Harf — Volume Two

Winter 2017 McGill University Montreal, QC

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Gold & Bronze Š Reda Berrada

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EDITORIAL BOARD Sayema Badar Felix J. Fuchs Ashutosh Kumar Zain R. Mian Andrew Tower Ruqaiyah Zarook PHOTOGRAPHY Reda Berrada Sandeep Banerjee Mahnoor Malik DESIGN Zain R. Mian Felix J. Fuchs

Funding for this journal has been generously supplied by the Arts Undergraduate Society of McGill University (AUS), the Fine Arts Council (FAC), and the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU).

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CONTENTS SCHOLARSHIP

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The Cult of Manliness: Football, Nationalism, and Bhadralok Masculinity in Colonial Bengal – Abhinava Goswami

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Through the Prism of the Weird: Usman Malik, Weird Fiction, and the Representation of Uneven Development – Matthew Rettino

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The Myth of the Early Modern: Reassessing Early Portuguese Imperialism in the Indian Ocean World – Liam Mather

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FEATURES

Two Translations from Kūzah – Zahra Sabri

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‘Amma’ and Budhan Theatre – Dakxin Bajrange

119 REVIEWS

Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia (Walt Hakala) – Mehr Afshan Farooqi

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Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan, 1947-1972 (Kamran Asdar Ali) – Subho Basu

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Maoism in India and Nepal (Ranjit Bhushan) – Subashish Bhattacharjee

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The Symmetry Tunnel © Reda Berrada

Pigeons in Delhi Š Sandeep Banerjee

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Introduction: South Asian Studies at McGill University The Editors In the 2016-2017 academic year, Harf has successfully transitioned from a standalone journal into a student group that promotes consistent intellectual engagement with South Asia. In this regard, Harf has involved both the McGill campus and the broader Montreal community by planning events and activities throughout the Fall and Winter terms. As such, the present volume provides us the opportunity to record and contemplate this year’s progress. This introduction reviews Harf ’s activities for this past year, and reflects upon the essays, articles, and reviews featured in this volume.

Year in Review In Fall 2016, Harf conducted its first ever literature reading group, in cooperation with the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI). The group, entitled Registering Globalization, investigated the manner in which the particular social, political, and economic conditions engendered by globalization become perceptible in literature from South Asia. The texts chosen for this group reflected a diversity of locations, periods, and experiences: Abdullah Hussein was brought into conversation with Khushwant Singh, for example, and Mahasweta Devi was made to speak to Raja Rao. Importantly, Harf also organized two lectures in the Fall semester. The first was delivered by Aruna Roy, who was appointed the Professor of Practice at the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID) for this term. Ms. Roy is an important Indian activist, who is co-founder of the Mazdur Kisan Shakti Sangathan (Forum of Worker Peasant Strength), and who was also integral to the development of India’s Right to Information Act. In her talk, “On Culture and Democracy,” Ms. Roy spoke about the challenges facing Indian democracy at present. Her talk investigated the relationship between activism, nationalism, and democracy, with a view to understanding the role of literature and culture in this struggle.

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In addition to Ms. Roy, Harf was also exceedingly fortunate to host Professor Syed Akbar Hyder from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. On the 18th of November, 2016, Professor Hyder delivered a talk entitled “One in Grief: Aesthetics of Mourning and the Story of Hind.” In his lecture, Dr. Hyder discussed how the work of Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder engages with the narration of the tragedy of Karbala, and with the South Asian tradition of elegies, the marsiya. He explored how the calculated ambiguity of Hyder’s prose invoked ideas of mourning, history, and solidarities in suffering. This talk was organized with the Institute of Islamic Studies and the World Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Students’ Association. It would have also proved impossible without the magnanimous assistance of Professor Pasha M. Khan, the Institute’s Chair of Urdu Language and Culture.

In Winter 2017, Harf instituted a Film Reading group in cooperation with IPLAI. “Mapping the Nation(s): Parallel Cinema in South Asia” brings together a varied selection of films that speak to the development of antagonistic nationalisms in the subcontinent. In particular, the group draws together individuals to discuss how these films narrativize the partition of India, its aftermath, and the relationship of Indian Muslims and Hindus, both with reference to each other, but also in relation to British officials and the state.

Significantly, the group has sought to problematize conventional understandings of South Asian nationalisms, and to engage students and the general public alike with the history of the region.

Finally, this semester Harf is collaborating with the English Graduate Students’ Association to host Professor Henry Schwarz from Georgetown University’s Department of English. On the 7th of April, Professor Schwarz will be speaking on the development of Budhan Theatre, a theatrical movement that mixes the political and the emotive through its artistic practice. He will discuss the manner in which artists from India’s ‘criminal tribes’ combine Indian street theatre, western dramatic theory, and rasa aesthetics to create a politically relevant and effective art form. Harf is eager to have Professor Schwarz join us on McGill’s campus. We also acknowledge

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that Professor Schwarz’s lecture would be impossible without the generous financial and logistical support of our own Professor Sandeep Banerjee of the Department of English. To him we find ourselves indebted for his unflinching support.

This Volume The present volume reflects Harf ’s ambition to unite scholars of South Asia from our usually disparate disciplines and regions of focus. Moreover, it represents the coming together of scholars from the significantly stratified tiers of the academe. It is perhaps an achievement of this volume that it features alongside undergraduate and graduate scholarship short articles and reviews from senior professors, both from within McGill University and without.

This issue features three scholarly articles. Through painstaking historical analysis, Abhinava Goswami’s “The Cult of Manliness” examines the development of a masculine national identity in the literary and cultural productions of colonial Bengal. Specifically, Goswami discusses how football became a means by which the ever-flagging morale of the ostensibly effete Bengali could be resuscitated. He deftly reads the sporting triumph of the Mohun Bagan club over the English East York Regiment to suggest how this event proved the culmination of the strong wave of cultural defence that had preoccupied the Bhadralok with increasing tension since the mid-19th century. In particular, Goswami excavates the manner in which this quest for masculinity circulated through the fandom of Mohun Bagan which, when imbued with the Swadeshi ethos, created a virile interpretation of a Bengali-Indian imagined community.

The second essay in this collection is Matthew Rettino’s “Through the Prism of the Weird: Usman Malik, Weird Fiction, and the Representation of Uneven Development.” In this essay, Rettino reads the speculative fiction of Usman Malik as a peripheral modernism that represents the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. Rettino suggests that Malik’s work foregrounds the limits of representation in a world-system defined by combined and uneven development, and

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he makes this argument through the close-reading of Malik’s “Resurrection Points,” “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro,” and “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn.” Of particular importance in his essay is the theoretical distinction Rettino makes between magic realism and weird fiction: he notes that while magic realism sustains the cognitive tension between empiricism and the supernatural implicitly in the realm of the reader, weird fiction renders this tension explicit within the text and in the protagonist’s mind as well.

The third scholarly paper in this volume is Liam Mather’s “The Myth of the Early Modern: Reassessing Early Portuguese Imperialism in the Indian Ocean World.” This essay interrogates the interactions between the Estado da India and the Indian Ocean world’s indigenous polities from 1498 to 1600. Mather questions accepted historiography that suggest the commercial and political domination of Europe over the Indian Ocean World at this time. The significance of Mather’s essay lies in that it demonstrates a more expansive understanding of the kind of scholarship that may be productively included within the interdisciplinary ambit of South Asian Studies. By engaging with essays such as this, scholars of South Asia may be provoked to consider the possibility of developing their work within more global frameworks.

In addition to the abovementioned scholarship, the present volume also contains three reviews by senior scholars. Importantly, each review interrogates a recently published text. Professor Mehr Afshan Farooqi of the University of Virginia, for example, has reviewed for us Walt Hakala’s Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia, published by Columbia University Press in August 2016. Similarly, Professor Subho Basu from McGill’s Department of History has appraised Kamran Asdar Ali’s Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan, 1947-1972. Finally, Dr. Subashish Bhattacharjee, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for English Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, has provided a consideration of Ranjit Bhushan’s Maoism in India and Nepal, published by Routledge last year.

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Apart from academic scholarship and reviews, Harf is also publishing two featured pieces this year. The first includes two translations from a recently published collection of short stories, entitled Kūzah. These stories have been translated by Zahra Sabri, of McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies. They are introduced separately

by Zain R. Mian. The second featured piece is the work of Dakxin Bajrange, an award-winning filmmaker, playwright, director, and activist from the Chhara De-notified Tribes. His piece, entitled “‘Amma’ and Buddhan Theatre,” describes Bajrange’s experiences in setting up the Buddhan Theatre movement, and the manner in which his development was influenced by his personal relationship with the late Mahasweta Devi.

Harf is grateful for the contribution of each of these scholars towards the current issue, and thanks them for their support. We would also like to give special thanks to the Arts Undergraduate Society, the Fine Arts Council, and the Students’ Society of McGill University for their financial and logistical contributions towards the production of this journal. At this juncture, the editors would also like to express their desire that the present issue prove both intellectually stimulating in its own right, and also that it be a fruitful point of departure for our readers to consider their research and the work of their peers. Moreover, Harf acknowledges that the achievements of the present volume are largely the prerogative of our many generous contributors, and accepts ownership of any infelicities found herein. Finally, questions, comments, and concerns may be directed to the editors via our email (harfjournal@gmail.com) or through www.facebook.com/HarfJournal.

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A Hollywood Hero Š Reda Berrada

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The Cult of Manliness: Football, Nationalism, and Bhadralok Masculinity in Colonial Bengal Abhinava Goswami “It thrills every Indian with joy and pride to know that rice eating, malaria ridden, barefooted Bengalis have got the better of beef eating, Herculean, booted John Bull in that peculiar English sport.”

- Basumati, August 5, 1911.

It was 29th July, 1911. When Abhilash Ghosh of Mohun Bagan seized a quick pass from Sibdas Bhaduri and swiftly put the ball into the back of the net against East York Regiment, in front of nearly eighty thousand native spectators on the sprawling Maidan1 of Fort William, Calcutta football seemed to come of age. Within two minutes, the final match for the Indian Football Association (I.F.A) shield between East York, a British military team, and Mohun Bagan, a team of Calcutta Bengalis, came to its frantic end as the natives miraculously clawed back from the jaws of an expected defeat. The dream of putting the colonial expatriate in their rightful place was thus honourably achieved. So electrifying was the victory for the Bengalis that many started tearing their shirts and waving them in the air.2 The event became international news as Reuters reported that “for the first time in the history of Indian Football, a core Bengali team, Mohun Bagan, won the IFA Shield by defeating a competent White team.”3 The Bengali narrative of this event undoubtedly demonstrates the relationship between sports and nationalism in the imperial context.4 National identities are, by nature, selectively inclusive. As Benedict Anderson defines it, the “nation” is “an imagined political community.5 Indeed, recent research demonstrates that sport, with its tense spectacular drama compressed within limited time, highlights moments of nationalist outpouring and transforms the imagined community of the “nation” into concrete reality marked by intense emotion, sentimentality, and displays of physical prowess.6 For the

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concerns of the present paper, this event in Calcutta also touches a crucial cultural aspect of the emerging nationalist consciousness among the Bhadralok of Bengal, namely, the cult of masculinity.

The Cult of Masculinity Masculinity, is like any other form of identity historically, politically, and culturally constructed. The notion of masculinity has always had a complex presence within the British Empire. While imperialism configured its ideas of masculinity by defining itself against a supposedly “effeminate� colonial other, the colonized subject, on the other hand, also created a masculine cultural space that resisted this feminization. With colonizer and colonized locked in constant struggle, the terms of which had been set by imperialism itself, not surprisingly various nationalist responses arose among the colonized while incorporating the values of imperial masculinity. However, this incorporation did not merely reproduce British ideas but was itself an imaginative configuration of nationalist myths and icons based on traditional cultural ideas that aimed to challenge alien colonial rule.

The present study of Bhadralok nationalism examines a particular intersection of masculinity and the nation in a colonial space integral to Britain’s empire in India: Bengal.

The cult of masculinity became a crucial component of Bhadralok7 nationalism in Bengal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the aftermath of the failed revolt of 1857, the cordial relations between the Bengali babu and his British superior that had endured in the earlier decades of British rule were fast coming to an end. The new distaste of the imperial rulers for the babu coincided with an assumption of India as a feminized land and the success of imperialism as a masculine project. In this ennobling project of imperial improvement, the British identified masculine virtues such as self-control and self-discipline as the root cause for the civilization and moral supremacy of Britain. Indians, on the contrary, were weak and degraded owing to their supposedly feminized nature, and the epitome of the Indian degenerate was the frivolous and the effete Bengali babu. Interestingly, the very notion of effeteness was built into

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the condition of the existence of western educated Bengali elites. They were haunted by the unhappy awareness that they were creatures of colonial modernity. A subtext to the white supremacist ideology of the British Raj was therefore a persistent lampooning of the Bengali Bhadralok and a parallel celebration of the rugged simplicity of the masculine tribes of the North-Western Frontier provinces as “real” men, brilliantly brought out, for instance, in the writings of Rudyard Kipling. The Bengali babu is the quintessential mimic-man of colonial discourse, English-educated, confused, and hated by the white rulers for his superficial smatterings of knowledge used to plot and scheme.

Kipling brings out the newfound hostility of the British for the Bengali in the character of Huree Babu who is repeatedly jeered at as a “monstrous hybridization of East and West…. He has lost his own country and has not acquired another.”8 The peculiar conception of the Bengali character, which found expression in the writings of Luke Scrafton and Thomas Macaulay who decried it as feeble, effeminate, deceitful and indulging in venereal pleasures, had a deeper purpose. It justified the colonial rulers’ domination of indigenous subjects by creating myths about the white man’s paternalistic mission of improving the natives.9 Amiya Bagchi argues that racism was required to maintain British economic and political domination, and to justify the denial of equality in rights and opportunities that laissez faire liberalism demanded.10 Ashis Nandy elaborates on this issue and points out that a conjunct of evolving Western male stereotypes was the consideration of others as effeminate or childish.11 As British rule produced geographical histories of India, the Bhadralok realized that they never had a culture of political virility in comparison to Rajputs, Sikhs, and Marathas. This realization, along with the colonial construction of the Bengali babus as an effete population, prompted a political project that challenged both the foundation of colonial stereotypes and their self-identity as a product of colonial social engineering. It is against this background that the “bhadra” (respectable) upper-caste, middle-class Hindu community of Bengal initiated a wider political project that appropriated the colonial

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modernity of state building, which it redefined for the purposes of nation-building and towards the organization of a political revolution.

In the political arena, this project bitterly contested the charge that the English-educated Bengali was physically or culturally incapable of carrying out with equal distinction the public responsibilities then vested exclusively in Europeans. From the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883–8412 to the agitations over the Age of Consent Bill in 1891,13 organizations of educated Bengalis publicly disputed the allegation of cultural backwardness. In other spaces, however, these accusations triggered within the Bhadralok an internal movement of social reform that included a scathing self-criticism of the effete culture of the Calcutta babu, the promotion of new norms of conjugal family life, and the inculcation of new habits of bourgeois self-discipline.14 It is in this light that educated Bengali Bhadralok in the late nineteenth century took to physical training in gymnasiums, wrestling arenas, and football clubs.15 This response crystallized in the Extremist Movement, which formed an intellectual defence based on moral strength, at the same time initiating a physical counter-offensive.

The intensity of political extremism among the Bengali Hindu Bhadralok had its socio-cultural offshoot in the quest for nationalist regeneration through religious revivalism, social reform and cultural achievements. Of relevance to this study is the preoccupation with physical strength and martial attributes that were enthusiastically espoused from the 1860s onwards. Such attitudes represented an attempt to define Bengali middle-class traits and characteristics through a prism of hyper-masculinity and a re-invention of the ideology of martial races latent in the traditional Indian concept of statecraft and Kshatriya-hood.16 The Bhadralok preoccupation with valour and past historical glory found expression through myriad modes. Patriotic history writing and the quest for reconstructing a heroic past was one such mode, best exemplified in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s writings on medieval Bengal. Such texts were consciously political, deliberately selective in their choice of subjects, constructing for Hindu Bengal (and by extension India) a heroic history. The portrait of Krishna in Krishna-Charita (1886) depicts him as a bold upholder of a righteous cause, a soldier, strategist, and

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empire-builder quite unlike the traditional and popular portrayals of him as a playful child and an effeminate lover. Krishna was reconstructed by Bankim to visualize the united India that sponsored the establishment of Dharmarajya after the Kurukshetra war.17 In his literary work Anandamath (1882), Bankim shows the vision of the puissant mother who “held trenchant steel in her twice-seventy million hands and not the bowl of the mendicant.”18 He advised the sons of Bengal to “leave the canine method of agitation for the leonine.”19 In Anandmath, as Tanika Sarkar argues, Bankim did not have to “imagine” the Motherland—it already existed as a tangible deity, a part of the Hindu pantheon to be worshipped and glorified.

The land is objectified as a mother figure not to be pitied, but one that is powerful, angry, and desirous of revenge.20 Bankim wrote the lyric of Vandē Mātaram in 1876 by mixing Bengali and Sanskrit. This lyric was published in Anandamath in 1882 as a patriotic slogan. It envisages the Motherland as prosperous, rich, with abundant harvest, and to be protected by her seventy million children: Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands When swords flash out in seventy million hands And seventy million voices roar Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?

With many strengths thou art mighty and stored, To thee I call Mother and Lord!

Thou who saves, arise and save!21 In time Bankim’s mantra of Vandē Mātaram became the rallying call of the militant nationalist fervour. Sarkar argues that since Bankim could not “actualise a male agent for such redemption,” he always visualised the “virtuous” woman empowered with “divine energy” to save Hindu power and glory.22 The revival of Shakti worship and the fusing of devotional passion with cultivation of personal strength and self-sacrifice propagated by the shakta cult thus became the symbolic pivot around which the regeneration was propagated.23 Its basic doctrine believed in a latent power called Shakti and involved the worship of Goddess Kali in

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various forms. A logical corollary was then to posit a militant response to the colonial domination, aptly shown in the rise of political extremism and the use of the symbolism of the Goddess Kali to stir anti-British sentiment. The Bengali newspaper Jugantar wrote: “The mother (Goddess Kali) is thirsty and is pointing out to her sons the only thing that can quench that thirst. Nothing less than human blood and decapitated heads will satisfy her. Let her sons, therefore, worship her with these offerings and let them not shrink even from sacrificing their lives to procure them. On the day on which the mother is worshipped in every village, on that day people of India be aspired with a divine spirit and the crown of independence will fall on their heads.”24 The enthusiasm of the Bengali middle class intelligentsia to valorise the heroic and the masculine also found literary and intellectual expression in the writings of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Swami Vivekananda, and Aurobindo Ghosh in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Madhusudan redefined popular mythology to fit the emerging values, glorifying the characters of Ravana and Meghnad from the epic Ramayana as masculine and majestic vis-à-vis the emasculated brothers—Rama and Lakshmana. Ravana was credited with masculine vigour, accomplished bravery in war, and a sense of Realpolitik. What was latent in traditional Indian masculinity was now made salient with the help of existing cultural imagery and myth.25 Vivekananda, described as “the cyclonic Hindu” by the American Press, had a profound impact on the new generation of Bengalis. His speeches brimmed with stirring motifs reminiscent of the epic call to arms as he exhorted the men of his times to rise in strength and unite against the imperial masters. In one of his speeches he said: “First of all, young men must be strong. Religion will come afterwards. Be strong, my young friends… you will be nearer to heaven through football than through the study of Gita….you will understand it better with your muscles a little stronger.”26 Similarly, Aurobindo wrote in Bhabani Mandir that “Strength… and again strength and yet more

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strength is the need of our race. The Shakti we call India, Bhabani Bharati is the living unity of the Shakti’s of three hundred million people… but she is inactive, imprisoned in the magic circle of tamas, the self-indulgent inertia and ignorance of her sons. To get rid of tamas we have but to wake the Brahma within…”27 Most of the poems and songs of the period continued this trend of inspiring patriotic feeling. Periodic gatherings like the Hindu Mela of Nabagopal Mitra, the Birashtami and Pratapaditya festivals and the Shivaji Utsav all projected a total image of the “motherland” with its distinctive culture, tradition, and heroes.28 Achievement in several indigenous ventures boosted the confidence of the Bhadralok and emboldened them to take on the colonial rule.29 The image for strength found expression in the formation of voluntary associations, physical culture clubs or akhras, and in the burgeoning secret societies.

Often the distinction between the akhra and the secret society remained blurred. The akhras functioned as centres for body building, fencing, boxing, lathi-plays, and gymnastics, and secret societies found it easy to function within these conditions. The games’ ethic, in other words, was appropriated by the Bengali middle class and turned into an instrument for confronting British power.30 Magazines catering largely to the tastes of children and the Bengali youth published simple poems and essays usually laced with humour and drew skilful parallels between the cultivation of sports or physical strength and the chance to break colonial domination.31 The burgeoning appeal of militant nationalism and violent revolutionary terrorism had much to do with the changing tenor of juvenile literature from the mid-19th century onwards and the increasing enthusiasm for an aggressive response to colonialism.

In the project of political reconstruction, therefore, the Bhadralok was seeking a thorough overhaul of all that was perceived as effete and morally feeble. The enthusiastic adoption of football by them was thus a direct outcome of the above processes. Football signified masculinity and vigour and, for a group constantly ridiculed by colonial stereotypes of weakness and effeminacy, the prowess with which this sport was adopted was crucial for re-making the Bengali

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ethos. It is within this context that the question of manliness acquired a somewhat special significance. This manliness, in short, involved the ability to prevail over a technologically superior opponent by sheer courage, skill, and cleverness.32 Football, as a competitive exercise of collective controlled violence, was the ideal game for this purpose.

The Bengali babu sought to prove that he was well up to the masculine strength, physical control, and stamina required by football. This was the “nationalist” response to the negative construction of Bengali males in official discourse as unfit for martial service.

Football thus allowed Bengalis to rework their political vocabulary towards a masculine reconstruction of their identity.

Its masculine logic also served as an immediate inspiration to the burgeoning revolutionary activities in Bengal and evidence suggests that many Bengali revolutionaries were also proficient in football.

