In June 1857, when Indian soldiers laid siege to Cawnpore (now Kanpur), enclosing British East India Company officials, they were accompanied by a courtesan. In the midst of the confrontation, as shots whizzed around, the courtesan was seen by at least one eyewitness armed with pistols.

Azeezunbai’s fascinating story finds no mention in history textbooks. If it survives today, it is mainly in archival reports, local legends, and a paper written by Lata Singh, an associate professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Going through these resources can be like leafing through a flip book. Scattered across them is a picture of a woman who made a pivotal contribution to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, at the forefront and behind the scenes, working as an informer, messenger and possibly even a conspirator in the Kanpur chapter of the rebellion.

A courtesan from Lucknow, Azeezunbai moved to Kanpur at a young age. There, as Singh writes, she grew close to the sepoys of the British Indian Army, particularly one Shamsuddin Khan.

Testimony given to the British inquiry into the rebellion described Azeezunbai as being “intimate with men of the second cavalry” and “in the habit of riding” with armed soldiers on horseback. She was also spotted “on horseback in male attire decorated with medals, armed with a brace of pistols” during the mutiny.

The tale of Azeezunbai is one of the many forgotten stories of India’s courtesans that were examined during a seminar held at Mumbai’s Royal Opera House on April 27.

Tehzeeb-e Tawaif, organised by Manjari Chaturvedi’s The Courtesan Project, in collaboration with Avid Learning and the Royal Opera House, brought together historians, writers and researchers for a day-long symposium to discuss the legacies of India’s performing artists of the 18th to the 20th centuries.

The panellists included Singh, historian Veena Talwar Oldenburg, musician Shubha Mudgal, cultural writer Veejay Sai, cinema scholar Yatindra Mishra, academic and political science professor Sanghamitra Sarker and bureaucrat-historian AN Sharma.

The event followed a similar iteration in Delhi in March and is one of many ways in which Chaturvedi, a Kathak dancer and founder of the Sufi Kathak Foundation, is trying to change the contemporary perception of courtesans.

Pushed to the margins

History has famously marginalised the voices of women, but even within that paradigm, India’s female entertainers have received a disproportionately bad rap.

Known variously as tawaifs in the North, devadasis in the South, baijis in Bengal and naikins in Goa, these professional singers and dancers were dubbed as “nautch girls” during the British rule, and their profession was conflated with prostitution in the late 19th century.

As a result, their contribution to India’s classical arts was scrubbed out of the collective consciousness and their stories found little place, even in the margins of history.

In their glory days, the courtesans were at the centre of art and culture in India, proficient in both music and dance.

Author and historian Pran Nevile, an authoritative voice on the subject, drew a link between these public entertainers and the apsaras of Indian mythology. In his book Nautch Girls of India: Dancers, Singers, Playmates, Nevile described how the tawaifs of North India enjoyed wealth, power, prestige, political access, and were considered authorities on culture.

Noble families would send their sons to them to learn tehzeeb, or etiquette, and “the art of conversation”.

The tawaifs reached their zenith under the Mughal rule. “The best of the courtesans, called deredar tawaifs, claimed their descent from the royal Mughal courts,” wrote Nevile.

“They formed part of the retinue of kings and nawabs...many of them were outstanding dancers and singers, who lived in comfort and luxury...To be associated with a tawaif was considered to be a symbol of status, wealth, sophistication and culture...no one considered her to be a bad woman or an object of pity.”

There is no definitive research on the extent to which sex was a part of what the courtesans offered. What is clear, however, was that their lives could not be covered by a broad brush stroke.

These were women of wealth and agency, and any sexual relationship they may have had with patrons was likely consensual.

Moreover, there were hierarchies within the performing artists, and the tawaifs were at the top, a class distinct from street performances and prostitutes.

With the arrival of the British began a gradual decimation of their livelihoods. Their royal patronage waned as the territory under the East India Company grew, but it wasn’t until the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny that the institution was eroded.

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By this time, the Mughal empire had already been in decline for decades. Leaving Delhi behind, many tawaifs had moved to Lucknow in Oudh State, where the nawabs still supported their art.

But it didn’t take long for their fortunes to turn even in Lucknow. The British annexed Oudh State in 1856, and suddenly the tawaifs found themselves in an ideal vantage when the mutiny started brewing.

Discontent against the East India Company was growing, and the tawaifs responded by playing an active role in the revolt from behind the scenes.

Their establishments called kothas became meeting zones and hideouts for rebels. Those who had accumulated wealth provided rebels financial support.

The power and influence they exerted are detailed in Veena Talwar Oldenberg’s essay Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow. Her examination of civic tax ledgers from 1858 to 1877 shows that the tawaifs were in the highest tax bracket, with the “largest individual incomes of any in the city”.

The essay also notes the systematic crackdown on the institution following the mutiny. Oldenburg writes:

“The courtesans’ names were also on lists of property: (houses, orchards, manufacturing and retail establishments for food and luxury items) confiscated by British officials for their proven involvement in the siege of Lucknow and the rebellion against British rule in 1857.

These women, though patently noncombatants, were penalised for their instigation of and pecuniary assistance to the rebels.

On yet another list, some twenty pages long, are recorded the spoils of war seized from one set of ‘female apartments’ in the palace and garden complex called the Qaisar Bagh, where some of the deposed ex-King Wajid Ali Shah’s three hundred or more consorts resided when it was seized by the British.

It is a remarkable list, eloquently evocative of a privileged existence: gold and silver ornaments studded with precious stones, embroidered cashmere wool and brocade shawls, bejeweled caps and shoes, silver-, gold-, jade-, and amber-handled fly whisks, silver cutlery, jade goblets, plates, spittoons, huqqahs and silver utensils for serving and storing food and drink, and valuable furnishings.”

During the symposium in Mumbai in April, Oldenberg shed more light on the British retaliation against courtesans. “They got warrants for [searching the kothas] and would destroy them, break the furniture, pull down the curtains,” she said. “That’s how the tawaif culture was actually, physically, dismembered.”

Decline of the art

In the amnesic annals of history, another little-appreciated name is Begum Hazrat Mahal.

The wife of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, Hazrat Mahal was, according to some accounts, a courtesan before marriage.

During the mutiny, while her husband was in exile, rebels under her leadership briefly seized control of Lucknow and her son, Birjis Qadr, was named the king. When British forces recaptured Lucknow in 1858, Hazrat Mahal sought asylum in Nepal and lived there until her death in 1879.

Over in Cawnpore, there were murmurs of another courtesan playing a role in the 1857 rebellion, in connection with the infamous Bibighar massacre, in which more than 100 captive British women and children were killed.

Some accounts identify the conspirator as Hussaini, who Singh believes was a courtesan lower in the hierarchy of tawaifs.

She writes that apart from Hussaini and Azeezunbai, “there are bound to be hundreds of stories about the role of these women in the Rebellion”, most of which have gone unrecorded. She mentions, for instance, “unsubstantiated accounts of girls taking to the streets in a battle with British soldiers”.

Also read: Who was Brigadier General John Nicholson? And what should we do about his monument on GT Road?

The mutiny was a turning point for the British empire in India — and the death knell for courtesans’ art. The administration came directly under the British crown, bringing with it the Victorian-era morality project, which placed a premium on women’s chastity and domesticity.

As public performers, courtesans were equated with prostitutes and their kothas, where they had entertained wealthy men for decades, were branded as brothels.

Laws such as the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, which was originally aimed to curb the spread of venereal diseases among British troops, allowed the Crown to monitor, control and stifle the earnings of courtesans by clubbing them with prostitutes and subjecting them to strict regulations.

Christian missionaries and Indian reformers launched the anti-nautch movement in the late 19th century, and public opinion started to weigh heavily against courtesans and dancers.

With their livelihoods wrecked, some of them turned to sex work to make ends meet, further cementing their association with prostitution.

By the time mass resistance to British rule began through the Swadeshi and non-cooperation movements in the 1900s, the social status and financial position of most courtesans was a pale shadow of their clout in 1857.

Still, examples of their support for, and assistance to, the nationalist cause can be found in historical records.

Gauhar Jaan, a celebrated courtesan who found immense success as a recording artist in the 1900s, was approached by Mahatma Gandhi to contribute to the Swaraj Fund to support the freedom movement.

She agreed to organise a fund-raising concert on the condition that Gandhi would attend her performance. Gandhi was unable to make it, and Gauhar Jaan sent just Rs12,000 of the Rs24,000 she managed to raise, as Vikram Sampath writes in My Name is Gauhar Jaan, his book on the musician’s life.

During the Gandhi-led non-cooperation movement from 1920 to 1922, a group of courtesans in Varanasi formed the Tawaif Sabha to support the independence struggle.

According to Singh, Husna Bai, who chaired the sabha, urged members of the group to wear iron shackles instead of ornaments as a symbol of protest and to boycott foreign goods. Singh is documenting the role of tawaifs during the later stages of the nationalist movement in an upcoming book.

Amritlal Nagar’s Ye Kothewalian (1958), an account of the life of tawaifs, included a letter from a courtesan, Vidyadhar Bai, on her meeting with Gandhi in Varanasi.

On his suggestion, she wrote, some courtesans had decided to start their musical performances with renditions of nationalist songs. One such song written by her, Chun Chun Ke Phool Le Lo, was included in the letter.

That song lives on today — it was included in singer Shubha Mudgal’s 2008 album Swadheenta Samar Geet, a collection of songs from the freedom movement. The music was composed by her husband, Aneesh Pradhan.

In 2011, the couple collaborated with theatre director Sunil Shanbag on a musical drama Stories in a Song, one episode of which recreated Gandhi’s encounter with the Tawaif Sabha.

Mudgal said, “The idea of artists asking for political and social change” was what drew her to Vidyadhar Bai’s song.

“[The song] is quite a reminder that this is not something new being done. The political class was including them in discussions on a more long-term basis and not just as an election strategy. They were being asked to take part in the movement and in public life at a grassroots level.”

In other parts of the country too, former courtesans and prostitutes sought to participate in the freedom movement.

Gandhi met a group of prostitutes in Barisal (in present-day Bangladesh) and Kakinada (Andhra Pradesh), who expressed the desire to join the Indian National Congress.

Gandhi urged them to give up sex work and start spinning the charkha instead.

“My whole heart is with these sisters. But I am unable to identify myself with the methods adopted at Barisal,” he wrote in an editorial in Young India, his weekly publication, in June 1925.

“...I am firmly of opinion that, so long as they continue the life of shame, it is wrong to accept donations or services from them or to elect them as delegates or to encourage them to become members of the Congress.”

This social ostracisation may have restricted the extent of tawaifs’ involvement in the freedom struggle, says Singh. “Even the middle-class women who were participating in the movement said they do not want to be seen around them [the courtesans]. Being with them [and] being seen with them was also creating anxiety among the middle-class bhadra mahila [educated woman].”

These disparate anecdotes, when put together, create a rough picture of the ways in which courtesans tried to contribute to the freedom struggle.

Chaturvedi says many of these stories have been lost because “we never thought that tawaifs were important enough to document. But [the stories] are very well known in the oral narrative”.

Chaturvedi’s The Courtesan Project has been working to bring these contributions to light through dance performances and seminars like the one in Mumbai.

She is also working to consolidate all her research through a documentation project, which will involve a book and a web interface.

“We snatched away everything from them, their music, dance, poetry,” she said. “But we’ve never given credit to them. We must respect them. We must know about them, and I hope to be able to do this in my lifetime.”

This piece originally appeared on Scroll.in and has been reproduced with permission.

After my last trip to Gondogoro La, a friend asked me where I was headed to next.

“Mount Kangchenjunga”, I replied. “Mount Kangchen- what?” she asked.

I was not surprised — not many people know about or even heard of Kangchenjunga. This despite the fact that at 8,586 metres, it is the third highest mountain in the world, after Mount Everest (8,848m) and just 25m shy of the second highest K2 (8,611m).

Kangchenjunga was once assumed to be the highest mountain, a status it lost in 1852 after The Great Trigonometrical Survey in India established Everest as the highest mountain. K2 was measured second highest and Kangchenjunga third.

About Kangchenjunga

Lying on the border between Nepal’s yet-to-be-named Province No. 1 and the Indian state of Sikkim, Kangchenjunga is the eastern-most of the fourteen 8,000-metre peaks and the only one in India.

The word Kangchenjunga is Tibetan and means 'the five treasures of high snow', treasures referring to the five peaks of this massive mountain. Four of these cross the 8,000m mark (Kangchenjunga Main 8,586m, Kangchenjunga West 8,505m, Kangchenjunga Central 8,482m, Kangchenjunga South 8,494m and Kangbachen 7,903m).

These peaks do not classify as individual mountains by themselves due to their lack of prominence.

Also read: How my love for the mountains took me from Hyderabad all the way to Everest Base Camp

The first successful ascent of Kangchenjunga was in 1955 by British mountaineers Joe Brown and George Band.

Locals in the area believed that spirits or mountain gods live on the mountain summit that must remain undisturbed. In respect, both Brown and Band intentionally stopped short of the summit, a tradition that every climber has followed since then.

The mountain has three faces: North and South in Nepal, and East in Sikkim. In both Nepal and India, the area is protected by wildlife conservation. It is home to the blue sheep, red panda and snow leopard, among others.

Why Kangchenjunga?

What really caught my interest in Kangchenjunga was the lack of information available on this mountain and area.

In the last few years, both Everest Base Camp/Kala Patthar and K2 Base Camp/Gondogoro La have soared in popularity, but Kangchenjunga still remains hidden from the eyes of outdoor enthusiasts.

It does not have the highest mountain tag of Everest nor the legendary status of K2. The area was also affected by the Maoist insurgency in Nepal from late 1996 to 2006 and although now it has subsided, the interest never returned to Kangchenjunga.

However, the lack of visitors has really preserved Kangchenjunga in a pristine state. At the Everest Base Camp there are queues at key viewing points and yak waste is all over the trek, just like mule waste is on the K2 base camp trek.

You will not run into that on Kangchenjunga.

For me, it was a personal goal as well. I had already explored base camps of the two highest mountains in the world: Mount Everest in 2017 and K2 in 2016. By completing a trek to Kangchenjunga, I would have completed the triple crown of base camps.

How to get there

India was out of reach, so I never really explored the option. It is known that on a clear day, the Kangchenjunga range is visible in Sikkim as far as Darjeeling.

In Nepal, you can trek to the North Base Camp (Pang Pema), South Base Camp (Yalung or Oktang) or complete a full circuit that combines both camps but requires crossing a series of non-technical high passes (Sele La and Mirgin La).

I called my Nepal advisor in Kathmandu, Anil Bhattarai, to discuss the possibility. Anil had previously arranged the logistics for my Everest base camp expedition.

He was very excited about my interest in Kangchenjunga since he hailed from the same area. He advised me to go for it instead of other, relatively more commercial treks.

Arrival in Kathmandu and journey to Taplejung

With all formalities sorted, I landed in Kathmandu in early March, where I stayed for a full day to get my trekking permit for Kangchenjunga.

Since Kangchenjunga lies in a wildlife conservation area and due to its close proximity to the Indian and Chinese borders, a special permit is needed from Nepal's Department of Immigration, unlike for other trekking areas.

The next morning, a 40-minute flight took me to Bhadrapur in eastern Nepal, one of the lowest lying areas of Nepal at 175m.

Here at the airport, I was received by mountain guide Dilli Bhattarai and our porter Neema Sherpa. Both were from Taplejung and made their living through tourism.

From Bhadrapur we took an uncomfortable eight-hour drive to Taplejung through switchbacks, where the car speed hit 50 kilometres per hour just four or five times.

We stayed overnight in Taplejung and then drove another six hours the next day to Tapethok.

Tapethok is the end of the road and beyond this, one has to walk into the Kangchenjunga area for the North trek (the South trek starts in Mamangkhe).

Walking into Kangchenjunga

On the trail, we walked around 7.5km in three hours to reach the small settlement of Sekathum, where we stayed at a local lodge run by a Sherpa couple. We affectionately called them Dai and Didi (brother and sister in Nepali).

It is here that I got my first taste of daal bhaat, a Nepali dish of lentils, rice and vegetables (mostly saag and potatoes). This would be our dinner for the next many days on the trek.

Walking through farms and tea gardens

The next morning we were on the trail early, following the Ghunsa River (Ghunsa Khola in Nepali), melt from the Kangchenjunga Glacier. We would be following this river for the next four days to Lhonak, where the glacier begins.

We passed through cardamom, potato and corn fields near Sekathum. Somewhere in the middle, we stopped for tea at a small shop on the trail.

A few minutes later, we were back on the trail. Standard treks rest overnight in Amjilosa, but we pushed to reach Thangyam, where there was just one house. A young Sherpa couple, with a newborn, were running a very basic lodging facility.

We had trekked 16km and climbed up to 2,375m in 6.5 hours.

From Thangyam, it took us 14km in 7.5 hours to reach Ghunsa at 3,400m. We passed through dense rhododendron and larch forests, with views opening up occasionally but mostly blocked by the trees.

We had two stops this day, first in Gyabla where we had tea at a home shop run by a Sherpa lady. Our second stop was at Phale, but Ghunsa was waiting.

Ghunsa is the main town in the North Kangchenjunga area with approximately 35 houses, all belonging to the Sherpa community.

It is to Kangchenjunga what Namche Bazar is to Everest, except there is no bazaar, wifi or phone signal in Ghunsa. The village does have electricity, telephone lines and a primary school though.

All campsites on the North Kangchenjunga trek are run by people from Ghunsa. Here we had to check in with Security and Wildlife Conservation personnel. We stayed at Peaceful Guest House, another Sherpa family-run business.

Spotting the yeti footprint

In my opinion, it is after Ghunsa that the spectacular views of the Kangchenjunga area begin to appear. I prefer trekking in the open where I can view the mountains and valleys, not through forests where the views are blocked by trees.

There was still snow and ice on the trail north of Ghunsa, so we had to be careful now, avoiding slips and injuries. We left around 8am in the morning and shortly after, noticed humongous footprints on the icy trail.

Dilli, my energetic mountain guide, really tried to convince me that it was the footprint of a yeti.

A yeti is an ape-like creature thought to exist in the Himalayas. Sightings have been reported by locals, guides, mountaineers for decades, but the scientific community still denies existence and treats it as a variety of bear in all likelihood.

While locals in Tibet, Bhutan and Nepal still believe the monster exists, for the outside world, the yeti remains a legend from folklore.

Dramatic night at Khambachen

Back on the trail, the weather got a little gloomy as the day progressed. We made our way through the snowy trail, passing through some bridges to reach Khambachen before 1pm.

It took us four hours and 30 minutes to complete the 11km trek and climb from 3,400m to 4,100m. We had plenty of time to rest for the next day but later, after darkness fell, the dramatic sky could not let me sleep.

There were mountains, glaciers, clouds and stars all around. How could I sleep with all of that? How could anyone sleep?

I stayed out late that night taking pictures in subzero temperatures, only retiring back into my sleeping bag when my fingers and toes couldn’t bear the cold anymore.

It was here at Khambachen where we met for the first time on this trip a team other than ours, a duo of European climbers also headed to the North Base Camp.

It was their rest day in Khambachen and they were planning to trek to Lhonak the next day, same as we were.

I must admit, I was getting spoilt having the entire trek and camps to myself.

