Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  The history of Murree which was selected as a hill station in 1850 and built by the British soon after the annexation of the Punjab province, is a fascinating account. Till Prohibition in 1977, the company used to supply to the Pakistan Army.10 Dr Khan writes that the brewery was the largest of its kind, supplying beer all over India. It was given an award for excellence as early as 1876 in the Philadelphia exhibition, and its beer sold for Rs 5 per dozen in the 1880s and at that time it was considered better than imported brands.

  I emailed Bapsi Sidhwa, author of the highly acclaimed Ice Candy Man and Crow Eaters, in Canada, Bhandara’s aunt, for her memories of the brewery, and she sent a very detailed response to my questions. She remembered the brewery and the imposing mansion opposite it.

  My father, P.D. Bhandara, acquired the Murree Brewery in 1947 and he proudly took us from our home in Lahore to Rawalpindi to show us the Brewery Lodge opposite the brewery. It was an imposing mansion, and as we walked through its several rooms, furnished in the old British style, my father told us it would be our home in Rawalpindi. Shortly thereafter, the lodge was requisitioned by General Ayub Khan to be used by the foreign office. We moved to Vine Cottage opposite it, which was where one of the British brewers had lived, and this was our home in Pindi ever since. It was spacious and over the years made comfortable and well furnished by my brother Minoo Bhandara. We had many wonderful and happy memories there. The requisition of the Lodge was the only disturbing memory I have.

  Every visit she made to the brewery as a child was pure delight. ‘I was pampered by the staff and loved the fragrance of straw, barley and hops that pervaded the compound. To this day those memories bring me joy,’ Sidhwa said. After her father died, her brother Minoo was called back from Oxford to take over the running of the brewery at the young age of twenty-one, and his son Isphanyar inherited the responsibility at thirty-five after his father’s death. The Bhandaras trace their ancestry to a village by the same name in Gujarat.

  Parsis in Pakistan are a ‘winding down’ society in Karachi, Bhandara said, and many of them have migrated. Theirs is one of the few business families left in this country; another family is the Avaris in Karachi. Apart from being one of the first breweries in the subcontinent, it was one of the first commercial ventures to be listed on the Calcutta Stock Exchange. Its branch in Quetta, which was destroyed in the earthquake of 1935, was relocated to Hub in Balochistan and is now run by someone else. The brewery was once the biggest employer in the Punjab but now it has about 1800 workers. Bhandara was proud of his single malts, blended whisky and premium vodka; the only venture that flopped was Irish cream ‘as no one likes the concept of liqueurs here and its production was closed’. That was sad since I managed to get some and it was excellent.

  There was a time when Murree used to export its fine beer to the US, India, Afghanistan and Europe. Many medals came its way till Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto banned local consumption and exports. ‘This was continued by Zia-ul-Haq but my father developed a very good rapport with him and he managed to prevail over him to open the brewery after a gap. Liquor is available on a system of permits to non-Muslims, while exports are still banned,’ Bhandara said. The company now has large non-alcoholic exports.

  As for Prohibition, it has only made liquor available that much more freely, and the crowds at the permit place and the fact that most people drink, makes the policy look a bit ridiculous. Liquor is also served quietly in some restaurants in the capital, sometimes in teapots or cups if they fear a crackdown. If you knew the owner well, you could even bring your own alcohol.

  Mera Rang De Basanti Chola in Bangay

  Every 23 March, the day of his hanging, annual demonstrations are held at Shadman Chowk in Lahore which the government had agreed to rename after Bhagat Singh, (though it backed out later). In 2013, the JuD had come to protest. ‘We were in for a big shock; the JuD guys defaced our posters. When I asked the man if he was doing this because Bhagat Singh was a Sikh, he said no, it’s because he was an atheist,’ said Madeeha Gauhar, playwright and director from the Ajoka theatre group. On Bhagat Singh’s birthday on 28 September, a small crowd cut a cake in a quiet commemoration. ‘It is more about reclaiming a secular narrative and that space is shrinking rapidly,’ Gauhar said.11 Ajoka, wedded to the ideals of secularism, humanism, democracy and tolerance, has been performing plays for the last thirty years in Pakistan, India and all over the world. Madeeha and her group have persisted in keeping the narrative of peace and togetherness flowing through their work.

