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profile Ideological
universe
profile Off Lahore’s
famed Mall Road stands one of the most well known buildings of the city —
Government College, with the suffix ‘University’ attached to it of late.
As I enter the college, I am captured by the Gothic charm of the campus. A
strange sense of nostalgia engulfs me, even if I had not been here before. Making my way towards the
Urdu Department of the college, I pass through thick foliage of trees and
lush green flowering shrubs alongside the paved road that leads to the main
building. I chance upon students sitting in sprawling lawns, gossiping
eagerly, undisturbed by the scorching sun. The department building
itself looks neglected and time-worn. The paint is coming off and a host of
spider webs flap in the corners of rotting walls. The condition of the Urdu
Department is not much different from the current status of Urdu language in
Pakistan. At a time when Urdu is fighting to save itself from extinction, Dr
Saadat Saeed is one of the few scholars who have been vigorously struggling
to promote and sustain the language and the literature written in the
language. His outstanding contribution in the fields of literary criticism,
linguistics and modern Urdu literature are well-recognised. And, this is what brings me
to this place — to meet a man of his stature and to introduce him to a
generation that is estranged from its own language and literature. Widely known as a poet,
critic and academic, Dr Saeed is an author of 28 books. His poetic collection
‘Kajli Bun’ is an important book of modern Urdu poetry. His books of
criticism — ‘Jayhat Numayee,’ ‘Fun Aur Khaliq,’ ‘Adab Aur
Nafi-e-Adab’ — encompass the contemporary trends of Urdu fiction, poetry
and literary theories. He has more than 250 national and international
research publications to his credit. Besides, he has translated important
works of writers and poets from Iran, Turkey, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Denmark and
Latin America. Following a distinguished
academic career, Dr Saeed became a teacher and has stayed one for the last 43
years. He began teaching at Government College, as it was then called, in
1986. He was posted on the Pakistan Chair for Urdu and Pakistan Studies at
Ankara University, Turkey, for a period of five years in 1999, and he
re-joined GCU on
his return. Though he has taught both classical and modern literature, his
areas of academic interest are linguistics, modern literature and literary
theory. He retired from GCU in 2009
as the Head of Department but did not stop teaching. Now, he is part of the
visiting faculty, teaching linguistics and criticism to students of BA
Honours and Persian language to Phd students. These look like enough
engagements in one lifetime. What does he want to be recognised as — a
poet, critic or academic? “I am basically a poet, with a keen interest in
poetry. In order to understand poetry, I stepped into criticism. The
critic’s specific purpose is to interpret literary works, to enrich the
readers’ understanding of the writer’s perspective. Literary criticism,
thus, bridges the gap between the readers and the writer. T.S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound were poets and at the same time were extraordinary critics,” he
explains. Prevalence of pre-existing
beliefs and views negatively impacts the society, he thinks. “Therefore, it
is important to examine, analyse and interpret information based on logic and
rationale. This is exactly where criticism helps.” So what does a poet have to
do with criticism, I am still not convinced. “When a poet turns to
criticism, he tries to nourish people with some sense of understanding about
the deepest mysteries of life and conflicts between individuals and the
society. Poet is a critic unto himself. Poets criticise the woes and
injustices of our so-called civilised society. They desire to make the
society a better place.” He sees it as a dialectical
process. “The society has its impact on the poet and the poets’ works and
experiences, in turn, have their influence on society. This is the basis of
all improvement, development and evolution. It is through this process that
the society gradually moves towards change.” Does he think art and
literature play a role in changing the society? “Literature and poetry
rather have a subliminal impact on the society. The change comes very slowly.
It is not like a revolutionary change. The writers and poets have no
financial incentives; yet their passion and intense desire to bring change
serves as motivation.” In a
sort of dialectical way, we move on to discuss Sartre, Camus, Kafka
and Heidegger. Our discussion, expectedly, takes a turn to existentialism.
Existentialism is one of the most important philosophical views of the
twentieth century. For Heidegger, existence was everything. Nothing lied
outside, before or beyond being. Sartre, however, gave his ideas a new
direction by pointing that reality is inherently absurd. “Sartre’s combination
of existentialism and Marxism was based on the theory of individual agency
and moral responsibility. His Existentialist-Marxism yielded some exemplary
works in the field of literature. Most of the important examples of
existentialist writing are rather thought-provoking plays and novels than
purely philosophical treatises. I believe that Existentialist-Marxism is the
only correct approach,” says Saeed. About other theories like
structuralism, post-modernism, deconstruction, historicism, Dr Saeed is of
the view that they all promote banal and sophomoric ideas. Feminist theory,
according to him, is quite an unrealistic approach. “Feminism is not
producing very good results for our society. I believe that men and women are
equal but if feminists start anti-men propaganda, it will help neither men
nor women.” Being a self-proclaimed
“radical feminist,” I am rather provoked to ask him if he thinks the same
about “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir. “That is undoubtedly a
great book and why should it not be? It was written by an existentialist
writer. However, if we talk about other feminist writers like Virgina Woolf,
their stance on feminism was rather chauvinistic.” The discussion shifts to
Nobel Prize winners like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hermann Hesse, Knut Hamsun
and Tagore. I was eager to know if Dr Saeed thinks Urdu writers are capable
enough to bag a Nobel Prize. “Yes they are. The problem is that Urdu is not
internationally recognised. We can’t compete with the western writers but,
recently, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk won it. When the literary world realises
that Urdu writers are doing something extraordinary, they will get it.” As we move to the
distinction between Urdu novel and short stories, the issue of translation
springs up. This, I thought, was linked to our earlier discussion about Urdu
writers getting the Nobel Prize, because Pamuk certainly has the advantage of
a brilliant translator. “We have some distinguished novelists like Aziz
Ahmed, Abdullah Hussain and Quratulain Hyder. Many critics have introduced
Urdu short stories in the West. Not many Urdu novels have been translated
yet. Once they are translated and introduced, they will definitely receive
acknowledgement,” he says. Of Manto, Krishan and Bedi,
Dr Saeed would choose Manto any day. “Manto was a short story writer
par-excellence. Krishan and Bedi have written on similar subjects but have
never been as impactful as Manto. There are two schools of thought here: One
believes Bedi is better when it comes to style; the other thinks Krishan
takes a lead in ideology.” Dr Saadat Saeed does not
agree with either of these views. “Manto has written stories like
‘Phundney’ (Tassles) and a collection of sketches ‘Ganjay Farishtey’
which was written in an entirely different style. He was a versatile writer.
The other two, however, were superficial writers.” Why can’t we see great
writers of the likes of Manto, Faraz, Jalib and Faiz these days? Dr Saeed
thinks this is because we are currently living in a state of confusion.
Nobody knows where he is heading to or why. “There is no sense of
direction. At the time of Faraz, Faiz, Jalib and Manto, all writers and poets
were actively struggling for the cause of revolution. Gradually, though, our
society became consumerist. Bringing a positive change in society, I believe,
is a spiritual practice. People busy in feeding their materialistic thirst
can only welcome negativism.” “Commercialism is a
menace that we need to shun completely” looks like an impossible suggestion
at the moment. But Saadat Saeed thinks “Hum sochne wale log nahi, consume
hone wale log hain (People don’t appreciate thinking, they would rather be
consumed).” He is of the view that
there will come a time, soon, when writers and poets will realise what is
happening to them. “Currently, art and literature are nobody’s priority.
Television, newspapers or magazines hardly promote literature. They only look
for advertisements to sell their papers. Ideological literature is fading
away.” Dr Saeed has managed to
keep his ideology alive in all his poetic masterpieces. In one of his most
noteworthy poems titled ‘Phoenix’, he sums up the state of
disillusionment, in these verses: “O Phoenix Rise on the hill of fear For a moment Coming out of your web and restoring the chords of throat Tell us — who brought to
us The chill of tyranny From door to door The ash of the hill of
agony The death of writers’ conscience And the way leading to nothingness”
Ideological
universe The peculiar
circumstances of the birth of Pakistan, in the sense that it defied the
laid-down models of political science in the middle of the twentieth century,
have puzzled many an analyst. The course of its existence, in the first
twenty five years as a united Pakistan and then the next forty two years of
West Pakistan designated comfortably as the whole of Pakistan, has made
political pundits reassert the manufacturing peculiarities of this country.