Breakfast with Kumbakharna, Ravana’s younger brother

The morning at Khambachen was magical. While the mountains were glowing in sunlight, the valley still remained dark and the sky was a shade of dark blue which we never see in cities.

Here we got our first and what would be the only views of Kumbakharna (also called Jannu Peak). Named after the younger brother of Ravana in Hindu mythology, Kumbakharna is the 32nd highest mountain in the world at 7,710m and one of the toughest to climb.

Two fried eggs with pancakes and black coffee and we were on our feet again to march to Lhonak, the last site before the North Base Camp (Pang Pema).

I must admit, it was the most fascinating day of the trip so far. The Himalayas north of Kangchenjunga appeared in all their glory under the spotless sky.

Looking for the snow leopard

It was here on our way to Lhonak where we spotted some blue sheep, grazing on the greens of a mountain slope.

I was told that we were in snow leopard territory. Makes sense for the predator to live where there is hunt available. I was really hoping to catch a glimpse of one and got my extended zoom lens ready, but all I could shoot was the blue sheep.

The probability of me spotting a snow leopard was as high as that of spotting a yeti. Wildlife conservation officers who have spent decades here have rarely seen the elusive beast.

Confluence of Lhonak and Kangchenjunga Glaciers

Lhonak is where the Kangchenjunga and Lhonak glaciers meet, though both may have receded back now due to climate change.

The glacial melt from the two forms a pond or small lake just before Lhonak, which was frozen in March.

We walked carefully on the ice sheet, bypassing any cracks to avoid falling into the water underneath and reached Lhonak at 12pm exactly.

It took us four hours to complete 11km and climb up to 4,800m approximately, which was very fast and none of us were feeling tired either.

Kangchenjunga North Base Camp (Pang Pema)

Ten minutes later, while sipping hot tea under the clear sky at Lhonak, we decided to push for the North Base Camp the same day.

It was certainly doable, except we weren’t sure if we’d be able to return in time.

So, our strong porter Neema agreed to carry the sleeping bags while Dilli and I shared the load of the food items. At roughly 12:40pm, the three of us were on our feet again, heading for the base camp.

Severe landslides had eroded the trail that was used in the past season, extending our efforts to reach Pang Pema (a term used to refer to the North Base Camp of Kangchenjunga).

Slowly, the peaks of the Kanchenjunga massif appeared — but the problem was that we were now racing with the storm to reach the base camp.

Severe winds from the south were blowing clouds towards the base camp and I was barely able to take one shot of the main peak before everything was covered in fog.

Spending the night in starlight at Kangchenjunga

Here we decided to pitch tent and spend the night at the base camp. There was no one there except us, and I was excited that once this fog cleared up, I would have the third highest mountain in the world all to myself.

We had tea and snacked on two-minute noodles cooked melted snow before it became so cold that all three of us were in our sleeping bags around sunset.

By then it had started to snow as well, just a few flakes. However, around midnight the clouds were all gone and there was just the mountains under starlight.

So many stars covered the entire sky that it became difficult to spot the easiest of stars and constellations. I shot hundreds of pictures, once again in below-freezing temperatures and finally retired to the cosiness of my sleeping bag. I still regret not staying awake the whole night.

Magical morning at Kangchenjunga

Waking up the next morning, there was magic at sunrise once again. As the sun rose, casting light on darkness, the sky remained unsure, half lit, half dark.

The mountain peaks were shining from the first rays of the sun but the valley was still dark. We munched on our last few remaining biscuits and I took our last photos of the mountains here at Pang Pema.

As the day got brighter we also noticed how overwhelming the Kangchenjunga glacier was once it started to glow in sunlight. Soon we were heading back to Lhonak and I wondered, why so early?

We left the camp at 8am to arrive in Lhonak around noon, completing the 8km trek in four hours. At Lhonak, a lone Sherpa was waiting for us. He had ascended up from Thangyam in hopes of working for us.

He rented a room and cooked meals for us while we were there. Except us, there was no other team at Lhonak. The Europeans we had met in Khambachen had trouble with altitude sickness and decided to descend earlier.

We too spent a night in Lhonak before descending to Ghunsa. Our first leg of the circuit, North Kangchenjunga, was over and it was time to head for the South.

Return to Lhonak and Ghunsa

It took us two days from Kangchenjunga North Base Camp to return to Lhonak and then Ghunsa. On our way to Ghunsa we stopped over at Khambachen to have lunch.

Crossing from North to South Kangchenjunga

The transfer from North Kangchenjunga to South Kangchenjunga (or vice versa) is possible via non-technical passes Sele La/Mirgin La that connect Ghunsa in the North to Tseram in the South.

During a regular season, crossing the path is simple. Trekkers and climbers from Ghunsa ascend to Sele La, where they spend a night at a lodge before crossing Mirgin La and descending to Tseram, which is two camps away from South base camp.

But as luck would have it (or the lack of it), the past winter saw record snowfall in the area. Taplejung, which had not had any snowfall in half a decade had received snowfall as many as six times.

Thanks to the heavy snowfall, we were told by the Sherpas at Ghunsa that the lodge at Sele La was still closed and parts of Mirgin La had snow up to waist-height.

Even the tough Sherpas were avoiding the Sele La for now and when Sherpas avoid a route in the mountains, we don’t challenge that.

Dilli, Nima and I stayed the whole evening in Ghunsa, going over a map of Kangchenjunga that I bought in Kathmandu and pondering possible alternate routes to cross to the South.

It was a special evening though. The family that ran the lodge had invited local villagers. They sang local folksongs of while we all sipped home-made Himalayan salt tea, made with salt and yak butter.

Are you out exploring remote regions? Share your experience with us at prism@dawn.com

It may seem strange to kids today, but back in the late 1980s, getting access to music was an onerous and time-consuming task. When the place was Islamabad and the music in question was Western, matters got even more complicated.

There was only one radio station and one state-run television channel, PTV. It sometimes played good movies, but hardly any music.

There were also only a handful of music stores in Islamabad. It was a time when Pakistan was recovering from a decade of religious extremism, censorship and a war in the neighbourhood.

Islamabad was a quiet, small bureaucratic town where everybody took themselves too seriously. Occasionally the stillness could be interrupted by a rogue rocket landing in the driveway (ala Ojhri Camp incident), but these incidents were few and far between.

It was the city of stiff upper lip bureaucrats and it seemed there were far more important things on people’s minds than figuring out where to get one’s hands on some rock’n’roll music.

In this bleak scenario came MTV — like an oasis in the desert. My exposure to the music channel came in the unlikeliest of places — Gujranwala Cantonment in 1988.

My mamoo was posted there in the army and my cousins had somehow managed to get their hands on a videocassette that featured two music videos from a channel called MTV.

It was there that I saw my first few videos: ‘One’ by Metallica and ‘Rocket’ by Def Leppard. These were the latest popular bands at the time and I was hooked. I needed to get my hands on that music and somehow tap into this magical channel.

The only source of somehow getting all this music in one place was the mixtape.

Now, the concept of the mixtape differs somewhat between Pakistan and the West. In the West, the mixtape served mainly as a conversation between two lovers. One would put on tape a selection of songs about love, life and everything in between that would convey what they were feeling.

The mixtape was the audio documentation of a relationship — from its glorious initiation to its muddled and depressing dissolution.

The writer Nick Hornby talks about the mixtape extensively in his 1995 novel High Fidelity. The book is about a record store-owner who spends most of his time making top-five music lists and mourning the end of his relationship with his girlfriend. Through his character, Hornby describes the detailed process of properly making a mixtape:

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again... A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got to Get You off My Mind,' but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and... oh, there are loads of rules."

In Pakistan, the mixtape meant something less romantic entirely.

Due to budgetary constraints, most young music listeners could not just go and buy entire albums by artists. They had to be selective, and that meant handing over a blank cassette to an audio store with a selection of songs that the audio store would tape and put together from separate albums.

Even if budgets did allow, back then I didn’t know any girls who were into any of the music I was. The only conversation taking place between boys and girls was about some random useless talk of the day — nothing about rock’n’roll or discussing the merits of Slash as a guitar player.

There was also the dread and fear that parents would discover that a boy had given a girl a mixtape and both parties would be condemned to eternal purgatory.

However, putting together a good mixtape was not easy. It required thought, time and good knowledge of the different music contained within.

Mixtapes could not be put together randomly — they had to be curated carefully so nothing seemed out of place and each track could seamlessly flow into the next.

The mixtape was akin to the ultimate album — different artists coming together from varied styles and backgrounds to collectively fuse into one glorious mix.

Within the confines of two short sides of a cassette, and the limited music selection that the late 80s music shops in Islamabad had to offer, we distilled a one-of-a-kind soundtrack.

The first mixtape that my music-obsessed brothers and I curated and put together was aptly titled Selection 1.

Our interest in music began at an early age. My father had a collection of cassettes lying around the house, which included music he listened to as a student while he was studying in the United States in the late 1960s. The earliest music we heard was The Beatles and ABBA. It had proved an epiphany.

Soon we rummaged through his other tapes and found The Moody Blues, Simon & Garfunkel, Rainbow and Crosby, Stills & Nash. We consumed and soaked it all in, though there was a special place in our hearts for Rainbow and their legendary guitarist Ritchie Blackmore.

When we moved houses in 1988, one of the valuable things we lost was the only Rainbow album we owned: Bent Out of Shape. We were disconsolate.

Cassettes could cost an average of Rs80-100, a substantial sum in those days, and even if we could put together that money, none of the music shops had any albums by Rainbow.

In the meantime, 1989 had come along and we had successfully harangued our parents into getting the very first and very expensive satellite dish. We had one primary objective — to watch as much MTV as possible.

School was an irritant (and homework even more so) that seemed to cut valuable time from watching MTV. The explosion of Guns N' Roses had happened and the ‘Sweet Child o' Mine’ video was on heavy rotation.

We had tried to record the song from the TV onto our tape deck but the sound quality was scratchy and not up to the mark. We wanted the high quality audio version of that song so we wouldn’t have to wait for it to come on MTV to have a listen.

We needed ‘Sweet Child o' Mine’, ‘One’ by Metallica, some of the music from Rainbow and a number of other tracks we had read about in music magazines and extracted from our father’s knowledge of music. Thus came about Selection 1.

Somehow, Rs80 were cobbled together and the decision was made to curate a playlist and then have BackBeat record it. BackBeat was a music shop based in Jinnah Market and had the best-sounding audio cassettes in Islamabad back then.

This was the first mixtape of our lives and resources were scarce, so the 60 minutes of music on Selection 1 had to be carefully put together. Each minute was precious and no song could be filler.

Making the tape

The first thing discussed at length was music from Rainbow. We had lost Bent Out of Shape and we wanted most songs from it. But there was an innate acknowledgement of the fact that there couldn't be more than two tracks on a mixtape from the same band.

We hadn’t read this anywhere. We just somehow knew that urban legend dictated this fact. Getting three brothers (each with their own strong opinions) to decide on two songs from Bent Out of Shape was a tough ask.

Ultimately we decided on ‘Desperate Heart’ and ‘Anybody There’, an instrumental featuring some stellar guitar work by Ritchie Blackmore.

I guess you can tell how much we liked the electric guitar by the fact that we featured an electric guitar instrumental.

‘Sweet Child o' Mine’ had to be in there and it had to be the first song. Looking back at it now, I don’t think there could have been a better way to kick off Selection 1 than that joyous riff played by Slash.

The first song had to lead into something mid-tempo and here we fitted in Skid Row’s ’18 and life’. From Axl to Sebastian Bach, I guess we liked high-pitched rock singers.

We had read about Led Zeppelin in a magazine and our father had mentioned it being the ultimate rock band. Their most famous song was ‘Stairway To Heaven’ so that had to be in there.

The drawback: it was an epic seven minutes — or roughly 11.6 per cent of the total cassette’s playing time.

Seven minutes could fit in two other songs, but a tough decision had to be made. If this was (as magazines claimed) the greatest rock song ever written, we needed to listen to it.

‘Stairway To Heaven’ also gave Selection 1 a dynamic of light and shade — especially after the attack of the first two songs.

Frankly, at the time we put together the selection, we did not know that ‘Stairway To Heaven’ was a ballad so the accident was a happy one.

‘Stairway To Heaven’ gave way to ‘Desperate Heart’ and to the last song on Side 1: ‘Hysteria’ by Def Leppard.

The flip side started with ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon. We were big Beatles fans and had heard that this was John Lennon’s biggest solo hit. The rest of the side was dedicated to the music of the 80s.

It included ‘With or Without You’ by U2, ‘One’ by Metallica and the collection ended with Poison’s ‘Fallen Angels.’

Over the years, our tastes in music became more sophisticated. Our fondness for rock music was replaced by a keen interest in jazz, blues, tango and reggae. Thankfully, none of the music has proved to be embarrassing to own up to all these years later and I can still walk around showing off Selection 1 and not be embarrassed by my peers.

In today’s world we don’t have nor need cassettes. We can organise digital playlists of any length and can go on adjusting them endlessly. Time has become more limited and attention spans shorter, so the thought of painstakingly putting together a collection of songs on tape has been replaced with a quick and efficient fast-food model of music consumption.

The idea of the mixtape, however, remains stronger than ever; in the 2014 movie Guardians of the Galaxy, it serves as a key part of the narrative.

It could well be the fact that even with infinite choice and the ease of playing whatever music you would like to, there is still a simple pleasure in being bound to a collection of songs on a cassette.

The mixtape is also a gateway into a quieter, simpler time — where brothers would endlessly debate on song selection and patience had to be cultivated. Where rock music was the only music we knew and the disappointments, cynicism and moroseness that are part and parcel of adult life were still a long time away.

Selection 1 seems to be, now, not just a collection of songs. It transcends that realm and serves as a snapshot of a past. A past that is long gone but can be heard every time the cassette is played — and the first refrain of ‘Sweet Child o' Mine’ plays gently through the speakers.

Selection 1:

Side A

1. Sweet Child o' Mine
2. 18 and Life
3. Stairway To Heaven
4. Desperate Heart
5. Hysteria

Side B:

1. Imagine
2. Anybody There
3. Stay With Me Tonight
4. One
5. With Or Without You
6. Fallen Angels

Are you holding on to analog memories? Share them with us at prism@dawn.com

Economic indicators are an important measure to track a country’s progress, but by themselves and without context, they do not mean much.

Looking at economic data, quarter by quarter, year by year, without focusing on what’s driving changes, or lack thereof, is like looking at the blood sugar levels of a patient without paying attention to that person’s lifestyle or dietary habits.

In the run-up to this fiscal year’s budget, Pakistan’s print, electronic and social media has been drowning in economic data. However, almost no one has paid attention to the underlying social indicators that reflect what ails Pakistan’s economy and its society at large.

A holistic analysis of these ailments is worthy of a thesis by itself. I will, however, try to use some key — and at times, shocking — indicators to paint a picture of the crisis facing Pakistan.

But first, a bit about economic development: sustainable economic growth of a society occurs when a strong social foundation exists, and this foundation is only laid when key indicators, particularly those that measure the wellbeing of women in society, begin to improve.

GDP growth, exports, tax revenues, foreign exchange reserves and other economic indicators can only be sustainably improved when such a foundation exists.

The Analytical Angle: Why haven’t past education reforms had more effect?

The 2017-18 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) offers us a glimpse into key social indicators and can explain why Pakistan is consistently falling behind the rest of the world. According to this survey, Pakistan’s women are undereducated, physically and mentally abused and lack access to information and financial services.

According to the survey data, almost 49.2 per cent of ever-married women aged 15-49 had no education whatsoever (the figure is 25.4pc for men). If you look at rural women by themselves, the figure rises to nearly 61.6pc (33.3pc for men).

Only 13.1pc of women in Pakistan have attained an education level of Class 11 or higher (18.9pc for men); 21.5pc of women who have had no schooling or studied between Class 1-9 can read a whole sentence (24pc for men).

Half of the women surveyed were illiterate, which is evidence on its own that the state has failed its citizens.

Based on these indicators, we can conclude that women in Pakistan have a strong disadvantage in terms of access to employment and information. This has dire consequences not only for women themselves, but for their children and society writ large.

Literacy and violence

Many in Pakistan claim that social media and the internet have changed the country, but according to the data, the information age has yet to reach almost 9 in 10 women in Pakistan. The PDHS data shows that 29.8pc of men surveyed have ever used the internet, while only 12.6pc of women reported to have ever used the internet.

High illiteracy means that women cannot inform themselves, and the PDHS shows that only 5.1pc of women read a newspaper at least once a week, compared to 27.1pc.

Only 6pc of women have and use a bank account, compared to 31.6pc of men. 92.7pc of men own a mobile phone, while only 39.2pc of women said that they own a mobile phone.

Lack of education and access to information leads to a lack of employment opportunities. Only 17.3pc of women said that they were currently employed (96.1pc for men), while an astounding 80pc of women said they had not been employed in the last 12 months preceding the survey (2.3pc for men).

The data also highlights that even when women attain education, they tend to not work.

According to the PDHS, 62.5pc of women in the highest wealth quintile have attained an education level of Class 10 or higher. However, the employment rate is only 11.5pc among these wealthy women, meaning that the vast majority of highly educated women are not putting their education to productive use and are choosing to stay at home.

Poorly educated and with little to no prospects of employment, it is also very common for Pakistani women to experience physical violence.

The data shows that 27.6pc of women have experienced physical violence since age 15. Within this group, 14.6pc reported experiencing physical violence often or sometimes in the past 12 months.

Violence committed by husbands is the most common form of violence women face, and 23.7pc of women reported experiencing physical or sexual violence from their spouse.

These women have no choice but to bear this violence, and 56.4pc of women have never sought help and never told anyone about the violence that they have faced.

Left behind?

Pakistan has a fertility rate of 3.6 births per woman, one of the highest in the world. Poorly educated, facing physical and sexual violence and with little to no access to information, Pakistan’s women are being asked to raise a new generation in a society that is already facing major resource constraints.

According to the PDHS, 38pc of children under the age of five in Pakistan are stunted and 23pc of children under the age of five are underweight. This means that a significant proportion of Pakistan’s future generations are growing up with a high risk of mental and physical disability.

According to the 2017 census, there are over 101 million women in Pakistan, making up almost 49pc of the country’s population. With over a 100 million Pakistani citizens facing an educational, employment, financial, physical, and emotional crisis, is it any surprise that the country continues to fall behind the rest of the world?

Also read: I'm glad Imran Khan has highlighted stunting. But there is more to it than clean water and food

It is preposterous that, faced with such a crisis, Pakistan’s elite wants to discuss and debate whether this International Monetary Fund bailout will be the last one ever, whether the country needs a commission to investigate the debt taken on in the last decade or whether a quote is attributed to Gibran or Tagore.

A volcano is bubbling under the surface and it will burst forth sooner or later. If Pakistan does not get its act together, this nuclear-armed country will find itself in a crisis unlike any faced by a nation-state in the twenty-first century.

Do you have an eye on Pakistan’s economy and development? Share your insights with us at prism@dawn.com

The silver twilight of Mughal civilization began with Shah Jahan. Delhi was now a sanctuary of an urbane, sophisticated court which had taste, even elegance. By early 1730 the city had absorbed various elements from neighbouring regions and witnessed a mingling of international as well as national strains and an interchange of ideas, customs and food.

