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review
Zia Mohyeddin column
review
Competing with the glut of books in the market on the Taliban in Pakistan is the rush of new scholarship on Sufism, its intellectual and spiritual antithesis. Major publishing houses have now taken to promoting messy field diaries and primary listing of data made by European scholars as erudite commentary on the mystical path, the popular and purportedly ‘softer’ face of Islam. This project of knowledge is invariably Orientalist and tied to the technologies of power, often incapable of appreciating oral traditions and parallel discourse. A new addition to this literature is the carefully worded and well illustrated pictorial, Artefacts of Devotion, a Sufi repertoire of the Qalandariyya in Sehwan Sharif, Sindh, Pakistan by French academic Michel Boivin who examines the art objects produced by local artisans at one of the most popular shrines in the subcontinent, the shrine of Usman Merwandi or Lal Shabaz Qalander in Sehwan, Sindh. Some of these objects
purportedly belong to the sage and are solemnly guarded by the families who
consider themselves the custodians or gaddi nashin of the shrine, while other
objects are the inexpensive amulets produced for the ziyarati, or visitors
and readily available in the winding markets of Sehwan. But the author’s
disclaimer that this is neither a book on art history nor even a commentary
on the history of design makes it clear that this is no appreciation, begging
the question of the purpose of such a study. Michel Boivin explains, “It will allow us to explore the new ways by which Sufism pervades local cultures, especially through the dissemination of different kinds of ‘devotional objects’, and also how their ownership and use play a dominant role in the preservation of the social order. This will reveal how the devotional field and the socio-political field are intermingled, and why the system, once implemented, proposes individual room for escaping the control of the elites.” This is a tall order for so short a book, but Boivin is introduced as a scholar of Sindh studies, involved in research with a resident team in the area over a number of years with several publications on the theme. His interest in the devotional object is the interface of art and monumentalism to understand the extant social order, the political economy of mysticism as it is played out in contemporary Pakistan. Boivin laments the many inadequacies of scholarship on Sufism, for instance, in the understanding of Sufism and territory, politics, aesthetics, local culture, and religious expressions, an eminently sociological concern. His interest, therefore, is not in gaining access to esoteric knowledge of the symbols as is evident in the listing made of the many objects supposed to belong to Shahbaz Qalandar, the guluband or stone worn around the neck, the gajgah or panjah, the begging bowl or kishti with sea monster motifs (also detailed on the cover of this publication), the godri or drape, and the mohar or seal, prayer beads, the cup, the staff or asaa, the beragan or stick and the cloth bag or gabri. Boivin makes a good case of revealing the disingenuous claims made by the Awqaf Department and the local Sayyid families that the objects belonged to Usman Merwandi, either because their date of manufacture seems incorrect or because there are more than one such object or since several competing narratives survive concerning their symbolic value. Most of all, it seems unlikely that a qalandar committed to a life of prayer and meditation would be interested in owning ornate objects of lasting value. But even in the other popular devotional objects available in the surrounding market, the dia or oil lanterns, the pictorial depiction of Lal Sain in posters, the woolen gano or wrist band, and the tawiz, Boivin seems not particularly invested in exploring the epistemology of dreams and divination or why the symbol carries as much meaning. He attempts to explain his eclectic listing and specious interest in the objects because this is “a repertoire and not a theory.” The British Orientalist, Richard Burton, who Boivin often quotes on Sehwan, was more forthright and wrote with much more jocular and open contempt about the Sehwan of 1851 as the pestilential place that…”not even Coleridge himself could define and generalise the genera and species of its nauseous odours.” As for its people, he remarked, “I believe, in all sacred places and holy cities, from Rome to Meccah, the inhabitants are a very disreputable race.” But what had Richard Burton had to say about the shrine of Lal Shahbaz itself was a classic. “Under the dome is the holy place, covered with a large satin pall, and hung over with a variety of silken, velvet, brocade and tinsel articles, shaped like your grandmother’s pet pincushion.” Boivin is not as corrosive, his prose poised and circumspect, committed to sifting through the data, the artefacts, while showing due appreciation of the native culture and inhabitants and acknowledging the sage, Usman