Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Shadows: Spectral Visualities in Karachi’s Public Sphere

In the last decade, there has been increasing recognition of the growth of new civic cultures and greatly enhanced participation of various non-state actors in the public spheres of the Muslim world. Scholars

have recognized that this phenomenon is characteristically urban, deeply implicated in social modernity and enabled by modern communications and media technologies. This civil sphere also bears a complex relationship with the state, which may range from collaboration to indifference to antagonism, but which cannot in any case be delimited to the actions of the state (Bunt 2003; Eickelman and Anderson 1999; Mahmood 2005; Hefner 2005; Van Der Veer and Munshi 2004). And while the participation of non-state actors in constructing social movements has a genealogy that extends back into the early years of the twentieth century,1 the ‘emerging public sphere’ has greatly expanded in significance during the last two decades, as the domain of the state has been increasingly seen as ‘in retreat’ since its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s (Hefner 2005; Norton 1999). While scholarly literature has been salutary in bringing attention to the salience of this development, contributors have largely stressed its socio-political and religious dimensions. There have been few attempts by humanists to understand the aesthetic strategies of mediation in the Muslim world. In particular, the articulated relationship between modernity and visuality has resulted in a great flowering of visual representations of ‘everyday life,’ an aspect of modernity that was recognized as early as the mid nineteenth century by Charles Baudelaire in his celebrated essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1964). This essay

Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Shadows: Spectral Visualities in Karachi’s Public Sphere

CHAPTER 7

IFTIKHAR DADI

07 Ch. (Comparing).indd 159 3/17/09 9:38:56 AM

Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia. Ed. Martina Rieker & Kamran Ali (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009)

160 COMPARING CITIES

will revisit issues regarding the structure of aesthetic mediation of mass/popular cultures in urbanized modernity in South Asia by examining two case studies from Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan. Since the 1970s, Karachi has been increasingly saturated with printed and painted imagery in numerous public and private sites. Images of politicians, war heroes, pirs (Sufi saints), religious motifs, etc., participate in a wider visual economy that encompasses advertising, magazines, and other printed materials. During elections, demonstrations and other events, various religious and political groups produce posters and other images specific to these events. Numerous silhouettes and slogans are stencilled on walls, overlapping with great quantities of pasted posters, while calendars and images are widely sold by hawkers on sidewalks and at traffic signals. Along with vehicle decorations,2 painted advertising and film imagery on hoardings, vernacular and modernist architecture, the performative dimensions of public interaction with this visual space produces Karachi itself as a dense site of visual modernity. In the following analysis of two case studies, I demonstrate how suppressed civic-political demands in the public sphere by various actors emerge as a shadowy, spectral visual aesthetic. I will read these aesthetic strategies iconically, by seeing what the individual images signify, but also interrogate them formally, by stressing how they negotiate sedimented and repeatable codes of visual cognition. While my analysis is limited to a set of developments in the megalopolis of Karachi, I hope that the issues raised here will be pertinent in the analysis of other urban sites in South Asia and the Muslim world. It is important to clarify my own position at a time when direct US military involvement in Iraq has persisted for fifteen years since the first Gulf War in 1991. The heavy-handed and bloody occupation of Iraq by American-led forces is facing an unprecedented uprising, and Saddam Hussein himself has been executed after his capture and trial. I consider Saddam to have been a cruel dictator (even in comparison with other unsavoury and disenfranchising regimes in the Muslim world), and my study of Saddam images here should not be seen as an endorsement of his image as a legitimate symbol of protest. As numerous scholars have pointed out, groups active in the civic sphere are neither automatically democratic nor anti-democratic (Hefner 2005). My objective in this study is to see how mass-mediated popular culture allows for new or neglected visions beyond official policies to be articulated in the public



GHOSTLY SUFIS AND ORNAMENTAL SHADOWS 161

sphere. Such analysis is possible only when one exercises a certain degree of detachment and impartiality about the objectives and methods of groups with whom one may not necessarily be in agreement.

THE SADDAM POSTER EXTRAVAGANZA IN KARACHI,1990–91

In January 1991, on the eve of the first Gulf War, the Karachi-based monthly magazine Newsline published an article by Aamer Ahmed Khan entitled ‘Poster War’ with this revealing subtitle: ‘Whatever happens in the Gulf, Saddam posters have won the war in Pakistan’ (8). The article noted that posters of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein were selling in massive quantities in Lahore. I witnessed a similar scenario during my stay in Karachi at that time, where a variety of posters and cards were sold at traffic lights, on sidewalks and were widely circulated in general. Printed Saddam images decorated humble donkey carts and were also utilized for painting large portraits of Saddam on makeshift billboards and petroleum tankers (Figs. 1–8). The Newsline article also noted that there was a shadowy, inexplicable dimension to the production and circulation of these posters:

Fig. 1: Postcard, Saddam, c. 1990–91, 6x4 inches.




Fig. 2: Poster, Saddam, 1990–91, 13x19 inches.




Fig. 3: Saddam poster hanging near a decorated gate erected to celebrate a wedding, on left side, above the figure in red, and placed on top of a white banner. The banner states: ‘Long live Saddam. Saddam, we are your army. On behalf of the neighbourhood (ahl-i muhallah) of Soomro Lane.’

