Mir Osman Ali Khan, The Nizam of Hyderabad Deccan, erected the main gate of the Dargah Sharif in 1911. Upstairs small drums beat, during the day and night at an appointed hour. A view of Dargah Bazaar can be seen from the top of the gate.

During the reign of Qutubuddin Ebak, Syed Meeran Husain (R.A.) was the Garrison of Taragarh Fort. He also live in the fort. While playing polo in Lahore, Sultan Qutubuddin Ebak fell down from the back of the horse and died. As soon as the news of his death reached Ajmer, the Thakur and Rajput landlords of adjoining areas jointly launched a night atack on Taragarh and entered the fort It was totally dark and the Muslims were sleeping unaware. Most of them were slashed. rest of them were awaken in a panic and started resisting. But they were smaller in number than the powerful enemy. at last they all were martyred. the enemies fled before the break of the day. Meeran Husain Khatak (R.A.) was also martyred in the attack.

When the Muslims of the city heard the news of the bloodshed there was a mass mourning. Knowing about the tragedy, Khwaja Gharib nawaz visited the fort with his followers and after the Namaz-e-Janaza, burried the martyres of Taragarh. Presently the ruins of the fort are left, but however everyone visits the Dargah of Hazrat Meeran Husain Khatak (R.A.) to pay the tributes.

Hazrat Meeran Husain (R.A.) was a great abstemious saint. He mostly used to be at the service of Gharib Nawaz (R.A.) as a staunch follower. His Urs falls on 17th and 18th Rajab every year.

The concept of welfare state has become very popular these days; the term means a state in which the government assumes responsibility for minimum standards of living for every citizen. The term is generally used to describe a state which possesses all or some of the following features:

1. Provision of social security for unemployment, health issues, old age and disability.
2. Provision of free or subsidized education and medical services.
3. Social justice through fair distribution of income and wealth among all citizens by through effective system of taxation.
4. Provision of full-time employment to everyone as per his education and skills.
5. Public ownership of utility services to make sure uninterrupted supply on affordable rates and even further subsidized rates for low-income groups.

 Welfare State in Islam aims at achieving the total welfare of mankind, the Islamic concept of the Welfare State is based not only on the manifestation of economic values but also on moral, spiritual,   social and political values of Islam.  Islamic welfare state ensures socio-economic welfare of its citizens. Its functions for material welfare of its people include provision of basic necessities of life for all, ensuring of a comprehensive social security system, establishment of social justice, etc., since its functions for the spiritual well-being of its people include the establishment of  Islamic system of life for the Muslims and full religious freedom for the non-Muslims.

1. The Islamic welfare will make sure the share of revenues for the poor and the needy; it is the responsibility of state to give basic needs to its citizens. Islam has made no distinction between the Muslims and non-Muslims. Caliph Umar once found a Zimmi begging alms. He granted him pension and absolved him from payment of Jizyah. Khalid, the famous general of Islam, concluded a treaty with the non-Muslims of Hira which made a provision for financial help to the poor and destitute of non-Muslims.
2. The Prophet of Islam Peace be upon him has also defined the least necessities of life. He is reported to have said: “The son of man has no better right than that he would have a house wherein he may live, and a piece of cloth whereby he may hide his nakedness, and a piece of bread and some water”-(Tirmizi). From this tradition of the Prophet also, the barest necessities of human life include food, water, clothes and a house.
3. Every person living in the Islamic state is entitled to these basic needs, but if he is unable to procure them for himself or for his family then the Islamic state is duty bound to provide him the same. Many Muslim jurists have held that Islamic state is responsible to give minimum standard of living, in the form of basic necessities of life, to all those persons who being poor, needy, sick, disabled, old or unemployed, are somehow unable to do the same.
4. The economic philosophy of an Islamic state is based on the concept of social justice. An Islamic state provides equal opportunities to all its citizens to earn their livelihood. In order to meet social justice, Islam takes two major steps: Firstly it discourages rather condemns concentration of wealth in few hands; secondly it ensures fair and equitable distribution of wealth through effective measures. To check concentration of wealth in few hands, unlawful and unfair means of acquiring wealth like interest, games of chance, bribery, business malpractices such as short measuring, short weighing, hoarding, embezzlement, theft and robbery have been strictly prohibited. Fair and equitable distribution of wealth has been ensured by Islam through Zakat and charity, through taxes and compulsory contributions levied by the Islamic state, and last of all through the laws of inheritance and will. In order to meet its ideal of socio-economic justice, Islam imposes social rights over personal wealth such as rights of the poor relatives for financial support, rights of the needy neighbors for assistance, rights of the slaves and servants for help, rights of the wayfarers, friends and general Muslims who need financial aid. Since afore mentioned social rights of others are to be fulfilled and payment of Zakat may not be enough for the same, the Prophet of Islam is reported to have said: “In one’s wealth there are other rights to besides Zakat”. Thus the followers of Islam are required to fulfill the needs of the poor and if Zakat revenues are insufficient, the Islamic welfare state can ask them to give more so that the needs of the poor can be met.
5. Islamic welfare state is also duty-bound to protect the weak against the strong. For this purpose many steps have been taken by Islam. Usury which is a strong instrument of human exploitation has been totally abolished. Unfair means to acquiring wealth and exploiting the weak such as bribery, usurping the wealth of orphans, gambling, speculative business, embezzlement, spurious weights and measures, fraudulent business practices have been banned in the Islamic state. Rights of the weak like orphans, women, slaves and servants, laborers and workers, tenants, consumers, etc., are also protected in the Islamic welfare state from the onslaught of the usurpers, oppressors, capitalists, feudal lords, industrialists, etc., as discussed in the previous chapter.
6. Education and health play very vital role in the welfare of the people as well as in the development of a nation. So a welfare state to achieve its socio-economic goals cannot ignore these two sectors. Therefore, to provide education and healthcare to all of its citizens free or at heavily subsidized rates is one of the foremost duties of the Islamic welfare state. Islam’s emphasis on education can be understood from the very fact that the first verses of the Holy Qur’an which were revealed to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) laid stress on reading. The Prophet of Islam has made it obligatory upon every Muslim, whether male or female, to acquire education and knowledge. Islam also lays much stress on health and the Prophet of Islam has enjoined upon his followers to look after the sick. Providing healthcare and medical aid to the sick is thus another onerous duty of the Islamic welfare state.
7. The last, but not the least, important duty of the Islamic welfare state is to look after the spiritual welfare of its citizens. To discharge this duty, the Islam welfare state establishes the Islamic system of government as contained in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. Muslim citizens are enabled to lead their lives in accordance with the teachings of Islam; because non-Muslim citizens are provided with full religious freedom so that they may do their religious practices in their places of worship without any restriction. The Islamic state is obliged to work for the spread of Islam because the salvation of humanity ultimately lies in Islam. But this is done through preaching, persuasion and not through coercive measures or exercise of pressure which has been strictly prohibited by Islam.

I find it apt to include here the kind words that Muneeza Shamsie, renowned Pakistani writer and critic,  wrote about Pakistaniaat and about my book in her annual bibliography of Pakistan-related works. You can find the whole article at the website of the Journal of Commonwelath Literature.

Shamsie on Constructing Pakistan:

Constructing Pakistan: Foundational Texts and the Rise of Muslim National Identity (1857–1947) by Masood Ashraf Raja studies the ways in which pre-Partition literary texts in Urdu created transgeographic narratives of Muslim unity which contributed to the idea of Pakistan. He asserts that the growth of Muslim nationalism and concepts of Muslim exceptionalism were political and “a question of survival” (xvi) amid major political changes in the post-Mutiny era. He re-interprets the writings of Ghalib and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan as a means of negotiating an equitable relationship between the British Raj and the Indian Muslims (not one of patronage). He discusses the new movement in Urdu literary criticism pioneered by Azad and Hali and the reformist message in the fiction of Nazir Ahmed, who advocated Anglicization while neo-traditionals such as Shibli Nomani and Akbar Allahbadi searched for answers in Muslim history and pan-Islamism instead. Raja goes on to compare Iqbal and his modern, egalitarian universalist interpretation of Islam with Maulana Mawdudi’s concepts of an Islamic state governed by shariah.

