9. The Hairbrush and the Dagger

Mediating Modernity in Lahore

Richard McGill Murphy

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

He who has not seen Lahore is yet unborn.

The Argument: Representation in Lahore and in  Anthropology 

Debates about the nature and value of modernity permeate daily life in Lahore. I argue, accordingly, that competing representations of modernity are in large part strategies through which Lahoris negotiate the business of everyday life. These strategies often involve the conscious or unconscious manipulation of class rhetoric—the words, arguments, and turns of phrase that mark membership in a range of situationally constructed social groupings.^[1] I read local discourses of religion, class, gender, and politics contrapuntally, in Edward Said’s (1993) sense of the term, to achieve a multiple perspective on the rhetorical construction of modernity in urban Pakistan. These constructions take the form of texts drawn from newspapers and television dramas, from the sermons of Muslim preachers, and from the conversation of my Lahori informants. The argument (and, where I use it, the ethnographic present tense) is based on fieldwork conducted in Lahore between 1992 and 1994.

It is argued that what I call a crisis of social representation in urban Pakistan is best analyzed as a debate whose rhetorical positions undercut the naturalistic representation of truth by a constant questioning of the moral authority conveyed by any particular perspective on the social world. Perspectival multiplicity, uncertainty, and moral ambiguity are fundamental to the rhetorical strategies through which Lahoris construct and act upon the world. My analysis distinguishes three broad, often clashing moral perspectives within urban Pakistani society today: nationalism, modernism, and Islam. Some frames of explanation, such as formal Islam, encompass a broader world than Pakistan yet are deployed in very local ways. Others, such as nationalism, are less easy to deploy in the Lahori setting but set moral limits to the development of local “meta-narratives.” Indeed, certain obvious possibilities for totalizing explanation (“caste” not least) are ruled out by a need for contrast with neighboring India.

The term “representational crisis” also applies to contemporary  anthropology , another world dominated by rhetorical contestation. Since the early 1970s our discipline has been preoccupied with epistemological debates: what is another culture, and how do you represent it? After a lengthy initial round of postcolonial self-flagellation (see Asad 1973; Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986), the terms of the debate have shifted somewhat. Now the emphasis is on arguments that displace the traditional self/other, center/periphery binarisms of neo-Cartesian epistemology in favor of a rather weightless globalism. All now seems to be capital flows, space-time compression, ethnic diasporas, ethnoscapes: in  anthropology  as in contemporary political and media discourse, the emphasis is on cultural, political, and economic processes that transcend the local (see especially Appadurai 1990, 1991; Ghosh 1989; Glick, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Harvey 1989; Kearney 1995). Judging from recent literature, urban  anthropology  has been strongly influenced by this globalizing trend (see Castells 1989; Hannerz 1992; Martin 1996; Susser 1996). In a review article, Setha M. Low remarks, “The shifting terrain of public culture is constantly redefining the local according to the global” (1996, 393). My own ethnography, however, suggests that Low’s formula should be reversed. The terms of Lahori self-representation often transcend the city. As a result of emigration, overseas labor remittances, international marriages, satellite television, and a dozen other factors, Lahore is densely articulated with the global cultural economy. But moral debate in urban Pakistan displays an ethnographic specificity that is not adequately captured by the giddy transnationalism of much currently fashionable anthropological theory.

 Anthropology ’s theoretical capital was originally based on the study of practically or heuristically isolated local communities whose links with broader social worlds were often effaced by the terms of ethnographic discourse (see Fabian 1983; Sperber 1985). Without endorsing a return to village ethnography, much less colonial ethnography, it seems to me that our discipline is best suited to generating global insight through the prism of a local world. I would also note a family resemblance between Lahori debates on the nature and value of their own modernity and what has by now become an institutionalized anthropological penchant for self-examination.^[2] Modern Lahoris often express an ambivalent nostalgia about their city’s colonial past. Modern anthropologists are often ambivalent about their theoretical patrimony, drawing on the rhetoric and insights of classic ethnography while deploring the colonial power relations that made most classic ethnographies possible. (Lahoris are comparably ambivalent about the rural Punjabi world in contrast to which urban Punjabi culture is defined: Lahori modernist discourse tends to classify the countryside as simultaneously “authentic” and “backward.”)

Low points out that urban ethnography has historically been marginal both to urban studies and to mainstream theoretical debates within social  anthropology . Even so, the metropolitan, middle-class ghetto of poststructuralist  anthropology  and literary studies is permeated by a curiously placeless imagery of cosmopolitan urbanism. In this textualized universe, privileged readers play in fields of free-floating signification while effacing the materiality of life in a world of socially, politically, and economically differentiated nation-states.^[3] Reflexivity, in short, is not confined to  anthropology . Nor is multiperspectival ambivalence unique to Lahore. By providing a nuanced ethnography of Lahori perspectives on modernity, I hope to contribute to our understanding of how modernity gets constructed in cities and in social  anthropology  today.

Lahori social rhetoric is permeated by hierarchical imagery from which it is sometimes possible to infer a communal ranking principle based on the opposition of pure and impure. Many, perhaps most, Lahoris, further, behave in a castelike way when it comes to marriage and choice of occupation. But the caste model as such is undercut by orthodox Islamic discourse, which argues that there should be no rank in Islam.^[4] It is also undercut by the discourse of the so-called two nation theory, which argues that caste is not a morally adequate perspective from which to understand Pakistan because it belongs to the Hindu world, in contrast to which Pakistan is identified as a nation-state. Islamic discourse is equally undercut by modernism, according to which Muslim preachers represent retrograde forces in a society progressing toward a vaguely defined ideal of social and economic “development” thought to be most closely approximated by the secular democracies of northern Europe and America. From both nationalist and Islamist points of view, however, this very modernism is attacked as un-Pakistani and un-Islamic because it is identified with non-Muslim foreigners who once colonized the region and continue, according to locally ubiquitous conspiracy theories of history, to exert enormous covert influence over everyday social and political life.

These perspectives do not exclude one another. People commonly shift perspectives, often within the same argument. And although Pakistanis tend to gloss this multiplicity of moral standpoints as “hypocrisy”(munafiqat), it is not precisely a question of saying one thing while doing another. Instead the various perspectives all carry some weight but are all challenged by alternate moral interpretations. Our argument engages with a world dominated by rhetorical contestation. Hence we proceed from the premise that the social facts with which we have to deal are not real objects but rather arguments about reality. Lahore, in this view, is not a set of objective social facts connected according to some more or less transparent logic but a set of mediated debates about social, political, and historical registers of truth.

Nostalgia and Modernity in Lahore

The collective memory of urban society tends to contrast today’s Lahore with an idealized, pre-Partition paradise lost. Consider the tautological Punjabi phrase “Lahore is Lahore” (Lahore Lahore ai). Normally this is an expression of pride in the city’s glorious heritage as the political, cultural, commercial, and gastronomic center of Punjab. Lahore is Lahore because it is unique, incomparable.^[5] Yet the local journalist Imtiaz Sipra modified the cheerful chauvinism of Lahore Lahore ai by appropriating it as the title for a series of English-language columns on Lahore’s cultural identity. These essays shed a nostalgically normative light on contemporary Lahore, often harping on the theme that the core values of local society had been destroyed by modernization and urban growth: “The real, original Lahorite…illustrated politeness, helpfulness, love for nature and beauty and importance given to friends and friendship.…It has all changed now, thanks to modern amenities and ‘urbanization’ [sic]” (Sipra 1993, 3). Given the moralistic tone of this argument, its explicitly materialist conclusion deserves comment. Effectively, Sipra argues that technological progress (“modern amenities”) and demographic change (“urbanization”) together determine the nature of moral relations in society. Because of technology and urbanization, Lahoris have apparently become rude, unhelpful, and indifferent to nature, beauty, friends, and friendship. This is a materialism devoid of class consciousness, however: the “real, original Lahorite” belongs to no particular class, although (s)he is anachronistically defined as a Muslim: “This more or less uniform character and identity of Lahorites allowed them to ‘integrate’ fully with migrants, conquering intruders and converts and followers of religions other than Islam” (Sipra 1994, 3).

Sipra’s narrative interprets the past selectively, ignoring the communal bloodbath of Partition and the fact that Lahore was a Hindu city for the first thousand years of its history, not to mention the mythical tradition of Lahore’s foundation by the sons of the Hindu hero Rama. But it does reflect material changes in the demography and political economy of the city, whose population has exploded from about 400,000 in 1931 to perhaps 5 million today, growing at an annual rate of more than 4 percent (PEPAC 1993, 6). This dramatic growth has stretched Lahore’s police, sanitation, transport, and communication systems to the cracking point (see Lahore Development Authority 1980; Qadeer 1983). The city has become demonstrably dirtier, more crowded, and less safe since Partition. Independence drew a line also between Lahore’s multicommunal past and its overwhelmingly Muslim present. The city’s Hindu and Sikh heritage is preserved only in the names of certain streets, in sacred architecture,^[6] and in hospitals and schools endowed by long-dead philanthropists whose families now live in India. According to the 1981 District Census Report of Lahore, 42.8 percent of Lahore’s population was fifteen years old or younger. As a result, the collective memory of pre-Partition Lahore is fading into romantic nostalgia for an imagined time when, as one local politician put it in a newspaper interview, “the pace of life was slower, evenings were lit by the soft light of lanterns and people had time for one another.”^[7] This sort of elegiac materialism is the complement of a progressive theory of history inspired by Western models of social and economic development.

