I reviewed Alia Malek’s Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice for Dawn. You can read the full review here.

On March 21, 2012, Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi woman, was fatally beaten with a tire iron in Southern California. A note found near her said, “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” The investigators asserted that it was an isolated incident and that other Iraqis need not worry. Lumping disparate peoples into threats and describing violence against them as “isolated incidents” works in tandem. The former justifies sustained violence and the latter diverts our attention from the systemic nature of this violence. What we see instead are exceptional events — “isolated incidents” of violence suspended outside the broader societal context and exigencies of the national security state. We don’t see them as the latest in a long chain of violence on a particular group of people or an episode in the nation’s deep history of violence and dispossession.

Alia Malek’s work of oral history, Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice, gives the lie to the frame — isolated incident — that holds within it the image of the idyllic American society as it effaces its systematic injustices. By including the violated as victims of isolated crimes, this frame excludes the chorus of their voices. It shuts out the stories of unrelenting violence: of racial terrors such as beatings and violent deaths; of legal terrors such as incarcerations, detentions, and deportations; of routine, everyday violence such as bullying at school, employment discrimination, travelling made arduous, racist jibes and sneers. In Malek’s words, “the personal stories and lived experiences of these realities remain excluded from the general understanding of the American experience, as well as the mainstream narrative about 9/11 and the War on Terror.” In Patriot Acts that chorus pushes at the constricting margins of the frame and enables us to see the lives damaged and the families shattered by America’s domestic war on terror. 

Here is how I introduced Jahangir earlier:

I walk down towards the rooms – there is an old man, in white wife-beater, a dhoti, and two fistfuls of shockingly white beard. He is sitting in front of a canvas on which is a bucolic village scene with a tube-well and a date palm. He looks up, and smiles, and kinda springs off the chair. He is wearing hipster glasses and he has only one tooth in his mouth, which is stained with nicotine or with paan.

I spoke with reporter Rabia Mehmood, and she followed up and produced a wonderful video-essay that I urge all to see, since my words could not do justice to his colors.

The christian colony, the milk colony, the officers colony, the even more ridiculously named murghi-khana (hen coop) neighborhood, all packed together, surrounded by acres upon acres of open spaces teeming with puchal parei, churail, jinn, chalawa.¹

*I should note that this will be the last in the series. I needed to begin a writing project and some basic things had to be worked out – my voice, my archive, my approach. What you read is some of what I am playing around with. I would appreciate any comments you have and I think the rest you will see in print in the future. Thank you. The complete series: I, II, III, IV, V, VI. Next up, Berlin.

1. In Rang Mahal, under the Gold-worker’s bazaar, is a rib-crackingly tight alley that meanders for half a street and abruptly runs into a house. Off to the right, there are high steps which take you to a green door. Inside that door, used to sit an old man, hair white, wearing a small smile and cradling in his big hands, beads. I see him every sunday morning. My grandmother, my uncles, or my mother accompany me. To him, our family, is betrothed. One day, my grandfather tells me of meeting him early in his Lahore life, in the mid-40s. He repairs shoes for a living, and a tall man brings him fruits from Srinagar. Fruits that were out of season. That man, grandfather says, was a jinn and he was one his murids. I note this down. Jinns, in my world, bring you fruits.

   Many years forward, and I begin to want to write about Lahore again. I am composing a piece on the spiritual landscape of Lahore, and I want to talk about Rang Mahal, but from there, I want to talk about Data Darbar, LUMS and GCC and Chowburgi and whatnot. The idea is to trace some notion of sanctity, sacrality and landscape cutting across time in Lahore. I am taking notes, and talking to people. I join a sufi halqa which is reading the medieval Sufi text written in Lahore, Kashf al-Mahjub. I see a wide swath of Lahore – men with grease permanently etched in their folds, emergency room doctors, writers and businessmen, very young and very old, and the military man who cannot bend his back.

   He is in pain. His AD rushes to the side of the Sufi Master and whispers urgently that for the last few months, this very-high-ranking-officer has not been able to sit down or stand up without help. The Sufi Master gestures him over. I am seated by the column of the hall and I can hear them talk. I take notes. Next to me, is a 18 year old, rocking on his buttocks in a rather frenzied pace. I am slightly distracted by him. He sees me looking and smiles. I will have a muwakkil soon! I nod. Then the question forms in my head. Um, What will you do with a muwakkil? He shakes his head and goes back to his incantation. I scribble in my notebook: Man wants Jinn.

   The Sufi Master calls me over. The stiff military man stiffens. I scoot nearer, keeping a respectful distance from the brass. TSM places his hand on the Brass’ chest and exhales. The man melts. He is carried away. TSM calls the young reciter. He has memorized the Qs. I have very little idea of what the Qs are but, keeping to my ethnographic practice, I nod. The young reciter, with a flow that MC Ren would envy, raps out a string of words and phrases all beginning with the letter ق. He exhales after a solid 2 minutes. I am visibly impressed and TSM smiles. Tell us what and where do you perform this incantation?

   I am at Ravi two hours after ‘Isha; have to work until 5pm at the mechanic’s shop. You know it has been hard since my father died and I am the only one who can earn – I am determined that the younger brother will stay in school. I take him to school myself. Not even trusting the van wallahs. And then it is mechanicay until 5. It is tiring, hazoor, but I never stop the recitation. All day. I am focused on my work and on reciting. Malik is very happy with me. His old hand was always stealing the drained oil and selling it off at the corner but I have not stolen a pint. He likes me. They do cuss a lot and I am always keeping pure so sometimes, it makes him cuss me more because I won’t cuss. Yet, he respects my riazat. Once I get to Ravi, I sit there, by the water for two whole hours, as you instructed. Huzoor, they take the form of dogs and attack me. Vicious things. But I keep my focus. It has been 30 days. 10 more to go. I am never afraid because I know you will protect me. I have now seen the muwakkil twice. He scared me so. So. But I persist. I work hard.

   TSM looks over him and blesses him. I venture a rare question. What will you do with a Jinn, who is beholden to you? He looks bewildered. I will have a powerful being under my control!

   Stretched across Lahore are stories of invisible beings and visible non-beings. My uncles often tell many. They like to tell stories, full of both bravado and menace. There was the one about the newly-wed bride seen alone by the roadside, whose touch rendered flesh cold and dead. There was the one about a kid goat who seemed lost and was picked up, only to develop a severe case of leg drag (they elongated to ten feet). There was the one about the undead mother looking to steal the young. And then, the love stories.

   What do I make of this landscape of Lahore? There is a mosque in GaRhi Shaho where Qur’an is recited all day but no one can be seen. There is the tree in Miani Cemetery which blooms red flowers that smell of blood. There is the alley that, after dark, refuses passage to non-residents. I have these spots mapped out. There are many more. I will keep writing them into the footnotes.

[A version of this essay was published in Counterpunch.]

During the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan, three burly American classmates jeered at me. They said, “We’re gonna kill Osama.” Presumably, I would be especially aggrieved at Osama’s death, since I am a Muslim, and therefore, an Osama sympathizer if not also a bomb-carrying terrorist. My classmates were full of assurance and triumphalist pride. They said: “We can hit even a coffee mug in a cave.” The cave stood for where I am from, the enemy territory, the blank space on the map, the primitive place that lacked modernity. I couldn’t stop myself from asking how they would know which cave to hit. They said: “If you can bring down the whole mountain, you don’t have to know which cave to hit.” This is how the empire reveals its darkness: behind the fantasy of technological dominance lies a world of complete violence.

The capacity to do violence allows the powerful to exercise the privilege of what Gayatri Spivak has called “sanctioned ignorance.” To put it more crudely, if you have enormous power you have the right to be stupid. Since the powerful can command and punish, they do not need to do the interpretive work of understanding. Moreover, power is incapable of recognizing its own violence. It maintains a self-image of a benign, civilizing force. This violence is seen as delivering justice, a burdensome necessity to counter the perils and terrors of places far away, places imagined as lying at the fault line between civilization and barbarism. It is this willed ignorance that historian Manan Ahmed brings into focus in his book, Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination, a curated collection of his blogposts and published essays.

Ahmed writes, “We have programmed forgetfulness in our civic and political lives.” Narratives are the pills we swallow for our collective forgetting. Narratives obscure and obfuscate. In the aftermath of 9/11, the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report and pundits in general, went through a crash course in fourteen centuries of Islamic history to answer one question: why 9/11? The authors of the report declared that Americans had suffered a failure of imagination. The report called for “routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination,” and for thinking globally: “the American homeland is the planet.” And yet, for understanding the threat of terrorism to America historically, it focused on the internal failures of the Muslim world in isolation of American involvement. It completely ignored the history of America’s militarized engagement with the rest of the planet, and specifically America’s midwifing of violent transnational Jihad during the Cold War. Little wonder that no significant insight was to be had from such an inquiry and clichés to the tune of “They hate us for our freedoms” were the result. This failure of imagination, Ahmed writes, was at display in the then Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s explication of America’s foe to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2007. Indistinguishable from that of President Bush, it conformed to the scholar-combatant Bernard Lewis’ Orientalist pabulum, “the template of The Old Man of The Mountain,” for understanding terrorism and militancy. And that is because there was, and is, no alternative narrative available. “The myopia we extend out to the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” writes Ahmed, “exists in North Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma.”

Geography, a sense of the place, its people, local histories, and memory, is from where Ahmed’s critique of power emerges and where it is located. Noting that the “clash of civilization operates not on differences but on sameness—whether in Us or Them,” Ahmed posits that “unless we decide to get local, to pay attention to local narratives, facts, histories, realities, languages, religions, ethnicities, cultures, and so forth, we will remain in this deeply flawed discourse.” And this is not merely a matter of intellectual nicety. Oblivious of local realities, war-mongers like Seth Jones call for drone strikes on “Baluchi cities like Quetta,” as the US has done “so effectively in the tribal areas.” Quetta is a major city of Pakistan, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, and a populous city with more than a million people. There is already a war raging on in Baluchistan. But none of this merits a consideration. The drone’s eye view collapses histories, geographies, cultures, and lives into one dangerous whole: the target.

Empires impart the belief that there is “a dominant ‘core’ that rule[s] over a conquered ‘periphery’” and that it is the “right of the Emperor to create and execute laws universally, i.e. absolute sovereignty.” To extend imperial diktat over the “periphery,” it must be deemed lawless— or in today’s idiom, a failed state. Pakistan (and Afghanistan), routinely visualized and coded as “lawless,” comprises the American empire’s internal frontier with which the center deliberately maintains distance and refuses to see its people historically as socio-political beings. Ahmed lays out the history of the America’s violent entanglements with Pakistan through the years; the antidemocratic agenda it pushed (in Pakistan and many other Muslim-majority countries) by supporting military rule, so that its people, stuck in the “not yet time,” can be taught democracy by despotic satraps.

But Ahmed is no scribe of power. His is not a critique smitten with the omnipotence of power so as to have no hope in the agency and resilience of people, and no room for resistance. Ahmed chronicles Pakistanis’ struggle against General Musharraf, and gives readers a sense of Pakistani politics through carefully crafted profiles of some of its public figures. This, though, does not mean an uncritical romanticizing of “the people,” let alone that of the Pakistani nation and nationalism. Ahmed does not lose his sense of justice and writes with profound empathy for the violated –Ahmadis and Pakistan’s other religious minorities, women, the poor, Balochis, and Bengalis— and records the injustices meted out by the society and the state.

“[H]yperbolic invocations of local violence have played a substantive role in colonial imaginations of frontiers, in general,” writes Ahmed. “Now, it plays a rhetorical role in our present day imagination of Pakistan.” Violent, unstable, and chaotic are common tropes in imperial narrative about the places it deems the frontier— a distant place, a place of danger, peopled by barbarians. The anxiety the frontier provokes; it “paradoxically internalises a peculiar fascination with the frontier even as it pushes away more robust understandings – it simultaneously keeps the frontier a known object and an unknowable terrain,” writes Ahmed in a more theoretical essay, “Adam’s Mirror: The Frontier in the Imperial Imagination,” that regrettably is not part of the collection under review. This particular view of the frontier obscures all “historical contingencies, the particularities or the specifici­ties, and those instated there” and replaces it with “a caricature of the exotic, the unknown.”

To elucidate empire’s ways of knowing what it deems the frontier, Ahmed turns to imperial history, and brings to the fore the imaginative terrain –unknown, dangerous, and exotic –by which the frontier is routinely circumscribed. Ahmed says that for empire, the anxiety of the frontier “embeds itself in the frontier itself, waiting to be recalled, remembered and reproduced.” The task of recalling it for the prince is performed by the expert who either reproduces the frontier in the “image of the capital or reproduce[s] an image of it for the capital.” The expert, writes Amitava Kumar in the Foreword, “speaks from a distance; the expert sees like the State. … Or like a drone.”

Ahmed studies the profiles of those who are deemed experts and invited to the halls of power to ply their craft, to understand and arrive at an ideal type that the official point of view considers an “expert:”

Such an “expert” is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the “official” narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being “a critic” of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn’t know enough.

Rory Stewart and Greg Mortensen are examples of a particular type of expert – “the ‘non-expert’ insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an ‘expert.’”

Critical scrutiny of the nexus of knowledge and power in general and the American empire in particular, is an abiding concern of Ahmed’s writings.  The prince’s councils, the experts of many stripes, come in for a thorough examination (and stick): globetrotters like Robert Kaplan “who claim expertise by staying in hotels and who produce nothing but banal observations;” unabashed apologists for empire such as historian Niall Ferguson; peddlers of racist tripe such as Thomas Friedman, reportedly a pundit President Obama reads “to get a local flavor for events;” and “authentic voices,” like that of Ahmed Rashid and Daniel Mueenuddin, that serve to confirm the caricature of violent brown masses. Ahmed drives the congruity between drones and experts home with characteristic polemical verve:

The appeal of the drone’s eye is precisely that it does not see everything, because it carries no understanding of the things it records. The experts who are required to imagine Afghanistan or Pakistan traverse those spaces in a manner similar to the drones, on their own preprogrammed missions where every little thing becomes a target on which to pin their policies.