Shamsie on Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies:

Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, edited by Masood Raja at the University of [North] Texas, is an immensely important addition to Pakistan Studies. The journal is a peer-reviewed multi-disciplinary academic journal with online and print editions; its many literature-related writings include critical articles, reviews, bibliography and a much-needed platform for new poetry, fiction and translations by writers of Pakistani origin.

Shamsie on Pakistaniaat’s Special Issue on 1971 War, edited by Cara Cilano:

Cilano guest-edited the “Special Issue on 1971 Indo-Pakistan War” of Pakistaniaat: Journal of Pakistan Studies which has five essays that look at the national and international dimensions of the conflict. These include Philip Oldenberg’s discussion of the four different phases of the 1971 war including Kissinger’s visit to Peking; Luke A. Nichter and Richard A. Moss’s examination of the memoirs and policies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and Mavra Farooq’s analysis of the relationship between Pakistan and China in 1971.

My personal gratitude and thanks from the entire staff of Pakistaniaat to Muneeza Shamsie for including us amongst the best of Pakistan-related works.

© 2012, Masood Ashraf Raja. 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.

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This will probably be one of the many articles that I plan to write about the construction of contemporary Pakistani national identity. While I have many versions of theories of nation available to undertake this project, I have decided to focus primarily on the mainstream statist narrative that Pakistani media, the school system, and the foundational intellectuals rely on to  construct the narrative of Pakistan.

In this highly idealized and ideological narrative, Pakistan is posited as the terminal outcome of an elitist dream of separatism defined in difference and in conflict with the larger “Hindu” nationalism of India before partition. We have been telling this story to our children, showing its unfolding in well crafted historical TV shows and movies. As a result, the Pakistani national narrative has now streamlined itself as more or less a religious narrative of nationhood. In my humble opinion, unless Pakistan dismantles and restructures this psuedo-religious national narrative, it will continue to struggle as a nation perpetually in crisis.

There is a dire need for a new kind of historiography: a historiography that does not rely on usual clichés of a great leader fighting against the machinations of Hindus and the British to wrest a country for Indian Muslims. Those of us who have read the events and politics of the creation of Pakistan know, through textual analysis, that mr. Jinnah, until the very end, would have been happy if the British and Indian National Congress had agreed to a sort of federation in which the Muslims of India could have had parity at the federal level. It was the failure of this particular thrust of Jinnah’s struggle that ultimately resulted in the failure of his larger dream and creation of Pakistan as a less-than-perfect alternative. We need to seriously read and discuss this hidden aspect of the creation of Pakistan.

We also need to seriously question all those who assert that Pakistan was to be exclusively a Muslim nation: that was never what Jinnah had intended. In fact, the religious leaders–most of them–were opposed to the creation of Pakistan and did not lend their full support to Mr. Jinnah until the very end.

A critical historiography will highlight these aspects of the struggle for Pakistan and will also open space for imagining a more diverse, equal, and egalitarian Pakistan. A kind of Pakistan in which histories of minorities, women, and peasants are not whitewashed but foregrounded.

Our national narrative should also focus on the rapacious role of the zamindari system, the sardari system, and the destruction of our public sphere by the mullahs and their followers. We should have the courage to challenge all these sectors of political power that seek to present Pakistan in their own contorted and outdated vision of  national life. Unless Pakistan tells a story in which the people have the ultimate power and, Pakistan will remain the crisis state that it is so aptly dubbed by its friends and foes alike.

Most importantly our historians and writers need to stop valorizing the military and need to highlight the destructive role that the armed forces have played in keeping democracy in check and in maintaining the socio-economic status quo.

The stories that we tell our children should be about a more diverse and democratic Pakistan and not of a religiously defined nation perpetually in embrace with all the outdated and repressive forces in of our public sphere. All assertions of exclusive ideas of identity–may it be regional, political, or religious–must be challenged and questioned perpetually by the public intellectuals and the media.

A critical historiography, a democratic didactics, and a re-imagining of our past to create a vision of a better future would be a good start!

Related articles

• Interview: Martial PTV plays indirectly boosted jihadist mentality (pakistaniaat.net)
• Engage With Pakistan at Harvard University This Summer (pakistaniaat.net)

© 2011, Masood Ashraf Raja. 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.

