Introduction: National integration at home and cultural projection abroad

Such appeals and exhortations made by hereditary music practitioners reflect an underlying assumption about the nation-state: in its modern political form, it is expected to patronize ‘cultural reproduction’ through its institutional apparatus.Footnote ³ Such institutional apparatus is central to the state’s objective of defining what constitutes ‘national culture’ and negotiating various contestations around this task.Footnote ⁴ Importantly, amid discussions around transforming patronage for music in South Asia,Footnote ⁵ in the wake of colonial and post-colonial modernity,Footnote ⁶ state institutions have proved vital in facilitating the transition from what is often called ‘the feudalistic model of patronage’Footnote ⁷ to a modern institutional framework.Footnote ⁸ Regarding music production, for example, what does such an institutional framework look like in the case of Pakistan?

To answer this question, the article engages actively with a growing body of recent scholarship on music and cultural politics in the post-colonial context of South Asia, which has heretofore been framed through an India-centric lens. Existing studies have paid attention to the post-colonial Indian state’s vast institutional framework comprising public sector education and music academies and institutions, such as national broadcasters, that have ensured music’s active role in national cultural formation.Footnote ⁹ By contrast, citing music’s ambivalent place in South Asian Muslim modernity, Pakistan has often appeared only peripherally in these debates. Bakhle, in her seminal work on the classicization of the Hindustani Khayal tradition, acknowledges the limits of academic research in this regard:

This question, often left unaddressed, has led to an assumption that music’s place remains contested in South Asian Muslim modernity and in its attendant official forms of identity formation. Hence, the extant academic literature exploring the dynamics of Pakistani national cultural formation and its scripted protocols,Footnote ¹¹ has overwhelmingly focused on the question of languageFootnote ¹² (Urdu) and religionFootnote ¹³ (Islam) as the constituent elements of Pakistani national culture.Footnote ¹⁴ This ignores the question of music, relegating it to secondary importance, especially given the contested legitimacy of music in Islam and its relevance to Pakistani cultural formation.Footnote ¹⁵ Although two postgraduate dissertations engaged with state institutions, music’s role in state-led cultural production is not their primary focus.Footnote ¹⁶ Specifically, Hemani, focusing on the period between 1965 and 1985, hints at the broader contestations around the representation of Pakistani music.Footnote ¹⁷ However, this dissertation focuses more on the contestations in relation to folk and regional (Sindhi) cultures vis-à-vis competing claims by the cultural elites than on elaborating on the institutional, political, and international underpinnings of state-led cultural production.Footnote ¹⁸ A few other studies, although they have considered music and the role of the state in Pakistan’s post-colonial context, do not make it their main concern, with such concern potentially consisting instead of a feminist intervention centred on the difficulties faced by women musicians in Pakistan,Footnote ¹⁹ or a post-colonial critique to deconstruct the binary of sacred and secular music in the regional context of (East and West) Punjab.Footnote ²⁰

However, even a cursory engagement with the music scene in Pakistan would reveal that there does exist a set of public cultural institutions that involve the production of music.Footnote ²¹ The state’s task of managing cultural production rests with the National Heritage and Culture Division (NHCD).Footnote ²² Nonetheless, as music remains completely absent from public curricula at the primary and secondary levels across the country, this duality makes the questions in this article more pertinent, given music’s contested and ambivalent position.

This article brings into focus this existing institutional framework that the state deploys for national cultural reproduction.Footnote ²³ Delineating the national institutional context and international imperatives under which the state engages with an ideologically contested component of performance culture, I will show that the post-colonial state’s engagement with music is marked by a set of priorities that entails a logic of managing music rather than reproducing it. In the next section, I will develop a framework of ‘managing culture’ to decentre and contest India-focused scholarship on cultural reproduction in South Asia. It highlights Pakistan as a distinct yet connected context, where music occupies a far more ambivalent place in national cultural formation.

Ambivalences and contingencies of ‘managing music’ in post-colonial Pakistan: Theoretical and methodological considerations

The absence of a pronounced positive relationship between music and post-colonial Pakistani national cultural formation has led scholars of music and cultural politics in the South Asian context to often disregard the exploration of music’s role therein. The extant scholarship has shown how musical modernitiesFootnote ²⁴ in India were shaped by radio,Footnote ²⁵ recording and digitizing technologies, and nationalist aesthetics.Footnote ²⁶ For example, Bakhle’s work on Hindustani music’s role in Indian nationalism demonstrates how classical traditions were sacralized as embodiments of cultural authenticity.Footnote ²⁷ The notion of an alternative modernity versus a version of derivative modernity has been central to these and related questions of the emergence of Indian nationalism, state-led cultural production, and wider cultural politics in the context of South Asia.Footnote ²⁸

Contesting this Indian-centric scholarship, I contend that these questions do not take into account music’s relationship with South Asian Muslim modernity and its attendant Pakistani nationalism. Therefore, music’s cultural position in Pakistan cannot be understood as a mere extension of these Indian trajectories. In Pakistan, music was not made central to the nationalist project. Instead, it remained ideologically fraught; as Afzal-KhanFootnote ²⁹ and Basra note,Footnote ³⁰ music has long been contested within Islamic reformist discourses, where questions of gendered respectability, the cultural ideals of the ashraf Footnote ³¹ classes, and public morality have shaped attitudes towards performance, unlike in India, where music became integral to national culture. As a result, the emergent landscape of state patronage for various music genres and forms—thought of as representatively ‘Pakistani’ (in that it actively distinguishes itself from Indian classical music)—remains highly patchy, contingent, and precarious.

For example, historically, as empirical evidence and extant scholarshipFootnote ³² suggest, the rise of ghazal singing owes to Radio Pakistan. Yet, when talking to practitioners of ghazal singing in contemporary Pakistan, they responded, ‘Now no one at these institutions [PTV and Radio] values ghazal singers. It has become a thing of baithak (informal music gatherings) culture. PTV and Radio do not offer us any employment contracts as they used to back in the 1960s and 1970s.’Footnote ³³ This sentiment resonated with many among the music fraternity in Lahore and Islamabad. While cultural change and transformation in musical taste, amid evolving recording technologies and ever-globalizing musical aesthetics, contributed to the decline of ghazal singing, the musicians I interviewed reiterated the absence of sustained state patronage for the musical genres once deemed to be representative of Pakistani music. Reflecting the lack of state support for music, Nawazish, a hereditary musician says:

This sentiment entails grappling with a notion of the state ‘controlling’ and managing music rather than reproducing it through an institutional framework in any ‘substantial’ way. Indeed, all states exercise control over cultural reproduction through institutional frameworks and selective patronage of various musical genres. However, what makes the Pakistani case unique is music’s aforementioned contested position in the national culture. Hence, when entrusted with formulating a cultural policy and envisioning a relevant institutional framework in Pakistan’s early years, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the unofficial poet laureate of Pakistan, hinted at the ideological concerns pertaining to art and culture:

However, no matter how much art and culture are considered ‘risky things to play around with’, they cannot be neglected altogether at the institutional level.Footnote ³⁶ Although often desirous otherwise, engaging with them was inevitable on the part of the state; music and musicians were a required linchpin for cultural promotion, whether in terms of sending cultural troupes abroad or endorsing UNESCO’s conventions on heritage and culture. Our question is therefore: how can we develop an understanding of the Pakistani state’s institutional framework vis-à-vis the performing arts and music in light of the state’s ideological objection thereto,Footnote ³⁷ while also considering the role of music in South Asian Muslim modernity?Footnote ³⁸

In addition, international imperatives, mediated through organizations like UNESCO, required newly formed states, like Pakistan, to participate in the international community with a distinct cultural identity in the domain of music. The genesis and formation of state cultural institutions like the NIFTH and the PNCA should be understood within this framework. In its own stated objectives, one of the key functions of the NHDC has been to liaise with relevant international organizations to seek assistance in the promotion and preservation of what is deemed ‘national culture’, an objective shared by the PNCA and NIFTH. Participation in the international community and responding to the imperatives of international cultural institutions like UNESCO, as a means of projecting the state’s ethno-national identity abroad, provides one of the greatest rationales for engaging with the performing arts and music.

