I remember my Pakistan Studies Teacher relating an incident . Gandhi was addressing a press conference when a snake crawled out of somewhere and passed the leader without biting him. The next day the incident made it to the papers. Later at another press conference this time addressed by Jinnah the journalists asked him what he thought of this miracle. Even a snake would not dare touch Gandhi. ‘Professional ethics’ remarked Jinnah. I do not know whether this story is true or not but it left a mark on me.

It’s a national habit of ours to make our leaders, one dimensional. They become austere portraits hanging over bureaucrats bent over files, lifeless over judges and on the currency notes thumbed repeatedly, their features blurring with use. These men on our paper money who changed the course of history; do we ever wonder what they ate, how they lived and loved.

It was a delight to find out Muhammad Ali Jinnah loved spaghetti, and enjoyed eating grapes and plums. That he had a love of newspapers, had these ordered from all over the world, cut out pieces, wrote notes on them and stuck them in files. He enjoyed reading Kamal Ata Turk’s biography , ‘Grey Wolf’ and was later nicknamed the same by his daughter Dina.

Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan was a good book to start from. The book goes into great detail about Jinnah’s marriage to Ruttie; Jinnah catching Dinshaw Petit off guard, inquiring his opinion about inter-communal marriages and getting a positive response from Petit, asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The book stirred controversy with passages of Ruttie bringing Jinnah bacon sandwiches and refuting the whole episode of Jinnah seeing the Prophet’s (p.b.u.h) name listed as one of the Great Law Makers of the World in Lincoln’s Inn. Nonetheless, Jinnah with all his flaws appears enigmatic.

Interestingly a recent programme on Dawn News confirmed the presence of a plaque, with the Prophet’s (p.b.u.h) name on a list of the Great Law Makers of the World, by showing it on television, though it is no more displayed.

There are a number of books that let us into Jinnah’s private world. A book by by Saleem Chaudry called Quaid-e-azam: baimisaal shakhsiyat, Daraakhshan kirdaar ki Jhalkiyaan is an excellent read. It is full of extracts, personal observations and anecdotes. Jinnah might appear haughty but his wit crackles and amuses.

The book records an incident about him travelling on a train as the reason for reserving a whole coupe for travelling alone. Once when he was travelling to attend the National Assembly from Bombay to Delhi on a first class ticket, he found himself alone in the compartment. From a station an Anglo Indian woman got on the train. She sat down silently on the seat opposite him. The train started moving. Jinnah lay on his seat reading something when he heard her saying, ‘Give me a thousand rupees or I will pull the chain and defame you.’’ Jinnah kept silent.

He gave her the impression that he had not heard her talking. The woman repeatedly demanded the same thing over and over again. Jinnah knew the next station was still some distance away. Angrily the woman came close to him, and violently shook his arm saying. ‘Cant you hear anything? Why are you not listening to me? Aren’t you worried about getting disgraced?’ Jinnah relates, that by this time he had thought of a way of getting out of this sticky situation. Without saying anything, using signs and gestures he got it through to her that he could not hear anything. He pushed a pen and paper towards her to write whatever she wanted to say to him. When she had written down what she was saying on the piece of paper Jinnah took the paper and pulled the chain. Immediately the Guard entered the compartment and Jinnah handed him the paper. The woman was arrested and the train resumed its journey. This incident made him extra cautious and he decided to always book the entire compartment.

A man labelled ‘cold’, ‘stubborn’, ‘arrogant ‘or even an ‘average lawyer who was a late achiever in life.’(Nehru). I find him brutally honest, witty and hard to pin down. How else could you describe a man who could snap at a Governor’s wife (Lady Willingdon as recorded by Hector Bolitho) when she suggested his pretty wife cover her bare shoulders with a wrap to prevent herself from getting a cold?

My favourite passages of Saleem’s book are ones that take the reader into the courtroom where Jinnah played the main lead. The man who had once dreamt of playing Romeo at the Theatre commanded rapt audience in real life courtrooms.

Jinnah had stopped practicing law by 1944 but a request by a Muslim inspector forced him to take his case. The case dealt with the issues of divorce and iddat and required Jinnah to explain about the Muslim Lunar Calendar to the judge. The Judge asked Jinnah about the moon, ‘if it does not rise?’ Jinnah replied, ‘then I cannot make it rise, my Lord.’

In another case when a Judge inquired about a ruling Jinnah was referring to during the proceedings, saying he had not seen such a ruling. Jinnah was quick to answer, ‘Mr. Jinnah says so.’

What baffled me while reading these incidents was if it was audacity to the point of recklessness? For example during the proceedings of a case, an English magistrate, bored and tired of the long discourse interrupted Jinnah in a sarcastic tone, ‘Mr. Jinnah I just listen to what you say from one ear and let it fly out the other’. Jinnah’s retort, the place between the magistrates’ ears must be empty if whatever he says goes in one end and flies out the other, makes me laugh in awe.

I think I am charmed by Jinnah like Sarojini Naidu, a prominent Indian Leader also known as the Nightingale of the East. Some sources claim her to have been besotted by Jinnah, with her writing love poems for him. A profile picture of her sitting in the National archives sent to Jinnah is signed ‘from your friend’ and there are many who deny the infatuation. Jinnah has that power. There is nothing average about him and nothing one dimensional about him.

BY Sandip Hor

“This is where India was sold to the British,” tells my omniscient guide Quadir when we visit an abandoned mango grove in Plassey, a small village in West Bengal, which for the last 250 years has remained as a silent spectator of a drama that changed the fate of India.

History books account that so called drama as “Battle of Plassey”, which in 1757 was staged between Nawab Siraj-Ud-Daula, ruler undivided Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa and Lord Clive of East India Company.

Murshidabad, located 150 km away from Kolkata was then the bustling capital of Siraj’s empire; now a shabby district town where almost every stone and brick has a story of lust and passion, obedience and conspiracy, power and greed to narrate. That’s enough to lure visitors like me to land there on a weekend and browse through the impoverish townscape, dotted with ruined palaces, mosques, monuments, mausoleums, tomb and graveyards.

The history during the golden period of Murshidabad is very interesting. Situated on the banks of the Bhagirathi, it was established in 1717 by Nawab Murshid Quli Khan as the capital of his province in Eastern India at a time when the might of Mughals in Delhi was on the wane. The British East India Company, established a century ago in Calcutta, was becoming more interested in territory than trade. They had organised an army of their own and built walled bastions in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Other European colonizers — the French, Dutch and Portuguese — were also trying to make their presence felt, but their scores were limited.

Siraj-Ud-Daula, ascended to the throne in April 1756 at the age of 26, after the death of his grandfather Ali Vardi Khan, superseding other princes, senior ministers and nobles. This aroused extreme jealousy among close family members and officials. From day one, Siraj was not in good terms with the British Company, particularly because of their strengthening the fortification in Calcutta. So in June 1756, he attacked the fort, captured it and held 146 British subjects in a small, dark chamber, recorded in history as the infamous “Black Hole of Calcutta”. Only 23 were said to have survived the ordeal. Revenge became the top of the agenda item for the British East India Company.

At the same time, a conspiracy to overthrow Siraj was growing exponentially in Murshidabad. His most senior minister Mir Jafar, aunty Ghasetti Begum and many others including wealthy merchants like Jagath Seth and Umichand, joined hands with Lord Clive, the commander of East India Company and struck a deal that if Siraj can be ousted, the throne will be awarded to Mir Jafar.

So on June 23, 1757, the 3,000-strong army of Clive met face-to-face with Nawab’s 50,000 men equipped with a train of heavy artillery at the tranquil mango grove of Plassey at the outer periphery of Murshidabad. However, the outcome of the battle had been decided long before the soldiers came to the battlefield. Nawab’s soldiers were bribed by Mir Jafar to throw away their weapons and surrender prematurely. So without many gun shots fired, the battle ended within a day and with Siraj fleeing for his life; but he was soon captured by Mir Jafar’s son and brutally murdered.

Nawabs for puppets

Mir Jafar and his descendants became the future Nawabs, but remained as puppets under the British, who wasted no time thereafter to establish their reign, not only in Bengal, but all over India. Years later Jawaharlal Nehru, in his book Discovery of India aptly described Clive as having won the battle “by promoting treason and forgery”, thus marking a sordid start to British rule in India.

A monument stands today in the ill-fated battle ground, perhaps to remind the generation of independent India and visitors as well, how sovereignty of a nation was lost and to make them think what would have India looked like today if a fair game was played.

Mir Jafar was never forgiven for his disloyalty to his motherland. He was nicknamed Ghaddar in Urdu meaning unfaithful traitor and remembered in history as another word for betrayal. It’s said people kick and spit on his decorated graveyard, of which nothing remains except the ornamental gate called the “Namak Haram Deorhi” meaning traitors gate.

There is also nothing much left to remember Siraj other than his grave in Khosh Bagh, located on the other side of the river. He rests there alongside his grandfather and wife Luft-un-nisa, inside an arcaded mausoleum, surrounded by a pleasant garden, peppered with 108 varieties of roses.

Hazarduary Palace

The town’s most tourist occupied venue is the Hazarduary Palace, which surfaced long after the era of Siraj and Mir Jafar. Built in 1837, it’s an Italian architectural styled three-storied edifice, fitted with 900 real and 100 artificial doors (hazarduary literally means thousand doors), guarding 114 rooms which now display an exquisite collection of Nawabi memorabilia. The 41-acre walled area that also houses a Clock Tower, a mosque, an impressive white- painted Imambara and a huge 4m long cannon, which has been kept idle after it fired its first shot. Its explosive sound was so loud that all pregnant women within a 15 km radius gave birth to their child prematurely.

