{"id":3250,"date":"2018-03-26T21:59:47","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T20:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=3250"},"modified":"2018-03-26T21:59:47","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T20:59:47","slug":"letter-from-lahore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=3250","title":{"rendered":"Letter from Lahore"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
the only person in Lahore wearing a pork pie hat<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s not every literary festival where you have to check out the foreign office security warnings before you attend.\u00a0<\/strong> It certainly doesn\u2019t apply to Cheltenham. \u00a0But then the literary festival which has just taken place in\u00a0 Lahore was no ordinary one.<\/p>\n

For a start, there were guards with machine guns at every entrance.\u00a0 Lahore remains a city where foreign nationals have sometimes needed to exercise caution, as have the Pakistani locals.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been before and thought I knew my way around.\u00a0\u00a0So I felt particularly stupid \u2013 and alarmed \u2013 when I realised the taxi taking me from the airport to the hotel on my arrival was heading in the wrong direction.\u00a0 Moreover the driver only spoke Urdu and brushed aside my questions.\u00a0 Then he pulled into a lay-by and another younger and meaner-looking driver replaced him.<\/p>\n

It was still early morning so there were not many people around.\u00a0 My state of paranoia was not helped by having been upgraded on the incoming Emirates flight and celebrating with a couple of vodka martinis which had left my judgement the worse for wear. Was I now about to be abducted before I\u2019d given a single talk (on the new Hachette India edition of Nanda Devi<\/a>)?\u00a0 I should have stayed in coach.<\/p>\n

But as so often with the paranoia travellers feel on first arrivals, it soon evaporated.\u00a0 I had just been part of a regular shift change for sharing a car.<\/p>\n

Irvine Welsh was one of many writers attending the festival with me<\/strong> and I decided to keep close in case any situation did \u2018go off\u2019, as they say on the hostile environment courses. Surely he\u2019d be able to channel his inner Begbie and be useful in a crisis?\u00a0 Also he was always easy to spot in the crowd as the only person in the whole of Lahore wearing a pork pie hat.<\/p>\n

Trainspotting<\/em> is enormously popular in Pakistan.\u00a0 You can see why from the amphetamine charged way young men ride their motorbikes through the back streets of Lahore.\u00a0 Pakistanis like their literature direct and engaged.\u00a0 The session Irvine gave was packed.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, I talked to a polite young man who was in awe of him and spoke in the modulated and careful English of the Lahori middle classes.\u00a0 \u2018He is such a very important man. When I read his books, every word is like a bullet that goes through me.\u00a0 The only thing is, I have a problem when Irvine Sahib is speaking. I cannot understand a single word.\u00a0 It is his Scottish accent.\u00a0 It is like trying to understand someone speaking Bengali!\u2019<\/p>\n

The festival has come about through the sustained and admirable efforts of Razi Ahmed and his colleagues<\/strong>, who felt that Pakistan desperately needed a literary festival.\u00a0 There is little in the way of a publishing industry here compared to India and the need for freedom of discussion and debate is acute in a society still under the long shadow cast by military involvement in the state.<\/p>\n

And Lahore was the obvious city to hold that festival.\u00a0 Kipling\u2019s birthplace and his \u2018city of dreadful night\u2019 has become a huge metropolis of eleven million.\u00a0 It is also the literary and artistic hub of the nation, a counterpart to Karachi\u2019s commercial success.<\/p>\n

A packed session celebrated the memory of Asma Jehangir<\/strong>, the much loved\u00a0 human-rights lawyer and activist who died just a few weeks ago after a lifetime campaigning \u2013 and being imprisoned \u2013 for the cause of women and the disadvantaged in Pakistan.\u00a0 Her friend Ahmed Rashid told of how when he wrote his influential book Taliban<\/em> \u2013 which because he wrote it pre 9\/11, became essential reading after that particular situation \u2018went off\u2019 \u2013 the Pakistani government tried to suppress it, given their own close ties to Mullah Omar and friends.<\/p>\n

Asma Jehangir came up with an idea.\u00a0 She decided to invent a fictitious literary prize and award it to Ahmed\u2019s Taliban book.\u00a0 \u2018Because then the Government will be unable to stop it being distributed.\u2019<\/p>\n

Over the two days of the festival, I became acutely aware of \u00a0the malign effect of the dictatorship\u00a0 of General Zia in the 1980s.\u00a0 Many artists and writers told of how they had been imprisoned or needed to resort to subterfuge to survive those years \u2013 and of how freedom of expression is something that has continually to be fought for.<\/p>\n

This is a free festival, like the one in Jaipur in India which I attended a few weeks ago<\/strong>, and at both the excitement and energy were palpable. \u00a0British literary festivals can be decidedly blue-rinse and cautious these days.\u00a0 At Lahore, there were swarms of young students wanting to seize on writers and ideas, and hungry for debate.<\/p>\n

As Pakastani novelist Sabyn Javeri put it when she spoke on a panel with Esther Freud, \u2018literature helps us listen when we all do too much talking.\u2019<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

A version of this article appeared in India Today<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  It\u2019s not every literary festival where you have to check out the foreign office security warnings before you attend.\u00a0 It certainly doesn\u2019t apply to Cheltenham. \u00a0But then the literary festival which has just taken place in\u00a0 Lahore was no ordinary one. For a start, there were guards with machine guns at every entrance.\u00a0 Lahore […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3250"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3263,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3250\/revisions\/3263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}