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| November 23, 2002 | Saturday | Ramazan 17, 1423 |
Ethnicity reflected in elections, say writers at US moot
NEW YORK, Nov 22: Academics and writers at a symposium on Pakistani languages and cultures have observed that the October elections have shown that ethnicity retains a pivotal role in Pakistani culture and politics.
They called for a deeper understanding of Pakistani culture and society in all its complexity and layers which they emphasized is perhaps more necessary now than ever before.
The symposium, which was held last week at the University of Texas, titled “Pakistani literature and national integration: revisiting the language question”, was attended by writers and activists from Pakistan, the United States and Europe, who came to discuss their work in and on regional Pakistani languages and ethnic cultures such as Sindhi, Balochi, Pashtu, Bangla and Punjabi.
Prof Kathryn Hansen, Director of the Center for Asian Studies and Prof Kamran Asdar Ali, Asst Prof of Anthropology, who organized the two-day symposium, noted that too often in the western academy the study of Pakistan is centred upon the study of Urdu literary culture.
However, they pointed out that taking the results of October elections in Pakistan demonstrated that ethnicity retained a central factor in Pakistani culture and politics. It was therefore necessary to undertake a deeper understanding of Pakistani culture and society.
Irfan Malik, a poet currently residing in Boston, recalled his experiences while learning to write poetry in what he termed the “non-literary” language of Punjabi. He described how difficult it was while growing up in Pakistan to find anyone who could even teach him how to write in the Punjabi script, for Pakistan had been formed under the “one nation, one religion, one language” theory, and that one language was to be Urdu.
Attiya Dawood, an activist from Karachi, spoke about the female voice in contemporary Sindhi literature. In addition to providing a genealogy of female Sindhi poets from the twelfth century to the modern day, Attiya discussed the difficulties of writing poetry as a woman. She stated that she is often asked why there is no woman poet of the calibre of Shaikh Ayaz or Shah Bhitai. In response she pointed out that Ayaz’s wife spent her entire life looking after his needs so that he was free to pursue his poetry.
Iftikhar Dadi and Samina Choonara expounded on Pakistani cinema. Dadi addressed the subject of ethnicity in Urdu cinema, focusing on films from the late 1960s, the golden age of Urdu film and explained his viewpoint with some examples.
Samina Choonara discussed popular Punjabi cinema, focusing on the 1970s, when regional cinemas were booming and the gun-toting, law-defying hero Sultan Rahi came to dominate the Punjabi screen. With the aid of movie clips and film posters, Choonara illustrated how Sultan Rahi served as a resistance figure.
In her discourse Shelley Feldman, Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University and Saadia Toor, a student at Cornell’s Sociology department, discussed the language politics of Bangla in East and West Pakistan from 1947 to 1971.
Prof Shelley Feldman argued that historical erasure is an active process and that Bangladesh has been actively forgotten in modern Pakistan. She underscored that “we cannot understand Pakistan and certainly not its efforts at integration or unification, without understanding the place of Bangladesh in Pakistan’s history.”
Saadia Toor focused on the language debates that occurred between 1947 and 1952, focusing on the need to understand how the language debates of this period worked to reinforce a Bengali identity as an identity separate from and unique to West Pakistani identity. In addition, several other papers were presented.
Sabir Badal Khan, Professor of Folk Literature and Oral Traditions of the Islamic World, at the University of Naples, spoke about Balochi resistance poetry, explaining that the poet’s duty in Balochi society was to act as a record keeper for the tribe and to record its tribal clashes. The Balochi poetic tradition has often been characterized as harsh for its emphasis on fighting and on weaponry. But knowledge of Balochistan’s history sheds light on this poetic aesthetic, said Khan, for it is a history of constant battles for independence and for the ability to speak the Balochi language.
Carla Petievich, Professor of history at the Montclair State University, summed up the two-day symposium observing that perhaps the title should have been “Pakistani literature and national (dis)integration,” as the collective subject of the papers presented seemed to highlight the failure of the project to unify Pakistan through a dominant language (Urdu) and religious identity.
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