The oldest monument of significance in Murshidabad is the Katra Masjid, a large mosque built on a 20-acre property in 1723 by Nawab Murshid Quli Khan. During heyday, this mosque could accommodate thousands easily and had numerous cave-type cells for worshippers to read the Quran. Though this monument, like few others is maintained by the Archaeological Society of India, unfortunately signs of neglect are evident everywhere

He had no doubt of  his place in literary history and left behind the following epitaph for himself: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried the arts of short-story telling. Here he lies underneath tons of mud still wondering if he was a better short-story writer than God.”

Saadat Hasan Manto died in Lahore in 1955. He was forty-three years old. The life of  one of our greatest short-story writers had been prematurely truncated. I was eleven years old at the time. I never met him. I wish I had. One can visualise him easily enough. In later photographs the melancholy is visible. He appears exhausted as if his heart were entrenched with sadness. In these his face displays all the consequences of a ravaged liver. But there are others. Here his eyes sparkle with intelligence, the impudence almost bursting through the thick glass of his 1940’s spectacles, mocking the custodians of morality, the practitioners of confessional politics or the commissariat of the Progressive Writers. ‘Do your worst’, he appears to be telling them. ‘I don’t care. I will write to please myself. Not you.’   Manto’s battles with the literary establishment of his time became a central feature of his biography. Charged with obscenity and brought to trial on a number of occasions he remained defiant and unapologetic.

It was the Partition of India in 1947 along religious lines formed his own attitudes and those of his numerous detractors. The episodes associated with the senseless carnage that accompanied the withdrawal of the British from India loom large in Manto’s short stories. A few words of  necessary explanation might help the reader to understand the corrosive impact of  Manto on the reading public.

The horrors of 1947 were well known, but few liked to talk about them. A collective trauma appeared to have silenced most people. Not Manto. In his stories of that period he recovered the dignity of all the victims without fear or favour. Even the perpetrators of crimes were victims of a political process that had gone out of control.

In these bad times when the fashion is to worship accomplished facts real history tends to be treated as an irritant, something to be swatted out of existence like mosquitoes in summer, it is worth recalling that something terrible happened fifty years ago today when India was divided.  It is time to recognise it and see if it can be understood and transcended. The survivors owe it to those who perished. At least a million men, women and children lost their lives during the carnage of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that overcame Northern and Eastern India as the Punjab and Bengal were divided along religious lines.

In the months that preceded Partition,  Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other glared into each other’s hate-filled eyes before embarking on  frenzied blood-baths. The character and scale of the butchery was unprecedented in Indian history. In fact even Jinnah, as late as June 1946, was prepared to consider a federal solution as proposed by the Cabinet Mission sent to India by the Labour Government. It was the Congress Party which made that particular solution impossible.

This failure meant that exactly one year before Partition, the Hindu-Muslim riots started in Eastern India. During four days in August 1946, nearly 5000 people were killed and three times that number wounded in Bengal. The mood in the Punjab became edgy. Fear overcame rationality.

My mother, an active member of the Communist Party, often recalls how in April 1947, heavily pregnant with my sister and alone at home, she was disturbed by a loud knock on the front door. As she opened the door  she was overcome by anxiety. In front of her stood the giant figure of a Sikh. He saw the fear on her face, understood and spoke in a soft, reassuring voice. All he wanted to know was the location of a particular house on a nearby road. My mother gave him the directions. He thanked her warmly and left. She was overpowered by shame. How could she, of all people, without a trace of prejudice, have reacted in that fashion. Nor was she the  only one. Manto’s stories help us to understand the madness that grippped [everyone].

Trains became moving graveyards as they arrived at stations on both sides of the new divide, packed with corpses of fleeing refugees. As always, it was  the poor of town and country who were the main victims and they were buried or burnt in  hastily dug pits. Neither the song of the nightingale nor lamps or flowers would ever grace their graves. They are the forgotten victims of that year. No memorial in India or Pakistan marks the killings. The Partition of India was a tragedy and a crime. It was neither inevitable nor necessary and  its traces are only too visible in the unending anguish of the great  sub-continent. Faiz Ahmed Faiz,  one of the greatest of 20th century Urdu poets,  born in what  became Pakistan, spoke for many  in his poem Freedom’s Dawn on August ‘47:

This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled—
This is not that long -looked-for break of day,
Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades
Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void
Somewhere must be the star’s last halting place,
Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,
Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.

But now, word goes, the birth of day from darkness
Is finished, wandering feet stand at their goal;
Our leaders’ ways are altering, festive looks
Are all the fashion, discontent reproved;–
And yet this physic still on unslaked eye
Or heart fevered by severance works no cure.
Where did that fine breeze, that the wayside lamp
Has not once felt, blow from—where has it fled?
Night’s heaviness is unlessened still, the hour
Of mind and spirit’s ransom has not struck;
Let us go on, our goal is not reached yet.

A year later, another poet Sahir Ludhianvi, who crossed the border and came to Pakistan could not bear the atmosphere and returned to India. He sent an explanation in the form of a dirge addressed to fellow-writers in Pakistan:

Friends, for long years
I have spun dreams of the moon and stars and spring for you,
Today my tattered garments hold nothing
But the dust of the road that we have travelled.
The music in my harp has been strangled
Its tunes buried by wails and screams
Peace and civilization are the alms I crave
So that my lips can learn how to sing again.

Saadat Hasan Manto, was moved to write ‘Toba Tek Singh’. Manto wrote sparsely, each word carefully chosen. His diamond-hard prose was in polar contrast to the flowery language of many  contemporaries. He wrote about sexual frustration and its consequences, of jealousy and how it often led to murder. One of his stories, ‘Behind the Screen’, describes a wife’s revenge once she discovers her husband has a secret mistress. The wife takes the husband to his lover’s apartment and in his presence has her body chopped into tiny pieces. The story was based on an accrual event that took place in the North West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan. Manto spared his readers the real life ending: the wife had her rival’s flesh cooked and forced her husband to eat the cooked flesh, a striking demonstration of the saying that truth is stranger than fiction (1).

‘Toba Tek Singh’  is a masterpiece set in the lunatic asylum in Lahore at the time of Partition.  When whole cities are being ethnically cleansed, how can the asylums escape? The Hindu and Sikh lunatics are told by bureaucrats organising the transfer of power that they will be forcibly transferred to  institutions in India.  The inmates rebel. They embrace each other and weep. They will not be parted willingly. They have to be forced on to the trucks. One of them, a Sikh, is so overcome by rage that he dies on the demarcation line which divides Pakistan from India. Confronted by so much insanity in the real world, Manto discovered normality in the asylum. The ‘lunatics’ have a better understanding of the crime that is being perpetrated than the politicians who have agreed to Partition.

Few politicians on either side had foreseen the results. Jawaharlal Nehru’s romantic nationalism portrayed independence as a long-delayed “tryst with destiny”. He never imagined that the tryst would be bathed in countless gallons of Indian blood. This was partially the result of a failure by the Congress High Command to make the large Muslim minority an offer it could not refuse.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was a second-rate politician, but with a first-class lawyer’s brain. Initially he had used separatism as a bargaining ploy. Even later, he genuinely believed that the new state would simply be a smaller version of secular India, with one difference. Here Muslims would be the largest community. He really believed that he would still be able to spend some time every winter at his mansion in Bombay, the only city where he had found love and happiness.

Jinnah conceived of Pakistan as an amalgamation of an undivided Punjab, an undivided Bengal together with Sind, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province. This would have meant that forty percent of the Punjab would have consisted of Hindus and Sikhs and forty-nine percent of Bengal would have consisted of Hindus. It was, alas, a utopian nonsense. Once confessional passions had been aroused and neighbours were massacring each other (as in the former Yugoslavia during the last decade of the 20th century) it was difficult to keep the two provinces united.
“I do not care how little you give me,” Jinnah is reported as saying in March 1947 to the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, “as long as you give it to me completely.”

A dying old man in a hurry, who could have been a willing collaborator in establishing a single state with important safeguards for the minority, had the Congress been capable of strategic insights, but now he wanted his own statelet, however small and awkward it might appear on the map.
India had come a long way in 1947. All previous rulers had attempted to govern with the consent of the ruling elites of whatever religion. The Mughal Emperors, themselves Muslims, had learnt this lesson very quickly and Akbar had unsuccessfully attempted to create a new religion synthesising Hinduism and Islam. Even the last of the great Mughals, the religious-minded Aurungzeb did not attempt any Islamisation of his army:  his ablest Generals were Hindu chiefs!

The British, when confronted with the nightmare of actually governing India, realised that, despite their more advanced technology, they would not last too long without serious alliances. They could only govern India with the consent of its traditional rulers.  The raj was maintained by a very tiny British presence: in 1805 the pink-cheeked conquerors numbered 31,000; in 1911 they had grown to 164,000 and in 1931 there were 168,000. In other words the British in India never comprised more than 0.05 of the local population.

It was this fact that concentrated the finest minds of the raj on politics and strategy. The civil servants trained by Haileybury and other imperialist nurseries in Britain to govern a mighty sub-continent were political administrators, often of the highest order. They learned to speak Urdu and Bengali so that they could, when necessary, communicate directly with peasants and administer justice. They also learned how to divide local rulers from each other and how to fan religious prejudices. The birth of modern Sikhism and Hinduism owes a great deal to the British presence in India. In return, local potentates were permitted to learn English and taught the etiquette of nibbling cucumber sandwiches with His Excellency at Government House.