The Portuguese relationship with the Mughals had already been established a long time back, along the trade routes. Hence the imperial kitchens, besides Indian ingredients, saw an additional ingredient brought by the Portuguese — the chilli. The chilli was very similar to the long pepper, already in use, and therefore did not look too unfamiliar to royal chefs, but had the hot taste. Other vegetables like potatoes and tomatoes also appeared on the scene and the food of the Red Fort became rich in colour, hot in taste, and varied as compared to the bland food of its ancestors. Qormas and qaliyas, pulaos and kababs, and vegetables in different garb, besides European cakes and puddings, adorned the table.

Cooking and serving food in the royal kitchens was a riot of colours, fragrances, experiments, table manners and protocols. The emperors usually ate with their queens and concubines, except on festive occasions, when they dined with nobles and courtiers. Daily meals were usually served by eunuchs, but an elaborate chain of command accompanied the food to the table. The hakim (royal physician) planned the menu, making sure to include medicinally beneficial ingredients. For instance, each grain of rice for the pulao was coated with silver warq, which aided digestion and acted as an aphrodisiac. One account records a Mughal banquet given by Asaf Khan, the emperor’s wazir, during Jahangir’s time to Shah Jahan — though no outsider had ever seen any emperor while dining except once when Friar Sebastian Manriquea, a Portuguese priest, was smuggled by an eunuch inside the harem to watch Shah Jahan eat his food with Asaf Khan.

Once the menu was decided, an elaborate kitchen staff — numbering at least a few hundred — swung into action. Since a large number of dishes were served at each meal, an assembly line of staff undertook the chopping and cleaning, the washing and grinding. Food was cooked in rainwater mixed with water brought in from the Ganges for the best possible taste. Not only the cooking but the way the food was served is interesting to note — food was served in dishes made of gold and silver studded with precious stones, and of jade, as it detected poison. The food was eaten on the floor; sheets of leather covered with white calico protected the expensive carpets. This was called dastarkhwan. It was customary for the emperor to set aside a portion of food for the poor before eating. The emperor began and ended his meal with prayers; the banquet ran for hours as Shah Jahan liked to enjoy his food, spending long hours at dastarkhwan.

With the passage of time, indigenization in the cooking style became obvious and certain Indian ingredients, like Kashmiri vadi, sandalwood powder, suhaga, betel leaves, white gourd, and batasha, and fruits like mango, phalsa, banana, etc., were used to give different flavours to dishes.

The arrival of every dish was a ceremony and history will never forget the pomp of those times, along with the flavours which remain only in the pages of handwritten manuscripts of those days, such as Nuskha-e-Shahjahani. Not only the imperial kitchens of the emperor, but also the bazaars of the city were charged with the smoke of different kababs, and the environment was filled with the fragrance of nahari, haleem, qormas and qaliyas. The array of breads was dazzling. Festive occasions were never complete without baqarkhani, kulchas and sheermals. Sharbat ke katore and kulfi ke matke added colour to the scenario. The city of Shah Jahan was a paradise of food with the creations of local and foreign chefs.

This luxurious way of serving and preparing food continued only till the time Shah Jahan ruled, as his son Aurangzeb did not believe in luxury, pomp and show. Unfortunately, the last years of this great emperor were unhappy. Deposed by his son Aurangzeb, Shah Jahan was imprisoned in Agra Fort and remained there for eight years until his death in 1666. Legend has it that Aurangzeb ordered that his father be allowed only one ingredient of his choice, and Shah Jahan chose chickpeas. He chose them because they can be cooked in many different ways. Even today, one of the signature dishes of North Indian cuisine is Shahjahani dal, chickpeas cooked in a rich gravy of cream.

QALIYA KHASA DO-PIYAZAH

LAMB COOKED WITH ONIONS, GREEN GRAM AND VEGETABLE | Serves: 4-6

INGREDIENTS

Lamb, cut into medium-sized pieces 1 kg

Green gram (moong dal), washed, soaked for ½ hour ¼ cup / 60 gm

Ghee 1 cup / 250 gm

Onions, sliced 1 cup / 250 gm

Salt to taste

Coriander (dhaniya) seeds, pounded 4 tsp / 20 gm

Ginger (adrak), grated 4 tsp / 20 gm

Beetroots (chuqander), peeled, cut into medium-sized pieces 3 cups / 750 gm

Turnips (shalgam), peeled, cut into medium-sized pieces 3 cups / 750 gm

Carrots (gajar), scraped, cut into cubes 3 cups / 750 gm

Rice paste 4 tsp / 20 gm

Saffron (kesar) 2 gm

Freshly ground to a fine powder:

Cinnamon (dalchini) ½ tsp / 3 gm

Cloves (laung) ½ tsp / 3 gm

Green cardamoms (choti elaichi) ½ tsp / 3 gm

Black peppercorns (kali mirch), ground 1 tsp / 5 gm

METHOD

1. Heat 100 gm ghee in a pan; sauté the onions and lamb with 2 tbsp water. Add the salt, pounded coriander seeds and grated ginger; cook, on medium heat, until the lamb is tender.

2. Add the beetroots, turnips, carrots and green gram with enough water to cover; cook the vegetables on low heat.

3. When the vegetables and lamb are fully cooked and at least 1 cup water remains in the pan, remove the pan from the heat and separate the lamb pieces and vegetables from the stock.

4. Temper the stock with the remaining ghee. Return the vegetables and lamb to the stock and bring to a boil. Add the rice paste and mix well.

5. Add the freshly ground spices and mix.

6. Transfer into a serving dish and serve garnished with saffron.

NARANJ PULAO

ORANGE-FLAVOURED LAMB CURRY COOKED WITH RICE | Serves: 6-8

INGREDIENTS

Oranges 4 big / 6 small

Rice 4 cups / 1 kg

Yoghurt (dahi), whisked 1 cup / 250 gm

Lemons (nimbu) 2

Sugar 2 cups / 500 gm

Saffron (kesar) ¼ tsp

Ghee 1 cup / 250 gm

Salt to taste

Dry fruits as needed

Green coriander (hara dhaniya), chopped as needed

For the yakhni:

Lamb, cut into pieces 1 kg

Ghee 1 cup / 1250 gm

Onions, sliced 1 cup / 250 gm

Ginger (adrak) 4 tsp / 20 gm

Salt to taste

Cinnamon (dalchini), 2 sticks 1˝

Green cardamoms (choti elaichi) ½ tsp / 3 gm

Coriander (dhaniya) seeds, crushed 4 tsp / 20 gm

Cloves (laung) ½ tsp / 3 gm

METHOD

1. Peel the oranges carefully so that the case remains intact. Remove the segments and keep aside. Sprinkle salt inside the case and float them in whisked yoghurt for an hour. Remove the cases from the yoghurt and wash with cold water. Boil the orange cases for a minute. Remove and keep aside.

2. In another pan filled with water, squeeze the juice of one lemon and boil the orange cases again. In case lemon is not available, boil in thin yoghurt liquid, simmer to make them tender.

3. Make yakhni with the lamb pieces and all the ingredients mentioned. Temper the stock with cloves.

4. Parboil the rice and keep aside.

5. Prepare a sugar syrup of one-string consistency; keep aside.

6. Remove the seeds and the skin of each segment and coarsely chop and mix with the yakhni. Take 1 tbsp cooked rice and mix it with saffron. Cook on low heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove and keep aside.

7. In a separate pan, spread the yakhni, evenly pour 3 tbsp syrup and simmer, when the syrup is absorbed, spread the rice and pour some ghee. Cover the pan and put on dum. While serving, transfer the pulao into a serving dish and place the orange cases over it. Fill one case with almond halwa, another with pistachio halwa, another with saffron and orange rice and another with salted minced lamb*. Garnish all with dry fruits and chopped coriander.

*You can buy almond halwa, pistachio halwa and salted minced lamb at a grocery store, or make them separately. You can also choose your fillings as per your liking.

GURAK KABAB

CHICKEN STUFFED WITH MEAT AND SLOW-COOKED ON CINNAMON BED | Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

Chicken, cleaned, washed, skinned 2 (700-800 gm each)

Onion juice ½ cup / 125 ml

Ginger (adrak) juice ¼ cup / 60 ml

Salt to taste

Vegetable oil 3 tbsp / 45 ml

Lamb, minced 400 gm

Onion, medium-sized, sliced 1

Coriander (dhaniya) seeds, crushed 1 tbsp / 15 gm

Ginger (adrak), chopped 1 tbsp / 15 gm

Saffron (kesar), dissolved in milk 1.5 gm

Yoghurt (dahi), whisked ¼ cup / 60 gm

Cinnamon (dalchini) sticks to cover the bottom of the pan 8-10

Ghee ½ cup / 125 gm

Black gram (urad dal) flour ½ cup / 125 gm

Freshly ground to a fine powder:

Cloves (laung) 1 tsp / 5 gm

Cardamom (elaichi) 1 tsp / 5 gm

Black peppercorns (sabut kali mirch) 1 tsp / 5 gm

METHOD

1. Prick the chicken all over with a fork.

2. Marinate the chicken with onion juice, ginger juice and salt; rub well inside and outside the chicken and keep aside for 30 minutes.

3. Heat the oil in a pan; add the minced meat, onion, crushed coriander seeds, chopped ginger and salt. Stir and cook until the meat is tender.

4. Smoke the cooked mixture.

5. Fill the chicken with the minced lamb and tie both legs with twine to keep the shape of the chicken intact.

6. Mix the saffron and ground spices with the yoghurt.

7. Apply the yoghurt and saffron mixture all over the chickens evenly.

8. Spread the cinnamon sticks on the bottom of the pan. Place the chicken on the cinnamon bed and pour the ghee around.

9. Make a semi-hard dough of black gram flour. Cover the pan and seal with this dough.

10. Place the pan on low charcoal heat and cook on dum for 4 hours.

11. Remove the cover, take the chicken out, cut into four pieces and serve over the mince.

BAQLAWA

LAYERED SQUARES GARNISHED WITH PISTACHIOS | Yield: 10

INGREDIENTS

Egyptian lentil 1 cup / 250 gm

Ghee 1 cup / 250 gm

Ginger (adrak) 4 tsp / 20 gm

Salt 8 tsp / 40 gm

Wholewheat flour (atta) 4 cups / 1 kg

Kid fat 4 tsp / 20 gm

Sugar 2 cups / 500 gm

Pistachios (pista), pounded 8 tsp / 40 gm

Freshly ground to a fine powder:

Cinnamon (dalchini) ½ tsp / 3 gm

Cloves (laung) ½ tsp / 3 gm

Green cardamoms (choti elaichi) ½ tsp / 3 gm

METHOD

1. Boil the lentil until soft. Remove from heat and drain. Fry the lentil in little ghee with ginger and salt. Then add enough water to cook the lentil, ensuring that it is not mashed and each grain looks separate. Sprinkle the ground spices and smoke the mixture.

2. Knead the flour into a hard dough (in summer one part ghee and two parts kid fat is used while in winter the proportions should be equal).

3. Divide the dough equally into small portions. Roll each portion out into a thin poori, apply ghee and dust with dry flour, sprinkle the lentil mixture lightly and cover with another poori. Repeat the process with 5-7 pooris.

4. Shape them into squares and secure the edges with water.

5. Heat the ghee in a pan; deep-fry the squares. Remove and keep aside to cool.

6. Make a sugar syrup and soak the fried squares in it. When the syrup is absorbed, sprinkle pounded pistachios.

This piece originally appeared on Scroll.in and has been reproduced with permission. Excerpted with permission from The Mughal Feast: Recipes from the Kitchen of Emperor Shah Jahan, a transcreation of Nuskha-e-Shahjahani by Salma Yusuf Husain, Roli Books. Available at Liberty Books and Saeed Books in Pakistan.

On a day in early May 2019, scholars, writers and activists from the mountain communities of Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa gathered in Bahrain, a scenic town 65 kilometres north of Mingora in Swat district.

Coordinated by a local organisation in collaboration with the University of Sydney, the one-day gathering was an attempt to deliberate the social, cultural, economic and political challenges the communities face, aimed at finding ways to address the challenges of modernity and of the internal and external colonisation of the margins.

Chief among their concerns was the threat to the rich cultural heritage of these communities posed by "the exclusion of the languages of these communities from spheres of state education and media". There was consensus that with the attrition of their languages, these communities will lose their identity, history, literature (which is mostly in oral form or orature) and indigenous knowledge of their cosmos.

The gathering was unique in many ways: the scholars, writers and activists in attendance resolved to carry out a number of initiatives to address their challenges.

They did not lament the apathy of the state towards their heritage, but determined to do whatever they could for their heritage and social development.

The multifaceted issues and insights of the participants need a series of articles of their own, but as threats to their languages emerged as a pressing issue in need of introspection, I would like to devote this piece to the languages spoken in northern Pakistan. I am sure, many Pakistanis do not have an idea of the extent of linguistic diversity.

Uncatalogued and unaccounted

None of Pakistan’s governments or universities have ever taken initiative to profile the languages spoken by the people of Pakistan.

Only a few — Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi, Sindhi and Saraiki — are used in media, teaching materials and any kind of national database.

According to Ethnologue, a compendium of the languages of the world, Pakistan currently has 74 languages spoken within its territory.

Past attempts to catalogue languages spoken in Pakistan have been by foreign researchers either associated with the colonial British government or international organisations.

An Irish linguist and language scholar who also served in the colonial-era Indian Civil Services, Sir George Abraham Grierson compiled a remarkable survey of about 364 languages and dialects of British India, which he published in 19 volumes. His work, titled Linguistic Survey of India, was published over five years from 1903 to 1928.

This survey also has information about some of the languages spoken in the mountainous region of what is now Pakistan.

Explore: On embracing the hyphen and hybridity of language

Before Grierson, the Orientalist and educationist Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner did some linguistic and anthropological work on the languages and people of these areas in a book called Languages and Races of Dardistan (1877).

Following Leitner, another officer in the British Army, John Biddulph, published his work on the languages and peoples of these areas in a volume called Tribes of Hindoo Koosh (1880).

Since then a number of notable linguists and anthropologists such Georg Morgenstierne, Karl Jettmar, D.L.R. Lorimer, Fredrik Barth, Colin Masica, Richard Strand and many other individuals have studied the languages and cultures of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

A systematic survey of the languages of northern Pakistan was, however, started in the 1980s. The survey was started in 1986 by Summer Institute of Linguistics under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, through the National Institute of Folk Heritage, Lok Virsa.

The National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, facilitated and supported the research and, finally, the survey was jointly published in five volumes by both partners in 1992.

The survey, titled, Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, covered 25 languages of northern Pakistan including Pashto, Hindko, Ormuri and Waneci.

This survey was an improvement of the Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India’s part of this region as the preface admits, "At a macro level, this work is definitely an improvement over Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India and the subsequent studies by various scholars".

Fieldnotes

By ‘north Pakistan’ I mean the region of Gilgit-Baltistan and upper Khyber Pakhtunkhwa such as Chitral, Dir, Swat, Kohistan and Mansehra. I intentionally do not mention two major languages of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, namely Pashto and Hindko, as by now these are considerably known to many people.

A brief note about each language will be of help for those who are interested in the linguistic diversity of the northern parts of Pakistan. I abstain from giving a number of speakers of each language because none of these languages have ever been accounted for in successive national censuses.

Nevertheless, the number of speakers for these languages vary from 500 to one million. Counting the correct number of speakers for each becomes a difficult task. Numbers given in surveys done so far are mostly based on interviews and observations — and they are just estimates.

Many of these languages are also spoken in neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan, India and China.

I have presented a very brief account of each language spoken inside the territory of Pakistan. All of these languages are categorised as ‘endangered’ in Routledge’s Encyclopedia of World’s Endangered Languages (2008). Many of them are ‘severely endangered’ whereas a few are classed ‘moribund’ or already ‘extinct’.

Most of these languages are still in the speech form; they don’t have a writing culture. Because of the erosion of these languages, scientific and literary communities of the world will lose vital indigenous knowledge and wisdom that are so important for sustainable communities.

Also read: The little-known religious history of Balakot

On the other hand, if these languages are left to their fate, the communities who use them as native languages for social interaction and understanding and communicating about their world are sure to lose their past memories, histories and identities, be exposed to manifold vulnerabilities such as loss of self-esteem, crises of identity and belonging, and the loss of their imagination which is so intrinsically embedded in language.

The region also has a blend of multilingualism, which resists forces that attempt to break the harmony these communities have.

These languages need to be revitalised using modern means and tools. The most important step is to build literacy in these languages because it is the written word that not only keeps a language vital but also enhances its prestige among speakers and non-speakers.

As the Latin proverb states, verba volant, scripta manent — spoken words fly away, written words remain.

Illustration by Rajaa Moini

Are you exploring Pakistan's languages? Share your insights with us at prism@dawn.com

Read Part I of this travelogue here.

In the first part of this travelogue, I had documented our trek up Kangchenjunga North Base Camp (Pang Pema). We started in Tapethok, trekked all the way to North Kangchenjunga (Pang Pema) at approximately 5,200 metres and returned to Ghunsa, covering almost 96km by foot in seven days with no rest.

It was at Ghunsa that we came to know that Sele La, a pass that connects North and South Kangchenjunga, was closed due to heavy snow, so Dilli Bhattarai (my mountain guide), Neema Sherpa (our porter) and I spent that evening in Ghunsa to ponder over other options that would lead us to the South Kangchenjunga trek.

The simplest option was to drive back to Taplejung and take another ride into Mamangkhe and start the Southern trek from its starting point, but that was a very long option and we did not have so many days.

I had bought a map of Kangchenjunga from Kathmandu and the three of us stayed glued to the map that evening, finding and then discarding several options.

The route to South Kangchenjunga

We finally found one option that was possible, a minor trail that started in Sekathum (our first stop for the North trip) and followed Simbuwa River to Tortong in the south.

The Simbuwa River is melt from Yalung Glacier lying south of Mount Kanchenjunga and Tortong is a camp south of Tseram, the site that Sele La would have connected us from Ghunsa.

This new plan had two disadvantages. One: It added two more days to reach Tseram, and two: none that we spoke to had used this route before. We had two unused rest days on the trip and we decided, in the worst case scenario, we would return back to Sekathum and call an end to the expedition.

That evening was very special in Ghunsa. The family we were living with had invited other Sherpa villagers to join them. They were singing songs and sipping on salt butter tea (made with yak butter) and Tumba, a local alcoholic drink.

Journey to Yassang

From Amjilasa, we had to trek down to Sekathum and decide where and how we would head to the route that would connect us to Tortong. We arrived in Sekathum at 10am after completing 10km from Amjilasa.

We had tea in Sekathum with the Dai (Nepali for brother) and Didi (sister) who helped us find the route to Tortong. It was here at Sekathum we discovered that the route from Sekathum to Tortong has a good trail used by the villagers, but it was long and could not be completed in a day. It passes through several farming communities which end halfway between Sekathum and Tortong.

We decided to push from Sekathum to Yassang, one of the last villages on our way to Tortong, following the Simbuwa River. It turned out to be a very long day; we first descended from 2400m (Amjilasa) to 1600m (Sekathum) in 10km and then ascended again to 2150m (Yassang) in another 15km.

In Yassang, there were no lodges or teahouses, so a local family lent us a room in their house.

The next day, we left Yassang around 8am, less anxious now as we knew that there was a route to Tortong.

The trail after Yassang was well-built with solid rocks for around 3.5km, after which it was a thin but maintained trail.

