Art and Life: Unraveling a Puzzle

By Anjum Altaf

The relationship between art and life may not have been a puzzle to most but it was to me. And it was not resolved by the debate over whether art ought to be for its own or for life’s sake. This was a difference over the purpose or otherwise of art whereas my interest was in the nature of the relationship. At one level, art must reflect life since it cannot exist in a vacuum. But this only opens up a number of questions: To what extent does art reflect life and what might be a measure of the goodness of that reflection?

I am concerned here with the novel as a particular form of art. The novel is a story and so in some sense is life. There is, therefore, a natural correspondence between the two. Life, however, is messy, all over the place, and any novel that attempted to reflect it faithfully would be likely to be unreadable. I presume that is the reason I have not been able to read Ulysses despite my best intentions.

Most novels, unsurprisingly, extract some aspects of life and cut out its messiness. We can get a sense of this if we consider what we typically ask for in a ‘good’ novel – tight plot, taut storyline, minimal digressions, well-rounded characters, and the like. At the very least, we don’t like the action to sag and complain if it does. But real life is almost all sag; characters are involved in any number of related or unrelated stories and break up their days for mundane acts that we expect to be left out of the story as reflected in the novel.

This extraction of the essence of the ‘real’ story, the omission of the seemingly irrelevant, might be considered necessary, even a strength of the novel. Art does reflect life but in a stylized manner designed to sustain the interest of the reader with limited time and patience.

This is an understanding I arrived at working backwards from what to me was an exception to the rule – The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, a debut novel by Shehan Karunatilaka. This was the first novel I have read that made the messiness of life so much an integral part of the story and was able to carry it off. I became engrossed in, indeed I wished to know, everything that Wije did whether it was part of the part of the story or not. In some uncanny way, the non-story became a part of the story itself.

What I took away from my reading of The Legend of Pradeep Mathew was that the extraction of the essence of life was not necessarily a strength of the novel, it was more a reflection of the limits of the novelist. To reflect life faithfully and remain interesting and readable is beyond the capability of most authors. And hence, one measure of the success of a novel might be the degree it can be faithful to life and yet remain readable. Joyce might be the master of faithfulness but ventures beyond the absorptive capacity of most readers. Pradeep Mathew hit the sweet spot for a reader like me.

Faithfulness, at one level, can be considered a synonym for realism – if there are two-dimensional characters in real life, those who only serve and wait, why shouldn’t they appear as such in a novel? At another, the relationship is more complex. Pradeep Mathew has been criticized for its ‘unreal’ end. But this too had an appeal for me. In real life, characters are a mix of action, thought and imagination. What may never happen but a character desperately wishes to transpire to the extent that the reader begins to wish it too, is also a part of life that can find a place in a novel.

Shehan Karunatilaka writes, quite believably, that once in a while there comes a bowler who can make the same ball break both ways. Pradeep Mathew is a novel in that mould – one that both formed and broke apart my mental picture of the relationship between art and life and forced me back to the nets. Well bowled, indeed.

Anjum Altaf is Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Back to Main Page

Theater and Social Change in Pakistan: The Plays of Shahid Nadeem

By Kabir Altaf

Art does not exist in a vacuum. The artist lives in a particular social context and his or her work reflects the era in which it was created. Artists have long been concerned with exploitation and injustice. Rather than have their work simply reflect the society around them, many artists wish to use their work to change conditions on the ground. For example, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) believed that plays should not cause spectators to identify emotionally with the characters on stage but should rather provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the onstage action. Thus, Brecht used techniques that would remind the audience that the play was a reflection of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate to the audience that their reality was equally constructed, and thus changeable.

Two of Brecht’s most famous plays are The Threepenny Opera and The Good Person of Szechwan. Both these works reflect Brecht’s concerns with the exploitative nature of capitalism.  The Threepenny Opera dramatizes the question: “Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?” The Good Person of Szechwan is about a prostitute, Shen Te, who struggles to lead a life that is “good” without allowing herself to be trod upon and used by those who would accept and abuse her goodness. Her neighbors and friends prove so brutal in the filling of their bellies that Shen Te is forced to invent a male alter ego to protect herself, a cousin named Shui Ta, who becomes a cold and stern protector of Shen Te’s interests. Shen Te’s altruism conflicts with Shui Ta’s capitalist ethos of exploitation. The play implies that economic systems determine a society’s morality.