If the British had granted India self-government on the Canadian and Australian pattern after the First World War it is unlikely that the sub-continent would have been divided. Partition was not a planned conspiracy by either the British or Jinnah. It came about because of a combination of circumstance during the Forties, including the Second World War. Jinnah backed the war effort, the Congress demanded Independence. Some scores had to be settled. Pakistan was imperialism’s rap on the knuckle for Indian nationalism.

Nehru and Jinnah were both shaken by the orgy of barbarism. It offended all their instincts.  But it was Mahatama Gandhi who paid the ultimate price. For defending the right to live of innocent Muslims in post-Partition India he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a fundamentalist Hindu fanatic. Godse was hanged, but two decades later, Godse’s brother told Channel Four that he regretted nothing. What happened had to happen.
That past now rots in the present and threatens to further poison the future.  The political heirs of the hanged Godse are shoving aside the children of Nehru and Gandhi. The poisonous fog of the religious world has enveloped politics. History, unlike the poets and writers of the sub-continent, is not usually prone to sentiment.

Partition was a disaster, adjacent to which there lurked another. The two parts of Pakistan were divided by a thousand miles of India, culture, language and political tradition. The predominantly Punjabi military-bureaucratic elite belonged to West Pakistan, while the Bengali majority of the population (60%) lived in East Pakistan. The refusal of the military rulers to permit democracy led to a successful uprising in 1968. A dictator was toppled. In the elections that followed the Bengalis of East Pakistan won a big majority. They were not permitted to take office. The Army invaded the Eastern part of its own country.  There was a massacre of intellectuals and mass rape (Punjabi soldiers had been told to ‘change the genes’ of Bengalis forever) followed by a civil war. Bangladesh was born. One partition had led to another.

India, too, was severely damaged by Partition. The Nehru years (1947-64) disguised the processes underneath, but now the Furies are out into the open. Bombay, once the centre of cosmopolitanism is now Mumbai and under the sway of a neo-fascist Hindu organisation. In their absurd search for a new Indian identity, the scoundrel parties have re-discovered Hinduism and sections of the ‘secular’ Congress have fallen into line.  Communal riots have claimed tens of thousands of lives over the last fifty years.

Manto was amongst the few who observed the bloodbaths of Partition with a detached eye.  He had remained in Bombay in 1947, where he worked for the film industry, but was accused of  favouring Muslims and was subjected to endless communal taunts, even from those who had hitherto imagined to be like him, but the secular core in many people did not survive the fire.  Manto came to Lahore in 1948, but was never happy. He turned the tragedies he had witness or heard into great literature. He wrote of the common people, regardless of ethnic, religious or caste identities and he discovered contradictions and passions and irrationality in each of them. In his work we see how normally decent people can, in extreme conditions, commit the most appalling atrocities. ‘Cold Meat’ is one such story. In 1952 he wrote: “My heart is heavy with grief today. A strange listlessness has enveloped me. More than four years ago when I said farewell to my other home, Bombay, I experienced the same kind of sadness…”

Years later he was still trying to come to grips with what had happened:

“Still, what my mind could not resolve was the question: what country did we belong to now, India or Pakistan? And whose blood was it that was being so mercilessly shed every day? And the bones of the dead, stripped of the flesh of religion, were they being burned or buried? Now that we were free who was to be our subject? When we were not free, we used to dream about freedom. Now that freedom had come, how would we perceive our past state?

“The question was: were we really free? Both Hindus and Muslims were being massacred. Why were they being massacred? There were different answers to the question; the Indian answer, the Pakistani answer, the British answer. Every question had an answer, but when you tried to unravel the truth, you were left groping.

“Everyone seemed to be regressing. Only death and carnage seemed to be proceeding ahead. A terrible chapter of blood and tears was being added to history, a chapter without precedent.

“India was free. Pakistan was free from the moment of its birth, but in both states, man’s enslavement continued: by prejudice, by religious fanaticism, by savagery.”

In a series of Open Letters to Uncle Sam he marked his displeasure at the state of world politics and Pakistan’s Security Pact with the US. Hedisplayed a remarkable prescience as expressed in this extract from his ‘Third Letter to uncle Sam’, written shortly before his death:

“Another thing I would want from you would be a tiny, teeny weeny atom bomb because for long I have wished to perform a certain good deed. You will naturally want to know what.

You have done many good deeds yourself and continue to do them. You decimated Hiroshima, you turned Nagasaki into smoke and dust and you caused several thousand children to be born in Japan. Each to his own. All I want you to do is to dispatch me some dry cleaners. It is like this. Out there, many Mullah types after urinating pick up a stone and with one hand inside their untied shalwar, use the stone to absorb the after-drops of urine as they resume their walk. This they do in full public view. All I want is that the moment such a person appears, I should be able to pull out that atom bomb you will send me and lob it at the Mullah so that he turns into smoke along with the stone he was holding.

As for your military pact with us, it is remarkable and should be maintained. You should sign something similar with India. Sell all your old condemned arms to the two of us, the ones you used in the last war. This junk will thus be off your hands and your armament factories will no longer remain idle.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is a Kashmiri, so you should send him a gun which should go off when it is placed in the sun. I am a Kashmiri too, but a Muslim which is why I have asked for a tiny atom bomb for myself.

One more thing. We can’t seem able to draft a constitution. Do kindly ship us some experts because while a nation can manage without a national anthem, it cannot do without a constitution, unless such is your wish.

One more thing. As soon as you get this letter, send me a shipload of American matchsticks. The matchsticks manufactured here have to be lit with the help of Iranian-made matchsticks. And after you have used half the box, the rest are unusable unless you take help from matches made in Russia which behave more like firecrackers than matches.”

Given the circumstances it is hardly surprising that he sought solace in alcohol and drank himself to death. He had written over 200 short stories and had no doubt of  his place in literary history and left behind the following epitaph for himself:

“Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried the arts of short-story telling. Here he lies underneath tons of mud still wondering if he was a better short-story writer than God.”

Notes:

Khalid Hasan, ‘Sadat Hasan Manto: Not of Blessed Memory’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 4, 1984, P.85

(From Viewpoint Online)

© 2012, Tariq Ali. This article may not be reproduced in any form without providing an active attribution link/ reference to The Pakistan Forum. All attribution links within the article must also be retained.

“I do not think Manto was particularly obsessed with prostitution. It might be more accurate to say that he was part of a broader movement in Modern literature to depict sexuality more honestly and sincerely than earlier generations had done, and writing stories with characters who were prostitutes was one way for him to do that.”

Amardeep Singh and Sadat Hasan Manto have something in common-both come from the same Indian side of Punjab. But that’s not the only connection they have.

Dr. Amardeep Singh, who teaches English literature at Lehigh University, is a second-generation Indian raised in the U.S. working on a new book on Sadat Hasan Manto. He is studying the Progressive Writers movement and other movements like Naya Kavita and Nayi Kahani that came after it. In this project he is trying to work with literature written in multiple South Asian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and English. In some cases he is working with translations, while in other cases he is looking at material in the original languages.

His first book, “Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth Century Fiction,” was based on his Ph.D. dissertation, and was published in 2006. Dr. Amardeep has also written a number of articles on British and contemporary world literature, focusing on authors such as E.M. Forster, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rabindranath Tagore, and G.V. Desani. In 2010 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue research on the new book project, “Modernism and Progressivism in South Asia.”

In this interview he talks candidly about Manto, his work and pedagogical issues in teaching South Asian literature in the U.S.:

1.    Sadat Hasan Manto was the product of an era when the subcontinent was going through significant political changes that ultimately ended in dividing the region into two separate countries. He wrote a lot on the impact of these changes on individuals and families. How would you analyze his understanding of the partition as portrayed in his short stories?  

Manto, as is well-known came out of what is today the Indian part of Punjab – Ludhiana and Amritsar. He grew up in a pluri-religious environment and felt a very deep sense of loss in the disappearance of that sense of shared community across religious lines. He was also influenced by the emerging Progressive Writers group he encountered at Aligarh Muslim University in 1934; they wrote in Urdu and had a generally secular and reformist outlook. Manto was living in Bombay in 1947, and he did not initially jump to join Pakistan at that time. However, as he found his career in the Bombay film industry suffering, in large part due to the discrimination against Muslims that began to appear in the industry around that time, he did finally decide to relocate to Lahore in 1947. From what I can tell, he did not love Lahore, but he did provisionally accept the idea of himself as a Pakistani during the last few years of his life.

Manto’s short stories about the Partition, particularly “Toba Tek Singh,” “Khol Do!” (Open It), and “Thanda Ghosht” (Cold Meat) are some of his most famous stories. Stories like “Khol Do” and “Thanda Ghosht,” both of which feature shocking scenes of sexual violence, show how disappointed he was in the way people on both sides of the religious divide acted during the Partition. These are stories where people seem to behave like animals, thinking only of revenge and the crudest sort of satisfaction. “Toba Tek Singh,” for its part, is more about the strange sense of dislocation many people felt as the identity of large regions near the border changed status overnight. What was “India” one day became “Pakistan” the next, even if people still spoke the same languages, drank the same chai, and lived the same lifestyle they had the day before. The conceit of “Toba Tek Singh” is to have a mentally ill person attempt to digest the arbitrariness of this sudden transformation.

