugh. It reminds us of many things we ourselves have encountered growing up, but we either forget them or we ignore them as we grow older and get caught in the rat race. Give it a watch.

This was originally published in the Herald's June 2017 issue under the headline "Language barrier". To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

This review needs to be prefaced with two disclaimers. First: I have known Harris Khalique for the last 34 years and we are close friends — as such, any claims to objectivity will be less than truthful. Second: Crimson Papers is written on the social and political history of Pakistan in particular, and that of the South Asian region in general, through the lens of a poet — I wonder at the wisdom of the Herald’s editors to have chosen me, a political economist, to review it.

In Harris’ own words, “poetry is the only constant thing” in his life. While this may be his own perception, having known him for more than three decades, I can verify that he underplays the intensely political nature of his being. It was bequeathed to him by his father, Ibrahim Khalique – a progressive thinker and littérateur in his own right – who also happens to be the greatest influence on his son’s life. That parental influence is a running theme in the book.

Harris has taken to this intellectual bequest in a way that very few heirs do. Since the first time I met him as a 16-year-old fellow student at D J Science College, Karachi, I have found the intensity of his political thought and knowledge the most endearing feature of his personality.

At no point in the last three decades has that intensity diminished even by an iota. A few years ago, he even dabbled in practical politics when he attempted to organise a left-oriented political party but, as his good fortune would have it, his comrades lacked the wisdom to value what he brought to the table.

Harris is also one of the most accomplished development practitioners in the country. In a relatively short span of time, he has headed two important non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in Pakistan – one after the other – and is now heading a major advocacy initiative.

Given that his first degree was in mechanical engineering and that he thinks, breathes and feels poetry and politics, this goes to demonstrate the energy, commitment and diverse talents that he is made of.

Crimson Papers is an elegantly crafted book. The author brings his poetic and literary credentials to bear on virtually the entire gamut of social and political events and afflictions of mainly Pakistan, but tangentially also of the broader South Asian region.

The book is neatly divided into four parts – blood, sweat, tears and ink – to narrate and analyse historical events and assess their protagonists as well as their hapless victims.

After narrating the horrific bloodletting the two partitions broughtabout, Harris pins his hope for the future on the inherent pluralismof the people of South Asia

The creation of India and Pakistan as independent states forms the main theme in the chapter titled blood. To discuss the formation of Pakistan (or the partition of India) and its break-up (or the liberation of Bangladesh) contiguously is an important conceptual contribution the book aims to make. It should inform future historians and social scientists in assessing the underlying structural link between the two events.

After narrating the horrific bloodletting the two partitions brought about, Harris pins his hope for the future on the inherent pluralism of the people of South Asia. However, some analysis of the differing trajectories that the postcolonial state has taken in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh would have added nuance to his writings in this part: pluralism is neither uniformly distributed across South Asia, nor is it similarly strong everywhere in the region.

India’s democracy, for instance, seems to have a higher probability of reversing Hindutva fascism than Pakistan’s fledgling democracy has of reversing religious extremism — at least in the short to medium run.

The chapter entitled sweat is about the hard-working and committed leftists who saw their dreams of a just and equitable social and economic structure, promised by socialism, shatter in their own lifetimes. Many of them – Dr Aizaz Nazeer, Fatehyab Ali Khan, Ahmad Bashir, Begum Majeed Malik, to name a few – were known well to Harris Khalique and he is personally familiar with their lives and ordeals.

While their political project did not succeed, their contributions in the fields of journalism, art and literature have inspired at least one generation of Pakistanis to think rationally and to empathise with the less privileged. Since very little enlightened literature is produced in Pakistan anymore, whatever little progressive thought is being bequeathed to the future generations is owed mainly to the efforts of the leftists profiled in this chapter.

Tears narrates the ordeals of those whom Harris Khalique calls victims of “historic decisions they were not part of”. The chapter chronicles the stories of the mother of a young Hazara who lost his life to sectarian violence in Quetta; Shabana, the dancer from Swat who was brutally murdered by the Taliban; Asia Bibi, the Christian woman who languishes in jail over blasphemy charges; and Sabeen Mahmud and Parveen Rehman, who lost their lives to conflicts to which they were not direct parties.

The narration of contemporary conflicts through their female victims is an evocative method to draw out the depths of depravity that the state and the society have sunk to.

