Together culturally, divorced politically

Once-thriving Indo-Pak literary, cultural exchanges fade, leaving a vacuum calling for renewal

Naseer Turabi was one of my mentors, and I had the privilege of learning the intricacies of literature from him. Jaun Elia, Obaidullah Aleem, Parveen Shakir, and Iftikhar Arif were other legends of the era who contributed to theme-laden poetry, rich, articulate and exceptional to this day, with a personified edge in ghazal, uniquely theirs. The era from the 1980s to the dawn of the new century also saw a mosaic of mushairas, not only on television (the sole PTV at the time) but also at the Karachi Arts Council, the Aero Club, and educational institutions.

A speciality of those days was the cross-border interaction with India, wherein poets and prose writers, including Bollywood-fame artists, frequented Pakistan. To name a few: Manzar Bhopali, Kaifi Azmi and his daughter, Shabana Azmi; the spell-bounding Javed Akhtar, Om Puri, the exceptional Naseeruddin Shah, the great Dilip Kumar, Saira Bano and the perfectionist Amir Khan.

Faiz Festival, Lollywood flicks, Basant and corporate invites, including Shaukat Khanum fund-raising events under Imran Khan, served as fora for such exchanges, adding to homogeneity and empathy.

That journey of words, lyrics and music continues as we had the prerogative of sending over Amanat Ali Khan and sons to India for supra-classical evenings, the iconic Ghulam Ali, the maestro Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, our Sindh's nightingale Abida Parveen and Reshma and recent stars Atif Aslam and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan.

Shahenshah-e-Ghazal, Mehdi Hassan was a showstopper in India and is revered among the best oracles of all times such as Lata Mangeskar, Rafi, Mukesh and Kishore Kumar. They were sensations on both sides of Wagah and Attari, and victors indeed over politics of hate and otherness with an egalitarian Indo-Pakistan populace.

Today, the surface and beneath are mistrustful. Cultural activities have come to a nought, and what is left in the form of government-sponsored events is no more than a farce. Very few stand out to drive a message, and the only exception to celebrate among our midst is the cogent Anwar Maqsood, a humorist and writer par excellence, who at least vents his diatribe without being bothered. Potent writers such as Amjad Islam Amjad, Ashfaq Ahmed, Fatima Suraya, Bano Qudsia, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi and Hasina Moin are gone, leaving behind a void difficult to fill.

Pakistan is in dire need of reinventing the lost literary pursuits. That can serve as a common denominator in not only ushering in a new wave of collective practice in terms of assembling learned minds and talents, but also in furthering the envelope of reconciliation in state-centric terms across the divide. Both countries have a lot in common in terms of history, language, culture and aesthetics. Let the politics of quid pro quo take a back seat, and statesmanship prevail.

As cricket is mired in degeneration, with Delhi unfortunately seeing it through the prism of jaundice, Lahore and Karachi can harness the aura of prose and poetry rooted in affect. Renowned journalist and my yesteryear's boss at Khaleej Times, Bikram Vohra, aptly wrote on the cricket apathy, saying "...not shaking hands is a band aid on a gaping wound," and had served no purpose.

This thought process should not be brushed aside as utopian, nor dubbed apostate, as patriotism has graduated to chauvinist benchmarks! Healing can only come by agreeing to disagree, but with the condition of beginning a conversation. If States are lagging, let the civil societies on either plank leap forward in these times of social media. History does not repeat itself; it rhymes. Let it reinvent the cycle of grammar in the disciplines of prose and poetry that are misconstrued today.

To quote Turabi from the 1971 epic that he wrote on the truncation of East Pakistan, “…kabhī ye haal ke donoñ meñ yak-dilī thī bahut; kabhī ye marhala jaise ke āshnā.ī na thī…” Sometimes, a state where there was oneness between both; sometimes a stage as if there was no acquaintance. This sounds too qualified for this contested divorce between India and Pakistan in the realms of people-to-people contacts, arts, culture, music and theatre. With realpolitik in grime, it’s time to write a new apolitical prologue.