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Kamran Asdar Ali teaches anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.

Film-maker Sabiha Sumar, in a scene from her documentary about women in Pakistan (For a Place Under the Heavens, 2003) contrasts the present public arena where urban women are increasingly donning veils with an era when Pakistan was newly formed. In a voice-over during an autobiographical moment in the film (while showing a home movie of her family), Sumar asserts that her mother told her as a child that we are now in Pakistan and we do not need to be veiled; we are all Muslims and the same.

Historians have critically analysed this notion of “sameness” by pointing out the genesis of Muslim nationalism as a partial resolution of the contradiction between the particularism of Muslim identity linked to locality and place, and the larger construction of Muslim moral community connected to a territorially bounded nation-state. Scholars like David Gilmartin have argued that although the Pakistan movement sought to transcend the divisions among Muslims through the symbol of the emergent state and the formation of the moral sovereign, the diversity of people’s lives and particularistic cultural experiences remained in perpetual tension to this order. To be very clear, during the struggle for Pakistan’s creation and after its independence, Pakistan’s political leadership emphasised Muslim nationalism that incorporated one language (Urdu), one religion (Islam), one people (Pakistani). Culturally, the Mohajirs (refugees from India), along with the majority Punjabi ethnic group, have been the most closely linked with this facet of Muslim nationalism, at the cost of alienating those Muslim ethnic populations, like Bengali, Pashtun, Sindhi, and Balochi, that lived within its own borders.

This political and cultural history is intrinsically linked with Karachi’s own history of the past few decades where several waves of immigration have reconfigured the city. The first massive population increase in Karachi was of course in the aftermath of the Partition of British India, when Muslim refugees from various regions of India settled in the city. This pattern continued until the late 1950s, when migration from rural and other urban areas of the country led to population increase. This emergent ethnic and cultural heterogeneity changed the social and political character of Karachi. In the immediate post-Partition years, Karachi was still a city where a large section of the population being refugees from India did not have adequate housing (although see Qurutulain Hyder’s novella, Housing Society, to appreciate how the upper class was allotted lands and accumulated wealth). Many among the working poor were living on sidewalks in the centre of the city and there was a constant fear by the authorities of mass disturbances and urban disorder. Resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees hence became a key preoccupation for Karachi’s urban planners during this period.

In 1958, when Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s military regime came into power, it claimed developmental and modernist ideals and opted for a rational urban planning model to reduce the demographic pressure on the centre of city and also to create enclaves for the working poor where they would find employment nearby. The regime, more specifically, brought in the famous Greek architect, C.A. Doxiadis, who presented a report in December of 1958, naming his first project Operation Korangi. Perhaps duly impressed by the generals in charge of Pakistan (Lt. General Azam Khan was the minister of rehabilitation), the report uses the language of invading “hostile territory” and creating a “beachhead,” even at the expense of suffering “casualties” to achieve national goals. The war analogy is carried further to argue for a major effort in rational urban planning that would help in creating a “reasonable urban way of life in Pakistan”. Operation Korangi and the resettlement of “displaced persons” (as refugees from India were called in official language) was considered the first attempt at resettling 30,000 to 40,000 families, leading to a larger campaign to address the changing demographic patterns in Pakistani cities due to the pressure of migration from the rural areas.

Along with this rationalist approach toward urban management, it was also clear to the Ayub regime that despite the banner of Muslim nationalism the pivotal cultural question was that of national integration. Where during the first decades Pakistan’s creation issues related to infrastructure development, settlement of refugee populations and national security concerned the new state, there simultaneously, the debates on questions related to the trauma of Partition, of Urdu as the national language and the major question of Islam’s role in political life was as much a part of the state’s internal discussions. In order to“tame” and “harness” particularistic identities (to produce “sameness” of sorts) of various ethnic and linguistic groups, a cultural leadership — artists, poets, writers, journalists, film producers — was recruited (the formation of the National Press Trust and the Pakistan Writer’s Guild were attempts to bring in the intelligentsia to support the cultural policies of the regime. We should also not forget Qudrattullah Shahab and Altaf Gauhar).

