Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan

Beyond Crisis

Critical Asian Studies Series Editor: Veena Das Kreiger-Eisenhower Professor in Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University Critical Asian Studies is devoted to in-depth studies of emergent social and cultural phenomena in the countries of the region. While recognising the important ways in which the specific and often violent histories of the nation-state have influenced the social formations in this region, the books in this series also examine the processes of translation, exchange, boundary crossings in the linked identities and histories of the region. The authors in this series engage with social theory through ethnographically grounded research and archival work.

Also in this Series Living with Violence: The Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta ISBN 978-0-415-43080-7 Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization (Ed.) Saurabh Dube ISBN 978-0-415-44552-8 The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi Perveez Mody ISBN 978-0-415-44604-4 Settlers, Saints and Sovereigns: An Ethnography of State Formation in Western India Farhana Ibrahim ISBN 978-0-415-44556-6 Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire (Eds) Huri Islamog˘lu and Peter C. Perdue ISBN 978-0-415-48166-3

Beyond Crisis Re-evaluating Pakistan

Editor

Naveeda Khan

LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

First published 2010 by Routledge 912–915 Tolstoy House, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi 110 001

Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2010 Naveeda Khan

Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited 5–CSC, First Floor, Near City Apartments Vasundhara Enclave Delhi 110 096

Printed and bound in India by

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-48063-5

To my parents Munawar and Shafique, my husband Bob and my children Sophie and Sulayman with my deepest gratitude

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Contents Glossary Foreword by Veena Das Acknowledgements Introduction Naveeda Khan

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Part I: Artificiality of the State 1. Towards a Lyric History of India Amir R. Mufti 2. The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State Tahir Hasnain Naqvi 3. A Real Terrorist Oskar Verkaaik 4. Reimagining the ‘Land of the Pure’: A Sufi Master Reclaims Islamic Orthodoxy and Pakistani Identity Robert Rozehnal

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61 89

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Part II: The Difficulty of Nationalist Visions 5. Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s Iftikhar Dadi

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6. Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistan Army, Violence and Memories of 1971 Yasmin Saikia

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7. Strength of the State Meets the Strength of the Street: The 1972 Labour Struggle in Karachi Kamran Asdar Ali

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8. Jama’at-e-Islami Pakistan: Learning from the Left Humeira Iqtidar

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Part III: Foreignness Within 9. The Paradoxes of Ahmadiyya Identity: Legal Appropriation of Muslim-ness and the Construction of Ahmadiyya Difference Asad A. Ahmed 10. Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu-Indian and Muslim-Pakistani Publics in Bombay Deepak Mehta

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11. Itineraries of Conversion: Judaic Paths to a Muslim Pakistan Sadia Abbas

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12. Iqbal and Karbala Syed Akbar Hyder

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Part IV: The Everyday 13. Look Who’s Talking Now: Voice and Authority in Pakistani Shi’i Women’s Gatherings Amy Bard

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14. Madrasa Metrics: The Statistics and Rhetoric of Religious Enrolment in Pakistan Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Tristan Zajonc

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15. Uncivil Politics and the Appropriation of Planning in Islamabad Matthew Hull

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16. Mosque Construction or the Violence of the Ordinary Naveeda Khan Afterwords Living the Tensions of the State, the Nation and Everyday Life David Gilmartin Anthropology and Pakistani National Imaginary Katherine Pratt Ewing Bibliography Note on the Editor Notes on Contributors Index

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521 531 541 565 566 569

Glossary This is a select list of the non-English terms that appear in the articles in this book. I have given the Urdu spellings although in a few cases I have indicated the more usual spelling by means of a backslash. For a few words I have opted for the Arabic spellings as the authors privileged them. I have not attempted to standardise names across the individual articles. adab alim amir aql arkan ashraf auliya/awliya auqaf awam azan baraka/barakat batai biradari chilla

dargah dars darsan darud/durud dastan dawa/dawat

civility; comportment religious scholar ruler; commander intellect; sense pillar; support, pl. rukn noblemen; well-born; Muslim gentry; s. of sharif literally friends of God; saints; pl. of wali religious endowments; pl. of waqf the people Muslim call to prayer blessing; spiritual quality transmitted by saint to his place of burial and his descendents division of agricultural produce among landlord and tenants brotherhood; patrilineage a period of 40 days demarcating such events as mourning, spiritual exercises, missionary trips, etc. shrine or tomb of a reputed saint which is the object of veneration and pilgrimage religious lesson seeing; looking; visiting a sacred shrine; worshipping in the presence of an image benedictions; prayer in praise of the Prophet Muhammad story; fable invitation; missionary activity

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dil din dua dunya dupatta fakir/faqir fana fatwa firqa fitna gasht ghazal gherao gunah Hadith/Hadis

hajj haqq haveli/haweli hijr imam

iman imambarah insan insaniyat ishq izzat jagirdar jahil jahiliyat

heart faith; the Islamic religion personal prayer world scarf mendicant; a sufi extinction; to be absorbed in God legal, non-binding opinion; pl. fatawa sect in Islam discord; perfidy; sin patrol a poetic form in Arabic/Persian/Urdu a protest in which workers encircle the place of work fault; offence; sin the words, actions and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad that have been transmitted by a chain of reliable authorities and recorded (pl. Ahadith or Ahadis) annual pilgrimage to the Kaaba in Mecca, required once of all able Muslims truth; due; obligation a term for private homes in India and Pakistan separation; desertion (of country and friends); absence a leader of prayer or the community within Sunni Islam; chosen of God as exemplar and leader within Shia Islam faith the site of religious assembly for Shia Muslims human humanity passionate love honour; dignity ruler of a local region ignorant; uncivilised ignorance; days or times of; the times prior to the manifestation of Islam

Glossary

jalsa janun jat jawan jihad Kaaba kafir kufr khalifa khanqah/khanaqah sufi khatib khirqa khuda khudi khutba madrasa malang malik majlis marsiya/marsia

mashaikh mashhad masjid maslak maulvi milad millat mohalla/muhalla

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a sitting; a meeting; an assembly madness respectability; rank; family; race; lineage; tribe; caste; sect young; soldier spiritual struggle; fighting in the cause of Islam the square temple at Mecca enshrining the Black Stone; the destination of the hajj unbeliever; non-Muslim; pl. kuffar unbelief; infidelity; impiety successor to the authority of a saint or religious leader residence one who delivers the khutba; a preacher cloak; dress of a mendicant or devotee God self; state of being besides oneself; ecstasy sermon delivered at the mosque, usually during the Friday prayers religious seminary; institution of higher learning; pl. madaris religious enthusiast; one who lets ones hair grow out and leaves it uncombed property owner meeting; assembly; party elegiac poem to commemorate the martyrdom of Husain and the events at Karbala in the 7th century A.D. sufi masters; pl. of shakyh/shaikh martyrdom place of worship; pl. masajid path; religious perspective title for a learned Muslim celebration; milad-un Nabi birthday celebration for the Prophet religion community urban neighborhood

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momin muhajir

Muharram

mujahidin munshi murid muezzin mulla

nafs namaz nat pahlvan peon pir potwari purdah/parda qabristan qabza qari qasba qaum

Quran riba rishvat rukn salat

a believer refugee; one who has left country and friends; the name for an Indian Muslims who migrated to Pakistan at the time of the partition of India in 1947 the first month of the Islamic calendar; the first 10 days of this month in which the deaths of Husain and his companions at Karbala are mourned one who undertakes jihad scribe; secretary disciple of a pir one who gives the azan title for a Muslim learned; now often used as a derogatory term for those who are religious enthusiasts. the lower faculty of the human as opposed to the aql the five daily ritual prayers; also called salat (Arabic term) poetry in praise of the Prophet Muhammad a hero; wrestler office attendant of lowly rank sufi guide land registrar the state of being veiled graveyard forcible possession; in one’s possession one who recites the Quran small town a community based on religion, descent or nationality qawwali singing that largely occurs in sufi dargahs the central religious text of Islam interest bribe pillars; supports; pl. of arkan namaz in Arabic

Glossary

sayyid (m)/sayyidani (f) Shab-e Barat/ Shab-i Barat

shakyh/shaikh sharia/shariat sharif Shia shura sifarish silsila sufi Sunnah/Sunna Sunni sura tabarruk tariqa taslim tassawuff taziya tauba tehsil/tahsil ulama ummah ushr wafa wali waqf watan

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title signifying a claim to descent from the Prophet Muhammad The night before the fifteenth day of the Islamic month of Shaban when a vigil is observed with prayers, feasting and offerings made in the name of the dead. One’s upcoming future is said to be registered in heaven. title of respect given to sufis; pl. mashaikh Islamic law derived from the Quran and Hadith Muslim nobleman; pl. ashraf the minority sect of Muslims advisory council recommendation; introduction; intercession literally a chain; a chain of sufi masters a mystic; a follower of a path of spiritual devotion and discipline the sayings and habits of the Prophet Muhammad the majority sect of Muslims a chapter of the Quran the portion of presents presented to saints given to their dependants a path or way associated with a sufi surrender the theology of the sufis the representation of the tomb of Husain and Hasan carried during Muharram processions repentance an administrative unit religious scholars; pl. of alim the Muslim moral community tax on agricultural land loyalty literally friend of God; a saint; pl. awliya religious endowment; pl. auqaf one’s country

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wisal zakat

zakir (m)/zakira (f) zameer zimmi zina ziyarat

union a religious duty whereby Muslims give a fixed percentage in value of certain kinds of property as charity preacher conscience non-Muslim subject of a state governed by sharia law extramarital sex pilgrimage of a religious shrine

Foreword Much attention has been paid in recent years to the contiguity between sovereignty and the state of exception, a proposition first suggested by Carl Schmitt in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty and elaborated with some force in the recent writings of Giorgio Agamben. The puzzling question for Agamben is that if states of exception are directly related to political turmoil — which leads to the setting aside of law, then how do they get a legal form? Put differently, jural doctrine itself produces exceptional measures which, in the name of security (equated with security of the state), leads to the setting aside of normal law. But in whose favour is this suspension of law to be understood? In a now famous statement, Agamben talks of the state of exception as ‘encompassing life’ in a manner that both binds and abandons the subject to the law. The relation of the subject to the law must appear in a somewhat different light to the student of Pakistan, as if the picture painted by Agamben is slightly out of focus and has to be moved somewhat for the specific kinds of political crises and their relation to the production of the subject to be brought to light. The relation between law and life is precisely what is at stake, but the manner in which the subject is both bound and abandoned to the law must take the specificities of the political crisis produced in Pakistan in 1947 — when it emerged as an independent state, and in 1971 — when, after a bloody war, its east wing declared independence and became a new nation, Bangladesh. It might be recalled that the first time an Emergency was declared in Pakistan was on 27 August 1947 by the then Governor–General — 13 days after it was inaugurated as a new nation-state — under Section 102 of the adapted Government of India Act, 1935, on the grounds that the influx of refugees threatened the economic life of the country. The terse statement declared: ‘Whereas the economic life of Pakistan is threatened by circumstances arising out of the mass movement of population from and into Pakistan, a State of Emergency is hereby declared’. Yet these were not refugees produced by civil war in other countries or those escaping from economic disaster but refugees created by a decision of the colonial State to partition India and create two independent nations from the existing territory. As scholars of law

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and jurisprudence have argued, the juridical framework of Emergency was inherited from colonial law, and from the frequent practice of evoking State necessity as an essential part of the governance of the colonies. What, then, is the relation between law and life as it unfolded in the case of Pakistan, especially if we think of life as not only encompassed within the law but also as lived beside and with the law? It gives me great pleasure to introduce this multidisciplinary volume of articles on Pakistan, many written by a young generation of scholars, who address these issues through a deep engagement with the specificities of Pakistan’s history, politics and everyday life, and ask what bearing these specificities have on contemporary social theory? Naveeda Khan’s editorial labours and her brilliant Introduction to the volume show how a new way of comprehending the plenitude of Pakistan even in full wakefulness to its many crises is surely at hand. The book neither denies the various crises Pakistan has been mired in, nor is content with reiterating the inevitably of the failure of nationalism, or of state and sovereignty (the favourite triad of political science and security studies) but instead asks how these issues might be made productive for understanding what is at stake for various social actors — global, regional and local — by tracking these events in the everyday. With no hopes of doing it full justice, let me take a couple of examples from the rich set of articles on how the category of ‘crisis’ operates in this volume, and the manner in which it is joined to the everyday such that something new about what it is to inhabit failures of a promise comes to light. The two events of the Partition of India and emergence of Pakistan in 1947, and the division of Pakistan and independence of Bangladesh in 1971, as I said, form two important inaugural moments for Pakistan. Much has been written on the theme of Partition/Independence in 1947 and its legacy of distrust if not outright violence between Hindus and Muslims in India, and between different Muslim sects in Pakistan. Yet it is not possible to ignore the multiple definitions of the situation — if loss of home was one theme, the other was the idea of the experimentation with Muslim modernity, tied to national territory for those in Pakistan. Historians have made it amply clear that Pakistan was not created as a result of a massive popular demand but was in fact a result of various negotiated settlements among leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League, with a departing colonial power eager to divest

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itself from any further responsibilities towards the regions it had ruled. My wish is not to recapitulate that story but to point out that along with this revisionist picture of that period in connection with the demand for Pakistan, we need to recall the sense of excitement on the part of many Pakistani Muslims on the future of what they hoped would be a territory that could show how an Islamic vision might shape a political order in the contemporary world. This was evident in the Constituent Assembly debates of Pakistan when much emphasis was laid in the early discussion on what Islamic values would guide, for instance, the rights of lower caste Hindus who were promised a better deal than what they would get in ‘Brahmanic’ India. This was a different kind of political theology than say, imagined by Schmitt, and if it failed we must remember that it would be the task of social science to show not only the pathways to this failure but also the newness that these very failures produced. It is thus not the burden of these articles to make an assessment of Pakistan in terms of failures or successes but to move out of the habits of thought created by both cynicism and nostalgia for Pakistan to ask how we might go beyond the language of crisis. What are the processes taking place in Pakistan in the realm of education or arts or legal technologies that are obscured by the too-ready-at-hand trope of ‘crisis’? The second inaugural moment under consideration is that of the creation of Bangladesh on which scholarship and literary works abound from India and Bangladesh but on which, as Khan puts it, scholars of Pakistan (and not only those based in Pakistan) have not spoken. Several articles in this volume show how reflection on that particular failure — to give recognition to the desires of one region, that of East Pakistan — and the subsequent independence of it as Bangladesh initiated major changes on the idea of Pakistan. Not only is there the question of how Islamic ideas of ‘humanity’ and not just ‘Muslim’ might function in helping to remember atrocities by those who committed or authorised them, but there is also an experimentation in which the relation of the territory to Islam undergoes both intensification and reorientation. Thus, for instance, the success of regional cinema and later TV serials (especially in Punjabi) point to the manner in which official definitions of nationalism and language give way to a different kind of assertion about what it is to belong to Pakistan. Although there has been a flowering of multiple imaginations of Islam’s relation to modern forms of the state including, in Pakistan, the tendency in much scholarship and in

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public imagination to reduce all this multiplicity to either a binary of fundamentalist versus moderate Muslims or even to good Muslims and bad Muslims within the global arena, they do little justice to experiments on self-formation that must constantly re-imagine the Other. Naveeda Khan identifies this as the problem of foreignness within the Self or the condition of immigrancy, the term coined by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, to characterise the human condition. Others think of this issue as the condition of exile that can overtake you as it did the poet Faiz, as the definition of home changes. It would be easy to imagine that the everyday life to which this volume refers is the descent into habit and is opposed to either the pursuit of the moral life (dunya versus din) or to macro questions such as those relating to governance. The originality of the book, though, lies in showing us precisely that such binary distinctions that invest the everyday with some kind of organic wholeness are as illusory as the assumption that the everyday is only the scene of trance and illusion. In Khan’s words, ‘these lives are equally that of state institutions and artifacts, of political parties and religious traditions, as of the daily lives of average Pakistanis. It is not necessarily the case that the sheer existence of a daily-ness negates crisis, that is, in self-perpetuating everyday life gives lie to the crises that inform Pakistan’s past and present.’ However, the lens of the everyday helps us to ask new questions: how did the imperatives of governance modify the ideology of Pakistan as the exemplar of Muslim modernity for all Muslims and not only Muslims from Muslim majority states in India which is not to say that this claim was accepted by all. What stories do numbers tell and what do they hide from view as in the global media’s insistence on the madrasa crisis in Pakistan? How does the category of class function in defining belongingness? What accounts for the continuity of the cast of characters between the Left-inspired labour movements and the movements for Islamic reform? How is one to understand the militarisation and temporal rhythms through which the democratic project is sought to be now embraced, now abandoned? The reader is not going to get any definitive answer to such questions but they are posed in new and provocative ways. Finally, the book has the great merit of unsettling our ideas of Pakistan as a fixed entity in space. On the one hand there is the continued engagement with themes of betrayal in which Pakistan comes to stand for the anxiety within India that Muslims in India though larger in number than those in Pakistan, cannot truly want

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to belong to India. On the other hand, the imagination of Pakistan as a theological space that existed in history much before it was in fact realised in the form of a concrete nation-state makes such imaginations as that of certain Sufi poets available for rereading the past and for leaving the possibility open that the idea of Pakistan could acquire a different form in the future. None of these issues is settled; nor is there a teleology that is going to determine the direction of the future. If I might conclude on a personal note — for an Indian brought up with the idea of Lahore as the place from where one was exiled, there is the challenge of imagining a future that is not a hostage to the past. Perhaps one can think of Pakistan as both the making of small communities below the level of the nation (in neighbourhoods, schools and mosques) and large communities (that already include global families, circulation or art, literature and films), and the ever-present competition over which country — India, Pakistan or Bangladesh — has clerics who can give more enlightened fatwas. To suggest these possibilities is not to negate the nationstate but to enrich it with other repositories of ideas that might be available to craft a future that can speak to the particular genius of its own history. This is one way in which I understand how the relation between law and life goes beyond the notion of bareness of life and its appropriation by the state. October 2009

Veena Das Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

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Acknowledgements This book is the outcome of a conference held at Johns Hopkins University in April 2006 titled ‘Beyond Crisis: A Critical Second Look at Pakistan’. The conference was jointly funded by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS). I thank Ed Lattman of JHU and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of AIPS for extending their faith to this effort. I thank Veena Das, David Gilmartin and Katherine Ewing for their strong backing of this project, without which I would have not had the courage to propose a conference on Pakistan that flew in the face of mainstream representations of the country. I am grateful for their attending the conference and providing critical and helpful commentary throughout. The participants of the conference and those who came on board later in the project, contributing their articles for inclusion in the edited volume, were outstanding. Neither the conference nor the book would have been possible without their scholarship, energy and generosity, most valuably towards me. The Department of Anthropology of JHU, specifically Becky Elmore and Sharon Trader, provided helpful administrative services during the conference, while Amrita Ibrahim, graduate student in the anthropology department, was crucial to this project from beginning to end, helping with the organization of the conference and the preparation of the manuscript for publication. The comments of the two anonymous reviewers were appreciated in finalizing the manuscript. As a number of the articles were published earlier and are being reproduced here by permission, I thank: Blackwell Press for ‘The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State’ by Tahir Hasnain Naqvi (2007) in Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 20 (1/2): 44–71, March/June; Cambridge University Press for ‘Strength of the State Meets the Strength of the Street’ by Kamran Asdar Ali (2005) in International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 37: 83–107; Duke University Press for ‘Towards a Lyric History of India’ by Aamir Mufti (2004) in boundary 2, vol. 31 (2): 245–74;

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Oxford University Press, Inc. for ‘Iqbal and Karbala’ excerpted from Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory by Syed Akbar Hyder (2006); and University of Chicago Press for sections of ‘Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A Look at the Data’ by Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Tristan Zajonc (2006) in Comparative Education Review vol. 52 (3): 446–77. I thank Julia Hart for permission to use her translation of Oskar Verkaaik’s article. My gratitude to Asad Ali for his help with the initial preparations for the conference and book. Although he contributed an article to the book, he could not stay as involved because of the press of other deadlines. This book has been in the good care of Nilanjan Sarkar, my editor and Pallavi Narayan, my copy-editor at Routledge, New Delhi. I thank them both for seeing the book through. October 2009

Introduction Naveeda Khan Since its inception in 1947, Pakistan has faced numerous crises, from one-off catastrophic events, to the slow and steady intensification of debilitating conditions. The discourses through which crisis has been framed have been put securely in place through the exertions of disciplines such as political science, economics and more recently security studies.1 These disciplines have traditionally been in close relationships to states by putting themselves in the service of states while serving to evaluate them. It is no different in Pakistan.2 In fact, the three most obdurate evaluations of crises — the failure of the state, the failure of nationalism, and the external influence on the country compromising national sovereignty and security — were put in place quite early in Pakistan’s history. Moreover, these evaluations have greatly influenced subsequent intellectual inquiry and analysis in Pakistan. The key question for us is: have these evaluations of crises adversely affected thinking about Pakistan? Certainly one could argue that they have to an extent closed off attention to those aspects of Pakistan that do not fall within the category of crisis and do not seem deserving of urgent reportage.3 Yet, I would argue somewhat differently. While these evaluations have certainly overshadowed more nuanced perspectives on Pakistan, they are yet perspicacious in capturing the affect of not getting it right. Furthermore, this affect, differentially expressed and embodied by a diverse range of Pakistanis, is a crucial aspect of belongingness in Pakistan. In other words, one comes to attach oneself to Pakistan, claim it as one’s own, through disclaiming it. This argument will become clearer over the course of this introduction as I show how the evaluations appear with great regularity at different moments of crisis in Pakistan’s history expressing variations of the same affect. Furthermore, the essays in this volume help us to understand this mode of attaching to a modern nation-state, by showing how these evaluations carry ontological weight. In other words, through these essays we see how the failure of the state becomes a moment to ruminate on the artificiality of this most modern construct, the failure of nationalism, an opportunity to dream of alternative modes of association, and the failure of

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sovereignty to consider the threats and possibilities of the realm of foreignness within the nation-state as within the self. Only then do we come to see that to belong to a nation-state is not always premised on a sense of sharing a common origin, language, ethnicity, territory or goal but may entail a shared sense of being alienated from it. The ambition of this volume is not only to complicate standing representations of Pakistan. It is to take Pakistan out of the status of exceptionalism that its multiple crises have endowed upon it. By now many scholars have written of how exile, migrancy, refugeedom, and other modes of displacement constitute modern subjectivities (Cavell 1994; Agamben 1998; Said 2000). Through the argument I am making for Pakistanis’ mode of attaching to their nation-state, one inspired and sustained by the writings gathered here, I am saying that Pakistan is no stranger to this condition of human immigrancy (Cavell 1989; Eldridge 2003). Therefore, it can be pressed into service in helping us to understand our present condition. I begin with the crisis precipitated by the 1971 civil war between the eastern and western wings of Pakistan to show how the evaluations of crisis in scholarly discourse unfold along the lines I have already described. I choose this crisis as it is both a crisis event, that is, a war, and produced by crisis conditions that hold both before and after Pakistan’s subsequent break up into two nation-states, that is, the exacerbation of internal ethnic, linguistic and economic differences. The evaluations express, however mutedly, the sense that Pakistan is on the wrong course. Thereafter, I move forward in time to show how post-1971 evaluations of crisis return fixatedly to the problematic origins of Pakistan as if by way of explanation. Third, I move backwards to the earliest writings on Pakistan to show how these are also very pragmatic accounts of Pakistan’s shortcomings. I undertake this circuit of analysis so as to show just how integral the affect of not getting it right is to the fact of being of Pakistan.4 In the final section of this introduction I turn to the writings in this volume. By drawing out the theoretical and empirical work in them, I show how they transfigure the three evaluations of crisis with which we are working in this introduction. In so doing, they show crisis to index a more general, ontological condition of Pakistan, as of the world, but one that is also often exceeded.

The Problem of Belongingness It was a rather unwieldy state that emerged in the aftermath of Partition, with its western and eastern wings physically separated by

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a 1,000 miles of enemy territory. In 1971, the eastern wing formally separated from Pakistan after a brutal civil war largely conducted between the Pakistani army and Bengali guerilla forces on the territory that was to become Bangladesh. I begin with this war because it was the crisis par excellance to which one finds affixed the three evaluations of Pakistan that I have mentioned previously; that of the failed state, failed nationalism, and failed sovereignty. More importantly, as I hope to show, the analysis of 1971 and the evaluations of Pakistan that emerge from it not only inform subsequent scholarship but also share much with earlier studies of Pakistan. This would suggest that belongingness has always posed a problem for Pakistan.5 First, a quick word about my sources. Leaving aside first-hand accounts by Pakistan’s generals and bureaucrats (Niazi 1998; Salik 1978), empirical descriptions of the unfolding of events (Choudhury 1974; Zaheer 1994), and some creative writing in English, Urdu and other regional literature (see Memon 1983), Pakistani analytic writings on 1971 are sparse.6 As the idea of the foundational texts of 1971 has yet to take shape, I rely upon three well-known works on the war offering us scholarly interpretations. While I have generally tried to draw upon Pakistani scholars,7 I use Philip Oldenburg’s well-known article on the war as it provides a clearer analysis of the failings of Pakistani nationalism in 1971 than any other work I have encountered (also see Ali 1970). Rounaq Jahan’s Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (1971) went to press at the same time that Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan. In this prescient analysis, Jahan, a political scientist, captures the growing crisis of governance by which one government after the other, for the most part located in West Pakistan, mismanaged the politics and economy of East Pakistan. Such discriminatory practices forced a consolidation of the demand for separation and independence. You can hear the judgement of ‘failed state’ in the air in her description of the common problems facing new states: In the case of Pakistan, as we shall see, a disequilibrium arose in the development of the country’s different sectors, i.e., in economic development, modernization, state-building, and nation-building. The failure to develop adequate nation-building polities, in spite of success in other sectors, endangered the viability of the state (1971: 4).

Philip Oldenburg’s influential article ‘“A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971’ (1985) draws on Salman Rushdie’s words from his novel Shame (1997) to

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describe Pakistan as a place insufficiently imagined. Oldenburg, a political scientist, captures something of the cultural difference between East and West Pakistanis in their different accounts of why they went to war. East Pakistanis went to war to make explicit their demand for parity between the east and the west and, failing that, to express their demand for separation and independence. In Oldenburg’s description, West Pakistanis responded to this demand as if it were a trace of the machinations of Hindus living in East Pakistan. They felt that by decimating Hindu influence on East Pakistan this demand would die out. Oldenburg’s article conveys less the failure of the state to undertake national integration and more the failure of West Pakistan to acknowledge a shared nationalism: I shall show . . . that the exploitation of East Pakistan, the failure to build a nation encompassing the two peoples, and the tragic mistakes made in dealing with Bengali demands cannot be called inevitable unless one considers forces centered in West Pakistan which pushed the country apart. In this speculative view, the tragedy of Pakistan was in part the result of a failure of understanding by the ‘Pakistanis’, a failure to recognise what the meaning of Pakistan was for the Bengalis and a blind commitment by the ‘Pakistanis’ to their own model of the new state (1985: 712).

With Hasan Askari Rizvi’s early work Internal Strife and External Intervention: India’s Role in the Civil War in East Pakistan [Bangladesh] (1981), we have the classic evaluation of Pakistan’s sovereignty at risk due to undue external influence and outside intervention. Rizvi, a political scientist who now serves as a political and defence consultant of the region, shows that India was compelled to intervene on behalf of East Pakistan in its conflict with West Pakistan because of its shared linkages with East Pakistanis. These were, he recounts, ‘ideological linkages, linkages based on language and culture, and linkages between the Hindu community in East Pakistan and India’ (1981: 258). In other words, India and East Pakistan were clearly more sympathetically linked than East and West Pakistan. On the other hand, India’s motivations were also geopolitical: ‘It cannot be denied that there were humanitarian considerations underlying India’s intervention in the civil war in East Pakistan but we cannot ignore the fact that Indian intervention aimed at changing the political authority pattern of Pakistan’ (p. 260). India was encouraged in its ambitions by the implicit support of the Soviet Union, while Pakistan

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clearly benefited militarily from US and Chinese support. Through his appraisal of the flow of sympathies, linkages, influences and military and other material support, Rizvi provides us a view of the region as one in which state sovereignty is not so much chimera as a negotiated ideal. Thus we see how central the evaluations of the failed state, of nationalism and of sovereignty were to the analysis of the crisis of governance constituting the 1971 war and Bangladesh’s subsequent secession from Pakistan. As mentioned previously (also see endnote 5), there is little sustained work on 1971 in Pakistan. While it does suggest a certain degree of willed ignorance on part of the state and its subjects, I find it intellectually untenable to say that Pakistan suffers from amnesia, as some Pakistani intellectuals now say in criticism of their nation-state. 8 On the contrary, several essays in this volume show how 1971 produced marked effects on diverse domains of life in Pakistan. Moreover, there is one particular line of argument within scholarly discourse that would suggest an attempt to think through the aftermath of 1971. According to these views, Pakistan lost its meaning for existence as a homeland for South Asian Muslims after the losses it suffered in 1971, thus precipitating a stronger engagement with Islam (Weiss 1986). To put it less whimsically, the pragmatic approach the state of Pakistan had evolved to differences amongst Muslims prior to 1971 was replaced by a more ideological approach to Islam after 1971 (Cohen 2001). While I do not disagree that this break-up of Pakistan was followed by a more insistent turn to Islam, this argument denies the extended discussions over the place of Islam in a modern state and experimentation over Islamic modernity since the inception of Pakistan. By imputing amnesia to Pakistan, it imposes a psychological model, that of overcompensation, upon the state and society, letting commonsense substitute for empirically grounded analysis. In lieu of the perspective that sees only amnesia at work in Pakistan’s treatment of 1971 and that sees 1971 segue into a singular engagement with Islam, I posit that there is yet another way in which 1971 made its presence known in the post-1971 period. It is in the intensity with which Pakistani scholars and historians took to examining Pakistan’s beginnings. In other words, the intellectual soul-searching that 1971 generated in Pakistan did not actually attend to the events of 1971. Rather, it recursively extended to the origins of

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Pakistan. The most famous writing of the post-war period would be that by the well-known Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal titled The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985). This book, much more so than any other writings attending to the origins of Pakistan (Ali 1983; Mufti 1995; Ahmed 1997), lays bare how the demand for Pakistan did not arrive on the crest of widespread popular support but on a patchwork of agreements and horse trading amongst Muslim elites in Muslim majority states in colonial India, notably Punjab and Bengal. Not only was there no consensus on what Pakistan was to be, nor was there any mandate for its creation. There was simply a single spokesman — Jinnah. Thus, in one fell swoop this analysis anticipates, but only after the fact, the earlier evaluations of failed state, nationalism and sovereignty, as if Pakistan could fare otherwise given the conditions of its emergence. Jalal’s parting words summarily delineate the impossible circumstances out of which Pakistan was born: While Punjab writhed and turned under the impact of decisions taken in distant places, Mountbatten boldly claimed credit for having accomplished, in less than two and a half months, one of the ‘greatest administrative operations in history’. On behalf of the Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims who were slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands and the refugees who in their millions stumbled fearfully across the frontiers of the two states, the historian has a duty to challenge Mountbatten’s contention and ask whether this ‘great operation’ was not in fact an ignominious scuttle enabling the British to extricate themselves from the awkward responsibility of presiding over India’s communal madness (1985: 293).

Yet, one has only to look at the early literature of the 1960s on Pakistan by scholars such as K. B. Sayeed, K. K. Aziz or famously Hamza Alavi to find similar accounts of the problems of Pakistan at its origins. In his essay ‘Class and State’, the sociologist Hamza Alavi studies the oligarchic nature of the Pakistani state that must mediate vastly different interests and perspectives within its territorial rubric.9 At one point in the essay, Alavi calls the state ‘an alien force’ saying: We can begin by recognizing a plain fact: that there is a widespread tendency on the part of regimes in peripheral capitalist societies, such as Pakistan, to acquire an authoritarian character and to proliferate military dictatorships (1983: 42).

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In The Making of Pakistan: A Study in Nationalism (1967), the historian K. K. Aziz reminds us of the great many ideas of Pakistan that crowded the colonial scene: Every nationalism is sui generis and takes on its character and shape from its context and environment. Each is a mixture of all these ingredients — but never in equal proportions. It is a compound of all these in varying dogma, another that of sentiment, still another that of policy. The same nationalism may appear sometimes to underline its doctrinal foundation and sometimes to over-accentuate its mythical content. However, it is unwise to underestimate or ignore the role of myths in nationalism (1967:15).

With this he launches into a critique of the mythical strains that constitute Pakistani nationalism so as to make tenuous the fact of its emergence. As a final example, in The Political System of Pakistan (1967), K. B. Sayeed, the political scientist who intermittently served in the government, explored how Pakistan’s inheritance of the colonial structure influenced its experimentation with various political systems. Writing about Ayub Khan’s experimentation with Basic Democracies, at one point he says: Ayub’s approach to Pakistan’s politics in similar to that of the British regime in India. The British felt that the demand for representative politics and political independence was largely confined to urban groups, particularly the city lawyers, and therefore, if they were kept in check, it would be relatively easy to control the rural areas (1967: 213).10

The wording of these analyses are much different from later evaluation. In speaking of an oligarchic state, Alavi is not yet speaking of a state bound to failure; in speaking of competing nationalisms, Aziz is not declaring nationalism a failed project; and in speaking of the continuation of the colonial structure into the present, Sayeed is not decrying the impossibility of sovereignty. Rather, they speak pragmatically in the expressed hope that Pakistan may yet overcome its problems. However, this literature review from 1971 forward and then backward in time is useful as it shows how there has always been a strain within Pakistani studies concerned with its tenuous origins, systemic weaknesses and possible/eventual failures in the field of

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statecraft, nationalism and sovereignty to which crises have served as instances for expressing these anxieties. At one level, my analysis would seem to signal the problem of belongingness; how faultlines such as I have been outlining perpetually undercut belongingness to Pakistan. Yet the persistence with which these faultlines are visited and revisited suggest that something else may be afoot. I would venture to say that it is not that belongingness is a problem in Pakistan but rather that belongingness is premised upon acknowledging and mulling over the problems of Pakistan. I am not in any way suggesting that Pakistan does not have serious issues with which it has to contend, but nonetheless reading these evaluations of crisis against the grain is productive. It allows one to understand the consistency of certain discursive preoccupations of the state of Pakistan and its subjects, intellectuals and laymen alike, and thereby to excavate a more complex means by which attachment to Pakistan happens.

Crisis and Ontology How are we to understand the specific relationship between crisis and the ontological condition of human immigrancy I am imputing to Pakistan? It is not the case that life in Pakistan is in a state of perpetual crisis. To say so would deprive crisis of its definitional import as a critical turning point within a given event or condition. It would also cast life in Pakistan in a somewhat unreal light to think of it as always crisis-ridden. Rather, crisis in Pakistan has served as the occasion to articulate evaluations that express something about Pakistan, in particular the modes of attaching to it. Moreover, the way in which the essays and excerpts in this volume treat these evaluations, we see how they come to carry ontological weight. In other words, reflections upon a specific set of crisis events and evaluations express something more generally about the present. In so doing, the writings render the evaluation of Pakistan as a failed state into a meditation on the artificiality of the modern state, that of the failure of nationalism as a difficulty of committing to one vision of things, and the failure of sovereignty as an anxiety over the foreignness that resides within. Yet, no sooner as they do as much, they rearrange established historical facts, relocate themselves elsewhere than the point of view of the state, bring into view new vistas of innovation and forces of contingency, and provide alternative ways of being. In particular, they draw our attention to that which exceeds crisis. And more often than not this excess accrues from the dimension of the everyday that runs

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through any event or condition and that cannot be delimited to crisis alone. In other words, the writings gathered here simultaneously inhabit crisis and the horizon beyond it. In the interest of drawing out the fullest scope of the work undertaken by these writings, I arrange my discussion of them according to the following themes: (i) the artificiality of the state, (ii) nationalist visions, (iii) the foreignness within, and (iv) the everyday. I put these themes into conversation with broader theoretical perspectives on the state, nationalism, sovereignty and the everyday. I should say at the outset that each of these writings could be taken to speak to several of these themes, and to speak to others besides, but I have chosen to group them so as to draw out our themes more forcefully.

Artificiality of the State Timothy Mitchell’s now classic essay ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics’ (1991) put forward some of the crucial Foucauldian lineaments of the study of the state that endure to the present. Most notably, Mitchell gave us the state that does not have presence as such but which is retrospectively produced by a dispersed field of bureaucratic and administrative effects. In Magic of the State (1996) Michael Taussig gave a different understanding in which the state substantiates itself through its entanglement with local practices of magic, sorcery and secrecy. In their introduction to Anthropology at the Margins of the State (2004) Veena Das and Debbie Poole proffer a useful conjoining of the two perspectives by emphasising that the state partakes of both logics, that of transparent government and hidden practices by appearing both legible and illegible to its constituencies.11 Legibility and illegibility are mutually constitutive and are present together in the everyday life of the state. The varied experiences of the state in Pakistan provide a specific take on the issue of the legibility and illegibility of states. While the state is pervasive in everyday life, actualised and naturalised through material artifacts such as decrees and documents, the state is also experienced as artificial, in so far as it does not fit individual circumstances. It appears differentially remote and indifferent. While this perception of the state would raise the crucial question of whether it indicates an opting out of Pakistan, in line with the analysis that I have been putting forth in this introductory essay, I would ask that we consider this discomfort with the state not as seeking separation from it but assimilation within it, to borrow Aamir R. Mufti’s felicitous

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words (2007). These experiences of the state are useful because they show how statecraft is a fine management of senses of artificiality and naturalness, how quickly a state can flip from one sense of it to another or how both senses of the state may persist alongside each other. It is with Aamir R. Mufti’s contribution to this volume that I begin my discussion of those essays that bring to mind ruminations on the artificiality of the state. Mufti’s essay, ‘A Lyric History of India’, speaks of the Urdu progressive poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz who hailed from Sialkot and resided in Lahore, Punjab. Lahore was granted to Pakistan during partition. That was how Faiz came to be in Pakistan after 1947. Thus, by the sleight of hand of states, Mufti claims, Faiz found himself an exile in his own hometown from his beloved India. Faiz gave most poignant expression to the artifice and artificiality of states by setting himself up in the role of an outsider to the state in which he found himself marooned. At one point he left for Beirut, Lebanon in self-imposed exile. This movement outwards was not to mark his distance from Pakistan but to move to a desired picture of it, for he used his position of exile to launch the most stringent criticisms of Pakistan’s various military governments. The central crisis in Faiz’s life was his irreparable separation from himself, that is, from that version of himself that persisted in undivided India. Mufti finds Faiz to give fullest expression to his sense of separation from himself in what Mufti describes as ‘lyric poetry’. This poetry, specifically (i) the ghazal and (ii) the nazm forms, has been largely ignored for being decadent, claimed as masochistic by Faiz’s leftist compatriots in Pakistan for self-indulgently mourning the loss of a beloved without any explicit political objectives. Yet, deep within Faiz’s lyric poetry Mufti finds that the lost beloved was none other than the Indian subject, a collective selfhood. The self as Indian that resists reification as a stable singularity nicely illustrates the theme of foreignness residing within, a theme further developed in the essay by Deepak Mehta in this collection, through the introduction of the very possibility of the Hindu within the self. It also expresses a critique of the nationalist project in that it asks to what extent a common vision of a future can be forged when the past, with the figure of the Indian/Hindu as the trace of a time of commingling and conflict, of separation and union, remains repressed. Thus, partition serves as a foundational event in Mufti’s account, from which point issue out

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trajectories of the sense of the state as artificial, the repression of memories and unfulfilled nationalist aspirations. In ‘The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State’, Tahir Hasnain Naqvi also treats partition as a foundational event in the history of Pakistan. However, he speaks of it as such from the perspective of the state which, he says, staked its sovereignty upon the management of refugees pouring into Pakistan in the aftermath of partition. As the movement of people reached momentous proportions with the outbreak of unanticipated violence between the two opposing streams of refugees, Pakistan state worked furiously to cast wide its net so as to appear to have anticipated the violence and thus to have planned for all exigencies. In so doing, Naqvi says, the state revealed its paradoxical selfpositioning. Unlike the worldwide refugee situation at the time when the European state, for instance, staked its sovereignty on its ability to produce and dispose of ‘bare life’ such as that of refugees (Agamben 1998), Pakistan staked its sovereignty on the appropriate reception and integration of refugees, that is, on the fullest flowering of their lives. In so doing it also had to subsume within itself the violence for which the refugees, that is, its future citizens, were responsible. Thus, it ended up staking its sovereignty upon violence. However, in not being able to countenance violence, in other words, in not being able to admit that the violence exceeded its governmental plans and projections, it both gave expression to its act of self-construction and to the limits of its constructed nature. In a sense then the refugees became the marker of this paradoxical self-positioning, both an integral part of the state’s construction of itself and outside of it. Shahmim Raza, a refugee quoted in Naqvi’s paper, eloquently gives expression to this paradox. Thankful to have reached Pakistan, she expresses her gratitude to Pakistan for giving her refuge. But in the same breath she speaks of having returned to her homeland and awaits her full rights as its citizen. The refugee would seem to refract the artificiality of the state, both legitimising the state while serving as the foreign within. Oskar Verkaaik’s contribution, ‘A Real Terrorist’, an excerpt from his book Sayyid Pakistani and the Wedding of the Dead, continues the saga of the refugees from India, self-designatedly the muhajirs, into the recent past in Pakistan. Uneasily integrated into major urban centres in Sind, notably Hyderabad and Karachi, the muhajirs had by now a violent history of confrontation with both the provincial and

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federal government, arising out of their sense of the state’s failure to follow through on its promises to this constituency. It was a most peculiar constituency; without any autochthonous claim upon Pakistan but which constituted the bulk of the political movement for Pakistan and upon whose linguistic and cultural provisions Pakistan relied, as evidenced by Pakistani films of the 1960s about which Iftikhar Dadi writes in this collection. In this particular essay Verkaaik explores how young men born in Pakistan feel the state to be remote and indifferent to their lot, yet simultaneously feel themselves to be intimately connected to it in so far as their violent actions impinge directly upon its body politic. In so doing, he provides the perspective of the muhajirs on the paradoxical relationship between themselves and the state of Pakistan, as previously outlined by Naqvi, some 40 years since Partition in which their violence founds the state but stands outside of it. Verkaaik conveys a variegated sense of this distant yet intimate connection to the state through the stories of two young men, friends, both of whom are recruited by the MQM (Muttahida Qaumi Movement), the major political force that emerged in the 1980s to represent the interests of the muhajirs. While Adil feels strongly the force of political rhetoric and is quickly persuaded to undertake a difficult, possibly violent mission, Javed experiences the rhetoric as hollow and the invitation to action as the sly overtures of a political machine that willingly sacrifices its young for its own perpetuation. Risking the derision of his friends, he chooses instead to marry, desire his wife and find a job. Verkaaik’s lyrical description of muhajir dominated Hyderabad and of the boys’ lives therein strongly introduces the singular dimension of the everyday with its own siren calls that cut through the entanglement of lives with the state. Yet, by the 1980s, it was not the provincial and ethnic dissonance of which Naqvi and Verkaaik speak that informed one’s sense of alienation from Pakistan. It was the sectarian divides that emerged most forcefully under President Zia ul-Haq. Most notably, sectarianism felt as though produced by the state’s policies and practices underlining public perception of the state as an alien force (Zaman 2007). Through his close analysis of the text The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan written by Shakyh Wahid Baksh Sial Rabbani, Rob Rozehnal shows how a prominent shakyh (leader) of the Pakistani branch of the Sufi silsila (lineage), the Sabri Chistiya, attempted to

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establish the spiritual prefiguring of Pakistan to castigate the state for wasting Pakistan’s heritage.12 In ‘Re-imagining the “Land of the Pure”: A Sufi Master Reclaims Islamic Orthodoxy and Pakistani Identity’ Rozehnal shows Wahid Bakhsh writing that, irrespective of who and what actually brought Pakistan into being, it was already augured by Sufi saints of the region. In other words, it was to come into being, irrespective of human agency. Pre-figured in a spiritual vision, it was to be the world’s first spiritually grounded nation-state powered as much by spirituality as by its other material and military resources. So even though Sufis and Sufism had fared poorly in Pakistan, due as much to administrative interference into their material affairs as to a widespread suspicion of them inculcated by modernist Islam, it was Sufism that grounded the creation of Pakistan. It was Sufism that would allow it to overcome the violence of its origins, the perceived artificiality of its state, and the dispersal of its nationalist project into contending sectarian and political visions to produce unity towards ensuring its worldly success. Albeit based in love for humanity, this was Sufism with a fighting spirit in that it would fight for Pakistan in the face of enduring polytheism, modern paganism and western materialism, a Sufism clearly cognisant of the threats of the foreignness both within and without. What Shakyh Wahid Bakhsh calls ‘the power potential of Pakistan’, Mazher Sahib, the self-styled pir (spiritual guide) in Verkaaik’s piece, calls ‘super potential’.

Difficulties of Committing to a Single Vision and Foreignness Within While older studies of nationalism made a virtue of the substantive sharing of common origins, languages, ethnicities, etc., in his now classic statement Imagined Community (1991), Benedict Anderson shifted our focus from the substance of what is shared to the modular modes of sharing itself, particularly, the selective memorialisation and collective forgetting practised by a buoyant nationalism and emergent nation-state. Yet, what if that which is shared is exactly the inability to memorialise and collectively forget, the winnowing through competing claims to an agreed upon version of the useful past and a possible future? The early subaltern historians (Guha and Spivak 1988) responded to this challenge with detailed studies of divergent tendencies within Indian nationalism under British colonial rule, showing how

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consensus was often no more than a momentary agreement that dispersed into acts of coercion and what has famously been called ‘dominance without hegemony’ (Guha 1998). More often than not, however, they were qualifying a nationalism whose success, in so far as it produced freedom from colonialism, they took for granted. Furthermore, they delimited difference in their accounts as they tended to pit subaltern groups as relatively homogenous against a highly individualised and internally differentiated nationalist elite. What if we were to take account not only of the differences that run internal to any community but within any imaginary or even within the individual? Would it render uncertain the success of nationalism? What would it do to the assumed sovereignty of the self as of the state? In Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (1994), James Siegel recounts a famous scene in the writings of an Indonesian nationalist in which he realises that a Dutch policeman has mistaken him, however fleetingly, for a Dutch colonial. In that moment of misrecognition the author realises in a flash that he could pass for someone else, not necessarily Dutch but not necessarily a Javanese-speaking person linguistically and culturally tied to a specific locality. It is this other thing for which he could pass, the foreignness within him that the Dutch policeman’s mistake inadvertently captures, which constitutes an emergent Indonesian identity. In other words, it is precisely difference internal to a self, a self that is hidden to itself, militating against any notion of the sovereignty of the self which opens up the possibility of nationalism. Transposing this picture of the self upon the sovereignty of a state unsettles the assumption of a state known to itself and its citizens. Once again, the experiences in Pakistan can contribute both specifically and generally to a discussion of divergent tendencies within nationalism and foreignness within oneself. As mentioned previously, nationalism has been declared a failed enterprise in Pakistan, as much a failure of citizens to fully subscribe to a single vision, as of the state in successfully naturalising such a vision. Yet if one looks at Pakistan’s relation to Islam, which is usually taken to be singular, multiple imaginations of this relatedness abound, from recasting Pakistan’s troublesome origin as one of fulfilling a Sufi vision (see Rozehnal) to considering Pakistan the guard house of an archaic Islam (see Abbas). These arguments would suggest the flowering of imagination

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in the absence of an official nationalism. While the threats of an excess of imagination have been amply explored, the possibilities remain as yet understudied perhaps because of their challenge to an always emergent official nationalism. Furthermore, it cannot be assumed that an official nationalism has not been effective. In the ways in which certain imaginations of solidarity and possibilities for relatedness, such as those based on class consciousness (see Dadi and Ali), have been rendered as though non-existent in the history of Pakistan would suggest how influential even the most unsuccessful form of officialdom has been. An exploration of foreignness further suggests just how complicated a task it is to forge a nationalism premised on sameness or to assume sovereignty as self-contained. While foreignness has most often been studied as the extent of external influence and intervention in Pakistan, it must also be of consideration in the ways in which a particular colonial past continues to be present even in one’s ways of speaking and living. Furthermore, foreignness may reside in the ways in which shared pasts are repressed within one’s memories, repugnant others are rendered intimate within the recesses of one’s self, and selves turn against themselves. As such it may be considered an elsewhere lining one’s interior, perhaps, even a productive outside located within oneself from which to look upon oneself and one’s milieu. Thus, while Mufti, Naqvi, Verkaaik and Rozehnal give us essays that explore how the state appears to its citizens, the essays by Dadi, Saikia and Ali more explicitly address the interrelations and tensions among different bodies of the citizenry suggesting the difficulties, if not the impossibilities, of sustaining a nationalist vision. Iqtidar’s essay is a close study of the interrelations between two political parties that suggest not so much limits of nationalism as how one’s bitterest rival, in clear opposition to everything one stands for, can serve to educate one. In ‘Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 70s’, Iftikhar Dadi makes Pakistani Urdu films, lush melodramas of the 1960s and 1970s, the subject of his essay. He finds in them a growing anxiety that nothing concrete holds Pakistan together. And this anxiety is articulated cinematically through the failure of Urdu to establish its linguistic and cultural hegemony. This hegemony was, after all, the promise that the muhajirs once held for the state of

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Pakistan and upon which the Urdu-speaking non-muhajir Pakistanis, notably the Punjabis, count to pull Pakistan together. Dadi explores the sense of crisis from within the nationalist project to establish Urdu as the lingua franca of the nation-state through the changing selfrepresentation of the Urdu-speaking person in Pakistani cinema. In the movie Arman (Desire), made in the mid-1960s in the heyday of Ayub Khan’s modernist military leadership, the Urdu-speaking elite are presented as free of the trappings of tradition and joyfully immersed in an American-style modernity. However, by the time the movie Anari (Novice) was made in the mid-1970s, the representation of the Urdu-speaking person had undergone a major transformation from being cosmopolitan to appearing provincial. So although the Urdu-speaking village buffoon, the protagonist of the film, prevailed, his representation as close to caricature revealed deep ambivalence over his success. Thus, says Dadi, Urdu cinema ceased to be; moving into television serials to be replaced by the popular regional films, of which Punjabi films have been particularly successful. In ‘Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistani Army, Violence and Memories of 1971’, Yasmin Saikia presents a small portion of her long-term study of the after-effects of the war between West and East Pakistan in 1971 of which I spoke in an earlier section. What is noteworthy about Saikia’s study is that she brings India into the picture such that we see this war as a complex three-way struggle as opposed to a unilateral offense by West Pakistan. Within this context, Saikia attempts to redress the excess of speech over the war on the part of nationalist Bangladesh and triumphal India, and the continued silence on the part of the aggressor, Pakistan, by speaking of the collective suffering the war has entailed and its possible overcoming through the philosophy of insaniyat (humanity). Thus, she attends as carefully to the narratives of events of war by military generals and their subalterns as those of the numerous victims of war in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. She most vividly recounts the narratives of encounter between West and East Pakistanis when the generals and subalterns of the predominantly West Pakistani army are sent to East Pakistan in preparation for war. The culture shock is palpable in the West Pakistani soldiers’ accounts of finding themselves air-dropped into rural East Pakistan where the dense vegetation, the watery landscape and the Bengali-speaking people feel alien. The raping, the killing and the scavenging for food all run into one another as just so many

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tasks within a day’s work in the army. The shock of encounter is very illuminating of the fact that the West and East were strangers to one another despite being of one nation-state, putatively united under one religion. Thus, Dadi gives us the cinematic scene of encounter between the Urdu-speaking elite of Pakistan and Punjabis, and Saikia the military encounter to death between West and East Pakistanis, both showing in their distinct ways the difficulties besetting the nationalist project in Pakistan. With Kamran Ali’s essay ‘Strength of the State Meets Strength of the Street: The 1972 Labour Struggle in Karachi’, we are offered an account of a different kind of project which tried to rise above regional and ethnic divides, even above nationalism, to engender class consciousness. He writes of the workers’ struggle of the 1960s culminating in the 1972 Labour Struggle in Karachi. Within Ali’s careful account, we learn that workers experienced Ayub Khan’s military regime quite differently than the Urdu-speaking elite mentioned in Dadi’s paper. The regime did not come with buoyant promises of modernity, as with heavy repression and governmental procedures shortchanging international labour standards. However, what comes across in Ali’s account is how worker politics continued to be quite lively with popular strikes and encirclements. Also clear is the varied and paternalistic nature of the trade union movement that tried to graft itself on to worker politics. While Ali is careful not to overplay the ethnic divides, it is clear that workers were as marked and placed within hierarchies by ethnicity as by class positions. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s ascension to the Presidentship of Pakistan following the 1971 war brought promise of a new era of labour politics. However, when a worker strike in June 1972 was met by an unprecedented intensity of police violence it became clear that the Pakistan People’s Party government lead by Bhutto was not that different from Ayub’s military government. While Ali leaves us with a sense of the dissolution of the worker struggle into weakened trade unions and a slide into patron–client relations with the state, we are nonetheless given to learn that such a place with a heavy interpenetration of bureaucracy, industry and military could and did once give birth to vibrant worker politics. Following Ali’s lead in describing a once vibrant leftist movement in Pakistan, Humeira Iqtidar’s essay ‘Learning to be Left: Jamaat-e Islami (JI) in Pakistan’, shows just how influential the left labour movement once was by exploring how the religious party, Jamaat-e

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Islami, I belligerently anti-left and anti-communist since the 1980s, learnt from it. While it has been generally assumed that the JI is an elitist party, subscribing to a vanguard theory of political leadership (Nasr 1994), Iqtidar shows how JI incorporated techniques of grassroots mobilisation utilised by the left through participation in leftist political rallies of the 1960s and early 1970s. In the 1990s the Pakistan Army attempted to force a new style of contract upon the country’s peasants. At this time the peasants turned to none other than JI’s Kisan Board (Farmers Board) to solicit its help in negotiating with the army. This suggested its success in winning over workers and peasants. Moreover, the choice of JI over any other groups is interesting in that it is made by Christian peasants, leading one to ask what promise a political party with an explicitly Islamic agenda has for its Christian constituency. It suggests, as Iqtidar nicely brings out, that the JI did not simply learn organisational tricks from the left but that they may have learnt to be left-leaning. With the essays by Ahmed, Abbas, Mehta and Hyder, we move to a consideration of the theme of foreignness. Foreignness within Pakistan has most often been spoken of as the undue external influence and intervention into its inner workings, by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya or any other nation. Pakistan’s porous nature often makes suspect the intentions and workings of its state, political parties and civil institutions to the average person (Verkaaik 2001). Yet foreignness may also be thought of as the persistence of colonial structures of government into the present as has been well explored by many Pakistani scholars (Sayeed 1967; Jalal 1990). The essay by Asad Ahmed, ‘From Muslims to Apostates: The Legal Construction of Muslim Identity and Ahmadi Difference’, goes further in examining the extent to which colonial categories and procedures continue to inform civil and criminal law, which are said to have been reformed by bringing them into alignment with the tenets of Islam. Through close readings of parliamentary debates on constitution making and amending in the 1970s, cases in the high courts and the parallel structure of sharia (Islamic Law) courts in the 1980s, culminating in a Supreme Court decision in the early 1990s, Ahmed shows how the state uses syncretic modes of legal reasoning and a wide range of legal instruments to secure its position as the ultimate authority on Islam. In his exploration of how the state struggles to render Ahmadis, the newest entrants to the Islamic community, into non-Muslims through laws and courts largely given to it by

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the colonial state, he shows how colonialism continues to animate contemporary struggles over Islam. A persistent aspect of foreignness that has come up several times already in our discussion is that of the Hindu within the Pakistani body polity and self. Earlier, I discussed Oldenburg describing how West Pakistanis were convinced of Hindu influence in East Pakistan, leading them to think that if they were able to eradicate this influence East Pakistanis would fall in line. We discussed Mufti’s subtle exposition of Faiz pining for his collective self, that is, his self as Indian/Hindu. Then we had Wahid Bakhsh decry the lingering influence of polytheism in Islam in Pakistan in Rozehnal’s essay. Thus, we see how the Hindu moves from being a physical presence within a body polity, to being a part of the inner self, to being a metaphysical scourge upon monotheism. These examples also point to the efforts by Pakistanis to continue to grapple with the place of India in their memories, imagination and anticipations. Thus, the figure of the Hindu and of India more generally constitutes a dense symbolic system within the Muslim imaginary in Pakistan, one that is yet to be properly unpacked. Deepak Mehta’s contribution to this collection, ‘Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu-Indian and Muslim-Pakistani Publics in Bombay’, goes some way in undertaking the unpacking for us. In an examination of the colonial archives in Bombay of the 1920s, Mehta finds a fine equilibration of insults and counter-insults that sustains the structure of hate between Bombay’s Muslim and Hindu communities in the present. The archives suggest two communities who once lived cheek by jowl with intimate knowledge on how to hurt each other, a deep familiarity with one’s enemy being necessary for putting everyday life under jeopardy and ensuring it. But what makes Mehta’s essay most relevant for our volume on twentieth-century Pakistan is the extent to which Pakistan constitutes the foreign within India. There is a standing imagination of Pakistan that draws upon the colonial archives of hate, as Mehta provocatively calls them, and a vigilance of Muslim communities by Hindu nationalist groups to see that they do not try to act Pakistani or grow a Pakistan within present day India. In other words, the idea of Pakistan does not belong to Pakistan alone. While also serving as intimate referents in the speech of Indian Muslims, Pakistan and Pakistani circulate among and acquire elements of the fantastic in the political speech of extremist Hindu groups in India.

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The theme of foreignness as mediated by colonialism gets a different twist in Sadia Abbas’s essay, ‘Itineraries of Conversion: Judaic Paths to a Muslim Pakistan’. She writes of how Imran Khan, the reputed Pakistani ex-cricketer, ex-playboy and budding politician, chooses a route of return to Islam sharply distinguished from the Islam inherited by Pakistan from its colonial and pre-colonial predecessor states, the Islam of which Wahid Bakhsh once complained as being dispersed into numerous and conflicting sectarian visions (see Rozehnal). He selects as his sources of inspiration two famous Jewish converts to Islam, Muhammad Asad and Maryam Jameelah, who claim access to an archaic form of Islam in which they see the perfect expression of Universal Judaism against the narrow strictures of Zionist Judaism. Abbas claims that in the process of converting out of the Islam, into which Khan is presumably born as a Pathan in Pakistan, into this archaic vision of Islam, Imran Khan uncritically reproduces the orientalist tropes utilised by Jameelah and Asad in speaking of Islam as an unchanging constant and Muslims as bearing the permanent inscription of Islam upon them. Moreover, the fact that Imran Khan marries a Jewish girl from England and converts her to Islam, hints Abbas, indicates there may be a fantasy at work of conquering and subsuming Jewry within Islam. We are made to see how there is something very singular and perhaps unassimilable about this particular vision of Islam, unlike that of Shakyh Wahid Bakhsh’s that aims to reunite all Pakistanis under the rubric of Sufism. At the same time, Abbas raises for us the marvellous question of what is it about Pakistan that gives occasion for such fantasies. By speaking of Muhammad Iqbal, the Indian poet–philosopher posthumously declared Pakistan’s poet laureate, Akbar Hyder’s contribution, ‘Iqbal and Karbala’, brings to the fore the one historical persona who expresses all the ambivalences preoccupying Pakistanis, which I have been elaborating. Muhammad Iqbal is said to be the visionary of Pakistan. Yet, in all his writings he militates against the form of the modern state, seeing it as too artificial to capture the organic nature of the ummah (community of believers). He is upheld as the exponent of a certain variant of Indian nationalism. However, in his later life, he is said to have thought coexistence impossible with religious others. Further yet, his writings continually speak of the foreign within through the figuration of Hinduism as the Brahmin or the temple.

