[Part 3 of 6]

I hate all armies. Yours, mine—all armies.

-Muhammad Zinnatul Alam, the lone survivor of the Thanpara massacre.¹

The main focus of Sarmila Bose’s much talked about book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is the civil war in East Pakistan, and not the international war between India and Pakistan or the Cold War context of the conflict, though they are not completely ignored. Her stated aims are to study and scrutinize how the war of 1971 is remembered, perhaps to illuminate what is willingly forgotten. Growing up in West Bengal, India, Sarmila Bose was familiar with a particular narrative about the conflict: “Our Bengali brethren …once again fight for freedom” from their fellow countrymen from West Pakistan, who “seemed for some inexplicable reason intent on killing them all.” India had played the role of “white knight to the beleaguered Bangladeshis.” The latter claim she deftly dismantles.² During her research, realizing that something was off, she militated against this narrative (and her Bengali informants). As Naeem Mohaiemen points out in his incisive review of her book, “her fury was of the naïf making a late discovery. What animates Dead Reckoning therefore is that palpable rage.” Having grown up with my own nationalist blinders, I empathize with the rage that comes with the realization that one has let oneself be duped. But Bose’s research and her book, perhaps still guided by the force of the nationalist narratives, “goes so far to the other side as to create a new set of biases, even more problematic.”³

Bose makes much of her neutrality, balance, and objectivity, and so do the Pakistan Army officers she interviewed and some of the Pakistani reviewers of her book. She writes that “it would be impossible to humanize the conflict without emotional empathy for the subject,” but her empathy seems to be reserved only for the Pakistan Army and the victims of pro-liberation Bengalis. The Bangladeshi voices that she presents either exonerate the Pakistan Army of Bangladeshi allegations of wrongdoing or expose the lies in Bangladeshi national narrative. Of course, not all allegations would be correct and there are fabrications and lies in epics of nationalism. It is her lax critical standards in accepting her Pakistani sources with which to debunk them, and her constant and consistent berating of her Bangladeshi subjects, that cast a cloud of doubt on her scholarly enterprise.

Reserving others’ voices for making the most objectionable assertions about Bengalis, Bose deploys two Bengali voices to note something seemingly inherent or innate to Bangladeshis. “The Bengalis are noted for a negative and destructive attitude […] they also have a tendency to put the blame on others” says one. The second voice chimes in, “in this attitude I see a similarity in all Bengalis […] to court suffering in order to nurse self-pity by way of emotional satisfaction.” This bizarre passage reflects a pattern in her book: hammering Bangladeshi “attitude” and culture of victimhood, their penchant for complaining too much (and that too using the wrong statistics!),  and a tendency to exaggerate. All of this is presented without the objective scholar dwelling over the injustices meted out by West Pakistan on the East. One of her many assertions that clearly demonstrates her decontextualized reading of events, lack of empathy for Bengalis, and uncritical acceptance of Pakistani sources, is her approving mention of a Pakistan Army official who took part in the abysmal, late, and bungled effort at providing relief to those affected by the Bhola cyclone in 1970 – one that killed, displaced, and affected hundreds of thousands. The aforesaid officer, Lt Gen. Ghulam Mustafa, notes that “even as they [the Pakistan Army] worked, Bengalis watched from the sidelines and complained that nothing was being done.” That this delay in and mismanagement of relief emblematized (West) Pakistan’s attitude and lack of sympathy for its citizens in the East, and is, in fact, in line with how East Pakistan was marginalized from the get-go, is not commented upon.

With respect to Bangladeshi history’s singular focus on exploitation by West Pakistan in the pre-liberation era, and colonialism being the only language with which to remember the Pakistan period, Yasmin Saikia, in her book, Women, War, and the making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, offers a valuable insight. She writes that “the intimacy of the Other (Pakistan and Pakistanis) as well as the fear of remembering so engulfs the Bangladeshis today that they have willfully lost the segment of pre-1971 history.” This insightful and sympathetic reading of a silence is contrasted by Bose’s denial of Pakistan’s colonial relationship with East Bengal by a reasoning that suggests that Bangladeshis’ perceived grievances were due to its historically being an economic backwater and not because of systematically sustained inequality. The disparity between Bengalis and others in government and military jobs, in Bose’s reckoning is different from discrimination, which she defines as lack/denial of equal opportunity. The state’s privileging of Urdu, its machinery being disproportionately manned by West Pakistanis, or the racist attitude of the West Pakistani elites and civil society towards Bengalis who were considered not Pakistani enough, had, it seems, nothing to do with the disparity and Bengali grievances. A longer view of history is conveniently outside of the time line of her project, but if that is the case, why resort to essentialisms of Bengladeshi attitudes, calling it a culture of complaint, exaggerations, and victimhood, or characterizing Bangladeshis as “a swarm of [angry/excited] honey bees?” Divorced from the power relations between East and West Pakistan, the conclusions she draws stoop to charging Bangladeshis with innate violence (though chaotic and unorganized; you see, they can’t do anything right!), false bravado, and a penchant for lying, exaggerating, and complaining.

Bose gives scant attention to how the memory of the pre-1971 history shaped the events of 1971 and continues to shape how 1971 is remembered. She describes the demolition of Shahid Minar by the Pakistan Army as “a pointless waste of time and resources,” an act of vandalism “that added fuel to Bengali rage,” and finds “no military reason to demolish a memorial to the language movement of the 1950s.” But there was a point. The demolition of Shahid Minar [Martyr’s Tower] marked the commencement of the military operation–dubbed “Operation Searchlight”– to crush the budding Bengali uprising; an act of destruction that symbolized Pakistan’s attitude to Bengali history, and was a signal to the people of what is to come with the intended effect of demoralizing them. It is also the kind of move that almost always backfires, as it did in 1971. The Shahid Minar was a memorial to the Ekushey massacre; it commemorated a movement that lasted five years; and marked a milestone in the struggle of the people of East Pakistan against (West) Pakistan’s colonial exploitation, dominance, systemic discrimination, and mission civilisatrice. But deliberation on these contexts do not fit with Bose’s gleeful debunking crusade; and such a decontextualized reading of events produces distortions that pervade her book.

A League of Extraordinary Pakistani Gentlemen

Most of Bose’s Pakistani interviewees were retired Army officials. Initially she did not have much success, but with the efforts of her Pakistani and American friends she was able to get a foot in the door and impress her interviewees. The interviewees connected her with their fellow veterans of the 1971 war, and they thus formed the close-knit network of Pakistani Army officials that informed her and whose word she seldom seems to doubt or find flaws in. Bose’s focus on complicating the Bangladeshi national narrative at the cost of what amounts to legitimating a militarist Pakistani nationalism is unhelpful. This lack of concern for the official Pakistani narrative, and willed ignorance of Pakistan’s political history is captured in her laudatory remark about General Yahya Khan, the martial law administrator of Pakistan in 1971, being “the only military ruler who actually kept his word on returning the country to democracy one year after taking power.” No reflection is on offer regarding the fact that a defeated and discredited army had no legitimacy left to continue ruling a country that was in open revolt even in its Western wing since 1968.⁴ And as for the act of handing over power to democratic rule, C.M Naim’s words are worth bearing in mind:

Yahya Khan resigned, but in his last act helped perpetuate one-man rule and disregard for constitutional processes by transferring power not to the duly elected National Assembly but to Mr. Z. A. Bhutto, whom he personally appointed as Chief Martial Law Administrator.

Bose’s Pakistani interlocutors, these gentle military men, “unlike the Bangladeshi … had no hatred towards their former countrymen.” What she does not dwell on is how, in Yasmin Saikia’s words, “the rhetoric of Bengalis as brothers occupied the same space as the representation of them as ‘betrayers’ and ‘Indian-like,’ that is, the Other or ‘Hindu-like.’” On the other hand, having brushed aside the injustices of the Pakistan period and exalted the Pakistan Army’s conduct during the war, Bose contends that Bangladeshis have an unwarranted visceral hatred of the Pakistan Army which was created through Bangladeshi war-time propaganda. For the ethnicization of Bangladeshi society, she blames “political alchemists,” Bangladeshi nationalism, and Mujib’s “campaign of hatred.” (or is it the Bengalis’ innate penchant for excitement and violence?) What she does not comment upon is the dominant power, namely the Pakistan state, which produced not only this ethnicization through its racialized discourses, imperial practices, and colonial exploitation, but also the Bangladeshi nationalism with its own parochialisms, inequalities, and hatreds, in a dialectical opposition to it.

Jalal Alamgir and Bina D’Costa remind us that “a deeply racist agenda accompanied the war crimes,” and the East Pakistani population was considered “ethnically sub-par:” from Yahya Khan’s genocidal language (as reported by Asia Times: “Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands”⁵) to Ayub Khan’s racial language (“East Bengalis … probably belong to the very original Indian races … they have been and still are under considerable Hindu cultural and linguistic influence…they have all the inhibitions of downtrodden races”⁶), to Jinnah’s view of the Bangla Language Movement being a plan to break up Pakistan and absorb it back into the Indian Dominion by “our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there are still some Muslims.” C. M. Naim’s survey of the press coverage of 1971 shows that racialized othering was pervasive in the West Pakistani literate society, and that the charge of treason was “leveled…unequivocally against all the Hindus of East Bengal.” And indeed this should be noted, for the ire of the Pakistan Army fell most brutally on the Hindus of East Bengal who were deemed always already Indians or closet-Indians, and in any case, traitors working for and with India in weaving a secessionist conspiracy in East Pakistan. Bose too notes that during the 1971 war, “Hindu men appear to have been more likely to be presumed to be insurgents solely on the basis of their religion.” This othering and racialized language was pervasive in the officer cadre as well. Oldenburg mentions Salik’s book Witness to Surrender, where he writes about officers chatting in the Officer’s Mess on the afternoon of March 26, 1971 and one Captain Chaudhury says, “The Bengalis have been sorted out well and proper—at least for a generation.” One Major Malik chimes in with the familiar colonial bile “Yes, they only know the language of force. Their history says so.”⁷

The Language of Force

The Pakistanis believed that the war would be quickly won as Bengalis being “weak and unmartial, and cowardly” would quit their rebellion. This “myth of power” over Bengalis held sway over rank and file Pakistani soldiers, whose ignorance about Bengali society, language, people and even body language, and the martial “manliness of bravado” made for a destructive brew. At checkpoints, young Bengali men were forced to remove their lungis [sarongs] in front of their elderly and womenfolk to see whether they were circumcised and thus Muslim. One can imagine what befell those that failed this racialized test of religion so familiar to South Asian history.

General Niazi, whom Bose notes as a dissenter (perhaps to maintain her self-perception of being “balanced” or whatnot), did not object to the war or Pakistan’s military action but that “it should have been conducted differently:” “instead of wholesale attack, the rebels’ so-called strong points might have been smoked out …” She documents one ‘smoking out’ attempted at Jinjira where a blockade was set up to encounter the rebels as they escaped the assault from the other direction, but, “what they had not expected, however, was when the firing started, the civilians started to run as well.” (How easy it seems to be able to place people in one’s own categories of choice: civilians or rebels. What about rebel-civilian or civilian-rebel?) Then, she takes her informer on his word that the kind soldiers fired over civilians’ heads only to induce them to run in the direction of the assault. This she explains with the fog of war argument whereby soldiers have to make split second and difficult decisions, and bad things happen, and that can’t be helped. She does not entertain the possibility that the Pakistanis did not expect the civilians to escape the assault from one direction into the line of fire from the other because the civilians either did not enter the inhuman calculus of war; or were considered fair game or “collateral damage,” in today’s parlance, whose lives didn’t matter enough to merit a change of course; or perhaps the population were considered the support system of rebels or future/potential insurgents and thus, being a “terrorist population,” a legitimate target.

This “smoking out” is evident literally in another incident Bose discusses wherein during the assault on Dhaka, Pakistani soldiers set fire to a slum by throwing ‘a powder-like substance’ on the slum and then firing on it (this burning down of dwellings seems to be a widely used tactic by Pakistan army as Bose mentions it in many incidents but without much deliberation and reflection on its systematic use) and shot at people as they fled the inferno. Bose notes this incident rather briefly as an example of the discord within Pakistan army on the level of rank and file soldiers that she quickly counters with the example of Pakistani soldiers giving water to a survivor of an attempted execution earlier by another set of Pakistani soldiers. You see, there were bad soldiers but there were good soldiers too, hence the Pakistan Army’s conduct cannot be denounced as all bad by people whose villages were burned to the ground, their men lined up and shot, their women raped. Even when Bose mentions that after the assault on a village called Satiachora on the road to Tangail from Dhaka, soldiers, “some half a dozen” bad apples as she would have it, “went hut to hut in the village, setting them on fire and killing anything that moved,” she ensures that the reader is left with the silver lining that “the soldiers did not harm women in anyway.”

Bose presents a superb reconstruction of the massacre at Thanpara, a village on the India-East Pakistan border remembered as ‘the village of widows.’ She tells the story of Pakistan army’s horrendous massacre where all the men whom the commanding officer deemed Indians and/or Hindus (always already assumed to be Indians and Indian agents), were “rounded up together and shot. Their bodies were stacked in a pile and set alight.” The in-coming Pakistani soldiers were on foot, and proceeded “through the villages along the side of the road, destroying everything they came across,” burning villages with a substance that set huts on fire when they shot. Bose mentions General Mitha, (for the second time as “the legendary founder of the Special Services Group (SSG) of commandos in the Pakistan army”) who saw from air that ‘‘in many of the villages near the road, almost all the huts were burnt and there was not a soul in these villages.” (One wonders what became of the unharmed women and children.) She masterfully teases out how the commanding officer was playing god not only when he shot all the Bengali men in batches with the subsequent batch stacking up and setting fire to the previous before being shot, but more so when he spared a young boy’s life whom the officer did not believe to be a Bengali. After the massacre of the first batch of men, the captain took the second batch back to the academy where they were shot. (The survivor recalled that the Captain’s higher officials thanked the Captain for having done a good job.) Bose mentions the soldier who helped the boy get a pardon and that some soldiers had tears rolling down their cheeks as the massacre unfolded. That may be, and there is much good in representations that humanize soldiers, but what needs to be highlighted is the fact that they still went along and assisted in the cruelty that so troubles them, moves them to tears, and, at least in some cases, haunts them for the rest of their lives. One explanation for that may be the militarist nationalism that idolizes the military and puts the defense of a nation—always deemed under siege from enemies without and within— at the forefront of national self-hood. Another explanation is the very institution of military that has at its core obedience, hierarchy, and killing which is writ large when it is unrestrained by public scrutiny and accountability.