One medium that provided the avenue for this cultural work during the Ayub era was the development of the Pakistani cinema in the 1960s. An urban oriented and modern narrative started being portrayed, especially in the new Karachi-based cinema (the emergent nexus of Waheed Murad, Sohail Rana, Pervez Malik and Masroor Anwar among others). I am not going to provide a complete history of cinema during this period (that remains a cherished goal), but concentrate on a particular film, Behen Bhai (1968), to show how Muslim nationalism becomes linked to modern urban life in this era of developmentalist politics. Just to remind ourselves, Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s rule (1958-69) was a time of unprecedented growth in the wealth and holdings of Pakistan’s major industrial houses (the novel, The Murder of Aziz Khan by Zulfikar Ghose is a brilliant portrayal of this era). However, the heavy reliance on foreign capital for industrialisation faced a major setback when, after the 1965 war, these funds were reduced. Ayub Khan’s much heralded “decade of development” finally came to an abrupt end when, in 1968-69 students, intellectuals, the urban poor and the working classes participated in a massive civil disobedience movement. Spearheaded by the PPP in the West and the Awami League in the Eastern wing, this movement was not only against the political bankruptcy of the Ayub regime but also a protest against deteriorating economic conditions and the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth.

The movie Behen Bhai, directed by Hasan Tariq, although not financed by the state, could be understood as an attempt to address the question of national cohesion at this particular juncture of the nation’s history. (It was one of the most commercially successful films of the year.) It starts with Partition and depicts a caravan of refugees moving across the tense borders. Among them is a family comprised of a woman and her five children (Talat Siddiqui, who most probably has been widowed during the Partition violence). She is singing a song asking for shelter from the Almighty (“Ai bay kusson kay wali, day day hamain sahara,” sung by Mala). Soon the caravan is engulfed in a storm and the family is separated. The children, four boys and a girl, are eventually rescued by different sections of people in the new country. One is given shelter by a physician, one is taken in by a courtesan, a brother and sister remain together to be helped by a rural family and the final one ends up in a den of petty criminals. The mother loses her mind and is shown to be constantly looking for her children.

Years pass and the mother somehow ends up in the physician’s ward and is taken home by him, where the doctor (Ilyas Kashmiri), a widower, lives with his grown-up daughter (Husna) and also with one of the sons who is now a lawyer (Aslam Pervez). She becomes the physician’s kin sister. We then meet all the other children. One is a pick-pocket (Nadeem), one a pimp (Ejaz) and then there are the brother and sister in the village (Kamal and Deeba). Through plot twists and turns the rural brother ends up in the physician’s house as well, where the daughter (Husna) starts to like him. The rural daughter (Deeba) comes to the city looking for her brother and ends up in the courtesan’s house where one of her brothers is employed. On realising where she is and her subsequent fate she sings the song that her mother used to sing. Hearing the song, the brother (Ejaz) recognises her as his long lost sister. Ashamed of his profession, as he was procuring clients for his own sister, he kills the courtesan and a client and allows his sister to escape. He himself is then given shelter by the pick-pocket (Nadeem), his own brother. Eventually the song unites the entire family and the lawyer son (Pervez) wins the case for his brother who had committed the murder. The story ends on this happy note.

There can be multiple readings of the film. Of course the modern widower physician who has an adult daughter and a home that becomes a shelter for those who were lost due the turmoil of history (he also acquires a sister in the process), reminds us of a father figure of the nation (dare I say the widower Jinnah with his daughter and sister). Then there is the dispersal of five children (perhaps representing the five provinces) with distinct ethnic mannerism. The characters played by Kamal and Deeba (in real life from UP and Bihar respectively) are depicted as having a rural Sindh background, Nadeem’s character lives with gypsies (the actress Rani is his love interest) in a multi-ethnic poor neighbourhood of Karachi, Ejaz is shown as a Pashtun through his wardrobe and self-presentation, while Pervez is the modern English-speaking lawyer. They have all become different, but the audience knows that they all share a history, are children of the same mother and belong to the same family (nation); the difference is incidental and they are connected through their past (the myth of Muslim nationalism and the idea of being one prior to ethnic diversity). Within this context, Kashmiri’s character remains unmarked, the most rational and unaccented, perhaps with a tilt of Punjabiness in him (here one could compare him to Ayub himself, trying to take on the mantle of the father of the nation).

All characters converge in the large city (Karachi), the most cosmopolitan space in post-Partition Pakistan. Not unlike the modern city as it emerges in the West in the late 19th century (Vienna, Paris, Berlin), which is characterised as a space of opportunity and emancipation, in Pakistan too by the 1960s this modern space, the city, is considered the milieu of freedom, individuality, civic rights and democracy (albeit of the controlled BD system type). It is contrasted with the rural, which remains the space of tradition, feudal oppression and superstition. The urban, in a teleological cultural ethos of progress, becomes the dream of becoming modern in the Pakistan of the 1960s with its promise of ‘emancipated’ lifestyles and bourgeois pleasures (the cars, the night life, the marriage by choice). Of course, women, the poor, children and minorities in such cities are not always granted full and free access to the public sphere. They survive and flourish in the interstices of the city and negotiate its contradictions in their own particular way (as the lumpen characters of Nadeem, Ejaz and Rani do in the film).

