| March 13, 2002 | Wednesday | Zilhaj 28, 1422 |
Language, ideology and feminism
WHAT a hiding Pakistan took and but for the weather, the match might have ended inside four days. No excuses please, not even the horrible decision against Inzaman-ul-Haq. Sri Lanka played total cricket and the commitment was so tangible, one could almost touch it. Not so Pakistan who looked out of sorts and in the words of P.G. Wodehouse “if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
Waqar Younis has denied reports of disharmony in the team and I am glad that he has done so and although one should not read too much into body-language, the Sri Lankans seemed to be enjoying themselves, there was a stoop to the shoulders of the Pakistanis. One obvious reason for this could be that the Sri Lankans were winning and the Pakistanis were on the back-foot, throughout the match.
Great pains were taken to prepare the wicket and because some grass had been left on it, it was described as a green-top and the expectation was that the ball would fly about. I don’t think one can change the fundamental character of a wicket by leaving some grass on it.
In the end, it was a typical Gaddafi Stadium wicket which got slower, with the occasional ball keeping low and to no one’s surprise Muttiah Muralitharan was the bowler of the match while our own Saqlain Mushtaq was turning his arm over, along with Wasim Akram, for PIA in the one-day competition.
Wasim had not been picked by the selection committee because it was not satisfied about his fitness but Saqlain was in the squad and was, therefore, dropped by Waqar and his think-tank. This meant that Pakistan had decided to go into a Test match without a specialist spinner and in this particular case, one of the best spinners in the world.
Both Shoaib Malik and Shahid Afridi were played more for their batting and were not seriously bowled. I found Saqlain’s omission particularly surprising as the Sri Lankans have so many left-handers including Kumar Sangakkara who scored a double century.
The Australians have stripped the captain of any say in the selection of the playing eleven. I am not in full agreement with this because a captain is the one who is held responsible if things go wrong and should have a say in the playing eleven but in a home series, it should be the selection committee who should decide the playing eleven, giving due weight to any in-put from the captain and the coach.
The Pakistan attack lacked variety. Saqlain would have provided it and I don’t think the Sri Lankans would have made 528, if he was in the team.
The Pakistan cricket public is disappointed but there was some good news as well, the best being the return to form of Inzamam. As the cliche goes, form is temporary but class is permanent and it was only a matter of one good innings before the confidence would return to this burly Multan batsman, among the best in the world.
He was out for 99 to a decision that seemed almost fiendish, a no-ball plus too high plus missing leg. I don’t know whether it would have altered the result of the match, it seemed too far gone but those of us who were in Auckland for the 1992 World Cup semifinal saw Inzamam pull out Pakistan from a deeper hole and who knows, he could have steered Pakistan to the safety of a draw?
Inzamam has had a lot on his mind lately, the health of his father which is of urgent concern to him. But his return to form could not have come at a better time with New Zealand’s tour of Pakistan confirmed.
Mohammad Sami bowled with a lot of heart, a hat trick being the reward of his honest labour. He seems to be a quick learner and I noticed that he had shortened his run. Shoaib Akhtar too bowled well and seemed fully fit which is good news.
Afridi was run out in the first innings, a mix-up between him and Younis Khan but he batted with determination in the second, a calm innings by his standards but a very good one.
He was deceived in flight by Muralitharan but better batsman than Afridi have been bamboozled by the Sri Lankan magician. But batting remains the main worry and though there is no Muralitharan in the New Zealand attack, there is plenty of high class bowling, as well as batting.
Pakistan must forget this Test match, its overall performance being eminently forgettable and become a settled team as Sri Lanka was. Sri Lanka came with a plan and stuck to it, Pakistan, on the other hand, chose to play it by ear. Having lost the toss and been put in, the batting just folded and no one was able to stay long enough to take charge.
There was some poor shot selection which at this level of cricket shows a lack of application and an inability to differentiate between Test and one-day cricket. Compared to the Sri Lankans who seem to enjoy their fielding, the Pakistan effort in the field made it appear as manual labour. But where we were decidedly better was in the bowling of no-balls. The Sri Lankans bowled some 60 no-balls in both the innings, the Pakistani bowlers were more disciplined. They bowled far fewer. This is not comfort enough.
It’s not quite back to the drawing board but the Pakistan team must have a session among themselves and do some honest soul-searching. Why should there be this perception that a wholehearted effort was missing, that the team appeared to be stuck in second gear? I still rate Pakistan among the best Test teams in the world. And as far as the PCB is concerned, it has gone an extra mile to support the players. The players have never had it so good. There should be some reciprocity from them.
SINCE the emergence of feminism as a new ‘front’ of progressive criticism, some Urdu ‘feminists’ of our literature seem to be working overtime to prove that the majority of Urdu writers, being mostly male, have made the same ‘mistakes’ which their Western counterparts have made.
The situation is quite interesting. We not only borrow ‘perceptions’ from the West; we borrow arguments as well. A step further: we start searching for our ‘Portias’ and ‘Lady Macbeths’ and try to study them from the angles of today’s ‘decoders’. Isn’t it quite a pathetic situation that we create ‘ailments’, ‘perceptions’ and, with the help of Western diagnostic methods, do not mind misreading our specific social development?
