Some more important readings for you in terms of the DU/Ramanujan.

– Shahid Amin (Professor, History, Delhi University), When a Department Let a University Down, The Hindu, Nov. 3, 2011

At the first sign of trouble, in a letter written in September 2008, OUP decided to thank those who felt aggrieved by it, “for pointing … out … that the essay has the potential of hurting religious sentiments.” It went on to add “that neither are we selling the book nor there are any plans to reissue it.” This was a corporate’s way of being economical with the truth, for the apology left unsaid that the offending article was also a part of another OUP-published volume, the Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, and whether that academic bestseller was being trashed forever as well. That was not the end of the story. The Press also served a veritable notice on DU’s History Department for infringing its copyright (and in effect profiting) by including the Ramanujan article in a book of readings! There was no such book, and no intent, only a bunch of photocopies including that essay in a campus photocopy shop, and stories planted in the press about it. The publishing house was being simultaneously both supine and assertive.

- Ananya Vajpeyi (Resident Intellectual, Delhi), Old tale, Modern Hate: The Ramayan returns to haunt Indian Polity, Nov. 3, 2011

Towards the end of the 20th century, India returned once more to the Ramayan. In the late 1980s the epic was serialized and broadcast, bringing the cable television revolution to India. A resurgent Hindu Right demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, claiming it stood on the hallowed ground where Ram himself had been born on earth. A constitutional crisis, widespread violence between Hindus and Muslims, legal battles in India’s courts on the authenticity and historicity of competing religious beliefs and claims, and the attenuation of minority rights in secular India followed throughout the mid-1990s.

On the back of its virulent Ramjanmabhoomi movement (a campaign based on the idea of recapturing the so-called “birthplace” of Ram from Muslim control), the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power and led the national government until the general elections of 2004.

- Rukun Advani (Publisher, Permanent Black), Narrow View at the Top: Ramanujan, a publisher’s perspective, The Telegraph, Nov. 7, 2011.

A history department prescribes it. A hurt Hindu, his sentiments backed up by the sort of antagonism to ideas in which only cretinous Indian vice-chancellors specialize, takes the publisher to court. And what does the publisher do? Instead of preparing for a siege and sticking his Oxford Blue banner into the battleground, the publisher grovels. He agrees that what he has published can cause religious offence, and that by publishing Ramanujan he has caused it. He promises in court that he will renounce Ramanujan and not reprint the offensive essay.

Do read!

#OccupyMadisonConcourseHotel2011!!

Ahem.

It is the Annual Awesomeness that is the Madison conference – this is the 40th one! Big times now. I will be on two panels – giving a paper on something I am quite excited about and discussing a set of papers elsewhere. I wish there was a way to link to my panels but that technology is currently unavailable. You are welcome to go here and kinda browse around, however.

Friends and scholarship. What more can a historian want?

We were just talking about the scholastic and the imaginative that underpins some gems of scholarship – such as Ramanujan’s work on the Ramayana (and his work on poetry, in poetry), and here comes another deeply inspiring articulation.

Nauman Naqvi, anthropologist, delivers a wonderfully framed, evocative,(and beautifully filmed) lecture ruminating on the art, the poetics of Sadequain – linking his calligraphy, his art, his poetic imagination, and then moving out towards the act of witnessing, of sacrifice and of truth.

It really is a must-must-watch.

A Muslim Meditation on Violence from nofil naqvi on Vimeo.

What is the source of Islam’s potential for a beautiful, passive revolution today? How are the greater and lesser jihads distinct and entangled? What are the experiences of force given in the Muslim tradition? What are the relations between beauty, divinity, history and the forces of peace, truth and violence in this tradition? These are the prayers, the questions silently addressed in this filmic presentation of the anguished work of poesy and asceticism against historical violence in the painter-poet Sadequain (1930-87) – a presentation of the experience and logic of another force given in Islam, and dramatized in the life and oeuvre of this postcolonial Pakistani artist. Through a range of effects – including a generous and dynamic display of striking images juxtaposed with ravishing lyric from both Sadequain, as well as the larger Indic-Muslim and affinate traditions of the pre- and post-colonial modern period – this lecture-film enacts the experience and logic of this other force in three dramatic scenes of a performative lecture given by Nauman Naqvi at The Second Floor (PeaceNiche) in Karachi. The scenes – the hand, the head, and gesture – are scenes of what Sadequain called the technique of ‘mystic figuration’ in his painting: a certain tortured entanglement of the aesthetic, the ethical and truth in Muslim inheritance. An anguished entanglement of beauty, the good and truth in their ecstatic appearance in the secular world – the world of sight and sound – that is inseparable from the demand of sacrifice, of a strenuous self-canceling intention given in the aspect of a subtle violence of immanence in the Muslim understanding of being and existence. In tracing this haunting, subtle force of life, the lecture-film gestures towards the potential inheritance of a radically ethical politics of universal grace in Islam.

The First out of the four experts termed the text as “appropriate” for the syllabus, second expert congratulated the History Department for including the essay, third expert opined that the contents of the essay are “unexceptional”. Only the fourth expert proposed to incorporate other texts in lieu of Ramanujan’s text, as “anything that goes against” the “sacred character” of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata is “almost blasphemous” for the “Indian psyche”.

I had no idea what I was doing. That first semester of graduate school – on the intimidating premises of University of Chicago – was mostly overflowing with mundane paperwork and the collection of life stories that seemed too fantastic to be real (“I was de-worming orphans in Bombay…”). We were supposed to figure out some classes but also supposed to scatter around the various departments of the University, looking for sympatico professors. I wandered to Foster Hall where the South Asianists lived. A series of embarrassing (for me) encounters later, I found myself holding a syllabus for a class on Kings and Epics.

My admissions essay for Chicago had featured a text. It was written in 1226 CE or so and I had read a small portion of it. I thought that I could work on that text for my PhD. Like most of my thoughts, I didn’t really think through what this would mean.

What would it mean to read something written nearly 800 years before I was even born. Leave aside the issue of language, grammar, or context – tell me does it make sense? How would I access a world which made sense of words in that order, saying that particular thing. How would I know the mentalscapes which erupt in that reader’s mind as he (yeah) read or she (yeah) heard that text. I had no idea. There was just too much I didn’t know. About reading. About texts.

The first time something changed for me was in that class with Ron Inden. We read A. K. Ramanujan’s essay “Three Hundred Rāmāyanāṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” Ramanujan (1929-1993) had taught at the University from 1961 to his sudden death in 1993. The essay appeared in Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (1991), edited by Paula Richman.

The change was Ramanujan. His essay looked at the variations in tellings and re-tellings of the story of Rama, Sita, Hanuman etc. across southern and southeastern Asia. He rejects the notion of an ur-text; instead he posits a family of texts (invoking genetic and structural resemblances) so that “no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling – and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in text.” Ramanujan’s reading of text, of epic of the role of repetition, of textual movements altered my own sense (but as I recall, I had no sense). The greatest shake – and one upon which I remember spending days and weeks – was the last section of his essay. Listen to him:

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LISTEN

This essay opened with a folktale about the many Rāmāyanāṇas. Before we close, it may be appropriate to tell another story about Hanumān and Rāma’s ring. But this story is about the power of Rāmāyanāṇa, about what happens when you really listen to this potent story. Even a fool cannot resist it; he is entranced and caught up in the action. The listener can no longer bear to be a bystander but feels compelled to enter the world of the epic: the line between fiction and reality is erased.

A villager who had no sense of culture and no interest in it was married to a woman who was very cultured. She tried various ways to cultivate his taste for the higher things in life but he just wasn’t interested.

One day a great reciter of that grand epic the Rāmāyanāṇa came to the village. Every evening he would sing, recite, and explain the verses of the epic. The whole village went to this one-man performance as if it were a rare feast.

The woman was married to the uncultured dolt tried to interest him in the performance. She nagged him and nagged him, trying to force him to go and listen. This time, he grumbled as usual but decided to humor her. So he went in the evening and sat in the back. It was an all night performance and he just couldn’t keep awake. He slept through the night. Early in the morning, when a canto had ended and the reciter sang the closing verses for the day, sweets were distributed according to custom. Someone put some sweets into the mouth of the sleeping man. He woke up soon after and went home. His wife was delighted that her husband had stayed through the night and asked him eagerly how he enjoyed the Rāmāyanāṇa. He said, ‘It was very sweet.’ The wife was happy to hear it.

The next day too his wife insisted on his listening to the epic. So he went to the enclosure where the reciter was performing, sat against a wall, and before long fell fast asleep. The next day too his wife insisted on his listening to the epic. So he went to the enclosure where the reciter was performing, sat against a wall, and before long fell fast asleep. The place was crowded and a young boy sat on his shoulder, made himself comfortable, and listened open-mouthed to the fascinating story. In the morning, when the night’s portion of the story came to an end, everyone got up and so did the husband. The boy had left earlier, but the man felt aches and pains from the weight he had borne all night. When he went home and his wife asked him eagerly how it was, he said, “It got heavier and heavier by morning.” The wife said, “That’s the way the story is.” She was happy that her husband was at last beginning to feel the emotions and the greatness of the epic.

