Art lovers from Ireland

MORE and more people are coming to the city to buy works of art and paying good prices. There are many foreign buyers too. A fortnight ago, there was an art collector from New Delhi, and last week two art enthusiasts, both from Ireland, were on a buying spree here. Each of them returned home with ten works of art each.

They were no ordinary art collectors. One of them, Patrick Murphy, is art adviser to the president of Ireland. His job description includes buying art and sculpture for the President’s House and other important government buildings. These have as many as 7,500 works of art.

“Artists, musicians and writers in Ireland are exempted from paying income tax,” revealed Murphy at a dinner thrown in honour of the two collectors at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts, where the two Irish visitors were treated to a feast of instrumental and vocal music. Murphy enjoyed the sitar as much as he enjoyed the hot prawn curry.

His friend and fellow-traveller was Abdul Bulbulia, whose parents had migrated from Gujarat to South Africa, from where Bulbulia migrated to Ireland 30 years ago. A physician, Dr. Bulbulia is on the board of governors of the National Art Gallery in Dublin. He is also president of the Waterford Healing Arts Trust. His Irish wife, Katharine, is political adviser to the deputy prime minister of her country, whose president is also a woman.

Both Murphy and Bulbulia came to purchase works of art for their own collections (Ireland’s public buildings house only Irish art). Murphy says he has a thousand paintings. “How do you manage to display them?” someone asked him. “My house in Dublin is quite large, and my country home is larger. Besides I have lent some of my works to museums in Ireland,” came the reply. Dr. Bulbulia was less forthcoming about the size of his collection but his friend said it was ‘very large.’

What induced them to visit this country and not India, which is projected more in the West? “Your ambassador in Ireland, Mr Tawheed Ahmed, spoke volumes about the high standard of paintings in Pakistan and was good enough to put us in touch with the Pakistan National Council of the Arts. Their guardian angel was Musarrat Nahid Imam, who took them to different art galleries and the residence of collectors in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. It was in the megacity that they completely loosened their purse strings. They bought paintings by, among others, artists Naheed Raza and Meher Afroze. Two calligraphic pieces by the young Lahore artist Rashid Butt were also acquired.

The two Irish collectors have made plans to exhibit their purchases at 1, Marian Square, the house of Irish satirist, playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde in Dublin. “I have a strong feeling that the exhibition will give a shot in the arm to the art market in Pakistan. Until I cam here I didn’t realize what a treasure trove you have here,” said Murphy. — Asif Noorani

A culturally enriched personality

With the passing away of Dr. Aftab Ahmed we have lost a genuine writer and a gentle soul. We are living in times when a combination of these two in one person is rare indeed. That adds to one’s sense of loss. Because of the association I had with him since the early days following independence, I can’t help but feel in his death a great personal loss.

I remember the evening, my first evening in Pakistan, when Mohammad Hasan Askari had introduced me to Dr. Aftab Ahmed. It was actually my first introduction to my adopted new homeland. Because he was a friend of a friend older than myself, I immediately accepted him as my elder. Now his departure has left me with a feeling of being deprived of the affection of an elder.

He could cultivate close personal relationships with personalities with different, even opposing, temperaments and maintain his warmth towards all with grace. Of course, that at times created uncomfortable situations for him.

I was witness to two such occasions. Once Askari fell out with Dr. Taseer. It was most embarrassing for Aftab, who was very close to Taseer and who in fact had paved the ground for the friendship between the two. The friendship soon ended in a quarrel, leaving Dr. Aftab feeling most ill at ease.

The second occasion was when Askari grew hostile towards Khwaja Manzoor Husain and gave vent to his anger in an article. Once again, Dr. Aftab found himself caught between two loyalties as he had great respect for Khwaja Manzoor and was deeply attached to him.

On both occasions, he refused to take sides. And so he gracefully absolved himself and others of suffering undue embarrassment. This kind of detachment is the first sign of a cultured man. And a cultured man Dr. Aftab was in the true sense of the term.

He had an intricately woven web of deep personal friendships. On one side he was close to the literary elite of Punjab, especially those known as the Niazmandan-i-Lahore. On the other hand, he counted as friends many literary personalities on the other side of the border, who had a different temperament and political views.

This catholicity was reflected in his literary involvements also. In his early years he was associated with the modernists. He wrote a heated article in defence of the free verse of Noon Meem Rashid, triggering off a controversy. And those were the years when the modernists had no tolerance for the ghazal. But in those very years he wrote his famous article on Ghalib’s ghazals as well which secured for him a respected position among Ghalib’s critics. The article is still counted among the precious contributions made to Ghalibiyat.

Dr. Aftab had a modernist background through his studies of English and foreign literature, and he had developed a taste for the ghazal because of his reverence for the classical tradition. Born and brought up in Punjab, he had imbibed many colours from this culture which has now vanished —- along with the literary tradition it had nurtured. With these manifold influences, Dr. Aftab’s was a culturally enriched personality.

His literary life encountered a long break. In fact, from the day he joined the civil service, he slowed down in his writings. His long years in service may be seen as a barren period. But with his retirement, his writing life seemed to take on a fresh start. He began writing with new vigour.

Much of what we have from him has been written in the years after his retirement. Once again, he turned to Ghalib and made fresh additions to what he had already written and collected those writings in a volume under the title Ghalib-i-Ashufta Nawa. His fresh study of Ghalib may be found in his extension lecture, Mir, Ghalib and Iqbal.