2.    Manto was tried in India and Pakistan for “obscenity” as he used images of women as sex object and prostitute in several of his short stories. How would you compare obscenity and portraying sex as a social reality in literature? Who defines standards of pornography and sex in fine arts and literature in South Asia?

Manto wrote about prostitution because it was a part of life in his era. Once he was asked this same question, and he had the following rejoinder:
“If any mention of a prostitute is obscene then her existence too is obscene. If any mention of her is prohibited, then her profession too should be prohibited. Do away with the prostitute; reference to her would vanish by itself.” (via Harish Narang)

I do not think Manto was particularly obsessed with prostitution. It might be more accurate to say that he was part of a broader movement in Modern literature to depict sexuality more honestly and sincerely than earlier generations had done, and writing stories with characters who were prostitutes was one way for him to do that. Even within Urdu and Hindi literature, Manto was not the only one to push the boundary with regards to explicit sexuality in his writing. The first wave of Progressive Writers, emerging from the Angarey group, also did this. One infamous story by Sajjad Zaheer, for instance, was called “Vision of Paradise” (Jannat ki Basharat) which featured a Maulvi who begins to have erotic dreams while he intends to stay up late praying. The story was controversial at the time because it was seen as blasphemous, and reading it today there’s no doubt that Zaheer intended to be provocative regarding religious piety. But it is no less provocative because of its use of explicit sexuality.

Alongside the Angarey group, Premchand himself was often more direct about matters of sexuality than many people realize. His famous 1936 novel Godaan, for instance, features a cross-caste sexual relationship described quite frankly – though it’s by no means pornographic. Finally, it should be noted that Manto’s friend and rival, Ismat Chughtai, also pushed the line regarding the depiction of sexuality.

That said, there’s no question that Manto takes things a step further. A story like “Bu” (Odour) is significantly more explicit in its depiction of a random sexual encounter than anything written by Zaheer or Chughtai. As a side note, this story, which is one of Manto’s most infamous ones, is not actually about prostitution, but rather a middle-class man’s encounter with a poor woman (a Marathi “Ghatin”) working as a laborer. Other stories do deal directly with prostitution, but often with a focus on the hypocrisy and weakness of men. Manto’s prostitutes are often honest and even noble individuals – trying to survive in a society that treats the exploitation of women’s bodies as merely another kind of financial transaction.

On the question of who sets the standards for obscenity. Here I think there’s no question that by the standards of his time, some of Manto’s stories could be found to be “obscene.” As is well-known, he was tried for obscenity six times during his career, some by the British Indian government before 1947, and some by the independent government of Pakistan. I certainly oppose the censorship, but I think Manto knew what he was doing in writing stories like “Bu,” and I don’t think he or his career suffered greatly because he got in trouble for it; if anything, it may have gotten him more attention and thus helped his career in some ways. That said, with the sexual elements in “Khol Do!” or “Thanda Ghosht,” I do feel these are worth defending, since Manto is referencing sexual violence not for titillation but to make an important ethical point.

3.    How would you compare Manto with short story writers of other languages, especially the known English writers of his time?

Manto was actually more influenced by Russian short story writers like Chekhov and French writers like Maupassant than he was by English literature. The Russian influence goes back to his time in college at Amritsar, where his mentor Abdul Bari Alig encouraged him to read the Russian short story writers. In fact, Manto’s very first book was his translation of French writer Victor Hugo’s The Last Days of a Condemned Man. He also published a book of translated short stories from Russia (often translated from translations: English to Urdu rather than Russian to Urdu) called Russi Afsane. In fact I do not think Manto can be usefully compared to any major English writers.

4.    For Manto, South Asia and the U.S. had astonishing paradoxes and similarities in 1950. When Manto was being tried in Pakistan for obscenity, for example, writers were also facing similar charges in the U.S. How would you compare these two societies in the 21st century?

Manto was actually highly aware of the obscenity trials taking place in the United States. In one of his Letters to Uncle Sam (in Urdu as “Chacha Sam Ke Nam”), he actually acknowledged the obscenity trial surrounding Erskine Caldwell’s novel God’s Little Acre. At that time (1950) the United States was seen as the source of racy images and scantily dressed starlets within South Asia, so this was especially surprising to Manto. As he put it, “You are the king of bare things so I am at a loss to understand, Chachaji, why you tried brother Erskine Caldwell.”  The judge in the Caldwell case, of course, dismissed the obscenity charge with some famous lines: “I am absolutely certain that the author has chosen to write truthfully about a certain segment of American society. It is my opinion that truth is always consistent with literature and should be so declared.” Manto claims he quoted these lines to the judge in his own case, but to no avail: “That is what I told the court that sentenced me, but it went ahead anyway and gave me three months in prison with hard labour and a fine of three hundred rupees. My judge thought that truth and literature should be kept far apart. Everyone has his opinion (‘raee’).”

While Pakistan and the U.S. were not so far apart in 1950, during the time of one of Manto’s obscenity trials and the trial of Erskine Caldwell, I think as time has gone on, they have grown further apart. In the 1960s, the U.S. moved away from the censorship model of the Hayes Code in the film industry, to a “ratings” model, wherein adult material would effectively always be legal as long as it was rated for adults only. Both India and Pakistan have, however, kept the censorship model alive, meaning that many legitimate and important works of art run the risk of censorship sometimes for arbitrary or simply

5.    You have been teaching literature in the U.S. for some time. Do you think there are major pedagogical issues in teaching South Asian literature to students of South Asian origin and white Americans?

I should preface by saying that I myself have been raised in the U.S., albeit in a pretty conservative Sikh community with strong and continuing connections to South Asia. One problem with raising issues such as caste or debates about gender roles within Indo-Islamic culture with students who aren’t familiar with the society is that you can very quickly give the students a very negative picture of South Asian society. If you bombard them with the depth of poverty in India, or the repressiveness around gender and sexuality that still pervades in some parts of the society, you can make it less likely that they’ll want to seriously engage with South Asia in the future. In my teaching I strive for a balanced look at the society, pointing at the way some things have improved (for instance, the growing middle class in both India and Pakistan) alongside the things that aren’t improving (growing religious conservatism in Pakistan, extreme disparities of wealth in India). In that respect I may differ from some of my colleagues on the left: I think trends such as globalization have been beneficial at least in some respects in South Asian societies.

6.    Urdu and Hindi are spoken by a large South Asian diaspora all over the world. Some say, combined together, it becomes the second largest language after Mandarin Chinese.  How do you see the future of teaching South Asian languages and literature in the U.S?  

The outlook for teaching South Asian languages in the U.S. is complex. On the one hand, languages like Urdu and Pashto have actually seen somewhat of a boom in recent years, though the boom is entirely due to the post 9/11 “war on terror,” and the source of the interest is the U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies. Languages predominantly spoken in India are not receiving the same kind of interest. That said, even the study of those languages was, during the cold war, supported by the State Department.

Away from the question of official government support, the economic and prestige disparities in the publishing world have been quite detrimental to the study and publication of literature in South Asian languages. Authors know they will get paid more if they write in English, and have broader readership and recognition as well. This does not mean that good literature in Indian languages is not being written (indeed, in my own experience visiting Punjab not long ago I found the state of Punjabi poetry in Chandigarh to be particularly lively – though it’s mainly a live scene, without much in the way of economic support from the publishing world).

I do not teach at the kind of university where I would have a significant number of students interested in reading Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi literature in the original. However, there is certainly interest among some students in reading literature in translation from Indian languages, perhaps in conjunction with literature written in English.

One interesting development is a growing community of writers working in South Asian languages here in North America. I was at the University of British Columbia for a Punjabi literature conference a few years ago, and I was overwhelmed at the number of students studying Punjabi, often at quite a high level. There is an entire community of diasporic Punjabi writers (novelists and poets), mainly living in Canada, and publishing in their own small publishing houses here in North America (some of those writers also publish their work in Punjabi in India). I do not know if something similar exists with other South Asian languages, though I have seen some collections along those lines.

I should add that I am a person who does not see the choice of language as absolutely determining of authenticity. There are very good, representative novels of South Asian life written in English and very poor ones written in Hindi and Urdu. I have always been inspired by the case of Ahmed Ali, who in mid-career shifted from Urdu to English without really losing much in the way of his ability to describe the Indo-Islamic culture of Old Delhi. I think authors who make a strong attempt to use words from South Asian languages in the midst of their English prose when necessary – and who don’t worry about the possible incomprehension of western readers – can be every bit as “authentic” as their peers writing in South Asian languages.

(From Viewpoint Online)

© 2012, Qaisar Abbas. This article may not be reproduced in any form without providing an active attribution link/ reference to The Pakistan Forum. All attribution links within the article must also be retained.

By Shahan Mufti

The route from Karachi to Kabul was the best way to get supplies to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the main artery for a Pashtun trucking empire—until Pakistan shut it down.

Like a broker tracking the dips and spikes of a volatile but lucrative stock, Mohammad Shakir Afridi has kept a close eye on U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan since the first Americans landed in the country 10 years ago. As president of the Khyber Transport Assn., one of the largest associations of truck owners in Pakistan, Afridi’s biggest contract involves moving military equipment for American and coalition forces through Pakistan to military bases in Afghanistan. The slightest policy shift in Washington can carry major consequences for Afridi and his business.