Another factor which adds singularity to the Pakistani case and which is central to the analytical lens of managing culture is the recognition that hereditary musicians continue to play a crucial and much broader role in Pakistan’s national cultural reproduction than in India. While Schofield’s account of the hereditary musician’s liminality in Mughal India is historically instructive,Footnote ³⁹ in contemporary Pakistan too, hereditary musicians remain the dominant custodians of musical knowledge, even as they face marginalization and precarious livelihoods. Unlike in colonial and post-colonial India, where institutional reforms and middle-class participation reshaped music traditions in relation to hereditary practitioners of music,Footnote ⁴⁰ Pakistan’s fragile institutional structures and complete neglect of music education at primary and secondary level have left hereditary lineages disproportionately responsible for sustaining musical savoir-faire.

Amid the absence of sustained state patronage for the hereditary practitioners of musical forms such as classical music (Khayal) and ghazal singing, it was mainly cultural elites from an ashrafi background who patronized these musicians. These musicians relied on these ashraf as major appreciators of this art form as well as gatekeepers of economic opportunities and social perks. For example, the emergence of the All Pakistan Music Conference (APMC) in 1959 as a dedicated platform for practitioners of classical music was an effort by Hayat Ahmad Khan, a patron from a similar background, to bring renowned classical music singer Rosha Ara Begum back to the music scene after she had allegedly decided to quit music altogether amid declining state patronage. Therefore, there is an analytical need to centre these musicians’ voices, treating them not as mere illustrations of state policy, but as central interlocutors whose experiences elucidate the contradictions of post-colonial cultural governance. Such a model of governmentality ordains a logic of managing culture which causes music and musicians to limit their role in national cultural reproduction. In other words, to develop a critical understanding of the post-colonial state’s engagement with music and musicians requires going beyond the ‘framework of cultural reproduction’ to a ‘framework of cultural control’. The notion of managing culture, therefore, also offers a critical appraisal of post-colonial bureaucracies. In conversation with the extant literature on everyday practices of the post-colonial stateFootnote ⁴¹ in the South Asian context and adopting it to the empirical context of Pakistan,Footnote ⁴² I show how cultural policy documents in Pakistan often reflect lofty ideals but rarely translate into coherent implementation. Institutions operate through feudalistic modes of patronage, personal discretion, and ad hoc compromises rather than through rationalized bureaucratic routines.

I situate my analyses of these dimensions of cultural production specific to the Pakistani case at the intersections of South Asian cultural studies, historical anthropology, and sociology, and make use of a mixed-methods approach that combines ethnography, interviews, and documentary analysis, complemented by selective archival research. The aim is not to construct a linear historical account of musical change in Pakistan, but to explore how state cultural institutions operate in practice and, most importantly, how musicians themselves experience, negotiate, and narrate their relationship to these institutions.Footnote ⁴³ Methodologically conceived thus, this article centres musicians’ voices and testimonies, rather than treating them as illustrations of state policy or archival sources. As musicianship remains dominantly hereditary in contemporary Pakistan,Footnote ⁴⁴ I take seriously the narratives, memories, and critical reflections of practitioners, recognizing them as authoritative accounts of cultural life. In this way, musicians’ testimonies do not merely form an appendix to institutional history but offer a critical vantage point from which the ambivalence of state cultural management can be understood.

The majority of fieldwork upon which this article is based was carried out from October 2019 to July 2020, followed by short follow-up field visits annually up until 2023. Most of my interlocutors were based in urban centres such as Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Islamabad, where state institutions are concentrated and musical circuits are most active. The sample size consisted of approximately 42 participants, including hereditary musicians (ustads and gharana practitioners), non-hereditary musicians, employees of state cultural institutions (PNCA, NIFTH, arts councils), and patrons and cultural organizers. However, I was also able to interact with a small number of folk artists, mainly from rural Punjab. While hereditary musicians formed the majority of the sample, this heterogeneity allowed me to capture a range of experiences and perspectives on cultural reproduction and institutional engagement.

My own status as a bansuri (flute) disciple and my relationship with my music ustad (teacher/guru) proved crucial in accessing relevant sites and interlocutors. Additionally, my religious background as a Shia Muslim (one of the two major sects in Islam and which form a considerable minority in Pakistan) resonated with the hereditary performer communities that mostly, especially those residing in the Bazaar (a colloquial expression to refer to Heera-Mandi—the red-light area in Lahore,Footnote ⁴⁵ formerly associated with courtesan culture) who identify as Shia, another distinctive feature of musicianship in Pakistan in comparison to India.Footnote ⁴⁶ These dynamics were helpful in matters of access and building rapport with my participants. Therefore, my positionality and proximity to musicians’ experiences significantly influenced the process of collecting and analysing data. As a researcher primarily based in Punjab, I have qualified my claims and explicitly noted the scope and limits of my fieldwork.

In this regard, I was able to conduct participant observation at music gatherings (baithaks),Footnote ⁴⁷ in traditional as well as modern performance spaces, and to draw on experiences that emerged from living with my flute teacher. I was also able to conduct interviews with various patrons and practitioners of music in Pakistan. Data collectedFootnote ⁴⁸ through these means was triangulated with journalistic accounts, institutional websites, policy documents, and selective archival sources such as the Faiz Report.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such a multi-source methodology enables a multi-scalar analysis in the context of the Global South, where official discourses and the everyday workings of state institutions are read critically alongside the practices and experiences of cultural workers and music practitioners. Both are contextualized through secondary scholarship in history, anthropology, and sociology. This afforded me a unique insight that draws on a range of actors, sources, and sensibilities to animate the relationship between state cultural institutions and music and its practitioners.

Many hereditary musicians framed their experiences of marginalization through nostalgic comparisons to earlier forms of princely or courtly patronage. While historians such as BakhleFootnote ⁵⁰ have cast doubt on the empirical accuracy of such narratives, regarding them as exaggerations shaped by loss, I approach them differently. As an ethnographer, I do not treat memory and nostalgia as an unreliable distortion but as an emblematic expression of marginalized and subaltern voices in the present. These memories, embodied through an affectiveFootnote ⁵¹ relationship with the past, function as a critique of post-colonial institutional frameworks that have failed to offer sustained patronage and have instead relegated hereditary practitioners to the margins.

Reckoning with music practitioners’ dismay at the real working of the PNCA and the NIFTH, the article now turns to an assessment of the Pakistani state’s need to participate in the international community with a distinct national cultural identity and its limited scope for cultural reproduction before moving on to elucidate music’s marginalization at the national level. It then explores the entanglement of various musical genres—classical, ghazal-singing, qawwali, folk, pop, etc.—with ideological and political imperatives. Finally, it shows how the working of the post-colonial Pakistani bureaucracy has limited previously ambitious policy goals concerning music’s role in national cultural reproduction.