An example of this kind was Jatin Mukherjee, a legendary Bengali revolutionary who was also a member of the Kumurtuli football club.33 In this political atmosphere, the natives had begun to contemplate that unless they developed the requisite masculine spirit, they would never match their colonizers in any platform of life. Within a context that privileges binaries of masculinity and effeminacy, negatively constructed difference, to evoke Anderson, is crucial in forming and stating national identity.34 Football, which “ritualized male aggression and enabled its supporters to invent a national community for themselves,”35 thus represented a catalyst for arousing a consciousness imbued with ideas of strength and power. Perhaps Achintya Kumar Sengupta, a noted literatteur of the period, did not exaggerate when he said that the seeds of the revolutionary movement were sown in the football field.36 The particular intensity with which the Bhadralok redrew the contours of what started as a within the expatriate white subculture of Calcutta’s mercantile and military groups needs to be situated in the context of the Swadeshi challenge to the Imperial machinery. By the first decade of 20th century, football in Calcutta had come a long way. From being a recreationial activity of civil and military British personnel stationed in the city, it became an arena for competition

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and conflict between the British and the Bengali Hindu Bhadralok.

From imitation arose competition and the dream project of beating the British at their own game. Mohun Bagan club’s 1911 triumph over an English club in the IFA Shield tournament final was thus the successful culmination of a strong wave of cultural defence that had preoccupied the Bhadralok with increasing tension since the early 20th century.

Football, Nationalism, and 1911 In English universities and public schools, football was very clearly associated with boys of a privileged social order. However, this did not confine the game to elite groups. From the 19th century onwards, a parallel shift in the character of football helped it to become increasingly a working-class sport, epitomizing an assertion of ritualized male aggression that had a large appeal for the male working-class subculture.37 This disposition developed further as the ruling white elite soldered ideas of manliness, discipline, and selfcontrol with empire itself. Newer complexities were added to this intricate linkage when the game was appropriated by the Calcutta elite in the 19th century, though numerous paradoxes persisted.

Despite being a popular sport in England when it was introducted to Bengal, football developed differently in the colony. It began as an unabashedly elitist sport, initially confined to the colonial administrative, military, and business groups, and was later adopted by the Hindu Bhadralok of Calcutta.38 Its radical potential therefore lay not in its class basis but in its particular utilization for anti-colonial consciousness and emotion.

By the end of the 19th century, football in Calcutta had matured, and was organized in a systematic fashion. It now created spaces for competition and conflict between the British and the Bengali Hindu Bhadralok. The particular intensity with which the Bengali Hindu elite began to redraw the contours of what started as a component of the expatriate white subculture of Calcutta’s mercantile and military groups needs to be situated in the context of the Swadeshi challenge to the Imperial machinery. At this time, the paradox of football

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becoming a conduit of nationalist feeling despite its imperial roots became evident. In 1911, when Mohun Bagan Athletic Club won the IFA Shield tournament, it not only represented the climax of a series of difficult matches fought tenaciously on the pitch, but also reflected the radical Bhadralok counter to a terrible mixture of racial arrogance and imperial high-handedness. In a sense, this win resonated with the growing sense of cultural aggression and the austere cultivation of physical strength that typified the Bengali Hindu Bhadralok.

The nationalist tenor of fandom was certainly not born overnight.

Its first stirrings could be discerned during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal.39 In the wake of the vehement anti-Partition agitation, the Bhadralok came to contemplate the game with a new eye.

Pramathanath Chaudhury (1868-1946), the famous author and the editor of the literary journal Sabuj Patra puts it very cogently: National consciousness was something that everyone talked about in the Swadeshi era. In those days our people understood this only in its political sense. In those days, what we meant by national consciousness of ourselves was an awareness of our deplorable lack of independence. Needless to say, in that narrow sense, the identity consciousness as an Indian and as a Bengali is one and the same thing.40 It was as if Bengal was the custodian of national consciousness. In an age when Bhadralok political consciousness was characterised by a confident assertion of being “advanced” relative to the rest of India, football fandom had very serious implications. Any success against British teams on the football field came to be constructed as a victory of the spirit “nationalism” over the evil of “colonialism.” Incidentally, this was also the period of Mohun Bagan’s stellar rise to prominence as the sole Indian club to earn a series of worthwhile successes in various tournaments beating on many occasions, civilian European teams.

Born on August 15, 1889 in an age of rising political consciousness, Mohun Bagan Athletic Club rose amongst its native counterparts to symbolize the formal nationalist response of the

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injured Indian/Bengali “cultural self ” against the British. The inaugural meeting was held at 14 Balaram Ghosh Street, the residence of a prominent Congressman named Bhupendranath Basu. The club derived its name from Kirti Mitra’s Mohun Bagan villa situated in North Calcutta and its activities began on the lawns of that place. The villa and its extensive grounds were surrounded by Shibdas Bhaduri Street in the north, Upper Circular Road in the east, Kirti Mitra Lane in the west and Mohun Bagan Lane in the south.41 The place of origin of the club is significant as north Calcutta was the cultural, intellectual and political hub of Calcutta where the best minds of its intellectual elite resided. The increased prominence of the club was perhaps another outlet through which the leading personalities of the time expressed themselves.

The social composition of the Mohun Bagan’s fans can be delineated into two main segments of the Bengali Bhadralok.

Pioneering supporters and patrons belonged to what has been described as “abhijatya-bonedi” families, which meant that these were essentially landlords holding glorified titles like “Maharaja” or “Rai bahadur.” This was a group familiar with outdoor activities such as hunting and had long employed armed retainers known for their physical prowess; they had suitably groomed themselves over time to having an almost instinctive affinity for sporting pastimes. These were prestigious but usually absentee sponsors. It was those members of respected and influential families having professional and service backgrounds who handled the daily job of club management. In fact, this was the stratum greatly affected by the surge in white racism in the latter half of the 19th century, though they were paradoxically dependent on the whites for jobs as civil servants, lawyers, doctors or journalists. This class eagerly espoused the ideologies of cultural nationalism which Mohun Bagan came to represent. Men like these were naturally prominent in the nascent nationalism of the Indian National Congress. Bhupendranath Basu was a prominent Congress member while R.N. Mookherjee was a leading Swadeshi industrialist.42 The majority of the club’s fans came largely from “nimnamadhyabitto” or lower middle class economic backgrounds. These

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were economically poor but respectable men, highly educated but working in low-paying clerical jobs in the increasingly expanding bureaucratic and business apparatuses of the Raj.43 Bearing the brunt of white racism and the humiliation, fear and insecurity of the male householder or jobseeker in colonial Calcutta, this was the section who were most volatile in tea shop addas and were emotionally aroused easily for just about any cause.44 Mohun Bagan’s 1911 victory acquired deep symbolism largely due to the agency of the latter category of the Bhadralok, who transformed the club into a visible cultural icon of resistance to the Raj. The IFA Shield tournament of 1911 provided just the kind of impetus required to bring intense psychological currents of innate rebellion to the fore. A series of incidents between July 10 and July 29, 1911 require special historical reconstruction because they had a major role to play in the construction of a “national consciousness” in Calcutta soccer. The tournament provided an important motive force in establishing a sense of oneness amongst the Bhadralok in Calcutta precisely because they perceived it as an attack on what was decried as the bastion of colonialism. To achieve victory in a tournament that had traditionally been dominated by British teams ever since its inception in 1893 was nothing short of a triumph over colonial supremacy itself. Allied with the implication that what Calcutta is today, India is tomorrow, the crystallization of national identity was epitomized through the ideological aggressivity of the “GreenMaroons.”

The unexpected victory seemed almost audacious. In the first round Mohun Bagan beat St. Xavier’s by three goals to nil.45 In the second round the Rangers club was defeated by two goals to one in a difficult match played on a ground sodden with rain.46 These two victories immediately raised public interest, as it was noted that “the fans of the native team mustered in full force around the field. In spite of the excellent arrangements it was at times difficult to keep the hordes of Bengalis off the ground of play.”47 When the club beat Rifle Brigade by a solitary goal from Bijaydas Bhaduri and went into the semi-finals of India’s premier football championship,48 the

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city suddenly woke up in a state of emotional tumult to the fact that history was about to be made. This match was of particular interest in view of the presence of a huge crowd, some of whom had travelled twenty to thirty miles from small suburban stations such as Chinsurah simply to attend the game “live.” The Amrita Bazar Patrika tallied it to be in between 35,000 and 40,000.49 Although the figure seems to have been exaggerated what cannot be denied is the popular frenzy it occasioned among the natives, as has been depicted by The Statesman in a neat picture of the scene on the Maidan that day: A vast sea of eager, exciting faces thronged the galleries . . . .

From it there arose a continuous crackle of chatter—mostly in the vernacular—and the crowd was an entirely different one from the crowds that generally witness other football matches, full of fire and enthusiasm with only one thought—the thought of victory.50 Thousands crowded to watch Mohun Bagan play the Middlesex Regiment to a one-to-one draw, and bitterly complained afterward that the army team’s equalizer was gained by their forwards rushing on goalkeeper Hiralal, knocking him down, and pushing the ball into the goal with their hands.51 In the replay, however, Mohun Bagan scored a resounding victory by three goals to nil, helped by an unfortunate injury to the Middlesex goalkeeper Pigot.52 Achintya Kumar Sengupta in his Kallol Yug recalls how ardent the Bhadralok absented themselves from work in order to see the game and how the clerks in almost every office in the city went so far out of their ordinary course as to clamour for early dismissal to witness the game.53 Even The Englishman furnishes a theatrical picture of the evening’s excitement as if the whole of Calcutta had flocked to the Maidan: Indeed Bengali Calcutta had gone football mad. The trees around the field swarmed with spectators who climbed up to the very tops. Many a man came down and had a nasty fall and an immense branch of one of the trees behind the Dalhousie tent, unable to bear the strain, crashed to the ground with its load of human freight. Several persons were injured.54

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In the same match when Mohun Bagan conceded the first goal owing to a disputed decision of the referee, the native team’s fans lost their patience and vehemently abused the referee and the lineman.55 As Mohun Bagan reached the final after its demolition of the regimental team in the replay, The Times of India Illustrated Weekly observed: “On Thursday and Friday every Bengali carried his head high and the one theme of conversation in the tramcars, in offices and in those places where the Bhadralok congregate most, was the rout of the King’s soldiers in boots and shoes by barefooted Bengali lads.”56 By nationalizing the local, Mohun Bagan was swiftly becoming the spirit of the place that was widely presumed, at least in the Bhadralok psyche, could and would reshape the dominant meaning in the contradictory acculturation. The criss-cross zones of playing the politics as well as playing the game produced the sense of a replacement map that aimed to subvert the colonial policy of subordination. The results acknowledged the oppositional voices from the marginal location; significantly, it also acknowledged the presence of the “Other.”

In the final match Mohun Bagan was pitted against the East York Regiment.57 East York took an early lead which it maintained till the breather (half-time). In the second half Mohun Bagan playing “like demons” equalized through a goal scored by Shibdas Bhaduri, at which “the Bengali spectators nearly shouted themselves hoarse.”58 Two minutes before the match ended Abhilash Ghosh of Mohun Bagan scored a second and suddenly history had been made. An Indian team had won the prestigious IFA Shield for the first time since the tournament’s inception, creating shockwaves throughout the insular British world in Calcutta, while the Bhadralok celebrated it as if it had been a victory for the entire “nation.”

The enthusiasm that Mohun Bagan’s march into the final generated reveals a remarkable scale of spectator support and fan frenzy surrounding this incredible achievement of the time. The final match was supposed to start at 5:30 p.m. but the natives began to assemble starting in the morning. Special trains ran between Burdwan and Howrah, and extra boats ferried passengers across the river to

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Calcutta. The western side of the Calcutta Football Club grounds had white stands for its European members, while temporary green stands were put up on the northern side for the natives with tickets priced at two rupees (they were being sold for fifteen rupees on the day before the match).59 The total capacity inside could not have been more than four or five thousand. Outside the fencing on the eastern side, opportunist entrepreneurs had set up rows of shipping boxes arranged like galleries going up to ten or twelve feet. On the southern side, fans were standing on top of parked bicycles, and behind them were rows of supporters on the sloping glacis of Fort William, known to generations of football watchers on the Maidan as “the ramparts.”

There were, it was reported, perhaps eighty to a hundred thousand native spectators that day in and around the football grounds, most of whom had no chance of seeing anything of the game.60 Still, they were informed of the game’s progress by kites in the sky bearing the latest score. Several newspapers had temporary telephone lines installed so that the result could be immediately reported to their offices—the first time this had been done for a sports event in Calcutta.

The scenes that followed the victory had never been seen before on the Calcutta Maidan. Fans went delirious, not knowing how to react to something so unprecedented. “Hats, handkerchiefs, umbrellas and sticks were waved,” reported Amrita Bazar Patrika,61 while the defeat produced, it seems, widespread European dejection. It was reported in one vernacular newspaper that in the immediate aftermath of the match the European parts of the city wore a dark and deserted look reflecting something very mournful.62 The Englishman, too, reported that the white localities of Calcutta were engulfed by gloom after the defeat.63 The post-victory reactions including the enthusiastic patriotism revealed the extent to which the city of Calcutta had responded to the triumph.64 After the match, the winning team was taken out in an impressive victory procession from the Maidan to Shyambazar—the nerve centre and cultural hub of the non-white city.

There was tremendous excitement with frequent shouting of slogans like “the firinghees have lost” while cries of Bande Mataram rent the air. The procession stopped for some time at the Thanthania Kali temple on College Street to pay homage to the Goddess and thank her for “inducting strength” to defeat the British team.

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An interesting reminiscence that throws light on the victory’s nationalistic implication was the question asked by an elderly sanyasi (monk) while approaching Shibdas Bhaduri, the captain of the winning team: “We are thrilled that you have overcome the military team, but when will you pull that down?” He was pointing to the Union Jack flying over Fort William. An amazed but emotional Bhaduri responded: “The next time we beat the English on the football pitch.”65 It seems, for a brief moment, the nebulous desire in the subconscious of the Bhadralok to come out winners in the struggle for self-assertion leading to independence was made a tangible reality.

Interestingly, Mohun Bagan would not win the IFA Shield again due to various unfavourable circumstances until 1947, the year India won independence.

Mohun Bagan and the Construction of a Bhadralok Masculine Space Since the inception of colonial rule in India, the British categorically degraded the Bhadralok “babu” as a “non-martial” race and continued to ridicule him as “feeble” and “effeminate.”66 The practical repercussions of the colonial construction of Bengali effeminacy and racial inferiority were visible in the ruthless British attitude and behaviour in everyday social life. Even as fervent an admirer of the British Empire and culture, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, in his autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, acknowledges how he was told off for walking on the wrong side of the Eden Gardens, the side reserved for Europeans. The Bhadralok had become used to bear the brunt of daily British discrimination, condescension and physical assault in all walks of life. From tramcars to offices, the British practiced a form of racial apartheid in Calcutta.67 The Bengali always awaited opportunities to return the compliment by any means, however trivial. Calcutta’s football Maidan promoted a metaphorical battlefield to counter-attack their haughty masters. In the dialectical play between dependence and independence, Mohun Bagan successfully offered an apolitical space of an oppositional position of power in the field that contained the shadows of native-selfhood in search of identification. The victory was thus a colourful mosaic of social, political and historical elements. Through the identification of

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India with Mohun Bagan, what is ultimately displayed is the clamant self-reflection of the Bhadralok to outdo as well as undo the disruptive power of the imperialists.

Allied with the national/local slash, the process of reshaping the natives’ identities according to a particular cultural heritage endorses the ideological standpoint of a desire through a local game that additionally promotes a desire in national frame. Achintya Kumar Sengupta points to an implication of the win that was directly political: “Mohun Bagan have succeeded in what the Congress and the Swadeshiwallas have failed to do so far to explode the myth that the Britishers are unbeatable in any sphere of life.”68 Even The Englishman highlighted Mohun Bagan’s win vis-à-vis the political failures of the Indian Association and the Congress: “There are no players today in the playroom of the Indian Association. The Congress playroom has been blown off by one blast like a house of cards. Revered leaders like Surendranath have not been able to unite their adherents by the tie of unity. In a country where union takes place only to dissolve, where repulsion is more powerful than attraction, you [Mohun Bagan] have been able to knit together so many hearts.”69 Through the circulation of local to national in the Bhadralok imaginaire, the play was not a mere game but a sheer struggle to strike back and fight back in the political philosophy that underpins an imbalance vis-à-vis the available power equation. Containing the seeds of a decolonizing device, Mohun Bagan’s defence not only defends the East Yorkshire attack but also defends the colonizers’ on-going advancement. Every chant, cheer, clamour and gesticulation thus establishes the race, nation and identity of native selfhood. This is why the question of manliness and race became such a delicate issue in relation to football in the years following Mohun Bagan’s victory in the IFA Shield tournament. The victory came at a time when the unified constitution of a national identity seemed to be problematic. 1911 was also the year when the Partition of Bengal was carried out and Bengal was split into two with the creation of the new provinces of Assam and Bihar-Orissa. The blow to Bhadralok self-confidence was completed by the parallel event of shifting the capital of the British Empire from

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Calcutta to Delhi. Ramchandra Guha is under the impression that due to this shameful defeat, Britain was bound to transfer its capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911: Oddly enough, it was in the same year, 1911, that the British shifted the capital of the Raj from Calcutta to Delhi . . . . If it is a coincidence, for it is highly likely that one was the cause of the other and that to pre-empt further humiliation the British adroitly and deliberately moved the seat of power from Bengal, away from its skilful footballers and its bombwielding nationalists.70 For the Bhadralok, preceded with the Curzon’s decision to divide Bengal in 1905 and the hanging of Khudiram for his attempt to kill Kingsford in 1908, the win over a white team in football seemed a moment of self-pride. It functioned as some sort of recovery of dignity and self-respect in the year that Calcutta was to lose its status as the capital. Most of the people who had assembled at the Maidan had little idea about the technical aspects of the game and had been brought there by a sense of oneness and a feeling of concern for a fellow team pitted against British regimental teams. The unequal competition for strength had been emphasized by the sheer physical constraints of playing barefoot, as Mohun Bagan did while the English team played with well-shod boots. Moreover the referee was white and perhaps favourable to the English while the Bengalis were playing not only a British team but also a military squad. It was this fabled inequality of the encounter in which the apparently weak trounced the inherently strong that made Mohun Bagan’s victory the stuff of legends ever since and more so in the next two decades, when the club while maintaining its position as the leading Indian football team in the city, failed to win another trophy, whether the I.F.A Shield or Calcutta League Championship. Football legend is replete with stories of how Mohun Bagan was the victim of unfair scheduling by an association dominated by white clubs and, above all, biased match supervision by white referees. It is difficult to accurately elaborate on this with the help of the usual sources that historians use precisely because the public archive in print does not document any evidence of this

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submerged discourse. Nevertheless, there is enough experiential evidence in the form of first-hand autobiographical reminiscences and a plethora of newspaper reports to considerably acknowledge the submerged discourse among Mohun Bagan fans that the club’s misfortunes were entirely due to the arrogance and envy of the British ruling race. Faced with serial embarrassments, the Bhadralok blasted motivated white refereeing to have granted their opponents undue advantage.

One such reported incident documents the role of controversial referee R.R. Clayton who gained notoriety for being instrumental to Mohun Bagan’s discomfiture time and again. The Bhadralok firmly believed that biased refereeing was frequently to blame for the footballing injustices of the 1920s and 30s which are also explicitly presented in Achintya Kumar Sengupta’s autobiographical Kallol Yug: In those days, the ruling British had a monopoly over referees and obdurate referees repeatedly caused trouble for Mohun Bagan. An indisputable goal by Mohun Bagan—and the whistle blows for offside. The C.F.C (Calcutta F.C.) is guilty of a foul—it is ignored or blamed on Mohun Bagan. When there is no other way to undermine Mohun Bagan, like a bolt from the blue, without a warning, comes a penalty charge.71 The club however, patronized by leading zamindars and loyalist politicians, was always ready to play by the rules and rarely complained about any of these decisions. The fans became agitated at the club’s wretched performances in major tournaments and as erstwhile excitement soon gave way to acute despair and disrepute, the languishing image of Mohun Bagan subtly echoed the frustrated figure of the Bhadralok, who, exacerbated by a loss in moral and political self-confidence, gradually soured into one of a failed contender in the imagination of the “nation.” As Ramchandra Guha neatly puts it: “The link between sporting prowess and militant anti-imperialism was thus undermined, to be finally rent asunder by Gandhi and the Bombay capitalists.”72 Sengupta’s Kallol Yug further attests to such anguish:

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Despite all these efforts, Mohun Bagan . . . used to get beaten by weaker teams like Aryan, Kumartuli or Howrah Union when it really mattered. The boat just drowned just before reaching the shore. It’s pathetic to remember those fateful days. Powerless to move on, the situation became so desperate that the only face-saver was to board a second class tram compartment at the expense of luxurious evening hotel on a hoodless Walford double-decker. A supporter’s dejection, which had led him to commit suicide at Mohun Bagan’s defeat, becomes understandable in this light.73 As if to compensate, the Bhadralok made special heroes of players such as Gostho Paul (dubbed “The Chinese Wall” for his sturdy defensive skills) and Balaidas Chatterjee who had the physical strength and courage to challenge British regimental players while not giving an inch even when unfairly tackled. In an immensely competitive match between Mohun Bagan and Calcutta F.C in 1916, which Bagan subsequently won 1-0, Calcutta’s DuBois broke his shinbone in a reckless encounter with Bagan’s Balaidas Chatterjee.

The Statesman correspondent reports the fans’ exhilarating reception at the excruciating site of DuBois’ agony which personified the “exaction of revenge for the martyrdom of Khudiram Bose and countless other revolutionaries who ascended in direct physical confrontation against the imperialists.”74 Sports clubs and heroes take on contingent meanings according to wider social, economic and political circumstances. Thus, footballers were expected to accomplish what politicians and native representatives in the British Indian administration could not. If India was constantly losing to its imperial rulers in politics, footballing success was championed to ameliorate the Bhadralok’s feelings of inefficacy and emasculation.

There is little doubt that the 1911 football victory was widely read as more than just a sporting event. Coming at the same time that Calcutta lost its status and the national capital, and following the abrupt collapse of the armed revolutionary movement, it certainly provided a spurt to the public airing of political grievances focused

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on the racial divide between the rulers and the ruled. Being a leading Bhadralok institution of the time, Mohun Bagan certainly provided the ideal space of reflection and projection to react and resist British control. Growing up in that age, the political events of the first decade of the 20th century had a stirring effect on the Bengali youth.

