Urdu poetry – Brown Pundits

Last week, there was a lot of discussion about Basant and its place in Pakistani culture. In that context, I’m sharing this essay I wrote while I was preparing for my panel at the Faiz festival last weekend. The panel was entitled “Faiz and the Cultural Policy of Pakistan”. My co-panelists were Asad Gilani— presently serving as Secretary National Heritage and Culture Division– and Mahtab Akbar Rashdi-– a former actress, bureaucrat, and parliamentarian.

I spoke at the 10th Faiz Festival held in Lahore last weekend (February 14-15) as part of a panel titled “Faiz and the Cultural Policy of Pakistan”. I was invited to be a part of this panel primarily because of my book A New Explanation for the Decline of Hindustani Music in Pakistan (Aks Publications 2024).1 Though my book–a republication of my M.Mus thesis in Ethnomusicology– focuses narrowly on Hindustani music, I did discuss the Faiz Cultural Report of 1968, particularly in the context of arguments that Hindustani music declined in Pakistan because it did not accord with the national identity of the newly formed Pakistani state.

I thought I’d briefly share some of my thoughts here since others might find them interesting.

What is the Faiz Report? Continue reading Some Thoughts on Pakistani Culture

I’d said to myself: Why don’t I do my own Bhartiya-karan, that is, Indianise myself, before someone else thinks of doing it? The first problem was my name. Perhaps you don’t know: my name is Iqbal Chand. It occurred to me that “Iqbal” is an Arabic word. What kind of nationalism is it to live in India and have an Arabic name? And so, I changed my name to Kangaal Chand. As it happens, this name is far better suited to my financial condition considering that “kangaal” means “poor”. And why just me, it suits the rest of my country too.

The second problem that arose was of the dress. There was no trace of Indianness in the pants, coat and tie that I wore. In fact, all three were a reflection of my slave mentality. I was amazed that I had worn them all this while. I decided to wear pajamas instead of pants. But then, a certain Persian person told me that the pajama had come to India from Iran. And so, I began to wear dhoti and kurta. But not a kameez, as the word “kameez”, too, is of Arabic origin and it reeks of the stench and stink of an Arab!

The third problem was of hair! After all, was it not treachery against the country, a blatant form of antinationalism, to keep one’s hair fashioned in the English style? I instructed the barber to keep only one lock of long hair at the back of my head and shave off the rest. He did exactly that. I had seen images from ancient India showing men with long and lush moustaches. Following their example, I began to grow my moustache. When my friends saw the large moustache on my somewhat small face, they assumed that I had put on a fake one, possibly because I was acting in some play. Forget my friends, when I saw myself in this new look, I began to feel that I had been created not by God, but Shankar, the cartoonist. But I did not lose heart. One has to do all manner of things to be Indian.

An excerpt from a story by Kanhaiyalal Kapoor in ‘Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?: Stories by Non-Muslim Urdu Writers’, edited and translated by Rakhshanda Jalil.

As the posting on BP (and the comments) are pretty fast and furious; my capacity to edit and moderate is getting pretty stretched..