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| December 12, 2006 | Tuesday | Ziqa'ad 20, 1427 |
Writers urged to portray life as they see it
LAHORE Dec 11: A two-day writers conference opened here on Monday with a call to writers to portray life as they see it.
Ambassadors of Love, Art and Peace (ALAAP), a non-governmental organisation, is hosting the moot in collaboration with the Iqbal Academy Pakistan, the Church World, Service (CWS) Heinrich-Boll Foundation (HBF) and some other bodies, at the Aiwan-i-Iqbal.
The topic of the inaugural session was ‘Language, literature and society’.
Intellectual Hameed Akhtar presided over the session and Urdu literature icon Intazar Hussain was the chief guest. The conference started some two hours late from its scheduled time.
In his presidential address, Hameed Akhtar said a writer should portray life as he saw it. “Poets and writers should describe in their writings and verses the happenings as they take place around them.”
He said instead of pondering over the issue that what kind of verses and stories be produced, it was important to find ways to convey the message to the people.
Intazar Hussain regretted that now bureaucrats and ministers, having nothing to do with literature, advised the writers that what kind of literature they should produce.
He said at every book launch, most of the authors tried to invite some government functionary as chief guest.
He said leaving aside the debate that literature written before partition was our asset or not, the focal point should be that what a writer felt about life, about people around him and how he described them.
Writer and lyricist Ahmed Aqeel Ruby gave a detailed account of 5,000 years long literary, social and political history of subcontinent.
Writer Nasreen Anjum Bhatti posed the question that “why we have become bankrupt when it comes to literature”. She said books were being published in bulk but the quality was not there.
Hitting at those speaking against pre-partition literature, Hussain Majrooh said the ghazal should also be discarded as it had been introduced by courtiers.
Critical of quality of fiction, poet Zafar Iqbal said “we should individually think that what kind of literature we are producing.”
The subject of the second session was ‘Democracy, rights and freedom’.
Chief guest Prof Azizuddin Ahmad read his paper on ‘Problems of History Writing in Pakistan’. He said it was easy to write Kassasul Ambia in Pakistan as compared to history.
The history writing, according to him, was not based on facts. “Concocted incidents are a part of history books in our educational institutions.”
He alleged that Pakistani establishment, both civil and military, had moulded history according to their own interest. The names of two leading scientists had never been mentioned in the history as one was Ahmadi while the other was a Hindu.
People like Muhammad Bin Qasim and Mahmood Ghaznavi, he said, had been portrayed as heroes.
Pakistan Academy of Letters (PAC) director Qazi Javed said there had been hurdles in this country when it came to writing factual history.
Dr Mehdi Hassan said in Pakistan, history was being written according to one’s whims.
Facts could only be put down on paper with a secular approach, he continued.
He said “since our conduct as a nation was that of a slave, a slave never tells the truth.”
Dr Hassan said Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, who became the prime minister of Pakistan, had decided not to disclose Jinnah’s Aug 11, 1947, speech because, according to Ali, the speech was against the Two-Nation Theory.
Dr Mubarik Ali said history should have been written from the regional point of view.
He said those “who see their cultural roots in Central Asia instead of India have their own objectives. Why people forget other forces that helped in the creation of Pakistan when they simply say Iqbal dreamt of Pakistan and Jinnah accomplished that dream. We should now think ahead of Iqbal and Jinnah,” he added.
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