the review2 Analysing the novel 3 The Afterm

ath 4 Rock PalaceSunday, 06 March, 2011

With Colonel Gad-dafi hanging on to the last strings to his long rule in Libya, and the spillover of

the Tunisian revolution spreading, we are left with a number of questions – a num-ber of questions regarding the future that the youth of the world are articulating for themselves.

We make a very casual mistake when we think regime-change (as revolt): we gloss over the intricate connection be-tween politics and economics. Explained more specifically, we gloss over the deep connection the state has to preserving and ensuring that a particular economic order remains in place.

Still taken as the foundational defini-tion of the modern state’s face, Max Weber defined its specificity as, “the monopoly over physical violence over a territory.” Taken at face-value, the definition begs the question: a monopoly over physical vio-lence to preserve what?

If your answer is regime, then it is too simple an answer. Regime-change is a fea-ture intrinsic to most political orders.

The answer, rather, is: the state’s mo-nopoly over physical violence exists to preserve an economic order (and, for more complicated souls, a symbolic order…but don’t think of this).

The question to askThe BBC defines what sparked the

protests in Egypt as, “The main drivers of the unrest have been poverty, rising prices, social exclusion, anger over corruption and personal enrichment among the political elite, and a demographic bulge of young people unable to find work.”

The question to ask is not who, but rather what is at fault?

What happened after Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt?

I suppose relatively few of us would know, but the aftermath of the toppling of the regime has seen a number of mas-sive labour strikes: public transport work-ers have protested, bank workers have protested, health, tourism, oil and textile workers have protested. All these protests are despite the ban on independent unions during the Hosni Mubarak era.

What produced these post-Mubarak

la-bour

protests?The first task

set in front of us is to open up the Egyptian econ-

omy (as a stereotype) – and under-stand the evolution of it to contextualise the material conditions which produced the current revolts. An article in Al-Jazeera makes two remarks about Egypt’s his-tory as a neo-liberal state: one, it was at the forefront of neo-liberal policies in the Middle East (like Tunisia); two, the reality of the Egyptian political economy is very different from rhetoric (a constant feature amongst neo-liberal states from Chile to Indonesia).

The Egyptian brandThe Egyptian brand of neo-liberalism

was lauded by IFI’s such as the Interna-tional Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success but a far starker pic-ture emerged from behind the curtain of the blinds of statistics. In reality the mar-ketisation and privatisation agenda was itself unevenly applied.

Applied to whom? Of the most vulner-able classes of society – whose experience did not provide a pretty picture – organ-ised labour was suppressed, and the public education and healthcare systems were left neglected and privatised. Wage fell in real terms relative to inflation and unem-ployment spiraled. All this while, Egypt was being lauded as a suc-cessful neo-liberal experiment.

The same Egypt, of course, was different for its wealthy. For them, the public sector did not shrink. Rather, it real-located public resourc-es to the already afflu-ent. The windfalls of privatisation fell to already po-litically well-con-nected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monop-olise rents from such diverse sources as tourism and for-eign aid. Government contracts be-

came a major source of the profits of con-

struction companies. The State itself re-mained central – it only used neo-liberal doctrine to reshape the distribution of profits. The interconnection of business and government became stronger – not weaker.

The first task inside Egypt for the fu-ture is not to manage (IMF terminology) but to re-structure the Egyptian economy to a more pro-labour economy. Essen-tial to that end is the displacement of the Egyptian military from control of major economic resources (much like our own army). The same task is required across the Middle East.

The real truthA revolt is against an order that op-

presses a people – and rulers are only the visible sources of that order. The real truth of the order is hidden behind rulers – in the day to day operation of the State. In this sense, when the suicide that sparked the Tunisian protests occurred, it was not Ben Ali that directly caused it. It was the police that had displaced the fruit seller because he was, legally speaking, ‘encroaching.’ It was an op- eration by the po-

lice to enforce the legal norm of the day to day in Egypt that sparked the protests – a legal order predi-cated on the principles of neo-liberalism.

And the protests in the Middle East are categorically against this neo-liberal order – a product of the post-Soviet union structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The rejection of the protestors is of the neo-liberal world order to which these sul-tans and dictators of the Middle East were perfectly honest to.

And if in the ensuing politics its funda-mentals are not questioned then the struc-tural causation of the rage that is fueling the streets.

Politicians, policemen, oppressors are all symptoms – not causes. It is the system that is being rejected.

