Читать книгу Who Is a Muslim? - Maryam Wasif Khan - Страница 10

In recruiting literary texts, particularly those intended for broad, almost mass consumption as historical sources on the way Muslims are defined by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientalists, colonial administrators, and North Indian, later Pakistani readers and writers, I am arguing that we ethically scrutinize the domain of literature for its complicity in the violence and exclusions enacted by religio-nationalist politics. The idea of literature, as it is understood first in colonial North India and in the postcolonial state, develops in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries under the aegis of British orientalists and supporting institutions at home and in the colony. I show how a number of fictions—including the canonical Bāġh-o Bahār (1803) of Fort William College—that are initially developed as a literature for Urdu under colonial patronage form the ideological basis for a modern Muslim imaginary. While this impulse manifests itself in the form of numerous novels and short stories that critics and scholars dismiss or discount as prototypes (Nazir Ahmad’s Mirāt al-‘Arūs [1862]) or bestsellers (Hijazi’s Muhammad bin Qāsim [1945] or Umera Ahmad’s Pīr-e Kāmil [2004]) the imbrication of the popular or the low-brow with the scholarly and the empirical is, in fact, essential to the totalizing discourse of orientalism and to its legacies in the colony. This book, then, asks for a radical reconsideration of what constitutes the “canon” of Urdu prose fiction by suggesting that this entire body of works evolves in accordance with, rather than in contradiction to, its orientalist origins.

The troubled coming-of-age of the English term “literature” has been explored from various ends by Marxist critics and postcolonial scholars, including Terry Eagleton and Gauri Viswanathan, both of whom have variously argued that the idea of English literature as a discipline and body of canonical works emerged in nineteenth-century England as a means of containing a burgeoning middle-class.¹³ Offering a nuanced examination of the term, its transformations in Enlightenment Europe and then the colonies, Vinay Dharwadker reminds us that literature evolved from suggesting letteredness and knowledge to a broader ideal of an aesthetically refined textual body suggestive of a certain national character or spirit during the latter half of the eighteenth century.¹⁴ Dharwadker, of course, draws on the detailed account offered by René Wellek in his essay “Literature and its Cognates,” as well in his opus, The Theory of Literature, from which it becomes clear that while in early eighteenth-century usage “literature” implied a grounding in the knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin languages and works, by the second half of the century it had come to connote a body of writing. In Voltaire’s 1751 use, “literature” refers to the genres of Italy, while L’Abbe Sabatier de Castes titled his 1772 book Les Siècles de littérature francaise, or The ages of French literature, both inadvertently imbuing the notion of a collective body of works with a tentative sense of having to do with or belonging to a nation or a people.¹⁵

For an orientalist such as William Jones, then, the self-proclaimed “discoverer” of Sanskrit, the entire body of writing in that ancient language naturally came to constitute the basis of “Indian” literature. Somewhat differently, his successor, John Gilchrist, who took it upon himself to invent a new Indian vernacular, did so through the synchronized production of a body of largely fictional works, believing that the latter could revive Indian culture to the lost eminence of classical Europe itself. In other words, both Jones and Gilchrist, orientalists whose legacies I discuss at length in this project, rewrite entire traditions and aesthetic practices in both premodern and colonial North India as “literature,” whether Indian, Urdu, Hindi, or vernacular. Because Jones, as M. H. Abrams reminds us, in the spirit of Longinus, the ancient rhetorician, had already defined and thus sequestered lyric poetry as the unique expression of a nation’s character, the quest of invention focused largely on prose forms, which then bore the onus of functioning as both entertaining and useful.¹⁶

The English ideal of the term “literature,” Michael Allen has argued, is at its heart a “disciplined reading practice,” or more broadly, “a cultivated sensibility linked to civil norms of what it means to be educated,” which by the eighteenth century becomes attached with markers of nation—whether these be origin, language, character, or domesticity.¹⁷ When we turn to colonies such as Egypt or India, this distinctly English and orientalist ideal of literature comes to be erroneously conflated with the idea of adab, the untranslatable Arab, Turko-Indo-Persian concept of being mannered: cultivated in knowledge, the arts, and etiquette, a premodern practice distinctly removed from conceptions of modern nation-thinking.¹⁸ That is to say, as colonial administrators undertook the task of producing the fictional works that would become the earliest examples of a literature of modern vernaculars such as Urdu and Hindi, the terms adab and sahitya are relieved of their broader implications and slowly designated as Urdu or Hindi equivalents of literature.¹⁹

Thus, a term such as adab, with all of its diverse implications (in North India adab privileged oral recitation, performance, etiquette, attention to linguistic register, above all else) is reduced to the realm of the textual by the late nineteenth century and begins to imitate European modes of self-historicization and progression. Urdu literature, in the then-orientalist (and now universally accepted) sense of the term, therefore, begins at Fort William College, Calcutta, a language school for young English officers founded by John Gilchrist in 1800. Mostly in the form of simple, moral stories, this orientalist inauguration of Urdu literature obscures several centuries of Indo-Persian oral fiction and lyric practices, including the widespread presence of the dāstān, that grand, morally disinclined fictional telling of alternative magical worlds navigated by great heroes and their companion tricksters. Though the College initially published the ghazals of then-revered court poets such as Mir Taqi Mir, by the mid–nineteenth century even that seemingly abstract, Arab-Persianate form of poetry was dismissed by colonial administrators as inappropriate and immoral. What I am briefly describing here, and what the first part of this book explores in some detail, is how an entirely modern European ideal of literature is imposed in the North Indian colony through orientalist institutions and individuals.

I argue, therefore, that the body of textual works we refer to as literature in Urdu is invented and organized for the particular purpose of moral, and subsequently, religious reform over the course of the nineteenth century. That is to say, prose literature in Urdu, from the moment of its inception in colonial Calcutta, is invested with the authority to designate and endorse certain ideals of Muslim practice, while excluding, even condemning, others, a practice entirely at odds with premodern Indo-Persian aesthetic practices. While in its early stages the Muslim of Urdu prose fictions is modeled on the Mahometan of the eighteenth-century English oriental tale, by the second half of the nineteenth century this same Muslim has to be refashioned to accord with colonial culture. The Mahometan, a staple protagonist of the oriental tale, is a refinement upon earlier European emblems of Islam, including the Shakespearean “Turk” or Moor, and or the medieval, all-purpose pagan. His figure precedes the more scientific religio-racial theorization of Arabs and Jews as Semites that orientalists such as Ernest Renan popularized in the nineteenth century. In the latter half of this book, I show how a rising Muslim nationalism in North India fashions itself on and against these early conceptions of the literary Mahometan, giving way in the present to an increasingly insular religio-nationalist definition of the Muslim self.

Literary histories for the most part tend to end on triumphant notes, their undertones often nationalist in nature. In the case of English, world anglophone and postcolonial literatures represent reparations for three centuries of imperialism. In the case of Egypt, the nahdāh is celebrated as a moment of literary and cultural awakening for a colonized people, a literary historicization that Allen has argued against in In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Likewise, Hindi literature or a modern Hindi canon is directed by “standards proposed by early Western critics and the succeeding generation of Indian critics writing on canon formation.”²⁰ American literature in the twentieth century, Juliana Spahr shows in her recent book, Du Bois’ Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, is curated as a set of liberal, state-friendly literary texts that celebrate the national mantra of diversity and assimilation, while anti-colonial voices remain suppressed by political and state actors. In the case of Urdu, the Euro-American academy and affiliate liberal scholars celebrate the Progressive Writer’s Movement as marking Urdu’s embrace of secularity.²¹ Valuable contributions, including Jennifer Dubrow’s Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia and the late Kavita Datla’s nuanced study on the Osmania University at Hyderabad, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India, have attempted to open up the world of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Urdu literary production as cosmopolitan and secular, that is non-religiously, or at the very least, syncretic.

What literary histories and, more recently, world literature histories, tend to obfuscate in their rush to celebrate a literature or even a particular literary text as worldly or diverse are the broader contexts of its production.²² The literary histories of modern Urdu prose, both in Urdu and in Euro-American academy, trace a progression that roughly mimics that of literature in English, and subsequently dismisses several hundreds of influential novels and stories as merely pulp or popular fiction. The broad set of works we traditionally know as constitutive of Urdu literature roughly accords with Western norms of canonicity and genre: romance, novel, modernism, postmodernism, and so on. In other words, the nineteenth century is traditionally seen as the moment when Urdu prose fiction matures from its propensity for the romance and other fantastic forms toward the realist novel, while the twentieth century is a moment marked by the modernist works of the All-India Progressive Writers, as well as a number of other experimental, subversive fictions.

