Tennessee resident Gary Middleton worries that the mosque could house extremists. “It’s just another mosque, training kids to be terrorist,” he said.

Stan Whiteway also objects to a new mosque for local Muslims. “I’m sorry, but they seem to be against everything that I believe in. So I don’t want them necessarily in my neighborhood,” he said.

–From an article about opposition to mosques in the United States, chosen at random from Google News

I. Retirement

My father calls me at least once a week to ask me if I know anyone who has ever been abducted by aliens. No, I say, I don’t. Me neither, he replies, a hint of regret in his voice. My father, a life-long agnostic by belief and eccentric artist by profession, will turn seventy-nine on Friday. Throughout much of his seventies he has been deeply focused on paranormal phenomena and philosophies of reincarnation and the after-life. At first he read Krishnamurti extensively, then it was past life regression and out-of-body experiences, now aliens. His chair in the living room is surrounded by books written by mediums, psychics and other experts on the paranormal. Not for him the second adolescence of retirement communities in Boca and the shuffleboard and sweetheart dances of senior cruises. His preoccupations remind me of the regimen of religious observances favored in India by the elderly, or those we call ‘retirees’ and ‘senior citizens’ in the US.

A combination of climate, gender, friendlessness, foreignness and a dissertation that needed to be written kept me often at home at our roof-top barsaati in Allahabad some years ago. Living in a barsaati affords an excellent view of the courtyards and front yards of neighboring houses. From this vantage point, I could see the neighborhood’s senior citizens seated in the sun on their respective charpoys, engaging in religious observances. In the courtyard of our own house, our landlady, a Partition immigrant from Multan, sat each morning and read small paperback books of Hindu prayers written in Urdu script. Across the way, a grandfather sat cross-legged on his perch above rows of drying chili peppers, reciting Sanskrit prayers. Another man, next door, often appeared to be napping or peering over the fence to see what the neighbors were doing, but even he spent a certain amount of time in prayer.

II. Apprenticeship

Years later, in Chicago, my dissertation on Hindi literature finished, I was determined to learn to read and write Urdu properly, after years of false starts. A colleague helped me find a tutor. He was from the Indian city of Hyderabad, the retired Chair of Arabic Studies at Usmania University. He was also the Sufi imam of a mosque in the basement of the brick courtyard building where he lived on the north side of Chicago, somewhere around the confluence of Clark and Ashland. As I sat on the floor across from him, reading aloud from Pakistani children’s primers, he would nod agreeably and correct me when necessary. All the while he managed from his cell phone the affairs of his flock, fielding calls about problems ranging from the spiritual, to health, to travel to marital counseling.

As an imam, and an Arabic scholar, my Ustad was, with respect to his spiritual observances, many steps ahead of the retirees I had known in Allahabad. Nevertheless, he was not about to give himself a pass. He took particular care to say the Bismillah in its entirety before undertaking any task, luxuriously elongating the long vowels and stopping to emphasize the consonants: Bissssmillllaaaah al-Rahmaaaan al-Rahiiiiim. It was clear from his delivery that he strove with each invocation to renounce the automatic patter of frequently uttered prayers. Before beginning anything, whether it was our lesson, or opening the door of my car when I gave him a ride to his other son’s home, he would stop, shut his eyes and then intone, slowly and loudly: Bissssmillllaaaah al-Rahmaaaaan al-Rahiiiiim. The same practice pertained to sneezing, to which he fell prey in Chicago’s allergy season: <sneeze> Alllhummmmdulllllaaah.

As his shagird, or student, I was obliged, as much as possible, to help my Ustad, or serve his needs where feasible. This was a perk of which he took only light advantage. Most often, I gave him rides to various nearby points in his neighborhood, especially in inclement weather. One particular special occasion arose during my time with him. This was a visit from his son’s in-laws, a retirement aged couple who were coming to the US for the first time, having never traveled anywhere besides India and Saudi Arabia. It was arranged that one afternoon, I would drive the three of them around the city to see the sights.

III. Alienation

As we drove up and down various Chicago streets, my Ustad pointed out salient details of the city landscape. After a half an hour or so in the car, we were driving down Clark St., toward Lincoln Park. Our guests had been mostly quiet, staring out the windows with that bewilderment one feels in a totally unfamiliar place. At last, scanning the rooftops, the husband remarked thoughtfully, “You don’t see many minarets around here.” No one wanted to break the news to him that you don’t see any minarets in much of the city, so we talked instead of the subtlety of Chicago’s mosques, housed unobtrusively in old churches, apartments, storefronts and basements.

Soon we arrived in Lincoln Park, a sprawling green space along the curved shore of Lake Michigan with unobstructed views of the downtown skyline. Our party made our way slowly along the paths to the shore, dodging joggers, roller-bladers and cyclists. It was a bright spring day, warm enough for Chicagoans to throw off most of their clothing, but slightly chilly for my older Subcontinental companions. They were all three heavily dressed, the men with turbans, long coats, kurta-pajama, woolen socks and lace-up shoes, the wife of the couple in shalwar-kameez under a long, black robe, her hair covered in a black headscarf. We sat for some time as they warmed themselves in the sun, mostly in silence, looking out at the lake and people-watching. After some time, the husband of the couple turned and asked my Ustad with some puzzlement, “Why do so many people have dogs with them?” My Ustad did not skip a beat. “In this country,” he explained, “everyone is separated: child from parent, husband from wife, brother from sister. They all live alone. They keep these dogs with them as companions in their solitude.”

I just want to cry. And then, I want a new homeland.

A Farmer and His Dead Bhains (Water Buffalo) in Pakistan

I am a bhains. I am now dead.

You must have read, recently, a particularly elegiac treatment of the last moments of a prostrate brown-and-white brindled cow in your favorite newspaper. I didn’t read it, but I was told about it. Cow? I said to myself. Cow? We are talking about southern Punjab, yes? Sure there are cows here, but to use a cow as a crassly evocative narrative device seems akin to highlighting the Vespa scooter, when the Honda Hero is really the star of the show!

A Cow in the Pakistani Flood

I mean, come on, I am here. Me. Use Me. Punjab is unexplainable, unknowable, unthinkable without Me. Speak about me, think about me, hear my voice.¹

bhains kay aagay been bajana

You may have heard of me. They routinely say: ‘aql bari kay bhains. Am I right? What an insult. Of course, I am bigger than “intelligence”. But these city-folks who can only see me as a street nuisance, while they sip on the delicious milk I provide, are so very keen to make up insulting proverbs about me. Or you may have heard, jis ki lathi uss ki bhains. Another insult. Just because someone has a stick, I do not become his possession. I do have a functioning brain! I do recognize, know and love my owner. The most insulting, however, is, bhains kay aagay been bajana. Insulting for the sad, pathetic human, of course. I am not sure why they think I am immune to the charms of a good tune on the flute. I love music.

Breeds of Water Buffalo in Punjab

Or you may heard of mine genetic cousins in Kenya or Indonesia or wherever the Montgomery Breeding Techniques took my breed (we work well in tropical heat, they concluded)? Or maybe you heard of my cousins, Murrah, Kundhi, Nili, Ravi, here in desh?

Oh, I know. You don’t care about me. It is that farmer standing next to my dead carcass that interests you more, isn’t it? You think that now that his life is ruined by this flood, his cattle is dead, his land is covered in waist high mud and soil, his crops are ruined, his body is racked with dysentery and cholera, he will become a Taliban and attack America. Yes. That is who you really want to hear about. Sadly, even though I have a voice (beyond the carcass, even!), he doesn’t. He needs someone else to speak for him. Someone with a more evocative touch than his illiterate, agrarian yet highly combustible brain can possibly produce.

I hear you. You are a hammer and every thing else is a nail. More precisely, every Pakistani is a infected with HIT-virus – full blown disease is just a matter of time.

What is the point then? I cannot tell you anything that can change your mind. He is poor. He is easily bought by Wahabi or Opium money. He works hard for his meager food. He will swallow whole the dialectic of revolution or of Khilafa. He is traditional in his outlook, in his customs. He is a fundamentalist and a sectarian. He spent some time in the Gulf doing labor. He was indoctrinated with Wahabi ideology. He can recite Bulleh Shah or listen to the Heer for days. He what? He is a human being with a past, a present, a culture, a society, a vision of the good life, a sense of community, a method of belonging, a routine of daily practices, a collection of stories for his children, a corpus of songs for his friends, a set of possessions, a love for radio or tv, a daily grind and an early night. He is waiting to attack us in New York.

Surrounded

You see his suffering through your security, your strategy, your politics. You don’t see him as a human. Just as you don’t see me as more than cattle. You don’t know who he is, so he must be your worst nightmare. If you saw him as human, if you granted him agency, thought, you wouldn’t be so afraid. You would want to help him. Not because he might become Taliban, but because he is your kind, and he needs your help.

1. I can see you rolling your eyes. I can’t actually see you. Oh, how Pamukian, your sensible selves are noting. You know what, My Name is Red can go ma’an chudao itself. I won’t apologize for my crassness, since I am an unabashed Punjabi bull.

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

Some of you may be old enough to remember a letter to an academic journal that Sepoy posted last February. Below, I furnish the piece of writing in question for those who are curious. The article, on the portrayal of terrorists in Indian cinema, was written in 2002. It was, I like to think, fresh and timely. It can no longer be described in that manner now. Many new movies have come out that would be interesting to discuss in this context. Mani Ratnam has since made a film that touches more directly on the conflict in Sri Lanka (Kannathil Muthamittal). I would no longer be caught dead writing this kind of academic article. The world has changed, etc. But in the interest of freecycling, I give it to you, below. Perhaps it can be repurposed and made into a quilt?