It has been compared to a chant, a rhythmic divine beauty, a melody, an aria, a toccata, an edification, an exaltation. As poetry is for the tongue, calligraphy is to the page. The authors of The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy … Continue reading →

By Yasser Latif Hamdani

(Written exclusively for PakTeaHouse. Please give credit when crossposting)

The poison of ignorance and extremism that Bhutto and General Zia jointly fathered during their dictatorial regimes has fully indoctrinated even those who otherwise describe themselves as educated.

This week the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN inched closer to the discovery of Higgs Boson or the God Particle as it were. In this extraordinary story of human achievement,  Dr. Abdus Salam is a key player who put Pakistan on the map of theoretical physics. In his homeland though, a group of self-styled champions of Islam have started a posthumous campaign of scurrilous slander claiming that Dr. Salam was giving out nuclear secrets. Forget that even a confirmed bigot like General Zia  held a ceremony in our only nobel prize winner’s honour or that no one ever accused Dr. Salam of any such thing; in Pakistan to be a hero you have to actually transfer technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Now consider the case of 11 year old Sitara Akbar. Every Pakistani and his mother in law are citing her as a crowning national achievement, blissfully oblivious of the fact that she is an Ahmadi. To them her religion is suddenly unimportant or irrelevant or is it? How many Sitara Akbars have been expelled from our schools for being Ahmadi? How many productive citizens of this republic have been killed and maimed for believing differently?

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s National Assembly imagined itself the Islamic equivalent of the Council of Nicea. Just as that ancient bastion of Christian orthodoxy excommunicated unitarian Christians for not believing in the trinity of the father, son and the holy ghost, the National Assembly saw it fit to – primarily at the instigation of the Prime Minister and his law minister- declare an entire sect non-Muslim. Just like the post hoc elevation of the principle of trinity at Nicea, Pakistan’s National Assembly located Islam in the principle of the finality of Prophethood.

This act of our sovereign legislature stood in sharp contrast to the view of this nation’s founding father. On 5 May, 1944, in response to demands of the orthodox vis a vis Ahmadis, Jinnah made it absolutely clear that anyone who professes to be a Muslim is a Muslim and welcome in the Muslim League and that those who were raising the issue were trying to divide the Muslims. Here I am forced to say that I am inclined to accept Jinnah’s view and reject the collective wisdom of our sovereign legislature. There are several reasons which may be cited in this regard:

1. First and foremost Pakistan is bound by the United Nations’ charter. Therefore Pakistan is bound to ensure freedom of religion for all its citizens and freedom of religion means freedom of religion according to the definition of the subject of the said freedom.
2. Identity is subjective not objective. The state of Pakistan or any other state cannot tell an Ahmadi that he is not a Muslim because it is intrinsic to the faith of an Ahmadi.  This is an inviolable, inalienable right as part of right to life which every state in the world is bound to protect. If Ahmadis say they are Muslims they ought to be accepted as such.
3. Pakistan is a signatory to the ICCPR and without reservations since June 2011. Therefore every piece of legislation that discriminates against Ahmadis or forces a label upon them is ultra vires the ICCPR.
4. The Islamic argument: According to the Holy Prophet (PBUH) anyone who utters the Kalima Shahadah is a Muslim. None of the Kalimas, including the Primary Kalima Shahadah contains any reference to the principle of the finality of Prophethood as understood by the Muslim majority today.
5. Finally because by conduct and promise, Pakistani state is estopped from claiming otherwise. In 1947, Pakistan laid claim to Qadian as a Muslim holy place, a counter-blast to Sikh claims on Nankana Sahib and Hassan Abdal.  Similarly in 1946 elections which is the basic referendum on the question of Pakistan, Ahmadi votes were instrumental in getting Muslims Pakistan. These are undeniable facts of history.

Therefore- fully aware of the stigma attached to this statement- I concur with Quaid-e-Azam Mahomed Ali Jinnah, thefounding father of Pakistan that Ahmadis are Muslims, if they say they are Muslims and no one, not even the sovereign legislature, has the right to say otherwise.

In the context of what we now term “Pakistani” theatre and performance, in addition to gender, aesthetic and racial histories, conventions and traditions, we need also to acknowledge the religious, nationalist, ethnic and linguistic contestations which are key to understanding the history and historiography of Pakistani theatre.