While this narrative is a satisfactory one, allowing us the comfort of enjoying literature and literary writing as generally isolated from or occupying a higher moral ground than that of quotidian history, parochial religiosity, politics, and culture in general, it offers only a cosmetic view of a literary canon, or even an individual text. For modern Urdu (though there are several approximate examples), the canon of prose works is the love-child of an uncomfortable union between low-brow English orientalist fictions and the colonial effort to inculcate a subservient, mostly religiously derived morality in native subjects through simple, textbook-like stories produced for the purposes of widespread vernacularization in North India. Only in the past decade or so have we begun to question the so-called origins of what many histories have celebrated as a modern literature, but we have yet to question the various, often futile omissions that are so essential to the making of literary canons.

In an oppositional gesture to the fashion in which literary histories are written—celebratory from a national perspective, philanthropic or positivist from a transnational or world literature lens—this project confronts both the canon of Urdu literature and the limits within which this literature continues to be studied and circulated in critical histories, the Euro-American academy, and more recently, literary festivals and related media of a globalized age.²³ In asking that we, particularly humanists from postcolonial states, reconsider or interrogate national canons or accepted literary ideals, I am not undermining the haunting, politically resistant voices of writers such as Sa‘adat Hasan Manto and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the defiant feminisms of Fahmida Riaz and Ismat Chugtai, or even the older, incorrigible notes on exile by nineteenth-century aesthetes Mirza Hadi Rusva and Mirza Asadullah Ghalib. I also acknowledge that the trajectory of literary writing in Urdu in post-1947 India, where the language is now associated largely with the sizeable Muslim minority, has taken diverse directions, evidenced in the evocative magnificence of Shamsur Rehman Faruqi’s fictions and the subversive bent of S. M. Ashraf’s writings. I am, however, arguing that these authors, whether Indian or Pakistani, and the aesthetic and ethical positions they espouse are peripheral, minor, at times even exilic, when held up against what is a continuous, cohesive, and fecund body of works, constructed on the orientalist premise of Urdu as an essentially “Muslim” language. Dominant, enduring, and omnipresent in the contemporary Pakistani imagination are writers who have conformed around the task of defining the Muslim. Their contributions, works whose concerns range from the political to the domestic, present the recent religio-populist impulse in contemporary Urdu as continuous with its past, rather than as an anomaly that needs to be explained away.

An honest acknowledgment of the fact that it is this latter set of works that commands the national imagination lays bare the historical processes through which modern literatures in colonized territories first took shape. It directs us to think critically about the fast-shrinking space that progressive or humanist writings occupy in the national narrative of a postcolonial state such as Pakistan. The question I was forced to ask and answer as this project unfolded was simply: What works, ideas, and arguments about Pakistan and Pakistani identity dominate across the literary and broader socio-political and cultural landscapes of the country? In a moment marked by the self-righteous rise of a religious populism whose single-point agenda—one that extends beyond the realm of politics—is to protect the sanctity of Islam and Muhammad as its last prophet, secularity, reflections on exile, doubt, other faiths, and alternative expressions of sexuality present nothing less than a dire threat to Pakistan’s raison d’etre.

What literature, canon, or textual tradition, then, is complicit in propagating these insularly populist ideals, and what are its historic antecedents? Alternatively, who are the writers we dismiss as nationalist, popular, or one-dimensional, but who, nevertheless, are ubiquitous, their stories, characters, and moral universes affirming the rigid bounds of nation and state? Do they force us to reexamine the generally exclusive, even lofty fashion in which we have so far employed the term “literature”? Or should we perhaps rethink our currently perforated use of the term, which often differentiates high-brow from low-brow, women’s literature from that designated for men, world literature from all others? The terms of this continuously self-affirming body of fictional works in Urdu range from colonial language primers inspired by the English oriental tale to longer, complex contemplations on the idea of the Muslims of North India as constituting a distinct “nation,” in the modern sense of the word, to bestselling novels that sacralize Muslim pasts in medieval Islamic empires and tout an idyllic future where Muslims, saved from the evil seductions of the West, practice the pure Islam of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The production of a consistent and systematically developing canon in modern Urdu is undertaken by a varied cast of authors who begin with Mir Amman, a scribe in the colonial language school, Fort William College, and extend from nationally revered figures such as Syed Ahmad Khan, the leader of the Aligarh Movement; his followers, Nazir Ahmad, an education inspector, Altaf Hussain Hali, deemed one of the greatest Urdu poets in Urdu; to journalists-turned-novelists in the twentieth century, Nasim Hijazi prominent among them; and finally to bestselling women novelists such as Umera Ahmad and Farhat Ishtiaq.