Authors: John Freeman
The reason for this dissonance was the dramatic shift that took place in Pakistan’s cultural life between the early seventies and early eighties. The shift had a name – ‘Islamization’ – and a face – heavy-lidded, oily-haired, pencil-moustached. That face belonged to Pakistan’s military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, ally of the Saudis and the Americans. As the alliance with the Americans brought guns into Karachi, so the alliance with the Saudis brought a vast increase in the number of Wahhabi mosques and madrasas: these preached a puritanical version of religion at odds with the Sufism that had traditionally been the dominant expression of Islam in much of the subcontinent. Fear of the growing influence of political, Wahhabi-inspired Islam formed a steady thrum through my childhood, and early on I learned that one of the most derogatory and dismissive terms that could be used against another person was ‘fundo’ (as in ‘fundamentalist’).
By the time I was watching Nazia and Zoheb on TV, I already knew Zia ul-Haq stood for almost all that was awful in the world; he had placed my uncle, a pro-democracy politician, under house arrest. What I didn’t know then was that the video of ‘Disco Deewane’, at which I was turning up my nose, was coming under attack by Zia’s allies on the religious right; they had decided it was un-Islamic for a man and woman to dance together, as Nazia and Zoheb did in the video, even if they were siblings.
These were the early days of Islamization, when the censors were confused about what was permissible. A few years later, the process of Islamization was sufficiently advanced that a video such as ‘Disco Deewane’ would have no chance of airing. Although Nazia and Zoheb continued to release albums, the censorship laws and official attitudes towards pop meant they never gave concerts, received limited airtime on PTV, never released another video with the energy and sensuality of ‘Disco Deewane’, and were seen as a leftover from the days before Zia’s soulless rule sucked the life out of Pakistan’s youth culture. Or, from the point of view of my historically amnesiac adolescent world, by the mid-eighties, when pop music really started to matter to me, they were already dinosaurs from another era.
B
ut I was soon to learn that some dinosaurs can roar their way out of seeming extinction in a single moment. The person who taught me this was thirty-three-year-old Benazir Bhutto. As long as I could remember she had been the pro-democracy politician under arrest, house arrest or exile. Pakistan was Zia ul-Haq to me, after all; how could someone who spoke of replacing not just the man but the entire system ever be of relevance? Imagine then how my world must have turned on its head in April 1986 when Benazir returned to Pakistan a free woman, for the first time in eight years, and a million people took to the streets of Lahore to welcome her home.
Benazir’s triumphant return was one of several watershed political moments that marked my young life. My earliest ever recollection is of my father showing me his thumb, with a black mark on it, and explaining that he’d just been to the polling booth, and that the black mark, indelible ink, was to guard against anyone attempting to cast more than one vote. I was three and a half then, and the start of Zia ul-Haq’s dictatorship was just months away. I remember the day Benazir’s father was hanged, the day women’s rights activists marched on Islamabad to protest against misogynistic laws and were set upon by baton-wielding police, the day Zia held a referendum to extend his rule. So, the return of Benazir, after a decade of
soul-wearying
, dictatorial, oppressive political news was electrifying. For me, this is how it happened: at one moment she was far away, then she was in our midst and nothing was quite the same as before.
It seemed just that way with pop music, too. In the mid-eighties, in Lahore and Karachi (and in other pockets of urban Pakistan), groups of students came together in each other’s homes for jam sessions; the names of some of those students are instantly recognizable to anyone following the rise of Pakistani pop in the eighties and nineties: Aamir Zaki in Karachi, Salman Ahmad in Lahore, Junaid Jamshed in Rawalpindi. In 1986, Lahore’s Al-Hamra auditorium hosted its first ‘Battle of the Bands’, and the underground music scene cast off its subterranean nature. Some of the loudest cheers were reserved for a Rawalpindi-based group called the Vital Signs. But down south, in my home town, we paid little attention to ‘the provinces’ and so the Vital Signs remained completely unknown to me until that day in 1987 when I turned on the TV and saw the four young men singing in an open-top jeep.
