The Review - 1st May, 2011 - Pakistan Today

Sunday, 01 May, 2011

A

favourite move amongst novice chess players is, in a moderately dangerous situation, put one’s queen in the firing line of the opposition’s queen, in the hope that they shall shy away. Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif tried to play the move by conceding the Seraiki province but demanding that Karachi be declared a province too.

Little did he realise, in pulling the Karachi ploy, he had no chess piece backing his piece. He conceded, Southern Punjab, his piece without really threatening the other piece. He pulled a poor dummy. And this has accelerated the path towards the creation of a Seraiki province.

But it is not the present political chessboard that we wish to locate our analysis on. We wish to situate it in terms of the history and present of the people’s that inhabit the Seraiki region.

It is through such an analysis that we hope to assess the merits and de-merits of the Seraiki province proposal – a proposal that this article, at the outset, concedes that it supports.

But intelligence is to be critically cautious of what one supports – and to be aware of the principles upon which the support is constituted.

Thus – this shall be a cautious article geared at arguing for a Seraiki province.

The Punjab, in terms of both its present and colonial history, has been signified by Lahore and its Northern regions. The past, however, belonged to Multan, Bahawalpur and Uch Sharif.

At different nodes in subcontinental history, each of

A political turn towards the South: The marginalization of South Punjab exists at a psychological level: when we think about Punjab we think of the Northern parts and Lahore. Multan constitutes our Southern limit.

This limitation on our thought reflects how the region has fared.

However, in recent history, a rising Seraiki nationalism has meant a shift of focus and a political circus in South Punjab.

The PPP (Gilani’s Multan linkage), the PML-Q (Durrani and the electoral loss of Northern Punjab) and the PML-N (with Danish Schools and other hoolahoops) have turned to battle it out for Southern Punjab. This has

meant the last six years and more have seen a diversion of funds towards the ‘development’ of Southern Punjab. But, again, it is important to recognize that this diversion only became possible due to the increased disillusionment of the Seraiki people’s from the centre.

However, the PML-N’s true interests lie in Northern Punjab. Only this year did Shahbaz Sharif move a Neuroscience Institute planned for South Punjab to Lahore. It was a matter over which Pervaiz Elahi raised great hue and cry.

Powerful resentment against Lahore brewing in the South meant this other Lahore-based politician had to speak up about the marginalization of the Seraiki peoples for votes.

Restore Bahawalpur or create Seraikistan?

The debate between the restoration of the Bahawalpur province and the creation of a Seraiki province is a debate between the restoration of an administrative (and political) monopoly versus the creation of a cultural unit.

The idea that there is no difference within the Seraiki area is, of course, false – but there is sufficient homogeniety to argue that a united sense of culture does exist. The 1998 census revealed 14 million Seraiki speakers in Pakistan. However, in 2002, Seraiki nationalists claimed 30 million Seraiki speakers.

What we have been arguing for is to offer support to the ethno-lingual province.

And, more than the nostalgic reminiscing which causes Bahawalpuris (including the old Nawab) to crave the restoration of the Bahawalpur province, the case for a Seraiki province lies in the existence of a coherent cultural unit in the present. The demand for a Seraiki province carries little nostalgia – and therefore there is scope for cultural, political and economic and social regeneration.

It is, in fact, due to the potential for social re-generation that ethno-lingual provinces offer a path for the future.

A separate province as a first step: The creation of a province is not a solution to the economic ills faced by the average inhabitant of South Punjab. What must be

ir

Illustrated & Designed by Babur Sagh

3 Th e rel ev an ce of Os car Wi lde ’s wi tti cis ms 4 Lost from view

Why divide Punjab?

the three was an important cultural and economic centre and a centre of power.

With the British re-demarcation of the province of the Punjab, the centrality of these three cities was lost.

In a similar vein, rural South Punjab was subjected to similar neglect. More than neglect, the greatest running grievance has been that development has come but for the migrant only. The local has been neglected. The creation of barrages (Taunsa and Chasma barrage fall in the area) and the carving of canals has displaced locals from their farmland and destroyed lifestyles in harmony with the geography of the region.

