A Student's Reflections on the Valley of Wonderment

The following is part of an email I received from a young student on my post 'The Valley of Wonderment, 1987-2006'. I am sharing it here, and shall soon try to answer the two questions asked at the end of this excerpt:

As you say that the bookstores, libraries and cinema houses were fast vanishing when our collective life started to live in the Valley of Wonderment (1987-2006), which left the young minds of Pakistan in bewilderment. Their questions were left unanswered. Though if there had been some efficient means of bringing them closer to the literature Pakistan have produced, the films we have made and the messages our heroes have tried to convey through them, they certainly could have found the answers they were looking for. Also being in this ‘Valley’ the youngsters probably had little choice as to whom shall they make their role-models. Patriotism and positive thinking was there, but it had no direction to follow (as you quoted "they are in love but do not know with whom").

Yes, there was a time when all I knew about myself or the world was what others told me. My life was hollow and I had no solid reason to live, and consequently had no idea how shall a life be spent. Be it politics, philosophy, human behavior, arts or religion, my thoughts about life were quite superficial, dealing only with the surface, never looking for anything deeper inside. This was the time I stayed in the ‘Valley’ and although my efforts had no specific direction at that time, still it turned out to be fruitful as I was able to observe people and histories at that time which acted as a base for my future ideas and thoughts.

And now you have made me believe that every person has to pass through this stage. Perhaps it is some sort of a ‘grounding stage’ and sort of compulsory as well.

If yes, then that means that it had to be a part of our history, so that we can ask as much questions as we can, collect material which can help us fight our doubts and also in our future journey. I have always heard praises of the 20 years you have termed as the Valley of Wonderment, that there was peace all across the country, we had fewer problems and things were calm, and nowadays there is unrest everywhere, also in the heart of every Pakistani. From youngsters to their parents, from established businessmen to working class, everyone is in a strange quest. And now I feel that the ‘calmness’ of that time can be termed as ‘a collective slumber’ which ended to bring this ‘activity’ and ‘hustle and bustle’ of life. Today nearly all of us feel a need to change and revolve, although every single human being evolves in a different way, and we need to merge all the different frequencies of change in one wave of revolution.

Although I myself have not seen the James Bond film you are talking about, still I can notice the close link it has with the Pakistani public. And also ‘Living on the edge is the only way Pakistan lives’ is so true a statement! Living on the edge gives us strength and it prepares us for future, just like mechanism of immunity prepares antibodies for future use.

Now my questions to you are:

• Am I right in saying that Valley of Wonderment provided a grounding stage for us as a nation, and no matter what, every great nation has to experience it?
• Also, I have seen many people full of patriotism and good feelings for Pakistan but they hardly perceive depths regarding many issues faced by our country. So it can be said that they are on the right track but they still have to pass the ‘grounding stage’ and have to focus their energies more precisely?

Cinema and Society, Up to 2006

These writings which I am collecting as Cinema and Society, Up to 2006, trace my journey through questions and explorations in film criticism theory from 1987 to 2006 (see “the Valley of Wonderment”):

Part I: Analyses

• Cult Heroes
• Importance of Being Eve
• Sold for a Song
• Director's Cut
• Hunt for Success
• The Chocolate Hero
• Women and Cinema in Pakistan
• Anarakali
• Shirin and Farhad
• Romeo and Juliet
• Oliver Stone's Alexander

Part II: Profiles and Interviews

• Pervez Malik
• Sohail Rana
• Nisar Bazmi
• Syed Afzal Hussain
• Noor Jahan

Sometime in the mid-1980s, in the Urdu edition of UNESCO’s magazine for the youth, Payami, I saw a write-up that drew connections between the rise of cult heroes and social circumstances prevailing in their times. The figures studied there were Dilip Kumar, Waheed Murad, Amitabh Bachan and Michael Jackson.

A little later, around 1987, I came upon British Cinema and Society, 1930-1970 by Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate (1984), which showed that feature films represented an important and largely untapped source of evidence for understanding the history of the present century. The authors had tried to answer some simple questions about ten British movies:

1. What was the society's general attitude towards an issue that was picked up in a movie?
2. What did the movie say about it?
3. How was the movie received?

These ideas never left me completely as I went on exploring other dimensions (especially Auteur, feminist, psychoanalytical and anthropological approaches). Even material written about Indian cinema from these perspectives was rare to find in Pakistan, and absolutely very little was being written about Pakistani cinema that could be comparable with such studies. I had seen some old issues of Eastern Films, an exquisite magazine about Pakistani cinema published from Karachi in the 1960s and the early 1970s. Hence I knew that there had been a foundation that could be built upon. However, indigenous parameters for evaluating our cinema were either non-existent or had been worn-out already. I had to do my best within frameworks acquired from elsewhere.

The advantage was that my writings were readily comparable with some credible stuff being written abroad because I was speaking in the same terms. They may still be of interested to a wider audience than some of my new ideas and be useful for universities interested in a Pakistani perspective on cinema and society within the widely known parameters of media studies.

Inquiries about Ancient Greece

Under this title, I am presenting the following writings of mine, originally published in The Review, the midweek supplement of Dawn in the early 2000s and written from a perspective which I now see as "the Valley of Wonderment":

1. Helen of Troy
2. Herodotus
3. Socrates
4. Aristotle
5. Alexander the Great
6. Cleopatra

As explained elsewhere, I refer to the twenty years from 1987 to 2006 in the history of Pakistan as "the Valley of Wonderment" because Sheikh Fariduddin Attar has described the valley in The Conference of the Birds as a place where the Unity previously written on the souls is gone. Travelers do not know whether they are dead or alive, awake or asleep, and all they can tell is that they are in love but do not know with whom. There cannot be a more apt description for this phase of our collective life, and I guess it resonated in my writings too.

