We can rightly be proud of Harappa civilisation aka Indus civilisation which had an advanced urban society about 5,000 years back as it has been amply testified by ruins of Harappa, Mohen jo Daro, Lothal, Rakhigharhi and a score of other sites. You can find its remnants in our material life in some forms even today. Remember the bull cart found at Harappa; A small cart with two wheels and a bull that pulled it. In the area from Sahiwal to Multan you could see exactly such a cart. Only recently its wooden wheels have been replaced by rubber tyres.

Another example is that of the wrap called Ajrak in Sindh and Jhimmi in Punjab. One can see it worn across shoulders by a male statue found at Mohen Jo Daro that is wrongly known as the priest king because such a notion of a priestly kingdom has not been corroborated by archaeological evidence found elsewhere. But do we find some reflection of advanced civic life of that era in our contemporary social and cultural life? No, one can say. Our social and cultural behaviour is in no way redolent of the atmosphere of sophisticated society of the Harappan era. Far and few are persons who would say thank you if you open or hold the open door for someone to pass. The individual shown respect would not especially if she is a woman bother even to look at you. A matter of small courtesy, one may say. But it carries a cultural significance; it shows a lack of civility and cultural refinement, displaying as if our people have no cultural traditions rooted in history. What does such a rupture with the past signify? Lack of continuity caused by historical conditions or rejection of the historical past for ideological reasons or mere decay?

You walk in a busy bazaar and someone jostles you. Such an unwelcome touch is avoidable but becomes unavoidable. The guy doesn’t say sorry. Visual contact is deliberately avoided. Apologising is something alien or something that lowers one’s prestige. Hence it is avoided like the plague. Have you noticed that even on spacious pavement or on a wide road all of sudden a guy coming from the opposite direction will bump against you? It’s sheer laziness. The lack of control over one’s bodily movements shows lack of civic consciousness and disrespect for other persons in public spaces. And this happens in a society that has a longstanding tradition of discouraging physical touch as it is at times considered to be a source of pollution. Ritual impurity is greatly feared in a society based on the caste division of human groups some of which are treated as nearly sub-human. But rubbing someone the wrong way on a pavement has become normal. Cultural history spanning 5,000 years is dead wood. Why is the cumulative process of cultural learning absent from our life? Our professors in the universities are rarely pushed to probe such phenomena. They are more comfortable discovering the arcane secrets of some known poetaster.

You are on a bus or in a bank and you offer a seat to a lady or an oldie. The person would take the seat nonchalantly but wouldn’t bother to look at you and return the courtesy by saying thank you. Is it a sense of entitlement or simply a sign of being ill-cultured? Maybe it is an expression of cultural insouciance born of civilisational decay. Such an attitude is also the social fallout of family upbringing and lax social training or lack of it.

Our women, married and unmarried, do the household chores, cooking, washing, cleaning and taking care of children and also of men. Have you heard men and children say thank you to the lady who lays the table for them to please their palate? On the contrary if they find anything which they don’t find delectable, they would frown at her and start cribbing. The woman of the house is supposed to do all such things. Non-recognition of hard work that goes into its making borders on disrespect for human labour. A life hidebound by feudal conventions looks at work with contempt. Work which is the bedrock of life is thought to be demeaning. If work is demanding the worker naturally appears mean regardless whether he/she is in a factory, office or house.

Patriarchal norms make the female worker more vulnerable. That’s why we rarely thank our mothers, sisters, wives and daughters for what they do for the family, especially men. One may say I am making small things look big. That precisely is the intention because such things may be small but are not insignificant in any way. Small things are what life is built on. They are what put flesh on the bones of life. Concrete life comprises small acts but their aggregate is what we are. So culture is what permeates our everyday existence, the mundane life we live. Sadly, what we see in our daily life is a lack of culture. Care for fellow beings and what makes life less burdened would be a high mark of culture.

Culture, alive and dynamic, is more concerned with the current practices of life. Let’s pause and reflect for a moment; what has gone wrong with our civilisational march? Why have we failed to retain what was dynamic and sophisticated in the culture our ancestors nurtured? Building on the achievements of the past is what the civilisational march is all about. Failure to do so may be one of the main factors that has rendered us deculturated. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2025