The international imperative to engage with culture and music

Such cynicism is often found among musicians vis-à-vis cultural institutions. ‘Art councils’ is used as an umbrella term for state cultural institutions not related to radio and television (of which the PNCA and the NIFTH are prime examples). These comments by musicians, hinting at the logic of managing culture, suggest that the state simply wishes to appear as though it engages with culture on the international stage. This section brings this aspect to the fore by attending to Pakistan’s history and that of its emergent cultural policy, with a focus on engagement with the international community, that is how such policy has changed in accordance with UNESCO’s varying emphases. In short, this section will demonstrate that the need to appear in-line with the contingencies of changing international historical-political contexts (from the Cold War to the more recent War on TerrorFootnote ⁵³) and to participate accordingly in the international community has dictated the Pakistani state’s engagement with and support of culture at home, and that the state’s according cultural participation in the international community has been performative.

To begin with, during General Ayub Khan’s regime, a period of martial law and dictatorship in the 1960s, a standing committee on culture was formed under the chairmanship of Faiz Ahmad Faiz to formulate a cultural policy and a relevant institutional framework for engaging with the international community and organizations such as UNESCO. The rationale behind the formation of a committee to make policy recommendations for developing an institutional framework for patronizing arts and culture was the following: ‘The lack of any organised institution or mechanism … puts us at a disadvantage with international organisations like UNESCO.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Therefore, the formation of such an institution would relieve the country of ‘isolation and anonymity’,Footnote ⁵⁵ as Faiz himself recommended, and would enable it to participate and be visible at the international level as an emergent nation-state.Footnote ⁵⁶

The resulting official document with recommendations for engaging with culture is called the Faiz Report.Footnote ⁵⁷ Its rationale and policy framework fits well with UNESCO’s framework for engagement with developing countries.Footnote ⁵⁸ In its first three conventions, this framework implies seeing culture as an expression of national identity.Footnote ⁵⁹ Therefore, the establishment of a cultural institution was deemed necessary so as not to be ‘deprived of many services and facilities such organizations are able to offer’.Footnote ⁶⁰ What further strengthens the projectionist view of the state’s institutional framework, as opposed to the reproduction of culture at home, is the historical fact that, prior to the PNCA, it was Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) that ‘maintained and organized cultural troupes’ and enjoyed a monopoly as ‘the purveyor of national culture abroad’.Footnote ⁶¹

However, from my interviews with musicians, the lofty goals of the Faiz Report have evidently not been met (or have been, but solely with regard to expressing a softer, generalized image of Pakistani culture internationally while neglecting its authentic form domestically). The institutions it engendered—the PNCA and the NIFTH—have lost their credibility with musicians as a result and are viewed by many as institutions that solely organize cultural nights at foreign embassies. Raheem, who has worked as a recordist with both these public institutions for more than three decades, comments:

While both institutions organize festivals, arts exhibitions, and workshops on various artisanal crafts and short courses for music at the national level, their sustainability and impact on local cultural reproduction is viewed suspiciously by musicians. As Iqbal, a non-hereditary flute player, says, ‘About these music classes at arts councils, you name a single musician who got trained here and became a professional musician.’

Similarly, Ashfaq, a journalist who reports on arts and culture in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, casts doubt on the effectiveness of festivals, which are held to celebrate regional music and performance culture, describing the backstage activity during Mother Tongue Day being celebrated at the PNCA: ‘You saw the dance performances representing the folk music of each province? They did not even bother to invite performers [dancers] from each province. It was the same group of performers who were just changing costumes to represent each province.’ Therefore, more than reproduction at the national level, this infrastructure is perceived as prioritizing a projection of Pakistani music and culture abroad.

Following the Eighteenth Amendment (2010), and the state’s keenness to retain important functions pertaining to art and culture at the federal level,Footnote ⁶³ the PNCA and the NIFTH were partly and temporarily handed over to the Foreign Ministry, another indicator of the state’s preference for its engagement with culture.Footnote ⁶⁴ While acknowledging the general issue of the legitimacy of arts and culture at the national level, the current (2018) national cultural policy, addressing an international audience, urges a way forward that would connect people to a culture from which they supposedly have been distanced:

The continuing global War on Terror (since 2001) and Pakistan’s geo-political position provides the international context in which the purpose of promotion abroad was articulated in terms of projecting a ‘soft image’ of the country. Redressing the stereotypical perception of the country’s association with religious extremism and viewing music as having a potentially de-radicalizing value,Footnote ⁶⁶ as well as emphasizing the role of the individual in cultural production (in the wake of ratifying UNESCO’s fifth convention on intangible cultural heritage, which frames culture as an expression of the individualFootnote ⁶⁷), the document is meant to send a message to ‘the people of the world that we are a peaceful nation; an artistic nation, we are proud of our heritage and the creative spirit in our being’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Since the promulgation of the Eighteenth Amendment, such logic is also present at the regional level, whenever provincial cultural policy is formed, despite reluctance on the part of the central government. For example, ‘the maiden’—as it was dubbed—Punjab Cultural Policy was launched in November 2021.Footnote ⁶⁹ The fact that it was formulated after 11 years of devolutionFootnote ⁷⁰ only reveals the strength of the integrational logic of the state’s engagement with culture at home. And, even when it was formulated, in ambition and vision, the policy tries to replicate the objective—international projection—of the national cultural policy. The then chief minister delivered the following speech on the occasion of the policy launch:

Emphasis on the discourse of peacebuilding and the need to engage with an international audience (including a Punjabi diaspora) replicates the intention to project a ‘soft’ image of Pakistan internationally. This is the main objective which informs the Pakistani cultural institutional framework in the post-9/11 context as discussed in existing studies,Footnote ⁷² which specifically see culture as an important resource for fighting the menace of terrorism and religious extremism.Footnote ⁷³ Additionally, engaging with diasporic communities abroad has also led to musical backflow, affecting local musical cultures and their audiences.Footnote ⁷⁴

However, as the focus shifts from international engagement to local cultural production, contradictionsFootnote ⁷⁵ arise from the state’s own commitment to the ideological means it deploys to form a unifying national culture, relegating music and its practitioners to an uncertain place within the institutional framework. The institutional bodies that directly relate to the production of music are arts councils that are now located in almost ten divisions of the province. Officially called the Punjab Council of Arts (PUCAR),Footnote ⁷⁶ these arts council chapters claim to offer music classes, but the actual infrastructure remains far short of being able to bear out the truth of such a statement, not to mention the fact that none of these organizations at the district level offers job contracts to music artists. Only in cities like LahoreFootnote ⁷⁷ and Faisalabad does one observe a semblance of what could be called a regular music learning scene; the situation in other divisions of Punjab remains far less hopeful. However, the more telling indication of the state’s logic of managing culture is reflected in music’s gradual marginalization from broadcast institutions and its complete neglect in the national curriculum. The next section offers a detailed appraisal of the decline of music at these institutions and in public education.

National integration at home and marginalization of music and musicians

Of the 16 organizations/functions that the NHCD oversees, six are dedicated to building institutions and funds in the name of the founding father Jinnah, Quaid-e-Azam (a title meaning the greatest leader), and the national poet Iqbal. The main function of these organizations is to commemorate these two personalities, who are associated with the Pakistan Movement,Footnote ⁷⁸ the struggle for the creation of a ‘separate homeland of the Muslims of the subcontinent’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Therefore, the politics of veneration ties well into the post-colonial state’s priorities around cultural production. Four other organizations directly or indirectly relate to the management of scripted protocolsFootnote ⁸⁰ related to the production and dissemination of the Urdu language and literature, one of the determining elements for imagining Pakistani national culture.Footnote ⁸¹ Given the relationship between Pakistani nationalism and the Urdu language as a primary element of national integration,Footnote ⁸² the rationale for ensuring cultural production with regard to the Urdu language and literature is obvious enough. Thus, it is not unsurprising that the department was previously named the ‘Literary Division’. Therefore, these two major categories—Urdu literary production and memorializing Jinnah and Iqbal—focus on the integrative function of culture.

