The Real Pakistan - Behind Char Divari

Published 8/04/07 on: Desicritics

The American public is dismally uninformed about Pakistan. What little it knows is tied to the news reports; Pakistan being an epicenter for terrorism, Pakistan being the hiding place for Taliban, Pakistan being the nursery for Al Qaeda, Pakistan as a new nuclear threat, Pakistan as the critical pawn in Southeast Asia for keeping the lid on Afghanistan’s political instability. Those informed Americans who read the journals or the daily newspapers or watch CNN rather than the soaps, see George Bush and Musharraf meeting together in Washington D.C. and Musharraf promoting his new book. The real Pakistani people? Hardly.

Who are Pakistanis anyway? Are they the sophisticated and wealthy elite in Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore? Yes. Or are they part of the Diaspora which now lives in Toronto, Seattle, London or Brisbane? Yes. Among these are the well educated, wealthy articulate groups that cluster in the world’s large cites and carry on with their lives, contributing their skills and expertise to the countries they have adopted. Yes, these are in large, the doctor-men, lawyer-men, business men and scientists-men whose expertise is part of what make America great. Their brains and talents become part and parcel of the fabric of our way of life; we are a county of immigrants like none other in the world and we are enriched by their presence, my fellow Pakistani Americans.

Who are Pakistanis anyway? We answered that. Did we? The well educated wealthy elite are a relatively small part of the total population of Pakistan. Who are all those other folk? We see pictures of some of them, almost always men, males, and young men at that, crowding the street, holding banners, shouting and screaming at the camera about a fatwah against an author who blasphemed, an inappropriate cartoon, about holy books being flushed down toilets, about the Iraq War, about the American bombing of a Pakistani village! Many of these young men having finished school, matriculated, at the secondary school level, are often jobless or performing jobs with very low pay, restless youths that cluster together in huge numbers in the ever growing urban populations of Pakistan in Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Lahore. It has been estimated that Pakistan’s urban population has expanded seven fold since 1951. It is a young and restless population.

But where are the girls, the women? Why don’t we see pictures of them? Is Pakistan made up of mostly men? Males? Who are Pakistanis anyway? Are they these male urban folk? Do males dominate? Are they in control? Yes. Some 34% of the total population now crowds into cities. Logically, of this group, almost 50% must be women. Where are they? What are they doing? Why don’t we see them? Oh, but we did see one, a beautiful, articulate one. Pakistan, an Islamic state had a woman, Benazir Bhutto, as Prime Minister, imagine, twice over! Yet where have all the girls and women gone? Oh yes, I remember the striking eyes of the young woman who graced the cover of National Geographic. Yes! And then there is Mukhtaran Bibi, called Mukhtar Mai by many, who was raped five times by members of the same family. Yes! Her book with Nicholas D. Kristof, In the Name of Honor, tells her story for the world to hear. It is an important story.

Behind Char Divari

Of Pakistan’s 169 million people, almost half are women in the vast and diverse rural areas of Pakistan. Rural women, approximately thirty three percent of the total population, reside in the countryside. That sounds idyllic, almost romantic. It is far from it. They bear huge burdens. “Women in Pakistan, particularly the large majority of rural women, bear a number of burdens which Islam and social custom places on them as they interact in a fast changing world. Three major burdens are sex segregation, (purdah) their legal status in Islam, and their role in the family. These are barriers to change; barriers to the ability of women to take part with their sisters in many rural development activities going on in the Third World.”1 Economic development and political participation have been shown to be tied to high levels of literacy in most developing countries and women’s participation is a key element in this equation.

I was in the remote hill station of Nathiagali with my own family and the ill-clad wife of the Forestry Rest House caretaker bent down to touch my feet. I reached out to lift her up and asked in Urdu, “What is it, my sister?” She, with tears in her eyes undid the swaddling clothes of the little child she was carrying in the crook of her arm and held it out to me. “Take her. Take her to America. Don’t leave her here. Please.” Why? What was her burden?

Women in Pakistan, women, who we in American call our better half, bear many, many children, endure poverty, labor unceasingly in brutal conditions in farms, they rear animals, cook, gather manure for fuel, wash clothing, sweep the home from early dawn until dark. My driver, Bashir Mohammed was glum. I asked him what his problem was. He replied, “My wife is pregnant with her ninth child. She is not well and almost died the last time. What can I do?” \

Look in the mosques at the first call to prayer and see how many women you count. Look at those who prostrate themselves in prayer and count the number of women. They are too busy, in most cases to pray along with their husbands, and are prohibited from joining him shoulder to shoulder, kneeling equally before their maker. They were a missing link in the social and economic development of Pakistan in 1989. 2. But this is 2007! The rural women of Pakistan still bear such burdens today; yet they are the tremendous potential for the country’s development. Demographically they are about half of the total, but it is very much a man’s world out there. Purdah is still a reality! What is this char divari business? It relates to purdah. Compare the street scenes in Delhi, Patiala or Dehra Dun to Peshawar, Quetta or Dehra Ishmael Khan and you will understand immediately. The women are absent in the latter three.