During travels in the Seraiki lands after the floods, the idea that the Takht-e-Lahore (throne of Lahore) had been siphoning upto Rs 60 crore per year in revenue generated the region was found articulated. Once when asked to speak at a public forum, this writer had to pun upon himself as a representative of the oppressor to break communicative ground with the audience. Once that ground had been broken, this writer was thrown into the dilemma of what language to speak: Urdu? Punjabi? a mixture of both came out and the stage had to be ceded to a laughing audience.

Why do I narrate this light-hearted story? It is to point out two things. One, that the language spoken is Seraiki.

Even though it takes from both Punjabi and Sindhi (Sindhi more dominantly), it constitutes a separate language form.

Two, that the idea that Lahore is the oppressor and the Seraiki waseb is the marginalised in widely prevalent and founded upon reality.

The region faces a three-tiered marginalization: economic, political and cultural.

And its oppressor is (northern) Punjab.

the review

By Hashim bin Rashid

The relevance of

Oscar

the review

Wilde’s fame rests ultimately on his marvellous wit which contained a lethal dose of sarcasm and satire

By Khawaja Manzar Amin

O

scar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit, was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854 and died in Paris on November 30, 1900. A brilliant student from his earliest days, he went on scholarships first to Trinity College, Dublin and later to Magdalen College, Oxford. He developed into an accomplished Greek scholar, and achieved First Class honours in classics (or ‘Greats’ as they were known colloquially in those days) – a comprehensive study of ancient Greek and Latin literature, history and philosophy – a singular distinction. The fine tuning of the mind in this extremely demanding field of study no doubt contributed (apart from his genius and Irish ancestry!) to his becoming both a ‘perfect grammarian and an excellent logician’.

But the ancient Greek ‘love of form and …intolerant cult of physical beauty’ also contributed to his downfall in the end.

Wilde moved with effortless ease among the social, fashionable and intellectual circles of his day. He gave a new direction to English drama with his society plays (The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of no Importance) which were imbued with a lively cynicism and scathing comment on the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisy of the conservative Victorians. G.B Shaw remarked on ‘An Ideal Husband’, ‘Mr. Wilde’s new play is a dangerous subject, because he has the property of making his critics dull. He plays with wit, with philosophy, with drama, and actors and audiences, with the whole theatre’. Perhaps it was this flippant attitude towards the powerful and the holy cows that was responsible (in a large measure) for his tragic end. Macaulay, with the poet Byron in mind, maintained that the English public suffered from ‘fits of morality once every seven years or so’, adding that they make a horrid spectacle of themselves in the process: ‘the savage envy of aspiring dunces … gratified by the agonies of superior spirits and famous names’. But that is another story… .

Wilde was a man for all seasons: an art activist, a leading light of the Aesthetic Movement with its credo of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ led by Walter Pater and John Ruskin, a novelist, a journalist, a literary critic, a lecturer (it was on a US lecture tour that he announced to a New York customs official: ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius’), a bit of a poet (‘the poet

is Wilde, but the poetry’s tame’) and a champion of social, economic and political reform. He also wrote the most charming fairy tales ever (The Happy Prince and Other Tales, A House of Pomegranates), which even today have the ability to ‘interest the child no less than the man of the world’. ‘It is the duty of every father’, he maintained, ‘to write fairy tales for his children’, and these superb masterpieces were for his two young sons Cyril and Vyvyan.

Though Wilde was all these things, his fame rests ultimately on his marvellous wit, which contained a lethal dose of sarcasm and satire, especially on the foibles of the British upper classes, not to forget the clergy. He was the prince of epigrams and the unrivalled lord of wit in the late Victorian era. A brilliant dinner table conversationalist, ‘it has often been said that his conversation was far more wonderful than anything he wrote. The dialogue of his plays only hint at it’. What a hit he would have made with our modern day media, always hamming it up, always coming up with priceless gems of wit off the cuff, day after day. He himself remarked: ‘I summed up all systems in a phrase and all existence in an epigram’.