Merwandi, as a man of deep learning and renunciation. And yet, he joins the ranks of the Orientalists in basing his knowledge claims on empirical observation and in his commitment to reductive rationalising of the ecstatic experience embedded in the innocuous symbol. Like the Orientalists, his project is redemptive since it succeeds in unravelling nothing but disingenuity, failing to deepen the understanding of what draws so many people to the qalandar who was not a Sufi like those of the other four orders — the Chishtis, Naqshbandis, Suhrwardis and the Qadriyas— but someone who challenged mysticism as an order or tariqqah because it recreated the orthodoxy and replicated the hierarchies that ecstatic knowledge or Ishq was meant to dispel. But Boivin’s methodology may be an eccentricity of French Orientalism, aestheticising the cultures of the other while also calling them inauthentic, applying curatorial skills to museumise the study of religion, and working under the assumption that language is a secular and transparent medium of ideas and experiences that may be orchestrated toward the production of knowledge of the other. Divested of the power of European languages — English and French — obviously meant to address the uninitiated; this documentation would fail to engage anyone speaking the vernacular since nothing new or substantive seems to have been added to the information on the qalandar. Perhaps the one thing it does reinforce is why the qalandars, unlike other Sufis, were so against canonical text as diwan or treatise or even hagiography.
Exile
in red, white and blue I was recently asked to co-teach with two other instructors a class on American Cultures in Literature and Film. As the division of labour worked out, I ended up with the assignment to focus on short fiction written by South and Southeast Asian-American writers. To be sure all lists, to a certain extent, are arbitrarily drawn and mine would no different. But, still, I had to come up with some kind of reason, a coherence that could be justified. Given my own personal
political biases, I thought that I should at least start with an Asian
country that, to my knowledge, was the first to experience the direct hit of
the American Imperial might. Once I had decided on that, the Philippines was
the number one contender, with the distinction of having been colonised by
the US for close to 50 years as a result of the Spanish-American War,
courtesy of the Treaty of Paris (1898). Now I needed a good short story by a
Filipino-American writer and I couldn’t think of one. The only author of
stature I was aware of was Jessica Hagedorn whose novel Dogeaters (1990) was
a hit among the political types. But I had read her novel more under the
shadow of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children rather than as a
Filipino-American novel. A Filipino-American friend suggested a few names which I hadn’t heard before or at least had not bothered to read. After some rudimentary research, I settled on one name: Bienvenido Santos. I was instantly drawn to the title of his short stories Scent of Apples, which was originally published in 1955 in the Philippines under a different title You Lovely People but with fewer stories. The collection in its current form, published by University of Washington Press in 1979, included a few newer stories. As I read these stories what became obvious to me was the issue that how important it was, especially for writers of immigrant minority background, to read Filipino-American writers and perhaps Santos was a good place to start. According to Linda Naranjo-Huebl, “Filipino American literature is distinguished among Asian American literature because of its specific colonial history: a former Spanish and then American colony, it has been heavily influenced by the European literary tradition. Because English superseded Spanish as the language of the Filipino educational system, and many early twentieth-century Filipinos studied under American teachers, most twentieth-century immigrants to America arrived familiar with the language and the literature of America. The latter proved particularly the case among pensionados, those well-educated youths of primarily the upper classes whose studies at American Universities were subsidised first by the American and then by the Philippine government so that they might return to fill roles as the next civil servants and cultural leaders.” Close to 1.5 million Filipinos died fighting the American colonial onslaught. Santos was studying at Columbia University when the war turned his native country into living hell. He was forced to quit his studies and began working for the Philippine government in exile. It fell on Santos’ shoulder to tour all over the United States and explain his country, where American soldiers were dying, to the innocent Americans who knew very little of the rest of the world or, in general, world history. Santos would be one of the pensionados that Naranjo-Huebl mentions. Up until then there had been two major groups of Filipino