Meera, the svelte Lahori film actress, is Pakistan’s sole claim to fame in the plastic world of international showbiz. So it is perfectly understandable that she should try to exploit the recent thaw in Indo-Pak relations and elbow her way into Bollywood by way of a film by the famed Indian producer-director Mahesh Bhatt. Alas. Screen morals being lax in India as compared to Pakistan, some zealous officials in our Ministry of Culture have “seriously objected” to Meera’s screen engagements and threatened to “impose a heavy fine on her because her vulgar actions are against Islamic ethics and moral values”. Well, well, well. Just goes to show how far General Pervez Musharraf’s plea for enlightened moderation has gone in this Land of the Pure.
Lahore is the classic city of saints and sinners. Its zinda dilaan citizens are not cowed down by the Ministry of Culture. They have successfully resisted official attempts to shift the ancient red light district from the old city to new suburbs. They have fought tooth and nail to flog the subculture of popular (‘vulgar’) theatre. They have thumbed their noses at holier-than-thou judges who insist on steering them to the straight and narrow. They have braved the chilling vagaries of February to clamber to their rooftops and indulge in an orgy of kite flying and feasting, and they have blown rings in the air when the stalwarts of the Jamaat i Islami have fretted and fumed, refusing to abandon Basant. On the contrary, Basant is bigger and better than ever. It has been adopted by the multinationals and co-opted by the local and provincial government. Now Lahore is girding up its loins to regain its pre-partition glory as the great secular and intellectual gateway to north India.
We may recall that two provinces of British India, situated geographically on its flanks, were hinged to their own cultural epicentres. One was Bengal that boasted of Calcutta and the other was Punjab which bragged about Lahore. Indeed, Lahore’s cultural and geographical hinterland stretched north to Srinagar and east to Delhi. Urdu writers from Lucknow and Delhi would seek out publishers in Lahore. Three religious entities (Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs) lived in Lahore in harmony under the political leadership of the Muslims, made permanent by the device of separate electorates. When the Partition came in 1947, the cultural hub of Bengal (Calcutta) fell to India and the cultural centre of all Punjab (Lahore) fell to Pakistan. But Lahore, unlike Calcutta, was a big intellectual loser. The Hindu middle classes, including teachers, artists, musicians, writers and publishers, moved to Delhi. But there was no similar movement of such professionally endowed Muslims from Delhi to Lahore. So overnight Lahore lost its secular sheen and lay at the mercy of Pakistan’s new religious ideologues. In time, these self-appointed thekedars of the new state of Pakistan became a critical lynchpin of the anti-secular, anti-democratic, civil-military Pakistani establishment and connived to strip Lahore of all its intellectual fervour and secular culture.
The greatest pre-partition political figure who helped create Lahore as the cultural hub of Punjab – and for a time all of India – was Sir Fazle Hussain. During his tenure, Punjab in general and Lahore in particular saw an unprecedented period of cultural and religious tolerance. But it was precisely this post partition loss of the secular cultural resource of Muslim Punjab that hurt Pakistani Punjab’s ‘national’ culture and created hatred against Punjabis in the other provinces. Is that about to change?
The opening of the land routes from Lahore and Muzaffarabad to Amritsar, Jammu and Kashmir is bound to herald a profound change in the economic and cultural landscape of Lahore. Since current day Lahoris have no memories of Delhi or roots in it because they didn’t emigrate from Delhi at the time of the Partition, the traffic is likely to be pretty one sided, that is, from Delhi to Lahore since hoards of Delhi wallahs migrated from Lahore and struck new roots in Delhi. So Lahore is set to become a boom town awash with secular intellect and culture that reflects multiple religious and community identities and lifestyles.
Under the circumstances, what purpose can possibly be served by censuring Meera for getting chummy with an Indian actor on screen? We see “banned” and “un-Islamic” Indian films in Pakistan all the time on illegal and pirated CDs. Therefore the Ministry of Culture is opening a can of worms when it refers to “Islamic ethics and moral values” and wants actors to behave like “Pakistani ambassadors”. Such references are a throwback to a morbid past that will hurt our composite culture in the future because the mullahs are the sole arbiters of what constitutes “Islamic values”. As a consequence, they can always dig up the entire issue of filmmaking in the country which shows actresses flitting from tree to tree without hijab. Won’t the next step lead to attacks on CD-sellers and cable operators who show Indian TV channels in which the actresses show a lot of leg? Where will it stop, as culture gets scraped off all the nooks and crannies where it is hiding now? In the end will the mullah remain the only “Pakistani ambassador” with the right to parade his views in public?