I am in no position to comment on ink — the chapter devoted to poetry. In the preface, Harris Khalique states that it is “because of art and creativity in Pakistan that hope refuses to sink in the deluge of sorrow”. The hard-headed social scientist in me remains sceptical on this count for a variety of reasons. But then one has to clutch at all straws to keep hope aflame.

Crimson Papers is a must read mainly because it weaves sociopolitical subjects in a literary style and does it wonderfully well. It is accessible to the literati as well as to historians and social commentators. One also hopes that this effort on the part of Harris Khalique will be a precursor to more works in this genre.

This article was originally published in the Herald's May 2017 issue with the headline "The poetics of hope". To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge and is currently a director at the Collective of Social Sciences Research

Oscar-winning film-maker Martin Scorsese stated last year in an interview with the Associated Press news agency that, “Cinema is gone.” Many other revered directors have made similar observations about the future of cinema in the digital age. Images – moving as well as static – are routinely being consumed online, making cinema as we know it seem a little too dated a medium to survive.

This does not mean that cinema of all kinds is fated to die. Out of the old one is emerging a new cinema that presents new opportunities. For example, video-on-demand website Netflix made Win It All available globally, including in Pakistan, on April 7.

Such simultaneous availability of a film all over the world would not be possible for a cinema-house release. Win It All, being the independent film that it is, would not have even made it to Pakistani cinemas, let alone be (legally) available to Pakistani viewers on its very release day.

Changes in film distribution mechanisms have triggered cultural changes too, with the old tradition of going to a cinema to watch movies becoming increasingly rare. This brings up the question of watching a movie as a communal experience. Even Scorsese is unsure “what kind of experience is it going to be”.

This uncertainty, along with the latest technological innovations, has given film-makers new room to experiment and this experimentation is more conspicuous online than on traditional television. The most groundbreaking shows exist online because streaming services, unlike traditional television, can give unconventional stories time to find their audiences without worrying about broadcast schedules and viewership ratings. It is perhaps for these reasons that Joe Swanberg, director and co-writer of Win It All, has chosen the online space for the release of his film (alongside a limited release in cinemas).

Win It All is the story of Eddie Garrett (Johnson). In his late thirties, Garrett does not have a stable job and clearly does not have his life together. A twist in his tale occurs when an acquaintance of his who is going to prison gives him a bag full of cash for safekeeping.

Garrett tries to make a quick buck for himself by gambling with some of the money in the bag but, predictably, ends up losing badly. In the end, he is left with a small window of opportunity to win back the lost money or face the consequences of his decision to gamble — and his failure to win.

The plot is very straightforward, perhaps even predictable. You can foresee what is about to come next. But what sets Win It All apart from other gambling flicks is Swanberg’s characteristic slice-of-life storytelling approach. The camera often shoots from a distance, letting the action unfold without a change in the frame. This is a big departure from traditional gambling scenes that feature fast-paced frame changes, close-ups and cut-ins. By doing away with these techniques, the director almost entirely removes the sense of secrecy and alert associated with the genre.

Swanberg has a reputation for making genre-defying films but his technical choices in Win It All may strike as curious to some viewers — at least initially. They only start to make sense when his protagonist is compared to protagonists of other films in the gambling movie genre.

Unlike their previous collaborative work, Win It All feels a littleconventional, not the least because its supporting cast fails to bringmuch to the table.

Let us take Ben Campbell – a smart MIT student who starts to count cards to pay his tuition – from the 2008 indie film called 21. Even in a classic like The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Eric Stoner, played by Steve McQueen no less, is a ‘stud poker player’. Garrett is neither drawn to gambling out of sheer necessity like Campbell, nor is he an accomplished player like Stoner. If anything, he is pretty bad at gambling and is not the underdog you may want to root for.

He also does not play against rich baddies in dingy low-lit casinos where men in suits stand around the table, intently looking at the game while puffing on cigars and sipping whiskey. Garrett sticks out even at his most high-stakes game since he is the only one on the table wearing a suit — his wealthy competitors are dressed casually with rolled up sleeves.

By this stage in the film, one can appreciate the absence of sleek editing. What place would that have in a film about a character that is anything but sleek? To those familiar with Swanberg’s style, this treatment is expected. He is a prominent member of the ‘mumblecore’ film movement — a subgenre of indie film-making characterised by a ‘natural’ feel and shoestring budgets. Rather than focusing on the plot, these films place emphasis on dialogue (which is often improvised instead of being scripted). Actors’ performances, thus, assume paramount importance in a film’s success or failure.