Such expert “knowledge” Ahmed juxtaposes with the constant surveillance that yields indecipherable mountains of data to conclude that “the American war effort prefers its human knowledge circumspect or circumscribed and its technical knowledge crudely totalized.” As the political theorist and psychoanalyst, Ashis Nandy writes, “knowledge without ethics is not so much bad ethics as inferior knowledge.” In this case, it is one with grave consequences for the world.

Ahmed describes how as a student, he suggested to his faculty that they should write op-eds in papers of record to try and puncture the Fox News narrative of the Iraq War. All to no avail. A debilitating cynicism seemed to have set in whereby it was conceded that the public space had already been lost to the Fox News outlets of the world, and that the faculty should be focused solely on the academy and their scholarship. The advice given to Ahmed was that he should wait for tenure before engaging with the public opinion through blogging or opinion pieces. But Ahmed was convinced that “those who stay silent before tenure will remain silent after tenure.” Ahmed started his blog, Chapati Mystery, in 2004, as an effort to explore the “historical dimensions of commonly recalled terms in contemporary politics.” Through his blog, he cultivated a community of readers and commentators, and a space to challenge the dominant narratives pertaining primarily to Pakistan. The antidote to the blindness inculcated by separations and exclusions, and the hope that emerges from Ahmed’s writings is that we live in one and the same world, with shared and intertwined histories. We are, and have been, entangled with one another by movements and migrations, of people and ideas. But that same history is also one of violence, conquest, and exploitation, which have acquired terrifying efficiency and massive scales. And in this too, we remain intertwined. In the words of Aimé Césaire:

a nation which colonizes, […] a civilization which justifies colonization – and therefore force – is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.

The time to contest the hegemonic narratives and systems of dominance is now. “The effort to be ethical in the world we inhabit,” writes Ahmed “cannot wait for better times and milder risks.” For while the tenured illuminati console themselves with doses of virtuous patience and cautious knowledges, drones continue to colonize the skies and rain death from afar like gods. And they are headed home to roost.

The modern traveler, wrote Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, is forever chasing after “vestiges of a lost reality”. Such that writing about a city becomes a mode of constant nostalgia, a constant looking back, either textually or experientially.

Sarnath Banerjee’s Harappa Files (which I read recently; thankfully, after I had already planned and written some of this series), at first glance reads as a chronicle of the city’s capacity to fold the absurd into the norm. Then, later, I saw that it wasn’t so much about the absurd, but about those minutiae lost in the city’s creases which are simultaneously absurd and normal. His work (I love him) manages to find the bathos in the city, by chronicling these small moments, these lives lived in both plain view and along the margins – each tuned to some hidden frequency that Banerjee hears.

Aman Sethi’s A Free Man – an ethnography of Sadar Bazaar in Delhi – follows Ashraf and a host of day laborers around. What really worked in that text was Sethi’s own limitations and inabilities to transcend something he is trying to document or understand. Very unlike the gaze of Levi-Strauss who, burdened with reams of booklore, settles for the fleeting glimpse, for a gesture that explains it all. Sethi sits with, around, Ashraf and five years later, he is hesitant to say more than that he sat with, around Ashraf. It is for us, to look at Delhi’s crushing urban chaos, the labor, the drugs and exploitation, through Sethi’s observation of Ashraf. Rather Sethi’s attempted cataloguing of Ashraf’s chronology – and his failure.

Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables captured, in the chapter ‘Tabloid and the City’, a way of writing about city that resonates. He weaved narratives running across the cityscape with various sites of productions – the courtroom, the dailies, gossip circles, novellas, memoirs. It is a bravura chapter and you can see how different Prakash’s approach is to Sethi, to Banerjee in the tone of his essay, the evidence he marshals and the framing. In many ways, his is a furthering of Levi-Strauss’ archeology of space, but one which is not built on the randomness, aléa or the golden hue of past memories. In Prakash’s work the device of critically choosing fragments and sections of city (planned or otherwise), viewed across archives and lived space, works precisely because he brings a historians’ sensibility to the task – a deliberate distancing, that omniscient speaker.

IV.
I went to him, the mochi, to have a charm sewn in to leather. He sits on Joreypull (literally, the bridge that joins). Joreypull was a terribly unsexy neighborhood in which to grow up. At the end of the cantonment area of Lahore, abutting golf courses and airport runways on one end, and the dense population of canal on the other. Towards its east lay the Indian border and a vast farm lands. I never liked saying to people that the actual last stop on the bus to my house was called joreypull. Call it the bourgeois sensibility of a middle class kid. In retrospect, it was a great neighborhood to grow up in. The christian colony, the milk colony, the officers colony, the even more ridiculously named murghi-khana (hen coop) neighborhood, all packed together, surrounded by acres upon acres of open spaces teeming with puchal parei, churail, jinn, chalawa. At the tail end of every day, would be a gathering of elders and young ones where such encounters, from that day or days thence, would be recited and sworn upon and discussed – even some episodes too racy for ears as delicate as mine. During the day, these same open spaces became our cricket grounds – rows upon rows of men in never-quite-whites knocking balls into the air. Then, in the 90s, all that empty space disappeared under curlicue lanes of sectional housing, each distinguishable only by the number bolted to its front. Askari Housing Schema. Joreypull changed too. There were new populations to replace the spectral beings. The spaces were haunted with something much more malicious.

I don’t know his name. He never offered, even when I asked. He sat on the ground, surrounded by his wares- plastic bags with various bits of leather, scissors, cutters, moulders – and a steady stream of customers. A ten year old worked as his assistant or maybe was his brother. He was sewing it up, the charm, and looked up at me, and asked me to take a seat. I sat on the stone on the ground. This works? I don’t know. He nodded. A student came by with a bag full of brand new books. The spines had to be broken, and a new binding of cardboard installed. As he worked, I tried to catch his eye and smile. He spoke with the student in pashto, so I ventured a joke. He asked me what I do. I said I write. I asked him where he was from and how long had he been at Joreypull. He said only a year. Hazara. His eyes flicked to my ring. I smiled, hoping he would catch on. He relaxed a bit and said, it is not so nice here. They have to constantly shift their home – the neighbors complain about smells. We are dirty people, they say. I don’t like Lahore. I don’t enjoy eating this dirt and smoke all day. And the punjabis are just rude, superstitious. I looked at the charm now in my hand. Well, don’t you think there is evil-intent? He shrugged. So where do you live? I tell him. You? Garhi Shaho. Really? I say – that is a far trip.

My first day back in Berlin from Lahore, I went with friends to a flohmarkt. We had just wandered in, and were looking around (for that proverbial needle). I saw a booth manned with one desi uncle, and another older man sitting back, and I walked up, said hi and asked him where we could find whatever it was that was needed. He made some helpful indications and we went our way. Wandering back, half an hour later, I bumped into the second gentleman. He was walking slowly, hunched over. I guess he was in his late 60s or early 70s. Or he looked like he had lived those many years. Did you find it? Yes. I think. Hmm, he nods. And begins to turn away. You live in Berlin? I have been asking this from almost every desi uncle in Berlin (working on a small series on Berlin). Yeah, been here for 20 years almost. Oh. Where from? Lahore. Me too. Where? Joreypull. Aap? Garhi Shaho.

I laughed. He moved closer to me. I went to school there, you know. Right in Garhi Shaho. You must know it? I nod. It was the best, walking up the road to the school; used to be so crowded around school time. You must have seen it. I nod hesitantly. Our Lahores were separated by decades or more. He began to describe Garhi Shaho’s life. His trips to the haveli. Do you know why they called it Garhi Shaho? I went there two years ago. All these Afghans. Everywhere. Aab wo Lahore kahan? He sighed and turned away. I turned and went to find my friends.

The odd synchronicity of the encounter stayed with me. One of the places I had wanted to write about was Garhi Shaho. I had been reading about it. How during Shahjahan’s Lahore, a noble, Abul Khair, settled in Lahore and established a social meeting place. Aurangzeb gave him a land grant and asked him to establish a central Madrasa for students of Lahore. During the early years of the Sikh regime of Lahore, 1802-4 or so, bands of “outsiders” settled in the neighborhood, taking over empty or deserted houses. One of the bandits, named Shaho, came and occupied the Madrasa. It was known as Khair Ghar (House of Wellness). It became known as Shaho’s house. The neighborhood suffered many tyrannies, but also remained a place for first immigrants. Whether in 1947 or later.

I had wanted to write about Garhi Shaho because Lahore is, as I said earlier, a city of neighborhoods, constantly in flux, even as Lahore becomes a unchanging beacon to past glories. I had felt a cadence of nostalgia in my own voice, but that belied my effort to say something about Lahore (and Berlin) which was decidedly anti-nostalgic. I hadn’t realized though that my nostalgia was a result not only of my own distancing from Lahore but also of the archives I was reading – memoirs written from the 17th century onwards. They may moan about the past, but they moan precisely because Lahore is rapidly changing in front of their eyes. Change driven not only by raiders of Lahore (which, really, the 18th and 19th c were not kind to Lahore) but also by influxes of new citizens, driven to Lahore by crisis elsewhere.

Men like Shaho.

Which space in Lahore do we locate this discordance?

Once again, I missed it. Eight years ago this little experiment – which, in 2011 produced two books (!) and countless millions of dollars (!!) – began.

There is no denying the fact that dhandha has been manda here lately. I have not found too much time to write.Yet, I have had so many amazing contribution from guest as well as the regulars that CM looks vibrant and alive to me. I intend to keep it this way. This year two of our old friends passed away. Ralph Luker shut down Cliopatria – the historian collective blog which I joined in 2004 as well. Ralph is an amazing curator as well as indefatigable member of the online community for many long years and I wish him all the best. The other good bye was from Sepia Mutiny – the place for desis to mingle. It was certainly a marker in media/social history of Desis in America. Both of these collectives were about community and about connections and about a certain relationship between dominant and marginal discourses. Their shuttering down is most certainly a step back and a diminution of public culture on those terms. There is no doubt that FB and Twitter have taken over conversations in ways unimagined in 2004 but that only means we need to incorporate newer ways of explicit community building.

CM will continue. We are actively adding new members to our writing team. I am excited to write. We are ON!

Newly Minted CM

You can’t see through cement – and neither can I. When I look at Lahore and the ways in which cement has cordoned off sight-lines, I see a city full of people blind-folded. The gated communities were the first variant – ghettos of the elite – where cement walls rose up to seclude and to protect. The Defense Housing Authority which emerged in the 90s on vast swaths of land confiscated, distributed and redistributed by the military junta. That military-gated community needed its own armies of servants, chowkidars, drivers who couldn’t live too far, but not too close. So behind Defense was the soft settlement – corroded tin, bricks, mud. Then came the newer colonization – the Askari Housing Society. A new generation of military families, needing cheaper fabrics. So more empty and settled land had to be cleared off, parceled out, built. Then more roads added. Access roads.

III.

Lahore used to be a city connected by neighborhoods, each reaching a tentacle into the next, linked by small roads and alleys. The arterial Mall Road or Jail Road or Canal Road were remarkable not for what they traversed but by how much of the city they left alone, untouched. To go from my house – at the far end of Cantonment to the Old City, say the Fort, took forever plus an hour. It used to feel good to me – this slow, fitful, crawl across Sadr, Mughalpura, Railway Colony, Landa Bazaar, Do Moria Pull, Bilal Ganj – to visit my friend L. The journey was its own event.

Now, I got on the Ring Road.

A thick toothpaste slathered across Lahore’s exterior, the Ring Road horrified me. It cuts through arable land, dairy colonies, satellite townships – anything and everything. As we drove across, in silence, the road empty of other cars – I saw only those separated by this cement and concrete river, trying to swim to the other side. The eight-feet high wall of cement which frames the highway had been broken into – human shaped chunks torn through, where silhouettes gathered waiting to run and vault across. Single men. Women and children. Some carrying goods. Some empty handed. A donkey cart hesitant. Imagine if between your home and your grocery store was a major highway. You have to imagine it, because it is not your reality. Nor is it mine. I live inside the bubble. The nice people had built pedestrian bridges – 500 meters or so apart – high stairs. Imagine walking to one, climbing up the stairs and then down. Imagine if you have to do it 15 times a day. With weight of your livelihood. I saw one couple – him holding her hand; she carrying a child; they carrying cloth-wrapped bundles waiting for my car to whiz bye so they could cross. Hesitant.

But the torn fabric of these lives was not the full story. On other sections, as our car made its way towards Ravi, were other tableaus. Two kids – barely 12 – lying flat on the cement embankment, sunning. Their legs lazily entangled, their eyes chasing the clouds. At another moment, a group of men smoking on the cement wall. Gossiping. Perhaps these points existed as meeting places, and they were re-enacting a lost world. Perhaps the din of passing traffic provided its own pleasant soundtrack.

No matter what we do, we can never educate our people. There it is, the pedestrian crossing and look at our jahalat that we are jumping walls and sprinting through traffic, because we cannot simply follow the law and cross legally. There really is no hope for us, you know. In Germany, I bet no one would ever dream of such a horrendous way to cross a highway.

I replied that maybe in Germany they would not partition a neighborhood like this, but that seems a silly response to make in hindsight. I wanted to be angry. Because the Ring Road angered me. I wanted my indignation to be registered. How dare they create partitions. But, I can see partitions everywhere in Lahore. The walls have grown taller all across Lahore. Every house has its own, shielding its inhabitants. Every neighborhood its own. My anger at the Ring Road seems silly in one sense.

The convenience is really amazing.

Yes, it is.

In the last ten years, Lahore has finally had the immense migration which was long a hallmark of Karachi. Neighborhoods have changed – the new migrants bringing their own languages, their own habitations, their new economies. The Ring Road, the motorway, the heavy-cargo industry, all participate in this Lahore. I heard more Pashto in DHA than Punjabi. Yet social fabric of Lahore was tied intimately to the cartography of Lahore. To be from Lahore, was to answer with the name of a neighborhood. Samnabad. Garhi Shaho. Mazang Chungi. Each neighborhood an encoding of a particular genealogy, accent, attitude, charisma. As you moved slowly, were forced to, across Lahore you saw and heard all of this. The only sight you see from the Ring Road is cement. The only sound is the whoosh of the silent car.

