I have now discovered Do not get angry, Dude in Germany along w/ a commemorative stamp. It was invented by the clerk Josef Friedrich Schmidt (1871-1948) for his three children and then commercialized in 1914.

[originally published Aug 30, 2005 @ 9:03]
This falls squarely in the well-established tradition, here at CM, of wasting time. Raven’s post on Ludo [which you should also go read] made me really curious about the history of this board game most Americans know as Parcheesi.

The game has many names: Pachisi or Chaupar being the ancient Indian/ medieval Mughal names [there is some difference in the rules for the two], and Parcheesi or Ludo being the American/colonial ones. Essentially it is a dice game, with cogs for players, five safety points [traditionally arranged with four points of the compass and the center of the earth], with the objective being to reach the safety points while taking out the cogs of your competitors. The origin of the game is a tad mystical. It is Duryodhana’s deception at this dice game, which emulates the realm of earth as its board, that sets up the epic war of Mahabharata. I will allow Mughal historian and chronicler Abu’l Fazl to set the stage:

Duryodhana was beside himself at the sight of their sovereign splendour, and the pangs of envy drove him more distraught. With deceptive intent, he held a festival and invited the Pandavas and proposed a game of chaupar, playing himself, with cogged dice. By this means he won all they possessed. The last stake was made on the condition that if the Pandavas won, they should recover all that they had lost, but if otherwise, they were to quit the royal dominions and wander in the wilds for twelve years in the garb of mendicants after which they might return to civilised life for a year, and so conduct themselves that none should know them. If this last particular were infringed, they would have to pass a similar period of twelve years in the forests. Unsuspecting foul play, their uprightness brought them to ruin.

Let’s go from the realm of gods to those of men. Herodotus claimed that Lydians invented dice while Socrates thinks the Egyptians did. Both are obviously wrong because dice, as you may or may not know, was invented by one of our common ancestors named Javihm who found some knuckle bones lying outside the cave while he was recuperating from a nasty case of poison ivy. More interesting is the case of the “board game”. Leslie Kurke in Ancient Greek Board Games and How to Play Them mentions two games which I found interesting, polis and pente grammai – both involving a lined board, throwing dices, moving pieces and capturing pieces. In the case of polis, Kurke maintains that the board resembled the layout of the city. The pachisi board, like I said, takes the idea of the polis but to the global scale.

In terms of archeological evidence, we have the ancient game of Pa‚àö¬±ca[game of five], found in Tamil, with a board with five safe spots, player tokens that moved across the board after the roll of dice. However, the board here could be of any shape [and was often in any shape]. It is conjectured that this earlier board travelled all the way to Egypt to become the Dogs and Jackals Game, as well as Snakes and Ladder, which, in turn, gave us the Game of Goose and Chutes and Ladder. The board with the four points of the compass symmetry of Pacisi spread to Ceylon [panca], Korea [nyout], Vietnam etc. There is some controversy around E. B. Tylor’s claim that the ancient Aztec game of Patolli is also related.

Anyways, back to Pachisi, Chaupar and to the medieval/early modern era. Akbar, the Great Mogal King [as I like to call him], was a big fan of Chaupar. In his capital at Fatehpur Sikri was a courtyard which doubled as a Chaupar board and on which the life-sized game was played in the King’s attendance [those fetching kaneezis being the gotis]. Here and here are a couple of contemporary pictures. Just as Akbar was a big fan of the game [or maybe because Akbar was a big fan of the game], there was wide popularity for the game [I love that painting]. In folklores of Sindh and Punjab are many tales of the game being played amongst wily and cunning opponents. The hardcore players kept the cloth board rolled up in their pagris and hats. The pieces [got] were often carved out of wood [or ivory for the fancy folks] and dyed in red, green, yellow or black colors. I’d imagine that this was a great source of entertainment for travellers, and wayfarers. It also caught the fancy of the colonials. Here is a photograph taken by William Chapin in the early part of the twentieth century. India, being timeless and all, I am sure that their medieval counterparts behaved much in the same way.

Selchow & Righter, the American board-game company, trademarked Pachisi as Parcheesi and started marketing it as a children’s game in 1868 or so. It had reached England a few years earlier but by the 1920s, it was marketed as Ludo [latin for "to play, sport /imitate, banter /delude, deceive"]. Ludo was the version I grew up with.

So, there you have it. A game of chance played on a board of the world. Wasting my time….

Bob Stein was kind enough to invite me to a conversation with the historians (Stephen Brier, Joshua Brown, Ellen Noonan, Penee Bender) who wrote and maintain Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History. The first edition of that text was accompanied by a CD-ROM which was designed by Bob Stein’s company (with the world’s first crossword, no less). That CD-ROM was built using Hypercard and Quicktime, and sadly is no-longer functional (at least the Hypercard bits but probably the QT codecs as well).

The question: How can we re-think that textbook, now in its third edition, along with its interactive/multimedia components, now?

More than anything, I was amazed by, and greatly admired, the intellectual honesty and willingness to re-think central assumptions at display in the meeting. The little bits and pieces of the oral history of the project that I picked up, made me realize how incredibly “safe” my generation of historians has become. These graduate students who wrote the first edition were also the editorial board of Radical History Review – intent on re-telling the history of America, from the perspective of the ordinary Americans. Their emphasis on multimedia was precisely to enable wider dissemination of history beyond the traditional classroom.

In a sense, the vision of teaching history through multimedia, to spread it outside of the classroom, is now a reality. The archives of Google, Flickr, Youtube are crammed with amazing historical artifacts. More importantly, a highly synthetic account of history (of whatever kind) exists within easy grasp at Wikipedia. Given this landscape, what next?

To really re-think the textbook, one has to be able to jettison the very model of a unitary text. The textbook should be constantly evolving, socially networked, modular entity that can easily transport across various media and delivery devices, from print to web to ipod/iphone etc. It should allow various points of entry, the ability to restructure one’s own narrative, to compile and comment modules as desired. In essence, it should be truly interactive.

My only contribution to the conversation was to insist that a XML encoded, micro-formatted and tagged base-structure will allow not only future-proofing the product but its ability to take on different forms. Along the same lines, is the imperative to stay away from other “closed” or “silo” systems of delivery. But what of the need to have the product look good? How does one provide a working structure that can handle everything from a scanned pdf to a youtube video? Consider that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – one of the best examples of expertly produced on-line compendiums – is severely limited in its aesthetic appeal. Perhaps intentionally so.

This textbook has have visual appeal, it must render text in a clear and legible (and readable) format, and it has to incorporate digital, visual media seamlessly. The web, for all its wonder, is horribly unsuitable to delivering even “good looking” print. Hence, the need for controlled environments like the PDF or Flash or QuickTime etc. My suggestion would be to do both – have a nice looking text built in, say Sophie, but also a vanilla Media-wiki incarnation.

Easier said than done, of course.

The conversation spurred me to think back on the dream of having a South Asia Sourcebook – a collection of primary materials for teachers of South Asia. Now that I have more time (theoretically), I want to really focus on cranking it out.

I am eager to listen in, and watch, the conversations about WBH, as they develop. Hopefully, they will have me back.

Lately, we have had some insanely good weather. And I found myself wandering around snapping pics. Here are a few.

More on flickr…

At Madison, Ram Guha gave a thoroughly entertaining talk on contemporary history. It was filled with nice anecdotes, pointed criticisms of “establishment” histories and historians, and a genuinely felt call for new directions in history writing. It was also overly broad, had outdated generalizations, mis-characterized historiographical developments and seemed a bit too caustic. I didn’t take any notes during the talk – eager to simply enjoy the spectacle. So, I didn’t comment on it here. I don’t want to misquote the man.

Thankfully, I learned from Rohit that he had published an article, The Challenge of Contemporary History,” Economic & Political Weekly, June 28, 2008, which seems to contain the full text of his remarks at Madison. It allows me to make the one point that occurred to me during his talk.

He writes (and said)

The overwhelming importance in the academy of that single date, August 15, 1947, has led to a paradox – namely, that while India is the most interesting country in the world, we know very little about its modern history. And what we do know about independent India is chiefly the work of sociologists, economists, political scientists, and journalists – not historians. In fact, the works of history, properly so-called, on any aspect of India since 1947 are so few that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand, or, at most, two.

