Raza Rumi  wonders why we remain in search of a Pakistani identity

Half-truths are what we love to indulge in. One of the countless crimes committed by President Asif Ali Zardari is that he wears a Sindhi cap instead of a Jinnah cap. That by preferring a Sindhi topi and thundering at the occasion of late Benazir Bhutto’s death anniversary, he undermined his Pakistani identity, is truly mystifying. After all, what is a Pakistani identity and why is the Jinnah cap being elevated to the level of an article of national faith?

If anything, Mr Jinnah’s patronage of Muslim identity mark was an afterthought. His usual attire was a well-tailored pucca-sahib-like suit. It was only in the nineteen forties and that too close to India’s independence that Mr Jinnah started donning the Muslim nobility’s attire.

So what is this fuss all about? Constructing Pakistan’s ideology based on theological interpretation of a universal religion like Islam has been a carefully executed project of the Pakistani establishment and its shadows in the non-state domains. Such cliques have grown bigger, mushroomed and are now essential to our lived reality. Therefore lambasting of Zardari on not sporting a Jinnah cap finds public resonance and broad acceptability within the populous Punjab province where the Urdu press flourishes and finds readers and writers aplenty. (more…)

Iftikhar Chaudri’s excellent note on the great saint:
Hazrat Baha-ud-din Zakariya(RA) was a Sufi of Suhrawardiyya order (tariqa). His full name was Al-Sheikh Al-Kabir Sheikh-ul-Islam Baha-ud-Din Abu Muhammad Zakaria Al-Qureshi Al-Asadi Al Hashmi. Sheikh Baha-ud-Din Zakariya known as Bahawal Haq was born at Kot Kehror, a town of Layyah District near Multan, Punjab, Pakistan, around 1170.

His grand father Hazrat Shah Kamaluddin Ali Shah Qureshi al Hashmi arrived Multan from Makkah en route to Khwarizm where he stayed for a short while.In Tariqat he was the disciple of Renowned Sufi Master Shaikh Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi who awarded him Khilafat only after 17 days of stay at his Khanqaah in Baghdaad. (more…)

Raza Rumi relives the enchantment of the dastans (published in The Friday Times)

Musharraf Ali Farooqi and the Urdu Project have revived a tradition that was fading in the age of instant communication, sms lingo and a dying reading culture. When I started reading the book, I could not help remember the day when my Uncle, Zaheer Ahmad Bhutta, a man of letters and book-lover handed over a set of Tilism-e-Hoshruba to me in my early childhood. I distinctly remember the summer when I devoured all the abridged versions, feeling thirsty for more. So I read them again. As a young man I dared to read the originals and could not help being pleased with myself. Tilism and its magical kingdom remains a part of me, and of many others of my generation who grew up on its diet of bravery, magic, lust and a peculiar aesthetic.

Tilism is a wonderful product of our composite Indo-Muslim culture that took centuries to evolve. This is why it defies the clergy’s diktat and religious bigotry, and its characters are a mix of all that the Indian context offered to outsiders such as Arabs and Central Asians. It is a larger than life metaphor for our past that has been lost now. Perhaps forever.

Hoshruba, Book One: The Land and the Tilism begins by telling us how Amir Hamza and his armies have chased the giant Laqa to the dominions of King Suleiman Amber-Hair on Mount Agate. While out hunting nearby, Hamza’s son, Prince Badiuz Zaman, follows a unique fawn and enters the land of Hoshruba. (more…)

By Irfan Ahmed

CHANDIGARH, India, Nov 18 (IPS) – Imagine writers, scholars and folk performers from eight South Asian countries coming together to share their common heritage and culture while promoting peace and harmony at the same time.

That is precisely what 200 members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) did early this month, prompted by a collective aspiration to pursue their common objectives.

The move—which took place in this city—was deemed highly significant in a situation where the political leaderships of these states had been unsuccessful in making any major breakthroughs towards peace. (more…)

Before his death in July 2009, KK Aziz had accomplished one mission that he had set for himself, i.e. to write about the Lahore Coffee House, the glorious nursery of ideas. Luckily, despite his failing health, Aziz finished a draft that was meant to be a shining part of his autobiographical kaleidoscope. “The Coffee House of Lahore: A Memoir, 1942-57” was published in 2008 and Aziz, in the opening chapters, tells us about the genesis of his passion to document this memorable phase of our contemporary history.

Whenever an intellectual, cultural and literary history of Lahore (or the Punjab and Pakistan) is written, the diverse circles which met and discoursed in the Coffee House will have to be described in detail and the ever-widening waves of their influence recorded. As nothing has been written so far on the subject and I don’t see anything in the offing, I give below a list of the important persons who I can recall.

