The Culture of Lahore: Culture

A broad definition of ‘culture’ was adopted by the World Conference on Cultural Policies (MONDIACULT), Mexico, 1982, “Culture is the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or group. It includes not only arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs”. MONDIACULT also affirmed that, “balanced development can only be ensured buy making cultural factors an integral part of strategies designed to achieve it”.

1.1- Cultural Heritage

Cultural heritage is a key component of identities and is rapidly becoming a key factor for both economic growth and social cohesion. Heritage buildings, locations and sites, art-works and artifacts, as well as languages, customs, communal practices and traditional skills articulate identity and meaning at local, national and regional levels. The notion of cultural heritage itself has become inclusive to encompass cultural landscapes, living cultural traditions, and symbolic and spiritual values.

Heritage is everything received from the past. But everything received from the past is a pile of junk, a treasure trove; a historic document or a symbol with which we identify ourselves and the ‘other’. What we decide to conserve will depend on what we value and why.

Cultural heritage is revered by all traditional value systems as signifier of “the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society”

Cultural heritage is valued by modernism as document validating the narrative of its own evolution, progress and development. But the destruction of value systems, traditions and beliefs is written off as collateral damage, the inevitable price of progress and development.

It is valued by Post-Modernism/consumerism as an investment opportunity and for its economic potential.

Cultural heritage, other than their own narrowly defined ideology, is despised by supremacists as signifier of “the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize …” the enemy. It must therefore be destroyed to make way for their own triumphal march.

1.2- Sub-sectors

· History
· Geography
· Demography
· Flora
· Fauna
· Environment/ecology
· Economy
· Transport
· Governance
· Architecture
· Arts
· Food
· Apparel
· Entertainment
· Religions
· festivals

2- Analysis

2.1- History

Once upon a time …

o 1021, Mahmood Ghaznavi conquers Lahore, appoints his slave Malik Ayaz as regent;

o Ali Hajveri takes up residence outside the gates. A confrontation with the revered local sage ends with the sage accepting Ali Hajveri as his spiritual master and attaining to great spiritual heights.

o Lahore is described as a beloved city by its poets and a prosperous metropolis by European travelers.

o 1614, Maryam Zamani, the Christian wife of Akbar, endows the city with a Friday mosque.

o 1617 – 1618, In the inscription by the architect recording the completion of Jahangir’s palace at the Lahore Fort, the architect now using the title Ma’mur Khan refers to the king as “the shadow of God, a Solomon in dignity, a Kayumarth in state, an Alexander in arms, the asylum of the Caliphate, …”[1]

o 1631 – 1632, Another inscription, by the same architect Abdul Karim, over the Hathi Pol says that the Royal Tower (Shah Burj) “is like the Divine Throne beyond imagination and conception. In purity, height, elegance and airiness, such a tower has never appeared from the castle of the sky nor ever will”[2]

o 1634, Wazir Khan, as governor of Lahore, purchases a Lodhi nobleman’s heveli, builds a larger Jami mosque but retains the ancient seminary of Ishaq Gazruni. He converts his own properties along the Delhi Gate Bazaar into a waqf for the maintenance of the mosque, and adds a serai and hammam for public use.

§ The inscription at the top of the entrance tells us that the mosque was “completed in the reign of Abu Muzaffar, the second lord of the constellation[3], Shah Jahan the ghazi king.”

§ All the named calligraphers of the mosque were Sufis. The calligraphic and fresco panels in the mosque expand on the theme of the initiatic journey with quotations from the greatest Sufi masters:

o Shah Jahan’s son Dara Shikoh enters the Qadiri order of Sufis at the hand of Mulla Shah, becomes a devoted disciple of Mian Mir and writes numerous treatises on Sufism.

o Mian Mir lays the foundation of the Golden temple of the Sikhs in Amritsar.

o Ranjit Singh’s minister and governor Faqir Nur-ud-Din was among his closest advisers and most trusted courtiers.