Since Win It All offers little visual flair and has a predictable script, it falls upon Johnson’s shoulders to bring Garrett to life. He certainly does a good job playing this flawed character.

Johnson, who has also co-written the film, has done some of his best work with Swanberg — though his claim to fame is his role in Fox TV sitcom New Girl. The two have previously collaborated on the wonderfully odd film Digging for Fire (2015) and Drinking Buddies (2013), the latter being arguably their best film together.

Their latest offering falls a little short of expectations. Unlike their previous collaborative work, Win It All feels a little conventional, not the least because its supporting cast fails to bring much to the table. Johnson, however, does share noteworthy chemistry with Keegan-Michael Key who plays Garrett’s friend and reluctant sponsor.

A common factor between the characters Johnson has played in all three films – and to some extent in his Fox TV show – is that each one of them is a man-child. Seen from this perspective, Win It All is essentially a coming-of-age story. Garrett may already be an adult but he still has plenty of growing up to do. By the end of the 88-minute running time, a lot about his life changes, yet it is clear that the character has not matured at all.

Win It All is clearly not the indie film of the year but fans of Swanberg and Johnson may still find themselves enjoying it. Other viewers may come across it online, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and decide to give it a shot. This laid-back, no expectations kind of viewing may let the film shine for them too.

This article was originally published in the Herald's May 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” – Oscar Wilde

Feica is not a new name to anyone who has ever seen political cartoons in Pakistani newspapers. The journey, which began several years ago, has only gained momentum for Rafique or Feica as he is known in the world of print media. During our recent conversation at the Alliance Francaise gallery in Karachi – where his exhibition “Inextricable Love” was running from April 22-28, 2017 – he gallantly declared that he would soon be painting on large canvases for another exhibition, whilst also complaining about other galleries not being readily accepting of his work. In his mind, he is an artist first and everything else later.

Rafique Ahmed was born in 1957 in Multan and went to the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. After graduating, he started working with several magazines and newspapers, including the Muslim, The Star, Dawn, Hurriyat and the Frontier Post. Despite working for so many of these newspapers, his association with the Dawn group has been most unremitting. Day after day, the artist would present a new comic, a new cartoon and with that a new statement, which categorically reflected the problems of Pakistan. Ahmed had become the iconic Feica, one of the nation’s most popular and veteran political cartoonists.

It remains difficult to separate his current expression from that of the political cartoon. The paradox that his work presents in the exhibition is intriguing and enchanting at the same time. The kind of dissent, which is emblematic of his work, is fairly missing from this new series, which devotes itself to images of two abstract human bodies intertwined and intermingled in cubist fashion. There is an obsessive repetition of this imagery, rendered in different angles, perspectives and colour. There is angst in this repetition, which is perhaps what the artist desires to express as he reclaims his artistic identity again. But the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree and stylistic qualities of all of the drawings determine Feica’s “inextricable” romance with the cartoon.

There are certain drawings that address the current political scene of the country. One in particular is a direct reflection of atrocities committed by a formidable self-righteous patriarchal figure. Appearing to be a violent extremist, the man in the picture, who is wearing a turban, is seen clutching on to a child’s head in one hand, dragging a woman by her hair in the other. His face is blackened with graphite strokes, suggesting the darkened soul, exposed through his forceful actions. These narratives fit into the several issues that have recently come up in the Pakistani parliament, including domestic violence, acid attacks and honour killings.

But perhaps Feica does not intend on dwelling on these ideas very much because the rest of the works divert from violence to bodily love. The subsequent drawings and paintings demonstrate Feica’s unabated passion towards the tenderness of love, where he presents love in its various facets. While the works are abstract, they demonstrate the obvious through exaggerated body postures, indicative of love as lust, affection, eroticism, passion, and power. It is clear from the manner of his execution that, for him, despite all the troubles and turmoil, love conquers all. Although his interpretation of love appears to be limited it could be due to his stylistic rendition and also perhaps the emphasis he lays on, and the confidence he has in, the ‘institution’ of love.