Sitting on a rooftop in a leafy residential block in Peshawar, the largest city in northwest Pakistan, Afridi slaps the morning paper on the floor beside his mat. “Twenty-four of our boys in one go,” he spits out. A front page photograph shows a field full of coffins draped in Pakistani flags. The soldiers were killed on Nov. 26 when U.S. helicopters and jet fighters from Afghanistan fired on military outposts on the Pakistani side of the border. The relationship between Pakistan and the U.S., which has been rocky for years, hit a new low. While the U.S. military promised to investigate and the NATO chief regretted the “tragic, unintended” incident, the Pakistani Prime Minister said there would be “no more business as usual” with the U.S. Pakistan demanded the U.S. vacate an airbase it was using in the South and choked off all U.S. and coalition military supplies traveling through the country.

Afridi learned of the American attack before the Pakistan military or government had issued any statement; one of his truck drivers called to tell him the border was closed. Afridi was later given orders from the military to halt trucks near the border, and to direct all others to the southern port city of Karachi. He quickly obliged. “It’s serious this time,” Afridi says. “They’ll make the Americans sweat.”

U.S. and Allied forces in Afghanistan get the bulk of their supplies in two ways. The first is the Northern Distribution Network, a web through Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia that crosses through at least 16 countries, using a combination of roads, railway, air, and water to move supplies in from the north. The chain can be complex and circuitous. One path through the network, for example, might involve military cargo that arrives by sea in Istanbul. From there it travels the width of Turkey on truck and crosses the northern border into Poti, Georgia. In Georgia the equipment goes by rail to Baku in Azerbaijan, where it’s loaded onto a ship bound for the Kazakh Port of Aktau, across the Caspian Sea. Then it’s put on trucks for the 1,000-mile ride through Kazakhstan, then a train through Kyrgyzstan and, finally, into Afghanistan.

The second passage to Afghanistan, known as Pakistani Lines of Communication, begins at the port of Karachi and continues on one of two land routes, north toward the logistical hub at Bagram Airfield or west toward Kandahar. It has always been the primary option for American forces: It’s the shortest and cheapest, requires only one border crossing, and minimal time on the road inside Afghanistan. Nearly 60,000 trucks drive more than 1,200 miles through the length of Pakistan every year carrying supplies and fuel. According to varying figures provided by U.S. and NATO forces, 40 percent to 60 percent of all military supplies used by coalition forces in Afghanistan come through Pakistan.

Afridi doesn’t cut the figure of a man playing a key role in the U.S.’s long war in Afghanistan. The 46-year-old Pashtun is from the Khyber Agency, one of the seven Pakistani tribal sectors along the border with Afghanistan. He has a neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard and prefers to drape his rotund figure in a plain white shalwar kameez and a black vest. When he’s not too preoccupied, he wears a disarming smile. The only thing that makes him stand out from the legions of similarly dressed men on the streets of Peshawar are his dark tinted glasses and a cell phone that never stops ringing.

ven Afridi wouldn’t have dreamed of such a life a decade ago. His grandfather started the family transport business in the 1960s, buying a few trucks to move melons, grapes, and wheat from the fertile lands of the Punjab in Pakistan to largely arid Afghanistan. Afridi inherited the business in the 1980s. In 1996 he added a few tanker trucks to his fleet after signing a contract with Pakistan State Oil to transport fuel from refineries in Karachi. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and coalition forces moved in to occupy the landlocked country, Afridi’s business took off. He says he orchestrates a fleet of nearly 4,000 flatbeds and more than 3,000 fuel tankers that haul military supplies into Afghanistan.

On a November morning, two days after the U.S. attack, Afridi rides around in a brand new black Toyota Hilux Vigo pickup. He’s just returned from the haj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, a prohibitively expensive ritual Muslims are required to do at least once in a lifetime—if they are able to afford it. Afridi says this year was his second haj. His first was in 2010.

Despite the prosperity, there are times he wishes he had never become involved with the Americans. After all, he is bringing fuel and supplies to forces fighting Pashtuns like himself in a neighboring country. In Peshawar, where his business is based—and where the Pashtuns are a majority—he’s a man on the run, constantly looking over his shoulder. As Pakistanis increasingly see the U.S. as the real enemy in the conflict in South Central Asia, Afridi feels like a target for doing business with them. “Can you believe it? They won’t even let my guards carry their guns here anymore,” Afridi gestures to the two unamused looking men, with no obviously displayed firearms, who have hung near him like a shadow ever since they jumped out of the cargo bed of the pickup.

The fallout from the Nov. 26 friendly fire incident means Afridi’s business is at a standstill, indefinitely. Still, he thinks the Pakistanis have done the right thing. He says he hates the sight of the American flag, and stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Pakistan’s army. “Your homeland is like your mother,” he says, pausing to turn off a ringing phone. “You can screw people here and there, that’s just business.” He peers over his dark glasses. “But you never, ever screw your mother.”

Of Afghanistan’s neighbors, Pakistan has the longest border and has historically wielded the most influence. It also provides the nearest seaport to Kabul. To leverage Pakistan’s strategic position, the U.S. has poured more than $20 billion into the country over the past decade. The money is not simply to strengthen Pakistan’s democracy against the threat from militants, as diplomats sometimes suggest. It has also been a way to buy Pakistan’s loyalty, aimed specifically at luring Pakistan away from the Taliban. Most important, the money is also for the continued use of Pakistan’s highway network. “If we want to be successful in Afghanistan,” as General James L. Jones Jr., former National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama, said in recent congressional testimony, “the roads to that success have a lot to do with Pakistan.”

The U.S. has worked hard to find an alternative. The Northern Distribution Network, running through Europe and Central Asia, was developed only in 2009. That was after the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan had begun the previous year. Besides easing congestion on Pakistani ports and border crossings, it was also an opportunity to decrease dependence on Pakistan, which the U.S. increasingly suspected was collaborating with the Taliban inside Afghanistan and providing their fighters and leaders sanctuary in Pakistan. Today around half of U.S. military supplies to Afghanistan come in from the north, but the northern network comes with its own set of challenges. (About 10 percent to 20 percent of supplies are flown in.) Besides being very long and costing three times as much to use as the Pakistani route, it’s vulnerable to attack. Only days before the closure of the Pakistani Lines of Communication, a Russian news agency reported an explosion along the northern supply route in Uzbekistan.

Russia’s sphere of influence spreads across much of the northern route, which can cause complications. In 2009, for example, after Kyrgyzstan threatened to eject the U.S. from the Manas Air Base, a key node in the supply chain, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Russia was “working against us.” Two days after the Pakistanis closed the supply route in November, and the U.S. was left with only the northern route, Russia’s NATO envoy made loosely veiled threats at closing off the northern supply line as well if NATO didn’t begin to rethink its European missile defense shield.

Many countries along the northern route still don’t allow the passage of foreign military gear, so Pakistan was the only way for the U.S. to move nearly all of its combat equipment. At a congressional hearing in May, Lieutenant General Mitchell H. Stevenson, the U.S. Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, was asked what the “long term impact” would be if the supply route through Pakistan was “suddenly shut down.” After explaining that the Army kept a 45-day supply of reserve fuel on the ground in Afghanistan, the general said they could only “last several weeks” without any significant impact.

This is what Pakistan’s calculation appears to have been from Day One. According to Abdul Sattar, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister from 1999 to 2002, the evening after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, General Pervez Musharraf, who then ruled Pakistan as an unelected Chief Executive, called a meeting at the military’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. He wanted to discuss his country’s response to the inevitable U.S. call for cooperation.

Abdul Sattar, one of only two people at that meeting not affiliated with the military, says that by midnight the group had decided on the broad outlines of Pakistan’s official response to the U.S. in case of a war in Afghanistan. Sattar suggested a “Yes, but…” approach to Musharraf, meaning Pakistan should agree in principle to whatever reasonable demands the U.S. would make, then secure strategic advantages while negotiating the fine details.

Sattar was soon sidelined though, as were many others, and decision-making shifted into an insulated and small circle of generals closest to the dictator. “I would not hear much after that, a memo here or there, months after the fact,” says Sattar, now retired and living in a quiet corner of Islamabad. The agreements the U.S. reached with Musharraf were never fully revealed, but information trickled out over the years.

The most important part of Pakistan’s role in America’s war was impossible to conceal: The country’s highway network would be the route along which the U.S. military’s supply chain would run. On this issue, Pakistan had taken the “Yes, but…” path. The country did not allow American military vessels on its waters. The U.S. Transport Command handed out massive contracts to international shipping lines such as Singapore’s APL (NPTOF), the Danish company Maersk (AMKAF), and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd. Since the beginning of the war, APL has received more than $700 million in defense-related contracts and has moved more than 300,000 shipping containers for the U.S. military. Maersk has won nearly $2 billion in contracts. The goods transported through Pakistan include everything from blankets and microwave dinners to armored Humvees and Kevlar vests, and even shipping containers full of frozen food.

Getting all the overseas crude oil and other supplies to the port city of Karachi has proven to be the easy part. Once the cargo is unloaded in Karachi, however, the international shipping lines subcontract the job of getting it to Afghanistan to local agencies. Those agencies in turn hire local truckers like Shakir Afridi. And so the lifeline for one of the largest deployments of U.S. forces in American history falls into the hands of a loose association of truck drivers and owners from the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The nerve center of the transport business in Karachi is in Shireen Jinnah Colony, a smoggy and rusty seaside neighborhood with an apocalyptic landscape. Flatbed trucks are assembled from scratch on the side of the road. These “jingle trucks” are painted in every color of the spectrum and decorated with hundreds of intricate metal, wooden, plastic, and glass trinkets. In the background, monstrous oil refineries pump thick smoke into the air. From a small room in an office block abutting the Port of Karachi, Muntazir Afridi, Shakir’s younger brother, deals with the southern end of the Afridi family business.