But before we move on, one last item of business. I must also share with you the reviewer’s comments alluded to in my original letter. The following was scrawled in heavily applied ballpoint on the review sheet:

NO– I am normally very open-minded, but I cannot be so here. I have no interest in advocating an article which is designed to elicit empathy for terrorists & terrorism. I don’t want to “appreciate” or “comprehend” the world of terrorists. I am not naive. The problem is with the terrorist– NOT my understanding of these PSYCHOPATHIC KILLERS. (and yes, I understand the intent of the essay. I am not misreading it)

Let Me Sleep in the Lap of Death:
Indian Cinema’s humanizing embrace of terrorists and freedom fighters

Introduction
In the final scene of the Indian film Dil Se (‘From the heart’, 1998), the hero, an employee of All India Radio (AIR), embraces the heroine, a separatist suicide bomber. The setting is a ridge in a Delhi park, dotted with ruined buildings from pre-colonial kingdoms. The heroine is on her way to bomb the annual Republic Day parade through the nation’s capital. The two embrace, and the bomb explodes. As the flames and embers radiate outwards, the last verses of a song, begun earlier in the film but never finished, are finally heard:

mujhe maut kii god meN sone de

mujhe maut kii god meN sone de
tere ruuh mere jism meN Dubone de…

Let me sleep in the lap of death

Let me sleep in the lap of death
Let your soul be drowned in my body…

For those not familiar with the aesthetics of the Indian cinema in general, and Bollywood (Bombay’s film industry) in particular, the scenario may seem bizarre and even rife with contradictions. How can one have a musical about a suicide bomber? How can the real-life present-day brutality of separatist movements and terrorist acts against states and their citizens be enveloped into the apparently real-time-external Bollywood formulas of romance, action, singing and dancing? We can learn human lessons about the phenomenon of terrorism from the region of South Asia, which has a greater familiarity with the so-called phenomenon of ‘terror,’ a familiarity which is reflected in a number of recent films on the subject. In the past ten years there have been a number of major films released in India with a terrorist as a central character, including Dil Se (1998), The Terrorist (1999), Maachis (‘Matches,’ 1996), and Mission Kashmir (2000). In all these films, the terrorist or terrorists are depicted in remarkably human terms and their motivations and actions are presented in a light which makes the audience see them as sympathetic characters. In each of the first three movies, all of which are discussed below, there are female terrorists.

The spate of film-making on terrorist themes may have been spurred on by the many separatist and violent struggles taking place within India’s borders. From the Islamist separatists in Kashmir, to the struggles in Assam, to the Khalistan movement in the Punjab, as well as the Sri Lankan civil war to the south, India and other South Asian countries have been contending with a number of different terrorist threats for quite some time now. But the paradigm of the terrorist protagonist is nothing new in Indian narratives, and dates back to the era of the struggle for independence in India.

Terrorism in India: context
In India, the concept of terrorism has been around a good deal longer than it has in the US. In the colonial era, the term ‘terrorist’ was used by the British to designate agitators for Indian independence who favored the use of force. The use of the term by the British (as opposed to ‘revolutionaries’, the term preferred by Indian nationalists) grew into a contrastive position with the Satyagrahis, or practitioners of the non-violent resistance advocated by MK Gandhi, whose movement in fact was started in reaction to the violent method of fighting colonial occupation. A non-violence movement only makes sense if there is a ‘violence’ movement. The use of the term by the British sought to denigrate the aims and goals of those who believed that force would be more effective against the British than the philosophies and demonstrations of the non-violence movement. Both groups were freedom fighters, and revolutionaries, but one ostensibly posed less of a threat to the British than the other. Many historians now believe that contrary to what popular opinion and Attenborough’s myth-making 1982 film Gandhi hold, it was, in actuality, a combination of these two tactics, violent and non-violent (along with the second World War and the election of a Labor Party government in England), which led to the successful removal of the British from India. Because of this history of the term ‘terrorist’ in India, one often finds a much more subtle discussion of the idea of terrorism in public debates, literature and film than one is wont to find in the American media. In particular, the notion that a terrorist is often just a pejorative term for freedom fighter or revolutionary is well understood. Many of India’s heroes of the Independence movement were bomb-makers and advocates of force- such as Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar ‘Azad’ and Subhash Chandra Bose (shown above)¹ – and not only do their names and deeds live on in history, but so too does the memory of their label from the British side as terrorists. Because of this, and perhaps because of a longstanding knowledge that one’s ideological and perhaps physical enemy could be living next door, the portrayal of terrorists in Indian films rarely resembles that found in American movies, in which terrorists tend to be shadowy, ‘international’ figures with indistinct and evil goals. Not only does this formulation, which is more often than not drawn from the portrayal of terrorists in the US news media, not help viewers understand what might motivate a suicide bomber- for example, because their goals are so vague and so patently evil- but their foreignness and superficiality play on deep-seated instincts toward xenophobia and suspicion of outsiders. By contrast, the terrorists of Indian film and fiction² are strikingly human, clearly defined in their political goals and motivations, attractive, intelligent, and often even saddened by the path they feel has been forced on them by history.

Songs in Dil Se
It may come as a surprise that a ‘serious’ film about terrorism could be made within the aesthetic framework of the Bollywood musical, but some Bollywood filmmakers have created a tradition of this kind of treatment. Director Raj Kapoor (1924-1988), for example, pioneered the big-budget entertainer with a progressivist political message in his films Awara (‘The vagabond’, 1951), criticizing the criminal justice system and discrimination, and Shree 420 (‘Mr. 420,’ 1955), a critique of big-city corruption and homelessness. In the final scene of Dil Se, discussed above, part of the effectiveness of the dramatic tension resides in the fact that the audience is already, more likely than not, familiar with the song which is about to erupt on the soundtrack. As Meghna the terrorist’s bomb detonates in a ball of fire, the audience anticipates the final lines of the song which round out the earlier verses from another scene. The audience, already fully aware of the lyrics for the song, “Satrangi Re” (‘The seven colors [of love]’), realizes that the line “Let me sleep in the lap of death” has not yet been sung. Death, and therefore tragedy, is anticipated as the ending.

The songs in Dil Se are the work of one of the most renowned composers in the Indian cinema, and certainly the most innovative in Bombay, AR Rahman, and as such are probably even more important to this film than regular songs are to other films. In the opening scene of the film, the hero, Amar, played by Shah Rukh Khan (SRK), enters a remote train platform on a dark and rainy night. He approaches a shadowy figure wrapped in a black cloth and asks him for matches. A sudden gust of wind blows the cloth away from the person’s face, revealing that it is not a man but a woman. For the audience, this one moment makes it perfectly clear that there is something out of the ordinary about this woman, since it is unusual for a beautiful young woman to be sitting on a train platform late at night all alone. SRK draws near to her and begins a lengthy monologue in which he attempts to get her to speak to him or tell him something about herself. The questions he asks her- What is your name? What is the name of your village? What is your mother’s name? And then, humorously, ‘what is your dog’s name?’- presage her discontinuity with location, family, and home. As we realize much later, the only thing she has is a name, and as a revolutionary terrorist she has renounced all else. Eventually he introduces himself, showing her an identification badge and explaining that he works for All India Radio (AIR; see Figure 3, above, in which Amar shows Meghna his badge for the second time). We come to realize over the course of the film that SRK is Meghna’s opposite: he is a servant of the State, an appendage of the government media and propaganda network, which serves the function of binding together the imagined community of India.

As he continues to ask her if there is anything she needs that he can get for her, she suddenly turns and looks him full in the face and replies, “A cup of hot tea.” What is remarkable about this exchange is her naked stare into his eyes. She is a woman, alone, in an empty station in the middle of the night, and she has the composure to look a strange man in the eyes, a mark of union and the beginning of a relationship in the visual-poetic language of the Indian cinema. He rushes off to get the tea and rushes back to see a train pulling out of the station, and Meghna seated in a lit compartment with two men. Pulling his jacket over his head, still holding the two cups of tea, he stands in the rain and remarks with resignation, “The world’s shortest love story.” A remark which signals to us that a) it will be a long love story, and b) we are ready for a song.

Of the many beautifully written and arranged songs in Dil Se, this opening number “Chhaya Chhaya” has attracted the most attention. The song is ‘picturized’ on the top of a train traveling through a jungle that seems to resemble the forests of the Northeast regions of India, where, not coincidentally, there is much ethnic and communal tension, separatism, and violent clashes of organized militias with the State. SRK dances in a contemporary, hip-hop style accompanied by a large chorus and a super model-statuesque woman dressed in peasant attire. The Janet Jackson-style dance moves are a deceptive cover for the complex Perso-Arabic lyrics (much of the poetry of the song lyrics borrows heavily from Urdu poetic traditions, particularly the sonnet-like verse form the ghazal), which would be nearly impossible for the average viewer to comprehend. The nature of the linguistic/poetic style of the lyrics and their reference to devotion and love presage the tension which will carry us through the movie. This is a terrorist movie, but it is also a love story, and not just any love story, but the kind of love story that legends are made of. The setting might be modern, but, as we will learn, this is Romeo and Juliet, or more accurately, Laila and Majnun, all over again. The tale of Laila and Majnun is a traditional Arabic love story in which the two characters fall in love but cannot marry because they belong to separate tribes. Majnun eventually goes crazy from his love and wanders out in the desert where he is nourished for a time by animals, but dies because of the intensity of his passion for Laila.

Thus begins a tale which creates an ingenious blend of commentary on modern day terrorism and separatism and a compelling reworking of the tale of Laila and Majnun. Following in the footsteps of earlier populist-progressivists in the Indian Cinema such as Raj Kapoor, the filmmaker, Mani Ratnam, knows that making a film in the realist mode of say, Satyajit Ray, on the subject of terrorism, will not appeal to the general public. In a cinema which requires non-linear and symbolic narrative; relatively ahistorical, apolitical romances; and the copious use of songs and dances, it is not easy to deliver messages on current events with a straight-on treatment. Mani Ratnam manages to weave together multiple layers of visual, lyrical, musical, and narrative-based symbolism to create both a blockbuster-style film and make a serious commentary on contemporary events. In the song “Chhaya Chhaya,” for example, the most experimental element, in terms of the visual poetics of the Bombay cinema, is not the fact that SRK and a huge chorus are dancing on top of a moving train (spectacle is an important part of the genre, especially during the song sequences), nor is it the complex and elaborate Perso-Arabic flavored song lyrics. Rather, it is the fact that the song is shot in a setting which at least looks like the Northeast frontier area of India. Connected to the rest of India by a strip of land carved around Bangladesh by the Partition of 1947 (Bangladesh was then West Pakistan), the Northeast frontier provinces are a remote region torn apart by separatist movements and brutal army-led crackdowns. In the landscapes of popular national imagination, this thickly jungled and mountainous region does not play much of a role, certainly not in the landscapes of the Bombay cinema. At the same time, forests and natural surroundings, as well as hilly regions, are in fact important parts of the visual vocabulary of the picturization of Hindi songs. In a tradition which could be seen as rooted in the poetics of traditional love poetry from a number of different language literatures in the Subcontinent, Hindi film songs arrange visual cues that are recognized by the audience as symbolizing a complex array of moods and progressions in the romantic aspect of the narrative.³

In the case of “Chhaya Chhaya,” the jungle landscape can be seen as a ‘beginning of romantic love’ setting in the traditional sense, but it is also meant to evoke something unfamiliar: a particular remote area of the nation, and one to which the audience does not frequently travel. In addition, the use of the train as the stage for the dancers can be seen as one step beyond spectacle: it actually is a train, and it is taking us, the audience, and the film’s hero, a character firmly rooted in the capital, New Delhi, on a journey to the periphery. Throughout the film, Mani Ratnam uses this method of merging messages and symbols to create a complex story, one which is a classic tragic love tale, as well as a story about separatism and suicide bombers, with multiple layers of interpretability and accessibility by the audience.

