The Dancing Girl of the Indus Valley Civilization was slender, subtle, sensual and naked. Lahore’s popular Nargis is voluptuous, bold, crude, and dressed so loud that her co-actors call her ‘pathano ki cycle’. The Dancing Girl clasps her hand, joining the tips of the thumb and the index finger, to make the traditional Indian dance posture that signifies a lotus bud. Nargis clasps her hand too, but slides the index finger down the thumb, to make a hole that signifies an invitation to copulation. The Dancing Girl is a figurine and cannot speak. Her hair, jewellery and posture are the media that mirror the social life of the Indus Valley Civilization about 4,500 years ago. Nargis is the queen of pun. She speaks loud and always accentuates social and moral dysfunction. Her jokes are the circus mirror of today’s Punjab.
What is common between Nargis and the Dancing Girl of India is their chin-up self assurance. Nargis is perhaps a degenerate form of the temple dancer that has come back to haunt us and avenge her suppression. If that is true, what will happen if we suppress Nargis?
Nargis and the theatre in which she and dancers like her perform is already in a constant state of crisis – as a medium (looming threat of police raids on vulgarity, blackmailing by tax authorities and fear of terrorist attacks) and as a message (miscommunication, broken families, mistaken identities and absurd plots).
Earlier this month, right before Eid-ul-Azha – the three-day feast that earns Lahore’s theatre industry a significant income – Nargis was banned for vulgarity. Vulgarity is considered by many Pakistanis as one of the primary reasons of the society’s failure. There is strong faith that it invites God’s wrath. There is no real logic to why violations involving women have more serious consequences than the rampant corruption in Pakistan involving men. In these politics of gender, Nargis is defenceless. Like many women before her – from the ancient sacrificial virgins to the more recent burnt witches – she is the scapegoat. The term scapegoat was coined by Tyndale in 1530, as a translation of the Latin word caper emissarius, which itself is a translation of the Hebrew ‘azazel’, read as ‘ez ozel’ – the goat that departs.
Eid-ul-Azha is the Eid of the annual ritual slaughtering of goats. A ritual is a re-enactment of a prior event, usually a myth. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, a ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition and substitution. Theatrical practice started possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Eventually there was no bloodshed at all, and only a re-enactment. Theatre artists, like Nargis, are descendants of priests in that sense. An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are the Jihadi groups involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings – slaughtering of humans in the name of religion. Most of those beheaded are labelled traitors and spies – impurities that are responsible for social and moral dysfunction.
The practice probably began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. It “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to one of the most interesting professors I’ve had the opportunity to study with. In his book, Fear of Small Numbers: an essay on the geography of anger, he sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice.” “My father’s Jewish. My mother’s Jewish. I’m Jewish,” Daniel Pearl had said before he was beheaded and his body was cut into 10 pieces. It looks like these boys have gone back full circle. If Nargis is Pakistan’s theatre, terrorist groups are Pakistan’s anti-theatre. In a way, they are two sides of the same coin.
The writer is a media and culture critic and works at The Friday Times. He tweets @paagalinsaan and gets email at harris@nyu.edu