Shifting the gazeAnd before we conclude it is impor-

tant to shift our gaze from the Middle East to ourselves for a single critical mo-ment. Pakistan itself during the Musharraf regime made a significant push towards neo-liberalism. The privatisation of pub-lic commodities began in the 1990s to be exact – but the ‘commodification of every-

thing’ is symptomatic more so of the Musharraf era in Pakistan.

Pushed ahead by the IFI’s the same policy-set

continues to be expanded upon – at the detriment of the people.

The Illegal Dis-possession Act 2005

and the Sindh Public Property (Removal of En-

croachment) Act 2010 are laws directed against the removal of ‘encroachments’. The laws themselves lie steeped in neo-

liberal rhetoric and have a deep anti-people founda-tion. The Sindh Law is currently being scruti-

nised by the Sindh High Court – but in Lahore the

DCO has given encroachers a deadline till March 11 to leave ‘encroached’ lands by them-

selves – or face removal.The application of a similar set

of laws in Tunisia sparked the self-immolation that set Tunisia and sub-

sequently the Middle East in uproar.Is there any chance that we shall

learn?

The Arab revolts represent more than a rejection of dictatorship – they are the rejection of the neo-liberal economic order by the youth

By Hashim bin Rashid

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By Navtej Sarna

In the recent years, the Oxford Univer-sity Press in Pakistan has published a series of good books on national and international issues.  Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan is one of

these. It has been jointly composed by Arif Hasan and Mansooor Raza.

Arif Hasan (Hilal-i-Imtiaz) is a Paki-stani architect and planner, activist, teacher and social researcher. Educated at the Ox-

ford Polytechnic, he specializes in urban planning and development issues. He is also a consultant/advisor to many local CBOs (community-based organisations), national and international NGOs and do-nor agencies. He has been involved in the Orangi Pilot Project first as its Chief Con-sultant and then as the Chairman of its Re-search Institute. As an academic he is con-nected with many Pakistani and European universities and has authored a number of books on development and planning. Pres-ently he is chairperson of the Federal Gov-ernment’s Task Force on Urbanization.

Co-author Mansoor Raza is a quali-fied engineer and environmental scientist. He is currently Deputy Director, Disaster Management for the Church World Ser-vice – Pakistan/Afghanistan. He has also

been associated with capacity building of community-based NGOs and designing of training packages for grassroots organisa-tions.

This book was originally published (2009) as a working paper encompassing a larger study by the International Institute for Environment and Development, on governance for local development in small urban centres responding to the challenges and opportunities of increasing migration/emigration and mobility.

The book has largely capitalized on secondary sources and census reports of the government of Pakistan. Besides visit-ing three small towns viz., Mithi (in district Tharparkar, Sindh),    Uch (in district Ba-hawalpur, southern Punjab) and Chiniot ( now a district in central Punjab) chosen for

Analysing the novel

The social demography of Pakistan

The book has a racy style. Its factual accuracy and narrative fluency is sure to interest and impress the readers

Orhan Pamuk’s latest work is a fluent 200 pages on his literary craft and absorbing reflections on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce and Mann

At the Jaipur Literary Festival I was one of the couple of hun-dred people who could not get a seat to listen to Orhan Pamuk in the crowded front lawns of Diggi Palace. It was even

better I thought, a sort of sweet penance, to actually stand through the hour on the side-lines to listen to an admired author in person. It was all fine till we came to the Q&A.

A few lucky ones were selected from the sea of hands that rose from the audi-ence. And like a trained handler of large audiences, Pamuk bit into each one of them, cutting them short, rephrasing their questions impatiently, hurrying on to the next. One somewhat long-winded but patently sincere questioner was waved disdainfully into stammering silence.

Perhaps Pamuk did not intend to be rude at all and I am certainly not suggesting that there was a touch of Ottoman arrogance about it. Perhaps it was only a combination of his somewhat didactic manner, his heavily de-liberated sentences and a quicksilver intellect, eager to get on with things. In any case, the spell was broken and I found myself wishing that at least I should have been seated.

Nevertheless, I picked up his latest book, though I could not muster up the courage to have it signed by him. The Naïve and The Sentimental Novelist contains Pamuk’s brilliant Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 2009 and is modelled on the tradition set by E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and The Theory of the Novel by Hungarian critic Gyorgy Lukacs. Read-ing it, several other immensely readable works by novelists on the art and craft of fiction came to mind: John Gard-ner’s essays, Irving Wallace’s The Writ-ing of a Novel and John Steinbeck’s Jour-nal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters.