(Footnote: These works are cited at appropriate places in this essay. I speak here only on books in English – as it happens, scholars writing in Marathi have written important works of contemporary history, that is, on Maharashtrian society and politics since 1947. Notably, these scholars – among them Dhananjay Keer, Kumar Ketkar, and Y D Phadke – have worked for the most part outside the academy.)

He didn’t read that footnote in his talk. “… [O]nly on books in English” rankled me, as it did the peanut gallery in which I sat. It is no small point to ignore the production of history in Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali etc. etc. Especially, if one’s entire argument is on contemporary history. Pakistan, for example, can be cited as a case-study of doing only contemporary history – for reasons entirely political. There are scores upon scores of Urdu histories – some even by prominent academic historians such as Mubarak Ali, Muhammad Aslam, K. K. Aziz etc. And if we really want to just stick with English, go check out GC University Lahore’s history faculty. Their bi-annual research magazine, Khaldunia seems to have 2 out of 5 essays devoted to post- 1947 history (3, if you count the Hussain’s article). He also bemoans the lack of modern regional histories. Again, if there is one abundance in Urdu/Sindhi/Pushtu, it is of regional histories, be they of Sindh, Punjab, Swat etc. The majority focusing specifically on the modern period. I would venture a guess that the same is true, if we check a bookstore in Mysore.

Next, Guha points out the dearth of biography. But again, only if we (for unknown reasons) stick to English. In his talk he mentions Fatima Jinnah as one individual ignored by historians. He cites that in Ayesha Jalal’s book on Jinnah, there is no entry in the index on Fatima. But, here is the deal, Guha ji. Fatima Jinnah has had numerous, numerous, histories and biographies written in Urdu. One on my desk, right now, is Shakir Husain Shakir’s “محترمه فاطمه جناح :‏ ‏حيات و فكر” (Respected Fatima Jinnah: Life and Thought), published in 2003 and a hefty 250 pages. WorldCat lists another twelve titles – all in Urdu, as early as 1963 and as late as 2007. Let’s just ignore Ayesha Jalal on this one.

It is “academic fashion” which propels the anglophile US-based historian, according to Guha, to write solely on the colonial period. I won’t necessarily quarrel with that. I have said as much regarding the medieval periods. However, one gets the feeling that it is also “academic fashion” which propels Guha’s criticism. The site of the contrarian is a privileged site; especially, if one gets to define the terrain. The reality, however, is that the historiography of South Asia is larger than the Bengal-centric Subaltern Studies collective, and it is larger still than the US-based academics. Guha seems more interested in straw men, sacred cows and paper tigers, than the contours of current scholarship – whether in vernacular or in English.

My one point aside, EPW also carried a pointed critique of Guha’s essay by Nivedita Menon, The Historian and ‘His’ Others: A Response to Ramachandra Guha [pdf]. It is an excellent read and Menon takes Guha to task not only on his treatment of feminist historians and history but also on his engagement with history, itself. Less pointed engagements come from Sasheej Hegde, The Demands of Contemporary History: A Comment [pdf], and Nonica Datta, A ‘Samvad’ with Ramachandra Guha [pdf link]. All worth your time, if you go for such things. Finally, I want to draw your attention to Rohit’s Ramachandra Guha’s peculiar conservatism which deals more broadly with Guha’s intellectual burdens in the recent past.

Rohit’s post made me realize that Guha is, in broad circles, the historian du jour – combatively staking out a space distinct from the US-based academics. One is also reminded of his spat with William Dalrymple – which was particularly snarky. There is a certain air of “outsider-ness” that he projects – in his writings, and then, in his talk – from the “in-crowd”. Rhetorically, he turns the tables and argues that it is the “other” (Dipesh Chakrabarty or William Dalrymple) who are out of the club while he is with the people. For all I know, it might all be true. Guha may indeed know the soil of India better than those others. He may indeed have the goodness of history in his heart. The only thing I ask, as a historian, is that he present a forthright case without making swift generalizations and side snipes. It is a heavy burden to bear – speaking about the general state of history and history-writing for a complex nation-state and people. But he is the one who chose to do so, not me.

Via Rohit, I read Vinay Lal’s excellent, “The Gandhi Everyone Loves to Hate”, Economic & Political Weekly, Oct 4, 2008 [pdf]. I wanted highlight this footnote which discusses Gandhi’s historiography in the Western academy (with a nod towards his memory in Delhi) and his discussion of why the subaltern studies (or postcolonial studies, in general) failed to raise Gandhi as an anti-imperial figure.

Even more importantly, Lal highlights the contributions of Gandhi’s thoughts to the Civil Rights movement and some key recent studies.

I would like to allude, if only briefly, to the two sets of disjunctions which in part, and only in part, led to this paper. In the staunchly middle class circles of west Delhi in which I grew up and from which my family drew the greater bulk of its acquaintances, the respect for Gandhi was commingled with deep suspicion, foreboding, and even hatred of the “Father of the Nation”. Many of the people who lived through the Partition held Gandhi responsible for their own misfortunes, and among the family elders and some of our guests the sentiment that Gandhi had often blundered in politics ran deep. Owing to my sustained interest in Gandhi over nearly three decades, his name came up in conversations often, and there was frequent mention of his appeasement of Muslims and his inability to understand the modern world. If he was nonetheless referred to as Gandhiji, it was not only out of habit, but also from the recognition that Gandhi had been a patriot, if a misguided one, and from an acknowledgment that the state-sanctioned version of Gandhi could not be entirely rubbished. As young teenagers, my friends and I wondered why a national holiday had been set aside in the memory of a rather backward-looking old man who wandered about scantily dressed, but the received textbook versions spoke of him in such unambiguously hagiographic language that the instinct to laugh at the old man was somewhat contained. In recent years, it appears to me, the reaction against him has hardened, and one cousin who is a doctor casually referred to Gandhi as a scoundrel (Gandhi to kamina tha). I suspect that the disjunction between the authorised version of Gandhi and that encountered in middle class homes is one which is familiar to many.

As a graduate student in the United States in the 1980s, I became aware of another kind of disjunction. In those heady days of post-colonial theory and cultural studies, when anti-racism, antiimperialism, and nationalism spawned immense number of studies and it was argued that finally “the empire was writing back”, there was barely a mention of Gandhi among internationally known thinkers except in the writings of a few Indian scholars, notably Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, and Shahid Amin. None of the post-colonial critics or cultural studies advocates had any use for Gandhi, not even Henry Louis Gates, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, or, most significantly, Edward Said. In the voluminous writings of Said, Gandhi appears as a rare footnote; on the other hand, a cultish attachment to Fanon is everywhere evident. One would have thought that Bhabha, over whom the shadow of Lacan looms large, might have sensed something of an affinity between psychoanalysis and satyagraha, or that the post-colonial critics with their stated intention of defying master narratives and signifying their solidarity with the downtrodden might have found Gandhi an intellectually and ethically engaging figure. The silence which surrounded Gandhi at a time when colonialism was the principal subject of a supposedly dissenting body of work might itself be construed as a critique of Gandhi, one that did not even do him the service of taking him seriously.

At the conclusion of my talk at Emory in 2005, Gyanendra Pandey made two interesting arguments to suggest why Gandhi has drawn, so to speak, a near blank among major figures in the academies in the US and the United Kingdom, though I remain unconvinced by either argument. Pandey suggested that the insularity of the Indian intellectual tradition, while not recognised by Indians, is deeply experienced among scholars of India in the US, Japan, and elsewhere. For insularity of intellectual traditions, I would think that one could turn more profitably to the US itself, where most debates appear to be conducted without any reference to anyone except godblessed Americans. As someone with a fair share of experience of the American academy, stretching back to my first undergraduate days at a US university in 1978, I find it all but implausible that the US academy should be viewed as an example of intellectual ecumenism or cosmopolitanism. Moreover, in the case of Gandhi, his alleged indigenism or nativism, his repudiation of the modernist aesthetic, the unsexiness of non-violence, the moralist tone of much of his work, among other phenomena, appear to me to furnish better grounds for understanding why he has been marginalised by the progressive or radical elements of the academy.

