by Meena Menon
It was after a stint as the UNICEF’s social development consultant in Sri Lanka in the Mahaweli Ganga project (which earned him a full-page write-up in Newsweek called ‘A Man Named Khan’) that the Aga Khan Foundation asked him to take up a project in Gilgit in Pakistan. The day he was to fly to Gilgit, on 1 December 1982, his flight didn’t take off. That’s when he got hold of a jeep and drove the 600 kilometres from Islamabad.
The AKRSP has an ongoing programme not only in Gilgit but also in other parts of Pakistan, much of it documented in Sultan Khan’s book, A Journey through Grassroots Development.2 He emerged as a rarity, a bureaucrat who tried to use his powers to do something for the poor, and one who had established strong ties with communities and leaders in both India and Pakistan. His biography is called Man in the Hat,3 but his own memoirs I am sure could fill several volumes.
Instead of some quotes for my story, I ended up doing an op-ed article and a blog on Sultan Khan whom I missed meeting in New Delhi after I returned. He made it to the list of twenty Pakistanis to be proud of in a book published by the Jang Group in April 2016. At eighty-five, he can look back on a more fulfilled life than most people.
Demure yet determined
In a society where women moving around freely aroused suspicions of the worst kind, Shaista’s task was tricky. When she and some others first started community work in a tribal area in Haripur, people thought they were American agents or had come to rob them. They started locking up their houses on seeing her, but slowly she convinced them about the need to come out and speak up over issues like water. Women began to realize the joys of mobility by holding meetings and controlling their finances. Over fifteen years ago, Narian village was the first in KPK to have a community organization, and digging bore wells was a priority, which improved the water situation. In the whole process, the women were able to overcome their fear of visiting other mohallas. This freedom often triggered the community’s ire—they were called ‘shameless’ and even got death threats when they first started their organizations.
The women from the self-help groups told their stories casually; they were chilling at times and I got a brief glimpse into their difficult lives which had been transformed by their association with the Rural Support Programme. They were young and older women, demure yet determined, and since I couldn’t travel out of Islamabad, some of them came from Haripur and other places to meet me. It was Zubina perhaps who faced the gravest threats to her life when she was trying to train survivors of the massive earthquake in 2005. She was more educated than most girls and had managed to study till the tenth class in Haripur (in KPK) and became a master trainer in handicrafts. When she was sent to Kohistan to teach survival skills to young people, she faced a class full of hostile boys, ready to kill her because she was a woman. Zubina explained to me patiently that women were not allowed to step out of the house or even go into another mohalla. This invited death, and in Besham the young boys were startled to see a woman as their teacher and they reacted in the only way they had been taught. This is an area where a woman can be shot in the name of honour, for looking at a man, for going out to bathe or for any other ‘non-reason’. Being a woman, in fact, seemed enough reason for a man to kill you. But Zubina was tough; mere threats were not going to deter her and she told her class to take it or leave it. As part of the Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP), the only development organization working there, she had a distinct advantage and managed to teach tailoring to some boys. The SRSP is part of the Rural Support Programmes Network (RSPN), Pakistan’s largest network of NGOs, and its work is based on the approach first implemented in northern Pakistan by the AKRSP in 1982.
The RSPN was set up in 2000 as a network of eleven rural support programmes. Microcredit is a big part of the programme and community groups set up by women run small businesses or shops or even buy taxis for their husbands. Instead of working in other people’s houses, they are self-sufficient thanks to the small amounts of money on credit. Fauzia from Nilor said that at first the women started saving PKR 10 and those who couldn’t bring money brought something in kind, sometimes even eggs. It was difficult to get loans from banks but the credit from the RSP became a revolving fund and women disbursed money themselves. More than money or loans, it was the motivation and courage to do something which was a thrill for women like Naheed from a settlement in the Islamabad Capital Territory. Similarly, Shagufta and some other women started their own pickle manufacturing business and she was certainly the first businesswoman in her area. The entire programme taught the women to speak up, and the community groups also started throwing up political leadership—about 300 women have won elections at various levels. In the case of Iram Fatima who contested twice—the second time in the General Elections of Pakistan in 2013—she lost both times but planned to contest again.
After the Indian connection when Shoaib Sultan Khan became adviser to a UNDP project in the SAARC countries, a team from Pakistan visited Andhra Pradesh to see how women were at the forefront, and it had a galvanizing effect. Shandana, the chief executive officer of the RSPN, said that for Pakistanis to see women as leaders was quite startling. After the visit, nearly 50 per cent of the credit groups and community organizations had women working in them, which was less than half of that many years ago. However, the expansion of the Rural Support Programme has been slow—it exists in 111 of the 131 districts of Pakistan, and in two of the thirteen FATAs, covering 5.2 million households. The target is ambitious—17 million poor, rural households. I was invited to visit a successful microcredit programme in Bahawalpur but I didn’t even ask to go. I knew what the answer would be.
Soulful and simple
I was introduced to her at one of the Indian high commission parties just as she was leaving and I was entering. I was flaunting my new jeans from Khaadi to friends and I didn’t realize it was the Queen of Soul who was looking on. I was so taken aback that I stammered a greeting and she kept bowing. I was puzzled as to what I should do next, as I had already—and I thought effusively—greeted her. She lowered her right hand to her knees lifting it up again and again—thrice in fluid movements—her curls tumbling over her shoulder. I later read somewhere that it was a floor salaam. I had seen courtiers greet the emperor in probably Mughal-e-Azam and wondered why I was so deeply honoured. If anything, it was I who should be scraping the floor for her. I stood transfixed till she bowed out of the gate while I heard stifled laughter in the background. I should have bowed deeply as many times in return, explained my wretched friends who were hysterical with laughter, and who had suddenly become sticklers for etiquette. I lacked tehzeeb, they stuttered. That was Abida Parveen for you—her love and humility knew no bounds, like her music which melted borders. To my horror, that encounter was narrated many times and it amused some of my friends no end. For a while every time I met them and there was a new person who hadn’t heard the story, they would start, ‘Do you know what she did when she met Abida Parveen?’
It was a bit comic really. Anyway, undaunted, I fixed up a meeting at her residence, next to a fancy boutique owned by her daughter. I didn’t think it would be easy to meet her though. Her new album, Shah Jo Raag, had been released in Karachi and that was a perfect peg for my feature. I had to wait for an hour as she was resting, and I was getting nervous that she wouldn’t meet me at all. Waiting in AP Gallerie, her boutique, I met some fashion designers from Peshawar who were displaying their well-cut but expensive stuff, and to pass time I looked at a whole wall dedicated to her Sufi albums, and photos (mostly with Indian artistes): Lata Mangeshkar, R.D. Burman, Pandit Jasraj; of her performance in 2008 at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai; there is one of her hugging Shoukat Kaifi Azmi; with her guru, Ustad Salamat Ali Khan; and one of her at Dargah Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer Sharif in 2001. There were awards displayed in another section of the gallery which had a motley collection of clothes, jewellery and artefacts.
When I met her at last, she was dressed simply in beige, her hair fell in an u
nruly mop around her shoulders, and she was warm and effusive as if I was an old friend. To my relief, she didn’t mention my lack of tehzeeb. In her mind there was no doubt of the mohabbat between India and Pakistan, and her first love was Sufism and her Sufi masters. She was simple and childlike in her answers, and the word ‘ruhaniyat’ (soulfulness) was the theme that evening. She took very little credit for her music—it was all a gift from her devotion to her spiritual masters, the many Sufi saints. She was full of the ‘jalsa’ in Karachi where the Shah Jo Raag album had been launched and the warm feelings from there—the kind of soulfulness that reduced people to tears. She suddenly referred to the politics and the bomb blasts, and said in the midst of these, there was a message of love and peace from Sufism and that message gave an inner strength to people to unite them. It was almost miraculous, she exulted. In this world of love and soul, there was no room for blood, she said.
It was fifteen years ago that she recorded the first sur of Shah Jo Raag, the verses of Shah Abdul Latif, the eighteenth-century Sufi poet, whose songs have been sung by his disciples, from sunset to sunrise in his mausoleum in Bhit Shah for well over 250 years. It was a colossal effort to compile some of that music for the first time into Shah Jo Raag, an eleven-CD album which is accompanied by a beautiful monograph. She started learning music at three, and she giggled as she said that school was everywhere since her father, Ustad Ghulam Haider, ran a music school. Unlike the strict regimen for learning classical music, there was no one place she sat to learn, she said—it was all so casual and fluid, they would fight about notes, he would ask her to sing something, correct her, and so it went on. Music was everywhere, she was learning all the time though she lifted a finger to press home the point that learning was never enough or complete. The real school was dispensable in this charming and informal world she had lived in, and she dismissively said that she had studied up to the twelfth standard (barah–chaudah).
Her father was an exponent of the Patiala gharana and a great admirer of the legendary singer Amir Khan whose music he heard on All India Radio. She grew up listening to the songs sung at Bhit Shah and longed to sing them. And she did, after many years of hard work and research. ‘Even if you understand a single word, it’s a moment of ecstasy, and it shows you how to live your life and what should guide you.’ She has sung all the thirty ragas in the album and some of them had not been sung before this way. Her first public performance was also at Bhit Shah and it was not without some trepidation. I couldn’t believe that someone who gave herself to so much abandon in her performances, was actually afraid. It was only in 1973 that she auditioned for Radio Pakistan; later, she launched her first album with songs by Bulleh Shah. She has sung at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai a few times and wants more exchange between the two countries. There was so much love across the border among families, artistes, she said, and no one could stop that. For her, India and Pakistan were one country: ‘They think the same way and there is sweetness and love. I think this way—please correct me if I am wrong. Love is a force, it’s like the sea, it cannot break.’