The picture that emerges is that of a hierarchic society presided over by a normative spiritual order. To be sure there are villains, rogues and scoundrels who raid and plunder the territories and properties of others, who scheme and conspire for power. But these are aberrations. The norm is “socio-economic peace, cultural diversity, interfaith harmony” premised on a shared world view. In this picture too we find beautiful buildings with sculptured wood, stone, brick and stucco plaster, with fresco and glazed tile murals, and painted ceilings. We find all manner of exquisite metal ware, ornaments, armaments and astrolabes, illuminated manuscripts, carpets. We are surrounded by a diversity of artifacts and articrafts in the homes and in the bazaars. But there is no “Art”. There are artisans and artificers, but no “artists”, no one who claims to be creative and original.

2.2- Present conditions, issues: assets, deficiencies

Things Fall Apart

With the annexation of the Punjab, one of the first promulgations by the British was for its de-fortification. The outer walls of the city were pulled down and the moat filled up and made into a garden. The southern wall of the Fort was replaced by an esplanade opening onto the city. The eastern wall of the Badshahi Mosque was dismantled to open the courtyard towards the Huzuri Bagh. The city’s defenses and gun emplacements had in fact been already mapped by various European travelers. The first survey of the city after the annexation was a census of the population and its educational institutions. They found the diversity of its Muslim, Hindu and Sikh population reflected in the diversity of its educational institutions including schools, colleges and “universities”, and a literacy rate of 70 to 90 percent. By the time they left the diversity had been reduced to a single religious community and the literacy rate to less than 15 per cent.

But they left behind a School of Art where none had existed before. The school produced a special kind of person – the artist – who arrogated to himself the prerogative of “creativity” and indulged in a special kind of activity called Art whose sole function was the production of Art. But something vital had deserted the streets and bazaars of the city.

The encounter with the British Raj was not just another in the series of imperialist conquests. Not just a transition from one ruler to the next. It was the replacement of one world view by another, a paradigm change, the transition from tradition to modernity.

Regional cooperation, linked with trade which had been limited by animate modes of transportation to high value luxury items such as gems, silks, porcelain and metal ware, was replaced by global competition, linked with trade in essentials such as food grains, cotton and industrial raw materials and products. This was made possible by mechanized transportation and industrial production, but it required structural adjustments in governance, economy and cultural norms.

Pre-industrial modes of production involved intimate personal relationships between the producer, his materials, his tools, the product and the end user. But industrial modes of production distanced the producer from his materials, his tools, the product and the end user and replaced the personal relationships with purely monetary transactions. Moreover, economies of scale in industrial production demanded standardization and uninterrupted inputs and outputs. Thus governance by fiat, the personal whims of despotic rulers, had to be replaced by an impersonal state governed by legal instruments and bureaucratic mechanisms. The diversity of sustainable, self reliant agriculture had to be replaced by monoculture cash crop economies linked to the global market.

“British policies in the 18^th century, designed to eliminate competition against its own growing industry, reduced Indian manufactures to the extent that these was nothing left of value to the ‘home market’ with which India could pay for an increasing volume of imports. It was when the British Indian trade itself began to suffer in the 19^th century that the government decided to take action. A solution was devised, which, while leaving the Indian home market to the mercies of Western competition, might slowly increase the competitive power of Indian goods. The solution adopted was ludicrous. It was nothing less than the establishment of a college of art.”[4]

“Post-colonial cultural discontinuity”

From its inception in post-renaissance Europe to the present phase of post-modernism and post-structuralism, art and art writing has been part and parcel of the modernity project. Along with “humanism” and rationalism of the renaissance, art had risen to challenge the authority of the church. The “age of reason” enlisted art in the service of the imperialist cause, with evolutionism, of carrying the white man’s burden, bringing civilization to the primitive races, who were represented as so “backward” that their culture had not yet “evolved” to the level of producing “art”.

In the resulting encounter between modernity and tradition in colonial and post-colonial societies, art was identified with the west, with modernity, progress, and development, while the crafts and tradition were associated with the past, the orient, primitiveness and backwardness.

Art and art writing were used to justify and give a moral gloss to the civilizing mission of colonialism, and continue to serve global capital’s neo-imperialist mission of bringing civilization, freedom and liberalism, to the people living under the tyranny of cruel, suffocating, barbaric traditions. This mission was adopted by the post-colonial state, for whom modernization was the route to economic prosperity, and by the ruling elites who were quick to align themselves with the colonial masters.