Secondly, Pandey argued that Africa and the Atlantic world, far more so than India, have registered an intellectual and political presence in American life. There is no gainsaying this fact, and the story stretches from the early presence of the slave trade through the Civil War to the traditions of jazz, blues, rap, and hip-hop. Indian studies, in comparison to studies of the Atlantic world or African-American Studies, occupy a minuscule if rapidly growing place in the American academy. However, by an irony of history, in no community did Gandhi have a more magisterial role than among African-Americans. Everyone is aware of Martin Luther King’s full-throated embrace of Gandhian ideas of non-violent resistance, but many other important if not supreme figures of African-American history, such as Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, A Philip Randolph and James A Lawson, had a deep engagement with Gandhi’s ideas. Sudarshan Kapur’s study, Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992, amply documents Gandhi’s presence in the African American political imagination, as does John D’Emilio’s superb biography, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, The Free Press, New York, 2003.

This paper also provides, I believe, some cues that might help us to understand the relatively marginal note Gandhi has played even in supposedly progressive, liberal, radical, or dissenting elements of the academy in the US, Britain, and elsewhere where recent theoretical trajectories have informed much of the work on nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the like. Gandhi has a considerable presence in peace studies or conflict resolution programmes, though a “theorist” of non-violent resistance such as Gene Sharp takes precedence in most such programmes; moreover, the institutionalisation of Gandhi has robbed his thinking of its most radical and potentially emancipatory elements. See also Vinay Lal, ‘Gandhi, the Civilisational Crucible, and the Future of Dissent’, Futures 31 (1999), pp 205-19, and idem, ‘Gandhi and the Social Scientists: Some Thoughts on the Categories of Dissent and Possible Futures’ in Arif Dirlik (ed), Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interest, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder and London, 2006, pp 275-97.

Needless to say, you should read the whole essay.

The South Asia Madison conference is such a pleasant, communal affair. Every one is in good spirits and any testiness of panel Q&As never spills out into the lobby. It is the biggest gathering of practitioners of the South Asian intellectual trades – though, some disciplines are more gathered than others. (pre-modern folks are few, as usual.)

I confess that my paper was barely there (ok, bad) but my panel, called “Vernacular Histories” was one of the best I have participated on. I further confess that this year’s Madison conference was surely in the top 5 evah. Mostly, because there seemed to be a much healthier group of young Turks selling their wares. Ramachandra Guha gave one of the keynotes – speaking on the need to do ‘contemporary history’ and the urge to write biographies of key “mid-level” figures. Biography, as a genre, is certainly neglected in South Asian historiography (in English, i.e.), and I am sympathetic to his claims. However, that does seem to put Indian language academic/popular works on a different pedestal. Not quite sure why the eighty biographies of Fatima Jinnah in Urdu do not count?

I was also on a roundtable called “Beyond Marginalization: Pakistan as South Asia”. It was a useful discussion – in parts. I don’t think I was the useful part, though.

The highlight was meeting (finally) the legendary Frank Conlon, Professor Emeritus, University of Washington and karta dharta of H-ASIA. He came to our panel and managed a nice zinger on U of Chicago.

You can check out some random fotos, as well.

Finally, this came up in discussion and I feel the urge to let you all bask in this glory. Perhaps my favorite clip of all times.

Am off to the conference. Holla, if you see me. I will post pictures, reports, when I return Sunday.

The non-juicy kind, at least. Look, I know dissertations are supposed to be shameful and to be hidden in the attic. I agree. Still, I thought that my gentle readers would want to know what I have been up to, when not putting up youtube songs. So, below the fold, you can read my defense presentation (with a section missing).¹ It is customary, at Chicago, for the candidate to have 20 minutes to lay out the case, before the grilling begins. Keep in mind that I wrote this as an oral presentation, so some of the verbiage is awkward in print. But, if you like to know more about my dissertation, here it is.

The Many Histories of Muhammad b. Qasim: Narrating the Muslim Conquest of Sindh

This dissertation began with the question, Why Muhammad b. Qasim?

As a school child in Zia ul-Haq’s Pakistan, I produced more than a healthy share of panegyrics to Muhammad b. Qasim – extolling the virtues and strengths of this great “First Citizen of Pakistan” – for my social studies and history classes. During my summer vacations, I read novels and comic books centered on his heroic persona – how, in the year 712, this young commander, led a small army and conquered the Indus valley region (present day Sindh), overcoming great odds and beating superior armies. An Alexander of our own, the novels claimed. In countless news-pieces and op-eds, I learned of this great conqueror who represented the apogee for all Muslim teenagers. But, it wasn’t just the school textbooks, the popular culture and the media elite who pedaled this great hero. A relative explained to me – with great somber consternation – that we, the Chaudhry clan who belonged to the ‘Arain bridari (family) were direct descendants of Muhammad b. Qasim’s army. That, he thought, attributed for our war-like spirits and natural propensity to lead. However, he conceded, that since my mother’s side was Kashmiri, I may genetically too weak to conquer any thing.

All this anecdotal evidence serves only to highlight the context from which I began this study. In Zia ul-Haq’s Pakistan, Muhammad b. Qasim was constructed a vaunted national hero – a paragon of good virtue who, as one sixth grade textbook describes, converted the entire land of Sindh to Islam by merely smiling. He was Pakistan’s originary link to Islam’s earliest history. Above all, he was a true Hijazi Arab – member of a celebrated family from Ta’if, who provided a religious (and genetic) linkage between Arabia and Pakistan. If we are to begin a project to understand the re-construction of Pakistan’s internal logic – the oft-called Islamization – after the secession of West Pakistan in 1971 and the military coup of Zia ul-Haq in 1977, then the memory and history of Muhammad b. Qasim needs be a central focus.

Why did General Zia ul-Haq’s nascent government choose to build a nation out of the mythography of this particular conqueror. How did they account for, and respond to the public contestation over his memory. It was to understand this “persistence of history” – a narrative that continues to exist in contravention of “official” or “sanctioned” histories, which drove my investigation. In the colonial archive, he was not simply a temple-raider, but the earliest marker of Islam’s “Dark Ages” in India. In the nationalist archive were the communal struggles of situating him within the Ghazni/Gauri invaders. But the key contestation over the political memory and history of Muhammad b. Qasim was within the political and regional histories of Sindh. Here, Muhammad b. Qasim was a vilified destroyer of an ancient land – not on communal grounds, but on colonial. I wanted to examine how the regional Sindhi histories of Muhammad b. Qasim relied on the very same veridical grounds as the official histories – judging “truth” from medieval narratives, counter-posing one version of an event against others – both relying on translations done by British Orientalist in the mid-nineteenth century. It was with a desire to illuminate such intertwining of medieval and modern, of colonial and post-colonial, of history and memory, that I broadened the scope of this study to encompass a full historiography of Muhammad b. Qasim from the earliest extant sources to the present and to highlight the constructions and contestations within these many histories.

I should clarify, very briefly, what I mean by ‘memory’ in the limited sense that I use it here. Maurice Halbwachs, in his 1925 study of social memory, theorized a dichotomy between collective memory and history. The first was natural, organic remembrance of a group while the later was intentional, political. Memory was personal, telescopic, episodic, oral. History was formal, comprehensive, written. Halbwachs’ rather over-determined categories were reinforced by, among others, Pierre Nora who postulated a even stricter division between collective memory and historical memory. While these rigid boundaries have been contested by others like Michel de Certeau and Jan Assmann (whose “cultural memory” is a much more useful construct then the more popular “Tradition”), we remain with an amorphous concept of memory positioned against disciplinary history. 

Paul Ricoeur offers a way, for the historian, to deal with the methodological challenge of how to study “memory” by focusing on, what he terms, “trace, document and question”. Briefly,

1. to inscribe historical processes into the construction of documentary proof itself (that is the text or artifact that is the object of our historical attention);
2. to investigate the distance between the event, the testimony of the event and the narration of the fact. That is, to explicate ‘what happened’ along with ‘what is said to have happened’
The focus then, is not on some elusive and contestable category of ‘memory’ – whether social, cultural or political – but on the production of text, its relationship to other texts, and to the uses of these texts in remembering and forgetting a particular social past.