In attempting to theorize Pakistani Theatre and Performance, what you will find in the next several pages are ruminations on the entity thus-named to outline a series of questions and concerns which can only, at this juncture, begin to enunciate steps toward the elaboration of a proper poetics or theory of Pakistani theatre.

The very first issue requiring acknowledgment, even though its naming raises more questions and complexities than it clarifies, is the (debatable) fact: it is a species of the genus Islamic Theatre, which then raises several additional questions: what is Islamic theatre? Assuming that such a tradition exists, what aspects of its history are pertinent in the Pakistani context and in what specific forms do they exist today? These questions inevitably entail the problematic of aesthetic criteria of performance and its origins, and so, in a sense, what is really at stake is the location and evaluation of Pakistani (read: Islamic) theatrical praxis within the context of World Theatre.

I want to begin by citing a number of quotations from theater theorists and human rights activists from within and without Pakistan as a means of calling attention to the complex web of questions/issues that are germane to the task of developing a theoretical framework for understanding and evaluating and possibly even developing a manifesto for theatrical praxis in Pakistan. This web of questions in turn addresses one of the sub-themes of this conference: “Drama Under Scrutiny”—in this case, all of the issues of what can or can’t be said about “Muslim Theatre” in general, and Pakistani theatre in particular. There are issues of “expertise” involved and who has it, which have shaped the dominant narrative of an Islamic Theatre in the centers of Western learning, and on the other hand, the self-censoring state narrative of an Islamic ideology which has constrained what can be said or thought or performed within the context of the Pakistani state ideology.

John Bell, theatre scholar, writes in the pages of TDR, that “Now, at the beginning of the 21^st century, in the midst of a “War on Terror,” Middle East, Arabic, and Islamic cultures are subjects of a relentless American gaze that looks intently but superficially at certain aspects of those cultures, for the most part ignoring depth, context and history; and disliking, or at least not understanding what it sees.”

For Bell, this ignorance of indigenous theatrical traditions and histories—a form of censorship by default if not design– has the unfortunate consequence of belittling these rich and diverse cultures all lumped into the pejorative label “Islamic,” according to a specious ideology believing that the origin of all innovative knowledge including within the dramatic arts, has its roots within the west. Such an ideological belief underwrites the thinking even of those indigenous or “native” scholars like Raif Karam of Lebanon, who wish to counter western stereotypes of their cultural heritage and work. In his, and the work of such renowned Arabic scholars like Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Islamic and Arabic performance is seen, ironically in the same light as it is in the work of western orientalist scholars like Oscar Brockett and Franklin Tildy, as a “tradition of absence,” in which the Western origin of “modern theatre” when “introduced” to the Islamic cultures is seen as a sign of their “crippling social failure” (Bell 5).

An oft-cited reason for the lack of theatrical traditions in Islamic lands has been the assumed hostility of the religion to representational art. According to Brockett and Tildy, noted “experts” on world theatre, “In the history of the theatre…Islam is a largely negative force. It forbade artists to make images of living things because Allah was said to be the only creator of life and to compete with him was considered a mortal mortal sin. Thus, Islamic art remained primarily decorative rather than representational.The prohibitions extended to theatre and consequently in those areas where Islam became dominant advanced theatrical forms were stifled.” (qtd in Bell 6)

Quite rightly, (though I am not entirely in agreement with him here)-Bell remarks upon how stunning—and damaging to unbiased appraisal of Islamic contributions to theatre—in both scope and ignorance such a sweeping denunciation is, a result of the faulty scholarship of two scholars regarded as “the deans of American theatre history.”

Ultimately, for my purposes, the most important observation to be made here is that such claims lay the groundwork for an analytic or theoretical model dependent on particular, if subtle, aesthetic evaluations of theatrical form (Bell 6). What such a heuristic model either leaves out or denigrates (censors!), is precisely what needs attending to in any theory of performance rooted in Islamic history and Islamic cultural practices (however “mixed” with other non-Islamic traditions these may be and are, as in the case of Pakistan).

