Pakistan: A Hard Country (46 page)
As far as personal pride and identity are concerned, to be a Sayyid usual y comprehensively trumps being a Punjabi or a Sindhi.
Many of the great landowning families of Sindh and southern Punjab are the descendants of Baloch tribesmen who conquered the local peasantry centuries ago, stil speak Baloch at home, and owe al egiance to saints whose fol owing is as widely spread as the Baloch tribal migrations which shaped these local societies.
As for the Pathans, as wil be described in Chapter 10, though they have a very strong ethnic identity, their deep and rivalrous tribal al egiances and their division between Pakistan and Afghanistan mean that they have never been able to turn this into a strong modern nationalism – something in which they resemble certain other tribal ethnicities such as the Somalis.
Final y, Karachi, the country’s greatest city, is itself a major source of unity, since it includes not only indigenous Sindhis and Mohajirs from India, but also huge populations of Punjabis and Pathans. In fact, Karachi is the third largest Pathan city after Kabul and Peshawar, and probably the fourth or fifth largest Punjabi city. More Baloch may live in Karachi than live in Balochistan. These different populations in Karachi often loathe each other, but they also depend on the city for their livelihoods, and their more responsible (or self-interested) leaders and the businessmen who fund them do not want to destroy those livelihoods for the sake of nationalist dreams.
In Europe, the USA and Japan during the nineteenth century it was above al the modern state education system that deliberately created a sense of nationhood among the ordinary people of these countries, most of whom had previously had little sense of belonging to any identity beyond their vil age, region, local religious al egiance and kinship group.4 In Pakistan, state education barely reaches most of the population; and education in the religious schools or madrasahs obviously influences people more to a sense of being part of the universal Muslim world community or Ummah than to a sense of being Pakistanis – just as the Church schools of medieval Europe were designed to turn boys into Catholics, not into Germans or French.
But then none of the different bits of Pakistan’s education system is designed to make children into Sindhis or Punjabis either. So it would probably be wrong to see Pakistan as necessarily fol owing a classical Western course in this matter, or to assume that because Pakistan’s national identity is weak, other, inherently stronger identities are waiting in the wings to break the country up.
Rather, therefore, than an early disintegration, the greatest threat would once again seem to be that long-term ecological degradation – especial y in the area of water resources – wil over time so increase tensions between different regions, and so reduce the ability of the regional elites to contain these tensions, that national government becomes unworkable. By this stage the situation may have become so bad that effective provincial government wil also be unworkable.
DIFFERENT PUNJABS
In the case of Punjab, not only the great majority of the Punjabi establishment but a great many ordinary Punjabis identify their provincial identity with that of Pakistan as a whole; and this identification is one of the things which makes writing about Punjabi identity and Punjabi attitudes to Pakistan so difficult. Apart from the fact that there are simply so many more Punjabis than others, and of more varied kinds, the identities of most of Pakistan’s other nationalities are to a considerable extent shaped by their differences with the Punjabis (except for the Mohajirs), and their ambiguous relationship with the Pakistani state.
Many Punjabis, by contrast, believe that they are the state, and if they define themselves against anybody else, it is against India. An adviser to Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif with whom I spoke in January 2009 was unabashed in his declaration that ‘if anything is ever to get done in Pakistan, Punjab has to take the lead. We determine the direction of Pakistan.’ As a senior official (of Mohajir origin) remarked sourly, ‘The difficulty about writing on Punjab as a province is that they think and behave as if they are the whole damn country.’ This Punjabi commitment to Pakistani nationalism has profoundly shaped Pakistan, and is indeed responsible for Pakistan’s survival as a state. And the overthrow of that state can never happen in peripheral areas such as Waziristan, Balochistan or even Karachi. It would have to happen in Punjab.
