Q&A WITH AYASHA JALAL
We are publishing the transcript of Waseem Ahmad Siddiqui’s interview with the Pakistani-American historian Ayasha Jalal aired on Açık Radyo on Aug 28.
Waseem Ahmad Siddiqui: Good morning everyone. I am Waseem Ahmad Siddiqui. Welcome to AçıkRadyo 95.0 fm. This morning Ayesha Jalal is joining us from Lahore. This is the city where I was born. This is the city where my home is, it is now 09:00 a.m. in Istanbul and 11:00 a.m. morning in Pakistan. I want to introduce Ayesha Jalal here. She is a Pakistani-American historian and academic and the Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University. Her work focuses on the military industrial complex, postcolonial politics, and muslim identity in South Asia. She is also known for positing the sole spokesman that the partition of India and Pakistan was less a political necessity than a terrible human tragedy, and that the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was pragmatist who was motivated by greater rights for the Muslim of the indian subcontinent than the creation of a separate city state.
Hi Ayesha Jalal, thank you for joining me with this solidarity and friendship of our radio program: Hüsnü Kabul.
Ayesha Jalal: Thank you for having me Waseem.
W. A. S: Ayesha Jalal, I also want to mention that the word “Hüsnü kabul” is our program name in Turkish, hüsün, which means “kind reception” or “kind acceptance”. It is a concept that reinforces the voices of asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey. Today, my ambition is to propose a record extension, 30 minutes of our political imaginaries.
So while we are recording this podcast in privileged conditions of confinement, we keep in our thoughts of the multitude of people around the world who do not share similar conditions or have no choice but to risk being affected by the war or climate catastrophe because of criminal policies that we have to do with neoliberalism, colonialism or barbarism.
Ayesha Jalal, two weeks ago we reported on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim attacks in the UK, namely pogroms against asylum seekers. It was violent attack on immigrants. We also mentioned Eqbal Ahmad’s book Terrorism: Their Terrorism. Especially the introduction, in which he portrays the Al-Qaeda mujahideen who visited Reagan in the form of heroes in Washington in 1984. While referring to Eqbal Ahmad, we have tried to focus more on Islamophobia and terrorism.
The phrase ‘War on Terror,’ which became a rallying cry in the 1970s, brings to mind the colonial era in the Indian Subcontinent by British. In this geography, the separation of Pakistan and India by the British after the Second World War is a picture of a period of violence built by borders and nation-state. So, I think we can start for here. Ayesha Jalal, can I request you to lay out for us the significance of this hidden or unspoken history?
A.J: Well, I mean, there are many aspects of it that one can comment on, but I think the most significant is that the commonplace notion is that Pakistan, as it emerged in 1947, is exactly what Mister Jinnah wanted, which I’ve shown is not the case. He wanted a much bigger unit. He wanted undivided Punjab, undivided Bengal. And he wanted a relationship with what he called Hindustan, which were the hindu majority provinces that never materialized. So that’s one thing. The second thing, of course, is that the predominant paradigm in which Pakistan is understood or partition is understood, is that it was religious reasons that were primarily the cause of the division. This doesn’t explain why there are more Muslims in India and Bangladesh today put together than in Pakistan. If this was really a state created for Muslims, then why were so many Muslims left in India? We know that at the time of partition, there were 100 million Muslims, one out of every five Indian, of which about 65 million became citizens of Pakistan, east and west, while 35 million were left inside India, the largest single muslim minority in a non muslim state.
So even if Pakistan became the largest muslim state in 1947, it did mean leaving, creating the largest muslim minority. And I think it might interest your viewers to know that in 2050, India is supposed to emerge at the moment, you know, that it’s Indonesia, that’s the largest muslim country in the world, but in 2050, it will be India. So if Pakistan was indeed created purely in the name of religion, it seems very odd that India is going to become the largest muslim state, raising questions of what partitions solved. My analysis, which is not sort of simply, you know, repeating this paradigm of religious, ubiquitous religion everywhere, is that I’ve studied the provincial dynamics and how the Pakistan demand, as articulated by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, known as the Quaid Azam, or “the great leader” in Pakistan and the All India Muslim League that he led, what they were really trying to do, I mean, they obviously, a lot is made of the history that Jinnah made, that is Pakistan and partition, but very little is made or understood of the history that made Jinnah. So I think as a historian, I can say that that history, which includes the provincial dynamics, this was a federal issue. There was a need for a federal solution, which, as I’ve argued in my book and shown and demonstrated the Congress high command, as it inched closer to the british departure, was not willing to concede. They wanted a strong centre, they wanted to pull in the princely states, of which they were over 565 at the time, big and small. So they felt that they needed a strong center, and they couldn’t really accommodate the muslim league’s demand for a share of power, a large share of power for Muslims based on their majority in the northwest and the northeast. So that, I think, is very significant. And I think that by constantly talking about religion in an amorphous sense and ignoring so many other aspects, we’ve not only misunderstood the reasons for partition, we’ve also undermined the federal dynamics that continue to inform politics in both India and Pakistan. By constantly harping on Hindutva now in India or religion or Islam in Pakistan, you try to undermine the provincial aspirations that are there. So I do think that it distorts not just the history, but also our understanding of the present.