On the third day, he sat at the edge of the crowd and was so sleepy that he lay down on the floor and even snored. Early in the morning, a dog came that way and pissed into his mouth a little before he woke up and went home. When his wife asked him how it was, he moved his mouth this way and that, made a face and said, “Terrible. It was so salty.” His wife knew something was wrong. She asked him what exactly was happening and didn’t let up till he finally told her how he had been sleeping through the performance every night.
On the fourth day, his wife went with him, sat him down in the very first row, and told him sternly that he should keep awake no matter what might happen. So he sat dutifully in the front row and began to listen. Very soon, he was caught up in the adventures and the characters of the great epic story. On that day, the reciter was enchanting the audience with a description of how Hanuman the monkey had to leap across the ocean to take Rama’s signet ring to Sita. When Hanuman was leaping across the ocean, the signet ring slipped from his hand and fell into the ocean. Hanuman didn’t know what to do. He had to get the ring back quickly and take it to Sita in the demon’s kingdom. While he was wringing his hands, the husband who was listening with rapt attention in the first row said, “Hanuman, don’t worry. I’ll get it for you.” Then he jumped up and dived into the ocean, found the ring in the ocean floor, brought it back, and gave it to Hanuman. Everyone was astonished. They thought this man was someone special, really blessed by Rāma and Hanumān. Ever since, he has been respected in the village as a wise elder, and he has also behaved like one. That’s what happens when you really listen to a story, especially to the Rāmāyaṇa.

Firstly, I had never read an essay like that before. My template for a “well written” article in Middle East/Orientalist reading canon was someone like R. B. Sergeant. Dry as that dustpan in your attic. Ramanujan opened the essay with a story, ended the essay with a story. In the middle, he included a severely nuanced critique of both western philological practices and our idea of text and circulation. The writing was light, his voice was unmistakable. This was a erudite human being talking – not an academic automaton.

Secondly, I got stuck and came unstuck at the notion of a text that transforms – that changes the way reality is organized. Later, much later, I read Gadamer and his efforts to “understand” text and I too began an effort to “understand” my text. But I am still, hopelessly, trying to “listen” to my text.

Ramanujan’s essay is, in my view, one of the best pieces of scholarship the discipline of South Asian Studies has produced – theoretically rich, innovative and amazingly perceptive about the lived ways in which texts continue to exist – the importance of reading, of listening. It ought to be, if it already isn’t, required reading for anyone working on epic or performative texts in any historical or geographical period.

So, when I hear that the Delhi University has removed the essay from History syllabi, I feel the urge to grab my print copy, a chair, walk to the busiest intersection on campus, stand on the chair and start reading out loud his essay. Every word. Make them listen. They will be transformed.

I am rather stuck on the fliegender Teppich in the NPD ad. I want to continue the link I made between Hans Schweitzer’s anti-Semitic cartoons and the NPD flying-carpet by focusing on this particular relationship between orientalism and anti-Semitism.

The 1926 Lotte Reiniger movie Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed was one of the first “animated” films and revolved around the story from 1001 Nights of Prince Ahmed and Pari Banu. 1001 Nights, properly entered Europe via Antoine Galland‘s French translation in the early years of the eighteenth century. Some of the tales, Sindbad, Ali Baba, Aladdin, found their ways into various other languages and became part of the Brother Grimm collection of children stories in the mid nineteenth century (perhaps through Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall‘s translation, but really, such texts were in relatively wide circulation as pamphlets, and small etchbooks). The flying carpet was in many of these tales, most prominently in Drei Prinzen und zwei Frauen (which features the adventures of Prince Ahmed, and Aladdin). The flying carpet – as the most potent symbol of Orient was seemingly everywhere in the late nineteenth century onwards. Nowadays, one can routinely see it in travel bureau ads as well as nice yogurt brands which transport you to other havens of delight.

The flying carpet in the NPD ad is more than an orientalizing gesture which evokes an image familiar to every German child (and subsequent adult). It is crucially the link between anti-Semitism of Germany and Europe and the Orient – for Johann Gottfried Herder, Jews were the “Asiatics of Europe”. The connection of Jews of Germany with the Orient was widespread in the nineteenth century Europe. Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791) was one key biblical exegete who commented extensively on the dangers facing Germany by the Oriental Jews:

As an expert on ancient Judaism, Michaelis also took an interest in contemporary Jewry. In a review of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Die Juden (1749), a drama that broke with tradition to present a Jew as a noble character, Michaelis complained that finding nobility of character in a Jew was utterly impossible. .. In his critique of Dohm’s proposals for Jewish emancipation in 1782, Michaelis stuck by his original views, claiming that both Judaism and the Jews’ character were incompatible with citizenship. Citing their moral corruption, proclivities toward crime, and the clannish nature of Judaism as insurmountable obstacles to integrating Jews into the modern state, he claimed that granting them rights would risk transforming Germany into a “defenseless, despicable Jewish state”.¹

The solution for Michaelis lay in colonial expansion – specifically to the “southern” climate of the “sugar islands” which was suited to the “southern” Jew. The Orient of Michaelis as Jonathan Hess shows in his essay, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany” (2000) was never the Orient of Islam or Muslims – it was the Israelites and the Jews of his contemporary society. To access both that ancient past, and illuminate his current world, Michaelis sought to study the “contemporary Near East” as analogue. Such anachronism, as Said has argued, rest in the very bones of Orientalist formulation of knowledges. In the case of Michaelis, the contemporary travel accounts, the translation of Arabic epics, histories and poetry (as from Mosaic law). For Michaelis, the connection to folklore and children’s tales was another way of cementing his understanding Jewish danger. Hess notes that Michaelis also commissioned studies of Arabia Felix and the accounts were used by both Kant and Blumenbach in their anthropological writings. He further points out that Kant’s reliance on Arabian and Indian accounts for his racial classification in On the Various Races of Human Beings (1775). Blumenbach, while putting Jews and Arabs in the “caucasian” wrote, “The Jewish race .. can easily be recognized everywhere by their eyes alone, which breathe of the East“:

For Blumenbach, Jews mark an irreversible aberration from the original human variety that inhabited the southern slope of Mount Caucasus. Michaelis’s adaptation of this scenario similarly leaves no doubt as to the superiority of the “northern” Europeans over the “southern”race of the Jews. With its hegemony over the Orient secured in this manner, Christian Europe can safely lose all anxiety about the power and influence of its Oriental origins in religion and jurisprudence. In this way, racial theory secures for Michaelis precisely that which his Mosaisches Recht strove for: a vision of Europe as already de- Orientalized. Seeing the Jews as racial degenerates one might deport to German sugar islands does not merely envision Germany as a self-sufficient colonial power much like England or France; it also emancipates Christian Europe once and for all from the burdens of its Oriental heritage, allowing Michaelis’s northern European peers to gain complete ascendancy over their Oriental Jewish childhood.²

Such racializing of the Jews – look, again at that NPD poster – thus married the production of knowledge about the Orient with the political question of the “other” within. The fantasies of the Orient rendered onto the topography of France, Germany and England in the nineteenth century are hence most clearly visible in anti-Semitic writings of most great Enlightenment figures. I don’t want to go much further into Voltaire and the other founding figures of Enlightenment and their views on “tolerance” but it needs to be noted specifically for Germany that the popular play of Oriental tropes and the vilification of its own Jewish community went hand-in-hand. The Jews of Germany were simply not “volk” and you can check that with Fichte. In 1794, Saul Ascher who lived in Berlin and was a proponent of Jewish rights, wrote that Fichte’s writings were “a quite new species of opponents, armed with more dreadful weapons than their predecessors. If the Jewish nation had until now political and religious opponents, it is now moral antagonists who are arranged against them”³

The moral argument against Jews, the political argument against their participation in German military or society is now seen most clearly in the moral and political arguments against the Turks, and against Islam. In deadly comparison to the nineteenth century, the tropes of the Orientalized other – the beaked nose, the veil, the black-face – both familiarizes the sight and the hatred in the German viewer. The viewer has no need to confront the knowledge that contemporary German society is irrevocably tied to production of its “immigrant” community or that the state is working breathlessly to argue for more “ausländer” to come to Germany to teach, to work, to live.

The flying carpet is not a simple gesture of the Europe’s Orient. It is a gesture linking the history of anti-Semitism and imperialism and racial theorization in Germany with the present day Turkish and Arab Muslims. It provides one window on processes such as which Said called “orientalism” but which focused on Christianity’s relationship to Judaism and Germany’s political relationship to its Jewish population. The Orientalism that manifests itself in today’s hatred against Arabs, Turks and Islam is, I would argue, a culmination of both these strands of Orientalism – the gaze outwards and the “trouble” inwards. The history of Jews, along with the Roma and the homosexual, in Germany is then precisely the framework in which we need to place this xenophobia and Islamophobia.

