5.29 - Feriyal Aslam

Join us for our next Chew On This
Tuesday May 29 at 12pm
Kaufman Hall Conference Room 160

Feriyal Aslam presents

Choreographing Inclusivity in Pakistan:

The Tree, the Dancer, and the City

In this presentation Feriyal introduces a section of her PhD dissertation project, centered on life
and choreographies of Indu Mitha which provide the foci to probe broader questions of the place
of the outliers, i.e. Muslims in India, and non-Muslims and “non-Pakistanis” in Pakistan (Post
1971), in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition of India. Indu’s choreography Islamabad qa muqaddas
daraxht (The Sacred Tree of Islamabad) facilitates the author on a journey to occluded parts of her
hometown Islamabad, to its rich Buddhist and pluralistic histories in sharp contrast with the twenty-
first-century tragic fate of Islamabad’s historical Bodhi tree. The dancing bodies of Indu’s male
students also from a marginalized Christian community provide another contrast to founding father
Jinnah’s vision for an inclusive Pakistan. The dancer and her tactics, the tree, the city of Islamabad
and its occluded histories serve as call to promote inclusivity in Pakistan, bring forth voices of
the underrepresented in Pakistani society today namely: non-Muslim communities in Pakistan,
underrepresented Muslims, and occluded Islamic values such as muhabbat, amen, ravadarie (love, peace, and good behavior).

Bio: Feriyal Amal Aslam is a Ph.D candidate at Department of World Arts and Cultures at the
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), commencing her dissertation this quarter. A
Fulbright (2004-2009) and East-West Center (2005-2006) alumni, currently a Teaching Fellow for
a unique Urdu-Hindi program at the Asian Languages and Cultures Department at UCLA. Trained
as social and cultural anthropologist with an MA from the University of Hawaii (UH) and an MSc
from Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan, her first dissertation traced the genealogical and cultural
history of the Rubabis, a clan of Muslim performers in Sikh Gurdwaras for generations, who reside in
present day Lahore. Her present project in occluded, contested histories is taking her towards soft-
ball diplomacy approach using aesthetic and performative practices, people to people diplomacy
towards better solutions to peaceful relations between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.