  It was thanks to her that I did stories on the play in Bangay, Bhagat Singh’s birthplace, and also on Ajoka’s joint theatre ventures with Indian groups. While the renaming of Shadman Chowk didn’t come through, the Faisalabad district government was keen on redeveloping his village as a heritage site. Madeeha staged a few popular songs from her play, Rang De Basanti Chola, in the now-dilapidated primary school where the young revolutionary studied. The play is based on the exemplary life of Bhagat Singh who was executed by the British in Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931. She told me that the one-room government school still stood there with its walls and roof fallen in, but the blackboard and some of the old door frames were intact. Even now a few classes were held in the grounds outside as a mark of respect to Bangay’s most famous son. She had planned to stage the entire play and the songs which are part of the Bhagat Singh narrative, and celebrate his heroic life.

  The school was kept in its original condition but another one was built elsewhere. There were some very old trees, Madeeha said, and one of them was said to be planted by Bhagat Singh himself. Every November, a free eye camp would be held in the village in his memory. While the play, written by Shahid Nadeem, was performed in India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, and in Pakistan, it was the first time after Partition that anything on the lines of a commemoration took place in Bangay village, about two hours from Lahore.

  Unlike Rawalpindi, I did put in a request to visit Bangay, and I was even told it was possible. It would have been eventful to visit it, but, of course, it was not to be. Instead, I had to be content to speak to Madeeha who took me there with her lively description. ‘The play is a small attempt on our part to pay a tribute but the significance of staging it in his village is to reclaim some of the lost historical connections and narrative denied by India and Pakistan. Also the play was an attempt to connect with the peace movement,’ she said. Madeeha’s mother was from Gujarat and father from Peshawar, and as an artist she felt the need for this connection. History in a sense stopped in 1947 and it was important to rediscover one’s identity and sense of belonging and continuity which has been totally broken in Pakistan since 1947 in the way a new discourse/identity was created by the establishment. She wanted to link all these strands—the personal, political and cultural—through her theatre which connected to a deeper, underlying truth.

  She strongly felt the need to bring out the story of how relevant Bhagat Singh was still to all of us—he was an atheist and had nothing to do with religion though he was being reconstructed differently in some sections. It was also important to bring back the importance of Bhagat Singh, as many younger people wouldn’t even know who he was. Her son, Nirvan, played Bhagat Singh in the play; he was a student of film-making, and has also made a film on how he approached the role. While doing so, he asked students who Bhagat Singh was and the answers he got were varied: that he was a dacoit; he killed Muslims; and one of them even said that Bollywood actor Ajay Devgn had something to do with it. These were students of a premier educational institution, the National School of Arts.

  The government had plans to develop Bhagat Singh’s village as a heritage site, and his house, which was occupied, would be acquired with the consent of the owners. Both his school and house would be restored to the way they were. The Lyallpur Heritage Foundation was restoring places of importance in five selected villages so that people could visit them. Other than Bangay, Gangapur, the village of engineer and philanthropist Sir Ganga Ram, and Kharal,
the home of freedom fighter Ahmed Khan were also selected.

  Apart from reviving the importance of Bhagat Singh, in 2014, Madeeha launched a two-year theatre project for peace, collaborating with two well-known groups from India, Manch Rangmanch from Punjab headed by Kewal Dhariwal, and Ranga Karmi from Kolkata; and along with theatre festivals, seminars were held in Karachi and New Delhi. It was after a six-year gap that Indian and Pakistani theatre groups were collaborating to produce a new play. The proposed joint production, Ani Mai Da Sufna (The Blind Woman’s Dream), was directed by Ranga Karmi’s Usha Ganguly, and written by Shahid Nadeem. She said the script was written in Shahmukhi which was unusual since the Persian script for Punjabi was rarely in use. It had to be transcribed, however, for others to read. The play is based on a true story of a woman who used to live near Lahore and left for Amritsar during Partition. It is set in the aftermath of the terror attacks on Mumbai in 2008 and tells the story of Janki, a woman in her eighties who has never gone back to her home and wants to see it once again. With a contemporary theme in times of terrorism, the play evokes nostalgia, and narrates the main character’s longing to see her childhood home and friends. Gauhar said this was the aspiration of thousands of Punjabis who had felt the trauma and violence of Partition the most. The play was also an attempt at talking to younger people, and except for the lead role of Janki which was played by Jatinder Kaur, an actor from Amritsar, the rest of the cast was young and not affected by the events of 1947 and the dislocation.

