As professional meetups go, AHA is less painful than COMDEX but slightly worse off, sartorially speaking (some of these sweaters - sheesh!). For the first time, in a long while, I attended panels and listened to scholars and thought about their words. My favorite panel was a Silver Jubilee retrospective of Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India by Ranajit Guha - the book that launched a thousand careers. I especially appreciated the historiography of Gramsci (and later, the Subaltern Studies collective) in Latin America sketched by Greg Grandin. I hope I see it in print soon.

The AHA will have, for the first time, a South Asianist as the President this year, Barbara Metcalf. And we also have a new caucus/affiliated organization Society for Advancing the History of South Asia which hopefully will have a new web-presence soon and may even do insane things like contribute to the Archives wiki. Yeah? If you work on South Asia history, and this is news to you, please get in touch with Manu Bhagavan. Exciting.

Unluckily, I also got the flu. So much of the last two days have been spent hunkering deep inside my soul for any warmth.

Irfan Habib, senior Mughal historian, has some thoughts in The Hindu, Subaltern studies a challenge to historians [via Naim Sahib]:

Talking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the 69th session of the Indian History Congress, which concluded on the Kannur University campus at Mangattuparamba on Tuesday, Professor Habib said globalisation was accompanied by an immense ideological offensive.

On the one hand, there was globalisation and on the other, “you are telling every country, along with every cultural community within that country, that your culture is different, your history is different,” he said.

Subaltern historians such as Ranajit Guha believed that only local alternative communities had history. That meant India did not have a history and even the working class did not have a history.

Professor Habib said the subaltern concept was similar to the view that Indian values were different from western values and, therefore, it could not be understood by western methods. That was the view of Edward Said, who said that oriental history could not be studied with critical tools fashioned in the west. That also meant that an Indian could not study Arab history. The post-modernist view was that every culture must have different tools.

According to this view, Marxism was a meta-narrative and rejected by Professor Said, subalterns and post-modernists. “British historians will never think of applying these methods to the British history. They are applying it to Indian history,” he said.

I think “talking on the sidelines” is awesome. But the critique rings hollow to me. The cultural relativism angle has been run to ground, no? He’d be hard pressed to find a card-carrying Subalternist nowadays.

While he raises a fair point about communalism not infesting the ranks of professional historians, he also seems to miss the point. The domestic consumption of non-academic historians has never rivaled that of the arm-chair variety. Bar Thapar.

update: On FRIDAY, JANUARY 2, there will be a roundtable discussion of the state of the field, moderated by David Ludden and possibly others. The event will be held in THE HILTON NEW YORK, NEW YORK SUITE (4TH FLOOR), FROM 5-7PM.

I will be there. See you all there, too.

Thinking out aloud about the historiographical landscape of current South Asian studies is a pretty silly thing to do at Medici’s coffee shop (”Obama Eats Here!”). You get all kinds of unsolicited advice - what do you mean Burton Stein’s History of India is under-appreciated?

If most of the 80s and all of the 90s can be given over to Subaltern Studies in particular and Postcolonial Studies in general, than how will we look back on these 00s?

Since 2000, I think these four titles are significant and merit (ed) widespread attention (in chronological order):

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

2. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Textures of time: writing history in South India 1600-1800. New York: Other Press, 2003.

3. Richard Eaton. A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

4. Sheldon Pollock. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

It is instructive that the latter three are concerned largely with the pre-modern. But maybe, this shows my bias more than a trend. Casting widely, I think the following would have to be on, again, my list of “significant” works on South Asian history since 2000.

• C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (2000)
• Ronald Inden, Daud Ali and Jonathan Walters, Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (2000)
• Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (2001)
• Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (2001)
• Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra (2001)
• Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001)
• Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2004)
• Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800 (2004)

Romila Thapar, Somanatha, the many voices of a history (2004), Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Impostor?: The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002) and James Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (2003) are of special interest to those of us who dabble in questions of memory and history.

Most recently (and this may very well be controversial), I think William Dalrymple and his The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 is going to leave a mark on the field. Hopefully, a positive mark. Looking ahead, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History is going to be monumental.

What would you add?

SMSes are running around saying that India has attacked.

To all my gentle readers, a merry end to 2008.

The aftershocks of Mumbai continue. The incursion, last week, of Indian jets into Pakistan’s airspace has galvanized the predictably jingoistic public, once again behind the Army. The Pakistan Airforce has started running low-flying sorties over major cities (Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad). Newspapers are reporting that crowds cheer when the planes fly over. The major airports have cancelled flights - at least, for the duration.

Over the last two years, the armed forces of Pakistan - the titular leaders - rapidly became a dirty word. Musharraf, corruption, failure to secure the cities, operations in Baluchistan and NWFP, all contributed towards an emerging discourse of “Army is bad for the country”. We saw the culmination of such sentiments in the February election and the resignation of Musharraf.

I am afraid those advances are now lost. On Pakistani blogs, the machismo of the “Pakistan, Fuck Yeah!” crowd is, once again, dominant. India is, once again, a militant target. Even the nascent student movement, which had taken to the streets during the Lawyers Movement, has donned the green colors of civil defense.

It is all frighteningly familiar. And here I was, hoping for change.

