1. These include the Pakistani nation (qaum), defined as a Muslim community in contrast to Hindu-dominated India, and the Punjabi-speaking qaum, as a linguistic community opposed to the Sindhi, Baluch, and Pushtu speakers of Pakistan’s other three provinces. Lahore itself is a highly self-conscious urban community, defined in contrast to the village culture of rural Punjab and as the cultural and political heart of Pakistan (see Aijazuddin 1991, 9–14; Weiss 1992, 1–6). Within Lahore there is a basic spatial and ideological contrast between the “traditional,” working-class Old City and the “modern” city that has grown up around it since the beginning of the colonial era. In turn, this contrast subsumes a wide, overlapping range of sociologically and spatially local identities, including the state bureaucracy, urban representatives of the landowning political aristocracy, sects within Islam as well as religious minorities, the emerging business elite, and several occupational groups. In the situational foregrounding of particular identities, Lahoris use distinct styles of behavior and language to distinguish themselves from others and to get what they want, be it a marriage, a promotion, an election victory, or an industrial permit. [BACK]

2. I borrow the term “family resemblance” from Wittgenstein’s (1989, 31–32) discussion of games. The contrast between Lahori and anthropological reflexivity is inspired by Michael Herzfeld’s ([1987] 1992) Cretan ethnography. Stressing that  anthropology  is as much a historically generated system of meanings as the societies it studies, Herzfeld’s argument opens space for a critical reappraisal of the complex, mutually determining relationships between anthropological theory and ethnographic practice. [BACK]

3. See Ahmad 1992a for an illuminating Marxist critique of poststructuralist writing on class and nationalism. [BACK]

5. As another Punjabi saying puts it: “He who hasn’t seen Lahore is yet unborn” (Jinai Lahore na’i vekhiya oo jaamiya i na’i). Or, most explicitly: “There is no comparison with Lahore” (Na’i raisan shehr Lahore diyan). [BACK]

6. That is, what remains of it in the wake of riots following the December 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque in India, when Hindu, Sikh, and Jain temples were attacked throughout Lahore and the rest of Pakistan. [BACK]

7. One urban population who seemed to view their lives in at least marginally optimistic terms were migrants from elsewhere in Punjab and Pakistan. In a 1981 study of one lower-income squatter community living in a central Lahore slum area (kachi abadi), for example, 74.67 percent felt that their lives had improved as a result of moving to Lahore (Qureishi 1981, 25). [BACK]

8. According to UNDP’s 1995 Human Development Report, in 1990, 20 percent of Pakistan’s urban population lived in “poverty,” defined as “the income or expenditure level below which a minimum, nutritionally adequate diet plus essential non-food requirements are not affordable.” Between 1990 and 1993 the labor force was only 28 percent of the national population, fourth lowest among all developing countries. Between 1981 and 1992, meanwhile, the poorest 40 percent of the Pakistani population had an income share of 21.3 percent. [BACK]

9. Reputedly the highest-paid performer in Pakistan during my fieldwork, Nusrat was much in demand at high-society weddings and musical evenings in Lahore. (He died in 1997.) [BACK]

10. Libas International 8, no. 2 (1995). [BACK]

11. Beyond relations of production and domination, “feudal” also denotes an attitude, a particular way of being in the world. In Lahore Society the phrase “X is a real feudal” often prefaces anecdotes of X beating his wife and/or servants, selling land to finance his lifestyle, or arranging for the public humiliation of a rival’s household women. Not unlike the apocryphal “droit du seigneur” in Norman feudalism, the popular Pakistani image of the “feudal” humiliating men with whom he is in conflict by violating the modesty of their family women is an informal metaphor of domination, whose empirical instances have no legal basis and are not restricted to the landowning notability. Cases such as the following appear frequently in the Pakistani press, and have been documented for all levels of society: “In a morbid show of power, six armed men stripped naked two women and forced them to dance naked in the streets at Jhugian Khudayar, Shahdara [Lahore]. The accused, led by a local tough, Khadim Hussain, indulged in this sadistic activity to avenge [sic] victims’ brother-in-law, Amjad, when he stopped Khadim from eveteasing [harassing women] in the area” (The News, August 24, 1993, p. 3). [BACK]

12. Jagir: “fief”—in other words, Tiwana was granted the rental and/or crop income from a village or group of villages. [BACK]

13. Sharif was sacked by then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan under the controversial Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of 1973, a legacy of the Zia dictatorship that gives the president broad powers to dissolve the National Assembly in cases where he has subjectively determined that the present government can no longer function in accordance with the Constitution. Since Zia’s death in 1988, the Eighth Amendment has been invoked in the presidential dismissal of three consecutive elected governments, most recently that of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in November 1996. [BACK]

14. In traditional North Indian Muslim class nomenclature, the gentry were collectively referred to as ashraf, the plural form of sharif (see Cole 1988, 69–85). In modern Lahore the term “sharif” is more commonly associated with generic moral virtue than with genteel social status. [BACK]

