Lahore literary festival a celebration of liberal thought and inquiry

Pakistan’s literary scene is seeing a spirited revival, with packed festivals attracting tens of thousands in a rock concert-like atmosphere that defies security threats.

Events such as the raucous Lahore Literary Festival, held last weekend, are reclaiming the “cultural space” that has shrunk significantly in the conservative Muslim nation in recent years amid a raging Islamist insurgency.

The festivals – platforms for all forms of cultural expression, from architecture to film to food writing and feminism, as well as poetry and a recital by Central Asian musicians – are becoming a forum for exchange of liberal thought across the Muslim world.

“It’s great – one of the saddest things when you keep talking about Islam, the Muslims, the Ummah [the brotherhood of Muslim countries] is we don’t know what their writers are, we don’t know what their stories are,” says Mohammed Hanif, whose internationally renowned 2008 novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes weaves a dark comedic narrative around the death of dictator Muhammed Zia ul Haq.

“And there is very little that gets translated from these languages. So it’s great to have Palestinian writers, Egyptian writers.”

The Lahore festival began with an interview with veteran Indian actress Sharmila Tagore, who received a standing ovation after discussing her career in Bengali and Bollywood cinema. She hailed the cross-pollination of artists across the two rival countries’ borders as an important part of “cultural diplomacy”.