In modern Pakistan the language of development carries with it a concept of time lived forward in moral as well as strictly chronological terms. This is a global discourse based ultimately on popular Victorian notions of social evolution, according to which the “developed” societies of the industrialized West represent cultural and economic advancement (“modernity”) relative to the “backward” societies of the developing world. The main local symbols of modernity—high technology, the English language, Western styles of clothing and architecture—continue to enjoy widespread prestige. The rhetoric of “advanced” versus “backward” modes of life is also very much in local use. Rich and poor Lahoris alike, however, are conscious of what economists like to call the “costs” of Pakistan’s highly uneven economic growth: pollution, crime, unemployment, and salaries that stubbornly refuse to keep pace with inflation.^[8] In an increasingly polarized political context shadowed by the breakup of the country in 1971 and marked by sharp ethnic and sectarian tension in many parts of the former West Pakistan, this ambivalent sense of having, perhaps, grasped the short end of the Faustian stick has all the more influence over the ways in which people structure their personal and familial relations with the past.

In interior decoration, music, and fashion, for example, there is a growing urban upper-class vogue for styles perceived as “ethnic” or “traditional”: handcarved Swati doors and arches, print reproductions of Mughal miniature painting, the Sufi devotional music (qawwali) of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan,^[9] embroidered mirror-work textiles from Sindh. A typical issue of the Lahore and London-based Pakistani fashion magazine Libas International includes articles titled “Mughal Treasures on Bond Street” and “Jewelry: Ethnic Richness.”^[10] And throughout the society great value is placed on belonging to an established family. While this is neither unique to Pakistan nor new in Lahore, the contemporary context of nostalgic reaction against “modernity” determines that more established families are currently perceived as living links to a time when society as a whole was better off.

The Urdu/Punjabi term for this sort of background is khandani, literally, the adjective form of family (khandan) but connoting the kind of family that has long held a position of social prominence. There are no precise criteria for being khandani. At most, khandani people say they have been in their social position “since the time of our [paternal] grandfather’s grandfather” (dada ka dada) or point to some notable ancestor. However, one of the more striking aspects of Pakistani English is its appropriation of quasi-Marxist class terminology to mark everyday social distinctions. Often shorn of their critical implications in Western political theory, terms such as “elite” and “feudal” denote, respectively, the upper classes in general and the landowning gentry in particular. The term “feudal” is similar to other Pakistani class terms in that it changes its moral valence according to the social context in which it is articulated. Members of the landowning notability describe themselves, with no apparent irony, as “feudals.” In Gulberg, a Lahore residential suburb where property values are among the highest in Pakistan, there is a tailoring shop whose signboard reads “Ossian Tailors, Stitched and Stitching, For Elites and Feudals.” Yet in other contexts Pakistani intellectuals often blame the country’s political and economic problems on “feudalism,” understood here as a social system in which land tenure and political power are, if not freely convertible, at least organically linked.^[11] Not all khandani families deploy rural landowning claims to social prestige. Nor is the term associated exclusively with upper-class families. Khandani lineage, in the diffuse sense of kinship claimed with some more or less distant ancestor of glorious repute, can be constructed in many different ways. Among working-class musicians in the Old City of Lahor, glorous ancestry is associated with the transmission of musical competence. Some of the more khandani musical families claim descent from musicians at the court of Akbar and other Moghul emperors. For urban notables such as my Old City patron, Mian Yusuf Salahuddin, the virtue of descent was political and patriotic prestige. His maternal grandfather was Allama Mohammed Iqbal, the poet-philosopher generally credited with articulating the idea of Pakistan; his paternal grandfather was Mian Amiruddin, a former mayor of Lahore. Leaving his Old City residence in Barud Khana Bazaar, Mian Yusuf would sometimes point to an empty chair in the doorway and remark, “From that chair my grandfather [Mian Amiruddin] ran the politics of Punjab.”

The local term for this sort of distinction is ‘izzat, often translated as “honor” but more accurately glossed as the respect of society. As such, the ‘izzat of a khandani family is construed in nostalgic terms, suggesting a glorious past rather than present-day political or economic clout. However, khandani status is always open to contestation. Lahoris are quick to point out that many of the leading families in society are commercial clans who have been upper class for at most three generations. Some have marriage connections with khandani rural families who in many cases rose to social prominence in the nineteenth century when they received land grants in exchange for their loyalty to the British Raj. While historically accurate, this is often mentioned in contexts of social rivalry. Thus great landowning clans are often attacked on nationalistic grounds by people wishing to challenge their claims to social eminence.

This was the thrust of a series of articles in the Lahore Friday Times titled “The Hidden Face of History.” Written between 1992 and 1996 by the local historian Ahmad Salim, most of these essays examine the historical relationship between Punjab’s leading political families and the British Raj, with particular reference to the honors and financial rewards granted to historical notables in exchange for supporting the British at moments of crisis such as the sepoy rebellion of 1857. Pakistani history textbooks invariably describe this conflict as a South Asian “War of Independence.” The fact of having ancestors who sided with the Raj in 1857 is thus politically loaded in the context of modern Pakistani nationalism. In a piece on the Tiwana family of Sargodha, for example, Salim notes that Malik Sahib Khan Tiwana fought on the British side in 1857 and was subsequently granted “the title of Khan Bahadur and a life jagir^[12] of Rs. 1,200 in addition to his previous life pension of Rs. 480 per year. On his return to the Punjab…he obtained a large grant of land.” Salim concludes by describing how Malik Sahib Khan Tiwana’s modern descendants had deserted their former ally Nawaz Sharif after his government was dismissed in April 1993:^[13] “The Tiwana brothers were staunch allies of Nawaz Sharif.…Then they joined [Sharif’s Islami Jamhuri Ijtehad (IJI) rival Manzoor] Wattoo and have been his staunch supporters since. From advisors to Sharif to manipulators for Wattoo, the transition has been remarkably smooth” (1996, 134). The unveiled message of this and most of Salim’s other articles is that Punjab’s more khandani political families are and always have been cynical opportunists with dubious patriotic credentials.