The trucking industry in Karachi, which is as far away as you can get in the country from Afghanistan, is in the hands of the city’s large minority Pashtun population. Mostly immigrants from Peshawar and the tribal areas on the Afghan frontier, the Pashtuns arrived in the 1950s and ’60s in flocks, looking for jobs. Largely uneducated and unskilled, 1,000 miles from home, they slowly acquired transport contracts to supply Pakistan’s north. Their deep cultural ties to Afghanistan’s majority Pashtun population also made them favorites for transport jobs for Afghan trade. In a city where ethnic groups battle and bloody the streets over slices of the local economy, two tribes in particular have an unshakable grip on the trucking business: the Shinwaris and the Afridis.

Muntazir Afridi’s office is sparse. Taped to the wall are photos of the holy mosque in Mecca and the prophet’s mosque in Medina. A desk sits in a corner, and on a rickety coffee table is an overflowing ashtray. “In Bombay they have their film industry,” Muntazir proclaims with a smile, while sipping his morning green tea on a stained couch. “In Karachi we have the trucking industry.”

With NATO transport shut down, the office block, which houses logistics companies, trucking companies, insurers, and customs clearing agents, is quiet. In an adjacent room, a group of men, mostly truck drivers, lie on soft rugs watching a Pashto film on television. The smell of Afghan hash hangs thick in the air. Other men, clearly stranded, shuttle between offices in the block with fists of crumpled papers, asking for loans, food, and lodging.

Muntazir is in his mid-20s and dressed, like his brother, in a plain white shalwar kameez. His beard is long and neat. He points outside at the sheer scale of the enterprise. Stretching for miles, from the walls of the office block below all the way to where the large cranes of Karachi’s port are visible through the smog, is a patchwork of hundreds of oil tankers and flatbed trucks in yellow and red and green. “On a regular day they would all be on the move like ants,” Muntazir says, but instead the trucks are parked, overflowing from the terminal lots. Lines of jingle trucks are parked, sometimes double parked, for miles along the roads of Karachi. The entire southern quarter of the city looks like it’s been invaded by trucks.

The Afridi family is only one of hundreds that have enjoyed the boom from the steady flow of American military supplies through Pakistan after 2001. The real gold rush started with the troop surge in Afghanistan that began soon after Obama won the election in 2008. When he took office there were just over 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By January 2010, the number had more than doubled to nearly 70,000. In May of this year, troop levels peaked at nearly 100,000.

More troops naturally meant more supplies. Figures issued by the Pakistan Federal Tax Ombudsman illustrate the spike in traffic at Karachi’s port. U.S. military equipment received at the port rose from nearly 16,000 shipping containers in 2005 to more than 54,000 in 2009. Halfway through 2010 the U.S. military had already shipped nearly 30,000 containers to Karachi.

In Pakistan the demand for trucks skyrocketed. “Everyone who had nothing to lose took out a loan and bought a truck,” Muntazir says. He invited many of his extended relatives from the tribal areas to come to Karachi and start driving. The local “third party vendor” transport companies, to whom the international shipping lines subcontracted, were so desperate for drivers that Muntazir says they began lending money to people they had just met, so they would buy a truck and get supplies moving. “There was just no way the companies would be able to deal with truckers,” Muntazir says. “They couldn’t keep track of a thing.” Entire truckloads started going missing. Drivers would take the wheel of a brand new truck and simply drive off, never to return. The supply chain was coming undone.

This is where Shakir, the elder brother, began to do work he describes as “brokering,” placing himself between truck owners and the local transport companies. He takes responsibility for the cargo and ensures it gets to U.S. and other ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Acting as a guarantor, Afridi receives a cut from the logistics companies when the cargo is picked up and again when it’s dropped off. The work has proved so profitable that Afridi has sold his entire fleet.
In November 2008, Hakimullah Mehsud, a commander of the newly formed Taliban Movement of Pakistan, invited the news media to Orakzai, a tribal agency in Pakistan, for his first press conference. Mehsud arrived riding in a brand new armored U.S. military Humvee. As he posed for photographs, he told reporters he had captured a few American vehicles after attacking and looting a military convoy traveling through Pakistan. He boasted he would increase these attacks.

Such attacks started at the same time as the U.S. troop surge in late 2008. Fuel tankers began getting torched regularly and shipping containers were ripped open, looted, and left empty along highways. In the local press, Pakistani military officials told of groups in the tribal areas stealing helicopter parts. Militants who couldn’t get to the trucks took to bombing bridges and roads along the route, at times shutting the supply route for days.

The supply line was not just vulnerable to militants. In the past several years, the Pakistani and American visions for Afghanistan’s future have diverged so far that the relationship has turned hostile. Pakistan first cut off NATO’s supplies in September 2008, in response to the first-ever reported incursion of U.S. troops into Pakistan. Two months later, after a drone aircraft targeted Pakistan’s “settled,” nontribal lands for the first and only time, 160 NATO trucks were burned in a nightlong rampage in Peshawar. Many believed the event was staged by the Pakistani military and meant to send a clear signal. Vice Admiral Mark D. Harnitchek, deputy commander of the U.S. Transportation Command, said in a 2009 speech that 12 percent of the freight bound for Bagram in December 2008 had disappeared.

The supply line has been under consistent fire ever since. In 2009 there were 25 attacks on NATO supply lines in Pakistan, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, an online database tracking terror incidents in the region. In 2011, before the supply line was closed in November, there had already been a total of 111 reported incidents, destroying hundreds of supply vehicles. Even in times of relative calm, the Pakistani military has had its hand on the valve, as it alone decides how many trucks carrying U.S. military equipment to let through on any given day.

The spike in attacks is partly because drivers and truck owners have jumped into the action. Drivers in particular, discouraged by the high risks involved, have taken to selling their loads of fuel on the black market, then setting fire to the tankers and collecting insurance money. They can earn a nice profit, even after paying off local collaborators. Though the scam is a pain for the brokers, Muntazir says he feels for the truckers. “These guys risk their lives, and they get what? Thirty thousand, maybe forty thousand rupees for a trip?” That’s about four hundred dollars. Peanuts, says Muntazir. “Anyway, you can’t blame them trying to make their little bit,” he adds. “The real money is being made by those guys dealing in dollars”—meaning Pakistani transport companies, the Americans, and others higher up the food chain.

In June 2010, after an unsourced news report on Pakistani TV claimed that nearly 11,000 Afghanistan-bound shipping containers that had arrived in Karachi had gone missing, the Supreme Court of Pakistan asked another agency, the Federal Tax Ombudsman’s office, to investigate. The case landed on the desk of Shoaib Suddle. A career police officer, Suddle was Karachi’s police chief at the height of a war between several ethnic groups in the mid-1990s. He has a doctorate in white-collar criminology from the University of Wales and has also served as the chief of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau.

When Suddle first began his investigation, he received little encouragement from his colleagues. It’s made-up news, people would say. How can thousands of shipping containers go missing without anyone noticing? Then he had a breakthrough. The Pakistani ports and customs authorities were not keeping track, but he found that private container terminals in Karachi were keeping detailed records of the exact time containers would depart and return. Some trucks would never check back in. But thousands of mostly empty trucks were coming back too soon, sometimes a few hours after departing for Afghanistan.

“We found the mother of all scams,” Suddle said. In a report published by his office earlier this year, he described complex transnational networks bribing local customs agents and using crooked bureaucrats in Pakistan to forge documents and create fake companies. The intent of that corruption was to get goods labeled as Afghanistan-bound into the country, and then divert them for resale on the black market.

In total, Suddle estimated that at least 7,992 shipping containers had never reached Afghanistan. The report called this “the tip of the iceberg.” A follow-up investigation, also ordered by the Pakistani Supreme Court, revealed that close to 29,000 cargo loads have gone missing in the country. There is no way of knowing precisely what disappeared. While many of these containers were loaded with commercial cargo destined for Afghanistan, military equipment for coalition forces accounts for nearly 40 percent of all trade to Afghanistan through Pakistan. Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue estimates that 3,300 shipping containers full of military equipment were among those missing.

According to an agreement between the Pakistani and British ministries of defense, signed in June 2002 and made public only recently, Pakistan allows ISAF military equipment to arrive in Pakistan without inspection. The U.S. military is not even required to file a customs declaration form describing contents inside shipping containers. Much of the lost military gear finds its way into the Pakistani black market. Some of it might even make it across the border into Afghanistan—but into the wrong hands.
In the Khyber Agency, not far from Peshawar, the hemorrhaging U.S. supply line stocks a long bazaar the locals call Karkhano Market. Among the haphazard corrugated-iron storefronts and randomly arranged merchandise, middle-aged women are shopping for “USA” branded oil and soap bars with the American flag printed on them. Crisply clothed young men in dark glasses who walk in and out of back doors make hushed deals with suppliers. Scruffy fighters drop in from Afghanistan to sample the latest in the military technology available on roadside tables.