In modern Pakistan, a group that is producing work similar to Brecht’s is Ajoka. Led by director Madeeha Gauhar and playwright Shahid Nadeem, the group was founded in 1983 when Zia ul Haq’s martial law was at its peak. Since then, Ajoka has been producing plays focused on human rights, the plight of women and the increasing Islamization of Pakistani society. A representative selection of Nadeem’s plays have been translated into English and published as Selected Plays of Shahid Nadeem.

Nadeem’s plays address various topics, ranging from the plight of women in Barri (The Acquittal) to exploitation by village pirs in Kala Meda Bhes (Black is my robe) and the struggle against religious fundamentalism in Bulha and Burqavaganza. Three plays that are particularly powerful are Barri, Bulha, and Burqavaganza.

Barri was written in 1987 in the context of General Zia’s Hudood Ordinances, discriminatory “Islamic” laws that were used to punish women and caused gross miscarriages of justice. The play revolves around a middle-class activist, Zahida Zaman, who is arrested for going on a hunger strike in protest of the family laws. She is placed in a cell that already contains three other women, Jannat Bibi, Jamila and Marium. Throughout the course of the play, the audience learns the stories of each of these women. Jannat Bibi is in prison for a crime that her son is supposed to have committed. Jamila has been convicted of murdering her husband while Marium has been imprisoned on charges of dancing in public. Jamila tells the audience that she was married at 14 to a man who was almost as old as her father.  She fell in love with a younger man and asked her husband for a divorce. He refused and physically abused her. She managed to run away with her lover, but was caught and returned to her husband’s house where she was chained to the bed. When her husband thought that she had accepted defeat, he untied the ropes. That night, Jamila killed her husband with an axe. Because he would not grant her divorce, the only way for her to save herself from a loveless and abusive marriage was to kill her husband.

In Marium’s case, she was imprisoned on charges of dancing in public and was given a three- month sentence. However, at the time the play takes place, those three months are long over and Marium is still in jail. In addition, she is pregnant. When Zahida expresses surprise at Marium’s pregnancy and then asks who the father is, Jamila says that she still doesn’t understand. Marium has been repeatedly raped by many of the prison officers and the child could be anyone’s. The prison officers tried to force Marium to get an abortion, but she refused. Finally, Marium is subjected to a forcible abortion, under the guise of a medical checkup. By the time Zahida returns home from jail, she has learned about the many injustices that are visited upon women. She also realizes that while, in theory, prisoners have legal recourse, no such rights exist in practice.

Bulha, first performed in 2001, is about the life and times of the Punjabi Sufi poet Bulleh Shah.  The play revolves around the disagreements between the Mullahs and their orthodox interpretations of Islam and Bulleh Shah’s Sufism. The play opens after Bulleh’s death, when the Qazi (head of the Islamic court) refuses to allow the body to be buried in the city graveyard until it is determined if he is entitled to a Muslim burial. It then proceeds in flashback to show Bulleh’s life and his struggle with the Mullahs. During his lifetime, the saint was accused of heresy and exiled from his city. After his death, the religious authorities refused to lead his funeral prayer or to bury him in the city’s graveyard. Through the struggle between Bulleh Shah and the orthodox representatives of Islam, Nadeem comments on contemporary tensions between liberal and fundamentalist versions of Islam.

Like Bulha, Burqavaganza concerns the increasing Islamization of society. Written in 2007, in the context of the Laal Masjid episode and the moral policing of the female students of Jamia Hafsa, the play is a farce that uses songs and humorous situations to highlight contradictions in society. Because the play treats the issue of the burqa in a comedic manner, it was banned by Pakistan’s National Assembly for being “disrespectful” to Islam. In the play, everyone, both men and women, wears a burqa and carries out all normal activities. For example, people are shown exercising in burqas. It also satirizes religious talk shows where mullahs give rulings on important issues such as whether women can wear nets with their burqas. There is also a character based on Osama bin Laden called Burqa bin Batin.  Finally, the play is interspersed with parodies of well-known Bollywood songs. For instance, “choli ke peechay kya hai” becomes “parde ke peeche kya hai.” Through showing characters engaging in all activities while wearing the burqa, the play makes the point that wearing or not wearing the garment has no impact on people’s behavior.

While Nadeem’s plays all deal with extremely serious issues, he uses music and humor to keep the audience engaged. Almost all his plays contain music, from Sufi Qawaalis in Bulha to film-song parodies in Burqavaganza. Thus Nadeem’s plays combine entertainment with important social messages, continuing in the tradition of Brecht.