Even families of such unimpeachably patriotic antecedents as the Mians of Barood Khana can be described, by social rivals, as unworthy of their glorious ancestry. At a private Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan concert sponsored by the Mians at their residence in the exclusive Lahore suburb of Gulberg, one of the guests was heard to remark, cattily, “So these are the grandsons of Iqbal?” Another popular line of social attack against the Mians was to suggest that they were an immoral family because of their traditional ties to the Taxali Gate area of the Old City, which contains Hira Mandi (the Diamond Market), Lahore’s notorious red-light district. (In this context it is ironic that among the socially despised Kanjar, or dancing girl, community that dominates Hira Mandi, certain families describe themselves as khandani in order to make the point that they have been established in the dancing business for longer than their rivals.)

The Kanjar community as a whole is perceived, predictably, as being in a state of sad decline compared with the past, when dancing girls (tavaayif) were northern Indian high-culture virtuosos and the sons of sharif (noble)^[14] families flocked to learn music, poetry, and polite conversation at their feet.^[15] This romantic image is famously conveyed by the 1981 Hindi film Umrao Jaan, a sprawling nineteenth-century historical drama about a tragic love affair between a dancing girl and the son of an Uttar Pradeshi nawab. Invidious comparisons between the vulgarity of modern dancing girls and an imagined golden age of courtly nawabs and polished courtesans singing tasteful Urdu ghazals (lyric poems) are reinforced by films such as Umrao Jaan (Dear Umrao) and by many Pakistan Television (PTV) serials. The influence of Bombay films and MTV music videos, meanwhile, is often cited as contributing to Hira Mandi’s “decline.” Once again the historical accuracy of this contrast is irrelevant to its nostalgic force.

It is at this aesthetic level that we can most clearly contrast Lahori representations of modernity and authenticity. On the one hand, the modernist perspective casts history as a developmental process tending toward a vaguely defined ideal of moral, economic, and political perfection. On the other hand, the rhetoric of nostalgia devalues the present in relation to the past. From a nostalgic point of view, aesthetic products are dismissed as inauthentic insofar as they betray the influence of modernity. From a modernist point of view, the same products are dismissed as “backward” insofar as they can be identified with local tradition as opposed to international style. Authenticity and modernity contest the same aesthetic ground. At stake is the relative moral status of the future and the past.

Politics and Popular Culture

Pakistan Television is a partisan organ of the Pakistani state. Incoming prime ministers invariably appoint their own loyalists to senior positions within the PTV bureaucracy, and programming reflects the government’s point of view on domestic politics as well as international affairs. Shortly after the Benazir Bhutto–led Pakistan People’s party won the national election of October 1993, the state television network began screening a fourteen-part Urdu melodrama called Zard Dopehr (Yellow Afternoon). The main theme in the drama’s complex plot is the rise to political power of a balding, middle-class Lahori businessman named Malik Mehrban ‘Ali (played by Shujahat Hashmi), who was universally viewed as a thinly disguised alter ego of opposition leader and, at that time, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.^[16] The writer and director of the series, Shahid Nadeem, is a prominent Lahori playwright, screenwriter, and television producer. He developed Yellow Afternoon during spring 1993 but was unable to get permission to produce it until Nawaz Sharif’s bitter opponent Benazir Bhutto returned to power. Because the drama presents Malik Mehrban as a corrupt, brutal, “uneducated” Old City thug who bribes and bullies his way to political power while pretending to be a pious Muslim, PTV could not have screened Yellow Afternoon while Sharif was still prime minister and thus in a position to influence hiring and transfers within the PTV bureaucracy.^[17]Yellow Afternoon played on the common upper-class Pakistani perception that the industrialist Sharif family were vulgar, “uneducated” arrivistes.

In urban Pakistan today representations of literacy and education are often conflated with class. Thus the adjective for polite or refined Urdu, nasta‘liq, also refers to the court style of Persian script in which Urdu is usually written. The metaphorical equation between literacy and social refinement parallels the equation between rationality and class. Upper-class Lahoris in particular often argue that “uneducated” (in this context, poor) people are incapable of “rational” behavior. As one young professional put it, “The poor are like animals. They know getting up, eating, and working. Nothing else.” However, it seems that poor people are naturally good (albeit irrational), as long as they stay poor. Urban Pakistanis tend to blame all social problems, including poverty, on “lack of education.” Because “education” is also a metaphor of class distinction, poor people are blamed for their poverty (they are poor because they are “uneducated”) while upwardly mobile people are blamed for escaping poverty (they are vulgar and corrupt because they are “uneducated”).