Specificity and Timelessness
How does one fit a narrative which, though not a ‘true story,’ still must contain elements of historical, political, and geographical specificity, into the Bollywood generic framework? The Bollywood framework could be defined as non-specific, non-particularized, and emphatically non-realist, perhaps because it seeks to capture a pan-Indian audience, and perhaps because it plays the role of escapist fantasy for a large viewing public for whom the harsh realities of everyday life are not something one pays money to go and see. One method Mani Ratnam uses is to make the origins, regional affiliations, and religious/ethnic identity of Meghna, the terrorist herself, deliberately vague, supplying the audience with only the barest clues to figure out what movement she has joined.

Her name, Meghna, sounds vaguely Hindu, but on the other hand it is simply the name of a river in the Northeast. She doesn’t appear to be Muslim, although she is sometimes seen wearing a dark shawl over her head, but that might just be for anonymity or warmth. The only truly factual clues come near the end of the film, when Meghna explains to Amar her reasons for being a suicide bomber. Her explanation is depicted by means of a video montage flashback shown partly from the narrative perspective of Indian Army soldiers killing and raping the people in her village. Through the flashback, we come to understand her motivation as one arising from being orphaned and raped by the Indian Army, and later adopted into a separatist army camp for children. In one scene, Meghna is shown as a young girl standing to attention in her training camp with a flag flying overhead featuring a rhinoceros. The rhinoceros is indigenous to Assam, and is often used as a symbol of the region. Here, it probably suggests Meghna’s affiliation with one of Assam’s many separatist organizations, such as the powerful group ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam).⁴

The ambiguity of Meghna’s heritage serves not only to make Dil Se a timeless romance analogous to Laila and Majnun, but also to suggest that in the matter of separatism and terrorism, specificity can only be given so much importance. As the audience seeks to figure out which struggle Meghna is engaging in, they are forced on some level to confront the fact that it could be one of many. The story of disenfranchised communities, either at the geographical peripheries of nations, or simply at the socio-economic peripheries, and the state-sponsored violence perpetrated against members of these communities, is a fact of life all around India, and indeed all around the world. Meghna is simply a young woman driven to the edge who has nothing left to lose.

Mani Ratnam himself is Tamil, from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, the separatist struggles of Kashmir and Assam are very far away, and the battle raging much closer to home (but external to India’s borders) is that between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE—The Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam). It was in fact a female suicide bomber from the Tamil Tigers who assassinated the then Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991. Dil Se is part of a trilogy rounded out by Mani Ratnam’s Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995). The previous two films dealt with Kashmiri terrorism and how it can be of importance to Indians in the South (Roja), and Hindu-Muslim conflict and rioting around the time of the demolition of the Babri Masjid (Babur’s Mosque) in Ayodhya (Bombay). Mani Ratnam’s trilogy attempts to bring together a variety of conflicts eating away at India’s national borders and identity and show how these are conflicts which affect all Indians, although his apparent confidence in the idea of a nation shown in Roja seems to have been substantially undermined by the time he directed the third part of the trilogy, Dil Se.

Specificity and Realism: The Terrorist
Interestingly, Mani Ratnam’s films do not deal with the Tamil Tigers at all, perhaps out of an urge to bring together lessons learned from both the south and the north of India and create a national dialogue. Fellow Tamil filmmaker Santosh Sivan (also cinematographer for Dil Se, as well as a number of other Mani Ratnam films), however, has brought the theme of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination to film in his 1999 The Terrorist. The Terrorist was shot in South India and is a Tamil language film. With no song and dance numbers and not much romance or dialogue, The Terrorist falls into the genre ‘art film’ in terms of Indian cinematic categories. The ninety-five minute film, extremely short by Indian standards, chronicles the life of a young woman in a terrorist training camp, presumably run by the LTTE, in a country which is presumably Sri Lanka, from the time she is selected to take on the mission to assassinate a ‘VIP’ to the moment when she is supposed to press the button. Sivan’s film also lacks specificity, although this is probably because of the dangers both legal and otherwise involved in openly making a non-allegorical film about the Tamil Tigers.

The Terrorist is very clearly meant to bring the audience inside the head of Malli, the terrorist, to help us understand the mindset of a suicide bomber, as well as to explore how such an individual might experience being human. The device used for this is a possible pregnancy; Malli had during a battle spent the night comforting a fellow wounded soldier, and had for the first time found herself in the close proximity of a man her own age. Through a series of suggestions she comes to believe that she may be pregnant and carrying his child. The film never makes it clear whether or not her encounter with the fellow soldier was sexual, but it is also implied that Malli is probably not certain what exact conditions would produce pregnancy in a woman other than proximity to a man. As the consciousness of possible motherhood begins to overwhelm her she undergoes a humanizing transformation, perhaps bringing about an awareness of the cycle of human life, a cycle she has essentially been trained to interfere with. While in earlier parts of the film, Malli is seen ruthlessly and unemotionally killing the enemy with, variously, a machete, an automatic weapon, and a bayonet, she begins to transform into a more emotional and self-reflective state as she awaits her mission and contemplates the possibility that she is pregnant.

Her transformation is aided by the setting where she has been assigned to wait until the assassination date. She is staying with a talkative elderly man in a large, mostly empty house. The room where she sleeps used to be the bedroom of her host’s son. The son, who we later learn is dead, was a photo-journalist, and the tiny room is completely collaged from floor to ceiling in photographs of international conflicts, as well as many pictures of different women, a world map, and a mirror. By looking at herself in the mirror, locating her place on the map, and examining the pictures around the room, she comes to identify herself as both a woman and a human with common bonds to other humans (see still, Figure 5, a reflection of Malli examining herself in the mirror in the room, photographs in the background). A shocking moment comes one day when she realizes that one of the photographs of women in her room is actually a small window cut out of the wall through which she can see her host’s wife, lying open-eyed in a coma in the room next door. She learns that the photographer’s mother had gone into a coma the day she had learned of her son’s death (presumably due to violence surrounding a photo-journalism assignment). As Malli comes to believe that she is pregnant, her identification with the comatose mother on the other side of the wall grows. Motherhood is an all-encompassing identity for the other woman, to the extent that she more or less ceased to exist when she lost her son. She is placed in opposition to Malli, for whom killing ‘the enemy’ as a good soldier is the only identity she has had up until now.

In the final scene it is not clear whether or not she pushes the button, but it seems as though she does not. Oddly, The Terrorist, shot in a realist style with no singing and dancing, seems more farfetched in the end than Dil Se, in the sense that the realist film resorts to clichéd ideas about lifecycles and the contradictions between motherhood and terrorism, while Dil Se suggests that though Meghna eventually admits her love for Amar, there is no practicable solution or way out of her mental state, or her commitment to follow through with her mission. Meghna is not softened by human experience; it destroys her. By contrast, Malli seems to be redeemed by her essential femininity, an unrealistic solution to conflicts and struggles which clearly transcend the urge to play out traditional gender roles in all different parts of the globe.

The Hunger of Majnun: The State Stalks its Borders
Gender roles come into play on multiple layers in Dil Se through the analogies of Amar with Majnun, the crazed and obsessed lover, and, Meghna with Laila, the object of Majnun’s desires. The hero of the standard Bombay film wins the heart of the heroine through dogged persistence and aggressive pursuit. He has to prove his commitment to her through his tenacity, to an extent that would make him seem like a stalker and not a hero in an American film (see Figure 6, from Dil Se, above). Added to this traditional portrayal of the male lover or suitor in Bombay cinema, the actor in Dil Se, Shah Rukh Khan, actually rose to mega-star status through a series of roles, such as those he played in the hits Darr (‘Fear’, 1994), Baazigar (‘The gambler’, 1993), and Anjaam (‘Consequence’, 1994), in which the role of lover and stalker/serial killer are conflated in a manner quite unusual to Bollywood norms. The persona and the layering of roles of a particular actor or actress is often used as a device in Indian movies to build the character the actor or actress is currently playing (theme songs from previous hit films will sometimes be laced into the soundtrack when a particular actor walks onto the set, to remind the audience of the effect surrounding the nostalgia for the previous movie and its songs, for example). Because of this, SRK brings to his roles as romantic lead a strong subtext of violence and obsession, carrying over from the audience’s memory of Darr and Baazigar in particular (see Figure 7, above, picturing SRK in this mode, as opposed to the one below, Figure 8, where he is pictured in his more playful love interest mode). Everyone knows that SRK’s obsessive brand of love can lead him to the border of dementia, and that it is always possible he will appear in a desperate situation before the film is over, in which he must stagger or crawl insanely through some alleyway or forest , stammering incoherently, rivulets of blood and sweat running down his face and body (which does in fact happen in Dil Se).

As the plot for Dil Se builds, and with it, Amar’s Majnun-like obsession with the elusive Meghna, we know, both from the traditional pursuit by the hero of the heroine in Bollywood movies, as well as from SRK’s presence in the role, that this can only lead to madness and total destruction, due primarily to Amar’s self-destructive and all-consuming male desire for Meghna. This use of the gender roles of the hero and the heroine makes possible another, even more compelling analogy: Amar is identified with the State (as a reporter for All India Radio) and Meghna with the peripheries of the State’s borders (as a separatist from the Northeast Frontier). Thus the dogged, macho, and obsessive pursuit of Meghna by Amar becomes emblematic of the State’s ‘desire’ to hang onto the peripheral regions and crush out opposition at all costs, rejecting the possibility of separation, or even dialogue about separation or demands.