When one observes his work carefully, one discovers the strokes with which the artist exaggerates, manipulates and informs his stylised characters. They are in perfect harmony and synchronicity with the centre of the image, creating a musical composition and proportionate distortions, allowing him to retain the primary characteristics of the personalities, figures and bodies he makes. He has, however, repeated these bodies to a great extent. While he introduces colour, shape and background to his work, the original image of the two bodies does not cease to exist.

This repetition is not entirely meaningless as it evidently embodies and emulates the cubist modernism of early Pakistani painting. The painterly strokes, adopted by the likes of Mashkoor Raza, Bashir Mirza, Jamil Naqsh and even Sadequain during the 1970s and the 80s, were directly inspired by the impressionist and cubist artworks showcased in museums in the West. Feica’s lines and strokes are no different, and are perhaps also reminiscent of that era of his youth when he was consumed by the phenomenon of cartoon making. His work revisits that life he wishes to relive through his modernist work.

Feica is as mysterious as he is multi-faceted. His art is not limited to modernism or drawing. In the mid-90s, Feica had opened his own radio channel, FM 103, in which he would assume the character of ‘Gullu Bhai’. There is certainly much more to the artist than meets the eye.

Disclaimer: Feica is an editorial cartoonist for Dawn, the daily newspaper of the Dawn Media Group, of which the Herald is also a part.

The writer is a lecturer at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture

Aslam Khwaja’s book, People’s Movements in Pakistan, fills a major gap in our national historical discourse and could not have been published at a more opportune hour. It has come out at a time when poverty and misery among the subaltern sections of society are at an all-time high after three decades of unhindered neo-liberal capitalist expansion.

The same period has also witnessed the retreat of progressive modes of thinking and institutions of collective resistance that could possibly have reversed the abysmal elitist logic of neo-liberal capitalism. Consequently, people facing abject poverty and getting subsistence wages find themselves systematically disempowered.

This disempowerment, in turn, worsens their standard of living. In the midst of this vicious cycle, Khwaja’s book takes us on a historical journey that reminds us of a time when resistance to systemic oppression was not merely an ideal but a lived and experienced reality in Pakistan.

To truly appreciate the importance of his contribution, two factors need to be understood. First, in complete contrast to what the champions of neo-liberal economics had promised, three of their most favoured policies – privatisation, deregulation and fiscal reform – have resulted in highly unequal economic growth. As recent surveys conducted by the Planning Commission of Pakistan indicate, four out of 10 Pakistanis live in poverty today. The problem is much worse in rural areas – home to peasants and other farm workers – where a majority (55 per cent) lives in conditions of poverty.

Workers in urban areas do not fare better either — the incidence of massive working-class poverty coincides with a time when Pakistani workers have longer work hours at stagnant or declining real wages. The incidence of poverty is most pervasive in such peripheral regions as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (where 74 per cent people live in poverty), Balochistan (where 71 per cent people are poor), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (where 49 per cent of the population lives in poverty) and Sindh (where 43 per cent residents are poor).

Khwaja also sheds light on the role of often ignored Pakistanisocialists and communists in resisting dictatorships and fightingunder repressive circ*mstances for the rights of workers and peasants.

A gender-based breakdown of poverty data shows that an overwhelming majority of the victims of neo-liberal economic policies are women who suffer as mothers (confirmed by the staggering number of maternal mortality), as workers (most of them are engaged in unpaid domestic work) and as citizens (most of them are suffering from domestic abuse and harassment in public spaces). The question, of course, is why the ruling classes could get away with such disastrous economic policies and why their victims did not, or could not, resist them?

This brings us to the second factor. That the last three decades have been an economic disaster for the subaltern cannot be understood without appreciating what has happened during the same period to people’s movements and struggles for social justice. It is fairly well established in the economics literature that the distribution of economic resources in a country is a direct consequence of the relative bargaining powers of different sections of society. Who gets what is not determined by some abstract entity (such as market efficiency) but by the relative political power of various groups.

The work of economist Daron Acemoglu from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard political scientist James Robinson has shown that decline in the voice and power of labour unions, peasant organisations, women’s rights movements and students’ associations almost automatically translates into declining standards of living for these sections of a populace. Since economic distribution is neither neutral nor immune to people’s struggles, disengagement and/or repression of people’s democratic and political movements leads to the worsening of living conditions for these groups and an overall rise in inequality. This is exactly what has happened in Pakistan.