However, when it comes to assessing music’s place within institutionally driven cultural productions, the empirical evidence suggests its gradual decline therefrom. For example, music’s almost complete absence from the public education sector emerges as the strongest indicator of music’s limited role in cultural reproduction in Pakistan. Taking into account this neglect, this section also narrates the gradual decline of music programming at Radio Pakistan and Pakistan Television to substantiate music’s increasing marginality.

While the colonial state had its own policy regarding the role of radio as a medium of instruction and entertainment in colonial India,Footnote ⁸³ the institution certainly became subject to nationalist agendas in the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan.Footnote ⁸⁴ Therefore, these institutions’ significance for national integration through cultural reproduction has been immense. Indeed, nostalgia pervades the conversations among contemporary musicians when they reminisce about the ‘good old days’ of Radio Pakistan and Pakistan Television.

When discussing the role of Radio Pakistan with musicians, a certain nostalgic dreaminess settles in their eyes and the conversation is driven accordingly. Reminiscing and romanticizing the time when his father was a permanent staff member at Radio Pakistan, the flute player Jamal, a hereditary musician, went on to idealize the significance of radio patronage in a crude yet emphatic way: ‘… If radio had continued its support, it would have produced musicians at “an industrial scale”.’Footnote ⁸⁵ It was in view of such historical institutional significance that Mukhtar and Pervaiz, who are employees of the Lahore-based Al-Hamra Arts Council, when asked about the suggestion for the revival of traditional and regional music forms such as Hindustani classical music in the country, advised bringing music back at Radio Pakistan. This was preferable to recommending any reform within their own institution, ostensibly created to promote the arts. Radio, in particular, seems the only panacea for the ever-worsening case of state-engendered institutional neglect for music in the country.

While once it was considered ‘a shelter for the musician’,Footnote ⁸⁶ as Asif, a former producer of various music programmes, states, the institution no longer offers employment of any sort for musicians. On the occasional instances when music artists are invited to perform for a recording, they are offered payments, often a paltry sum, by cheque, which, according to Nawazish, a hereditary tabla player, reflects ‘the institution’s [lack of] seriousness towards facilitating musicians or music … as they have not updated its payment method’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Within the limits of that paltry payment, there exists a range of tiered categories. Historically, these categories were listed alphabetically (A, B, etc.) and determined the worth of the artist and the amount of payment. Being an ‘A’ class artist was considered high status and a worthy accolade for a musician. However, in the contemporary context when Radio Pakistan is no longer perceived as the sole and leading patron for music and musicians, being placed in one of these categories does not help musicians in their career.

The decline in music programming and the recruitment of musicians accompanies the programming shift towards the elements of national integration, Urdu and Islam. At regional stations, a few programmes are conducted in regional languages or include music from that region. However, most of the programmes for entertainment focus on audio dramas in Urdu, tourism in Pakistan, and educational programmes focusing on IT, domestic issues, and related topics. In this regard, it may be important to mention that transmissions during the months of Ramadan, Rabi-ul-Awal, and Muharram broadcast religious and devotional music forms such as Na’at, Qaseeda, Marsia, etc. The remaining random music programming mostly consists of recorded music that may be chosen from contemporary folk music, nineties Pakistani pop, and a selection from Pakistani film productions and special programming for the anniversaries of musicians of national fame like Noor Jehan, Mehdi Hassan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, etc.

However, now that commercial stations have taken over the airwaves, programming at Radio Pakistan has again fallen back on the public exchequer because of the institution’s inability to compete in the market. PBC launched its own FM channel, called FM101. As there is no music programme that would engage musicians and produce its own music, the channel replays the tunes that became famous in the heyday of the Pakistani film industry or those that were once produced by Radio Pakistan. On the other hand, private FM radio stations, whose only criterion is economic success, offer Bollywood listening experiences, music charts taken from music apps, and whatever is deemed ‘contemporary’. In this situation, the fragile state institutional structure struggles to compete with the emergent imperatives of the commercial and digital sphere.

It may be worth mentioning here that in recent years the government has on several occasions announced the decision to sell the PCB building in Islamabad, in addition to seriously considering privatizing the institution. The decision was reversed only after a PCB employee strike in 2020. At the same time, aligning itself with global trends of digitization and technological advancement, the institution claims to be at the verge of ‘bringing about a revolution in the field of broadcasting in the country, and to capture the audience at home and abroad’.Footnote ⁸⁸ By ‘installing the biggest 1000-kilowatt DRM Medium-wave transmitting station’, the institution is looking forward to ‘reaching out to all the strategic destinations like India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, China, Central Asia and the Middle East’.Footnote ⁸⁹ These developments hint at how the imperatives of digitization, globalization, and commercialization become key sites of visibility and state messaging in Pakistan’s contemporary cultural governance.

In contrast to radio, Pakistan Television is not a history that only the older generation of musicians are able to recall.Footnote ⁹⁰ Its memory is quite fresh and often evoked by the younger generation of musicians too. After all, it was not so long ago that Faheem Mazhar, himself a classical vocalist, was hosting Firdos-e-Gosh, a music programme dedicated to raag-based music. It was only in 2016 that the programme was taken off the air. As a newspaper reports:

The state-owned telecast does not currently feature any music programmes for classical music per se. There are a few other programmes that exclusively or partly feature music from different genres. Historically, along with Radio Pakistan, PTV was the other major state institution that not only provided employment to musicians and composers but also developed its own repertoire. In the 1970s and 1980s, PTV was still producing music programmes like Raag Rang, Sur ka Safar, and Taranumm, all produced by Farukh Bashir.Footnote ⁹² Owing to those early productions, there are dozens of tunes and compositions whose copyright lies with Radio Pakistan and Pakistan Television.Footnote ⁹³ However, as the flute player Jamal, a hereditary musician, says: ‘That is history. Whenever we talk about Radio Pakistan and PTV, it is just history, and we do not have any hope of any revival.’Footnote ⁹⁴ This pessimistic view of the role of state institutions is certainly indicative of music’s marginality in state-led national cultural reproduction.

Though neglect at broadcast institutions points to the limitations of the state’s institutional framework for engaging with music, stronger evidence of the marginalization of music therein comes from the role and place music is assigned in the public education sector. In this regard, the case of music’s neglect in the public education sector epitomizes the state’s logic of managing music rather than reproducing it. It lends credence to how the dictum of ‘art and culture are risky things to play around with’,Footnote ⁹⁵ rather than any policy, provides the main guideline for restricting music’s institutional place.

In the name of equality, social cohesion, and national integration, and to alleviate disparities in education content, the Education Ministry, under the political vision of the Pakistan Tehreek–e–Insaaf (PTI) government (2018–2022), introduced the idea of the Single National Curriculum (SNC). The SNC claims to be committed to enshrine the ‘vision of Quaid and Iqbal’, ‘the constitutional framework’, and the ‘teaching of the Quran and Sunnah’, alongside a few other more minor aims.Footnote ⁹⁶ No doubt, the constitutional framework and its republican spirit,Footnote ⁹⁷ to which the SNC appeals, is often thought of as an excuse for ideological rollback by the ‘establishment’.Footnote ⁹⁸ For example, the SNC was considered crucial to rein in the liberal and moderate values promoted during the Musharraf era as the latter was also known for its generous support to music and musicians. Shabir, a non-hereditary musician, says:

Undoubtedly, the reforms of the Musharraf era (1999–2008) provided an opportunity for the tertiary education sector to broaden its disciplinary scope and capacity. It was during these years that a Musicology Department was established at the NCA through the personal efforts of private music patrons like Reza Kazim and Sara Zaman. Also, the country’s foremost performing arts institution, the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA), was established in 2005 under the presidentship of Zia Mohyeddin, a Pakistani-British actor who had left the country during the Zia-ul-Haq era due to the regime’s oppression of artists and cultural activists. However, institutions like the NCA and the NAPA cater to the educational needs of students from influential backgroundsFootnote ¹⁰⁰ and, as BasraFootnote ¹⁰¹ has argued, discussing the case of tirades against the ‘obscene art’ of the painter Iqbal Hussain during the Zia era, they have better chances to eschew the state’s moral surveillance and reformist agendas.