One is often asked if theater can actually lead to social change. After all, Brecht’s plays were written in the early twentieth century, yet the exploitation of laborers and the excesses of capitalists still exist one hundred years later. Similarly, Ajoka has been performing plays in Pakistan for over twenty years yet it seems that society has become more fundamentalist over time. Thus, many people would conclude that these plays have had little or no impact on their societies.

I would argue against this notion by pointing out that these plays serve an important function by raising awareness of the issues. However, without concrete action and political institutions, theater alone cannot bring about change. People need to select political parties that share their values and will work towards implementing the kind of changes that they want to see. People also need to come out on the streets and protest for causes they believe in.  The function of art is only to inspire action. Brecht did not want his audience to passively identify with his characters and reach a catharsis at the end (the purpose of theater according to Aristotle). Rather, he wanted them to confront the issues that he was raising and to be inspired to go and work towards changing social conditions. Similarly, Ajoka does not produce plays purely for entertainment, but to serve as a liberal voice countering the increasing conservatism of society and to inspire concrete actions. The artist can only raise his voice and point out the problems that he sees in his society. He depends on others to work to change conditions on the ground. We must first confront the issues facing our society, before attempting to change them.

Kabir Altaf attended the Lahore University of Management Sciences and graduated magna cum laude from George Washington University with a major in Dramatic Literature and a minor in Music.

Back to Main Page

Brown as the Mouths of Rivers

By Hasan Altaf

Excerpts from an essay published in a special issue (A Country of Our Own – A Symposium on Re-Imagining South Asia) of Seminar, India, April 2012.

*

A nation cannot grow in entirely barren ground, however, and so in Pakistan we have attempted to replace “South Asia” with “Islam”: to substitute for culture, religion, in theory a straight one-to-one transfer. There is no space for chaos here, either, though; the Islam we choose to imagine is monolithic, straight-from-the-sands, brooking-no-argument; it ignores the vast diversity even among our Islams, let alone all our religions and cultures, and says that in the interests of simplicity, order, there will only be one, there has always been only one right way to go about this business.

Once again, it was the Met that put things in context. Recently the museum reopened its collection of what is in shorthand referred to as “Islamic art” because its formal name is simply so overwhelming: the new galleries for “the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.” By the time one reaches the end of that phrase, it feels as if a globe has already spun halfway around – if the “Islamic world” stretches from at least as far west as Morocco to as far east as Indonesia, and if the “Islamic world” has in some form or another existed for nearly fifteen hundred years, expecting “Islam” – the culture of Islam, the interpretations of Islam, the forms and practices and implications of Islam – to remain constant across both time and space is foolish at best and destructive at worst, like asking evolution never to happen, your seeds never to bear fruit.

*

These are all however exhibitions, displayed in museums; behind glass and untouchable, these are all in a sense relics, remnants, objects from the past and therefore by definition no longer a part of our present. A show in a museum, then – particularly a show of ancient “South Asian” art in a museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the twenty-first century – is just a show in a museum; one could argue that real life is another thing entirely, and in the real life of South Asia in 2012 (precise, emotionless geography; precise, normative time), painting a Jainesque Shahnama is not exactly anyone’s first priority.

Maybe such things belong now only in museums, and perhaps the same could be said for “South Asia” itself, that as an idea its time has passed, that in any sense other than the geographic it has become as untouchable and distant as a Jainesque Shahnama mounted, framed and hung. Golden ages after all cannot last, empires and nations and even cities fall, languages develop and morph and die: Cultures change, in the end; why should South Asia – because when we use the term to mean anything other than geography in the end what we mean is culture, what we are talking about is culture, kinship – be any different? The lines have been drawn; we have lived since then for the most part within our walls, fortifying our borders (geographical and otherwise, precise and vague, emotionless and heated) with blood and with rhetoric. SAARCs and most-favored-nations are all well and good, but as for anything more, the general consensus (general because it is the view espoused by the governments meant, in our theoretical democracies, to represent us) seems to be that it is time to let the idea go. The rainforest has been razed; now we should make do with our endless acres of corn.

