However, Nigah was happy that after her bold appearances in male-dominated mushairas, other female poets started slowly coming out of purdah and staging their appearance on the literary scene.

But even during the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, the only female writers on the literary scene were short story writers. Female poets were hardly visible in the newly emerged literary scenario. Even after Nigah’s bold appearances in mushairas they took their time to come out and assert their presence in the literary world. Why was it so?

In the session ‘Humara Culture aur Bairuni Asarat,’ the controversial question of foreign influences on our culture came under discussion. Maulvis and mullahs are horrified to find Pakistan under what they see as the cultural invasion from the West. In fact, according to their perception, our culture already stands contaminated because of what they see as Hindu cultural infiltration in every sphere of our social life. Asif Farrukhi expressed this apprehension by saying that “there may come a time that the very institution of marriage may appear to them as something borrowed from Hindu culture.”

In fact, we have among us those who — call them fundamentalists or purifiers — very much believe in the concept of a purified culture, which perhaps is a contradiction in terms. A living culture can hardly afford to stick to purification. It is in the nature of culture to develop with its neighbouring culture or cultures, a process of give and take, or, to be more precise, a process of acculturation. That process stands a guarantee to the enrichment of a culture. And that was the process which started after the arrival of Muslim conquerors in South Asia, who were soon followed by the arrival of mystics, poets, artists, and all sorts of scholars and intellectuals.

This process led to the gradual evolution of a new culture, which we like to call the Indo-Muslim culture. But Dr Javaid Iqbal says, as he has written in an article recently published in the journal Muasir, that “our siqafat is not Muslim siqafat. Ours is Islamic siqafat.”

While the panellists were trying to explain the nature of culture in contradistinction to the fundamentalists’ concept of a purified culture, one gentleman from the audience asked about the place of regional cultures in this scenario. This reminds me of what T.S. Eliot has said in this respect. “A people,” he says, “should be neither too united nor too divided, if its culture is to flourish. Excess of unity may be due to barbarism and may lead to tyranny. Excess of division may be due to decadence and may also lead to tyranny. Either excess will prevent further development in culture.”

This is how he explained his idea of unity and diversity in culture with reference to regions. But the rulers in Pakistan, who very much believe in the centrality of power, can hardly afford diversity in proportion to unity in culture. Such a mindset cannot perceive that cultural diversity adds to the colourfulness of a national culture without posing any danger to its unity.

The festival itself presented a scene of diversity at different levels — linguistic diversity, gender diversity and the diversity of subjects under discussion. This diversity, taken together, added to the meaningfulness of the festival.