AT the opening ceremony of the Islamabad Literature Festival recently, co-founder Ameena Saiyid of OUP Pakistan told the audience that the Lahore house of famed writer Saadat Hasan Manto had been sold off to property developers, who intend to demolish the house and build a shopping plaza in its stead.

As reported in the Express Tribune, this is the house where Manto wrote his famous short stories Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do and Thanda Gosht. Now it will be gone forever unless the Punjab government takes action to preserve the house.

According to Salima Hashmi, culture minister during the 2013 caretaker government, nothing ever came of recommendations to convert the house into a library and reading room, the way writers’ and artists’ houses are treated as cultural landmarks everywhere around the world.

Ameena Saiyid’s appeal to the media to highlight this development was on my mind as I spoke on a panel during the literature festival on cultural diplomacy.

We discussed the need for soft power in order to promote Pakistan’s image, but many other issues came up during the discussion that proved the broader issue of Pakistan’s cultural identity is very much on people’s minds these days: the Arabisation of Pakistani society; the greater deculturalisation of Pakistan; the promotion of some cultures within Pakistan while others were being ignored; and that overarching question: what is Pakistani culture, and how should it be defined in the first place?

For some years now we’ve seen the creeping influence of Arab culture into the Pakistani way of life. Every year we argue about how we should pronounce the name of the holy month of fasting one way or another, and complain about how Pakistani women are abandoning traditional Pakistani dress for the burqa, niqab and abaya. These and other cosmetic changes seem to point to the prominence of religion above all other traditions in contemporary Pakistani society, the assumption being that Arabisation is synonymous with Islamisation.

But there has always been an Arab influence in this part of the world, through ancient trading ties and travel. These influences predate by centuries the export of a certain strain of Islamic ideology; they haven’t changed us into an Arab society in the least. Indeed, what we see in Pakistani society is not true Arabisation; rather, it is our fantasy of what Arab culture looks and sounds like.

Our ‘adoption’ of certain easily imitated elements of Arab culture speaks not of true cultural colonisation, but instead of an observed, idealised Arabia that exists not in reality in the Gulf, the Levant, or the Maghreb, but in our own consciousness. And while we may dream of mimicking that culture, we must recognise we are actually changing it from its ‘pure’ form and assimilating it into our own Pakistani, and larger South Asian culture.

Our need to adopt this strange version of Arabia also speaks more to our own fear that Pakistani culture is somehow invalid or shameful, rather than the strength of Arab culture. Perhaps our lack of interest in saving Manto’s house, where he chronicled the trauma of Partition, points to certain fault lines in our perceptions of ourselves that arose from those terrible days, compounded by the loss of East Pakistan in 1971.

But denying the common source of our cultural heritage or the ruptures that have created our country will do nothing to prove the case for Pakistan’s existence. It is only by owning our past, honestly and with dignity, that we will be able to define ourselves for the future.

We should not be so fearful of ‘losing’ our culture. We have previously absorbed Persian, Turkish, Mongol, Greek, and even British influences into the fabric of our traditions. Our 5000-year-old civilisation, which sprang from Buddhist and pre-Hindu traditions, and encompasses the great heritage of the Indus Valley, Taxila and Gandhara is strong enough to withstand and dilute the influences of other, younger cultures.

Our Pakistani culture is made up of the rich traditions of our different provinces, but mutual suspicion between them has arisen over the years. Why not use cultural diplomacy between provinces, to build instead a foundation of trust between them that would only serve to strengthen our existing federation and its political systems? A good start would be to create a Fata section at Islamabad’s Lok Virsa Museum, which an audience member pointed out does not even exist. 

Manto’s house deserves to be saved, not just in its own capacity as a historical venue, but in the broader context of owning our culture. In doing so, we would be making the commitment towards saving our own house as well.

The writer is an author.

Twitter: @binashah