Conclusion: Future Moves?

CONcLUSION: FUTURE MOVES? As I conclude this book, and contemplate the future moves of the bhānd, I learn that the senior bhānd Hajji Munir Hussain has passed away (2 February 2016). The bhānd mode that animates these pages is from his wisdom, wit and practice. But he left the world quietly, without an obitu- ary, ‘a king without fanfare’, gone the fakir’s way. During our last meet- ing in the summer of 2015, he took me around his house, which had fallen into disarray in the five years since we had last met: bookings were irregular despite the return to power of Munir’s former patron, the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his PML-N government. Unclear of what his future held, yet still pulling out stinging repartee on both the government and my research assistant’s fashionable spectacles, Munir reflected upon his elder brother’s death a decade earlier, through which he had worn a smile and put on a performance the very same day. He summarised: ‘what is apparent and what is hidden are different.’ I have respectfully left such personal struggles hidden, to instead foreground struggles and agency in performance. As these performers crack their slapstick at the prevailing injustices, the more we laugh with the bhānd, the more we heal, and the more bhānds triumph over adversity. The adversity is not in the forces of Islamism, as most scholarly accounts of theatre in Pakistan would have us believe. Instead, a body politic plagued by the legacy of colonial moder- nity, military dictatorship, geo-political uncertainty, an unequal economy exacerbated by the miserliness of the rich and cultural domination of the elite. Yet these are the very factors that perpetuate the bhānd’s feisty wit and generate innovative forms. © The Author(s) 2017 197 C. Pamment, Comic Performance in Pakistan, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56631-7 198 COnclusiOn: FutuRE MOVEs? While Munir’s death is a great loss to the bhānd tradition, the bhand̄ mode continues to live on in different embodiments. This book has mapped these transformations in broad and significant strokes, from wedding performances, to popular theatre and contemporary television media. Here I wish to pause for a moment so as to not lose sight of the performers who are carrying this dynamic mode forward. Here I will consider smaller contemporary manoeuvres, performed by bhands̄ on the fringes of my nar- rative, which further gesture to future possibilities of this comic mode. Munir’s son, Waseem Abbas, as he grieves not only the demise of his father, but also the passing of the other half of his bhand̄ act, tells me that everywhere he goes in the neighbourhood, people ask where is Hajji Munir. He responds, ‘I am his ghost’ (Waseem 2016). This ghost is the phantom bhand̄ mode that travels with him, in the rickshaw that he has been driving for the last year to supplement his earnings. He weaves between the pajeros and donkey carts of the city, past the shiny new plazas, and down into the broken pot holes. Behind him, the whitening cream advert with which he has decorated his vehicle, parading the slogan ‘now Pakistan will turn white’ and tattooed with the Punjabi Jatt’s moustache, brings smiles across the hierarchies that divide the landscape, as this bhand̄ takes to the road (Fig. 1). Elsewhere, in Dharmay Wala village on the outskirts of Dipalpur, the bhānd Ustad Achi (Arshad Khan 1954–present), has been acting in the Dipalpur Arts Council’s theatre plays for the last 20 years (an extension of the repertoire mapped in Chap. 5), generating fame that secures his wedding invitations. He states, ‘juggats are our weapon’ in the theatre, the wedding and beyond. He exemplifies the power of his verbal ammunition as he (the bighla) and his partner (the ranga) intercept a passer-by on his way back from the local hospital in the open village grounds. In this improvised interaction, the bhānds identify this prospective patron as an affluent ‘Chaudhry’, and take his presence near the hospital to indicate that his wife may be with a newborn child: RANGA: I pray to Allah that colours be with you all the time. BIGHLA: You are great people, very tall people, you are having a son. CHAUDHRY: What’s your problem? This is not the first time we’ve got a son […] RANGA: Chaudhry! When your son is born, light comes. When our son is born, rust comes. Give some reward. BIGHLA: It looks like only bhānds’ sons are born because there is no light in the country! COnclusiOn: FutuRE MOVEs? 