As in the gender stereotypes reinforced by mainstream Bombay films, in which women’s desires and women’s voices are neither heard nor relevant, Amar’s desires and Amar’s thoughts are the only ones we hear until the film is practically at an end. This paradigm is reinforced by Amar’s actual employment as a DJ and radio-journalist, who is not only able to speak to us, the audience, throughout the film, but is also able to speak to the nation through the means of broadcasting his voice all over India. In a haunting and recurring song, Amar actually ‘speaks’ and calls out to Meghna by playing a particular song over the radio in which he asks her to call out to him, an ironic and impossible request when broadcast through the unilateral organ of the radio from which she hears it. Her only defense or possible active role in this supposed interchange is to turn the radio off and on, which she does, causing this refrain to echo in and out of the soundtrack:

Ai ajnabii tuu bhii kabhii aawaaz de kahiiN se
MaiN yahaaN TukRoN meN jii rahaa huuN
Tuu kahiiN TukRoN meN jii rahii hai

….MaiN adhuuraa tuu adhuurii jii rahii hai

Oh stranger, will you please call out as well some time?
I am living here, in pieces
You are living somewhere, in pieces

….I am incomplete, you are living, incomplete

The notion that they are neither of them complete beings without the other is his, and is never expressed by her. This again is a reminder of the State’s belief that the nation is incomplete without these regions, a belief that is unilaterally expressed. As she slowly becomes conscious that she loves him, Meghna loses her sense of composure and is robbed of peace of mind, though she does eventually assert herself by using him to achieve her goal. Manipulating his obsessive love for her, she asks him to give her a job at AIR, and thus infiltrates the center, gaining access to press passes that will allow her a good position on the day of the parade. Despite her loss of composure and her love for him, she does not, however, lose her resolve. She is already wired with explosives and walking toward the Republic Day parade when Amar manages to track her down, secure from her the sought-after nod that yes, she does love him, and envelop her in that embrace of unity and completeness he has desired for so long, an embrace which sets off her explosives and kills them both. This suicidal union, setting up a parallel between the Indian state’s ultimately self-destructive pursuit of unity at the expense of peace- broadcasting at the expense of listening- with the legendary crazed lover Majnun, shows both sides tragically entrenched in their positions. By aligning the state and the separatists with the traditional gender roles of the Hindi hero and heroine and with Laila and Majnun, Mani Ratnam suggests that the terrorist’s ostensible goal, for his or her voice to be heard and be considered consequential enough to move the State, can be understood in terms of the suppression of female voices in patriarchal systems of love, courtship and marriage. Though Dil Se ends as a tragedy, with no apparent solution to the entrenchment of both sides, the romantic parallel does suggest ways of re-viewing India’s relationship with insurgency and separatism in terms of traditional gender roles, gender equality movements, and paradigms for dialogue and understanding.

Another Laila, Another Majnun: Maachis
In the 1996 film about the separatist movement in the Indian state of Punjab (or the Khalistan Movement), Maachis (‘Matches’), by the director Gulzar, the Laila and Majnun parallel is also introduced, this time explicitly. The film centers on the transformation of an ordinary middle-class Punjabi teenager, Kripal Singh (Chandrachur Singh), into a terrorist in the separatist movement in the Punjab (following the 1984 Operation Bluestar attack by Indira Gandhi’s government on Sikh separatists in the Golden Temple in Amritsar). The film seeks to show how an ordinary citizen might be driven to extremism in an environment marked by police brutality and political corruption. Leaving behind his girlfriend, Veera (played by the actress Tabu), Kripal Singh disappears into the movement, reappearing only once. Veera’s world is in turn slowly completely dismantled by the police crackdown in the region, and in the end she too joins the movement, surprising Kripal Singh by showing up one day as the new missile shooter in his unit. A series of gaffes on the part of their unit leads to Kripal Singh’s arrest and the annihilation of the group. In one of the final scenes, Veera goes to visit Kripal Singh in prison and, comparing their relationship to that of Laila and Majnun, passes a cyanide capsule to him in a kiss.

The reference to Laila and Majnun is made here not to engage with the paradigm of the crazed lover, but simply to invoke the tragedy of their love story. Here Laila and Majnun are on the same side and are divided by the brutality of the State. Whereas in Dil Se and The Terrorist, the terrorists are depicted as ruthless and impeccably trained for combat and insurgency, the terrorists in Maachis are consistently portrayed as inexperienced and inept. While Malli is humanized by the possibility of motherhood and Meghna is humanized through a sensitive portrayal of the traumatic stress that has created her psychological state, as well as the pain that love causes her (though she stoically withstands temptation), Veera and Kripal Singh are human from the start and never become ‘inhuman’ warriors. Their ineptitude, lack of savvy, and poor timing ensure that their humanity is never in doubt. Throughout the film, it does not even seem as though they ascribe to a clearly formulated political ideology of separatism, and one of their mentors, Sanatan, is even given dialogue in which he suggests that their group wants nothing more than to remain in the nation, but is being driven apart from the center. In the final scene, the hero and heroine ingest cyanide capsules and slowly die, separated from one another, from their movement, from their families, and from the State. Though this method of humanizing the terrorist is effective in some ways, it downplays the actual ideologies of the proponents of the Khalistan Movement and thus casts the terrorists in a weaker position than is actually accurate historically.

Conclusion
The very notion underlying the idea of ‘terror’ as perpetrated by the ‘terrorist’ speaks of the emotional, affective response of a people toward strategically planned acts of violence or threats of violence. The ‘terror’ at the root of ‘terrorism’ is a collective sensation across a society which must be processed in emotional terms. A terrorist and the people he or she targets are in fact locked into an emotional relationship. By imagining terrorism through the romantic generic lens of Bombay’s popular film-making tradition, we can learn new ways of comprehending the phenomenon. In the films discussed here, Dil Se, The Terrorist, and Maachis, the terrorists are all portrayed in sensitive human terms. Though this is in part the legacy of the history of the notion of terrorism in India, which has had an impact on characterizations of revolutionary activity in literature and film there for the past century, these films bring to the genre a new twist. Since all three films feature an intrepid female terrorist, we are given a new lens through which to consider the role of the terrorist in society. The creation of characters who are female suicide bombers works on a number of levels to complicate conventional notions of what terrorism means and what drives individuals to join terrorist movements. On one level, the femaleness of each character, and her inability to play out traditional gender roles of wife, lover, and mother, suggest that terrorism is the last resort of a people and is chosen when conditions of oppression are so extreme that basic life-cycle roles must be curtailed. On an allegorical level, we can read the phenomenon of terror through gender and consider the conditions of extreme oppression of a people closely parallel to those of patriarchal domination and oppression of women. Terrorism then becomes the last resort to make one’s voice heard in an unequal relationship.

Works Cited
Films:
Anjaam (1994)
Awara (1951)
Baazigar (1993)
Bombay (1995)
Darr (1994)
Dil Se (1998)
Maachis (1996)
Mission Kashmir (2000)
Roja (1992)
Shree 420 (1955)
The Terrorist (1999)

Websites:
Cineraider. Cineraider: A Critical Guide to Asian Cinema. March 15, 2003.
.
India Talkies. Dil Se…A Mani Ratnam Film. 1998. Rage-India. .
Internet Movie Database. 2003. .
Sivan, Santosh. Santosh Sivan Online. 2001. .
Subramanian, Satish. Rahman Online!. 2003. .

Books:
Agyeya. Shekhar: Ek Jiivanii (‘Shekhar: A biography’). Benares: Sarasvatii Press, 1940 (Part I), 1944 (Part II).
Ahmad, Eqbal. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
Baruah, Sanjib. India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture and Political Economy.
New York: Routledge, 1998.
Chandra, Bipin. India’s Struggle for Independence. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. British Film
Institute, 1999.
Selby, Martha. Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Wirsig, Robert G.. India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute: On Regional Conflict and Its
Resolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Yashpal. Daadaa KaamreD (‘Dada comrade’). Lucknow: Viplav Kaaryaalay, 1941.
—. Sinhaavalokan (‘A retrospective’). Allahabad: Lokbhaaratii Prakaashan, 1994.

1. Bhagat Singh (1907-1931) was a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republic Army and was executed by the British in 1931. He was linked to a number of attacks on the British, including the 1928 murder of the British official Saunders and the bombing of the Central Assembly Hall in 1929. Following the earlier film on his life, Shaheed (1965), five biographical movies are being released this year alone about Bhagat Singh, including 23rd March 1931, Shaheed (2002) and The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002). The sudden resurgence in interest in Bhagat Singh has been linked to the current climate of nationalism in India following recent cross-border conflicts with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue. Chandrashekhar ‘Azad’ (1902-1931) was Bhagat Singh’s mentor, and was assassinated by the British in 1931. Subhash Chandra Bose (1897-1945), also known as ‘Netaji’, was originally a member of the Congress Party and a colleague of Gandhi’s. Later he decided that the only way to beat the British was through allying with the fascists in Europe. Bose forged ties with Hitler and formed the Indian National Army with the help of the Japanese, who released a large number of Indian Prisoners of War to him. After a military conflict with the British Indian Army that ended in the defeat of the INA, Bose died on his way to Japan in a plane crash.
2. Portrayals of the humanized terrorist have a long history in Indian fiction writing going back as far as the Bengali novel Anandmath (1896) by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee perhaps and appearing in many other language literatures.
3. In the study of classical and pre-modern literary genres, these poetic ‘rules’ are of paramount importance. In Sanskrit poetics, the vocabulary of emotions has been classified into eight or nine ‘rasas’ or flavors, literally ‘juices,’ with corresponding landscapes, colors, weather, animals, and the like. It would be a stretch to say that Bombay cinema follows the dictates of traditional Rasa Theory, but more aptly, one could say that Bollywood has a rasa theory of its own, perhaps not so elaborate as in classical models, but still rather complex. For a readable treatment of rasa theories, see the introduction in Martha Selby, Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.)
4. For an excellent and detailed work on contemporary Assam, see Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

I wrote this many, many moons ago, for a seminar – actually my first year in grad school. Legally, I am no longer responsible for its contents, but I thought I’d share at least the primary source material, here.

…We cannot for a moment imagine that the Government will forsake and ignore us or allow those things on which our life depends to come to grief. I do not believe that the Government will allow our language to die; it will keep it alive. But there is no doubt that if the efforts being made by the other side to kill our language continue it may suffer a setback at any time in future. These fears have led us to make these efforts to keep alive our language and, even if we cannot, to take out its funeral bier with great eclat.
— Nawab Mohsin ul Mulk speaking at the Urdu Defense Association on August 18, 1900. Quoted in Allana, G. (ed.) Pakistan Movement: Historic Documents (Lahore: Islamic Book Service, 1977)

The growth of nationalism in India is traced usually to the rise of print culture and modernization of the educational system. Nationalism brought with it a new idiom of community, one that was based on a shared language and a shared sense of time and space. However, India was a land of multiple languages and multiple spheres of shared spaces. There were the intra-religious divides of Hindu/Muslim, the inter-religious divides of caste and creeds, the inner and outer spheres of knowledge and tradition. Needless to say, nationalism in South Asia was never a simple or straightforward concept – as various competing nationalisms sought to define the interests and boundaries of its constituents.

This paper is an attempt to look at one aspect of Muslim nationalism in the late 19th century: the Urdu language. This, in itself, is a rather broad and varied topic but I will attempt to situate it in the life and work of the leading Muslim thinker of the time, Syed Ahmed Khan (1817 – 1898). I will show that he played a pivotal role in the propagation of Urdu as the language of Muslims and provided the ideological and theoretical framework for the cultivation of separatist nationalism among the Muslims of India. The first section is a brief bio sketch of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan meant to place him in the socio-cultural context of his time. The second section on Urdu language provides the background of the Hindi-Urdu controversy of the late 19th century, the change in British policy and Syed Ahmed Khan’s response.