Fig. 4: Painted billboard in a market showing Saddam praying, next to the MQM election symbol, the kite.




Fig. 5: Enamel painted Saddam on the back of a petroleum tanker. The text includes a rousing verse by the poet Muhammad Iqbal, which approximately translates as, ‘Open your eyes, see the earth, the sky, and the atmosphere/witness the Sun arising from the East.’

Fig. 6: Postcard, Saddam, c. 1990-91, 6x4 inches.




Fig. 7: Saddam posters displayed on a truck.

Fig. 8: Saddam posters displayed on a truck.




Where are these posters coming from? Their price suggests that they are not a purely commercial venture, though the presses engaged in printing them are obviously not carrying out a jehad at their own expense.…‘We got our contract for 150,000 posters from Tehrik-i-Mujahideen-i-Islam [the Movement of Islamic Warriors],’ one press owner on Hospital Road told Newsline. No one had ever heard of this Tehrik before.…Owners of the presses printing the Saddam posters requested that their identity not be disclosed because ‘we are not sure how the government might react to it.’…Apart from government policy on the Gulf, these posters are also ‘technically illegal’ because none of them bears the name of the printing press, as required by law. (A. Khan 1991: 8)3

In an insightful overview of the political developments in Pakistan in relation to the 1991 Gulf War, Mumtaz Ahmad (1991) has charted the dramatic shift in the views of various Islamic political parties between October 1990 and January 1991. Normally, these parties consistently differ on foundational issues, but all denounced the American intervention by the outbreak of the Operation Desert Storm. According to Ahmad, the Jamiyat Ulama-i-Pakistan (JUP), a major Islamic party, was responsible for disseminating the massive number of poster images of Saddam praying. The Pakistani government, however, alleged that the funds for this printing were clandestinely supplied by the Iraqi embassy, and expelled an Iraqi diplomat from Islamabad for ‘distributing money to recruit mercenaries to fight against the allied forces in the Persian Gulf, organizing mass demonstrations through local agents, inciting people to engage in anti-state activities, and paying money for printing pro-Saddam posters and Saddam portraits’ (Ahmad 1991: 167, 168; quoted from Jasarat, an Urdu-language daily newspaper in Pakistan). Also, one must not disregard the commercial motives of the printing establishments themselves, who operate largely in the informal sector and who might have seen Saddam’s sudden popularity as an opportunity to make a quick windfall. But even if one were to assume that the wide circulation of Saddam posters in Pakistan was secretly commissioned by Pakistani Islamic parties and/or surreptitiously supported by Saddam’s government, one would still be left with the ‘problem’ of their popular reception, and indeed, by the aesthetic modalities through which this reception is elicited. I undertake here a preliminary analysis of this phenomenon by studying an intriguing image on a poster that circulated in Karachi at




that time. The poster image shows Saddam Hussein being blessed and protected by an anonymous spiritual figure with a faint yet distinctive South Asian Muslim visage and dress (Fig. 9). For the purposes of this

Fig. 9: Poster, ‘Saddam with Sufi Saint,’ c. 1990–91, 10x13 inches.




essay, I will call this image Saddam with Sufi Saint. Saddam, dressed in military uniform, is depicted in the lower half of the poster in a pensive posture. The upper half shows a bearded and turbaned saintly figure, radiant and dressed in white, holding a golden sword in one hand, while bestowing barakat (grace) on the head of Saddam with the other hand. The sense of barakat is enhanced by the prayer beads that forge another link between the saintly figure’s arm and Saddam’s head. The background of the poster, with its airbrushed pop sensibility and atmospheric haziness, contributes to the saintly figure’s impression of otherworldliness. The text on the top right reads, ‘O Allah, You are the only redeemer,’ while the block of text towards the top left proclaims the spiritual prowess of the saintly figure in aiding and protecting Saddam:

THE SECRET OF PRESIDENT SADDAM HUSSEIN’S POWER!Is neither battle skill and strategy, nor superior armaments! But rather, it is a spiritual force [ruhani quwwat]. This spiritual elder [ruhani buzurg] always escorts President Saddam; wherever he goes, the spiritual elder constantly accompanies him.

While one can ascribe a folk Sufi sensibility to aspects of this image, the influence of mass culture in its overall composition and reproduction is also clearly evident. Besides this particular poster, other images of Saddam Hussein were circulated widely, painted large scale, and sold as prints by hawkers at traffic signals and on the bustling sidewalks of Karachi’s vast marketplaces (also discussed below). A peculiar aspect of the overloaded visual density of Karachi is the near absence of commentary by the press and by individuals on the ubiquity of images in everyday life, except perhaps when a charged event precipitates the display of new imagery. The fact that this particular image of Saddam did elicit commentary by the Pakistani press alerts us to a new domain of signification produced by this image. How does one begin to undertake an analysis of this image? At the outset, the image appears to embody a contradiction—how does the figure of the once secularist Baathist leader Saddam, who was hardly known in Pakistan for his piety or his commitment to Islam, become a persona blessed with supernatural, divine power?4 And how is this image placed within the structures of production and consciousness that modernity enables? Is this a remnant of folk art, signifying a rural or pre-modern Sufi




understanding of the barkat of saints, which somehow incongruously persists in urbanized mass culture?