In Pamuk’s lectures the words

“naïve” and “sentimental” are not used as ordinarily understood in English. The analogy is drawn from an 18th century essay by the German poet Schiller: “Naïve poets are one with nature; in fact, they are like nature – calm, cruel and wise. They write poetry

spontaneously, almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual or ethi-cal consequences of their words and paying no attention to what others might say… the sentimental (emotional, reflective) poet is uneasy… so he is exceedingly aware of the poem he writes, the methods and techniques

he uses, the artifice involved in his endeav-our.”

Pamuk extends this analogy, and deepens it in the process, to novelists and novel readers, analysing the pro-cesses that go into reading a novel – following the narrative, absorbing

the atmosphere, wondering how much is real and how much imag-

ined, searching for what he calls its “secret center” – and in con-

structing it. The result is a fluent 200 pages on his literary craft and absorbing reflections on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce and Mann.

In his lecture titled “Mr. Pamuk, did all this really hap-

pen to you?”, the author addresses that question that every writer faces from his readers, the question that forced Flaubert to exclaim, when re-peatedly asked who Madame Bovary was modelled on: “I am Madame Bovary.”

While Pamuk says clearly that he is not Kemal, the hero of his huge novel The Museum of Innocence, he

is also aware that it is impossible to convince readers of this fact and also

that partially he wants readers to believe that he is Kemal. The novelist expresses

his own experience, his way of seeing things, through the experience and

the reactions of his characters and it is this power that brings

the text to life in the imagina-tion of the reader.

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Title: Migration and Small Towns in PakistanAuthors: Arif Hasan with Mansoor RazaPublishers: Oxford University Press, KarachiPages: 205; Price: 695/-

this book and their neighbouring villages, the authors inter-viewed a cross-section of people from amongst businessmen, NGO employees, artisans, welfare associations’ representa-tives, successful/unsuccessful migrants/emigrants and agents facilitating legal/informal emigration.

The book has eight chapters preceded by abbreviations, glossary and the preface whereas the addenda comprise two lengthy appendices carrying excerpts from interviews and various tables.

The title of the book viz.,  Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan explains itself in more than one way. It describes ‘the political, geographical, and ecological contexts within which migrations to and from Pakistan have taken place’  including those from India arising from the establishment of the canal colonies, partition and the Kashmir wars in the late nine-teenth and early-mid twentieth centuries, and from Afghani-stan and Bangladesh in the two crucial decades of 1970s and 1980s.

The authors have also taken into account the scale of rural-urban migration and emigration along with its history, causes, repercussions (social, physical, economic and demo-graphic in the relevant areas of study), and processes (both legal and illegal) vis-à-vis the actors at play i.e., emigrant or-ganizations, state and private agencies and illegal operators.

The book further describes the impact of remittances on Pakistan’s macro economy and the response of the state to the phenomena of emigration. It spotlights the evolution of small towns in general with special reference to the designated towns of Mithi, Uch and Chiniot.

The relationship between political power, land holding, urban form and development of the aforesaid three towns has been critically evaluated. The text of the book is supported by a wide range of facts and figures containing statistical data, maps and interviews.

A study of Mingora town in the Swat district of Khyber

Analysing the novel

When a perceptive reader tells Pamuk: “I know you so well, you’d be surprised,” he is overcome with guilt and embarrassment. It was not the writer’s factual details or even his personal habits and views that the reader was referring to but “a deeper, more intimate, more secret thing.”

Pamuk realises that the reader had come to know his sensory experiences: “how I feel when I inhale the scent of rain-soaked earth, when I get drunk in a noisy restaurant, when I touch my father’s false teeth after his death, when I regret that I am in love, when I get away with a small lie I have told…” and it is this knowledge of intimacy that embarrasses him in front of the reader. This ambiguity between the real and imagined is but one of the fascinating characteristics that makes the novel the unsurpassable genre that it is and it is clear that the more the novelist succeeds in blending his na-ïve and his sentimental sides, the better the novel.

Pamuk also takes head-on the issue of character against plot. “Novelists do not first invent a protagonist with a very special soul, and then get pulled along, ac-cording to the wishes of this figure, into specific sub-jects or experiences. The desire to explore particular topics comes first. Only then do novelists conceive the figures who would be most suitable for elucidating these topics.” The plot is nothing but a line that con-nects several thousands of small points, “large or small spheres of energy” or what Nabokov called “nerve end-ings” that make up the novel. Each of these nerve end-ings, even if they be a mere description of landscape, or the snowflakes outside Anna Karenina’s train window, “should be an extension of the emotional, sensual and psychological world of the protagonists.”

As I finished reading these fascinating lectures, including his ruminations on the similarity between novels and museums — his actual Museum of Inno-cence is nearing completion in Istanbul — I realised I like meeting Orhan Pamuk on the written page. I only wish I had managed to slip him a note on the crowded front lawns in Jaipur saying that it is the readers, be they naïve, sentimental or occasionally long-winded, who make the writer.

