Harf- Volume Four

HARF A Journal of South Asian Studies

Volume 4 (2019)

HARF A Journal of South Asian Studies

Volume 4 Spring 2019 McGill University Montreal, QC

Š Reda Berrada

Editor Sabeena Shaikh Editorial Board Alainah Aamir Ashutosh Kumar Daneese Rao Muskan Sandhu Twisha Singh Jessica Stilwell Suvij Sudershan Anna Lee White Photography Jassim Ahmed Reda Berrada Muhammad Cheema Design Felix Fuchs

Funding for this journal has been generously supplied by the Dean of Arts Development Fund, the AUS - Fine Arts Council, the McGill Alumni Association, and the PGSS.

© Muhammad Cheema

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Passing the Baton Sabeena Shaikh –– 9

Scholarship The Imam Resides in the Bermuda Triangle: Examining a Shi’ite Narrative Naveen Zehra Zaidi –– 11 Say Hello to Ambedkar: Understanding ‘Dalit Consciousness’ through Ajay Navaria’s Hindi Short Fiction Prateek Paul –– 25 Information and Impersonation in Colonial India: The Strange Case of Panchkouree Khan Niyati Shenoy –– 43 Hegemony and History in Postcolonial Pakistan Arthur Martin –– 59 Something to Remember Me By: Buddhist-themed Souvenir Objects in Gangtok, Sikkim Liam Greenwell –– 77 Misfit of Modernity: The Anxiety of Belonging in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column Zehra Kazmi –– 101 Recovering an Archive of Women’s Voices: Durga Prasad Nadir’s “Tażkirāt ul-Nissāy-e Nādrī” Sundas Amer –– 119

Features & Book Reviews The National Movement

by Irfan Habib Subho Basu –– 141

“A Day in the Office”

by Fehmida Riaz A short story translated by Noor Habib –– 145 Śaṭakōpaṉ Tiruvāymoḻi (True Sacred Words) Selections translated by Archana Venkatesan –– 155 Mirza Athar Baig Ghulām Bāgh Café Ghulam Bagh: Selections translated by Aqsa Ijaz –– 173 Contributors –– 189

9

© Jassim Ahmed

© Muhammad Cheema

10

Sabeena Shaikh Introduction: Passing the Baton This year was full of trials and triumphs for the largely new editorial board of Harf. Transitions are always difficult, but Harf has been fortunate to receive the support and encouragement of a large community behind each of our endeavors. It is with this enthusiasm that we reflect on all of the accomplishments of this year and introduce the fourth volume of Harf – a Journal for South Asian Studies.

This year Harf hosted two powerful events that engaged not only McGill students and faculty members, but Montreal community members as well.

The first was a screening and panel discussion of “Salam,” an award-winning documentary about the Nobel-prize-winning physicist, Abdus Salam. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Pasha Khan and consisted of prestigious and diverse faculty members including Ehab Abouheif, F. Jamil Ragep, and Martin Grant. A packed auditorium and copious amounts of chai facilitated a discussion on belonging, nationalism, and revelation in scientific work among many other topics. The second event was a South Asian Literature Research and Publishing Panel which featured three McGill professors (Pasha Khan, Sandeep Banerjee, and Hamsa Stainton) who have forthcoming books related to South Asian literatures. Each professor spoke about the process of researching and publishing a book, including the evolution of PhD dissertation to monograph, and how to find a publisher. The informal environment allowed students to engage the panelists on topics about methodology in writing, as well as strategy in professional advancement.

The events of the past year focused on bridging inter-disciplinary gaps and engaging community members alongside those within academia in discussions about South Asia. This effort mirrors the current issue in terms of versatility and synthesis. We have translations from Urdu and Tamil, poetry and prose, as well as a book review from Subho Basu in the features section. Our scholarship section spans research from the corners of the subcontinent and various disciplinary backgrounds which engage temporally diverse topics that are sure to delight our readers. Harf is grateful for the patience and collaboration of each of the contributors in the current issue.

We continue our endeavor to provide a platform for scholarship on South Asia, especially for students.

11

Š Reda Berrada

12

Naveen Zehra Zaidi The Imam Resides in the Bermuda Triangle: Examining a Shi’ite Narrative The idea of the Mahdi1 is a prominent concept in Islam, popular in both Shi’ite and Sunni belief. The Mahdi is reported to be a redeemer of Islam, a human figure who will appear before the yawm al-qīyamāh (‘the Day of Judgement’) to rid evil and establish justice. Sunni Islam asserts that the Mahdi has not been born yet, and that his exact identity is not known by any except Allah himself. However, according to Twelver Shi’ite belief,2 the Mahdi is the twelfth Imam of Shi’ite Islam, Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Mahdī,3 who went into hiding or Occultation, in 941 Common Era.4 The Occultation, generally referred to as the ghaybāh of the Imam, is a central concept for Shi’ite Twelver Muslims, and has urged curiosities and questions amongst scholars, religious figures, and followers alike. If the Imam is present in this world, but hidden, the question of his īqāmatgāh (‘place of hiding’) is central. There is an entire canon of Shi’ite texts that deal with the imam’s ghaybāh: speculations about where he is, when he will re-appear, as well as first-hand accounts of those who have reportedly maA version of this paper was presented at the Graduate English Conference at McGill University in February 2018, and at the Graduate English Conference at the University of Virginia in April 2018.

Mahdi literally means “guided one.” Abdulaziz Sachedina argues that the word Mahdi has gained eschatological significance over time. For a complete discussion, see Abdulaziz Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: the Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shi‘ism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 65.

2 Here, I am referring to the athnā‘ashariyyah or ithnā‘ashariyyah Shi’ism. This is the largest branch of Shi’ite Islam.

3 Muhammad ibn Hasan was born on 15 Sha’aban 255 AH of the Islamic Calendar, or 19 July 868 CE, in Samarra, Iraq. He is also commonly referred to the Imam Zaman or the Imam-e-Zamana (‘Imam of the Time’) as well as Sahib al-Zaman (‘Master of the Age’), a reference to his current status as the present Imam and the protector of the Shi’ite community. For a detailed discussion on the most frequently used titles of the twelfth Imam in Shi’ite tradition and their connotations, see Sachedina (1981, 60-70).

4 It is believed that the Imam, along with some family members and companions, was concealed by Allah in order to avoid harsh political persecution. Shi’ites generally refer to the Minor Occultation or ghaybāt al-sughra (874-941 CE) when the Imam communicated with his followers through a series of deputies or saf ’ir, and the Major Occultation or ghaybāt al-kubra (941 CE - ongoing) when the Imam stopped communicating through saf ’ir.

1

13

naged to communicate with him. One narrative that has emerged, and circulates, amongst some Shi’ite communities in South Asia has been about the Imam residing in the Bermuda Triangle. This paper examines this very narrative in contemporary Urdu and English language sources.

My aim is twofold. Firstly, my emphasis is on the circulation of the narrative: who are the ‘actors’ involved in its circulation? What ‘texts’ are providing this narrative legitimacy and authority? What ‘forms’ does it circulate within; and what are the debates that are taking place around it? I argue that there is a whole archive being created around this narrative that combines elements from theological and religious Shi’ite texts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu on the one hand; and English texts on the Bermuda Triangle Mystery on the other hand. Both these distinct genres of writings are conferring the narrative legitimacy. Secondly, my argument is that despite being presented through different ‘forms,’ these narratives of the hidden Imam residing in the Bermuda Triangle share what Luise White calls ‘formulaic’ elements and can be seen to comprise a specific ‘genre.’5 I argue that this genre of the Imam in the Bermuda Triangle shares specific imagery, language, and symbolism to establish a particular relationship between Western science and faith. Conventional scholarship has seen religion and science or rationality as polar opposites, as distinct ideologies that are constantly being invoked to challenge one another. However, an examination of the Imam in the Bermuda Triangle narrative disrupts these conventional binaries: in my sources, science is being used to substantiate theological texts and further legitimize certain claims about the Shi’ite Imam. This is particularly important to conceive how notions of ghaybāh, so central to the Shi’ite community and its identity, are being mediated through notions of Western science. Science or a uniform ‘West’ is not the ‘enemy’ – rather, it is the lack of faith in God and the absence of belief in the Mahdi that contributes to the failure of Western science when it comes to understanding the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.

I am borrowing my conceptual framework from historian Luise White, who, in her book Speaking with Vampires, studied stories about vampires in colonial East and Central Africa.6 White claims that these stories can be Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 9.

6 White, 9.

5

14

seen to comprise a genre7 – though they are told and re-told in different languages and geographical regions, they retain a specific pattern of plot details, as well as shared imagery and symbols. She is mindful not to ‘explain away’ or reduce these vampire stories to anxieties about colonialism, Western technologies, or science. White’s method is particularly useful because she is not concerned with the origin of the stories, but rather how the stories hold meaning and power for a particular community during a particular time. Similarly, I do not wish to dismiss the claims of my sources as being merely fictitious or rumours: even though at times I may be focusing on the literary features of the texts, I do not wish to suggest that they are fictive. Here, I am drawing upon more recent scholarly approaches to ‘aja’ib texts, such as that by Travis Zadeh, who pushes for a reading of such texts that does not associate literariness with fiction. 8 Zadeh further asserts that we should not set up binaries of truth and fiction while assessing such texts that may seem to comprise of fantastical elements.9 My sources for this paper are unconventional: partly, my project is an attempt to make a case for sources that may generally be set aside by academics. Bringing together Shi’ite religious texts, as well as texts on the Bermuda Triangle into this one narrative is an archive through which this narrative circulates: through Facebook pages, religious lectures uploaded on YouTube, internet chat forums, pamphlets printed by small Shi’ite presses, photoshopped images, as well as e-books circulated on the internet. These source materials – publicly accessible – allow us to understand directly the sensibility of a community that is using the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle to reflect on the central idea of their Imam’s ghaybāh, or hiding.

Omid Ghaemmaghami has recently worked with Arabic, and to some extent Persian, sources to examine the narrative of the Green Island as the abode of Imam Mahdi but focuses on the proliferation of this narrative during the Safavid and Qajar period.10 A study of this narrative in Urdu White, in turn, draws inspiration from the idea of genre as presented in Charles L. Briggs and Richard Bauman, “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power,’’ Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, 2 (December 1992): 131-72.

8 Travis Zadeh, “The Wiles of Creation: Philosophy, Fiction, and the ‘Ajā’ib Tradition,” Middle Eastern Literatures 13, no.1 (April 2010): 21-48, 2010.

9 Zadeh, 24.

10 Omid Ghaemmaghami, “To the Abode of the Hidden One: the Green Isle in Shi’i, Early Shaykhī, and Bābī-Bahā’ī Sacred Topography” in Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious Authority in Islam, 137-173, Edited by Orkhan Mir-Kasimov, (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

7

15

and other South Asian language sources, as well as its circulation in South Asia, is missing. Additionally, focusing on the narrative’s circulation in the contemporary period showcases concerns about notions of science and rationality, and displays how the narrative presents itself through a vocabulary of rationality.

The narrative borrows elements from two distinct types of texts. The first is a series of religious and theological texts on the Imam’s Occultation.

Undoubtedly, the most authoritative of these texts within the Shi’ite textual canon has been the Bīhar al-Anwār (“Sea of Lights”),11 which is an Arabic language, encyclopedic collection of traditions and sayings that spans 110 volumes. It was compiled by the prominent Shi’ite scholar Al-Majlisi12 and is said to have been completed between 1106 AH and 1110 AH (1694 AD and 1698 AD). Volumes 51, 52 and 53 correspond to topics related to the Mahdi, including a chapter on those individuals who have met the Imam during his Occultation.13 It is in this text that one encounters the report of an account by Ali bin Fazil,14 who claims to have traveled afar on an ocean of distinct milky-white colour and met the hidden imam on an island that emanated with green light. He further reported that the “Green Island,” the residence of the Imam, was protected by water “all around like a strong wall of a fort;” and that whenever opponents came near the island, their “durable” ships sank.15 Al-Majlisi clearly mentions that he is skeptical about Ali bin Fazil’s account as he is unable to find a mention of it in any credible sources and, hence, places it in a separate chapter.16 Despite its own skepticism, it is the single most authoritative account of what became known as the “Green Island” and the “White Sea” – something that has been picked up by subsequent Allamah Baqar Al-Majlisi, Bīhar al-Anwār: Kitabul Ghaibah (“The Promised Mahdi: The Book of Occultation”), translated by Syed Athar Rizvi, 1698 (Mumbai: Jafari Propagation Centre, 2013).

12 Muhammad Baqar Al-Majlisi (1627 – 1699), born in Isfahan, was a prominent Shi’a cleric in Safavid Iran. He remains among one of the most influential and prolific Shi’a scholars and clerics of all time.

13 Volume 51, 52 and 53, in the English translation, are named “The Promised Mahdi”.

There are a number of hadith related to the virtue of waiting for the reappearance of the Mahdi. Chapter 29 is titled “Those Who Have Met the Imam (A.S) during the Major Occultation and Near to the Time of the Author.”

14 Ali bin Fazil is referred to as Shaykh Salih Zainuddin Ali bin Fazil Manzandarani.

15 Al-Majlisi, Bīhar al-Anwār, 64.

16 Al-Majlisi, 56.

11

16

Shi’ite maulanas, historians and scholars; and circulated through oral transmissions and texts, as the dwelling place of the Imam. Through the course of my paper, I will show how this text has been cited and used in subsequent years as the authoritative text on the Imam’s hiding place. Al-Majlisi’s own unwillingness to confirm its veracity is seemingly forgotten or not carried over in subsequent texts which take Ali Bin Fazil’s account, and Al-Majlisi’s inclusion of it, to be proof enough of its authenticity.

On the other hand, worldwide intrigue with the Bermuda Triangle proliferated in the 1970s onwards, largely due to the influence of one particular text that was seen as central to the construction of the Bermuda Triangle mystery. This text was Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, published in 1974.17 The book reportedly sold more than 14 million copies worldwide and was translated into 22 languages. Even though Berlitz was heavily criticized for promoting pseudo-science and fabricating information, he became central to the Imam-Bermuda Triangle narrative because he was subsequently hailed by Shi’ite religious scholars for his research, particularly by Maulana Syed Abbas Zaidi in his Urdu language book Jazirāh-e-Bermudā (‘The Island of Bermuda’) (1991).18 Zaidi refers to Berlitz as one of America’s foremost intellectuals, quotes him repeatedly as a legitimate and well-researched source of truth, and also directly quotes (in translation) from Berlitz’s book. The fact that Zaidi mentions repeatedly that Berlitz is American, as well as an established scholar, is particularly significant, as I will later argue in my paper. By the late 1970s, the Bermuda Triangle mystery was in vogue. Other projects took cue from Berlitz’s theories and evidence and used them to advance their own notions of the Bermuda Triangle as a space of mystery. Though it was met with criticism, many of those that believe in the mysterious nature of the Bermuda Triangle regard it as a canonical piece of scholarship.

Up till now, my paper has looked at two different strands of narrative: that of Charles Frambach Berlitz, The Bermuda Triangle (New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1974). Charles Berlitz (1913-2003) was an American linguist and language teacher who was also known for his books on supernatural phenomenon. He was also, interestingly, the grandson of Maximilian Berlitz, who founded the Berlitz Language Schools.

Berlitz made a career out of writing about the paranormal. His other books include Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds (1972), The Roswell Incident (1980) as well as The Mystery of Atlantis (1969).

18 Maulana Syed Muhammad Abbas Qamar Zaidi, Jazirāh-e-Bermudā : Hazrat Hujjat (A.S) ki Iqamatgah? (Karachi: Jamiat al-Manzareen, 1991).

17

17

the Bermuda Triangle mystery, and that of the Green Island and the White Sea. It is impossible to say why the Bermuda Triangle mystery was picked up by some Shi’ites – and this question is outside the scope of my project.

However, by the end of the twentieth century, the notion of the Green Island and White Sea from Shi’ite religious texts began to be equated to the Bermuda Triangle. Zaidi’s aforementioned Urdu book, Jazirāh-e-Bermudā, is a good example of how these two narratives came together to present the Imam in the Bermuda Triangle narrative. Jazirāh-e-Bermuda is itself quite an influential text. In addition to its print circulation, the book is accessible online on a website that houses Shi’ite books.19 It showed 7,070 views since it had been uploaded in April 2009. The book is further referenced online on Shi’ite chat forums and Facebook pages when the possibility of Imam Mahdi residing on the Bermuda Triangle is brought up in discussions. Zaidi himself is a Shi’ite scholar and orator based in Karachi and, hence, an influential figure within the Shi’ite community.

Another authoritative source for this narrative is the prominent Shi’ite orator Allama Zameer Akhtar Naqvi. Born in 1944, Naqvi is a Shi’ite maulana and scholar based in Karachi, Pakistan. He has written several books, and is a regular reciter of Muharram majālis or religious lectures in Pakistan. Like many influential Shi’ite orators, he frequently travels both nationally and internationally to deliver majālis. Naqvi is famous for espousing this view, and recorded majālis videos of him making this claim have been uploaded to YouTube where they have several thousand views. In one lecture available on YouTube, he claims, that the whole of the island is the Imam’s city, containing his infrastructure.20 There is contestation within the South Asian Shi’ite community regarding this narrative. Internet chat forums reveal important aspects of the debate that take place surrounding the Bermuda Triangle and Imam Mahdi.

While there are supporters of the theory, there are also skeptics. Criticism is launched both by Shi’ites and non-Shi’ites. On ShiaChats.com, some users such as “abumuslim” assert that the Imam is “present everywhere” and “he wouldn’t want to limit himself to one piece of land.”21 Some say that See www.ziyaraat.net which has many Shi’ite books available for download.

“Topic: Bermuda Triangle & Imam Mahdi (afs) - Allama Zameer Akhtar Naqvi,” YouTube video, 39:56, posted by “mkazmi91,” August 4, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Btdfb4xOI8c&t=651s. (53:02) 21 “Bermuda Triangle Jazeera-e-Khazra Imam Mahdi.” Shia Chats (online discussion forum). October 29, 2011. http://www.shiachat.com/forum/topic/234995463-bermuda-tri19 20

18

the Bermuda Triangle is indeed mysterious but it is an evil force that may be the home of Satan.22 Others, such as user “ANJUM 442,” see it as part of a broader conspiracy theory on the part of the American government.23 Much criticism within Shi’ite forums seem to posit either that the Imam was put into ghaybāh for a reason, and that dwelling on a piece of information that is not meant for us is not conducive. Others claim that it is wrong to equate the Imam’s residence with a place such as the Bermuda Triangle which is clearly been a source of destruction and loss to others.

Though Shiachats.com largely consists of users who identify themselves as Shi’ites, other forums such as YouTube allow us to get at criticisms by nonShi’ite users. The most prominent example of this is a video on YouTube titled “Funny Shia on Al Mahdi & the Bermuda Triangle, and Mahdi ‚s knowledge of accents!” uploaded by user “SunniPureIslam” in 2011.24 Here, it becomes clear that the intention of the video is to present the Bermuda Triangle/Imam Mahdi narrative as a ridiculous Shi’ite belief. The content of the video is even more direct: it starts with some footage from the Bermuda Triangle documentary, followed by an interview footage with Shi’ite religious leader maulana Shaikh Ali Al-Koorani in which he speaks of the Bermuda Triangle being the ‘‘military base’’ of the Imam.25 The video ends with footage of a baby laughing loudly. The implication is clear – this narrative is something to be laughed about.26 With the internet and social media, the narrative circulates in novel ways.

For example, we have the emergence of doctored or ‘photo-shopped’ illustrations and pictures that combine text and image, and are shared on Facebook and online blogs. Images include amalgamations of images of green light, white water, a map marking the Bermuda Triangle, as well as aircraft and naval vessels. angle-jazeera-e-khazra-imam-mahdias/.

22 Ibid.

23 “Is Bermuda Triangle Somehow Related With Imam?” Shia Chats (online discussion forum). August 5, 2011. https://www.shiachat.com/forum/topic/234992506-is-bermuda-triangle-some-how-related-with-imam/.

24 “Funny Shia on Al Mahdi & the Bermuda Triangle, and Mahdi ‚s knowledge of accents!,” YouTube video, 2:39, posted by “SunniPureIslam,” October 10, 2011, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=c6HBmH_wyI4.

25 A teacher at the prestigious Shi’ite scholarly institute of Hawza in Qum. 26 Comments on the video follow suit. User “Joe BoomBots” posts “is this a Joke????if it is, it was hilarious. these Shia are comedy relief ”, while user Shirra posts “this shia imam must have smoked some ganja because this story is fuckin hilarious.”

19

Till now, this paper has provided a survey of the different kinds of ‘forms’ through which this narrative circulates, and how certain texts deemed authoritative are re-fashioned in subsequent texts. Now it will argue that though the ‘forms’ of the narratives may be different – the narrative itself shares similar elements that lead me to argue that they can be seen as a ‘genre.’ Additionally, this genre can be seen as combining elements from other established genres – those of theological writings on Shi’ite Islam, as well as paranormal ‘mystery’ literature. I will outline a few key features that I believe bind the different forms and narratives into a single genre. Firstly, I want to suggest that a constitutive element of the genre is to draw parallels between the Green Island and the White Sea from the Bīhar al-Anwār and accounts of the Bermuda Triangle mystery. Secondly, another significant element of the genre is its treatment of the West and what is seen as its corollary – scientific rationality. Inspired by Luise White’s emphasis on language and symbols, I hope to delve deeper into seeing how the narrative is represented (like White, the ‘truth’ of the narrative has never been my concern).27 This approach is also similar to what Travis Zadeh proposes in his reading of ‘aja’ib literature – the question of setting up binaries between ‘truth’ and ‘myth’/ ‘fiction’ should be avoided even if the text itself may seem to be comprising of fantastical elements.28 However, this should not stop us from examining the ‘literariness’ of the text itself – something that is distinct from fiction.29 The most prominent feature of the Bermuda Triangle/ Imam Mahdi narrative establishes parallels between the account of the Green Island and the White Ocean from the Bīhar al-Anwār with accounts of the Bermuda Triangle. Anecdotes and reports from the Bermuda Triangle mystery genre are quoted with the emphasis being on the white water and the green light that is encountered by the ships and airplanes before they disappear. Zaidi also claims that one of the first encounters with the mysterious Bermuda Triangle was that of Christopher Columbus, an account that is also quoted in Berlitz. Zaidi claims that Columbus noted sparkling white water on his voyage and an immediate parallel is made to the white water encountered

by Ali Bin Fazil.30 Zaidi also mentions the report of an American pilot who once encountered green light while flying near the Bermuda Triangle – acWhite, Speaking with Vampires.

Zadeh, “The Wiles of Creation,” 26.

29 Ibid.

30 Zaidi, Jazirāh-e-Bermudā, 68.

27 28

20

cording to the report, the pilot then spoke to other pilots about his strange encounter who confirmed that they had experienced something similar but refused to openly talk about it.31 Naqvi, in his majālis lectures, also speaks about the white water and makes parallels to the streams of milk that are to be found in heaven in the Islamic tradition. The water is always represented as sparkling or glittering, rather than treacherous or unsafe. Similarly, the light is always portrayed as ‘nur’ – the pure light of being that is equated with the Divine in the Islamic tradition. This is a stark difference from the Bermuda Triangle mystery genre that describes the water and air as something that is meant to induce horror. Within the Shi’ite tradition, however, such a portrayal would be flawed – the Imam cannot be equated to images and symbols that invoke terror.

Most versions of the Bermuda/Imam narrative that I have examined parody Western technologies as well as the ‘West’ while asserting the legitimacy of Shi’ite beliefs. The Shi’ite Imam does exist in the Bermuda Triangle, he is accessible to certain pious Shi’ite individuals, he is beyond the realm of understanding of the rest of humanity, and all the West’s efforts and superior technology to unravel his terrain will be met with failure. This is a belief that is constantly reasserted. The mention of science is usually accompanied by a mention of the ‘West’ or America that is seen to operate this science – Naqvi in his lecture claims that the West has been trying to understand the Bermuda Triangle for over 700 years but have failed, and will continue to fail.32 The sense of failure communicated by Naqvi is amplified by immediately mentioned that this failure was in spite of the growing sophistication of Western technologies.33 Similarly, Zaidi, in his book, says that America and European nations have to admit defeat by acknowledging that there is some incomprehensible power that resides in the area.34 He also brings up the failure of the American government – which he claims has spent thousands of dollars in research grants and equipment but all of these efforts and finances have been in vain.35 On the other hand, science also provides legitimacy to the Imam/Bermuda Triangle narrative by proving the mysterious nature of the Bermuda triZaidi, 71.

Naqvi, “Topic: Bermuda Triangle & Imam Mahdi,” (43:27).

33 Naqvi, 2012, (28:54).

34 Zaidi, Jazirāh-e-Bermudā, 7.

35 Zaidi, 63.

31 32

21

angle. Naqvi in his lectures and Zaidi in his book both assert that science ‘says’ that islands miraculously emerge and disappear near the Bermuda Triangle, science ‘says’ that there are islands present in the Atlantic that cannot be seen or accessed. The narrative does not set up a simple binary between faith and Western science. It is not that the West’s technology and science is inferior. The ‘problem’ identified is lack of faith that is dominant in the West. Science is not incapable; it is only incapable in so far as it is used without faith or pious intentions. Similarly, it is not Westerners who are inherently incapable of understanding the Bermuda/Mahdi narrative by virtue of belonging to the ‘West’ – but, rather, it is the lack of faith that hinders their understanding. The narrative actually lauds those accounts of Westerners who admit, either through scientific research or else, that we need to broaden our understanding of rationality and faith to fully grasp the reality of the Bermuda Triangle. One of the most telling quotes is from Naqvi’s lecture in which he states that the entire problem of the Bermuda Triangle can only be solved if we put together the knowledge of science, the knowledge of religion, and the knowledge of the Imam together.36 Scientific knowledge and rational thought, then, serves to strengthen the narrative’s claim that the Imam resides in the Bermuda Triangle. The narrative presents itself in rational and scientific terms. Zaidi’s book draws extensively upon Berlitz’s pseudo-scientific evidence for unexplained wind and water patterns in the Bermuda Triangle region, while hailing Berlitz as an expert on the subject. Both Zaidi and Naqvi mention the evidence of the mysterious nature of the Bermuda Triangle is gathered by expert scientists and specialists who are pointedly identified as belonging to the ‘West’. It is science, then, that ultimately proves that one needs to go beyond science to understand the mystery behind the Bermuda Triangle. Alireza Doostdar, in his recent study of Cosmic Mysticism in Iran, noted that his interlocutors used the language of science and intellect rather than superstition to explain what he called the “metaphysical” aspects of their religion.37 Doostar understood this as an attempt to rationalize ghaybāh.38 Similarly, the Imam in the Bermuda Triangle narrative also attempts to rationalize the Imam’s ghaybāh and the Bermuda Triangle as his īqāmatgāh through scientific vocabulary and references to evidence put forward by non-Muslim ‘Westerners.’

Naqvi, “Topic: Bermuda Triangle & Imam Mahdi.”

Alireza Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 3.

38 Doostdar, 4.

36 37

22

Another important symbol that appears in the narrative is that of an enemy or dushman. Zaidi mentions that the ships of the enemies cannot cross the water of the Bermuda Triangle – and that any attempt to do so, with the grace of the Imam, will result in the sinking of the ship.39 The sinking of the ships, as well as the falling of the planes, through the grace or barkat of the Imam is a repeated trope – usually it is presented by making a comparison – the grace or barkat of the Imam is greater than the strength of the strongest and most technologically advanced planes and ships.40 Moreover, it is repeatedly mentioned that the Imam’s island within the Bermuda Triangle is invisible because Allah wants to protect it from the sight of enemies.41 Naqvi also speaks of the dushman, claiming that the white water around the Imam’s island protects the island from enemies. It may be worth dwelling on the question of who this enemy is – though the enemy is not named, it can be inferred that the ‘enemy’ are those that are without faith or knowledge of the Imam, and those that seek to understand the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle without any knowledge of the Imam.

The enemy, then, represents a scientific rationality that acts without belief in the Imam.

Examining this narrative shows how two distinct genres come together; how a series of seemingly dissimilar texts in different languages are combined to reformulate a singular set of imagery, symbolism, and language that forms a unique narrative of the Imam in the Bermuda Triangle. Today, this narrative circulates through various forms whether it is through online chat forums, books, sermons or photographs. However, it shares a vocabulary through which it can be seen as to constitute a genre in its own right. I have argued that one of the most significant and striking features of this genre is its notions of Western science, rationality, and faith; as well as its attempt to couch itself in rational terms with validation from Western ‘experts’. In concluding my paper, I want to reassert why examining such a narrative, and the forums within which it circulates, is important. We find here the creation of an archive centered around the narrative of the Imam in the Bermuda Triangle – a narrative that refashions canonical and authoritative religious texts with a more contemporary narrative of the Bermuda Triangle mystery. Examining unconventional sources can be highly rewarZaidi, Jazirāh-e-Bermudā, 50.

An example of this parallel is in Zaidi, 70.

41 Zaidi, 53.

39 40

23

ding as they open up a vast world of lesser studied, but equally significant, actors of history; and allow us an insight into the very beliefs that shape the lives of people.

Bibliography

Al-Majlisi, Allamah Baqar. Bīhar al-Anwār : Kitabul Ghaibah (The Promised Mahdi: The Book of Occultation). Translated by Syed Athar Rizvi.

1698. Mumbai: Jafari Propagation Centre, 2013.

Berlitz, Charles Frambach. The Bermuda Triangle. New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1974.

Briggs, Charles and Bauman, Richard. “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.’’ Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 2 (December 1992): 131-72, 1992.

Doostdar, Alireza. The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Ghaemmaghami, Omid. “To the Abode of the Hidden One: the Green Isle in Shi’i, Early Shaykhī, and Bābī-Bahā’ī Sacred Topography” in Unity in Diversity : Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious Authority in Islam, 137-173. Edited by Orkhan Mir-Kasimov. Leiden: BRILL, 2014.

Sachedina, Abdulaziz A. Islamic Messianism: the Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shi’ism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981.

White, Luise. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Zadeh, Travis. “The Wiles of Creation: Philosophy, Fiction, and the ‘Ajā’ib Tradition.” Middle Eastern Literatures 13, no.1 (April 2010): 21-48, 2010.

Zaidi, Maulana Syed Muhammad Abbas Qamar. Jazirāh-e-Bermudā: Hazrat Hujjat (A.S) ki Iqamatgah? Karachi: Jamiat al-Manzareen, 1991.

YouTube Videos

“Topic: Bermuda Triangle & Imam Mahdi (afs) - Allama Zameer Akhtar Naqvi,” YouTube video, 39:56, posted by “mkazmi91,” August 4, 24

2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btdfb4xOI8c&t=651s.

“The Mystery Of The Bermuda Triangle,” YouTube video, 6:38, posted by “AlltimeConspiracies,” January 31, 2015, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=IBfI3_la3K0.

“700 Years ago shia ulema described about Green land Bermuda Triangle.”

YouTube video. 46:26. Posted by “majālis512.” January 16, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_R4v8lmNeA. “Funny Shia on Al Mahdi & the Bermuda Triangle, and Mahdi ‚s knowledge of accents!,” YouTube video, 2:39, posted by “SunniPureIslam,” October 10, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6HBmH_ wyI4 Online Blogs, Chat Threads, and Facebook Pages

Sabri, Asad. “Imam e Zamana (Imam Mehdi A.S) and Bermuda Triangle Mystery.” The Barmuda Triangle History (online blog). February 16, 2015. http://thebarmudatriangle.blogspot.com.

“Is Bermuda Triangle Somehow Related With Imam?” Shia Chats (online discussion forum). August 5, 2011. https://www.shiachat.com/ forum/topic/234992506-is-bermuda-triangle-some-how-related-with-imam/.

“Bermuda Triangle Jazeera-e-Khazra Imam Mahdi.” Shia Chats (online discussion forum). October 29, 2011. http://www.shiachat. com/forum/topic/234995463-bermuda-triangle-jazeera-e-khazra-imam-mahdias/.

“Bermuda Triangle/Jazira e Khizra.”Facebook (page).https://www.facebook. com/Bermuda-Triangle-Jazira-e-Khizra-1409054989331228/.

25

Š Reda Berrada

26

Prateek Paul Say Hello to Ambedkar: Understanding ‘Dalit Consciousness’ through Ajay Navaria’s Hindi Short Fiction A majority of ‘dalit literature’ comprises of autobiographies and life narratives, which as M.S.S. Pandian notes, possess great potential to produce ‘enabling re-descriptions of life-worlds and facilitate the re-imagination of the political.’1 Pandian rationalises life-writing—ordinary-life-writing—as the predominant form of dalit writing as a compensation for the ‘deficiencies of dominant modes’ of writing, such as fiction and non-fiction modes of discourse.2 Similarly, much of the recent scholarship that has dealt with these dalit-authored narratives has privileged the genre of autobiography.

Though life narratives and testimonies constitute an important category in dalit self-expression, this paper seeks to put the genre of the Hindi short story—albeit in English translation—as used by dalit writer Ajay Navaria and dalit-writer3 Premchand at the centre of its exploration to understand dalit identity construction in the framework of a dialogue with one another.

It then goes on to closely analyse the relationship between Premchand’s “The Price of Milk” (“Doodh Ka Daam”) and Navaria’s “Hello Premchand” (originally titled “Uttar Katha” or Responding story) to understand the discursive potential of Navaria’s dalit literature in its quest to ‘construct social and political meaning’ of its ‘dalit consciousness.’4 This entails a literary analysis that goes beyond the authenticity or legitimacy of the voice of author-ity, and delves into an aesthetic, formal, and ideological approach to the discourse in the (dalit) short story. To evoke Mikhail Bakhtin, if one is to make meaning of the ‘social stratification’ of the dalit writer, it is impeM.S.S. Pandian, “Writing Ordinary Lives,” Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 43, No. 38 (Sep. 20–26, 2008): 35, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40277974.

2 Pandian, “Writing Ordinary Lives,” 36.

3 In this hyphenated usage, ‘dalit-writer’ denotes the writing of the dalit—the dalit individual as the subject of writing—by kayastha (upper-caste) Dhanpat Rai, popularly known as Premchand. This evokes the long-existent and ongoing debate over whether Premchand’s literature can be considered ‘dalit literature.’ Can non-dalit writers genuinely represent the lives and experiences of dalits? This also brings to fore the dilemma of an ‘authentic’ dalit experience and dalit identity, as well as the legitimacy of a non-dalit writer to represent the same in literature. Who is dalit enough to realistically represent dalit experience?

4 Laura Brueck, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 7.

1

27

rative to make sense of the ‘generic and professional’ stratification of dalit literature.5 Rightly so, the second half of the paper analyses Navaria’s “Tattoo” (originally “Godna”) to theorise his usage of the genre of the modern short story and the literary-language of Hindi+English (Hinglish) to carve out a separate and unique space for dalit literature in the Hindi literati of the capital city of New Delhi.

‘Dalit literature’ is a term accorded to what generally constitutes both ‘dalit’ and ‘literature.’ S. Anand, founder of the anti-caste publishing house Navayana (publisher of Navaria’s stories) defines it as ‘literature produced by dalits in a conscious, defined, modern sense with an awareness of what it is to be dalit’ whereas dalit literary critic Sharankumar Limbale classifies it as ‘writing about dalits by dalit writers with a dalit consciousness. 6 This ‘dalit consciousness’ or ‘dalit chetna’ is what critics seem to attribute to dalit writing, to differentiate it from dalit-writing (as used earlier). This ‘insider’ account, as opposed to that provided by an ‘outsider’—the othering of the upper-caste savarna, or upper caste, writer—claims to be more ‘authentic’ than one which claims to have merely a dalit subjectivity but not a dalit identity. Such ‘strategic essentialism,’ to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term, is at the root of dalit representation which dalit writers are committed to shaping for themselves in their own literature, refusing to be object-ified in savarna sympathy. However, this section does not attempt to authenticate or delegitimize either text as ‘more dalit’ or ‘less dalit’ in terms of identity, or more authentic or less authentic in terms of representation, but participate in the intertextual framework adopted by Navaria, and the dialogue with Premchand thus initiated by its very title, “Hello Premchand” or even the Hindi title, which translates to “Responding story.” In doing so, the first-half of this paper tries to explore how Navaria constructs a dalit consciousness in his writing through the presence of Ambedkar—in spirit and even in person—in his story.

The figure of Premchand has always inhabited a contentious space in the Hindi dalit literary sphere; its spectre continues to loom large over this terrain. His short stories in particular, spark off heated debates on the repreMikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (London: Blackwell, 2004), 675.

6 S. Anand, ed., Touchable Tales: Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature (Chennai: Navayana, 2003), 1; Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies, and Considerations, trans. Alok Mukherjee (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 19.

5

28

sentation of the dalit subject, the authenticity of dalit experience (in light of his “Aim of Literature” address to the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936). Premchand is heralded for positioning lower-caste characters as central protagonists in his writings (it is another thing that they inhabit the margins in the stories) and writing (about) them with a ‘strong social conscience,’ making him a ‘particularly valuable and rare role model these days.’ 7Yet, the charge that is usually laid on him is for representing his dalit characters from a sympathetic, rather than revolutionary perspective as he had little experience with dalits, and more importantly, no experience as a dalit.8 “Kafan” or “The Shroud” is the most (un)celebrated story in this regard, with both sides forever-engaged in a polemics of the dehumanization of father–son duo of ‘chamars’ Ghisu and Madhav, in the story. The futility of their existence, as read by Upadhyay—‘they do not have any need for society, as the latter does not have any need for them. They are fully outcast’—alienates them from possessing any agency within the space they inhabit.9 While Premchand’s quest for realism is valuable, it is deemed dishonourable to the dalit protagonists, left to accept the ‘bitter truth’ of their subjugated existence, as many of the characters of his stories resign to their reality, albeit with a strain of resistance.10 Premchand’s stories, therefore, lack a ‘dalit consciousness’ which is understood by Limbale as ‘the revolutionary mentality connected with struggle.

