In a dusty village, an old man stands over a karahi, shaping spirals of dough with a precision born of decades of practice. His movements are measured, inherited, and exact. Each jalebi is a testament to lineage and refinement.
No one calls him a master of confectionery.
Elsewhere, in a white-walled gallery, a canvas hangs under soft lighting. A name is printed beside it. Viewers stand at a distance, reading, interpreting, assigning meaning. Here, authorship is visible. Here, value is assumed.
Between the jalebi and the canvas lies a hierarchy that does not announce itself, yet quietly governs what is recognised as creation.
The Architecture of Cultural Value
Cultural value does not reside within objects; it is produced through processes that determine what is seen, circulated, and acknowledged. The very act of living in a society is, in many ways, an act of being sorted into categories of what is valued and what is not.
A creative work is often described as valuable because of its ability to affect those who encounter it. Yet this effect is not self-evident; it depends on recognition. Something becomes valuable not simply because it exists or even because it is skilfully made, but because it is acknowledged within systems that grant it meaning.
A woman peruses carpets in a local market.A marketing image by high-scale retailer Iqbal Carpets.Same function, different values placed upon them by society.
This is why the same form can occupy radically different positions. Truck art, embedded in everyday visual culture, is treated as background noise until it is extracted, photographed, and curated into coffee table books. At that point, it becomes aesthetic. Similarly, national recognition tends to follow visibility rather than mastery: film and television personalities receive awards and public acclaim, while craftsmen in Sialkot or Multan continue their work without their names travelling beyond local markets.
This means that cultural value is not inherently neutral in creation. It is assigned and reinforced by those positioned to define it. To be valuable, then, is to be seen and acknowledged.
Culture is a Gated Community
If recognition determines value, access determines who is able to seek it. Cultural production does not operate on equal terms. It is structured by forms of capital that are unevenly distributed.
Cultural capital, a term coined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, refers to the familiarity with high-status cultural codes, and the ability to convert this familiarity into other types of legitimacy. Cultural capital is acquired in different ways: through the objects we possess, the behaviours we embody, and the institutions that certify us. It can look like owning niche art or family heirlooms, but it can also look like knowing how to speak in certain rooms, or having degrees from prestigious institutions that signal legitimacy and respect. In Pakistan, it might mean having studied at Aitchison or LUMS, having exposure to global cultural trends, or knowing about an exclusive restaurant.
The accumulation of cultural capital is not evenly distributed. It is shaped by socio-economic class, upbringing, and geography. The more of it one has, the easier it becomes to enter spaces where culture is not only produced, but validated. The idea that access to art is equal collapses quickly under scrutiny. Language becomes a barrier, education becomes a filter, and urban centers become cultural hubs that exclude those on the margins. In Pakistan, this geography of culture is stark: Karachi and Lahore serve as epicenters of cultural production and validation, while interior Sindh, South Punjab, and Balochistan remain largely outside the mainstream.
Even within cities, participation is filtered. Literary festivals, theatre productions, and curated heritage events are priced and located in ways that favour the urban middle and upper classes. Creative workshops, often presented as open spaces of expression, carry costs that quietly exclude those who cannot afford both the fee and the journey.
Entry into creative professions follows the same pattern. Internships in media, publishing, and the arts are frequently unpaid, accessible primarily to those who can absorb the cost of working without income. Under these conditions, creative industries appear to reward talent, but in practice, they reward the ability to sustain risk and to fail without consequence.
Creativity can be pursued by those with economic security. For those without it, creativity must be negotiated against survival.
Culture, in this sense, operates less as an open field and more as a gated structure, where entry depends on access, inheritance, and recognition rather than ability alone.
The Working Class Artist
A woman leans in to engage with the work, its perceived impact reinforcing its cultural value. Image from Ejaz Art Galleries.
The division between art and craft provides one of the clearest expressions of how value is assigned. Art is positioned as intellectual, aesthetic, and worthy of preservation. Craft is treated as functional, repetitive, and replaceable. Traditional artisans’ work carries centuries of knowledge and cultural memory, yet is often undervalued economically.
The imbalance is visible across industries. Sialkot produces footballs used at the highest levels of international sport, yet recognition accrues to global brands rather than the workers who manufacture them. Truck artists may be commissioned for commercial campaigns or to decorate upscale cafés, their work briefly entering curated spaces, being photographed, aestheticized, and elevated to coffee-table books, while their original practice on vehicles remains overlooked.
Artisans operate within supply chains dominated by intermediaries who control access to markets. These intermediaries capture the majority of profit, leaving producers with minimal returns. As a result, craft becomes economically unsustainable. As financial returns diminish, younger generations of artisans begin to disengage, leaving villages for cities, often turning to ride-hailing or other forms of informal labour. As craft becomes economically unfeasible, it results in the loss of entire traditions.
What appears as a decline in craft is, in fact, a failure of valuation. When the same techniques are reframed within the language of design and branding, they are elevated, exported, and recognised. The labour remains constant, but the context changes. It is this shift in framing, rather than any transformation in skill, that produces value.
Genres, Judgement, and Hierarchies
Even within recognised cultural spaces, hierarchy persists through the organisation of taste. Genres do not merely categorise cultural forms; they structure relationships between producers of culture, audiences, and legitimacy. They guide cultural consumption, shape values, and signal where individuals belong.
Genres carry with them the ability to gatekeep and encode judgment.
In everyday language, this judgment often takes on familiar forms: “burger” and “paindu”. These words function as cultural verdicts. These labels operate as shorthand for class, exposure, and perceived refinement. To call something “paindu” is to place it outside the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, refined, or culturally legitimate.
This is how genres become social markers. Certain forms of music, specific ways of speaking, particular aesthetics become associated with sophistication, while others are labelled as crude or are inadmissible in the cultural conversation. A Coke Studio performance, carefully curated and globally circulated, is celebrated as high culture, while the same musical traditions performed at local weddings through dhol or folk singing are dismissed as “basic.” Dhaba food, rich in flavour and history, becomes rebranded and aestheticized in upscale cafés, where presentation transforms perception and price. TikTok creators from small towns may achieve mass visibility, yet struggle to be taken seriously within established creative circles.
“Refined” goods are often just what align with urban, upper-class sensibilities. What is dismissed as “paindu” is not necessarily inferior; it simply does not conform to those social codes.
Personal taste becomes a kind of currency that signals belonging, and can grant or deny access.
Digital platforms have expanded the reach of cultural production, but they have not dissolved these hierarchies. Algorithms sort audiences into neat categories, reinforcing existing preferences and creating echo chambers of taste. What one consumes becomes both a reflection of identity and a boundary around it. Genres are more than just artistic classifications, they are tools of segmentation, aligning cultural products with specific demographics and, in doing so, cementing divisions between them.
Through labels, individual preferences, and offhand remarks that carry historical weight, culture continues to draw lines between the insider and the outsider. Taste becomes a mechanism through which inequality is reproduced, not through overt exclusion, but through everyday acts of classification.
The Myth of the Creative Genius
At the center of all this lies one of the most persistent myths of modern culture: the idea of the “creative genius”. The belief that creativity is an individual trait, something innate and self-contained, detached from the conditions in which it emerges.
Creative output is shaped by time, resources, education, and networks. The ability to take risks, to experiment, and to fail without consequence is not evenly distributed. Some individuals are able to pursue creative paths precisely because they are supported by economic and social stability. Others, facing immediate financial constraints, are compelled to prioritise income over experimentation. Private school students are often exposed to theatre, music, and debate, cultivating both skill and confidence, and study-abroad pathways further consolidate this divide, producing “global” artists who return with both exposure and legitimacy, often dominating local cultural spaces.
Sadequain’s trajectory was not solitary genius but institutional ascent: from joining the Progressive Writers’ and Artists Movement, to being propelled into public recognition by Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, and later refining his craft in Paris. The “genius” was cultivated as much as it was claimed.
Cultural capital, once accumulated, reproduces itself. It passes from one generation to the next, shaping educational outcomes, career opportunities, and social mobility. Those who have it are more likely to be seen and validated. Those who do not, remain on the margins, their creations unrecognized.
Should access to culture be treated with the same urgency as access to education? Can cultural capital be redistributed through interventions that make art and culture more accessible?
Studies suggest that exposure to the arts can significantly impact critical thinking, social skills, and academic performance, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. But beyond measurable outcomes lies something more fundamental: the right to create, and to have that creation recognized.
The problem is not that some creations are greater than others. It is that we have built a world where only some creations are allowed to count.
The Gully Kahani Team approaches storytelling as lived observation, blending on-ground reporting with narrative depth and cultural analysis. Each article is shaped through careful research, street-level perspectives, and a commitment to capturing the layered realities of urban Pakistan. The editorial voice prioritizes nuance over simplification, tracing how history, culture, and everyday life intersect in meaningful ways.
Creation, and the Politics of Being Valued
In a dusty village, an old man stands over a karahi, shaping spirals of dough with a precision born of decades of practice. His movements are measured, inherited, and exact. Each jalebi is a testament to lineage and refinement.
No one calls him a master of confectionery.
Elsewhere, in a white-walled gallery, a canvas hangs under soft lighting. A name is printed beside it. Viewers stand at a distance, reading, interpreting, assigning meaning. Here, authorship is visible. Here, value is assumed.
Between the jalebi and the canvas lies a hierarchy that does not announce itself, yet quietly governs what is recognised as creation.
The Architecture of Cultural Value
Cultural value does not reside within objects; it is produced through processes that determine what is seen, circulated, and acknowledged. The very act of living in a society is, in many ways, an act of being sorted into categories of what is valued and what is not.
A creative work is often described as valuable because of its ability to affect those who encounter it. Yet this effect is not self-evident; it depends on recognition. Something becomes valuable not simply because it exists or even because it is skilfully made, but because it is acknowledged within systems that grant it meaning.
This is why the same form can occupy radically different positions. Truck art, embedded in everyday visual culture, is treated as background noise until it is extracted, photographed, and curated into coffee table books. At that point, it becomes aesthetic. Similarly, national recognition tends to follow visibility rather than mastery: film and television personalities receive awards and public acclaim, while craftsmen in Sialkot or Multan continue their work without their names travelling beyond local markets.
This means that cultural value is not inherently neutral in creation. It is assigned and reinforced by those positioned to define it. To be valuable, then, is to be seen and acknowledged.
Culture is a Gated Community
If recognition determines value, access determines who is able to seek it. Cultural production does not operate on equal terms. It is structured by forms of capital that are unevenly distributed.
Cultural capital, a term coined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, refers to the familiarity with high-status cultural codes, and the ability to convert this familiarity into other types of legitimacy. Cultural capital is acquired in different ways: through the objects we possess, the behaviours we embody, and the institutions that certify us. It can look like owning niche art or family heirlooms, but it can also look like knowing how to speak in certain rooms, or having degrees from prestigious institutions that signal legitimacy and respect. In Pakistan, it might mean having studied at Aitchison or LUMS, having exposure to global cultural trends, or knowing about an exclusive restaurant.
The accumulation of cultural capital is not evenly distributed. It is shaped by socio-economic class, upbringing, and geography. The more of it one has, the easier it becomes to enter spaces where culture is not only produced, but validated. The idea that access to art is equal collapses quickly under scrutiny. Language becomes a barrier, education becomes a filter, and urban centers become cultural hubs that exclude those on the margins. In Pakistan, this geography of culture is stark: Karachi and Lahore serve as epicenters of cultural production and validation, while interior Sindh, South Punjab, and Balochistan remain largely outside the mainstream.
Even within cities, participation is filtered. Literary festivals, theatre productions, and curated heritage events are priced and located in ways that favour the urban middle and upper classes. Creative workshops, often presented as open spaces of expression, carry costs that quietly exclude those who cannot afford both the fee and the journey.
Entry into creative professions follows the same pattern. Internships in media, publishing, and the arts are frequently unpaid, accessible primarily to those who can absorb the cost of working without income. Under these conditions, creative industries appear to reward talent, but in practice, they reward the ability to sustain risk and to fail without consequence.
Creativity can be pursued by those with economic security. For those without it, creativity must be negotiated against survival.
Culture, in this sense, operates less as an open field and more as a gated structure, where entry depends on access, inheritance, and recognition rather than ability alone.
The Working Class Artist
The division between art and craft provides one of the clearest expressions of how value is assigned. Art is positioned as intellectual, aesthetic, and worthy of preservation. Craft is treated as functional, repetitive, and replaceable. Traditional artisans’ work carries centuries of knowledge and cultural memory, yet is often undervalued economically.
The imbalance is visible across industries. Sialkot produces footballs used at the highest levels of international sport, yet recognition accrues to global brands rather than the workers who manufacture them. Truck artists may be commissioned for commercial campaigns or to decorate upscale cafés, their work briefly entering curated spaces, being photographed, aestheticized, and elevated to coffee-table books, while their original practice on vehicles remains overlooked.
Artisans operate within supply chains dominated by intermediaries who control access to markets. These intermediaries capture the majority of profit, leaving producers with minimal returns. As a result, craft becomes economically unsustainable. As financial returns diminish, younger generations of artisans begin to disengage, leaving villages for cities, often turning to ride-hailing or other forms of informal labour. As craft becomes economically unfeasible, it results in the loss of entire traditions.
What appears as a decline in craft is, in fact, a failure of valuation. When the same techniques are reframed within the language of design and branding, they are elevated, exported, and recognised. The labour remains constant, but the context changes. It is this shift in framing, rather than any transformation in skill, that produces value.
Genres, Judgement, and Hierarchies
Even within recognised cultural spaces, hierarchy persists through the organisation of taste. Genres do not merely categorise cultural forms; they structure relationships between producers of culture, audiences, and legitimacy. They guide cultural consumption, shape values, and signal where individuals belong.
Genres carry with them the ability to gatekeep and encode judgment.
In everyday language, this judgment often takes on familiar forms: “burger” and “paindu”. These words function as cultural verdicts. These labels operate as shorthand for class, exposure, and perceived refinement. To call something “paindu” is to place it outside the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, refined, or culturally legitimate.
This is how genres become social markers. Certain forms of music, specific ways of speaking, particular aesthetics become associated with sophistication, while others are labelled as crude or are inadmissible in the cultural conversation. A Coke Studio performance, carefully curated and globally circulated, is celebrated as high culture, while the same musical traditions performed at local weddings through dhol or folk singing are dismissed as “basic.” Dhaba food, rich in flavour and history, becomes rebranded and aestheticized in upscale cafés, where presentation transforms perception and price. TikTok creators from small towns may achieve mass visibility, yet struggle to be taken seriously within established creative circles.
“Refined” goods are often just what align with urban, upper-class sensibilities. What is dismissed as “paindu” is not necessarily inferior; it simply does not conform to those social codes.
Personal taste becomes a kind of currency that signals belonging, and can grant or deny access.
Digital platforms have expanded the reach of cultural production, but they have not dissolved these hierarchies. Algorithms sort audiences into neat categories, reinforcing existing preferences and creating echo chambers of taste. What one consumes becomes both a reflection of identity and a boundary around it. Genres are more than just artistic classifications, they are tools of segmentation, aligning cultural products with specific demographics and, in doing so, cementing divisions between them.
Through labels, individual preferences, and offhand remarks that carry historical weight, culture continues to draw lines between the insider and the outsider. Taste becomes a mechanism through which inequality is reproduced, not through overt exclusion, but through everyday acts of classification.
The Myth of the Creative Genius
At the center of all this lies one of the most persistent myths of modern culture: the idea of the “creative genius”. The belief that creativity is an individual trait, something innate and self-contained, detached from the conditions in which it emerges.
Creative output is shaped by time, resources, education, and networks. The ability to take risks, to experiment, and to fail without consequence is not evenly distributed. Some individuals are able to pursue creative paths precisely because they are supported by economic and social stability. Others, facing immediate financial constraints, are compelled to prioritise income over experimentation. Private school students are often exposed to theatre, music, and debate, cultivating both skill and confidence, and study-abroad pathways further consolidate this divide, producing “global” artists who return with both exposure and legitimacy, often dominating local cultural spaces.
Cultural capital, once accumulated, reproduces itself. It passes from one generation to the next, shaping educational outcomes, career opportunities, and social mobility. Those who have it are more likely to be seen and validated. Those who do not, remain on the margins, their creations unrecognized.
Should access to culture be treated with the same urgency as access to education? Can cultural capital be redistributed through interventions that make art and culture more accessible?
Studies suggest that exposure to the arts can significantly impact critical thinking, social skills, and academic performance, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. But beyond measurable outcomes lies something more fundamental: the right to create, and to have that creation recognized.
The problem is not that some creations are greater than others. It is that we have built a world where only some creations are allowed to count.
The Gully Kahani Team approaches storytelling as lived observation, blending on-ground reporting with narrative depth and cultural analysis. Each article is shaped through careful research, street-level perspectives, and a commitment to capturing the layered realities of urban Pakistan. The editorial voice prioritizes nuance over simplification, tracing how history, culture, and everyday life intersect in meaningful ways.
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