LAST week, I participated in a function in Karachi where I had to answer certain questions not only regarding my own conduct as a male, but also for the conduct of all men. We, in fact, are now living in the age of feminism, which has put all men in our society on the defensive.
Apparently, I should have felt happy to find myself in the company of a host of distinguished female writers and intellectuals of our times. More conspicuous among them were Fahmida Riaz and Kishwer Naheed, who are perhaps the most aggressive women hailing from our literary fraternity. Fahmida, along with Fatima Hasan, was the chief organizer of the function, designed as the national workshop on ‘What feminism is in our context’.
Amidst a pleasant feminist crowd, I found two familiar men, Hasan Abdi and Asif Farrukhi. Naturally, I saw in them the two men providing moral support to me when needed. But Hasan Abdi has excelled in posing as a neutral person even on occasions when the progressives viz-a-viz the reactionaries become the subject of a heated discussion. As for Asif Farrukhi, he has already been won over by the feminists. He is now one of the ardent defenders of the feminine cause. I don’t see myself in agreement with the anti-feminists either. My article was rather a statement not just in my own defence, but in defence of the whole tradition of the kind of fiction that I belong to.
Ours is a tradition of fiction where female participation is very prominent. Not so in our poetic tradition, which is a male-dominated one. It is only in recent decades that a handful of female poets staged their entry into Urdu poetry and forced their male contemporaries to acknowledge their presence. At the function that I attended, too, a number of articles spoke of this assertion on their past. Fahmida Riaz presented a review of Kishwer Naheed’s poetry, while Fahmida’s poetry was critically judged by Khalida Husain. Shahida Hasan made an attempt to trace feminist sensibility in poetry with particular reference to modern Urdu verse.
However, in Urdu fiction a feminist critic does not need to take much pain in tracing female sensibility. We had, in the days gone by, a long tradition of female story-telling represented by our grandmothers, who were master story-tellers in their own right. The restrictions of purdah did not allow them to come out with their art in public and pose a challenge to the dastan reciters of Delhi and Lucknow. They, however, discovered, within the four walls of their houses, their audience in children and young girls of their families. Their granddaughters, as they grew up, were introduced to a new kind of fiction. In their hands story-telling turned into story-writing. The rise of the print media proved a death knell to the oral tradition of fiction. Nani Amman soon breathed her last. The granddaughters had, in the meantime, grown in years and were engaged in writing novels.
Now coming back to the workshop, where Dr Farzana Bari from Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University sounded more vocal in giving vent to her ideas. She spoke incessantly and took a full day in educating the girls gathered there about feminism. But soon during her lecture she had to face a ticklish question posed by the girls. Is God male or female? There was a prompt reply to the question. God stands above the male-female categorization. All right, then why should God be addressed as a male?
Feminism is not a concept that can be unanimously agreed upon. There are, as Dr Farzana Bari pointed out, several theories that have spawned quite a few feminist schools. Dr Bari explained and discussed at length all these different theories. Among them is a school which questions the very origin and development of philosophy. The entire history of philosophical, scientific and metaphysical thought, according to that school, is dominated by male thinkers and faces male prejudice. How can it be relied upon?
Most humbly, I communicated my perplexity to Dr Farzana. “Then the whole tradition of thought right from the Greek thought up to the present moment stands rejected.” She consoled me by saying: “We don’t reject it outright, but, you see, they were all male thinkers and carried with them their male mentality.”
An important variety among these theories is the post-modern one, which says there can be no such thing as a universal concept of womanhood. Womanhood, according to the theory, is a manifold phenomenon as different women live and behave differently in different circumstances and conditions.
I should stop here as feminist theories are too many. I cannot recount them all.