There are several basic but beautiful bridges to cross along the way until the trail meets the bank of the river. Here, we had tea with a bridge construction worker before arriving in Tortong.

Just before Tortong, the route goes back into the forest, green and blooming with flowers. We covered 12km in six hours and climbed from 2,150m in Yassang to 3,000m in Tortong.

The hike from Tortong to Tseram was gentle and enjoyable. It took us through the forests before it disappeared and we got clear views of the far-lying Himalayan giants.

The forest out of Tortong is incredibly beautiful. Along the way, Dilli showed me a bridge and the trek route to Sikkim. There are no check posts along the border, just a trek into the state of Sikkim.

On several occasions, unprepared parties have wandered into India from Nepal, only getting into trouble with authorities over there when caught. After a photo or two, we continued on our trek to Tseram.

There was only one lodge open in Tseram, run by a young Nepali lady named Kanchi Sherpa. I was awestruck by her courage; living alone and running a lodge all by yourself in the middle of the Himalayas is no easy task.

Not only did she help us with our stay, she also guided us in planning for our trek to the South Base Camp.

It was at Tseram that we came to know that Ramche, the last camp before base camp, was still closed due to heavy snowfall. Sherpas returning from South Base Camp warned us of the knee-deep snow near Ramche.

So far, only one team had made it to South Base Camp and it was a group of climbers that was staying at the base camp for the season and attempting to climb Kanchenjunga.

For us, there was only one option: start early in the day and make it to Ramche and South Base Camp before returning back the same day. This would combine an effort of two days into one single day.

Wake up at 4am, breakfast at 4:30am and we were on our feet for South Base Camp at 5am — it was a busy morning in Tseram. But here’s what worked in our favour, at least going up to the base camp: at night, the temperature had fallen below freezing (-10 to -15 degrees Celsius), turning the snow into ice.

We trekked up through the rock-hard ice, making progress in record time. Wind was still blowing from the South, pushing us from the back and helping us move faster.

We reached Ramche at 8:30am, completing 7km in two hours and 30 minutes, which is quite fast at 4,800m elevation. A short break in Ramche and we were moving again.

The Kabru peak that lies adjacent to Kangchenjunga and forms the border between Nepal and India was now much closer, and it was here that we noticed that even though the southern sky was clear, there was a spot of clouds over Kabru.

Mountains have their own weather systems, often unrelated to the regional weather. What if the weather changed and the clouds once again beat us to the view point? I pushed both Dilli and Neema to cut the breaks and move faster.

There was a steep climb to reach Oktang and here was the knee-deep snow. Dilli even slipped through the snow a few feet and took a break, where he shot a spectacular photo of me and Neema making the push.

After a tough climb at the climax, we finally reached Oktang at 10:45am, 4km in an hour and 45 minutes from Ramche.

At the top was a prayer site for those attempting to climb Kangchenjunga and other peaks in the vicinity. But here’s what broke our hearts. Though Kabru seemed stunning with the clouds over it, Kangchenjunga’s south face was covered in the clouds.

An early arrival allowed us to stay longer, so we decided to wait a couple of hours and hoped that by then Her Majesty Kanchenjunga would reveal herself.

An early arrival allowed us to stay longer, so we decided to wait a couple of hours and hoped that by then Her Majesty Kanchenjunga would reveal herself.

We had hot tea and biscuits for lunch, went around taking pictures of the cloud-covered Kanchenjunga and its adjacent mountain, the peaks of Kabru (7,412m, 7,339m, 7,338m and 7318m).

11am turned into 12pm. 12pm turned in to 1pm, but the weather only got worse and there was less of Kangchenjunga visible now than before.

After so many hours, the cold was taking a toll on our bodies. With that we called it the end of our expedition. It would have been perfect to see the south face of Kanchenjunga. but such is the world of the mountains.

We started our descent to Tseram around 1pm and it took us five hours to reach Tseram. It was physically harder going back: heat from the sun had now melted the nice, solid ice we had walked on earlier, turning it into a soup up to knee-height.

Twice, we had to cross through a glacial water stream that filled our shoes with freezing water. We finally reached Tseram at 5pm, much to Kanchi's surprise who thought we wouldn't be back before 7 or 8pm for such a long day.

We had finally completed the entire Kanchenjunga circuit, replacing the Sele La with a new southern route without a single rest day. It was now time to descend to Tortong, Yamphudin and Mamangkhe, from where we could catch a local ride to Taplejung.

At breakfast the next morning in Tseram, Kanchi pointed out that it was snowing up at Kabru and Kangchenjunga. Soon after we reached Tortong, it started snowing there as well. The entire green Himalayas turned white in minutes.

Here, sitting with Neema and Dilli, I thought that had we taken a rest day, we would have arrived at Ortong or the South Base Camp in snowfall, so we were very lucky.

The snowfall forced us to change our route once again; instead of returning via Yamphudin, we decided to return via our newly-discovered trail to Sekathum.

The route to Yamphudin climbs up to 3,600m from Tortong and there was a lot of snow up there that we avoided now that we knew of another way out.

We trekked to Sekathum via Yassang, spent a night at Sekathum and then descended to Tapethok the next morning, from where a local ride took us the Taplejung the next day and another one to Bhadrapur the day after.

With the trip now behind me, I really enjoyed the ride from Taplejung to Bhadrapur. It passes through so many valleys, going down to as low as 600m and then up again to 2,200m several times. One can feel the weather getting hot at lower elevations and cold again at the higher elevations.

We passed through several small bazaars and beautiful mountain communities. Approximately 90km from Taplejung was the colourful little city of Phidim and 75km from Phidim lies Ilam, Nepal's tea capital.

We stopped at Ilam bazaar to explore the place and buy some fresh, local tea before resuming our journey once again, passing through the tea fields where I could literally smell fresh tea in the air.

From Ilam, the route finally descends down to 200m, to the plains of Bhadrapur. What’s fascinating is that from Bhadrapur, the massive mountains aren’t even visible anymore, just plain fields.

Dilli joked how Sherpas who live in colder weather at higher elevations have a difficult time coping with the hot weather in Bhadrapur.

It was Holi that day and on our way, we passed through several groups celebrating the festival of colours on the streets of Bhadrapur.

On the long eight-hour drive back to Bhadrapur, there were periods of silence where moments of the trek, people I met and the new friendships kept flashing across my mind. It’s amazing how travel connects us with people that we had never met before.

Had I not made this trip, I would not have met Dilli and Neema, the two people without whom this trip could not have happened. We spent 15 days together, passing through forests and broken trails under the grandeur of one of the highest mountain ranges on the planet, counting on each other for motivation and survival.

And then the Dai and Didi in Sekathum who helped us find the route to Yassang, the baby and grandfather in Thangyam, the boy working at his father’s tea stall, the child in Phale who was sad to see us leave, the bridge construction worker we had tea with near Tortong, the brave Kanchi Sherpa at Tseram.

So many lives, and each one of them have their own stories.

Before flying out of Kathmandu, I promised Dilli that I would mail him photographs of all the people we met on the trek, which he can gift them on his next trip to Kangchenjunga.

I may never return to Kangchenjunga but I will always have their memory in my photographs. I hope these photographs will remind them of me — a Pakistani trekker who once visited Kangchenjunga.

Are you exploring remote regions of the world? Share your experiences with us at prism@dawn.com

By the 1880s, curry symbolised how different parts of the Empire were intertwined, as tastes and palates adapted to new lands and new requirements.

Colonial culinary innovations, especially the curried dishes, ensured meals were the long drawn and leisurely events that they had become in the 19th century, thanks to the wide use of gaslight and the ubiquitous presence of servants ready to serve every course, especially in the colonial outposts.

Also, these recipes and the spices that were integral to them helped make certain foods, such as the coarser and “inferior” meats of the east, more palatable, and ensured their preservation.

Besides curry, other colonial culinary adaptations included the mulligatawny soup (originally pepper water to which other ingredients were added to make it a complete dish), kedgeree, pish pash (a rice gruel popular in colonial Southeast Asia), and the notion of “tiffin” and chota hazri, or a small breakfast.

Such dishes were part of a cumulative culinary enterprise, the earliest examples of “fusion foods” — in the words of food historian Cecilia Leong-Salobir — born out of adaptation and adjustment, as memsahibs learned to work with native (local) cooks, as the latter learned to figure out their employers’ tastes, and the manner of how local ingredients and long-sustained dietary habits arrived at mutual accommodation.

A new wave of experts

In 1889, Daniel Santiagoe’s Curry Cook’s Assistant or Curries and How to Make Them in England in their Original Style was published in London.

A cook who had served the British in Madras and in Ceylon, and whose father had been a butler and fiddler in Ceylon, Santiagoe had impressive credentials.

His master, John Loudoun Shand, a plantation owner in Ceylon, wrote the book’s introduction, explaining helpfully to the reader that curries were perhaps one reason why Easterners had longer lifespans and that Santiagoe’s use of English was quaint, but his knowledge of curries excellent.

Santiagoe begins his book of 60 recipes by providing a list of ingredients for making curry powder. He considerately provides two separate lists, since ingredients readily accessible to the Ceylon cook would not be as easily available to the London resident and vice versa.

By this time — the late 19th century — curry powder was sold commercially but good cooks insisted on making the authentic stuff from scratch.

Colonel Kenny-Herbert’s books, Fifty Breakfasts, Sweet Dishes and Culinary Jottings for Madras, based on his newspaper writings in Madras, had also been published in the 1880s.

The army colonel had established the Common-Sense Cookery Association in London to teach “high class cooking” to Westerners.

In several newspaper pieces, Kenny-Herbert appeared anguished over the fact that young ladies keen to write columns approached him seeking tips on the making of curries, brazenly confident that a few classes would give them the necessary expertise, and were totally oblivious to the reality that it took several months, or even years, to master this art.

In Henry Yule and AC Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson, a dictionary of colloquial Asian terms published in 1886, curry was defined as a “savoury dish made up of ‘meat, fish, fruit or vegetables cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric’ served to flavour the two staple foods of the east — bread and rice, both of which are bland dishes”.

Travelling west

George Francklin Atkinson’s Curry and Rice (1858), with its eye-catching lithographs, shows how the lives of the sahibs and the locals were intertwined in small colonial towns and hill stations. Besides ayahs and lascars, cooks were the first undocumented international travellers from colonial India.

Some two decades before Santiagoe wrote his book, Hadjee Allee had already established a reputation for himself for his kebabs.

In 1851 the writer William Moy Thomas, in a story called The Elixir of Life, mentioned Hadjee Allee as the famous cook who had newly arrived from India to work in the Bengal Hotel.

Allee, Thomas’s narrator says, was known for his “Indian dupeajja, Keorma, Jerdu and Koorma Plow, Indian Coaptu, Kitcheree, Mancooly and Indian cababs”.

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The story by a man about town narrator appeared in Household Words, then edited by Charles Dickens.

The real Hadjee Allee did move to London. He married a British woman in 1846. A decade earlier, he had also published a book, Receipts for cooking the most favourite dishes in general use in India, partial reproductions of which are available in later books.

There were some translations before this too. In 1831, a Sandford Arnot, a linguist and one of the Orientalists that had once been based in Calcutta, translated for the London Oriental Institute, a Persian book of recipes into English: Indian cookery, as Practised and Described by the Natives of the East, perhaps the first cookery book from India available in English.

Cookery and advice

Apart from these early cookbooks by officials and travelling cooks, another genre comprised mainly of books that offered advice.

Written first by men and, from the 1870s onward, by British and Anglo-Indian women (several of whom wrote anonymously), these were intended to help women who travelled to India as wives and homemakers.

The authors shared copious notes on setting up a house, appropriate clothing for every occasion, habits for everyday living, recipes for entertainment and how to run a household and, especially, manage domestic staff.

According to the books, servants were childlike but could be cunning and evasive. They were an indispensable part of colonial life, but they had to be carefully monitored and disciplined, going by these books.

Moreover, as kitchens were not very healthy places, cooks had to be rigidly supervised.

Among the first books of this kind was written by R Flower Riddell, a colonial official who served as Surgeon General to the Nizam of Hyderabad in the 1840s. Riddell’s Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book appeared in 1849, and servants feature in the very first chapter.

Riddell was unequivocal in his warnings about their dishonest ways and suggested that servants be registered at the “thana” or local police station before employment.

He also listed the kinds of domestic workers and the salaries they usually received.

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For instance, in Bengal, there was the sircar or accountant, the khansamah or butler, khidmatgar or table servant, bawarchee or cook, dhobee or washerman, bhisti or water carrier, halalkur or sweeper, hurkara or messenger, durzee or tailor, durwan or porter, ghareewan or coachman, syce or horsekeeper and others including tent pitcher, hookah attendant and female servants such as the ayah or nanny and amah or the wet nurse.

The book details the necessary care for maintaining poultry and horses, then goes on to providing “receipts” (archaic for recipes) for the making of various dishes, including soups (two different kinds of mulligatawny), sauces, chutneys, fish, puddings, and of course, curries which appear toward the book’s latter half in the chapter, “Oriental Cookery”.

Riddell lists the detailed ingredients for making curry powder (four kinds) on pages 402-3.

Women take the stage

Later writers often mentioned their years of residence in India in the book’s very title, so as to establish the validity of authorship.

Books such as The Indian Cookery Book: A Practical Handbook to the Kitchen in India (1869) was declared to have been written by “a thirty-five years’ resident”, and JH’s Household Cookery: Tested Recipes Collected During 23 Years’ Residence in India, was published in 1902.

There were other writers who wrote for the India-returned or those who had already acquired a taste for the new foods.

Henrietta Harvey wrote her Anglo Indian Cookery at Home by gathering recipes from various parts of the subcontinent and suitably “Anglicising” them.

She had returned with her dekchis or metal cooking utensils, curry powders and curry stone (akin to the mortar and pestle but used to grind spices for curries). Her book remained a classic for some years.

Mrs Grace Johnson’s Anglo-Indian and Oriental Cookery (1893), introduced her book as “Oriental cookery modified by English, French and Italian methods”.

A decade later, in 1903, Joseph Edmunds wrote Curries: and how to prepare them.

He sold his own version of curry powder and had his carefully picked recipes vetted by cookery teachers and eminent chefs.

Making vs manufacturing

Though curries featured on the menus of a couple of coffee houses established in the 1770s and the Hindustanee Coffee House set up by Sake Dean Mohammad opened in 1810 (and closed a year later), curry powders and other packaged foods such as chutneys, sauces and pickles were already commercially available by the end of the 18th century.

Experienced cooks, however, insisted on concocting their own powders.

In a book written by the head chef of the British royal household from the 1880s to the 1910s, Gabriel Tschumi describes how cooks at the palace (evidently there were many) were disdainful of curry powders that were bought and insisted on pounding and mixing their own.

While every cook and cookbook writer worth her while stood by her version, there was also widespread belief that curries were a way of building good health.

Harvey Day, in his Curries of India, was particularly eloquent on the benefits spices conferred on the human body.

As Day wrote: “[Almost every spice had some] antiseptic value and many are carminatives: that is, they tend to reduce flatulence, as do dill and caraway. The paprika and chilli families are extremely rich in vitamin C, an anti-scorbutic vitamin, which is good for the skin. This may be one reason why so many Indian women have such remarkably clear skins.”

Ginger’s medicinal value had been recognised by the ancient Indians and the Chinese but King Henry VIII (1491-1547) was especially appreciative of ginger’s value as aphrodisiac. A mention that is revealing not because Henry VIII remains best known for his many marriages but for the fact that ginger was already known to the West as a trading commodity, long before spices such as pepper entered the picture.

This piece originally appeared on Scroll.in and has been reproduced with permission.

In August 2017, following a controversy over Confederate monuments in Virginia, the American Historical Association (AHA) issued a joint public communiqué urging a revisiting of the state government’s decision to honour individuals associated with slavery.

President Donald Trump had opposed the removal of monuments that had been in place for over a century, arguing that they were remnants of a troubled past that could not be erased.

But as the AHA statement pointed out, the idea was not to erase history, but to open a healthy public debate on matters relating to public recognition of individuals based on their contribution towards society.

Many of such monuments throughout the United States, the statement pointed out, had been installed decades ago without wider consultation from a broad spectrum of society, especially African Americans.

I am reminded of this important discussion on the politics of commemoration by the recent installation of Ranjit Singh’s statue at the Lahore Fort. There are, however, huge differences between the troubled legacy of Confederate monuments and a single act celebrating Ranjit Singh who, even by the standards of what his critics say, does not trigger such painful memories.

The unveiling of Ranjit Singh’s statue has not sparked any controversy, let alone demand for a public debate. This is even though the Walled City of Lahore Authority (WCLA) made the decision without broader consultation.

The primary motivation seems to be commercial, as the statue would help draw tourists, especially the Sikh diaspora, though the authority must also have taken into calculation the political implications of such an act.

What prompts me to write about the Ranjit Singh statue is the celebratory language in which it has been received by some. The best example is to be found in the way the federal minister for science and technology, Fawad Chaudhary, tweeted about it:

Other than its jubilatory tone and use of such anachronistic terms as ‘reforms in the governance’ for early 19th century, the tweet is hopelessly faulty on historical counts as well. Even though he commanded a large area under his control, the Maharaja didn't even rule over entire Punjab, let alone Kabul and Delhi.

Ranjit Singh’s legacies

The statue derives its support from different constituencies based on varied legacies that they ascribe to the man.

Widely celebrated as a warrior and an able statesman, Ranjit Singh established a strong, expansive empire that encompassed a vast area of present-day Pakistani Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, along with Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh.

For a section of Punjabi activists in Pakistan and most Sikhs, Ranjit Singh is a local hero — 'son of the soil' — who successfully thwarted aggressors from the north and established a strong centralised government that provided relief to the people of Punjab after decades of chaos and violence.

There is also a counter-narrative which denounces Sikh rule under Ranjit Singh as an era of darkness in which Muslims were persecuted and their sacred sites were vandalised.

For me, the search for the ‘real’ Ranjit Singh is not important. I am more concerned about the legacy of Ranjit Singh as it is being created, invoked and commemorated.

The question of ascertaining Ranjit Singh’s contributions assumes the historian to play the role of a forensic expert. It assumes the craft of the historian to be precise and scientific that can, on objective and impartial scrutiny, reveal absolute truth about a historical figure or event.

History, at best, can be an approximation of the past in an academic idiom that is contingent on the personal outlook of the author, and informed by a range of personal influences, ideologies, affiliations and worldviews. It is just one way of recording the past.

There are other ways, especially in the South Asian context, in which competing ideas about the past percolate to sections of the society, internalised, passed on and then reimagined. For example, the creation of Pakistan in 1947, was seen as a culmination of, as well as a foundational moment for, new myths and reimagining of older ones.

In one such instance, immediately after independence, a formal ceremony was held to open the Lahore Fort for the public, revoking its status as a military garrison. This act was interpreted as marking the fulfillment of a longstanding prophecy that the Fort would be reopened once Muslim power was reestablished in this region.

So, it is not about ascertaining the truth about Ranjit Singh’s reign, especially the status of his Muslim subjects. What is important is that he founded an empire on the strength of Sikh militaristic prowess and ran it on ideas of moral legitimacy inspired by the Sikh gurus and their teachings.