Hence, along with this desire for the good life, there is an uncertainty prevalent in the city where recently arrived migrants experience changing social relations and the breakdown of support structures (the urban milieu that Doxiadis sought to organise). This new form of painful individuality leads to anxieties about new identities and encounters with strangers (those who are not ‘same’). This aspect is highlighted in the film through a song sung by the character played by Nadeem (again in real life a migrant from India), “Kaash koi mujh ko samjhata, meri samajh main kuch nahi aata” (Ahmad Rushdie). The song delves into the contradictions of city life as witnessed by the underclass (Nadeem the pick-pocket) and its lyrics and the images speak about the social and economic divide in the new country.

Let me digress here to make a theoretical point on the moving image and the urban form. The early 20th century city constituted an historical and cultural change that manifested in a rapidity of movement of people, ideas and capital. Events at times moved too fast for human experience to keep pace with. Hence scholars like Walter Benjamin argue that the cinematic image comes out of the urban experience. It encompasses such experience into a new aesthetic form where instability becomes the structuring principle. The cinematic image is clearly an unstable one, as opposed to the stable image of the photograph. It is fleeting and unreliable and the condition is produced to make us accept multiple stimuli and absorb and respond to it simultaneously. The modern city’s multiple stimuli of a fast-moving world can hence only be captured through this new kind of image; the cinematic image.

But while the cinematic image can represent the city in its movement, cinema can also give us assurance through the backdrop of permanency (urban landmarks as stable points of reference). For example, in a given film the same locations may be used for the audience to feel familiar and comfortable. In Behen Bhai, the song sung by Nadeem takes us to quintessential Karachi landmarks of the 1960s — the newly built Intercontinental Hotel (with the old Palace hotel in the backdrop), the National Bank building on Mcleod Road, the Kothari Parade in Clifton, and Saddar (the centre of shopping and leisure activities in those days). So, despite the critique of class disparities, the song seduces us toward the accomplishments and pleasures of urban life and creates desires of good living, epitomised by the acquiring of wealth, among the viewers. Embedded in these images are also invitations to touristic voyeurism and a selling of the city. Karachi, like other famous cities, is presented to a national audience, which is still largely rural in the 1960s, through a particular enunciation of its landmarks; spaces where we would want to get our photos taken, Kothari Parade, Intercontinental Hotel, and so on (see Ackbar Abbas “Cinema, the City, and the Cinematic”). Similar to those old newsreels that showed the state’s achievements (as children we would watch them before the main show), these images too, in somewhat more subtle terms, brought people into the fold of the progressive nation-state with their portrayal of the modern built environment and the pleasures of city life.

The rapidity of the moving image is further tamed through the task of producing a certain kind of fantasy by playing on the familiarity of the on screen personages (actors) who play roles that they have been seen in before. All the actors in Behen Bhai seem to be already known to the audience through their incarnations in earlier roles as mother (Talat Siddiqui), daughter (Deeba), dutiful son (Kamal), caring partner (Nadeem), benevolent father (Ilyas Kashmiri) and villain (Aslam Pervez). Hence, the aesthetic of the city, the visuals and the images along with the lyrics, the story-line, the narrative structure all create a space of fantasy which accommodate the joys and frustrations (falling in love, the contradictions of class divide) of urban life, but also desires, aspirations and possibilities for the common viewer.

