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Pakistan Culture and traditions Pakistan

 
 
Area : 307375  sq.mi - Population 162000000 hab.
Pakistan

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Culture and traditions Pakistan

 Traditions and customs

Legacy of the British colonial era, cricket and polo are the national sports about which people feel passionate in Pakistan. Competitions take place all year long and, at the time of the great tournaments, in public places and everyone in the bazaars has their ear stuck to their portable radio or their eyes riveted to the television set.
In Gilgit or in Chitral, you ought to try and attend a game of polo, with its incredible cavalcades raising huge dust clouds. As far as dress code is concerned, most men, with a turban and a long beard, wear the traditional salwar kamiz, a long shirt falling over baggy trousers.
Many of the members of the Pathan tribes wear an incredible collection of gleaming rings on their fingers. Their bright eyes shadowed with kohl could almost give them a feminine air, if they didn't carry daggers and kalashnikovs as a sign of manliness and fighting spirit.
Pathans on the north-eastern border, who obey their own customary rules, are used to settle quarrels in blood shed and will mercilessly demand an eye for an eye. Women are often at the origin of vendettas. Veiled from head to toe, they obey the purdah, that is to say that they owe absolute submission to the men of the family clan.
Although Pakistan can boast the fact that it was the first country to have a woman at its head, Benazir Bhutto, sex segregation remains omni-present.
On a different note, visitors will be surprised by the innumerable naive and multi-colour paintings decorating the vehicles, turning them into incredible mobile works of art. In addition to this, inside the vehicles, you will see strings of lucky charms, bells, chains, pious images, supposedly scaring away the evil eye. Though the Pakistanis are superstitious, they also practise a popular form of Islam, via Sufism and the worship of holy figures.
Dances and spectacular mortifications take place for the ceremonies at the time of major pilgrimages to the sanctuaries, such as Sehwan Sharif's.
The Kalash, Animist tribes of the Hindu Kush, celebrate by way of music and dancing for the important dates on the farmers' calendar and for births, weddings and funerals.
Finally, Pakistan being a rigoristic country, visitors, and in particular women, should proscribe light clothing, considered provocative and refrain from drinking, eating and smoking in public during the month of Ramadan.

 To read, see, listen

guide

- Pakistan and the Karakoram Highway. Lonely Planet.
books






- Shame by S. Rushdie.





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