CULTURE-PAKISTAN: Dancer Makes Fragile Stand For Peace

By Zofeen Ebrahim Reprint | | Print |

Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug 19 2003 (IPS) - ”The day I stop dancing will be the day I die,” said Sheema Kermani, Pakistan’s leading classical dancer. The petite 52-year-old is not given to making such statements lightly, and particularly not given the cultural repression and outright threats she has faced.

It was 20 years ago that her first solo recital to a small private audience turned into a public performance as 300 people came to see her dance. The former president of Pakistan, Gen Zia ul-Haq, had banned such cultural activity and Kermani recalled the moment: ”It was like a response, a protest to Zia’s ban. The people seemed so starved.”

Since then, she has used dance to forcefully drive home her views – against violence directed at women and children, in defence of the rights of the poor and the disadvantaged, to free cultural expression in Pakistan, and to seek peaceful co-existence with neighbouring India.

It has been a perilous stance for an artiste to adopt in Pakistan. The official resistance to her and her art has been unrelenting and concerted. She has always lived a threatened life.

”I’m used to that,” she said laconically, ”But over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy – a decided thought not to promote good culture. This started many years ago and continues.”

It does not help, in the eyes of Pakistani officialdom, that Kermani’s preferred dance tradition is Odissi – an ancient form of sacred dance originally developed in the temple of Jagannath in the state of Orissa, in eastern India, as a form of worship and meditation.

Yet for all the sub-continental fusion she has brought together in herself, Kermani is sceptical of the recent moves towards peace between Pakistan and India. Her question is, ”Will it last and for how long?”

Her own yearning for such a peace was most recently, and most touchingly, seen in a dance recital for Indian documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s award-winning ‘War and Peace’, a searching examination of the rise and spread of nationalist propaganda, misplaced patriotism and militarism in both India and Pakistan.

Kermani herself has not seen the documentary, which has only recently been cleared by the Indian Central Board of Film Certification after an 18-month struggle against moves to ban and censor it.

While ‘War and Peace’ may yet be screened in Pakistan, Agha Nasir, a scriptwriter and broadcaster who has headed organisations like Pakistan Television, Pakistan Broadcasting Corp and the National Film Development Corp, is even more doubtful than Kermani about lasting peace between the neighbours.

”In bringing the two countries together, which have lived on a relationship of hate for the past 55 years, art and culture can play a very important role,” he said. ”Unfortunately, the political leadership – because of their vested interests – have never allowed that to happen.”

Nasir said he is disturbed by the changes he has seen in the Indian broadcast media and in some artistes and writers. During visits to India, he said, he believed that ”India was better than us as far as love for humanity and efforts for peace in the region were concerned”. Not so now, he finds.

”Our colleagues in art and culture in India have been hijacked by the politicians,” he said. ”But sooner or later they will realise that friendship and good relations between the two countries are beneficial for both.”

That realisation, from all accounts, is coming from the ground up.

In the last several weeks a bus service between the two countries has resumed, while a life-saving heart surgery performed on two-year-old Noor Fatima – a Pakistani girl – by doctors in the Indian city of Bangalore captured the attention of millions in both countries.

Nasir hopes this is ”the beginning of that change and that this time it might be successful”. Kermani however takes the argument further. It is the peoples of Pakistan and India, she said, who have to ”push their governments into a corner” and force them to change.

She sees the enormity of the task on both sides of the border. ”The (Bharatiya Janata Party-led Indian) government has to appease the Hindu fundamentalists in India, and the Pakistani army’s ego is bloated enough not to care about people’s wishes,” she observed. ”And without such a confrontational stance, how will the latter ever justify such a huge share of the country’s budget?”

Aside from cross-border peace, Kermani’s main concern is the narrowing space for artistic expression in Pakistan.

Following the coming to power of Gen Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, in 1999, she said matters have deteriorated for artistes. ”I feel earlier there were just a handful of such people (those who branded dance and music as un-Islamic), but these have grown into larger, more organised and heavily-armed groups,” she said. ”They are more fanatic and Talibanised.”

Indeed in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an alliance of Islamic religious parties that won political control after a landslide election victory in October 2002, ”un-Islamic” culture and expression is being rooted out.

In this border province police and religious students have arrested, threatened and beaten up musicians and music shop owners, defaced billboards and destroyed merchandise.

More alarming for artistes like Kermani is that the campaign is beginning to spread to other cities like Quetta in the west and even Lahore in the north, although the southern port city of Karachi has not so far been touched.

Kermani’s immediate concern is the future of her street theatre performances in the poorer sections of Karachi – her intrusion with art into politics, which she said ”is a very important aspect for politics and which conveys far more deeply the messages”.

She worries too about the next generation of writers, painters, dancers. ”We have no dearth of talent, given the dismal situation, but I’m afraid the various art forms are not being passed on,” she said.

But there is a ray of hope she sees: ”A few schools have started classes in the past two or three years. Still low-key, but it is a start nevertheless.”