Beautifully-lit, the white walls of the Rohtas 2 Gallery in Lahore, Pakistan could be a miniature modern Vatican Map Room, except that in Zarina Hashmi’s exhibition, energetically curated by Salima Hashmi, Dean of Beaconhouse National University School of Visual Arts, every map is fractured, every place, broken. Yet one is not left with the sense of emptiness one sometimes feels after visiting galleries of contemporary art in the West.
Theatre, visual art, music, literature and puppetry in Pakistan arise from economic, physical and social life. Over the past thirty years, much of the arts has been led, driven and created by women. They receive little official support and yet are burgeoning and gaining increasing recognition abroad. Vital, aesthetic and plugged-in to networks of intra-national, regional, and global politics, they are as far from bourgeois pastimes as you can get. Every artist is de facto an activist.
During the long, dark night of Zia’s dictatorship (1977-1990), artists were imprisoned or prevented from working and a shameful parody of Islam was burned into statute. In a deeply patriarchal society, Woman became the Other. Over the years, artists have worked with the women of the Craft Cooperative Movement, have explored the conceptual centrality of Sufism in South Asia, have translated to and from intra-national languages and have been diligent in every field of folk culture. Women writers challenge a dominant romanticism; this is art as truth-telling.
There is anger, yes, in a country where wealth distribution is like an Escher folly, where, in spite of the national debt, military spending never seems to run dry, where ‘honour’/dowry killings are rife, where most women work outside the home in fields or offices yet have a farcical level of public representation, and where health statistics and literacy levels, especially for women, remain scandalously low. However, key themes of this art seem to be humanity, sensibility, tolerance, dialogue, love and understanding – a powerful alternative cartogram to that of the Taliban-types who have just taken over the government of the Northwest Frontier Province of the country.
Grassroots artistic bodies get funding mainly from donors, private sponsors and NGOs, while the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation links together journalists, writers, lawyers, transport and water administrators across the seven countries of South Asia and aims through civil societal means to drag governments into action. Poetry is intimately linked with the Women’s Movement, and far from being in thrall to the West (whose rulers, to maintain hegemonic control of trade and resources, have created, financed, armed and skillfully utilised the fundamentally misguided Islamists), in their creations these artists draw deeply on the living cultures of the region.
Surely, given the right ‘creative cluster’ approach (à la Oslo, which has one of the largest Pakistani communities outside South Asia), the youth of Pollokshields, Bradford and Tipton might plug in to the verve, activism and centredness of these arts movements. Once you have painted a picture or written a poem, it becomes increasingly difficult to render your brain subject to someone else’s machinations. Subverting nihilistic unemployment and fascistic thought, the link between art and political and economic life is real. Civilisation is partly about connectedness. It is hugely exciting that the Scottish Arts Council is exploring such creative interactions.
Some Pakistani artists point to the difference in attitude between their own embassies and those of India, which actively promote art abroad. Just as, irritatingly, the world refers to Britain as ‘England’, so the conception of South Asia resides in the numinous iconic receptacle of ‘India’.
The general perception of Pakistan heaves with inchoate archetypes of bearded violence. The blame for this lies with tenacious Western folk prejudice, with contradictory notions of national self-image and with the political instability and entrenched patriarchal feudal interests of successive Pakistani governments. Who, internationally, knows of Sadequain, whose artistic stature matches that of Dali? Or of the sharp intellect of feminist poet Kishvar Naheed? Or of the fearless Ajoka Theatre, set up by actor-director Madeeha Gauhar twenty years ago with the express purpose of exploring the social relevance of themes of living traditions of dance and drama? Or of Jamil Naqsh, whose elegant, visceral paintings currently inhabit the luminous, echoing galleries of the 1920s Rajput-Mughal-style Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi?
Artists of both sexes in the ‘Land of the Pure’ are carving out new territories, untrammeled by either cultural bankruptcy or the dysfunctional parameters of religious psychosis. The maps are broken. The lights in the galleries of Pakistan are switching on. Let us hope that they will not go out again in our time.
Suhayl Saadi recently accompanied freelance arts curator Alina Mirza on her Scottish Arts Council-funded feasibility study of the arts in Pakistan.
1 comment:
Well said.
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