FOLK ART AND MASS CULTURE IN KARACHI

The relationship between folk culture and the emergence of mass media has been a subject of discussion by theorists of modernity.5 Fredric Jameson, in his influential article, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’ (1979), has framed metropolitan Western mass culture as distinct from popular culture:

[T]he commercial products of…[mass culture] can surely not without intellectual dishonesty be assimilated to so-called popular, let alone folk, art of the past,…The historically unique tendencial effect of late capitalism on all such groups has been to dissolve and to fragment or atomize them into agglomerations (Gesellschaften) of isolated and equivalent private individuals, by way of the corrosive action of universal commodification and the market system. Thus, the ‘popular’ as such no longer exists, except under very specific and marginalized conditions (internal and external pockets of so-called underdevelopment within the capitalist world system): the commodity production of contemporary or industrial mass culture has nothing whatsoever to do, and nothing in common, with older forms of popular or folk art. (Jameson 1979: 134)6

According to Jameson, the remnants of folk art (or popular art) are confined, at best, to the margins of the developed capitalist world. However, these ‘margins’ may well constitute major sectors of the world population, and therefore an adequate characterization between popular and mass culture in these areas, which is lacking in Jameson’s account, is needed. In the context of South Asia at least, the effect of modernity upon the folk or the popular within these areas does not always lead to a process of extinction of the latter: popular folk modernities must be seen as both complicit with and discrepant with mass culture. They acquire new significations and amplified trajectories of circulation through reproduction by mechanical and electronic means. This is corroborated by Nestor Garcia Canclini (1995) in his study of culture in Latin America. Garcia Canclini suggests that what he terms the ‘“media” popular’ (or mass culture) resonates in multiple ways with the ‘“traditional” popular’ (folk culture), so that modernity, far from killing




off the traditional, serves to shape, modify, and amplify it.7 Here one can also deploy Walter Armbrust’s term ‘mass-mediated popular culture’ (Armbrust 2000: 1) to designate the imbricated relationship between mass and folk (popular) culture. Jameson does, however, point out the mutually-defining relationship between artistic modernism and mass culture, suggesting that high modernism and mass culture are both produced in ‘fission’ as a consequence of capitalism, and arguing that modernism and mass culture are therefore dialectically related. Mass culture, above all, depends upon a serialized chain of auto-referentiality, in which the originary artifact can no longer be recovered:

The atomized or serial public wants to see the same thing over and over again, hence the urgency of the generic structure and the generic signal [in mass culture];…In mass culture, repetition effectively volatilizes the original subject—the ‘text,’ the ‘work of art’—so that the student of mass culture has no primary object of study.…[A] dialectical conception of this field of study in which modernism and mass culture are grasped as a single historical and aesthetic phenomenon has the advantage of positing the survival of the primary text at one of its poles, and thus providing a guide-rail for the bewildering exploration of the aesthetic universe which lies on the other, a message mass or semiotic bombardment from which the textual referent has disappeared. (Jameson 1979: 137–138)

Jameson’s argument allows us to place mass culture in relationship with high art, and provides an avenue toward the exploration of the problematic of mass culture through the study of canonical formations. Hence the importance of disciplines such as Art History, where traditional emphasis on canonical images can provide anchoring points in the study of visual mass culture (and ‘mass-mediated popular culture,’ in the case of the non-West). This is undoubtedly a useful methodological position that furnishes significant formal correspondences for comparative study of popular images.8

Jameson’s position may also be usefully complemented with the Gramscian approach of William Rowe and Vivian Shelling, in which the ‘popular is defined not as an object, a meaning or a social group, but as a site—or, more accurately, a series of dispersed sites’ (1991: 10). The latter approach, especially when seen through an optic that recognizes




the productive relationship between mass and folk cultures, has the advantage of keeping open the everyday social possibilities of the production of popular visual culture through a bricolage of fragments assembled in the informal sector in the non-West.9 This is a process whose modality cannot be fully captured by conventional arguments regarding reification and homogeneity that are marshalled by regarding mass culture as a product of the Culture Industry. It is precisely the fluid nexus between the popular and mass culture in the ‘margins’ that allows various actors to articulate their demands by deploying repetition as a structural mechanism in order to participate in the popular public sphere. In the face of state suppression or neglect, this public sphere is itself transformed. Not limited to rational contestation and debate, the arena of Karachi’s civil society itself becomes thoroughly permeated by vectors emanating from a shadowy and spectral popular sphere.

SADDAM AS A FIGURE OF REPETITION

The deployment of repetitive motifs is clearly evident in other political and nationalist images that circulated in Karachi at that time. For example, the nationalist image of General Ziaul Haq, the military dictator who supervised Pakistan’s participation in the Afghan War in the 1980s (Figs. 10–11), depicted in prayer offers striking formal

Fig. 10: Poster, General Ziaul Haq with other nationalist leaders, c. 1988–90, 19x13 inches.




Fig. 11: Postcard, General Ziaul Haq, c. 1988–90, 6x4 inches.

Fig. 12: Postcard, war hero Rashid Minhas, c. 1980s, 6x4 inches.




correspondences with images of Saddam engaged in a similar posture (Figs. 1–5). Similarly, the stance and placement of the ‘martyred’ and decorated pilot of the 1965 India–Pakistan War, Rashid Minhas, on a postcard (Fig. 12) provides a template for the postcard portrait of Saddam with a dramatic air battle in the background (Fig. 6). The modality of these repetitive visual motifs is corroborated by the fieldwork of Christopher Pinney (1997) in India, who has shown how artists and printers resort to similar mechanisms in Indian poster production. Clearly, the existence of a prior set of visual codes allows the image of Saddam, quickly produced for a new set of events, to be immediately cognizable. I now return to Saddam with Sufi Saint (Fig. 9) in order to map possible antecedents for this image. This is an admittedly speculative and conjectural undertaking given the difficulty of tracing genealogies of mass cultural artifacts. Again, as Jameson has perceptively noted, ‘the student of mass culture has no primary object of study’ (1979: 137). A list of prior referents for Saddam with Sufi Saint might include nationalist images of Pakistani leaders and heroes (as seen in Figs. 10, 11, and 12), film and advertising imagery (Fig. 14), images of Saddam that ‘migrated’ from Iraq, art historical parallels, images of religious and spiritual life in South Asia, and images deployed as symbols in subaltern uprisings. But above all, the spectral quality of Saddam with Sufi Saint needs to be stressed in relation to the specific global context of the American articulation of the ‘New World Order,’ its impact on official Pakistani politics, and their dispersion into the popular arena.10 The Pakistani government’s support of the US was widely unpopular, and was seized upon by Islamic parties to challenge the government of Nawaz Sharif (Ahmad 1991; Talbot 1998: 316–317). The streets became an important visual and performative site in which the differences between specific political groups were enacted, but I argue that the role of the mass-mediated popular culture exceeds its manipulation by politically recognized entities such as Islamic political parties. The gap between official policy and the particular perception of many Pakistanis provided the preconditions for the revitalization of existing imagery, imaginatively reconfigured in an image like Saddam with Sufi Saint, which materializes a set of contradictory and veiled demands for civic and political participation through sacralization of a figure who until then had not and indeed could not have been seen in Pakistan as a (religious) hero.11




During the last few years and especially since the fall of Baghdad to US forces in 2003, US media organizations have extensively reported on Saddam’s obsession with freighting his persona with historical and mythical charge by commissioning innumerable grandiose monuments of himself (Anderson 2000: 76–89; ‘Monumental’ 1999: 77–78; CBS Evening News 2003). For the purposes of this essay, which is concerned with how Saddam’s image migrated to Pakistan, the most interesting of

Fig. 13: Jacques-Louis David, ‘Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand Saint-Bernard’, 1800–1801. The image would have become available to poster artists through book and magazine illustrations, and possibly from earlier appropriations.




these images are those in which Saddam’s persona is recast with overt Islamic referents. Early examples of Saddam’s ‘conversion’ to Islam can be seen in Kanan Makiya’s study The Monument: Art Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (al-Khalil 1991). One portrait shows Saddam riding a white horse, which Makiya identifies as referencing an important Shia symbol: the white horse which Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, rode to his martyrdom at Karbala, in present-day Iraq (al-Khalil 1991: 14).12 A very similar equestrian image circulated in Karachi (Fig. 8 left), rendered more dramatic through the appropriation of the landscape and posture of Jacques-Louis David’s celebrated French painting, Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand Saint-Bernard (1800–1801) (Fig. 13), which draws upon numerous earlier depictions of Napoleon by Antoine-Jean Gros and equestrian paintings by Nicolas-André Monsiau and others (Bordes 2005: 83–91).13 While David’s Bonaparte is clearly the ‘original’ reference of the Pakistani image in terms of the latter’s composition, one cannot disregard the reference to Imam Hussain’s white horse at Karbala, without which the equestrian portrait of Saddam would arguably lose much of its symbolic force in the streets of Karachi. The geographic transfer of contemporary imagery from Iraq to Pakistan, or its simultaneous crystallization at both sites exemplifies the regional links across the West Asian Muslim world, evident in both religious and secular registers.14

It is worth recalling that South Asian Islam has maintained significant links with West Asia for several centuries now. Particularly from 1857 onward, Muslim identity in South Asia has been imaginatively constituted through tropes of migration of armies, intellectuals, Sufis and fortune hunters, from Persian, Turkish and Arab West Asia. Although this topic is too complex to outline in even a cursory fashion here,15 it suggests how Saddam with Sufi Saint might also recall the celebrated figure of Shaikh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the founder of the important Qadiriyya order of Sufism. Jilani was born in Iraq, where he also died, in 1166 CE. His tomb has been a major pilgrimage site for visitors from South Asia as he is considered a pre-eminent Sufi in South Asian Islam. S.A.A. Rizvi, in his study of Indian Sufism, remarks:

To all intents and purposes, the Qadiriyyas advocated the deification of their founder and all its descendants, both of the blood and spiritually. To some extent this developed from Shaikh ‘Abdu’l-Qadir’s saying, ‘My foot is on the