Among his contemporaries, he chose Faiz and Askari for a detailed study and brought out a volume under the title of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Shair aur Shakhs. The other is a study of Askari in the light of his personal letters. His book Bayad-i-Subhat-i- Nazuk Khiyalan is a study of a different kind. It may be seen as an outcome of his personal relations with the distinguished literary personalities of his time. It is a collection of finely written portraits.

In addition to these works, we had from him a study of N.M. Rashid titled Noon Meem Rashid, Shair Aur Shakhs. His miscellaneous articles were collected in a volume titled Isharat.

It seems strange that he is gone. Only the other day, we had seen a letter from him in the correspondence columns of Dawnon the Cabinet Mission Plan, and the controversy generated by it is in fact continuing. — Intizar Husain

Zahida Hina’s holistic feminism

There is an implied seduction and a subtle coaxing in the apparent resignation of this old favourite by Lata piyar ka silsila purana hai/ yeh mulaquat ek bahana hai, that she so tauntingly and effectively renders as her gender’s enigmatic comment on the nature of love. Men are probably too thick to get at its meaning, though it’s a part they have played for long and women’s refrain of never getting enough of it is legend. Zahida Hina, as a thorough-going scholar, delves into this more deeply and studies the conundrum from various angles and aspects. Through eight brilliantly put across and often laboriously researched essays on the status of women (Aurat: Zindagi ka Zindan) what she has been able to arrive at as her quest’s final solution is a prayer that gods don’t seem inclined to answer yet. This business of love is old indeed, and this encounter a mere ruse.

Zahida Hina beseeches Providence to grant women the company of enlightened men who believe in (gender) equality. But her prayer is not for all women. Such men she seeks as companions only for equally enlightened and free-spirited women. Not others probably who are resigned to their lot in the until-death-do-us- part sort of companionship with the general available stock of our sterner manhood. The set-up she is envisioning is for the coming generation of women. There is absolutely no doubt in her mind that a society such as her prayer implies can materialize any time soon.

In another essay on Pakistani women she concludes that their deliverance from trials and tribulations is not separate from the wider struggle for the establishment of a democratic society free from exploitation and discrimination. Seeing the women’s issues in this overall context is a holistic approach that distinguishes Zahida Hina from uppity feminist racketeers, the bulky Begumat and the spindly spinsters. She goes further back to trace the roots of current gender politics, in the anthropological evolution of society over the millennia, from the matriarchal family arrangement to the patriarchal system in which women’s degradation has become a small byproduct of the principle of power and brute force that is this macho establishment’s governing law of life. No other creed is more simply, more honestly and more aptly explained than the patriarchal in three innocuous words: Might is right. Period.

The single superpower that is calling the shots is the logical culmination of this arrangement. The system has reached its climax but is crumbling from within. Zahida points to the disintegration of the nucleus family which was the patriarchal system’s molecular brick work, its foundation. It is a shocking conclusion for the orthodoxy and the conservatives who have all along believed in having divine sanction behind patriarchies. Now this divine arrangement is eroding from within, for one thing because women are out and about and for another since no system that is not just can last for ever. The sight of women demanding and sharing power with men is abhorrent, unnatural. This is not what the gods intended. It means doom; the mountains will soon be unscrewed and crash on top of each other if there are no women around walking with uncovered heads.

There is another inner dimension to this holistic, evolutionary frame in which Zahida sees the whole gamut of issues connected with the status of women. This concerns the psychophysical aspect of male power-seeking. Poet and philosopher Akhtar Ahsen who practices psychiatry in the States, and has not been known for any special espousal of women’s causes, used to suggest a relaxed shoulders posture for men if they aspired for adequacy in their physical relationship with women. Men whose coarse sensibility has undergone several stages of refinement are still at odds with their dominant status that they use to make up for the deficiency they experience from the virility standard that they have set for themselves to impress the opposite sex. These physical and mental states are conjoint that men don’t seem to understand. They don’t understand that they need to relax their hold on life to be conjugally adequate. What happens is that women, clever as they are, make extraordinary demands on incompetent men as a kind of penalty. This makes men tense and raised-shouldered. They think the accumulation of power and domination will make for conjugal disequilibrium. But it doesn’t. Women keep making faces.

The prayer that Zahida Hina makes for the coming generation of women to have men companions who have enlightened minds will be such men with relaxed shoulders and lightened hearts. They will make no show of their power and superiority because they would find nothing degrading in equality.

Other very illuminating essays in the book discuss the services of the earliest women reformers like Rashandri Devi, Rashidunnisa, and Ruqayya Sakhawat Hussain; media’s gender approach in which Urdu press continues to paint a bad image of women by propagating orthodox views, suppressing liberal thought and informed opinion and giving crime against women a salacious twist to please male readership. On the literary side she investigates Urdu fiction for its mixed attitude towards family ties in a patriarchal set-up. Mercifully she is not a poet. She steers clear of this messy pool that is easy to slip into and splash much slime since the bulk of our poetry has a female focus. But in the essay, Zaban ke Zakhm, in which she describes how language is used to demean and demonize women through a tapestry of slurs, innuendo, smears, aspersions, slander and even open calumny, she seems to confuse the erotic with the sexist. Quite a few of the verses she quotes from early classics as derogatory to women are, to my mind, plainly sensuous, or vulgar at the most, even rude but in no way insulting or discriminatory. In the war of words between sexes, sensitivities become edgy at times. In America you can’t praise a beautiful woman. It may be taken as a sexist remark. Civilization is all nerves. But in her elaborate essays Zahida Hina is not making a segregated case. Her inquiry is about how the women’s issue integrates into the overall struggle for justice, freedom and equality.