[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.

I try not to say much when I am a little overwhelmed. Agha Shahid Ali overwhelmed me a while ago – when I started to seriously read his collected works. Over the years, I have mentioned him many times here, or quoted his Faiz translations or highlighted writings on him. But when I began to go through his poems, I stopped. At first there was too much grief. The poems on his mother, on Kashmir, on murders in Kashmir. So, I put it aside, as my own griefs were too raw for other griefs to lay nearby.

Many months later, at home, in a different world, I began to read from him. This time, the grief surrendered to smiles and Kashmir dwindled to reveal America.

This essay, which I was reluctant to write, is a bit of revisionist take – on him as a poet of exile, and on the capacity to see past the somberness of his grief to his smiles. There is a lot more I want to say – on his translation of Faiz and Darwish, and his tonal poems and the usage of Shi’a imagery. Some other time.

Hope you like it (the online version has some italics issues and I will post pdf once I get it).

Postcard from Kashmir, The Sunday Guardian, Jan 15, 2011:

In a sense, Hafiz, Ghalib or Faiz (but really, if we are to talk of Ali, we ought to include Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Mahmoud Darwish) have their work enhanced by reams of commentary, of scholarship and of cultural weight. Shahid Ali remembers that he grew up in a household where those names, and their words, were oft recited and fondly remembered. Ali, who died on December 8, 2001, has not attracted that kind of attention yet. By which I mean, specifically, an attention to his contribution to the language of human emotions. Tonight the air is many envelopes/again. Tell her to open them at once/and find hurried notes about my longing/for wings. Tell her to speak, when that hour comes,/simply of the sky. Friend, speak of the sky/when that hour comes. Speak, simply, of the air. Thus concluded the thirteenth, and final, canto of “From Another Desert” — Shahid Ali’s telling of Laila and Majnoon guised in that Poundian structure. Yet what it contains — a rumination on love, on defiance, on the ways in which epic and belief coincide in religion and poetry — makes “From Another Desert” that rarest of creations, a masterpiece, one that Faiz would gladly claim for himself. Certainly that sour Muhammad Iqbal would.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. His fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in various international magazines including Granta, Vallum, Caravan, and Words Without Borders. He was one of Granta’s New Voices for 2011 and one of the eleven recipients of the 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant. He teaches literature and fiction writing at LUMS, Lahore. He’s a CM fanboy.

Pakistan

• Pakistan’s General Problem: Mohammed Hanif / OPEN Magazine
  The sanest reading on Pakistan and the Generals who run the country. This would be hilarious if it wasn’t entirely true—but it’s still pretty hilarious. (By the way, I am still waiting for a designer to come up with t-shirts that read: murshid, marwa na dena. I’ll buy two, I promise.)

• At Sea: Manan Ahmed / Chapati Mystery
  The best post on the OBL saga. If you want perspective, if you want understanding, this is the place to go. 

• Forfeiting the Future: Manan Ahmed / Caravan
  And not surprisingly, the best piece on the ghastly murder of Salman Taseer was also by Manan Ahmed. Others may give you information. This gives you understanding. 

DFW
This was the year of DFW’s The Pale King. I read so many reviews but none was particularly memorable. However, two pieces are worth remembering. First, DFW’s nasty letter to his editor at Harper’s where he threatens his editors in footnotes. Second one is on the tangled youths of DFW, Franzen, and Eugenides and how that led them to create great books. One heck of a read.

• David Foster Wallace’s Threats to Harper’s Magazine
• Just Kids: Evan Hughes /NY Mag

Places, Loved Ones

• Seven Places in My Heart: Mohammed Hanif / Newsline
  Of the most charming essays I’ve read in 2011, this beautiful ode to Karachi by Mohammed Hanif is my winner. Over the course of the year, I have returned to it many times for its little stories, quirky characters, and hilarious situations. I tell you, there is a funny, affecting novel buried in this piece. I hope Hanif writes it one day. I hope he’s listening. 

• A.A Gill: Dubai on Empty / Vanity Fair
  The curmudgeon-travel writer I love visits a city I loathe. I reread Gill all the time for his mind bending sentences. Nobody writes like him. He can tell you about his writing desk and make it read like a thriller. Favorite reading.