The European bourgeoisie’s struggle against the established power of the feudal aristocracy and the church was a confrontation between modernity and tradition. Thus in the European context, the elitist icons signified tradition. But in the context of “post-colonial cultural discontinuity”, it is the trappings and accoutrements of modernism, along with western dress, western languages, western education, and values etc. that have become the elitist icons of wealth, power, domination and control, while tradition has become an icon of resistance to domination and control.

3- Proposals

3.1- Objectives/Goals

Conservation of our humanity and our environment

3.2- Policies

- Any policy on culture must be related to the objectives of human development as defined by a given society.

- The modern and traditional definitions of development and what it means to be human reflect two different world views. While the traditional world view has defined our humanity and sustained our environment for millennia past, the modern development paradigm has brought all mankind and life on this planet as we know it to the brink of disaster.

- We propose a cultural policy that is rooted in our traditions, is an integral part of a strategy for sustainable economy that takes into account our natural and human resources and the present global realities.

3.3- Strategies

A National Strategy for Sustainable Economy

For the last sixty years in Pakistan we have pursued the goals of modernization, that is, economic prosperity through industrialization. The result has been economic and social collapse. Clearly, this state of affairs can not be sustained any longer. Neither can we ignore the changes taking place in the emerging ‘new world order’. In the technologically advanced countries industry has moved on to very high levels of technology. At the same time, the green lobbies in these countries have prevailed upon their governments and industries to clean up their acts. One of the results of these developments has been that these economies are looking for markets /buyers/takers on whom they can dump their obsolete technologies. Another aspect of the “globalization” of capital has been that the rich are becoming richer, raking in super profits, by exploiting the vast pools of cheep labor in the less developed poor economies of the Third World. For countries like Pakistan this is the road to a “cheap and dirty” future.

The modernization of the past sixty years has devastated our social infrastructure to the point that “catching up with the west” on their terms is simply out of the question. We do not have the necessary infrastructure of education, power, communications, efficient state institutions and systems of justice, law enforcement, revenue collection, and governance. Even if we decide seriously today to put things right, it would require three or four generations just to rehabilitate our health and education sectors. Neither do we have the cash. Continuing to chase after capital from international funding agencies and investors will only drag us further into the debt quagmire.

So do we have any options? Yes. Get real. Look to our real strengths, and the realities of the global marketplace. What has really sustained this country over these past fifty years? It has been our agriculture and small and medium sized enterprises based largely on skilled labor and low-tech processes of manufacture. Our foreign exchange earnings have come mainly from rice, cotton, yarn, gray cloth, carpets, garments, knitwear, leather, sports and surgical goods, and manpower export. Our strength is our land and its people. This is what we have to build on.

It is our contention that as life in the technologically advanced countries becomes more and more industrialized, and mechanized, there is, and will continue to be a growing market niche for hand-crafted products and organic agriculture. This is a niche we are well placed to exploit. We have the basic resources: land, sun, water and the traditional agricultural and craft skills. But ultimately, our greatest asset may be our “under-development”. Despite our best efforts we have not been thoroughly “developed” or “modernized”. As a result, we have retained vast reservoirs of traditional knowledge, practices and skills. These are the threads that link us with the deep wellsprings of traditional wisdom that have survived, interwoven into the tattered fabric of our “collective sub-conscious”, informing every aspect of our cultures, especially the arts - poetry, literature, music, dance, calligraphy, popular graphic arts, popular architecture and the decorative crafts.

Traditional manufacture of consumer products relies on natural, indigenous materials and human resources, and simple technologies that employ animate and other renewable sources of energy. These technologies are therefore environment friendly and low cost (in the less developed economies of the Third World). But to capitalize on these advantages in the global marketplace our agronomists and framers will have to improve quality while re-introducing traditional methods of fertilizers, pest control and seed selection etc. Better animal husbandry, livestock and forestry will also be necessary to improve the quality of raw materials required for manufacturing hand crafted consumer products. Our scientists and materials technologists will need to improve the quality of raw materials such as cotton, wool, and wood, and standards of traditional skills, by tapping the wealth of traditional wisdom and re-introducing traditional materials and techniques.

