LOOKING IN FROM WITHIN
Durriya Kazi
At school in British India, my mother was penalized by her British teacher for writing in her history assignment, “The War of Independence”, instead of “The Mutiny”. This small incident is a microcosmic view of what is increasingly being considered a primary obstacle in creating an appropriate space for study by, what is termed as, the “home” scholar.[1]
There is a need to develop a vocabulary that is free of the pre-associations of current cultural theories that grew out of European post-modern approaches. While cultural studies have passed on to “home” scholars, the paradigms of debate used are the same. It is only by examining and developing a new lexicon that we can avoid hearing “inflections of the mother tongue in alien hands” [2] . This is a complex task.
The experience of colonization in South Asia is more or less the experience of other decolonized nations of the world, and each of these nations is struggling to speak for itself in a way that is not esoteric, but that can be understood in a cosmopolitan world, and can stand independently of, and parallel to, western epistemology. However, here I will speak specifically about Pakistan and the British policies in India.
The Muslim rulers, and more so the Sufis of India, made an art of intellectual assimilation, introducing the philosophies of cross–geographical Muslim scholarship and art, and absorbing local religious and social theories. One can debate how successful they were, or how objective. It was successful enough to at least evolve a specific Indo-Islamic language in the arts, philosophy and religion.
The final blow came with the famous or infamous “Minute on Indian Education” 2nd of February, 1835, by Thomas B. Macaulay, a mesmerising piece of oratory whose logic was, and is, difficult to resist. In effect, he, and others like Dalhousie, systematically set into motion the process of unravelling the very fabric of Indian social and economic ecology that had developed over thousand of years, by shaking the faith of the Indian in his own ways.
I will quote some parts of this speech:
“A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” [4] Macaulay said, arguing for the use of English in India:
“The dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them, natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories.”[5]
“Whoever knows that language (English) has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.[6]”
Ironically this is a place that, perhaps, once Arabic occupied.
Macaulay has a point when he says :
“Had our ancestors .... neglected the language of Thucydides and Plato, and the language of Cicero and Tacitus, had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island, had they printed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon and romances in Norman French, –would England ever have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity.”[7]
Of course this was not motivated by any altruism to the spread of knowledge, but was a pragmatic strategy to rule unchallenged.
His recommendation was to stop funding to the Arabic and Sanskrit Colleges which would... “form a nest not merely of helpless place hunters but of bigots prompted alike by passion and by interest to raise a cry against every useful scheme of education”. [8] There was a fear of rebellion.
It was also for the practical needs of a small contingent of British administrators to rule a country several times its size and several times its population. [9]
“..it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, –a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”[10]
As the Hindu Nationalist, MSN Menon puts it: “ the ‘children of Macaulay’ grew up ashamed of their civilisation, of their ancestors, while they felt overwhelmed by the ‘great achievements’ of
This was equally true of the Muslims in India. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan[12] may have brought Muslims out of the madressa, but he brought them into Macauley’s world. Although, like the Hindus, the Muslims had never abandoned their religion, and the breakaway Jamia Millia University in Delhi was a conscious attempt to resist the over anglicizing of education.
Nevertheless what gained hold was a sense of inadequacy. The Muslims of what is now Pakistan have faced this sense of inadequacy twice: First through Macaulayism, and secondly during the Zia years which imposed the “arabization” of Islam. Not only had we inherited a generational loss of confidence vis a vis the European dismissal of our past achievements, we now were made to feel we were not true Muslims unless we replaced the burqa with the hijab and khuda hafiz with Allah hafiz, and pagri with kefiya[13]. The implied logic was that since Islam came to
Fanon defined three phases in the role of intellectuals in de-colonized countries :
“In the first phase,
the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power. . . His inspiration is European… This is the period of unqualified assimilation.
In the second phase,
we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is. . . Past happenings of the bygone days of his childhood will be brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed aestheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies. . . . We spew ourselves up.