In other public education sector institutions, which host students from more diverse strata of society, the case of music education remains largely marginalized and highly contested, and at best is pursued through extra/co-curricular provision. Although excluded at the primary and secondary levels, there are a few instances where, under the Musharraf-era political slogan of era ‘enlightened moderation’,Footnote ¹⁰² music was accommodated in a niche in tertiary education institutions. However, this only engendered conflict and controversy. The establishment of the music department at Punjab University Lahore and its opposition by Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), a religious student organization, serves as a relevant example in this case. The department was established during the Musharraf era but had to be closed down soon after receiving threats from the IJT.

Therefore, if education has to be seen as one of the most important avenues for the state’s cultural reproduction,Footnote ¹⁰³ the complete neglect of music in this regard signifies how it is rendered irrelevant to what is perceived to be national culture, thus reasserting the logic of managing music and culture in a way that negates their role in national culture. Therefore, the biggest paradox, in reference to the existing institutional framework, is that it is the Ministry of Education that oversees the subject of music and yet music is not included in the public curriculum at all! This only confirms the ideological grip of the integration logic the state deploys to keep music out of the purview of national cultural reproduction.

Sounding nationhood

After her migration to Pakistan right up until 1982, the year in which she died, Roshan Ara Begum regularly corresponded with the institutional heads of Radio Pakistan, Pakistan Television, and the PNCA. Her writings are full of the frustration she feels towards state authorities for neglecting classical music due to its perceived relationship with Indian national culture, from which the Pakistani state was seeking to distance itself, particularly following the 1965 war. The war intensified state-sponsored bordering logics and accelerated the marginalization of classical music. Radio was one of the most important ways in which the Pakistani state sought to do so. The institution proactively enlisted singers and poets to produce patriotic content, most notably mobilizing icons like Nur Jahan to perform national songs as part of a concentrated ‘morale-raising campaign’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ across 17 days of broadcasting during the war. Such state engagement with cultural production, however, was never sustained or institutionally embedded; rather, it remained precarious and contingent, mobilized sporadically in moments of political crisis and nationalist urgency rather than reflecting any enduring commitment to supporting cultural life. As Basra notes,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Radio Pakistan, in its formative years, had become an important institutional site for translating the cultural logic of Two Nation Theory—defining a Pakistani culture distinct from Hindu culture.

This section demonstrates this by instantiating a few broadcast preferences and genre prioritization at previously mentioned institutions and shows how the state sought to develop its own distinct Pakistani cultural and musical identity accordingly. This analysis is supplemented by oral histories, autobiographical accounts, and ethnographic evidence to show how such logic of managing culture through institutional infrastructureFootnote ¹⁰⁷ proved decisive in marginalizing certain forms of music (Hindustani classical music) while mainstreaming certain others (ghazal singing, folk, qawwali, etc.). However, changing institutional priorities notwithstanding, the evidence links to the contingent and precarious mode of state patronage for music in the neo-liberal context of twenty-first century Pakistan. Of all the institutions, radio was the most prominent source of state patronage for music (although such patronage remained sparse). As Yousaf, a music ustad of Christian background, tells us:

Similarly, Nabeela, a patron and performer, comments through reference to some clear historical directions:

Nabeela’s comments resonate with those historical writingsFootnote ¹¹⁰ that have explained the Brahmanization of the North Indian classical music tradition during the colonial period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its concomitant communal exclusions, that is, Muslim hereditary practitioners. Therefore, the narrative of the classicization of Indian music that these music histories recount is the history of confrontation between these traditional Muslim hereditary performers and Indian cultural nationalists.Footnote ¹¹¹ However, the bigger question that looms large is how the Muslim ashraf responded to such exclusion of Muslim hereditary musicians who mostly hailed from the lower ranks of society. Yousaf’s evocation of ‘they’ at the radio station and Roshan Ara Begum’s reference to the ‘educated elites’ probably point to the ashrafi classes who were heading the main cultural institutions post-independence.

It was Z. A. Bukhari, the station director of All India Radio (AIR) in the British Raj, who became the first and longest serving director general of Radio Pakistan in post-colonial Pakistan. When countering Indian cultural nationalists’ historical claims about the origins and repertoire of classical music as allegedly Indian, Bukhari cites the figure of Amir Khusro as evidence for the historical contribution of Muslims to this performance tradition. As he writes in his memoir: ‘Our [Indian Muslims’] history has only two chapters: the first one is Amir Khusroo and the last one is Ghalib. All the pages in-between are blank.’Footnote ¹¹² Therefore, when it comes to articulating an Indian Muslim identity in relation to music, it is the figure of Amir Khusroo that is evoked to imagine a Muslim music heritage and therefore music’s legitimate continuity in Pakistan’s post-colonial national culture.

Contemporaneously, many music patrons continue to deploy this mode of seeking legitimacy for music’s place in a Muslim society. As Salma, a music patron and performer, says:

Salma is a prominent patron who holds regular music programmes featuring qawwali nights, folk music, and Khayal. Though recognizing the genre protocols of each of these musical forms, the devotional zeal with which she pursues and patronizes music blurs those strict genre boundaries. It is noteworthy then that, be it Salma in the contemporary context or Z. A. Bukhari historically, a significant part of classical music patronage in post-colonial Pakistan seeks to narrativize classical music’s history, distinguishing it from its dominant appellation of ‘Indian’ classical music.

However, at the same time, because Pakistani classical music lacks an international purchase due to the genre’s reception globally as part of Indian culture, musicians and patrons alike struggle to articulate it as a musical expression of strictly Pakistani ethno-national identity. It is significant to note that at launch of their digital application Saarey Music a few years ago (aimed at a global audience), the All Pakistan Music Conference (APMC) branded its music archive/collection as South Asian Classical Music instead of prefixing it as Pakistani. Therefore, despite this ongoing attempt at an articulation of the tradition in which the Muslim contribution, via Amir Khusroo, is emphasized, classical music could not get much traction within post-colonial national cultural formation as a form that could be distinctly or legitimately presented as Pakistani.

It was accordingly ghazal singing, and its strong association with the Urdu language and North Indian Muslim heritage, that came to enjoy a privileged status at Radio Pakistan during that institution’s heyday. Commenting on the marginalization of classical music on Radio Pakistan and the rise of ghazal singing, Azhar, a non-hereditary performer, reflects in this way:

The bureaucrats and affluent groups that Azhar is referring to probably comprised the ashrafi intelligentsia in Pakistan’s formative years.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Cultural bureaucrats like Z. A. Bukhari, along with his elder brother, Patras Bukhari, a famous Urdu essayist, and Qudratullah Shahab, a civil bureaucrat and fiction writer, were at the forefront of creating and patronizing such an Urdu-led cultural sphere. An obvious result was that ghazal came into focus for broadcast institutions. As Asif, a former music programme producer at Pakistan Television (PTV), says:

In similar oral accounts, the era is remembered as the one when ghazal rose as a prospective genre in parallel to the marginalization of classical music at Radio Pakistan. In this regard, many musicians, from various backgrounds of expertise, started adapting their skills to the imperatives of ghazal singing. The distinct association of Karachi with ghazal culture makes sense as the city, in the wake of Partition, has been host to Urdu-speaking migrant communities from North India and beyond. However, as the above passage suggests, ghazal singing as a prospective genre started gradually appealing to artists from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds in the country. It is no wonder then that two folk icons from interior Sindh,Footnote ¹¹⁷ Reshma and Pathany Khan, experimented with ghazal singing in the early years of their ‘radio careers’.