  Earlier in 2004, Ajoka did a very popular play for children called Border Border with a cast from Amritsar and Lahore, exposing the ‘theatre of the absurd’ at the Wagah border. It’s about children inadvertently crossing the border, while this current production is a more serious venture. Between 2004 and 2008, there was the Panj Pani Indo-Pak theatre festival in Lahore and Amritsar. While Ajoka had performed for twenty-five years in India, it had never been allowed to visit the Punjab till 2003 when a play based on Sufi poet Bulleh Shah was staged to much acclaim in eight cities. ‘It was a turning point in my understanding of history. The connection with East Punjab was so lacking. It was so meaningful and you discover a part of your body which has been brutally cut off. That was the time when news of the ceasefire came on the Line of Control and we were performing there and people said the good tidings came because we brought Bulleh Shah there,’ said Gauhar.

  Ajoka, now thirty, was the first Pakistani group to perform in Jammu and Srinagar. Travelling to Punjab, Gauhar encountered amazing stories, including one of a boy and his uncles who were forced to convert and become Sikhs. The family was reunited at one of the theatre group’s performances. The current play, too, is about the longing to visit Pakistan and she found out that strangely, the visas for senior citizens on arrival didn’t work all that well and they could not visit Punjab. The theatre for peace project was aimed at interaction between the audience and artistes, and strengthening cultural diplomacy. For her, it was a journey of getting to know artistes from India and finding a ‘part of you that has been lost’. ‘Pakistan is an incomplete story where centuries of history have been cut off. Our work is about that memory which has been deliberately lost to us because of some ideological discourse and these historical and personal narratives don’t fit in,’ said Gauhar. I wonder if the project went off well.

  Not all the Indo-Pak connections had happy endings. Often, Pakistani artistes had to go back without performing or the venue of cricket matches had to be changed after protests. I was told about a different art exhibition quite close to my house and that’s how I met Arjumand Faisel who ran Gallery 6. A doctor by profession and an artist, he was invited to India to exhibit at least fifty paintings by Pakistani artists in September 2012. He was highly excited by this and seventeen artists were chosen for the event which was a success in Mumbai in February 2013. But Mumbaikars, five years after the terror strike of 26 November, questioned him over that and the killing of Indian Army men. In August, this exhibition was vandalized by Bajrang Dal members in Ahmedabad’s Amdavad ni Gufa gallery to protest Pakistan’s killing of Indian soldiers on the LoC.12 Faisel’s own paintings were torn down, along with many others. Out of forty-seven works, thirty survived with minor damage, fourteen were badly damaged and three were missing. The International Creative Art Centre (ICAC) which had invited Faisel did not even entertain his calls and pleas to send the paintings back. The ICAC said it couldn’t send the paintings back to Pakistan because no courier agency was willing. They sent them to Dubai, and from there, at great personal expense, he got them back to Islamabad. The India Pakistan Friendship Association didn’t help either. But undeterred by this experience, Faisel organized ‘Resilient Ambassadors’, an exhibition of the vandalized paintings. Video footage playing in the background shows young men tearing up the canvases and breaking the frames. Faisel’s damaged paintings were cut and repainted on the same canvas but the scars were evident.

  Hajra Mansoor, a student of Lucknow Art College and her husband, Mansoor Rahi, had regular exchanges with India where they sold their work and also made many friends. Deeply pained by such incidents where their work was damaged, their love for India persisted and they felt that artists had a unifying role to play.