One sign of Punjabi commitment to Pakistan, to the point in some cases almost of submersion in Pakistan, is that (in sharp contrast both to the other Pakistani provinces and to Indian Punjab), Pakistani Punjab has not been committed to the development of Punjabi as a provincial language. Instead, successive state governments have promoted the national language, Urdu, as the language of education and administration throughout Punjab. Urdu is also far more prevalent in society. Whereas Sindhis and Pathans almost always speak Sindhi and Pashto among themselves, educated Punjabis usual y speak Urdu with each other, when they are not speaking English.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal, the great Urdu poet, philosopher and prophet of Indian Muslim nationhood, came from Sialkot in western Punjab.
Pakistan’s two greatest writers, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto, were both Punjabis (albeit in Manto’s case from a Kashmiri family) but both wrote mainly in Urdu. Punjab’s finest writer of the present day, Daniyal Mueenuddin, writes in English.
So while Punjabi dialects continue to be spoken at home and there is a rich and living folklore in Punjabi, almost al public life is conducted in Urdu or English. The spread of Urdu is also encouraged by Pakistani television, by the Pakistani cinema (‘Lol ywood’, because based in Lahore) and indeed by the passionately beloved Indian cinema from Bol ywood, which uses Hindi – and despite assiduous nationalist efforts in both India and Pakistan to change the languages, spoken Hindi and Urdu remain basical y the same language.
Much older influences than Pakistani nationalism are also at work here. Although quite distant from the Urdu-speaking heartland of the old Mughal empire, Punjab was stil far more cultural y affected by it than were Sindh or the Pathan areas. Equal y importantly, Punjabi is not in fact the language of large parts of Punjab – or even of most of it, depending on how you define ‘Punjabi’.
According to a traditional Punjabi statement, ‘Language changes every 15 miles’ – just as it did in Europe until the rise of modern mass education and entertainment in the nineteenth century. So ‘Punjabi’ is itself broken up into numerous dialects. Meanwhile, people in most of the southern third of Punjab, from Multan down to the Sindh border, speak a completely different language, Seraiki, which while related to Punjabi is closer in some respects to Sindhi.
A movement for a separate Seraiki-speaking province has existed for many years, but has never got anywhere much. One reason for this is the entrenched opposition of the Punjab establishment, backed by the fear of national governments in Islamabad of the appal ing can of worms which such a move might open (a new Mohajir demand for a separate province of Karachi leading to fresh Mohajir – Sindhi violence, for starters).
Probably even more important is the fact that the Seraiki-speaking area also contains numerous other dialects, or languages (like Haryani) which might be part of Punjabi, Seraiki, Urdu, Sindhi – al or none of them. Until 1955, much of southern Punjab was covered by the former autonomous princely state of Bahawalpur, many of whose inhabitants continue proudly to claim their own special identity, and even that they speak their own language separate from Seraiki. Other identities also cut across the Punjabi – Seraiki divide: these include religious affiliation (whether of the different Sunni sects, Shiism or the fol owing of a particular saint) and wider kinship group (Jat, Rajput, etc.).
Many Seraiki-speakers are in fact by origin from Baloch tribes. How for example is one to define former President Sardar Farooq Khan Leghari in terms of identity? Is he a Punjabi (the province where his clan holds its land); a Seraiki (by language); a Baloch (by ethnic descent and tribal identification); a Punjabi-speaking Pathan (by marriage); a Pakistani (having worked as a Pakistani official, spent most of his life in national politics and ended as president of Pakistan); or, at bottom and perhaps most importantly of al , hereditary chieftain of his branch of the Leghari tribe? So ‘Punjab’ contains numerous overlapping identities, in a way that helps heavily to qualify ‘Punjabi’
dominance over Pakistan as a whole.
LAHORE, THE HISTORIC CAPITAL
For a land which cradled one of the very first human urban civilizations, Pakistan is remarkably lacking in historic cities, and even those that do exist often have few historic monuments. What war has spared, the rivers have often destroyed, either by washing away cities or by changing course and leaving them isolated and waterless.