Rather than in contradiction, or in tension, Paul Ricoeur’s posits an “intimate” relationship between memory and history – wherein memory serves as the “womb of history, inasmuch as memory remains the guardian of the entire problem of the representative relation of the present to the past.”²

Turning to the textual traces of memory, I approach the medieval texts drawing upon Ronald Inden’s work in Querying the Medieval. Inden advances the notion of texts that are dialogical in their discursive nature and operate within a “scale of texts”. It is this ‘life of the text’ wherein “later agents and their texts overlap with those of their predecessors and contemporaries and, by engaging in a process of criticism, appropriation, repetition, refutation, amplification, abbreviation, and so on, position themselves in relation to them.”³

My question, reformulated: Why was the history of Muhammad b. Qasim written? Who wrote it? To what purpose? What were the sites of its production? What were the political, cultural and social contexts which influenced this production? For what audience? In answering this set of inter-related questions, I trace the production of this history at key intervals.

My archive, corresponds to those moment at which Muhammad b. Qasim’s history is invoked. 
1. 850 – 950. The earliest Arab accounts of Muhammad b. Qasim’s history emerge in the conquest literature of the mid-ninth century. The universal histories of al-Ṭabarī and al-Ya’qūbi contain some slim accounts of the frontier of Sindh and Hind. The most substantial, and earliest extant, account of Muhammad b. Qasim and the conquest of Sindh is in al-Balādhurī’s Futūh al-Buldān (mid to late ninth century).
2. 1216. The text at the heart of this study is ‘Ali Kufi’s Chachnama – an account of the region of Sindh immediately prior to the Muslim conquest and a detailed history of the conquest itself. It was written in Ucḥ in the early thirteenth century against the backdrop of Mongol invasions of the Islamicate world. For all of the historiography which followed, this is the primary text. One of the earliest Persian histories to be composed in India, <i>Chachnama</i> is a unique re-formulation of Islamic pasts and the most significant construction of Muhammad b. Qasim.
3. 1600-1800. It was Akbar’s invasion of Sindh, in 1592, which prompted the writing of Mir Ma’sūmi’s Tari’kh-i Sindh. It remains one of the only major Mughal text to discuss Muhammad b. Qasim. A later work, Mir ‘Ali Sher Qāni’s Tūhfat ul-Kirām (1761) makes some brief mention of this history.
4. 1830s – 1900. The British East India Company invaded and annexed Sindh in 1843 under Charles Napier. The Company had multiple interests in Sindh, as a frontier zone to perceived Russian and French threats via Persia, as a zone between Ranjit Singh’s Lahore and Dost Mohammad Khan’s Kabul, and as part of the network of Opium trade via the Indus River and the port of Karachi. To pursue these interests, Company proposed extensive ordinance maps and ‘memoirs’ of the region. The history of Muhammad b. Qasim’s conquest of Sindh became a center-piece of such histories. In the later half of the nineteenth century, these official Company accounts were folded into universalist histories of India by Orientalist and Muhammad b. Qasim became a key signifier of India’s fractured history.
5. 1900 – 1947. During this renaissance of nationalist and communalist attention to the history of Islam – the originary moments of Islam and Muhammad b. Qasim received ample attention. The histories produced included accounts of the connections between India and Arabia, on the one hand, and situating Muhammad b. Qasim among the more notorious invaders of India, on the other hand.
6. 1950s – present. This period coincides with the postcolonial state of Pakistan and it frames the creation of Muhammad b. Qasim as the national hero. The political turmoil over One Unit, the partition of West Pakistan, and General Zia ul-Haq’s Arabization and Sunnification policies provide the political and cultural framework within which accounts of Muhammad b. Qasim were produced. The histories, to broaden our usage, of Muhammad b. Qasim during this period include school textbooks, official accounts, historical novels, tele-plays, and public histories.

I conclude by returning to the question of Why Muhammad b. Qasim, or why Sindh, even. What is at stake in the writing of such histories, and where do I situate this particular production in this longue duree that I sketch in the dissertation. Again, allow me to echo Inden:

We wish to establish a dialogical or inter-discursive relationship with the texts we study. Instead of looking at them as dead monuments, as mere sources of factual information or the expression of a creative and exotic genius that we can only appreciate in itself for itself, or as the accidental expression/sedimentation of some larger structure or context, we want to see them as living arguments both in their historic usages and by virtue of our reenactment of their arguments, in our own present. We want to see what we can learn from these texts that pertains to our own time and its problems.⁴

My interest in such uses of the past, or rather pasts, emerges from a broader desire to engage in the public life of history in the present. Or what Neeladri Bhattacharya terms “The Problem”:

These other ‘histories’ threaten to arise from their submerged locations, their life in the bazaar and shishu mandirs, and assert their right to power – their right to be patronized by the state, prescribed in the textbooks that children read. Academic historians have for long ignored the reality of these alternate ‘histories’, the logic of their production, the nature of the historical sensibilities they produce. If we have to resist the threat they pose to the practice of academic history, we need to understand these other histories, explore their inner structure and the premise of their popularity.⁵

Unlike Bhattacharya, it isn’t the “threat” that interests me in these other histories, rather the questions of how and why they are produced, at all. And what they tell us about our presents. Consider this dissertation, a first step.

1. The missing section is what I am sending in for an article right now and can’t publish here.
2. Paul Ricoeur. Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 87.
3. Ronald B. Inden, Jonathan S. Walters, and Daud Ali. Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12.
4. Ibid., Querying the Medieval, 14.
5. Neeladri Bhattacharya, “The problem”, Seminar, vol. 522, (Feb 2003): 8.

I defended. Deets, soon.

Have a drink for me, gentle readers.

This one goes to the Urduphiles, out there.

A proverb was used in a newspaper headline: “Hukmaran Hosh kay Nakhun lain”. Literally: Government should trim the nails (nakhun) of sense (hosh), the Jama’at-i Islami. (Leaving aside the JI from this discussion) Meaning that someone is being stupid, or doing something without much thought, and should change? “Nakhun Laina” is to pare one’s nails.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out 1. Why does “hosh” have nails? Or why would it give those nails? Or why would it trim those nails? What is it about the nails? That is, wth does anything like trimming one’s nails have to do with anything like, being smart? Moreover, why is “hosh” anthropomorphized? My random guess is that there is some verse behind this. That, or Sa’adi. He is behind every non-sensical idiom.

Apparently, in English, “cutting nails” has some associations – Shakespeare name-checked that a few times. From a ditty cited in Dictionary of Proverbs: “Cut them on a Monday, you cut them for health; Cut them on a Tuesday, you cut them for wealth; Cut them on a Wednesday, you cut them for news; Cut them on a Thursday, a new pair of shoes; Cut them on Friday, you cut them for sorrow; Cut them on a Saturday, see your true-love tomorrow; Cut them on Sunday, the devil will be with you all the week”. This being the height of 1830 rhyme-fest.

Cut them in Urdu, you grow sensible?

Any help would be appreciated.

Here is Platt‘s translation of “hosh”:

P هوش hosh [Pehl. hôsh, or hush; Zend ushi, fr. ush = S. उष् (ओषति)], s.m. Understanding, judgment, intellect; sense, discretion;—mind, soul:—hosh uṛnā or uṛ-jānā, or hosh bāḵẖta honā, or hosh parāganda honā, ‘The senses to fly or to be lost’; to lose (one’s) senses; to be or become confounded; to become senseless or silly:—hosh pakaṛnā, v.n. To bethink oneself; to recollect;—to get sense; to arrive at the age of discretion:—hosh jāte rahnā, or hosh daṅg honā, v.n. To lose (one’s) senses, &c. (=hosh uṛnā, q.v.):—hosh sambhālnā (with gen.), To get sense, &c. (i.q. hosh pakaṛnā, q.v.):—hosh-mand, adj. Intelligent, prudent, sensible (syn. ʻaql-mand):—hosh-mandī, s.f. Intelligence, understanding; sensibleness, sense; wisdom:—hosh-meṅ ānā, v.n. To come to (one’s) senses; to come to oneself, to recover (one’s) senses (after intoxication, or fainting):—hosh-o-hawās, s.m. Sense and understanding:—bā-hosh, adj. Intelligent, prudent, sensible, judicious, wise:—be-hosh, adj. Without understanding; unwary, insensible; foolish, insane;—deprived of sense or consciousness; unconscious; in a faint; intoxicated; stupefied;—delirious;—dead:—be-hosh karnā, v.t. To stupefy, make insensible; to intoxicate:—be-hoshī, s.f. Senselessness; unconsciousness; stupefaction; intoxication.