Many of Wilde’s witticisms on the reactionary and formalized Victorian society still have relevance today, especially for the denizens of a nameless Third World country verging on a banana republic (Most of the citizenry certainly seems to have gone bananas). As a hypothetical exercise, please tick the ones reproduced below that apply to you or appeal to your deepest nature (and no cheating or self-deception!).

Since the ‘great hunt’ is on nowadays for a not extinct but extremely shy bird species known as the ‘tax- payer’, let us see how Wilde tackled the taxation issue back in the eighties (the 1880s, that is): Oscar Wilde (OW) and the tax-collector (TC) of Tite Street (in fashionable Chelsea, where Wilde lived): TC: ‘I wan’t to talk to you about your taxes’ OW: What taxes? What makes you think I should pay taxes?

TC: Well sir, you live in this house and sleep here.

OW: Ah, yes! But then you see, I sleep so badly!’

Here are some other gems from the evergreen genius whose name was and still remains a synonym for wit: ‘Ah, well, then I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means….’– (At the mention of a huge fee for a surgical operation) The English public takes no interest in a work of

Iqbal as a poet and thinker

02 - 03

Sunday, 01 May, 2011

This third edition of Atiya Begum’s book contains transcripts of all the eleven (discovered) letters that Iqbal wrote to her and also some Urdu and Persian poems and couplets in Iqbal’s own handwriting

By Syed Afsar Sajid

T

he Oxford University Press in Pakistan has lately published two important books on Iqbal.

One is an edited compilation of the letters and poems addressed

by Iqbal to one of his close intellectual friends Atiya Begum (Atiya Fyzee) while the other is a miscellany of articles compiled and edited by three eminent scholars associated with Iqbal’salma mater, the University of Heidelberg in Germany, on his work as a poet and philosopher.

Epistolary interpretation of Iqbal Atiya Begum aka Atiya Fyzee (18771967) was a reputed writer, musicologist,

and maven. She came of an elitist family of Bombay (now Mumbai) and was educated in England and Germany. She married the renowned artist Samuel Fyzee Rahamin, in 1912. She is also known for her intellectual camaraderie with two great Islamist thinkers, scholars, and poets, Maulana Shibli Nomani (1857-1914) and Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938).

This is the third edition of Atiya Begum’s book titled Iqbal – the first two appeared in 1947 and 1969. It contains the transcription of all the eleven (discovered) letters that Iqbal wrote to her along with their all but one (available) facsimile. The book also carries some Urdu and Persian poems and couplets in Iqbal’s own handwriting, duly transcribed for the reader’s benefit. Interestingly the editor reveals that ‘some of the verses in Atiya Begum’s book do not seem to have been written by Iqbal, which is apparent from the fact that the handwriting is very different from Iqbal’s. I suspect that Atiya Begum may have got these verses mixed up with other documents and erroneously attributed them to Iqbal. However, since these verses were in the original publication, they have been included in this edition …’

Fateh Muhammad Malik’s introduction to the book serves to illustrate its background. In his words, ‘This book provides original source material on Iqbal’s stay in Europe (1905-08) during the formative phase (at the age of 27-30) of his personality. Atiya was Iqbal’s fellow student in Britain. The letters in question as also the poems in the book, admit the reader into Iqbal’s personal life spanning his emotions and fancies, his superior intellect and genius, and his mysticism’ Revisioning Iqbal Revisioning Iqbal As a Poet and Muslim Political Thinker is a collection of articles representing ‘substantially revised versions of the papers’ presented by historians, linguists and scholars of Iqbal studies at an interdisciplinary international conference held at Iqbal’s alma mater, the University of Heidelberg on November 9th and 10th 2007, to commemorate the centenary of Iqbal’s stay in Heidelberg coinciding with his 130th birth anniversary. ‘These individual essays, drawing on original research and new source material, have accordingly been arranged in three separate sections dealing

with the multi-faceted legacy of Iqbal …’

A word about the editors of the book!