Yet, as Khwaja reminds us, things were not always as bleak as this. There was indeed a time in the not-so-distant past when people were actively engaged in organising resistance movements for social justice. The author takes a historical view and explores movements led by nationalist activists, trade unionists, peasant mobilisers, women’s rights campaigners and student associations in Pakistan in separate chapters with the aim to present various directions these movements have taken. A discerning reader will inevitably draw some important lessons from their successes as well as failures.

Khwaja starts his account with a discussion of the controversial ‘nationalities question’ that, according to him, has been a “sore spot” since Pakistan’s inception. He examines the evolution of various nationalist movements over the past seven decades and explains how these were defeated through praetorian means.

Many of them – including such luminaries as Tahira Mazhar Ali, HajraMasood, Khadija Omar and Alys Faiz – were directly associated with theCommunist Party of Pakistan.

He then presents a fairly detailed account of the civil disobedience movement against the martial law regime of General Ziaul Haq and shows how contradictions within and between the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) shaped its course. Khwaja also sheds light on the role of often ignored Pakistani socialists and communists in resisting dictatorships and fighting under repressive circ*mstances for the rights of workers and peasants.

Next he turns his attention to the trade union movement and offers a number of facts pertaining to the workers’ struggles during the colonial and postcolonial periods in a largely chronological order. While his description does not offer an analysis into the political economy of the trade union movement per se, his work can be extremely useful for scholars and activists who want to acquaint themselves with the history of protests by workers and their general strikes against the British capital during the first half of the 20th century.

For the post-independence period, the author describes in detail how the trade union movement reached its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He then captures its subsequent decline in the wake of Zia’s dictatorship and the advent of neo-liberal economic policies in the 1990s.

In the chapter on women’s struggles for equality, Khwaja highlights the under-examined and often misunderstood yet crucial role that women activists played in carving out a better environment for both men and women in the late colonial and post-independence periods – often bravely negotiating and challenging traditional patriarchal public spaces. Many of them – including such luminaries as Tahira Mazhar Ali, Hajra Masood, Khadija Omar and Alys Faiz – were directly associated with the Communist Party of Pakistan.

Despite suffering from poor editing (and as a result of it becoming fairly dense), People’s Movements in Pakistan will be useful for all those – researchers, activists and common people alike – who want to know a thing or two about the struggles of ordinary men and women against capitalism, patriarchy, and ethnic/nationalistic discrimination in Pakistan. By underscoring the factors that have led to the rise and decline of people’s movements in the past, the book may help the activists of today to initiate struggles for equality and social justice in the future.

This was originally published in the Herald's April 2017 issue under the headline "Change Agents". To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is presently an assistant professor of social development and policy at the Habib University.

Women’s active engagement in domains outside of their traditional roles is transforming Pakistan in remarkable ways. There is, however, little agreement within the country on the extent of their engagement with the world outside their homes, on how Pakistan has been changing because of it or on the value associated with women’s changing roles.

Many groups within Pakistan are differently interpreting what Islam says as they grapple with women’s rights. The long-held view that women need protection from the outside world where their respectability – and that of their family – is endangered is changing as women take on greater responsibilities and activities in the ‘outside world’.

There are many reasons that account for the emergence of women in public life and their notable leadership roles in a wide variety of activities. Whether we attribute these changes to women being more educated than before, to economic necessities that force them to work outside their homes, to personal choices, or to the ‘information revolution’ whereby Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media platforms connecting people in unprecedented ways — the reality is that the changes exist. Social conservatives have debunked them as being western-inspired but a mere glance down any boulevard, road, street, gully or corner virtually anywhere in Pakistan can attest to their indigenous origins.

Twenty-five years ago, I related personal stories of women living within the walled city of Lahore in my book Walls within Walls: Life Histories of Working Women in the Old City of Lahore. I described the old city’s public spaces as being the domain of men; what was “conspicuously absent” there was “the presence of women”. This scenario no longer exists as women today are seen actively participating in those public arenas that were once restricted for them.

There have been important studies of women’s participation in public life in polities similar to that of Pakistan and those can offer valuable insights into the issues raised above. Turkish academic Aysegul Baykan’s 1990 essay Women between Fundamentalism and Modernity provides a gendered perspective on the clash between two of the most potent ideologies competing for supremacy in Muslim societies. Egyptian-American writer Leila Ahmed’s book Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, published in 1992, takes a historical view of gender relation in Islamic societies.

This transformation has enabled the Jamaat’s female members to claimpolitical – if not moral – leadership of working-class rural and urbanwomen.

