RELIGION (GOD IN THE MOUNTAINS)

HERITAGE: GOD IN THE MOUNTAINS

Nasser Yousaf | Syed Javaid A. KaziJuly 30, 2017

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St Luke’s Church in Abbotabad

As one reaches the nearly 9,000-ft mountaintop called Thandiani, near Abbottabad, there comes in view a little stone and wood building in need of urgent repair. A small wooden plate erected in the grass not far from its gates identifies it as Saint Xavier Church, Diocese of Peshawar, Church of Pakistan.

St Xavier’s Church was built somewhere towards the end of the 19th or early 20th century by the British civil and military officers during their stay in what was then called the British or Indian Northwest Frontier. In keeping with their missionary zeal, a small two-room dispensary was built some 100 yards to the right of this Anglican place of worship. The clinic still gets a visiting doctor on some weekends from the Bach Christian Hospital at Qalandarabad, midway between Abbottabad and Mansehra.

The church at Thandiani is a picture of neglect. Locals selling tea, food and groceries in the few shops clustered around the church do not remember when a service of any nature was last held inside its penurious hall. As one peeps through its broken glass windows, a time-worn rug can be seen spread on the potholed floor. Its wooden pews look rickety. It does not even have a lectern. Underneath its tin-covered sloping roof, there is little on the bland walls except a curtain with some words of universal wisdom on it. And yet some tourists seem to have made blatant attempts at knocking one of its windows off its hinges out of mere curiosity, leaving the job half finished out of frustration.

There are a number of awe-inspiring churches hidden away in the mountains upcountry

For some years, two elderly nuns also acting as compounders, resided in the dispensary during their summer sojourns on the mountaintop, but not anymore. One of them is reported to have died while the other is said to have departed for her country of origin. These days its broken windowpanes tell a tale of poor living conditions and an acute lack of sanitation.

The Holy Trinity Church in Murree

The serene hill station of Thandiani has transformed during the last three decades into a dirty little bazaar, thronged mostly by domestic tourists from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. These tourists, finding little of what they revel in at the Mall in Murree, find the place quite below their expectations. Water on the mountaintop is scarce if not altogether nonexistent, which together with the unavailability of proper hotels, drives most visitors away. They loiter on this narrow mountain strip for an hour or two and after feasting on pakoras fried on kerosene stoves, depart for the more happening places in the region.

The highest altitude point in the Himalayas, Thandiani is not a place for revellers. Unaccustomed to the heat of the plains, the British civil and military administrators serving in this part of India developed Thandiani as a summer retreat for themselves and their families. Before the present road was built, British officers would transport their families to the mountaintop in palanquins. The tall conifers found in such abundance on the mountaintops in the Himalayas including Thandiani, Nathiagali, Dungagali, Ayubia and Murree were all planted during the times of the British. These trees constitute our most prized heritage.

All these quaint churches would have attracted foreign tourists only if our tourism policies had been a little more imaginative in preserving and creating them as tourist attractions.

Similarly, until quite recently most of the land on the mountaintops, in what was earlier known as the Frontier, was in the ownership of the Diocese of Peshawar. Perhaps the same was true in the case of Murree which has the highest number of churches built along the perimeters of the Mall. By the look of things, it appears that in future the Diocese of Peshawar would be left in charge of only about half a dozen churches at Thandiani, Nathiagali, Dungagali and Ayubia as private landowners have seized a major chunk of the prized land.

interior view of The Holy Trinity Church, Murree

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The church at Nathiagali is by all estimates the most photographed place of worship in the mountains. With its wooden structure, perennially painted in black with its towering spire, it offers a panoramic view and numerous photo-points to the tourists looking for recreation near it. There is a small rectory behind the main hall that presently serves as a lodging unit for its forlorn-looking watchman. The good-natured watchman normally lets the tourists enter the church. Most of these churches and particularly those at Dungagali, Ayubia and Murree were built in the Gothic style of architecture.

Some four kilometres to the east of Nathiagali, the wood and stone church at Dungagali stands next to the Mukshpuri Hotel. The main building of the hotel built in 1880 was reduced to ashes in a blaze some four months ago. The proximity of the church to the hotel is of significance since the hotel with its famed dancing hall served as the central point of congregation for the English officers in the old days. The church narrowly survived the high rising flames of the blaze which was put down after great effort but not before it had devoured an invaluable piece of heritage.

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Relatively hidden from public view, the church at Ayubia is nestled among one of the most beautiful spots. The location is nevertheless quite well-known to the domestic tourists of the Christian faith who use its expansive lawns for picnics -- and leave it littered afterwards. With its purpose-built rectory, a couple of lodging units, an old-fashioned staircase made from iron that takes one up to an attic, and even an old piano, the grand old church at Ayubia must have served as a complete administrative set-up during its heyday.

