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| 06/07/2004 |
| CULTURAL IDENTITY OF LAHORE (Part 1) |
Paper on CULTURAL IDENTITY OF LAHORE AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR PUNJAB for the Seminar on policy for the Preservation and Promotion of Culture, organised by the Department of Information, Culture and Youth Affairs Department, Government of the Punjab in collaboration with UNESCO, Lahore, 6 July 2004.
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| I must begin by expressing my deep gratitude to Mr Taimur Azmat Usman, Secretary, Information, Culture & Youth Affairs Department, Government of the Punjab, and to UNESCO, for their invitation to participate in this seminar. |
| It would be tempting to begin with a definition of what we all mean by the word ‘Culture’, but that in a sense would be as meaningless as asking each one of you what you understand by the word ‘Religion’. Religious beliefs are a matter of individual conviction, just as cultural norms are a matter of individual perception. But when taken together, the sum of individual beliefs aggregate into religion; so too is the case of culture. It is the accumulation of human perceptions, human experience, human endeavour, human expression and of human achievement. |
| Culture in itself is not a new phenomenon even if seminars on culture are. I can find no references to any of Egyptian Pharaohs ever holding seminars on their culture. Even if they did, they left no incised hieroglyphics as a record of the minutes of such proceedings. |
| Similarly, I can find no trace in the voluminous records left behind by the Mughals of seminars arranged to define what they understood by their culture. They were too busy being creative to stop long enough to take stock of who they were, and why. |
| I use these examples deliberately because it is only when culture is threatened that human beings feel the need for such self-appraisal. And at no time in our own history – from the earliest days that predate Mohenjodaro until today – has there been such a need to take stock of who we are, what we are, and what we wish to be remembered for. After half a century of nationhood and five thousand years of recorded existence, it is time for us to pitch our own position on the cultural map of the world. |
| To Lahoris, Lahore is more than a beloved city. It is the cultural centre of the entire civilised world. There is an old adage – Jine Lahore nay wekhiya, au jamiya nahin / Anyone who has never seen Lahore has not been truly born. This aphorism was invented not to reduce every non-Lahori to the helpless, insignificance of an unborn embryo, but to express the conviction that to see Lahore was akin to opening one’s eyes for the first time. |
| What was there about the city of Lahore that made people feel so strongly about it? What is it about Lahore that continues to hold the affection of millions of its inhabitants, the interest of even more Pakistanis across the country, and the admiration of a growing population of visitors? |
| To them and to me, Lahore is Time Incarnate. Lahore is not where Time stood still. It is the city where Time came and never left. To trace the history of Lahore is to use a foot-rule on Time itself. Some archaeologists maintain Lahore was founded by Loh, the son of the Rama, one of the later avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu. The mounds of Lahore brilliantly investigated by Dr Farrukh Saleem indicate small communities of migrants who had decided to settle on the banks of the fertile river Ravi, keeping one eye permanently on its fickle course. |
| Gradually, as the mists of time give way, one is aware of a more reliable chronology – the visit by the Buddhist monk Hiuen Tsang in 630 AD, its emergence as the capital city of the Brahman dynasty in the eighth and ninth century, its selection as the capital (in preference to Sialkot) by the conquering invader Mahmud Ghaznavi in the early eleventh century. Everything after that – the Ghoris, the Slave dynasties, the Mongols, the Mughals, the Sikhs and then the British – is modern history. |
| There can be no birth without pain, and the pain in our case was the partition of the Punjab. In the massive movements across the new border – the largest exodus of a peoples after the Biblical exodus itself – the Punjab that had remained a contiguous entity since geography began was divided. |
| This is neither the time nor the place to stick pins into Radcliffe or to spit on his award. What happened is history, recorded in blood. It is the aftermath of August 1947 that is of interest to us today. From being a mutli-religious society of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs – all proud to call themselves Punjabis – we became a mono-religious concentration of Muslims. The Hindus and the Sikhs quit the Punjab but left behind the cultural residue of their traditions, symbols, monuments both sacred and secular, and perhaps most importantly an infusion into our own psyche of their previous presence. It was a repetition of a pattern, when the Afghans and the Persians came and in time departed, leaving behind the green shoots of their culture that grafted and grew in our local, hospitable environment and contributed immeasurably in making us what we are today. |
| I hope the time when we needed for political reasons to skip over our immediate past has gone. We may be tempted to rewrite history; we cannot change it. We have only to analyse our wedding customs, our fairs, celebrations of the advents of fresh seasons, to recognize and acknowledge our debt to earlier Punjabis of a different faith. Basant – something that we have made into a commercial carnival - was originally an occasion to welcome the blossoming of the mustard seeds in January. It was celebrated at the tomb of Haqiqat Rai, near the village of Kot Khwaja Said and belonged to the rural communities in the Punjab, rather than to the rooftops of inner Lahore. By saying that I am not denigrating the present mayhem that accompanies that mad weekend when Lahoris send their kites up and let their hair down. We have few enough reasons to be happy without banning Basant as well. |
| Similarly, if I look at the list of fairs that used to be held in nineteenth century Punjab, I realise how dull and introverted our life has become by comparison. We hardly know of local fairs that are held by communities across the Punjab, and those that are held are invariably ‘Urs’ associated with specific saints and divines. |
| Saints are to the Punjab what the canals are to the city of Venice. They permeate the entire geography of our cultural landscape. If I was to ask you to name me some of our Punjabi saints and sufis, you could perhaps recall a dozen. Fifteen perhaps? And yet, the Madinat-Aulia compiled by Muhammad Deen Qadri listed 636 in Lahore alone. Most of their tombs and graves are buried, as they themselves are, deep, below the surface of our consciousness. |
| Similarly, while music itself is alive and screaming, the earlier traditions of folk music, of village bards, of commemorative ballads are gradually slipping away. I remember reading in the Journal of the Panjab Historical Society, published by discerning Punjabis in the early 1900s, a translation into English of the Ballad of the Invasion of Nadir Shah. The invasion had occurred more than a century and a half earlier, but the tradition was still extant, and therefore deserved to be documented and preserved. We could be doing that with the bhands, whose irreverent comments are a valuable social commentary on our times. |
| This brings me to core of my talk – the need for us to do four things, if we are to protect and preserve our culture. The first is to learn to pay for it. Culture is not promoted on a shoestring. We should be prepared to pay for culture. Pay our performers more, pay for the upkeep of our monuments, pay for research, pay for its documentation. You know that adage – if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. If you spend peanuts on culture, you get performing monkeys. |
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| 06 July 2004 |
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| All Speeches |
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