What is unforgivable, however, is Bose’s pointing out the “eerie similarity between what happened in Thanpara and the military action in Dhaka university a couple of weeks before, in the way a few villagers were kept in reserve to stack the dead bodies before being lined up and shot next to the corpses they had just been made to carry,” and then in the same paragraph falling back to the “few bad apples” apologia as she gently chides the Pakistan military to hold those “one or two companies of a single regiment” to account, that have brought ill repute to “an entire army” and “a whole nation.” (A comparison with her vicious denunciations of the lack of accounting of the pro-Bangladesh perpetrators of violence and the Bangladeshi national denial of its own atrocities is instructive.)

Bose states that due to the small number of Pakistani troops in East Pakistan, “many young officers were left to shoulder responsibilities, in terms of territory or decision-making, that they never would have had to bear in peace-time or conventional wars.” These young officers would include those that played god in the Bangladeshi countryside and urban areas, and the likes of the aforementioned Captain Chaudhurys and Major Maliks of Pakistan Army celebrating the ‘sorting out’ of the Bengalis. If the absence of any accountability on the part of Pakistani state and military of its conduct in East Pakistan is not sufficient evidence of indifference to and a systemic legitimation of indiscriminate violence, then, short of some master document sanctioning a general and wonton attack on the populace, one is left to wonder what is.

1. Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, Columbia University Press, June, 2011, p97
2. For India’s role in exacerbating the conflict, see Eqbal Ahmad, ‘Notes on South Asia in Crisis,’ Bulletin of Concern Asian Scholars, Winter, 1972. Available online at http://www.bitsonline.net/eqbal/articles_by_eqbal_view_9C3140B3.htm
3. Naeem Mohaiemen, “Flying Blind: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971,” Economic & Political Weekly, vol xlvi no 36, September 3, 2011.
4. “In truth, the threat to the Army’s predominance has always come from its own people. The only time the old Pakistan was genuinely united was during the 1969 uprising from below that saw students and workers in Dhaka and Karachi, Chittagong and Lahore, topple the dictatorship of Field Marshal Ayub Khan. The Army never forgave its Bengali citizens this act of treachery, and embarked on a bloodbath when they proceeded to elect the leaders of their choice. It is worth stressing the point, glossed over in so many recent accounts, that the Army which demands such vast sums to preserve the state actually provoked its break-up in 1971.” Tariq Ali, “The Colour Khaki,” New Left Review, January – February 2003. http://newleftreview.org/A2429
5. Quoted in Jalal Alamgir, Bina D’Costa “The 1971 Genocide: War Crimes and Political Crimes,” Economic & Political Weekly, 2011 vol xlvi no 13, March 26, 2011.
6. Quoted in Philip Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Aug., 1985), pp. 711-733.
7. Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971,” 1985.

[Part 2 of 6]

Painted on a wall inside my old school.

 Translation: The Ideology of Pakistan: Every nation has a specific civilization and culture. The civilizational and cultural capital of the Muslims of the Subcontinent comes from Islam. This capital, their beliefs and religious rituals, mannerisms, religious and historical literature, literary and technological research, is preserved in their literature and philosophy. On this basis, the Muslims of the Indo-Pak Subcontinent understand themselves to be a separate nation. This was also the reason why two societies, that is, the Hindu society and the Muslim society, came into being in the Subcontinent. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Allama Muhammad Iqbal stressed that Muslims are not a a faction but a separate nation. When with the beautiful efforts of these elders, Muslims came to believe firmly that Congress, established by an Englishman Allen Hume, is an anti-Muslim Hindu organization, they put forth a demand for a separate homeland for themselves. Foundational Principles of the Ideology of Pakistan: 1. The Muslims of the Subcontinent constitute one nation. 2. The Muslims will live freely in accordance with the eternal principles of Islam. 3. The Muslims of the Subcontinent need a free country to retain/maintain their separate/distinct national existence, so that they can make religious, societal, political, cultural, and economic progress. Truth is weary of bodies without soul / The living God is the God of the living.

Bengal played a crucial role in the Pakistan movement, but within a little over two decades after the creation of Pakistan, a political movement with broad popular support in East Bengal turned secessionist and sounded the death knell for the State of Pakistan as it had existed. This parting of ways of the erstwhile East and West Pakistan, as Philip Oldenburg has persuasively argued, “cannot be called inevitable unless one considers forces centered in West Pakistan which pushed the country apart.” Different conceptions and models of the state animated ideas of Pakistan in the two so-called wings of Pakistan. The West Pakistani model of the state, in Philip Oldenburg’s words, “saw the state of Pakistan as inseparable from the Muslim nation of the Indian subcontinent, a nation locked in combat with the Hindus,” and Urdu formed a central plank of this narrative. To the East Pakistanis/Bengalis, the creation of Pakistan meant the escape of the majority from the economic, intellectual/educational, and political domination of Hindus. The fact that Muhajir and Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan imposed its own vision of the state of Pakistan on East Pakistan to the detriment of all other visions is central to the making of the second partition.¹

East Pakistan/East Bengal had more than half of the population of Pakistan, was demographically its largest province, and had a vibrant history of activism and political awareness. The Muslim League and the West Pakistani elites construed Bengal as a threat, since in a democracy, Bengal would have dominated Pakistani politics. “The Muslim League thus tried its best to contain East Bengal and deny its rightful representation in the nation-state both at a symbolic level (in the ‘imagined community’ of the nation) and at the level of the state (that is, political representation, recruitment into the bureaucracy and the military, and access to economic resources),” writes Saadia Toor, in her book, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Jinnah had re-organized the Muslim League into a centralized political party, and the centralizing drive of Jinnah’s leadership continued and cemented his control over both the party and state after independence with, among other things, his retention of the colonial office of Governor General, and abandonment of the idea of a federal state with a weak center and strong provinces. The vertically integrated and centralized state structure—one that did not include many Bengalis at higher echelons– involved unification of the civil services under its aegis and a highly powerful civil and military bureaucracy that acted as the shadow government of Pakistan at the expense of elected officials. Through this vertical integration of the State and the non-representation of Bengalis in the center, what was set in motion was a clash between a Bengali middle class seeking equal representation and, in Toor’s words, “an increasingly fascist ruling party at the center dominated by not just the (predominantly Punjabi and Muhajir) West Pakistani ruling elite but also the Bengali Ashraf.”

The earlier Hindu-Urdu language controversy informed the stubbornness with which Bengali linguistic demands were met. The Hindi-Urdu controversy, Toor writes, “had resulted in the breaking up of the shared and syncretic literary tradition represented by a single language (Urdu/Hindustani) into (Muslim) Urdu and (Hindu) Hindi under pressure from Hindu nationalist forces.” Thus Urdu had become a cornerstone of the ethnic nationalism of the North Indian Muslims whose “ideology of Muslim nationalism […] underpinned the demand for Pakistan.” Urdu’s stature in the Muslim nationalist narrative had become even more heightened due to the fact that many of the landmark monuments of the Indo-Islamic history, on the basis of which the separate nation-hood of Indian Muslims was asserted, were now in the state of India. The declining status of Urdu in the Post-Independence India further exacerbated the sense of siege that proponents of Urdu felt, and Hindi being declared the national language of India prompted Urdu’s proponents in Pakistan to harden their stance for Urdu as Pakistan’s national language. Last but not the least, the Bangla-Urdu language controversy heightened anxieties of Muslim nationalists of the geographically non-contiguous “wings” of Pakistan that perhaps there was also a cultural non-contiguity.

With Bangla not appearing on coins, stamps, and official forms, the status of Bangla language became a contentious issue almost immediately after the creation of the state of Pakistan. The demand that Bangla be the national language was buttressed by the fact that a majority of Pakistanis spoke Bangla, albeit mostly in East Pakistan, while Urdu was the first language of just 5 percent of Pakistanis, whatever the claims of the latter being a lingua franca of Indian Muslims and central to their cultural identity. However, in November 1947 Urdu was proposed as the medium of instruction and recommended as the national language in the National Education Conference. Even when Urdu’s use as the medium of education was left to the discretion of provincial governments, thanks to the strong opposition of the Bengali participants, the federal Minister of Education continued to make statements that Urdu should be the national language of Pakistan. On December 5^th 1947, a street demonstration protested the conference. The State responded by invoking the very colonial-era law prohibiting public assembly that Bengalis had fought against on the road to decolonization. The resulting clash between the protesters and the Police only fueled Bengali resentment towards the Muslim League government.

The East Bengal Language Committee (EBLC) was set up in 1949 to pursue the possibility of writing Bangla in the Arabic script to make it more of an “Islamic language.” This would purge it of its Hindi influence and help it to shed its Sanskrit past, thus bringing it “into harmony and accord with the genius and culture of the people of East Bangal in particular and Pakistan in general.” (EBLC, 1949:2) The committee, despite its retrograde assertions of Bangla being a non-Muslim language, did not agree to the proposed change to Urdu script. But this was too little, too late, and did not allay the popular Bengali fear that the state will impose Urdu on them. In the aftermath of the massacre of tens of protestors on February 21, 1952, remembered as Ekushey, the government did declare Bangla as the second national language, but the West Pakistani elite’s anxieties over Bengal’s demographic majority remained and would lead to the declaration of emergency rule and the unification of West Pakistan into one administrative unit by executive order.

The Bangla script and vocabulary was seen to be too close to Sanskrit and therefore Hinduism. This was consistent with the West Pakistani view that Bengalis were ‘Hindu-like’ and under the influence of Hindus. This identification of Bengalis and Bengali culture with Hindus, Hinduism, and thus with India, became the reigning paradigm with which all things Bengali would be considered. As Toor shows, two tropes were deployed to conceptualize and represent East Pakistan: East Bangal as a problem province rife with Hindus and Communist subversives working to destroy Muslim Pakistan; and Bengali culture, language, and people as ‘Hindu-like’ and under heavy influence of Hinduism, and therefore, not Pakistani enough. As Raj Kumar Chakravarti, a Hindu Congressman from East Bangal noted in a 1952 Constituent Assembly Debate, “whenever there is trouble in Pakistan, it is attributed by the people to ‘the enemies of the State’ and, by insinuations, the Hindus are regarded as these enemies.” The paranoia about Indians “dressed differently” crossing into East Bengal to sow discord had manifested into scapegoating. As Toor puts it, “This chain of significance (dressed ‘differently’ = Hindu = Indian) also relied on and reinforced the idea that to be a Hindu was not to be Pakistani.” Toor quotes Shri Dhirendra Natth Dutta, an opposition member of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, whose complaint to the Speaker of the House captures the deleterious impact of the aforesaid state discourses: “If we put on Loongi, poor Muslim clothes in Eastern Bengal, it is said we disguise ourselves. If we put on Dhoti then it is said that we have come from West Bengal. There is such a sense of mistrust and this has been engineered under the Government of Pakistan.”

Jinnah himself was, of course, one of the sources and proponent of this paradigm, as is evident from his March 1948 address in Dhaka on his first official tour to the province in the wake of the initial agitations of the Bengali Language Movement, wherein he terms the proponents of Bangla language to be “enemies of Pakistan” and thus seditious: “Let me make it clear to you that the State language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan.”²

Three days later Jinnah would go on to affirm Urdu as the language that “embodies the best that is in Islamic culture and Muslim tradition and is nearest to the language used in other Islamic countries.” He also located the demand for Bengali language rights in the infamous “foreign hand.” In Jinnah’s words, “Our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there are still Muslims, have set about actively encouraging provincialism in the hope of weakening Pakistan, and thereby facilitating the re-absorption of this province into the Indian Dominion.” […] “[T]he recent language controversy … is only one of the many subtle ways whereby the position of provincialism is being sedulously injected into this province.” In short, the Bengali demands were not genuine but were the nefarious handy work of “our enemies” whose ranks were peopled mostly by Hindus. The Bangla Language Movement, in this view, was a Hindu/Indian conspiracy.

The colonial/Orientalist historiography at the heart of the two nation theory that posited Muslims and Hindus of India as not only historically separate and distinct, but also fundamentally different, is manifest in Jinnah’s conflations: Bengal’s Hindus (“Our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there are still Muslims”) with Indians (“position of provincialism is being sedulously injected into this province”), Urdu language with Islamic culture, any attempts to dislodge Urdu’s dominance as sedition to the nation at the behest of the Hindu enemy across the border. These conflations will burst forth in all their murderous glory in 1971 with the genocidal attack on Hindus and ‘Hindu-like’ Bengalis.

1. Philip Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Aug., 1985), pp. 711-733.
2. Quoted in Oldenburg, 1985.

[Part 1 of 6]

Forgetting is imposed as a strategy to hide the haunting memories that cannot be revealed without destroying our romance with nationalism.

~Yasmin Saikia

During the many blackouts and power outages in the Pakistan of my childhood, my family used to sit in the veranda of our home cursing the electricity department and cooling ourselves down with hand-fans. But on cool autumn nights, blackouts were rather enjoyable, and we would ask Ammi to sing. ‘Aa ja sanam, madhur chandni mein hum,’ a Raj kapoor and Nargis number, apt for a moonlit night in the veranda, was her favorite. That was also the song that she and her favorite nephew (her eldest brother’s first son) used to sing at Eid dinners as a duet. The whole family adored him. He was brilliant and a high achiever. Every kid in the family, to this day, is compared to him: Those that do well in their studies are likened to him and those that don’t are chided to try to be like him. I never got to meet my cousin.

One day in 1978, my Mamu was told that his son, my mother’s favorite nephew, a 28-year-old major with the Pakistan Army, had committed suicide. Mamu never believed that his son committed suicide. His son had told him that he had taken on his superior for some financial malfeasance. My Mamu believed it was for this reason that he was murdered. The story that I grew up with was that the alleged suicide note had a blood stain on it and that Mamu had taken the matter to court, where the judge had said that it was not a suicide. The forensic investigation on his remains was never completed. Some military high-up threatened my Mamu with an offer to arrange for him to meet his dead son. Mamu stopped pursuing the matter, but his grief lingered and the story lived on in my family.