The way Ranjit Singh’s rule has been interpreted by his admirers today is a different process of past-making which makes use of such anachronistic terms as ‘secularism’ to explain Ranjit Singh’s fair treatment of all his subjects and the fact that he had a Muslim as one of his closest aides.

Constituencies of Ranjit Singh

It is no surprise that this adulation for Ranjit Singh is most common among the Sikhs in India and the wider diaspora, as he is recognised as the embodiment of Sikh political power.

There is a huge nostalgia for empire that celebrates the memory of the Sikh rule and the materiality of it classified as ‘heritage’. It is no wonder that Ranjit Singh’s life-sized statue has been gifted to the WCLA by SK Foundation UK, an organisation based in the United Kingdom.

In one of the major events sponsored by Sikh groups in London (UK Punjab Sikh heritage) was a 2018 exhibition, titled Empire of the Sikhs, held at Brunei Gallery, SOAS. The Sikh nostalgia for the empire — a veritable will to power – is a product of both an impulse towards anchoring the communitarian identity in state power, and the historical peculiarity of the Sikhs — especially since the 1940s.

Partition set into motion a series of setbacks for Sikhs. They lost material wealth and were uprooted from the land they held sacred and relocated to a part of Punjab where an uneasy relationship with the Hindu majority followed.

A similar process of past-making, albeit with a completely different reception of Ranjit Singh, has taken place among Muslim nationalists who talk about oppression suffered by Muslims during the Sikh rule. This opinion has been based on historical works written in post-annexation Punjab that speak of Sikh violence against Muslims and vandalism of their sacred sites. Such a narrative served well to portray the British as the harbinger of peace and stability in the region.

Punjabi nationalists in Pakistan, however, have been jubilant as they see the installing of the statue a symbolic act of recognition from a state that, despite its domination by a Punjabi elite, has been oblivious to the history and language of Punjab.

Punjabi sense of nationhood has been sublimated within the larger Pakistani nationalism conflating Islam, Muslim and Urdu. This made it frustratingly hard for Punjabi intellectuals, mostly affiliated with Marxists groups, to plead for or articulate an idea of Punjabi nationhood that could be rooted in its language and mobilised for a progressive polity addressing class issues.

In other words, the statist project of an Islam-based identity with Urdu as its flagship has made such massive inroads that the successive generation of Punjabi activists has found it difficult to counter it.

For them, the Ranjit Singh’s statue, therefore, is a breath of fresh air that could possibly become a precedent for similar steps to be followed. For them, it remains important that the act of recognition — whether for Dulla Bhatti or Bhagat Singh — should come from the state as it signifies a symbolic reversal of policy.

From the perspective of Pakistani liberals, it is a welcome step as it interrupts the singular telos of Muslim history that is taught at schools and rhetorically championed in the larger public sphere. There is a strong element of truth in this approach.

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The inclusion of Ranjit Singh sits uneasily with a historical timeline which, simultaneously, champions the exploits of Ahmad Shah Abdali. Widely hailed as a saviour of the Muslims of Punjab from the excesses of Sikh and Maratha violence in the mid-18th century, Pakistani textbooks pay lavish tribute to his military campaigns and services to the 'glory of Islam' — so much so that one of Pakistan’s ballistic missiles is named after him.

Similarly, Pakistani textbooks pay glorious tributes to the jihad led by Sayyid Ahmad against the Sikh rule. This militaristic attempt was also aimed at ‘liberating’ the Muslims of Punjab.

Any historical representation for a statist project — whether as a museum artefact or textbook — is marked with erasures of some aspects of history that do not conform with the rest of the narrative. Historical narratives, therefore, and especially statist narratives, have seeds of subversion within. They are marked by silencing of voices and insist on a particular type of truth about a historical figure or event.

Up until now, it has been the erasure of Pakistan’s non-Muslim pasts and their richness. For once, there has been un-silencing of this past, so it counts as a welcome step for Pakistani liberals.

Languages of commemoration

What I find problematic, however, is the celebratory language used on this occasion rooted in the language of power, state and empire.

Tweets and comments ‘welcoming’ Ranjit Singh hailed him, not as the ruler of Punjab, but the founder of an empire whose boundaries stretched up to Afghanistan in the west and Kashmir and Ladakh in the north.

This valourising of the Maharaja, thus, is thinly veiled othering of the Afghan as savage — with a certain fear and appreciation for the adversary as well — whose savagery could only be matched by a noble savage who was able to give them a taste of their own medicine.

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Regardless of what Punjabi nationalists think of their ‘son of the soil’ and reasons for honouring him, it cannot be overlooked that, in contemporary Pakistan, where Punjabi-dominated military and bureaucracy is seen responsible for the misery of every other ethnic group, such an act of state recognition — that, too, for a figure known for military exploits outside of Punjab — is interpreted as a celebration of Punjabi chauvinism.

People outside of Punjab may not be willing to understand the reasons for which Punjabi nationalists, a handful as they might be, are celebrating him, given what they have suffered at the hands of the same Punjabi-dominated state.

Counter histories and memories

This occasion of honouring Ranjit Singh has prompted other ethno-nationalist ideologues to demand similar recognition for their warrior-like figures. The most interesting is the case of Nawab Muzaffar Khan of Multan.

The afterlife of his battle with the Lahore Darbar can be aptly summed up using Agha Shahid Ali’s words: “My memory keeps getting in the way of your history”.

The expansion of Singh’s Lahore Darbar, brutal as it was like any other empire, brought him into conflict with the ruler of Multan. The war that followed was violent, where Nawab Muzaffar Khan died fighting along with his sons.

Later, as a Seraiki national identity coalesced in postcolonial Punjab, Muzaffar Khan was to assume the role of a ‘freedom fighter’ who resisted against the aggression of ‘Punjab’.

Taj Muhammad Langah, one of the leaders of Seraiki nationalism, tried to transform Muzaffar Khan’s final resting place into a mausoleum which he would visit every year with a handful of enthusiasts to lay down a floral wreath and chadar.

This shows how collective memories are formed, draw upon a peculiar version of the past that, in turn, itself, is subject to change under different political contexts.

The same holds true for Sindh where a section of hardcore nationalists glorifies Raja Dahir — the ruler of Sindh defeated by Muhammad bin Qasim — as a hero.

One could interpret these responses as an effective way of subverting statist narratives glorifying Muslim rulers and invaders. Such a reactionary approach, and the elusive search in the history of strong men as heroes, is the most unfortunate consequence of authoritarian state practices in Pakistan.

Ever since the notorious imposition of One Unit in 1955, much of progressive politics from smaller provinces have been tainted with ethnic chauvinism.

Explore: How old is Lahore? The clues lie in a blend of historical fact and expedient legend

In the end, coming back to the politics of commemoration, choosing Ranjit Singh among an ideological range of representations is a political act which aims at signalling a specific kind of historical narrative.

It replaces one set of state practices with another, though its supporters don’t think of it as replication and expect a different outcome from such practices.

It is as if all those celebrating Ranjit Singh — or those demanding recognition for Ahmad Shah Abdali for the Pashtuns, Nawab Muzaffar Khan for the Seraikis and Raja Dahir for the Sindhis — are vying for an imperial legacy under the regalia of a sovereign whose politics they agree with, who conforms to their present-day ethnic imaginary or whose religious beliefs they share.

They have convinced themselves that their imperialist treated everyone fairly, and thus ascribe to him such terms as ‘secular’ and ‘liberal’. This, unfortunately, means that their investment remains in the idea of state itself, conquest as state-making and the power that comes with it to establish and safeguard a singular idea of nationhood.

Their commitment to the idea — in this particular case — of Punjab and its history that addresses questions of caste oppression, gender violence and class dispossession should have taken precedence over everything else.

In endorsing the symbol that the state has chosen for them, the nationalists and the liberals have chosen unwisely.

Are you exploring history in Pakistan? Share your insights with us at prism@dawn.com

Prime Minister Imran Khan recently launched Ehsas, a programme to alleviate poverty and uplift some of the most disadvantaged sections of society. One of its goals is to tackle malnutrition and stunting and reduce health inequities.

To achieve this goal, a major strategy that the prime minister intends to follow is to distribute chickens and goats to poor households, especially in rural areas. There is some evidence that such a policy can lead to poverty alleviation and better nutritional outcomes for poor households in other parts of the world; therefore, his idea of replicating it here in Pakistan has some merit.

However, it is noteworthy that this strategy is intended for rural and food insecure households, while the problem of stunting is not just concentrated in such households. According to the World Bank, 24 per cent of the children in food secure households of Pakistan suffer from stunting. This number jumps up to 38pc when we consider food insecure households as well.

Explore: Why PM Khan’s chicken and eggs solution has been mocked for all the wrong reasons

These asset transfer programmes in isolation, without a complementary nutrition-focused health and agricultural policy, may not solve the malnutrition crisis faced by Pakistan, where even per-capita income growth has not led to significant gains in malnutrition mitigation.

Although a number of social, environmental and genetic factors are relevant in determining the nutritional well-being of an individual, I want to focus on how agricultural policy can be leveraged to improve nutritional outcomes in Pakistan.

What can be done?

What does having a nutrition-focused agricultural policy entail and how can Pakistan move towards it? Simply put, the government needs to incentivise production of crops that are a rich source of macro- and micro-nutrients.

A focus on traditional cash crops production may not always lead to improved nutrition. Policies and agri-food innovations that bridge the gap between agricultural production and nutrition-related outcomes need to be prioritised.

In other words, the emphasis should be on improved nutrition through pro-poor consumption growth of foods that are a rich source of nutrients and micronutrients.

Related: Imran Khan may have counted his chickens before they're hatched

Two sectors can potentially form the backbone of this nutrition-led agricultural policy. The first is the livestock and fisheries sector.

By ensuring that small-scale fishers and processors have equitable access to coastal and inland waters, and by providing rational subsidies for inputs required for fish farming and by prioritising access and affordability of fish for the poor, the government can ensure better nutritional outcomes for its citizens.

Growth in fishery and aquaculture in Bangladesh led to poverty alleviation as well as growth in pro-poor consumption and better nutrition outcomes. Pakistan has the opportunity to replicate Bangladesh’s experience and use this sector to ameliorate its malnutrition crisis.

However, intensification of fisheries and aquaculture can potentially affect water use and management — so growth in aquaculture should be accompanied by technology adoption that can help reduce water footprint of this sector.

The figure below illustrates the differences in per-capita fish consumption between Pakistan and other South Asian countries, reflecting how supply-side policies could increase the per-capita consumption, which may lead to better nutritional outcomes.

Similarly, the livestock sector can play a central role in enhancing food security and mitigating malnutrition. The government needs to commission a breeding programme that enhances the milk and meat productivity of our indigenous species of cattle, sheep and goats.

Small farmers rely on these animals to feed their families and it is imperative that their productivity is enhanced and technology like biosecurity as well as better feed is adopted to extract optimal economic and nutritional gains from these assets. A highly productive livestock sector will ensure availability and affordability of animal-sourced proteins, which are key requirements in a healthy diet.

Figures below map the average milk and meat productivity of Pakistani breeds and those from other parts of the world. Differences in the figures reflect that there is much work that needs to be done to increase the productivity and profitability of our livestock.

The second sector that needs to be brought to the forefront in the fight against malnutrition is lentils and pulses.

This can be achieved in two ways. Firstly, Pakistan needs to adopt and produce high-yield seeds of lentils and legumes so that it does not have to rely on relatively expensive imports, which raise local prices.

Given that lentils can be efficiently grown on dryland (barani) areas, it is imperative that the high-risk and low-productivity drylands of Pakistan are converted into high-reward and high-productivity regions. An excellent example of such dryland farming can be seen in Whitman County, United States, where high-productivity seeds suited to the local climate are produced.

The world is increasing relying on scientific interventions to raise yields and incomes for their farmers and Pakistan needs to do the same.

Given that our dryland farmers are generally resource poor, such scientific interventions can have positive nutritional gains for the society, as well as positive income gains for farmers and reduction in demand for imports.

Also read: A farmer in Punjab is rejuvenating sand dunes though drip irrigation

At the same time, bio-fortification (breeding food with higher micro-nutrient content) of lentils and other affordable foods have the potential to bridge nutrient gaps in our population.

Bio-fortification has shown positive signs in terms of reducing micro-nutrient deficiencies in a cost-effective manner in India. Such initiatives can be especially fruitful for vulnerable groups like children and pregnant women who are more likely to suffer from micro-nutrient deficiencies.

The pursuit of raising productivity of our agriculture very much lies at the forefront of science and policy interface. The effectiveness of interventions will thus heavily depend on the collaboration between scientists, producers, processors and policymakers.

While most themes discussed in the article can be found in the National Food Security Policy, the latter lacks a clear road map on how the goals will be achieved and who is responsible for what actions.

A detailed institutional framework needs to be established, with clear goals and deliverables for the Department of Agriculture, universities and producers so that agriculture can be leveraged for nutritional gains.

Lastly, it is important to note that the above-mentioned policy goals only address issues of access and availability of food. Improving nutritional outcomes will also require efforts to reduce air and water pollution, lower the disease burden — especially in early childhood — and improve water, hygiene and sanitation conditions.

Are you involved in agriculture reform? Share your insights with us at prism@dawn.com

One doesn’t have to travel far in Pakistan to come across places named after yesterday’s saints, martyrs and leaders. These names typically evoke a sense of positive nostalgia about the past.

While reading the travel accounts of the Indian folklorist Charles Swynnerton, I was amused to learn about his visit in 1903 to the desolate hills of Gandgarh, which he translated as “Mountain of Filth.”

Why did the barren hills situated 50 kilometres northwest of what is today Islamabad earn such an unflattering name?

Local history and folklore books pointed towards the presence of several ancient caves along the Gandgarh range that contained cues about its past. A few months ago, I convinced my friend Ayaz Achakzai to join me in an adventure to search for these caves, using whatever limited information we had.

Also read: Clueless in the abandoned centuries-old city of Tulaja in Soon Valley

Our first destination was a cave concealed by a cliff under the ruins of an ancient fort called Kafirkot (not to be confused with the Kafirkot temples in Dera Ismail Khan).

According to Swynnerton, Kafirkot was where the people of Chach (adjacent to the Gandgarh hills) fled to escape Mahmud of Ghazni’s armies a thousand years ago. The ancestors of the Gakhar tribe inhabiting the Salt Range and Potohar plateau put up a ferocious fight but were unable to prevent Mehmud’s onslaught into the plains.

As per Swynnerton’s documentation of the area’s oral traditions, those seeking refuge at Kafirkot were slaughtered to a man; the secret cave we were looking for was where the unfortunate inhabitants of Kafirkot had made their last stand once the fort’s walls had been breached.

A donkey track from the lofty village of Chinarkot in the heart of the Gandgarh led us to the location of Kafirkot.

Our guide Bilal took us to the ruins of the fort along with his donkey, Chandni. He even joined us in the subsequent search for the cave under the oppressive sun.

Although our books indicated that the remains of Kafirkot’s walls were visible until a century ago, we could only find piles of rubble. The site bore marks of excavation attempts by amateur treasure hunters over the years.

On a sharp cliff located south-east of Kafirkot, we were relieved to discover the cave Swynnerton described as “so cunningly contrived by nature that only by accident could its existence by suspected at all.”

A well concealed gap in the cliff opened into a small chamber that was the entrance to the cave.

Since we were without any lighting, ropes, safety equipment or formal training, we decided to halt after scaling 15-20 feet along the cave’s narrow walls with no end in sight .

According to the Tareekh-e-Hazara by Dr Sher Bahadur Panni, Maulana Ismat Ullah of Sirikot, a local who conducted an exploration of the cave in 1930, found a comprehensive network of steps leading to further chambers deep inside the cave. Swynnerton reported finding inside the cave “ashes and potsherds in abundance that attested its former occupation.”

As we took a moment’s rest in the unsettling silence of the cave, I thought of all the Hindu men, women and children who perished therein a thousand years ago. I imagined them in their last moments communicating with each other in the soft and earthy Hindko that I and others belonging to the region speak in our homes today.

Nuances such as this, or the fact that Mahmud of Ghazni and his son Masud also employed Hindu officers and soldiers in their armies, hardly seem to matter to South Asia’s chest thumping history commentators these days.

After saying goodbye to Kafirkot, it took us nearly 15 minutes to convince Bilal to accept compensation for his help and support. I’ve always found it disturbing when tourists take advantage of the generosity of locals, usually under the convenient garb of ‘respecting traditions’ of rural hospitality.

Our next destination was much easier to locate as it was situated close to the road. According to folklore, thousands of years ago it was here that an old woman had asked the mythical hero, Raja Rasalu, to rescue her only surviving son from a gang of giant man-eating demons who openly roamed the Gandgarh hills.

Our second cave corresponded to the location where Raja Rasalu imprisoned the giant, Thirya, for eternity, after slaying his companions, Baggarbath and Wazir. Thirya’s howls of agony could be heard far away after he was locked in the cave by Raja Rasalu.

Several historical sources mention reports of a roar-like sound that would occasionally emanate from Gandgarh.

While passing through the region in 1619, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir wrote in his memoirs:

“I heard from the people of this country that a noise like that of thunder fell from the ear from a hill in the neighbourhood, though there might be at the time no sign of rain, or cloud, or lightning. This sound is now to be heard every year, or certainly every two years. I have also heard this matter frequently discussed in my father’s (Akbar’s) presence.”

In June 1841, the Indus experienced the greatest flooding in its modern history when Sham Singh Attariwala and Arbel Singh, both experienced military commanders of the Sikh empire, were skirmishing with my ancestor Painda Khan Tanoli near the Gundgarh range.

Although the leaders on both sides managed to escape, the raging waters of the Indus obliterated both armies “like a woman with a wet towel sweeps away a legion of ants.”

Seven years after the incident, Hazara’s first colonial administrator, Captain James Abbott, interviewed survivors to ascertain what they witnessed on the day of the flood. According to Ashraf Khan, an eye witness, the armies mistook the forceful sound of the Indus’s incoming waters as the “Gandgarh’s bellowing”.

Whether or not there is truth to the claims of the roaring sounds is perhaps a question that geologists are best qualified to answer.

For laymen such as myself, the actual significance of the forgotten stories of the Gandgarh’s caves lies in what they can teach us about our primitive responses to human suffering.

If Raja Rasalu’s helping of the old woman against the giants represents our capacity to unite when confronted by external enemies, then our apathy to the massacre at Kafirkot represents our shallow tendency to suspend empathy when atrocities are committed by our co-religionists.

Although Swynnerton hinted that a third cave (called Manghar Kallanh) in Gandgarh contained further items of historical interest, we were content with our findings for the day and decided to head back home to Islamabad.

Are you exploring Pakistan? Share your experience with us at prism@dawn.com

I wasn’t sure what to expect more than seeing animals. What awaited me was something so special and much larger than myself — something that would change me forever.

I must confess, it was never really on my bucket list. In fact, after watching some terrifying videos on YouTube on animal-human interaction, I was too scared to even go on a safari, let alone see animal migration.

I must also confess that a recent experience made me realise how one can have a truly paradigm-shifting experience, or miss out on one, by simply being willing to take risks. So as opposed to saying no a year and a half back when my husband chalked out a complete plan for experiencing animal migration, to his surprise, I said yes.

Ngorongoro Crater

As we set out on our journey to Tanzania, we flew via Nairobi to Arusha, where we stayed a night and then headed off to see one of the eight Natural Wonders of the World, the Ngorongoro Crater in the protected Ngorongoro Conservation Area, approximately 180 kilometres west of Arusha.