W
atching the video of ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ (‘Heart, Heart, Pakistan’ or ‘My Heart Beats for Pakistan’) today, I’m struck by the void that must have existed to make pretty boys singing patriotic pop appear subversive. In a bid to circumvent growing restrictions, TV producer Shoaib Mansoor had the idea of getting a pop song past the censors by wrapping it up in nationalism. Vital Signs and ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ was the result. The video, with its guitar-strumming, denim-clad twenty-something males, premiered on Independence Day – 14 August – 1987 and millions of Pakistanis, including my fourteen-year-old self, fell over in rapture.
Our reaction clearly wasn’t to do with their dance moves. The Vital Signs boys of 1987 seem ill at ease, their gyrations arrhythmic, their posture self-conscious. This is particularly true of the lead singer, Junaid Jamshed, but still, I was in love. They were clean-cut, good-looking and, most shockingly, they were nearby. They were Pakistani after all; one day you might turn a corner and run into one of them. This scenario started to seem even more thrillingly possible the day gossip raced through the schoolyard, telling us that one of the boys at school – a boy I knew! – was Junaid Jamshed’s cousin.
The first concert I ever attended was Vital Signs playing at a swanky Karachi hotel. It’s a safe guess that some of the girls present hadn’t told their parents where they were really going that evening. Mine was a co-ed school, and while all the boys and girls were entirely at ease in each other’s company, many of the girls had restrictions placed on them by their parents about co-ed socializing outside school hours. Almost no one’s parents were classified as fundo, but many were ‘conservative’ – the latter having more to do with ideas of social acceptability and ‘reputation’ than religious strictures.
The concert took place in a function room, one used for conferences, small receptions or evenings of classical music. I had doubtless been in that room many times for tedious weddings, but I don’t suppose I’d ever entered it in jeans before – and that alone must have made the room feel different, unexpected. There was a makeshift stage placed at one end and neat rows of chairs set out for the audience by organizers who obviously had no idea what a pop concert was all about. But we did, we Karachi adolescents. We’d watched pirated recordings of Hollywood teen movies, and
Top of the Pops
, and we knew that when a pop group started singing no one sat down and politely swayed in time to the music. So, as soon as the band came on, all of us climbed atop our chairs and started dancing. ‘You guys are great,’ Jamshed said in surprised delight, before breaking into Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’. I recall telling myself:
Remember this
. I had never before come so close to touching the Hollywood version of Teenaged Life.
By 1988, a slightly reconfigured Vital Signs, having replaced one of its original band members with the guitarist Salman Ahmad, was in the process of recording a debut album when a plane exploded in the sky, killing Zia ul-Haq and allowing Pakistanis to take to the ballot box to declare what we wanted for our nation after eleven years of military rule and so-called Islamization. The answer was clear: no to the religious parties; yes to the thirty-five-year-old woman.
G
iven the state of Pakistan today, it is impossible to remember the heady days at the end of 1988 without tasting ashes. Elation was in the air, and it had a soundtrack. At parties my friends and I continued to dance to the UK’s Top 40, but the songs that ensured everyone crowded on to the dance floor were ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ and the election songs of both Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Karachi-based Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). There was little concern for political affiliation. At one such party I recall a young Englishman looking perplexed as Karachi’s teens gyrated to a song with the chorus
Jeay jeay jeay Bhutto Benazir
(‘Long live Benazir’). ‘I can’t imagine a group of schoolkids in London dancing to a “Long Live Maggie” number,’ he said, and I pitied him and all the English teenagers for not knowing what it was like to see the dawn of democracy.
A few months into the tenure of the Bhutto government, with the new head of state’s approval, Pakistan TV organized and recorded a concert called
Music ’89
. Nazia and Zoheb Hassan hosted, fittingly; but the event also passed the baton to a new generation, including Vital Signs and the hot new talent, the Jupiters, fronted by Ali Azmat. Tens of millions of people tuned in and religio-fascists fulminated from every pulpit. Benazir, as she would go on to do time and again, gave in to the demands of the religious right and, despite its huge success, the tapes of
Music ’89
were removed from the PTV library.