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In this essay, Hyder introduces another paradox into Iqbal’s persona. Iqbal is said to have been disapproving of Sufism, considering it a form of flight from the world. Hyder unveils him to be a sensitive Sufi in the Sunni tradition for whom Karbala, the symbol of oppression of the Shias, served as the trope of martyrdom for all Muslims, regardless of sectarian affiliation. Most astonishingly, Hyder claims, Iqbal rendered the two polar opposites within the Karbala drama, the martyred Husain and the oppressive Yazid who ordered his killing, as a dialectical unity. This dialectic, presumably lying within Muslims, further complicates any picture of a sovereign state or a self.

The Everyday While anthropology is the discipline most often preoccupied with everyday life, it is unfortunate that the two contemporary theorists who have exerted great influence on the concept of everyday life have not sufficiently attended to the dimension of the everyday in and of itself. In other words, they have tended most often to see it as derivative of a standing political and economic order. While Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1991) considers everyday life to be the passive site where structural inequalities play themselves out, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) Michel de Certeau asserts the agential nature of everyday life by showing how people resist and undermine structures of dominance from within. Yet neither considers how everyday life may have its own inner dynamics and temporalities in which structural forces have their place. If scholarly attention to Pakistan has by and large been preoccupied with the state and nation, it is only very recently that the dimension of the everyday has been brought into clearer focus, more precisely through the exploration of individual lives in the writings of Ewing (1997), Verkaaik (2004) and Ring (2006). Moreover, these lives are equally that of state institutions and artifacts, of political parties and religious traditions, as of average Pakistanis. It is not necessarily the case that the sheer existence of a ‘daily-ness’ negates crisis, that is, in self-perpetuating everyday life gives lie to the crises that inform Pakistan’s past and present. Nor is it the case that a more organic order holds within everyday life that gives cause for hope in the face of the artificiality of the state, the fragility of national connectivity and the pervasiveness of foreign influence. Rather, the same forces

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exist within the dimension of the everyday as they do within the national scene, suggesting how crisis is lived. Attention to the detail of everyday life yields a differentiated milieu, a complex range of human subjectivities and activities and the continual possibility of an unexpected turn of events leading to different outcomes. In other words, it yields an existence that cannot be entirely contained within the category of crisis and its standard evaluations. With Bard, Andrabi et al., Hull and Khan, I turn now to the four final essays for an elaboration of the everyday that, while not entirely resisting crisis, at least exceeds its evaluations. In ‘Look Who’s Talking Now: Voice and Authority in Pakistani Shi’i Women’s Gatherings’, Amy Bard continues Akbar Hyder’s exploration of Shia theology but as lived experience through her focus on a young Shia zakira (female preacher) in Pakistan. The preacher’s services are in great demand during the Islamic month of Muharram when Shias mourn their loss through commemorating the events of Karbala in various gatherings (majalis). Restricting herself to female-only majalis, Bard does a close study of the recitational form and narrative strategies of the preachers. In the process, the sectarian conflicts in Pakistan that are repeatedly mentioned in the essays by Rozehnal, Ahmed, Abbas and Hyder fade out of sight. Instead, we are brought close to the theological events that inspire devotion and the disciplining in rhetoric and gesture by which one learns to render these events so as to make one’s audience re-live them. The largely female audience must cry copiously for the preacher to consider her lecture a success. Through the close analysis of a particular sermon, Bard suggests the virtuosity of the preacher as of the women-audience, leading her to argue that Shia women have not only kept vibrant their tradition through their enthusiastic participation, but they have actually innovated styles of performance and audience response. While Bard acknowledges the difficulties introduced into Shia lives by the larger context of Pakistan, even these are turned to the advantage of devotion as references to contemporary political events are used in sermons to elicit deeper emotional responses. In the end a minority is shown to endure in Pakistan. While Bard speaks of the everydayness of a religious tradition, Tahir Andrabi et al. in ‘Madrasa Metrics: The Statistics and Rhetoric of Religious Enrolment in Pakistan’ focus on the education choices of Pakistani parents in rural settings to discount the inordinate

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attraction to religious education and the deep desire to become a (terrorist) such education is said to produce. In so doing they work to introduce the dimension of the everyday into poor Pakistani Muslim lives, which is slowly being rendered into stereotype with the rise of security studies and its alarmist pictures of the world of Muslims as docile subjects, vulnerable to external influence. In some ways this is an unusual piece in this volume in so far as it relies upon economic data while the rest of the pieces are more descriptive in nature. However, I felt its inclusion to be important not only because it undermined the above assumptions about Pakistan, but also because this work suggests how susceptible scholarship and journalism on Pakistan has been to such unfounded assumptions, which empirical work readily unsettles or else renders more complex. While it is almost commonsensically believed that poorer parents willingly send their children to madrasas (religious schools) to accrue religious merit for themselves, this group of economists study education choices to show that most parents send their children only reluctantly and avoid madrasas if other opportunities for schooling exist. Thus, one finds difference in educational opportunities to hold within a family as well as across families. This finding is most illuminating as it shows the extent to which people, rural and uneducated, are invested in Pakistan’s promise of modernity. It would further suggest that we could expect to find them similarly preoccupied with the problems of belongingness as in the case of the intelligentsia. In ‘Uncivil Politics and the Appropriation of Planning in Islamabad’, Matthew Hull continues the theme of the everyday, this time attending to the daily workings of the state through an examination of the Capital Development Authority entrusted with building and managing Islamabad, the modernist capital dreamt of by Ayub Khan and materialised by the Greek town planner Constantinos Doxiadis in the 1960s. While the city never served as a proper crucible for civil politics, Hull shows how the CDA inadvertently produced what he calls uncivil politics. In the details provided by Hull’s essay — the scramble over housing allotment lists, the unofficial insertion of names of benefactors, etc. — he is clearly describing an institution that smacks of graft. It would be the natural target of the many anti-corruption campaigns undertaken by well-meaning international agencies and desultorily put into effect by their local representatives. However, Hull suggests that what looks

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like outright corruption may not be so easily categorised. Many of the actions are, after all, undertaken to redress gross neglect, in some cases injustice, of the state, others to ensure that families and communities stay together in the face of the dispersal mechanisms at work within the bureaucracy, while still others are undertaken out of relations of friendship and kinship. Thus, Hull refuses to see this as a crisis of the state or of civil society. Instead he prefers to see this as the way in which something as unwieldy as a modernist city, built from scratch, has been made to work; how a bureaucracy has come to be inhabited by non-bureaucrats; and, how an authoritarian government has been pushed and pulled into expressing a politics of sorts. In the final essay in the series on the everyday, ‘What is it to build a Mosque? Or, the Violence of the Ordinary’, Naveeda Khan attempts to take stock of everyday life in urban Pakistan, in the city of Lahore, through a close examination of how people busy themselves with building mosques in their neighbourhoods. She explores mosques as she sees the building of mosques both as a time-old expression of piety as well as an expression of the Pakistani imagination of new beginnings within the context of the nation-state. It soon becomes clear through people’s narratives that mosques are built with various projects of self-formation in mind and community. Khan explores these projects through the stories of construction and the politics of usurpation that develop around individual mosques. In this way, she is able to show how central and lively experimentations on the self and the community are in Pakistani Sunni practice. However, it soon becomes clear that entropy is also part of this milieu. Entropy, in her case, results in the dispersal of the original momentum behind building mosques as people descend to fighting each other. While such entropy is to be expected, the essay draws on Henri Bergson (1998) to suggest that life requires the conservation of energy to take a milieu forward. There is a sense in which small acts of consideration towards others in the midst of conflicts shows this milieu to be banking energy for a different future. In the discussion of the essays in this collection thus far, I hope to have shown how crisis, devolved into its various evaluations as failed state/artificiality of the state, failed nationalism/difficulties of committing to a single vision, compromised sovereignty and security/foreignness within, is lived and prevailed over at various times and different settings within Pakistan. This is by way of suggesting how crisis and its beyond constitute a simultaneous experience for

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Pakistanis and how mulling this simultaneity provides the conditions of possibilities for attaching to Pakistan. Other themes have emerged from my discussion so far that are also important to put on the table. As with the earlier generation of Pakistani scholars, we see many of the authors in this collection preoccupied with the event of partition and its capillary effects into the present. Colonialism is a persistent influence upon the present whose lineaments we have yet to take full measure of. There is a sense in which India exists not only as a regional enemy but also as an intimate other. The question of Bangladesh or how to come to terms with what happened in 1971, which goes beyond pious hand wringing and cringing confessions, is a crucial issue that Pakistan continues to deal with. While the state is often shown to be weak and compromised or violent and repressive, it is never complacent and inactive. Instead, it is shown to be continually attempting to gauge the demands upon it and to adjudicate on contentious issues. The fact that other forms of social arrangements, aesthetic productions and political imaginaries exist but are either hidden from view or excised from public memory posits the necessity for perpetually recounting the history of Pakistan but from varied perspectives and through diverse sources. That the history of Pakistan is not simply a local history but a part of world history with experiences in Pakistan speaking to larger historical and theoretical issues is a consistent claim of the writings presented here. Finally, there is the issue of Islam’s place in Pakistan. Throughout I militated against organising the essays that dealt with Islam under a common rubric. This reluctance on my part comes from my sense that Pakistans relationship with Islam is all too often readily assumed, as in the Pakistani ruling elite instrumentalises Islam or that Pakistan turned to Islam with the failure of its nationalist project. Yet, if one looks at the essays in this collection, one can see how Pakistan’s relationship with Islam is as problematic as its relationship with the state form, nationalism or foreign influence. In other words, mulling over the problems of Islam in Pakistan, in its myriad ties to colonial bureaucracy and governance, the perception of official Islam as artificial, the multiple imaginings of Islam, the fears over the outer aggression towards Islam and its inner pollution, the endurance of the tradition along both its majoritarian and minoritarian forms, all speak to how integrally Islam is tied to the problem of belongingness

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and the means of attaching to Pakistan. Therefore, it alone cannot be considered as the panacea to Pakistan’s problems.

Conclusion If a state were in perpetual crisis, or rather, goes from one articulation of crisis to another, how do the fortunes of its citizen body and ancillary institutions fare? Does the army, as a privileged institution, derive its strength in inverse proportion to that of the civilian state? Do political parties simply perform their differences from one another without offering meaningful options to the state and citizenry? Must the legislature, judiciary and bureaucracy now work under the taint of corruption and compromise? Do the citizenry, under the rubric of ordinary people, doggedly continue on as before while dealing with new exigencies as they arise? What happens to all that which makes up a nation-state but goes under the threshold of the sensible, such as, shared memories, traditions, and histories; affiliations to peoples and places; and, senses of a future together, however contested these may be? Much is assumed by way of cause and effect and little demonstrated in the instance of a postcolonial state such as Pakistan. It is with these fighting words that we began this exercise some three years ago, to put together this volume of writings. Our effort was to introduce an empirical thickness to the history and present of Pakistan. While we were not able to answer all these questions we posed to ourselves, it is from this vantage position of detail that this collection works hard to interrogate the predominant narratives that locate Pakistan under the sign of crisis, by examining how crisis is framed, sensed, registered and refused in different ways by various constituencies. In so doing, we hope to have unsettled assumptions that intercalate state, civil society and citizenry in Pakistan and that go under the guise of common sense. Finally, it is our hope that these contributions will prompt not only a reconsideration of Pakistan, but will also serve as a meditation on the present condition, that of ‘human immigrancy’.

Notes 1. In this introduction I do not study any one instance of crisis in Pakistan. Rather, I am interested in the discursive evaluations of crisis that have developed over the course of Pakistan’s history. However, my approach is not deconstructing these discourses, to unmask some villainy at work internal

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3. 4.

5.

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to the disciplines that have produced them. Rather, I wish to engage these evaluations as serious statements on life in Pakistan, to see how they may be hinged to actual experiences and expressions as held up by the essays in this volume. While the outpourings of these disciplines on Pakistan are much too vast and varied for me to cover exhaustively, I do wish to draw attention to the fact that this writing is largely undertaken by scholars located in the United States (US), with the second largest bulk of writing by Pakistani scholars. This should not surprise given the extent of US involvement in the country. Notable among US scholars are Abbott (1968), Baxter (1974 and 1984), Binder (1961), Braibanti (1987), Bray (1997), Callard (1957), Cohen (1984 and 2006), Feldman (1972), Kennedy (1987), Oldenburg (1980 and 1985), Weiss (1986 and 2001), Wheeler (1970) and Ziring (1980). Among Pakistani scholars who show a preoccupation with crises of the state, nationalism and security see Khan (1973), Hussain (1985), Islam (1981) and Azam (1974). Others, those better known, will be introduced over the course of this introduction. Even a quick survey of this scholarship in both the US and Pakistan suggests the need for a sustained study of the influence of the US on educational institution building, scholarly networks, and genres of scholarship in Pakistan. See Saunders (2001). See Gilmartin in this volume for a refutation of this position. I try to the extent possible to use scholarly works produced by Pakistanis. Even though I limit my focus to English writings I would argue that the incorporation of non-English writings and even those by avowed non-secularists would not greatly change my argument. One of the reviewers of the book asked that I specify for whom in Pakistan belongingness is a problem. This is a provocative question; it resonates with the commonly held perception that the elite of Pakistan do not somehow belong to Pakistan as such either because of the cosmopolitanism they espouse or because of their privileged lifestyle which is at odds with that of the majority of Pakistanis. Yet, I would argue that this sense of not quite knowing how one fits into Pakistan plagues many, across class and ethnic divides. This is borne out by several of the papers whose subjects are not the elite at all but the lower middle class (Verkaaik) and the poor (Andrabi et al.). Memon’s 1983 article is quite an eye opener into how West Pakistani public intellectuals and presumably the larger public assimilated the events of 1971. Besides, the paucity of writing on 1971, which already suggests a cultivated ignorance and self-censorship on part of the public, the writings that do exist further suggest that by and large most blamed Bengali Hindus for inciting East Pakistan into rebellion, focused largely on the India–Pak aspect of the conflict, in particular the Pakistani prisoners of war subsequently held and released by India, and expressed the loss of East Pakistan in terms of nostalgia for a territory of great natural beauty that is oddly un-peopled. These perspectives are born out by the essay by Yasmin Saikia in this volume. Regardless of the apparent amnesia by the state and its subjects towards 1971, along with Iftikhar Dadi in this volume I would wager that the loss of such a large part

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of its territory and population could certainly not go unnoted. While Dadi shows how this loss manifests itself as a growing ambivalence towards the archetypical Urdu speaking national subject, an affect cinematically expressed, Kamran Ali in his essay shows how the aftermath of the war brought about a substantial shift in geopolitics and national policy leading to the undermining of a previously strong labor movement. In other words, 1971 exerted a capillary effect through all spheres of life in Pakistan. It is precisely this capillary effect that I note in post-1971 history writing and historiography in Pakistan, which seem to return obsessively to the problematic origins of Pakistan as if to attempt to anticipate and subsume the violence of 1971 within their accounts. The gesture I see is similar to the one Tahir Naqvi shows of the Pakistani state in its attempts to anticipate and subsume the violence of 1947 within itself. For the purposes of this introduction I have taken Rounaq Jahan’s writing as that of a Pakistani as it was written immediately before the formation of Bangladesh. She is now off Bangladesh. I am not at all suggesting that Pakistan shouldn’t do more in terms of 1971 but that 1971 is built into all post-1971 scholarship, even if only implicitly and inadequately, and that this mode of invocation is deserving of attention even if only as a way to understand how a people lives alongside a public secret. Such attention may also yield understanding of how a society, and not only a state, imposes silences and sacrifices upon its own. See Das (1995 and 2006). Hamza Alavi is famous for having coined the term ‘salariat’ for those Muslims in the colonial bureaucracy who spearheaded the Pakistan Movement. See Alavi (1989). Among Pakistani scholars, Jalal (1990) and Rizvi (2000) have made persuasive studies of how Pakistan inherited the bulwark of its defense economy from the colonial state among others. Western scholars, in particular historians such as Gilmartin (1988), Low (1991), Metcalf (2003), and Talbot (2005) have left a distinct mark on scholarship studying the colonial inheritance of Pakistan. In Das’s essay in the same volume, she shows how each rule emerges with the conditions of possibilities of its infringement. States derive their power as much from the making of rules as from the zones of their transgression. See Ahsan (1997) for an attempt to argue the prefiguring of Pakistan on grounds of civilisational difference rather than religious.

Part I Artificiality of the State

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1

Towards a Lyric History of India Aamir R. Mufti∗ The whole cannot be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction. —Theodor Adorno (1982)

Introduction At its best, the Urdu lyric verse of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84) can make available to the reader a disconcerting form of ecstasy, a sense of elation at the self being put in question, giving even the thoroughly secular reader the taste of an affective utopia not entirely distinguishable from religious feeling. It is, at the very least, a paradoxical structure of feeling, given the explicitly Marxist and anticlerical affiliations of his poetry, which displays a marked interest in the secularisation of culture and language. Faiz is widely regarded as the most significant Urdu poet of the postcolonial period. His poetry exemplifies some of the central dilemmas of Urdu writing in the aftermath of the partition of India, at the moment of independence from British rule. It represents a profound attempt to unhitch literary production from the cultural projects of either postcolonial state in order to make visible meanings that have still not been entirely reified and subsumed within the cultural logic of the nation-state system. Despite his stature as the uncrowned poet laureate of Pakistan during the first several decades of its existence, his is notoriously an oeuvre with vast audiences across what was once North India — the map of its reception seemingly erasing the national boundaries that are the territorial legacy of partition. Against much of Faiz criticism, I argue here that the foremost theme of Faiz’s poetry, its defining theme as a body of writing, is the meaning and legacy of partition. I have argued elsewhere that the problematic of minoritisation inscribes itself in Urdu narrative at the level of genre in a foregrounding of the short story as the primary genre of narrative fiction (Mufti 2000). In poetry, it translates into debates about the meaning and nature, that is, the

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very possibility of lyric verse in modernity. In the decades following the 1857 Rebellion, for instance, the classical tradition of lyric poetry, and in particular the ghazal form, became the site of fierce contention about the prospects of a distinct ‘Muslim’ experience in Indian modernity. The poetry of Faiz exemplifies the unique relationship of Urdu literary production to the crisis of Indian national culture that is marked by the figure of the Muslim. The lyric element in Faiz’s poetry — its intensely personal contemplation of love and of the sensuous — poses a notorious problem of interpretation: he is a self-avowedly political poet — laurelled in the Soviet Union, repeatedly persecuted by reactionary postcolonial regimes — whose most intense poetic accomplishments are examinations of subjective states. The orthodox solution — shared by critics of many different political persuasions — has been to argue that Faiz merely turns a ‘traditional’ poetic vocabulary to radical political ends, that we should read the figure of the distant beloved, for instance, as a figuring of the hoped-for revolution (Kiernan 1971: 40; Ali 1995: xiv). I suggest a somewhat different direction here, and argue that first, the political element in Faiz’s work cannot be read without the mediation of the social. Faiz’s exploration of the affects of separation and union with the beloved makes possible an examination of the subject, the ‘I’, of Urdu writing. It would be incorrect to assume that Faiz’s ‘Progressiveness’ — his association with the literary culture that carries the imprimatur of the All-India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA) — implies a dismissing of the question of identity. The central drama of his poetry is the dialectic of a collective selfhood at the disjunctures of language, culture, nation and community. In his well-known argument about the relationship of lyric poetry to society, Theodor Adorno suggests that it is precisely lyric’s apparent distance from social determinations that constitutes its social meaning. He holds out the paradoxical possibility that its distance from the social in fact made of lyric poetry an exemplary site for the inscription of social meanings. The more the lyric reduces itself to the pure subjectivity of the ‘I’, Adorno argues, the more complete the precipitation of the social within its content will be; the more it immerses itself in what takes individual form, the more it is elevated to the level of universality, but a universality that is ‘social in nature’ (Adorno: 1991: 38, 42). In this essay, I shall elucidate the place of lyric in Faiz’s work and its relationship to the social horizon that is brought to crisis in partition. It is precisely in those poems that are

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closest to being ‘pure’ lyric, that is, ones in which the inward turn is most complete, rather than in such explicitly ‘partition’ poems as ‘Freedom’s Dawn’ (Subh-e azadi), that we may glimpse these social meanings in their fullest elaboration. I would like to explore the possibility that what Faiz’s love lyrics give expression to is a self in partition; that what they make visible is a dialectic of self and other in which the subject and object of desire not so much become one as simultaneously come near and become distant, exchange places, and are rendered uncertain. The desire for wisal, or union, takes the form of this dialectic itself. In the years following the partition of India, the problematic of national fragmentation comes to imbue the lyric world of Faiz’s verse in profound and explicit ways. But, the broader problematic of a partitioned self is already present in the poems of the pre-partition years, at least as potential, something that these poems point to and anticipate. The social truth embodied in Faiz’s lyric poetry is that the emergence of the (modern) self is also its self-division. The truth of the self is its contradictory, tense and antagonistic reality. Faiz makes it possible to think about identity in post-partition South Asia, in terms other than those normalised within the shared vocabulary of the postcolonial states. The purportedly autonomous national selves that emerged from partition are revealed to be what they are — moments within the dialectic of Indian modernity. And partition comes to acquire meanings very different from its usual significations, now referring not merely to the events of 1947 (or even of 1946–48), but to a history of social (‘communal’) identifications coextensive with the history of the Indian modern itself. The immense popularity of Faiz’s poetry in the Urdu–Hindi regions, its almost iconic status as a pan-South Asian oeuvre, is a vague but nevertheless conclusive measure of its success in making available an experience of self that is Indian in the encompassing sense, across the boundaries of the ‘communal’ and nation-state divides. But this is a staging of selfhood that takes division seriously, refusing to treat it as merely epiphenomenal, as in the unity-in-diversity formula of Indian nationalism. In fact, it suggests that division, the indefinitely extended separation from the beloved, constitutes the very ground from which union can be contemplated. Criticisms of Faiz’s works often invoke love of country or nation as an essential feature of his poetry (Hassan 1985: 119, 121). Faiz himself thematises this on several occasions — in the early poem ‘Two Loves’ (Do ishq): ‘In the same fashion I have loved my darling

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country,/In the same manner my heart has throbbed with devotion to her’.1 However, it is not accidental that neither the criticism nor the poetry itself is unequivocal about what the term country (watan) signifies. It might even be said that to speak of watan and qaum (nation/people) in the context of Faiz is to remain meaningfully silent about the objects toward which they point: does the hubb-ul-watani (love of country or nation, patriotism) of Faiz’s poetry attach itself to any one of the postcolonial states of South Asia? Does it represent a hope for dissolution of these states? What is its stance on partition, their moment of coming into being? Does it imply a ‘civilisational’ referent? If so, which civilisation — Indic, Indo-Persian or Islamic? Where exactly, in other words, is the poet’s home? The symbolic vocabulary of Faiz’s poetry draws on the stock of traditional Persio-Arabic images available to the classical Urdu ghazal — barbat o nai (lyre and flute), lauh o qalam (tablet and pen), tauq o salasil (neck-irons and chain), kakul o lab (lock of hair and lip), dasht o gulzar (wilderness and garden) — resisting the ‘plain’ language that had already become more common with some of his contemporaries and is more so with the generation of poets who have followed in his wake. In this sense, Faiz’s poetry is a living rebuke to the ideal of a neutral ‘Hindustani’ idiom from which both Arabo-Persian and Sanskritic influences have been excised, an ideal to which the secularist, ‘anticommunalist’ imagination in South Asia has been repeatedly drawn. Victor Kiernan, his translator and lifelong friend, notes that Faiz ‘was repelled by the prospect held up by Gandhi of a united “Hindostani” language, a nondescript neither Hindi nor Urdu’(Kiernan 1971: 38).2 The mythopoetic universe of his work is replete with references to Persian, Arabic and ‘Islamic’ sources, although, as Kiernan has noted, ‘a fondness for allusion to things Hindu, even religious, has not left him’, an important question to which I shall return (ibid). My contention here is that the question of collective selfhood — the meaning of ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘culture’, ‘community’ — is at the heart of Faiz’s poetry, and not merely in the sense of his political devotion to ‘the people’ and contempt for their exploitation by neo-feudalism and colonial and postcolonial capital. Faiz problematises the very notion of nation or people, raising fundamental questions about identity and subjectivity and their historical determinations. To put it more precisely, in Faiz’s poetry, both the degradation of human life in colonial and postcolonial modernity — exploitation — and the withholding of a collective

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selfhood at peace with itself — what I am calling partition — find common expression in the suffering of the lyric subject.

Love and its Discontents: The Lyric Poet in the World In a small number of early poems, one or two of which have something like a programmatic status in his oeuvre, Faiz stages the aesthetic dilemmas of the modern poet. They are meta-poetic texts, for in them Faiz turns to exploring the nature and meaning of lyric poetry in modern life. In such poems from the late 1930s as ‘The Subject of Poetry’ (Mauzu-e-sukhan) and ‘My Fellow, My Friend’ (Mire hamdam, mire dost), but above all in ‘Love Do Not Ask for That Old Love Again’ (Mujh se pahli si mahabbat meri mahbub na mang), we find the poetic persona torn between the exquisite demands of unrequited love, on the one hand, and those of the larger world and its oppressions, on the other. Faiz himself has spoken of these poems as turning points in his aesthetic development, marking a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the dominant, ‘romantic’ literary ethos of the times (Faiz 1986: 308–11). Thus, in the latter poem, the dominant mood is set by the speaker’s asking the beloved not to ask for the kind of love formerly given — pahli si mahabbat — a singular love, alert to nothing but the beloved’s charms and cruelties. The speaker lists the efficacies of this love in which it had formerly believed and concludes the first section of the poem with the confession, ‘It was not true all this but only wishing’. After noting the cruelties of the outer world — its injustice, inequality and alienation — with which the beloved must compete for the speaker/lover’s attention, the poem ends on the note on which it began. In ‘The Subject of Poetry’, the same tension between the alternative demands on the speaker’s senses is maintained, but this tension is approached, as it were, from the other direction. Alternating between the mysteries of the beloved and those of the larger world, the poem ends by affirming that the poet cannot expect to overcome the former as his true theme: — These too are subjects; more there are; — but oh, Those limbs that curve so fatally ravishingly! Oh that sweet wretch, those lips parting so slow — Tell me where else such witchery could be! No other theme [lit., subject] will ever fit my rhyme; Nowhere but here is poetry’s native clime [lit., homeland].

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[Ye bhi hain aise kai aur bhi mazmun honge Lekin us shokh ke ahista se khulte hue hont Hae us jism ke kambakht dil-avez khutut Ap hi kahiye kahin aise bhi afsun honge? Apna mauzu-e sukhan inke siva aur nahin Tab-e shair ka watan inke siva aur nahin.] — Kiernan (1971: 90–95); Faiz (1986: 89–91)

These early poems have most often been read as signs of a young poet’s political awakening, a politicisation that does not lead to an abandonment of concern with the integrity of literary language. Faiz himself has contributed to the authority of this reading (Faiz 1986: 308–11). While I do not take this to be an incorrect interpretation, I read the apparent dualism of these poems — interiority and affect versus the external world, lyric poetry versus society — somewhat differently, as demonstrating an interest in the relationship between the lyric self of Urdu poetry and the ‘wider’ world of contradiction and conflict over the meaning of nation and community. I shall argue that these poems enact, in a literary-historical register, the dilemmas and complexities of a ‘Muslim’ selfhood in Indian modernity. The phrase pahli si mahabbat points to the problematic of love in the classical Urdu lyric, and the poem comments on the relationship of the modern poet, located in the national-cultural space that is (late colonial) India, to that classical tradition. In Pakistan, Faiz has long been spoken of as a ‘national’ poet, as the national poet during the first 40 years of the country’s life. It is my contention that this cannot mean what it is usually thought to mean, that, in part, the accomplishment, the grandeur and ambition, of his work is precisely that it raises serious doubts about whether the nation-state form can account for the complexities of culture and identity in modern South Asia. Born early in the second decade of this century in the now Pakistani city of Sialkot, Faiz received an education that was becoming increasingly typical for young men of his regional, religious and class background — the rudiments of Quranic instruction, Persian and Arabic with the local maulvi (religious teacher), modern schooling of the colonial (in his case, missionary) sort and degrees in (in his case, English and Arabic) literature.3 According to his own account, Faiz’s early reading consisted of a diet of Urdu poetry of the classical period, in particular Muhammad Taqi Mir (1723?–1810) and Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1795?–1869), and the major nineteenth century works of Urdu narrative. After finishing his studies at the Government and

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Oriental Colleges, Lahore — those bastions of modern higher learning for northwestern colonial India — Faiz took up a teaching position at Amritsar, where he was first exposed to Indian Marxism and to nationalist political culture in general. Faiz’s first collection of poetry appeared in 1941, and the last to be published in his lifetime, was in 1981.4 From time to time, he also published widely read volumes of critical essays, letters and memoirs. In Amritsar, Faiz was drawn into the literary circles that proved to be the core group in the establishment of the AIPWA in 1936, and he subsequently came to be identified as the leading ‘Progressive’ voice in Urdu poetry, while also maintaining his autonomy from that organisation and from the Communist Party, never becoming a spokesman for either in quite the same way as a number of his contemporaries, such as Sajjad Zaheer and Ali Sardar Jafry. Jafry even accused Faiz once of equivocating about the goals of Progressive poetry and of ‘drawing such curtains of metaphor [istiariyat]’ around one of his poems — ‘Freedom’s Dawn’ — that ‘one cannot tell who is sitting behind them’.5 He joined the colonial Indian Army after the collapse of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, at a time when the official policy of the Indian National Congress was non-cooperation with the war effort, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and returned to civilian life in 1946 decorated with a Member of the British Empire (MBE). A few years after independence, during which he rose to prominence in Pakistan as a newspaper editor and labour unionist, he was arrested in 1951 with a number of other radical writers, political activists and military officers — including Zaheer, who was the leading founder of the AIPWA and after partition became general secretary of the newly founded Communist Party of Pakistan — charged with conspiring against the state. The arrests, part of a general crackdown on the Pakistani Left, had a chilling effect on political and cultural life, and marked the beginnings of Pakistan’s realignment as a frontline US satellite in the Cold War and as a reliable regional client after the rise of Mossadegh in Iran, a role whose price the country continues to pay to this day. After a trial, during which the shadow of a death sentence hung over him, Faiz was sentenced to imprisonment and was finally released after spending over four years in various prisons in Pakistan. In the late 1950s, with the implementation of martial law in Pakistan, Faiz was again in jail, this time only for a few months. Already, by the late 1950s, Faiz had developed an increasingly international reputation, especially in socialist countries and many parts of the Third World. In 1962, he was awarded the Lenin Peace

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Prize and, at the end of his life — in exile from Zia’s Pakistan — served for several years as editor of Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, which he edited from Beirut, during the years of its devastation, including the months of the Israeli siege and bombardment. There, he composed a small body of what is the most exquisite exile poetry in modern Urdu literature, ‘an enactment of a homecoming expressed through defiance and loss’, in the words of Edward Said, who met him in Beirut during those exile years.6 It represents an attempt to introduce exile and homelessness into the vocabulary of Urdu verse as a constitutive experience. Read together with the early ‘meta-poetic’ poems, this later exile poetry makes clear that for Faiz, Urdu is, in a strong sense, a homeless literature and culture, that he sees its entire modern history as a series of uprootings and displacements. The appropriateness of using the term ‘lyric poetry’ in anything more than a loose and descriptive sense with respect to Urdu writing in general and Faiz in particular is not self-evident and requires some justification. While Urdu has a number of terms, such as the adjectives bazmiyya and ghinaiyya, that provide very partial equivalents of the English word, Urdu poetics makes no extensive theoretical use of such an umbrella concept and proceeds for the most part in generic terms — and in particular in terms of the mutual opposition of the ghazal and the nazm. It is certainly part of the specificity of Faiz’s work that, unlike some of his contemporaries, he does not turn his back on the ‘classical’ poetic genres, in particular the ghazal, with its rigid metre and rhyme schemes, and its set themes centred around the experience of separation from the beloved. He is, in fact, widely credited with having resuscitated this form after a half century of neglect and disdain. In the decades following the suppression of the uprisings of 1857–58, with the collapse of the tottering social structure that had been the basis of the Urdu literary culture of the ashraf, or ‘noble’ elites in northern India, ‘reform’ — religious, social, cultural, political and educational reform — became the slogan of what I would call reluctant embourgoisement among these social groupings. The Aligarh Movement of Sayyid Ahmed Khan is only the most famous and influential of these reform efforts directed at Muslims.7 In the critical writings of such Aligarh-related figures as Muhammad Husain Azad and Altaf Husain Hali, the ghazal came to be singled out as the genre par excellence of Muslim decline and decadence, as too decorative, subjective and impervious to nature,

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incapable of the sober intellectual effort and didactic purpose called for in the ‘new’ world.8 For nationalist writers beginning in the late nineteenth century, it became something like an icon of the vast distances separating the ashraf Muslim elites from the space of the genuinely popular. Such distrust of the ghazal has survived into our own century among both the literary movements committed to the social purposiveness of poetry, including the Marxists of the AIPWA who were Faiz’s contemporaries and comrades, as well as those whose commitment to the intellectual demands of modern poetry is in the name of art for art’s sake (Narang 1994: 9). The Urdu ghazal and the constellation that surrounds it — metrical structures, histories of composition and reception, Persianate vocabulary and thematic conventions, and the image associated with it of an imperial culture in decline — retain a distinct place in the postcolonial Indian cultural imaginary, from popular ‘Hindi’ cinema to such a work of Indo-English fiction as Anita Desai’s In Custody, despite the massive effort in recent decades to denaturalise and alienate Urdu to contemporary Indian culture and society. Perhaps like no other poetic form in northern India, the history of this lyric genre is inextricably tied up with the emergence and development of national culture, and in no other form, not even the Hindi git, or ‘song’ that is sometimes said to be the national-popular poetic genre par excellence, are the contradictions of the social so deeply inscribed. Even in his practice of the diffuse nazm form — whose only possible definition appears to be that it is a non-narrative poem that is not a ghazal — Faiz bridges the divide between these varieties of poetic writing and imbues the lyric world of the latter with its characteristic, non-national forms of affectivity. In this essay, I shall look most closely at a number of poems that are not ghazals, strictly speaking, but apply the concept of lyric to Faiz’s oeuvre as a whole, irrespective of genre in the narrow sense. In treating Faiz as a modern lyric poet, however, I am not suggesting that we engage in a search for qualities in modern Urdu verse that are characteristic of the lyric in modern Western poetry. On the contrary, the purpose of my analysis of a number of Faiz’s poems is precisely to make it possible to explore the specificities of modern lyric in a colonial and postcolonial society. Above all, what the concept of lyric makes possible is the translation, the passage, of Faiz’s poetry from a literary history that is specifically Urdu into a critical space for the discussion of Indian literary modernity as a whole. The extent that Faiz’s poetry

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itself pushes in the direction of ending the inwardness of the Urdu poetic tradition is implied and required by his work itself.

Remembering Oneself: Lyric Subject and Memory in Faiz I shall now turn to the theme of separation and union in Faiz’s love poetry by working through its elaboration in one of his best-known lyric poems, ‘Yad’ (Memory). The poem appears in the collection Dast-e saba (1952) and has been made hugely popular by the singer Iqbal Bano as ‘Dasht-e tanhai’: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

In the desert of solitude, my love, quiver the shadows of your voice, your lips’ mirage. In the desert of solitude, under the dust of distance, the flowers of your presence bloom. From somewhere nearby rises the flame of your breathing, burning slowly in its own perfume. Afar, beyond the horizon, glistening, drop by drop, falls the dew from your heart-consoling eyes. So lovingly, O my love, has placed Your memory its hand this moment on my heart. It seems, though this distance is young, The day of separation is ended, the night of union has arrived.

[1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Dasht-e tanhai men, ai jan-e jahan larzan hain Teri avaz ke sae, tere honton ke sarab Dasht-e tanhai men, duri ke khas o khak tale Khil rahe hain, tere pahlu ke saman aur gulab Uth rahi hai kahin qurbat se teri sans ki anch Apni khushbu men sulagti hui, maddham maddham Dur — ufaq par chamakti hui, qatra qatra Gir rahi hai teri dildar nazar ki shabnam Is qadar pyar se, ai jan-e jahan, rakkha hai Dil ke rukhsar pe is waqt teri yad ne hath Yun guman hota hai, garche hai abhi subh-e firaq Dhal gaya hijr ka din, a bhi gai wasl ki rat.]9

Dominant in the first stanza is the image of solitude as an expanse of desert or wilderness, expressed in the string ‘Dasht-e tanhai’ (the desert/wilderness of solitude/loneliness), which opens lines 1 and 3. The metaphor also governs the second stanza, as the spatial language of line 5 — ‘From somewhere nearby rises the flame of your

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breathing’ — acquires a geographical register in line 7: ‘Afar, beyond the horizon. . . .’ The dominance of this desert metaphor is sustained in the treatment of the beloved, at least in the first stanza. There, the solitary subject is confronted with the ‘mirage’-like presence of the object of its desire — ‘the shadows of your voice, your lips’ mirage’. For the subject, the shadows and mirage are both signs of the beloved. But while a mirage points to an absent, illusory object, the shadow of an object, though it is itself immaterial, is a sign of the object’s physical presence. By being placed in combination with each other, however, ‘shadows’ and ‘mirage’ infuse each other with new meanings. The latter becomes something more than illusion, a mere projection outward of a desire intensely felt, like a vision of water in a parched land; and the former becomes something less than the sign of a physical presence. The geographical metaphor is fused here with a visual one, and together they come to signify the manner of the beloved’s becoming present. What exactly this manner is becomes more clear in the next two lines (3–4), for here ‘the flowers [lit., jasmine and rose] of your presence’ are said to bloom ‘under the dust [lit., the withered bushes and dust] of distance’. In other words, the nearness or presence of the beloved does not cancel out its distance. And the reverse is also true: the distance of the beloved is also the mode of its coming near. This theme is developed in the second stanza. In lines 5–6, the ‘flame’ (anch) of the beloved’s breathing is said to be rising from somewhere near the speaking subject — ‘kahin qurbat se’ — and yet, simultaneously, the ‘consoling eyes’ of the beloved are placed by the speaker ‘Afar, beyond the horizon’. In the third and final stanza, the geographical metaphor is abandoned, and we are within an internal, purely subjective space. This intimate space is here signified by ‘heart’ (dil), or, more precisely, by its ‘cheek’ (rukhsar), which is traditionally a sign of the beloved’s beauty and of (the lover’s) intimacy with it, but here comes to express the tenderness of the lover’s own heart (line 10). The inexpressible beauty of this image — a beating heart gently caressed by a human hand, as a lover’s cheek is touched by the beloved — is an expression of the desire for an end to suffering, for union, for reconciliation of subject and object. It expresses a desire for the form of reconciliation that Adorno has called ‘peace’: ‘Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other’ (Adorno 1988: 500). The presence of the beloved continues in this stanza to also be its distance. For the beloved enters this interior

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realm only as image or yad (memory). In the last two lines (11–12), the poem turns to the intensity of this caress of memory, to its effect on the subject: the guman (appearance/feeling/illusion) that ‘The day of separation is ended, the night of union has arrived’. Like the first two stanzas, therefore, the third stanza also enacts the dialectic of separation and union, in which separation is indefinitely extended, and union, intensely desired and felt, does not cancel out the distance between the subject and object of desire. It renders uncertain the distinction between them but not in order to appropriate the life of the object in the interest of the former. The object is also revealed to be a subject and the (desiring) subject an object of (the other’s) desire. The beloved is at the same time distant, and hence other, and intimately present to the self as itself. In other words, the self that emerges in the course of ‘Yad’ is a divided one, not at home with itself, desiring reconciliation and wholeness and yet cognisant that its own distance from itself is the very source of its movement and life. It is an uncanny interplay of nearness and distance precisely summed up in a four-line poem titled ‘Marsia’ (Elegy), which appears in Sar-e wadi-e Sina (1971): Having gone afar you are near to me, when were you so close to me? You will not return now, nor leave, meeting and parting [hijran] are now same to me. [Dur ja kar qarib ho jitne Ham se kab tum qarib the itne Ab na aoge tum na jaoge Wasl o hijran baham hue kitne.]10

We may begin to outline the social meanings of this lyric self by noting the resonances of the word hijr (separation) in the final stanza of ‘Yad’ (and of its derivative hijran in ‘Marsia’). A transformation of the Arabic hajr, the word is the most frequently used term in classical Urdu poetry for ‘separation’, or parting from the beloved. As is well known, the meanings of this word and those of its paired opposite, wisal (union), constitute one of the central and most familiar problems in Urdu poetics. These meanings vary not only from poet to poet or era to era, but also from one poetic genre to another, in the works of the same poet, and often within the same poem itself. Thus, depending on the poemic context, the words may signify the dynamics of romantic or

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erotic love, or of religious devotion. In the Sufi traditions of Urdu (and Persian) poetry in particular, wisal is a sign for mystic union with the divine, for the desire of the self to become extinct (fana) in a realisation of its ishq-e haqiqi or ‘true’ love of God, compared to which the love of man for man is only ishq-e majazi, inauthentic or ‘metaphorical’ love. Most typically, a verse may be interpreted at several different levels, in several different registers, simultaneously.11 The problematic of ‘love’ is thus constituted around an oscillation or productive tension between otherworldly and this-worldly significations. In latter times, this poetic language is very far indeed from any concrete practice of Sufism. In Faiz, paradoxically, this religious substratum is brought close to the surface again, in order to be secularised anew. The secularisation of hijr in Faiz’s poetry is part of the general secularisation of poetic language and purpose undertaken by him and his contemporaries. One aspect of this secularisation has been that the Sufistic eroticism of the vocabulary of the traditional poetic genres, and the ghazal in particular, has acquired political meanings, most explicitly in militant poets such as Habib Jalib, who is associated with the world of radical student politics, but also in more serious poets such as Faiz himself. Thus, for instance, wafa (loyalty or devotion) and junun (madness or intoxication) come to mean political steadfastness and selfless abandon, the rational and irrational components, respectively, of commitment. Faiz’s most programmatic announcement of the secularising impulse of his poetry comes perhaps in ‘Dua’ (Prayer), a poem written in the mid-1960s: Come, let us too lift our hands We for whom prayer is a custom forgotten, We who except for love’s flame Remember neither idol nor god — [Aiye hath uthaen ham bhi Ham jinhen rasm-e dua yad nahin Ham jinhen soz-e mahabbat ke siva Koi but ko khuda yad nahin.]12

Prayer may be a ‘forgotten’ custom for the lyric subject, but its very knowledge of this fact belies a memory of a living connection to it. The secular subject contains within itself traces of the lifeworld signified here by ‘idol’ and ‘god’. As in so much of Faiz’s poetry, secularisation is not a mere rejection of religious experience but rather a wrestling

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with it. This is not an expression of a positivistic atheism that wants simply to abolish the religious impulse in a rationalised culture of struggle and action — ‘love’ in the sense of political commitment. What is performed in the poetry of Faiz, instead, is the recognition of the immense power of religious thought and experience for the modern subject. More specifically, the unorthodox and transgressive energies that are always at least implicit in the mystical Sufi tradition are turned in Faiz’s verse against religious orthodoxy and its alliance with oppressive worldly authority. A Marxist and internationalist poet, Faiz is nevertheless immersed in the religious language of mystical Indian Islam, both in its high cultural elaboration in the Urdu poetic tradition and as a kind of cultural lingua franca in northern India. Faiz’s poetry reveals a deep respect and love for this culture and a recognition of the poet’s very complex relationship to it. It represents an agonistic embracing of a particular religious tradition — the IndoMuslim and Urdu poetic elaborations of Sufi expression — in order to produce out of it the resources for modernity; at the same time, therefore, it also points to the worldly basis of religious experience itself. At no point, however, is this merely a nostalgic embracing of a supposedly syncretistic religious life, and (poetic) modernity appears as a kind of dialectic of the religious and the secular or worldly. The problematic of hijr in the work of Faiz therefore cannot fail to evoke another narrative–mythological constellation, designated by the related word hijrat. Originally referring to the emigration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, hijrat was appropriated in Urdu at partition for the dislocations and emigrations that accompanied that event, in particular from the Hindi–Urdu heartland to the territory of Pakistan. It lends to the latter experience an epic quality and seeks to contain partition itself within a narrative of leave-taking. Faiz explores (and exploits) this historical density of hijr as a signifier of relation to place, community, uprooting, and the paradoxes of restoration and return. While he was not himself a muhajir, or partition migrant, strictly speaking — having been born and raised within the territorial limits later claimed for Pakistan — hijr-hijrat becomes in his poetry a metonym for the displacements of partition as a whole, the massive fissures it requires of people, language, culture and memory coming to be figured as the experience of prolonged separation from the beloved. The political impulse in Faiz’s poetry can therefore be understood only through the mediation of the social. For the desire for justice, the steadfastness in the face of suffering and oppression, and the belief in a new dawn are complicated by the ‘partitioned’ nature of

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the collective subject. In other words, for me the significance of Faiz’s repeated use of hijr and of its derivatives is that it imbues the lyric experience of separation from the beloved with a concrete historical meaning — the parting of ways or leave-taking that is partition. If, in Sufi traditions, to speak simultaneously of the pain and joy of hijr is to point to the consummation of love in death or self-extinction, then in Faiz this prolongation of separation from the beloved is made the modality of collective selfhood, its very mode of being in history and the world (Schimmel 1979: 134–35). It is significant in this connection that within Pakistan, critics have sometimes complained about the seeming masochism of such prolongation of hijr in Faiz’s poetry, in marked contrast to the work of his contemporary Miraji, for instance, where the attempt to project an authentic selfhood not only takes the form of an actualisation of union but often is literalised in sexual release. This complaint is significant, for from within a framework that affirms the terms of partition, this refusal to grant to the (collective) self autonomy (from the whims of the beloved) can indeed only appear masochistic. The lyric subject in Faiz’s poetry is located at those borderlands of self and world where autonomy and heteronomy lose their distinctness, where the self is confronted with the uncanny presence of an other that is also self. For Faiz, the end of hijr is not a literal union. The sadness of hijr echoes the finality of hijrat, of leaving one’s home forever, but it also inverts the implied religious sanction for partition by reinscribing the self’s leave-taking of the (antagonistic) other as a separation from the beloved. When Faiz speaks of lost companions and almost-forgotten friendships, as he does in a number of poems from the 1950s onward, he is echoing an experience that is common in the entire northern belt that was affected by partition. Take, for instance, the opening lines of ‘Paun se lahu ko dho dalo’ (Wash the Blood Off Your Feet): What could I [lit., we] have done, gone where? My feet were bare and every road was covered with thorns — of ruined friendships, of loves left behind, of eras of loyalty that finished, one by one. [Ham kya karte kis rah chalte Har rah men kante bikhre the Un rishton ke jo chhut gae Un sadyon ke yaranon ke Jo ik ik kar ke tut gae.]13

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I suggest that we read ‘eras’ (lit., centuries) here as a sign of historical time, and ‘friendships’ (lit., relations or connections) and ‘loves’ (lit. friendships companionships, or loves) as pointing toward the fabric, the text, of culture, difference and identity in history. The modes and forms in which memories of the pre-partition past are popularly kept alive pose questions of immense importance and interest for scholarship and have only begun to be explored. In Pakistani cities such as Lahore, Karachi, Hyderabad and Rawalpindi, which were cleared of their large Hindu and Sikh populations within months of August 1947, the signs of these erstwhile residents are ubiquitously present — in the sight of sealed-off temples, in street and neighbourhood names that continue to be used, despite municipal attempts to erase them, in the signs of the ‘other’s’ tongue above doorways in the old quarter of any city. The memories and stories of older eyewitnesses, the tales travellers tell of revisiting long-abandoned homes, the enormous font of verbal genres — folk songs, nursery rhymes, proverbs and popular tales about characters such as Birbal and Mullah Dopiaza — are among the many everyday means of unsettling the finality of partition, of disconcerting the self with its own uncertainty. The paradox at the heart of Faiz’s reception is that while he writes poetry that is ‘difficult’ in some obvious ways and true to the subjective demands of lyric, it is this enormous font of popular memory that it seeks to mobilise. We can say of him, as Adorno does of Brecht, that in his poetry, ‘linguistic integrity’ does not result in poetic elitism or ‘esotericism’ (Adorno 1991: 46). The suffering of the subject in Faiz’s poetry, or rather its pleasure and suffering at being separated from the beloved, echoes in lyric terms what is already present everywhere in popular experience, even if in ways that are muted, less than conscious, and fragmentary. If hijr and its derivatives point us in the direction of dislocations and separations that are collective, such a historical reading of Faiz’s lyric poems is made possible in other ways as well. Since Dast-e saba (1952), an increasing number of poems in successive collections appear dated by month and year or by exact date, and many are also marked by place of composition, which, in the case of the poems included in Dast-e saba and Zindannama (1956), is most often a Pakistani prison. This dating and ‘placing’ of the poems is almost always significant. I suggest that we read the date (and/or the place-name, where it exists) as an extrapoemic, historical text requiring interpretation

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in interaction with which the poem reveals its meaning. The date functions with respect to the text of the poem in the manner of what Gérard Genette has called paratexts. ‘Elegy’, for instance, is dated August 1968, and ‘Prayer’ is underlined with Independence Day, 14 August 1967. The month of August, during which Pakistan and India celebrate their independence from colonial rule and Pakistan, its separation from India, in fact, appears frequently over the years as the date of composition of numerous poems. The extrapoemic, ‘historical’ reference here is to the complex text of national independence– partition, lending to these poems a quality of national stocktaking. The pronouns ham (we) and tum (you, singular/familiar) acquire in this context a collective resonance, even as the lyric quality of the poems, their uncompromising subjectivity, produces a sense of deep intimacy, of meetings and partings at the very core of the self, which defines its very existence. Let us take, for instance, ‘Blaik-Aut’ (Black-Out), which appears in Sar-e wadi-e Sina and is dated September 1965. The historical reference in the date is to the Indo-Pakistani war of that month, the first full-scale war between the two postcolonial nation-states, which is a watershed in their histories. As C. M. Naim has argued, for Urdu literary culture, in particular, the war proved a turning point, for with the ensuing suspension of communications between the countries, Urdu literary production and reception began to take place within national spheres, less and less in contact with each other.14 The availability of books and journals from the other side of the border, visits of writers and critics, and simultaneous publication of works in both countries, all common in the period leading up to the war, fell sharply in the following years, to the point of being almost extinct today. The year marks the entrenchment of ideological polarisation between ‘Indian’ and ‘Pakistani’ writers, with increasing self-consciousness about hitching literary production to the cultural fortunes of either the one state or the other. In the wider cultural milieu as well, the war led to a suspension of contact between the two societies, which had been extensive and routine earlier, ranging from frequent family visits within divided families to the public availability of cultural commodities, such as magazines and films, from across the border. The title of Faiz’s poem makes reference to the introduction of a new vocabulary of war into Urdu — a vocabulary of war, like its technology, of foreign and Western origin. The poem itself remains

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faithful to the subjective demands of lyric poetry, with the collective and historical reference made explicit through the title and date of composition: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

[1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Since the lamps have been without light, I am seeking, moving about, in the dust: I do not know where Both my eyes have been lost; You who are familiar with me, give me some sign of myself. It is as if into every vein has descended, Wave on wave, the murderous river of some poison, Carrying longing for you, memory of you, O my love [lit., life]; How to know where, in what wave, my heart is swallowed? Wait one moment, till from some world beyond Lightning comes towards me with bright hand. And the lost pearls of my eyes, As luminous pearls of new eyes drunk with the cup of darkness, Restores. Wait one moment till somewhere the breadth of the river is found, And, renewed, my heart, Having been washed in poison and annihilated, finds some landing-place Then let me come bringing, by way of offering, new sight and heart, Let me make the praise of beauty, let me write of the theme of love. Jab se benur hui hain shamen Khak men dhundta phirta hun, na jane kis ja Kho gai hain meri donon ankhen Tum jo waqif ho batao koi pahchan meri Is tarah hai ke har ik rag men utar aya hai Mauj dar mauj kisi zahr ka qatil darya Tera arman, teri yad liye jan meri Jane kis mauj men ghaltan hai kahan dil mera Ek pal thairo ke us par kisi dunya se Barq ae meri janib, yad-e baiza le kar Aur meri ankhon ke gum-gashta guhar Jam-e zulmat se siyahmast nai ankhon ke shabtab guhar, Lauta de Ek pal thairo ke darya ka kahin pat lage Aur naya dil mera Zahr me dhul ke, fana ho ke kisi ghat lage

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17. Phir pa-e nazr nae dida o dil le ke chalun 18. Husn ki madh karun, shauq ka mazmun likhun.]15

The poem opens in darkness, in a state of lightlessness that is external — ‘Since the lamps have been without light’. But this absence of light is, as it were, reflected internally, and the speaker finds himself lost, in search of himself. The first three lines of the poem are an elaboration of this metaphor of darkness — darkness as metaphor for forgetting, for losing oneself. In line 4, the speaker addresses an other being, asking to be recognised and hence restored to his own (lost) identity. But this other is also an intimate, familiar (waqif) with the latter’s identity (pahchan). In lines 5–8, there is a shift of metaphors, and the crisis of the self is likened to the infusion of an unknown poison — ‘the murderous river of some poison’ (line 6) — into the veins, a deluge into which the self — ‘my life’ (line 7) and ‘my heart’ (line 8) — struggling to keep from drowning, carries its memories of, and longing for, the beloved (lines 7–8). In the elaboration of this second metaphor, as well, we get a shift of emphasis from externality and the physical to interiority. In lines 9–13, the poem returns to the metaphor of light, or rather, returns to the darkness metaphor of lines 1–4 by reversing it into the image of light as deliverance from the darkness of the self. This section of the poem opens with the gentle injunction to wait, to be patient — ‘Ek pal tahro’ (Wait one moment) which is repeated at the beginning of the next section, lines 14–16. Clearly, lines 9–10 contain a primary allusion — ‘from some world beyond’ and the ‘bright hand’ of lightning — to the (here Quranic) story of Moses on Mount Sinai, an allusion made explicit in the title poem in this collection, ‘Sar-e wadi-e Sina’, written on the occasion of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. But I wish to stress again the manner in which this image is secularised here: ‘us par’, unlike ‘beyond’ in English, suggests more a horizontal gesture, directed toward the horizon, than a vertical one, toward the heavens, which the strictly religious image would require. The light that restores comes, in other words, from beyond the horizon — an orientation that we have already seen in ‘Memory’. The feeling produced by the phrase ‘from some world beyond’ is of a neighbouring world that should be unknown, yet is half familiar and vaguely remembered. The spatial register in which these images, and indeed the use of space in ‘Memory’, become meaningful is the very opposite of state

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territoriality or of a geography whose scale is superhuman. There is something small-scale and intimate about it. It suggests distances that are traversable by human beings. It is a register to which Faiz repeatedly turns in order to convey a sense of a place both not far away and not so close as to be indistinguishable from here. I suggest we read this complex spatial imagery as a means of exploring, within the terms of lyric poetry, the connections between culture and geography, or, more precisely, the process through which the nationstate converts its territory into a national geography. What Faiz is able to render here is a human geography that traverses the boundaries, and escapes the territorial logic, of the nation-state. In a number of essays and lectures from the 1960s, Faiz raises the basic geographical conundrum faced by Urdu writing in Pakistan: the historical ‘home’ of Urdu — Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Hyderabad — lies beyond the territorial confines of the country. In his lyric poems, this question is echoed by the predicament of a dislocated, displaced lover, often depicted as imagining union with a beloved left behind in a world — nearly but not completely forgotten — somewhere beyond the horizon. In lines 14–16 of ‘Black-Out’, the metaphors shift again, and the dominant image is once more that of a river, a broad and mighty river, and the struggle of the self to keep from drowning. However, this river, which could consume the self, is also the means to its restoration, to the healing of its wounds. In fact, in order to be restored to itself, in order to find a riverbank (ghat), the self must be bathed in this poison and become extinct (fana). Having come to know annihilation, it is born anew. The fact that Faiz uses reaching a ghat as an image of restoration and healing is not insignificant. It is an Indic (rather than Persio-Arabic) word and image, with a clear reference both to the Hindu sacralisation of bathing in river waters as a means to purification and to the ritual cremation of the dead. Furthermore, fana points to the Sufi goal of extinguishing the self in the (divine) object of the self’s desire. But in its secularisation here it has a utopian impulse, signifying an end to the self’s suffering. This combination of these images — the one clearly of ‘Muslim’ origin, the other, ‘Hindu’ — is an attempt, in this poem occasioned by the war of 1965, to keep open possibilities of collective selfhood that that event was closing off. Nothing is more natural to a nation-state than going to war, and it may be argued that this particular war was a key moment in the realization of the nation-state form in postcolonial South Asia. That is certainly how it was perceived in contemporary Urdu writing, and aside from

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Faiz’s own poems of that moment, Ahmad Faraz’s ‘Main kyun udas nahin’ is among the more famous literary responses to the dilemmas it posed. But even in Faraz’s poem, there is a slipping into the terms provided by the structure of national citizenship, as the speaker singles out and names the Pakistani cities of Sialkot and Lahore, both on the border with India and both threatened with occupation, and bemoans their suffering.16 In Faiz’s work, on the contrary, the insight about the war as interpellative event is held on to steadfastly, and, above all, suffering never becomes an alibi for a reification of the self. The functioning of lyric in Faiz’s writing as a whole is as an abrupt flash of memory — not a fully formed recollection but rather an instantaneous sensation, of the self in motion, in dialogue with an other that is, uncannily, also self. The final two lines of ‘Black-Out’ offer a glimpse of reconciliation and restoration. Having been washed in poison and made anew, armed with ‘new sight and heart’, the self becomes capable once again of ‘praise of beauty’ and of writing of ‘the subject of love’. This resolution is highly significant, for it comments on the seemingly dualist movement of programmatic poems like ‘Love Do Not Ask for My Old Love Again’ and ‘The Subject of Poetry’, which I discussed earlier, and opens it up to the influence of a third term.17 If those early, pre-partition poems suggest a tension or poemic indecision between the aesthetic autonomy of love and lyric, on the one hand, and the material predications of the (lyric) subject, on the other, these closing lines suggest that that earlier duality was not simply the opposition of lyric self and society but rather that the identity of the social was all along at stake in each of its terms. Thus, it is not simply the material environment of the lyric self that poses the problem of the social; the interior world of affect itself raises questions about collective identity. The closure of that lyric world is a figure for the illusion of autonomy of Urdu literary culture and identity as a whole. And the coherence of that world is disturbed by the uncanny appearance of the other. To suggest that the lyric self in modern Urdu can no longer be contained within the world defined by love’s intoxications is to insist, in historical retrospect, that the claim to autonomy of that world is itself socially determined, that it is a moment within the contradictory movement of a larger whole. Thus, in neither of the two early poems is the lyric sensibility simply cancelled and overcome by a higher sensibility. The two are held in an indefinite, dialectical tension, with the result that while the first term is forced to open itself

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up to the second, larger term, it does not simply submerge its identity within it. The poems announce an end to the isolation of the lyric subject, or, rather, an end to the illusion of its isolation. But they do not cancel out the distance between the interior world of subjectivity and the outer world of objectification. To the extent that these early poems are programmatic works, therefore, this is not simply in the sense that they announce an aesthetic of commitment. They are essays in literary and cultural history. They explore the relationship of the lyric in Urdu to the larger history of social and ‘communal’ contradictions — that is the history of the Indian modern itself — raising questions about the ‘subject’ of Urdu writing in the double sense of the word, a double sense that the word mauzu shares with its English equivalent. What these poems make visible is the social life of the lyric subject — the subject as it appears in classical Urdu lyric — its isolation now appearing as its mode of being in the (Indian) world.18 In the closing lines of ‘Black-Out’, the impossibility of sustaining the purely lyric sensibility is finally explicitly linked to the vicissitudes of collective and national selfhood. What forces the lyric self to look beyond itself, to other pleasures and sufferings than those of love, is therefore a recognition of its own fragmentedness. The lyric as an aesthetic mode will become possible once again only when the wounds of the self are healed and it is whole again. In other words, the lyric, and the ‘purely’ aesthetic in general, is held up as a utopian possibility tied to an end to the antagonisms, and hence suffering, of the collective subject. In ‘Sipahi ka marsia’ (Soldier’s Elegy), another poem from this period and dated October 1965 — that is, marking the end of the war — this refusal to reify self and other is given a novel turn. The poem, in the voice of a parent (perhaps mother) addressing its dead son, abandons ‘high’ Urdu vocabulary altogether and turns to an idiom whose resonances are ‘Hindavi’, in a generalisation of the function that ghat performs in ‘Black-Out’: Utho ab mati se utho Jago mere lal, Ab jago mere lal Tumri sej sajavan karan Dekho ai rain andhyaran . . . [Stand, get up from the dust Wake up, my son

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You wake up now, my son Look, to make your bed Dark night has arrived . . .]19

The effect of the Hindavi idiom here is untranslatable into English (a very partial parallel would be a poem about World War II written in Middle English). It is as if in this moment of crisis for collective selfhood, modern Urdu becomes inadequate as a vehicle for grief. What the Hindavi makes possible here is an exploration of the communal and nation-state conflict in terms of the dissonances of language and language history. The poetic language associated most famously with the Sufi saint and poet Amir Khusro (1258–1325) is a fraught issue in the history of the Hindi–Urdu conflict over the last century and a half. It has often been excised from official histories of Urdu as too vernacular, that is, not Persianised enough, to be considered an antecedent for the mualla or ‘exalted’ Urdu that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but is embraced within Hindi literary culture as the medieval font from which modern, shudh (or pure) Hindi has evolved.20 The larger effect of Faiz’s abandonment in this poem of the Persianised Urdu, that is the language of his entire oeuvre, and its substitution with a Hindavi idiom, is therefore to undermine, within a linguistic register, the claims for an autonomous Muslim (and hence Pakistani) selfhood. Faiz places the language that is conspicuously absent from the poem, namely, modern ‘high’ Urdu, in a line of descent from the lingua franca of fourteenth century northern India. Or rather, the surface of modern language is peeled off to reveal submerged sounds and meanings. To turn to Hindavi in order to articulate the grieving voice of the modern self is to reveal affinities beneath the surface of modern Urdu that are disavowed in its official history. If this poem can belong to the canon of Urdu, and of Pakistani, literature, then the linguistic and cultural configurations of self and other are not what the postcolonial nation-states, in this moment of self-definition through war, require them to be. The use of Hindavi idiom makes it impossible for the poem to be canonised as an elegy for a Pakistani soldier alone. It does this, not through disavowals of difference — ‘we are all the same’ — but rather precisely through a careful elaboration of the text of linguistic, cultural, and historical discontinuities. Faiz returns to the themes and motifs of ‘Soldier’s Elegy’ in a poem that is dated September 1975 — pointing to the tenth anniversary

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of the war of 1965. The poem ‘Mori araj suno’ (Hear My Plaint), is accompanied by a dedication to Amir Khusro and opens with a series of citations from the Hindavi poems attributed to the latter, each in a plaintive mode, asking for recognition, for the attention of the other, for deliverance and restoration. Unlike in the former poem, here modern Urdu provides the dominant discourse, with the Hindavi in the subordinate position of citation, a mode appropriate to remembering the war and the crisis of self it had precipitated. The language of the rest of the poem, following the lines from Khusro, is the ‘normal’ language of Faiz’s poetry, with words and phrases from the citations inserted. The overall effect of the poem is therefore again to resist a reification of self and other, to disconcert the self with a recognition of the sameness of the other, without collapsing the distinction between them. The poemic present, signified by ab (now), points to the moment of the modern, specified by the self’s apperception of itself in the other. As in so many of Faiz’s poems, modernity is the putting into motion of self and other.