Despite the scar left on my family by the Pakistan Army, I, like so many kids, was fascinated by soldiery, even as I heard my father swear at the TV every night, as he watched General Zia on the TV screen. My brothers and I used to stage elaborate battles between two armies of toy soldiers separated by a Ludo board or an old desk calendar, and lob stones at the other side. Sometimes the artillery included lit matchsticks that had to land on, or sufficiently near, the enemy soldier for it to be counted as a fatal hit. That game of ours, in its indoor manifestations by the windowsill, ended when the curtain caught fire, but the war fantasy continued in other games. My brother and I would line up two chairs, one in front of the other, and throw a heavy blanket over them. This tent would sometimes be a helicopter, and at other times a tank, firing and dropping bombs at the imaginary enemy.

I grew up in 80’s with a heady dose of nationalist songs valorizing soldiers and military. Pakistan was heavily involved in the Afghan war at that time. All the same, war seemed distant to me— something that happened in the past or happens far away. My father would sometimes tell us the story of blackouts in Lahore when he was a young man. He told us of seeing flashes at the distant horizon and hearing sounds of gunfire. Our favorite story was about Dad sleeping on the roof and smoking a cigarette during a blackout and being visited by army men who respectfully asked him not to smoke.

The war of 1971, unlike the 1965 war, was not mentioned much in popular culture. This was perhaps due to the shame associated with Pakistan being defeated and dismembered at the hands of India. When remembered, it was always as a war between India and Pakistan and an episode in the continuing saga of antagonism between the two nation-states. The Bangladeshis themselves are simply forgotten, except as betrayers of Pakistan, collaborators with India against Pakistan, or at best, as victims of India’s plot who were duped or brainwashed by the enemy. There was not much understanding or recognition of the fact that Bangladeshis were once Pakistanis, and explanations such as the ‘betrayal by Bengalis’ or ‘Indian designs’ only work as convenient frameworks to stunt any meaningful reflection on why it is that East Pakistanis are now Bangladeshis. A discussion of Pakistan’s own conduct is simply not on the table. A search inward stops at the nationalist complaint of soobaiyat [provincialism] breaking up Pakistan, which in turn takes one back to Indian designs and affirms Pakistan’s raison d’être. Silence ensues, and endures.

What little public conversation about 1971 exists in Pakistan is saturated by nation-state-centered commentaries and that too of the zealous nationalist variety. Western commentators are assumed (and not without cause) to be tainted with Orientalism, West-centric chauvinism, racism, and Islamophobia, and both Indian and Bangladeshi commentators with their own nationalist partisan bias. So, what to do?

Genocide and mass rape are serious charges leveled against Pakistan that simply can’t be brushed aside by taking an identity-centric view that operates on an insider-outsider binary. This is a view that dispenses with all outsiders, and labels dissenters within as furthering outsider agendas. The near total dearth of dissent on the 1971 war –with admirable exceptions from the Communist Party of Pakistan, and some poets and writers such as Faiz, Jalib, and Eqbal Ahmad— in the face of a national and popular culture crowded with militarist nationalism and anti-India jingoism makes it that much harder to find one’s bearings and begin a search for a narrative outside the official history and collective memory.

The ‘foreign hand’ continues to deflect our attention elsewhere. A friend of mine who works for the Pakistani Army, when asked for his opinion on whether Baluchistan will eventually become another Bangladesh since it has been treated like East Pakistan was prior to its liberation, coolly remarked that there are many countries involved in fermenting separatist trouble in Balochistan, but not to worry, “hum ne wahan sab pakar liye hain” [We have apprehended/captured all of them.] Indeed, many have been apprehended, and some released as dead bodies on the roads bearing torture marks, something that Justice Raja Fayyaz, a Pakistan Supreme Court Judge, aptly described as “a reign of terror like Gestapo.” Power, blind to its own violence, projects its own inability to speak any language other than force on those at the receiving end of the imperial stick. This demeaning view of people and how to deal with a political conflict is captured in a Pakistan Rangers’ officer’s comment to Human Rights Watch regarding the Okara Uprising, that “It’s nothing we cannot deal with. These people only understand the language of the stick.”

During the people’s movement (popularly referred to as the Lawyer’s Movement) to oust General Pervez Musharraf in 2007, I started taking issue with the Pakistan Army’s heavy involvement in the socio-political life of Pakistan and its heavy-handedness in dealing with its citizenry. This dissent awakened me to the need to develop a social conscience that does not let my elderly uncle’s (and my mother’s) grief over losing his young son and being forced to abandon his search into the causes and circumstances of his son’s death, fade from memory. It also offered me a line of inquiry with which to probe the murky events in Pakistan’s history, such as the Balochistan issue. With such unraveling of the official narrative, it becomes somewhat possible to think of the 1971 war outside the tropes of Bengali betrayal and Indian designs, which, in turn, is sorely needed to understand and examine the present state of Pakistan and how we got here.

The pillage of East Pakistan and its bloody birth into Bangladesh offers an illuminating case to see the history of Pakistan’s centralizing state and society’s narrowing vision of what Pakistan is, the dominance of Pakistan’s Armed forces over the state and society and its repression of contending visions of Pakistan and Pakistan’s constituent parts. No meaningful public exploration, either in the roots of the East Pakistan conflict or the conduct of war was undertaken in Pakistan, and that has grave consequences. In Sepoy’s words, “the complaints of Swat, of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, of Balochistan for justice, for recognition are echoes of the cries of Dhaka.”

In this the 40^th anniversary year of Bangladesh’s liberation and the war of 1971, two historians, Sarmila Bose and Yasmin Saikia, have published their studies of the war of 1971 and how it is remembered, focused primarily on Bangladesh. Neither book offers a narrative of the Bangla Language Movement that sprang up in East Pakistan almost immediately after Pakistan’s independence. In the posts that follow this one in the coming week, I will offer a reading of the Bangla Language Movement as gleaned from Saadia Toor’s new book, to elucidate the relationship between East and West Pakistan, and then review Bose and Saikia’s books to discuss the events of 1971 and probe issues of history and memory.

[This is a guest post from Rohit Chopra -eds]

16 excursuses in despair

0.
Sepoy and Lapata have very kindly given me the opportunity to share some thoughts about the Rushdie affair (the new one, at the Jaipur literature festival this year, which, of course, is connected to the old Rushdie affair, 23 years to the day on February 14) on Chapati Mystery, following an effort to express them as tweets yesterday. Here goes my attempt to unpack the events related to the controversy and the subsequent flood of commentary that followed. I will assume the events and many views shared in mainstream media the world over do not need repeating, since the pipes of the Internets and Twitters have been choked with nothing else for the last so many days. The particular reflections below—which, foregoing the artifice of transitions find form as aphorism—do not invalidate each other; that, hopefully, should be clear. For any philosophical contradictions, I remain responsible but might hide behind Wittgenstein.

I.
I thought Rushdie was intimidated and terrorized by the Rajasthan police and Indian state (yes, we can and should use that word, wresting it back from the WOTists or War-on-Terror-ists). A false death threat qualifies surely.

II.
I do not feel the need to prove my credentials here as a defender of free speech.
Nor prove that I am a friend of Muslims. Nor prove that I am a believer. Or a rationalist. Or secular. Or Indian. Or an atheist. The merits of my argument do not, and should not, rest on any of these.

III.
I did not attend the festival, but got a ringside view of the drama on the Internet. I grew sick of it at some point of time, but could not stop reading or reacting on Twitter. This was not just gratuitous rubbernecking if I may say so myself. What bothered me was the way in which the debate had been hijacked—not just by Rushdie’s detractors and critics but, equally, by his supporters—effectively prohibiting the expression of any nuanced political view beyond Rushdie-or-Deobandi. I could not help think. “You are either with us or you are with the enemy”. Where had I heard that before?

IV.
If Maulana Nomani of Deoband and his supporters were and are guilty of a revolting piety, then Rushdie’s supporters were and are surely guilty of sanctimony. For instance, in their unfair demand—not unlike a theological diktat—that all right-minded Muslims, Indians, Indian Muslims, lovers of literature, and lovers of free speech everywhere are obligated take up cudgels on behalf of Rushdie. And in their exaggerated claim that such an act will reverse decades of intolerance and make whole India’s compromised modernity and failed enlightenment.

V.
Because such a claim assumes that India is locked, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, in the “waiting room of history,” til Sir Salman of South Bombay and his band of merry men and women usher it in to the clear future of liberal utopia, away from the darkness in which medieval Muslim hordes and Hindu obscurantists keep us. Because it plots a graph of Indian intolerance—Rushdie, Laine, Nasreen, Mistri, Ramanujan—that does not recognize the many ways in which Indians struggle everyday for their rights, including the right of freedom of expression and the right of freedom of religion. And just because the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal do not acknowledge these struggles, that does not mean they do not exist.

VI.
Because those who paint the Rushdie-Deoband spat as a battle between Gandalf and Sauron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauron should consider if they judge Rushdie’s friends and supporters by the same yardstick. Rushdie’s pals, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Hitchens—the “liberal supremacists” as Terry Eagelton calls the breed— have made the vilest remarks about Muslims, and yet they are touted as great defenders of liberal values. In contrast, anyone who disagrees—even civilly—with the stance of Rushdie and his acolytes is cast as a narrow-minded, unenlightened, bigot.

VII.
Eagleton reminds us: “Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis’s slurs on Muslims”

and for good measure,

“The irony is clear. Some of our free literary spirits are defending liberal values in ways that threaten to undermine them. In this, they reflect the behaviour of western states. Liberals are supposed to value nuanced analysis and moral complexity, neither of which are apparent in the slanderous reduction of Islam to a barbarous blood cult.”

VIII.
I found it puzzling that David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, should state at the festival that the Rushdie affair was “a blot on Indian democracy.” This was not postcolonial sensitivity on my part. I wondered if Remnick, a supporter of the Iraq War, would state that the war on Iraq was a blot on American democracy.
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Remnick wrote:

“Ten years after the attacks, we are still faced with questions about ourselves—questions about the balance of liberty and security, about the urge to make common cause with liberation movements abroad, and about the countervailing limits. Only absolutists answer these questions absolutely.” (italics mine)

I replaced the word ‘liberty’ with ‘freedom of expression’ in the sentence above. Many in India had made the same argument. As had many about the freedom of speech not being absolute in India or anywhere. I do not necessarily agree with them. But why do we see them as enemies of free speech and Remnick as a defender of liberal values?

I thought of another asymmetry. Would an Indian or Pakistani or Kenyan editor be able to declare, at the New Yorker’s festival, that any of the policies of the American state were a ‘disgrace to American democracy’? Would he or she be invited back again? Or get a visa?

IX.
Amit Chaudhuri has, in this article fleshed out the sorry implications of the fiasco for freedom of speech in India with devastating thoroughness, identifying with equal precision the sources of intolerance in Indian life. Thus: “In India, though, I get the feeling that the liberal middle class is only dimly aware of the importance of the arts, and how integral they are to the secular imagination, except in a time of media-inflated crisis, when it becomes a ‘free speech’ issue.”

This too is part of the problem.

I also liked this statement “The secular middle class – in which I include myself – needs to learn that free speech can’t be arrived at via a well-mannered compromise with its enemies,” because Chaudhuri speaks of the enemies of free speech here not of the enemies of the middle classes. For sometimes the Indian middle classes decide that their enemies—the poor, illiterate masses who demand some security and subsidies from the state—are also, conveniently, designated as the enemies of modernity, rights, free speech, and correct English.

X.
If it has been clear for some time now that there is such a thing as the ‘Rushdie Limit,’ there is also such a thing as ‘Rushdie Capital’

Rushdie Limit: the point at which people who claim to be defenders of free speech find out they aren’t. Thus, when the Satanic Verses controversy blew up some two decades ago, Jimmy Carter, Germaine Greer and John Berger hit their ‘Rushdie Limit’ pretty quickly. Or if I had to make another sentence, I might say, “after initially defending Rushdie, Hari Kunzru seemed to hit his Rushdie Limit when he wrote on his website ‘I apologise unreservedly to anyone who feels I have disrespected his or her faith.’”

Rushdie Capital: Benefit, tangible and intangible, such as cash, votes, visibility, scoops, or publicity to be gained by supporting or defending Rushdie. Thus Barkha Dutt reminding us on Twitter that she had got the prized Rushdie interview and was going ahead with it. And Kunzru, again, on Twitter, on January 24, about the traffic to his website after he posted his explanation for reading from The Satanic Verses “I think my website is about 500 unique users from falling over. #jlf”

XII.
Yes Barkha, we know you are also brave. And that you like the word ‘antediluvian’

And that it’s pretty fucking ironic that you claim to stand up for free speech when you are a one-woman chilling effect army threatening to sue anyone who you don’t like.

XIV.
None of this means that I am equating Rushdie with Maulana Nomani of Deoband. Sometimes these things need to be clarified threadbare.

XV.
Because brilliant and courageous as Salman Rushdie is, the histories of Islam, late twentieth-century India, Indian Muslims, and free speech exceed him.

XVI.
And it is amazing that not a single article on the controversy has actually bothered to discuss the The Satanic Verses. Which is a crying fucking shame because it is a spectacular book. Because it tells us that one person’s sacred verses are another person’s Satanic verses. And it paints a picture of religion as dreamfever quite different from the Marxist claim of religion as opium for the masses. And it shows a writer at the peak of his powers effortlessly claiming, commenting on, and transforming every tradition which sustains him: religious, literary, cultural, civilizational.

Sepoy insists that I share this painting of Nehru by my grandfather. He also has asked me to share my thoughts and feelings. Here they are: When I painted Nehru, I didn’t realize, at least not consciously, that my grandfather had painted him. When I found out, it made me feel kinda funny.

Look at the background of the picture. That’s the best part! Dada Sahib had his own style, as we all know, but he also could paint in anyone else’s style. Further evidence in this painting, for which he painted the Pollock using the same methods as Pollock.

As a bonus, here is a photo of him pretending to paint the Nehru painting.

