On 4th January 2022, aged twenty and standing on my toes at the cusp of twenty-one in the throes of total, consuming adulthood, I go to have lunch with my partner, Omair, at New Bombay Restaurant situated near Cantt Station, Karachi. This event has come to occur after Omair has mentioned this restaurant to me more than once as a place marked by nostalgia for him because he goes there with his friends. As a photographer himself, the photos he shows me wholly depict this vein of nostalgia that is a constant thread between him and this restaurant. I congratulate him for the success of his photography in convincing me. The secret is, it doesn’t take much to convince me to go out and eat; I was born and have been raised in Karachi, it runs in my blood.
Karachi’s comforting winter Sun shines unfazed; the clouds, the season have nothing on it. The time is about one in the afternoon, broad daylight because I have chosen to walk from Frere Hall to New Bombay Restaurant with my partner and that requires for the Sun to threaten danger. We walk for ten anxious minutes and reach the restaurant.
The restaurant is essentially a dhaba. I enter as I make this distinction marked by the general furniture, cutlery, hygiene, menu, gentry, and ambiance of the place. Here begins the series of unfortunate events that have led to this project.
I tell Omair I want to sit at the rundown tables placed outside to soak in Karachi’s humdrum while I eat. He says passerby men will stare at me which will make him uncomfortable so we might as well sit inside. I ask him where he usually sits to eat with his friends and he tells me about the specific table he sits at. Said table is one of the many placed outside, outside being the place I want to sit at. I say nothing. We go inside and I want to sit downstairs, near other people who have also stopped for lunch and a cup of their famous doodh patti. Before I can choose my table, I am ushered upstairs and we sit at the table second to the end, close to the wall where, if I sit long enough, visitors sitting downstairs will forget about me ever having walked into this place. Yes, I assume they noticed me and I claim that by the unanimous gaze of the work personnel and the visitors turning towards me when I walked in and staying there, wide-eyed, threatened even, sunflower field to the summer Sun, pride of lions to a wounded gazelle. Omair calls an elderly waiter with a practiced flick of his wrist and orders some barbeque and their special ghee roti. Before leaving, the waiter says something to Omair about the womanhood I have so carefully nurtured, makes us get up to sit at the absolute last table in the far corner of the floor and with one swift motion, pulls a curtain upon us. My protest is drowned by the immediate relief in Omair’s breath, on his face.
This is the final act of the play. After all, the curtains have been drawn.
First-hand photo of curtained area, New Bombay Restaurant, Cantt Station, Karachi (1/2)First-hand photo of curtained area, New Bombay Restaurant, Cantt Station, Karachi (2/2)
Parda. I begin with the etymology of the word that gives meaning to the cause of my fury. The noun parda is Urdu for curtains and is simultaneously used as an umbrella term for the clothes women use to cover themselves with, especially in public places, in accordance with the sharia in a South Asian, Islamic context. The burqa, hijab and niqab fall under the most common ways that Muslim women observe parda. The gravity of this word is linked to discourse surrounding the visibility of women in urban spaces as happening as the streets of Karachi that claim to welcome one and all.
My research on the visibility of women in the public and private worlds began through two adequately apt, previously read works of literature, Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Hossain & Jahan, 2013) and The Power by Rhonda Byrne (Byrne, 2014). Both works are feminist utopias, set in worlds where an institutionalized matriarchy exists to destabilize the structures of the patriarchy in the world we live in today. While the latter is a Western work of fiction that weaves in-depth structures of governmental politics and science fiction, the former became my interest, not just as a text translated from Bengali, written by a South Asian, Muslim author but because of its premise being the transformation of the imperial subcontinent’s zenaana (secluded palace enclosures for women) to the mardana (secluded enclosures for men). This got me thinking of how the policing of the visibility of female bodies has transcended the public realm into the privacy of their homes. While Hossain highlights the dual nature of this observance of parda with regards to class difference, wherein noblewomen were expected to observe it while maid-servants were exempted from it, this difference was bridged with the loss of imperial power in the subcontinent. Irrespective of class and religion, women are exempted from the humdrum of Karachi and the gaze of males who visit their own houses.