Syed Ahmed Khan was born in Delhi in 1817. He belonged to a family steeped in the history and culture of Delhi. His forefathers had close ties with the Mughal court and were writers, poets and jurists in the Perso-Islamic tradition: more commonly known as a Sharif family. In Aligarh’s First Generation, David Lelyveld gives the following characters of the Sharif class:

One usually defines Sharafat in terms of honorable descent. Sharafat also defined character: a sharif man was one who had honorable descent, dignified temperament, self-confident but not overly aggressive, appreciative of good literature, music, and art but not flamboyant, familiar with mystical experience. Sharif social relations involved a pose of deference , but were above all a matter of virtuosity within the highly restricted bounds of etiquette.¹

He received traditional Muslim education at home consisting of Qur’an training until the age of seven, Persian at the local madrasa, Arabic grammar, and military skills like swordsmanship, archery, wrestling, horseback riding, and swimming. He also received some training in the fine arts like painting and music. Syed Ahmed Khan entered the governmental judicial system in 1838. In 1841 he was appointed as a munsif (a lower-level judge) in the court of Agra and he later obtained the position of Level 1 judge at the Delhi court. From 1841 until his death in 1898 he was involved in working both for the welfare of Muslims of Delhi and in presenting the Muslim case to the British. He started and published numerous newspapers, journals, magazines, publications etc. that touched on every manner of religious, cultural and political matters of the Muslim community. He wrote exegesis of the Qur’an as well as commentary of Hadith and jurisprudence. He advocated a rationalist approach to religion that created numerous opponents amongst the ulema class. He worked for and advocated English and technical education as well as programs for education Muslim women. He put forth ideas on nationalism and communal identity of the Muslims in pamphlets that were distributed freely to the people. He founded the Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental College (Aligarh) geared specifically towards the education of Muslims. He poured just as much energy into presenting the Muslim case to the British. He wrote and published tracts on the causes of the 1857 riots, a refutation of Muir’s thesis on Islamic history, pamphlets on the Muslim community and its political ambition, and was awarded the KSI in 1888. Perhaps because of his many achievements and honors from the British, Syed Ahmed Khan faced severe internal opposition from Muslims during his life. Roughly 25 years after Syed Ahmed Khan’s death, Maulana Mohammad Ali addressed the Indian National Congress and said of Ahmed Khan:

Be it remembered that the man who enunciated this policy was not at the time persona grata to the major portion of the people he sought to lead. He was hated as a heretic because of the heterodoxy of his aggressive rationalism in interpreting the Qur’an, and his militant opposition to popular superstitions believed in the bulk of the orthodox and to shackling customs consecrated by time, though wholly unauthorized by Islam. He was abused and vilified by hundreds of thousands of his co-religionists, and for long the college he had founded at Aligarh was the bete noire of the pious Muslim.²

In his book A House Divided, Amrit Rai speculates that it was in the early 18th century that Urdu began to separate itself from the common vernacular of the North Indian people – Hindi/Hindavi – which was a mixture of Sanskrit, Barj Bhosa, Punjabi, Persian and Arabic. Even though Hindavi was the growing language of social interaction between the common Hindus and Muslims, the elite, i.e. the courtiers of the Mughal Empire and the Sharif families of Delhi, had very little to do with it. Persian was the official language of the Mughal durbar and persian culture dominated these elites. The Hindavi they adopted was infused with persian words and grammar and called Urdu-i Mualla. This was a deliberate attempt by the Sharif culture to preserve their persian heritage. He concludes, “It is thus clear that the change-over from Hindi/Hindavi/Qadim Urdu to Jadid Urdu was not a step in the course of the natural evolution of this language but a side-step or a breaking loose from it, in order to create a class-dialect of the ruling aristocracy.”³

The British used this split to categorize Persian and Hindoostani or Oordoo as the Muslim language and Sanskrit and Hindi as the Hindu language, completely ignoring the presence of Hindavi as the combined language of a majority of North India. They continued to use Persian as the court language and at Fort Williams College and other institutions, Persian grammars and Persianized Urdu texts were used and fostered. But this changed after 1857. English was declared the official language and the British turned their attention toward the development of other vernacular languages, especially Hindi.

The rise of print played a crucial role in this transformation. Hindu presses printed pamphlets and books that used the Hindavi vernacular but in the Devanagari script instead of the Perso-Arabic script. The language itself began to be stripped of any Persian or Arabic words. Christopher King, in One Language, Two Scripts, charts the production rates of books in the UP area from 1868-1925. He reports that while Urdu/Arabic/Persian texts were roughly the same percentage with Hindi/Sanskrit texts in 1868 (39.1% to 48.5%), by 1925 Hindi/Sanskrit texts were 76.6% while the Urdu texts had dwindled to 12%.⁴ Urdu newspapers and monthly publications, along with religious texts, constituted the bulk of these publications. However, with roughly 5% literate audience these newspapers had very limited press runs, usually only around 100. Jam-i Jahan Numa, the first newspaper in Urdu was published under Munshi Sada Sukh Mirzapuri from Calcutta in 1822. After Jahan Numa, came several important publications: Delhi Akhbar (1837), Syedul Akhbar Delhi (1841), Jamai al Akhbar Madras (1842), Muhib Hind, a monthly from Delhi (1847), Syedul Akhbar Agra (1847), and Koh-i Nur Lahore (1850).⁵

Syed Ahmed Khan tried to rescue Urdu from these dire states. Even though he was a member of the Sharif, the same class Amrit Rai blames for the persianization of Hindavi. Yet Syed Ahmed Khan’s lifelong goal was to create a simple and clear language that could function in the scientific age and serve the community of Muslims. He founded the weekly journal Aligurh Institute Gazette in 1866 with the motto, “Liberty of Press is a prominent duty of the Government and a natural right of the subject”. The journal was set up to translate telegraph news from London dailies and carry editorials and opinions written by Muslim notables. He wrote in the first issue, “The intention is to have a newspaper with fine essays written by Indian well wishing English and worthwhile Indians so that the general public would be educated as well as entertained”.⁶ He looked toward the newly educated English-reading Muslim youths to contribute to the AIG:

The English educated youths are also responsible for the poverty and dearth of Urdu vocabulary. English educated Bengalis filled their language with treasures from European languages. Professor Shibli has expressed this as a sad state that the English educated youths are neglecting Urdu and wishes that a literal translation be made of European classics so that the language as well as the people can benefit from these qualities.⁷

In 1872, the Journal had its largest circulation of 381.

In 1870, Syed Ahmed Khan decided to publish a monthly for the social and political development of Muslims and named it Tahdib-i Ikhlaq/Muhammadan Social Reformer. On the subject he wrote to Muhsin ul Mulk, “We twenty friends will contribute 5 ruppees each every month and distribute the paper for free and also sell it. There will nothing in the paper except articles on the Muslim religious and social benefit. You and me will be the main writers and, if possible, we will ask Munshi Najmuddin to contribute articles”.⁸ He was clearly concerned with reaching a wide audience of common Muslims and the writings of his journals – especially Tahdib-i Ikhlaq – were known for their clarity of language and thought. In this journal, he made a conscious effort to clear the Urdu prose from overly Persian and Arabic stylings, writing that “although Urdu contains many words from Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit and many have been modified … [people] have developed a habit of either including too many Persian words or using Persian grammar to write Urdu. Neither of these practices are good and rob Urdu of its essence”.⁹

In 1872, Syed Ahmed Khan again took stock of the condition of Urdu prose and said, “In verse and poetry, no other age is worse than our age. Essay is nothing except romances. Even that does not highlight the higher ideals of humanity but points to those baser emotions that are opposite to civilized behavior”.¹⁰ He encouraged his companion Altaf Husain Hali to forgo Ghazals and write “natural” poetry. When he responded with thematic poems written in a clear and concise meter, Syed Ahmed was delighted and wrote, “The day of 1874 will live long in the history of Urdu literature as the day when the first gathering of Natural poets took place in Lahore”.¹¹

Through his writings and his publications, Syed promoted the development of a clear, concise and comprehensive style of Urdu that was not bogged down with flowery prose and unnecessary stylistic complications. In 1875 he wrote in the pages of the Muhammadan Social Reformer, “As far as possible, we have tried to propagate Urdu language in these papers. We adopted a simple and clean style of writing and tried to correct the vocabulary and vernacular of Urdu”. He turned the attention of Urdu authors to literature that was socially constructive and beneficial. Under the influence of his thought, a circle of intellectuals emerged who became his companions and compatriots. Together with men like Mushin ul Mulk, Waqar ul Mulk, Charagh Ali, Muhammad Husain Azad, Nazir Ahmed, Altaf Husain Hali, and Shibli Naumani Syed adopted a rationalist and scientific approach to the world and started the Aligarh movement. Syed’s efforts were not restricted only to the propagation of Urdu but also the preservation. He was very concerned with the position Urdu held in the Indian political and cultural arena. During the time the British used Persian as the court language, men from the Sharif class in particular and Muslims in general had an advantage over Hindus and others: in 1850, 72 percent of the judiciary in North Western provinces were Muslims educated in Persian. To secure their jobs, Syed was intent on keeping Persian as the court language. In 1868, Hindu nationalists started a campaign to recognize Hindi as the language of the courts, but Syed was quick to oppose. A strong advocate of Hindi was Babu Sarud Prasad, an official of the Education Board who had written textbooks in the Hindi Nagari script. During the Urdu-Hindi controversy he wrote to Babu Sarud Prashad, “In my consideration, the areas in the North and West and the province of Bihar should have a court language that is similar to the spoken language; which you call Hindi and I call Urdu. You are incorrect in asserting that Urdu contains many Persian words. The reason being that only those people include Persian words in Urdu who know Persian and those that do not simply use the common language”.¹² Syed saw no need for Hindi to be identified separately from Urdu in the court system. In fact, he was a proponent of using the Roman script in the court documents for both Urdu and Hindi. But Syed saw that the Hindi movement was tied in with the rise of Hindu nationalism and knew all too well that the separation of these languages would lead to the ultimate separation of the communities. He wrote to Mushin ul Mulk in 1870:

I have received report that has caused me grief and anguish that Babu Shiva Prashad’s movement has riled the Hindu people to eliminate the Urdu language and the Persian script which are the distinction of the Muslims. I have heard that they have asked the Hindu members of the Scientific Society to publish their paper in Hindi rather than Urdu. Books also should be translated into Hindi. This is a proposition that will cause disunification. Muslims will never agree to Hindi and if Hindus insist, the result will be that Hindus and Muslims will be separated.¹³

Another incident is mentioned in Hali’s biography of Syed who narrates this incident:

During these days when the Hindi-Urdu controversy was going on in Benares, one day, in 1867, I met Mr. Shakespeare who was posted there as Divisional Commissioner. I was saying something about the education of Muslims and Mr. Shakespeare was listening with amazement, when, at length, he said, ‘This is the first occasion when I have heard you speaking about the progress of Muslims alone. Before this you were always keen about the welfare of your countrymen in general’. I said, ‘Now I am convinced that both these nations will not join wholeheartedly in anything. At present there is no open hostility between the two nations, but on account of the so-called educated people, it will increase immensely in future. He who lives will see’. Mr. Shakespeare thereupon said, ‘I would be sorry if your prophecy were to prove true’. I said, ‘I am also extremely sorry, but I am confident about the accuracy of this prophecy’.¹⁴

It is clear that for Syed Ahmed Khan the notion of language and community was intertwined with the ideas of nationalism. Again and again, he insisted that Urdu was the language of the Muslims and that any compromise of that was not possible. Syed Ahmed defined Muslim nation (qaum) on the basis of a shared ethnicity or religion. He believed that both Hindus and Muslims could share a language, even a script, and work together to benefit their condition.

