Texts of a Nation: the Literary, Political, and Religious Imaginary Of
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2006 Texts of a Nation: The Literary, Politcal, and Religious Imaginary of Pakistan Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES TEXTS OF A NATION: THE LITERARY, POLITCAL, AND RELIGIOUS IMAGINARY OF PAKISTAN By MASOOD A. RAJA A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006 The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Masood A. Raja defended on May 12, 2006. __________________________ Robin Goodman Professor Directing Dissertation ___________________________ Alec Hargreaves Outside Committee Member ____________________________ Hunt Hawkins Committee Member ___________________________ Christopher Shinn Committee Member ____________________________ Amit Rai Committee Member Approved: ____________________________________ Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English ___________________________________________ Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For Jenny iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract …………………………………………………………………………….. … v INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………… 1 1. DASTANBUUY: GHALIB’S NARRATIVE OF SURVIVAL ………………… 20 2. POST-REBELLION INDIA AND THE RISE OF MUSLIM EXCEPTIONALISM 41 3. THE MUSLIM LITERARY RENNAISANCE: AZAD AND HALI …………… 72 4. EARLY URDU NOVEL AND MUSLIM EXCEPTIONALISM ………………… 95 5. THE CRITIQUE OF LOYALISM: NAUMANI AND ALLAHBADI ………….. 115 6. IQBAL: CHALLENGING THE MASTER’S DISCOURSE ………………………130 7. THE POLITICS OF MUSLIM NATIONHOOD ………………………………… 149 CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………………… 157 NOTES …………………………………………………………………… 159 WORKS CITED ………………………………………………………… 166 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ……………………………………………………… 169 iv ABSTRACT This study focuses on the foundational texts of Pakistan. Most theories of anticolonial nationalism have a strictly culturalist emphasis, of which the works of Partha Chatterjee and Benedict Anderson are two good examples. I suggest that politics and not culture was the main signifier of the post-1857 struggle of Indian Muslims. While the social, religious and ethno-linguistic ideologies became a part of the mobilizing discourse of the Muslim elite, the main problem was not cultural—for they had always a had a living thriving separate culture—but a question of political survival under a national structure run by non-Muslims. Unlike Europe, where nationalism succeeded as the prime signifier of a modern identity, within the realm of political Islam territorial nationalism was always a sort of arbitrary compromise and it was never able to erase completely the pan-Islamic tendencies of political Islam. The history of the Pakistan movement is a good example of this tension between the nationalist and supranational politics. For political Islam in India this movement from a supranational-pan-Islamic identity to the politics of nationalism was a fairly complicated negotiation. Starting from 1857—the formal end of the nominal Muslim rule—until 1947 these tensions between the nationalist elite and pan-Islamic movements played an important role in defining the pre-and post-independence character of the Muslim politics. The main problem was to define a viable political identity in order to create a physical public space where the Muslims could live their lives according to a political system controlled by Muslims. It is this search for a viable political identity that led to the nationalist movement of Pakistan. In the same process, however, there were two major divisions within the Muslim community: the political elite led by the secular All India Muslim League (AIML) and the popular movements spawned by the religious scholars. Texts of Nation primarily focuses on the national texts produced by the Muslims from 1857 to 1947. v INTRODUCTION It is with feelings of greatest happiness and emotion that I send you my greetings. August 15 is the birthday of the independent and sovereign state of Pakistan. It marks the fulfillment of the destiny of the Muslim nation which made great sacrifices in the past few years to have its homeland. Muslims of India have shown to the world that they are a united nation, their cause is just and righteous which cannot be denied. Let us, on this day, humbly thank God for His bounty and pray that we might be able to prove that we are worthy of it. (Jinnah 1) In his inaugural speech, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and its first head of state, refers to a preexisting Muslim nation that “made great sacrifices” to achieve the nation-state of Pakistan. He also sees this transformation of the nation into a nation-state as a divine gift to the Muslims of India. Yet, Jinnah’s words, so simply stated, are saturated with the silences that make his claim possible. The nation that he so gratefully addresses on August 15 did not exist in history, nor was there any ethno- linguistic or, for that matter, religious imaginary of Pakistan (or a separate Muslim homeland) just thirty years before its birth. In fact, according to Ayesha Jalal, at the time of partition “thirty-five million [Muslims] were left inside India, remarkably, the largest number of Muslims in a non-Muslim state” (2). Jalal also concludes her study by suggesting that “Jinnah never quite abandoned his strategy of bringing about an eventual union of India on the basis of Pakistan and Hindustan” (293), implying that the actual creation of Pakistan can also be read only as a partial success of Jinnah’s larger dream1. The case of Pakistani nationhood, therefore, is exceptional; within the Muslim politics of India, Pakistan was a novel and, until the very end, an amorphous and loosely defined concept. In fact, no natural unfolding of historical processes could have concluded the history of Indian Muslim nationalism in a nation-state. The Pakistani nation, therefore, can only be understood as the result of human will. Tracing the history of the nation and 1 nation-state of Pakistan is inextricably linked with retrieving and foregrounding the cumulative acts of human will, leadership choices, and the politics of Muslim representation that narrowed it down to the final and terminal choice of a nation-state. To define the nation or nationality, which I use as interchanging concepts, I am drawing on Karl Deutsch’s “functional definition of Nationality” (27). According to Deutsch: Membership in a people essentially consists in wide complementarity of social communication. It consists in the ability to communicate more effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, with members of one large group than with outsiders. (27) The functional aspect of this definition obviates the need to define nationality as an organic or objective state of being and gives it a certain kind of dynamism that eventually may force a nation or nationality to strive for a nation-state of their own in competition with the groups that are considered outside the nation. For the purposes of my discussion, the transition from the nation to nation-state involves a political process in which a certain national group employs its particular symbols, history, and socio-economic aspects of particularity to declare itself a sovereign political unit. In the case of Pakistani nationalism, my main strategy is to read the post- Rebellion Muslim texts as political responses to a changed political situation; hence my emphasis on politics instead of culture. I am relying specifically on John Rapley’s explanation of politics, which suggests the following while explaining the role of political regimes: However, political regimes entail more than material accumulation and distribution. They always entail a cultural or spiritual dimension. Equally sudden change in the material conditions of people’s existence will render prevailing ideas obsolete, initiating a period of cultural experimentation. Politics is thus a conversation between governors and governed [emphasis added]. (10) Rapley bases this “conversation between the governors and governed” in creation of hegemony, but in his view the governed are not just passive recipients of the elite’s hegemonic dispensations but rather a part of it. Even though culture and religion play a part in this process of elite-mass conversation, the process itself is inherently political. It 2 is this particular connotation of the term politics and the political that I will be applying in my discussion of the Indian Muslim nationalism. For the Muslims of India, it was the sudden political change after the 1857 Rebellion that prompted the politics of Muslim exceptionalism and particularism. From the very start the idea of Muslim nationhood was less a question of historical essences and more a problem of articulation, which manifested itself, in Homi Bhabha’s words, within the “performative” as well as the “pedagogical” aspects of nationhood, which Bhabha explains in the following words: The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are also a complex rhetorical strategy of social reference: their claim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process of signification and discursive address. We then have a contested conceptual territory where the nation’s people must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical