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The Dawn: Nov 17, 2017
PUNJAB NOTES: The city: a window or a cul-de-sacMushtaq Soofi
City is thought to be a high point in the evolutionary process of human society. It reflects both collective achievement and individual excellence in its diverse aspects. City in fact represents triumph of the cerebral over ‘village idiocy’, social dynamics over vegetative existence and detachment over saccharine intimacy. It’s a hall-mark of cultural refinement and civilisational advance by which we judge human development in all its aspects. City is an opportunity but with the passage of time it has become more of a challenge as a result of fast paced urbanisation which has put it under immense pressure. But the city, how big it may grow, is never a finished product or a perfect entity. It’s ever evolving, ever-changing in both predictable and unpredictable directions. Academics and intellectuals all over the world wrestle with the graspable and ungraspable dimensions of the city and urbanisation. “The City: An Evolving Organism” was the theme of the 8th International Conference organised by THAAP [Trust for history, art and architecture of Pakistan], in collaboration with the Government College University, Lahore and the Higher Education Commission last week. The event was professionally managed by Prof Pervaiz Vandal and Prof Sajida Vandal with the help of their team of enthusiastic young men and women. The city as we all know has a paradoxical nature; it’s an open book and a perplexing puzzle, a known construct and an undecipherable enigma. The secret of this elusive phenomenon to a degree lies buried in the fact that the city is an evolving organism. It continues to undergo multiple changes perceptibly and imperceptibly driven by diverse and conflicting forces, known and unknown. It has avaricious appetite to expand both horizontally and vertically. The theme of the conference was highly relevant in our context where our cities, most of them ill-planned, are busting at seams due to unbearable population pressure exerted by internal growth rate and migration from small towns and countryside. Scholars, academics and researchers from diverse backgrounds and disciplines gathered in Lahore to ponder over the issue and exchange views. Intellectuals from Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi were obviously there. The presence of scholars from the United Kingdom, France, Turkey and New Zealand added to the prestige of the occasion. One could see I A Rehman, a veteran human rights campaigner and journalist, HEC Chairman Dr Mukhtar Ahmed, Government College University Lahore Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Hasan Amir Shah, HEC Punjab Chairman Prof Dr Muhammad Nizamuddin, Prof Dr Syeda Arifa Zahra, Prof Dr Gulzar Haider and Kalim Siddiqui among the literati. Prof Pervaiz Vandal, in his key-note address lucidly and forcefully broached the subject when he said: ‘the question is why a city and why did it become what it is today…Cities can perhaps best be understood as part of ongoing process of human survival…it is one of the tools that homo-sapiens invented to help with their survival just as writing or the scientific thinking… the cities cannot be wished away, nor their continued expansion be stopped as long as we continue with the existing socio-economic and political framework’. This exposition set the ball rolling. The conference had seven sessions spanning over three days in addition to the opening and closing ceremonies. Some 30 well-researched papers were presented. The organisers received 140 abstracts making the selection of papers a challenge. The presenters covered a vast range of issues such as environment, ecology and animal and bird life in cities, domestic workers, origins of urbanism in South Asia, cities in literature, begging, life of Bazaar, to name a few. The quality of the papers presented was high because each paper had a component of original research, a rare thing in our plagiarism infested academic world. One of the papers deserves special mention. Ms Rehana Lafont’s ‘A Glimpse of Everyday Life in Early 19th Century Punjab Through Jean de la Fontaine’s Fable Illustrated by Imam Baksh Lahori, 1837-1840’ was a wonderful presentation aimed at introducing a little-known but highly creative miniature painter and illustrator who worked for the French general Allard employed by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. It was a serendipitous gift for the most the audience. One hopes in future this son of Lahore will be accorded iconic status which he amply deserves. An important session on photography took place at the GCU. The good thing about the conference was that it shunned glitz and glamour. It focused instead on the contemporary socio-cultural and politico-economic issues of urban life in a serious academic manner. That most of the scholars who took to the stage were young dispelled the impression that our intellectual future would be bleak. The THAAP Conference probed one thing: the future belongs to the young and they are concerned about it. — soofi01@hotmail.com |