1. Jonathan M. Hess, “Johann David Michaelis”, in Richard S. Levy, ed., Antisemitism: a historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (2005): 458
2. ibid., p. 91
3. quoted in Paul R. Sweet, “Fichte and the Jews: A Case of Tension between Civil Rights and Human Rights”, German Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 37-48

Ich bin ein Ausländer doch Berlin ist mein zu Hause
meine Heimat meine stadt hier kriegst du auch mal auf die Schnauze – Alpa Gun

There is a recessed walkway leading up to the side entrance of a building which bears the plaque that Albert Einstein worked here after moving to Berlin in 1914. Ehrenbergstraße 33 was also his first residence in Berlin from March until November 1914 – following his divorce he moved to the hip part of town near Fehrbelliner Platz in Wilmersdorf. He probably walked or biked up Briennerstraße 9, on his way to work, where the Ahmadis built the first mosque in 1928. I am sure he noticed a mosque going up within a five minute walk from his residence. His third residence in Berlin was in Schöneberg near Bayerisher Platz. These three residential areas – Dahlem, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg – had a significant Jewish population. The plaque noticed that Einstein never returned to Germany after leaving on a trip to the United States in 1932. Before he left, he would have seen the rise of anti-Semitic propaganda rags of Goebbles in Berlin – Gau Berlin and Der Angriff – which operated precisely during the time that the party was banned in Berlin. In the pages of Der Angriff were the anti-Semitic cartoons of Hans Schweitzer.

My office is just a five minute walk from Ehrenbergstraße. I used to live two minutes from Fehrbelliner pltz and I live now, very near Bayerisher. As I noted in my earlier post, these are the very areas in which anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim posters have appeared. Today, I saw scores more – this time for the NPD party (Security, Rights, Order):

Photo on 9-14-11 at 10.47 AM

Have a nice flight home. Here is a better version so that you can see the cartoon – “a Turk”, a hijabi woman and “an African”.

The NPD is the neo-Nazi party and this particular campaign was protested against last year as well but, more recently, they have upped the controversy.

Seeing these posters, near my place of work, near my residence, makes me angry. I seethe. They are affixed high above the ground, and I cannot pull them down, and I cannot deface them. I stand in front of them, and I see no one else stopping. Everyone just walks by. Two of these are in front of an Indian restaurant in Dahlem. The waitstaff just shrugged and told me that the elections will be over soon when I asked them about it. Berlin was their home.

As I mentioned last time, the Jewish experience in Berlin, the hatred, the killings, the deportations echoes through every step here. The spectral remainders of the lived lives which surround those of us now in Berlin, also invoke in me a deep, deep unease, and a rage when I see these posters.

Lately, I have seen some young concerts against Racism advertised and there was an anti-Nazi rally in Kreuzberg. But these posters are NOT in Kruezberg. They are NOT in Mitte. That is where the tourists may be, and that is where the press would come. The posters are in Dahlem, in Schöneberg, and this is where the rallies need to be. This is where the protests need to happen.

I don’t know how to get rallies started.

The wind blows cold outside your door/it whispers words I’ve tried before
But you don’t hear me anymore/your pride’s just too demanding
The end is coming soon, it’s plain/a warm bed just ain’t worth the pain
- Tower Song, Townes van Zandt

Two things I know about Houston – my Babu hails from that town and is known to cheer for the Astros. And that Townes Van Zandt came from Houston. Ok, I guess, I listened to some DJ Screw a while ago. And I remember that thing w/ Two Gallants. But seriously, that is absolutely it.

I am eager, very eager, to remedy this.

I will be giving a talk next Monday at Rice University – on the topic of Prophecy and end times and Pakistan. Do come and say hi!

Talk in Houston

The esteemed Amitava Kumar, who wrote the foreword for the CM book, interviewed me for his column on academic blogging:

Manan Ahmed is a historian. He is also a blogger who started the blog Chapati Mystery. His blog-posts have been curated into a book that is coming out this month. Manan’s publisher asked me to write a Foreword to this book. (I did, but damn, I wish I had come up with the sentence “His is a canny insurgency of the keyboard and the kilobytes.”) I’m going to quote later from the Foreword, but first a brief interview with the author. The idea is to treat this occasion as a discussion of the phenomenon of academic blogging.

Tell me a bit about your starting Chapati Mystery. When did you do it, and what was the immediate reason?

The immediate reason was to speak to my brother in Pakistan who was disturbed by the stories he was reading about Pakistan/Islam/Middle East in the American press. Hence, media criticism was at the heart of it. However, more broadly, since 2002 and the launch of the Iraq War, I had grown increasingly frustrated and angry about the unanimity of war porn around me.

Were there other academic bloggers that you were reading at that time? What was the difference that you thought you could make?

Juan Cole who was running his Informed Comment and Angry Arab who had his News. Both were tenured faculty in Middle East Studies and they were both incredibly vigilant against US media and thorough in presenting views/news from the warzone. However, neither concentrated on Pakistan/Afghanistan issues and I felt that I could contribute specifically in that hole. Of course, there were other academic bloggers (like Amardeep Singh or Crooked Timber or Language Hat whom I read with great pleasure) but CM was decidedly on the political end of things.

What are your views on what often gets called “academic blogging?”

Perhaps unlike most of the academic bloggers, I had a lot of experience with web-publishing (since the mid ’90s, courtesy of an active career in IT). I thought that blogging software allowed a greater democratization for publishing on a space that was already fairly open. I was/am very vocal in my support for it. In May 2005, I wrote an essay for the American Historical Association’s magazine encouraging historians to blog more. The beauty of the open web for academic writing was the undifferentiated readership and the quick/dirty feedback mechanism.

It was a stark contrast to the studied ways in which our universities handle “open dialogue” where we show up at designated times; assemble ourselves on carefully aligned furniture; listen to a highly didactic and structured speech for 45 minutes and maybe get the chance to ask one question. This is neither “open” nor “dialogue.” The typical university talk is never ever advertised off-campus and rarely manages to get people even from neighboring departments. Yet, academia wants to pat itself on the shoulder about being the last bastion of freedom for exchange of ideas. It is a rather laughable assertion.

So anyways. The point is that while we cherish open-ness or dialogue, we relish our closed structures and cordoned-off and privileged hallways. Academic blogging, to this graduate student, was a way out of this clubbiness. Over the years, I have tested ideas for articles, posted conference papers, talked about books in the field and out of the field, challenged other historians and their interpretations. And for each, received both genuine and amazingly instructive feedback and crazy ad-hominem attacks. I am grateful for both. (I should add that as a result of blogging I have had four academic publications, half a dozen academic conference invitations and countless other specifically academic benefits — references, reviews, gossip etc. etc.)

Also, were you ever advised to wait till you had got tenure?

Yes! A number of times. More specifically I was advised that I won’t be able to get an academic job being a blogger (they will just google you and find out all the crazy shit you said!). But the tenure thing was just silly. If I am silent now, I am silent after I get tenure as well. My speech is not, and can not, be tagged to the expediency of my personal life. If something is worth saying, it is worth saying now.

Please tell me what it is that you do when you blog. What are your rules for blogging?

This has changed, of course, over time and is specific to topics. Usually, I want to show something that I feel is hidden in plain sight. It is mostly a historical connection, but sometimes it is a way in which the politics gets framed. I try to avoid long pieces. And I try to use images to talk specifically with my text.

Finally, what have been the changes since you started? The changes in your audience, but also in the sphere of social media.

I can now reach and talk to spheres which were completely inaccessible to me earlier (editors of op-ed pages, the White House press corps, politicians in PK etc). My audience is also remarkably different and both of these are as a result of participating in social media for the last six years and feeding into it. Twitter has changed my blogging and my online reading. It is now my primary place for link aggregation and short commentary. It is also the primary interaction with social media. It is actually miles improvement over the blog/comment model and I think my blogging is completely changed as a result of it. The community building/outreach efforts for academics in twitter are so vast and vastly under-utilized. Maybe I need to write a follow-up for the American Historical Association?

From the Foreword:

When you read a good practitioner of any form of writing you are also provided a lesson in the practice of the art itself. Here’s what you learn from Manan Ahmed about blogging: Blogs should be short in order to be true to their medium; bound to the everyday, they should appear like fresh blood on the bandage. Ahmed’s posts possess both these qualities. As a blogger, Ahmed has too much quickness and wit to sound sententious; he is also far too self-conscious, or just plain honest, to ever wrap himself in sanctimony. These qualities not only make him eminently readable, they also push his writings, which deal with grim issues of culture and bloody politics, toward a kind of startling poignance. I know very few writers who lead us to rich sentiment as a refinement of thought itself. Ahmed is one of them. There is also something else in this writing: it is youthful, hip, eager to reach out to the world. I don’t mean I see here a naïve friendliness. No, as should be deduced from the idea of the blog, there is a desire to engage in a conversation, sure, but it is a critical conversation, full of attitude. Think of the young Los Angeles-based South Asian hip-hop artist Chee Malabar singing: “…From Madras to Mombasa, / they harass us in our casa sayin, ‘You Hamas huh?’ / ‘Yeah, like I learned to rap in a fucking Madrasah.’” Lastly, the blog posts that have been assembled for this book do not have the Saran Wrap of retrospective packaging: They possess the immediacy of newborn hope, and of a fear that is more like foreboding than settled despair. As a reader, coming upon these entries again, I’m instantly transported to the moment of their making. Thanks to Ahmed, you and I are alive to history.