American historian Margot Badran’s 1996 book Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt focuses on the status of women and women’s rights movements in contemporary Egypt. A 1998 volume edited by American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, analyses changes in the role of women in the Middle East. Saba Mahmood, a Pakistan-born anthropologist teaching in the United States, offers an ethnographic account of a women’s movement in mosques in Cairo, Egypt, in her 2005 book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.

None of these studies, as is obvious, is specific to Pakistan. In the past few years, however, a number of books have interrogated the extent of women’s political activism, the effects of this activism on the women participating in it and its impacts, over time, on Pakistan’s political and social transformation.

These books situate their research within specific historical and cultural conditions of the country. This frame of reference is important because it enables a study of contemporary expressions of political Islam and secularism that not simply collide but, as Amina Jamal argues in her book Jamaat-e-Islami Women in Pakistan: Vanguard of a New Modernity? (published by Oxford University Press, Pakistan, in 2017), also have the possibility of colluding in promoting an understanding of piety, freedom and modernity coexisting among Muslim women.

This understanding, Jamal argues, enables South Asian feminists to reconsider “the secular” — not simply as a guarantor of democratic participation, representative government and human rights that progressive Muslims associate with it. It also becomes, as Talal Asad has argued (in his 2003 book Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity), a globalised (hence western/Christian) standard for evaluating civilisation, modernity and citizenship.

This review essay, in the same vein, discusses how women’s lives, their sense of active agency and their roles as actors in public spaces are changing even when they work as members of ‘non-secular’ groups.

In her 2011 book Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wa in Urban Pakistan, Britain-based political scientist Humeira Iqtidar first raised the possibility of the Jamaat becoming a party of “secularized Islamists” in Pakistan. Jamal, who teaches sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, takes the subject further. She questions the “guiding principles” that once saw “Muslim women’s emancipation” in their ability to enjoy “unveiled mobility”. These principles, she argues, are now being tested as larger numbers of university-educated women from lower classes are moving into “the social-political space of Pakistan’s crowded urban centres and even its portals of political representation”.

This transformation has enabled the Jamaat’s female members to claim political – if not moral – leadership of working-class rural and urban women. Their presence in the legislature, in effect, has turned “from purdah to parliament”, a well-known coinage by the independence movement activist Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, on its head, changing it to “purdah in parliament”.

At the outset of her book, Jamal addresses questions arising out of the interaction between local and transnational identities on the one hand and the emergence of modern institutions such as political parties and legislative houses in religious-political realms on the other.

She offers a historical overview on how changes in identity and issues of modernity are being negotiated by many “religiously based women’s groups with widely differing constituencies” in contemporary urban Pakistan. She also argues how the postcolonial and transnational feminist reworking along the lines of western modernity in the late 20th century has amplified the cultural and political significance of women for Islamist movements such as the Jamaat.

Jamal has chosen to focus on the political and cultural activism of women in the Jamaat not just because it is one of the most significant politico-religious groups in Pakistan but also because, as she claims, it is the only political party in which members of a women’s wing are elected rather than nominated.

The Jamaat is also unique in the sense that its women members seem to have achieved some of the objectives sought by the secular women’s movement but with limited success — such as participation in political protests, electoral contests and legislative proceedings.

Yet, women in the Jamaat do not view their activities through a purely modernist lens. They rather see it from an opposite vantage point — how they are “harnessing the forces of modernisation and bringing them into conformity with Islam” as a “necessary part of the project of decolonisation and recovery from processes of degeneration of Muslim subjectivity”. A “discursive reconstruction of the relationship of Islam and modernity” is how Jamal interprets their activities.

She also highlights the dichotomy between the globalised promise of feminism and its inability to become a part of traditional orientations towards Islam in Pakistan. “ … it is not too far-fetched to propose that the Jamaat women’s successful mobilisation of a modern Muslim women’s identity marks the limitations of the secular modern as a cultural political project in Pakistan.”

She, therefore, advocates that “constructing a feminist argument by undermining local cultural practices as necessarily oppressive” must be avoided and, instead, the best traditions of Islam and of local cultures must be brought together to develop an emancipatory political discourse. She, however, provides no road map for such a discourse to emerge.

Jamal does show women in the Jamaat as building bridges and making productive compromises within this dichotomy. “ … there is no doubt [that their] activism has contributed to the successful linking of Islamic modesty and freedom of mobility by the scarf-wearing women who are appearing in larger numbers in public places.”