In Masks, Mimes and Miracles, Allardyce Nicoll informs us that, “Among the entertainments condemned by the Fathers of the Church the neoropasta [art of puppets] often figured…in 1317, the Council of Terragona condemns the bastaxi [play of puppets]…”

After the collapse of the Roman empire with its strong theatrical traditions, and with the subsequent rise of Christianity in the early centuries AD, all sorts of entertainments were suppressed by the Church Fathers. Indeed, in the earliest extant drawing of puppets in Europe (The Hortus Deliciarum or Garden of Delights by Harrad Von Landsberg, dated AD 1170), King Solomon is shown as a Christ-like figure pronouncing judgment on a puppet-show as a demonstration of a pastime that is unworthy of a true Christian (The Historical Development of Puppetry) Thus, the hostility to any form of representational art or artistic pastime ( in this case, a form of theatre)—here emanates from within Chrishastian iconography and religious dicta. More interestingly, the date of this document, 1170, Is during the time that ordinary folk from all over Europe traveled East to Islamic countries to drive out the infidel from the Holy Lands. They traveled to Egypt, Turkey and Arabia and some returned home bringing along new ideas and customs from the exotic East.

While there are no documents showing when and where Oriental puppets came to Europe, the example of the history of the game of chess may be the method and path of transference according to the author of The Historical Development of Puppetry. Arabian chess pieces found in Central Europe in the 11^th and 12^th centuries may well have been brought by the Vikings from the Far East. Indeed, in the Alfonso Manuscript is a miniature where “three Indian seers bring a chess game and a dice game to the Persian king who is portrayed here as a Christian king.” And it is around this time in Persia that we begin to hear of “theatre,” through the Rubaiyat of famous Persian poet Omar Khayyam (105-1153):

We are no other than a moving row

Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go

Round with Sun-illumined lantern held

In Midnight by the Master of the Show.

Two important thoughts come to mind here: one, Islam was hardly the inhospitable snuffer-out of theatrical innovation as theatre historians quoted earlier have made it out to be, certainly not in the Middle Ages when it was Christianity that seems to have had trouble with performative traditions as they were beginning to be disseminated in Europe via a puppet-theatre originating in the Islamic east. Second, that Islamic puppetry, with its roots in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt, allowed for and even encouraged, a form of social and political critique and commentary that became popular in Renaissance Europe through the Punch and Judy show, and which in its earliest Turkish incarnation during the 16^th century, was known as the “Karakoz” or “Shadow Theater.”

James Smith informs us that Karakoz became a popular art form in Turkey from the late 16^th century on, coinciding with the rise of popularity of coffee shops, where the plays were esp. popular during the holy month of Ramadan. According to Smith, Islamic officials condemned both the coffee shops and the plays—but, the poorer classes filled the shops after sundown during Ramadan, to enjoy a post-fast feast and a karakoz show at the same time—with a different show being performed every night of Ramadan. Ironically, then, Karakoz became associated with festival—“with the carnivalistic side of Islam’s most solemn holy month, and as such, karakoz shows became mixed with both religious elements and carnival elements.” Furthermore, Islamic Sufi thought, one of the most powerful cultural forces within Islamic society from the 12^th century onwards, also affected karakoz performance. According to karagiozis expert Linda Myrsiades, “Turkish shadow puppetry was designed both to entertain and to achieve religious experience, based on the Sufi Islamic doctrine that man is but a shadow manipulated by his Creator” (Myrsiades 1988, 2)

Islamic officials displeasure at these forms of spectacle may have been couched in Islamic rhetoric against the dangers of representational art (even in puppet form)—but it is fairly obvious that what they feared was people power that could be harnessed as a revolutionary protest form via exposure to social critique through a folk performance tradition, occuring in a carnivalesque setting of food and coffee-shop intimacy. Yet, even though the disenfranchised masses found an expression of power through the themes and plots of karakoz puppet plays, the authorities and religious institutions found ways to excuse—and even bless—these performances. Why? Because at the end of most of these plays, the mock king (the fool, the man of the masses)—became dethroned after enjoying power only briefly; Karakoz, the Man of the People, is always returned to his “normal” place in society. Social and cultural norms reinstitute themselves. Thus, the message is that while the lower classes could have the power to define themselves, it could only be for a short time, and then it had to be given back. In Smith’s words, “the carnival world portrayed behind the white curtain of the shadow puppet theatre was only a fleeting, temporary illusion.”