For similar reasons and partly owing to the significant rise of Urdu literatiFootnote ¹¹⁸ during the colonial period, Lahore too became the home of many ghazal poets. The name of Urdu poet Nasir Kazmi is often invoked among many ghazal listeners to commemorate Lahore’s character in the 1960s and 1970s. Due to their appreciation for and association with the Urdu-led North Indian Muslim heritage, even progressive poets like Faiz came close in this domain to supporting the idea of Urdu being the bedrock of Pakistani culture. Indeed, Faiz is remembered among many musicians and patrons as someone who played a vital role in the popularization of ghazal singing in post-Partition Pakistan. Therefore, some might plausibly suggest that it was ghazal-singing that emerged as the distinct musical identity in the newly created state of Pakistan. The claim may be historically true; however, it cannot be confirmed in the contemporary context of Pakistan. Far from presenting a case of historical continuity, ghazal singing too is now seen as becoming extinct. The following response from Dilawar, a non-hereditary tabla ustad, provides a detailed overview of the rise and decline of ghazal and its contemporary status:

It is evident from the above passage how the North Indian Muslim tradition of ‘Shaer-o-Adab’ (poetry and literature) that was once considered an essential part of Muslim identity, as championed by ashrafi classes, has become somehow irrelevant to current popular culture. Rather, the space has been taken over by the corporate and commercial media outlets that ostensibly fulfil the same purpose by offering a wide range of entertainment avenues for mass cultural consumption. Accordingly, the rise and decline of ghazal singing in post-colonial Pakistan maps onto the broader processes through which the region and nation have intersected historically. While Devji arguesFootnote ¹²⁰ that the Pakistan Movement is often understood as a result of separatist sentiment among the Muslim ashraf of North India, what we note in the case of the decline of ghazal singing is how in the historical process of reterritorialization to the present-day geography of Pakistan, its national culture has distanced itself from the North Indian literary heritage.Footnote ¹²¹ Similarly, as Afzal-Khan argues,Footnote ¹²² the success of the most popular Pakistani music—Pakistani pop music—owes much to the fact that it was the first genre that could be seen as entirely devoid of any residual North Indian heritage.

It is also this genre (pop/rock/fusion) that has become the most popular musical template for composing patriotic songs, which have been routinely commissioned by the Inter-Service Public Relations (ISPR),Footnote ¹²³ a media wing of the Pakistani Army, since the 2000s. Recognizing the significance of digital platforms, the ISPR utilized platforms such as YouTube to regularly produce these songs in synchronicity with national commemorative calendars. However, traditional hereditary musicians remain marginal to this patronage circuit as Kamil, a young flute player of hereditary background, notes: ‘They have middle class bachy [boys] for this purpose.’ Ironically, Pakistani pop’s rise in the 1980s was contemporary to the Islamization drive spearheaded by the then military dictatory Zia-ul-Haque. It is a widely shared anecdote among the music fraternityFootnote ¹²⁴ that Zia himself reached out to Nazia Hassan and Zohaib Hassan, the sister-brother duo credited with introducing and popularizing the genre, to suggest that they leave the country as their lives might be at risk given the ‘religious sentiment’ and its anti-art ideology that Zia himself was otherwise propagating.Footnote ¹²⁵ Therefore, in its own realm of reforming identity, Pakistani national culture remains amenable to the lurking fear of what Faiz called the ‘religious school’ in his famous report on arts and culture.

At the same time, in the initial few decades after the creation of Pakistan, qawwali was seen as the major source of potential patronage among musicians. A famous anecdote that is often shared among gharana musicians is that after leaving Pakistan, Bade Ghulam Ali kept urging Ustad Fateh Ali Khan to follow suit or be prepared to sing just qawwali. Traditionally associated with shrine culture, the genre has remained one of the most ubiquitous forms of music culture in the region (especially in Sindh and Punjab) and, as Azhar, a classical vocalist from a non-hereditary background, says, ‘Even today if we ban qawwali here [in Pakistan], half of the music in the country would die.’

However, this ubiquity is attributed more to the traditional cultural and devotional practices associated with the shrines than to state-led patronage as such. Therefore, it would have been much easier if qawwali alone could be seen as presenting a synthesis of the problematic relationship between Muslim identity and music. The biggest blow to the understanding of qawwali as a valid and legitimate representational musical form of Muslim identity vis-à-vis Pakistani cultural identity came in a most tragic form: the murder of qawwal Amjad Sabri in 2016. The murder was claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and can be seen as part of a sequence of orthodox Islamists factions’ militant efforts to reform all deviant forms of Muslim identity—shrine culture and associated performative traditions being the prime target. It is equally worth mentioning here that Sabri was not the first victim of such violent attacks on qawwals. However, his tragic demise shook the whole country due to his fame and his popularity with the urban-based younger generations who otherwise seemed only remotely interested in the form we recognize as qawwali.

Sabri himself came to represent the seismic transition that one sees in the contemporary music consumption scene in Pakistan—from qawwali to sufi music. It was his appearance in Coke Studio’s season 09 alongside none other than Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, the nephew of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who rose to fame in the wake of his playback singing in Bollywood, that brought Sabri to much wider popular attention. Sabri’s murder and the subsequent country-wide shock, partly the result of the electronic media’s sensationalist coverage of news, did not entail any decisive step on the government’s part to protect musicians or music, as the state acts reluctantly owing to the sensitive (religious) nature of such incidents. Rather, the incident revealed the deep ideological fissures that underpin the contested place of music in contemporary Pakistani society and state-led cultural production.

On the one hand, it is such orthodox ideologies that have proven to be a strategic asset to the state. On the other, in the wake of the ‘War on Terror’, the state attempts to respond to the global political imperatives of the twenty-first century to create a soft image of the country among the international community. It is also along these coordinates that commercial avenues like Coke Studio respond to transforming musical tastes and sensibilities. The emphasis of creating a ‘soft image’ of Pakistan resonates well with the commercial agendas of Coke Studio; the latter successfully showcases, as its trademark logo says, the ‘voice of nation’ to wider global audiences. This finding also mirrors the transforming consumption patterns of the rising Pakistani middle classes,Footnote ¹²⁶ who, in their efforts to appear modern, distance themselves from the traditional modes of piety and worship associated with shrine culture. Qawwali rendered by a traditional ensemble, comprising hereditary musicians, thus comes to occupy a backward, uncouth place in the modernizing imagination. As Naveed, an emerging patron, reflects on these phenomena:

Be it customized mobile ringtones or the special Ramazan transmissions on TV and radio, ‘Tajdar-e-Haram’ has been a piety sensation for almost half a decade in the country. Therefore, in the domain of music, the rise of Sufi music and the decline of qawwali evidently maps onto this distinction: Sufi music with contemporary instrumentation appeals to the consumption-based sensibility of the new middle classes more than the qawwali, which is associated with rural shrine culture.