W. A. S: In fact, what actually I have been trying to do, and you are completely right about, especially when you are talking about some other facts. For a few weeks, I was trying to elaborate or to cover the history of South Asia or indian subcontinent in the light of, especially communal violence and Islamophobia during partition, and actually this violent separation and partition of the indian subcontinent. It seems that it was very difficult for those who migrated from India to Pakistan, because we know that the partition of the subcontinent was the biggest migration in history, and also one of the, as I have said before, the violent process of the nation making. At least 15 million peoples were displaced from their homes. At least 2 million people were killed, and at least 1 million women were raped. So all these statics are based on estimation and are probably an underestimation of the actual violence which took place. What would you say about this generally, about this huge migration?
A.J: Well, I mean, there’s no question that it was a human holocaust. I mean, it was a holocaust of unprecedented proportions, even in a subcontinent which has a history of bloodshed over the years. But nothing can quite compare. And I think it’s also important to sort of remember that despite conflict and violence in the subcontinent during and preceding the British Raj, India was never divided on a religious basis. The lines were or ostensibly religious bases. There was much more of a center region dynamic. Former regions sometimes emerged as centers, and former centers slipped into marginal regions. So this process was ongoing for millennia. But the British, who, as you know, privileged the religious distinction even in census enumeration, created a kind of religion with a capital “R”, a census category, and then, of course, proceeded to give Muslims separate electorate. So it was in that context that this issue of religion became important. But I do think it’s important to distinguish between religion as a census category and religion as a matter of personal faith, something I do and elaborate on in my book: Self and Sovereignty. So I do think, that’s important and it’s the confusion of the two that has resulted in the treatment of religion. A capital “R”. I mean, you know, I just want to say quite bluntly that if there was a difference between the All India Muslim League, led by Jinnah, and the Congress led by Mohandas Karamch and Gandhi for a bit, and then later, by Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel, the differences were political and not on theology. They were not arguing on the idea of God. They were not discussing. I think that there is a confusion of what was really at stake. So I would say that while the violence that you speak about is undoubted, I mean, it was undeniably shocking, unanticipated and left. The two countries that emerged out of the British Raj are terribly impacted, not just in terms of everyday life, but ideologically, emotionally, something that we continue to suffer from today. But I do think that the misunderstanding of the religious dimension needs to be certainly pointed out by historians, even if it’s difficult for ordinary individuals to comprehend.
W.A.S: Religion with a capital “R.” I think, I understand what you’re trying to say.
A.J: In my books, self and sovereignty, I make a distinction between religion as identity and religion as personal faith. So while you can say that there were so many Muslims in an area, 40% Muslims, 50% Hindus, 10% Sikhs, you know, you are not really talking about their personal faith, you are just, you know, it’s an external, external observation. I mean, it’s an identity, external identity. What that we don’t know much about what that means in personal faith. And when it comes to violence, I’ve shown again in my book, self and sovereignty, that the violence was perpetrated in areas against minorities to seize their property even before the two states were in a position to operate and govern. So I think that a lot happens in the name of religion. And one of the great sort of problems of our modern era is our inability to really sort of understand what we mean when we talk about religion. Religion is used far too loosely to describe things and ends up explaining nothing.
W. A.S: It’s actually reminding me of something, when you are saying that the religion as identity. Actually it brings another issue: Identity politics. Especially in Europe and a part of Turkey where the identity politics is now very much criticized. And it’s not easy to talk about identity or identity politics because there is something where this sort of violence is embodies. And that’s also how it is understood in the place where I’m living in Turkey. It was very difficult for me to understand in the beginning that how come the identity could be that much problematic? So, actually partition was many things, as you are saying, and the intergenerational trauma of it continues to occupy us, but we have just reduced it to nationalistic, hindu versus muslim narratives. And in reality, religious minorities were also one of the biggest victims of violence. And the Pakistan movement also owes a lot to religious minorities, like the Christians, like the partisans or of Ahmadis, especially in the case of Pakistan’s border was made by Zafrullah Khan.