199 Fig. 1 The bhānd Waseem with son, outside his home in Samanabad, next to his rickshaw. Waseem has decorated his vehicle with an advert, which reads ‘now Pakistan will turn white’, and features Zubaida, on whom Waseem has painted the jatt’s moustache (2015). (Photo: Claire Pamment) 200 COnclusiOn: FutuRE MOVEs? CHAUDHRY: Why don’t you do something else? RANGA: This is our ancestral work. What else should we do? CHAUDHRY: Why don’t you cut potatoes? BIGHLA: We have never seen a potato! (Arshad Khan 2009) The reluctant passer-by provides the bhānds with a ‘high’ counterpart to play off their ‘low’ rusty predicament of electrical load shedding and poverty. While ‘Chaudhry’ tries to get rid of his assailants by urging them into the mundane task of cutting potatoes—this only gives them further ammunition— they suggest that they are so poor that they have never even seen a potato. As they hurl the potato back at the dull gentleman in their punch line, they assert their right to vail (reward), and deliver redress to the dark state of affairs, amidst load shedding and an unequal economy. The opprobrium allied to the bhānd: ‘Why don’t you do something else?’ implies the work of the bhānd to be worthless, and is the social tension upon which Achi bhānd and his partner launch their comic weapons. In the village of Chakral (near Chakwal), Nasar Qureshi, discouraged by such stigma from his community and pressure from his family, has moved on to ‘something else’: a ‘respectable job’. While Achi asserts, ‘This is our ancestral work. What else should we do?’, Nasar has abandoned wedding performances in the face of social scorn. However, the bhand̄ mode lives on in Nasar’s work. Now he sells newspapers in the city, earning his com- mission by making juggats on the latest headlines. Similar to the satellite bhand̄ s of Chap. 6, the journalistic items of his newspapers serve as his ranga, as he explains, commenting on a news report concerning a local politician contesting elections: ‘When General Majid was fighting elections, his election sign was a cycle and I used to shout: General Majid says “I’ve grown too old and I can no longer ride a bicycle”’ (Qureshi 2007). These bhānd practices, in both rural and urban locales, offer a micro- cosm for the extended canvas of larger transformations that this book has mapped, where performers shape-shift themselves through the factors that marginalise them. Pakistan’s bhānd culture far exceeds its often asserted categorisation as a ‘folk form’. The bhānd entails multiple forms. Through precedents in the Brahmin jester and Sufi wise fool, thebha ̄nd works to delineate social hierarchies, while also liberating status distinctions with the humbling demonstrations of the fakir. This religiously affirmed base contributes to the bhānd’s survival. From the Muslim courts to the world of the bazaar, this comic mode has moved through diverse social, cultural COnclusiOn: FutuRE MOVEs? 201 and religious contexts, even amidst the more rigid demarcations of British crown rule. The bhānd’s processes explain the perseverance of a dynamic mode, as performers battle with rigid classifications of caste and class, reli- gion and genre and taste distinctions carried over from the colonial period into twenty-first century capitalism. Within the context of these exclusionary frames, irreverent repartee, genealogical prowess, a topsy-turvy play with hierarchies and shape- shifting offer powerful tools in destabilising dominant culture’s attempts at regulation. This sees the bhand̄ penetrating a range of contemporary performance contexts. In the wedding, bhands̄ use their marginality in the capitalist structure to locate feudal residues in the elite and upwardly mobile, appearing in high ranks among the company of prime ministers, all the way down to the donkey carts of street performances. In the popular Punjabi theatre, performers respond to their cultural isolation in an ironic response to elite theatre, now populated by bhānd-like pairings such as householders and servants, begums and prostitutes, Euro-American capi- talists and dwarfs, as well as through transgendering practices, especially pronounced during the ban against women’s dance. More recently, bhānds have been drawn into the television media as peripheral items for comic relief, using their outsider status to open the monologic nature of the news and politicians’ rhetoric to public debate. As such, the bhand’s̄ transformations do not end here: the satellite bhānd boom is indicative of the bhand’s̄ penetration into politics and of the bhand̄ mode being activated by the public through an increased interest in political juggats in social networking media, through SMS, YouTube uploads and blogging patterns, as people try to bring sense to chaos. In society’s cracks and fissures, we find thebha nd̄ . There are also indications that the other side of the theatre hierarchy is beginning to take note of the bhānd mode’s dynamic potentialities beyond the Punjab. Shehzad Ghias (born 1989), who recently returned from post-graduate theatre studies in USA, has set up a Karachi-based impro- visation group, named ‘The Bhands’ (2015–present), which draws upon the ranga–bighla pairing, status interactions and the guiding principle that ‘the target of the joke must never be the oppressed class’ (Ghias 2016a).

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