In the third phase, the “fighting phase”, the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people’s lethargy an honoured place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; (who now) feel the need to speak to their nation, to compose the sentence which expresses the heart of the people and to become the mouthpiece of a new reality in action.” [14]
Fanon is angry. In
Culture remains unvoiced, quietly or, in some instances, speedily changing, unnoticed like a middle child. An opacity has developed, a furtive practice of secret atomized resistance, that emerges both in the staging of Moulin Rouge or Mama Mia in Pakistan,[15] or in the akharas[16] in quiet back streets defying the growing conservatism in dress code. Cultural identities have also gone underground: people publically wear beards and cover every inch of their female bodies, and make their homes and close social circles the only arena in which to remain Seraiki, or Gujrati or Luknawi[17] in language, choice of music, cuisine or wedding ceremonies. The minorities lie low, adopting Muslim names and Muslim dress.
The cultural literati are unchallenged by the people they speak for, who, in any case, never hear them. They do not make a presence on television screens, or radio, the two most widespread instruments of communication. They speak in English, or elegant Urdu. They present their art in galleries that seem inaccessible to many, their films go on international circuits, their books nestle in discrete bookshops.
The literati themselves are atomized into pockets determined by language or disciplines, rarely closing rank. When they venture across our national borders, they carry the burden of their countrymen to convince a hostile world of their ordinary humanity, of their sameness, by speaking as Joanna Sharp and Gaytri Spivak put it, “in adopted Western thought, reasoning and language” in order to be heard. Instead of expressing “their own reasoning, forms of knowledge or logic, they must instead form their knowledge to Western ways of knowing”[18]
Back home, they have been confined or confine themselves from their own people whom they lovingly observe and depict in their works, usually to foreign audiences. “However,” Fanon stresses, “at the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a work he fails to recognize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion, . . .of a much more fundamental substance which itself is continually being renewed.”[19]
More about this “fundamental substance”, this “teeming” “hidden life”:
By defining what we see and what we experience in “western ways of knowing”, much gets left out, remains unnoticed or is looked at as merely amusing practices of the uninitiated. Not only have decisions been made of what is worthy of attention but also what would be the conceptual framework for examining what was considered worthy. Thus miniature painting, classical music, the mushaira[20], and Fashion Week are considered as significant cultural expressions, while the Horse and Cattle show[21], Malakhra [22]or poetry on the walls of highway tea shops or on transport is not. We are still following Mathew Arnold’s definition “Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world”[23]
The revolutionary thinker Raymond Williams redefined culture: "Where culture meant a state or habit of the mind, or the body of intellectual and moral activities, it means now, also, a whole way of life."[24]
Herbert Read, wrote a paper in the 40s called provocatively “To Hell with Culture” in which he reveals that the Greeks had no word for culture: “They had good architects, good sculptors, good poets, just as they had good craftsmen and good statesmen. They knew that their way of life was a good way of life, and they were willing if necessary to fight to defend it. But it would never have occurred to them that they had a separate commodity, culture --something to be given a trade-mark by their academicians, something to be acquired by superior people with sufficient time and money, something to be exported to foreign countries along with figs and olives. It wasn't even an invisible export: it was something natural if it existed at all--something of which they were unconscious, something as instinctive as their language or the complexion of their skins. It could not even be described as a by-product of their way of life: it was that way of life itself.” [25] Culture he says was the result of the Capitalism that grew out of Empire (starting with the
Read goes on to say: “It is not until art expresses the immediate hopes and aspirations of humanity that it acquires its social relevance... A culture begins with simple things – with the way the potter moulds the clay on the wheel, the way a weaver threads his yarns, the way the builder builds his house. Greek culture did not begin with the Parthenon: it began with a whitewashed hut on a hillside. Culture has always developed as a slow but sure refinement and elaboration of simple things – refinement and elaboration of speech, refinement and elaboration of shapes, refinement and elaboration of proportions, with the original purity persisting right through….until a society can produce beautiful pots and pans as naturally as it grows potatoes, it will be incapable of those higher forms of art which in the past have taken the form of temples and cathedrals, epics and dramas.”[26]