However, as a reaction to the Hindu nationalist movement’s appropriation of Hindi as their national language, he changed his stance to insist that Urdu alone was the language of the Muslims and strove to bring it up to par for modern needs.

In his letters and his speeches, he emphasized the development of Urdu as a modern language for Muslims that must supplant English as a vehicle for their uplift. Of course, he faced stiff competition from within the Muslim leadership on this issue. Many already considered him a persona non grata due to his reliance on western thought and his adherence to the principles of nationalism in religious commentary. Now others who sought not to antagonize the Hindu majority and work with them in the British Raj believed that he was wrong to label Urdu as the language of the Muslims.

While political realities had already forced two scripts and new vocabularies into the languages among the middle and higher classes, the debates were far from over. As late as 1937, we can still see the remnants of this debate in the political sphere, as this Muslim League resolution stated:

Urdu language was originally an Indian language and was the result of inter-action of Hindu and Muslim culture and it was spoken by a great part of the people of this country, it was best suited to develop a united nationality, and the attempt to replace it with Hindi might upset the structural basis of Urdu otherwise known as Hindustani and adversely affect the comradeship between Hindus and Muslims. All India Muslim league calls upon all Urdu speaking people of India to safeguard the interest of their language in every field of activity.

Bibliography

Jamiluddin Ahmad. Historic Documents of the Muslim Freedom Movement. (Lahore: Publishers United Ltd. 1970)
Ghulam Allana Pakistan Movement: Historic Documents. (Lahore: Islamic Book Service, 1977)
Moinuddin Aqeel. Tahrik-i Pakistan ka Talimi pas Manzir. (Lahore: Idara Talimi Tahqiq, 1992)
—–. Tahrik-ii Azadi mein Urdu ka Hissa. (Lahore: Anjuman Tariki Urdu, 1976)
Suriya Husain. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan aur unka Aihad. (Aligarh: Educational Book House, 1993)
Jamil Jalbi. Tarikh-ii Adab-ii Urdu. (Lahore: Majlis Taraki Urdu, 1975)
Christopher R. King. One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the 19th Century North India. (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994)
David Lelyveld. Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978)
Hafeez Malik. “Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Contribution to the Development of Nationalism in India” in Modern Asian Studies, 4, 2 1970. pp. 129-47.
Gyanendra Pandey. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Amrit Rai. A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi/Hindavi. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984)
—–. Risalah Hindustani Illahabad, 1931-1948 se intikhab. (New Delhi: Taqsimkar Maktabah Jamiah, 1993)
Christopher Shackle. Hindi and Urdu since 1800: A common reader. (London: SOAS, 1990).

1. David Lelyveld. Aligarh’s First Generation (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978). pp. 30
2. Jamiluddin Ahmed. Historic Documents of the Muslim Freedom Movement (Lahore: Publishers United Ltd., 1970) pp. 72
3. Amrit Rai. A House Divided (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). pp. 246
4. Christopher King. One Language, Two Scripts (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994) pp. 38-39
5. Jamal Jalbi. Tarikh-i Adab-i Urdu vol2 (Lahore: Majlis Taraki Urdu, 1975), pp. 134
6. Mushtaq Husain, ed. Makatib-i Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (Aligarh: Friends Book Store, 1970). pp. 45
7. ibid., p. 145
8. ibid., p. 98
9. ibid., p. 32-3
10. ibid., p. 176
11. ibid., p. 84
12. ibid., p. 116
13. ibid., p. 123
14. ibid., p. 153

Follow the #pkfloods on Twitter for latest, as always.

20 million people affected. To be “affected” means to somehow be in need of humanitarian assistance because of the flooding. As of Saturday the official death toll was 1,384, with 1,680 people reported as injured. Over 722,000 houses damaged or destroyed. 6 million people do not have access to clean water. 3.5 million children are at risk of contracting deadly water-born diseases, like diarrhea. [via]

• Himal Mag Indus Flood Relief [non-US]
• Relief for Pakistan [US]
• Avaaz.org: Pakistan Floods [US/non-US]
• Doctors Without Borders [US/non-US]
• Human Development Foundation Chicago [US]
• Asia Society Pakistan Flood Response Webcast with Richard Holbrooke, August 19, at 8:30AM [US]
• Anyone in the United States can now text the word “SWAT” to 50555 to give $10 and help these flood victims. Every $10 helps provide tents and emergency aid to displaced families. When prompted, reply with “YES” to confirm your gift.

The flooding in Pakistan is beyond imagination. You can see some of the heart-wrenching imagery here and here.

IN USA:
Those in America can TXT “SWAT” to 50555 and it will give $10 dollars to UNHCR-PK. Otherwise, please donate via any of the organizations listed here.

You can also contribute to the MercyCorps initiative Relief4Pakistan.

As usual, I can whole-heartedly recommend EDHI, though they are not online.

IN PAKISTAN:
These friends are doing work on the ground. Ramazan Flood Relief.

If you are in Pakistan/Non-USA, you can also contribute to this effort by SA Relief and donate specifically to them:

To that end, SA Relief operating under the aiegus of Paksef has joined hands with Motorclub of Pakistan, and Off-Roaders Pakistan to collect funds for flood relief victims starting with areas surrounding Moro, Sindh by distributing care packets.

Each care packet will contain 20 kg flour, 2 kg dal, 1 kg oil, and 3 kg rice,. Based on current market rates each packet will costs 920 PKR (Pakistani Rupees), that is around 13 USD (U.S. Dollars).
What we need is your help in raising funds, please donate generously.

Donations can be made one of two ways:
By depositing into MOTORSPORTS CLUB PAKISTAN account at Samba Bank Ltd. in Karachi. A/C#06500379349 or ChipIn via PayPal:

Those else where can check here or here for useful organizations.

You should also see the Donor Factsheet on Pakistan by Global Humanitarian Fund which dramatically highlights how little humanitarian aid actually flows into Pakistan from “official” sites. Which is what makes efforts, such as this, relying on individuals donating to international or national organizations all the more valuable.

Spread the word. Donate. Please.

Amitav Ghosh, “The Ghat of the Only World”: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn“, 15 December, 2001. [pdf]

He had a special passion for the food of his region, one variant of it in particular: “Kashmiri food in the Pandit style.” I asked him once why this was so important to him and he explained that it was because of a recurrent dream, in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of Kashmir and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and his poetry.

At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed to perfect me:
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory: …
There is nothing to forgive. You won’t forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.
There is everything to forgive. You can’t forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine, what would not have been possible in the world?

Once, in conversation, he told me that he also loved Bengali food. I protested: “But Shahid, you’ve never even been to Calcutta.”
“No,” he said. “But we had friends who used to bring us that food. When you ate it you could see that there were so many things that you didn’t know about, everywhere in the country …”

This was at a time when his illness had forced him into spending long periods in bed. He was lying prone on his back, shielding his eyes with his fingers. Suddenly he broke off and reached for my hand. “I wish all this had not happened,” he said. “This dividing of the country, the divisions between people—Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu—you can’t imagine how much I hate it. It makes me sick. What I say is: why can’t you be happy with the cuisines and the clothes and the music and all these wonderful things?” He paused and added softly, “At least here we have been able to make a space where we can all come together because of the good things.”

فیض احمد فیض / Faiz Ahmed Faiz, August, 1952

روشن کهيں بهار کے امکاں هوۓ تو هيں / It’s still distant, but there are hints of springtime
گلشن ميں چاک چند گريباں هوۓ تو هيں / some flowers, aching to bloom, have torn open their collars.

اب بهي خزاں کا راج هے، ليکن کهيں کهيں / In this era of autumn, almost winter, leaves can still be heard
گوشے رەِ چمن ميں غزل خواں هوۓ تو هيں / their dry orchestras play, hidden in corners of the garden.

ٹههري هوي هے شب کي سياهي وهيں، مگر / Night is still where it was, but colors at times take flight,
کچھ کچھ سحر کے رنگ پر افشاں هوۓ تو هيں / leaving red feathers of dawn on the sky.

ان ميں لهو جلا هو همارا، کۂ جان و دل / Don’t regret our breath’s use as air, our blood’s as oil –
محفل ميں کچھ چراغ فروزاں هوۓ تو هيں / some lamps at last are burning in the night.

هاں کج کرو کلاە کۂ سب کچھ لٹا کے هم / Tilt your cup, don’t hesitate! Having given up all,
اب بے نيازِ گردشِ دوراں هوۓ تو هيں / we don’t need wine. We’ve freed ourselves, made Time irrelevant.

اهلِ قفس کي صبحِ چمن ميں ُکھلے گي انکھ / When imprisoned man opens his eyes, cages will dissolve: air, fire,
بادِ صبا سے وعدە و پيماں هوۓ تو هيں / water, earth — all have pledged such dawns, such gardens to him.

هے دشت اب بهي دشت، مگر خونِ پا سے فيض / Your feet bleed, Faiz, something surely will bloom
سيراب چند خارِ مغيلاں هوۓ تو هيں / as you water the desert simply by walking through it.