Ambedkarite thought is the inspiration for this consciousness… [It] is an important seed for dalit literature, it is separate and distinct from the consciousness of other writers. Dalit literature is demarcated as unique because of this consciousness.11 A critique of Premchand, argues Laura Brueck, is at the core of ‘both a reconstitution the dalit public sphere as a counterpublic, and in developing the power to effectively enter the mainstream literary sphere.’12 Ish Ganganiya rightly points out the endless debate surrounding the ‘dalitness’ of Premchand’s writing, as the dalit writers are ‘firmly reFrancesca Orsini, “Introduction,” in The Oxford India Premchand (New Delhi: OUP, 2004), xxvi 8 Geetanjali Pandey, Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Premchand (Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 112–24.

9 Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, “Representing the Underdogs: Dalits in the Literature of Premchand.” Studies in History 18 (February 2002): 51–79.

10 Premchand, “January Night,” trans. David Rubin, in The Oxford India Premchand (New Delhi: OUP, 2004), 49.

11 Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic, 32.

12 Brueck, Writing Resistance, 62.

7

29

solved and compelled to perform a re-reading of traditional literature and history.13 Ajay Navaria attempts to do just that. His modern short stories, which appear in the collection Unclaimed Terrain (2013), are dedicated ‘to the characters in my stories who fight for their dreams of justice, and to the tradition that teaches us to struggle for dignity, equality, and freedom.’14 As paratext to the collection of short stories, this dedication to the characters ends with the first person plural pronoun ‘us,’ thereby signifying the mutual identity as one of the characters in reality. This binds not only the author with the characters but, in a triad of dalit consciousness, with the intended audience—the dalit reader—as ‘the experiences narrated in dalit literature are very similar. Untouchables’ experiences of untouchability are identical.15 Together, the ‘unclaimed terrain’ of dalit literature is claimed, as expressed and interpreted in the act of reading and writing, which ‘non-dalits cannot claim’ as ‘this is an issue of a long-suppressed community finding its own voice.’ 16 Writing stories, re-writing lives: Navaria’s dialogue with Premchand and Ambedkar The spectre of Premchand, his doppelgänger—albeit only in physical features, and not literary, as the reader will soon be told—frames the narrative of Navaria’s story, “Hello Premchand.” He approaches the narrator and reads out an excerpt: ‘Whatever else may change in this world, bhangis will always remain bhangis.17 It is tough to make them human.’18 He declares his source: “The Price of Milk” and also the purpose of this—and his—presence is laid bare, ‘That was the first story, and this is the response…’; he gives out a manuscript to the narrator to type.19 Thus begins the dialogue between the modern-day Premchand (stand-in for Navaria) who declares Ibid., 53.

Ajay Navaria, Unclaimed Terrain, trans. Laura Brueck (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013), n.p.

15 Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic, 35.

16 Anand, ed., Touchable Tales, 17.

17 ‘Bhangi’ is used to refer to those engaged in manual scavenging—an occupation imposed upon them by virtue of their lower caste status. Over the years, it has come to be a casteist slur.

18 Navaria, “Hello Premchand,” trans. Laura Brueck, in Unclaimed Terrain (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013), 125.

19 Ibid., 126.

13 14

30

his difference from the person he is supposed to be writing back to —‘I’m not Premchand’ (my italics).20 Now that the difference is acknowledged, it is for the reader to discover the truth claim of this utterance by reading the responding story to “The Price of Milk” and drawing their own conclusions. The metafictionality of this story directs the reader to the formation of history as artifice, as Hutcheon posits, and seeks to rewrite it by going back in time to 1934, to respond to the figure whose spectre continues to haunt dalit literature at the time of Navaria’s writing in 2006 (and even today, as this paper is being written).

In his version of “Prince of Milk,” Ajay Navaria rewrites Premchand’s savarna version of the narrative of history where the dalit is treated with mere sympathy and status quo is restored. After his mother’s death, the protagonist, Mangal, relies on the thakur (landowner) for food. Upon being asked to kneel down to imitate a horse so that the thakur’s son Suresh can ride him, he utters a thought, ‘Will I always be the horse or will I get to be a rider, tell me that’ and rebukes Suresh, ‘You people are pretty smart! You want to enjoy being riders and I’m supposed to stay just a horse.’ He knows the prevailing power structures are inescapable, but in this game, he wishes to possess the illusion of power, and so he proposes to Suresh, ‘You ride afterwards. Be the horse first, then I will after I’ve ridden.’21 His resistance is thwarted and he is forced to be a ‘horse’ with three riders on his back.

He acquiesces for a brief while and then, in another act of rebellion, slips away from down under and renders the upper-caste rider powerless on the ground. He is reprimanded severely for this transgression by Suresh’s mother, and so he walks away and vows never to return.

This episode of Premchand’s story could have been a narrative of Mangal’s emancipation, yet the story continues, and his hunger returns since there is no one to feed him, and he is relegated to a position of compliance yet again. His dog Tommy is his only companion, and he consoles him, saying, ‘just consider my case now, sometimes somebody beats me with a stick and yells after me, then in a little while I go back to him with my tail wagging.

That’s the way you and I are, my friend.’22 In a way, the dog and the child become one, ‘united in the great fraternity of discrimination and deprivaIbid., 125.

Munshi Premchand, “The Price of Milk,” trans. David Rubin, in The Oxford India Premchand (New Delhi: OUP, 2004), 228.

22 Premchand, “The Price of Milk,” 230.

20 21

31

tion.’23 Both return and eat the leftovers from the same leaf. Lacking agency or means to agency, the child has to rely on his oppressor for survival, thereby ensuring that the power structure is not broken down, but a mere tremor is felt.

As has been pointed out earlier, dalit consciousness obtains its primary energy from Dr. Ambedkar’s life and vision. Just like Premchand, Dr. Ambedkar believed in literature’s social function, but also in the revolutionary potential of the (dalit) writer: Through your literary creations cleanse the prescribed values of life and culture. Do not limit your objectives. Remove the darkness in villages by the light of your pen. Do not forget that in our country the world of the dalits and the ignored classes is vast. Get to know intimately their pain and sorrow and try through your literature to bring progress to their lives. True humanity lies there (my italics).24

Ajay Navaria follows Babasaheb’s directive, and “Hello Premchand” begins thus: ‘Light had not yet appeared in the distant sky, but the clatter of the day had already begun in the small hut.’25 It becomes essential, then, to decode literary creations of Ambedkarite dalit authors such as Navaria, who wield aesthetic and stylistic tools of language in the construction of a dalit consciousness, and to understand how these narrative strategies serve the emancipatory goals of the dalit movement led by Ambedkar. In Navaria’s subversive act of rewriting “The Price of Milk,” that which is taken to be an axiom of history—as declared from the thakur’s position of power—is overturned. The bhangi does not remain so. While his mother Ghungi is still a manual scavenger, Mangal is ensured schooling—in line with Dr. Ambedkar’s command of ‘educate, agitate, organize!’ As the story unfolds, all three of these calls to action are fulfilled despite one of his neighbour’s rebuke, ‘what good is education to the sweeper’s son—it’s not as if he is going to become a collector.’ 26Little does this neighbour know of the alternate reality planned by Ajay Navaria for Premchand’s characters. After Mangal’s mother’s death, he remembers her longing for him to continue schooling so that he never has to pick up the broom. His mother’s wish is fulfilled thanks to the community’s collaborative participation in raising Upadhyay, “Representing the Underdogs,” 59.

Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic, 50.

25 Navaria, “Hello Premchand,” 126.

26 Ibid., 139.

23 24

32

Mangal after her demise. He is educated, and by the time he is in eighth standard, he is well-read in the genre of dalit life-writing —he reads the autobiographies of Navaria’s contemporaries Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan,27 Surajpal Chauhan’s Tiraskrit, Roop Narayan Sonkar’s Nagphani and B.R. Jatav’s Meri Safar aur Meri Manzil. These intertexts give him a shared consciousness through the life narratives of fellow dalits, and thus, help him re-write his own life. When asked, ‘What kind of inspiration do you get from all these autobiographies and life stories?’ he replies, ‘Determination, Maatsaab, that you should never let your circumstances defeat you.’28 Navaria’s Mangal migrates to the city, becomes a government official (not through the route of reservation), and wielding the very power that the thakur held in Premchand’s story—he possesses administrative control over his own district—he returns to ask for the thakur’s daughter’s hand in marriage. In the meanwhile, the thakur was left ‘with nothing’ and has died ‘a horrible death’ while ‘bhangi’ Mangal’s ascent is being charted.29 He is vindicated when he finds out that Suresh has failed at writing his own life using the upper-caste privilege that he once enjoyed. He is living a life of labour as a security guard in a private company in Delhi, while Mangal travels back to his roots with a convoy of guards performing for him the role Suresh performs in Delhi. The reader is given a snippet of Mangal’s hidden desires, which depicts Navaria’s revolutionary strain, as well as Mangal’s conception of justice—he wants Suresh to be the horse, and he the rider.

When Suresh refuses, Mangal and his fellow dalits forcefully ride on him, replicating the very structure of power in 2006 that oppressed Premchand’s Mangal in 1934. He wishes to be the ruler and everyone else, his subjects.

One could argue that Navaria takes it too far, but it throws light on the indelible stain that caste oppression has left on the Mangals of history, leading to grave resentment against the Sureshs of brahmanical society. They want the tables turned, and not just the chairs shifted.

In Premchand’s look-alike’s—and by extension, Navaria’s—story, one discovers traces of the original Premchand, with several of characters from This particular intertext is significant here as the revulsion that ‘joothan’, or leftovers, causes in Valmiki’s real life, as is evidenced by the title of his autobiography, is at the center of Premchand’s Mangal narrative in “The Price of Milk” but is conspicuously absent in Navaria’s Mangal. He has already been writing his own life narrative on those that he reads.

28 Navaria, “Hello Premchand,” 133.

29 Ibid., 148.

27

33

Premchand’s oeuvre coming together in the discursive space created for them by Navaria. Not only is Mangal’s fate rewritten in this metastory, the ‘ordinary lives’ (evoking Pandian) of the other Premchand’s characters are re-written by this author. Tommy, Mangal’s only companion finds a friend in Jabru, Halku’s only companion in Premchand’s “Poos Ki Raat” or “January Night.” If this reworking signifies the emancipation of the animal-figure who shares the human subject’s oppression, one must not be surprised to see the radical reinterpretation of the human characters that come together in the discursive space of “Hello Premchand.” Madhav and Ghisu from “Kafan” contribute money for the shroud, finally, and Budhiya lives to continue being the source of the family’s prosperity as mother to a child who will grow up to be a teacher. Gangi and Jokhu from “Thakur Ka Kuan” or “The Thakur’s Well” are not murdered for their transgression, but only beaten up(!) for it. Halku, from “January Night” sells his land (his crops are eaten by nilgai) and is a labourer in the thakur’s fields. Most importantly, the cause of Dukhi’s death in “Sadgati” or “Deliverence,” Pandit Ghasiram becomes Mangal’s patron, by funding his education. The pandit-figure facilitates the breakdown of caste oppression in Navaria’s metastory, and thus, the modern dalit short story is no longer a Manichean tale of the good dalit–bad brahmin.

To see this metastory through, in the end, another spectre appears, that of Dr. Ambedkar, who gives yet another text to the narrator, another intertext for the reader, which contains his thoughts on Premchand’s narratives.

What he hands over is a speech he gave in 1941 at the annual meeting of the Bombay Municipal Workers’ Union, and says, ‘You have to read this with the story… this is the placenta and the umbilical cord’ of the story. In the speech, he declared, ‘You do not seem to realise the tremendous power you have in your hands. You can, simply by refusing to work, spread more havoc and disaster in a week than Hindu–Muslim riots should do in three months.’ 30 An Ambedkarite in thought and in action, Navaria emboldens his characters with this very agency to say no to their oppressors, something Premchand tried to do but in vain—which is not to say that his critique of social oppression is not valid, but that its revolutionary potential is left unfulfilled, and the characters (virtually) dead. However, in Navaria’s responding story, Premchand’s dalit characters are resurrected, educated, and politicized, with 30

Ibid., 154.

34

the subjectivity and power to resist, rebel and change. Together, they say to the father of their original story, ‘Hello Premchand! This is dalit consciousness.’ A genealogy of dalit consciousness is presented in the story, when the principles and teachings of Ambedkar are imparted to the modern dalit character (Premchand’s look-alike), the modern dalit author (Navaria), and the modern (dalit) reader (you and I).

Navaria’s revolutionary potential is as much aesthetic as it is political. His choice of the genre of the short story (and not the autobiography, characteristic of dalit literature) to conjure a dalit identity is a self-conscious one, for his ‘dialogue’ in this case, is directed towards Premchand, whose chief mode of writing was the short story (and the novel). Thus, the stylistics chosen by Navaria to re-write Premchand’s characters into existence are indicative of the difference in the politics of representation of the two literary works. To understand this dalit consciousness more comprehensively, Bakhtin’s theory of language and discourse is helpful. Heteroglossia—the multiplicity of social voices—manifests itself in Navaria’s stories not just intratextually, but intertextually as well, as they were first written into existence by Premchand. The ‘double-voiced discourse’ of dalit writer Navaria’s hypertext is therefore initiated when he engages in a retelling of dalit-writer Premchand’s hypotext(s). He makes use of words that are already charged with the social intention of Premchand, and compels them ‘to serve his own new intentions, to serve a second master’ and thus carves a more revolutionary social intention in line with Ambedkarite thought. 31 The ‘word’ in dalit literary expression becomes his own when he ‘populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.’32 An instance would be the utterance of the thakur in “The Price of Milk”, ‘Whatever else may change in this world, bhangis will always remain bhangis. It is tough to make them human.’33 In this story, this diatribe is meant to evoke sympathy in the reader, but the reader’s hopes of Mangal proving the thakur wrong are dashed by Premchand who eventually maintains the status quo of social relations. However, when cited in “Hello Premchand,” this casteist slur becomes the source of revolution, serving a wholly different purpose of the story to prove it wrong through the narrative it weaves. The language of oppression spoken by the thakur in Premchand’s narrative is reformulated Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 678.

Ibid., 35.

33 Navaria, “Hello Premchand,” 125.

31 32

35

when Navaria ‘cites’ it within the specificity of his modern short story. So much so that the speaking authority (the thakur and not Premchand!) is killed off in this reformulation.

Reading Inscriptions of Caste: Translating Dalit Chetna Sharankumar Limbale’s translator, Alok Mukherjee, posits, ‘the experience that dalit writing narrates is not that of just one individual but a collective experience that is embodied in one individual.’34 Navaria’s stories in Unclaimed Terrain depict the urban dalit individual of the metropolis (महानगर) at the centre of the narrative, who is yet, dangling between his identity as a village ‘bhangi’ and the privilege of a city ‘babu.’ This individual in Navaria’s writing, although differently presented in in every story (unlike an autobiography), yet, essentially remains the same—he is in a sense, ‘every dalit.’ In Navaria’s narrative, social injustice beset dalits, in the form of caste slurs, displacements, and the discrimination—overt or covert—every step in their attempt towards transitioning from past object to future subject.

In line with Bama’s dictum that dalit literature should not be a ‘simple, superficial and empirical collection of the dalit life. It should probe the deep, psychological underworld of the oppressed,’ Navaria, in his story, “गोदना” or “Tattoo,” does so—he delves into the complex psyche of Subhash Kumar (Paswan) to provide insight into his inner being, or ‘वजूद.’35 It therefore becomes hugely significant to engage with Navaria’s writing in the original Hindi, and venture into the ‘discourse’ that is initiated through the use of language by Navaria towards understanding a dalit chetna.

This section analyses “गोदना” to argue that Navaria adopts a stylised form of literary-language in his stories to situate his dalit character in the urban setting, and himself—the dalit writer—in the corpus of modern Hindi literature. In doing so, he also posits dalit consciousness in accordance with the teachings of Lord Buddha, and Dr. Ambedkar, as shall be further proven by eponymous ‘tattoo.’

This story, situated in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi with a government offiGodard, Barbara, Arun Mukherjee, and Alok Mukherjee, “Translating Minoritized Cultures: Issues of Caste, Class and Gender.” Postcolonial Text Vol. 2, No. 3 (2006): 9.

35 Bama. “Dalit Literature,” trans. M. Vijayalakshmi, Indian Literature Vol. 43, No. 5 (193) (Sept–Oct. 1999): 98, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2334264 34

36

cial as its protagonist, has a strong political undertone to its critique of the hierarchical structures that afflict the city. Home to the highest echelons of the three pillars of democracy—the executive, legislature and the judiciary—this story brings to the forefront that which is continually brushed under the carpet—caste identity—in an everyday recreational setting such as that of the gym. By situating the dalit protagonist in the upper-class setting of Khan Market, Navaria confronts his non-dalit reader with that which they are either too ignorant of or too aware of to acknowledge—the dalit citizen. The non-dalit reader is forced to confront the social reality that pervades their surroundings and is made aware of their own complicity in the same, while at the same time, the dalit reader is motivated to organize and change their own circumstances.

This story is a searing account of the psychological effects of caste on a person’s material existence and becomes a coming-of-age story of a middle-aged man, Subhash, engulfed in the ‘alluring and magical charm of the metropolis.’36 Standing outside the gym, he is conscious of the ‘driver’s complexions and the makes of the cars,’ yet when he is outside, in the ‘vast, sweet ocean of anonymity,’ he concludes that ‘we were all the same.

Equal.’37 Then, he enters the posh gym in his old and faded shoes, and is immediately made conscious of his less-privileged standing in society. Just like his tattoo which reads ‘Namo Buddhaya, Jai Bhim,’ his shoes become yet another bearer of his caste. Subhash’s old and torn shoes stand in a metonymic relationship to his existence—a walking reminder of his caste identity. This is manifested in Subhash’s struggle to polish his dalit identity, make it better, and gain inner strength. His decaying shoes are made new each night at first when he washes them, and then polishes them, but the old continues to remain. Real strength is derived when at the end of the story, he comes to accept his shoes as they have been, are and will be—‘जो है सो है।’ or ‘It is what it is.’ This way, he embraces the true colours of the shoes, and by extension, of his identity, and stops trying to change or fit in, thereby keeping his dalit identity intact. This trajectory is what Navaria narrates in his moving story “गोदना”.

Apart from Navaria’s clever narrative arc, it is his adroit use of the Hindi+English language combine that works ably towards the construction of Ajay Navaria, “Tattoo,” trans. Laura Brueck, in Unclaimed Terrain (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013), 122.

37 Ibid., 122.

36

37

a modern dalit identity. As Spivak states, ‘language … allows us to make sense of things, of ourselves. … Making sense of ourselves is what produces identity.’38 Navaria undertakes this exercise in his linguistic approach, which, Spivak would agree, disrupts the ‘logical systematicity’ of the Hindi language.39 Predominantly, the dialogues of the characters, usually conversations that originally take place in another language, are translated into the target language, the language of writing; however, Navaria instead transliterates full sentences and dialogues uttered in English by his dalit characters, Subhash and Rahul into Hindi. Conversing in the space of a capitalist enterprise of the gym situated in posh central Delhi, the language of encounter between the two characters mirrors the language spoken by the author and the educated dalit reader—a deviation from the norm as represented in earlier literature. To the upper caste reader, this linguistic strategy then becomes a disclaimer, indicating a resistant endeavour on part of the Dalit subjects.

For instance, the Hinglish combine is seen in the sentence—“उनके लिए टू थाउज़ंड हे, हर महीने, तीन महीने का छे हज़ार।” (For them, it is two thousand per month, six thousand for three)—‘thousand’ and ‘हज़ार’, both of which connote the number 1000, appear in one breath. When Rahul speaks, “सर, मन्थ्ली फ़िफ़्टीन हंद्रेड और फ़ाइव हंद्रेड रेजिस्ट्रेशन चार्जेज़।”40—which transliterates to, ‘Sir, monthly fifteen hundred and five hundred registration charges’—it could be written as “सर, महीने का पंद्रह सॉ रुपय और दाख़िले के लिए पाँच सॉ रुपय।” but is written the way it is spoken in English. Even in matters of identity and identification, “सर यू में कोल मी राहुल।”—which transliterates to, ‘Sir you may call me Rahul’—is not written as “सर, आप मुझे राहुल बुला सकते है।” Even Subhash replies to this in English, and is directly reproduced here, “ओके, आई विल कॉल यू राहुल जी, ऐफ़्टर ऑल यू आर माई ट्रेनर।”41 which transliterates to, ‘Okay, I will call you Rahul ji, after all you are my trainer’ and not the Hindi, “ठीक है। में आपको राहुल जी बुलाऊँगा, आख़िर कार आप मेरे ट्रेनर हो।” These instances show the bilingual proficiency of Navaria’s characters, who are as fluent in English as their upper caste companions. This is a clever usage of linguistic tools in the realm of Hindi literature, as Navaria makes it a point to reiterate his dalit characters’ English proficiency, whilst writing in the Devanagari script.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 179.

39 Ibid., 180.

40 Ajay Navaria, “गोदना” नया ज्ञानोदय August 2012: 48.

41 Ibid.

38

38

Another, and more powerful statement that conveys Navaria’s ingenious use of language(s) is in “रेज़र्व्ड रहना ही सबसे बड़ी ताक़त है।”42 (The greatest power lies in being reserved.) This statement uses the English word ‘reserved’ to describe the disposition adopted by the protagonist Subhash to ignore judgements from others, and to crack a pun on the political identity that he has imbibed as a reserved (category) person. It must be noted that the word ‘आरक्षण’, the Hindi word for reservation, is used in the text previously, so ‘आरक्षित’, its adjective form, could also have been used by Navaria, but he consciously dismisses the Hindi equivalent in this diatribe towards society and social engagement. Such strategic use of language signifies the hetroglossic nature of speech-language in urban Delhi, which Navaria preserves, turning the socio-economic stratifications that the different varieties of speech connote into a site for investigating issues of caste difference and oppression on the linguistic plane.

As Brueck writes, ‘dalit chetna [or consciousness] is articulated in the expressive and interpretive practices of both writing and reading.’43 The moral imagination of the reader is sought to be evoked through realistic representations of the conditions of a dalit person’s being (Navaria ends this story with ‘वजूद’, or being). A dalit experience narrated by Navaria would necessitate the preservation of such a dalit consciousness engaged in the ‘vectors of power.’44 Navaria preserves his characters’ speech-language of English by transliterating them into the written word in Hindi. Translation, being the most intimate act of reading, must be done without losing the immense significance that certain words, expressions and idioms hold for every dalit, words and expressions which together situate him/her (Navaria’s characters are all male, though) and the savarna oppressor in a dialectics of power and privilege. Spivak insists on the ‘rhetoricity of the original’ being preserved in the act of translation because its function is that of disruption, and this denotes the ‘falling apart of language.’ She lays down the task of the translator to ‘facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying’45 The ‘fraying’ is where the limits of language are uncovered, yet the boundaries of the self are lost. These are the ‘rhetorical silences of the original’ that need to be communicated in translation.46 Ibid., 51.

Brueck, Writing Resistance, 65 44 Godard, Mukherjee, and Mukherjee, “Translating Minoritized Cultures,” 1.

45 Spivak, “Politics of Translation,” 181, 189.

46 Ibid., 183.

42 43

39

The tattoo inhabits this space of silence, yet Navaria manages to make it speak loud and clear. The dalit protagonist of the story is ‘outed’ to the gymgoers because of his tattoo—an inscription of his dalit identity. The power of this tattoo lies in its unique untranslatability across language systems yet its transmutability across socio-cultural systems. The fixed, unchangeable and inerasable nature of this tattoo—unlike the shoes—is central to the story, and a visible signifier of one’s dalit identity. Through this tattoo, Navaria conjures a dalit consciousness, for the story says about the tattoo in the end: “यह तो जैसे मेरी त्वचा से बूँद-बूँद रिस कर मेरी संपूढ़ चेतना, मेरे पूरे वजूद पर छाया हुआ है।” (“It has seeped, drop by little drop, into my consciousness and has permeated my entire being”).47 The truth is that the tattoo has been etched onto the skin of Subhash—it defines his dalit identity.

A literal translation of the tattoo, ‘नमो बुद्धाय, जय भीम,’ would be, ‘I bow to you, Buddha, Long live Bhim!’ This would not only elongate a succinct powerful declaration, it would also change the meaning significantly, for the signifiers will have changed from one language system to another. Must one then transliterate the tattoo? Navaria’s translator Brueck does. She reproduces the tattoo as ‘Namo Buddhaya, Jai Bhim’48 in her translation of the short story.49 The two tattoos—the one on Subhash’s skin and the other in Navaria’s story about Subhash, transliterated into English—however, are different. While they read the same, they are no longer written in the same way. The written feature of the tattoo, the epidermal inscription (‘त्वचा’ or skin) of the tattoo ought to be preserved, and that is precisely what is ‘lost in translation.’ The only way to convey the epidermalisation of this tattoo into the very being of the dalit subject is to write the tattoo in the story the same way it is written on the skin of Subhash Kumar Paswan, ‘नमो बुद्धाय, जय भीम’. This movement of the tattoo from the material to the spiritual realm, from the skin to the consciousness of one’s being is the key to understanding Navaria’s dalit chetna.

Crossing the Bridge: Towards a Dalit Aesthetic This paper has aligned itself with Bakhtin’s formulation, that the ideologiNavaria, “गोदना,” 51; Navaria, “Tattoo,” 122.

An expression of reverence towards the two idols of the dalit community: Lord Buddha and Bhimrao Ambedkar.

49 Navaria, “Tattoo,” 122.

47 48

40

cal thrust of a work can only be understood by analysing the interactions between diverse registers and styles of language by an author in their works in a dialogue with other works. As one may have realized, the relationship of contemporary Hindi dalit writers to the literary-language they write in is quite different in its motives and nuanced in its agendas. They wield a powerful wand to alter existing literary conventions that have come to shape Hindi literature and its aesthetic sensibilities. The goal of many dalit writers, according to Brueck, is ‘to decenter understandings of literature by expressing what is not traditionally literary, or aesthetic.’50 The literary-register used here defies conventions of the elite, shuddh, or pure Hindi that is employed by prolific authors of Hindi literature. It is also manifested in the language spoken by the dalit characters. Much like Navaria himself, his characters are educated and qualified, and speak the ‘modern vernacular of the urban Indian, seeped in Ambedkarite religious and social theory.51 In doing so, the modern non-dalit reader of Navaria is able to immediately position himself within the space that Navaria’s characters inhabit. This happens because the stereotype of the dalit is disproved, and the savarna reader is told: He is as qualified as you are, can speak fluent English, can own a Ford Endeavor, can be a high-ranking government official, and possibly goes to the same gym as you do. This relatability feature is conveyed in a register of Hindi+English—urban, conversationalist, easy-to-understand—used by Navaria in his writing which allows a direct confrontation of caste in the metropolis.

‘Dalit writers consciously stylize their narrative to construct social and political meaning,’ writes Brueck.52 Rightly so, for Navaria, a story is a ‘bridge between the private and the public. The author crosses the bridge and invites others to come across it themselves.’53 His characters, like Subhash, undergo a crisis of identity between their private and public self in the urban setting. Here, they find their caste status anonymised, but are constantly made aware of it owing to the psychological turmoil that accrues out of the cutting of the umblical cord. The modern casteless subject is fraught with the signifiers of their caste identity such as the tattoo and the shoes, and this becomes the source of alienation in the city. Crossing this bridge becomes essential for the characters, in order to facilitate that sense of Brueck, Writing Resistance, 126.

Ibid., 123.

52 Ibid., 7.

53 Ibid., 124.

50 51

41

achievement in the minds of the dalit reader, who would be encouraged to do the same in their public sphere. In this way, a modern dalit identity is sought to be constructed within and outside the literary sphere. This ‘stylistic uniqueness’ of Navaria’s writing supplies his text with its specificity of a dalit consciousness. Rightly so then, Mohammed Hanif ’s blurb recommendation to the collection of short stories by Ajay Navaria, Unclaimed Terrain, reads, ‘I am not sure if new India ever realized that it needed a new Premchand, but in Navaria, India has got one.’ Along with that, a new and renewed dalit consciousness.

Bibliography

Anand, S, ed. Touchable Tales: Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature.

Chennai: Navayana, 2003.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 674–685. London: Blackwell, 2004.

Bama. “Dalit Literature,” translated by M. Vijayalakshmi, in Indian Literature Vol. 43, No. 5 (193) (Sept–Oct. 1999): 97–98. http://www.jstor. org/stable/2334264.

Brueck, Laura. Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Godard, Barbara, Arun Mukherjee and Alok Mukherjee. “Translating Minoritized Cultures: Issues of Caste, Class and Gender.” Postcolonial Text Vol. 2, No. 3 (2006): 1–23.

Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980.

Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies, and Considerations. Translated by Alok Mukherjee.

New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004.

Navaria, Ajay. “गोदना” नया ज्ञानोदय August 2012: 46–51.

———. “Hello Premchand.” In Unclaimed Terrain, translated by Laura Brueck. New Delhi: Navayana, 2013.

———. “Tattoo.” In Unclaimed Terrain, translated by Laura Brueck. New Delhi: Navayana, 2013.

42

Orsini, Francesca. “Introduction.” In The Oxford India Premchand. New Delhi: OUP, 2004.

Pandey, Geetanjali. Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Premchand. Delhi: Manohar, 1989.

Pandian, M.S.S. “Writing Ordinary Lives.” Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 43, No. 38 (September 20–26, 2008). https://www.jstor.org/ stable/40277974.

Premchand, Munshi. “The Price of Milk.” In The Oxford India Premchand, translated by David Rubin. New Delhi: OUP, 2004.

———. “January Night.” In The Oxford India Premchand, translated by David Rubin. New Delhi: OUP, 2004.

———. “Aim of Literature.” In The Oxford India Premchand, translated by Francesca Orsini. New Delhi: OUP, 2004.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Politics of Translation.” In Outside in the Teaching Machine, 179–200. New York: Routledge, 1993.

———. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by C. Neson and L. Grossberg, 271–314. Bassingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988.

Upadhyay, Shashi Bhushan. “Representing the Underdogs: Dalits in the Literature of Premchand.” Studies in History 18 (February 2002): 51–79.

Valmiki, Omprakash. Joothan: A Dalit’s Life. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

43

© Muhammad Cheema

44

Niyati Shenoy Information and Impersonation in Colonial India: The Strange Case of Panchkouree Khan The involuntary disguise that inherited language so often imposes . . . was thus superimposed by a voluntary disguise . . . the result is a work censored twice over: its spaces, ellipses, contradictions, disorders, allusions, repetitions, are the result of this uniquely adverse process of composition.

Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci

Page twenty-seven of The Perishable Empire, a compilation of Meenakshi Mukherjee’s essays from the 1990s, contains an appendix of early Indian fiction in English, chronologically arranged, from the period 1830-1930.

At the earliest end of this array we find an unknown. “Khan, Panchkouree.

The Revelations of an Orderly. First published in Benares Recorder, 1846 (?).

Subsequent editions: London, 1849; Calcutta, 1857; Calcutta, 1891.”1 Given the intensity of scholarly attention to English-language writing by Indians in the nineteenth century, this entry provokes immediate speculation.

The date 1846 would make this title the first novel-length work in English by an Indian, contemporary to novellas by the Young Bengalians Kylas and Soshee Chunder Dutt, and almost twenty years ahead of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Rajmohan’s Wife. Like the mention of Uqbar in the story

by Borges, however, it appears here and nowhere else.

Whether the desire to explain, uncover, reconcile, or rationalize this anomaly is a valid one—given that the very terms of such an inquiry imply misplacement or misrecognition in some assumed order or established series of facts—is a question that will arise with great force in the progression of this essay, but which must be set aside for now. What historical records offer, in the meantime, is evidence of something that both is and is not a ‘mistake’: the name Panchkouree Khan is a pseudonym, and the novel written under this name is a first-person account of how its character-author, a recently-hired chaprasi or peon in the British East India Company’s government offices in Benares, participates in and observes various widespread practices of corruption and bad governance in the mofussil courts of Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000) 27.

1

45

the administration about a decade prior to the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

The real author behind this fictive persona is George Wyatt, a Company civil servant who worked between the years 1841 and 1854 in the district administration of Benares as a deputy collector and deputy magistrate.2 Wyatt published Revelations in serialised form in the Benares Recorder, a local periodical which circulated amongst the British inhabitants of the United Provinces from 1846 to 1854. It was very well-received as a satire; the work was picked up first by a Benares publisher, E.J. Lazarus, and then by a London publisher, Trubner and Co. of Paternoster Row, in 1848-1849.

On reaching London, Revelations appears to have been popular enough in India circles to merit plagiarism. An article that appeared in Charles Dickens’ journal Household Words in 1853, titled ‘The Great Indian Bean-Stalk,’ by a longtime India-based journalist named John Capper, borrowed passages almost verbatim from the opening chapters of the novel, only changing proper names.3 We also see evidence of a political afterlife for this novel in the Nil Durpan trial in Calcutta in 1861, where a lawyer defending the Reverend James Long against the charge of libel cited Revelations, along with Oliver Twist and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as an example of fiction that closely paralleled society without singling out an entire class of people as villains (though this characterization, we will see, may not be entirely true).4 “Many gentlemen might have been annoyed at it,” the trial summary says of Revelations, “yet no legal exception was taken to it”—perhaps, we might add here, because its writer clearly knew his courts.5 We have no way of knowing what Wyatt might have thought of Long, who, in his attempts to bring the gross mistreatment of native labourers at indigo plantations to public attention, can be seen a fellow intermediary-of-sorts between the British ruling elite and the population they controlled. We have no way of knowing because, having retired in 1854, Wyatt was killed while defending Benares when the Rebellion spread there from Meerut in 1857.6 Bernard S. Cohn, The Development and Impact of British Administration in India: A Bibliographical Essay (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1961), 23.

3 John Capper, ‘The Great Indian Bean-Stalk’, Household Words VIII, No. 182, (17 Sept 1853): 60-64. http://www.djo.org.uk/media/downloads/articles/2369_The%20Great%20 Indian%20Bean-Stalk.pdf 4 Dinabandhu Mitra, Nil Durpan, or The Indigo Planting Mirror, trans. A Native (Michael Madhusudhan Dutt), ed. Sankar Sen Gupta (Calcutta: Indian Publications, 1972), 138139, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.33402.

5 Mitra, Nil Durpan, 138-39.

6 “Anglo-Indian Literature,” The Reader: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Art (London: 2

46

The ‘record’, then, lends to this novel a trail that has been mined here only to an extent that enables this inquiry to posit for its author a condition of misrecognition or intermediacy. This has been done so that we may address the question of Panchkouree Khan’s inclusion in a list of Indian English authors in more knowing terms. If Wyatt seems British, and the persona of Panchkouree—an ex-ryot, or small cultivator, with a publishable level of skill in English—seems to be presented in a self-conscious condition of impossibility or unreality, we are confronted by the application of the category ‘Indian’, itself fictive in different ways for different historical periods, and must ask how or why it cannot exactly accommodate either. Is Wyatt identified as ‘Indian’ in the above-mentioned appendix because Panchkouree Khan is taken to be a real name? This seems unlikely. The mystery comes to its crux when we realize, however, interestingly enough, that by some rubrics Wyatt himself ‘counts’. The scholar Bernard Cohn, in a guide to sources on administrative history, notes that Wyatt was an “Anglo-Indian uncovenanted servant.”7 While the designation ‘Anglo-Indian’ also sometimes extended to non-mixed-race Europeans living in India, the fact that Wyatt was also an uncovenanted civil servant tilts toward the conclusion that he was of mixed race. Uncovenanted posts in the East India Company were created largely to satisfy an urgent administrative need for subordinate English-speaking clerical labour to which the duties of higher-ranking European officers could be deputized, and Anglo-Indians monopolized these posts in many parts of India.8 Servants in uncovenanted posts could not rise beyond certain levels of rank in the administration; their appointments were regulated entirely by local branches of government. This allowed the Company to employ Anglo-Indians as intermediaries at a time when English education for native Indians was at a nascent stage without compromising on a Europeans-only policy for the highest levels of the colonial state.

It will be argued here that misrecognizing Wyatt—taking in his disguise, one way or the other way—may serve as the best way to interrogate an ad112 Fleet Street, November 1864): 663-64, http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/ india/reader1864.html; Bernard S. Cohn, The Development and Impact of British Administration in India: A Bibliographical Essay (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1961), 23. The edition of The Revelations of an Orderly from which this essay cites is the 1866 London reissue by Trubner.

7 Cohn, Development, 23.

8 Noel P. Gist and Roy Dean Wright, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially-Mixed Minority in India (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973), 57.

47

ditional double-interlinked status he possesses: as an agent of an occupying state aspiring to hegemony, and as a claim-making subject upon whom power acts. The slippage between his identity and his invented persona reveals a complementary logic of intermediacy and impersonation that operates through the information-gathering, expository, and knowledge producing agendas of this text. We see through Wyatt the outline of a state or structure—an intention to become or achieve—that cannot simply occupy or impose or appropriate in order to produce assimilation and change. In order to further itself, it must know, and in order to know, it must interpret, translate, construct, represent, and subsequently encounter the limits of its knowledge and power in the Other’s resistance to understanding. The discourse Wyatt engages in Revelations of an Orderly can thus be illuminated through his choice of genre, especially as this genre is taken in conjunction with what we may infer of his own social identity. A half-Indian civil-servant’s impersonation of a ryot-turned-peon, this essay suggests, gives the servant a cloaking device through which he is ‘free’ to ‘tell the truth’, but also to reify the frustrations and self-contradictions of colonial power.

Wyatt’s preface to Revelations, in its appeals to a literary tradition of impersonation and a political tradition of well-meaning ‘exposé’, draws upon a claim of real, not fictive, eyewitnessing, of cultural embeddedness, that complicates the logics of both traditions. Writing as himself—anonymously—Wyatt states that his object is “to expose abuses in the subordinate administration of the Courts, that are universally acknowledged to exist.”9 His grounds to speak on this issue—which is evidently something of a sore topic for India’s rulers—derive from twenty-one years of service in a variety of departments. This has “given him some insight into the native character”: sufficient insight, it is asserted, to be able to transcend the mere showing-off of familiarity with administrative creoles and hybrid language, and instead to reinscribe the conditions that produce this language back into the very act of relating to, and thereby inventing, the Other.10 Sentences like “The Saheb Shistant represented matters truly to the Magistrate, who dakhil duftured the case” and “Whereas now he is as unctuous-looking a man as ever lived upon a pou of ghee per diem” appear almost gratuiPaunchkouree Khan (pseud.), The Revelations of an Orderly. Being an attempt to expose the abuses of administration by the relation of every-day occurrences in the Mofussil Courts (Benares: E.J. Lazarus, 1866), 3.

10 Ibid.

9

48

tously code-switched,11 and false names like Madame Dilfureb (Deceitful Heart), Lootcha Singh (Mr Libertine), Beinsafpoor (Injustice-town), and Zalimgunje (Criminal-ville) signal an element of satire,12 but the claim to represent alterity in personality, perspective, and character through the redeployment of this language appears to be very serious. Thus even as he mocks the venality and moral dissolution of the natives, Wyatt also uses Panchkouree to parody the bland cluelessness of white residents through an exaggeration of their mannerisms: A Subaltern was dispatched on horseback [during a panic about a rumoured rebellion], and on his reaching the godowns [of the opium factory], he was agreeably surprised to hear shouts of merriment. “Hallo! Captain Snooks, how are you all?” asked the Sub; “Jolly,” said Snooks, “I never passed a pleasanter night, and trust I may have several more such nights yet.

Nothing but broiled bones and beer and billiards all night, my boy. What dye-call-‘em, and I were right Jolly.”13

His claim to seriousness established by daring, Wyatt proceeds to his intentions: he is “desirous of shewing the public in general, and young officials in particular, the several modes that the natives have of ‘throwing dust’ in the eyes of their European superiors.”14 Should this a priori statement of helpful and improving intent fail to reconcile his European readers to the quantity of criticism the text levels at both them and their administration, Wyatt pleads humility: “He could not presume to do this in his own person; and he made use of the fictitious agency of ‘an Orderly’ to relate his own diverse experience.” 15 This plea, and its avowed presumption, implicitly acknowledges that a loyalist or collaborator in the British colonial system must perform subordination in a certain way: as “humble, menial, unconditionally rendered services,” passively and invisibly aggregated to the mass functionings of a leviathan in forever unacknowledged, and thus valorized, displays of selfless patriotism and dedication. On the other hand, however, the plea shows that in actual practice colonial loyalty is a matter of flux, never assumed, and always somehow ‘less,’ no matter how earnestly proclaimed: its logic is “demonstrative by its very nature: it speaks up because it Ibid., 54; 38.

Ibid. 22; 27; 54; translations are the ones given in the glossary of the text itself.

13 Ibid., 155.

14 Ibid., 3.

15 Ibid.

11 12

49

wants to be noticed.”16 In this sense it is a favour that is bestowed upon, and simultaneously asked back of, India’s white rulers: the collaborator tries to distinguish himself from the low esteem with which the rest of his class or level are regarded by revealing their secrets to his masters.

We see exactly, then, why the term ‘fictitious agency’ is apt, and also how helpfully it serves as an agency, despite being fictitious, at the very end of the novel. Wyatt issues a final disclaimer, but the lingering spirit of his persona and the condemnations it has made reflect in closing remarks that make a much more bold gesture to neutrality, and beyond that, to a shifted allegiance with the governed and oppressed. “I had no personal enmity to revenge; no personal friendship to serve; no ambitious object to attain,” he writes. “If the truths I have written have the effect of remedying one single evil that may press heavily upon the ryut, in that shall be my reward.”17 Between the meta-commentary of preface and conclusion lies a dance of imposture and exposure that struggles at every turn with the privilege implicit in claiming knowledge production and the danger of taking a fictitious subordinate agency too far. For if Panchkouree Khan is yet another iteration of “the colonized subject who exists both as a fictive construct of colonial topology and actual resident of tropical space, object of representation and agent of resistance,” then the conditions that enable his constructed existence implicate elite white readers—who are relying upon this imaginative exercise to learn more about themselves and their record of governance—in the counterfeit nature of that knowledge.18 As Panchkouree, who has bribed a friend to gain his position in the courts, learns the tricks of his trade, the reader who learns in parallel with him must contend with the awareness that this wisdom is acquired by swindling zamindars, cheating the state, and fooling superiors, and that the very fact of needing to know it legitimizes it in some way. “The Saheban Aleeshan little dream of the hundreds of ways in which grinding oppression is practised under their very noses,” Wyatt writes. What is unsaid here is that, as the author of this text, he possesses that ability to dream, that greater canniness Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 65.

17 Khan, Revelations, 212.

18 Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) 4.

16

50

of imagination. It sets him above his superiors despite the privileges of their education: “Be they ever so vigilant, they are deceived by the native officials; and it is only by some lucky chance that they stumble upon the practices which pervert the intentions of justice. If they be ever so clearsighted, they are made to see through the eyes of others. How is this possible? you indignantly ask; are not the Civil Servants of the Government the elite of England? Are they not some of them acknowledged to be the most talented men of the country? Has not this class furnished some of the ablest Statesmen in the world? All this I acknowledge. But what can they do? I have stood behind the chair of the Collector Saheb, and I have seen him absolutely unable to go through the official drudgery of the day.”19

These stories are true, and they humiliate the colonial elite that enable them; if Panchkouree’s knowledge is ill-acquired and his intent is malevolent, Wyatt’s must be unimpeachable.

One notable way in which Wyatt attempts to establish this good faith is in the invocation of the ryot as an object of social justice. The origin story of Wyatt’s persona Panchkouree involves a tale of rural dispossession effected through the manipulation of corrupt and inefficient local courts. “I have myself been a humble ryot and have felt the insolence and oppression of the ‘Jacks in office,’” Panchkouree narrates. “I have had the produce of my little field, which with the labor of my wife and little ones, I had matured, and expected to reap, attached and sold, despite my complaints to the Hakims.”20 Because a new zamindar is able to bog Panchkouree down financially and bureaucratically in the contestation of endless appeals, the British judicial system presents itself to him as arbitrary and contingent, distorted by the flows of money, whim, and social consequence: “God and the Prophet know that the Saheban Aleeshan have a peculiar mode of administering their own laws. One Hakim passes an order to a certain effect, and another passes one diametrically opposite to it. Both fancy themselves to be right; either the laws are enigmas, or the administrators are over-instructed in them. God help us poor ryuts.” 21 In parallel to Panchkouree’s local and personal investment in the fate of Khan, Revelations, 121.

Ibid.

21 Ibid., 130.

19 20

51

peasants, however, Wyatt also has his persona quote lines of Oliver Goldsmith that he finds aptly sum up their plight: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey . . . a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, when once destroyed can never be supplied.”22 These are lines from The Deserted Village, written in 1770 to lament the effects of enclosure and emigration upon the peasantry of Ireland. In looping back from an exercise of empathy with an alien subject to an affective marker that his readers might find more moving, Wyatt frames both the ryot’s embitterment and the white saheb’s benevolent-but-passive pity within the single charge of mutual incomprehension, momentarily leveling the field between both perspectives. While the governors are literate and the governed are not, neither, in this formulation, can read what is legible or sensible to the other—and neither can do much of anything about it. We see at this moment that the ‘revelations’ imagined into the heart of this text are concerned with the problem of intervention in a system “structured like a despotism, with no mediating depths, no space provided for transactions between the will of the rulers and that of the ruled.”23 And yet it is at this very moment of revelation that the ryot—the lowest and most ‘voiceless’ of the governed, invoked in the dedications of dozens of ‘improving’ administrative treatises—effectively vanishes from our sight: Panchkouree, by taking advantage of his intermediary position to solicit bribes and exploit petitioners, has turned from ryot to oppressor.

Invoking this class in an imagined persona does nothing to recover its subjectivity.

Thus, as Wyatt attempts to mediate an understanding between ruler and ryot from a middle position, that position itself evades clarity: it must remain concealed and opaque, or reveal itself to be fractured to the point of absence and illusion. The ryot’s perspective is subsumed within the fictionalized rise of a bitter peasant into a world of venal, cynical flunkeys, while the contradictions of colonial self-knowledge and aspirations of hegemony are replicated in the mixed-race subordinate’s efforts to feel his way into the shoes of a native servantry he reviles but has more in common with than he would like to admit. Like the state he seeks to aid, Wyatt fails to become transparent and frictionless in his aspirations to end an epistemic impasse.

In effect, the only understanding he unwittingly reproduces is one that reveals the integrality of middlemen—the Omlah, or the native informant/ collaborator class—and the ways in which they will continue to embody 22 23

Ibid., 161.

Guha, Dominance, 65.

52

the contradictions of the colonial state. The strongest lingering impression we receive in the course of this exercise is in fact that of Wyatt’s own anxiety—that either the state he collaborates with will collapse under the inassimilable weight of its laws, or worse, that newly-educated and corrupt Indian middlemen will render the intermediary role of loyal Anglo-Indians obsolete: The witnesses named by the poor widow turn against her, and the thanadar is obliged to report that the charge is not proven by the witnesses of the prosecutrix. Now, how can the Magistrate punish? Where is the legal proof ? The witnesses dare not give honest evidence! Of what use then are laws and legal and police establishments you ask. I answer, that the are only fit to awe the weak. There is no law that has yet been passed, that a clever scoundrel cannot break through. And thanks to the policy of an enlightened age, the spread of education is only enabling the natives to become keener rogues. Every common gunwar quotes his kantractions and surkoolarhookoom; and nine out of ten of the hangers on of the courts know only so much of English as to render them dangerous eaves droppers.24

Ironically, then, Wyatt is condemning the Frankenstein’s monster that he himself has used as a narrative instrument to convey his political warnings: the native who has familiarized himself with an alien language solely on his own terms. These lines reveal that as both exploiting and exploited Indian natives learn to navigate the rigid principles and configurations of the alien state, that state’s unbending foreignness—manifested in both English itself and in the juridico-legal-political language which structures the worldviews of white administrators—presents an opportunity for institutional capture. Laws and language that are meant to transform society, civilize natives, and improve governance are imbibed in a way that is unscrupulous, unprincipled, and instrumental; their ethical force, deterrent value, and effectiveness are essentially neutralized, even as the Omlah continue to feign humbleness and submission. Breakable laws and trickable state apparatuses which are only “fit to awe the weak” serve to destabilize and fragment the concept of legality. Seeing this this in Gramscian terms—as a conflict between the laws and moral codes of the state, which can be backed by coercion, and those of indigenous civil society, which lacks equivalent coercive capacity but is much more ubiquitous and has its own methods of pressure and compulsion—leaves us with a situation in which middlemen harness the coercive power of the state to whichever local societal moral code hap24

Khan, Revelations, 76.

53

pens to serve them well at any given moment. In the words of Perry Anderson, a noted commentator on Gramsci, this results in a theoretical bind: “a structural indistinction between law and custom, juridical rules and conventional norms, which impedes any accurate demarcation of the respective provinces of civil society or the State in a capitalist social formation.”25 “I confess that no preventative measure occurs to me,” Wyatt both brags and pleads through Panchkouree. The search for such measures, he suggests, must derive from a strategy of survival: Company servants must shed both the principle of self-sufficiency and that of reciprocity. They must get what they can, in the best spirit of their venal native subordinates: without opposing fraud by fraud, how is villainy to be countered? Moral obligations must cease to have influence when the law, which is supposed to protect, is not sufficient to check the atrocious practices which subvert its best ends. Hence ignorant men, like myself and my brethren, infer that if the law cannot protect us, we must do so ourselves; and since the law cannot penetrate through the mysterious veils of villainy and punish it signally, we must adopt cunning to overthrow conspiracy.26

Wyatt’s invocation of Oliver Goldsmith and the deserted village, we see then, is intended both to function as a ‘veil’ of sanction and as a marker of resignation and disillusionment. Goldsmith was one of a number of eighteenth-century European authors, such as Charles de Montesquieu and Elizabeth Hamilton, to write novels critiquing metropolitan European society in the impersonated voice of an exotic foreign traveller. The scholar Inderpal Grewal has noted that metropolitan writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century privileged “the Rousseauist dream of a transparent civil society with the perfect social contract, where homogeneity was the predominant trait ensuring knowledge, a single will, and a disciplined populace”; the ideal state of affairs was one in which “everybody was like everybody else and people saw into each other’s hearts.”27 The problem of projecting this worldview onto non-egalitarian and non-democratic colonial societies vexed a number of fake travelogues, such as Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796). Using the voice of her narrator, a Hindu prince who is inspired to travel to England after befriending a wounded British officer (modeled on her brother), Hamilton Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review (1976): 33.

Khan, Revelations, 204.

27 Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 26.

25 26

54

attempted to demonstrate the value of the colonies to British social modes and forms of government. The scholar Padma Rangarajan summarizes Hamilton’s political vision thus: “benevolent British Oriento-colonialism will return India as well as Britain to their respective and quasi-utopian pasts through the symbiotic dissemination of knowledge.”28 The European readerships that consumed this genre of ‘travelogue’ were especially drawn to “the new fictional form’s practiced ambivalence about its relationship to ‘fact’—its constant insistence that it was history and journalism rather than fiction.”29 The success that even non-privileged or non-authoritative authors such as Hamilton and the writer Phebe Gibbes had with their impersonations and representations of the Other in Orientalist fantasies may have been a significant influence upon Wyatt, a member of a social group that was increasingly shunned by Indians and Europeans alike. It may have empowered him to investigate whether the use of imagination to convey unauthorized political opinions and positions proves effective in a curtailed reality, such as when the originator and the subject of the fantasy are deprived of the right to authoritatively represent themselves, and wish to recover that right through an imaginative alliance.

Yet, as we have seen, in Panchkouree’s endorsement of countering one kind of fraud and illusion with another, Wyatt’s agenda of unauthorized critique struggles against, but buys back into the ultimate premise of, a larger narrative of knowledge extraction and blame. The colonial state within which he operates is a denialist one: it explicitly rejects the potential of imaginative alliances on any terms which even fleetingly admit an equal humanity or rationality in the Other. It is simultaneously run through with discourse that seeks to expropriate powerful information from a resistant subject population for the purpose of economic exploitation, and a sublimated desire to achieve what C. A. Bayly calls “embodied knowledge”: an affective assimilation or acculturation that, translated into Gramscian terms, harnesses the moral and social authority of civil society to the dominant state, and enables that state to cast its dominance over every aspect of life as a sign of cultural knowledge, legitimacy, and consensual governance.30 The history Padma Rangarajan, “Colonial Funkiness: Cosmopolitanism and Fake Travelogues in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Nineteenth Century Studies 23 (2009): 6.

29 Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 11.

30 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3.

28

55

of the earliest days of the East India Company’s conquest of Bengal was entangled with the emergence of an imperial ruling philosophy that failed to recognize the impossibility of reconciling these two aims without effecting an insupportable change upon its own core principle of European racial distance, superiority, and mastery by right of conquest. The first administrators of the Bengal diwani were concerned almost solely with economic extraction, and Guha sums up the aims of their knowledge project thus: “information about the volume and value of agricultural produce, the rules for appropriation of the producer’s surplus by landlords and the state, the nature of land tenures and proprietary institutions, the technicalities of estate accounts, and above all, the laws and traditions governing the relationship of peasants, landlords, and the state.”31 If Panchkouree’s cultural commentary then centrally concerns itself with disputes over land, agriculture, and revenue, this is no accident. The quest for precisely these categories of information brought the Company’s economic agenda face-to-face with cultural institutions that did not fall within the sphere of economic relations, but which comprised the superstructural establishments that mediated between the economy and the extractive State—in other words, elements of civil society, such as the landed elite, that possessed their own logics of power.32 Complaints about the ‘treachery’ and resistance of these mediating components of native society are baked into accounts of the Company’s administration from its very beginning. Given that the imperial master-narrative required natives to make embodied knowledge readily accessible to their rulers for the purpose of conversion into official intelligence, any quests for information that did not produce total and transparent divulgence were regarded as failures to be blamed on native treachery. “The alleged ‘chicanery’ consisted,” Guha writes, “of two shortcomings on the part of the natives: first, their refusal to part with a knowledge that owed nothing to the alien rule to which they had been recently subjected; and secondly, their resistance to ‘the use of such knowledge’ in the ‘public’ interest . . . .”33 If Wyatt is seeking to feel his way into the perspectives of these resisting subjects and corral them into “knowledge-altruism” through an imaginative alliance, he effectively blurs his own connection to this colonial concept of public interest: if the colonizer must deign to explain the logic of this interest or prove Guha, Dominance, 158.

Anderson, “Antinomies,” 13.

33 Guha, Dominance, 158.

31 32

56

how it benefits everyone, that interest is no longer self-evident, and ceases in some way to be “public.” This concession will not be made, judging from the outcomes of previous attempts to elicit it. As Guha writes, “the efforts of the ‘improvers’ amongst [the colonialist elite]… failed to develop a strategy of persuasion effective enough to overcome the sense of isolation that haunted the regime, a sense in which the alien character of the state was more amply documented than anything else.”34 Wyatt’s intention to critique the operation of the colonial state is therefore shot through by a well-established discursive convention that views native middlemen, the Omlah, as both an object of blame for the failure of knowledge acquisition and as the primary cause of the colonial state’s inability to transform civil society or achieve hegemonic status. This outcome is in some way inevitable. If this matter is personal for Wyatt—himself a product of sexual exchange, a hated relic of ‘embodied knowledge’—it is also “personal” for the State: the Western observer . . . regarded the withholding of an indigenous knowledge of any kind invariably as an assertion of ethnic identity, which excluded him . . . . The fear and indeed the sense of humiliation generated by the want of access to what he thought was his by virtue of an undefined racial, cultural or spiritual superiority, or simply by right of conquest . . . could be compensated by generalizations about native character and society as devoid of all that stood for positive values in the alien’s own society and character.35

In this reality, Wyatt cannot but make generalizations and judgements about the Omlah’s morals and values. The state whose rules facilitate their corruption may be able to be salvaged, but they can be counted as good men only in so far as they are held in check by it, and not by any virtue intrinsic to them: Where people have almost unlimited power to do good or to do evil; and they may be turned out at a moment’s notice, either for any presumed offence, or from dislike on the part of the Huzoor, and when such dismissals are, in reality, final, without the benefit of an unprejudiced hearing on appeal, of course an incumbent must be a fool to allow any moral considerations to check his venality. “Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die” 34 35

Ibid., 65.

Ibid., 162.

57

is their motto [note the ‘their’ here]. Accordingly, in forty-nine out of fifty officials the practice is to do nothing without a fee.36

This deflection onto a timeless truth, an unimpeachable principle of subhuman nature, constitutes the true misplacement or misrecognition inherent within The Revelations of an Orderly. The attempt of one type of intermediary subject to expose—and thus render transparent and eliminate—another intermediary group actually clarifies the permanence of its resistive character, its evasion of class or moral categories, duties, or interests, its centrality as a by-product of a despotic and oppressive colonial state, and the inability to assimilate it neatly to any positive-theoretical role whatsoever in the operation of hegemony and power. Perhaps George Wyatt the writer—an admirer of irony, of realities that transcend fiction—might have appreciated the involuntary disguise that history, in its whimsy, mistakenly cast upon him. George Wyatt the man, however—a social, racial, and political go-between—vanishes into the grey space of collaboration that upholds the colonial order of things.

Bibliography

Anderson, Perry. “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.” New Left Review, November-December 1976.

“Anglo-Indian Literature.” The Reader: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Art. London: 112 Fleet Street, November 1864. http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/india/reader1864.html

Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804.

Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Bayly, C.A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Capper, John. “The Great Indian Bean-Stalk.” Household Words VIII, No. 182 (17 Sept 1853): 60-64. http://www.djo.org.uk/media/downloads/articles/2369_The%20Great%20Indian%20Bean-Stalk.pdf Cohn, Bernard S. The Development and Impact of British Administration in India: A Bibliographical Essay. New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public 36

Khan, Revelations, 96.

58

Administration, 1961.

Gist, Noel P., and Roy Dean Wright. Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially-Mixed Minority in India. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973.

Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Guha, Ranajit. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Joseph, Betty. Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Khan, Paunchkouree. The Revelations of an Orderly. Being an attempt to expose the abuses of administration by the relation of every-day occurrences in the Mofussil Courts. Benares: E.J. Lazarus, 1866.

Mitra, Dinabandhu, and Sankar Sen Gupta, ed. Nil Durpan, or The Indigo Planting Mirror. Calcutta: Indian Publications, 1972. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.33402

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Rangarajan, Padma. “Colonial Funkiness: Cosmopolitanism and Fake Travelogues in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Nineteenth Century Studies 23 (2009).

59

Š Reda Berrada

60

Arthur Martin Hegemony and History in Postcolonial Pakistan In his address at the 1952 All Pakistan History Conference’s second session, Pakistani education minister Fazlur Rahman called on the scholars present “to start seriously the work of rewriting the history of Islam.”1 The appeal to rewrite the history of Islam or of Pakistan would be made repeatedly by future government and military leaders, and many historians began writing textbooks and official histories of Islam in South Asia. These textbooks and official histories have been reviewed in recent academic critiques and policy reports which examine the errors in Pakistani history books and raise concern about the use of history as a tool for ideological indoctrination.2 Many have concluded that there is a direct correlation between the extremism and violence witnessed in Pakistani society and the history textbooks which are exclusively centred on the supremacy of Islam and reveal a deep distrust and hatred of the Hindu other.3 While these works acknowledge that there have been attempts at indoctrination, they do not elaborate about the ideas of Pakistani or Muslim nationalism or the processes whereby nation-building strategies were developed and co-opted for state purposes in the postcolonial period. To fully appreciate why textbooks and official histories told certain narratives, it is necessary to understand how they relate to the project of Pakistani nation-building.

It is also necessary to understand why Pakistan’s dominant class sought to construct the Pakistani nation on the basis of Islam, with antipathy towards India, in the immediate postcolonial period.

Fazlur Rahman, “Foreword,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 1, no. 1 ( January 1953): 2.

2 Pakistani textbooks were examined in K. K. Aziz’s The Murder of History in Pakistan, first published in 1983, which reviewed a sample of the history textbooks published by various school boards. He concluded that the textbooks were fraught with obvious factual errors.

His work inspired subsequent reviews of Pakistan’s education system and textbooks. These include academic writings of Arvil Powell, Ayesha Jalal, Aminah Mohammad-Arif and others. American non-governmental organizations and think tanks such as the RAND Corporation, the Sustainable Development Policy Initiative, and the United States Institute of Peace have focused on Pakistani historical education as well, often to consider its impact on terrorism and jihad.

3 C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army‘s Way of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

1

61

Since 2009, historians such as Faisal Devji, Sadia Bajwa, and Ali Usman Qasmi have attempted to address these questions by examining how official histories are used for the process of nation-building. Devji has argued that the concept of a Pakistani nation was developed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who sought to provide a historical justification for a distinct Muslim community from the rest of India’s religious communities. In Devji’s reading, Jinnah’s approach prompted rapid historical writings inventing Pakistani nationhood, despite the idea of Pakistan being ahistorical.4 This interpretation of Pakistan as ahistorical overlooks the historiographical tradition focusing on the history of Muslim communities in India that was already rich by the mid-twentieth century, and which invariably influenced Muslim politics as well. Devji insists on reading Jinnah’s statements about the past as an acknowledgement of the intertwining of Hindus and Muslims in history rather than a conscious effort on Jinnah’s behalf to invoke the past as an idiom of conflict so as to support the case for a separate state.5 Contrary to Devji’s interpretation, when Jinnah referenced the differences between Hindus and Muslims in matters of culture, traditions, and religious beliefs, he referenced examples already expounded in Muslim historiography. Bajwa traces Muslim historiography in pre-independence South Asia, and more convincingly argues that the production of historical narratives about a Muslim past in the colonial period shaped how history was written in the postcolonial period.6 Nationalist histories of Muslims in South Asia were included in the nascent official histories written with the ideological aim of forging a Pakistani identity. Bajwa shows how these histories were not constructed out of thin air; rather, much of the content is drawn from pre-partition discourses contained in Muslim nationalist historiography.7 Ali Usman Qasmi has expanded on Bajwa’s research to argue that the historical narratives found in Pakistani textbooks (and even the scholarly works produced in Pakistan) have taken the form of a master narrative in which heroes are glorified, villains are condemned, and specific events are Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 97.

5 Ibid., 10.

6 Sadia Bajwa, “The Genealogy of Pakistan’s Nationalist Historiography: An Analysis of Historiography in the Context of the Emergent Muslim Nationalist Discourse, 1857– 1947,” (MA thesis, University of Heidelberg, 2009).

7 Ibid., 5.

4

62

remembered to help the construction of the Pakistani nation.8 Though they had their origins in the colonial period, these master narratives were perfected in postcolonial Pakistan and attained structural dominance because of the support lent to them by the state. According to Qasmi, these master narratives were transformed under the political exigencies of, first, the demand for a separate homeland for Muslims and, later, by the necessity for legitimizing the historical origins of the nation-state thus established.9 Qasmi’s findings uniquely contribute to the historiography of postcolonial Pakistan by examining how master narratives of history were replicated, for intellectual, ideological, and statist reasons, in textbooks and academic works in Pakistan.

Central to the construction of master narratives were the generations of historians who – with state approval or not – elected to write histories that defended and promoted the political positions of Pakistan’s dominant class.

These histories were written and rewritten repeatedly as the ideological basis of the dominant class’s rule changed. This paper will seek to expand on Bajwa’s and Qasmi’s research by relating the historians in nascent Pakistan to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘the intellectual,’ which acted in support of the hegemony of the dominant class. Gramsci’s concept of the intellectual also relates to Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the intelligentsia and its role in constructing nationhood. Muslim historians in colonial India challenged the hegemonic historical narratives before independence, however they became critical to the military-bureaucratic axis’s rise to dominance in postcolonial Pakistan. This paper will conclude by evaluating the degree to which master narratives achieved hegemony. Despite the master narratives becoming the seminal works of history in postcolonial Pakistan, some poets, novelists, and academics attempted to challenge the hegemony of the dominant class. For example, Hamza Alavi became known outside of Pakistan for his Marxist reading of Pakistani history that rejected the claims contained in master narratives.10 Ali Usman Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan: Tracing the Origins of an Ideological Agenda,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 4, Cambridge University Press (2018): 4.

9 Ibid., 5.

10 Beyond the purview of this paper, but an obvious gap in Pakistani historiography is an examination of how Western scholarship on Pakistan has also been plagued by similar historical errors and master narratives. The War on Terror has spawned new interest in Pakistan by American social scientists who have developed their own master narratives of Pakistani history. These narratives often use regional frameworks, such as ‘Af-Pak,’ or 8

63

Pakistan’s ‘Intellectual Class’ The scholars writing master narratives of Pakistani history are comparable to Gramsci’s intellectuals. Gramsci argues there is a strong relationship between the intellectuals and the dominant group, as the intellectuals are the ‘functionaries’ of complex superstructures which mediate the fabric of society.11 In this structure, the intellectuals are the dominant group’s deputies, exercising the functions of social hegemony. Gramsci argues that the ‘traditional’ professional intellectuals, which would include historians, are like the subalterns of the army in that their job is to articulate the message of the dominant classes and carry out the immediate execution of the production plan. Many intellectuals may think they “are the state,” a belief which is fundamentally incorrect according to Gramsci.12 Gramsci’s analysis of the relationship between the intellectual and dominant classes applies to master narratives of Muslim nationhood following independence. During the colonial period, Muslim histories of South Asia challenged British and Hindu cultural hegemony. This was originally seen in the Pakistan Movement, as Muslim historians of South Asia emphasized the uniqueness of the Muslim nation, though they never became the dominant scholars of Indian history.13 These histories were expanded upon and reshaped following independence to take the form of master narratives as the military-bureaucratic axis became dominant in Pakistan. The North Indian Muslim elites leading the Muslim League during the Pakistan Movement were not able to achieve hegemony in the new state they created. conceptual frameworks, such as crisis narratives, to write new histories which attempt to inform or defend American foreign policy. Not only are these narratives ahistorical, but they are plagued by many tropes common to Orientalist scholarship. For example, many American social scientists writing on Pakistani history have very homogenized perceptions of Islam, and often limit their analysis of Islam in Pakistan to how Muslims perceive the West. The work of these scholars also relates to Gramsci’s intellectuals in that they are purportedly critical of Pakistan’s state and society, but operate within the culturally hegemonic frameworks of writing about postcolonial societies in America, often to defend the position of the dominant class. The place of historians such as Ayesha Jalal, Ian Talbot, and David Gilmartin, who have analyzed Pakistan’s state and society without appealing to America’s foreign policy decision-makers or obeying Orientalist tropes is necessary to review as well.

11 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12.

12 Ibis., 16.

13 Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan,” 12.

64

Their popular support largely came from Muslims in provinces where they were religious minorities, not the Muslim-majority provinces which would form Pakistan. As the Muslim League failed to become a unifying organization after Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination in 1951, the military elites, who had deep historical roots in West Pakistan, became the dominant class. However, many of the historical arguments that were used during the Pakistan Movement, such as the two-nation theory, were interpolated into official histories once Pakistan became an independent state.

The military-bureaucratic axis first influenced the decision-making processes of the cabinet before overthrowing the government in 1958. Gramsci elucidates how the dominant fundamental group achieves its position because of historical prestige (and consequent confidence) which supports its position and function in the world of production. As Tan Tai Yong has argued, the regions which would encompass West Pakistan had long histories of militarization dating to the pre-colonial period, and the military became the principal mode of economic participation following the 1857 rebellion.14 This allowed the military-bureaucratic axis to wrest the coercive power of the state and oversee a nation-building process that protected its hegemony with the consent of Pakistanis.

Master narratives were thus constructed by historians in an attempt to achieve the “spontaneous consent” of the great mass of the Pakistani population.15 The position of the intellectuals who were supportive of Pakistan’s dominant class was buttressed after independence, as the apparatus of state coercive power could be used to enforce discipline on those groups who do not consent either actively or passively. This took the form of using Pakistan’s public and military education systems to teach these dominant histories. Historians often acted on behalf of the military-bureaucratic axis – sanctioned or otherwise – to affirm and protect its social and political hegemony.16 This was not done by explicitly referencing the military as the rightful dominant group in the various master narratives. Rather, historians willingly advocated on behalf of the military by defending its political Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab 1849-1947 (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005), 91.

15 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 12.

16 For a review of the military-bureaucratic axis in Pakistan, see: Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan‘s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Hamza Alavi, “The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh,” New Left Review 74, no.1 (1972): 59-81.

14

65

positions. For example, when historians advocated for the primacy of the two-nation theory, they gave moral authority to a state with an increasingly Islamic complexion. Similarly, when historians castigated India as an enemy and portrayed Hindus as a threatening ‘other,’ they sought to win the consent of the great mass in support of the established social order. By supporting the military’s dominant position, military elites were able to expand their control over the government and modes of economic production.17 The Uses of History during the Independence Movement Gramsci’s emphasis on the intellectuals as the functionaries of the dominant group relates to Benedict Anderson’s argument that the intelligentsia was central to the process of nation-building in postcolonial communities.

Anderson argues that postcolonial states’ nation-building policies saw both genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm and a systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling of nationalist ideology through mass media, the educational system, and administrative regulations.18 These nation-building policies instilled by the state created an imagined political community with a deep, horizontal comradeship, necessary for a state with an oversized military such as Pakistan’s. The production of master narratives of Pakistani history was one aspect of the nation-building – attempting to force the elite administrative language, Urdu, on a diverse, polyglot population was another – however, the other nation-building policies were included in later master narratives as having existed all along.

The process of imagining a Pakistani political community commenced during the colonial period. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, political organization and mobilization in the name of Indian nationalism had become commonplace. History as an academic discipline had become essential to political organization as the practice of writing accounts of Indian history by Indians themselves was embraced with great urgency.19 This was in part a response to current developments in Indian historiography written by colonial administrators. For example, the first volumes of the Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan‘s Military Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 22.

18 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016), 114.

19 Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan,” 11.

17

66

Cambridge History of India appeared between 1922 and 1938. These volumes were written mostly by British scholars, which prompted some Indian scholars to fully embrace what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the “cult of scientific history” to write their own competing narratives.20 As Hindu scholars embraced the task of writing histories of the subcontinent, some Muslim scholars felt the need to reconsider the questions driving their historical research and move beyond questions considered to be internal to Islam. For example, the Muslim writers contributing to Indian historiography since the 1880s had covered various themes related to Islamic history, including Hadith studies, and histories of scholasticism and jurisprudence in a South Asian context.21 As historical scholarship by Hindus became increasingly prominent in support of Indian national movements, Muslim scholarship which placed Muslim political communities in their South Asian contexts became more common in response. By writing histories which examined Muslim nationalism, Muslim historians challenged the dominant forms of South Asian history.

By the mid-twentieth century, history as an academic discipline had become an important source for defining Muslim identity and projecting an image of the Muslim community in a favourable light. This required developing a historical narrative which, without compromising on the idea of history as an empowering discourse, could paint historical Muslim rule in terms of modern-day principles of rights and tolerance.22 With the passage of Jinnah’s Lahore Declaration in March 1940, which was interpreted as demanding a separate state for Pakistan, narratives had to provide the historical basis for a distinct Muslim community that justified the argument for its separation from the rest of India’s religious communities.23 Paired with the Muslim League’s overwhelming success in the 1946 elections, Jinnah was able to appeal to a vague notion of what Pakistan would be following independence in part because of the histories written in support of Muslim nationhood.24 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Birth of Academic Historical Writing in India,” in Oxford History of Historical Writing, Vol. 4: 1800–1945, ed. Stuart Macintyre et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 524.

21 Bajwa, “The Genealogy of Pakistan‘s Nationalist Historiography,” 93.

22 Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan,” 11.

23 Tan Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), 44.

24 Ibid., 12.

20

67

As Anderson has argued, new postcolonial states often included both popular support and the instilling of nationalist ideology, which was seen throughout the Pakistan Movement. The Muslim League was able to conjure popular support in Muslim-minority provinces by appealing to historical notions of Muslim nationhood which would form the basis of Pakistan’s postcolonial nationalist ideology. Anderson also notes that the intelligentsia’s role in postcolonial civil society as the vanguard of national identities was derived from their bilingualism and literacy.25 This was certainly the case during the Pakistan Movement. As previously noted by Chakrabarty, South Asian historians adopted Western forms of historical narratives.

Many of these historians, such as Choudhry Rahmat Ali, who studied at Cambridge and is credited with founding the name of Pakistan, had adopted what Anderson calls Western languages-of-state which influenced the burgeoning national ideologies in Pakistan.26 Historical Production after Independence Just as historical narratives of Muslim nationhood were conducive to the Muslim League during the Pakistan Movement, they were even more central to the idea of Pakistan following independence. Immediately following partition, Pakistan needed to justify its existence at home and abroad. This was not lost upon the government and intelligentsia of the newly created state.27 Central to the government’s efforts to justify its existence was its perception of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims in South Asia. During the Pakistan Movement, the Muslim League had used the two-nation theory, the notion that there were historically two distinct nations in India – one Muslim, one Hindu – as its rallying cry. Upon Pakistan’s independence in 1947, Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, and other secular Muslim League elites sought to use Islam as a shared point of unity in the imagination of Pakistan’s political community.28 The two-nation theory continued to be used in historical writing in postcolonial Pakistan as a means to unify the new state and overcome provincial inequality, ethnic diversity, and Pakistan’s fissiparous tendencies. Some of the first histories of Pakistani nationhood Anderson, Imagined Communities, 116.

Ibid., 114.

27 Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 25.

28 Ibid., 51.

25 26

68

even predated Islam’s arrival on the subcontinent, however, they detailed the distinct character of the Muslim community upon its establishment.

The two-nation theory remained essential to Pakistani history writing after the military began its incursion into the government in 1951.

Immediately after independence, historians published narratives defending Pakistan’s existence without government sanction. However, these new histories were often endorsed and co-opted by the government. These works provide insight to the narratives that would be replicated in official histories and textbooks. Many scholars following their own pursuits genuinely believed in the distinctiveness of the Muslim community, which further helped the state justify its existence.29 This is consistent with Gramsci’s understanding of intellectuals as exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony. Even without explicit state support, Pakistani historians willingly enshrined the position of the dominant class in the new state, especially by highlighting Pakistan’s differences with India and Hindus.

