NON-FICTION A WOMAN'S PLACE.

Sadia Pasha Kamran's book Bano's Companion to Feminist Art: Women, Art and Politics in Pakistan is an out-of-the-box narrative on women and art in the country. To explain who 'Bano' is, Kamran writes: 'Bano represents all the curious young women eager to understand the meaning of life and their existence in this world.'

Kamran's approach stems from pedagogy as a lecturer on art history, combined with the desire to make the reading of art accessible to both art and non-art audiences - it is no mean task for a scholar to anchor complex histories and convoluted jargon in ways that make sense to the average reader.

The book's opening essay is a preamble on the nature of feminist art in Pakistan, locating it within the cultural context of Kamran's times. Hers is a passionate embrace of female artists, whose struggle for women's rights inspired her and her colleagues and seniors at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore.

Kamran herself graduated in studio arts from the NCA in the mid-1990s. This was a time after women had come out of the studios and art institutions to protest on the streets. 'In the hide of Islam,' she writes, 'General Zia enabled a convoluted version of Shariah Laws. The Hudood and the Zina Ordinance (1979) particularly scrutinised the status and role of women within the society, restricting them within the chadar and char dewari - a metaphor for the household away from mainstream life.'

An art historian urges readers to take her out-of-the-box book as a means to rethink what is feminist in the cultural context of Pakistan

Kamran notes that, in 1983, Gen Zia introduced the Shariah law, 'according to which a woman's legal evidence was valued half as compared to the man's testimony.' The ensuing remonstrations marked 'the first time that women artists had overtly identified their work with the political struggle for female emancipation.'

That same year, 15 artists, including many from Karachi, signed a manifesto voicing their outrage in Lahore. Zubaida Javed, Abbasi Abidi, Salima Hashmi, Lala Rukh, Talat Ahmed, Shehrzade Alam, Rabia Zuberi, Jalees Nagi, Birjees Iqbal, Riffat Alvi, Nahid Raza, Meher Afroz, Qudsia Nisar, Mamoona Bashir and Veeda Ahmed all put their signatures on the document drafted, interestingly, by human rights activist I.A. Rehman.

Though the manifesto was not published, it provided the impetus for the artistic form to break away from being a 'gallery and museum article'. Female artists and educationists...