(A version of this review essay ran in The Friday Times, Vol. XXIII, No. 41)

Review Essay by C.M. Naim

In May 1962, when the first groups of America’s newly established Peace Corps were flying out to various “underdeveloped” countries to help them along the road of “progress”, a twenty-eight years old woman set off in a Greek freighter from New York, to a self-imposed exile in one of those same countries, Pakistan. She traveled under the name Margaret (Peggy) Marcus that her parents—racially Jewish, politically Zionist, religiously members of the then quite the fashion Society for Ethical Culture—had given her, but to herself she was Maryam Jameelah (the Beautiful Mariam). Having only recently converted to Islam after a long struggle with her parents and her milieu, she was traveling to Pakistan not to join hands with her compatriots in the Corps but to find shelter from her painful and troubled past in a well-to-do suburb of New York, and to gain a new, purposeful and happy life at the home of the founder of Jama’at Islami, Maulana Abul Ala Maududi. She possibly felt she had found in the Maulana the understanding father she needed, while the Maulana might have taken comfort in believing that she would be the ideal person to expose for the benefit of the Pakistani youth the spiritual hollowness of the West and its notions of Modernity and Progress.

Jameelah had already written strong denunciations of her inherited culture, and of the U.S.-aided Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Even at the age of eleven, she later noted, she had felt herself drawn to Islam and the Arabs; she had also convinced herself that any Jewish desire to seek a home in Palestine was a desire to recreate the golden days of Arab-Muslim-Jewish fraternization and creativity in Andalusia. Consequently, she was horrified to discover in 1948 that her almost non-Jewish, Ethical Culture-liberal, comfortably suburban parents could be openly racist with reference to the Arabs—particularly, the Palestinian Arabs—and could enthusiastically contribute to fund Zionist ambitions in Israel. I must add that like almost all Americans then and now, Peggy Marcus too identified Palestine only with its Muslim population, when in fact, in 1948, there were at least 140,000 Christian Arabs in the British Mandate area, and even now there are about 200,000 Christians in the West Bank and Gaza (9% of the population), as compared to the 150,000 in Israel (2% of the population). Further, she never showed, even in her later polemics, any awareness of those Jews within Israel and the United States who steadfastly opposed aggressive Zionism and demanded a just and equitable resolution. Likewise, the fate of the Palestinians handed over by the British to the son of their Arab ally against the Turks was of no concern to her—as has been the case with other Muslim commentators like her.

Jameelah was welcomed into the Maududi household at Lahore when she reached there in July 1962, but soon problems arose. In quick succession the Maulana packed her off to another family outside Lahore, then had her confined to the lunatic asylum at Lahore for a few months—her parents in Mamaroneck, N.Y., had done the same to her a few years earlier—and finally got her married to a Pakistani man who already had a wife and children. Through all this her ideological embrace of the Jama’at remained unbroken. Eventually her husband, Mohammad Yusuf Khan, became her publisher, and she began writing articles and small books on the themes that were dear to her and the Jama’at. These trenchant writings first appeared in English, and then in Urdu, Arabic, and other languages. Her name became widely known as an ardent Islamist. Anyone interested in Islam in South Asia in the Sixties and Seventies knew who Maryam Jameelah was. She became to countless Muslims a living proof of Islam’s supremacy as religion: a well-educated Jewish woman who left the comforts of American suburbia to live out a life in Islam in Pakistan, voluntarily going into strict purdah and marrying a married man—all for the sake of her chosen faith, and in obedience to the wishes of her self-appointed “father-in-Islam.”

Jameelah’s presentation of herself to Pakistan and Muslim intelligentsia in 1962 was rather dramatic for the time. Her first book, a collection of previously published essays, was brought out by a prestigious publisher of Lahore, Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, which had also been publishing Iqbal’s The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam for many years. The book’s title, Islam Versus the West, seemed to suggest an aggressive reversal of the apologetic posture implied in the expression “The West Against Islam,” used in similar polemics in Pakistan and India. Hers was an assertive posture, that of an Islam launching a preemptive attack. And a brief text on the cover indicated that the fight was going to be on two fronts: “Read how Islam is far more seriously menaced from within than from without.” The back cover carried a picture of the author, her face encircled by a chador but otherwise fully exposed, and a brief resume of her life, bravely including a mention of her two years in a mental hospital. It ended with this bold statement: “The author wishes to be able to use her talents and abilities to further the cause of Islam.” Her next book, Islam and Modernism (1965), published by her husband, was a collection of new essays exclusively condemning Muslim “modernists” scholars. And it contained a picture of the author in an all-covering burqa—the exposed hands were encased in gloves—that seemed to challenge the women of Pakistan to live up to the “truly” Islamic standards of modesty. Its caption made the intention clear: “Thus do I, an American-born convert, speak through this picture to my Muslim-born brothers and sisters misled by an education hostile to all that Islam stands for and blinded with its false standards and ideals.” While the introductory title in the first book was simply, “How I Became Interested in Islam,” the opening essay in the new book was titled: “Why I Embraced Islam.” Nothing was tentative now; henceforth there will be nothing but uncompromising conviction.

Needless to say there was a great deal more to the story, and a brilliantly presented account is now available in The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker (Greywolf, 2011). For one, Jameelah had an eye on posterity all the time. Over the years she made several deposits at the New York Public Library, consisting of her writings, correspondence—some of it heavily revised—and paintings and sketches, where they were safe but also readily available to any curious reader. Baker stumbled upon the hoard by chance, and at an opportune moment when the Jama’at, Extremism, and Jihad—not to mention Islam itself—had become hot button words within the American society. It was equally opportune for Jameelah that it was Baker who found her papers, and not some perfervid, jargon-struck academic. As an experienced writer, Baker rose to the occasion by deciding to tell Jameelah’s story more or less as it unfolded for her, honestly sharing with us her frustration as contradictory details—even deliberate deceptions—stumbled out. She has skillfully created a narrative that grabs our interest fast, and then compels us to read the book as avidly as one reads a good whodunit. Of course, in this case, it is not the question “Who?” but “Why?” that lies at the center. As expected, there is no single powerful answer. Nor does Baker ask the question so crudely. Placing before us any number of credible causes and explanations, ranging from the personal and familial to the global and ideological, she allows us to gain much from her insights while letting us come to our own conclusions.

It is a wise and engaging book that should generate many useful discussions in these troubled times. Most importantly, her book might make many readers more aware of one terrible feature of today’s discourse on terrorism. Presently it is as if a “terrorist” has only an ideology or religion that dictates his actions, while the rest of us could safely use family situation, peer pressure, mental or psychological issues and much more to explain our actions. Even the “Unibomber” had a psychological life, but not Major Nidal Hussain. In the latter’s case, his “Muslim” name explains everything.

Baker’s book was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award. But it deserves much more attention than it has received so far. I have not heard her being interviewed on national radio and TV programs, and her book has not received much mention on the blogs that deal with Islam in South Asia. It is, however, a book that should be read by many, in particular by young Muslim men and women in the United States and South Asia. Not as a cautionary tale, but in order to obtain a more nuanced understanding of what they might be experiencing. Their present lives are filled with challenges that cannot be met with easily, and Baker’s book should help them discover that easy answers usually come at a heavy cost.

My only quarrel with Baker is the word “Exile” in the subtitle of the book. Who exiled Jameelah? And if it was a self-imposed exile, why can’t we simply call it migration? As I see it, Jameelah went to Lahore to find happiness, security, and fulfillment on her terms, just as one of the Maulana’s sons later traveled to New Jersey seeking the same boons in the United States. The Maulana passed away in 1979, in a hospital in the United States. Some say his sudden collapse was caused by the insensitive and hurtful behavior of one of his acolytes who visited him in the hospital. His house in Lahore is now a disputed property between the party he created and the children he sired. As his precious library rots in sealed cabinets, his writings continue to make money for the Jama’at and the family. Jameelah continues to live in Lahore, no more a prolific writer but still working for the Jama’at to earn an income for her family. Her two sons live in the United States, but the two daughters seemingly live the same secluded married life as she does. Way back in 1949, the fifteen-year old Margaret—her parents called her Peggy—had fallen in love with the voice of Umm Kulthum and spent all her allowance on a stack of the great Egyptian singer’s records. One can only hope that she allowed herself—or was allowed by her husband—to find some similar joy and comfort in the company of Farida Khanum and Abida Parween. The Maulana’s daughters reportedly did.

Naim Sahib, one of my teachers at Chicago, has a must-must-must read “rant” (as he puts it) in Outlook India. I really think it is one of his best and critically lays bare a key disconnect between the intellectual engagements within Urdu and English presses when it comes to matters of Muslims and Islam. I think almost everything he writes, holds true for the case of Pakistan. Please read, print, and frame it.

C. M. Naim, “The Deadening Silence of Good Intentions“, Outlook India, Nov 18, 2011

Let me put my argument this way. In Kerala, for example, local Muslims at all levels of the society not only speak the language of the region but also think, argue, and communicate—with each other as well as their non-Muslim peers—in that language. The same can be said to be true for the Muslims of so many other states. A Muslim professor of sociology in Bengal will not only be conversant in Bengali but also very much aware of what was being said or written in Bengali on the issues that should be of concern to him. Likewise, a Muslim intellectual in Gujarat would not hesitate to jump into some cultural debate in the Gujarati press because she would most likely be a part of its readership. These persons of my examples are unlikely to be entirely circumscribed by the English media in their regions. That situation, I aver, does not exist in Delhi, U.P., and Hyderabad. (I leave out Bihar and Madhya Pradesh since I know nothing about the Urdu press there.) Over the last five or six decades, the educated Urdu-speaking Muslim elite in Delhi and U.P., particularly those equipped with higher education in social sciences and thus expected to hold and express considered views on socio-political and economic issues, have become cut off from the Urdu-medium discourse around them. Those who seriously read and write on contemporary issues do so almost exclusively in English. That disconnect does not affect their wellbeing either professionally or personally. Most remain oblivious of it, and a few cheerfully so. Many of them, in my experience, express a little disdain when Urdu press comes up in conversation. Of course, that is to their loss. But, more importantly, it is a greater loss to the general Muslim population of the region.

Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day

1935. Professor of Sanskrit
on cultural exchange;
passing through; lost
in Berlin; reduced
to a literal, turbaned child,
spelling German signs on door, bus, and shop,
trying to guess go from stop;
desperate
for a way of telling apart
a familiar street from a strange,
or east
from west at night
the brown dog that barks
from the brown dog that doesn’t
memorising a foreign paradigm
of lanterns, landmarks,
a gothic lotus on the iron gate
suddenly comes home
in English, gesture, and Sanskrit,
assimilating
the swastika
on the neighbour’s arm
in that roaring bus from a grey
nowhere to a green.
– AK Ramanujan

I have a piece on Ramanujan’s essay and the DU controversy in The Caravan, All the Myriad Ways:

It’s no surprise, then, that so consistently we receive a singular history of the State, a composite account that tells an overwhelmingly familiar arc of progress towards the very moment in which you—the school child, the dutiful citizen—happen to be reading and accepting that history. That the United States is a melting pot, or that India contains multitudes is itself a monolithic and singular account.

We, for whom the history of the State is a familiar battleground; we, who grew up in dictatorships, for whom history was the first and most potent weapon for warfare, know this intimately. In Pakistan, there is no multitude of narratives when it comes to our pasts. In Islam, there are no voices that interpret scripture in divergent ways. Notions like these are quickly labelled heretical and such voices are shunted off to the mortuary. Notice the fate of Punjab’s governor, Salmaan Taseer, who dared to imagine a Constitution that might include another voice, admit to another living diversity.

Do tell me what you think.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/uses_of_history_ramanujan_edition.html/feed 3 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/meanwhile_back_home.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/meanwhile_back_home.html#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:33:55 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6589

Holy Jesus, Moses and Muhammad.

The power-points, I urge you to drop everything and just stare at them, are amazing. They really are. They show, quite clearly, the mental acuity of a 12 year old child when confronted with a newspaper. There is reading comprehension, of course, and even retention and maybe some kind of a inner monologue. But it is not making sense. No sir.

My dear friend Babu (oft. mentioned here) jotted off this passionate and erudite response to his Senator and I reproduce with his permission:

To: Senator Richard J. Durbin

RE: The FBI and Counterterrorism

Dear Senator Durbin,

As a resident of Chicago, and now Evanston, for the last twelve years, I have been extremely proud to have you as my Senator. Indeed, I have almost never felt the need to contact your office with gripes and concerns about policy, largely because every time I get worked up about something I look into it and find that you are almost always on the right side of the issue. This, indeed, is why I write to you today, hoping that you can help sound the alarm about some deeply troubling recent revelations about alleged “counterterrorism” briefings being given to FBI agents presently in the field.

Even from what little we already know, I can tell you that these briefings have come from some exceedingly dubious — indeed dangerous — sources: including, astonishingly, the openly Islamophobic blogger Robert Spencer (a favorite author of the right-wing Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik), and William Gawthrop.The details of these briefings are only coming to light thanks to the diligent reporting of Spencer Ackerman at WIRED magazine. Ackerman notes that Gawthrop had told the website WorldNetDaily, that in his opinion “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism”. WorldNetDaily, Ackerman says, “would later distinguish itself as a leader of the ‘birther’ movement.”

Ackerman’s reports can be found here:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/fbi-muslims-radical/all/1

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/fbi-islam-101-guide/

As someone who holds a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and an assistant professorship in South Asian history at Northwestern University, with a specialization in medieval and early modern Indo-Persian intellectual history (including expertise in both Persian and Urdu cultural and political traditions), I can tell you with some confidence that the material being presented in these briefings is beyond misleading — it is utter garbage, not to mention self-defeating and counterproductive. If this is what our FBI agents know about Islam and Muslims, then I’m afraid they know less than nothing.

Indeed, virtually all of the “knowledge” presented in these briefings comes directly from long obsolete, and long discredited, Orientalist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims propagated mainly by nineteenth-century British and French colonial administrations in India, Egypt, and the wider Middle East, primarily to justify Europe’s conquest and ongoing exploitation of those regions. People in the Muslim world, and, in fact, in most formerly colonized countries of the world, have a living memory of that colonial era, and thus are extremely sensitive about such rhetoric, which can only inflame existing concerns that the US is engaged not in a struggle against terrorism, but rather in a war against Islam, and a war for global empire inherited from our British and French friends and allies.

But forget about the sensitivities of faraway peoples — my own undergraduates would easily spot these frauds in a second, and yet the FBI appears entirely clueless about the utter bankruptcy of the instruction they are receiving. This is all especially ironic coming at a time when Congress and the Obama administration are busy slashing funding to critical education programs like Title VI language and Fulbright research fellowships, which for generations have been our country’s most proven and reliable means of training future scholars, and generally improving our larger understanding about the history and cultural traditions of Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Meanwhile, charlatans like Spencer and Gawthorp (and who knows who else) are somehow being allowed to step into the vacuum.