Amitava Kumar is the author, most recently, of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb. He teaches English at Vassar College.

EVERYONE IN NY GO SEE LAPATA

Wednesday, April 20, 5pm

This Is Not That Dawn: A Book Launch Symposium on the English Translation of Yashpal’s Jhutha Sach.

Jhutha Sach (1958-1960) is widely considered to be one of the masterpieces of Hindi literature, the most enduring of all works penned by militant Indian novelist, Yashpal (1903-1976). The pubication of the novel’s much-anticipated English translation, This Is Not That Dawn, at last makes this important work available to a larger audience.

Please join the novel’s translator, Anand, and scholars of South Asian and comparative literature as they discuss the politics of translation, Hindi in the world literary marketplace and the legacies of India’s Partition in 1947.

With participants:

Anand, Montreal-based journalist and translator of This Is Not That Dawn
• Toral Gajarawala (NYU)
• Bilal Hashmi (NYU)
• Christi Merrill (University of Michigan)
• Daisy Rockwell (Dartmouth College)

Location: 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor

You can see what Lapata thinks of Yashpal at her review on Bookslut.

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.

I spent the last few days in The Reg. For my next parlor trick, I need to find magazines which circulated among the middle class Pakistani households during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It sometimes confuses people that such materials exist in a place like University of Chicago. This is where post-War politics and the burgeoning Cold War comes into play. Congress had designated that the first 5 million dollars from the 1951 India Wheat Loan Interest Fund be spent on cultural exchange. So, in 1957, money generated from that interest was used to begin a program of acquisition of Indian titles to three research centers: University of Pennsylvania, Midwest Inter-Library Center in Chicago and UC-Berkeley. This initial fund was the basis for the PL-480 amendment in 1958 which streamlined the process.

If you check out a book, published in India or Pakistan, you will likely see a stamp and a scrawl, PL-480 or Public Law 480. Michigan Congressman Joseph D. Dingell passed an amendment to PL-480 which stipulated that monies derived from sale of agricultural surplus abroad be used to procure publications for scholarly interest. This money was always in foreign currencies and, hence, its usage back into the economy would be of greater good. In 1961, $400,000 in soft-money and 12 universities as recipients were established. By 1967, there were 20 university libraries which were receiving the shipments.

On the ground, in India or Pakistan, were field offices staffed by the American Embassy or Library of Congress, who worked closely with local publishers and librarians to identity, catalog and bulk purchase vast quantities of mass market publications. All of this material (some 765,816 “items” in 1965-66 alone) were sent to the University of Chicago Library for dissemination to all other member institutions. The Reg kept a copy.

So, here is a bit of post-war cultural capital that made an archive possible where none could exist. PL-480 cannot be separated from the birth of the Area Studies and the beginnings of the “South Asian Studies” but it is rarely studied, and scholars are rarely cognizant of the centrality of this program to the development of scholarship.¹ It is no surprise that University of Chicago, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Berkeley were the power-houses of scholars in the 60s, 70s, 80s – there was an archive attracting folks from around the world.

In a few days, I head to another archive. To Lahore, to Multan, to Uch and maybe to Islamabad. I will keep you posted.

1. See Maureen L. P. Patterson, “The South Asian P.L. 480 Library Program, 1962-1968″ The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 28, No. 4 (Aug., 1969), pp. 743-754

Heading home is always a highlight and soon enough, I will be in sweet Hyde Park drowning in snow, slush, Powell’s and Istria. Life will be as it ought to be. As it once was.

However, before that, I am participating in – it readily appears – a wonderful conference at the University of Pennsylvania. I am going to try and lay out (what will be a chapter eventually) my understanding of the position prophecy holds in the imaginations of middle-class Pakistanis. I will also talk about Zaid Hamid.

Details on the conference:

Popular Culture and Alternate Histories: Voices from Beyond the Security State in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia

.

FRIDAY, 18 February, 2011

1:30-1:45: OPENING REMARKS
* Kathleen Hall, South Asia Center Director
* Daud Ali, Chair, Department of South Asia Studies

1:45-2:45: VIOLENCE, SECURITY, MEMORY
* Elizabeth Kolsky, “The Archival Remains of a Frontier Rebel”
* James Caron, “Transnational Memory in the Plains of Layla”

2:45-3:00: Break

3:00-4:30: STATE, NATION, HISTORY
* Kamran Asdar Ali, “Communists in a Muslim Land: Cultural Debates in Pakistan’s Early Years”
* Lutz Rzehak, “Historiography and Localism in Modern Tajikistan”
* Morgan Liu, “Post-Cold War Reflections on Central Asian Imaginaries of the State”

6:30-9:00: SHADOW ANTHROPOLOGY: a play reading with Rick Mitchell, and dinner
(ARCH Auditorium, 3601 Locust Walk)
………………………………………..

SATURDAY, 19 February, 2011
………………………………………..

9:30-10:45: EXPRESSION AND AGENCY
* Saadia Toor, “Feminist Poetry and Protest in Pakistan”
* Iftikhar Dadi, Title TBA
* Margaret Mills, “Afghan Women between Victimhood and Agency”

10:45-11: Break

11-12:30: TRANSCENDENTAL IMAGINATIONS, PAST AND FUTURE
* Manan Ahmed, “Prophetic Time #FAIL”
* Jo-Ann Gross, “Between Memory and History: The Interplay between Orality and Textuality in the Funerary Narratives of Nasir-i Khusraw from Badakhshan”
* Jamal Elias, “Imaging and Imagining Religious Virtue”

12:30: CLOSING REMARKS

The conference will be held at
Room 245 (2nd floor)
Jon M. Huntsman Hall
3730 Locust Walk/Walnut Street

Do come by and say hi!

It was startling to recognize my life these many years, codified

Mortimer J. Adler conducts the Great Books Seminar, LIFE Magazine, July 15, 1945

Step 1: The Professor sets up the Reading

Step 2: He expands, quotes from the text.

The floor is now open for discussion.

The Most Important Part of the UofC seminar: the debate

Fists can fly!

Beware the Silent ones, in that seminar room

Also, this bit of Ad-copy from that same issue is too precious to miss.

Protecting the American Home

I have been doing some translation work on Shibli Naumani for a small project. He was a major historian of early Islam who published seminal works in the early 20th century. He was also a committed reformist who wanted to modernize “Muslim” education. But reading around on him, I got to read his letters to Atiya Fyzee. That is her in the photo above, seated center. It is taken from a work of musicology that came out in 1925, The Music of India.

The daughter of Haji Hasan Ali Afandi, she was born in Istanbul in 1876 (d. 1967) and was the first Muslim woman to go to London for higher education, to pen a travelogue/memoir of her time abroad, to forcefully advocate for gender equality, to write on musicology, to become a muse for Shibli and for Iqbal. She is now largely forgotten (and mis-remembered since that article confuses her with her sister. Delacy in the comments!).

In 1906, Atiya Fyzee left her home city of Bombay to spend a year studying at a teacher’s training college in London. She was certainly not the first Muslim woman to travel to Britain, but she certainly was the first to have penned her observations of Europe. Her travelogue (Roznamchah) was firstly serialized in the Urdu women’s journal, Tahzib un-Niswan from Lahore, then published in book form under the title Zamana-i-tahsil [A Time of Education] in 1921.

That remarkable journal is now translated into English by our very own Sunil Sharma and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley as Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain.

They are also interviewed by WSJ here:

IRT: As historians, what brought each of you to her?

Lambert-Hurley: Atiya was an extremely fiery, colorful and accomplished woman—all characteristics that make her a very attractive subject for the feminist historian! Until the final years of her life, she was also relentlessly itinerant, traveling on numerous occasions to and across three continents—Asia, Europe and the Americas. This peripatetic quality made Atiya especially interesting to me, first of all, as a scholar interested in travel and travel literature as a means of recovering the Muslim female as an actor in world history.

Sharma: As a literary historian, I was drawn by Atiya the muse who figured in the lives of two prominent figures of Persian and Urdu literature. She inspired the venerable Maulana Shibli Numani to write numerous ghazals (ballads) in Persian that included a veiled reference to her. Iqbal, who is thought to have been besotted with her, also wrote a lyrical poem inspired by her. Their letters to her—her letters to them do not survive or have not been made public—are amazing documents in the history of friendship.

