Reading Salima Hashmi’s Waiting in the Wings and Enter Stage Left—originally published in India as two separate volumes, but printed in the form of a single book in Pakistan—one gains an important testament to the life of the Faiz family and a unique view of Pakistan’s progressive pasts and tumults. More surprising still is the documenting of the sometimes-ironic interactions the Pakistani state has had with its creative artists—a byproduct of the singular involvement Salima Hashmi has had in the practice and institutionalization of art in the early years of Pakistan’s existence.

Though their span begins before Partition, the texts chiefly focus on Hashmi’s education and development as an artist in Pakistan and England, particularly her later involvement with the evolution of the diploma-granting institution of the Mayo School of Arts into the prestigious public university it became in Lahore. A memorable segment describes how Nur Khan, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Air Force, involved the institute in urging Pakistani fine artists to dedicate more of their creativity to patriotic efforts. “Poets had written patriotic songs,” writes Hashmi, “[and Nur Khan] approached the artists of Lahore and told them that they now had to do their duty and paint the exploits of the heroes of the [1965] war” (p. 197). Along with many of her colleagues, Hashmi was then flown to an air base in Risalpur where she delivered a presentation supported by speeches of war veterans. Candidly, Hashmi confesses that she was unmoved: “I didn’t feel any need to make a work of art based on a seventeen-day war in which some good people lost their lives on both sides” (p. 198). In reflecting on this day, Hashmi includes mention of how preeminent personalities, such as Shakir Ali and Colin David, responded similarly to the presentation; she then quickly follows with another memory of a demonstration against the Tashkent Declaration and the war’s cessation, led by the widows and families of fallen soldiers who felt they “had been betrayed” by the suddenness with which the government declared and ended the war. In doing so, Hashmi tries to completely flesh out what the 1965 war entailed not only for her, but also the effect it had on what she was most proximate to, both in her position as an artist-educator and as a resident of Lahore in that time.

This style of narration is characteristic of both texts. It is partly why their self-labeling as “memoir” does not feel warranted. Typically, memoirs seek to have a central narrative; in the words of critic Sven Birkerts, memoir writings “are necessarily filtered by the memory and recounted in ways that reflect understanding and interpretation—in some cases to the point where the process of coming to understanding is the main part of the story.”Footnote ¹ But there is no such central narrative or searing insight that governs what is brought to the page in either Waiting for the Wings or Enter Stage Left; instead, Hashmi seems to aspire to a comprehensive autobiography of events of public consequence in her life. This means that neither text is especially personal in the emotional, confessional sense of the term. Though unusual anecdotes are shared of personalities that may be familiar to Pakistanis engaged in these fields, Salima Hashmi’s purpose here is more to present various microhistories than to narrate a story of self. Nonetheless, these are compelling pasts and would make for rewarding reading for any researcher or student keen to learn more about Lahore’s artistic and literary spaces and its creatives across several decades of Pakistani history. Hashmi’s professional engagement with these fields has been just as wide ranging, being a painter, theater actor, broadcasting creative involved in children’s programing and humorous shows, and, of course, an arts educator. As a result, the kinds of creatives and practitioners who appear in the texts are just as diverse, even if generally limited to those residing in Lahore.

Something particularly worth noting in all this creative production is the extent of government involvement in their execution. For instance, a satirical program started by Hashmi and some of her colleagues, Taal Matol, was produced through the government-owned Pakistan Television Corporation. After being told that religion and the army were the only topics off-limits for the program, Hashmi and her troupe proceeded to mock sitting ministers, railway policies, failings in the education sector, and the then-First Lady, Nusrat Bhutto. That this amount of open criticism was aired through government channels in a period otherwise characterized by the severe repression of President Bhutto’s political opposition highlights the imaginative ways Pakistani creative artists carved a space for themselves and their work, maneuvering trying circumstances to some success.Footnote ² Even though the Zia coup in 1977 ultimately ended Hashmi’s involvement in television by 1979, she continued to be employed as faculty at a government university, subtly organizing against the government’s use of institutions such as the National College of Arts and the Alhamra Arts Complex.

Scattered across both texts are also Hashmi’s recollections of Faiz Ahmad Faiz: visiting him in wartime Beirut, traveling with him to Soviet Moscow, and what life was like for her in Lahore as the child of an imprisoned poet, encountering sudden and unexpected financial precarity. Indeed, much like an earlier memoir by Alys Faiz, Over My Shoulder, Hashmi is careful to establish the poetics of Faiz Ahmad Faiz as emerging from a particularly communist interaction with the world in which he was located. If, in the decades since the poet’s death, Faiz’s association with international communism has dimmed in how he is memorialized, turning him into a more vaguely “progressive” poet—to the extent that historian Ralph Russell dismissed him as someone characterized by “an avoidance of full commitment to any clear cut stand…Always on the left, but never either a Communist Party member or so close a fellow-traveller to be identified with it”—both Salima Hashmi and Alys Faiz’s memoiristic writings re-entrench Faiz’s communist alignments as central to his entanglements with literature and its public.Footnote ³ Owing to the breadth of Hashmi’s undertaking, this is but one of the many observations one can glean about Lahore’s creative pasts, making both Waiting in the Wings and Enter Stage Left rare and vital accounts for a range of cultural historians and researchers.