Of fashion show, Rahman Baba’s translation and PDA strike

By Afzal Hussain Bokhari

With attractive summer prints flowing down their shoulders, about a dozen of the female models did a cat walk before a select gathering under high security. Guests in glamorous clothes added to the liveliness of the event by clapping their hands here and there. Except for Mohsin, the young fashion journalist, the media were conspicuous by their absence. The arts and design section of the privately-run Iqra University arranged a fashion show in Peshawar after 12 long years. Eight of the models had been invited from Islamabad and Lahore while three students of the arts and design department acted as such. Students who participated in the competition were divided into eight groups. Put on display were bridal clothes and summer designs.

BBC producer Sharjeel Baloch recorded the impressions of the department’s female student of fourth year, Palwasha Shinwari: “It is a healthy sign that Pukhtun girls are showing interest, even if on a very limited scale, in the aesthetic field”. Coming from a comparatively more liberal city of Lahore, model Naila said that she initially got scared at the idea of taking part in a fashion show in Peshawar as this remote border town was associated with suicide car bomb explosions and the never-ending Kalashnikov culture. Fashion journalist Mohsin said that he enjoyed the event as much as he could have done in Karachi and Lahore.

By and large being a conservative society many an eyebrow was initially raised in the Frontier metropolis when the local campus of Iqra University started the department of arts and design. The per semester charges were slightly higher than those in other universities but all the same looking at the quality and standard of teaching, female students from middle and upper middle class made a beeline for admissions and parents silently acquiesced and decided not to become any hurdle in the learning-teaching process. Some of the girls almost acquired the kind of sophistication one normally associated with Lahore’s National College of Arts (NCA).

The aesthetic work does not end with textile designing. It silently extends to intellectual domain and occupies the brains of hermit-like research scholars. The publicity-shy Western academic Robert Sampson, for instance, has brought out a 103-page book Vision of Love (Sufi poetry of Pushtuns) in which he has translated into English selected poetry of Rahman Baba. He has included in the book some 53 pictures which are truly representative of the typical Pukhtun culture. In one of the pictures, the author can be seen wearing shalwar-qamees and squatting outside the shrine of Rahman Baba.

In a brief one-page introduction to the book, he says that the book is a celebration of the poetry which forms the core of the deeply spiritual and expressive oral culture of the Pushtuns. He says that he has attempted to free Adur Rahman Baba’s verse from the constraints of rhyme and metre to communicate its essence for which he owes thanks to his Pukhtun friend Momin Khan for his collaboration on the earlier translation from which the latest interpretation is derived.

For the consumption of his Western readers, he explains that Rahman Baba was born in 1650 and lived near Peshawar towards the end of the Moghal era. He wrote at a time when sufism was dominant in local culture.

Like other sufi poetry, a delicious ambiguity exists in the expression of love for the divine and the human beloved. Rahman Baba’s vision of love – with its soaring values of equality and tolerance – is a refreshing antidote to the obsession with rank, power and sectarianism that has so come to plague our world.

As some Pukhtun scholars already know, Robert Sampson has lived and worked as a secondary school teacher in Peshawar with his wife and four children since 1989. For his Master’s degree from Nottingham University, he did research on Rahman Baba’s poetry. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham. He has collaborated with local friends and students in publishing books on Pushto language and poetry. His recent publications include A Dictionary of Spoken Pukhto.

In order to enable our readers to relish the flavour of Robert Samson’s English, we  seek to reproduce below just four translated lines from the poem titled Your Face:

Is that a pink satin on your pale cheek,

Or scarlet drops of my own blood?

My tears of anguish just enflame you more,

Like drops of hot fat on fire.

Simile of the drops of hot fat on fire incidentally came to mind on Saturday when enraged employees of CD&MD at the call of their trade union leaders came out of their offices at midday and shouted themselves hoarse on the lawns of the PDA building in Phase V of Hayatabad by chanting slogans in support of their demands. Apart from raise in salaries and allowances, they also demanded their quota of plots of land.

On hearing the slogans, surprised customers from the nearby shops and branches of various banks peeped out to see if something was the matter. Wearing black bands around their arms and holding aloft banners and placards with their demands inscribed on them, the protesting employees later walked on to the main road and marched in the form of a tiny procession towards Hayatabad police station.

On second floor, the complainants saw that housing section adjacent to the large prayer room was empty with just one junior clerk attending to the general public. Relaxed naib qasids sat on wooden benches and told the applicants that rest of the staff had gone to the court in connection with a case. Friendly government contractors walked in and out of various sections and cut jokes with PDA officials.

PDA has placed advertisements in newspapers to announce that it intends to auction the vacant plots of land on which the carefree owners have failed to undertake any construction over the last 30 years or more. These plots serve as garbage dumps and open lavatories and the general public is fed up with the attitude of owners.