The News on Sunday: Do you identify yourself with any particular genre of literature?

Asghar Nadeem Syed: There was a time when a writer or poet identified himself with a particular genre of literature. There have been poets and writers who have tried various genres of literature; they were multitalented. I think that the intellect of the present day writer is very different and also the social role is different. Now it is not sufficient to have a particular genre of literature that you identify yourself with.

Particularly talking about myself I have multiple identities. Besides other things I am also a teacher and I have extensively read literature on very wide canvas: poetry, novel, criticism, history and drama. I also learn from history, culture, fine arts and so many other things. If you are not interacting with all this, you cannot understand any of it because everything is related.

I do not consider myself to be restricted to drama at all although I am teaching drama and that includes its history. I try to do justice to all of these while studying and teaching.

TNS: Which medium do you prefer?

ANS: I use the mediums of poetry, drama, essay, short story and newspaper column.

TNS: You have a deep understanding of literature and it has an impact on your writings as well but today the drama that is being produced for tv seems to be totally divorced from the tradition of literature...

ANS: Drama no doubt is passing through a very difficult time in Pakistan. There are various reasons for that but globalisation, multinational companies and marketing has a great deal to do with it. It is because the media managers are being given a particular thought and a definite line to toe. Market managers are calling the shots so when market managers decide on issues such as creativity then things start to go wrong.

There are so many channels and there are talented, thinking, intellectual people but nobody seems to be able to control the situation. Why? Because the owner of the channel is listening only to the market manager and it's being applied to the channel.

That is why drama is moving away from its traditional path i.e. the tradition of PTV or Pakistan drama. That tradition was to be linked and associated with the people, reflect our society and our issues, and highlight our culture and environment. The focus was the common man. Now the focus is removed from that tradition. I give you the example of digests. Digests represent superficial and transitory writings with no lasting or enduring value. Good for a cheap thrill, they have basically less educated readership. Maybe they are good for light reading or for the entertainment of less educated class but now unfortunately it is the writers of those digests who are writing TV drama. How do they qualify as writers? They have probably not even read any of these writers who constitute the basis of Urdu literature.

It is actually not their fault but that of the media mughals and marketing mangers who are promoting cheap thrills and cheap romanticism just to make a quick buck. It is all because of the lure of easy money.

The good writers have not stopped writing, but there is a limit to what they can produce, therefore the gap created by the mushroom growth of channels and not enough playwrights is filled by these writers. It has resulted in the fast deteriorating quality of drama.

TNS: How do you analyse the popularity of the soap opera, like the dramas on Star Plus being religiously followed by viewers in Pakistan?

ANS: The reason for their popularity is that they have been packaged intelligently. If you are packaging your product well you can sell your substandard product just as well.

The packaging they did appealed to a particular class of viewers but it is definitely not popular in all strata of society. I have been to India and there too the soap operas are popular with housewives. They do not have a huge viewership. India has more than a hundred channels and the more popular ones are news channels and sports channels.

In our country however this packaging had attraction. If there were better dramas being produced here people would not have reverted to the soaps. Our drama suffered further as we started copying them. But even today if good drama is produced people will watch.

TNS: Do you think viewers are becoming addicted to substandard drama?

ANS: There was a time when that was true because there was a vacuum in which these dramas flourished. Their appeal was the glamour they presented. But soap operas should not be taken as serious drama. They are just temporary entertainment.

TNS: As a dramatist how do you conceive an idea for a mega teleplay?

ANS: First of all I have a commitment to the viewer. The screen belongs to the viewer. The creative process is not an instant action. It is an ongoing process. I am a progressive writer and I am critically watching society and my surroundings. I am a critic of the society and I am totally against undemocratic forces. I am against oppression, against human rights violations. So whenever I observe something I write about it from that perspective.

I criticise and question the political system, I question poverty. Naturally my stories emerge out of these themes.

TNS: Do you also consider the commercial success of the play while writing?

ANS: For me whatever has quality is also commercially successful. All my good plays were commercially successful also. I have never considered writing a play just for its commercial success.

TNS: Do writers have the responsibility to influence people's thought process?

ANS: The generation of writers that I belong to were committed to society. It's not enough to know the language, but it's also important to know history and culture as well. Our priorities were different from the commercialisation we see today. All writing should carry the reality of society where the writers belong.

TNS: Manto once said, "I only hold a mirror to society and nothing more?" Is this true with you also?

ANS: Manto was a great writer and he didn't care about criticism. All the criticism levelled against him has proved to be meaningless anyway. I am writing and producing literature with a big commitment; for example if I write the story of the walled city of Lahore I have to go deep into the sociology of that area and its people. I would also have to learn the history, anthropology, behaviour patterns and customs of the people. It is essential for a good writer to do thorough research. Whatever I have written has been well researched. You see the dialectics have to be discussed and there are layers and layers of the story to be built upon. It is not a simple thing.