And here is “nakun”:

P ناخن nāḵẖun (nāḵẖ˚ = S. नख+un = ūn = wan = wān = S. वान), s.m. Nail (of the finger or toe); talon, claw:—nāḵẖun-se likhnā, v.t. To write with the finger-nail (considered an accomplishment):—nāḵẖun-gīr, or nāḵẖun-tarāsh, s.m. A small knife, or scissors, for paring the nails:—nāḵẖun lenā, v.t. To pare the nails;—to trip, or stumble (a horse):—nāḵẖun-meṅ paṛe-rahnā, v.n. To be in (one’s) possession; to be lying in the pocket.

S**t I do, when I need to be doing S**t.

Update: I think, I have it:  Hosh kay Nakhun lo: Figuratively, Get Some Sense: ‘Even something as trivial a nail clipping’ FROM hosh. Why Hosh is personified? I still don’t know.

Ralph Russell, noted Urdu scholar, and head of Urdu at SOAS from 1949-1981, has passed away.

I am re-printing, with his permission, Professor C. M. Naim’s thoughts:

Subaltern Urduwala:

Anyone who came in contact with Ralph Russell (1918-2008) always remembered him as a remarkable man. Mostly because he not only knew Urdu so well but insisted on using it. You either used English or talked in Urdu with him; no mixing of the two, certainly not the way most of us do. Then there was his knowledge of Urdu literature. He had read much and digested it better than most. So, talking about some literary topic, he could surprise you by referring to something that you of course knew but had not occurred to you as relevant. But those who got to know him slightly better also found him remarkable on other accounts. For me the reasons were his intolerance for humbug. He spoke frankly and firmly, but never arrogantly. I never heard him make fun of someone just for the heck of it, while he always showed readiness to laugh with you at some foible of his own. Simultaneously, he was a principled man, and always ready to a take a position, if he thought it was right, against popular acceptance. His ‘progressivism’ was that of a true subaltern and not of the coffee-house type that prevailed in Urdu circles for decades.

His contributions to Urdu are many and lasting. In terms of real influence and effectiveness, the prime place goes to his Urdu pedagogical books and his years of teaching Urdu to hundreds of non- academic men and women in England, people who then used the knowledge in their professional work with the South Asian community in U.K.

Ralph was the first, and perhaps the last, Urdu academic to think of undertaking that very important work.

Ralph’s initial academic work was done in collaboration with Khurshidul Islam of Aligarh Muslim University, who taught at the School of Oriental & African Studies, London, for a number of years. The first fruit of that collaboration was Three Mughal Poets: Mir, Sauda, Mir Hasan (1968) It still remains the best introductory book to put in the hands of any student interested in Urdu poetry. Scholars may differ with some of their conclusions but the overall usefulness and excellence of the book cannot be denied. The second book the two put out will last a long time. Entitled, Ghalib: Life and Letters (1969), it is a biography of Ghalib in English using Hali’s book on Ghalib and Ghalib’s own letters, woven together with excellent commentary. It’s a beautifully conceived book, and can be read for pleasure and instruction alike. Though done in collaboration with K. Islam, they were in fact dominantly Ralph’s books both in conception and execution. Ralph did two more books on Ghalib, including one of translations from Ghalib’s Persian poetry.

Ralphs wrote numerous essays and finally put most of them together in two volumes: The Pursuit of Urdu Ghazal (1992) and How Not to Write the History of Urdu Literature (1999) Ralph was a superb translator.

Very early on, he published an exquisite translation of Aziz Ahmad’s novel Aisi Bulandi Aisi Pasti, with the title The Shore and the Wave (1971). Later he put together his other verse and prose translations into a book titled Hidden in the Lute (1995).

More recently Ralph had started writing an autobiography, of which one volume entitled Findings keepings: Life, Communism and Everything came out in 2001. (The second volume was in progress, as I understand. An Urdu translation of the first volume has been done and will soon
come out from Karachi.)

Ralph’s younger colleague Christopher Shackle organized a book to honor Ralph. Published in 1989, it is titled Urdu and Muslim South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell. It contains a useful bibliography of Ralph’s writings to that date.
– C. M. Naim (Sep 15, 2008)

Since I will be publicly auditioning for this job, I present this without comment.

August 26, 2008

Dr. Randy Diehl
Dean of Liberal Arts
GEB 3.216
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712

Dr. Itty Abraham
Director, South Asia Institute
WCH 4.132B
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712

Dear Dean Diehl and Dr. Abraham,

We the undersigned South Asia faculty at the University of Texas, Austin, write to express our strong objection to the university’s decision to establish a “Charlie Wilson Chair in Pakistan Studies.”

While Hollywood may profit from valorizing Mr. Wilson’s role in the Soviet-Afghan war, the concerns of a flagship, state-funded academic institution should be to maintain high scholarly standards and to avoid participating in historical caricature. The cold war in South Asia, which saw the United States shore up decades of military dictatorship in Pakistan against the democratic aspirations of its people, cannot be construed as a triumph of “good” democracy over “evil” communism. Mr. Wilson’s record as the key Congressman who sent monies and munitions to the anti-Soviet mujahideen groups underscores the worrisome role the U.S. played in escalating the Soviet-Afghan conflict, with devastating consequences for the peoples of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States.

“Charlie Wilson’s War,” or the “largest covert action program since World War II,” channeled more than two billion dollars to the mujahideen in the 1980s; by 1987 the CIA was supplying 65,000 tons of armaments to the mujahideen. During the 1980s, Osama bin Laden from his base in Peshawar (Pakistan), used his family’s wealth to build a series of camps where the mujahideen were trained by the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These CIA-funded, ISI-supervised mujahideen operations targeted airports, railroads, fuel depots, electricity pylons, bridges, and roads, destroying vital civilian infrastructure in Afghanistan. The mujahideen, while advocating a narrow and extreme version of Islam, were also brutal killers who preyed upon the Afghan people and trafficked heroin to finance their activities. Between 1979 and 1992, thousands of Afghans died, and six million more became refugees—the largest refugee population in the world–many of them living in mujahideen-run refugee camps in Pakistan. Out of the rubble of a decimated Afghan society and the misery of these camps emerged the second generation of mujahideen: the Taliban. Space does not allow us to detail the myriad forms of cold war “blowback” that have continued to affect India, the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, and resulted in the events of September 11, 2001. These facts are, however, well-known. Mr. Wilson’s central involvement in the cold war in South Asia does not warrant the honor of establishing a University chair in his name.

A named chair sends a public message that not only the holder of the Chair, but its donor, represent standards to which the university and larger community should aspire. To endow a chair in Mr. Wilson’s name implicitly endorses an ideological and romanticized vision of his legacy, ¬and thereby of South Asian history as well. Mr. Wilson is not a role model for what we should teach students about the struggle for democracy in South Asia. It is also hard to imagine that any credible scholar of Pakistan could be recruited to fill a chair named after Mr. Wilson.

If Mr. Wilson and the Temple Foundation want to support research on South Asia, they can be encouraged to make an unmarked and unrestricted donation to the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas. We support the idea of establishing a Chair in Pakistan or South Asian Studies named after a person of integrity and principle that would allow UT’s South Asia program to recruit from among outstanding scholars in the field. We are happy to be consulted and to provide suggestions for a named chair that will enhance and not compromise the reputation of South Asian Studies at the University of Texas.