Awesome!

Needless to say, I have been waiting for this translation to come out for a few years and now cannot wait to have my copy. Also, now maybe we can request Prof. Sharma to return to the eleventh to the fourteenth century where we really, really need him.

As documented previously – here, and here (here) – there is a great gathering of all South Asianists at UW-Madison every October. This will be gathering # 39. I have two panels – one of which is “Fractured Genres: The Afterlives of Medieval Indo-Persian Histories” and the other one “Blogs of War: The Analytical Terrain of the Af-Pak Blogosphere“.

Come see.

Rather related is this Greatest Video of All Times, courtesy of Mircea: Homi Bhabha + Katy Perry.

This was also a seminar paper, long while ago. However, this one became a conference paper (which I gave at Madison) and then I thought of trying to turn it into an article but never managed to do it. If any enterprising editors reading this, want it, I would be happy to send it.

Law and Order in 17th Century Mughal Sindh

The regions of the realm from the palm of ill-intent
By an army keep safe and the army by payment!
-Sa‘di (Bustan)

In recent historiography, studies of resistance movements in Mughal India have been limited to simple causality links in the decline of the Mughal Empire. Viewed from the centrality of the Mughal State, all uprisings and resistances are seen as the weakening of the Mughal power – either economically, militarily, or administratively. However, we cannot conversely make the argument that at the height of a central Mughal polity, there were no such movements or uprisings. Indeed, we have to separate from the Decline Model Theory to look at local regions and the tribal, political and economic factors at play to understand these movements. The argument advanced here is that in seventeenth century Sindh, these movements are more accurately described as peasant protest movements and were not against the Mughal State but against the tribal elements and were clashes between nomadic and sedentary communities in the region. They arose from various factors, including oppression from Mughal-appointed administrators. Prior to the 17th century, the Mughal state was able to reach the locale and respond energetically to these incidents. However, with the reign of Shah Jahan (1592-1666), the Mughal State began to lose its ability to control the region and bring justice to the peasants.

This paper looks at Mazhar-i Shahjahani (A View for the Emperor), a contemporaneous source from the region, and examines sources of disorder in the region as well as the response of the peasant communities. I will begin by giving a brief overview of the studies on resistance movements. I will then introduce and situate my source text. In the next section, I will use examples and incidents to show the forms of disorder in the region under Shah Jahan and the peasant responses to them. In conclusion, I will highlight the importance of such regional histories and how they can help us in formulating a picture of the Mughal State as a whole.

The Mughal State faced constraints common to other early modern empires like the Safavids and the Ottomans. It needed to collect revenue that would support its armies and allow for constant expeditions. It needed allegiance from the landed elites to provide loyal officials for government services as well as local appointed authority. It had to insure a standard of living for the cultivators, along with protection from rebels, bandits and predatory elites. Above all, it needed to provide sufficient stability and sustenance for the working and cultivating population so that these groups could pay their taxes and other obligations and avoid becoming fodder for rival faction in rebellions.
The Mughal State depended on the rule of the appointed elite over the local landholders and the collection of various taxes and revenue through the chain of authority from the local village raiyat to the Mughal emperor. Irfan Habib, in his seminal work The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556-1707, laid out the triumvirate power structure of the faujdar (military elite), Mansabdar (court-appointed administrative elite) and the Zamindar (land-grant elite). He focuses on the rise of the oppressed peasants against the elite who had no intentions of helping the raiyat. Over-cultivation of agrarian land, failure to extend cultivation and harsh penalties for the decline in revenue payments led to the flight of the peasants to zamindars who floated flags of resistance against the Mughal monarchy. Habib posits that it was the struggle between the imperial administration and the local zamindars that played out over the peasants, who were the victims of the oppression. The zamindars were able to recruit the peasants in their struggle against the imperial administrators and provided the leadership and impetus behind many peasant revolts.

Can we really put forth one common scenario to explain the entire Mughal dominion and its decline? Given the regional and local variation in the Mughal state, that would be a shaky proposition. In fact, recent studies that looked at regional histories have given us a more nuanced and balanced picture of the Mughal state than before. Chetan Singh, in Conformity and Conflict: Tribes and the ‘Agrarian System’, stresses the complexities of tribal and class formation in Punjab, which led to the differing state policies. Irfan Habib’s “peasant” is no longer just a peasant but is divided into tribes, classes and clans. Singh brings as evidence the tensions between nomadic tribes and settled populations. The nomadic tribes often sustained themselves by launching raids at the settled villages. These raids disrupted both the supply of revenue and production and also caused populations to migrate from the area. The local landlords attempted to settle the nomadic tribes by offering them grants and land holdings. However, even the process of sedentarization created tensions between the populations and led to unrest in local areas. Singh points to these tribal tensions as causes behind many peasant uprisings. Muzaffar Alam, in Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India, shows us the many variations in the relationships between the zamindars and the Mughals in Awadh and Punjab. He shows that the zamindars were not always fighting the Mughal state but also each other. Similarly, the peasants participated with the Mughal armies in their quest to curtail the zamindars. It was largely the weakening of central control and the rise in local-landed elite that sought to disrupt the Mughal’s balance of power.

We also have to keep in mind that all resistance movements are not equal. As evidenced by Michael Adas in his study, “From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia”, the correct term in most case is peasant protest movement rather than peasant rebellions. In this article he describes the reluctance of precolonial peasant populations to engage in outright rebellion against their landlords. He states:

A careful scrutiny of many of the rebellions which have been attributed to peasant unrest or labeled as agrarian uprisings often leads to the conclusion that these conflicts were in fact inter-elite feuds or dynastic struggles…The peasants themselves understood that they had little to gain and very often much to lose. It is not surprising then, that the peasant’s usual response was flight en masse.¹

Along with flight, he discovered that petitions, relocating to the land of a more sympathetic ruler, and joining messianic or religious movements were the main defense mechanisms available to the peasants.

Three main themes emerge from the present scholarship on resistance movements. First, Mughal administrators sought to extract higher and higher revenue payments from peasants who were already unable to bear their tax burdens. Second, the zamindars were engaged in a power struggle with other landholders as well as with the Mughal administrators. Lastly, the peasant uprisings were led by – and often fueled by – the zamindars as pawns in their struggle for autonomy from the central powers. Sindh, in the seventeenth century, provides an excellent venue to examine these themes.

As a region, Sindh’s political history is filled with tensions with centralizing forces. It goes in and out of political domination of the Delhi Sultanate. From the 13th to 15th centuries, local rulers – the Soomras and the Sammas – exercised de facto rule over the territories. Feroz Shah Tughluq attempted an invasion of Sindh in 1364 C.E. and succeeded in having his rule recognized by the Sammas. However, Riazul Islam concludes that, “even after the imperial victory over the Samma dynasty the control of the Central Government over Sindh was slight. Probably it did not go beyond a formal recognition of the suzerainty of the Sultan of Delhi and payment of an annual tribute to him by the Samma rulers who, in effect, continued to rule Sind”.² He summarizes that the 200-year rule of the Sammas was, in part, due to their popular support among the people of Sindh. The Sammas were followed by the Arghuns and the Tarkans. The Arghuns were also of Central Asian descent and held sway over the Sindh in the 16th century. They were reputed for being just and legitimate rulers who did not oppress the people they ruled over. They tried to maintain good relations with the Mughals by claiming joint ancestry. However, Akbar (1542-1605) rejected any marital alliances with them and insisted on bringing them into central domain. His desire to do so may have been fueled by the growing Portugese presence in the region or Akbar’s plans to take over Qandahar. In 1511, he sent an expedition that failed completely. The local ruler at the time, Mirza Jani Beg, tried to appease him by issuing coins in Akbar’s name and saying his name in the Friday Khutba. In 1589/90, Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan was sent to conquer Thatta. Mirza Jani Beg’s forces were not able to resist for long against the imperial armies and he capitulated. He accepted the position of banda-i dargah and was taken to stay at Akbar’s court. He was granted a mansab of 3,000 and assigned a jagir in Multan. After taking over Sindh, Akbar made it into a suba (administrative unit) with five sarkars (districts) and appointed mansabdars to them, the relatives of Mirza Jani Beg among them. After Akbar, Jahangir (1569-1627) kept cordial relations with the Mirza’s son. He was allowed to hold local court with up to 1,000 ranks (Mughal court standing system) present.

Beginning with Shah Jahan’s reign, Mazhar-i Shah Jahani provides us with an amazing amount of local detail about the conduct of the central administrators and the response of the local population. Yusuf Mirak was a nobleman and a Mughal administrator who wrote Mazhar-i Shah Jahani for the Mughal emperor in 1634 as a depiction of the conditions in Sindh, describing the Mughal administration in Bhakkar, Siwi and Thattah. He describes the atrocities committed by the local mansabdar, the lack of military control exercised by the Mughals against the tribal elements, the subordination of the military commander to the jagirdar, and the prevalence of rent farming and extortion of monies by the ‘amil (scribe) and the ‘arbab (leading members). Mazhar-i Shah Jahani is invaluable in its depiction of the imperial jagirdari system in Sindh. Written as a “Manual on Management” as well as a “Mirror for Princes”, it follows the conventions of the genre and, hence, concludes with an advisory section, putting forth all the necessary steps that the Mughal administration has to undertake to maintain law and order in Sindhi society.

