No Rush for Sweets

By Imtiaz Ali - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan
Monday, February 25, 2008

Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai’s Urs which culminated Sunday in Bhit Shah (district Mithiari), had 50 percent less attendees than previous years.

Bhitai, a Sufi poet, is loved equally by the rich and the poor, and his Urs is considered to be the biggest cultural event of Sindh.

Poverty, inflation and lawlessness however, adversely affected the turnout this year. “Shops and hotels look deserted,” said an employee of the Mithiari district government.

Sunday was the last day of the three-day Urs, and the usually rush of people was conspicuously missing. The Mithiari district government employee that The News spoke to has been arranging for Sabeel (drinking water) at the Urs for the past four years.

He said that all main circuses, including the famous Irani Circus, usually visit the venue of the Urs, along with elephants, lions and horses. Moreover, camels, horses and farm animals are also brought from different parts of the country for traditional display. This time around, however, no circuses visited, and very few animals were brought for the traditional display.

Also, contractors of the local government forced vendors to pay Rs 200 to Rs 600 because very few shopkeepers set up business at the venue, the Mithiari district government employee said.

Ghulam Rasool, a resident of the area near Bhit Shah, said that shopkeepers were upset because of the disappointingly low turnout of visitors at the venue. Similarly, the main event at Malakhro (traditional wrestling) attracted a very limited number of spectators.

One vendor has been setting up a sweetshop near the venue for the past couple of years. He said that the local administration charges Rs 300 per feet, and he had hired a 90-feet shop, 1.5 kilometres away from the mausoleum. Shops in the vicinity of the mausoleum went for around Rs 500 to Rs 600 per foot.

“This time, I could not sell event 25 percent of my sweets,” the vendor said. He originally belongs to Pad Idan, Nawabshah. In the past, he explained, he’s get so many customers, that a fresh batch of sweets had to be prepared every hour.

Dr Haider Malokhani, an NGO activist who visited Bhit Shah on the second day of the Urs, said that people from India, Punjab and other districts of Sindh usually visited in a large number but this time, their number was almost negligible.

He said Bhit Shah was the source of livelihood for thousands of local people, including farmers, who tended to provide fodder for animals, milk for tea stalls, roses and other things.

Dr. Malokhani was of the opinion that the thin attendance this year was due to a number of factors, ranging from political uncertainty to official apathy.

“Because of election-related violence and subsequent jubilation and lack of advance announcement by the department concerned, people gave scant attention to the Urs,” Amar Leghari, a Sindhi folklore writer said.

He said that this was the first time ever than Sindhi newspapers did not publish special supplements about Shah Latif Bhittai.

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[Picture: Door to the Tomb. Photo from: Sindh in pictures http://yangtze.cs.uiuc.edu/~jamali/new-html-pages/bhit-shah4.html].