During the many years I lived in India in the North West Frontier Province, in what is now Pakistan, as a child, I saw a few women, just here and there, usually from the window of the old 1937 family Ford sedan as we drove past, rural women working outside their homes and in villages. Later in my teens, studying in Mussoorie at Woodstock School in the foothills of the Himalayas, I studied with a few of them, beautiful, bright and talented young Indian women. Later, in 1985, working on a World Bank project for the Ministry of Agriculture in On Farm Water Management, I saw a few women in the cities. I was one of the really fortunate ones. Amazingly, I was assigned a typist, a young woman we will call Naheed, who learned to be a copy-typist and do filing as she worked for me. She was the only woman in the Institute and the faculty dropped by my office with great regularity to talk ‘important business’, with me, of course. In Lahore, I was privileged to attend concerts where many wealthy, elite, sophisticated, educated Pakistani men and women listened to singers, ghazals, and players of musical instruments. I met two very beautiful Pakistani women at cocktail parties in Lahore, imagine that, who worked in the entertainment industry as actresses. I met a few other Pakistani women teachers, one who taught my son, in the American School in Lahore. In 1984 my fellow worker, who was assigned to me from Islamabad to visit rural farmers in Dehra Ishmael Khan, to set up regulations for Water User Associations, was an articulate and fearless young woman, Meher J. who had her BA in Sociology. She had been born a Thalomide baby and had one flipper arm and of course had never married. Yes, I remember each and every Pakistani woman I met and worked with, and know most of their names to this day. They were, as I struggled to do my work, my better half!

Culturally, women, particularly rural women, find little chance to participate in programs for personal and economic development. Yet, much is being attempted to assist rural women. Aid programs target women’s health and attempt to improve their life in a variety of ways, including pre and post-natal child care, improved nutrition and literacy programs. But, in order to be effective, such programs must reach millions upon millions of women, those same women who are, for the majority of their lives behind char divari, the four walls of the hundreds and thousands of compounds in Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province. In order to be effective, all the girls of Pakistan need to become literate, to attend school. One particularly difficult and sensitive area needs much work, that is, women’s reproductive health care. But how does one access rural women, who in the name of honor, are under the protection of their men? How does one communicate with rural farmers and householders about the need to protect women from disease, including AIDS that these very men bring back to their households? How can their wives be protected?

There is one very bright light on the horizon. Pakistani women writers! The world is beginning to take notice of these articulate and gutsy women who are writing about their world. Deepti Priya Mehorta wrote in “Women and Words, A Review of Pakistani Women Writers, Boloji.com on Oct. 9, 2005 these words: “On a question of women’s writing specifically, Guahar remarked, ‘Writing may be the only avenue of expression for many women. Men may whistle, saunter around, behave badly. In Pakistani society, we women do not whistle, wink or make salubrious noises.... but you can write quietly.’”

In the Book Review section of Boloji.com, which means in Urdu, "okay speak up", more than a hundred excellent book reviews are presented! What a fantastic way to expand the voices of women! From my observation, however, unless there is a consistent and effective way for these hundreds of Pakistani women writers to present their valued points of view, their narrative to the world, much will be lost. Many of the publishers are little known and many titles are not easily available in the United States. But one book that should be touted is Hoops of Fire: Fifty Years of Fiction by Pakistani Women by Aamer Hussein, Sagi Books, Feb. 2000. This anthology presents stories that reveal the aching, the love, the frustration and the hope of so many Pakistani women. The more the world hears these, the greater will be the web of understanding, empathy and love for the people of Pakistan. Speaking of the web, the digital linkages that are possible to expand awareness for Pakistan and its people has not been well utilized. My Google perusal of ‘Pakistani bloggers’ was an eye-opener for me. What I often read was, men going about ‘whistling, winking and performing salubrious acts’, or decrying Pakki Bashing. We need quiet and serious women writers here as well. While the elite and powerful men go about planning wars, scheming political campaigns, building and tearing down empires, women, their better half are revealing the soul of their land through their writing. It may well be true that the pen is more powerful than the sword, especially if the better half wields it.

The millions behind the physical real mud-brick walls and the religious-cultural and psychological char divari are, from my viewpoint, the untapped resource for Pakistan’s development. Women’s development is the crucial tool to bring about change in Pakistan. But the high hard walls of fundamental religious belief and rigid social custom are difficult to breach.