Fig. 14: Film hoarding, 1998.




neck of every saint of God,’ which his followers interpreted as implying the superiority of the Qadiriyyah order. Legends about Shaikh ‘Abdu’l-Qadir in both India and Indonesia ascribe to him numerous and incredible miracles, whose execution was assisted by both angels and genii, obedient to his every command. (Rizvi 1983: 54)

Visually, the superiority of Jilani over other Sufis is evident in a popular print (Fig. 15) where Jilani, holding white prayer beads, presides over ‘his gathering’ (mahfil-i-ghaus-i-pak), elevated over, and larger than, all of the other thirty or so Sufis significant to South Asian Islam. According to Mumtaz Ahmad, the JUP—an important Islamic party sympathetic to folk Sufism that considers Jilani as its patron saint—emphasized their concern for the safety of Jilani’s shrine as a central issue during the US operation. The JUP organized demonstrations and even established ‘recruiting centres’ where volunteers could sign up to protect the shrine (1991: 158,166). In this context, a comparison of the Jilani image (Fig. 15) to Saddam with Sufi Saint (Fig. 9) is most suggestive. In the latter image, Saddam himself now occupies the position of a Sufi, with allusions to his possession of hidden and miraculous powers.

Fig. 15: Poster, c. 1980s, 19x13 inches, showing 33 prominent and lesser-known Sufis. Jilani is depicted as the large central figure.




South Asian Muslim identity was also deeply influenced by pan-Islamic ideas in the later nineteenth century. The Khilafat movement of 1919–24, which sought to preserve the Ottoman Caliphate against British designs, was a major expression of this sentiment. Supported by Gandhi, the mass Khilafat movement would scarcely have been possible fifty years earlier. It was innovative in inaugurating mass politics in India and was also significant for its performative and visual dimensions, which included uniforms, tickets, and other paraphernalia whose further study would illustrate the Khilafat movement’s wider aesthetico-political repercussions.16 Here I simply underscore the observation that the beginning of mass politics in India was imaginatively negotiated through a set of events in Muslim West Asia, and this transnational consciousness of the ummah has served to shape Muslim identity in South Asia in subsequent decades as well.17

Apart from Jilani, Iraq remains extremely important to Shiites due to the presence of key holy sites at Karbala and other locations—indeed, the major Pakistani Shiite Islamic party threatened the US with dire consequences if any Shiite site were to be damaged by allied bombing (Ahmad 1991: 169). Moreover, the memory of Baghdad as a city of Arabian Nights legend and fantasy has been propagated by Hollywood for decades, and also circulates through numerous children’s stories in present-day Pakistan. A concentration of such diverse referents to Iraq’s sacred and legendary aura can be seen on the top of the poster in Figure 8 (right), where domes and minarets of Iraqi monuments centrally located between Makkah and Madinah are clustered together. This poster also strikingly depicts diagonal beams of light linking Saddam’s supplicating hands with the Kaaba, providing yet another visual corroboration of Saddam’s mystical piety. Finally, the use of the Saddam images as visual cues in demonstrations can be contextualized as part of a long history of subaltern insurgency in South Asia. Ranajit Guha quotes a figure of at least 110 insurgencies in a 117-year period (1783–1900) from one region of India alone (Guha 1983: 1–2). These rebellions did not usually rely upon legally-sanctioned leadership, debate in organized forums and newspapers, etc.; rather, they were characterized by loose struggles that seemed dormant at most times, becoming suddenly violent and highly disruptive at others, yet ultimately remaining localized. Relying upon communal solidarity and leadership, messages circulated via verbal and non-verbal codes and were effected




through rumour and ambiguity. Guha mentions a number of non-verbal icons adopted in past insurgencies during the British colonial period whose meanings were deeply enigmatic for colonial officials. These include the circulation of arrows of war by Kols in Bengal in 1832, and of mango branches in 1856, whose number of leaves and verdancy might have marked the time frame for the insurgency. The meaning behind the possible circulation of chapatis (bread) as a coded transmission during the Mutiny in 1857 has remained indecipherable (Guha 1983: chap. 6). Ayesha Jalal has noted that during the 1919 disturbances in the Punjab, a postcard bearing the emblems of both Om and Ali circulated, which was perceived by the colonial administration as instigating subversive activity (Jalal 2001: 205). In the present day, images produced through the reproductive apparatus of print make it far easier to disseminate such symbols. The historical circulation of untraceable rumours, visual and verbal signs in subaltern insurgencies has correspondences with the contemporary Saddam poster phenomena. Thus the possibility exists that an image of Saddam does not simply refer to the person himself, but might also involve the circulation of coded meanings which index and cue modalities of protest that should not be overlooked by a mimetic or realist reading of the image. Clearly, the factors listed above could be explored further through multiple examples, but I hope that this cursory outline of the preconditions for the circulation of images of Saddam highlights the need to situate the impact of such images in global, regional and local contexts, and within a productive relationship between high modernism, mass culture and popular culture. The mechanism of repetition and seriality allows for the articulation of new events in a recognizable visual language, and allows various groups to voice political demands in the public sphere by deploying images within the anonymous structure of mass-mediated popular culture. It is precisely this anonymity that permits mythical, fantastic, and spectral images to flourish, indexing civic and political demands for participation that cannot be directly expressed in officially sanctioned and regulated public arenas.