As our jeep reached the first vista point, from where one is able to see the whole crater, I was a little disappointed.

It was a nice sight, rather beautiful, but not something I hadn’t seen before. After taking a few pictures, we started descending into the crater and on our way down, I kept thinking to myself, is this it? Perhaps, I was looking for something extraordinary.

As we descended 610 metres into the crater, the idea that there once stood a magnificent volcano in the 259 square kilometre-area shook me to my core.

The Ngorongoro Crater is the largest unbroken ancient volcanic caldera in the world. The nearly three-million-year-old site was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1979, and home to roughly 30,000 animals, including some of Tanzania’s last remaining black rhinos.

We got to see four of the Big Five in the crater: elephant, cape buffalo, lion and rhinoceros. Some of the other animals in the crater included zebras, wildebeest, gazelles and hyenas.

The crater only reveals its beauty and magnificence once you descend into it and in comparison to Mother Nature, it makes you feel humble — almost irrelevant.

Ndutu

After a couple of hours in the crater (one can spend a maximum of five hours on a day’s fee), we were scheduled for another two and a half hour-long journey to reach Ndutu Safari Lodge, located in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area on the edge of the Southern Serengeti.

The Great Migration takes place in Ndutu in early March, when herds of wildebeest, zebras, gazelles and other animals migrate through the Serengeti National Park looking for a new grazing land. Also, February is the calving season and one is expected to see a lot of adorable babies along with mums migrating.

Our jeep mostly stayed on mud tracks with few paved roads in between, but after about an hour’s drive, we suddenly ended up in the wild plains.

The sight that lay ahead was difficult to put into words, the emotions impossible to capture on paper.

In the middle of nowhere, the vastness of the land evokes the nostalgia of the glorious breadth of the sea, with the land stretched all around as far as the eye can reach, the beautiful setting sun painting the sky in liquid gold and the silhouettes of gazelles, zebras and wildebeest with pronking gait racing beside our jeep — the sight was both peculiar and magical.

We kept standing throughout in the eight-seater Land Rover Defender Safari Vehicle with a pop-up roof to get an uninterrupted 360-degree view.

At times, we called out to each other to look at something and other times we just stayed quiet, absorbing the vivid scenery into our hearts, etching it in our memories forever.

After sunset, the dreamy evening sky with hues of deep blue and pink and the silhouetted trees topped with vultures eyeing our lone jeep in the wild were both stunning and scary.

Around 7:30pm, we reached Ndutu Safari Lodge and found out that due to safety concerns, the government has put a curfew of 6:00pm for jeeps to return to camp.

Rangers also patrol the area and if caught, one is charged with a hefty penalty: a fine plus a nighttime game drive charge, which is almost double the amount of a daytime game drive.

The following morning, we left for a game drive at 6:00am. Most animals enjoy basking in the sun. We got to see 26 giraffes, each with their unique beautiful pattern, posing for us, allowing us to photograph and admire them to our heart’s content.

Unlike their popular image, we saw lions panting and cuddling like dogs and wildebeest, and zebras playing with gazelles. And although we didn’t witness a live kill, we had sights of big cats feeding on fresh kills of zebras and wildebeest while hyenas and vultures waited their turn to feed on what was left.

We learned so much about animal behaviours, and our knowledgeable driver, Cosmas, left no opportunity to tell us more — how giraffes were shy, or how it’s better to come across a lion than a cape buffalo which, if it feels threatened, can get aggressive and attack.

Once, an elephant approached very close to our jeep (about 50m away) and Cosmas asked us to be completely quiet. He told us that elephants have a great memory and if any of them have witnessed poaching, they sometimes get furious and attack as humans and cars can remind them of the killings.

We saw lions so up close, with us hanging out of the roof trying to capture the sight with our cameras, that I hope it was the closest we ever got to them; yet, they peacefully walked by our jeeps.

We then proceeded to the migration site in South Ndutu. The magnitude and scale of the migration was both surreal and overwhelming. We had never seen anything quite like that; it was truly a larger than life experience.

Thousands of wildebeest all around us were moving in one direction, some resting, while others walking or playing with each other. According to government statistics, there are nearly two million combined wildebeest, zebras and gazelles migrating each year.

One night, staying in the unfenced lodge, I opened my cottage door around 1:00am to get rid of the odor from the insect repellent spray and had the most unexpected greeting by a zebra that was standing right outside my door.

We kept looking at each other for a few seconds and then it continued to graze. There were five of them altogether

The animals were calm in their habitat and throughout our stay, I didn’t see any animal getting furious or aggressive other than when there was a need to hunt for food.

Unlike the popular notion of wild animals being aggressive, I realised that even ‘wild’ animals, if given due space, do not create any nuisance; I found them much more civilised than humans.

Their generosity and hospitality was unparalleled, be it by their king that let us enjoy his royalty and didn’t scare us beside being fully aware of its power, or by the beautiful giraffe tower that almost orchestrated a formation for us, as if honoring our presence.

Are you spending time in nature? Share your experience with us at prism@dawn.com

The first time I heard of Bhera was when a friend of my father’s brought pheonian, a kind of vermicelli, to our house claiming these to be the best in the subcontinent.

For a long time, Bhera for us was just a small town somewhere near Sargodha. It was when the Motorway opened in 1997 that it slowly became recognised more as a popular pitstop.

A few weeks ago, I found myself on my way to Bhera with a long-time friend. We wanted to get out of Lahore and explore, so we decided upon Bhera, which was incidentally my friend’s ancestral town as well. Some frantic calls and we had Nayyar waiting for us near the town’s Chakwala gate.

Bhera, or Bheda from older times, existed probably since 400 BC. There are accounts of Mahmud of Ghazni raiding the city in the 10th century or Genghis Khan's forces ransacking it later. More recently, Bhera was a trading town on the western side of the River Jhelum and was shifted east of the river after being attacked by different armies around the early 16th century.

As was common in those days, Bhera was established inside a fort with tall walls and around eight gates. Few of these structures remain today and whatever is left is fast on its way to ruins, thanks to disregard for heritage.

Some of the gates are named after the major cities in whose direction they open: Lahori, Kashmiri, Multani, Chinioti and Kabuli, while others like Peeranwala or Haji Gulab gates are names for peculiar local reasons.

Bhera is divided into an old walled city and a sprawl beyond the walls. The former is further split into mohallas. Interestingly, each mohalla has distinct traits and is inhabited by different castes — Mohalla Piracha, Mohalla Sheikhan and Mohalla Sethian — though times are changing and these boundaries are becoming less important.

We were first led to Mohalla Piracha, as our host Nayyar was a Piracha. The view from the rooftop of his old haveli was exquisite, with green farms giving way to the River Jhelum and the Salt Range in the backdrop. You could spend a soothing evening reading books and sipping tea here, but not today.

Nayyar then led us through a maze of narrow streets into other parts of Mohalla Piracha and we could see old wooden arches, balconies and wood-carved doors in almost every old haveli. The alleys were reasonably clean and it seemed like the local government was doing a decent job.

Our guide next took us to an elegant peeli kothi in Mohalla Sheesh Mahal. The kothi, or mansion, was a tall building on a small mound with an expansive courtyard and outhouses. It apparently belonged to a local landlord and the structure pointed to a colonial origin.

The problem with Bhera is that not many know about the history of these havelis and most of the time, your knowledge is based on guesses. Apparently, the mansion was built on the ruins of a centuries-old haveli, as the delicate brickwork on outer walls implied.

Our next stop was Mohalla Sheikhan. Again, a few large havelis told the story of a glorious past. The white 1840s mosque looked beautiful with its three domes.

As we were walking through these alleys, we came across many abandoned Hindu and Sikh temples. Nayyar told us stories of gold buried by Hindus leaving Bhera at the time of Partition. According to him, people still occasionally find these hidden treasures and even he had been lucky once.

We then went to the Eiffel Tower of Bhera, as Nayyar called it. This was an old Sikh gurdwara with a tower that provides a panoramic view of the town. The Sikhs left Bhera in 1947 and their place of worship was now an imambargah.

The gurdwara was in the centre of town with a bustling bazaar. Bhera is known for wood-carved objects, quilts and khussas, and besides pheonian, pateesa and warrian (a spice ball used for making curries) too.

It was afternoon and the weather was temperate, so we headed to the river bank almost a kilometre away from the city. The trek was muddy, but not too bad, and we crossed a Hindu temple, made by the Chopra family, on our way.

We were later taken to the Marhi of Bhera. One Bhisham Singh Sahni wrote Mayyadas ki Marhi set in Bhera and revived interest in this forgotten religious heritage.

Marhi used to be a religious site for Hindus — still is — though few come here anymore. There was a deep well in a dense palm grove and you could picture blindfolded bulls (kohlu kay bael) working their way in circles to draw water out of the well, while the religious proceedings led by priests continued.

Sher Shah Suri, after defeating Mughal Emperor Humayun, camped near Khushab and planned the construction of Rohtas Fort in Jhelum to consolidate his rule and curtail the threat from Ghakkars of Pharwala Fort. In 1541, he also ordered the construction of Sher Shah Suri Jamia Mosque in Bhera, apparently to appease the locals.

The mosque was in a typical Mughal pattern (yes, Suri was not a Mughal) with an entrance, a wide courtyard, an ablution water pond in the middle, the main mosque with domes in front and minarets at the four corners.

The architecture of the mosque was in a similar pattern to the Badshahi and Wazir Khan mosques. It had a small museum and a seminary and has been administered by Bugvi family since the 19th century.

Bhera also used to be the terminus on the Malakwal-Bhera line, but the last train departed from here decades ago. The huge station with its waiting rooms, station master’s office, ticket windows and tracks are now dilapidated, but the lovely turntable — a circular mechanical structure usually at the last station on the line to turn the direction of the engine — was still there.

And for railway buffs, the 1887 Victoria Railway Bridge on the River Jhelum is just a 30-minute drive away, still serving the Malakwal-Pind Dadan Khan line.

Nayyar would not let us go without visiting the Bhera Government High School. Inaugurated in 1927 by Sir George Anderson, the school was a typical colonial school with vast grounds that has churned out many politicians, civil servants and other notables for 90 years.

The residents of Bhera rose to become judges, actors, doctors and entrepreneurs, but few stayed behind or maintained their connections with the city — and that's how Bhera became a forgotten town somewhere near Sargodha.

The town has a long history and the authorities may consider doing a heritage project on the lines of the Shahi Guzargah Project in Lahore. A number of these havelis, temples and structures can still be saved.

With a river at one end and ancient mosque and colonial railway station at the other, Bhera has all the potential to be our own heritage resort in Punjab’s heartland.

Are you exploring Pakistan? Share your experience with us at prism@dawn.com

The following is an excerpt from Justice Project Pakistan’s (JPP) book, The Death Penalty in Pakistan: A Critical Review, to be launched on July 11, 2019 in Islamabad. A culmination of 10 years of JPP’s work, the book documents the many ways in which Pakistan's application of the death penalty intersects with legal, social and political realities.

It focuses on how capital punishment impacts some of the most vulnerable populations: juveniles, the mentally ill, persons with physical disabilities, low-wage migrant workers imprisoned in foreign jails and the working class.

Relying on public records for multiple JPP clients sentenced to death, nearly a decade of experience in the field, as well as extensive experience with legislation and advocacy, this book tracks the many junctures at which violations occur, from arrest to sentencing to execution.

As the Mughal Empire fell, the British took control and established the Indian subcontinent as its colony until both Pakistan and India gained independence in 1947. Most of the laws and structures currently in place in Pakistan including those related to criminal justice and the legal system date to colonial times. While the British altered the modes of carrying out death sentences and made hanging the norm,¹⁹ they also made it so that capital punishment was administered more readily and frequently. Whereas the Mughals did not have many formal prison systems, the building of new and improved prisons marked the entry of the British into the Indian subcontinent.²⁰ In her book Prisoner Voices from Death Row, Reena Mary George indicates, ‘Prisons continue to be located and structured more or less as they were in colonial times. Any change that has been made has been incorporated somewhat clumsily into the old system that basically served the triple colonial aims of order, economy and efficiency’.²¹

The first formal placing of capital punishment in the legal system, though, came when the Governor-General of the India Council enacted the Indian Penal Code in 1860.²² The law, drafted by a group of Britishers making up the Law Commission, did not attempt to integrate any traditional Indian legal systems and instead, as the historian David Skuy notes, ‘the entire codification practice represented the transplantation of English law to India, complete with lawyers and judges’.²³ Since English law at the time was not itself uniform, this was a first attempt to create such a standard body of law. The current Code of Criminal Procedure was introduced in 1898 but draws from the very first code of 1861 that followed the 1857 Indian rebellion.²⁴ Its intent was to control Indians. Some of the provisions in these laws are termed as ‘draconian or black laws’.²⁵

In fact, these codes made the death penalty the automatic punishment for murder with life imprisonment as the exception rather than vice versa.²⁶ The primary justification of the death penalty itself today stems from the time [the parts that now constitute] Pakistan was still a colony, namely ‘the belief that common people can be made to obey the law only through fear instilled by harsh punishment’.²⁷ This belief persists despite reputable empirical evidence to the contrary and influences public opinion on the death penalty to this day.

Along with increasing the number of convicts and prisons and instating harsh laws, the British increased the number and frequency of executions in the country significantly. In fact, by the 1920s, fearing that they were losing their grip on the Empire, the British executed an average of 3 people every day.²⁸ According to one scholar, Anderson, ‘capital punishment was used extensively in colonial India by the British Empire to control its colonial subjects and reinforce its sovereignty’, particularly ‘given to the lower caste and class’.²⁹ This discriminatory trend persists to this day such that a vast majority of those on death row are from marginalised communities with poor socio-economic backgrounds. Time and again, scholars indicate that executions helped ‘consolidate imperial rule and eradicate resistance against it’.³⁰ These often took the form of public spectacles to dissuade dissenters and others from rising up. One example is the blowing up of Indian soldiers by cannons for mutiny.

These public displays, in fact, sometimes drew from the harsh means of executions used by the Mughals before them. Other than these public spectacles, hangings for common crimes from murder to theft to refusal to work were also used to teach the colonised a ‘lesson’.³¹ While the actual number of executions was roughly the same in Britain and India, the difference was that these deaths were public and directly a way to assert dominance and repress insubordination to curb challenges to the British Raj. And though there are multiple cases where the British commuted capital punishment, they often did this in face of a worse punishment of transportation and indentured servitude elsewhere, believing that forcing Indians to move would severely affect their religious practices, funerary rights, and caste structures, and thereby constitute a form of social death.³² Often, the British would use the bodies of dead prisoners for research – medical or otherwise. These routine post-mortems became one of the sets of grievances that led to the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857.³³

At the same time, the British put in place numerous due process guarantees. As part of several reform movements in 1837, the Colonial Office sought to reconcile law on capital punishment in England with that in the colonies, but inconsistencies remained.³⁴ As Britain sought to prove its ‘civilizing’ mission, the push for reforms intensified, but in many ways, this did not reach the colonies they were intended to benefit and the ‘theater of execution’ continued in the Indian subcontinent.³⁵ When makeshift gallows were proved prone to botched executions, the British, under heavy criticism, set up new and improved ones. However, problems persisted: ‘the drop was often too short, and criminals were on occasion hanged weighed down with heavy fetters on their legs’.³⁶

The death penalty in England itself was inherently problematic. Seeing its rise in the industrial era, a sentence of death was the penalty for hundreds of offences from pickpocketing to cutting down a tree to being out at night with a black face to rape and murder.³⁷ It was only after sustained activism that the death penalty was narrowed down by 1861 from 200 offences to 4.

Footnotes

¹⁹ Treating Indians as automatically of a lower class, they did not consider beheading which in Britain itself was reserved for upper class men and women.

²⁰ Reena Mary George, Prisoner Voices from Death Row Indian Experiences, (New York: Routledge, 2016).

²¹ Id.

²² Divya Metha, ‘Capital Punishment in India: Life, Death and Rebirth?’, Brown Political Review, November 29, 2016.

²³ David Skuy, ‘Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The Myth of the Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System Compared to India’s Legal System in the Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies Vol. 32, No. 3 (July, 1998): pp. 513-557.

²⁴ TNN, ‘CrPC was enacted after 1857 mutiny’, The Times of India, May 5, 2008.

²⁵ George, Prisoner Voices.

²⁶ Id.

²⁷ C. Mohan Gopal, ‘Colonial Legacy’, Frontline, March 8, 2013.

²⁸ Id.

²⁹ Clare Anderson, ‘Execution and its Aftermath in the Nineteenth Century British Empire’, University of Leicester, last accessed August 17, 2018.

³⁰ Id.

³¹ Anderson, ‘Execution’.

³² Id.

³³ Id.

³⁴ Id.

³⁵ Id.

³⁶ Id.

³⁷ ‘A brief history of capital punishment in Britain’, Historyextra, March 27, 2018.

The following is an excerpt from Justice Project Pakistan’s (JPP) book, The Death Penalty in Pakistan: A Critical Review, to be launched on July 11, 2019 in Islamabad. A culmination of 10 years of JPP’s work, the book documents the many ways in which Pakistan's application of the death penalty intersects with legal, social and political realities.

It focuses on how capital punishment impacts some of the most vulnerable populations: juveniles, the mentally ill, persons with physical disabilities, low-wage migrant workers imprisoned in foreign jails and the working class.

Relying on public records for multiple JPP clients sentenced to death, nearly a decade of experience in the field, as well as extensive experience with legislation and advocacy, this book tracks the many junctures at which violations occur, from arrest to sentencing to execution.

Read another excerpt from the book about the colonial roots of capital punishment in the subcontinent here.

Aftab Bahadur was arrested at the age of 15 for the murder of a woman and her two children. Aftab protested his innocence to the very end. The only eyewitness who testified against Aftab recanted his statement by claiming that he had been coerced by the police to provide his damning testimony. In fact, he admitted, that Aftab had not even been present at the scene of the crime. The Supreme Court of Pakistan, however, refused to consider the exculpatory evidence stating that a fresh appeal was untimely. Aftab Bahadur therefore, marched to the gallows at the age of 38 after having spent over 22 years on Pakistan’s death row.

He was executed on 10 June 2015.

Like 160 countries in the world, Pakistan has enacted legislation prohibiting the sentencing and imposition of the death penalty against juvenile offenders — persons who commit crimes before turning 18 years old. The Government of Pakistan is, additionally, a party to both the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) which categorically prohibits capital punishment for juvenile offenders. However, despite the explicit bar, cases of juvenile offenders such as Aftab Bahadur are far from the exception.

As a result of a criminal justice system that violates international human rights standards at each stage of the judicial system, arrest, investigation, trial, sentencing, and punishment, the death penalty is disproportionately applied to the most vulnerable of Pakistan’s population — the mentally ill, physically disabled, and juvenile offenders. Since the moratorium was lifted, at least six juvenile offenders have been executed despite credible evidence in support of their juvenility.

Pakistan’s failure to protect juvenile offenders from the death penalty since the resumption of executions drew sharp criticism from international actors. In June 2015, four United Nations experts, whilst urging the Government of Pakistan to halt the execution of juvenile offenders, condemned the existence of 'several hundred' juvenile offenders on death row as a violation of its international law obligations. Similarly, in June 2016, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child urged the Government of Pakistan to stay the executions of all juvenile offenders and reopen all cases where there was even the slightest indication of the minority of the accused at the time of the commission of the alleged offence.

