At the start of 2003, Claire Pamment had not yet been to Pakistan, but she knew there was more to it than the way it appeared on stage in England, reports the Financial Times.
A theatre practitioner by trade, Pamment had worked in community outreach with the south Asian diaspora in the UK and found her interest piqued. The opportunity to travel to Pakistan arose in March of that year when Pamment and a colleague were invited by the British Council to Islamabad to initiate a cultural exchange through theatre. “For me it was an opportunity to visit a country that was portrayed in often very crass stereotypes in the theatre, as well as elsewhere,” she says. “I had become a little tired of butchers and brothels– images conjured often in the theatre, even sometimes by the diaspora themselves.”
However, March 2003 turned out to be a less than opportune time to visit. “The Iraq war had just begun and a nervous British Council treated us to very high security. You go to a park and you’re told to hide behind bushes, bob down your head as you’re driving. And we were stuck in Islamabad, which is more of a bureaucratic arena than a theatre arena,” she says. After one week, Pamment returned to London, where the real exchanges began via email. After collaborating with a Pakistani NGO exploring internet chat rooms, Pamment directed a theatre piece called Gup Shup, or, simply, “Chat”.
In October that year, following another brief visit, Pamment was hired by Beaconhouse National University in Lahore to teach in their newly inaugurated theatre, film and television department – the country’s first – launched in response to a media boom that saw a proliferation of new TV stations and a flourishing free press. Despite mounting political tensions in the region, Pamment left her life in the UK, including Context Theatre, the company she had co-founded with a director friend, and moved to Pakistan.
“What really brought me back was Pakistan’s popular theatre, which changed my vision not only of Pakistan but theatre itself. Here was a tribe of practitioners who were living out vibrant performance traditions, which had been banished by the so-called legitimate theatres.” In the course of her research, which has taken her all over Punjab and beyond, Pamment has learned Urdu and Punjabi, interviewed and worked with numerous folk theatre luminaries, and gained considerable expertise in the history of the Pakistani stage.
Pamment was born in Dewsbury, a town in Yorkshire in northern England. When she was 13, her father’s job took the family to Fiji, where they spent two years living in Suva, the country’s capital and largest city. Today she lives in the Cantonment area of Lahore with her husband, poet and playwright Sarmad Sehbai.
Cantonment, or Cantt, as it is referred to locally, is a lush green retreat amid the famously snarled traffic and cultural vitality of Pakistan’s second largest city of 6.5m. Having lived for a few years in Islamabad, which she deems “a very meditative city” – despite the conspicuous military presence and the sharp rise in political violence since 2005 – Pamment finds spending time in both cities provides a much-needed balance. “Islamabad is a great place to clear your head and think and write,” she says. “That is, when there isn’t a big protest taking place or blockaded roads, which does frequently happen. But in essence, Islamabad is quiet. Lahore has much more going on. That’s always been the case, historically. It’s the city of cinema and theatre and music. I like to spread myself across both places. Lahore can get suffocating, and one needs to come back to breathe in Islamabad, or just digest Lahore.”
Islamabad’s official “twin city” is the industrial hub of Rawalpindi, where Pamment had one of her more memorable encounters to date. Following up on her study of hijras, or transgendered women, as performers embedded in the fabric of Pakistani culture, Pamment sought an interview with Bobby Khusra, the putative queen of hijras. “I expected her to be living underground,” she says, “but she lives in a palace. You enter her haveli and there’s a Persian cat, and it only eats chicken on a particular rug.”
She and Bobby Khusra talked for a while, Pamment then still struggling to communicate in Punjabi. “And at the end of the hour,” says Pamment, “she turned to me and said in pristine English, you know, I was also born in England. She started to describe primary school and milk bottles in her classroom, and these were for me totally suppressed memories of my own childhood. It turns out Bobby Khusra was born very close to Dewsbury. So yes, in the face of the other, we often discover ourselves, as they say.”
Despite what she calls “a greater sense of frustration and confusion” in the country, Pamment intends to remain in Pakistan. Following appointments in both public and private universities, as well as a period as a consultant to the Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Pamment has returned to teaching at Beaconhouse National University.
And perhaps because of the social and political challenges confronting the nation, Pamment says Pakistani theatre is flourishing. “It gets no support from the government. The elites snub it. But we have a thriving popular theatre industry [here]. I think Pakistan must be the only country in the world where theatre has overtaken cinema houses.” As for inspiration, Pamment cites the small daily performances of the people around her in the face of mounting political tension. “It’s the everyday humour which is so fascinating in Pakistan,” she says. “It’s a brilliant resistance technique, and it’s becoming more prevalent. Humour is an infectious way of coping, and there’s a warmth in humour here which I’ve never found anywhere else.”