She argues that women in the Jamaat are reinterpreting modernity and Islam in ways that do not rule out global feminism entirely. Instead, they are seeking to reconceptualise their understanding of feminism – in their activism and discussions – to fit it into their interpretations of Islam.

While it is common to stereotype Islamist groups as being unconcerned or even regressive regarding women’s rights (as opposed to a secular women’s movement), the reality is far more complicated. As a group, the Jamaat seeks to connect Islamic theology directly to women’s actions in the world, believing it fully understands what the scripture says.

Its founder Syed Abul A’la Maududi championed complete segregation of men and women, subordination of women to men (that is, men are to have control over women) and recognition of shariah as the only source of law. He opposed any political role for women and declared that women should not step outside of the home and must veil themselves from head to toe. He went to the extent of propounding that a woman’s entry into the public domain causes immorality. But now we see women in the Jamaat doing all that.

But the Jamaat does not have an exclusive claim on orthodox Islamist visions of women’s rights. An offshoot of it, or rather a related organisation, al-Huda, clearly sticks more closely to the original vision of women in public life held by Maududi.

Originally named as Al-Huda International Welfare Foundation and founded in 1994 by Farhat Hashmi, a former faculty member of the International Islamic University, Islamabad, it styles itself as an “institute of Islamic education for women” and focuses on educating women about Islam especially through tafsir (exegesis or interpretation).

It has emerged as a potent force in Pakistan over the past quarter century or so, as it has become hugely popular throughout the country and is fostering a new generation of educated, middle-class women who have become veiled, orthodox practitioners of Islam.

The Islamic identity that al-Huda espouses is not rooted in indigenous traditions in Pakistan but instead borrows its features from Salafi visions of Islamist thought. Signs of al-Huda’s impact can be seen in every major city in Pakistan: more women – especially from educated classes – are veiling today than a decade ago and are wearing a distinct kind of hijab (a headscarf more common in the Middle East and Southeast Asia than in Pakistan).

Al-Huda’s emphasis on observing purdah reinforces the notion thatwomen’s uncontrolled sexuality will lead men astray and disrupt thesocial order.

As women’s rights activist Simi Kamal observes in a 2001 article, women who have completed al-Huda training “are under the impression that their hijab is somehow different from the purdah of the middle classes”.

Sadaf Ahmad’s book, Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women, thus addresses a scenario very different from the one being negotiated by women in the Jamaat.

Her study sheds light on how an orthodox Islamist women’s organisation is provoking a certain type of social change without overtly indulging in politics.

“Al-Huda has appropriated the meaning of Islam and presented it as not something that illiterate and ignorant people engage with, but as something very modern,” she offers. “The use of PowerPoint presentations and other audio visual aids contributes to the modern atmosphere of the school, and plays a role in increasing its validity, as does the fact that Hashmi has a doctorate from abroad.”

Al-Huda’s uniqueness, according to Sadaf Ahmed, lies in the fact that it has been able to make inroads into the middle and upper classes of the urban areas of Pakistan, a feat other religious groups have been unsuccessful at accomplishing.

“This quality is particularly relevant in a social context where Islam has always been closely associated with the maulvis ... [who are] generally perceived by the masses in general, and women in particular, as uneducated, unkempt, misogynist, and extremist.”

The author provides an alluring, comprehensive account of al-Huda’s various activities — its promotion of Islamic education, ‘character building’ and practical application of Islamic tenets. She also chronicles al-Huda’s considerable expansion in the past decade and its subsequent social impact.

Women taking classes at al-Huda become the basic building blocks of its work, resulting in many urban Pakistani women becoming avid yet unquestioning consumers of the kind of teaching that the organisation propagates.

While al-Huda states that it is not affiliated with any Muslim sect or group, that it instead teaches the one “true” Islam, Sadaf Ahmad observes that the Quranic exegesis developed by Hashmi is heavily influenced by the writings of the late Maududi and that the kind of Islam the organisation propagates has remarkable similarities with those promoted by other purist Islamist groups in the country. “[Hashmi] draws on a literal interpretation of the Qur’an, relies on the Sunnah, and has an idealised image of the first Muslim community.

