The Burgers of Pakistan
Living under terrorism and orthodoxy, the country’s youth search for their own path
I remember it all too vividly: the tremors I felt in my body after being caught breaking my school’s cardinal rule.
“Eman Omar, I will see you in my office,” said Saima Asim, or Teacher Saima, as we called her. Her voice, as I remember it, was ear-splittingly nasal.
Each day at 7:45 a.m., students at the all-girls Lahore Grammar School gathered in the courtyard of our octagonal, red-brick building for an assembly. School assemblies were like a manual on acceptable forms of behavior. We were instructed to refrain from political and religious discussions in class — these were distasteful. We were also told that wearing the hijab, a headscarf, made us “fundos,” or Muslim fundamentalists. And most of all, perhaps, we were not to speak Urdu. Though this was our native language, it was associated in the minds of our teachers with the lower socio-economic classes. It was to be spoken in Urdu class, and not outside of it. If we were caught conversing in Urdu, we were penalized.
It was at the morning assembly that I had been called out for doing just that.
The assembly had not yet begun. Shehrbano Muggo, a bubbly and rotund classmate, had brought a new shipment of Jolly Ranchers to school from Dubai, and I was hoping to buy some. In 2008, it was very rare to find imported candy in the supermarkets in Pakistan, so Shehrbano, despite having the reputation of being the school’s shrewdest candy seller, became our go-to person for all things candy and chocolate. Like the family of industrialists she hailed from, Shehrbano understood the demands of the time and devised a plan to meet them. Her family owned Kashmir Banaspati, Pakistan’s largest cooking oil manufacturer. Perhaps this made her naturally drawn to the food trade, with a sense for how to make it lucrative.
I was eager to purchase three watermelon Jolly Ranchers from Shehrbano: one for myself and one for each of my brothers, Nadir and Danyal. I haggled and bargained, just as my mother would with the shop owners at the various bazaars across the city. Shehrbano was stubborn and would not reduce her rates — she told us that the dollar exchange rate with the Pakistani rupee meant the prices would stay as is, especially with the candies being imported. Shehrbano was right. We were living in Pakistan, a poor country, which, at the time, was facing one of history’s most difficult global financial crises. Pakistan was struggling with not just a precarious economy, but a shaky law and order situation. The Pakistani Taliban was on the rise, which affected the life of the country, and our city, very much. For these reasons and more, Pakistan could not afford many imports at the time.
I spoke with Shehrbano just as I had seen our mothers communicate with various shop owners during bargaining, in Urdu. That’s when Teacher Saima caught me.
Teacher Saima was born and raised in Lahore and attended Kinnaird College, an elite all-girls institution set up by Christian missionaries in 1913. This college produced some of society’s most “progressive” and “intellectual” women. Graduates often snatched some of the most successful, eligible bachelors. That had been the case for Teacher Saima, who was married and had two daughters, both of whom attended my school. Her elder daughter was one year below me; it’s possible she was embarrassed by how tough Teacher Saima was on us, how many things she forbade us to do. She also denounced girls who wore the hijab, because she thought it tarnished the “elite” and “Western” perception of the school. There was just one girl in my class who wore the hijab, Minahil Rehman, and Teacher Saima criticized her relentlessly. In the hallways of our red-brick school, we heard rumblings that Teacher Saima was going through a rocky divorce with her husband, leaving her as their family’s sole provider.
When she found me waiting for her in her office after catching me speaking Urdu on that day, Teacher Saima, clearly enraged, called me a “village idiot.” She explained that speaking Urdu was simply not how a young lady was to behave at one of Lahore’s most elite institutions. “Cream of the crop,” she would often say, of her students; this was in contrast to public school students, whom she would often classify as “everyone else.”
I was not offended by Teacher Saima’s comments; in our family, we were expected to know Urdu because it was important for our work in the rural areas where we owned land. My parents viewed their ties to these rural areas as sacrosanct, going back hundreds of years. And although our bread and butter in Lahore was and is in real estate, my father has always enjoyed traveling to a small village called Mokal, in Kasur district, which borders India to the East and is just two hours away from Lahore. Here, he visits the small orchard, just over twelve acres, called “Eman Orchards,” and grows oranges, lemons and grapefruits. As a result, my household has always been multilingual. We speak Urdu and English fluently and use Punjabi to communicate when traveling outside Lahore and into the rural areas where it is widely spoken. My friends, on the other hand, were very urban, and grew up in the city, and were often far more comfortable in English than anything else.
I grappled with these two very disparate value systems when I was growing up. My upbringing in urban Lahore taught me that English was the language that symbolized opportunity, progress, and modernity, and thus should be the sole mode of communication. But this meant belittling the very languages that were being spoken not just in my home, but by the millions of people living on Pakistan’s urban and rural peripheries.