Prof Dr Gita Dharampal-Frick is head of the department of History and executive director of the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. Ali Usman Qasmi, PhD, a Pakistani national and her erstwhile doctoral student, is currently a Newton Fellow in the History Department of Royal Holloway College, University of London. Co-editor Katia Rostetter is an MA in English as well as history and political science of South Asia from the University of Heidelberg.

Contributors to the book are Dr Christiana Oesterheld (Assistant Professor of Urdu at the University of Heidelberg), Dr Stephan Popp (Research Fellow at the University of Wurzburg), Dr Qazi Jamal Hussain (professor of Urdu at Aligarh Muslim University), Dr. Axel Monte (free-lance scholar based in Munich), Dr Shamim Hanfi (Professor Emeritus at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi), Dr Tahir Kamran (chairperson, history department, GCU Lahore), Dr Inayatullah Baloch, (Research Associate, History Department, University of Heidelberg), Dr Hans

Wilde’s

witticisms

art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.

The history of women is the history of the worst tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.

I couldn’t help it. I can resist anything except temptation.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

To love oneself is the beginning of a livelong romance.

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.

We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilized body.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

As for omens there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

If you want to mar a nature you have merely to reform it.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.

People are very fond of giving what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points, is one of the first elements of sanity.

Modern journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

Children begin by loving their parents; After a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them!

Thirty five is a very attractive age.

London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty five for years.

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

I don’t want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

I can believe anything, provided it is quite incredible.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

They (the trustees) were extremely old fashioned people who did not realize that we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

Anybody can sympathise with the suffering of a friend but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.

They (our countrymen) are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth and vice by hypocrisy. ` More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read.

You gave her good advice and broke her heart. That was the beginning of your reformation.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

More than 10 answers in the affirmative would confirm you as a red-blooded citizen of the unnamed republic, a true son of the soil(ed), and a Grade A pest! A (surprising) lesser score would put you on the list of Honourable Mentions!

The long night’s journey

towards daybreak

The narrative style adopted by the author brings out well the human dimension: the shocks, the torments, and the moments of bliss, without making the result judgmental

By Javed Asghar

H

arlots are a blot on the society: this is the general consensus.

But no such stigma is attached to the so-called respectable men who visit brothels. This contradictory attitude of the society was what prompted Dr Fauzia Saeed, Ph.D in anthropological studies, to undertake an intensive, long-term study of Shahi Mohalla, Lahore to find out the reality behind the sex trade, and to separate the truth from the myth.

She visited the mohallah on nearly every week-end for over 14 months. It was a labour of love, as she developed close relationships with her subjects, and at the same time was able to maintain objectivity in her analysis. The culmination of her efforts resulted in the publication of this book in 2002. The second edition has just come out, with the addition of an epilogue.

The narrative style adopted by her brings out well the human dimension: the shocks, the torments, and the moments of bliss, without making the result judgmental. Given below, is a summary of the descriptive aspect of her investigation. The main baradaris of the mohalla are the Kanjars and the Marasis. The former ply the dancing and sex trade, and the later restrict themselves to providing musical accompaniment.

Obviously, her focus is on the Kanjars. They are born into this profession, and there is no way they can escape this fate: no outsider accepts their girls in marriage, their boys acquire no skill. The Kanjars are poor, so beyond sustenance they only spend money on the training of girls to learn the nuances of singing and dancing. And by the time she is 14, she has to assume the responsibility

Title: Ten Years of Taboo With an additional epilogue Taboo! The Hidden Culture of a Red Light Area Author: Dr. Fauzia Saeed; Publisher: Oxford University Press, Karachi Pages: 325; Price: Rs 595 of providing for her family. The one who is either not good at her job or is a daughter-in-law, has to bear and raise children. The Kanjar child is more often than not, born out of wedlock. The career of a prostitute generally ends in her mid-twenties.

Her old age is only secure if she has at least one ‘daughter’ to take over, or she has landed property to rent out.