The great exception is Lahore, ancient capital of Punjab. The old city of Lahore contains one of the greatest Mughal mosques, and one of their greatest forts, as wel as a host of lesser monuments, including the tombs of both Sultan Qutb-ud-Din Aybakh (died 1210 CE), founder of the Muslim ‘Slave Dynasty’ which ruled from Delhi, and of the Mughal emperor Jehangir. Lahore also contains some of the greatest monuments of British rule in the former Indian empire.
In fact, Lahore looks and feels much more like the capital of a major state than does Islamabad – and in the view of Pakistan’s non-Punjabi ethnicities Lahore also often behaves that way. It is some ten times the size of Islamabad, and Pakistan’s largest city by far after Karachi – just as the province of Punjab is home to almost 56 per cent of Pakistan’s population (more than 100 mil ion people) and forms its industrial, agricultural and military core. Punjabis on average are considerably richer than the inhabitants of the other provinces (though, as wil be seen, with huge regional variations within Punjab). In Sindh, Balochistan and the NWFP, more than half the population is listed as being below the poverty line. In Punjab, the figure is around one-quarter. If Pakistan is to be broken from within by Islamist revolt, then it is in Punjab that this would have to happen, not among the Pathans of the Frontier; for Pakistan is the heart, stomach and backbone of Pakistan. Indeed, in the view of many of its inhabitants, it is Pakistan.
As described in Chapter 6, the old Punjab elites (themselves often not so old, having been in many cases the product of British land grants) have been greatly changed in recent decades by the entry of very large numbers of ‘new men’ into their ranks. However, these new families have frequently intermarried with old families from the same ‘castes’, and some of those old families also retain considerable wealth and, more importantly, great local power through the leadership of their clans and kinship networks, or the inheritance of shrines and religious prestige.
This can give Punjabi politics a united and clannish air, and covering Punjabi elections in the company of wel -born and wel -connected Punjabi journalists can be a bit like attending a family party, albeit a pretty quarrelsome one: ‘Wil Booby or Janoo get the family seat this time, do you think? Wil Bunty get a ministry at last? And isn’t it soooo sad about Puphi Aunty’s marriage?’5
The participants and household members do not even necessarily have to be human. During my last visit, I listened as a great Punjabi aristocratic and political lady conducted an impassioned phone conversation about Punjab politics. I was increasingly bewildered by the fact that not only did the conversation keep switching between English and Urdu, but an increasing number of horses seemed to be wandering into it along with the name of the Chief Minister and other leading Punjabi politicians. When my hostess got off the phone, I asked her if she was planning to make one of her horses Chief Minister. That would be an excellent idea, she laughed, but no, the conversation had been about something much more important – the composition of the Board of the Lahore Race Course.
At its worst (which is admittedly much of the time), Lahore high society is al too close to the ‘Diary of a Social Butterfly’, the weekly satirical column by Moni Mohsin in the Friday Times, which she has put together in a book of the same name.6 Though bril iantly funny, this column is in a way quite unnecessary, because the picture of this society which appears on the society pages of the Friday Times and its sister publications is in fact beyond parody.
For the absolute epitome, the non plus ultra of this set (in Karachi as wel as Lahore), readers might want to buy a book of portraits of society figures by the society and fashion photographer Tapu Javeri, entitled – in pretentiously lower case - i voyeur: going places with haute noblesse, and decorated with captions to portraits like ‘on the sperm of the moment’. This is the hard-partying world portrayed in Mohsin Ali’s bril iant, grim novel Moth Smoke.
However, at its best, there is also in Lahore a mixture of elegance and intel igence which could make it one of the great cities of the world (if they could only fix the roads, the drains, the public transport, the pol ution, the housing of most of the population, the electricity supply, the police ...). The Lahore museum, with its magnificent Buddhist and Mughal works of art, is the only museum in Pakistan of international stature, and casts the rather sad Pakistani National Museum in Karachi into the shade.