Alongside old British rifles and Soviet AK-47s, American military gear like Kevlar vests, boots, camouflage suits, night-vision goggles, and knives hang from hooks. Tall stacks of large boxes carrying ammunition and weapons parts will not be opened without a good reference. In the bargain bins, thrown in with used fleece socks and shrink-wrapped copies of The Book of Mormon, are U.S. military operation manuals that restrict distribution to “DoD and DoD contractors only,” and carry instructions to destroy “by any method that must prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of documents.” A large sign for a shop on the second floor reads, “Haji M. Ikhlas USA traders,” with crude paintings of a U.S. military helmet and army boots. In 2009 a U.S. military laptop that the U.S. Army’s 864th Engineer Combat Battalion used for diagnostics and maintenance of military weapons systems and vehicles was found in this same market. It contained restricted U.S. military information, as well as software for military platforms, the identities of numerous military personnel, and information about vulnerabilities in American military vehicles used in Afghanistan. All that for $650.

Shopkeepers say that much of their stock comes from Afghanistan or is brought in from elsewhere in Pakistan—they don’t differentiate. From whatever direction, it’s clear that the stuff is stolen from the U.S. military supply chain, and here in the open black market it fetches a good price.

This is an enterprise that none of the subcontractors in the U.S. military supply chain—the international shipping lines, the local logistics agencies, the truck owners and drivers, and brokers like Shakir Afridi—lose much sleep over. After all, it doesn’t affect their bottom line.
Back inside the city limits of Peshawar, Shakir Afridi is attending a lunch at the house of a truck owner he represents. There are more than a dozen guests, some of whom introduce themselves as truck owners, others as drivers. There are local officials from towns along the supply route who might help out with paperwork in case of an accident, and reps from the transporters’ union, too.

Afridi sits at the head of a decadent spread of goat meat and Kabuli pulao rice. “When I was in Mecca last month, I prayed and begged Allah to finish this war,” he says, sinking his teeth into a leg of goat, coated in dripping salty fat. A truck owner sitting next to him pours himself a glass of Pepsi and passes Afridi his phone. He wants to share a photograph of one of his drivers, whose eyes had been gouged out, he explains, by Taliban who attacked his truck as he drove along the western route to Kandahar. “This is a dirty, dirty business,” says Afridi shaking his head sadly.

Afridi says he’s not worried about revenue should the war end. He’s confident other contracts will come through. After all, he’s been cooperating with Pakistan’s military for years now, “standing shoulder to shoulder.” He talks about the Central Asian “stans”—all landlocked, growing, and looking to trade. He thinks Pakistan will start moving goods into Central and East Asia. Most important, he is convinced that “Allah, not America, is the one who provides sustenance to man.”

As Pakistan and the U.S. drift apart, Afridi’s prayers for an end to the war may soon be answered. As of Dec. 13, the supply route remains closed. President Obama has ordered a military investigation into the events of Nov. 26. In the meantime the blame game continues. While Obama has called President Asif Ali Zardari to offer condolences, the U.S. has yet to apologize. To the contrary, some U.S. officials are saying Pakistan was warned of the operation in advance. On Dec. 8, 32 oil tankers and 10 shipping containers full of NATO military supplies parked at a poorly protected terminal in Quetta were burned and destroyed. A day later the Pakistani Senate heard testimony about how the country had incurred nearly half a billion dollars in road damage over a decade because of NATO supply trucks. Pakistan’s government pulled out of the Bonn conference held to plan the last stages of the conflict in Afghanistan. Pakistan, it seems, wanted to make the point that while it is consistently asked to do more to help in the war in Afghanistan, it can do less, too.

“America has been trying to get out of this for years now,” says Afridi as he pushes away his empty plate and sticks a toothpick in his mouth. Dessert and green tea are served. “We have them so badly hemmed in that they can’t go anywhere,” he chuckles. By helping supply the U.S. with enough to keep busy in Afghanistan, but not enough to win, Afridi believes he is killing two birds with one stone. He is turning a profit and bleeding the country he hates most in the world. “They want out, but we’re still not done with them yet,” he says as he dips a spoon into a bowl of custard. “There’s still a little more to go.”

Mufti is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.

Source : Business Week

Thank you Mark Dummett, for the report in BBC today paying tribute to Anthony Mascarenhas, the brilliant and courageous Pakistani journalist who had to flee abroad in order to be able to tell the truth – Bangladesh war: The article that changed history.

Mascarenhas

“Eight journalists, including Mascarenhas, were given a 10-day tour of the province (East Pakistan). When they returned home, seven of them duly wrote what they were told to,” writes Dummett.

“But one of them refused.”

That was Mascarenhas, who died in 1986 in London.

His wife Yvonne Mascarenhas told Dummett that she remembers him coming back distraught: “I’d never seen my husband looking in such a state. He was absolutely shocked, stressed, upset and terribly emotional. He told me that if he couldn’t write the story of what he’d seen he’d never be able to write another word again.”

“Clearly it would not be possible to do so in Pakistan. All newspaper articles were checked by the military censor, and Mascarenhas told his wife he was certain he would be shot if he tried,” writes Dummett.

Here is a case of a journalist who rose above what was no doubt being touted as the “national interest”. His subsequent reports in the Sunday Times made him a “traitor” to West Pakistan and a hero to the Bengalis. But I think he was a hero to the cause of journalism.

“There is little doubt that Mascarenhas’ reportage played its part in ending the war. It helped turn world opinion against Pakistan and encouraged India to play a decisive role,” writes Dummett… “Not that this was ever Mascarenhas’ intention”.

He was, simply, as editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans wrote in his memoirs, “just a very good reporter doing an honest job”.

It speaks volumes for the mainstream Pakistani narrative about the events of 1971, that I, as a journalist with a deep interest in human rights issues, never even heard of Anthony Mascarenhas until just a few years ago, and then too, quite by chance.

My uncle Zawwar Hasan, a retired journalist now over 80 years old, mentioned “Tony Mascarenhas” while reminiscing about how he ended up in this profession. Unsuccessful in getting a job in his own field, marketing, he had landed a job as a sports reporter with the government-controlled news agency Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) in Karachi in 1948. After his first assignment, a cricket match, he went to the India Coffee House with a new friend, another sports journalist, M. Akhtar.

“We wrote our reports there, and he gave me a lift to my office at APP.… Tony Mascarenhas was there – he later ended up with London Times,” said my uncle, remembering how Mascarenhas, who was editor of APP, had told him off for not coming straight back to the office after the match to file his report.

“Do you realise this is a news agency and every minute is precious. Anyway, show me what you have.”

Mascarenhas the editor then himself typed up the handwritten report (because the rookie reporter didn’t know how to type), telling him only to “come early tomorrow and learn to type.”

Being interested in the contributions of non-mainstream Muslims to Pakistan’s struggle for democracy, I was intrigued by the obviously Goan Christian name Mascarenhas. I started looking him up. I also learned how he “ended up with London Times”, initially as their correspondent in Pakistan.

According to the Times obituary of December 8, 1986, he was born Neville Anthony Mascarenhas in “Belgaum, near Goa, on July 10, 1928. A Roman Catholic, he was educated at St Patrick’s College, Karachi, before joining Reuters in Bombay in 1948.

“At the time of partition he was sent to Karachi to start their operation in the new state of Pakistan. He then helped to found Pakistan’s own news agency, APP.  In 1958 he joined the Times of Karachi as assistant editor…  From 1961 to 1971 he worked for the Morning News, mainly as assistant editor, though for two years (1963-5) he was its correspondent in India, and in 1965 was interned there with his family for three months while India and Pakistan were at war.

“In 1970 he was recruited by The Sunday Times, for which paper he wrote, the following year, the report from East Bengal which profoundly influenced opinion in the outside world, and which changed the course of his life.”

Read Dummett’s article for fascinating details about how Mascarenhas and his family escaped from Pakistan.

Later, in Cambridge MA, with access to the Harvard libraries, I found his books, The rape of Bangladesh (Delhi, Vikas Publications, 1971) and Bangladesh: a legacy of blood (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1986). As far as I know, neither is unavailable in Pakistan although I hear that there have been some translations.

Some years ago I asked a senior journalist who had been posted in Dhaka during 1971, why no one in West Pakistan wrote the truth about what was happening. “We were not allowed,” he said simply. “There was strict censorship.”

But Mascarenhas had the courage, and the opportunity, to follow his conscience.

As I wrote in an essay for the Economic and Political Weekly, the State controlled Pakistan Television, that started broadcasts in 1964, has remained very much ‘his master’s voice’.

Along with a few newspapers and the government controlled Radio Pakistan, PTV reported only what the government allowed. This censorship was particularly evident when it came to the growing unrest in what was then East Pakistan. The news censorship and slanting was so extreme that even on Dec 16, 1971, when the Pakistan army surrendered to the Indian, the West Pakistan media was still predicting victory. An exception was Anthony Mascarenhas, the Goa-born, Karachi-educated journalist…. In 1970, recruited by The Sunday Times, London, his reports on the happenings in East Bengal “profoundly influenced opinion in the outside world, and changed the course of his life”, as his obituary in The Times notes.

“He and his family had to leave their home and all their possessions in Karachi. He arrived in Britain on June 12, 1971, and the following day his three-page story appeared in The Sunday Times. It was quoted all over the world and won him awards from IPC and What the Papers Say. But it also earned him the bitter hatred of Pakistan’s military regime, and for time he had reason to fear for his life.”

Ironically, or perhaps tellingly, he had become an Indian citizen in 1976 –obviously Pakistan had disowned him — although at the time of his death he was intending to apply for British citizenship, according to the Times obituary.