Dr Fauzia further dwells on how the traditional business of Shahi Mohalla has dwindled to one or two streets only, and simultaneously, sex trade controlled by organised crime has increased manifold in various parts of the city.

The above facts show that Kanjars have not entered this profession through their own free will. Dr Fauzia uses historical data to show that prostitution as a profession was developed by the ruling elite for their pleasure, and to ensure its continuity,

over the years they developed traditions around it, traditions which have been maintained over the centuries. Kanjars are the main part of that tradition.

Thus Dr Fauzia was able to expose the society’s hypocritical attitude mentioned in the beginning of the review. However, the final conclusion reached by her is not only overly simplistic, but also leaves the issue dangling. She says that the root cause of all the problems faced by women is the domination of men over women: it is the men who fix the roles of women in society and in doing so ensure that the women will always remain subjugated: it is the same for all women whether the role assigned to any particular group is considered good or disreputable.

However, it has also to be taken into account that as the women have been exploited over the ages, so have been the men, as the institutions of slavery, serfdom and indentured labour show.

So the root cause of all misery turns out to be the domination of absolute rulers and their henchmen over ordinary folk. Thus misery can be assuaged if we, the ordinary folk, somehow break this yoke of domination.

A number of countries have been able to do that through development of strong democratic institutions and universal education. It does not mean that all forms of exploitation have been abolished and that all their problems have withered away, but that two of the biggest instruments of oppression – dictatorship and ignorance – have been blunted.

In Pakistan, the democratic institutions are weak, and the goal of universal education is nowhere in sight. But there is cause for hope as the long night of dictatorship has ended, hopefully for good.

The case for a Seraiki province From Page 1

Title: Revisioning Iqbal As a Poet and Muslim Thinker Edited by: Gita Dharampal-Frick, Ali Usman Qasmi, Katia Rostetter Pages: 231 - Price: Rs.450/Published by: Oxford University Press, Karachi

Harder (Chairperson, Department of Modern Indology, University of Heidelberg), Dr Qazi Afzal Hussain (Professor of Urdu at Aligarh Muslim University), and Dr Abdul Wahab Suri (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Karachi). They have focused on a variety of seminal themes including a comparative analysis of two poems of Iqbal and Goethe, Muslim Spain as a leitmotif in Iqbal’s poetry, images of Iqbal and Tagore in Germany, Iqbal’s dialogue with the West, problematising Iqbal as a State ideologue, Islamic universalism, the caliphate and Iqbal, Iqbal on Arabs and Persians, Semites

Title: Iqbal Author: Atiya Begum Edited by: Rauf Parekh Pages: 125 - Price: Rs.495/Published by: Oxford University Press, Karachi

and Aryans, Iqbal and the next generation, and understanding the apparently incommensurable hermeneutical circles in Iqbal’s thought besides Dr Ali Usman Qasmi’s introductory article on the genealogy of Iqbal’s creative and intellectual genius. Thus the book tends to reaffirm the ‘transcultural significance’ of Iqbal side by side with ‘a paradigmatic concretisation of the dynamics in the shifting asymmetrical flows between the cultures of South Asia, the Middle East and Europe’ whose influence has considerably impacted on the political and cultural discourse in contemporary Pakistan.

realized is that the creation of a province is not a panacea – but a first step. What it is ensures, however, is surplus previously siphoned off is spent within the Seraiki region. But will it solve the woes of the common Seraiki worker?

This is a question that I have repeatedly put to my Seraiki activist friends. Their response is to say, “you help us end your oppression, and, we shall wage a struggle against those amongst us who oppress us.” Again, admittedly it is overtly hopeful to suggest that the structural violence within embodied social structures shall be done away with any time soon, but it is hoped that more focused struggles shall become possible with the granting of provincial status.

Impoverishment, it must be understood, operates at a number of levels. In the argument for a Seraiki province, the hope is to get rid of the impoverishment caused by the province and the federation. What Seraiki activists must remember is to wage the next battle against locals causing impoverishment.