I think of Frantz Fannon who once wrote that the biggest problem of the East is to ‘decolonize’ its mind. The Eastern mind is still the same ‘colonized’ territory where colonial flags still flutter from their flagmasts, with the result that all that the East seems to be learning today is the ability to explain itself in the Western idiom.
And it is not surprising, therefore, to produce an entirely different ‘version’ of the mind which is sought to be explained and explained in the light of our own ‘truth’. It has been rightly said that while explaining our art forms and artistic vision we should be on guard whether we are really doing an honest job or busying ourselves with ‘constructing’ something which was not our objective.
Dr Ismat Jamil’s doctoral thesis Urdu Afsana Aur Aurat is the first serious attempt to understand the history of women’s grievances against a system of values which didn’t believe in treating them justly over the years. Starting from the first written constitution of the world — that of Hammurabi of the first dynasty of Babylon (1894 BC to 1595 BC) in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, we see a fairly better society for women but as we travel downwards in history — say towards Egyptian civilization down to Egyptian, pre-Islamic Indian, the Chinese, Greek, Roman and mediaeval Europe — the situation goes on worsening to an extent that one is apt to regard the Islamic concept of women’s rights a lot better than the ones obtaining in the pre- Islamic times.
It is quite another thing that women in Islamic societies prefer the rights given to them in the UN Charter of Human Rights only to prove that the concept of human rights changes from time to time and from region to region, depending on the socio-economic-political development.
The study of women’s plight in the 19th century Urdu fiction is vastly different from the “gender sensitivities” of our time, and Dr Ismat Jamil’s thesis does full justice. I regard the Urdu Department of Bahauddin Zakariya University of Multan an avant- gardist department. The doctoral dissertations of this university live up to the expectations. Our expectations cannot smack of the Left Bank (Paris) intellectual culture but we should surely be appreciating that the times of Mohammadi Begum and Nazar Zehra (latterly Nazar Sajjad Yaldrum) radically changed in the days of Ismat Chughtai and Dr Rashid Jehan.
Ismat Chughtai had to study in the Aligarh University Women’s College behind the curtains as the ‘purdah’ had to be observed as a matter of rule. But it was from the same ‘purdah’ girl that we, perhaps, got the most radical woman writer of Urdu fiction who was so radical and fierce that she nicknamed even Qurratul Ain Haider as the ‘Pom Pom Darling’ of Urdu literature. It means that Ismat took Qurratul Ain to be a weak-kneed, coward writer.
The question then arises, whether Ismat Chughtai could be considered ‘feminist’ if the Western canons of feminism are applied to her language.
Language is the most important yardstick of the feminist philosophy of criticism. Our Kishwar Naheeds and Fehmida Riazs have talked a lot about feminism but they didn’t give any consideration to the main charge of the feminist critics of the USA and Europe that no woman writer could be called feminists if she didn’t write in ‘feminine language’. Kishwar and Fehmida write in hefty masculine language and they have not as yet developed the ‘feminine language’. Unless they do so, they will be writing about women’s sad plight — and will surely get our approbation as well — in ‘Male’ language. The similes, metaphors, symbols, allusions and all that goes to embellish their poetry or prose is strictly ‘female’.
It is the language which reflects the social structure of the community in a variety of ways. A social structure is an ordering or distribution of power and social functions. Such a distribution is normally reflected in and sustained by differences of language, class languages and regional and social dialects of different forms. Power at the smallest level is normally reflected in and meditated through language. Our advocates of ‘feminism’ have altogether shut their eyes to the differences of languages ingrained in a truly feminist voice. It is the male voice talking against male ideology of linguistics — not views on society — which our feminists employ.
Dr Ismat Jamil has discussed the different outlooks of female fiction writers and has partly succeeded but right from the days of Daastan literature to Deputy Nazir Ahmed’s novels and Altaf Husain Hali’s Majalis-ul-Nisa (1874) there was a lot of distance to be traversed. And, my goodness, from Muhammadi Begum to Ismat Chughtai to Khadija Mastur to Hajira Masroor to Qurratul Ain Haider to Mumtaz Shirin to Jeelani Bano to Bano Qudsia to Khalida Husain and Azra Abbas we are really in a very interesting situation.
There is not a single woman writer in our midst who could prove that she could employ a language free from the male-dominated variety. The structures of female thought should have ideally had a particular structure of language consistent with their place in a society they find themselves in.
It was heartening to see that a Women’s Day was observed. I wish some women’s organization could give some thought to the need for having a ‘female language’ expressing their plight in a language free from male prejudices. Maybe some of their problems are not understood and appreciated because they were not couched in a language which should lend itself to better understanding.
Finally, Dr Ismat Jamil should try to study — now that she has got her PhD — what could be the possible gender-specific language. International NGOs, such as Amnesty International, which have been organizing lectures on women intellectuals, like Hamza Wahid, should also lend their support to the issue of having a proper and gender-specific language for the creative women writers.
Some countries have paid a great deal of attention to this problem and we should have some Hamza Wahids to take up the issue and see what could be done to have a women’s language for understanding women’s problems. It is not stretching the argument too far but stating the obvious.