by SIBTAIN NAQVI
Sunday, June 12, 1976 had been another hot day. With the weekend over, Lahoris gathered at their homes for dinner. The short twilight that marks Lahore’s summers was deepening when, at 7:30pm, residents of Shadman II town, whose homes were close to the Punjab Arts Council (PAC), heard a deafening blast. As fire trucks wailed, news got around: the gallery of the PAC had been bombed. The seething protests against the inimitable artist Sadequain had taken a dangerous turn.
After a successful exhibition at the Khana-i-Aftab in Tehran, where he had the pleasure of turning down Queen Farah Pahlavi’s request for a portrait, Sadequain had arrived in Lahore in February 1976. He lodged in a small cabin on top of the hillock in Bagh-i-Jinnah. Christening it Koh-i-Alwaan, he filled the cabin with canvas after canvas in a frenzy of creativity. Forty figurative works and 40 illustrations of Sadequain’s rubaaiyaat (quatrains) were being displayed in the PAC gallery.
The exhibition opened on May 18 and caused an immediate sensation. There was an instant backlash from religious extremists, who took one look at the paintings and declared them “fuhash” (obscene). The clergy led widespread protests. Right-wing political parties saw another opportunity to gain political mileage. Creative expression was under siege in Pakistan and Sadequain was at the heart of it.
This was not the first attack against creative arts in Pakistan. Manto was brought to trial on obscenity charges. His short stories were banned thrice before Partition and then thrice more in Pakistan after independence. The situation in 1976 was much worse. For decades, Pakistan had been drifting to the right and, after the fall of Dhaka, had laid even more emphasis on its religious ideology. The 1973 Constitution firmly labelled the country as “Islamic”. After the loss of Pakistan’s eastern half, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto looked towards the Middle East and determined that Pakistan should have a paramount place in the comity of Muslim countries. He hosted the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) conference in 1974, the same year the National Assemly declared Ahmadis non-Muslims. The onslaught of religious populism was a juggernaut and religious parties were gaining power on the streets and university campuses. Sadequain’s exhibition was another excuse for extremists to gain political ground.
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