AN interesting point was raised at a literature festival recently. The panellists observed that despite the fact that Karachi is as culturally diverse a city as, say, Lahore, it does not really have that reputation generally. To most people, Karachi stands for crime and political violence, or perhaps business and industry, not for the many and varied communities that call the city home.

Many reasons can be found for this, and the one these authors chose to highlight was that Karachi has not really claimed for itself a place in contemporary fiction — for the purposes of this discussion — produced in English. That is not to say that the city is completely unrepresented in this dimension. But as compared to the body of work that has been produced, by comparison, using Lahore’s realities as the framework, the city that has the most number of languages spoken in it (to use just one indication of diversity and multiculturalism) is curiously underrepresented.

The argument does have merit. Popular imagination is fuelled by stories, and who better to tell them than people who have the ability to turn the mundane into something special that takes on a life of its own in readers’ or viewers’ minds. Because the stories don’t have to be in the form of a book, of course.

One panellist pointed out that the mystique about Mumbai, or people’s familiarity in the imagination with the city and the consequent connection to it, is because of all the stories Bollywood has spun about it over the decades and the vast spectrum of material these accounts cover.

The trouble is, Pakistan in general does not place much value on stories or on culture. It could be argued, of course, that it is unreasonable to expect this when people are taken up with matters that pose immediate threats to their lives and livelihoods. Getting enough food to keep body and soul together, or trying to ensure one’s safety and rights are not compromised, are such formidable challenges in the landscape that Pakistan, particularly Karachi, constitutes, that people simply do not have the luxury of recounting stories.

This may be true, but there’s also the converse argument. As liberal Pakistan has stopped owning and telling its stories, more conservative and obscurantist elements have taken advantage, perhaps even gained dominance.

One any sidewalk book bazaar now, it is more common to come across more books disseminating narrow points of view than the converse. As is well known, extremist elements have for years been producing pamphlets and other literature filled with their version of what the country’s realities should be, and the ideology that Pakistanis should aspire to.

Why they are able to freely disseminate such material without any significant interference posed by the state and provincial authorities is a mystery, unless the historical inefficiency — words such as ineptitude and helplessness also spring to mind in this context — of these quarters is factored in.

Regardless of the reason, the unpalatable fact remains that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that in the societal imagination, the versions and stories of those who wish regression for Pakistan are gaining ground. The literature produced by the extreme right is one end of this worrying spectrum. But there was also much happening at the other end of the same spectrum.

At the Children’s Literature Festival held in Karachi recently, for every one praiseworthy book that children or younger readers might be interested in, whether it was Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Tik-Tik the Master of Time or Oxford University Press’s lovely series of Urdu classics, there were three that could be considered controversial (in the context of what lessons they would leave in readers’ minds and what ideologies they propagated).

One such pernickety little book is called Jeevay Jeevay Pakistan, whose cover says that it is a collection of milli naghmay, or national songs, for children from the age of four to five upwards.

I expected to find the usual songs that are familiar from PTV’s independence day transmissions from days past. Instead, the first four pieces are poems, unfamiliar to me, about religion and the readers’ absolute faith in it. The next five poems, one of which I knew, are about Pakistan and Islam being synonymous. You can imagine the rest. The one children’s poem I was searching for, Iqbal’s Lab pe aati hai dua, I did not find at this forum.

There are plenty of stories to tell, and there are plenty that could do with better dissemination. The effort is being made, certainly. But it needs to be recognised that at stake is the struggle to reclaim the country’s soul from those who would take it backwards.

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com