* * *

What happens however, when artists in Pakistan, who have traditionally worked in gallery settings or produced official public art, attempt to




voice demands in the popular-public sphere? In order to discuss my next case study, I now employ biographical narrative in keeping with the subject-oriented discourse of art history. I demonstrate how art premised upon subjectivized creativity nevertheless enters into a productive dialogue with urban popular visual culture in order to address a potentially wider audience.

NAIZA KHAN’S HENNA HANDS

The Karachi-based artist Naiza Khan was born in Bahawalpur in 1968 and educated in the United Kingdom. Over the last decade, Naiza has worked in a sustained fashion with a set of forms and themes that she has elaborated in an increasingly incisive manner. Trained as a printmaker at the Ruskin School, Oxford, Naiza has engaged in a persistent dialogue between the academic disciplines of drawing and printmaking, and the realities of postcolonial Pakistan that are deeply marked by issues of gender. Her work indexes the anxieties surrounding the textual construction of gender, but also the resilient poetic habitation of women’s bodies in everyday rituals and objects. While the Pakistani public sphere is characterized by the constraint toward and vulnerability of women, it is also haunted by the silent and unacknowledged presence/absence of women. Naiza’s work might thus be described as unveiling traces of this paradoxical ‘spectral corporeality.’ During the mid-1990s, Naiza employed drawing, Letraset type, calligraphy, and handwritten graffiti in Urdu and English in conjunction with sculptural works made with latex, organza, and other unconventional materials. Her drawings and prints have carefully delineated aspects and fragments of the female body, and her latex and text works have incorporated graffiti-like expressions in Urdu and English, messages that seemingly strive to speak with great urgency, but which ultimately remain fragmentary and largely undecipherable. Here Naiza can be seen as straining an academic artistic language towards a search for representational and metaphorical adequacy demanded by the conditions of postcolonial Pakistan. In this ongoing and deeply reflective body of work, Naiza continues to explore the private, domestic subjectivity of women. In a recent artist statement, she comments on her artistic trajectory as follows:




I am often stepping back or rather forced to step back, and begin to see how I am struggling to create an autonomous feminine subjectivity, which is pertinent to my own personal realities. What is becoming visible is my need to articulate how the body is marked by femininity as a lived experience, where subjectivity is produced through new narratives. (N. Khan 2002b)

By contrast, the works discussed here form part of an ongoing series called Henna Hands, begun in 1997, which continue to explore her earlier concerns while shifting their orientation towards an intervention in the urban popular public arena. Henna Hands can be situated in relation to other projects in the public sphere where international artists respond to the specific history of an urban site.18 In a similar project, the Chinese artist Zhang Dali utilized a graffiti-like visual language, spray-painting an outline of his profile on the walls of Beijing, a city that has experienced an extremely rapid transformation of its urban tissue (Hung 2000). By contrast, although it bypasses the demanding techniques of traditional henna application, the modality of Henna Hands still requires a more patient endeavour that the work of Zhang Dali. In these works, Naiza draws both fragmentary and complete silhouettes of the nude female figure in various positions by using stencil designs of henna patterns (Figs. 16–21). Commonly found in bazaars in Pakistan, these inexpensive stencil designs are shaped in the form of a hand and are meant to provide a shortcut to the elaborate and time-consuming craft of henna decoration widely practiced on women’s palms (and foot soles) for festive and ritual occasions.19

Needless to say, the plastic stencil design coarsens and ‘stereotypes’ the otherwise fluid and performative practice of henna decoration into a set of designs that are screen-like. For example, long, sinuous and serpentine lines are no longer possible, as the stencil design is composed of small angular or curved geometric spaces—not unlike carved Mughal window screens or contemporary decorated cement blocks that separate private interior space from the public street. Traditional methods of henna application are a respected craft of the body that demand a great deal of patience from the artist and the sitter alike. Thus the lengthy process of henna decoration also becomes an occasion for enacting a private, feminine space and temporality. By contrast, the newer stencil design application denigrates skill and lessens the opportunity for women’s bonding.




Fig. 16: Naiza Khan, Henna Hands, inside gallery (photograph by Naiza Khan).




Fig. 17: Naiza Khan, Henna Hands, outside (photograph by Naiza Khan).