We will begin by looking at an example provided by Yusuf Mirak of an ideal Mughal administrator and his companion military commander:

The fifth parganah is Darbelah. In this parganah(district) live the mardum (people) Sahtah. And two quam (community) of Samejah, first Rajel and second Behan, also cultivate in this land. In olden times they were rebellious and gave the hakim (ruler) of Bhukkar in charity. At that time, Syed Bayazid Bukhari was appointed the faujdar. His sons attacked these two groups and killed many of their men, and arrested their wives and relatives. Since that day, they became as raiyat (citizens) and never risen against the order of the hakim and gave the tax amounts.

During the days of Hazrat Arsh Ashiyani (Akbar) this was the jagir of Mir Masum Bhakkar. He raised this parganah to the zenith of prosperity. Where a canal was needed he spend his own money and bought water to that place. Hence, the peasants did nothing except cultivation. As a result of his well management, these parganah were such that there was no jungle land between them. All available land was bought under cultivation and populated. And hence, this author has heard from reliable sources that when the parganah was given to Mir Masum as a jagir, the cultivated land was 500 begah belonging to both the peasants and the nobles. When the peasantry was impressed by his judicious behavior and encouragement, within one kharif (season) the cultivated land arose to 50,000 begah. And these parganah paid their revenues and none were rebellious.³

From this passage it is clear that the author wishes to portray the ways in which the Mughal administration ideally prospered. The rebellious factions were bought under control by military exercise and forced to settle down as cultivators. The jagirdar was sensitive to the needs of the citizenry and was just to them. Revenues were increased by bringing new lands under cultivation. In fact, the triumvirate power structure was balanced in favor of the central Mughal state.

The destabilizing factor, at that time, in this balance were not overachieving imperial administrators but tribal clans who are described as “seditious and rebellious”. These were mountain and hill people who belonged to various ethnic and linguistic clans and were unimpressed by the efforts of the Mughal state to bring them under control. Mirak details the following about the composition of these tribes:

Know that there are three groups who cause mischief in this land. The first group is the Samejah, who are divided into twelve clans. Ten [of these] are submissive and pay their revenue. The eleventh clan of Mangiwanah are thieves. … [Lastly] are the Únar. The Sanaryah are also the source of riot and rebellion and cause trouble in all these clans. They are not afraid of any punishment. When the jagirdar is a weakling, other factions of the Únar will join hands with the Sanaryah and start causing trouble. The Sanaryah are around 5,000 total in the parganah of Lakut, 4,000 men and 1,000 horses. In battle, their foot soldiers are braver than their horsemen. These darkskins engage in cultivation in their village but do not pay the revenue or grain like other peasants do. In fact, they have killed and destroyed the imperial peasants.

The second group is that of the rebellious Baluch Chandiyah who live south of the Baghbanan parganah in the midst of the mountains. They cultivate the land and have many cattles. No one has gotten any revenue from them. In all they are 1000 horse and foot. These type of trouble-makers are rarely found. They do business in human kidnapping and cattle-lifting. They sell their captives. From their oppression the parganah of Baghbanan has been destroyed as well as the decline of the parganah Kahan, parganah Patir and parganah Akbarabad.

The third group of rebellious elements is the clan of Nuhmardis. They are around 6,000 with 1500 on horses and 4500 on foot. They are not cultivators but own plenty of horses, camels, goats, cows etc. They are not short of anything but are quite rich. Their occupation is destruction.⁴

This Mughal official’s description of the district of Sindh illustrates a large population of tribes and clans who are said to be “constantly attempting to wreak havoc in the lives of the local villagers”. In Mirak’s understanding, they were not doing this as a power play against the Mughal state or at the behest of a local landed elite; they were recently nomadic populations making a difficult transition to sedentary modes of production. Hence, they were averse to paying any sort of revenue payments and when forced to do so under threat of the Mughal armies, they simply raided the peasants. Yusuf Mirak details the following incident from the parganah of Thatta that shows the amount of damage inflicted upon the local peasants by these clans as well as the loss of revenue for the imperial coffers:

Another seditious element of this sarkar was the Samejah Únar. They ravished a parganah that had the joint income of 2 million dams. Most of this parganah’s destruction took place during the tenure of Mirza Husam al-Din Murtada Khan. The wretches plundered the villages and ran away. [When] one of their arbabs (member) was arrested and a heavy fine was placed on them. Being unable to come up with the fine, they extorted contributions from the poor peasants. …[O]ne night they fell upon the village of Thatti and killed most of its inhabitants. The surviving villagers ran to the Halah Kandi and settled there.⁵

Again there is no historical evidence in the text that these clans were acting at the behest of a local zamindar against the Mughal administration. The only indication is a slight reference that some zamindars might start thinking about creating ties with these clans and that that possibility should be prohibited.

The main argument we can state so far based on Mazhar-i Shah Jahani’s evidence is that the regional area of Sindh had a serious problem maintaining law and order and protecting the local cultivators and villagers. The Mughal state responded to this with swift military responses to the rebellious tribes and by keeping the imperial appointees in check. Akbar and Jahangir kept strong garrisons of military personnel in the region. They also established thanas (police stations) in the cities as well as in the outlying regions to curtail any raids or attacks by the clans. In addition, they carried out expeditions against the various tribes during which they slaughtered many clan members and took women and children as prisoners. For example, when the Samejah Únar killed a revenue collector, the military commander dispatched an army that killed many members and drove the tribe into exile. Having no recourse against the superior army, the Samejah came back and adopted cultivation and became loyal peasants. They were also quick to help rehabilitate the peasants after an attack. As Yusuf Mirak writes,

When Pir Ghulam reached Sihwan, he found a weak and destroyed land. He called upon the qanungus (jurists) and said: Write a detailed report of all villages in every parganah and indicate which are in ruins and which are populated. With this paper in hand, he tracked the peasants of the destroyed villages from wherever they had gone and re-established them in their previous homes. He encouraged them with a crop sharing system with reduced State portions, and gave written assurances to everyone. He took no notice of the liars and slanderers. He stationed strong garrisons on the frontiers of the region and appointed a shiqdar (revenue-collector) on the Samejah. During his first year of reign, the region was back to prosperity.⁶

The Mazhar-i Shah Jahani provides us with the example of Shamshir Khan Uzbek as an exemplary Mughal administrator. He was appointed as the governor of Thattah and the jagirdar of Sehwan by Jahangir. He was quick to respond to the raids on peasants with military force. For example, “when he was near the village of Pallí Sammah, which was in the Samwati parganah, the Samejah Dal attacked that village and carried away the cattle. Shamshir Khan Uzbek gave chase to them and killed the men and freed the cattle of the peasants from the hands of the wretched ones.”⁷ Shamshir Khan’s policies did much to spread safety among the villages in Sihwan and Thatta. He forced many of the tribes to bear the royal taxes and refrain from acting against the villages. When he had to leave the region for a campaign, some of these newly habitated villagers decided to revert to their earlier ways. However, Shamshir Khan’s brother who was in charge, “swooped upon them and killed a number of them and took many captives, among them the wife of the local leader, Da’ud Shurah. Finding himself helpless, Du’ad Shurah went to Sihwan and paid the fines and outstanding dues of his village and liberated his wife from the captivity. Thus, they were chastised. Abandoning their old habitation in the foothills, they settled in Belah, the recently relinquished land”.⁸

Shamshir Khan’s tenure over Sihwan lasted for 15 years. He never charged the peasants above the royal decree and gave jagirs to all his armies. He was always accessible to the peasants and they were allowed to approach him at any time of the day or night. According to Mirak, during his tenure, one could find the products of Hindustan, al-Iraq, and Farang (Europe) – in the bazaars of Thatta. And the “peasants, merchants, and artisans all lived comfortably. If a merchant should be looted his goods, he would strive to recover the goods and have them returned to the merchant”.⁹

This high point of Mughal administration deteriorated under Shah Jahan. The main reason Yusuf Mirak offers for the decline in Mughal central control over the region is lack of military presence and the slow response of the Mughal administrators to the various atrocities committed by the local tribes. However, the region suffered heavily under poor Mughal administrators during Shah Jahan’s reign. Yusuf Mirak lists a number of ineffectual appointees that failed to notice the growth in rebellious tribal factions and the unrest among the peasant populations. He names Ahmed Beg Khan and his brother Mirza Yusuf as the worst of the bunch. They established arbitrary taxations on the people. Mirza branded all the cattle in the region, imprisoned numerous local chieftains and landholders and subjected 200-300 people to daily floggings at his residence. He repossessed property belonging to the people of the village and instituted draconian taxes on boats and highways in the region.¹⁰