A large section of the Bhadralok were economically decent, highly educated, rational and outspoken, but were hesitant to actively take part in the fold of nationalist politics. Serving the British as officials, clerks or professionals, the urban Calcutta middle-class were unable to express their anti-British resentment in public and were reluctant to participate in the politics of direct confrontation. It is this section which came to fantasize an act of shoving an elbow or a fist into the face of a Sahib or a soldier, or kicking him under the guise of tackling as their personal execution of a “reverse hit” or “palta-mar” to the imperial “other” in their socio-political every day. Mohun Bagan as a club and its players like Gostho Paul, Abhilash Ghosh and Balaidas Chatterjee thus came to be extolled as ideal cultural nationalists, more precisely, “freedom fighters” who would get the desired success on the pitch that perhaps eluded the Bhadralok in politics and economy, the more crucial spheres of national life. This national tenor of Mohun Bagan fandom largely needs to be located as a reflection of contemporary politics, which as yet was not communally polarized and was chiefly concerned with a sense of unitary Bhadralok masculine pride and as an integral component of Calcutta’s anticolonial project. Subsequently however, by the third decade of the twentieth century, the so called “national” metaphor fragmented into sub-regional and communalist overtones and thus testified to the unfolding dynamics of the socio-historical fault lines of a city in transition from the colonial to the post-colonial.

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Notes

1. The Maidan (literally open field), also referred to as “Brigade Parade Ground,” is the largest urban park in Kolkata in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is a vast stretch of field and home to numerous play grounds, including the famous cricketing venue Eden Gardens, several football stadia, and Calcutta Race Course. The Maidan is dotted with statues and pieces of architecture, most notably the Victoria Memorial.

Due to the freshness and greenery it provides to the metropolis, it is often referred to as the “lungs of Kolkata.” It is property of the Indian Army and hosts the Eastern zone high command of the Indian Army in Fort William. The Maidan stretches from as far north as the Raj Bhavan building in Esplanade and as far south as the National Library on Belvedere Road in Alipore. The wide field stretches from the Hoogly River in the west to the Victoria Memorial in the east. It is a historical and cultural centre of Calcutta as well as a centre of leisure and entertainment for Calcuttans.

2. Ganen Mallik, “I.F.A. Shield Tournament Final,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, August 1, 1911; Times (London), July 31, 1911.

3. Reuter News Agency’s cablegram to England on Mohun Bagan’s success on July 30, 1911, cited in Mohun Bagan Athletic Club Platinum Jubilee Souvenir (Calcutta: Mohun Bagan A.C., 1964), 17.

4. While scholars such as J. A. Mangan elaborate upon the Victorian “Games Ethic” of introducing colonial sports such as cricket and football in public schools for the Indian elite so as to inculcate virtues such as patience, persistence and esprit de corps amongst the natives—see, for example, J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (London: Frank Cass, 1998)—scholarship has also explored the complex relationship between sports and nationalism in South Asia. Ramchandra Guha, in his Wickets in the East: An Anecdotal History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992) looks at the way in which cricket was first used as a vehicle for expressing anticolonial and nationalist emotions. Boria Majumdar’s Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004) is by far the best account of cricketing nationalism since it establishes that “Indian cricket” is far from a monolithic structure and highlights the local variations of nationalism. He explores how cricket differently served as a nationalist front against colonial dominance in Bombay and Calcutta, and how it subsequently embodied politics itself instead of remaining a metaphor for politics.

Similarly, writers like Ashis Nandy and Arjun Appadurai have examined the theme of indigenization of cricket in the post-colonial period, and point to its central place in a range of emerging positions and identities in the years after Independence in 1947.

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According to Nandy, aside from enabling Indians to negotiate colonial modernity, the “moral posture” of cricket empowered them to question the post-utilitarian colonial governance for not living up to their own standards of morality. See Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Appadurai instead argues that post-colonial politics and culture explain the rise of cricket in India to the status of popular sport. He points to state support and commercialization as the driving forces behind the promotion of the game to the masses as “it became an emblem of Indian nationhood at the same time that it became inscribed, as practice, into the Indian (male) body,” in other words, to post-colonial generations of men, cricket became a means of developing a national and a masculine identity. See Arjun Appadurai, “Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in Contemporary India, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 45.

5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

6. For further details on the subject, see Gary Armstrong, Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score (Oxford: Berg, 1998); Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti, eds., Fear and Loathing in World Football (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

7. The historical data provided by scholars like S. N. Mukherjee provides room for the argument that the category Bhadralok refers to both a class of aristocratic Bengali Hindus, the “abhijatya” Bhadralok, and more middle-income groups, the “madhyabitya” Bhadralok. The “abhijatya” sreni was comprised of men who had moved into the city of Calcutta around the mid-eighteenth century. While some of them had earned their fortunes through service to the Mughals, most of them “rose from poverty to wealth” in business and occupations as varied as shipping, indigo plantation, banyans to the British, purchasing zamindaris and flour mills. Below this group were the large shopkeepers, small landholders and white-collar workers in commercial and government houses, teachers, “native doctors,” journalists, lawyers and writers. This group was referred to as the “madhyabitya” in early nineteenthcentury Calcutta. See S. N. Mukherjee, Calcutta: Essays in Urban History (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1993).

8. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan and Co., 1901) 9. See Luke Scrafton, Reflections on the Government of Indostan: With a Short Sketch of the History of Bengal from the Year 1739 to 1756; and an Account of English Affairs to 1758 (London: Richardson and Clark, 1763); Thomas Macaulay, Critical and Historical

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Essays (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1961).

10. Amiya Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 1900–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

11. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

12. As of 1883, when the Ilbert Bill was introduced, the Europeans could not be tried in court by Indian native judges. Lord Ripon realised that this provision needed to be changed. So, the original Ilbert Bill allowed equal treatment for Europeans, i.e.

Indian judges could preside over cases involving Europeans. This led to organised lobbying and opposition by all Europeans in India and an amendment was brought as a compromise. As per the amendment, while Indian judges could preside over cases involving Europeans, the Europeans got the right to demand trial by jury, where at least half of the jury would be composed of white Europeans. This completely defeated the purpose of the original Ilbert Bill. Though the educated Bhadralok had vehemently protested against the amendments, they soon realised that to pressure the government, an all India organisation and a more effective coordination amongst Indians was needed to press for equal treatment. This is why the Ilbert Bill controversy is seen as an important precursor to the formation of the Indian National Congress.

For details, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), Introduction.

13. The “Age of Consent” referred to the age at which the law recognized that an individual was eligible to give consent to sexual intercourse. A historic landmark in the social legislation of nineteenth century Bengal was the Age of Consent Act of 1891, the culmination of the long-standing child-marriage debates of the 1880s.

On 19 March 1891, the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure was amended so that the Age of Consent for girls was raised from ten to twelve years making sexual intercourse with unmarried and married girls below twelve years rape and punishable by ten years’ imprisonment or transportation for life. According to Swaminath Natarajan, this act was the last measure of reform in India affected by influencing English public opinion, the first measure of reform for which the Bengali public opinion was aroused, the first time elite Bengalis harnessed the potential of the masses and the first time that politics and reaction were successfully linked. See Natarajan. A Century of Social Reform in India (London, 1959), 82–83. As Charles H. Heimsath argues, the real importance of the Bill was in terms of the nationalist movement and the popular support won for Hindu orthodoxy. See Heimsath, “The

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Origin and Enactment of the Indian Age of Consent Bill, 1891,” Journal of Asian Studies, 21, no. 4 (1962), 491–504.

14. See Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.

15. John Rosselli’s analysis of the shifting mind-sets of the Bhadralok who consciously undertook to pursue physical culture and martial arts is of great relevance here.

Rosselli’s work, however, is confined mainly to the deliberate revival of traditional sports like wrestling and lathi-play along with the proliferation of gymnasia and was devoted to physical training skills. See John Rosselli, “The Self-image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in 19th Century Bengal,” Past and Present 86 (1980): 121–148.

16. The term “Kshatriyas” denotes members of the warrior caste that rank second in the four-fold Hindu social hierarchy.

17. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, “The Aim,” Krishna-Charita (Calcutta: M.P. Birla Foundation, 1991).

18. Sisir Kumar Das, The Artist in Chains: The Life of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (New Delhi: New Statesman Publishing Company, 1984), 189–190.

19. Ibid.

20. Tanika Sarkar, Rebels, Wives, Saints (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009), 219.

21. The English translation of Bande Mataram was rendered by Sri Aurobindo.

22. Tanika Sarkar, “Bankimchandra and the Impossibility of a Political Agenda,” Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Communal, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 161.

23. Shaktas are the followers of the cult of Shakti, the Goddess of power.

24. Extracts from the Jugantar quoted in Sedition Committee Report, 1918.

25. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy.

26. Swami Vivekananda, Collected Speeches (Calcutta, 1952).

27. Bande Mataram, 6 March 1908.

28. The Hindu Mela was started by Nabagopal Mitra in 1867 to promote selfconfidence and a feeling of patriotism among the Hindus. Performance of physical exercise and feats of physical strength formed an integral part of the Mela. Birashtami was another such festival where emphasis was laid on drill, lathi-play and gymnastics.

Shivaji Utsav was celebrated to arouse religious revivalism in order to fight the foreign rule.

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29. Some achievements of the Bengalis of this time were P.C. Roy’s Bengal Chemicals, Kishorilal Mukherjee’s Shibpur Iron Works, Ananda Mohan Bose’s tea plantation, enterprises like Inland River Steam Navigation Service, Bengal Natioanl Chamber of Commerce, Society for the Development of Indian Industries, Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan Project, the National Educational Programme and Banga Laksmi Cotton Mills.

30. An argument has been made that the “games ethic” of Victorian public schools became a useful pedagogical tool for disciplining a colonized middle class into civilized citizens of the empire. From the late nineteenth century, European school teachers and missionaries tried to introduce the game among Indian students in schools and colleges as part of a general effort to inculcate physical training along with the moral lessons of hard work, team spirit, and obedience to authority. For details, see J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (London: Frank Cass, 1998). For an instructive discussion of soccer as a means to an imperial end, see Mangan, “Soccer as Moral Training: Missionary Intentions and Imperial Legacies,” Soccer in South Asia: Empire, Nation and Diaspora, ed. Paul Dimeo and James Mills (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2001), 41–56. For a native incorporation of the same, see Ch.1, “From Recreation to Competition: Early History of Indian Football,” Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation, ed. Boria Majumdar and Kausik Bandyopadhyay (New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2006).

31. Some popular magazines for children were Mouchak, Sandesh, Sishu Sathi, Bulbul, Rang Mashal and Ramdhanu. These along with Prabashi, Bharat Varsha, Sanibarer Chithi, Baromash and Sachitra Bharat reflected the mood of the time.

32. There was also an aura of Oriental magic surrounding the Indian preference for barefoot football. Karuna Bhattacharya (1942), a legendary player of the 1930s, wrote of the wondrous reception that greeted a visiting Indian team in Australia in 1938. The players’ feet were closely inspected and photographed, and the pictures were published in newspapers. He was convinced that playing barefoot was the distinctly Indian style of football that ought not to be given up.

33. Prithvindranath Mukherjee, Sadhak Biplabi Jatindranath (Calcutta: Paschimbanga Rajya Pustak Parishad, 1990), 156.

34. Anderson, Imagined Communities. In the context of football, fans share a sense of belonging, a collective identity, social community and, in fact, an imagined community with their fellow fans. As Richard Giulianotti, drawing on Anderson, notes “football supporters […] belong to an ‘imaginary community’ of those that follow the same club.” They identify with their fellow fans, with their object of

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fandom and with what it represents for them. At the same time, through a negatively constructed difference, they also state what their anti-fandom object is and what their rival fans are. In the case of fandom surrounding Mohun Bagan A.C. as the one examined here, fan identities amongst the natives were constructed “through a hostile opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them.’” See Richard Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 70.

35. Anthony King, “Outline of a Practical Theory of Football Violence,” Sociology 29, no. 4 (1995): 4.

36. Achintya Kumar Sengupta, Kallol Yug (Calcutta: S. C. Sirkar and Sons, 1998).

37. See Eric Dunning, Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), Ch. 2 and 3.

38. Majumdar and Bandyopadhyay, Goalless, Ch. 1.

39. The anti-Partition Swadeshi movement (1906–1907) was waged against the unjust decision of the British government in 1905 to partition Bengal. For an authoritative discussion on the same, see Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal: 1905– 1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973).

40. Pramatha Chaudhury, “Bengali Patriotism” Sabuj Patra (December, 1920), translation mine.

41. Mohun Bagan Club Platinum Jubilee Souvenir (Calcutta: Mohun Bagan A.C., 1964), 2–3.

42. See “Early History,” Mohun Bagan A.C. Golden Jubilee Souvenir (Calcutta: Mohun Bagan Club, 1939), 10.

43. Mohun Bagan Club Institutional Papers (Calcutta, 1964), emphasis mine.

44. The term adda is a popular Bengali term that may be roughly translated as leisurely chats and friendly debates on a wide variety of topics.

45. The Statesman, July 10, 1911.

46. The Statesman, July 14, 1911.

47. The Englishman, July 15, 1911; see also Tony Mason, “Football on the Maidan: Cultural Imperialism in Calcutta,” in The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, ed. J. A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 145.

48. The Statesman, July 19, 1911.

49. Amrita Bazar Patrika, July 20, 1911.

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50. The Statesman, July 20, 1911.

51. The Statesman, July 24, 1911.

52. The Statesman, July 26, 1911.

53. Sengupta, Kallol Yug, 53.

54. The Englishman, July 25, 1911.

55. The Indian Daily News, July 25, 1911.

56. The Times of India Illustrated Weekly, July 27, 1911.

57. The Statesman, July 29, 2011 58. Singapore Free Press, July 30, 1911.

59. “Football at Calcutta,” Bengalee, July 30, 1911, reproduced in Arbi, Kolkatar Football (Calcutta: East Light Book House, 1955), 125.

60. As a ten-year-old, Ahindra Chaudhuri went to the football grounds that day, but was unable to see most of the game except the last few minutes, when a kind gentleman pulled him up on top of a shipping box. For a graphic description of the proceedings outside the grounds, see Ahindra Chaudhuri, Nijere Haraye Khuji (Calcutta: Saptarshi Prakashan, 1962), 42–43.

61. Amrita Bazar Patrika, August 1, 1911 62. Amrita Bazar Patrika, July 31, 1911.

63. The Englishman, July 31, 1911.

64. Interview with Umapati Kumar, President, Mohun Bagan Club, The Statesman, December 26, 1985.

65. See Sengupta, Kallol Yug, 66.

66. This stereotype of physical effeminacy of the Bengali as a “race” found most prolific expression in critiques offered by British officials and writers like Thomas Macaulay or G.W. Steevens. For details see G. W. Steevens, In India (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1899), 85–86, cited in Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, “The Effeminate and the Masculine: Nationalism and the Concept of Race in Colonial Bengal,” The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 298.

67. See Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India: 1921–1952 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987).

68. Sengupta, Kallol Yug, 65–66.

69. The Englishman, July 31, 1911; Basumati, August 5, 1911.

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70. The Telegraph (Calcutta), June 20, 1998.

71. Sengupta, Kallol Yug, 66–67.

72. The Telegraph (Calcutta), June 20, 1998.

73. Sengupta, Kallol Yug, 72.

74. The Statesman, June 15, 1916, reproduced in Arbi, Kolkatar Football (Calcutta: East Light Book House, 1955; 2002), 25.

Newspapers and Periodicals

Amrita Bazar Patrika Bande Mataram Jugantar Mohun Bagan Club Institutional Papers Singapore Free Press The Bengalee The Englishman The Indian Daily News The Statesman The Telegraph The Times of India Illustrated Weekly

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Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Appadurai, Arjun. “Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket.”

In Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in Contemporary India, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge, 23–48. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Armstrong, Gary. Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score. Oxford: Berg, 1998.

Armstrong, Gary and Richard Giulianotti, eds. Fear and Loathing in World Football.

Oxford: Berg, 2001.

Bagchi, Amiya. Private Investment in India, 1900–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Bandyopadhyay, Kausik. Scoring Off the Field: Football Culture in Bengal, 1911–1980.

London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

Bengalee. “Football at Calcutta.” July 30, 1911.

Bhattacharya, Rakhal (Arbi/RB). Kolkatar Football (Calcutta’s Football). Calcutta: East Light Book House, 1955; 2002.

Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra. “The Aim.” In Krishna-Charita. Calcutta: M.P. Birla Foundation, 1991.

Chaudhuri, Ahindra. Nijere Haraye Khuji. Calcutta: Saptarshi Prakashan, 1962.

Chaudhuri, Nirad C. Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India: 1921–1952. London: Chatto and Windus, 1987.

Chaudhury, Pramatha. “Bengali Patriotism.” Sabuj Patra, December 1920.

Chowdhury-Sengupta, Indira. “The Effeminate and the Masculine.” In The Concept of Race in South Asia, edited by Peter Robb, 282–303. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Das, Sisir Kumar. The Artist in Chains: The Life of Bankimchandra Chatterjee. New Delhi: New Statesman Publishing Company, 1984.

Dunning, Eric. Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization.

London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

India: Sedition Committee Report, 1918. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1918.

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Giulianotti, Richard. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge: Polity, 1999.

Guha, Ramchandra. Wickets in the East: An Anecdotal History. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Heimsath, Charles H. “The Origin and Enactment of the Indian Age of Consent Bill, 1891.” Journal of Asian Studies 21, no. 4 (1962): 491–504.

King, Anthony. “Outline of a Practical Theory of Football Violence.” Sociology 29, no.

4 (1995): 635–651.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. London: Macmillan and Co., 1901.

Macaulay, Thomas B. Critical and Historical Essays. London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1961.

Majumdar, Boria. Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004.

Majumdar, Boria and Kausik Bandyopadhyay “From Recreation to Competition: Early History of Indian Football.” In Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2006.

Mallik, Ganen. “I.F.A Shield Tournament Final.” Amrita Bazar Patrika, August 1, 1911.

Mangan, J.A. “Soccer as Moral Training: Missionary Intentions and Imperial Legacies.” In Soccer in South Asia: Empire, Nation and Diaspora, edited by Paul Dimeo and James Mills, 41–56. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2001.

—. The Games Ethic and Imperialism. London: Frank Cass, 1998.

Mason, Tony. “Football on the Maidan.” In The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, edited by J.A. Mangan, 85–96. London: Frank Cass, 1992.

Metcalf, Thomas R. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Mohun Bagan A.C. Golden Jubilee Souvenir. Calcutta: Mohun Bagan Club, 1939.

Mohun Bagan Club Platinum Jubilee Souvenir. Calcuttta: Mohun Bagan A.C., 1964.

Mukherjee, Hiren. “Playing for Freedom.” The Statesman, August 9, 1997.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. Realism and Reality. The Novel and Society in India. New Delhi, 1985.

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Mukherjee, Prithvindranath. Sadhak Biplabi Jatindranath. Calcutta: Paschimbanga Rajya Pustak Parishad, 1990.

Mukherjee, S.N. Calcutta: Essays in Urban History. Calcutta: Subarbarekha Press, 1993.

Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Natarajan, Swaminath. A Century of Social Reform in India. London, 1959.

Ray, Rajat. Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal: 1875–1927. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Rosselli, John. “The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in 19th Century Bengal.” Past and Present 86 (1980): 121–148.

Sarkar, Sumit. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal: 1905–1908. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973.

Sarkar, Tanika. “Bankimchandra and the Impossibility of a Political Agenda.” In Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Communal, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.

Sarkar, Tanika. Rebels, Wives, Saints. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009.

Scrafton, Luke. Reflections on the Government of Indostan: With a Short Sketch of the History of Bengal from the year 1739 to 1756; and an Account of English Affairs to 1758. London: Richardson and Clark, 1763.

Sengupta, Achintya Kumar. Kallol Yug. Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar and Sons, 1998.

Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Steevens, G. W. In India. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1899.

Vivekananda, Swami. Collected Speeches. Calcutta, 1952.

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A Fort Mosaic Š Reda Berrada

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Review: Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia.

Walter N. Hakala, New York, Columbia University Press: 2016

Mehr Afshan Farooqi The Urdu language is notorious for borrowing words while failing to provide adequate, up-to-date dictionaries. Urdu’s hybridity is the source of its beauty but presents a challenge for the non-native learner because the boundaries of the language are so fluid. In the past, Urdu dictionaries were rarely able to properly define the meaning of the terms they glossed; they provided synonyms instead. For someone unfamiliar with a term it thus became very difficult to understand the sense of the word. It is not easy to track the cultural exchanges within multilingual milieus that lead to the development of Urdu.

Walter Hakala’s ambitious research into Urdu dictionaries and their role in shaping the language is akin to opening Pandora’s box: one may not know what to do with the tangled stuff one finds in it.

Nonetheless, Hakala’s book attempts to make sense of interrelated stories. One of the main threads features the story of a language evolving over the course of several centuries. Numerous scholars, politicians, and educated readers have tried to explain how Hindvi (an umbrella term used to describe a spectrum of dialects from North India) evolved into two competing linguistic registers: Urdu and Hindi. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the advocates for either language associated them with religious and nationalist projects. Hakala’s book demonstrates how proponents of the two styles of a single, mutually intelligible language, inscribed through dictionaries, children’s vocabularies, and administrative glossaries a lexical division that contributed to the violent partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.

Here, I do want to raise two points of concern, one major, and the other minor. First, the minor one: I think the title of the book overreaches in the sense that Hakala does not evenly engage with the subject of Hindi lexicography in the same way he has researched and discussed the Urdu side. In fact, Hindi lexicography is practically

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absent from the book, which undermines the title’s claim that it is about “negotiating Urdu and Hindi.” More fundamentally, I am concerned with his theory of the “dictionary” as an intellectual and socio-linguistic construct. Hakala appears to have put the horse before the cart in some of his analyses and conclusions. I question his presentation of how the “dictionary” is produced. While it is true that once a dictionary is made, and particularly if it proves useful, a poet will at times use it for alternative words, ostensibly to improve his/her poetry. However, Hakala would have it that literature proceeds from the dictionary, whereas I would argue the other way around. Allied to this reversal of logic, is his apparent willingness to conflate culturally distinct traditions of the “dictionary.” While it is true that South Asia experienced colonization on many levels, Hakala appears to apply anachronistically a western concept of the “dictionary” to the realm of Indo-Persian languages and literatures – a realm that was developing various types of “dictionaries” long before English did so, for example, through the person of Samuel Johnson, the first formal lexicographer, ca. 1750.

One of the glossaries examined by Hakala is Munshi Ziya-uddin Ahmad Barni’s (1890-1969) Akhbari Lughat, or The Newspaper Dictionary, also known as The Key to Newspaper Viewing. Hakala engages with the over-arching, pertinent theoretical issues of cosmography, linguistic displacement, metalinguistic terminology, and offers valuable insight into lexicography. He shows that a lexicographic work is not a merely mimetic representation of linguistic reality, carefully constructed with endless hours of labor. It may also be charting sociological movement, defining and critiquing the governing and literary classes.