*

The notion that the arts transcend national boundaries is both obvious and familiar, especially on that subcontinent. It is impossible to imagine the visual art, the literature, the architecture, the cinema or the music of any of the countries of South Asia without imagining at the same time South Asia as a greater whole. More than impossible, it would be foolish, brutal (you would have to tear down the Taj Mahal, burn the poetry of Iqbal and Tagore), and it is also by now a moot point. Jainesque Shahnamas may be passé, but Indian soap operas and game shows are, inexplicably, hugely popular in Pakistan; Coke Studio (the Pakistani one, although the whole concept was started by the Coca-Cola Company in Brazil) has a large audience in India; Urdu ghazals are read in Bangladesh. Somewhere I read that one way to define “South Asia” might be by Bollywood; as long as those movies remain the lingua franca, you are still in some sense in South Asia, you are still in some sense at home. By this calculus, “South Asia” is immense, diverse, impure, jumbled, confused, chaotic, and richer for it.

Art does not convince everyone, however, but the fact of music, “South Asian” music, may have been secondary. Those concerts and competitions, I remember them as completely distinct from the rest of my childhood: We grew up in jeans and T-shirts; only on those weekends would we don shalwar kurtas or lehngas or saris and sit on stage awkward in those unfamiliar clothes (except the dancers, the dancers were never awkward); when we climbed back down the language we spoke was English. Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, South Asian, we were most of all the kids in America. Between us and the Indian subcontinent there lay the gulf of language, culture, environment; between us and the Indian subcontinent there lay ten thousand miles.

Ten thousand miles were, in the end, the shortest route home: I grew up on the East Coast, but if I looked for it, South Asia was right there. When I was in middle school, the Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis gravitated towards each other, drawn by the opportunity to make fun of other people and complain about our parents to peers who would understand. (The same thing happened even with our parents, people born and raised in South Asia, people for whom the conflicts of South Asian history were not history but lived reality. They met for tea and samosas; they went to listen to Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy read; they went to listen to Abida Parveen or Vilayat Khan perform.) Later, when I was in college in New York, Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis went to the same restaurants for a taste of home; we wound up at the same grocery stores, the same parties, the same movies; now, on Facebook, we laugh at the same memes. One could of course have looked for Pakistan, instead of South Asia, but the former was harder to find, and the differences so minimal.

The important factor was the distance, those ten thousand miles. From so far away, the internal differences began to fade, some of the boundaries blur; as the American child of Pakistanis, the American children of Indians and Bangladeshis were by and large just like me, growing up with similar languages, similar cultures, similar expectations, the exact same schizophrenia of one way of life outside their homes and another inside. This seems though fairly common: In the US and Canada and the UK, in the Middle East and in Singapore and in Hong Kong – surrounded that is by “others,” by people whose languages and backgrounds and cultures and experiences and expectations are more starkly different – Indians and Pakistanis begin to seem and to feel more alike – to feel, as it were, more “South Asian.” (You can see the same phenomenon, on a different scale, working within South Asia too: People from Bikaner and Calcutta can both be “Indian,” Burushaski- and Punjabi-speakers can both be “Pakistani.”)

 

*

Internet memes are one thing, but it would be foolish to deny all the problems of South Asia’s history, all the different desires and pressures and goals, all the conflicting needs, all the blood that has been shed. Leaving the region itself aside, even the individual countries have essentially since their independences been divided along lines of language, class, caste, ethnicity, religion, power, wealth; the violence of even individual cities – Karachi, Bombay – shows that while we may all like our food spicy and all our parents may want us to be doctors, old wounds can still bleed. The history of our part of the world is troubled and violent and impossible to escape, even for those of us who left South Asia or who were born or raised in other countries: You bring your scars with you when you travel, too.

In the end, like most things, it boils down to a choice: One can choose to focus on the bloodshed, one can choose to see only the differences, and in response try to eliminate and expel all that is in any way other (although this is a fool’s errand; there will always be someone else to ostracize, another other whose influence to purge), or choose another interpretation, one of which might be that our history has both tragedy and its opposite almost beyond measure, and it is precisely those tragedies and their opposites that are our background. History was handed to us; what we do with it is our own choice. Similarly, identity, too, is a choice: We are born with the geography of our birth and our origin, but everything beyond that geography is up to us. “South Asia,” like any other such grandiose idea (“Islam,” “America,” “Europe,” take your pick), is not static, an object to be passed from parent to child, like a jadanagam – it’s something that we make, something that we create and modify and reshape.

As always happens to me, somewhere in the middle of Central Park I got lost, and I wound up at the Bethesda Terrace, where the Angel of the Waters hovers over her fountain. The terrace always makes me think of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and I remembered a scene in which one of the characters, Belize, tells another about heaven. I’ve remembered his description almost word for word since I first read the play, in the eighth grade:

Big city, overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty-corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens… Prophet birds… Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths… And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion… And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers… Race, taste and history finally overcome.

