Reading between the lines

A generation of English language readers in Pakistan has grown up on Nadeem Farooq Paracha’s musings on current affairs and popular culture. As a popular newspaper columnist, Paracha has always worn his cultural critic stripes well. In recent years we have seen his droll social commentary on South Asia making it to India, too. And so it is with great pleasure that one greets a collection of essays bearing the indomitable Paracha wit, which has not dulled over the years.

In the book Points of Entry: Encounters at the Origin Sites of Pakistan , Paracha introduces himself as a “Pakistani nationalist, rather, who tries to clarify that no matter how ragged or ‘roguish’ Pakistan sometimes seems, it is one of the oldest democracies in the Muslim world whose people are inherently pluralistic, multicultural and enterprising”. He attempts to sketch an outline of a ‘‘mysterious Muslim nuclear power that is not Arab, yet Islamic; militaristic, yet democratic; ‘Indianish’, but not Indian; and extreme in parts and liberal in others”.

What Points of Entry does very well is that it opens a window to the highly contested spaces where Pakistanis continue to celebrate and be themselves in a country that grows extremely regimented. Cultural studies specialists elsewhere have observed that no cultural spaces, forums or narratives can be deemed “Pakistani” unless they recognise Mohammad Bin Qasim as the “first Pakistani” and that “we are all good Muslims here”.

One should commend Paracha for assembling chapters from his personal lived history that enable us to understand and appreciate the rich tapestry that survives outside the problematic spiel that exists in Pakistani textbooks. I have always stood by the thought that even if events leave “no material traces” (as a part of history books or written texts), haven’t they been a part of our oral history? Paracha has very ably catalogued Pakistan’s people (who exist on the margins of the ideal Pakistani citizen — very like the adarsh balak trope bandied about in India) and their everyday adventures with class, politics and location, ensuring that these interactions are now a permanent part of public imagination. The book’s timeline section gives one a quick (non-partisan) chronology of events.

I have always enjoyed a project which insists on a narrative about what people “do”, and “how” by not completely acceding to the power structures within Pakistan: the actors Paracha introduces have managed to negotiate their own space and agency in the country.

I do have a grouse with this project — it lacks in women’s voices. Women, if they do pop up (other than the ubiquitous nod to Malala), are usually the mother who leads him by the hand to the border, and the wife, who is a witness to his cringe-worthy retort to a nosy lunch companion.

To Paracha’s credit, he has pinpointed how in Pakistan’s changeover from a society that was less schizophrenic (when it came to definitions and expressions of art and leisure) to one that is a garbled understanding of the Ideology of Pakistan (read Wahabi Islam, Arab, censuring), social patterns have been disturbed. But no ethnic community has been as disenfranchised in this process as Pakistan’s Christians. In interviews with Paracha, they disclose the ambiguity they fear about their identities, and their grief in losing their place as historical and cultural agents in the cities they once called home and which celebrated them.

Points of Entry: Encounters at the Origin-Sites of PakistanNadeem Farooq ParachaWestland/TranquebarFiction₹499

The chapters ‘Escaping Mao’ and ‘A Band’s End’, in particular, revolve around the struggle of the Pakistani Christian, Anglo-Indian and Pakistanis of Chinese origin as they deal with the ambiguity of being at once insiders (Pakistani to the outside world) and outsiders (non-Muslims in Pakistan). There is also the dominant grief upon reading of the way we once were, the stifling of voices such as Yaqub’s, the Sufi on the ferry in the chapter ‘The Indus Raga’, and Zaki, the troubled genius in ‘It Came From The West’.

Though Paracha is forever optimistic, it is quite clear that a community that is comfortable with conflating the Pakistani identity with a particular kind of religious nationalism alone, is quite capable of gradually alienating the ‘other Pakistanis’ living amongst them.

Paracha does not say as much, but one does fear that these efforts have been successful in manipulating the discursive arena in Pakistan so effectively that those on the periphery would gradually have no language with which to express resistance.

Aneela Z Babar is the author of We Are All Revolutionaries Here: Militarism, Political Islam and Gender in Pakistan

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