More sophisticated readers of the New York Times’ editorial pages have, for years, fumed at Thomas Friedman’s inane musings. Even less sophisticated readers, some of which write book reviews and essays for online magazines named after mysterious flatbreads, have bristled at Friedman’s claims, prose and weak reasoning.

There are times, in fact, that one might suspect the Times’ Editorial Board is putting Friedman over on the public as some sort of Onion-style goof, a la Jackie Harvey.

Some readers have an automatic, visceral dislike of his face, alone: the suburban-mall Glamour-Shots photograph accompanying his crimes against logic calls for snarky comment; in it, he appears smug, self-satisfied and eager to be taken as the thinker of deep thoughts that, in The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, Belen Fernandez proves he is not.

One sure marker of a great work comes when, having experienced it, one is left with a sense of shame—that somehow, the thesis presented is so clear and well-argued that it was obvious all along, and to have not recognized it without the interlocutor’s help is somehow a grievous, personal shortcoming.

Fernandez’s spit-roasting of Friedman’s career is one of those works, and it is proof that America’s reading public should have itself a come-to-Jesus meeting about whom it reads, and on what subjects.

The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work is a grueling, painful read, but it’s a necessary contribution to the greater, shamefully-necessary project of new/alternative media self-justification, vis a vis old media’s privileged place in public discourse; Friedman’s unearned, destructive bully-pulpit, and the appalling influence it holds over, with, and because of Occidental elites, created the need for Fernandez, and critical voices like Chapati Mystery, in the first place.

The rejoinders are getting louder, too—voices such as Glenn Greenwald’s, which puncture the balloons of Imperial hubris, easily, by dispensing with double-standards and applying simple facts to analysis, seem to enjoy greater echo than they might have, even five years ago.

“It’s evidence of a flattening world!” Fernandez joked in a March interview with Chapati Mystery. “These new media provide venues in which Friedman’s bullshit can be immediately exposed as such. Great will be the day in which the NYTimes eXaminer supersedes the Times in readership.”

Like a good doctor, Fernandez comforts us, salving our wounds with clear, caustic prose, doing her damnedest to bring us through a necessary but excruciating treatment. She diagnoses the ailment, explains its causes and effects, and implicitly offers the cure, which is, of course, to strip this yokel of any shred of credibility he might hold in the world of respectable ideas and send him where he belongs, to the backwaters of op-ed commentary, with Cal Thomas and David Broder, where he can warm the top margins of Doonesbury .

The negligent patients that we are—how could we let the infection go this long before seeking help? We didn’t even know we were this sick. It was very nearly terminal. It took Fernandez to show us, exactly, how far the malady had spread.

“To tell you the truth,” Fernandez said, “…I had hardly read the man prior to 2009, when I read a few particularly abominable articles and decided it would be enjoyable to write a book debunking him. It was not…I think Robert Jensen of the University of Texas journalism school explained the Friedman phenomenon quite well in his review of my book for Truthout:

‘Friedman tells the privileged, and those who aspire to privilege, what they want to hear in a way that makes them feel smart; his trumpeting of US affluence and power are sprinkled with pithy-though-empty anecdotes, padded with glib turns of phrases. He’s the perfect oracle for a management-focused, advertising-saturated, dumbed-down, imperial culture that doesn’t want to come to terms with the systemic and structural reasons for its decline. In Friedman’s world, we’re always one clichéd big idea away from the grand plan that will allow us to continue to pretend to be the shining city upon the hill that we have always imagined we were/are/will be again’.”

In Friedman’s case, she says,

“[T]he coordination with power structures is pretty straightforward. The World Is Flat, for example, was designed by corporate CEOs, who then hailed it as an ingenious treatise when it was published (see, inter alia, Friedman’s receipt of the FT/Goldman Sachs book of the year award). Friedman’s entire career at this point is basically thanks to his symbiosis with centers of US power, and his service as imperial messenger is handsomely remunerated…[b]ut as for why to single Friedman out—aside from the fact that his rhetorical incoherence, self-contradictions and mangled metaphors should have ordinarily prevented him from attaining such a prominent journalistic post—Norman Solomon has pointed out that, while Friedman’s astronomical wealth of course does not categorically discredit his work, it’s worthwhile to question whether he would be so intent on selling globalization if he hadn’t been so rich for the past several decades.”

The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, as a title, tells us much about how Fernandez views Friedman’s role in the sordid business of justifying, simplifying, and amplifying received elite opinion, and by extension, Imperial policy.

Fernandez divides her indictment into three main infractions: Friedman’s ridiculous take on modern America, his particular disdain for cultures where Arabic is the predominant language and Islam is the faith to which most believers adhere, and, finally, his nearly unqualified support of Israeli foreign and domestic initiatives.

In treating those areas, Fernandez’s explication of Friedman’s heinous prescriptions for a well-ordered world comes rapid-fire. Point by point, column after column, Fernandez compiles a litany of misstatements, historical reductionism, cultural ignorance, journalistic sloth, bald errors, obfuscations, ethnocentrism, banality, nonsensical business jargon, multitudinous contradiction and rank assholery.

For example, she asks us to consider Friedman’s lauding Ireland as a good example of how globally-engaged economies thrive. Friedman claimed, by way of showing the lumbering U.S. how it should be done, that tax revenues generated when Ireland’s leaders gave the commonweal over to corporate interests allowed for greater public spending on domestic programs, including education. This assertion, of course, was false—tax revenues plummeted in Ireland, and the Globalists’ Irish servants were eviscerating their country’s educational system, even at the time of Friedman’s writing.

As he is the richest “journalist” in the United States, one might be tempted to debit the oversight to Friedman’s slavish devotion to pushing whatever policies favor money and power. But it’s possible he took his evidence wholesale from his usual sources, which, as Fernandez points out, happen to be whomever he talked to most recently among Charlie Rose regulars, or whatever odd cab-driver or kraut-vendor he last deigned to engage.

“Friedman’s restricted travel circuit,” Fernandez reminds, “despite his possession of an essentially unlimited travel budget, is symbolic of his intentional exclusion of most human reality from his reporting…[t]he reality facing poor African-Americans, to take one historically maligned group, is thus largely ignored aside from passing references to the idea that too many black males in American inner cities are ‘failing’. Thanks to Friedman’s refusal to explore or convey the circumstances of average Americans in any meaningful way, persons employed at fast food restaurants end up getting to share the blame for the financial crisis while Friedman demands a slashing of entitlements, etc—all while purporting to be a ‘social safety netter.’”

Friedman’s animus against Arabic-speakers and Muslims has passed under mainstream radar, Fernandez says, because “[o]rientalism and anti-Arab/Muslim bias is largely acceptable in US political and intellectual discourse.” Fernandez provides dozens of examples of Friedman’s disgusting racism, most of which have settled in among elite received wisdom without challenge.

In taking passive-aggressive, paternalistic stances toward America’s Muslims and Arabs, Friedman may have done those demanding definition and clarity in discussions of world events a favor.

He has, quite in spite of himself, accidentally admitted what was once verboten: America and its erstwhile allies comprise an empire. And it would seem that empire is bent on not only conquest, but also the promulgation of blowjob metaphors, as when he married his support of the war in Iraq to the phrase, “Suck. On. This.”

…[I]t’s easier to acknowledge a US empire when one is pushing the idea—as Friedman does—that said empire is in fact beneficial to the world as a whole,” Fernandez said.

The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work also offers a complete dissection of the complex and harmful position Friedman holds in U.S. public discourse about the Middle East. Despite the veneer of gravitas and veracity he enjoys as a standing columnist for America’s “paper of record,” Friedman exhibits a shamefully subjective take on “The Special Relationship” between the United States and Israel.

Fernandez documents his time spent there as a young man, his devotion to the ideals of Zionism, his cozy personal relationships with Israeli politicians, army brass, and intelligentsia, and his habit of recommending courses of action for the U.S., and for Israel itself, that align with the aims of the Israeli far right.

As of late, readers may have noticed a greater willingness on Friedman’s part to criticize Israeli policies. Do these nods toward balance indicate Friedman’s evolution to a more balanced, reality-based positions? Not so, Fernandez told Chapati Mystery.

“Friedman himself has been criticizing the Israel Lobby with increasing regularity—a useful façade for his Zionism. The fact that US politicians constantly reiterate their devotion to Israel meanwhile suggests that there is nothing out of the ordinary about permitting a full-fledged Zionist such a position at the newspaper of record. I, however, am not of the opinion that US and Israeli “interests” are in fundamental disagreement; both entities are concerned with perpetuating conflict in the Middle East.”

It’s also worth considering whether Friedman’s enthusiasm for spilt blood in the Middle East has waned because the situation in the U.S. has deteriorated to such an extent that not even he can further cheerlead for expensive military adventurism, at least for the time being. Regarding the headlong rush to war on Iran, Fernandez said, currently,

“Friedman is…not in warmongering mode…given his decision that America must now engage in ‘nation-building at home’.”

But, she warns,

“Once America has been fixed, Friedman wrote in 2011, he will be willing to ‘follow the president “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”.’ ”

The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, concludes with sixty pages of endnotes, which apparently are sixty more than Friedman has compiled in his dastardly career.

Friedman’s lack of documentary support doesn’t seem to matter, nor does Friedman’s narrow point of view, his shallow analyses, nor his dreadful writing style. Fernandez’s book proves that what matters, in Friedman’s case, is his utility to the powers he serves, and his ability to help further whatever designs those powers have on humanity.

But the question remains: what, in the face of so great a Murrow-on-McCarthy style takedown, can be done to obviate the harm that Friedman, this idiot savant, has done to the American—no, the world—body politic?

“Nir Rosen suggested that the book be given as a vaccination to all college freshmen lest they become infected with admiration for Friedman,” said  Fernandez. “I’ve actually heard from a few university professors who admitted to having previously used From Beirut to Jerusalem in their courses and have now pledged to reference my book.”

Atonement is a start, but one fears the cure for having listened to voices like Friedman’s, for decades, will require more of a curative than that. Healing will require a realization of, and rejection of, a demonstrably false notion: the idea that America’s powerful, elite, and wealthy hold the the world’s well-being and best-interests to heart, and when the empire speaks—especially through well-paid mouthpieces like Friedman—that it is not lying through his teeth.

###

Belen Fernandez is an editor and feature writer at Pulse Media. Her articles have appeared at Al Jazeera, The Electronic Intifada, Counterpunch and many other publications. The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work is published by the good folks at Verso Books.

In Cairo, I thought I met Khizr. More likely, I found a new way of walking. Following hints, barely visible pathways, I try only to keep my sense of direction overpowered by my desire to get lost. Cairo, around Tahrir Square, looks a lot like the late colonial city abutting Old Lahore – the architecture of 20s and 30s behind Shah Alami Market, around Lakshmi Chowk, near Mayo Gardens. Unlike Cairo, Lahore seemed swallowed up by the destructive, unregulated building which happened mostly over the last decade or more. Where previously I could still find livable traces of the past, it seems impossible to contemplate now. Something has clicked over – some fatal blow. Maybe, it is the Ring Road, built to encircle Lahore – a tribute to the millions of infrastructure dollars and euros poured into Lahore. More roads.

II.

I was nearly to Rang Mahal when I discovered that I was going the wrong way. Turning around seemed impossible, but going forward was out of question. I managed – crossing in front of a large group of merchants who were amassing to begin their protest against the debilitating 16-18 hours of load shedding. In every city – from Karachi to Lahore to Faisalabad to Multan to Pak Pattan, people were burning tires, burning cars, destroying shops. In Lahore, there had been massive protests and destruction a few nights ago – in Walton (that big empty lot where Partition Refugees first sat down). I thought that it would be best to put some distance between myself and the merchants (a quick look had made me think that they weren’t the burning types but …). I stopped to ask a Rickshaw-wallah for directions.

The back of his rickshaw had a relief of Lahori Pehlwans (wrestlers) – eyes fixed, arms held out as if an onion was strapped in their armpits, and chests gleaming in oil. The ad was for a dangal (meet). I laughed, remembering the conversation about old Masters. I asked the Rickshaw where he got the screen from. He told me that by Bhatti Gate there are many Rickshaws parked and maybe someone there would know. Bhatti Gate would be retracing my steps (here is a map of Old Lahore, if you care). The clock was ticking. I had an appointment elsewhere. Yet, I couldn’t pass this hint. I had to follow.

I reached Bhatti Gate, my eyes and mouth full of smoke and dirt, I was confronted by a giant silk-screen poster extending across an empty Ghee shop. A white clad, handlebar-mustachioed young man with a warm smile walked up to me, seeing me fixated on the poster. You want to attend the dangal? No, actually, I just wanted to know who was painting these. The wrestlers were drawn and painted over, their bodies given shades of brown and black, their short lungis embroidered with pearls and tassels, wide sashes across wide chests and often other touches: a full Punjabi male dress, a tiger, a flute-playing bard. He shrugs. Whoever paints them, someone else pays for it, and hangs it here. He turned away. I looked again. There at the bottom was a name: Jahangir and a mobile number. Standing there, I dialed. I had no idea if the name belonged to the printer, the organizer of the tourney or the artist.

The man who answered asked me to come to him – in Lakshmi Chowk. This was the heart of Lahore’s famous film industry – a twin to Bombay as talkies began to reign across India in the 1930s. Lahore’s studios attracted most of the writers, poets, singers, and actors who went on to define Indian cinema of 40s through 70s. Lakshmi Chowk, now, is either an insulting reminder of that glory, or I don’t know. It is not fair to keep seeing it from a lens of the 40s, is it?

Behind the chowk, is a large gathering of businesses which cater to printing oversized materials. The shops are nestled up and down plazas which have no facade, no railing on steps and often no formal entrances. Everything seems to have been constructed recently and fifty years ago. Cement with a caking of smoked dirt.

Up and down, asking for Mansoor Tailor. The man on the phone had said to meet at the Tailor. You mean the dude with the long beard? I am asked. I have never seen Mansoor Tailor and I have no idea if he has a beard. So I say yes. I am told to follow the road (pathway?) to the curve and take the third alley on the left. Slowly, unsurely, I make my way, looking at the political rally posters, giant signs for Summer Lawns, doting the way.