One of the most distinguishing features of the Bhutto government was the prevalence of the status quo precisely where there was the most urgent need for change. Islamization was no longer the government’s spoken objective, but all the madrasas, jihadi groups and reactionary preachers continued as if nothing had changed, with the support of the army and intelligence services. Benazir’s supporters argued that she had no room to manoeuvre given all the forces ranged against her; her detractors said her only real interest was in clinging on to power. Either way, the great social transformation we had expected to see, that Return to Before, never happened.
Even worse, many of the changes begun by Zia ul-Haq gained momentum. Almost all of rural Pakistan continued to hold fast to Sufi Islam, but the cities, where there was no deep affiliation to a particular religious tradition, became, perversely, more susceptible to the reactionaries. There were signs that a reactionary Islam, which entwined itself with world events, had made its mark on several of my schoolfellows – the male athlete who didn’t want to run in shorts on the school’s sports day because Islam demanded modesty in dress; the close friend of mine who held up a picture of Salman Rushdie in the months just after the fatwa and said, ‘He even looks like the Devil!’; and, most notably, the other friend who told me, in 1991, that Saddam would win the war against the Americans. When I pressed him for his reasons, given the disparity in the two nations’ armies, he shrugged and made some cryptic comment about Saddam having a ‘greater’ weapon. Chemical? I asked, and it was only when he continued to look straight at me, without expression, that I realized what he was thinking. ‘Allah?’ I said, and he raised both shoulders and dropped them – a gesture that told me I may not believe it, but it was so.
Everyone I knew at school had been closely following the Gulf War, though much of that had to do with the excitement of CNN broadcasting into our homes for the first time – after a lifetime of state-controlled TV, we were all hungry for images from around the world. At seventeen I knew certain basic political truths, even if they were never directly articulated on CNN: America had turned its back on Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the Gulf War was about oil; the same America that had embraced the religio-military dictatorship of General Zia was now turning frosty towards the new democratic government and imposing sanctions on the nation. None of this got in the way of the draw of America as a destination for my friends and myself – most of us, including the boy who predicted Saddam’s righteous victory, were headed there for university. We knew that America was a wonderful place, if you were in it. There was no struggle to reconcile my conflicting views. I’d always known it was a country that produced both Rambo and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
By the summer of 1991, even though political disillusionment with Pakistan’s democracy was rife, I viewed the world around me as a source of delight. University beckoned – almost all my friends would be on the East Coast by the autumn. We made plans for meeting in Boston on weekends and over Thanksgiving break. It didn’t occur to me that I might be homesick, or that anything would seem remotely unfamiliar. It also didn’t occur to me that henceforth Pakistan would be no more than a part-time home, and that I would eventually join the ranks of Those Who Left. I was going away for university, that was all; in four years, I’d return, and both Karachi and I would be much the same as before. And as for those pop stars of my youth – I assumed that some would fade away before others but that in the end they’d all be remembered as ‘pioneers of pop’. I certainly never would have imagined that their lives over the next two decades would reflect Pakistan’s shifting religio-political landscape.
W
eeks before I left for university, I had one concert-going experience that was to prove more potent in retrospect than at the time. The group with whom I spent that summer included a boy called Sherry, whose brother Salman Ahmad had just left Vital Signs to start his own band, Junoon. Junoon’s first album, released that year, was greeted with total indifference by critics and the public, but Sherry rounded up all the gang to go to a Junoon concert that summer. We went, but without much enthusiasm. Vital Signs was still the premier band in the country, and Ahmad, the guitarist, who was either jettisoned or parachuted out (accounts varied), had a whiff of second best about him. But onstage, Junoon was electrifying – thanks to both Ahmad and the singer, Ali Azmat, formerly of the Jupiters. Later, when Junoon became the biggest name in Pakistani pop, I would talk about that concert with an ‘I heard them before they were famous’ tone of superiority. But the truth was, soon after that I went to university and started to see the overwhelming maleness of Pakistani pop as alienating – my musical world now revolved around Natalie Merchant, Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls.