society
The city can be a cruel place. This is especially true in for our current capitalist economies, where globalisation constantly keeps impacting the dreams, desires and aspirations of the city dwellers. This becomes even more complicated when the rich and the poor co-share the urban scape, interacting mostly in the houses of the elite as masters and domestic servants. This interaction often leaves a sense of worthlessness and develop an inferiority complex in the poorer section of the society, because they see the rich spending lavishly and taking many things for granted in their lives, for which the poor have to undergo a daily struggle.
Written by playwright Ashfaq Ahmed, the classic PTV play titled ‘Fehmida Ki Kahani, Ustani Rahat Ki Zubani’ touches upon some of these struggles and focuses on what the low income households in urban areas of the global south, face on a daily basis, and how that damages their self-esteem and sense of worth. This often happens without any realisation on the part of the richer sections of the society, who think that a display of their wealth is their basic right. However, do the rich ever internalize the far-reaching impact this brazen display has on the people around them, especially those who are financially weak? This is the question that had been bothering me for some time, and I got my answers by attending a wedding recently.
This couple getting married lives in the part of the city which started out as an informal settlement and was formalised over the years. A kachi abadi to be exact. Or the kinetic city, as the Indian architect Rahul Mehrotra would call it.
Although the kachi abadi is part of the everyday physical reality of the couple, but their social and cultural realities are located elsewhere and are often disconnected to each other. Physically the couple is part of a dense area in Karachi, which is centrally located within the city of 20 million (according to unofficial sources), with narrow lanes preventing large vehicles from entering. Some lanes have sewerage over flowing and individual houses have expanded vertically and incrementally with the passage of time. Socially the couple belongs to a close-knitted Punjabi family, originating from Chinniot’s agricultural plains. Part of their families still resides there and mostly elders hold onto the family rituals around marriages. Another thing the elders hold onto is the local dialect whereas the younger generation that has been born and bred in Karachi, is more inclined towards learning English as a second language.
The girl who is about to be married, has obtained her Bachelors in Arts education from a public sector university and is one of the many girls who are opting for higher qualifications in their family. She is working as a teacher’s assistant in a private school, on a meagre salary. The groom is not so educated and has barely cleared his intermediate examination. Although he is working as a sales person in an international fast food chain, and is making decent money. The girl has been asked to give up her job after marriage, as the husband will provide for her, while her duties would be needed around raising a family. This very reason has caused a delay in the marriage as the bride preferred financial independence over getting married but had to finally give into the demands of her parents, as they preferred seeing her married, even if it was to a lesser educated groom.
Culturally the wedding is planned as per global, and more specifically ‘rich’ people’s aspirations. These objectives are passed on through movies and soaps, projecting the bride, the groom and their families wearing certain types of clothes, situated in a certain setting and following definitive customs. There is no connection whatsoever of these customs and rituals with the physical, social or ethnic realities of the bride and groom or their families. These rituals have been adopted virtually from global realities and international traditions.
Another source of influence are the middle and high income families within Karachi. The trends followed by these groups also trickle down into low income households and get adapted as per financial affordability. The result is often kitsch or pastiche, as it is far from original customs and their origin, and often disconnected with local social and cultural realities of the low-income households. And then there is the physical space where the wedding is taking place; it is a threshold space between a formal and an informal settlement. It is ‘third space’ or the ‘non-space’ where the static (formal) meets the kinetic (informal) or the planned meets the unplanned. The space also has an ephemeral quality about itself, as the marquee springs up underneath a vehicular bridge on a major traffic artery of Karachi.
The legality of using this space for a marriage function in itself is questionable, yet all is validated under the table dealings which are taken as rent against giving the space for hosting weddings. This is the most financially reasonable space the bride’s family can afford to host the wedding against the loan obtained from a wealthy uncle within the family.
The cultural endosymbiosis is also seen in the high energy dramas taking place within the wedding. As an outsider, who was invited to the wedding of my domestic worker’s daughter, I witnessed strained relationships behind the glitz and glamour of expensive dresses and layers of makeup. These strained ties at times stem from various community based inter marriages where one khala is unhappy because the daughter is being wedded off to the phuppo’s son. Or because the mumani was not invited to be part of the family photo-shoot.
While these family feuds are taking place on one end, the other section of the wedding marquee is bustling with young girls and middle-aged women dancing to the latest beats of foriegn item numbers, which is again an example of holding onto globalisation as a source of expression. The idea is to make use of the occasion and party hard as such free entertainment and food is seldom available.
All the participants at the wedding are dressed in latest style fashionable clothes, showing off a certain face to the in-laws, irrespective of the fact that the wedding is being executed on borrowed money. Borrowed from the brother who will soon enough be demanding the money back, even before the bride is wedded off, causing another row amongst the elders.
The negotiations in the wedding are not just between formal and informal, but also between traditional and global social values and between empowerment and disempowerment. In this case in particular, globalisation becomes a tool for disempowerment, as stated by Ananya Roy, another theorist, as once a tightly knit community is being forced to change. Further, this change is not always black and white, in fact there are many shades of grey and is surrounded by confusion stemming from identity crises. This in turn causes confusion and chaos, leading to family feuds and outburst making happy occasions like the wedding a burden. The financial crunch caused by the expectations of a lavish wedding add to these woes, and leave long-lasting negative impacts on once a close-knitted introverted community.
While the space chosen for the wedding, is an example of yet another negotiation. This time the negotiations are between the formal agencies, local municipalities, police and the management responsible for renting out the space. So all in all, the universe has come together to make the wedding happen and negotiations have taken place on various scales, which are at times nimble enough and at times jump from one scale to another.
This wedding, and the associated nuances, point towards the struggles of lower-income households in urban centers of the global south. Their struggles are situated between aspirations and reality, tradition and modernity, finances and desires, mobility and stationary. More than often, these struggles last a life time, as charmingly expressed in ‘Fehmida ki Kahani, Ustani Rahat Ki Zubani’.
The writer is an academic, architect and urbanist. She can be reached at suneela_mailyahoo.com
This article was originally published in an issue of SouthAsia Magazine.