Outside Mansoor Tailor is a man, who hesitates when he sees me. You here for Jahangir Sahib? I nod. Come. He walks briskly. He is clean shaven (I never saw what Mansoor looked like) and his pants are really clean. I note this because I see the streaks of smoke on my jeans. I catch up. He pauses in front of a half-built plaza/condo. All the way to the top. I look at the unfinished steps and start up. The first three floors are some kind of paper-mill. The fourth is empty, I think. I come up at the roof and am pleasantly surprised to see a nice, clean finished floor. There is no one in sight.

I walk down towards the rooms – there is an old man, in white wife-beater, a dhoti, and two fistfuls of shockingly white beard. He is sitting in front of a canvas on which is a bucolic village scene with a tube-well and a date palm. He looks up, and smiles, and kinda springs off the chair. He is wearing hipster glasses and he has only one tooth in his mouth, which is stained with nicotine or with paan.

I am Jahangir, you wanted to talk about the posters?

I have been working here, in Lakshmi Chowk, since 1963. At first, it was only filmi work – painted artist promos, film posters, title boards, whatever they wanted. Then I started, I don’t know when, to paint wrestlers and their meets. I started getting loads of business as people who want me to paint their pre-fight bodies. His fingers bustle through a stack of photographs. Some 12, some 15, some 40, men in tights. Oiled. Posing in studio, or on the street. Look at this poster. I take this photograph and then I paint it. I add touches from our culture, to make them stand out. The great wrestlers of yesterday are gone but we always include them in the line-up. They must live and stand next to these young ones. The punjabi wrestlers never die.

However, the movies are dead. There is no money. Everyone just wants to do it on Computers. My son, he is also a computer-wallah. So he does it too. But sometimes, I get an older patron who wants the way things were. So I paint the posters. You want to see some of my old movie ones – what a time that used to be in Lahore. He goes back into the room and comes out with a roll of posters. Slowly he unspools. Edges are torn. Big chunks of paper missing. Just what I salvaged over forty years of painting. Look at Waheed Murad. Here is Naheed. And Sultan Rahi. I would paint them from photograph and then when I would meet them and talk to them, I would quickly sketch them. I learned lighting, shading, depth, everything on my own. No teacher, you know. I saw some girls painting on the wall, while I was going to pray the other day. I asked them about if they thought of where the sun is, when the shade of the character comes into the art. They laughed at this old man who cannot stop spitting when he talks. My art – this is all I have left and some other torn posters – is here, though. Look at it.

The colors were rich. The lips red. The smiles white. The eyes locked between the Chocolati Hero and his One True Love.

But this is not what I do anymore. I just keep them for my record. There is no exhibition of my art. There is no one who knows. I die, maybe someone will come asking. Probably not. Nowadays, I just paint something for my own HEAD. He taps his skull. Come see.

The canvases are all cardboard. There is a beautiful PunjabaaN, holding a muTka, her hip jutting to the left, her nath gleaming. She is lovely. There is a meeting of Hir and Ranjha. There is a child and mother walking down a village path. There is a tube-well scene.

This is my culture, you know. My Punjab. My Lahore. I am an artist of my culture.

At some point in Old Lahore’s life, cement won. Floors stacked like cardboard boxes, and filled only with cardboard boxes, sprung up everywhere. The sky which is hard enough to find, now simply hides behind slabs of grey loosely slapped into holes or onto bricks. When you see an older building, terror-stricken and shaky, you pray for its quick release. Let the past just vanish – this lingering is another long death.

I.

Such were my dismal thoughts when I went to Urdu Bazaar – the motorcycle weaving in and out of traffic blocked from Shimla PahaRi onwards; everywhere the clamor against Load Shedding, everywhere the signs of impending protest. The heat, perhaps seasonal but none the less stifling, did not help my mood. I was hoping to get one particular poetry volume and my usually reliable source did not even offer me tea, let alone my desired object.

As I left the shop, I decided, to look for a poster that I had promised a dear friend. I asked my first randomly picked shop-keeper – he was studiously studying the Qur’an and I felt a bit odd interrupting him – who told me to go to Rajput market for all matters posterial. Off I went.

I walked, my mood began to lift. The crush of quad/bi/wheeled/peds and various other rotary beings in Urdu bazaar is overwhelmingly against any notional “walking”. Yet suddenly, I felt dodging things was fun! Such are the manic side of things.

In Rajput market, a plaza suffering along with everyone else in darkness due to the electricity shortage, I found a smallish man intently practicing his English on a slate. I asked him where I can find the poster, and he thought about it, then said, go to Lohari Gate. I told him that I was told this was the spot! He laughed and said, we only keep “educational” posters. I kept on, asked another shop. This guy brings out a mobile phone, then asks me to bring mine out. I comply. Yeh number dial karain. I do. He holds out his hand and I pass him my phone, completely mystified. He speaks to the person at the other end – and after a solid round of hail-fellows: Go to Tony’s on second left from the main at Barkat Plaza. Or to Old Anarkali. Or to Lahori Police Thana.

I stepped back out of the plaza building, careful to avoid plunging off the stairs in the dark and thought about my options. If I drew a big enough circle, I could walk to Old Anarkali, move out to Lahori Gate and then end back at Barkat Plaza. It would cost me an hour. I thought of my dear friend.

Off I went. Lost I got.

Up and down alleys which dead-ended, passing bright, glimmery Shadi and Mehndi shops, the dye and lye shops, the pharmaceuticals, the flags (the new Imran Khan flags are AWESOME). I walked up a flight of steps careening at near 90 degree and hacked out of the side of an older building, to reach a shadow-lit room full of 4 ft high posters of Shah Rukh Khan and Preeti (?).

Nope.

An hour later, I found myself at a very old building – next to the Lohari Gate Police Station (a Station which was instrumental as the site of Migrant Registry in 1947 and which has a brilliant sign posted out front about proper disposal of dead bodies at the Station) looking at the poster. Except this poster was a rather vapid updated version and lacked the awesomeness of the original. I asked him about the original and after hearing my description, he shakes his head. Oh that was published for some newspaper and we never did it again. No one cares about those old style posters – which were made by artists. Also those artists are dead. The old masters. While Aleem is telling me this, an impassive, impressive older Gentleman with a rotund figure sits buddha-quiet behind the register. He is the owner. Aleem looks at me for a while, and says, well, we pulped a lot of posters a few years ago but maybe we have some left. He looks briefly at the owner, and then gestures me further back into the shop. When my eyes adjust for the darkness, I see a latticed wood roof and bricks that scream 1910 Lahore. How old is this building. Aleem shrugs – all I know is that we have been selling prints here since 1935. It used to belong to Hindus but when they left (he shrugs) it came to this family. I have been working here since mid 70s. He reaches through reams of frames and exposes a wall high cabinet. Inside pigeon-holes are sheets of paper covered in dust. He starts to pull out 11×8 in sheets, and amazingly, these are the individual portraits which made up the poster I sought. We start compiling them – Sher Shah Suri, Akbar (the Worst, he exclaims), Jahangir, Muhammad bin Qasim, Ghaznavi, Mumtaz Begum, Khilji, Mir Momin (eh?). He pauses after 10 or so. You want more. I nod. Soon I have a full set. What do you do? I tell him I teach history. He shrugs. These are fake you know? Khilji didn’t look like this. But look how beautifully the artist captured him. I counter.

We move out and I pay. The Buddha’s eyes flickering over my poster collection for a brief moment and then going back to the street outside. I stand in the foyer, having said my good byes, yet rooted. These sheets will also be pulped. Can you give me another set? Of the whole thing? Just one of everything? Aleem laughs. Sure, come on. Much dirt later, I leave.

Back on the motorcycle, I take a wrong turn – and as I try to not-move in front of a total gridlock, my thoughts linger on the old masters who painted Khilji, Qasim and illuminated history. All this while warehouses towered over me. Lahore is nothing but a huge Godown.

…to be continued

A snippet from my new Bookslut column by me in which I review Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights:

Said’s thesis has unfortunately made little effect in the US outside of the academy. The greatest ostensible change seems to be on the use of the term “oriental” for persons of Asian origin, which is no longer deemed politically correct. Beyond this I have found that when trying to explain his theory, there is a strong desire to reject it on the part of those who enjoy the cultural artifacts of traditional Orientalism, such as the writings of Kipling, or Orientalist paintings. I have never taken from Said the need to denounce or cast off all Orientalist works. There is no need to wrap your well-thumbed copy of The Arabian Nights in brown paper when taking it to read on the train. You can hang onto your Ingres print and display your little bits of chinoiserie about your living room without fear. We are not coming for your Rimsky-Korsakov records. Take heart! If all the world’s art and literature were rejected for its association with the project of empire building there would be little left to enjoy.

I sincerely apologize for the absence, gentle Readers. Let it be known that I have been tweeting in my absence here, and I wrote a very short note on Ismat Chughtai:

These essays showcase the best of Chughtai’s range and mastery as a writer – they are erudite, self-aware and always probing. This is not, as the introduction notes, a memoir. Akin to Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (A Berlin Childhood in 1900), these essays intersect space and interiority, letting the reader discover a highly subjective and original reading of a world that is otherwise saturated by categories like The Muslim Woman and thus rendered un-intelligible.

I have also been in Lahore for the last few weeks and headed back home (?) in a few days. Some snaps are up on flickr.

In the meantime, there is much to share – and share I will.

[A guest post by Tipu Sultan]

Once, I Was An Oil Drop
I was taught that oil was the most glorious thing that had ever happened to humankind.

My first memory of this education was at age six. I was inducted into the girl-scouts, along with some of the other girls in the corporate-garrison town-city of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where I grew up. We were made to dress up as oil drops for the annual Saudi ARAMCO Day Parade. Who dresses six-year-old girls in large black plastic garbage bags to be paraded around for two hours, in over a hundred degrees of heat? That is some serious love of the Company. As the mothers effusively took our photographs, beads of sweat coagulated between the thick, dark plastic, and my skin. I wasn’t just dressed up as an oil drop—I was turning into one. We all felt hot, suffocated, and sticky. But the adults had decided that we looked too adorable dressed up as oil drops. For what felt like forever, we walked all around Dhahran in single file, and were rewarded for our efforts afterwards with soft drinks and chocolate-chip covered cake. The great love for the Rumplestiltskin-like benefactor who spun oil into dollars, had transformed otherwise cautious adults who would keep kids away from wearing plastic bags, into oil-besotted tyrants. Oil was anthropomorphized in that moment. We were made to experience the ‘life’ of an oil drop.

Saudi Arabia was a land, we were constantly told, that time forgot—until the Americans and the oil. History began there and nowhere else.

In the 6th grade, I went on a school trip to the first museum I remember: the Saudi ARAMCO Exhibit. It had been two years since the museum had been inaugurated in 1987, by the company (Saudi ARAMCO – Arabian American Oil Company) and the King (Fahd). The museum has enormous ceilings, and houses a vast collection of installations dedicated to petroleum pioneerism, or in words of the exhibitors, ‘energy education’, while also ‘paying tribute to the Arabic and Islamic heritage at its core.’

I have a vivid memory of the larger-than life size photographs of the first American geologists in Arabia in the 1940s, smiling confidently through their sunglasses as they sat in rugged clothes, in front of tents and oil wells. I also recall glass-encased astrolabes from 11th century Andalus—whether re-creations or real I have no idea. And then there were the technologically interactive installations which instructed us that oil was in everything we needed to live a civilized, modern life, from baby bottles to garden chairs.

The Golden Ages of Islamic Spain had everything to do with American geology? Apparently so.

I also remember being enchanted by a telescope which held my attention for a while—but that I was much more excited about the caves of Hofuf where we were heading next. Hofuf is about an hour and a half south-west of Dhahran, and much of the drive there is through desert and sandy slopes and elevations referred to as jabal, the Arabic word for mountain. Meandering in and out of the caves in jabals was one of my favorite past-times as a child in the Kingdom. It was a welcome escape from the confines of living in a walled up world.

Dhahran is one of the very first American gated communities ever built in the twentieth century: the exemplary, model ‘suburb.’ In fact, the gated communities built in post-World War II America were modeled on Dhahran and the two smaller communities of Abqaiq and Rastanura nearby. By both its residents and the company, the corporate-garrison oil town of Dhahran is called a camp. On its Eastern border is the Persian Gulf, to its south-west lies the city of Hofuf, and further south still, the seemingly uninterrupted, unpopulated ‘Eastern region’ and, to its north is King Abdul Aziz Airbase. Between 1945 and 1962, the airfield was owned and operated by the U.S. While it has been a Saudi-owned airbase for decades, the Americans are allowed free and open access: no security clearance is needed whatsoever. The 1991 Gulf War ensured an ever more permanent US military presence.

Dhahran camp was established as a U.S. camp, settler-colonial style, as part of the long tradition of America’s westward expansion, otherwise known as Manifest Destiny. Many of our neighbors were proud Texans, hailing from oil towns back in the States. It was not unusual to see the Lone-Star flag draped from garage doors. Such neighbors were not happy about their proximity to non-Whites, such as my South Asian Muslim family; they used their White credentials for gatekeeping organizations and institutions (Girls Scouts, Little League, etc.,) within the camp, determining who was allowed in, and to what extent. Seeing themselves as pioneers in a hostile land, it was they who arranged the hierarchal contours of what constituted ‘civilization’ within the American camp. In my mind, I have often likened Dhahran to images from books and films about Californian frontier-towns during the mid-nineteenth century gold rush. As it happens, this is not so distant an analogy. Saudi Arabia’s state owned national oil company—holding the largest oil reserves in the world—was born in 1933 out of the oil concessions made by Saudi royal elite to California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC). An affiliate of the better-known Standard Oil of California (Chevron), it was the first company to begin oil prospecting on the Kingdom’s Eastern coast.

The dominant, official narrative within the camp was constantly reinforced to all those living and working there: that the discoveries of American geologists heralded great progress, that they brought with them all the good sense of science and technology, much in the way that many American school children were, and still are, taught about the great ‘discoveries’ of Columbus. The American geologists were depicted as brave, good, great geniuses—innovators and dreamers, men with visions, almost prophetic. They saved Arabia from a backwater nowhere, to a land of great prosperity, and it was a beautiful, beautiful thing. That the ports of the Gulf were ever backwaters to nowhere is a myth of course, since the Persian Gulf region had been for centuries a vast trading route and network between Africa and the Indian Ocean. But the more insidious aspect of this miracle narrative was that the Americans brought the Arabs out of their stupor and into the modern world, by renewing for them their Islamic golden age—ergo, Andalusian astrolabes and American geology.

