When a political analyst metes out his opinions with a real kick and an author’s writings refuse branding, never the twain shall meet. Such was the feeling I had when I sat down in the session titled ‘Literature and Culture: A Discussion Between Khaled Ahmed and Intizar Hussain’.

Intizar Sahib’s advanced age belies a very strong mind which holds its own with a wealth of experience in his enviable literary career. He is a true symbol of the fast-fading generation where the might of qissas and knowledge gathered through a lifetime lived with people and history are all the credentials one needs to command respect. Ahmed, of course, is one of the best known Pakistani journalists with an equally rich body of work in his own field.

This particular conversation began with a claim by Ahmed that the state is discontent with the state of culture in Pakistan. The word he used for culture was saqafat. Intizar Sahib, on the other hand, used the word tehzeeb in his answer — which of course has a much wider meaning, much like ‘civilisation’. While saqafat is quite specific in meaning and is a much politicised term, tehzeeb brings with it echoes of time gone by — it opens a door into a history larger than saqafat or adab. The delicious tension between these terms was one of the highlights of the discussion.

Intizar Sahib ventured that adab or literature has no relation to the state as it is judged by its own standards and creativity cannot be judged in political terms. Ahmed built up his initial claim as he introduced the perils of cultural invasion and how the state believes its job is to keep such invasions at bay. Intizar Sahib leapt back with a wonderful (or conversely ominous) thought — that in the absence of creativity the fear of cultural invasion breeds. The idea was that perhaps there is no such thing as a cultural invasion, that the term better suited is cultural enrichment. The discussion also brought up various examples of Muslims writing for centuries in what could be then construed as alien languages, without feeling threatened in the least. Intizar Sahib cited post-Partition as the time when such fears set in, driven partially by the anti-Hindu party lines of the pro-divide political groups and the rhetoric of the Pakistani nation-state.

The idea of cultural exchange in literature and tehzeeb was a major point of the discussion and Intizar Sahib pointed out that the cross-semination of cultures was historically a fact, as well as a necessity.

The need for the “other” to exist not just at the margins but very much at the centre is a kind of an imperative for a culture or a civilisation to thrive. Counterintuitive as it might be, such have been the high points of the Muslim civilisation, from the first conversions till the mid-20th century, a vast period replete with all sorts of new adventures in writing.

The discussion closed with a comment on Zia’s regime when ‘jihad’ became a national duty. Differences were shunned and homogeneity under a puritanical Islamic banner became the state’s official stance. Ahmed commented that the Bedouin era was possibly the worst for the Muslims as the insulation from other cultures and people that it engendered caused immense repugnance towards anything (or anyone) different. Unfortunately, it can be ventured that Pakistan is currently in the same rut of insulation, or at the very least, in an artificially imposed and internally morally policed state of insulation, which makes this self-afflicted cultural exile even more dangerous.

THE MYSTERY CALLED MICRO NARRATIVES

The Khayaal Festival was a wonderful attempt to promote South Asian culture in its entirety and reminded audiences that the arts, especially in Pakistan, are still a force to be reckoned with.

However, the discussions lacked the focus and planning that has been absolutely spot-on in previous literary and arts festivals. The session called ‘Micro Narratives,’ moderated by Ali Mehdi Hashmi who was in conversation with Musharraf Ali Farooqi, was one such example. Farooqi is a renowned writer and translator and also a treasure chest of anecdotes about Urdu literature and children’s literature in Urdu, in particular. And it helps that his conversations are always candid, always politically incorrect and always with seriously funny laugh-out-loud moments.

The session’s intriguing title and the curse of a degree in English literature immediately led me to a mental wiggle in half-forgotten post-modernism classes and the downfall of the great narrative. Halfway into the discussion, however, I gathered that micro narrative was meant quite literally, as in, short story. Ironically, though, the two speakers also mentioned gossip, hikaayat, twitter and newspaper columns as examples of micro narratives — which are all quite fitting in a post-modern context.

But I digress. While Farooqi’s anecdotes about his childhood escapades with chipkalis and dragons were interesting as always, the session lacked structure and the answer to the question — what about micro narratives? It remained an undefined word hanging torpidly over the discussion — thrown in now and then in unsuccessful attempts to regain focus but otherwise simply redundant. Even though the speakers tried to remedy this imminent muddle by mentioning at the beginning that they were going to discuss “fables, folktales and dastans,” eventually what was discussed were a few examples followed by entertainment for the audience in otherwise unrelated stories. That is all well and good, but it’s a drawing room discussion. Given that the audience (however few — about 13 members in total) had most likely come to hear about the given topic, the discussion was dishearteningly weak in content.

While the discussion started out quite well with Hashmi bringing up gossip as a form of micro narrative and Farooqi adding hikaayat to it, some questions that remained unanswered for me were how they affect South Asian literature and how Farooqi has used micro narratives either in research for his work or to enrich his writing in some way. But the discussion instead meandered from very amusing historical incidents regarding Hakim Niccolao and the cannibal qazi of Lahore (this is worth a look in Farooqi’s column in Dawn) to Tot Batot. Not exactly what I expected from this session.

At the risk of sounding contradictory, I did enjoy the session for reasons completely different to why I attended it. Every time I hear Farooqi in such discussions, I always experience a throwback to golden years when Ferozsons was the go-to place for a birthday present (it hadn’t burnt down), when “secret stash” meant the adventures of Amir Hamza and Amr Ayyar and when Chacha Abdul Baaqi was cooler than Chacha Chakkan. Let’s hope that questions on micro narratives are answered in the next much awaited Khayaal Festival.