The first and fourth chapters of the book are the most exciting ones. It is fascinating to follow Hakala’s narrative on how dictionaries document the evolution of a single mutually intelligible language into two competing registers, Urdu and Hindi, which then become associated with contrasting religious and nationalist goals. The modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language.

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Overall, Hakala deserves to be congratulated for his pioneering study of lexicography as well as the sociology of Urdu’s pre-modern literature. The book has an abundance of information presented in a highly readable form.

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Inner City Š Mahnoor Malik

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Through the Prism of the Weird: Usman Malik, Weird Fiction, and the Representation of Uneven Development Matthew Rettino The combined and uneven capitalist world-system registers itself in the weird fiction of Usman T. Malik, the first South Asian author to win the Bram Stoker Award in 2014.1 A young author whose stories have appeared in several Year’s Best anthologies, Malik cites Pakistani writers such as Saadat Hasan Manto as influences, alongside writers in the tradition of American horror, such as Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft.2 Grounded in the Islamic mythos and the subcontinental realist tradition,3 Malik expands the aesthetic possibilities of South Asian literature through speculative fiction dealing with ghost stories, the supernatural, and forbidden knowledge. In his novella “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn,” ancient spiritual beings belong to an invisible world that lies beyond human cognition. Their existence subverts conventional understandings of reality by revealing how empiricism limits the totality of life to surface-level, observable phenomena. In “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro,” Malik uses the language of the weird to create a gothic atmosphere in which history returns with violence to haunt the present. Finally, “Resurrection Points” presents a world haunted by modern horrors in which the weird expresses a utopian impulse to transcend human alienation.

Malik’s weird fiction is a peripheral modernism that represents the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous while foregrounding the limits of representation in a world-system defined by combined and uneven development.

According to the publishers of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction anthology series, weird fiction is “an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the laws of Nature,” and not so much a genre as “a mode of literature that is present in other genres.”4 It is an increasingly popular speculative mode professed by authors ranging from H.P. Lovecraft, Angela Carter, and Julio Cortázar, to contemporary authors such as Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, and China Miéville. It is preoccupied with “ghost stories, the strange

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and macabre, the supernatural, fantasy, myth, philosophical ontology, ambiguity, and … the outré,” obsessed with representing that which lies outside the real.5 Darko Suvin calls the weird tale “a genre committed to the interposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment” and maintains that, to be successful, this kind of fiction must sustain cognitive tension between empiricism and the supernatural.6 In this sense it is distinguished from magic realism, in which the cognitive tension is implicit and occurs in the reader, while in weird fiction the tension is often explicit within the text and occurs in the protagonist’s mind. Weird fiction is not always anti-cognitive, but it works best as radical literature when its foregrounding of the failure of cognition has social implications.

Using weird fiction as a critical irrealism,7 Malik expresses selfconsciousness about problems of representation, achieving a more total representation of reality by drawing on techniques not commonly associated with realism. Critical irrealism is a literary form that must not be understood as “an alternative, a substitute, or a rival to critical realism: it is simply a different form of literature and art, which does not attempt, in one way or another, to ‘reflect’ reality.”8 Instead of subscribing to normative mimetic assumptions about literature, the weird acts as a prism and, in Malik’s words, “distorts the reality we have gotten desensitized to and in doing so sheds new light on it.”9 Within the white light of reality lie many concealed colours that are only revealed when the beam is refracted.

Critical irrealism enables authors to write fiction that allows for a representation which is more representative of reality without being representative of realism. When realism, satisfactory to European bourgeois society in its attempts at self-representation, encountered the warped, uneven social totality of India, critical realist authors of the 1930s began to let “disjunctures rupture their texts” in order to “represent precisely the crises surrounding modernity.”10 Anjaria cites Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali novel Ghare Baire (1916) as anticipating this crisis of representation. Tagore satirizes the pragmatism of his character Sandip to foreground the dissolution of a naïvely realist aesthetic philosophy. “By satirizing a realism that is

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so fixated on surfaces, objects, and flesh that it loses its commitment to truth,” writes Anjaria, “Tagore takes a surprisingly Lukácsian perspective on realism, privileging shyotto, or truth, over “riyaliti.”11 This new realism foregrounds “the issue of realism as such within its structure,” achieving a new representational technique.12 True to this subcontinental tradition, Malik’s fiction reflects the disjuncture between truth and reality, although he does so with ‘magical’ aesthetics. By being self-reflective of the problems of representation—and by implying the existence of a (supernatural) world concealed below the surface world of reality—these irrealist techniques can be “all the more realist, even if less realistic.”13 Critical irrealism lets Malik violate of the superficiality of realism in order to highlight the combined unevenness that constitutes modernity and renders totality opaque.

Malik’s award-winning novella “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” might strike readers as reminiscent of magic realism, prompting the question of what makes weird fiction a distinct category. There is a thin line between the aesthetics of “Eucalyptus Jinn” and, for instance, Julio Cortázar’s magic realism, which bleeds into the territory of weird fiction.14 Both magic realism and weird fiction use the fantastic as a critical irrealist strategy. Despite their disparate lines of descent—one in the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, the other in early twentieth-century American pulp magazines15—magic realism and weird fiction share common aesthetic values. For instance, magic realism represents (semi-)peripheral reality as qualitatively different from the bourgeois constructions of reality prevalent in the global centres. By representing the inseparability of magic from mundane reality, it foregrounds how peripheries experience modernity in a fundamentally different way.

However, magic realism implies that a conventional reality principle still exists outside the represented chronotope. In short, although it appears to assert the existence of magic, “magic realism (implicitly) asserts that there is no such thing as magic.”16 In contrast, weird fiction contains no such irony; it has a distinct representational philosophy.

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Weird fiction, like magic realism, contains fantastic elements that coexist with modern realities, but they tend to be phenomena bizarre and alien to the world in which they appear. The weird tends to intrude into daily life, creating disruption and, at times, evoking horror. This is impossible in magic realism, since magic in this form is ‘indigenous’ to reality. The weird, on the other hand, invades and disrupts reality with its anti-cognitive logic.17 Frequently, the protagonist is charged with reconciling the ‘weird’ set of laws against those of conventional reality. Whereas magic realism presents a construction of reality that is different from conventional bourgeois empiricism, weird fiction presents contrasting realities that the reader and/or protagonist must reconcile: taken-for-granted mundane laws versus the radical otherness that emerges.

“Eucalyptus Jinn” establishes this cognitive conflict through its dramatization of a protagonist’s encounter with strange forces that disrupt his taken-for-granted reality: the spiritual entities known as jinn. Salman, a Pakistani professor who grew up in the United States, recalls the story his grandfather Sharif told him when he was a boy, about the time he lived next to Zeenat Begum, a Mughal princess who “ran a tea stall outside the walled city of Old Lahore in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus.”18 Nobody believes Sharif ’s stories of a jinn who once lived in the tree and was sworn to protect the disinherited royal family. Alienated from his parents after moving to New York to live with his girlfriend, Salman goes on a “manventure” to Lahore to confirm his grandfather’s stories.19 In the end, he learns from a rug merchant, who is actually the jinn in disguise, that his grandfather discovered the Cup of Heaven, the Jam-e-Jaam, buried beneath the eucalyptus. The cup was made “to imprison the memories of a bygone age,” the age of the jinn, which occurred before the dawn of humans.20 When Sharif looks inside it, the cup shows him the Great Unseen, granting him knowledge of the future. After entering Sharif ’s memories of this great journey, Salman decides that the knowledge of this deep past would threaten his connection to the people he loves.

In the end, he destroys the cup, saying, “The Old World is gone, let it rest.”21

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The different realities in “Eucalyptus Jinn” are produced through its registration of the conditions of uneven development. According to the Warwick Research Collective, combined and uneven development describes “a situation in which capitalist forms and relations exist alongside ‘archaic forms of economic life’ and pre-existing social and class relations.”22 Raymond Williams calls these archaisms “residual,” which denotes culture “effectively formed in the past, but … still active in the cultural process.”23 “Eucalyptus Jinn” represents the residual through the Mughal dynasty and the jinn, the survival into the present day of the latter symbolizing the endurance of the former.

In the content of this novella, Mughal feudalism coexists with the capitalist present, and in its form, the fairy tale-like romance structure coexists with realism. This unevenness not only structures the story’s contrasting laws of reality, but emerges as what Jameson calls a “symbolic resolution to a concrete historical situation,” namely the situation of the simultaneousness of the non-simultaneous, a principle condition of modernity in which residual economic and cultural forms coexist with the dominant culture.24 The existence of traces of feudalism lends credibility to Sharif ’s story, which otherwise might sound like an outmoded fairy tale or romance. Stuck between the modern, post-colonial present and the Mughal feudalist past, the princess in exile, Zeenat Begum, has lost her kingdom. It fell “to the British a hundred years ago,”25 making her a relic from another age even though she is still active in the present, like the eucalyptus jinn who protects her. In an unevenly developed modern Pakistan, feudal-age relics, such as the zamindar system of landholding,26 retain an active role in society. As Salman reflects: “lots of nawabs and princes of pre-Partition India had offspring languishing in poverty … An impoverished Mughal princess was conceivable.”27 Romance, a literary form associated with the feudal mode of production, coexists with modern realism in this novella to register what the Warwick Research Collective calls the “bifurcated or ruptured sensorium of the space-time of the (semi-)periphery.”28 Since history lends credibility to Sharif ’s fairy tale, readers are more likely to believe in the intrusion of the jinn into modern Lahore.

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Salman’s struggle to cogitate Lahore foregrounds how his intellect is alienated from its environment, a key condition of weird fiction in its encounters with the strange. The mind is alienated from its environment when it contemplates the weird, which follows laws that run contrary to science, such as the supernatural. But it is also worth noting this same conflict manifests when the mind contemplates an alienating social system, such as capitalism. Under the conditions of what Fredric Jameson calls late capitalism, a “spatial disjunction” between the centres of production and consumption occurs, which causes “the inability to grasp the way the system functions as a whole.”29 The weird can confront this representational problem by foregrounding the very impossibility of representing the system in its entirety.30 Malik demonstrates Salman’s alienation from the knowledge of totality by depicting Lahore as resisting his quixotic search, showing the social totality to always be more than Salman can know.

Salman encounters a city unavailable for representation when he strives to uncover the history that Lahore has repressed beneath the “white shrouds” of fog and mist that symbolically obscure his view.31 This process of obfuscation is what Christophe Den Tandt means when he argues that the modern city is “a mysterious totality” defying human comprehension and cognition.32 And Lahore is by no means an exception. The existence of residual and oppositional cultures indicates the sublimity of the social totality, in the sense that “no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice.”33 Lacking a comprehensive form, the social totality sustains disjunctures in which apparently different time periods may be seen to coexist; in “Eucalyptus Jinn” these disjunctures are the dividing lines between the logic of conventional reality and the logic of the weird.

Elements of residual culture remain concealed from Salman’s view, and this fog of unknowing implies that the city contains a potential that exceeds the limits imposed by the dominant culture.

Among these cultural residues lie the jinn, creatures who in their ability to remain hidden from the human gaze demonstrate the deceitfulness of representation, making them ideal examples of the ‘weird.’ A jinn, Malik writes, is “a daunting, invisible entity that

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defied the laws of physics: it could slip in and out of time, could swap its senses, hear out of its nostrils, smell with its eyes. It could even fly like the tales of yore said.”34 The jinn are more than invisible entities, however. Paraphrasing Ibn Arabi’s The Meccan Revelations, Malik writes that “the lexical root J-N-N in Arabic is ‘concealed,’” meaning that ‘jinn’ refers to “the entirety of the hidden world.”35 In other words, ‘jinn’ refers to everything that does not yield to perception, or for that matter, to representation. Jinn not only disobey the laws of nature as they are commonly known but evade our attempts to contain them visually: according to Ibn Arabi, a jinn, when held immobile by the gaze of Man, may “manifest an Image it adopts for him, like a veil,” in order to throw off his gaze.36 This deceitful image symbolizes the illusionary quality of representation and the impossibility of claiming an unmediated and direct perception of reality. It implies that reality exists in a hidden world that lies beyond images and representations, even though representation is our only way of making that reality accessible. Instead of filtering the white light of reality through a clear glass in order to represent mere appearances, weird aesthetics break surface reality into the rainbow of concealed colours that constitute it, drawing attention to the disjuncture between appearance and existence.

Salman’s destruction of the Cup of Heaven symbolizes how the very conception of totality cannot be allowed to survive in the modern world. Although he receives a taste of enlightenment when he magically enters his grandfather’s memories of journeying through the Great Unseen, the realm of the jinn, “an awful black” defies Salman’s attempts to follow his grandfather any further than necessary into that realm.37 Thus protected, Salman’s point of view does not assimilate the totality to the same extent as his grandfather. Instead, his spiritual vision foregrounds the impossibility of knowing that totality, a conclusion that receives strong emphasis when he destroys the cup, letting the jinn depart this world. To retain his sense of identity and to avoid becoming flooded by the full knowledge of time and history that the jinn represents, Salman lets the past rest by destroying the cup. This gesture of refusal implies that totality cannot be allowed to survive as a modern concept because the survival of the cup would

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mean engaging with that which cannot be cogitated. On a literal level, this refers to the sublime jinn, who will remain mysterious forever. On another level, this refusal indicates that it is impossible to come faceto-face with the hidden source of social inequality and fragmentation, the dark underbelly of the capitalist world-system that makes totality unthinkable.

In its dramatization of such a profound gesture of refusal, “Eucalyptus Jinn” can be read as a peripheral modernist text, a designation that could be extended to weird fiction in general.

Theodor Adorno defines “modernism” as any literature that refuses the experience of life under the pervading, unevenly developed capitalist world-system.38 Especially in its gothic, or horrific, modes, weird fiction—and fantastic literature in general—may be termed a form of modernism, particularly in the capacity of each of these genres to seek out raw material from residual cultures that are oppositional to the dominant culture. To mark its aesthetic distance from the normative cultural production of central modernist trends, weird fiction may furthermore be termed a ‘peripheral’ modernism.

Malik’s work is peripheral in the world-literary sense as well, since he uses the narrative ecology of his native Pakistan as his raw material.

Like many peripheral authors, his work bridges the distance between centre and periphery.

One example of this centre-periphery crossover is Malik’s Lovecraftian story “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro.” In this narrative, Malik adopts an Anglo-American form to content derived from the history and geography of Pakistan. In so doing, he adopts Lovecraft’s gothic vocabulary to register the combined unevenness of the periphery, in which past and present simultaneously coexist. In European literature, Gothic literature is often cited to have arisen with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, a medieval romance blended with a modern novel, in which romance’s feudal sensibilities directly contradicted bourgeois values, “two opposed and irreconcilable worldviews.”39 Romance is a residual genre that developed under the feudal mode of production and endured into modern times to create the gothic novel. In this way, the gothic emerges from the coexistence of the feudal and bourgeois modes of production, which is to say,

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the conditions of uneven development. Gothic and weird fiction are thus related: both are forms of irrealism in which alternative, residual epistemologies, such as those emerging from religion and magic, violate the modern laws of empiricism. Interacting with a Western genre while at the same time resisting the Western gaze, Malik participates in the production of gothic literature as a global form.

Gothic literature is global because it is a literature of “the modern capitalist world-system” and as such, “the effectivity of the worldsystem will necessarily be discernible in any modern literary work.”40 In particular, this is true of fiction that uses a supernatural vocabulary to register the worldwide conditions of the “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.”41 In Malik’s story, Noor, a cadet supervisor, leads a group of kids to the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, which is Sindi for “Mounds of the Dead,” a real archaeological ruin dating from the time of the Indus civilization.42 Since it is the festival of Eid, the cadets ritually slaughter a goat in commemoration of “Ibraham’s gratitude to God for sparing his son’s life.” 43 Malik draws a parallel between this Islamic custom, based on the biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, and the Indus custom of animal and human sacrifice. It is said that on the Day of the Goat, a day sacred to a pagan god called the Lord of Beasts, those who stay in the ruins past midnight are doomed to meet a grizzly end. Tabinda, an anthropologist, tells Noor about a time when she lingered in the ruins and lost three men to a collective madness.

Soon the Pakistani Taliban attack a nearby cadet college, making it unsafe to leave the ruins, and Noor becomes haunted by the modernday practitioners of the cult of the Lord of Beasts. Noor relives a traumatic memory of her brother, Muneer, who forced her to become a suicide bomber in New York City. Although she refused to commit the act of terrorism, she is brought to a sacrificial altar by the modern head of the cult, Tabinda, to be slaughtered as if in payment for her sins.

Just as feudalism and bourgeois values form what José B. Monleón calls “two opposed and irreconcilable worldviews” in traditional gothic fiction,44 in “Mohenjo-Daro,” Noor gets caught between two sets of irreconcilable values: those of rural Sind and the values she

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has acquired during her metropolitan “comprador” education.45 These values manifest in the conflict between the peaceful conception of Islam she has embraced and the more violent conception of her religion which she rejects.46 Like Salman in “Eucalyptus Jinn,” Noor, while retaining her faith, has absorbed Western values to the point of growing distant from certain customs of her country of origin. This is amply shown when she wonders how the other cadets “would react if she whipped out Oxford jeans and long white shirts, her preferred dress back in her high school days in New Hampshire, instead of the plain shalwar kameez and dupatta she wore now.”47 A vegan, Noor is uneasy around suffering animals, such as the goat the cadets slaughter. While the cadets argue that it is “sunnah to slaughter your own animals,” Noor prefers to remind them of “what the Prophet said about teaching mercy.”48 Her practices contrast with the traditions of Sind, the region of Pakistan where the ruins are located and from this conflict emerges the element of horror.

The terror Noor encounters at Mohenjo-Daro is symptomatic of the horror of modernity itself, in which scapegoating becomes a way of punishing neocolonial powers for their crimes. Malik compares the act of ritual scapegoating practiced by Tabinda’s cult to the act of terrorism. When Noor watches one of the cadets holding a knife to the goat’s throat, she experiences a return of her repressed memories: “The boy was smiling, a cold twisting sneer that was frighteningly familiar.

The feeling of unreality, of red-hot memory, resurged.”49 She recalls how her brother, Muneer, instructed her as a teenager to become a suicide bomber in order to repay American victims, as he says, “for their sins.”50 Just as blood libations redeem sin, the Pakistani Taliban see something redemptive in mass murder. For the Taliban, these civilians are scapegoats that must be killed to punish the United States for its acts of violence against Pakistani Muslims; they are payment for crimes that perpetuate a neocolonial power hierarchy.

Scapegoating is also the method by which neocolonial powers, namely the United States, assuage their own sense of guilt. Noor’s observation that “double strikes [were] a well-known MO used by the Taliban as well as the CIA (where they used drones for warfare)”

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implicates western imperialism in the act of bloodletting.51 In this case, the Taliban—and any innocent bystanders—are assumed guilty and killed to assuage American guilt over their interventionist, neocolonial foreign policy. “Confronted with a world ruled by the settler,” Frantz Fanon writes, “the native is always presumed guilty.”52 It is thus possible to read the significance of the bloodshed at MohenjoDaro as a microcosm of the dynamics of violence and guilt that define geopolitics under the unevenly developed capitalist world-system.

Noor’s dream strengthens the link between ancient blood libations and modern scapegoating, showing how weird aesthetics lend themselves well to gothic representation. In her dream, the New York City crowd she nearly obliterates assumes the form of the skeletons unearthed at Mohenjo-Daro: “They wore business suits, sweatshirts, dresses, and tourist caps. Suitcases and backpacks dangled from bones picked clean by time.”53 For Muneer, the victims are scapegoats for the sins of westerners. By representing the skeletons of the people slaughtered in the Indus libation rituals as Noor’s wouldbe American victims, Malik lends a supernatural cast to his depiction of modern violence and strengthens the sense that scapegoating as a form of violence emerges from the past to haunt the present. The imagery of the weird enables Malik to overlap eras of history like sheets of onionskin paper to make this startling and deeply disturbing representation of how history determines the present—and of how this overlap unhinges one’s perception of time.

Both the supernaturally-tinged resurgence of the Lord of Beasts cult and the Taliban produce a disjuncture in the perception of time that haunts the ruins, fragmenting Noor’s perception of totality. The Taliban not only confine the cadets to a set of pre-modern ruins by their lurking presence, but actively regress them to an earlier period of technology, since they bomb the signal towers that prevent Noor from calling for help on her cell phone.54 This plummets the cadets into the dark ages, in which they search the shadows with torches and shovels. This rift from the modern world fragments Noor’s perception of her surroundings. The ruins become impenetrable once this disjuncture from reality takes hold: “Broken platforms poked

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and plunged unevenly; black and formless holes gaped in the wall.

Above, an icteric moon sat distorted by a low cloudbank, its light not a promise, but mere possibility.”55 Words like “uneven,” “formless,” “dark,” and “distorted” express the inability of Noor to perceive the ruins as a whole. This is the tonal register of horror as well as the vocabulary of unevenness. Just as the foggy mists of Lahore in “Eucalyptus Jinn” symbolize the obstacles that stand in the way of Salman’s pursuit of knowledge, the darkness of the ruins of MohenjoDaro stands in Noor’s way of perceiving the immanent danger they pose to her. This obscurity allegorically represents how totality has become unrepresentable in a modernity constituted by the “horrific” conditions of uneven development.

Malik continues the theme of religious violence in his short story “Resurrection Points,” but instead of letting the horror of violence stand alone, he represents a utopian response to trauma. The narrator, Daoud, dissects corpses with his father, a doctor, including one teenager who washes up on a beach with a “sea-blackened aluminum crucifix” indicating his Christian faith.56 Daoud and his father are gifted with the ability of healing sickly, diseased flesh with electric shocks from their bodies. After the Defend the Sharia office causes some trouble for his father and his friend Sadiq, who lives in a poverty-stricken Christian muhallah, Daoud discovers his own mother’s hidden Christian heritage. He also learns that his ancestral powers enable him to store electric charges in dead bodies to reanimate them. In the end, his father is killed under suspicious circumstances and a sectarian mob torches the muhallah where Sadiq lives. The apocalyptic conclusion shows Daoud in the muhallah using his abilities to call up the dead from their rest.