There was another factor, too, which was very active during this period: the emboldened Pakistani Taliban, which affected the life of the country, and our city, immensely. In 2008, just a few months before I tried to buy the Jolly Ranchers from Shehrbano, the Taliban started a terror campaign against their opponents, namely people who wanted to modernize and secularize Pakistan. In December, 2007, Taliban militants killed Benazir Bhutto, who was running for prime minister. Following Bhutto’s murder, the Taliban blew up tribal elders who went against them in the north. This became a recurring event. In March 2008, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at the entrance to the Pakistan Naval War College, located on the Mall, in Lahore’s historic district. My brothers were enrolled at Aitchison College, a private school (grades 1 to 13) two doors away from the Navy College. They felt the impact of the explosions, including their deafening noise. Schools in Lahore were shut down for months afterward. The threats from the Taliban continued. Depending on how severe the terrorist threat was, the government decided when schools would shut or remain open by issuing directives on television.
It’s hard to say how much of this affected what Teacher Saima told us — whether she associated Urdu and the hijab with the Taliban. I know that for many people, the Taliban’s terror campaign from this period is what made them give up on Pakistan. Or had she always thought this way? After catching me speaking English with Shehrbano, Teacher Saima lectured me on why I would benefit more from speaking in English than in Urdu. Knowing English, she said, would make me more presentable to universities in the West, and — if I was fortunate enough to attend them — I could make a good career for myself.
On the one hand, I found what Teacher Saima said deeply disturbing: it went against a lot of what I was learning at home. On the other hand, I did really want to leave Pakistan. And speaking English well was one way of getting there.
I began to brush up on my English, familiarizing myself with the works of Harper Lee and Stephen King, while distancing myself from the epics of Altaf Fatima, Mirza Athar Baig, and Qurat-ul-Ain Haider, my favorite Urdu writers. I always considered Urdu the more poetic of the two languages, but it was The Bell Jar and The Great Gatsby that were read and discussed by my peers at school.
My family was equal parts appalled and baffled by the school’s disparaging attitude toward the Urdu language. This attitude hurt my maternal grandmother the most. In her time, Urdu was a powerful unifying force among the Pakistani population in their long-standing struggle for independence from the British. It being sidelined broke her heart. She feared the erasure of the language that Pakistan was built upon, and she feared, too, the return of the imperialist hegemony of English language and culture. At the same time, my family accepted that for me to flourish in a Western environment, I had to learn English. They wanted me to receive the best education, though not at the expense of forgetting my heritage. All of this left me feeling very confused.
I n 1947, Pakistan was founded as a separate homeland for Muslims, who lamented their position as third-ranking citizens on the subcontinent, behind both the Hindu majority and the British colonizers. But since its inception, Pakistan has grappled with its identity on the global stage. It started off as a secular country that welcomed people from all religious and social backgrounds. However, in 1973, the young country evolved into an Islamic Republic under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This dramatic ideological shift, from secularism to religiosity, was further aggravated by a slew of historical events. A particularly nasty one was the 1974 Parliament Act, which declared that Ahmadis, a minority sect in Islam, were non-Muslims. This led to their widespread persecution and caused them to flee Pakistan and settle in other parts of the world, including the United States.
In her 2017 book The New Pakistani Middle Class, anthropologist Ammara Maqsood explores the role that religion and politics have played in inculcating distinct values and beliefs among various social classes in Pakistan. To do this, she zooms in on middle class urbanites in Lahore, and dissects the way that language and religion have been a means of identification and self-representation among social groups throughout the country’s history.
Maqsood describes Pakistan’s urban citizens as feeling that their country’s development as a modern, progressive nation was interrupted in the 1980s by military dictator General Zia-Ul-Haq’s policies of Islamization. Zia-Ul-Haq introduced Sharia law, borrowed directly from Quranic scriptures, into Pakistan’s constitution. (Some examples of prohibited behaviors included drinking alcohol and adultery, violations of which were punishable by public lashings.) Sharia law also extended to the education system, which made Islamic studies compulsory even for non-Muslims in schools. In cinema, women began to dress more conservatively and take on more traditional roles such as housewives and child-rearers.