“The only way to stop these people is to take their money, so I say take the artifacts and sell them,” she said. “I’d ask any scholars who have a problem with that whether they have any family members that have been victims of terrorism. If not, they don’t have any right to raise an argument.”

An account of the intersections of the Chicago Persepolis Project and the global war on terror appears in Chicago Magazine: Gwenda Blair, Paying with the Past.

Anyone wanna design a new look for CM that looks passable on IE/Win? I am about ready to go back to .txt files.

Bahār-i Dānish (Garden of Wisdom) by Munshi Ināyat Allah Kanbuh in the mid-seventeenth century. These are hikayāt (tales) of a romance between a prince Jahandar Sultan and a maiden Bahrawar Banu, translated by the narrator into Persian. Think Sheherzade, but with a Munshi.

I was delighted to find this on Google Books - though, it is scanned backwards, and is hard to read in the browser. The scanned edition is from the famed Naval Kishore Press, produced in 1879. Take a look at the way the text, the footnotes, and the notes intermingle on that front page. I absolutely love the upside-down notations. The day our web reaches this level of textual interminglings, is the day I will worry about print.

The ads were in the magazine section of Pakistan News - an Urdu weekly for diaspora desis in NY, Chicago etc. In breathless prose they invited broken hearts and spirits to have their problem solved within “two and half minutes”. One promised a reward if not successful, another lauded his experience of 55 years. In tone, or in content, these ads were apace with any psychic, Dionne Warwick-style salespitch that you may encounter elsewhere. Except for one garish detail - all three ads were explicitly selling services of Kala Jadoo, black magic.

Lost in the noise of “wahhabisation” of the Pakistani publics, are some really interesting changes which accompanied the seasonal migration of Pakistan’s labor force to the Gulf since the 1970s. Broadly understood, “wahhabisation” denotes the growth of parties/philosophies in Pakistan who share the stringently narrow-minded Sunni sectarianism from Saudi Arabia, along with some attendant thoughts on anti-imperialism of a local or global kind. Often, the calls for a resurgent Caliphate, or destruction of Israel become à la carte additions.

But one particularly pernicious long term side-effect of this seasonal migration has been the disruption of the varied local traditions of charismatic and spiritual leadership in Pakistan - specifically the heterogenous sufic traditions. The explicitly “local” site - whether a shrine, a seat or a house of a Sufi - where the community would go for counsel, help, adjudication and spiritual growth was rapidly overwhelmed by a new generation of preachers. This new breed was freely entrepreneurial - tying the remittances to moral panics in the domestic sphere. How do you know if your wife was faithful to you?. The cash-for-salvation business has many, many facets. Clerics like Hafiz Saeed, etc., have done wonders within this ‘emerging market’.

The “Black Magic” industry is another, less-frequently mentioned, outpost of this wild capitalism. It operates through a network of intermediaries in the foreign city (be that Doha, Qatar or New York, USA) who identify the marks and get them hooked through a nominal fee. A local payment, in dinars or dollars, gets the troubled soul a special phone number to call. On the other end, is another intermediary who will solicit all your sordid details. The client is usually strung along for months, doing mind-numbing spells and sacrifices and paying small amounts. Eventually, desire and despair forces the client to ask for the ultimate - a direct audience with the ‘Amil (Knowledge Bearer). It is perhaps needless to point out that this ultimate round of communications has its own price bracket.

The practitioners use specialized constructions to lure in their clients. They situate themselves, explicitly within the Islamic cosmology, as “outsiders” and mimic a parallel genealogy of filth, as sufis have a genealogy of pure. Alistar Crowley would easily understand. Note that the ads above name the practitioners as either “Massih” or “Bengali” - that is, Christian or Bengal (it has a long history of being associated w/ the darker arts in certain traditions). Additionally, they explicitly name “demonic” beings - some are standard (Kali, Churail, Nag,جیسے ہنومان ،کھیترپال ،بھیرو، ناگ دیوتا ، لوناچماڑی، چڑیل، لکشمی دیوی ، کالا کلوا ، پاروتی دیوی ، کلوسادھن، پیچھل پیری ،ڈائن ،ہر بھنگ آکھپا etc.), and some rather inexplicable (Hanuman!). Graveyards, become the counterpoint to the sufi shrine. Lest we think that this is merely defrauding money from suckers, there are constant reports in the media of child abductions and mutilated corpses being used in such rituals.

What to make, then, of these ads which tout their particular other-ness with such aplomb? How do we fit this utilitarian embrace of the Christian and the Hindoo within the same fold as the shrine-hating “wahhabisation”? Theoretically speaking, we have to conceive of a landscapes that accommodates spirituality post modernity. Second, we have to discard the notion of a uniform process of “wahabbisation” (I am tired of putting in the quotes).

Things are way more, um, diabolical.

Below the fold, the actual ads.
[below the fold →]

Naim Sahib has a must-read review, in Outlook India of LeT’s propagandistic Ham Ma’ien Lashkar-e-Taiba Ki, The Mothers Of The Lashkar. I will leave you to read the essay in full, but apropos of my earlier post, this stood out:

To my knowledge there is no companion book about the fathers. In fact, in a great many narratives included in the book the fathers are mainly absent. Often literally so, toiling somewhere in the Middle East, providing nothing more than financial support to their families. The absence of the fathers probably helps the Lashkar in their recruiting efforts.