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LAST week, I wrote a column about changing notions of arranged marriages in Pakistan.
The essay attempted to trace the evolution of marriage from a bond geared primarily to promote wider communal solidarity and family ties; to a relationship chosen by and resolved between individuals.
The selection of marriage as the focus of the discussion was intended to highlight the idea that even while traditional structures persist; the changes visited by sweeping globalisation have irrevocably changed the Pakistani understanding of identity.
At the core of this transformation is a redefinition of identity in private relationships; from the collective and communal to the obstinately individual. Tracing the story of this change reveals just how fragile post-colonial assumptions about resisting modernity have proven to be against the results revealed by lived experiences in Pakistan.
Central to this belief was the idea that some aspects of progress could be selected and deployed after being judged as benign, with others rejected as being repugnant to Pakistani culture and mores. As per this recipe, innovation could be permitted, say, in areas such as economics but not in social relations, science but not in art and so forth.
Experiments in the application of this theory of selective modernisation and piecemeal globalisation were supplied in abundance by the Gulf states, whose juxtaposition of skyscrapers and abayas was aimed at reflecting just such a controlled relationship with modernity.
The experiments with change in Dubai and Sharjah were indeed alluring in their aesthetics, pristine against the grimy contrast of Pakistani need. Their gift to Pakistan was not the provision of a safe recipe for cooking up modernity at home, but something quite different. The very project of the Gulf experiment, the directed construction of an acceptably filtered participation in globalisation, relied crucially on the labour of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis.
Its consequence was the extrication of hordes of Pakistanis from collective economic structures based on village and family to individual units of labour, who found their own jobs, earned their own paycheques and shared their pain and ponderings with fellow labouring strangers rather than father and brothers.
As workers were shipped out to foreign lands, clan and tribe, village and caste, continued to have significance but only symbolically so, unable to deliver the benefits they once yielded.
The slow transformation of Pakistan from a communal society cannot of course be pegged solely to the impact of labour migration. The actual assumptions of the Gulf experiment, the premise that American capitalism and Italian cars could be safely absorbed into a communal lifestyle while women living alone and rock concerts could not; unleashed their own impact on Pakistan.
This belief, sometimes that innovation would be manageable in certain areas, and avoided in others was harder to implement without the largesse of oil revenue.
Its consequence in Pakistan, where scattered families could not be brought together by collectively owned companies and oil rigs was to knock out crucial nuts and bolts in a communal system leaving society maimed and confused.
The foreign-owned factory that brought jobs to Gujranwala, or the computer that allowed a professor in Dadu to send an email for the first time did not just change economics and communication; it changed everything. Clicks opened other worlds and made the return to blissful ignorance impossible. The clan, the tribe and the community still existed, but its limbs hacked off, it was on life support, unable to make believers out of doubting young Pakistanis.
The new Pakistani, weighed down by the demands of finding a job, setting up a life, most often in a large city with many strangers and many dangers, is a solitary Pakistani. But just as it was mistaken to suggest that change could be managed and manufactured to suit, it is similarly deceptive to insist that the newly individualised Pakistani is but a lost late-arriving twin of its western counterpart.
One illustration of this is that the evolution of an individualised Pakistani identity has produced not an aversion to religion as it did in the West, but rather a revival of religious identity as a means of exercising individual identity.
Religious expression in a newly individualised Pakistan, whether it is the avowal of hijab by only one of five sisters, or the visibly ascetic lifestyle chosen by an ex-pop singer, are exercises in displaying just this new individualism — an act of rebellion that sets one person apart as a single self-defined being; an act unimaginable in a solidly communal society where standing out was sinful.
As historians have noted, the search for drastic, sudden changes in the annals of the past that spit out explanations for the present is largely a misguided one. The dislocation of identity and its gradual redefinition in individual terms provides but one narrow and partial explanation for the tumultuous times being endured by millions who make their home in Pakistan.
The obsession with religious purity, the genocidal ire directed towards all that seem to threaten it, the killing of thousands based on ethnic divisions cannot just be explained by the destruction of a communal society or experiments with self-constructed religious identity.
However, the complexity of these problems need not discredit the supposition that those caught at the cusp of creating new structures, will tragically, bloodthirstily clash over the form they should take.
The new Pakistani, created by war and want, and largely misunderstood by the world is inevitably, and because of no personal lack of courage, a scared Pakistani. Echoes of a past, where need was the burden of many and not one, where the future if meagre was still certain, haunt existence.
Youth is tempered by the descending burden of becoming something, someone, with many choices that bring with them the possibility of many mistakes. Some flee into the pursuit of recreating the past; reviving the ghost of traditions in the hope for deliverance. Others plunge headlong into new lives, seeing in the ruins the possibility of something different, which although solitary could be better.
The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.