Pakistan’s urbanites — a mix of middle, upper-middle, and elite citizens — were resentful of Zia-ul-Haq’s policies of Islamization. They argued that, in addition to constricting choice and activity, they were also an “inauthentic” cultural representation of Pakistan. These urbanites, according to Masqood, grew nostalgic for Pakistan’s rich and syncretic cultural heritage; they felt that Islam had nothing to do with it. Converting from a secular country to an Islamic Republic left little room for creative and cultural expression. Many among the urban elites refer to this as a “lost modernity”: as Islam began to circumscribe people’s lives, Pakistan ceased to evolve culturally with the rest of the world.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, Pakistan’s image on the global stage was tarnished by its involvement in the War on Terror as both an ally to the United States in their anti-terror efforts and also, some suspected, a supporter and abettor of terrorists. Parts of Al-Qaeda, including the 9/11 mastermind Khalil Sheikh Mohammed and, as it later turned out, Osama Bin Laden himself, were either based in Pakistan or had fled there from Afghanistan. An uptick in terror attacks orchestrated by the Pakistani Taliban made the country increasingly unsafe. In 2007, a headline on the cover of Newsweek read, “The World’s Most Dangerous Nation Isn’t Iraq, It’s Pakistan.” All these terrible events caused a deep sense of frustration among Pakistan’s urban elites and made them hyperconscious of how they appeared on the international stage. People began to dissociate from everything they thought constituted Pakistani culture. Long gone were the days when fairytales like Layla and Majnun were celebrated — instead, people wore Hannah Montana t-shirts and brought their school lunches in Hannah Montana lunchboxes. The shared language was also affected, with thousands of Pakistanis now changing their preference from Urdu to English. Rather than recite the iconic poems of Allama Iqbal and Mir Taqi Mir, they revered the West’s canonical English literature. All of a sudden, Hemingway was popular.
The rest of Pakistan, however, had little to no access to an English education. This disparity gave rise not just to two distinct mindsets, but two completely different identities. One identity was the “village idiot” who spoke Urdu, and the other the elite and enlightened individual who spoke English with a British or American intonation. Because of their fervent association with the West, the urban elites began to be referred to as “burgers” — that is, Pakistanis who preferred to eat American hamburgers over traditional Pakistani cuisine. Maqsood likened the burger generation to “McCaulay’s children,” as they were known during the British colonial era. The nineteenth century English statesman Thomas Babington McCaulay had changed the official language from Urdu to English in 1835. His proverbial “children” were the young professionals who spoke in English and emulated the mannerisms of the British. They were Indian by blood but British by taste. In some sense, the “burger” generation was re-enacting this historical humiliation, though now without any pressure to do so; we were doing it of our own accord.
I n 2013, the word “burger” rose to popularity when Imran Khan, former captain of the country’s cricket team, ran an electric campaign for parliament. Many of Khan’s followers were young people from the cities, my friends among them. They enjoyed Khan’s charisma and seeming worldliness. The old guard referred to Khan and his supporters as “burgers”; the young supporters, in turn, embraced the “burger” label and wore it proudly as the signifier of a new and more modern Pakistan. In 2018, Khan became prime minister, but his time in office was marred by corruption and other scandals, and hardly represented the breath of fresh air he had once promised his voters. (He is now in prison on what he argues are politically motivated charges.)
While English was the language of the burgers, there were many non-burgers who shared the belief that English would improve their employment prospects, and so had a desire to learn it.
I remember Batool, my family’s maid, learning English alongside me. She knew the English alphabet somewhat, and she caught on fast by binge-watching Disney Channel and Nickelodeon with me. When I could, I helped her learn. Once she had basic sentence construction and I was myself more advanced, I taught her more complex words like “rolodex” and “inundated.” One day, she wrote a proper English sentence in her notebook. “My life is very peculiar,” it read.
As for me, after finishing high school, I moved to England for college. The college was an hour from London, where my aunt lives, so I would visit her frequently. In the United Kingdom — unlike in Lahore — I was able to walk around freely as a woman. I had a great time. I studied sociology and learned about gender; I played sports and even learned to ride a horse. I made lots of friends from all over the world. It helped that I knew English and was comfortable speaking it. In that, Teacher Saima was right.
I hoped to get a job and stay in England after graduation, but no one wanted to hire a Pakistani citizen with a sociology degree. I moved back home. Being back in Lahore was not at all easy. I had gotten used to living on my own and doing what I wanted, while my parents thought I was the same person I had been before leaving for college. My friends from high school had drifted away — some of them moved abroad, others just moved on.
