Art and the Other Pakistans
(The Ones that Don’t Make the Headlines)
By Mohsin Hamid
Looking back, it’s obvious to me now that the Pakistan of my
teens was bursting with art. I had a burly cousin who used to play
(incongruously) with inks and watercolors in the afternoons when he got home
from school. I had an aunt who was in the habit of telling the story over and
over again of her random encounter with Sadequain, an encounter that resulted
in him executing what was surely his version of an autograph: a quick drawing
depicting my aunt as a Nefertiti-necked goddess holding a flower above a line
of calligraphy. I had seen Chughtai’s long-eyed ladies smiling out from drawing
room walls, offering half-lidded innuendoes to easily flustered young men like
me. And I had in the backdrop of my youth the Lahore Museum, the marvellous old
city, the trucks and cinema billboards covered in bold, pelvis-thrusting
iconography.
But at the time, art felt to me like something that belonged
either to the past or to other places, because my teens were in the 1980s, and
Pakistan in the 1980s had the misfortune of being governed by a moustachioed
dictator with dark bags under his eyes and a fondness for dystopian social
reengineering. General Zia-ul-Haq claimed to be acting in the name of Islam,
and even though the history of Islam in our part of the world stretched back
over a thousand years, we were told that our Islam wasn’t Islamic enough,
indeed that we Muslims weren’t Muslim enough, and that he would make of our
Pakistan the “land of the pure” that its name suggested—or ruin us all trying.
Under Zia, flogging, amputation, and stoning to death became
statutory punishments. Acts disrespectful to symbols of Islam were
criminalized. Public performances of dance by women were banned. News in
Arabic, the language of the Qur’an but spoken by virtually no one in Pakistan,
was given a primetime slot on television. Thugs belonging to the student wings
of religious parties seized control of many college campuses. Heroin and
assault rifles flooded the streets, “blowback” from Pakistan’s alliance with the
United States against the Soviets in Afghanistan. My parents reminisced about
how much more liberal Lahore had been in their youth.
When General Zia was blown to bits shortly after my
seventeenth birthday in 1988, he wasn’t much mourned, at least not by anyone I
knew. I left for college in the United States a year later. There I met people
who were studying photography and sculpture, and I myself enrolled in courses
on creative writing. Without thinking much about it, I supposed an education in
these “artistic” pursuits was something only affluent societies in the West
could afford to invest in, or rather, that only the twin luxuries of material
success and tolerance of free expression could provide the sort of soil in
which an artistic education could thrive.
I was, of course, completely wrong. When I returned to
Pakistan in 1993, I was working on what would become my first novel. I thought
of writing as a transgressive act. I wrote at night, often from midnight to
dawn, and in between writing sessions I would escape into the darkness with my
friends. We drove around town in old Japanese cars, hung out on our rooftops,
and searched for places beyond the reach of societal control or parental
observation. Cheap local booze and even cheaper slabs of hash were the
intoxicants of choice in that young urban scene, and avoiding the predations of
the bribe-taking police was an alarming and amusing preoccupation.
Increasingly I found my wanderings taking me into the world
of the National College of Arts (NCA). A couple of my friends were enrolled
there, one studying architecture, another graphic design. Others were dating
students: painters, printmakers. It was unlike anything I had ever seen.
Students of all social classes, and from all parts of Pakistan, attended NCA.
The place was a microcosm of Pakistan, but of a creative Pakistan, an
alternative to the desiccated Pakistan General Zia had tried to ram down our
throats. Here people who prayed five times a day and people who escaped from
their hostels late at night to disappear on sexual adventures in the city could
coexist. In the studios I saw calligraphy and nudes, work by students with
purely formal concerns, and by others for whom art overlapped with politics. I
was inspired. I wrote like crazy. I made friends I have kept for life.
Love comes to mind when I think of that time. There was a
lot of it going on among the people I hung out with. But I was also falling in
love with Pakistan. I have always had a stubborn affection for the land of my
birth. When I went abroad for college I thought I knew it pretty well. But it
was my encounters with the denizens of the NCA universe after my return that
reminded me that Pakistan is too vast a country to be known, that it is full of
surprises, of kinks and twists, of unexpected titillations and empathic
connections, of a diversity that can only be described as human. It was
exciting and vital and real.
Or rather, they were exciting and vital and real—for my
Pakistan had become plural. The art, and artists, I found at NCA ushered me
into many more Pakistans: the nascent underground music scenes, the emerging
film and television scenes, the scenes of writers like myself, and of course
the scenes of other art and other artists, not just in Lahore but in Karachi
and Islamabad and elsewhere, and not just in 1993 but in the rest of the
nineties, the noughties, and now.
Just a few months ago I was in Amsterdam with two old
friends from the Lahore art world. On a warm summer night we checked out some
galleries and walked along the canals, whirring bicycles and shrooming
teenagers passing us in the darkness. Nothing could have been more different
from where we had all been fifteen years earlier. And nothing could have been
more similar, either.
(From: Hanging Fire - Contemporary Art from Pakistan)
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