TNS: Are the producers able to do justice to your plays?

ANS: I usually try to work with producers of my choice, whom I have previously worked with and have a rapport with. Sometimes compromises have to be made and you cannot get people of your choice but generally I am satisfied with the quality of my plays like Hawaian, Chand Grehen, Piyas, Nijat Ghulam Gardish etc.

Society today is unfortunately moving away from literature and arts and the emphasis of education is just skills. Whereas I think that for a society to progress there is a great need to promote art and literature in the next generations.

TNS: What are you doing in this regard?

ANS: I am trying to help promote social sciences by coordinating with different institutes and universities. I am also in touch with Higher Education Commission (HEC) with my recommendations. I have successfully organised an University International Writers Conference in Government College with the help of HEC.

The governor of Punjab is also very keenly promoting arts and social sciences in different universities and is willing to give financial support to universities for this purpose.

Blood Brothers,

A Family Saga

M.J Akbar

Publisher: Roli Books Pvt Ltd

Pages: 346

Price: Rs 495

M.J. Akbar does it again. His latest book Blood Brother, a saga of three generations of his family, is simply unputdownable. But then M.J. Akbar is a towering personality of journalism in the subcontinent. His columns are as widely read in Pakistan as in his own country. His previous books have also been widely read.

The story starts with his grandfather Prayaag, a Kshatriya of a village in Bihar, who had to migrate when famine erupted in the area around 1870. The author puts it thus: 'Famine had no caste. Funnily enough, famine was kinder to the Shudra than to the Brahmin, for the scum of the earth were familiar with hunger while the salt of earth were not.' Prayaag had a vague idea of a jute mill located in Telinipara, near Bengal. With much difficulty he reached there and found a real mentor in Wali Muhammad. Thus started another phase in the life of Prayaag. The sheer love of Wali Muhammad and his wife made him embrace Islam. Named Rehmatullah after adopting Islam, he was destined to play an active part in the social life of small Telinipara. He was instrumental in maintaining friendly relations between Muslims and Hindus through his efforts.

The other people with whom he hobnobbed also helped in his efforts. Talat Mian, the storyteller, could hold an audience spellbound with his rich repertoire. Burha Dewana, a mendicant, solved many riddles with his love centred philosophy. Bauna Sardar, whose word was law for the mill workers, was a man with a heart of gold. All these characters succeed in making an indelible impression on the reader.

Rehmatullah's life again turned upside down in the frenzy of riots at the time of of partition. The family went to Dhaka, and returned to Telinipara once things were calmer. M.J Akbar was born in 1951, and at the time of his birth astrologers prophesied fame for him.

Reminiscing his eagerly awaited occasional visits to Lahore, where his aunts lived in the Shah Alam area, he writes, "Yusuf Uncle would take me to busy corners of the city, dense with pungent smells, like the Bazaar-e-Hakimah near the majestic Wazir Khan mosque, crowded with herbal doctors who looked more exotic than their medicines, and faith healers who looked more important than their faith. At Mochi Gate, we bought open leather shoes with a colourful curl at the tip that reversed like an elephants raised trunk."

In the 1965 war some Hindus concocted a plan to implicate his father in a false case. So his father was branded a Pakistani agent. This led to his father's brief incarceration. The author made a point to be a journalist at that time too. The reason was quite simple. In his own words, 'By the time I returned to boarding school, I had made a decision. The Statesman had written an editorial against the jingoist victimization of innocent Indian Muslims during the 1965 war. I knew then I wanted to become a journalist.'

So he started hanging around the newspaper office to get his articles published. Many of his articles were rejected. But he did not give in. Once his first article got published, there was no looking back. The rest, they say, is history.

Towards the end of last year, a young lady rang me up to say that she was preparing a piece for a leading English newspaper about what the literati had read during the year. In particular, she wanted to ask them questions about the book that had impressed them the most -- and why. I said that I was not a man of letters. "Ah", she said "but we thought we should include you". Since I am loath to being interviewed, I told her, as politely as I could, that I was not interested in being included.

Why I have developed an aversion to interviews by newspaper reporters and researchers (and, I might add, television hosts and presenters) is a subject I shall dwell upon some other time. Suffice it to say that I, no longer, find myself able to cope with asinine inanities.