The artist I’m featuring today is a strange woman who has a delicious way with words and scribbles. She is constantly muttering strange sentences that spin fantastic tales. Then she draws them. VIDHA SAUMYA came to Lahore from Mumbai in search of a place she had read about. She worked and practiced as an artist for a couple of months and that was the first time I got to see her ridiculously gorgeous books at an exhibit right before she left. Since then I have been endlessly fascinated by here. This is an attempt to enter her chaotic world with my quite useless questionnaire. Enjoy.

IMAGES FROM VIDHA’S LATEST SHOW ‘LOVE CHARADES’ SHOWING IN MUMBAI

Quick Bio. As short as possible. In 1 word or 2 please state name, age, upbringing, school, college, degree, bad relationships and pets. Stick to letters. Or numbers. Or don’t say anything. Or do. (Question I asked Mehreen Murtaza first & now plan to use it for everyone!)

Name: VIDHA SAUMYA;  Age: 10095 days; Upbringing: Healthy; School: 4, College: 4

Degree: Double BFA, Single Diploma. BFA(Painting) J.J. School of Art, Mumbai; Diploma in Visual Communication Design, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore; Independent Study Programme, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.

Bad relationships: None; Pets: Prefer to let animals be

How did you end up in Pakistan? And what was the BNU experience like?

Manto, Ismet Aapa (Ismat Chughtai) and Asghar Wajahat are my most favourite writers and their writing was my first introduction to Lahore. Apart from the fascination and shared history it is sense of impossibility that made me desire going to Pakistan so much, especially Lahore. In 2007 SAF (South Asia Foundation) sent a scholarship circular and requested interested female students to apply. The entire process was to be carried out through our current institutes. After getting no response for a month I called up Mr. Karan, the COO of the organization, and he told me how they had wasted months trying to get a candidate who would be interested AND WILLING to go study for 9 months in Lahore. He asked me to immediately send him a hand-written and signed letter stating that I am interested and willing to study at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.

BNU experience was exhilarating at many levels. I signed in for 3 theory courses with Julia Ahmad – Iconoclasm, Goya, Angels and Devils in Film and Art. These courses exposed me to a very unique method of learning, presenting and understanding subject of much social and visual relevance.

I did not have to attend class everyday, which gave me the opportunity and freedom to work towards 4 city-based projects. I also taught History of Art to 2^nd year Jewellery and Architecture students and worked briefly at Human Rights Commission (Child Rights Unit).

an old drawing stolen from Vidha's facebook page

BNU as an institute repeatedly presented opportunities to know the city and its people. I was always unsure and not too aware of my position and presence at BNU and didn’t really make any friends while my stay there. I mean I was friendly and people were friendly too (mostly). Over time I had convinced myself that always felt I did not or could not belong there. To add to it and was very shy to approach people and initiate conversation. Everybody else seemed so much cooler and happening and smart and all knowing that I always wanted to remain invisible and experience everything.

It is so ironic that after 3-4 months of my stay in Lahore I no longer felt that I had arrived from somewhere else to this new city and country but at BNU I still feel like an outsider.

However I must also mention the support I received from the faculty at BNU. Professor Salima Hashmi, Rashid Rana, Sadaf Chughtai, Huma Mulji, David Alesworth, Gwendolyn Kullick, Risham Syed, Nadia Khwaja, Farida Batool, Malcolm Hutcheson, Julia Ahmad, have been very encouraging and appreciative of all that I was doing at the institute. They came for my exhibition openings, offered help and were very forthcoming and helpful in making me realize the few projects I did there. This experience really enriched my work and made me feel very special. It also drew my attention to the fact that there are few Art schools in India that have such dedicated professionals as teachers. Learning gains such a quantum if we have such facilities and opportunities.

Answer in Yes/NO: Is there a secret cult in BNU which teaches students to shoot NCA students with laser beams and decapitate their vital organs or something-to-that-effect? Because I think I’m onto something.

SECRET CULT? At BNU? Which teaches students?

NO. NO! NO! Not at all.

I do not think any such thing exists.None that I am aware of but I think students/peers can be very cruel sometimes say very mean things. At such times I feel l have been thrown back into school amongst the rich, mama’s boy, teacher’s pet, clean and clear meanies.

NCA is a competitive, versatile, and a very open space. An institute like that will always be looked at as the other by students from an institute that is younger, fresher and experimental.

Apparently you like corpulent naked jovial women with lots of love handles and appetites to match. Explain your art with the help of diagrams.

Vidha in VOGUE July 2011, page no. 95

Talk about your recent show.

The drawings in Love Charades have a come a long way from being very coy with composed shy poses presented in the exhibition Song of the Sirens. ‘Song of the Sirens’ displays a certain anxiety that comes from feeling the need to expose the bodied self, but not being able to go all the way. By contrast, ‘Love Charades’ does not play a precious game of hide-and-seek with social pieties in the matter of the female body, desire or sex. It is about itself; its figures do not trap themselves into performing, even as assigned adversaries, to the scripted expectations of society.

Drawings from the show 'Song of the Sirens' – 2010, image courtesy Grey Noise

Sometimes, the eye wanders away from the theatricality of the performance and settles on the volumetric fact of abstract piles of bodies inflated to the maximum. One is led into a reverie around the body, as it ceases to be the vessel of an individual human subject, and becomes instead a symbol of humankind in extreme states of various kinds, whether abject or delirious.

Making the final preparations for the solo I decided to make some sculptures. For me it was simply an act of digging my fingers into clay and moulding playful versions of the drawings. There was an instinctive need to plumb the depths of the flesh in some way to articulate the libidinal energies implicit in all acts of creation.

There is photo series as well. I wanted to include these other two mediums to create a dialogue within the works and also give the exhibition an added dimension. I’ve played with contrasting dimensions of the works and also their mediums and I hope it communicates my practice.

What about the ‘conversations’ you post on your blogs. What’s happening there?

The conversations that appear on the blog are part of a book I published in 2008. It is called Guftagu: gutarrrgoon. This book is a documentation of  short-lived fleeting  encounters with Lahori rickshaw-wallahs. This documentation prompted me to repeat the adventure with their counterparts in Bombay. A few lines from the introduction, “Being a stranger in a country empowers you to look at the city, its people and its culture from a very objective perspective. The ‘unfamiliar’ grants a certain clarity of vision.”

The rickshaw is the appropriate metaphor for mobility and nomadism: its open-close architecture strikes the right balance between public-ness and privacy. Rickshaws was my only mode of commuting through Lahore which gave rise to impromptu exchanges and led to further questions, silences and a renewal of inquisitiveness.

“ …Don’t call me from India” said one rickshaw-wallah. “They’ll put me up on inquiry… In fact, you should just delete my number when you leave Pakistan.”

And in Bombay, amidst stories about competing claims of belonging made by the ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ to the city, bomb blasts and riots, emerges a story of exquisite greenness: a rickshaw-wallah takes his young bride from the village on a walk through the city in the rains. In a way it is a research-based project but the intimacy of its ethnographic methodology creates a surplus of poetry, desire and sensorial residues.

Having displayed in both Pakistan and India, what do you find different in the art scene of Lahore and Mumbai?

Apart from being able to serve wine the only difference is that in Mumbai people see exhibition till the last date of the exhibition.

Lahore has some good gallery spaces but only one gallery with a vision and a bigger intent of making a mark and difference.  Mumbai has many competing art galleries hence there is more dialogue here.

I absolutely loved your books and drawings at Grey Noise. Where are the books now? Would they play with my books? My books have ugly naked men who pee on everything.

‘Explosives’ enacts an overheated sexual fantasy; but its shock value is blunted through a repeated assault on the senses. In a sense, this book mimics the surfeit of libidinous images that flood the market and infiltrate people’s minds in the age of globalization.  I am fascinating with anything naked.

Explosives 'Series 1', "I Love U Dreams", 2009 – Set of 15 drawings, collectively titled EXPLOSIVES.

Apparently you also like sentence-free words. Let’s try a free verse shall we. A story of 10 lines. No, don’t think. Just go.

Sticking ants to the masking tape

hoping to get my pay cheque

I look at invites

some glossy

some that don’t shine

Seurat long went digital and Duchamp’s

shifted the urinal

Decompression, Intangible Interlocution

Account payee only

Milkstone on screen

The ants are finally biting me

AC switched off

Green stickies adorn the wall

Their end curls

And Saira still insists I go free verse

Which artists do you enjoy looking at, and wish you could stalk – locally and internationally? Who’s your favourite Pakistani artist, Indian Artist, Old dead white artist?

Kiki Smith, Nalini Malani, Wolfgang Laib, Manish Nai, Mehreen Murtaza, Mithu Sen, Sophie Kalle, Orlan, Marjane Satrapi, Will Eisner, Audrey Niffinegger, Dawn Klements, Chris Offilli, Grayson Perry, William Kentridge, Gerard Mermoz, C.K. Rajan, Jyothi Basu, Ratheesh T., Nicola Durvasula, Dayanita Singh, Rachel Whiteread, Pippoliti Rist. Tyeb Mehta, Wolfgang Laib.

My favourite right now are Wolfgang Laib and Rachel Whiteread.

Do you save ‘bad’ drawings? Ones you know totally wasted that sheet of paper. I can’t seem to throw them away.  They just might become good ‘bad’ drawings when we’re famous or dead, or both.

I use bad drawings as rag, wrapping paper or soaking oil. 

Can drawing save the world?

The idea of drawing can lead to some great possibilities.

*******

Credits:

Installation views(Love Charades) - Photographs by Anil Rane
Installation views(Song of the Sirens) - Aacif Khan
Images of drawings - © Vidha Saumya

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