KARACHI: The one thing that bothers architect and urban planner Arif Hasan is when people go on about how good, law-abiding and peaceful Pakistan used to be.

“The Pakistan I remember was not like this,” he said while speaking at the Irtiqa Institute of Social Sciences on Saturday evening. He added that people remembered that time when rules were followed because there was a cruel or dictatorial power behind it.

Mr Hasan was invited by the institute to talk about social change and its impact on Pakistani society.

He started the session by talking about how around 20 years ago research had indicated that there would be a social revolution in Pakistan where women would play a significant role.

He tried to explain social change in the country by sharing a personal story from 1968 when he was taking some French journalist and friends from Sukkur to Larkana. He said that during their journey, they met a man who was travelling in a bullock cart that “looked like it was right out of Mohenjo Daro”. He said the Frenchman wanted to take a photograph but the man driving the cart jumped out, apologised and said that he would never come in front of his car again.

Today, he said, this would not happen. According to Mr Hasan, this was because of social change. He said that from a primarily agricultural and artisanal system which was self-sufficient, people had moved on.

Impacts of social change discussed

To explain his point further, Mr Hasan went on to explain the feudal system and how the British had set it up as a part of their power sharing formula where the landlords’ decision could not be challenged by the farmer.

This system, he said, did not let the kissan/farmer remain independent but “like a slave dependent on the landowner”.

Mr Hasan then went on to talk about the Ayub era and green revolution technologies. He said the new system brought in capitalism which led to breaking away from the traditional caste system and later the panchayat.

He said that breaking away from these systems gave families freedom. He added that in a joint family system, there used to be one breadwinner and one person who used to run the house — when a nuclear family started making more money, they didn’t stay with the joint family. This, in the long run, he explained, gave more freedom and power to women.

He also talked about early migration to the city and how the caste based system became more class based.

Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2016