Congress needs to investigate this matter, and must urge the President immediately to open an internal investigation into how such outmoded, and frankly racist, forms of discourse about Islam, Muslims, and the Islamicate world could find their way into our nation’s most elite law-enforcement training apparatus. The FBI should have access to the most advanced scholarship, not the most ignorant Islamophobic canards. Indeed, how can they possibly expect to better protect us all from the legitimate threat raised by actual terrorists if they are schooled by people who either have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, or worse, are deliberately manipulating post-9/11 anxieties to foster and maintain a climate of fear?

To their credit, Senators Lieberman and Collins have already spoken out on this issue, but I urge you to do so as well. Besides being President Obama’s friend and erstwhile senior Senator, you also sit on both the Senate Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees, and serve presently as Assistant Senate Majority Leader. As such you are in an ideal position to insist on Congressional hearings that can get to the bottom of this situation. Representative Peter King has made quite a show in recent months of flaunting his so-called “radicalization” hearings. Now, you and others in Congress who have any sense at all must do the right thing and hold credible hearings about the damage being done to our values, our civic ideals, and our national security by these egregious lapses in judgment at the FBI.

We know roughly what was in the Power Point presentations that were delivered at some of these training sessions, but what exactly was said between the slides, to elucidate the content? Who did most of the talking? Were any other views sought, or any reputable academic specialists consulted? How were the speakers for these briefings chosen? Were they paid? What is the vetting process? Who has oversight over these procedures? Indeed what is the FBI’s general protocol for educating its agents about the culture and politics of the Islamicate world? What alternatives might the Bureau (and other state and federal agencies) explore in terms of enhancing their understanding of actual Muslim communities, rather than treating the latter collectively as a bunch of irrational, fanatical automatons mentally stuck in the 7th century? Are they even aware that the majority of the world’s Muslims are not Arabs? Are they aware that there are plenty of terrorists in the world who are not, in fact, Muslim? And finally, at the risk of sounding smug, but in all seriousness: has anyone at the Bureau even read a book in the last ten years?

When the general tenor of these briefings was first exposed back in July, the Bureau officially responded that the offending presentation was “a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced” — but replaced by what, exactly? As citizens, we have a right to know, and clearly this week’s further revelations suggest that the problem is far more widespread within the FBI training program than we have been led to believe.

Again, I urge you to use all your power and influence as my elected representative in the U. S. Senate to do something about it. I have also faxed copies of this letter on my department’s letterhead to your offices in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Very sincerely yours,

Rajeev K. Kinra

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/meanwhile_back_home.html/feed 1 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/if_you_see_something_say_something.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/if_you_see_something_say_something.html#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:46:13 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6502

A few weeks ago, I visited Hamburg’s vast harbors and storage houses. There, I saw the faded signs of an old network of traders from Iran, Afghanistan and Kashmir who came to Hamburg in the 1880s and 1890s bearing carpets and artifacts. I loved that part of Hamburg, and I wished I had had more time to talk to some members of this old Muslim community.

There are parts of Berlin which also evoke past entanglements. The Ahmadi mosque in Wilmersdorf – the oldest in Germany – is an example. I wrote about wandering onto it a while ago. Since then, I have learned a lot more about the post-War Turkish immigration to Berlin, the Muslim (Turkish, Desi, Arab, Iranian) communities in Kreuzberg, in Neukölln, in Wedding, in Charlottenburg. I met families of Sikhs and Punjabis from Ludhiana who have been in Berlin since the early 1970s. I met East Pakistanis. I met PPP jaiyallas still in hiding from Zia ul Haq. Berlin, as it has to many before me, only begrudgingly unveils its seductive charms – and one of its charms has been its matter-of-fact diversity.

And just as matter-of-factly, it shows its racism. When I was vacating my last apartment – in the quite white, old (as in the demographic), rich kiez of KuDamm, I spent an epic 28 hours scrubbing the apartment clean for the landlord’s inspection. The tenure in the place was about 16 months and there was very little wear and tear. Yet, during the inspection, the landlords acted in a ridiculously rude manner – at one point saying that only “animal-like Turks” could live like this.

In my new place in Schöneberg – a neighborhood I absolutely love – my 80 plus year old neighbor looked me up and down.
“Are you Turk – your name is Achmet”
“Actually, that is with a D, not a T but, I am from Pakistan”
“…. Pakistan?”
“India”
“Ah! I used to know an Indian. Yes, you are much too dark to be a Turk.”

I was quite happy that we had settled the matter and a few weeks later, I bumped into her again. She began to tell me about the building, the neighborhood and while describing the 1950s and 60s life, she quickly inserted a comment about how those were the days before the “African and Turk” families couldn’t be seen on the street. Afraid that my German comprehension was not up to par, I repeated after her and she elaborated that the Africans started moving into the apartment buildings around us in the late 80s and early 90s. Haven’t I seen them?

These encounters are, however, not the same. While the old landlord was definitely a racist, my new neighbor simply belongs to a world view which is restrictive around class and color lines. I can’t begrudge this casual prejudice to the old and the infirm. And sometimes, I feel that Berlin as a whole has a similar outlook – a casual prejudice against the ausländer (outsider) be they white or green.

Maybe.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of us brown/semi-brown, over-educated people found ourselves at a “progressive” bar, Kirk Bar, in Kreuzberg at 2am. Even before we entered the largely empty establishment, the bartender stopped us and denied us entry because we were “a group” and they had “enough groups” there. The heated conversation that followed confirmed that he just didn’t like so many obvious “foreigners” coming to his bar. The irony that 3 of 5 in the group were residents, property holders and salaried members of Berlin was completely lost on him. He just didn’t want us in there. We left, but not without a bitter, bitter taste in my mouth. Berlin didn’t look so charming any more.

A day or so later, near my office in Dahlem, I spied this sign and it stopped me in my tracks.

Wählen gehen für Thilos Thesen!

And today, near Blissestrasse stop of the U7, this:

Unsere Frauen bleiben frei!

This “pro Deutschland” party is mostly a neo-Nazi outfit (you can read a history of its main slate members here and its activities in Berlin here). It is participating in the upcoming mayoral and city elections in Berlin on a platform of “Zuwanderung begrenzen, Islamisierung stoppen”. They explain that the Turkish immigrants have created “Zuwanderer-Ghettos” in Berlin where they hope to begin a “parallel” society to install Shar’ia laws. Manfred Rouhs, who is heading the pro-Deutschland ticket is a neo-Nazi organizer with a long list of “gegen Islamisierung” activities.

The rise of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim immigrant and the close relationship between the US based ideologues such as Pam Geller or Daniel Pipes and their European counterparts such as Geert Wilders is quite well established. The actions of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway illustrate one outcome of such hatred and fear-mongering. Berlin, with its sidewalks dotted with “stolpersteine” (stumbling stones) detailing the forced removal and execution of its Jewish citizens, reminds us of another historical outcome of hatred fed to a supplicant mass.

These signs don’t just offend me. They frighten me.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/if_you_see_something_say_something.html/feed 14 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/all_is_well.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/all_is_well.html#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:17:04 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6497

I have a more detailed review of Maleeha Lodhi’s edited volume Pakistan: Beyond ‘The Crisis State’ in Dawn’s Books & Authors: All is Well… or is it? I had briefly discussed it in my previous review essay, but this is special care:

Pakistan, as a subject of critical analysis, is ill-served when realities are ignored for the sake of policy. The need to resist a crude stereotype of “failed state” is clear and present but to go “beyond the crisis state”, we must also look seriously to history, to narratives other than the state or military and admit the harsh truths: The Pakistani military is just as fallible as its civilian regime, though the latter needs the explicit support of the population as a legitimate government. The state structure incorporates within it gross injustices towards the minorities — defined religiously, ethnically or culturally. Redressing these injustices — against the Ahmadis, the Christians, the Hindus, the Baloch, the Swatis — is just as vital to the nation-state as the need to prioritise health or education or commercial sectors. This volume is but a hampered beginning in this long process of a national soul-searching.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/all_is_well.html/feed 0 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/an_abandoned_man.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/an_abandoned_man.html#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:52:05 +0000 patwari http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6432

If tear-streaked faces of broken families
begged you to stop killing their sons,
would you reflect and see your wrongs,
or would you still load your guns? 

For every girl who lost a father,
every wife now a widow,
I hope you see that you have spilled,
the blood splattered on my window *

 I

 High on testosterone and brimming with teenage angst, we entered the office of the Chief Minister of Punjab. The object was to get a personalized license plate for my friend’s new car. The plan was that in order to get through the “gatekeepers,” I would claim to be the Chief Minister’s nephew, but we hadn’t a clue of what we would do if we were granted audience. I had probably imagined that the innocence of our request and confidence in our ability to access a high ranking official would be enough to charm the man. Or perhaps, we were sure that we wouldn’t get that far. And we did not. But that provided us with something to laugh about for years afterwards.

We had met in college. New to the city and facing similar issues of unfamiliarity with our surroundings, we started spending time together. For two years, until our lives took us on divergent paths, we were together in class in the morning, playing cricket in the afternoon, taking tutorials in the evening, and roaming around the city at night. We became the best of friends, and have remained so. In time, our families too developed cordial ties.

Not too long after we met, he matter of factly told me that he was an Ahmadi. My heart sank. I thought to myself: why me? Why do I have to be the one who has to decide whether or not that should matter? And, what would my parents say? While I was thinking about what that revelation meant for me and our friendship, I didn’t much reflect on how often he must have been shunned and ostracized in the aftermath of revealing this information to others. That his cautious pace of befriending people, the degrees of closeness, the maintenance of various gradations of friendship and the concordant measured dissemination of personal information, is not merely a matter of his introverted personality and its attendant quirks, did not dawn on me at the time.

The easiest way to proceed was to ignore the differences between us, and to avoid talking about religion. Shared culture and language, common generational concerns and interests, and most important of all, the glue of friendship was enough to hold us together through the years and even across continents. But that was my escape into the liberal conceit of “tolerance,” whereby even as I acknowledged his humanity, I did not have to engage with his experience as a Pakistani Ahmadi – and therefore my own complicity in the violence inflicted on Ahmadis. For a gaze that sees all things religious and signs of religiosity as essentially pre-modern or anti-modern, and religious differences and the terrifying violence they spawn as mere internecine squabbling that it transcends and is not implicated in, it is perhaps easy to accept an Ahmadi as an Ahmadi and as a Muslim. But this self-serving acceptance, convinced as it is at not having a dog in this fight, consigns itself to irrelevance vis-à-vis the thus far largely, and increasingly, one-sided conversation that needs to be engaged, and the history of violence and marginalization that needs ceaseless elucidation, dissemination, and popular and state acceptance, in order to not only restore but also sustain the full citizenship and socio-cultural standing of Ahmadis in Pakistan.

That history of violence rears its ugly head in the spectacular acts of terror, such as last year’s attack on what was reported as Ahmadis’ “place of worship.” These events are then explained away as aberrations, and the work of a few bad apples. Conceived as polar opposites, terms such as Sufi/Salafi, secular/fundamentalist, moderate/extremist, are routinely employed to analyze and make sense of such events. But they obfuscate and mystify, and for analytic purposes they are inadequate and ultimately unhelpful. Since there is no internal stability and coherence to these terms, they end up being used as a device to place the self in the former moderate category and the purveyors of violence in the latter extremist category, and thereby excusing oneself by finding only and all of the culpability in the latter. Their pernicious effect is to exceptionalize brutality as something that only monstrous life-forms are capable of, instead of seeing brutality as a human trait and that those thought to be brutes are in fact human like the rest of us.

II

 [Dipesh] Chakrabarty points to the everyday behavior [in India] that in Europe or Australia would indicate racism, for example, informal unwillingness to sell property to Muslims – to which one could add references to Muslims as dirty or having too many children, or, as in the American South, the remnants left when the smart ones go north. No analogy is perfect: others have found anti-Semitism a useful parallel. One can also link Muslims, Copts, Ahmadis, and Bahais who are labeled in their respective countries as the cosmopolitans, people of mixed loyalty with links to outsiders, secretly privileged and powerful, in short, the language once used of European Jews. In all these cases minorities are forced to play roles not of their own choosing, not least that of foil against which the unity of others – Hindus, the nation –can be constituted, and injustices of class and wealth obscured. The history that identifies Indian Muslims as aliens, destroyers, and crypto-Pakistanis, with its profound moral and political implications for citizenship and entitlements is critical in sustaining that role. It presumably cannot be successfully challenged until, as has happened only partially and very recently in the United States in relation to African Americans, the social and political interests that sustain belief in fundamental difference are changed.

                                                            Barbara D. Metcalf, “Too Little and Too Much”

It is tempting think that those spewing hateful misinformation and spreading rumors are simply misinformed or more derisively as ignorant and therefore innocent of willed bigotry. That may be, but it is not, or not merely, ignorance or not knowing. It is also the unknowing of what one knows – that Ahmadis live within and transgress the societal norms as much as non-Ahmadis do; that they are shaped by the society at large and the various local, national, and global dynamics, in varying ways and to different extents, just as non-Ahmadis are, and hence have as much of a claim in defining and shaping the society at large or what is called the national culture – and having filled the lacunae with a kind of bad knowledge acquired actively or accumulated passively over time. Constructed meticulously from the available reservoir of rumors, caricatures, and stereotypes, this bad knowledge is tied to a malignant project of homogenization through dominating and exterminating those deemed different and beyond the ever-shrinking pale.

Is that judgment too harsh? After all, don’t most sects, religions, and secular ideologies have some variant of the idea of the “chosen people,” the real this-that-or-the-other, which eventually is damning for all else or some particular “others.” I, too, have thought in such terms: “well, they think they are the true Muslims and we think we are – same difference.” But, this difference is not a difference the weight of which is spread equally between two people: I am as different from him as he is different from me, and I have my religious beliefs and practices (individual and collective), and he has his. No. “They” are different from “us” in a specific way and that has very specific and dire consequences for them and none for us for being different from them, other than perhaps their justified suspicion and hesitance in letting us into the inner sanctums of their socio-religious lives.  Divorced from troubling questions of power and culture this sometimes desired equivalence of religious difference, read as reality on the ground, becomes false equivalence, one that eschews, covers over, and perpetuates the invisibility of the long history of persecution and violence visited upon those deemed different from the majority “us.”