For example, Abdullah Qureshi, a Pakistani journalist, claimed that Hindu and British historians had purposefully maligned the reputation of Muslim rulers and undermined their achievements. He claimed that this impacted Muslim historical scholarship as examiners in India’s universities were mostly Hindu, meaning Muslims had no option but to abuse their Muslim heroes to score higher marks.30 Academic publications attempted to defend Pakistan’s existence by pointing to its ancient culture. R.E.M. Wheeler’s 5000 Years of Pakistan: An Archeological Outline presented Pakistan to the world as a modern nation-state. It argued that Pakistan was a new Islamic state, however Islam was new to a nation that had existed for millennia.31 Similarly, S.M. Ikram, a former officer in the Indian civil service, and Percival Spear shed light on Pakistan’s antiquity in The Cultural Heritage of Pakistan, discussing the longstanding cultural foundations of Pakistan. Its publication later received funding from the Department of Advertising, Films and Publications of the Government of Pakistan.32 Following Khan’s assassination, Ishtiaq Qureshi and Fazlur Rahman, two cabinet ministers, were responsible for the organization of the production 29 Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan,” 13.

30 Ibid., 15.

31 R.E.M. Wheeler, Five Thousand Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline (Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1950).

32 S.M. Ikram and Percival Spear, The Cultural Heritage of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1955).

69

of master narratives of Pakistani history. This was first attempted through the Pakistan Historical Society, founded in 1952, which promoted the writing of history through “Islamic ideology,” an extension of the two-nation theory.33 Rahman organized the Pakistan History Board, which oversaw the society and sought “to prepare an authentic History of the Freedom Movement of Muslims in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent by covering the period from the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 to the establishment of Pakistan in 1947.”34 The Board was chaired by favourable historians such as Wheeler and reported to the cabinet. The main task for historians was to produce authentic and authoritative accounts of Muslim history in the region and of the circumstances that led to the establishment of Pakistan.

To this end, the government actively supported the society by funding its annual conferences and making demands of the types of histories it wanted to see published, as President Iskander Mirza did in 1956.35 The publications of the Pakistan History Board were essential to the writing of a state-sanctioned, official history of Pakistan. In the forward to A Short History of Hind-Pakistan, published in 1955, Rahman continued to emphasize the importance of history – or the rewriting of history – for the nation-building project, especially when Pakistan’s nascent society was being raised on an ideology.36 A Short History of Hind-Pakistan was the first example of a master narrative of history which was reproduced in officially sponsored histories, biographies and textbooks. The first, most noticeable, feature of the book was its title, as ‘Hind-Pakistan’ was used in place of ‘South Asia’ or ‘subcontinent.’ This reflected the effort of the Pakistani intelligentsia to reject what was perceived as Indian terminology and extend their civilizational claims through the use of such terms. Given that Pakistani nationhood was being shaped exclusively around the centrality of Islam, classical Hindu texts or revered figures did not fit into a historical narrative that explained the history of Pakistan and its nation.37 The historical narrative produced in A Short History of Hind-Pakistan traced a linear development of political events in which successive generations of rulers, scholars, and the masses were shown to be striving towards the socio-political and religious development of the Muslim community. The development S. Moinul Haq, “Editorial,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 1, no. 1 (1953): 4.

Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan,” 15.

35 Ibid., 16.

36 Pakistan, A Short History of Hind-Pakistan (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1955).

37 Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan,” 19.

33 34

70

of the Muslim community culminated in the establishment of the Muslim homeland of Pakistan, where an egalitarian, Islamic socio-economic order was created. This narrative was largely influenced by Qureshi, a former historian of the Delhi sultanate.38 Qureshi had no qualms with using history for the purposes of imagining a Pakistani political community. In 1961, he claimed it was important “to instil a sense of a common past among a people if it is to be moulded into a well-integrated nation with loyalties seated within the deepest recesses of the heart. This process need not be a falsification of history; it can be its discovery.”39 To Qureshi, national cohesion was achieved by writing about the historical evolution and organic unity of the Muslim community in the subcontinent. Such a conception required putting Muslims outside the frame of Indian society and its religious and cultural traditions. Thus, Qureshi sought to depict Islam as foreign to India, with Muslims needing to constantly be vigilant about their distinct identity and struggling against any attempt towards assimilation.40 Qureshi’s willingness to rewrite for the purposes of nation-building was even reflected in Pakistan’s emergent foreign policy. As Pakistan was a signatory of the American-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954, Qureshi lectured on Buddhism’s rich legacy in Pakistan for an audience in Thailand.

Despite his claim about fostering national cohesion, Qureshi was in fact supporting the military-bureaucratic axis. For example, by the mid-1950s, Pakistan’s military had occupied an ever-increasing portion of Pakistan’s government expenditures, claiming the state needed to be defended from a potential Indian invasion.41 By arguing Pakistani Muslims were fundamentally different from, and even threatened by, Indian Hindus, Qureshi helped establish the perception of the ‘Hindu other’ in Pakistani society. Once Hindus were considered to have been threatening historically, the military could easily claim the need to defend Pakistan from India. Similarly, the Pakistani military profited from greater foreign engagements with the United States, as the Eisenhower administration bankrolled many of Pakistan’s expenses.42 Qureshi’s historical defense of SEATO further served to justify Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 21.

40 Ibid., 23.

41 Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (London: C. Hurst, 2009), 142.

42 Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan, 86.

38 39

71

the military’s relationship with the United States.

After Ayub Khan’s imposition of martial rule in 1958, Qureshi was approached by the military regime to help draft new education policies. He became involved in organizing historical research to transform Pakistan into a modern Islamic state that matched Ayub’s vision of authority and power emanating from the centre.43 In January 1965, a committee comprising eminent historians, including Qureshi, was organized to serve as an editorial board for the writing of an authoritative account of the history of Pakistan.

This work became A Short History of Pakistan, published in 1967.44 Unlike A Short History of Hind-Pakistan, A Short History of Pakistan received official support and direction, and was meant to be a more rigorous work for Pakistani students and scholars. Ayub directed the editorial board to create a history of Pakistan distinct from India.45 Thus, terms such as ‘Hind-Pak’ or ‘Indo-Pak’ were discouraged. The underlying argument behind this change was that only by disengaging from the sub-continent could Pakistan have a history distinct from that of India. For example, the conquest of India by the Mughals was explained as the eastward expansion of West Pakistan and the westward expansion of East Pakistan. The new narrative proposed in A Short History of Pakistan envisaged East and West Pakistan as sharing the same historical timeline, serving as the centres of activity that influenced developments taking place in India.46 Historical Production after 1971 The discontinuance of the established historical tradition of viewing South Asia collectively – and Muslim history within its South Asian context – deviated strongly from previous historical scholarship, including Qureshi’s.

That Qureshi was willing to break with his own previous historical writings to fulfill the guidelines set by Ayub is indicative of how historians were the functionaries of the dominant class in postcolonial Pakistan. This continued after Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. As debates over language, education, and self-government in East Pakistan had indicated, the two-nation theory was not the unifying theory it was purported to be. Rather than Ibid., 106.

Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi et al., A Short History of Pakistan (Karachi: University of Karachi, 1967).

45 Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan,” 29.

46 Ibid., 30.

43 44

72

re-evaluating his writings since 1947, Qureshi claimed that Bangladesh’s independence was caused by the failure of previous governments to use the education system to promote the cause of national harmony effectively. To Qureshi, it was necessary to reaffirm Pakistan’s Islamic foundation at home and direct Pakistan’s foreign policy at spreading Muslim revivalism in the subjugated lands north of Afghanistan.47 Qureshi’s claims echoed the efforts of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who succeeded the military regime as president in 1971, who, at times, used Islam as a tool to unify Pakistan after its breakup, including by establishing relationships with other Islamic states. Despite the restoration of parliamentary democracy in 1973, the military still remained dominant as Bhutto was unable to re-organize the military or limit its funding. Qureshi’s changing arguments echo Gramsci’s claim that many intellectuals believe they are the state, rather than an instrument of the state. Despite being a cabinet minister when the military began its incursion into the government, Qureshi was always a functionary of their hegemony. The changes in his historical writings to defend the current position of the dominant class are indicative of the influence the military-bureaucratic axis had over the intellectuals in postcolonial Pakistan.

Official histories of Pakistan continued to be re-written after Qureshi and Bhutto. General Zia-ul-Haq restored martial law in 1977 and used Islamism to justify his rule as no Prime Minister or dictator had before. Zia centralized Pakistan’s education system, closing English private schools and permitting the rapid growth of madaris. As C. Christine Fair has shown, Zia‘s education reforms placed greater emphasis on historical teaching that located Pakistan in a civilizational conflict with India.48 Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif struggled to alter the Islamized education system after Zia. Despite further use of master narratives in textbooks, other historians who have questioned the seminal works of Pakistani history have received more attention, especially outside of Pakistan. Hamza Alavi’s 1972 article analyzing Pakistan and Bangladesh, The State in Postcolonial Societies, challenged classical Marxist views of the modern state, the nature of Pakistani nationhood, and the hegemony of state-authorized master narratives. He claimed the military-bureaucratic axis assumed a new economic role unparalleled in the classical bourgeoisie state because of the 47 48

Ibid., 35.

Fair, Fighting to the End, 70.

73

varied impacts of Britain’s colonial administration.49 Alavi was one of the few historians to challenge the dominant narratives in nascent postcolonial Pakistan. Further research is necessary on the extent to which Alavi and others influenced future generations of historians to question these narratives. Recently, Pakistani scholars such as Qasmi and expats like Ayesha Jalal have produced varying accounts of Pakistan’s state and society that address the master narratives while avoiding the errors of American social science scholarship. As seen during the colonial period, historians are capable of challenging cultural hegemony and reconsidering dominant historical narratives. However, it will require reconsidering the position of the military and the master narrative as a form of historical writing to address the ideological orientations of Pakistani history.

Bibliography

Afzal, Madiha. “Education and Attitudes in Pakistan: Understanding Perceptions of Terrorism.” United States Institute of Peace, 2015.

Alavi, Hamza. “The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh.” New Left Review 74, no.1 (1972): 59-81.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.

Aziz, K. K.. The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan. Lahore: Vanguard, 1993.

Bajwa, Sadia. “The Genealogy of Pakistan‘s Nationalist Historiography: An Analysis of Historiography in the Context of the Emergent Muslim Nationalist Discourse, 1857–1947.” MA thesis, University of Heidelberg, 2009.

———. “Crisis and its Beyond: A Review of Recent Critical Inquiry into Pakistan.” South Asia Chronicle 2 (2012): 271-304.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Birth of Academic Historical Writing in India,” in Macintyre, Stuart et al. (eds). Oxford History of Historical Writing, Vol. 4: 1800-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Devji, Faisal. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

49

Alavi, “The State in Postcolonial Societies,” 61.

74

Fair, C. Christine. Pakistan: Can the United States Secure an Insecure State?

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2010.

———. Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army‘s Way of War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Gilmartin, David. Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.

Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. and eds. New York: International Publishers, 1971.

Haider, Ziad. The Ideological Struggle for Pakistan. Chicago: Hoover Institution Press, 2010.

Haqqani, Husain. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010.

Ikram, S. M., and Percival Spear. The Cultural Heritage of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Jalal, Ayesha. The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan‘s Political Economy of Defence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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

———. The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Lieven, Anatol. Pakistan: A Hard Country. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.

Mohammad-Arif, Aminah. “Textbooks, Nationalism and History Writing in India and Pakistan.” In Bénéï, Véronique (ed.). Manufacturing Citizenship: Education and Nationalism in Europe, South Asia and China. London: Routledge, 2005.

Nawaz, Shuja. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Nayyar, Abdul Hameed, and Ahmed Salim. The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan Urdu, English, Social Studies and Civics. Sustainable Development Policy Institute, 2005.

Pakistan. A Short History of Hind-Pakistan. Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1955.

75

Powell, Avril. “Perceptions of the South Asian Past: Ideology, Nationalism and School History Textbooks”, in The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics, edited

by Nigel Cook. Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Siddiqa-Agha, Ayesha. Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan‘s Military Economy.

London: Pluto Press, 2007.

Talbot, Ian. Pakistan: A Modern History. London: C. Hurst, 2009.

Tan, Tai Yong, and Gyanesh Kudaisya. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London: Routledge, 2000.

Tan, Tai Yong. The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab 1849-1947. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage, 2005.

Qasmi, Ali Usman. “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan: Tracing the Origins of an Ideological Agenda.” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 4 (2018): 1-40.

Qureshi, Ishtiaq Husain, Ahmad Hasan Dani, M. Kabir, Sh. A. Rashid, Muhammad Abdur Rahim, M. D. Chughtai, W. Zaman, and A. Hamid. A Short History of Pakistan. Karachi: University of Karachi, 1967.

Wheeler, R.E.M.. Five Thousand Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline. Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1950.

76

77

© Muhammad Cheema

78

Liam Greenwell Something to Remember Me By: Buddhist-themed Souvenir Objects in Gangtok, Sikkim I was rebuffed twice on my first day conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, a state that lies in the Himalayan foothills and borders Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet. I visited in November, 2018, as part of an undergraduate Buddhist Studies program in order to conduct this independent research. When I began asking store owners about the Buddhist-themed souvenir items that lined their shelves, I was twice told that these items were not important and that they did not understand why I was so interested in them. I pressed on, but twice, the best I could do was a few one word answers. One informant called a friend to end my pestering. It was not a promising start to my first anthropological project.

But this dynamic did not entirely surprise me. The mass-market souvenir objects that I wanted to study are cheap and widely available, and stakeholders often derided them as meaningless, which makes a dismissive first impression understandable. Souvenirs do not immediately seem to matter for understanding Buddhism, Sikkim, or even tourism. To many of my informants, they seemed a minimal component of the robust tourism economy in the state, which is the smallest state in India. Between 2011 and 2017, both domestic and foreign tourist inflow more than doubled, and the sector remains one of Sikkim’s major industries along with agriculture and hydropower.1 And to lay Buddhists and monastics alike, they are a misrepresentation of their religion, kitsch that has little connection to Buddhism itself.

The souvenirs occupy cramped, bustling shops on Mahatma Gandhi (MG) Marg, Gangtok’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, and the adjacent New Market area. The items I focus on feature Buddhist iconography: produced for commercial appeal rather than worship, these items generally feature the Buddha in a lotus position, a disembodied Buddha head, a spinning dharma wheel, or one of a number of other universally recognizable Buddhist images. But I also became interested, over the course of my work, in “Industries in Sikkim, Tourism, Economy Growth & Agriculture.” IBEF: India Brand Equity Foundation (2018): https://www.ibef.org/states/sikkim.aspx; Anjan Chakrabarti, “Tourism in Sikkim: Quest for A Self-Reliant Economy,” The NEHU Journal 8, no. 1 (2009): 100.

1

79

other, sometimes-confusing souvenirs in these shops, to which I will return.

The reason I chose to focus on Buddhist imagery first and foremost, however, is important. Sikkim has a long history of Buddhist identity—it was a kingdom, led by a Buddhist monarch and with a large influence on its politics by its many monasteries and monastics. This was despite the increasing presence of Nepali Hindus in the area, who were cast as outsider immigrants in popular discourse.2 Since the deposition of the king and the state’s merger with India in 1975, the Buddhist identity of Sikkim has remained contested. According to the 2011 census, Buddhists make up around 27% of the population—by far the greatest proportion of any state in India.3 Tashi Galey, a deputy director at the Department of Tourism and Civil Aviation, told me that Sikkim should, in fact, still be seen as a Buddhist state—“even though we Buddhists are in the minority at the moment.”4 It is also a conscious choice to study souvenirs, which are items that have been often overlooked in scholarship, and studies of tourism specifically. I take seriously in this paper the idea that even though many stakeholders may consider some thing unimportant, that thing could still matter for complex issues of identity formation and could inform larger political discourses. I will return to this idea in my theoretical reflection.

Over three weeks of fieldwork in Gangtok, I observed buyer-seller dynamics at souvenir stores in the MG Marg/New Market areas and interviewed store owners and souvenirs buyers around the time of a transaction.

I also interviewed other tourists, Gangtok residents, Buddhist monastics, lay Buddhists, people who work in the local tourism industry, and government officials at the Department of Tourism and Civil Aviation. Most of these interviews were informal and on-the-spot, though some were formalized and pre-planned. I also employed other anthropological methods for data-collection, including mapping the location of souvenir stores (using Google Maps), photography, and sketching. I conducted most interviews in English and some in Hindi. Some informants’ names have been changed to protect anonymity.

Andrew Duff, Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom (Gurgaon: Penguin, 2015).

“Buddhist Religion Census 2011.” India Population Census, 2011: https://www. census2011.co.in/data/religion/5-buddhism.html.

4 Tashi Galey (Deputy Director of North Adventure at the Department of Tourism and Civil Aviation and lay Buddhist), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 27, 2018.

2 3

80

Throughout my research, I tried to be observant and self-reflective with respect to the ways situations might have been changed by both my anthropological gaze and my positionality as a white American male college student. I observed how people became sometimes less willing to talk about the products once I disclosed that I was not a potential buyer; I also noticed how some were more willing to talk in Hindi, though for some others the appearance of a foreigner speaking Hindi became a topic of conversation in itself and distracted from the initial questions. There are also obvious limitations of the short fieldwork period, which further reduced the possibility of objective study because of bias towards informants who I met initially and had enough time to meet again. I shy away from using too much of a first-person narrative in the rest of this paper, but one ought not mistake that hesitancy for a claim of remoteness: I was regularly recognized by people who knew about my project, and this visibility led to either reticence and openness depending on the situation and the informant. I also thought it important in a study that discusses (especially Buddhist) identity formation in a region with a fraught history in that regard, so I regularly asked historical questions of my interviewees as well and tried to maintain knowledge of that context.

Part of that context are the ways Sikkim’s history is exploited as a tourist draw. Buddhism in Sikkim is touted as an untouched form of the religion, and imagery that advertises the state repeatedly relies on the interplay of the perceived “peacefulness” of Buddhism with the natural peacefulness of the landscape. I will argue that Buddhist-themed souvenirs do, to a certain extent, contribute to Sikkim’s construction as a “Buddhist” state, a construction that elides the realities of a Hindu-majority population. But I will also claim that this is not the extent of the function of souvenirs in Gangtok: as I probe deeper why certain images are employed and others are not, it becomes clear that a greater factor is how well the souvenirs on sale map onto existing discourses about Sikkim in the rest of India. Scholars have looked at souvenirs, I will argue, in generally a far too a reductive way. Instead of being concerned with authentic expression of tourist zone, the souvenirs—in order to perform their function of confirming a travel experience and helping the tourist lay claim to an internal transformation—must be legible upon return home. This requires the objects to reflect the existing discourses about a given location, which in Sikkim’s case are exoticized and racialized.

81

Theoretical Reflection In order to effectively discuss this topic, it is necessary to back up and look at the state of scholarship regarding material culture, tourism, souvenirs, and Sikkim itself. Material culture studies, for one, have pushed anthropological scholarship past the state of ignoring “low-brow” physical objects writ large. Whether or not an object is considered an expression of high culture, that object can construct and inform social worlds through its materiality.5 Anthropologist Daniel Miller has written about how studies have typically limited their scope to either items that the anthropologist considers “important” herself, or those which the subject culture seems to consider so. Miller attempts to push us to consider the ways in which things could “matter,” even if they lack importance to stakeholders. “Matter” can suggest more sentimental associations and can allow us to study the ways in which objects do inform the identities and landscapes in which they exist, even if they do not operate on the scale of radical economic or social transformation.6 Not everything “matters” in this way, but it can be a more flexible term than “important,” and can account for this possibility. Miller writes, “There are many instances where clearly things matter to people even when in speech they deride them as trivial and inconsequential.”7 This is a useful intervention for this study, as most everyone I talked to about the souvenirs did tell me they were trivial pieces of the landscape or their identities, and indeed they have a relatively small economic footprint. But, as I will argue, these objects still “matter” in different ways to different stakeholders in some of the ways Miller suggests.

One of the most important of those stakeholders for this study is the tourist herself. And even today, Victor Turner’s “The Center out There,” his comparative study of pilgrimage, lays much of the groundwork for the fields of both pilgrimage and tourism studies. Much like how low-brow objects have long been ignored, mass popular movements were for too long ignored as well, Turner writes. And now, though pilgrimage has long since been accepted as a legitimate area of scholarship, it is only recently that the same has been true for tourism. So it is by necessity that I base some of my discussion here in pilgrimage and how it is different from tourism as a phenomenon. To that end, Turner’s essay can serve as a decent starting Daniel Miller, Why Some Things Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3.

Ibid.,11.

7 Ibid., 19.

5 6

82

point for probing these differences—the first question being, what does each archetype (the tourist and the pilgrim) seek in their ritual, and how do they accomplish that goal? Turner writes that there is a “bonding together, however transiently, at a certain level of social life” during pilgrimage.8 Though he concedes that this “communitas” spirit does not always hold in every moment of pilgrimage, he claims that an “anonymizing effect” is a distinctive quality of the practice.9 Some scholars have failed to see any distinction at all between the two groups. Instead, they argue, the tourist is a distinctly modern pilgrim, taking part in travel-as-ritual for personal rather than spiritual advancement.10 Tim Edensor, in his study of tourists at the Taj Mahal, thinks this idea nonetheless fails to account for real distinctions in actions of “intensity and reverence” during pilgrimage that are distinct from tourism undertaken for other reasons.11 Others have taken a more nuanced approach, claiming that the two categories may be distinct in theory but can be made and re-made, not indicative of a priori identities, and can be constructed in part by the specific gaze on the tourist/pilgrim subject at a given time.12 Both experience a break in daily life—ordinary constraints of behavior and social obligation are lifted.13 But only for pilgrims is there a sense of “obligatoriness,” as with the imperative for Muslims for go on Hajj, for instance.14 In fact, a lack of sense of obligation is perhaps constitutive of tourism as a phenomenon. For both pilgrims and tourists, scholars write that a desire for transformation is a central goal of the ritual.15 “A change in one’s inner or outer condition,” Turner put it.16 Upon return home, the act of pilgrimage could act as a form of social cleavage to lay claim to an increased social position. In pilgrimage, this would be a claim to increased religious standing Victor Turner, “The Center out There: Pilgrim’s Goal,” History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 201.

9 Ibid., 216.

10 See discussion of MacCannell in Tim Edensor, Tourists at the Taj: Performance and Meaning at a Symbolic Site (New York: Routledge, 1998), 3; Peter Moran, Buddhism Observed: Travellers, Exiles and Tibetan Dharma in Kathmandu (New York: Routledge, 2004), 38; Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing, eds., Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2007), 354.

11 Edensor, Tourists, 4.

12 Moran, Buddhism Observed, 56, 34.

13 “Tourism,” 354; Edensor, Tourists, 137.

14 Turner, “The Center,” 197.

15 Rapport and Overing, Concepts, 354; Edensor, Tourists, 137.

16 Turner, “The Center,” 214.

8

83

because of the pilgrim’s tangible interaction with religious ideals (embodied in the pilgrimage site or the act of traveling itself ).17 A secular holiday could operate under the same framework, argue some scholars, because of the “intensity” of the experience (even if it is non-religious).18 Tourism as we recognize it today—whether or not it is distinctly modern, or how far removed it is from pilgrimage as an act—is still a potent method of identity formation.

But in order for that to be true, there would need to be some non-religious analogue to the tangible symbols of religiosity at a pilgrimage site.

Souvenirs can be one of those analogues—a tangible method by which a tourist can claim a certain experience and subsequent transformation. Instead of the visited location being a religious center, secular tourist zones are increasingly advertised as “authentic” (often a colonial idea, positioned in contrast to the perceived inauthenticity of the “modern” Western city or person).19 This is an effective and widespread selling point for tourists, from Iceland to Sikkim to the Pacific Northwest.20 These claims of authenticity are disputed and changeable, open to subjective interpretation.21 In Borneo, some cultural practices, such as certain dances initially created for viewing by tourists, have been re-appropriated as authentic within native culture.22 Because of the prevalence of the desire for “authenticity” in tourism, we should then be attuned to the potential ways souvenirs can help tourists assert their interaction with an authentic Other in a tourist zone.

In an increasingly commercialized world, “the key moment in which people construct themselves or are constructed by others is increasingly through relations with cultural forms in the area of consumption,” writes Daniel E. Alan Morinis, Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition: A Case Study of West Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 4.

18 Victor T. King, “Identity, Material Culture and Tourism: Of Ritual Cloths and Totem Poles,” Southeast Asia Research 25, no. 2 (2017): 193-194.

19 Edensor, Tourists, 3. This is of course not the only way a tourist zone becomes such, or advertises itself; however, marketing a place through the language of “authenticity” is a widespread form and is important to consider.

20 Katrin Anna Lund, Katla Kjartansdottir, and Kristin Loftsdottir, “‘Puffin Love’: Performing and Creating Arctic Landscapes in Iceland through Souvenirs,” Tourist Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 143; Vibha Arora, “Framing the Image of Sikkim,” Visual Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 54–57; King, “Identity,” 195.

21 Edensor, Tourists, 3.

22 King, “Identity,” 195.

17

84

Miller.23 One way souvenirs could matter, then, would be if we saw evidence that the objects contribute to the construction of the identities of tourists (or locals). The act of consumption is quite potent, Miller argues, for identity formation: especially, I will add, in the context of tourism, when a tourist may only buy a few items to take home instead of buying things in a regularized pattern. A tourist brings home a souvenir item, by definition—in contrast to other items she might consume on her journey. The souvenir can serve as a bridge between the world of the trip and the return home, and through that as “confirmation of the tourist’s engagement with ‘otherness.’”24 The souvenir, then, aids and contests memory. At a very basic level, it can serve as confirmation of a trip successfully completed (which could have been something to brag about in the past when surviving a long trip abroad was hardly a guarantee) and a way to remember the journey—it is evidence.25 But memory is neither a fixed object nor simply a psychological process. It is socially constructed and subject to purposive attempts at construction.26 I want to suggest that what someone did or saw, while on a trip, could matter less than the methods by which those things are remembered. Objects that someone brings back—such as souvenirs or photographs—then can serve as proof of memory, of things happening in a certain way. In other words, tourists assert the memory of the trip through the purchasing of souvenir items: they can assert, very simply, that they were there and they survived; that they had a brush with something authentic and exotic, as mentioned earlier; or that they have gained some amount of social standing from the journey by having a marker from somewhere iconic.

The next question, then, is what determines how effective a souvenir is at accomplishing these roles. A cursory glance at any souvenir store in Gangtok or any other tourist zone demonstrates that it is not artistic merit that determines this—the souvenirs are kitschy, clearly of low financial value, and replicable. Compared to a work of art, a souvenir only has value because of its connection to the tourist’s personal experience.27 So if it is not inMiller, Matter, 11.

King, “Identity,” 200-201.

25 John Guy, “The Mahābodhi Temple: Pilgrim Souvenirs of Buddhist India,” Burlington Magazine 133 (1991): 356, 362.

26 Edensor, Tourists, 135.

27 David L. Hume, Tourism, Art, and Souvenirs: The Material Culture of Tourism (New York: Routledge, 2013), 7. Of course, inherent to many mass-produced souvenir items is a sense 23 24

85

herent artistic merit, what defines a souvenir’s effectiveness? Some scholars provide an easy answer: the object must reflect the “culture and heritage of the tourist destination.”28 This seems sound reasoning for souvenirs that depict iconic locations, like miniature replicas of the Taj Mahal or Mahabodhi Temple.29 But, in studies of totem poles in the Pacific Northwest and puffin figurines in Reykjavik, Iceland, the authors write that such objects have very little connection to any “culture or heritage,” or, for that matter, history or lived experience of said destinations.30 Even though the puffin, in the latter example, has little cultural or natural ubiquity in Iceland, puffin souvenirs are some of the most popular for tourists. This matches Iceland to larger market forces that position the Arctic as in vogue, and manufactures Iceland as an Arctic destination.31 Something similar happens to souvenir objects in Kathmandu, Nepal, according to Peter Moran. Though most of the population is Hindu and not of Tibetan ancestry, souvenirs advertise connections to Tibet. This claim of connection can “imbue [the souvenir] with a quality that outshines the object’s status as a ‘mere’ commodity.”32 Both of these examples recall my questions about the ubiquity of Buddhist-themed objects in Sikkim, which is majority Hindu, and also the inclusion of other seemingly incongruent objects in the souvenir stores. The existing scholarship leaves unaddressed the question of why these specific souvenirs can be effective and popular in cases where they do not reflect the culture of the location in which they are sold (surely it is not a case of universal popularity and legibility of certain objects—there are no puffin souvenirs available in Gangtok).

Vibha Arora has examined similar dynamics in an article about tourism materials in Sikkim. She examined visual objects—namely postcards, posters, and tourist brochures—and writes that these items overwhelmingly depict Buddhist imagery. The most popular images for postcards include of “kitsch” or “tackiness,” that “half-physical revulsion,” according to Roger Scruton, that marks our experience of such an item. For many souvenir items, it is actually that lack of an art item’s “value in itself ” that creates the souvenir item’s unique power to produce effects “dramatic and subtle,” according to Lund, et al. See Roger Scruton, “Kitsch and the Modern Predicament,” City Journal 43 (1999): https://www.city-journal.org/html/ kitsch-and-modern-predicament-11726.html and Lund et al., “Puffin Love,” 151-152.

28 Hume, Tourism, 5.

29 Edensor, Tourists, 135-147; Guy, “Mahābodhi.”

30 King, “Identity”; Lund et al., “Puffin Love.”

31 Lund et al., “Puffin Love,” 142-143.

32 Moran, Buddhism Observed, 51.

86

photographs of written mantras, religious sites, or monks.33 She claims this connects to specifically Western, Orientalist desires about Buddhism. Peter Moran writes, for example, that Buddhism is a “now mysterious, now reified, now authentic, now fading object of Western desire” unsullied by modernity.34 Arora argues that these selective representations re-inform the landscape itself, and contribute to the political elision of Sikkimese non-Buddhists. Here, she is reflecting other scholarship that claims tourist places are contested and re-made through narration, a part of which is visual culture and souvenir items.35 In all, Arora writes that the visual representations create Sikkim as a “Buddhist-scape.”36 But she does not confront the extent of the influence of these postcards, nor does she probe further her admission that some of the most popular images are of the natural landscape itself. Souvenirs (and Arora’s postcards) inform, I think, a wider array of discourses than her limited “Buddhist-scape” thesis permits.

I will examine this further in my findings.

Souvenir landscapes in Gangtok

Figure 1.

Souvenir shops (blue), antique shops (red), and jewelers (orange) along MG Marg and New Market in Gangtok, Sikkim. There are twenty-two souvenir stores in this central area.

Image by author.

Arora, “Framing the Image,” 54-58.

Moran, Buddhism Observed, 4.

35 Lund et al., “Puffin Love,” 142-143.

36 Arora, “Framing the Image,” 54.

33 34

87

There are twenty-two shops selling Buddhist-themed souvenir items in the MG Marg/New Market central pedestrian shopping areas. These shops are aimed directly at tourists; there are also two antique stores selling Buddhist figurines and as two jewelry shops that prominently display Buddhist statues for sale, but the statues in these shops, according to their owners, are purchased almost exclusively by locals. All of these shops are clustered in this relatively short, half-kilometer stretch that sees heavy tourist foot traffic, especially during the tourist season that lasts from June to November (Figure 1).

The objects for sale are made outside of Sikkim, mostly in China.37 They are almost exclusively purchased by tourists, especially domestic tourists from West Bengal, with a smaller proportion purchased by a combination of domestic tourists from Tamil Nadu and Mumbai and foreign tourists from Europe or the United States, according to multiple interviews with shop owners, personal observations, and interviews with tourists. Locals typically do not buy these souvenir items; if they buy Buddhist statues or similar items, informants said they would make those purchases from one of the antique or jewelry shops. The fact that tourists purchase these souvenir items nearly exclusively was again confirmed by one shop owner, who said that in the off-season, “we put away our souvenirs and do xerox instead.�38 The most widespread and popular souvenirs include Buddha head wallmounts, Buddhas sitting in lotus position, Chinese Buddhas with coins arranged around them, solar-powered rotating dharma wheels for car dashboards, caricatured figurines of whistling monks, figures of stereotyped Native American or African people made to look like they were carved out of a tooth, Chinese child figures in absurd or cute positions (i.e. sweeping, curled in a ball), and thangka paintings, magnets, and large fans labeled with the name of Sikkim or with a likeness of MG Marg itself. Every shop has a similar selection (I noticed no item in one shop that I did not see in at least one other) and they are supplied, according to multiple conversations, either by order directly from China or from warehouses in Siliguri, West Bengal, a major trade town a five-hour’s drive away.

The vast majority of informants claimed their wares were made in China, but a few claimed that some were made in Nepal, Delhi, or Mumbai as well. Not a single souvenir shop owner told me that their wares were produced in Sikkim.

38 Mishita Das (souvenir shop owner), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 17, 2018.

37

88

During the course of my conversations, there was insistence that the objects I was studying were not important. “My answers will not help you,” said one shopkeeper. “These are not real Buddhist products.”39 Another was hesitant to talk to me because of a belief that the objects had little bearing over Buddhism and because of the fact that he was Muslim; “I don’t want to give you the wrong information about this religion,” he told me after I had asked him about some monk figurines. “It’s better if you go talk to some monks.”40 It is worth noting that none of the buyers to whom I spoke identified as Buddhist, though a few of the souvenir sellers did.

While witnessing many transactions, I noticed clear grounding for the theory that souvenirs can be a way to aid or construct memory. Many of the people I observed were buying five or six copies of the same item, meaning to give them as gifts to family back home. It was rarer to see people buying only one item for personal use. Either way, several buyers mentioned to me the importance of “remembering” in their purchasing decisions. One said clearly, “This item will be for remembrance of the trip.”41 Another tourist, from France, said that she would have wanted shops to stock replicas of statues present in Sikkimese temples and monasteries, so she could “look up and say, ‘I’ve been there.’”42 Coming in to the study, I had anticipating needing to gain the trust of my shop owner informants before they would admit to me the true origin of their goods. After all, the literature seems to suggest that souvenirs gain more inherent value when they are authentically of the place where they are being sold. But this theory was not true in Gangtok. Sellers told me right away that their products originated in China, or at least out of the state; several shops even tout their affordability by putting the word China in the name of their shop, like China Bazaar, which advertises itself on a prime location on MG Marg. Among tourists, most knew that their purchases were not made here and did not care. The one exception was the French tourist I mentioned previously, who specifically bought an item Siddharth Rai (souvenir shop owner), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 12, 2018.

40 Hazrat Ali (souvenir shop worker), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 13, 2018.

41 Neel Agarwal (tourist traveling with family at Ganesh Tok), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 14, 2018.

42 Aimee Toussaint (tourist), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 17, 2018.

39

89

at the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, she told me, because she didn’t want anything made in China (though she was alright with the item having been made elsewhere in India, outside of the state).43 The owner of an antique store drew a distinction, meanwhile, between his clients and the mass of tourists: the locals that shopped with him, he said, did so because they “want something authentic.”44 Perhaps a more accurate determiner of whether something was a bestseller was more practical: both shop owners and tourists mentioned transportability to me as important in the decision-making process. Items need to physically be light and small enough to pack home, especially if someone buys multiple items to later give to family. This suggests a practical reason why certain items are popular and others aren’t and opens the door to evaluating the complex reasons behind a souvenir purchase, beyond the formulation of the objects expressing the culture of the tourist zone.

One reason for a microeconomy that is so uniform, with every shop selling similar items with very little diversification, is that the purchasing decisions for the shops are not critical. All items were bought in bulk, and though many were made to feature the name “Sikkim” or “Gangtok,” no one was sure who controlled the design of the actual products. This fact is a hole for future study and would require tracking the entire supply chain, in order to measure how much input—if any—the tourist zone, like Gangtok, has for the material design and manufacture of the products on sale. Some lay Buddhists suggested to me that there might be an ominous motive at play, an attitude exemplified best by Tashi Galey, a deputy director at the Department of Tourism and Civil Aviation. Since the products all come from China, he said, there might be a purposeful attempt to display a degenerate or disrespectful form of the religion: “China doesn’t want real Buddhism.

They’re destroying it in Tibet,” he said.45 Souvenir sellers were more skeptical of this conspiratorial idea.

It is worth noting that despite the somewhat absurd assemblage of items available at these shops, Buddhist-themed items are still a major selling point. One day, I walked up to Ganesh Tok, an old Hindu temple dedicated to Ganesh that is a major tourist stop in Gangtok and from which one Toussaint, November 17, 2018.

Raja Bhanwas (antique shop owner), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 19, 2018.

45 Tashi Galey, November 27, 2018.

43 44

90

can see a beautiful panorama of the city. Despite the fact that the mandir and most of the visitors were Hindu, a majority of the souvenir items that had recognizable religious imagery were Buddhist in nature, including both those at the state-sponsored gift shop and the various informal souvenir stands near the parking area. Clearly there is some basis for Peter Moran’s theory that Tibetan Buddhism holds an international mystique, and that this fact is a reason for this particular selection of items. There is also something special about Sikkim: tourists I talked to bought these Buddhist items in Sikkim, even though they were visiting a Hindu temple, because of a perceived connection between Buddhism and the state. It did not strike any of my informants as strange to be buying or selling Buddhist paraphernalia at a Hindu mandir, but I posit that this would not be true if the mandir were instead located in, say, Chhattisgarh. The souvenirs could matter (beyond their strict economic or social “importance”) because of how they provide a marker of entering a zone where these normal assumptions or practices about how and when Buddhist iconography should exist no longer hold water.