Towards a Lyric History of India As we have already seen, the poetic program that Faiz announced early in his career envisioned orienting the lyric subject toward the larger world. I have argued that some of his most ambitious and effective poems are a series of exercises precisely in ending the isolation of the lyric subject, or rather in ending its illusion of isolation. They take the form of imbuing it with the recognition that what it takes as object, as the larger world of things, is itself subject and in dialogue with it. This dialectic of inner and outer worlds, I have further argued, carries collective, historical resonances; it is an enactment of the relationship of ‘Muslim’ culture and identity to the emergence of a wider ‘Indian’ modernity. The self-absorption of the lyric subject in classical Urdu poetry, so widely and repeatedly condemned since the nineteenth century, becomes for Faiz a social fact. And if that lyric subject — and its locus classicus is the ghazal — appeared to be, as Azad and Hali had argued, addicted to fantasy and impervious to reality and nature, that judgment could itself be explained in terms of the emergence of the horizon of ‘nature’ and ‘reality’ that we call the nation.21 Therein lies the modernity of Azad and Hali’s critique of classical lyric: it seeks to reorient writing within an emerging national experience, with the fatally necessary corollary that it enter the field of contest and conflict over the meaning of community and

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nation. In this sense, Faiz is a descendant of the nineteenth century reformers — and we should recall that his early formation took place in a milieu where the writings of nai raushni (the New Light) had long acquired canonical status — with the important difference that for him this project is to be carried out not through didactic poetry, as it is for Hali, but in terms of the lyric itself.22 Faiz himself makes the argument that much of what Hali is credited with having originated in poetry. What is the nature of the modern (Indian) self? — that is the question that underlies the reorientation of the Urdu lyric subject in Faiz’s poetry. The enormous paradox of partition, for Faiz, is that it requires a rewriting of the self in the name of whose preservation it had been demanded. It is a paradox that he sometimes figures as the collision of different, inner and outer languages of self, as in this couplet from a ghazal that is dated 1953: The heart as such had settled its every doubt when I [lit., we] set out to see her But on seeing her the lips spoke love’s unrehearsed words and everything changed everything changed [dil se to har muamla kar ke chale the saf ham Kahne men un ke samne bat badal badal gai]23

I suggest that we read the pathos of this couplet, this sense of the impossibility of saying what you mean, as a response to ‘public’ languages of selfhood and identity. What Faiz points to here is the excess that cannot be contained within the categorical structure of the nation-state, within which ‘Muslim’ is placed at the cusp of a fatal dilemma: it can signify either ‘a separate nation’ or ‘an Indian minority’. Faiz’s entire lyric oeuvre is a refusal to accept the terms of this fixing of identity and an attempt to put the self in motion. The narrative element in the above couplet — the self setting out with confessional intent to encounter an other but finding its own words becoming alien, producing meanings other than those intended — must be read in a collective and historical register as an interpretation of the history of conflict over the meaning of nation and communal identity, and, in particular, as an interpretation of the history of Muslim cultural separatism. Faiz is indeed a descendant of the writers and intellectuals of the New Light, who, a century earlier, postulated

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for the first time the distinctness of a ‘Muslim’ experience in Indian modernity. But, with historical retrospection, he bathes that assertion itself in the subdued light of pathos, pointing to the twists and turns, the reroutings and misfirings that mark the passage from that moment to our own. This ghazal, composed in 1953, is a comment on India’s partition from this side of the cataclysmic event, full of infinite sadness at what Indian Muslim ‘nationhood’ has finally been revealed — in the cold light of statehood and ‘sovereignty’ — to mean. Faiz distills that historical pathos into the subjective language of the ghazal, giving it the form of the lover’s sadness at the impossibility of saying, when face-to-face with the beloved, what exactly one means. The recurring image in Faiz’s poetry of an ever elusive totality that is no less real for its elusiveness shares something of the melancholy of Adorno’s concept of a contradictory whole whose ‘movements’ are visible only in the ‘changes’ of the fragments.24 This concept of the dialectic is an attempt to comprehend totality in late modernity, once ‘the attempt to change the world’, as Adorno put it, has been missed (Adorno 1973; Fredric 1990; Said 1995: 264–81). The ‘lateness’ of the contemporary world for Adorno thus resides in the fact that it is the aftermath of a disappointment, a kind of dénouement once the utopian hopes generated by modern European history have suffered a catastrophic defeat. Hence the series of questions that Adorno directs at contemporary culture: Is it possible to write poetry after Auschwitz? Is philosophy possible once the chance to realise it in a transformation of human existence has been missed? Is it possible, or even desirable, to defend the subject in an age when it is besieged on all sides by the forces of mass culture and mass destruction? Postcolonial culture is itself constituted by an aftermath and marked by the ‘late’ acquisition of the cultural artifacts of the European nineteenth century: national sovereignty, the popular will, the demand for democracy. In postcolonial South Asia, this moment is also that which follows the partitioning of northern Indian society. Frantz Fanon argued a long time ago that in order to be transplanted to the colonial setting, ‘Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched’ (Fanon 1963: 40). The ‘lateness’ of postcolonial culture itself requires a stretching of the concept of late modernity, its uncoupling from the narrative of economic overdevelopment and overconsumption, and its opening up instead to a comprehension of the aftermath of decolonisation. Faiz is certainly not an ‘Adornian’ poet in the sense in which Celan, Beckett or even Mann might be spoken of as

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Adornian writers.25 But, it has been my purpose here to rethink and expand what it means to write in and of the vistas of ‘lateness’ that Said and others have identified in the constellations of Adorno’s thought (Jameson 1990; Said 1995: 264–81). Faiz is the poet of a late postcolonial modernity, a poet who directs the energies of negative thinking at the congealed cultural and social forms that constitute the postcolonial present. For Adorno, the concept of lyric poetry has a referent that is ‘completely modern,’ and ‘the manifestations in earlier periods of the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us are only isolated flashes (Adorno 1991: 40)’. Faiz, however, turns to the traditional Urdu lyric itself and extracts from it a vocabulary for the elaboration of the relation of the self to the world, individual to totality. He elaborates an experience of modern Indian selfhood that seeks to escape the cultural logic of the nation-state system inaugurated at partition, that paradoxical moment of realisation through reinscription, of success through failure. He does this, furthermore, by immersion in the IndoIslamic poetic tradition, with its deep relationship to Sufi thought and practice, and its long involvement in the crisis of culture and identity on the subcontinent. This is the larger meaning of Faiz as an Urdu poet with an immense audience across the political and cultural boundaries implemented by partition. His is not an appropriation of the fragment from the position of totality, but neither is it an attempt to reconceive the fragment itself as a totality. His is the oeuvre of an aftermath once the chance to achieve India, to ‘change the world’, as it were, has been missed. He confronts the fragment itself with its fragmentary nature, making perceptible to it its own objective situation as an element in a contradictory whole. To put it differently and more explicitly in historical terms, we might say that Faiz is another name for the perception — shadowy and subterranean for the most part, but abruptly and momentarily bursting through the surface of language and experience from time to time — that the disavowal of Indianness is an irreducible feature of Indianness itself. The powerful tradition of lyric poetry in Urdu, long accused of its indifference to properly Indian realities, is revived and given a new lease of life in Faiz and his contemporaries, not because they infuse old words with new meanings, as the intentionalist cliché in Faiz criticism would have it, but because in their practice it becomes a site for the elaboration of a selfhood at odds with the geometry of selves put into place by partition. In his lyric poetry, Faiz pushes the terms of identity and selfhood to their limits, to the point where they

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turn upon themselves and reveal the partial nature of postcolonial ‘national’ experience.

Notes ∗ For Professor C. M. Naim, ihtiraman. 1. Kiernan (1971: 166–67). In matters of translation, I have set the following principles for myself: wherever it is possible, I cite Kiernan’s translation, the ‘literal’ one if I am engaging in a line-by-line analysis, as this is closest to the original in terms of line content, and the ‘non literal’, where the object is to convey a sense of the whole. Where a poem or fragment is not available in a Kiernan translation, I either provide my own ‘literal’ translation or turn to the more freely translated versions of Agha Shahid Ali (1995) or Naomi Lazard (1988), depending, again, on the specific purpose at hand. 2. For a contemporary selection of Gandhi’s views on the language question, see Gandhi (1942). 3. This biographical summary is based on the following sources: Kiernan (1971); Faiz (1983: 5–20; 1985: 112–21; 1986: 307–14, 489–97); and Khaleeq Anjum (1985: 14–37). 4. Naqsh-e faryadi (Remonstrance) was published in 1941, to be followed by Daste saba (Fingers of the Wind [1952]), Zindan-nama (Prison Thoughts [1956]), Dast-e tah-e sang (Duress [1965]), Sar-e wadi-e Sina (Mount Sinai [1971]), Sham-e shahryaran (Twilight of Kings [1978]), and Mire dil mire musafir (My Heart, My Traveling Heart [1981]) during his lifetime. His late and previously uncollected poems have since been collected as Ghubare ayyam (Dust of Days [1984]) as part of an edition of his complete works. The first four translations here are Kiernan’s, the rest are mine. 5. Quoted in Azmi (1972: 109). 6. Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’ (1984: 160). Faiz makes a brief appearance in Mahmoud Darwish’s memoir of the Israeli siege. See Darwish (1995). 7. See, for instance, the brilliant cultural history of the early years of the Aligarh movement by David Lelyveld (1978), Barbara Daly Metcalf (1982) and an intriguing study of culture and space by Faisal Fatehali Devji, ‘Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform, 1857–1900’, in Hasan (1994: 22–37). 8. For a full-length account of these debates see Pritchett (1994). 9. Faiz (1986: 184–85). It is regrettable that Kiernan did not include this very beautiful poem among his excellent translations. It is also ignored by Agha Shahid Ali and Naomi Lazard. This translation is my own. I have tried to keep it as literal as possible — with almost no attention to meter or rhyme scheme — and to retain the content integrity of the lines, even at the cost of syntactical awkwardness, as in lines 9–10. I shall stay in my analysis close to the original, with the translation meant as merely a rough guide for readers not familiar with the Urdu.

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10. See Faiz (1986: 438). The translation is mine, with the literal meaning as the immediate goal, with some attention to rhyme scheme. 11. On the classical ghazal and its symbolic and thematic universe, see Russell (1992), Schimmel (1992); on the erotics of ghazal imagery, see Schimmel, ‘Eros — Heavenly and Not So Heavenly — in Sufi Literature and Life’, in Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot (1979: 119–41). 12. See Kiernan (1971: 276–7), for Kiernan’s rendition, which I have altered slightly; and Faiz (1986: 429). 13. This evocative, but largely free, translation is Agha Shahid Ali’s (1995: 85) and Faiz (1986: 524–25). As has often been noted, Faiz’s poetry shows a marked preference for the first-person plural, a sort of royal ‘we’, over the first person singular. 14. See C. M. Naim, ‘The Consequences of Indo-Pakistani War for Urdu Language and Literature’, (1969): 269–83. Also see Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Some Reflections on Urdu’ (1989: 29). 15. This is a slight modification of Kiernan’s translation. See (1971: 268–71). Also, in Faiz (1986), the lineation is slightly different and Kiernan’s line 12 is broken into two after ‘siyahmast’ and line 16 after ‘ho ke’ (see 409–10). 16. Ahmad Faraz, ‘Main kyun udas nahin’, in Faraz (1989: 29–30). The title itself is ambiguous and could be translated as either ‘Why Do I Not Grieve?’ or ‘Why I Do Not Grieve’. I am not interested here with the explicitly jingoistic verse that was produced in response to the war. For a discussion of some of this work and its context, see Naim (1969). 17. Kiernan translates the title ‘Mauzu-e sukhan’ as ‘Poetry’s Theme’. This leaves out the grammatical and philosophical senses that mauzu shares with subject. 18. For a rather different reading of ‘Mujh se pahli si muhabbat’ by an orientalist ‘lover’ of the classical ghazal tradition, see Russell (1992: 230–31, 243–44). In line with his literal readings of Urdu poetry in general, Russell notes sarcastically that he is not impressed with the discovery ‘that there are other things in life besides love of women’ (243). His entire chapter on Faiz would be laughable — he considers Faiz a second-rate poet — if it did not border on the scurrilous, accusing Faiz of self-promotion and political insincerity and cowardice. 19. Faiz (1986: 412–14). The translation is mine. 20. For a clearly executed survey of the far from clear debates about the origins of modern Hindi and Urdu, see Rai (1984: 1–36). 21. See Qureishi (1993: 116–17, 153–54, 158, 178–85). Hali makes it very clear what he has in mind when he recommends ‘naichral shairi’ (natural poetry): ‘By ‘natural poetry’ is meant that poetry which, in terms of both words and meanings, is in accord with nature and habit . . . [in accord with] the everyday form of the language, because this everyday speech carries for the inhabitants of the country where it is spoken, the weight of nature [nechar] or second nature [saikind nechar]’ (158). 22. Faiz himself makes the argument that much of what Hali is credited with having originated in poetry — the turn to ‘nature’, the rejection of ‘artificial’

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affect, the rejection of abstraction and esotericism — can in fact be traced to Nazir Akbarabadi, who wrote almost a century earlier. Hali’s uniqueness lies in the national (qaumi) nature of his poetry and poetics. See his important essay, ‘Nazir aur Hali’, in Faiz (1956: 169–70, 179–83). 23. The English here is a modification of Agha Shahid Ali’s very free but lovely translation. See (1995: 30). 24. See, for instance, Adorno, ‘The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’: ‘The whole can not be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction’ (1982: 275). 25. I am grateful to Stathis Gourgouris and Eduardo Cadava for making clear the need for this clarification.

2

The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State Tahir Hasnain Naqvi∗ As long as the state of exception and the normal situation are kept in separate space and time, as is usually the case, both remain opaque, though they secretly institute each other. But as soon as they show their complicity, as happens more often today, they illuminate each other, so to speak, from the inside. —Georgio Agamben (2002)

Introduction The partition of India occurred at the cusp of the great inter-war refugee movements in Europe. It initiated the era of decolonisation but mired the independence of India and Pakistan in the ether of communal genocide and mass displacement. In the months preceding independence, political elites and party workers from the All India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress prepared their constituencies for the eventual division of the provinces of Punjab and Bengal. However, as the scale of communal violence took on genocidal proportions these very same nationalist leaders in both countries assumed the tenuous position of neutral official arbiter by insisting that the persecution of communal minorities was out of step with the ideological and moral purpose of nationalism. Judging from official reports and statements, it appears that the leadership of the All India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress did not anticipate1 the scale of partition’s genocidal chain of violence (Brass 2003). One may argue that despite their history of antagonism, as agents of the ‘post-partition national order’ (Zamindar 2003), the League and Congress shared the perception that national emancipation was jeopardised by those who had been mobilised in its name.2 By referring to the ‘unthinkability’ (See Bourdieu 1977; Trouillot 1995) of partition’s violence, my aim is to suggest the motivated

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significance of ‘not knowing’, as a symptomatic reflection of the wider hegemonic predicament of anti-colonial nationalism in the late colonial period. Rather than the willful or unwitting failure to foresee violent consequences, ‘unthinkability’ conveys the more systematic disconnect in the final years of colonial rule between elite and popular constructions of territory, nationalism and nationality. Practices of genocidal purification incited the dissolution of a ‘politics of place’3 at the village and district level, amounting to an alternate reckoning of nationality as an individual experience of loss and becoming. While such acts diverged from the nationalist elite’s concept of mobilisation,4 the elite nevertheless sought commensuration between the acts and with the abstract contests and objectives originating in the highpolitical arena. What would it mean to approach the freighted nationalist narrative and logic of commensuration from a perspective inverse of the state’s? Drawing on official and journalistic accounts of the period between 1940 and 1951, this article attempts to write a history of the violence of partition against the grain of its unthinkability within elite nationalist discourse. And while it does not perform the necessary labour of recovering the voice and agency of partition’s popular actors, it addresses how partition’s chain of violence and displacement engendered the post-independence state as an entity capable of wielding the sovereign power to decide on life and death. Crucial to the development of this prerogative were practices of knowledge and power that produced the refugee ambivalently, as a figure of right and an object of governmentality. Focusing on Pakistan’s official response to the ‘refugee problem’, I wish to suggest that the movement of populations both relied upon and informed implicit efforts at official commensuration with the violence of the mass. A caveat is necessary before proceeding. In focusing on the case of Pakistan, I wish to build a more discursively informed account of the official politics of partition in which emphasis is usually given to specific rationalities and practices of official intervention. On the one hand, had the governments of India and Pakistan not maintained the semblance of uniformity in the evacuation and rehabilitation process, the communal violence of partition could arguably have escalated into an outright war over the refugee crisis.5 On the other hand, the crucial significance of uniformity and reciprocity as values of bilateralism does not take away from the fact that each government

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applied differential significance and weight to the political and material dimensions of the crisis. For instance, when examining the Pakistani archive, it becomes clear that: (i) as a proportion of the national population, the number of refugees who settled in Pakistan was greater than India; (ii) the party at the forefront of the Pakistani Movement and post-partition ‘nationalist’ government, the All India Muslim League, faced much greater internal resistance to postindependence hegemony; and (iii) while both governments used emergency powers to handle the refugee crisis, over the course of 61 years, extra-constitutional statecraft has become a normal feature of contemporary political life in Pakistan. To draw regional and narrative distinctions does not diminish the moral and historical primacy of partition as an event of subcontinental proportions. In fact a focus on specific formations and responses complements the more geographically comprehensive approach which characterises the political historiography of partition by providing the basis for a more plural and critical understanding of partition’s bearing on the postcolonial present. Three interrelated narratives are presented in this article. The first deals with so-called ‘agreed-area’ refugees, or, refugees who were involuntarily evacuated through the co-ordinated efforts of the governments of India and Pakistan. I then address the predicament of ‘nonagreed’ Muslim refugees, who by contrast, were not designated as subjects hailing from ‘disturbed areas’ warranting official evacuation. That the state of Pakistan engaged in such dividing practices was not unique. For instance, India’s government also sought to discourage non-Muslim exodus from east to west Bengal in 1948 (Tan and Kudaisya 2000: 144). The salience of the Pakistani narrative, however, rests in the primacy that the All India Muslim League had assigned itself to the redress of Muslim minoritisation since its inception in the early twentieth century. Finally, I examine the heated conflict between the federal government and the provincial government of Sindh over who had the jurisdiction to control the intake and management of recently arrived agreed-area refugees awaiting resettlement in transit camps throughout the province of (eastern) Punjab. That Pakistan’s outlying provinces were compelled under emergency powers invoked by the Governor-General in August 1948 to increase its quota of refugees, points to the agreed-area refugees’ liminal political status as a ‘problem’ to be resolved and a national subject of rights.

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As I show, the official inclusion of Muslim refugees within Pakistan’s national order entailed the exclusion of others, such as the Muslims residing in India’s ‘minority-Muslim provinces’, whose communal future was seriously left in question as a consequence of Pakistan’s independence. Any discussion of the role of the state as a force of intervention and commensuration, therefore, must attend to the primacy of violence and displacement in producing specific and immediate subjects of territorial belonging and exclusion. Before addressing the specific historical cases outlined above, I wish to provide more historical and conceptual depth to the analytic metaphor of a ‘chain’ of violence, the aim of which is to include the drama of human movement within the experiential and political ambit of partition’s genocide.

Partition’s Chain of Violence: Displacement and Belonging It is estimated that 10 to 12 million6 people undertook migration during partition, making it the largest cross-border migration in modern history (Brass 2003: 75). Between March 1947 and August 1948 approximately 7 million Muslim refugees crossed into Pakistan’s eastern and western territories (Ashraf 1948: 24). Widespread patterns of violence and displacement began to unfold in the months preceding independence — most of it centred in the province of Punjab — whose territory, along with Bengal, was slated for division along (roughly) communal lines. Muslim refugees subsequently transformed both wings of Pakistan — separated by northern India — into a post-riot sanctuary.7 The tension between affective (sanctuary) and ideological (homeland) constructions of Pakistan’s territory is apparent in the life histories of men and women who experienced the violence, displacement and loss engendered by partition in ways that continue to inform their social and inner experience (see Das 2006). Now a retired teacher, Shamim Raza came to Lahore from District Patiala in September 1947, at the age of 17, with her family mercifully intact. She situates the tension between belonging and sanctuary in the disorder and uncertainty inherent in the experience of forced exodus: Only after we began our journey towards the border did it dawn on us that Pakistan would be our home from that point on. The devastation we came upon along the way . . . all the signs were clear. We were never

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going to return. When one talks of the refugees (panahguzeen) kissing this Pak-sar-zameen (the pure land of Pakistan) upon their arrival it is no doubt true they were grateful to finally have a homeland for Muslims (Musulmanon ka qaum). In this homeland they could live according to Islam. But this ground also marked the end of our horrible journey. We kissed it out of sheer gratitude for our lives.8

The great majority of India’s Muslim refugees were evacuated through a co-ordinated military effort from East Punjab (India) to West Punjab in what was initially conceived as a reciprocal, temporary but complete exchange of their respective minority populations. Sensing repatriation would take longer than originally planned, the India and Pakistan ‘Inter-Dominion Conference’ of 1948 categorised the divided province as an ‘agreed-area’ — a retroactive, but crucial distinction which qualified its inhabitants to official rehabilitation entitlements such as the right to till on evacuee (non-Muslim) property (Government of India, Ministry of Rehabilitation, 1950). This benefit was not available to all partition era migrants. Agreed-area refugees were categorised under the Inter-Dominion covenant as involuntary migrants; that is, they fulfilled what could be described as the necessary condition of a partition refugee by hailing from areas where the level of ‘communal disturbance’ was seen to merit official evacuation (Ali 1967: 270). According to this logic, ‘non-agreed’ areas, such as northern and central India, as well as the divided province of Bengal, did not meet this criterion. By contrast, non-agreed refugees were considered to possess sufficient grounds to remain in Pakistan. Seen as less vulnerable to communal attack than their counterparts in the agreed-areas, nonagreed inhabitants were actually discouraged from migrating by their potential ‘host’ states. And yet, they were not turned away nor denied citizenship if they managed to succeed in making the passage. As I argue in the section dealing with conflicts between India and Pakistan in 1948 over the potential for non-agreed area migration to Pakistan, ‘sufficiency’ works in this context as less a humanitarian concept than as a problematic outgrowth of the All India Muslim League’s attempt to reconcile Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty with its pre-independence political role as a religious nationalist movement committed to the rights of all Indian Muslims (see Jalal 1985). What is striking about these formations is the critical role that extreme violence comes to play in the state’s imagination of normal and lawful politics.

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The Refugee as a Figure of Right and Object of Government Refugees settled in Pakistan and India faced relatively fewer legal obstacles to formal political inclusion than their historical or contemporary counterparts in Europe and the postcolonial world. This anomaly is not lost on scholars of the subcontinent. The American political scientist Theodore Wright (1974) observes how, in contrast to Europe, ‘the 15 million involved in the mammoth Hindu–Moslem exchange of population . . . though they have suffered greatly . . . [had] from their very beginning . . . the security of citizenship, protection and encouragement of their respective co-national state in which they had found a haven . . . a new life, not on sufferance [by the state], but as of right’ (1974: 45, my emphasis). Wright is not unjustified in calling attention to the moral salience of the citizenship of partition refugees. In a famous critique of human rights in the era of nation-states, Hannah Arendt (1979) brings Europe’s contrasting history of the inter-war refugee phenomenon to the centre of her examination of the modern paradox of national sovereignty. It is the European refugee’s statelessness, argues Arendt, which compels him to ‘fall back’ on his status as ‘mere life’ (ibid.: 290). The condition of mere life does not signal the ‘loss of specific rights’, but a more encompassing and consequential ‘loss of a community’ willing to guarantee national citizenship: as the sole mechanism of rights in the national age, ‘[o]nly the loss of polity expels him [the refugee] from humanity’ (ibid.: 292).9 If the refugee’s mere life (or ‘human rights’) evokes the original universality and sovereignty of the citizen-subject, the exclusion and despair of their statelessness points to the modern nation-state’s failure to conceive of universal rights beyond the particular framework of territory, nativity and naturalisation (see Agamben 1998). Theoretical and anthropological treatments of the refugee in contemporary legal, humanitarian and media discourse build on the Arendtian category of mere life. Here the refugee is often cast as someone whose loss of locality and culture confirms — often, by critically interrogating — the connection between statelessness and the loss of subjectivity. In this view, the exclusion of the modern refugee within the national order constitutes their ‘liminality’ within, and displacement of, the nation-state’s ‘sedentary metaphysics’ (Malkki 1995).

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Yet, in order to fully grasp the challenge that the case of postpartition Pakistan presents to the dominant contemporary image of the stateless refugee, I believe one must also resist the alluring fiction that its refugees were — to invert Arendt — merely citizens. In an ethnographic study of Cambodian refugee ‘naturalisation’ in California, Aihwa Ong (2003) takes issue with the Arendtian stress on the refugee’s exclusion from the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). In Ong’s view, juridical citizenship is just one (albeit significant) lens through which it is possible to address the subordination and exclusion of modern refugees within the nation-state. Any meaningful distinction between refugee and citizen therefore must address cultural values and social asymmetries built into technologies of governmentality, such as naturalisation, whose objective is to remake refugees into competent cultural citizens of the nation-state (Ong 2003: 79). Analyses focused on statelessness and naturalisation are inevitably bound to the historical and political contexts they seek to address.10 Thus, in contrast to both Ong’s study and the Arendtian school of refugee studies, the cultural and political membership of Pakistan’s refugees within the League’s pre and post-independence concept of the Muslim nation was not called into question by the Pakistani state after independence — this, despite the seemingly paradoxical consensus at this level against opening Pakistan’s borders to all of India’s Muslims (see later). Moreover, the antimony between statelessness and citizenship is called into question in Pakistan’s rehabilitation context by the state’s interpellation of the refugee as a specific and partial subject of citizenship rights. Thus, on the one hand, their right to rehabilitation diverged from conventional discourses of humanitarianism, while on the other, the nationalisation of the rehabilitation process actually preceded the codification of formal citizenship rights for the Pakistani polity at large. However, when conceived in Foucauldian terms as a ‘population’ — that is, in terms of their efficient movement, their potential to carry and spread contagion, and their potential role in developing the agricultural and industrial sector of the nascent Pakistani economy — the refugee’s ‘national’ right to rehabilitation becomes equivalent with the achievement of a finite and non-juridical set of objectives. In the following section, I pursue how the emerging state of Pakistan blurred the distinction between the construction of the refugee as a possible citizen, whose rehabilitation provided the post-independence

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state with a new and vital nationalist ‘cause’, and the refugee as a technical problem of how best to achieve an end to partition’s chain of violence and displacement.

Instituting the Time of Partition: The Transfer of Population in the Punjab Two weeks before independence, amid escalating levels of violence and displacement, the Partition Council11 passed an agreement ‘to arrest further exodus and encourage the return of people to their homes’ (Rai 1965: 75). At this point, the two governments adhered to a policy of local containment which assumed conditions of communal normalcy would be re-established. Consensus soon arose, however, on the necessity of a complete but temporary communal transfer of population in divided Punjab, primarily because special law enforcement mechanisms which had been put in place in the final weeks of colonial rule in anticipation of a communal backlash had been overwhelmed or communally compromised in certain regions.12 With the acceleration in the number of attacks, the ethical distinction between perpetrators and the victims grew increasingly blurred and often became irrelevant. That certain provincial politicians from East and West Punjab characterised the pogroms waged by their respective communal constituencies as necessary acts of selfdefence, did not deter them from valorising such acts — often in the same public speech — as the pinnacle of religious virtue (see Pandey 2001). Discursive and non-discursive tactics within this more historically entrenched provincial political arena went far to make, in the words of partition historian Satya Rai, the ‘physical annihilation of the minority . . . more or less a matter of policy with the majority communities’ (Rai 1965: 76). Prior to independence, the leadership of the Indian National Congress as well as certain dissenting voices within the League had argued that a complete transfer of population in the Punjab would only increase the political and psychical vulnerability of minorities residing in other provinces (Rai 1965: 73). In contrast, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the movement for partition and later the premier of Pakistan, proposed a transfer of population accord as early as November 1946 in response to the forced exodus of non-Muslims in Bengal in the wake of the Muslim League’s ‘Day of Direct Action’.13 A more ideologically inspired rationale for a complete transfer was

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put forth by Muslim League stalwart Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan, who saw it as a natural step towards the realisation of a ‘Muslim state’ (Rai 1965: 92). The emerging federal government of Pakistan negotiated its ex-nihilo appearance in uneasy and partial contrast with popular and provincial communal sentiments on the ground. While the participation of League cadre and lower-level operatives in the 1946 Bengal riots has been acknowledged (Das 1991: Chapter 6 and passim), the League-asnationalist-government maintained a formal posture of communal neutrality and bilateral cooperation throughout much of the early post-independence refugee crisis. Despite the ambiguity surrounding the Muslim League leadership’s role in fomenting violence and displacement,14 the decision in 1947 to commence an official transfer is framed within Indian and Pakistani official accounts as a necessary response to the mutual breakdown of law enforcement mechanisms on both sides of Punjab (see Aiyar 1995). The aim of this section, however, is not to conclude whether the transfer of population was an example of ‘false’ necessity.15 Instead, I follow how the logic of necessity was shaped by, and gave shape to, a regime of postcolonial governmentality that codified the conditions of violence and displacement produced by partition into an ambivalent ‘end’ for the postcolonial state. What kind of real and imagined end did the transfer of population represent for the state of Pakistan? Official statements and practices surrounding the planning, execution and outfall of the official transfer point to the discreet and formative relay between popular violence, impending citizenship and the imagination of the post-partition state.

Passions, Normality and the Post-partition Citizen In the Emergence of Pakistan (1967), Chaudhry Mohammad Ali, Pakistan’s first Secretary General, notes that initially, the official exchange of population was ‘looked upon as a temporary phenomenon’: It was believed that when the passions excited by civil war subsided and conditions returned to normal, evacuees would return to claim their properties. In the meantime, the governments of both Dominions (India and Pakistan) were to take charge of the properties and look after them on behalf of their evacuee owners (Ali 1967: 298, my emphasis).

In what way could the state of Pakistan and India equate, or even reconcile, the violence born of territorial partition and the founding of

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nation-states with the colonial construction of communal violence as a spontaneous and reversible phenomenon? Colonial representations of native violence often resorted to the trope of passion or spontaneity, which sought to limit the agential and political scope of native rebellion by casting it as an un-orchestrated, sporadic and irrational outbreak.16 I maintain that for Ali, the idea of the passionate subject’s departure from reason and civility had to contend with the latter’s overdetermined location within the postcolonial order as communal victim, perpetrator and liberated citizen. Ali’s construction of passion relies on three assumptions about the course of nation-building in the aftermath of mass violence and displacement: (i) ‘native’ violence no longer indicates an intrinsic ‘lack’ of reason but its temporary suspension; (ii) after this lapse, the lawful game of citizenship can begin as if it has resumed; and (iii) the violence of partition was a consequence of, but bears little ideological relation to, the political agency of nationalism. In keeping with colonial discourse, neither of these assumptions about the participants in partition’s arena of ‘civil war’ approximate the liberal understanding of legitimate popular violence as an expression of ‘natural liberty’ (see Guha 1988). Not only did the communal contours of partition’s chain of violence and displacement foreclose this reading, the role of the states of India and Pakistan as neutral forces capable of ending violence was inextricably tied to a shared set of decolonising anxieties about inclusion in the liberal comity of ‘civilised’ nation-states. This perhaps provides some explanation for the state’s re-habitation of the depoliticising trope of ‘passion’. Beyond the realm of civilising anxieties, however, Pakistani as well as Indian’s execution of the transfer of population sought to institute the subject of passion into postcolonial material for the dialectical formation of citizen and state.17 In this view, the assumption of a return to normalcy was simultaneously a vestige of colonial political rationality and a necessary corrective to its coercive and racial logics of domination. Thus, if the state’s belief in the possibility of normalisation and return18 relied upon an ‘older’, colonial frame of thinking on communal violence as an unreasoned and temporary outbreak on the part of the native, its assumptions about the violence of citizens was complicated by an emerging set of anxieties concerning its legitimacy, distinction and control vis-à-vis the social. The building of assumptions about the subject and temporality of partition’s

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violence therefore represented a movement of the unthinkable into the realm of knowledge, power and state reason. To elaborate on this point, I turn to the official Pakistani discourse of evacuation, whose techniques of calculating and measuring human movement problematised the distinction between the violence of the social and the violence of the state.

The Ambiguous Location of Evacuation in the Chain of Violence At the level of implementation, the transfer reinvented the apparatus of colonial governmentality which, for more than a century, had fixed India’s Hindus and Muslims as singular and antagonistic communities. Colonial technologies of enumeration, such as the census, were therefore essential to the process by which a complete communal transfer of population could be conceived and executed. The West Punjab provincial government managed the evacuation of nonMuslims in tandem with the central government. Both governments, in turn, employed pre-partition census data to frame the technical requirements of evacuation. For instance, in a ‘Progress Note’ submitted to the West Punjab Ministry (Pakistan) on 9 November 1947, Mian Iktikhar-ud-Din, West Punjab’s Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation, calculated that ‘the approximate number of Muslims to be evacuated from the East Punjab and the East Punjab States [was] 25 lakh’.19 In addition, the remaining number of non-Muslims ‘awaiting evacuation from West to East Punjab cannot be more than nine lakh’ (Iftikhar-ud-din 1947). The ministry posited its forecasts of communal outflows and inflows according to the baseline population figures provided in the 1941 census, which, in keeping with colonial tradition, were organised to reflect religious and caste affiliation as well as distinctions between the rural and urban and the propertied and non-propertied. Such information enabled provincial and central authorities to identify ‘pockets’ and ‘concentrations’ of remaining Muslim minority populations in East Punjab (Iftikhar-ud-Din 1947). Food, fodder and medical care could thus be provided at precise locations by projecting through the census data the size and location of any given evacuee ‘column’ in relation to the impending border. The measure of the transfer’s success was the number of remaining Muslim ‘pockets’ in East Punjab, a figure arrived at by subtracting the number of incoming

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Muslim refugees registered in ‘transit camps’ from the district level returns of the 1946 East (India) Punjab census. The fashioning of new demographic categories from the colonial census concretised a rationality and practice of bilateral co-ordination. Indeed, the semblance of official neutrality relied not only upon the transparency of demographic information exchanged, but on the mirroring of methods of collection, interpretation and execution. Moreover, by situating a given village or district within a geographically wider and abstract calculus of Muslim and non-Muslim population flows, Iftikhar-ud-Din could establish November 1948 as the goal for completion of the transfer (Iftikhar-ud-Din 1947). It is possible to assert from this account of the transfer that the Pakistan and Indian states’ use of the 1941 census provided them with a statistical lens to measure and imagine the end of the violence of partition.20 However, the use of colonial census data to regulate the spatial and temporal dimensions of mass movement prompts one to probe further into the status of these technologies of official intervention whose task was not only to end violence, but also to symbolically differentiate the terms of something like a ‘transfer’, ‘exchange’ or ‘evacuation’ from the purificatory violence engulfing the districts and villages of divided Punjab. Interviews and writings from this period suggest that territorial expulsion was an objective of communal violence. Its effects on the minority ‘enemy’, therefore, worked in practical tandem with, and sought the same effect as, more corporeal idioms of communal purification. As I note in the introduction to this article, such violations were considered by India and Pakistan’s nationalist leadership as an unmitigated departure from the normative and political objectives of the nationalist struggle. In the case of the Pakistan Movement, an equally decisive gap existed among the subcontinent’s Muslim political elite, particularly in the Punjab, whose leadership steadfastly resisted the Muslim League’s attempts to incorporate the second largest ‘Muslim majority’ province in India under its electoral–political banner. Mired in intra-elite contests, the territorial contours of Pakistan were therefore ‘deliberately vague’ until early 1947 (Jalal 1985).21 Practices of communal genocide read the sudden certainty of the partitioned landscape through gendered idioms and rituals of purification. Such logics of commensuration22 not only manifest in the expulsion, murder and abduction of communal enemies, but in the putting to

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death of young female family members in a similar effort to preserve purity (Menon and Bhasin 1998). Was the state facilitating the purification of territory or bringing about peace? If sovereign power is understood as the right to ‘take life or let live’ (Foucault 1978: 137), the phenomenon of migration or expulsion marked its dispersal. This brings us to a crucial juncture in Pakistan’s history, where the state sought to incorporate the violence of the social body into its ‘legitimate’ body through the anxious process of rationalising one link in partition’s chain of violence and displacement. I would suggest that technologies of measurement and forecasting were crucial in enabling the state to frame the limits of this process of commensuration. The logic at work here resembles what the jurisprudence of the state of emergency refers to as the ‘doctrine of historical necessity’. The legal historian Nasser Hussain suggests that ‘The category of necessity is itself a temporal condition’ (Hussain 2003: 109), pointing to the unstable moral and political location of violence and coercion within the liberal constitutional order. For the state to legitimately wield sovereign violence (in this case the right to banish, which I am arguing is symbolically equivalent to the right to kill), the situation authorising the use of state violence ‘must be represented as an interruption in the otherwise smooth functioning of lawful politics. Only its minute-by-minute narrative, its always closely anticipated ending, can make legitimate the exercise of violence’ (ibid.: 12). What motivates the state’s construction of the emergency as a temporary phenomenon, Hussain goes on to suggest, is the imperative to inscribe an ‘external signature of legality’ onto its practices of violence. For ultimately there is little ‘integral difference’ between the violence of the state and the violence of the social world (ibid.: 107; see Benjamin 1978; Derrida 1990: 6). The official evacuation narrative thus reveals the manner in which the sovereign violence of partition was symbolically converted into an object of state reason. In seeking commensuration with popular (passionate, spontaneous, purificatory) expressions of communal violence, the state sought to initiate its ‘monopoly’ over the ‘legitimate’ use of physical force (see Weber 1978: 54).23 This process of commensuration fixed an arbitrary end to the event and subject of partition, such that its enduring effects upon public culture and domestic life — as well as its bearing upon the Pakistani Army’s use of genocide 20 years later against the nationalist uprising in East Pakistan (1970–71) — remains unexplored.

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Anticipatory Violence: Non-agreed Refugees and the Model of Communal Counterbalance In his address to the Partition Plan Council in June 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah compared the ‘exemplary sacrifices’ made by Muslims residing in the ‘Hindu majority states’ for the ‘cause’ of Pakistan to the ‘state of slumber’ he perceived in the Muslim majority provinces. Paradoxically it was the latter, along with the non-Muslim minority of Pakistan, who were recognised as undisputed citizens of Pakistan under the terrotorial principle of nativity. The effective significance of Jinnah’s comparison therefore reverts this back to the Muslims from the Muslim minority provinces, who are warned in the same address to ‘stick to their respective homeland[s]’, live as Indian citizens, and avoid the ‘temptation’ to migrate to any part of Pakistan (Muslim League 1947). Keeping in mind the political, economic and physical threats to existence faced by many Muslims citizens of India today (Devji 1992; Pandey 2006), I wish to address the making and unmaking of the political rationality that made it possible for Jinnah to assert without a sense of contradiction that he had ‘created’ Pakistan for the very Muslims he expected to ‘stick’ to India. After partition, the scenario of a complete movement of India’s Muslim population into Pakistan gave way to apocryphal visions, such as the one drawn by the Muslim League leader Hussain Surhawardy in 1948, If the [Muslim] minorities of the Indian Union were forced to migrate to Pakistan, Pakistan will be swept away in the flood of disgruntled and distressed humanity. If the Hindus of Pakistan, particularly of East Bengal, migrated to the Indian Union, there will be such disorders and misery within the Indian Union that it will be destroyed.24

Despite the radical changes in the communal landscape that occurred in the short period between Jinnah and Surhawardy’s comments, neither saw the potential influx of Muslims from the minority provinces solely as an impending crisis of bodies and space. For what stood to be jeopardised by such an influx went beyond the material domain to implicate a vision of post-independence communal ‘counterbalance’, which had been a feature of Muslim League nationalist strategy since at least 1940. As the name suggests, counterbalance was a proposed mechanism of reciprocal minority safeguards between the Muslim majority ‘states’, which eventually comprised Pakistan, and the rest

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of the Indian union. In order to be effective, the model expected all of the subcontinent’s minorities (i.e. Muslims and non-Muslims) to stay put after independence — affirming the point made earlier regarding the primacy of communal violence, rather than cultural or ideological affinity, in propelling the official designation of the Punjab as an ‘agreed area’. Formally introduced within the 1940 Lahore Resolution, ‘counterbalance’ epitomised the Muslim League’s oppositional construction of India and the Congress party as crucibles of ‘Hindu majority’ domination. The Resolution is known for its initial outline of a territorial picture of Muslim sovereignty, carved from the subcontinent’s ‘contiguous’ Muslim majority states. Ayesha Jalal has shown how, more than the consecration of the territorial Pakistani nation-state, the Resolution sought to reconcile the ‘uneasy equation between (colonised) Muslim identity and territorial sovereignty’ (Jalal 2000: 123). Specifically, what constitutional and political safeguards would the consolidation of the Muslim majority provinces (without whose electoral support the League lacked the legal and political authority to speak on behalf of the colonised Muslims of India) provide to India’s remaining 40 million Muslims after the departure of the British? Seen from this perspective, the League’s counterbalance model provides one of the best — and most short-lived — examples of its original nationalist strategy: to wager the rights of the minority province Muslims on the autonomy and influence that the majority Muslim provinces would potentially be able to wield within a larger Indian Union (Jalal 1985). The high-political machinations leading to the development of the counterbalance framework suggest its principle motivations lay less in curtailing movement than in governing the communal conduct of majorities, minorities and states. Some evidence of this can be found as late as August 1947, in Jinnah’s first address to the citizens of Pakistan. Although significant debate still exists in Pakistan about whether the address constituted a ‘founder’s statement’ on Pakistan’s true identity as a secular, multi-religious polity, far less attention is given to the fact that it also insists upon — and thus questions — the loyalty of Pakistan’s non-Muslim minority citizens.25 The pull of official norms, however, went both ways to include the majority Muslim citizenry. This provides clearer shape to the historical significance of the model of counterbalance as a certain type of transnational communal governmentality. Muslim toleration within Pakistan was conceived pragmatically, somewhat against the grain

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of liberalism’s ahistorical and pre-social construction of tolerance. Thus, although the League’s elite assumed that counterbalance would be effective in generating political quietism among the non-Muslim minority, they placed even greater emphasis on the conduct of Pakistan’s Muslims: a Pakistani Muslim would therefore accommodate the beliefs, rights and aspirations of the non-Muslim minority as a stance of necessity, knowing that any collective or (depending on the outfall) individual aggression on their part could incite reciprocal violence against India’s remaining Muslim minority. Jinnah’s ultimate decision to accept the Cabinet Mission plan which called for the division of the Punjab and Bengal on communal lines, dealt an obvious blow to the original conception of counterbalance (since both provinces had sizable non-Muslim populations). Yet, as late as June 1947, Congress leader Vallabhai Patel (soon to be at the forefront of India’s official response to the genocide of partition) seemed agreeable to reworking counterbalance to fit the reality of two sovereign nation-states. Accepting the communal underpinnings of the model, Patel suggested that ‘Pakistan may find the presence of Hindus and Sikhs indispensable’ and ‘may find that it is in their interest to ensure protection and justice to (the non-Muslim) minorities. If that comes about, (Muslim) minorities (in India) may not have anything to fear. We may also be able to afford some protection on the basis of reciprocity in regard to the treatment of minorities’ (Patel in Zakaria 1996: 46, my emphasis). In the brief interim between the announcement of territorial partition and the onset of communal genocide, it appeared as if counterbalance might function as a bilateral logic of communal détente. The League’s anticipatory strategy dissolved within weeks of independence when it became apparent amidst mounting conditions of genocide that a much larger proportion of Pakistan’s non-Muslim minority would migrate to India. By contrast, most of India’s ‘nonagreed’ area Muslims had managed to remain in place. Accusing the state of Pakistan of failing to protect ‘its’ minorities, Patel floated a revised evacuation plan for India that included the western part of India’s United Province in the ongoing mandatory transfer of population scheme. Patel’s proposal appeared around the time that a more militant demand for Muslim evacuation was put forth by the Sikh Akali Dal leader Master Tara Singh.26 Singh encouraged the Congress to evacuate Muslims from the United Provinces to accommodate beleaguered Sikhs refugees arriving from West Punjab.

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This consequently fuelled panic among Muslims in the province due to rumours that Sikh marauders loyal to Singh had recently conducted pogroms against Muslim refugee caravans in the Punjab. The circulation of rumours of an impending Sikh attack and involuntary evacuation by the Indian state throughout the province prompted thousands to flee to Delhi and onwards to Pakistan. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan responded to the situation in the United Provinces by recapitulating the government’s refugee policy. He argued that while Pakistan would not refuse shelter to any Muslim settler, it must refuse in any way to facilitate abandonment by Muslims of their homes and properties in India outside East Punjab. I emphasised that it was for the Government of India to implement their reiterated promises to give full protection to all their Muslim nationals and that if they did so honestly and truly the question of evacuation of Muslims from Delhi and U.P. (United Provinces) would not arise. The division of India into Pakistan and India Dominions was based on the principle that minorities will stay where they were and the two States will afford all protection to them to live as citizens of the respective states (Khan 1967: 126).

The intensification of anti-Hindu violence pushed Indian and Pakistani nationalism to the verge of ideological contradiction. The narrative culminates with Patel’s proposal that India would reconsider retaining U.P. Muslims, who had since been re-categorised as ‘intending evacuees’ by the Indian rehabilitation machinery (1948, Government of India, Ministry of Communication), if the Pakistan government publicly announced its inability to accommodate them. Keeping the League’s aforementioned position on Muslim migration and the Congress’s secular discourse of citizenship in mind, Liaquat Ali Khan’s reply was equally — if not deliberately — untenable: the League, he asserted, would concede to Patel’s terms if the Congress similarly disclosed its inability to guarantee the security of India’s Muslim citizens.27 I would argue that the scene of brinkmanship I have just described conveys more than the role of unforeseen and countervailing factors, such as the massive Hindu outpouring from Pakistan’s non-agreed regions, in dismantling the viability of communal counterbalance. In its pre- and post-independence iteration, counterbalance was implicitly predicated upon the prerogative of the state to permit reciprocal violence against ‘its’ minority population. As one important

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commentator at the time put it, it was an autocratic ‘hostage theory’ of post-independence citizenship that would have the effect of stultifying the political voice of religious minorities throughout the subcontinent (Ambedkar 1946). The possibility of counterbalance as an engine of perpetual communal peace, then, relied upon the capacity of each state to subsume the potential for majoritarian collective violence into its own body of ‘finite’ ends (see Foucault 1995).

Rehabilitation in Sindh: Building the Emergency In Pakistan, rehabilitation involved the ‘organisation of camps, the utilisation of land and factories and the employment of our whole administrative machinery’ (Ashraf 1948: 34), including the important custodial function of redistributing evacuee property on a temporary basis to incoming refugee agriculturalists. Initially, Pakistan’s central government managed the work of ‘evacuation’ while ‘rehabilitation’ was assigned to the provincial units (ibid.: 34). Within months of independence, however, rehabilitation activities increasingly fell under the authority of the federal government. The process of centralisation began with the formation of the Pakistan-Punjab Rehabilitation Commission in November of 1947. As I mentioned previously, Punjab was the undisputed epicentre of Pakistan’s ‘refugee problem’, and with ‘lakhs of agriculturalists still pouring into this province, no clear policy seem[ed] to have been laid down regarding restarting present factories or setting up new industries’28 (ibid.: 34). One bureaucratic observer described the Joint Rehabilitation Commission as a ‘useful co-ordinating body’ for ‘dealing with the problem of evacuating refugees from East Punjab and rehabilitating [refugees] in this province’ that reflected ‘the importance attached to the refugees’ problems by the leaders of our [federal] State’ (Ashraf 1948: 32).29 Being a quasi-federal institution, the energies of the Commission would be spent smoothing over interprovincial obstacles to the timely rehabilitation of the Punjab’s transfer-refugees. The participation of the Punjab in the forefront of the Commission was a demographically determined matter of expediency. This was not the case for Sindh30 and the North West Frontier Province whose provincial evacuation returns revealed a net loss of population, prompting members of the Pak-Punjab council to cite the ‘axiom that each unit of West Pakistan should receive refugees up to the number of evacuees and to rehabilitate them out of property left by evacuees as a matter of course’.31

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An assumption prevailed in the ‘smaller’ provinces that the introduction of centre-province commissions would erode their autonomy. Which tier of government had jurisdiction to regulate the intake and care of Muslim refugees, especially in light of the fact that the official financial burden for rehabilitation rest principally with the provincial units? Muhammad Khuro, Sindh’s Chief Minister, resisted the creation of a Pakistan-Sindh Joint Refugee Council and asserted that none of its decisions would be executed without the consent of the provincial government.32 Anticipating the central government would request the administration of Sindh to increase its quota of west Punjab’s transfer-refugees, Khuro announced the provincial capital of Karachi was effectively ‘full’ (Dawn, 28 January 1947).

A New Ratio In the weeks and months after partition, members of the Sindh Provincial League undertook a range of initiatives to discourage the exodus of Hindus and Sikhs from Karachi. Through frequent statements made in the local press, Sindhi Muslim politicians pleaded that ‘migration is to the mutual disadvantage of the majority and minority community’.33 More forceful tactics were deployed as well, such as when the Sindh administration sought to ban the entry of ships from Bombay into the port of Karachi.34 Neighbourhood ‘Peace Committees’ were established with the aid of the Sindh government to protect nonMuslims in urban Sindh from violent reprisal at the hands of incoming Muslim refugees. Attacks by refugees against non-Muslims, including the seizure of evacuee property, was roundly condemned by the Sindh Muslim elite while, by contrast, the League’s federal leadership appeared sympathetic to the plight of refugees who were arrested by the provincial government for ‘lock breaking’ (Jang 4 August 1948). In response to federal quiescence, and to the fact that unlike West Punjab, Karachi’s refugee population had settled in large, freely organised concentrations throughout the city, the Chief Minister of Sindh posed an ultimatum to the refugees and the centre: The refugees ought to learn that by such behaviour on their part, they become a drag on society and place an inestimable burden on the state . . . In case able-bodied refugees don’t avail themselves of opportunities of employment and shirk work assigned to them, we shall be compelled in spite of all our sympathy for them, to take steps for their externment from the province in order to avoid undeserved burden on our resources (Khuro quoted in Dawn, 29 September 1947).

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Khuro’s provocations exposed the thin line in place since the institution of the Pakistan-Sindh Joint Commission, between provincial coordination and subordination. He permitted the entry of 100,000 refugees from the West Punjab camps into Sindh, a figure exactly half of the central government expectations.35 He called for ‘speed’ in their transport to Sindh so they could ‘settle on land in time for kharif (harvest) season’.36 Indeed, Khuro rarely shied from predicating the inclusion of the refugees in Sindh on their ability to produce economic utility without lessening opportunities for the native Sindhi-speaking population.37 According this view, the industrial–commercial centre of Karachi would only accommodate ‘government servants and industrialists prepared to invest substantial capital in the commerce and industry’ of the city (Dawn, 13 December 1947).

‘Capacity’ and the Line between Ongoing and Forced Migration Sindh’s jurisdictional conflicts with the central government were propelled by the Punjab bureaucracy’s control in framing the statisticalpolitical contours of the refugee problem. Relying on the 1941 census, Francis Mudie, a senior colonial administrator who had been asked by Jinnah to act as governor of Punjab, estimated that approximately ‘6.14 lakh Hindu and Sikh agriculturalists’ remained in Sindh in December 1948. He proceeded in the same report to make the following extrapolation: if ‘all Hindus and Sikhs were to leave Sind and [the government of] Sind were to agree to fill their places by refugees now in the West Punjab, our problem would be solved’.38 The relevance of this statement lies in its obvious resemblance to the kind of demographic forecasting I addressed in my analysis of the transfer of population in the Punjab. ‘If all the Hindus and Sikhs were to leave Sind . . .’: it is unclear whether Mudie was simply attempting to predict an impending outcome or whether, in fact, he foresaw a more active role for the state of Pakistan in ‘facilitating’ such an outcome. I would suggest that neither the drive to displace non-Muslims from Pakistan nor the ‘right’ of Muslim refugee-citizens to occupy Pakistan’s land motivated Mudie’s reasoning. While such motivations were certainly intelligible to the wider communal polity, Mudie’s prognosis, I contend, was tied to a decidedly non-normative and empirical construction of the Muslim refugee as a problem of territorial capacity. Communal difference

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therefore manifested as a problem of land scarcity, which was seen in terms of the disequilibrium in the ratio of departing to incoming refugees. As I discuss later, calculations of this scale and level of probability assumed the character of an emergency only when situated in narrative relation to the biological and economic conditions prevailing in Punjab’s refugee camps.