My brothers were home, too. Nadir, who is a computer scientist, is three years older than I am, and at the time was working with the Punjab Information Technology Board, a government company; Danyal, four years older than Nadir, was working for my father’s real estate development business. My mother, who works in agriculture, spent her time producing turmeric from fields owned by her family. Neither of my parents pressured me to go into their fields of work, which was good, because I didn’t want to. I wanted to write, so I worked as a freelance journalist and editor at some magazines, filing stories about art shows and large cultural events. I enjoyed it, but the work was not steady, or well-paying. Eventually, an aunt helped me get a job with the Lahore Literary Festival, a free and open-to-the-public literary event that took place each spring in the city. I was asked to draw up the festival program. I’d ask International Booker Prize winner Marieke Lucas Rijneveld to read a chapter of their latest book, and launched the festival’s first digital product, LLF Online, where I would connect authors and opinion leaders from all over the world to have conversations on some of the most pressing issues of our times. What made it particularly meaningful was that not only was I contributing to a community-led initiative that offered free literary events to all, but that I was also able to include more Urdu sessions, to give Urdu writers a platform to showcase their writing and work.
S cholars have argued that burger culture is a direct result of Pakistan’s relationship with Western hegemony, and consequently, the ways Western values have seeped into the country’s elite educational institutes.
In her ethnographic study, “Devoted Cosmopolitans: Estranged Pakistanis,” anthropologist Tayabba Batool Tahir writes about how globalization led to a Pakistani youth that was estranged from its native culture. She surveyed students at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and listed the stark differences in attitudes between the students who came from big cities like Lahore and those who were scholarship holders on the National Outreach Program (NOP), typically from lower-income families from various villages in Pakistan. Tahir found that students from elite backgrounds touted themselves as modern, global citizens. They also sometimes disdained students who were not like them.
Tahir shared an example of how these elitist attitudes have harmed NOP scholars. Talha, a student from Shujabad, a suburb near Multan, was mocked by his classmates for announcing that he read the novels of Qudsiya Bano when everyone else was reading Sydney Sheldon and Marquez. Talha began feeling insecure about his English. To fit in better, he bought The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and consulted a dictionary to fully understand the book. He would also practice speaking to himself in English in the mirror.
LUMS would have designated days where students would dress up as people from different social classes, thereby furthering classist stereotypes, according to Tahir. LUMS has a “Paindoo Day,” when students dress up as villagers. Students within the university have spoken up and called on the university to either change the name of these days to “Cultural Day,” or to cancel them entirely.
Mariam Durrani, who lectures on anthropology with a focus on South Asia at American University, theorized that while these attitudes are rooted in Western hegemony, they are actually shaped by Pakistan’s political relationship with the United States. The U.S., she argues, has sent significant aid to Pakistan in an effort to keep it on side during the War on Terror. Pakistan, in turn, offered the U.S. military bases in some remote areas of Pakistan. The aid Pakistan received went into Pakistan’s higher education and Fulbright programs, which directly influenced what curriculum was being taught in universities, but also ensured that students from Pakistan would have the opportunity to study in the United States on these scholarships.
Durrani said these partnerships were not all benevolent. She argues that the United States required military bases within Pakistan to carry out drone attacks on the population residing in Northern Pakistan, to rid the region of terrorists. That was the tradeoff. “For every bomb,” said Durrani, “there was a Fulbright scholarship.”
Durrani also noted how “cultural performances,” including speaking in English and consuming Western media, is a large part of “imperial messaging.” This began to take root during the British colonial era and has extended all the way to modern day Pakistan in the form of neo-imperialism, through policies and partnerships like U.S. aid.
“The whole idea of learning English during the colonial era was an important one because that was how one could be a part of the [British-Indian] bureaucracy and get staff jobs,” said Durrani. “Now, in order to get a [white collar] job in Pakistan or be prepared to settle abroad, speaking English is still a must.
“This is how empire operates.”
M y education at Lahore Grammar School and the liberating feeling I got when I was able to walk the streets in England without being harassed ultimately drew me back to the West. Now, I am in New York City studying Journalism at Columbia University, something that would not have been possible if I had not taken my English lessons seriously. I am hoping to stay in the U.S. for some time, though I do miss my native country. Wherever I go, I know that I will remain Pakistani.
One friend from back home, Zara Mannan, recently started Kitab Ghar, a small library tucked away in the crevices of Anarkali, an important historical bazaar in Lahore. The impulse behind setting up Kitab Ghar was Zulfiqar’s desire to rehabilitate her relationship with Urdu. She had grown up in Lahore and attended private school, as I had, and then went to Yale for college. Like me, she had very mixed feelings about her upbringing. During lockdown, she told me, she designed something she called “Burger Rehab,” a program meant to help interlingual and bilingual people learn Urdu. Zara created the curriculum herself to include Urdu writing and reading for swifter learning and to ensure there was clarity in what was being taught. Her diverse cultural experiences, like mine, had stirred an unrest and a desire to make things right.
“We are a confused specimen of a civilization,” Zara said recently. “Understanding our roots will better help us understand and develop an identity.”
It’s something I am also working on. Whether Teacher Saima would approve or not, I don’t know.