• What if We Lose This Match?: Khurram Husain/ The Express Tribune
  We weren’t paying much attention to the newspapers on the day of Pakistan-India World Cup semi-final. But we did to this piece—because it captures subcontinent’s collective madness and raging euphoria for the game of cricket. Amazingly, incredibly, impossibly. It simply nails it.

• Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.: Johnathan Franzen / NY Times
  Nobody talks about love these days; not even poets. Thank God for Franzen.

Some of the Best Writing Is Writers Writing About Books
No, really.

• The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami: Sam Anderson / NY Times
  Since he’s moved to NY Times Book Review, Sam Anderson has been focusing on his Sentence of the Week column that, generally speaking, I find pretty uninspired and uninspiring. But the Sam we know and love makes a return here and shows some serious love for Murakami, Tokyo, weird things. In between he also talks about Murakami’s new novel, 1Q84.

• Daisy Rockwell: Night-Smudged Light / Caravan
  In this review of the first-ever translation of Yashpal’s monumental Hindi novel, Jhoota Such (This Is Not That Dawn), our friend, Ms Rockwell, takes a long view of Partition narratives in fiction, history and photography and point to the limitations of the existing conversation on Partition—and looks to expand it.

• La doublure: The singular fabrications of Raymond Roussel—By Ben Marcus / Harper’s Magazine
  Ben Marcus is probably the smartest writer I have met. Here he reviews Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa. A random favorite sentence from the review: “The procession of strange set pieces comes so fast in Roussel, the effect—an intoxicating disquiet out of a world that is ravishingly gorgeous, if wholly unrecognizable—is almost punishing.” (Subscription required, sadly.) His New Yorker podcast on Ishiguro is also a must listen by the way.

Teju Cole
You know who made an appearance this year and rocked our world right away? His name starts with a T and he writes such transparent, light sentences that I seethe with envy. I share two pieces by him.

• Miracle Speech: The Poetry Of Tomas Tranströmer: Teju Cole / The New Yorker Blogs
  
  
• Essays From One of Our Best Wishful Thinkers: Teju Cole/ NY Times

Other Stuff

• Falling Man: Vinod K. Jose: / Caravan
  This profile of Manmohan Singh, is a must read even if you are not interested in Indian politics. It details the long and fascinating story of a man who is “an economist among politicians and a politician among economists.” 

• Paul Simms: GOD’S BLOG / The New Yorker
  This, I think, was the funniest thing I read on the internet in 2011. And it gets better upon rereading.

And Finally, Some Lit Crit
It’s a bad, bad world out there. Writers are constantly asked: Writing is fine, but what do you really do—and, more importantly, why. Two favorite literary critics articulate the role of literary criticism in our age of opinion and numbers. (Technically, these are 2010 – but hey, 31 December, 2010 is so 2011.)

• The Intellectual at Play in the Universe: Pankaj Mishra / NY Times
• Translating the Code into Everyday Language: Sam Anderson/ NY Times
  

The recent hissy fit thrown by historian Niall Ferguson (racist! imperialist!) because Pankaj Mishra wrote a scathing review in the LRB deserves comment.

Mishra’s review of Ferguson’s TV-Book Civilisation, Watch This Man, led with drawing attention to White supremacists like Theodore Stoddard and the twin peaks of their insanity – the inherent belief in their racial rule and the imminent rise of the non-white. He carefully placed Ferguson’s tele-tectonic career within those peaks, as Ferguson maniacally catapulted from one to another to back to forth; content only when everyone was praising his wit or inviting him to exclusive seances with Dick Cheney. Well, sure. Ferguson was only one among many intellectuals who took the post 2001 moment and led the charge of the key boards. Let us never forget Fouad Ajami or Bernard Lewis or Kanan Makiya or Boot or Kaplan or Zakaria or Friedman. Let us never forget.

Here is what Ferguson wrote in October 2001:

The future of Afghanistan must, if the war is successfully prosecuted, be very similar indeed to those states currently under this kind of international colonial rule. Nothing else will do. Contrary to popular arguments made in the 1980s, imperialism is affordable for the richest economy in the world. You could argue that the cost of isolationism could be much higher in the long run than the cost of confident intervention in rogue states. When the British empire controlled 25% of the world’s surface and population, the British defence budget averaged around 3% of GNP. Currently the US defence budget accounts for slightly less than that. It would not be beyond the bounds of possibility that by increasing the defence budget to 5% of GNP, still below the levels of height of the cold war, more effective military intervention could be undertaken.