Pakistan enacted the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance (JJSO) in 2000 in order to bring its criminal justice system in conformity with its obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 2018, the JJSO was repealed and replaced by Juvenile Justice System Act (JJSA). The law prohibits executions of juveniles and makes provisions regarding separate courts, trials, and detention centres from judges and lawyers. However, in the 18 years that had passed since the JJSO came into force, it remained virtually ignored in practice. Firstly, the law was enacted without retrospective force – thereby denying its protection to juvenile offenders sentenced to death prior to its enactment in 2000. A Presidential Notification granted a 'special remission' for all juvenile offenders whose death sentences were confirmed prior to the JJSO on the basis of an inquiry into their juvenility. However, such inquiries were seldom conducted and when they were the investigation was replete with incompetence, inefficiency, and violations of human rights standards.

Pakistan has also consistently failed to set up juvenile courts, borstal institutions and provisions for effective legal aid for juveniles as provided under, first the JJSO and now JJSA. In a context marred with low birth registration and a lack of sensitisation of law enforcement and judiciary to juvenile delinquency, a significant number of juvenile offenders fall outside the few institutional safeguards actually implemented in practice. As a result, the juvenile justice system is rarely applied to those it is designed to protect, resulting in a significant number of death sentences being meted out to juvenile offenders. Once sentenced these juvenile offenders are denied effective recourse to appeals and post-conviction reliefs, even in the face of exonerating evidence. All of these aforementioned problems constitute violations of international law and taken together reveals a broken criminal justice system that fails to protect juvenile offenders from the most severe and irreversible form of punishment – the death penalty.

The irreversible nature of the violations mandates that Pakistan reinstate a moratorium of its application on the death penalty and launch an independent investigation into all death row cases particularly those marked by allegations of juvenility. Additionally, in order to prevent future executions of juvenile offenders and to ensure that they are extended the requisite protections under international human rights standards requires a comprehensive reform of its juvenile justice system starting from the determination of age at the time of arrest to the grant of mercy prior to execution.

The federal cabinet this week proposed to block media coverage and interview of politicians who are either convicts or under-trial prisoners, and directed the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) to fulfill its “responsibility” and do the same.

Pemra’s legal mechanisms usually impose restrictions on subject matters and issues, and not certain classes of individuals. Much of Pemra's laws (eg Pemra 2015 Code of Conduct) relate to ensuring that a licensee, amongst other things, airs content in an objective manner and does not air content that is deemed to be obscene, against Islamic values, inciting hatred, justifying violence or containing aspersions against the judiciary or the armed forces.

Traditionally, the sub judice doctrine mostly bars coverage of cases that are before a court of law. The doctrine is primarily meant to protect a defendant’s right to a fair trial, as media houses often report on more than the events that transpire or are admissible in court. This includes dilating on stories from witnesses who are not supposed to testify, examining other evidence that has not or will not be presented before a court, disseminating information which may influence future witnesses or even disrupt the decision-making process of judges.

Editorial: Channels taken off air

While the media is legally not allowed to engage in dissecting sub judice matters, imposing blanket ban on media coverage on politicians facing trial or convicted politicians, even if such reporting is analytical and factual, prejudices the media’s right to freedom of speech and the public’s right to access to information.

Laws already exist to bar anyone, let alone politicians, from discussing matters that are sub judice. Article 204 of the Constitution empowers the Supreme Court or a high court to punish any person who "does anything which tends to prejudice the determination of a matter pending before a Court."

Clause 4 (3) of the Pemra Code of Conduct bars airing of sub judice matters which tend to prejudice determination by a court. However, such content is allowed to be aired if it is done in an informative and objective manner. In fact, the Supreme Court has lauded this clause for striking a delicate balance between freedom of speech and the right to information (Articles 19 and 19A of the Constitution) with fundamental right to be dealt with in accordance with the law (Article 4 of the Constitution) and the right to fair trial and due process (Article 10A of the Constitution).

Related: How pressuring the media is risking the quality of our democracy

The United Kingdom's 1981 Contempt of Court Act also bars media publications that significantly discuss pending legal proceedings to the extent that justice is endangered to the point of influencing a court proceeding. However, a publication is considered to pose such a threat only if it creates a “substantial” risk in the adjudication.

This is why a blanket ban proposal on coverage of politicians facing trial and convicted politicians is problematic. It is perhaps based on the assumption that the airing of such content is only done by the media to A) glorify such politicians, sans objective discourse and/or B) discuss the merits of the politicians’ case before a court only, and not any other topics. This is at best presumptuous, and at worst draconian. The Supreme Court has held that by virtue of the Code of Conduct, great trust is given to the media and the journalist community that they will provide objective information about pending proceedings, while taking precautions that they do not pass subjective or prejudicial comments.

Pemra’s existing Code of Conduct is more measured than the cabinet proposal. For instance, the Code of Conduct does impose a ban on airing statements on a class of individual (ie members of proscribed organisations, as defined in the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997). However, even that ban is not a blanket and all-encompassing one, as airing of such information is allowed if it exposes the said proscribed organisation's ideology and does not glorify it.

In-depth: A look at media censorship during the British Raj leaves us asking how much progress Pakistan has really made

The rhetoric that politicians’ interviews and/or media coverage will always be prejudicial to the public at large is in fact discrediting the media’s ability to analytically disseminate the news and taking away the public’s ability to absorb such information according to its own free will.

In the international sphere, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has tried a number of media-related incitement cases (eg TV channels and print platforms distributing suspects’, terrorists’ and criminals’ interviews for the public). In all these cases, the ECHR carefully examined on a case-by-case basis as to whether media reporting was done to glorify criminals/terrorists (eg by providing a platform for preaching hate and violence), or whether such reporting was done in spirit to inform the public at large about the perils of such ideology.

The cabinet proposal, if effectuated, carries a serious risk of being unlawful. Journalistic recklessness should be regulated, but it should not be regulated on the basis that journalism is always reckless.

Are you facing media censorship? Share your experiences with us at prism@dawn.com

An award-winning show called Big Little Lies has a prescient scene in which a second-grader collapses in school after a panic attack.

Upon enquiry by a therapist, we learn the girl is scared because she believes the world is ending. Her class teacher had been discussing the ominous consequences of climate change with the kids that week.

Climate change should be scary for everyone. Those familiar with the destructive effects of climate change already recognise it has altered life as we know it by disturbing weather patterns, economies, food security and physical health.

What most of us don’t discuss, however, is the impact climate change has on our mental health. In 2017, the American Psychological Association (APA) produced an updated detailed report highlighting the penetrative effects of climate change on mental health.

These include not only stress, depression and anxiety, but also the negative impairment of our social and communal relationships. Ever snapped at someone because it’s unbearably hot and you’ve read tomorrow will be even hotter?

Not surprisingly, children and low-income communities will bear the greatest brunt of climate-induced mental health consequences.

Read next: Climate change does not need visas to cross borders

An increasing number of people complain of climate change-induced stress and depression. Even in a nation laced with climate deniers, a 2018 Yale University study found that at least 70 per cent of Americans were “somewhat worried” about climate change. In a related poll in 2018, three quarters of millennials admitted to climate change having adverse impacts on their mental health.

If detailed studies were conducted in Pakistan, imagine what the depression rates would be among flood victims and those who’ve lost their livelihoods because climate change has diminished agricultural yields and, ergo, sources of income.

This overwhelming feeling of helplessness has been termed eco-anxiety in the APA report, and described as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” Whereas eco-anxiety is not yet officially included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the handbook for diagnosing mental illnesses, it’s not hard to relate to eco-anxiety. In fact, it is almost an understandable reaction to climate change awareness.

Worrying about children and future generations now invariably carries a climate component; there is no doubt that the world we’re leaving our children with will be laden with our eco-mistakes.

Frustration over half-baked attempts by governments to address climate change, accompanied by the persistent feeling that individual efforts will do little to combat the greatest crisis in human history are all symptoms of eco-anxiety.

Susan Clayton, co-author of the APA report, says there is confirmed evidence of mental health issues being linked to worries about our planet’s future. She says preoccupations such as eco-anxiety, climate change distress and ecological grief are all expected to increase. However, how severely these mental health issues will affect people is contingent upon the steps being taken to curb climate change.

Learn more: A car-unfriendly Pakistan? Yes, that's how you make livable cities

Climate-induced anxiety can present itself in two main circumstances: where the individual has been a victim of a climate-caused disaster, and when there is a persistent fear tinged with sadness on the state of our planet.

Per the Union of Concerned Scientists, between 25 to 50pc of people exposed to extreme weather disasters suffer adverse mental health effects. The litany of symptoms for these include depression, anxiety and also trauma from the loss of a loved one, damage to personal property or even losing sources of livelihood.

These intense emotions eventually subside and are replaced by post-traumatic stress disorder. The severity of the symptoms depends on various factors, including the person’s age, coping mechanism and the proximity to the disaster or devastation.

Alternatively, the long-term effects of climate change on mental health are connected with the loss of livelihood and climate change-induced migration. Individuals may lose a sense of personal and professional identity as occupations and quality of life are affected.

Similarly, losing one’s home, property and a disrupted social structure can arouse feelings of helplessness, fear and a loss of personal autonomy. High levels of stress and depression are further linked to disrupted physical health and lower immunity.

Timely evacuation from a likely disaster-impacted area can help reduce adverse mental health impacts. Once an individual has acknowledged that they are within an anticipated radius of a climate disaster, the aim should be to eliminate as much uncertainty as possible about an impending weather event. Preparations for emergency exit plans, non-perishable food and water storage are all ways to help reduce eco-anxiety. Climate ignorance is no bliss.

The APA report further suggests that those with strong social connections and networks might experience lower rates of psychological distress and that the best way to combat climate anxiety is to build resilience.

Even where domestic environmental policies are not entirely promising, adopting environmentally-friendly lifestyle choices may make individuals feel less climate-anxious as social involvement in a cause helps dispel feelings of powerlessness.

Also read: Can climate change Pakistan?

We can no longer hide from climate change and its unexpected and pervasive impacts.

The 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg went on a school strike and said she doesn’t want hope from adults anymore — she wants them to panic.

Thunberg is right. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms irreversible damage to the planet unless we realistically end all greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, the fine line between ‘positive’ panic and anxiety should not be confused. The aim is to pressure governments and businesses into respecting our climate reality while we ourselves remain motivated to do our part.

Panic that triggers feelings of overwhelming helplessness will not improve our climate crisis. You have to believe that even small actions will help you, your children and our planet in this global war against climate change.

Are you examining the effects of climate change in Pakistan? Share your insights with us at prism@dawn.com

My first encounter with a work of desi science fiction was very much by accident.

During my undergraduate studies at the English department at Karachi University, while idly browsing through a professor’s personal collection on her desk, I came across Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, a English-language short story set in a feminist utopian world written by a Bengali Muslim woman in 20th century colonial India.

Up until then, my study of literature had been mostly white, mostly male authors, an unsurprising fact when we take into account the (Western) literary canon’s inherent whiteness and maleness, as well as the institutional history of English departments as tools of the colonial project — teaching works of English literature in the British Empire’s overseas colonies was originally part of the overarching goal of “civilising the natives.” In the words of 19th century British politician Thomas Macaulay, “a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (gotta love that British sense of entitlement and arrogance).

In any case, amidst the steady diet of Shakespeare and Dickens in school, encountering Hossain’s delightful story, which I promptly borrowed from my professor, blew my mind wide open. Sultana’s Dream is a futuristic tale in which the concept of the upper-caste Indian Muslim notion of the zenana (seclusion of women within a specific section of the house) is flipped to imagine a utopian world where men are sequestered into the mardana while South Asian women smoothly and efficiently run society through scientific innovation and reason.

The exploration of domesticity, gender and the notion of public and private space situated within 20th century colonial Indian nationalist and gender politics using science fiction tropes and an archly playful tone — I had never read anything like it before. If Hossain’s story was different from those of the white, male authors that populated my course syllabi, it was also distinct from the kind of realist South Asian fiction that is usually privileged as “literary” and therefore more worthy of attention or academic study.

At that time, there was a certain kind of post-9/11 Anglophone Pakistani fiction that you were supposed to be reading: the kind that used a specific style of grim realism to explain South Asian “issues” like terrorism, poverty or corruption. Playful, experimental, speculative works like Hossain’s or those of her more contemporary counterparts, either in English or local languages, rarely come into the discussion.

This dismissal of the genres of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) as low-brow, trashy or pulp or, at the very least, unimportant, is not just a desi stance, although it might be a bit more pronounced here. The snobbish attitude towards SFF has historically been prevalent in academic and literary circles (although things seem to be changing in the West now), even as popular culture is filled with beloved works of science fiction and fantasy films and television shows.

But the dismissal of the SFF genre, or the broader umbrella of speculative fiction, has excluded from the South Asian literary discourse a rich tradition of desi works of science fiction and fantasy, as well as the fascinating speculative fiction words being written by contemporary South Asian writers today. This makes conversations about South Asian literature woefully homogenous and, frankly, much more uninteresting than they might otherwise be.

I.

Even though definitions are notoriously slippery things in literary criticism, we might define SFF as a broad literary genre encompassing any fiction with supernatural, fantastical or futuristic elements.

Ursula K. Le Guin, one of my favourite SFF writers, explains it this way:

“All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life - science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another.”

Closer to home, Pakistani sci-fi, fantasy and horror writer Usman T. Malik defines it as:

“the literature that explores the boundaries of knowledge... that definition is mostly applicable to speculative fiction’s subgenres, including magical realism, fantasy and horror; it’s just the class of knowledge that changes within each.”

Given these definitions, works of South Asian science fiction and fantasy have existed long before both genres came to be codified as such.

Whereas “science fiction” as a distinct, recognisable genre term only came together in the early 20th century and “fantasy” a few decades after that, works that utilise SFF conventions and tropes have existed since long before. As Dalit speculative fiction writer and editor Mimi Mondal explains in her two-part history of South Asian speculative fiction, the earliest works of speculative fiction in the subcontinent were written in Bengali, Tamil and Urdu in the mid-19th century, published from Calcutta, Madras and Lucknow respectively (although oral stories go back even further).

The earliest subgenres to gain popularity were horror, crime and detective stories, all with a bent towards the fantastical, told in a folkloric style. There is, of course, the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, adapted from the oral dastan into written Urdu by Ghalib Lakhnavi in 1885, or its literary successor, the Tilism-e-Hoshruba, written by Muhammad Husain Jah in 1883. Both works are brimming with magic and the fantastical, jinns and paris, trickster ayyars and parallel magical universes called tilisms, centuries-old prophecies and classic good vs evil battle scenes (not to mention some very unfortunately regressive and troubling gender politics, conveniently ignored by most Urdu literary critics).

In a similar vein was Chandrakanta (1888), the Hindi fantasy epic by Devaki Nandan Khatri equally filled with ayyars and tilisms, which gained a cult following and was turned into a massively popular Indian serial in the 1990s. In Bengali, Rabindranath Tagore wrote supernatural horror stories, while Jagadish Chandra Bose, a biophysicist wrote the earliest science fiction of the language, including his short story 'Niruddesher Kahini', which was published in 1896.

There was also Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, my literary favourite of the period, an upper-caste Muslim woman, a political activist, educationist and feminist thinker who struggled for the rights of women and critiqued the 19th century notions of purdah from within, through science fiction, writing in both Bengali and English.

In the post-independence period, the literary cultures of Bengali and Urdu became split across two (and, eventually, three) countries, and pretty much stopped being in conversation with each other but continued to grow separately, each producing various forms of SFF.

The Urdu series that I grew up hearing about, as part of our family lore, was the popular supernatural spy thriller Imran, a series that began in 1955, written by Ibn-e-Safi and later taken over by Mazhar Kaleem in the 1970s. According to my mother, she and her brothers and sisters would eagerly wait each month for the latest issue chronicling the adventures of the dapper and brilliant secret agent/detective to come out, and then squabble over who got to read it first.

There was also Kala Jadoo, a horror/dark fantasy novel by M. A. Rahat, who wrote prolifically in the SFF sub-genres of horror and mystery, which were published in various digests and periodicals across Pakistan from the 1960s onwards. Another popular work was Devta, a serialised fantasy thriller novel by Mohiuddin Nawab, written in the form of an autobiography of a man with telepathic powers, which was published in the Karachi-run Suspense Digest for 33 years from 1977, making it the longest continuously-published series on record.

In 1950, Urdu humourist and writer Mohammad Khalid Akhtar wrote Bees Sau Gyara, a satirical dystopian novel in the vein of Orwell’s 1984, creating a futuristic world in which the poor and homeless are re-named Lovers of the Open Air, a special police category is PULJAKMACH — Pakar Lo Jis Ko Marzi Chahey and the state machinery includes the Ministry of Lies, the Ministry of Ignorance and the Ministry of Food, which are all operated by the identical twin brother of the Minister of Finance.

SFF in Bengali flourished to an even greater degree. As Mondal explains:

“As science fiction became more distinctly recognizable as a genre in the West through the twentieth century, the language that most directly caught the influence was Bengali. Every prominent Bengali author has written speculative fiction in some parts of their career — stories that are widely read, loved, and often included in school syllabi — since the speculative imagination is inseparable from realism in the Bengali literary culture.”

These Bengali writers include the great Satyajit Ray, India’s most famous and prolific SFF writer, although he is known more as a filmmaker outside India. He wrote, among other SFF works, the Professor Shonku series from 1965, about a scientist and inventor who solves mysteries in both real and fantastical lands, a kind of supernatural, Bengali Sherlock Holmes (incidentally, Ray based Professor Shonku partly on a character of Arthur Conan Doyle).

Clearly, there is a rich tradition of SFF fiction in the subcontinent, in various languages, dating back to at least the 19th century, which uses culturally grounded fantasy tropes, such as ayyars, paris and jinns, as well as sci-fi tropes of technology, scientific progress and invention to tell stories of horror, intrigue and humour and which comment on or reflect, in interesting ways, the culture, history and politics of South Asia at various moments in its history.

A survey of South Asian literature which excludes such a diverse and fascinating body of work, merely by virtue of it being “low-brow” or pulp, is therefore not just incomplete, but also much less varied and certainly much less fun.

II.

When I was growing up, my English-medium education and access to cheap second-hand American and British paperback novels meant that I mostly read about the adventures (both fantastical and realist) of white kids and teens, with only a smattering of Urdu children’s novels of horror, adventure and humour about characters who looked like me.

The whitewashing of the stories I read in English as a child is indicative of a structural problem, one that includes the whiteness and maleness of the literary canon, and also the racial and gendered gatekeeping of the Western publishing industry, all of which affects the kind of books that circulate in the global literary marketplace, and therefore reached me in Karachi as I was growing up.

But with Western speculative fiction, particularly science fiction, there is an additional wrinkle. Literary scholars have pointed out that the rise of science fiction as a genre occurred at the height of Western imperialism, making the origins of sci-fi complicit with colonialism and its ideologies.

According to scholar Adam Roberts, science fiction serves as the “dark subconscious to the thinking mind of Imperialism,” the seedy underbelly hidden beneath the rationalistic veneer given to colonial and neocolonial ideas. After all, the two biggest myths in science fiction are that of the Stranger and the Strange Land. "Stranger" (the alien, whether it's extraterrestrial, the technological, the human-hybrid) and the "Strange Land" (the far away planet waiting to be conquered).