On the other hand, I began thinking of the importance of free access to public space, especially as a visual artist myself, after reading an excerpt from The Painter of Modern Life by Charles Baudelaire (Baudelaire, 2018). While the text is Western and dated, its commentary on the importance of anonymous flaneury as integral to active seeing while remaining passive for the process of artistic creation remains contemporary. A woman can never be ‘a man of the crowd’ because a woman can never remain unseen in a hoard of people. This I realized when I entered Bombay Restaurant. A more recent, South Asian study on wandering as a fundamental activity for women is Why Loiter by Shilpa Phadke (Shilpa, 2011), which argues for the case of meaningless meandering of women through the urban study of present-day Mumbai using socio-ethnography and space mappings.
Only two instances of negation in this trend occur in my research, one in the recent past of Pakistan and the other in the present. In Political Posters in Karachi, Iftikhar Dadi states that ‘while men had long controlled the private sphere of women’s lives, discursive control over the public sphere was instituted as well during the Zia era, as seen in repressive legal injunctions and formulations of proper attire for women in the media. Not accidentally, it was precisely during these years that women gained much greater public visibility in everyday life. … In urban areas, even as dress codes became more uniform, an unprecedented number and new class of women started appearing in public places such as parks and restaurants.’ (Dadi, 2007). However, this rise was immediately subdued and the restricted lives of women reserved. Conversely, in her study Taboo (Saeed, 2011), Fouzia Saeed highlights the juxtaposition of rare helpless objectification and the more important existence of a hardcore matriarchy in Lahore’s red-light area that makes it safe for women, not just who conduct business there but also for female passerbys by preserving a female-majority area where their rules apply.
In her text, Phadke highlights another issue that legitimizes this need for concealing and that interests me. This is the issue of modesty, used as a device to categorize women into the good-bad binary. In South Asia, the respectability of a woman is directly proportional to her fulfillment of expectations of clothing and body language. The outrage on slogans like ‘Mera Jism, Meri Marzi’ and ‘Lo Baith Gayi Theek Se’ that appeared in Aurat March Karachi, 2021, insist on the sexualization of every move that women make, every word that escapes them.
Aurat March Poster, Lo Baith Gayi Theek Se, 2021
Academia is rife with discourse on the unavailability of public spaces for women with regards to modesty. I speak from my own experience as a woman denied my wish to sit where I want to. This legacy of denying women space they want to occupy is tragically long; from women not being admitted into art schools until the 19th century to Virginia Woolf being denied access to a library of a college that requested her to give a lecture resulting in her work, A Room of One’s Own (Woolf, 2014), from Rosa Parks being denied a seat on the bus to women today being denied spaces in public.
I hum this song all the time, the lyrics of which summarize my sentiments. Mujhay apnay jeenay ka haq chahiye / Woh zameen jis pe meray qadam tik sakein / Aur sar par kushaada falak chahiye. (I want my right to live / My right to the ground that can welcome my feet upon them / My right to a vast sky.) (Source)
Bibliography
Baudelaire, C. (2018). The painter of modern life. In Modern art and modernism: A critical anthology (pp. 23-28). Routledge.
Byrne, R. (2014). The Power. New York: Atria Books.
The facade of New Bombay Restaurant, Cantt Station, Karachi.
Close to no research has been done on New Bombay Restaurant. The only article I found was this one by Dawn, which immediately presented two points of contention to me. I record my contentions here.
One. A list of quotes: ‘iconic landmark for all those entering Karachi’, ‘treats in the form of aromatic parathas, steaming-hot chainaks [traditional teapots] brimming over with doodh-patti chai [tea cooked in milk]’, ‘awami restaurant’, ‘looking for an experience that’ll stay with him’ (Quraishi, 2021). I am glad for the use of the gendered ‘him’ in the last reference because this glamourization of a dhaba being “awami” (pertaining to the masses) is exclusionary to women in the multifold ways I present in this project. For as well-established a media house as Dawn to ignore the gravity of this exclusion despite commenting on ‘the restaurant’s two separate dining halls’ is noteworthy because it reflects on how deep-seated such exclusion is.