‘Folk’ music and culture have also been promoted by the state. For example, historically, emphasizing folk music and traditions as a distinct part of Pakistani identity has enabled the state to project its national music culture to a global audience while differentiating it from Indian national culture due to the latter’s perceived relationship with the classical music tradition.Footnote ¹²⁸ In the Faiz Report, while grappling with the issue of defining national identity and the role of religion, and the ensuing issue of the legitimacy of arts and culture, Faiz Ahmad Faiz strategically frames ‘folk’ as a primary element of Pakistani national cultural identity.Footnote ¹²⁹ Therefore, the National Institute of Folk Tradition and Heritage (NIFTH), known nationally by its more appealing name of Lok Virsa (Lok = folk, Virsa = heritage), is indebted to the policy aspirations of the Faiz Report.Footnote ¹³⁰ In the early days of the PNCA and NIFTH, folk had become the most coveted genre to be projected internationally as a part of Pakistani cultural troupes. Dilawar, a non-hereditary tabla ustad, narrates a pertinent anecdote:

It is not only musicians but patrons also who recognize that ‘folk’ is the dominant mode through which the state can engage with music and culture. Therefore, folk presents an alternative legitimacy to negotiate or participate within the limited space of state-led cultural reproduction (read projection). So much so that even the All-Pakistan Music Conference (APMC), the oldest music forum to have patronized classical music in the country, felt the need to play around with the idea, questioning the binary relationship of folk versus classical. One day ahead of their monthly programme, I arrived at Jameela’s, who runs this organization, to interview her. She opened the discussion in this way:

After the event, there was much talk among those musicians who make a point of their exclusive commitment to classical music and see the forum as the last refuge for presenting their much-practised art to an audience initiated into the refinements of Hindustani classical music. ‘Eh v arts councilan nu khush karan waasty pholk val tur paey ny (they too have resigned themselves to the idea of hollow [pholk] music to appease these arts councils)’ was the frequently exchanged comment. To clarify, when the term ‘folk’ is aspirated to an obvious extent in the Punjabi accent, it resembles another Punjabi word pholk, meaning hollow or, in certain instances, shallow. It may reflect a classical musician’s bias against folk music; however, in this context, it is the instrumental and non-serious engagement with the genre in state-led discourse around ‘Pakistani music’ that elicits such criticism from musicians. Within the institutional scope of the PNCA and NIFTH (Lok Virsa), the diversity of folk cultures is then harmlessly exported via the logic of projection and promotion of national identity abroad where it complements the rhetoric of diversity and plurality in the post-9/11 quest for a ‘soft image’ of the country.Footnote ¹³³

Most importantly, when it comes to the practical workings of these institutions, these priorities and preferences are mediated through the likes and dislikes of their individual heads, as Saleem, a hereditary vocalist, states: ‘Every head [of these institutions] brings their own mirasi [hereditary practitioner of music]. You know Tufail Niazi was not Aalam Lohar [implying that the former was not originally trained in folk singing as was the latter], but back then the head liked Niazi Sahib and he became a folk icon.’Footnote ¹³⁴ Therefore, when it comes to evaluating the place of music in state-led cultural production, one needs to go beyond the official narratives and policy discourses to attend to the contextual imperatives and compromises that underpin the actual working of post-colonial state institutions. The next section elucidates this aspect of cultural production in the Pakistani context.

Post-colonial bureaucracies, policy play, and managing culture

This comment by Raheem, a former recordist at PNCA and NIFTH, points to the limitations of the working of state institutions which is specific to the post-colonial context. In this context, policy is not a set of guidelines but a set of borrowed ideals that do not determine the course of action for the institution. At institutions like the PNCA and the NIFTH, those ideals are not drafted to envision a radical infrastructural change for cultural reproduction but rather are endorsed merely to appease a global audience. This is not to reduce the differences among political agendas and their cultural consequences that different political and military governments have held over the history of the country, a history which can be broadly categorized as: Ayub’s era (1960s) (state-led proactive participation in the cultural sphere),Footnote ¹³⁶ Pakistan People’s Party (1970s) (a progressive though selective patronage for arts and culture),Footnote ¹³⁷ Zia’s Islamization (1980s) (an era of censorship for the performing arts in particular), and the Musharraf era (1999–2008) which saw the emergence of the ‘NGO-led public sphere’Footnote ¹³⁸ and opening up of a private-public partnership for the working of cultural institutions like the PNCA and the NIFTH. However, overall, such historical narrations chart the trajectory of the relationship between culture and the state that has so often engendered the decline of the former over the past several decades.

This decline of music and culture’s patronage at the state institutional level is often narrated, in extant studies, through the lens of the loss of secular ideals enshrined in policy documents such as the Faiz Report.Footnote ¹³⁹ However, as this section delineates, existing literature’s tendency to critique the working of post-colonial state institutions through the examination of policy documents remains embedded in a Weberian/Eurocentric conceptualization of state bureaucracy.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This perspective is partially useful but falls short of pointing to the main problem: the limitations of a policy discourse in the face of the actual working conditions of the institutions, especially in the realm of arts and culture. In the following section, we will see how the mere documentary analysis of these policy documents does not suffice to consider the sociology of needs, imperatives, and compromises that underpin the working of a post-colonial state institution.Footnote ¹⁴¹

In existing cultural commentaries and academic critiques, the Faiz Report figures as a document of potential alternatives that, if they had been implemented, would have meant a different future for the arts and culture in Pakistan. For example, Afzal-Khan writes:

Without underestimating the significance of these critiques and commentaries amid an overall dearth of academic research on the topic, the evidence, on the contrary, suggests that the 2018 policy endorses almost all what is read as progressive in the Faiz Report. Acknowledging the existing challenges for the production and promotion of arts and culture in the contemporary society of Pakistan, the 2018 policyFootnote ¹⁴³ goes many steps further to make national cultural policy more inclusive and representative, such as a focus on diversity, the pluralistic nature of Pakistani culture, the need to engage the artist communities, and the promotion of music, theatre, dance, and visual arts. However, these lofty aims require us to assess these policies against the socio-political imperatives of the time that urge such ambitious policy aims. As such, when considering actual indicators of change, it is actually an evaluation of the scope of the institutional infrastructure that accommodates culture and music within the state’s overall ideological apparatus that becomes more significant for the researcher.

Therefore, policy discourse at the level of the institutions of international engagement, the PNCA and the NIFTH, does not simply reflect a course of action or set of guidelines to be followed by these institutions. On the contrary, the broadcasting institutions, which oversee national cultural reproduction at home, do not even have an explicitly formulated policy framework for their course of action and decision-making. In response to the aforementioned decision to discontinue Firdos-e-Gosh, a music programme featuring classical music, the then managing director of PTV, when contacted by the news agency, responded this way:

It is left up to the ‘thinking’ of the management more than any criterion or any evaluation framework supported by a certain policy guideline to make decisions about discontinuing a music programme. However, at the same, it hints at another important feature of post-colonial bureaucracy and how it can affect musical production at these state institutions: the role of the institution head, which, in the above case, is the managing director of PTV. If the existing literatureFootnote ¹⁴⁵ falls short in taking into account the restricted place of policy goals against the broader limitations pertaining to the working of these state cultural institutions, it rightly assumes—and, therefore, does not discuss in any critical terms—another characteristic of post-colonial bureaucracy, that is the role of the institution head in influencing the function and decision-making of the institution. The assumption is reflected in these studies’ own expectation of Faiz, as an individual with a certain political leaning, to bring radical change for the patronage of arts and culture in society. Therefore, what is worth further exploration is the extraordinary discretion and influence such individuals can exercise.

