Pakistan: Geography of romance

Jump to Comments

We are posting this brilliant piece by a Karachi based author that indicates the new contours of relationships and the transformations that are taking place in the realm of romance, relationships and marriage… (Raza Rumi)

Majed Akhter writes on the emerging Geography of romance in Pakistan:

 Not only does the novel spatiality of cyberspace offer great potential for romance, Pakistani youth, and corporations, are responding vigorously to the opportunity. To what other goal, if not a new geography of romance, are the giant billboards that offer “completely free, late-night mobile conversations” striving for

The generation gap in Pakistan is increasingly apparent in more and more facets of life to the youth, and the older generations.

Let’s take, for example, romance in urban Pakistan. Once you get past the trappings of diamonds and roses, gaudy weddings, and cheesy pop songs, what you have is a site of extreme intergenerational and ideological contestation.

Understanding romance or the process of falling in love, through the lens of gender, class, and religion, has already been done quite well.

But the spatiality of human relations is also important to how we act out our ideas of romance. Looking at romance through the lens of human geography can yield insights into this most enigmatic of human experiences.

We must take as a starting point that the concept of romance is dynamic. How we fall in love today is very different from how it used to happen two hundred — or even fifty — years ago. Although it is a different matter altogether to define what love is exactly or decide whether it is a universally standard experience, it is hard to argue that the process of arriving at love has stayed the same throughout time. For example, my father met my mother on their wedding day. It would be ludicrous for them to expect me to ascribe to the same notion of romance.

The single most significant factor affecting the dynamic geographies of romance is the increased physical mobility of women and the number of legitimate spaces they occupy. According to the Penguin Atlas of Human Sexual Behavior, about 60 percent of marriages around the world are still arranged. Contrary to Western belief, this does not preclude the notion of romance. What is usually idealised, at least in Pakistan, is the romance that occurs immediately after marriage. The secret surprises that emerge as the young couple gets to know each other, and the initial coyness flowering into warm intimacy is the stuff that respectable Pakistani romance is made of.

But this notion of romance is rooted firmly in the idea that marriages should be arranged by parents or elders of the family, which is, itself, at least partly, rooted in young women being spatially segregated from young men. After all, how is a young man to meet a nice eligible lady, when all the nice eligible ladies, by definition, do not enter public spaces?

This obviously is no longer the case, at least for middle and upper class Pakistanis. The institution of arranged marriage, and the notion of romance associated with it, is being rocked by the increased spatial ambition of women in today’s urban Pakistan. There are now spaces that are legitimate for ‘nice ladies’, but that are nonetheless in the public sphere. Universities and offices are just two examples of spaces where women have made massive inroads.

These dynamic geographies have expanded the possibilities for romance; they have modified the ways in which we fall in love. Whereas before, a single picture (if that) was all you had to fuel your passion before marriage, full-out courtships are possible in the new legitimate spaces. I am not sure if it is as novel a sight, but lovers’ strolls in Jinnah Bagh or Model Town Park can only have gotten more open and legitimate with the increased geographical scope of women, not less.

Another major factor impacting geographies of romance is technology. The internet and, especially, mobile phones have opened up a whole new kind of space for both women and men: virtual space.

Although a young man dialling randomly, ad nauseam, until he hits gold is not normally seen as romantic, it is not much different than young men in the West frequenting pick-up bars every night until they get lucky.

For those more comfortable with the anonymity provided by the written word, chat rooms and messenger services like ICQ and MIRC provide the perfect ‘place’ to meet someone. Not only does the novel spatiality of cyberspace offer great potential for romance, Pakistani youth, and corporations, are responding vigorously to the opportunity. To what other goal, if not a new geography of romance, are the giant billboards that offer “completely free, late-night mobile conversations” striving for?

Yet another way that the idea of romance, although not specifically its geographies, has been affected is through the increased exposure to capitalistic (normally read western) notions of romance. Universalisms contain a commercial appeal derived from their standardisation. If you can standardise a commodity, it reduces the costs of selling and marketing the product. Witness the wholesale acceptance of the standard package that heretofore only Western romance ascribed to: flowers, diamonds, cards, hotels, vacations, and fancy meals. It is hard not to notice that all of these are for sale, and all have simultaneously colonised the idea of romance in emerging economies like Pakistan.

This cultural influence is different from the spatial influences I pointed out earlier, because it acts not through spatial conditions, but via the power of representation and symbol. It is not contradictory to mention this type of influence in the same breath as spatial influences though; the interconnections between representation and reality are very complex and the lines that separate them often blurry. Consider: how would the images of commodity romance be available for consumption without the material conditions that make the mass purchase of TVs possible?

Failure to accept the fact that romance is a product of material conditions, among them spatial possibilities, has led to much resentment and resistance from older generations to the changing forms of romance.

The report on authority figures clamping down on a romantic space (‘Tryst abandoned’, Daily Times, January 15) at GCU is a case in point. Of course, there are factors more sinister than stodgy old party-poopers at play. The patriarchal habit of delegating women to be the manifestation of society’s moral condition has justified restrictions on their personal mobility and freedom in the past, and continues to do so today. The attitudes and material conditions that used to underlie those acts are rapidly changing though, and it remains to be seen whether the older generations can keep up.

It is important to recognise that not all changes in romance have to do with aping the West, as older folks might decry. As I have tried to show, the dynamic geographies of romance are responsible for at least some of the changes that we are experiencing as a society.

Of course, some members of the older generation understand this, and are content with the older forms being merely acknowledged. Thus, “arranged” marriages become “approved” marriages, and “romance” becomes the more sanitised “understanding”. Not wanting to betray the romantic ambitions of my generation, but at the same time understanding the difficulty of letting go, my response to this cautious change in labels is: good enough, for now.

Majed Akhter is an economist based in Karachi. This was published in Daily Times on January 24, 2007.

4 Comments

Filed under Love, Society, urban