Two. The article relates from a long-employed waiter at the restaurant that the location of the place was owned by Hindu Malabaris before the partition. Upon some research, I found that the surrounding areas of the restaurant are still majorly Hindu-populated. For a restaurant that handles beef and only serves seher and iftaar during the holy month of Ramazan to stand amidst such a population that also lives in a minority made my research twofold. Power is hegemonic and it utilizes the violence of taking over and erasing, whether it is the trauma of the Partition or the post-partition erasure of women from the public.
For this project, my collaborator is Kanwal Khalid, a second-year student of Social Sciences at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi. While I have known Khalid as a mutual friend for a while and have followed her work, it was a certain work of hers that she posted on her art Instagram that caught my eye as appropriate for this project.
Khalid’s work as a writer-artist on the subject of the unavailability of urban spaces for women is admirable, not just as a political statement but more importantly, as a work that reflects her personal sensitivities towards the topic. Feminist themes recur in her work as radical and unapologetic, hard-hitting and fearless. Her personal interest in this subject is important to me since it is my effort to keep this project as personal as possible, having taken root in my specific experience of New Bombay Restaurant and it is only appropriate that another woman artist and writer who feels as strongly about this subject as I do be made part of this project. On the other hand, Khalid is a graphic artist while my own skillset lies in traditional painting and I have never dabbled in any form of graphic art. In this way, I have a to learn from her. Conversely, I have also never seen a work of art that juxtaposes the two forms of painting but I believe that as works of art, one must complement the other. Thus, I want to experiment with this new form of juxtaposition tied in with writing, the words we both hold so close to each other. Moreover, Khalid and I understand each other, not just by virtue of our womanhood and our interest in it but by virtue of our age and our level of education.
To remain true to the spirit of the project, I begin by stating her formal introduction and point of departure in her own words. ‘Hi! I’m Kanwal Khalid, an aspiring writer and self-taught illustrator and I love to explore themes revolving around human complexities through both of these mediums. Alongside my undergrad in social sciences, I design and sell self-illustrated stickers, cards and prints!’
Kanwal Khalid, Mere Sheher Kay Mard, 20221/52/53/54/55/5
“There is, ofcourse, the general lacking of public space. But I wanted to tackle it with the motif of the Moon. As a matter of mundanity, the Moon is trivial but has a certain sentiment of good feeling and nostalgia attached to it as a creator of the ambience of the night. But I have never seen the Moon alone because the night always stays at arm’s length from me. I cannot leave the house at night without fearing at the least, discomfort and at the most, for my life. Sometimes I can’t even access my balcony, depending on the time of the day and clothes I’m wearing because of the passerby men on the street who make sure to stare. The Moon is a stranger to me, the glamour of Karachi’s night life is inaccessible to me. I know a very dull Karachi.
Women experience layered restrictions, foremost by our own fears for ourselves that have become a part of our bodies, then the fear that our male counterparts have for us and the limitations our parents set for our safety. The motif of the Moon makes it seem like women whine for fleeting luxuries such as looking at the sky but in an urban space where the sky is already hidden behind walls of concrete, that is a luxury that only men can afford. My interest is in the inequality in the access of such a commonplace, so-called luxury.
Women are always hidden from everywhere, even in private spaces that are visited by stranger males and to me, the erasure of the visibility of women is the erasure of their identities which is a form of objectification itself, to be able to control the showing and hiding of a thing. This is because we, as a society, are invested in making spaces comfortable for men.”
Khalid’s intention with her work reminds me of the injustice I have suffered at the denying of the rampant dhaba culture that Karachi prides itself on, especially for the age group that I belong to. I have been excluded from such plans made by my male counterparts, actively while I was still present there. In this way, the active taking up of space by Girls at Dhabas, has also informed my efforts in this project.
It is only appropriate to juxtapose the experiences Kanwal and I have had in public spaces with the experiences of our male counterparts. I informally asked Omair and his friend, M, to answer a few questions about their experience at New Bombay Restaurant. Below is a comprehensive table.
First Time/Later Experience
Times of the Day to Visit
Concern
Inside/Outside, Why
Discomfort
First Time with a Female
Omair
17 years old, with male friends, 20-30 times since then
Any time of the day, mostly evening
Little concern about himself at night, none by family
Outside
Not really
With his partner at 21 years of age
M
19 years old with a male friend, about 20 times since then
Late night, around 10 -11 p.m.
Sometimes but not enough to stop him from going
Outside in the fresh air
Not that he can recall
Has not been to the restaurant with a female
When asked for further comments from each, Omair added that the curtain seemed unnecessary to him at the time it was pulled on us but he found that the second time he went there with me, the discomfort had eased slightly. He added that he has never seen any women his age visit the restaurant and when women do come by, they are older and always accompanied by male counterparts. The police also come to the place a lot since there is a station right across the restaurant and in one instance, a policeman commented on the dyed hair of a friend of his who identifies as non-binary. Omair did not remember if the comment was gendered or not.
On the other hand, M informed me that since he is currently studying in the U.K. he finds ‘places here to be a lot more comfortable, there’s less eyes on you with regards to who you’re with. Often, in Pakistan, you can sense an air of judgement when you’re out with a female friend but I haven’t noticed that here. I also think segregation is not common here, there are no “family” areas, all areas are common, anyone can sit anywhere and staff is accommodating to your needs.’
At the restaurant, both waiters and the person at the counter refused to talk to me about women frequenting the place.
For photography at New Bombay Restaurant, I looked up Tentative Collection and their work on urban spaces in two of their projects, Beyond Walls (2011) and Projections (2015).
Beyond Walls (2011) laid emphasis on the accessibility to public spaces with regards to class instead of gender, using the motif of chai as the traditional symbol of welcome and hospitality.
‘In response to Karachi’s increasingly privatized, securitized and segregated public spaces, the Tentative Collective organized a group gathering on top of the boundary wall around Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Park. This is one the city’s most beloved parks that has restricted public access by building a boundary wall and charging an entry fee. Some 50 people from different parts of the city including the nearby migrant colony (Shirin Jinnah) joined us at 4:00 pm on a Sunday to drink chai and hang out in an unusual gathering place. Our action coincided with International Migrants’ Day and was documented and tracked by Immigrant Movement International led by artist Tania Bruguera in Queens, New York.’ (Source)
Similarly, Projections (2015) is a group work of nine artists preserving the identities and histories attached to urban spaces by projecting photos onto walls. Rajani’s Ratan Jalao uses the fractured identities of migrants that make up a majority of Karachi’s population while Malkani’s To know in every distortion of the light what fracture is creates discourse on missing persons in Karachi. Both works surround the issues of identities, erasure and the memory that erasure leaves, whether it is allowed to be physically manifested in public spaces. This not only relates to this project in terms of issues regarding gender but is also reminiscent of the displacement of Malabari Hindus from the site of New Bombay Restaurant at the time of the partition.
Shahana Rajani, Ratan Jalao, 2015Zahra Malkani, To know in every distortion of the light what fracture is, 2015
Photography at New Bombay Restaurant
Hindu Settlements, ExteriorRestaurant, ExteriorBehind the Curtain, Interior (Credit: Omair Danish)
With these photos, I aim to juxtapose the mood of the light sitting outside for breakfast with the gloom of the area inside that I was relegated to.
On the other hand, I asked Omair to send me the photos he took of the restaurant to compare with the photo he took of me there. Once again, there is the juxtaposition between the interiority and exteriority of the space and the separate moods they create. Omair’s concerns are more of external interest like food and objects that caught his eye while I viewed the space with regards to how I can exist in it as a visible, seen entity with personhood. Conversely, there is also a comparison of his accessibility to the restaurant in the night while both my visits have been limited to the day.