I read during the year 2006 -- as I have been reading in the years before -- many books. My reading habits are desultory. I read several books at the same time. I keep a pile of books on the table next to my only chair in my study, and a smaller pile on my bedside table. There was a time when I read myself to sleep. Alas! that does not happen any more. There are many nights when I find sleep hard to come by and even such titles as A History of Moral Philosophy, and Man for Himself fail to put me to sleep. I used to fret about this but I don't, any more. I get out of bed, ungrudgingly, and come downstairs to my study to pick up whatever book lies on top of the pile, and open it where the book mark is. I used to be fussy about bookmarks and used only those given to me by Dillion's or Barnes and Noble, but I ran out of them. Now I use a pair of scissors to slice wedding invitations. They make excellent bookmarks and I defy anyone to think of a better use for these enormously expensive invitation cards.

All these books are wonderful, imaginative and exciting. Eric Fromm's Man For Himself, a work that identifies the crucial link between psychology and ethics that underpins all our actions, made me wonder why I did not pursue psychology, a subject I took my honours in, along with my bachelor's degree. Macintyre's History of Moral Philosophy From Homeric Age to the 20th Century, is about ethical ideas that we employ, and what lies behind our ethical decisions. It is a well-argued book but I felt that it did not turn me into a better human being perhaps because of my inherent incapacity to accept moral self-righteousness as a yardstick of human relationship.

But by far the most astonishing -- and intriguing -- book of the year 2006 is Clare Asquith's Shadowplay which paints a vivid and striking picture of the complexities of religious politics in Elizabethan England. She unfolds the mysteries about the abstruse hidden references in Shakespeare's plays so brilliantly that it is one of the most compelling books I have ever read.

Ms. Asquith sets the scene from the day that Henry VIII forbade actors to interpret scriptures or to dramatise matters of doctrine. Censorship of the stage, she tells us, arrived for the first time in England in 1543. Shakespeare grew up in a Catholic family that remained defiantly Catholic in an anti-catholic era. There were Catholics on both sides of his family. His relatives and acquaintances suffered appallingly, for their faith and beliefs. During his early years a wave of anti-Catholicism spread throughout England. The queen's agents and commissioners kept on confiscating Monastic lands around Stratford. Heavy fines were imposed on those who showed their loyalty to the Pope. Sometimes they were evicted from their homes and tortured; many families went underground.

When he was 17, all the lively, inventive productions of the Mystery Cycles, plays that had been staged for centuries around the feast of Corpus Christi, were banned. He also saw that access to the printing presses was permitted only to literature that debunked Papacy.

Clare Asquith presents well-researched and documented accounts to prove that the monarchy (and those who manipulated the monarchy) commissioned playwrights to write new versions of morality plays replacing Lucifer with the Pope and the seven deadly sins with the Roman Catholic Cardinals, monks and friars. Elizabeth's spymasters produced "good government playwrights" who wrote stridently Protestant Plays. London audiences were not moved by these propaganda plays.

People at the time, especially in London, did not take to the Protestant religion; they preferred flocking to the theatre where they could savour the coded references to the glory of their faith. Theatrical performances were timed to coincide with religious services and they were so popular that they emptied the churches. The late 16th century, therefore, provided a ready audience for plays that had a dissident code and hidden meanings. Shakespeare's plays are full of coded messages, all veiling the cruel and despotic nature of the Tudors. The establishment tried its best to ban all theatrical activity, but Elizabeth wouldn't have it. She was fascinated by the theatre and by those who treaded the boards.

In sonnet after sonnet Ms. Asquith finds markers which reveal that Shakespeare was deliberately using dense language to bemoan the fate of England's Catholics.

"More than that love which more hath more expressed..."

The reference here, she points out, is to Sir Thomas More, the great intellectual who was martyred by Henry VIII and whose writings had been proscribed.

Ms. Asquith's book, as Antonia Fraser has observed, is a riveting literary detective story. She traces -- and unravels -- Shakespeare's coded messages step by step, from his earlier plays to The Tempest his last work. She tells us that Shakespeare worked out a set of simple markers, basic call-signs that would alert his audience to the entry point they needed to access the hidden story. The master key to the hidden level, she emphasizes, is so simple that it is easy to miss. There are the terms 'high' and 'fare', which always indicate Catholism and 'low' and 'dark', which always suggest Protestantism. (The modern Christian distinction between high and low church goes back to Pre-Reformation days).

One of the most poignant examples of the 'high-low, dark-fair' image that she cites is the scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet compels his mother, the queen, to compare her late husband with the villain she has chosen to wed. The old Hamlet was a sun god:

"A station like the herald Mercury.

New lighted on a heaven kissing hill

Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed

And batten on this moor..."

Hamlet's coded language here is that Elizabeth, the Queen of England, had swapped the high ideals of Catholicism for the base and dark Protestantism. (A moor was a pun on the dark looks of Claudius and low-lying land, the opposite of the fair mountain).

(To be continued)