What should become clear at this point are a number of factors: that in the development of theatre worldwide, Islam contributed a lot more than is commonly understood, and also that as with any other religious world-view upholding concepts of the “natural order” of things such as the divine right of kings or of the higher classes to rule over the lower classes, and its corollary, of men over women—theatre understood as the performance of a certain kind of exercise of power would necessarily become a site of potential conflict and hence of control.

These general observations and notes bring me to the subject of Pakistan, and of the place of theatre in Pakistan. To help situate a tradition that is rooted in the history of prePartition India, and is most immediately and most recently traceable to the beginnings of Urdu theatre in India (Urdu being the language associated with the Muslims of India) as well as with the Parsi Theatre tradition (which like the Urdu theatre, speaks to the polyglot, mulitreligious and multicultural influences of what we now think of as the Theatre, such as it is, of Islamic Pakistan)—I want to call attention to a couple of statements by prominent cultural and human rights activists of Pakistan today.

Beena Sarwar, a noted journalist, reports on the atmosphere of cultural and political despair and chaos existing during the Nawaz Sharif regime which was in power in Pakistan just prior to the take-over by Martial Law dictator Pervez Musharraf. In 1998, a few years prior to 9/11, it was clear to Pakistani citizens that the country was on a path to self-destruction, with the democratically-elected regime of Nawaz Sharif unable to stem the tide of religious fundamentalism. Indeed, he urged the senators to pass the horrific 15^th amendment or Shariat bill, curtailing the rights of women and religious minorities, despite nation-wide protests. Very astutely, Mehboob Khan, a lawyer, linked culture and politics in his response to the proposed bill: “In this situation, women and religious minorities are particularly threatened, as is cultural and artistic expression.”

What is interesting to note for the purposes of my project, is that many Pakistani citizens tried to counter the atmosphere of repression and fear that had started to build in Pakistan since the late 1970s, and which exists to this very day with the “Mullah” threat very much present despite the current President’s policy of “Enlightened Moderation”—by clutching at the straw of cultural expression. The rock band Junoon, which had made statements critical of Pakistani state repression in enemy territory—India—became more popular than ever before. The privately-organized annual Music Conference in Lahore began drawing larger crowds, and, Sarwar informs us that “Record numbers of people and performers attended the Fourth International Puppet Festival, which hosted as many as 38 troupes From 27 foreign countries, including India, between Oct 17-27…”

These festivals, organized by the Rafi Peer Theatre Group of Lahore, have taken place each time against great odds, mostly on private funding, since government support for the performing arts has always been almost negligible.

I.A, Rahman, the director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan since the 1990s, observes, “Culture is the antithesis of anarchy.” While hanging on to culture in various forms seems to promise some order to (some of) the people of Pakistan, Rahman’s prognosis is dire: Culture has little chance to flourish in a society that has chosen the path of chaos and fratricide. ..those wielding the axe against artist will not only harm cultural flowering in Pakistan, but will also aggravate society’s state of debility. (Interpress Third World Agency, 1998, p. 3)

I have chosen to begin my theoretical ruminations on Pakistani theatre by quoting Rahman and Sarwar in order to highlight the importance of cultural work in contemporary Pakistan as a bulwark against the forces of religious obscurantism and the ensuing chaos or breakdown of civil society—against, in other words, censorship from within. Theatre work, in this sense, must be understood broadly within the parameters of performance in general, and the notion of performance has to be opened up to encompass not only formal genres associated with a commonplace understanding of “performance,” but in a more fluid sense of the term as developed by a Performance Studies perspective (associated most closely in the western academy with the work of Richard Schechner). Indeed, what we need to attend to is our tendency to conflate “drama” and “theatre” (Bell, 7). While text-based “drama” certainly exists in the Pakistani context, traceable to the Urdu-language dramas first developed by the Indian Muslim dramatist Agha Hashr Kashmiri in the early 1900s, and even earlier to the marvelous “total theatre” productions developed in the Awadh court of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the energy and excitement of contemporary Pakistani theatre comes from the folk traditions of Sufi music and poetry, puppetry, and other folk forms of dance and song such as the “swangi” traditions of the Potohar plateau, all of which are being revived through annual festivals organized by big theatre companies like the Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop (the only one of its kind in Pakistan it must be noted) as well as in the work of what used to be “street theatre” groups all over Pakistan and which now survive as fairly stable theatre companies such as Ajoka in Punjab, Tehrik-i-Niswan (Movement for Womens Rights)in Karachi (Sindh), or as Theatre of the Oppressed groups being formed all over Pakistan since the last five years under the leadership of an NGO called the Interactive Resource Center of Lahore. Ribald folk humor and dance often dismissed as :vulgar” and “obscene” both by the state and religious authorities as well as by the “cultural elite” which paradoxically now includes people associated with original street theatre groups such as Ajoka–is performed as proscenium productions which play to packed audiences in the “commercial” theatre auditoriums of Lahore.(Many of these theatre venues have been the sites of small bomb detonations as recently as January 2009).