The Valley of Wonderment, 1987-2006

The fifteenth film in James Bond series appeared in 1987. Unlike in the West, The Living Daylights became quite a sensation in Pakistan. We had participated in the Afghan War of Liberation for years and had felt the pinch too: drugs and guns smuggled through the open border were seen to be destroying the more sophisticated culture of Pakistan. James Bond in shalwar kameez, helping Afghan freedom fighters not because it was his war but because he was trying to save the world, blowing up a hyper billion shipment of heroine together with the C-130 military aircraft carrying it, rescuing the starry-eyed Russian girl from the clutches of bad communists and listening to Mozart in the music halls of Vienna: the allegory could not have been more complete for the urban Pakistani ("Living on the edge," the film poster was saying about the hero. "It's the only way he lives."). I watched the movie seven times in a cinema in the city center and invariably the crowds included diverse cross-section of the society from the most educated to the unschooled and the working class.

Ibne Safi was now dead for seven years and Waheed Murad for four. Bookstores, rental libraries and cinema houses were fast vanishing. Pakistan was soon going to depend on imported fantasies not only for its politics, religion and education but even daydreams. Welcome to the Valley of Wonderment.

I call the twenty years from 1987 to 2006 the Valley of Wonderment in the history of Pakistan because Sheikh Fariduddin Attar has described the valley in The Conference of the Birds as a place where the Unity previously written on the souls is gone. Travelers do not know whether they are dead or alive, awake or asleep, and all they can tell is that they are in love but do not know with whom. There cannot be a more apt description for this phase of our collective life.

Our intelligentsia had been working for it. Since 1936, they had not used any parameters that were our own and had redefined originality as an exercise of imitating "high literature" of the West in the vernacular. What was recognized as the best of our own had been defined by the West too, so it was only natural that the entire society should finally give in to foreign influence whole-heartedly. Hence we asked questions that wouldn’t have arisen if we had known ourselves better (questions about identity, for instance).

These questions gradually came to resonate in my writings too. At least for me it is ironic that this period was my most productive (I was nineteen in 1987, so the Valley of Wonderment was my prime time). I may not agree anymore with a lot of things I wrote then, not because they do not seem to be true anymore but because now I feel that it is possible to look deeper and find other realities beneath the surface. Since the Valley of Wonderment was to see things essentially through approaches that prevailed elsewhere, it meant to find and enjoy contradictions in personalities and to take the benefit of doubt in ideas. When looking at Pakistan, it appeared nobler to search for an identity rather than finding it.

I am still preserving my writings from this period on my website, as many as I may find and possibly upload, because many are good hard work (the Valley of Wonderment is also the phase of erudition). These were also the days when I was reading a lot, and diversely, and that reflects here too. Some pieces also present field research that could be useful in its own right. On the whole, these are my notes from the Valley of Wonderment, which I understand to be a state through which many have passed and many more are bound to pass, and that is yet another reason to preserve these writings as first hand account of the experience:

Complete list of my writings available from my website

I draw the line on this phase of my writing in October 2006. That is when I started on The Republic of Rumi and the work became a breakthrough for me.

Andaz Mehramana (2009)

Andaz Mehramana is my new small book on Iqbal Studies published by Iqbal Academy Pakistan a few weeks ago. As you know, the academy works under the Federal Ministry of Culture and I am Research Consultant for it.

Unlike most of my other work, Andaz is not so much for general readers as it is for specialists and academics. I have tried to briefly mention my recent findings in the field (which have been elaborated more artistically in my full-length book The Republic of Rumi: A Novel of Reality). Basically:

1. It is somewhat erroneous to say that the thought of Iqbal does not follow a system. The system is there but one has to discover it and Iqbal scholars have mostly failed in doing that because the works of Iqbal haven’t been classified properly: most scholars fail to distinguish between work and biography (this error was apparently imported from modern Western scholarship because it is most evident in the works of foreign scholars writing about Iqbal).
2. It shouldn’t need anything more than common sense to see connections between poems occurring together in an anthology but unfortunately the practice has been uncommon among academics working on Iqbal. I have offered examples from a few poems which reveal an astonishing subtext when studied in textual context.
3. Well-known poems “for children” in Baang-i-Dara (The Call of the Marching Bell), including the most-often recited “Lab pay aati hai dua ban kay…” (“God make my life a little light”), are a case in point: about two years ago I noticed that in the order in which they are presented by the author they form a single story about the journey of a soul from the state of “a fly” which is easy prey for the spider (Satan) to the state of “a caged bird” in whose heart the memory of the primordial state has been vividly awakened (this is a story which I would like to share in detail in this newsletter sometime).
4. Iqbal claimed to be aware of the major events of several next centuries as well as their purpose. As early as July 1917, he intimated a friend about his “resolve” to write down a book about the future history of Islam although he said that it would be published after his death “or whenever the time is right for it.” Even if someone discards his claim, it cannot be denied that he himself believed in it up to his last breath. Hence, the major issue for his biographer as well as critic is to show how his life and work reflect this perception of his and what were his guesses about our times as well as the times to come (this doesn’t mean that one has to necessarily agree with him but at least it needs to be explored in proportion with the emphasis which he himself laid on it).

The book is only 40 pages and its price is Rs.50. I intend to conduct a workshop about it soon at Teachers’ Development Centre, Karachi, under auspices of Iqbal Academy Pakistan.