Furthermore, I asked Kanwal to collaborate with these collections of photos by sending photos of spaces she considers safe. All of these spaces are interior or exterior with the absence of males.
Film
I have always been inspired by the absurdity of Andy Warhol’s work in new media and film. It is his work, Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger (1981) that inspired me to film my own work at New Bombay restaurant. I am inspired by the politics that such an absurdity creates discourse around. While Warhol’s work implies the essence of his simplicity in his practice, my own film indicates how the simple act of eating as a woman in a public space politically points as an act of resistance. I hope to imply the absurdity of systems that require such acts of resistance in the film, amidst the backdrop of Karachi’s humdrum and slow stares. Similarly, I was inspired by Bani Abidi’s Mangoes (2015) in which Abidi employs the motif of food and eating to critically depict the South Asian diaspora. Food is an important South Asian legacy, it is what the British colonized us for and it is what we consider an emblem of our unique identity. Karachi is a hub of age-old and newly emerging food centers and restaurants and eating is its population’s central hobby, irrespective of the many classes it is home to. More importantly, to me, tea is an emblem of cultural importance since it signifies welcome, belonging, the nostalgia of bygone Karachi evenings. I knew that I wanted to carry forward the symbol of tea into my final work. To be unable to access commonplace dhabas is to be excluded from the very fabric of this culture and relegated to the margins of social life, lacking in opportunities and experiences, both good and bad.
Below are some process photos from the making of the film.
As a traditional visual artist myself, my prime portrayal of discourse is through the visual arts. However, since a substantial part of this project has been in the form of critical writing, I allowed my inspiration from Fazal Rizvi’s Coloured Fields (Typewriter Series) (2018) to inform my own work. This is the first time that I created a work of art which involved simple typography and mark-making.
My artwork consists of words from the poem I wrote, some half concealed in parda and others, not so much.
Parday Kay Pechay Kya Hai?(1/2), 2022
Part 2
I could not resist the urge to employ the technique of painting that I find myself most proficient in so I began my research on the interests that female artists have historically portrayed in their work. Two prominent nineteenth-century impressionist painters, Berthe Morisot and Mary Casatt, contemporaries and friends of the likes of Renoir and Manet, struck my eye. Their work is important to my research in that it echoes Kanwal’s idea of safe spaces, either interior spaces that are familiar to her or public spaces where she is is decidedly alone, and almost always during daytime. The work of these painters introduces non-sexualized female subjects in the contexts of their own solitudes, often indulging in private hobbies.
Berthe Morisot, Edma Morisot Reading, 1867.Mary Casatt, Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly, 1880.
Then came the revolutionary Guerilla Girls illustrated poster, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? (1989) which raises pertinent questions on the spaces that women are allowed to access and the circumstances unto which this accessibility is dependent. While the poster talks about the erasure of female artists from art canons, it is also a reminder that the only condition in which women are allowed space under the public eye are when it is to fulfill the desires of their onlookers, never anonymously as a flaneur existing for themselves.
Guerilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989
In the South Asian context, Naiza Khan’s Henna Hands (2000 – 2003) stood out to me because of its unique and radical, almost omniscient method of taking up public space. Khan imbues visuality with a strong, almost physical presence by using the traditionally feminine symbol of henna to disrupt to the landscape of political visual warfare in Karachi. In doing so, she doesn’t just make space for women in the public realm but also indicates their strength as a source of political undoing. I find this act of taking up space through art as important to my practice in this project.
Naiza Khan, Henna Hands, 2000 – 2003
As I began to investigate my method of collaborative painting, I began to look at works done by multiple artists on the same canvas. I found that much of the work is non-representational. However, I could not find a single instance of work that is an integration of digital and traditional painting. So that’s what I decided to do.