In her book Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer argues that these two myths of science fiction are also the twin pillars of colonialism: the Stranger is the Other (the savages whose lives and behaviours are strange, whose cultures are misshapen but who nevertheless retain an exotic fascination because of this strangeness) and the Strange Land that these Others occupy, and which are in need to "settling" and "civilising". These myths are at the heart of the colonial project as well.

A lot of the science fiction written in the 19th and 20th centuries in the West explored — and in many instances, reinforced — these colonial myths in various forms. Many of these SFF works, for example, flip the racial dynamic that characterised the most influential imperialist ventures of the last few centuries. In such stories, the conflict is about “them” (a non-white, foreign civilisation) doing to us (Western, largely white powers) as we did to them.

But just as the genre of science fiction has been a vehicle to explore and further imperial fantasies, it also developed into a genre through which critiques of colonialism and racism could be enacted, through which non-white people, with their violent histories of colonialism and slavery, could tell their own stories, drawing on their own cultural heritages in different forms.

Afrofuturism, for example, is a vast subgenre of SFF which treats African-American themes and concerns, and Black history and politics, through the motifs, tropes and imagery of science fiction and fantasy. Marvel’s Black Panther is a recent, popular example of the subgenre, but Afrofuturist works, by Black writers such as Octavia Butler and Robert Delaney, have been around since the 1960s.

Similarly, since the 1980s, as English became the more common language for SFF in South Asia, overtaking or at least catching up to genre fiction in Urdu, Bengali and other languages, South Asian speculative fiction writers began using the genre to engage with the violent colonial legacy of the subcontinent using the motifs and tropes of SFF. Their works can be said to be part of what is a nascent sub-genre known as postcolonial science fiction.

An early example is Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, published in 1995. His only foray into speculative fiction, Ghosh’s completely bonkers (in the best way) novel juggles multiple timelines, one in 19th century colonial Bengal, one in 1990s Calcutta and one far into the future in New York. It explores themes of colonialism, marginality and notions of Western versus indigenous forms of knowledge and medicine, using common sci-fi tropes of cyborgs, artificial intelligence and surveillance technology.

Other Indian writers such as Samit Basu (whose 2004 Gameworld trilogy is pitched as "Monty Python meets the Ramayana and Robin Hood meets The Arabian Nights") and Khuzali Manickavel (whose short stories combine SFF with a distinct Tamil English sensibility) started emerging, whose work found an audience with a new generation of SFF fans who read primarily in English.

This new generation of South Asian SFF writers, who are writing in English and are more explicitly in conversation with Western science fiction and fantasy, are doing really fascinating things in their work. They are doing this by appropriating, remixing and upending Western SFF tropes to explore concerns that are firmly situated within South Asian history, culture and politics, using imagery and motifs that are distinctly desi.

For example, as I have written elsewhere, many contemporary writers are re-appropriating the mythological figure of the jinn (appropriated and tamed into the benign figure of the ‘genie’ by Orientalism writers of the 19th and 20th centuries) to talk about contemporary South Asian concerns.

One of my favourite stories in this vein is ‘Bring Your Own Spoon’, a short story by Bangladeshi SFF writer Saad Hossain, published in an excellent anthology edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin called The Djinn Falls in Love. The story is set in a futuristic, dystopian Dhaka ravaged by climate change, a world where the boundary between the human and superhuman worlds has become threadbare because of a collective struggle for survival.

In this city, where the bodies of the poorest, most marginalised in the society are used by nanobots to clean the air for the rich, a jinn and a human decide to open a restaurant together, allowing people on the fringes of this society to come together as a community through food and the memory of a better past.

With masterfully done worldbuilding and brimming with hope (very hard to pull off in a dystopian narrative), Hossain uses a distinctly desi mythological figure to comment on the unique ways in which climate change and capitalism are affecting contemporary South Asian society.

Other SFF writers, including Pakistani ones, are doing similar things — mixing a distinctly desi sensibility with science, technology and myth to produce stylistic varied and interesting stories. There is Usman T. Malik, who has combined Sufi philosophy, South Asian history, with cosmology and physics to explore things such as terrorism, gendered violence and feudalism in his short fiction, published in various anthologies and online SFF magazines (his story ‘The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family’ won the Bram Stoker Award in 2014).

There is Sami Shah, who has his own spin on the jinn in his Boy of Fire and Earth, and whose contribution in Murad’s anthology, ‘Reap’, also used desi horror tropes of jinn and possession to make a masterful commentary on drone strikes and US imperialism.

Shazaf Fatima Haider and Bina Shah have both recently entered into the foray of speculative fiction, with a supernatural young adult novel (Firefly in the Dark) and a feminist dysoptian novel respectively (Before She Sleeps), articulating, in their own ways, concerns about gender, sexuality and coming-of-age which feel both distinctly South Asian and universal.

The best of South Asian SFF is that which casts in a new light our turbulent history to imagine different presents and futures. For example, Indian writer Vandana Singh’s short story ‘A Handful of Rice’ takes place in an alternate part of South Asian history where the Mughal Empire gave way not to the British Empire, but an era of a syncretic empire with technological advances and steampunk wonders.

Sri Lankan writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s ongoing trilogy, The Commonwealth Empire, imagines Kandy in an alternate future in which the British Empire never fell but remained strong through advanced technology.

Mary Anne Mohranraj, another Sri Lankan writer (this one from the diaspora), wrote a delightful novella The Stars Change, set on a technologically-advanced distant planet colonised by South Asian people, which playfully explores gender, sexuality and intimacy against the backdrop of colonialism, caste and race.

Another particularly compelling example is Indian writer Prayaag Akbar’s novel Leila (published in 2017, recently turned into a Netflix TV show helmed by Deepa Mehta), set in a futuristic Indian city which, due to a scarcity of water and the rise of religious authoritarianism, is segregated into sectors based on caste and religion.

In this digitised, highly surveilled city, each sector is surrounded by 60-foot walls and “purity,” both in terms of caste and class, as well as in the physical terms of air and water, dictates social hierarchies. It’s not hard to see the resonances of contemporary India in Akbar’s novel, and its critique of class and caste has many uncomfortable parallels with Pakistani society as well.

South Asian SFF, in various languages and across very distinct moments of the subcontinent’s history, has always found imaginative and refreshing ways to look at the world at large and South Asian society in particular. The best of it evokes in us a sense of awe, and also a sense of vulnerable humanity — the kind of literature that allows you to look at our world’s wonders with delight and its stark and complicated political and social realities with clear and focused eyes.

Contrary to popular belief, speculative fiction is not necessarily escapist — as the best South Asian SFF writers have shown, it is that which brings us closer to our own reality, which presses our faces up against our society, warts and all.

Illustration by Leea Contractor

Are you exploring Pakistani literatures? Share your insights with us at prism@dawn.com

"The goal of journalism to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted and to give voice to the voiceless, is one that guides us in what we cover, how we cover it and who we speak to," states the mission statement of Mada Masr, a well-known Arabic and English online journalism platform from Egypt.

In a depressing human rights landscape in that country and the region overall, Mada Masr shines bright as one of the few beacons of hope.

The independent publication was founded in Cairo by a group of young journalists six years ago. I met up with Mada Masr’s co-founder and chief editor Lina Attalah in Germany at the Kultur Symposium last month.

We spoke about the birth of the publication, the pressures it faces from the Egyptian authorities and how Lina manages to run the operation in a testing environment; an environment that journalists in Pakistan may relate to.

The interview below has been edited for clarity.

Lina, can you tell me the origins of your publication, what’s the idea behind it?

In 2013, a group of journalists and I were working for a big media company, and there came a point when they didn’t want us to work for them anymore.

It was also the year when there were mass protests against the elected Islamist government [in Egypt] that eventually led to a takeover by the military, which continues to rule the country up until this moment.

So when we were shown the door by this media company, there was no other option for us to continue doing what we were doing except that if we created our own institution. At the same time, we sensed the urgency because we felt that the country was going through a deeper level of transformation for which there will be no good or honest record. That’s really how it started.

It’s desiring to be present and functioning as a journalist at a time when we would see major freedoms be violated, a whole set of new restrictions being put in place and how you would live through this and how you would write about it — this is really what we wanted to do.

What are some of the challenges that you face, especially in the online sphere?

The major challenge that we are working through right now is the block. In 2017, the government started anonymously blocking a small number of websites, which [has] eventually grow[n] to reach over 500 websites at this point, and one of the first ones to blocked was ours. How to generate mirror sites and how to make sure that people can access the information that we worked really hard on, that’s our main challenge.

We also have some financial challenges. Due to the block, the loss of advertisement also meant the loss of other potential sources of revenue. That’s how we were dealt with.

The blocking of the website is quite paralysing. It doesn’t end your operation, but it puts you in a situation that requires needing to work around the problem.

More broadly, I feel concerned about how they will get to us, how bad it will be and what kind of price we will pay.

It was living with that fear and, at the same time, not letting it get in the way of producing and working and not resisting interesting stories, even if they put you at risk.

Other than the block, have there been other instances where you have had to face pressure from the government?

That, I would say, is the main one. Otherwise, all other pressure is in very indirect ways.

We’ve been — indirectly — asked about people who are being arrested, [who have] contributed [for us in the past]. So it’s very indirect, they make you feel that they are present but haven’t done anything yet. But the short answer is that the block has really been the main pressure, nothing else really.

You mentioned fear — what is creating that fear? Maybe not against you, but perhaps there are things that have happened to other journalists and publications that contribute to the fear...

Exactly, the fact that we seem to be living in a state where there is zero tolerance for dissidence, in ways that I hadn’t experienced even before the revolution, during the other authoritarian regime that preceded the present one.

It’s this idea that everybody is getting picked up, everybody around us, like the circle is tightening and tightening. I feel like we’re the only media out there still able to do something, or at least one of the very few remaining.

However, we are the biggest in terms of the information and the volume of work. It’s like, being alone and isolated in a context that continues to send you a message every day that there is zero tolerance, but for some reason you are still there; somehow, you’re still left. So it makes you question, when will my turn be?

What is the revenue model that your publication is trying to survive on?

We started a membership programme to capitalise on the idea that people should be paying for good information.

So we have a membership club. To join, you can pay according to one of seven tiers, depending on your abilities, and in return you get additional services.

We never put the content behind a paywall. The content remains free, but if you become a member, you get some add-ons in the shape of services and products.

We have some editorial services, both unsolicited and solicited. The unsolicited ones, they are up for subscriptions, so people subscribe and pay for a morning digest that we produce every day. We also have an events platform; we try to organise ticketed events from which we can get some revenue. That’s mainly how we run.

In terms of censorship, is there any content that you absolutely cannot publish or something that you have to be really careful publishing?

That’s what I meant when I said compromising. If there’s a story I have and it’s well-served, especially if it’s very sensitive and it’s very well-served in terms of evidence, in terms of sourcing, in terms of making it very hard to, in prosecution processes, be accused, we don't question — we just publish.

The idea is not to publish just anything, to make it seem like we are blindly brave. We are negotiators, we play politics, but the rule for me is if the story is well-served then there is no argument.

But have you faced pressure directly from the state when you publish a story? For example, in Pakistan, when you publish certain stories you might sometimes be called to court as to why you did it.

It has happened in the past and, yes, it was scary and everything, but I never questioned if it was the right decision to publish.

What are some of the topics that you get the most state attention from? National security? Human rights?

Military stuff. So, talking about the military institution, pinpointing their practices, hinting at corruption, that’s the thing that irks them the most.

I would say primarily the entire security institution, the military and the intelligence. When we do stories about them, it gets attention and they don’t like it.

What about the reception from your readers? A newspaper can survive if it has social support in society and in different segments of society. What is your reception when it comes to that?

I feel that when we started, it was a moment of polarisation between the military and the islamists. It was hard to gain traction from beyond the very traditional circle of supporters for our project.

And what is that traditional circle?

Liberal leftists, in the Western sense, people who were part of the 2011 revolution. It’s really that contingency, and I think what happened with time is the subsiding of the polarisation and the military takeover.

The fact that people have been saying that we have been producing simple, professional content and that it is not trying to push this or that ideology made us gain more ground, it made us gain more mainstream audiences who are not necessarily pro-revolution or leftist, but need information and there is no other source of information, so they come to us. We’ve been gaining more mainstream audiences over the years and I think that’s an interesting development.

How would you describe the media landscape in Egypt?

Right now, it’s a very fractured environment, in the sense that we have a few surviving veteran state-media which have no influence whatsoever. They have very outdated forms of production, not to mention complete control by the state.

In parallel, we have very few surviving privately-owned media that have either been recently acquired directly by the intelligence or continue to be dependent on the state and intelligence but completely aligning themselves to the authorities in order to be able to survive, because otherwise they won’t be able to.

Then we have the third stream; these are the very few websites, like ours, that tried to be completely independent, that don’t have the same sort of outreach that the mainstream media has, but are somewhat surviving and giving out a different kind of information.

So in Pakistan, we have a sort of divide between the English press and the Urdu press. The English press is still allowed to function and is tolerated despite its criticism of the state, but the clampdown on the Urdu press is a lot heavier because, I suppose, the state fears the penetration of local media. Is that the case in Egypt as well?

It has been the dynamic for some time, but recently there has been more attention directed towards the English media because the state doesn’t like the embarrassment it brings when it enters international circles. So we’ve had situations where the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times [Declan Walsh, previously the Times’ Islamabad bureau chief, who was expelled from Pakistan in 2013] was summoned and interrogated. His predecessor was deported from Egypt altogether.

So there is more attention paid towards the English-speaking media, specifically the international media, just because of how they can embarrass our regime, which likes to maintain a polite picture of a modern reformist in front of the Western world in particular. That makes the English media more relevant.

What about media in the region? Do you think Egypt is perhaps still better than what’s out there in the rest of the Middle East, or do you think there are other countries that are leading with better examples?

Media-wise, the whole region is subscribing to the global media crisis. Even the established media that are traditionally freer, traditionally more professional, in Lebanon [for example], are facing a major crisis right now, be it political or financial, and are shutting down.

There is a crisis everywhere; I don’t think that Egypt is in a better position. I don’t really know who is in a better position.

You obviously are not trying to compare us with places that are completely conflict-ridden like Yemen, Libya or Syria. So in a context of comparison with other countries where we don’t have war, we are equally in a terrible place, more or less, where we have a few reformist voices that are trying to push the boundaries, and then the big, mainstream beacons of traditional media that are losing their influence more and more.

It’s hard enough to condole the death of a person; what does one say about the death of an institution?

‘Herald parhta hi kon tha? Woh alag time tha jab log magazines parha kartay thay,’ said the smug ones among us. It wasn’t entirely untrue.

Wounded by censorship and financial constraints, Herald was a dinosaur heaving its last breath. Nostalgia kept it alive in people’s collective imagination even when they stopped their subscriptions. But so many others I spoke to — journalists, academics, activists — agreed it was the end of an era. A cliché we use too often to describe someone’s demise. But some clichés are underrated.

It really was the end of an era. An era that began when Jimi Hendrix was playing at Woodstock, my father wore bell bottom pants and booze was still legal in Pakistan. Oh, and the country was also under its second martial law.

Sadly, the archives for those first few issues — an illustrated weekly in the late 1960s — were not available at Herald’s office when I worked there, But most issues of Herald, after it became a monthly magazine in the 1970s, are bound and preserved.

I’ve had the privilege of spending countless hours sifting through Herald’s physical archives. My favourite were the issues from the 1980s. Edited by the indomitable Razia Bhatti, a towering personality and uncompromising journalist, Herald defined what it meant to hold truth to power. Its constant defiance and refusal to cower down in the face of Ziaul Haq’s military regime made me want to punch the air.

Not all the stories were in your face. Some would circumvent conspicuously. Sometimes, the pages would be left blank (I didn’t come across any blank pages but Zahid Hussain, who worked there at the time, has confirmed it in his column). That must’ve really riled the generals up.

Razia Bhatti and Herald eventually fell out and she moved to open up Newsline, Herald’s first direct competitor. I’m told the pressure on Herald’s management from Zia was too great to withstand. She was not interested in mincing words and Herald wasn’t willing to come under the butcher’s axe. So they went their separate ways.

Razia Bhatti with her band of fiery men, but mostly women, continued to court controversy, while Herald came back with an entirely new editorial team. The stories covered by Herald in the 1990s on the country’s political strife, particularly the violence in Karachi, are a masterclass in fearless reportage.

I joined Herald in April 2016, in my ninth year of being a professional journalist, and for the first time, I could write and edit without feeling the constant need to self-censor. Herald was, at the time, still lucky enough to say things and get away with it — for the most part. But the tide started to turn pretty quickly. Soon came the loss. In waves. Like a storm in the sea of misfortune.

Cyril Almeida's story in October 2016 unleashed a campaign to try to drown Dawn out. The boat for Herald, too, suddenly started rocking. The pressure to not cover certain stories increased and the number of adverts decreased. But there is — was — something in the DNA of Herald to resist. It has always been a left of centre publication, even when Dawn the newspaper hasn’t.

Dawn was a centrist paper at best, at times swinging right, up until the turn of the century when Abbas Nasir started editing the paper. It was under him that Dawn truly established its progressive credentials. So, on plodded Herald, asking difficult questions from people not used to giving answers.

Then came another wave. The run-up to the 2018 elections was difficult, as it was for the rest of Pakistani media, but the May 2018 issue with Manzoor Pashteen on the cover brought a barrage of abuse. The usual suspects came out with guns blazing, spewing vitriol and branding Dawn and Herald as traitors. In one instance, we had to remove a nominee from our person of the year poll. Every month was a battle against censorship, within and without.

The last couple of years, right until the closure of the magazine, felt like trying to breathe on the bottom of the ocean floor. Thankfully, journalism and adversity have a way with each other. Herald continued with the same vigour to not dilute its legacy. The magazine poked the bear in Balochistan, questioned sectarianism in South Punjab and retraced the steps of a killer in Kasur — without fear or favour.

The storm also delivered personal loss. A childhood friend who was diagnosed with cancer soon after I joined Herald died a year and a half later. I watched him wither away on the hospital bed, asking friends and family for donations to help him pay his medical bills. His death convinced me nothing was worth hanging on to. Not even the love of my life.

When we first heard talk of Herald’s closure at the end of last year, the sense of loss came flooding back. I wanted to run. To scream. And so in April this year, I left Herald and moved to another city. I felt guilty about abandoning my colleagues. I told them it wasn’t them. It was me.

I find it ironic that I now work for an organisation fighting for the rights of condemned prisoners, because one of my favourite Herald stories from these last years was on people on death row. Written by Subuk Hasnain, whose courage and kindness I will never forget, the story was a testament to the magazine and the people who contributed to it. Lesser people like me run away from loss, she faced death in the eyes of people who live it every day.

'Life After Death' was the title on that June 2018 issue’s cover. I can’t help but hope that there is life after death after all. For my friend, so he can drink tea and drive fast cars somewhere up there. For lost love, so that we may find it again someday. For Herald, so that it may continue to tell stories from the margins. And for the rest of us, who just feel terribly lost.

Have you experienced Pakistan's changing media landscape? Share your insights with us at prism@dawn.com