Harf — Volume Three

‫حرف‬ HARF V. III

A Journal of South Asian Studies

Volume III Winter 2018 McGill University Montreal, QC

© Rukhshan Arif Mian

EDITORIAL Michael Britt Zachary Chackowicz Felix Fuchs Ashutosh Kumar Zain R. Mian Sabeena Shaikh Twisha Singh Ruqaiyah Zarook

PHOTOGRAPHY Mobeen Ansari Zainab Ashraf Rukhshan Arif Mian

DESIGN Zain R. Mian

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Three Years of Harf at McGill Zain R. Mian — 8

Scholarship You too want to be suspended in space: Event, Time-Image, and The Partition in Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha and Satyajit Ray’s Jana Aranya and Pratidwandi Suvij Sudershan — 11 The Hidden Left: Communist Activity and Influence in Pakistan’s Early Years Meher Ali — 47 Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-) Tania Siddiqi — 75 The Blaue Blume in Bombay: Manto’s Aesthetics of Critical Distance in the Age of Technological Reproducibility Emily A. Durham — 105 Sikhs, Students, and Subversives: Race, Exclusion, and the Birth of the Ghaddar Party in America Ethan Seeley — 133 Ethics of Translation: (Un)Translatability, Différance, and Meaning in the Translation of Baidehisabilasa Amrita Chowdhury — 163

Features Whether Flowers Bloom or Not: Selections from Bengali Poetry Sandeep Banerjee — 41 From Imperial Adventurer to Prophet: A verse translation from Nizami of Ganja’s Alexander Book Prashant Keshavmurthy — 65

© Zainab Ashraf

© Zainab Ashraf

The Turning Point of Crime: Tribal Identity and Criminal Subversions Henry Schwarz — 123 On Liberation and Violence: Two Translations from the 1971 War Sarah N. Shahid & Zain R. Mian — 149

Reviews Reading the Mahavamsa (by Kristin Scheible) Aditya Bhattacharjee — 37 A Book of Conquest (by Manan Ahmed Asif) Usman Hamid — 61 The New Pakistani Middle Class (by Ammara Maqsood) Fatima Tassadiq — 99 The Struggle for Pakistan (by Ayesha Jalal) Sara Tahir — 145 Writing Resistance (by Laura Brueck) Felix Fuchs — 183 Contributors — 189

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INTRODUCTION: Three Years of Harf at McGill Zain R. Mian Producing a journal like Harf is much like raising a child: it takes a village. In the three years since our inception, we have been awestruck by the kindness and generosity of McGill’s students and faculty. Your support has been integral to our success: from helping us book rooms to putting our posters on your doors, and sharing our events through email— each of these acts is as important as any of the work we do. For this reason, we can begin no other way but with a gesture of gratitude: thank you.

The present issue is likely the most interesting so far. An essential part of Harf’s work over the years has been to not only publish this annual journal, but also to learn from each year’s experience, and to continually refine the way we work.

We are fortunate to be featuring in this issue a diverse collection of people, disciplines, methodologies, and genres. In particular, we have expanded our reviews section from last year: we are thinking about newer texts, and our reviewers write from four different universities across the United States and Canada. It has been a privilege, too, to have professors Sandeep Banerjee (McGill), Prashant Keshavmurthy (McGill), and Henry Schwarz (Georgetown) contribute to the present collection. Harf is exceedingly humbled by— and grateful for— their contributions and support. Their efforts mean we can continue to do what we’ve always sought: to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue across university structures that are otherwise deeply stratified and hierarchical. This has proven a challenging and rewarding venture— one that we hope to continue in the coming years.

It has been a pleasure, moreover, to have worked with the many young academics who shore up our scholarship section. From McGill to Minnesota and from Texas to New York, the scholars published in the present volume are a testament to Harf’s growing presence in North America, and to its continued commitment to publishing new and exciting research across a diversity of fields and disciplines.

Specifically, we have focused on publishing more translations in the journal. In particular, it has been exceptionally rewarding to work on collaborative translation projects, as in the case of the translations from the 1971 War we have produced alongside Sarah Shahid. Working with these scholars and helping their work take shape has been an invaluable experience for all of us on the board.

This year, the emphasis really has been on collaboration: between editors and writers, designers and photographers, professors and students. We feel strongly that a collaborative ethic deeply improves any work. It ensures that— even as no single word is actually written by more than one person— the overall structure is nonetheless a negotiation, holds a dialogue at heart. Such productive exchanges are the core of excellent scholarship. It is with them in mind, then, that we present you this, the third volume of Harf— A Journal of South Asian Studies.

© Zainab Ashraf

© Zainab Ashraf

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YOU TOO WANT TO BE SUSPENDED IN SPACE: Event, Time-Image, and Partition in Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha and Satyajit Ray’s Jana Aranya and Pratidwandi Suvij Sudershan दयार-ए-हुस्न की बे-सब्र ख़्वाब-गाहों से पुकारती रहीं बाहें बदन बुलाते रहे बहुत अज़ीज़ थी लेिकन रुख़-ए-सहर की लगन बहुत क़रीं था हसीनान-ए-नूर का दामन सुबुक सुबुक थी तमन्ना दबी दबी थी थकन … …चले-चलो िक वो मं िज़ल अभी नहीं आई “The beds of the land of beauty, they beckoned, arms, bodies, they beckoned There was beauty there, and yet the beloved dawn’s face breathed around me the horizon of those beauties whispered desires, tiredness fought … … Onwards, for we are not there yet.”

—Faiz Ahmad Faiz, सुबꂔ ह-ए-आज़ादी(अगस्त-47) [Freedom’s Dawn]1 Faiz Ahmad Faiz was one of the most important poets of Partition in 1947. Of socialist leanings, and a member of the All Indian Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA),2 Faiz voiced a sentiment of dissatisfaction with the Independence of 1947 that led to the incredibly violent creation of India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). His poem “Freedom’s Dawn” displays this sense of dissatisfaction, and advocates for the continuation of the people’s struggle that won the South Asian nation-states political independence from Britain. Faiz urges the reader to move onwards from the celebration of the event of 1947, bringing into focus both the incompleteness of the kind of decolonization that took place in 1947 and the utopian impulse of socialism to discover a greater liberation than the event that brought the national bourgeoisie to power. This sentiment of dissatisfaction with the events of 1947 was, however, not just reflected in cultural production. Political actors, like the Communist Party of India in East Pakistan and Bengal, made them their guiding line. Sukumari Chaudhuri describes how the Nari Seva Sangha (Women’s Support Group), a group allied with the CPI and operating in East Pakistan and Bengal in the aftermath of Parition, taught people secular values in the aftermath of the event to decrease the sense of animosity between Hindus and Muslims.1 The Nari Seva Sangha was thus invested 1 Faiz Ahmad Faiz,“Subh-e-azadi (August ’47),” Rekhta, accessed on: December 12, 2017, https://www. rekhta.org/nazms/subh-e-aazaadii-august-47-faiz-ahmad-faiz-nazms.

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in an attempt to change people’s subjective understandings of what Partition was.

The manner in which the narrative of partition was framed did not map onto the lived realities of those directly affected by the violence.

“Whose independence?” thus asks Siddhartha (Dhritiman Chatterjee), the young protagonist of Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (The Opponent).2 The film itself is set in 1970’s Calcutta during the height of the Naxalite movement, but its concerns are still very much structured by the event of “independence.” At an interview for a job he is desperate to get, the three old men interviewing him begin by asking Siddhartha who the British Prime Minister was during “independence.”

Siddhartha’s responds with this question and his counter sheds an immediate light on the subjective nature of the event of 1947. When the old men label the event of partition “independence,” they universalize a subjective experience and posit it as objective truth. Since they seem to have attained a modicum of success as a result of the event, they deem their “independence” the independence.

Through Siddhartha’s interjection, Ray thus sheds light on the subjective nature of the event of 1947, and in fact events in general. What the national bourgeoisie calls independence has barely brought any improvement in the economic state of affairs for the working-class. As Siddhartha meandering from one job interview to another shows us—and as we see similarly in the character of Somnath Banerjee in Ray’s Jana Aranya (The Middleman)3—the tension between a subjective appreciation of the objective event and the forces of economic power and ideology registered in these subject-positions (i.e. those of the bourgeoisie) come to structure the larger public discourses surrounding Partition in particular, and events in general.

To understand the Partition as an “event” in Alain Badiou’s use of the term helps shed light on the different perspectives offered by Ray and Ghatak’s films.

Badiou’s philosophy is intimately concerned with understanding the meaning of an “event.” In Philosophy and the Event, Badiou, in a series of interviews, sheds light on the concept of the “event,” and its subjective and objective manifestations, of which he wrote of in much greater detail in Being and Event (). Dispensing with the mathematical apparatus he made use of in Being and Event, the interviews draw the concept of the event out through the myriad ways in which “love,” “art,” “sciences,” “philosophy,” and most importantly for the purposes of this paper, “politics” constitute events. For Badiou, “[t]he event creates a possibility but there, then, has to be an effort - a group effort in the political context … for this possibility to become real; that is, for it to be inscribed, step by step, in the world.”4 The state, and political power in general, works to prevent the emergence of certain

2 Rakhshanda Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), pp. xiii-xxix.

3 Sukumari Chaudhuri, “Noakhali’s Victim Turned Activist,” in The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, ed. Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (Kolkata: Stree Publishers, 2003), 143-149.

4 Satyajit Ray, Pratidwandi, Film, directed by Satyajit Ray, (1970; Kolkata: Shradha Home Video, 2010), DVD.

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possibilities in the real world and thwarts their actualization.5 The subject, that both Badiou and Faiz thus speak of is “always between two events.”6 Political subjects in this sense exist in situations “upon which the events of the recent or distant past still have an impact.”7 The “truth” an event presents is brought into being, is actualized, through the subjective understanding and praxis of the subjects the event calls into existence.8 This “truth,” however, is unrepresentable for Badiou. In this sense, it can be understood as what Raymond Williams calls “structure of feeling,” a pre-emergent formation that cannot be articulated in the symbolic order of the conditions within which it has arisen.9 In other words, a structure of feeling speaks the unspeakable in a way for people to hear faint echoes of the unsaid in the said, and with a necessary futurity factored in the (un)speech. A structure of feeling contains and hopes to create a space for the emergent truth it unfolds into; through an unfolding “event,” subjects (engaged in this act of unfolding the event in time) create the truth which they deem the event stands for. Truth, therefore, always exceeds the knowledge (understood as representable and communicable information) that arises from an event.

Badiou’s contemporary, Giles Deleuze, uses the medium of film to understand the temporality of situations and subjects. His theorization provides an examination of the ontological aspects of representation, and for the purposes of this paper, bring the aspect of mediation to Badiou’s idea of the event. Deleuze provides us with two further concepts which allow us to think further about the event in terms of subjective and objective experience: the time-image and the movementimage. The movement-image creates an artificial sense of the passage of time through montage and continuity editing.10 The time-image, on the other hand, presents the subjectivity of the character acting in time, thereby making the viewer conscious of the passage of time itself.11 Deleuze names a number of strategies that are deployed to this end: “images, memories of childhood, sound and visual dreams or fantasies.”12 David Martin-Jones expands on this by reading time- and movement-image as engaged in a tussle of attempting to dominate one another, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.13 Like centripetal and centrifugal forces, the time-image draws the strains of a movie apart, constantly exposing the temporal dimension of the image itself, while the movement-image is engaged in the task of pulling the images together, arranging them to build the illusion of linear time.14 5 Satyajit Ray, Jana Aranya, Film, directed by Satyajit Ray (1976; Kolkata: Shradha Home Video, 2013), DVD. 6 Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 10.

7 Badiou, 11.

8 Badiou, 13.

9 Badiou 13.

10 Justine Clemens, “The Conditions,” in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, ed. A.J. Bartlett and Justine Clemens (Durham: Acumen Publishers, 2010), 25-37.

11 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 132.

12 David Martin-Jones, Deleuze Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006), 20.

13 Martin-Jones, 21-22.

14 Giles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997), 6.

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Comparing Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha with Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi and Jana Aranya, this paper argues that their different approaches to the representation of time are structured by this tension between subject/object, representation/illusion, time and movement. Where Ghatak manipulates the time-image to express the subjectivity of the event (of 1947), Ray’s filmsare driven by the movement-image (even Pratidwandi). Ghatak’s art thus consists precisely in posing the question of the event of 1947 through its subjective manifestation in time. This can be explained partially by the fact that the timeimage is uniquely suited for representing the “event” (as Badiou understands the term) because time-images chart the development of things over time, and in this sense narrativize the experience of time as unmediated by motor-perception or human action. They challenge the viewer to search for the cause, since they show the effect of an event which is reported only through itself without explanation.15 This is to say, they show human action in time, and not time through human action in space. Time, as the fabric of an event’s historicity, unfolds, in Ghatak’s films, through the image. Simultaneously, the time-image, unmoored from providing strict narrative coherence, is apt for historical representation, and almost invites allegorical interpretations. Since the time-image provides a vision of the manner in which an event takes place in time, rather than focusing on the qualitative aspect of the event, it focusses on the quality of the time that passes during an event, and of which an event is composed. The time-image dwells in the subjective appreciation of an event— how history is experienced by the subjects historical events calls into being. The task of meaning-making in Ghatak’s Partition trilogy then very quickly becomes an act of thinking about what it means to be a subject constituted by the event of 1947, what “truths” this event expressed, and where the unfolding of the event of Partition is headed towards.

Ghatak’s films display a great affinity for tapping into the Jungian archetypes and relating them to the myths of his world-historical moment to gesture towards an epic totality. According to Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ghatak’s films thus attain a sense of epic completeness/wholeness by constantly juxtaposing lived reality with the mythic system that the modernity of the event of 1947 heralded.16 While this mythic system is present in Ray’s Calcutta Trilogy as well, he is more invested in the mythification of the banal, the cosmic and universal aspect of the human struggles in the Calcutta of the 1970s.17 Ghatak, on the other hand, is invested in both understanding the universalizing temptations of the mythic and demonstrating how human subjects are interpellated by it.18 He is concerned with the question of how they are called upon to behave, what such ritualized modes 15 Martin-Jones uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of re- and de-territorialization from A Thousand Plateaus. He quotes: “The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organization … scrambling forms by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assemblages.” See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

16 Martin-Jones, Deleuze, 26.

17 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7.

18 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (Mumbai: Screen Unit, 1982), 31.

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of behaviour entail, and how it shapes their lived experiences. As Ghatak himself declares: I have often had to face the criticism that Subarnarekha has made too much use of “coincidences.” No doubt there are far too many of them in the film. But the central event, the brother ending up at the doorstep of his sister in his search for paid sex is such a great coincidence that I thought of using coincidence itself as a form in this film. I have tried to leave clues for the audience about coincidences occurring in the film from the very outset. I have injected connotations in the formal order of coincidences in order to make them pregnant with meaning.19 Coincidence itself is here strongly linked to the idea of archetypes.20 The dialectical dance of form and the content—where coincidence becomes the structuring principle that simultaneously receives its response in the manifestation of the clue on the level of content—drives this interaction between the mythic and the everyday.

Manifestations of Clock-Time in Jana Aranya and Subarnarekha Another structuring principle shared by Ray and Ghatak’s depictions is time. What is common to both films, for example, is the way in which other temporalities are structured by clock-time. As E.P. Thompson has argued, clock-time has to be seen as an imposition that changes the qualitative conceptualization of time (astronomy, biology, etc.) and replaces them with pure, abstract quantities.21 In Jana Aranya, Somnath’s interactions betray the anxieties connected with the ever-increasing shortness of time and the effects this has on economic stability.

Set in the early-1970’s Calcutta, a city caught between Naxailte efforts and police crackdowns, Jana Aranya follows Somnath Banerjee, a recent university graduate. After being unable to find employment, he begins his career as a middleman, providing supplies for a myriad number of businesses around the city, encountering all measures of corruption, economic uncertainty, and financial compulsions in urban society. For instance, when Somnath returns home from H.L. Shaha’s office, having just received a commission for his work, his sister-inlaw asks him about their prospects of financial stability in decidedly temporal terms: “What about tomorrow?”22 In the next scene, from the moment Somnath enters M.L. Goenka’s office, there is the sound of a clock loudly ticking away in the background. “Road condition bhalo hole, distance matter kare na [if the roads are in a good condition, the distance doesn’t matter]” Goenka tells Somnath.23 Interrupting the conversation is the sound of a siren, signalling a work-break.

Somnath then gazes at the ticking clock as Goenka leaves the room.24 After the 19 Rajadhyaksha, 31.

20 Rajadhyaksha, 20-26.

21 Ritwik Ghatak, “ On Subarnarekha,” Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 19.

22 Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence (London: Picador, 1979), 96.

23 E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, no. 38, (December 1967), 94-96.

24 Ray, Jana Aranya.

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dinner scene, when Somnath calls Mr. Sengupta, and then calls PRO Mitter, there is again a clock placed visibly in the background.25 Further, when Somnath suggests to Mitter that they meet in an hour, Mitter tells him otherwise, and tells him that they can only meet “at 5.30 P.M. sharp.”26 Adding to this focus on clocks and time, when Somnath needs to obtain money to pay Mitter, he decides to pawn his watch, suggesting a complete loss of control over his own time, having given up to the rhythms and motions of clock-time along with his job.27 Ray also uses a right-toleft, clockwise panning motion multiple times in the movie, as if to depict how these characters are controlled by clock-time and a linear conception of progress and development. Jana Aranya can thus be read as Somnath’s slow but total absorption into a world where he has forsaken any ownership over his own time, where he only understands time through business cycles and work assignments.

Ghatak’s Subarnarekha too presents the creeping onslaught of clock-time as it increasingly controls everyday life. Subarnarekha begins on the eve of the Partition of 1947, and charts the story of Ishwar Chakraborty, his young sister Sita, and Abhirama, a boy they meet at a refugee camp. Ishwar finds a job at a steel factory far from urban Bengal, and the children move with him, but Abhirama is soon packed off to boarding school. He returns, many years later, only to profess his love for Sita. When Ishwar rejects this match, the young couple elope and begin a new life in Calcutta, while Ishwar’s fortunes at the factory start to decline.

The first indication of the prevalence of clock-time in daily life is Sita’s anger at Abhirama when the latter is told to be prepared to leave for boarding school at 4 P.M. sharp.28 The foreman, Mukherjee, stresses the punctuality of the bus, as the children are leaving the space of Ishwar’s house. Clock-time, in Subarnarekha, is aligned with specific kinds of spaces, such as Ishwar’s household, or the steel factory, and these are, for most part, not the spaces where the main plot of the movie unfolds. Time in general passes differently in different places, which in itself throws Bakhtin’s chronotope into relief, and shows how capitalism and clock-time are essentially waging war against the plurality of spatio-temporal uniqueness of experiences. Sita, for example, has a very different perception of time, one that seems to work based entirely on how she experiences the world around her. When she thus tells Abhirama “we are late, let’s go,”29 it is unclear what she is late for, and by what standards. The next scene presents Sita and Abhirama continuing their conversation by the river instead of the forest, and they do not, in fact, seem to have been late for anything.30 This could be read as a reflection of Sita’s desire to steer the conversation toward a less sexually-charged topic. However, the song that Sita suddenly begins to sing further complicates this matter. Since we find out in the next scene that the voice we hear with Sita and Abhirama in the forest, the voice that Sita was trying to listen to, was actually 25 Ibid.

26 Ray, Jana Aranya.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ritwik Ghatak, Subarnarekha, film, directed by Ritwik Ghatak (1965; Kolkata: Maxitech Entertainment, 2010), DVD.

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Sita’s own voice. It fills the forest landscape, but it is not coming from her since she is clearly not singing, and seems to, in fact, try to listen to it This cross-temporal existence of the voice suggests that when Sita tells Abhirama that they are late, she is merely pointing out that they would be late in getting to the place where they will be. It is a paradoxical statement to make, but it is very much in line with the conceptualization of time and the present moment that Ghatak expounds throughout the film: a sense of a contemporaneity of the past with the present, unfolding into the future, and thus unmoored from the linearity that, for example, makes Somnath lose control over his life in Jana Aranya. In Subarnarekha, on the other hand, the camera spins around when Sita begins to sing, moves in a circle, returns to where she was standing, and stops, only to show that she is no longer there. The song leads her through space and time, and it is her realization of their “lateness” that presents her as someone who has a different understanding, and an actual sense of control, over her time.

On the other hand, Sita seems to have little understanding of clock- and other social understandings of time. She asks Ishwar why people say she has grown up; it is almost as if she is unable to understand the passage of time in the social context. The reason that people remind her of her age is to suggest that it is time for her marriage, and she realizes that, but the manner in which she phrases the question points not only to her fear of leaving Ishwar, but a fear of having lost control of time. However, unlike the case of Somnath’s lost control over clocktime, Sita here seems to be afraid of being absorbed into the greater network of bourgeois relations and urban society. What her lack of understanding of socially constructed meanings points to is thus the loss of familial kinship ties (as her attachment to Ishwar suggests).

Once Abhirama tells Sita that he has three weeks before leaving for Germany for four years, she realizes the existence of this threat that clock-time represents, and her interactions with Abhirama reflect as much. She asks him whether the ruined British clubhouse still exists, and vaguely alludes to the Second World War as “that long-ago war,”31 which contrasts with the specific knowledge she presents earlier in the movie as a child about the British bombing Burma. The space of the clubhouse was previously shown to be a safe one over which the playing children exercised control. In the later scene, in contrast, the space of the clubhouse is shot in a choppy manner. The angles change abruptly, and Sita seems to move between shots in impossible ways (Figures 7-10),32 which creates a strange hallucinatory effect. The main difference between the childhood scene and the later one is that in the former, the space is not impervious to outside influences, and Abhirama has to leave when Mukherjee calls him. In the later scene, the space seems like a fortress of time, having internalized its temporality, in effect suspended in time. With Sita and Abhirama’s return there, the club house becomes ritualized and takes on mythic quality— and it is this myth of the space which then begins to operate according to its own logic. In fact, the space of the clubhouse demands a different kind of aesthetic, and the choppy 31 Ghatak, Subarnarekha, Film.

32 Ibid.

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montage, broken down in time registers the the disintegration of spatio-temporal logic here through the deterritorialized movement-images. While the children, not socialized at all, seem to experience that space in a natural manner (as in the smooth movement-images in the first sequence), the adults, resisting clock-time, come to this place as a haven, and experience time here in different manner (seen in the deterritorialized movement-images).

Space has thus been revealed as myth, outside clock-time, and Sita and Abhirama experience it as such. Broken, fragmented, the time of the Real, the time of history, that time which they as children had unalienated contact with, is gone, and, like history, emerges only as fragments, in choppy linearity, as the Real battling the time outside. And this, the space of the rubble, clattering at Sita’s feet, is where she would like to pause for a moment, “to piece together what has been smashed.”33 But a storm is blowing from Paradise, and these khwab-gahs, these Edens, of history have to departed from, left behind, as Sita and Abhirama do, to seek their fortune in Calcutta, integrating with the bourgeois urbanity.

The Space of History and the History of Space

है अब इस मामूरे में क़हत-ए-ग़म-ए-उल्फ़त ‘असद’ हम ने ये माना िक िदल्ली में रहें खावेंगे क्या “As it thrives, as it is hollowed of that sorrow of love, Asad, If we are to stay in Delhi, what will we eat?”

—Mirza Ghalib Mirza Ghalib’s poem, written in the aftermath of the 1857 “national war” in Delhi, describes the desolation of the city in the bloody aftermath of the British crackdown on the nationalist forces.34 This sentiment of the emptying out space, of the hollow spectre of a city that remains, persisting in time past its epoch, is present in the depiction of the British Colonial clubhouse in Subarnarekha and Jana Aranya as well. Both films in fact present the decline of the clubhouse after Partition, and both films choose some form of combination of the time- and movement-image to convey the history of those spaces.

In Jana Aranya it is the businessman, H.L. Shaha, who works in an office next to Somnath Banerjee, who brings up the matter of “shahib baadi” (colonial mansions).35 He tells Somnath about colonial mansions disappearing because they being replaced by high-rise apartments. He goes on to explain how the mansions have now essentially become commodities, and, fetishized to the extreme, are considered desirable by the wealthy. The camera in this scene moves from their conversation and actually begins to map the space of the colonial 33 Ghatak, Subarnarekha, Film.

34 Ibid.

35 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 19381940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 392.

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mansion, peering into all the rooms, overlaid with the following conversation between Somnath and Shaha: SHAHA. You could get commission for such information [about the location of a colonial mansion].

SOMNATH. Commission?

SHAHA. Have you ever been in one of these houses? You can see how the British used to live. Huge teakwood doors, high ceilings, marble floors. And bathrooms, a British bathroom is something to see, even the toilet is stunning. They all fetch good prices.36 We see here the persistence in space of memory. Yet the shaking, hand-held-style shots of the colonial mansion’s interiors creates a sense of being inside Somnath’s dream, the dreams of a person who has never actually seen the inside of the mansion. These buildings, which were once symbols of power, now fetch great prices on the market, according to Shaha. The hallucinatory, expressionist camera movement and the music here lend the house a dream-like quality. It is this dream landscape that invests the image with the force of history, for the viewer here is stranded without causes, or rather in the absence of causes, and left wondering as to why they are here. Time-image and movement-image here serve as aspects that are engaged in a struggle to re- and deterritorialize this image.

The emptiness of the interiors points to the event of 1947 in two ways. First, it shows how the British have indeed been evicted by political decolonization from the space of the house itself. Second, it depicts the power that this hallowed space of the colonizer still has, and how it has been appropriated into bourgeois economics. The latter is evident in the sense of awe with which Shaha and Somnath speak of the house. This contradiction is resolved by the commodification of the spectre of colonialism, the myth of the colonizer’s space absorbed by capitalism to its value-producing ends. This hidden charm of the house, the fetish that, in Karl Marx’s words, makes this inanimate space feel dreamlike (giving rise to the time-imagistic aspects of the shots), emerges from its exchange-value. At the same time, the exchange-value is predicated on the colonial power that the house exudes, and the implication (never voiced) that the house was once inhabited by the colonizer.

The commodification of the condemned colonial house is mirrored throughout the movie. So prevalent is this concern that Jana Aranya can be read as an exploration of the creation of surplus-value seemingly out of nowhere. At the same time, Somnath’s fantasy vision of the colonial house betrays his petty-bourgeois and, more importantly, comprador perspective on colonialism. Marx, in Capital Volume 1, writes about how “while productive labour is changing the means of production into… a new product, their value undergoes a metempsychosis. It deserts the 36 Mirza Ghalib,“Subh-e-azadi (August ’47),” Rekhta, accessed on: December 12, 2017, https://www. rekhta.org/couplets/hai-ab-is-maamuure-men-qaht-e-gam-e-ulfat-asad-mirza-ghalib-couplets?lang=hi

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consumed body, to occupy the newly created one.”37 Somnath’s job is to serve as a middleman who delivers goods from suppliers to users and earns on commission, the Charon navigating the rivers of dead labour, supply and demand, animating surplus value into existence. His wages, in this sense derive from pure exchangevalue. The movement-image aspect, for Deleuze, provides a sense of continuity and linearity, imposing a bourgeois sense of manufactured reality. Ray’s use of the time-image aspects in this scene is underscored by its dialectical interaction with, and underpinning by, the movement image; the time-image experience is only activated insofar as it comes into frictional contact against the movementimage. If we are to understand the deserted colonial mansion as a symbol of the event of 1947, its truth is being actualized in two dialectical ways, providing two different but similar subjective perspectives, on that event. The scene is focalized through Somnath, presented as his imagined projection of a space he has never experienced. Somnath, born around 1950 (he is 26 years old in the movie, which is itself set in 1975), did not live through the Partition, and so only knows it as an abstract event and a series of possibilities that emerged from it. This empty colonial house, depicted as Somnath’s fantasy, represents a spatial materialization of the petit-bourgeois aspirations (such as Somnath’s) that fill the emptiness left behind by the colonial space, and occupy that same space, without changing it.

However, just as the spectral house is “evolving grotesque ideas” out of its brain through Somnath’s fantasy, the use of movement-images in the scene provides a counter-narrative. The linearity imposed by Shaha’s voiceover punctures the dreamlike visual depiction, to the point that the juxtaposition of the two turns the experience into its dialectical inverse— a satirical, overinflated and exaggerated idea of the colonial mansion. The movement-image, the defining feature of Shaha’s narrative, frames exchange-value (the money he will make on the house) as usevalue (as something inherent in the house’s features and fixtures), and in this sense conflates quantity as quality. Are the British toilets, which the viewer can see, really that different? In this regard then, Ray’s use of the time-image shows that the absent cause indicated by the empty space should not be mystified, but must be understood in its present manifestation: here, the dominant bourgeois ideology of exchange value is revealed to have coopted the power of such dwellings, or in other words their residual myth. This dominant ideology both channels the power of the event of 1947 and shows how the subjects constituted by it are involved in using it to the end of attaining surplus value. Thus, while the cinematography here exposes the myth of value creation in bourgeois society, showing how fetishism operates as a myth of its own, the second myth remains closed, attains a level of banality and ordinariness, normalization, that prevents opening it up to further possibilities. It remains frozen in the present, and time does not expand beyond it.

Ray’s cinematography is very much invested in depicting a history of space (or rather a historicization of space), its emptiness indicating both its past “glories” and its present commodification. Ritwik Ghatak’s clubhouse, on the other hand, provides a space of history (a spatialization of history) in providing a history to 37 Ray, Jana Aranya.

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space. The event is once again 1947, but it is depicted and instilled with such an overwhelming sense of temporality that the space of the narrative seems to lose all meaning. The children, Abhirama and Sita have just learnt that Abhirama is to leave that afternoon for boarding school.38 They leave Ishwar’s residence and begin to wander in the countryside. Suddenly, they arrive at a barrier and the camera slips away and we see shots of a crashed airplane from the Second World War.39 The whole context of that history is then transported to this space, as an unfolding event, decaying through time and into the present moment. Here, the present is understood as a possibility, as a juxtaposition of two temporal moments along a continuum. Both are in flux and connected to one another, which is markedly different from Ray who chooses to depict new manifestations of the old.

In Subarnarekha once more partition makes an apperance as a rundown clubhouse where British pilots would relax after “dropping bombs on Burma.” The fact that it is the children’s actions through which this scene is focalized lends a dreamlike quality to it that is not undercut by any narratorial or aural inputs. As Deleuze has pointed out, the way in which Italian Neorealism depicted children in postwar settings (for instance, Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero) highlights a failure of human motor-perceptions to interact with the environment. The time-images in Subarnarekha perform a similar function. The heightened perception of the visual and sonic registers of the space lend it a surreal quality, since space is not being acted upon in any other sense. Thus, the shots presenting the crashed plane are immediately followed by a shot of the children running down a hill.40 Then the camera shifts to the cockpit of an airplane, moving over a runway, taxiing or landing.41 This can be read as both the children imagining the pilot’s experience and/or as the space emitting these narratives that it once bore witness to. To consider both these simultanouesly would be to underscore the point made above, that the children had an unadulterated contact with spacetime around them, which they lose over time. This simultaneity of these two interpretations is established through the next shot, which shows Abhirama imitating that motion of an airplane on the same runway the cockpit-shot established, having fully merged with both the history of this space (the mechanization of the human body in warfare), and with the experience of the pilot, through his own body.

It is the inclusion of this deterritorializing time-image of the airplane, interacting with the emptiness of the landscape surrounding Abhirama and Sita, that infuses the other parts of this scene, so that their centripetal pull fails in their attempts to provide a linearity. Now, when we see the clubhouse, it rings with past occurrences. And yet for all intents and purposes there is nothing to provide us with that resonating sense of history in the ruin. The ruin, to literalize Walter Benjamin, exists in the realm of things as, and just as, an allegory would be in 38 Ibid.

39 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1), trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1982), 163-164.

40 Ghatak, Subarnareka, Film.

41 Ibid.

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the realm of thought.42 So the image of the ruin forces the viewer to register the passage of time, and to allegorically reconstruct the entire history of the house.

The material manifestation of this abstract part of history in the ruin shows the subjective reconstruction of the event itself (a search for the total experience of history) and the subjects (Abhirama and Sita) being constituted by the event.

Unlike the case of Ray’s cinematography, there is no explicit case for focalization here, and thus no indication as to where the viewer should position themselves temporally, which ends up constituting the depicted present as pure possibility guided by the event.

With the clubhouse reconstituted as a processual thing developing in time, its ravaged face thus materializes History itself as unfolding through time. In Ray’s Jana Aranya, on the other hand, the event of 1947 has occurred, which is to say, its possibilities are depicted as saturated by the influx of capital, even as this manifestation of material possibility (in the commodification of the colonial mansion) is condemned throughout the movie. If, as Jacques Derrida suggests, the experience of time is marked by the spectral, by the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present,”43 then Ghatak’s style points to the contemporaneity with its not-self of the living present. Abhirama’s movements here provide a motor-perceptual correlative to the associations brought to mind by the plane and the house. He imitates both the plane taking off and dropping bombs on Burma, with the violence of the past merging with the child of the present, which in fact implicates future possibilities as well. The event here then is registered in physical actions, not in the realm of fantasy. Ray’s focalization and subjective portrayal of the past, through Somnath, thus make it seem totalizing in its desire to present the empty house as singularly manifest in the present as commodity.

Representing Women, Representing Violence

की थी हराम ख़ुद-कु शी मेरे ख़ुदा ने क्यूँ बे-वज्ह िज़दं गी का सफ़र काटना पड़ा “The solace of suicide God denies too I have wandered the streets of life aimlessly” — Kishwar Naheed44 The commodification and reification of spaces was also accompanied by the commodification and regulation of women’s sexualities before, during and through, and after, the Partition.One of the predominant myths of the Bengali Hindu middle-class, developing since the mid-nineteenth century in social and cultural discourse, was that of the Mother Goddess, which played a major role in providing ideological buttress to the gendered violence that accompanied the Partition.45 The mythification of the mother, as a symbol of the colonized, is 42 Ghatak, Subarnareka, Film.

43 Ibid.

44 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 178.

45 Jacques Derrida, The Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), xviii.

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for example already evident in the works of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.46 Jasodhara Bagchi charts the entire history of this discourse in Colonial Bengal, from Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita to Aurobindo Ghosh. While seeming centered on women, the myth of motherhood, however, had the patriarchal goal of controlling women’s sexuality.47 The cult of jauhar and sati, which were ideologically deployed more than ever during the event of 1947, were supposed to preserve “the honour of the community.”48 Women came to be thought of as property in lieu of the seizure of land.49 At the same time, they were also brought under control as a way of regulating the “purity” of caste/class/religion.50 These ideological tensions, myths, and oppressive control mechanisms come to the fore in both Ghatak’s and Ray’s films. To use Fredric Jameson’s term, sex and sexuality become, for representative forms like cinema, a shared code.51 In this case, the extreme sexual and reproductive violence against women during Partition has emerged from the nineteenth century discourse of the nation as Mother as well as from the Hindu discourse of the Mother Goddess.52 It is on this level of abstraction that the major conflicts, myths, and realities of the event of 1947 play out for both films.

It is Ray’s Pratidwandi that provides the most explicit image of these anxieties through Siddhartha’s nightmares. Siddhartha dreams of his sister as a model who is comfortable with her sexuality, and it frightens him since he still thinks of her as a child.53 Yet, at the root of this anxiety is an economic dimension.

When he suspects that his sister is having an affair with her boss, he seemingly gets very angry and marches to the boss’s house. Having planned some kind of confrontation, he instead ends up asking for a job once he gets there.54 It is thus her economic power and her independence that unsettles him, but it is expressed and represented instead as sexual anxiety.

The economic and the sexual are not just in this instance presented in all manners of gendered entanglements in Jana Aranya and Subarnarekha. The primary commonality of these different cases is the otherness and sense of paranoia with which sex work is presented at the climax of both films. The linkage between the economic and the sexual presents how, for the patriarchy, the event of 1947 has constituted women-as-subjects as sex workers. As Bagchi has said, quoting 46 Kishwar Naheed, “Har Naksh-e-panv ko manzil-e-jaan maanna pada,” Rekhta, accessed on: 12 December 2017, https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/har-naqsh-e-paa-ko-manzil-e-jaan-maannaa-padaakishwar-naheed-ghazals?lang=hi.

47 Jasodhara Bagchi, “Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal,” Economic and Political Weekly 25, No. 42/43 (Oct. 20-27, 1990), WS-65.

48 Bagchi, Motherhood, WS-66.

49 Jasodhara Bagchi, “Freedom in the Idiom of Loss,” in The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, ed. Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (Kolkata: Stree Publishers, 2003), 19.

50 Bagchi, “Idiom of Loss,” 19.

51 Bagchi, “Idiom of Loss,” 20.

52 Bagchi, “Idiom of Loss,” 21.

53 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002), 69-70.

54 Chidananda Dasgupta, “Cinema, Marxism, and the Mother Goddess,” India International Centre Quarterly 12, no. 3 (September 1985), 260-261.

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Gyan Pandey, “the Partition never ended for [women],”55 and the idea that men were supposed to protect women commodifying them still persists. There is a sexualization of female economies presented here, which at the same time reflects the commercialization of women’s sexuality. The two films offer two very different visions, in this regard: in terms of how Sita and Juthika think of themselves, and in terms of how Ishwar and Somnath react when they find out their occupations.

Somnath thinks of himself, in a condemnatory manner, as a “dalāl”— a pimp— since he more or less serves as a middle-man.56 In this sense, he views sex work as the lowest form of participation in bourgeois economics. When Juthika first sees him, he is shown as a silhouette, and even though she knows who he is, the moment when she stops and stares at his silhouette suggests her perception of the community that threatens her economic existence. According to Bagchi, community and the state colluded in creating the myth of the woman as vulnerable property.57 In this regard, Juthika’s vision of Somnath registers him, on the one hand, as representative of the community, in that the threat he poses is one of exposure of her economic identity and her sex work (evidenced by how he calls her Kauna, her non-professional, familial name). On the other hand, he stands in for the state in the sense that is he who has forced her into this sexualized economic identity in the first place by appearing as her customer for the evening.

That he pays her extra, and that she accepts it after pointing out that he is paying more than necessary, shows how she acknowledges that he is paying more to assuage his conscience. It is in this regard that Ray chooses to portray sex work merely as something that troubles the male psyche only in economic terms.

Just as in Pratidwandi, the matter is wholly economized, and the overpayment is accepted as a symbolic gesture for the damage done to the female body that Somnath acknowledges he has participated in.

In contrast to his perspective, Juthika seems much more comfortable with the situation. She accepts that it is purely economic, a separation in the types of reproduction of labour that Somnath fails to understand. As her different names suggest, her profession for her is very distinct from her personal life. Further, whenever the camera takes her perspective, Somnath is shown as a blur or a silhouette, showing his generalization as simply another customer (Figure 12).58 Yet, it is he who continually tries to impose a communal, familial lens on Juthika’s sex work. He asks her about her brother, Sukumar, as if to remind her of their kinship ties by invoking the former days when he and Sukumar were friends at university. When that fails to dissuade her from going into Goenka’s (her actual client for whom Somnath is playing the middle-man) room, he walks away from the door, just as his father’s face is superimposed on the hotel corridor.59 The figure of the father has stood in, from the beginning of the movie, as a manifestation of the event of partition and of the era of the Independence 55 Ray, Pratidwandi.

56 Ibid.

57 Bagchi, “Idiom of Loss,” 17.

58 Ray, Jana Aranya.

59 Bagchi, “Idiom of Loss,” 20.

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Movement. The father remembers being called upon by Gandhi to work for the Independence movement. His existence in the house is haunting, and his presence is marked by the absence of his wife, who, he says, suffered immensely as she died. This leaves the actual reasons behind her death shrouded in mystery, and brings the full horror of the father’s strangeness and quietness to the fore by omitting the details of her death. Since these are the only glimpses of the father’s character that the audience receives (apart from his general comments on the violence of the Naxalites and his scattered remarks on the past), he seems to be trapped in the past, and specifically, in the moment of partition through a series of correspondances between his remorse for his wife’s death and his nostalgia for Gandhi. The presence of his face, superimposed over the hotel corridor, as Somnath walks away, both renders him in his father’s image, as a suffering being who has lost meaning in life, and historicizes the moment of his walking away. It is in this subjective mode (in Somnath’s subject-position) that the event of 1947 returns to haunt the scene. The juxtaposition of Juthika’s and Somnath’s perspectives on matter of sex work, for example, where the former sees it as an economic necessity, while the latter sees it as the degradation of an ideal, of the violation of the Law of the Father (with Somnath’s father looming in the background), particularizes how the event of 1947 and its interpretations are structured by various logics of gender. Just as Bagchi has pointed out, Partition and the gender relations that it actualized never disappeared for women, and consequently for Somnath, in this moment, it is as if the event has reasserted itself, and he realizes that he is a part of history. Upon his return home, his father is alone on the verandah, and Kamala is standing behind the curtain, quickly disappearing into his room.60 The ominous music, and the zoom-in on Kamala’s face, indicate Somnath’s alienation from his household.61 What is thus brought to the fore for Somnath, is the dissolution of the kinship ties between him and his family. He enters Juthika’s perspective in some limited form as he realizes that his father is made happy only because he received the contract. It is only Somnath’s economic success that brings him joy.

As a figure standing in for Partition, his joy in this regard once again harkens to the idea that the event itself has been lost in bourgeois aspirations. Somnath’s vision of the family ultimately dissolves in that final scene, and unlike Juthika who can still, ostensibly, operate in both spheres (the familial and the occupational), it appears that for Somnath his economic success comes at the cost of at least one of the spheres, because he is unable to separate his existence in one from the other.

In this regard, Somnath’s predicament is compounded in the case of Sita. Unlike the impression the viewer gets of Juthika, as someone in control of her economic identity, Sita actively resists taking up the profession of a sex worker, as evidenced by her shocked and uncomfortable reaction to Kajal’s announcement that a client had come for to “hear her singing.” According to Allison Harris, the situation of the postcolonial woman can be understood through Julia Kristeva’s idea of the abject.62 Since the postcolonial/colonized woman can neither identify with the colonizer nor with the colonized (since both are constituted in a patriarchal paradigm), her 60 Ray, Jana Aranya.

61 Ray, Jana Aranya.

62 Ibid.

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position remains ambiguous, and leads to an identification with abjection, with that which simply does not fit in the subject/object schema of the colonizer and the colonized.63 This abjection also functions on the level of the nation, as the patriarchal nation-state constitutes itself through exclusion of the identities and demands of its minorities, most notably, of women.

In Ghatak, the portrayal of women as abject also plays out on the level of myth.

According to Ira Bhaskar, throughout the movie, in fact, Sita is identified with several mythical female figures. She is, for example, named after the mythological Sita, who represents an idealized wife in the Hindu imaginary. And Ishwar consequently understands her exactly as such an idealized mother figure. He also thinks of her as a daughter, however, upon considering the age difference between them. She plays the veena, the classical instrument of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of speech, wisdom, and learning. She is finally related to Kali, the Goddess of death, first through the bahuroopee, and then through her violent suicide which takes place to the same sharp music that accompanied her first sight of the Kali bahuroopee.64 Her suicide upon encountering Ishwar, while on a material level a response to the horror of the tabooed sexualization of the family, also registers the complicity of the community in the violence inflicted on women. Unlike Ray, where the family is shown to exist only as an economic unit, (as Somnath’s disappointment suggests) Sita’s tragedy shows that it is bourgeois economics that is actually destroying the family through both the collusion of bourgeois forces (represented by Kajal) and the community (represented by Ishwar). It is this moment when the constructed myth of the woman is brought to destroy itself, with Kali’s violence unleashed upon herself, as Sita rejects the subject-object positions that the state of affairs affords her.