This is essential to overturning the transformations in social structure

that accentuate everyday oppression.

Thus to give a province to the Seraiki-speaking people shall constitute the removal of the toptier of marginalization. The struggle against impoverishment of lower classes we must trust them to conduct themselves.

The case for other ethnolingual provinces:

One of the apprehensions a number of people have is the fear that the federation shall break. The more centralisation, they argue, the more unity and the more likely it is that ‘Pakistan’ shall survive.

This form of thinking is founds itself upon the idea that being Pakistani means that only one identity configuration can be allowed.

This is a flawed rationale.

The history of the Pakistani state, 64 years now for those who have goldfish memories, offers a different lesson. If a State has been unable to take-over indigenous cultures in such a long period of attempting to manipulate society into its own shape, then, it shall not be able to do so in the medium-term future.

That ethno-lingual movements are rife in the Gilgitis and the

Hazaras is a fact we must come to terms with. These are movements we must show respect to. Most certainly each movement is mired in specific political interests; but if nothing else these do take origin from a genuine grievance: people feel disrespected by a State that claims to be their own.

There are, however, genuine questions that one may ask of movements demanding ethno-lingual provinces. The most important of these questions is: what about migrants? Migration to and from the regions demanding ethno-lingual province status has been continuous.

In the Seraiki region, Baloch migrants (100-150 years ago) have broadly assimilated A similar assimilation has been experienced for the early migrants after partition. But similar processes of assimilation have not taken place for later Punjabi and Pakthun migrants. And the question of their place in the Seraiki provinces future remains. These are valid questions.

And while we must concede the demand of ethno-lingual provinces – and the Seraiki province – we must continue to ask these questions from those who shall take the reins of these new provinces.

Looking at the whole lot of Pakistani people, this utter disregard for our own heritage is our only unifying national trait. Surely this must make us the one country in the entire world where a citizen can destroy any historical building without fear of persecution

Pictures by the Author

Sunday, 01 May, 2011

By Salman Rashid

F

rom very ancient times, this land was traversed by roads, roads and roads. There were arterial highways like the Rajapatha that connected Bengal with the Afghan highlands. We hear of it from the chronicles of the 4th century BCE and know that this was the very road that we eventually came to know as the Grand Trunk Road. There were others that stretched between important cities.

One such was the highway connecting Lahore and Multan that we today call National Highway 5 (N-5). Though this highroad had existed ever since time began, in the Middle Ages its importance grew when the peaceful years of the Mughal Empire spurred all-round growth. While Lahore in the north became a much favoured city as an alternate Mughal capital, Multan once again thrived as a rich centre of trade and commerce. It was one of the richer subas (provinces) of the empire during the reign of the third Mughal king, Akbar the Great.

To facilitate the passage of trade and travel, the old road connecting Multan and Lahore received a good deal of attention.

Among other road furniture, new caravanserais were built where existing ones were falling to pieces.

Now, distance between serais was dictated by the day’s travel which in those times was between twenty-five to thirty kilometres. Thus leaving the walled city of Lahore the first serai on Multan Road was at Hanjarwal. A victim of unplanned growth, this serai has long since disappeared.

Lost from view, overgrown with the ugly warts of unplanned rural architecture, Serai Chhimba sits amid blocks of agricultural land some thirty kilometres south of Hanjarwal. Lying a kilometre west of N-5, Serai Chhimba marks the alignment of the old road from the Middle Ages.

We know of Begum ki Serai adjacent to Attock Fort; Serai Kharbuza, midway between Taxila and

Lost from view Rawalpindi; Rewat, east of Rawalpindi and Rajo Pind just outside Rohtas Fort that are all believed to be fortresses. In truth, these are serais, fortified so that they could be locked up for the night to hold robbers at bay. Indeed, this was no deviation, but standard serai architecture all across Central Asia, Iran and the Indian subcontinent.

