For many years, the various provinces have come up with designated culture days when they flaunt their cultural expression with the confidence that they have something big to celebrate.

Societies that are not so developed tout their cultural assets to claim equality or superiority in relation to the more developed societies. It is sometimes claimed or assumed that ‘they’ may have the riches, the technology and power but ‘we’ have something more humane - like music, dance and poetry. Art, in some form, has been there for centuries. Even when the societies now recognised as ‘developed’, were struggling with learning to wrap the loincloth or snuggled in caves for refuge and protection.

Poverty has been equated with simplicity, naivety and possibly greater innocence; and development or advancement with cunning and deviousness. This was at least the narrative and the stated position till the beginning of decolonisation and the less developed societies blamed the developed ones for exploitation and plunder of almost everything. The native culture for its ancientness and the unchanging longevity remained a constant benchmark to run against other societies.

Pakistanis have always been cagey about their culture. Once they looked at it closely, they realised the pitfalls in differentiating it from the culture of the land. The land, of course, always had its own language, musical structures and visual preferences to claim its individuality. So, after some tinkering, it was declared to be different seeking greater allocation of foreign influence than there actually was. It was claimed to be special and peculiar, but at the back of the argument was a forced narrative. The cultural expression, as it existed, was never seen to be sufficient. It needed more and greater foreign intervention.

East Pakistan was particularly an oddball. Whatever homogeneity was crafted was not enough to explain all that the Bengalis were up to. The ultimate blame was made to rest on a few who were being beguiled by foreign agents - the professors, the artistes and the intellectuals who were in a position to exercise soft power to exert their influence beyond their numbers.

Museums and Art Centres in Dubai and Qatar have collected art pieces from all over the world and put them on display in modern dedicated spaces built at a high cost. These must be some of the most recent and modern sites to house such cultural riches.

So, it was with some relief that many saw the demise of East Pakistan as they prepared for their own version of the culture to prevail in the remaining part of the country. However, the trauma was not to go away as the Sindhis started to claim their own cultural heritage with the rise of the Pakistan Peoples Party. There were tensions within Sindh with new arrivals, the mohajirs. With the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the divide became even deeper. An apoliticisation of culture was ushered in by divorcing it from the emerging sensibility. It was restricted to song and dance dissociating it from its organic oneness. Music, dance and painting had nothing or little to do with the overall sensibility and the arts were reduced to being entertainment or a means to relax and unwind.

A similar line is being followed in some rich gulf countries. The museums and Art Centres in Dubai and Qatar have collected art pieces from all over the world and put them on display in modern dedicated spaces built at huge costs. These must be some of the most recent and modern sites to houses such cultural riches. Similarly, shows, dances and plays are staged and held for people go and see. These societies are very strictly controlled and no politics is permitted. The academia does not interact with the vibrant social and intellectual currents emanating from the social undercurrents to develop into theses of new cultural social and intellectual patterns. At least this is the understanding of the universities and the centres that one has and not of regurgitating the theories already crafted in other, more open, societies.

As some other more conservative societies are opening up, one wonders whether the history and heritage of those lands would be looked at dispassionately and not through the lens of a religious ideology. Until that happens, all culture is viewed as only entertainment and nothing more.

In a way, it was the Western influences and colonial interventions that came to our rescue. Urdu was developed as a language lifting it from the level of a dialect with designated alphabets and rules of grammar. Public museums were established, liberating the cultural heritage from personal monopolies; theatre, music and dance were made accessible through box office, rather than personnel invitation of those with riches and the means. Similarly, public education systems were launched for the less privileged to have access to whatever level of instruction. Technological breakthroughs made printing press and mass printing a common occurrence rather than the being at the mercy of the katibs. The recording of sound opened another channel, making sound, including music, accessible to the people at a nominal charge. The invention of film opened a whole new era where people did not have to necessarily visit the salons for music, dance and performance.

All new inventions have been received with suspicion and doubt and seen as a conspiracy against us but gradually, sooner rather than later, become routine and people have stopped taking notice of them. The pace of new inventions is so vaulting that it is forgotten in the light or the onrush of the new. More tales of conspiracies are woven ad spun .From the loudspeaker to the radio, the film and then television and now the internet, the moral and social fabric has always been claimed to be under threat.

The writer is a culture critic based in Lahore