(Translated by the ever-loved Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali)

فیض احمد فیض / Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 1958

تم یہ کہتے ہو اب کوئی چارہ نہیں / you say there is no remedy left, now
تم یہ کہتے ہو وہ جنگ ہو بھی چکی / you say that war is over, now
جس میں رکھا نہیں ہے کسی نے قدم / that war in which no one stood
کوئی اترا نہ میداں میں ، دشمن نہ ہم / neither the enemy, nor us
کوئی صف بن نہ پائی ، نہ کوئی علم / no front was made, and no raised banner
منتشرِ دوستوں کو صدا دے سکا / could rally back our scattered friends
اجنبی دُشمنوں کا پتا دے سکا / or locate the unknown enemies.
تم یہ کہتے ہو وہ جنگ ہو بھی چُکی / you say that war is over, now
جس میں رکھا نہیں ہم نے اب تک قدم / in which we are yet to stand
تم یہ کہتے ہو اب کوئی چارہ نہیں / you say there is no remedy left, now
جسم خستہ ہے ، ہاتھوں میں یارا نہیں / this body is weak, these hands are powerless
اپنے بس کا نہیں بارِ سنگ ستم / the burden of this oppressive stone is beyond us
بارِ سنگِ ستم ، بار کہسار غم / the burden of this oppressive stone, the burden of this sorrowful mountain
جس کو چُھوکر سبھی اک طرف ہوگئے / once they had touched it, they all stepped away
بات کی بات میں ذی شرف ہوگئے / once they discussed it, their honor was there.
دوستو، کوئے جاناں کی نا مہرباں / Friends, on the inhospitable dirt of this beloved land
خاک پر اپنے روشن لہو کی بہار / will our bright blood never bring a Spring?
اب نہ آئے گی کیا؟ اب کِھلے گا نہ کیا / Will there never blossom
اس کفِ نازنیں پر کوئی لالہ زار؟ / in the palm of this beauty, a garden?
اس حزیں خامشی میں نہ لَوٹے گا کیا / Will there never return, in this mournful silence
شورِ آوازِ حق ، نعرئہ گیر و دار / the din of Truth, the cry of Action
شوق کا امتحاں جو ہُوا سو ہُوا / So it happened that passions were put on trial
جسم و جاں کا زیاں جو ہُوا سو ہُوا /So it happened that lives were wasted
سُود سے پیشتر ہے زیاں اور بھی / but before any gain are losses even more
دوستو ‘ ماتم جسم وجاں اور بھی / friends, we will mourn lives and bodies even more
اور بھی تلخ تر امتحاں اور بھی / even more bitter trials await us, even more.

And directed by Ali Kapadia:

From the inbox, a great event in NYC, hosted by Brownstar Revolution:

THE BROWNSTAR REVOLUTION presents…UNIFICATION 2010

Featuring performances by:
DJ Rekha
The Kominas
Hari Kondabolu
Fair and Kind
Curated by: BROWNSTAR

11pm Saturday, August 14
Joe’s Pub (425 Lafayette Street between East 4th Street and Astor Place), New York City
ONE NIGHT ONLY

Commencing at 11 pm on Saturday, August 14 (Pakistan’s Independence Day) and continuing into the early morning hours of August 15 (India’s Independence Day), UNIFICATION 2010 celebrates 63 years of independence and the voices of talented, socially conscious South Asian/American artists. With performances by DJ Rekha, The Kominas, Hari Kondabolu, Fair and Kind, and others, UNIFICATION 2010 will explore the politics of our motherlands, reveal the experiences of being brown outside of it, and question the tensions between us, while fostering a movement towards a more peaceful, unified South Asia. Proceeds from UNIFICATION 2010 will support South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT).

Advanced tickets $20 @ www.joespub.com
Same day tickets $25 @ the door

Co-sponsored by:
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
Indo-American Arts Council
Naan Sense Radio
PakUSonline
SALGA-NYC

If you are in NYC, you should go – say hi to the Kominas or, more appropriately, yell something obscene at them.

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.

The incomparable Hamid Ali Khan Bela sings.

See related: Dard Vachor Da II, Dard Vachor Da

In February, I posted a review of Amitava Kumar’s novel Home Products. That self-same book, with minor revisions, is now out from Duke University Press under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. Below is an excerpt from the review; to read the whole thing, click here.

This past week, some years after hearing Amitava Kumar read excerpts from Home Products, I was finally able to read the book. I had remembered that there was something about its aesthetic that seemed very familiar to me. As I began to read, I knew right away what it was. Home Products feels like a Hindi novel. It even feels like a translation of a Hindi novel. I say this as someone who has translated substantial quantities of Hindi literature. In fact, the day before I began to read Home Products, I had been revising some old translations of Hindi short stories. As I read, I felt tempted to get out my red pen and cross out certain word choices as too close to the literal translation from Hindi.

The pace of the narration, the close attention to the mundane details of daily life, a certain reserved quality, a sense of connectedness to history, to human struggles, to politics, these are all markers that are ever-present in the Hindi novels of the mid-twentieth century novels. Kumar makes it clear through sections of dialogue and narration that this similarity is no accident. Characters make references to prominent Hindi authors throughout; some have degrees in Hindi literature. Binod’s family is solidly Hindi-medium, English literate. Though Binod writes for an English-language newspaper, he chooses to do so after some deliberation between Hindi and English.

The fact that Home Products has been written in conversation with Hindi literature is astonishing. I can think of no other English language novel that does this. Because of the hierarchy of language-medium education in India, it is rare for a writer in English to have read any literature in Hindi whatsoever. In my experience researching Hindi literature, I found that the English-educated classes outside of Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, people who could read, write and speak Hindi, had read virtually no literature written in Hindi and had heard of no Hindi author other than Premchand. The fact that I was studying Hindi literature at all was usually met with derisive laughter. What could there possibly be to read in Hindi?

A guest essay by Basanti

Mushtaq Bhai: Any last words?
Babban: How about a joke?
Mushtaq Bhai: Yes, go ahead.
Babban: (nervously) There was once this mullah who had a female parrot. This female parrot had quite a mouth on her, always saying the foulest things. The mullah was at a loss, what to do. He went to his friend, the qazi. The qazi said: look, I have a pair of male parrots, who are both very respectable. They are always singing the praises of Allah. Just have your parrot spend a few days with them, and she’ll be straightened out soon enough. The mullah was very happy by this prospect and handed over his parrot to the qazi. But as soon as the qazi’s parrots took one look at her, they started saying the most vulgar things, suddenly acquiring the most foulest of tongues themselves… the worst insults (galis)! I mean… things I cannot bring myself to repeat…you see, I am much too embarrassed. No, I just can’t say them out loud …I’m really just too shy….Are you sure you want to hear what they said?
Mushtaq Bhai: (chuckles) Of course, yes…
Babban: Ok, but I’m really too embarrassed to say it out loud. Shall I whisper it in your ear?
Mushtaq Bhai: (bending forwards) Yes, do tell…

I finally got around to watching Abhishek Chaubey’s much acclaimed debut, a marvel of a film. Ishqiya follows the interconnected stories of a femme fatale named Krishna (Vidya Balan) having just lost her hardened criminal husband, and two thieves, Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and Babban (Arshad Warsi), on the run. The film’s subtle, yet powerful critique of the Hindu right, its mockery of the rising nouveau rich middle-class; and [relatively] progressive sexual politics, makes it worth a watch. Its landscape is a north India as home through the eyes of its marginalized poor: these happen to include Muslims, (widowed/unattached) women, and lower-castes.

It is to writers’ credit that Ishqiya’s chief Muslim characters—male protagonists aptly portrayed by Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi—are for once not the Good Muslim-Bad Muslim familiar duo of Bollywood, chasing their tales in a narrative about terrorism (a la Fiza, Mission Kashmir, Dhoka, Fanaa, etc.) I will spare you the history of the much maligned figure of the Muslim in many a film from Roja (1992) onwards, which has pitted the Indian nationalist hero in opposition to the jihadi terrorist. Many recent films, when featuring Muslims, are structured around a popular narrative about a purported crisis unique to Islam—between good Muslims working for the success of the secular Indian state, and bad Muslims, taking on the state out of adherence to an aggressively blind religious ideology. Suffice to say, there is rarely a film out of Bollywood these days where the Muslim character is not the bearer of religious particularity or difference or presented as political conundrum. So when a film comes along that doesn’t fall into the usual scenario, and does well at the box office, it is noticeable.

Khalujaan and Babban of Ishqiya are all too complex and human: vagrants who drink, whore, and thieve their way through rural north India, a pair of comedic, endearing sinners, having universal problems like lack of money, being bullied, homelessness, and dreams of moving on to greener pastures, trying their best to survive in a dog eat dog world.

The figure of the Muslim in Ishqiya is that of bearing witness and as civilizing persona.

Set in rural UP, the uncle-nephew pair is on the run from rifle toting Mushtaq Bhai whom they’ve crossed yet again. Mushtaq Bhai, though bearing no blood relation to Khalujaan, does share a kin relation: his beloved wife is Khalujaan’s rakhi sister. The thieves have recourse to pleading with their sister—have your husband spare us—via a mobile phone whose ringtone is amusingly, Mera Zohrajabeen. Ishqiya is quite self-referential, if not nostalgic, about cinema songs between the 1950s and 1960s, a period when progressive Urdu poets dominated the song-writing scene in Bombay—a self-referentiality nicely brought to life by Naseeruddin Shah, who represents one of the last Urdu-wallahs of the IPTA generation.

After groveling for their lives in a pit dug as their graves, even the cantankerous Mushtaq Bhai has the valor to listen to their last words: a latifa (joke) about corrupting and corruptible parrots, which turns out to be a ruse for the thieves to escape from their graves. Making off with his money, they decide not to kill Mushtaq Bhai—for the two are often at comedic cross-roads, regarding the question of taking a life.

The theme song in the opening credits is Ibn Batuta, lyrics by Gulzar, and interestingly, a subject of plagarism controversy .

Ibn Batuta sets the tone of the vagabonds’ adventures, referencing the eponymous Muslim traveler, the fourteenth century Moroccan who left behind a detailed rihla (travelogue) of his journeys from North Africa, through Central Asia, and India (where he served in the court of the Delhi sultanate) and to South East Asia. The song’s chorus:

Ibn-Batuta, bagal mein juta, pehne to karta hai jhurrr!
Ibn Batuta, carrying his shoes under his arm, when he wears them, they go jhurr!

You can view the full mast song here. You can read the full translation of the song, the issue of plagiarism and the similarity to Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena‘s Hindi poem here.

From the outset, Ishqiya celebrates and humanizes the mobility of its Muslim characters, a refreshing break from depictions of Muslim travel as an inherently threatening, terrifying, and anti-Indian phenomenon. And not just any mobility—but mobility of the vagrant, criminal kind—where Khalujaan and Babban wax nostalgic about farting freely in their village, and make off with stolen cars. Out of favor with most of their family, friend, and criminal networks, Khalujaan and Babban are in search of temporary shelter. The two travelers rapidly find themselves in the ‘uncivil’ hinterlands: in rural UP, that apparently means being caught in the fray of gun-runners posing as respectable businessmen, and out of control caste wars.

But for anyone who is familiar with Ibn Batuta there appears to be an interesting reversal of a much older theme of ‘cosmopolitan travel’ at work. The Berber Ibn Batuta was a qazi, and a learned scholar, epitomizing medieval North Africa’s Muslim elite. As Ross Dunn has put it: “the Muslim cosmopolite of the fourteenth century [like today’s sophisticated jet-setter] was urbane, well-travelled, and free of the grosser varieties of parochial bigotry…and above all possessed a self-consciousness of the entire Dar-ul-Islam as social reality.” Khalujaan and Babban are far from urbane elites but the invocation of Ibn Batuta stands in for their vagabond cosmopolitanism.

