Commentary on Zaman: Taneja

I first heard of Salman Taseer’s death in Delhi, in the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla. I was with a visiting friend from Pakistan, who wanted to see this place he’d heard so much about, this fourteenth-century royal palace where people deposit letters addressed to jinn-saints. As we walked through the arched corridors and thick masonry walls of Firoz Shah Kotla, dimly lit by votive candles that people left as offerings, he said, “This is like a ruin from a Hindi film.” We both laughed. We continued our exploration of the ruins till we were on top of a tall pyramidal structure, atop which stands a massive monolithic pillar, dating back to the third century. As we looked out west on the ruins and the city beyond, on that grey December afternoon, his phone rang. It was his father calling from Lahore. Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, had just been assassinated by his bodyguard.

What does it mean to look west, to look to Lahore from Firoz Shah Kotla? Perhaps, it illustrates the continuing connections between Delhi and Lahore, despite the sixty-seven years of formal, and brutally-enforced, separation between India and Pakistan. Connections that include not just travelers like my friend, but the ghostly figures of saints and kings that haunt both cities, and which index the pre-colonial un-Partitioned past. Perhaps it also illustrates that the work of rebuilding a “missing order of being within ourselves,” the ambitious task that Taymiya Zaman sets for the historian, risks remaining incomplete without moving beyond history, a discipline long tied to the archives and exigencies of the nation-state, and taking into account the suprahistorical realms of religion and popular art.[1]

“Modern citizens contain within them shadows of earlier selves that still attach easily to images of kings.” One of the deep insights that informs Zaman’s work is that the move from (pre-colonial) subject to (post-colonial) citizen is not one of straightforward progress, but also one marked by enormous losses.

How are these losses marked, and mourned? In Delhi, the medieval Muslim past manifests in the form of saintly figures dressed in medieval robes, seen in people’s dreams and waking visions. These saintly figures are inextricably connected to the pre-modern buildings and ruins scattered throughout Delhi. At Firoz Shah Kotla, people write letters detailing their most intimate problems, and deposit them in the ruins of a medieval palace, the remains of the seat of pre-modern sovereignty. They ask for intimate justice, far beyond the capacities and imagination of the post-colonial state. Is this an act of mourning for the pre-colonial political order, swept away in 1857, where the sovereign was, at least normatively, supposed to be available to all his subjects to hear their complaints and problems? Perhaps. But the letters deposited in the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla are also photocopied multiple times, as if being submitted to the different departments of a modern bureaucracy. The letters deposited here often include passport photographs and copies of government issued I-Cards, the technologies of identity necessary for being recognized as a subject of the modern state.

There is a telling irony in the fact that people petition the sarkar or government of the jinn about their most intimate problems in the ruins of a premodern space of sovereignty while using the bureaucratic forms and mechanisms of the modern state when, as Emma Tarlo observes, “the poor in Delhi relate to the state principally through the market. Basic amenities, such as land, jobs, electricity, water and paving are things, not provided but purchased in exchange for votes [and] money.”[2]

Firoz Shah Kotla became a popular dargah a few months after the end of the emergency of 1975-77, a period of formally undemocratic rule which had catastrophic consequences for the Muslim and lower-caste Hindu working-classes of Old Delhi. The amplified sacrality of the premodern space of sovereignty in the aftermath of state violence in 1977 seems to me a form of apotropaic magic against the magic of the modern state.

Perhaps in rituals we encounter the past not as a closed chapter, but as an open field of potentiality—what could have been, but wasn’t, but could be now, perhaps? Sultans and Badshahs, kings and emperors, are hardly ever mentioned at Firoz Shah Kotla. It’s as if knowing history, the narrative of what really happened, is antithetical to the relations to the past that are more important here—the past as an open field of potentiality, not what was, but the what could have been. It is as if remembering the historical narrative of what happened to Dara Shikoh gets in the way of embodying the translatory mode of thinking he is known for, through which he bridged the distances between the Upanishads and the Quran, Islam and Hinduism. Even today, at Firoz Shah Kotla, the constant work of translation—or what I call translation as a mode of being—allows Hindus and Muslims to continue to create shared cosmologies and moral worlds and vocabularies. But Dara Shikoh is never mentioned.

It is ritual and dream-visions, rather than history, which opens up the past as a possibility we can re-inhabit. Meanwhile, though the angel of history would like to stay and awaken the dead Dara Shikoh, the storm of “progress” is caught in its wings, relentlessly bearing it backwards into the future.[3]

Zaman does not quote the poet Faiz Ahmed “Faiz” in her article, but his words haunt my reading. All our countries in the sub-continent are veritable assemblies of pain. The pain of colonial violence—literal, psychic and epistemic—and the pain of Partition continue to haunt everyday life and being in South Asia. Like Zaman’s students confronting Mughal ruins in Lahore with a combination of wonder and loss—many of us carry the feeling of being incomplete, missing a part of our selves, being, in a sense, amputated. And the phantom pain never quite goes away.

Sustaining the idea of an inverted other, Zaman says, is an escape from pain. And many acts of violence in South Asia, including the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, are evidence of a constructed Other who deserves neither empathy, nor ambivalence. What kind of pain does it take to pump the body of a man full of bullets? What made Mumtaz Qadri kill a man whom he was sworn to protect? What made him (and others) equate opposing the blasphemy law, imposed by military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, with the unforgivable (to them) crime of blaspheming against the Prophet?