The henna stencils can be thus seen as marking the fluid location where craft practices are negotiating a shift towards mechanical reproduction. They also signpost a transformation of the division between the public and private, and analogous to the Mughal window-screen or the decorated cement block, point towards the delineation of, but also the opening out of, the interiority of women’s space into public space. For precisely these reasons, the mechanically-stamped stencil pattern also becomes an important vehicle for Naiza’s intervention in the gendered public space of Pakistan, where the presence of women has been marked by repression and precariousness. Initially, Naiza worked inside, on gallery and studio walls (Fig. 16), but she found the results to be unsatisfying. She subsequently discovered the peeling, palimpsest-like walls of Karachi to be a more suitable site for her enigmatic figures. A typical Karachi public wall experiences daily changes; handbills of advertisements for cigarettes, body lotions, and computer training courses are overlaid with calligraphed announcements of rallies by ethnic, political, and Islamic groups, as well as random graffiti. Moreover, a fresh residue of cigarette butts, bodily waste, and decaying printed matter, deposited daily, constantly adorns the walls and sidewalks. The wall bears witness to the traces of countless encounters, becoming a site pregnant with memory, despite the constant threat of its demolition in a city where the construction mafia and informal sector activities continue to overwhelm the efforts by city planners and the municipal authorities to rationalize urban planning and upkeep. Keeping this context in mind, we are now in a better position to understand Naiza’s compulsion to work directly on the city wall:

In an attempt to reallocate the Henna Hands out of the gallery and studio space, I have been working in different locations near the Cantonment Station and Railway Colony. The work started in March 2002 in a lower-middle class area. This ‘mohalla’ [locality] is home to a community of Parsis, Muslims, Christians and Hindus. Most of the old buildings belong to the railways and the residents are slowly being evicted for demolition and rebuilding. Reactions from the residents of the community are informing my own understanding of the work, which was previously constrained by its response from a more select audience within the parameters of the art gallery space. (N. Khan 2002a)




Naiza works early in the morning, before the city is awake. The silhouettes of whole and fractured figures are screened directly onto the wall itself with the hand-shaped stencil patterns. Composed of screened hand-patterns, the figure of the woman is profoundly multivalent; while it attests to the ‘shaping’ of the woman’s body by the ‘hands’ of social forces, it also powerfully reaffirms the presence of the woman in public space, but without denying her a gendered aesthetic specificity. Naiza explains the play of meaning in these works as follows:

In the henna hands, the figure is turned into a sign, rather than an object (of desire) and stripped of its eroticism. It becomes a signifier of self-perception and self-deception, in which silence and repression, domesticity and confinement, vulnerability and retreat simultaneously resonate and contradict [one another] as the eye is focused on the pattern and the body that surfaces out of it. (N. Khan 2002b)

The placement of many of the henna figures intrudes upon markedly gendered and politicized spaces. For example, in Figure 17, the hennaed silhouette confronts Urdu lettering that claims this part of the sidewalk for ‘Aslam Hair Dresser,’ a makeshift business in the informal sector whose patrons are generally male, as evidenced by the printed poster that exhibits men sporting a variety of ‘Pakistani’ hair styles. Similarly, in Figure 18, the hennaed figure is created at the same level as—but facing away from—the Urdu-lettered sidewalk on the left that announces the ‘March for the Glory of Jihad’ organized by an Islamic student group for 24 September 2001, possibly in response to the geopolitical aftermath of 11 September. It is important to note that henna is not a permanent dye, but one that fades within a few days. Naiza’s figures become fleeting and transient presences, fading away and disappearing, perhaps even before they are fully overlaid and eradicated by newer traces. For example, Figure 19 shows a site at which one henna figure was applied. Only a few days later, Naiza added another figure, and one can already see the difference between the freshly applied henna and the older figure that is already subject to fading and dissolution (Figs. 20, 21). This temporal dialectic of presence and absence indexes the fragility of the human body and its ephemeral daily practices amidst enormous social change. But the ornamental pattern—however ‘degraded’—that comprises each hand print also reiterates the continued importance of bodily arts and craft




practices in safeguarding an aesthetic that is intimately linked to the human hand. The figure of the woman in popular-public space is thus marked as supplemental. Naiza’s Henna Hands draws upon craft traditions as it traces their contemporary transformations in order to poetically reclaim public space and utilize the city skin itself as a site for artistic intervention. Henna Hands also references the dangerous ethnic politics of Karachi during the 1990s. This period witnessed the growth of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), a political and social organization that championed the identity of migrants from India after the division of colonial India into the post-independence states of India and Pakistan. The decade of the 1990s, filled with daily terror, violence, torture and extra-judicial killings, was a difficult one for Karachi. Oskar Verkaaik (2004) has shown how participation in the MQM fostered a new sense of identity among its members, a sense that was formed by foregrounding violence with sense of play and fun. The activities of MQM members contributed to yet another proliferation of visual icons that saturated Karachi with billboards, posters, and other images. The menacing silhouette of the ‘terrorist’ forms an aspect of this identity by evoking connotations of dangerous play. By comparing Henna Hands with the image of the ‘terrorist’ (Fig. 22), Naiza’s intervention can be viewed as a protest against the pervasive imagery of (gendered) political and ethnic violence, yet one which also participates in visual codes made recognizable precisely because of the prior presence of icons such as the ‘terrorist.’ In seeking to address an expanded public sphere, the exclusive language of high art enters into a spirited dialogue with the serialized imperatives of mass-mediated popular culture.