Kathryn Hansen, Professor of South Asian Studies, Director, Center for
Asian Studies (2000-4)
Akbar Hyder, Associate Professor of South Asian Studies
Judith Kroll, Associate Professor of English
Shanti Kumar, Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film
Janice Leoshko, Associate Professor of Art History and South Asian Studies
Gail Minault, Professor of History
Carla Petievich, Visiting Professor of South Asian Studies
Stephen Phillips, Professor of Philosophy
Sharmila Rudrappa, Associate Professor of Sociology
Martha Selby, Associate Professor of South Asian Studies
Stephen Slawek, Professor of Ethnomusicology
Kamala Visweswaran, Associate Professor of Anthropology

via BASAS:

I wanted to draw your attention to a new annual accademic prize that has been instituted for Humanities and Social Science students studying at a university in Pakistan.

The Falak Sufi Memorial Prize has been established to support innovative work on women and gender in South Asia by Pakistani undergraduate and graduate students. This prize is meant to honor a Pakistani student in a Pakistani college or university for his or her excellence in research and writing in the fields of women and gender studies.

The Prize aims: firstly, to recognize undergraduate and graduate students interested in the topic who often have had lesser opportunities for such recognition, and secondly, to contribute to the vibrancy of the study of humanities and social sciences in Pakistan.

This Prize was established to honor the contributions of Falak Sufi, a Pakistani scholar of women and gender in South Asia.

For fuller details on the rubric of the Prize, kindly refer to: www.fsmprize.com
Please circulate this post as widely as possible to relevant individuals and bodies.

You can learn more about Falak Sufi here or in the remembrance of friends.

Edward Eastwick (1814–1883) joined the East India Company in 1836 as a cadet but was soon promoted because of his capacity for language acquisition. In 1845 the East India Company appointed him to the post of professor of Urdu at their officer-training school at Haileybury. He continued to serve the India Office in a number of diplomatic missions through the 60s until his election to House of Common. His translations of Sa’di’s Gulistan and Kashifi’s Anvar-i Suhaili were popular texts in the East India Company corpus. He also wrote several handbooks on various cities and edited or prefaced a number of books by the natives (published for English audiences).

In his 1859 Handbook for India: Being an Account of the Three Presidencies, and of The Overland Route; Intended as A Guide For Travellers, Officers, and Civilians; With Vocabularies and Dialogues of the Spoken Languages of India with Travelling Map and Plans of Towns, he lists the essential books one needs to know India before getting to India.

I assume that this list was exhaustive.

Now, admittedly, I am a medievalist but I was surprised at how many of these texts were familiar to me.¹ Eastwick doesn’t provide dates of publications for these texts (I added the ones in the History section) but the overwhelming majority were produced after 1840 – so, within the last 20 years of his composing the list. The overwhelming majority of writers represented are also Company employees (as opposed to Her Majesty the Queen’s). There are only two women – Mrs. Spier’s history and the travelogues of Thomas Postans’ wife, Marianne Postans. The natives are absent. There are three texts that derive on local sources – Dow’s History of Hindustan, 3 vols., 1768 (based on Firishta’s Tarikh, 1606), Brigg’s Mohammadan Power in India, 1832 (based on Tabatabai’s Siyar ul Mutakherin, 1781) and Postans’ Sindh, 1841 (based on Tattavi’s Tuhfatul Kiram, 1727). The local histories are recent (historically speaking), dynastic and concerned mainly with the Mughal past. We get one cursory, secondary text on “Muhammadan Customs”, and one memoir of a “Native Gentleman Lutfullah”. Absolutely nothing from any puranic or vedic text.

Which brings me to the main reason I found this list so fascinating. I have been thinking lately about the profile of “Indian history” in the late colonial period after reading a recent article by Kumkum Chatterjee². British Orientalists, the postcolonial claim goes, asserted that India lacked historical consciousness – either because it has remained unchanged and static or that Indians are themselves unreflective and incurious by nature. Evidence for both these claims is legion – the histories of India by James Mill (1773–1836) and Vincent Smith (1848-1920) are often cited, as are the works of administrators or thinkers from Robert Clive (1725–1774) to Warren Hastings (1732–1818) to Karl Marx (1818–1883) to Charles Napier (1786–1860) and everyone in between and after. Robert Orme (1728–1801) is an early exemplar of the view that Indian pasts – prior to the arrival of Islam – are mere fictions:

The Indians have lost all memory of the ages in which they began to believe in Vishnu, Ishwar, Brama, and a hundred thousand divinities subordinate to these. … The history of these gods is a heap of the greatest absurdities. Here are there a moral or metaphysical allegory, and sometimes a trace of the history of a first legislator, is discernible in these stories; but in general they are so very extravagant and incoherent, that we should be left to wonder how a people so reasonable in other respects should have adopted such a code of nonsense as a creed of religion, did we not find the same credulity in the histories of nations much more enlightened

- A Dissertation on the Establishments made by Mahomedan Conquerors in Indostan, 1775.

Later influential colonial historians of India such as Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) and Henry Miers Elliot (1808–1853) turned Orme’s observations into demonstrated truths by the mid-nineteenth century. Some nationalist historians, and in rare cases postcolonial historians, have continued to hold the view that “History” came into being in India with modernity.³. This is the view that Chatterjee criticizes.⁴ While Chatterjee’s correction is commendable, I cannot help, per habit, think that blanket dismissals of Orientalist historiography are in need of a corrective as well.

So, here is something else to chew on from Alexander Dow – one of the earliest historians in India:

Though our author has given the title of the History of Hindostan to his work, yet it is rather that of the Mahommedan empire in India, than a general account of the affairs of the Hindoos. What he says concerning India, prior to the first invasion of the Afgan Mussulmen, is very far from being satisfactory. He collected his accounts from Persian authors, being altogether unacquainted with the Shanscrita or learned language of the Brahmins, in which the internal history of India is comprehended. We must not therefore, with Ferishta, consider the Hindoos as destitute of genuine domestic annals, or that those voluminous records they possess are mere legends framed by the Brahmins.
The prejudices of the Mahommedans against the followers of the Brahmin religion, seldom permit them to speak with common candour of the Hindoos. It swayed very much with Ferishta, when he affirmed that there is no history among the Hindoos of better authority than the Mahabarit. That work is a poem, not a history: It was translated into Persian by the brother of the great Abul Fazil rather as a performance of fancy, than as an authentic account of the ancient dynasties of the Kings of India. But that there are many hundred volumes in prose in the Shanscrita language, which treat of the ancient Indians, the translator can, from his own knowledge, aver, and he has great reason to believe, that the Hindoos carry their authentic history farther back into antiquity than any other nation now existing.

- Preface to A History of Hindostan, 1768.

There is then the historiographical question of the tension between Dow and Orme and their vision of Indian past – balanced precariously within the Saidian framework, even – and the reasons that motivate Orme’s version to dominate. Next is the question of that list we started with. I hate making lists – but they are uniquely placed historical documents willing us to find the silences and the prejudices that may go beyond that of the list-maker. Eastwick, an “old India hand”, an Indologist, a teacher and a librarian (he managed the Haileybury library for many years) reflects both conventional wisdom and personal biases in this list. It is also instructive however to think of the list in the post-1857 moment – before the narrative of Muslim betrayal solidified and that is where all those travelogues listed become fascinating. What? No one made it west of Punjab, Mr. Eastwick?

ps. speaking of Indian pasts, I request comments on the proposed giant Shivaji’s statue from CM correspondent in Pune.

1. I chalk that up to my Orientaphilia (Love of the Orient and of the Orientalists).
2. Chatterjee, Kumkum. “The Persianization of Itihasa: Performance Narratives and Mughal Political Culture in Eighteenth Century Bengal”. Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 67, No. 2. (May) pp. 513-543
3. This is different than the view that “History as a discipline” was introduced by the Europeans in colonial India. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent piece in Public Culture deals with that and I still want to discuss that separately
4. She is not alone. See Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800

A week or so ago Stephen Mihm had an interesting article in Boston Globe, Everyone’s a historian now: How the Internet – and you – will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate. Mihm concentrated on the effect of crowd sourcing on history as a research/archival practice, but I have been thinking about the positive contributions to pedagogy as well.