Daoud’s electric-shock abilities empower him to address the trauma associated with religious violence and to envision a world free from such trauma. According to Jameson, magic powers in fairy tales typically function as a symbol for unalienated “human powers.”57 The same instinct for wish-fulfillment motivates Daoud, suggesting the utopian impulse behind his actions. At his father’s funeral, he imagines “Baba juddering on my fingertips as I reach inside his mouth, shock his tongue, and watch it jump and thrash like a bloodied

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carp.”58 Although he cannot really make the dead speak, his desire to transcend the silence of death suggests that his powers hold the potential for a response to trauma.

In the end, he returns to the burned-out muhallah and raises the dead: “I closed my eyes and jolted the Christian muhallah back to life. … Blackened men, women and children swaying in rows, waiting for me. How unafraid, joyous, and visible they were.”59 The final image of the story is Daoud leading the victims on “their final pilgrimage through the land of the dead,” a tableau that invokes the “salvational historicity” of the Christian Apocalypse, what Jameson would call a premonition of utopia.60 Daoud’s ‘weird’ powers enable him to transcend trauma in anticipation of the founding of a world free from trauma and alienation. Unlike the previous stories examined in this essay, the weird in “Resurrection Points” thus takes on a speculative function in which it expresses hope for a better future. That this future is unattainable under normal scientific laws does not diminish the authenticity of the narrative’s utopian impulse.

The scientific discourse surrounding Daoud’s ability is dialogized with religious discourse, suggesting that the epistemologies of scientific reason and religion can coexist. Jamshed, Daoud’s father, explains that their family’s gift may have originated in the distant past of the Abrahamic faiths: The Prophet Isa is said to have returned men to life. When Martha of Bethany asked him how he would bring her brother Lazarus back to life, Hazrat Isa said, ‘I am the Resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.’ […] But he was a healer first. Like our beloved Prophet Muhammad Peace-Be-Upon-Him.61 The gift of healing through electric pulses, although it is explained using the language of science, is essentially what previous eras have called miracles. Daoud’s gift is a residual trace that survives into modernity and its possibility in this world indicates that science can confirm the miracles of religion. Daoud approaches his gift with a cognitive, scientific mindset when he recalls “words that Baba

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taught me from his textbooks: cell membranes, calcium-gates, eggshaped mitochondria and polarized ionic channels. Could they act as capacitators at times and hold charge so the flesh would stay alive even after I removed my fingertips?”62 If the inheritors of the abilities of Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Isa (Jesus Christ) exist in the modern era, within a scientific context, then the secularism that underlies bourgeois constructions of reality is subverted.

The coexistence of science and religion suggests that religion can play a role in a utopian future despite the religious extremism and violence haunting the present. Religion in this sense performs an active social role in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Identifying sectarian hatred as the “root of all evil” that must be extracted from society to produce a better future,63 Malik’s story of a teenager brought up Muslim rediscovering his identity as a Christian expresses a hope for desperately needed interreligious solidarity. After all, as Daoud reflects, “dust has no religion.”64 The utopian horizon projected by “Resurrection Points” is one in which religion and science move forward hand-in-hand, away from divisions and violence, forging a progressive, emergent culture.

Weird fiction as a peripheral modernism foregrounds the impossibility of conceiving totality, while providing the sensorium needed to represent the simultaneousness of the non-simultaneous.

By narrating the loss of the Cup of Heaven in “Eucalyptus Jinn,” Malik symbolizes how a consciousness of totality is impossible to achieve and that our partial knowledge of the truth must be continually acknowledged. “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” demonstrates how weird fiction, especially when drawing on a gothic idiom, has an aptitude for describing how history disrupts the present. Finally, “Resurrection Points” indicates how weird fiction’s violation of cognition can express utopian impulses, especially ones that express a human desire to transcend mortal limitations and alienation. Distinguishing itself from magic realism in its tendency to disturb reality, the weird refracts what is alienated and residual in modern culture in order to bring out the horrifying and strange.

The cognitive ruptures of the weird reveal the disjunctures of the

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unevenly developed world-system for what they are: breaks in the social totality and in the possibility of imagining it. Engaging with the aesthetics of critical irrealism, Malik uses the narrative ecology of his native Pakistan and the traditions of American horror to develop his emergent voice. His experimental fiction carries with it the potential to inspire the radical aesthetics of a future generation of South Asian writers.

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Notes 1. The Bram Stocker Award is given out each year by the Horror Writers’ Association.

2. See Usman Malik, Interview with Salik Shah, Mithila Review, Accessed January 2, 2017, http://mithilareview.com/usman_malik_03_16/, and Interview with Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Islam and Sci-Fi, Accessed January 2, 2017, http:// www.islamscifi.com/islam-and-sci-fi-interview-with-usman-malik/.

3. Usman Malik, Interview with Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad.

4. “Year’s Best Weird Fiction,” Undertow Publications website, http://www. undertowbooks.com/years-best-weird-fiction/.

5. “Year’s Best Weird Fiction,” Undertow Publications website.

6. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 8-9; “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion.” Extrapolation 41.3 (2000): 210.

7. This essay treats the term “critical irrealism” as the Warwick Research Collective does: as a collection of techniques that function “more broadly as the determinate formal registers of (semi-)peripherality in the world-literary system.” WReC, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015), 52.

8. Michael Löwy, “The Current of Critical Irrealism: A ‘Moonlit Enchanted Night,’” Adventures in Realism, Edited by Matthew Beaumont, (Blackwell Publishing, 2007), Accessed April 7 2016, doi: 10.1111/b.9781405135771.2007.x 9. Usman Malik, Interview with Salik Shah.

10. Ulka Anjaria, Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 28.

11. Anjaria, Realism, 20.

12. Fredric Jameson, “Antinomies of the Realism-Modernism Dialectic,” Modern Language Quarterly 73:3 (2012): 478.

13. Anjaria, Realism, 10. Italics in original.

14. In fact, Cortázar’s story “Headache” appears alongside Malik’s “Resurrection Points” in the second volume of Undertow Publications’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction anthology series.

15. Michael Kelly claims that the history of the weird as a literary device extends

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all the way back to the Iliad (“Forward,” The Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume 2 (Pickering, ON: Undertow Publications, 2015), viii).

16. Gregory Bechtel, “The Word for World is Story: Towards a Cognitive Theory of (Canadian) Syncretic Fantasy,” (Diss. University of Alberta, 2011), 119. Italics in original.

17. The colonial vocabulary here is deliberate. See Farah Mendelsohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008) on the ‘intrusive fantasy’ for more about the rhetoric of colonization in the horror genre. See also Stephan Shapiro’s theory of capitalism’s relationship to horror in “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic Periodicity,” Gothic Studies 10.1 (2008): 29-47.

18. Usman Malik, “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn,” Tor.com (New York: Tor Book, 2015), accessed February 1, 2016, http://www.tor.com/2015/04/22/thepauper-prince-and-the-eucalyptus-jinn-usman-malik/.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 11. The embedded quote is from Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 432.

23. Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 122.

24. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 117. The simultaneousness of the non-simultaneous is a concept Jameson borrows from Ernst Bloch, who originally coined the term Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen in Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935), or Heritage of Our Times (trans. 1991) (WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 12, n.23).

25. Usman Malik, “Eucalyptus Jinn.”

26. John McCarry, “The Promise of Pakistan,” National Geographic, (October 1997), 65.

27. Usman Malik, “Eucalyptus Jinn.”

28. WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 16.

29. Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers, (New York: Verso, 2007), 157.

30. Witness the language of the unreal in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which rather than shedding ‘light’ on the Belgian ivory trade in the Congo opts to represent

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the darkness and unknowability of the horrific system of colonial exploitation that divides Europe from Africa. Charles Marlow goes from the cognitively stable position of belonging “to a world of straightforward facts” to beholding the “unreal” worship of ivory, the commodity fetish. Weird fiction employs a strikingly similar rhetoric in its structure. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Edited by Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill, Shorter Seventh Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 135, 143.

31. Usman Malik, “Eucalyptus Jinn.”

32. Christophe Den Tandt, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism, (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998), xi.

33. Williams, Marxism, 125. Italics in original.

34. Usman Malik, “Eucalyptus Jinn.” Italics in original.

35. Ibid. Italics in original.

36. Quoted in Usman Malik, “Eucalyptus Jinn.”

37. Ibid.

38. WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 18-19.

39. José B. Monleón, A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 6, Accessed January 19, 2017, https://muse.jhu.edu/.

40. WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 8, 20. Italics in original.

41. Ibid., 12.

42. “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro,” The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Edited by Paula Guran, (London: Robinson, 2016), 328.

43. Ibid., 324.

44. José B. Monleón, A Specter is Haunting Europe, 6.

45. Noor’s conflict reflects the positionality of a specific class of Anglophone Pakistanis identified by Zain Rashid Mian as “comprador,” whose metropolitan values are imparted by an education that privileges English writing and pedagogy over an education in native languages. (“Pakistani Literature and the Case for Comprador Fiction,” paper presented at the English Department MA Colloquium, McGill University, Montreal, QC, March 2017.)

46. Rather than misinterpreting Malik as representing an Orientalist dichotomy between ‘peaceful’ Western values and ‘violent’ Islam, his fiction should be read as expressing the metropolitan worldview of the comprador class.

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47. Usman Malik, “Mohenjo-Daro,” 320.

48. Ibid., 324.

49. Ibid., 324.

50. Ibid., 349.

51. Ibid., 326.

52. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington, (New York: Grove, 1963), 53.

53. Usman Malik, “Mohenjo-Daro,” 349.

54. Ibid., 339.

55. Ibid., 340.

56. Usman Malik, “Resurrection Points,” The Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume 2, (Pickering, ON: Undertow Publications, 2015), 189.

57. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, (London: Verso, 2005), 66.

58. Usman Malik, “Resurrection Points,” 204.

59 Ibid., 206.

60. Ibid.; Jameson, Unconscious, 148.

61. Usman Malik, “Resurrection Points,” 192. Italics in original.

62. Ibid., 200. Since the weird is already an integrated part of Daoud’s reality, “Resurrection Points” is the story examined in this essay that most closely approaches magic realism. The weird may disrupt the reader’s cognition, but does not disrupt the cognition of the fictional characters.

63. Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (2004): 25.

64. Usman Malik, “Resurrection Points,” 203.

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Bibliography Anjaria, Ulka. Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 1-30.

Bechtel, Gregory. “The Word for World is Story: Towards a Cognitive Theory of (Canadian) Syncretic Fantasy.” Diss. University of Alberta, 2011.

Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.

Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Edited

by Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill. Shorter Seventh Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 126-188.

Den Tandt, Christophe. The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963.

Jameson, Fredric. “Antinomies of the Realism-Modernism Dialectic.” Modern Language Quarterly 73:3 (2012): 475-85.

---. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

London: Verso, 2005.

---. “The Politics of Utopia.” New Left Review 25 (2004): 35-54.

---. The Modernist Papers. New York: Verso, 2007.

---. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.

Kelly, Michael. “Forward.” The Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume 2. Pickering, ON: Undertow Publications, 2015. vii-ix.

Kofman, Eleonore and Elizabeth Lebas. “Lost in Transposition—Time, Space and the City.” Writing on Cities by Henry Lefebvre. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996. 3-53.

Löwy, Michael. “The Current of Critical Irrealism: A ‘Moonlit Enchanted Night.’”

Adventures in Realism. Edited by Matthew Beaumont. Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Accessed April 7 2016. doi: 10.1111/b.9781405135771.2007.x.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. 1920. Translated by Anna Bostock.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.

Malik, Usman T. “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro.” The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction. Edited by Paula Guran. London: Robinson, 2016.

318-362.

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---. “Resurrection Points.” The Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume 2. Pickering, ON: Undertow Publications, 2015. 189-206.

---. “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn.” Tor.com. New York: Tor Book, 2015.

Accessed February 1, 2016. http://www.tor.com/2015/04/22/the-pauperprince-and-the-eucalyptus-jinn-usman-malik/.

---. Interview with Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad. Islam and Sci-Fi. Accessed January 2, 2017. http://www.islamscifi.com/islam-and-sci-fi-interview-withusman-malik/.

---. Interview with Salik Shah. Mithila Review. Accessed January 2, 2017. http:// mithilareview.com/usman_malik_03_16/.

Mendelsohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Mian, Zain Rashid. “Pakistani Literature and the Case for Comprador Fiction.” Paper presented at the English Department MA Colloquium, McGill University, Montreal, QC, March 2017.

Monleón, José B. A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Accessed January 19, 2017. https://muse.jhu.edu/.

Shapiro, Stephan. “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic Periodicity/” Gothic Studies 10.1 (2008) 29-47.

Suvin, Darko. “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion.”

Extrapolation 41.3 (2000): 209-247.

---. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre.

New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

WReC (Warwick Research Collective). Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015.

“Year’s Best Weird Fiction.” Undertow Publications website. Pickering, ON: Undertow Publications. Accessed January 2, 2016. http://www.undertowbooks.com/ years-best-weird-fiction/.

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Mustard Oil Š Mahnoor Malik

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Two Translations from Kūzah Introduction

Zahra Sabri Zain R. Mian

The following stories were originally published in a collection entitled Kūzah, curated by Zahra Sabri and produced by Muniza Naqvi for Oxford University Press Pakistan in 2015. A unique collection, Kūzah features stories from diverse demographics, including writers from not just the Pakistani metropolises, but also those resident in rural areas, and others who have immigrated to places such as the U.K., Estonia, and Qatar for work. Consequently, what we have is an exciting and variegated selection of new Urdu writers, most of whom have never been published before. The two stories reprinted here have been selected and translated, very kindly,

by Zahra herself. Their wide-ranging concerns, and the deftness of their execution, make these stories exceedingly valuable. They provide fresh insights into Pakistan’s social, cultural, and economic fabric, which are different to those characteristic of the English-language fiction encountered by most readers of ‘Pakistani Literature.’

The first story, “Concealed in My Construction” by Ahmad Naseer, reworks a concern that often implicitly undergirds Pakistani Anglophone fiction, which is the relation of the native voice to Western characters and their space. I am thinking, for example, of Changez from Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

However, while characters like Changez attempt to straddle the perceived dichotomies between their ‘traditional’ local values and the more ‘liberal’ transnational ones, Naseer’s story works differently. It is mediated through an unapologetic and wry narrator, who looks outwards at the English-speaking world, rather comfortably, from his position as a middle-class speaker of the vernacular. Unlike Changez, this anonymous narrator acknowledges himself as culturally different from his English friends. Consequently, he does not as much attempt to assimilate into their way of life, but mocks them on the basis of this difference, particularly with reference to how these individuals place abstract duty and idealism above everyday pragmatism and reason.

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Indeed, in Naseer’s story, there is no hint of the “identity crisis” Bina Shah finds extant in Pakistani society.

The second story, “Ast Khan” by Mansoor Raza, explores the moral, social, and religious underpinnings of a middle-class Pakistani household. It sheds light on the dependent condition of Afghanis in Pakistani society through the figure of Ast Khan, a young boy who comes to the narrator’s house every night to claim leftover food. Raza’s story brings to the fore the Pakistani narrator’s internal contradictions. He helps Ast but is resolute in that he can help only this one boy, repeatedly telling himself that he and his wife simply cannot afford to help more people. The narrative continuously questions this claim, most notably through the intrusive figure of Time, who interrogates the narrator about his inability to help people like Ast in any systematic fashion. And it is with these concerns in mind that the story’s end achieves its pathos. However, we must always read such a story critically. Enamoured by its romanticized end, we must perhaps not forget that nothing of any real consequence has changed in society. We must continue to interrogate the narrator, as the story does all along.

Importantly, Zahra Sabri’s translations retain the idiosyncrasies of Urdu idioms as they would appear to the English speaker’s ear. The ability of these translations to dutifully recreate the literalness of the original phrasing is integral to their success. In preserving the texture of the original Urdu, Sabri retains both the content and the form of the lived experience behind the narrative. We are exceedingly fortunate to feature these translations in the present volume.

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Concealed In My Construction...1

Ahmad Naseer, Mirpurkhas

If anyone in England says to you that they have an exam tomorrow or are about to set off on a trip and you merely nod and become silent, they will become offended that you haven’t ‘wished’ them. What you should say is “I hope your trip or exam goes well.”

People there also expect that when they tell you some news that they consider to be important, you should express amazement. You should raise your eyebrows to their furthest extent and say “No! Really?” If you don’t respond in this manner, the person telling the news will feel mortified in the way of a child who lights a cracker and covers both his ears with his hands in anticipation but the cracker never goes off. This mortification can also change into pique.

In sight of these trends of Western culture, when Rebecca informed me during lunch that it was her birthday the next day, I immediately placed the burger I was holding in my hands onto the plate lying before me and said with amazement, “Oh, really!” This playacting of mine caused her face to flush with many shades of joy.

She nodded her head in the affirmative and said in tones trembling with happiness, “Yes. Tomorrow, I will turn exactly twenty-six. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to call you to the birthday celebration, because I have invited only a few close friends to it.” Though my friendship with Rebecca was not of long standing, not being invited created a rather hollow feeling in me.

At nine p.m. that night, Rebecca called to say that after thinking it over quite a bit, she had decided that I should also be invited to the birthday celebration. This was patent proof that my expression of amazement had borne fruit.

“But where is your home located?” I asked.

1. This title phrase is part of the first line of a famous she‘r by Ghalib: mirī tā‘mīr meñ muzmar hai ik sūrat kharābī kī – “concealed in my construction is a prospect of my ruin.”

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“The address is very simple. Take the 101 bus from near the school.

After twenty minutes, get off at the Oxford Avenue stop. There is a gas station there, next to which is my home.”

I bought a bouquet of flowers since it was the most inexpensive and convenient thing to buy, and reached Rebecca’s house around half past four. Rebecca had told me that she had been born at five p.m., hence she would cut her birthday cake at that exact time. Accordingly, I had arrived a full half hour before the time of her birth.

Rebecca’s mother was helping her arrange things at the table for the birthday celebration and was also looking anxiously at the clock again and again. It occurred to me that perhaps she would not have awaited five o’ clock as impatiently even on the day Rebecca was actually born.

Rebecca took my gift and arranged it in a vase, and started unwrapping and showing everyone the gifts from her other friends.

Like us, guests there also bring their gifts wrapped up in pretty, colourful paper. The only difference is that we let these gifts remain wrapped and unwrap them only after the very last of the guests has departed and the door shut behind them. There, however, they unwrap each gift before the guests themselves.

The cake was cut and everyone united to sing the song sung most in the world. Friends congratulated Rebecca. Rebecca’s mother kissed her on the forehead and cheeks with such great reverence as to suggest that she had performed some extraordinary task by turning twenty six. All the guests were served their favourite drinks after which Rebecca’s mother took leave of us and went upstairs to her room. The party continued in the room we were in.

Counting Rebecca, there were four boys and three girls at that gathering. With the exception of myself, everyone else was white.

Racially, as well as facially. When they spoke to each other in English, I would be able to understand only a part, but they would make their

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English relatively simpler when addressing me.

One of them asked me, “Hope you didn’t have any difficulty reaching here?”

“None whatsoever,” I replied. “It was a short and comfortable journey. I caught the bus from near the school, gave the conductor thirty pence, and arrived here in twenty minutes.”

“But the fare to here is about eighty pence,” Rebecca said.

“But the bus guy only took thirty pence from me.” I took the bus ticket out from my pocket and showed them.

“What had you told the conductor?”

“Oxford Street.”

“That’s why!” Rebecca had perhaps made sense of it all. “The fare to Oxford Street is thirty pence, and this is Oxford Avenue. You paid the fare to there and travelled to here.”

Upon hearing this, a feeling of gladness and satisfaction washed over my heart and shone on my face. I said happily, “This means that I saved half a pound!”

“What you’ve done is not right,” everyone said unanimously. The atmosphere suddenly became solemn. Everyone looked at my ticket and regretfully shook their heads over it as if it were not just a ticket but my charge sheet.

Looking at their changed demeanours, I showed great adroitness in altering my attitude and effectively concealing my feelings of joy to make my face exhibit signs of anxiety and confusion.

“Friends! I have come here for the first time and English is not my native tongue. I assumed ‘avenue,’ ‘street,’ and ‘road’ to be interchangeable terms.”

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This explanation of mine was deemed acceptable and their stern faces began to exude sentiments of sympathy rather than disapproval.

One of them said, “This has all occurred not because of any deliberate ill intention, but because of a misapprehension.”

Rebecca said, “An error has definitely occurred, but not knowingly. Now this error can at least be redressed in this way – you should go to the same bus stop at four p.m. tomorrow and pay the remaining amount to the bus conductor.”

“This is now incumbent upon me as a duty,” I said, and took the ticket from them to place in my pocket with so much care, even veneration, as to suggest it were not a ticket but a holy amulet. “Even if Rebecca had not said it, after learning about this entire matter, I had fully intended to give the outstanding amount to the bus conductor.

Otherwise, my conscience would bear the burden of this fifty pence as long as I live.”

This assurance of mine, or rather my glibness of tongue, had the desired effect. Joy returned to everyone’s face and the gathering became lively again and the atmosphere pleasant once more.

This gathering continued in an unconventional style late into the night, meaning that first there was conversation, then music and dancing, and in the end rowdiness. Rebecca came to the door and said goodbye to each person in turn. One guest dropped me to the place I was staying.

After three or four days, when I met Rebecca at school, after talking about this and that for a little while she asked me whether I had gone the day after her birthday to return the fifty pence to the bus conductor concerned.

“Indeed, I went.” I replied. “The weather was bad that day and it was drizzling, but despite the rain, I went out to wash the stain off my conscience.”

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She was delighted to hear this and pinched my check and said, “Nice boy. Well done.”

This pinch later proved to be the starting point of a long friendship between us.

Listening to this entire incident, you must certainly be wondering whether I had really paid that amount of half a pound to the bus conductor... So, my friends! Tell me yourself – had you been in my place, what would you have done? Would you have gone dripping in the rain to the bus stop the next day to pay the amount? Stand in line to wait for a bus you are not even planning to travel in? And then once that bus arrived, give the conductor fifty pence and ask to be excused for that crime of yours that he must not even remember?

I’m sure you wouldn’t have gone – right? I didn’t go either.

However, today when several years have passed since that incident, I find myself thinking how nice it would have been had I gone.

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Ast Khan Mansoor Raza, Karachi It was a dark and cold winter night. Strong blasts of wind added to the coldness of the night. The shutters of the windows of the house were flapping away like a wounded bird. Like some frenzied lover, the curtains were dashing their head against the windowsill and walls.