That “they” share cultural, class, ethnic, and yes, religious past and present, with the rest of us, and like the rest of us participate in all the contestations therein, albeit at a grave disadvantage, is beside the point. They are marginalized and penalized because of that difference, which is after all minute in comparison with the similarities and commonalities between them and other groups within the same class and location. That over-determined difference is assigned a politically charged value. A hierarchy of social power is constructed on the basis of this difference whereby one does not win much solely by being a Sunni (there is, of course, no shortage of poor and marginalized Sunnis), but one sure gets docked for not being one, and much more so for being an Ahmadi. That is where being a Sunni in Pakistan becomes an unfair and unjust advantage and a privilege, making it nearly impossible to be Sunni (though, not only) and not be complicit in the gross injustice meted out to Pakistan’s “minorities.” Such is the hegemony of systems of dominance that it makes collaborators of even those grinding under its weight, pitting one against the other, whereby having a scapegoat or a shared object of ridicule, derision, and bigotry (a class/cultural/religious/linguistic/ethnic/racial/sexual other, or a national enemy within or without) provides a form of social bonding and upward social mobility, however limited.

It is worth quoting Gyanendra Pandey at length, here: “When used in conjunction with ‘religion’ or ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture,’ these terms [‘minority’ and ‘majority’] result in a curious ambiguity, as Talal Asad has reminded us. For whereas majority and minority belong primarily to a vocabulary of electoral and parliamentary politics, and the shifting terrain upon which these politics are supposed to be carried out, culture (like religion, race, and so on) is ‘virtually coterminous with the social life of particular populations, including habits and beliefs conveyed across generations.’ To speak of cultural, ethnic or religious minorities is therefore to posit what Asad calls ‘ideological hybrids.’ It is ‘to make the implicit claim that members of some cultures truly belong to a particular politically defined place, but those of others (minority cultures) do not—either because of recency (immigrants) or of archaicness (aborigines).’ Or, one might add, simply because of unspecified, but (as it is asserted) fundamental, ‘difference’—as in the case of the Indian Muslims.”

The anti-minority nationalist juggernaut of Sunni dominance that seeks to constitute Ahmadis not only as a numerical minority but also as a social, cultural, political, and economic minority in Pakistan, and thereby constituting a majoritarian unmarked “self,” feeds on the petty social biases and bigoted views of average decent people like ourselves, our neighbors, uncles, and parents. Such views are considered either justified, or ignored (how could uncle Iqbal be a bigot? he’s a nice person after all!), or brushed aside (yes, but uncle Iqbal is a charitable person, and he is not against Ahmadis as persons, and is not rude when he sees one), or defended as benign, or not mal-intended, or at least not explicit, not overt, or not rabid (it’s an ever-sliding scale!). But they are not divorced from questions of socio-political power and machinations of the state, which implicate the good uncle Iqbal in the steam-rolling and hounding of minority “others.”

 III

 Galtung’s theory, highly valued in peace and conflict studies, provides a framework for explaining the interdependence and functions of structural, cultural and direct violence in bringing about the systemic exclusion of a population. Structural violence – for example, poverty – among a particular ethnic group such as dalits, encompasses different forms of domination, exploitation, deprivation and humiliation that emanate from societal structures, [and is] often cited to describe the prevalence of caste, class and ethnic inequalities, power relations and domination occupy a central place. Direct violence – for example, a street fights or an inter­national war – harms or kills individuals or members of a group in a targeted manner. Cultural violence refers to those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, art and culture, and empirical and formal science – that are used to justify or legitimise violence in its direct and structural forms.

[…] Galtung theorises that when the triangle of violence stands on legs of direct and structural violence, it projects the image of cultural violence as the legitimiser of both. When the head is direct violence, an event, an image of the cultural and structural sources of violence is revealed. When direct and cultural ­violence are at the foot, structural violence is revealed in the social, economic and poli­tical status of the violated. Galtung claims cultural violence ­motivates actors to commit direct violence and omit counteracting structural ­violence insofar as it imbeds the inevit­ability and righteousness of violence into people’s world views …

Taha Abdul Rauf, “Violence Inflicted on Muslims: Direct, Cultural and Structural,” EPW,  VOL XLVI NO. 23, June 04, 2011

The violence inflicted on Ahmadis affects all areas of their life: admissions in school, making friends, dealing with mean kids in the playground spewing venom that they have heard their elders speak, employment opportunities, choice of profession, career graphs, marital choices, what they can or can’t say, and whether or not they will live out their whole lives in their own country or will they be chased out, or meet an assassin’s bullet, or be lynched by a mob, – all the while living under the Sword of Damocles.

 Though the legal battles involving Ahmadis about who can pray behind whose imam and who is or isn’t a Muslim go back to the early twentieth century, and are successors of the 19^th century Ahl-iHadth vs. Hanafi/Deobandi conflicts over the said issues, as Manan Ahmad explains, “Until 1974, Ahmadiyya were a religious minority within Islam – they could contest elections as Muslims, hold posts, get married, own land – their status was no different than the Sunni majority. Their status was secure in Indian legal code – as above – and it was re-affirmed under Government of West Pakistan v. Begum Agha Abdul Karim Shorish Kashmiri (1969) which judged Ahmadis to be citizens, to be Muslim, and protected under the fullness of law.” In the “legal shift of the Ahmadis’ status from Muslims to religious minority and then to potential blasphemers there were two key moments,” according to Asad A. Ahmed whose detailing of the said process I will attempt to summarize here[1]. Ahmadis were declared non-Muslim in 1974, but no legal means of enforcing this decision were enacted. This allowed Ahmadis, who in their religious praxis were by and large not differentiable from Sunni Muslims, to continue to act and be recognized as Muslims, leaving the anti-Ahmadi agitators legally hamstrung in preventing Ahmadis from being and behaving as Muslims. That Ahmadis “pose as Muslims” (that standard fare of anti-Semitism, or Western Islamophobia, or Hindu nationalist propaganda in India that “the enemy within” is duplicitous, dissimulative, and deceptive) became the center of political (and later, judicial) activism which materialized in the introduction of Ordinance XX in 1984. This ordinance criminalized Ahmadi usage of Muslim terminology such as epithets to refer to holy persons, calling their place of worship a masjid (mosque), and the call to prayer, azan; and prohibited Ahmadis from Muslim ritual practices such as the actual calling of the azan.

The next round of agitation and the second critical moment in this politico-legal violence on Ahmadis centered at the Ahmadi recital of the kalima, which was not specifically criminalized by the aforementioned ordinance. The courts ruled that the recitation of kalima would constitute Ahmadis as “posing as Muslims” and is thus within the scope of the Ordinance; therefore outlawing the very core of Ahmadi faith. When argued that the Ordinance violated the constitutional right to assembly, freedom of speech, and religion, the court ruled that the Ordinance did not violate the said constitutional rights since these rights were subject to other provisions of the constitution dealing with public order and morality and that the Ordinance was issued because of Ahmadi insistence to claim a Muslim identity — an act that was itself unconstitutional since the constitution declares them non-Muslim, highlighting once again the irresolvable contradiction between recognizing freedom of religion as a constitutional right and in the same document laying the foundation of restricting Ahmadis from practicing their religion in their own way. The judge, then assumed the role of interpreting the Ahmadi faith, praxis, and intent, and argued that the various resemblances between Mirza Ghulam Ahmed and the Holy Prophet, as laid out by the Ahmadi literature, amounted to the concept of reincarnation, pressing Hinduism (read: India) — that other religious and national “Other”— into service, concluded that it is thus foreign to Islam (read: Pakistan). He then concluded that when Ahmadis recite the kalima they refer to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and that therefore amounts to defiling the Prophet and under the purview of Section 295-C, the blasphemy law, enacted in 1986 to criminalize the defiling of the Holy Prophet’s name.

In another legal case of consequence, the court held that by reciting the kalima, Ahmadis were violating the constitutional demarcation between the parallel communities of Ahmadis and Muslims, the former having been severed from the latter through the severance of the former with Prophet Muhammad. This time around the court held that when Ahmadis recite the kalima, they refer to both Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and Prophet Muhammad simultaneously. So, by referring to Prophet Muhammad along with the prophetic founder of the Ahmadi community, they appropriate the religious identity of another community and therefore ‘pose as Muslims,’ which is blasphemous. It is as if the alleged parallel communities are fundamentally different from one another with no points of contact, cross-pollinations, common beliefs and practices, and shared histories. Instead, they are columns under the heading of one could be written masjid and that of the other ibadatgah (place of worship).

To sum up, Ahmadis were first declared non-Muslims, and then hounded through legal means as posers and frauds, and therefore always already potential blasphemers. With the criminalizing of the defiling of the Holy Prophet by misrepresentation, construed as such presumably by officially sanctioned/defined/recognized Muslims, the sword was firmly in place that cleaved the populace into a privileged majority that was spared and those that were not. This sword was to cut down whomsoever challenged the tyranny of a majoritarianism constructed through the liberal legal concept of property rights[2] that submitted Islam and Muslim-ness to the exclusive ownership of Muslims, as recognized by the state and law, and defined as those who believe not only in the finality of Prophet Muhammad, but were also willing to condemn Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (a state-modified kalima, if you will) and therefore legally willing to be accomplices in the persecution of Ahmadis (or else!).

IV

That Zafarullah Khan’s memory has been so thoroughly erased from everyday lives – where theorists often prattle on and on about the long memories of the nation-state, such intense and immediate silencings are rarely noted – is indicative of the changed narrative about Ahmadis inPakistan– who are now simply heretics and infidels to be eliminated indiscriminately.

Manan Ahmed, “We Are All Ahmadi V: Erasures”

[…] Giorgio Agamben has written […] about a figure found in ancient Roman law called the homo sacer. This is a man who is the most vulnerable denizen of the political community, because his absolute vulnerability is the condition for the absolute power of the ruler. The homo sacer is placed under a ban – that is to say, he is banished from the company of other men, and at the same time abandoned by the legal and juridical order.

This state of banishment and abandonment renders the life of the homo sacer less than the politically-defined and legally-protected life of a citizen: he is reduced to what Agamben calls “bare life” or “naked life”. In this state, which lies outside the realms of both politics and the law, the homo sacer may be killed, without any entailment in the form of punishment or reward, by anyone who wishes. [...] The life of the homo sacer is less than a life; consequently, it can be extinguished with impunity.

            Ananya Vajpeyi, “The Bare Life Of S.A.R. Geelani, Ph.D”

 The state claims to be merely the nation’s representation and self-realization in whose interest it selflessly acts. But it is, in fact, a self-interested arbiter of the politics and culture of the very nation it shapes and constitutes. The state of Pakistan has, through legislative and juridical means, not only made it increasingly harder for Ahmadis to live as Ahmadis by criminalizing Ahmadis to live as Muslims, but also by being unable and/or unwilling to hold vigilantes to account, has made it fair game for Ahmadis to be coerced, violated, or killed as the persecutor sees fit. Those with a grudge against an Ahmadi have the legal route at their disposal to inflict violence through the state and/or hang a target on his head through the blasphemy law which would materialize in the state or a vigilante doing the job for free.

Not too long ago, it was reported that a pamphlet was openly distributed in Faisalabad deeming Ahmadis “Wajibul Qatl” (‘liable to be murdered’) and inciting people to kill them. It listed the city’s prominent Ahmadis. The name of my best friend, the same college friend who told me that he was an Ahmadi, is on that list. He is a marked man. Abandoned by the state and the society, he is left to fend for himself.

 

---

[1] Asad A. Ahmed, ‘The Paradoxes of Ahmadiyya Identity: Legal Appropriation of Muslim-ness and the Construction of Ahmadiyya Difference,’ published in ‘Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan,’ ed. Naveeda Khan (London andNew Delhi: Routledge, 2009)

[2] “It is thus clear that intentionally using trade names, trademarks, property marks or descriptions of others in order to make others believe that they belong to the user thereof amounts to an offence and not that they belong to the user thereof amounts to an offence and not only the perpetrator can be imprisoned and fined but damages can be recovered and injunction to restrain him issued. This is true of goods of even very small value. For example, the Coca Cola Company will not permit anyone to sell, even a few ounces of his own product in bottles or other receptacles marked Coca Cola … the principles involved are; do not receive and do not violate the property rights of others.” (Zahiruddin v The State, Supreme, 1993, Supreme Court Monthly Review, 1753-54). Ibid, p 303.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/an_abandoned_man.html/feed 3 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/the_middle_man.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/the_middle_man.html#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:16:45 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6326

I was asked, by Murtaza Vali, to write for a “Manual of Treason” which dealt with the notion of treason and affiliation in the colonial and postcolonial settings. I offered to write on the case of Seth Naomul Hotchand (1804-1878) and the annexation of Sindh in 1843 by the East India Company. The essay was translated into Urdu by Aftab Ahmed. Two fine artists, Lapata and Rajkamal Kahlon provided original art for the essay. A version of that piece was produced as a cover story for Dawn’s “Books & Authors” as A Nation’s Fugue State. The full essay is reproduced below.

A Brief History of Afghanistan by Rajkamal Kahlon

“Seth Nao Mull’s history would in itself have furnished the materials for an Oriental romance. His father had been a compulsory convert to Mohamedanism, and the son had long wished for an opportunity to assist the English, to whom he looked for the chance of avenging the wrongs of the Hindoos upon their Mahomedan oppressors.”¹

Hindu ki bas eik khasusiat: Baghl mein churi, moen par Ram Ram. My Urdu, at the time, was idiomatically sub-par. I had recently moved from Doha, Qatar, to General Zia ul Haq’s Lahore and his 9th grade Social Sciences textbook was nearly incomprehensible. The teacher read the line with a sneer. I intuited from his body language, and from the twitter that ran through the class, that this was a derisive remark, but I couldn’t quite follow: If someone had just been stabbed in the side with a knife wouldn’t he be crying to the gods in pain? What’s the shame here? I went home and asked my mother. She explained the idiom: Baghl mein churi does not mean a knife in the side but a knife concealed in the armpit of a garment. Moen pay Ram Ram is not a gesture towards pious invocation (like my grandmother’s recitation of Ya Rahman Ya Rahim)—it is meant to stand as insincere. The Hindu has only one characteristic: He conceals a knife, ready to strike, even as his lips intone Ram.

