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Just
browsing The
beloved and the city Zia
Mohyeddin column
Aimless
reading can sometimes come together in a way that mirrors the logic of
research By Ash'ar
Rehman
Take the
following experiment where some books were picked up for reading at random
and some of the messages inherent in them stringed together in an attempt to
create a whole -- coherent or incoherent? It may be against the very
principles of research, but already cleansed of its rebels, what would the
world be without an occasional act defying rules and breaking norms? And, who
knows, while one draws pleasure out of the exercise, one may not be breaking
any norm and in fact contributing to a tradition. Letting
a long-guarded secret out, this kind of self-indulging defiance comes more
naturally to those in the business of piecing together the transient stuff
newspapers are made of. Six people are killed in a shootout over a land
dispute in Raiwind. Seven lives are smothered in Shiekhupura. One boy is
killed in revenge in Karachi. They are all separate topics that should
ideally be dealt with one by one, or alternately, if the space is short, they
can all be combined in one three-hundred-word compact box. The absence of
justice serves as an adhesive, as does the free availability of arms. In
fact, in literature too, principles, once decided upon, can help a researcher
to come up with the most exciting parallels and the most unlikely analogies.
The difference is that in literature (often) a verdict is reached and a label
thence pasted at a considerable loss of words.
Hasad se
dil agar afsurda hay garm-e-tamasha ho Keh
chasm-e-tang shaayad kasr-e-nazzara se wa ho Hali
describes Ghalib's lines as not imaginary but as very real, which capture the
actual facts in fine style. His explanation goes something like this: It is a
fact that when man is confined to the four walls, unaware of the situation
around and unaware of factors behind the rise and fall of people (or nations
as we are fond of saying), he cannot stand someone prospering within his
close group. The wider his exposure, it beckons to him that people's progress
is not to be envied as an outcome of coincidence but it is a result of hard
work and wisdom. Hali was
dead set against breaking the formula, and he observes in his 'Muqaddema... '
that once the new (poets) began emulating the old, they copied not only the
subjects, but also the thought. The references were the same as were the
symbols and metaphors. Even the rhymes and metres were borrowed, until it
first became all too stale, giving way, when it did to 'bhondi ikhtara' or
nonsensical innovations. Hali,
later on in the same book, -- the page selected at random -- likens poetry to
food which must taste well as it should provide sustenance to body. It must
also look good and have a nice aroma. It must carry all these qualities and
is better served in china. "Ditto with the shair. The shair's main
quality is that it should be natural, that it is effective. And if it has a
lafzi riayat (witticism), the better, otherwise this is not all that
necessary." It so
happened, by coincidence, that the next book one browsed through was 'Making
Meaning in Indian Cinema', edited by Ravi S Vasudevan, fellow of the Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. The echoing line was "it
should be natural and it should be effective". This could very well mean
that 'the natural' could be, when such a need arose, compromised in favour of
'effect', justifying the masters of understatement and of irony who have so
excelled effectively in their chosen genres -- the Faizes who so very quietly
dare 'them' to turn off the moon and the Moti Lals and Dilip Kumars of this
world, as maybe those prone to overstate and justify it effect-wise. Instead
the eye looking for continuation of thought stumbled upon the word 'realism'. Almost a
century after Hali's initial work, the influence was Italian. The
International Film Festival of 1952 -- four years before Satyajit Ray
released his 'Pather Panchali' -- provided "the decisive historical
influence". By 1957, a critic would argue that "a certain depiction
in Indian commercial films, whether through location shooting or the more
'fabricated' realism of the studio-set, reflected features of the Italian
neo-realist work exhibited at the (1952) festival". In his
own article, included in "Making Meaning.. " Vasudevan lists many
films of the period, among them Guru Dutt's creations, as he plays the urge
for realism against the desire to be effective commercially. His analysis of
a segment from Mehboob's 'Andaaz', based on a very real situation of a woman
engaged to one man and in love with another, is particularly interesting. But
at the end of it all, or rather in the middle of all these aimless wanderings
into the world of images and words, the writer is still caught as helplessly
as ever in the same old debate: what constitutes real and realistic and just
how much freedom can a trickster using picture and print exercise in the name
of poetic licence and for the cause of effect? The bad thing about all good
things is that they must have their endings and conclusions. As credits go,
Hali pointed to certain deficiencies in our vision a long time before the
lust for formula found an expression in the popular medium of film. However,
in our search for terms to describe the inexplicable world of art and
letters, it is only natural for some to pander to what sells.