In discussions of political and bureaucratic corruption, members of the self-described “old elite” frequently argue that corruption results from upward mobility on the part of the “uneducated.” This is based on the widely shared assumption that it is impossible to succeed in the Pakistani economy without either paying bribes (rishwat) or benefiting from high-level patronage (sarparasti). Among the old elite this identification of mobility and corruption tends to dominate political discussion.

Upper-class Lahoris from old-money backgrounds often refer to themselves collectively as “Lahore Society.” The term denotes a clique defined less by rules of exclusion than by exclusion itself, whose practice is justified by reference to a fuzzy set of values supposed to have been clearer at some time in the past. Members of Society often contend, for example, that Lahore no longer has a clear class hierarchy. This can make for frustrating ethnography. Asked to comment on Lahore’s class system, they tend to reply that there is none: “There are no classes anymore. Money is all that matters in this society.” This statement expresses a clear stance on the relative merits of inherited versus achieved status, in effect drawing on the same set of class distinctions whose continued relevance it affects to deny. In other words, money is not all that matters in Society. Hence the disdain that members of Society express for nouveau riche Lahore industrialists such as the Sharif clan, who have dominated Punjab politics since the death of President Zia ul-Haq in 1988 and are reputedly the richest family in Pakistan. During my fieldwork (1992–94), Nawaz Sharif served successively as prime minister and opposition leader in the National Assembly, and his brother Shahbaz was a dominant figure in the Punjab Provincial Assembly. As one Society hostess put it, however: “It will be a thousand years before they are accepted in Lahore Society.” One of her friends added, “But you must remember that we are a powerless class, hence bitter. We sit in our drawing rooms and complain about the government, but we can’t really do anything about it.”

This was the social context that gave Yellow Afternoon its satirical bite. The drama begins in a courtroom, where a poor village caretaker named ‘Ali Mohammed is being sentenced to death for the murder of a police constable. Crusading investigative reporter Sanya ‘Ali (Samiya Mumtaz) decides that ‘Ali Mohammed has been framed to protect some shadowy higher-up. Meanwhile, we see Malik Mehrban at a family council in his crumbling Old City mansion.^[18] He announces that since the Mehrban Group is now one of the country’s leading business families, he as family leader must enter politics to safeguard the family’s interests. An elderly relative objects: “Politics isn’t our job: it’s for landlords [vadairon] and feudals [jagirdaron]. We’re businesspeople: our job is to get the politicians in our grasp so they’ll look after our interests.” Mehrban retorts: “You don’t understand. We’ve reached a point in business where we can either go up or down. We can’t stay level. If we don’t get some political power we could end up going down. Completely down.”

This scene establishes Mehrban’s class position conclusively: he is materially rich but morally middle class, in Lahore Society terms an upwardly mobile shehri (with characteristically Lahori ambivalence, the Old City, or purana shehr, is viewed simultaneously as the heart of traditional urban culture and the epitome of lower-class vulgarity). Malik Mehrban and his flashy young wife inhabit a garishly decorated bungalow in affluent Gulberg. His sister Saira Begum (Madiha Gauhar),^[19] a middle-aged school headmistress, has elected to stay in the Old City and run a girls’ school. For reasons that remain opaque for the first several episodes, she is unmarried and harbors a deep hatred for her genial, politically ambitious brother. She has two dependents: a young girl in a wheelchair who spends much of her time talking to pigeons and a dumb madwoman named Zaytoun (played by the leading dramatic actress Samina Peerzada) who speaks to nobody but seems to be in the grip of a terrible fear. In a recurring theme, Saira Begum tells her wheelchair-bound young ward installments of a dark fable in which an evil king walls up a handsome young prince alive in his palace. We eventually learn that the story is autobiographical. Saira Begum hates her brother because she believes that, years before, Malik Mehrban had her fiancé killed and buried in the basement of the family havaili (mansion) where she lives to this day, despite its distressing personal associations. (Her brother had opposed the marriage, it seems, because he was unable to bear the idea of alienating any part of the family property in dowry.)

In subsequent episodes the beautiful young journalist Sanya ‘Ali uncovers evidence that appears to link Malik Mehrban to the framing of ‘Ali Mohammed and to the mysterious madness of Zaytoun. ‘Ali Mohammed, it turns out, had been Malik Mehrban’s gatekeeper at his country house. Zaytoun had been married to ‘Ali Mohammed until he committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Sanya and ‘Ali Mohammed’s defense lawyer (Salman Shahid) enlist the help of Tariq Hussain, the police officer who had investigated the case against ‘Ali Mohammed. Tariq helps them build a damning case against Malik Mehrban; in the process he and Sanya fall in love.

Mehrban, meanwhile, is scaling the political heights. He starts modestly, by hiring a political coach named Sadiqi, a Pygmalion figure in charge of smoothing his rough edges so that he can become a proper ruling-class politician. This means wearing Western clothes, improving his English, and learning various tricks such as a hierarchy of different handshakes with which to greet different classes of people (ordinary voters, political workers, and important political personalities), depending on how much respect, or ‘izzat, he wishes to convey.