Incidentally, Ibn Batuta called to my mind that other song about vagabond travel and shoes from Indian cinema (Mera Juta Hai Japani) from Kapoor’s Shri 420. In Ishqiya, we have the itinerant stranger heading out of the city and into the village—where the village is anything but the space of tranquility and innocence. The lyrical Ibn Batuta of Khalujaan and Babban’s world brings to mind older narratives of Muslim travel, where the sojourner from the cosmopolitan city of origin, is a commentator on the ‘un-civil’ customs of those whom he comes across: nonetheless he remains part of this larger world. But I digress. Khalujaan and Babban’s cosmopolitanism is expressed in their language: small town Hindi (and Hinglish), the urban slang, and Urdu. Theirs is by no means a provincial world, but they are linked up via mobile phone, and are quite well-traveled, finding shelters and serais from tour guides to train-ticket masters.

The two heroes eventually succeed in securing a place to stay with an old friend, Verma-ji, whose home’s sole occupant now is his wife, the sharp-witted and attractive Krishna. They soon discover that Verma-ji is not coming back. But Krishna has often lived alone: the film’s opening scene portrays her in repose, delighted to see her husband after his long stint away. He brings the gift of a gold chain bearing a pendant of the Taj Mahal, but their reunion is short-lived. Krishna confesses to having gone to the police querying what her husband’s sentence might be if he fesses up, upping the ante in effort to persuade him to surrender; Verma makes a promise to abandon his criminal activities forever. Shortly thereafter, there is an explosion which leaves Krishna widowed.

The name Krishna is appropriate—as Vidya Balan’s character conveys the mischievous, clever, seductive, thieving, and much adored Krishna of folklore. Whereas the romantic and chivalrous Khalujaan quickly becomes enamored by her sweet voice and manner, bonding with her over their mutual love of 1950s film songs, the rough and roving Babban is drawn to her unapologetically open sexuality. When Krishna blithely remarks on the stark difference between uncle and nephew: “zamin-asman ka fark hai (as different as earth and sky)”, Khalujaan corrects her, “No, only as different as Hindu and Muslim.” The statement shores up the shared social space of these characters negotiated by rituals such as rakhi and by film songs.

Within the first few days of their stay, Khalujaan and Babban discover to their horror that not only has Mushtaq Bhai hunted them down yet again, but the stolen money has disappeared. Their arch nemesis gives them one month (until Rakhi day) to return the stolen money, otherwise, they will be buried alive along with Krishna.

Babban immediately accuses Krishna of stealing the money, though she is quick to point out that while Babban was busy in the brothel, the sweeper Nandu was busy cleaning house. It is Nandu the low-caste teenager who had familiarized Babban with the area, promising to fix his gun: “In our village, children learn to use the gun before learning to wipe their butts,” Nandu explains that the outskirts of Gorakhpur’s villages are gripped by caste-wars, with a growing Sena army, one that he has just recently joined.

As a friend pointed out to me, the film may be making reference to the Ranvir Sena from Bihar, which had initially developed to harass lower castes, though received comeuppance from the Maoists, and who have been around longer than news reports portray. In the film, however, the Sena is out to seek revenge from a neighboring village of Thakurs.

It is to these caste-wars that the Muslim is witness. When Babban angrily goes in search of Nandu, he accidentally interrupts a meeting, witnessing fiery oration and the distribution of rifles by the Sena army. Cornering Babban, Sena guerrillas threaten him, ordering him never to return to the area, sparing him presumably because he comes with good credentials: a guest of the late Verma-ji. Babban as witness is quite interesting, for if shahid—martyr—means bearing witness, it is worth visiting what the Muslim figure as witness in this narrative implies…

Upon his return, an exasperated Babban explains to Khalujaan that they need to leave immediately:

yeh jaga bahut danger hai…hamare paas to sirf sunni aur shia ka chalta hai, lekin yahan to har jaat ki apni apni sena hai, khalu!

This place is dangerous! We just have Sunni and Shi’a differences, but here, each caste has gotten together his own army, Khalu!

My (not so fully developed) theory: in bearing witness to the caste-war preparations, the Muslim as witness in Ishqiya interrupts widespread narratives of the War on Terror, where the root problem of insurgencies in Muslim countries like Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, is seen to be (political) Islam. In presenting the figure of the Muslim interrupting a caste-war under way, and then commenting upon it, is the filmic narrative implicitly suggesting a historical, comparative, and regional connection between the sectarian conflagrations of Pakistan, and the ‘tribal/low-caste’ Maoist insurgencies rocking the red corridor of India? I am not quite sure how else to read the Muslim (as a minority) bearing witness to organized political violence centered upon ‘caste’…. I do wonder that had the portrayal in Ishqiya been of the Shiv Sena, as an open critique of rightest forces in India, if such an interruption may have been possible.

A debate between uncle and nephew then ensues, as to whether to stay put or go on the run again with Khalujaan saying he can’t have it on his conscience that Krishna’s life is at Mushtaq Bhai’s mercy. The debate is put to end by Krishna herself, who tells them at rifle-point that nothing will be decided without her permission, a punishment for fools who have put her life on the line.

It is at this point where Krishna officially hijacks the narrative.

If Ishqiya does not fall into simplistic narrative portrayals about the minoritized Muslim, neither does it fall into some fable about an un-hitched young woman (here, widow) waiting to be rescued. From this point onwards, Krishna does not drive the narrative as a simple object of the two thieves’ affection: rather, she is the brains behind a heist carried out by the threesome. Having captured both their hearts, she persuades them into a plan to kidnap a local millionaire and hold him ransom. ‘If you throw a stone in Gorakphur, it will land on the head of one millionaire or another,” says Krishna, for if rural UP is ridden with caste wars and poverty, then the bustling cotu of Gorakpur is home to a class of the newly moneyed. Krishna has learned her husband’s vocation, having tracked Verma’s exploits, his records, and studied all his cons. She suggests one Kakkar, a local steel tycoon, as their unwitting victim.

For anyone who has watched Sholay Ishqiya’s widow is a nice rejoinder to the armless Thakur’s chaste and sorrowful daughter-in-law. Recall that Thakur had enlisted two thieves to fight off dacoit Gabbar Singh, but in Ishqiya it is Krishna as widow who has brought in her two guests/admirers for her own independent agenda. When the two thieves first appear at Krishna’s doorstep late in the night, an elderly widow of the village bangs on the door, asking, ‘Krishna, people for you. Where are you? Have you gone and burnt yourself up?” In these gestures—here the implication of sati—Ishqiya hints too at a history of politics around the ‘woman –community – nation’ question in India, heating up in the late 1980s, following the sati case of Roop Kanwar of Rajastan and the rise of the Hindu right in Indian politics right into the liberalization era.

The link between property and womanhood—Krishna is seemingly the sole proprietor of the house—is a tense one. We see in Krishna the possibility of sexual and intellectual agency, without narrative recourse of turning her either into a kind-hearted, redeemed prostitute who is sacrificed at the end of the narrative, or as someone’s wife or betrothed. That is, in Ishqiya there is the refusal to give Krishna an ending in either marriage or death. Nor is there any recourse to making Khalujaan, Babban, and Krishna as part of a narrative of thick religious difference—for anyone familiar with the predictability of Hindu-Muslim love stories of Bollywood (a la Bombay, Veer Zara, etc.,). Rather, it depicts the triad of Krishna, Khalujaan and Babban in a space of friendship, love, kinship, and intimacy far beyond the narrow confines of middle-class hetero-normativity and morality and always just beyond the reach of the state: a shared space of marginality in guiding human relationships, and challenging power structures. Indeed Khalujaan, Babban, and Krishna share in the most intimate of political relations: bringing moral retribution to a most sinister Sena leader.

Towards the end, Khalujaan and Babban feel betrayed, reeling from the discovery that Krishna had stolen their money and hidden it all along, deciding to carry out the operation alone, and interrogating Kakkar about Verma’s whereabouts. Krishna claims that Kakkar is one of Verma’s men and that Verma is still alive. But Khalujaan and Babban do not believe her, since, “a woman can’t be trusted…”—a statement quickly laid to rest by none other than the low-caste Nandu—as the newly initiated Sena member—who narrates the truth of her tale.

Just wanted to note here that I taped a show with Worldview last week on Zaid Hamid. Apparently it was posted on the official Syed Zaid Hamid facebook group which generated a lot of comments. Some of the wise ones went over to the CPR site as well, and left comments. I gathered some choice ones. Now you can enjoy too:

Usman // Sunday, July 25, 2010 @ 12:56 PM

Mr. Manan and respected Host, you can’t even begin to perceive that being a patriotic Pakistani directly/indirectly links to the Islamic belief. Zaid Hamid’s followers are the school/college/university students that aren’t ignorant and have their own way of looking at things. You can not analyze current affairs happening in Pakistan while sitting out. Zionist Brahman Idiology is simply targeting the minorities in India which include and isn’t limited to Muslims. Manan Sahab, you better be prepared next time before being a guest on a show as a “historian”. No illusions being drawn by Zaid Hamid.. you are just ignorant and are unable to view events on a larger scale. Our GOAL is the Re-establishment of Khilafah. Ahmadis have been declared non-Muslim by the fiqah and aren’t even allowed to enter Mecca.
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u illiterate pathetic so called Pakistani historian. Im sure u wouldnt even know when did the Pakistan movement started

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this fake manan ahmed is infact india hindo, only acting as pakistani. chicago radio you should be ashmed of yourself.

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Mr. Mannan is a bad bad historian & even a worse “Analyst” of situation on ground in Pakistan.

I am still -swamped- but thought I’d let y’all know of this first (hesitant) piece I wrote about Berlin and which appeared in Express Tribune‘s Sunday Magazine this past weekend. The print layout is nicer so here it is embedded.

I will update this with other hospitalities in the war zone as I encounter more data points. Others please contribute.

Date 2007-02-07 00:00:00

Following the formal discussion, they set a table of finger foods and chi [sic]. We continued to talk discussing more personal histories and the two officers were very open and candid. We took a group photo (they had taken several of us already while we were sitting there) and then left the way we came.

Date 2007-02-08 15:21:00

The Pakmil were very hospitable, they were on time at the border and transported the party to Chaman Fort without event. At the fort they provided light refreshment with snacks and curry lunch with music post meeting.

Date 2007-04-16 10:15:00

Atmospherics: (reception of HCA, reactions to ANSF and Coalition forces, etc): All villagers/elders were extremely pleased with the products that we gave to them along. Only the elder didnt want his village taking the products. He personally blamed George Bush for his AK-47 being taken from him. He doesnt want us to give stuff to his village because of fear from the enemy punishing him. He did say he would take money though. Only about 6 kids came out to get stuff. We gave some stuff for the women of the village too.