A.J: The irony, of course, in Pakistan’s case for minorities is that it was created by a man wedded to the defense of minority rights, was a firm constitutionalist, and yet Pakistanis, on an everyday basis praised Jinnah and his achievement of Pakistan and failed to understand what he stood for, which was minority rights. So that’s really a tragedy. You were absolutely right that, you know, the way that the discourse of partition or the explanations of partition have been used in official nationalisms has really hurt minorities. Because, you know, what you have now in India, as you know, is hindu majoritarianism. We’ve seen the impact of muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan earlier, and I think India is set to repeat many of those mistakes that Pakistan has already gone through earlier in the earlier decades.
W. A.S: Ayesha Jalal, you might know much better than me that Hannah Arendt, she used the word, the term, the concept a lot in her work of Totalitarianism: Tribal nationalism.Arendt talks about it. And it’s interesting that in tribal nationalism, the majority is always threatened by minority, there is always this kind of insecurity and insafety. It also reminds me of those minorities, especially muslim minorities, for example, in India or in the UK or in America or in Palestine, for example. What is happening now in Palestine. The complete genocide.Actually, last week I was also speaking to a Bangladeshi friend, a student, Mahmudul Hasan Naim, a PhD student at Ibn Khaldun University from Bangladesh. He told me something which made me think about later on. He said something like this about the partition. He said that the partition between Pakistan and India, or later Bangladesh, was not only the political or cultural hegemony of british colonialism, it was also intellectual hegemony. What would you say about this intellectual hegemony?
A.J: Hegemony is precisely what is the problem seems, because, you know, I talk about. I mean, I use different terminology. I talked about that the political decolonization occurred in 1947. It was the easiest, but it was not accompanied by economic decolonization, something that the postcolonial nation states continue to struggle for in the international arena. But the most difficult and unacknowledged legacy of colonialism is the intellectual legacy. And the decolonization of the mind is far from complete. The ruling elites who took over India and Pakistan found it easy to embrace the ideological or national norms of the colonial state because they also inherited the structures. So, whilst they were opponents of the structures, whilst when they were fighting the british or when they were engaged in anti colonial movements no sooner had power been acquired that they embraced those and used those to their advantage. Take the example of, you know, you talk about, you’re interested in refugees, take the idea of borders. You know, I’m a historian and I have a longer view of history and, you know, we forget that both India and Pakistan emerge out of the british colonial state which really succeeded a multi ethnic empire. Whether, I mean, this was the Mughal Empire where religion was not the main source of identity. The borders were fluid. There was the Ottoman Empire, there was the Safavid. So a talented Turk could very easily make his way or her way. It was men mainly into the Safavid era domain or certainly the Mughal domain. So that kind of turning the borders, I mean, cartographic obsession of the colonial state, the british colonial state has been embraced by the postcolonial elite in India, Pakistan. I mean, if you look at some of the lingering border disputes, let’s say the Mecmohan line between China and India these are all legacies of colonialism or the Durand line. These are all sort of lines that you can’t see with the physical eye. These are cartographic constructions of the colonial state. That’s an example of the intellectual legacies or the intellectual ongoing intellectual hegemony of the colonial state, of the british colonial state. I think. I hope that you can understand that.
W. A.S: Yes, yes, I can relate at least what you are saying.
A.J: Actually, it’s everywhere. I mean, even Turkey. After all, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk decided that rather than persist with a multiethnic state which was the Ottoman empire, I mean, given the circumstances, it was a realistic decision on his part. It was better to go for a nation state. So the success of the nation state over the multiethnic empires of old is what has led to this question of borders where people are unwelcome and where human beings have multiple identities. But the insistence of the nation state on a singular identity as the basis of loyalty, as the basis of citizenship is a problem. It’s the persistence of the colonial thinking that has won over even with decolonization politically. And to some extent the economic struggles continue. But the intellectual one is the hardest to shrug off.
W. A. S: The idea of nation state. Sometimes we really feel fed up to talk about but it’s extremely important.
A.J: It’s extremely important to talk about it. If you want to talk about refugees, all these things are related to the nation state.
W. A. S: Yes, yes, you are completely right. That’s where I was trying to arrive. It’s too much important to talk about, but sometimes all these concepts, personally speaking, when we speak about these issues, we all are actually sometimes attacked in the school, in the university, in the academia.They might even tell you that, what is your problem with all these primitive things? I mean, they call it primitive thoughts and they want us to get rid of it.