There is no excuse for the relative weakness of the US as a quasi-imperial power. The transition to formal empire from informal empire is an affordable one. But it does not come very naturally to the US – partly because of its history and partly because of Vietnam – to act as a self-confident imperial power. The US has the resources: but does it have the guts to act as a global hegemon and make the world a more stable place?

This is what he wrote in October 2003, reviewing a book:

Perhaps the book’s real problem is that the very concept of “hegemony” is really just a way to avoid talking about empire, “empire” being a word to which most Americans remain averse. But “empire” has never exclusively meant direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants. Students of imperial history have a far more sophisticated conceptual framework than that. During the imperial age, for example, British colonial administrators such as Frederick Lugard clearly understood the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” rule; large parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly, through the agency of local potentates rather than British governors. A further distinction was introduced by the British historians Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article on “the imperialism of free trade,” in which the authors showed how the Victorians used naval and financial power to open markets well outside their colonial ambit. There is an important and now widely accepted distinction between “formal” and “informal” empire. The British did not formally govern Argentina, for example, but the merchant banks of the City of London exerted such a powerful influence on that country’s fiscal and monetary policy that its independence was heavily qualified.

Ferguson has bristled (BRISTELD) that Mishra “called” him a racist. Ferguson has threatened to sue LRB and Mishra because, well he is NOT a racist. Mishra, to his credit, has used the Letters to further skewer and flay Ferguson and one great, great service Mishra has done to humanity (the thinking third) is to wipe the sheen off that smug face. Bravo.

I am less interested in the racism debate, and more in the imperialism. In a recently published article, historian Richard Drayton, succinctly blasts the defenders of cultural imperialism.

It is important now to be clear about the reality of Imperialism, in ways its historians so rarely are. For it is not merely, as it was at its origin, a word of political abuse. It is a useful category through which we may make sense of a phenomenon which recurs in world history wherever a power gap allows one soci- ety to become predatory towards others. Imperialism, in all its contexts, is a regime through which external entities derive maximum gain from the labour and resources within a territory. A foreign power, with or without formal colonization, although always with local collaborators, secures a protected and privileged sphere for its economic actors. There the relationship of labour to capital is manipulated via the suppression of taxes, wages, social or environmental protections, by forms of coercion which drive labour towards that direction of employment and limit its legal or practical ability to resist the regime, and from which tribute, commodities and profit may be freely expatriated. The social rent paid by capital is minimized, as both the costs of social reproduction (childhood, ill health, aging) are borne from the wages of labour and the costs of infrastructure through which the external actor derives extraordinary benefit – roads, deepwater harbours, airports, electricity networks, local policing and repression – are funded mainly out of taxation of the wages and consumption of the squeezed wages of labour. Those on the under- side of this regime derive reduced benefit from their labour and resources, and live in circumstances of insecurity, if not permanent malnutrition. The upshot of this is high levels of unnecessary mortality sustained over very long periods, a kind of slow-motion mass manslaughter. Violence is a constant and necessary corollary of such an order, needed to install, defend, discipline and replace local collaborators. Torture is not just a problem that oddly pops up in the midst of imperial adven- tures: it is the necessary recurrent partner to a non-consensual regime of exploita- tion, where the application of force to bodies to extract information, to spread terror, to break the will to resist, is fundamental. But Imperialism always comes wearing the mask of community, promising that its form of domination is in the universal interest. To such a claim historians and their colleagues in the social sciences lend active help.¹

Drayton criticizes historians who took the cultural turn of making imperialism about representation:

But even these new currents of Imperial history as a subject rarely posed a critique of either the past of British Imperialism, or even less, a challenge to the forms of domination and exploitation which it had shaped and which survived its formal collapse. For the ‘cultural turn’ was associated with an ascent of Idealism in the historiography of British imperialism which was remarkably compatible with the Neo-Liberal moment. On the left, the postcolonialists were preoccupied with how the British perceived the colonized, and with the imperial life of cultural ste- reotypes.15 On the right, as we shall see, apologists for contemporary British and American power sought to revive the Whig history of the British Empire. Somewhere in the centre, we were told of the ideological origins of the British Empire. Colonial encounters, for Cannadine, became mere consequences of how the British imagined social class. The mental worlds of individuals at the frontier, usually white, became the subject of many elegant studies from Linda Colley and her two distinguished students Kathleen Wilson and Maya Jasanoff.17 A focus on subjectivity, on how people in Africa, Asia, or Latin America thought about things, displaced examination of practical and material experience. Historians appeared to be more bothered by ‘epistemic violence’ than the real thing. The exceptions to this have been few – David Anderson’s and Caroline Elkins’s studies of the violence with which the colonial state repressed the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya stand out, and the hostility with which both, but particularly Elkins, were received, is an emblem of the costs involved in breaking the code of silence.

In important ways, post-colonial Imperial and world history is still written mainly for the pleasure of the reading classes of past and present imperial powers.

This is a serious critique that deserves to be taken seriously by historians – especially those among us who wish to show the rot in the fruits of imperialism. I am going to take my time and write more on Drayton’s critique but for now, just wanted to highlight this to you (my thanks to Mishra for drawing attention to this essay).

In the meantime, the likes of Ferguson will never go away (I blame TV) until the true horror of imperialism is distinguished along with the representations of imperialism.

Gitmo is real.

1. Richard Drayton, “Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism“, Journal of Contemporary History 2011 46: 671

Nandini Ramachandran reviews WTWFA for the Sunday Guardian:

The size of its betrayal would’ve forced Manto into asking his fellow citizens what he once asked Uncle Sam — my country is poor, but why is it ignorant? This is a query that haunts Manan Ahmed as much as Manto, and his book is an antidote to the assumptions many make about Islamic societies. Wild Frontiers taps into the angry bewilderment of generations of postcolonial thinkers. Why is it, everyone from Frantz Fanon to Eqbal Ahmad to Mahmood Mamdani has asked, that modern civilisation insists on operating in binaries?

In the meantime: THERE IS NOW A KINDLE VERSION OF THE BOOK!!!! and it is also more affordable for the holidays.

More actual content will come on this blog soon. Sigh.

Below the fold, a twitter-based debate on a review essay in NYT.

(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.

For my recent column on Bookslut, I approached the worrisome task of writing about the most exalted stars in the Bangla literary firmament gingerly and with some trepidation. What if my reverence was insufficient? What if I missed some important salient details? Was I even qualified to write about Bankim and Tagore at all? It scarcely occurred to me that I might run the risk of treating B and T with too much reverence. But no sooner had the column gone up than I received a string of tweets from a Bengali twitter friend suggesting politely that I look into assertions that it was not Bankim, but rather Peary Chand Mitra who wrote the first Bangla novel. Soon after, an old friend and learned Bangla scholar wrote a critique of my piece in an email (below), taking issue above all with my excessive reverence for the subject matter. This post then is dedicated to the lively spirit of debate, or adda, that stirs in the heart of all Bangla-philes. Feel free to spar, pile on, or sit by with pursed lips and folded hands in the comments below.

Literary ganwaars like me would only ask, ‘yeh sab kaun hai aur jo bhi hain, yeh logon ko leke ab bhi kya guzur fusur ho raha hai?’

Otherwise my comment is that you were too reverent. You wouldn’t write with such reverence on someone more contemporary, would you? This proves that they do not have contemporary relevance but are period pieces. Period pieces of perceived bong greatness. I am unsubtly telling you that Tagore was a crappy novelist–lit-crits don’t want to admit that because they will lose their trade then. Bankim would be spared because he was a novelist though. As in, he was interested in the form.

Now, on to the women’s question:
“…and women rarely know any existence outside the family compound. In such settings there is no room for pre-marital romance, and no chance of swashbuckling strangers striding onto the scene as they do in historical fictions like Durgeshnandini. Romantic tension must therefore materialize and play out entirely within the bounds of the home, the outside world penetrating only through the slats in the window shutters, and through novels, which bring with them a whiff of adventure and the possibilities of romantic love.”

T ‘n B or TB (?) wrote about a social milieu that also was the kachra of the Permanent Settlement (PS): the babus and bibis of Bengal. The majority–literally the millions–who were screwed as a result of the PS beyond any doubt stayed on as landed or landless peasants. And half of that population were women. These women too were indeed married off early but they had to work! And there were many instances of pre-marital sexual encounters (romance too maybe) among poor and working women, tribals, and women living in barren lands as well as forest lands. A good deal of ethno-lit (for what the term is worth) of the 20s and 30s when T was alive and had become the baba of culture bear evidence. Women also really worked in the fields and forests and did gazillion kinds of work and therefore the outside world didn’t come to them through slats at all. On this very premise, it is high time to refuse to write on Tagore and Bankim–simple as that. Your next assignment should be Manik, if you want to hang out with the bhadralok with a difference.