Quite diligently, Aziz sets forth to list two hundred and six names that would include a wide array of thinkers, scholars, artists, writers and even some CSPs who obviously changed their life course despite the influence of their Coffee House days. For those who want to know about Lahore and its not-so-old diversity, KK Aziz’s memoir is a must-read. It is (more…)

I have loved these pieces by several authors who have written about their favourite walks as a collaboration between Orion and the online magazine for international literature, Words without Borders. The writers are  Tomas Espedal, Manik Datar, Homero Aridjis, Sa?t Fa?k Abasiyanik, and Yuri Rytkheu (Published in the September/October 2009 issue of Orion magazine)

EVERY WALK—whether urban or rural, real or imagined—features the movement of one or more persons on foot through a particular place and some manner of dialogue that unfolds either between characters or in the narrator’s own head. Beyond that, anything can happen. From an editorial perspective, the walk is a universal narrative device for exploring a diverse sampling of cultures and places, ideas and environments. Which is why Orion teamed up with Words without Borders to jointly commission and collaterally publish a collection of short pieces, each written in a language other than English and translated, about a walk taken, remembered, or invented. Five of these pieces appear here, in the pages of Orion. To read the balance of the selections, readers are directed to the September issue of Words without Borders, which can be found at wordswithoutborders.org/internationalwalks. (more…)

Found this interesting post on Shunya

The road to Dholavira goes through a dazzling white landscape of salty mudflats. It is close to noon in early April and the mercury is already past 100F. The desert monotones are interrupted only by the striking attire worn by the women of the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral tribes that still inhabit this land: Ahir, Rabari, Jat, Meghwal, and others. When I ask the driver of my hired car to stop for a photo, they receive me with curious stares, hoots, and giggles.

This is the Rann of Kutch, an area about the size of Kuwait, almost entirely within Gujarat and along the border with Pakistan. Once an extension of the Arabian Sea, the Rann (“salt marsh”) has been closed off by centuries of silting. During the monsoons, parts of the Rann fill up with seasonal brackish water, enough for many locals to even harvest shrimp in it. Some abandon their boats on the drying mudflats, presenting a surreal scene for the dry season visitor. Heat mirages abound. Settlement is limited to a few “island” plateaus, one of which, Khadir, hosts the remains of the ancient city of Dholavira, discovered in 1967 and excavated only since 1989.

Entering Khadir, we pass a village and find the only tourist bungalow in town. It hasn’t seen a visitor in three days; I check in and head over to the ruins. I’ve planned this for months; even the hottest hour of the day cannot temper my excitement for the ruins of this 5,000 year-old metropolis of the Indus Valley Civilization. While hundreds of sites have been identified in Gujarat alone, this is among the five biggest known to us in the entire subcontinent, alongside Harappa, Mohanjo-daro, and Ganeriwala in Pakistan, and Rakhigarhi in India. Read more here

Lahore is celebrating Mela Chiraghan – the death anniversary of the elusive saint Shah Hussain who is also known as Madhu Lal Shah for his life long association with a Hindu disciple called Madhu Lal. Each year in spring the festival of lights is attended by thousands of people.

Lighting of lamps is a metaphor for killing the inner darkness that we live with. By invoking spiritual light through love and self-knowledge, we can overcome ourselves and attain the mystical state of union with the beloved.

Madhu Lal’s syncretic shrine represents the long-gone era of spirituality rising above religious identities and rituals. Here is a kaafi poem with translation on this blog. A few lines :

They alone know what is love and longing,
Who have it in their lives.
Like digging a well in dry land,
With no cart to carry away the sand. (more…)

Read this impassioned appeal in the press – it also alerted me to the situation that haunts this ancient relic.

The city is built beside an old Buddhist metropolis of 4th century. There are remnants of the Stupa in ancient city known as Kahoo Jo Daro.

The Stupa on Moen Jo Daro , Kahoo Jo Daro and some other un-excavated Stupas can be classified as the lower Indus basin sites. They are different in art & material. Mud & terracotta is widely used instead of stone. (more…)

Perhaps the greatest of the experiences at Data Darbar is to find oneself connected to a stream of humanity, shoulder to shoulder, with a shared sense of spirituality that cuts across ethnicity, sect, ritual and even religion at times. Despite the mayhem, the serenity of the place is soothing

Raza Rumi
Last week, accompanying a visitor from the Mecca of Sufis, Delhi, I reconnected with the Data Darbar or the royal pavilion of the great saint of Lahore, Ali bin Usman Al Hajveri. This shrine is the oldest and perhaps the most vibrant cultural marker of the past one millennium in Lahore. The title of Ganj Bakhsh was bestowed by the saint of the saints Khwaja Moin ud din Chishti of Ajmere, whose ascendancy in the Chishtia Sufi order is recognised by all and sundry. Pilgrimage to Ajmere by itself is a matter of spiritual attainment for the majority of Muslims in the subcontinent. It is not difficult to imagine then what the stature of Lahore’s Data Darbar is in this esoteric yet real and lived Islam in South Asia. While Khwaja Moin ud din Chishti honoured the Lahori saint with the title “bestower of treasure,” ordinary folk on Lahore’s streets were more direct by naming the saint as Data, the one who facilitates the fulfilment of aspirations.