Moving on, the urban trope is further accentuated in the film by positing the spatial rupture between the village and the city; the traditional and the modern. Kamal’s character is depicted as representing the rural and the folk, which in a rendition of our national history is thought to be worthy of praise. But the movie insists that we go beyond village life and become more modern. In a song sequence we see Kamal and Husna move across almost the same landmarks depicted in the earlier song (this time adding HawkesBay and JheelPark near Tariq Road, with the newly constructed bungalows of PECHS in the background). Along with the reiteration of the city’s preferred geography and the acclimatising of the audience to the urban and its environs, the song, “Hello Hello Mr Abdul Ghani” (Ahmed Rushdie and Irene Parveen) portrays the tension between rural life and the urban sophisticate. The song shows Kamal donning a western suit for the first time in which he feels uncomfortable, while Husna seeks to bring him into the world of cosmopolitan lifestyles. In the duet there is a lyrical exchange and Kamal’s character complains about how we have to call our relatives uncle and aunty as older relationships are dissolving (“mamoo ko uncle bolun, chachi ko aunty, rishtay purane sare ho gaye chanti”). To this, Husna’s character replies that new times require western food and western songs and now even the village dweller is fluent in English (“phar phar English bolai ab gaon ka rehne wala”). Irrespective of the impossibility for an educated modern young woman like Husna falling for a country bumpkin like Kamal (this truly is a world of fantasy), the main point here is how the developmentalist ethos of the times is played out in such scenes. There is a hint of seeking to construct the modern citizen through harnessing the absence of self-control and the excess of passion (the exuberant and uncouth Kamal). There is no doubt a celebration of the rural in the film (through the depiction of Kamal as a sympathetic character), yet there is also a denigration of village life as it has to be surmounted to become a modern citizen (Kamal’s simple ways are not enough to succeed in this new world that is being constructed). As the political theorist Udhay Mehta argues, for this to happen individuals need to be embedded in social institutions, especially the institution of education. It is through education (pedagogy), Mehta stresses, that natural untutored imagination (the rural, the irrational, Kamal in the film) is made to submit to conventional authority and social norms. The control of desires, self-denial, responsibility and reason are taught and learned, as Husna teaches Kamal English and manners to make him the desired citizen of the new nation (see Ranjani Mazumdar’s Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City).

At the end of the film the first song (“Ai be kusson kay wali”) invoking the divine along with the figure of Ilyas Kashmiri, the modern physician, bring all the children back into the fold of his house; the nation. This happens in Karachi, the epitome of opportunities and good living where the mother who has lost her children, and perhaps her honour, can be reconciled with her lost children. Of course the city has an underworld — the prostitute, the pimp, the rural bumpkin, and the pick-pocket. However, the film shows how a combination of religious faith and modern values intertwined in this new era of progress (Ayub’s tenure) can perhaps heal wounds and bring the fractured nation together (class and ethnic differences are overcome).

This is the fantasy of progress that modernity promises us. But what about the future? Will this resolution work for Rani (the gypsy) falling in love with Nadeem (the pick-pocket)? How will the class-segregated city treat this lower class couple in the coming years? Love may overcome class difference as in the case of characters played by Husna and Kamal, but he will have to give up his rural ways and become an English speaking ‘babu’ to be accepted into the world Husna lives in. Then there is the added issue of Deeba, the sister. If she is going to be the ‘sharif’ girl that she is portrayed to be then what are her chances of settling down if the knowledge about her having spent a few nights at the kotha comes out. The city, or the nation, may offer many opportunities to its citizens, but clearly these are not always equally distributed.

The film in its image and narrative structure represents the possibilities of a tranquil Karachi of the 1960s, where an emergent post-Partition mostly ‘mohajir’ middle class considers the pleasure of co-existence. Such a remembering of Karachi (the potentially “unveiled” city, according to Sumar’s filmic narration discussed above), of overcoming difference (a difference which in the film is created due to Partition, as everyone indeed belonged to the same family and it was only a matter of eventual recognition and reconciliation; we are basically all the same), perhaps remains a class specific memory mostly shared by an elite that had investment in the politics of Muslim nationalism linked to a modernist state during the early years of Pakistan’s existence. Behen Bhai, I would argue, remains one of the aesthetic repositories of such memories from the period.

Despite the film’s message of creating a unified nation, the subsequent history of Pakistan has been one of contestation and conflict around questions of difference (ethnic, sectarian, gendered, religious or class based; Karachi itself witnessed a major labour strife and language based (Urdu) riots in 1972). It is clear that more than 60 years after its independence and 40 years after the creation of Bangladesh, the Pakistani state has been unable to resolve the question of national integration of its many cultures and diverse linguistic groups.

And what about Doxiadis’ Operation Korangi? In a recent text on Karachi (InstantCity by Steve Inskeep), the author goes on an urban “archeological” trip to find the model houses that Doxiadis’ project built. He perhaps finds one in the densely populated poor neighbourhood part of Korangi. Layers of other structures had obscured the history of the house and its environs … there was also no memory of the project in the area. Much like the politics of cultural integration, rational urban planning perhaps also had unanticipated endings!

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