In passing–20th century Bong novel form has truly little or nothing to do with Bankim. It is a lit-crit myth to presume so. My theory experiment is, what if there were no T & B? Would you still be able to lead a meaningful literary and social life? My unambiguous reply to that is, Yes! You would then truly get to know those who were made to live in the dark with TB raging inside and outside.

TB, as we all agree must be eradicated.

My new column is up at Bookslut. It was with some trepidation that I approached the hallowed topic of Bangla literature. Here is an excerpt:

“Neither of them noticed that the period in which husband and wife rediscover each other in the exquisite first light of love—that gold-tinged dawn of conjugal life—had slipped silently into the past. Even before savouring the new, they had become told, familiar, and accustomed to each other.”
– From Rabindranath Tagore’s The Broken Nest

A bored young woman walks from room to room in her beautiful house. She sprawls on her bed and leafs through a novel, then wanders to the living room and looks through the bookcases for a new book. Suddenly she hears an interesting sound. She rushes to the windows and peers through the slats in the dark shutters. She sees a performer with a monkey, then some men carrying a palanquin, then a foolish man waddling along with an umbrella. Excited, she moves from shutter to shutter to peer through as these characters cross back and forth through her line of vision. She fetches a lorgnette, so she can see them better. When all disappear from view, she walks back through the living room, still holding up the lorgnette and stands on the porch that encloses the house’s interior verandah. Her husband walks by, fetches a book, and walks back again. He doesn’t notice her. She focuses her lorgnette on him. As his figure recedes into a different part of the house, her hand, still holding the lorgnette, drops to her side, and the camera zooms abruptly away from her.

Satyajit Ray’s film Charulata (1964) tells the story of a lonely young housewife whose distracted husband fails to notice until too late that she has fallen in love with his younger brother. The film is based on Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali novella Broken Nest (Nashtaneer), which, along with two other Tagore novellas, Two Sisters (Dui Bon) and The Orchard (Malancha), about complicated marriages, has just come out in an excellent new translation by Arunava Sinha as the collection Three Women. The opening scenes of the film Charulata convey viscerally Charulata’s boredom and confinement, conditions that are described, quickly and succinctly in Tagore’s economical but poetic prose:

Living as she did in a wealthy household, Charulata had no chores to do. The only task of her long, undemanding days and nights was to blossom fruitlessly, rather like the flower that will never ripen.

Tagore adds that Charulata has “a natural propensity for reading” and thus he, and Ray, in turn, sets up a clearly Madame Bovary-esque premise for his bored, educated bourgeois heroine. But whereas Madam Bovary gallivants all about the landscape in search of romance, Charulata, as a respectable young woman in late nineteenth century Bengal, does not leave the house. Her adventures, as her boredom, all exist within the confines of her home. Romance, or something like it, comes in the form of the traditionally close friendship between a woman and her husband’s younger brother, known as her “debar” in Bengali.

Read the rest here.

Dear Readers,

Chapati Mystery is launching a new flash fiction contest, which might just happen one time or might become an OVERNIGHT SENSATION or even a TRADITION. For the first contest, we solicit entries inspired by the following tweet sent out by @polgrim on the occasion of Hosni Mubarak’s removal from the office of President of Egypt:

I was deep in conversation with an ambassador’s wife of an ‘x’ country over dinner when I get a text from Paris to tell me Egypt is free.

Later, @polgrim added that ‘x’ country was Scandinavian. INTRIGUING. Entries should be between 100 and 200 words long and should be pasted into an email to lapatastic at gmail dot com. Our special CELEBRITY judge will be the acclaimed flash fiction writer KUZHALI MANICKAVEL. Deadline? February 28th, 2011, MIDNIGHT GMT. The top three winners will have their stories published on Chapati Mystery (!!) and receive a FREE copy of Zero Degree by Charu Nivedita to be mailed ANYWHERE in the world.

Sincerely,

Lapata

Update!

Deadline has been extended to March 15th, 2011!!