Beloved
City Edited
By Bapsi Sidhwa Published
by Oxford University Press Price:
Rs. 395 Pages:
373
A book
on Lahore with 'Bapsi Sidhwa, Editor' printed above and more hugely than its
title, cannot fail to interest its citizens. In Pakistani English fiction, no
one has bettered her plain-style storytelling, or the funniness of her
portrayals of Parsees in Lahore. Sidhwa's anthology is a mixed bag of poems,
excerpts from stories and novels, travelogues, journalism and memoirs, which
reflects Lahore distortedly, like a pond with a stick thrown in. But
aspects of Lahore do glimmer back at you from the hurly-burly of its pages.
There is no getting away from Exotic Lahore in this book -- it has been
published as 'City of Sin and Splendour' in India -- the playing field of
dusky dancing girls the tinkle of whose ankle bells lingers on amid the
summer scent of jasmine under an ancient archway of the... that sort of
thing. Liberal touches of a faded exoticism tar the book in places, not least
in Sidhwa's own introduction. It is only partially mitigated in Pran
Neville's accounts of leading sights and scandals of the Shahi Mohalla of his
youth. Minoo Bhandara, in his more blokish 'Ava Gardner and I: Post-Partition
Lahore', reminisces about an evening when he almost resolved to save a
beautiful courtesan from her disreputable life. The excerpt from Adam
Zameenzad' novel in progress, 'Kanjari', shows a much more unpleasant side of
the trade. This piece has nothing of the Arabian Nights atmosphere about it,
but, sadly, it cannot do much for the reader jaded by overexposure, so to
speak, to writings on the pleasures and brutalities of the 'red-light' area. But
pleasure-seeking in Lahore, in this and other guises, easily forms a
sub-theme of the book. Ismat Chughtai writes of the time when, summoned to
Lahore to stand on trial for her story 'Lihaaf', she wandered through the
city with her husband and Saadat Hassan Manto, contentedly fingering soft
woolen shawls. (The Urdu original of this piece of translation wants, in
places, to burst through the seams of the English prose.) "This was the
time when words of praise issued forth spontaneously from my heart for the
King of Britain, because he had brought a case against us and afforded us the
golden opportunity of having a festive time in Lahore! We no longer cared if
we were to be hanged." An indicted woman, lightheartedly drifting
through Lahore, sure that she "would be let off with just a fine",
feasting on fare that makes "good wishes gush forth from our hearts for
those who had brought us to court" -- she makes Lahore seem like an
alluring hedonists' paradise. But the piece ends on an ambiguous note:
"The memory of an unknown beloved rises like bittersweet pain in the
heart. There is a glow in the atmosphere of Lahore, silent bells tinkle, and
the orange blossoms of Mrs. Hijab Imtiaz Ali's afsaanas fill the air with
fragrance. And one remembers that period of life when one used to get lost in
her dulcet, sunset-hued afsaanas." Is
Lahore a melodrama, a youthful mood, from which escape is necessary for the
serious artist? This theme, not explored in the book, nevertheless peeps out
here and there from its pages, as it does in Lahori life. Krishan Khanna, who
had to flee Lahore with his family in 1947, writes: "(As) much as I
loved Lahore and continue to do so, my ejection from this wonderful city was,
in a sense, a blessing. Had I stayed here, comfortable with the easy rhythm
of Lahore, I might never have become an artist. I might very well have ended
up teaching literature in a school or college, taking pride in writing some
indifferent verse myself." Sara
Suleri, in her distinctive style of lyrical declamation, tries to feel her
way back to the Lahore of her memory hidden behind its newer lineaments.
Mohsin Hamid's Lahore gifts him "a sense of home to sustain me on my
travels." Not all visitors in this book are like this. Ved Mehta in 'A
House Divided' and Urvashi Battalia in 'Ranamama' are hungrier for material
evidence of the past, of foresaken persons and homes which, in being accepted
and understood, will somehow free them into self understanding. But, in not a
few pieces, this city is a muse of memory, a place to be escaped and then
inhabited in thought or art but not in real life. There
are, in this book, two pieces of journalism, Jugnu Mohsin's profile of Habib
Jalib and Khaled Ahmed's of Intizar Hussain, that together make up an
interesting micro-study of the arts in Lahore in the last few decades. 'Habib
Jalib: An Archetypal Lahori' is a sketch of the poet's career, marked as it
was by marches and protests, by his support for lost causes and his relish
for the good, hard fight. Intizar Hussain is a different story. Khaled Ahmed
describes, with irony, exasperation and affectionate humour, the career of a
man who is one of Lahore's finest 'mourners'. "All literature, after
all, is words. Intizar wrote them carefully and guarded them against Lahore's
contamination. His Buland Shehari speech, sealed against miles and miles of
dull prose surrounding his journalistic career, is powerfully evocative. All
revolutions come to grief at the end of the century. Intizar survives them,
but not without a touch of sadness about what, to him, was always
predictable." The
ideological battles through which Intizar Hussain's art survived unscathed,
bring us a long, sobering way from Minoo Bhandara's description of a
pre-partition, "Bloomsbury Lahore", where the lads good-naturedly
parroted the latest argument from a Pravda they had not read. The
poems included in this book are its weakest point; journalism and memoirs,
its strongest. Does that also reflect how things are in the beloved city?
More or less missing is a sense of what it is like to be a present civic
member of this bustling, corrupted, polluted metropolis. For whom, one
wonders, is Samina Qureishi's portrait of Lahore's walled city meant?
"As a civic structure, the Old City of Lahore is a remarkable study in
planning efficiency... Though the city is constantly rebuilding itself it has
maintained over twenty nationally recognised monuments and buildings of
cultural value... Even today, the more industrial, modern trades... are found
outside the wall." This is from a book printed in 1988; but then,
Alexander Burns's account from 1831, quoted in 'Akbar's Capital: Jewel in the
Sikh Crown', is far more accurate: "The houses are very lofty, and the
streets, which are narrow, offensively filthy." -- By Sarah Humayun
Zia
Mohyeddin column What we
must complain of in our current theatrical productions is not that they are
in a style we don't like but that they have no style -- and any ideas they
may embody are merely cute interpretations of glorified amateurs. The
superlatives used in the newspaper notices about those efforts are many:
'staggering', 'stunning', 'electric', 'magical', I know of no dramatic
offering that has not 'enthralled' the audience. What
then does one say about Naseeruddin Shah's dramatisation of Ismat Chugtai's
fictional work that played in Karachi for two nights last week? Adjectives
elude me. It was simply the liveliest and the most well-knit theatrical
production in Urdu that we have ever had the good fortune to see in our part
of the world. Ismat
Chughtai, one of the most eminent Urdu writers of the 20th century, wrote
hundreds of short stories. Naseeruddin Shah, who has a sharp eye for what may
or may not work in the theater, has picked three of the most piercing stories
and shaped them into a riveting evening called, 'Ismat Apa Ke Naam'. Ismat
Chughtai didn't merely explore language through words -- people who do that
treat words as building blocks for communication -- she was the language. It
existed in her mouth, her ears, hands and eyes; when she narrates an incident
she uses words that snarl and words that purr, taboo words, regional dialect,
spoonerisms, malapropisms, gobbledegook and a host of other spoken forms and
variations. Her prose bubbles, simmers and dazzles the senses -- and just as
we begin to feel cosy, she jolts us with a lashing phrase, making us acutely
conscious of our pettifogging, our bickering, our deep seated prejudices
about cast, creed, dark complexion, love and lust. The real
genius of Ismat Chughtai, as a short story writer, was to make eloquent and
expressive conversation out of the real speech of men and women, particularly
the unhappy, downtrodden, frustrated women. She was not a playwright; the few
plays she has written are dialogued -- or duologued -- stories. There
are two types of actor-narrators; the narrator of a single role and the
narrator of many roles -- the latter being halfway to the one-man theatre
(that became the hall-mark of Roy Dotrice and Emlyn Williams). Naseeruddin
Shah has perfected the second type. When it comes to dialogue he delivers the
speeches with full characterisation of posture, gesture and facial
expression. The
story he chose for himself is titled 'Gharwali' (the cultural connotation of
the word is 'Housewife'; the entire story is a scathing satire on our
sanctimonious attitude towards the institution of marriage) He not only takes