These are the types of practices that Irfan Habib points to as leading the peasants toward open rebellion against the Mughal state. However, the Mazhar-i Shah Jahani reveals a nuanced picture of the peasant response to a wayward and oppressive Mughal administrator. They resorted to extreme measures only after exhausting all other options available to them. Even then only a handful participated in open revolts against the Mughals. The majority chose to flee the land toward Punjab. Yusuf Mirak describes group after group of the impoverished people reaching Lahore to seek redress of their grievances. There was little immediate help from the center. “Seeing no alternative those of the peasants who were still outside the Mirza’s jail and still owed part of their revenue obligations abandoned the standing crops and took to flight. Some Hindus from the town of Bubakan carried their grievances against this treatment to the royal court and returned from there with a farman prohibiting excessive taxation and undue hardship”.¹¹

The first venue of grievance resolution available to the peasants was utilized soon into the seventeenth century. Even Mazhar-i Shah Jahani itself is a grievance register written explicitly for the eyes of the Emperor himself. However, as Yusuf Mirak describes in the text, he was never able to reach Agra to present it to the throne. He fell ill. The news of his intent, however, reached Ahmed Beg Khan who immediately “released 200 to 300 men from jail…He also relieved the people of the villages from forced labor”.¹²

Eventually news reached the imperial court through the reports of the waqai-nawis (news writer) of Thattah and redress came in the form of a new administrator Dindar Khan. Ahmed Beg Khan, though, was merely transferred to Multan. Dindar Khan was not an oppressor, but was completely ineffectual against the resurging Samejah and Nuhmardi clans. During his tenure, “the Samejahs plundered the horses of his soldiers right from the middle of the city of Sihwan, slew people under the city wall and took their belongings. They killed whosoever was a man and amputated the ears of the womenfolk and took the children captive. While all this was going on, Dindar Khan sat unmoved in the fort of Sihwan”.¹³

The peasant tribes, such as the Halahpotrahs, who had been loyal citizens and were once able to defend themselves against the Samejah, could not protect themselves without any help from the Mughal military. Dindar Khan failed in other respects as well. He refused to send the annual report of the region to the imperial court. He delayed and cancelled the appointments of the law enforcers. His actions, and the inaction of the imperial court, led mass migrations from the region. As Mirak narrates:

The details of the oppression of Ahmed Beg Khan and Dindar Khan have already been described to the royal throne. But Ahmed Beg Khan was transferred from the region; no trace of wrath has touched him. It was the sight of this state of affairs that dismayed the victims of his oppression and so, instead of going to the heavenly court for the redress of their grievances, they retraced their steps back to their native places. ¹⁴

While in the regime of Shamshir Khan, the peasants had worked alongside the imperial forces to defeat the Samejah. Now, they scattered and joined some of the Samejah clans. There is a hint in the text that some groups who had joined with the Samejah later went back to cultivation when they relocated to the Multan region. Overall, though, the land was ravaged and the Mughal administration in Sindh came to a halt. Mirak describes the administrative disconnect between the center court and the regional administration: when a “sazawal (land steward) arrived with an imperial decree ordering the qanungu (jurists) to accompany him to the court with a statement of a ten-year settlement and to explain to the Emperor all the factors contributing to the destruction of this region, including all the excesses of the jagirdars, as well as the control of the rebellious elements. No efforts were made in sending the qanungu”.¹⁵

There are hints scattered throughout the text, and especially in the recommendations chapter, which indicate that for Yusuf Mirak the reason behind the collapse of the Mughal administration in Sindh was the absence of a strong army. He describes the many abandoned police stations, garrisons and checkposts that in the past ensured the safety of the peasants, merchants and trade routes. All were now waylaid by the criminal clans of robbers and bandits. He describes the absence of fear in the jagirdar because they were beyond the reproach of the Imperial court. Even if word of their misdeeds reached Delhi and Agra, they were able to escape with a transfer. He bemoans the fact that it took two months of preparation to undertake a military expedition when it once took only two nights. He stresses that each police station should hold at least 100 horsemen and 50 barq andaz (musket-bearers). His description of the destruction of the cities and villages by the Samejah and Nuhmardis is long and repetitious. However, there is no indication of any rebellion against the imperial armies by the peasants. One can surmise that, lacking any protection, those that did not flee simply joined the criminal clans and engaged in some malpractice of their own.

Mazhar-i Shah Jahani is immensely helpful in creating a picture of the Mughal administration in a crucial trading and political center of the Empire. The Mughal state managed to bring an incredible level of centralized control to the region during the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir. The seventeenth century was not so kind to the people of the Sindh. The decline in military presence, the rise in burdensome taxes and recalcitrant jagirdars caused the criminal elements in the society to wreak havoc. Though there was the opportunity for redress all the way to the Emperor, we find that actual results were hard to come by for the peasants of the land. We do not find Irfan Habib’s zamindar vs. zamindar duality in which the peasants were mere pawns. Instead, we find Chetan Singh’s study on the role of intertribal and inter-clan strife to be a much truer picture of Sindh. The peasants were victims of oppression by both the Mughal administrators and the rebellious clans. Their only available venue was flight. With the influx of international trade into the region, the growing presence of the Safavid Empire, it is surprising that the Mughals did not pay closer attention to the region. Under Aurengzeb, with his Deccan offensive, the conditions of the region could only have deteriorated further. By the late 17th century, the Mughals had ceded much of the control over Sindh to the Kalhoras and the Balochs.

While I have concentrated mainly on the law and order condition in seventeenth century Sindh, there are several other venues that should be explored within this text. First are the excellent details about the trade and taxation of the region and the amounts that went into Mughal coffers. This economic data could be invaluable in comparing the growth of this region to other around it, mainly Punjab. Second, we should compare the political and economic picture provided in this text with the social and cultural picture of the region available in a text like Tuhfatul Kiram of Mir Ali Sher Qani Thattavi. Finally, it could prove useful to do an against-the-grain reading of Mazhar-i Shah Jahani, reading the rebellious clans as indigenous people of the region who refused to submit to Mughal imperialism. I will leave that reading for my second seminar paper.

1. Michael Adas, “From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 23, Issue 2 (Apr 1981) p. 227
2. Riaz ul Islam. “The Rise of the Sammas in Sind” in Islamic Culture v 22 (1948): 359-82
3. Hassamuldin Rashid. Mazhar-i Shah Jahani. Sindhi Adabi Board. Sukkur, 1972. p. 11-13. All translations are mine.
4. ibid., p. 82-88
5. ibid., p. 36-8
6. ibid., p. 108
7. ibid., p. 37
8. ibid., p. 48
9. ibid., p. 145
10. ibid., p. 155
11. ibid., p. 159
12. ibid., p. 160
13. ibid., p. 165
14. ibid., p. 177
15. ibid., p. 179

Gordon S. Wood. In Defense of Academic History Writing, Perspectives on History, April 2010.

Academic historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. Instead, most of them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history. Narrative history is a particular kind of history-writing whose popularity comes from the fact that it resembles a story. It lays out the events of the past in chronological order, like a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Such narrative history usually concentrates on individual personalities and on unique public happenings, the kinds of events that might have made headlines in the past. Since politics tends to dominate the headlines, politics has traditionally formed the backbone of narrative history.

Instead of writing this kind of narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of their careers, have chosen to write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations. Recent examples include an account of artisan workers in Petersburg, Virginia, between 1820 and 1865; a study of the Republican Party and the African American vote between 1928 and 1952; and an analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne in France between 1100 and 1300. Such particular studies seek to solve problems in the past that the works of previous historians have exposed, or to resolve discrepancies between different historical accounts, or to fill in gaps that the existing historical literature has missed or ignored. In other words, beginning academic historians usually select their topics by surveying what previous academic historians have said. They then find errors, openings, or niches in the historiography that they can correct, fill in, or build upon. Their studies, however narrow they may seem, are not insignificant. It is through their specialized studies that they contribute to the collective effort of the profession to expand our knowledge of the past.

Like few others, Judt has been a model for a long time, and his passing fills me with sadness. However, I take solace in the fact that his deeds and words will ever illuminate.

POSTWAR: An Interview with Tony Judt, conducted by Donald A. Yerxa, Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society, January/February 2006

Yerxa: Some of the most intriguing lines of the book, for me at least, appear on the penultimate page: “Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive . . . .” Should historians see themselves as sources of disenchantment and disruption?

Judt: The historian’s first responsibility is to get it right—to find out what happened in the past, think of some way to convey it which is both effective and true, and do it. But if you are a historian of, say, medieval social life, then you don’t necessarily have a civic obligation to get out there in the public square and give speeches about what is wrong with wife dunking. It happened a long time ago; it’s no longer an issue; and the historian can deal with it professionally and not have to feel moral responsibility in his other capacity as a member of the community. But I don’t think that historians of the 20th century, particularly of Europe’s 20th century, have that option. The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves. Historians have a special role in this, probably a more important role than moralists. The latter start from some sort of universal set of propositions that may in fact not be shared by many of their audience, whereas the historian is simply saying, “Look, this is something you all share, because it is part of your common past. You have this in common, and you have to recognize it.” So, yes, we have a disruptive duty. This is one of the reasons why I get so annoyed with those of my colleagues who only write for each other. We have a duty to the larger community. We can only perform that duty by writing good professional history, but we do have that duty. I’ll give you a practical example. When the Papon trial happened in France in 1997—the only major trial of a Vichy war criminal—the prosecution asked historians of Vichy to testify in the French courts as expert witnesses to set the context for the accused’s behavior. Most of them refused, not wanting to get involved in a tricky public arena, but also on the grounds that it was not the historian’s duty to enter a court of law. The historian writes books, and that’s it. But Robert Paxton of Columbia University, who wrote the first book on Vichy France that blew open the whole debate in 1952, agreed to serve as an expert witness and played a crucial role informing the trial not only of the real world of France in 1942, but also of what was morally and politically possible in terms of personal choices and courage for a bureaucrat in that time and place. That seems to be the role of the historian as it should be: it is truthful but inevitably therefore disruptive.

The Trials of Tony Judt, The Chronicle Review, January 6, 2010.

There was a fuss, however, when in 1979 the journal History Workshop published an attack by Judt, then a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, on the field of social history. “A whole discipline is being degraded and abused” by the postmodern turn toward identity and feminist history, he wrote. (The essay, he tells me, placed his bid for tenure in jeopardy.) By the early 1980s, his displeasure with the field had evolved into a deep malaise. It was around that time that he met the Czech dissident Jan Kavan, living in exile in London, who in later years would serve as foreign minister and deputy prime minister of the post-Communist Czech Republic. Through him and others, Judt, who had since moved to Oxford, developed an interest in Czechoslovakia and, more broadly, in Eastern Europe. He bought a copy of Teach Yourself Czech, studied for two hours every night, and enrolled in language classes at the university. By the mid-80s, he was competent in Czech, and in 1985 he traveled to Prague as part of a group organized by the English philosopher Roger Scruton and the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, an Oxford-centered organization that supported samizdat publishing and other clandestine cultural activities in Czechoslovakia. During that visit, the first of many, Judt helped smuggle in banned books and lectured to crowded rooms in private apartments. It was there that he recovered his passion for the politics and history of Europe.

When he first arrived at NYU, in 1987, “there was a sense that if you had good ideas, they would let you act on them,” Judt says. So in 1995, when he was weighing a “very tempting” offer to join the Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago, he proposed pursuing his interest in European and American relations by setting up the Remarque Institute. NYU, eager to keep him, agreed. With typical self-assurance, Judt told the university, “Give me 10 years, and I will give you a world-famous institute.” According to Wolin, Judt has succeeded by nurturing a continuing conversation—through conferences, workshops, and fellowships—among European and American academics. “If you’re a European scholar of modern politics and history, and you want to be known in America, Remarque is a rite of passage,” Wolin says. Fritz Stern, who is on the institute’s board, adds that “Tony has turned it into a major international center.” The institute’s reputation is almost inextricably tied to that of Judt, for good and ill. (Two board members resigned after he came out in favor of a binational future for Israelis and Palestinians.)

In Judt’s mind, however, his “greatest achievement” is his book Postwar. In 1945, Europe lay in ruins. Some 36.5 million of its inhabitants died between 1939 and 1945. Most of those who survived were starving or without shelter; Germany had lost 40 percent of its homes, Britain 30 percent, France 20 percent. Yet in the next 60 years, Judt writes, Europe had improbably become “a paragon of the international virtues,” and its social model—free or nearly free medical care, early retirement, robust social and public services—stood as “an exemplar for all to emulate.”

Uncomfortable Truths, The Guardian, Saturday 17 May 2008.

Since September 2001, however, Judt’s articulate polemicism has taken a new direction – one that has transformed his life. Uneasy about the political reaction to 9/11 in the US, he soon began to publish a series of condemnations of Bush’s international policies. But whereas his anti-communism sat comfortably with mainstream liberal opinion in America, his early opposition to the Iraq war threw him out of alignment with his usual allies, who were still rallying around the president following the terrorist attacks. Judt, who was born and has spent most of his life in Britain, began to feel more aware of being European – and different.

He raised hackles by labelling liberal commentators in America – including New Yorker editor David Remnick, Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman – Bush’s “useful idiots”. But by far the biggest tumults Judt has caused have followed an essay he published five years ago, entitled “Israel: The Alternative”, which opened with the notion that “the president of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line”, and went on to contend that the time had come to “think the unthinkable” – the bringing to an end of Israel as a Jewish state, and the establishment in its place of a binational state of Israelis and Palestinians.

The essay was written for the New York Review of Books, and within a week of its publication, Judt had received a thousand messages of protest. From that time, Judt, who lost close friends over the article, has been regarded as nefarious by a large section of American Jewry.*

Dreams of Empire, New York Review of Books, Nov. 4, 2004:

And yet the election of 2004 is the most consequential since 1932, if not since 1860. Is John Kerry the man for the moment? I doubt it. Does he fully grasp the scale of America’s crisis? I’m not sure. But what is absolutely certain is that George W. Bush does not. If Bush is reelected much of the world (and many millions of its own citizens) will turn away from America: perhaps for good, certainly for many years. On November 2 the whole world will be looking: not to see what America is going to do in future years, but to find out what sort of a place it wiWith our growing income inequities and child poverty; our underperforming schools and disgracefully inadequate health services; our mendacious politicians and crude, partisan media; our suspect voting machines and our gerrymandered congressional districts; our bellicose religiosity and our cult of guns and executions; our cavalier unconcern for institutions, treaties, and laws—our own and other people’s: we should not be surprised that America has ceased to be an example to the world. The real tragedy is that we are no longer an example to ourselves. America’s born-again president insists that we are engaged in the war of Good against Evil, that American values “are right and true for every person in every society.” Perhaps. But the time has come to set aside the Book of Revelation and recall the admonition of the Gospels: For what shall it profit a country if it gain the whole world but lose its own soul?

A few years back, I was privileged to hear (and briefly meet) Tony Judt in Chicago. I would like for you all to hear him, as I did – passionate about telling the truth.

Life is rather hectic, gentle readers, and I cannot promise anything here for another ten days or so. However, I promise that once life is returned to me, I will return to you with reports, opinions, excitement of various sorts. I lead you on, because I know you still have feelings for me.

In the meanwhile, here is a riddle. Below is an image from Punch, 1842. Can you guess the context, the jab, what in the world is going on?

This is too important to ignore so y’all should go read UNESCO’s World Social Science Report 2010. The whole thing.

Still a quote for the peanut gallery, from Venni V. Krishna and Usha Krishna, “Social sciences in South Asia”, pp. 77-81.

There seems to be consensus among social scientists that, with a few exceptions, the quality of both teaching and research in social sciences is declining in South Asia. The accountability factor is virtually absent and peer evaluation systems are weak in publicly funded research institutions and universities. Social scientists and eminent scholars are seriously concerned, and via various forums, they have actively tried to draw policy-makers’ and the academic community’s attention to this neglect.

Compared with science and technology, the funding of social science research is marginal in the region as a whole. Within the region, India has the longest and strongest tradition of public funding for social science research. Nevertheless, even this has not been as high as desired in recent years. In the absence of adequate governmental support for social science research in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and to a lesser extent India, foreign agencies are increasingly playing a crucial role in funding, but also in determining the content and direction of research. The donor-driven shift towards Mode 2 knowledge production is causing social scientists in the region considerable concern. This calls for a serious commitment to increased public funding to encourage independent, objective research that could contribute to a better understanding of socio-economic and political trends in the region.

The declining status of research, poor funding and poor career options have combined to produce brain drain roblems in the region. Economics is the most affected discipline, as some of the most talented Indian and Pakistani economists work in foreign countries. Serious policy attention is needed to arrest the brain drain and attract the best students to social sciences.

Knowledge production is very unevenly distributed in the region. There is a wide knowledge gap between India and the smaller countries. Unlike these countries, India, with its large pool of intellectual capital, its institutional structures and its government support for social sciences, has been able to produce a mass of empirical knowledge, which has contributed to a better understanding of its society and culture. To some extent this knowledge has also been used by policy-makers for developmental purposes and to create a more just and participatory society. In comparison, social science research in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka is still trying to establish a professional footprint. The bulk of research relating to these countries’ societal issues is undertaken by foreigners or by local scholars who have settled in the West. Thus, the nodal points from which knowledge is produced are located outside the countries, research is externally sponsored and the research agendas are imposed from abroad. This raises the issue of how far knowledge produced in this way can cater for local needs.