In America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, one of the only books to document the history of the Arabian American Oil Company, Robert Vitalis systematically discredits the mythic stature ARAMCO has acquired in company and kingdom narratives about the US in Saudi Arabia. Using sources from geologists’ letters home, to official company documents, Vitalis shows that ARAMCO was, from the beginning, a venture having everything to do with profit and security. The first Americans to arrive in the desert were heirs to mining dynasties which had already been extracting copper and other metals in South America. In its chase after oil, the US government followed the company into the Arabian Peninsula. American oil officials agreed to share profits with the King, train employees, build roads and towns, and eventually turn ARAMCO into a Saudi run and owned company in return for revenue and exclusive oil rights. From Eisenhower’s agreement to train Ibn Saud’s army, to Lyndon Johnson’s sale of missiles to the Saudi royal family, ARAMCO—like the East India Company had been for the British—was transformed into America’s largest overseas private enterprise.

I grew up on one of the final frontiers of the American Empire. But unlike tea or pepper, oil is very sticky indeed, and its stickiness never washes off. Its grime never quite leaves you.

***************************************************************************

Roller-skating and riding my bicycle were amongst my other favorite past-times as a youngster. I wanted to know if I could bike up until the edge, right up to where Dhahran ended and something else, the desert, began. There were at least two main gates, if not three, but I couldn’t think of any others. Inspired by English novels, which were often full of trap doors and secret gardens and closets that opened out into vast fantasies, I wondered if there was a hole, or a key, that led us away from what kept us trapped. If we were all in a giant peach, and I lived next to the pit, what was outside? There must be a hole, I remember thinking, or a little secret door where people could slip in and out without anyone noticing: I found none. But that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. There were all sorts of secrets and rumors that buzzed around the camp, since there was no free press in the Kingdom. So secrets must be coming in somehow from somewhere.

Only once did I find, what I thought was the edge. I was about twelve years old. It was a late winter afternoon. I was riding, faster and farther than I had ever before. I had to ride as fast as I could on my imitation BMX, because I had to be home before maghrib. That day, I rode quite far, beyond some cul-de-sacs, right off of Penninsular Avenue and behind Rolling Hills Blvd, where the Golf courses were, and then I rode further still. I thought I had found it, and in the distance there were some rocky shards of hill, the jabal. It lay behind tall metallic fences. In all likelihood, it was an area where construction was about to begin. I stared out at the jabal. I had heard from other kids at school and from family friends, in whispers, that the jabals around Dhahran were haunted by a jinn (spirit). The jinn apparently dressed in a jalabiyya, and looked like he could be a bedu. But he wasn’t, because he walked two feet off the ground, in the air. And, no one had ever seen his face: it was said he had none, only smoke arose between his ghutra. Only from a distance, the silhouette could be made out. It was said that only he could command the area around the jabal, which was infested with scorpions, snakes, and poisonous lizards. I shuddered. I wasn’t going in there. Not if the gatekeeper was a jinn. And as exciting as the possibility of caving my way into a desert hole, away from everyone, I certainly was going to have nothing to do with any scorpions. In all my life, I had seen only one, and it had scared the life out of me. Stuck to the front screen door of our house, I could see its enormous pincers even from half-way down the drive-way, and screamed. My father killed it after smacking the arachnid until I could hear it crack on the back of a shovel. So, when I saw that jabal, I shrank back and knew I would never go inside. But I did feel some vindication: I had finally found the end, the border, the fence which made us all living inside the camp, hemmed in by a strange hamlet: above us were the searing screeches of airplanes from the base which flew low and loud, and below us, only black stickiness that made the airplanes go. I quickly hopped onto my bike and rode home, stepping inside just as the muezzin’s call to prayer was ending.

And so, I came to know of the bedu only as traces, as ghosts, and as Halloween costumes for the Americans in the camp.

The opening chapters of Vitalis’ book are edifying. In them, he shows how a Jim Crow system was instituted in Dhahran’s oil camps during the 1930s, between native Arab workers and American petroleum explorers. By the 1950s and 1960s, the workers began to openly challenge the racial hierarchies of the ARAMCO camps, in one strike after another. Simultaneously, progressive Saudis questioned the oligarchs who dictated the rules of the international oil market. These groups and voices were crushed by the Company and by the royal elite. Their defeat signaled the consolidation of America’s Kingdom under the House of Fahd, the royal faction that governs Saudi Arabia to this day.

In ARAMCO’s unearthing of black gold, a Texas operation-California style, and with the assistance of native royal elites, the Company cleared the oasis communities of indigenous nomadic peoples. Paving the way for progress, ARAMCO used the labor of once itinerant, relatively free-moving Bedouins, to build camps of concrete under the fierce sun. Progress came to the Arabian Penninusla in those years by way of blisters, heat stroke, deprivation, and the melding of human labor to the molding of oil. The native guides who assisted the American geologists in the early days likely belonged to tribal communities who had already been transitioning to a semi-nomadic lifestyle as a result of the British and Ottoman imperial competition in the region.

A letter to his wife from one American geologist about his native guide is revealing:

I enjoy the poems even though I can’t understand a word. The listeners all repeat the last two or three syllables at the end of each line. Khamis [ibn Rimthan] usually summarizes the story for us beforehand. Jerry…told them about the escape of Daniel Boone from the Indians, the ‘American Bedu’ by throwing tobacco in their eyes and swinging across a river gorge on a grapevine. I stumbled through an account of Custer’s Last Stand. Abdul Hadi [ibn Jithina]..wanted to know what tribes the American Bedu belong to. Khamis said none that he would know, but Abdul Hadi said he had been up to the border and perhaps the American Bedu were related to some of the tribes in Iraq! After I had told about them about cutting out Custer’s heart and eating it to make them brave, Khamis said the Bedu did the same thing with a wolf’s eye—they carried it with them when they did not want to be seen at night. Khamis is member of a once-powerful northern tribe, the Ajman, who rebelled against the King Ibn Saud, and were defeated in battle…Many fled to Iraq, had much of [their] land taken away, and their largest city now falling into ruins.
Asked to finish the story of the American Bedu, Tom Barger drew two uneven circles in the sand. “Before the war their land was like this, after like this.” Here was Barger’s version of the story ….about the mining capital’s expansion into Apache and other Native American people’s lands. Khamis concluded, “Yes…this is what happens to the Bedu in Arabia when they make war with the government.” (Vitalis, pp. 88-89)

Dhahran was the first of these towns where local Arabs and Americans lived in segregated quarters—separate and most definitely unequal: no Saudis were allowed to live inside the Dhahran camp. It was caste, Jim-Crow style. Those who collaborated, that is accepted the Company’s dictates and the royal edicts, tended to be wealthier and better-off. The royal elite justified oil extraction and modernization in the name of Islam, thus providing ample employment opportunity to a conservative, patriarchal ‘ulema.

The only history written of the place known as Dhahran is a novel by the Jordanian-Saudi writer, Abdul-Rahman Munif. It is entitled Cities of Salt and was published in 1984, but I only came to know of it in its English translation many years later. At six hundred pages, the novel—the first of a quintet—is an epic for only the committed. In it, Munif tells the story of what happens to a small oasis community when the Americans arrive in their search for oil. It is narrated through the eyes of the local Bedouins, as they are forced to flee from their oasis community by foreign strangers bringing with them “mysterious magic tools”: bulldozers, cars, radios, and telephones. Amongst the many characters in the novel, is one Bedouin, al-Hathal, who leads a rebellion of Arab workers when the village of Harran, near his oasis, as it is turned into an American port city, and his people are forced into construction work. Cities of Salt was banned in Saudi Arabia, and Munif, Saudi Arabia’s only novelist and historian, was forced into exile by the monarchy. Dissent of any kind gives the royal elite indigestion.

I quickly realized that Harran was none other than the fictional name of the camp I grew up in. It was the first time I had read an account of Dhahran that was not written up by the ARAMCO Public Relations Department. I savored every bit.

It was more than the historical narrative which drew me in, however. Munif’s apocalyptic imagery is powerful: he likens oil-drilling machines to iron giants tearing away at the flesh of palm fronds; the bedu watch in horror as the earth is dug up into a veritable hell-fire. Such descriptions showcase a war, not between modernity and tradition, but between inhumanity and the ecology, as petro-capitalism makes its final triumph. The bedouins’ confusion, anxiety, and despair are voiced through Prophetic predictions about the end of the world, inspired by Islamic motifs. And, Munif’s title is evocative. In an interview with Tariq Ali, Munif explained why he chose it:

Cities of salt means cities that offer no sustainable existence. When the waters come in, the first waves will dissolve the salt and reduce these great glass cities to dust. In antiquity, as you know, many cities simply disappeared. It is possible to foresee the downfall of cities that are inhuman. With no means of livelihood they won’t survive. Look at us now and see how the west sees us.

Why haven’t there been more novels like Munif’s?

In coining the term, “petro-fiction”, Amitav Ghosh has observed that the Oil Encounter has yielded hardly any meaningful works of literature, and suggests a few reasons why this is the case. Oil encounters occurred in places in the Persian Gulf which were predominantly made up of people belonging to oral cultures, “those parts of the Middle East that have been the most marginal in the development of modern Arab culture and literature—on the outermost peripheries of such literary centers as Cairo and Beirut.” But over and above this, Ghosh claims that it is the the multi-lingual aspect of the Oil Encounter that prohibits it from being narrated through the novel form, which tends to function best through the “monolingual speech community,” of the nation-state. (Ghosh, p. 79)

The languages of the Oil Encounter, languages also seminal to the history of the Indian Ocean—Arabic, English, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, and Bengali, and others—do not mix, but rather float like the different, coated layers between water and oil. Perhaps, like oil drops, the encounters between the peoples and languages of the petroleum industry, must fall one by one, meeting one another on the more solid literary ground of short stories, travelogues, and memoirs.

[Editor's note: This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's two-part essay on South African Desis. A longer version of this essay appeared in Transition 107]

In my return to Southern Africa as an adult, I was delighted to find a space in which “Indianness” was engaged in a different conversation. It was only then, almost twenty years after I first left, that I realised that it is possible to renegotiate a relationship with a place that had little patience for the nuances of difference. But that interstice—where confluences between seemingly vastly different bodies could take place—wasn’t found on the front pages and the blaring headlines. Just by the pervasiveness of samosas along the eateries of Cape Town and the interior of the Western Cape, for instance, one knows that there had to have been Indians in these quarters for much longer than the nouveau-riches that make the front page. We don’t know exactly how the famous fried savory pastry got to Cape Town, but it’s firmly ensconced there.

But one does not have to rely on taste alone to see the hallmarks of India all over the Cape. The cobblestoned streets that line the hill of the Bo-Kaap, a historical neighbourhood built by those transported forcibly from Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and parts of India – the locations in which the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company) carried out “colonial activities,” empowered by the 21-year monopoly granted by the States-General of the Netherlands in 1602 –are swirling with signs of the Indian Ocean. I recognise one person’s sidelong shy smile, the hairline on another, and the disgusted curl on the lips of a street-hawker, spitting unhappily as a deal goes awry. These embodied connections, as old as the slave ships that brought people from that region, reach back to 1654.

 ***

By the 2000s, scholars and amateur historians alike were already digging up the clues to South Africa’s long tradition of entanglements, rather than its separations. That image of the “rich Indian,” of which Riason Naidoo spoke, comes from connecting South African Indians with mercantile networks across the Indian Ocean, allowing them access to “deals” unavailable to others. Uma Duphelia Mesthrie, in “The Passenger Indian as Worker: Indian Immigrants in Cape Town in the early Twentieth Century,” notes that these misunderstandings come from conflating two sets of migrants: one indentured, and the other, more free. First came thousands of Indians, mostly from Tamil and Telegu-speaking areas of India, brought to South Africa from 1860 onwards as indentured labourers, under contracts to work in the British Colony of Natal. Arriving later, from the 1870s and the 1880s, were those who came to be known as “passenger Indians”: migrants who paid the ship’s passage to the colonies, coming to trade or serve in commerce-related activities. Perhaps simply because the wealthier Indian merchants, by the very fact of their rarity, were visible in a country where wealth was mostly only possible if one were “white.” However, the majority of these latter passengers, according to Mesthrie, were small-time traders or hawkers, assistants or servants to wealthier merchants.

***

Outside the academy, the more subtle conversations about what it meant to be simultaneously African and Indian were already taking place along the railroads, cane fields, mineshafts, and the backrooms of shops during the early part of the twentieth century. Those early conversations led to political convergences. In 1913, for instance, under Gandhi’s guidance, indentured labourers rebelled against a new tax on their persons. Later Indian involvement in the anti-apartheid movement was not restricted to the “greats;” ordinary middle-class Indians joined with ANC efforts, facing detention under the State of Emergency, house arrest, and “banning,” which effectively removed them from the public sphere. Amina Cachalia, co-founded The Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW or FSAW), which was launched on April 17, 1954 in Johannesburg and was the first attempt to establish a broad-based women’s organization. As leaders in the Defiance Campaign, Yusuf Dadoo, Ahmed Kathrada, and Billy Nair were three of the defendants at the Treason Trials of 1956, along with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Govan Mbeki (father of president Thabo Mbeki).

***

On my return to Southern Africa, I had this list of historical figures, names and noble deeds memorised like a litany of self-protection. But I found that I didn’t have to carry such amulets. Within a short time, I found that the political, aesthetic, and intellectual leanings that led to convergences between “Africans” and “Indians” were still alive, as is evident in The Indian in Drum Magazine in the 1950s (2009), edited by Riason Naidoo, containing essays accompanied by a lavish collection of photographs curated from the pages of Drum Magazine.