immigrants. The earlier wave was of those who came to Hawaii to work on plantations. Those were mostly from rustic backgrounds and not very educated. In the Filipino-American lexicon they are referred to as pinoys — the working class, the labourer — though the original meaning only alluded to immigrants from their native land. Santos explores in Scent of Apples that Filipino-American men have suffered. In Santos’ case the war made it impossible for him to return to his country of origin. Later on, he suffered through another period of exile when the Marcos dictatorship banned one of his novels. Scent of Apples contains sixteen stories which deal with a same set of friends of Ben, short for Bienvenido. The friends, most of whom are pensionados, are referred to as the hurt men, which is also the title of one of the stories. These are the men who, despite their education, are forced live in exile, without having any news of their family’s well being. Theirs is a female-less living. The close knit friendships and banter and card games help them survive but it’s only a façade, as the reader learn towards the end of the story that most of the characters had lost a dear one when one army or another ran over their neighbourhood. The America of the 1930s and 1940s was also not a very hospitable place for dark-skinned people. E. San Juan, Jr. tells us that, “During the thirties and forties of the last century, Filipino workers exposed to the insurrectionary and seditious milieu of the islands were considered nasty trouble-makers, aside from being perceived as a threat to the purity of Caucasian women. They collaborated in strikes with Japanese, Mexicans, and other ethnics in the Hawaii plantations and West Coast farms. From the outset up to 1946, Filipinos were legally considered “nationals” without any rights but only the “duty of permanent allegiance” to the US nation-state. They were not allowed to vote, own property, start any business or marry Caucasian women.” In Scent of Apples, the narrator Ben comes to Kalamazoo on a speaking engagement. A pinoy by the name of Celestino drives hundreds of miles to listen to him, only to invite him to his house for dinner because he has not seen a Filipino for such a long time. And that he wants his wife and son to meet a “first class Filipino.” Ben accepts the invitation. There Ben encounters a sad situation. Celestino turns out to be very poor, his wife very unattractive. There on the mantelpiece Ben notices a photograph of a Filipina whose face has faded. It turns out it was a picture Celestino had bought or found in Chicago. The pinoy’s shack reminds Ben of “the poor colored folk in the South.” One of the remarkable tensions in Santos’ fiction results from his debt to American literary tradition and his political alliance to ethnic or racial minorities of the US. The entire story is peppered with references to the histories of the minorities as if Celestino is a composite of all those who have suffered at the hand of the white man. It is for no reason that the story opens with the following line, “When I arrived in Kalamazoo it was October and the war was still on.” Kalamazoo is an American-Indian name beckoning the reader’s attention to wars on native population and broken treaties. The title of the story is taken from Robert Frost’s poem After Apple-Picking: Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. But let me assure you that Santos’s apples are different with a post-colonial scent to them.
Zia
Mohyeddin column Our anonymous author writes in the vein of an Oriental story-teller: “Let us pass over the feast, during which Sir Charles ruled for the hour, and adjourn to the open veranda, where the influence of the eastern moon, looking at itself in the silver mirror of the broad Hooghly, attuned the mind to deeper thoughts”. Read any Dastan in Persian (or in 19th century Urdu) and you will find the narrator setting the scene in a similar, flowery mode. When he is not lyricising, he writes penetratingly about life in Calcutta. His description of the scenes outside and inside the Kutcheree is simply brilliant. You feel you are watching a film directed by Vittorio de Sica. The camera pans across the maidan and you see painted palankeens of attendants and suitors, anxious people sitting on their haunches; others, who have been waiting endlessly, are sprawling on the ground. We brush past them to see a cluster of peasants who have walked several miles for the sake of an hour’s hearing before a Nazir, a Sararrishtadar or — if they are lucky — the ultimate decider of their fate, a Ferungee magistrate. The camera now cuts to the chambers filled with clerks, the coming and going of peons, and the Mukhtars (Indian attorneys) ready to take up the business of any applicants. In the distance we can hear Munshees reading aloud various documents in that “rapid singing tone which none but the adept can understand”. The camera steadies itself on one of the Mukhtars, a short, smart-looking Hindu with a thick bundle of papers under his arm. We move with him as he approaches