The mythic and material registers, described above, of Sita’s suicide are compounded through the manner in which Ghatak’s use of the time-image, in this sequence and in the scenes immediately following her death, harnesses the echoes of the event of 1947. Since Sita dies in the room alone with Ishwar, he is the only person to have witnessed the event. Ghatak presents this entire scene in a hallucinatory and dream-like manner. This is partially due to the fact that the scene is focalized through Ishwar, who is inebriated. Apart from that, however, the entire trip to Calcutta is strange and oneiric, providing a sense of the timeimage which comes to dominate in Sita’s room. Here, the time-image only gains importance in the aftermath of the events it presents. When the reporter arrives to interview Ishwar and Hariprasad for statements, the only thing that he actually asks them, and which reveals Ishwar’s idea of bearing witness to such an event, is why Ishwar, who had never lied in his life, was lying about having killed his sister.65 In this depiction, the event of 1947 is allegorized through the event of Sita’s suicide by way of representing the common theme of violence inflicted upon 63 Ibid.

64 Allison Nicole Harris, “Paradox of the Abject: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban” (Master’s diss., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2012), 3-5.

65 Harris, “Postcolonial Subjectivity,” 3-5.

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women. Hariprasad reveals his nationalistic and socialistic position on the matter when he claims that Ishwar’s lie in this regard is a symbol of his martyrdom, and relates it to Khudiram Bose’s march to the gallows.66 This is the casting into the heroic, patriarchal narratives through which stories of women’s suicides during the partition are often seen.67 Ishwar himself, however, seems to have a different perspective, which is suggested by the fact that he asks the reporter whether Sita’s suicide was really that shocking to him, as if he (the reporter) had no female relatives who had been through such an experience. By stating the matter of Sita’s suicide in this light, he generalizes the event, expanding its horizons until it stands, more starkly than ever, as a correlate for the violence against women during Partition, thus identifying Sita’s death as a part of that unfolding event.

It is then in this allegorical spirit, that the time-image once again permeates and inspects the linearity of the narrative that takes place after Sita’s suicide. Ishwar is not trying to be a martyr. Instead, he seems to have arrived at an understanding of the event of Sita’s suicide that reads it in an allegorical manner, explaining Ghatak’s use of the time-image as well as his own decision to bear witness in a specific way. Noëlle McAfee comments on the distinction between being an eye witness “with its notions of evidence gathered through vision,” and bearing witness, “which usually offers a testimony of something that cannot be seen.”68 Thus, the representative distinction between the movement-image and the timeimage is analogous to the camera’s function as an eye-witness. The use of the time-image in the suicide scene makes Ishwar into someone who bears witness, but refuses to comment on what he has seen. Further, Ishwar’s initial reaction to Sita’s suicide is so physical, that it is seems to almost act out the abjection that she herself faced.69 His body expels fluids (tears), his clothes are stained with her blood, and he thrashes on the floor like a child, unable to make sense of the sequence of events that he has just experienced. Thus, he is on the one hand an eyewitness, but on the other hand chooses to remain silent in the face of an event that is not representable in words. The only way he is able to react to it, is through the failure of the motor-functions of his body.

The contextualization of the time-image suicide sequence within the linearity of the narrative that follows is thus essential in the ways in which it renders Sita’s suicide as an integral part of a larger history. Ishwar’s comments on the matter further strengthen the force of this suggestion. It is not that he desires martyrdom, but that he accepts the guilt for her death, as a bourgeois industrialist who refused to stand by his opposition to casteism at the vital moment, as someone whose ideals were purchased by the system. His guilt is not for her death, or only for Abhirama’s death, however, but implicates the larger machinery which he has at this point become a part of. More than anything else, it exposes the failure of the movement-image to capture the horror that the time-image renders palpable.

66 Ghatak, Subarnarekha.

67 Ghatak, Subarnarekha, Film.

68 Ibid.

69 Deepti Mishra, Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 55.

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In this paper I have attempted to pinpoint the major differences in Ray’s and Ghatak’s directorial methods in terms of the movement- and time-image, to show the differences in their assessments of the afterlife of the Partition in 1960’s-70’s Bengal. I have chosen this particular period in time because, with the rise of Naxalism, Ray’s cinema entered a period of intense cynicism and came to resemble the mood of many of Ghatak’s films.70 Analyzing the different representative functions the time- and movement-images can fulfill, this paper also outlined the ways in which the dialectical tension between these two modes of representation plays out in Ghatak and Ray’s films. The time-image, in making the viewer search for causes, presenting a sense of time itself, and throwing the subject/ object distinction into disarray, ultimately achieves a sense of subjectivism that shows the echoes of the event becoming audible. These echoes are present, in different ways, in both Ray’s and Ghatak’s depictions of time and space, and their intersections with economics. The gendered implications of the Partition survive well into post-Independent India. The peculiar ontological insight provided by the time-image is an important site for understanding how gendered subjects were and are constituted in and through the unfolding of the event of the partition.

70 Noëlle McAfee, “Bearing Witness in the Polis: Kristeva, Arendt, and the Space of Appearance,” in Revolt, Affect, Collectivity : The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, ed. Tina Chanter, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 114-115.

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Figure 1: The clockwise pan (Jana Aranya)

Figure 2: The clockwise pan (Jana Aranya)

Figure 3: The clockwise pan (Jana Aranya)

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Figure 4: Clock-time (Jana Aranya)

Figure 5: The British Colonial Bathroom (Jana Aranya)

Figure 6: The British Clubhouse (Subarnarekha)

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Figures 7-10: Sitare’s impossible movements in the Clubhouse’s ruins (Subarnarekha)

Figure 11: The sexual anxiety revealed to be economic (The Mercedes owner being beaten up in the background) (Pratidwandi)

Figure 12: The Silhouette - Recognition as General, Recognition as Abstract (Jana Aranya)

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Figure 13: The Spectral Law of the Father (Jana Aranya)

Figure 14: Ishwar’s Cosmic Despair (Subarnarekha)

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Ghatak, Ritwik. “On Subarnarekha.” Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 1921.

Ghatak, Ritwik. Subarnarekha. Film. Directed by Ritwik Ghatak. 1965. Kolkata: Maxtech Entertainment, 2010. DVD. Harris, Allison Nicole. “Paradox of the Abject: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban.” Master’s diss., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2012.

Jalil, Rakhshanda. Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge, 2002.

Koestler, Arthur. The Roots of Coincidence. London: Picador, 1979.

Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1). Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1982.

McAfee, Noëlle. “Bearing Witness in the Polis: Kristeva, Arendt, and the Space of Appearance.” In Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, edited by Tina Chanter, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, 113144. New York: State University of New York Press, 2006.

Mishra, Deepti. Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Nahid, Kishwar. “Har Naksh-e-panv ko manzil-e-jaan maanna pada.” Rekhta.

Accessed on: 12 December 2017. https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/ har-naqsh-e-paa-ko-manzil-e-jaan-maannaa-padaa-kishwar-naheedghazals?lang=hi.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic. Mumbai: Screen Unit, 1982.

Ray, Satyajit. Jana Aranya. Film. Directed by Satyajit Ray. 1976. Kolkata: Shradha Home Video, 2013. DVD. Ray, Satyajit. Pratidwandi. Film. Directed by Satyajit Ray. 1970. Kolkata: Shradha Home Video, 2010. DVD.

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(Fall 1988): 15-25.

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© Zainab Ashraf

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Reading the Mahavamsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravada Buddhist History. By Kristin Scheible. New York: Columbia University, 2016.

Aditya N. Bhattacharjee From the mid-1960s onwards, the question of how communities remember collective pasts was reshaped by the contributions of different interdisciplinary thinkers in the liberal arts such as the late Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Michel de Certeau, whose theoretical interrogations spilled over into the various disciplines that constitute the humanities. This question was also enthusiastically adopted in Buddhist Studies, provoking several path-breaking research projects on Buddhist history writing that dominated the field from between the early 1980s until the mid-1990s. As these scholarly concerns intersected with the advent of Sri Lanka’s long and devastating Civil War (1983-2009), a voluminous body of secondary scholarship was produced that addressed vamsas, an important literary genre of Pali-Theravada Buddhist chronicle texts that anticipates several outcomes. Apart from delivering a verse account of how the Buddha’s sāsana was introduced to and then established in a Buddhist polity, vamsas also provide genealogies of scholastic and dynastic succession that connect the dhamma overseen by a Buddhist monarch to the Buddha himself, thereby legitimizing the government in question as a valid one. Given the ubiquity of the subject in Buddhist Studies, one might question the value for writing a new book on a topic that was discussed to exhaustion almost twenty years ago.1 Kristin Scheible’s Reading the Mahāvamsa (henceforth RMV) functions as an elegantly-argued response to such questions as it offers a fresh, accessible and valuable reading of a 5th century Pali chronicle from Sri Lanka, the Mahāvamsa.

In light of the continued use of the text in Theravadin countries to justify violence perpetrated by Buddhist-majority populations against non-Buddhist ethnolinguistic minorities, RMV’s re-evaluation of the Mahavamsa is well-timed and appropriate.2 Divided into five main chapters, each of which ranges between 30-40 pages, with smaller introductory and concluding sections, Scheible calls upon readers to revisit the prevailing, but reductive interpretation of the Mahavamsa as a historical record, used principally to justify the Sinhala nationalist project. Instead, RMV advocates for an alternative approach, interpreting the Mahavamsa as an example of Buddhist liturgy that aims to inculcate ethical, and affective transformations in the minds of those that actively engage with the text.

1Kemper, Steven. The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991 2 The text was most recently mentioned in a discourse by a respected Burmese monk Sitagu Sayadaw who referenced its account of Sinhala King Duttagamini’s defeat of the Damilas in support of the Burmese army’s brutal campaign against the Rohingya Muslim population in Myanmar’s Rakhine State (https:// engagedharma.net/2017/11/03/sayadaw-killing-non-buddhists-is-not-a-sin/). Additionally, the most recent outbreak of violence in March 2018 between Sri Lankan Buddhists and Muslims reminds observers that the potency of texts like the Mahavamsa to incite nationalist sentiments is far from outdated.

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After this argument is laid out in the RMV’s introduction, Chapter 1 (Instructions, admonitions, and aspirations in vamsa proems) explains how Scheible’s assessment is validated by clear hermeneutical instructions presented in the proems (preludes) of both, the Mahavamsa and the Dīpavamsa.3 The proems, Scheible writes, commence in the vocative tense, inviting the reader-listener to pay attention to this narration of Buddhism’s introduction to Sri Lanka, an act carried out by the Śākyamuni Buddha himself, and its preservation by the royal dynasty established by the Indian Buddhist King Vijaya and his followers, a group that the texts identify as the island’s first human inhabitants and as progenitors of the Sinhala race. In addition to defending the view that the Sri Lankan island is the quintessential Buddhist kingdom, Scheible highlights the proems’ promise of membership in a community of “good people” (Scheible 36) who, after engaging with the text, will experience the desirous emotional states of samvega (anxious thrill) and pasāda (serene satisfaction)—affective consequences that, if underlined, radically transform the texts’ biographies.

The emotional reconstitution that the aforementioned vamsas assure its exegetes are explored further in RMV’s second chapter (Relocating the Light). The chapter focuses on the Pali term dīpa, which figures especially prominently in the Mahāvamsa, that can denote both island and also light. The text’s narrative opens with a description of three visits paid by the Buddha to Sri Lanka, a land that had already been primed to receive his teachings on account of its association with Buddhas of former eras, but that was believed to occupied by non-human beings like the Yakkhas and Nāgas, a class of empowered serpents who assume human forms at will, but remain classified as animals within Theravadin taxonomies of terrestrial species. Before relocating the Yakkhas elsewhere during the first visit and winning over the Nāgas on the second, the Buddha enveloped the island in a blanket of darkness that was unmasked as the light of the Buddhist dhamma was revealed to its inhabitants. Translations of Mahāvamsa that thoughtlessly render dīpa as just island without considering the term’s contextual placement in the text may be politically opportunistic strategies to determine an exclusively nationalistic exegesis. Expanding the semantic boundaries of dīpa, Chapter 2 convincingly contends, buttress the Mahāvamsa’s affective and moralizing telos.

By raising a narrower focus on the Nāgas, Chapters 3 and 4 propose more evidence to maintain the central argument outlined in the introduction. Entitled ‘Nāgas, Transfigured figures inside the text, ruminative triggers outside’, Chapter 3 explores the role played by Nāgas in the Jātakas, stories of the Śākyamuni’s former lives, and in the Māhavamsa. While both texts portray Nāgas as exceptionally sensitive to the Buddha’s teachings, they lamentingly posit them as unworthy of achieving nirvana due to their nonhuman ontological status. Adopting a term from Buddhologist Anne Blackburn, Scheible styles Nāgas as “ruminative triggers”, a set of rhetorical tools aimed to invoke the reader-hearer’s pity, yet also underscore the privilege of their human birth (Scheible 92-93) conveying upon them a sense of urgency regarding religious practice. Chapter 4 (Nāgas and Relics) extends 3 The oldest of the Pali vamsas (composed circa 3rd century CE), the Mahavamsa presents itself as an improved re-telling of the Dīpavamsa’s teachings

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the conversation on the Nāgas’ rhetorical efficacy by examining the relationship between Nāgas and the Buddha’s relics in different Buddhist narratives. Firmly devoted to the Buddhist dhamma despite being denied soteriological access, the Buddha bestows other rewards upon the Nāgas that include custodianship over his corporeal relics and the capacity to assume the Buddha’s own form, a power that allows them to stimulate “feelings of amazement and satisfaction” in worshippers (Scheible 114). RMV suggests that accenting features distinctive to the Buddha’s Nāgas, is a deliberate trope adopted by the Mahāvamsa’s authors to convince human worshippers that they may reap even more significant benefits, should they choose to cultivate an attitude of devotion equivalent to that of the Nāgas.

Chapter 5 (Historicizing [in] the Pāli Dīpavamsa and Mahāvamsa) is the lengthiest of the RMV’s chapters. After summarizing various scholarly perspectives on how the historicity of events discussed in the Mahāvamsa have been evaluated according to contemporary rubrics of historical writing, the chapter ends with an explicit tackling of nationalist appropriations of the vamsa genre in more recent settings. A coupling of the expository apparatus recommended by the Mahāvamsa’s verses themselves along with the analytical framework supplied in Chapters 1-4, should enable the reader-listener to make meanings of the text that disarm nationalist intentions. Such a disarming, the RMV concludes, opens up new interpretive spaces wherein ethical readings of the Mahāvamsa become outstandingly compelling to Theravadin communities.

Although its topic may appear outdated to some readers, the content brought forth in RMV should swiftly resolve concerns its critics might have regarding its necessity or relevance. Besides being useful to senior experts of Pali texts and Buddhist nationalism, it is also suitable to be read by advanced undergraduate students in Religious Studies or Asian studies programs. Aside from one or two minor typographical errors that can be easily rectified, the book is a superlative example of literary criticism and historiographical writing, practices that have not been as popular in more recent publications penned by scholars of Theravada Buddhism. Should Scheible choose to renew this biography of the Mahāvamsa at a future date, she could also consider incorporating an ethnographic investigation that seeks out Sinhala sermon-writers and Sri Lankan monastic spaces that approach the chronicle in a method that is resonant to hers. Such an assignment would only enrich her current research initiatives, and would also deepen our insights on this marvelous text that has spurred complex discussions in the Southern Buddhist world for the last 1500 years.

© Mobeen Ansari

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Whether Flowers Bloom or Not: Selections from Bengali Poetry Sandeep Banerjee The poems here are literary moments drawn from the corpus of modern Bengali poetry from the twentieth century. The realities of lived life in that corner of South Asia— the depredations of colonialism (especially famines); visions of decolonization and the hope of global revolution; the failure of decolonization and the ethnic violence of independence; the neo-colonial turn of postcolonial states— structured the development of realism, modernism, and irrealism, across genres, in the Bengali literary universe. In this context, poetry, especially the modernist lyric, emerged as a crucial literary form.

The shaping of the Bengali modernist lyric begins, unsurprisingly, with Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), that towering figure of Bengali literature whose work expresses the movement from romanticism to a developing modernism.

The Bengali modernist aesthetic would begin to take concrete shape in the works of Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), Jibanananda Das (1899–1954), and Sukanta Bhattacharya (1926–1947) poets who, while signaling their indebtedness to Tagore, would also begin to chart out their own aesthetic trajectories. Sukanta, in his homage to Tagore titled “For Rabindranath” (“রবীন্দ্রনাথের প্রতি”) lays this out succinctly: Even now in my mind, you are a glowing presence Each reclusive moment, as usual, spreads its madness Even now your songs overwhelm me, all of a sudden…

But the surety of fasting, scatters sighs Interminably, at the edges of my mind I am a poet of famine I see in my daily nightmares, clear reflections of death My spring is spent in food queues, lying in wait… এখথনা আমার মথন তিামার উজ্জ্বল উপতথিতি, প্রথিযেক তনভৃি ক্ষথে মত্তিা ছডায় যোরীতি, এখথনা তিামার গাথন সহসা উথবেল হথয় উঠি... িবু ও তনতচি​ি উপবাস আমার মথনর প্রাথতে তনয়ি ছডায় দীর্ঘশ্াস – আতম এক দুতভ্ঘ থক্ষর কতব প্রিযেহ দু​ুঃস্বপ্ন তদতখ মৃ িুযের সু স্পষ্ট প্রতিচ্ছতব| আমার বসতে কাথে খাথদযের সাতরথি প্রিীক্ষায়...

Other modernists who follow, such as the poets of kallol era, the Hungryalist poets (who inspired the American Beat poets), as well poets more directly inspired by the anti-capitalist struggles: poets such as Bishnu De and Subhash Muk-

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hopadhyay would continue to fashion the modernist aesthetic throughout the course of the twentieth-century. It would also be disseminated through the songs of groups such as Moheen’s Horses as well as those composed and sung by performers such as Kabir Suman.

This history requires a longer narrative than this short introduction; neither can it be adequately captured, or even alluded to, in the small selection of 6 poems that follow. But I hope it will give readers a glimpse into the fascinating world of Bengali lyric poetry. The poems selected (and translated) here allude to this larger trajectory of the development of modernist aesthetics in Bengal.

Three poems by Tagore open this selection that shows not just his engagement with a developing modernism but also his borrowing (poems II and III) from the Japanese tradition of haiku poetry. The work of Sukanta Bhattacharya, the shortlived Communist poet, is characterized by a radical modernist aesthetic underwritten by visions of decolonization and global revolution. In the poem presented here he can be seen insisting that it is barbaric to write poetry after the Bengal Famine, the darkest hour that Winston Churchill gifted to the Bengali people. Jibanananda Das forged a distinctive modernist voice (at once distinct from Najrul or Sukanta) that inscribe the global and historical into the local and engage in a kind of scalar play that makes Bengal— the landscapes of Bengal, in particular— an allegory for the world, giving it a mythical charge. A phrase from Jibanananda’s “Horse” (included here) also inspired the name of one of Calcutta’s legendary progressive rock bands, Moheen’s Horses (মহীথনর তরাডাগুতল; Moheener Ghoraguli) that flourished between 1975 and 1981. The selection concludes with the lyrics of one the more enduring songs of that group, a love song for Calcutta, the once-great premier city of British India that today stands as a monument to the defeat of the visions of decolonization and internationalism.

Collectively, the poems presented illuminate a critically lyrical modernism from the peripheral location of Bengal even as they seek to be lyrically critical of the worlds their creators inhabit. The poetic vision of these poems could, I think, be aptly captured by the words of another Bengali modernist, Subhash Mukhopadhyay: “Whether flowers bloom or not/ Today is spring.” (ফু ল ফু েুক না ফু েুক/ আজ বসতে; phul phutuk na phutuk/ aj boshonto).

The translations that follow are mine.

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I Song Rabindranath Tagore

১

আজ তযমন কথর রবীন্দ্রনাে ঠাকুর

Sing like the sky, as it sings today Long like the sky, as it longs today.

And as the wind— That in rustling the leaves, Leaves the forest in tears— Tear up the heart of my heart.

আজ তযমন কথর গাইথছ আকাশ তিমতন কথর গাও তগা আজ তযমন কথর চাইথছ আকাশ তিমতন কথর চাও তগা আজ হাওয়া তযমন পািায় পািায় মম্ঘতরয়া বনথক কাঁদায় তিমতন কথর বু থকর মাথে কাঁতদয়া কাঁদাও তগা

II

২

Untitled Rabindranath Tagore

স্ুতলঙ্গ ৩৭ রবীন্দ্রনাে ঠাকুর

In the wordless world of images Rests your steady stare.

A tale emerges from there Telling of its uneventful mute past— That turning the mind’s sky dark Lets rain pitiful despair.

ছতবর জগথি তযো তকাথনা ভাষা তনই তসোয় তিামার তথির দৃতষ্ট তয কাতহনী কতরথিথছ সৃ তষ্ট, রেনাতবহীন িার তবাবা ইতিহাস কাথলা তমথর তছথয় তফথল তচত্ত-আকাশ তবষাদ-বাদল কথর বৃ তষ্ট।

III

৩

Untitled Rabindranath Tagore

তলখন ৭ রবীন্দ্রনাে ঠাকুর

The spark finds rhythm in its momentary wings And joy in fading, as it flies.

স্ুতলঙ্গ িার পাখায় তপল ক্ষেকাথলর ছন্দ। উথড তগথয় ফু তরথয় তগল তসই িাতর আনন্দ॥

IV

৪

O Great Life Sukanta Bhattacharya O Great Life, enough of this poetry— Now bring prose: hard, austere Wiping away feet, beauty, flourish Strike with the stern hammer of prose!

Poetry’s tenderness is not needed— Today, poetry, I bid you adieu In this realm of hunger the world is prosaic The full moon, a toasted flatbread.

তহ মহাজীবন সু কাতে ভট্াচায্ঘ তহ মহাজীবন, আর এ কাবযে নয় এবার কঠিন, কথঠার গথদযে আথনা, পদ-লাতলিযে-েঙ্ার মু থছ যাক গথদযের কডা হািুতডথক আজ হাথনা! প্রথয়াজন তনই, কতবিার তনিগ্ধিাকতবিা তিামায় তদলাম আজথক ছু টি, ক্ষুধার রাথজযে পৃ তেবী-গদযেময়ুঃ পূ তে্ঘমা-চাঁদ তযন েল্সাথনা রুটি।।

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V

Horse Jibanananda Das We are not dead yet – but visions are born still: Moheen’s horses eat grass on November’s moonlit field, These Stone Age horses still greedy for grass Graze atop the formless dynamo of earth.

The stable smell wafts in with a crowded night’s breeze The sound of morose hay falls on steel machines; These teacups, like kittens ulcerated with sleep In a dog’s hazy grip Turn to dew, shift into that cheap eatery there; In the round stable the paraffin lamp dies Blown out by the serenity of the Age Touching the moonlight of these horses’ neolith stillness.

৫

তরাডা জীবনানন্দ দাস আমরা যাইতন ম’তর আথজা- িবু তকবলই দৃথশযের জন্ম হয়: মহীথনর তরাডাগুতল রাস খায় কাতি্ঘ থকর তজযোৎনিার প্রাতেথর, প্রস্তরযু থগর সব তরাডা তযন- এখনও রাথসর তলাথভ চথর পৃ তেবীর তকমাকার ডাইনাথমার ’পথর। আস্তাবথলর ঘ্াে তভথস আথস এক তভড রাতরির হাওয়ায়; তবষণ্ণ খথডর শব্দ ে’তর পথড ইস্পাথির কথল; চাথয়র তপয়ালা ক’ো তবডালছানার মথিা- রু থম- তরথয়া কুকুথরর অস্পষ্ট কবথল তহম হ’তয় ন’তড তগল ও-পাথশর পাইস্-তরথস্তারাঁথি; পযোরাতফন লন্ঠন তনথভ তগল তগাল আস্তাবথল সমথয়র প্রশাততের ফুঁথয়; এই সব তরাডাথদর তনওতলে-স্তব্ধিার তজযোৎনিাথক ছুঁ থয়।

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VI I Gift You These Moheen’s Horses

৬

তিামায় তদলাম মহীথনর তরাডাগুতল

The city’s hottest day The tar-melting sun The faith of rain – These I gift you today.

শহথরর উষ্ণিম তদথন তপচগলা তরাদ্ুথর বৃ তষ্টর তবশ্াস তিামায় তদলাম আজ |

What else could I gift – Old marches, rows of old tramcars The pavement cart selling balloons All strung tight, the reds and the whites, For my startled city, they make up its Rhododendrons.

আর তক বা তদথি পাতর পু রথনা তমতছথলর পু রথনা ট্াথমথদর সাতর ফু েপাে তরষা তবলু নগাতড সু থিা বাঁধা যি লাল আর সাদা ওরাই আমার েিমি এই শহথর রডথডনড্রন |

These I gift you today.

তিামায় তদলাম আজ

What else are my gifts – Neon light lit eateries Glowing in the deepest nights The highest building’s highest terrace These I gift you today.

তক আথছ আর গভীর রাথির তনওন আথলায় আথলাতকি যি তরথস্তারাঁ আর সব তেথক উচু ফ্যোেবাতডোর সব তেথক উচু ছাদ তিামায় তদলাম আজ |

I can’t gift you The paddy or grass-flower smells My arms’ gathered tenderness – My lungs seek from burnt fuels Lifelong assurances.

These I gift you today.

পারথবানা তদথি রাসফু ল আর ধাথনর গন্ধ তনিগ্ধ যা তকছু দুহািভথর আজ ফু সফু স তখাঁথজ তপাডা তডথসথলর আজন্ম আশ্াস তিামায় তদলাম আজ |

The image of poetry Of the city In its entirety – These I gift you today.

শহথরর কতবিার ছতব সব-ই তিামায় তদলাম আজ |

I gift you these.

I gift you these.

I gift you these.

তিামায় তদলাম | তিামায় তদলাম | তিামায় তদলাম |

© Mobeen Ansari

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THE HIDDEN LEFT: Communist Activity and Influence in Pakistan’s Early Years Meher Ali Introduction The birth of the modern nation of Pakistan— in 1947, at the moment of independence from British rule — was the product of a movement, led by the All India Muslim League, to protect the religious identity and political interests of India’s Muslim community. Understood through the driving ideology of Muslim Nationalism, the trajectory from religious separatism to Islamic state seems obvious, even inevitable. But nationhood is not constituted with the declaration of independence alone; it is a process— often circuitous, and never truly completed— shaped in important ways by moments of contestation and conflict with alternative political imaginings. The Pakistani political Left, represented in part by the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP), constituted one such arena where alternative viewpoints were being articulated. Through a reconstruction of the Party’s early history— between 1948 and 1951, with a closer look at their student front— this paper aims to introduce their perspective to our understanding of Pakistan’s early history, complicating the easy teleological narratives that dominate nationalist historiography.

In its first three years, the CPP grew— from less than 50 members left behind after Partition — to number over 400, along with numerous “sympathizers” and “fellow-travelers” who lent their support through associated organizations.1 As one foreign intelligence report put it, by January of 1951 the Party, “...though small and greatly harried by the security authorities, had emerged as an open political force with a declared policy and candidates ready for the Punjab elections.”2 Its parallel non-political organizations such as student groups were, it continued, widespread and active, and the party “seemed to be firmly on the threshold of its career.” The blow dealt to this burgeoning strength by the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case in 1951 is one from which the party would never really recover;3 but their influence continued to be visible through the efforts of various front organizations.

Without the CPP’s internal files from that time (and given the lack of consistent records on their activity overall), this study is seriously limited in how much it can reconstruct of the Party’s day-to-day history. But through bits and pieces from different sources, one can begin to piece together that picture.

1 Kamran Asdar Ali, “Communists in a Muslim Land: Cultural Debates in Pakistan’s Early Years,” Modern Asian Studies 45 (2011): 513.

2 Dominions Office, “Despatch No. 210,” DO 35/2591, London, July 14, 1951, From National Archives, Public Records Office.

3 In February of 1951, the Pakistani Government brought charges of sedition and the plotting of a military coup against certain military leaders and members of the Central Committee of the CPP. As a consequence, several leading members of the CPP were arrested and communists were effectively discredited as enemies of the state.

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The main sources consulted for this paper were the collections of the United Kingdom’s Foreign and Dominion Office, which were accessed at the National Archives in London during the summer of 2014. The forms of these documents vary; this study relies most heavily on official reports and dispatches between the British Intelligence Service (BIS), the Office of the High Commission in Karachi to the Foreign Office (FO) and the Dominions Office (DO). These files, along with the Public and Judicial series of the former India Office Collection (P&J Files), include accounts of the Party’s public activity and help trace the evolution of the CPP during these years. The research on student politics also utilized articles from the major English language daily Dawn, focusing on the paper’s coverage of the 1953 student protests in Karachi. Finally, this research was aided enormously by oral testimony, including interviews conducted in the summers of 2013 and 2014 with Jamal Naqvi, Rauf Malik, Sibghatullah Qadri, and Hussain Naqi. All of these men were either active student leaders or Communist Party members in the ‘50s, and their stories and memories add richness and detail to the narrative that cannot be found anywhere else.

I. Building the Party in a Nascent Nation State The Communist Party of Pakistan officially came into existence at the All-Party Conference for the Communist Party of India (CPI), which was held from February 29th - March 3rd, 1948, in Calcutta. At this conference, which was attended by 632 delegates from across the subcontinent, a “Report on Pakistan” was presented by Bhowani Sen, a prominent member of the politburo.4 While stating that the program for communism in Pakistan was similar to that of India’s, the Report acknowledged difficulties the party would face in the new country. These included feudalism, the strong religious character of the masses and, notably, the “authoritarian” hold of the ruling Muslim League party, which was accused of being “anti-national” and “anti-people.” While this hostility towards the Muslim League had not always been the official communist position, by 1948 the CPI had come to reject not only the party but also the very idea of Pakistan itself.

The Calcutta Conference marked a moment of turmoil and transition within the CPI, which was beginning a significant shift towards the left and a stricter vision of revolutionary politics. The conference also saw the election of a new general secretary, B.T. Ranadive, who presented a report in which the Partition plan was denounced as a “thoroughly opportunist resolution,” not a transfer of power but rather a “betrayal by the bourgeoisie.”5 The report concluded that, “Pakistan has come out neither as the achievement of freedom for any nationality not for any section of the people, Hindu or Muslim, but has been an imperialist conspiracy to keep the Hindu and Muslim masses divided.”6 The man chosen to lead the new party in Pakistan shared in this climate of bitterness and betrayal, as well as the dedication to a harder and more strictly anti-capitalist party line. Syed Sajjad Zaheer, known affectionately as Bannay 4 Ali, “Communists in a Muslim Land,” 513.

5 B.T. Ranadive, “Report on Reformist Deviation,” India and Contemporary Islam, 162.

6 Ibid., 169.

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Bhai by his peers, was one of the Indian communist movement’s most important figures. Born into a prominent Lucknow family in 1905, Zaheer became politically active during his years at Oxford University, where he co-founded the Progressive Writers Association. Upon his return to India in 1936, Zaheer led the Progressive Writer’s Movement and quickly rose through the CPI ranks, becoming a member of the Central Committee in 1943. Even with this venerable track record, he was not an entirely uncontroversial choice as the CPP’s first secretary general. At the time of the Calcutta Conference, many communists expressed their doubts regarding Zaheer’s organizational abilities, including Eric Cyprian, who said that “Stalin had said that all roads led to socialism and Sajjad Zaheer took it to mean to jump at any adventure.”7 Zaheer’s zeal toed the line between enthusiastic and reckless; he was the kind of person who would jump heedlessly into a military conspiracy (as he did in 1951)8 but is also credited with single-handedly rebuilding a broken party from the ground up. Early in 1951, less than three years after Zaheer’s arrival in Lahore, the head of the Punjab Criminal Investigation Department (CID) wrote this in a private report: After Partition the Communist Party in Pakistan lost all of its workers and was left without financial resources, yet within three years a powerful party machine has been built up...the budget of the party is perhaps only next to that of the Muslim League. It employs more paid workers than any other political party, new links have been forged, and the work organized amongst the students, factory workers, and other laborers/ kisans and writers, including journalists.9 How was such a transformation accomplished, on the ground? Upon his arrival in West Pakistan, Zaheer spent six months traveling around the country and meeting with the communist leaders who had not left upon Partition. His goals were, in broad terms: “(i) to evolve a common political understanding on the basis of the new line; (ii) to reactivate the past organization with its linkages to various social classes; (iii) to bring out a political organ, Naya Zamana, to unify the Party on new lines; (iv) to form various committees from among the existing Party members; (v) to make technical arrangements to protect the Party from being smashed; and (vi) to set up a collective Party centre.”10 East Pakistan formed its own regional party, and Zaheer determined a West Pakistan Central Committee with nine members: Jalaludin Bokhari, Muhammad Hussain Ata, Mirza Ibrahim, Shaukat Ali and C.R. Aslam from Punjab, Mirza Ishfaq Beg from the center, Ziarat Gul from the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP), and Abdul Khaliq Azad and Hasan Nasir from Sind.

7 Hasan Zaheer, The Times and Trial of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case 1951: The First Coup Attempt in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 206.

8 Zaheer was one of two Central Committee members to be charged in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case.

9 Abdur Rauf Malik, Marxi Danishwar aur Communist Rahnuma, (Lahore: People’s Publishing House, 2010), 3.

10 Zaheer, Times and Trial, 208.

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The head of Pakistan’s Crime Investigation Department (CID) is reported to have said, around this time, that “the danger [of Communism] lay in the misery which could be so easily exploited.”11 Early intelligence reports often described this danger, identifying particularly risky circumstances such as agrarian unrest in the NWFP and labor trouble in Karachi. One report highlighted, “There is much misery and poverty;” according to another: “Class feeling has intensified. The atmosphere is entirely favourable [for Communism].”12 The anxiety manifested in such accounts is simultaneously allayed, however, by other realities, such as the lack of CPP funds, prompt police action against unrest, and the predominance of religious and patriotic feeling amongst the general public.13 Unions and organized laborers were small in number and generally weak, the industries themselves being small-scale. In Karachi, where the labor movement had the most potential, attempts at organizing were hampered by the arrests of local leaders and the influence of the explicitly anti-communist Pakistan Federation of Labour. The Punjab had been the most active CPI region before Partition, but the departure of Hindus and Sikhs in 1947 drained their ranks, and attempts in rural areas to establish Kisan Sabha (peasant union) branches were sporadic and ineffectual.

The most pressing issue facing the party was the acquisition of funds; having separated from the CPI, the Calcutta Congress had refused to give any money to the new organization. They did grant them three printing presses in Lahore and Karachi, but two were taken over by the government and Zaheer sold the other for 16,000 rupees.14 The CPP also came into possession of the People’s Publishing House (PPH) in Lahore, which was a branch of a CPI-owned company based in Bombay. Zaheer asked his friend Rauf Malik, a young Communist who had only recently completed his bachelor’s degree, to run it. “I had no experience,” Malik recounted in an interview. “Just my inclination towards books and Marxist ideas.”15 He began with a small shop in the YMCA16 building on Lahore’s Mall Road, which quickly expanded to become the main channel for leftist literature and Soviet publicity in the city. In July, Zaheer sent the PPH’s acting manager, Ahmed Hussain, to establish indirect contact with the Soviet Union through their Tass News Agency representative in Karachi. Hussain met regularly with this representative, a man by the name of Bolshokhov, under the pretense of teaching him Urdu. Over time, Bolshokhov became acquainted with a large circle of left-leaning journalists and intellectuals in the city, and he eventually helped set up the Pakistan-Soviet Cultural Association.17 11 India Office, “Extract from letter from Deputy UKHC at Lahore,” L/P&J/12/772, London, February 22, 1948, p. 83, From British Library, India Office Collection 12 India Office, “Lahore Report,” L/P&J/12/772, London, July 29, 1948, From British Library, India Office Collection.

13 India Office, “Despatch No. 305,” L/P&J/12/772, London, June 3, 1949, p. 340, from British Library, India Office Collection.

14 Zaheer, Times and Trial, 208.

15 Rauf Malik, Interview by Meher Ali, Lahore, Pakistan, August 15, 2014.

16 Young Men’s Christian Association 17 Zaheer, Times and Trial, 208.

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In Lahore, the large number of students and intellectuals along with the industrial proletariat in the city’s factories and railway workshops made it, as one report put it, the party’s “best hunting-ground.”18 Local leaders like Mirza Ibrahim, Eric Cyprian and C.R. Aslam were already active in Lahore at the time of Partition, and a handful of committed communists migrated from India for the purposes of party work. They included Sibte Hasan, who took over the publication of the Party’s paper, Naya Zamana, and Mirza Ishfaq Beg, who was put in charge of finances and issuing internal documents (like circulars, leaflets, and letters). By April of 1949, it was reported that around 60 Communist cells had been established throughout the region.19 Headquarters were maintained at 110 Mcleod Road, but this office, like others around the country, functioned more as a facade than a legitimate party base.

Manned by a few minor members, they served as publicity centers and were frequently raided by the police. Important meetings and councils were held in the private homes of senior members instead. The party leadership operated almost entirely from underground, due to the “wanted” status of many leaders under various preventive detention laws, and constant surveillance by the police.

To compensate, senior members operated under code names and the Party created an elaborate network of couriers. If a courier did not reach a destination within two hours, he was assumed to have been arrested. Precautionary steps, like change of residence and the destruction of documents, would then be taken without delay.

“It was a very small organization,” remembered Jamal Naqvi, who first came into contact with the Communist Party as a student in Karachi and eventually went on to occupy important positions in the Central Committee. “But party discipline,” he said, “was very strong.”20 According to Naqvi’s descriptions, even at the early stages of its existence the CPP had a well-developed hierarchy, based on the Marxist model, and an efficient vanguard system suited for secrecy. “There was the leadership, there were members, there were sympathizers, there were fellow-travelers: people who were friendly to us but not our members,” Naqvi explained. “It was united,” commented Malik, who attributed the strength of this base— despite its small size— in large part to Zaheer’s tremendous drive and disciplinary zeal.21 It seems that Zaheer himself was confident in the progress he was making. As early as the spring of 1949, the Party turned its eye to the general Punjab elections, scheduled for March 1951. In an intelligence report from April of that year, the province is described as being in a temporary “political vacuum,” and communists

18 India Office, “Despatch No. 90 (522) - Pakistan Leftist Reports,” Communism in Pakistan and India (L/P&J/ 12/772), London, March 28 1948, pp. 127, From British Library, India Office Collection.

19 India Office, “Communism in West Punjab,” L/P&J/12/772, London, April 21, 1949. pp. 354, from British Library, India Office Collection.

20 Jamal Naqvi, Interview by Meher Ali. Karachi, Pakistan, June 21, 2012.

21Malik, Interview.

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are noted for “doing their best to seize as much of this no-man’s land as possible.”22 In the autumn of 1950, the CPP openly put forward eleven of their own candidates and released a manifesto, which was summarized in a British report as, “calling on men of good will in all walks of life to unite in a joint front to expel the foreign interests which were preserving Pakistan as a tool of Anglo-American imperialism, to overthrow landlords, and to create a workers’ state in close harmony with the U.S.S.R. and China.”23 From January through March of 1951, the party also issued various statements of policy, including a press statement denouncing the Prime Minister’s visit to London and calling on Pakistan to quit the Commonwealth and align with the Soviet Union. On February 7th, 1951, the party even issued a draft constitution for Pakistan in Lahore and Karachi, which expanded on their manifesto and emphasized the relinquishing of foreign interests and friendship with the U.S.S.R. This emphasis on doctrinal purity ensured, as noted above, that party discipline and organization was very strong. However, outside of Zaheer and his close-knit group of committed communists, this attitude seems to have left no room for a more moderate Pakistani Left. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the postPartition trajectory of the Progressive Writer’s Association (PWA) in Pakistan.

The PWA, although never officially associated with the Communist Party, had always functioned as a cultural stage from which the communists could reach a wider progressive audience. In Pakistan, with the CPP operating largely from underground, its importance multiplied. At the first official All-Pakistan Conference, which took place on November 12, 1949 at an amphitheater in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens, the group presented their new manifesto.24 Calling for “art for life, art for the struggle of life, and art for the success of socialist revolution,” this manifesto also included a severe critique of the Pakistani state and the many “reactionary” writers who supposedly supported it.25 These writers included not only the “Islamists” who propagated a distinctly “Pakistani” or “Islamic” literature but also several liberal writers who, for instance, believed in “art for art’s sake” and aimed to keep their work separate from political issues. The cultural debates that took place during this time are extremely interesting, and have been expertly examined by others such as Saadia Toor and Hafeez Malik in their work. It is enough to note here that even those writers who were not cast as reactionaries were rigorously surveilled for their political tendencies; anything that strayed from approved “progressive” norms was harshly criticized and censured by PWA ideologues. This increasingly strict doctrinal policy mirrors that of the CPP’s; for both groups, as their dogmatism deepened, so did the divide between their “progressivism” and the “reactionism” of everyone else.

22 India Office, “Communism in the West Punjab,” L/P&J/12/772, London, April 21, 1949, pp. 354, From British Library, India Office Collection.

23 Dominions Office, “Report on Communist Activity in Pakistan, July 1951-January 1952,” DO 35/2591, London, February 9, 1952, From National Archives, Public Records Office.

24 Hafeez Malik, “The Marxist Literary Movement in India and Pakistan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 26 (1967): 662.

25 Ibid., 661.

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The harshness of such a stance, while it may have solidified a certain ideological base, also left the communists open to attacks on the question of their national loyalty. The CPP’s openly hostile position towards the Muslim League, as well as their perceived bitterness over Partition, made it easy to label them as subversive and non-patriotic. The CPP leadership, in turn, could be violently dismissive of arguments that used religion and nationalism to label them as enemies of the state. These critics argued that these were mere tactics of the capitalist elite, who wanted to divert people’s attention from, as Zaheer put it, “the real struggle, the class struggle.”26 These very arguments, however, proved to be extremely effective ideological attacks on the Left, and were taken up vigorously by the state as it clamped down against the party. The May Day celebrations of 1949 in Karachi and Lahore reflected this fragile state of affairs. In Karachi, a small procession was followed by two meetings where generic resolutions were passed urging the improvement of working conditions. These events were not publicly “communist,” although red banners were carried in the march. In Lahore, a more overtly communist note was struck at a special PWA meeting, presided over by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, where revolutionary messages from the CPP’s West Punjab Committee were read out loud. These messages pledged themselves to the Moscow line, condemning the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Pact in particular.27 The following week, the Lahore Press carried a series of articles accusing the speakers of having proclaimed the superiority of communist doctrines over Islamic ones. This indignation built up and culminated, on the Friday after May Day, with the passage of resolutions against communism in over 40 mosques in Lahore. “The ease with which the Pakistani public can be rallied to the defense of Islam,” one report concluded, “is not likely to have been lost on the authorities.”28 The government crackdown on communism found its ultimate opportunity in February 1951, with the uncovering of a military conspiracy in which a handful of CPP leaders were implicated. Although the actual level of communist involvement in the conspiracy was limited to a renegade few (including Zaheer), the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case dealt a fatal blow to the already struggling Party. It precipitated an onslaught of arrests under various preventive detention laws for “subversive activities,” and the government even declared the PWA a political organization, warning employers not to hire these “suspected communists.”29 As it was related in one report, the conspiracy allowed the government “to authorise the security authorities (who had long craved this opportunity) to comb out the party and its parallel agencies without restraint.”30 As another put it: “The government is now addressing itself to a programme of anti-communist education on a scale previously unknown and without the inhibitions of the past.”31 26 Ali, “Communists in a Muslim Land,” 518.