Some have gone into the colonial era politics for the peculiar dispensation
of people like Markus Daechseal. For him, the British never
recognised class as a key political identity, only a politics of interest
based on intermediate and patronage networks. The beneficiaries, whom he
calls members of the Urdu middle class milieu, were simultaneously bound by
such structures and developed a desire to overcome them. As the contradiction
could not be directly resolved, they developed a new form of politics — the
politics of self-expression in which troublesome questions about the nature
of social and economic relationship were no longer visible or permissible. From this baseline,
Daechsel develops the argument within the global framework of explanations.
The search for the socio-cultural foundations of self-expressionist politics
led the people of Pakistan into the realm of middle class material culture
and into the problematics of a consumer society. The Urdu middle class’s
two sets of cultural phenomena had little or nothing to do with the specific
context of late colonial India, like the widespread appropriation of
political ideas from European fascism and emergence of a global language of
advertising. The politics of self-expression was the result of the logic of
consumption taking over the realm of politics. Collective identities were
invoked and given some form of meta historical grounding. By assuming a
direct correspondence between a collective soul and the soul of individual
activists, the latter translated their inner struggle into something that was
recognisably political by the standards of newspaper-reading middle class
culture. The importance of the public sphere as the cultivation of an open
debating culture that demonstrated an international standard of political
maturity was similarly rejected with no place at all for concepts such as
democracy and citizenship. The ultimate aim of the
politics of self-expression was never a return to societal politics but a
flight into an alternative ideological universe with all societal constraints
that plagued the middle classes. The activist could achieve the state of
ecstasy and intoxication that marked the end of his or her as a socially
networked person. In Pakistan, the post-colonial state was almost
intermediately after its creation redefined by the self-expression activists
and he shifted the goalpost of what true liberation meant. A constituency
that could not otherwise exist as a class due to the constraints imposed by
political economy of favour, found in consumption a space where it could
establish some form of undefined cultural consciousness. The problem with consumer
identities is that they suggest great identity depth — goods are believed
to reflect a person’s innermost being but at the same time they rely on
garish and the mundane to produce identities. Consumption is not about great
deeds in world history but about the choice of consumption items. Political
action revolves round to a remarkable degree on the appropriation of sign
objects — expressed through right consumerist choice. The language of
politics becomes a caricature of advertising language. It retains all the
hyperbole-talk of total liberation, total extermination of providence and the
stern law of history, while replacing the advertisings playfulness and self
irony with the certainty of assumed prophetic airs. The ideological content has
been sifted from figures like S. Chander Bose, V.D Sarkar and Allama Mashriqi
and explains the self-expressionists’ mode of action, its characteristic
stylistic vocabulary and its distinctive register of political experience. As
a survey of pamphlets, reformist tracts and journalistic writings demonstrate
it was person’s relationship with the body above everything else that made
them middle class, and this included diet, hygiene and sexual self control by
both men and women. The first phase of
self-expression in politics was to a large extent suppressed by the emerging
martial state in the early 1950s. The second wave was the aftermath of the
Afghan War, neo-fundamentalism or jihadism. The new Islamist activist has
lost interest in the societal; they are no longer interested in the project
of creating an Islamic society based on the Sharia but concentrate on matters
of self-fulfillment and meta-historical statement of identity. The methodology is a direct
reflection of the logic of consumer society. Activists seek to create
spectacles, beamed round the world through the media universe in which they
turn themselves into political brands which are immediately and often quite
literally consumed. The suicide mission is the ultimate extension of the old
self-expressionist longing for self-annihilation and intoxication, a
self-indulgent form of political activity that is ostensibly based on supreme
sacrifice but in reality gives the person involved a taste of the ultimate
power trip. And, there is a warning at
the end for all to heed. Persistent contradiction between a consumerist
society and other forms of societal organisations stimulates forms of
self-expressionist radicalism that may be very hard to control. Far from
being the historical carrier of the voice of reason and modernity, the
consumer middle class could well turn out as the destroyer of the world that
gave birth to it. One shortcoming of the book
is that though the middle class cuts across the communal divide, the focus
has been more on how it has cast its long shadows in Pakistan. Some of the
analysis may appear to be far-fetched but it adds to the body of works that
try to understand this peculiar phenomenon. If the phenomenon is peculiar
then the analysis can be entertained as well, even if it tends to be a little
far-fetched. The Politics of Self Expression Marcus Daechsel Oxford University Pakistan Year of Publication 2013. Price Rs 895 Pages 295
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