Google Earth – the application which allows you to fly around the world and find oddities – is a case in point. Historians would be delighted to know that Google Earth has an amazing array of communities dedicated to charting out time and event in space. For example, the battles and routes of Alexander the Great which includes his route, maps of cities and sites of battles. You can download the .kmz file (aka the Google Earth file) and open it up in your copy of Google Earth. Now you can fly like a bird alongside Alexander with notes and comments from the wikipedia, from the Google Earth community, from National Geographic and host of other sources. Surely, you can see the amazing opportunity that offers as an aid-in-teaching. Or, look at the Life of Muhammad which is incredibly detailed time and place map of the Prophet. Or, Paris in 1808. Or, footsteps of Buddha. You can find your own interest at the moderated History,Illustrated forum or the broader Educators forum. You can also simply search for keywords with .kmz extensions.

Going back to Mihm, these are more than collective applications of research or documentation; they allow us to present history in altogether new formats to our students. It grants a physicality to history that often has to struggle to be taken as “real” – separated as it is with time and distance from any typical classroom (yes, I wish I was teaching Civil War history in South Carolina or Muhammad b. Qasim in Thatta). This is not simply crowd-sourcing intelligence, it is re-illuminating our solo-sourced research with crowd-generated technology.

The recent news at Google I/O was that Google Earth is coming to the browser which opens up great possibilities of creating our own versions of digital archives that adhere to the geographical spaces.

Via pdcs

What is it that must precede the conveying of history? Must there not be the declaration of a double passion, an eros for the past and an ardor for the others in whose name there is a felt urgency to speak? To convey that-which-was in the light of this passion is to become a historian. Because the past is irrecoverable and the others in whose stead the historian speaks are dead, unknowable, she cannot hope that her passion will be reciprocated. To be a historian then is to accept the destiny of the spurned lover – to write, photograph, film, televise, archive and simulate the past no merely as its memory bank but as binding oneself by a promise to the dead to tell the truth about the past.
…
Can the historian ever bring back that which has gone by, ever tell the truth about the past? The mundane view of truth as a matching of event or pattern with what is said about it, a relation of homology between proposition and referent, has been undermined by powerful present-day criticisms of both rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge. Is the historian as the lover who is spurned a faithless lover after all who seduces with a promise that cannot be fulfilled, yet knows all along that truth as the return of the past in all of its Leibhaftigkeit is a chimera? Does she lie when she avers, “I will tell the truth about the past, je te jure?”
– Wyschogrod, Edith. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Courtesy of Samip.

The Winter 2008 issue of Public Culture covers “The Public Life of History” and has an intriguing piece by Dipesh Chakrabarty on the practice of history writing and the lessons from India. It is something that I will want to return, in the near future, for a thorough discussion. But, right now, I want to vent a bit about Faisal Devji’s Red Mosque, also appearing in the same issue. Faisal Devji has a thought-provoking style of “speculative scholarship” that hints and highlights ways of getting out of the discursive box that hems in every other analyst of our various pre and post postcolonial conundrums. I happen to mostly disagree with what he writes, but I always appreciate his unique sensibilities. One of these days, I will try and underline my entanglements with his Landscapes of Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity. But, for now, let’s look at his piece in PC.

There are a string of factual mis-readings, the most egregious one being that the Red Mosque was a “co-ed” compound which “not only included large numbers of women but also put them in close proximity to men,” and that in this unique madrassah, there was “the militarization of women…and their deployment shoulder to shoulder with men.” Let me answer this, briefly: No, wrong, Nope, and Absolutely off-the-wall. And, I just got off the phone with an erstwhile female student at the seminary, just to make sure I wasn’t all confused and wrong. Jami’a Hafsa, the female seminary, was completely separate from Jam’ia Faridia, the male seminary. They had separate buildings. They were never in contact with each other; no combined rallies; no annual picnic; no campus sports day. Do you remember seeing the pictures of the ninja-warriors-for-islam? Um, did you see any men next to them? Check out this GIS and let me know when you find them fighting shoulder to shoulder. In addition, Devji argues, based on a few last interviews of Abdul Rashid, that the madrassah was not ‘conservative’, nor explicitly anti-Shi’a. Again, if one has any, even remote, understanding of the history of Jami’a Hafsa/Faridia and the connection with Darul Ifta Jamia Benori, Karachi, or if one visits the forums of the Jamia with threads such as Shia Exposed, one wouldn’t make such claims. These are not simple errors since the “mixing of gender and geneologies,” is more or less the fulcrum on which Devji’s entire argument rests. Hence, the classic blunder of “speculative scholarship” – facts are constructed after the “theory” has been solidly established – facts be damned, in fact. I will focus, some other day, in some other venue, on an examination of the “expert on jihad” phenomenon which is currently sweeping the field of South Asian history and political theory. For now, let us disentagle Devji’s convoluted logic a bit more.

Based on his spurious reading, Devji makes two theoretical points, one about Lal Masjid itself and the other about Islamic militancy:
1. Red Mosque folks were motivated by the desire to “occupy the arena of antigovernment struggle in Pakistan’s civil society” and that the “Red Mosque was linked more to the everyday and even secular practices of modern life in the region than to any religious or cult behavior.”
and
2. Red Mosque, particularly the case of Abdul Rashid Ghazi, is “an example of the gradual transformation or at least flattening out of Islamic militancy, which has in many parts of the world been weaned off its dependence on highly organized or institutional forms to become yet another kind of voluntary association that individuals join for their own reasons, often as part-time members rather than full time radicals”.

Devji misreads a lot of things – most importantly, he misreads the fact that the Red Mosque contingent knew P.R. and media relations; that they realized the power of spectacle. The somber force of rows upon rows of burqa-clad seminarians as an image of considerable impact does, in fact, mean that they were keyed-in to the global arena of anti-state, anti-secular, fundamentalist propaganda. But, it is a mistake to read their awareness of message politics with their fundamental cry: “Shariah or Shahadat” (Rule of Islamic Law or Martyrdom). The Message is the Message.

Red Mosque is, of course, a part of Pakistani civil society. To argue that they have “evolved” into a civil social organization is again a misreading. The operational context of any of the religious groups that have cropped up since Jamaluddin Afghani traveled down these roads is always social and civil. They don’t form a civil society organization, they are conceived in civil social terms – hence, the schooling component. Devji’s assertion that Red Mosque is a “mutation of Sunni militancy into the kind of mobilization that is neither nationalist nor in fact militant in any professional way but perhaps nongovernmental” is patently absurd. I don’t even know what and where to begin disputing that because the statement rests on his already factually inaccurate reading of Red Mosque’s history, ideology and operational structures.

However, leaving aside Red Mosque, I want to see if Devji does highlight a new development when he speaks about the “flattening out of Islamic militancy”. Devji, uses as evidence the failed suicide attacks in Glasgow and London in 2007. He believes that since these professional doctors¹ concocted this scheme during their private time, hence, it must mean that they are absolutely amateurs engaging in “extracurricular” activity. This “amateurism” speaks to Devji of Islamic militancy entering a “pluralistic kind of civil society activism.” Well, now. The scholarship that I have read on Al Qaeda (admittedly not much, not my cup of tea) has always highlighted the fact that it operates on the distributed computing model with a host of quasi-independent functionaries operating in rigid, hierarchical organizations. Which is why, unlike other historical examples of anarchists and terrorists, AQ relies so heavily on coded but publicly accessible rhetoric. Their aims and ideologies aren’t “secret” but are disseminated as far as possible. Hence, the teams of experts on our end, trying to find the hidden messages in this or that released video from these terrorists. These videos get abundant airplay, easily discoverable on youtube; forums proliferate wherein folks can divine secret strengths from their sheikh. What I see is, then, the easy availability of mediating messages that functional, yet disturbed, individuals can glom onto and attempt their own interventions into global injustices against their perceived community. This points out only that there exist structural inequalities in societies that permit individuals to “disappear” and “re-emerge” in a new form. Or it may point towards major psychological damage. I don’t know. Was Seung-Hui Cho a case in Devji’s point?