When a strong gust of wind would enter the house to disappear upon touching one’s body, it would feel as if a surgeon’s lancet had pierced through the body. And I was in my kitchen that night, washing dishes from the evening meal. Like many other households, dinner at our house occurred to the accompaniment of the nightly news bulletin.

Dinner and news and dinner. International news, local cravings.

Sounds would merge with sounds and the scene in the room would become something like this: Six American soldiers killed in Iraq.

Tomorrow, please make potatoes.

Universal Children’s Day will be observed tomorrow.

The garlic relish Amma makes is really something else.

Pakistan will play a one-day match against India tomorrow.

Could you please pass the salt? The curry is a little bland.

Because both my wife and I work, punctuality is very important to us. And punctuality is important so we can maintain discipline in our tasks and adhere to the office routine. And the office and job thus directly shape our lives. So, I was saying that as the news ended at nine-thirty, our dinner would simultaneously end. And I would become busy with the task of washing dishes. My wife and I had already talked over and drawn up a division of chores during the initial period of our marriage. If in the morning she makes breakfast, I will wash the breakfast dishes. If on Sunday I do the laundry, she will

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spread it on the clothesline outside. Effort to carry out routine tasks would, in short, be shared and shouldered in this manner.

Since repugnance at the thought of wasting and desecrating one’s daily bread had been pounded into our bones like a case of deeply set rheumatism, we would not waste the food left over from the evening meal but give it, for the sake of investing in our Hereafter, to the seven-year-old Afghani child who would unfailingly knock at our door each morning at seven. This boy has been coming regularly to our house in the neighbourhood since the past three years, and we consider him to be a means of securing a home for ourselves in heaven. There are, however, some handicaps to this self-appointed beneficence of ours which I will discuss further ahead.

Since the past three years, Ast Khan has been knocking at our door at seven in the morning. Even in the harshest cold, I have never seen anything other than a grimy, unbuttoned kurta shalwaar on his body. His rosy, fresh-complexioned face would be marked by dirt. He would come in the morning and say salaam. He would take the bag of food remaining from the night before, say salaam again, and set off to pick trash from the garbage dumps all day long. When he received his breakfast, i.e. the remains of our evening meal, a special smile would appear on his face. This smile would hold gratitude, a vestige of satisfaction, and another uncertain sort of quality. I had never really been able to comprehend his smile entirely. He would open the bag over a very old and wide piece of masonry lying on the small segment of grass outside my house, and eat the bits of roti and cold curry or rice left over from the night before with unhurried contentment. After drinking one full jug of water from the clay pitcher placed outside, he would set off to pick trash, and then he and I would meet the next morning.

This routine had been continuing since the last three years. Ast Khan’s family were refugees from Mazar-i Sharif; they had at first been living in Quetta, and then settled in Orangi Town, Karachi. His father searched garbage dumps for his means of subsistence, and Ast Khan did the same. Paper, bone, iron, cardboard, wood– Ast Khan would

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gather it all up into his blue-coloured sack, and separate it into little heaps on a nearby plot of empty land a bit before dusk, and then in the evening a Suzuki van would come and take it all away. Once when I asked him, he told me that he manages to get about fifty rupees a day.

Since I belong to a middle-class family, everything in our house is curtailed by limits. And therefore, all activities are conducted within measured limits. Vegetables at the end of the month, and beef and chicken at the beginning. Rikshas at the end of the month, and taxis at the beginning. In the same way, our charity is also curtailed by limits. If another child came along with Ast Khan in the morning, my facial expressions would visibly alter. Partly from the awareness that the food is barely enough to satisfy even one person’s hunger, hence why has a second person arrived, and partly from the fear that if the numbers kept increasing in this manner, then our doorbell would be ringing all the time, an alien expression would cross my face which Ast Khan despite his tender years seemed able to interpret. The day something like this would occur, he would not open the small bag over the segment of grass and eat, but would instead take the bag and go on ahead, and for the next several days he would come alone. And then again one day some unknown child, and then for the next several days...

Well, on that cold night, I washed the dishes quickly. My wife prepared a bag from the evening’s leftover food as usual (as I told you earlier, it was barely enough to feed one person), and placed it in a corner of the kitchen. I said my night-time prayer and lay down to sleep.

Partly because of the day’s exhaustion and partly because of the sombre quality of the news, I spent a disturbed night. And half sleeping and half waking, I became lost in a dream. In the total darkness surrounding me, I could hear only the voice of my own mind and sense that this voice was engaged in dialogue with another voice.

That voice was somewhat deep and faint, and was saying: “Do you really think this inadequate charity of yours will gain you a plot of land in heaven?”

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“I know, but this is all that is in my power to do,” my mind replied.

“You should look at the other side of the wall too sometime. How many people can you provide this sort of half meal to, and how many Ast Khans can survive their entire life on the strength of this half meal?”

“Even Ast Khan can’t survive on it. Even I work hard to be able to eat, and it’s not as if my father had left me property to live on. Man’s fate is decreed up above in the heavens. If this is what is in Ast Khan’s fate, what can I do?”

“You have constructed the edifice of your satisfaction upon the ruins of Ast Khan’s self-respect. If he had not been financially destitute, you could not have been mentally affluent.”

“God is the one who determines all this, and this is how the affairs of the world transpire. Who are you?”

The sound of laughter. “I am time, and it is my task to guide people.”

“But your words reek of callowness and inexperience. How can you be the voice of time?”

“It is on the basis of my experience that I speak. You need to carry out organised charity and to come together with other people to make charitable institutions, otherwise who knows how many Ast Khans this society will keep on spitting out and devouring.”

“It is individuals who have run institutions, historically. Don’t belittle the charity of the individual, because if this no longer remained then charity itself would cease to exist and only an unfeeling sort of act would remain. The grand ladies and sirs give Abdul Sattar Edhi lots of money once in the year and, for the remaining 364 days, haggle with the grocers over paltry five-rupee sums.”

“The very problem with institutions is that they are unfeeling, but it

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is also institutions that ensure the consistent continuation of any activity.”

“Ast Khan and I are living in a specific time and space, and will both die here too. What happens in the world in future is not my responsibility.” The voice of my mind was becoming acrid. “As far as the issue of self-respect is concerned, the manner in which you give is more important than merely giving. Rather than standing in a long queue for the sake of two rotis before an institution on a well-known thoroughfare, mornings at this house in a corner are better for Ast Khan.”

“You’re very stubborn. You are a good man, but lacking in foresight.”

This dialogue continued till late. Neither did my mind admit defeat, nor did that voice. One difference certainly existed which was that my mind and its voice were aggressive, acrid, and harsh in expression, whereas that voice held calmness and tenderness, and its manner was that of offering counsel. The sound of the call to the fajr prayer interrupted this dialogue. I woke up. Because of these mental acrobatics, I hadn’t got sufficient sleep. My body felt like it would break with exhaustion. The night-long ideological tumult had caused a lassitude in my body.

At seven in the morning, the bell on the door rang. I picked up the small bag besides the door and started walking towards the door.

When I opened the door, Ast Khan stood there as expected. Next to him stood another small boy whose face resembled his. As I told you, when I would see an additional face next to Ast Khan’s, the expression on my face would alter, something which Ast Khan also seemed able to sense. Thus that is exactly what happened. I extended the bag towards Ast Khan. He took the bag from my hand and said, “This is my younger brother– Gul Aalam Khan. The anxiety on my face deepened for if this was Ast Khan’s own brother, then his demand must be that I should now provide for two people which would perhaps not be possible for me. My mind was still engaged in these thoughts when I heard the second salaam with which Ast Khan took

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his leave after taking the bag from my extended hand. Upon taking the bag from my hand, Ast Khan gave that same bag to his brother.

His brother took it and went to the other side of the lane. On Ast Khan’s face was that same familiar smile, but today it also had an added unfamiliar quality which I was unable to put my finger on.

Two years have passed since that incident. Ast Khan never came to get food after that. Yes, his brother now comes regularly at seven each day.

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Flag © Sandeep Banerjee

Review: Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan 1947–1972 Kamran Asdar Ali, Karachi, Oxford University Press: 2015

Subho Basu Pakistan is imagined in various ways: a Muslim homeland, an Islamist theocracy, and also as the epitome of praetorian capitalism.

Despite their salience, such dominant narratives reinforce particular silences as they reflect only those mainstream modes of knowledge production that speak to the interests of global readers. Beneath such dominant narratives there exist complex social articulations of an alternative politics that demands for individuals’ emancipation from exploitation. Such voices are often silenced and marginalized. Elites in Pakistan and their patrons among global policy mandarins located in metropolitan centers conveniently elide over such alternative possibilities articulated by workers, peasant women, and minorities.

It is to his credit that Kamran Asdar Ali excavates such alternative voices in Pakistani history. He employs a complex methodology for tapping into these voices: systematic explorations of official archives, party journals, oral anecdotes, interviews, literary musings, and even nostalgia. He presents not simply a picture of hitherto neglected social movement but highlights many possible alternative histories and, hence, the possibility of a differently imagined Pakistan.

In many ways Ali’s book reads like a thriller full of suspense, conspiracies, cruelties, betrayals and tragic internecine conflicts among fellow believers. The book also features crusading heroes such as Comrade Sajjad Zaheer, the antifascist writer, organizer and a relentless champion of working classes in Pakistan in its formative years. Ali rejects both the elitist historical imagination of upper class intellectuals and their political frailties. He tells us about the hopes, dreams and pains of factory workers, trade union organizers, women, and communist party activists. It gestures toward a short story writer of eminence and those bards emanating from the lower depths of society, to use the sobriquet of Gorky’s now discarded famous play.

Like “The Lower Depths,” Surkh Salam depicts harsh reality alongside the ruling class’s ideology and its irresolute faith in utopia.

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Partition and migration configure Ali’s book, particularly as he accounts for how many of the activists working in the newly created Pakistan had left their regional territories to embrace the new homeland, and to craft their dreams through social movements.

Through his considerations of Manto, Ali Sardari Jafri, and their ilk, Ali reveals how literature produced at this moment reflects the anguish of the past. Importantly, he suggests how this anguish was not simply immortalized in the literature but also integrally in the person of Hassan Nasir, who remained a firm communist as he moved from India to Pakistan, from Pakistan to India, and again from India to Pakistan. Eventually silenced in Lahore Fort, Nasir was not spared even in death as the circumstances of his demise became the subject of immense scrutiny, without, however, ever being fully resolved. In histories such as these, narrated by Ali, the partition becomes a continuing process that is always evolving and touching every aspect of human lives.

Pakistan’s unresolved nationality question also informs Ali’s narrative in numerous ways. For Ali, the debate among communists about the relationship between class, ethnicity, and nationality also led them to ignore the Baloch, Pakhtuns, Sindhis and Bengalis who were raising issues pertaining to provincial autonomy and the recognition of sub-nations. In turn, all of these individuals were ignored by the centralizing Praetorian state as they struggled to redefine the meaning of nation. Their demands were brushed aside by the rhetoric of Muslim nationalism and sometimes even racism. This inability of the state and the communist cadres to sufficiently account for subnationalisms finally led to the dismemberment of the ‘nation’ in 1971.

At this point, the utopia of the nation-building process succumbed to the quotidian reality of power configurations. Simultaneously, however, the disintegration of a united Pakistan questioned the attempted class and institutional colonization of national imagining.

There is a sense of betrayal inscribed in the history of the post-colony. The social democratic rhetoric of the Pakistan People’s Party dissolved into the real suppression of working classes and their basic demands for bread, clothing, and shelter. The slogans, lyrics and

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the sense of betrayal were poignantly expressed in the words of many workers who wrote about how in lieu of food they received bullets, instead of clothes, shrouds, and in place of shelter, graveyards. Yet, Ali’s history reveals the power of everyday individuals, as students, workers and peasants toppled the false promises of powerful military dictators through street action. From this work it is clear that the revolution of 1967 was as much Pakistani as it was Parisian. The politics of utopia then transcended the barrier of periphery and metropolis.

Surkh Salam breaks from the traditional linear narrative. It picks up the threads of the story at many different points without losing its sense of totality. It moves fluidly back and forth from the early formative years of the movement, to the revolutionary storms of the sixties, the vicissitudes of the early seventies, and the repression of the 1980s. The chronology functions quietly in the background and humanizes the narrative as Ali weaves the tales of many individuals into his account.

Significantly, Ali’s history is devoid of victors and victims. Rather, there is a dense and dexterous portrayal of the struggle for a better future, of how the communist literary constructions of that struggle echoed in the imagining of Pakistan in its formative years. The book enables us to learn how social struggles against the repressive state endured and why the literary and cultural imaginings of the organized left, comprised of intellectuals, workers, peasants and women activists, played a pivotal role in the making and re-making of Pakistan. It also establishes firmly that the story of the evolution of Pakistan does not suggest a readymade narrative of Islamist and military violence, but that it also involves at its heart a struggle in which the intimation of utopia inspired working classes. This struggle is a corollary to those same struggles that gripped Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the twentieth century. For unearthing such a history, and for making such comparisons possible again, Kamran Asdar Ali deserves a lāl salām.

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Oil Painting Š Reda Berrada

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The Myth of the Early Modern: Reassessing Early Portuguese Imperialism in the Indian Ocean World Liam Mather I. Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, establishing the first direct maritime route between Europe and the Indian Ocean. European historians have generally heralded this event as a crucial juncture that ushered in the Early Modern era, an epoch characterized by Europe’s military, political, and economic domination of the non-European world.1 According to the Eurocentric narrative, the route pioneered by de Gama facilitated immediate Portuguese imperial dominance, with the Estado da India swiftly monopolizing Indian Ocean trade and supplanting indigenous socio-political systems. This historiography assumes that the societies of the Indian Ocean World possessed archaic technology and institutions, were devoid of meaningful economic enterprise, and did not trade with each other. H.R. Trevor-Roper, for example, argues that the Portuguese capitalized on a “vacuum in sea-borne trade” that purportedly existed before de Gama’s voyage.2 Through an examination of the interactions between the Estado da India and the Indian Ocean World’s indigenous polities from 1498 to 1600, this paper demonstrates that, in contrast to the Eurocentric historiography, Europeans were not immediately dominant in the region, politically or commercially. The Indian Ocean World played host to a vibrant system of maritime trade before 1498, and the Portuguese had minimal impact on this system. Therefore, 1498 was not a turning point for the history of the Indian Ocean World, and the conventional periodization is flawed.

Conceptually and geographically, the focus of this paper is the Indian Ocean World, which encompasses the diverse places historically connected by the Indian Ocean, including East Africa, Mesopotamia, India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. The notion of a distinct Indian Ocean regional history was inspired by the work of Fernand Braudel, the eminent French historian of the Annales School.

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Braudel deviated from the conventional emphasis placed on political factors of causation; he argued that the sea, and longue durée patterns of human-environment interactions, were crucial factors in the history of Mediterranean civilizations.3 For the Indian Ocean World, the primary unifying feature was the monsoon system, a recurrent pattern of winds and currents that facilitated the transoceanic exchange of people, ideas, and goods stretching back over 2,000 years. As Kenneth McPherson writes, this system of exchange constituted a distinct historical ‘world’ that, for centuries, operated independently of other worlds, such as Braudel’s Mediterranean.4 Gwyn Campbell notes that these winds created a “purposeful two-way transoceanic trade” that many economic historians term “the first global economy.”5 When the Portuguese arrived, the system was flourishing, with powerful empires and autonomous port cities across the Indian Ocean engaging in complex maritime and land-based trade.6 Although there were intra-regional variations in indigenous-European interactions, the Indian Ocean World had a distinct imperial experience because of the environmental, political, economic, and cultural continuities between its societies.

This paper seeks to prove that the immediate European impact on this prosperous system was minor, and will examine the period from 1498 to 1600. During this time, the Estado da India, the commercial and colonial branch of the Portuguese empire, was the primary European actor directly engaged in the Indian Ocean World. In 1494, Pope Alexander VI authorized the Treaty of Tordesillas between Portugal and Spain, which divided the non-European world into separate spheres of conquest for the two Catholic empires.7 Under this treaty, the Portuguese sphere stretched between Brazil and China, which nearly encompassed the entire Indian Ocean World; following the agreement, King Manuel of Portugal styled himself as: “The Lord of Guinea and of the Conquest of the Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India.”8 However, his claim to lordship over these territories was rather premature. Because of the Treaty, the Spanish Empire did not penetrate the Indian Ocean World except for its conquests in the Philippines, which fell under its church-sanctioned sphere. The Protestant states of Europe did not gain a foothold in the

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Indian Ocean World until the early 17th century, when the English East India Company and the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie were founded. This paper therefore focuses on 16th century Portuguese imperialism; the implications of the British and Dutch arrival in the Indian Ocean World are only briefly discussed.

A central assumption of the Eurocentric narrative, pushed by Immanuel Wallerstein, E.L. Jones, and others, is that the Portuguese had innate advantages that enabled them to dominate the Indian Ocean. To disprove this assumption, I begin by comparing Portuguese naval power and imperial institutions with those of the Indian Ocean World’s societies. This comparison is contextualized within the expansive Indian Ocean World trade system that predated the Portuguese arrival, and suggests that although the Estado da India had a stronger navy, its competitive advantages were not sufficient to monopolize the Ocean’s trade. Second, this paper explains the unique challenges faced by the Portuguese, which prevented their push for domination during the first half of the 16th century. The Estado’s operations were impeded by shipwrecks and disease, and they did not pose a serious threat to the powerful Asian empires. Due to these challenges, and a flawed mercantilist economic model, the Portuguese were forced to shift their imperial strategy from conquest and collaboration with indigenous traders. Therefore, the Portuguese became integrated into the dynamic Indian Ocean maritime economy that existed centuries before their arrival, but they did not assume control over it. Europeans were not dominant in the region until the 18th century, after the Industrial Revolution and indigenous political and economic decline. Thus, the conventional chronological division, which asserts European dominance from 1498, is therefore not applicable to the Indian Ocean World.

II. As McPherson argues, the primary aim of the Estado da India was to monopolize the trade of valuable spices between the Indian Ocean and Europe, which was controlled by Italian and Muslim traders by way of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.9 Controlling the spice

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trade required complete Portuguese control of the indigenous trade in the Indian Ocean, which the Estado were unsuccessful at attaining.

The following analysis of Portuguese military and institutional capabilities demonstrates that the Estado did not have the requisite competitive advantages to dominate the region’s trade, nor the power to effect any meaningful change on the socio-political systems in the region.

Adhering to mercantilist economic thought, the Estado initially aimed to establish a monopoly on the spice trade through the use of violence. They possessed a seemingly crucial advantage in this regard: the Portuguese navy was stronger than that of any individual indigenous polity.10 There were two components to this advantage.

First, many indigenous powers did not have large navies. Michael Pearson notes that there were two types of polities in the Indian Ocean when the Portuguese entered the region: autonomous port cities and landed empires.11 The rulers of the port cities rarely attempted to establish trade monopolies on goods because their economic success rested on their ability to attract private merchants.12 Additionally, the rulers of major port cities had established conventions to conduct trade peacefully; the Mediterranean method of warring trade was not practiced in the Indian Ocean before the Portuguese arrival.13 For these reasons, the autonomous port cities did not maintain large navies, had little experience in naval warfare, and many failed to resist the Portuguese imposition of force. The landed empires, including the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals, also had small navies. They drew the bulk of their revenues by taxing the land, so they did not directly involve themselves in maritime trade and did not offer naval protection to their private merchants.14 The second component of the Portuguese advantage was that their Indiamen ships were equipped with cannons, making them militarily superior to most indigenous ships.15 The only two Indian Ocean World polities that possessed comparably powerful armaments were Ming China and the Ottoman Empire. However, China had abandoned naval warfare after the ventures of Zheng Ho in the 15th century,16 and the Ottomans, because they prioritized land revenues,

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ignored the Indian Ocean after 1526.17 The Estado’s superior weaponry enabled them to capture strategic ports through force, and impose taxes on local traders. As K.N. Chaudhuri details, a mere thirteen Portuguese ships successfully bombarded Calicut in 1500, the Indian Ocean world’s greatest spice market, and took home to Lisbon a large quantity of spices.18 Owing to their numerical and military advantage, the Estado similarly took the major entrepôts of Sofala,19 Goa, Colombo, Melaka, Hurmuz, and Diu by 1535.20 Capturing these ports won the Estado early gains in the spice trade. But despite these victories, it is important to note that the Estado’s naval advantage was not due to inherently superior European technology. The Portuguese Indiamen deployed stronger armaments, but the indigenous navies possessed tall ships of higher structural quality, a factor that, as I explain later, proved costly to the Portuguese.21 Furthermore, Eurocentric histories have a tendency to emphasize the nation state as a central historical unit and the most effectual political entity.22 Accordingly, the literature partially attributes purported Early Modern European imperial domination to institutional benefits afforded by their political structures.

For example, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that Portugal had an edge because of the strength of its bureaucratic state machinery.23 Unfortunately, however, Wallerstein restricts his comparison to the competition between European nation-states. In so doing, he neglects the possibility of Indian Ocean World polities having a superior political structure. He also fails to sufficiently account for the institutional inefficiencies that hampered the Estado da India’s operations.

The nucleus of the Estado’s operations was Goa, an entrepôt on India’s West Coast. The careirra, the trip from Lisbon to Goa, took between six months and one-and-a-half years.24 This distance necessitated a decentralized command structure for the Estado, as the Portuguese Crown could not directly control its activity. Estado command was further decentralized within the Indian Ocean world because its nexus of ports that stretched from Mozambique to Malacca could not be centrally administered from Goa. In this arrangement,

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Estado port captains had significant autonomy and were largely free to engage in fraudulent activity. As explained later, the Estado had to pay for spices with bullion because they did not produce any goods that indigenous people in the Indian Ocean world valued. A bullion deficit restricted the means for paying Estado employees, and as L.F. Thomaz notes, payments often came in the form of merchandise, which Estado employees were licensed to trade privately.25 In many cases, the pursuit of private trade, which constituted the bulk of many employees’ profits, hurt the interests of the company. For example, the captains of Mozambique often abandoned their guard posts at the fortress to pursue private mercantile activity on the Zambezi River, and one captain of Diu sold his fort’s cannon to the Estado’s enemies.26 Even the King’s agents, to whom royal power was delegated, often defied the state’s interests in pursuit of private trade.