27 India Office, “Despatch No. 305,” L/P&J/12/772, London, June 3, 1949, p. 340, From British Library, India Office Collection.

28 Ibid.

29 Saadia Toor, State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 76.

30 Dominions Office, “Despatch No. 210,” DO 35/2591, London, July 14, 1951, From National Archives, Public Records Office.

31 Dominion Office, “Appendix A: Report on Communist Activities in West Pakistan,” DO 35/2591, London, July 14, 1951, From National Archives, Public Records Office.

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II. The Student Front When Zaheer was arrested, many Party records were seized which, along with detenus statements, identified the official front organizations of the CPP. While the CPP was, throughout its existence, too small and secretive to do much by way of political or public action, these parallel organizations had significant influence of their own. The list is as follows: (i) Peace Committee; (ii) Azad Pakistan Party; (iii) Democratic Women’s Association; (iv) Kisan Committee; (v) Sind Hari Committee; (vi) The Punjab Union of Journalists; (vii) Azad Pakistan Students Federation; (viii) Democratic Students Federation; (ix) People’s Publishing House; (x) Pakistan Trade Union Federation; (xi) Pak-Soviet Cultural Association; (xii) Pak-China Cultural Association; (xiii) Civil Liberties Union; and (xiv) Progressive Writers Association.32 Even as the CPP broke down, some of these organizations survived the government crackdown and remained active. It is through their efforts, then, that one might be able to trace whatever lasting influence the Party has had. For that reason, I turn now to the sphere of student activism, and in particular the history of the Democratic Students Federation, which was active from 1950 until its ban in 1954.

The Democratic Students Federation (DSF) was formed in 1950 by a small group of communist-minded students at Dow Medical College, in Karachi. The recently named capital was caught, at that moment, in the turmoil of rapid change. In the four short years following Partition, its population jumped from about 450,000 to well over a million, drastically transforming not just the demographics but also the culture, politics, and physical landscape of the city. The incoming refugees (muhajirs) occupied the open land and empty buildings left behind by fleeing Hindus, creating multi-class refugee settlements across Karachi and in particular around the area of Saddar Bazaar. This “downtown” area developed rapidly in response to its new population; the federal secretariat was constructed adjacent to the Bazaar, embassies sprung up nearby, and existing educational institutions expanded. These schools and universities, like other institutions in the city, were not prepared for the floods of change brought on by Partition. Students, many of them refugees with financially struggling families, found themselves facing a lack of basic amenities, run down facilities, and high tuition fees.

One of those students, Mohammad Sarwar, had migrated to Pakistan from Allahabad, where he and his brother had been involved in communist activism.

Upon his arrival in Karachi, he met with the hardships of resettlement such as a lack of housing and adequate jobs. For students, these problems translated into daily struggles in their academic lives, including insufficient hostel accommodation, lack of transportation, costly medical care and the availability of basic materials such as books and laboratory equipment. “It got so bad that if you were just a couple of minutes late to class, you couldn’t find a place to sit in the classroom,” described student leader Hussain Naqi, who came to Karachi’s D.J. Science College in 1953 after his family migrated from Lucknow.33 When Sarwar and a 32 Zaheer, Times and Trial, 235.

33 Hussain Naqi, Interview with Meher Ali, Lahore, Pakistan, July 7, 2012.

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handful of his classmates (including Mir Rehman, Ali Hashmi, Asif Jaffrey, Asif Hameedi, Yousuf Ali, and Haroon Ahmed) decided to form a student group, it was in response to these practical concerns. While several of them were involved with the CPP as well, it was not an explicit party agenda that initially attracted scores of students to the DSF. “There were many economic difficulties facing students,” said Sibghatullah Qadri, who joined the organization in 1953 during his first year of intermediate college. “The demands were basic...about fees, libraries, that kind of thing. They were not revolutionary.”34 In the first year or so of its existence, the DSF expanded rapidly and branched out to colleges throughout the city. Their demands focused, above everything else, on a reduction in tuition fees, which the new city government had recently hiked up by 60 percent. By 1952, the DSF was sweeping student union elections in all Karachi colleges, and had begun to take on distinctly political dimensions. “It had evolved into a dedicated Left-wing organization,” remembered Jamal Naqvi, who held several leadership positions within the DSF’s wing at Islamia College. The group began to support various “progressive” causes through demonstrations and rallies; in late 1951, for example, they held a series of anti-British demonstrations on declared “Egypt Days,” reflecting their expansion beyond specific student issues to political action at large. The DSF also organized regular study circles, which quickly became popular in colleges all over the country. In these informal sessions, students read history and Marxist literature, especially the works of Lenin and Mao. “This is how we propagated our ideology,” said Naqvi who, like others in the DSF leadership, was a committed communist. He corresponded with the CPP, which established a network of student cells, go-betweens, and pamphlet distributors in all the colleges where they had a presence. As Mirza Mohammad Kazim, the Vice President of DSF at D.J. College, explained: “The original aim was to work on students’ problems. But between ourselves, we thought that once we had built up a student base, we’d be able to discuss other issues, like poverty alleviation, problems of the working class, and so on.”35 In 1953, the DSF drew up an official “Charter of Demands,” which included all of their main grievances; namely the issues of fees, hostel accommodation, lab equipment, and a call for the establishment of lending libraries. Naqvi remembered meetings spent preparing the charter at their “headquarters” at 29, Mitha Ram Hostel, which was actually the room of DSF-member Rahman Ali Hashmi. Along with the relatively modest demands listed above, the group put in one “highly political demand” which set them apart from other student bodies: employment for all. According to Saleem Asmi, then president of DSF at S.M. College, the Inter Collegiate Body (ICB)— an organization that brought together student unions from different colleges— decided to approach the government directly with their demands. When Education Minister Fazlur Rahman refused a meeting, apparently brushing off their efforts as communist propaganda, the ICB 34 Sibghatullah Qadri, Interview with Meher Ali, London, United Kingdom, May 29, 2012.

35 Aur Niklenge Ushhaq ke Qafley, Documentary Film (Karachi: Sharjil Baloch, 2010).

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decided to call a “Demands Day” for January 7th, 1953.36 In response, the government imposed Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure on the city (which bans gatherings for protests).37 The students went ahead with the plan anyway, congregating in the thousands at the D.J. College compound and then making their way along Frere Road and Elphinstone Street toward Rahman’s residence. According to an article published in Dawn newspaper the following day, the police announced that the procession was illegal over loudspeakers and then used tear gas to disperse the students.38 While Dawn’s report on the demonstration only mentions tear-gassing, those who were there remember baton charges (lathi charges) and firing as well.39 Continuing in smaller groups down alternate routes, many students still managed to assemble in front of Fazlur Rehman’s house; and although 30 were arrested on the spot, others remained to continue the protest.40 The agitation, however, had only begun; the next day, the ICB called for another procession to be taken out, peacefully, to protest the police action of the previous day. In the newspaper reports of January 9th 1951, however, the protest is no longer termed a “demonstration” but a “riot” and a “defiant mob,” one with bloody consequences: early estimates counted 59 injuries and seven deaths in police firing.41 Official figures for the casualties over the course of what would be considered three days of disturbance (January 7-9) were ten killed and 80 injured. The trouble escalated into “pitched battles” between the students and the police, with students barricading themselves with wooden benches and throwing a “shower of brickbats.”42 At least 60 people were detained by the police, and the military was called in toward the evening to take charge of the area around Saddar Bazaar, where most of the firing had occurred.

That night, a group of DSF leaders— including Sarwar and Naqvi— were taken to meet with Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin at his office. According to Naqvi in his autobiography, when the PM offered the students tea, Sarwar refused, saying they were there for a purpose and had no interest in refreshments. When Nazimuddin offered them cigarettes instead, Sarwar pulled out a pack of his own bidis— a local low-grade version of cigarettes— before looking the Prime Minister in the eye and saying: “Mr. Nazim, you should know that you are the most unpopular leader in Pakistan today.”43 He then threatened a nationwide strike if their demands were not met within 24 hours. “It was all quite dramatic,” recounted Naqvi, but it worked; Nazimuddin accepted the students’ main demands, and promised that no student would be victimized or persecuted on political grounds.

36 Naqvi, Interview.

37 Aur Niklenge Ushaq ke Qafley.

38 “Rahman’s Assurance to Students,” Dawn, January 8, 1953.

39 Aur Niklenge Ushhaq ke Qafley.

40 Ibid.

41 “Rahman’s Assurance to Students.”

42 “7 Killed, 59 injured in Police Firing,” Dawn, January 9, 1953.

43 Naqvi, Leaving the Left Behind (Karachi: Karachi University Press, 2014), 63.

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This victory was to be short-lived; only a few months later, the DSF was banned on the grounds that it was assumed to be a CPP front organization. Many of its members tried to maintain the group secretly; but the mass arrests made it impossible to continue working under the DSF banner. For a couple of years, leftwing student activity was completely disrupted, but by 1956, it resurfaced again through a new group, the National Students Federation (NSF). The NSF would go on to become much more prominent than the DSF ever was, but their success owed much to the structures and foundations laid down by their predecessors.

The triumph of Demands Day became a symbol for all future progressive student activism in the country, giving the nascent student groups their first taste of victory and a basis from which they could grow. Although the Communist Party itself was effectively dispersed and irreparably damaged by 1954, this “front” took on a life of its own and ultimately endured.

Concluding Thoughts When I asked Rauf Malik about the aftermath of the Communist Party’s ban, his lighthearted mood sobered for the first time. He mentioned Sajjad Zaheer’s exile, mandated by the Pakistani government after Zaheer got out of jail, and shook his head. “For our ideology, they came after us,” he said. “Despite the fact that we supported the Pakistan movement. Despite the fact that we helped build Pakistan.” As Sajjad Zaheer himself described it, the progressive vision of independence imagined “the possibility of an era free of the exploitation of workers and peasants; the chance at a revolutionary dream.”44 That this dream remained only a dream, unrealized in the waking world, does not undermine its significance in Pakistani history. Despite their failure to impact political change, the Communist Party of Pakistan organized the core of a leftist coalition and inserted a progressive perspective into Pakistani politics and culture during a formative period of the nation’s history. Their ideals left imprints in the cultural sphere, most notably through literary groups such as the PWA. Their influence on early student activism ignited a movement which served as the seedbed of later left-wing projects, including the prominent Pakistan People’s Party. Most importantly, their history reveals alternative models that may have existed for the Pakistani nation-state project; and at the very least, complicates the notion of Pakistan’s history as simple progression from religious separatism to religious statehood.

44 Muhammad Yusuf Abbasi, Pakistani Culture: A Profile (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1992), 64.

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Qadri, Sibghatullah Interview with Meher Ali, London, United Kingdom, May 29, 2012.

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354. From British Library, India Office Collection.

“Despatch No. 90 (522) - Pakistan Leftist Reports,” L/P&J/12/772, London, March 28, 1948, p.127. From British Library, India Office Collection.

“Despatch No. 305,” L/P&J/12/772, London, June 3, 1949, p. 340, From British Library, India Office Collection.

“Lahore Report,” L/P&J/12/772, London, July 29, 1948, From British Library, India Office Collection.

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Secondary Sources Abbasi, Muhammad Yusuf. Pakistani Culture: A Profile. Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1992.

Adhikari, G.M. and M.B. Rao. ed. Documents of the Communist Party of India Vol. 7, 1948-1950. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1976.

Ali, Kamran Asdar. “Communists in a Muslim Land: Cultural Debates in Pakistan’s Early Years.” Modern Asia Studies 45 (2011): 501-534.

Malik, Abdur Rauf. Marxi Danishwar aur Communist Rahnuma. Lahore: People’s Publishing House, 2010.

Malik, Hafeez. “The Marxist Literary Movement in India and Pakistan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 26 (1967): 649-664.

Naqvi, Jamal. Leaving the Left Behind. Karachi: Karachi University, 2014.

Toor, Saadia. The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan.

London: Pluto Press, 2011.

Zaheer, Hasan. The Times and Trial of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case 1951: the First Coup Attempt in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

© Zainab Ashraf

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A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia. By Manan Ahmed Asif.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Usman Hamid In A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia, Manan Ahmed Asif offers an important new reading of a thirteenth-century text which continues to play a significant role in the historical imagination of modern South Asia. The text in question is the Chachnama of ‘Ali bin Hamid bin Abi Bakr Kufi, which was written for ‘Ain al-Mulk Abu Bakr Ash‘ari, the vizier to Nasir al-Din Qabacha, who ruled a modest polity in Sind centered around Uch from 1206 to 1226. The Chachnama purports to be a Persian translation of a hitherto unidentified Arabic history of the Muslim conquest of Sind, which took place in the eighth century under the leadership of Muhammad bin Qasim al-Thaqafi (d.

715). The narrative of the Persian Chachnama encompasses much more than Muhammad bin Qasim’s military campaign. It begins by charting the career of the titular Chach bin Sila’ij, who rose from from his humble beginnings as a secretary to the chief minister of a local ruler in Aror, Sind, to becoming the king of all of Sind. It then traces the struggles between Chach’s successors and the establishment of his son Dahar’s rule. It is only after documenting the history of Sind on the eve of Muhammad bin Qasim’s campaign that the Chachnama turns to its Arab dramatis personae. Starting from the first half of the seventh century, the Chachnama covers the history of Arab interventions in Sind, which culminated in Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquest of the region. The work concludes with the account of Muhammad bin Qasim’s death, but not before explicating in lavish detail a theory of practicing politics in the form of speeches, letters, and other narrative devices.

Despite being a rich text that rewards multiple readings, as Asif’s work shows, the Chachnama has long been viewed by historians of various colonial, postcolonial, and nationalist stripes in both India and Pakistan to be “a carrier text... which had to be carefully stripped bare and reassembled into a ‘historically accurate’ narrative” (Asif 9). Thus, the Chachnama has functioned in both scholarly and public discourse as “the primary account of the origins of Muslims in India which contains the history of their rise to dominance” (Asif 8). Contrary to this more utilitarian approach of mining the text for seemingly factual data about the eighth century, Asif revisits the Chachnama not so much as a carrier text but as a product of the thirteenth century that needs to be understood holistically and not in piecemeal fashion. Central to Asif’s project is his argument that the Chachnama is neither “a work of translation” (Asif 15) based on an earlier Arabic text, nor is it “a conquest narrative about Islam’s origins on the Indian subcontinent” (Asif 16). Instead, Asif argues that “it is a prescriptive text advocating for a dialogical present for its thirteenth-century world and a political system that encompasses diversity in that present” (Asif 16). In other words, “it is a work of political theory” (Asif 20).

Before laying out the central claims of his book, Asif orients the reader to the world of the Chachnama. Instead of looking at Sind as a locale that was hermetically sealed off from the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf, which awaited “an originary encounter which posits conquest as first contact” (Asif 45), Asif situates the region as a node in a broader network of sites across an “Indian Ocean-Middle

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East arena” (Asif 28), in which communities and commodities circulated long before the Arab conquest. Attempts to reconstruct the history of the conquest, its causes and consequences, must make due with narratives preserved in sources composed during the ‘Abbasid period, a century or two written after the events.

Based on a reading of the Arabic work Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (Book of Conquest of Lands), written at the caliphal court by a Persian historian named Baladhuri (d.

892), Asif posits that “the Umayyad State was interested in the region for several reasons: to secure a frontier region against rebels, to address the financial affairs of the Marwanid branch of the Umayyad, and to consolidate mercantile routes” (Asif 37). Asif closely reads Baladhuri’s, “conjectur[ing] that his text is the chief source on the campaigns in Sind for Chachnama” (Asif 34).

Turning then to the central contention of the book, Asif looks at the Chachnama from the perspective of the work’s thirteenth-century audience of “elite publics in Sind” (Asif 48) in order to understand what kind of prestige was afforded to authorial claims such as the ones made by ‘Ali Kufi— namely, that the work was a translation from Arabic and a book of conquest. Asif rightly points out that the Chachnama belonged to a broader constellation of texts written in New Persian by members of a scribal class that served Muslim polities in eastern Iran and north India. A number of these made claims to “the Arab descent of the author, the Arab origins of the text, and the Arab descent of the patron of the text” (Asif 56). Such “claims are an assertion of the right to produce texts, to interpret them, and to present them to an elite ruling class... best endowed with skills to understand the moral and ethical lessons in these textual productions” (Asif 56). His interpretation fits the scholarly consensus on works produced in the Persianate cosmopolis such as Bal‘ami’s (d. ca. 997) translation (tarjuma) of the Arabic history of Tabari that may be more appropriately called “transcreations or commentarial interpretations” (Asif 56). Turning then to the author’s claim that the work was a book of conquest, Asif argues that the Chachnama differed significantly in style and content from its source material of Baladhuri that it “cannot be considered a text in the genre of conquest literature” (Asif 67). The main contrast between the two appears to be Baladhuri’s interest in narrating conquests and the Chachnama’s focus on governance. It is this attention to governance that highlights the actual function of texts such as the Chachnama—that is, historic writing written in New Persian in eastern Iran and north India aimed at elite audiences of scribal and military background—namely, to present “accounts of the past as political theory for the present” (Asif 69). Here, Asif follows Peter Hardy’s suggestion from 1981 that the Chachnama’s author may have regarded his work “as containing lessons for Muslims rulers of his own day” (Asif 76).

The remainder of the book focuses on the advice contained in the Chachnama and the work’s reception up until the modern period. Asif draws attention to the significant number of letters contained in the Chachnama that deal with governance and which enumerate a political theory that highlighted the significance of divine will, sage advice, personal effort, and the use of accomodation in dealing with different religious communities. Such advice draws on a connected web of political theories that were elaborated in works of advice that were not only written in Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian, but were also translated from one language to another. Here Asif is careful to note that his “effort to read Chachnama in light of these Sanskrit texts is not to argue for direct lineages but to highlight the interdepencies of political theory in early thirteenth century across literary cultures” (Asif 96).

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I find Asif’s rejection of ‘Ali Kufi’s authorial claims to be generative insofar as it then poses a question about the Chachnama’s function in thirteenth century Uch. However, the Chachnama does fall into a more expansive understanding of what constitutes a translation based on recent research on the works that were translated across the cosmopolitan and vernacular languages of early-modern South Asia. In fact, one may argue that ‘Ali Kufi translated his Arabic source material, possibly Baladhuri’s Kitab Futuh al-Buldan, into Persian, and in doing so translated a conquest narrative into a work of political advice as it fit the dictates of language-specific genres. One of the great advantages of Asif’s remaining chapters is that by examining the Chachnama as a work of advice, the reader comes away with a much richer appreciation of the cultural world of thirteenth century Uch, particularly with respect to issues of religious difference, ethical subjecthood, and gender.

Asif’s work is a necessary corrective to the prevailing interpretation of the Chachnama both amongst specialists as well as the public, particularly in Pakistan.

It thus deserves a wide audience both amongst scholars of South Asian history as well the general reading audience in the region. I hope that the work inspires both students to revisit ‘foundational’ texts of history and translators to bring the work into the contemporary languages of the Chachnama’s geography such as Sindhi and Urdu.

© Zainab Ashraf

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FROM IMPERIAL ADVENTURER TO PROPHET: An annotated verse translation from Nizami of Ganja’s Alexander Book Prashant Keshavmurthy Niẓāmī of Ganja (1141-1209), canonized as one of the originators of the romance masnavi or narrative poem in Persian, composed a quintet of masnavis that came to be imitated through the centuries. The last and longest of these was the Alexander Book, completed in 1202, that narrated the life of Alexander of Macedon in two parts, The Book of Honour and The Book of Fortune. The former relates Alexander’s adventures as a conqueror while the latter tells how he became a prophet. Niẓāmī’s sources lay in many earlier prose and verse legends of Alexander’s life that had passed from Greek lore into Syriac, Arabic and Persian.

What follows is a translation of the opening chapter of the first part that, as per convention, constitutes praise of and prayer to God. Niẓāmī’s subtly appropriates this conventional topos to characterize God, to speak of His omnipotence over His creatures and their affairs, of His humbling of the human intellect that must fall silent before His mysteries, and to offer his own concluding prayer in ways that constitute an extended critique of the Greco-Islamic ideal of the philosopherking and its pretensions. This was an ideal that was prestigious in the Islamic philosophy, political theory and politics of Niẓāmī’s age. Since Niẓāmī goes on to present Alexander in the remainder of the poem as an adventurer impelled by desire to transgress political and epistemological boundaries and as someone who eventually becomes a prophet, this chapter is a condensed anticipation of Alexander’s transformation from someone who would know God’s creation by an imperious exertion of the intellect into someone who would know God by the light of God Himself.

A masnavi, a genre distinctive to Persian and the languages Persian was prestigious to, is a poem of indeterminate length in a uniform meter and an a-a, b-b rhyme scheme. I have tried to replicate the end-rhyme and jogging rhythm central to the reading experience of any masnavi by translating into heroic couplets, the most proximate English poetic form. I have lightly annotated some potentially unclear distichs, often using a Persian commentary composed in North India by the philologist and poet, Sirāj al-Dīn Khān-i Ārzū (1688-1756).

For you, O Lord, is world kingship1 For us is service, yours is lordship.

Hoister of heights and curler of kernel 1 Ilyās bin Yūsuf Niẓāmī Ganjavī, “Sharafnāma” in Khamsa-yi Niẓāmī: bar asās-i matn-i ‘ilmī-intiqādī Akādamī-yi ‘ulūm-i shūravī, ed. E. Bertels (Tehrān: Intishārāt-i Quqnūs, 1380/2002), 899-903.

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All creatures perish but you’re eternal.

Created is all – from cloud to crater.

Of all that is, are you creator.

A teacher of wisdom, stainless and great.

With wisdom you drew upon the earth’s slate.

When you were proven in your lordliness Then wisdom testified before all else.

Of wisdom you made a resplendent eye And you held a guiding lamp up high.

It’s you who raised up the Milky Way And made the turning earth its passageway.

It’s you who from a single droplet spun Such pearls on pearls, each brighter than the sun.2 By grace did you cause jewels to be.

To jewellers did you grant the key.

And you streak stones’ hearts with a running seam Of colours you cause to glow and gleam.

Arrested the wind, till you say “Blow!”

Fruitless the earth, till you say “Grow!”

By such beauty you made the world grand Not so much as seeking a helping hand.

The hot and the cold, the wet and the dry You fashioned each the other’s ally.

You hammered out such gilding and glitter That reason’s silent on seeking its better.

Its secrets geometers seek as they can.

But cannot fathom how you began.

2 The first hemistich alludes to God’s creation of the first prophet, Adam, from a drop of blood and the second to the prophets who descended from him.

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There’s simply nothing we can do but gaze And sleep and eat again in self-same daze.

Beginning to speak in your confession Is not to plumb your deepest reason.

Accounting past this is only brought low.

Your mystery lies where no thought can follow.

Of all that you fashioned and fitted to order Do you remain needless, O sovereign power.

So did you fashion the earth and the ages And likewise the circuit of star and sky’s stages No matter how much the mind spirals high This knot it can’t loosen, this noose it can’t fly.

Your lordship, without creation, still would be.

Without so much as that, you still would be.

It’s you who hammered stars on heaven’s steeples.

And you adorned the earth with its peoples.

It’s you who assay the four elements.

Concatenate the pearls in temperaments.3 Vertiginous you raised the sky’s fortress Besieging in it all thought, no less.

So did you fashion this sapphire sphere Beyond its ramparts thought cannot rear.

Eternally you remain reason’s grief For you are fire to reason’s feeble leaf.

Your being, a court, eternally aloof Stones thought’s emissary in stern reproof.

You are not scattered that you may gather

3 In the Aristotelian cosmology of Niẓāmī’s society God composed creation of four elements: fire, water, wind and earth. Here, “the pearls” refers to “the four elements” which also make up human natures or temperaments.

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Nor do you add up that you’d be fewer.

Of roads to you in mind’s eye not a sign.

Aloof, above all change abides your shrine.

The head that seeks toward you to rise No one can raise from feet where it lies.

Nobody ever cast down by your ire By others’ intercession rose up higher.

All under your thumb and yours to command Beneath your guidance, your grace do we stand.

The elephant’s foot, the ant’s tiny scale On each you acted, making powerful or pale.

When you send power forth by pure decree By fish do you bring death to the flea.

When you raise smoke’s screen from the way At Nimrod’s brain the gnat gnaws away.4 When enemy armies you put to flight Elephants and riders you kill from a height.5 By seed at times a fortune you decree.

Of fruit core at times do you make a tree.

From house of idols you bring forth at times An Abraham or friend from stranger betimes.6 From hail of stones betimes you will not balk 4 Though unnamed in Qur’an 21:68-70, the unbeliever who is the nemesis of the prophet Abraham was understood in the lore of Islamic prophets to have been the Biblical king Nimrod who tried without success to destroy Abraham with fire. The second hemistich refers to when God dispatched the humblest of His creatures, a gnat, to gnaw its way into Nimrod’s brain, driving him to have his head beaten with mallets till a mallet finally split his head open after forty days.

5 This distich alludes to an episode from the Qur’an in which God put an army of elephant-riding invaders of the Ka‘ba to flight by a swarm of birds that dropped stones on them.

6 The edition I have used says “Junayd” instead of “Abraham” but since Ārzū’s edition said “Abraham” and since in the Qur’an Abraham, the first monotheist, is the son of an idol-maker, “Abraham” makes more sense here and I have preferred it to “Junayd”. Sirāj al-Dīn Khān-i Ārzū, Shukūfazār: sharḥī bar Sharafnāma-yi Nizāmī, ed. Zahrā Ibrāhim Ughūlī Khiyāvī (Tehrān: Safīr Ardahal, 1392/2014), 87.

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Upon Bū Tālib, noblest of your stock.7 Who’d have the gall for terror of you To speak except to submit to you?

The silver-tongued you don’t grant audience.

What treasure needs a torch’s radiance?

Mystery’s enemies you strike dumb by your rod Lest they air the Sultan’s mystery abroad.

Upon this earth, dust-dimmed and dark with strife You quickened my heart with light and life.

If sullied by dirt I shall have no fear.

What’s dust’s business but to grow dull and blear?

If from all sinning this earth turned away Who to your mercy’s court would find his way?

If my sin had not been accounted for Why would you be called the forgiver?

At night and by day, at dusk and at dawn You spring to mind of all I dwell upon.

At earliest night when into sleep I sway It’s your name’s rosary that speeds my way.

At midnight, starting betimes from sleep, It’s you I call to and my eyes weep.

To you does my path extend if it’s dawn.

You are my succour from dusk till its dawn.

It’s your aid I seek by night and by day So don’t let me down in all that I say.

Thus, O resolver, to you do I plead So I may shake free of every such need.

7 This is an allusion to the suffering of the Prophet Muhammad’s paternal uncle Abū Tālib ibn ‘Abd alMutallib who, in defense of his nephew, withstood the attacks of the Quraysh in Mecca.

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A worshipper who submits himself Who humbly worships one such as yourself In this world’s wealthy, finding treasure In that world’s freed of pain past measure.

The creatures of the world come forth from you.

You steer and grant resurrection too.

For my account of deeds no credit’s due.

My capital and credit’s all from you.

To vice and to virtue do you hold the key.

All virtue’s from you but vice springs from me.

When you act in virtue I do the same.

For whatever’s vile I take the blame.

From you springs forth what first was fashioned.

To you returns what last was uttered.8 From you – a sign within I must obey.

The devil prompts me, so I look away.

When in my soul your nurturing name takes hold How could the devil ever make so bold?

That my deeds be yours – this surely can’t be That I say ‘It’s you’ and then say ‘It’s me.’9 If I live in wealth, in struggle or strife Just as you made me do I lead my life.

To that mighty lordship this do I pray That when from this workshop I fall away10 8 Ārzū writes: “‘What first was created’ refers to the earliest of creations and this was understood variously in various traditions and groups. According to the philosophers it was the First Intellect, and according to lexicographers it was the Muhammadan Light and the Pen. ‘What last was uttered’ refers to the Day of Resurrection as it is recorded: [Arabic] ‘From Him is the Origin and to Him is the Return’.” Ārzū, 91.

9 Ārzū glosses this distich as an apology for the speaker’s earlier distich in which he had attributed the cause of his vile actions to God. 10 “This workshop” is a metaphor for this world.

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That, fallen to dust from this form and shape, I utterly change from this form and shape.

May winds blow my dust, each mote and the whole.

May no one set eyes on my limpid soul.

That seeker into my most secret state Across my being strikes nothingness as fate.

The visible by might from veils you freed So we may know that it exists indeed.

When for your being I seek from feeble mind Such heart-gladdening proofs as I can find Draw into dust my cradle, too, I pray.11 Let it be known that soul survives the clay.

Enthuse with ardor my journey to you So joyful I come when I come toward you.

All ride with me till at your door I cease.

And once I’m gone all friends are enemies.

My eyes, my ears, perhaps, my hands, my feet Are left behind as each falls out complete.

It’s you who, while I’m ‘I’, lives in my core.

May I not turn forsaken from your door.

I strike my head upon your door in sojourn.

I rise in hopes that you will grant a crown.

This head that I grant freely to you, Lord, It’s best you bless it with a crown, not sword.

What you in pre-eternity made fast The pen won’t change what you have brought to pass.

But strike a line across all that I ask.

11 The body is a cradle here because the speaker was born in it but is not the same as it, as per Islamic eschatology, and will survive it.

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I’m only gladdening my heart with such talk.

You said, “To those who plod on, plunged in grief, And pray to me I will bestow relief.”

As I know you as savior of the frail In such frailty how could I not appeal?

The patronage of servants is what you Indeed do while I pledge myself to you.

So did I break, was to powder ground down My realm to bits blown, not even a town.12 It’s you who’ll save me from such shattering Or shatter me and be my swaddling.

In storm’s eye I strive and seek out your quay By moon-bright virtue, Lord, please light my way.

Preserve me from the wiles of highwaymen.

May enemies not rejoice in my pain.

Before your bounty grant me gratitude.

If you send pain then grant me fortitude.

And such calamity as I can’t bear Keep far from me, O far, I swear!

And if you visit woe upon me First give me patience, then calamity.

And if you put me on the rack and break me Or make me dust, to power ground me I’d spill out of myself, all burst to bits But I’d never swerve from your service.

I sing your praise no matter where I am.

I call you God no matter where I am.

12 Ārzū notes that the image of an urban settlement here is a metaphor for the five senses. Niẓāmī is speaking of bodily decay in old age.

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All creatures are destined to extinction.

Remaining as you are is your distinction.

The scholar lost his way to you forlorn Because he looked by reason’s light alone.13 Whoever looks within you by your light Will wash their futile tomes and pages white.

May we seek you by yourself, as we ought And curb ourselves, galloping to a halt.

If you’ve set your sights here then lower your head.14 Beyond this the heart will hammer in dread.

And now I consign you to your own care.

As you know what’s best now, do as you dare.

13 I have relied on Ārzū’s gloss in translating yāva in the less common sense of ‘losing one’s way’. Ārzū notes that this distich refers to the familiar (Sufi) idea that philosophers seek God by the light of their reason alone and thus lose their way while prophets seek Him by His own light, the latter captured in the Arabic saying: “By my Lord did I know my Lord”. Ārzū, 95.

14 From here till the end of the chapter Nizāmi is addressing the aforementioned scholar who we might identify with the poet himself.

© Zainab Ashraf

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VOICING THE PAST: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-) Tania Siddiqi Introduction In 1947, the Partition of India led to the largest migration of people known to humankind. Reports indicate that roughly 10 million people journeyed to either India or Pakistan1. Prior to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, Pakistan existed in two wings—West Pakistan and East Bengal.2 Countless Hindus and Sikhs began migrating to India and many Muslims chose to go to either side of Pakistan. Many scholarly and literary works account for tragedies caused by Partition, yet most accounts focus on women and men’s experiences in India. Only a handful of works discuss the experiences of Muslim women who migrated from India to Pakistan.3 Sources that include voices of Muslim women primarily draw attention to the violence and brutality inflicted on women, honor killings, and governmental programs implemented to rescue and recover women remaining in the “wrong” nation.4 Such representations have led to a “silence” regarding women who did not experience these particular forms of conflict, yet still experienced transformative change as a result of migration during Partition.

In this article, I aim to see if and to what extent women frame Partition as something other than traumatic. Through the use of oral history, I explore factors relating to women’s emergence into the “public” sphere of society, transformation of family structure, and Muslim women’s understanding of their nationality. Such investigation will aid in breaking this historiographical silence by presenting Muslim women as active agents, drawing attention to the important roles they played both during and after Partition. I will conclude with a discussion concerning how my research informs ongoing work regarding incomplete conversations that include Muslim women in Partition-related discourse.

1 Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices of the Partition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 3.

2 Ferhana Hashem, “Elite Conceptions of Muslim Identity from the Partition of Bengal to the Creation of Bangladesh, 1947- 1971,” National Identities 12, no. 1 (2010): 61-79, accessed April 9, 2016, http://www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14608940903542656.

3 Rabia Umar Ali, “Muslim Women and the Partition of India: A Historiographical Silence,” Islamic Studies 48, no. 3 (2009): 425-436, accessed September 17, 2014, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20839174?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents; Furrukh A. Khan, ”Speaking Violence: Pakistani Women’s Narratives of Partition,” in Gender, Conflict, and Migration, ed. Navnita Chadha Behera (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), 97-115; Pippa Virdee, “Negotiating the Past: Journey Through Muslim Women’s experience of Partition and Resettlement in Pakistan,” Cultural and Social History 6, no. 4 (2009): 467-483, accessed March 7, 2016, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2752/147800409X466290.

4 Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Anne Hardgrove, “South Asian Women’s Communal Identities,” Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 39 (1995): 2427+2429-2430, accessed March 5, 2016, https://www. jstor.org/stable/4403269?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents; Pippa Virdee, “Negotiating the Past,” 467-483.

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Addressing the Silence There remains a relative lack of Partition narratives from Muslim women who migrated to Pakistan from India, and existing narratives often restrict their focus to the trauma of migration. In contrast to existing trends, I document perspectives on women’s migration to Pakistan that incorporate everyday experiences outside of the traumatic honor killings, rape, and mutilation. As such, this article contributes to existing research on women in the Muslim world that emphasizes the heterogeneity of Muslim women’s lives.5 Current work primarily focuses on women who migrated from Pakistan to India or became Pakistani upon creation of Pakistan during Partition.6 Urvashi Butalia has greatly contributed to breaking the “silence” surrounding these women’s experiences during Partition. In The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Butalia recognizes that collecting narratives from only one country provides “one aspect of Partition”.7 According to Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, authors of Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, “When India was partitioned, some sixty million of her ninety-five million Muslims (one in four Indians) became Pakistanis.”8 For this reason, my contribution in focusing on Muslim Indian women’s experiences during their migration to Pakistan mirrors and complements the work of Butalia and Menon and Bhasin.

Much research has focused on the extreme physical violence that occurred in Punjab during Partition.9 Rabia Umar Ali discusses the importance of considering Muslim women’s voices during Partition. Ali writes, “Partition studies are destined to remain incomplete if this vacuum in Pakistani historiography continues to persist.”10 Although Ali attempts to shed light on the silence that has remained for Muslim women who migrated, her reasoning for why this silence exists seems incomplete. Ali argues that Muslim women have suffered the greatest when discussing experiences during migration because of “patriarchal constraints and societal norms.”11 Similarly, historian Furrukh A. Khan writes that women who discussed their experiences during Partition felt they would “shame their respective communities.”12 Experiences during Partition, it seems, are defined by many historical participants as exclusively traumatic, inadvertently limiting the scope of investigation and oral history. Khan is successful in providing insight on the violence inflicted on women who migrated to Punjab, however, a number of questions concerning Muslim 5 Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others,” American Anthropological Association 104, no. 3 (2002): 783-790.; Lila AbuLughod, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

6 Ali, “Historiographical Silence,”; Khan, “Speaking Violence,”; Virdee, “Negotiating the Past,”.

7 Ibid.,17.

8 Ritu Menon & Kamla Bhasin, Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick: Kali for Women, 1998), 4.

9 Ali, “Historiographical Silence,”; Khan, “Speaking Violence,”; Virdee, “Negotiating the Past,”.

10 Ali, “Historiographical Silence,” 428.

11 Ibid., 432.

12 Khan, “Speaking Violence,” 113.

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women and Partition remain unanswered. Why is there an almost exclusive focus on exposing the brutality and conflict that Muslim women endured during Partition? What about Muslim women who did not experience physical trauma during migration? Silence can also exist because few have asked. This article writes against this collective discourse that limits Muslim women’s narratives due to assumptions of an unwillingness to share them, cultural homogeneity, and gendered violence as the primary lens by which people interpret Partition experiences.

Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod provides a number of channels to gain new perspectives on understanding Muslim women’s lives.13 In Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories, she presents Muslim women in a way that differs from most discourse. Here, she challenges the notion that Muslim women are victims of an oppressive patriarchal society. She stresses the need to break away from continued (re)produced generalizations.

Additionally, Abu-Lughod argues that homogenization and generalization prevent multiple perspectives from emerging. This “makes it easier to conceive of groups of people as discrete, bounded entities.”14 Abu-Lughod writes against preconceived notions of characteristics that define Muslim women by presenting individual narratives and stories from a concentrated group of Bedouin women in Egypt.15 Through the use of narratives, Abu-Lughod draws attention to the heterogeneity that exists among Muslim women and how they position themselves in their community.16 Works by Lila Abu-Lughod influence how I frame the oral histories collected from my interviewees and understand the importance of highlighting the diversity of women’s experiences. I have also drawn inspiration from the anthropology of gender. Literature stemming from the anthropology of gender explores the many complexities of constructing and performing gender, emphasizing that there is no fixed conceptions of this construct and deemphasizing homogeneity.17 Gender is a cultural and iterative act rather than a static biological category,18 and Butler considers this continual enactment gender performativity. Wardlow states, “there are particular modes of exerting power or producing effects that are particular to women as women or men as men.”19 Because gender is not fixed, this aspect of culture exhibits qualities that can influence certain spheres of society. In this article, I demonstrate how migration influenced a transformation in the act of 13 Abu-Lughod, “Cultural Relativism,”; Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds.

14 Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds, 9.

15 Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds.

16 Ibid.

17 Ellen Lewis, Feminist Anthropology: A Reader (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006).

18 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); Rebecca F. Plante & Lisa M. Maurer, Doing Gender Diversity: Readings in Theory and Real-World Experience (Boulder: Westview Press, 2010); Holly Wardlow, Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

19 Wardlow, Wayward Women, 9.

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expressing gender, notably the transformation of family dynamics and the emergence of Muslim women in the “public” sphere of society.

Female agency is the process of intentionally executing gender roles for particular outcomes and varies from culture to culture.20 Through this article, I analyze how Muslim women exercised their right to act by exerting “encompassed agency” in relation to familial, national, and ethnic identity in Pakistan.21 Encompassed agency is “action that produces effects, but effects whose ends are beyond the individual’s actions and for a wider purpose.”22 In Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society, Wardlow applies this concept to analyze how women’s expression of gender impacts institutions such as kinship and marriage in Melanesian culture. Thus, while gender stratification due to hegemonic patriarchy can be significant in any given culture, women maintain influential roles in society.

In order to explore how one group of Muslim women from India migrated to and lived in Pakistan during Partition, I collected and analyzed oral histories.23 The sample of women on whom I focused were Muslim women who migrated from India to Pakistan during Partition and who currently reside in either the United States or England. I chose to focus on my Pakistani-American and PakistaniBritish relatives, in order to maximize recruitment of potential interviewees in a short period of time and to highlight the diversity of experiences among a closeknit group of women. I used pseudonyms to protect my interviewees’ identities.

I included the word “aunty” after the assumed name to acknowledge and respect the difference in age between my interviewees and me. Among many Urduspeaking groups, “aunty” is a title given to women of advanced age.

I collected oral histories for seven weeks during the summer of 2015: two weeks in Houston, Texas and five weeks in London, England. I chose these two locations because of personal networks with the target community. In Houston, my family resides in an area that has a highly concentrated Pakistani population and as a child I attended Sunday school at our local masjid, becoming friends with some of my classmates. Since I am a second-generation Pakistani-American, my time in Sunday school gave my parents the opportunity to build friendships with members of the Pakistani community. These roots run deep; my connection with Pakistanis in my community gave me direct access to potential interviewees. I would simply call one of my family’s friends, explain my research project, and read a script that I created for potential participants. I established rapport through my previous connections, visiting women and conducting interviews in their homes.

In London, I lived with an elder female relative during the month of Ramadan.

Ramadan is a month on the Islamic calendar and is recognized as time for fasting and self-purification. I attempted to create rapport with potential participants by 20 Butler, Gender Trouble; Butler, Excitable Speech; Wardlow, Wayward Women.

21 Wardlow, Wayward Women.

22 Ibid, 13.

23 H. Russell Bernard, Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2000).

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attending Khutbahs (sermons), reading namāz (praying) with members of the community, and attending Iftār gatherings (the time people break their fast) at the local masjid.

In total, I collected oral histories from twelve women, conducting oral history interviews using a semi-structured format organized around a linear timeframe (i.e., pre-Partition, Partition, and post-Partition). I wanted to gain an understanding of family structure, including its variance across generations, families, and with reference to gender separation (if any). Questions related to what types of activities women engaged in, what styles of clothing they wore, and who their friends were provided insight on gender roles performed during this time. I asked about feelings related to leaving India and journeying to Pakistan, definitions of home, and ideas of belonging in order to understand how participants construct their national identity. As the interview was semi-structured, some oral histories included other topics that naturally emerged in conversation.

Analysis: Women’s Voices and Partition I analyzed eleven out of the twelve interviews that I conducted. I did not use one interview because the interviewee’s first language was Punjabi, and I only speak English and Urdu. The eleven interviewees are Sunni Muslim women. Ten of these women were from Uttar Pradesh and one was from Bihar. Every woman was college educated with a career related to her educational background. Also, all women were relatively wealthy before migrating to Pakistan. Some of the women came from landowning families while others attained high social status through their fathers’ profession. Throughout the interviews women shared stories, demonstrating how their perspectives on Partition shaped their experiences in changes regarding family structure and women’s emergence into the public sphere of society. In order to understand the transformations that these women experienced, I analyzed three of the most commonly recurring themes: social status, family structure, and gender roles.

Social Status: Education and Space Social status pertains to the interviewed women’s perception of their position in society relative to others. Of the eleven oral histories, all discussed social status as important to understanding their experiences during Partition. Access to formal education and to public and domestic spaces were the greatest areas of emphasis when discussing changes in social status once women migrated to Pakistan.

However, education and space seem to have affected people’s social status in markedly different ways.

Of those migrating from India to the newly created Pakistan, every interviewee received a formal education and enrolled in school; however, women indicated that they experienced a change in their quality of education. Most interviewees believed that their education suffered because of the migration to Pakistan.

Financial losses incurred during migration and the scarce number of schools

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in Pakistan following Partition greatly influenced education. Yasmeen Aunty, for example, migrated to Pakistan in 1947. Prior to Partition, she had begun attending Queen Mary’s Boarding School in New Delhi at the age of six. Yasmeen Aunty shared fond memories of this school and said that she enjoyed her time at Queen Mary’s because: All of the girls were from royal families. They would not take girls from riffraff families. There were only 25 girls, because there was a selection process. They would not take everyone. There were girls from Kashmir, Punjab, and other places. The school provided us with a proper nurse who used to look after us.24 Upon arriving in Karachi after Partition, however, Yasmeen Aunty enrolled in a government school. Here, all students were able to gain admission. She believed that this school “did not have any standards or anything.” 25 Her reaction indicates that transformations she experienced concerning her quality of education were indicative of her decline in social status.

Parveen Aunty, a retired schoolteacher who now lives in London, was also discontented with the education she received in Pakistan. She shared: There were very few schools in Karachi. There was a master saab (teacher) who opened a school for matriculation preparation. I was in 6th grade and matriculation was meant for those who were in 10th grade.

Meena [older sister of interviewee] and I enrolled together. We did our matriculation in one year and then went to college. We were coming from a school [in India] that was in a huge building. The size was worth seeing.

Then, [in Pakistan] we started going to a disgusting school and living in a disgusting house.26 Parveen Aunty and her older sister enrolling in the same grade could indicate that the school they attended in Pakistan was less structured at the time of Partition than the school they attended in India prior to migration. Also, Parveen Aunty emphasizing the inadequate amount of space allocated to the school she attended in Pakistan demonstrates her lack of physical space was relative to her decline in social status and in the quality of education she received. While some interviewees interpreted their education in Pakistan as reflective of lower social status, others viewed this as a means to achieve status. Shabnam Aunty, a retired scientist residing in the United States, mentioned that her father held an esteemed government position in India and was unable to secure a similar job after migrating to Pakistan. She stated:

24 Yasmeen Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), June, 2015.

25 Ibid.

26 Parveen Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), June, 2015.

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My father said to my mother, when it was really hard and we had just come to Pakistan, “my children have nothing, so we are going to give them education even if we have to go without food.” He gave education to all four of us. I do not think that if we had lived in India it [education] would have been that important to him. We went to the best colleges; there were not that many colleges in Karachi.27 Hardships Shabnam Aunty and her family endured after migration shifted the significance of education within her household, becoming a channel through which her family reclaimed social status.

Interestingly, unlike Yasmeen Aunty and Parveen Aunty, Shabnam Aunty considered the absence of many educational institutions as a positive factor rather than a negative attribute when discussing her experiences after migration; moreover, education became an area of significance for her after Partition. For Yasmeen Aunty and Parveen Aunty, the schools they attended in India reflected their access to prestigious institutions and the importance their families placed on education. Similarly, both aunties spoke favorably about their experiences in school before Partition. Interpretations concerning the relationship between the schools in Pakistan and social status, it seems, were influenced by premigration experiences in India. This also explains why Yasmeen Aunty and Parveen Aunty were critical of resources provided by their schools in Pakistan as opposed to Shabnam Aunty who believed she and her siblings attended “the best colleges”.28Additionally, an important idea to consider is that mass migration on both sides of the newly draw borders may have influenced the quality of education students received in schools in India and Pakistan.

Significance of Space Of the eleven interviewees, eight came from landowning families in India.

Seven participants’ families had land, either in the form of orchards, fields, or villages; these territories were handed down from one generation to the next.

One participant indicated that her family owned an extensive amount of rental property. In India, many interviewees would spend their vacations travelling throughout India, visiting various hill stations, or staying with relatives in different parts of the country. Hill stations were located in areas with cool climates and served as holiday destinations for wealthy families during the summer months.

Once the women migrated to Pakistan, the amount of space afforded to them dramatically changed. As such, the transformation of their experience of space was influenced by financial decline, tension between ethnic groups, and the lack of multigenerational homes.

Naheed Aunty, a retired gynecologist who now resides in London, England, mentioned that her father came from a landowning family and that her family 27 Shabnam Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), July, 2015.

28 Ibid.

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owned a village. In India: The village we owned was called Begam Sarai. Our village was really big.

My dad was a big landowner. There were many fields and orchards in this village. We had a house in Lucknow, which was our city house. My father used to do service [work] there. In the summer time, we went to Begam Sarai and we used to go to school in Lucknow. Part of my childhood was in Lucknow and part of my childhood was in Allahabad.29 When asked about her initial reaction upon migrating to Pakistan, Naheed Aunty said, “The first thing that struck me [in Pakistan] was that we were going to live in a rental home. I did not know that rental homes existed. Over there [in India] there was land, a huge house, and freedom. Here, there was a 200-square-foot square yard with a small rental home in Nazmabad.”30 Naheed Aunty felt as though she had experienced a decline in social status because her family lost ownership of a home that existed in her family for many generations. Once her relatives sold their home in India and migrated to Pakistan, their ownership status went from homeowners to renters, further contributing to the apprehension and uncertainty she and her family felt after migration.

However, some women shared that their families purchased land after settling in Pakistan. Parveen Aunty, the daughter of a landowning family from Uttar Pradesh, was accustomed to visiting her family’s properties that produced agricultural goods. When asked if her family was able to grow their own food in Pakistan or if they had to purchase ingredients at a store, she responded: My father claimed some land in Sindh and my brother said he was going to go inspect the land. However, Sindhis are belligerent and they [father and brother] were from UP. They [father and brother] could not survive [tolerate Sindhis] so they left the land. People said that they should have sold the land. They would have gotten a lot of money for it. When Mushtaq bhai [cousin of interviewee] was alive, a lawyer came to visit and said that he could fight this case. We have always been lazy in these sorts of matters. I told Mushtaq that he should have pursued this matter. Even if they got eighty percent at least we would get twenty percent. Over there [in Pakistan] we had to buy everything [food].31 For Parveen Aunty and her family, their ownership status changed from food growers to simply food consumers. Their inability to use this physical space for its intended purpose stemmed from tension between her family and Sindhis.

Moreover, the agentive properties physical space afforded her family in India— the power to make, distribute, and control goods— was lost after they gave up the property purchased in Pakistan. This transformation in access to physical space demonstrates both a decline in social status and limitations in the ability to act.

29 Naheed Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), June, 2015.

30 Ibid.

31 Parveen Aunty, Voicing the Past.

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Parveen Aunty expressed similar feelings toward changes in lived experience as a result of reduced space. During our interview, Parveen Aunty states: In the beginning [when we moved to Pakistan] there were very few mangoes. My father would buy mangoes from somewhere. They were very expensive. My mother would say, “Look there are mangoes, we saved one for you.” I would tell her that I would not eat any mangoes. I would say, “is this how people eat mangoes? There is only one or sometimes only half [of one].’ [In India] mangoes would be brought on a wagon and they would be soaked in a huge tub. You could eat as many as your heart desired. I would not eat mangoes as a form of protest.32 Parveen Aunty’s refusal to eat mangoes signifies the resentment and frustration she felt towards her family’s decision to migrate to Pakistan. More importantly, her protest demonstrates her rejection in accepting lifestyle changes she and her family experienced in Pakistan and her ability to exercise agency within her household.

Although most participants felt strongly towards parting with large amounts of land, there were two interviewees who did not assign as much importance to this. Factors such as emotion tied to memory and age at the time of migration greatly influenced these women’s perspectives concerning their living conditions in Pakistan. For example, Aisha Aunty was either six or seven-years-old when she migrated to Pakistan. Upon reaching Karachi, her family moved into a small home that did not have running water or electricity. Aisha Aunty mentioned that her family did not have the same resources in Pakistan as they did in India. But, she emphasized that this transformation was positive and unrelated to social status.

We used to light lanterns. I remember well that I used to shine all of the lanterns before it became dark. I remember this well because I used it enjoy it a lot. All of these responsibilities were on us. We had to watch the younger siblings, do work in the house, and help in any way we could. There was a lot of heat and no electricity. There were all of these responsibilities. There was a small courtyard and I had an interest in growing various plants. I grew a mango tree and an agan tree. I looked after them. We stayed happy. We used to visit the people around us, some of my father’s old friends lived close to us, and our family lived close to us.

Aside from all of the hardships, I had a nice time, I enjoyed.33 Shabnam Aunty was nine-years-old when her family migrated to Pakistan. She shared that she and her younger brother adjusted quickly to life in Pakistan because, “We were young. It makes a lot of difference when you’re very young.

You accept whatever comes [your way]. My sister and brother had a harder time because they were older. My sister is six years older than me. They were used to 32 Ibid.

33 Aisha Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), June, 2015.

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a very high standard of living.”34 Because Shabnam Aunty and her siblings shared this age gap, fewer experiences, memories, and instances of life in India may have influenced her adjustment to life in Pakistan.

Gender Roles: Changes in Clothing and Domestic Space Usage Gender roles pertain to cultural scripts that distinguish women and men in most societies.35 All eleven interviewees discussed the transformation of gender roles after migrating to Pakistan. The most common factors that were used to understand how such transformations occurred were through changes in articles of clothing and space.

In India, households were segregated between women and men. For the women’s sphere of the household there was a purdah (curtain) used to separate women’s spaces from men’s spaces. Once a Muslim girl had experienced her first menstrual cycle, she practiced purdah by wearing a burka when in public spaces. Meena Aunty, now a retired schoolteacher, lived in India until she was fourteen or fifteen years old. When asked if she practiced purdah, she said, “Yes my chācha (paternal uncle) was big on purdah. When girls would turn fourteen he would say, “Okay, these girls are now mature they should practice purdah and wear a burka.”36 However, Meena Aunty also shared that she stopped this practice after migration to Pakistan: We stopped wearing burka two or three years after migrating to Pakistan.

The bus stop to get to our college was very far from our house. When we would come home [from college], Parveen [sister of interviewee] would grumble and say, “I have a lot of difficulty wearing burka when I go out.’ Our father said, ‘okay, you can stop wearing burka but you have to properly wear a dupatta (scarf).’37 Meena Aunty’s father allowed her sister and her to stop practicing purdah because they did not have the resources to continue such practice. Once the family migrated to Pakistan, they no longer had a car, multiple servants, or assistance in facilitating private transportation. Now, these women were required to enter the public sphere of society to continue daily life practices. For example, in order for Meena Aunty to go to school, she had to ride the bus. This form of public transportation was difficult while wearing a burka, causing her sister and her to abandon the practice so they could be comfortable while going to school.

The emergence of these women in the public sphere also transformed the significance of wearing saris. Saris were considered a gendered marker in distinguishing girls from women, and, typically, girls were recognized as women after marriage. Sadia Aunty was a college lecturer in Pakistan. She notes: 34 Shabnam Aunty, Voicing the Past.

35 Butler, Gender Trouble.

36 Meena Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi,Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), May, 2015.

37 Ibid.

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Before I got married, I always wore shalwar kameez. I was not married when I started teaching at a college in APWA. Most of the female lecturers were bachelorettes. Our principal used to tell us, “You all look so young when you wear shalwar kameez, you should wear saris. Some of your pupils look older than you. She made a rule that all of the lecturers will wear saris and braid their hair. That’s how I started [wearing saris]. We also wore black gowns to distinguish ourselves from the girls. I started wearing saris to college, but I would wear shalwar kameez at home.38 Once Sadia Aunty began working, saris became an article of clothing that distinguished students from professors. Interestingly, she continued to wear shalwar kameez within her home. Wearing a sari traditionally meant a woman was married. In this case, the sari helped to convey a sense of respect based on age.

Another example of a shift in gender roles occurred during my interview with Aisha Aunty. She shared that “usually, men and women occupied different portions of the house. When guests would come and visit our house, men would sit in the mardāna (men’s portion of the house) and women would sit inside”.39 However, after migrating to Pakistan and moving into a smaller home, the line between men’s space and women’s space diminished. Both genders were more likely to spend time in the same space at home.

Family Structure: Change to Nuclear Family Structure Family structure pertains to the organization of individuals living together in a particular household. Of the eleven interviews, nine lived in a joint family system in India and two interviewees lived in a nuclear family system before Partition.

Every interviewee adopted the nuclear family system after migration to Pakistan.

Interviewees discussed how family structure was altered during Partition due to family disagreements about political affiliations in India and changes in the physical space of homes.

Fatima Aunty is a retired physician who now resides in England and Pakistan.

Fatima Aunty’s father died when she was either five or six years old. Nonetheless, she lived in a joint family system with her extended family in Lucknow. Fatima Aunty’s immediate family consisted of her mother, brother, and older sister.

Before migrating to Pakistan, she and her mother were living in Bombay (presentday Mumbai) with her brother. Her sister migrated to Pakistan with her husband and wanted her immediate family to join her. However, Fatima Aunty’s brother opposed the idea of Partition and refused to migrate to Pakistan. Fatima Aunty remembers: I was very close to my brother and he loved me a lot. When I learned that he did not want to go I said, “No, I’m not going.” But my mother said, “No.” 38 Sadia Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), July, 2015.

39 Aisha Aunty, Voicing the Past.

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My mother was pulling us and my sister was pushing us. So, push and pull forced us to go. I was there [in Pakistan] and Parveen’s uncle, he was my uncle too, because my mother and Parveen’s mother are first cousins. He told me that if I wrote to my brother in Bombay he, “will come because he loves you so much.” I wrote to my brother. I did not want to force him.

I said, “If he does not want to come then why [should I write the letter]?”

They said, “No, he must come here.” So, I wrote a letter saying, “please come, we are alone, and we cannot live without you.” He wrote back, “This was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.” I felt sorry for him, but he came.40 Although Fatima Aunty’s brother and her relatives who migrated did not share similar ideas on moving to Pakistan, uncertainty and tension endured while journeying to the newly formed nation resulted in the letter she wrote to him.

Additionally, Fatima Aunty’s letter to her brother shows the importance of her position within the household and her use of encompassed agency41—her actions served a wider purpose and were beneficial to her family.

Another example is found in my interview with Parveen Aunty. Parveen Aunty grew up in a joint family system that consisted of her older paternal uncle (barē abbā) and his nuclear family; her younger paternal uncle (chācha jān) and his nuclear family; and her nuclear family. Parveen Aunty’s father and chācha jān were members of Muslim League and wanted to migrate to Pakistan. However, barē abbā did not did not share such views. According to Parveen Aunty, barē abbā scolded them and said, “that is not our country, we are not going there. The formation of that country was a mistake.”42 Later on, barē abbā said, “You both can go, but I am not going and neither are the children.”43 Both Parveen Aunty’s father and chācha jān listened to what barē abbā said because he was the head of the household. However, once barē abbā passed away, Parveen Aunty’s father became the head of the household and decided to migrate to Pakistan.44 When asked if she felt any change in family dynamics, Parveen Aunty said, “There was a huge change because of migration. Look, when a person lives somewhere they have a base. If you move a plant from one place to another the plant can either survive or die. But you have exposed its roots, right? There was a great change.”45 By comparing her family’s migration to Pakistan to the uprooting of a plant, Parveen Aunty shows that Partition introduced vulnerability to her family structure. Furthermore, the ways in which her family would grow and thrive became an area of uncertainty once her family’s roots were exposed.

40 Fatima Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), June, 2015.

41 Wardlow, Wayward Women.

42 Parveen Aunty, Voicing the Past.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

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Meena Aunty indicated that the transformation of family structure was a result of insufficient physical space. During her migration from India to Pakistan, members of her immediate family and her extended family accompanied her. After migrating to Pakistan, Meena Aunty and her entire family occupied an apartment that her brother-in-law owned. Meena Aunty said that after some time: My father bought a house in Nazimabad. We sold our house [in India] and came [to Pakistan]. We knew that if we did not sell it someone else would claim the house. The house was sold, but for a very cheap price.

My father bought the house [in Nazimabad] and sent my chācha’s family there. Then, my brother and sister-in-law arrived. After a short time, my brother moved to London. My sister-in-law left one year later. We were still living on Jail Road, then my father said, “No, this is Sameer’s house [sister’s husband] we are going to buy a different house.” We bought an apartment in Nazimabad called Muslim League Quarter.46 Meena Aunty claimed that her family was unable to continue living in a joint family system after moving to Pakistan because there was not enough space for her entire family to occupy one house. For this reason, her father, who decided family matters, was obligated to find homes for his family and his brother’s family.

One person who also experienced the transformation of family structure, but through a different channel, was Mumtaz Aunty. Mumtaz Aunty was married in Lucknow and migrated to Karachi with her husband. She is the only interviewee who was married in India during the time of Partition. Once she and her husband reached Pakistan, she noticed: His [her husband’s] entire family was living in two rooms, because there was a shortage of houses. People had already claimed the big kothis (mansions). Those who were Iman waalay (of Iman) had a difficult time.

Buying a house was not easy; I think there were restrictions. Everyone was living in two rooms, including us. Five or six children would sleep near us.

My mother-in-law slept near the door. Regardless, we still managed to have a child. There were a lot of famous stories of newlyweds who used to search for places for privacy.47 Mumtaz Aunty’s husband came from a joint family system and would have received a portion of their multi-generational home after he got married. However, migrating to Pakistan caused his family to downsize, decreasing the amount of physical space afforded to him. Mumtaz Aunty understood the transformation of family structure as a result of physical space through discussing its impact on her relationship with her husband.

46 Meena Aunty, Voicing the Past.

47 Mumtaz Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), July, 2015.

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Discussion: Memory, Multiple Migrations, and Current Events National identity was not a topic around which women’s experiences of Partition coalesced. As I explored why this might be, a larger consideration emerged: how women’s understandings and memories of Partition appeared to be influenced by: 1) their current residence outside of either Pakistan or India, and 2) their opinion on current events in Pakistan. In this section, I will discuss each of these influences on women’s recollections of living in Pakistan after migrating as a result of Partition.

Multiple Migrations and National Identity After migrating to Pakistan, national identity regarding one nation was not a topic of importance for a majority of interviewees. Yasmeen Aunty summed the significance she placed on nationality by stating, “migration was only a change in passport.”48 National identity in Partition experiences only became salient when I asked about it directly. However, women would raise the topic when talking about their experiences migrating out of Pakistan. They associated their continued use of Urdu and consumption of Pakistani and Indian foods outside of Pakistan with Pakistan and/or India. Thus, identifying with particular nations became important after the interviewees experienced multiple migrations and not simply after they moved from India to Pakistan during Partition. No interviewee solely resides in Pakistan and only one resides in both England and Pakistan.

The other ten interviewees have a primary residence in either England or the United States. During the interview processes, women discussed their feelings towards migrating to Pakistan and the multiple migrations they have experienced throughout their lives. When asked about her initial feelings towards moving to Pakistan, Mumtaz Aunty shared: All of Sardar’s family [husband of interviewee] was in Pakistan. We went to Pakistan two weeks after our wedding [in Lucknow]. I liked that we were going to Pakistan and see all of our family, but we were also sad.

There were mixed feelings: going from one place to another. When a person lives somewhere, they feel love for that place. I opened my eyes in Hyderabad. When that was gone, there was not much importance on where I would go. After my father died my family was affected. My sense of belonging was gone. I remember everything; how things were, old friends, old conversations, but what could I do? I did not have any say in what needed to happen. We had to go, so we left.49 Mumtaz Aunty first experienced migration to a new nation during the Partition.

After settling in Pakistan, Mumtaz Aunty did not sense a shift in national identity.

What is identity? They are both the same [Pakistanis and Indians]. Punjabis are Punjabis; they are one. Indians are Indians; they are one. Bengalis are 48 Yasmeen Aunty, Voicing the Past.

49 Mumtaz Aunty, Voicing the Past.

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Bengalis; they are one. With regards to facial features, dispositions, and looks; we are all the same. I was born in India and moved to Pakistan. My thoughts are still with India. However, we were really happy in Pakistan.

We met some really great people and received a lot of recognition—both of us.50 Mumtaz Aunty believes that there is not a vast difference between an Indian identity and Pakistani identity. She still feels a connection with India, and shows fondness for Pakistan. Upon leaving Pakistan, however, national identity became significant to Mumtaz Aunty. While discussing life in England. Mumtaz Aunty shared: When I lived in Pakistan I called myself Pakistani. I believed that I was Pakistani. When I lived in India, I considered myself Indian. Now that I live here [in England] I consider myself to be both Indian and Pakistani.

There is not a lot of difference between both. I was happy there [in India] and I was happy there [in Pakistan].51 Mumtaz Aunty now resides in England, but does not consider herself English.

Although she is a British citizen, she feels a closer connection to India and Pakistan.

By combining multiple national identities to understand her sense of self postPartition, Mumtaz Aunty demonstrates the heterogeneity of the experiences that exists among women affected by Partition.

Aisha Aunty also shared how current location and experience of multiple migrations influence the relevance and understanding of national identity. During our interview, she mentioned: The people in my family who went [to Pakistan] believed that they were going because of their love for Pakistan. There would be better halat (situations) over there. In the beginning we did not notice, but later we realized people would say, “They are not from here. They are Muhajir.”

They did not really accept us. I am sure the halat is even worse now. At that time, we started to feel this way. Also, the mannerisms were so unique [in Pakistan]. For example, the Sindhis, Pathans, and Punjabis that lived there had different manners, etiquette, and languages than us. My elders used to get very sad and very hurt because of this. They used to think that they do not fit in and that they are different from them. However, with time, we settled in. Even now, when I look at my life, I want to be seen as someone from UP.52 Aisha Aunty felt as though her family was “othered” after they migrated to Pakistan. She also sensed that differences among ethnicities contributed to how her family viewed those around them. Interestingly, Aisha Aunty did not side with a particular national identity after migrating to Pakistan. Rather, she considered 50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Aisha Aunty, Voicing the Past.

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the province where she was raised (UP) as an area of significance. However, Aisha Aunty later shared: Our domicile became Pakistani, so our identity became Pakistani. In many ways, we still think and prefer to live like we did in India. That culture has now dominated Pakistan. Our surroundings were the same in terms of the people we associated with [after moving to Pakistan]. Now, I always think of myself as a Pakistani. Obviously, I also consider myself to be British; I have lived here for many years. Aside from being British, the other identity I consider is Pakistani, not Indian.53 Aisha Aunty emphasizes how multiple migrations can influence memory and draws attention to the fluidity of identity. Although her daily life practices are similar to those she performed in India, Aisha Aunty does not see herself as Indian. Instead, she views herself as both Pakistani and British. As with Mumtaz Aunty, national identity becomes an area of importance when discussing living outside of both India and Pakistan.

Not all women shared positive feelings toward each place they lived in. Shabnam Aunty migrated from India to Pakistan and then to the United States. She stated: I do not remember India. I only remember my house and fear [feeling afraid]. I do not have many memories of India. I was young, but I was not that young. I must have blocked those memories because I do not remember much about India. I only know Pakistan; I lived there for 10 years. I went to school there, I owe it to Pakistan. I received all of my education in Pakistan, the basis for which I came to the United States. I am very sad to see what is happening in Pakistan. I gave up my Pakistani citizenship in 1974 when Bangladesh was divided. I really think that the Pakistani government acted abominably towards Bengalis. I also felt that Bhutto’s government denying people to come to Pakistan was so immoral. We [Shabnam Aunty and her husband] gave up our citizenship.

We became American citizens. I had a green card for fourteen years and I wanted to go back to Pakistan, but not after that.54 Shabnam Aunty did not speak fondly of her pre-Partition childhood and credits Pakistan for giving her an education, which allowed her to move to the United States. However, she later gives up her citizenship because of the IndoPakistani War of 1971, a civil war in Pakistan that resulted in the secession of East Bengal.55 Because the Partition of India and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 share similarities regarding conflict, Shabnam Aunty’s actions demonstrate that subsequent moves and current location can influence understandings of national identity and Partition. She also indicates that current events play a role in making sense of Partition experiences.

53 Ibid.

54 Shabnam Aunty, Voicing the Past.

55 Ian Talbot & Gurharpal Singh, (2009). The Partition of India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Making Sense of Partition Through Current Events Throughout the interviews, participants compared past events to current events in an attempt to understand their experiences while living in Pakistan. These comparisons demonstrate the interrelationship of memory, an understanding of the present, and a sense of self. Bushra Aunty, a retired physician who now resides in England narrated how: Very rarely are people ashamed of their parents or their identity. Pakistan has gone so down in the world that you’re almost ashamed of calling yourself Pakistani. It is true, you might not like it, but it is true. Sometimes I think that it is better if I say I am Indian.56 Bushra Aunty indicates that she feels uncomfortable calling herself Pakistani because of Pakistan’s reputation in the world. Later, Bushra Aunty described her views concerning Pakistan: Pakistan is not a developing nation. It is a regressing nation. We went to Pakistan five or six years after Partition, when there was a big upheaval.

Pakistan was a hundred times better than it is now. Pakistan is going down in the depths. There was more education and more culture than there is now. Pakistan is not a developing nation. It is an undergoing nation. The biggest weapon we Muslims have is denial. Once, I was telling my uncle a story about my husband meeting an English businessman. He did business with third world countries. He met my husband at a party.

This man said he had recently been to Pakistan. My husband just casually asked, “How did you find Pakistan?” He said, “Well, Sharif, if you won’t mind [the truth].” My husband said, “No, I won’t mind, what?” He said, “Look, I know there is bribery and corruption in third world countries, because I deal with Africa and all of that. However, Pakistan is the only country that accepts bribes in checks.” I asked my uncle, “What do you say to that?” He responded, “These people just want to speak ill about Pakistan.” If we do not accept that there is a problem, how will we improve it?57 During our interview, Bushra Aunty shared strong opinions concerning the current state of Pakistan. She believes that Pakistan is gradually becoming worse and undergoing negative changes. In comparing Pakistan’s condition after Partition to its present state, Bushra Aunty draws attention to shifts in how Pakistan is perceived by those who migrated soon after Partition. Additionally, her husband’s encounter with the English businessman highlights how those considered “other” perceive Pakistan. Through agreeing with the English businessman, Bushra Aunty further solidifies her belief that Pakistan is experiencing a negative transformation.

56 Bushra Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi, Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), July, 2015.

57 Ibid.

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Naheed Aunty also expressed how current events are shaped by memory. While discussing identity, Naheed Aunty shared: I was sad to leave India. I was sad to leave my friends and the place where I spent my childhood. With regards to national identity, I went [to Pakistan] as a Pakistani and Muslim. Now, the halat in Pakistan indicates that people are not ready to accept us as Pakistani and Muslim. You need to be Punjabi, Balochi, or Sindhi. This brings me great sadness. All I know is Pakistani and Muslim [in terms of identity]. I know the Pakistan that Quiad-e-Azam (Jinnah) created. I pray that Pakistan becomes that way. I saw good days in Pakistan. There is still a lot of potential; it can become great. The children of Pakistan are intelligent. There is a lot of talent in Pakistan. Our children are excelling in terms of education.58 Naheed Aunty remembers Pakistan’s portrayal during the time of Partition. She believes that people should disregard their ethnic identity and focus on their religious affiliation to transform Pakistan into the state Jinnah envisioned. Similar to Bushra Aunty’s interview, Naheed Aunty mentions religion when discussing current events in Pakistan. Furthermore, she states that she had positive experiences in Pakistan and believes that the country has the potential to thrive.

Fauzia Aunty migrated to Pakistan in 1947 and discussed her memories of Pakistan after Partition. She, too, relates past events to her present interpretation.

In the beginning, people were really proud to call themselves Pakistani.

They used to say, “We are Pakistani. We created Pakistan.” People used to be proud, but not anymore. The halat is such that people are embarrassed to call themselves Pakistani. The halat in Pakistan is bad, but when I was younger Pakistan was really nice. When I was in college it was beautiful.

Girls would go to college and ride buses and rikshaws. During the summer months, there would be picnics. In Karachi, Elphinstone Street was considered a fashionable street. Girls and boys used to go there in the evening. We used to go to Clifton [beach] and have picnics. People would go out and eat paan, ice cream, falooda, and tikka. It was lovely.59 As in Bushra Aunty’s interview, Fauzia Aunty’s comparisons of her past experiences to present interpretations of the halat in Paksitan indicates a shift in her perception of the Pakistani identity. While reminiscing about her experiences in college, Fauzia Aunty mentioned that she was proud to be Pakistani and discussed activities she engaged in when she was a student. However, current conditions in Pakistan have caused her to reconsider her relationship with this national identity—now, she is embarrassed to call herself Pakistani.

58 Naheed Aunty, Voicing the Past.

59 Fauzia Aunty, interviewed by Tania Siddiqi,Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-), July, 2015.

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Limitations Herein, my role as a native ethnographer, my interview methods, and my sample size are my perceived limitations. The term native ethnographer applies to individuals conducting research within their own community. As a native ethnographer, I was able to recruit and build rapport with interviewees without many research related obstacles. However, my interview questions indicated bias in my research. As someone who grew up in a Pakistani household, I listened to many stories about tensions between India and Pakistan. While constructing my research questions, I assumed the importance of national identity emerged during Partition. For this reason, I asked many questions about national identity. Also, my approach as a native ethnographer could have caused me to overlook crucial data pertaining to my research question. A seemingly insignificant topic to me could have been an area of importance.

Of the eleven interviews, three were primarily conducted in English. I gave interviewees the option of facilitating the interviews in English or Urdu. While transcribing key passages, I realized that language impacts interpretations of past events and conducting interviews in the interviewees’ first language would have provided a baseline for all interviews. Another limitation includes the small sample size of the study, and the participants’ relative homogeneity regarding their socioeconomic level. Throughout the interview process I wondered how Partition experiences would differ for women who did not share such similarities.

Also, recruiting more women would have aided in delineating the heterogeneity that exists among Muslim women.

More Women’s Voices Future research is needed to understand the impact of Partition on later generations.

Every woman who was interviewed discussed why they experienced a loss of space after migrating to Pakistan. However, it is not clear as to how women compensated for such a loss. Subsequent studies should include how Muslim women renegotiated space after Partition. Moreover, such discoveries would aid in understanding how women exercised their ability to act and the diversity that exists among members of this particular population.

All eleven interviewee had children after leaving India, and some of their children were part of the first generation of Pakistani-born citizens. Although national identity was not a topic that was discussed in detail, current events suggest national identity is now an area of importance. Future research should include oral histories from Muslim women who are first generation Pakistani. This research could aid in understanding when and how national identity became an area of importance. Also, research could demonstrate how Partition has influenced subsequent generations.

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Conclusion My initial research question aimed to investigate how Sunni Muslim women’s lives were transformed after the Partition of India. Prior to my investigation, I hypothesized that women would discuss how gender, kinship, and national identity were transformed during this time. After analyzing the eleven interviews that were utilized for this article, I found that women primarily understood their Partition experiences through the lenses of social status/class, gender, and kinship. More specifically, the transformation of gender was best understood though changes in clothing and physical space. Transformations pertaining to kinship were best understood through lack of physical space and differences within households regarding political affiliation. However, the women whom I spoke with did not find national identity as a topic of importance when discussing their experiences of migrating from India to Pakistan.

My work contributes to broader literature in the anthropology of gender and the interdisciplinary field concerning Muslim women lives during the Partition of 1947 in South Asia. Findings in this article confirm both the performativity of gender60 and the potential of women to use gender roles to impact other areas of social life.61 During the interview process, women discussed how and why gender roles were transformed through new practices. Meena Aunty mentioned that before Partition, girls in her family were expected to practice purdah and wear burkas. Migrating to Pakistan resulted in abandoning these gendered practices; however, this was not due to ideological shifts or social change campaigns.

Instead, she attributed lack of physical space and resources as the reason for changes in gender roles. Wearing burkas in Pakistan was impractical because she and Parveen Aunty, her sister, either walked or relied on public transportation to perform their daily life practices. Thus, a primary gender marker, the burka, fell away in significance due to changes in social class and physical, not ideological, circumstances. These shifts also draw attention to why women entered public spaces.

Additionally, my results add to existing works that promote the diversity of experiences that exists among Muslim women62 and the use of individual narrative as a method to document this heterogeneity.63 Every interviewee received the same questions regarding their experiences during migration; however, their answers varied. Through individual narratives, these women shared their accounts of their journey to Pakistan. Additionally, these questions allowed for common themes to emerge. These ideas aided in analyzing women’s experiences; however, the commonalities presented in this article did not diminish individual interpretations concerning topics of interest. For example, the transformation of kinship was discussed in every interview, but the consequences of such changes depended on individual interpretation and personal family history of 60 Butler, Gender Trouble; Butler, Excitable Speech.

61 Wardlow, Wayward Women.

62 Abu-Lughod, “Cultural Relativism,”; Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds.

63 Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds; Butalia, The Other Side of Silence.

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the interviewee. Fatima Aunty’s account of writing to her brother who remained in India after Partition at her uncle’s request demonstrates the critical role she played in keeping familial ties and shows the impact of conflicting political ideology within families. For Mumtaz Aunty, living in a smaller home with her in-laws in Pakistan caused her to reframe certain aspects of her relationship with her husband, further demonstrating the variation of experience for Muslim women migrating to from India to Pakistan.

Perhaps the most significant finding in this article is the need to challenge the collective discourse surrounding Muslim women’s experiences during Partition.

While current texts primarily draw attention to the violence and brutality inflicted on women during Partition64, voices presented in this article demonstrate the necessity of understanding transformations during migration through multiple lenses. Parveen Aunty’s refusal to eat mangoes after migrating to Pakistan and the comparison of her migration experience to an uprooted plant shows the pain and sadness she felt towards leaving India. Likewise, Fauzia Aunty’s discussion of the activities she and her friends engaged in during their college years indicates fond memories of experiences in Pakistan. These dynamic and rich narratives concerning daily lives and routine activities outside of physical violence and trauma are essential in gaining a more holistic understanding of Muslim women’s experiences during Partition.

Bibliography Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others.” American Anthropological Association 104, no. 3 (2002): 783-790 Abu-Lughod, Lila. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Aisha. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). June, 2015.

Ali, Rabia Umar. “Muslim Women and the Partition of India: A Historiographical Silence.” Islamic Studies 48, no. 3 (2009): 425-436. Accessed September 17, 2014. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20839174?seq=1#page_scan_ tab_contents.

Bernard, H. Russell. Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2000.

64 Ali, “Historiographical Silence,”; Khan, “Speaking Violence,”; Virdee, “Negotiating the Past”.

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Bushra. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). July, 2015.

Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices of the Partition. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Fatima. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). June, 2015.

Fauzia. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). July, 2015.

Hardgrove, Anne. “South Asian Women’s Communal Identities.” Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 39 (1995): 2427+2429-2430. Accessed March 5, 2016. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4403269?seq=1#page_scan_tab_ contents.

Hashem, Ferhana. “Elite Conceptions of Muslim Identity from the Partition of Bengal to the Creation of Bangladesh, 1947-1971.” National Identities 12, no. 1 (2010): 61-79. Accessed April 9, 2016. http://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/14608940903542656.

Khan, Furrukh A. “Speaking Violence: Pakistani Women’s Narratives of Partition.” In Gender, Conflict, and Migration, edited by Navnita Chadha Behera, 97-115. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006.

Lewis, Ellen. Feminist Anthropology: A Reader. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006.

Menon, Ritu & Kamla Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. Brunswick: Kali for Women, 1998.

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Meena. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). May, 2015.

Mumtaz. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). July, 2015.

Naheed. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). June, 2015.

Plante, Rebecca F. & Maurer, Lisa M. Doing Gender Diversity: Readings in Theory and Real-World Experiences. Boulder: Westview Press, 2010.

Parveen. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). June, 2015.

Sadia. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). July, 2015.

Shabnam. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). July, 2015.

Talbot, Ian & Singh, Gurharpal. The Partition of India. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Virdee, Pippa. “Negotiating the Past: Journey Through Muslim Women’s experience of Partition and Resettlement in Pakistan.” Cultural and Social History 6, no. 4 (2009): 467-483. Accessed March 7, 2016, http:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2752/147800409X466290.

Wardlow, Holly. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society.

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

Yasmeen. Interviewed by Tania Siddiqi. Voicing the Past: The Migration of Muslim Women from India to Pakistan (1947-). June, 2015.

© Zainab Ashraf

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The New Pakistani Middle Class. By Ammara Maqsood. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Fatima Tassadiq The New Pakistani Middle Class by Ammara Maqsood explores the emergent politics and contestations between an old, established middle class and a new, upwardly mobile middle class in contemporary Lahore. In particular, she interrogates how the struggle between these different middle class groups for social recognition and legitimacy is mediated by the politics of modernity and practices of piety.

The first chapters of the book trace the history of modernism in South Asia, particularly its relationship with the colonial and later the postcolonial middle class in 1950s and 1960s in Pakistan. Maqsood’s historically grounded analysis underscores the importance of the colonial state and thus employment with the state and participation in the public sphere in colonial and postcolonial notions of respectability and status. She also explores the different vectors of urban life in the decades following independence by analyzing the importance of increased access to the state and the expanding private sector to the middle class; the impact of President Ayub Khan’s modernization and industrialization policies; the association between centralized military-bureaucratic control and technocratic modernism; the importance of internationalism to visions of modernity; and the dominance of an Ashrafi etiquette and an Urdu-oriented culture within elite urban circles. The author also critically examines the construction of nostalgia for and memory of Pakistan in the 1950s and ‘60s amongst the old, established middle class of today. She highlights how these narratives of the past entail the erasure from memory of widespread inequality and state repression, the equation of a particular class-based experience with urban experience, and the slippage between nostalgia for a particular type of urban life with a moral vision in the context of religious violence in contemporary Pakistan. Maqsood’s analysis is particularly relevant today considering that the resurgence of right-wing forces in countries like Pakistan, India, and Iran has prompted an uncritical acceptance of the modernity and progressiveness of the mid-20th century within mainstream as well as certain academic circles.

The second half of the book turns to an ethnographic analysis of the new middle class in Lahore and its engagement with religion. Composed of upwardly mobile urban groups that have emerged since the 1980s, this class includes second generation rural to urban migrants in Punjab as well as residents indigenous to the walled city and surrounding areas. Visibly religious, this group is marked by a direct engagement with religious texts and a cultivation of individual ethics and piety. Here, Maqsood’s analysis resonates with Saba Mahmood’s seminal work

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on religious self-formation amongst Egyptian women1. However, Maqsood’s work breaks from much of the recent work in anthropology of Islam in that it grounds religious practices in the everyday economic and political environment and explores how religious engagements unfold in line with and sometimes in tension with aspirations for modernity and class mobility. The new middle class challenges the established status of the old middle class by mobilizing particular notions of modernity, progress, and morality. This involves an emphasis on education, socio-economic and material progress e.g. consumption, homeownership, and connections with the global Muslim community. Most importantly, it includes moral self-representation based on adherence to asl (real) Islam disentangled from sectarian division, violence and rendered compatible with modern life.

The religious moral self is thus relational as it is used to distinguish oneself from the old established middle class that is believed to have abandoned Islam in its desire for westernization as well as the poorer working class that is seen as blindly following rituals such as those practiced at shrines. Maqsood points out that while this self-representation by the new middle class challenges the existing status quo, it reaffirms the importance of modernity, international connections, and material consumption in constructing social hierarchies.

This analysis clearly speaks to the well-known work of Partha Chatterjee on the formations of Indian modernity and religion in response to the colonial encounter.2 There is also considerable scholarship tracing the changing engagement with religion amongst the Hindu middle class in India with the rise of right- wing politics from the late 1980s onwards3. There has been little work, however, which tracks the transformation in aspirations for modernity and religious practice during the same period in Pakistan.4 The latter diverges from the postcolonial Indian experience not only because of the different trajectories of the two countries but also due to the particular association between Islam and violence in the post9/11 world. This book therefore makes an important intervention in addressing the impact of a new form of engagement with the western world on local religious practices and formations of class and identity in contemporary Pakistan. Through ethnographically grounded research, Maqsood examines how globally-circulating representations of Muslims as violent extremists are received, processed, and enfolded in local class politics in Pakistan. The anxieties of self-representation are evident in the way the desire for modernity is directed at the ‘imagined outsider’ to counter narratives of religious extremism (34). The author details how the old, established middle class dismisses the visible religiosity of the new middle class as a product of Zia’s Islamization program and rising Wahhabi influence and holds these responsible for religious extremism in the country. For the old guard, local Sufi practices considered indigenous and authentic to South Asia serve as an important counter to new religious practices. The new middle class, on the other hand, acutely aware of this portrayal by the local elite as well as the larger world, 1 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2004).

2 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Oxford University Press, 1994).

3 See, for example Mankekar (1999) and Hansen (1999).

4 Notable exceptions include Khan (2012) and Iqtidar (2012).

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constantly distances itself from violence through appeals to asl Islam and direct engagement with the Quran.

Although the author makes a compelling connection between Pakistan’s black sheep status in international politics and local class contestations, I wonder if the global perception of Pakistan is really as central to everyday life in Lahore as the book seems to suggest. At several points in the book, Maqsood argues that the various literary and cultural events held in the city seem to be directed at an external, global audience, and aim to counter existing narratives of religious extremism. The author is very cognizant of her positionality and discusses how her status as a researcher based in a western university and working on contemporary forms of piety would prompt people to underscore Pakistan’s ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ past. However, I would caution against equating the narratives prompted by her presence with the goals of these events, which may lead to an overestimation of the importance of the imagined outsider in everyday life.

Maqsood’s consideration of the established middle class’s claims to authenticity through an engagement with a supposedly more indigenous Sufi Islam is characteristically nuanced. She points out that this involvement usually takes the form of cultural rather than religious or spiritual practice. However, she does not pursue this argument further since the focus of her ethnographic work is the new middle class. It would be worth interrogating the nature of elite engagement with such practices for what it can reveal about the actual operation of class privilege.

For example, Maqsood mentions the now-famous Papu Saeen who plays drums at the shrine of Shah Jamal (127). The music and dancing at the shrine are shunned by the new middle class but are increasingly patronized by the established middle class. However, it is critical to note that old middle class’s involvement takes the form of a highly selective consumption of these customs and is very distinct from that of the working class devotees who throng the shrine every Thursday. The Lahori elite might have suddenly discovered Pappu Saeen, but they will watch the dhamal (spiritual dance) from a safe distance, relegating the working class devotees to a spectacle available for their consumption. Some might even use drugs consumed freely at the site but will rarely go into a trance or worship at the grave of the saint. Their preferred means of consuming Pappu Saeen’s music is either watching the drummer from a distance or relocating him to the sanitized environment of a music studio. In this way, the elite may have more in common with the new middle class than they would care to admit. Neither one of these urban groups usually engages in worship or other spiritual practices at shrines.

However, the established class privilege of the old middle class ensures that they can frequent such spaces without running the risk of being associated with them.

The modernity and progressiveness of the new middle class is too precarious to allow them to do the same.

Maqsood’s book is a refreshing addition to the growing body of work on Pakistan

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that parts ways from older ‘gatekeeping concepts’5 of Islam, status of women, and security studies that have tended to dominate scholarship on the country.

Her historical and ethnographic approach enables her to move between different scales and examine local formations of piety, modernity, and class in Lahore while remaining attentive to how these are informed by broader urbanization and migration patterns, neoliberal economic policies, and the post-9/11 world order.

The disciplinary range and accessible writing make the book relevant to students of South Asia, urban studies, and anthropology of Islam.

5 Arjun Appadurai, “Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, (1986): 357.

© Rukhshan Arif Mian

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THE BLAUE BLUME IN BOMBAY: Manto’s Aesthetics of Critical Distance in the Age of Technical Reproducibility Emily A. Durham Even the most incisive observations within realist literature cannot surmount the distance between the text and its referent. Film, however, often succeeds in the illusion of being real. As Theodor Adorno says, “fictional characters never resemble their empirical counterparts no matter how minutely they are described. In fact it may be due to the very precision of their presentation that they are removed even further from empirical reality; they become aesthetically autonomous. Such distance is abolished in film: to the extent that a film is realistic, the semblance of immediacy cannot be avoided.”1 Because literature cannot hide its means of construction, it considers reality from a distance. But while literature cannot imitate empirical reality, its capacity to construct and change narrative tropes remains on the surface, a capacity that becomes all the more important in times of political crisis.

In the case of Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s essay “Main Film Kyon Nahin Dēkhta” (“Why I Don’t Watch Films”), published very shortly after his move to Pakistan and in the midst of post-Partition violence, this aesthetic of distance is applied to the process of filmmaking itself. Through his literary representation of film, Manto not only interrogates the illusory narratives of commercial filmmaking within the culture industry, but also the broader narrative erasures that threatened to define empirical reality.

Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s relationship to a critical realism is often a matter of debate, in particular because of his troubled relationship with the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and their very public attacks on both his work and character, attacks that would ultimately come to a head with his blacklisting from PWA journals in India.2 Kamran Asadar Ali summarizes discussions of Manto’s work in the minutes of PWA meetings thus: “[Manto’s] characters were deemed weak and ineffectual, and his plots, although acknowledged as realistic, were dismissed as pessimistic and perverse.”3 Although Manto’s stories fulfilled the requirement of depicting a social reality, a commitment to haqīqat (realism) strongly promoted by the PWA, the consensus was that his work did not develop narratives of possible future growth and change. Manto’s relationship with the Progressives would remain complicated, and he would retain several friends and supporters

1 Theodor Adorno and Thomas Y. Levin, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique 24/25 (1981): 200.

2 Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 133.

3 Kamran Asdar Ali, “Progressives and ‘Perverts’,” Social Text 9, no.3 (1970): 9.

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within the PWA, but in the press and official meeting minutes his stories were labeled “reactionary” as they did not live up to the greater political goals of the organization.4 Perhaps less encumbered by the Cold War arguments over decadent or propagandist art, Harish Trivedi has re-asserted the obvious artistic power found in Manto’s work. Still, he agrees with the PWA’s skepticism that Manto’s literature could be connected to a cultural project of social transformation.5 However, Trivedi disagrees with the Progressive Writers’ claim that Manto fails to point towards a future emancipation because he merely depicts what is. Rather, Trivedi argues that Manto’s work is characterized by a capacity to exceed realism by gesturing towards what isn’t, which makes it unsuitable to political realism as such. Trivedi says that Manto’s writing contains “a surreal intensity of physical observation and description of detail,” with “an acuteness of sensory perception and representation that goes beyond simple realism.”6 Between the PWA and Trivedi, the consensus seems to be that Manto’s work is too real to serve as a catalyst for change. It is either only realistic, or it is in excess of realism, which Trivedi observes, “does not show any radical inclination to plead for a change or reform in society…On the contrary, he seems content to deploy his art to show things as they are, but as we may not be able to see them without his illuminating artistic mediation.”7 This is, however, is precisely what give’s Manto’s work its critical power, and what makes it political in that it resists a tendency to “aestheticize politics,” what Walter Benjamin identified as a key practice of fascism.8 The fictive realness of Manto’s illuminations, which complicated notions of everydayness, demonstrates his intolerance for illusion, be it progressive, regressive, or otherwise. Manto had a penchant for zeroing in—or perhaps more appropriate to the essay discussed here, zooming out—on those material details which dislodge any simple aestheticized understanding of life. Whether he undermines the spectacle of a romanticized future or the beautification of an intolerable present, one cannot

4 Progressive Writer Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, who famously wrote an “open letter” to Manto condemning his relationship to the liberal critic Muhammad Hasan Askari, later claimed that Manto was “happy” that the letter at least wasn’t about his writing, and they remained friends. Ismat Chughtai who, unlike Manto, remained part of, if in constant contention with, the organization, wrote a touching account of their friendship in the essay “Mera Dost Mera Dushman” (“My Friend My Enemy”). She also came to Manto’s defense when his short story collection Siyā hāshīyē (Black Margins) was released, claiming “Manto may be many things, but he cannot be bigoted, and won’t be forced by anyone to become so; he won’t approve of violence…Manto will never write reactionary literature.” See See Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Leslie Flemming, “Leslie Flemming Interviews Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi: A Friend and Colleague Reminisces,” Journal of South Asia Literature 20, no. 2 (1985): 149, and My Friend My Enemy, Trans. Tahira Naqvi (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001) 15.

5 Harish Trivedi, “Manto, God, Premchand and Some Other Storytellers,” Social Scientist 40, no. 11/12 (2012): 64.

6 Ibid., 64-6.

7 Ibid.

8 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility [second version],” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2008), 42.

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leave Manto’s work viewing the world in the same way.9 It is not difficult to understand why such a shattering of illusions was necessary in the context of Partition, where incendiary rhetoric regarding the division Hindus and Muslims threatened to overshadow centuries of peaceful co-habitation.10 If anything, the violence indicated the need for narratives that could re-complicate easy formulations of “us” versus “them”. Similarly concerned with the illusions of the masses and their relationship to mass media, Benjamin’s warning regarding the aesthetisization of politics in the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” was a response to the rise of Nazi propaganda in Germany.11 Given the way that they both represent a critical intervention into the social function of media at moments of violence that threatened to destroy the very social fabric they were a part of, this essay will examine Benjamin’s essay in discussion Manto’s literary representation of film. Manto’s distanced illuminations into the narratives of commercial film in “Why I Don’t Watch Films” shatter the illusions of both the unalterable solidity of real life and the enchantments of shadows on the movie screens.

Reanimating Time and Refusing Spectacle: “Why I Don’t Watch Films” “Why I Don’t Watch Films” first appeared in 1948 in the journal Imroz, which was run by the noted Progressive poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.12 Partition violence still raged in the streets across the subcontinent, and anxieties over lawless outbreaks merely lead to the government sanction of armed militias, many of which had participated in some of the worst atrocities.13 The choice to write about film at a time when destruction threatened to take over the most mundane aspects of daily life is not an unprecedented move: In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin wrote about the technologies of film in a context of wide-spread nationalist fervor and coordinated violence as an intervention into the cultural promotion of fascism. Hitler had already come to power and was quickly building a totalitarian regime, and so unlike his ruminations on literature in “The Storyteller,” which retains a nostalgic tone for a 9 As an example, Manto’s first story to be tried for obscenity, “Bu” (“The Smell”) came to the attention of authorities not because of its explicit sex scenes, but because of his suggestion that the main duties of the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (WAC) was to “service” English soldiers. And Ulka Anjaria has observed that “Toba Tēk Singh” is less of a literary representation of madness than a literalization of the madness of partition. See Sarah Waheed, “Anatomy of an Obscenity Trial.” Himal Southasian, 21 Feb. 2014, http:// himalmag.com/anatomy-obscenity-trial/; and Ulka Anjaria, “Madness and Discontent,” THAAP Journal (2015), 22.

10 Sanjay Chaturvedi ,“Process of Othering in the Case of India and Pakistan,” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93, no. 2 (2002): 150. Chaturvedi reminds us that Jinnah and the Muslim League are often given undue importance in the choice of Partition. He says, “What makes the partition of British India such an intricate and complex phenomenon…is the convergence…of several discourses of otherness…imperialists, nationalists and communalists alike. In other words, several competing logics of partition were simultaneously striving to arrive at ‘totality with oneself by separation from another self.’”

11 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: The Work of Art Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (1992), 5. For another account of Benjamin’s essay as an urgent re-assessment of film’s political potential in the face of fascism, see Miriam Hansen’s essay “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 179-224; emphasis in original.

12 Leslie Flemming and Tahira Naqvi, Another Lonely Voice (Lahore: Vanguard, 1985), 17.

13 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 184.

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literature that appeared to have lost its relevance, “The Work of Art” is an urgent attempt to critique aesthetic technologies in order to find new possibilities within them.

Benjamin’s claim is that, “the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art differ from those now current in that they are completely useless for the purposes of fascism,” heralding not only a new venue for the expression of the masses, but also the perception of social actuality and material inequality.14 As historian Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out in her analysis of the essay, Benjamin set out to find a way to “undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them.”15 Benjamin does not spend much time mourning what has been lost in previous artistic modes of production, but rather focuses upon the way that the technology of mechanical reproduction “emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual” by abolishing the aura of unique authenticity.16 The idol of the temple is now accessible everywhere to everyone.

Benjamin argues that film in particular contains the possibility for “immunization against…mass psychoses” because of its ability to appropriate the dream world of the individual and replace it with figures of the “collective dream.”17 He says that it does this “by means of certain films in which the forced development of sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions can prevent their natural and dangerous maturation in the masses.”18 The collective catharsis of such fantasies, indulged in rather than repressed, can remove the repressive tendencies of modernity and open new avenues of social behavior. Film’s ability to reach into the innermost libidinal realms of humanity and allow their collective expression then undermines the work of art’s use as a means of social control.19 However, the line between collective catharsis and collective indulgence in mass psychosis remains thin. Along with film’s potential for disenchantment, the collective experience bringing its fantasies into the sobering light of day, Benjamin notes the regressive nature of “the cult of the movie star.” 20 With the release of Triumph of the Will just the year before the publication of “The Work of Art,” the danger of placing the masses in their own starring role must have been readily apparent. Benjamin describes the lie of the aesthetics of fascism in terms of organization which replaces social re-organization, where, “in great ceremonial processions, giant rallies and mass sporting events, and in war…the masses come face to face with themselves…The masses have a right to changed 14 Benjamin, 20.

15 Buck-Morss, 5.

16 Benjamin, 24.

17 Ibid., 38.

18 Ibid., 37.

19 It is this liberatory aspect of film, which exists despite the self-censoring of the culture industry that lead Adorno to concede, “the culture industry becomes as internally antagonistic as the very society which it aims to control. The ideology of the culture industry contains the antidote to its own lie.” See Adorno, 202.

20 Benjamin, 33.

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property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”21 In the propaganda film, the masses become aesthetically organized— in uniform and in unison— which valorizes existing social structures and elides all distinctions, hypocrisies, and inequalities, instead of a collective realization of social actuality which could lead to their organization for political change.

An aestheticizing of politics has its own severe implications in the context of Partition, where the collective excitement of independence was often accompanied by rising inter-communal tensions. Thus, the celebratory spectacle of nationalism was also always in danger of becoming the celebration of one community’s victory over another. Emerging governments had a stake in stoking these public displays of grandeur as people “stood in vast crowds, dazzled by fireworks and illuminated buildings, not only in Delhi, but in major cities throughout South Asia,” witnessing the tryst with destiny that brought two nations into the world.22 As opposed to Nazi Germany, film in the subcontinent was not a participant in the narrative violence of aestheticized politics, so much as a victim of it. Prominent nationalists attempted to ban films on both sides of the border, both before and after independence, as a means to purify the cultural products of the new nations.23 Still, the aestheticization of politics occurred through other means: In the same year “Why I Don’t Watch Films” was published, a photograph appeared showing armed women, all in uniform, marching in formation along the recently formed Punjabi border.24 The aesthetics of the nation, both those that had been disallowed and those which were beginning to emerge, urgently required a critique.

It is in the context of these developments that Manto turned to literature, pulling from an “old” medium a new kind of narrative distance that would reimagine the forces at work behind the cult of the movie star, but he is careful to distance himself from the politicians who labeled cinema as culturally inappropriate. He says: In my head there was a beautiful temple in which every evening I’d light lamps to my favorite actors…but what happened to extinguish all these lamps of faith?... Was I possessed by the spirit of Ghaznavi?... Not at all….

Several people don’t watch films because…they think they are the games of demons and want to distance themselves from it….Deception and deception only turned my heart away.25 The cult of the movie star, that which Manto has literalized through his metaphor of the mind’s temple, is at once as attractive as it is deceptive. Commercial film fetishizes itself, for its illusions of reality remain hidden as illusions.

21 Ibid., 41; emphasis in original.

22 Khan, 150.

23 Ibid., 72; Mushtaq Gazdar, Pakistani Cinema (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 24.

24 An 11th century ruler, the first Sultan of Northern India, who was renowned for his inconoclastic raids on the Somnath temple. See Romila Thapar, Somnatha: The Many Voices of a History, (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2005).

Ibid., 185 25 Manto, “Why I Don’t Watch Films,” 418-419.

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Adorno criticized Benjamin’s gloss of the commodity character of film by saying that “[he] did not elaborate on how some of the categories he postulated for film…are imbricated with the commodity character which his theory opposes.”

As a possible solution to the collapse of the commodity character of film with the referent it portrays—while maintaining film’s depictive power—he proposes the adaptation of literary techniques into the medium. He says that, “The obvious answer today, as forty years ago [when Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art”], is that of montage which does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to that of writing.”26 Montage allows for the unique properties of immediacy of the camera lens, but creates a distance that can allow the referent to stand for itself rather than what it is made to be as a consumable product.

Instead of adapting writing to film, Manto’s essay adapts the technology of film to the medium of literature, which draws upon the emotional power of film even as it undoes its commodity character. “Why I Don’t Watch Films” flattens in film that which unveils the collective unconscious even as it creates mass consciousness— its dialectical essence. In Manto’s essay, similar to montage, all of film’s elements— its heroes, props, and language itself— exist in constellations without privilege or precedent, dismantling the ordered and hierarchical principles of commercial film.

From the very beginning, the essay roils with activity, but gods and heroes alike are revealed as mere human beings. Describing the very first time he was allowed inside the gates of the studio, Manto continues the satirical comparison of himself with the iconoclastic Sultan Ghaznavi and says, “About twelve years ago, I raided the Somnath studio.”27 Within his first few steps inside the studio gates we hear the voice of God, which turns out to be a voice through a loudspeaker. Another “god” is accused of stealing costume props, but the man demonstrates that the elaborate mustache in question is actually his own. A group of soldiers comes running into the scene clashing swords as if fighting to the death, until one of them drops his weapon and runs backstage. The frightening sword is made of wood.28 Taking what would be reduced to a flash of celluloid, left on the cutting room floor, or missed by the limiting lens of the camera altogether, Manto creates a space of chaotic creativity where much more than an commercial narrative is possible.

What results is that this imagined process of filmmaking is rather more enjoyable than Manto’s condemnation of film, which undermines even his own narrative that film should be avoided or distrusted. As such, Manto’s literary-cinematic space challenges the established tropes of both realist literature and film, and brings their aesthetics front and center in all of their illusion and malleability.

The timing of the publication of the essay is significant even beyond its role as call to truth at a time of increasingly fanatical rhetoric. It also reanimates a gentler time before Partition that had been displaced by crisis. By demonstrating the degree to which a history of inter-communal tensions and intra-communal purity has always been a myth, it once again brings into question an aesthetics 26 Adorno, 202, 203. He proposes this in opposition to other forms of meta-cinema 27 Manto, “Why I Don’t Watch Films,” 419 28 Ibid.

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of belonging that was increasingly narrowed by the process of national selfdefinition: Muslims against infidels, Pakistan against India, Urdu against Hindi.

The PWA, along with the subcontinent, was split in two following Partition, and this process further narrowed the spirit of linguistic possibility perhaps most compellingly illustrated by the bi-lingual figure of Munshi Premchand.29 After his death in 1936, literary groups became even more regionalized as Hindi and English became the official languages in India, and English the national language of Pakistan, with Urdu as a secondary “link-language.”30 Punjabi and Bengali, which were spoken by the majority of residents in West and East Pakistan respectively, were entirely ignored, thus erasing political expression in these languages under the increasingly monochromatic umbrella of officialized forms.

In the context of these arguments over the canonizing of national languages, Manto’s “Why I Don’t Watch Films” brings in language as an actor: it is not just as a caricature of cinematic dialogues but also a satire of established literary tropes and conventions. Urdu, which was the language of the elite in the 19th century, emerged in a new form in the cinema of mid-twentieth century India. Manto’s essay reflects upon this new Urdu as a conveyor of aesthetic authority now leveraged for commercial value.

In those days even I didn’t have much affection for language. So when I met with the director every day to maul it I did not get offended. But one day the matter became grave when Seth Saheb shook the director’s hand and told him the good news: “Old man, today I’ve sold the rights to your thirteenth film.” The director congratulated Seth and asked him, “What name did you give it?” Mr. Seth smiled. “It’s really great. Pharj-e-Ada.”31 Taking the very Urdu-sounding title Farz-e-Ada (Loyalty, 1936) through various permutations in which it becomes clear that not only is Mr. Seth’s pronunciation incorrect (swapping the Urdu-specific sounds of “f” and “z” with the Hindi “ph” and “j”) but also his grammar (reversing the genitive and noun, as it would be done in Hindi), Manto pokes fun at Urdu literary traditions colliding with the new urban, multi-lingual landscape in Bombay. When Manto tries to express his objections, nothing can be done: “You’ve lost your mind, Munshi! The title cannot be changed for because I’ve already sold the film!”32 In the end, it is unclear if it is the literariness of Urdu in an entirely unfamiliar landscape or its thriving bastardization that emerges as the butt of the joke. Manto creates a comedic imitation of literary majesty, plucking turns of phrase from the lofty idiom of the urban elite and reducing them to mere sounds and grammatical elements as so many movable parts. Words that had been immortalized in print are suddenly, along with heroes and heroines, made mortal, struck down from the lofty authority of the printed page by their translation for and by a broader public.

29 Shobna Nijhawan, “Christine Everaert’s Tracing the Boundaries Between Hindi and Urdu,” The Annual of Urdu Studies 29 (2014): 29.

30 Alyssa Ayres, Speaking Like a State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 32.

31 Manto, “Why I Don’t Watch Films,” 420.

32 Ibid.

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In exile from the film world of Bombay, Manto turns his mind to his days there.

But instead of romanticizing the film studios and their productions, he makes visible scenes the studios work hard to obscure. Manto widens the lens to include the whole of the process before the film can is sealed. In doing so, he creates a new space for observing and recognizing the inherently social nature of filmic expression, not just its presentation of the mass to the masses, but also its involvement as participants in the creation of heroes, and the way that such cults of personality are always propped up by less glamorous means: One actress was very famous for her horse riding. But when her time to ride the horse came, I saw a wooden horse being brought out. It wasn’t even a whole horse. Just the back and nothing more to which a saddle had been tacked on. Neither snout nor tail. Actress Sahebah saddled this strange horse with the support of three men.

The lights came on. Director Sahib gave the order. “Go!” One man quickly put the reigns in the hands of Actress Sahebah and another slowly began to shake this very strange horse of wood. The filming of this shaking continued on for a while. The next day there was an outdoor shooting. A skilled circus rider put on the actress’s sari and blouse and rode a touchy horse that kept rearing. His different riding poses were filmed. When all of these pieces were joined together and came on screen, it seemed to my astonished eyes that the actress was doing everything herself.33 The temporal effect of this passage is that literature’s malleable time, which covers three days within a single paragraph, draws out the filmic instant and reveals it as a lengthy process. But also, word by word, it draws us along from the moment of the entrance of the wooden horse to our witnessing of the final product as the astonished spectator. Captive as we are to the linear flow of the sentence, the turning of pages, and the inescapable distance from the referent in the form of text, the literary medium re-assembles what has been lost to the editing process in order to spark our wariness of the film’s manipulated contents. This distancing of the immediacy of the medium provides a valuable critical function. One could well imagine the difference in an audience’s reaction to a political speech, for instance, if all previous drafts had been included, along with the interjections of politicians and speech writers. Suddenly the theatricality of the speech becomes transparent, and India’s tryst with destiny becomes less an inevitability and more apparent for the long, difficult, and entirely transformable process that it was.

Manto concludes his essay on the deception of film by revealing his complicity in the deception: “The straw that broke the camel’s back was when, watching a movie that had been made before my eyes with the audience in the cinema hall, the glycerin tears on the heroin’s false eyelashes made me cry more than once.”34 Manto implicates himself as both the vulnerable spectator and the manipulator, and the visceral depth of the manipulation is what he cannot stand in an environment of 33 Ibid., 421.

34 Manto, “Why I Don’t Watch Films,” 423.

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intolerable conditions. Partition cannot be the time for unquestioned communal indulgence, yet the strength of the experience within the cinema hall remains. In a context where so much violence was rationalized, the irrational empathy he feels for the actress exposes cinema as a valuable tool if it is taken beyond the expected parameters of commercial film and allowed to re-illuminate social realities that had been lost to communal rhetoric.

Manto had moved to the newly created Pakistan, along with several other writers, composers, and directors, expressly to work as a screenwriter in Lahore.35 But when arrived he found himself chronically unemployed. One of the three film studios that existed in Lahore prior to Partition had been burned to the ground in the ensuing violence, and another became defunct.36 In addition, the unfortunate coincidence of Pakistan’s first film release with Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s death meant that greater anxieties occupied the public consciousness than the stars and stories of its new film industry.37 And so, as Ayesha Jalal notes in her biography, Manto “had no choice but to rely exclusively on his short stories and essays for a livelihood.”38 His involvement with the glitz and glamour of Bombay cinema would remain only a memory.

Manto produced a staggering amount of material that would earn him more money from literature than any other Urdu writer of his age.39 Even amidst unprecedented upheaval, including his own move to Pakistan due to increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in Bombay, Manto’s pen provided a steady flow of short works following Partition, right up until his tragically early death in 1955.

And his stories constantly return to the marked absence of empathy within a traumatized populace. Muhammad Hasan Askari describes this phenomenon in the introduction to Manto’s bone-chilling black comedy on Partition violence, Siyā hāshīyē (Black Margins): “these events are so fresh, some that they have already seen with their own eyes, or heard from a close friend, that merely adding to the list of cruelty has no effect.”40 In response, Black Margins abandons melodramatic renderings of distress and instead replaces it with an emotionless irony that unsettles more than prompts an emotional response. The idea is not to sympathize with those who suffered cruelty but rather to recognize cruelty within oneself.

The appearance of “Why I Don’t Watch Films” just the year before Black Margins, also acts as a renegotiation of the aesthetic product’s emotional terms: it allows us to detach from the immediacy of film technology at a moment of social crisis, and to see the work of filmmaking at the distance that a literary form provides.

Through that, the vivid power of film becomes a set of conditions and techniques to which the corporeal sensorium is no longer held hostage.

35 Jalal, The Pity of Partition, 175.

36 Saādat Hasan Manto, “Pakistani Film,” trans. Ali Nobil Ahmad, BioScope 5, no. 2 (2014): 164.

37 Gazdar, 30.

38 Jalal, The Pity of Partition, 175.

39 Ibid., 176.

40 Saadat Hasan Manto, “Hashiye Arai,” by Muhammad Hasan Askari, Manto numa, (Lahore: Sang-e mil publications, 1991), 748.

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Manto’s adaptation of the process of filmmaking to the essay form shows the world of filmmaking from a perspective entirely unavailable to the average filmgoer, and expands the focus of the lens to include scenes outside of the mise en scène. “Why I Don’t Watch Films” interrogates a technology that thrived in Bombay even as it languished in Lahore, and explores how films participate in the construction of social fantasies. In the context of Partition, where the fantasies of the public were often nationalistic and communal, such a question was more than just an excuse for Manto to earn some much-needed cash, nor was it a simple object for pointed satire. Rather this kind of depiction was an inquiry into the modes of expression of social existence at a time when society was in total shambles.

The Blaue Blume in Bombay In effacing the method and means of their production, mainstream films create illusions. For Benjamin, however, this illusion is only “of the second degree; it is the result of editing…the apparatus-free aspect of reality has here become artifice and the vision of unmediated reality, the Blue Flower in the land of technology.”41 By invoking the Blaue Blume, the perfect fusion of man with nature dreamed of by the German romantics, Benjamin points out the way that film makes the natural world more acutely visible than ever to the observer because of the way the camera captures and distills its scenes. This is in contrast to the more distant and subjective truths of previous forms of representation, such as the landscape painting. But the camera operator, while gathering an unprecedented awareness of his subjects, can only do so with the intervention of the camera, lights, and editing.

At the same time, the viewpoint of the spectator who stands in the film studio has an entirely different perspective from that of the film spectator, and the process behind capturing reality on film is lost to most film-goers. While the spectator experiences a fusion with nature through art more visceral and powerful than ever, this Blaue Blume only comes into being through the operator’s separation from it, such is the nature of the apparatus. However, Manto’s description of the filming of the horsewoman brings the second-degree nature of this powerful illusion back into view, creating a wider frame through which the presence of the apparatus again plays a significant part, and thus again de-natures the heroine’s scene as an act of many participants across several days and hours.

Further, the humor of Manto’s description of the heroine’s horse ride does not make the film world appear worthless or dangerous. To the contrary, there is a bit of joy in the viewing of the final film. But the heroine who is larger than life when projected on screen in this essay becomes only one of Manto’s many minor characters. She is upstaged by her peculiar wooden horse, the men who make it gallop, and the skilled horseman who takes her place in the outdoor scenes. This reorientation of the viewer to the entirety of time and space involved in the film’s production disrupts and delays both her heroic entrance and the resolution of Manto’s narrative: the conclusion that films are not worth watching. By allowing us the critical distance to see the story as it unfolds, and all of the people and devices involved in its unfolding, Manto’s essay, in fact, expresses the transformational 41 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 28.

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possibilities in film through the way that it has access to our libidinal responses, which, for the first time through this new technology, are ours to transform.

Still, Manto’s attitude regarding the deception of the film industry remains. In the case of the horse-riding actress, all of the amusing moments that Manto describes are excluded from the film itself in service of reproducing what the heroine was commercially known for. This exclusion goes far beyond mere creative playacting, since what the film can project is a picture of the natural world that far surpasses the interpretations of a theatrical set. This is an illusion of action, causality, and of seemingly natural ability. The actress mounts the horse, the horse moves around with her on it, and there is clearly a real horse with a real rider presented on the screen. Thus, she is clearly riding a horse, and a rearing horse at that, so she must be an accomplished horsewoman. Without access to all that has gone on in the making of the film, the heroine appears simultaneously imbued with all of her symbolic meaning as a central figure, but the capacities of film to capture visual detail at an unprecedented level also makes her appear objectively heroic. We have had it decided for us, and impressed upon us with no insignificant authority, that she is an excellent horse rider, not just the skilled handler of a wooden steed.

Benjamin likens the camera operator to a surgeon, while the landscape painter is described as a magician: The painter observes in his work a natural distance from the given…Hence, the presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for people of today since it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from art and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with the apparatus.42 But, as Manto shows, the interpenetration of reality is often more than real.

Concrete visual forms, especially in the form of the commodity of the heroine, nearly always contains a social element. Somehow, the real must be made to accommodate the abstract which, while not immediately tangible, makes up a significant element of life under capitalism. Moishe Postone, in his analysis of anti-Semitism as it progressed through Romantic thought and into National Socialism, has made clear that a consequence of a fetish of the real can lead to the “hypostatization of the concrete,” demands for local specificity over cosmopolitan openness, and the acceptance of nationalist mythologies over the complicated history of inter-religious co-existence.43 In Nazi Germany, it lead to the association of Jews with looming international conspiracies of both capitalism and Communist revolution.

By showing the social processes behind film, the social can again become natural, and the complicated inter-communal negotiations of the subcontinent no longer have to be seen as compromising collective identities. Manto’s warning against the deception of the edited film can then be extended to the erasures necessary for the nationalist plotlines that gained in frequency and force in the days of 42 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 29; emphasis in original.

43 Moishe Postone. Anti-Semitism and National Socialism. Chronos Publications, 2000.

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Partition. This is perhaps best illustrated by the historian Gyan Prakash, as he describes the changing social environment of 1947 Bombay: The imperial cosmopolis was deeply hierarchical; it was underwritten by concepts of racial and cultural superiority and required subordination to imposed authority. But it did not demand a common, homogeneous identity among its subjects…Not so nationalism. In challenging imperialism, it pressed the nation’s claim as the most fundamental of all identities. This demand for loyalty to the modern nation-state over everything else left little room for those who took their other affiliations as seriously as they did the nation. 44 Thus, a Hindu identity had to be subordinated to a Hindu-nationalist identity, and a Muslim identity had to be subordinated to a Muslim-nationalist identity.

By contrast, Manto’s Bombay film studio in “Why I Don’t Watch Films” challenges both the unity of nationalism and the hierarchies of imperialism. By re-framing— literally placing back into the frame— the way that any construction of a national or filmi hero depends upon the active participation of people and things considered extraneous to that subject, Manto gives the freedom of that participation back to film’s spectators, places the apparatus of this construction into their service, and thus allows for the choice of a different lens, a different series of events.

In his narrative, Manto himself embodies the complex identities that Prakash says were being denied. He says, “Maybe you think I’ve given up the world and become an acetic…No, I still draw breath in your world of rang o bu.”45 By invoking the famous line from Muhammad Iqbal’s poem “Jabril o Iblis” (“Gabriel and Satan”), where Satan refuses Gabriel’s offer to leave the world and join Gabriel in the worship of God in Paradise, he places himself among his readers and as a participant in the multiple negotiations between identarian demands.46 The complications of life cannot be abandoned but only critiqued. In the final line of the essay, Manto says, “Please God (khuda), do not show me the day when I should watch films!” Given his ambiguous views on religion, his appeal to God to save him from film seems rather disingenuous, even ironic. But Manto does not, even in his impassioned plea to be saved from film, endorse them being banned. In “Why I Don’t Watch Films,” Manto’s frustration is less a condemnation of film than an exposure of the way that certain narratives require editing out people, things, and concepts seen as marginal to the central action; and this is the focus, in its vividness and power. The narratives produced by a commercial film industry in the process of editing clears away much of what Manto brings to these pages, and the centrality of the movie star becomes the most important, if not the only reality.

Manto revealed these incongruous details of the film world in a time of incomprehensible violence. We can read the deception of film not as an exhortation 44 Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 130-131.

45 Manto, “Why I Don’t Watch Films,” 418.

46 Muhammad Iqbal, “Jabril o Iblis,” Bal-e Jabril, (Lahore: Taj Company Limited, 1935), 192.

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to turn away from technology, though he insists that he has done so, but as the furthering of selective narratives as a replacement for the chaos of living ones, an obscuring of the process by which certain human beings are excluded entirely and others become merely figures, expressions of larger social desires in consecrated form. Benjamin says that “All the efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war.”47 The consequence an understanding of life narrowed by aestheticized ideologies is that even those who exist outside of films turn into forms, representative of this or that nation, and by extension this or that religion, and on to the Cold War battles of this or that political party.

This process was aggravated by the administrative and political expediency that became the driving force behind the creation of Pakistan, a process that by all accounts rode roughshod over contested principalities and ignored the complications of mixed communities.48 These are failures that Manto would regularly take up in his later work. As historian Saadia Toor has pointed out, “Partition, far from being a simple affair of splitting the Muslim from the nonMuslims, actually underscored the impossibility of such a division.”49 But the division did happen, and in pieces like Black Margins, “Tobah Tēk Singh,” Manto dragged back into view the incomprehensible destruction that nationalist ideologies work very hard to deny. The sense-less-ness of Black Margins exposed the emotionless cruelty of communal violence, and “Tobah Tēk Singh” the rationalized insanity of the division of the Punjab.

The consequences of a restriction on modes of expression marks a clear turning point in “The Work of Art” essay, which moves from an optimistic imagining of film’s potential to the dangers that confront us if that potential is not utilized.

Benjamin’s pointed and emphatic warning of the pitfalls of art that fails to examine the social relations that produced it leads him to the conclusion that, “war furnishes proof that society was not mature enough to make technology its organ, that technology was not sufficiently developed to master the elemental forces of society.”50 Film must turn its power toward a more penetrating, unaestheticized and unanesthatized examination of society itself, and in particular, the immense, world-transforming force that society is capable of. Otherwise, society turns to war, and redirects its technological resources from the service of humanity to the maintenance of social relations that have become untenable with the advances of technological development. In the end, this will consume the very same social energies that film has the capacity to express.

If war was the result of the inadequacies of political expression under capitalist exploitation, Benjamin argued that fascism justifies these inadequacies by 47 Benjamin, 41.

48 Ayesha Jalal, “Conjuring Pakistan,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no.1 (Feb. 1995): 75. “The selective uses made of history after the acquisition of state power differed in important respects from the creative imaginings that had sought to transform a minority community into a nation… the Muslim case for nationhood that was more nonterritorial than territorial in its imaginings came to be appropriated by a nation-state whose geographical limitations contravened the creative expansiveness of its ideological frontier.”

49 Sadia Toor, The State of Islam, (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 19.

50 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 42

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making war appear as though it is the desired result.51 In Pakistan, however, a point of frustration for Manto was that the same technologies that had enabled a new conception of nation before Partition were entirely unavailable due to the destructiveness of war.52 What comes through most clearly in “Why I Don’t Watch Films” is the way that the cosmopolitan urban landscapes in the film studios of Bombay were under threat of being erased. Manto overcomes the absence of film to redirect literature into an examination of technology in a way that it can be seen in relation to the psychological manipulation of collective emotions, those elemental forces as they were at work in South Asian society.

Manto’s examination of the riotous sensorium of the film stage reminds us to be aware of those same bodily senses in the context of Partition, a moment where, because of the tremendous uprooting of house and home, even one’s own conception of self was thrown into uncertainty. To do this, Manto disrupts the easy symbolism and continuous narratives of film in favor of its many fragments: a confounding and estranging portrayal of generalized and unedited sense, whereby the inherent and preventable wrongs of Partition could and must be confronted. Far from a dispassionate record of reality, and far exceeding a resigned acceptance of the inevitable, Manto’s work creates a critical distance by which even one’s own innermost longings are exposed in all of their fragility. Through the interaction of filmic and literary space, Manto creates aesthetic distance that, much like the “Work of Art Essay,” questions the social functions of film, and also demonstrates the collective power that film can, in the right conditions, provide.

But fundamental to this is the film’s social character, which becomes obscured within the commercial film and can, in the worst circumstances, lead to the mere aestheticization of untenable social relations. Through his satirical essay on the work of film, however, “Why I Don’t Watch Films” demonstrates film’s ability to create new collective emotional experiences which were urgently needed in an atmosphere of increasingly rationalized violence.

51 Ibid.

52 Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at The End of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) 204. “Indian films, though the ebullience of nationalism in colonial India conspired to mask the presence of stylistic and tropic instabilities. Films of the 1930s struck more than one note in conceptualizing tradition, cultural identity, and nationalism through an aesthetic hybridity that was historically specific to a period of enfeebled imperial rule, volatile nationalism, and a competitive film market.”

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor and Thomas Y. Levin, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique 24/25 (1981): 199-205 Ali, Kamran Asdar. “Progressives and ‘Perverts’: Partition Stories and Pakistan’s Future.” Social Text 29, no. 3 (108) (2011): 1-29.

Anjaria, Ulka. “Madness and Discontent: The Realist Imaginary in South Asian Literature.” THAAP Journal (2015): 20-30.

Ayres, Alyssa. Speaking like a state: Language and nationalism in Pakistan.

Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility [second version],” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2008.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (1992): 3-41.

Chaturvedi, Sanjay. “Process of Othering in the Case of India and Pakistan,” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93, no. 2 (2002): 149159.

Chughtai, Ismat. My Friend, My Enemy: Essays, Reminiscences, Portraits. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001.

Flemming, Leslie and Tahira Naqvi, Another Lonely Voice. Lahore: Vanguard, 1985.

Gazdar, Mushtaq Pakistani Cinema. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience:” The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”.” New German Critique 40 (1987): 179-224.

Iqbal, Muhammad. “Jabril o Iblis.” Bal-e-Iblis. Lahore: Taj Company Limited, 1935.

Jalal, Ayesha. The Pity of Partition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

—. “Conjuring Pakistan: History as official imagining.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no. 1 (1995): 73-89.

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Postone, Moishe. Anti-Semitism and National Socialism. Chronos Publications, 2000.

Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at The End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Manṭo, Saʻādat Ḥasan. Manto Numa. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1991.

—. “Pakistani Film.” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 5, no. 2 (2014): 163166.

Nijhawan, Shobna. “Christine Everaert’s Tracing the Boundaries Between Hindi and Urdu.” The Annual of Urdu Studies 29 (2014): 27-38.

Qasmi, Ahmad Nadeem, and Leslie A. Flemming. “Leslie A. Flemming interviews Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi: A friend and colleague reminisces.” Journal of South Asian Literature 20, no. 2 (1985): 147-151.

Prakash, Gyan. Mumbai Fables. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Toor, Sadia. The State of Islam. London: Pluto Press, 2011.

Trivedi, Harish. “Manto, God, Premchand and Some Other Storytellers.” Social Scientist 40, no. 11/12 (2012): 63-73.

Waheed, Sarah. “Anatomy of an Obscenity Trial.” Himal Southasian, 21 Feb. 2014, http://himalmag.com/anatomy-obscenity-trial/

© Zainab Ashraf

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THE TURNING POINT OF CRIME: Tribal Identity and Criminal Subversions Henry Schwarz This article is written memory of Chuni Kotal, the first woman from the Lodha tribe to attain a BA. She was driven to suicide in August 1992.

The alleged criminality of tribal people goes a long way back in the British anthropological literature on India. The “turning point” of my title is a movement, both formal and historical, for analyzing the role of discourse in the statement of anthropological truths about tribals. Such “scientific” statements about India’s indigenous people, or adivasis, have informed two great pieces of legislation responsible for turning them into criminals, and much later, turning off their criminal status. Thus we see how the legal discourse can make and unmake identities by acts of writing, much informed by pseudo-science, with tremendous human cost. This movement must be analyzed both as formal strategy—a narrative technique, or “trope”— and as an historical event, the long- term criminalization of India’s tribal people, including the recent campaign to restore their humanity.

Mahasweta Devi (1926 - 2016), the great Bengali author, worked tirelessly to turn these criminalized tribals into humans through both her creative and practical efforts. Mahasweta saw more clearly than most that identity is a discursive construction that has enormous practical effects. As such, it is imperative to focus on this turn as trope, as metaphoric equivalency or literary figure, since the common understanding of tribal India today typically guarantees the application of stereotyped metaphors to tribal reality. These stereotypes must be countered in discourse, such as in the mainstream press, but also in literary writing, in documentary reportage, and in bland petitions to anonymous officials. This mountain of paper rises against the tide of arbitrary criminalization suffered by adivasi tribes in history, and supports their effort to construct their identities anew.

The Act for the Registration of Criminal Tribes and Eunuchs of 1871 (“The Criminal Tribes Act”), was designed “to provide for the registration, surveillance and control of certain tribes,” and allowed local authorities to designate “any tribe, gang or class of persons” as criminal if it were “addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offenses.” Based on the Thuggee and Dacoity model of criminal punishment invented in the 1830s by officer William Sleeman in the areas around Bhopal, any organized gangs could, by the 1870s, be categorized as a tribe, regardless of kinship relations within the unit. If the tribe failed to settle into the desired mode of village agriculture favored by the British, but remained “lawless, wandering and predatory,” it could be criminalized under the Act and “notified” as an organized band of criminals whose very existence threatened the practical authority of British rule. Members of such notified tribes were restricted in their movements by a pass system and were required to register periodically

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with local officials. Such officials had authority to conduct roll-calls without warning, to search huts for stolen property without a warrant, and eventually to resettle tribespeople to reformatory compounds. Violators of the law were subject to six months rigorous imprisonment, a fine, or a whipping.1 The forest-dwelling Kheria Sabar (sabar meaning savara, or “hunter”) tribes existing in modern-day West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa were declared criminal in 1924, and “denotified” (decriminalized) five years after Independence in 1952.

However, the stigma of thirty years of legal criminality clings to the tribe to this day. Kheria men and boys today are routinely rounded up and jailed on suspicion for any reported offense, so that most of the male population experiences jail as a natural part of the maturation process. Official statistics may be misleading.

The 1981 Census showed a population count by the West Bengal Purulia District Tribal Welfare Office of 1080 families, but workers from the Paschim Banga Kheria Sabar Kalyan Samiti (PBKSKS), a local development organization based in Rajnoyagarh, Purulia estimate that by 1992 they had enrolled 6,000 persons of a total possible population of 10,000. The government is not necessarily wrong, but the NGO has done the hard work of searching the forest and locating the people, many of whom are still living in primitive conditions without fixed habitation or even modern clothing.

A study of Kulabahlal village in Purulia, made by Dikshit Sinha for the Anthropological Survey of India in 1980 revealed that 19 out of 25 males (76%) above the age of twenty were arrested at one time or another. The generally accepted belief among the peasants, landlords, police and local government of Purulia district is that Kherias are associated with every theft or dacoity occurring in the region. They are said to be capable of covering forty miles on foot within a single night, and of having elaborate series of underground tunnels in which to travel.2 When criminal behavior of any kind occurs in the region, it is inevitably linked to a Kheria agent. Thus Kheria identity is basically unthinkable outside the pre-determination of criminality.

The notion of tribal criminality stretches back almost two hundred years in British colonial ethnography. A Mr. V. Ball, in Jungle Life in India, is said to be among the very few Europeans who had seen a Kheria by 1866. Though he does not explicitly state their natural criminal propensity (having only short experience among them), he nonetheless notices the possibility of discovering criminal traits from their physical appearance: In their persons the Kherias are very dirty, seldom, if ever washing themselves. Their features are decidedly of a low character, not unlike the Bhumij, but there seemed to me to be an absence of any strongly-marked type in their faces or build, such as enables one to know a Santal, and even a Kurmi, at a glance.3 1 “The Criminal Tribes Act” (1871).

2 All figures from Dikshit Sinha, The Hill Kharia of Purulia: A Study of the Impact of Poverty on a Hunting Gathering Tribe (Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India, 1984).

3 Cited in H.H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Vol. I, (1891); reprint (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1981).

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Risley corroborated their shiftiness in 1891, claiming their story of origin and migration “hopeless... to contain the clue to any really ancient history. Barbarous people like the Kharias have no means of handing down a statement of fact for any length of time.”4 Coupland in 1911 cited their natural propensity for crime, but gave no reasons why they might commit crimes; it was a simple fact of nature. Bhowmick offered a sociological explanation for criminality among the neighboring Lodha tribe in 1961 that could be extended to the Kheria, suggesting that poverty and deforestation drove the tribals into village society in the early 20th century. Thus we see the first glimpse of ethnographic empathy. “In this unfamiliar world, they could find no staying mode of livelihood and therefore... took to the more primitive ways of subsistence, of possessing by force, of burglary.... The criminal propensity of the Lodhas, can therefore be said to have been born of their habit of food-gathering.”5 However sympathetic, objective, scientific or neutrally ethnographic, each statement attributes a natural essence to the tribal that serves to explain— even to predict— his illegal acts. Each presupposes the existence of the genetic structure of the born criminal as the defining mark of Kheria identity, an identity which, moreover, is defined as collective, organized, and capable of coordinated group activity. This point is crucial, for official representations of Kheria crime typically involves Kherias of other villages acting in concert on the basis of a system of shared social codes and expectations. The notion of collective organization as the basis of crime goes back to Sleeman’s original writing on the Thug gangs from the 1830s.

This figure (or trope) of collective activity is precisely what troubled most deeply the British notion of security, and what likely led to criminalization as far back as Sleeman. For even if the Kheria did not necessarily perceive what they were doing to be criminal, British authority nonetheless perceived the organized nature of Kheria activity as a threat that had to be checked. According to Sandria Freitag, the Thugee and Dacoity model operated through a mechanism of guilt by association: “though it was necessary to prove that a particular gang committed a particular crime, it was then sufficient to prove that an accused man belonged to the gang, not that he committed a specific crime.”6 Thus to identify an individual criminal it was merely necessary to point to a tribe or gang, not to the individual himself. Group identity remained generalized. Collectivity operated as the trope of individual definition: they are dangerous because they are a group; each individual is dangerous as a member of a group; individual identity is group identity; all individuals are criminals.

Such reporting, fixing, typing, and identifying was surely one of the dominant features of British ideology in the colony: the propensity to isolate and label, by caste, gender, religion, race, and other distinguishing marks, quantifiable identities for the purpose of containment and control. The scholar who has documented 4 Cited in Risley, p. 466.

5 Cited in Sinha, p. 62.

6 “Collective Crime and Authority in North India,” in Anand Yang, ed., Crime and Criminality in British India. Tuscan: University of Arizona Press, p. 147.

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this process most convincingly is Bernard Cohn.7 This tendency to label was partly an administrative necessity, and partly an anxious fear of otherness and a means of consolidating British identity, a process well-described by Sara Suleri and Homi Bhabha.8 On a grander scale, this could be considered an episode in the larger Enlightenment dream of establishing an eternal rule of reason and utility over the face of the earth, of which Bentham’s English panopticon, in Foucault’s memorable phrase, could “induce[...] a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”9 A Benthamite legal code was indeed adopted for the whole of India after the Mutiny, and the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 grew more or less naturally from the British preoccupation with surveillance and control under the shadow of this grand scheme.

The legacy of tribal criminalization since this time features not only the thirty-year period in which Kherias were convicted on sight, but also includes the enduring success of the internalized surveillance mechanism for ever larger segments of the Indian populace, of which Kheria stigmatization may be read as a particularly charged symbol. Even at the most diffuse level of subaltern existence, at a margin which can barely be registered by the official organs of state such as the census or even a district development scheme, an internalized version of colonial discipline and punishment is operative. More crucially, the elaboration of this model in the backwaters of high imperialism has been extended subsequently to vastly larger populations since independence. But before we go down the road of Foucault’s own 1984, let’s look at some specifics of the tribal crime scene today.

It seems that the elaboration of the theoretical model of Thuggee and Dacoity, first conceived as a means of preserving law and order on the highways, but later serving to model the stabilized space of British-Indian authority in the colony, had from the murkiest strata of subaltern life been generalized to the administrative logic of the state itself. Tribal/village relations in the late twentieth century continue to operate via an early nineteenth century mechanism that resembles an “automatic functioning of power.” The enduring stigma of criminalization serves to repeatedly construct Kheria identity as the “conscious and permanently” visible outside of civilized village society. The village in this schema now forms the panoptic nucleus, while the scattered tribal settlements (paras) on the outskirts house obscene inmates, their huts always open to inspection, their bodies always available for locking away, or for providing the usual suspects in the narrative of crime, a story whose outcome is known in advance.

Lest we seem grandiose without evidence, let us first explore the structure of tribal/ village relations in rural India in the 1990s. Contemporary attitudes towards the Kheria stem from the historic fact of criminalization, and seem to represent, seventy years after denotification, an efficient mode of negotiating 7 An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

8 Sarah Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 201.

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power within peasant society. Clearly the surveillance model serves the interests of the state to some extent, with the lingering threat of Naxalbari always in the background. But more immediately and practically, Kheria criminality serves a more local function: it mediates factional disputes within the village in such a way that elite individuals can purchase surrogate actors to conduct illegal activity to support their symbolic rituals of power and privilege.

Dikshit Sinha, in the Kheria ethnography cited above, discusses the mystified inside of village society as follows. The structure of the account is fundamentally ironic, in the tropological sense, as I will point out. It is important to note that the story represents an anthropologist’s recording of the “Kheria point of view;” it is a reconstituted oral report that Sinha is transcribing, and as such marks a great advance in supposedly empathic ethnography over that practiced by colonial officials.

[A] dacoity was committed in Chakradhar Mahato’s house in 1972. He was said to have refused to pay one maund of paddy as subscription that village chau dance organizers levied against him. Chakradhar Mahato, who had a reputation of being stingy, refused to pay the ‘exorbitant’ amount of subscription. The organizers knew that Chakradhar had large stock of paddy and rice. Hence his refusal to give the paddy seemed to them unjustified. The organizers, therefore, contracted Judhisthir Sabar and asked him to organize a dacoity in Chakradhar`s house.

Judhisthir was paid rupees thirty and a bottle of liquor for this.

He contacted the Hill Kharia inhabitants of Balakdih, his wife’s natal village. Judhisthir was promised help by Chakradhar’s own close relatives who agreed to keep the loot in their house if any difficulty arose. That there was collusion between the dacoits and the rest of the villagers was evident from Chakradhar’s own statement. His wife said that she managed to escape from the house during the dacoity and ran down the village road shouting for help. But no one came to her help. The dacoits made good their escape with a few maunds of rice and paddy.10 Everyone is in on the fix, and the definition of criminal identity allows the game to be played without true repercussions. Judhisthir will be accused whether he commits the crime or not, so why not take the loot and risk a possible getaway?

Even the poor wife manages to “escape” from a charade designed for her benefit.

The surveillance model is generalized to the village level, where local elites and despised criminals each play their respective roles. The symbiotic irony is clear; the system is working well.

Having noted a sympathetic anthropological description of Kheria criminality, I turn to a positive attempt to rehabilitate the equation of Kheria with criminal identity, a project whose very success depends upon the recognition that criminal 10 Sinha.

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identity is not essential, a being to be transformed, but relational, a structure to be reconfigured. One could examine the everyday work of the NGO mentioned previously (PBKSKS), but I turn here to consider the literary work of its founder, who, in complete indifference to Michel Foucault, explicitly destabilizes the fixed bond of criminality.

Mahasweta Devi, in the late 1980s, produced a series of what she called “true stories” based on tribal, especially Kheria situations. My first reaction to them was somewhat cold after my initial fascination with such monumental stories as “Draupadi,” “Breastgiver,” “Pterodactyl,” “The Death of Jagmohan” and so on. With some understanding of the dilemma of historical criminalization however, these “true stories” take on a powerful, practical dimension.11 Clearly her intention was to further demystify the constructed nature of tribal criminality, and to represent the historical process of undoing by which they could be restored to humanity and justice.

In “Makar Savar” (1991) a Kheria is jailed for refusing to cooperate in a villagesponsored criminal act. After losing three wives for failing to impregnate them, he comes to realize he has undergone forced sterilization while serving time in jail. When his third wife leaves him, Makar turns dejectedly to a stump of wood which he intends to chop down and sell for five rupees. He is promptly assaulted and beaten by police from the Forest Department. They deliver him to the police station in full expectation of a reward. But the new officer is a reformed type, sympathetic to tribals. He lambastes the babus as a way of asserting his superior anglicization, and throws them into prison. Although the police officer is merely doing his duty to progressive India, Makar Savar complains: Babu!

What now?

My home is an empty one, babu, there’s no one there. I’d be happy to spend the night here. It’s warm here, the night is chilly. No food at home either, babu! But the babus! They have wives, children, cooked food, nice homes, why make them suffer, babu? Do let them free, babu!

Didn’t they beat you, drag you here?

A Savar is used to abuses, babu, to beatings, hunger! But they are not.

They have homes, babu. I do not have a home.

The second officer stares at Makar with unbelieving eyes. Makar Savar walked towards Bandih. He would manage to chop that stump of wood in the transparent darkness. The stars were so bright.12 11 Many of these stories have been translated by the writer herself and are not yet published in English.

Author’s file.

12 “Makar Savar.” Trans. Mahasweta Devi. Unpublished. Author’s file.

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Makar’s realization is as cosmic as his historical bondage. His “seeing through” the transparency of the code of crime reveals the social contract linking criminal identity as essence to colonial definitions. The colonial-era hangover of this relationship defines much of the grand narrative of progress in India. The police officer is reformed, but Makar remains a criminal, even in the absence of any explicit crime, even more so because of the unambiguous legality of his actions.

His home is empty and sterile, his world is the jail— the only space in which his identity can be registered as intelligible to mainstream society, and where— because he sees through the trope— he can participate in the humanitarian gesture of rescuing the babus from the fate of their own oppression.

Since I know Mahasweta is optimistic about Kheria development, I am encouraged to read the final line of the story as a confirmation of this structural renegotiation— “the stars were so bright”— rather than the ironic mockery implied by a similar construction in “Breast Giver,” the constellation of cancerous tumors on Jashoda’s breast. The stars here seem to illuminate the brutalized village-tribe relation, and offer a transitive understanding that might undo a static opposition. Unravelling the village-tribe dyad, the specular third presence of the stars turns the trope of Makar’s identity into the transparent structure of a relationship, quite similar to that between the cognitive abyss that separates village-tribal consciousness in the story “Salt:” The tea shop of Daltonganj was not a million miles from Jhoojhar, yet they were in two different galaxies of this universe.... And the dark space between them, stretching across millions of miles, separated the angry whirling stars from each other.13 The metaphor of the stellar economy offers a galactic perspective on both time and place, a perspective in which the designation of “criminal” can be understood as historically constructed, and therefore humanely remade. These metaphorical relations to stars and universes repeat Mahasweta’s frequent comment that tribal and mainstream India move on two parallel tracks with no point of meeting between them. In my reading, the stars represent a mediating third term, a galactic perspective, in which these two tracks may be seen as historical, and as such amenable to human intervention. In contrast to the time of the galaxies, the time of tribal- mainstream interaction should be measurable and correctable. We are all Homo sapiens.

A more comfortable and familiar tale is given us in the story “Arjun” (1989), at least to those who are comfortable and familiar with what Michel de Certeau describes as the ruses of subaltern overflowing (debordement).14 The constructed nature of criminal identity is exposed here as a game of rivalry and complicity between two village factions. The dupe, as always, is the tribal, who is commanded to fell the huge Arjun tree that stands on Forest Department land. But when his employer 13 “Salt.” In Bitter Soil. Trans. Ipshita Chanda. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998.

14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

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leaves the village on business, Ketu Savar arranges an old Brahminical charade: the God appears to him in a dream in the avatar of the old Arjun tree.

The God appeared to him in a dream. They have built a raised platform made of big boulders. Puja is going on with the money you gave them. All the tribals are there, the Santals, the Bhumijs, the Mahalis, the Savaras....

The village deity!

Yes. Look at the crowd, it’s like a fair. Well, I’d always thought the Savaras to be fools. But they outwitted us at our own game. This time we’re beaten.

Bishal crept forward. Impossible. Such a crowd! Ketu was dancing round the tree beating a dholak. Bishal had a sinking feeling. He was shaking with fear. He knew the faces, knew the tree. Yet he felt like an unwelcome stranger. And fear, such fear.15 Bishal’s fear recalls that of the tribal specialist Senanayak at the end of “Draupadi.”

Where that story however, solicited the urban-rural opposition of the Naxalite struggle, “Arjun” disrupts the more intimate equation of village-tribal identity. “He knew the faces,” for he had in fact created them, subjected them as the others of his own criminal imaginings. The complicity of the zamindars, banias, mahajans and other rural elites in the functioning of the Criminal Tribes Act will be the subject of a further essay; for now it is sufficient to discern the function of the stereotype in the everyday workings of village power.

As so often in her work Mahasweta ironically reinscribes a tale from the Mahabharata, translating the dharmic blessing from the Pandava hero, inspired

by Krishna, to the champion of nature, the Arjun tree, ironically deified by the outcast tribal. The tree is in fact directly figured in epic imagery— “solemn like a sentinel, guarding the approach to the village... a lone tree standing guard over the devastated and ravaged soil of Purulia.” Mahasweta’s smashing and parodic retelling of the epic forces us to reconsider the lost agency of the thousands of dark skinned soldiers killed on the plain of Kurukshetra, and to turn (on) again their role in forging Indian identity.

Mahasweta Devi’s contribution to Bengali literature, Indian literature, and indeed to global modernism is inestimable. Two years after her death she continues to generate front page headlines. In the last few years of her life she turned her attention to demystifying the relationship between tribal and village society, and in these last small stories she succeeded in unmasking the criminal conspiracy that continues to stalk so many tribal communities. Thanks to her efforts, the Indian government has re-opened the vexed problem of the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, those communities that were de-criminalized after independence, but were never wholly freed from the taint of their prior historical criminalization. In one of her last public utterances, Mahasweta reaffirmed the fundamental human 15 “Arjun.” Trans. Mahasweta Devi. Unpublished. Author’s file.

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right to dream. In these stories she has begun to grant this right to tens of millions of Indian citizens.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Cohn, Bernard. An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Devi, Mahasweta. “Arjun.” Trans. Mahasweta Devi. Unpublished. Author’s file.

Devi, Mahasweta. “Salt.” In Bitter Soil. Trans. Ipshita Chanda. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1979.

Freitag, Sandria. “Collective Crime and Authority in North India.” In Anand Yang, ed., Crime and Criminality in British India. Tuscan: University of Arizona Press, 1985.

Risley, H.H. The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Vol. I. Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1981.

Sinha, Dikshit. The Hill Kharia of Purulia: A Study of the Impact of Poverty on a Hunting Gathering Tribe. Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India, 1984.

Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

© Zainab Ashraf

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SIKHS, STUDENTS, AND SUBVERSIVES: Race, Exclusion, and the Birth of the Ghadar Party in America1 Ethan Seeley In July of 1911, the Calcutta-based magazine, The Modern Review, opened with an article by a young Indian émigré living in Berkeley, California. The writer, Har Dayal, was twenty-six years old and a lecturer at the University of California. He had arrived in America in February of that year to study Buddhism at Harvard, but he quickly traded the Cambridge winter for the warmer— and far-more-radical —climate of the Bay Area. By the time he took up residence on the West Coast, Dayal was already a world-traveler, having left his native Delhi for Lahore, Oxford, Paris, Algiers, and Martinique. His sojourn in America would last only three short years, but in that time he would help to found an influential and militant challenge to British Rule in India, the Ghadar Party.2 Preceding the founding of the Ghadar Party by two years, the article, titled “India in America,” is dated April 28, 1911.3 The author had spent a little over two months in America before offering his assessment of its cultural landscape.

In this article, Dayal divides the Indians in America into four “accidentally alliterative” components: “the Sikhs, the Swamis, and the Students, with the Spies as an abnormal gang.”4 From these first three elements— and despite the troublesome spies—Dayal imagines the foundation of a new Indian nation, as conceived from the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean. His thinking fits with the concept of “long-distance nationalism” in which “Exile is the nursery of nationality.”5 Unconstrained by the actual political circumstances of the homeland, and able to produce literature and speeches that would have been banned in British India, it was easier to imagine a new, independent nation from abroad.

While many Indian students traveled to Japan where they formulated some of

1 This article received extensive comments and suggestions from Dr. Walter Hakala and greatly benefitted from editing by Michael Ely, Zachary Chackowicz, and Zain Mian.

2 For background on Dayal’s biography see: Emily C. Brown Har Dayal, Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist. (University of Arizona Press: Tucson, 1975) also Benjamin Zachariah “A Long, Strange Trip: The Lives in Exile of Har Dayal.” South Asian History and Culture, vol. 4, no. 4, 2013, pp. 574-592 3 Har Dayal, “India in America” in The Modern Review (Calcutta) vol. 10:1 (July, 1911) p 11 4 Dayal “India in America” p 2 5 Lord Acton qtd. in Benedict Anderson. Long Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics (The Wertheim Lecture, Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies, 1992), 2. In this same lecture Anderson uses as his exemplar of long distance nationalism a Sikh who lives in Toronto in the 1990s and provides arms for an independent Khalistan movement in the Punjab. This Canadian’s energies are directed toward an “imagined heimat in which he does not intend to live, where he pays no taxes, where he cannot be arrested, where he will not be brought before the courts—and where he does not vote.” The parallels are striking and beyond the scope of this discussion.

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the first strains of Pan-Asian thinking,6 other nationalists, like Dayal, became enamored of the idea of a “United States of India,” and consciously modeled their vision on the American republic. At the same time, conditions in America could not help but influence Dayal and his compatriots as they strategized for their revolution. Though Har Dayal, as an upper-class Hindu, is hardly representative of the majority of the members of the Ghadar party, which was almost entirely made up of working-class Punjabi Sikhs, his early writings give us a sense of some of the ideas circulating at the time. An examination of Dayal’s essay, “India in America”, and the historical context behind the formation of the Ghadar Party will explain how Indian intellectuals, such as Dayal, were able to perceive the United States as a “moral tonic” for an Indian populace weakened and emasculated by colonialism. This idealization of the US came at the cost of downplaying vehement race-based exclusions towards African Americans and newly immigrated Indians.

Dayal’s reaction, or lack thereof, towards this “American color line,” reveals the ambivalence of his racial politics. Dayal hoped the émigré experience would produce new identities for Sikhs and students in America, not as colonized brown subjects, but as liberated, masculine, non-racialized citizens. To be independent citizens in America, however, meant identifying with the white majority, while ignoring the similarities between the experiences of African Americans and those of Indians suffering under the British Raj. Insofar as Dayal suggests that the end to British rule will end discrimination based on color, he badly misreads the American and global landscape and the US government’s tolerance for his own organizing.

Indians living in North America had to interpolate themselves into a racial hierarchy that was both foreign and strangely familiar. They had to choose how to react to the supposed inferiority of being a colonized subject once in a country ostensibly free from colonial prejudice. Caste differences also became largely irrelevant in a world where all Indians were simply regarded as “Hindoos.”7 However, the US (along with Canada) remained an explicitly White nation, and apart from the late addition of African-Americans, citizenship was reserved for “free White persons of good character” a phrase that would become instrumental in later Supreme Court cases regarding Asians.8 Chinese immigrants had been excluded from the end of the 19th century— a fact that precipitated the influx of South Asians— and legally, only English speakers could be naturalized.9 In addition to legal barriers, Asian immigrants faced persistent discrimination and

6 Rebecca Karl “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” The American Historical Review 103:4 (1998) 1110-1112. Karl identifies six anonymous Indian students who were the driving force behind the founding of the Asian Solidarity Society in 1907, and whose influence would reverberate through the Chinese nationalist movement. Both these Tokyo activists and Har Dayal were linked to the original India House in London.

7 Kritika Agarwal. “Uncertain Citizenship: Race, Empire, and the Denationalization of Asian-American Twentieth-Century United States” (PhD diss., University of Buffalo, 2016) 29 8 Ian Haney López. White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York University Press: New York and London, 2006) 6 9 López. 27-28. Also barred from naturalization were polygamists and anarchists. The latter became an issue for Har Dayal who identified as an anarchist.

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occasional violence at the hands of nativist mobs.10 The Ghadar Party and its particular strain of Indian Nationalism emerged from this environment. While Punjabi workers freely mingled with other immigrants from around the world, forging solidarities with Mexicans, Finns, and others, the elite elements remained in a mostly White milieu. Indians positioned themselves on both sides of the American color line, depending on language, class status and politics. The balance between American freedoms and American racism is an important subject among this first generation of Indian Americans, and their attitudes toward the status of African-Americans form a crucial part of how they negotiated this new racial terrain and how they formulated ideas of citizenship and independence.

Dayal’s article, “India in America” begins: “Very few readers of this Magazine can have a correct idea of the noble work which is being silently accomplished by the sons of Bharatvarsha under the hospitable Stars and Stripes. America is known to the average Indian as the country of Washington and Emerson and of negro-lynchings.”11 Dayal uses these three characters to typify American life in the Indian imagination: Washington, the national father; Emerson, the spiritual guide; and the dead Negro, anonymous victim of White racial terror.12 The first two figures are standard elements of national identity— the statesman and the religious thinker—but the third jarringly disrupts these two poles of authority. From this opening, we might expect Dayal to demonstrate ambivalence toward the portrait of America as admirable for having cast off British colonialism, but marred by the subjugation of its Black citizens. He does nothing of the sort, though, instead praising America fervently and unambiguously, deeming it an “ethical sanitarium, where eternal social sunshine prevails.”13 The effect is uncanny because Har Dayal does not mention African-Americans or racial violence again in his effusive paean to America, leaving the specter of Negro lynchings to haunt the essay, unacknowledged.14 Dayal’s enthusiasm for America is overwhelming in its hyperbole. The US is a model nation, celebrated for its salutary effects on an individual’s moral character.

No one can breathe beneath the Stars and Stripes without being lifted to a higher level of thought and 10 Ogden, Johanna. “Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging: Early 1900s Punjabis of the Columbia River.” Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 113, no. 2, (2012) 171-172 11 Dayal. “India in America”, 1 12 How the knowledge of lynchings became as well known as Washington and Emerson in India is an interesting question that requires more research.

13 Dayal “India in America,” 4 14 Over 800 lynchings of African-Americans occurred between 1900-1910. “Lynchings by Year and Race,” University of Missouri Kansas City Law School, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/ lynchingyear.html. Following the terminology of the authors quoted, I sometimes use the word Negro, rather than Black or African-American.

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action. The great flag of the greatest democratic state in the world’s history burns up all cowardice, servility, pessimism and indifference, as fire consumes the dross and leaves pure gold behind.15 In his brief stay in America, Dayal claims to have discovered an almost magical environment for personal development. Obviously, the example of George Washington and the American Revolution looms large, as the American colonies had bested the same powerful army the Indian militants hoped to defeat. The analogy was made explicit in a 1913 speech given to workers in Astoria, Oregon, where Dayal called for Hindustan to overthrow British rule and construct a “United States of India.”16 More important than the American military victory, though, is its culture of democracy and the elusive American spirit. This spirit of independence and freedom was seen of as the opposite of the Indian condition. Where America was strong, optimistic, and masculine, India was currently enervated, exploited, and feminine. Building an independent India would be as much a question of revitalizing the national character as building political institutions.

This emphasis on Indian character-building makes sense if we consider the threepart strategy Dayal laid out earlier in the newspaper, Bande Mataram.17 Here he proposed that moral and intellectual development must precede the war for independence and reconstruction. Dayal argued that— in the contemporary moment— Indian revolutionaries were unprepared for battle. Analyzing the Rebellion of 1857, he concluded its failure was due to the inferiority of the morale and fighting skills of the rebels compared to the British soldiers and the armies that assisted them. If Indians hoped to prevail in the future, it was necessary to “renovate the lost manhood of the nation.”18 In Dayal’s conception, notions of masculinity intersected with ideas of self-respect and independence.

The nationalist’s vision of himself thus reflects the colonizer’s view of “Orientals,” who, as Sikata Bannerjee puts it, “were conquered because they were effeminate and seen as effeminate because they were conquered.”19 Dayal believes Indian populace lacks for masculinity and self-respect, but also that this deficit can be overcome in America. He writes that the Punjabi Sikhs who come to work in the farms, sawmills, and lumber camps of the West Coast undergo “a great internal revolution,” when exposed to this new culture.20 So much are they improved that they “cannot be recognised for the same timid, shabby, and ignorant rustics who landed at San Francisco or Seattle in search of 15 Dayal “India in America,” 4 16 Ogden, Johanna. “Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging: Early 1900s Punjabis of the Columbia River.” Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 113, no. 2, (2012) 183 17 For the sake of clarity, this newspaper, which Dayal edited and wrote for from 1909-1911 in Paris has the same name after an earlier Calcutta paper, edited by Aurobindo Ghose that had been outlawed.

18 qtd. in Brown, 80 19 Sikata Bannerjee. Make Me a Man!: Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India. (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2005) 22. It should be noted that this construction of masculinity takes place in an environment entirely devoid of Indian women. If they had not been excluded from immigration, we might have seen very different sorts of views.

20 Dayal “India in America,” 4

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a livelihood.”21 Spurred by economic need, the rural peasants become modern through participation in a transnational labor force. As proletarians instead of peasants, they could then return home with their new values, freed from their former provincialism. Dayal’s condescension toward the ignorant rustics belies what he clearly also saw as their revolutionary potential. Though it is tempting to see the Ghadar party as primarily the work of writers and propagandists like Dayal, the movement was forged more in the lumber camps and mills of the Pacific Northwest, than the universities of the Bay Area.22 Though much of Dayal’s rhetoric owes to the class-based assumptions about manliness and moral discipline shared by many nationalists of this era,23 it nonetheless actually captures certain social shifts occurring at the time. The American flag does not contain a “moral tonic”24 as Dayal suggests, but in America, the workers escaped direct colonial oppression and became aware of rights unknown in British India. In America, they could bear arms— an act that had been illegal in India since the 1857 Mutiny. They read and published papers that would be illegal at home, and some even joined labor unions.25 They saw a (White) male population that could vote for its elected leaders and they mingled with radical workers from around the world. When dozens of these immigrants were beaten and robbed in the Portland suburb of St Johns in 1910, they enlisted the local District Attorney to issue warrants against their assailants.26 These Sikhs took advantage of their access to legal recourse, in addition to practicing physical self-defense. Moreover, the men gained economic power. In the fields, forests, and cities of the West Coast they had the opportunity to earn more than two dollars a day,27 an unheard of sum for the Punjabi villagers, whose most lucrative prospect at home was serving in the British Army for seven to nine rupees a month.28 The students who came to America also gained opportunities to which they would otherwise not have had access. Dayal praises these “humble suppliants for industrial education.”29 For him, they embody a different promise of modernity, acquiring from the West the necessary technical knowledge for building a new country. Many of them acquired degrees through California’s inexpensive public university system, largely majoring in fields like medicine, chemistry, and engineering. These sons of the middle-class often earned their way through school by also working in the agricultural sector during the summers or in domestic service.30 For the most part, neither students nor migrant workers were politically conscious upon arrival, but their time in America would radicalize 21 Ibid., 4 22 Ogden, 172-73 23 Daniel J. Elam. “Echoes of Ghadr: Lala Har Dayal and the Time of Anticolonialism.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (34.1, 2014), 15 also Zachariah, 584 24 Dayal “India in America,” 4 25 Ogden, 183. The only union that would have them was the Industrial Workers of the World or I.W.W., for which Dayal became the San Francisco chapter’s secretary.

26 Ogden, 173 27 Harish K. Puri. Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation & Strategy. (Guru Nanak Dev University Press: Amritsar, 1983) 12-13 28 Puri, 19 29 Dayal, “India in America,” 10 30 Brown, 87, also Ramnath, 29

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many of them. We might see this change as resulting not just from exposure to a society where they could speak, study, and organize relatively freely, but also from being an alienated minority within that society. Part of the revolutionary potential of the Ghadar movement came from the mixture of these ambitious students, the working-class with a strong tradition of ethno-religious solidarity,31 and talented propagandists like Dayal.

Despite laws designed to exclude them, many South Asian immigrants came to own land and find a home in America.32 Dozens of Indians, including two prominent founders of the Ghadar party, Taraknath Das and Bhagat Singh Thind, were granted US citizenship. Official government opposition to Indians’ economic and political rights did not mean that they were uniformly excluded at the local or state level.

In a certain sense, then, Dayal’s enthusiasm for the US was justified. And yet his description almost entirely leaves out the widespread discrimination faced

by Asians in North America. Nowhere does he mention the near-total exclusion of Indian migrants from Canada in 1908, nor the riots against Sikh workers in Vancouver, Bellingham, Portland, or St Johns.33 The only discussion of anti-Asian sentiment comes when Dayal says that some workers were expelled from a small town for their “riotous conduct,” and even here he blames the workers’ crude behavior. “They are simple oriental peasants,” 34 he says of the men who would form the rank-and-file of the Ghadar party, and for whom Dayal would spend his time proselytizing and publishing. Reading Dayal’s essay, one would be unaware of the difficulties students had finding housing or the Asiatic Exclusion League’s editorial attacks against the workers who they labeled “the Tide of Turbans.”35 The author must have known of these incidents of anti-Asian rhetoric and violence, since the man who first encouraged him to travel from Cambridge to the West Coast was Teja Singh, an instrumental organizer in the Canadian Sikh community against exclusion and deportation.36 So why this omission in his discussion of America’s greatness?

There are a few possible reasons for this conspicuous absence. First, Dayal is writing as a propagandist practiced in the bold style of the global anarchist movement. From his tone, it is reasonable to assume that his goal is to encourage more migration to the United States. The audience for The Modern Review was 31 There are numerous reasons for the radicalization of this Punjabi Sikh community that fall outside the scope of this discussion, but I would include in them the fact that over half of them had served in the British Army, and the communal traditions and religious discipline of Sikh life centered around the gurdwara. We could add as a factor influencing both of these, the British theory of “martial races” in which the Punjabis ranked highly.

32 See Karen Leonard Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1992) 33 Sohi, Seema “Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Empire, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America” (PhD Dissertation: University of Washington, 2007), 34-67; also Ogden, 171-172; Puri, 22-39; and Rammnath, 28-29.

34 Dayal, 4.

35 Ogden, 167. As many of the immigrants were Sikhs or Muslims, the turban became a metonymy for the menace of the Indian body.

36 Brown, 85

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presumably literate in English, liberal in politics, predominantly middle-class, and, as the name suggests, engaged with ideas of modernity. These are precisely the sort of people who could be persuaded to allow their sons to study in America. To this end, Dayal celebrates the success of the students and praises their work ethic, while he downplays any difficulties they might face.37 Hence, he is also evasive about his own political commitments and allays fears about radical groups by insisting that students are too busy to become involved in any such pursuits.

Personally, Dayal was welcomed by the leftist intelligentsia, and moved easily through the halls of the American upper-classes. He recalls that immediately upon entering the select enclave of Boston’s Metaphysical Club a lady asked him if he could perform “mental healing.”38 In this case, the educated Englishspeaking Indian was an object of fascination and respect, not fear or revulsion.

The compounding effects of class determined which Indians had the worst experiences of racism in North America. Given his particular situation within the broader context of Indian migration to the U.S., Dayal’s lack of attention towards the marginalization of Indians in America was possibly due to his lack of personal experience with discrimination during his first two months in the country— a fact that by no means unburdens him of the necessity of doing so.

Although Har Dayal, a well-educated, upper-class Hindu could easily move through elite circles, his political radicalism would eventually cause problems. Immigrant groups were often racialized as a result of their leftist politics. British agents sought to have Dayal deported from America on the grounds of his anarchism, but were just as willing to use America’s “free white clause” to bar suspected radicals.39 Dayal did not wish to offend the American government, and even without citizenship he argued that freedom of speech and conscience to applied to him as much as anyone. Even after he was arrested by the US government, he maintained his stance, telling the press, “I value my sojourn chiefly because I can educate and organize my countrymen. We shall continue to assert our right to carry on oral and written propaganda from this country against the British government of India.”40 Immigration officials, under pressure from intelligence agents and rising homegrown anti-radicalism, were not sympathetic to foreign agitators preaching insurrection.

But there is an additional explanation for why Dayal omits racial exclusions from his essay, one that recalls the author’s incongruous mention of lynchings in his opening paragraph. Dayal was looking for a location from which he could freely propagandize, but he was also in search of the ideal environment for man’s personal development, a place where, as he puts it, “the wrecks of other climes are wrought into beautiful specimens of restored humanity.”41 If Americans are revealed to have color-prejudice on par with the British, this image of refuge is shattered. The reason that Indians need the “moral tonic” of the United States 37 Dayal, 3 38 Dayal, 6 39 Sohi, 129 40 “Har Dayal Says Official Cannot Now Deport Him” The Hindustanee I:IV (April, 1 1914), 2 41 Dayal, 4

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is that their pride and self respect have been eroded by their second-class status. In their awareness of themselves as colonized subjects, Dayal argues that Indians’ moral and physical strength has been sapped. But because they do not have a colonial relationship with the United States, Indians ought to be liberated in America. However, the status of African-Americans upsets the equation of post-colonialism with post-racialism, and their treatment mirrors the negative characterizations of Indians Dayal was trying to escape. If America is an “ethical sanitarium,” why have African-Americans not been able to raise their status, and why did some Whites continue to inflict violence upon them?

Dayal’s views also depend on the denial of racialization as an international phenomenon whose logic involves more than just colonial occupation. He writes at the time when America had recently begun its foray into overseas imperialism and taken on its own version of the “White Man’s Burden.”42 Dayal was unable to see America as the British Empire’s partner in constructing a racialized world order. Understanding the existence of racism as more than colonial exploitation might also force Indians to regard their own caste and color prejudice. All these reasons provide an explanation for why whenever Dayal invokes racial violence, he almost immediately erases it.

In the same issue of The Modern Review, though, another Indian resident of Berkeley was willing to address the issue. Sarangadhar Das, a student at the University of California, wrote an essay on his experience called “Why Must We Emigrate to the United States?” The author agrees with Dayal that Indians “long for manliness,” and that they can find in America’s democratic environment the opportunity for self-improvement denied at home.43 But Das is more forthright about the prejudice he encounters. Some Americans, he says, despise Indians because the latter “possess no self-respect and take everything ‘lying down.’”44 He ascribes Americans’ disdain for the foreigners to the Indians’ docility, rather than to their nationality, religion, or skin color. This servile attitude, like that of the “timid, shabby, and ignorant”45 Sikhs, could be changed and the discrimination overcome, once they no longer felt the shame of colonization.

But the figure of the Negro again appears to question this otherwise simple narrative. “Some [Americans] take us for Negroes at the first sight but when they come to know our nationality, they don’t show any hatred,” Das writes.46 Of course, he does not inquire why these Americans hate Negroes. He says no American ever kicked a “Hindu” out of a train car, saying, “‘Get out of here, you nigger,’”47 whereas we may presume that he has witnessed or at least heard of this happening to African-Americans. In short, there are at least two reactions for an Indian confronted with racial prejudice against African-Americans. One is 42 Rudyard Kipling. “The White Man’s Burden” The Kipling Society. available at http://www. kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_burden.htm. accessed Mar 6, 2018.

43 Das, Sarangadhar “Why Must We Emigrate to the United States?” in The Modern Review (Calcutta) vol.

XI:1 (July, 1911), 79 44 Das, 79 45 Dayal, 4 46 Ibid., 79 47 Ibid., 79

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to recognize your own position in theirs; the other is to do everything in your power to ensure you are not confused with them.

Through the propagation of Aryan invasion theory and contemporary “scientific” classifications of race, some Indians saw themselves as biologically and culturally White. In the famous court case revoking Bhagat Singh Thind’s citizenship (U.S. v Bhagat Singh Thind), the defendant did not argue that the “free White persons” clause in the Immigration Acts was unconstitutional, nor that it was illegal to strip citizenship from someone to whom it had already been granted by an American court. Instead, the former Ghadarite took the position that he, as a “high caste Hindu” and descendant of the Aryan conquerors of Northern India, was a Caucasian, and hence, a White man.48 He argued the caste system had ensured that his bloodline had not mingled with the darker residents of India and that he felt as strong a disdain toward intermarriage with a “aboriginal Indian Mongoloid” as Americans did toward racial miscegenation.49 Citing the understanding of “the common man,” the US Supreme Court did not agree with his assessment. He, along with Taraknath Das and other naturalized Indian Americans, was stripped of his citizenship.50 To be sure, there were Indian nationalists who acknowledged the limitations of America’s greatness and urged a politics that looked beyond its shores. The Indian writer, Saint Nihal Singh, wrote a series of articles from the southern US for The Modern Review where he discussed African-American struggles for equality, denouncing “the evil effects of the colour-line operating in the United States.”51 Lajpat Rai was another for whom American claims to democracy fell short. The fact of lynching in America, which he likened to the treatment of Untouchables, was proof that “caste and privilege rule in the United States as much as India.”52 Then there were many of the poorer Sikhs in the Ghadar party who saw that they were excluded and discriminated against wherever they went, and for some, these experiences became the impetus for trying to overthrow the entire racialcolonial world system.53 Har Dayal was arrested in 1914, marked as an undesirable alien for his anarchist activities, and he self-deported to Europe. That same year, dozens of young men, heeding the Ghadarite call for mutiny, returned from the United States to India to try to bring down British rule. The way these men imagined a future Indian nation had been remarkably altered by their time in North America. Some had experienced repeated expulsions and mob violence, while many for the first time worked and lived as equals alongside Mexicans, Finns, Eastern Europeans, and others from around the world. Meanwhile, their relationship to America’s 48 Agarwal, 20-57. The courts had already ruled in Ozawa v United States that a Japanese man was not eligible for citizenship because he was not Caucasian. Thus, Thind thought he had a logical argument for his ancestry being Caucasian. The extent to which his argument should be taken at face value or as opportunistic is open to debate 49 Lopez, 105 50 Agarwal, 59 51 qtd in Sohi, 1 52 qtd in Sohi, 6 53 See Sohi and Ramnath; also Puri.

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racial categories merits a closer examination. One advantage of migration and exile is that old hierarchies and social differences break down and migrants can see new ways of governance and civic life, but like other aspects of language and culture, race was also translated from an Indian to American context. The preWWI moment of international anarchist-inspired radicalism was also a time of expanding colonialism and the globalization of White supremacy in which America would play an increasingly large role. That is to say, the terms of racial exclusion were becoming increasing universal. Looking to America as a postcolonial Utopia with liberated and manly populace requires the elision or erasure of racial discrimination both against Asian immigrants and African-Americans within the US. The relative freedom enjoyed by some Indian émigrés, along with racial scientific theories of who could be considered White led them to ignore this contradiction in their veneration of America, a contradiction embodied in the figure of Har Dayal himself. Both anarchist and elitist, Dayal could not seem to acknowledge the power and persistence of the color line in America and beyond.

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Karl, Rebecca E. “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” The American Historical Review 103:4 (1998) 10961118 Leonard, Karen. Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1992) “Lynchings by Year and Race,” University of Missouri Kansas City Law School, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html Accessed: Jan 30, 2018 Ogden, Johanna. “Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging: Early 1900s Punjabis of the Columbia River.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 113: 2 (2012) 164-197.

Puri, Harish K. Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation & Strategy. (Guru Nanak Dev University Press, Amritsar, 1983) Ramnath, Maia. Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire. (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2011) Sohi, Seema “Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Empire, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2007) Zachariah, Benjamin. “A Long, Strange Trip: The Lives in Exile of Har Dayal.”

South Asian History and Culture 4:4 (2013) 574-592

© Zainab Ashraf

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The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics. By Ayesha Jalal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Sara Tahir In The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics, Ayesha Jalal provides a coherent historical-political narrative about Pakistan, a country that is highly stigmatized in the international arena. The book begins strong with an excellent deconstruction of Pakistan’s national ideology of the Muslim Homeland.

She elucidates with great detail and precision how the alleged demand for Pakistan at the time of the British withdrawal from the subcontinent was first and foremost a demand for an equitable power-sharing arrangement at the center between the Muslims and Hindus of the subcontinent. With the Muslim population scattered all over the subcontinent, no neat fit between a Muslim nation and a state existed, leading Jinnah and the League to advocate for a Pakistan and Hindustan with permeable boundaries. This conception of the nation-state put forth by Jinnah and the League built on the idea of a shared sovereignty in contrast to the British idea of monolithic sovereignty, which Congress had mobilized in its favor (33).

Jalal sets the record straight with respect to the Pakistani nation-state’s cooptation of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s two nation theory. She highlights that the term qaum, which is today loosely translated as “nation,” more accurately refers to a community, the inhabitants of a country regardless of religious identity (25). Jalal carefully de-hyphenates the nation-state pairing that we take for granted as the fundamental political organization of our times. Having deconstructed the national myth, Jalal is able to situate the bloodstained birth of Pakistan within a colonial history, tracing the violence of Partition as well as subsequent developments such as the long-standing Kashmir issue between Pakistan and India, to the problem of artificially created borders. Through her problematization of the demand for Pakistan, Jalal also debunks the myth of a linear progression from the rise of a nation to the achievement of statehood.

Beginning with Jalal’s seminal thesis (initially featured in her earlier work on Jinnah), the book recounts the watershed moments in Pakistan’s political history.

Substantial sections are dedicated to recounting Ayub Khan’s era of modernization, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s nationalization policies, Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization regime, Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorship, the 1965 war, and the 1971 liberation of Bangladesh, all the way up till the recent era with the emergence of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) party.

In The Struggle for Pakistan, while Jalal does not spare the reign of secular liberal leaders such as Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf from scrutinization, offering a critical view of their entanglements with colonial and imperial structures of power, her discussion of Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization regime and political parties such as Jamat-e-Islami seems to fall right in line with secular liberal parlance.

Zia’s regime and political parties of the religious right are viewed through the lens of a typical liberal discourse, utilizing descriptors such as ‘Islamist’ and ‘islamic ideologues’ when referencing them.

Just as notably, gender does not figure centrally enough in Jalal’s work: the only places where it emerges as a salient issue is in her chapter on Zia’s Islamization

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regime and in her discussion of the women of the political families of Pakistan (mainly Benazir Bhutto). For Jalal, the oppression of Zia’s Islamization regime led urban middle and upper-class women to establish the struggle for women’s rights by making it an intrinsic part of democracy (251). Thus, Jalal’s general preoccupation with a democratic political system as the standard, without the explication of what this standard entails, along with her championing of democracy as being intrinsically linked to women’s rights movements, reveals the liberal presumptions in which she partakes.

However, in attending to the effects of US imperialism on Pakistan’s trajectory as a nation-state, Jalal does not circumvent the issue nor paint a homogenous picture.

While she is careful in attending to the nuances of the US-Pakistan ties, factoring in the Saudi influence as well as military authoritarianism of the Pakistan Army itself, she does so without exonerating the U.S. (85). It is interesting that the quotations cited on the back cover, as well as the book blurb, identify religious extremism and military authoritarianism as the primary concerns of a book about Pakistan. This is not to say that they are not, but rather that there is no mention of how Jalal embeds these issues within a larger historical framework of colonialism and imperialism.

Nonetheless, one of the strengths of Jalal’s book lies in her effort to provide a narrative about the powerful involvement of the Pakistan Army in the governance of the nation-state. It is a public secret in Pakistan that the establishment is the main power broker in the country, but to have this claim substantiated by historical facts opens space for an informed debate on the Army’s hegemonic position in Pakistani politics. This focus on the Pakistani military also serves as a counter narrative to popular ideologies of the Pakistan Army as the savior of the people of Pakistan. This having been acknowledged, the historical narrative of the Pakistani military that Jalal provides is far from coherent and tends to veer off into a list of historical facts in which analysis becomes secondary.

Significantly, while Jalal is able to split the hyphenated nation-state in the historical context of Partition, she pays little attention to the theorization of the state and nation thereafter. A history of the state, the book uses a top-down approach exemplified by Jalal’s use of literary works such as Manto’s short stories, Faiz’s poetry, and autobiographies such as Musharraf’s In the Line of Fire in her analysis.

The news media she looks at, too, includes U.S. and U.K. based newspapers such as The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, and The Economist. The only Pakistani newspapers she utilizes as sources include English language ones such as The News and Dawn, the country’s premier English newspaper.

Throughout the book, Jalal constructs a kind of dichotomy between the civilmilitary state and the people of Pakistan but does not fully detail exactly what she means by the state or the Pakistani people. My own indecisiveness in excusing Jalal’s use of such essentialisms stems from the difficulties and struggles inherent in the postcolonial line of thought about, if, and/or when, where, and how to deploy essentialisms to one’s advantage. While phrases such as “the religiously minded lower middle classes” (206) and “the Pakistani mind” (243) should be used with caution, if at all, Jalal’s acknowledgment of the struggles of people living in Pakistan and her identification with them in positive terms are welcome contributions.

Considering the importance of history in enabling a retrospective reckoning with one’s past (the first step in decolonizing the mind), Jalal’s work underscores the

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need for more historical scholarship on Pakistan. While not without its flaws, her book provides a stepping stone for future studies of Pakistani history. What is important, however, is that this history be more inclusive of the multiplicity of voices that constitute Pakistan’s society. Especially since the “battle for the soul of Pakistan does not yet have a clear winner,� it is integral that all its citizens are able to lay an equal claim to the representation of its past (396).

© Mobeen Ansari

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ON LIBERATION AND VIOLENCE: Two Translations from the 1971 War1 Sarah N. Shahid Zain R. Mian The Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, which split the eastern and western wings of a single state into Pakistan and Bangladesh, is a crucial turning point in the history of modern South Asia. The full repercussions of this crucial event are understudied in the Anglo-American academe. For this reason, we have chosen to translate two texts— in Urdu and Bangla respectively— to gesture to the necessity of a comparative method in approaching this event, and to help create the platform necessary for such a discussion.

The texts translated here are both excerpts: the first, “The House in Dhaka,” is a short section of the novel Rākh (Ash), published by Pakistani author Mustansar Hussain Tarrar in 1997. The second translation relies on an excerpt from Bangladeshi author Nilima Ibrahim’s collection of oral histories entitled Āmi Birangona Bolchi (This is the War Heroine Speaking), which was published in 1994. Collectively, these texts speak to the absence of key forms of historical documentation which could reveal insights into the subjective experiences of everyday people embroiled within the larger conflict of two nation-states.

Presented together, our translations hope to enable a collaborative understanding of the ‘71 war. In this regard, what is most crucial to both translations is how gender forms a constitutive component of war-time imaginings and practices.

In each translation, the female body is the site where national identity becomes marked (as when the soldiers in “The House in Dhaka” “shed brief tears at the girls’ sight”). Consequently, the female-gendered body also becomes the site of the most brutal kind of violence, the experiential elements of which are integral to our translations.

The translation from Āmi Birangona Bolchi is significant, in particular, as it details the experience of one of the 200,000-400,000 women systematically raped by the Pakistani Army and their Bengali and Bihari collaborators, the Razakars.2 Despite being given the title Birangona (War Heroine) by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, these women found their stories inadequately represented in the Bangladeshi press from 1973 onwards. Public knowledge of wartime rape was instead sustained primarily through literary representations and oral histories like Āmi Birangona

1 This introduction and the excerpts that follow contain highly distressing material: discussions and depictions of gore, dismemberment, sexual assault, and intense misogynistic violence. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

2 Nayanika Mookherjee, “Mass Rape and the Inscription of Gendered and Racial Domination during the Bangladesh War of 1971,” in Rape in Wartime, ed. Rapahel Branche and Fabrice Virgili (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 68.

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Bolchi.3 The book offers an intimate insight into the lives of seven Birangonas from lower-middle-class Muslim and Hindu families.4 This representation proves crucial as the South Asian Anglophone literary tradition seldom deals with Birangona experiences and also because many Birangonas, born into lowermiddle class families, are unable to produce their own written narratives given their inability to acquire literacy.

Our texts speak to one another, offering two almost contradictory depictions of rape within the context of the 1971 war. The excerpt from Āmi Birangona Bolchi highlights the life of a Birangona who recollects the incidents of 1971 in a matter-of-fact manner. Though Ibrahim’s text reproduces the woman as socially wounded, rejected from family and society, yet it gives her the agency to choose an alternative post-war life as she anticipates the stigma she will face. Moreover, the Birangona’s pared-down tone challenges the aestheticization of wartime rape and its survivors that occurred throughout the 1990s, particularly in Bengali literary traditions of this time. In contrast, it is possible (and perhaps even necessary) to charge Rākh with this kind of aestheticization of violence.

Like Ibrahim’s text, Rākh is invested in the detailed exploration of the links between masculinity, femininity, and the marking of what is considered “one’s property.”

Though its excessive depictions mean that it risks becoming a pornography of violence, Rākh nonetheless sheds significant light on the hypocrisies and contradictions of the Pakistani Army and its experience of the war. What is particularly stunning in Tarrar’s novel is how Pakistani soldiers simultaneously appear as scared and homesick boys and as bigoted, murderous men. Significantly, the text also complicates questions pertaining to rape in the 1971 war, depicting as it does the brutal assault on Bihari women’s bodies by the Muktibahini.5 As distinct viewpoints invested in common concerns— nationality, religion, language, and the state of “one’s” women— these texts collectively gesture to the need to render a holistic account of the experience of the ‘71 war. This kind of holistic analysis requires empathy which, however, itself rests on a uncompromisable moral commitment. This kind of approach necessitates a comparative perspective which does not become a means for creating simple equivalences that ultimately serve historical oppressors. The oppression of one group of women, for example, should never be used to negate the experiences of others. What we must attempt to do, then, is to think through the multiple experiences of the war without equally accepting all viewpoints (particularly not the oppressor’s), without using the experiences of Bihari women to trivialize the experience of the hundreds of thousands of Bengali women, and also without losing a sense of how decades of oppression compel the oppressed toward 3 Nayanika Mookherjee, introduction to Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 6.

4 Nayanika Mookherjee, “Imaging the War Heroine: An Examination of State, Press, Literary, Visual, and Human Rights Accounts, 1971-2001,” in Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 209-212.

5 Guerilla freedom fighters who were part of the resistance movement.

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violence for liberation. In so doing, however, we must also make the distinction between violence that is legitimate, and which is not. This is partly the challenge.

In “A Prescription for Reconciliation?” Nayanika Mookherjee gestures to the method such a holistic analysis of the 1971 War should take. She notes that it is possible to highlight the “contradictions, complicities, and nuances” of the war “without negating the foundational violence of the history of rape of the Bangladesh war perpetrated by the Pakistani army and the local collaborators.”6 Mookherjee’s approach thus leaves room for a comparative inter-subjective analysis of the 1971 War without losing sight of the objective historical conditions that divide subjects into the oppressor and the oppressed. In our project, the recognition of multiple subjectivities is what allows us to recognize the variety of experiences of the war, whereas attention to objective historical conditions allows us to nonetheless insist on an uncompromisable morality.

We hope that these translations, presented here together, become the source of a productive discussion, that their contradictions do not pre-empt understanding but enable it. We invite our readers to consider both texts, each on its own terms, but also in relation to one another. Moving forward, we hope to see more of such comparative ventures undertaken.

6 Nayanika Mookherjee, “A Prescription for Reconciliation?,” Economic and Political Weekly (9 September 2006): 3903.

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The House in Dhaka7 Excerpted from the novel Rākh by Mustansar Hussain Tarrar Translated into English by Zain R. Mian Zaheer ul-din Babar’s home was the refuge for all creation. Youthful army officers had arrived into a hostile environment far from their homes in Chakwal, Gujarat, and Sawabi. Feeling unsafe, they would descend upon this house like a group of flies. And here they would, alongside tea, find an empathy that was the end of loneliness. And girls’ voices were here, and in their pleasant speech the convent school expression that could hold one’s heart in its closed palms. And Mrs. Babar was here, who would ask for each boy’s name every five minutes, and then say “You’re welcome, lad.”

Mr. Babar was seeing out the last years of his appointment with the civil service, and was only tolerating his assignment to Jessore on the grounds that it was a “tough posting.” Everyday, his architect would call him from Karachi to ask the dimensions of the bathrooms in his new house that was under construction.

Of course, after retirement he would have to settle in Karachi, for this was the cultured thing to do. Anyway, he had come into the civil services quota for East Pakistan only because the Natives weren’t that brilliant, quite dull-witted actually, and because Mr. Babar — though he was a Bihari—could actually say to them in Bengali “Tumi kemon accho?”8 And yet, still, Mr. Babar would note with immense modesty that I have not polluted my tongue in this Bengali environment.

Hesitating beside his fellow officer, Captain Gulrez, Mardaan also once arrived at Aunty Babar’s house. And then he became a regular. Outside, a lot of unrest persisted, but Aunty Babar’s home was peace and rest, and a small West Pakistan had been raised there. The faces of youthful officers turned crimson midsentence: every one of them was madly in love with either Aarfeen or Naazneen, or both. Away from home, their eyes would begin to shed brief tears at the girls’ sight. They would be discussing the “order of the day,” but their gaze would keep turning in that same direction.

“Man, you can’t imagine what Colonel Khan said today!... He said that the problem of East Pakistan is the Hindu. Eliminate the bastards and— no problem…. You know that when Colonel Khan arrived in Dhaka last week he took a round of the city in the afternoon. He said that, man, wherever I’ve gone all I’ve seen is Hindus.

In dhotis and what not— man, in one burst I killed four or five of them. Then when I went back to the mess there was this nutty major who says Colonel sahib everyone here is a Muslim and those people whom you killed they may have been Muslims too…. And so the colonel laughed. He said, ‘Look major, if someone walks in front of the colonel wearing a dhoti like the small branch of a tree, then he can only be a Hindu.’”

7 CONTENT WARNING: This excerpt contains gore, gratuitous misogynistic violence, sexual assault, and descriptions of mass genocide. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

8 “How are you?” in Bengali.

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When, on the first day Mardaan arrived at Aunty Babar’s house beside Captain Gulrez, the fresh “order of the day” was under discussion.

“Sir, this is a problem of Islam. The Quran says that mushrak9 non-believers cannot be your friends, sir. I think this “order of the day” has come up a bit late. I tell you, sir. The people in the higher administration are not lovers of the nation, sir. Sir, give us the liberty and the Bengali problem will be solved in no time, sir. They are cowards, sir. It’s only India, mind you.…”

“But lieutenant… the problem does exist…Now the order is that wherever the convoy passes, should there be any Hindu homes in villages, they must be burnt.

They need to be burned because these people… but lieutenant… all the bastards here in Bengal live in the same kind of houses… how do we know whether the house is Hindu or Muslim?”

“One must have the fervour of faith, sir. One can tell. A believer’s sword can never be raised against a Muslim.”

At this declaration, the entire group looked to the young lieutenant, eyes brimming with praise, and the young lieutenant looked to Aarfeen and Naazneen who, with an enchanting glory, were attentive to him.

And so Zaheer Ul-Din Babar’s home was a meeting place for all. Outside, a lot of unrest persisted. The fundamental point was simply this: that these people all lived in the same kinds of houses, were all thin like the branches of trees, and wore dhoti shotis.10 In any case, as per orders, they had dedicated many villages to the fires they lit.

“Sir these people call their little huts made of grass homes! I tell you, sir, I have seen harmoniums in their houses. And their girls dance, sir. When I have seen it myself, how can they be Muslims! Sir, I can swear that… this house is Hindu, sir. I can feel it, sir.”

It had not rained in many days and so it was easy to set houses ablaze. Starkly black and utterly naked, little children screamed and ran like ants out of the burning huts. And the mothers, whose chests were bare and who spoke in crazed tongues, would appear in front of the men and they would become attentive to these women’s breasts.

Captain Mardaan had been returning to his unit after completing the rounds when, on his left— where the jungle ended— there was some movement in the bushes by the edge of the river. His men became alert and from the shrubbery pulled out three feminine dhoti-wearing youth, whose yellowing faces trembled like fall leaves.

9 Denotes “those who ascribe partners to God.” 10 A dhoti is a garment consisting of a cloth tied around the waist and extending to cover most of the legs— it is often considered a Hindu garment. Shoti is meaningless— an allophone meant to accentuate the effect of reading dhoti.

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“Muktibahini, sir—” said Subedar11 Allahyaar happily.

His men straightened the barrels of their guns.

“Are you sure?” Mardaan asked.

“Yes— you can tell just by looking at their faces— shall I shoot them, sir?”

“Check them first, man.”

“Will do, sir.” Subedar Allahyaar yanked the dhotis off with a quick jerk. The three Mukhti became afraid like mice and shrunk closer together.”

“Yes, subedar sahib?” Mardaan was some distance away, and did not want to risk getting off the jeep. “Have you checked them?”

“Sir.” The subedar bent down to take a careful look between their legs. “Sir, I can’t make out anything. I can’t tell a thing about these motherfuckers.”

“Hurry up. We could get ambushed here.”

“Sir, theirs are very shrivelled. You can’t tell if they’ve been cut or if they’re still in the original state.”12 “Ask these bastards what they are.”

“These motherfuckers don’t speak Urdu, sir. Our national language, sir, and— who knows what they speak. But sir they’re reciting the kalima13 again and again.”

“Even all the Hindus here can recite the kalima, sir.” Another lieutenant spoke his mind. “They are Bahini, sir.”

“Shoot them.”

He received all the news as soon as they reached their unit. The Muktibahini had trampled their Bihari abode into the dirt.

It was ten in the morning but only silence filled Aunty Babar’s large bungalow.

The servants were absent and food for the dogs had been put out. The chains were there, but they were not. Mardaan pushed the doors. They were locked from the inside. He opened a window-screen on the side, and jumped indoors.

Aunty Babar in a rocking chair— in her favourite white sari— and from her nostrils deep, low snores. On her eyes thick glasses— red blotches on the white of her cloth. She was asleep, just how she is today.

Mardaan went into the second room, into Mr. Babar’s study. He found each of the man’s arms and each of his legs cut apart, decorated upon the bookshelf like “a work of art.” One arm next to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the 11 A rank, carrying over from the British Raj, of the Pakistani Army, and which is also retained in the Bangladeshi Army after independence. Equivalent to the British rank of Captain.

12 The Pakistani army officers are checking to see whether these men are circumcised. Circumcision is meant to indicate Muslim-ness.

13 A confession of faith. These people are likely reciting the first kalima, which declares “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”

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second near a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. One leg, in perfect condition, on Fasāna-e Āzād, and the second on the pages of the Divān-ē Ghalib. Mr. Babar’s chest lay on the study table like the whole body of goat decorated for a presidential banquet. Whoever had cut him up had done so with incredible skill. No thread or wire hung anywhere.

Through the full glass wall of the living room the breadth and desolation of the old Ganges could be seen, and there Aarfeen lay naked, with a green flag over where man is born. Aarfeen, on whose breasts “Jiyē Bangla” was painted. There was no need to paint the dot on Jiyē and on Bangla because with each inhalation the tips of her breasts were appearing dark. Lines of blood were coagulating at her neck from the corner of her mouth. Aarfeen was breathing, because the flag slowly rose and fell.

Naazneen was lying in the bathroom, inside the tub. And she too had been made intoxicated with the fervour of love for the nation. Another green flag, but the blood that turned the crescent and star crimson was her own.

Mardaan went deaf over the sink and began to vomit.

“Bastards. Bastards.”

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This is the War Heroine Speaking: Chapter Two14 Excerpted from Āmi Birangona Bolchi by Nilima Ibrahim Translated into English by Sarah N. Shahid My birthplace is in Kapasia village, near Dhaka city. During the time of Bengal’s Liberation War, Tajuddin Ahmed, one of our village’s very own brave offspring, was the temporary Bangladesh Government’s Prime Minister. Naturally the village’s regular people are all intense supporters of the Liberation War. Schools, streets, river banks— on all of our tongues, “Joy Bangla, Joy Bangabandhu!”15 But the tide of victory did not last long.

The first week of April was like lightning that struck without thunder. One random day bullets from planes rained down on the bazar in Narsingdi16 and the whole marketplace was set ablaze. My Baba had a small shop in that bazar. He worked as a tailor alongside two other colleagues. With whatever income he made, our household was running rather well and all four of us siblings remained in school.

One brother read in college, stayed with Baba in Narsingdi. Me, Ma, my two younger brothers were staying in Kapasia. Slowly, the atmosphere in Kapasia was also heating up. Injured and in-hiding, E. P. R.17 army members started taking refuge in villagers’ homes. Most likely this news was not a secret. At that time, the Razakars18 hadn’t publicly self-expressed themselves yet. Information was being traded in secret.

One day in late afternoon, a sudden scream broke through the village, “Military is coming, military!” People were dazed. Everyone started running towards their own houses. It seemed like the village’s surroundings were covered in fire. Now and then, the sound of bullets. Baba and Boro Bhai19 were in Narsingdi, busy with repair works on the half-burnt shop. In Kapasia, it was only me, Ma, and my two younger brothers— Lalu & Milu. Lalu had gone to watch a football game in the school field, hadn’t returned yet. Ma was pacing around the house.

Around that time an olive coloured jeep making a loud noise came to a halt in front of our house. Ma wrapped Milu against her chest and held my hands to take us to the bedroom. Some Bengali was speaking, “Haan saab, this is Meherjaan’s house, bahut khubsurat ladki.20 My body became numb. There was a kick on the door. A second kick broke the door open. Few people wearing lungis21 were at the forefront. They dragged us out of the bedroom. In spite of a lean body, I tried my level best to resist. I was taken to the jeep by my hair. As soon as Ma started wailing, those devils began firing indiscriminately towards Ma and Milu.

14 CONTENT WARNING: This excerpt contains misogynistic violence and sexual assault. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

15 Slogan used by freedom fighters meaning “Victory to Bengal, Victory to Bangabandhu,” where Bangabandhu refers to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

16 A town near Dhaka.

17 East Pakistan Rifles.

18 Anti-liberation Bengalis who collaborated with the West Pakistani army.

19 Salutation for Eldest brother.

20 Urdu, as spoken by the unnamed Bengali, indicating that there is a beautiful girl inside the house.

21 A type of skirt commonly worn by Bangladeshi men.

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As they tossed me around, I saw Ma’s body still trembling. While they started the car, I saw Milu’s head tilt down to one side. I understood that Ma and Milu have passed away. When I broke into a sudden scream, I was scolded at. “Shut up, slut.”

I became stupefied. How could they address me that way? I was a girl from a wellrespected family; I read in the eighth grade. Suddenly I became strangely rigid and cold. This mental stillness passed many days later.

From there on, sometimes alone and sometimes with other girls, I went around changing hands and places. Sometimes I would wonder, are Baba and Boro Bhai still alive? Lalu? Did Lalu manage to escape? Then again, who is Baba? Who is Bhai? Lalu— who is that? And who am I? My own self felt like a bodiless skeletal petni.22 Yet there was no escape from this corpse. Every month or two after, out of their own necessity, our captors would let us bathe. To wear, we’d get lungi and shirt or an undershirt— never a saree.23 If they hated Bengali sarees so much, they could have at least provided shalwar-kameez.24 A woman from Mymensingh College was also with us. She said, “Some prisoner girls had committed suicide by wrapping themselves in saree-dupatta which is why neither of those two items are provided. Moreover, we are merely pet animals. If they wish, one day perhaps they will not provide lungi-shirt either.”

Apa25 pronounced these words indifferently, her gaze upwards, towards the roof.

She spent most of her time staring up at the ceiling on her own as if searching for a hole to get a glimpse of sunlight. Few days later, Apa fell sick. She would remain lying down all day. Finally, she was adorned in a saree and taken outside to see a doctor. Apa never returned. I thought that perhaps she got free or perhaps she was in the hospital. But no, there was an old cleaner in our compound who said, “Apa became pregnant so she was killed.”

My body became stiff as wood out of fear. Where was Apa’s fault in this? Allah, what misery did you throw us in? What crime did we commit? Why are you not taking away my soul? That is where my thoughts stopped.

For some reason, I would never think about dying. I would think: this country will be liberated, and I will return home again. Baba, Ma, Boro Bhai, Lalu, Milu, we will laugh and play and talk together again. But what of that Ma and Milu whom I witnessed dying? But could it not be that once the military left our village, the villagers saved Ma and Milu and informed Baba? That could be! There was no beginning or end to such contemplations.

Day from night was distinguishable only by the state of my body. The first night would pass under those beasts’ tortures and the remaining nights passed in sorrow, hardships, distress, body’s pains— all these things. Much did I call Allah.

Perhaps He had even heard my prayers, or else how am I even alive till now?

22 A type of ghost in Bengali folklore of unmarried women who have died without having their sexual desires fulfilled.

23 A type of cloth wrapped around a woman’s body, common in South Asia, traditional dress for Bengalis.

24 A type of woman’s clothing associated with Muslim or Pakistani clothing (in a Bangladeshi context).

25 Salutation meaning “sister.” Used to address a woman older than oneself.

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Other than the occasional sickly deaths of one of the women or the bodily assaults, our days were rolling by unceremoniously. Among the captives, there were girls of varied ages and attitudes. Starting from young girls aged fourteen or fifteen to menopausal women of forty-something— all would be present in the camp. Some would cry almost all the time— sometimes in silence, sometime in a tune— but seldom aloud. If any sound went outside, we would have to get strict punishment.

Many simply chose to shut up instead of crying, as if they had gone mute. And some few would gossip and even make others laugh. In that plain life, one would sporadically experience such gentle tremors.

The food would come in tin plates. Most times it would be daal and roti along with some sort of mixed vegetables in place of meat curry. Never rice. The woman who delivered the food would say, “Who knows whose caste is what, that’s why no meat.” I would laugh to myself because unfortunately I had already read Saratchandra’s Srikanto.26 It’s easy to make a life with someone for twenty years but to let them enter your kitchen is the difficult part. Hence, there is no obstacle in taking us to bed but there are restrictions when it comes to eating meat. No, Pakistanis are actually not as heartless as I initially thought. Otherwise, is it that simple to show generosity in protecting people’s caste? Well whatever one’s caste is, better keep it in your heart for the body has already been dedicated for the masters to feast on.

First-first, no news from outside came in. But on arriving at our latest compound, we got a new sweeper who would whisper plenty of news to us. For starters, we got to know that the place was called Mymensingh. Nearby in some town named Kamalganj, an intense battle was taking place against the Muktibahini. That a war was in motion, I already understood from overhearing those devils’ conversations.

Those of us who were together in the beginning are no longer together, by the way. At random times, one or a few of us would be chosen to be taken elsewhere.

We would not even know where or why. These days the firing could be heard directly from our camp. I kept wishing that be it this side or the other’s triumph— any conclusion would do. Maybe I would not survive the war but at least I would be free from this half-dead existence.

One day at dawn, dropping all else, we were taken in the jeep to god knows where.

The place we arrived at had a few tents. And for us there was a big room with attached toilet, the door to the room fenced with raw bamboo. Luckily, this time we could see light through a gap in the fence. One could tell night from day. All around seemed tranquil, the men were regularly absent during daytime. But the cook warned us, “Don’t you think of this as an opportunity for running away. You will lose your life. They are nearby, dressed in leaves and vines, camouflaged as bushes. They dodge bullets from there.” Did this mean that the previous headquarter had gone under the Muktibahini’s possession? Allah, hope that is exactly what had happened.

26 Srikanto is a Bengali novel by Saratchandra Chattopadhay that depicts women’s struggle in the domestic and public sphere.

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These days, the mornings and afternoons were rather chilly, blankets had to be put on at night. Sometimes it would feel cold even during daylight. It was probably the month of November or December now. Indeed, it had been long. We came in May, and now it was the year’s end. How much more of this?

The sound of gun shots was almost ending. Regularly at night, we heard heavy tanks as if they were removing things from our camp. Where could they be going though? But no, all hopes were alas futile for it resumed, the sound of bombs falling from the sky! Who were dropping these bombs? This was not a two-party war anyway and only one party had been dropping these bombs so far.

No word was secret anywhere. In whispers, we learnt that the Indians were dropping those bombs. But why them? Whose hands were we falling into next?

There was an old police constable at the camp— almost the age of sixty. Even though he was a Pathan,27 the man seemed to have affection and kindness in his heart. For some reason, he behaved well with me. Even after knowing that I was a play-thing, he always expressed sorrow for me. For the past three days, I had noticed him looking grave and burdened.

I pulled up the courage to ask, “Khan Shaheb,28 has anything happened with you?”

He said, “Pyari, the war is coming to an end.”

I replied in delight, “Now will you all return to your home? You must be overjoyed, no? But where will I be left?”

Layek Khan replied with a nod, “No Begum, we are not returning home. My grave will be on your soil. We lost. In the next few days, we will either be killed or be imprisoned. If we fall in the hands of Mukti29 then there is no hope for survival.”

I may have been excited from the good news, but I hadn’t become irrational. I said, “Khan Shaheb, marry me, I will save you from the hands of Mukti.”

Layek Khan was not a fool. He said, shaking his head, “That won’t happen, Bibi.

They will not spare any of us.” The Pathan son said with grief, “Either way, you will be fine. You will get married to one of your countrymen, have a home and be happy. You are a very sweet girl. You will see that my words will turn out right.”

I held onto my tenacity. “No, you have to marry me.” I knew that if this did not happen then who knows which hands I will fall into next. My society wouldn’t have accepted me, that I knew. Nobody came forward for me the day I was captured, I am sure nobody will hold my hand and take me in today either. Baba, Boro Bhai, Lalu— they won’t come!

27 Pashtun people, ethnic group common in Pakistan and Afghanistan 28 Salutation for respectful men.

29 Short for Muktibahini (freedom fighters).

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Suddenly I noticed the flood of tears rolling down my two cheeks and, out of fatherly affection, Layek Khan pulled me closer and wiped my tears. Closer together, he said, “All right, since the war is over now, we can request the camp’s Maulvi30 Sahib and see if he agrees. Nobody else would know, just you and me and Maulvi Sahib.”

Just before evening, Maulvi Shaheb wedded us. He seemed to be from this side.

Having received a lump sum remuneration, he appeared very happy. He said to me, “It turned out favourable for you sweet child, Khan Shaheb is a good man, he won’t abandon you.”

And the next day— frenzy, chaos, and few gun shots. People were running to and fro, but the Pakistani soldiers remained standing, holding up their own weapons.

I was swinging off of my husband’s waist. But how strange, he didn’t push me away!

Some men came through giving commands on a loud speaker and at once all the soldiers dropped their weapons at their feet. Some were Muktibahini people, but few seemed like foreign men because they were giving orders in Hindi. They announced that all prisoner girls are now free. They had prior experience which is why they brought a few sarees with them. Everyone wore those clothes right away and started fleeing to wherever they could.

I wore a saree too, but I didn’t leave Layek Khan’s grip. By now I had realized that the Hindi speakers are Indian soldiers. One of them said to me, “Dear, please don’t be afraid, if you instruct us then we will take you to your home.”

My husband was looking at me with doleful eyes. I said, “I don’t have a house, this is my husband. We have been wed according to religion. Wherever you will take him, I will accompany as well.”

The Indian soldier laughed. Along with other Pakistani soldiers, I too was taken into the truck as a captive. No high army officials were present since all of them had fled as soon as they took note of the unfavourable situation. Of course, later we learned that many of them had fallen into the hands of Muktibahini and had paid their dues. The Muktibahini ruthlessly avenged the atrocities caused by those beasts. But had Indian soldiers found these officers then they were merely imprisoned, they were not beaten up since the war was officially over. Apparently, it went against the rules of war. I don’t really know— all of this is what I heard from Khan.

“Now our destination was the cantonment in Dhaka. Other trucks and jeeps tagged along with us. When we reached the Dhaka barracks, we saw that the Pakistani officers were being kept in fairly nice homes. We were kept in the barracks, but the police constable received a private room as per his rank. I was relieved. How it had all worked out, I still wonder.”

30 Muslim cleric.

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Layek Khan started praying shukrana prayers31 increasingly because he never thought he would be permitted to live. He continuously thanked my luck for his fate. And since he was alive thus far, he would return home one day or the other and meet his wife and kids. But my heart troubled on hearing this for it must mean that he will forsake me somehow. He gave me assurance that once a Muslim son has committed to holding one’s hand, he will never let go. This was not a time for debate for I was faced with the culmination of all my misfortunes. Otherwise, I had willed to say, “How many women have you men held so far and discarded right after?” Yet my tongue, lips, all were confined.

31 Special prayers to express gratitude.

© Zainab Ashraf

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ETHICS OF TRANSLATION: (Un)Translatability, Différance and Meaning in the Translation of Baidehisabilasa1 Amrita Chowdhury “There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

— Samuel Beckett This paper studies translated verses from Baidehiśabilāsa— a pre-modern South Asian poem composed by Upendra Bhanja in the seventeenth century in the Odiā language— through the Derridean paradigm of (Un)translatability. It has been divided into certain themes and questions keeping in mind the (Un)translatable paradigm and Derrida’s concept of différance. I begin with a discussion of translators’s debates regarding literal translation and essential translation.

Against this background, I introduce the Derridean paradigm and concept of différance, applying it to a reading of the text that I am currently cotranslating.

In so doing, I take a cue from the conundrum that Derrida faced in translating a concept of Hegel.

Thirty-four years after the publication of L’É criture et la différence and several translations later, Derrida felt the need to justify the translation of a key concept he had translated from Hegel. The German word in question was “aufheben/ aufhebung,” and the word proposed its place was the French relever. In a manner typical to Derrida, this essay is dedicated to discussing what constitutes a relevant translation as well as to comprehending the relevance of the term relever.

In the introductory section of his essay, Derrida justifies his selection of relever and sets the standards for translators by defining “relevant translation.” For Derrida, relevant translation entails: “quite simply, a ‘good’ translation, a translation that does what is expected of it…performs its mission, honours its debt and does its job or duty while inscribing on the receiving language the most relevant equivalent for an original, the language that is the most right, appropriate, adequate, opportune, pointed, univocal, idiomatic and so on.”2 By highlighting the most, Derrida immerses the translator in a quandary— which equivalent should the translator inscribe for the written word, is it the written meaning or is the intended meaning? Which meaning would then be the most 1 The excepts of translation in this text are from a translation project I am currently engaged in with Ujaan Ghosh. The original texts are palm-leaf retellings of Baidehiśabilāsa. However, an annotated version of the same exists in Odiā and for that, See, Upendra Bhanja, Baidehisa Bilasa, ed. Udaynath Sarangi, (Cuttack: Kalia Prakashan, 1972).

2 Jacques Derrida and Lawrence Venuti, “What Is a “Relevant” Translation?” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 177.

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right so that the translator is not driven to the extremities of dry literal translation or meaningful parody, and can such a violation of the original text be avoided or is the belief in these extremes unwarranted? The problem intensifies when the ‘guest’ language and the ‘host’ language have no lexicographical or ontological similarity. For the term relevant there is still a close equivalent in relever but for a Bengali term such as ‘abhimān’ pride, vanity or arrogance cannot be substituted.

An emotion that is used to describe the withholding of love in the guise of vain pride (which may be construed as arrogance), a common emotion in South Asian literature, cannot be expressed with the kind of economy integral to a word for a word, and yet any excess in vocabulary dilutes the intensity of its intent. The most appropriate would then depend on the sensibilities of the translator, to choose in this case between ‘vain pride’ or ‘arrogance’, and in each case the sense of the word would be lost, the translator themselves being seen most unfit by the exacting and impossible standard that translation demands. This crucial and antagonistic relationship between accuracy, laconicism, and effect informs the debates to which my paper responds.

Fidelity in Translation: the Letter and the Spirit Behind the search for the most appropriate, the most right form of translation is the idea of fidelity.3 In this conception, the translator is meant to demonstrate fidelity to their craft as well as to the distant or the near figure of the author, and yet in this demonstration of fidelity, is always to fail. At times, they maybe able to touch upon the ‘pure’ limit set by the text, but each touch is only to remain fleeting. And yet, the quest for ‘purity’ that binds the translator and with which the translator has bound their self, is the most urgent need that calls forth and yet stops short the task, which makes every translation (un)translatable. The text on the other hand, beckons and refuses, (Translate me but do not translate me4).

Thus, taken at its logical extreme, every attempt at translation can be seen as act of violence and the attempt itself a crime of translation.

What makes any act of translation a crime is perhaps the presumed sacredness of the origin, and the text. Perhaps the problem began with the translation of sacred texts, which in turn led to a ‘sacredness’ being assigned to the written Word. On sacredness and sacralization, Derrida opines “… there are two incompatible attitudes with regard to the sacred. One tries to understand the genesis of the sacred and sacralization. It begins with sacralization in order to understand the sacred. The other says: No, the sacred is not sacralization; it begins by happening; first there were 3 For simplicity, I refer here to interlingual translation, which is the most prevalent of the three forms of translation identified by Roman Jakobson in Ecarts. This form of translation distinguishes itself from paraphrase through its conciseness. See, Ear of the Other: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed by Christie V McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (New York: Shocken Books, 1985), 95.

4 Derrida opines this in reference to the ‘Proper Name Effect’ in the Roundtable on Translation documented in Ear of the Other, when he discusses the translation of Babel. However, I have used it more liberally to mean the Text, having seen that many words in a language such as Odia to have the ‘proper name effect’, offering the same resistance and beckoning the same when translating to English. Ibid., 103.

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the prophets, Babel or the Gospels, and then there is sacralization…the debate here is open-ended: the only response is the event”5 The text being assigned sacredness, or having been in its origin sacred, demands fidelity from the translator, and the translator in turn is assigned the most difficult task, to remain true to the text, but to what is the translator remain true to? Is it the text or its essence? Is it the letter or the spirit? In this regard, I would like to highlight two opposing views— one vouching for the letter and the other the spirit.

Writing on the problems of translation of Puskin’s Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov weighs in heavily on the side of fidelity to the letter, to the extent that he maintains that one can sacrifice readability or what I think can be taken to mean the meaning of the form as a whole, at the altar of the sanctity of the Word. He opines that “the term ‘free translation’ smacks of knavery and tyranny. It is when the translator sets out to render the ‘spirit’— not the textual sense— that he begins to traduce his author. The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times better than the prettiest paraphrase.”6 He then proceeds to critique the translations of Onegin in the harshest terms, adding that the translator should abide by absolute accuracy— literalism, literality, literal interpretation. For Nabokov, there is no such thing as literary translation for translation alone should account for literariness.

Moreover, if upholding accuracy results in the letter killing the spirit, Nabokov reasons that there could only have been one cause: “there must have been something wrong either with the original letter or the original spirit, and this is not really a translator’s concern.”7 How do we then think about the excess in the original that cannot be done justice through the literalness of translation?

Nabokov’s reply to this is no less dramatic than his stance. He says, “I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this page or that page so as to leave only one textual line between commentary and eternity.”8 However, one does wonder, that if this were the case— would the reader then gaze at the limit of the sky or marvel at the height of the skyscrapers? Though the (f)utility of Nabokov’s stance is debatable, one may question the dichotomy between the letter and the spirit that informs his argument, and which he covers up in a cavalier manner by telling the translator that it is really not their concern. Nabokov notes that the only reason behind the letter killing the spirit is that there was something ‘wrong’ in the original letter or the original spirit. He thus entertains the possibility of an impure origin and thereby questions the very sanctity of the word he wishes to uphold.

On this note, I wish to turn to Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “The Translators of Thousand and One Nights.” In this essay, Jorges exonerates the translator of the heinous crime they supposedly perform in translating a text non-literally.

5 Ibid., 150.

6 Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: “Onegin” in English” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed.

Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), 71.

7 Ibid.,81.

8 Ibid.,83.

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The essay begins by praising the first translation of the Qitāb Alif Lailā ua Lailā translated as The Thousand and One Nights by the French Arabist Jean Antoine Galland. Borges opines The most famous and eloquent encomiums of The Thousand and One Nights— by Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Stendhal, Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Newman— are from readers of Galland’s translation. Two hundred years and ten better translations have passed, but the man in Europe or the Americas who thinks of The Thousand and One Nights thinks, invariably, of the first translation…Word for Word, Galland’s version is the most poorly written of them all, the least faithful, and the weakest, but it was the most widely read. Those who grew intimate with it experienced happiness and astonishment. Its Orientalism, which seems frugal to us now, was bedazzling to men who took snuff and composed tragedies in five acts.” 9 Despite acknowledging the success of a generally unfaithful translation, Borges doesn’t vouch for something that Nabokov would have considered a free and haphazard translation. For Borges, translators are first and foremost readers and should exercise their sensibilities when reading and translating, particularly with reference to syntax. Borges liberates the translator of their binds to the letter by making light of literalism itself. He suggests that “[t]o translate the spirit is so enormous and phantasmal an intent that it may well be innocuous; to translate the letter, a requirement so extravagant that there is no risk of its ever being attempted.”10 Borges frees the translator of their literal bindings by stating that “it is [the translator’s] infidelity, his happy and creative infidelity, that must matter to us.”11 Nonetheless, much remains to be said about the literalness of the word, and what is meant when discussing about fidelity to the letter. Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Task of the Translator,” delves precisely into this theme of literalness and fidelity in translation. He alludes to the idea of a “pure” or a metalanguage, wherein there is no separation between the “guest” and the “host,” for “languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they express.”12 Benjamin too alludes to an idea of a sacred origin, but for him this sacrality does not mean the sacredness of the text but that of the language that flows through the original and the translated texts. Benjamin’s conception of literalness differs significantly from Nabokov’s notion of the letter. He stresses that languages evolve and words mature. Thus, in the time lapsed between the original and the translation, the signification of words may change. How, then, do we conceive the demand for literalness?

Benjamin opines: 9 Jorges Luis Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights” trans. Esther Allen, in The Translation Studies Reader, 35.

10 Ibid., 37.

11 Ibid.,45.

12 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator, An Introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens”, trans. Harry Zohn in The Translation Studies Reader, 17.

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“Of necessity, therefore, [is] the demand for literalness, whose justification is obvious, whose legitimate ground is quite obscure, must be understood in a more meaningful context. Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.”13 However, Benjamin notes that a work is translatable to the extent that it offers in itself a translatability. He notes that whether a work is translatable also depends on whether “its nature lend(s) itself to translation, and therefore, in the view of significance of the mode, call for it…” 14 Similar to the notion that the translator “marks [the author’s] stage of continued life,”15 the act of translation carries within itself the survival of the original structure, überleben16 or fortleben. Derrida notes that though these words do not share the same meaning, they are supplemented by the French word survivre or survival, which exposes the futility of Benjamin’s notion of translatability. This argument, in my opinion, espouses that words do not inherently flow or develop in linearity or in simpler terms, words do not merely transcend the course of time.

Building on the above, Derrida explains the fundamental concept on which the crux of Benjamin’s essay is based, the concept of ‘pure language’ that offers translatability, that offers the piece by piece supplementation of the vessel (what he calls the metamphora). Derrida opines that “what Benjamin calls the pure language or the ‘die reine Sprache’ [is] the being language of language: there is language and because there is something like language, one is both able and unable to translate.”17 Derrida takes this as his point of departure to develop his paradox between translatability and untranslability which provides the focus for the next section. However I wish to highlight here that by “pure language”18 Benjamin meant the pure limit or rather, as Derrida would note, the promise of the pure limit of the sacred text, which the translator is bound to reconstitute because of their impossible contract to further the hallowed growth of the “kinship of languages.19 This notion assumes a common origin and a common meeting place of languages facilitated by translation. Thus, translation is for Benjamin “transparent; it does not cover the original, does not black its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium to shine upon the original all the more fully.

This maybe achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves 13 Ibid., 21.

14 Ibid., 16.

15 Ibid.

16 The word uberleben or fortleben which means afterlife is discussed by Lawrence Venuti to demonstrate the history of reception of the work. Venuti borrows it from Benjamin, see “Introduction” of The Translation Studies Reader, 11.

17 Jacques Derrida, “Roundtable on Translation” in Ear of the Other, 124.

18 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator, An Introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens”, trans. Harry Zohn in The Translation Studies Reader, 18.

19 Ibid.

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words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.”20 By asking the translator (who is foremost a reader) to read and translate between the lines or sentences, Benjamin assumes an inherent translatability. However, Derrida reads it as a paradox of (un)translatability. The translator is called upon to translate with the promise that all texts are inherently translatable to only understand the limitations of this process. The translator is faced with the promise of translatability on one hand and the limitation in the form of untranslatability on the other. The distinction between the two rests on what Derrida calls a principle of economy,21 which based on property as well as quantity. While property signifies an appropriation i.e. the most relevant substitute for a word, quantity preserves the intent of the translation by limiting the quantity of the words employed. Thus, for Derrida the most relevant translation would be the one which preserves the economy of the word, a concept I discuss in the next section.

Translation and Différance22 In the previous sections, I have briefly discussed the themes of fidelity to the author and the letter-spirit dichotomy. I have also briefly touched upon the concept of afterlife of the author and the work. It is the survival of the two, the beyond of the language, according to Derrida, that calls for translation, as an attempt to fill the lack through a supplementary act. According to him, one does not simply translate or happen to translate by accident to prolong the afterlife of the author. If the translator approaches the original text, it is because the original text demands it as Derrida notes that “the original is not a plenitude which would come to be translated by accident. The original is the situation of the demand, that is, of a lack23or exile. The original is indebted a priori to the translation.”24 Translation by its act of supplementation would then be a process of re-inscribing this lack. The translator sets about the utilizing the lack between the guest and host language, inscribes it into the recipient language and further defers the arriving at of meaning.

20 Ibid., 21.

21 Derrida and Venuti, “What Is a “Relevant” Translation?”: 179.

22 Derrida explains that the word Differance is different from difference by the silent presence of the letter ‘a’ to differentiate it from difference which expresses the difference from itself. This silent presence (almost absent and overlooked) means the sameness which is not identical, in essence it captures the essence of translation- i.e. the same but not quite the same. See, Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

23 Italics mine. The concept of lack is central to Derrida’s essay “Ellipsis”. Since Translation can be seen as foremost rewriting, the idea of the impassioned origin holds true for the translated work as well. Derrida opines that writing is a ‘non-symmetrical division’ between the closure of the book and the opening of the text and within it the graphein flows, graphein meaning the wandering without return which itself is born from the lure to return to the impassioned origin, end, line, ring, volume or center. The wandering of the graphein thus takes an elliptical path in it’s quest to return to the same, and since it can never return to the Same, a lack is generated. The translator is foremost a reader and in opening the book, and closing the text and then opening the text, only to close it again but not quite the same, they further the chain of Ellipsis or they further ‘lack’. See, Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, (London: Routledge, 2001): 371-378.

24 Derrida, Ear of the Other, 152.

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This act of supplementation is quite evident in the way Derrida approaches the subject of literal translation. The term he uses is “word by word” instead of “word for word,”25 expressing in the word by the act of displacement and the never-arriving-at-meaning. Every language carries in itself its specific set of self contradictions that can never be quite replaced in the recipient language, merely because language develops in different temporal and spatial specificities.

Thus, the translator does not replicate or replace the original in order to convey meaning or sense but displaces the word either in the guest or the host language to convey its lack.

However, the act of supplementation is also not inherently pure. In an interview with Julia Kristeva, Derrida discusses about the possibility of a “transcendental signified” in the Saussurean thought, a concept signified in and of itself, which is simply present in thought and is not dependent on language.26 In its operation, the transcendental signified far exceeds the chain of signs. To reach such a point would entail stripping language of its metaphysical bearings till one reaches the impossible point where concept exists independently of language. Thus, one realizes that every signifier also occupies the position of the signified. Derrida discusses the origin of the theme of a transcendental signified as such: “In effect, the theme of a transcendental signified took shape within the horizon of an absolutely pure, transparent, and unequivocal translatability.

In the limits to which it is possible, or at least appears possible, translation practices the difference between signified and signifier.”27 What appears to Benjamin as reading between the lines is then to Derrida the difference between the signified and the signifier. However, the difference can never be pure for language is never pure itself— Derrida, after all, has remarked that “at the word go we are within the multiplicity of languages and the impurity of limit.”28 And if this difference is never pure, there cannot be ever a pure translation. Thus, Derrida substitutes “transformation” for translation because, in effect, translation is “a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another.”29 A question arises as to the applicability of Derridean thought: how does one situate it in the practice of translation? It begins with the acknowledgment of the lack and the paradox of (un)translatability, and it is here that Derrida departs from Benjamin.

Arka Chattopadhyay argues that “Derrida imagines a universal brotherhood of languages where there is harmony stemming from the fact that however plural

25 Derrida and Venuti “What is a “Relevant” translation?”: 180.

26 Derrida, Positions, 20.

27 Ibid.

28 Derrida and Venuti, “What Is a “Relevant” Translation?”: 176.

29 Derrida, Positions, 20.

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they maybe, they are all languages nevertheless.” 30 In this regard, he writes about Derrida’s reading of Babel, which houses in itself multiple tongues that cannot be translated into a pure language without losing their significance. He understands Babel as the conception of “a political moment” which marked the disintegration of the monolith of language into “egalitarian” multiplicity of tongues.31 It is here that he locates the beginnings of translation. However, in my opinion, this moment is not so much the breaking of the metamphora into many shards as it is the piecing together of individual shards to create a likeness of a metamphora which had never been. When Sarah Gendron cites that “‘Babel’ is for Derrida the incarnation of “multiple singularity,”32 she does not suggest that there was a structure of unity of language that housed all multiple singularities.33 Instead, she suggests that Babel is an exercise in identifying the limits of translation— to acknowledge that certain words are to remain untranslatable to uphold the multiple singularity of the work.

Scholars like Lawrence Venuti and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak have attempted to use aspects of Derridean thought on translation in their works. Lawrence Venuti has discussed the strategies through which the translators can uphold an ethic of difference. Venuti echoes Derrida’s opinion that translation is a “politicoinstitutional problem of the University”34 and remarks how at the limit of this is an exacting ideal of “exhaustive translatability.”35 The problem Venuti highlights is the subsuming of the peculiarities of a national language for the production of a universal translation. He suggests that the translator should follow the “ethics of difference”36 in order to better incorporate cultural and social differences, and to understand nuances of the national against the demands of a universal translation that caters more to the sensibilities of the target language by adhering to its standards of translatability.

Spivak also observes this subsuming of the source language by the target language. She states that the “politics of translation takes on a massive life of its own if you see language as the process of meaning construction.”37 Having first translated Derrida’s De La Grammatologie into English, Spivak experienced these politics of translation when she translated Mahashweta Devi’s works from her mother tongue, Bengali, to English. In this case, the exacting demand of total representation of a place and culture is placed on the marginalized third world woman translator whose identity is always seen in terms of an unnuanced 30 Arka Chattopadhyay, “Jacques Derrida and the Paradox of Translation”, Academia, https://www. academia.edu/589470/Jacques_Derrida_and_the_Paradox_of_Translation_You_must_go_on._I_can_t_go_ on._I_will_go_on._ (accessed December 2, 2017) 31 Ibid.

32 Sarah Gendron, Repetition, Difference and Knowledge in the work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze, (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 86.

33 When Derrida talks of an impassioned origin, he also clearly mentions the lack and its absence inscribed in the origin itself.

34 Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an ethics of difference, (New York: Routledge, 1998), 91.

35 Ibid.

36 The ethics of difference here means taking into account cultural and linguistic differences in producing a more nuanced translation of the original text, and is better illustrated by Spivak’s work 37 Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation”, The Translation Studies Reader,397.

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totalization of this space or culture.

As Spivak demonstrates, translation is more difficult for the third world scholar because by undertaking the act they have to match the exacting standards set by the university as well as represent the totality of their respective cultures. She explains this further by remarking that “[I]n the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third World gets sort of translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan.”38 Spivak opines that the Derridean ethics of carefully reading between the lines39 to understand the difference between the signifier and the signified offers a way out of this quandary. She demonstrates this possibility when she chooses to translate the title of Mahashweta Devi’s “Stanadãyini” as the “Breast-giver” instead of “The Wet-Nurse.” In choosing words whose sense perhaps does not exactly transfer to the host language, Spivak avoids the trap of neutralizing the language, preserves the irony employed by the author, and — at the same time— makes visible the politics of female labour by ensuring the act (and work) of giving remains in the title.

This practice for Spivak relies upon a Derridean ethics of translation. It is for her an act of “surrender to the text,” through which she is able to show the limits of a text’s language and which points to “the silence of the absolute fraying of the language that the text wards off.”40 Moreover, it must be remembered that such an act of translation is also “the most intimate act of reading”— for Spivak a surrender to the text is impossible unless the translator has “earned the right to become the intimate reader,” unless they have gained intimate knowledge of the mechanics of the original text and the world it invokes.41

Impasses in the Translation of Poetry Among the insurmountable limits offered to a translator keen to practice différance are the limits they find in the translation of poetry, and here again one must return to the spirit. Geraldo Holanda Cavalcanti writes: “It has been said time and again that a poem bears no words, but rather meanings. Needless to add that the meaning of the word can only be 38 Ibid, 400 39 Difference here means to understand the cultural differences. Such ‘cultural translation’ takes into account the cultural specificities of the Source Language rather than the demands of the Target Language.

For instance, translations from many third world texts have fallen several times into an Orientalist trope, when being translated into English. However, sometimes, to avoid sounding ‘overtly Oriental’ translators have heavily neutralized the original text at the cost of negating the otherness and the differences that attribute to the distinction of the work, and hence Spivak’s reference to translates.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

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perceived in the semantic set in which it is contained; but this meaning [is] not transparent. If the word is innately polysemic, so is the sentence in fiction or poetry-particularly in the latter.”42 For Cavalcanti, the sentence is not the wall43 that stops translation, but the essence of the poem that renders the translation of the poem possible. His perspective on the matter becomes further apparent when he writes that the “purpose of the poetry (of the poem) [is] providing not a ‘signification’ but a ‘meaning’ which is beyond the knowledge produced by reason.”44 There are other challenges unique to the translation of poetry, for instance, the presence of some formal elements— the meter, the rhyme. If one undertakes a word by word translation of poetry, one would be left with a hollowed shell devoid of its essence. Furthermore, even if one does undertake a literal translation of poetry without attention to aesthetic and phonetic sensibilities (a difficult standard to maintain), then one might find oneself at the limit of the language with each rhetorical device. Derrida has discussed the self-contradiction present in every language and the paradigm of presence-absence in each word, but there are certain rhetorical devices peculiar to poetry that generate word after word of homonyms and which demonstrate a multiplicity of presence rather than Derrida’s conceptualization of presence-absence.

Though this question of the multiplicity of presences will be taken up later, it is important to note here that there is something lacking in the Derridean notion of translation. While it is important to grasp the difference between the signifier and the signified and — following Spivak — to read it in the most intimate way, the translator of poetry might find it more relevant to render what Eugene Nida calls a “gloss translation,” by which “the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original.”45 In this way, the translator reads between the words as well as the sentences in a manner to convey a message (or in the case of Baidehiśabilāsa, multiple messages). Such ‘formal equivalence’46 is particularly helpful in translating more archaic works, which because of their temporal distance may appear strange in both structure and content. However, the ethics of difference remain important even in the translation of poetry for us to avoid falling into the trap of ‘translatese’. It is crucial to employ such ethics to be able to convey the formal message, laden with its cultural, regional and perhaps even temporal specificities, and it is in this milieu of formal equivalence and the ethics of difference, that I situate the translation of Baidehiśabilāsa.

42 Geraldo Holanda Cavalcanti, “Impasses in the translation of poetry”, Estudos Avançados 26, no. 76 (December,2012):127.

43 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator, An Introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens”, trans. Harry Zohn in The Translation Studies Reader, 21.

44 Geraldo Holanda Cavalcanti, “Impasses in the translation of poetry”:128.

45 Eugene Nida, “The Principles of Correspondence”, The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 129.

46 A term introduced by Eugene Nida, to mean ‘structural equivalence’

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Situating Upendra Bhanja’s Baidehisabilasa The Baidehiśabilāsa is a seventeenth century retelling of the Ramāyaṇa and was written in Odiā by the poet-king Upendra Bhanja. The Ramāyaṇa is an epic poem which is traditionally ascribed to Vālmiki, composed in Sanskrit in the sloka meter.

However, over the centuries, there have been multiple retellings of the Ramāyaṇa narrative in South and South-East Asia.47 Influential retellings include Kambar’s Tamil Ramāyaṇa, Tulsi Das’s Rāmacharitamānasa, Kṛittivas’s Bānglā Ramāyaṇa, Vimal Suri’s Jain Ramāyaṇa, which have deeply impacted the political, social and cultural life of the subcontinent. Upendra’s retelling, however, has not received much attention from scholarship, despite being one of the more aesthetically nuanced. Baidehiśabilāsa an “indexical translation” (to use A.K. Ramanujan’s phrase) in that barring local specificities, it remains largely faithful to Valmiki’s text and does not alter much of the structural relationships found in Valmiki’s version.48 The specificity of the work lies in the fact that it narrates the story of Rama and Sita within the tradition of kāvya which celebrated courtly love, values, and aesthetics Central to the norm of kāvya writing is its (to use a cliché) favouring of form over content. The most important expectation laid on the author of the kāvyawas its literary sensibility. The author was expected to carefully attend to the phonetics of poetry. Alliteration, consonance, and exquisite sonorous execution was expected.

Beyond this, the kāvya was adorned with figurative language to transform mundane details into grandiloquent and transcendental experience.49 The genre of the kāvya flourished primarily in Sanskrit, and was later taken up by vernacular languages. Sheldon Pollock notes that the birth of the “vernacular millennium” saw local languages challenging the authority of Sanskrit, from first millennium CE onwards.50 Odiā as a language also started adopting Sanskrit literary norm as a result of which, the genre of the kāvya was also taken up in Odiā. Numerous rhetorical devices— alankaras, (which translates to the ‘ornaments’ with which the poem is adorned) is central to the writing of kāvya, and in this paper, I would discuss only one type of alankara, the category of slesa (bi-textualism/ multiple narration) in the next section.

Upendra Bhanja’s Baidehiśabilāsa should also be situated in the regional courtly traditions of Odisha. Mayadhar Mansinha opines that the first ‘proper’ association of literary production with the court as a political site was made after the death 47 For details, See the chapter “Three hundred Ramayanas” in The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131-160. Also See, Sheldon Pollock “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India”, The Journal of Asian Studies 52, no.2 (May, 1993), 261-297.

48 It is important to note here, that the original work of the poet is lost, and the earliest representation or ‘translation’ in Odia is a palm leaf manuscript which is dated to the 1830s, almost a century after his death. This makes the task of fidelity particularly interesting, since the translator here does not know what to demonstrate fidelity to 49 Deven Patel, Text to Tradition: The Naisadhiyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 90.

50 Sheldon Pollock discusses this theory in his book The Language of Gods in the World of Men. See, Sheldon Pollock, The Language of Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006)

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of the “last Hindu king of Orissa” Mukunda Deva (1557-68).51 The rapid raids

by Muslim rulers, he notes, destroyed the centralised administration of Odisha leading to the formation of semi-independent principalities. The lack of political power caused these courts to eventually indulge in literary activities and to patronize poets from different parts of the region.52 While the court of Khurda was the premier court of the province that provided patronage to poets and litterateurs of the era, similar efforts were also noticed among other feudatory states of Southern Odisha. The courts of Gumsar, Paralekhemundi, Atgarh, Parbatipur, Dharakot and Banpur to name a few were responsible for spearheading a distinct literary culture that would define early modern Odiā literature. Literature was an essential mode of self expression in this cultural milieu. Poetic immortality was sincerely sought after by the kings of these courts and a number of works by seminal poets were often ascribed to the kings in whose courts they served. A fetishism surrounding poetry gradually developed in the region and literature came to be commoditized.

Upendra Bhanja was born at such a time (1670 C.E.) in the royal family of Gumsar, Southern Odisha, and grew up in a court committed to literary patronage and excellence. He is credited with the authorship of nearly seventy works. However, since ascribing authorship in pre-modern South Asian texts is difficult, the actual number might be significantly different. It is evident from his works that he was well-versed in Sanskrit, mythology rhetoric, astrology and botanical sciences which he demonstrated abundantly in his works. Baidehiśabilāsa is one of his seminal works, divided in fifty-two cantos, composed in different metres, with each line of the work beginning with the phonetic sound ‘ba.’ While translating the work, we have tried to maintain this formal and aesthetic element which Bhanja so beautifully demonstrates, by beginning every sentence with the English letter ‘b.’ The aim here is not to traduce the author by moving away from literal meaning, for the English language cannot capture the complexities of the vernacular literary traditions of South Asia, however it is to convey even at the cost of traducing the work, the brilliance demonstrated by the original author.

Slesa and its discontent: Multiplicity of Presence in Bi-Textualism of South Asia Bhanja’s Baidehiśabilāsa relies heavily on śleşa, which is a type of alankara often used in Sanskrit as well as poetic texts in Odiā. Śleşa is as a rhetorical device employed in bi-textual or multi-textual poems, which makes numerous narrations possible, and may be present throughout an entire poem or may be restricted to some of its verses. As Yigal Bronner notes, śleşa is like narrating the Iliad while simultaneously narrating the Odyssey.53 Śleşa is produced by the use of homonyms and homophones, and through the careful manipulation of 51Mayadhar Mansinha, History of Oriya Literature, (New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1962), 108.

52 Ibid.

53 Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2.

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phonetic experience. It is used in order to craft a narration that is intended for vastly different readerships and leaves the decoding of meaning to each reader’s rhetorical might. In composing such a work, the poet chooses the death of the self to preserve and demonstrate poetic prowess, and the inscription of meaning (ideally) is to take place in between the hands of the reader. The closest equivalent to śleşa is the pun, however, if we follow this logic we must remember that some of the most brilliantly crafted śleşas can have up to seven or eight different meanings.

Upendra Bhanja is known for using rhetorical devices to produce simultaneous narratives in his work. One of his texts, Kotibramhāndasundari,54 demonstrates his mastery of multi-textualism. A text such as this remains untranslatable for one cannot translate it without seriously denuding the original of its power. It is easy to see why this is the case through an example: in a section of this poem, Bhanja uses the same set of words and sentences to mean three different seasons.

The canto is written as such that it describes the monsoon but if one removes the initial letter of all the lines, then the canto celebrates the season of winter. Finally, if the first two letters of all the lines are removed, the canto becomes a description of summer. I cite only four lines, hopeful that these will be enough to convey the craft of the passage.

Aśaḍa ṣaghana kāl hoy uday.

Aśit prabalaru dharāsamay.

Stanita hi sphuti kālkantha śarut.

Achirprabhā hi tar diśe diśeta.

The first line of the passage describes the coming of the month of aśaḍa but if one were to remove the first letter [A], the poem would read in a different meter— Sarasaghana Kāl Hoy Uday Sarasaghana would then read as Sarasaghna with the letters “Gha” and “Na” then combined together. Sharash in Odiā denotes a lake or a pond and Sarasaghna would mean the drying up of the lake, which usually denotes the coming of winter.55 Further, if the first two letters (“A” and “Śa”) of the lines are dropped, it would read, Rasaghana Kāl Hoy Uday. Raṣghana then denotes the coming of summer. Similarly, in the second line, Aśit denotes something that is not white or alternatively darkness in the context of monsoon. Again if [A] is dropped the line would read as Śit Parabalaru Dhārāsamoy and śit would mean winter and the meaning of the line would keep changing. The intended meaning of the verse, on the author’s part, remains unsubstantiated.

Though śleşa forms a part of the multi-textual tradition described above, it operates somewhat differently. In śleşa, the word as a whole conveys two or more meanings (it does not need to be altered) and can be interpreted as concealing a narrative while revealing the other or as revealing and concealing two narratives at once. Depending on the taste of the reader, one narrative would appear as the intended meaning and the other as the apparent meaning.

54 Ujaan Ghosh, “Upendra Bhanja: The Afterlife of early modern Odia poetry”, Marg Asia 5, no.1 (Autumn, 2017): 20-22.

55 B.C. Majumdar, Typical selections from Odia literature, (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1921), 215.

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Derrida would regard this interaction of intended and apparent meaning as an insurmountable limit of the source language, one that can render the work most untranslatable. He elaborates on this theme by adding that: “…whenever several words occur in one or the same acoustic or graphic form, whenever a homophonic or homonymic effect occurs, translation in the strict, traditional sense of the term encounters an insurmountable limit-and the beginning of its end, the figure of its ruin…A homonym or homophone is never translatable word-to-word. It is necessary either to resign oneself, the economy, the strategy…or to add a gloss…”56 Derrida thus resigns himself to the (f)utility of Nabokov’s skyscrapers, but not without first noting that in doing so the translation no longer remains strictly and literally a translation but becomes more of an “analytical explication” which demonstrates the same fidelity that is demonstrated by the prettiest paraphrase.57 I will discuss the translator’s note further in the subsequent section, but will now revert to the discussion on śleşa to demonstrate how meaning is ascribed in a poem that employs simultaneous narration.

The first canto of Baidehiśabilāsa gives an example of a passage in which it is completely up to the reader’s discretion to choose one meaning over the other.

Upendra Bhanja has kept it deliberately open-ended to show the dual presence rather than presence-absence. A translator without any prior knowledge of South Asian mythology would inevitably end up choosing one over the other but, in doing so, they would neutralize the canto that Bhanja has so painstakingly crafted. Following the ethics of difference, however, one has to be able to read the difference between the signifier and the signified to comprehend the dual messages he implies.

Bhanja uses ślesa also to conceal the intention, and this is brilliantly demonstrated in the conversations that the adolescent and innocent Ṛṣyaśṛṅga has with the prostitutes. The canto begins with the backdrop of kingdom of Champāvati, which has been without rain for twelve years. The kind Lompād is worried about his kingdom and holds the conviction that rain would come to his kingdom only upon the arrival of the sage Ṛṣyaśṛṅga. For that purpose, a boat is sent with many delicacies, housing many beautiful prostitutes. The aim of the prostitutes is to entice the sage Ṛṣyaśṛṅga, and they do it in the craftiest manner. This story, mentioned briefly in Vālmiki’s Ramāyaṇa, is described elaborately with śleşa in Upendra’s retelling. By using bi-textualism, he describes how the naïve Ṛṣyaśṛṅga is lured by the promise of spiritual liberation (the intention and the concealed meaning here is of sensual liberation) and is caught up in the play of the prostitutes.

When Ṛṣyaśṛṅga asks the prostitutes about their castes, the prostitutes cleverly reply: Bipra tumbhe, āmbhe jāhā bolāu tā śuņa Bipralabdhā gheni aşta jātire nipuņa (B.B 4:35) 56 Derrida and Venuti, “What Is a “Relevant” Translation?”: 181.

57 Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: “Onegin” in English” in The Translation Studies Reader, 71.

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“Bipra” replied they “you are” “But Bipralabdhā, the greatest of the eight divisions, are we” In this translation, the term ‘Bipra’ has been deliberately left untranslated because displacement or substitution of the term would have defeated the effort of the poet. ‘Bipra’ signifies the highest of all castes / division (jāti) – the Brahmin, and Bipralabdhā signifies one of the eight nayikās (heroines). By using the terms ‘Bipralabdhā’ and ‘jāti’ the prostitutes have Ṛṣyaśṛṅga in a double bind. While they demonstrate a closeness to his caste, they also say (albeit in a concealed manner) that they are Bipralabdhā, a nāyikāwhose love is never returned. It refers to the prostitute’s identity for the lover of the prostitute cannot ever truly love her. By leaving this word untranslated (albeit supplemented by Nabokov’s skyscraper), the politics of ‘purity-pollution’ is conveyed, the Brahmin being the ‘purest’ and the prostitute the ‘most impure’ in this hierarchy denoted by the same term ‘Bipra.’ On the other hand, the word jāti has been translated to ‘division’ to mean both the division of a caste system and the classification of the traditional nāyikās.

However, rhetorical devices such as śleşa expose the insurmountable limits a language offers, which the translator tries to accommodate in vain in their work in the forever incomplete sections of ‘translator’s notes’ which though methodical in appearance, and perhaps in intent, jar the flow of the original text, softening its intent, for the reader is forever beckoned to look at the skyscrapers when they want to gaze at the sky.

Revisiting the Translator’s Note In the earlier sections of this essay, I have discussed Derrida’s concept of the economy of words, which, if exceeded renders a translation less of a translation and more of an analytic explication. However, it is impossible to substitute one word for another or one word by another, particularly if the Source Language and the Translation Language do not share the same origin. As Yigal Bronner has noted, śleşa is possible because of the lexical traditions, and a grammatical revolution that renders such “extreme poetry” possible.58 Thus, it might offer less resistance to translate the work into a more familiar language, perhaps Telugu or Sanskrit, just as the word relever could still substitute for the aufheben/ aufhebung. However, the metalanguage that Benjamin conceived of and its near equivalent in modern day English, whose hold spans across one corner of the world to another, calls for the translation as much as the original work beckons the translator, if not more.59 In the previous section, we have discussed the category of śleşa that lies closer to the ‘untranslatable’ pole of the Derridean paradox, and yet the work still beckons 58 Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration, 1-17.

59 Benjamin in his notion of a ‘pure language’ had conceived of a language that would assimilate as well as appropriate. Thus, he talks about how Hindi should Hindise German more than German germanising Hindi. Benjamin and many other scholars have posited the theory of a mother language or a pure original language can be manifested in the assimilating-appropriating body of English, the metamphora that is gradually being constructed due to the works of the translators. ‘Pundit’ is one such word that has been assimilated from Sanskrit to English.

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for translation. How is the translator then to cope with this excess in the economy of word and yet convey the formal equivalence? Here, one must resign oneself to Nabokov’s skyscrapers, although the aim here is the height to a two-storeyed building, for sake of preserving the flow of the poem. Derrida acknowledges this matter when dealing with the excess of the economy. He opines“While indicating that the meaning and formal effects of the text haven’t escaped the translator and can therefore be brought to the reader’s attention, the translator’s note breaks with what I call the economic law of the word, which defines the essence of translation in the strict sense, the normal, normalized, pertinent, or relevant translation. Wherever the unity of the word is threatened or put into question, it is not only the operation of translation that finds itself compromised; it is also the concept, the definition, and the very axiomatics, the idea of translation that must be reconsidered.” 60 Though, Derrida might have thought the idea of such translation to be redundant, yet it is the Translator’s Note that offers the translator relief from the debt they incurred by undertaking the mammoth task of translation. The translator uses the same device that the historian uses to express contradictions in history (foremost, a narrative) the footnote (or alternatively the end note). The tallest skyscraper in the history of antiquarian scholarship is the third volume and second part of John Hodgson’s History of Northumberland that as Anthony Grafton in his work on Footnotes, notes to run from pages 157 to 322. Even the limit of the text is not seen above the height of this skyscraper. Is it relevant to flood the translation with footnotes? Can the translator’s note ever trap the excess of the economy of word?

Can there ever be a correct method of adding notes? These are some questions when comes to the mind when pressed with the absurd banality and urgent necessity of the Translator’s note. However, not much seems to have been written on the Translator’s Note itself though many a translator’s note has been written.

Thus, I resign myself to end this section by acknowledging the (f)utility of translation, given the inevitability of loss from the original, especially when the grammatical makeup of the languages in question is very different. However, the translator should not be deterred from the act of translation. It is not the translator’s aim to account for this loss, nor should this loss cause the translator dismay. Rather, translation should also be seen as an act of delight for the translator is assigned the task of upholding the promise of the metamphora- the pieced together pure language, and by doing so marking language with their invisible presence. If the translator acknowledges their own presence as well as absence in the act of translation, the weaving in and out of their own voice in the narrative of the author, like dancing shadows casted by leaves of giant trees in the sunlight, the translator is not to think their task futile. For the ethics of difference, exposes the present/ absent nature of ‘translatability’ just as the Translator’s notes (providing an escape from the debt of translation) highlight the presence/ absence of the translator.

60 Derrida and Venuti, “What Is a “Relevant” Translation?”:181.

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Conclusion In the course of this essay, I have attempted to highlight the paradigm of (un) translatability that the original work has to offer. By taking a cue from Derrida’s ‘What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?’ I have attempted to highlight what an appropriate translation (if there is indeed one) should attempt to, and in doing so I have also undertaken a Derridean reading of the translation of Baidehiśabilāsa, a project that I am currently engaged in, and in this vein, have discussed certain challenges. However, it remains to be asked what should the translator of the premodern poem do when faced with the ‘untranslatable’ conundrum of Derrida?

The answer lies in a canonical Sanskrit work where the literary device of śleşa is employed most illustriously. The author is Sri Harsha, (who remains one of the major influences for Upendra Bhanja) and the text is Naiṣādhiyacaritā. The text narrates the romance between the king of the Niṣādha kingdom Nala and the princess of the Vidarbha kingdom Damayantī. In a section of the work discussing the groom selection ceremony of Damayantī, she is faced with a quandary. While she intends to marry Nala, her exquisite beauty causes four Gods to disguise themselves as Nala and present themselves before her. Sarasvatī, the Goddess of speech then describes these four Nalas in disguise in śleşa while expressing and concealing their true identities. Thus, it is up to Damayantī to choose the correct Nala. The translator’s task is quite like that of Damayantī, for the perfect marriage between meaning and words cannot come without capturing the rhetoric, the syntax, and the grammar that connects them.

Bibliography Bhanja, Upendra. Baidehisa Bilasa, edited by Udaynath Sarangi. Cuttack: Narayan Pustakalay, 1972.

Benjamin, Walter, “The Task of the Translator, An Introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 15-25. London: Routledge, 2000.

Bronner, Yigal. Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights.”

Translated by Esther Allen. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 34-48, London: Routledge, 2000.

Chattopadhyay, Arka. “Jacques Derrida and the Paradox of Translation.” https:// www.academia.edu/589470/Jacques_Derrida_and_the_Paradox_of_ Translation_You_must_go_on._I_can_t_go_on._I_will_go_on._ Cavalcanti, Geraldo Holanda, “Impasses in the translation of poetry.” Estudos Avançados 26, no. 76, (December, 2012) : 127-135.

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Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

——Ear of the Other: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Edited by Christie V McDonald, translated by, Peggy Kamuf. New York: Shocken Books, 1985.

—— Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001.

Derrida, Jacques and “Venuti Lawrence. “What Is a “Relevant” Translation?”

Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 174-200.

Gendron, Sarah, Repetition, Difference and Knowledge in the work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

Ghosh, Ujaan. “Upendra Bhanja: The Afterlife of early modern Odia poetry”, Margasia 5, no.1, (Autumn, 2017): 20-22 Mansinha, Mayadhar. History of Oriya Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1962.

Majumdar, B.C.. Typical selections from Odia literature. Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1921.

Nabokov, Vladimir. “Problems of Translation: “Onegin” in English.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 71-83. London: Routledge, 2000.

Nida Eugene, “The Principles of Correspondence.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 126-40. London: Routledge, 2000.

Patel, Deven. Text to Tradition: The Naisadhiyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Pollock, Sheldon. The Languages of Gods in the World of Men, Berkley: University of California Press, 2006.

—— “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India.” The Journal of Asian Studies 52, no.2 (May, 1993): 261-297.

Ramanujan, A.K. The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty. “The Politics of Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 397-416. London: Routledge, 2000.

Venuti, Lawrence, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an ethics of difference.

New York: Routledge, 1998.

© Zainab Ashraf

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Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature. By Laura R. Brueck. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Felix Fuchs A key issue in teaching South Asian literature— both as a comparative subject in the subcontinent and as part of a “postcolonial” curriculum in literature departments worldwide— is the dearth of translations. Concomitant with this lack of access to primary texts is the general absence of secondary scholarship that seriously engages the aesthetic strategies of vernacular texts while bringing them into the purview of a broader academic audience.

This situation has for a long time been aided— and, in fact, strategically produced— by an entire culture industry.1 Thus, when Salman Rushdie (in)famously dismissed literary production “in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India” as paling in comparison to the “stronger and more important body of work” of Indian Anglophone authors, he played into the hands of postcolonial publishers and distributors that seldom produce works in non-English languages.2 Significantly, Rushdie made himself the figurehead of the “postcolonial exotic”: the production of Otherness which, in becoming representative of literary production from certain “postcolonial” spaces, stands over and conceals indigenous literatures.3 Though the criticism of this industrially produced canon of postcolonial literature is well-established, there is an immense need for research that may support existing criticisms of the “postcolonial” by examining and unpacking the diverse cultures and history typical of textual production in South Asia. In this regard, Laura Brueck’s “Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature” proves a crucial intervention into present debates.

Brueck’s monograph represents an important contribution to the critical study of South Asian literatures. It not only develops an opening into mainstream debates on canonical texts of Hindi literature, but boldly engages with a segment of writing in Hindi which is understudied even in India. Her expert analysis of the aesthetics of Dalit writing in Hindi, along with her survey of contemporary debates and developments within the Dalit community, makes this an important contribution to the study of South Asian literature.

Another major strength of the text is Brueck’s conscious disavowal of the study of South Asian literature from a merely sociological or historical point of view.

Her declared goal is thus to study not just the content of Dalit writing, but its formal features, its writing strategies, its use of symbolism and plot structure, 1 See, for example: Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

2 Salman Rushdie, introduction to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian writing, 1947-1997, ed. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (New York: H. Holt & Co, 1997).

3 For his definition of the “postcolonial exotic,” see: Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), 28-33.

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and its innovative engagement with realism through melodramatic elements.

Writing Resistance can count itself among the growing number of texts which have identified this blind spot in the engagement with South Asian literatures in academic circles.4 This approach is also clearly reflected in the structure of Brueck’s book. Presenting her study in two parts, she focuses on the “mapping” of the Dalit literary sphere in the first section (chapters 1-3), and on close readings of short stories by important figures of contemporary Dalit writing in Hindi like Omprakash Valmiki, Jaiprakash Kardam, Surajpal Chauhan, Ajay Navaria, and Kusum Meghwal (chapters 4-7).

In the first three chapters, Brueck gives a concise introduction not only to what constitutes Dalit literature, but to how it has been and continues to be shaped by its contrarian position within Indian society. Here, she develops the concept of the “counterpublic” by drawing on Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas (Brueck 23-26). Citing the example of Premchand, Brueck notes how he has been subject to a widely publicized book burning by Dalit activists, who object to his portrayal of Dalit characters in some of his stories. She discusses how historically Dalit writing has been defined through a “strategic essentialization” (Brueck 62),5 and dalit chetna (dalit consciousness): the loyalty to the heritage of B.R. Ambedkar and to a realist portrayal of the violence and oppression Dalits as a whole have suffered and will suffer as long as the caste discrimination persists. She rounds off this introduction to Dalit literary production with a survey of literary criticism on Dalit texts by Dalit writers. In this regard, the question of authorship is still very much structured by who qualifies as Dalit author, and how the boundaries of Dalit writing are currently being decided and extended. Here, Brueck’s focus on female authors who challenge the persistence of patriarchal structures within Dalit literary circles stands out as a major contribution to the study of Dalit literature as a whole.

When placing Writing Resistance in the context of the political and historical trajectory of Dalit literature, especially in languages other than Hindi, however, some of the limitations of Brueck’s study become visible. The claim that Dalit writing is much more than social activist writing and literary realism is an important one to make, and works well in the way she develops feminist writing within the Dalit literary sphere as a counterpublic within the counterpublic. But what does not fit well with her broader argument that Dalit writing is multifaceted and cannot be reduced to a “singular” conception of dalit chetna, is that she pairs the critique of mainstream Dalit literary production by female authors with the urban experience of middle class Dalit authors.

It is certainly true that there is a tendency within the Dalit community to dismiss these texts by middle class authors about their experience of alienation within 4 See, for example: Kanishka Chowdhury, The New India: Citizenship, Subjectivity and Economic Liberalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Snehal Shingavi, The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India (London: Anthem Press, 2013).

5 Brueck borrows the term from Spivak’s contribution to the Subaltern Studies project; see Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 330-63.

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modern society, where caste discrimination still persists, as products of what is derogatorily referred to as “Dalit Brahmins” (that is, Dalits who have benefited from a system which still excludes the majority of Dalits) (Brueck 68-69). Brueck then extends her criticism of strategic essentialization into a critique of dalit chetna as an exclusive and “singular” paradigm (68). This is a rather unsympathetic reading of a concept that was developed as a broad strategy of resistance meant to reappropriate the concept of class consciousness in a caste society and to develop it into an inclusive mode of resistance against an exclusive society.

In fact, this claim is a rather problematic one to make given how it parallels debates about the politics of language which notably took place in the context of African literature and the use of English in the 60s and 70s as well as the continuing debates about the dominance of English in the study of literature from South Asia.6 In both cases, English is criticized for the role it served in the formation of a national bourgeoisie, a middle class of bureaucratic compradors the post-colonial state inherited from the colonial administration. In the context of Dalit literature, a Hindi-speaking elite is now seemingly vying for dominance in defining the Dalit literary sphere as a field of cultural production. Brueck’s account of how contemporary Dalit authors are reconstructing a literary history, which traces Dalit writing in Hindi back to 15th century bhakti poets (70-71), registers the development of a literary canon which is not merely meant to create a space for Dalit literature in the Indian mainstream, but is simultaneously directed inwards in how it is staking out the central position of Dalit writing in Hindi against Dalit writing in Tamil or Marathi.

Unlike Barbara Harlowe’s Resistance Writing, which Brueck cites multiple times, Writing Resistance is thus ultimately more interested in the construction of a discourse about Dalit writing in Hindi than in showing its deep connection to Dalit writing in other languages. Instead, it participates in the construction of Dalit writing in Hindi as a central part of a resistance tradition, which was quite literally written into existence through Tamil and Marathi. This, however, does not necessarily detract from the merits of the book, from its detailed close readings of Dalit texts in Hindi, or from its status as an important study among the currently growing academic interest in Dalit literature.

Just as significantly, the enormous critical strength of Writing Resistance remains its discussion of gender and its reading of Dalit feminist writing in the last chapter that challenges how, for example, rape narratives are instrumentalized by male authors on the one hand, and how writers like Kusum Meghwal have successfully “re-scripted” these through revenge fictions and counter-narratives (in which female characters overpower their attackers and bring them to justice). One issue in Brueck’s reading of re-scripted rape narratives that slightly detracts from its force, however, is that she ultimately turns from reading these 6 I am referring especially to the debate between writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. For a general discussion of this parallel and of English in the South Asian context in general, see: Aijaz Ahmad, “Languages of Class, Ideologies of Immigration,” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992/2008), 73-94.

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as realist interventions to suggesting that successful resistance to male attackers is somehow to be categorized as an “intrusion of the fantastic� (177). This suggestion undermines the strength these stories attest to, and challenges their narrative content unnecessarily without furthering our understanding of their formal aspects. Nonetheless, this does not take away from her powerful emphasis on the resistance of feminist writers against a male dominated field of cultural production that typifies the earlier chapters.

Overall, Brueck’s book stands out as an innovative study of South Asian aesthetic traditions and as an important resource in the study of Dalit writing in Hindi. Its value thus lies in its examination of how a literary Dalit counterpublic is pushing back against the persistence of oppressive structures through artistic innovation that will leave a lasting impact on Dalit writing.

© Zainab Ashraf

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CONTRIBUTORS Meher Ali recently completed her BA in History from Brown University, with a focus on modern South Asia. Her honors thesis, which received the Distinguished Senior Thesis Award, was an in-depth study of the Communist Party of Pakistan in the 1950s. Her previous projects include oral history work on leftist student politics in both Karachi and Calcutta, the latter for which she received a Fulbright Research Fellowship in India. She is currently pursuing her masters at the University of Chicago, continuing to explore her research interests in histories of nation-building, resistance, and social movements in post-independence India and Pakistan.

Mobeen Ansari is a photojournalist, painter, and sculptor based in Islamabad, Pakistan. A graduate of National College of Arts in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, his mission is to promote a positive and often unseen side of his country through his photographs. He has published two photography books: the first, Dharkan: the Heartbeat of a Nation, features portraits and stories of iconic people and unsung heroes from Pakistan. His second book, White in the Flag, is based on the lives and festivities of Pakistan’s religious minorities. Mobeen has been a speaker for several TED talks and has exhibited his works in USA, Italy, China, Pakistan, and Iraq. His silent short film, Hellhole, chronicles the life of conservancy workers from one such worker’s perspective. This film has been screened at film festivals across the world and has won and been nominated for several awards.

Zainab Ashraf is currently studying at the University of Waterloo, after migrating from the warmth of her hometown Lahore, Pakistan. Her interest in photography began with a borrowed film camera at the age of ten, and she has since relied on photographs as a secondary visual that can be altered. Working as a photographer for official and unofficial events with NGOs and PR companies throughout the years allowed her to become more acquainted with not running out of battery life. When Zainab is not photographing, she is walking, reading or arguing, and rarely— all of them, simultaneously. Particularly interested in theoretical literature and Urdu poetry, Zainab tries to maintain a grasp on both. She would bargain mortality for coffee or chai. You can find her on Flickr or Instagram at @ zainabashr, and on Facebook at @zainabashrimagery.

Sandeep Banerjee is Assistant Professor of English at McGill University. His work focuses on Anglophone, Bengali, and Hindi literature from colonial and postcolonial South Asia; Hindi and Bengali film, as well as literary and social theory. He is the author of the monograph Figurations of the Postcolony: Spatial Desire and Utopia in the Age of Empire. His articles have appeared in journals such as Victorian Literature and Culture, Modern Asian Studies, and Mediations; and in the edited volume Cities in South Asia. He is a General Editor of the Routledge Series in the Cultures of the Global Cold War, and a member of the editorial collective of the journal positions: asia critique published by Duke University Press. A recipient of grants from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC)

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and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in Germany, he is currently researching the literary imagination of the colonial Himalaya for his second book project.

Aditya Bhattacharjee was in Bombay, India, and raised in Bangkok, Thailand. He is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include investigating the interrelatedness of Hinduism and Buddhism in both pre-modern and contemporary Thai religion.

He previously pursued BA and MA degrees in Religious Studies at McGill University, Montreal. Aditya is a fluent speaker of Hindi, French, and Bengali, and has studied Sanskrit for a number of years at McGill and at the American Institute of Indian Studies’ (AIIS) Pune Center.

Amrita Chowdhury is an MA student working at the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University. Her thesis examines the commodity history of sea salt in South Asia that spans a little over the early half of the nineteenth century. Amrita studies aspects of the consumption, conceptualization, and production of Nature by the colonial state. She has also been involved in a translation project over the last year, working on a seventeenth century Odia retelling of the Ramayana by the king-poet of Gumsar, Upendra Bhanja.

Emily A. Durham is a PhD candidate in the Asian Languages, Cultures and Media program at the University of Minnesota. She is currently completing her dissertation, titled Magic, Madness and Mud: Realism in the Short Works Premchand, Manto and Chughtai. The dissertation focuses on the aesthetics of Progressive Realism in short stories written in the years surrounding Independence and the partition of India. Some of Emily’s ongoing research interests include the influence of Progressive writing in contemporary film, and the interventions of Dalit writers in contemporary Hindi literature.

Felix Fuchs is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at McGill University.

He works on postcolonial theory and world literature with a focus on the Anglophone novel in South Asia and Africa. His research draws on historical materialist theorizations of globalization as a process of uneven development and investigates struggles over cultural hegemony as well as the political framing of resistance narratives. His dissertation, Rethinking Realism: Towards a Theory of Global Emergence, is a comparative study of Anglophone texts from South Asia and Africa that attempts a broader theorization of realism as a representational mode that emerges globally with the advent of multinational capitalism.

Usman Hamid is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Prior to coming to University of Toronto, he graduated from the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in 2012 where he wrote his thesis on early Mughal history. His dissertation at the University of Toronto focuses on the veneration of the Prophet Muhammad in Mughal north India during an age of increasing Indian Ocean circulation.

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Prashant Keshavmurthy is Associate Professor of Persian Studies in the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. His interests include classical Persian and Urdu literatures and the formation of meta-literary discourses in these languages.

His first book, Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (Routledge, 2016), Wwas a study of poetics and politics in the oeuvre of the poet-mystic Mirza Bedil of Delhi (d.1720) and his circle.

Rukhshan Arif Mian is currently a student at the Lahore University of Management Sciences pursuing a degree in Economics. His interest in photography developed while volunteering at a social enterprise, TurrLahore that used to conduct guided tours of the Walled City of Lahore. His favorite locations to photograph, in Lahore, are Kamran’s Baraderi (believed to be the oldest existing Mughal structure in Lahore) and the Wazir Khan mosque. He loves travelling up north, especially to Karimabad and Minapin in Gilgit, and Neelum Valley in Kashmir and plans on going on a road-trip through Gilgit once he graduates. His interests also lie in data analysis and innovation in education.

Zain R. Mian is a graduate student in the Department of English at McGill University, working on comparative literature in Urdu and English. Zain’s Master’s Research Project examines the limits of world literature as a mode of organizing and reading texts. He is interested in understanding how sociolinguistic stratification in South Asia produces parallel literary formations that undermine the concept of a national canonicity. Zain is the Founding Editor of Harf— A Journal of South Asian Studies. He will be pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania as of Fall 2018.

Henry Schwarz is Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he was Director of the Program on Justice and Peace from 1999- 2007. His books include Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India (1997), and Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief (2010), and co-edited volumes Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies (1996) and A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2000). He has produced four documentary films on underclass culture in India, including “Mahasweta Devi: Witness, Advocate, Writer” (2001) and “Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!” (2011) with Shashwati Talukdar and P. Kerim Freidman. He is co-General Editor of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (2016). His areas of specialization include literary theory, cultural studies, South Asia regional studies and comparative literature. Current research and writing bring him increasingly closer to human rights, indigenous people, and creative practices of social change.

Ethan Seeley is a graduating senior at the University of Buffalo’s English Department. He is interested in the history of South and Central Asia, as well as its intersection with American culture. He has also worked making videos and pruning trees and plans to study Urdu in Lucknow this summer.

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Sarah N. Shahid graduated with a B. A. in Economics and Art-History from McGill University in 2017. Born and brought up in Dhaka, she is interested in the politics of language and gender in Bengali film and literature. Sarah is currently working as a contributor to The Daily Star, Bangladesh’s English-language newspaper, where she writes about Bangladeshi visual culture.

Tania Siddiqi graduated with highest honors in Anthropology from the University of Texas at San Antonio in May of 2017. While conducting research for her undergraduate honors thesis, Tania explored the importance of women’s voices during the Partition of India, focusing on gender, migration, and diaspora. She is the creator and former host of The Common Link, a podcast series that promotes community involvement, and has written for Burnt Roti magazine. Currently, Tania is applying to law school and aiming to merge her interests in communication and activism to address social justice issues.

Suvij Sudershan is a final-year B.A. student of English Literature at McGill University. Suvij was born in India and grew up in New Delhi. In the last few years, he has been working with postcolonial literature and theory: his honours thesis was on the representation of anti-colonial subjectivities in the works of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce. Suvij is also interested in South Asian literature, particularly understood through Modernism. He plans to begin his Master’s at McGill University in Fall 2018, during the course of which he will study South Asian writers between the years of 1925-1965 to understand the influence of colonialism and nationalism on those texts. Suvij currently serves as the Editorin-Chief for Sankofa: The McGill Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Sara Tahir completed her undergraduate degree from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan, in Anthropology/Sociology. While in Lahore, Pakistan, she interned for the Citizen’s Archive of Pakistan (CAP) in the Oral History Department and has also worked with a public health and education NGO by the name of Nur Center for Research and Policy (NCRP). She is currently a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University and is interested in looking at migration and the transnational politics of the Pakistani-American diaspora in the context of immigration to the US. In particular, Sara wishes to examine how these intersections inform Pakistani national imaginaries and their implications for postcoloniality.

Fatima Tassadiq is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Fatima is an urban ethnographer who works on Pakistan. Her work largely centers on political ecology of infrastructures, urban development, and formations of citizenship.

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