Rita Lazarus, Miss Durban 1960. Photo by Ranjith Kally. © BAHA

Drum has a significant place in the South African political, social, and aesthetic imaginary: in the 1950s, the establishment of Drum Magazine, with its racy sets of photographs and articles, reflected the dynamic changes that were taking place among the new urban Black South Africans, be they African, Indian or Coloured. The images therein contrasted with the vision promoted by the freshly elected Nationalist Party’s policy of Apartheid: a docile, rural lot, ready for servitude. The images splashed across the pages of Drum were the location in which the liveliness, intellectual ingenuity, and style of the disobedient apartheid-era subject was captured. Consider Ranjith Kally’s photograph of Rita Lazarus, Miss Durban 1960: there she is in curvy deliciousness, wrapped around a breaker at high tide, the Indian Ocean swirling around her. It wasn’t the official South African vision of the Indian woman: bejewelled and covered, eyes downcast in submission to lord and authority.

Tommy Chetty and Amaranee Naidoo on the Wall of Death, 1957. Photo by Ranjith Kally. © BAHA

The photographs Naidoo chose for The Indian in Drum are deliberately intended to challenge conventional and “official” portrayals of the South African Indian community, and illustrate the role of ordinary Indians in challenging those conventions. Here, we are treated to a series documenting the feud between the “Salots” and the “Crimson League” gangs, and the swagger of Sheriff Khan (known as “South Africa’s Al Capone”), the king of the South African underworld. Khan aggregated power by collaborating with apartheid law enforcement officials and combining various gangs in Johannesburg and Durban to become the mastermind behind illegal gambling establishments.

Miriam Makeba with Sonny Pillay and his family, 1959. Photo by Ranjith Kally. © BAHA

Other images are of activists Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker, Indian footballers, ‘Jazz King’ Pumpy Naidoo, daredevil motorcycle riders, ballroom dance champions. There is one especially priceless photograph of Sonny Pillay, the dashing Durban Indian ballad singer, who was dating Miriam Makeba at the time: he is surrounded by adoring family members, they crowd around a sofa, looking through a magazine, while Miriam balances a cup of tea in her hand. Others are less glamorous: images of child labour on the sugar farms in Natal, and dire depictions of the living conditions in the ghettoes in Cato Manor illustrate the reality lived by most Indians of Natal.

God's Chillun Gotta work, 1957. DRUM photographer, Durban. © BAHA

 ***

Roster of ‘new arrivals’ in Port Natal, in the British colony of Natal (present day South Africa). Indentured Indian labourers began arriving in 1860, and were identified only by number. Photo courtesy of The Indian in Drum Magazine in the 1950s, edited by Naidoo (Bell-Roberts Publishing, 2009). This image was originally published in Meet the Indian in South Africa (1950), State Information Office, Pretoria. Government Communication and Information System (GCIS).

In Naidoo’s office hangs a painting that has always captured my attention: it depicts, in Warholian colours and shadows, the faces of indentured labourers, whose photographs were taken upon their arrival in Port Natal in the nineteenth century, much like prisoners’ mug shots. The labourers hold little placards with numbers on them: that number, not their name, is their identity. Their displacement, and the shock of arrival, is captured in their haggard, wild features. Images such as these got Naidoo interested in early photography of colonial subjects: “in the nineteenth century, photography was used to document the colonial people…in a very ethnographic fashion, as the sick, as prisoners, or as the poor.” When he began his career in art, he wanted the people in the communities from which he came—people who had no access to conceptual and abstract Western art—to be able to see themselves in the work he produced, rather than in mug shots taken to document their labouring bodies for empire. “I wanted to speak to our real history. My father and brothers were tough guys, quite serious fighters who could take care of themselves. They could carry big sacks of rice and beans, drums of oil. I was looking for photographs to tell these stories and I couldn’t find them. I just found bits and pieces.” Then one day, as he was looking through a 1950s copy of Drum magazine, he found that “about half of it was about Indian gangsters, Indian footballers, Sonny Pillay, and Indian photographers and writers. These were the stories that my parents spoke about.” While scholars had pored over Drum to document its place in the struggle against apartheid, and to signify its importance to black culture, “nobody had yet mentioned [the Indian photographers or the Indian subjects] in all the studies done about the contributions of Drum. It was completely overlooked. And that’s when [my] project started.”

When I looked at the neat rows of small images from the entrance of the National Gallery, they didn’t look imposing, or world-changing from a distance. The photographs were deliberately small—so the viewer was compelled to walk towards them: they invited intimacy; they requested a conversation beyond a passing perusal. They showed me that it is possible to begin a conversation with one’s history, as impossible and displacing as it will be, undoubtedly, at times.

***

 In my youth, I’d wanted nothing but leaving—the voluminous otherness that was America was such high pleasure that I forgot to return home for nearly two decades. When I left my rural backwater mining town in Zambia for an equally backwater college town in the U.S., I wanted nothing but to run away from the narrative of expatriate-Asian unbelonging in Africa. I thought I’d never return: it was neither a negotiation that I imagined wanting to encounter, nor was prepared in any way to face.

As I walked through the gallery on a quiet weekday, overhearing the conversations of other visitors, I realised that even in 2011, South Africans were still engaged in the daily labour of encountering difference, and re-inscribing closed patterns of thinking that fit each of them into too-tight moulds. Here, in these images, I saw that people had already engaged in the difficult conversations that I had once found too debilitating to face: they had had no place to run away to. They had opened up a space for dialogue during a time and in a place where there was only room for a one-way ethnographic description. I wasn’t facing this work alone.

[editor's note: This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's two-part essay on South African Desis. A longer version of this essay appeared in Transition 107. Our sincere thanks to her for allowing CM to host it.]

As a child growing up within Southern Africa’s socio-political landscape, I found no easy, seamless fitting in. South Asians were always Indians in Africa, and Africa’s encounter with Indians didn’t teach them about the beauties and wonders my own father had encountered there: his stories about his student days in India were littered with nostalgia for the seven temples of Mahabalipuram crumbling into the Indian Ocean, and the fineness of silk saris that could be threaded through the eye of a needle; he conjured up Calcutta as the beloved seat of Indian literary knowledge and classical music, and the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu as Sri Lanka’s once-conjoined siblings, separated by the imprecise surgery of oceanic waters.

I remember that our small Sri Lankan community in Zambia did everything they could to differentiate themselves from Indians in Africa. But for all practical purposes, no one on the continent (or anywhere else, for that matter) could see any difference. We corrected those who mistakenly misidentified us. We listed and elaborated upon our differences from Indians. But our attempts to separate ourselves from Indian barbarity were to no avail: for Africans, India remained a broken nation. And Indians in Africa were the shop-keeping, corner-crisps-shop-running, trader-cum-smuggler-cum-briber, arse-kissing, yes-no-head-lolling-and-“r”-rolling, expel-from-your-African-nation-Asians. Africans thought of Indians in much the same way as much of the world thought of India and Indians back then: dusty, diseased, starved, overpopulated.

***

Manager Govender and boxer Louis Joshua described in DRUM as the ‘Last of the Indian Champs’, 1956. Photo by G.R. Naidoo. © BAHA

During my visit to South Africa in 2011, the National Gallery in Cape Town was exhibiting a selection of photographs of Indians in South Africa circa the 1950s, together with a concurrent exhibit profiling the work of photographer Ranjith Kally (b. 1925, Isipingo). When I spoke to Riason Naidoo, the Director of the National Gallery in Cape Town and the curator of this exhibit, he had a lot to say about constantly battling that image of “Everyone’s Indian”. “Everyone’s got their Indian” – a phrase that embraces an old racist trope in South Africa— expresses fear and need, but it ultimately emphasises the disposability or interchangeability of the Indian. It says that hustlers big and small—from the illegal shabeen and spaza owner to those who have set up shop in the headiest locations of power in South Africa—all had their set-up man, their palm-greaser, their apologist, their go-between. But that ugly phrase also conveys something more: that the man to whom one swore brotherhood in the thick of plot and hangover would inevitably be disowned and discarded when the time came to rule.

When he first went to university in the mid 1980s, Naidoo, a Durban-born “Indian” in Cape Town, realised that apartheid made people lazy: they simply bought the stereotypes of the four “racial categories” (White, Black, Coloured, and Indian) wholesale, along with the images that accompanied the categories. As an Indian, he was expected to be the result of an arranged marriage. But Naidoo’s real experiences were a collage of less conventional portraits: he grew up in Chatsworth, an area delegated for those classified as “Indian” under the auspices of the 1950 Group Areas Act, which mandated that desirable areas of urban spaces be designated for “Whites,” while all “Others,” including those registered by the census bureau as Black, Coloured (people of mixed racial descent), or Indian had to move to far more desolate areas, giving up their homes in the city. The Group Areas Act only amalgamated the aims of several previous laws, passed as a result of European agitation against Indian “penetration.” In Durban, the Act had the effect of forcibly removing tens of thousands of Indians from around the city to Chatsworth, fifteen miles away from the city, only to be packed into semi-detached housing.

***

Chatsworth, existing on the outer margins of Durban, today contains the largest concentration of Indians in South Africa. It is not the location of the picturesque poor. Scholar and activist Ashwin Desai substantiates Riason Naidoo’s experiences: here, the poorest residents continue to be routinely evicted because they are unemployed and unable to keep up with rent and utility payments. Those who are employed spend ten to eleven hours away from home, because they have to take the long bus ride into Durban, leaving children without supervision. Desai’s The Poors of Chatsworth: Race, Class and Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2000), points out that among the deeply impoverished, the “Indianness” of Indians hardly matters, especially not in “post-apartheid” South Africa, where economic conditions maintain racial separations as tightly as did the legal definitions. The title of his book comes from the quip made by a Chatsworth resident bearing the disarming name Girlie Amod: during a standoff between Chatsworth residents and local ANC politicians, the residents—who were about to be evicted—were accused of asking for special treatment because they were Indians. Amod’s famous reply was: “We are not Indians. We are the poors,” thusly connecting herself and her community’s plight with that of the global favela-resident, be they black or Indian, from Durban or Johannesburg, Rio or Bombay.

It was these “poors” among whom Riason Naidoo grew up. As a youngster, Naidoo spent hours in the market on Victoria Street after school, mingling with street fighters and the gangsters; it was here, among the hundreds of stalls set up by Indian and African merchants in a huge building on the corner of Queen and Victoria streets, that his grandfather had a stall beginning in the late 1920s. When he was accepted into university, where he studied fine art, it was the first time he left the cocoon of all-Indian society, segregated as it was during apartheid; there, he was confronted by white students’ stereotypes of what being “Indian” represented. Naidoo recalls, “And this was completely surprising for me, because it wasn’t my experience. My parents weren’t arranged in marriage. They went out to ballroom dance. We weren’t rich.” Naidoo confirms that in his understanding and experience, Indians in South Africa were already a “Creole culture,” although “people from the other racial groups didn’t understand that. So I was looking to tell that story. It began with my own paintings, about articulating what life was like in Chatsworth.”

When he arrived in the Cape, as Director of the National Gallery in 2009, there was more than a gentle resistance to his ideas of representation. In the gallery’s 139-year history, it had never before had a “non-white” director. When Naidoo decided to remove paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, which had hung on those walls for sixty-three years, Art Times, an influential South African journal of art, decried that the venerable institution had been “trashed” and called Naidoo’s ambitious collection chronicling South African art from 1910-2010 an example of “the Wal-Marting” of South African art.

Naidoo faces an uphill battle in his attempt to remove the “eliteness” (read: “whiteness”) associated with aesthetics in South Africa, and not just from the sniffly reaches of the art world. Besides that fight, his actions, whether supportive of artists of all the late-great racial groups’ work, is continually read for signs of what people believe might be motivated by his “Indianness.”

Hlongwane, Nhlanhla. “South Africa: the Indian Question.” August/September 2004. New African.

As late as 2004, Nhlanhla Hlongwane disparaged what was seen as the “separatist” attitude of Indians in a report published in the New African: while the Indians in England, “be they Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Hare Krishna or Christian…[are] very British,” just as “the Indian on the Caribbean Islands is very Caribbean,” the writer found that the “Indian in South Africa” had not “found an affinity and solidarity with both country and continent.” Hlongwane’s piece is fronted by a delightfully troubling image: a bejewelled, turquoise-satin clad dancer, midriff bared, regales a very glum looking president Thabo Mbeki; he eyes her from his seat on an ornately carved wooden chair, stifled by two gigantic garlands of flowers. The image, and Hlongwane’s writing, capture the uneasiness historically associated with the Indian in South Africa. Having “internalised the racial hierarchy advocated by colonial rule with white people at the top and black people at the bottom of the strata,” as Hlongwane wrote, “Indians,” who were situated somewhere in the middle, are forever imagined to be stuck on replay: playing “white” and playing up to the “whites” in order to be recognised as better than barbaric.

I. Years ago, while writing my dissertation, I stepped out one evening to one of those enormous drug stores that are open all night in cities. I browsed idly among the nail colors, wondering if I should consider adding layers of glitter to my already elaborate manicure. The aisles of women’s products were full of women browsing and wondering such things. Over the loudspeaker the music changed from one anodyne pop hit to another, until all at once Whitney Houston’s voice slid into the audioscape, then erupted into her super hit “I Will Always Love You.” The women began to hum, and then to sing, softly, as they gently cradled canisters of hairspray in their hands. And then they sang, loudly; we sang loudly, unashamedly: “I will always love youuuuuuuu!” And I thought, “Yes. Yes, I can go with glitter. Yes, I will do blue. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

II. In her memoir of her time as a sex slave to Osama bin Laden during his playboy phase, Kola Boof, a Sudanese poet, wrote that bin Laden was in love with Whitney Houston. It was his fantasy that he would give her a mansion he owned in Khartoum and take her as one of his wives. And he would order a hit on Bobby Brown. If only he had. If only he had shown that same sticktoitiveness he showed later in life, he could have helped Americans avoid a national tragedy.

III. An essay eulogizing Whitney Houston from India compares her tragic tale to that of Choti Bahu (played by Meena Kumari) in the Guru Dutt film Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam. Choti Bahu wants to attract the attention of her husband, who ignores her each night in favor of the courtesans that entertain him and drink with him. She takes up drink herself. The plan backfires and she becomes a sad drunk, spurned yet again by her cruel husband.

Whitney did it all for Bobby too, argues Lakshmi Chaudhry, quoting an Oprah interview in which Houston said:

He was my drug. I didn’t do anything without him. I wasn’t getting high by myself. It was me and him together. You know, we were partners. And that’s what my high was. Him. He and I being together. And whatever we did, we did together. No matter what, we did it together.