This pervasive fraudulence suggests that the Estado da India did not act as a cohesive organization in the service of the Portuguese state, and many company officials amassed private wealth at the expense of state profits. The Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto identified this flaw in the Estado’s system: “for the king’s property to increase, it should pass through few hands, and the fewer hands of officials it has contact with the greater will be its increase.”27 The Eurocentric literature assumes a political backwardness in the Indian Ocean world – E.L. Jones writes in The European Miracle that prior to the European exportation of the nation-state, the non-European world “had hitherto known only tribalism.”28 However, the Estado was institutionally inferior to many Indian Ocean World polities, especially the landed Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal regimes, which possessed large militaries, intricate tax systems, and upheld law and order.29 The Estado was also not a monolithic power; due to its decentralized framework and resultant internal corruption, the Portuguese Crown could not implement sound imperial policy. In contrast to the claims of the dominant Eurocentric literature, the Portuguese did not have an institutional edge that ensured their dominance.

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III. Though they had a formidable navy, it is clear that the Portuguese did not possess intrinsic technological or institutional superiority.

The question, then, is whether their naval advantage translated into dominance of the Indian Ocean World. Despite the challenges of administration, their network of conquered ports initially increased the Portuguese share of the spice trade to Europe. The Estado used their naval power to force indigenous ships to call at their ports, where they imposed licensing requirements, known as caratzes, on the traders. Pearson describes this system as a “protection racket,” whereby the Portuguese sold protection from their own violence and prohibited Muslim ships from trading spices.30 At first, this practice was successful; Lisbon replaced Venice as the chief source for European spices in the early 16th century, profiting more than double the value of their trade in gold and metals.31 However, by the middle of the 16th century, trade of Indian Ocean goods through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean increased, and Lisbon’s share of the supply to Europe fell.32 This was because of inadequate manpower and resources, powerful indigenous foes, and an inability to compete with the Indian Ocean World’s commodities. Therefore, the Portuguese navy did not have a sufficient competitive edge to usurp the prosperous trade and dynamic political structures that predated their arrival.

The Estado was beleaguered by high rates of ship loss and crew mortality during the entirety of the 16th century. Despite their strong armaments, Portuguese ships were poorly suited for the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean. Their ships were made of oak, which is only appropriate for the temperate waters of the Atlantic. Oak rots in warmer waters, like those of the equatorial regions in the Indian Ocean World. As such, Portuguese ships lasted only three or four round voyages, and had an average lifespan of a decade.33 Poor ship quality, overloaded cargo, and climatic disasters caused a shipwreck rate of 10% from 1497 to 1590.34 This forced the Portuguese to employ indigenous shipbuilders, who used teak, a wood local to the Indian Ocean world, for their ships.35 Building ships in India was significantly more expensive, and drained the resources of the Crown.36 This

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reliance on local shipbuilding skills further confirms that the Europeans were not technologically superior; their ships could not withstand the environmental conditions of the region.

In addition to a high rate of shipwrecks, the employees of the Estado da India were ravaged by disease, which contributed to a severe manpower shortage. Due to horrific living conditions, the long voyage from Lisbon to Goa around the Cape of Good Hope was considered “without any doubt the greatest and most arduous [voyage] of any that are known in the world,� as one Italian Jesuit described it.37 This is an apt description; each Indiaman was crowded with hundreds of crewmembers, resources on board were scarce, and the ships were insanitary. This caused the spread of diseases like dysentery, a major cause of death because its origin and cure were not known.38 The composition of the crew exacerbated the problem; many sailors were prisoners forced by the Crown to go to the Indian Ocean World, and these men were often infected before they came aboard. An attrition rate of over 50% for a single carreira was common.39 Although the Crown mandated that the Indiamen take a direct route between Lisbon and Goa, many were forced to call in Mozambique due to a shortage of provisions, a high rate of on-ship disease, or stormy weather in the Mozambique Channel.40 However, doing so posed severe risks to Estado crews. Malaria was endemic on the coast of East Africa, and caused the death of tens of thousands of Portuguese.

Although the Crown commissioned the construction of a hospital, they did not have a cure for malaria.41 The high rate of death among Estado sailors was significant for a number of reasons. First, unlike the European colonial experience of the Americas, the Portuguese did not introduce virgin soil epidemics to the Indian Ocean World, where, with few exceptions, the indigenous people were immune to European diseases.42 The high rate of death for Portuguese sailors forced the Estado to hire indigenous mariners to work on their ships.43 Therefore, the Portuguese relied heavily on indigenous people and their skills to carry out their imperial ventures, in both constructing and staffing their ships Second, it accentuated an already crippling manpower deficiency.

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The Indian Ocean World was a geographically expansive region home to hundreds of millions of people. As noted by Pearson, Portugal only had a population of 2,000,000 in 1600. Given the demands of its concurrent imperial endeavours in North Africa and Brazil, the Crown could only commit 14,000 to 16,000 Portuguese citizens to the Estado.44 Following the Portuguese succession crisis of 1580 until 1640, Spain controlled Portugal, and diverted Estado men and ships to fight wars with the British.45 Disease ravaged their already short manpower. Thus, the Estado did not possess the manpower, resources, institutional efficiency, or technological primacy needed to dominate the trade of the numerous civilizations that existed between their littoral holds at Sofala and Malacca.

As mentioned, early naval successes won the Estado strategic port cities a larger share of the spice market in the first half of the 16th century. Their inability to maintain this position was the result of their failure to capture the port city of Aden, which was strategically positioned near the mouth of the Red Sea. Through the Red Sea, goods could travel to the Levant, the Mediterranean, and reach the European markets.46 In response, the Estado imposed a blockade at Bab al-Mandeb, a strait that connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. However, by the 1550’s this blockade consistently fell to Acheh, a Sumatran naval power, which carried spices and other Indian Ocean goods into the Red Sea.47 As C.R. Boxer notes, the Achenese were skilled mariners, and received military assistance from the Ottomans in the form of cannons and gunners.48 The Estado lacked the resources and manpower to maintain the blockade, and therefore could not maintain their early gains in the European spice market. Furthermore, this proves that the indigenous polities of the Indian Ocean world were equally developed technologically. The advanced weaponry of the Indiamen was not a uniquely Portuguese feature, and the Achenese deployed aggressive naval tactics to support their merchant activity.

The indigenous trade in the Indian Ocean World was expansive when Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape, and the local merchants were more knowledgeable about regional nuances in geography and economy than the Portuguese newcomers. In many cases, indigenous

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traders who did not possess the powerful armaments of Acheh simply evaded Estado ships instead of engaging with them militarily.

For example, Muslim traders on the East African coast rotated the centre of their commercial activities between the ports of Angoche, Mombasa, and Pate, and the Portuguese did not have the resources to monitor this activity directly, or the logistical proficiency to control all three simultaneously.49 In the Bay of Bengal, local traders moved their major port to Masulipatnam from Pulicat, after the Portuguese took the latter. Masulipatnam quickly became the greatest market in the Bay of Bengal.50 In this way, the Portuguese disrupted patterns of local trade, but due to a severe manpower deficiency, they could not control them. They lacked the capacity to closely supervise the host of indigenous merchants that participated in maritime trade.51 The powerful landed-empires – the Ottomans, Safavids, and the Mughals – further obstructed the Estado’s attempted monopolization of the Indian Ocean spice trade. The strong Portuguese navy allowed Estado to capture port cities, but as mentioned, this was largely because the land-oriented states did not defend their littoral with big navies. Despite their success at capturing ports, the Portuguese could not conquer large territories on the continent because these states had formidable militaries.52 This had two major implications for Portuguese imperial policy. First, geography gave the land-oriented states leverage over contrasting interests. Portuguese ports prospered from trading with hinterland markets.53 Since these networks were controlled by the landed states, they could cut off this trade and hurt Portuguese enterprise, or attack the ports from the land. For example, the profitable Portuguese forts in Gujarat and Diu were prone to attacks from the Mughals. The Estado also held the port of Surat, an exit point for Indian Muslim pilgrims, and the Mughals had an interest in keeping it open. To prevent a Mughal attack, which would cripple their economic activity, the Portuguese allowed certain Mughal ships free access to Surat.54 Because they could only control ports, the Portuguese were often conciliatory to indigenous rulers on the interior.

The second major implication of Portugal’s inability to penetrate the interior is that they could not monopolize the spice trade. The

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production of spices occurred in the interior, and 90% of production was consumed within Asia, much of it traded over land.55 Even if the Portuguese successfully monopolized the trade to Europe, it would not significantly affect the economies of the landed-states. The landed-states largely acquiesced to the Estado’s littoral gains, and none responded by building up their navy56 because the Portuguese maritime trade did not conflict with their primary economic interests – the land.57 Given that the Estado did not have the ability to establish a territorial empire, no Asian power considered the Portuguese a threat to the Indian Ocean World’s balance of power. That the Portuguese could not penetrate the Asian interior and that the landed-empires did not consider them a legitimate threat suggest the Portuguese had a minor impact on Indian Ocean World. Portuguese imperial influence, limited to the littoral, did not match the Eurocentric narrative of political and economic usurpation of the nonEuropean world in the Early Modern epoch. As Pearson concludes, “it is impossible to see the arrival of the Portuguese as affecting the progress or decline of these states in any significant way.”58 IV. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Portugal had lost its initial gains in the European spice market. Although they maintained most of their strategic ports throughout the century, their violent efforts to monopolizing the trade proved futile and costly, and a host of internal and external challenges impeded their attempted conquests.

This precipitated a reappraisal of the Estado’s policy, and they began participating in the country trade, or inter-port trade in the Indian Ocean World.59 To understand this adjustment in policy, it is first necessary to outline the economic model under which the Estado da India operated. Like other European and Asian states,60 the Portuguese adhered to the economic doctrine of mercantilism. Central to mercantilist thought is the belief that national wealth is defined by possession of bullion, particularly gold and silver. Under this paradigm, trade is a zero-sum contest: national wealth increases

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when one state pillages another state’s reserve, or when it maintains a positive balance of trade to increase bullion stocks. Accordingly, the Estado’s early strategy in the Indian Ocean world was to violently monopolize the trade of valuable spices, and sell them to other European states for high quantities of bullion. However, the Portuguese were unable to take control over spice production, which was concentrated in the hinterland where the powerful landed states operated. This required Estado to purchase the spices from indigenous merchants, but this presented a number of challenges. As described by L.F. Thomaz, the Portuguese traders had no commodity that appealed to the indigenous markets in the Indian Ocean world.61 Not only does this defeat the Eurocentric creed of European economic and technological superiority, it meant that the only money the Estado could use to pay for spices was bullion, which defied mercantilist principles. Immanuel Wallerstein cites the high availability of capital as an impetus for Portuguese imperialism,62 but Pearson discredits this, noting that Portugal could not afford to relinquish significant bullion reserves for the purchase of Indian Ocean spices.63 Portugal’s inability to acquire spices caused them to shift their policy from conquest to cooperation with indigenous merchants.64 Their new aim was to integrate themselves into pre-existing indigenous trade networks to earn a profit that could be used to purchase spices. Their gradual integration into the East African trade illuminates this Portuguese strategy. The Mutapa state, located on Zimbabwe plateau, produced large amounts of gold and ivory.

The Estado had previously attempted, and failed, to monopolize the gold reserves due to local resistance.65 Both gold and ivory were commodities that could be used to pay for spices, but they could only be acquired from the Mutapa in exchange for the traditionally demanded products: beads and high-quality Gujarati muslin.66 Thus, the Portuguese moulded for themselves a niche in the traditional trade. As summarized by Pearson, the Estado became “immersed in an intricate web of country trade in the Arabian Sea, in this case cloths from Gujarat to exchange for gold and ivory which then could pay for spices which then could be extracted from the Indian Ocean network and sent outside it to European markets.”67 The Portuguese repeated

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this pattern throughout the Indian Ocean World, appropriating ancient trading patterns, and establishing strong relations with local traders.68 A significant characteristic of the Portuguese involvement in the country trade is that they participated as an equal partner with the indigenous polities, and did not hold any advantages or disadvantages.69 By the second half of the 16th century, it became clear to the Estado that the use of violence to monopolize the spice trade had failed; that they lacked the capabilities to take over spice production from the powerful landed states, and that efforts to control maritime trade required greater resources than they possessed. E.L Jones writes that Early Modern Europe was “endowed with a disperse portfolio of resources…that conduced to long-distance, multi-lateral trade in bulk loads of utilitarian goods.”70 However, Portuguese commodities were not valued in the Indian Ocean World, and it was most profitable for the Estado to trade in traditionally demanded goods. It was therefore in their interests to embed themselves within indigenous trade networks rather than to disrupt them. Reflecting a similar bias to Jones, Wallerstein suggests that Europe forged a world-economy in the sixteenth century based on the capitalist mode of production, which included the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, but not the Indian Ocean World.71 These perspectives are blinkered in their focus, for they do not directly account for the immense economy that was developing simultaneously in the Indian Ocean World at the time. This economy had existed for centuries before Vasco de Gama’s arrival, and the Portuguese in fact had to integrate into it. As was the case before their arrival, the monsoons governed this system, with exchange patterns determined by the longue durée fluctuation of winds, currents, and the interaction between people and their environment. Therefore, the century following the Portuguese arrival in the Indian Ocean World was characterized more by continuity than it was by change. Aside from the ports captured by the Portuguese, autonomous port cities and the landed empires of Asia maintained independent political structures and flourishing economies.

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V. The arrival of the Dutch and British in the 17th century introduced more change into the Indian Ocean World than was precipitated

by Portuguese imperialism in the 16th century. The Dutch captured Portuguese ports like Melaka, and the Estado’s relative position to the European newcomers suffered significantly.72 European impact on the Indian Ocean world dramatically increased in the 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution equipped the British with the capacity to conquer the Indian Ocean world’s hinterlands.73 The growth in British power was concurrent with political decline and environmental problems experienced by Indian Ocean world indigenous societies due to the Little Ice Age. However, as Pearson notes, the 18th century colonization of the Indian Ocean World would have happened regardless of Vasco de Gama’s voyage. De Gama did not “discover” the Indian Ocean World like Columbus discovered the New World; European-Indian Ocean connections via the Red Sea had existed for millennia.74 There is thus no causal mechanism that links Portuguese imperial policy in the 16th century with British colonial practices.

Even if we are to accept that Europeans were dominant during the later stages of the Early Modern epoch, de Gama’s voyage did not precipitate this in any way.

C.R. Boxer, whose scholarship on the Portuguese navy is frequently referenced in this paper, describes de Gama’s inaugural carreira as an “epoch-making voyage.”75 Famed Scottish economist Adam Smith articulates a similar perspective in The Wealth of Nations, writing, “The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”76 These two opinions reflect the chronology delineated in Eurocentric historiography, which classifies de Gama’s voyage as the origination of the Early Modern era, an epoch characterized by European ascendancy. This paper has sought to deconstruct this conventional temporal division by arguing that Portugal – the primary European actor in the sixteenth century – did not dominate the Indian Ocean world in the period immediately following de Gama’s voyage.

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It first showed that the Portuguese did not possess technological or institutional superiority. The Portuguese naval advantage, which enabled the Estado to capture a nexus of ports, initially won them a larger share of the European spice market, but the powerful states in the Indian Ocean World willingly acquiesced to these endeavours and were politically unaffected. Ultimately, the Portuguese naval advantage was mitigated by a myriad of factors, including insufficient resources, rampant disease, high ship attrition, strong landed states, and an expansive trade system that persisted despite their attempted monopolization. These factors caused the Estado to lose their gains in the spice trade and, lacking a tradable commodity to acquire spices, they were compelled to practice the country trade. Famed Portuguese poet Luis de Camoens wrote that upon entering the Indian Ocean the “Portuguese sailed ‘por mares nunca dantes navegados’ (‘through seas never before navigated’).”77 On the contrary, the Indian Ocean world was home to a dynamic economy when Vasco de Gama arrived.

Unable to control this system, the Portuguese became a minor player in centuries-old indigenous trade networks. Europeans had no significant material advantages until the Industrial Revolution. That the Portuguese did not dominate the Indian Ocean World in the 16th century exposes this myth underlying the Early Modern.

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Notes 1. Gwyn Campbell, “Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the ‘Early Modern’: Historiographical Conventions and Problems” in Africa, Empire, and Globalization, eds. Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2011), 89.

2. Trevor-Roper, H.R. Historical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1957), 120.

3. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2.

4. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 4-5.

5. Gwyn Campbell, “Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the ‘Early Modern,’” 82.

6. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 9.

7. “Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).” Credo Encyclopaedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present.

8. Geoffrey Scammell, The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion 15001715, (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 12.

9. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History, 158, 10. Ibid., 159.

11. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea, (London: Routledge, 2003), 114.

12. Ibid., 115.

13. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 64, 66.

14. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 115-116 15. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History, 159.

16. Ibid., 163.

17. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 114.

18. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 67-68.

19. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History, 162 20. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 120.

21. C.R. Boxer, “A Note on Portuguese Reactions to the Revival of the Red Sea Spice Trade and the Rise of Atjeh, 1540-1600,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10 (1969): 418.

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22. Gwyn Campbell, “Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the ‘Early Modern,’” 89-90 23. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 50-51.

24. James Tracy, The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 49.

25. Luis Filipe Thomaz, “Factions, Interests and Messianism: The Politics of Portuguese Expansion In the East, 1500-1521,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 28, (1991): 106-107.

26. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 141.

27. Ibid., 142.

28. Eric Lionel Jones, The European Miracle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 127.

29. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 117.

30. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 121.

31. Ibid., 128.

32. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 66.

33. K.M. Matthew, History of the Portuguese Navigation in India, 1497-1600, (Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988), 259.

34. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 138.

35. C.R. Boxer, From Lisbon to Goa, 1500-1750, (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), 37-39. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 38.

37. Ibid., 33.

38. Ibid., 48.

39. Ibid., 58.

40. Ibid., 35.

41. Ibid.,36-38.

42. David Arnold, “The Indian Ocean as Disease Zone, 1500-1950” South Asia 14 (1991): 5.

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43. Ibid.

44. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 140.

45. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History, 165, 167.

46. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 128.

47. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 75.

48. C.R. Boxer, “A Note on Portuguese Reactions to the Revival of the Red Sea Spice Trade and the Rise of Atjeh, 1540-1600,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10 (1969): 420.

49. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 132.

50. Ibid., 136.

51. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History, 167.

52. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 121.

53. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History, 165.

54. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 131.

55. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 129.

56. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 79.

57. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 121.

58. Ibid., 132.

59. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 69 60. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 116-117 61. Luis Filipe Thomaz, “Factions, Interests and Messianism,” 106.

62. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 49.

63. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 129.

64. Ibid., 129-130.

65. Ibid., 130.

66. Ibid., 129.

67. Ibid.68. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History, 164.

69. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 143.

70. Eric Lionel Jones, The European Miracle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 227.

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71. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 67-68.

72. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 137.

73. Ibid., 139, 145.

74. Ibid., 140.

75. C.R. Boxer, From Lisbon to Goa, 34.

76. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (Digireads.com, 1776), 369.

77. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 3.

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Bibliography Arnold, David. “The Indian Ocean as Disease Zone, 1500-1950.” South Asia 14. 1 (1991): 1-21.

Boxer, C.R. “A Note on Portuguese Reactions to the Revival of the Red Sea Spice Trade and the Rise of Atjeh, 1540-1600.” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, no. 3 (1969): 415-428.

Boxer, C.R. From Lisbon to Goa, 1500-1750. London: Variorum Reprints, 1984.

Campbell, Gwyn. “Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the “Early Modern”: Historiographical Conventions and Problems.” In Africa, Empire and Globalization, edited by Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell, 81-92. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2011.

Chaudhuri, K.N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Jones, Eric Lionel. The European Miracle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Matthew, K.M. History of the Portuguese Navigation in India, 1497-1600. Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988.

McPherson, Kenneth. The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Pearson, Michael. The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea. London: Routledge, 2003.

Scammell, Geoffrey. The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion 1500-1715.

New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Digireads.com, 1776.

Tracy, James. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

“Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).” Credo Encyclopaedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present.

Trevor-Roper, H.R. Historical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1957.

Thomaz, Luis Filipe. “Factions, Interests and Messianism: The Politics of Portuguese Expansion In the East, 1500-1521.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 28, no. 1 (1991): 91-109.

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Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

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Calcutta 8 © Sandeep Banerjee

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Review: Maoism in India and Nepal

Ranjit Bhushan, Routledge, Oxon and New York: 2016

Subashish Bhattacharjee In the context of the Indian subcontinent, Maoism is synonymous with the Naxalite movement, and its heyday in the late 1960s and 70s.

While the ideological framework followed by Maoists in India and Nepal is based on the ideology of Mao Zedong, the more immanent influence is of Charu Mazumdar, the architect of the Naxalbari movement of 1967. The genealogy of Maoist far-left Communist politics in the subcontinent can effectively be traced to the Naxalbari uprising. In his book, Maoism in India and Nepal, author Ranjit Bhushan seeks to understand the Maoist movement in these two nations through a series of interviews with eminent ideologues, scholars, and practitioners of Maoism in India and Nepal. Bhushan focuses upon the question: “Why are Maoist, Naxalite and other left extremist movements taking root in the most backward and underdeveloped regions of South Asia?” (p. 1) The question, as Bhushan himself contends, is a fundamental one. Maoism in India and Nepal stems from the rampant inequity in development in the two countries. In his Introduction, Bhushan presents a contemporary political reading of the Maoist movement through its various historical and political stages. According to Bhushan, Maoism has become “a force that not only fundamentally questions South Asia’s development paradigm but also threatens the carefully crafted balance of power in the region” (p. 1).

It is essential for readers of the book to understand that the term ‘Maoism’ cannot be used as an umbrella term to understand specific politics of the far-left in India and Nepal, two countries with distinct historical and sociological backgrounds. India, in stark contrast to Nepal’s history of governance, has been the social and political location for a plethora of statist practices, ranging from feudalism, micro-monarchy, and regional imperialism, to foreign imperialism, partisan governments, and, finally, but not definitely, a democratic government. Furthermore, the genetic makeup of this democracy is different in the two countries. Such differences further the impossibil-

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ity of a singular South Asian definition of Maoism, and show how the ideology is itself adaptive and heterogeneous.

Following Bhushan’s Introduction are the collected interviews of Vara Vara Rao, Kameswar Baitha, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, Nepalese Maoist Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda), Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, civil rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen, Manoranjan Mohanty, Charu Mazumdar’s son, Dr. Abhijit Mazumdar, and veteran journalist, Anand Verma.

Dipankar Bhattacharya’s interview perhaps caps the ideological age of a bygone era, the exterminatory politics of Charu Mazumdar.

