He is a classicist, so I would say: understatement. When he reads the Urdu classics he enchants us with an understated rendition. Ghalib or Mir would wake him from his deep-seated restraint; give him Faiz’s ingrained feminine instinct of bearing the pain of someone else’s power projection; don’t give him Allama Iqbal’s longing for power and dominance.

He was born in Lyallpur, a city that was cultured before 1947 because of its non-Muslim majority but is brutally visceral today presided over by the headquarters of Ahle Hadith following its renaming after a Saudi king. He graduated from Government College Lahore, worked at Radio Pakistan before joining Radio Australia. He was a debater in Urdu at GC, but was finally drawn to the stage in England, to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Reading his book A Carrot is a Carrot (Ushba Publishing International, 2012) I realised he is nothing but what his father carefully nurtured him to become.

His father loved classical music and patronised its gifted practitioners. And he taught English and loved the stage. Out of this came Zia Mohyeddin. People who dote on him in Lahore while he reads his Urdu purple patches should know it is all a son’s payback time.

The book is full of people who made his life meaningful. Among them you find maestros of Indian music, and if you follow him to England, then it is Peter Ustinov who took to him. For Zia he embodied the ideal that only Athens and then Renaissance city-states seriously pursued: supremacy of the spoken word. Another Ustinov will not come; another Zia will not come either.

Against ideological brainwash

Can I quote something from the book? I will focus first on Zia’s sadness over the ideological brainwash of Pakistan.

He writes: ‘Give any organisation power to generate beliefs and it will make, within 20 years, the majority of the population believe that two and two make five. So much for an authoritarian state, but even in a democracy governments tend to control thought. (p.139)

‘The power of authority over belief in the present day is vastly greater than before. No one can deny, in face of evidence, that it is easy to produce a population of fervent patriots. It ought to be equally easy to produce a population of sane, thinking people, but authorities do not wish to do so, since then it would be difficult to admire those in authority’. (p.140)

There is an observation made in a chapter in the book about Shakespeare’s resistance to Reformation in England:
‘Censorship arrived for the first time in England in 1543. Shakespeare grew up in a Catholic family that remained defiantly Catholic in an anti-Catholic era. There were Catholics on both sides of his family. His relatives and acquaintances suffered appallingly, for their faith and beliefs. During his early years, a wave of anti-Catholicism had spread throughout England’.

Zia tells us that Shakespeare had embedded coded references in his plays that described Protestantism as ‘low’ and ‘dark’. There were of course other ‘incidents’ in his plays, such as the imperiled friars in Romeo and Juliet and the Catholic priest in Much Ado about Nothing. Shakespeare also described marriage as sacrament when Queen Elizabeth had decreed marriage as a non-sacramental institution requiring no priests for solemnisation.

Shakespeare and Reformation

If I may add here an insight that might well be wrong: Shakespeare was part of a culture that Catholicism in decline had produced. He spoke of personages of the Renaissance that the champions of the Reformation thought were heretical. The father of the European Reformation, Martin Luther, and the father of the English Reformation, Henry the eighth, both died in the year 1546-47. Luther’s assault on the Papal authority was based on Catholicism’s coalescence with pagan cultures and with individualism. In Luther’s eyes, Catholicism had become Low Church. He laid down the doctrine of religious certainty based on biblical literalism. Protestantism he proclaimed was High Church, Catholicism was Low Church.

The Lutheran movement, which led to a long period of religious wars in Europe, was like the Wahhabism of today and was against the culture that was born of the cross-fertilisation of Catholicism with Europe’s pagan past, somewhat similar to Barelvism in Pakistan as it is described by Ernest Gellner in Post-modernism, Reason and Religion (Routledge 1992), p.19: ‘High Islam stresses the severely monotheistic and monocratic nature of Islam; the most characteristic institution of Low Islam is the saint cult, where the saint is more often than not a living rather than a dead personage’. Low Islam is a culture of entertainment and creative assimilation of local elements extraneous to Islam.

When religion loses its punishing aspects it begins to coalesce with culture. It may happen the other way around too, but in most revivalist religious movements culture is equated with heresy and unacceptable innovation.

The Reformation could have continued its High Church persecution of culture had it not been for Dutch humanism and the appearance of personages like Bacon (d.1626) and Newton (d.1727), one announcing induction as the basic principle of knowledge, the other establishing the foundation of all scientific inquiry: the law of probability as opposed to the doctrine of certainty propounded by Luther that led to persecution of the Jews and to religious wars. Enlightenment in the 18th century brought in relativism of knowledge, causing tolerance of the variant worldview.

Fifty years after the death of Henry the Eighth, Shakespeare was under threat from the Anglican hatred of culture, but fifty more years had to pass to see yet another bout of Puritan persecution of all kinds of entertainment under Cromwell.

What humanised Reformation and later Protestantism in Europe did not happen in Islam.

Conversion of Pakistan to High Church

High Church in Pakistan was born out of the requirement of the new state to legislate according to Islamic law or sharia. Even though the Muslim League leaders were liberal and secular in their approach they found the mystically inclined Barelvi shrine ill-equipped to guide the Islamic state. Like most radical religious movements, Deobandism grew in the cities while Barelvism survived in the countryside. Today, High Islam is dominant inside the state and in the thinking of elements trying to overthrow the state, with their hatred of culture as purveyor of entertainment and tolerance of different identities.

Shakespeare would have been persecuted today in Pakistan. As a Muslim he would have clung to Barelvism that allows culture to some extent but would have balked at its obsession with blasphemy. What he faced in England in his day must also be felt by Zia.

Zia Mohyeddin is high-culture, distant, and un-talkative; but when Lahoris go to hear him read on the 31st of December every year they know instinctively that he is quintessentially a language animal. He has introduced us to a new way of inflecting the Urdu sentence without us being aware of what he has done. He has removed the thunder of doggerel rendition as practiced by Zulfiqar Bukhari, and has read even the rhymed couplet in a spoken rhythm. I have always tried to explain to myself what he does to the text that rivets us so. Is it that he ignores the rhyme, the only uncreative thing in Urdu poetry?

Zia provided the answer to the mystery of our declamatory recitations in his other book Theatrics (2012). Talking of the Parsee theatre of Bombay, he writes: ‘When the Parsees tackled the text in Urdu (a foreign tongue to them) they followed the pattern of the English actors, that is to say, they spoke their lines sonorously, over-inflecting the rhyming words and laying undue stresses on line-ending words. This style became the hallmark of Urdu acting for generations. When non-Parsees (towards the end of the 19th century) entered the arena to play leading parts, they, too, took up the bombastic style.’

What will pacify Zia Mohyeddin? | Khaled Ahmed |  16-22 November 2012 | The Friday Times

Zia Mohyeddin
Zia Mohyeddin, now a legend in his lifetime, is a man of many parts. His long career spans acting, directing, writing, broadcasting and a wide range of aesthetic disciplines.Born in Faisalabad, he graduated in 1949 from Government College, Lahore

Parsi theatre — the golden age of Urdu drama by Intizar Husain