I remember wanting to see or speak to a Hindu, to corroborate or defy this assessment, but Lahore in the mid-1980s held only bare traces—a place name, the legends of a boarded-up building, a strange spiral shape buried in the horizon—of its Hindu past. The city of Madho Lal or Chandarbhan had disappeared even from memories.

Our teacher was a history enthusiast and he quickly warmed up to my hesitant question: Sir, why are Hindus never to be trusted?
Because, they will betray your trust, just as they betrayed the Muslims, again and again, during colonial times. Class, what is the “Two Nation Theory?” Hindus and Muslims are two, separate civilizations who existed side-by-side without any cultural, religious or economic overlap. Muslims, As a minority, Muslims were persecuted by the Hindus who often joined forces with the British colonial powers. Our leaders Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Muhammad Iqbal created this nation to give Muslims a safe haven. Let me give you an example. The British had conquered all of India but Pakistan was unconquerable—Sindh, Punjab, NWFP and Baluchistan were independent for a hundred years after Plassey! The first to fall was Sindh—the British conquered it in 1843—when a Hindu traitor Seth Naomul Hotchand betrayed his Talpur lords and sold his people to the British. Soon after they had Punjab, they had everything. Let us not forget (I remember his voice rising dramatically) that the Hindus raped and murdered (another shudder through the class as he said izzat looti).

I kept quiet.

Many years later, I was engaged in archival research on the Muslim military expeditions to al-Hind w’al-Sind (as the Arab geographers termed the sub-continent) in the 8th and 9th centuries. Seeking a particular manuscript in Hyderabad, Sindh, I trudged from dusty archives to pulp-paper resellers (the chances of encountering rare manuscripts are grimly equal between those two sites). There, I was introduced, once again, to the traitorous Seth. In a series of conversations with Sindhi nationalists—those who believed that the region of Sindh as a political entity pre-dated Pakistan and could not be subsumed under the rubric of that nation-state—I heard mention the name of Seth Naomul Hotchand. He was a traitor, they proclaimed loudly, one who betrayed the natural rulers of Sindh, the Mirs of Talpur, by siding with the British. His memory is tainted; he is a cause for shame.

Among these closely quartered, beleaguered freedom fighters it wasn’t his Hinduness upon which the charge of treachery was pegged, but his lack of fealty to a political regime.

Two eminent historians of Sindh, Hamida Khuhro and Mubarak Ali, have written brief assessments of Hotchand. Khuhro found him “an opportunist” who “judged against the principles of patriotism … will remain the unrepentant traitor.” Ali was more forgiving and sought to contextualize his actions as one among a community of responses. After all, there is little wiggle room in the binaries inscribed onto nationalism or colonialism by current historiography: one resists or perishes; one is either a hero or a traitor.

Such binaries are, however, historically inept and socio-culturally corrosive. Hotchand was a node in a vast network, which operated in conjunction the colonial and the princely networks – of khatib, munshi and vakil who made possible the legal and diplomatic work of daily governance. In Sindh alone, he was only one among a vast array of Persian and Anglophone knowledge brokers (both Hindu and Muslim) who received distinctions for their services to the Company. Mirza Ali Akbar was in the employ of General Charles Napier, who annexed Sindh for the East India Company in 1843. Akbar also received many laurels and honors for his service to the Company – which included translating key documents and acting as an interpreter. Mirza Lutfullah was an employee of Political Agent Major Eastwick, who was given the task to negotiate major treaties with Sindh by the Company. There were many others – some who left behind memoirs and notes and others whose names linger only in Company registers and in official documents. Yet, the fact is that from among his peers, Hotchand is the only one whose memory lingers as a “traitor” in present day Pakistan.

The construction of nationalist identity in Pakistan, since 1971, has relied exclusively on a communal reading of South Asian histories – positing Hindu and Muslims as inchoate categories. Such reductive narratives may suit the purpose of nationalist discourses but they do not represent history. I have decided to tell the story of Seth Naomul Hotchand as a story of a broker between regimes of power, as a local negotiator of globally written politics. In my telling, Hotchand is a symbol—not of treason or collaboration but—of the fugue state that cripples the modern nation-state, which forgets pasts just as easily as it invents new ones to fill the gaps.

An Oriental Romance

The “Orient” is a fiction, and a romance. The fiction espoused by the British officer in the opening quote frames our colonial and postcolonial stories – a Hindu son’s revenge for a Muslim injustice wrought upon his father. This romantic story swivels on its axis in postcolonial Pakistan – all Hindus are traitors, and can be represented by the money-lending, vengeful Seth Naomal Hotchand, who brought down a princely state. In what follows, I lay out a fuller picture of Hotchand’s life and argue that the real tragedy lies with the collective memory to which his history has been ascribed.

Seth Naomul Hotchand, C.S.I. (1804-1878) dictated his memoirs, titled Memoirs of Seth Naomul Hotchand of Karachi, in 1872, to his grandson. In 1915, after being translated from Sindhi into English, it was published with a strange proviso by its editor, Sir Evan M. James, which stated that, the publication be restricted to “Seth Naomul’s own descendants and relations, to officers connected with Sind, and to personal friends.” A text meant only for some is now one of our primary sources on a pivotal series of events in South Asian history—the 1843 annexation of Sindh by the East India Company.

The memoirs details Hotchand’s various activities—as a supplier of assets or merchandise, or information and intelligence, from Afghanistan to Persia and beyond. As the head of one of the most successful merchant houses of Sindh, he had direct access to a vast personal and familial network among the class of knowledge brokers (munshi, amil and vakeel) who served the various courts as scribes, financiers, advocates, and accountants. This was a network through which both information and materials flowed. The British relied in some parts on him and his connections for dispatches to and from the ruling Mirs as well as the neighboring principalities in Punjab, Kalat and Afghanistan. And, in 1867, he was given the Companion of the Star of India [C.S.I] for services provided during the 1857 uprising.

Hotchand was “a man of middle stature, spare habit, and brilliant keen eyes.” His ancestors, part of the vibrant finance network that connected the littoral Indian Ocean ports to cities scattered across continents, settled in the port village of Karachi in the late 18th century, just as it was changing hands from the Khan of Kalat to the Mirs of Talpur. According to the Memoir, it was their particular role in facilitating a bloodless transfer of power that gave them an early access to the newly assertive Mirs. The Hotchands were rewarded with various lands and grants and special rights to business transactions. Their privileged status is reflected in Hotchand’s description of the family house in Karachi, which had a stable for 40 horses, a household expenditure of 40,000 rupees per annum, and controlled business firms in over 500 locations.

In 1821, after the death of Hotchand’s great-grandfather, Seth Bhojoomal, the property and business was divided equally among four brothers. Only Hotchand’s grandfather, Seth Lalmandas, took to the trade while the others “gave themselves up to pleasure and luxury, leaving their affairs to be managed by their agents.” After having squandered their fortune, the brothers decided to contest the division of property with Seth Lalmandas, claiming he had kept three extra pitchers filled with gold and silver. This dispute was ultimately referred to the royal Mirs in person and Seth Lalmandas and his retinue set out for Hyderabad with “six camel loads of daftars (account papers).” The suit took many years and was resolved only after Hotchand paid his cousins a rich sum for the rights. He seems to have felt that the Mirs were not as helpful as they could have been.

It was soon after, in 1832, that a distressed Hindu child sought shelter from his parents at a mosque in Nasarpur. From this innocuous act erupted a religious maelstrom that consumed most of lower Sindh—resulting in the kidnapping (for ransom or for conversion) of Hotchand’s father. He was eventually freed after ten days in captivity but rumors circulated that he had been forced to convert to Islam. Hotchand does not comment directly on the matter of conversion – though he notes that his father immediately left on a pilgrimage to specific temples, and that the Mirs of Talpur had not done enough to rescue his father. Both the colonial commentators and the Pakistani nationalist narratives read this event as a pivot on which Hotchand switched his allegiance. Though there is no evidence, in the memoir, that this was the case.

The direct correlation between the abduction of Hotchand’s father and Hotchand’s collaboration with the East India Company comes to us from the records of the Company itself (such as James Burnes, Richard Burton, James Evans or, the infamous Charles Napier, speaking about the “evil” practices of the Mirs of Talpur) which carefully delineate a strict division between the Muslim rulers and the Hindu population in Sindh—caused entirely by the ruling Mirs of Talpur.

Since 1830, the East India Company had sought to build up British influence in Central Asia, keep the Russians and the French at bay, and monopolize the opium-cotton trade triangle between the United States, China and Britain. The imagined Russian danger precipitated the first Anglo-Afghan war from 1838-42.

Harried by their Great Game, the Company ratified a new treaty with the Mirs of Sindh in 1839. This placed some English troops in the region, abrogated all of the Mirs’ foreign affairs in favor of British, put an annual subsidy on the Mirs and gave the British the authority to mint coins in Sindh. In the meantime, Admiral Maitland captured the port of Karachi on the pretense that someone had fired a cannon shot at a British frigate in the harbor. The capture of Karachi was a severe blow to the Mirs as it was a major port of commerce. The Company desperately needed to control the point of egress for Malwa and Bengal opium to China, both for the purposes of tax revenue but also for supply.

Seth Naomul Hotchand cannot be a traitor, largely because on his shoulders did not rest the fate of any great conflict. He was a merchant, a trader, a broker, a participant in the “information order,” and as such, while his life intertwines with events that loom large as sites of colonial or local power, he did not determine their outcome.

Mirza Ali Akbar’s name, however, is not written in school textbooks as a traitor to the Muslim cause. Where Hotchand is vilified, Mirza Ali Akbar is simply forgotten. Where Charles Napier is honored with an arterial Napier Road in Karachi, Seth Hotchand Road is renamed Shah Waliullah Road. Where Hindus can exist only as caricatured boogey-men, reducing Seth Naomul Hotchand’s memory to that of a traitor is a violence doubly rendered.

———

1. Fredric J. Goldsmid, James Outram: A Biography (London: Smith, Elder, Co., 1881), pp. 393-4.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/the_middle_man.html/feed 3 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/wtwta_now_available_on_amazon.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/wtwta_now_available_on_amazon.html#comments Sun, 12 Jun 2011 16:12:59 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6294

Yes!

If/when you buy it, and read it, I would appreciate comments on Amazon (be partisan!) and also your grandmother wants this book.

love,

s

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/wtwta_now_available_on_amazon.html/feed 6 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/over_at_the_caravan.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/over_at_the_caravan.html#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 07:58:16 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6288

I have a piece in Hindoostani glossy magazine The Caravan Beta. It is about my research trip to Uch Sharif. Actually, no, but almost about that. Here is a paragraph that didn’t make the cut (or got cut, rather) but I liked it:

To make conversation, I told him about the Arab migrations of the 8th and 9th centuries to this region. The Qur’an and Had’ith scholars, the muftis, the geographers, the merchants. I mentioned also Richard Burton and his paean to Falconry written in the mid nineteenth century within a couple of hours drive from our location. Eventually, I shut up. His thoughts were elsewhere, and his fingers were nervously fiddling with his many devices. We both fell silent and let the heat and dust slowly envelop us.

Read the actual piece: Ways of Seeing: Pakistan’s paradox of knowledge and denial

Also, in the same issue, there is Bilal Tanweer’s (CM ♥ BT) Faiz for Dummies. Really, read this:

Carry the book on your bus trip home. Open it at a random page and encounter the words barq faroza’n and sar-e vadi-e sina in the same line. Feel your heart slipping down to your belly. Slam/shut/drop the book immediately. Stare some more at the cover. You vaguely sense the picture of a man. It is a man. A white silhouette on the glossy all-black cover. His elbow rests calmly on a table and his limpid hand is holding a cig. This is the poet. Introduce yourself, say hello.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/over_at_the_caravan.html/feed 2 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/at_sea.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/at_sea.html#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 09:15:20 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6262

I.

Rudolph says to the sheriff,
“For five long years you’ve tried.
And you can search as long as you like,
you can try with all your might,
but I’ll see you in the sweet bye and bye.
I’ll see you in the sweet bye and bye.”

Sheriff says to Eric Rudolph,
“Through caves and abandoned mines,
We’ll search through scraps and the old feed sacks.
In every old place you could hide.”
– Ballad of Eric Rudolph, Michael Holland (2008)

For a time, Mr. Rudolph’s success as a fugitive reframed the conflict, from criminal vs. the law to local boy vs. federal intruders. It made him a celebrated underdog, with T-shirts being sold bearing the phrases “Run Rudolph Run” and “Hide and Seek Champion.”
– New York Times, April 9, 2005

Eric Rudolph disappeared for five years in the United States. He planted bombs and killed civilians at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, family planning clinics, and a gay club in 1998 and then, went on the run. It was hard to believe, sitting in the States, that someone can disappear like that. We were all in the known universe. I don’t believe at his capture, much was made of him. John Ashcroft called him “the most notorious American fugitive”. This was in 2003. The coverage, which I followed, didn’t make any connection between Rudolph and terrorism or between the plausibility of local help and Rudolph’s long evasion. Rudolph belonged to some other America – not the one where on May 1st, 2003 George W. Bush had declared “Mission Accomplished” and where John Ashcroft was busy busting potheads. Rudolph was some lingering story – one about battles long over. His acts, his flight, his evasion or his capture had little to offer us.

II.

Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world…
– New York Times, May 2, 2011.

It is wrong to claim that Osama b. Laden was irrelevant long before he was killed. He wasn’t. He represented, and represents, hundreds of thousands of lives lost since December 2001 when US forces reportedly failed to capture or kill him. He disappeared for the next decade but that absence was filled with wars in Iraq and Pakistan – wars waged on the heads of civilians, among urban centers, and at the cost of trillions. Just the technological developments of killing from the skies accomplished in this decade are mind or moral numbing. No, Osama b. Laden was never irrelevant and he was never off the script. Sure, George W. Bush or Pervez Musharraf told us that the battle was now bigger, the stakes higher and the cost greater, but they were empty words. The deaths of September 11th, 2001 and the destructions that followed hold us accountable – to remember that the cost of those lives began in a bid for this one life. So, we must deal with that life and the narratives it spawned. NYT claims that he was a “hero in much of the Islamic world”. The obituary moves on, and we are left with that “fact”. What are we to make of it? Heroes, after all, were gods and immortals.

III.

The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.”
- New York Times, May 2, 2010.