Intangible Heritage

It can be argued that while tangible heritage – the visual arts, architecture and consumer products – represents the outer manifestation, the body of a given culture, but it is the intangible heritage – the performing arts, literature (including oral histories, myths and folk lore) and philosophy – that represents the core, the fountainhead from which flow the waters that nurture and nourish the body, while the water itself is the wisdom, the knowledge, the “science of the Real” that provides answers to the big questions (What is real? What is man essentially? What does it mean to be human? What is the relationship of Man to the Real? What is Man's function in this universe?).

The strength and vitality of our traditional cultures had derived from the nourishment provided by the intellectual elites. The erudition and polemical writings of Ibn-i-Rushd, Al Ghazali, Ibn-i-Sina, Mulla Sadra and other luminaries were the power-houses that energized all cultural activity. The abandonment of the traditional framework by our intellectual elites, and their embracing of the modernist world view, resulted not only in the withering of the traditional arts, but a stagnation and degeneration of our cultures as a whole. The void left by the intellectual elites was naturally filled by less enlightened minds, whose narrow vision and limited horizons have corrupted our society, replacing its highest values of love, compassion, generosity and justice with hate, egotism, violence and bigotry.

3.4- Plans

Critical Discourse: the prerequisite for any cultural renaissance is a climate of free and open intellectual discourse, critical debate and spirit of enquiry. This may be initiated by a program of, symposia, seminars, debates, research projects, publications etc at the highest academic and professional levels through think tanks and universities;
Linkage of policies on culture, education and economy within a common framework at the national and provincial levels;
Network of centers to provide supports for the promotion of traditional arts at the town level;

research, documentation, analyses and conservation of indigenous cultures, including initial compilation of inventories;
Provision of spaces and fora for intellectual discourse and critical debate with the participation of local institutions of higher learning;
Dissemination of discourse through print and electronic media including establishment of culture (TV) channel;
Maintenance of database inventories on master artistes and craftspeople

Raising of standards at the professional level;

workshops with practicing professionals;
recognition and monitory rewards for excellence;
Development and re-orientation of art education curricula for professional colleges based on theoretical principles and practice of traditional arts;

Critical awareness at the popular level;

Integration of cultural awareness and practices into educational programs and curricula at all levels from primary to post-graduate;
Promotion through print and electronic media, including a culture channel;
Promotion of live performances and participatory events such as festivals, fairs and special audiences;
Exhibitions
Seminars and lectures for specific audiences: e.g. schools, designers, users and consumers etc.

Utilitarian/applied Arts:

Develop appropriate designs based on traditional principles but applicable to contemporary needs of users and consumers;
Scientific research and development to improve quality of relevant materials and appropriate technologies
Marketing of consumer products: assist in connecting producers with consumers, traders, wholesalers, retailers, and end users, and advising on appropriate packaging and presentation;

Inventory of Cultural Heritage:

The basic inventories of cultural heritage should be compiled at the town level;

b.Entries may be submitted by any citizen/resident of Lahore

c. The aggregate of Town Inventories will form the Lahore Inventory

d. Inventories should be digitized and posted on an interactive net portal or site

e. Data should be linked to geographic location through GIS mapping

[1] Vogel, J. Ph. Tile Mosaics of the Lahore Fort, Pakistan Publications, Karachi, p 19

[2] Ibid.

[3] Sahib-i-Qiran, i.e., one born under an auspicious conjunction of Jupiter and Venus; a fortunate and invincible king. It is the title of Timur. The Emperor Shah Hahan is called Sahib-i-Qiran-i-Thani, i.e. “the second Sahib-i-Qiran”. Vogel, J. Ph. Tile Mosaics of the Lahore Fort, Pakistan Publications, Karachi, p 19

[4] Mumtaz, Kamil Khan, “Architecture in Pakistan”, Concept Media, Singapore, 1985, p 112.

Culture

Contents:

1- Definition & scope