In Urdu the word for culture, saqafat, is an all encompassing word: wider than tehzeeb, including both rasm-o-rawaj ( customs), and the lived culture. In“Hamari saqafat mit rahi hai? ”[27] the Urdu literary critic, Amjad Ali Shakir, presents a more local definition of culture. He mentions that the word saqafat[28] comes from the idea of straightening one’s spear: burcha seedha karna, as well as incorporating the more common concept of “tending to” (paalna), This suggests not a passive revisiting of the past but a direction for future practices. He suggests that the geography not the history of Pakistan determines its culture which is as diverse as its many mountains and valleys. By this definition the culture of the land is 10,000 years old, but the colonial enterprise was to make the native feel his presence was transient, incidental , to make him feel unworthy. But then Shakir adds, feeling unworthy has now become part of Pakistani culture, and is expressed through a wry and satirical sense of humour. The wounds of history find their way into Pakistani literature, songs, even the bolian or idioms and graffiti he came across written on prison walls. One could add to this list the enigmatic soul-baring verses routinely written on public transport. Shakir says wryly, that Pakistanis have become as apologetic about their culture, as one does after having made a big mistake. This, he says, was the colonial intention: to make the Indian feel rootless. Interestingly he uses the word lehan or intonation when he speaks of architecture or Amir Khusro, instead of identity. Quoting the well known Sindhi poet, Sheikh Ayaz, he states: “in our diversity is our unity which does not make us better than anyone, but simply different”. [29]
In order to develop a theoretical approach to the study of e.g. Pakistani society and culture, to understand the internal logic of its complex layers, there needs to be, what Thomas Samuel Kuhn called, a paradigm shift, [30] to understand that which would never have been considered valid before, to make a space for subjective perspectives, which he said were key to the progress of knowledge. My references in this paper to writers from other contexts, despite a conscious effort to not rely on postcolonial, or postmodern constructs, underscores the need to develop home scholarship that develops its own parameters of critical studies. There has been substantial scholarship of Pakistan’s past, its archaeological and political history. However there has been what I can only call an avoidance of any substantive study of its cultural history outside of these contexts. One of the major checks to scholarship has been the persistent inclusion of the Ideology of Pakistan, which, like all ideologies, is an imagined framework . Another stumbling block is linking the culture and history of Pakistan to religion, to 711 AD, which signals the first Muslim military conquest in India, and the pre and post partition Muslim presence, throwing in references to folk culture to resolve contested identities. A third factor is the presentation of choices of histories to Pakistanis : a 10,000 year old geographical history; a Muslim history; a South Asian history; or a modern post 1947[31] history.
Looking at critical readings of Urdu literature would ordinarily be a logical place to start, but critical writings on Urdu literature appear to be a fairly recent activity and western terminologies are translated into Urdu to form the epistemological base for these readings. Nevertheless there is a movement to extract history from literary writings, as literature is a very close reflection of the times it was written in.
To develop our own epistemology we need to ask some basic questions: what constitutes knowledge? How is it to be acquired? What do people know? How do they know what they know? Who will ask the questions? To whom will the questions be directed?
The past is a foreign land brought alive by anecdotes. The place to start is the present and trace back the threads if need be. Perhaps theories cannot be determined until after the collection of knowledge. We need to look everywhere: at people’s lives, the objects they use, how they use them, the songs that fill their memories, the images they make, the jokes they SMS, the stories and myths they relate, the games they play, the way they dwell in their homes, the life they long for. I have a long list. Many scholars have already been collating the lived cultures of people: Dr Nabi Bux Khan Baloch[32] has collected the folklore of Sindh, Lok Virsa[33] has been quietly documenting village practices, photographers have recorded people’s lives, diaries have been preserved, folk love stories are being sung. There is a need to bring all these together much as Saima Zaidi’s book Mazaar Bazaar[34], or The Citizen’s Archive of Pakistan[35] has begun to do. Our scholars have to start listening to these hidden and sometimes suppressed stories and start asking the right questions: We need to ask why Ibn e Safi’s [36] mystery and suspense stories have enthralled generations of readers since the 1940s ; why the Gujjars[37] invested in Sultan Rahi’s[38] films and kept Pakistani cinema alive; what does it mean that we loudly interject our appreciation during poetry or music recitals?