She has her favourite Indian artistes—Pandit Jasraj, Ustad Amir Khan and Ustad Zakir Hussain Khan. Her favourite in Pakistan was Tari Khan, a celebrated tabla player. Her spiritual guide was Syed Muhammed Najib Sultan Bahu, though she drew inspiration from other Sufi saints as well. She was then busy with a new project translating the compositions of Hazrat Sultan-ul-Arifeen (born in 1631 or perhaps a couple of years earlier, and died in 1691), who wrote in Persian, into Seraiki and she would sing it in both languages. Sultan-ul-Arifeen had said that whoever reads his work will not need to search for a spiritual master. Abida quoted a line by him: ‘Where I have reached no one else has.’ She closed the interview with that moving line and I thought that along with so many other Pakistanis I met, she had brought an element of sanity and soulfulness into the relationship between our two countries. There was no room for hatred or suspicion here and not even an iota of doubt about the love between the two countries. Abida Parveen’s music and performances can take you to a higher realm when the world is being destroyed by violence and she is a very vital part of that narrowing fabric of peace. My favourite album is the one where she has sung the verses by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. I never imagined one day I would meet or interview her. She shows us a way, like Jiddu Krishamurthi did many years ago, to rise above our ‘petty tyrannies’.
Voice of the desert
She sang for the first time at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan, Sindh. Her family didn’t think much of her talent, but at the age of twelve she recorded the song ‘Laal Meri’ on Pakistan Radio, but her favourite was ‘Badi Lambi Judai’. When I first heard Reshma I wondered who this woman was, with her full-throated, haunting voice. She was born in Bikaner in Rajasthan in a nomadic Banjara community, and her family moved to Karachi after 1947.
Throat cancer claimed Reshma when I was in Islamabad and I had to write a tribute. In one of the CDs I bought, she speaks before each song and disarmingly attributes her voice to God. She speaks of her family’s resistance to her singing and of later acceptance. Reshma was discovered by Saleem Gilani, then a producer with Radio Pakistan who went on to head it as director general. He heard her when she sang at the shrine in Sehwan and called her for a recording to Karachi, according to journalist Murtaza Solangi who had tweeted a photo with Reshma. When I called Solangi, he spoke to me at length about the beginning of her long and stellar singing career.
During his tenure with Radio Pakistan, Solangi launched a series of programmes at different radio stations to pay tribute to living legends, and one of them was Reshma. ‘How could I forget Reshma? In my youthful years her voice always enriched me and she connected Rajasthan, Cholistan and Sindh. She was the voice of love and peace. Last year in March, we had an event to pay tribute to her musical journey and contribution, with her contemporaries and young artists. She couldn’t resist. I will sing too, she said. And there she was on the stage in unbelievable command, giving instructions to musicians and people on the percussion.’ Solangi also described how when she started singing, many eyes went misty. ‘When I put a woollen shawl from Sindh on her shoulders, she had an amazing smile. It smells of home, she told me.’
He continued, ‘She is not with us, but her voice will always be with us. I will always remember Reshma, the flower of the desert, symbol of love, music and peace!’ Her voice which is full of longing, evokes the desert of her origin and always reminds me of wide, open spaces.
Student exchange and Partition memories
If great artistes like Abida Parveen form one end of the spectrum of love between the two countries, there are other attempts to bring the two countries closer. And I came across this Exchange for Change programme quite by accident from an encounter at a friend’s lunch party. The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) was recording oral histories of those who survived Partition and I was lucky to meet some of the people featured in that project. The letters exchange programme, or Exchange for Change, between school students in India and Pakistan since 2010, also set up by the CAP, was one way of sharing and learning about each other. The letters reflected a natural curiosity about food, clothes, monuments and way of life, and the students met at the end of the programme. The CAP is dedicated to cultural and historical preservation, and the letters programme was quite a success with the number of schools and students increasing every year. Untainted by propaganda and stereotypes, the students wanted to visit each other’s countries and learn. There was plenty to discover: for instance, that the Taj Mahal is not the only monument in India; Indians eat mangoes and the women wear ‘ghaghras’. Some had grandparents born in India and they prayed for unity between the two countries. One student in a letter said that India was a nice place and there were nice people like Gandhi! The third phase connected 5000 schoolchildren from India and Pakistan—2500 from each country.
In a way, both programmes of the CAP were different dimensions of relations between India and Pakistan. One looked
to the future and the other wanted to preserve the past, rich with memories painful and happy, but evocative testimonies to the bloody and painful division of a country. The Exchange for Change in collaboration with Routes 2 Roots, an Indian non-profit organization, was for young students while the oral archives documented memories of those who lived around the time of Partition. I interviewed three survivors of Partition and I sensed a feeling of regret because Pakistan didn’t turn out the way it was envisaged by Jinnah as a secular state, though for Prof. Naeem Qureshi, the parting was inevitable. ‘Partition is a process, where does one begin and where does one end? And the last word on it has not been said.’ For others, it was a process that reversed for ever a pluralistic society. It was not what he saw or remembered of Partition that mattered to Khalid Chima, a retired civil servant, it was the aftermath. ‘Growing up was a time when religion didn’t matter and all you worried about at school was if the new boy was a team player. Your Brahmin scoutmaster ate with you and you had friends staying over. It was a time of long Sunday visits, shikar trips, vacations spent together at hill stations with friends and family,’ said Chima. Life changed in the new country, and his father, a government servant in Sialkot, fully intended to go to East Punjab in India during Partition.
