Painting a canvas with words: Gauhar

Feryal Gauhar's session at KLF discussed women’s rights in what she says is an inherently misogynistic society.

KARACHI: As an actor, an author and a human rights activist, Feryal Gauhar was perhaps uniquely suited to host the session of the Karachi literature festival titled ‘Imagining the nation: Painting a picture with words and images’.

Gauhar’s main focus during the session was on women’s rights in what she says is an inherently misogynistic society. It is that misogyny, says Feryal, that leads to the degradation of both women’s bodies and lives. These are the themes that recur time and again in both The scent of wet earth and No space for further burials, the two books she read from. The two books provided the words for this bleak canvas, and the film Tibbi Galli provided the images. Both the excerpts and the clips showed Gauhar’s thoughts on society; the sad reality of our hierarchical structure is that regardless of whether a dictatorship or democracy is in place, it is the lower classes that always suffer, and of those, it is women who bear the brunt. From the film one could see that Gauhar was trying to show that women are downtrodden in our society and are inevitably the ones who are blamed and punished, regardless of where the fault actually lies. As an important literary figure, it is evident that she is trying to use her position to create awareness and make changes.Gauhar said, “My voice, which tends to be heard, would only be meaningful if it’s the voice of the people.” The author also pointed out that authors like Karen Armstrong may write Charters of Compassion, but the people of Pakistan do not need a foreigner to come and teach them how to be compassionate. This is something we should be doing on our own, without any assistance from the outside world.

It is unfortunate that literary figures, while highlighting problems, cannot offer concrete solutions and the audience was a little disappointed on that front.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 6^th, 2011.