So too was Serai Chhimba built like a fort with massive walls and two gateways, one each in the direction of the rising and setting sun. In the interior, along the perimeter walls, was a series of sunken rooms with domed ceilings and thick walls to keep out the heat and cold. These were the residential rooms for passing travellers while their pack and riding animals were tethered in the broad enceinte.

The gatehouses on both sides are massive and have bulky arched openings which, going by their style, are clearly Akbari. While the western gatehouse is now occupied and turned into a residence, the one in the east serves as the only way in and out. Until a few years ago the timber leaves of the gatehouse were still in situ, but with the rise in street level, they became unserviceable and one day disappeared. Local gossip has it that the expensive teak was appropriated and sold by the keeper of the spurious shrine inside the serai. So much for those who pretend to be descendents of a worldly man turned holy post mortem

by the accretion of yarns.

While the gatehouses mark east and west, the other two cardinal points are scored by massive vaulted structures. These and the gatehouses are each topped by two square towers rising to ribbed domes starkly reminiscent of Samarqand and Herat. None of them retains any of the coloured tiles that may have once adorned them. To emphasise its defensive strength, each corner of the serai has an octagonal turret.

The compound where travellers once tethered their animals is now choc-a-bloc with haphazardly placed houses bisected by streets.

Houses along the perimeter wall incorporate the sunken rooms of the serai into their design: as bedrooms these are cool in summer and warm in winter.

Everywhere there are signs of disturbance to the original structure of the serai in order to add rooms.

Only a few days before my visit in mid-February, the owner of the house adjacent to the east gate had pulled down one of the two domed towers in order to add a room on his roof. The debris of ancient Mughal bricks and lime mortar had still not been removed. It was his home and he felt he could do whatever he pleased with it – the historic monument be damned.

Indeed, the two similar structures on the south wall had gaping holes: used as rooftop kitchens,

the openings in the roofs served as chimneys. In the north wall only one of these towers remains. Inmates do not know what became of its companion but they have broken a large opening in it and use it as storage for cow dung patties. Its exterior serves as the post where the patties are dried.

Sometime after the advent of train and motor transport Serai Chhimba fell out of use as a way station. During the Raj when people were more than aware of the presence of the government, this historical inn would not have been appropriated for private residence.

With independence two things happened. First, in the hands of incompetent politicians, the new state of Pakistan began to cede authority from the very first day.

Secondly, in the absence of any settlement policy, the huge influx of refugees pouring in from across the newly-drawn border took over whatever they found handy.

Serai Chhimba, built about 1580 and therefore a protected historical monument, fell victim to this takeover riot. For some years after partition, it may have retained its serai atmosphere, but galloping population growth quickly smothered it with ugly and unplanned housing. For these refugees from Karnal and Rohtak, this is apparently still not home.

They have no feeling for the land, its culture and its history. It is something to be appropriated and destroyed. Sadly, this is no aberra-

tion; this is the norm in this blighted land.

Looking at the whole lot of Pakistani people, this utter disregard for our own heritage is our only unifying national trait. Surely this must be the only country in the entire world where a citizen can destroy any historical building without fear of persecution. We see it happening in cities like Lahore, Bhera, Shikarpur, you name it. It is happening in Serai Chhimba as it happened at Hanjarwal where no more than part of the serai gateway now stands. Only some miles away to the east of Serai Chhimba, Dera Chaubara, another 16th century monument and exquisitely beautiful too, has been laid waste by treasure hunters (Herald April 2003). This same breed of ignorant philistine is destroying the hilltop monas-

tery of Tilla Jogian in Jhelum district. This list is endless.

In another country where the writ of the state exists, such wanton destruction of the national heritage would cause uproar.

Heads would roll, especially of those entrusted with the upkeep of national monuments. But in Pakistan we let things be. In another few decades, monuments that should have drawn ordinary tourists and students of history and medieval architecture to this land will be no more than heaps of rubble. And not because of age and natural causes, but because of our national indifference for our own heritage.

–Salman Rashid, rated as the best in the country, is a travel writer and photographer who has travelled all around Pakistan and written about his journeys.