“Because you were his wife.” Responds Oprah. “Yes,” she replied, “Yes. And he was my husband.”

IV. In 2003, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown made a visit to Israel on the invitation of the Black Hebrew Israelites. In all the photographs of the trip, Houston looks skinny and unkempt. The trip involved a spiritual dip in the Jordan River near the Sea of Galilee. Brown and Houston, both wearing red dashikis, also met with then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. When Sharon held out his hand to shake hers, Houston looked visibly uneasy and made Brown shake his hand in her stead.

V. When Whitney Houston died in her bathtub, I tried to block out the sordid image with thoughts of Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, floating peacefully among the flowers. Numerous articles and blog posts explored the depressing details of the life of a drug addict. This one even discussed, from first-hand knowledge, the unsurprisingness of a celebrity drug addict dying in her bathtub:

So while stars are infamous for their hard partying, their dizzying downward spirals, their headline-making binges, but the truth is, when they use most heavily and subsequently die, it’s usually in their most private places, where they can relax, be in quiet, and don’t have to appear functional to the outside world.

Much more rare are the overdoses out in the world of the living, like River Phoenix’s in front of the Viper Room many years ago. After beds (recently these deaths include Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Casey Johnson, Michael Jackson), it seems that bathtubs are where drug abusers die.

I tried to blot the image out again by painting it but could not. I meditate instead upon the famous painting by John Everett Millais, a postcard of which my mother hung next to the bathtub in the house where I grew up.

CM friend, Neelika Jayawardane, reviewed Lapata’s The Little Book of Terror for Africa is a Country.

Rather than fall into the sort of pop-psychology that claims to sort out why the children of the well-off (Osama bin-Laden included) may find “radicalism” attractive, Daisy Rockwell’s “cheeky little volume” of paintings and minimalist essays, The Little Book of Terror, offers a series of “big-name, international rogues” as well as the small fry caught in a big net. But, as Sepia Mutiny reports, “the feeling of uneasiness comes not from these over-chronicled villain archetypes whose images we’ve all seen scattered over televisions a hundred times over.” Instead, that unease comes from the realization that “The State is…a makeup artist,” as Amitava Kumar writes in the introduction to the book: the theatre surrounding “the bad guys” portray the accused as the “shabbiest” of actors with the “worst lines.” But beyond the re-plays repeated on CNN, we also see that the State is skilled “at presenting us with people who come to us stripped of any sign of place or past”: this way, we only see terrorists and terror without a contextualising history.

Rockwell works from some of those highly publicised photographs for many of her paintings, giving the captured people a depth that photography and the State’s vision of them often robs. She writes, in an email correspondence, “I have been interested in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for some time. Looking through photos of him on the internet, it was almost hard to pick which one to work with because he looks kind of sad and lost in all of them.” Her fauve painter’s techniques capture the “ordinary teen” who sported jeans and T-shirts, track suits, headphones, and rode a red-and-blue motorbike too fast sometimes. Her painting also reveals a significant moment in the life of a young man: he has found himself in a location where, perhaps, his limited understanding of subjectivity intersects with power structures that had over-determined the fortunes of vast swathes of humanity. It is far more than he is ready to face. Here, in this photograph, Rockwell points out, “he seemed excited to model his new Nike hat, and perhaps excited to be in London.” In a way, he had too much understanding, but little wisdom or equanimity. “I felt like that interaction with Empire might have somehow informed his eventual decision to attempt to make himself into a human bomb.”

Read the full piece here.

Phillygrrl’s Q&A with Lapata at CM rival-friend, Sepia Mutiny:

 In her portrait of Alessa, Rockwell depicts him in bubble-gum pink tones, prone on a floral bedspread, cuddling with his beloved cat, Princess Tuna. Unsettling. The narrative of terror that we often see seldom contains photos of wannabe terrorists cuddling with their kitty cats, or of the underwear bomber as a sullen teenager, posing during a school trip.

CNN Outfrontblog: Her grandpa painted Amrikans, and OMFG, she paints terrorists!!!!!!

My review of Habibi is out in The Sunday Guardian today. It was originally longer. The full piece is below:

I. Hating Art
I have hated many pieces of art in my life. An Italian restaurant I used to go to was decorated with enormous abstract oil paintings. The paintings were so aggressively bad they made me feel physically ill. But the food at the restaurant was good, and we always ended up trying to find seating that placed me facing away from the walls with a view of the street. It’s easy to hate art. Growing up in a family of artists, hating, and loving, works of art was a preoccupation. I fully understand hating art for aesthetic reasons, but I’ve always had trouble understanding taking offense at art for religious or moral reasons.

A number of years ago, in an attempt to understand the question of political and religious offense at art, I designed and taught a course in South Asian literature called Art that Offends. I chose for the syllabus texts that had at one time or another become the focus of controversy with charges of obscenity or blasphemy. Most notable among these was The Satanic Verses. The university where I taught attracted families from religiously conservative backgrounds with a promise to ‘strengthen faith’ in students (rather than to proselytize the Catholic faith of the institution). There were several students in my class from conservative Muslim backgrounds. As we began to read The Satanic Verses, some of these students approached me outside of class and told me that members of their families had advised them not to read the book due to its blasphemous content. Having ascertained that none of these relatives had read the book, I asked the students to consider reading it for themselves and then deciding whether or not it was blasphemous. I assured them that they were free to decide whatever they wished and I would not grade them on the basis of their assessment, but rather on their participation and completion of assignments.

The students were required to keep a journal throughout the class and to hand it in once a week. Since The Satanic Verses is long, it took us some time to get through it. Over the period of weeks that we read the text, I noted with interest the reactions of the students who had worried about reading it. The reactions of one girl in particular stood out. A Pakistani American, she was enthralled with Rushdie’s writing style and expressed pride that one of her people could write so cleverly and skillfully. Nevertheless, she did decide by the end that the book was, if not blasphemous, at least willfully offensive with respect to the sections portraying a brothel populated by prostitutes equal in number to the wives of Mohammed and bearing the same names as his wives.

For a final project, that student, and another Pakistani American friend of hers in the class, wrote up an indictment of Rushdie that they read to the class. They had also filmed themselves arguing with a liberal Muslim friend about what punishment he deserved. In the film they resolved to burn a photograph of Rushdie, which they then did, in the bathroom of their apartment. Some students in the class were horrified by the presentation, as have been friends and colleagues when I have told them the story. Yet the tone of the video was playful and exuberant.

I have always prized the memory of that class, feeling that those students took away the valuable lesson that they must determine for themselves what offends them and what does not. They loved the book, and yet, they wanted to burn it. Until recently, I have never been able to fully understand this tension, this desire to burn a work of art that one admires.

II. Orientalism Rides Again
There have been many works of fiction and writing that have sought to dig into the territory of the post-9/11 zeitgeist over the past ten years. One of the most recent is Habibi, a 600+ page graphic novel by artist Craig Thompson. Habibi is a book I really wanted to love. Thompson, who previously wrote and illustrated the insipid (and award-winning) autobiographical graphic novel Blankets, has said that Habibi was born of a desire to learn more about Islam and the Muslim world after the intense negativity leveled toward both in the US following the 2001 attacks. He spent seven years on the book, which he richly illustrated with Islamicate patterns and designs and a fair amount of Arabic calligraphy. The binding makes it look remarkably similar to a holy book, and numerous stories from the Quran are included in the text. In interviews, Thompson has said that he wanted to embrace what was positive about Islam and the Middle East to counteract prevailing narratives of terror and violence. He describes how he then proceeded to ‘embrace Orientalism’ (his words) and immerse himself in both a study of Islam and ‘traditional’ tales such as the 1001 Nights.

His construction of what it might mean to embrace Orientalism does not appear to have included any study of the works of Edward Said, and seems to be predicated entirely on studying Orientalist art and literature, which he believes should be considered positive aesthetic depictions of the Arab world and Islam. Both in terms of the narrative and the drawing, Thompson heavily references Orientalist painting and storytelling. The results are visually lovely, but highly problematic in terms of the storyline, which follows an odd quasi-sexual relationship between a child-bride turned courtesan named Dodola, and a slave-child turned eunuch, Cham, whom she adopts. These two inhabit a non-specific Middle Eastern country in the modern era that most of the time resembles the sort of kingdom one would find in the Arabian Nights. In this kingdom, there is a sultan with a harem, and eunuchs to guard the courtesans. Odalisques recline on divans smoking hookahs, and a dwarf marches about the geometric gardens chatting with the castrati. As if this weren’t enough, Dodola is subjected to a seemingly endless stream of sexual violence. The only positive character in her life, her adoptive son, Cham, actually volunteers to have himself castrated out of his shame for his desire for her. In the end, they fall in love, and adopt another slave child together.

Thompson’s infatuation with Orientalism, and his preoccupation with the use and abuse of highly sexualized heroine combine to produce the opposite effect to what he claims he had in mind. The Orientalist tropes are deployed in a non-ironic fashion and are not updated in any way, save for the fact that they are eventually welded to current stereotypes about the Middle East, as the characters move outside the Sultan’s palace and make their way through the corrupt, filthy and immoral universe of a generic modern day Middle Eastern city. When asked to defend his use of Orientalism, Thompson has said that it should be seen as a fantasy genre that can be referenced without replicating the racism of the original Orientalism, like ‘cowboys and Indians,’ he explained. As for the rape, prostitution and all manner of misogynistic depictions of women in the book, well, these have long been the stuff of comic books and graphic novels without the help of Orientalism, and undoubtedly Thompson’s influences came from that direction as well.

The fusion of Orientalist tropes and misogyny has a special place in the landscape of post-9/11 rhetoric, however. Susan Faludi, in her book on sexism in post-9/11 America, The Terror Dream, has rightly pointed out that the plight of women in the Middle East and Afghanistan became a sudden cause célèbre in the Bush administration. The co-opting of feminist rhetoric was a useful tool for winning over liberals to the plan to invade Afghanistan in particular. The Americans were not just going to invade another country; they were going to liberate women brutally oppressed by the Taliban. This message was elided with the rhetoric of the Iraq invasion as well, despite the fact that women’s rights have reportedly been set back substantially since the Americans landed there, and despite the fact that women enjoy very few rights in the countries of some of America’s closest allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia. Faludi rightly highlights the knight-in-shining-armor rhetoric deployed by the Bush administration to frame its role in the Middle East as one concerned with rescuing women. Thompson’s statements about his aim in creating Habibi, that he wanted to create a positive image of Islam and Muslims, mirrors this rescue-mission rhetoric. He then enacts a rescue mission through the creation of the book, creating a helpless and victimized woman and then rescuing her from her fate. Of course, the rescue itself is bizarre: to escape a life of rape and exploitation, she must be saved by a man who desires her sexually but is unable to have intercourse with her. Oh, and he’s sort of her son.

The question of how much one can describe or illustrate sexual violence against women before crossing the line from realism into voyeurism is the subject of much heated debate. But here’s a useful yardstick: if you illustrate it once, maybe you are informing your audience about a problem. If you illustrate it twice, or five or ten times, you are reproducing it for the salacious enjoyment of your viewers. Thompson illustrates sexual violence against his heroine at every possible opportunity, and his lavish and ornate drawings make each incident unforgettable. Interspersing the narrative with detailed stories from the Quran and the Hadith of the Prophet does not make the voyeurism go away.

When I had finished reading Habibi, I thought, well, it’s Orientalist, it’s misogynist, but damn, he learned how to write Arabic calligraphy well. I admit I was even a little jealous. I decided to find out how much Arabic he had studied. To my surprise, I discovered from reports of people who had seen Thompson read and discuss his work, that though he had learned the basics of the alphabet, the intricate calligraphy in the book was all traced from outside sources. As an artist, I found this very difficult to understand. If the work took seven years, and if he learned the alphabet, wouldn’t he want to try his hand at creating his own calligraphic designs? Wouldn’t he want to learn more Arabic? But this is simply one more example of the shallowness that undergirds the entire work: a laudable impulse to learn more, to reverse prejudice, was followed by a lazy embrace of Burton over Said, of voyeurism over empowerment, and tracing over writing. Habibi is a beautiful book and a terrible book. I am grateful for how much it has offended me. I could almost burn it.

[Part 6 of 6 -- A short version of this series was published at DAWN - Books & Authors]

That three million perished in the 1971 conflict is widely stated around the world. Salil Tripathi points out that “Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make it one of the most lethal conflicts of all time.” Is that so? Numerous scholars have concluded that the figure of three million is exaggerated and incorrect. Sarmila Bose contends that “it is possible to estimate with reasonable confidence that 50,000 – 100,000 people perished in the conflict in East Pakistan in 1971, including combatants and non-combatants, Bengalis and non-Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis.” The Bangla Academy’s district surveys, conducted between 1996 and 2001, Naeem Mohaiemen mentions, also found the figure to be much lower.  However, the importance of establishing statistically sound estimate of casualties and other war-crimes notwithstanding, as Sarmila Bose points out, there is no magical number of dead that needs to be hit before one can refer to a mass killing with the historically charged label of genocide.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 states that:

genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

It is this definition with which Bose contends that the Pakistan Army’s violence in Bangladesh cannot be termed as genocide of Bengalis, but Bengali violence on Biharis can be. Bose claims that since Pakistan Army could not differentiate among Bengalis as to who was pro-liberation and who was pro-Pakistan, that it used “proxies” or “profiling” to target people of a certain occupation (police), or political affiliation (membership of Awami League), age (adult), gender (in Bose’s reckoning male, but not female!), and religion (Hindu) and therefore engaged in “political killing.” She does not accord the same logic of profiling to the killings of Biharis, which she contends had to do with the narrow ethno-linguistic nationalism and xenophobia of Bengalis.

Bose does state that the killings of Bengali Hindus simply for being Hindus “could be [my emphasis] termed genocidal by their nature” but then mentions that the Pakistan Army left many unharmed, as if that somehow dilutes the genocidal nature of violence unleashed upon Hindus. She mentions that Hindus were attacked, looted, and hounded by Bengalis too, which is apparently the case from the evidence she presents. However, the war being waged by Pakistanis on Hindu ‘subversives’ and their ‘Hindu-like’ accomplices in Bengal is surely the overarching concern, and a key factor even in Bengali violence on Hindus since that is the broader context that animated the violence in Bangladesh in 1971. That India encouraged the migration of Hindu refugees from Bengal who were imagined as future “good citizens,” (but not Muslim refugees) also went into the making of Hindu exodus, which she correctly names as ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Hindus, but one that went hand in hand with the genocidal attack on Hindus.

