From Nasim Hijazi to Netflix, A Cultural Roller-Coaster Ride for Pakistani Urban Middle Class
All societies have their own stories, sagas, heroes, and villains. The stories are embedded in the cultural capital of geography. Its dough is kneaded with local moisture of human interactions and responses to the environment.
Cultures may be weak, or strong. It is the basic unit of translation. Historically cultures are nomadic, agricultural or in the later part of 20th century industrial. However, in the late nineteenth century, there has always been a difference between the urban middle class and rural culture of any society.
In the sub-continent traditionally, there is a culture of collaboration and from the beginning of history, this place became a melting pot of civilizations. Indus Valley had 1500 settlements twice the size of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Mehrgarh was founded in 7000 BCE; a precursor to Indus valley civilization which evolved from nomadic to agriculture civilization. The area from Indus to the Ganges had been a literal, cultural and intellectual food basket for the rest of the world.
Subcontinent’s political influence and proximity to Turko-Persian empire was always at the doorsteps. Muslims living in the sub-continent were always on the cultural periphery due to their limited numbers as compared to the vast local population. The cultural diversity of the Subcontinent was absorbingly assimilative and engulfed all the external elements in its fabric. It was hard for Muslims to adopt a plain vanilla flavour of their culture especially the ‘cultural geography’. Festivities like Nauroz, Baisakhi or Basant were mutually coexistent and sometimes overlapping.
This became too imperative when Pakistan was founded to find a relevant ideological software. Understanding the post-partition, the popular urban middle-class, mindset would become easy. As an upstart nation, Pakistanis aspired to be something local, vernacular, and unique from the other carved half of the Subcontinent.
As a newly found Islamic Republic, the Pakistani nation was in search of a new cultural definition and belonging. Sharif Hussain, a migrant from Gurdaspur, after going from Indian Punjabi in 1947 to a Pakistani, adopted the pseudonym of Nasim Hijazi. Hijazi, which meant a person from Hijaz i.e. Arabian Peninsula. Hijazi chose to pick Islamic history as his fictional genre. Like all fiction writers and novelists, he had his sense of imagination with a literary license. He was riding dragons of imagination from the Subcontinent’s partition to Umayyad European conquests.
Ironically Hijazi was a contemporary to famous and iconoclastic writer Saadat Hassan Manto and the famous humourist Shafiq Ur Rehman. All these contemporaries got their place within the middle-class Pakistani readership. If we compare that era with the current time of online blogging, we can well imagine Hijazi must have gotten the most clicks.
Hijazi’ first novel ‘Khak Aur Khoon’ which means ‘Soil and Blood’ is set in Gurdaspur, Punjab, India alluding to the atrocities of Subcontinent’s partition and migration. As a novelist one can understand his comfort to venture into his realm of familiarity of locations with a fictional lens.
Followed by Hijazi, Qudrat Ullah Shahab, Bano Qudsia, Ashfaq Ahmad, Dr Ishtiaq Qureshi, Hafeez Jalandhri, and many others-who were migrants from East Punjab spun the Pakistani cultural wool in the partition’s tinge. Two things happened: traumatic partition coupled with immigrant psychology and external funding for religious fervour. Without the two factors, historically, urban middle class, religious leaders, and local aristocracy have a history of slavery for the last 3500 years. It is this slavery that shows up as love for outsiders be, they Arabs, Moguls-off shoot of Mongols, Afghans and the British. The rural, nomadic, and mountain dwellers were always free from this hangover.
In the recent past, when books were being replaced with TV and later with YouTube and now with Netflix, Pakistanis found a new hangover with erstwhile Turkish or Turko Mongol glory. The visual storytelling was a new cultural software upgrade of certain dogmatic, and mostly written in the Nasim Hijazi coded software in the form of Turkish plays translated in the Urdu language. The plots are mostly predictable, a love story of conquest where a Turkish prince charming woos over a European infidel in an oversimplified Crusade saga.
The post-partition urban middle-class stories in Pakistan are rife with angels, baptized bureaucrats, a mix of mullah-Sufi cocktail fantasy. Interestingly the traditional folklore of Subcontinent especially is different from all this post-colonial hangover.
Chaupal used to be a public space. A social setting where people with talents and folk could come forward based on craft and oratory. In the South Asian-Indian or Pakistani context, Chaupal always gave a contextual meaning to this life. A Chaupal of this type can be compared to an Opera or Shakespearean theatre of the west. Chaupal was a hotspot to brew folklore, rich in history, mystery, mysticism, poetry, and prose. It was a place for mentoring the new folk on history and heritage. For elders, Chaupal used to be a triumph of wisdom over intelligence. The victory of steadiness over speed. The victory of experience over knowledge.
Chaupal’s setting is social like English Café Scientific or French Café Philosophic but in its form is like the Greek oracle of Delphi or Oracle of Apollo. In some places, Chaupal is known as Dera, Hujra or Autaq. The only difference between the Greek oracle and the South Asian Chaupal is the ordinariness. Chaupal is more egalitarian and democratic.
Before the Pakistani middle-class urban printing press sprawl, Chaupal used to be the storytelling arena. Chaupal’s cultural capital was hinged on folklore storytelling with characters like Heer Ranjha, Kabir Das, Mangal Panday, Dulla Bhatti’s, Sachal Sarmast, and Rehman Baba of this side. The folklore in its outlook and message was secular and assimilative weaving all the social fabrics existing in the society.
Only time will tell which software will last long on the Pakistani cultural operating system. However, the more culture has local essence the more it is liveable. For Pakistani culture elite, it is important to utilize networks, alliances and gateways to bring forth local folklore through action, symbolism, dialogue, debate before every Pakistani saddles on the oriental sagas of ‘Khaak Aur Khoon” i.e. Soil and Blood, where neither the blood nor the soil has a local story.