I recently spoke at a conference in Chicago about teaching South Asia critically and I concluded with:

To tell the story of America’s entangled history with South Asia is the first and most basic step in teaching South Asia critically. Elihu Yale, who lived and worked in India for nearly three decades with the British East India Company from 1670 to 1699 donated to the Collegiate School of Connecticut three bales of goods- Madras cotton, silk and other textiles from India – laying the foundation of their first building. The first seated chair of Sanskrit emerged at Yale. In 1800 when Alexander Dow negotiated yet another treaty with the Sindhi Mirs to establish ports and harbors on the Arabian Sea, he specifically noted that Americans were to kept out of Sindh. The1856 Guano Islands Act passed by Congress claimed for the United States any “unclaimed” island with sufficient supplies of bird waste (to be used as fertiliser by American farmers) by any American entrepreneur, and this annexation to be defended by the US Navy. The list of island territories annexed, claimed or contested – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, and so on – is long and scattered around the globe. But that act of Congress is also part of the legal framework that created Guantanamo Bay and that enables drone assassinations in “remote frontier” regions of Pakistan where there “is no rule of law”. The opium trade network which sustained the East India Company coffers in the mid-19th century by supplying Bengal-raised opium to China was remitted through American cotton and that money seeped right into the Southern slave economy.

These entanglements disrupt the teleologies of postcolonial study in the United States, and they complicate the relationship of the academic to the funding bodies, to the region, and to the student. The politics of provincializing Europe are all too evident but the necessity to provincialize America bears laying out. We must look at the American state-war on the Native American populations – decreed explicitly by the post-Civil War Congress. We need to look at the barbary Muslim pirates in whose encounters American power first went ashore. We need to look at the American imperial gaze that stretched out towards the West and called it the open Frontier and sought to settle it, sought to categorize its people, its histories, build ethnographic portraits of the good Indians and the bad Indians. It is of utmost importance to our understanding of the American engagement with the Tribe post 2005 that we recall the work of John Wesley Powell and the Bureau of American Ethnology. We need to pay as much attention to Locke, Jefferson, Whitman, Turner, Wilson as we do to Hegel or Heidegger or Bentnick or Curzon.

The “Indians” or the “hostiles” as they were once named remain an indelible part of our national myth. The myopia we extend out to the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan exists in North Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma. We have programmed forgetfulness in our civic and political lives. We have enabled our academic lives to non-entities in the public sphere.

IV.

I go myself, as agent of the British Government, to a Court of the language and manners of which I am utterly ignorant, and to accomplish that of which the most sanguine have no hope. It is simply a matter of duty .
- James Abbott, Narrative of a Journey from Heraut to Khiva, Moscow and St Petersburgh (1843)

Abbottabad was named to memorialize the service of Sir James Abbott, commissioner of the Hezara region. One can say that he became immortal.

V.

So I would have no objection if we picked out a country that is a likely suspect and bombed some oil fields, refineries, bridges, highways, industrial complexes, airports, military bases, and anything else that is of great value but doesn’t shelter innocent civilians. If it happens to be the wrong country, well, too bad, but it’s likely it did something to deserve it anyway. Or would in the future. And its leaders, as well as other troublemakers, would get the message: Terrorism is too costly a game.

President Clinton says we should be cautious about placing blame or taking action. OK. But when the time comes for punishment, it wouldn’t be an eye for eye. That’s just a swap. We should take both eyes, ears, nose, the entire anatomy. That’s how to make a lasting impression.
– Mike Royko, April 21, 1995, Chicago Tribune

Salman Rushdie wants Pakistan to be declared a terrorist nation and expelled from the “comity of nations”. To Rushdie a 6 ft 4in man wandering around a country of 5 ft 8in plebeians without getting noticed is inconceivable and, hence, the entire 180 million must pay the price. They were all in the know. Keeping mum even as drones kept killing their lots; even as the Taliban kept blowing up hotels, police compounds, intelligence agency offices, shrines and hospitals; even as the US kept endorsing and supporting dictatorial power over them; even as the US kept funding their military to the tune of tens of billions while “non-humanitarian aid” was pegged to a billion or so; even as an earthquake and a flood shook their geography loose. The millions of Pakistan kept their quiet, maybe giggling in anticipation of whenever Uncle Sam would catch them in the act. Now they have been caught! The ISI knew! This validates all the drones missiles! It means MORE DRONE MISSILES! Yeah. That is what it means. They were all in it, Rushdie. Every stinking lying one of them.

Royko wrote what I quote above after the Oklahoma City Bombing. I remember that morning. I was ironing my clothes for my night shift at the restaurant. I remember Connie Chung breathlessly telling me that men of Middle Eastern hue had been seen fleeing the scene. She was literally out of breath: The war in the Middle East has finally come to the United States. Royko was similarly shocked and convinced. It wasn’t important that almost immediately the call had went out to look for white caucasian suspects. Later, in October 2001, we kept hearing that Timothy McVeigh got his training or his weapon or something from Iraq. Royko’s wish came true – we got both ears, nose, the entire anatomy. Maybe Rushdie’s wish would come true as well. Who remembers Geronimo anyways?

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/at_sea.html/feed 27 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/lahore_snaps_xv_a_city_about_food.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/lahore_snaps_xv_a_city_about_food.html#comments Tue, 12 Apr 2011 10:27:11 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6247

Lahore, if you want to believe me, is a city about food. The second most popular gossip in Lahore is about specific sites/corners in the city and the specific foods available there. The first most popular being a vehement disagreement/challenge/let-us-go-RIGHT-NOW-and-SEE about that food-stuff. Or maybe, this is just my Lahore. I mentioned earlier that I have been reading memoirs of Lahore and it is seriously messing with my head. I know Lahore, intimately in some areas, cursorily in others; but I know Lahore. I can usually imagine any intersection, any particular cluster of shops or houses. As I read memoirs of Lahore (most concentrated on the 1940s and 50s), I began to notice some oddities in my recollections. I was somehow sublimating those memories as my own memories of Lahore.

A. Hameed, noted writer, in his Lahore ki Yadeein (Memories of Lahore) (2000) describes drinking chai at Pak Tea House and a particular gentleman seated on the table over, who delightfully would lean over and openly eavesdrop on everyone’s conversation (everyone being people like Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Ibn-e Insha). I swear I have that same memory. Except I am sure that I never met Qasmi or Insha. Almost certain, actually. There are other oddities – F. E. Chaudhry, one of the greatest news photographer of Pakistan, describes a meeting with Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the Pakistan Times office in his memoir Ab woh Lahore Kahan? (Now, Where is that Lahore?) (2009). I was there. I think.

My problems with memory seep into things other than Lahore. I mis-remember people. I forget that someone was funny. Or that I had already read something and that this spark of a misshapen “new” thought was really the blob of a half-memory. These things, the worry about these things, seem to prey on me only when I am not paying attention. Or when my attention is diverted by memoirs or by food.

The thing about food is, I am not actually a foodie or someone who cares a lot about gastronomic pleasures. All my food memories are people memories. All my taste-buds are conversation-buds. I like to be with my friends, my loved ones. I like to see them enjoy the food. Probably why I like cooking so much more.

So, when I say Lahore is a city about food – I am saying Lahore is a city where I like talking about food. That’s a quirk of my memory.

There will be more pictures of foods, but these are street pictures – taken hastily, in passing, walking, talking. Except for two meals which are documented in this series, I ate at home every day. I will post those later.

You can see a lot more street food on Flickr.

You can see earlier entries in the Lahore Snaps series here.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/lahore_snaps_xv_a_city_about_food.html/feed 12 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/nabi_bux_khan_baloch_1917-2011.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/nabi_bux_khan_baloch_1917-2011.html#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 07:09:51 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6244

Belatedly, I have learned that the one of the most significant historian of Sindh, and one of the most meticulous historian in Pakistan, Nabi Bux Khan Baloch passed away on April 6, 2011. Almost every thing I have touched, directly related to my dissertation, was created, edited, compiled or reflected upon by Dr. Baloch. I have been arguing with him, through him, for this past decade. To my regret, I never got a chance to meet him. But as someone who is infinitely familiar with his vast Sindhi/early Islam bibliography, I can pay no greater tribute to a scholar than that he was exacting, precise and thorough in his handling of an archive that defies almost everyone. He was, quite possibly, the last of the greats in Pakistan’s historical field. We have already lost K K Aziz and Ahmad Hasan Dani.

Dr. Baloch’s crowning achievements are his works on Sindhi folk and sufi poetics and literature.

You can read a fuller description of his intellectual output here.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/nabi_bux_khan_baloch_1917-2011.html/feed 1 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/lahore_snaps_xiv_trees.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/lahore_snaps_xiv_trees.html#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:58:54 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6219

That Lahore, of late 80s, is no longer there. Neither is the Lahore of the 90s, or early 2000s. The city has changed, most rapidly, between 2002-2009 and further in the last few years. The roads have been widened, new beltways built, farm land confiscated by the Army and parceled out to its million-strong leeches, built to the height of urban horror and resold. Lahore is more a palimpsest than a city, and to scratch away the ugliness of the present, requires incessant trips to the libraries. I will, as this series on Lahore, enfolds, talk a lot more about such things. Perhaps too much and perhaps to no one listening.

I read some memoirs of Lahore recently and I did some walking on my own. It was good to breathe Lahore for longer than two weeks and it was good to visit parts I hadn’t visited in a long while. It was quite early in my trip that I stumbled upon trees as a way to scrap away the encroachments of present Lahore. My bike ride to my high school was marked by trees. As in, I marked my distance/time in relation to specific trees along the way, and sunlight that reflected through its leaves. It was one small ritual but it was effective. As I graduated to a car, and then to a motorbike, things changed. Still, the specific trees in specific streets, on specific times of the year remain inscribed in my mental map of Lahore.

This is one of those trees that I saw every day. In the summer, a chabhari walla sits under it, or used to, and sell jamon, or shatoot. For two rupees, he’d wrap em in a small torn piece of newspaper, and sprinkle atrocious amount of masala on it.

I remember this tree with much more dread. It is inside the compound of the Lahore Cantt Thana (police station). I went there a few times to get friends bailed, or to get myself some paperwork processed. None of those memories are pleasant. But look at this tree.

Leaving Lahore, I visited Uch Sharif for some manuscript/field work. There at a site where legend holds, Muhammad b. Qasim prayed, I saw this tree.

You can see a lot more trees on Flickr.

You can see earlier entries in the Lahore Snaps series here.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/lahore_snaps_xiv_trees.html/feed 3 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/resettling_the_indus_raising_funds.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/resettling_the_indus_raising_funds.html#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:28:15 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6211

This trip had, what learned call, serendipity flowing through the pores. One such serendipitous moment resulted in my encounter with the Resettling the Indus project. A group of architects, media and finance specialists, wise fools gathered to help raise funds and resources during the greatest natural disaster in Pakistan last year – the floods. However, even as we (the world) has mostly forgotten and moved on, they are continuing to work in the area, rebuilding the villages and sites swept away by the flood.

Let me pause here to tell you that this post is to raise funds for this project. A project that I can genuinely say deserves every little dime you can spare plus some. I have rarely endorsed/raised money here but you can trust me that this will help people.

As Hyder Ibrahim explained to me the philosophy and genesis of the project, I couldn’t help but marvel at the directness and clarity with which RtIndus approached NGO-style work and engaged the “locals”.

The most major impact on any affected of any kind of a natural disaster is psychological displacement. This is equally true for the victims of the Pakistan Floods of 2010. Their houses have been washed away or damaged beyond repair; their sources of incomes have been destroyed (in the form of crop or livestock); their lives have been put on a sudden hold. Any kind of rehabilitative work that is carried out for them needs to address the psychological impacts on their lives. Displacement, in physical form or even culturally, may not affect them in the short term; as a matter of fact, they might welcome any kind of rehabilitative work that is ‘offered’ to them as a privilege. In the long run, however, it will cause an unforeseen shift in their lifestyles to which they may or may not be able to cope with.

Architecturally speaking, people who have lived in mud houses for generations will be satisfied to be living in a brick or concrete house, but in the long run, will they have the resources to maintain these houses? Who will pay for the maintenance of these houses? ‘Aid’ will be not always be flowing in for them. They need to be given solutions that they can sustain, long after the aid is gone. Mud (or any other local material) is readily available in these areas, and will always be. Why give them an infrastructure, which they will not be able to afford? Why give them an infrastructure that they are not used to culturally, socially and financially?

It is utterly impractical, and insensitive, for any organization to pick up a project that promises more and delivers less. The approach to this disaster should be delivering more by promising them less – in a way that requires the participation of the local population in the reconstruction process.

This might seem like an unsympathetic approach to their vows, but one that understands the overall implications. It is imperative, in our view, that the people affected by this natural disaster are involved in the process of rehabilitation, so that they are a vital part of putting their own lives and their communities back together again. This will not only instill a sense of ownership in them, it will give them a chance to be a part of rebuilding their own lives. Maybe the only opportunity in this disaster is to help these people rise beyond their current states of mind about not being ‘able’ enough and actually be able to be agents of change in their own lives.

From that starting point, they built a site-specific philosophy: 1. Involve the local afflicted population in the cleaning up process; 2. Teach them the skills necessary to design and construct their own houses. 3. Use common sense, long-existing social and cultural knowledges, work.

It is that crucial step – building in the community the capacity to produce their own rehabilitation which makes this project so worth your support. The RtIndus folks even designed their own brick making machine (the brick-producing industry is a serious roadblock to most such efforts – and usually the greatest money-sink). Their invention, Bhatta Jr., made bricks on site.

From that philosophy, with that tool, and using the skills of their varied but specialized backgrounds, RtIndus began training and rebuilding – first a community center (mosque, dispensary etc) and then houses. Look at these photos.

This is, quite honestly, the best applied knowledge I have encountered. In another heartbeat, I would be working with them.

This entire project is funded either through private funds or through donations. There are narratives about the post-Flood global aid here but we will go over them some other time. For now: You can donate, and you must donate, to them via Western Union to their account information:

Account Name: Resettling the Indus
Account #: 00242002040107
Silk Bank – Allama Iqbal Town. Lahore, Pakistan
Email: hashez@gmail.com
SWIFT CODE: SAUDPKKA

It is fairly impossible to send money to PAKISTAN but you can go to your bank and do a wire transfer using that Swift Code above.

Alternatively, you can PayPal me the money (Paypal Account: manan@uchicago.edu) and I will total and forward all donations after a let’s say April 30th.

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