COMMENT: Pursuit of acceptance —Taha Najeeb Khan

Our society essentially functions on this perverse notion that Urdu must be reduced in its application as the language of the illiterate masses, while the role of English is elevated as the language of the privileged elite, an unfortunate hangover from the days of the British Raj

Most of us are aware of the Berlin Wall that split Germany. It is said that while the eastern side of the wall was dirty and stained, the western side was clean and polished. This, in some manner, depicted the glaring divide in the German population. The western bloc, under the administration of the Allied Forces, was progressive and fast developing whereas the eastern bloc, under Soviet control, was regressive and impoverished. Seldom in history have we witnessed such a profound disparity between two sides of the same population, split only by a dividing wall.
The present day social order of Pakistan presents a similar divide. A bird’s-eye view of Pakistan’s social landscape reveals deep and disturbing fissures. There is an obvious split in the demographics, the two main denominations being the elite and the masses. It could be argued that all societies in the world have a similar structure in place. After all, even developed countries like the US are divided into various strata and layers. But what renders our society markedly different from others is how pronounced these fissures have become. In most societies, especially developed ones, the variations between the different social layers are very subtle, nuanced and not nearly as distinct as ours.
It would be edifying to understand the causes and implications of the anomalous social dynamics that prevail in our society. We can attribute this to a number of factors, not the least of which is the decadent culture of feudalism and land ownership that continues to plague us. The lord-peasant paradigm has created an unbridgeable divide between the two classes. This imbalance has exposed one class to the excesses of wanton luxury and privileges while condemning the other to interminable misery and deprivation. The worst aspect of this master-slave model is that it is a generational phenomenon: the children born into peasant families will invariably get sucked into the same cycle of unending slavery and suffering that their previous generations went through, while their rich counterparts bask in wealth and luxury. The rich will send their children to private and international schools where they will immediately pick up the English language, creating another significant divider between the two classes.
This brings us to another important factor that widens the rift between the classes — the multi-tiered school system. Our educational system is predicated on three tiers of education: madrassas, government schools and private schools. We all know how the madrassas have morphed into recruiting agencies for nefarious elements over the years, so there is not much that needs to be said here. The government schools, although more advanced and better equipped than madrassas, churn out scores of students who are severely disadvantaged by their poor command of English, in a society that holds English as the most potent marker of one’s modernity and social acceptance. This, in turn, has lead to swathes of Urdu speaking middle class people completely disenfranchised and marginalised. Our society essentially functions on the perverse notion that Urdu must be reduced in its application as the language of the illiterate masses, while the role of English is elevated as the language of the privileged elite, an unfortunate hangover from the days of the British Raj. This factor alone engenders a deep sense of angst and rancour amongst a major bulk of the population, as the attendant disadvantages of government/Urdu medium schooling start to bear upon them in different areas of life. The children from these schools will stay trapped in a perennial struggle to transcend the unflattering status of ‘social outcasts’ foisted upon them by the prevailing warped notions of social acceptance and would, therefore, readily do whatever it takes to jump across to the other ‘socially accepted’ side of the divide. So, it is not uncommon to witness a rather bizarre range of desperate and embarrassing measures employed by some to fit into the party-hopping, liberal, ‘elite’ crowd just to get a stamp of acceptance. Indeed, it is this very pursuit of social acceptance that has come to define the contours of our social landscape. Again, we can see similar dynamics at play in other societies, but our society represents a very extreme manifestation of this phenomenon. It is no wonder terms like ‘paindu’ (country bumpkin) and ‘burger’ tend to reverberate in our social discourse with high frequency; the paindus have ended up as objects of unmitigated derision and ridicule at the hands of the pseudo-westernised lot, so much so that for many people the label of paindu is looked upon as a greater insult than other curses.
We can all see this phenomenon play itself out all around us. In fact, it is so commonplace that we take it to be a natural condition of social behaviour. Those who have the misfortune of being confined to their ill-fated roles in society, in spite of all their travails, will then turn to other avenues for a much needed sense of respite and acceptance. This can incite all kinds of reactions. In many cases, it creates a need to establish an alternate identity, one that is usually at odds with the other side. Some of them are pushed to other extremes and start viewing ‘modernity’ as a bane for society.
Ironically, many of us have not fully fathomed the full measure of this issue and how it plays into our collective psyche. We tend to forget that we live in a society where the basic parameters of our social identity are nebulous and conflicted, so this sense of eroding self-identity coupled with a compulsive obsession with western constructs has driven a wedge between the people. Such self-inflicted divisions become even more disturbing when we account for the myriad ethnic cleavages and ideological schisms that already separate us on so many levels. So, as a first step towards making any progress to remedy this situation, the full measure of the ramifications of this divide should be acknowledged, understood and appreciated in their entirety. The divide cannot be allowed to grow wider. We need to make conscious efforts to mitigate this now, otherwise we will essentially be creating generations of intellectually disoriented, psychologically disillusioned and mentally frustrated people — lost generations — for the times to come. It is time to bring the wall down.

Taha Najeeb Khan is a Solution Design/Development Consultant currently based in New York. He can be reached at tahanajeeb@hotmail.com