CONCLUSION

The relationship between popular (folk) culture and mass media in urban Pakistan is complex and mutually constitutive, and allows for various groups and agents to exploit the aesthetic potential available in both realms. If popular culture allows aura and charisma to retain potency in the modern urban site, the reproductive potential of mass media, based on seriality and repetition of cultural codes, forges a malleable and widely recognizable visual language for production and consumption in response to new social and political developments. Mass-mediated popular culture




also allows for much greater participation by numerous non-state bodies, political organizations, religious parties, artists, etc., producing Karachi itself as an extremely rich and dense palimpsest of visual references. While numerous studies have underscored the ‘failures’ of the political process in Pakistan to move towards a sustainable democracy, the rise of a new visual popular culture and its associated informal politics has not received sufficient attention. Precisely because the path towards smooth and formal participation in official public life is blocked or impeded for diverse groups, their concerns are expressed obliquely by images, spectres, shadows, and silhouettes. Thus a fuller account of civic and political activity will need to come to terms with these popular activities of non-state urban actors, including those of artists as they increasingly venture beyond the museum/gallery circuit. A wider conception of the public sphere, beyond rationalized and legalized debate, needs to encompass the symbolic and fantastic dimensions of the increasingly aestheticized and spectacularized character of urban popular culture in contemporary South Asia and the Muslim world.

Fig. 22: Wall silhouette from Hyderabad showing an MQM ‘terrorist’ fighter (Verkaaik 2004: 168, fig. 5).




NoteAll site photographs from Karachi by the author, 1991 (unless otherwise specified). All posters and postcards are from the author’s collection.

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NOTES

1. For the case of South Asia, see Gooptu 2001 and Metcalf 1999. 2. On Pakistani truck decoration, see Elias 2003. 3. At least some of the posters do have the attribution of the printer, including Fig. 9,

and Fig. 8 (left) (reproduced in Newsline), both of which have been produced by ‘Artpoint’ and printed by a ‘Beauty Art Printers’ with a Karachi business address. I have not attempted to check the veracity of these references.

4. Scott Ritter (2004) has however suggested that the 1991 Gulf War was a turning point in Saddam’s relationship with Islam. During the course of the 1990s, Saddam increasingly made use of overt Islamic symbols. According to a 2003 report by CBS News, for example, Saddam had a Quran calligraphed in his own blood and displayed prominently in a new mosque. However, Kanan Makiya’s book, The Monument: Art Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (published under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil [1991]), provides ample evidence that Saddam turned to Islam as early as the late 1980s.

5. For example, see Naremore and Brantlinger 1991. 6. For an assessment of the importance of Jameson’s essay on American cultural studies,

see Denning 1991. 7. For a detailed discussion of the relationship of mass culture to the popular that is

influenced by Garcia Canclini, see Rowe and Schelling 1991 (Introduction and Chapter Three). Note especially Rowe and Shelling’s salient remark that ‘[a]ctually existing popular cultures have an interpenetrative relationship with mass culture’ (1991: 10).

8. For example, a parallel between the posters analyzed later in this essay, and Rosalind Krauss’ analysis of seriality and repetition in Picasso’s drawings may be a valuable exercise. (See Foster 1988.) Other illuminating correspondences via art history might be in the areas of collage, montage, colour theory, history of landscape and portraiture etc.

9. Chris Pinney has stated: ‘The bricolage imposed by what publishers perceive to be a conservative market is sustained by the extensive personal archives of earlier images which most artists maintain and which ensure that no images are ever lost.…[The images] are, rather, continually reanimated and instantiated as a fragment, shadow, or half-remembered style in some new design.’ (Pinney 1997: 847).

10. A good collection of essays on Pakistani government’s activities is available in the January 1991 issue of Newsline, especially the essays by Hamza Alavi, Zahid Hussain, and M.B. Naqvi; see also Ahmad 1991.

11. For an interesting comparison with the response to the Gulf war in Algeria, see Susan Slyomovics 1992, pp. 93–99. Her article discusses Algerian political cartoons in newspapers and street graffiti. A recent example of the strange journey of motifs in political poster imagery is examined by David Pedersen (2003).

12. For a review that discusses some of the shortcomings of Makiya’s understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, see Winter 1991.

13. Chris Pinney (1997) has discovered a similar case in a recent popular print of Shivaji modelled after a coloured lithograph from 1825 by the French artist Louis Dupré, a student of David.




14. Another example of these connections is provided by the film Zarqa (1969), which depicts the Palestinian struggle, and which was billed as Pakistan’s first ever ‘Diamond Jubilee’ Urdu film, running for over 100 weeks. These affiliative and imaginative networks remain significant for the diffusion of mass-mediated popular culture across borders today (Gazdar 1997: 92-93; Gorija 2000: 170–173; Iqbal n.d.; Pakistan Film Magazine n.d.).

15. For an excellent summary of the intellectual history of Muslim South Asia that emphasizes Sufi and literary aspects, see Schimmel 1980.

16. On the Khilafat movement, see Alavi 1997, Gooptu 2001, Jalal 2000, Minault 1982.

17. For a brief summary of some of the major issues, see Metcalf 1999. 18. Ellen Harvey’s New York Beautification Project (n.d.) is one example of these. 19. For a discussion of the recent Western fascination with henna practices and on the

work of a Sudanese henna artist, see Hassan 1998.



Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Shadows: Spectral Visualities in Karachi’s Public Sphere

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