The Narrative Structure of the Camp A number of transit camps in Pakistan, mostly located in East Punjab, were constructed soon after the decision to undertake the transfer of population. A camp management scheme was introduced, outlining ‘detailed instructions for the treatment of refugees at each stage of their sojourn in the camps from the time of entry to that of departure, providing especially for Reception, Rations, and Clothing Issues, [and] Census Information’ (Dawn, 5 April 1948). District-administered ‘Illness and Death’ statistics were compiled on a weekly basis, and figured into the calculation of the maximum number of inhabitants a given camp could sustain before its ‘liquidation’ — i.e. resettlement in surrounding areas (Pakistan National Documentation Centre 1993: 112). Due to incidents of cholera and other contagious diseases, interns were confined to the camp and risked losing any future resettlement and welfare entitlements if they failed to comply (Leghari 1948). Despite the use of holocaust metaphors and policing techniques, the East Punjab transit camp system is a departure from Agamben’s (1998) characterisation of the concentration camp as a ‘political– juridical structure’ of the state of exception. A more adequate description would take into consideration the changing function of the camps in Punjab from their unfulfilled original role as temporary sanctuaries (to be followed by repatriation to India) to temporary waystations on the path to long-term resettlement and, eventually, citizenship within Pakistan. Admonishing the federal government against equating rehabilitation exclusively with the provision of property, Mudie considered an ominously durable, yet enabling, role for the camps: We have at present a large number of people, who unless something is done at once, appear likely to remain for indefinite period in refugee camps with serious consequences not only to the economic position of the State but also to their own moral and earning power . . . Apart

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from the rehabilitation of existing industries we must start new ones, both large-scale industries and cottage industries . . . In the meantime, while these schemes materialise, we have to maintain the morale of the refugees at present in camps. Everyone agrees that is absolutely essential for this purpose that every one should be employed in some way or another. No one should be unemployed because, for instance, of lack of tools or the necessary capital to start up a small shop (Mudie 1948).

The operative yet unstated political signifier in this passage is the statistical probability known as the ‘permanent transit camp’. In a lengthy report to the Pakistan-Punjab Rehabilitation Council, Refugee Commissioner A. K. Leghari identified November 1947 as a turning point when ‘the number of Muslim refugees entering West Punjab began to rise above the number of evacuees leaving West Punjab’ (Leghari 1948). Indeed, the Punjab and federal government viewed this numerical shift as an event of crucial magnitude. The eventual ‘saturation’ of agricultural land in the Punjab would create a population of ‘surplus refugees’ whose future access to the ballot spurred official anxieties that the squalor of camp life might provide the grist for ambitious politicians and communist activists. The spectre of unabated camp life crystallised the bureaucracy’s statistical projection of communal flows and territorial capacities into a biopolitical argument for the centralisation of state power.

‘Resolving’ the Refugee Problem: The 1948 Emergency The federal and Punjab administration frustration with Sindh’s political elite was exacerbated by the latter’s refusal to accommodate the federally mandated share of refugees (200,000). From possessing almost complete jurisdiction over the rehabilitation process, by the end of 1947, the government of Sindh was being vilified by the federal– Punjab combine as an ‘un-Islamic’ and ‘provincialist’ body (Dawn 18 November, 1948). Calls were made upon the central government to ‘override opposition from interested parties’ and resolve the refugee problem.39 The centre began the process of securing legislative backing from the First Constituent Assembly to suspend Pakistan’s provincial assemblies, leading an amendment to be passed in May 1948 by the Dominion Legislature to the existing powers of emergency (inscribed in Sections 102 and 126 of the Government of India Act, 1935). The amendment empowered the Governor-General to declare a state of

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emergency if he believed the ‘economic life’ of the country was in danger (Ashraf 1948: 35). Declared on 30 August 1948, the emergency immediately dissolved all of Pakistan’s provincial ministries. As the first of numerous extra-constitutional foreclosures upon provincial autonomy in Pakistan’s political history, this emergency did fulfill its immediate objective: by the end of the year Punjab’s transit camps had been dissolved. Pakistan’s ‘refugee problem’ can therefore be interpreted historically as a material and discursive site for the mediation of the ambiguity between the principles of provincial autonomy and state sovereignty. This ambiguity both guided and limited the League’s attempt to secure the participation of the ‘Muslim-majority’ provinces that ultimately constituted the national territory of Pakistan. Paradoxically, the high level of political and bureaucratic coordination between the federal government and the Punjab during the evacuation and rehabilitation stage was underscored by the fact that until 1946, it was Punjab’s Muslim elite who insisted upon provincial autonomy and thus posed the most formidable challenge to the All India Muslim League’s hegemonic quest to act as the ‘sole representative party’ of the Muslims of India (Jalal 1985; Talbot 2000). The close coordination between the League and the Punjabi political and bureaucratic establishment in the context of the refugee crisis thus anticipated the Punjab’s eventual capture of the central state apparatus and the devolution of the politics of provincial autonomy to ‘smaller’ provinces, such as Sindh and the North West Frontier Province. As a link in partition’s chain of violence, the refugee problem brought the question of life and the territorial and economic conditions needed to sustain it to bear on the decision to declare a state of emergency. Although the provincial limits to League hegemony may have preceded the ‘refugee problem’, they did not determine the politics of rehabilitation in a unidirectional manner. An effective political historiography of this moment entails doing more than verifying if centre–province tensions functioned as the real or cynical rationale behind the 1948 emergency. Such tensions were undeniably remade by the material crisis of mass migration. Rather than adjudicate on the validity of the 1948 emergency, the goal of this analysis has been to investigate the role of political techniques in delimiting the crisis of partition into a state of emergency.

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Conclusion If the popular violence resulting from the partition of India was unthinkable for the nationalist elite, the postcolonial state engaged this violence as an ambivalent site of intervention and commensuration. Within Pakistan, this unfolded through a set of procedures whereby the unthinkable was fashioned into an event, one whose representation and resolution fashioned the state into an autonomous apparatus of government and a legitimate vessel of sovereign violence. To follow a narrative such as this, in which the state develops autonomy by channelling unprecedented patterns of violence and displacement into its instrumental body of ‘ends’, confirms the distinction made by Walter Benjamin (1978) between expressions of ‘divine violence’ that seek to annihilate the law and the ‘mythical violence’ of institutions such as the postcolonial state, that work to conserve it. As the example of the Pakistan state’s intervention in the genocide accompanying partition suggests, this distinction was not absolute nor did it foreclose a certain process of commensuration. When examining the Pakistani nationalist narrative, ‘official’ attempts to include the potential for mass violence into formal political rationality appear to precede the communal devastation of partition. The League’s proposal of a model of communal counterbalance was a response to its mounting inability to secure its founding political commitments to the minority-province (non-agreed) Muslims. In light of this impasse, whose signs were evident by 1940, how would the game of citizenship proceed in ‘a’ Pakistan whose sovereignty would only marginalise India’s Muslims further? Counterbalance was an attempt to secure the rights of this remainder by creating a transnational regime of communal governmentality that simultaneously sought to curb and harness the potential for majoritarian violence. Against the ‘ineffective’ model of postcolonial citizenship embodied in the notion of counterbalance, we may juxtapose the subalternity of Pakistan’s ‘agreed-area’ refugees — this, in a manner that acknowledges, but also questions, the narrative of their inclusion as citizens of Pakistan. I have shown how Pakistan’s official discourse of evacuation and rehabilitation positioned the agreed-area refugee in a ‘zone of indistinction’ (Agamben 1998) between their status as a problem to be resolved and a citizen bearing the specific right to rehabilitation. A fundamental equivalence therefore existed within official rehabilitation discourse between emptying unhealthy transit

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camps, absorbing its inhabitants into the national economy and delimiting the end of partition’s chain of violence. This equivalence does not begin with the question of rights, nor even the question of population, but with the priority of violence in framing the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.

Notes ∗ The author wishes to thank Veena Das, Naveeda Khan, Markus Daechsel and two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Historical Sociology for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. This paper draws on archival research conducted in London, Karachi and Islamabad between 2000 and 2003, which was generously supported by the Wenner–Gren Foundation and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. 1. This amounted to a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’ in the words the Indian historian Rafique Zakaria (1996). 2. Take, for instance, the following public statement to the Indian public by Vallabhai Patel, leader of the pro-Hindu Mahasabha faction of the Indian National Congress and India’s first Home Minister: ‘Butchery of innocent and defenseless men, women and children does not behoove brave men; it is the war of the jungle and the hall-mark of inhumanity and barbarity. There will be occasions and opportunities for all of you to show your zest for fight; one must seek for it on one’s ground and in suitable time. It is no time to be foolhardy or desperate but time to reflect calmly on your course of action. We have won our freedom to make our country great and prosperous, not to destroy what little has been vouchsafed by alien rulers’ (Zakaria 1996: 51–52). 3. More productive histories of the popular experience of partition’s chain of violence describe a dissolution of a ‘politics of place’ (Gilmartin 1998), or what, in a similar vein, Gyan Pandey (2001) calls the ‘death of face-to-face relationships’. Pandey and Gilmartin do not represent the pre-partition ‘local’ as a politically isolated universe of communal harmony. Rather, the loss of a politics of place more subtly links elite political contests, hierarchies of mobilisation and popular meaning to partition’s outcome of territorial sovereignty and communal genocide. 4. Ranajit Guha (1997) defines mobilisation in the context of anti-colonial Indian nationalism as an elite logic, ‘another name for popular consent, for hegemony’ (102). He goes on to analyze the spectral location of coercion within Congress nationalist strategy. See his discussion of ‘Swadeshi sanctions’ as an example of the ‘very real tension between force and consent from which Indian nationalism acquired its form and substance’ (1997: 103, 110–114). Shahid Amin’s (1995) analysis of the violence at Chauri Chaura provides, to my mind, the best historical account of how the violence of the mobilized resulted in their exclusion from the elite narrative of nationalism. See also Pandey (1990).

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5. India and Pakistan did go war in 1947 over the disputed territory of Kashmir. This makes the arrival at ‘Inter-Dominion’ covenants concerning the transfer of refugees especially significant. 6. Tan and Kudaisya’s (2000) study provides an unofficial estimate of 18 million. 7. For a penetrating theoretical analysis of the political and spiritual topography of the riot ‘sanctuary’ see Feldman (1991), who draws from Franco (1985). 8. Interview with author, Lahore, 1999. 9. See Birmingham (2006) for a discussion of Arendt’s attempt to transform the alienation of the inter-war refugee from nationality and nativity into a humanist philosophical position. 10. Of course, it would be problematic to oppose the discourse of naturalisation to the juridical discourse of citizenship that engenders the stateless refugees. Both have their point of reference in territorial nationalism’s discourse of nativity (see Agamben 1998). For Ong, naturalisation is important in so far is supplements the juridical logic of citizenship rights through practices of governmentality that extend the state-society divide. State welfare institutions and domestic abuse NGOs catering to the Cambodian refugee community in Northern California therefore work according to a shared set of normative/nativist assumptions about what constitutes competent American cultural citizenship. 11. The Partition Council included British administrators and the leadership of the Indian National Congress and All India Muslim League. 12. The Partition Council established the Punjab Boundary Force in July 1947. Led by a joint (British, Pakistani and Indian) command, this force of was created to ‘ensure protection to the minorities . . . so that they may stay back in their respective areas’ (Rai 1965: 74–75). According to Rai, the Boundary Force ‘utterly failed to protect the minorities from the exodus of the people from one country to the other . . .’ (ibid.: 75). The breakdown in the official machinery served to accelerate the rate of exodus on both sides of the border’ (Aiyar 1995). 13. Conceived as a protest against the Cabinet Mission’s territorial and constitutional outline for Pakistan, the All India Muslim League’s ‘Day of Direction Action’ fomented Muslim violence and forced thousands of non-Muslims to flee to Hindu-majority areas in the Bengal. League activists and members of the League government in Bengal were accused of complicity in the riots (see Das 1991, Brass 2003, Batabyal 2005). 14. On the anti-Hindu violence resulting from the League’s Day of Direct Action Sunjan Das (1991) writes, ‘elite mobilization and (popular) self-mobilization were not autonomous from each other. They were interrelated and mutually dependent . . . The rioting (Muslim) crowd appears to have been broadly aware of the objective of violence in which it was participating (p. 171)’. 15. ‘Historical necessity’ is not the state of emergency but the trope through which it achieves articulation with the structure of law. This process, argues Agamben (2005), anthropomorphosises the state as a discreet subject of rights and instantiates its unique condition of autonomy from the social:

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16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

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necessity inscribes causality and difference between the peoples’ ‘right’ to security, which is supreme, and the security of the state (see Agamben 2005: ch. 1, see below). Guha (1988). For a contemporary discussion of popular passion as a trope of postcolonial state power in India see Cohen (2004) Corrigan and Sayer (1985) employ this analytic to describe the role of governmental technologies of moral regulation in fashioning the autonomy of the nineteenth century British state. I deliberately avoid using the term ‘repatriation’ to describe this scenario. 1 lakh equals 100,000 Timothy Mitchell (1991) discusses how practices of governmentality and knowledge production generate the symbolic and material illusion of a division between society and state. The League’s discourse of Muslim nationalism relied upon an abstract, ethnic, and secular representation of India’s Muslim ‘community’ which was in tension with more fluid, local, and orthodox constructions of religious authority and affiliation (Gilmartin 1988, Ansari 1995, Jalal 2000). For a more detailed discussion of political violence as a practice of commensuration, see Feldman (1991). For Hegel ‘violence is convertible (‘the real is rational’), provided it is preventively processed . . . by a state which is, itself a Reichstaat — that is to say, a state which constitutes itself with the intention of liberating individuals’ (Balibar 2003: 30–31). Suhrawardy quoted in British High Commission Karachi Fortnightly Report. 1948. (OPDOM 27: April 1–7, 1948: 106). It was estimated that in October 1948 approximately 30–40 million Muslims resided in India. By this time migration from the non-agreed regions of India had begun to exceed the rate of Muslim influx from East Punjab. ‘Muslims of India have shown to the world that they are a united nation and their cause is just and righteous, which cannot be denied . . . let us impress the minorities by our word, deed, and thought that as long as they fulfill their duties and obligations as loyal citizens of Pakistan they have nothing to fear’ (Muhammad Ali Jinnah, quoted in Dawn, 17 August 1947). British Foreign Office Report. DO 142/418 ‘Communal Situation in India and Pakistan Since Transfer of Power’, No. PHC/15/47: 10/12/47. ‘Communal Situation in India and Pakistan Since Transfer of Power’. British Foreign Office Document, 12 October 1947, DO 142/418. ‘Role of Government in Solution of the Refugees’ Problems with Particular Reference to Formation of the Pakistan Punjab Council’, Pakistan Times, 4 November 1947. By December 1947, Sindh had resettled 244,000 persons against Punjab’s 4 million (Talbot 2000: 199). A. K. Leghari. ‘Plan Dated 5 July 1948 for the Rehabilitation of Refugees and for the Speedy Liquidation of Refugees Camps’, Central Record Office, Punjab Archives, Civil Secretariat, Lahore. C File no. 25, vol. III, Pol., Gen., 1948.

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31. British High Commission Karachi Fortnightly Report — OPDOM No. 69, 8 September 1948, para. 8. 32. Hussein Hidayatullah, prominent Sindhi-Muslim politician (Dawn, 10 October 1947). 33. In November 1947 Sindh’s Chief Minister banned the entry of all ships from Bombay holding Muslims passengers to the port of Karachi (Dawn, 18 November 2001). The strategy was meant to curtail non- Muslims from using these same ships to depart for India. According to the British High Commission in Karachi, Sindh’s Chief Minister attempted to slow the rate of out-migration by giving a ‘confidential order to District Authorities in upper Sindh, including, it is believed, the Districts of Hyderabad, Larkana and Nawab Shah, that no Hindu be permitted to leave the district without a special permit from the District Magistrate’ (British High Commission Karachi Fortnightly Report — OPDOM No. 8, 28 January 1948). 34. Khuro quoted in British High Commission Karachi Fortnightly Report — OPDOM No. 7, 22–28 January 1948). 35. Ibid. 36. Khuro responded to the federal government’s decision to relax existing domicile and age restrictions on government employment by asserting ‘the government [of Sindh] makes it quite clear that although they wish to help the refugees, they do not wish to injure the interests of permanent residents in Sindh. It is the government’s policy that all things being equal, a Sindhi should be given preference over others’ in the provincial sector (Khuro quoted in Dawn, 28 November 1947). 37. Francis Mudie, ‘A Report Dated 31 Jan. 1948 on Refugee Camps’. Minutes of the 8th to 14th Meeting of Pakistan Punjab Joint Refugees Council. File no. 25, vol. I Pol. Gen., 1948. 38. British High Commission Karachi Fortnightly Report — OPDOM No. 7, 22–28 January 1948.

3

A Real Terrorist∗ Oskar Verkaaik The word ‘terrorist’ had become a nickname among the youth of Karachi. It was a fashionable label to give one another. And ‘Muslim terrorist’ was even better. If somebody hit a great shot in cricket, for example, you could admiringly shout: ‘Yo! What a terrorist!’ When a foreigner joined in, playing badly, it was a perfect opportunity to provokingly shout, ‘Hey whitey! You can’t beat us Muslim terrorists!’ A terrorist was a strongman. A terrorist was a hero. Other words used to say the same thing. Then, you would compare somebody to the legendary wrestler Pahlvan. When James Bond movies were popular, Raja Moore — a bastardisation of Roger Moore — became the rage. Rocky was also popular for a while and Jacky of course, after Jackie Chan the martial arts hero. Boxer, Commando, or simply, Fighter were some of the other popular nicknames. You could also use jiyala. But that sounded very outdated. Jiyala had been popular with the previous generation — the old folks now too listless and lazy to play cricket. Jiyala dated from the 1960s. Then, a political group called the Pakistan People’s Party had suddenly risen almost out of nothing. Its followers called themselves socialists and talked of social equality and revolution. The legendary Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, their leader and later Prime Minister of the country, raged against the mullas and their pious talk. Once, after the Prime Minister had returned from a visit to Turkey, a journalist at a press conference insinuated that he had drunk a glass of whisky during his visit. ‘Slander’, Bhutto shouted, ‘I drank much more than one’. This appealed to a lot of youngsters — a man with the courage to make his own choices. They joined the party and called themselves jiyala, those who would remain loyal to the party through thick and thin, and would not stop at anyone or anything. They were hotheads — the passionate. They instilled fear and respect. At times they also called themselves fakirs to show that they thought of things other than life’s comforts — just as the fakirs had turned their backs on earthly matters, dedicating their lives to God.

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After jiyala, ‘goonda’ and ‘dacoit’ became popular. Those two words meant more or less the same: rogues, bandits and highwaymen. In the 1980s and 1990s there were a lot of those. In the country, groups of armed dacoits lived in the swamps along the banks of the Indus River. They kidnapped the rich. Sometimes they would also kidnap foreigners — Japanese or Chinese. They would be paid a ransom and rumour had it that this money was given to the poor. But that was all it was — a rumour. Nevertheless, they were fine words to put someone in their place. Telling your rival, ‘Take care, I’m a dacoit’, made it sound convincing, and he knew he had to watch out. Kaliya, the Black, was also a name to be proud of. It expressed the power of darkness and destruction. But terrorist was better, more terrifying still, especially in Karachi where everybody talked about terrorists. Javed could still vaguely remember when the word became fashionable. It was sometime at the beginning of the 1990s. He was still very young, not even 20, terribly reckless and already a great cricketer. In those days, the city endured fighting on a daily basis. Several political factions were active, all with their own armies, battling each other as well as the police. Things were rough. Rounds were fired from automatic rifles imported from Afghanistan — where they had been used to fight the Russians. Once the firing was over, the government sent the army to the city and launched a propaganda campaign against the terrorists to justify sending in the army. All kinds of politicians gave speeches in which they talked about terrorists. The press and other media joined in. Daily, the news programmes would mention how many terrorists the army had beaten. You couldn’t open a newspaper without reading about terrorists. People also started using the word in everyday conversation. If you disliked someone, you used to say, ‘You’re a bastard’. Now you said, ‘You’re a terrorist’. Eventually people began to acknowledge this. They’d answer back, ‘Yes, I am a terrorist and if I were you I’d watch what I was saying’. Of course, you had to make it sound believable. If you said, ‘I am a terrorist’, while shaking like a leaf, you’d only make yourself ridiculous. But if people thought it could actually be true, you had it made. Javed knew this from experience. He looked like most people’s idea of a terrorist: not very big but broad shouldered and muscled with a face that showed no fear. This was very useful. If he parked his motorbike somewhere and said to a boy, ‘Are you also a terrorist? Look after my bike, will you’, he could trust the boy to do so. In a

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city where everything that was not bolted down was stolen, he had no need for locks. But now, Javed feared that the good times would soon become a thing of the past. I’d known him for about three months when I first saw him subdued and thoughtful. Nevertheless, he’d come to the park with the boys for our game of cricket. He wasn’t the kind of man to let his personal problems ruin his pleasure. As usual, he had the loudest voice but you could tell that his mind wasn’t on the game. Even I, who had learned the game from him, and never stood a chance while playing against him before that evening, managed a few runs while he was bowling. ‘Hey, terrorist’, I said at the end of the game, ‘is something the matter?’ ‘Yes’, he grumbled with irritation. ‘I’m getting married’. His days as a terrorist would soon be over. Three hours drive from Karachi was Hyderabad, a city of a million and a half inhabitants, situated on the right bank of the Indus River. When the bus wearily crossed the old colonial bridge, I’d usually see a herd of buffalo in the river. The water was the light brown colour of Pakistani tea and along the bank the lead-grey backs of the beasts rose out of the water like an island kingdom. Their shepherd, a mercurial boy, about 12 years old, swam amongst the animals. Pulling himself up by a buffalo horn he’d hop from the back of one beast to another before diving into the water again. Beyond the bridge lay the city, the city that was home to Mazhar Sahib. Mazhar Sahib, or Mister Mazhar, was 70 years old. He had lightcoloured eyes that sometimes burned with an inner fire and sometimes showed great sadness. He had a white moustache like a tusk and tufts of white hair curled upwards from under a felt hat. He said, ‘I am both man and woman’. That he was a man was clear from the way he walked with his legs wide apart. This was, he explained, because God had hung him so heavy that he couldn’t walk in any other way. ‘That’s a fact’. But in public he also often wore a dupatta, a thin headscarf normally only worn by women. He wore the dupatta around his shoulders. The cloth was almond-coloured: something in between yellow, orange and brown. ‘Almond is the colour of love’, he said. ‘Love presents a great problem’. That too, he said, was a fact. He used that expression a lot. I had met Javed because I wanted to learn how to play cricket, and I had made the acquaintance of Mazhar Sahib because I was

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on the lookout for a job. I had come to Pakistan for anthropological research. Interested as I was in the place Islam took in politics, I was also interested in the meaning Islam held in daily life, as politics begins with the personal. I had a special interest in the muhajirs, the migrants who had left India after it became independent, fleeing to Pakistan as they preferred to live in a Muslim country. There were an estimated 10 million muhajirs, the majority of whom lived in Karachi and Hyderabad. After a short while in Pakistan, travelling back and forth between the two big cities, I found that anthropological fieldwork can be quite a frustrating experience as, in essence, you don’t do much more than talk to people and drink tea. While all around you people are hard at work, you give the impression of lazing around, having nothing but spare time on your hands. I felt the need for an occupation people would see as both useful and significant. In Karachi it had been cricket, everybody saw how meaningful that was. In Hyderabad I had gone to Mazhar Sahib. Mazhar Sahib used to be a conductor on a Hyderabad city bus. Wearing a colonial uniform, he had sold tickets to the passengers. Around his neck he had carried a leather case on a belt, which contained large roll of tickets and money. As a conductor, you had to be able to stand your ground, as there were always people trying to travel for free. But he had always managed to avoid that. Now he was a pensioner and looked after by his sons. He had four sons. His daughters had all been decently married off. After he had retired, he’d wander around the small neighbourhood park each day. Local children played here and the men came for a chat. People were buried here too, as the park also functioned as a graveyard. Next to the park was the Mosque of the Date Palm, sandwiched between a shoe repair shop on one side and a smithy on the other. This was where Mazhar Sahib found his new calling. He watered the grass and plants and rinsed the dust off the graves, clearing away the mess that others had left behind. When I asked him if he could use an assistant, he promptly said, ‘You can start looking for diamonds’. He meant, collect the garbage. I was glad to have the job, he was happy to have someone to talk to. He started by telling me that he was a man of graves. He had been born close to a grave that he considered to be the most important in all India and Pakistan. It was the shrine of Pir Moinuddin Chishti, one of India’s greatest Muslim saints, and was situated in Ajmer, Rajasthan. The holy man was known as a mystic with a great love of

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music who had come to India centuries ago to bring people the gift of Islam. Now every year many Muslims returned the favour, making pilgrimages to his grave. This was the holy place where Mazhar Sahib had been born. His family, he said, was related to the great Pir Chishti. ‘In that case’, I said, ‘your family must be quite wealthy’. Mazhar Sahib answered, ‘In the spiritual sense, yes, but not where money is concerned’. These things don’t always go hand in hand. Because of his heritage, Mazhar Sahib now also considered himself to be a pir — the title the holy man passed on to his descendents. And the holy man not only passes on his title, Mazhar Sahib said, he also hands down the holy power carried in his breast that made him a gateway to God for his disciples. So Mazhar Sahib also carried this power, making it his duty to look after people, both living and dead. This was why he now tended the small graveyard. He helped not only the people who lay buried but also those who came there in their spare time. ‘There are two ways to become a pir’, said Mazhar Sahib. ‘One way is by birth and the other is by living a good life’. As far as he was concerned living a good life was fine but being born a pir was better. ‘At least that way you have it in the family’. A self-made pir just had to wait and see what his son made of things. His own family had borne pirs for many generations now. When he was young he’d never thought he’d leave Ajmer. He’d always thought he would continue to live close to the grave of Pir Moinuddin Chishti. His father always said, ‘There are two ways to learn from the world. One is to travel and go out into the world. That is tiring. The other is to stay in Ajmer and wait underneath a tree for the world to come to you’. Mazhar Sahib had always thought he would do the latter. Then, in the year 1947, on the 26th day of the Ramadan month of fasting, Pakistan gained its independence. That night was also the night when, many centuries before, the last of the Koran had been revealed to the Prophet. Close to the station in Ajmer, there was a mosque across the road from a Hindu temple. There had been trouble there before. The Hindus had the annoying habit of tolling the bell in the middle of the Muslim prayers. The Muslims had protested. An Englishman came to the temple and asked, ‘What is this?’ The Hindu said, ‘Well, this is a temple’. ‘What do you do here?’ ‘We pray of course’. ‘And this can be done at any time of the day?’ ‘Yes, no problem’. Then the

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Englishman went to the mosque and asked, ‘What is this?’ The peshimam said, ‘This is a mosque’. ‘And what is you do here?’ ‘We pray, what else?’ ‘Can this be done any time of the day?’ ‘No. We pray five times a day, at set times’. ‘Good’, said the Englishman. ‘From now on, when you pray, light a lamp so the Hindus know not to toll the bell’. For a while all was well. But then independence came and the Hindus said, ‘Now India is ours we can pray as often as we like’. So they tolled the bell while the Muslims were praying and the Muslims became angry. After all, it was the night on which the completion of the Koran was commemorated, making this nothing less than pure provocation by the Hindus. ‘It was then that we razed that temple to the ground. I was there too. That’s a fact’. After the fight, Mazhar Sahib fled to Pakistan. A train travelled across the desert to Hyderabad on the other side — former residence of the kings of Sindh, the land that lay downstream from the Indus River. The kings had built a citadel there. When the British conquered Sindh, they turned the citadel into an army base and after independence a refugee camp was established there to house the Indian Muslims. Here Mazhar Sahib found shelter. Later the refugees built houses there, turning it into an illegal ghetto, a slum. At times the city council tried to demolish the citadel but the inhabitants refused to leave. ‘Pakistan is also our land’, they said, ‘and we can live where we want’. They added extra floors to their houses. Shoemakers, tailors and blacksmiths opened their shops there and, with donations from the neighbourhood, the Mosque of the Date Palm was built and the park was laid. Mazhar Sahib, too, never moved from there. He built a house right on top of the citadel walls, with a view over the whole city. He said, ‘I came here as a refugee and now I live like a king in a citadel’. A few days after I started work, while we were sitting on the grass at dusk, he asked me what I had come to do. ‘To study Islam’. He nodded in approval. He thought Islam was an important subject that the people in my country knew little about. A silence ensued in which he slapped at a mosquito on his neck. Then he stood up stiffly, legs apart, his mouth full of pan and said, ‘I will tell you about love’. Because love, he said, was the single most important thing in Islam and, above all, a great problem about which there was much to say. I was looking for continuity in the kind of things you read about in the daily newspapers. I was curious about the ideas that had been

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handed down from generation to generation. Not that I thought you could simply explain people’s behaviour by their traditions alone — as an anthropologist I would be the last person to believe in such cultural determinism — but I found it important to know how these traditions had changed over time under the influence of developments in society. Mazhar Sahib and Javed were both muhajirs, migrants, but of different generations. Mazhar Sahib was of the generation that had known India and had chosen to come to Pakistan. He still had relatives in India with whom he had communicated solely through letters for many years now. Javed was born when the borders between the two countries had long been closed. To him, India was not a home left behind. To him, India was the enemy and possibly the subject of some tales his father told him. Yet, Javed still considered himself a migrant just as much as Mazhar Sahib. If push came to shove, he would be even prouder to call himself a muhajir than Mazhar Sahib. If he had to describe himself in one word, then muhajir, alongside terrorist and a damned good cricketer, would probably be his choice. Then again, muhajirs weren’t like the normal type of migrants you would find the world over. Muhajirs saw themselves as people who had left their country because of their faith. They had chosen to become Pakistani. They hadn’t become Pakistani simply by birth. They were proud of their choice. This was especially true of the younger generation, who may not have chosen it themselves but had to deal with the most suspicion and discrimination, particularly because the local population doubted the loyalty of migrants. So there were very different opinions of migrant loyalty. They themselves said, ‘We are the champions of Pakistan’. The others said, ‘They are fake Pakistani’. Young muhajirs had formed their own political party, the MQM, or the Muhajir National Movement. It was a huge success. During elections, the party had won almost all the seats in Karachi and Hyderabad, traditionally places where the muhajir were the majority. All of a sudden young and inexperienced muhajir began to govern those cities. Then they fell out with other parties and different minorities, and the members of the Muhajir National Movement were soon branded terrorists. Nevertheless, the party had built up a massive following. You didn’t often come across boys like Javed who had never worked for the party. But there was a difference between the boys who just supported the party and those who were willing to take the biggest risks for it.

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What was this difference? Why was one willing to sacrifice his life while the other wasn’t? What compelled one human being to choose martyrdom and what stopped another from doing the same? You had the celestial and the terrestrial — din and dunya — and a marriage, explained Javed, usually didn’t present any problems as long as it was an earthly matter. A marriage should be something sober, a duty to fulfill, a matter of dunya. If you turned it into a love story, a beautiful thing in truth, it usually ended badly. This was because love came from heaven and what came from heaven was life threatening. The earth’s powers were great and dangerous, but the powers that came from heaven were countless times greater and more dangerous still. If you did your duty you could flatten a hill. But if you were driven by love you could move mountains. In serving God, you rose above the worldly powers, making the risk of things going wrong so much greater. Javed’s marriage wouldn’t be a marriage of love. He was at peace with that. ‘Love makes you blind’, he said. ‘Isn’t that what people say? How can you tell if the person you fall in love with is the one who’s right for you? One day you’ll wake up, regain your sight and find that you’ve made a mistake. Then it’s too late. It is better that the family finds you a wife. The family is experienced in these matters’. It was true, he said, that women these days were more impatient. They watched all kinds of romantic series on television and wanted to live lives like those. His bride-to-be, for instance, had already said that they wouldn’t move in with his family but get their own place. On television people always lived with their own little family. A nuisance, Javed thought, particularly if there were children. Who would mind the children if his wife wanted to go out on her own? These kinds of issues were never addressed on television. But she had stood her ground and, no matter how problematic, that stubborn streak in her appealed to him. When he had discovered this trait in her, or rather, when he and his family had run into it during the wedding negotiations, he had begun to feel something for her. It was then that he thought: apart from being a duty, a marriage is also a challenge. The house in which he and his wife were to live in stood in an area of the city called Lalukhet. Actually, the neighbourhood was officially called Liaquatabad. It was a district that had been built for Indian refugees shortly after the country’s independence. At the time Liaquat Ali Khan was Prime Minister of Pakistan and the district was named

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after him. Liaquatabad: Liaquat’s city. But the ground on which the houses were built belonged to a Hindu called Lalu. This was his land: his khet. It was Lalu’s khet. And although the Hindu had migrated to India, everyone referred to the area as Lalukhet. Lalukhet had a reputation of being one of the most rebellious and violent districts in the city. It had always been that way. When Karachi rose against the military regime in the 1960s, the rebellion started in Lalukhet. Later when there were riots between the different ethnic groups in the city, they often involved people from Lalukhet. When the military went on the hunt for terrorists, they started their search in Lalukhet. ‘And now my wife wants a house and she finds it in Lalukhet’. But that was just a joke; it was logical for them to live in Lalukhet. Javed and his bride had both lived there all their lives. It was a good neighbourhood, Javed thought, he liked living there and didn’t want to leave. A lot of young people lived there; people whom he divided into four categories. The smallest group, about 10 per cent, were the religious. They read books about Islam and went to religious meetings. The odd one even visited Koran school. Then there were the students, 20 per cent, who also read books but about computers, history and politics. They were mostly poor because they didn’t work. Next, there were the illiterates, about 20 per cent, who learned a trade from their father, like carpentry or butchery. They did have money but were very frugal, saving everything. The other youths, about 50 per cent, were the dacoits, the pahlvans (strongmen), the commandos, and the terrorists. They usually worked and spent their money on cigarettes, card games, illegal alcohol, motorbikes, bodybuilding and porn films. A real terrorist also visited the whores. Javed thought of himself as the latter, but his marriage would put a stop to that. He was now 26 and had worked for 10 years. He jokingly referred to his first profession as ‘sugar engineer’. He had made candy from buffalo milk and heaps of sugar. The sugar and the creamy milk was mixed with fruit extracts or nuts and heated over a fire in a large wok. It was crucial to stir the mixture well. Slowly the milk would thicken until a rich and sweet cake remained that was cut into straight pieces and sold by milkmen. Stirring the thickening mass was the hard work that had developed Javed’s arm muscles. After a few years he became a rickshaw driver, as the job seemed less strenuous and he liked the speed on the roads. By then he had also become a member of MQM, the Muhajir National Movement.

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Transport was important for the party — more important than candy made from buffalo milk. He carried all sorts of things for the party, materials for propaganda, flags and weapons: mainly automatic rifles. He knew the alleyways the police would rather avoid. He wasn’t paid for these trips but he could ask the party for money whenever he needed it. He had more money than ever before. He lost the rickshaw one night when he got careless and left the safety of the back streets to take a shortcut along a main road. It was late at night, almost morning, and he thought it was safe. When he saw the patrol car he quickly ducked into a side street but he didn’t know the area and soon became lost in the maze of narrow alleyways. He heard the soldiers jump from the car and follow him. Leaving the rickshaw behind, he leapt over a few walls until he was safe. But he had lost the rickshaw. He then went back to his first profession — making candy. He spoke of his work for the party as a temporary whim. It was exciting and you could make a good living. You gained a lot of respect in the neighbourhood. But when he became aware of the dangers, he quit. ‘Terrorism’, he said, ‘is just like marriage. You’re either in it for din or for dunya. I did it for dunya. I did it for money, the excitement and the respect. Then, things usually end well. But if you do it for love, trouble is bound to come your way. Your powers will become too strong. You will lose control’. He had witnessed this himself. With his own eyes he had seen how somebody had become so enthralled with this love that he had virtually forsaken the world. This person was Adil, a former friend. Adil had been a real terrorist. Compared to Adil, Javed thought of himself as a novice and an amateur. Compared to Adil, Javed had just been play-acting. Mazhar Sahib was a pir, there were people who came to him when they needed divine power in their lives, but he also had a pir. And that pir was his beloved. ‘I am his wife’, he said and to underline his words he threw the almond-coloured dupatta over his head. ‘I obey him. Only him. I belong to him’. The dupatta slid onto his shoulders and he started to twist the ends of his moustache. I asked who that pir was. Mazhar Sahib spit the pan from his mouth, gave me a penetrating look and solemnly said, ‘Pir Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti’. The man that lay buried in Ajmer, in Mazhar Sahib’s place of birth.

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‘But he has been dead for centuries’, I said surprised. ‘No!’ He spat out the word, like his pan. This was something he felt very deeply about. ‘In my Islam we say: he who once was born will never die. You change worlds, like a child that is born enters another world, from the belly into this world. But that belly is also in the world. When we die we enter into a new world, one much larger than this world. And this world is part of it’. He paused for a moment to think. Then he said, ‘But you can no longer return. We can also not return to the belly. But inside the belly you sometimes hear the voices from the larger world’. I asked, ‘Do you sometimes hear the voice of your pir?’ ‘Sometimes’, he answered. ‘In dreams’. He also heard the voices of other departed in his sleep. His father had visited him recently. He wasn’t at peace as his grave wasn’t clean. The next day Mazhar Sahib had visited his father’s grave and saw that there was dust and mud on the stone. He had cleaned the grave. He had fed the fakirs that lived by the cemetery. Two nights later, he saw his father again. He said that he was now free. ‘That is a fact’. As usual, we were sitting in the park. A little further along, pilgrims lay sleeping. There were several different places of pilgrimage around the citadel, attracting visitors from far and wide. Some people said, ‘Hyderabad has so many holy places because kings used to live here. Saints and kings need each other’. Most saints indeed lay buried right outside the city walls. One of them had loved pigeons and now his shrine swarmed with the birds. Another had a grave 30-feet long because, through his devotion and God’s power, he had grown to become a giant during his lifetime. A third held a stone on which Hazrat Ali, son-in-law to the Prophet, had knelt and prayed. Through the force of his prayers the stone had turned soft and when Hazrat Ali rose up and the stone became hard again, impressions of his knees, hands and forehead were left behind. These places, which were colourful and where there was always something to do, were crowded. When they grew tired, the pilgrims came to the citadel park to smoke hashish and sleep. Sometimes we had to wake them when we were about to sprinkle the grass. ‘The Prophet also isn’t dead’, Mazhar Sahib said. ‘The Taliban over there’, he said pointing with his thumb over his shoulder towards the minaret of a mosque situated outside of the citadel and rising above the walls, ‘the Taliban over there say the Prophet is dead, but they are wrong’.

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The mosque he was referring to was not a Taliban mosque. There were no Taliban in Hyderabad. But the mosque did have a bad name. In contrast to most mosques it hadn’t been built with money raised by the neighbourhood. Gifts had come from abroad to build the mosque. Everyone suspected these gifts had come from Saudi Arabia. It had become a large mosque, the largest in the neighbourhood, incorporating marble, sandstone and rare woods. Above the entrance the 99 virtues of God were chiselled in stone. Inside, the mosque looked bare, without the lights and carpets that typified the local mosques. An air of missionary zeal and meddling surrounded the mosque. The muezzin always began his calls to prayer a fraction before the surrounding mosques. Every Friday the imam preached about what was and was not allowed. Even though everyone agreed that every mosque was a house of God and that a Muslim could pray everywhere, there were few local residents who visited the new mosque. It was just a little bit too fanatical, everyone agreed, just like the Taliban in Afghanistan. They also understood little about Islam. ‘The big difference’, Mazhar Sahib said, ‘is this. They say the Prophet is dead, the pirs are dead; all dead are dead. Death is a different world. That is God’s world and our world is not a part of it. When we die we are born into a world that is already there but which we cannot see. We continue our lives there and every once in a while we stroke the belly. My prophet is still there as is my pir and they too caress our belly every once in a while’. It occurred to me that Mazhar Sahib had made his beliefs his own. He always spoke about my Prophet, my pir, my Islam. Not that he begrudged other people anything. It was more that he actually experienced everything as if it really was his and belonged to him. The Taliban say there is only the Koran. We say there are the Koran and the Prophet and the pirs. Because God gave His word to my Prophet, peace be upon him. And the Prophet had the word written down. That is the Koran. But he also passed the word from heart to heart. And whoever could listen would hear the word in his heart. And in turn they too passed the word from heart to heart. Those are the pirs. The pirs carry the word in their heart. Others read the word in the Koran.

The word transcended everything. He gave an example of the power of the word. If you were ill and recited a line from the Koran throughout the night, you would receive the strength to become

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well again. The word, he said, had the power to give you five different things: success in life, protection against your enemies, a painless death, a place in heaven, and honesty. But, of course, you needed to know exactly which words from the Koran to recite. For that reason, among others, people came to him. As a pir he knew these things. This was the role he had to fulfill. At that moment the call to evening prayer sounded from the Taliban mosque, followed a moment later by a similar call from other mosques. I said that I thought the Taliban voice was the most beautiful. Mazhar Sahib thought so too. The Taliban muezzin also had the best pronunciation, he said. It almost sounded like real Arabic. He disappeared inside the Mosque of the Date Palm and came back after about 15 minutes. He had evidently given our conversation further thought as he returned to it. ‘In my Islam there are three groups’, he explained. ‘There are the fakirs’. He nodded towards the pilgrims sleeping in the grass. ‘They have forgotten about the world. They don’t wash, they wear old clothes and they don’t cut their hair. That is not good. Then there are the Taliban and other foreigners. The Wahabis and the Deobandis’. He alluded to the two reformist movements from Saudi Arabia and India. ‘They read the Koran with the head. That is not our Islam. The third group believes with the heart. That is my Islam. The heart is more important than the head. But the heart is also a major problem’. When I asked him what he meant, he made a dismissive gesture as if to say: don’t even mention it. Then he reconsidered and, to my surprise, answered with a poem. It was by a great Indian poet, he said, but he had forgotten which one. Translated, it boiled down to, ‘He who has once experienced the oneness of love and remembered it, has never again found peace of mind’. This brought him to his most favourite topic of all: love. And his second favourite topic: death. Most of our conversations would eventually end up about one of these two topics, or both. He removed the dupatta from his shoulders and held it in his hands like an offering. ‘This is the colour of love which scorches all’, he said, referring to the colour of almonds. Once there was a man so in love with Pir Moinuddin Chishti that his white shirt was scorched where it covered his heart. ‘Ever since then’, Mazhar Sahib said ‘almond has been the colour of his pir’.

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Love, so he explained, makes you incredibly strong and terribly weak. It makes you weak because you obey every command your beloved makes. ‘If you don’t feel like eating and he says: eat, then you eat’. That is why love puts you in the most extraordinary and difficult situations. ‘Imagine, he said, if your beloved tells to you to stay here until he returns. Then he goes to the bazaar, meets someone and forgets to return. And all that time you are sitting here in the park. After two days he comes back and asks: what are you doing here? You would feel like a weakling’. Some pirs abused the love of their followers. They asked for money or said don’t ever wash again; if you obeyed his command, everybody would dislike you because you smelled. Nonetheless, you couldn’t go to a different pir. ‘Your pir is your pir’, Mazhar Sahib said, with the same conviction that he’d say the sun rises every day. ‘You can’t choose a different father either’. When your heart burned, you lost your head. You were happy with the stupidest things. There was a well-known poet whose name was Amir. His heart burned with love for his pir. One day an old man came to the pir asking for money so he could let his daughter marry. But the pir said, ‘All I have is a pair of old shoes’. The man thought, ‘They are of no use to me’. But he took them out of respect. The man went home. He lived close to the soldiers’ encampment where Amir, the poet, lived. Amir was also a soldier and had been off fighting, returning home with a considerable fortune. He was tired and wanted to sleep, but when he reached the encampment he smelled the scent of his beloved. He followed his nose and reached the old man’s hut. The daughter opened the door and Amir asked whether his beloved was there. No, said the daughter, but we do have his shoes. Oh, begged Amir, give me his shoes and I will give you my fortune. The daughter said yes. She received the fortune and was happy, for she could now get married. But Amir was even happier. He danced around with the shoes on his head. He had completely forgotten his tiredness. So, love makes a man strong, because you never feel tired. But the power of love was even stronger than that. It filled you with a super power. Mazhar Sahib used the English term. It was an incomprehensible power that took possession of you and forced you to commit the most terrible deeds, not because you wanted to, but because you couldn’t help it. The power was too strong to resist. There was once a disciple of Pir Moinuddin Chishti, whose mother had wanted him to marry. He didn’t want to get married, all he could

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think about was his pir, but his mother insisted. He gave in. But when he first laid eyes on his bride, she dropped dead, purely through the destructive power emanating from his eyes. With a mixture of rage, anguish and panic he said to his mother, ‘You see. This is what comes of it’. I began to laugh, but Mazhar Sahib looked at me in surprise. He hadn’t meant the story as a joke. According to him, the groom hadn’t tried to blame his mother for his crime. There was no crime. There was ‘super power’, the power that came from the other, larger world, and in comparison a man’s strength was nothing. That was no reason for irony or Weltschmerz. That was a fact and it was wise to be aware of it. But the groom’s mother hadn’t known this. You had to anchor yourself in this world if you weren’t to be consumed by love. ‘Let’s say there are two boys. They are both in love with the same girl. The first one says, as any boy would, I have to marry you; if you don’t marry me I’ll die. Then she marries someone else. The boy is sad, but he has his family, his work, his duties and slowly he forgets her. He carries on. The same thing happens to the second boy. He also says if you don’t marry me, I’ll die. And the girl marries someone else. The boy leaves home and starts to wander, he loses his way, falls ill and dies. End of story’. By now it was dark. We were sitting in the sparse light of a single lamp hanging by the entrance to the little mosque. A group of women passed, their long shadows thrown across the grass. A blue moon rose above the citadel. The pilgrims awoke and readied themselves to go to the shrine of their choice. The evening and night were the best times for this. As a man you had to have the strength not to be overcome by your emotions. You had your role to play in this world. ‘But to those who carry inside the strength to surrender’, Mazhar Sahib said, ‘death will be like a wedding. The most important moment of the wedding is when the bridegroom lifts the bride’s veil. The bride is ready, the groom is ready, and they look at one another. That’s that’. That was how he envisioned death to be. His pir would come to him and lift the veil from his face. ‘In death I am the bride’, he said and rearranged his dupatta. Adil was restless and moody. He had always been like that even when he was little. When they were 15–16 years old — Adil, Javed, Najeeb, Siddiq, Na’im and all the other gang members — Adil’s moods had been legendary. Sometimes, it was as if he flew, he was so cheerful,

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so energetic; he would constantly hold your hand or put his arms around your shoulders. It was as if he wanted to be with you always and stop time so that everything would stay exactly the same as at that delicious moment. But a week later the fire would be out. He would complain of tiredness and headaches, and become irritated and sulky at the slightest provocation. Then he would keep to himself and make sarcastic comments. Malicious behaviour would then be his only source of pleasure. He was never the leader of their gang. Taking on the role of leader was usually a contest between Na’im with his sense of humour, Najeeb because he was an even better cricketer than Javed, and Javed because of his muscles. However, Adil could have competed on the basis of his intelligence and courage. He was the most daring and understood things more quickly than the others. He was also the one the girls looked at when they passed by in the bus. That was because of the black shirts he wore. The girls liked black. But he was too unstable. If things became too much for him he would stay away for days. He remained an outsider, even though his good moods were infectious and, for that reason, everyone thought he was one of their best friends. When he was 18 he really did disappear. It was typical of Adil not to tell anyone in the group. He left on an impulse. Javed and the others had to hear from Adil’s brother that he had left Lalukhet. He had joined the Muhajir National Movement. He had become a full-time member. He had joined the underground. The party felt cornered when the army came to Karachi and started branding its followers terrorists. It wasn’t like the old days anymore when a 100,000 people would come to a public rally of the party and Javed and his gang decorated their motorbikes with party flags tearing through the city, honking loudly and yelling, ‘Long live the muhajirs!’ and ‘Karachi is ours’. These days if you waved a party flag a little too provocatively you ran the risk of being arrested, and there were endless stories of torture and disgrace from the police-cells and prisons. The gang had discussed what to do about this. They all agreed that an injustice was being committed and when faced with injustice you should show courage. But it was no longer so easy to show courage. Earlier you could have gone into the street yelling ‘Long live the muhajirs’. Now you had to first get in contact with the underground movement. But it wasn’t easy to find. On a particular occasion the army had arrested party members, one after the other they had said, ‘That’s enough. Now I’m joining.

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What do I care about my life?’ But no one had been expected to follow through. And now Adil had gone and done it. They were astounded when they heard. They admired him too. Adil had always been the most daring one, they said to each other. When Adil returned, he couldn’t stop talking about the party leader. He had met him, he said. ‘Really?’ the boys asked. Yes, he said, he had met him. In a crowd in front of his house. They had looked at each other for an instant and the leader had said something to him. But he hadn’t heard the words, he had been too enraptured. It had suddenly become so quiet in the middle of that busy street, as if the noise had disappeared from a movie soundtrack. The leader had smiled. And waved. And made a fist. ‘We call him pir’, Adil said, ‘Pir Sahib. And sometimes we call him Brother. He always calls us Brother’. He was in a good mood, as if the world lay at his feet, and he couldn’t stop talking. ‘At the end of time there will be a universal government of Islam’, he said. ‘All injustice will disappear. Justice will be done. But first there will be a period of tyrants. They are strong, merciless and will seem unconquerable. But with God’s help the people will fight them. Many people will die. But no power is greater than the power of God. He is bigger than India, bigger than Israel, bigger even than America. The power will come from God, but how it will come, we do not know yet. We must be prepared to risk our lives’. That sounded ominous and mysterious. Javed asked what he meant by that. Adil answered with a story. A man, walking across a street, saw a dead child lying on the ground. He walked over to the child and said, in the name of God I command you to rise. He said that three times. But the child stayed dead. Then he said, I command you to rise in my own name. The child stood up and walked away. A mulla saw this miracle and called to the man, you are a heathen, you act as if you’re better than God. To which the man answered, the child had died at God’s command, how could He change His own command? That is why I changed it. The mulla got even angrier and went to the king to register a complaint. The king agreed with the mulla and said to the man, you are an apostate; I demand your hide. No problem, said the man. He pulled off his skin from the top of his scalp and gave it to the king. Initially Javed didn’t understand the story, but Adil explained it to him. You had to believe that the power of God was within you and

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you could perform miracles. Even if threatened by the mulla and the king, you still had to believe in yourself. You had to be prepared to lay down your life for that belief. Only then would you be completely invincible and immune to any injustice. Adil told of the oath of loyalty and devotion he had taken. He spoke about it as if it had been a wedding. It had all been very solemn, beautiful and serene. Afterwards he had felt more calm and determined than ever, as if a new life had started for him that was many times more serious, responsible and purposeful than the life he had lived as a boy. ‘Javed’, he said, his voice touched by emotion, ‘now I know what I have to do. Now I finally know what to do. I always had the feeling of being born in the wrong place. Now I know where I am needed’. Javed understood that he was talking about the party. Javed was happy to be persuaded to take the oath too. He was curious. To take the oath he first had to become a member of the party. Adil arranged the contacts. Javed filled out the forms and then had to wait for the ceremony to be held. In the meantime he had to go to meetings where he and other new recruits were taught the party ideology. ‘It was just like going to school’, Javed said, still disappointed after all those years. A man resembling a teacher told them about the hierarchy within the party and to whom they, as new members, should be obedient. He told them that only strict discipline could bring the goal of liberation closer. At the end he told them what the punishments would be for those who were ill-disciplined. The ceremony was like a group meeting. In the street in front of the leader’s house, carpets were spread out on which the new recruits sat in straight rows. The solemnity made Javed nervous. He was careful not to sit at the front. He wore black clothes and a band around his upper arm in the party colours. It wasn’t the leader himself that took their oaths. Javed didn’t get to see the leader at all that day. That, too, was a disappointment. Maybe, Javed thought, the leader wasn’t at home because he had to attend important meetings. Seated on the carpets, the members-to-be waited silently and solemnly for what was to come. After a long time a man came out. He motioned for everyone to stand. Javed tried to stand up as straight as possible, chin in the air. He struggled to feel the determination and sense of purpose Adil had spoken of. Then the man started to read out pieces of text that the group had to repeat. He said, ‘In the knowledge that God is present and watching me, I swear on His holy book and on the honour of my mother that I will always be loyal to

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the party and the leader for the rest of my life. I swear never to take part in any conspiracy against the party and the leader. If I ever hear of such a conspiracy I will immediately inform my superiors, even if the conspirator is my blood brother, my blood sister, my father, my mother or any other blood relative. Should I ever take part in a conspiracy against the party and the leader, it would be a crime as terrible as the dishonouring of my mother and I ask God to damn me for it. I will obey all my superiors’ commands precisely, regardless of my personal circumstances, thoughts or emotions. I will guard each secret like a treasure greater than the treasure that is my life. I will not consort with members of any other organisation, unless ordered to do so by my superiors. I swear that I have and will continue to have complete confidence in the party and the leader. May God strengthen me in my resolve and my loyalty’. Javed repeated the words and waited for the sensation of transformation that Adil had promised him. But he was distracted. He looked at the neck of the boy in front of him and watched a fly slowly crawl into the open collar. Javed’s neck started to itch in exactly the same spot, just to the left of the spine. He had to force himself not to raise his arm and scratch himself. But the boy in front of him didn’t move a muscle. He no longer felt such irritations. ‘Looking back’, Javed said, ‘it was really an idiotic, unbelievable display; a scene from a bad movie’. But at the time he didn’t see it that way. At the end of the ceremony, he was ashamed to feel exactly the same as before, with the difference that his nervousness and excitement had turned into sleepiness and disappointment. He avoided Adil for a few days. He didn’t know what to say to him. When they finally ran into each other, Adil immediately asked, ‘And? Did you see Pir Sahib?’ He was talking about the leader. Javed still doesn’t know why, but instead of telling the truth he answered with faked enthusiasm that ‘Pir Sahib’ had come outside and addressed the entire group and that all of them had cheered and applauded. He told it so realistically that Adil became jealous. At full moon in the month of Shaban, Shab-i-Barat was celebrated, the night during which, according to Mazhar Sahib, accounts were drawn up for the coming year. On that night God decided what fate would await everybody that year: who would die and who live? Your future was decided on that night. It was also when people visited graveyards to tend to the graves of their dead and light candles in remembrance. This was done because

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although the dead resided in the larger world, it was better for their peace of mind if they knew they were connected to the living. A neglected grave would sadden them. ‘God only knows who takes care of the graves in Ajmer’, Mazhar Sahib said at the beginning of the night when I found him in his little house on top of the citadel walls. ‘It’s not good if the graves are left alone’. A Muslim could live everywhere, he said, because the earth was God’s creation, but graves bound you to a spot. His sons’ wives had made halva, a sweet dish, which was handed out to the neighbours on plates. People ate in the street. The children lit firecrackers. The boys were dressed in their best clothes and the girls wore lipstick and eye shadow in lollypop colours. Fireworks could also be heard outside the citadel. The chickens and goats, which were kept in the streets, had become restless, just like the people. It was a cold December night. The wind had turned. Instead of coming from the south, carrying the warm air from the Arabic Sea, it now came from the west, from the direction of Quetta and Afghanistan, where the snows had started. During the day the sky was so dry, clear, fresh and blue that I imagined I was on a Central Asian high plain instead of the Indus delta. Several inhabitants of the citadel had dressed their goats in a coat or sweater to prevent the animals from becoming sick with the cold. The full moon was big and white. ‘I come from over there’, Mazhar Sahib said, pointing in the direction the wind was coming from. ‘My second name is Gardezi, he who comes from Gardez’. Gardez, he said, was a city in Afghanistan. Mazhar Sahib was like most Pakistani. They insisted that their families originally came from Afghanistan, Central Asia, Persia or Arabia to indicate that they, being Muslims, had always been strangers in India. Before his ancestors settled in Ajmer about five or six centuries ago, Mazhar Sahib said, they had lived in Afghanistan. ‘And now I live in between’, he said, ‘halfway between Ajmer and Gardez’. He valued his migrant status, his life in diaspora, and the omnipresent feeling of homesickness that accompanied this, as if he meant to say: I will be restless until I die, that is my destiny. Although he had already performed the day’s last prayer, he went to the mosque. There he recited the same verse from the Koran 300 times. It said, ‘And if We please, We should certainly take away that which We have revealed to you, then you would not find yourself any protector against Us…’. He recited this verse to remind himself

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that all power and mercy lay with God and not with the people. It was the most fitting verse to take into this night. We left the citadel through the large gate. The city was decorated with garlands of light and banners, and the streets were filled with people. Only the Taliban Mosque wasn’t decorated or lit up. The Taliban and the other fundamentalists, Mazhar Sahib said, didn’t believe in Shab-i-Barat. They said it was a Hindu custom, not really Islamic at all. It was too similar to the Hindu fest Diwali, they said. The children lit firecrackers to make noise just like the Hindus at Diwali. And Mazhar Sahib admitted, ‘That in itself is true. Those firecrackers, they aren’t really suitable. But the children like it and they would start to pester us if they were banned’. Shab-i-Barat was also a happy night, he said. All good things that happened over the past year were remembered. ‘We are happy to be alive’. That happiness was celebrated on this night. Outside the citadel gate, the stream of gravegoers swept us up in the way people are swept up every summer by the Indus River, at high tide when the water coming down from the Himalayas had an unstoppable force. The human river flowed churning towards its target, like the water flows to the sea and that lowest point was the graveyard. Out of the side streets new streams flowed into the main stream. The road travelled downwards in a bend from the hill upon which the citadel was built. Along the side of the road local representatives from political parties stood on flatbed wagons and gave speeches amplified by speakers. On top of a few of those wagons, video screens had been placed on which the leader of the national party could be seen and heard. There were also charitable institutions asking the stream of people for donations, committees from neighbourhood mosques that needed money for maintenance and religious movements calling for people to join them. Sometimes small groups would disengage themselves from the main stream to pray at the shrine of some wellrespected man at the roadside. We crossed the railway line, turned right along the tracks and arrived at an open space, qabristan: the land of the graves. At the entrance stood long rows of tables on which rose petals were laid out in heaps. They were sold by weight and handed over in clear plastic bags. Mazhar Sahib bought two bags. It wasn’t until that moment that I started to wonder about whose grave we were heading to. I asked him. He said, ‘My wife’s’. She had, he said, passed away six months ago.