Zaman wishes to make a methodological intervention here into the historiography of South Asia, by focusing not on the political history of the Mughals (Dara Shikoh versus Aurangzeb), but rather by trying to recover the phenomenological experience of what it meant to be a Mughal subject, as distinct from a modern national citizen. She wishes to recover the psyche of a pre-modern subject, his ways of relating to his king, to address “both the distorted versions of kingship that shape the present and our sublimated desires for an unpartitioned world.” This methodological intervention is necessary, she says, “because loss, anger, and longing lodge themselves too deep in the psyche to be countered by historical reasoning alone.”

While fully in sympathy with her project, I would like to add a complicating note here. It is “historical reasoning,” from the nineteenth century onwards well into the present moment, that has intensified the pain, loss, and anger of the fractured sub-continental psyche. From Elliot and Dowson onwards,[4] the modern rewriting of medieval history has been the very basis on which the Other has been constructed, and chauvinist, nationalist histories have been written and propagated, till they have become common sense in both India and Pakistan. History has richly cultivated the field of pain. History has birthed the Others, which allow, however infinitesimally, an escape from the pain. There is a direct link between the figure of the blood-thirsty Muslim invader, a creation of colonialist and nationalist historiography, and the death of a Muslim man at the hands of a lynch-mob for the alleged crime of having stored beef in his fridge.

I register these caveats not to question the worth of Zaman’s project—because there can be no question that recovering a phenomenological sense of pre-modern subjecthood is a valuable corrective to the rigid identitarian boundary making and demonization of the Other which underlie so much of contemporary politics in South Asia. Rather, I want to suggest that history is not enough. History and the urgent task of the historian need to be in conversation with both religion and popular culture, both of which are realms where traces of pre-modern selfhoods and sensitivities do not merely survive as archival traces, but remain open as potentialities for life. Work like Zaman’s adds historical depth and richness to this suprahistorical world, allowing us to see what Kosseleck would call the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous,[5] where an earlier history and anthropology would see merely rupture and bricolage.

To illustrate what I mean, let me turn to a passage from Zaman’s essay and the associations it immediately drew for me. The protagonist, as it were, of her essay is Bhimsen Saxena, a loyal (if disgruntled) Hindu official working for the emperor Aurangzeb. “Bhimsen writes that God has made each man an empire, and the heart is the ruler of the empire that is man. The king, acting as the agent of God on earth, is the heart of his empire and he is meant to maintain order.” This Mughal view of the relationship of kingship to the body-politic, rather than being remote to my experience, immediately reminded me of a dialogue from an immensely popular and canonical Bombay film, Mughal-e Azam, released first in 1960, and then again to immense popular acclaim in 2004. In the film, when the rebellious prince Salim/Jahangir confronts his mother about the woman he loves, she rebukes him by saying, “Our India is not your heart, that a dancing-girl becomes its queen.” “Then my heart is not your India either, that you can rule over it.” Here, in an immensely popular dialogue in a movie made in post-colonial India, the political theory of Mughal India shines through, if only as negation, in surpassingly elegant banter.

And again and again, in Bombay cinema, ways of being that the post-colonial modernizing states of South Asia had no time for come forth in the medium of popular entertainment. When the modernizing Nehruvian state privileged modern infrastructural projects as the “temples of modern India” in the 1950s and 60s, audiences watched “Muslim socials,” in which the ethics and aesthetics of Nawabi Lucknow, that long lost nineteenth-century world, moved them to tears. In times of growing communal polarization, the shrines of Sufi saints are still the places, in the world of Hindi cinema, where lovers across religious communities can come together, and miraculous sovereignties reign. And it is Bombay cinema, with its immense popular affective appeal, which most effectively challenges the right-wing politics of hatred in India and Pakistan. There are many, many films that I could name, but I am thinking here of the recent film Bajrangi Bhaijaan, a blockbuster hit in both India and Pakistan, which both lampooned the construction of the Other and revisited traditional shared sacred spaces and sensoriums through the immensely popular qawwali, “Bhar de jholi meri ya Muhammad.” As the forthcoming work of Rachana Rao Umashankar wonderfully demonstrates, Hindi film qawwalis are the soundtracks of Indian pluralism. A soundtrack that blares, loud and clear, against the divisive politics of otherness.

“We have yet to engage with the radical possibility that longing for the past and the futures that could have been cuts across people who appear, on the surface, to have nothing in common, including those who idealize Aurangzeb and imagine a pristine Islamic past, those who see Dara Shikoh as representative of South Asia’s lost tolerant future, and even the historian who sees the retreating figure of the king in the tunnels beneath Lahore. All of us are drawn, for reasons we cannot always explain, to a world that no longer exists.” Zaman’s deep insight is indeed a radical one. In a time of the entrenchment of otherness, it remembers that we are all part of the assembly of pain that is our homeland—“fundamentalists,” Bollywood producers, anthropologists, historians, and those who petition jinn-saints in a long-abandoned ruin.

Svetlana Boym distinguishes between two kinds of nostalgia, reflective and restorative nostalgia. Reflective nostalgia, according to Boym, “reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection.”[6] Restorative nostalgia is the opposite, the simplistic yearning to return to a pristine past. This is the nostalgia that gives nostalgia a bad name, the nostalgia of the fundamentalist. But Zaman’s deeply ethical, intellectual, and affective insight sees this binary not as an impassable border but as a porous boundary. A boundary that we need to cross, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney, if hope and history are to rhyme.

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980.

2. Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi, 11. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

3. This is a reference, of course, to the famous angel of history from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on The Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

4. On the politics behind the British chronicling of medieval Indian history, see (among others) Carl Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center, 18–22. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

5. See Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002.

6. Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review 9(2) (2007): 15.