Fanon, speaking of the native writer wrote:
“the artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turns paradoxically towards the past and away from actual events. But the native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art must realize that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. He must
go until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will be found…. A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. .. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.”[39]
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[1] Introduction to New Terrains in Southeast Asian History. Ed Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee.
[2] Aamir R. Mufti. Enlightenment in the Colony: the Jewish Question and
the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture.
Press, 2007
[3] Lord Dalhousie who was Governor General from 1848 to 1856, devised the Doctrine of Lapse, 1848, by which princely states were annexed by the East India Company if the ruler was either found to be incompetent or died without a direct male heir.
[4] Thomas B. Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” 2nd of February, 1835 ( note that this was before 1858 when India officially became part of the Empire, and while it was still ostensibly managed by the trading East India Company) .
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid
[7] ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] “By the end of Queen VictoriaÃs reign, some 300 million Indians were ruled by barely 1500 administrators of the Indian Civil Service.”The British Raj Zachary Nunn http://www.choose.drake.edu/artsci/PolSci/ssjrnl/2001/nunn.html
[10] Ibid.
[11] Macaulay and
By M.S.N. Menon The Organiser Vol. LXI, No. 42, Page: 36/39 New Delhi, April 25, 2010
[12] Sir Syed Ahmed Khan established the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College, in 1875, later known simply as Aligarh Muslim University which, for the first time since the end of the Mughal Empire, offered modern education to the Muslims.
[13] Burqa (Persian- urdu) hijab (Arabic) cloth covering of the female body; Khuda hafiz ( Persian-Urdu) Allah Hafiz ( Arabic ) goodbye; pagri ( Urdu) traditional male Pakistani turban ; kefiya ( Arabic) cloth Arab headdress for men
[14] Frantz Fanon “On National Culture” (1961)
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington.
Grove, 1963.
[15] Travelling local productions of western musicals, in 2009, that played to great acclaim in major cities of Pakistan .
[16] Pakistani wrestling arenas.
[17] Seraiki, Gujrati, Lukhnawi prominent vernacular populations from South Punjab, Gujrat and Lucknow respectively.
[18] Sharp, Joanne Geographies of Postcolonialism, chapter 6: Can the Subaltern Speak. SAGE Publications, 2008.
[19] FRANTZ FANON “ON NATIONAL CULTURE” (1961)
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington.
Grove, 1963.
[20] A usually large gathering where Poets recite their verse to an audience
[21] Annual festivals of Punjab and Sindh where rural communities bring their best cattle and horses, handicrafts and participate in traditional sports and folk music.
[22] A style of wrestling from the Province of Sindh, Pakistan.
[24] Raymond WILLIAMS, Culture and Society 1780-1950,
[27] Translation: Is our culture being erased?
[28] Translation: culture
[30] T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1st. ed.,
[31] The creation of Pakistan took place on 14th August 1947.
[32] Sindhi Lok Kahaniyoon Dr. Nabi Bux Khan Baloch, Sindhi Adabi Board, Hyderabad. 1962
[33] The national institute for the preservation of folk cultures, Islamabad.
[34] Mazaar Bazaar, Ed.Saima Zaidi, Oxford University Press Pakistan 2010. Essays on Pakistani Visual Culture.
[35] The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) is a not for profit association dedicated to preserving Personal narratives of Pakistanis. www.citizensarchive.org
[36] Ibn e Safi 1928 – 1980. Seminal mystery writer of Pakistan whose Jasoosi Dunya (125 novels), and Imran Series (120 novels) have a huge cult following.
[37] The Gujjars, a widespread tribe in Pakistan, have been the main investors in formula Punjabi films.
[38] Sultan Rahi, Lollywood actor who dominated films from 1972 until his sudden death in 1996
[39] Frantz Fanon “On National Culture” (1961)
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington.
Grove, 1963.
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