The image makeover extends to Malik Mehrban’s entourage. He places two employees named Jaida and Shida in charge of campaign administration. “Jaida” (from Javaid) and “Shida” (from Rashid) are common working-class Punjabi nicknames. In Lahore shida is also slang for an “uneducated,” working-class city dweller; in urban contexts it corresponds to the equally condescending pindu (villager/hick). Jaida and Shida speak thick, Punjabi-accented Urdu and wear dhotti kurta (tunic and wraparound skirt), a style of local dress associated with peasants, petty shopkeepers, and other “uneducated” people. Sadiqi renames them Jerry and Sherry and dresses them in jeans, loud shirts, and sunglasses. When they break into Punjabi, he orders them to stop talking like shidas. In episode 3, Sadiqi explains that if Mehrban wants to be a successful politician, he too must differentiate himself from the mass of common people, in the first instance by wearing a Western suit:

sadiqi:

. . . The people should see that you’re different from them, stronger than them.

mehrban:

That I am, by the grace of God. [pugnaciously] Am I not?

sadiqi:

Malik Sahib, being and appearance are not the same. Look at Jerry and Sherry. Underneath they’re still Jaida and Shida, but now they look different. Now if you appear before the people in this getup [the suit], you’ll look bigger, stronger.

The subtext of this image transformation, of course, is that like his employee Sherry, Mehrban remains a vulgar shida no matter how “educated” (i.e., Westernized) he tries to appear.^[20] Mehrban’s career takes off when he is sponsored by a rich, drug-dealing film producer with close links to the Lahore chief of police.The chief is in turn taking direction from a mysterious cabal of (intelligence) “agencies” whose representatives appear mainly as disembodied telephone voices. After they rig Mehrban’s election to the city council, he sets his sights on a federal cabinet portfolio. He also drops his political coach Sadiqi, replacing him with his own son Mustapha, who has just returned from America with a college degree and speaks highly Anglicized Urdu, even calling his shehri father “Dad.” Mustapha brings in another U.S.-educated friend named Rehan to act as a public relations consultant. Muscle and money by themselves, they argue, will not propel Mehrban to national political leadership. They must manipulate the media by setting up a task force to research and plant stories about his enemies, particularly the journalist Sanya ‘Ali.

This media manipulation subplot is ironic in relation to the political agenda of the television drama in which it is embedded. For all its subtle and varied social commentary, Yellow Afternoon was most obviously a satirical attack on a recently defeated prime minister, sponsored by his successor.^[21] Lahori viewers were highly sensitive to this irony, pointing out that Shahid Nadeem, the director, was a Bhutto family loyalist with a long history of opposition to the late military dictator General Zia ul-Haq. Benazir Bhutto’s archrival Nawaz Sharif, meanwhile, started his political career in the early 1980s as a protégé of General Zia.

Leveraged by his powerful connections within Pakistan, Malik Mehrban’s slick new political strategy yields rapid dividends. He joins the federal cabinet as minister for trade and commerce, a post that offers huge scope for corruption. Soon Jerry and Sherry are installed in his outer office, charging fees for access to the great man, who is busily arranging industrial development permits and interest-free loans for all his cronies. Ultimately, however, the forces of virtue triumph. Sanya and her friends manage to prove not only that Mehrban framed ‘Ali Mohammed for the murder of the police officer but that years before he had raped his previous gatekeeper’s wife, Zaytoun. Her husband committed suicide, and she went mad, but she also bore Mehrban’s illegitimate daughter, who his sister, Saira Begum, adopted to avoid scandal. The only heinous crime in the drama of which he is not guilty, in fact, is the murder of Saira Begum’s fiancé. After she finally accuses her brother of having ordered this murder, he produces the fiancé, who is now married with children and working as a manager in Mehrban Industries. Mehrban had bribed him, it seems, to disappear from Saira Begum’s life. But the heroic, highly “educated” investigative team of journalist Sanya ‘Ali, police officer Tariq Hussain, and lawyer Nabil Khalid manage to prove that Mehrban is responsible for every other iniquity in the story. In the final episode Mehrban is exposed and ruined; in the end he flees the country for an undisclosed location in Latin America. Sanya and Tariq remain in Pakistan, morally triumphant and in love.

The character of Malik Mehrban encapsulates most of what Pakistanis tend to argue is wrong with their politicians. He is violent, corrupt, and “uneducated,” as well as hypocritical in that he pretends to religious piety, strewing his conversation with Qur’anic phrases while behaving in a brazenly immoral manner. Interestingly, his character seems to belong both to the urban middle classes and to the rural elite. His roots are in the Old City of Lahore, and although he describes himself repeatedly as a businessman who does not come from an old “feudal” political family and must therefore use his money to get ahead, he is also a rural landowner with all the trappings of “feudal” power: land, a big house, police connections, and gunmen who terrorize the local population on his behalf.

