Hira Azmat

Along with taking a dozen pictures for Vikram Seth fangirls and soaking in the general vibe of the place, Hira Azmat went to the halls less populated at the LLF

Shehrbano Taseer in coversation with Shobha De

The most exciting part of any Literature festival is the speaker line-up, obviously because it adds to the quality of the sessions, but also because it gives us – the plebeians – a chance to be in the general vicinity of literary stalwarts. The thrill of running into them in say, the queue for the loo, or while wolfing down the pathooray on offer, makes the whole thing quite exciting. And the Lahore Literary Festival did not disappoint in this regard, with arguably the most star-studded line-up for a local litfest thus far, including Indian star novelist and poet Vikram Seth, American academic and author Vali Nasr, gossip columnist and novelist Shobha De, filmmaker Mira Nair, and the first local public appearance of one of our most internationally acclaimed artists Shahzia Sikandar in many years

Mira Nair and Mohsin Hamid Photo by Saad Sarfraz Sheikh

Unfortunately, my celebrity stalking skills left much to be desired, and the closest I came to a celebrity encounter was getting roped in to take about a dozen photos for random fangirls with Seth, who kindly said “Well, hello” to me afterwards, leading me to subsequently gush and stammer. I also hovered awkwardly around novelist Mohammed Hanif, whose Our Lady of Alice Bhatti holds its place in my heart as the most brutal and compelling Pakistani novel in English to date, while he grappled with a samosa swimming in chana. There’s always next year, I suppose. In general, it was quite heart-warming to see women giggling and squealing over short, balding men for a change, and young men dumbstruck and stumbling around middle aged women (on day 2, an awed 20-something male friend parked himself in front of Mira Nair, mumbled “Hello, I love you” and presented notebook for signing purposes).

Shobha De called Lahore”the scandalous, tempting mistress” and Karachi “the boring wife”

This time, I’d vowed to avoid any session that was about international relations or contained the word “global” in its title (trust Pakistanis to drag politics and Larger Global Implications into any space), and focus instead on literature as one should at a literature festival. Unfortunately though, this meant I missed Jugnu Mohsin’s session on ‘The Making of Political Satire’, hilarious and one of the highlights of the festival, by all accounts. But assiduously avoiding these buzzwords gave me a chance to often avoid the most impersonal and jam-packed sessions, and attend the smaller, more intimate discussions.

Panellists discussed the singling out of female authors for scrutiny that their male counterparts aren’t subject to

The “Women on the Verge” and “Women in Classical Punjabi Literature” offered some of the best conversation at the festival. In the former, panellists discussed the singling out of female authors for scrutiny that their male counterparts aren’t subject to, such as their private lives and personal choices. ‘Women’s writing’ continues to be treated almost as a separate genre, instead of approached simply as writing. In the Punjabi session, writers and poets discussed the female voice in classical lyric poetry and epics, and the female characters in dastaans. The folk Punjabi heroines – Sohni, Sahiban, Heer – were not simply the metaphors they are understood as today, but were written as living, breathing, fully fleshed out individuals who were situated and acted within a specific socio-political context. The panellists discussed their sexuality, class, appropriation and decline, as well as the dangers of the loaded term ‘Sufi’, since poets now considered Sufi never claimed the label for themselves, or for their poetry. Notably, Riaz Shaad contrasted Iqbal’s predatory ‘shaheen’ with the women of classical Punjabi literature who unlike the shaheen, are weak, powerless, and existed on the margins, and concluded that the latter serve as better spokespersons for our society.

Vikram Seth during the session ‘A writer and his other arts’

The smallest session featuring Mira Nair was also the most brilliant, which commemorated the twenty-five years since her first feature film, Salaam Bombay, the film that made the streets of Bombay come alive to a global audience. Warm, funny, poignant, she spoke about the thin line she had walked during the making of the film between documenting and storytelling, the joys and absurdities of living and filming in the red light district, and her struggles in the filmmaking process, including an absurdly small budget and bureaucratic constraints (“I started with a full head of hair, and 70% of it had turned white by the time the film was done.”) She spoke of the lives and joie de vivre of the street children who worked as actors in the film, their bawdiness and their patois. Most heart-warmingly, she discussed how the film was instrumental in establishing a charity that has built 17 centres for homeless children to date, and has directly impacted government policy.

Rachel Dwyer and Mira Hashmi took on anti-Bollywood snobbery

The session on Masala films in Bollywood with film professor Rachel Dwyer and Mira Hashmi took on anti-Bollywood snobbery, and deconstructed what constitutes a ‘masala’ film. They discussed the connection between the persistence of the genre and the audience’s need for fantasy, escapism and desire. Dwyer also discussed the influence of Lahore studios on Bollywood, popular Indian filmmaker Yash Chopra’s Lahori origins, and pointed out how a single street in Peshawar produced the Kapoors, Dilip Kumar, and Shahrukh Khan. Dwyer disagreed with the assertion that Hindi films are formulaic, pointing out that similar films in Hollywood are identified as “genre” while the Bollywood equivalent is pejoratively labelled “masala”.

Zia Mohiyuddin talks to a lady as he waits for his session to begin

One of the highlights of the festival was the session with Zia Mohyeddin and poet Zehra Nigah on elocution and reading. The man is an institution unto himself, seems virtually eternal, and the two had genuine chemistry. Some may consider Mohyeddin a relic and his purist tendencies redundant, but for sheer beauty of speech, he has no local equal. There was such joy in simply sitting back and hearing him speak of poetry with awe, with irreverence. Zehra aapa and Zia sahib spoke of the need to retain the musicality of words in articulation, about caressing them instead of shaking them, and kept the audience rapt and silent for an hour and a half, minus the collective laughter and earnest ‘waah waah’s. Mohyeddin spoke to a huge, packed hall, but his voice has a quality that each person in the audience must have felt as if he were addressing them directly.

Most sessions inevitably turned up some commentary on the city of Lahore. In “Delirium in Karachi”, author Bilal Tanweer referred to Lahore as “a vastly imagined city”, and spoke of the sheer volume of literature and art devoted to Lahore, art that has arisen out of an engagement with this very specific physical space. Mira Nair spoke of her great love affair with the city, and declared that with The Reluctant Fundamentalist, she had pounced on the opportunity to make a film about a resident of the city. Mohsin Hamid declared, rightfully: “The citizenship of Lahore is greater than that of Pakistan.” Shobha De described the city as “languorous, indolent, extravagant; no one’s in a hurry” and dubiously termed it “the scandalous, tempting mistress” (in opposition to a Karachi that is “the boring wife”).

Held at the gorgeous Al-Hamra, the cultural hub of the city, the festival must have reminded the Lahoris in attendance of various evenings filled with music, theatre and dance, of a more vibrant Lahore. Throughout the 3-day festival, it was immensely heartening to see the halls filled to capacity, long, winding queues outside each session, and the enthusiastic crowd often lining the floor and the stairs. After a long time, it actually felt like this is the Lahore of Manto, Faiz, Habib Jalib, of basant on rooftops, of winding streets steeped in rich history and culture – the Lahore that one can live and love in.

Frome : The Friday Times 28 Feb 2014