a part of the veranda where, seated on a small shabby saddle-cloth, sits Nawab Yoosuf Ulee Khan, perusing a long Persian document. The man with the bundle of papers is a crooked lawyer named Bishen Chand. Yoosuf Ulee Khan is his client. Bishen Chand informs the Nawab that his documents are not valid and that unless he can come up with huge sums of money, to be given as nazrana to the court administrators and magistrates, his appeal would be rejected and his jageers would be confiscated. The bankrupt Nawab moans that Bishan Chand has already extorted every penny he possessed. His coffers were now dry. Surely, his sunud, signed and sealed by the Company Bahudur and the Governor himself, would convince any Ferungee judge that he alone was the legitimate owner of his estate. “It is not the sunud that wins the case, my master”, Bishan Chand tells the Nawab, “you will not undertand the customs of these Ferungee kutcherrees. “Do you know what sum the collector will get as commission if your jageer is restored?” he asks the Nawab. The young civil servant of the Bengal administration who wrote The Baboo was prescient. Nearly two hundred years later, the same scenario can be witnessed today in our lower courts. The plight of the plaintiff, in the system of dispensing justice that we inherited from our colonist masters, continues to be as miserable as it was in 1830. * * * * * The conversation at Lady Wroughton’s dining table that begins with a light-hearted banter about whether the natives were better riders than Europeans soon develops into a discussion about the comparative virtues (and vices) of the two ‘opposing religions’: Hinduism and Islam. Beavoir suggests that what they should really discuss is not which of the two religions is better, but which of the two systems has the most poetical scheme. Lady Wroughton who knows her Anacreontic poetry interposes to say that though she knows too little of the national characters of Hindus and Muslims she is inclined to pronounce that the poetry of Koran is certainly superior to the poetry of Manu. Beavoir, who is considered to be a “regular Brahmin” by his colleagues, thinks that Ram Ram is more poetical than Allah Allah. Beavoir is well-versed in Hindu mythology and Vedic scriptures. He knows the plays of not just Kalidasa but of Vikram and Urvasi. Although he regards Greek mythology to be the most brilliant invention of poetic genius, yet he cannot help feeling that Hindu mythology, which closely resembles it, may have given the Greeks its outline. Forester who does not claim to have any ability to discuss the metaphysics of poetry says that he is ‘all feeling’ and that Saadi and Hafiz will always command a portion of his soul. “Tell me,” he asks, “by which the passions of mankind have been most led? By the promise which Muhammad held out — by the luxurious descriptions of the Paradise they would inhabit — or the theory that the human soul descends into the form of a monkey? He prefers the light-hearted military character of the joyous Muhammadans to the intriguing, “money-making, self-torturing, gloomy Hindoo.” The Muhammadan is an adventurer, he asserts, merry and generous when fortune smiles, resigned to destiny when she frowns”. He always found the Muahammadan to be fierce and brave, a little despotic in temper but pliant. The adventurer that Forester so admires, Beavoir reminds Forester, came indeed with a sharp sword and an empty pocket, but he brought down upon the Hindus all the miseries of tyrannies. He concedes that the Hindus were intriguing, selfish people “destitute of honourable veracity” but these were the vices that grew up in their minds under a system of corrupting oppression. It is not why the brave Captain Forester prefers the Muslims to Hindus, but the manner in which the polemic of comparative religion is handled as well as the piquant asides, which makes ‘A Chapter of Talk’ a delightful read. You cannot help being impressed by the study and extent of research that some of the early colonial settlers had conducted into the principles of the two religions. The ‘Baboo’ of the story, Brjmohun Bonurjee, is an oily, obsequious, head-treasurer in the court of Sir Charles Wroughton. He has risen to this rank by introducing himself to cadets and newly arrived civil servants and offering them small loans which he never asked then to repay because he knew that he would receive twenty times the amount when they were promoted to higher positions. Twenty years of supplying the best champagne to Sahib logs, and sycophancy, has turned Bournajee into a prosperous and worthy Baboo. He has amassed a fortune by chicanery. It is he who has stolen the original sunud of Yoosuf Ulee Khan replacing it with a forged one. The Baboo, of course, gets his come-uppance. His nemesis is none other than Captain Forester. The tale continues. I have read a fair amount of what the critics in England call Anglo-Indian literature, but I haven’t come across anything as perceptive as The Baboo. It is a rare book indeed.
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