Like Meyerhold, Artaud, Grotowski, Boal, and other major “modern” theorists and practitioners of Theatre in the West, theatre activists and other cultural workers as well as theorists and academics of Pakistani culture including myself, are concerned with issues of local aesthetics vs international (read western) standards, of marketplace pressures, of complicities between the state apparatus and the forces of religious extremism, of the complex and delicate negotiations necessary between competing demands and definitions of identity which are constantly threatened by internal and external divisions of ethnicity, class, gender, religion, sect, language and nation. The very term “censorship”, under such competing demands and sets of allegiances becomes a highly porous one, and its terrain a difficult one to negotiate by a theatre scholar who is aware both of western ideological traps, as well as native Islamist ones, in which what can or should be enunciated in one location is not necessarily transferrable to a different location—or, at the very least, requires a delicate balancing act and careful scrutiny of the performative codes of speech and behavior, within which complex positionalities must be etched out and contextualized, always.

Elin Diamond, in her introduction to Performance and Cultural Politics (ed Elin Diamond, London: Routledge, 1996; rpt.in The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance ed. Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay, London: Routledge, 2000, 66-74) reminds us that performance is always “a doing and a thing done ,” always drifting between past and present. That is to say, every performance understood as such, “embeds features of previous performances, gender conventions, racial histories, aesthetic traditions—political and cultural pressures that are consciously and unconsciously acknowledged….it is impossible to write the pleasurable embodiments we call performance without tangling with the cultural stories, traditions and political contestations that comprise our sense of history”.

In the context of what we now term “Pakistani” theatre and performance, in addition to gender, aesthetic and racial histories, conventions and traditions, we need also to acknowledge the religious, nationalist, ethnic and linguistic contestations which are key to understanding the history and historiography of Pakistani theatre which has become synonymous with “Muslim” and to a lesser or perhaps more contested degree, “Urdu” theatre across what used to be known as the Indian subcontinent (now the nation-states of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh).

Indeed, as Kathryn Hansen, an Indian theatre scholar specializing in the history of the Parsi Theatre tells us, the knowledge circulated thus far about the Parsi theatre exists in scholarly writing in the Indian languages of Urdu, Hindi and Gujarati, which have perpetuated a highly communalized [divisive] understanding of this highly significant theatrical form (Hansen 61). Urdu is widely regarded as the language of the Muslims and hence now associated with Pakistan, Hindi as the language of the dominant majority who are Hindus, and Gujarati as the language spoken by the majority of Indian Parsis or Zoroastrians who are a tiny minority in India hailing originally from Persia. The extant scholarly literature, depending on who has written it and in which language, perpetuates certain omissions and distortions which create this communalized notion of theatre separated by religion and ethnicity, and now, by nation. What gets “censored” is a more holistic view of these traditions rooted in a more unified intra-ethnic, intra-religious sensibility. Nevertheless, Hansen recognizes that scholarship in these languages cannot be dismissed simply because of its communalist biases since it provides us with invaluable sources of knowledge and documentation about theatre practices within Parsi theatre in its heyday from late 19^th through the mid-20^th centuries. What is important, however, according to Hansen—and here her point of view coincides with Diamond’s—is that the theatre investigator “needs to proceed with open eyes, reading across the linguistic divide and resisting the habit of constructing the past in the image of the present” . A worthy note of caution against the impulse to self-censor in the face of Ideological State Apparatuses which are operative no matter what our location.

(From Viewpoint Online)

© 2011, Fawzia Afzal-Khan. 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.