  Not the idea of Pakistan

  There is an ‘insidious intent’ in using school textbooks as propaganda to promote hatred and enmity. That they can be insular, go against the Constitution and have little understanding of history or relation to facts surfaced in a study in 2013 I wrote about. I met the author, Professor A.H. Nayyar, over coffee and we chatted about various aspects that he had analysed. A dedicated academic, his study found that the National Curriculum of 2006 relegated Jinnah’s speech to a mere call for freedom of faith. He had studied the content of twenty-seven Urdu textbooks and thirty English textbooks from classes one to ten prescribed for Pakistani schools for the academic year 2013–14, which followed the National Curriculum prepared in 2006.

  Textbooks play such a major role in our early understanding of political events and history, and in creating a sense of inclusiveness. Another academician, Professor Krishna Kumar, had made an outstanding analysis of school histories of the freedom struggle in India and Pakistan, which had highlighted the lack of scholarship on each other’s countries. ‘In general, the power of stereotypes in both countries has proved too strong to allow scope for any serious inquiry and knowledge about each other.’13

  While Jinnah’s domed white tomb in Karachi is a reminder of the man who founded this nation, there was little of his eclecticism and nowhere is it felt more acutely than in the school textbooks. These have been repeatedly analysed and suggestions made, but despite the improvements, flaws remain as Professor Nayyar’s study found in 2013.14 There is also a forcible teaching of Islamic studies to non-Muslim students which clearly violates the Constitution. While there is improvement, especially in English-language books for primary grades, in books on history and geography in the middle grades, and Urdu textbooks for secondary grades, there are continuing problems.

  A former professor at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, he concludes in his study that two very serious problems with the National Curriculum of 2006 need to be addressed urgently in a resolute manner so as to break from the old ways of using education for indoctrination: one, it must not let religious teachings be included in courses that are to be learnt by students of all faiths; and two, it must refrain from forcing an ideological straitjacket on the idea of Pakistan. But on both counts, the textbooks have failed.

  He found that textbook authors were selective in their use of historical facts. Some of the historical distortions that existed in old textbooks persisted and the most glaring are the ones related to the events of 1965 and 1971. In describing the events of 1971, Professor Nayyar said the textbooks entirely blame the Hindus of East Pakistan and omit any reference to the atrocities committed by the Pakistani military and its collaborators. One other persistent old habit is glorifying war and military heroes. Any m
ention of non-military heroes remains mostly restricted to a few of the founding fathers, which does not help the purpose of including the topic of national heroes in textbooks. The only heroes are either political or military ones, with a few exceptions. Female role models are only two: Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah and Begum Raana Liaquat Ali Khan. One Khyber Pakhtunkhwa text eulogizes Ilm Din as a hero for his extrajudicial, vigilante killing of blasphemers.

  On similar lines, Professor Krishna Kumar found that:

  Pakistani textbooks are replete with references to the 1965 and 1971 wars with India. In India, these wars have been the theme of a number of blockbuster films, but we rarely find stories related to them in textbooks. Pakistani school textbooks, on the contrary, use these wars to construct precise knowledge and imagery of battles and heroes. The same applies to war memorial days. For some years, India has been celebrating 16 December as Vijay Diwas (Victory Day) to commemorate the surrender of the Pakistani army in what is now Bangladesh . . . In Pakistan on the other hand, the celebration of 6 September as Defence Day—in memory of the 1965 war—has a larger appeal.15

  In the past too, textbooks had perpetuated a stereotypical understanding of India, her history and ethos. That made it so much more easy to create an enemy mindset. The myth that Pakistan has not lost any of its wars with India has its genesis perhaps in these textbooks which have influenced young minds, exclusively fed on a diet of military heroes as role models. This study found that some school textbooks in Pakistan even have distorted the speech that the Quaid-i-Azam made on 11 August 1947 to the first Constituent Assembly. Bolitho describes this speech on which Jinnah had worked for many hours as ‘the greatest speech of his life’.16 In that memorable address, Jinnah said: