The dictionary defines culture as shared beliefs, values, and behaviours of a group of people, such as a nation or a religious group. It also includes the knowledge, customs, arts, and laws of a group. Culture is often associated with a specific religion or a location.
Sometimes it feels that all of us trapped in our cultural milieu. Any digressions from accepted norms invoke the expression: What Would People Think? Or: what would people say?
کیا کہیں گے لوگ
It is interesting that had there been no eyebrows raised and tongues wagged, the digression would have gone on without much protest and become eventually acceptable. The following Urdu/Hindi song from 1957 movie Paying Guest exemplifies this dilemma.
چھوڑ دو آنچل زمانہ کیا کہے گا
The song exemplifies the dilemma that every culture faces. The girl is asking the boy to let go of her shawl/scarf because it is not acceptable to other people. Apparently, she herself is not opposed to him hanging on to the end of her shawl, but the optics are against what is normal and acceptable.
Our Pakistani society is shackled with tribal, caste, and family restraints. We try to stay in our lanes assigned by traditions. At one time, the tradition prohibited Syeds to marry off their daughters to non-Syeds or bring a non-Syed girl into the family. It was erroneously considered against the teachings of Islam. Many a beautiful and eligible maiden succumbed to the taboo and lived out their lives as single women. Mercifully, the passage of time has cast away that taboo.
Customs and traditions are not rigid. With time they do change. But they change only when someone challenges them or starts a new trend. One of my cousins, a highly educated intellectual woman, went against the tide and married a non-Syed man. Tongues wagged, family honour was invoked but, in the end, everything settled down and she had a wonderful, harmonious and productive life.
Buried deep in our psyche are the preventive measures that make sure any challenge to status quo is considered aberrant, frivolous and tampering with age-old traditions
Take the example of young men sporting long hair, pointed shoes and tight clothes. They were looked down upon as teddy boys, hippies and worse. They were at the time outside the societal norms. But gradually long hair became a fad, and it took almost 40 years for teddy pants with extremely narrow pant legs to become acceptable. Today, the pants of yesteryear with pleated baggy tops and wide pant legs and cuffs look out of place. It puts a person like me in a dilemma. Do I remain frozen in the past or move with the trend?
Even a cursory look at the old photographs of people on the streets of Peshawar or any other city of the Subcontinent show people in clothes that are not in common use today. In Peshawar, men wore baggy shalwars and long and loosely fitting kurtas. They all wore pagri or turbans on their heads and a folded sheet of cloth on their left shoulder. They wore boat-shaped khusas or Peshawari chapli on their feet. Many of them either had a rifle slung over their shoulders or wore a holster with a revolver.
Women were not very visible and those who were in the photos wore white burqas. White burqas are still visible now and then, but most women go out without a burqa. A shawl or a chador has replaced the tent-like suffocating garment.
Mahir-ul-Qadri was a well-known poet in India and later in Pakistan. He was against women’s education. One sher from his poem on girls’ education would express the prevailing views about the subject:
وہ دوڑتی ہوئ لاری نظر جو آتی ہے
وطن کی عزت و حرمت کی نعش جاتی ہے
(The lorry carrying girls to school is in fact the corpse of our culture and honour)
He would be flabbergasted if he rose from his grave to see Pakistani women running colleges and universities, flying jets, scaling high mountains and making a place for themselves in the highest levels of art, literature and poetry.
The changes in culture over the past hundred year are striking. Just look the way Western women dressed in the 1920s: multiple layers of clothing topped off with a hoop skirt. Now we don’t see those except in old vintage movies.
Also, in the West, women were not allowed to go swimming even fully clothed, because in wet dress they would be considered nude. It took 100 years for the women in the West to traverse the distance from baggy swimwear to the string bikini.
A few years ago, the French invented the burkini, a mix of the bikini and burqa for Muslim women who liked to go swimming. It did not take off fast, but did make headlines.
In the Hindi and Urdu films, kissing was a no-no. In the West there was no taboo in kissing on screen. When some Indian film directors took liberties, the Censor Board came down hard on the director. Some cynics say that members of the Censor Board see all the wonderful scenes but use their merciless scissors to cut out the juicy stuff. Still Indian and Pakistani films refrain from showing kissing on screen, whereas elsewhere in the world it has become rather common.
There is an endearing story of a young girl from New York City, who against all odds rose to become the first woman to cross the English Channel.
Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle wanted to be a swimmer. Society frowned upon women swimming in public. Even if they did, they were obliged to wear a wool dress, stocking and shoes. Her father was supportive of his daughter and would take her to the harbour, tie a rope around her waist and throw her in the water. That is how she learned how to swim. Her mother would sew bathing suits for her.
Against all odds – and all those odds were stacked against her by men – she went to the Paris Summer Olympics in 1924 and won one gold and two bronze medals. Next, she tried and failed on crossing the English Channel. But she did not give up. In 1926, she swam 21 miles across the narrowest part of the Channel and beat the men’s record by two hours. If she had not listened to her voice and her parents would not have been supportive, she would have never become a swimmer. In cases like this, what people think does not matter.
As an aside I would like to mention that those Pakistanis imbued with religious xenophobia and religious zeal don’t remember – or don’t care to remember – that Brojan Das, one of their own from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), swam the English Channel in 1958 and repeated the feat six more times. He was the only Asian to do so.
All societies and all cultures have guard rails that discourage innovations or fresh thinking. Buried deep in our psyche are the preventive measures that make sure any challenge to status quo is considered aberrant, frivolous and tampering with age-old traditions. These are all dictated by the all-encompassing phrase: “What would the people think?”
But some brave souls must be the trendsetters. Slowly and insidiously, the aberrant becomes mainstream.