The AQ remains just as much, or as little, professional as it ever was. The recent spate of suicide bombings in Lahore and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, in fact, point to the very meticulous and professional nature of such militancy. These were sophisticated operations. Not civil society activism. Which, by the way, is a particularly offensive way of categorizing terrorism that has claimed thousands of innocents lives across the world.

I know that there should be a space for such “academic” and “psycho-theoretical” discussions. But do we really need to muddy these waters, even more?

1. Devji writes, “Naturally some kind of relationship must have existed between the public and private lives of these doctors, perhaps based on the notions of altruism and self-sacrifice that are meant to inform medical as much as terrorist practices, but my point is that the latter remained distinctly amateurish in character”. I respond, “Huh??”

In a rather half-hearted piece for TNR, Imperial Illusions, Amartya Sen spends some time ruminating on the good/bad of British colonialism in India with an eye towards comparison with the American imperialism. He offers a sketch of the 2,000 year old pre-history of British rule in India as a “country” with “global influence”. Though, he places this global India squarely in ‘Ancient realm’ and gives us examples only from the second or the fourth century and cites only Claudius Ptolemy and Pliny the Elder – Roman accounts of the Red Sea trade with the East. After having set the stage from centuries ago, Sen jumps straight to “a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the town of Plassey, situated among mango groves between Calcutta”, where British won India in 1757. In this particularly cataracted vision of Indian history, Sen can declare, without any historical discomfort, that the 150 years of past and 150 years of coming future of British rule in India all hinged on one lieutenant of the local Nawab switching allegiance mid-”cricket match”. After that uniquely Bengali insight, Sen continues to treat all of British colonial history with the same generalized brush as he treats Indian political and economic history. And, he concludes:

In assessing Britain’s relation with India in this year of anniversaries, we must make a clear distinction between the positive contributions of the British in bringing India more closely into the global world (including many domestic institutional changes) and the plentiful presence of inequity and negligence in British imperial rule. It is important to appreciate the positive impact of India’s British association, but also to recognize that the changes that were important for India could have come without the colonial adversities. India’s approach to the contemporary world was certainly aided by many initiatives that can be linked to British influence, and many of these potentials have come into their own only after the end of the colonial rule.

All of this, is largely standard nationalist historiography. Hundreds of books peddle the same script of Indian and colonial pasts. The curious elision of centuries, the disappearances of key geographies and the History from the Present aspects are neither new nor unique to Sen but he has definitely elevated the discourse.

In this overarching thesis on the good and the bad of British colonialism, Sen opens with a few potshots at Niall Ferguson, a historian much admired and emulated. Sen calls his book “didactic” and calls Ferguson a cheerleader for American imperialism – in so many words. Ferguson responds with his own shot at Sen’s nobel prize. Sen then carries the load back home.

I admit that I found the entire back-and-forth, between these two Harvard nawabs, consistently boring. What is more noteworthy, is that they are both operating from within a standard decline-to-colonial template which necessitates a particular causation to British colonialism in India. That template, by the way, is historiographically Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of Roman Empire. One can trace its ubiquity, even in the Marx essay that Sen cites in his essay.

Karl Marx, writing in the New York Daily Tribune began with this caustic observation on British rule in India:

There cannot, however, remain any doubt that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before … All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broke down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of anew one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.

But Marx was concerned not with the particularity of British colonial rupture into Hindostani society but with the systemic failures within that Indian society which allowed for British Imperialism to triumph. The tropes of his argument there are unsurprisingly Orientalist: India had a static, stratified society, ruled by despotism and enslaved to horrendously unenlightened religion. The imperial intervention, then, was necessary for India:

We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Kinda reminds you of current discourse on Iraq, doesn’t it? In any event, this decline paradigm posits a particularly banal, generalized and ahistorical reading of the native past which is portrayed as being fundamentally diseased, decayed, and declined at exactly the moment when European civilization is avast in glorious modernity and industrialization. Whether it is the Ottoman, the Saffavid, the Qing, or the Russians, the decline of the East reigns supreme as causative background to the inconceivable rise of the British Empire. This despite the fact that the picture of eighteenth century in India, specifically, has long been complicated by historians as diverse as John F. Richards, Bernard S. Cohn, and Muzaffar Alam and that colonial interventions themselves have been proven wildly divergent in works by Fredrick Cooper, George Steinmetz or James Hevia.

Yet, the decline scenario continues to hold popular sway, both in the ex-colony and in the ex-metropole as an explanation and an excuse. There is no doubt that the central authority of Mughal polity in eighteenth century India was largely a relic – some have pointed towards even the seventeenth century where such effects are quite visible. But the rise of regional powers and diffuse centers of political clout is, in itself, a counter-narrative to any “decline” theory. In areas such as Sindh and Gujarat, or the Nizams in Hyderabad, the eighteenth century saw a particularly healthy growth of trade and local patronage – in communities and in cities.

The British historiography, particularly since the mid-nineteenth century, had a deliberate and conscious emancipatory message for the colony. For that historiography, the decline of the Mughal polity or the despotism of the local principalities was a central theme. Nationalist historians, more or less, continued that theme by casting the late Mughal, if not the entirety of Muslim history in India, as the medieval Dark Ages. Postcolonial scholarship, beholden to Bengal and the nineteenth century, have not had direct access to the Persian archives to make sense of seventeenth or eighteenth century. Nor have they felt a need to do so. After all, as Marx declared, colonialism was its own rupture into Indian pasts.

See:
Alavi, Seema. The Eighteenth Century in India, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Alam, Muzaffar. The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707-48, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

A few weeks ago, danah boyd wrote her resolve to publish only in Open Access journals. I couldn’t agree more – being an ardent supporter of scholarship that is freely accessible. One of my biggest complaint about our academic world is about the inaccessibility of research to anyone without institutional affiliation or a hefty bank account. The impact of which is that, academic work in the humanities remains largely confined to a handful of readers and commentators.

The comments to boyd’s piece were rather over-blown – highlighting the needed work of editors, production costs, peer-reviews etc etc. As if, those things are tied simply to dead-tree models of capitalism. As if, NYTimes, WSJ, and every other daily newspaper doesn’t generate revenue from online sources. As if, the pay-for-archives wall hasn’t crumbled everywhere else. The simple fact is that there are enough alternate revenue streams for any peer-review, niche academic jorunal to make its living via an open, public, archive and publication model. Other commentators, fixated on the struggle to start new OA journals – and the requirements of tenure stream to stick with prestigious print models. Good points both. The first step is, of course, to convince journals to move to Open Access.

Which is why the vote by Harvard Arts and Science Faculty to republish their scholarly work is such a welcome new step.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need. To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository. The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

Not enough, but a good start, nonetheless. We also need to work to free the archives.

Free JSTOR.

JSTOR (Journal Storage) began as a Mellon grant project to make digital copies of Journal back catalogs with universities subscribing through a two-tiered model – the initial Database Development Fee and the on-going Annual Access Fee. Fees that are often lacking for the scholars in the global south. I have done my share of copying articles for friends in Delhi or Karachi but I really would like to see the archives available to everyone. JSTOR – a non-profit – can spend some mental muscle figuring out ways to make money off of eye-balls. JSTOR results are already included in Google searches (through scholars.google.com but, often, also in normal search). So, some one is already making ad-sense money off those searches.

JSTOR can simply point towards the publishers of academic journals as the copyright holders who will resist any such effort. It is a valid point. A twin-pronged approach is thus needed.

One: Those of us, not at Harvard or not willing to take up boyd’s rallying cry, can still insist on retaining re-publishing rights on our work. We can also seek to pressure our field’s leading journals to open up their archives. And Two: We need to pressure JSTOR to open up its archives and find alternative revenue streams.

It boggles my mind that the Sciences are so far ahead of the Humanities* on the Open Access issue. Check, this paper or these myth-busters.

*: Also check the discussions of our colleagues in Anthropology at Savage Minds (via Tenured Radical).