The rape that ultimately destroys Mehrban happens in a village outside Lahore. From an urban modernist point of view, rape is often projected onto the “feudal” countryside, where it stands as a metaphor of all that is bad and backward about traditional rural society.^[22] Malik Mehrban is thus not simply an alter ego of the urban industrialist politician Nawaz Sharif. He represents the corruption of the imagined “feudal” tradition as well as the “uneducated” pretensions of the urban middle class. And because Mehrban is “uneducated,” that is, morally subordinate, it is logical that the plot denies him agency by placing his political career under the control of shadowy figures said to rule Pakistan from behind the scenes.

Muhasira: Two Nations on TV

The normative oppositions that structure class relations in contemporary Lahore are reproduced at a higher level of social segmentation, that of the Pakistani nation-state. The defining principle of Pakistani nationalism is that South Asian Muslims and Hindus cannot peacefully share a single state. Since Partition this “two nation” theory has been focused through the lens of Indian (in Pakistani rhetoric, “Indian Occupied”) Kashmir, where separatist Muslim militants have been fighting a guerrilla war against the Indian government with moral and, perhaps, financial and military support from neighboring Pakistan since 1990. In Pakistan the Kashmir revolt is conceived in religious terms, as an Islamic struggle (jihad). The militants are invariably referred to as mujahidin (the agent form of jihad) in Urdu and “freedom fighters” in English, whereas the Indian soldiers are often characterized by epithets that deny them rationality and even humanity. This headline from the Urdu press is not atypical of Pakistani discourse on Kashmir: “Kashmiri mujahidin exploded a bomb in an Indian army camp. In the clashes eleven savage beasts [darandai, i.e., Indian soldiers] went to the valley of death.” As with the Lahori rhetoric of “education,” this rhetorical contrast between Muslim mujahidin and their subhuman, non-Muslim Indian opponents subordinates the latter to the former in the very terms of its discourse. The two nations are not merely opposed to one another: they are also ranked.

In spring 1994 I played the role of an intrepid foreign correspondent in a PTV docudrama about the Islamic nationalist resistance movement in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Called Muhasira (Siege), the story was based on the monthlong Indian army siege of the Hazrat Baal Mosque in Srinigar during autumn 1993. The mosque scenes were shot near Mirpur in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, referred to in Pakistan as “Free [azad] Kashmir.” Mirpur is full of people who once worked in Britain. Lloyd’s Bank has a branch there to handle the remittances that have brought prosperity to the area, many of whose inhabitants speak fluent English in the accents of Bradford and Manchester.

Hazrat Baal (The Holy Hair), so called because it houses a hair from the beard of the Prophet Mohammed, is the most sacred and politically the most important mosque in Kashmir. The Indian administration sealed off access to and from the mosque on October 15, claiming militants inside were planning to steal the sacred hair and then blame the theft on the Indian government. Forty to fifty militants and 170-odd civilians were trapped inside. The government argued that the siege was necessary in order to preserve civil order, given that in 1963 Kashmir was swept by riots after the hair mysteriously disappeared from the shrine for a week.

Despite its documentary patina, Siege took several liberties with the historical record. The besieged were not in fact denied food and medical attention.^[23] Nor, so far as we know, did an Indian “Black Cat” commando break into the shrine to steal the sacred relic, only to be so overcome by its sanctity that he placed his mask and gun on the reliquary and left quietly after saying a prayer and pulling at his ears in a token of repentance. And the standoff was resolved peacefully, not with a daring night rescue by a squad of heroic Islamic militants.

Siege was the direct result of a PTV policy to publicize Kashmir in a manner favorable to the official Pakistani point of view, which is of course that as the Kashmir valley is a Muslim majority area it should have gone to Pakistan at Partition. According to the minutes of a PTV General Manager’s Conference held in May 1994:

Efforts should be made to project Pakistan’s stand and support to Kashmiris effectively in various programming formats including plays, music, mushaira [poetry readings], interviews, short documentaries etc.…PTV being a Corporation within the structure of the government should look after the interest of the government and government orders be carried out…; the burning issue of Kashmir in the present situation should intelligently be handled and subtle approach adopted for effective projection [sic].

Finding this document, incidentally, was one of the minor epiphanies of my fieldwork. Toward the end of the filming we shot a press conference scene in PTV’s Lahore studio. The director noticed that none of the journalist characters had paper in front of them, so for the sake of verisimilitude he had one of his assistants distribute some. The minutes landed at my place.

I was an ethnographer playing the part of a Western journalist in a Pakistani propaganda effort filmed on disputed territory. This was disorienting, the more so in that the director and many of the cast members were Kashmiri, hence connected to the story line in a rather immediate sense. One Mirpuri extra recited anti-Indian Urdu verses of his own composition whenever he was off camera. He wore a yellow polo shirt with, as I thought, a hairbrush and the words “Brush India” embroidered over his left breast. Climbing into the crew van to leave Mirpur, I saw that the hairbrush logo was in fact a dagger over the words “Crush India.” The double image lingers, somehow, as a metaphor of ethnography in a world of nation-states.