He does not conform to Mazumdar’s politics of violence, but rejects the idea that there is an absence of Marxism in peasant movements and insurgencies. Bhattacharya’s comments trace a history of the movement in India, its recasting as a major movement against the underground guerrilla policies of the 1960s. Bhattacharya gives precedence to Mao’s thought: Today’s need is to evaluate the Indian communist movement in the light of Mao’s thought – to ponder over the reasons why we failed in advancing the Indian revolution. Instead of evaluating Mao on the yardstick of one’s own party line, it would be better if one’s own party line is judged by the yardstick of Mao’s thought. (p. 46) Manoranjan Mohanty is critical of the violent insurgency of India’s Maoist outfits, which contrasted sharply with other quasi-Maoist and far-left movements that used violence as a last resort. In contrast, the Maoist movement in Nepal is, he states, equal to or, perhaps, better than Maoist movements in China and Cuba, and those that led to the Bolshevik revolution. An established academic and authority on the history of the Maoist movement in India, Mohanty suggests a development model of inclusiveness and growth: Globalisation has come up with a model of self-reliant economy; there are concrete issues of class, caste, ethnicity,

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gender. Then forces of globalization have gone deep into the countryside. Therefore it is necessary for Maoists to come up with policies and specifications. (p. 70) Kameshwar Baitha, a follower of Charu Mazumdar, is a supporter of the parliamentary system, which he believes is the only system capable of affecting development beyond the superficial level, and rejects violence. Baitha is India’s first elected CPI (ML) Member of Parliament, a status which he believes was more influential towards making policy changes than armed insurgency. Mazumdar’s account is at once a recollection of his early years and of the looming influence of his father, and also a rousing, and personal, commentary on history and ideology.

Vara Vara Rao is a popular communist and Maoist sympathiser from Andhra Pradesh who contends that governments tend to be repressive and deny negotiations. For Rao, the largest impediment towards a truly democratic India is the government’s unwillingness to lend an ear to opposing ideologies. Rao is a supporter of the armed struggle model, interpreting Marx’s ‘force’ as ‘the mid-wife of revolution’ to mean the universality of the armed path. For Rao, violence too is a prerogative of peace, in a more exclusive sense than one that is homogeneously applicable. He states: “It is not always violent; it is peaceful violence. You always try to use peaceful violence but once that is obstructed, you have to resort to arms” (p. 187).

Binayak Sen, a physician and human rights activist who was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of sedition in 2010, and granted bail in 2011 by the Supreme Court of India, comments on the ground reality of the Maoist movement. Sen reflects on the massive public outcry that followed his sentencing, as well as on the optimism he shares for the human rights situation in the country: “There is a confrontation; I think there is a fascist streak going through our society today and in response to that, there is a course of resistance and justice that is developing” (146-47). Sen’s words ring with more certainty than ever given the present political scenario in India.

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The veteran Nepalese Maoist politician, Prachanda, views Maoism as the only path that could absolve monarchy and its residual effects. However, he moves beyond the Marxist ideological paradigms to endorse ‘pragmatism,’ favouring an ideology that is more practical, applicable to, and appropriate for Nepal’s social situation. His view contradicts Maoist ideology, which favours a unified party-line ideology. Prachanda’s concepts often conflict with the general ideological position of the Maoists, but he does succeed in presenting a concept of Nepalese Maoism that is distinct from its more prominent Indian counterpart. He proposes a forward-looking strategy for the development of South Asian Maoism: [S]trategically, we will have to develop a new line on how to coordinate with each other; all the progressive, leftist and communist forces should come together to understand the dynamics of change that is going on all over the world.

Without understanding or synthesizing all the old experiences, the so-called globalization and liberalization, it will be difficult to fulfil the historical task of South Asian communists. (p. 170) Baburam Bhattarai, the 36th Prime Minister of Nepal and a Jawaharlal Nehru University alumnus, recollects his early days of activism at JNU and the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture.

Commenting on the phase-shift in Maoism in Nepal and the method that Nepalese Maoism has evolved into, Bhattarai, echoing Prachanda’s vision, remarks: “The basic cause of Marxist-Maoist revolution will remain valid but the method of struggle itself would change. It varies from country to country” (182). On the question of the violent tactics of armed struggle, Bhattarai’s views are quite similar to those shared

by Vara Vara Rao: The idea is to bring about transformation, [to] move towards a higher stage of development of society—that is the revolution.

It is not always violent; it is peaceful violence. You always try to use peaceful means, but once that is obstructed, you have to resort to arms. (p. 187-88)

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Within journalistic circles, Anand Swaroop Verma is one of the most authoritative voices on the Maoist insurgency in India and Nepal. Highly active as a reporter during the formative years of the armed struggle, Verma’s statements describe how the Nepalese Maoist movement has often been unable to follow its own doctrines. He decries the clarity associated with the poll in Nepal. His views are more factual than ideological, and warrant a much more analytical reading than the other commentaries which stem from some ideological position or the other within the Marxist-Maoist fold.

The emphasis of the interviewees is largely on ideology, a remnant of the Party-line thinking that borrows its genealogy from Lenin, Mao, and Stalin. This approach obligates the commenters, and Bhushan himself, to skirt the ground reality of contemporary Maoism in favour of a historicist approach. The approach is itself a contradiction to Bhushan’s claim that the work is one of oral historiography, as the interviews do not constitute the entirety of the numerous strata that comprise the Maoist reality. Also, viewed from a subaltern studies perspective, the historiographic account here seems inadequate to properly demarcate the layers of realities across the two countries and their experience with Maoism. The overlapping commentaries of Maoist practitioners, ideologues, and scholars make it difficult to view the book as charting a timeline of continued research. Despite its seeming inadequacies as a source of research into the Maoist presence in India and Nepal, Bhushan’s book cannot be dismissed. It articulates how Maoist ideologues and observers view the movement, and produces several concepts that illustrate the differences between these observations.

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Sikkim © Sandeep Banerjee

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‘Amma’ and Budhan Theatre Dakxin Bajrange On 21 August 2016, the body of Mahasweta Devi, “Amma” of the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, was interred at Adivasi Academy, Tejgadh – a place that is blessed by her. Looking to the future as she plannned her death, she had expressed the wish to be buried in Tejgadh a few years earlier. Here is a translation of a conversation between Amma and Dr. Ganesh Devi Sir that I recorded, which was published on 28 July 2016 by Matrubhumi, a newspaper in Kerala, and then Himal Magazine on 22 August 2016.

Amma in disappointment, “What does our country do? Nothing.

Nobody got anything after our Independence. Nothing.”

“What do you think about death?” Sir asks Amma out of the blue.

“What?” she remarks.

“What do you think about death? Is it tragic, or is it the logical conclusion.”

“No no... it’s a logical event,” Amma responds.

“I do also believe so,” Sir says.

“What happens after death?” he says, posing another conundrum.

“As far as I am concerned, I want to live forever. I will live through my writings. After my death. That’s why I have asked you not to cremate me. I have no belief in being cremated and turned to ashes. I want to be somewhere. I would love to be buried in Purulia, but they are such old-fashioned Hindus, that they won’t allow it. So, Tejgadh is the best option for me and I feel I should be buried here. What I want is for a Mahua tree to be planted above me. I nurse an affection for the Mahua… the tree will help me survive” says Amma, making her intentions clear.

“Extraordinary,” quips Dr. Devy.

“Is it extraordinary?” Amma counters. She expatiates, “No, it’s not like that. You can’t go into the river; the earth is the ultimate giver and receiver. Let the earth receive us, keep and eat us,” says Amma.

“But I want to flow... I like to flow,” responds Dr. Devy.

“Arre...I know, while flowing, fish will eat you but if you are buried, insects will also eat you and you will be become nutritious fertiliser.

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There will be organic farming on us, this is good, na?” Amma jokes.

Amma did not want to die. She wanted to live forever. Even after death, she wanted to dedicate her body to the earth mother. She wished that on the Mahua tree, which will be planted on her asthis, birds will come, they will play, and eat its fruits. Adivasis will come, take the Mahua flowers and will make daru (flower alcohol) out of it, will eat the fruit and the tree will help them to survive. She had great affection for the Mahua tree.

Seeding A Revolution But she will live, not just through the Mahua tree that will hug the sky and the birds, or her writings; she will live in my memory and of others. When I saw Mahasweta Devi for the first time in 1998, I was around 25 years old – a young man. She was seventy-two years old and full of energy, working for the invisible people – the most marginalized population of India called the De-notified Tribes. I heard the term “De-notified Tribe” for the first time from her, even though as a member of the Chhara tribe, I fell into this governmental category referring to those tribes who were listed as “criminal tribes” by the colonial authorities, and who, after India’s independence, were ‘de-notified,’ and their “born criminal” status rescinded. But these tribes continue to be ostracised socially, as people who are prone to criminality, and brutally repressed by the police and other state authorities. By talking to me about DNTs in other states, she planted a seed in my mind – there was work to be done, not only for my own community but DNTs across India.

For me, she has been instrumental in changing not just my life but of DNTs across India, through something called Budhan Theatre, which spawned a whole movement. The journey of community theatre in India, which parallels Budhan Theatre’s history, began, in a proper sense, in 1998. Tribal activist and literary critique Ganesh Devy and Mahasweta Devi started a small community library with the help of the community’s youth. Meanwhile, the judgment from the Calcutta High Court about the killing of Budhan Sabar appeared in the

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inaugural issue of the quarterly magazine called Budhan, which also sought to memorialize the death of this innocent tribal. Budhan was a person who belonged to the Sabar de-notified tribe of West Bengal and was brutally beaten up by police officials and then sent to judicial custody, where he died due to severe injuries to the head and chest.

The judgment came, soon after, that since Budhan Sabar had been brutally beaten up in police custody, this beating was the cause of his death. The police officers involved were suspended and compensation was awarded to the widow of Budhan Sabar. This judgment was remarkable because for the first time people from de-notified tribes felt they could trust the Indian judiciary.

The community’s youth, with the encouragement of Amma and Dr. Devy, came together in the small library and started rehearsing.

They adopted the street theatre format, and from among the participants, I was assigned to write the play. Budhan’s brutal killing and my community’s daily encounter with the legal system and the judiciary were similar. To pen the incidents related to Budhan Sabar was similar to writing down my daily observations of what I faced and the stories of discrimination told by our parents and elders. We were not financially sound; so we had no money for props, lights, costumes, make-up, or even space, really, to stage a play. We only had our bodies and voices to express Budhan’s killing and describe our daily encounters with the legal system and the judiciary.

Grotowski, the Polish experimental theatre director and theorist, explained the nature of ‘poor theatre,’ a form in which there is receptivity to a state of poverty in theatre, an uncovered all, which, indispensable to the format, exposes us not only to the backbone of theatre, but also the deep richness of the art form. Unknowingly, we were following the Grotowskian idea of ‘poor theatre’ against that of ‘synthetic theatre,’ which includes “literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, lighting, and acting (under the direction of a metteuren-scene)”– all things Grotowski deemed “nonsense.” He suggests avoiding a “bag of tricks” and instead using “trance techniques” during a performance, by “ripening” or seasoning the actor. This process unfolds when the actor expresses a tension stretching to the extreme,

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a complete “stripping down,” laying bare of one’s own intimate self. He writes: “Can the theatre exist without costumes and sets? Yes, it can.

Can it exist without music to accompany the plot? Yes. Can it exist without lighting effects? Of course.

And without a text? Yes. The history of the theatre confirms this.

But without the Actor, it doesn’t. It can’t.”

Reading this, we realized we were actors with only our bodies to express our historical stigmatisation – this, after all, was the situation that had caused Budhan’s death.

For the first time, the Chhara youth had the medium to express their views on social and political issues, and a non-violent weapon to resist the state and to ask for their constitutional rights. Punished once by the past, and twice by the people who unkindly keep in mind their manufactured history, Chhara youth are, even today, looking for a way to break free from the inhuman circle of a criminalized identity. The play therefore becomes even more significant when, at the end, the Chhara actors ask the audience thrice in a chorus “are we second class citizens?” and then assert their appeal: “we want respect!”

“Are we second class citizens?” This statement reflects perfectly the tyranny experienced by the DNTs that Mahasweta Devi witnessed, meeting the many such communities across India. She worked tirelessly, travelling to negotiate with government bodies, filing police cases for atrocities against DNTs in Maharashtra and West Bengal, and speaking at numerous public forums to inspire thousands to work on the DNT issue. When she spoke about DNTs, she sounded like an ‘Amma’ who was fighting for her children’s rights. For this reason the people began to call her “Amma” – a mother of not just 1084 but of 60 million people of the country.

In 1999, I wrote and directed a play based on the fake encounter case of Deepak Pawar, a Pardhi man, who was killed by Maharashtra police in Solapur. Amma was invited by the staff of National Institute

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of Design to deliver a lecture and we were invited to perform in the institution. After watching the play, she called me in her room and told me, “Sit in my lap.” I hesitated, as she was too old to bear my weight.

“Come and sit,” she repeated.

I obeyed her and then, she kissed my forehead and told me: “use theatre as a weapon; your theatre has the power to disturb the consciousness of the spectator. Don’t leave. I am sure a day will come when Chharas will lead the DNT movement; they will be torchbearers for the rest of the oppressed communities. Also, bring RESISTANCE in your play, bring RESISTANCE from all over the country, from all over the world. RESISTANCE will give a healthy democratic structure to our country.”

Since then, I have never stopped. Budhan Theatre has performed more than 1000 shows across the country and initiated a dialogue around the question “Are we second class citizens?” – just as Amma had wanted. She had great faith in the revolutionary potential of Budhan Theatre.

Kolkata-based filmmaker Joshi Joseph was filming a documentary on her life and he came with her to Baroda. During the interview, he asked her about what she thought about Budhan Theatre. She said: “I have worked, I believe, with Denotified Tribes, for many years, and I never found such a strategic fight. Time makes us act right and Dakxin and all are following the time. They have education, exposure and they are city-based dwellers, so what they can do, others cannot.

Kolkata-based theatre practitioners like Badal Sircar and all, they are city-based theatrewaalas but Budhan theatrewalas are creating from their [own] experiences, so it is more powerful and political. What is best is, it is continuous work.” Today Budhan Theatre is not just a small community theatre; it has become a social movement of De-notified Tribes and Nomadic Tribes. Actors from the theatre group have become spokespeople and social leaders for the cause, leading the movement successfully.

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Theatre and Liberation Considering Budhan Theatre, I think, indirectly she wanted us to liberate people through theatre; bring out the anguish, the insults, the anger, but non-violently. Create the space in our heart to feel another’s pain and in doing so, develop social leadership that nurtured communities. When I analyse Budhan Theatre performances from this ‘liberation’ perspective, I feel theatre is an event, a process, a challenge, and an attempt to conjure change, whether it is social, political, economic or personal. No matter whether it is commercial or experimental theatre or proscenium or any other theatre form, this holds true. Psychologically, it is a soul-searching process for actors and spectators. Rustom Bharucha, the academic and cultural critic, insists that, “if theatre changes the world, nothing could be better, but let us also admit that this has not happened so far. It would be wiser (and less euphoric) if we accepted that it is possible to change our own lives through theatre.”

In theatre, to analyse social and political change is a complex process, but to analyse lives of personal change may be a less complex, exercise but as effective a weapon. We can see the evolution, the transformation/liberation processes in three ways: it is liberating actors, spaces and spectators. To analyse the actor’s liberation is simplest. Budhan Theatre actors were performing just because they were committed to social change but they were not aware of how exactly they would achieve such change through theatre. They were illiterate but they were enjoying performing their suffering. This was the first time they had a platform to express their pain and they found people had begun to listen to them. When they were confronting the audience asking for acceptance, simultaneously they were also confronting the self as a way of initiating a process of change within themselves. It is difficult to say how theatre helped them to bring about change within themselves, but it is also true that while practicing theatre they kept away from all illegal activities that were widespread within the community, such as brewing illicit liquor, consuming alcohol, and stealing.

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Despite negative responses from within the community, the youth were raising their voices against the internal issues that were crippling the community like child marriage, superstitions, the community council’s exploitative practices, domestic violence, and other things.

I think theatre empowered us to help change attitudes about the community but also within the community. Theatre fulfilled the Chhara’s inner emptiness and it was through theatre that they ripped off the colonial mask of historically-imposed criminality. They conceived of themselves as the nomad entertainers of the nineteenth century, who had only their bodies and voices to entertain the people on the streets, jungles, mountains and villages in India.

Theatre revived their traditional cultural art which, instead of being a livelihood, became a social and cultural movement of the DNTs for the social and political opportunity to live life with dignity.

‘Poor theatre’ is liberating space. The place where the Chharas lived was an infamous place stigmatised as a known hub of criminal activity. Yet, theatrical experiments brought people from various classes and various places to visit this infamous, isolated and unnoticed place. When Mahasweta Devi visited Charranagar for the first time in 1998, the local police were scared that she would be robbed if she entered our locality. Her celebrity meant that she was detained for nearly an hour to convince her to turn back. But she came to see us despite it all. We didn’t even know who she was at the time!

After she came, it seemed that the world had ‘discovered’ Charranagar. People from around the world converge in this place now, learning from the actors and teaching them by donating books and sharing their experiences. Police atrocities have also decreased and policemen have become members of the community library, occasionally visiting for discussions and events. Many of the community spaces that functioned as liquor and gambling dens were transformed into theatre spaces. Now people from schools, colleges, institutes and nearby communities watch plays at these former spaces of crime and delinquency.

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Thirdly, through performances, Budhan Theatre has created a movement built on the awareness about the atrocities DNT communities face across the country. It has created a parallel force of people who can speak for the Chhara community and other DNT communities. Budhan Theatre members are gaining influence among powerful people within the democratic political system and to perform real life suffering is becoming a form of social movement for the DNTs, by the DNTs and of the DNTs, which can, later, turn into a revolutionary fight for their constitutional rights. In this way, Budhan Theatre, clear about its aims to bring about a cultural revolution for DNTs, is quite in line with what Mahasweta Devi and Dr. Devy had envisioned. Amma’s planted seeds have now become trees capable of producing more seeds that will give justice to the DNTs of India.

Before death, Amma lived in Kolkata, West Bengal. After death, she is with us, in her blessed Adivasi Academy in Gujarat, to motivate us to bring as much resistance, knowledge, art, and literature from all over the world! She cannot die; she visited us and now will live forever, in her writing, in our inspirations, and in our creative actions‌

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Symmetry © Reda Berrada

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Contributors Dakxinkumar Bajrange is an award winning filmmaker, playwright, director, and activist from the Chhara De-notified Tribes. He is a recipient of the Ford Foundation International Fellowship and the Mahatma Gandhi Award for Best Creative Writing on Human Rights, given by the National Human Rights Commission of India. He has also received the Rajiv Gandhi Arts Fellowship and the Bhasha Fellowship to study art forms of the DNTs. He is artistic director at the Budhan Theatre, for which he has written and directed 11 plays, and supervised another 46 productions. As a filmmaker, he has directed 80 fiction and non-fiction films on various developmental and political issues of India. He is also a recipient of ‘Jeevika 2005’ South Asia Award for his film on Snake Charmers. His academic articles have appeared in number of national and international journals.

Sandeep Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of English at McGill University. His research focuses on South Asian literary and cultural texts from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as literary and social theory. It takes up questions of the production of space and nature, literary geography, nationalism, globalization, peripheral aesthetics, and the global history of the novel from a materialist perspective. His articles have been published (or are forthcoming) in journals such as Victorian Literature and Culture, Modern Asian Studies, Mediations, and in the edited volume, Cities in South Asia. He is currently working on two book projects: on the spatial dimension of Indian anti-colonial nationalism, and on the colonial production of the Himalayas and the literary imagination, the latter funded by a grant from the Fonds de recherché du Quebec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

Subho Basu is currently appointed as an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University.

After completing his PhD at Cambridge University, he worked as the Smuts Hinduja Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Universtiy of Cambridge. Simultaneously, he was elected a fellow of Wolfson College at Cambridge. In years following, he taught at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, School of Oriental and

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African Studies, the University of London, and Illinois State University. He co-edited with Suranjan Das Electoral Politics in South Asia and the Oxford University Press-SOAS Series has published his monograph, ‘Does Class Matter?’ His other works include a co-edited volume with Crispin Bates, Rethinking Indian Political Institutions, which has been recently published by Anthem Press, London. With noted political scientists Ali Riaz, Basu co-authored Paradise Lost: State Failure in Nepal. Subho Basu is currently working on two projects related to the construction of space, race, gender, and nationalism, and the popular movements of 1967.

Reda Berrada graduated from McGill University with his Bachelors in Engineering in 2015. He is interested in Mughal history, Islamic architecture, Urdu poetry, photography. Reda will be rejoining McGill in Fall 2017 to pursue his Masters in Islamic Studies.

Subashish Bhattacharjee is a UGC-Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His book reviews have appeared in journals such as Society and Culture in South Asia (SAGE), Transnational Literatures (Flinders University), dialog (Panjab University), and Muse India among others.

Mehr Afshan Farooqi is Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia. She works on Urdu literature and culture with a deep interest in bilingualism. She has published The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature in two volumes (2008); The Postcolonial Mind: Urdu Culture, Islam and Modernity in Muhammad Hasan Askari (2012); The Two-Sided Canvas, Perspectives on Ahmed Ali (2013) and numerous articles on the development of Urdu prose and Urdu literary criticism. She is currently writing a textual history of Ghalib.

Abhinava Goswami is an MPhil candidate in History at Ambedkar University, Delhi, India.

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Liam Mather is a U3 Honours History student from Toronto. He enjoys following international politics, watching hockey, and listening to Bruce Springsteen. He also strongly recommends any history course taught by Professor Gwyn Campbell.

Mahnoor Malik is a Pakistani-American photographer whose work has been published in various media outlets around the world, including Tribune Magazine (The New York Times). Mahnoor is currently based in Montreal and Rome. Her work is available at www.mhmalik.com and on instagram: @mh_malik.

Matthew Rettino graduated with an MA in English Literature from McGill University in 2016. His Master’s thesis was entitled “Fantasy as a Peripheral Modernism: Uneven Development in Charles de Lint’s Urban Fantasy,” a project that earned him a SSHRC grant. He serves as a managing editor for Scrivener Creative Review, teaches English as a second language, and writes Weird Fiction.

Zahra Sabri is a doctoral student at McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies, with an MA in South Asian Studies from Columbia. Her most recent published research was on the Mughal poet Mir Taqi Mir’s hagiographical/historiographical writing. She is a course lecturer in Urdu language at McGill, and has taught Urdu literature and IndoIslamic history at the Aga Khan University and the University of Karachi. She also works as a literary translator for a variety of forums, including the music programme Coke Studio, Pakistan.

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