A.J: I mean, I think it’s a confused, it’s an example of a confused mindset and too little understanding of history that leads to these ideas. You know, I’m not saying that you can reverse the trend, but you can change your attitude by understanding history better.
W. A. S: Yes, you’re right. Ayesha Jalal actually, hereone more theorist, post-colonial theorist in Columbia University right now comes in mind: Partha Chatterjee. He also talks about this idea of quasi colonialism where he refers to W. E. B. Du Bois. He says something very interesting about Europe and partially Turkey. He says that the idea of quasi colonialism, it’s very much embodied in this part of the world. And he elaboratesaying that here you will most of the time find, “the colonialism partially presence, partially absence.”
A.J: Let me say, I mean, I know Partha Chatterjee’s work very well, and he’s a friend as well. You know, the fact that we talk about post hyphen colonial is to indicate the persistence of the colonial in the present. You understand that. So just, I mean, the very, the post hyphen colonial in itself is a terminal. That sort of, you know, what you’re calling Chatterjee’s notion ofquasi colonialism is captured in the post hyphen colonial idea.
W. A. S: And that’s where the “confusion” is, I think. I don’t know if that’s what you are trying to say.
A.J: Absolutely. I mean, I think the confusion, if you drop the post, then we are colonial. We continue to be that intellectually.
W. A. S: Yes, now I think I can ask you the last question here regarding to this hidden history or this confusion or this idea of safety and security especially when we talk about nation state. And here, I think speaking act is an important act. What I feel actually.
A.J: Sorry, what I didn’t get that. Which act?
W. A. S: Speaking act, I think it’s an important act. And I want to ask you again regarding, refugees and immigrants, because especially, they are the one who are mostly silent, unspoken.
But of course, right now, -let me also add this post humanism idea- where now environment and climate crisisis also another reality and right-now is the big issue facing us. But how do you think in this regard, the idea of security and safety we can talk about? Do you think, do refugees have a history? And I just want to add one more thing about Mahmutul Hasan Naim from Bangladesh. He told me that “everyone talks about the migration of Pakistan and India, but nobody knows anything about the violence migration of Bangladesh, the violence perpetrated by the pakistani army in Bangladesh in 1971.
A.J: I mean, contrary to his view, I know that Ilyas Chattha is writing a book. It’s about to come out. So, it’s not that people haven’t addressed the predicament of the Biharis. They are known as the Biharis because they were left abandoned. And even the Bengalis who had to flee the terror of the pakistani state after March 1971 and they took shelter in India, they suffered a great deal of violence. Bangladesh lost an entire generation of intellectuals. So that violence is, I mean, it’s not that we don’t know about it, but yes, I mean, if you’re talking about the everyday man on the common man on the street, maybe they are too involved in their lives to know about these things. But I don’t agree with your friend that the intellectuals or the academicians and scholars are unaware of this or don’t debate this all the time.
W. A. S: Yes, I think it’s important that this point is actually very important. We do are aware. But I think here again, this public intellectual crisis comes in. I don’t know if there is anyone left.
A.J: There are, of course, people are raising their voices all the time for these issues. I mean, the mere fact that a book is coming out on the forgotten Bihari or the Bengalis, I mean, it’s actually the Bengalis left behind in Pakistan. They are, you know, their predicament. So the point is that it’s, you know, and there are biharis in Bangladesh. And so these kinds of partitions based on a narrow conception of identity are invariably violent and leave lingering effects. And the subcontinent continues to suffer from them. And not just the subcontinent. I think now many of the repercussions are global. The fact that capital moves but capital doesn’t like labor to move, I think is at the heart of the problem. You can’t cross borders, but labor shouldn’t move. Borders but capital can. This was not the case prior to the onset of full fledged colonial backed capitalism. That’s all I was saying. I’m not saying you can go back to that, but I think it is worthwhile knowing the history of how we got here.
W. A. S: Ayesha Jalal, thank you so much. Actually, in reality, the violence has happened equally on both sides and cause of partition, but rather the outcome of it.
A.J: Actually, I would say that the post partition violence was far greater than the part, than the violence that led to partition. I think that’s something I would leave you with as well.
W. A. S: So here in the last part, I would also say that partition was also a horror and hope. And it wasn’t only an anti-Hindu victory. I think we can end it here. Ayesha Jalal, I’m very happy to hear your voice from Lahore.
A.J: Thank you for having me on your program. Thank you so much.
W. A. S: You’re welcome. Lahore is the place where my mother is right now. So, I’m very happy to hear your voice.
A.J: Well, that’s why I’m here. Because that’s where my mother is as well. All the best. Thank you. Take care.
W.A.S: Take care, bye. (VK)
Source: BIANET
