Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.

Many thanks to Kabir for inspiring this piece.

Toor at the Courtauld

Salman Toor was born in Lahore in 1983 and paints in New York. On Thursday TIME put him on its first TIME100 Art list, and he told the magazine “I straddle two cultures“. On 2 October the Courtauld opens his first solo show in Europe, nineteen paintings made since 2019. He describes the work as queer and immigrant lives, caught between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. One of the principal pictures, a bar on East 13th Street, revisits Manet’s bar at the Folies-Bergère, which hangs downstairs in the same building.

Two weeks ago his partner’s Pasoori became the first Pakistan-made music video to pass a billion views, and nine-tenths of those views came from outside Pakistan. I wrote about it. Add Toor. Add that Britain’s Muslim public face is Pakistani. How does Pakistan gets so much of so little that in the end it is the hegemon of “Monsoon” (Sub-altern) Islam, when technically it doesn’t even belong in that category. My candidate is the language, and I am not sure it is enough.

The Indus was the corridor, not the capital

Start with the map. Pakistan is the Indus, and the Indus was where everyone arrived. Alexander crossed it. Mahmud of Ghazni crossed it seventeen times. Babur crossed it and kept going, because the prize lay east. Lahore mattered: fourteen years as Akbar’s capital, Jahangir’s tomb, Shah Jahan’s gardens, Aurangzeb’s mosque. But the high culture that made modern Urdu crystallised farther east and later. Mir and Ghalib wrote in Delhi. Lucknow kept the court after Delhi lost it. Sir Syed built the college at Aligarh that manufactured the class in the next section. Lahore joined the Urdu world in earnest when the colonial state put Urdu above Punjabi in the province’s offices and schools, which is the story of the Lahnda post.

In 1947 Pakistan got the corridor and Lahore. Delhi, Lucknow and Aligarh stayed on the other side. On paper that is a house with a doorway with just about one good room.

Alavi’s salariat

The house may have been tiny but the people came in droves. Hamza Alavi, the Karachi sociologist who died in 2003, broke with the idea that religion made Pakistan. The movement was led, he argued, by the “salary-dependent class of Muslim government servants“, whom he called the salariat: Aligarh-educated, Urdu-speaking, raised for the colonial service, and watching its share of posts shrink against an English-educated Hindu middle class. A new state meant new posts, and the salariat stood to gain most from one. Alavi knew the type because he was one: an economics MA from Aligarh, a research officer at the Bank of India in 1945, back in Karachi in 1947 to help set up the new central bank. He also named what the class built once it arrived: the overdeveloped state, a bureaucracy and an army too large for the society beneath them. His own paradox follows. The salariat was the engine of the Pakistan movement, and the provinces that became Pakistan barely had one. The corridor had to import the court.

Count what crossed. Intizar Husain from Dibai went to Lahore. Jaun Elia and Sadequain, both from Amroha (the Amroha Sayyid, my late grandmama’s lineage, has been around for 800years), went to Karachi: one small town gave Pakistan its most quoted poet and its most famous painter.

Josh Malihabadi followed from Malihabad in 1955. Shaukat Siddiqui came from Lucknow and wrote Karachi’s great novel about its own poor. Behind the famous names came the clerks, who staffed the new state’s civil service out of all proportion to their numbers. Karachi tripled between the 1941 and 1951 censuses, and the newcomers were the majority. They were an accomplished lot, and they had just lost everything but the accomplishment. They were also ashraf, the well-born; the pasmanda majority of Indian Muslims stayed where it was, which is a large part of why Indian Islam transformed as well post-Partition.

Israelistan

Israel in 1948 and Pakistan in 1947 are the two states of that decade built by ingathering. Most of the people who came were not an elite; they were peasants, artisans, shopkeepers and the urban poor. But each migration carried a professional class at its head, pulled out of the cities where it had been a minority and dropped on a strip of land it had to turn into a country. Both had a catastrophe at the founding, and both then bloomed. Hebrew went from liturgy to a living literature in a generation.

Urdu, a court language with no country, got one, and with it a state broadcaster, a film industry, a national curriculum and an army of clerks who wrote their memos in it. Catastrophe does not produce culture. Concentration does. It made neither culture from nothing; it gave two old cultures new institutions and something to prove. Put a displaced elite in one city with nothing to do but rebuild its standing and you get Tel Aviv, and you get Karachi.

Bombay kept Urdu alive

The twist came from my Urdu teacher on Saturday morning. “Urdu got its progress from Bollywood,” he said. “A great deal of progress. I will give you proof.” The proof is due next lesson. Here is mine in advance.

The dialogue of Hindi cinema was written in Urdu, and much of it in the Urdu script. Rajinder Singh Bedi wrote his scripts in Urdu, as did a number of the leading screenwriters of his day. Inder Raj Anand, who wrote Raj Kapoor’s films from Aag to Sangam, was an Urdu writer working in Urdu. Akhtar ul Iman, the poet, wrote the script of Daag. A linguist at Qatar University notes that early filmmakers policed Urdu phonetics, the sounds for which Devanagari has no letters. India took Urdu out of its schools and kept it on its screens.

My teacher’s peak is the 1990s, and he loves the 1990s. Purists will say the 1960s. He is right for his generation, because the 1990s were when Pakistan watched Bollywood in bulk, on pirated tape and dish antennas, while Indian films stayed banned from its cinemas. Sunny Deol’s courtroom speech in Damini, “tarikh par tarikh”, is an Urdu set piece that crossed the border on cassette.

For fifty years the transmitter of Urdu stood in Bombay, not Karachi. The language Pakistan took as its own was mass-produced by the country it left. Bombay has not switched the transmitter off. Hindi cinema still speaks Hindustani, because its audience does. What it stopped doing, from about 2000, was treating Urdu as the prestige register behind the sound. The qaaf went, then the poets, and one Indian writer blames the language’s association with Pakistan. Pakistan took the frequency. Coke Studio Pakistan is now where the Urdu-and-Punjabi hit gets made, and a billion views of Pasoori, nine-tenths of them abroad, is proof in the pudding.

Straddling

So: Urdu, the salariat, or the trauma? The language is a prestige tongue with a film archive attached, and a Pakistani can walk into any room from Dubai to Delhi with it. The salariat gave the country a founding elite whose whole identity was accomplishment. The trauma concentrated that elite in two cities and gave it something to prove. I cannot rank them, and Toor is the reason I no longer need to.

He is not Muhajir. He was born in Lahore, which was never the salariat’s city, and he paints in New York, which is nobody’s. The Muhajir share of Karachi has been falling for forty years, and the culture has not fallen with it. The court that came west in 1947 became Pakistani property: Lahore learned it, then the rest of the country, and now a Lahori paints men who belong nowhere for a museum in London. Pakistan’s advantage is that a minority’s high culture became a majority’s, and the majority kept it after the minority thinned out. The corridor learned the court well enough to do without the courtiers. Toor told TIME he straddles two cultures. So does his country, and it has learned to do it without the people who taught it.