Living nearly 11 centuries ago, Syed Ali bin Usman Al Hajveri was not a Lahori but a resident of Lahore’s cultural step-cousin, Ghazni, until he arrived in India and wandered in northern India before settling in Lahore for the last 34 years of his life. This was the time when mystics from Central Asia, in their constant urge to discover new vistas of spiritual exploration, started to travel and settle in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. It remains a mystery as to why Data Ganj Bakhsh would have chosen Lahore as the final stop in his life long journey. Perhaps the secular interpretation could be that Lahore was an inevitable stop over for all the Central Asian and Turkic caravans and armies and provided the right kind of environment for a foreign mystic to amalgamate into. A little before Ganj Bakhsh’s arrival, Lahore had been resurrected from the earlier ravages of time by the Ghaznavid ruler Mahmood and his son Masood. (more…)

I was quoted in this NYT article on Lahore

Still, Raza Rumi, a writer and blogger who takes great pride in his city, insisted that “Islamic extremism has had very little appeal here.” The cultural life of Lahore goes on, as it has for centuries.

He said that a recent stage play, “Hotel Moenjodaro,” whose theme was against religious fundamentalism, drew a packed audience. “It was very encouraging,” Mr. Rumi said.

Nonetheless, he said, the Hall Road incident and the juice store blasts were alarming. “If the traders, the merchant class, which forms the bulk of the middle class of Lahore, becomes Talibanized, then the whole complexion of the city will change,” he said. “That’s a fear amongst the secular intelligentsia and elite of Lahore.”

Full story here

My piece for Himal Magazine’s October issue

There was a Lahore that I grew up in, and then there is the Lahore that I live in now. Recovering from an exile status for two decades, I find myself today turning into something of a clichéd grump, hanging desperately on to the past. Yet I resist that. Writing about Lahore is a sensation that lies beyond the folklore – Jine Lahore nai wakhaya o janmia nai (The one who has not seen Lahore has never lived). It has to do with an inexplicable bonding and oneness with the past, and yet a contradictory and not-so-glorious interface with the present.

Lahore is now the second largest city in Pakistan, with a population that has crossed the 10 million mark. It is turning into a monstropolis. Had it not been for Lahore’s intimacy with Pakistan’s power base – the Punjab-dominated national establishment – this would be just another massive, unmanageable city, regurgitating all the urban clichés of the Global South. But Lahore retains a definite soul; it is comfortable with modernity and globalisation, and continues to provide inspiration for visitors and residents alike.

Over the last millennium, Lahore has been the traditional capital of Punjab in its various permutations. A cultural centre of North India extending from Peshawar to New Delhi, it has historically been open to visitors, invaders and Sufi saints alike. Several accounts tell how Lahore emerged as a town between the 6th and 16th centuries BC. According to commonly accepted myth, Lahore’s ancient provenance, Lohawarana, was founded by the two sons of Lord Ram some 4000 years ago. One of these sons, Loh (or Luv), gave his name to this timeless city. A deserted temple in Lahore Fort is ostensibly a tribute to Loh, located near the Alamgiri gate, next to the fort’s old jails. Under the regime of Zia ul-Haq, Loh’s divine space was closed and used as a dungeon in which to punish political activists. (more…)

Salman Rashid muses on the ancient site of Rannikot in Sindh and prefers that it is”enigmatic, inscrutable, inviting”

One thing is certain about Rannikot: it is ancient. The most tangible proof of its great age is the remains of the bridge at Sann Gate. A bridge is necessary on a flowing river, but this part of Sindh is arid, its rivers flowing only during the largely unpredictable rains. This has been the case for most of its recorded history, but there was a time when Sindh had a much wetter climate and when all its mountain streams flowed. As an aside, Moen jo Daro and other prehistoric sites were all built of kiln-baked bricks, that is, there was sufficient timber to fire those kilns to bake virtually hundreds of millions of bricks. And timber comes from forests which thrive in a wet climate.

This comparatively wetter climate persisted until about the beginning of our era. Then the Ranni River was a perennial stream turning into a goodly torrent with the coming of the seasonal rains. That is when the bridge at Sann Gate was first built to connect the battlements on either bank of the river. Even earlier, however, there would have been a fortress in this area, perhaps near present day Mohan Gate, to oversee the passing of trading caravans between Bhambor and Kandahar along the ancient route that lies just outside the western walls of Rannikot. And it was this ancient fortification that was enlarged several fold to create the Rannikot of today. (more…)