Culture lost is culture perhaps
By Sarwat Ali
The Pakistani culture is forever under threat. If one pays heed to the alarming voices raised from certain quarters, this situation of permanent embattlement finds Pakistan on the losing side, with not enough being done to safeguard the essentials of its culture.
Usually societies or countries which are weak worry endlessly about the contours of their cultural identity. The unequal relationship with other more powerful competitors creates a situation of insecurity. Pakistan over the decades has sought to shield the particularity of its culture under the garb of ideology and this has led to the fabrication of an abstract concept of a Pakistani culture premised on two counts.
One, since Pakistan was carved from the larger unit of the Indian subcontinent, everything in the new country had to be different from India, and two, the regional cultures especially that of the five federating units were perceived to be militating against cultural homogeneity. This cultural homogeneity, too, was an abstract concept crafted more in the nature of an ideal culture which the five federating units were supposed to follow and uphold.
If the new country had resolved its political problems with the promulgation of a constitution that clearly defined the relationship of the federating units with the federation, then culture or even an ideology-based culture would have ran its natural course. But, in the context of the failure to settle political issues in a political manner, the onus was shifted to ideology and a culture based on it to resolve these issues. This led to the trumpeting of the role of an ideology-based culture with the result that it started to sound hollow and distractive after a while.
The dismemberment of the country clearly underscored the failure of a policy where culture was supposed to substitute for the resolution of political problems.
As it is, our cultural strength comes from its diversity and not from its homogeneity. The culture of the Muslims in India carried the baggage of a transnational religion that originates in one area and is then transported to other regions. The same issues must have been faced by the transportation of Buddhism from India to Japan and China and of Christianity from Palestine to Europe.
Even the early Muslim culture was very heavily mediated by Iranian, Turkic and Mongol influences. The initial conquerors and settlers here were from these areas but gradually, over centuries, some kind of assimilation was arrived at from a position of strength. Since the Muslims were the ruling religious group, though in a minority, they established linkages with the majority on their own terms.
The Sufis were the ones who brought about a synthesis between the tenets of faith and the local traditions. They interacted with the common people and spoke in their language. They ate with them and invited them into the inner sanctum of their hospices. They wrote in the languages spoken and written by the people and they chanted the same tunes as them. They created a cross religious culture based on humanism, evolving a workable prototype that facilitated a continuum between ishqe majazi and ishqe haqiqi, hence providing a greenhouse cover for the plants of the arts to flower.
Some Sufi orders were more prone to this interaction while the others were wary of losing their identity altogether. But in all gradations of the faith, practices and orders, the humanistic ideal stood the tallest. It was on the basis of humanism and the ordinary concerns of a person of flesh and blood that poultice of solace and contentment was offered. The Sufis appealed to others as healers and friends and not as scholars talking down from the pulpit.
But this sulah-e-kul was thrown into a tailspin by the establishment of European hegemony and the ushering in of an order where brute force and self-belief in religious ideology was displaced by numerical strengths of communities. This drove a petrifying spear of insecurity through the Muslim community and they started to work on the construction of an identity from a position of weakness.
Pakistan was created to counter that insecurity but, since the beginning, it has been in the state of petrification with the fear of a cultural invasion almost overrunning the defenses of its ideological territories from India and the West. It is feared that the cultures of both these perceived enemies is powerful enough to not only change our culture but of also corrupting it, making the people wayward and immoral, away from our culture into a culture that is pleasure-loving and basically epicurean in nature.
Culture is something which is dynamic and changes all the time. In the past centuries, our culture has assimilated and changed beyond belief. The clothes we wear, the language we speak and the food we eat is very different from what was practiced before the coming of the Europeans to India. The subjects that we studied, the systems of government that we mouth so often as ideal and the system of thought and feelings are all conditioned by the system of education that we adopted two centuries ago.
And in today’s world, which is becoming smaller by the minute due to the technological breakthroughs, the insularity of culture has become a dangerous sport to follow. There is just no way that we can seal our borders and live the life we want to because ideas that travel through technology cannot be stopped, censored and curtailed.
A living culture of the people relishes in the creativity of the arts giving them aesthetic satisfaction and elation through the sublimation of their own desires and ambitions; while the ideological abstract culture based on ideology pontificates and sermonises. People have to see their own image in the cultural projection of their country — in painting, music, literature, film and drama — and not a rarefied sketch of an ideal culture without the hue of local habitation and a name.
Source: The News
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