I flew to Karachi to attend the opening of the latest exhibition at the Mohatta Palace Museum last week. I had been very anxious to see what the museum decided to use to follow up their massively successful Rashid Rana retrospective, a show that was unusual in having been on for a year. Turns out the next offering was smaller, but no less spectacular. “Drawing the Line” is a rare display of even rarer maps from across the centuries. Its focus is on the areas that now, for their sins, constitute Pakistan. Some of you may not think looking at maps is the most interesting way to spend an afternoon. You’d be wrong. The maps, mainly from private collections, cover over five centuries of cartography in the region, and it is amazing to see what people discovered when, or what the names of towns and regions we know so well used to be.
One of the best things about the whole experience was how much effort the curators of the show had put into things like displays and backdrops. (Usually people just throw some frames on a white wall and call it a day.) The backdrops for this show would look at home in any good museum of the world. They’ve done the walls up to look like maps themselves (lines of latitude, little drawings of puffy winds, compasses, etc.), a lovely touch accentuated by gold linework done against deep blues and rich ochres by some truly talented artists.
The show is divided by time period, and you can meander from Ptolemy maps to the late 19th century and eventually even into contemporary prints from artists like Zarina Hashmi (google her now). In a seperate room they have tiny displays showing cartographical instruments, which the children found quite distracting. The whole show was just so very refreshing. Before people walked into the actual galleries, there were some short speeches in the grounds of the museum. People spoke about the show, the importance of Mohatta and of maps in general. One chief guest, an elderly man from a famous Parsi family in Karachi, was telling the audience a story about how back in the 30s, when he was a schoolboy, he would run into Mr. Mohatta on the streets of Karachi.
[quote]"We used to wear bikinis and now I think I'll be shot… would you like some Dhansak?"[/quote]
While he was speaking I wandered with him through the pre-partition streets of Karachi. “It’s a cliché to say Karachi was a different place then,” he admitted. I began thinking about so many Parsis who no longer live in Karachi. I had met a family in Bombay, half of which lived there and the other half in Karachi. Or used to, until they all moved out in the mid-nineties. “I haven’t been back to Karachi since the 60s,” one lady had told me. “What’s the point? We used to wear bikinis and now I think I’ll be shot… would you like some Dhansak?”
She moved to Zurich and never looked back. Now she shuttles between Europe and India, skipping over us entirely, as does the rest of her formerly Karachi-based family. Not a moment goes by in which their longing for it doesn’t shine through.
It’s tempting to say “well, ain’t it sad she’s gone and left it” but the fact is it isn’t. Not for her at least. She made a good decision. Switzerland’s lawmakers debated this week about whether or not they should pay their citizens 2,000 euros a month so they don’t have to “worry about basic living needs”. (You know, should they want to become flamenco dancers or competitive gardeners...)
We, by contrast, did not. Instead, we screamed “BLASPHEMY!!!” from behind beards at anything that moves. Imagine, they accused lawyers of blasphemy because they were protesting the heavy-handeness of a man called Omar. If you want to get offended, fine. But if you want to get offended on behalf of the religious figure you have been named after, then things are going to get a whole lot more complicated for everyone. The logical conclusion is that anyone who says anything against anyone with the name Muhammad (one of the most popular first names in the world) is automatically a heretic. Good luck with that.
Karachites throng to the Mohatta Palace exhibit
Living here feels like being in The Crucible without the racial diversity. The PTI (which should just change its name to PMS, considering how irrationally angry its members are all the time) have accused GEO TV of blasphemy for using a religious song for a morning show that televised a pretend wedding ceremony of a racy actress. The gist is they think the song equated the bride and groom with the holy figures of Islam. Child, please! The things that some Sunni clerics have said about these same historical figures would make your nostril hair fall out faster than a dose of chemo.
Things like this mean I no longer think Imran Khan is just unintelligent. I, along with the rest of the country that uses 1 percent of its brain, now see that he is also dangerous. (DIK, if you will.) The other man who has used this opportune moment to kick GEO TV is the cleric Hafiz Saeed (I won’t even deign to mention that muckracker-for-hire Mubasher Lucman.) Saeed’s anger at the morning shows seems strange at first because he hasn’t exactly been the Shias’ best friend. For him to have a fit of indignation over this is as blatanly opportunistic (and sponsored by YOU-KNOW-WHO, GHQ) as is it for everyone else to suddenly turn on GEO for stuff they’ve all done before.
Look, we’re already that place that bans YouTube. We ban”Homeland” when it comes on TV. We censor the Internet. We kill our people and use the blasphemy charge like people used the phrase “Whatever” after the movie Clueless came out. We are poor, angry, perverse and corrupted; we have, in a real way, lost our direction. No one can offer a quick solution to that. All I can say is that it helps at time like this to look at maps. That’s right. Maps.
As one of the speakers at the Mohatta Palace put it: “Those who lose site of the maps to their past are not condemened to relive their history, but to forfeit it altogether.”
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