She too desires to remove cultural accretion and tradition from society, places a great deal of emphasis on ritual, critiques the practices that people subscribing to [heterodox sects] engage in, deems Islam to be a solution to all human problems, and so forth,” writes Sadaf Ahmed.

It appears that an important result of participating in al-Huda’s educational activities is not simply that women get wholly focused on religion and become socially and politically complacent, even fatalistic, but that they also lose the desire to have agency in essentially anything else. Their focus turns to making religion “the primary framework informing their lives”.

A new chasm seems to be emerging among Pakistani women, notablybetween those who engage with al-Huda’s teachings and those who donot.

This indeed affects their vision of women’s place in the larger social order — the complacency and fatalism they harbour allow injustices to go unquestioned. Sadaf Ahmad purports that the vision of an ideal woman propagated by al-Huda is one who “takes on the responsibility of keeping her family intact, and by extension the larger social order as well”.

Al-Huda’s emphasis on observing purdah reinforces the notion that women’s uncontrolled sexuality will lead men astray and disrupt the social order. These teachings, therefore, not only put the responsibility of any sexual crime against women on men – as we see in the rest of the world – but they also become an excuse for the control of women’s mobility and sexuality.

An important social result of these practices is what Sadaf Ahmad refers to as “the systematized valorization of gender roles”. She writes how women “are considered naturally nurturing, emotional and empathetic, whose primary duty is raising a family”. Such “reinforcement of an essentialist notion of womanhood, which creates a positive value for their roles of wives and mothers, leaves very little space for those women who want a different life for themselves”.

Al-Huda’s vision of proper roles places women more squarely in the domestic domain and leaves little room for the acceptance of any forms of deviance. “ … the characteristics that make up a ‘good Muslim woman’ put down those who are different, both directly and by default,” Sadaf Ahmed writes.

While al-Huda’s leaders claim the organisation is explicitly non-political, it indeed encourages roles for women that are in marked contrast to those being supported today by the government of Pakistan, women’s advocacy groups and the majority of women’s movements worldwide. Sadaf Ahmad argues that “being a Pakistani” for the women at al-Huda “means being Muslim” and their strengthened Muslim identity now also makes them feel more connected to Muslims across the world.

A new chasm seems to be emerging among Pakistani women, notably between those who engage with al-Huda’s teachings and those who do not. There are many who feel alienated by al-Huda’s teachings. Some women become outraged when they consider how al-Huda’s vision affects their social agency.

“Al-Huda’s success [is] being tempered by people who are religious yet possess competing cultural codes that prevent them from associating with the school,” Sadaf Ahmed notes. “Al-Huda faces even greater criticism from persons completely outside the movement, whether they are in the secular women’s movement, leading human rights groups and non-government organisations (NGOs), or religiously inclined people in general. The latter include individuals who believe students at al-Huda are extremists or see the school as propagating an Islam that does not match their own.”

The salient issue here is that al-Huda is no small organisation whose impact does not go beyond its own doors. Instead, it is slowly but substantively changing the social landscape in Pakistan and is affecting gender roles, values and interpretations of women’s rights in unprecedented ways. These appear to be in direct contrast with Jamal’s understanding of how being a member of the Jamaat affects women. Although members of both groups couch their activities within the context of orthodox interpretations of Islam, they appear to advocate different levels of agency.

In sum, we can see from these two works on orthodox Islamist associations in Pakistan that women’s mobility, political participation and self-sufficiency remain highly contested social terrains. The pervasive impact of the global economy on Pakistan is forcing more and more women into the workforce and the rise in female education levels is prompting more and more of them to enter the public arena because they have the know-how and wherewithal to do so.

But there are limited opportunities in the country’s formal sector to incorporate them. While women in the Jamaat have found a domain in which to operate actively, opportunities for countless other women in Pakistan remain constrained by how their families perceive the appropriateness of their active presence in public spaces. The teachings propagated by al-Huda often reinforce these constraints.

What results from the competing ideas over women’s place in Pakistani society – from secular feminism to the Jamaat-sanctioned purdah in parliament to al-Huda’s highly restrictive vision – is a confounding situation. Consequently, such ideals as the freedom to make political and economic choices, the exercise of free agency in individual and collective endeavours and the wielding of power over their own lives remain far from realised for most Pakistani women.

This was originally published in the Herald's April 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a professor of International Studies at the University of Oregon and author of 'Interpreting Islam, Modernity and Women’s Rights in Pakistan'.