15. The venerable Lahori diplomat Sayyid Amjad Ali once told me that in his youth it was almost de rigueur for young Punjabi men of good family to form liaisons with Hira Mandi singers. He recounted a long story about a “feudal” friend of his named Javed, who was “attached to a very famous singer back in the thirties.” Asked whether he had himself been attached to a famous singer, and if so which one, Sayyid Amjad paused, stared reflectively into space, and finally replied: “Let me tell you another story about my friend Javed.” [BACK]

16. Nawaz Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League, regained control of the National Assembly after the general elections of January 1997. “Yellow Afternoon” refers to Sharif’s famous, or notorious, Yellow Cab Scheme, a hugely expensive plan to stimulate private entrepreneurship by subsidizing the import and sale of taxis. Many non-taxi drivers simply took advantage of the government’s generous Yellow Cab finance package to acquire cheap cars for their private use. [BACK]

17. In May 1994 Nadeem directed me in the role of a foreign correspondent in his production of Muhasira (see below). As a result of our professional relationship I was able to obtain copies of the shooting scripts for Yellow Afternoon, as well as background information about the politics behind the production. Parenthetically, Nadeem was forced out of his job as a PTV producer after Nawaz Sharif returned to power in 1997. [BACK]

18. For the exterior shots of Malik Mehrban’s traditional, courtyarded mansion (havaili), Shahid Nadeem used my patron Mian Yusuf Salahuddin’s havaili in Barud Khana Bazaar, the Old City neighborhood (mohalla) where I lived during fieldwork. Several other PTV programs with traditional urban accents were filmed in and around Mian Yusuf’s havaili during this period. [BACK]

19. Shahid Nadeem’s wife and a leading theater director in her own right. During the Zia regime she and Nadeem started the Ajoka Theater Group, a progressive company dedicated to social and political agitation through theater. Strict press censorship prevailed throughout Zia’s dictatorship; as a result small guerrilla theater groups such as Ajoka became important channels for the expression of political dissent during the 1980s. [BACK]

20. In a later episode, Sadiqi teaches Mehrban the proper way to address a political rally. He tells him to give the crowd a “V” for victory (fateh ka nishaan, “the sign of victory”) which is the Mehrban campaign’s political symbol. At his first big rally, however, Mehrban inverts his “V,” turning it into the familiar British gesture of vulgar dismissal. Both “V” signs are of course British imports. While the vulgar “V” is not widely understood in Pakistan, it serves to make the point that Mehrban is hopelessly unsophisticated from an upper-class Anglophone point of view. [BACK]

21. There was no comparable anti–Benazir Bhutto melodrama during the Sharif administration, although a press rumor did circulate, toward the end of 1992, about PTV’s alleged plan to produce a “documentary” on Benazir’s alleged extramarital sex life. It never appeared, but in the conspiratorial world of Pakistani politics there was no reason to think this was anything other than a consequence of Nawaz Sharif’s ouster. [BACK]

22. See note 11. [BACK]

23. The Indian army wanted to starve the militants into submission but were overruled by the Kashmiri civil administration. [BACK]

24. Considered as an interpretation of social reality, the two nation theory falls into the same category as this thesis and any other critical reading, be it historical, ethnographic, or literary. In this sense, Paul de Man’s (1983, 109–11) contention that every literary insight implies a degree of blindness in other places applies both to Pakistani nationalism and to the general practice of ethnography. [BACK]

25. This sort of analogy was not lost on Lahoris. The Hollywood adaptation of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, starring Winona Ryder and Jeremy Irons, enjoyed a vogue among the Anglophone upper classes when it came out on videocassette in Lahore. Several acquaintances from Lahore Society noted a resemblance between their own, rather rarified corner of the city and the late-nineteenth-century New York “Society” evoked in Wharton’s novel. [BACK]

26. Shi‘a Lahoris (perhaps 15 percent of the urban population) have a different, but in its own way equally nostalgic, understanding of early Islamic history. It centers around the battle of Karbala (a.d. 680), when the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson Hussein was killed, along with relatives and associates, by soldiers of the Umayyad dynasty, which triumphed over the Prophet’s family (the Ahl-e-beit, or People of the House) in the succession struggles that followed the assassination of the fourth Caliph, ‘Ali, who was also the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. This “Karbala paradigm,” to use Michael Fischer’s phrase, marks the point, for the world Shi‘a community, at which history began to go wrong (Fischer 1980, 7–11). [BACK]

27. Given the anticolonial rhetoric of Pakistani nationalism, it is ironic that the Enlightenment half of this intellectual genealogy reached South Asia via the educational apparatus of the British colonial state. See Viswanathan 1989 for a full discussion of the relationship between British rule in India and the British colonial education system. [BACK]

28. See Pandey 1990, 23–65, and Metcalf 1994 for good discussions of British colonial ideology in nineteenth-century India. [BACK]

29. I borrow this phrase from Nancy Tapper’s finely patterned discussion of marriage strategies among Durrani Pushtun tribesmen in northern Afghanistan during the 1970s. Tapper argues that ambiguity in Durrani marriage discourse is related to a more general “sleight of mind” in the local discourse of honor, which like many other Middle Eastern and Mediterranean “honor and shame” systems, employs precisely the same terms to assert equality and inequality. Only social context allows the two contrasting meanings to be distinguished, facilitating the use of honor as an “ideology of control” (Tapper 1981, 392). [BACK]