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RECENTLY, the Pakistani High Commission in London came up with a campaign called ‘Emerging Pakistan’ in which several iconic double-decker buses were wrapped in images meant to evoke Pakistan’s soft image. The campaign’s tagline was ‘The Land of Beautiful Faces’, but, unfortunately, the images included the usual elements of a PIA ad campaign from the 1970s: virile men playing polo, Caucasian-looking models dressed as Kalash women, and a lone white man standing and staring at two of the women.
It’s understandable that there might be some desperation to peddle Pakistan’s attraction as a tourist venue. If the Pakistan diplomatic front would only drop its regressive ideas about what sells Pakistan, this could have been a great campaign. No doubt Pakistan has many beautiful women, some of them fair-skinned, but it doesn’t make sense to exploit the stereotype of the Kalash as exotic creatures making up part of the nation’s flora and fauna. Showcasing Pakistan’s diversity and richness of culture and art needs more creativity than that.
The Foreign Office would do better to focus on the cultural renaissance that is taking place throughout Pakistan, especially in Karachi: a flowering not of pretty girls but of artistic expression that had been suppressed during Gen Zia’s rule in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Zia and his cohorts — dictators never act alone — turned a rich artistic landscape into a cultural wasteland that is only now coming back to life, 30 years later.
The citizens have made huge efforts to humanise society.
The gritty urban sprawl of Karachi doesn’t exactly bring to mind a renaissance, but Karachi is just beginning to recover from the late 1980s, 1990s, and the early years of this century, when its streets were abattoirs, controlled and terrorised by political parties and their militant wings. With curfews and no-go areas, people became too afraid to go out. Street art had no chance: political parties used the entire city as their billboard: any form of outdoor sculpture, public space or wall was defaced or plastered in ugly political graffiti, posters, and banners.
The Zia era and its political repercussions continue to echo throughout Karachi today, where post 9/11 terrorism made public spaces even more unsafe while the spread of religious extremism still endangers the lives of artists and cultural figures: Sabeen Mahmud, owner of The Second Floor, was killed in 2015 by self-radicalised terrorists, while the famous qawwali singer Amjad Sabri was assassinated in 2016 apparently by the Pakistani Taliban in Karachi.
Karachi’s citizens have made huge efforts to humanise a society that had become brutal and weaponised. Slowly, public shows and exhibitions have returned; museums like Mohatta Palace and the Sadequain Gallery at Frere Hall have grown popular thanks to private stewardship, corporate sponsorship and government support. Sheema Kermani, whose Tehreek-i-Niswan dance group survived even under Zia’s persecution, celebrated the arangetram of a young student, the first of its kind ever in Karachi.
It was the 21st-century dictator, Gen Pervez Musharraf, who asked the acclaimed actor Zia Mohyeddin to establish and oversee the National Academy of Performing Arts, a state of the art school for the performing arts in 2005, in order to promote his vision of “enlightened moderation”. Karachi’s cultural cachet has come full circle from taboo practice to a cornerstone of domestic policy that uses soft power to counter internal violence and terrorism.
The physical city itself is now part of a new phase of renaissance, with its artists and architects joining hands to save Karachi’s endangered buildings in the old parts of the city, and renew the teahouse culture where students and artists gathered in its cafés to talk literature and politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Karachi’s artists have been hard at work beautifying city spaces with truck art motifs and street murals, although these need regular maintenance to maintain their impact.
In December 2016, a group of dynamic young architects and artists, the Pakistan Chowk Initiative, restored a triangle at the heart of Karachi’s Old Town which housed libraries, art schools, small publishing houses and translation centres, and the myriad teahouses. The group cleaned up and rebuilt the square, where visiting artists from Spain and Germany built a contemporary art installation. Dozens of amateur artists now gather at Pakistan Chowk to paint and draw on Sundays.
Today, Karachi is a city in spring: every kind of artistic cultural activity imaginable takes place or is being practised, planned out and engaged with every day. This year, Karachi’s first biennale will take place later in October. The energy from its artistic renaissance is revitalising a city that its residents had long thought lost to violence and conflict, division and hatred. This is the revolution that should be promoted to the world: a country in bloom at last, visually, culturally and emotionally.
The writer is an author.
Twitter: @binashah
Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2017
