Recurring mess

Sarah Eleazer

Journalist; anthropology

student at the University of Texas, Austin

This year, I returned to my university in Texas after conducting two years of fieldwork on groundwater toxicity and factory towns in and around Lahore. Each year, the stories and statistics around Lahore’s worsening environmental conditions strike fear in the hearts of residents who suffer from iterant chronic bronchitis and gut-related problems, all of which can be tied to the worsening environmental situation of the city. This year, too, the news cycle over the last few months was dominated by environmental toxicity and its impact on people of all ages, especially children.

Somehow it gets worse every year.

For over two decades, the statistics and data on environmental hazards and impact on people’s health have been telling a chilling tale: over 60 million people in the country consume arsenic- and fluoride-contaminated water; Lahore’s air pollution is 40 times the level considered acceptable by the WHO; extensive DNA damage from exposure to pollution has been recorded among residents around Hudiara drain; heavy metal toxicity has left indelible marks on poultry, vegetables and basically the entire food chain. From a technical governance standpoint, this is a state of emergency. Like any state of emergency, it shifts our attention towards an altered world and way of life.

Why then does the city’s administration look to preserve the conditions that produce this reality?

In the past, large-scale policy interventions have followed specific news cycles involving harmful consequences of environmental toxicity for a large community. Towards the end of 1990s and early 2000s, the effects of arsenic poisoning of groundwater on children in factory towns around Lahore resulted in a large-scale drive to install filtration plants in rural areas. Launched by the then president, Pervez Musharraf, the Clean Drinking Water for All project introduced a new technical term of governance: clean drinking water. The term does not appear as a subject of policy or statistical documentation in government reports prior to 2000. Since then, filtration plants have become a ubiquitous sight in most of Lahore’s neighbourhoods and in the neighbourhoods of its surrounding villages and towns. Many filtration plants have been installed by the government, but factories, households, faith-based welfare organisations, and NGOs are all involved in the maintenance, upkeep and reinstallation of the plants.

Despite an absolute explosion of an economy and market of water filtration, the story keeps repeating itself.

Early this year, a group of Lahore-based researchers called the Action Research Collective published the findings of a report identifying hotspots of bacterial and heavy metal contamination of Lahore’s water. They identified Charar in Gulberg Town; Kiranwala in Shalimar Town; Kharas Mohalla in Shalimar Town; Mustafabad in Nishtar Town; Kot Khawaja Saeed in Wagha Town; Chungi Amar Sidhu in Cantonment; and Shadi Pura in Cantonment. I have written about this group’s advocacy work in Shadipura for TNS before. What stands out for me is how the solutions to environmental problems have changed very little from when Musharraf launched Clean Drinking Water for All.

These recurring forms of policy interventions indicate a misguided faith in technical solutions to socially complex problems. Environmental anthropologists call such policy interventions band-aids and magic bullets. If the environment has been damaged or injured to a point that the very bodies of the people living here tell the story of its depredation, then placing a band-aid on a gushing wound serves only to hide the problems.

“Extinct instruments, and the last vestiges of their makers”

Amar Alam

Academic & writer

his year started with riyazat (music practice) and is concluding on the same note. If I’m being honest, it started with some resentment, not all of which I can be sure has been metabolised. Why don’t our musicians write anything down? Why don’t they make it so that anyone can learn?

In my semi-regular trips to Bansan Wala Bazaar to visit a blind sitar maker, the last good sitar maker of a great lineage of luthiers, for jawari setting and sitar repairs, the old resentments burgeon behind the wonder of the romance of the forgotten, nostalgic ruins of old havelis.

Perchance a stained glass window, recalling the beckoning mehfils of tawaifs performing a thumri the complete way, with dancers, instruments and singing. The now tight roads, littered with ugly modern encroachments, overshadowed by a mess of electrical wiring and stinking open nallas recalling the echoes of tinkling ankle bells. The erasure, the disrespect, the rot, the unplanned urban detritus festering over the rot. And where the music lives: in shrines and places of worship; or in the halls of the gatekeepers and the age-old patrons of the arts, whose walls are too high to look over.

Still many things to find, so many I haven’t even begun to look for. Extinct instruments and the last vestiges of their makers. With how much sanguine resolute remorse do we proclaim to each other, as if these are just the facts of life that we have no agency over: this instrument is the last of its kind, this artisan the last practitioner of an art passed down over centuries, this baba ji left no disciples.

There has been a new vibrancy to Alhamra, under new management and freshly renovated, as the quality of the stages, light and sound systems at this year’s APMC suggests. A resurgence of the original Sachal Orchestra, renamed the Lahore Jazz ensemble, loaded with ustads carrying decades of musical knowledge and experience and many young innovators emerging on the scene. There have been more public concerts and musical events, in the classical vein and otherwise, than in any other year in recent memory and that at least implies that if what was lost cannot be recovered, there may be a resurgence of what lies dormant in the collective unconscious — under the tensions of opposing cultural forces but very much in our collective history and DNA.

Here we find a new possibility for the performing arts and — in the post-mortem of facts, media and information — a chance to tell our truths using the language of our own forgotten art forms.

Where the news media fails, art takes on a different role. Affording an opportunity to render communal the stifled stories and thought-policed emotions, slipping past the guard rails of censorship under the guise of myth, metaphor and meter.

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