The plot is nothing but a line that connects several thousands of small points, “large or small spheres of energy” or what Nabokov called “nerve endings” that make up the novel

The Aftermath

Most people die before they can witness the historical consequences of their actions. Ulrich, the 100-year-old Bulgarian man at the center

of Rana Dasgupta’s new novel, “Solo,” is an exception: he is so ancient he lives in a state of perpetual, dazed aftermath. Once the manager of a chemical factory for the Communists, he watches as Bulgaria’s rivers start oozing familiar poisons: “Like all his compatriots, Ulrich had become chemical himself, his blood a solution of cadmium, lead, zinc and copper.” Soon after, Communism falls, multiplying the pointlessness of Ulrich’s life.

The first half of “Solo” is a swift retelling of Bulgarian history through Ulrich’s many failures. When this story ends, we are abruptly introduced to Ulrich’s “Daydreams” — his “private fictions” that “have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense.” But these so-called dreams are in fact the ultramodern and well-researched tales of three young Eastern European characters trying to make it big in New York in the 2000s. They are only glancingly fabulist and tenuously linked to Ulrich’s experiences. “Solo” bills itself as a novel, but it is really two distinct novellas held together by the author’s interest in Bulgaria and Georgia.

Ulrich represents the proud Bulgarian spirit that was crushed by Communism. He is one of many students drawn by a surge of scientific optimism in the 1920s to Berlin, where a chance encounter with Einstein feeds his ambitions of making a great discovery. Tragically, he never finishes his studies in chemistry. Recalled to Sofia by his bankrupt family, he ends up working as a bookkeeper and, later, as the manager of a barium chloride factory. But he is never completely resigned to anonymity. In one startling section, he weeps uncontrollably when he witnesses any example of “surpassing human achievement.” His pitiable attempts to conduct private experiments are the most moving parts of the book.

In formal, almost fussy prose, Dasgupta suggests Ulrich is alienated from his own past. Certain happy memories, like the one involving Ulrich’s courtship, in Berlin, of Clara Blum, the only woman he truly loved, are presented in a series of beautiful paragraph-long fragments. But these never deepen beyond snapshots. Neither

do the other characters, who speak in a lofty idealistic manner, and whose lives, cut short by war or Communism, are mere illustrations of the brutality of Bulgarian history. The overall effect is of reading the summary of a tragedy rather than experiencing it firsthand.

Dasgupta’s writing soars when it isn’t tethered to historical fact. In the second novella, he moves fluidly from the pig-farming traditions of rural Bulgaria and the raves of post-Communist Tbilisi to contemporary New York, where a couple of Bulgarian bureaucrats approach an American record executive to produce a Bulgarian music superstar — the only way, they feel, the world can be made to care about their country.

What ensues is not the silly comedy of errors one would expect: Dasgupta is a deeply empathetic, serious writer. If he works with fairly recognizable

types (a narcissistic record producer, a mad-genius Bulgarian folk musician, a suicidal Georgian poet and his gangster-moll sister), he complicates them by making them care for one another in warm and mysterious ways. The last section of “Solo” brims with superb descriptions of folk music and the drunken talk of men and women who are brought together, then driven apart, by the fall of Communism.

In the end, it is the differences between the novellas that stay with the reader. Compared with the capitalist antics of the “Daydreams” section, the quiet heroism of Ulrich’s life becomes even more impressive. In his last decades, he is stripped of all relatives, denied his private experiments by the government and reduced to homelessness. Yet he goes on. And remarkably, at the end of “Solo,” Ulrich is still alive.

Karan Mahajan is the author of the novel “Family Planning.”

–Courtesy New York Times Review

By Karan Mahajan

SOLOBy Rana Dasgupta339 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25.

Pakhtoonkhwa was also included in the original plan of the book. But it could not be visited by the authors ow-ing to the adverse law and order situation prevailing in the area at that point of time (November, 2007).  None-theless, studies from that province do find a place in the early chapters of the book as an alternative to their visit to Mingora.

The book has a racy style. Its factual accuracy and narrative fluency is sure to interest and impress the read-ers. In the last chapter, the authors have come out with some optimistic conclusions about the positive impact of emigration on our social, political and economic life.

But in the end they have also emphasized that ‘a number of issues need to be addressed regarding the processes and repercussions of emigration’ like illegal

emigration, problem of bonded labour, need for productive investment of foreign remittances

and protection of the human rights of mi-grants in the countries to which they

emigrate.