on a character's tone of voice as it is described (or implied) in the
narrative, he also embellishes any noises and gestures that may be intimated
in them. His mastery of the individual scene and the force of the individual
word and phrase is never in doubt. It is only when we see Naseeruddin Shah
that the comedy of Ismat Chugtai's lines is released. It is only then that we
realise how much fun and meaning a particular verb or adjective conceals. Mercifully,
he has a complete actor's technique to draw on. Where a lesser actor would
use a gesture of mere emphasis, Naseeruddin Shah chooses an action with a
reference; a quick movement of the hand to the face will tell us that someone
has been dumbfounded by a revelation. Or, he will build a whole scene by a
repeated turn of the head. He adds abstract gestures at more solemn moments:
at the end of an episode he freezes under the dimming lights. His
observation is astute. With a few lethargic -- and sometimes phrenetic --
strokes he is able to evoke characters who are reserved, blinkered or
obsessed. And in so doing he illuminates many a blind alley of subtlety. His
direction is sure-footed. What I admired, particularly, was how well
Naseeruddin Shah understood, before he mounted his production, that, within
the idea of a narrative an audience must include not only the bare roster of
incidents, but the connection between one set of events and another, between
events and society and between society and the cosmos of our biases. **************** The
first act was presented by Heeba Shah (Naseeruddin Shah's daughter, but an
actress by profession). The clarity of her diction was impressive and the way
she held up her line-endings was an eye-opener for all our actresses and
actors, who drop or swallow the last two words of a sentence simply because
they have run out of breath. Her narrative, garlanded with ludicrous non
sequiturs and piquant innuendoes, was pungent and precise. The
story she enacted was about the fate of a woman who is expected to deliver a
child (preferably a male) soon after marriage. Her whimpering, sighing,
twittering before sliding in and out of her narration was effortless. If I
were to cast a 'Miss Julie', I would look no further than Heeba Shah. Ratna
Pathak Shah (Naseeruddin Shah's wife) is a seasoned actress whose work has a
purity partly, I think, because she has never fallen dangerously in love with
Bollywood. She works through her story of a woman, whose marriage could never
be consummated, with measured tones. As she picks up the momentum her face
seems to be lined with freckles, but I realised soon that these were tiny
beads born out of energy. If I was
to fault Ratna Pathak Shah at all it would be for her pauses which, as the
monologue went on, became more and more arch, but I am nit-picking. Her
timing as she draped her dopatta into layers and folds round her head for her
final supplication -- never once faltering in the narration of the last
tragic-comic scene -- was absolutely superb. Ralph
Richardson, the eldest of the formidable trio of English actors -- Gielgud
and Olivier being the other two -- once told an interviewer that the ability
to create a sense of mystery is one of the most powerful assets possessed by
the theatre. With 'Ismat Apa' Naseeruddin Shah has certainly achieved that.
The evening belonged to him. He may have given memorable performances on the
large screen, but the theatre, it is clear to me, is his hermitage. His
physical presence is rakish but self-assured. His voice is light of texture
but it moves easily to become a baritone. It can crackle and it can resonate.
Occasionally, he pounces upon a line and rips its heart out. He doesn't
occupy the stage, he rules it. There
are many flavours that an actor brings to his role; only a few combine these
flavours with the qualities of intensity, intelligence and authority.
Naseeruddin Shah is one of them, and he possesses that rarest of all
abilities -- to act Mind. He is not yet at his perihelion, but if he keeps
his theatrical zest alive, he will be -- soon.
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Do
we have to follow a certain pattern of study as we approach a subject,
assigned or self-assigned or actually never formally assigned? It is quite
remarkable that once we set our mind to a subject, references ooze out of all
kinds of books and other reading materials, like newspapers, advertisements
-- even the lines flaunted by the three-wheelers that whiz around the city. 
Off
the shelf, first, Altaf Hussain Hali, both his 'Yaadgar-e-Ghalib' and 'Muqaddema-e-Shair-o-Shairi',
which kind of rekindles the self-debate about what is natural and what is
not. In the first book, Hali hails his teacher Mirza Ghalib as a great
trailblazer who shunned the artificiality of an era gone by, and both in his
poetry and, in what caught my attention initially, in his letters, heralded
the advent of the natural school in Urdu. 
"Beloved
City is a reflection of the city it celebrates," says the back cover of
this collection of writings on Lahore. Normally publishers' blurbs are best
received with mild cynicism. But when 'Beloved City' is read in the city
which it claims to reflect, it cannot escape being held up against the real
light that beats down upon the object of its devotion.