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Olympic Rings, 2012
As an artist, I have often felt alienated by the continually fast-paced use of technology in art-making and for as long as I could, I resisted it. However, after looking through Kanwal’s work, I realized that I can use my own art practices as a bridge between traditional and digital art forms to place myself in the context of the ever, newly emerging art scene. Furthermore, when my research proved to me that such work hasn’t been noticeably done yet, I decided that this is a form of stylization that I want to continue to explore and see a lot of potential in. This is also the first time I have painted without using any outlines first and initially, I was nervous to do this kind of experimentation on someone else’s work but having run this through her and after having received a positive feedback from her on the painting, I was relieved.
While Kanwal chose to draw the scene imaginatively, I superimposed a photo I took there while taking the liberty to disjoint elements like the chairs and the cup of tea to indicate my anger about the incident.
Kanwal Khalid, Untitled, 2022 (Process Work)Kanwal Khalid and Zehra Khan, Parday Kay Peechay Kya Hai? (2/2), 2022
The four walls that make my room are my own. The house I live in is my own. All the places my feet have carried me across this city, all the areas I have driven to are my own. All the trees, the plants and flowers, the nooks and crevices, the pavements and poles, the electricity lines that fragment the sky, all the parts that I haven’t touched yet are my own.
When I dream of a future, which I do often, my utopia is never an overturning of patriarchal structures, never the subjugation of another gender. I want to be able to walk on the streets, to have access to intellectual circles over steaming mugs of doodh patti and to be able to live my life wholly, with my right to urban joy. I deserve to have fun against the night’s canvas and in the future I foresee, I have it.
I loved the food at New Bombay Restaurant and as an ongoing part of this project, I will continue to take up space there and enjoy the food.
I am a visual artist and I respond to both internal and external climates; this I consider my job description. Being denied my preferred place in a restaurant I was paying to eat at fractured my female sentiments, so to speak, because my parents have never denied me anything on the basis of my gender. I began with this source of humiliation as my point of departure.
Then, I listed down the sources in literature, art, music and film that I was previously cognizant of and followed those links for wider research on the issue while still tying it in with this personal incident at New Bombay Restaurant.
Kanwal’s piece had stuck with me since the day she posted it on her Instagram. So, I reached out to her and we began to communicate on text. I described the premise of my project to her, the scope of my usual art-making and if she would like to be part of it. When she agreed, I asked her for her own sentiment about the issue and her ideas on the project with regards to her own point of interest in this discourse. We discussed methods of photography and painting and we agreed upon a truly collaborative work of art, digital and traditional together. Moreover, we agreed upon joint ownership of this work.
I exchanged the parts of this project that I worked on individually with her because I wanted her to truly be a part of the process and inform it with the mind of a writer and graphic artist and simultaneously have an idea of the direction I am being led to with my own idea. We exchanged photos and I described to her how I will put them in the blog. She found this expression of comparison to be effective with regards to her own photography as well as mine, in the context of the project.
After I visited New Bombay Restaurant with Omair for the photography, film and some on-field research, I wrote my poem as a thinking exercise on gendered injustice. At being denied answers at the restaurant, I then asked Omair and M if they would be willing to answer questions regarding the survey on the text. They were both told in detail about the project and how these answers will be used and displayed.
Kanwal was given first access to the blog and Omair and M were also sent the link to this blog personally.
FAQs
Why not collaborate with an artisan?
As an artist, I have noticed a trend of being very controlled with my work. I found that the structure of this project is ideal to break this chain. With a paid artisan, the power dynamic of class and ownership would have informed my project and I did not want to employ that in my work.
Why choose the mediums I chose?
The answers to these are simple. I documented through writing because often, I’m better at words than I am with visuals. I wrote the poem because when I am most perturbed by something, more often than not, it comes out in rhyme and in my mother tongue. I employed the use of photos to facilitate my writing. The film I made is in ode of Warhol, who I wish I had met and whose work continues to inspire me. And I painted because it is what I love doing, it is my bread, butter and oxygen. Moreover, it is my intention to continue to work with digital artists to create such hybridizations and this project gave me the opportunity to experiment with that.
Jharoka 