If the souvenirs do indeed matter, I contend that this mattering does not come from these souvenirs being a true representation of Buddhist spiritual practice, either in general or in Sikkim in particular. Some store owners did claim that their objects were holy, but upon further questioning there was little differentiation between the objects with Buddhist images or themes and those that depicted a likeness of MG Marg, for example.46 One Buddhist jewelry store owner said that it was “ok” for non-Buddhists to buy cheap Buddhism-themed items, but took for granted that the items misrepresent Buddhist practice.47 Several lay Buddhists not directly involved in the trade claimed that the items were not holy, and that there was the danger of misusing Buddhist imagery. One lay Buddhist, Pema Dorjee, said, “From a Buddhist perspective, you would never see people selling statues or thangka paintings. They need to be consecrated. A Buddhist would not engage in that trade.”48 Even Siddharth Rai, a shop owner who is not a Buddhist, said that many of the statues he sold were in “unnatural poses” and not representative of canonical Buddhist iconography.49 Mishita Das, November 17, 2018.

Nithi Chettri (lay Buddhist and jewelry store owner), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 25, 2018.

48 Pema Dorjee (lay Buddhist), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 15, 2018.

49 Siddharth Rai, November 12, 2018.

46 47

91

Monastics I questioned had a similar perspective. Khenpo Chewang, a senior Rinpoche at Gonjang Monastery north of Gangtok, said, “According to Buddhist tradition, these images are inappropriate. We don’t appreciate them.”50 Sonam Rinchen, a monk from Bhutan, said, “We always have rules when constructing a statue. If it’s for a commercial purpose, that’s not good.

If something like that is made blindly, then it’s not ok.”51 This condemnation was qualified, however. These monastics underscored that intention mattered, for one, and that even an image of the Buddha created for purely commercial purposes and otherwise disrespectful could still hold power.

Khenpo Chewang said, A person can see a small item like that and it can change their life—it depends on intention. It can be so useful and can give courage. But even with bad intention, with a commercial intention, after a few years it can end up inspiring you. We have connections from many lifetimes ago. And by merely touching, by merely glancing, it can give awakening. In that way it matters.52

Others mentioned that it could inspire the purchaser to learn more about Buddhism. In this very basic way, then, despite their doctrinal inappropriateness, these statues are important to monastics in the sense that they can serve as a way for people to encounter Buddhism. The monastics hold out hope that even these disrespectful images will hold enough spiritual power to inspire their buyers to seek out more correct information on the dharma.

But Khenpo Chewang’s answer is not comprehensive; it may be true for certain Buddhists, specifically monastics, but it sheds little light on how the souvenirs could matter to a larger audience and cannot help us to formulate any ideas about souvenirs in general. It still doesn’t address whether these items that most of my informants derided could actually matter to those same informants and the landscape of Sikkim writ large. So it is worthwhile to further examine how these souvenirs represent a larger phenomenon of the fetishization of Buddhism, and whether the objects can create Sikkim as a Buddhist-scape, and matter that way.

Khenpo Chewang (Rinpoche at Gonjang Monastery), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 26, 2018.

51 Sonam Rinchen (monk from Bhutan), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 26, 2018.

52 Khenpo Chewang, November 26, 2018.

50

92

There is truth to Arora’s observations: people come to Sikkim to see “authentic” Buddhism, and the religion is used to advertise the state. My informants repeatedly expressed that both domestic and foreign tourists have a perception of Buddhism in Sikkim as pure, peaceful, and mystical. Khenpo Chewang told me, “Buddhism seems very peaceful [to tourists]. That’s the attraction.”53 One shopkeeper explained to me that Buddhism is a “trend” worldwide.54 Tenzing Nyentsey, owner of the boutique souvenir brand Sikkimis, said, “There’s a mystique to Buddhism, a mystique to Tibet. Buddhism sells.” He continued, “The people who come see it as a Buddhist state. They want to take a photo with a monk in traditional robes before they go home.”55

Figure 2.

The Buddha Cafe advertises “Eat. Drink. Nirvana.” in New Market in central Gangtok.

Image by author.

I saw this use of Buddhism for branding in my other observations, too.

Some tourist literature has photos of Sikkim’s monasteries or Buddha Parks prominently featured. There are restaurants, like Buddha Cafe, that promise “Eat. Drink. Nirvana.” (Figure 2). A director at the Department of Tourism and Civil Aviation, Prashant Rai, also admitted to me that the department consciously uses Buddhist imagery to claim Sikkim’s uniqueness: “Buddhism is used to attract tourists in the sense that it is used to draw a line from the other states in India,” he said.56 Perhaps the best example coKhenpo Chewang, November 26, 2018.

Siddharth Rai, November 12, 2018.

55 Tenzing Nyentsey (owner of Sikkimis brand and lay Buddhist), Khenpo Chewang, November 26, 2018. Gangtok, Sikkim, November 25, 2018.

56 Prashant Rai (land-use director at the Department of Tourism and Civil Aviation), in 53 54

93

mes from Kanupriya Raniwala, a Gangtok resident, the owner of a tourism company, and former traveler. She is helping a woman renovate her apartment for Airbnb rentals, and as part of that process she is adding Buddhist imagery and objects to “make it seem more Sikkimese” and because “Buddhism has become a brand for holidays.”57 Sikkim performs itself, then, in ways that are legible to those outside of the state. The closer a business owner can align their product with this Buddhist imagery, perhaps the more clients will be attracted. And Arora is correct that individual choices about visual culture do not happen in a vacuum: the obvious inverse to Ms. Raniwala’s statement is that a different apartment (that may be perfectly Sikkimese, in the sense that it is like other apartments in the state) would be considered non-Sikkimese because of its lacking Buddhist imagery.

The appeal of Buddhism is not limited to tourists from Western countries and their gaze on the “mystical” Tibet. One Indian informant told me that, even though he and his family are not Buddhist, his family would believe an object that had been blessed by a monk in Sikkim would gain power.58 Many of the other domestic tourists I interviewed in the midst of their purchasing a souvenir with Buddhist imagery told me that Buddhist items were beneficial for concentration or peacefulness in daily life, even though most believed, correctly, that the items were made outside of Sikkim. Their status as being purchased in Sikkim was enough to imbue them with extra significance—without regard for their material, point of origin, or price.

Buddhism thus unquestionably plays a role in Sikkim’s attraction. But the reality of tourism in the state is much more complicated than Arora’s Buddhist-scape model. It ignores that most tourists come to Sikkim for nature, in one form or another, and that Buddhism is, at most, a secondary attraction. Most of the Department of Tourism’s efforts to brand the state are along these lines: on the materials I examined, by far the most common motifs were of natural beauty, and indicative of the most common slogans are “the land of peace and tranquility” and “where nature smiles.”

If there are any people in these ads, they are wearing traditional clothes and advertising homestays; Arora’s monks and monasteries are few and far discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 27, 2018.

57 Kanupriya Raniwala (owner of a tourism company and former traveler), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 19, 2018.

58 Geet Gera (Gangtok resident and former traveler), in discussion with the author, Gangtok, Sikkim, November 19, 2018.

94

between. Tashi Galey, the tourism deputy director, told me that Buddhism is not a very common reason for people to come, at least not as a primary purpose; he mentioned that there are some pilgrims, almost all from Nepal and Bhutan, but their number is small compared to that of other travelers.

“Most tourists don’t understand about Buddhism or Sikkim’s culture,” he told me. “They come here for the environment, the scenery, the trekking.

A lot of domestic tourists just want to play with snow. Not many come for Buddhism.”59 When I asked tourists why they had come, many mentioned these very reasons. The proximity to West Bengal and the ability to see the mountains and be close to natural beauty made a convenient getaway to a place that felt far away. Arora’s idea that Sikkim is being constructed as a “Buddhist-scape,” then, begins to appear deficient. Tourist desires in Sikkim operate on more than one matrix—these desires are not as simple as seeking Buddhism. However much people align Buddhism with Sikkim as a state, people are not so reductive in their ideas of Sikkim as a whole. That also means that it is insufficient to argue that souvenirs, or any other tourist object in Sikkim, matter because they present as Buddhist; that conclusion does not take into account the extent of the more complex realities surrounding outsider views of Sikkim.

The reality on the souvenir front is more complicated than only a fetishization of Buddhism, as well. Many of the souvenirs have even less obvious bearing on Sikkim’s reality than the Buddhism-themed ones. I mention above the presence of certain souvenirs that look as if they are carved from a tooth. The image is of a stereotypical Native American chief with headdress or an African person with large earrings (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

An assemblage of souvenir objects at a Gangtok shop.

Prominent are items made to look like carved portraits of stereotypical Native Americans or Africans.

Image by author.

59

Tashi Galey, November 27, 2018.

95

These souvenirs might offer a clue as to what’s actually going on—and what the souvenirs here actually do, if not produce a “Buddhist-scape.” They reflect some other popular ideas of Sikkim—as being close to nature and also, importantly, being racially and culturally Other. It matters little that the caricatures on these objects are caricatures we are more used to seeing in other cultural contexts.

“A lot of people who come here think they’re crossing a border,” Tenzing Nyentsey, owner of Sikkimis, told me. “The Northeast is not seen as part of India. It’s lumped together.” People whose physiognomy “looks” Chinese are treated like foreigners, he said.60 “People want something clear, something to bring back and say, I was there,” explained Tenzing. The items people buy in Sikkim are available “even in the parts of the Northeast that have major influence from Bangladesh or Myanmar rather than Tibet. It doesn’t actually matter if they’re not made here, or don’t resonate with Sikkim. People from the rest of India look at the Northeast and think, it’s all Chinks up there.” People want a souvenir that, once they return home, they can recognize as part of a memory themselves but can also be recognized by others as originating in the tourist zone. To aid that goal, tourists buy objects that confirm preconceptions, whether they are about the prevalence and peacefulness of Buddhism or are racialized, such as the Chinese babies in absurd positions. Perhaps preconceptions about an alignment of Sikkim’s people with its natural landscape, in much the way racist discourses characterize indigenous Americans and Africans as somehow connected to nature, create the logical jump necessary to see the tooth objects as part of the natural souvenir assemblage. But the exact reasons do not make a huge difference—what does is the very fact that the souvenirs can matter not for the ways they reflect a culture like Sikkim’s, but for how they reflect preconceptions that the tourist brings to that place. And, for that matter, how souvenirs can make references to other racialized, Otherizing discourses that are dislocated in geography to re-make and re-inform the original Otherizing discourses upon return home.

“Landscapes...are constantly performed and narrated through objects,” write Lund et al.61 This claim is true in Sikkim, where these tourist objects narrate the landscape of Gangtok through their ubiquity. The landscape these souvenirs narrate is not primarily a Buddhist one, however. Instead, these 60 61

Tenzing Nyentsey, November 25, 2018.

Lund et al., “Puffin Love,” 142.

96

souvenirs are both informed by and inform an exoticization of Sikkim, an othering of the landscape in contrast to the rest of India. Souvenirs, in order to aid with that goal of “remembering,” must be recognizable once the tourist returns home. Sometimes, it is as easy as a model of the Taj Mahal.

But that requirement of recognition, especially considering that souvenirs are meant not only to perform memory-aid functions the tourist but also to tangibly assert a personal transformation in a web of social relations, means that they must represent not the reality of a place but the dominant discourses about it. And the most prominent and important discourse about Sikkim is not that it is a “Buddhist-scape” but that it is an exotic, otherized one—a place defined by dramatic differences in natural geology, in religion, in race. Buddhism, and the exoticized ideas around it, absolutely play a major role in the landscape of Sikkimese souvenirs. But Arora’s claim is too simplistic and only accounts for one component of what’s at stake here.

My theory accounts for the reality of the emphasis on nature in tourist dynamics, the prevalence of Buddhism-themed souvenirs (even at a place like Ganesh Tok), and also the popularity of souvenir objects like the tooth carvings that, upon first glance, have nothing to do with Sikkim at all other than a shared sense of difference from the Indian cultural sphere.

Conclusions Peter Moran says that travel guidebooks serve to make “the Other familiar, to domesticate alterity.”62 Souvenirs do much the same thing: they fit a place into an object that is recognizable, that resembles the place because it aligns with the discourses about it. For a place like the Taj Mahal that may be simpler than for the puffins in Iceland or the souvenirs in Sikkim, those that use Buddhist imagery and those that do not. In this paper, I have discussed how the state of souvenir studies is deficient for understanding how souvenirs both represent and inform the landscapes in which they are sold. In all of their roles—as ways to aid or assert memory, as ways to verify a pilgrim or tourist’s interaction with a foreign place—souvenirs must be legible both to the tourist and to those who remained home. Studies of souvenirs have been looking in the wrong place. When we wonder why sometimes they do not match with lived experience, politics, or culture in the tourist zone, even though we feel they should, we fail to see how that is not a necessity for souvenirs to operate. Instead, they must match the popular discourses about a given place. When that place is already marginal, like 62

Moran, Buddhism Observed, 35.

97

Sikkim, and excluded from the “mainland” cultural sphere, those discourses can not only be inaccurate but harmful.

Souvenirs are used not only to assert a change in social status vis-a-vis some assumed transformation in a foreign land, or as a tool for remembrance of a trip or even of said transformation. In order for that remembrance to work—in order that they can serve their role as confirmation of an encounter with otherness or even as simple proof that the journey was completed, as for pilgrims—they must also be recognizable. It is in that imperative that they gain their ability to narrate the world around them, to alter the very tourist zone of which they supposedly are an authentic piece. Too often in souvenir studies there is the assumption that the souvenirs somehow map onto the reality of the place where they are bought. They map, instead, onto the assumptions and opinions of that place from the outside, and from the tourists themselves. Just as the puffin is being transformed into an Icelandic symbol because of its associations with the Arctic—and the discourses that, in turn, are aligning Iceland with the Arctic—these Buddhist images are being crafted as Sikkimese symbols, even without material or cultural reflection there. But we cannot so quickly take Arora’s point that the only thing at work is a religious-cultural alignment, a branding of Sikkim as Buddhist, an elision of other extant cultural and religious forms. Surely, Buddhism has international marketing appeal and it is notable there is a prevalence of Buddhist imagery in a state that is mostly Hindu. The Buddhist motifs are “important” vis-a-vis their relation to Buddhism to the extent that, as many informants made clear, Buddhism’s perceived mystique has become an attraction for tourists. But this is not only because of a tourist obsession with Buddhism, but is instead part of a larger system that paints Sikkim as racially and culturally exotic and Other.

Souvenirs are a ubiquitous way by which those who come to Gangtok lay claim to transformation, one small piece in the contested act of identity formation. This fact is, of course, despite my observations that they have little perceived importance to many stakeholders and have a relatively small economic footprint, which suggests the necessity of talking about “mattering” rather than importance. It is not surprising that the more diffuse ways they influence their landscape are ignored. But they matter not despite the distance they hold from Sikkimese daily life, Buddhist practice, and cultural understanding but because of it, and how that distance re-informs the discourses painting Sikkim as exotic and foreign.

98

Bibliography

Arora, Vibha. “Framing the Image of Sikkim.” Visual Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 54–64.

“Buddhist Religion Census 2011.” India Population Census, 2011. https:// www.census2011.co.in/data/religion/5-buddhism.html Chakrabarti, Anjan. “Tourism in Sikkim: Quest for A Self-Reliant Economy.” The NEHU Journal 8, no. 1 (2009): 89-104.

Duff, Andrew. Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom. Gurgaon: Penguin, 2015.

Edensor, Tim. Tourists at the Taj: Performance and Meaning at a Symbolic Site. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Guy, John. “The Mahābodhi Temple: Pilgrim Souvenirs of Buddhist India.” Burlington Magazine 133 (1991): 356-367.

Hume, David L. Tourism, Art, and Souvenirs: The Material Culture of Tourism. New York: Routledge, 2013.

“Industries in Sikkim, Tourism, Economy Growth & Agriculture.” IBEF: India Brand Equity Foundation (2018). https://www.ibef.org/states/ sikkim.aspx.

King, Victor T. “Identity, Material Culture and Tourism: Of Ritual Cloths and Totem Poles.” Southeast Asia Research 25, no. 2 (2017): 192–207.

Lund, Katrin Anna, Katla Kjartansdottir, and Kristin Loftsdottir. “‘Puffin Love’: Performing and Creating Arctic Landscapes in Iceland through Souvenirs.” Tourist Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 142–58.

Miller, Daniel. Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Moran, Peter. Buddhism Observed: Travellers, Exiles and Tibetan Dharma in Kathmandu. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Morinis, E. Alan. Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition: A Case Study of West Bengal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Rapport, Nigel and Joanna Overing, eds. Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Scruton, Roger. “Kitsch and the Modern Predicament.” City Journal 43 (1999): https://www.city-journal.org/html/kitsch-and-mo99

dern-predicament-11726.html.

Turner, Victor. “The Center out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191-230.

100

101

Š Reda Berrada

102

Zehra Kazmi Misfit of Modernity: The Anxiety of Belonging in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) a formless fear deep within me / withdrawn and alien Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column1

Muslim femininity occupies a unique position within the Indian cultural sphere. Shy, veiled, peeping out from behind the chilman (portier) of an old haveli (old Indian mansion), Muslim women are often seen in glimpses, never fully revealing themselves of their own accord. This elusiveness has been eulogized in popular culture, and is often employed to harken back to a modest conception of femininity as virginal, sequestered, and passive.

Even today, representations of Muslim women’s personal agency are rare.

Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) by Attia Hosain (1913-1998) manifests the subjective experiences produced by the colonial encounter in India. Hosain’s work is unique for being one of the earliest examples of a Muslim woman writing a full-length novel in English.2 It is set during the tumultuous period of the struggle for freedom and the creation of newly independent India—a deeply significant moment for the Muslims of the subcontinent. The impact of colonial rule brought the tension between tradition and modernity into the forefront and the community had to take cognizance of their future following the Partition in 1947.

The novel is a first-person retrospective, set in the period leading up to and following Indian independence. Similar to other literary works of this period, one of the central concerns of the text is the Indian nation’s negotiation with modernity. It is distinct, however, in virtue of the insight it provides into the lives of the women who came to terms with the changing cultural landscape of India while seminal debates on independence, progress, and decolonisation were taking place. The narrative subjectivity of the text, Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009), 221, 114.

Zeenuth Futehally’s Zohra (1951) and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (1957) are other notable examples.

1 2

103

which follows the journey of the protagonist Laila, allows the reader to explore the deeply personal nature of these changes for women who had to carve out their own niche in modern India. Its representation of feudal aristocracy in Lucknow and the examination of a historical moment through the domestic space make Hosain’s novel a rare glimpse into the lives of elite Muslim women.

In this paper, I investigate the twin concepts of ‘mis-fitting’ and anxiety in Hosain’s novel in the context of the sweeping socio-historical changes of the era. The purpose of this approach is to bring the affective thrust of the text in conversation with the historical conditions that defined its production. Analysing these conditions is essential for an adequate understanding of the depiction of gendered domesticity in a novel articulating the struggles of a woman situated in the North Indian Muslim socio-cultural milieu.

These historical transformations not only led to the larger reconfiguration of ethno-national boundaries, but also reverberated across the domestic space such that the allure of intimacy these spaces signified became loaded with a painful political history. One group profoundly caught in the web of these changes was that of women who were in the process of occupying the public sphere in colonial India for the first time. They experienced this movement towards personal and national sovereignty with both hope and anxious trepidation. This movement towards the public sphere was induced partly by colonialism, the unfamiliarity of the setup making the process alienating for many women. This led to generations of women never truly fitting in within either domestic orthodoxy or secular modernity, rendering them eternal misfits in either context. This mis-fitting, I argue, is underlined in Sunlight by Laila’s religious and class location as well as her gender identity, especially in relation to the Partition. Further, I elaborate on the specific construction of the figure of the misfit and the term ‘anxiety’ within the text. Drawing from affect theorist Sianne Ngai’s analysis of the spatialization of anxiety, historian Antoinette Burton’s essay on the home as an archive in Sunlight, and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) to substantiate my argument, I examine Laila’s affective encounter with physical spaces, specifically her family home, Ashiana. Thus, I will demonstrate that the overwhelmingly nervous character of the novel is indicative of the colonised subject’s negotiation with modernity. This anxiety eventually guides the protagonist towards exercising her agency, despite her profound recognition of the curtailment of her free will by political circumstances. Laila’s fragmented consciousness drives the narrative voice of this ground-brea104

king postcolonial novel, wherein the aesthetic legacy of modernism takes on a specific local shape in the Indian context.

Modernity and Muslims Understanding the context of late colonial India becomes important if we hope to excavate what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ that challenged the hegemony of tradition. What follows is not an exhaustive list of social transformations in early twentieth century India, but a contextualisation of the conflict between tradition and modernity for Muslim women as portrayed in Sunlight.

The first step towards widespread anti-colonial resistance was the development of a cohesive national identity. Progressive Indians were entrusted with this task and thus the cultural ethos of the elite and privileged sections of the society defined its contours. Constructing the national identity of ‘modern’ India necessitated a narrative that unified people across varied ethno-linguistic boundaries and abolished regressive social practices, but still remained distinctly indigenous so as not to be a slavish copy of the colonizer. Despite its cosmopolitan intent, the process of creating a ‘new’ modernity was not free from prejudice and remained deeply embedded in power hierarchies.

Gender became a site of contestation for the forging of this new national identity. The woman question in modern India was framed around the concept of ‘reform’, not rights. Amongst Muslims, the reform process focused on the removal of purdah. This gradual shift towards greater integration between both sexes was only made possible through the consistent efforts of social reformers and educators like Sheikh Abdullah and Syed Karamat Husain. This project, however, was rooted in the cosmopolitan beliefs of barristers who were trained in England and sought to replicate western traditions of formal learning in schools and colleges. The colonial British government also had a stake in this process: motivated not simply by goodwill but also with an interest in proselytization, Christian schools and zenana missions were set up to fulfil the task of educating Muslim women.

Simultaneously, a new generation of educated women began inching towards political participation and self determination. Muslim women burst onto the scene of nationalist politics with the advent of the Khilafat Mo105

vement, an endeavour to protect the Caliphate of the Ottomans in Turkey.3 Liberal ashraf (upper-class Muslims) networks provided a progressive and broadminded home for women socialist writers to develop their intellectual potential. Women’s magazines like Tehzib-i-Niswan, Khatun and Azmat were instrumental in disseminating modern ideas among women and also acted as a means for communication between female writers.4 The British administration’s decision to accept Indians into the Imperial Civil Service also had a wide-ranging impact on gender and domesticity among the Indian middle-classes. It led to hordes of young men competing for prestigious jobs and assimilating to English culture to be rendered more suitable for opportunities of upward socio-economic mobility. These positions were engineered to be made available to only those educated in the western tradition and ensured that cultural capital was disproportionately available to the influential feudal classes. Thus a generation of aristocratic, educated men returned home from stints in Britain to find women who were entirely unfamiliar with this new language of cultural contact. The question of finding suitable matches became extremely important for this class of anglicized Muslim men who wished to spread a westernised atmosphere in the domestic sphere so as to aid their professional growth, especially in progressive ashraf circles.5 Consequently, it was women belonging to feudal households who were first drawn into the British cultural sphere and the colonial project of western education.

Finally, the seismic event of Partition raised the question of the Muslim community’s future in a country with a Hindu majority. It is within this nexus of colonial modernity, class and religious politics, and disparate gendered expectations that this English language novel by an upper-class Muslim woman writing about her own social milieu should be understood.

Anxious Misfits The primary struggle of the plot lies in Laila’s inability to neither embrace domestic orthodoxy nor accept the norms of (post)colonial modernity imAzra Asghar Ali, The Emergence of Feminism among Indian Muslim women, 1920-1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44.

4 Khizar Humayun Ansari, The Emergence of Socialist Thought among North Indian Muslims, 1917-1947 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 180.

5 Ansari, Emergence,180.

3

106

posed on her. In the context of the wide-ranging changes in the Indian subcontinent during this period, the figure of the misfit becomes significant.

This word has seen usage across a variety of theoretical frameworks like feminist scholarship, disability studies, and childhood studies. The manner in which I use the term implicates the postcolonial (and consequentially anglicized), gendered subject as a misfit. The occupation of this liminal space is beyond just the insider-outsider binary; the experience of intimacy is inextricable from the sense of alienation that defines mis-fitting.

Fitting in assumes the ability to assimilate and sit comfortably with the rules that govern a social group. A misfit is not an outcast, but someone who occupies space within the said group or setting and yet lacks the ease that marks the behaviour of other members of that group. This discomfort is not just internal to the consciousness of the subject—it is reinforced by their social context because of an inability to adhere to its normative structures.

Thus, the misfit is made to feel excluded and this feeling cannot be understood independently of the context which elicits it. The misfit is lost, ill-at ease, and fragmented. This inability of Laila‘s character to fit in is reflective of the anxiety and ambiguous position of the Muslim woman in modern India at the brink of independence.

The analysis in this paper hinges on how I frame the term anxiety. The ambiguity that exists in defining the term is symptomatic of its experience. As Simon Critchley notes, anxiety is fearful, but unlike fear it is not directed towards a particular thing–it is about being-in-the-world as such.6 Anxiety is experienced in the face of something indefinite, unclear. This amorphous, indeterminate quality of anxiety as philosophical mood or affect is unique, which makes it distinct from the use of the term in clinical psychology. Instead, anxiety as affect is persistent and gnawing—a gentle sense of unease and worry that underlies the everyday and pushes the subject to investigate the conditions of their being. Heidegger argues that anxiety is the only mood through which we can seek authenticity or recognize the nature of our existence. When we flee from ourselves, our familiarity with the world collapses and forces us to realize that we are ‘not at home.’ I interpret that feeling of not being at home as being comparable to misfitting. Much like how Dasein, or the nature of our being, is phenomenologically revealed to Simon Critchley, “Being and Time, Part 5: Anxiety,” The Guardian, July 06, 2009, accessed March 09, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/06/ heidegger-philosophy-being.

6

107

us by recognizing the uncanniness of the familiar, so does Laila’s constant recognition of her own position as a misfit propel her towards feminist emancipation. This propelling force is important in understanding the spatio-temporal dislocation that defines the anxiety of misfitting, which will be explored more as this paper continues.

Anxiety as a theme is explored extensively in the works of the Anglo-American modernists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot—an intellectual legacy Hosain was quite familiar with.7 The novel draws on the modernist aesthetic and in its structure plays with space and time to mediate Laila’s anxiety-ridden consciousness. Hosain borrows the title of her novel from a line of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” a poem about the otherworldly journey of the spiritually dead. The poem’s ‘Hollow Men’ fail to transform motions into actions and desire to fulfilment, similar to Laila’s struggle to find ‘completeness.’ For Laila, happiness is ephemeral; moments of consensus and cohesion are few and far between in an unending struggle for achieving them. In the final chapter, there seems to be an acceptance in Laila that completeness or fulfilment is impossible in the modern age.

In Laila’s context, however, the questions of fulfilment and completeness are deeply intertwined with those of the nation, identity, and belonging.

Supriya Chaudhuri writes: Modernism’s effort to locate the means of release in a new aesthetic order is historically the most critical element of its enterprise...In India, that aesthetic order must carry...the idea of a secular culture, the project of the nation, the reaffirmation of regional or local identity, the self-expression of the oppressed, and the sense of a ‘speeded-up’, intensely concentrated, time.8

Hosain’s nostalgic spatio-temporal exploration of the gendered belonging of Muslim women in the home and the national project, with Laila hurtling across this ‘sped up’ time in a kind of ‘thrownness’, makes Sunlight emblematic of the Indian modernist ethos, an artistic response to the (un) making of India.

Laila’s incompleteness dominantly arises from her position as a misfit amongst contesting femininities. As discussed, the occupation of the public Sunlight itself was published by Cecil Day-Lewis, a significantly noted poet of twentieth century Britain, though he did not identify as a modernist.

8 Supriya Chaudhuri, “Modernisms in India”, The Oxford Handbook Of Modernisms, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 960 7

108

sphere by women was considered a necessary step for modern India. It was, nonetheless, a cause of immense concern for the patriarchal order. There was an effort to craft the identity of the new woman on patriarchal terms, one wherein the role of the ‘new woman’ was still to support men rather than compete with them. Despite this expectation, many women were able to use their education to create their own paths. Sunlight gives us insight into these competing values of femininity and examines womanhood from a particular lens, one where the advantages of class are limited by the gender of these subjects. Laila goes to a convent school, reads voraciously, and has an English governess. She goes on to obtain a master’s degree. Thus, her privileged education and anglicized tastes ostensibly make her an example of the ‘new woman’ of colonial India: fodder for a marriage market which supplied English speaking wives to aristocrats and civil servants. Contrarily, Laila uses this education for emancipation, subverting the initial goals of the ‘new patriarchy.’ Jill Didur analyses this further and points out that “Laila’s experience of the expectations placed on her to assume a certain feminine role in the private sphere in both traditional/orthodox and modern/reform domestic contexts discloses how patriarchal power relations continue to circulate to equal degrees in both.”9 Both the traditional Aunt Abida and the modern Aunt Saira are deeply aware of their dependence on the feudal, patriarchal establishment for their sustenance. Their observance or refusal to follow purdah does not impact how they view sexuality; both are equally in opposition to Laila’s decision to choose a husband for herself.

Laila’s inability to align with either of these competing values of femininity constructs her as a misfit.

This experience of misfitting is fundamental to the anxiety of Laila’s character. The relationship between anxiety and modernity has been commented upon in cultural studies and discourses on mental health. In his illuminating book Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History (2015), Frances O’Gorman discusses how worry is one of the legacies of modern conceptions of free will and rational choice. He historicizes a steady increase in cultural representations of worry from the nineteenth century onwards, until worrying becomes the dominant affective mode of literature with Modernism. Laila finds it difficult to fit in anywhere, whether it is in the claustrophobic, sequestered space of the home or the cosmopolitan company of her peers at parties. She faces immense pressure to conform in a time where change is so rampant and enormous. There is a profound realisation 9

Jill Didur, Unsettling Partition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 110.

109

within Laila of her need to feel ‘complete’, which is reflective of the desire to escape the fragmentation which (post)colonial modernity imposes on her. She worries constantly, and the unease she feels becomes progressively more overwhelming. This informs the tone of the novel and its affective consumption by the reader. As pointed out earlier, Laila’s fears are rooted in her struggle to find herself in a world where traditional modes of being are quickly disintegrating. She has access to choices that the previous generation of Muslim women deemed unfathomable. The weight of these choices and the dizzying speed of socio-cultural changes cause a nauseating sense of anxiety within her.

Laila’s privileged education is clearly a radical shift from the kind of learning accessible to the generation of women before her. This fact in itself signals the birth of a new order in their home as older norms of womanhood and domesticity are replaced. This pre-sentiment of death is announced with the opening sentence, “the day my Aunt Abida moved from the zenana into the guest room off the corridor that led to the men’s wing of the house, within call of her father’s room, we knew that Baba Jan had not much longer to live.”10 This event symbolises not just Baba Jan’s demise, but becomes a temporal marker of the end of purdah, feudalism, and Laila’s childhood. The conditions of Laila’s birth and upbringing are thus riddled with precarity. Anxiety looms on the reader from the beginning of the text, and the death and disintegration of the home as well as of the nation are foreshadowed with Baba Jan’s death. The novel begins at a point where the old order of Ashiana is disintegrating with the ailing patriarch, Baba Jan, languishing on his deathbed. It is indicated that the world of purdah is vanishing and women have begun navigating the public sphere for the first time, with the emphasis on Laila’s education coinciding with the end of Baba Jan’s life. Laila remarks, “After Baba Jan’s death it was as if tight hands had been loosened which had tied together those who had lived under the power of his will and authority.”11 With the end of purdah in the household, Laila experiences not only a new-found freedom but also a sense of loss. In traditional South Asian Muslim society, the domestic space was divided into the zenana12 and the Hosain, Sunlight, 14.

Ibid., 112.

12 Literally meaning “of the women” or “pertaining to women,” contextually refers to the part of a house belonging to a Hindu or Muslim family in South Asia which is reserved 10 11

110

mardana (masculine) areas of the household. Zenana is often perceived as an isolated sphere, whose inhabitants lead a secluded, shadowy existence.

However, as Gail Minault points out, while the ideal of purdah society was one of ‘hermetically sealed respectability,’ its realities were considerably more sociable.13 A rich tapestry of domestic and familial connections imbued the lives of these women with a network of social contacts that were central to the way of life within a zenana. Thus, while critical of purdah, Hosain sees the zenana as a rich world of female homosociality rather than just a sequestered physical space. With the end of male-female separation in the household, Laila’s experience of liberation is accompanied by loss, as the world of female homosociality and the protection of seclusion purdah offered slowly disintegrates. In a telling moment, when she is told that Ameer is about to come to the house, she begins to excuse herself, to the surprise of her cousin who exclaims, “Why are you going …? You are not in purdah.”14 We understand that anxiety follows Laila from a very early age itself. Her status as an orphan leads her to occupy a space of some distance, disjointed from the traditional ‘family’ where she can never fully fit in because of the absence of her parents. Her exposure to western education and culture causes relatives and servants to worry about the potential ill-effects of her upbringing. She is warned by her nanny, “Your books will eat you. They will dim the light of your lovely eyes, my moon princess, and then who will marry you, owl-eyed peering through glasses?”15 Mohsin notes as he arranges Zahra's marriage: “I am sure Zahra will do as her elders decide. She has not had the benefit of a memsahib's education.”16 Zahra remarks, “I suppose you are going to find a husband for yourself. Maybe you'll marry someone for love like Englishwomen do.”17 Laila begins internalising these concerns from a formative age itself. An important moment where Laila expresses the disconnect she feels in her family is during Zahra’s wedding. The pomp and show of the arranged marriage makes her feel “withdrawn and alien in [her] thoughts.” She then goes on to rue, “Why question what others for the women of the household.

13 Gail Minault, “Begamati Zuban: Women’s Language And Culture In Nineteenth-Century Delhi.” India International Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1989): 5.

14 Hosian, Sunlight, 165 15 Ibid., 14.

16 Ibid., 23.

17 Ibid., 30.

111

accepted? Why was I allowed to be different?”18 This moment of internal withdrawal during a communal celebration is indicative of the immense isolation that Laila experiences due to her inability to submit to demands of the feudal, gender segregated household.

To put moments like this into focus in terms of the larger purpose of this paper, we must look deeper into how anxiety is affectively processed. Ngai states that the anticipatory character of expectant emotions puts them in a closer relationship with time, where increased emphasis is placed on the future. Beyond that, she also focuses on the spatial aspect of anxiety, finding that there is a projection towards the outside that defines it. Thus, anxiety is imposed onto something. This projection is spatially defined: anxiety hurtles from the internal consciousness of the subject to an object, and back again. She writes, “the externalizing aspect of “projection”...can be perceived not just as a strategy for displacing anxiety, but as the means by which the affect assumes its particular form.”19 It is therefore implied by her that projection is essential to experiencing anxiety. Here, Laila’s broader anxiety about mis-fitting in (post)colonial, semi-feudal, gender segregated context is localised in the realms of family and marriage.

Laila’s anxiety is what gives a specific ‘feeling-tone’ to the semi-autobiographical bildungsroman that Sunlight is. By ‘feeling-tone’, Ngai means the overarching feeling that defines a cultural artefact: “an organising affect that its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world.”20 In part four in particular, Laila is metaphorically ‘thrown’ into a web of relations, memories of which are evoked by her spatial location. The novel is ultimately about Laila’s search for agency and meaning in an era of rapid social change. Laila’s search for “interpretive agency,” an attempt at making an independent enquiry to make sense of the conditions of her being, propels her towards an unmoored, fragmented, political freedom which is liberating but also painful and precarious. This search is a process that is haunted by anxiety. It could be seen that this unique ‘feeling-tone’ signals the unmooring that comes with the loss of her family and Ameer, or as O’Gorman suggests, the debilitating loneliness of taking responsibility for individual choices under modernity.

Ibid., 114.

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 210.

20 Ibid., 28.

18 19

112

In Ngai’s characterisation of anxiety, the affect has traditionally belonged to a male dominion, wherein the male agent seeks interpretive agency through it and projects this anxiety through an expulsion mechanism to a being/object external to himself. In Hosain’s novel, we find a rare depiction of a feminine mode of anxiety where this expulsion is projected onto the family home. This makes teleological sense in the scheme of the novel’s construction as we see Laila framed by her different environs in each chapter through rich descriptions of physical spaces. Baba Jan’s death throws the spatial arrangement of the house into disarray. Thus, Ashiana becomes a recurrent idiom of history for Laila, she refracts her memory and her past through its interiors, but because she herself understands time as an “endless corridor” of years.21 She rues the loss of the original character of Ashiana after its re-decoration by Uncle Hamid, “I missed the ghostliness of the drawing-room. It had had a personality, gloomy and grotesquely rich, reflecting one of Baba Jan’s eccentricities.”22 The ghost of Baba Jan seems to still haunt the house, as Laila continues to experience a sense of foreboding and fear every time she crosses the ‘little room of swaying shadows’, where Baba Jan breathed his last, years after his demise. Similarly, heated political debates happen in the dining room, a formal setting with its hierarchically defined dining table, symbolic of the part-European, part-Mughal cultural background of the Muslim taluqdars (feudal landlords).

The projection, however, is not always limited to the home, notably so in relation to Ameer, wherein romantic love signifies escape from Ashiana.

Immediately prior to her first meeting with Ameer, during the grand celebrations at the historic Baradari, she experiences deep terror when a drunk man suddenly approaches her. Her fear evaporates on meeting Ameer and we see another way in which the fireworks display, the historic location, and a play between darkness and light is utilised to enhance the dreamlike quality of their rendezvous. Likewise, the declaration of love between the couple in the ‘effably serene’ hills is haunted by a ‘formless fear’; trepidation foreshadows tragedy.

Laila’s anxiety is built through a cycle of awe-inspiring encounters with her surroundings and eventual disenchantment and de-familiarisation, ‘throwing’ her into a state of emotional crisis but eventually leading her to an independent though indefinite future. The aspect of futurity linked to anxi21 22

Hosain, Sunlight, 16.

Ibid., 120.

113

ety troubles Laila. It is possible to read Laila’s turning away from politics as an attempt at deferment, one whereby she refuses to come to terms with the precariousness which defines the future of her country and community.

Though she engages in political debates with her college friends and family members, she finds the irreconcilability of different political positions frustrating. She is deeply critical of the political role played by the zamindars in colonial India, recognizing the exploitation and inequality the class rests on. Laila views the politics of the feudal class to be ideologically bankrupt and comments, “there was no political passion, only an implacable wish for power.”23 Her support for the secular nationalist struggle and rejection of Pakistan is clear, yet the novel contends that the possibility of belonging is extinguished for Muslims in post-Partition India. Despite this, Laila still displays attachment and fondness for the cultural mores of the taluqdari lifestyle, especially in the context of their imminent loss. In the concluding section of the novel Hosain highlights the decline of a class—they lose their sense of purpose as they either watched their world crumble or migrated to Pakistan to begin a new life. The erasure of this cultural legacy, and the consequent blank slate of ‘modernity’ imposed on her, leaves Laila in a state of flux, enveloping her in the uncertainty that marks the historical fate of Indian Muslims.

Notably, Laila’s impatience with politics increases with the entry of Ameer into her life. As thoughts of Ameer cloud her mind, she says: I began to live on two different planes of thought and action. Often, when imagination slipped its guard, the outward life in which Ameer played no part became blurred by the inner one in which only he and I existed. I would sometimes find myself slipping from one to another. My sudden withdrawals and absences were irritants to those around me.24

Later, she slips away from a dinner table conversation about politics to meet Ameer. They are then discovered kissing in a curtained room, an event that triggers Laila’s departure from Ashiana. This turning away from Ashiana marks a deferral from her family and the circumstances of her upbringing.

Romantic love allows Laila to assert her individuality, but divides her as it necessitates a rejection of family. While romantic love proliferated in Indi23 24

Ibid., 225.

Ibid., 227.

114

an mythology and literature, it was not seen as the basis for conjugal love.

A marriage of love was seen as a western invention; women choosing their own partners were considered dangerous since exercising sexual agency destabilized the strict codes of caste purity. Even as twentieth century India saw the growth of a discourse on marriage which emphasised ‘a meeting of the minds’ and not just matching caste/class identities, Laila is forced to choose between romantic love and family. The disapprobation of her beloved Aunt Abida hurts her the most. She painfully acknowledges this when she says, “I knew then understanding was impossible between us. She was a part of a way of thinking I had rejected. I had been guilty of admitting I loved, and love between a man and a woman was associated with sex, and sex was a sin.”25 The seemingly de-politicized notion of romantic love attains significant political meaning as we are made aware of the implications of loving another person. However, this exercise of political agency

by Laila is divorced from the struggles of the nationalist movement and in turn tries to delays her from facing the precarious future of her community.

The nation, the family and Ashiana return to haunt Laila in part four of the novel as the Partition spells the division of not just the nation but also of Laila’s family, consequently constructing Laila as a misfit in the temporal moment of India’s independence. After the splintering of the family across India and Pakistan following independence, the mounting financial and legal pressures on them cause Ashiana to be sold. Burton identifies this narrative as ‘future-past,’ a kind of nonlinear narrative where the future and the past collide to define a point of narrative origin:26 “Tattered settlements for refugees had erupted on once open spaces. Ugly buildings had sprung up, conceived by ill-digested modernity and the hasty needs of a growing city.”27 Burton points out that for Laila, even in its dissolution, the architecture of the neighbourhood is recognizable—and loaded with political and cultural significance—on the route home. Hosain represents Laila’s return to the house through her apprehension of the familiar and unfamiliar buildings on the road to Ashiana. Laila’s “eyes saw with the complex vision of nostalgia and sadness” the old and the new.28 Lucknow rejects colonialism by renaming buildings and roads. Familiar markers of Laila’s childhood are Ibid., 235.

Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 29.

27 Hosain, Sunlight, 270.

28 Ibid.

25 26

115

either abandoned or destroyed. She becomes a misfit again in independent India’s ‘ill-digested modernity,’ this time because of her religious and class identity: she is both a symbol of a past that modern India has discarded and a member of a quantitatively and culturally shrinking community. Despite her progressive upbringing, Laila fulfils the destiny imposed on Muslim women across all (post)colonial narratives from popular culture, that of being an anachronism for their time. Laila very much lives and breathes in her past: she does not belong to the present, and feels disoriented in the physical spaces altered massively by the ravages of modernity. Her past frames her indefinite tomorrows in a way that her “tomorrows were always yesterdays.”29 In an evocative moment, she stares at a derelict mirror, “longing for release from the ghosts that kept me [her] from acceptance of the present.”30 The acute sense of dispossession and loss that comes with the Partition informs the intimacy with which Laila catalogues Ashiana’s furniture, arches, gardens and, chiefly, its residents. Laila becomes “still as a stone in unstirred waters” when faced with the “disintegrating reality” of the house she had grown up in.31 The house returns like a ghost haunting her–distorted, yet recognizable. Recognizing that the house had been rented out to refugees, and thereby her once private abode is hers no more, Laila undergoes a de-familiarisation with her physical surroundings. The comforting space of the home transforms into the uncanny, forcing her to come to terms with intimate, painful memories which she had refused to confront. The deferment of anxiety is not possible once she comes to terms with her physical environment and the materiality of her existence.

Even as Laila re-engages with Ashiana, she does not return to the values it holds. Laila says, “and now the house was a living symbol. In its decay I saw all the years of our lives as a family; the slow years that had evolved a way of life, the swift, short years that had ended it.”32 It is possible to read this return as the trauma of the Partition bringing a nostalgic and penitent daughter home to the family like nothing else ever could—however, such a reading would be flawed. Burton writes, “although Laila is unquestionably moved by her return home, and particularly by encountering the past thIbid., 319.

Ibid., 313.

31 Ibid., 272.

32 Ibid., 273.

29 30

116

rough its domestic interiors, she is not, finally, seduced by what remains of domestic time and space at Ashiana.”33 It is in this slippage between past and present that the house evokes that Laila realizes that she must leave Ashiana behind. Laila’s engagement with the feudalism and oppressiveness of Ashiana is critical. Expressing a desire for freedom, she says, “I was my own prisoner and could release myself. ”34 It is unclear how easy it will be for Laila to escape her past, yet the novel recognizes the necessity of her attempt to do so. In order for her to assert her independence, Laila has to leave the home behind. While there are hints that her marriage to Ameer was not as perfect as she had expected, romantic love pushes her to seek individual agency. Her education, politics, and romantic choices establish her as a woman who refuses to let domesticity define her, yet the domestic space remains a force that continues to have a hold over her internal consciousness.

Laila’s quest for emancipation opens her up to censure, heartbreak, and uncertainty. This quest involves constant tension between the convenience of submission and the impulse of rebellion. The development of a strong feminist consciousness leads her to an eventual estrangement from the worlds she inhabits. Instead of conforming, she chooses to be a misfit. Laila faces this challenge of ‘unhappiness’ with a resilient reclamation of her identity as a misfit, a distinctly modern approach to dealing with the anxieties and unpredictability of a new era in the subcontinent’s history. There remains, however, a resistance in Sunlight to undo the pain and fear of this complex negotiation, perhaps the most remarkable quality of the novel.

Bibliography

Ansari, Khizar Humayun. The Emergence of Socialist Thought among North Indian Muslims, 1917-1947. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Asghar, Azra Ali.The Emergence of Feminism among Indian Muslim women, 1920-1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Burton, Antoinette. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

33 34

Burton, Dwelling, 32.

Hosain, Sunlight, 319.

117

Chaudhuri, Supriya. “Modernisms in India.” The Oxford Handbook Of Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Critchley, Simon and Reiner Schurmann. On Heidegger’s Being and Time.

London: Routledge, 2008.

Didur, Jill. Unsettling Partition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Hollow Men.” In The Hollow Men. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951.

Hosain, Attia. Sunlight on a Broken Column. New Delhi: Penguin, 2009.

Minault, Gail. “Begamati Zuban: Women’s Language And Culture In Nineteenth-Century Delhi.” India International Quarterly 11, no. 2, 1989.

Mody, Perveez. “Love and the Law: Love-Marriage in Delhi.” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 1, 2002.

Mohanty, Baisali. “Paradigm of Modernity in India.” Qrius. 7 June, 2016. qrius.com/paradigm-modern-india/. Web. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007.

O‘Gorman, Francis. Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Prendergast, Christopher. Cultural Materialism: on Raymond Williams. University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

118

119

Š Reda Berrada

120

Sundas Amer Recovering an Archive of Women’s Voices: Durga Prasad Nadir’s “Tażkirāt ul-Nissāy-e Nādrī” “Tażkirāt ul-Nissāy-e Nādrī” (Nādir’s Tażkirah of Women/Tażkirah of Rare Women) written by Durga Prasad “Nadir” (Rare) (1833 – 19??) and first published in parts between 1876 and 1884 in Delhi, is the second ever Urdu tażkirah to be devoted entirely to female poets of Persian and Urdu in the Indian subcontinent and Iran.1 Written in a time of political upheavals, transformation, and reform, the text has not received adequate attention in literary histories of the Indian subcontinent. Nadir’s tażkirah represents a strong voice from within the tradition that challenges the male-centered constructions of Urdu literary history, and asserts a space for women in Urdu’s formative stages. At a time when Urdu is being solidified and structured as a veritable language of consequence in the subcontinent, Nadir sets up a separate but intersecting canon of women’s contributions that ensures their representation in history. In this thesis, I draw attention to the most prominent features of this work as far as its contribution to history and gender is concerned.

Nadir’s tażkirah is an important literary archive and documentation of women’s voices that celebrates women’s creativity on its own terms. It contributes to the debates surrounding women’s education and societal reform in nineteenth-century India, a time when reforming women was considered essential to reforming society. Notwithstanding its contributions to gender and literary history, visible in the text are clear tensions within Nadir’s thought. Nadir adopts a somewhat pedantic attitude towards women, but the text offers ways in which to deconstruct his suggestions and their relevance to the women mentioned. While Nadir pays lip service to dominant reformist concerns, his treatment of the women does not adhere to these same standards. He prescribes notions of the ideal woman and the benefits of women’s education that are similar to reformist narratives, but simultaneously celebrates values of literary and historical female figures that do not neatly align with these merits. While Nadir seems to buy into certain colonial constructions and approaches, especially in regard to identity difDurga Prasad Nadir, Tażkirat-ul Nissāy-e Nādrī, ed. Rafaqat Ali Shahid (Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2016); except when noted otherwise, all translations are mine.

1

121

ferentiation, his writing betrays a disavowal of these same categories. From the late nineteenth-century, men such as Nadir were manifestly thinking about the involvement of women in a rejoinder to standard literary canons, as well as evaluating the content and quality of their compositions. This project recovers an important archive with all its problematics, and will give more guidance on how to read women's representation in the history of Urdu literature and gender.

The Tażkirah Genre The word “tażkirah” means “mention” or “remembrance,” and has come to denote a genre of Persian and Urdu that is viewed as part literary criticism, part history, and part outline of the material culture of a chosen time period. While tażkirah writers themselves give no standard definition of the genre, it can in its most skeletal sense be understood as a biographical compendium of poets and a select few verses of their poetry. As a genre of selection and categorization based on the sensibilities of the compiler, the tażkirah tends to give more insight into the values and literary taste (ẓauq) of its compiler rather than those of its subjects. “Lubāb ul-Albāb,” a biographical anthology of Persian poets completed by Sadid al-Din Aufi in Ucch, Sind, in 1221, is widely considered to be the first literary tażkirah in Persian. Its style was mimicked by Persian and later Urdu tażkirah writers. The first known Urdu tażkirah, Mir Muhammad Taqi “Mir’s,” “Nikāt al-Shu’arā,” while devoted to Urdu poets, was written in Persian in 1752, demonstrating both the dominance of Persian in the Indian subcontinent as a formal literary language and the influence of Persian literary traditions on the then fledgling Urdu literature canon. Mir’s tażkirah also reminds us of the interconnectedness of Persian and Urdu in the world of letters, such that knowledge of one language presumed fluency in the other.

Like all other works of history, tażkirahs can be problematized, and have been criticized both in their time and within modern scholarship for their lack of details, their subjective style, and repetition sometimes inherent in their emulation of other tażkirahs.2 However, tażkirahs are a dominant, established genre of literary history in the Islamic tradition. In addition to the information contained within them, they are veritable troves of the dialogues circulating within the author’s socio-cultural, poetical milieu. The tażkirah makes manifest the tensions, attitudes, and particular literary pre2

Fatehpuri, Urdu Shu‘arā, 77 122

ferences of poets and their interlocutors, as well as the personal standing of the author within these debates. What is sensed merely through reading poetry is lent credibility when validated by external evidence as given by a tażkirah. Moreover, tażkirahs set the standard for biographical writing in Urdu such that monologues today mimic the narrative style of tażkirahs.

While this survey has treated the conventional definition of the literary historical “tażkirah” genre within Urdu and Western scholarship, it can be argued that this is simply one understanding of the term. With “tażkirah” as “remembrance,” a reference by an author to other individuals in a manner not mandated by the requirements of the genre can be considered a certain kind of a tazkirah. For example, the nineteenth-century North Indian poet Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib” writes in his maṡnavī “Chirāġh-e Dair:” I look for three bodies from among the men of the country Who are the color and splendor of this town of gardens When I wish to measure the beauty of epiphanies Over and over, I ask God for “Fazl-e Haq” When I write the amulet of the arm of faith I write “Hussam ul-Din Haidar Khan” When I patch up the garment of my soul I sew “Amin ul-Din Ahmad Khan”3

Here, Ghalib directly addresses these three individuals while playing on their names to invoke the name of God, Imam Ali, and Prophet Muhammad respectively. “Fazl-e Haq” is a proper name, but also means “merits of God.” “Hussam-ul Din Haidar Khan” is translated as “the sword of religion,” and “Haidar” means “lion,” both common epithets for Imam Ali, cousin of Prophet Muhammad, the fourth caliph of Islam, and the first Imam of the Shia faith. “Amin” means one who can be safely entrusted with goods and was a nickname for Prophet Muhammad before he was established as a prophet of Islam. “Ahmed” was the first title conferred upon Muhammad from God, and means “most praiseworthy.” Ghalib uses this space to commemorate and hierarchize the central figures of the Islamic faith while remembering and memorializing three individuals within his milieu to whom he was closely connected. In its broadest sense, “tażkirah” can be extended to a literary mention of this sort, and this understanding Z. Ansari, Maṡnaviyāt-e Ghālib (Matn-e Fārsī ma‘ Urdū Tarjumah) (New Delhi: Ghalib Institute, 1983), 41.

3

123

troubles our notions of established genres and their accepted hermeneutic possibilities. It is necessary to approach archives with a critical eye to the labels of genre, gender, hierarchy, and so on to unearth those narratives that have been suppressed by these categorizations.

While Nadir’s tażkirah is in its structure very much in the scheme of a standard nineteenth-century tażkirah, his unusual subject matter makes us aware of how it is possible to carve a space within the genre for more subaltern narratives. In the following section, I detail particularities of his life and examine how his personal background, professional involvement, and socio-political environs may have influenced his approach to his tażkirah and their subjects, before moving on to discuss the tażkirah itself.

Durga Prasad Nadir and his Milieu Not much is known about Nadir from sources other than his own writings.

Nadir was born “Tej Bhan” into a Kayasth Hindu lineage well-versed in Indo-Persianate literary traditions and closely associated with the British on 21 September 1833 in Kucha Brij Mahal in Delhi. He completed his initial schooling at the age of nineteen and then moved on to Mission School located in Chandni Bazaar. Here he also served as an assistant teacher.

In 1852, he was admitted to Delhi College and studied Persian, Mathematics, Hindi, Arabic, and English there until 1855. After this, he learnt modes of mathematical inquiry and served as a scribe in the village registrar in Rohtak. During this time, Nadir also learned the art of calligraphy in Nasta‘līq script from Mirza Abdullah Baig, the student of Mir Panjah Kash.4 From 1859 to 1863 he taught Persian at a village school in Gurgaon. In 1864, he moved to Branch School in Teliwara, Delhi, and soon after to Normal School, Delhi. He was then brought to Lahore by Pyare Lal “Ashob,”5 who was close to the Director of the Department of Education Sayyid Muhammad Amir Rizvi (d. 1857), more commonly known as Mir Panjah Kash, was a calligrapher at the court of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. He was among the foremost calligraphers of his time and had a number of pupils. „Note on Mir Panjah-Kash.“ Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 1, no. 4 (Oct 01, 1953): 337.

5 Pyare Lal Ashob (1834 - 1914) was closely connected to the British administration and the Hindu community in Delhi. He was well-educated, fluent in English, and served in the school systems. He had a close correspondence with the great Urdu and Persian poet Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan Ghalib (1797-1869), for whom he prepared English communications with officials of the British administration. Daud Rahbar, Urdu Letters of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (New York: SUNY Press, 1987), 626. “Ashob” is also the 4

124

in Punjab, Major Fuller.6 Like Muhammad Husain Azad, Altaf Hussain “Hali,” and Maulvi Karimuddin, Nadir was employed in the British government upon Ashob’s recommendation. From 1872, he worked as an editor of Mathematics books in the government printing press of the Department of Education, Punjab. In 1875, he was appointed as a Mathematics teacher in the new Delhi College and returned to Delhi in that capacity. He married in February 1877 at the age of 43. In April 1877 Delhi College was abolished and Nadir was forced to return to Lahore and work as a Head Examiner. Upon receiving his pension, he resigned from his position and settled in Delhi, where in 1881 he founded a bookstore in Dariba Kalan Bazaar called “Delhi Book Society.” Additionally, Nadir served as an agent of the Office of Examination Key, Delhi, General Commission Agent, and caretaker of the magazine “Hindustānī Luġhāt-e Urdū,” or “Indian Dictionaries of Urdu.” Nadir passed away sometime after 1903.

By his own count, Nadir wrote over a hundred tracts in his life, of which forty-eight were published, and fifteen are of a literary nature. Given his long association with the education industry, it is of no surprise that most of his compositions are school curriculum books.7 From this short introduction, it becomes clear that the dominant influences on Nadir ’s life came from his and his family’s close ties to the British administration and his own association with Delhi College. Traditionally, Kayasths were known to have served the governments of the Mughals and their successors, aided especially by their literacy in Persian and record-keeping skills.8 Nadir’s lineage very much conforms to this involvement, given his author in Urdu of a history of British rule, entitled “Tārīḳh-e Salṯanat-e Inglīshiyā” (1871), translator of British legal texts and Sanskrit puranas into Urdu, and editor of geographical and educational texts.

6 Major Abraham Fuller was seconded out of the army to serve in this capacity. He was appointed in the Royal Artillery Bengal in 1845, made captain in 1858, major in 1865, and drowned in 1867. He had an interest in Arabic and Persian literature, and had translated some medieval Persian chronicles into English. Avril A. Powell, “Scholar Manqué or Mere Munshi? Maulawi Karimu’d-Din’s Career in the Anglo-Oriental Education Service,” in The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 220.

7 Except where indicated otherwise in a footnote, this information on Nadir’s life is taken from the compiler’s introduction to the tażkirah; Nadir, Tażkirat, 12-14.

8 Gail Minault, “The Perils of Cultural Mediation: Master Ram Chandra and Academic Journalism at Delhi College,” in The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 191.

125

father’s service to the British and literary knowledge of and production in Urdu, Hindi, and Persian. The British attitude towards Indians from the nineteenth-century through the 1830s is best defined by the concept of “White Mughals,” or those British who for the most part integrated themselves into Indian culture and adopted local ways. Members of Nadir ’s family worked for Shamru Begum, whose domain over Sardhana is known as a hybrid European-Mughal affair that exemplified the White Mughals.9 The Indian scholars of the Delhi College are divided into three main groups: those who studied before 1857 and managed to secure their positions as prime movers in Urdu literary and educational culture, those whose upwardly mobile careers were compromised by the Mutiny and who only managed subordinate posts in the education service, and those who were relegated to low-grade positions after the Mutiny such as “textbook hacks” and copyists. Of the first category, Muhammad Husain Azad is a prime example, of the second, Master Ram Chandra and Maulvi Zaka Ullah, and of the third, Maulvi Karimuddin.10 Nadir is very much in the tradition of, and contemporary to, products of Delhi College such as Muhammad Husain Azad (1830-1910), Master Ram Chandra (1821-1880), Maulvi Karimuddin (1821-1879), Maulvi Zaka Ullah (1832-1910), and Nazir Ahmed Dehlavi (1830-1912). Azad, who represented within the literary world the struggle between classical Indo-Persian poetics and pressures to adapt to the rising English influence, is said to have studied at the college approximately between 1845 and 1853.11 Chandra was a Kayasth Mathematics professor in the Oriental section who edited two journals in the subject issued from the College in the 1840s and 1850s,12 created an uproar when he converted to Christianity in 1852, and wrote articles on the need for women’s education and rights.13 William Dalrymple, “Transculturation, Assimilation, and its Limits: The Rise and Fall of the Delhi White Mughals 1805-1857,” in The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 78.

10 Powell, “Scholar Manqué,” 227-228.

11 C. M. Naim, “Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Sahba’i: Teacher, Scholar, Poet, and Puzzle-master,” in The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857, ed.

Margrit Pernau (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 159.

12 Minault, “Perils,” 190.

13 Christina Oesterheld, “Deputy Nazir Ahmad and the Delhi College,” in The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 309.

9

126

Karimuddin studied at the College from 1840 to 1844, worked in translation and publication of texts from the College after that, and edited histories (tażkirah) and authored tracts on women’s education.14 He taught Urdu at Agra Government College from 1848 – 1856, and after the Mutiny of 1857 served in the Punjab education service during which he also produced textbooks on geography, history, and grammar.15 Zaka Ullah was also descended from a family who served as teachers for the Mughals and was close to Master Ram Chandra. He taught in Delhi College and Agra College (1855-1869), served as Professor of Vernacular Science and Literature at Allahbad’s Muir Central College (1872-1876), headed the Delhi Normal School and was the deputy inspector of schools in Bulandshahar and Moradabad (1869-1872). Zaka Ullah was close to Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan and espoused many of his views, including the idea that the Muslims should throw in their lot with the British rather than oppose them. He translated European works of Mathematics into Urdu in the 1870s and published prolifically in the 1890s on moral issues, education, and money management. Zaka Ullah was a keen British subject and documented his loyalty to Queen Victoria in his tract entitled “Victoria Nama.” In his history of Hindustan, the first volume of which was published in 1897, he praises the East India Company for having replaced “a barbaric government with a sophisticated and civilized one.”16 Nazir Ahmed, who is regarded as Urdu’s first novelist, entered Delhi College in 1846 where he gained proficiency in Arabic. He was a close disciple of Master Ram Chandra and edited many of his articles on women’s education, the views of which later made their way into Ahmed’s didactic stories.17 After the Mutiny, he served until 1884 in various cities as deputy inspector of schools and deputy collector, and spent his remaining years reading, writing, teaching Arabic, and delivering speeches.18 Nadir’s educational and professional life followed a similar trajectory as many of these figures. Like all of them, he was directly or indirectly impacted by the Mutiny of 1857. It is highly likely that he operated within Powell, “Scholar Manqué,” 214.

Ibid., 203.

16 Hasan, “Maulawi,” 294.

17 Oesterheld, “Deputy Nazir,” 309.

18 Ibid., 311-312.

14 15

127

the same milieu, a fact that is reflected in the themes of his own writings.

In fact, in the introduction to his tażkirah he quotes directly from Maulvi Karimuddin’s “Tāriḳh-e Shu’arā-ye ‘Arabī” (“A History of Arab Poets”) and notes that Karimuddin currently serves as a District Inspector of Schools in Amritsar.19 Much like Master Ram Chandra, Maulvi Karimuddin, and Nazir Ahmed, Nadir had an interest in the cause of women’s education. Nazir Ahmed in particular is considered a member of the Muslim service gentry who responded to the loss of power, changes in patronage, employment, and fortune after the Mutiny of 1857 by devising means of educational and social reform for their class and community to recoup their self-respect and retain their “sharīf” (noble) status.20 This included an increased focus on women’s religious and intellectual education in the hope that it would help banish spiritual degeneracy in the zenana that had led to moral and material excess in the men’s lives. For men to progress outside the home, women were needed to step up in the home. This has also been viewed as a civilizing mission by Muslim men that mimicked its British counterpart.21 Nadir’s writings betray a fondness for the British that aligns with Maulvi Zaka Ullah’s own inclination for the colonial masters. Like Azad, Nadir is remembered in literary history for his tażkirah that reflected a certain changing trend in Urdu literary culture and social habits.

Nadir is very much a product of his time, an individual shaped by changing cultural forces and demonstrative of their peculiarities and requirements.

What emerges is a multifaceted, dynamic figure struggling to mark his presence and voice in the age. Nadir comes from an administrative background that allied closely with the Mughal model, if not directly, then through the British who emulated it. By virtue of this, he is well-versed in Indo-Islamicate literary and educational traditions. He and his family watched British ascendance in North India closely, first through their service for a “White Mughal” jāgīr system, and then through Nadir’s own direct interaction with them through the Delhi College and appointments thereafter. Nadir was in and around Delhi during the Mutiny of 1857, and must have been privy to the formalization of British rule. At the same time, his tenure at the Delhi College and co-participation with its figures, described above, meant that he was exposed to a certain kind of knowledge production. His Nadir, Tażkirat, 56 Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 55.

21 Ibid., 56.

19 20

128

writing reveals that he was involved with the same socio-cultural problematics as many of the students of the College. The reformist activity of the nineteenth-century, much of it a reaction to changing times, ensured a greater focus on issues of women’s education, both within the Hindu and Muslim community.

All of this is reflected in the introductory prose text in Nadir’s tażkirah. He is attuned to the changing social, structural, and cultural tides of the time, which results in a tażkirah on women’s poetry, a topic hardly indulged in before this and attempted in Urdu only once before. Nadir is embedded within the Indo-Islamicate traditions of knowledge production and literature, which is why he chooses to write a tażkirah on female poets in Urdu and Persian. His aim is also to demonstrate the depth of his familiarity with the tradition and to cement his positionality within it for posterity. He expects that this includes a space for reflection on education among Hindu women, and is comfortable developing understandings of learned Hindu and Muslim women in the past, and their knowledge-based accomplishments. Yet he also recognizes that there is no counterpart to the tażkirah in the “Hindu” tradition, a fact that evinces the separation between the two religious communities inherent in his conception. Nadir clearly addresses a Hindu audience; he is concerned with a lack of education among Hindu women, and wants to challenge mindsets that cause low levels of education among Hindu women, not among Muslims. He almost seems to think that the Muslims have sorted the matter of female education. Nadir uses this text to declare his loyalty to the British in a manner that involves a degradation of the Muslim rulers who preceded them, a fact that further plays into the identity politics of the time, but may also just be a way in which to receive patronage and recognition from the reigning power.

The complexity of Nadir’s character and the contradictions inherent in his thought seep into his prose reflections in the tażkirah, and allow the reader to investigate his writing and its assumptions. In the next section, I explore in greater detail these themes in Nadir’s introduction to his tażkirah, as well as the particularities of his treatment of women.

Tażkirāt ul-Nissāy-e Nādrī The tażkirah is divided into two main sections with corresponding introductions and notes. It is written entirely in Urdu with Persian and Arabic 129

colloquial expressions and verse throughout its prose. The first section, entitled “Gulshan-e Nāz,” (“The Garden of Coquetry ”) consists only of Persian women poets, and was first published in 1876 by Matba Fauq Kashi, Delhi.

Although the poetry is in Persian, the text of the narrative, including the introduction and the short biographies of the female poets, is in Urdu. The second section, entitled “Chaman Andāz” (“In the Style of the Garden”), was published under the name “Mirat-ul Khiyālī” (“The Mirror of Imagination”) in 1878 by Matba Fauq Kashi and consists of the poetry and short biography of Urdu women poets. Both the Persian and Urdu sections are organized by the first letter of the takhallus, or pen-name, of the poet according to the Urdu alphabet. In 1884, the complete tażkirah with both Persian and Urdu sections was published under the name “Tażkirāt ul-Nissāy-e Nādrī” by Akmal Al-Matabe, Delhi.

Nadir writes this tażkirah as a response to Hakim Fasihuddin Ranj’s earlier tażkirah, the first to focus exclusively on women’s poetry in Urdu and Persian. The tażkirah, entitled “Bahāristān-e Nāz” (“The Spring-Garden of Coquetry”), was first published in 1863 and with revisions four years later in 1867.22 According to Nadir, he compared these two versions with the information contained in other tażkirahs of Persian and Urdu that refer to women writers. He found discrepancies between Ranj’s account and theirs, as well as between the older texts themselves. His aim in writing a tazkirah is then to present a succinct, accurate narrative that compares and collates information contained in previous texts, and to add to it the few female poets in his knowledge.23 In addition to these tażkirahs, Nadir sources his material from his own personal knowledge, accounts of his friends and acquaintances, and newspapers and magazines of the time. This last source reflects the public preoccupation of the age with issues of women’s education, and how print technologies of the time made possible circulation of texts on the subject. While it is not uncommon for tażkirah writers to point to faults of others in their field, Nadir’s emphasis on his research methods, and the thoroughness of his investigation seems to be his unique claim. Nadir makes his methodology clear in a manner unusual for texts of the time.

He does pointedly quote Ranj’s tażkirah, but also includes the previous tażkirah writers in his criticisms of extant writing on the genre. Whether or not he is successful in doing so, Nadir desires to set himself apart in his writing method from the shoddier practices of all those who preceded him, 22 23

Nadir, Tażkirat, 50 Ibid., 50 130

not just one author. His rejoinder to Ranj’s criticism of his tażkirah, included in the appendix, signals his lack of reluctance to participate in more traditional tażkirah debates as well.24 Nadir opens his tażkirah with the following couplet and line: Oh noble of the age show us generosity Open the closed door with the key of generosity

Such is God’s consummate power that He made man the noblest of all created beings (ashraf-ul maḳhlūqāt) and made education and learning a means by which to gain nobility (sharaf).25

From the very beginning, we are made aware of Nadir’s preoccupation with sharif, or noble, status, and his conviction that education is the means by which to attain it. This sets the terms of his reformist agenda. His purported ideological aim in writing the tażkirah is to encourage the sharif Hindu men of India to educate their women, for this will allow mothers to raise their children better, and to ensure that the good name and standing of India is preserved. According to him, the men of the age keep women uneducated in order to “increase their own honor.”26 Sharif Hindu men do educate the widows of the family, but only so that they can read scripture and be near to God in their final years.27 This practice should be extended to married women so that they better understand how to serve their men, learn the benefits of maintaining their chastity (‘iṣmat), and remain wary through cognizance of the punishment of sins.28 To Nadir it is important that he present a survey of the state of women’s education across a broad survey of countries and communities. In addition to Hindu and Muslim women, he manages to slip in a few words on English, Jewish, and Parsi women. He notes that based on his knowledge the latter two are generally educated, but for the former assumes that an uneducated English woman is rare, and that many among them are poets.29 Given that his subject is Persian and Urdu and he delineates the geographical scope of his tażkirah as the Asian subcontinent, it is not surprising that Ibid., 274-280.

Ibid., 45.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 46 29 Ibid., 51.

24 25

131

the women of Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Anatolia, and Central Asia are given mention.30 What does stand out is his commitment to including China in this count, given that it possesses very little shared linguistic and literary overlaps with the Indian subcontinent. Nadir finds in the Avadh Aḳhbār an essay that translates from Chinese into Urdu a section of a guidebook for women, and reproduces a summary of this essay in his text.31 The essay advocates demure, submissive female behavior on the part of women from childhood through widowhood. Girls are advised to respect their parents and elder siblings, greet their older relatives every day and night, and forbear from habits for which they are reprimanded. They are encouraged to show interest in reading and writing, but to read the introductions of books first to ensure they are not perusing literature of any romantic genre. It is necessary for them to learn mathematics, since without it they will be incapacitated in the matter of household expenditure accounting. Above all, they are to be soft-spoken, good-natured, reticent, and not bold, outspoken, or immodest. After marriage, girls should serve their in-laws as they would their parents while at the same time attending to their parents with their husband’s permission. They shouldn’t look here and there while walking on the road, and must retire to a separate quarter when men come to their house. Women should never look at men with longing (ḥasrat) or amazement (ḥairat), and the woman who never raises her gaze to meet the eyes of men possesses great consciousness. They must never go to temples, laugh loudly, or wear anything more than simple, plain clothes. In widowhood, a woman should become so humble (ḳhāksār) that the very sight of her arouses hatred. Just as a young woman should be entirely obedient to her parents and elder brother, and a married woman to her husband, the widow should consider her son the central locus of her existence.

The contents of this essay are extremely similar to guidebooks for women published later in the subcontinent, the most notable and popular of which was Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s “Bihishtī Zevar” (“Heavenly Ornaments”) of 1905.32 The qualities described in this essay comprise an Ibid., 52.

Ibid., 119. Avadh Aḳhbār was the first Urdu daily newspaper in North India, launched in 1858 from the Nawal Kishore Press in Lucknow.

32 The earliest manuscript found dates to 1905. Minault, Secluded Scholars, 64.

30 31

132

archetype for the stock ideal woman whom Nadir can hold up as the desired result of reform. This reference also demonstrates Nadir’s familiarity with, and execution of, the Prophetic Hadith, “Seek knowledge even unto China.” Nadir exemplifies his own adherence to this credo by proving that he personally has made the effort to find a tract from China, that itself recommends education for women and so adheres to the Islamic tradition that refers to it. This circle of validation is important to Nadir, who makes the effort to expand his reach as far as China to give it central positionality in his move to define the ideal woman of the Asian subcontinent. By making these values non-specific to India, Nadir suggests that Indian women’s reform is very much within the rubric of broader reform. Indian values are universal, not exceptional. This reinforces the validity of Indian women’s reform, but also means that it can have a stake in and be responsive to broader movements of women’s reform. Nadir’s outlook is expansive and differs from the community, custom-oriented approach of reformers like Thanawi.

While Nadir sets out the desired woman in these terms, his own examples of educated women across the age do not conform to these specifications.

In the pages that follow, Nadir notes Muslim and Hindu women over the ages who were either well-educated, composed poetry, or both. He takes care to note the husband or father of the women where he can, but is in no way opposed to including women who do not possess these sharif markers but contributed significantly to literature or distinguished themselves as scholars. Of these, examples include Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, considered the first woman to have authored a divan, or a collection of poetry, in Urdu, and Kargi, who engaged in scholarly debates during the time of Raja Janak, King of Mithila in 4000 BC according to Vedic literature.33 While Nadir pays lip service to their sharif social status as decreed by marriage or birth where possible, he celebrates these women above all for their literary and intellectual accomplishments, and not for conforming to the notion of the “ideal woman” delineated previously in the text. These women are not lauded for being obedient daughters or wives, or for maintaining a modest and reticent disposition. They are distinguished on the basis of the verses they composed, and for the contributions they made to science and the arts.

Examples of women who wrote in Arabic include Zulekha, who composed verse in admiration of the Prophet Yusuf, Umayya, the daughter of Prophet Muhammad’s grandfather Abdul Mutallib, who along with her sisters reci33

Nadir, Tażkirat, 56-57 133

ted dirges at the moment of their father’s death, and Taqiya, who was born in Sur, Oman, in 505H (1111 AD) and wrote odes and verse fragments.34 Nadir also contextualizes and imputes consequences to verse composition.

For example, he mentions Qatila, famous among Arab poets.35 When her father Nusr bin Haris was captured and executed as a prisoner of war of the Battle of Badr, Qatila recited a few verses. Upon hearing these, Prophet Muhammad remarked that had he listened to her compositions earlier, he would have spared her father.36 Nadir not only recognizes and praises those women who engaged in the literary sphere, he ascribes potency and impact to their product, such that it had tangible ramifications in its immediate milieu. Women held a powerful tool in their poetry and possessed the ability to influence those around them with their skill.

Nadir ventures into the realm of epic poetry and legend to draw examples of learned Hindu women. He credits Mandodari, wife of King Ravan of Lanka as given in the Ramayana, with having created the game of chess.37 He mentions Roopmati, who was the queen of the King of Malwa, Baz Bahadur, and took her life when Bahadur fled in the face of the Mughal forces of Adham Khan.38 Her story is immortalized in folk tales that celebrate the couple and their love, along the lines of the similarly ubiquitous Laila-Majnun and Heer-Ranjha narratives. For Nadir, the historical legacy of women is cemented through such figures preserved in literary narratives.

While he cites the Muslim women for having composed poetry, in the Hindu section Nadir’s female examples are scholars as well. These include Lilavati, the daughter of the great mathematician Bhaskacharya. Lilavati was herself adept in the subject and excelled especially in accounting, as well as Sanghamitra, the daughter of King Ashoka who was a great scholar in her time.39 Of course, Mira Bai marks her place among these women as daughter of the Marwari raja of Merta and revered poet whose gčt and bhajans are widely sung in India.40 The matter of guidance in the matter of female education sheds light on the way in which Nadir differs from other reformers of the age, particularIbid., 54-57.

Ibid., 55.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 58.

