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Punjabi Bhangra Dancers |
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You have given up your memory of yourself -- of mystics and melas and kites and logorrhea -- and tried to submit yourself to order, and ritual, and discipline, and Shariah, and constipation.
I'm so Punjabi. For six hundred years we've done only three things: plant our fields, wench, and dance. Today, the fields are still feudal; the patriarchy is in full effect; but the dance, well, that we have lost.
In the Punjabi language you don't 'just' dance or 'do' a dance or 'go' dancing. No, you 'lay' down a dance (a bhangra). To dance is to unfurl. One is to make a carpet of his mischief, of his rage, of his weakness. Throw it down on the floor and hop on it, shoulders popping frenzy, a rhythmic murder of one's inner monstrosity. But, we have lost that dance.
Punjab is now the headquarters of the dance-forbidding Jamaat-E-Islaami brand parties. Punjab hosts the biggest Islamic convention of orthodoxy this side of Mecca -- Raiwind, that desolate salt field of the Tablighi Jamaat, where the lota flows freely. Punjab is the place where Mukhtaran Mai was violated; and Punjab is the place where the brutality against her was Islamically sanctioned. Punjab, province of dance, you are a place of privation; a daguerreotype etched in deprivation. Punjab, you are lost. Punjab, you have forgotten your dancing. |
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Is it any surprise that when a people's traditional mores are suctioned and spat out like so much phlegm that they give into murder, and consign themselves to illiteracy, and house their rage in their heart, and become angry at the drop of a dime? |
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I say it again: you've forgotten your dance.
It is not for wont of music. It is not for lack of poets. It is not for absence of artists. It is only that you have let your soul become severe. You have given up your memory of yourself -- of mystics and melas and kites and logorrhea -- and tried to submit yourself to order, and ritual, and discipline, and Shariah, and constipation.
In the film Khamosh Paani, the bubble of Punjabi amusement comes to an end when Urdu speaking chest thumpers compare the Punjabi bumpkins to ignorant know-nothings, and thereby, simultaneous to an attack on the Punjabi language, begins an assault on that bumpkin mentality which houses so much innocence; which is capable of so much dance. It was that mentality which for centuries treated Islam like an object of play and amusement, not as a form of control and castigation.
Punjab doesn't understand the Islam of Deoband, of Qandahar, of Arabia. It knows Islam; but not that kind. Its Islam is of Bulleh Shah: "Neither a believer going to the mosque; nor given to non-believing ways." The Islam of Nusrat, where
the idolatry of woman is the same as worship of God. Besides Bulleh Shah who recalls anymore Punjab's illustrious Muslim mystics? Who sings Heer/Ranjha and recognizes it as the greatest allegory on Love this side of Rumi's masnavi? Who hears in the dhol the palpitation of Divine Love? Who hears Abida Parveen sing of a God that only has one thing to teach? Punjab has forgotten its poetry; no, turned away from it. Its past has become lost to it. Islam, put that in quotes, has excised everything Punjabi from Punjab; even Punjab's chador-draping, saint-loving, melancholy Islam. Is it any surprise that when a people's traditional mores are suctioned and spat out like so much phlegm that they give into murder, and consign themselves to illiteracy, and house their rage in their heart, and become angry at the drop of a dime? Thank you so much Allama Maudoodi; thank you so much Maulana Fazlur Rahman; thank you so much Sipah-e-Sahaba.
Punjabis 'lay down' their dance so that they may stomp away their sorrow. Someone has slaughtered the dance. Now, to be Punjabi is to be sad. I'm so Punjabi.
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