St Mathew’s Church in Nathiagali

It takes little imagination to transport oneself to past when the echo of psalms and hymns recited in Latin would rise from the grand stone building of the church in Ayubia. Ironically, the present generation of Christians use the precincts of the church more as an advantageous place for tourism and picnicking.

All these quaint churches would have attracted foreign tourists only if our tourism policies had been a little more imaginative in preserving and creating them as tourist attractions. Till such imagination creeps into our effete system of bureaucracy, one can only hope that efforts would be made to conserve our irreplaceable heritage from further dilapidation.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 30th, 2017

TELEVISION (A SHORT LETTER TO PTV)

A SHORT LETTER TO PTV

Dear PTV,

It was after reading a few news reports about some protest demonstrations in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that one turned to YouTube to watch a comedy show aired by one of your many channels on the Eid day. The demonstrations were by and large low key and lackadaisical. The protesters merely wanted to vent their anger at some poetry recited in the said show on the grounds of it being insulting towards the Pakhtuns.

Humour being an important genre in literature, one thought the protests might well be unwarranted as making lighter fun of the people’s eccentricities and peccadilloes could not be perceived to be of and with malicious intent, and hence the comedy show ought to be watched to have some moments of good fun. One also thought that PTV, with its more than half a century of life, must have come of age one proof of which was the production of programmes like ‘The Classics Show,’ being telecast by PTV World. Another reason for thus being so sanguine was the gender of the state minister of information and the air of dignity surrounding her charming personality. 

All such hopes were, however, dashed to the ground after watching the Eid comedy poetry show under the banner of ‘Hansna mana hay.’ The title of the show appeared to be apt for there appeared to be nothing even remotely connected to the beautiful art of humour in it that could induce a smile or a grin leave alone laughter. And yet both the host as well as the audience looked to have been seized with such fits of laughter as if the poet was reading out from a long list of side-splitting jokes. By all means, the poet called Jawad Hussain appeared to be little versed in the subject that he was pretending to have mastered as the quality of the poetry, laced and loaded with unrestrained spite as it was, never rose above the pedestrian level.

About humour, Lucy Maud Montgomery said, ‘it is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes, but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them.’ Pakhtuns have always been the butt of jokes, and lo and behold, to their eternally joyful nature, they have always enjoyed being joked about with such relish. PTV in particular has been continuously making fun of the peculiar gender-free accent in which Pakhtuns communicate in Urdu language. The PTV playwrights have never raised the Pakhtun profile beyond that of a blundering watchman and a country bumpkin, and yet the disparaging treatment has elicited or provoked little response other than the raising of a few eyebrows. 

PTV could be called for tens of other blemishes when it comes to neglecting the Pakhtuns and presenting them through the skewed lens of its cameras. Celebrating Eid has got as much to do with a people’s culture as it aims to portray their religious beliefs. Thus, whenever Pakhtuns celebrate their Eid one day ahead of the rest of the country PTV ignores the event and censors it up as if this was some kind of a rebellious political statement that must not be allowed to be heard and seen. 

But never before had PTV crossed the line of decency with such unexplained indiscretion as it appears to have done now in the case of Jawad Hussain on the auspicious occasion of Eid. It was ridiculous to see a state organ allowing itself to be used by someone with a facetious agenda. If ever there was need for an inquiry in PTV affairs, it couldn’t have matched the urgency as it does now. If the PTV bosses want evidence, here it is.

Jawad Hussain did not hide behind double entendre. Whatever he said in his highly scandalous verses signified in plain words that Pakhtuns were the beneficiaries of terrorism as they used the sand blown from the mountains by the bomb blasts for their needs. In very lucid words, and to the applause of the audience, Jawad said that Pakhtuns were smugglers and smuggling was a way of life with them. 

Not content with such innuendoes, the maliciously charged poet said that the body odour wafted from the Pakhtuns was like that of sheep because they would take only one bath in a year on the occasion of Eid. Since he would stop at nothing, PTV’s blue-eyed poet said that Pakhtuns were such bad singers that they knew little about the finer points of music. And to cap it all with a predictable couplet about the snuff called ‘naswar,’ Jawad disclosed that a Pakhtun had informed him that no one could claim to be a man enough unless and until he used the said intoxicant. 

PTV has never expiated for its years of unprovoked sins against the unwary and indeed gullible Pakhtuns. But the sheer weight of the present sin, nay crime, needed to be thrown at the PTV headquarters in an epistle with a quote from Booker T. Washington that says: “Dignify and glorify common labour. … it is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.” It is the body odour of the Pakhtun labourers from across the Durand Line that we owe all the construction to and not to the mediocrities masquerading as developers.

Yours truly,

An aggrieved Pakhtun

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2017

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