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I was astounded. I had known Mazhar Sahib for several months now, I had worked in the park with him almost every day, we had had long discussions, but he had never spoken about his wife’s recent departure. Despite all his stories about love I had never wondered whom he was married to or had been. Following convention, we had never asked about each other’s wives. It seemed that I had only now become aware of another dimension in our conversations that had always been there. The dark open space of the burial grounds was lit by the small flames of hundreds of candles on top of the graves. The place was crowded with people but the noise of the street, where several amplifiers had simultaneously flooded us with speeches, had been left behind. Here people whispered and mumbled. The many prayers that were being said here flowed together into one soft murmur. Mazhar Sahib walked, legs wide apart, to the newest part of the cemetery. He filled a can with water from a public tap and rinsed the dust from his wife’s white marble gravestone. Her name was carved into the marble in graceful Arabic characters, coloured red and green. Mazhar Sahib produced incense and candles from the pocket of his long shirt, placed them around the grave and lit them. He strewed the rose petals over the grave. He opened his hands, holding them in front of his belly in an open gesture, and as he prayed tears streamed down his face. She had been, I read, 66 years of age. We took another route back to the hill on which the citadel was built. By now it was past midnight. The moon had shifted and appeared smaller. We drank tea in the park. From the graves around us rose the smell of roses and incense. Here too, people had visited their dead family members but had now returned home. During the weeks that I spoke to Javed about his work for the party, about Adil’s dedication and the differences between him and Adil, I found a book in a store in downtown Karachi. It had first been published decades ago and had only recently been reissued by the local office of the Oxford University Press. The book was called The Terrorist and was written by one H. T. Lambrick, an officer in the British colonial army who had served in Sindh in the Indus delta at the beginning of the 1940s. He described how in 1940 an uprising had started in the country to the north of Hyderabad. A group of men called fakirs had armed themselves and fought against the British colonial army. The group was led by Pir Pigara, the Turbaned Pir, a

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landowner from the Khairpur district on the eastern bank of the Indus. The fakirs formed a brotherhood and were reputed to be prepared to sacrifice their lives for each other and their leader. The brotherhood still existed. The Pir of the Turban was a hereditary title and after the death of the first pir his son had assumed leadership of the fakirs. In 1965, during the war with India, his men formed a separate unit in the Pakistani army that had fought in the Thar desert between Sindh and Rajasthan. When fighting needed to be done in the desert, everyone in Pakistan agreed that it was best left to Pir Pagara’s fakirs. In the elections the fakirs always voted unanimously for their leader and, so, he had become an influential politician. In fact, in the Khairpur area Pir Pagara ruled like a king. Lambrick, the soldier and author of the book, had captured one of the fakirs. He interrogated him extensively, so extensively that the man had told Lambrick his entire life’s story. He told him how he had grown up in a tiny village, destined to become a farmer employed by the landowner, until Pir Pagara called on him to give his life fighting for his pir. With the uprising the moment had come for the farmer to lay down his tools and take up arms. Lambrick had written down this life story and published it. He had called it The Terrorist because, while the rebels called themselves fakirs, the British considered them terrorists. The book was a mixture of autobiographical and authenticsounding passages of the prisoner’s life on one hand with, on the other, the writer’s descriptions and interpretations clearly showing British prejudice against the rebels. From the way Lambrick described the fakir, it was clear that the prisoner was the exact opposite of the author. The book unintentionally also became a mirrored self-portrait of an officer in the British colonial army. When the prisoner was passionate, the writer would be sober. When the prisoner was fanatical, the author would be logical. When the prisoner allowed himself to be led by suspicion and blind devotion, then the author would be rational. When the prisoner was mysterious and exotic, the writer would be rather dull. When the prisoner claimed that God and his pir were on his side, the author would make an appeal to law and science. When the prisoner was misguided, the author would have an open-minded view of the world. When the prisoner was deserving of pity then the author was there to give it to him. Lambrick was not a great writer. He had written an informative biography but had also conformed to the views of 1940s’ England regarding fanatical fakirs and Muslim terrorists. He had not questioned

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these views. Orientalism — the Western understanding of the East — did on a larger scale what Lambrick had done: create an image of the West by coming up with an imaginary East in which everything was exactly the opposite to the way it was in the West. Partly driven by fear, partly by a longing for the exotic, Orientalists built an unconquerable fortification dividing west from east and Islam from Christianity. Lambrick’s book fitted in perfectly with these views. He described his prisoner as a man who, if he hadn’t been blinded by his passions, could have been saved, had a little more English sensibility flowed through his veins. Yet I was intrigued by a passage in the book that reminded me of the way Adil had experienced the ceremony in which he had pledged undying loyalty to the party. It was where the prisoner described how he had been initiated into martyrdom by Pir Pigara. ‘Pir Saheb then ordered us all to lie down side by side, each man to spread his turban and shawl completely over himself, so that no part was visible. My mind was confused — for a moment I wondered whether our Lord was about to have us killed. Then his voice, in a different tone, began to declaim something in words I could not understand, though as I listened they seemed somehow familiar. At length it ended, and Pir Saheb ordered us to arise, in his usual voice. He said: “You have now passed through the shadow of death, and the life that you feel in you is a new life, dedicated for me, your Imam. Go in peace now, and remain prepared for my call.” As I went home through the night along the Sanghar road with a number of others, I asked one of them, and elderly man, what was the prayer Pir Saheb had read over us. The man replied: “If you had ever followed the bier of a Musselman to the graveyard, you would have known that they are the Janaza prayer, that the Mullah reads at the burial of the dead”.’ Adil had also spoken of a feeling that a new and grander life had started for him. He too had experienced the ceremony as a rebirth into a new world or dimension, as if the pledge of loyalty was some kind of premature death, necessary to prepare you for martyrdom. It seemed that with this death you became a part of a force many times greater than the powers that governed the earth. Adil had believed in this, believed in the significance of certain knowledge and holy conviction. Javed had played with it. He had been curious, he had investigated the power but withdrew in time. Nonetheless he had understood enough to pose like a terrorist, so he could instill fear into people and manipulate them. And when he bowled a wicket

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while I was batting and should have defended that wicket, he beat his chest and yelled, to emphasise my loss, ‘Look at me! What a Muslim terrorist!’ At these moments he turned the Western image of a Muslim as a fanatical fighter into something to be proud of. But he was never completely serious. That was the difference between him and Adil. That was why Javed was now getting married and Adil was no longer alive. After Shab-I-Barat I saw Mazhar Sahib with different eyes. And he, in turn, seemed to see me differently. After that night he would sometimes call me ‘son’. I told myself that this was less loaded than it seemed in a country where people would regularly adopt other people as kin through their choice of words. It was not unusual to address non-relatives with ‘brother’. The age difference between us was clearly too big for that. A fictional father–son relationship was a more obvious choice. Still, the expression filled me with pride. I now dared to talk to him about personal affairs that sometimes troubled me: the doubt of whether I truly wanted to understand other people, the feeling of being lost in a play in which I did not know the lines or direction, the question of what I was really doing in Pakistan. We were apart and yet close enough to discuss such matters. As adopted father and son, we talked much easier than a real father and son would have done. He talked about his longing for Ajmer, India, embodied in his devotion to Pir Moinuddin Chishti, whose grave he had left behind. He spoke of the doubt that occupied his mind; the doubt of whether his choice to come to Pakistan had been the right one. He spoke of Pakistan as ‘my poor country’, as if he was sorry that his loyalty was still divided. He sublimated the doubt by talking about it in an impersonal way. He would say: ‘We’ve become wealthier in Pakistan. The Indian Muslims are poorer than we are. But India is better for democracy’. It sounded like, ‘I’ve come to this place and I’ve survived, I have lived here, but shouldn’t I have stayed in Ajmer?’ He also talked of his longing to return to Ajmer and be buried there. He knew that wouldn’t happen. He would be buried in the cemetery where he had buried his wife. But it felt barren, as if his family didn’t belong there. Intizar Hussain, a well-known Urdu writer in Pakistan, has embodied Mazhar Sahib’s dilemma with irony and compassion in a single quote. One of his characters says, ‘Yar, you Muslims are wonderful! You’re always looking towards the deserts of Arabia, but for your graves you prefer the shade of India’.

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More and more often, Mazhar Sahib referred to himself as an old man. He said he didn’t have much longer to live. He spoke of how his wife had died. ‘Suddenly’, he said briskly, in staccato, ‘a heart attack. Blood pressure 240. Normal 140. First a big headache, then boom! She’d gone’. He told me that initially she hadn’t wanted to marry him. Maybe she had hoped to marry someone else. Her family had had to pressure her into marriage. But the love, he said, had begun during the wedding night and had lasted to the grave. He said that love flourished best in old age. By then shame has disappeared and your blood has stopped boiling. Now that she was dead he dreamed about her. He told me again how he envisioned his own death. He said that every human would be ready for death the moment it came. Sometimes death had to be persistent, as a family could be with the brideto-be. But if she wasn’t ready for it, the bride would try to gain time and delay the wedding just as his wife had repeatedly asked for a delay. When finally she did agree, she was really ready for it. That was the one moment in her life when she was at her most beautiful. She sat on her chair dressed in her wedding dress, ready to reveal herself. And when the veil was lifted, she would shine as never before, then she would truly become herself. As he told me this, I didn’t know whether he was talking about his own death or his marriage to his wife. I said, ‘You say that a person decides for himself when he is ready to die. But isn’t Shab-i-Barat the night God decides when everybody dies?’ He answered, ‘God decides when He is going to give you the strength to die. When the time comes, then no one can stop you, not even the best doctor. Your mind will be made up and that is how God will have helped you’. Javed invited me to the wedding. He said I had to come. And then he added, ‘But do bring something to read’. For if it were true that heaven was a place where nothing ever happened, a wedding remarkably resembled paradise. Nothing was as boring as a wedding. The feast seemed to go on forever and little of note happened. In an open tent the guests stood waiting for the food to be served. Javed and his bride were seated on a stage like statues, but we weren’t allowed to talk to them, we could only admire. The bride was wearing a glittering dress in all sorts of colours. She wore shiny jewellery and her hands were painted with henna. Javed wore a dark jacket over a white shirt and a beige turban wrapped around his head. A video was

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made of the guests so the family could relive the occasion later. The whole affair was essentially about seeing and being seen. I ran into Javed a few weeks later. He laughed when I asked him not to invite me to his wedding anymore. Although I was really curious to know what he now thought of his wife, I knew I couldn’t ask him. He didn’t mention it either. I did ask him what he made of the wedding. In reply he listed all the people who had attended. A lot of guests had come, so the wedding had been a success. He then said that he missed Adil. He didn’t often think of Adil, but at his wedding he had occasionally thought to himself, I wish Adil were among the guests. Of course, Javed wouldn’t have been able to talk to him as he was seated on a stage next to his bride wearing a turban on his head throughout the proceedings. Yet on the stage he had thought to himself: who is it I am sitting here for? When I think of the people in the room and who is looking at me and watching me seated at my wedding, who comes to mind? Who do I hope is proud of me? Who do I want to impress? And that was when Adil had entered his thoughts. Javed told me how Adil had died. After taking the oath, Adil was totally committed to the party. His whole life was now dedicated to the party. Everyone in Javed’s group noticed how Adil had changed. His dark and sulky moods disappeared. Only seldom was he still touchy. It was as if he now stood above the things that used to irritate him. Yet his careless cheerfulness had also disappeared. It had been replaced with enthusiasm. Now and then they would get fed up with his tales and visions of oppression and liberation. In his enthusiasm he became reckless. Although soldiers patrolled the streets, Adil refused to remove the sticker on his motorbike that showed his leader’s head. The soldiers stopped him, searched him and took his money. But he continued to look them straight in the eyes as if he wanted to say: this is my city, one day you will go away and I will still be here. They let him go but a week later he was stopped again. It was as if he was challenging them, looking for danger. Every time soldiers had insulted and robbed him, he came back with an even greater sense of dedication to the party. He started to call the boys ‘Brother’. He no longer said Javed. He said Brother Javed, or simply Brother. When the party organised a demonstration against the army, he told Javed and the other boys: Brother, you should come too. To protect the leaders and the party

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members from the army, as many people as possible needed to take part in the demonstration. But they never made it to the demonstration, neither Adil, nor Javed, nor any of the other boys. The army, it seemed, had heard rumours about the demonstration and a few days in advance, their trucks and patrol cars blocked the roads into Lalukhet. Within a short space of time the rumour spread that they had come to track down the party’s hidden weapons and arrest party members. Shots were fired and returned. Stones were thrown. Vehicles were set on fire. Javed soon withdrew to the roof of an apartment. He saw the soldiers patrol the broad cordoned-off street. In the narrow side streets and on the flat rooftops the party’s gangs held themselves back. And suddenly there was Adil, alone, walking down the middle of the main street, waving a party flag. At first he walked, then he started to run. He ran towards the soldiers. He shouted something, Javed couldn’t hear what it was. Later on the boys who had hidden themselves closer to the main street said Adil had shouted, ‘We may leave this world but we shall never leave Pir Sahib’. It was a well-known slogan that was painted on the walls of the city in red paint. Adil sometimes took things very literally. Then, as he ran, a shot rang out and Adil lay on the ground. That, Javed said, was a surreal moment. From the terrace he saw blood on Adil’s clothes and on the tarmac of the street. The military withdrew. Maybe they were afraid that the shot would trigger off a larger attack. Javed ran downstairs. An ambulance arrived, people ran to and fro but Adil was already dead. His picture was taken, bloodied head, eyes closed, mouth distorted. The picture would later turn up on the walls with martyr written above it. To Javed it always remained a mystery why Adil had suddenly run down the street like that, unprotected. What had he been up to? Had he simply wanted to provoke the soldiers by waving the party flag above his head and running past them? He didn’t have a gun on him when he was hit. His actions remained a mystery. And that only served to strengthen Javed’s last image of him. ‘He resembled an angel’, he said. ‘He seemed very light, as if he wasn’t running but floating above the ground. The waving flag, his waving hair. It was as if he was flying’. After the anger and sadness that followed his death came the jealousy. Adil became a hero in Lalukhet. He was admired and there were people who compared him to an angel. His status as a terrorist

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was safeguarded forever. There was no doubt about that fact if you had been shot by the military. Javed had to defend his own reputation time and again. His courage and loyalty were constantly being questioned. It was almost as if he could hear the people behind his back saying: he is only pretending to be a terrorist. Obviously it would take a reckless deed like Adil’s to silence those voices. But Javed wasn’t prepared to do this. And that was why he thought: the voices are right, Adil was the terrorist, not me. So, years later, sitting at his own wedding next to his bride in a tent full of people, he had suddenly thought about Adil. It was as if, in his absence, Adil had become the most important guest at the wedding. I asked Javed why he felt this way. What impression had he wanted to make on Adil? Had he wanted to take his vengeance by showing him he was getting married? Had he wanted to tell him: I was right, Adil, to take that whole circus surrounding the oath-taking with a pinch of salt? Had he wanted to show his regret and say: don’t blame me, Adil, for never having warned you of the danger? Or was he still jealous and hoping Adil would forgive him his cowardice? Had he hoped Adil would come to him and congratulate him and say good luck? Javed didn’t know.

Note ∗ Excerpted from Oskar Verkaaik (2002), Sayyid Pakistani en de bruiloft van de dood (Sayyid Pakistani and the Wedding of the Dead). Amsterdam: Bulaaq. Translated from the Dutch by Julia Hart.

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Reimagining the ‘Land of the Pure’: A Sufi Master Reclaims Islamic Orthodoxy and Pakistani Identity Robert Rozehnal Introduction 60 years after its traumatic birth, religion and politics remain inextricably linked in Pakistan. In a nation deeply divided along ethnic, linguistic, economic and sectarian faultlines, both state policy and public discourse focus on the relationship between Islamic and national identity. In the face of regional and domestic instability, politicians, the military hierarchy, religious leaders and average Pakistanis grapple over the roots of Islamic authority and authenticity and, by extension, religion’s proper role in the ideology of the state. What are the parameters of Islamic orthodoxy and who rightfully speaks for the tradition? What is the role of religion in framing the nation’s educational, legal, economic, social and administrative policies? Beyond the geopolitical realities of passports and maps, what does it mean to be Pakistani, and who represents the nation? These questions have dominated public discourse since the end of British colonialism and Pakistan becoming independent in 1947. From the beginning there has always been an unresolved tension in the constructions of Pakistan’s national identity, despite frequent appeals to a reified, universal Islam. As anthropologist Katherine Pratt Ewing notes, ‘The idea of a distinctive “Pakistani Islam”, the principle of difference that is the rationale for the founding of a nationstate separate from other nation-states, was inconsistent with the universality of Islam at the ideological level and with the reality of diversity amongst the practitioners of Islam who were to be subsumed under the signifier “Pakistani”.’1 Neither Islam nor Pakistan are inherently united. In this ongoing atmosphere of immense ambiguity and acute anxiety, however, questions about Pakistan’s Islamic

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identity have assumed an unprecedented urgency, with profound implications for Muslims throughout South Asia and beyond. This article explores a particular Sufi response to the debates over Islamic authority and national identity in Pakistan. My inquiry focuses on an intriguing text written by a spiritual master (shaykh) within a sub-branch of one of the subcontinent’s oldest and most dynamic Sufi lineages: Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani (1910–95) of the Chishti–Sabiri order (silsila). This twentieth century shaykh combined spiritual pedagogy with literary acumen, entering the combative arena of Pakistan’s public discourse to defend Sufism’s enduring relevance for postcolonial South Asian Muslims. Wahid Bakhsh’s ideas are encapsulated in his magnum opus: Pakistan ki azim ush-shan difai quwwat, or The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan.2 Drawing on a wide array of resources, this book surveys the evolution of Islamic civilisation in a triumphalist account of Muslim military, cultural and political history. The shaykh’s historical revisionism offers an alternative reading of the Indo-Muslim past that champions Sufism as the very essence of Islamic orthodoxy and the genuine foundation of Pakistani nationhood. The text also provides a sober assessment of the nation’s deep seated identity crisis. In an urgent, impassioned call for social reform, Wahid Bakhsh urges his fellow Muslims to mobilise the confidence, assertiveness and martial spirit of their forefather’s in order to reclaim Pakistan’s rightful position as the ‘Land of the Pure’. In the following pages, I contextualise the debates over Sufism in Pakistani political discourse and trace the Chishti Sabiri order’s imaginings of Pakistani identity towards an analysis of Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh’s enigmatic text.

The Politics of Sufism in Pakistan In the contestation over Islamic identity in today’s Pakistan, Sufism (tasawwuf) is an important — if controversial — symbol, a multivalent and often ambiguous signifier. As the inner or ‘mystical’ dimension of Islam, Sufism stands as an alternative nexus of Islamic authority, piety and practice.3 Neither a sect nor a cult, it is best understood as a spiritual quest, experienced and expressed via an interpersonal teaching network centred on the fundamental master–disciple relationship. Pushing the boundaries of normative Islam, Sufis strive for an intimate and unmediated experience of the Divine. Sufi adepts tend to emphasise the inward over the outward, intuition over intellect,

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spiritual contemplation over scholarly debate, and ecstatic poetry over legalistic prose in their spiritual strivings. Since the twelfth century, Sufi institutional orders — discrete spiritual ‘paths’ (turuq) — have proliferated throughout the Muslim world. Though they vary in their teachings and techniques, most Sufis strictly follow the dictates of the Qur’an and normative law (sharia) and model their behaviour on the example of the Prophet Muhammad (Sunnah). Despite its deep roots in Islamic history, Sufism remains a contested tradition. Much of this dissonance stems from the fact that such a broad range of practices are subsumed under its rubric. At the level of everyday social practice, Sufism is often equated with ‘popular’ worship at shrines. In South Asia, the tombs of Sufi saints provide an alternative outlet for piety and pilgrimage, especially for women who are often marginalised from the public, gendered space of the mosque. However, these same practices are a flashpoint in the public discourse on Islamic authority and authenticity. For conservative Islamist critics who reject any intermediaries between human beings and God, the cult of Sufi saints is blasphemous idolatry and the worship at shrines corrupt superstition. Yet the story of Sufism in South Asia does not end with saints and shrines. Throughout the subcontinent, the tradition has also inspired myriad forms of artistic and aesthetic expression — from vernacular poetry, to musical and dance traditions. Above all, Sufism in twenty-first century South Asia remains a spiritual teaching tradition — mediated in the intimate exchange between master and disciple and experienced through ritual performance. With their bold claims to experiential knowledge and authority, Sufis have often been misunderstood, and have frequently found themselves embroiled in conflict and controversy. The longstanding polemics against the Sufi tradition were further intensified under European colonial regimes and the subsequent proliferation of independent, neo-colonial Muslim states.4 The intensity and frequency of the attacks on Sufism by both secular nationalists and Islamists are a distinctly modern phenomenon that runs counter to Islamic intellectual history and pervasive cultural norms. As Carl Ernst notes: Ironically, as a result of strategic successes by fundamentalist movements in certain key regions like Arabia, and the massive oil wealth that fell into the lap of the Saudi regime, many contemporary Muslims have been taught a story of the Islamic religious tradition from which

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Sufism has been rigorously excluded. It is ironic because as recently as the late eighteenth century, and for much of the previous millennium, most of the outstanding religious scholars of Mecca, Medina, and the great cities of the Muslim world were intimately engaged with what we today call Sufism. It is doubly ironic because the fundamentalist story is belied by the religious practices of more than half of today’s Muslim population (Ernst 1997: xiii).

In South Asia, the British Raj attempted to appropriate and manipulate Sufi tradition — its language and symbols, its sacred sites and heroes — for political gain. Recognising the importance of Sufi shrines as the loci of regional identity and the power of hereditary Sufi leaders as moral exemplars and mediators, the British colonial administration actively incorporated Sufi leaders and institutions into its system of local politics and patronage.5 At times, the British intervened directly in the administration of local Sufi shrines, going so far as to mediate succession disputes in colonial courts. As historian David Gilmartin notes, under colonial rule the Sufi shrine’s traditional position ‘as a hinge between the culture of the locality and the larger Muslim community’ remained intact while the role of the saint’s living heirs was increasingly politicised (Gilmartin 1984). The politics of Sufism were only amplified in the wake of partition. In its effort to embed Islamic symbols in its political ideology, the fledgling state of Pakistan continued the British policy of direct control over Sufi shrines and Sufi leaders. Beginning with the secular government of the military leader, Ayub Khan (1958–69), successive Pakistani regimes attempted to link themselves with Sufi religious authority. ‘The Sufi was the symbol these secularists chose to represent their position and to legitimate their position as leaders of a Muslim democracy’, argues Ewing. ‘They strove to enhance the shrines and the Sufi origins of these shrines for the glorification of Islam and Pakistan. At the same time they sought to strip the hereditary pirs of their traditional functions’ (Ewing 1983). The state’s hegemony over religious spaces and local religious leaders was formally institutionalised with the passage of the West Pakistan Waqf Properties Ordinance of 1959. This act provided legal precedent for the state to appropriate control over religious endowments and to manage shrines, mosques and other properties dedicated to religious purposes. The result was a further dissolution of the independence and political power of both the hereditary Sufi families and the local ulema.

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The state of Pakistan used this newfound platform to aggressively pursue its own economic and social policies. As Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr illustrates: By taking over the management of the shrines, state leaders were able to use them to propagate a new interpretation of Sufism and rural Islam as compatible with development. Sufi doctrines were depicted as enjoining a positive work ethic, and rural religious festivals were used as venues for agricultural and industrial fairs. By becoming the keeper of shrines, the state was able to find a presence in rural areas, which was otherwise closed to it by the landed elite (Nasr 2001: 62–63).

This official policy of co-optation and control only expanded under the regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1971–79) and during the Islamisation campaign of General Zia ul-Haq (1979–89). In today’s Pakistan, Sufi history, sacred spaces and spiritual luminaries now form an important component of the administrative machinery and political theatre of the state. In official government literature and the public posturing of politicians, Sufi shrines are marked and celebrated as sacred national spaces while pre-modern Muslim saints are publicly embraced as poets, social reformers and proto-nationalists. Despite these determined efforts to appropriate the tradition’s symbolic capital, however, the state’s relationship with Sufism has always been plagued by an underlying ambiguity. The colonial and postcolonial state’s policies, in fact, never fully erased a deep seated ambivalence towards Sufi orders and their spiritual masters. Never fully integrated into the state’s ideology and institutions, the living Sufi shaykh always remained an ambiguous, liminal figure. In Ewing’s assessment: Within the framework of a colonial ideology, the Sufi faqir (mendicant) represented the epitome of indifference, a refusal to be captured by the ‘naturalness’ of the colonial order. The more threatening the presence of the faqir, the more demeaning were the images used to ‘capture’ him, images that continue to circulate in postcolonial discourse as versions of modernity, Islam, and secularism vie for dominance in the political arena. The Sufi saint occupies a contested position in these contemporary debates, which have inevitably been molded by the colonial experience out of which Pakistan emerged as a nation (Ewing 1997: 44).

In short, the state’s control of Sufi tradition — its worldview, its sacred spaces, its spiritual leaders — has never been totalising or hegemonic.

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Communicated orally via the intimate master–disciple (pir–murid) relationship and experienced primarily in private ritual arenas, Sufi knowledge, ritual practices and social networks survived and thrived — beyond the gaze and control of the colonial (and postcolonial) state.

The Chishti Sabiri Sufi Order The Chishti Sufi order is among the most prominent and prolific Islamic mystical brotherhoods in South Asia.6 With its doctrine of social equality, tolerance and spiritual discipline, the order (silsila) spread rapidly eastward from its roots in Afghanistan in the twelfth century. Under the guidance of charismatic spiritual leaders (shaykhs or pirs) who embodied Islamic doctrine through their piety and practice, Sufism helped translate Islam to the indigenous population. Versed in local customs and proficient in vernacular languages, Chishti shaykhs established centres of learning and hospices (khanqahs) that offered food and shelter for the wayfarers and mendicants who survived on their charity, solace for the pilgrims who visited them for spiritual blessings (baraka), and intensive spiritual training for their select corps of disciples (murids).7 The posthumous reputation of many Chishti shaykhs often led to the development of elaborate shrine complexes (dargahs) where devotees flock in search of spiritual power to alleviate their worldly troubles. As the loci of sacred geography and fonts for public social welfare, these regional shrines continue to thrive as pilgrimage sites and symbols of local Muslim culture and identity.8 Throughout modern South Asia, Sufism is still experienced in the popular practices at shrines, and expressed through the ecstatic poetry of its literary luminaries. But beyond this legacy of a rich Indo-Muslim past, it also remains a dynamic, living teaching network, rooted in the intimate exchange between master and disciple and mediated through ritual performance. In South Asia, the Chishti Sufi order developed two primary genealogical branches: the Nizamiyya and Sabiriyya. Breaking from the lineage of the predominant Nizami branch in the thirteenth century, the eponymous founder of the Chishti Sabiri sub-branch, ‘Ala ad-Din’ Ali Ahmad Sabir (d. 1291), initiated an alternative model of spiritual asceticism. From the beginning, the Chishti Sabiris were much less visible than their famous Chishti Nizami counterparts, withdrawing from urban life and the allure of the royal courts. Chishti Sabiri shaykhs

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were often renowned for their intense, awe-inspiring (jalali) personalities. In search of a life of solitary contemplation and spiritual discipline, they favoured more rural locales, avoided public appearances, trained fewer devotees, wrote fewer books and avoided building large shrine complexes. In the face of the increased communal politics, polemics and competition of the colonial era, however, select Chishti Sabiri leaders increasingly came to view silence and withdrawal as untenable. In the late nineteenth century, prominent Sabiri shaykhs linked themselves to social reform movements, founding educational institutions and publishing a broad range of texts. For example, both Hajji Imdad Allah al-Muhajir Makki (1817–99) and Rashid Ahmed Gangohi (1829–1905) — the spiritual founders of the famous Deoband madrasa — were prominent Chishti Sabiri masters.9 The social activism and reformist agenda of these nineteenth century Chishti Sabiri shaykhs mirrored the efforts of numerous Sufi leaders from diverse institutional orders across the Muslim world who resisted European hegemony and vigorously defended Sufi piety during the colonial era.10 In the context of the Chishti Sabiri order, however, it marked a radical break with historical precedent. Contemporary Chishti Sabiris are deeply attuned to historical memory. The order’s spiritual family tree (shajara) charts a spiritual heritage that links the current generation of disciples directly to the authority and legacy of the Prophet Muhammad. For today’s Chishti Sabiris, three spiritual masters set the standard for Sufi piety and practice: Muhammad Zauqi Shah (1877–1951), and his two principal successors, Shahidullah Faridi (1915–78) and Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani (1910–95).11 Through education and personal experience, these twentieth century Sufi masters were each acquainted with the institutions and ideology of the colonial state. As spiritual guides, they understood Sufism as a personal struggle for self-mastery, experienced and expressed within a moral community. As writers and public ideologues, they resolutely defended Sufism on the contested public stage of postcolonial Pakistan. Other notable twentieth century South Asian Sufi masters have pursued similar reformist agendas — the Chishti Nizami masters, Sayyid Mehr Ali Shah (1856–1937) and Khwaja Hasan Nizami (1878–1955), for example, as well as the Naqshbandi activist, Pir Jama’at,’ Ali Shah (1841–1951).12 Yet this trio of Chishti Sabiri masters articulated a distinctly Pakistani vision of Sufi identity. Throughout their voluminous literary corpus, the shaykhs responded directly to the aftermath of partition. In an eclectic range of essays, articles and books, they valourised the

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doctrinal teachings and ritual practices at the core of Sufi identity against Pakistani critics of the Sufi tradition urgently propagating Sufism as a panacea for Pakistan’s spreading social malaise. Adopting the idioms of modernity as in much of Pakistan’s official relationship to Islam, that is — the language and logic of science, rationalism and the market — they used the instruments of mass media to articulate and amplify this message to a broad national and international audience. Muhammad Zauqi Shah, Shahidullah Faridi and Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani were ardent Pakistani nationalists. From their writings it is clear that they envisioned Pakistan as a tabula rasa, a new and welcoming space for South Asian Muslims to resurrect the ideals of the early Muslim community. Their vision of the nation portrays Sufi masters as the rightful heirs to the Prophet and, by extension, the true spiritual founders of Pakistan. Significantly, the shaykhs’ notion of citizenship echoes the logic and structure of the Sufi master–disciple relationship. It equates the nation with a moral community grounded on knowledge and piety, and envisions a social order mediated by the Sufi rules of etiquette and decorum (adab). This idealised vision of an Islamic state rooted in Sufi tradition made the creation of Pakistan much more palatable to these Chishti Sabiri shaykhs than it was for many of their ulema counterparts who resisted partition. Even as the shaykhs put Sufism at the centre of Pakistan’s raison d’état their narrative of the nation frames Pakistan — ‘The Land of the Pure’ — as a utopian promised land for the global Muslim ummah (community). Here too they demonstrate the specifically Pakistani nature of their Sufi identity in so far as their proposal for a Sufism imbued nationstate was given in promise for all Muslims everywhere. The public and political posturing of these spiritual masters reveals only half the story of the Chishti Sabiri order in postcolonial South Asia, however. Above all, Sufism remains a personal spiritual quest. The Sufi path (tariqa) couples a unique model of human psychology with a series of practical, bodily techniques that together create religious experience and communicate religious truth.13 At its core, the Chishti Sabiri order is a moral community that aims to reshape and reconstitute the Sufi adept through its networks of knowledge and spiritual pedagogy. Chishti Sabiri ritual practice (suluk) begins with a choice. In the pursuit of knowledge, the Sufi disciple must voluntarily submit his will to the power and authority of a spiritual master. As the embodiment of Sunnah, the shaykh serves as the

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living conduit to Islam’s sacred past. In this system, Chishti Sabiri doctrine is interiorised and actualised via a complex, interdependent nexus of ritual practices: dreams and dream interpretation; rituals of remembrance (prayer, zikr [recitation] and muraqaba [meditation]); and the annual pilgrimage networks and musical assemblies (sama) at Sufi shrines. In Sufi ritual, the body serves as a medium for knowledge and a tool for self-transformation. By adhering to a disciplined routine of ritual performance, the Sufi disciple forges a new bodily habitus, transforming the acculturated, socialised self into a sacralised, moral self. While the Chishti Sabiri disciple’s progress along the path ultimately rests on individual action and personal responsibility, the Sufi subject is moulded within the community of the silsila. Through companionship with the spiritual master and the community of fellow disciples, the murid learns to navigate the arduous inner journey of the Sufi path. In my book Islamic Sufism Unbound (2007), I explore the literary legacy and ritual practices of the Chishti Sabiri order in detail. Drawing on both texts and ethnographic contexts, I chart how the silsila accommodated to the tectonic shifts in the social and political landscape of postcolonial Pakistan. I argue that the contemporary Chishti Sabiri order is both paradigmatic and protean. Like their spiritual mentors, today’s disciples acknowledge the imperative for reform, the pressing need to respond to changing times and adapt to new environments. For individual murids, the contingencies of modern, urban life have forced a reassessment of how best to balance the necessities of the practical, lived-in world (dunya) with the demands of religion (din) and the rigours of Sufi spiritual discipline. The increased demands of the workplace, the imperative for mobility and travel, and the pervasive ambiguity and anxiety exacerbated by social, political and economic instability — all these elements have forced a rethinking of the meaning and methods of Sufi praxis. Amid all this change, however, there remains an underlying continuity to Chishti Sabiri identity. The technologies of bodily discipline, the interpretive frameworks of selfhood and the rules of Sufi decorum remain very much intact. In this sense, the contemporary silsila remains true to its historical, genealogical, ontological, epistemic and heuristic foundations. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Chishti Sabiri Sufism is imagined and inscribed anew in texts, even as one’s spiritual quest is embodied and performed in ritual contexts and upheld in the public sphere. Consequently it is necessary to explore the mediation between

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one’s commitment to an enduring Chishti Sabari identity and one’s self-positioning as a Pakistani nationalist in both the person and the texts of Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani.

Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani’s Inheritance and Legacy In the context of late colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan, Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani emerged as the Chishti Sabiri order’s principal spokesman and public ideologue. The contours of the shaykh’s life mirrored the contradictoriness of the colonial era, as he was both drawn into participation in public events yet excluded from full participation on account of his religiosity. Educated at the Officers Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun (India), Wahid Bakhsh was commissioned in the Bahawalpur State Forces in 1933 as infantry officer in the British Indian Army before moving with his regiment to Malaysia at the outbreak of the World War II. He retired from military service in an act of civil disobedience. After being charged with insubordination for refusing — on the advice of his shaykh — to cut his beard and wear shorts, he resigned his post and returned to the subcontinent. He joined the Civil Secretariat of the Bahawalpur Government in 1946. Subsequently, he was transferred to the West Pakistan Secretariat, Lahore in 1955 and remained there until his retirement in 1968. During his tenure in the British military and civil service, Wahid Bakhsh became deeply immersed in Sufi practice. In 1940 he took formal discipleship with the influential Chishti Sabiri master, Shaykh Muhammad Dhawqi Shah. For the last three decades of his life, he committed himself entirely to writing and an austere life of ritual discipline. In 1978, following the death of Dhawqi Shah’s principal successor (khalifa), Shahidullah Faridi, Wahid Bakhsh began to initiate his own disciples as a teaching shaykh. Throughout his public writings, Wahid Bakhsh privileges his identity as a Chishti Sabiri master, asserting that his spiritual credentials provide him with a privileged perspective on Sufism and its relation to colonial and postcolonial structures of knowledge and power. With boundless energy, Wahid Bakhsh composed a vast corpus of texts, wide ranging in scope and scale, written in both Urdu and English. The shaykh published numerous Urdu translations of classical Persian Sufi biographies, including the discourses of Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakkar, Maqam-i Ganj Shakkar; Sheikh Abdul Rehman Chishti’s

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malfuzat Mirat al-Asrar; and Sayyid ’Ali al-Hujweri’s famous tome, Kashf al-Mahjub.14 Wahid Bakhsh also wrote numerous original treatises on ritual practice, as well as overtly polemical pieces in defense of the Chishti Sabiri tradition. Many of these works are now easily found in Urdu bookstores in Karachi and Lahore. Wahid Bakhsh clearly inherited the literary mantle from his mentor. In fact, Muhammad Zauqi Shah’s impact is palpable in the content and style of his writings. According to a senior Pakistani disciple, this was by design: ‘Zauqi Shah started with pen and paper and finished with pen and paper’, and Wahid Bakhsh carried on the former’s work.15 The vast majority of Wahid Bakhsh’s voluminous corpus focuses on Sufi doctrine and ritual performance. Yet in select texts, the shaykh responds directly to the realm of politics and polemics, commenting on the ideology and institutions of the Pakistani nation-state. Why would he do so? Analysing his actions through the lens of Talal Asad’s work suggests that he had little choice but to respond: Given that the modern nation-state seeks to regulate all aspects of individual life — even the most intimate, such as birth and death — no one, religious or otherwise, can avoid encountering its ambitious powers. It is not only that the state intervenes directly in the social body for purposes of reform; it is that all social activity requires the consent of the law, and therefore of the nation-state. The way social spaces are defined, ordered and regulated makes them all political (Asad 1999: 191).

It is the state that determines the parameters of geopolitical, social and discursive space in contemporary Pakistan. In direct response to the state’s attempt to monopolise Islam’s symbolic capital, Wahid Bakhsh’s writings imagine an alternative past, present and future in which Sufism plays an essential role not only in shaping one’s personal experience but also in the constitution of local and global Muslim identity. No text more succinctly encapsulates Wahid Bakhsh’s imaginings of Pakistan and the roots of its national and religious identity than his massive tome: Pakistan ki azim ush-shan difai quwwat, or The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan. In this eclectic work, the shaykh turns his attention from the rarefied heights of din (religion) to the concrete realm of dunya (the practical, lived-in world of realpolitik). In a sweeping survey of Islamic military and cultural history, he draws inspiration and guidance from a reified portrait of a lost Golden Age.

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In it Wahid Bakhsh champions the compatibility of Islam, modernity and mysticism as the genuine foundation of Pakistani nationhood and a bulwark against Western — and Indian — cultural encroachment and political hegemony. A critical examination of this text offers specific insights into how Wahid Bakhsh positioned Sufism in relation to the West, to the potential of Pakistan and to its disappointing actualities.

The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan was first published in Urdu in 1986. It was subsequently reissued in 2000 in an English translation by one of the shaykh’s senior disciples: Brigadier Muhammad Asghar. It is a weighty book, more than 550 pages in length in both its Urdu and English manifestations. This scale is equalled by its scope. Many of the book’s parameters — and all of its polemics — are understood only against the backdrop of South Asian geopolitics in the late Cold War period. It was written at a time of profound upheaval and uncertainty for Pakistan: internally, the military dictatorship of General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq and, externally, the destabilising proxy war in Afghanistan fought by US-sponsored mujahidin (warriors in defence of the faith) against the Soviet Union. Amid these turbulent times, Wahid Bakhsh views the late twentieth century through polarised lens. His analysis bifurcates the globe along two civilisational zones: an aggressive, expansionist ‘West’ — Europe, the United States and, by extension, its satellite state, Israel — that perpetuates the colonial legacy to subvert and control the Muslim world, the second civilisational zone. In Wahid Bakhsh’s words: Now that the valiant people of Asia and Africa have expelled the colonialists, they are trying to stage a comeback by weakening these countries from within. They are applying direct as well as indirect strategies, which include naked aggression, subversion, a cultural offensive, an economic aid offensive, a technical aid offensive and the so-called ‘peace’ offensives (Rabbani 2000: 479–80).

In surveying the global political landscape, Wahid Bakhsh inverts Orientalist essentialisms to valourise a spiritual ‘East’ against a godless ‘West’. In many ways, this rhetorical move parallels the ideological formations of early Indian nationalism outlined by Partha Chatterjee (1993). It is a common rhetorical strategy in South Asian Islamic and Islamist discourse as well. The notion of clashing civilisations is a familiar motif in the writings of the famous Indian religious

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scholar, Sayyid Abu’l Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi (1914–99), for example. And it echoes the polemical attacks of numerous Islamists — from Jamal-ud Din al-Afghani and Sayyid Qutb to Mawlana Abul ala Mawdudi. Like his contemporaries, Wahid Bakhsh’s notion of a chasm between East and West probably ‘owes more to nineteenth and early twentieth century Orientalist notions than he seems to recognize’ (Zaman 1998: 80). Wahid Bakhsh attacks the West for its hypocrisy, cruelty, greed and violence. With its singular obsession with power, wealth and conquest, he says, the West is morally bankrupt. Though technologically advanced, it has sacrificed religion in the name of science, absolute secularism and material gain. And it is this fatal choice, the shaykh concludes, that will be the West’s undoing: They [Westerners] accepted what related to the physical sciences and what contributed towards material progress, but rejected what belonged to the purification of self, spiritual progress and success in the life Hereafter. Consequently, their one sided development has created a culture which is unstable, imbalanced and moving on a single track. Since they rebelled against their religion, they have been deprived of the treasures of religious knowledge. They have jumped from one extreme to the other, as they have run away from absolute renunciation and walked into the trap of absolute materialism. They have rejected absolute superstition but adopted absolute secularism. Their absolute hatred for women has been replaced by absolute sexual frivolity. They have freed themselves from religion, but got into a race for material progress and national superiority. In their reckless pursuit of power they have stumbled, only to discover that the weapons of mass destruction, which they claim as their proud inventions, are there to destroy the entire edifice of their civilization (Rabbani 2000: 475).

While he acknowledges the prowess of the West, his descriptions of the West render it less of a cultural and political challenge and more of a scourge. This scourge has not only devastated the Muslim world, particularly Pakistan, as he demonstrates, it has also left the West fatally weakened. Moreover, the West has been left in this condition without its full knowledge. This makes it opportune for Muslims to take up arms against the West. However, while Wahid Bakhsh uses the language of a military action, the offensive he outlines is not one of physical violence: The miraculous power of Islamic spirituality is so strong that we, the Muslims, are not required to pick up swords to conquer the spiritual

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wastelands of the West. Since every heart by nature yearns for Divine love and Divine bounty, and heart with a spiritual vacuum is absolutely defenseless against the expanding spiritual torrent of Islam. The West is helpless and exposed to the ingress of the Truth. The process of Islamic conquest in spiritually starved humanity is therefore an eternal and continuous process (Rabbani 2000: 501).

First, one has to uphold Islamic spirituality and, second, one has to make an offering of this spirituality to the West. Such an offering will unleash its weaponry upon the West, defenceless against such a spiritual charge. We, the Muslims, must realize that the Westerners themselves are alienated against the Western civilization. They have very high hopes and high expectations from Islam. The new manifestation of religion which I have pointed to is the ever-increasing demand of the West for Sufism. It is our first and foremost duty to offer Sufism to the West. And in this lies the secret of our success (Rabbani 2000: 527).

Thus, Wahid Bakhsh is able to both speak as a Pakistani in propagating an offensive against one’s enemy and as a Sufi in making that strike be that of the force of love and truth. Yet how is one to undertake the initial task of strengthening Islamic spirituality? After all, Muslims have fallen into bad times according to the shaykh. The neglect of Islam’s original teachings and traditions, he asserts, has only resulted in doubt, weakness and civilisational drift: One of the causes of Muslim decline is their indifference to and detachment from their glorious history. This book therefore brings to focus the feats of valor, operational brilliance and tactical excellence of the great captains of Islam. It also throws light on the contributions of our forefathers to science, technology, artistry, social sciences and cultural fields. The aim is to pull our Westernized and defeated minds out of their inferiority complex so that they realize that they are sparkling stars of the glorious galaxy of the Muslim civilization and culture (Rabbani 2000: 3–4).

For Wahid Bakhsh, the martial spirit of the Muslim past offers a blue-print for renewal, promising a self-confident and assertive Indo-Muslim future. Hence, the bulk of The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan centres on a comprehensive — yet profoundly romantic — reading of Islamic military and cultural history. In his interpretation of history, piety was the backbone of power — military, social,

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economic, political and artistic — during the zenith of the Muslim empire. The shaykh’s call for Islam’s revitalisation conflates religious orthodoxy — with Sufism at its centre — with military might, social order and cultural florescence. Rejecting passivity, apologetics and defensiveness, Wahid Bakhsh challenges his fellow Muslims to restore the dynamism of the ummah by embracing the lessons of the past. Moreover, throughout the book, Wahid Bakhsh continuously invokes numerous premodern Sufi exemplars, among them Imam Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Junaid Baghdadi, Jalal ud-Din Rumi, Bayazid Bistami, Sayyid ’Ali al-Hujweri. As befits a Chishti Sabiri shaykh, he also lauds the luminaries of his own spiritual genealogy, especially Khwaja Muin ad-Din Chishti and Baba Farid ad-Din Ganj-i Shakkar. In Wahid Bakhsh’s eyes, these paradigmatic Sufi saints embody the virtues of the Prophet Muhammad: piety, self-sacrifice, sincerity, charity, humility and an unwavering commitment to social justice. As the heirs to the Prophet, the awliya’ Allah (the ‘Friends of God’) offer a moral compass for disenchanted Westerners, just as for Muslims. Beginning with the early community of believers surrounding the Prophet Muhammad, Wahid Bakhsh charts the rise and fall of Islamic civilisation across the centuries and around the globe. His sweeping narrative moves from the Hijra to Medina and the military conquests of Persia, Byzantium and Spain, to the Crusades, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and resistance to colonial regimes. Not surprisingly, the shaykh gives particular attention to Muslim incursions into the subcontinent and the subsequent rise of a distinct Indo-Islamic culture. Throughout this chronological survey, Wahid Bakhsh lauds the self-confidence, faith, bravery and bravado of the early Muslim community. His interpretive lens is entirely self-referential, following the thread of a sacred Muslim past that looks past the West. By looking thus, he suggests, Muslims can build a bulwark against present and future Western encroachment. Wahid Bakhsh’s alternative narrative also offers a spirited defence of the necessity — the orthodoxy — of jihad. If the archives of Islamic history are to provide the means to renew one’s spirituality, to literally fill it with new life, jihad was the concept in Islam that would ground the offensive against one’s enemies, notably the West. Reciting a wellknown (if disputed) tradition, he defines jihad as a both an internal

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struggle against the lower self (the ‘Greater Jihad’, or jihad-i akbar) and an external resistance against the enemies of Islam (the ‘Lesser Jihad’, or jihad-i asghar). Muslims, he insists, are compelled by their faith to fight against oppression, injustice and tyranny. In another clear example of Wahid Bakhsh’s eclectic mix of ideology and idioms, he invokes the Qur’an (4: 74–76) to ‘urge the Muslims to fight for Truth and Justice, and wage jihad for human rights’ (Rabbani 2000: 51). Acutely aware of the Western polemic against jihad, Wahid Bakhsh remains unapologetic. Once again, he goes on the offensive, criticising the West for its hypocrisy and double standards. In his words: Some Western thinkers criticise Jihad. Their criticism is not understandable as they themselves have acquired greater wealth and power by subjugating weaker peoples, conquering foreign territories and plundering others’ treasuries. Their hands are stained with the blood of many innocent and weaker nations. If enhancement of national superiority and imperialism through exploitation of weaker nations is considered legitimate by them, how do they criticise Jihad, the objectives of which are to extirpate falsehood, uphold Truth, uproot oppression, eliminate infidelity (kufr) and associationism (shirk), and wipe out all kinds of malpractices?16

Outlining the rules of military engagement, the shaykh asserts that armed conflict is always moderated by strict limits of conduct that insure discipline, moderation and mercy. Torture, multilation and the killing of non-combatants, he insists, are strictly forbidden in the Muslim tradition of just war. The triumph of Wahid Bakhsh’s book is to show how Pakistan is positioned to take the helm in taking forward Islamic spirituality. According to the shaykh, The creation of Pakistan is therefore not a fortuitous happening, or the consequence of an accident of history. It is rather a Divine reward for the centuries of sacrifices, toiling and tribulations of the Mujahidin of Islam. Those visionary leaders had sensed that the decline of the Ottoman and Mughal empires would spell disaster for the Muslims and their future would be absolutely dark. The Muslims had to be rescued, and an ideological state like Pakistan was a dire necessity of the time and the right answer to the prayers of the millions of oppressed human beings in general, and the Muslims in particular (Rabbani 2000: 15).

In other words, Wahid Bakhsh asserts that contemporary Pakistan carries the mantle of the ‘first Pakistan’, the paradigmatic Muslim

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state formed by the Prophet Muhammad and the early community of believers in Medina. His strategic analysis characterises Pakistan as a key buffer state for Middle Eastern and Asian countries alike, a counter-weight to the West’s hegemonic designs. Written 40 years after partition, however, his triumphalist discourse in which Pakistan is positioned to be a world leader in Islamic spirituality in its offensive against the West is permeated by a palpable sense of disappointment and anger at how things have come to pass in Pakistan. In the shaykh’s eyes, Pakistan has utterly betrayed its auspicious nature and divine prefiguration. Mired in poverty, nepotism, corruption and a profound crisis of identity, the modern state has failed miserably in its mission to preserve the spirit and values of the Prophet’s Medina. In language that resonates with sadness and righteous anger Wahid Bakhsh writes: [The Muslims of South Asia], their dream was Pakistan — a Muslim state based on the ideology of Islam and a state founded on the edifice of Nizam-e Mustafa [‘the system of the Prophet’], and a state which would be the precursor of Islamic renaissance. By the grace of Almighty Allah, the sacrifices, toiling and efforts of the Muslims led to the creation off Pakistan. A part of the dream had come true: we had a geographic entity called Pakistan, and we had to develop it into a citadel of Islam. But alas, we lost our way! We forgot the lofty ideals and objectives for which Pakistan was created. We changed our direction and we drifted away from our course — the course that would have led us to Mecca Muazzamah [‘Exalted’] and Medina Munawwarah [‘Illuminated’]. We are now heading towards temples, churches and abodes of idolatrous practices. We had sought to make Pakistan a fortress of Islam. But we have turned it into the center of greed, corruption, luxury, materialistic values and internal discord (Rabbani 2000: 383).

Incensed by Pakistan’s various weaknesses, Wahid Bakhsh calls for immediate and comprehensive changes to stall its slide into rot. It is only through the moral reform of the individual, he says, that social and political institutions can be revitalised. In a revealing passage, the shaykh attacks those who call for top-down structural changes in the absence of a prevailing change in the way people think and act: Some of our impatient politicians, who include some religious scholars as well, claim that they can reform the society only after coming to power. And that too despite the prerequisites spelled out by the

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tradition of the Prophet (peace be upon him). Unless the masses are reformed, pious and virtuous individuals will not come to power…In order to bring pious individuals to power, we need to commence our work at the grass roots level. Piety will not trickle down from top to bottom. Reconstruction of any nation is possible only if scholars, educationalists, reformers and thinkers reform the masses by interacting with them. There is a need to establish religious schools, arrange talks for the common men, write articles in newspapers, magazines and journals, write books and help in the control and eradication of crime from society. Once the society is reformed, virtuous people will emerge in accordance with the laws of nature (Rabbani 2000: 431).

Islamic values and practice, Wahid Bakhsh asserts, cannot simply be codified, systematised and enforced. Instead, they must be inculcated, internalised and enacted. The shaykh calls for an educated, pious elite to lead the Pakistani masses back to their Islamic roots. And once again, he evokes the Golden Age of the early Muslim community as the eternal, universal paradigm for emulation. It is the only political model, he asserts, in which national policy and public institutions emerge directly from individual faith and practice. Wahid Bakhsh outlines a host of practical reforms for Pakistan’s revitalisation. The restoration of Pakistan’s foundations, he argues, is not solely a spiritual battle, but one that must be fought simultaneously on multiple worldly fronts. In response to ground level realities, the shaykh offers a broad palate of prescriptions designed to purge Pakistan of its colonial vestiges. He calls for legal reforms to institutionalise and enforce the sharia;17 educational reforms to promote science and technology while solidifying ‘religious literacy’ (Rabbani 2000: 441–43); economic reforms to promote growth and stability while eliminating usury (riba) and the vicious cycle of the debt trap laid by international monetary institutions;18 sweeping military reforms to secure internal social stability and promote a unified front of Islamic nations to resist Euro-American, Israeli and Indian expansionism and hegemony;19 and political reforms to institutionalise an ‘Islamic democracy’ purged of all ‘Western influences’ under the leadership of an educated, pious elite of select ‘intellectuals, scholars, thinkers and social reformers’.20 Collectively, this panoply of institutional reforms is ambitious in scope and scale. Yet Wahid Bakhsh offers few practical details on precisely how they should be implemented, institutionalised, and administered.

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In this sense, his vision of social reform is reminiscent of Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-i Islami, who ‘showed little interest in the actual working of institutions’ and ‘was more concerned with abstract theoretical formulations and lessons in moral philosophy’ (Nasr 2001: 87). Pakistan can never be rebuilt, Wahid Bakhsh continues, if it fails to overcome the forces of internal dissolution. Regionalism and local ethnic identity politics, he says, threaten national unity, undermine political institutions and weaken the boundaries of defense. These home-grown divisions are as destructive as any external enemy. In the shaykh’s words: We need to bury our political, religious and ethnic differences and face the enemies of Islam like a solid wall …Nationalist parties are raising slogans of ‘Pashtunistan’ [‘home of the ethnic Pashtuns’], ‘Azad Balochistan’ [‘a free home for the ethnic Baluchis’], and ‘Sindhu Desh’ [‘the Sindhis’ country’]. But selfish motives, mutual rivalries and jealousy blind them. They do not realize that four smaller countries, which they wish to create, will be swallowed by India overnight. Their dreams of independence will be shattered and their personal ambitions ruined. When the necks are chopped off, who will wear garlands? And what use is the crown when the heads have rolled? (Rabbani 2000: 199).

An even greater danger to Pakistan’s integrity, Wahid Bakhsh suggests, is the threat of religious sectarianism — the growing specter of Sunni and Shi’a communalism. Drawing on a well-known Hadith, he makes a desperate plea for Muslim brotherhood. The divisions within the ummah should be a blessing, he insists, promoting healthy debate and competition that deepens faith and solidifies the community of believers. The alternative — the proliferation of sectarian violence — could tear the nation apart. Throughout the text, Wahid Bakhsh is pointedly critical of Sunni-centric Islamists. He decries the spread of Wahhabi and Salafi doctrine, denouncing the exclusivity of their faith and the absolutism of their political and ideological agendas. Not surprisingly, Wahid Bakhsh levels an especially harsh critique against the Deobandi movement. The leadership of Deoband, he argues, has betrayed the legacy of the movement’s founders, men like Hajji Imdad Allah al-Faruqi al-Muhajir Makki (1817–99) and Rashid Ahmed Gangohi (1829–1905), who were themselves Chishti Sabiri masters. ‘The Deobandis have deviated from the path of their prominent leaders and founders of their school of thought’, he writes.

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‘In fact, they are treading the path outlined for them by the enemies of Islam’.21 As an antidote to rigid sectarian loyalties and infighting, Wahid Bakhsh urges the state of Pakistan to stop exploiting religion for political gain. As an Islamic republic, Pakistan’s institutions and laws must encourage unity, defend minorities and promote a shared sense of community. According to the shaykh: These differences among Sunnis, Shias, Barelwis, Deobandis, Muqallids [followers of discrete schools of Islamic law] and non-Muqallids are of a peripheral nature. They have nothing to do with the core issues of Islam on which, by the grace of Allah, the entire Ummah [global community of Muslims] has consensus … We must not worry about the sectarian differences while enforcing Islam in the country. Our constitution should permit all sects to practice religion the way they want. The Government should enforce only those clauses on which all the sects have consensus, such as prohibition of interest, laws of inheritance, prohibition of drinking, adultery, corruption and criminal procedures. Peripheral or controversial issues like visits to the shrines, sama’ [listening to music], ta’ziya [Shi’a processions during Muharram], and milad [public celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday] should be left to the individual sects.22

In Wahid Bakhsh’s opinion, only a strong, centralised and assertive state can protect religious freedom and preserve social order. Loyalty to the nation, he insists, must ultimately trump the parochialism of regional, tribal, familial and sectarian identities, but should be a loyalty that simultaneously attends to those aspects of religious practice that holds for all and for all time. In Wahid Bakhsh’s optimistic assessment, once its own house is in order Pakistan can realise its full potential as a central player in the global geopolitical order. In a spirited call to arms, he urges his countrymen to work together to resist the continuity of neocolonialism: Colonisation of the entire under-developed world by the West has a lesson for all the Muslims and non-Muslims. Strong Islamic Empires did and can even now help to protect the rest of humanity from the ravages of the West…Although colonialism has ended and the physical size of European empires has shrunk to their native lands, they continue to dominate the international politico-economic sphere and exploit the weak nations on the basis of their industrial power, economic

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prosperity and military muscle…India and other Asian countries must therefore strengthen Pakistan rather than weaken it. The politicians and religious clergy of Pakistan must understand the role of Pakistan in the global power structure. They must overcome mutual rivalries and get united to fight the enemies of Islam. They must remember that any weakness in Asia will promote Western hegemony (Rabbani 2000: 248–49).

For Wahid Bakhsh, this is ultimately Pakistan’s true calling: to assume the vanguard of a global Islamic renaissance. In his construct of Islamic sacred history, nothing less will do if Pakistan is to live up to its name (‘The Land of the Pure’) and divinely sanctioned legacy as the heir to the ‘first Pakistan’, the Prophet’s Medina.

Conclusion The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan is an anomalous book in a Pakistani market glutted with religious literature, much of it ideological and highly polemical. Even for Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani, whose literary pursuits embraced multiple genres in diverse registers, this book is atypical. Published in both Urdu and English, the work is clearly aimed at a broad audience of educated Pakistanis, as well as potential international converts and allies. In a critical but creative voice, the shaykh alternatively embraces and resists the parameters of modernity. He appropriates scientific thought, technological innovation and the mass media. At the same time, he rejects absolute secularisation, the cult of individualism, unbridled free market capitalism and democracy — all of which he sees as distinctive (and destructive) Western values and institutions. Pakistan is the front and the centre in Wahid Bakhsh’s imagination. An ardent nationalist, the shaykh was firm in his support for a homeland for South Asian Muslims and unwavering in his optimism for Pakistan’s future. This distinguishes him from many of his Islamist and ulema counterparts who resisted the independence movement and lamented partition. In keeping with the famous Hadith, ‘Love of the homeland is part of one’s faith’ (hubb al-watan min al-iman), Wahid Bakhsh’s writings characterise the foundation of Pakistan as nothing less than a divine reward. At the same time, the text articulates a distinctly Pakistani Sufi identity: a sharia-minded and socially active Sufism, rooted in Indo-Muslim tradition, but responsive to

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the changes and challenges of postcolonial South Asia, including its geopolitics. Wahid Bakhsh’s historical narrative draws inspiration and guidance from an idealised portrait of Islam’s Golden Age. Pakistan’s salvation, he insists, lies in the restoration of the spirit of the early Muslim community — an ethos grounded in tolerance, discipline, order and strength. Throughout the text, the shaykh seeks a middle ground between two ideologies: an aggressive, exclusivist, conservative Sunni Islam (with no space for Sufism), and an absolutist, expansionist, secular West (with no regard for religion). In his view, only a strong, centralised, and assertive Pakistani state can transcend the divisive forces of identity politics, regionalism and sectarianism. Wahid Bakhsh’s framing of Pakistan as an Islamic state, his frequent invocation of a lost Golden Age, and his outrage at the social and moral decay of the nation mirror the style and substance of numerous Muslim social critics. Yet the shaykh’s final rhetorical flourish distinguishes him from his counterparts. For Wahid Bakhsh — the most prolific of twentieth century Chishti Sabiri masters — Sufi piety and practice are both the quintessential expression of Islamic orthodoxy and the enduring bedrock on Indo-Muslim identity. In short, the shaykh reconfigures an alternative Pakistani identity that is simultaneously Muslim, modern and mystic.