By Salman Rashid

From utter perdition the building was once again rehabilitated

Rock Palace

Sunday, 06 March, 2011

When I saw it in the summer of 1990, I de-

spaired. Shigar Fort, as outsiders know it, or Fong Khar, to give it the real name, was in a state of near total ruin. The massive stone walls had tumbled down in various places, doors hung askew on large hinges in hefty jambs, roofs had collapsed and rain and snow had washed in the mud to fill the rooms. One room with its roof intact, per-haps the only one, was a shelter for a few cows.

I came away from Fong Khar knowing that in another few years, its last traces will have crumbled into the dust. The sad part was that it was set in a perfect idyll: smack by a boisterous stream in the midst of huge plane and mulberry trees. If only the vines that would surely have once graced its eaves and over-hangs were still there, the picture would have been complete.

In August 2006 I was in Skardu and it was mentioned that Fong Khar had received a new lease of life breathed in by Aga Khan Cul-tural Service Pakistan (AKCSP). From utter perdition the building was once again rehabilitated. It was like a dream, I could hardly believe what I saw.

It was in the 1630s that Hasan

Khan, twentieth in line of the Amacha rulers of Shigar, returned home. Ousted from his kingdom by the neighbouring Raja of Skardu, Hasan Khan had fled to the court of Shah Jehan, the Mughal king of India. Making a return bid with royal help, he defeated the usurper and imprisoned him in Shigar. Meanwhile, he set to building Fong (Rock) Khar (Fort) with stone ma-sons, woodworkers and other arti-sans brought over from India.

The name owes to the huge boulder around which one part of the palace is built. One wonders why the building could not avoid this mass that juts out of the east wall and apparently serves no pur-pose. Perhaps Raja Hasan Khan fancied the name Fong Khar and deliberately incorporated the rock.

The architecture was strictly Balti incorporating defensive ele-ments in a residential royal build-ing, but the wood carving had subtle indications of| Tibetan, Kashmiri and Punjabi influences. Completing the fort, Hasan Khan moved into the valley from an older fort high up the hill to the east. From the middle years of the 17th century the family thus lived in this castle until it was abandoned in or about 1880.

Hashmatullah Khan, a bureau-crat of the Raj who spent about two decades of his service in  Kashmir, visited Fong Khar in the 1890s and found it in a reasonable state of upkeep. Photos from the 1930s, however, show a rundown and all but abandoned complex of build-ings. As newer annexes were raised within the Fong Khar complex, older parts of the palace were aban-doned. Only the annex known as Garden House built about 1950 served as residence for the Raja and his family as late as 2003.

It was the following year that the Raja of Shigar realising that it was beyond his capacity or that

of the government to redeem the building gifted it to AKCSP. Then he may not have imagined the ruin would be brought back from the brink. But it was that same meticu-lous planning and execution that gave us the restored Baltit Fort of Hunza that returned Fong Khar to its early 20th  century shape. Today Fong Khan is a five-star hotel making for the perfect getaway by its noisy brook where the magpies

engage in noisy arguments and golden orioles sing in leafy treetops.

When AKCSP took over Fong Khar, it had a definite plan. After restoration the proceeds from the hotel would be divided up to keep the hotel going as well as to enable local communities to finance their own projects. While thirty percent of the profit was to be kept aside to tide over lean years that the hotel might face, and equal percentage

was earmarked for maintenance – this being a nearly four hundred year old edifice. Ten percent was returned to AKCSP.

The Shigar Town Management Society received twenty percent which this year amounted to some-thing over one million rupees. This amount will be spent by the Soci-ety itself on whatever projects it deems fit. If Shigar and its environs see a change in the coming years,

they have to be thankful not only to AKCSP but to their elderly raja who gifted his palace to the organ-isation.

Across Pakistan there are virtu-ally thousands of historical build-ings as important as exemplars of vernacular architecture as Fong Khar – many of them with the po-tential of becoming profitable con-cerns. Yet they rot, fall to pieces and are by and by lost. In the last thirty years I have seen a few hundred bite the dust. AKCSP spent money on Fong Khar and turned it into a profit-making establishment. Is it difficult that organisations (not necessarily AKCSP) replicate this sterling effort elsewhere in  Paki-stan?

We are slowly losing our built heritage to negligence. Will someone else too heed this  cri de coeur  and come forward to begin the long journey?

–Salman Rashid, rated as the best in the country, is a travel writer

and photographer who has travelled all around Pakistan and written

about his journeys.

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We are slowly losing our built heritage to negligence. Will someone else too heed this cry from the heart and come forward to begin the long journey?

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The old cook house