M75 Women Artists of Pakistan

Women Artists of Pakistan Manifesto (1983)

Early in 1983 Pakistan was shocked by the brutal manner in which the authorities repressed a small demonstration protesting against the introduction of a law that would, in the eyes of the courts, give women’s legal evidence half the value of men’s testimony. The incident focused attention in the country on the appalling treatment of women and minorities, which had been steadily deteriorating since General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s coup d’état in 1977. It also provoked a group of fifteen women artists in Lahore into privately meeting in Model Town at the home of the artist Salima Hashmi and writing a manifesto decrying the oppression they endured. Composed while the country’s showcase National Exhibition was being staged at the Alhamra Art Centre, this remonstration was the first time that women artists had overtly identified their work with the political struggle for female emancipation, employing it to criticize the government’s policies and subvert traditional attitudes.

Due to the political circumstances of the time, the manifesto was never made public. But as one of the signatories, the artist and academic Salima Hashmi (b. 1942), has stated, simply the act of putting their names to the paper empowered the women to become more outspoken in their art against misogyny.

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We, the women artists of Pakistan,

having noted with concern the decline in the status and conditions of life in Pakistani women; and having noted the adverse effects of the anti-reason, anti-arts environment on the quality of life in our homeland; and having noted the significant contribution the pioneering women artists have made to the cause of arts and art education in Pakistan; and believing as we do in the basic rights of all men, women and children to a life free from want and enriched by the joys of fruitful labour and cultural self-realisation; and our commitment, as practitioners and teachers of the arts, to the noblest ideals of a free, rational and civilised existence:

affirm the following principles to guide us in our struggle for the cultural development of our people to serve as the manifesto of the women artists of Pakistan.

  1. We acknowledge the outstanding contribution made by women artists to the conservation and promotion of the artistic genius of our people and their role in pioneering art education in the country; we salute them for this and for their determination to spread out at all levels of education and to all strata of society.
  2. We unreservedly support the Pakistani women’s struggle for equality of rights, status, and dignity with menfolk.
  3. We call upon women engaged in any creative field in Pakistan to stand together for the cause of women’s emancipation not only from all constraints, perpetrated in the name of law and morality, but also from all forms of prejudice, superstition and cant.
  4. We recognise, respect and uphold the right of every woman artist to her own faith, her individual approach to content, form, medium, method, technique and style in the realisation of her artistic ideals. And we denounce any attempt, overt or covert, to suppress, inhibit, control or regiment her artistic functioning, or to interfere otherwise with her basic right to freedom of expression.
  5. We vigorously condemn the attitude which minimises woman’s constructive role in society, and attempts to restrict her active and rightful participation in society.
  6. We condemn the attitude which distorts the original and age-old role of woman as the giver and sustainer of life, love and affection and vulgarises it into an image of obscenity.
  7. We call upon all women artists to take their place in the vanguard of the Pakistani women’s struggle to retain their pristine image and their rightful place in society.

So that we may replace in the lives of our people despair with hope, brutality with compassion, darkness with light, and anarchy with culture, and leave the world a happier, more beautiful and more peaceful a place than we found it.

Signed by 15 Women Artists of Lahore – 1983

Rabia Zuberi, Abbasi Abidi, Mamoona Bashir, Salima Hashmi, Lala Rukh, Talat Ahmad, Zubeda Javed, Sheherezade Alam, Jalees Nagi, Birjees Iqbal, Riffat Alvi, Meher Afroz, Nahid, Qudsia Nisar, Veeda Ahmed