Notes 1. See Katherine Pratt Ewing (1997: 67). On the origins and development of the state of Pakistan, see also Ayesha Jalal (1990). 2. Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani (1986); id (2000). Many of the arguments of the book are summarised in another (and much shorter) English text by Wahid Bakhsh (1988). In this article, I quote from Asghar’s English translation. 3. For an overview of Sufi history and practice, see especially Carl W. Ernst (1997); and Annemarie Schimmel (1975). 4. For detailed cross-cultural and historical studies on the polemics over Sufism in various Islamic societies, see the essays in de Jong and Radtke (1999). 5. Ewing (1997: 49). For a more detailed examination of the British policy towards local Sufi institutions in the Punjab, see David Gilmartin (1988: 39–72, 205–24). 6. For an overview of the history, piety and ritual practices of the Chishti order, see Ernst and Lawrence (2002). The definitive work on the Chishtiyya remains Khaliq Ahmad Nizami’s Urdu magnum opus (1980/1985). See also id., ‘Chistiyya’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 11 (1965: 50–56).

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7. On the history of Sufism in South Asia, see especially Carl Schimmel (1975: 370–402). Schimmel provides a masterful survey of the Sufi contributions to Indo-Muslim culture and the development of regional literary and, in particular, poetic traditions. See also the two-volume work by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi (1975; 1983). 8. For an example of the cultural role of local Sufi shrines, see historian Richard M. Eaton (1982) on the shrine of the Chishti saint Baba Farid ad-Din Mas’ud Ganj-i Shakkar (d. 1265) in the town of Pakpattan in Pakistan’s Punjab and in Metcalf (1984: 333–356). For anthropological studies of contemporary practices at South Asian Sufi shrines, see the essays in Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu (1998). 9. The most comprehensive account of the history and legacy of the Deoband madrasa remains Metcalf (1982). 10. For an overview of the polemical debates over Sufism in the context of modernity and colonialism, see Elizabeth Sirriyeh (1999). See also Ernst (1997: 199–228). 11. While Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence (2002) focus primarily on the predominant Chishti Nizami lineage, the authors do give some attention to the Sabiri sub-branch. See especially pp. 118–27 and 130–40. A comprehensive history of the Chishti Sabiri silsila, however, has yet to be written. 12. On Sayyid Mehr Ali Shah of Golra, see especially Gilmartin (1988: 58–59). On Khwaja Hasan Nizami, see Ernst and Lawrence (2002: 113–18). On Jama’at ‘Ali Shah, see Arthur F. Buehler (1998: 190–223); and Gilmartin (1988: 59–61; 103–107). 13. For a theoretically nuanced approach to Sufi psychology and ritual practice see Scott A. Kugle (2003). For a broad overview, see also Ernst (1977: 81–146); and Schimmel (1975: 98–227). 14. Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani (1994); ‘Abd ar-Rahman Chishti (trans. 1993); Sayyid ‘Ali ibn ‘Uthman al-Hujwiri (trans. 1995). 15. Personal interview, 10 December, 2000, Karachi. 16. Rabbani (2000: 36. Especially in the wake of 9/11, jihad is a much misunderstood and maligned concept. For further insights on this concept, see especially Lawrence (1990); Cornell (1991: 18–23); and Kepel (2002). 17. Rabbani (2000: 382, 449). Clearly, Wahid Bakhsh views the implementation of sharia as the first step to social reform, but he provides no details on the codification, interpretation, and institutionalisation of Islamic law. 18. Ibid.: 453–66. The debate over riba remains a hotly contested issue in Pakistan’s domestic politics. Calls for its elimination remain a central item on the political platform of Pakistan’s coalition of religious parties. 19. Ibid.: 552–62. Wahid Bakhsh calls for military conscription and civil defence training for every male citizen of Pakistan between the ages of sixteen and sixty; the issuing of licenses for personal weapons; increased support for a national defense industry and military research; and the development of a ‘Common Defense Council of Islam’ to coordinate, finance, and implement a ‘common foreign policy of the Muslim states’.

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20. Ibid.: 435–41. Wahid Bakhsh provides a broad outline of ‘Islamic democracy’ but few details on its practical implementation. 21. Rabbani (2000: 407). On Hajji Imdad Allah, see especially Kugle (2003: 42–60). 22. Ibid.: 428–29, 433–34. For an insightful study of the history of sectarian politics and violence in contemporary Pakistan, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2002). See especially Chapter 5, ‘Refashioning Identities’, pp. 111–43.

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Part II The Difficulty of Nationalist Visions

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5

Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s∗ Iftikhar Dadi Introduction Even though the film industry of Pakistan has been a major producer of popular films, especially since the late 1950s, a proper study of its cinema is still in its infancy. Apart from Mushtaq Gazdar’s study Pakistan Cinema 1947–1997, little in the way of interpretive and critical scholarship has been published.1 According to Gazdar, Pakistan is one of the top 10 movie producing countries worldwide — in terms of the number of films produced — with an average of 80 films per year till 1997 (Gazdar 1997: 1). It is thus likely to be one of the least studied film industries, which is all the more surprising considering that film analysis is potentially very useful in illuminating the dramatic transformations of Pakistani culture and society. Certainly, the watching of films has continued to provide Pakistanis with a key leisure activity for decades, yet no critical analyses of film semiotics, production, distribution, reception and spectatorship have been undertaken. There is also little work on television in Pakistan, despite its importance in the shaping of regional and national identities and its role in the rise of Pakistani consumer society.2 This article relies upon Gazdar’s overall narrative of the development of cinema, but also subjects a few films to a more detailed formal examination with reference to a period of crisis in Pakistani society. The relationship between cinema and society is neither simply causal, mimetic nor reflective. Rather, this relationship is overdetermined, with thematic evasions and temporal distanciations that do not allow for a simple mapping between political crisis and cinematic production. Moreover, the effects of brute facts on cinema, such as the loss of more than half of the country (by population) in 1971, cannot be discounted either. I begin by examining a graph (after Gazdar) of the number of films produced each year between 1947 and 1997 (Figure 1), which shows the dominance of Urdu cinema from 1953 until the fateful year of 1971,

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when the rising number of Punjabi language films permanently eclipsed the declining number of Urdu films (Gazdar 1997: 240). The decline in Urdu film output, however, began in the late 1960s, when the number of Punjabi and Bengali films began to rise accordingly. If there was a Golden Age of Pakistani Urdu cinema from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, it was certainly over by the late 1970s when the number and quality of Urdu movies began to deteriorate severely. This decline can be attributed to numerous factors: the loss of the East Pakistani market in 1971; the introduction of the VCR and with it the convenient availability of ferociously competitive Indian films; the consolidation and extension of television programming that included serials dealing with social themes; and the imposition of more severe codes of censorship under General Zia’s regime. In this article, I have focussed on Urdu cinema of the Golden Age and traced its decline in relation to the crisis Pakistani nationhood experienced before and in the wake of 1971. This exercise is an initial attempt to interrogate cinema in Pakistan in relation to gradual and catastrophic political and social change, in the hope that others will extend and challenge my findings.

Modernity and Karachi Hamza Alavi has argued that the rise of Muslim separatism in India before 1947 was not primarily a mobilisation based upon Muslim or Islamic idealism, but rather was led by an auxiliary ‘salariat’ class, comprising aspiring and actual white-collar employees, for whom the most important source of patronage was government service. This Muslim salariat backed the idea of Pakistan as a way of securing this patronage for itself. This role of the salariat ‘can be fully understood only with reference to … the economically dominant classes, namely the indigenous and foreign bourgeois and the landowning classes on the one hand and the subordinate classes, the working class and the peasantry on the other’(Alavi 1989: 225–26).3 Suggesting its somewhat precarious position between Marxist class divisions, the salariat’s weak position led to its constant dependance upon government intervention in order to protect its interests. At the founding of Pakistan, the salariat was over-whelmingly comprised of UP-muhajirs (immigrants from the United Provinces in India) and Punjabis: At the time of the Partition, Muhajirs were well-established in the bureaucracy, though not in the armed services which are about

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85 per cent Punjabi, the rest being Pathans. The well-established Muhajir presence in the bureaucracy was a source of patronage and protection for them. They identified therefore with the Pakistan state and with Islamic ideology, and were hostile towards regional ethnic movements…. The bureaucracy, with its substantial Muhajir component, was presided over in Pakistan by the CSP (the Civil Service of Pakistan), successor to the colonial ‘Indian Civil Service’, the so-called ‘Steel Frame’ of the colonial regime. It was the senior partner in the military–bureaucratic oligarchy that has ruled Pakistan since its inception (Alavi 1989: 242).

The salariat continued to exert its influence during the 1950s and largely supported the rise of the big capitalists, many of whom were originally Bombay-based entrepreneurs. During the Ayub era (1958–69), the wider policies of centralisation, rapid economic development and the growth of a super-elite industrial sector under the guidance of American economists accelerated the consolidation of a national elite, which was now composed of more diverse ethnic elements, yet still excluded the majority of the population (Ahmed 1998: 19–26). The supremacy of Urdu films from the late 1950s to the late 1960s notably coincides with the regime of Ayub Khan and the broader socio-economic transformation occurring in Pakistan during this dynamic decade. As numerous historians have pointed out, Ayub Khan deliberately continued the implementation of the One Unit policy to create ‘functional inequality’. According to the government’s planning documents, this made it necessary to have ‘some initial growth in income inequalities to reach high levels of savings and investment’. While Ayub’s economic policies prompted massive centralisation in West Pakistan and negated regional specificity and claims, especially by East Pakistan, his promotion of Karachi-based industrialist families — a large number of them not originally Urdu-speaking, but speaking Gujarati (and other Mumbai-based languages and dialects) — led to their coming into possession of an extremely lopsided share of industrial capital (Sayeed 1980: 57). The close relationship between Pakistan and the US in military and security matters was paralleled by an alliance leading to US assistance in the issue of Pakistan’s economic development — though this was marred by the lack of US support during the Indo-Pakistan war and its aftermath (Talbot 1998: 169–79). Along with the traditional (largely absentee) landowning families, the bureaucracy, dominated by muhajirs and Punjabis, and

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the largely Punjabi army, the consolidation of the business sector during the Ayub era added to and complicated this multifaceted elite balance. It must be understood that this trend of growing inequality was economic, social, educational and cultural in a wide sense — an embrace of Westernisation but also a certain facility with Urdu characterised the West Pakistani elite. As will be shown from an examination of Urdu films from this period, an intensified hegemony of a certain type of Urdu overlay national life. I characterise this as ‘UP Urdu’, which marks the cultural hegemony of various elite agents who may themselves not necessarily have come from Urduised backgrounds, such as Gujarati-speaking industrial seths (tycoons) and the Punjabi bureaucracy and army brass. The case of Punjab itself is especially striking in this regard: twentieth century Urdu literature is simply inconceivable without the enormous contribution of Punjabi authors, who had largely ceased to write literature in Punjabi.4 According to Hanif Ramay (as paraphrased by Feroz Ahmad [1998: xix]), ‘Punjab lost its identity in order to gain a larger Pakistani identity, it began to perceive itself alone as Pakistan, while others started calling Pakistan the greater Punjab’.5 A key role the Ayub-era elite played during the 1960s was to not only deflect populist majority claims by East Pakistani Bengalis for a more equitable share of financial and social resources, but also co-opt demands by subaltern groups within West Pakistan itself. Cinephilia of the Urdu film was widespread during the 1960s among the urbanised Pakistanis, as Indian films were banned, and television broadcasts, which started in 1964 remained limited in their programming and accessibility for several years. The Urdu film enjoyed such a hold on popular imagination that Shaukat Thanvi, a noted satirical writer, considered ‘Filmaria’ to be an incurable new disease, ‘tropical or possibly confined to under-developed countries’ which was ‘not prevalent in this country [earlier but is now] … widespread, and in large towns particularly … in College students.…’ According to Thanvi, ‘our invaluable Pakistani films’ transport their subjects into a dreamy, imaginal and romantic world filled with melodramatic scenarios. The patient afflicted with Filmaria, having lost all appreciation for the achievements of ‘Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Mr Liaquat Ali Khan, Doctor Mohammad Iqbal and Tagore’, is instead continually immersed in cinematic plots and lives of film stars. The patient is even heedless of his religious obligations: ‘Instead of offering his prayers five times a day in a mosque, he visits the cinema

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shows in the town — a subject on which compared to all others, he has a remarkable fund of information and the soundest views’ (Thanwi 1970: 23–26). Watching the cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s today evokes vivid personal recollections. My earliest memories are of growing up in the second storey of a house my parents rented in Karachi in a development called PECHS. While our house, which was located only two blocks away from the main intersection on Tariq Road, was more modest, the bungalows past Nursery further towards the airport were the really grand ones, magnificent modernist architectural edifices on 2,000 sq. yds, with grand staircases, murals and polished terrazzo floors. Many of these structures have been demolished to make way for high-rise apartment blocks, but some still exist as remnants of aspirations of the groups that rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. This was precisely the new urban fabric of Karachi, with its façade of modernisation, which was vividly described in Qurratulain Hyder’s novella, Housing Society, first published in 1963.6 Hyder describes the new urban social rites and opportunities available to the emerging muhajir and Punjabi elite in Karachi, made possible by the rise of new Americanised professions such as international business, advertising, and public relations. Stuffy colonial British relationships no longer had much hold over the residents of the Society, whose lodestar was now the shiny new world of a pop lifestyle oriented by American patronage. The lives of the Society residents, in their Westernisation, sophistication and cynicism, had in a very short period greatly diverged from their previous avatars in India that were based upon feudal decay and older ashraf (noble elite) values — the residents successfully created the proper social distance from their poorer brethren in the more ‘backward’ refugee settlement in Karachi, the Pir Ilahi Buksh Colony. Indeed, the social descriptions in Hyder’s novella — sophisticated and pointed indices of location and taste — can be read productively in relation to the modernist mise-en-scène interiors of Urdu films of the period. For example, witness the setting to the dramatic denouement in Housing Society: Countless cars were parked all over a still unpaved road of the P.E.C. Housing Society and dignitaries alighting from them were gingerly making their way through them to the spacious compound. The prominent Karachi businessman, Jamshed Ali Syed, had invited almost all the V.I.P.s of Karachi to his house-warming. Through the picture window in the lounge, the expansive green lawn looked like a

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Technicolor scene on a cinemascope screen. Bright lights in the trees. Colourful Japanese lanterns. Flowerbuds bursting with blooms. Sofas scattered all over the lawn. Boxes of expensive cigarettes on little tables. Rows of long tables loaded with food and drink. Wine cooling in buckets of ice. White-uniformed bearers. Cabinet ministers, secretaries and other senior officials, ambassadors. Press and commercial Attaches. Big name industrialists. Packs of journalists busily taking notes. Photographers strolling around flashing bulbs. Pakistani ladies dressed in alluring ‘Indian’ saris, foreign women in evening gowns and cocktail dresses. A band was playing on the terrace and several couples were dancing.… Inside, in the lounge, a number of guests were intently discussing the mural on the wall. Suraya, who was wearing a French chiffon sari with large red flowers on it, stood nearby, talking to her admirers. Her hair was done in the latest ‘beehive’ style and the air around her was fragrant with Chanel No. 5. The daring cut of her blouse left her entire back exposed (Hyder 1999: 244).7

Beyond this glittering face of Karachi, there remained the continued problem of refugee resettlement, resimmering ethnic tensions and also the transfer of the nation’s capital to Islamabad in the early 1960s that altered the balance between the bureaucracy, business and other professions (Ansari 2005).

The Social Film Gazdar has identified the period 1957–66 as transitional, in which many modern themes were introduced into Pakistani cinema. Melodramatic realism was employed in a number of films dealing with social issues starting in 1957, where realism was achieved through a number of mise-en-scène devices, which include modern architectural interiors and street scenes with staged elements of street life, while the melodramatic mode centrally emphasised the emotional subjectivity of the characters. The melodramatic–realist plot usually moves towards a narrative resolution based upon individual sentiments that also prefigured values of the larger social good. To understand cinematic codes of the social film, it is useful to refer to scholarship on early Indian cinema, as Pakistani cinema in its initial years drew upon many of the same filmmakers, writers and technicians who were earlier associated with Bombay cinema. Pakistani Urdu cinema and Indian films share many of the same cinematic codes,

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themes, and techniques, even as differences begin to slowly but persistently appear. Geeta Kapur, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and others, working on Indian film and other visual mediums, have identified a mode of ‘frontality’ that was instantiated as a formal structure in popular Indian visual culture from the nineteenth century onwards. Geeta Kapur describes this frontality in relation to painting, theatre and cinema as ‘frontality of the word, the image, the design, the formative act. This yields forms of direct address; flat diagrammatic and simply profiled figures; a figure-ground pattern with only notational perspective; repetition of motifs in terms of “ritual play”; and a decorative mise-en-scène’ (Kapur 1987: 80). One sees this mode, which was inherited from Parsi Theatre, in a number of Pakistani films produced in the 1950s. Scholarship on Hindi cinema has drawn attention to the manner in which this cinematic code shares in traditional practices of viewing Hindu deities, the darsan.8 However, this analysis still needs to attend to how Muslims, who may not necessarily share these spectatorial practices, view such films. In the context of Pakistani cinema, where mythologicals are absent, I provisionally call this mode the dastan (story) mode in order to distinguish it from ‘mythologicals’ based upon Hindu myths in which viewing by darsana is foregrounded.9 According to Vasudevan there is also the historical genre in India in the late 1930s to the 1950s that was implicitly Hindu nationalist (Vasudevan 2000: 154). The linkages and differences between the mythological, the historical and the dastan clearly need to be explored with more nuance and sensitivity than is possible here. But some preliminary remarks must suffice. The primarily dastan mode films include either historical romances or pictorialisations of A Thousand and One Nights type of stories — for example, as the Urdu film Dosheeza (Damsel), which was released as late as 1962, exhibits. Its characters perform as if part of a tableau and are portrayed with little inner psychological characterisation, remaining as set types and there is a sense of stasis produced by the camera that remains largely inert and immobile. Moreover, the dastanic characters are not specifically ethnic, but two-dimensional types based on legends. Indian scholars have also discussed the development of melodrama and its relation to realism in Indian films from the 1950s onwards. Their findings are very relevant for Pakistani cinema, as the ‘social’ film in Pakistan needs to contextualised in relation to the creation of the ‘Muslim social’ genre in India, which explored the quandaries and moral dilemmas of characters caught in difficult social circumstances.

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It may be noted that this was primarily a secularised genre — even though the characters are Muslim, their dilemmas are not. This genre arises in India as a compensatory voice set against nationalist communalisation. As Vasudevan has suggested, by the end of the 1930s, the ‘non-Muslim’ social film was seen to have moved away from an embracing framework and towards communalised expression, which led to the belated entry of Muslim filmmakers who explored this genre, offering films that addressed universalised dilemmas instead. Here is Vasudevan’s salient argument at length: An influential film periodical, Filmindia, argued that the [social] genre was the preserve of Hindu drives to reform and modernize society, and the Muslim film-makers were averse to introspection about the practices of their community, preferring to invest in genres such as the historical. It should be underlined that this argument was a retrospective one, for the reformist films of the 1930s, while addressing change in Hindu society, never identified themselves in terms of particular socio-religious groups, and some of the issues they raised, such as the oppression of women, the contest of feudal authority, and the depiction of social inequality, could obviously have an appeal broader than the Hindu community. However, hegemonic practices tend to leave their identity unmarked in order to assume to speak on behalf of society as a whole, and when the exclusionist and suborning aspects of an emerging Hindu nationalist hegemony surfaced in the 1940s, there developed a drive to pluralize unmarked categories, such as the social. Thus we witness the emergence of the category of the Muslim social, led by Muslim-led studios, which laid claim to a reform and modernisation of Muslim society. Films such as Najma (Mehboob Khan, 1943) and Elaan/The Call (Mehboob Khan, 1948) pitted liberal professionals against the effete, feudal face of Muslim society. Here the address to the particular group was not isolationist. Rather, in appealing for change in the Muslim community, they clearly staged, for the wider public, the desire of Muslims to embrace a common modern social agenda (Vasudevan 2000: 156 and passim).

The Muslim social, which continued well into the 1980s in India, exhibits ‘difference’, but subordinates it to address the wider Indian society and is therefore not a primarily religious genre.10 My analysis of Arman (Desire) that follows will also thus implicitly argue for the transplantation of the Muslim social in Pakistan that continues the project of secularised reform, especially in relation to gender, which has been an abiding concern of the Indian Muslim social film for decades.

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However, the earlier social film from the 1940s did not remain simply one distinct genre out of many. By the 1950s, the Indian social film became an amalgamated artifact. In this sense, as M. Mahdava Prasad, Ravi Vasudevan and others have emphasised, older separate genres were subsumed by the 1950s into an emergent ‘super-genre’ in 1950s Indian cinema, called the ‘social’: The mixture of codes, generic and sensational elements, and a narrative undermining of social identity makes the social film of the 1950s an imaginary space in which a popular audience of mixed social background were offered a rather fluid system of signs, modes of address and social positions. Industry observers had their particular explanation for this mixture. They believed that the ‘social’, initially conceived of as a conventionally middle-class genre, had become an omnibus form in which different social groups were being catered to by different elements of the film. One observer noted that, whereas in the 1930s dramatic and story values appealed to the middle and upper middle classes, and stunts and action dramas appealed to workers, in the 1950s ‘a new type of social realism also came to occupy the screen. Actions, thrills, magic and stunts were introduced into the stories to attract the masses (Vasudevan 1993: 72).11

Prasad has seen the social as marking the emergence of a new kind of realism (Prasad 1998: 55–64). Vasudevan’s discussion of the social film emphasises its composite nature, however, made up of a combination of long-standing genre codes, such as iconicity and frontality, realism12 and melodrama, and classic Hollywood editing strategies that emphasised the relationship of suture between the screen image and the spectator (Vasudevan 1993: 61). Vasudevan stresses that the composite nature of the ‘social’ super-genre does not result in an incoherent narrative or a free-floating universe of interpretation — rather, the formal language of the film is resolved in a manner that helps produce static (and gendered) mythical meaning. I would like to suggest, however, that the different modes do not necessarily correspond, by some reductionist sociological aesthetic, to particular social segments of the audience.… it is difficult to separate out ‘traditional’ from ‘modern’ address, or to suggest that such addresses correspond to distinct audiences.… However, there is a strong tendency to subordinate movement and vision toward a stable organisation of meaning.… This has a parallel in the way in which the

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narrative reorganises the family so as to secure a stable position for the middle-class hero. To my mind, this feature brings the complexities of the popular cultural form into alignment with a certain normalising discourse and hegemonic closure (Vasudevan 1993: 72).

This is an apt analysis of the melodramatic–realist and social Urdu films in the later Ayub era as well, which also became aligned with elite normalisation of the Pakistani national imaginary. In short, the parallels between the Indian and Pakistani social film suggest the need for a more comprehensive study tracing the role of the social from the 1930s well into Pakistani television serials of the 1990s, while remaining attentive to the drama of shifting political and national scenarios.

The Ayub Khan Era Before I turn to an analysis of specific films, another salient factor to consider is Ayub Khan administration’s keen interest in the management of culture. Ayub Khan was always well-aware of the potential of cinema to be used as propaganda. His highly capable bureaucrats, Qudratullah Shahab and Altaf Gauhar, headed the Ministry of Information and under their aegis, the Department of Film and Publications produced an ensemble of documentary films and newsreels, which had to be played compulsorily by all commercial cinemas before the screening of a feature film. The Department also produced the feature length propaganda film, Nai Kiran (A New Ray of Light, 1959), which was released in separate versions in Urdu and the four regional languages — and the fact that the Urdu and the Punjabi version shared the same actors is surely not accidental. Gazdar has compared the effect of watching Nai Kiran with that of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. He recognises, however, the complexity of the Ayubian cultural intervention, in that the overall standard of documentary filmmaking unrelated to politics improved dramatically and the cultural policies of the country in general were imbued with ‘modern’, ‘progressive’, ‘tolerant’ and ‘secular’ values (Gazdar 1997: 73–78). The extent of governmental efforts in cinema can also be seen in the critical and exhaustive 410-page report on the state of film in Pakistan, prepared by government officials and published in 1962.13 This article provisionally argues that the insistent foregrounding of newsreels and documentaries was coupled with the rise of television with its own modes of presentation. This resulted in the addition

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of another mode to the omnibus that was the social film by the early 1970s, with the incorporation of a documentary mode in feature cinema itself.14 This mode is also seen in some Amitabh Bachchan films from the 1970s onwards and so its scope is again obviously larger that of the boundary of Pakistani cinema. This documentary mode is most commonly visible when the diegesis unfolds in a public outdoor location, which cannot be fully scripted. The documentary mode thus shares something with cinéma vérité’s emphasis on actual locations, where the director does not control traffic, movement or accidental encounters in the camera background, which produce in the spectator the effect of apprehending everyday life seemingly without cinematic artifice. To sum up our discussion so far, by the mid-1960s, the Urdu social film, which incorporated a number of cinematic codes, including most importantly melodrama (emotional subjectivity) and realism (contemporary mise-en-scène, classic Hollywood editing, etc.) was well in place. (The documentary mode will not be fully apparent until the mid 1970s). The Ayub era was characterised by the rapid growth of the elite Pakistani economy, political unrest against (largely Punjabi) centralisation and (largely muhajir) accumulation, and the festering of the East Pakistan question. The pervasive ethos was the effort towards the development of a dense, discursive web of governmentality.

Arman (Desire, 1966) The Urdu film Arman (1966),15 the product of a new generation of Karachibased filmmakers, captures something of the youthful exuberance and energy of the Ayub era.16 The producer, Waheed Murad, also played the lead role of Nasir in the film while composer Sohail Rana wrote a number of highly memorable songs. This, put together with the efforts of director Pervez Malik, who had studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California, resulted in the first platinum jubilee film in Pakistani history, having had a run of over 75 weeks. Arman’s protagonist Nasir recalls Hyder’s description of the residents of Housing Society, where a rapidly growing economy held the promise of a fully modern life for the elite. The film’s plot narrates the social dilemma of Seema — the daughter of Begum Sahiba — who has had a illegitimate child with a lover who is presently abroad. The lead female character is an orphaned relative of Begum Sahiba, the saintly Najma (played by Zeba). Begum Sahiba, despite having adopted

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Figure 2: Najma (left) agrees to cover up the existence of Seema’s baby (by making arrangements to have it cared for by a poor family).

Figure 3: Begum Sahiba discussing with the munshi (secretary) about Nasir as a possible prospect for her daughters.

Figure 4: The munshi.

Figure 5: Nasir’s father with his servant.

Figure 6: Koko Korina song, the band.

Figure 7: Koko Korina song, Nasir singing with the band.

Figures 2–7: Stills from Arman (1966)

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Figure 8: Koko Korina song, giant Coke bottle at the bar.

Figure 9: Koko Korina song, waiter dancing with a tray of Coke bottles.

Figure 10: Koko Korina song, Nasir recoiling from first ugly woman.

Figure 11: Koko Korina song, Nasir recoiling from second ugly woman.

Figure 12: Nasir convinces his father of his decision to marry Najma, by arguing for her virtues as the bearer of Eastern domesticity.

Figure 13: The munshi and Begum Sahiba arrange for the baby’s existence to be revealed to Nasir and his father, ir order to prevent Nasir from marrying Najma.

Figures 8–13: Stills from Arman (1966)

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Figure 14: Seema anxiously waiting to see who will be handed the baby.

Figure 15: Najma anxiously waiting to see who will be handed the baby.

Figure 16: The caretaker hands Seema’s baby to Najma, who is disgraced, and the prospect of her marriage with Nasir destroyed.

Figure 17: Gul Khan attempts to rape Najma who has been living after her disgrace with Gul Khan’s aunt, the caretaker of the baby.

Figures 14–17: Stills from Arman (1966)

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Figure 18: Villager: ‘The thief stole the bike’.

Figure 19: Villager: ‘Why did he [Jagirdar] dismiss you instead?’

Figure 20: Farmoo: ‘Though hardworking and loyal, I have suffered….’

Figure 21: Farmoo: ‘… grave injustice. My reputation has been ruined….’

Figure 22: Farmoo: ‘… and I have been disgraced’.

Figure 23: Farmoo: ‘A day will come when I won’t tolerate anymore…’

Figures 18–23: Stills from Anari (1975). Meeting under the village tree, villagers incite Farmoo after the Jagirdar has fired him.

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Figure 24: Farmoo: ‘That’s how capitalists treat us’.

Figure 25: Villager: ‘What are you waiting for? Grab him [Jagirdar] by his collar’.

Figure 26: Villager: ‘If want to retaliate, set fire to his house’.

Figure 27: Farmoo (agitated): ‘I will indeed, and when the Jagirdar’s house…’

Figure 28: Farmoo (declaiming): ‘… has been reduced to ashes, I will laugh and he will cry’.

Figure 29: The Jagirdar suddenly shows up, surprising Farmoo who exclaims, ‘The Jagirdar! I’m done for!’

Figures 24–29: Stills from Anari (1975). Meeting under the village tree, villagers incite Farmoo after the Jagirdar has fired him.

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Figure 30: Farmoo to Jagirdar: ‘The people have turned against you’.

Figure 31: Farmoo (pointing to the tree), ‘those people there’.

Figure 32: The villagers have vanished.

Figure 33: Farmoo: ‘I am a blundering fool. The fact is they incited me’.

Figure 34: Gulabi convinces Farmoo to leave for the city to find his prospects.

Figure 35: Gulabi warns Farmoo, ‘The city folk are very clever. Don’t allow them to cheat you’.

Figures 30–35: Stills from Anari (1975).

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Figure 36: Farmoo daydreams of Gulabi loudly, ‘you will be in my memory day and night,’ disturbing other passengers.

Figure 37: Passenger: ‘Please do it softly, will you?’

Figure 38: Farmoo remembers Gulabi’s warning about the clever city folk.

Figure 39: Farmoo decides to confront the passengers, ‘I’ll see how smart they are’.

Figure 40: Farmoo rudely places his foot on the knee of passenger, ‘You city people think you can outwit me?’

Figure 41: Farmoo boasts about his exploits as an outlaw, ‘Don’t you know that I am Farmoo, the gangster?’

Figures 36–41: Stills from Anari (1975). Encounter with city passengers in the train compartment.

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Figure 42: Farmoo: ‘If I become upset, I will deal with you the same way I handled the Jagirdar’.

Figure 43: Farmoo, ‘…rivers of blood will flow!’

Figure 44: The passengers are awed by Farmoo, who brags, ‘Now you have changed the tone of your voice’.

Figure 45: The passengers in awe of Farmoo ‘the gangster’.

Figure 46: The passengers now try to placate Farmoo by humbly massaging his legs. Figures 42–46: Stills from Anari (1975). Encounter with city passengers in the train compartment.

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Najma, treats her like a servant-girl in a stereotypical soutela (stepmotherly) fashion.17 Najma agrees to cover up Seema’s lapse by arranging for the latter’s child to be cared for by a family in a village (Figure 2). When the dashing Nasir (Waheed Murad) visits Begum Sahiba’s house in order to find a suitable bride for an arranged marriage, instead of choosing Seema — as Begum Sahiba had hoped — he unwittingly falls in love with Najma. When Nasir’s father asks for Najma’s hand in marriage for his son, Begum Sahiba arranges for her crafty munshi to reveal the existence of the illegitimate child and claim that it is Najma’s (Figures 13–16). Najma selflessly decides to cover up Seema’s moral lapse and embraces the attribution of motherhood by maintaining silence. This act immediately destroys her chance to marry Nasir, putting into play a more serious, melodramatic, cinematic mood that resolves itself after numerous emotional turns.18 As expected, the resolution of wider social issues, such as an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and the vexed relationship between duty, fidelity and desire, are rendered as individual moral quandaries, whose resolution, nonetheless, upholds the bourgeois moral universe. In this respect, the film’s outcome is already prefigured, echoing Vasudevan’s observation: ‘Indian popular cinema is singularly indifferent to mechanisms of suspense and surprise: the moral universe of the fiction, the figuration of guilt and innocence, is always already known’(Vasudevan 1993: 65). Arman introduced a kinetic body language in Pakistani cinema, while remaining largely faithful to the melodramatic realist narrative frame of the social film. While eyeline match and shot-reverse shot editing was very rarely used in its editing (except in songs), the subtle but constant camera movement and tracking shots, along with modernist mise-en-scène interiors, overcame the stasis associated with older modes, evoking emotional drama and a dynamic sense of identification with the characters on screen. The film was very selfassured in its handling of ethnic and gender roles and also about exploring a modernity inflected by Americanisation. In a nightclub (Figures 6, 7) that virtually serves as an advertisement for Coca Cola, or at least seems to be a highly visible early instance of product placement, a pop band performs the famous song ‘Koko Korina’ (Figures 8, 9). The visual excess of Coke as a signifier clearly denotes Americanised modernity. This graphic fetishisation of Coke, echoed in the words of the song itself, strongly suggests a teleological fascination towards Westernisation by the national elite.

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Ethnic types precede the ‘Koko Korina’ sequence and crop up throughout the film (Figures 4, 5, 17). The crafty Gujarati munshi and Nasir’s father’s simpleton servant are both muhajir, yet safely occupy subservient social roles, as indexed by their non-UP Urdu pronunciations.19 Nasir’s quest for idealised feminine beauty is also predicated upon his recoil at discovering two dark women in the club who do not conform to normative ideals of beauty that Najma obviously exemplifies (Figures 10, 11). But as expected, Najma is much more that a pretty face and Nasir’s decision to marry Najma is based firmly upon his perception of Najma as the bearer of the essential ‘Eastern’ (not Islamic) domestic values (Figure 12). Also, even though Begum Sahiba (Figure 3) herself is clearly an enforcer of patriarchy, this is not a jarring or out-of-place value, as she comes across as a well-meaning but somewhat traditionally obtuse character.20 Arman’s self-assured take on gender and ethnicity, incorporated smoothly in the narrative flow, is non-interruptive of diegesis. In Arman’s melodramatic realist take, the foreclosure of non-UP Urdu speakers from morality and modernity brings out modern ethical subjectivity as primarily UP Urdu-speaking. This valuation of subjectivity was not possible in a strictly dastan mode, in which everyone remains a mythical character type. By contrast, Arman marks the non-UP Urdu speakers as clearly and identifiably ethnic in a realist fashion — even if their exact ethnicity in some cases remains unclear. What begins as a light-hearted romantic comedy during its first hour increasingly becomes preoccupied by the psychic toll exacted by Nasir’s misrecognition of Najma’s circumstances, leading to the emotional torment of not only Nasir and Najma, but of all the secondary characters and thereby of society at large. I read the performance of affective labour by Arman’s characters as also enacting an allegory of the struggle of the Pakistani elite to interpellate themselves into the Ayubian US-inflected modernity, even as this aspiration founders upon unanticipated political developments.

The Aftermath of 1971 The devastating loss of East Pakistan in 1971 permanently altered the ethnic equation in Pakistan. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto no longer had to defend his policies against majority East Pakistani claims and thus did not need to rely upon the 1960s elite to bolster the case for privileges enjoyed by West Pakistan as a whole. Instead, his populist rhetoric drew upon the frustrations of the disadvantaged masses in

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West Pakistan itself — especially rural Sindhis and Punjabis. Bhutto’s nationalisation of the assets of the industrialist families in the early 1970s, his reform of the bureaucracy — the CSP and other governmental positions — by limiting the entry of muhajirs, his introduction of Sindhi language teaching in educational institutions in Sindh, and the perception that his administration allocated resources away from Karachi, all set the stage for ethnic claims to emerge forcefully in mainstream politics. While Bhutto’s reforms eventually led to the rise of an urbanised Sindhi middle-class, Hamza Alavi also suggests that the eventual stranglehold on all national institutions by Punjabis was an unintended consequence of Bhutto’s social engineering: [The CSP was] the senior partner in the military–bureaucratic oligarchy that has ruled Pakistan since its inception. It was powerful enough to keep the military at bay even during the Martial Law regimes of General Yahya Khan. The situation changed radically after Bhutto’s reform of the bureaucracy which effectively broke its back. Ironically that removed the main barrier that stood in the way of the hegemony of the army which is now supreme. With it has come unchallenged Punjabi hegemony in the country (Alavi 1989: 242).

This period also coincides with the emerging dominance of Punjabi cinema (Figure 1), whose rustic vigilante aesthetic, unlike that of the Urdu social cinema, remained somewhat outside the parameters of the competition posed by Hindi films through the rise of the VCR in the mid-1970s. Peter Manuel has suggested that Pakistan preceded India in adopting audio cassette technology for legal and pirated distribution of songs. One might also expect the spread of the VCR in the country to have followed an analogously precocious trajectory, especially since the forbidden fruit of Indian cinema was unavailable on the big screen or on TV (Manuel 1993: 95). While the VCR itself was banned during those early years, its use nevertheless spread rapidly, undermining the urban audience for Urdu cinema. Under General Zia’s censorious regime, the crisis of Urdu cinema was acute by the year 1980. Punjabi cinema, beginning in the early 1970s, embodied Punjabi identity with a new imagination. This cinematic identity eventually formed a distinctive genre. As Gazdar and others have pointed out, it was the black-and-white Punjabi film Wehshi Jat (1975), based on the Urdu short story by Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, which ‘has so many scenes

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of blood and gore that it shocked even the short story writer…’ [T]he successes of Wehshi Jat set a trend of ferocity and savagery in Punjabi cinema....’ (Gazdar 1997: 144). Maula Jat (1979) was even more popular, crystallising the genre of hyper-violent Punjabi cinema, typically a vigilante and outlaw response to rural exploitation but, according to Gazdar’s influential argument, also enacting an allegory of the repression instigated by General Zia’s martial law regime.21 Gazdar identifies a number of tropes peculiar to these Punjabi films: the chinghaar (battle cry), the bhangra (dance), and especially the barrack, ‘a high-pitched full-throated, threatening yell, as sort of warming up, a prelude to a brawl, verbal or physical’. Gazdar notes that the meaning of barrack is untranslatable, ‘difficult to explain through any single word in English or Urdu’. This incommensurability precisely marks the emergence of a genre proper to Punjabi film, definitely eclipsing the ‘super-genre’ of the Urdu social film (Gazdar 1997: 134).22 By the mid-1970s, the Urdu social film, under pressure from Indian cinema circulating through the VCR and the emerging Punjabi jat (an ethnic group native to Punjab) genre and other vernacular expressions, arguably ‘migrated’ to popular TV serial format — an important transformation that awaits detailed study.

Anari (Novice, 1975) The emergence of Punjabi cinema was, however, also felt by Urdu cinema internally. As an example, I consider the Urdu colour film Anari, directed by S. Suleman, which was released in 1975 and starred the highly successful Nadeem–Shabnam pair — both originally having made their careers in East Pakistan.23 While the film did fairly well at the box office, achieving platinum jubilee status, it is not considered as electrifying or groundbreaking as Arman or Aina (Mirror,1977), and is a rather plodding piece of work in its numbing repetition, endless monologues and flat camerawork.24 However, I have shown how its very lack of narrative cohesion is indicative of the mid-1970s atmosphere in Pakistan.25 I argue that the Urdu social film is no longer self-assured of its own social and moral universe, including its take on ethnicity; rather, its ideological coherence is put under considerable strain in the mid-1970s. Anari is the story of a village idiot, Farmoo — a shortened version of Farmabardar (‘obedient’ or ‘follower’) — played by Nadeem. Farmoo is a pure-hearted but highly gullible good-for-nothing, whose blind mother and unmarried sister, despite undergoing great financial

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hardships, are unable to get him to find a job that he can hold on to. Farmoo’s mother finally begs the village feudal-landlord, Jagirdar Sahib, to offer Farmoo employment. On the very first day of his job, Farmoo almost drowns the Jagirdar’s farm manager in a well and threatens to strangle the accountant — in order to enact physically and literally the Jagirdar’s frustration with the corruption of these employees. When Farmoo in his gullibility loses Jagirdar Sahib’s new bicycle to roadside thieves, he is fired from his job. Sitting under the tree that serves as the village meeting place, Farmoo is incited by the villagers to protest against the injustice meted out to him by the Jagirdar, prompting him to declaim a parody of revolutionary rhetoric (Figures 18–27). Suddenly when the Jagirdar arrives, Farmoo backtracks and tries to blame the villagers who have fled the scene by this time (Figures 29–33). With his future job prospects ruined in the village, Farmoo is persuaded by his childhood sweetheart, the beautiful village belle Gulabi (played by Shabnam), to leave for the city in order to try and find work and finally make something of himself (Figures 34, 35). Farmoo’s bumbling adventures in the city continue to land him in a great deal of trouble, but due to his innate sincerity, his social and financial situation is satisfactorily and mythically resolved, even though the gullibility of his character shows no signs of changing. Anari is a comedy in which the anachronistic appearance of Farmoo, decked out in an effete red kurta–pajama (tunic and pants) and a red fez, evocative of perhaps Lucknow rather than a Punjabi village, provides an overdetermined visual cue from the outset. The idiot Farmoo has neither wisdom nor wealth. But he is a highly eloquent and gifted orator in UP Urdu and the entire diegesis of the film provides an opportunity for Farmoo to show off his eloquence. When opportunities for employment appear to be fully blocked, his exceptional skill with the language provides for a sort of compensatory social capital for Farmoo. Moreover, Farmoo’s mother, Jagirdar Sahib and Gulabi all speak perfect UP Urdu, in a setting reminiscent of a Punjabi village. In this respect, the mise-en-scène of the film does not evoke the same sense of self-assurance we see in Arman. Here the discursive Urdu and the visual cues of the Punjabi village appear to be at crosspurposes, undermining any sense of ideological coherence. In comparison with Arman, the film is unquestionably a poorer aesthetic artifact — the camera is far more static and the acting is much more frontally oriented, theatrical and artificial. Anari is

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no longer a melodrama, but a film that combines the dastan mode with a new sense of documentary realism. Farmoo’s adventures are vaguely reminiscent of Sheikh Chilli stories26 and the dastan mode is thus appropriate for their narration in much of the film. The editing resolutely avoids classic Hollywood techniques of suture and interpellation — eyeline match and shot-reverse-shot. No attempt is made to pictorialise the inner life of Farmoo or Gulabi or any of the other characters, who all remain types — without inner psychological depth. In a number of outdoor action scenes, however, the mise-enscène threatens to break altogether from the loose script, allowing for the documentary mode to interrupt the dastan mode. Anari is not considered to be a political film, but I argue here for a reading that foregrounds its oblique political character.27 Farmoo rails against the perceived injustice committed by the Jagirdar and also against the alleged duplicity of the city slickers. His naïve, idiotic oratory, such as threatening to unleash rivers of blood, and revolution against landlordism, parodies the verbose socialist rhetoric expounded by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto from the late 1960s. Bhutto’s claim to popularity, as the champion of the disadvantaged masses, was coming under increasing strain due to growing disappointment regarding his actual performance as the leader of Pakistan since 1971 (Ali 2005: 83–107). But the film’s political undertones also encompass the discordancy of its own framing — perhaps the need for ideological suture across the trauma of 1971, by Nadeem and Shabnam, both actors from (former) East Pakistan, here incongruously playing the role of Punjabi villagers. I have already suggested how Farmoo’s character enacts the stripping of previously guaranteed employment opportunities to muhajirs. With a socialist revolution already co-opted by Bhutto, the muhajir-to-the-city (Farmoo) is left with little except the desire to project a compensatory identitarian symbolic capital. His attempt to migrate to the city is precisely a quintessential ‘muhajir’ (migratory) experience, which, after the oil shocks of 1973, was oriented increasingly towards the Persian Gulf and was very much a part of the trajectory of imagination and practice shared by muhajirs, Punjabis, Pathans, and other ethnicities in Pakistan. This popular orientation towards the gold-paved streets of the Gulf was more directly explored by the 1979 Punjabi film, Dubai Chalo (Let’s Go to Dubai), marking the desire of a large number of Pakistani blue and white collar workers to seek phantasmatic material success in the oil-rich Arab countries.28

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The symbolic purchase of UP Urdu is most evident in the relationship between Farmoo and the train travellers, but this transaction is also fraught with ideological excesses. Before boarding the train, Gulabi asks Farmoo to be careful in the city, as the ‘city folk are extremely clever’ (Figure 35). Upon boarding the train, Farmoo reminisces loudly about his life in the village, disturbing the surrounding passengers. When these passengers object, Farmoo, remembering Gulabi’s advice, instead of becoming docile and humble in the presence of city folk, decides to confront the passengers by boasting about his dangerous exploits as an outlaw who confronted the Jagirdar (Figures 36–39). Moreover, he boldly places his bare feet upon the knees of the traveller in front of him (Figures 40–43). This audacious act of rude behavior immediately elicits threatening responses from the passengers in the train compartment, who are visually coded to be the supposedly clever and devious city slickers. However, Farmoo’s outrageous revolutionary rhetoric delivered in UP Urdu allows him to gain the upper hand and, after this rhetorical flourish, the passengers are reduced to humbly serving Farmoo for the remainder of the journey (Figures 44–46). By 1975, this encounter on the train between the city folk and Farmoo can only be chiasmatic — Farmoo, the Punjabi village simpleton, who nevertheless declaims in perfect UP Urdu, manages to outwit the cleverer city dwellers, who can only express themselves in Punjabi accented Urdu. Gullibility and particularity are tortuously mapped onto the city folk, rather than onto Farmoo. It is precisely the very incongruity of the encounter, with its mixed-up signifiers, which reveals the lingering ideological substrate of Urdu cinema in relation to ethnicity. Urdu cinema continues to work towards the foreclosure of the ethnic as a proper subject, but by now this operation is itself under considerable strain.

Conclusion I emphasise again that this is a very preliminary study of a body of materials on films, which requires extended and group efforts to investigate more fully. My analysis has attempted to identify the structural aspects of the formation of the national subject in the 1960s as an unmarked universal. The cinematic modes that arose by the mid-1960s instantiate a combination of inherited codes of the dastan, with an emerging melodramatic realism by which the ethical and proper subject narrating national subjectivity is produced as a

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UP Urdu speaker. By the early 1970s, the rise of documentary realism, television, political and social changes after the break-up of Pakistan, the reign of Bhutto and the emergence of the Punjabi jat genre, all precipitate a crisis in the Urdu social film, which can no longer represent a self-enclosed social world as an analogue of the national that Arman offers. The cinematic in post-1971 is articulated with the social in an overdetermined sense, and relates to national crisis by temporal lags, evasions and aporias as much as by recognition via structural codes and thematic content. It senses national crisis as internal to the medium itself and by its representational fantasies that continue to insist on the primacy of UP Urdu in a Punjabi village setting in Anari. The identity politics that gathered force in Pakistan before and after 1971 shattered previously hegemonic elite subjectivities. In the process it also undid an unstated, unspoken universal consensus regarding the nation, unravelling it in the absence of a new consensus, corroborating Ayesha Jalal’s observation that ‘Urdu appears to have provided greater impetus to the counter-narratives of regional identity than to the construction of a Pakistani collective ethos’.29 The left was co-opted by Bhutto in the late 1960s and 1970s, and Islam, co-opted by Zia in the late 1970s and 1980s. If blindness to ethnicity in the 1960s films is by now demonstratably clear, it is immeasurably more difficult to imagine a new national project to replace the 1960s hegemonic subject. The normative Pakistani-ness that existed in a palpable fashion the 1960s has, of course, decisively vanished from the national imaginary after 1971 and is not likely to reappear in the foreseeable future, especially when discursive and institutional density to the nation also appears to have thinned out considerably since the Ayub era — the state no longer being able to even promise opportunities for its citizens within a national framework. The rise of populist cultures since the 1970s owes something to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s reorganisation of national institutions and his rhetorical skills, but also to the loss of the promise that the nation embodied during the 1960s. In that sense, while there is no longer a single Pakistani national cinema, there is, apart from numerous vernacular expressions, perhaps a ‘lite’ national mass culture fuelled by pop songs, television serials and the pervasive presence of Hollywood and Bollywood films on VCR, CD and DVD formats. Paradoxically, however, the demise of the 1960s elite national subject has not meant the demise of Urdu at all. Rather, the use of a simplified and modified Urdu is possibly more widespread in

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Pakistan than ever. In this respect, analyses of the Pakistani language and ethnic quandaries need to be attentive to their expressive and popular cultural dimensions (Rahman 1996, Ahmed 1998, Rahman 2002).

Notes ∗ I want to clarify from the outset that I am neither a film scholar nor a social scientist, but an art historian and surely not the best qualified person to undertake an analysis of cinema in relation to its social frames, specifically the relationship between ethnicity and film in Pakistani films of the 1960s and 1970s. But the paucity of prior work has led me to undertake this preliminary and tentative study. Preliminary versions of this paper were delivered at the conference ‘Literature and National Integration: Revisiting the Language Question’, University of Texas at Austin, November 2002, and the ‘Beyond Crisis’ workshop at Johns Hopkins University in March 2006. I am very grateful for the insightful comments on this effort by Kamran Asdar Ali, Samina Choonara, Naveeda Khan, and especially Aamir Mufti, respondent at the ‘Beyond Crisis’ workshop. 1. Basic facts and some interpretative suggestions are available in the gossip columns in Pakistani pop magazines, newspapers, and the Urdu trade journal Nigar (Ornament). The manual of filmmaking and critique by Zafar Iqbal Miyan, Miyari film sazi (Quality Film Making), has useful period information. Online resources include the very useful and fairly complete database http:// mazhar.dk/film/; reviews of mostly campy and raunchy Punjabi and Pushto films are available on http://www.thehotspotonline.com/moviespot/index. htm; an overall survey article by Sajid Iqbal, ‘Pakistani Cinema’ is on the British Film Institute website http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/imagineasia/ guide/contemporary/pakistani.html; a site dedicated to brief surveys by decade is http://pakistani_films.tripod.com/; useful information is also available on http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Countries/Pakistan/; and http://www.punjabilok.com/misc/movies/landmarks_pak_cinema.htm. Yasin Gorija’s recent books in Urdu include Pakistan ki 100 shahkar filmain (100 greatest Pakistani Films) and Pakistan millenium film da’irektari (Directory of Pakistani Films at the Millennium). Also see Alain Desoulieres, ‘The Three Lives of Umrao Jan Ada’, in Vasudha Dalmia and Theo Damsteegt, (eds), Narrative Strategies: Essays on South Asian Literature and Film. Mushtaq Gazdar’s indispensable text is Pakistan Cinema 1947–1997. 2. Some of these works are written from functionalist Communications Studies perspectives. See Nawaz (1983); Ahmed (1983); Desoulieres (1999); Tahir (1996, 2000); Rawan (2001); Ali (2005); and Kothari (2005: 289–305). 3. Both Aamir Mufti and Naveeda Khan have pointed out that Alavi assumes the ‘salariat’ class as clearly marked by its Muslim affiliation and already pre-constituted and liable to misuse as a handy and perhaps misleading marker to delineate ‘Muslim difference’ in pre-partition India. I acknowledge

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the substance of their critique, but am unable to offer a more carefully articulated narrative here for the pre-Partition period. However, this article argues for the rise of newer Americanised professions by the 1960s, as evidenced in literature and film, and thus for complicating the salariat marker as fully descriptive of Pakistan from the late 1950s onwards. Irfan Malik, himself a poet writing in Punjabi, eloquently presented this dilemma at the ‘Literature and National Integration Conference’ at the University of Texas at Austin, November 2002. Also see Ayesha Jalal’s analysis of Ramay’s ideas in her ‘Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1995, vol. 27: 73–89. An English translation is available in A Season of Betrayals: A Short Story and Two Novellas, edited and introduced by C. M. Naim. On the relation between literature and ethnicity in Pakistan, see Fehmida Riaz, Pakistan: Literature and Society (New Delhi: Patriot Publishers, 1986). Riaz discusses Hyder’s works (pp. 21–25) C. M. Naim has noted in his introduction to the novella that the narrative flow is ‘staccato and rapid. The scenes shift quickly, and through their firm linearity doesn’t allow for a truly montage-like impression, the final effect on the reader is much like that of watching a fairly fast-moving film’. See Eck (1998) for a good introduction. On the relationship between darsana filmic codes and the Hindi social film, see Vasudevan (2000). Fareed Kazmi (1994). Also see Mukul Kesavan (1994) in the same volume. This is available at the Digital South Asia Library, http:/dsal.uchicago.edu/ books/artsandideas/. ‘The terrain of the personality is a social and familial matrix in which the reality of everyday life becomes an inevitable reference point. Such a miseen-scène is vividly in evidence in the Hindi social film. Whatever the degree of fabrication, the street scene of the 1940s and 1950s is animated by the activity of newspaper hawkers, vegetable peddlers, construction workers, mechanics, urchins, shoe-shine boys, petty thieves and pedestrians going about their business. Vehicles — cycles, trucks, cars, trolleys, buses — and significant places — railway stations, cafés, the red light area — are also deployed in the semantics of the street and of movement. See Vasudevan (1993: 73). Report of the Film Fact Finding Committee, Govt of Pakistan, Ministry of Industries, April 1960–April 1961. A book on cinema by the critic Alamgir Kabir — The Cinema in Pakistan — especially on East Pakistan, was also published at the end of the Ayub Era. Kabir’s survey of Bangladeshi cinema — Film in Bangladesh — also contains historical information on East Pakistani cinema. This claim needs to be substantiated by further research, including locating and analysing the Ayub era documentary newsreels and seeing their crossfertilisation with popular cinema.

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15. Arman (Urdu, B/W) 1969. Starring: Zeba, Waheed Murad, Nirala, Tarannum, Rozina, Bibbo, and Zahoor Ahmad. Producer and Writer: Waheed Murad. Director and Screenplay: Pervez Malik. 16. On the contribution of Karachi to Pakistan film see Slote (1984: 39–42). 17. Fareed Kazmi has argued that the female lead character in Muslim social films usually comes from a degraded, poor or humble background. 18. As Yasin Gorija (2000: 101) puts it Arman ‘was fully comedic in its first half, and fully tragic in its second half, yet the director exercised a firm hand throughout’. 19. Later on in the film, Gul Khan (the nephew of the women taking care of the illegitimate child) does speak perfect UP Urdu. But as he is obviously dressed as a Pathan, his attempt to rape Najma thereby betrays his questionable ‘ethnic’ morality. 20. Gender is, of course, a central question in these melodramatic films, but one I cannot do justice to in this article. 21. Also see the online reviews by Omar Khan on: http://www.thehotspotonline. com/moviespot/bolly/reviews/m/Maulajat.htm; and http://www.thehot spotonline.com/moviespot/bolly/reviews/w/WehshiJat.htm. 22. The analysis of the jat genre is indebted to Samina Choonara’s presentation at the conference ‘Literature and National Intergration: Revisiting the Language Question’, University of Texas at Austin, November 2002. 23. Anari (Urdu, colour) 1975 — starring: Shabnam, Nadeem, Sangeeta, Ghulam Muhyyudin, Asifa, Lehri, Sabiha Khanum, Mustafa Qureshi; producer: Arfam Malik; director: S. Suleman; http://www.mazhar.dk/film/history/70s/1975. htm#super. 24. Even though successful Urdu films continued to be released during the later 1970s, their end was not far away. One of the most successful Urdu film, which ran for some 400 weeks was Aina (Mirror), released in 1977, and which was a solidly ‘East Pakistani’ affair, starring the Nadeem–Shabnam pair and directed by Calcutta-born Nazrul Islam. Aina again shows the difficulty of characterizing Urdu cinema in simplistic ethnic-muhajir terms (Gazdar 1997: 149–51); http://www.mazhar.dk/film/history/70s/1977.htm. 25. As clarification, I should mention that another version of Anari [Anaari] directed by Mustafiz was released in East Pakistan in 1969, also starring Nadeem, but this film was an apparent flop and I have not been able to find a copy of it or read a synopsis of its plot. Moreover, two Indian films by the same name were released in 1959 and in 1975. As I have also not been able to study these films, my analysis of the Pakistani Anari of 1975 that follows is therefore highly provisional; Anari (Urdu, 1969) — starring: Nadeem, Shabana (although Gazdar lists her as ‘Shabnam’ in his filmography, p. 264), Jalil Afghani; director: Mustafiz; http://www.mazhar.dk/film/history/60s/1969. htm#flop. Anari (1959) — director: Hrishikesh Mukherjee, with Raj Kapoor. Anari (1979) — starring: Shashi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore; director: Asit Sen. 26. I refer here to the figure of Sheikh Chilli (Chili) as a trickster and fool who appears in a number of oral-based short tales in South Asian folklore. It may

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be noted that three films with the title Sheikh Chilli were made during early Indian cinema, in 1928, 1930 and 1942, and a Pakistani Urdu film with the same name was released in 1980. 27. For a short list of films considered political, see ‘Pakistani Political Films, The Herald (January 2003): 260–64. 28. Dubai Chalo (Punjabi, colour), 1979 — starring: Mumtaz, Ali Ejaz, Nanha, Durdana Rehman, Naghma, Tani, Nasrullah Butt, Changezi, Allauddin, Ilyas, Qavi; director: Haidar Choudhry; http://www.mazhar.dk/film/history/70s/1979.htm. 29. Jalal’s analysis is based on official testbooks, but her conclusion is salient for popular cinema as well (1995: 87).