For example, the precarious and sporadic music programming at these broadcasting institutions owes to the efforts of the individuals who make such programmes logistically possible. In the music circles of Lahore, it is known that the programme concept of Firdos-e-Gosh was conceived of by a music ustad Joseph and Faheem Mazhar, the host himself, and its reception at PTV owed much to the efforts of Mohsin Jaffar, a producer at PTV. Similarly, another music programme, Virsa, is produced via an arrangement by which the host of the show, Mian Salli, takes care of the logistics. The programme is held at his lavish residence, a haveli. Maybe it was after being convinced of the institution’s lack of interest in music at all, that Mohsin Jaffer, the same producer, contacted Naveed, a music patron in Lahore, to seek his consent to broadcast the monthly programmes the latter holds at his residence. In other words, it is mainly individual effort that compensates for infrastructural decay and the lack of logistical support that sustains the music scene and musicians.

At institutions like the PNCA and the NIFTH, most of the administrative work is carried out by permanent employees hired through departmental recruitment or seconded from the central civil service. The head of the institution is a tenure-based position often offered to someone with the relevant professional profile—a poet, artist, or researcher in the field. Such a profile—resonant with the figure of a ‘cultural worker’ becoming ascendant in the field of managing and producing in the West during the second half of the twentieth centuryFootnote ¹⁴⁶—bodes well for negotiating with international organizations. In the post-colonial context of Pakistan, these cultural workers, having a taste and appreciation for the performing arts and stepping forward to help state institutions in the task of cultural bureaucracy and managing culture, hail from the urban upper-middle classes. Previously possessing a political bent towards progressive ideals, since the 1990s, many of them have adapted to the neo-liberal conditions of participation in the urban cultural scene. Faiz Ahmed Faiz is again the archetype of a progressive, literary character with a secular vision for Pakistan’s national project. While progressive figures like Faiz Ahmad Faiz fought against undemocratic political structures and became icons of popular resistance against state oppression, in the domain of cultural bureaucracy, the state had to rely on him for his relevant expertise and knowledge and therefore he was entrusted with the task of outlining a national cultural policy.

In the post-9/11 context, to tailor a draft policy document for the global needs of the twenty-first century, the consultation carried out for the 2005 policy required the participations of NGO-liberals and people of arts and culture from civil society. This marked a tension between these ‘cultural workers’ and the formal babus (denoting the powerful bureaucracy that recruits officers through a centralized civil service recruitment process) at these institutions. Shagufta, the current director general of the PNCA, who has served in the same position in NIFTH, narrating the challenges said: ‘These babus (bureaucrats) are the biggest hindrance to my vision. They themselves know nothing about culture and neither would they let anyone else do something.’Footnote ¹⁴⁷ However, aware of their contractual position at these institutions, they would be careful to not challenge the authority that rests with the traditional bureaucracy.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The majority of the musicians I interviewed held quite an antagonistic view of these institution heads and complained about their lack of support. As Rashid, a hereditary musician, deploying the wit that is typical of his community said: ‘Whether it is Faiz or Fauzia [the then director general of the PNCA], nothing will much change for our Fiaaz [a tabla player sitting next to us]!’Footnote ¹⁴⁹

At the PNCA and the NIFTH, employment opportunities for music practitioners remain precarious, mainly project-based and contractual. Given the uncertain nature of the contract, the artists keep looking for alternative opportunities. In certain instances where local knowledge and nous is required for conducting the project at hand, hereditary musicians might be hired as a gatekeeper, while decision-making regarding music programming rests with the institution head. For example, the PNCA’s Lahore office organizes a cultural dance troupe with the purpose of representing Punjab on international cultural visits. The troupe consists of dancers, nautch girls, mostly hailing from Heera MandiFootnote ¹⁵⁰ (the red-light area in Lahore, formerly associated with courtesan culture), all of whom are provided with annual or bi-annual contracts. This troupe is led by a tabla player who is also from Heera Mandi with considerable experience and music knowledge. However, most of the music selected for ceremonial events, at the national and the international levels, was the choice of the head of the institution. The purpose of the tabla player is to ‘manage’ those dancers as he, presumably, understands them well due to hailing from the same background. In other words, he is hired primarily as an intermediary with an informal managerial role contingent on a presumed cultural familiarity with the nautch culture.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Furthermore, with private-public partnership almost becoming an administrative norm in the twenty-first century,Footnote ¹⁵² the decline of music production by state cultural institutions consequently benefits the commercial and non-profit sector that emerges as a major client for the otherwise under-utilized, physical infrastructure of these institutions. Arts councils, both at the provincial and federal levels, consist of a performance space that is meant to facilitate events relating to music, dance, theatre, etc. Some of these venues enjoy the status of historical sites and figure significantly in popular memory for their association with performance cultures. For example, the open-air Bagh-e-Jinnah (previously called the Lawrence Garden) Theatre in Lahore was built in 1942 and has been a venue for annual and monthly programmes of the APMC for decades.

However, in the wake of the gradual decline of state-led patronage of art and music, the performance space at these councils is rented out to private events, related but not limited to music and the performing arts. For example, some of these venues are also used for theatrical comic performances,Footnote ¹⁵³ popularly called ‘stage-dramas’. Often frowned upon as featuring morally improper dance moves and objectionable music lyrics, the term ‘stage dramas’ refers to Punjabi theatrical comedies that emerged as a popular form of entertainment in the big and small cities of Punjab after the decline of the film industry, especially since the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The 1970s witnessed commercial influence on the programming of Radio Pakistan. Ironically, while Bhutto’s time-period (1973–1977) is associated with the nationalization of business enterprises and the patronage of arts and culture through public institutions,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Radio Pakistan, previously run through the Pakistan Broadcast Service, was turned into the Pakistan Broadcast Corporation (PBC) during the same time period. This statutory transformation made music programming amenable to the imperative of commercial jingles and advertisement. As Raheem, who has the experience of working with the institution back then, says:

While the decline of music programming on radio is often narrated, along with many other reasons, in terms of its statutory transformation to a ‘corporation’ and commercial imperatives, the emergence and development of PTV as an institution in 1964 also owed much to the efforts of private shareholders. It was industrial conglomerates led by Syed Wajid Ali that provided technical and financial assistance to the government for this initiative in the formative years of post-colonial Pakistan’s economy.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ It is no wonder then that, as Raheem, a former recordist at the NIFTH and the PNCA, tells us, all industrial commercials during the few years after PTV’s launch were free, without any fee at all. What is worth noting here, both in the case of the corporatization of the radio and industrial conglomerates envisioning and facilitating the inception of PTV, is that the private-public partnership that is often associated with the post-Cold War era and the triumph of neoliberalism figured much earlier in the post-colonial context of Pakistan.

Whether it can be attributed to the political specificities of formation of the Pakistani state, often rendered in the notion of the ‘fragile state’,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ or whether it may only be evident in the case of cultural institutions and radio and television, owing to the state’s relationship with arts and music, is a debatable point that needs further exploration. Also, while outsourcing and renting to or partnering with the private sector, do state institutions completely forsake control over music and art content and programming? In this regard, as the evidence suggests, it depends on the relevance of the respective institution for the logic of national integration. Particularly for international projection and showcasing, the advent of NGOs was crucial to the PNCA and the NIFTH as they proved instrumental in the state’s efforts to reposition itself against its image associated with religious extremism in a mass-mediated global world.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Certain roles and functions pertaining to the formulation of national cultural policy are also outsourced to these NGOs; as Raheem concluded: ‘The NGO world of Islamabad is the audience of these institutions [the PNCA and the NIFTH].’Footnote ¹⁶⁰