38 Ibid., 60.

39 Ibid., 58-59.

40 Ibid., 60.

34 35

134

ly Nazir Ahmed. Nadir laments that when an Indian, especially a Hindu man, raises the topic of women’s education, his listeners become upset and remain silent, and if they speak, utter this response: “Well, sir! If you begin this practice in your family, then perhaps another will become interested by following your example.”41 His rejoinder to this is a Persian statement of his own composition: “If there is desire in the heart, no guidance is required.”42 This is in direct contrast to someone like Nazir Ahmed, who perpetuated his reformist agenda through instructive novels that clearly defined the qualities of the model of a good, obedient woman that all women should emulate. According to Nazir, women require education, but in limited amounts, and have to be guided towards the optimal manner in which to receive and manifest this instruction in their reformed mannerisms. Conversely, Nadir is ostensibly rejecting the idea that there needs to be some sort of ideal precedent that women require and a manual by which to reach this. This statement is of course troubled by the Chinese essay that lays out the qualities of the desired woman, for it does indicate a standard Nadir is adhering to. Yet, by invoking examples of women who in no way evince characteristics of this ideal woman, Nadir has already undercut his strict adherence to and even belief in this archetype. Moreover, if we take the examples of women he quotes as “guidance,” it is telling that he looks not to tracts written by men dictating how women should behave and be educated, but to other women. If women are to be guided by anyone, it is these women who have distinguished themselves through their own skill and effort.

In fact, the one clear instance in which he details a woman being guided by a man is in his section on religious decrees that sanction female education and poetry-writing by women. Nadir utilizes religious scripture not so much as guidance on how to educate women, but injunctions to educate women at all. He claims the goddesses Parvati and Sita as women knowledgeable in Sanskrit, and asserts that women have been writing in Prakrit and Bhasha (Hindi) since the inception of the languages.43 Hindu women have been enjoined to seek education in the Vedas: “Obtain complete excellence and goodness and knowledge and well-breeding!”44 Muslims are instructed by the sharia to educate women, and women of good families are often Ibid., 46.

Ibid.

43 Ibid., 45.

44 Ibid., 48.

41 42

135

literate. If nothing else, they have “Bismillāh” ceremonies at the age of four years, four months, four days, to mark the child’s first encounter with the Quran and to recite its opening words “bismillāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm” (“In the Name of God, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful”).45 He quotes an Arabic hadith, or saying, of Prophet Muhammad: “Seeking knowledge is an obligation upon all Muslim men (Muslim) and Muslim women (Muslimah).”46 Nadir parses the Islamic tradition to prove whether poetry-writing by women is religiously permissible and sanctioned. To this end, the first example he gives is that of Prophet Muhammad having given iṣlāh, or the correction given by a master (ustād) to his student (shagird), to his young wife Aisha.47 This is the only instance in which a man is directly noted as having guided a woman. One day, Aisha comes back home from a visit to her relatives.

Prophet Muhammad asks her what present she has brought for him, and when Aisha says she composed a couplet for him at her relative’s place, he commands her to recite it. Upon hearing the couplet, Muhammad suggests an adjustment to the second verse, and gives her his own preferred version of the verse. Muhammad does not question the verse but seeks to correct and enhance it, and in doing so validates Aisha’s participation in poetry composition. Within Nadir’s scheme, the most revered and exalted human figure in Islam is the only one endowed with the authority to guide a woman.

The means of justification for the permissibility of female authorship Nadir utilizes further proves the depth of his familiarity with the Islamic tradition. His next example is that Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter and the wife of his cousin and fourth caliph of Islam, Ali, who composed a marṡiyah (elegy) upon the death of the Prophet.48 Finally, he states that the wife of the Abbasid caliph Harun ar-Rashid, Khadija, also named Zubaida, was an adept poet. What is important in these examples is that Nadir covers the dominant factions within Islam. Muhammad is considered the Seal of Prophethood during whose time Islam was perfected, and to whom the irrefutable word of God, the Quran, was revealed. Aisha is important to Ibid., 47.

Ibid., 45.

47 Ibid., 48-49.

48 Nadir, Tażkirat, 49. Marsiya is a term usually ascribed to dirges lamenting the Battle of Karbala where Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, was martyred in the fight against the tyrant, Yazid.

45 46

136

Sunnis, especially because of her status as the favorite wife of the Prophet and as the daughter of the first caliph of Islam, Abu Bakr, but not as respected within the Shia tradition. Yet, Nadir next invokes Fatima, who is revered by all in Islam, regardless of creed and faction. Fatima is considered the ideal daughter, wife, and mother, who epitomizes the desired values in these roles. Finally, he draws this poetic lineage out to a caliph associated with the golden age of Islam after the death of the Prophet. Nadir selects the most respected female figures in Islam to verify the permissibility of female authorship and secures an exalted lineage of its tradition.

While Nadir demonstrates his acceptance of certain colonial categories, his text belies his complete conviction in these. He laments the decline in women’s education over time, such that a phenomenon that seemed so prevalent throughout history has faltered in the current age. Here Nadir declares his loyalty to the British government and his disapproval of the Muslim rulers who preceded it. He buys into the colonial construction of Muslims as barbaric invaders who subjugated the local Hindu population to their uncivilized ways. According to him, these examples of educated Hindu and Muslim women in the past prove that it was only when the Muslims gained ascendancy over the country that the Hindus began keeping their women uneducated.49 Since the establishment of the exalted government of the British led by their esteemed Queen Victoria, peace and contentment have spread across the land, and schools for women have popped up and panḍitnīs and bāis appointed as teachers.50 A few pages later, he takes this one step further and states that India in the time of Hindu reign was progressive, but the attacks of the Muslims annihilated this trend.51 When the East India Company took over, education for women started, and after the Mutiny of 1857, when Queen Victoria took control over the country, this practice picked up greater speed.52 Nadir goes on to say that he would have liked to write a history of the British takeover of India including the coronation of Queen Victoria that was convened by Viceroy Lord Lytton in 1877, to indicate his reverence for the ruling power.53 Yet, many of the examples of educated Hindu and Muslim women he lists Ibid., 63-64.

Ibid., 64.

51 Ibid., 121.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

49 50

137

overlap with the time period of the Muslim rulers, contradicting his claim that Muslim takeover in the land stifled women’s education. Nadir’s proof that Muslims are allowed and even encouraged to seek education through their scripture and guiding religious figures such as the Prophet and his companions contravenes the basis of his contention that Muslims devalued and prohibited learning during their political hegemony over India. The fact that he is able to list so many examples of women who were literate and composed poetry before British rule undercuts his belief that they were the ones to revitalize interest in women’s education. His examples demonstrate that women’s contribution to the arts and sciences did not just begin in the nineteenth-century but had a long history in the subcontinent. It is clear that Nadir is aware of and paying lip-service to British socio-cultural beliefs that serviced their own political ascendancy in the subcontinent, but at the same time his text reveals the fissures in his unflinching support of these beliefs.

Nadir seems to pander to the Hindu-Muslim divide by making concerted efforts to section out and pointedly refer to Hindus and Muslims separately in his text. He links Sanskrit with Hindus and, by association but not overtly, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu with Muslims. He states that because the focus of his tażkirah is Persian, which derives from Arabic, and Urdu, which is the “child” of Persian, he will first give examples of women poets before the advent of Islam and contemporaneous with the Prophet.54 If he were following a chronological order, he would have started off with the “Sanskrit vāliyān,” the ones of Sanskrit. It is for this reason that he mentions Hindu women first in the preface.55 Plus, education among Hindu women is uncommon, and so he has placed them earlier so that Nadir’s “Hindu brothers” can benefit from the tażkirah more.56 He decries the fact that there are no counterparts to tażkirahs within the Hindu tradition that would document female poets of Sanskrit and Hindi.57 For Nadir, then, there is a clear, burgeoning awareness of Sanskrit and Bhasha (Hindi) for Hindus and Perso-Arabic traditions for Muslims, as well as an audience he is referring to by its religious and cultural identity markers.

Yet, his inclusion and discussion of both “communities” in the same space Ibid., 49.

Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., 57.

54 55

138

reveals his lack of strict adherence to these same distinctions. Within a text of a genre very much in the Islamicate literary tradition he views an opportunity for equal treatment of both Hindus and Muslim communities and literary traditions. It doesn’t seem anomalous to him to look for examples of Hindu women who authored poetry in Persian or Urdu as a marker of their educated status. He does not demarcate one particular kind of learning for a specific community. Nadir does not differentiate between a “Hindu” curriculum for Hindu women and a “Muslim” one for Muslim women. He laments equally the loss of the existence in his day of women such as one Khatri woman who lived in Aligarh before the Mutiny and was so well-versed in Persian that she could do her household accounting and letter writing in the language, and a woman who lived during the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s age and was acquainted with both Sanskrit and Bhasha (Hindi).58 To him, it is a shame that among the Persian, Arabic, and Urdu tazkirahs that document women poets over the ages, there is only mention of one Hindu woman who composed poetry.59 Yet, he is hopeful that this one example points to the possibility of more Hindu women who wrote, but were simply not documented. Again, this displays his belief in the fluidity in the people that participate in these genres, that are themselves malleable. Of note is also the matter of fact way in which he approaches women’s contributions to the arts. He takes for granted that women must have engaged in these traditions, and this involvement is seen neither as a curiosity nor an exception.

It is here that we can view Nadir’s contribution to the discussions circulating around women, their role in society, and their literary and intellectual engagement in nineteenth-century India. Nadir represents a discourse within the Urdu tradition that, amidst all its contradictions, celebrates women above all for their contributions to literature, arts, and sciences. He panders to reformist and colonial concerns and narratives, but in his treatment of women values them for their skill, knowledge, and literary and scholarly accomplishments. He does not look for instances of women who were known for being obedient and “good” wives, daughters, and mothers, but invokes examples of women who excelled in some pursuit of literature and science. This reflects trends within the standard Urdu literature canon of nineteenth-century India in which women and their lives were appreciated on their own terms.

58 59

Ibid., 46, 48.

Ibid., 47.

139

Conclusion This work is an initial foray into an under-explored realm within Urdu literature, i.e., the question of how women were represented in texts authored in nineteenth-century India and beyond. Durga Prasad Nadir is a fascinating figure who undertook this charge in a dramatically changing India, a time when an evolving political status quo and reform movements were challenging existing notions of gender, religion, hierarchy, social identity, and so on. His tażkirah is a product of this dynamic environment, and reflects the contradictions that emerged as a by-product of operating in this milieu. Nadir’s text is an important intervention at a time when Urdu was being constructed and cemented as a legitimate language with its own legacy and standing, in which process tażkirahs played an important role as literary histories. It creates a space for women in the Urdu literary and historical canon in its formative stages, but in an autonomous manner. Women are allotted not a minor role in a tażkirah focused mainly on men, but discussed in their own capacity in a text that can stand both as a complement and rejoinder to male-centered histories. Despite his prescriptivist tendencies, Nadir celebrates these women above all for their contributions, and not for their adherence to standards of the ideal wife, mother, or daughter.

This text proves that from the earliest days of Urdu, women and their work were being evaluated and documented in a manner parallel to that of men, and these analyses influenced later understandings of the same. By their definition and structure, tażkirahs reflect the views and literary taste of their compilers perhaps as much as of those of their subjects. As such, this study has been as much a focus on Nadir as the women he discusses within the text. Nadir’s voice is omnipresent throughout the work, but itself gives us ways in which to deconstruct his approach. In my reading, the stories and contributions of the women represented within emerge as the strongest voices in the narrative, despite Nadir’s occasional attempts to undermine them. My approach to the text gives us a way in which to redeem women’s voices even when they may be filtered through a patriarchal lens.

Bibliography

Ansari, Z. Maṡnaviyāt-e Ghālib (Matn-e Fārsī ma‘ Urdū Tarjumah). New Delhi: Ghalib Institute, 1983.

“Ashob.” in Pyare Lal. Tārīḳh-e Salṯanat-e Inglīshiyā. Lahore: Matba-e Sar140

kari, 1871.

Beale, Thomas William. The Oriental Biographical Dictionary. Calcutta: J. W. Thomas, Baptist Mission Press, 1881.

Fatehpuri, Farman. Urdu Shu‘arā ke Tażkire aur Tażkirah Nīgārī. Lahore: Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1972.

Karimuddin, Maulvi. Ṯabaqāt ul-Shu’arā-e Hind (Levels of the Poets of India). Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy, 1983.

Kugle, Scott. When Sun Meets Moon: Gender, Eros, and Ecstasy in Urdu Poetry. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Minault, Gail. Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Muhtasham, Abul Qasim. Aḳhtar-e Tābān (Luminous Star). Bhopal: Matba-e Shahjahani Dar al-Iqbal, 1882.

“Nadir.” In Durga Prasad. Tażkirat-ul Nissāy-e Nādrī. Edited by Rafaqat Ali Shahid. Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2016.

“Note on Mir Panjah-Kash.” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 1, no.

4. (1953).

Pritchett, Frances. Nets of Awareness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Pernau, Margrit, ed. The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Rahbar, Daud. Urdu Letters of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. New York: SUNY Press, 1987.

“Ranj,” Hakim Fasihuddin. Bahāristān-e Nāz (The Spring-Garden of Coquetry). Edited by Khalilurrahman Dawoodi. Lahore: Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1965.

Schimmel, Annemarie. Classical Urdu Literature from the Beginning to Iqbal.

Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1975.

141

Š Reda Berrada

142

Subho Basu

Irfan Habib, The National Movement: Origins and Early Phase to 1918.

Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013, 128 pages.

This book is part of a series titled A People’s History of India which indicates its ties to a Marxist approach towards history. The word “people’s history” was first used by Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the journal Anneles d’histoire economique et sociale along with Marc Bloch. In a 1932 critique of work by Albert Mathiez, a historian of the French revolution, Febvre used the expression “histoire vue d’en bas et non d’en haut” to indicate Matiez’s contribution towards understanding a history that is wrought out of the class struggle of the common masses. Since then, the idea of people’s history caught on the imagination of left historians and in 1938, the British communist historian and founder of the William Morris Society, A. L. Morton (1903-1987), wrote his A People‘s History of England which was published by the Left Book Club in London. The book was regarded as the Communist Party of Great Britain’s testimony on the history of England.

This approach was further popularized in the 1950s by the Communist Party Historians Group comprising E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton and Dona Torr. In 1966, E. P. Thompson wrote an article on “history from below” in the Times Literary Supplement providing an intellectual coherence to the idea of people’s history.1 In 1976 English Historian Raphael Samuel started the History Workshop Journal as a collaborative effort of socialist historians highlighting the people’s history approach, and finally, in 1980, American socialist thinker Howard Zinn published his People’s History of the United States. This short history of the Marxist origin of people’s history as an approach is necessary to chart out Aligarh Historical Society’s understanding of Indian history. Headed by the prominent historian of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal India, Irfan Habib, Athar Ali, Iqtidar Alam Khan and Shireen Moosvi of Aligarh Historical Society pioneered a critical approach towards economic and social history of India from historical materialist perspectives. Their heydays as radical scholars shaping the formidable institution of Aligarh University is well captured in Mushirul Hasan’s short remembrance elsewhere.2 This series conceptualized by Habib and his colleagues (though Athar Ali had E. P. Thompson, “History from Below,” Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1966, pp.

279–80.

2 Mushirul Hasan, “Aligarh Muslim University: Recalling Radical Days.” India International Centre Quarterly 29, no. 3/4 (2002): 47-59.

1

143

departed), sought to provide a wider introduction to Indian history in response to the challenge of Hindutva sponsored critiques of Indian historiography, and thus provided a new inclusive approach towards Indian history.

The current volume on Indian nationalism follows the already established historical methodology and analysis of Indian nationalism. Habib starts his volume by exposing colonial economic exploitation, moving through the stories of pre-nationalist resistance to colonialism to the account of the high politics of nationalism centred on the Congress movement. He also dwells on Syed Ahmad Khan’s modernism, the Muslim League’s ambivalence, the moderate politics of petitions and prayers, extremist challenges mixed with Hindu nationalist sentiments, and the internationalist labor movement spearheaded by the Gadar party and revolutionary plans of armed insurrection. It ends with the arrival of Gandhi on the Indian political scene. The treatment of the Gadar movement and revolutionary nationalism is a truly refreshing departure from traditional, Congress-centred portrayals of nationalism. His firm stance on exposing colonial economic exploitation also indicates a resistance to the current fascination in tracing the origins of colonialism in Indian social history.

Notwithstanding such a bold stance, this book sadly marginalizes voices of resistance from below. There is no discussion of the Santhal rebellion, and Birsa Munda’s uprising is confined to additional notes as an instance of primitive rebellion. Phule’s criticism of high-caste domination is not even mentioned. The rise of the Farazi movement in Bengal also escaped his notice, though Dhaka’s Nawab Salimulla is mentioned for his connection with the founding of the Muslim League. He also fails to mention the rise of working-class resistance to colonial rule. Economic nationalism had various layers in its approach to the totality of colonial exploitation.

In historiographic terms, what is surprisingly lacking in the discussion of historiography is further a complete omission of reference to Sumit Sarkar’s Modern India. More importantly, nationalism in this period did not encompass simply political and economic questions, but involved critical reflections on cultural understandings of “nationhood”; a subject that is completely glossed over in this presentation.

To teachers of modern Indian history, the book is useful for providing snippets from source materials and discussion of theories of nationalism as well as various strands on historiography in notes after every chapter. Habib also provides a global perspective on the rise of nationalism, which is useful for lay readers. Yet overall, the title of “people’s history” and the author’s own 144

reputation as a seminal Marxist historian does not match the treatment of Indian nationalism in its pages. At the same time, the conceptualization of such a series is extremely timely and speaks of moral courage to stand against narrow chauvinistic interpretations of the idea of India from Hindu nationalistic perspectives. Given the recent decision by the National Council of Educational Research and Training to remove chapters on caste-based oppression and on the impact of colonialism on rural communities, from the ninth-grade history textbook, and the ensuing resistance to that decision, Habib’s project could come to actually provide a popular and credible alternative to the central government’s propagandistic manipulation of high-school curriculums.

145

Š Reda Berrada

146

Fehmida Riaz “A Day in the Office” A short story translated by Noor Habib Fehmida Riaz (1946 – 2018) was a formidable presence in the world of Urdu letters. A poet, novelist, translator, and activist, she is celebrated as one of the boldest feminist voices in contemporary Urdu writing. She would as elegantly launch a searing critique of economic exploitation and social injustice (“Kya tum pūra chānd nahi dekho gē?”) as she would unabashedly explore feminine sexual desire (“Zubānon ka bōsa”). Her first collection of poetry, Pathar kī zubān was published in 1967, followed by over a dozen collections of poetry and prose, including Badan darīda(1973) and the novella Gōdāvari (2008), alongside several works of translation, notably the poetry of Rumi.

Riaz was the editor of the magazine Avaaz which came under scrutiny for its supposedly obscene and politically charged content during the dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq, following which she exiled herself to India, returning in 1988 (the year of Zia ul Haq’s death). Fluent in English, Sindhi, Hindi, Persian, and with some knowledge of Arabic, Fehmida Riaz read, wrote, and translated widely. Her contributions to feminist and poetic discourse cannot be emphasized enough. Given today’s particular political climate—the rising tide of the worldwide MeToo movement, the recent backlash to the Aurat March in Pakistan (March 2019), Fehmdia Riaz’s writing rings true as ever and must be read in order to understand the long and as yet unresolved history of feminist struggle in Pakistan.

I translate one of Riaz’s more recent short stories titled “Daftar meñ ek din.” This story chronicles a day in the life of a nameless female civil servant. This female protagonist heads what appears to be the Urdu Dictionary Board, a position that Riaz herself occupied between 2009-2012, presumably drawing from her own experience. The story describes the bureaucratic and inefficient system of a public sector office, and the particular challenges she faces when she encounters an unhelpful and condescending finance advisor in Islamabad. The woman is frustrated by the labyrinthine structure of the governmental offices and by the dismissive attitude of her male colleague. This story is a critique of not simply government bureaucracies, but the patriarchy that is deeply entrenched within them. Employing 147

a seemingly simplistic style, Riaz uses the critical lens of the female protagonist (supposedly modeled on herself ) to give the reader a window into the life of a civil servant and the ways in which petty politics play into the routine operations of government departments.

*** This devoted servant requests that due to the auspicious month of Ramzan, specifically from the 23rd of Ramzan, that is, 12th February till 27th Ramzan as per the lunar calendar, that is XYZ date, he be granted“rukhsat-e-maksūba.”

Yours unworthy, XYZ

The letter containing this piece of writing was on the woman’s desk. As was her habit, she tried to glean the gist of the letter in one glance but the truth is, it required another reading.

“What is this ‘rukhsat-e-maksūba’?” she asked.

“Earned leave,” the employee for the Board of Dictionaries humbly replied.

“Is this a request for leave or a Nikah nama!” the woman asked as she signed the document and wrote “approved” on it. “All that its lacking is a Haq Mehr,” and laughingly added, “for a moment I thought that the Governor of Sindh Mr. Ishrat ul- Abaad has sent a wedding invitation”. She then asked, “are applications here usually written this way?”

“Yes, this has been the case for a while now!” was the response. “Actually, we do not prefer the use of English in the office. This ministry was set up for the promotion of Urdu in Pakistan. Alas, the respected Sir Syed (upon whom be God’s blessings!) and Hali could not see their vision materialize during their lifetimes…but now (meaning, after a considerable pause) since you have been appointed, hope itself has risen from slumber!”

Upon hearing the immediate connection between Hali, Sir Syed and their supposed desire to see Urdu as the official language of this country, the woman, suppressing her laughter and signing the obsequious sounding application for approval while also adding next to her signature “with pleasure” muttered, “it would be better if this hope remained only a dream.”

“I beg your pardon?”

148

“Nothing.”

“Still...you said something?”

“I was only remarking, MashAllah, how good your Urdu is.”

He smiled ear to ear, and, taking the papers from the desk said “Oh madam, I am truly nothing”. He then looked at the ceiling fan and, raising a finger towards it said, “this is all your mercy, oh Lord, that I am blessed the way I am.”

Saying this, he left. The fan suddenly stopped working because of a power outage. A peon came in the room and opened all the windows which ushered in a gust of hot air. The papers on the desk became scattered. The woman crossed her arms and put them on her lap, rested her back cautiously on the broken presidential seat and immersed herself in a melancholic reverie, fixing her gaze on the dust particles that danced and glimmered in the broad ray of light that poured into the room through the window.

“Urdu imposition!” she thought. “The imposition of martial law, or the imposition of the seal of the Prophet”. She was seized by a fit of laughter.

Last week, she visited an historic mosque from the time of Emperor Shahjahan—Wazir Khan Mosque—on the dilapidated entrance, adorned with the once regal blue and turquoise patterns hinting at their earlier grandeur, she saw a huge banner that read: “Meeting to Demand the Rule of khatam-e-nabūwat”- as if there were uncountable prophets just waiting to emerge from every nook and cranny of the city. The invitation for prophethood was getting out of hand, she thought, and needed to be curbed immediately.

This is all to keep the Qaddiyanis from expanding their influence, she had thought with some pity. What harm have they ever done, the Qaddiyanis?

Though nobody cared to hear about such things. When she was a school girl, there was a Qaddiyani girl in her class. Khushbakht was so conscientious about her prayer and fasts that it almost guaranteed that they could never have been friends. All this prayer and fast for naught. Alas!

At any rate, she did not have even the faintest interest in the official imposition of Urdu. She often kept silent on the matter, and when she did voice her opinion, she would say “What is wrong with English- why put your hand in a beehive? Pakistan has its own languages too. And good quality textbooks are not found in Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Seraiki or Balochi. Take medical for example. In what language, other than English, are 149

we supposed to teach M.B.B.S? Never mind the specializations. Knowledge is good and necessary for our children, regardless of which language it is disseminated in. Needless and thoughtless sloganeering. Falsehoods and hyperbole. All of this was considered a part of Urdu here, but that is of course not true. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ismat Chughtai... Rashed and Miraji… Manto; the literature of this language is full of rebels. At least that is the Urdu the woman knew. The phrase “long live the revolution” in Urdu (inqalāb zindabād) made its way into many of the languages of the subcontinent.

Or perhaps indulgence and flattery are not simply a part of the Urdu language- perhaps it is a national disposition. She remembered the time she went to meet the financial advisor in Islamabad, accompanied by the principle of the Sindh Madrasa. Both of them had the same appeal, which was to finally build the departments which, since 1972, had been absent from official records. The principal of the Sindh Madrasa was a respectable and educated lady from Lyari who had devoted twenty five, thirty years of her life to teaching in the school but the way she spoke to the financial advisor! When she said “Sir, I will pray for you family and children- May God always keep you in a high station”- the woman was furious. For her own organization, she could not ask for anything. An inexorable wave of pity and embarrassment took over her heart. The same thought orbited in her mind over and over again: “they have really made beggars out of us.”

“Beggars!” Was the financial advisor not embarrassed by the way the principal addressed him? It was not apparent from his face. Perhaps he was used to listening to such things.

When the woman shifted her angle, the chair was about to fall over. She quickly regained her balance. It was broken. It should have been replaced or repaired. In the first place, the woman was too busy to attend to this and in the second, the funds for the repair and replacement of furniture had been redirected to other departments so that the office could pay electricity and telephone bills.

Reappropriation, meaning the file for transferred funds, had been sent to the Deputy Advisor for Finance (D.F.A) a month ago but a response had not yet arrived. Someone from the office staff told her that it was part of the routine, in previous years it would not have taken more than one or two days. The last time she went to Islamabad, she, at the behest of the section officer, went to meet with the D.F.A as well.

150

“It is very important that you meet him. All files that have to do with finance move forward with his signatures.”

“But here you keep telling me not to write a letter to an officer who is only one grade lower than me, that I should have somebody else in the office write it or I would be disrupting the protocol of the state. Now you are saying I should meet him.”

“Oho, everybody meets him,” the affable section officer said, “for he holds the key to the treasury. And Madam, when you go, make sure you take a gift with you. A diary, or perhaps some sweets…”

And so, straying from one door to another in the labyrinthine building of the ministry, she reached the office. It so happened that the officer was present in the room, and not at some “meeting” (that is to say, drinking tea, chatting with friends, stepping out on a personal errand, which are all classified as being in a “meeting” at the ministry). So the officer sahib was there, his brown skin flecked with yellow. For years, he had restrained his passions and persevered in his work, and in turn, his gall bladder turned green in defiance. Well aware of his importance, he remained seated on his chair with an air of dignity, engrossed in the perusal of other files! Ten minutes passed…then twenty.

“S-i-r…” the woman began tentatively. She stopped herself from saying “respected sir” lest she offend the protocol of the office, without which the system would not function, although the state of affairs was such that she appeared as some mendicant at the door of the D.F.A officer.

“Mister --------“ she said in the most concise and collected fashion possible “our files...”

“Hmm hmm!” the D.F.A cut her off. “There is an urgent matter before me.

The special advisor to the prime minister just called. Day after tomorrow he is to visit Lahore for a conference, so naturally I must organize everything for it.”

He then proceeded to call, one after another, various departments, asking them to call other departments with specific inquiries, and then directing them to get back to him when they collected the information he required.

After this, he began to go through another file.

By that time it had been an hour since the woman had come to his office.

151

She said “I’ve been here for quite some time and would like to say something. I’ll take my leave.”

The officer lifted his head from the file he was reading with some satisfaction and said “Madam! You may visit whenever you feel like, you are most welcome.”

“Our files…” the woman began to say.

“A new lady officer has recently joined. I’ve heard she is very stern. You should also meet her.”

At this point, the woman’s cup of patience brimmed over-- “I have not come here to wander aimlessly from one room to another. You have not spoken about the files even once for me to explain myself.”

The D.F.A saw the clock and got up. “I must go to a meeting now”, he said as he made his way to leave the office, leaving her sitting in the chair. The woman got up, foolishly. She thought how she really should have brought the box of sweets. She was confused about whether sweets really meant sweets, or perhaps something else…

“The people at the Ministry of Education never do anything themselves,” the D.F.A said as he left, “keep sending us incomplete files, maybe they want us to do their work for them.” After saying this, he left.

After finally finding her way out, the woman left the building. The conclusion of all this effort was simply that the files for the distribution of funds was still held hostage by the D.F.A. The funds were available, but could not be released because they were not filed under the correct department.

“I can’t please the D.F.A.,” the woman thought with some remorse. “the office is facing a loss because of me. A telephone line has already been cut because the bill wasn’t paid on time. There’s no fuel for the car… we might lose electricity next. All of this…is my fault”. The woman knew that even if she had said nothing, the D.F.A’s office itself seemed to say “do not disturb me. Fulfill your responsibilities on time”. How would the D.F.A have liked this?

A few people from the office came up to her.

“Madam… this has never happened before…what if…”

“What?” she asked with her eyes wide with curiosity.

“The seed of the scheme was planted in this very office.”

152

The woman was intrigued.

“The lady who was in your place before you often called the Islamabad office.”

“Hmm...” the woman responded. Her appointment at this post obviously meant that the woman she replaced was negatively impacted. Had she done nothing it would have been truly odd. Whatever was being told to her was perhaps not entirely impossible.

“Does she have that much influence?”

“Well, how much influence can you really have in Islamabad…” one of them said. “But she and the D.F.A share one thing in common. They are both Shi’a.”

It was as if a bell rung inside the woman’s head. Her eyes widened further.

“These people sympathize with one another and help each other out,” another one quietly added.

The woman sat numb. Was this possible?

Her first thought was that it wasn’t impossible.

“What can be done?” she finally asked.

She then thought of adding a paragraph to the complaint she was planning on writing for the unseemly delay in having the funds approved.

In addition, the lady in this post prior to me has conspired with the D.F.A. At her behest, the DFA will make my tenure here unsuccessful. He wants to help the woman I replaced as they are both Shi’a. This is the battlefield upon which the Shi’i community has decided to wage war against us Sunnis!

“It is time for revenge!... Oh fellow Sunnis! Come to my aid. A Sunni woman is in trouble!”

Thinking of this the woman had carelessly begun chewing on four of her fingers of her left hand. In her mind’s eye, she saw that after hearing her cry, a fleet of ships had opened sail and were coming toward her to save her.

The slogans grew louder as the ships approached “labaik, labaik, Allahuma labaik1…We are nearly there, oh daughter of the Muslims, oh pious one!”

1

Arabic prayer recited at the time of the annual Muslim pilgrimage, Hajj, and Umrah: 153

The light went out again. Her saviors left the scene. A peon entered once again and opened all the doors and windows. A staff member walked into the room through the open door and stood near the desk.

“Yes?” the woman took out the four fingers from her mouth.

“The dictionary is finally complete,” he said with a look of worry.

“Yes. This is great news. The work of five, six decades has finally come to fruition.”

“Shall we have this news published in the newspapers?”

“Why not!” replied the woman “Good idea! Prepare a press release then.”

“I wrote it and have it with me,” the employee said. “If you could please sign here… but please, let no-one hear a word of this. There will be an uproar in the papers tomorrow. Everyone will be amazed. You should crush them all and throw them out”.

The woman began to smile. “who exactly should I crush and throw out?” she asked with some interest.

“All your adversaries,” he replied with a start.

“And who are they?” the woman asked.

The department employee seemed disappointed. Still, he answered “Here… in this very office… and outside too. People are terribly jealous. There are snakes slithering about in their chests!”2

“Hunh!” In light of this, she began to think of herself as very fortunate.

Unthinkingly, she picked up her handbag, left the room, and made her way to the stairs. She was thinking of the expression “slithering snakes”. Does one face any loss when one is envied by others? The poison is in the snake’s venom.

She had once composed a verse: “Like a black snake, slithered across her heart all night.”

How did this snake expression come into being? The snake returns, slithers.

The slithering snake on the heart. Perhaps it wasn’t a figure of speech but a poetic rendering of one. The fear and dread induced by the threat of a snake bite….perhaps the reason for the expression itself ? But this explanation did “God, we are here” 2 An Urdu expression which means to feel jealous.

154

not quite sit with her. She decided that there was no real explanation for the saying, but that it was a very effective one nonetheless, and that it was why it came into existence and then endured.

She was being driven home in the office car. She glanced inside her handbag- as usual, she had left a number of things on the desk in her office. Her cellphone, telephone directory, glasses…

She heaved a long sigh and thought, “I suppose tomorrow I will find those things where I left them.” She then commended herself for her foresight when she remembered the extra pair of glasses which were at home.

During her car ride home, the woman contemplated over the origins of community conflict- Shia, Sunni, migrant and a host of others- and slowly began to understand what ingredients went into their making. She felt a shameful surprise at their shocking strength and ability to incite. She remembered the brown skinned D.F.A, who, according to a saying in the ministry, was “writing away in English”3 the fate of all the top dogs in the Department of Education, chewing them and spitting them out, without realizing that far away from all these games, a small office in Karachi was facing all sorts of neglect. Or perhaps this behavior was only to inconvenience the woman, for she had made the mistake of not pacifying his ego, or coming with a box of sweets.

What was the truth? The woman felt like asking the fortune teller’s parrot to draw out a card with the answer. The truth was, she felt like leaving the office for some place far away…far…very far…but she had a vague misgiving that no place was too far from the department or the ministry.

3

“Angrezī likh likh kar.”

155

Š Reda Berrada

156

Śaṭakōpaṉ Tiruvāymoḻi (True Sacred Words) Selections translated by Archana Venkatesan The selections below are from a long Tamiḻ poem called the Tiruvāymoḻi (True Sacred Words/The Revelation). The poem was composed sometime between the late eighth and mid ninth century by a poet named Śaṭakōpaṉ.

The poet is a devotee of Viṣṇu, and the poem is a meditation on the nature of god, grace, and the quest for a path out of the unending cycle of birth and death.

The poem is formally structured by the antāti, where each verse is linked either syllabically or semantically to the one that both precedes and follows it. There are 1102 such verses, and the first word of the poem (uyar, high) is also the poem’s final word (uyar, high). Further, the poem is divided into ten books of one hundred verses, and each of these hundred verses is further divided into sets of ten. Thus, I.9.1 is the first verse from the ninth decad of the first hundred of the Tiruvāymoḻi. While there are no obvious overarching themes that cohere each of the 10 books, individual decads explore specific ideas or themes. These may include a decad in praise of Viṣṇu’s devotees, a decad in praise of a particular sacred site, a meditation on the nature of the senses, or on god’s qualities, deeds and actions. A full quarter of the Tiruvāymoḻi is rendered in a woman’s voice. The woman can be a mother, a friend, a fortuneteller, but most often, it is the girl in love.

Excerpted below are four decads from the First, Second, Fourth and Ninth Hundred of the Tiruvāymoḻi. I.9 (First hundred, Ninth Decad) reflects on god’s nature. II.5 (Second Hundred, Fifth Decad) is in the voice of the devotee and explores the intimate relationship between god and devotee.

IV.2 (Fourth Hundred, Second Decad) is in the voice of the mother, and the final selection, IX.9 (Ninth Hundred, Ninth Decad) is in the voice of the heroine in love, separated from her beloved.

The translations are excerpted from Archana Venkatesan, Tiruvāymoḻi (New Delhi: Penguin Classics, Forthcoming, 2020). *** 157

Tiruvāymoḻi I.9 ivaiyum avaiyum I.9.1

These those and the in-between

this he that him the in-between other

within himself he becomes all things and all people he makes them protects them, primordial lord

my master, Kaṇṇaṉ, my sweet nectar, sweetness itself Śrī’s beloved is beside me.

I.9.2

He’s the master of many tricks

long ago he became a boar to lift the earth he broke the mad elephant’s tusk

he’s Keśavaṉ, my lord, beyond the understanding of even the gods rests on the deep dark sea He’s now close to me.

I.9.3

He’s the faultless primordial source of the immortals his body a dark blue gem, his eyes red lotus

he delights in riding his eagle with mighty wings Śrī’s beloved fed me a taste of the only path now he stays with me he won’t leave.

I.9.4

Seated beside him are three women

Śrī Bhū and the innocent cowherd girl

he also rules three worlds, the very ones he eats.

My lord rests on a banyan leaf, Kaṇṇaṉ

great master of mystery vaster than the sea is on my lap.

158

I.9.5

When she placed him in her lap to nurse he drank her milk and drained her life

The great lord made the naked god, Ayaṉ, Indraṉ and all the rest appear instantly the lord of mystery is in my heart.

I.9.6

The mysterious lord is in my heart

it is so for everyone. He’s body and breath wind and fire, he’s both far and near beyond thought, beyond the senses the pure dazzling bewildering lord rests on my shoulders.

I.9.7

He wears the cool lovely tuḷasi

across his shoulders, over his lovely chest, in his hair, on his feet

the peerless lord, his body radiant light he doesn’t leave for a moment he’s on my tongue.

I.9.8

He’s the spirit and body of all art

and wisdom that blossoms on the tongue He protects them, destroys them too

The lord with four arms soft as flowers

who bears the great war disc and battle conch his dark body and lotus eyes have entered my eye.

159

I.9.9

The lotus-eyed lord is in my eye. I see with his eye, gaze open to faults and the five senses made right He brings forth Ayaṉ in his lotus, and the god with the third eye.

He makes the perfect immortals and their worlds He’s now on my brow.

I.9.10

He rests on my brow, rules me

lovely Kaṇṇaṉ who wears flowers on his feet and tuḷasi in his hair. He’s worshipped

by the one who wears the crescent moon,

Nāṉmukaṉ, Indraṉ and all the immortals.

He now rests on my head.

I.9.11

His feet will crown those who beseech him with these ten verses from a thousand

sung by Śaṭakōpaṉ of wealthy Kurukūr for Kaṇṇaṉ the god of gods who rests on his head.

160

Tiruvāymoḻi II.5 antāmattu II.5.1

In that place he loved me fused with my breath.

the lord who wears lovely garlands, a crown conch disc thread jewels

His large eyes like a pool of lotuses

his lips red as lotuses, his feet too lotuses, his red-gold body glows.

