Pakistan, by Master Altaf

Ali Aftab Saeed brings forth a forgotten masterpiece

Pakistan is a complex country. Having grown up there and spent most of my adult life in Pakistan, it is hard to explain it to someone from outside the country. A country situated in South Asia, bordered by India, China, Afghanistan and Iran, with a majority Muslim population, equipped with nuclear weapons, and a ruling elite dominated by the military establishment, Pakistan resembles countries in sub-Saharan Africa or South America more than its neighbors. Salman Rushdie called it ‘insufficiently imagined’. The country can be explained better in poetry than in prose (with rare exceptions, like Manto).

In comes Master Altaf, a relatively obscure name in Pakistani literary circles, who spent most of his life in mofussil towns of Punjab. He wrote about the issues of his time, and managed to weave the narrative within traditional romantic poetry. I was not aware of Master Altaf until Ali Aftab Saeed decided to resurrect it in form of an album (Janjan Te Janazay).

Ali Aftab rose to prominence in the early 2010s with his blockbuster song, Aalu Anday, which starts off as a cheesy song about preferring chicken over mashed eggs and potatoes and then goes on to hit the Sharif dynasty, Imran Khan’s favored treatment by judges especially the chief justice, extension for the army chief, valorization of Mumtaz Qadri and Ajmal Kasab and neglect of Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate, Dr. Abdus Salam. Then band members are seen holding placards displaying some hard/harsh ‘truths’ about former army chief Kayani’s relations with PMLN, superior judiciary’s particular distaste for the PPP, Imran Khan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf being a modern, clean-shaven version of old-school Islamist party (Jamaat e Islami) and as a gag, being sponsored by ‘Zionists’. There’s the line about ignoring Blackwater, since most attacks are inside jobs. In a three-minute song, there is a lot of information to unpack. I would go as far as to call this song a mini-version of Billy Joel’s ‘We didn’t start the fire’, but with a Pakistani twist. One could write thousands of words on each of the topics discussed, but I guess this three-minute song is worth thousands of words.

In my opinion, it was the first mainstream ‘subversive’ song in Pakistan. Even the name of the band (Beyghairat Brigade) was a fuck-you to the self-appointed morality police. Music Bands of yore had previously played within certain cultural and thematic boundaries that this song upended. Two other songs that come close to this were ‘Inquilaab’ by Junoon (which served as PTI’s first campaign anthem in 1997) and Laal’s ‘Umeed-e-Seher’ (which was released with an evocative accompanying video at the height of Lawyer’s Movement in 2007-8). ‘Aalu Anday’ is a timeless masterpiece, since history keeps repeating itself in Pakistan. It is as poignant in 2023 as it was in 2011-12.

Following ‘Aalu Anday’ was going to be a big ask. Ali Aftab was not deterred though. He released ‘Dhinak Dhinak’, a mock-wedding song that mocked the military establishment with a thousand cuts in a three-minute song. Predictably, soon after its release, YouTube (where the song was released), was banned in Pakistan. Even when YouTube was unblocked, this song remained banned for a long time. This ban and the overreaction to the song revealed that the tide was turning. Pakistan had gotten rid of its last military dictator in 2008, and the tussle between political players and military was playing out in the late 2000s/early 2010s, pendulum swinging one way or another. Aalu Anday arrived in the middle of the PPP/coalition government (2008-13), while Dhinak Dhinak was released near the end.

I contacted Ali in 2012 for a potential project and we have known each other since then. In 2016 or mid-2017, I met him at my place and he was enthused to tell me about his latest project. He had found Master Altaf’s work, had visited his house, and bought the rights to his ghazals. He was gracious to even sang some of them for an audience of one (me!).

Four years later, he teamed up with Saad Sultan and produced ‘Sub Nu’. A love ballad that doubles as a critique of Pakistan’s power structures. This four-minute song with Ali’s powerful voice, Master Altaf’s lyrics and Saad Sultan’s production, starts off as a romantic song, and goes on to critique class divide, load-shedding, land mafia, Pakistan’s aloofness on the international stage, and flooding. In its messaging, the ghazal is reminiscent of Faiz’s ‘Mujh se Pehli si Muhabbat’ which starts off as a poem of love and ends up as a tribute to the proletarian class. Similarly, ‘Sub Nu’ diagnoses the various disease ailing Pakistani with simple lyrics, in the style of Habib Jalib. Master Altaf’s imagery is easy to understand for a layperson. This amalgamation of simple imagery and hard-hitting critique is rare in Urdu literary circles. While Master Altaf has passed away, his legacy lives on, in the voice of Ali Aftab Saeed.

One can argue that songs don’t create change or improve anyone’s life. Aalu Anday was released more than a decade ago, and the issues mentioned in it are still affecting the country. While songs, or any other art form, cannot replace effective political action, it can inspire hope, it can motivate people and it can serve as a record of the zeitgeist (borrowing from Milan Kundera here). In Pakistan’s context, a song like Aalu Anday or Sab Nu can serve as an escape for a young person searching for their county’s faultlines. It can serve as an anthem of dissent, of resistance, of a faint hope that things will change.