6

Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistan Army, Violence and Memories of 1971 Yasmin Saikia If a human being cannot empathise with another human being, who else would? Do you expect demons to become human? Perchance, demons do become human; tell me, wouldn’t you be embarrassed? —Bhupen Hazarika (1962)1

Introduction In 1971, two wars broke out in East Pakistan. One was a civil war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, and the other was an international war fought between India and Pakistan. In the wars, a variety of men representing the armies of Pakistan and India, as well as the Mukti Bahini (Bengali militia created with Indian support), and proPakistani Bengali and ‘Bihari’ civilians who volunteered in the auxiliary armed forces of Al-Badr and Al-Shams raped, looted, killed and terrorised civilians in East Pakistan, particularly women.2 In this article, I investigate the memories of some of the soldiers of the Pakistan Army to document the process and context of the violence of 1971 and analyse them in order to understand the complexities and nuances of personal memories.3 In particular, I trace the gradual transformation of soldiers into perpetrators of violence and continue the analysis further to trace the emergence of a human from within the abyss of violence. While committing violence, many of them admitted that they came face-to-face with their limited human condition and their vulnerabilities, which, in turn, enabled them to see the humanity of their victims. The recognition of these similarities had important consequences in the perpetrators’ lives, motivating them to rethink their experiences in the war and create a narrative that is different from the standard official history of 1971 in Pakistan. Drawing upon a popular local expression of insa¯niyat (humanity), soldiers tell the story of the war as a breakdown of the human condition, reminding us of the fragility and responsibility entailed in

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being human, which, unfortunately, they failed to live up to. In the process of committing violence, some of these men encountered and recognised the human desires of their victims — the emotions of love and hate, deep anxiety as well as the attachment to life and fear of death. In becoming aware of their victims’ human emotions the perpetrators recognised that what was within them was also within their enemies. Their lives became interconnected even though the external markers of identity such as nation, ethnicity, religion and gender, separated and distinguished them and motivated them to fight and destroy each other. The blurring of differences, at least temporarily, enabled perpetrators to see their victims as human and understand the limited power of violence that cannot undo humanity. An understanding of insa¯niyat of self and others emerged and produced a new understanding of the war that perpetrators report on, which I will address at greater length subsequently in the article. A slight caveat is necessary here in order to explain insa¯niyat and the theoretical location of its use in South Asian society and culture. Historically, the origin of the term is located within the culture of Sufi Islam and is considered the basis of human relationships. Insa¯niyat is the love that makes human beings recognise their humanity and facilitates their relationships with others. Conversely, the lack of insa¯niyat destroys man’s relationship with man. South Asian Sufi culture, being richly influenced by local Indic traditions along with PersoIslamic mystical ideas as expressed in poetry has many interlocutors and texts of insa¯niyat to draw from.4 Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, a thirteenth century poet–scholar of Islam (he lived and wrote in the Seljuk kingdom of Konya, Turkey), is the most prominent and beloved interlocutor on the subject. Using the metaphor of the ‘mirror’ to talk about men as reflections of each other and of the Divine, Rumi’s poems and discourses urge us to pay attention to the images we see in the mirror of life because they reflect what is within us.5 His appeal is to overcome the deformities reflected in these images by moving beyond the demands of our individual ego and embrace the shared reality of human life to make a truly humane and inclusive society.6 Rumi’s humanistic philosophy resonates throughout South Asia and insa¯niyat provides the framework for a ‘good’ human society. Although widely invoked in Pakistan, research shows that insa¯niyat is not a textbook lesson taught and learned in schools. The sources of insa¯niyat are in the lived experiences of people. In the state of war and violence, perpetrators

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of the Pakistan Army came face-to-face with a crisis of insa¯niyat and had to grapple with it, which some say with honest concern and deep remorse they failed to do. To explore the soldiers’ narratives for tracing the process and crisis of insa¯niyat we have to begin with a subtext on the issue of killing and destruction that are parts of every war. While listening to the soldiers’ stories, I began to gradually understand that killing and violence were not natural impulses but that they were learned behaviour, taught and cultivated as ‘duty’ within the institution of the army (see Grossman 1995). The Pakistani soldiers performed this ‘duty’, i.e., killed on behalf of the nation-state to establish power and force enemies into submission. The armed violence in 1971, however, produced different consequences of loss and failure for Pakistan and became a site for personal transformation for some soldiers who had experienced the war first-hand. An ethics of humanity emerged, motivating them to question the call for ‘duty’, i.e., commit violence. In short, one can say that the perpetrators were humanised in the war. The ethical dimension of this memory cannot be predated to the period before the war. It is in the war, and in the experiences of violence, that we begin to see the emergence of an ethics itself. It is this story of the process of finding insa¯niyat that I highlight in this article. What is the architecture of the memory of the war of 1971 in Pakistan today?7 How do individuals negotiate between state and personal memories?8 Can retrospective memory work to tell us what happened then?9 Why should we listen to killers and perpetrators and what lessons do we learn from their experiences?10 These are some of the questions I address here. In this article, I have adopted the methodology of presenting what some perpetrators told me in their words to overcome the division between experience and analysis. At the same time, I am interested in investigating the myriad ways in which an event may be narrated, incorporating personal and collective experiences to, thus, enable an inflection of the official narrative of the history of 1971 from the Pakistani perspective. And as we see how individual lives and recollections are entangled with the events of 1971, we begin to understand the historical conditions and intersections that connect 1971 with other episodes of postcolonial history in the subcontinent.11 First, I locate the history of 1971 within the long duration of violent history in the subcontinent, paying particular attention to the identitarian politics following the partition of the Indian subcontinent

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in 1947. Next, I attend to a variety of soldiers’ memories to analyse the language of masculinity and Muslim identity that was allegedly invoked for justifying violence in 1971. I also investigate personal and collective memories — what is remembered and forgotten — to explore how memory works in contemporary Pakistan for producing divergent narratives of the war. Third, I present the memories of ordinary soldiers whose lives were transformed in an extraordinary moment of war and violence. I use some of their stories to further the discussion on the ambiguous figure that appears as a heinous individual, a perpetrator and, simultaneously, as a soldier/worker — a victim — of the system. Heeding the soldiers’ message that violence can be a transformative experience, I draw upon Jalaluddin Rumi’s writings to frame a discourse on 1971 enabling us to see ‘self’ in ‘others’ and come to terms with our violent past. Rumi’s appeal to see the world through ‘heart-knowledge’ is a powerful language that facilitates the transference of experiences, making them shared events to which we can respond humanistically. This article is an effort to contribute to the vocabulary for knowing self and other in South Asia and returns to the fundamental ground of insa¯niyat for writing a human story that emerged from destruction in the war.12

Locating 1971: History, Politics, and Violence The ethnic and religious violence that took place in East Pakistan in 1971 is connected to many previous moments of violence in the subcontinent which were conceived and carried out with the intention of destroying the ‘other’. The history of ‘otherising’ in India is a long and complicated story created within the multiple spaces of politics, economy, society and culture beginning from the establishment of British colonial rule in the nineteenth century.13 I do not want to enter into a lengthy discussion of the process of ‘otherising’ and its outcome in postcolonial India. I will, however, briefly address the construction of the ‘Hindu other’ in the Pakistani military and political psyche and the construction of the ‘Muslim other’ in the Indian state psyche — both these categories being used for inciting violence in 1971. Both represent fractured narratives of hate and manipulation of people for fulfilling statist agendas. Initially, the term ‘Hindu’ was not used to signify the enemy of ‘Muslim’ in newly created Pakistan. Pakistan, it is important to note at the outset, was not a single, homogeneous nation but was made up of various communities that were divided into two wings — East and

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West. Besides the multi-ethnic and linguistic communities of Punjabi, Bengali, Sindhi, Pathan, Baluchi and Urdu-speaking Indian émigrés who were largely Muslims, there was also a sizeable population of Hindus and Christians in Pakistan. Under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah the different groups were able to ‘imagine’ a new nation called Pakistan, claiming for themselves a non-specified Pakistani identity. The equality of all citizens, irrespective of religion, was guaranteed by Jinnah in his inaugural speech on the establishment of Pakistan on 14 August 1947. The policy of non-discrimination on the basis of religion by the state continued during the tenure of the military rulers — Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan (1958–71). On the site of national politics, however, by the early 1960s the term ‘Hindu’ was invoked to mobilise Pakistan’s struggle against the enemy nation — India — and after 1965 the categories India and Hindu were interchangeably used.14 India became Hindu in the Pakistani state view and this impression was compounded through political rhetoric and discourse, particularly by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who initiated an agenda of ‘Islamic Socialism’ to reconstruct Pakistani identity. Many veterans of 1971 claimed that despite the injection of religion in the public political sphere, the Pakistan Army continued to maintain a secular identity, within which ethnic politics took precedence over religion. In India, the Muslim emerged as a problematic category at the very moment of the birth of the nation, in 1947. Partition did not purge the Muslim from the body politic and popular view deemed the Muslim as the ‘enemy within’. Jawaharlal Nehru’s politics of secularism and socialism did not erase and level the ground for full Muslim participation within the nation-state. The frequent outbreak of religious riots deepened the cleavages between the two communities and national politics focused on identitarian issues of ‘them’ and ‘us’ — Muslim and Hindu.15 In 1971 the rhetoric of Hindu as the enemy of Muslim Pakistan and Muslim as the enemy of Hindu India was primed for violence. The West Pakistani administration called upon its soldiers to annihilate the rebels in East Pakistan and made the war a struggle between the nation and an ethnic group, the Bengalis whom West Pakistan considered overly influenced by Hindus. The grievances of the East Pakistani Bengalis for the equitable distribution of resources, greater political representation in Pakistan’s national parliament, the end of economic exploitation and the removal of restrictions on the use

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of the Bangla language in the public sphere were downplayed by the Pakistani military establishment as engineered by ‘Indian Hindu masterminds’.16 The war of 1971 was triggered after the general election of 1970 when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League Party won the election and demanded to form a Bengali majority government. The possibility of a Bengali becoming the Prime Minister of Pakistan created panic among the political elite in West Pakistan and the ruling military junta reacted by deploying the national army to frighten the Bengalis into giving up their claim to state power. For nine months, beginning from 25 March until 16 December 1971, a rein of terror took over East Pakistan. So it was that two wars — a civil war and an international war — came to be fought in East Pakistan. In the civil war, West Pakistani troops along with local Urdu-speaking ‘Bihari’ supporters terrorised Bengalis, now transformed into the category of ‘Hindu-like’ thus justifying Muslim (Pakistani) violence against them (Mascarenes 1972; Sisson and Rose 1990). Large numbers of Bengali Hindus fled to India in the wake of the war from (Muslim) East Pakistan. The migration of Hindus from East Pakistan to India confirmed for India that religious persecution was driving the violence in the war, with the Indian press highlighting this. This garnered for Bengalis the active assistance of the Indian authorities. They formed a guerilla army, the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Force) and their soldiers wreaked havoc upon the non-Bengali communities.17 The international war fought between India and Pakistan, with the support of the Soviet Union and the United States of America respectively, was part of a long-drawn series of cold war battles in the Indian Ocean region. Further, fuelled by the memories of hate lingering from the partition of 1947, India used the opportunity presented by the Bengalis to fight against Pakistan to break up the new nation-state. The army establishment in India is very clear on this point. Repeatedly, the retired generals I interviewed told me, ‘We went to war in 1971 to settle scores with Pakistan and divide it. It was essential for India to vindicate what happened in 1947’.18 At the end of the war, Pakistan’s military dictatorship ended in the east. Bangladesh was born as a new and independent country. The war of 1971 was the first successful overthrow of a military dictatorship by people in twentieth century Asia, but alongside this heraldic feat was a dark human story of loss and destruction. Ten million people became refugees, two hundred

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thousand women were raped, and several hundred thousand Biharis became ‘stateless’.19 The violence and displacement notwithstanding, India and Bangladesh were jubilant about winning the war. India celebrated its victory over its arch enemy Pakistan by dismembering it and Bangladesh triumphed through ending of ‘internal colonialism’.20 The loser, Pakistan, on the other hand, adopted the policy of silence, trying hard to forget the dismal loss of one-half of its territory and the imprisonment of 92,000 Pakistanis as prisoners of war in India. It is important to note here that of the 92,000, 52,000 were soldiers of various ranks and of the rest, 40,000 were civilians, including 3,600 women and children.21 International pressure ensued for ending the hostility between India and Pakistan and resolving the problem of POWs as imprisonment of civilians went against the Geneva Convention of 1949. This encouraged the two countries to enter into a bilateral agreement called the Simla Pact on 2 July 1972 in which India agreed to release the POWs and both countries agreed that ‘in Jammu and Kashmir, the Line of Control resulting from the ceasefire of December 17, 1971 shall be respected by both sides without prejudice to the recognised position of either side’. Following this agreement, over a period of one and a half years (until April 1974) batches of Pakistani POWs were released from India and Pakistan officially recognised Bangladesh. The diplomatic and bureaucratic efforts for normalising mutual relations between the states notwithstanding, the memory of the war penetrated into the national psyche of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan and the states continued to mark the ‘other’ as aggressor to assuage its own guilt. While some may squabble over the finer details of interpretation and the roles of the different groups of ‘others’ in generating hate and violence, few can deny that the war of 1971 combined state violence with ethnic and religious hatred to target the vulnerable. Leaders and followers reduced their enemies into abstract numbers of population and demographic units, categorised as ‘us’ and ‘them’. The abstraction of the human person to fit ethnic and/or religious labels opened up the space for a cold, inhuman purpose for one group to exploit another. Bound communities saw themselves as enemies of other bound communities, and instigated by their leaders men elevated violence to the level of duty and transformed life into death for furthering the sovereign power of the nation and state. Vulnerable humans used and exploited by the system were not accounted for and their lived

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experiences were obscured and cancelled from the national registers. As in all wars, the stories of violence were suppressed and erased from public memory. At a more personal level, those who suffered — victims and perpetrators — women and men, even today, 35 years after the war, continue to be haunted by their memories. Listening to men’s narratives, we are forcefully reminded that violence was not happenstance or incidental — violence was written into the inscription and manifestation of cultural, political and ethnic differences between East and West Pakistan. We also learn that violence served multiple purposes. At one level, it was used as a tool to set groups against one another — Muslims against Hindus, Bengalis against Biharis, Pakistanis against Indians and vice versa — at another level, its purpose was to shock and break down the morale of the civilian population deemed enemy supporters. Violence was also used arbitrarily to produce a diffused atmosphere of terror, sometimes flaring up without purpose, just for the ‘sake of it’. The memories of men who had fought, raped and killed reveal an intimate, hidden story of the war that is not told in history books or recorded in state documents. They are troubled, dark memories, unutterable in many instances to the perpetrators themselves. The problem of enunciation, however, does not limit the possibility of developing an understanding of these suppressed memories.22 Paying attention to the moments of silence, when a narrative abruptly stopped (sometimes in mid-sentence) allowed me to grasp the shame and the agonising struggle of the perpetrators who cannot make enough sense of their traumatic memories to tell an easy story. The personal dilemma of the perpetrators notwithstanding, the historical records exhibit two dominant genres. Both address the external issues of the war. Military and political history focus on the armed conflicts, operations and military activities, strategies, tactics, and acts of diplomacy (for example, see Choudhury 1974; Siddiq 1977; Dasgupta 1978; Dixit 1999; and Bose 2005). The second emerging genre glorifying high-ranking soldiers’ personal memories of valour and bravado has created semi-fictionalised narratives of the war (example Lehl 1979; Matinuddin 1993; Jacob 1997; Niazi 1998; Qureshi 2003; Nanda 2003). But, at the margins of these celebratory national narratives are several stories of common people that are waiting to be told. The stories that I present in the rest of the article constitute the voice of the foot-soldiers of 1971. The stories that these men tell us tell

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are about their personal experiences of violence, cautioning us, their listeners, to be critical of the ideological narratological manipulations while inviting us to ponder the vulnerability of the human being in a war.

In Pakistan: Perpetrators Talk I travelled to Pakistan in June 2004 with a multiple entry visa and permission to live there for a year. On my arrival at Lahore, I immediately contacted scholars in local universities, telephoned the veterans affairs office and introduced myself to the press. I also gave an interview to an English language daily about my research, which, in turn, generated an extended discussion in several letters to the editor (Friday Times, 26 July 2004). In short, I started my research work in Pakistan with much visibility. I was surprised that despite the delicate nature of my research topic no one put up obstacles and I was allowed to investigate the story and the historical sources without any hitches.23 It quickly became clear to me that the reason for the easy access was because no one cared about the history of 1971 in Pakistan. It was a forgotten memory for most people, including scholars and students.24 In the military academy, however, 1971 is remembered for lessons on strategy, battle plans, operations, the role of officers and unit commanders and such technical matters. One issue that continues to haunt the Pakistan Army is the revolt of the Bengali officers in the East Bengal Regiment (EBR) in March 1971.25 The Pakistani officers talked at length about the civil war, of ‘brothers killing brothers’, and seemed unable to understand why and how that could have happened.26 The confusing memory of 1971 as a story of ‘betrayal’ within a ‘family saga’ depoliticised the issue perhaps making it easy for the military administration to facilitate my research work. I had another sanction. As an ‘Alig’ I had easy access to social and familial networks and was warmly received as a member of the ‘Aligarh family’ by many ‘old boys’ and ‘old girls’ of the university.27 The Fauji Foundation became my main ‘patron’ in Islamabad. Through this organisation, I contacted the principal actors, those military bigwigs who were directly involved in the war. Most of them are now retired from the army but continue to be involved in the civil sector of the administration. Although they were fully aware of the purpose of my research — to collect memories of war and violence — they did not seem anxious treating me as they would any guest. Many of them had left their

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homes in India in 1947 but they clung to the memory of their native villages and towns, and my visit provided them an opportunity to recount some tales of the home they had ‘lost’. And, those who had subsequently visited India fondly remembered the hospitality of the people there. Not surprisingly, many of them had Indian friends in the United States, their interactions being facilitated by their children who live there. By and large, the Pakistani military officers were curious about the Indian economy and standards of living while praising the Indian education system. The curious juxtaposition of my location as a researcher while being treated as a guest enabled me to interact with the representatives of the Pakistan Army at a close and personal level. In the course of my interviews, I repeatedly encountered a pattern of extreme hospitality but my hosts were uncomfortable about discussing critical issues about the war and spoke condescendingly to me as I was a woman.28 Their outlook towards the people of Bangladesh was, likewise, fractured. The rhetoric of Bangladeshis as brothers occupied the same space of representation to them as ‘betrayers’ and ‘Indian-like’, i.e., ‘other’ or ‘Hindu-like’. Despite this, I was able to persist and probe the experiences of the Pakistani military in 1971, often making many of the representatives very uncomfortable with my insistence. I interviewed 123 Pakistani military personnel who represented different ranks. The vast majority of retired officers live in Lahore and Rawalpindi. I was often welcomed to their homes and got to know their families quite well. To conduct interviews with rank and file soldiers, I travelled to and lived in their villages. This provided me with the opportunity to discuss with young and old people their memories of the war. With women, I was able to discuss intimate topics about their conjugal life and marital problems after their husbands returned from the war. On many occasions the women told me, ‘life has not been the same as before he had left for Bengal’. This hinted at a change in their relationship but since I was not able to explore this subject in greater detail without upsetting my hosts, I decided against it. In the villages, I was dependent on the men to take me from one house to another and even walk me from one village to the next to conduct my interviews.29 Ironically, the men who had been presented to me as perpetrators became my protectors while conducting this research. Barring two interviews with two very high ranking military officers, who I will refer to as X and Y, almost all the others had some recognisable characteristic patterns that I had come to expect from

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reading books on 1971 and studying oral history.30 The Pakistani army officers and soldiers generally confirmed these patterns by highlighting issues of duty, love for the nation, economic compulsions, peer pressure, etc., as reasons for their actions in the war. If one pays attention to these explanations they enable a partial understanding, in so far as one can understand why people commit violence, of how they are persuaded to join in the horrific activities, and how they later contrive to distance themselves from what they have done. X and Y, however, cannot be matched to these characteristic patterns. Nonetheless one can say a few things about them. Although, on the surface they both appear to be different, both X and Y have some common features of a perpetrator — recognisable in their speech about the violence they committed. They made the violence in the war out to be a normal thing. In meeting them I saw the face of what Hannah Arendt calls ‘the banality of evil’ (Arendt 1963: 252). Both X and Y talked about violence in a normal, matter-of-fact tone to explain that they performed the ‘duty’ that was required of them as military administrators. I will briefly talk about the interviews with X and Y to explicate their banal approach to violence against their role as perpetrators, which they denied. The first thing that struck me when I met X was his obsession with gardening. He invited me to a tour of his meticulously groomed garden and as we walked along he gave me a report on each plant. He told me about the quality of the seeds that he imports from London, the slow process of germinating the seeds while he designs the layout of the flower beds, the careful transplanting, growing, watering of his plants and his enjoyment in seeing the flowers in full bloom. The careful planning process, the grooming of each plant, the arrangement of colour and the careful selection of the mix and variety of plants that he maintains would make one think this fussy gardener was only concerned with his plants’ survival and flourishing. This is not what X is all about. Neither are his military colleagues fooled by his passion for gardening. They insisted that I should ‘ask about the violence he committed’ in East Pakistan. Despite being pre-warned, I was not prepared for such a man as X who celebrates violence as masculine valour and denounces human morality as weakness. The stories of killing he told me became increasingly gory as he became more comfortable talking to me. For two and a half hours I listened to one horrific story after another.31 When he had finished, I was relieved to be able to leave but carried

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the unhappy stories with me. I can still recall his cold, careful voice chronicling the various events of killing, ‘duty’ in his terms, which he engineered and executed so that he could ‘clean Pakistan of the betrayers, the Bengalis’. X started the story of his career in East Pakistan in 1971 by recounting the first order he gave which entailed the mass killing of Bengalis in Santahar, a railway town in northern East Pakistan, because, in his opinion, they — the Bengalis — had killed ‘over 17,000 Biharis’. The vast pile of bodies that were stacked in the railway building was clear evidence of the 17,000 missing Biharis, he concluded, and so he ordered the mass killing of Bengalis in retribution. X did not bother to investigate the reliability of what he had heard by inquiring whether Biharis had fled in the wake of ethnic violence; how many Biharis were in hiding; what kind of stories were the neighbours telling; and were all the Bengalis in the colony involved in the violence against the Biharis. He took pride in claiming that men like him ‘saw the problem on the ground. The Bengalis were deceiving the Pakistanis and they had to be taught a lesson’. This killing was followed by the killing of intellectuals in Rajshahi University and an attack on Dhaka University to teach the Bengali students a lesson on how to be good citizens. Specifically in the Dhaka University incident, it is well-known that many female students were raped. When I raised the question of the violence against women in Dhaka University he said, ‘no one raped anyone. Those who complain about it were looking for trouble’. The violence he indulged in even exceeded the tolerance of the establishment. He was removed from East Pakistan and the army court-martialed him. But an injury from an operation beforehand provided the opportunity to appeal for leave on medical grounds. After several months, X was reinstated and posted to the western sector. Much to his dismay, he found that the war had ended there as quickly as it started — within 12 days (3–16 December 1971) — and he could not execute his plans ‘to kill as many Indians (read: Hindus) as possible’. It would be unfair to say that X hated Bengalis and Hindus only. For him killing was an activity that he indulged in with passion, without consideration for ethnicity, religion or gender, but he masked his violence as acts of love for the nation. His passionate embrace of violence became further evident when I asked about the guns on display in his living room — there were over a dozen with several rings on each of them. My question provided him yet another opportunity to speak

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of killing. He chronicled the story of each gun and the ruthless killings by his ancestors — the rings indicated the number of people killed. These guns were his inheritance and he displayed them like trophies to illustrate the ‘manliness that distinguishes his family from many others in Pakistan’. Y, on the other hand, was a soft-spoken, quiet man. I had to strain my ears to hear him. Unlike X, Y did not flaunt his bravado in war nor he did he speak carelessly about the Bengalis. He never once hinted at his participation in the violent activities in East Pakistan that would incriminate him as a perpetrator. He denied any knowledge of the violence in his administrative area of Comilla (Southeast East Pakistan), despite written evidence of his activities there (see Mascarenes 1972). He claimed he had only obeyed commands and tried to maintain law and order. Although, crude soldiering was not his style, Y is known in the circle of veterans for his plots for arresting Bengali civilian officers — some of them his ‘friends’ — and ‘disappearing’ them without a trace.32 Of course, Y did not answer these questions when I raised them. He told me that he rose to the top of the military administration because of his abilities and merit. Yet no one could have risen to such a powerful office in Pakistan, as Y did, by simply obeying orders. The cultivated presentation of Y as a quiet, sophisticated man and his actions in war contradict each other. We know from eyewitness accounts that Y is not what he says he is. Like many other perpetrators representing the Pakistani as well as the Indian military, Y buries the violence he committed in his soft, calculated speech and his willed ignorance. While X burst forth with pride about his ‘military’ pursuits, Y passes them over in staged silence. Neither indicates even a hint of regret or remorse about the events of the war and their parts in it. Not all veterans of 1971 can be categorised as X- or Y-like. Participation in such a war with such intensity of violence was not a tried and tested experience for a vast number of officers and rank and file soldiers in the Pakistan army, although many of them had fought in the 1965 war against India. That was a strategic war fought at the border between India and Pakistan. The Indian and Pakistani armies are adept at staging such confrontations periodically. Both the armies certainly know the art of defence and strategy, but they were not prepared to deal with the extent of damage to people as in 1971.33 When the Pakistani soldiers were exposed to the realities of people’s unrest, they reeled under its impact and broke down.

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Violence became the language they used to reclaim the power that had slipped out of their control. While interpreting Pakistani soldiers’ actions it is crucial to remember that most of them were relocated from West to East Pakistan to ‘bring back law and order in the region, even at the cost of violence’. Pulled out of their familiar environment and sent to a strange land where they could not understand the language and customs, the soldiers reacted with fear and fulfilled the mission they were brainwashed into believing in — that they were going there to kill Hindus.34 For most of these men the army provided an outlet to see and interact with the larger world outside their village and community. The encounter with the outside world was not easy for them and more often than not, produced many wild fears and deep anxieties. When they arrived in East Pakistan, many confessed, they found the swampy terrain frightfully unfamiliar and were terrified because they could not swim. Many soldiers drowned in the small rivers and streams. The unfamiliarity of the language was another source of discomfort. Many of them told me that when they came across small groups of Bengalis, they immediately reacted because they could not understand their speech and immediately suspected that the Bengalis were conspiring against them. Often, they resorted to violence — beating to disperse the crowd because they feared for their own safety. The breakdown of communication between the Bengali civilian population and the Pakistani army administration brought the Bihari and Urdu speakers into the picture. Many of them had immigrated to East Pakistan from India and were active supporters of the Muslim League. These Bihari men now felt that it was their moral duty to support Pakistan — which represented the Muslim League ideology — to save it from destruction.35 Many of them became informants and helpers of the Pakistanis, as well as, joined the civil armed forces whose main activity was to terrorise the Bengalis to force them to give up the armed struggle. It is important to note here that the violence was not one-sided. The Pakistanis raped, killed and terrorised civilians and were assisted and helped by the local Biharis. So, too, did the Bengali Mukti Bahini militia men. With the help of the Indian military and border security forces they created terror among the people of East Pakistan. The unfamiliar terrain of war, ethnic and religious differences as well as personal fear for one’s life created conditions for men to forget that the people they were killing and brutalising were

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fellow countrymen. The Pakistanis saw themselves as representing the national ethos, while Bengalis were transformed into ‘Hindu’ or ‘Hindu-like’ ‘enemies’, ‘traitors’ and ‘anti-Pakistani’. During my interviews, I repeatedly probed soldiers’ memories for the experience of killing and sexual violence. It was always at this point of recounting their experiences that silence entered the narrative. Abruptly, many soldiers stopped telling their stories or changed the subject of our discussion. I claim that it is the traumatic memory of the destructive force of their violence that is at the heart of the perpetrators’ silence. One can say that silence marks the moment of a ‘crisis of remembering’ and reveals the complex intersection of an unforgettable memory and a need to forget a violent history. Silence is not devoid of language; it is expressive of the inability to put the memory into a perspective that can allow a new text of the war to emerge. This is the struggle of these men and mine. Culturally uneducated, Pakistani soldiers could not understand Bengali body language either, and interpreted Bengali curiosity as assault. One such account highlights this cultural gap. In early April a group of Pakistani soldiers were air-dropped by helicopter in an area called Belonia, in southern East Pakistan. When they approached the embankment in the early evening, they saw a group of Bengali men walking towards them. Fearful of an assault, the soldiers prepared to fire but were stopped by their commanding officer. On approaching the Bengalis, the officer found that they had brought buckets of water to welcome them. This situation was not unusual or distinctive. The Bihari men I interviewed in Pakistan tell similar stories of the cultural gaps between the Bengalis and the Punjabis and confirm that the differences became critically important in the delicate war scenario. All Bengalis, even the unarmed civilians, were viewed as the enemy and the Pakistani soldiers had a license to kill them. Added to this was the cultivation of manliness and bravado, which is a part of all armies. A high value was placed on physical toughness, which had to be perpetually performed. For instance, an officer told me, ‘there is a famous picture of a Pakistani officer holding a limb of a dead man and almost eating it over Bhairab bazaar Bridge. This picture was circulated among the officers to boost their egos…. This was a posed picture. The man at heart was a coward, but he became celebrated as a hero’.36 In another instance, a military intelligence officer in Rajshahi in a show of bravado killed six people, including a prominent politician. When news of it spread the local people

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organised a demonstration against the officer. Fearing for his life the officer discarded his military uniform, put on civilian clothes and stayed inside his house protected by a machine gun, until he was rescued. But once in Dhaka, his story changed and he started ‘bragging about killing six people with a special rifle’. The Pakistani establishment created the myth of superhuman power over others, particularly over the Bengalis, to enable the soldiers to believe that they could easily win the war. Not everyone in the establishment agreed with the logic of creating a myth about military prowess. Even before the war began, the commander in the east, Sahibzada Yakub Khan, sent desperate telegrams to Islamabad asking for a halt to the military solution. Failing to convince the President, General Yahya Khan, Sahibzada Yakub resigned from his position on the ground that a military solution was not acceptable.37 Strange as it may seem, the chief commander of the Pakistan Army in the eastern wing became a conscientious objector, for which he was punished. In recalling the violence in the war, he said, ‘We did not hear the many aza¯ns (call to prayer) rising from the pulpits of East Pakistan’. Pakistanis had failed to hear the different voices of their co-nationalists in the East. Their violence submerged the voices. Perhaps there were many more men like Sahibzada Yakub Khan who did not want to execute a military solution but no one listened to them. Today many in the Pakistani military are afraid to face their initial apprehensions. They use the common rhetoric of nationalism in order to justify their actions in East Pakistan. The general explanation I received was, ‘The Bengali people were initially not against us. Many of them continued to be pro-Pakistani to the end. But the Indians had infiltrated and manipulated the Bengalis and with the help of Hindu intellectuals, they engineered the civil war … We were simultaneously fighting a variety of enemies there’. Several of them tried to sanitise the events by explaining that ‘not too many people were killed in East Pakistan, perhaps fifty or sixty thousand’. The one million that India and Bangladesh claim were killed, they said, ‘is an exaggeration’. Frequently, they talked about killing and violence in the camps as necessary but rarely addressed the issue of rape. Occasionally, they admitted to having ‘relationships’, ‘affairs’, and ‘girlfriends’ in East Pakistan. Even if I accepted the rhetoric of ‘relationship’, the reporting of these interactions by Pakistani men without taking into account the hierarchies of power at work was truly disturbing. How could a

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Pakistani army officer, a representative of the master class, not be aware of the compulsions that led women to these ‘relationships’, and the limited options women had to reject their overtures? Was it really mutual? Also, the explanation for killing co-citizens in a normalised tone and representing the Bengali demand of justice as a derivative politics engineered by the Indian ‘masterminds’ continue to undermine the enormity of the issues that led to the break-up of Pakistan. Yet, how do we address the question of why ordinary Pakistani officers killed and raped East Pakistani civilians in war time. In my interviews I probed this issue further and many of the officers responded to this query. Together we investigated the distinctive emotional narrative of the individuals who were transformed because of the violence they witnessed and/or committed. I now relate a few interviews in brief to provide a general sketch of the range of memories and scrutinise them to understand the moral frame of humanity that was destroyed in the war.

The Voice of Humanity Speaks The voice of Colonel Ali is both poignant and assertive. The quote I provide below is a string of thoughts and memories of the horrific past of 1971, but which Colonel Ali refuses to craft into a comprehensive story for, in his words, there was no purpose to the war. The moving threshold of violence that is graphically projected in his story makes us keenly aware of the moments when sanity passed into insanity, the protective umbrella of the state became the destructive force of killing, when man became enemy and non-man, unrecognisable to himself.39 When you are part of the machinery called state, nation, you see it face to face. You see how comical/farcical it is. I had served in East Pakistan from 1962–66 and went back again in April 1971. Before the war, the Pakistanis used to treat the area as if it was their colony or a holiday resort, where everything was permissible to them. We brought with us the same arrogance when we went to fight the Bengalis. In the officer’s mess, we were shown pictures of the atrocities that the Bengalis were committing, particularly in Chittagong and Santahar. This was our side of the story of the Bengalis killing Biharis and Pakistanis. In another instance, a little Pakistani girl, a daughter of a Major, who was the sole survivor of a family that was brutally murdered, was taken from house to house to show how the Bengalis had orphaned her. This girl could not even speak. She was in shock and the army told her story on

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her behalf. There was so much fear, everyone was afraid of the other. Exaggerated stories were made up on both sides without verification and evidence. For instance, in Joydevpur an officer was killed by his own men. There were no Bengalis involved in it. Later, however, the story was told differently.

As Colonel Ali continued to speak he moved back and forth between the Pakistani and Bengali points of view. He admitted that the swiftness of events had left him totally confused and he quickly lost sight of the purpose of the war. He started imagining that the entire war was a devious plot masterminded by some ‘outside’ enemy. He felt hopeless and helpless because he had no control and no leaders to follow. He recalled his feelings in these words, In the subcontinent, we live in a false consciousness of the enemy. Often there is no foundation in the real, but we take recourse to it. When an opportunity arises we act it out violently, maybe it makes us feel heroic, masculine, autonomous. Most people in the war had no idea what they were fighting against, there was no plan. It became empty with each passing day without any leadership. We were all worried about ourselves, we were fighting ourselves. Nobody could see; we were all blind…. I carried out a guerilla operation on July 15, 1971. It was the infamous train incident in which many people were killed. It was one of our first successful ventures across the Indian border. In the evening, when I returned to Dhaka and listened to the BBC report, I learned that fiftysix people were killed. I felt justified that we killed some Indians, they were killing us. I felt very proud then. The general called me and gave me a pat on the back. Later that evening, in the Dhaka Club everyone celebrated the news. A few weeks later, I gradually slipped into madness … War is madness, how can a thinking person be heroic in that? I was recommended for a gallantry award. You have to be a SOB to get an award for killing people. No one was willing to see me as a person, weak and haunted by my own life. The Pakistanis claim I had seen too much violence of the Bengalis and that drove me nuts. I hear the Bengalis claim me as a conscience of the Pakistani violence. I was given credit for the breakdown. But in reality it was a lot different. It took me thirty years to figure it out. I am just human. When I was inside the machine called the army, I was a part of it. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. Now I know much better. But I don’t talk about it. The biggest problem to deal with is the emptiness. How can one write stories after killing civilians or fellow soldiers and ask people to celebrate?40

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Colonel Ali admits that he did not fight against the violence; rather he contributed to the war machinery until his psychological breakdown. The experience of mindless violence, the impersonal state machinery and his own dehumanisation in the process forced Colonel Ali to grapple with his fragile human condition. His state of madness freed him and he stopped playing the role of a soldier. Later, on regaining his equilibrium, he was able to recognise his and his ‘enemies’ humanity and he has made it his mission to tell the stories in his own language, Punjabi, which he believes enables him to convey his deepest emotions.41 Of all the interviews that I conducted in Pakistan, only a small fraction, no doubt, touch on these human matters. They may seem to be insufficient to frame and explain the difficult issue of how people are transformed by violence. As many explained to me, they did not see what was happening to them and those around them when they were inside it. But, now they think differently. The significance they are giving to their memories and their humanity in retrospect may not allow historians to create a ‘thick description’ of the war that is authenticated by cross-reference and evidence for corroborating the soldiers’ stories. Nonetheless, the individual voices of the soldiers that emerge from inside the vortex of the war machine decentre the master narrative of official history and illuminate us, however obliquely, with a powerful truth emerging from the location of the individual person’s understanding of the true nature of war. The loss of insa¯niyat that these men report rests on a thin line between ‘doing duty’ and killing, but it is in the condition of war that they suddenly encounter and realise the difference between the two. In retelling their stories, which highlight this understanding, I do not seek to judge nor exonerate the men who committed crimes against humanity. But, after a year of continuous interaction and discussion with several perpetrators of 1971, I have slowly come to appreciate that they are raising important questions about the military staging of nationalism and the making of perpetrators as a part of the nationbuilding process. The question that arises is: can we hear what they are saying? Malik is from a village in the area of the Salt Range in the Punjab, which at one time boasted the highest recruitment of soldiers in the Pakistan Army. For most families in the region even today the army is a lucrative source of employment and hence highly desirable. Malik came from a very poor family. His widowed mother made a bare-bone

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living by selling sugar cane and channa (chickpeas) in front of a local school. In 1968, when Malik was 16 years old, he found employment in the army. After a couple of months training, he was posted to East Pakistan. For three years he lived there and completed his normal duties. In 1971 when the war broke out, his unit was not well prepared — the collection of ration was a recurring problem. Malik, along with a few others, was given the responsibility of acquiring food for the mess. Since the Bengali merchants and shop keepers refused to sell them food, he had to go out to the villages and acquire ration for the soldiers. He said, ‘I looted some shops and beat Bengalis in the process. Some of them probably died. But I did not see it as violence. I was told to provide rations by my superior officer and I carried out his orders. In the army we are not allowed to question orders. We obey the commands and do as we are told’. When I asked if in the process of acquiring rations for his unit, he also committed violence against women, he said, I did not beat nor assault woman. But I did not do anything to save a woman. My peers [common soldiers] did rape many women in East Pakistan. Some even brought them to the camp, married and lived with them. No one stopped them. Since you ask, and I must tell you the truth, I will admit that there were occasions when my senior officers raped women. At times I had to stand outside the house and guard it. I knew why they had gone inside the house; they went there to rape the women. But I could not stop them. I was a sepoy. It was not my place to disobey the commands of my officers. My duty was to stand guard and that is what I did.42

Malik’s explanation of obeying commands, performing duty without asking questions, his complete subordination to the orders of his superiors perplexed me. When I asked him why he did not rape when others around him, his peers and superior officers too, were guilty of raping women yet no one punished them for it, he took a while to answer the question. Slowly, he said, ‘my zameer (conscience) would not let me commit such a crime’. I was nonplussed by this remark. How can a man distinguish so clearly between duty and ethics? How can he not be inflicted by remorse and a desire for justice on behalf of the victims? I soon learned that my assumptions were wrong. Malik has given much thought to these issues for, as he described himself, he is a troubled soul. To help me understand his suffering, he invited me to meet his mother because he had shared his pain

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with her. His mother is an old, invalid woman.43 When I met her in his home, she blessed me for my endeavour and told me, My son used to write letters to me from East Pakistan and later from the POW camp. I could not read his letters because I am illiterate. I took the letters to the local school master and all the women gathered to hear what Malik wrote. We used to be very proud to hear about the battles he participated in. But the violence troubled everyone. The women blamed the East Pakistanis for the violence. But I’d sit in a corner and think about the violence that my son was witnessing and my heart cried out, ‘tauba, tauba’ (forgiveness). I was very sorry that my son was part of such violence. But I knew he would not do bad things to women because he was raised by me, his mother. So I prayed to God to save him from committing violence and to save the women and children of East Pakistan because no women should suffer the loss of a child or be dishonored in war. I know my son still thinks about East Pakistan and what he witnessed there. The memory cannot be erased. He has taken refuge in religion to seek Allah’s forgiveness. That is all we can do.

The mother and son’s narratives clearly addressed the predictable violence that takes place in war but it moved beyond and raised questions about ethics. Men like Malik and women like his mother can understand that during the state of war, the propaganda of hate, the manipulation of minds, and the technological and political developments of the time transformed ordinary people into killers and murderers of other ordinary people. The state had called upon them to execute the duty of killing. Nonetheless, it is the person, the perpetrator who has to bear the consequences of his action. His mother believes that repentance is the beginning of the healing process. But there is no space in Pakistan for men like Malik to discuss what they experienced and lost. Not unlike their victims, the perpetrators live their lives in silence, repulsed and tormented by their brutal memories. Mohammad came to my apartment on his own initiative because ‘he needed to talk about the war’. Mohammad started his account in these words, I am from Attock. My father was in the army and I joined the forces because that was the only source of employment for us. I had to support a widowed mother and several brothers. In April, 1971 I arrived in East Pakistan. Soon after, our unit was sent to a border town in Northern Bangladesh. We were told that a large number of Biharis were

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slaughtered by the Bengalis. We had to teach the Bengalis a lesson. Eleven of us were sent to carry out the mission. After a day of fighting, we took many Bengalis captive. We sent them to the unit headquarters; I don’t know what they did to those men and women. At the end of the day, when I looked around, I saw the whole place was strewn with body parts. There were decapitated bodies, heads without bodies, dismembered arms and legs littered all over the place. Dogs were roaming about, dogs without any hair on them. They were feeding on human beings. Scores of vultures were descending too, and the dogs and vultures were fighting over human body parts. I thought, ‘He was a human being like me. Is this what a human being does to another human being? Humanity had died’ (Insa¯niyat khatam ho geya).44

Once he started this story, the floodgates of brutal memories were unleashed and he talked for several hours. He recounted in detail other campaigns, the initial successes and the gradual loss of control on the part of the Pakistani Army leading to their surrender to the Indian forces on 16 December 1971. In explanation he said, ‘Our officers were very corrupt. But the Bengalis were loyal to their land. Even when we took their families hostage and shot them, some of them died crying, Joi Bangla (Victory to Bangla). How can anyone conquer a people who love their land so much? No force can succeed against them. I knew this early on, but like the other soldiers, I fought for my country. We were disciplined. We did what we were told to do’. Later reflecting on his experiences in the POW camp in India he said, ‘There I became human (waha insa¯n bana)’. It appears that in his cell there were 36 men, and they often discussed their memories of the war. Only three of the 36, Mohammed reported, could honestly admit that they did not commit unnecessary violence in East Pakistan. Discussions with his cellmates made him realise that during the war they had became tools in the war machinery. Fear and anxiety and a desire to live at the cost of others drove them to cloak themselves in the garb of nationalism and commit violence in the name of doing duty. But, in their victims’ death, perpetrators saw their own emotional and psychological fragility and vulnerability. The mirroring effect of the victim enabled these men to see how the propaganda of hate and manipulation of minds had transformed them — ordinary men — into killers and murderers of other ordinary men and women. But in talking and acknowledging their crimes, they were able to dismantle the received narratives and rewrite their own script centring the human story.

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The acknowledgement of the shared human condition was a profound turning point in Mohammad’s life. He said, ‘When we acknowledged our gunah (sins/crimes), and did tauba from our heart, we became free. Even the barbed wire of the camp, daily inspection and parading by the Indians, trundling empty days of listlessness did not bother us. We became insa¯n (human), free and unencumbered, no longer fearful and following the orders of men above us. We had found our freedom’. On returning to Pakistan after two years of imprisonment, Mohammad resigned from the army because he said, ‘I had found my humanity (insa¯niyat)’. In this single sentence, in a momentary, almost matter-of-fact manner Mohammad realised the entire reality of his being and that of the world, the world of human beings that was lost in war. The realisation was not new. Yet, when I heard it, I was stunned. A simple truth of humanity was forgotten in the violence during the war and no one took notice. Even if they did, they marched on, ruining everything in their way and in the end a non-human order was put in place and people accepted the logic of inhumanity and called it love for the nation.45 State, nation, territory took precedence over human beings and man became anonymous, his actions irresponsible. However it is not productive to loathe the perpetrator and to take sides with the victim in order to understand an historical event. A different sensibility is required to hear what men like Mohammad, agents of a violent history, are telling us. His humanity is, like that of others, complex as well as fragile, fluctuating, delicate, yet, resilient. The inter-subjective connection between man and man was forgotten in the period of the war but by remembering the loss men like Mohammad have reconstituted their human selves and those they thought they had destroyed.

Conclusion: Facing the Other Listening to the variety of soldiers’ memories we become aware there is no final analysis or neat conceptualisation that can encapsulate their experiences. Men like X and Y and many others in Pakistan cannot distinguish between their personal experiences and the textbook account of the event. We cannot access them for who they are; rather we confront an image that is a caricature of a human. Fortunately, however, not everyone in the Pakistan Army is masked and devoid of humanity. Many of them who experienced the war and committed violence were transformed and have moved to another

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place where history has become a personal encounter with their own selves and others and in the face-to-face exchanges they have acquired a sense of responsibility that transcends the confines of national history, militarism and nationalism. Based on their experiences these men can now appeal to us to reconsider the contingent nature of the outward forms of subjective national identities and focus on the unmarked ground of humanity in the subcontinent. On this ground, multiple identities crafted by nations and states exist — they remind us — but it also offers us space for a new understanding of shared humanity which is at the centre of subcontinental memory, although occasionally forgotten in times of violence. The memory of a shared humanity — Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi wrote seven centuries ago — is the foundation of human identity. Without denying that varieties of external labels are created through ethnic, religious, linguistic, economic, social and cultural factors, Rumi urged his listeners not to confine themselves to these markers but continue the search for something within them that can be shared by others, in other words, find the universal base that makes one a human being like another. In this message, Rumi delivers a powerful concept of humanity that overcomes distinctions between self and other. Before engaging Rumi’s discourse in some detail, it is important to recognise that his work emerged from within the context of the tumultuous time of the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, an age of unparalleled violence and catastrophe.46 By recapturing the world of violent change within which Rumi lived and spoke his human message, one can begin to understand its relevance to our world and time of violence. Rumi’s mystical compositions are anchored in Islamic thought and religion. The foundational issue for Rumi is that man must sacrifice his self so that the glory of the Divine can become evident in the individual and so in humanity. Departing from the traditional mould of a teacher delivering a scripted message, Rumi’s discourses and poems were impromptu and spoken from his heart. His utterances talked about opening up to the possibility of intrusion from outside, a stranger, the Unknown, which interrupts the project of the self and creates a new possibility for a different kind of knowing. Rumi begins his famous book of poems, The Mathnawi, by reminding listeners that in telling stories of others, we begin to understand our secrets.47 The blurring of distinctions between self and other is repeated and elaborated several times throughout

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the Mathnawi. In one of his poems he reminds us that ‘we may know who we are or we may not. We may be Muslims, Jews, or Christians but until our hearts become the mould of every heart we will see only our difference’. Rumi’s call for the end of the individual self and submission for unison should not be read in line with the Hegelian ontology of sameness or likeness. Rather, his point is to unsettle human subjectivity, permitting us to talk about man’s relation or non-relation to man and God, in short, to overcome the process that is fixated on destroying the ‘other’ so that the self can triumph. Of course, the state of being/non-being and becoming part of a collective whole, Rumi suggests, is not a platform for creating common goals and experiencing monolithic humanity. Nor does Rumi make man the location of knowledge. In his poems and discourses it becomes clear that the creative possibility and potential for being human is a gift and a promise to mankind made by God. Rumi asks: can we be human and fulfill the role required of us? Rumi’s call to unmask the individual self and embark on a shared human journey is an active process blending the sensory and the spiritual worlds to enable continuous changes and transformation within the self while simultaneously acknowledging the interconnectedness with a variety of others. The significance of this webbed relationship between self and others undoes the totalising, stifling hegemony of individualism that dominates the concept of humanism in the West, and makes room for exploring new meanings of the interconnected as well as the independent human being to think beyond given structures. This concept offers human societies a template for continuous dialogue and is a truly liberating space to unfetter and unhinge from the singular, competitive national identity. It invites recognition of multiple identities and also creates space to claim a connection to shared humanity, which is our due. I read this message within a historical framework to revisit the question of nationalism, a construct of modern men and draw attention to the underlying connections shared by humanity at large, even those separated by hate and national politics in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh? In other words, I draw upon Rumi’s message to ask: Can we write a people’ history of the subcontinent without the barrier of flags? Our interlocutors of 1971 make us understand the meaning of the end of the national self by letting themselves become haunted by the memories of violence committed against each other. In the face

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of the victim that they see in the mirror, they see their own faces. The deformed image frightens and yet commands a moral responsibility to engage in and inspect their actions. These men, who take on that responsibility, in allowing us to access their thoughts and letting us interrogate them, show the possibility of becoming human in the truest sense, weak but resilient, confounded but not destroyed. In telling us their memories they are doing more than registering guilt, pain, fear, grief or anger. Rather, in continuously searching for the meaning of their actions, at least in their minds, they have let themselves be disturbed, upset and even overwhelmed by the memory of the ‘other’. In listening to their stories we become keenly aware of the import of Rumi’s message of letting ourselves become disturbed by others in order to produce a clearer image of our humanity. The perpetrators of 1971 teach us how the condition of one’s humanity and the concept called ‘man’ is extremely precarious. Violence against the other is a medium of undoing one’s humanity, but simultaneously it is a site to move beyond the limited outcome of the history it produces and enable people to unfetter. It is in this space that human subjectivity is unhinged from ‘structures’ like nation and national identity, although it may be temporary. The momentary unmarking is the place for another interrogation and the possibility of finding closure from the event of violent history. The perpetrator’s ability to acknowledge the violence committed against another human being is the most powerful statement of all. Being haunted by the memory of the other, the perpetrator delivers justice to his victim that no tribunal, state or court of law can deliver and in that same gesture realises that his existence as a human rests on the victim. He owes his life as a human to another, his victim, whom he tried to destroy. This is the story that national history cannot speak, the truth lies with the survivors — perpetrators and victims — who let us enter a murky world of memories and show us the possibility of moving beyond it towards closure. It is our task to listen to this history and then reveal it for a better understanding among people in the subcontinent.

Notes 1. ‘Manuhe manuhar baabe’ by Bhupen Hazarika was composed in 1962 as a gesture of peace making between the Assamese and Naga people to settle the boundary disputes. He sang it for the first time in his visit to Nagaland. In 1972, responding to the violence that the people of Bangladesh had suffered

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in the war, Hazarika composed another song, ‘Ganga amar ma, Padma amar Ma’, in which he described the relationship between of the people of India, particularly Assam, and Bangladesh as two eyes belonging to the same face of humanity. He sang this song in Comilla, Bangladesh during the independence celebration. I have used the lines from ‘Manuhe manuhar babe’ as my frontispiece because it speaks to the core of my article which is the human potential to realise one’s humanity. The term Bihari is not meant to identify the people of Bihar. Rather, a variety of Urdu-speaking people who migrated from India to East Pakistan after partition were commonly referred to as Bihari in order to distinguish them from the local Bengalis. I am not including in this article women’s memories in Bangladesh and India, or memories of perpetrators from India and Bangladesh. The extended study is part of a larger book project. In Diwan-i-Ghalib, the famous poet Mirza Ghalib writes, ‘Bas kain dushwar hain, Har kam kain asna hona, Admi ko bhi muyashar nahi Insan hona’ — It may be difficult to make every task easy, it, however, seems man cannot learn to be human. This sentiment echoes over and over again in South Asia and the critique that man has failed to be human is gaining voice in the state of insecurity and terror in the region. We see in others that which is within us, says Rumi. We hear words whose meaning we understand because they echo our thoughts. Our lives are mirrors of each other, even though we may think and believe we are individuals — unique and different. Rumi’s masterpiece, the Mathnawi (in six volumes) is regarded as the most outstanding work of Perso-Islamic mysticism on the relationship between man and man that brings one closer to the Divine. Rumi also composed the Divan-i Shams. Apart from these two masterpieces, his discourses produced in Fihi Ma-Fih, Mejalis-i Seba and Mektubat repeatedly address the issue of man’s relationship with man as well as the Divine. To study the history and outcome of 1971, we need to keep in mind the story of 1947. The first person accounts of partition told in the voices of women by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998) and Urvashi Butalia (1998) have provided me a grammar for pursuing oral history and search for the hidden and horrific experiences of violence in 1971. Also, the works of fiction on 1947 provided an entry point about the production of narrative and the sites of remembrance outside and beyond the archive and documents of the state. I have found the creative writings of Sadaat Hasan Manto (1987; 2003); Kushwant Singh (1956); Som Anand (1998); Bisham Sahni (1988); Alok Bhalla (1994); S. Cowasjee and K. S. Duggal, eds (1995); and Mohammad Memon (1998) to be particularly instructive. The emerging body of academic articles and essays, memoirs, and eyewitness accounts, likewise, have influenced and informed my research and narrative, for example, Pandey (1999); Das et al. (2000); Kaul (2001); Bagchi and Dasgupta (2003). The use of personal narrative and memory for talking about trauma is not new to the subcontinent or the study of 1971. Africanists were at the forefront

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of developing oral history for methodological and epistemological inquiry nearly fifty years ago. In Latin American history, testimonial narratives have produced counter-statist accounts and challenged the production of history from the archive and documents of the state to show the extraordinary range of contexts in which history and narratives are produced. India has a rich oral tradition that goes back several thousand years before the establishment of history as an official subject for documenting the past in the British colonial rule. For discussions on the uses of oral history and fieldwork in India, see Amin (1996; 2005); and Singer (1997). On the limitations of national history, see Chakravarty (1992a); Kumar (2001); Mayaram (2003); and Saikia (2004). On the subject of violence, pain and the endurance to tell about people’s experiences, see Pandey (1992; 1995). 9. Methodologically, the effort of oral history is unique in that it allows for asking questions that were, perhaps, ignored or not imagined in the past and to evoke recollections and understandings that were previously silenced or ignored. The probing works of oral history done by Thomson (1998); Mamdani (2001); and Hetzfeld (2005), among others, offer some examples. The project of oral history creates conditions for a face-to-face encounter with the agents of history and challenges us to move beyond the limited world of doing conventional history to engage in human interaction. The interactions that occur between the researcher and the research subject seep and penetrate the project, challenging oral historians to account for human relationships generated in the field, as well as contextualise and assimilate the method and narrative to answer larger questions for over-coming stigmatised history, and for a more sensitive interaction with the silenced subjects for democratising history and memory — for example, see the works of Sereny (1983); Butalia (1998); and Redlich (2002). 10. In order to tell, one must remember the past, which involves struggle for the survivors as well as the social and political life of the nation. Remembering, Gyan Pandey argues, may force us to address issues and open wounds that a nation does not want to deal with (Pandey 2002: 27–55). But the project of remembering the traumatic past has to be more than coming to terms with the bad and ugly that national history wants to silence. Moreover, remembering need not be directed at creating an oppositional story. The cognitive structure of writing a people’s narrative must move beyond and outside the control of already produced statist narratives, otherwise it cannot alter the received story of history that is accepted as the past. The task of unshackling and overcoming the general accepted story of the past and telling the story that is passed over and even silenced requires moving beyond the established historical methodology and epistemology and telling the past in terms that includes narrative, testimony, myth, history and memory. Ashis Nandy (1983; 1995) and Dipesh Chakravarty (1992) have made repeated appeals for fulfilling the responsibility of writing history in South Asia in South Asian terms that is inclusive of the variety of ways people know and remember the past, which promises to make history in South Asia autonomous of the official record keeping apparatus.

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11. Kleinman (1997); Das (2000); Hesford (1999); and Nandy (1995), among others, have cautioned against overemphasis on theory and preoccupation with critique leading to devaluing empirical research. Likewise, historian Igna Clandinnen appeals to us not to make a horrific event, even one such as the Holocaust, into a ‘unique and exceptional’ story of violence, but to read the texts of human actions and sufferings for understanding realities of politics and society (Clandinnen 1995). 12. In another context and time, after the Holocaust, Primo Levi wrote about his struggle to see his and his perpetrators humanity, in the midst of violence and beyond it. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi writes, ‘The networks of human relationships inside the Lagers were not simple; it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors. Anyone who today reads (or writes) the history of the Lager reveals the tendency, indeed the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides’ (Levi (1986: 37). Again, in Survival in Auschwitz, he writes, ‘When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski … proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working… It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change of which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again’ (Levi 1993: 159–60). Levi’s humanity and moral courage revealed in his writings echo the emotions and experiences of some of the soldiers we will encounter in the text of this article. 13. For a history of ‘othering’ leading to the partition see Pandey (1994). Also see Talbot (1995); Bayly (1985); and Kakar (1974). 14. For an extended reading of the changes that took place within the army leading to the Islamisation of its image, see Haqqani (2005). For a reading of the ambivalent search for a narrative to construct an official history of Muslim Pakistan to fit evolving state agendas and politics, see Jalal (1974) and Gilmartin (1998). 15. On this subject, see Van Der Veer (1994) and Gaborieau (1985: 7–14). For an excellent essay on the divide between philosophy and political construction of the Muslim, see Bilgrami (1992). 16. In the parliamentary debates, the East Pakistani representatives repeatedly reported on the ‘injustices’ done to the people and place. In turn, we hear many of the Pakistani parliamentarians complaining of the Indian Hindu assault on the Muslims and driving them across the border to East Pakistan. They expressed deep suspicion of the Indian activities and the identity of the people who were coming across the divide (See National Assembly of Pakistan Debates, 1962–64). During my conversation with officers and rank and file soldiers they repeatedly mentioned fighting the Indians in East Pakistan, because in their opinion India had infiltrated the place with their ‘spies and agents’ in the guise of teachers. Hence when they attacked the civilian population, one of the main targets of the Pakistan Army was educational institutions and their faculty.

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17. The ethnic conflict between Bihari and Bengali are documented in Urdu and English language newspapers in Pakistan. I have consulted the daily reports of the Imroz and The Dawn from March to December 1971. Administrator–writer Masood Mufti, who was in East Pakistan during the war and served as a POW, provides detail sketches of the ethnic violence of the Bengalis against non-Bengalis in his quasi-historical, though imaginative books such as Lemhe (1995); Chehre (1996); and Raize (1996). B. Withaker, Ian Guest, and Rt Hon. David Ennals have documented the atrocities against the Biharis in a report called The Biharis in Bangladesh. Minority Rights Group (London: Amnesty International, Report No. 11, 1975). 18. Although retired bureaucrats are more cautious on this subject, they do not hesitate to talk about the aftereffects of the war. The Bengali leaders and masses were very unhappy with the continued presence of Indians after the war, so it seems, and demonstrated against them to leave the country. The Bengalis did not want to be ‘colonized’ again. Ashok Mitra was Economic Advisor to Indira Gandhi during this period and was in Bangladesh during the reconstruction. He reaffirmed that the Indian government policy was to dismember Pakistan and develop economic ties with Bangladesh (personal conversation, Calcutta, June 2005). 19. These numbers are provided by the Indian and Bangladeshi sources. The Pakistani sources question these numbers and say they are exaggerated. 20. This term was first used in 1969 in Justice Shahabuddin’s report to the government to describe the feelings of the East Pakistanis toward the state controlled by West Pakistan. See Choudhury (1974). 21. International Review of the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1972, Geneva, Switzerland. 22. Georgio Agamben has argued that an utterance constitutes a voice even though the speaker may not have recourse to a language constituted by words to express his/her experiences. The effort to grasp experiences and recognise their implication is sufficient to generate an understanding between the speaker and listener. See Agamben (1991). 22. See ‘Breakdown of ‘71’, Friday Times, 26 July 2004. 23. The materials that one can access for undertaking research on 1971in Pakistan are many. Many public and private institutions and libraries in Lahore and Islamabad, including the private library of Ahmed Salim, The National Archives, the National Documentation Center and the Defense Library in Islamabad maintained by the armed forces have a sizeable collection of public papers, documents, journals, newspapers, transcripts of speeches, parliamentary debates, memoirs and secondary books in Urdu and English. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report which is, by far, the most important official document on 1971 is, however, not available for scholarly use; neither are the records at the General Head Quarters (GHQ). In addition to undertaking archival research, I benefited a great deal from discussions with the officers at the Fauji Foundation University and Defense Library in Islamabad.

