/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/ARTS-AFGHANISTAN: Suppressed Art Thrives in Post-Taliban Era

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan, Apr 2 2002 (IPS) - Sitting cross-legged on a small mat in the dusty street outside the Sultan Ghiasudin school, Agha Malang Kohistani, a tall bearded Tajik, tuned his sitar and struck up a song.

Within minutes, a crowd of children and men in this northern Afghan city gathered around him.

“Where are you hiding, Osama bin Laden? In a mouse hole? And where have you hidden that Mullah Omar?” sang Kohistani, causing the crowd to roar with laughter and clap along.

Just six months ago, the lyrics mocking the former Taliban leaders of Afghanistan would have been considered heresy, let alone playing a musical instrument, which was expressly forbidden under the government that fell from power in November.

During the Taliban’s rule, most musicians fled Afghanistan to Peshawar in Pakistan, Mashad in Iran, Hamburg in Germany, and New Jersey, Washington DC and the San Francisco area in the United States, the main centres of Afghan communities abroad.

Kohistani is from the Shamoli plains in the Panjshir valley near the capital Kabul, but during the time of the Taliban he fled the country to Badakshan in Tajikistan near the Chinese border. He returned only in November, after the Taliban had been routed by the combined forces of the Northern Alliance ground troops and the U. S. aerial bombing campaign.

Today actors, painters, film makers and musicians like Kohistani are emerging from hiding, unearthing their instruments and art work that they have hidden for the past five years.

Haseebullah Takdeer is one musician who used to perform in secret. “During the control of the Taliban, music was seriously prohibited. I have a shop where I sell music cassettes, which I had to do secretly. Once a week my friends and I used to gather and play music secretly in the basement or in other quiet rooms,” he says.

Takdeer sings traditional folk songs such as ‘Beya Ka Borem Ba Mazar’ (‘Let’s Go To Mazar’), a song from the western city of Herat inviting people to travel to the Blue Mosque, the holiest shrine in all of Afghanistan that is in the centre of the city of Mazar i Sharif (which means ‘The Noble Grave’), for the Afghan new year in late March.

Today, Takdeer divides his time between singing at weddings, funerals and other community functions and selling popular music in his cassette shop. The biggest demand for music in his shop, as well as at ceremonies, is for ‘Bollywood’ songs from Hindi films recorded in Mumbai, India.

Indeed almost every Afghan can understand some Hindi, even though the language is not formally taught in Afghan schools, because Hindi films, typically love stories with lots of singing and dancing, are the main source of entertainment in this country.

Parvez Nabi, a recent graduate of Balkh University, says: “I have watched 600 Hindi films, some many times. My friends have watched even more.”

“During the Taliban time, we would gather at my house at night and put up a satellite dish to watch television from Pakistan and India, and then at dawn we would take it down before anybody could see it,” Nabi recalls.

But writers are already working on telling the story of the last conflict. At the Ministry of Culture across from the Blue Mosque, a group of musicians, actors and actresses gather every day to practise a new play called ‘Uninvited Guest’, written by Engineer Ali and directed by Wakeel Negbeen.

The play is about an event that happened at Sultan Razya school, a girls’ school that was being used by the Taliban as a military base.

In early November, when the United States military bombed the school, an Arab fighter – one among many who had been fighting alongside the Taliban — escaped from the school and went to a house and took a family hostage, then killed a member of the family before fleeing.

The main roles in this play are all played by men, including the lead female roles, but some women artists such as Naseema Jaleeli are allowed to act in minor roles.

“Under the Taliban, we had very bad times. We were in jail in fact, inside our own houses. Now we are very happy with the new government and we are very grateful to the world for helping us,” says Jaleeli.

In major cities across the country, the arts are coming back with fanfare.

In February, interim president Hamid Karzai attended the reopening of the National Gallery in Kabul, where one of the latest attractions is a special display of the ripped-up drawings and broken frames left by the Taliban.

At the opening, Yousof Asefi washed away a veneer of watercolour paint on 80 oil paintings at the gallery. He had applied it to the pictures, in order to save them from destruction by the Taliban, who had forbidden representations of the human form as sacrilege.

“Afghan culture has been destroyed many times. By Alexander the Great. By the British army. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan attacked Herat and killed everyone,” says Makhtoum Rahim, the Afghan minister of information and culture.

Rahim adds: “We want to export a message of love and cooperation for all the world, and to show our great art, so that people understand this is not just a country of warlords and battle.”