We might compare the mirror effect by which the two nation theory constructs Pakistan in opposition to India to the mimesis through which the ethnographic present tense transforms social facts into sociology (see Fabian 1983; Sperber 1985). In both cases history collapses into a simplified, putatively timeless set of ideal social relations presented as “reality” or “truth.” According to the empiricist conventions of social  anthropology , ethnographers find a timeless logic “on the ground” rather than fit social facts into a logical framework supplied from outside. Yet, by definition, arguments include (or construct) certain facts while excluding others, like a realist painter who selects details from three-dimensional space in order to construct a mimetic illusion on two-dimensional canvas. Ethnographic realism constructs narrative patterns out of the noisy flux of life “on the ground” by a similar process of simplification and exclusion.^[24] In Pakistan, meanwhile, the descriptive apparatus of official nationalist discourse constitutes Pakistan and India as polar opposites. Because nonpolarizing social facts (linguistic overlap, religious syncretism) are left out of the argument, the radical distinction between Hindus and Muslims acquires a certain naturalism: the proposition “we are that which they are not” appears to be true because the structure of the argument excludes contradictory evidence.

Conclusion

Lahori constructions of modernity deploy multiple moral perspectives whose ethnographic particularity lies in a complex series of relationships among hierarchy, agency, and nostalgia. The rhetorically constructed foreground of Lahore Society evokes the novels of Henry James or Edith Wharton in its elaboration of rank and precedence, tension of inherited versus achieved status, and elegiac stance toward social change.^[25] Given all this, it was at first difficult to understand Society’s contention that hierarchy is a thing of the past. Yet class relations in the city are rather fluid, an argument in (and about) progress rather than a fixed set of sociological categories an empiricist could measure on some tangible “ground.” Expressions of the idea that society used, somehow, to make more sense are not confined to the drawing rooms of the upper classes.

Nor is class the only issue. Lahore is permeated by nostalgia for an imagined society preserved out of time. History textbooks evoke a precolonial golden age of Muslim rule on the subcontinent. In political discussions people commonly date Pakistan’s own “decline” almost from its foundation, arguing that the country’s volatile history of intermittent military dictatorship and secessionist violence would have been different had Mohammed ‘Ali Jinnah not died shortly after Partition. The sermons of Sunni and, to an extent, Shi‘a Muslim preachers in the city, attended mostly by middle- and working-class men, are also colored with nostalgia for an imagined past, in this case the idealized seventh-century Medinese community of the Prophet and his first four, “rightly guided” successors in the Caliphate.^[26] At the nationalist level media rhetoric subordinates Hindus to Muslims by describing Indian soldiers in Kashmir as “irrational brutes.” In Lahore the tendency to attribute social problems such as sectarian violence to “lack of education” while dismissing subordinates and rivals as “uneducated” are equally examples of a rhetoric that justifies a given relationship of subordination (state/nation, rich/poor, Society/nouveau riche) by linking subordination itself to the absence of historical agency. Given that moral behavior as such is predicated on an agent’s ability to discriminate between good and bad actions, it is paradoxical that this imputed absence is used to subordinate people on moral grounds. The paradox is managed in that the distinctions are made in a context of moral rhetoric rather than moral philosophy. The rhetoric is used to rationalize, rather than guide, positions of social and political exclusion.

In modernist, Islamist, and nationalist contexts, the rhetoric of urban Pakistani social distinction tends to construct outworlds according to a rational/irrational, “educated”/“uneducated” binarism rooted equally in the European Enlightenment and in the Qur’anic doctrine that the advent of Islam constituted moral and intellectual progress in relation to the pre-Islamic “age of ignorance” (jahiliya).^[27] As in Descartes, Thomas Jefferson, and the Qur’an, these Pakistani category distinctions rest on the originally Greek assumption that man is a rational animal. Just as nineteenth-century British administrators justified their rule on the grounds that they had come to civilize a “backward” subcontinent,^[28] modern urban Pakistanis justify the moral subordination of Indians, religious minorities, rural people, poor people, and nouveau riche industrialists by figuring them as irrational, hence less than fully human beings.

Yet there is no single point within contemporary urban society from which to represent reality as a coherent whole. My analysis stresses a multiplicity of moral perspectives because Lahoris constantly express this multiplicity in their everyday social and political rhetoric. Uncertainty and moral ambiguity are fundamental to the rhetorical strategies through which Lahoris construct and act upon the world. Ambiguity is only partially resolved by the sleight of mind through which different views do not clash because they are expressed in different social contexts.^[29] It remains the case that urban Pakistanis in all walks of life, on television, in drawing rooms, and on the street, are constantly expressing the belief that society no longer adds up. Sleight of mind, in other words, can only partially resolve the moral contradictions that result from multiple perspectives on modernity in Lahore and, perhaps, complex urban societies elsewhere in the world today.

Notes

Fieldwork for the dissertation on which this chapter is based was carried out in Pakistan between 1992 and 1994. My work was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship, a Social Science Research Council Dissertation Fellowship, and a Senior Scholarship from Wadham College, Oxford.