II.5.2

His body glows like the sun

his eyes and hands bright as red lotus Śrī rests on his chest Ayaṉ is in his navel

Araṉ takes every other place.

He’s within me, mingled

leaving not a whit of space.

II.5.3

The one who’s in me all mixed in

his mouth a red lotus, his eyes feet hands all lotuses too,

is a great bright mountain.

The earth, the seven worlds are in his belly there’s nothing not mingled in him there’s nothing outside of him.

II.5.4

He is all things, him

a dark emerald mountain, his eyes

feet, hands red lotuses in full bloom.

161

In every moment, in every day

in every month and year, in every age, age upon age, for all time

he is my nectar that never sates.

II.5.5

The nectar that never sates

mixed himself with little me.

Kaṇṇaṉ is like a dense dark cloud.

Coral can’t equal the redness of his lips

nor lotus the brightness of his eyes, feet, hands my lord wears a tall crown, the sacred thread, and jewels of every kind.

II.5.6

His jewels are many, his names are many his luminous forms are many.

To think of his nature

is to know the many pleasures

of seeing eating hearing touching smelling him. Vast is the wisdom

of the one who rests on a serpent.

II.5.7

He rests on a serpent on the ocean of milk He killed seven bulls for Piṉṉai, her shoulders slim as bamboo

In a honey sweet grove, he pierced seven trees He’s a fierce fighting bull, this one whose radiant crown is circled with cool tuḷasi.

162

II.5.8

My lord, a fierce fighting bull

wears a radiant crown and cool tuḷasi His four shoulders are broad,

He has no end. Thinking nothing

of my lowliness, he mingled with me.

I have no words for him.

What can I say? Tell me.

II.5.9

Tell me about my lord the spirit of my spirit

my brilliant dark jewel of infinite greatness sweet nectar,

the release difficult to attain

fragrant as the alli in bloom,

is the one who is neither male nor female.

II.5.10

Not male not female neither both

the one who can’t be seen neither is nor is not

taking the form you desire and not that either

how difficult it is to speak of my lord.

II.5.11

Kurukūr’s Śaṭakōpaṉ spoke of the pot-dancer, the lord difficult to describe,

in these ten verses part of an antāti of a matchless thousand.

163

Those who master their recitation will reach Vaikuᚇᚭha.

164

Tiruvāymoḻi IV.2 pālaṉ āy ēḻ ulaku uṇṭu IV.2.1

‘He’s the boy who ate the worlds

then blissfully slept on a banyan leaf.

I want the cool tuḷasi from his feet’

My innocent girl says such confused things, I am doomed.

IV.2.2

My doll-like girls says

‘He played with the cowherd women, danced the kuravai with them

I want the sweet scented tuḷasi from his feet’ I am doomed.

IV.2.3

My girl says

‘I want the red-gold tuḷasi from the feet of the one

praised by gods and sages singing the Veda.’

I am doomed.

IV.2.4

My girl sings

‘Different schools praise him

argue their differences about the great lord.

I want the tuḷasi fine as gold from his feet.’

I’m doomed for the ages.

IV.2.5

‘He killed the seven bulls for Piṉṉai, That cowherd, pot-dancer

I want the tuḷasi that adorns his feet.’

165

says my girl as she fades a little every day.

IV.2.6

‘Long ago for the great earth goddess he came as a pig, and

pierced this vast space.

I want the tuḷasi from his feet’ says my innocent child.

IV.2.7

Friends, my innocent girl is mad for the cool tuḷasi from the feet of the one who placed Śrī, a flower herself

among the garlands adorning his broad chest.

IV.2.8

My girl only wants

the tuḷasi from the feet of the one who for his lovely Sītā

burned Laṅka with a hail of arrows.

Friends, what shall I do?

IV.2.9

Friends, you too have raised girls with love.

What can I say about my poor girl?

Night and day all she says is ‘Conch disc tuḷasi.’

What should I do?

IV.2.10

Friends, what should I do?

My silly girl won’t listen to me she only wants the tuḷasi 166

from Kaṇṇaṉ’s feet to adorn her breasts.

She’s wasting away.

IV.2.11

Śaṭakōpaṉ of glorious Kurukūr sang about our Kaṇṇaṉ’s feet

a cure for the disease of love.

Those who master these ten from a thousand will be fit to join the celestials.

167

Tiruvāymoḻi IX.9 mallikai kamaḻ IX.9.1

The breeze sweet with jasmine cuts

The haunting notes of kuṟiñci pierce The waning light of dusk bewilders The red evening clouds destroy me My lord with eyes bright as lotus That bull among the cowherds, a lion, the mysterious one

embraced these shoulders, these breasts Now where has he gone?

Why am I alone?

IX.9.2

Forlorn, forsaken, I’ve nowhere to go

to escape the mournful bells, the gentle breeze,

water lilies, the dying light of day, the scent of sandal keening songs, the jasmine filling the air This wide world created, dug up, eaten, spat out, measured, ruled

by that mysterious one, lord of cowherds, death to demons

He still does not come

who can save me now?

IX.9.3

Who is to save me now?

My soft breasts yielded to his touch, my hips too

When he pushed into me, plunged deep into my self then he left, abandoned me, 168

cast me aside, thief.

Now Kaṇṇaṉ that young lion,

my mysterious lord won’t return

his lotus eyes, his lush lips, his cool dark curls his four wide shoulders torment my heart this is my wretched fate.

IX.9.4

I am wrecked.

A breeze pierces my heart

One moment cool, one moment hot

the moon burns, my soft bed of flowers scalds.

He swooped down on Garuḍa, came to me,

a divine bee sipped me like a flower left me drained and depleted

His wicked ways are more than I can bear my heart is no help at all.

IX9.5

The heart is no friend.

As evening falls the cows return and my cowherd’s heart turns to stone.

His flute’s sweet song cuts deep

and my friends, my dear companions filled with worry for me swoon before my eyes.

Who is to protect my life?

How hard it is to earn his grace.

169

IX.9.6

How hard it is to earn his grace but only his grace will suffice

nothing else can save my life.

Evening ends the day, my heart is lost.

He joins himself to Śivaṉ, to Brahmaṉ, to Śrī He cuts into me

Where do I hide?

What can I do?

What is left to be said?

IX.9.7

What is left to be said?

The sharp cold breeze singes my life

still my stolen heart with deceitful Kaṇṇaṉ, dark as storm clouds.

The wind from the north bears down

carrying with it the fine smoke of akil the harp’s haunting melodies

cool red sandal and heady jasmine.

with such an army, it wages war against me I am destroyed.

IX.9.8

I burn.

The young breeze from the north surges heady with the scent of fresh jasmine, the red sky fades bringing misery greater than Kaṇṇaṉ’s deceit.

He came. He left.

170

Crueler still are the sweet jasmine and fresh sandal But most cruel of all,

the haunting song he plays for his cowherd women.

This I cannot bear.

IX.9.9

He slays me with his sweet song his bright eyes speak secrets,

his darting glances toy with me he makes a sad face,

then pretends to be hurt

To ease the pain in my stupid heart he sings another song.

I know nothing except evening has come, and he has not.

IX.9.10

Evening has come, and he has not.

Soft cowbells sound like a lament

as the cows nuzzle their mighty bulls, a flute’s cruel song fills the air, while bees hover and hum

over bright clusters of jasmine the sea’s howls rend the sky How do I console myself

when I cannot live without him?

IX.9.11

The lovely cowherd women

bereft of him, not wanting to live 171

filled the evening with their wails.

These ten verses from his thousand

are Kurukūr’s Māṟaṉ Śaṭakōpaṉ’s lament, his songs of yearning

for the one who ate and spat out worlds.

Sing this garland of words and live well

Sing these words and draw near him. Māl.

172

173

Š Reda Berrada

174

Mirza Athar Baig Ghulām Bāgh Café Ghulam Bagh: Selections translated by Aqsa Ijaz Ghulam Bagh—literally Garden of Slaves—is a staggering vision of a world in which the author attempts to understand the totality of Pakistan’s collective experience as reflected in his personal experience. Ghulam Bagh, the actual garden of slaves within the story, is also a symbolic space of intellectual turmoil of the individuals who are at the periphery of the global intellectual traditions and who bear the deep-seated burden of colonial violence in the contemporary moment. The postmodern world of Ghulam Bagh, where the past, present and future all take place simultaneously, presents an intricate web of several major and minor characters whose stories elaborately unfold in Baig’s brilliant engagement with the theme of time.

Ghulam Bagh chronicles its four main characters’ infinite struggles to find the truth about who they are and how they make sense of the answers they discover along the way. But the book is also about how we tell our own stories and what’s at stake when the very language we possess fails us. The following translation is from the beginning of Ghulam Bagh and is a working translation provided by Aqsa Ijaz with permission from the author. *** “Consider this moment, for example!” said Kabir.

“Moment? What moment?” Dr. Nasir mumbled in an indifferent, semi-interrogative tone.

He was wondering why Ashiq Ali, the waiter of café Ghulam Bagh had not brought them their tea yet. It was true that in deference to their being old customers he made their tea with great care, or as he said himself, with an isspecial method, and anything done with an isspecial method took its time.

But he should have come by now. Nasir gazed impatiently at the kitchen door, and seeing no waiter there, looked back at Kabir.

“You were talking of some moment?”

175

“No, I was just uttering nonsense,” Kabir said angrily, spotting a grin on Nasir’s face.

“No doubt about that, what else, for the last twenty minutes you’ve been babbling about. But let’s see now, let’s start again, what was that … moment?”

“Take this moment, for example, I said.”

“Alright, let’s see, what’s in this moment? It’s evening. My watch says eight plus thirty minutes and forty one seconds. That archaic clock of our dear café Ghulam Bagh is showing eight hours twenty-five minutes instead, and … no seconds, because it has no seconds’ hand. If that’s what you mean by a moment … let’s see what else is in it. You, Kabir Mehdi, pen-name, Ibn-eBasher, a disillusioned and luckless writer; you’re sitting here and listening to my prattle now. Through that broken windowpane I can see the rain out there, which is rather untimely, in the middle of March. And I’ve been wondering all this time what’s come upon our dear Ashiq Ali… Perhaps right now, in this very moment of yours, he’s pouring some boiling water into the tea pot? But as I can’t see him, I can’t really say what he’s doing. So I must wonder, wonder….

“So, my dear Kabir Mehdi, a lot’s happening in this moment. Thousands are being born and thousands are dying. Countless atoms are splitting into quarks as we speak. And chemical changes are underway in my brain to appear as unpleasant feelings in my consciousness. And the only way to get over them is to have a nice cup of tea, rife with caffeine, which is an alkaloid…’ Dr. Nasir paused to breathe. Kabir smiled a guru’s patronizing smile at the unexpectedly good performance of a bungling novice, but with the troubling realization that the brilliance would be short-lived…

“Doctor, I have to admit you can make a good job of my nonsense when you put your mind to it. All that you just said demonstrates, however, that you’ve absolutely failed to understand the spirit of my proposition. And as I understand I think you’re not up for it. But I admit, your speech was rather amusing.

“Amusing?” the doctor exclaimed, twisting his mouth, “What the hell does that mean?”

Kabir gestured to him to be quiet. “What an idiot you can be,” he said. “By 176

‘the moment’, I don’t mean this external moment of events. There is no such all-pervasive moment, enwrapping the entire universe. The theory of relativity discredited that notion at the beginning of this century.”

“Don’t dare teach me science, you literary imposter,” Dr. Nasir sneered.

“Have you forgotten the way you had to crawl through your high school science exams? Or that they kicked you to Arts, which, thank God, is but a sure sign of intellectual paucity, bordering on mental retardation? How fortunate, indeed. People like you could be a pest to scientific progress.

Anything else I can help you with?”

“If you think,” retorted Kabir, “that by getting a degree in medicine and securing a house job in Psychiatry – which is, in point of fact, a caretaker’s job at a madhouse – don’t laugh, doctor, I’m serious. If you think that, with these ‘achievements’ of yours you’ve had a handle on science, you are sorely mistaken. All that you’ve achieved dear, is a shallow sort of objectivity; skin deep realism. And that’s all.”

Nasir kept on laughing. The likening of a house job in psychiatry with a caretaker’s job at a madhouse had oddly titillated his imagination. The entire mood changed. He gazed at Kabir with a fond sense of wonder, and the realization at the back of his mind that notwithstanding his cynicisms, he was the one who made his life a bit tolerable, even if, for a few moments.

“Okay… I’m sorry,” he conceded. “You were talking of some moment. The moment.”

“Forget it,” Kabir frowned.

“No, please, I’m interested. Perhaps, this moment of yours… it’s not to be measured by a clock?”

“What I’m trying to say, you idiot, is that time does not exist. It’s an illusion.”

“Really?!” doctor Nasir couldn’t rid his curiosity from a touch of mockery.

But Kabir had already slipped into that peculiar intellectual frenzy for which his dear friend, the psychiatrist, had yet not found a cure. He listened to him with a strange sort of excitement.

177

“The past is repentance, or a sense of pride, and the future, a premonition, or hope. These are the four states of consciousness packed into the capsule of the present. You understand capsule, don’t you?”

“As a doctor, I come across a lot of capsules every day.”

“Oh, but not this kind.” Kabir was loud and startled a few quietly relaxing customers. “This capsule of the present is the center of several concentric circles, extending from the near future, to the remotest future. The circles are expanding but the center is fixed. The past of the thing sitting right here.” He pointed to himself.

“What thing?” Dr. Nasir said bemusedly.

“Me, don’t you see. The entity which is I, the entire past of this entity, beginning from its birth in Sanmial – a small, remote village in the salt ranges, where it passed its high school, and then, having resolved to make a difference to the world, descended to these plains, and settled in a second storey dumping room of an old bookshop. This is all at the center of the past… repentance and pride; and around this center the perpetually widening circles of apprehensions and anticipations. The first circle signifies the undeniable actuality: Ashiq Ali’s arrival with our tea. We shall have our tea.

Then we shall leave the café and walk out into the rain in Ghulam Bagh, and then, the Big City… I’ll have to walk down the streets in rain, all the way to the office of the Asarri Digest, and deliver this script in my pocket, that recounts the hunt of a man-eating tiger of Africa. It’s chilling business, doctor !” Kabir tapped his pocket and examined Nasir for the effects of his rhetorical performance.

“And from there, to my nest,” he continued. “To my place in the old bookstore, my night’s sleep. This is the circle of today, my dear sir, and then comes tomorrow… the next month, next year … Then the year, month, and day of my death. I can see it encapsulated in this moment, and if you were to care to give it a try, sir, you could see it too. All those spheres of your future, expanding out ...”

As was customary of him in such situations, Nasir sighed and gave Kabir a look of professional apprehension. “I fear Kabir, if you should continue to live in that shabby dungeon you call your Nest, you will lose your mind completely. You’ll go mad.”

178

Kabir laughed. “Psychiatrists hardly ever use this word, ‘mad’. Please abreast yourself with the ethics of your profession, doc. Besides, you’ve been prophesying my madness for years now. And I dare say, wishing it in secret. But look at me… by the grace of God, far from being mad myself, I’m driving others mad –’ he broke off suddenly, “But yaar… he still hasn’t brought us our tea. It’s been an hour, I think … and that’s too long even for Ashiq Ali.” Dr. Nasir was relieved for the change in subject; a commonplace thing such as tea should bring Kabir down to routine existence. But his gratitude was rather premature and Kabir hadn’t emptied himself yet.

“Doctor, I’ve told you this before,” he said, “I experience a sudden inward convulsion, then a flurry of ideas, a multitude of words from somewhere… or nowhere. It is tumultuous and chaotic. And what is the result? I yak. If it so happens that I’m not lucky enough to have a patient listener like yourself, I begin to scribble the stuff down. But … what comes out is neither a poem nor a story or novel or play, it’s nothing… absolutely nothing – or maybe, bakbak, in other words, nonsense. Sometimes I wonder, why don’t we call it a new genre of literature, bakbak? That, then, could be my real work in this world.”

“Your real work indeed, my dear. You’re over thirty now, and post thirty the brain cells begin to die rapidly, consider that.” Dr. Nasir said piquantly, “Besides, if this is your real work, then what is it you do under that pen name of Sarang, or whatever … the writer of preposterous articles for little known digests and magazines? Not too shabby.”

“Shut up !” Kabir exclaimed. “A time will come when I will write under my own name. My real work will bear the name of Kabir Mehdi, I promise you.”

“As it stands though, nobody knows who Kabir Mehdi is,” Dr. Nasir said conclusively. “But Sarang, yes, he enjoys a loyal readership. His stuff is sensational, informative, political, scientific, philosophical, and psychological…

What more can you ask for?”

Kabir laughed drily, then peered out a window of the café at the rain in the ruins of Ghulam Bagh and further beyond the Big City. It was a torrent, unheard of in the middle of March.

Ashiq Ali, the waiter, appeared suddenly. He had no tray in hand, to their 179

disappointment. But he couldn’t have carried it because his hands were shivering, as was the rest of his body. His clothes were wet and dirty. Some of the regulars of the café eyed him lazily for a while, then ignored; they were here for sweet tea and hash and in no mood to be distracted. Kabir and Nasir, however, stood up from their seats, alarmed. But before they could ask what the matter was the waiter started himself, “For God’s sake doctor sahib jee, come with me!”

“What happened? Are you okay?” Dr. Nasir eyed him in a diagnostic manner.

“Please, come and see him, my brother Madad Ali, doctor sahib. I’ve stretched him out on the kitchen table. That boy– Irshad … and the watchman of the mausoleums… they brought him in through the back door. He must have beaten him, that watchman, the bastard wouldn’t admit. But how else can he go unconscious? Thank God you’re here doctor sahib, please hurry, please!”

“Madad Ali … your brother,” Kabir recalled, “the one who mixes horse fodder, and prowls about the ruins for relics?”

“The same sir, he’s the one. But please don’t mention the relic thing in public, somebody might hear you. Please doctor sahib, come!”

The three of them rushed towards the kitchen, Ashiq Ali in the lead. And again the sweet tea lovers ignored them; this was their bower to come to forget the world and its worries, they could not be bothered by even a scene so suspicious.

Ghulam Bagh was no ordinary junkies’ den, however, the ones who came here sought refuge in the ruins, between the crumbled walls and derelict tombs of Ghulam Bagh, curtained with webs and swarming with bats, they found peace in the silence of evening, and a few moments’ escape from the cares of the world. The café was in a dire condition, located in a corner of the ruins, appearing a remnant of the past itself. One could imagine a group of Tommies from an English platoon having drinks here in times gone by. But today the visitors comprised of these peace seekers, and, at other times, some offbeat group of university students, medical interns and radical intellectuals.

There was a time when Ghulam Bagh was an archaeological site in the suburbs of the Big City. But in the last thirty years or so the city had swollen out and Ghulam Bagh had been swallowed in by a swarm of educational, 180

commercial and residential buildings. The suburbs had receded further out, making it increasingly difficult for the Archaeology Department to protect the ruins from housing pressures of the city. And lawsuits of rather dodgy credentials, claiming rights over some fringe or another of Ghulam Bagh had not been uncommon. These cases lingered for years in the courts as encroachers ate away at the peripheries of Ghulam Bagh. Eventually, however, most of these cases sank into oblivion. But one managed to acquire international notoriety.

An heir of a Nawab family, through well-managed research, documentarily endorsed by reputed, and well-rewarded historians, launched a claim over the entirety of the ruin, pleading, that the land was in fact an inherited property of his lineage.

It was not the best of times for the judiciary, and Nawab Surreyah Jah Nader Jang’s success appeared imminent. Even the press reported it; that very soon, Ghulam Bagh will become the Nawab’s private property.

But this news item came to the notice of an international organization for the protection of world heritage, and the news led to much furor among the civilized nations. And during those days, one saw quite a few white scholars in Ghulam Bagh, protesting against the repugnant prospect of an archaeological remain of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and British origins, passing into the private ownership of a local Nawab. The government took prompt action. It was brought around to the Nawab that since the matter had started to affect foreign policy, he must behave, and reportedly, for this good behaviour he was very liberally compensated. That pacified the archaeologists as well, and investigations began anew at Ghulam Bagh, with newfound interest.

Experts across the board declared it an enigmatic and amazing archaeological site, of unprecedented importance in the history of the region.

The white men and women who showed up at Ghulam Bagh during the days of the world famous property trial, would come upon that shabby tea stall as they sauntered through the ruins, and the brown folks sitting inside would welcome them with subjugated eyes and a humiliating acceptance, that was all at the same time cold and hateful.

On such occasions, Kabir would say to the doctor, “Believe it or not, but there’s a magic in the white skin ... and it’s black magic. The very sight of a white man in these parts is a stab in the heart… look, how it makes us piss in our pants.” He preferred to make his more obnoxious remarks after leaving the café. Those were the days when he and the doctor had newly ac181

quainted Frederick Hoffman, a young German archaeologist who frequented the café for hash, mostly, haggling it out of the junkies, in exchange of what was peanuts in Euros.

Drawing as much smoke he could into his lungs he’d begin a drawn out discussion with Kabir and Nasir, on such varied subjects as the mythical history of Som Rus, the biochemistry of cannabis, and so on. And he’d be very impressed by their knowledge on these matters. But Kabir thought differently. “He’s not impressed,” he told Nasir once. “He is amused. Like that gora sahib from Company bahadur, who was amused at seeing his cook blurt out his first correct sentence of English.”

“But Hoffman is a German,” Nasir protested, “whereas the gora sahib belonged to the-’

Kabir interrupted him. “All these goras are the same. And look at us… we’re trying to impress him with the knowledge that’s but his charity to us. After all, we’re not authorities on Indo-Muslim civilization; the Orientalists are.

And probably the Germans have done most of the work on the biochemistry of poisonous plants….. he mocked, “I speak now English sir, correct English sir, right sir. I cooking pudding with stew,” says Kher Gul, the cook.

And gora sahib says: “Kher Gul ab tum aacha English bolta, good boy,” and Kher Gul is proud. Ah!... you know what I’d rather do? I would run up to the Janum Khunder — the ruined place of birth, making putt-putt sounds.

And piss there.”

“You can do that without the putt-putt,” said Nasir, worried once again about the state of Kabir’s mind.

However, neither did he lose his mind nor did their meetings with Hoffman end. Hash and Ghulam Bagh had suited the German well. So he stayed on to continue his work on the archaeological enigma, securing a fairly hefty grant from his university. And often he would say in his Germanized English, “This Ghulam Bagh of yours is a great mystery… In a small space no bigger than two football fields you find remains ranging from the Maurya dynasty to the East India Company. And if only your government will allow me to dig near the Janum Khunder… we may very well discover some connection between this site and those of the Indus valley. Who knows?”

“That’s your fifth cigarette,” Kabir said drily.

“Forget it my friend. Hash can do me no harm. It’s a psychedelic drug, the doctor knows. It gives the imagination a terrible flight… and to my ana182

lytical mind, which is so important to my job… that flight is essential. An archaeologist has to be a dreamer and a mean realist at once.”

Realism is just another kind of meanness… what an idea, thought Kabir.

Nawab Surreyah Jah Nader Jang had failed to secure the property rights of Ghulam Bagh, but he had never thought he could do so from the beginning. He was quite content with the commotion that his little ruse had created on the international stage; among all those lovers of heritage. Moreover, it had taught him the worth of that junk from the past. Ghulam Bagh in its entirety could not become his possession, but there were certain nooks and crannies surrounded by those walls of small bricks, and tombs littered with engraved slabs, where once in a while one hoped to stumble upon relics of some worth. Better that they adorned his private collection than rot in the national museum. So with open arms he greeted foreign observers to monitor the proceedings of the trial. Afterwards, at his haveli, of no small historical significance itself, he threw lavish parties in their honour. He told them he was to voluntarily surrender the property rights to the government, but only after a fight, so as to emphasise the law of right to private property; even if, it was to be the great Ghulam Bagh.

In these parties, his guests showed special interest in his collection: engraved wooden doors, terra cotta objects, artefacts of ivory and coral; most of the articles of his ‘museum’ had reached him after years of snooping around, and many a secret nocturnal diggings at Ghulam Bagh. This perilous assignment he had entrusted to his old buggy driver, Madad Ali, who no longer drove the buggy, for its time had long passed, but spent his time hunting hidden treasures under the grim, bricked exteriors. “Find anything, anything whatsoever, but it should be old”, the older the better, he was told. A Kohl pot of some Mogul princess, a cutlass of a Khaalsa trooper, a button off the shirt of a Company soldier, anything. And when he did find something the Nawab paid him a good sum. More than what his brother Ashiq Ali made in a month.

But what really made Madad Ali scour those ruins like a phantom in the nights and blazing summer noons, and the freezing winters, was not these little bargains he cut with the Nawab. He had his own reason, his own infatuation. Ghulam Bagh had been the playing field of his childhood, and once he had come across something ... something whose memory had never left him in peace. People called him mad, but Madad Ali had never been in doubt. Once, when he was a child, a day in the scorching wind they 183

called loo, leaping and hopping the labyrinths of the Janum Khunder he had come upon a flight of stairs behind an old hollow wall. He descended the stairs, and lo and behold! there was a box full of gold coins lying in there. Glittering… hypnotizing gold! Breathless, he had rushed up to tell the others. But when he returned, he had not been able to relocate the stairs, the wall, or the box. Everything had, as though, vanished. Fifty years had passed since and Madad Ali was still searching for the lost stairs behind the wall, the box full of of golden coins, which a child had come to once on a day of blistering loo.

The watchman of Ghulam Bagh was wary of his suspicious movements; and Madad Ali thought, if he were to find something of real value, he would strike a deal with the Nawab, and bribe the watchman. His love for the ruins knew no end.

But other than the ruins, he loved his horses. He had never owned a horse himself, or even a vehicle employing a horse: but he was an expert at mixing fodder. His masala was known for its remedial qualities. All day long beside the road that led to Ghulam Bagh he concocted the masala, mixing together all sorts of powders and potions, and at nightfall he set out in search of the lost moment of his childhood. He had never married and lived with the family of his brother, Ashiq Ali. It was a large family, and Ashiq Ali, like the other waiters of café Ghulam Bagh, was hardly ever tipped.

It was only that Madad Ali handed him all his earnings, that the grounds of fraternal love were firm between them.

* When Dr Nasir and Kabir entered the kitchen following Ashiq Ali, Madad Ali lay on a long narrow table, used by the kitchen employees to chop vegetables and knead the flour, and so on. Ikram, the watchman, Irshad the waiter, Nawaz the cook, and some other workers of the café surrounded the patient, and stared down at him with an unsympathetic curiosity. The doctor ordered them to clear out, but they only reluctantly dragged a step back. Ashiq Ali snarled, “Off you all! No entertainment this. Don’t you see, doctor sahib is here?”

A stool was brought in for doctor sahib. And when Nasir began to look for the tell-tale signs on the patient’s body a hush fell on the room. Kabir slip184

ped into a reverie. What an ecstasy of divine moments, he thought, so readily available to these doctors. When they feel the pulse of a patient or peer into his eyes lifting his eyelids, or count his heartbeat, the taste of time changes in the mouths of those who look. A mist of deeper mysteries shrouds everything and freezes them in that ubiquitous sensation of the great unknown, the end of time. Just look at the onlookers, those rigid, expectant bodies, poised as if in a deep prayer. No one, except Ashiq Ali, is really concerned about the life and death of Madad Ali but how the desire to know the future has stirred an eternal wonder in their minds.

How strange is this idea. How strange this moment!

Kabir let his gaze creep over the objects of his surroundings. The blue flame of the kitchen stove was pumping heat into a cauldron, and around it lay other pots, big and small, some with curry inside them, some empty. There was no fire under the big griddle, and white flour was scattered all around it. Jugs, plates, cups, spoons, knives lay there in a heap, and flies hovered over the dirty dishes, having entered indoors because it was raining outside.

The walls of the kitchen were old with a ten years old Islamic calendar hung in a corner, and cobwebs filled the nooks of the ceiling, a dead spider stuck in one; and water dripped continuously from a faucet. And there was Ashiq Ali… and Ikram, Nawaz, Irshad, Madad Ali … he was moving… yes, so feebly.

Dr. Nasir had lifted his eyelids with his fingers and peered into them. He had made his diagnosis.

“There’s nothing to worry about, he’s not in any danger,” he said, patting Ashiq Ali on the shoulder, while the spell of the moment shattered.

“He’s not in any danger, my good sir,” said Ikram the watchman, “But he himself is a big danger. He comes sneaking into Ghulam Bagh and starts digging, now here, now there. I’ve spared him this time, but not again !”

Ashiq Ali was furious and pounced at him, but Kabir intervened.

“Stop it. I say stop it! And you, watchman sahib. I’m guessing Madad Ali has not yet cut a deal with you. He always does that. But you’re a new comer, aren’t you? Don’t worry, it will be all right after the settlement. Then you’ll not stop him. Rather, you will help him.”

“Oh, no sahib, no sahib. That is not the...” the watchman stammered, and this meekness on his part tempted Ashiq Ali to jump on him again.

“That’s it !” he roared. “It’s money he’s after. He’s beating brother Madad 185

Ali for money!” There ensued another brawl, wilder and noisier than before. A cauldron was overturned and fell down with a terrible clank. Madad Ali opened his eyes.

“He’s awake!” exclaimed the cook, Nawaz, with a touch of disappointment in his voice. At once they all looked towards Madad Ali, who was rolling his beady eyes trying to find his bearings.

“Bhai Madad Ali!” cried Ashiq Ali, and embraced him.

Now that the show was over, the staff all said the customary, well-meaning things and started returning to their works. And just then the kitchen door swung open, and Hoffman came in. “What’s going on? What’s the matter doctor? Is he ill?” he started in his heavy, German English.

Seeing the gora, Ashiq Ali wasted no time in pointing to the watchman and pleading in Urdu, “Sahib, he hit my brother… he hit my brother sahib, he hit… hit !” A three year long stay in the country had enabled Hoffman to understand at least the entreaties of the locals. He started in his own, broken Urdu. “Hit? So bad, bad! Who hit?” The watchman was pale with terror. He knew this gora sahib had been doing something important in Ghulam Bagh, and for some time now, and he knew all the higher ups of the department.

“No sahib,” the watchman begged, “Pardon sahib, pardon!”

“You know not him my man!” Hoffman thundered, “my man, you understand? Khabardar, beware.”

His khabardar was very effective. Being German, it was not at all difficult for him to pronounce the sound of “kh’; in fact, it sounded even more real coming from his mouth. The watchman panicked and fled out the back door, into Ghulam Bagh.

Hoffman burst into laughter.

Kabir mumbled angrily. “A gora sahib can make us piss in our pants.”

“Did you say something, Mr. Kabir?” Hoffman said.

“Not at all.” Kabir said. “By the way, Herr Hoffman, since when has Madad Ali become your man?”

“Oh, since a few months.” Hoffman answered. “But I haven’t been able to fully get hold on him just yet. He’s still in the clutches of your Nawab sahib.

But you know, I’m not interested in his relic hunting. I’m only interested in 186

his story. So fascinating! Have you heard it, doctor? The story of the stairs descending into a tunnel, and a box full of gold?”

“I don’t think I have time for stories,” Nasir said drily. “I have to leave for my night duty. Now listen, Ashiq Ali, take your brother home.” He turned to the patient. “Get up Madad Ali. Do you feel any pain, anywhere?” Madad Ali said nothing. “Hmm, so everything is alright?” He patted the patient on the shoulder. The patient was mute and glanced around manically, rather nonplussed.

“Answer him, Madad Ali, doctor sahib is asking you something,” Ashiq Ali said, mopping his brother’s hair with a kitchen duster. But Madad Ali said nothing. It appeared, as though, his jaw was locked, and he couldn’t open it.

“He’s not saying anything,” Ashiq Ali said anxiously. Then he shouted, “Bhai Madad Ali? Doctor Sahib is asking something!”

Dr. Nasir sat down once again and began to probe his maxillary muscles.

“Hmm, there’s nothing wrong here.” He addressed the patient. “Madad Ali, open your mouth. It’s fine. Open it… open your mouth… shabash, open it.”

Madad Ali shook his head violently; he was helpless.

This new development sent waves of excitement among those present, as they began to reassemble around the mute man.

“Is it a spasm doctor, some convulsion?” Hoffman asked, and Ashiq Ali started crying.

“Oh, stop this weeping and wailing please, he’ll be alright!” Kabir said aloud, fuming at all the meekness. But then he regretted venting his anger on poor Ashiq Ali.

Doctor Nasir looked puzzled. “Strange, if this is a convulsion, then... it’s really... strange. Everything else seems to be fine, then why just the mouth...?” he sighed. “Anyway. We’ll have to take him to the hospital.”

The patient gave a big shudder, and shook his head vigorously.

“Then why don’t you open your mouth!” exclaimed Nawaz, the cook. “You’re wasting our time. But I shall treat him, doctor, just you watch.” Before the doctor could do something he’d poured a bit of egg-frying oil on his fingers and was daubing it on the patient’s jaws. His plan was to give the man a hearty massage, but Ashiq Ali pulled him away, and glanced helplessly at the doctor.

Hoffman chuckled. “Now what do you do about that,” he said amusedly.

187

“Everyone’s a doctor in your country. Isn’t it so, Mr. Kabir?” Kabir ignored him. “But let’s get going now. Let’s take him to the emergency ward. My motor is parked right outside. Okay? Pick him up, man... now!”

At once the kitchen workers clutched Madad Ali from his arms and legs and lifted him and carried him out. Madad Ali resisted as hard he could, and spying the touch of madness in his eyes now, Kabir remarked, “I believe this truly is a case for you, doctor.”

188

189

© Muhammad Cheema

190

Contributors Sundas Amer is a third-year MA/PhD student in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests lie in Urdu and Persian literary aesthetics and histories, women’s writing, and textual circulation with a specific focus on 19th century North Indian Urdu literary cultures. She can be reached at sundas.amer@utexas.edu.

Liam Greenwell is a junior studying History and South Asian Studies at Brown University. Liam has specialized interests in the history of premodern gender and sexuality, post/decolonial theory, and the use of art as a means of resistance. His scholarly work, translation, journalism, and commentary have been published in the Brown Classical Journal, Vietcetera, The College Hill Independent, and Mekong Teahouse. He also presented his paper "The Human Stain: Prostitution in Byzantine Religious Conception" at the inaugural edition of the Princeton Near Eastern Studies Undergraduate Conference, held in April 2018. In Fall 2018, he spent a semester studying abroad in Bodh Gaya, India, and he plans to return to Northeast India to complete research for an undergraduate thesis this summer.

Noor Habib is a graduate student in the program of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include translation studies and postcolonial theory, with a regional focus on South Asia and Iran. She is interested in Modern Urdu poetry and is currently working on translating the nazms of Miraji.

Aqsa Ijaz is a PhD student at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. She works on Indo-Persian romance traditions and focuses on the literary cultures of Persian, Urdu and Punjabi languages in 18th and 19th centuries North India. She is currently working on Ghulam Bagh’s English translation. She is also a regular contributor to Dawn news’ Books and Authors pages.

Zehra Kazmi is a Teaching Fellow with the Department of English at Ashoka University, India. After completing her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University, she went on to pursue an M.Phil in English Studies: Criticism and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Her master’s thesis was titled ‘Misfits of Modernity: A Reading of Muslim Womanhood and Feminist 191

Resistance in Late Colonial India in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Ismat Chughtai’s The Crooked Line (1945).’ Her research interests include South Asian and world literatures, film studies, spatiality, gender, affect and memory. She intends to examine nostalgia, memory and loss in the works of South Asian Muslim writers in the 20th century in her further research.

Arthur Martin is a fourth year Honours History student at McGill University from Toronto, Ontario. His interests include the postcolonial state in Pakistan and Muslim identity and nationalism in South Asia. Arthur will pursue a Masters degree in History at McGill in the autumn of 2019.

He strongly recommends any course taught by Professor Subho Basu.

Prateek Paul is pursuing his M. Phil. in English Literature at Delhi University. His thesis focuses on the strategies of indoctrination of children into the Hindu fundamentalist ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in its weekly journal, Organiser. He possesses a keen interest in post-colonial and Indian literature, with particular focus on the writings of the Progressive Writers' Association and on the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Evidently, he often finds himself exploring the terrain of literature lying in the interstices of history and politics. The word ‘apolitical’ does not exist in his vocabulary. Rightly so, his motto: A rose is not a rose is not a rose.

Niyati Shenoy is a doctoral student in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and a certificate candidate at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University. A native of Bombay, she holds a B.A. in History and Politics from Pomona College, California, has studied at SOAS, and has been a Princeton in Asia Fellow and a Young India Fellow. She aims to research the origins and causes of sexual violence in northern India as questions of concept history. Her broader interests include sexuality and masculinity studies, archive theory, affect theory and victimhood, early modern Persianate histories and cultures, life-writing and autobiography, and political thought as it relates to violence as well as the imagination of caste and gender difference.

Archana Venkatesan is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis and also served as the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies from 2015-2018.

192

Her research interests are in the intersection of text and performance in South India, as well as in the translation of early and medieval Tamil ecstatic poetry into English. Among her many books and publications is the forthcoming Tiruvāymoḻi published by Penguin Classics: New Delhi, 2019.

Naveen Zehra Zaidi holds a B.A. in History from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Lahore, Pakistan. She recently completed her M.A. in South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania as a Fulbright Scholar. Her thesis examined Urdu and Hindi language ‘popular’ histories of Lucknow. She has a broad interest in the themes of memory, Shi’ism, and diaspora within Urdu literary and print culture. Naveen is also interested in public history practices and has been a part of archival and oral history projects both in Pakistan and the United States.

193

Cover Photo: Š Reda Berrada