During my school days, my parents were quite strict about the kind of films we could see. As it was a time with no television, there were comedians who featured in a series of films. My favorite comedian, who was considered to be quite sophisticated, was Danny Kaye. One of his films featured him as a teacher whose light humor made him a favorite among students and let him teach without making education boring. As a teacher of history in an academic atmosphere where it was considered a boring subject, I used to add anecdotes to my lecture. One of them was a regular feature of most of my courses. It was about a man, during the Abbasid Khilafat, who had heard that the people of Baghdad were very wise and decided to see for himself. So, he travelled to Baghdad with on his donkey and carried his parrot with him for company.
As he neared Baghdad, he was running short of funds, so he decided to stop at a village outside Baghdad. He asked a child who was playing in the field what he could buy from the little money he had to feed himself, the donkey and the parrot. The child replied, buy a watermelon. You can have the melon, the donkey will eat the skin and the parrot will get the seeds. Well, the story naturally goes on; but this is the part that was meant for my blog today. The moral is that a single solution can take care of a variety of problems if the solution has byproducts.
Like the watermelon in the story, human industry has always capitalized on byproducts. Meat from the animal provided the byproducts of gut and bone and skin for strings and needles and clothing to name the more regular uses of the body parts of the animal. A byproduct of a modern road, for example, is that it is a divisive integrator, like a river. It cuts across communities that live on either side; but joins them to many others, thereby linking them to each other in another scheme of life. And that is the key that unties the Gordian knot and releases the catch 22.
The tie that binds culture to tradition is the Gordian knot and the catch 22. Most of us believe that tradition and culture are the same thing; just as many of us can’t distinguish between ethics and morality. Ethics is morality in action; while morality is a component of culture, ethics is a part of tradition. Traditions too, are culture in action. That is to say, that so long as culture acts upon a particular kind of situation, it follows a particular line of action as a tradition. Pakistanis are people who live through samaji identities. So long as the structure of occupations was linier, the biradri [a variant of zat, which eliminates the Hindu religious significance of zat] was our form of samaj. Today, with the workforce divided into ‘sectors’, the “education sector” forms a neo-biradri, the forces [police and military] are termed as peti bhira [belt brothers] another neo-biradri, like the vukala biradri, almost a literal replacement of the qanongo sheikh.
Like the biradri tradition, as a working form of the cultural nexus of samaji unity, has changed to accommodate needs of modernity, so too have changed many other Pakistani traditions. The change in culture is a different matter because it needs a deeper reorientation of values. In my last blog, that was the point where I sidestepped the issue of continuity.
Traditions change with the times and transform themselves into a new scheme of life. We are likely to feel disturbed by the transformation because we see it as an attack on culture. This is not so in many cases and we need to use culture to rephrase traditions as needed. Sometimes it is a matter of transforming a large unit into small ones for strength, like shattered glass that makes the shatterproof windscreen of a car. Sometimes numerous small units are fused together to make a large integrated whole like fiberglass. It is all in the mind, in our way of thinking, it is that which remains unchanged to hold together a value system that makes a culture.
And that brings me back, full circle to my refrain. Our elite, our managers, our politicians, our teachers and our activists who try to fight the Pakistani cultural context and value system are the ones who are holding us back because they make us schizophrenic as a nation. I am not saying that all our elite are like that. What I am saying is that, those who are like that and those who are not like that are really at loggerheads because they do not see that we are already in a new scheme of life. One to which the Pakistani mores and culture are well adjusted but which is not well integrated in our state institutions and governance structures.