Ever since I was thirteen this has seemed to me the best possible vision for any kind of heaven – a place of energy, being torn down and simultaneously rebuilt, improved upon, changed; a place where even the trash can be lapidary, precious; a place where the lines of color and faith, ethnicity and language, gender and identity can all be, finally, breached. And while this is a vision of a heaven, a similar destiny is, I think, possible for us, too, in South Asia and on this earth. That future may be distant, but it’s there, around the corner. The journey begins simply with the choice to believe that the destination is possible.

The complete essay is available on the Seminar website. These excerpts are reproduced with permission of the author.

 Back to Main Page

Is There a Puzzle in Indian Culture?

By Anjum Altaf

The seeming disconnect between the aural and visual dimensions of popular Indian culture has left me in shock and struggling for an explanation. There are many things I don’t fathom but most of the time I can advance plausible hypotheses to work towards an understanding. Not so in this particular case.

I have come upon this puzzle late and in a peculiar manner. Being aurally-oriented to an extreme, I have had very limited exposure to the visual medium. I have watched some classical dance live, attended the occasional play, and consumed some sports on TV. But as far as visual expressions of popular art forms are concerned, I am largely ignorant. Movies, in particular, I haven’t watched for decades.

This changed recently when I found myself responsible for managing senior citizens whose daily routine included a number of hours before the television. Hoping to wean them away from StarPlus soap operas and gruesome news footage, I proposed what I thought would be an acceptable compromise – leveraging new technology to watch video clips of classic Indian film songs of the 1960s and 1970s that evoked pleasant memories for all.

The senior citizens took the experience in stride but for me it was a monumental disaster. What had retained an enormous emotional hold for decades was rendered unbearable when picture was added to sound. I have since found it very difficult to unburden myself of what I can only describe as a contamination of the pure with the profane.

For me, one of the most sophisticated aspects of Indian culture is its music represented at its apex by the classical forms. One cannot miss the influence of this sophistication on popular film music as well, at least that of the 1960s and 1970s. The most haunting and memorable film songs of that period bear the unmistakable stamp of the classical tradition. The same sophistication in the visual dimension is represented by classical dance. Yet, that seems to have virtually no relationship to the depiction of movement in the popular domain. Why might this be the case?

Clearly, one argument would pertain to the nature of the audience; classical forms have a limited audience while popular forms are aimed at the mass market. But this does not provide a complete explanation. If the mass audience can relate to adaptations of classical music, why presume they would be unable to adapt to classical movement?

It is not even as if the visual representations are derived from Indian folk traditions. The folk forms, music and dance both, are beautiful in their own right. After all, the classical is nothing but the extraction of the essence of the folk, a process of refinement that has been going on for centuries. What I saw on the screen was neither classical nor folk; nor was it a caricature of Western dance forms although that might be a possible source of inspiration.

Could it be that popular Indian movies aim to appeal to fantasy and there are many more liberties that can be taken with movement than with sound to serve that end? Would it be correct to conclude that, at least in the minds of movie-makers, the Indian audience cannot be visually entertained without being titillated? Can one assume that this is not a trend likely to be reversed any time soon? And is music now also belatedly being liberated of its sophistication?

If one adds to this another presumption that suggests itself from my recent limited exposure, that the mass Indian audience is amused only by watching something silly, there is the making of a truly surreal experience. From what I remember of the Charlie Chaplin I watched as a teenager, there is an entire tradition in Western movies of being silly in an amusing way which seems quite different from the Indian tradition of being amusing in a silly way. And it seems to me that this acculturation starts at a very early age. Last year, I tried to watch the StarPlus Chhote Ustad series, a music program for very young children from India and Pakistan. I gave up after the first episode because I found the MC unbearable. It seemed it was taken for granted that the children would only be amused, entertained and made happy by the most grotesque kind of silly actions and conversation.

I really have nothing to offer here except my puzzlement and would greatly welcome any enlightenment, even censure of what may possibly come across as elitism. The only comparable experience I recall was pondering over the Ragmala paintings that are supposed to illustrate various classical ragas. I was unable to comprehend the connection but that did not ruin my enjoyment of the music itself. This experience belongs to another category altogether. I am now unable to listen to the songs without the association of the accompanying visuals. Shutting the eyes tight is no help.

Back to Main Page