Saikia, too, contends, that “it is not possible to establish that the Bangladesh case was genocide.” Violence in East Pakistan was not produced in death factories but as passionate episodes of violence responding to a previous outbreak of violence. This violence happened between and within communities. The perpetrators were driven by a multitude of motives ranging from group interest, politics, revenge, greed, and opportunism. Saikia advances another term, “Politicide,” whereby “political issues lead to mass murder of communal victims,” as an alternative to genocide.  Since the violence in 1971 was carried out on groups based on political terms, Saikia posits:

This was distinct from the violence committed by Nazis against Jews. Jews were not a political or military threat to Germany. They were killed solely because of their ethnoreligious identity.

(However, it seems that this methodology remains locked in a frame that takes the Nazi Holocaust as the standard with which every atrocity is compared to determine its station on the morbid hierarchy of misery.)

Remembering the dead as numbers is dehumanizing, and terminological labels have an effect of exceptionalizing violence and evil. Rather than being tied up with what terminology best describes the violence of 1971, Saikia brings our attention to the fact that common people committed atrocities as they took sides with ethnic or political groups and that “it is almost impossible to distinguish victims from perpetrators.” Pakistani military administrators, Indian politicians, Bengali leaders, and those following the aforesaid classes

reduced their enemies into abstract numbers and demographic units, categorizing us and them. The abstraction of humans to fit ethnic, religious, and national labels opened the space for a cold, inhuman purpose for one human being to violate another human being. Bounded communities saw themselves as enemies of other bounded communities.

A diverse population was reduced to mere labels – such as Hindu, ‘Hindu-like’ Bengali, Indian agent, Bihari, razakar and collaborator – and violence unleashed.

***

Perhaps the most important insight to emerge from a critical examination of the 1971 war and the consequent partition, is the need to recognize and affirm our shared humanity with the Other, which breaks down in times of conflict. Unable to see the Other except through de-contextualized and homogenized social identities, we are then left with no other vocabularies than the ones coughed up by ideologies of war. We reduce each other to mere labels as the contest for power plays out and the society brutalized. Saikia writes about Pakistani military officials like Amin and Alam who refused to see themselves as perpetrators of violence, and explained away their violence as normal. They considered themselves to have been merely performing their duty to “clean Pakistan of the betrayers, the Bengalis.”

Saikia also documents dissenting, and repentant officers as well, to posit neither “a banal idea that perpetrators and victims deserve similar understanding,” nor that the perpetrators’ taking responsibility of their acts exonerates them of their crimes. She does so to point out that the concept of insaniyat [humanity] gives us a vantage point from which to understand the complexities of violence, women’s suffering, and perpetrators’ obligations. She writes about Sahubzada Yaqub Khan, the chief commander of the Pakistan Army in the Eastern wing who sent telegrams to high command that a military solution was not acceptable and resigned after having failed to convince Yahya Khan to halt the military operation. She discusses her interaction with Colonel Nadir Ali, who went through a psychological breakdown during the war:

His state of madness freed him, and he stopped playing the role of a soldier. Later, after regaining his equilibrium, he was able to recognize his and his ‘enemies’’ humanity and fill the empty space wracked by violence to develop speech and tell the story of war in his own language, Punjabi.

She seeks out the lower cadre jawans and rank and file soldiers like Malik, who described himself as a “troubled soul” for the violence he saw his fellow soldiers commit, for not having done anything to stop his higher official from raping a woman as he stood guard at the door, and for looting Bengali villages to obtain food provisions for his company.

Whether or not there can be closure to what happened that fateful year in East Pakistan, and whether or not some form of reconciliation can occur between Bangladesh and Pakistan is a separate matter. What needs to happen first and foremost is the acknowledgement of violence and recognition of the pain and misery of those that suffered. It is the narratives of the repenting perpetrators and their recognition of guilt that can bring some solace to the victims. Saikia highlights the case of men like Malik and Nadir Ali, who “being haunted by the memory of the Other” tell their crimes, and by that speech-act

deliver a justice to their victims that no tribunal, state, or court of law can deliver, and in that same gesture they make us aware that their existence as human rests on the Other. The perpetrator realizes that he owes his life as a human to another, his victim, whom he tried to destroy. This is the story that 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.

The denial of their own violence exists in the three sub-continental nation-states – a willed collective amnesia regarding 1971 that is constructed through nationalist narratives, be it the Bengali betrayal for Pakistan, the innocent victim-warrior mukti-jodha for Bangladesh, or the savior, white knight triumphalism for India. But if we are to break the cycle of violence, a space needs to be opened up for people like Mohammad, a Pakistani soldier who sought Saikia out to tell her his story, and how he was told that Bengalis had killed a large number of Biharis and was sent to raze a Bengali town. Mohammad pleads that “it is important that Pakistan and Bangladesh governments must talk. I am ready to testify to my victims in Bangladesh and seek their understanding and forgiveness.”

Will we let them speak? Will we listen?

***

1. Toor, 2011, p136
2. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, Pluto Press, 2007

[Part 5 of 6]

[...] men see the abuse of “their” women as a degradation of their masculinity. What counts is not the suffering of the women, but the effect it has on men.

Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches”

All facets of the 1971 conflict and the subsequent nation-making processes had a devastating impact on women, including rapes, exile, displacement, camp-life, loss of family, social ostracization and financial insecurity and the consequent exploitation, and the subsequent silencing of their voices. “Women’s vulnerabilities” Bina D’ Costa reminds us, “increase with the intensity of conflicts” and “rape of the enemy’s women is often strategically used to terrorise the enemy population.” D’ Costa refers to Ruth Seifert’s “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches” to make the crucial point that “rather than considering rape as an aggressive manifestation of sexuality, it must be understood as a sexual manifestation of aggression.” The abuse of women serves as a communication between men of the opposing sides that signals one’s triumph and the failure of the other to defend their women whose destruction is conceived as the destruction of the enemy’s cultural identity.

Deepak Mehta’s essay, “Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu-Indian and Muslim Pakistani Publics in Bombay,”¹ discusses the battle of hate literature between Hindu and Muslim publicists in the early 20th century Bombay (and the continued hate propaganda around the Babri Mosque demolition), as documented in the colonial archive. It demonstrates the existence of a strong sexual undercurrent in this hate literature, and notes that “in their comments about women, in particular prostitutes, Hindu and Muslim participants found common ground” and based on “a combined assertion of masculinity and their religious community, both Hindus and Muslims imagined each other’s woman as sexually available or worthy of domestication.” Such rhetoric, and conception of women, not only lays the foundation of violence on enemy women, but also, stricter policing of the women of one’s “own side.” The contest of militarized masculinity also translates in the feminizing of enemy men², as is evident in the forced undressing of Bangladeshi men at Pakistani-controlled checkpoints during the war of 1971.

The racialized discourse that constructed Bengalis as Hindu (and Hindu-like), polluting and destroying the nation from within, made the purging of the Bengali population essential to restoring the nation to its original purity. In the words of Saikia “Muslim Pakistani (read: Pure) men assumed that the sacrifice of the Hindu women was necessary to undo the malaise.” Nominated as masculine agents of the state, West Pakistani men forced their idea and vision of Pakistan onto the East Pakistani population. Rape and sexual violence are used as a weapon of war against women to spread terror, and in this regard the war of 1971 was no exception. 

Bangladeshi women were raped by Pakistani soldiers on their ‘scorched earth’ operations in villages and campaign of intimidation and terror whereby they would attack villages, loot, and rape women who caught their fancy, sometimes tipped off by their collaborators or by those with a personal score to settle. Firdousi Priyabhasani’s story, included in Saikia’s book, makes clear that Bangladeshi women were raped as a means of interrogation and kept in bunkers to be raped by rank and file Pakistani soldiers. Prabhasani, even after being gang raped, was shown the bunker as a threat. Scholar Bina D’ Costa mentions Geoffery Davis, a medical student who worked in Bangladesh for a few months with International Planned Parenthood, who relayed stories of women taken to ‘rape camps’ where “women considered pretty were kept for the officers, while the rest were distributed among the ranks. The women did not get enough to eat, and when they fell ill, many died in the camps. A large number of survivors would never be able to bear children due to psychological and physical abuse.”

The denial of sexual violence done by the Pakistan Army and their goons is pervasive in Post-war Pakistan. That the Pakistan army spared women is a consistent theme throughout Bose’s book, which Yasmin Saikia’s book, Women, War, and the making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, makes clear was indeed not the case. But even if one momentarily allows for the possibility that women and children were not harmed in Pakistan’s dirty little colonial war while their men-folk were shot dead, what becomes of the surviving women?

Sarmila Bose, in her effort to complicate (if one were to be generous) the argument that the Pakistan army used rape as a weapon of war that affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of women, asserts in her earlier paper that “Voluntary liaisons between local women and army personnel and the prostitution that invariably accompanies the deployment of soldiers need to be excluded, to focus on the crime of rape (including comfort women), regardless of the  religion, ethnicity or politics of the victims or the perpetrators.”

“Voluntary liaison” – that soldiers had girl-friends in East Pakistan or had wives there that many left behind or discarded— is a standard euphemism used in Pakistan to deny sexual violence. The power differential/dynamics in a war zone/occupation/counterinsurgency and the production and maintenance of that differential by violence cannot be discounted even in “voluntary liaisons” and prostitution. Domestic violence, migration, and smuggling/human trafficking, as D’ Costa points out, are the biggest threats to women during and after the conflict. Villages razed, men killed, live-stock looted, crops destroyed; it is this violence that accounts for the increased vulnerability of women and makes them available for “voluntary liaisons.” Indeed, women report a general breakdown in community during the 1971 war, resulting in a loss of humanity which made them even more vulnerable, not just from armed political actors but from their neighbors, many of whom brutalized them, sold them, or delivered them to thePakistan Army for sexual exploitation, and extorted them in myriad ways.

The impact on vulnerable and targeted minorities such as Bengali Hindu, and Bihari women was particularly acute, and indeed the gendered terror unleashed by the Pakistani soldiers and their razakars devastated them. As is the case with other conflicts, so too in Bangladeshi narratives of the war, the mention of rapes and violence on women seems to be phrased in terms that only highlight the rapes that “they” carried out on “our women.” Not only does this silence the women of vulnerable non-Bengali communities, such as Biharis, that both the Pakistan Army and the pro-liberation Bengalis violated (much of it in anti-Bihari pogroms after liberation), it also serves to further stigmatize these marginalized communities, and thus doubles the violence on these women.

***

Mirroring the Pakistan state’s purging of the nation’s body politic of the Hindu through violence on women, post-liberation Bangladesh went on its own purging campaign. This one was also enacted on women’s bodies by making sure that, in the words of Sheikh Mujib, the then-Prime Minister of Bangladesh, “none of the babies who carry the blood of the Pakistanis will be allowed to remain in Bangladesh.” He is also reported to have said, “Please send away the children who do not have their father’s identity. They should be raised as human beings with honour. Besides, I do not want to keep those polluted blood in this country.” This meant abortion and adaptation — in many cases regardless of and at the cost of, women’s choice.

The silencing of Bangladeshi women’s voices in post-liberation Bangladesh matches the denial in Pakistan of its violence on women. Saikia found that “documents of survivors, case histories of birangonas [war-heroines], pictures, police reports, medical records, family documents have been destroyed, erased, lost, and removed from archival storehouses.” This cultural, political, and epistemic silence, as Saikia shows, is instrumental to the production of official histories in the service of nation-making. Surveying the Bangladeshi literature produced about the war, Saikia finds “the war of 1971 is a well-told tale of liberation in Bangladesh” largely told in four genres, namely, the euphoric narratives of male mukti jodhas [liberation war-heroes], thana [district] reports, documents of war crimes with names and pictures of war criminals that focus on razakars and those that collaborated with the Pakistan Army, and novels and other writings on civil society.

Birangona [brave women] is the only way women’s experience of the war is remembered. Initially used by Sheikh Mujib, the first prime minister of independent Bangladesh, the term birangona acknowledged the women who were violated, but such labeling marked women who came to be increasingly seen as fallen or loose women, and the social stigma of rape compelled women to hide their experience. What birangona narratives do exist are doctored and engineered by their sponsors, and in Saikia’s words, become

external, almost pornographic stories about women’s loss of honor. Not surprisingly birangonas, although projected as female heroes, are also viewed as being complicit in the crime of rape.

This, then, justified denying women their voice and the nation forgetting their experience and suppressing their memory from history. This renders them absent as agents and subjects of history.

Saikia shows how the violence visited on women continues in the silence that the nation-making process has imposed. A unity between Bengali woman, land, and nation is forged in the liberation-war centered Bangladeshi narratives, whereby the rape of the Bengali woman “stood for the rape of Bangladesh.” Thus the raped woman, even as her voice is systematically silenced and her story purged from collective memory, becomes a rallying cry for a secular ethnic Bengali nationalism to call for revenge against Pakistanis and their razakar collaborators who are still at large in Bangladesh and identified as “fundamentalists.” This Saikia calls out as “the national male heroes using rape as a weapon, once again … to make gains for themselves.”

Yasmin Saikia’s book is an important intervention in the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their voices. Saikia documents women’s voices and highlights their agency and the multiplicities of their role in the conflict. The book includes not only the narratives of women upon whom violence was visited by men — Pakistani and Bangladeshi, pro-liberation and pro-Pakistan — but also of the women who fought as rebels against the Pakistan army and the discrimination they endured during and after the war at the hands of their fellow Bangladeshis, and of the women who worked as care-givers and social workers to ‘rehabilitate’ the survivors of rape and aided in the the nascent patriarchal state’s abortion and adoption programs. Silenced by processes of nation-making, the voices and stories of women’s experience of the 1971 war must be heard.

1. Deepak Mehta, “Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu-Indian and Muslim Pakistani Publics in Bombay” published in Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan, ed. Naveeda Khan, London and New Delhi: Routledge, 2009
2. e.g. Abu Gharib