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24. Many Pakistani scholars were surprised that I was searching for a history of 1971. Some told me that it was not an ‘important’ topic and others cautioned me that the ‘military rulers will be unhappy about such research’. Curiously, the students I met, on the other hand, were very keen to know about Bangladesh. Many did not even know that Bangladesh was born out of Pakistani violence in the war. For me their and ignorance about their history and enthusiasm to learn was both encouraging and distressing. During my stay in Pakistan, I hired a young woman from Punjab University to be my research assistant and her dedication to find obscure literary materials and search the history going back to 1947 made the research an enriching experience. These and other interactions with students in Pakistan made me realize that the younger generation is far more open to knowing the past for what it is. The experience was similar in Bangladesh when I had undertaken research there in 2001. 25. The EBR revolted on 25 March 1971. The story has an element of drama. It appears that during dinner the Bengali officers stood up and fired on their fellow West Pakistani officers, killing many of them. Soon after this revolt, Ziaur Rahman, who later became President of Bangladesh, declared the independence of Bangladesh in a radio broadcast from Chittagong on 26 March 1971. 26. Many officers of the Pakistan Army expressed this sentiment concerning the EBR. For Ikram Seghal, whose father Chand Seghal had raised the 2 East Bengal, the import of this statement is heartfelt. Ikram Seghal, as he himself states (he has written many columns on this issue), is a Punjabi and a Bengali and he refuses to embrace one label over the other. His mother was a Bengali from Bogra in East Pakistan (in present-day Bangladesh) and his father was from Sialkot in West Punjab (in present-day Pakistan). Ikram Seghal started his career as a second lieutenant in 2 East Bengal. After the EBR revolted, Ikram’s identity became a matter of suspicion for everyone. The Bengalis saw him as an enemy because of his Punjabi connections and the Punjabis suspected him due to his Bengali roots. In the end Ikram was court-martialed and released from active duty. Today, when Ikram remembers the war of 1971 he continues to refuse to take sides with either group because it would mean for him betrayal of his parents, his Bengali mother and Punjabi father. For Ikram, it was a war between family members and he resists their divisions, at least, emotionally. He told me during one of our conversations, ‘I was really devastated in 1971. I always thought Pakistan was the finest experiment in nationhood, two distinct parts bonding together’ (personal conversations, February–March 2005). 27. Hafiz Malik writes, ‘It is not farfetched to state that Muslim national theory in India after 1857 was the child of Sir Sayyid’s Aligarh Movement’ (see Malik 1980: 281). Almost everyone in Pakistan accepted that Aligarh Muslim University is the birthplace of the Indian Muslim ideology that culminated in the foundation of Pakistan.

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28. Many of them advised me on my research methodology, gave me long lectures on the history of the subcontinent and the military history of Muslim conquerors, and/or told me stories about violence to flaunt their ‘bravado’. 29. The villages that I visited in the Kushab valley and the Salt Range region are remote and generally inaccessible by car. Donkeys and mules are the main source of transport and are used for carrying firewood and fodder for the cattle. Most of these villages do not have electricity or running water. Women spend a lot of time fetching water, fodder, firewood, and the essentials for cooking. The men I interviewed live a retired life, which led many women to comment, ‘They are good for nothing except for smoking hookah and talking’. 30. Except for Colonel Ali who requested that I use his name, all the names of the Pakistani soldiers in this article are pseudonyms to protect their identity. 31. This interview was conducted in the General’s house in Karachi on 2 March 2005. X refused to be put on tape. He told me that in all these years he has refused to talk to outsiders about his experiences in East Pakistan. Presumably, I am the first person he allowed an interview. 32. I had interviewed a wife of a ‘disappeared’ doctor in Chittagong in 2001. Her husband was well-known to Y. When he was arrested for the first time by the Pakistani intelligence, Y helped to secure his release. But a second arrest led to his disappearance. Mrs A (wife of the doctor), however, continued to believe the Y was not capable of brutal actions. ‘He was such a soft spoken, quiet man’, she told me. But having said this, she wondered, ‘Y would have known what happened, he was the head of the administration those days’. 33. A case in point for the Indian Army is in the north-east region of India where it operates through coercion and terror and has created a huge rift between the people and government. In Pakistan, the record of the army is very poor in Baluchistan and northern Waziristan in particular. There the army rules rather than governs. 34. One soldier told me, ‘In the Pakistan Army whatever you feed the soldiers they will believe and follow. Nobody spoke up. We were told ‘vahan pe sab hindu humko musalman banana hai. Indian ne pura Dhaka kabza kar liya, aapko ja ke bachana hai’ (there, you have to convert the Hindus to Islam and make them Muslims. The Indians have besieged Dhaka. You have to free it and provide protection)’. 35. In Karachi, when I lived and worked in Orangi, I had many discussions with Bihari immigrants from East Pakistan. Almost all of them reported that the ‘ghost of Muslim League had worked on their minds in 1971 and led them to support Pakistan and commit violence on its behalf’. They regretted their actions and spoke without rancor about the Bengalis. 36. Information based on a personal conversation with an officer in Lahore. 37. Sahibzada Yakub resigned as Commander of the Eastern Wing when he failed to convince the Pakistan President and his advisors to follow a political solution. He was recalled to Pakistan, demoted from his position, and court-martialed. Later, when the war was over and Sahibzada’s advice was

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proven right, he was appointed as the foreign minister of Pakistan during the prime-ministership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Curiously, at the level of ordinary people, discussions on 1971 seemed more animated and candid whenever I engaged them to recount their memories. They all agreed that both military and politicians particularly Bhutto, were at the heart of the break-up of Pakistan, and many referred to it as the ‘partition of Pakistan’. The term non-man was used by Primo Levi in his book The Drowned and the Saved (1986). Personal interview, 11 August 2004, Lahore, Pakistan. Colonel Ali is writing a novel on 1971. Personal interview, 31 July 2004, Pakistan. Malik’s mother passed away in July 2006. Personal interview, December 2004, Pakistan. One of the soldiers told me that they were ordered to burn, kill and destroy everything that came in their way to create fear and panic among the Bengalis. He reported that as they marched along they killed men, women, children and cattle, and ransacked the villages. The long march from Dhaka to Halwaghat in Mymensingh took several days and at the end of it they had devastated the countryside. The violence was unbearable to this soldier and he had a psychological breakdown. The two English translations of the Discourses that I have consulted are Arberry (1993) and Thackston (1999). There are various translations of the Mathnawi. For this article, I consulted Book One, translated by Jawid Mojaddedi (2004).

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Strength of the State Meets the Strength of the Street: The 1972 Labour Struggle in Karachi Kamran Asdar Ali∗ Why did they kill us? We wanted our rights — bonus, wages, health benefits, why did they kill us? To be honest we all cried, I cried too. — A textile worker, remembering June 1972

Introduction On 10 February 1972, the newly installed President and civilian martial law administrator of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, addressed the nation in order to present the salient features of his government’s new labour policy.1 As Bhutto laid out the details of workers’ benefits, he also warned them of dire consequences if they did not refrain from participating in ‘lawless behaviour’. He asked the working class to desist from their ‘gherao and jelao’ (lit: encirclement and burning) politics, ‘otherwise,’ Bhutto raged, ‘the strength of the street will be met by the strength of the state’.2 A few months later Bhutto’s government fulfilled his threat. On 7 June 1972, the Karachi police killed several workers when they opened fire on demonstrating labourers in the major industrial area of the city. The next day the police fired again on the funeral procession of one of the deceased workers. Press reports indicate that at least 10 people were killed on that day, including a woman and a child. These killings marked what is considered by many as the beginning of the end of one of the most protracted labour struggles in Pakistan’s history. Starting in the late 1960s, this movement was pivotal in shaping the transition from military rule to democratic forms of governance. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had come to power through the overwhelming support of the working class, students, and radical left groups, the key participants in this movement.3 It is indeed ironic, and also revealing, of Bhutto’s politics, that the PPP was instrumental in suppressing the workers’ struggle.

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Ask most Pakistanis about the significance of the years 1971–72 and, if they do recall, they will say that that was the year Pakistan lost its eastern wing. The meta-narrative of the creation of Bangladesh subsumes histories of all other events, happenings and struggles of that crucial era in Pakistan’s national history. Although not a part of the formal educational curriculum, the 1971 war with India is constantly retold in the popular press primarily by ex-high ranking army officers seeking to absolve themselves of any responsibility in the events that led to the break-up of the country. Such histories are by and large apologies for the atrocities that Pakistan’s military committed against its Bengali citizens. If the past can only be reconfigured in its relationship to the present, it makes complete sense for the Pakistani elite to concentrate on rehabilitating itself in front of a public that has lost confidence in its military rulers after the 1971 crisis. Shahid Amin, in his rendition of another South Asian event of early twentieth century,4 reminds us how nationalist master narratives can induce selective national amnesia in relation to events that fit awkwardly into neatly woven patterns (Amin 1995: 3). Similarly, events such as the labour movement during the late 1960s in Pakistan have remained a part of individual memories. Collectively, however, not many in Pakistan even remember the series of events that shaped those years. The unwritten history of such struggles is connected to their unremembered status in the national psyche. As participants of these events grow old and pass away, they take with them crucial pieces of this past.5 A past that like many other collective struggles of the Pakistani people remains buried in the hearts and minds of the actors themselves, seldom shared or celebrated by the nation as a whole. For example, it is almost forgotten how the long military rule in the 1950 and 1960s, with deep links to industrial and feudal interests, led to a popular mobilisation that demanded democratic reform, economic redistribution, social justice and rights for ethnic minorities. The results of the 1970 elections, with nationalist parties winning in Baluchistan, the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and in East Bengal, is interpreted by some as an important juncture in Pakistan’s history in which there was a popular consensus to resolve the nationalities question.6 In the same vein, although rarely remembered or discussed in the national media, Bhutto’s violent reaction can also be considered as a watershed event in the history of the nation’s working class movement. In order to rethink this particular moment, a major theme of this article is to capture the events that

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convey Bhutto’s response to popular opposition early in his rule. In addition, I also pursue the question of how trade union leadership itself perceived the labour movement of the time. Ranajit Guha (1994), in an article on the relationship of the Indian national movement with the masses, borrows the Gramscian concept of hegemony to show the processes through which consensus was built by the nationalist elite leadership. He argues that these leaders needed to harness the intuition and enthusiasm of the people so that order could evolve out of chaos. The subalterns’ popular initiatives, autonomy of function, the immediacy in their politics and the spontaneity of their actions needed to be disciplined by the bourgeois national elite for it to control and hegemonise the national movement. Through cultural and historical analysis I shall critically evaluate the teleological assumptions which begin with the expectation that the capitalist factory, in its ideal construction, acts as a powerful agent of social change transforming older particularistic identities of peasants/ tribals who are drawn into the factory as workers and binds them into new universalistic ties of class solidarity (Chakrabarty 1989: 21). It is within such a framework that I want to understand some of the responses by the trade union leadership to the events of June 1972. Hence, in presenting the argument I will analyse the relationship between the workers, the trade union leadership and the state of Pakistan. In discussing the 1972 labour struggle, I focus on Karachi, the industrial and commercial hub of the country and the most ethnically diverse city with a long history of labour politics. Being the major beneficiary of the state of Pakistan’s industrialisation programme, Karachi was one of the world’s fastest growing cities between 1947 and 1972, with its population increasing by 217 per cent during this period (Hasan 1999). More than half of Karachi’s growth since the early 1950s is attributed to migration from India and from rural and other urban areas of the country. This population increase, which was linked to ethnic and social heterogeneity, changed the social and political cohesion of Karachi as a functioning city. Academic studies, when available, concentrate on Karachi’s ethnic politics and violence, on housing and on resource distribution (see Hussain 1990; Shaheed 1990; Verkaaik 1994; Hasan 1997). Missing in these analyses is a discussion on the confluence of ethnicity and its relationship to labour and working class struggles that have historically shaped the political and social growth of the city in the last 50 years. Within this

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context, in addition to detailing the labour strife in the early 1970s in Karachi, this article also contributes to the understanding of the social and historical processes that have led to the substantive decline of labour and class based politics and the concurrent emergence of a politics increasingly shaped by issues of ethnic, religious and sectarian differences in contemporary Pakistan. I base this article on research in public and private archives, interviews with key participants in the labour movement, ordinary workers and with civil and political administrators. In this work, I have relied upon how the actors themselves recall the events of more than 30 years ago. I have heard many versions of the events and also multiple analyses of what happened and why. Memories, while reflecting the interest of the teller (Portelli 1992: 2), were still highly consistent with how the events were reported in the national media. Where people differed was in their analysis of the larger political momentum of the time. In order to present a more comprehensive understanding of the situation I shall continuously add my own reading of the processes under discussion.

Industrialisation and Labour Pakistan, at its independence in 1947, inherited only nine per cent of the total industrial establishment of British India. The lack of industrial capital was mirrored by the weakness of organised industrial labour and the peasantry (Shaheed 1983: 270–90). The nascent Pakistan government followed an import substitution model to rapidly industrialise the economy. The state also relied heavily on agricultural exports, specifically East Pakistani jute, to subsidise industrial development in West Pakistan (Papaneck 1967). The state promoted industrialisation by providing soft loans and tax holidays and by setting up the Pakistan Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation in the late 1940s with assistance from the World Bank and foreign capital. Due to lack of an early response from the local merchant capital, the state also formed the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), through which it initiated industrial projects that were then transferred to the private sector at bargain prices (Alavi 1983: 228–69). The first phase of private industrialisation occurred after the Korean War, when the profits gained by Pakistani traders were channelled into industrial investment. Special areas were developed in Karachi — the Sind Industrial Trading Estate (SITE) and the Landhi–Korangi industrial

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area, respectively — and land was sold to construct factories at extremely generous rates. With the state’s role in setting up industries, the bureaucracy became intrinsically involved in the control of this industrial expansion. For example, between 1947 and 1955, 774 new industries were established in Karachi, representing almost 50 per cent of all industrialisation in Pakistan (Salar 1986). State agencies directly financed the industrial concerns or participated in legislating laws to favour this growth. On the one hand, the collusion of the bureaucracy and industrialists was manifested in facilitating the finances for expansion of industrial houses; on the other, this alliance kept the wage rates down and insured industrial peace by brutal suppression of the working class. Despite state-sponsored repressive measures, worker unrest increased. The declining social and economic conditions of the working class and the disparity in income levels that were becoming shamelessly evident in the Pakistan of the 1950s gave rise to several labour strikes. According to estimates, between 1954 and 1957 there were more than 250 strikes in which more than 200,000 workers were involved (Salar 1986). An example of workers’ living conditions in the early 1950s is evident by the report filed by an International Labour Organisation (ILO) representative in 1953.7 According to the report, Karachi was still a city where a large section of the population, being refugees from India, did not have adequate housing. People were living on sidewalks and workers’ living conditions were extremely precarious. Trade union representatives would occasionally raise issues of housing and welfare with the factory owners. These requests were periodically turned down on the basis of the fact that such investments would lower the margin of profit. Earlier, in 1951, the government had ratified the ILO convention on freedom of association and the right to organise. Irrespective of the lofty ideals of higher wages and workers’ participation guaranteed in these conventions, the workers’ living condition did not improve in practice. Moreover labour was periodically warned by government functionaries not to hamper the industrialisation process with strikes and upheavals (Shaheed 1983: 273). The emerging state subordinated labour organisations by sponsoring anti-communist trade unions,8 by banning left and popular trade unions and passing draconian labour laws that effectively prevented collective bargaining or the right to strike. Trade union workers with whom I spoke remembered how radical workers and those desiring to form unions were either

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harassed, beaten by local goons hired by the industrialists or terminated from work on one pretext or the other. With rampant unemployment and a surplus of labour, many workers desisted from joining unions due to the fear of such reprisals. The military take over of the state of Pakistan in 1958 intensified this repression. Most labour laws were functioning under the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947, until the time it was repealed and re-enacted under the rubric of the Industrial Dispute Ordinance. The ordinance brought more industries under the essential services banner, prohibiting the formation of unions there. Strikes were made illegal and the registration of unions was made difficult. To safeguard against contravening ILO conventions, a system of conciliation and mediation was devised. Conciliation officers were government functionaries who referred unsettled disputes to industrial courts for mediation where the process could take months to settle. The idea was to move labour grievances from the streets to the courts and boardrooms under the watchful eye of state functionaries. The already beleaguered common worker was further entangled in the alien language of rules, regulations and legal sophistry to fight for his rights. During General Ayub Khan’s rule (1958–69) bureaucrats and exarmy officers began directly running major industrial units. This was an era of unprecedented growth in the wealth and holdings of Pakistan’s major industrial houses. They moved into banking and insurance that further supplied them the funds for expansion. Pakistan’s growth was heralded by economists from the United States as a model for the rest of the Third World and as a premier example of ‘free enterprise’. Gustav Papanek, the head of the Harvard Advisory Group to Pakistan, would affectionately call Pakistan’s state-sponsored bourgeoisie ‘robber barons’ and argued that the rising social and economic inequality contributed to the economy’s growth and would eventually lead to the improvement in the living conditions of the lower income groups (Ali 1983: 69). Irrespective of Papanek’s ‘rosy’ predictions, all through the 1960s retrenchment and dismissals were common tools for disciplining workers. An outburst of workers’ accumulated frustrations was evident in the March 1963 demonstration in the Sind Industrial Trading Estate (SITE) area under the Mazdoor Rabita Committee (Workers Coordinating Committee). The strikes led to police firing on demonstrating labourers; several people were killed. This incident led to an increased radicalisation among the workers that was in turn crushed

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by mass arrests of the mill level leadership. Industrialists, taking note of the state response, continued with their policy of dismissals and retrenchment. Usman Baluch, a trade union leader who lived through this and later labour struggles, represented the situation by stating that ‘the bureaucracy through the labour courts, the industrialists through their jobbers, masters and paid strong men and the police through violent suppression of demonstrations worked in unison to suppress the labour movement’.9 Between 1947–58 the economy had been sluggish in its growth (GNP 3.2 per cent); the largest employment was in the agricultural sector which contributed about 50 per cent of the output. However, manufacturing in this time period had a growth rate of 9.6 per cent. In contrast, during the entire Ayub era the GNP rates hovered around the 6 per cent mark and manufacturing still maintained a high 9.1 per cent growth. Even the agricultural sector grew at a rate of 4.1 per cent as huge subsidies were given to large landowners for mechanisation with additional public investments in irrigation and drainage works (see Husain 1999). By the mid-1960s, the industrial sector accounted for almost 20 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and about 18 per cent of the working population was involved in industrial labour. Pakistan was still primarily an agricultural economy with 40 per cent of the GDP and 61 per cent of the labour force tied to the agricultural sector. Yet the change was phenomenal in comparison to Pakistan of the 1950s. The heavy reliance on foreign capital for the industrialisation process faced a major setback when after the 1965 war with India World Bank funds were cut off and then resumed at much lower levels. As the entire structure was built on large inflow of foreign capital, the growth began to sputter. Bad harvests in 1965 and 1966 along with the demand of East Pakistan’s middle classes for a more equitable share of the spoils of development created a major political turmoil in the country (Alavi 1983). Ayub Khan’s much heralded ‘decade of development’ thus came to an abrupt end when in 1968–69 students, intellectuals, the urban poor and the working classes participated in a massive civil disobedience movement. Spearheaded by the PPP in the west and the Awami League in the eastern wing, this movement was not only against the political bankruptcy of the Ayub regime but also a protest against the deteriorating economic conditions and the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth.10

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As a result of these disturbances, a new military regime came into power with the promise of social and political reform. One of the first tasks of this junta was to call a tripartite labour conference and work on a fresh labour ordinance. Due to the extreme pressure from the working class the new government in 1969 introduced an Industrial Relations Ordinance (IRO). The Ordinance was liberal democratic in orientation and favoured a trade union policy that relied on negotiation instead of confrontation as the main mode of communication between the labourers and industrialists. Registration of unions was made easier, and where there was more than one union in an industry, a system of election to choose Collective Bargaining Agents (CBAs) was devised. Rhetorically, the Ordinance’s language was critical of previous labour laws and those industrialists who used extra legal means to curtail trade unionism’s growth in the country.11 However, the regime remained committed to the prevention of strikes and lockouts that were undermining production goals in most industrial units. Within this context, legal proceedings in military courts and arrests of labour leaders, workers and other pro-democracy activists persisted unabated. Irrespective of the Ordinance, the military regime also gave industrialists virtual freedom in hiring and firing decisions. It is estimated that in Karachi alone, almost 45,000 workers were retrenched between 1969–1971.12 Yet the Ordinance, after decades of state repression, did bring a new energy into the labour movement. Taking advantage of the clauses for registration and constituting Collective Bargaining Agents (CBA), moribund and underground unions started coming to life. New alliances were made as communist groups and student activists assisted the working class leadership in reorganising their trade unions. Before long, in response to the sustained repression of its leaders, an alternate leadership started taking hold in many trade unions. Following the lead of the Bengali working class and peasant leader Maulana Abdul Hamid Bhashani,13 the labour groups, now under a more radicalised leadership, took to encirclements of industries (gherao). Using these new tactics the workers started to demand bonuses, better working conditions, back pay and, in some cases, protested the dismissal of their comrades.

Labour and Ethnicity The oldest unions in Karachi were the dock and port workers and they were dominated by the Makrani/Baluch14 workers of old Karachi.

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In immediate post-independence Pakistan (1947) the muhajirs (migrants from India, mainly Urdu-speaking), being more educated and having previous experience of industrial labour and urban life, soon became the majority of the rank and file industrial workers. They started to occupy leadership positions among the already volatile and diversified labour population.15 Subsequently, the muhajirdominated trade union leadership played an important role in its advocacy and struggle for labour rights in Karachi. The leadership may have also managed to contain, much to its advantage, the cultural and linguistic tensions between the higher skilled local workers (muhajir) and the less skilled up-country migrants (Pashtun/southern Punjabis) through a rhetoric of class solidarity and proletarian politics. By the late 1960s, the ethnic make-up of Karachi’s labour population had, however, changed considerably. Skilled muhajir workers mostly populated the industrial complexes and multinational firms, where working conditions were better. The textile mills, where working conditions were far worse, had up-country migrant labourers or Bengali workers. In the 1960s, jobbers, as agents of factory owners, recruited men from certain specific districts in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) or southern Punjab and through economic and social coercion guaranteed a docile and disciplined workforce to specific factory management. The workers themselves resided in areas populated by a majority of people from their own region and linguistic groups. The radicalised left wing movement in 1968–69 sought to organise these workers who, till then, had mostly known management controlled union (popularly called pocket unions) into supporting more independent trade unions. The movement in this process also challenged complex set of ethnic differences and hierarchies in the workplace and in worker colonies. For example, the textile mills were mostly populated by Pashtun workers or workers from Swat and Hazara, also in NWFP. These workers had come to Karachi in the early 1960s and settled in vacant land at the edge of the industrial area. Worker neighbourhoods with names like Frontier Colony (NWFP is popularly called ‘Frontier’ by many) and Pathan Colony were created overnight — names that reflected the population shifts in the local ethnicity of the labour population. Muhajir workers also lived in these areas, but by the late 1960s many had more established their presence in Old Golimar (Bismillah Hotel), Bara Board, or in Nazimabad, all being middle to lower middle

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class neighbourhoods. The new immigrant colonies were, to a large extent, unplanned/non-regularised government land and, until the early 1970s, did not have direct water or electricity connections. In the streets one could regularly hear Pashto, Hindko (from Hazara), or Swati being spoken, making these areas somewhat distinct from the Urdu dominated culture of the larger city. To cater to the growing number of immigrants, a range of popular restaurants, workers’ hostels and bathhouses had started crowding the main thoroughfares of these areas. Gradually the labourers settled down and, in some cases, got married either in the city or brought their families from their villages and small towns to Karachi. These areas also had civic organisations that catered to specific ethnicities, sometimes to people from a particular district in NWFP or southern Punjab. These organisations were led by relatively influential men who at times were linked to factory managements and/or political parties and had the social and political power to mediate local disputes and conflicts. Keeping the above in perspective, a major problem faced by left groups was that although the labourers from different parts of the country were steeped in various traditions of constructing social relations, the Karachi-based left cadre was mostly urban, middle class, and Urdu-speaking. Hence those left wing activists, who belonged to the working class, were ethnically similar and had cultural affinity with different regional languages and cultures were the most successful in politically organising these workers.

The Event The industrial workers’ hopes were raised as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto assumed control of the country after the creation of Bangladesh and the surrender of the Pakistan Army in East Pakistan.16 In their interviews with me, the workers and labour leaders from that era attested to the sense of elation in them as they were encouraged by the initial anti-industrialist rhetoric of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Many had worked with the PPP and had suffered jail sentences to end martial law and bring about democratic rule in the country. During the election campaign, Bhutto had also promised to get those workers reinstated who had been dismissed by mill owners in the last several years. He had publicly warned the industrialists to bring back money that they had deposited in foreign banks and also threatened that their passports would be withdrawn making it difficult

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for them to travel. Such statements coupled with the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the government controlled media during the initial period of Bhutto’s rule raised hopes among the workers that Bhutto was on their side and would finally force the industrialists to accede to the labour’s demands.17 Labourers and working class leaders intensified their struggle and during the first six months of 1972, periodic lockouts and encirclements of industries continued in the two major industrial areas of Karachi.18 The workers insisted upon the reinstatement of those retrenched during the martial law years, the opening of those industries that the management had closed without notice or compensation, the distribution of bonuses, the payment of workers’ participatory funds, and demanded the pay that was their due in some cases. My informants told me that labourers belonging to different factories and sometimes rival unions would walk to other factories where there was a dispute to demonstrate in favour of the workers there. A vivid example of this solidarity was the spontaneous strike of 28 March 1972 when 200,000 workers stopped working, bringing the entire SITE area to a stand still in response to the continuing lockout by the industrialists at one of the textile mills (Zebtun). The mill owners had closed the factory and had laid off 2,000 workers for almost two months. An agreement had been reached between the management and the workers’ union that production would start on 24 March but the mill remained closed even on the morning of 28 March. The Zebtun workers went around to different mills and work stopped everywhere in solidarity.19 With the rising militancy, the provincial and central government responded by gradually taking a firmer stand on the labour issue. On the one hand, the government controlled press published reports that the industrialists were fomenting the labour unrest as a sign of their displeasure at the state’s recent nationalisation policy.20 On the other, Bhutto and his ministers also raised the spectre of the proverbial ‘foreign hand’ that was supposedly behind these occurrences and wanted to destabilise the popular government.21 Threats like the one voiced by Bhutto while announcing his labour policy were periodically made by his ministers and by his cousin, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, the governor and later chief minister of the Sind province.22 Interestingly, in some cases industrialists were even asked by Bhutto’s ministers to provide a list of ‘undesirable’ workers who could then be dealt with by the state authorities.23

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There were, however, other voices within the government reflecting the PPP’s varied power base. The labour friendly left leaning PPP cadres, some of whom now held government ministries and offices,24 would periodically give pro-labour pronouncements and seek to work out a compromise between the state and the striking labour unions. For example, Mir Rasool Baksh Talpur, Senior Advisor to the Governor of Sind, and who later himself became governor, Talpur Mairaj Mohammad Khan, the President’s advisor on public affairs, and Abdul Sattar Gabol, the Provincial Labour Minister for Sind would regularly meet with labour leaders and workers. In their meetings, they would condemn police excesses against the workers and also promise the release of any industrial labourers that were arrested during the continuing disturbances. However, they would also request that instead of strikes and demonstration the workers should cooperate with the PPP government and consider it as their true representative and in this spirit help it solve the people’s problems.25 Simultaneously, others in the government and a section of the media had continuously called for industrial peace on the basis of the fact that that the country was going through difficult times, onehalf of the country had been lost and the economy was in shambles. By continuing their agitation the labourers, newspaper editorials argued, were halting the much needed production to stabilise inflation and export manufactured goods, both necessary to solve the financial problems the country faced.26 Going by such statements, it was clear to many in the labour movement that the government, irrespective of its pro-labour rhetoric, was seeking to reassert itself and would ultimately crack down on the labour on the premise of maintaining law and order.27 A response to the government’s hardening position was the formation of the Sind Workers’ Convention in the SITE area that brought together major labour federations of the province to effectively lead the labour movement in this moment of crisis. This unity was partially forced onto some of the labour federations as they were becoming isolated by the rising tide of labour militancy and their own rank and file was deserting them to form alliances with other groups. Hence the federations, whose primary task in the 1960s was to negotiate with the factory management and involve themselves in legal procedures to procure labour rights were forced to make changes in the way they worked due to pressure from below. The most powerful trade union federation in the SITE area was the Mutahida Mazdoor

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Federation (MMF, lit: United Worker’s Federation).28 Since the late 1960s this federation had maintained an independent policy towards most political parties, although its members had past and present linkages with many left formations in Karachi. It had, in the process, become a space where a range of disaffected cadres — bickering communist groups, radical students, mobilised workers, and liberal civil libertarians — had come together. Because of its radicalised stance on labour issues, the MMF had, within a couple of years, become immensely popular among the rank and file within the SITE area. The confrontation finally took place on 7 June 1972.29 It was payday at the Feroz Sultan textile mill in the SITE. The mill’s management refused to pay the labourers their back pay that had then been overdue for a month and also their portion of the workers’ participation fund30 due to unavailability of funds. Instead, the mill owners declared the mill closed — a lockout. This mill’s management, like several others, had a particularly confrontational relationship with its increasingly militant trade union. The workers, angry over the non-payment, encircled the mill and confined the management executives to their offices within the mill compound and started putting pressure on them to meet the workers’ terms. The management called the police and the latter used tear gas to disperse the workers. The police then locked the gates, confining a large number of workers inside the factory. It also arrested 14 persons for illegally confining the management staff. The workers regrouped and other labourers joined them from nearby factories and worker residential colonies. By late afternoon about 5,000 people had encircled the factory, demanding the release of their comrades and asking that the factory doors be opened so that the workers could come out. Some workers also started throwing stones at the police contingent present at the factory gates. The police then opened fire, claiming that the workers had fired first. Official reports accounted for three dead and scores injured, including three policemen.31 Two bodies were retrieved by the police, while the third was taken away by the retreating workers.32 The very next day the funeral procession of this worker was taken out from the labour colonies near Benaras Chowk (lit: roundabout/ circle), a thoroughfare in the western part of the city near the worker’s colonies. The police contingent waiting at the roundabout stopped the procession from proceeding further. The workers, in retaliation, started raising slogans. The police then fired tear gas shells to

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disperse the crowd. The crowd reacted by pelting stones at the police. The police force retreated, regrouped and then opened fire as the marchers walked onto the main road, killing 10 people and injuring dozens.33 Eyewitnesses told me of the total mayhem where people were running everywhere to avoid the barrage of bullets. According to estimates the firing went on for about half an hour.34 Two people I spoke to recalled seeing several bodies with their heads blown away, arguing that the police was not merely dispersing the crowd but had taken aim at people to kill. Another informant remembered counting seven dead bodies. This filled him with extreme rage and he wanted to continue walking with the funeral procession even though it meant that he could be injured and possibly killed.35 The English daily, Dawn, in its editorial condemned the incident by reporting that the firing was not only prolonged but also indiscriminate, as some people were killed and injured at a great distance from where the actual clash with the labourers had happened.36 A journalistic account from the Urdu press describes the immediate aftermath of the incident in the following terms: As the firing ended some of us reached Frontier colony where most of the deceased and injured lived. People were extremely angry — a middle-aged man, Saifur Rahman who also owns a hotel in Frontier Colony pleadingly asked us ‘was Pakistan created for this reason, so that the police could play with the lives of the poor?’ The children and relatives of the dead were uncontrolled in their grief and one only heard wailing and crying all over the colony.37

These two incidents on two consecutive days created a wildfire strike in all the labour areas of the city and industrial production in SITE and the Landhi–Korangi area came to a halt for 12 days. Over 900 hundred units were closed while workers wore black badges and red and black flags flew from nearly all factories in Karachi. The impact was felt all over the country — workers went on strike in many industrial units in Hyderabad, Sind and in other parts of the province. In Punjab, trade union leaders organised protest marches and their offices flew black flags to show their solidarity with their comrades in Karachi.38

The Post-Event Eight labour federation39 leaders along with eight workers’ representatives organised a Joint Action Committee to respond to the series

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of events that had occurred.40 The Committee held the police officers and district commissioner41 responsible for the killings and demanded their immediate suspension. In its negotiation with the Committee, the state was unwilling to discuss the issue of suspension of the officials. Some leaders complained about the state representatives dragging their feet. They would meet the Provincial Labour Minister, Abdus Sattar Gabol, on one day, the Governor of Sind, Mir Rasool Baksh Talpur, on the next and waited on the Chief Minister, Mumtaz Bhutto, on the third. In turn, all three government officials relayed their discussions to President Bhutto. In the meantime, the workers’ demands had also increased to include the release of all workers arrested after the killings and the withdrawal of the cases against them. The state partially agreed to these demands and said it would provide civic amenities in labour colonies, but would not agree on the issue of suspension of the responsible officials. After not meeting the labour leadership for two days, on 15 June, the Provincial Labour Minister unilaterally announced that an agreement had been reached. The government had decided to set up a one-member inquiry board headed by a High Court judge and decided that some officials would be transferred. There were other vague promises about the release of arrested workers from custody and about civic benefits for the striking workers. The government’s offer was contrary to the agreements that the labour leaders had earlier negotiated with the provincial government.42 The Joint Action Committee was caught by surprise. The government strategy was clearly to undermine their status and to portray them as incompetent in front of the workers. Some among the leadership, however, argued that to sustain the movement any longer would create economic hardships for the workers themselves and a more volatile situation could ensue. They suspected that the state, by extending the negotiation period, wanted precisely that to happen and expected the workers’ unity to unravel — some workers would return to work in desperation to feed their families. Fearing that prolonging the movement may aid the government’s plan to manipulate the situation to its own advantage, the Committee decided to accept the state’s demands. The leaders had met in a marathon session to weigh the pros and cons of the government’s offer and to assess their own strength. Some SITE leaders were in favour of prolonging the strike for a few more days to put more pressure on the government to accede to their demands. Others in the coalition did not feel

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confident that they could control the situation further and thought that the Landhi area may not be able to sustain the strike and hence the workers’ unity would be undermined. But prior to giving its reply to the government it sought to put the issue in front of a people’s court (avami adalat).43 On 16 June, labourers and their leaders met at an open rally near Benaras Chowk (the site of the earlier police firing). The leadership of different federations within the Committee had decided, by consensus, to persuade the workers to bring the strike to an end. However, when the leaders spoke, there was a total confusion of line and action. Some spoke to the emotional and angry crowd to accept the demands while others continued to shout for blood and created such fervour among the workers that the gathering was dispersed with a decision to continue the strike. A group of workers also raised slogans like ‘khun becha pani liya’ (exchanged water for our blood) against the negotiating team and accused them of betraying the workers as they had accepted the government’s false promises of civic benefits (for example, piped water connections) and had not demanded justice for the deaths of their fellow workers. Although the workers, by raising slogans, were clearly showing their extreme disappointment and rage at not receiving a just solution to their demands, some of the slogans and disruption at this event can be attributed to the rivalry among different left wing political groups vying for the workers’ support. The MMF, as mentioned previously, was the most organised and prominent group in the SITE area and its leadership (in particular Usman Baluch) had emerged as the leaders of the movement, yet there were other labour organisations that were jockeying for this position as well. The Labour Organising Committee (LOC), which had larger numerical strength in the Landhi–Korangi area, was affiliated to a pro-China communist group.44 This group was critical of the MMF for not providing a more revolutionary direction to the strike and also challenged the other labour federation leaders on their credentials to negotiate on behalf of the workers.45 Similarly, there were other political workers who were close to the pro-Moscow communist party that had its major influence in parts of Sind, especially Hyderabad. The following day, after a long procession, workers assembled at a city park.46 The leaders tried afresh to convince the workers to resume their duties. The workers remained vociferous in their opposition to the idea of ending the strike and asked the leaders not to compromise

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with the government. They kept raising slogans like ‘khun ka badla khun’ (blood for blood) and persisted with their defiant posture until a shop floor leader, Bawar Khan, took the microphone and finally succeeded in persuading the workers to end the strike.47

The Multiple Responses As much as the strike showed labour solidarity among various groups, it is also an interesting example that highlights the differences and competing politics among the movement’s leadership and their allied left wing political groups. The strike leaders, along with the striking workers, had participated in the pro-democracy movement of the late 1960s alongside some of the left elements in the PPP. They had struggled together against the bureaucracy and the army. In this regard the most outspoken of the PPP left leaders, Mairaj Mohammad Khan, was reported to have made a statement that if the Deputy Commissioner could not see the coffin of the workers when the firing started, he would soon see the coffins of major industrialists (reported in Pakistan Times, 13 June 1972).48 Khan, while speaking to me,49 reiterated that the police firing was purposefully encouraged by the bureaucracy and the industrialists themselves to undermine the pro-worker government and isolate the more radical cadres of the party.50 Leaders like Khan and others in the PPP left, however, also feared that by prolonging the strike, long-term political benefits could be lost as the party could take on a rigid position and become dominated by the more retrogressive forces within it. Other left leaning groups, like leaders of the pro-Peking Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP)51 made statements about how Pashtuns (instead of the working poor) were being killed in Karachi.52 The pro-Peking National Awami Party (NAP),53 true to its Maoist line, also criticised the movement. In a statement, the party praised and honoured the sacrifices of the workers but called it a directionless movement that could not succeed in bringing about meaningful change unless the peasants were included in the struggle with a comprehensive programme for revolutionary transformation.54 As this strike progressed, a section of the middle-class muhajir population in Karachi was gearing up for another fight. The creation of Bangladesh and the dissolution of the one-unit system had opened up the long dormant language and ethnicity question in Pakistani politics.55 Within this context, as the labour struggle was continuing in

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Karachi, there was a corresponding move by the Sind government, as a response to sustained demands by the Sindhi people, to restore the original status of Sindhi as a compulsory second language in schools. The bill also favoured, without prejudice to the national language (Urdu), the gradual learning of Sindhi by all provincial government officials. This bill created a violent reaction by a large section of Karachi’s muhajir population that was closely aligned with the Urdu language and its constructed linkage with Muslim nationalism.56 As a result of the language conflict in Karachi, some non-muhajir trade union leaders with whom I spoke remember that the muhajir workers of larger industrial units did not participate as much in the 1972 movement as the Pashtun and up-country workers who dominated in the textile mills. This may be quite probable as working conditions in the non-textile heavy industry sector, where muhajirs were in majority as workers, was far better than the one prevalent in the textile mills. The situation reflected a hierarchy of labour positions, where those who were better off did not culturally or politically identify with the larger struggle. However, the comments by my informants may also represent a contemporary emphasis on identity politics in Pakistan and signify Karachi’s recent history of ethnic violence that has at times polarised the city.57 In contrast to these leaders, rank and file workers remembered the period as one in which ethnic difference did not play any role and muhajirs, Pashtuns and Punjabis, workers of all ethnicities, participated equally in the strike. Having said so, it has to be admitted that such formulations may represent a yearning for simpler times for these workers who in recent years have suffered much, economically and in some cases through loss of lives, due to the increase in ethnic conflict and violence in Karachi. As a response to civic unrest in the city, the government portrayed the situation as being manipulated by anti-state elements that were simultaneously creating language disturbances and labour problems.58 Anti-state, in this context, basically meant to be working for India or the Soviet Union. The PPP government invoked this anti-communist rhetoric to attack the National Awami Party (NAP), especially its proMoscow wing, along with other groups that remained a political threat from the left for the PPP.59 This inference was laced in the ethnic and political culture of Pakistani society. The pro-Moscow NAP had its power base in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and in Baluchistan (both provinces having large Pashtun populations), where it had won provincial elections and formed the state government

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(in NWFP as a coalition partner with Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI)). By calling the predominantly Pashtun striking workers anti-state, the PPP leadership was seeking to discredit the NAP (pro-Moscow) by linking it to Pashtun nationalism and as a Soviet stooge within Pakistani politics. The NAP (pro-Moscow) was indeed nationalist in orientation with a broad progressive agenda, but had very little influence on the actual workers in Karachi during the strike that was being led to a large extent by the more locally-based MMF and its allied leadership. Bhutto personally, in a briefing to the press, however, sought to link the MMF with the NAP (pro-Moscow).60 Further, the Chief Minister of Sind, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, who was the administrative head of the province, seldom met the labour leaders during the negotiations. He delegated this work to the governor who was a representative of the federal government. Yet Mumtaz Bhutto did meet some Pashtun civic leaders and asked for their help in restoring civic peace within the city. This gesture was clearly to inculcate an idea that the labour strike was not a class issue or one of law and order, but specifically a Pashtun problem.61 With such a move against the NAP and by playing the ethnic card, the PPP was also echoing a more deep-seated political rhetoric in Pakistan’s political history. Khan Abdul Wali Khan, President of the pro-Moscow NAP, was the son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Pashtun nationalist leader.62 This family had historically been portrayed as anti-Pakistan by Pakistan’s political establishment due to Ghaffar Khan’s close association with the Indian National Congress in the years preceding the independence of Pakistan. Moreover, the pro-Moscow NAP was one of the few political parties in Pakistan that had not only condemned army action in East Pakistan (while the PPP left had supported it) but considered the Indian army’s involvement in the former eastern wing as a support to the liberation struggle of the Bengali people. The party had also called for Bangladesh’s recognition after its creation.63 It is hence conceivable that Bhutto wanted to paint the NAP (pro-Moscow) as anti-Pakistan early on in his tenure. This argument holds if we analyse the accusation that NAP was fomenting the labour struggle as creating a political space for the future dismissal of the NAP governments in Baluchistan and NWFP, which Bhutto eventually carried out in 1973. In addition to the ethnic card, the PPP government continuously tried to challenge the trade unions’ claims of representing the workers by evoking its own history of introducing labour friendly laws and

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representing the true aspirations of the working masses. The state periodically argued that a disciplined work force was important for production and if the workers behaved then the state would deliver on its promise of fending for their just rights.64 This paternalistic attitude toward the workers was surprisingly close to that of the trade unionist leadership. At the level of the trade union leadership, there was a genuine fear of the chaotic and anarchic potential of the workers themselves. The leaders, in interviews, continuously stressed that the movement was like an exploding volcano.65 They argued that workers were finally taking out their frustration after years of oppression by the previous regimes. In saying this, they emphasised the untrained nature of the labour force. They highlighted the lack of discipline that comes from not being part of organised trade unions that gives workers a sense of working within the decisions made by the trade union leadership and hence inculcates within them the understanding of when to go forward and when to stop. The mob-like character of the labour movement needed to be checked as it could set dangerous precedents for prolonged anarchic violence.66 The workers who had lived through the strikes, however, in speaking to me, painted a different picture of workers’ discipline and life during the struggle. Many with whom I spoke still remembered the strike in June 1972 as a pivotal moment in their lives. In comparison to the uncertainties that they faced in contemporary life, with little job security, contract labour and other social and economic difficulties, they recall their participation in the strikes for better pay and living conditions as an empowering phase in their lives. One of them said, ‘if such a movement begins today we shall be delivered benefits at home’. Clearly, they were proud of the fact that they controlled the SITE area and the government was forced to recognise their strength. They also explained that despite provocations in the form of police harassment and periodic arrests of labour activists, not a single untoward or violent act could be attributed to the labour movement, an example of their discipline and solidarity that was unprecedented. They spelt out in great detail how within the colonies people survived through mutual help and through the generosity of local shopkeepers who would provide food items and other essentials on loan to the families of the striking workers. They offered these stories as examples of how the workers’ just cause was appreciated and reciprocated in the community at large. This may be a romantic picture of their past, but it

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needs to be understood with reference to the precarious conditions of their present day life.

The Paternal Unions An understanding of Pakistani trade union leadership comes from a recent review of a book on the subcontinent’s trade union politics. In this review, the late sociologist Hamza Alavi67 argues that historically, Pakistani trade union leaders were primarily middlemen (labourlawyers) between the working masses and Pakistan’s government sponsored a highly bureaucratised system of labour arbitration. The government created institutions such as labour courts and tribunals, gave authority to officials in labour departments to mediate labour disputes, and created a maze of laws and procedures that made it virtually impossible for local factory based leadership to negotiate with the state. Professional trade union leadership consisting of the labour-lawyers, Alavi stresses, represented the labourers in government designated forums and had very little incentive to change this system of redress as it only strengthened their own position in relation to the rank and file workers. My own interviews with workers and left wing student leaders who were active during 1972 confirm the gap depicted by Alavi in this review. This form of leadership was not much different from the one discussed by Dipesh Chakrabarty (1989) in his text on jute workers in colonial Bengal. Chakrabarty shows how the relationship between the leadership and the workers was one that can be read within the idiom of babu-coolie, where the babus (trade union leaders) held office outside the factory, occasionally writing petitions or holding meetings at different venues (1989:154). He continues to argue that the Bengali left leadership remained entrenched in a paradox where they sought to radicalise the workers yet themselves were situated in a hierarchical relationship with the labouring poor. Similarly, in the 1972 movement, the trade unionists spoke of representing and leading the workers. Not unlike the state, the predominantly urban leadership sought to contain the chaotic potential that they saw in the workers. The majority of the non-Urdu speaking (muhajir) workers were considered bodies that needed to be tamed and organised. They were seen as newly urban people who had yet to shed their tribal culture steeped in hierarchical social relations. For that matter, they may have been conceived as peasants who could not represent themselves but needed to be educated into being a part

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of the trade union culture of discipline and constraint, giving them a distance from their non-egalitarian past towards an egalitarian membership into a democratic process.68 In this process, the trade union leaders always retained the onus of educating and guiding. In the 1972 movement, the example of this distance was evident when the shop floor leader Bawar Khan asked the workers to agree to the terms of ending the strike for the second day in a row. Even though multiple trade union leaders had implored with the workers to end the strike, they remained unconvinced and kept on raising slogans. Bawar Khan then took the microphone and made a very passionate speech for almost three quarters of an hour. Bawar was extremely popular among the workers and was famous for his integrity and honesty. He made appeals against disunity and warned the labourers that this is what the government was looking for. He asked the workers to use their brains instead of being emotional; in this he was echoing the words of Nabi Ahmed, the veteran trade unionist who had unsuccessfully sought to convince the workers on both days. He also swore on his children that he would never betray the labourers and would always work for their benefit. Finally, he used the example of the leadership as being generals who unlike the generals of the Pakistani Army would not let the jawans (foot-soldiers) down.69 By swearing on his children, Bawar Khan invoked an important cultural symbol. He asked the labourers to agree with the leaders and trust them on the decision of stopping the strikes, stressing that if there were to be an underhand deal with the government on this issue, then blight and ill-health may come on his own children. To invoke the supernatural and God’s wrath on his own kin was an idiom that was familiar to the majority of the participants, a somewhat unmodern belief within a gathering of the ‘vanguard proletariats’.70 The use of the language of generals and foot-soldiers, which finally convinced the workers to stop the strike, may have had multiple meanings for the workers as well. As mentioned, a majority of the workers were ethnically Pashtun. There is a tradition among the Pathans of avenging their dead and of safeguarding their honour (Pakhtunwali). Such histories were tempered by the participation of Pashtuns in India’s freedom struggle under the guidance of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi. Ghaffar Khan in the 1930s and 1940s, as Mukulika Banerjee (2000) describes, persuaded Pashtun tribes to end their internal feuding to discipline themselves into nonviolent

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nationalist political actors, the Khudai Khitmatgars. This transformation, as Guha (1994) also suggests, was by taming the more autonomous local sentiments into those of a controlled national movement that responded to their leaders. The Khudai Khitmatgars would have training camps and a hierarchy of officials who had titles of captain, major and general (Banerjee 2000). Some older workers may have participated in the nationalist movement themselves, others may have had fathers, uncles and elder brothers who were Khudai Khitmatgars. Among the workers there may have been a memory steeped in a construction of an officer corps that was far more egalitarian — where a person of low social position or social status could attain a high rank — than the regular Pakistan Army, where lineage, social status and wealth, to a large degree, determined a vast gulf between the commissioned officers and the rest of the men. Hence Bawar Khan’s use of the military metaphor, even though steeped in a language of hierarchy, may have resonated within the framework of an historical experience of the radicalised Pashtun workers. Yet, the appeal to the workers in a language of army generals and soldiers does not conform (Khudai Khitmatgars or otherwise) to the ideal of voluntary contractual relationship that is commonly linked with bourgeois and modern notions of a democratic trade union movement. Rather, it falls back on the imagery of the unquestioned trust and loyalty of a more hierarchical order. I argue that the trade union movement’s leadership at this juncture, irrespective of its rhetoric of radical change, did not want to go beyond pushing for liberal democratic rights of association, speech and state welfare. Understanding that the workers had not become disciplined and trained enough (they were still emotional: not using their brains) for the final transcendence beyond a capitalist bourgeois order. The halting of the strike needs to be, therefore, understood within such analytical parameters.

The Continuing Struggle While the crisis in the SITE area came to a somewhat unsure end, labour strife intensified in the Landhi–Korangi area. This was the newer of the two industrial areas and the labour federations were not as entrenched among the unions there. This area had almost 300 industrial units employing 80,000 workers. After the 1969 IRO, when CBAs were allowed to operate openly, young radicals who had come up from the shop floor and had connections with outside/underground

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communist groups started forming unions that in many industries defeated the older federations or management supported unions. During the ongoing struggle in the early 1970s, the workers had formed the Landhi–Korangi Labour Organising Committee (LOC) to press for demands that were similar to the ones in the SITE area. However, the radicalised nature of the workers in some mills led to the taking over of the mills rather than their mere encirclement, which was the favoured form of action in SITE. The workers occasionally took management officials hostage to stress their demands. In a case consisting of dismissals and arrests of union leaders in a governmentowned factory71 in September 1972, the LOC demanded their release and as a show of protest ordered a two-hour strike every day until the demands were met. Sirens would be heard from one factory to another and workers would bring production to a stop. To intensify their struggle, the workers organised a 60-hour strike in sympathy of the arrested workers. The workers raised their demands further and asked to be paid for the strike period along with the release of their fellow workers.72 This situation prevailed until early October when a faction of the workers decided to occupy two mills — Gul Ahmed Textiles and Dawood Cotton. As a response, large contingents of the provincial police and paramilitary forces were deployed by the state. The workers threatened to blow up the boiler of one of the mills if the police dared enter the premises. The police then cut off the power and gas supply of the mills. An attack on the workers inside these mills was imminent. The occupying labour leaders spurned mediations by leftleaning PPP leaders and other trade union leaders.73 They claimed that the SITE leadership had failed in pursuing the workers’ cause and had surrendered the momentum, gaining nothing in return from the state. It was the Muslim month of Ramadan and at dawn on 18 October 1972, while the workers were preparing for their breakfast, the police bulldozed the factory walls and entered the premises of the occupied mills. Official reports give an account of four dead and over 50 injured, while eyewitnesses claim that mortality rates were far higher. The leadership within the mills managed to flee and the next day regrouped on the hills adjacent to the industrial area. A few days later, another firing incident occurred in these hills; three more people were killed. The army, for the first time after its 1971 defeat, was eventually called in to control the situation and the workers were forced back to work under their supervision. This ended the confrontation of 1972.

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The extreme action by the state corresponded to the extreme position taken by the workers. Unlike the SITE area, the Landhi–Korangi trade unions were politically closer to the Labour Organising Committee, whose leadership, as mentioned above, was influenced by a pro-China communist group. The group itself had internal factions; Mairaj Mohammad Khan, the minister in the PPP government, was also a member of this group. While Khan sought to mediate between the government and the striking workers, other members of this proChina group — like Zainuddin Khan Lodhi and Rashid Hasan Khan, a charismatic student leader — were more militant in their approach toward the strike.74 These leaders, along with radical elements in other communist groups like the MKP, guided the workers. They believed that the state had become weak due to its defeat in East Pakistan/ Bangladesh and the workers had finally arisen from their slumber. This, according to them, was an insurrectionary moment much like 1917 in Russia. They argued that once the state violence against the working classes was exposed, the nation and all the progressive forces would rise in their support and sweep the state away. People I spoke to also attested to the fact that the LOC members had felt sidelined during the SITE upheaval earlier in the summer and had not agreed with the way the strike had ended. The Landhi strike was their response to the Bhutto government for its atrocities.75 It should be noted that although in the SITE area there was much worker anger against the industrialists, the strike itself was spontaneous and was a reaction to the killings on 7 and 8 June. In Landhi, the events that led to the confrontation were partly created by the workers and their leaders. How idealistic their non-compromising position was is an endless debate among left wing cadres to this day. Some argue against the workers’ position as having been evidence of left wing extremism and others say that the indisciplined workers did not know when to stop. What remains unanalysed in these debates are the points of view of the workers themselves. It is still an open question why so many participated and under what conditions and for what kinds of imaginary future were they willing to risk their lives. Much research needs to be done on this very crucial aspect of the 1972 struggle. Yet, the left debates echo the intellectual hierarchy and physical distance between those on the receiving end of state violence and those who made theoretical plans for this tragedy. By continuously reframing the events in terms of whether it was the correct moment to confront the state, such arguments reinsert and reduce the multiplicity and

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plurality of the struggle, merely subordinating these issues to a predetermined point of view of whether it was a progressive or a retrogressive move (see Ranciere 1983: 1–16).

The Aftermath In its effort to re-establish state authority after the debacle in Bangladesh, the Bhutto government not only crushed the radicalised movement, but sought to reconfigure the working class according to its own vision of clientilist politics. There was also severe repression, in the shape of arrests and dismissals, of any dissenting voice from within the working class. Bawar Khan, the working class leader, who, through his oratory, had convinced the workers to stop the strike, was arrested and tortured for several days soon after the strike ended. Economic and social pressures to feed his family forced him to take a job as a ship hand. He left the country for some years and never entered active labour politics again. Such examples made others uneasy about entering the arena of confrontational politics. Even PPP members and ministers like Mairaj Mohammad Khan were not spared. Khan resigned as Minister of State in protest against the October action in the Landhi area. In November 1973, he resigned from the basic membership of the party in opposition to the increasing undemocratic character of the Bhutto regime.76 He was also later arrested and tortured in prison on charges of aiding the popular insurrection in Baluchistan. There is no doubt that Bhutto’s labour laws gave workers unheard of benefits in Pakistan’s labour history. Allowances for inflation, social security benefits, old age pension, increased participation in management by workers, increase in the per centage of workers’ participatory fund from 2.5 per cent to 5 per cent and increase in gratuity funds are some of its salient features. However, the trade union movement also suffered immensely in this period. Labour laws were periodically announced without taking into account the labour’s point of view. Strikes were broken up through administrative and coercive means. There was a continuation of centralised and bureaucratised handling of industrial disputes as the state’s labour department and the newly formed Industrial Relations Commission became prominent in coercing or corrupting the labour leadership. In nationalised industries, people were given employment far beyond the maximum requirement, thus diluting the influence of the existing unions and helping in the formation of a PPP supportive union. Some prominent labour leaders were given material incentives

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to support the state machinery and a general corruption of values seeped into the movement. Through the introduction of the quota system, workers in most state industries were hired according to regional and ethnically fixed quotas. This move, while providing jobs to those who were earlier excluded on the basis of their ethnicity, also divided the working class according to ethnic criteria where vertical linkages became more important than horizontal solidarity. The collapse of the textile industry in the mid 1970s led to a largescale dislocation of textile workers. The immigration of Pakistani labour to the oil-rich Arab Gulf states also brought with it a qualitative change in the labour movement. In an ongoing saga of deprivation, Bhutto’s overthrow by another military regime intensified the brutality against labour organisations during General Zia ul-Haq’s tenure (1977–88). That untold history needs a detailed discussion in another or several other texts. Today the low level of unionisation, contract labour, flexible manufacturing regimes and the dominance of informal sector work creates new challenges for those involved in organising the workers. Bhutto’s government, inclusive of its populist rhetoric and attempts to institute reform in Pakistan’s cultural and political life, continued to harass and persecute any and all political opposition within and outside the party, from the left or from the right of the political spectrum. One of the most egregious acts was the dismissal of the Baluchistan NAP government in 1973 on the pretext that it was receiving arms shipments from Iraq and was involved in a conspiracy with the Soviet Union and Iraq to break up Pakistan and Iran. This dismissal led to the protest and the subsequent resignation of the NAP–JUI coalition government in NWFP. On a more serious note, it led to a popular armed insurgency in Baluchistan that was brutally crushed by the PPP government. Bhutto provided the Pakistan military a free reign in that province; enabling the military to return to public life after its defeat in East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. This invigorated the military, which later, through a coup in 1977, forced Bhutto out of power.

Concluding Discussion The timing of the labour movement coincided with one of the most vulnerable periods in history of Pakistan. The division of the country and the overthrow of a dictatorial regime opened up a political space for radical change that was unprecedented in the nation’s life.

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It is argued by some (see Shaheed 1977; Ali 1983; Shaheed 1983) that during this movement the working class had, for the first time, shed its narrow economistic demands and confronted the state for broader political gains. This celebration of emancipation is prefigured in a move towards becoming a class unto itself and may reflect an analytical trope on historical writings on the working class. In a rethinking of this argument in this article, I suggest that the cleavages within the working class itself were just beneath the surface. Differences based on political affiliation, region, language and ethnicity were dividing the working class in this period as there were simultaneous efforts to consolidate a united front of working class rights by some trade union leaders and radical political activists. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (1989) work on Bengali working class politics in the early twentieth century, I submit that class-based solidarities and alliances are created in specific moments of struggle for certain immediate goals and may coexist with other solidarities that may encompass differences in language, region and ethnicity. To question the dichotomy between the positivity of class alliances and the negativity of ‘earlier’ forms of identity formation is to rethink the teleology in which labour history may find itself and to rethink how in different geographies a history of emancipation and struggle may take varied forms. Further, I maintain a distance from those historical representations of struggle that tend to exclude force, uncertainty, domination, disdain and confusion by normalising the struggle, evacuating its messiness — making it part of a narrative of assured advance toward a specified outcome (Pandey 2001: 4–5). Rather than show a united labour movement, I have tried to show the different ways in which the left itself was divided and also the distance between the leadership and the workers themselves. In light of Ranajit Guha’s work (1994), I hence also show how the trade union leaders sought to discipline an undisciplined and autonomous subaltern collectivity that would respond to the desires of the leadership. Yet, the final word belongs to the workers themselves. In their interviews with me, some rank and file workers from the SITE area lamented how they only wanted those who had ordered the firing dismissed from their jobs. One said,