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DISCUSSIONS about promoting a positive image of Pakistan abroad are not new. In their more frequent and familiar iterations, they have involved choreographed presentations by one or another politician, or perhaps a performance of folk music.
Just beneath their surface has been the subtext that Pakistan’s doubts and disagreements, the things that are spoken of at home, should never be spoken of beyond its boundaries. Like a child lately lectured, the Pakistani abroad has been expected to follow a script. A similar recipe has been followed across the border in India.
It is undoubted that the picture of Pakistan in the world’s imagination, particularly the Western imagination, requires some correction. Even a cursory glance at the headlines attached to news about Pakistan reveals this; words like ‘hard’, ‘dark’, ‘sinister’, ‘bombing’ and ‘coup’ figure prominently. The reality of Pakistan’s one-dimensional reputation as a repository for all things grim and grotesque cannot be countered by the insistence that everything is beautiful and bountiful, and the country’s inner frictions are merely fictions.
In simple terms, the export of denial and delusion does little to rescue Pakistan from a one-dimensional reality. A country’s diversity and humanity is demonstrated far more from its disagreements, its dissenters and its differences, than it is by rote performances that keep to a script.
It is the truth of this second fact that seemed finally to have been understood and underscored in Pakistan. Last week, the Lahore Literary Festival travelled to New York for the first time. Under the leadership of Razi Ahmed and Nuscie Jamil, the event was hosted at the Asia Society of New York over the weekend of May 7-8.
The Lahore Literary Festival in New York took with it the story of a country where art and resistance have a long and robust genealogy.
Inaugurated by Dr Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, the LLFNYC included panels focused on art, English literature, Urdu literature, education and foreign policy. Interspersing guests such as Ahmed Rashid, Arfa Syeda Zehra, Hina Khar, Salima Hashmi (and many others) who had travelled from Pakistan, with Western academics and interlocutors who specialise in Pakistan, created unique opportunities for dialogue and discussion.
Anyone attending was treated not to the usual paeans about Pakistan’s natural beauty or friendly people or terrorist hideouts but rather to the passion of Pakistan’s poetry, the inventiveness of its emergent art scene, the varied strains of thought that influence its foreign policy. In travelling to New York, the Lahore Literary Festival took with it the story of a country where art and resistance have a long and robust genealogy.
To underscore this last point, as well as the history of dialogue between Pakistanis at home and abroad, the LLFNYC honoured Yale professor Sara Suleri with a lifetime achievement award. Born and raised in Pakistan, Suleri was educated at Kinnaird College and Government College, Punjab. Her work on post-colonial theory is widely known and taught in classrooms around the world. In The Rhetoric of the English in India, Suleri traced the genealogy of how the rhetorical construction of India during the colonial era had a tremendous impact on its eventual conquest by the British.
Going beyond the simplistic placing of all blame on the colonial power, Suleri interpreted pivotal moments in colonial history to reveal how colonisation was not a unilaterally conceived project. If the British wished to occupy, there were plenty on the Indian side officiating over the occupation and then division of the subcontinent. Suleri’s work is ever more relevant in the contemporary moment: if colonialism was then, neo-imperialism is similarly sponsored by too many people in the very countries on which it has set its sights.
The politics of a literary festival travelling from its post-colonial home to a neo-imperial centre are also notable. The reduction of ‘other’ lands to amalgamations of strategic interests and security concerns is part and parcel of the rhetoric of neo-imperialism.
A counter-argument to such reduction, if at all intelligent or astute, has to counter that kind of erasure. Presenting a vision of Pakistan as all perfect or all good is immature and childish. Its only accomplishment is to insist on the opposite of what has been put forward. Presenting a Pakistan that is vibrant, that is connected to its past, interested in its artistic and cultural future, discards the good and bad binary for one far more sophisticated.
Debate and discussion were at the heart of what the Lahore Literary Festival took to New York and presented to the world. While most of the panels were conducted in English so that they may be accessible to a non-Urdu speaking audience, it was a speech in Urdu that melted everyone’s hearts and brought the audience to their feet.
Featured in the Urdu literature panel was eminent Pakistani professor Arfa Syeda Zehra, who spoke in Urdu; her subject was the literature of Manto. In juxtaposing the contemporary struggles of Pakistani writers and artists in relation to what Manto faced in his era, she brought together the past and the present with wit and lyricism. If the task of the author is to provide a picture of the society in which they live, it is only society and not the author that can be called obscene.
It was a crucial moment for the Lahore Literary Festival to travel to New York for one more reason. Currently, school boards in the United States are facing moves to alter American history textbooks so that ‘South Asia’ is replaced by ‘India’. Led by fervent and politically powerful groups of diaspora Indians, this effort to erase the ‘other’ nations of South Asia from American parlance makes initiatives like the Lahore Literary Festival even more pressing. Pakistan is real, it is diverse, its writers and artists diverge and disagree — it is a picture of Pakistan’s easily overlooked humanity.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2016
