South Asian Peace in Stockholm
Soundscapes of Muharram (Kabir’s Open Thread)
As promised, this is going to be my only post this week.
By Mansoor Raza
This is particularly timely since it is currently Muharram and Ashura is this week.
From the dust of Pakistan’s independence in 1947 emerged a sonic revolution that would permanently rewrite Karachi’s spiritual DNA.
Rooted in classical Urdu, Arabic and Persian literary traditions, the noha — a profound elegiac lament commemorating the tragedy of Karbala and the martyrdom of Imam Husain (AS) — travelled across a fractured Subcontinent in the hearts of millions of families that migrated to Karachi. Over the last three-quarters of a century, this localised ritual of displacement morphed into a defining cultural powerhouse.
Driven by global shifts and technological eras, 12 trailblazing master orators of the noha [elegiac lament] arose, not merely as reciters, but as architectural anchors and boundary-breakers who fundamentally re-engineered the soundscape of devotion.
2) DAWN reviewed Anjum Altaf’s book A Modern Introduction to Indian Music and Other Essays Including a Primer on the Physics of Sound
Part primer, part Socratic conversation and part cultural history, this engaging volume explores the theoretical foundations of Indian classical music
The book is unique and quite different from other Pakistani authors’ books on music, as it is interactive. It is the outcome of shared learning, in which a group learns from each other by pooling knowledge, and is more exciting and effective than passively being exposed to an expert’s views. In fact, the essays started off as blog posts that were then commented upon by readers. Those discussions are included in the book, almost like a Socratic dialogue.
The book has also been published in India by Primus Books
Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan
The settled view of Pakistan, is that it is the most ideologically Islamic state the world has ever produced, and that each decade carries it further into theocracy. We think the settled view is wrong.
The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.
Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.
Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.
It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.
The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.
Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.
This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.
Continue reading Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan
High-Intensity Precedent
Brown Pundits runs on attention. When we put hours into the site, it hums; when work and travel pull us across three jurisdictions at once, it slows. We have a backlog of pieces we want to write and lives that keep getting in the way. The June survey took the wind out of the schedule. We do not want to run this place as full-time editors, and we should not have to.
First, a thing worth saying plainly. Brown Pundits is not a magazine. It is a discussion community with essays attached, and it always has been. The life of the site is the conversation, not the rate of publication. Everything below follows from taking that seriously.
The principle is high-intensity posts. A lot of writing is rewriting, and we want authors to work their pieces hard before they go up. We have noticed the same thing for years. A post that carries real thought and attention never dies at ten or fifteen comments. Fifty is our quiet benchmark. Past a hundred, the thread stops being ours at all and takes on its own life, because people come here to argue with each other and use the post as fodder. Signal pulls signal. Thin posts pull nothing.
The rules:
- Fresh original writing is the post. Work it hard, put it up on its own, and let the comments run. This is the essay, and it keeps standing where it always has.
- Reposts do not each get a post. Links, columns, reviews, the odd video, other people’s work: these stack into a single running thread, one per author or theme. The author upranks the newest entry to the top, refreshes the timestamp, and lets the curation gather in one place. One dense thread beats ten thin link-drops that die overnight.
- Open threads, where the general cross-talk lives, stay scarce. We open a new one only when the current thread crosses fifty to a hundred comments, or once a week, whichever comes first. Two or three live threads, not twenty.
The obvious worry is that a long thread walls out newcomers. It does not, because the newest entry always sits on top, and the open threads rotate weekly or at a hundred, so the live conversation is never buried under a year of history.
An example. A contributor who shares a steady stream of links, a column here, a book review there, the odd YouTube, keeps one running thread for the lot instead of a dozen one-line posts. Each new link goes to the top. The older ones stay underneath. The regulars know exactly where to find it and argue about it, and the thread grows heavier and more valuable every week instead of vanishing down the feed in a day.
That is the whole idea. Original essays worked harder, reposts gathered in one place, cross-talk kept to a few live threads. We stay a discussion community with essays attached. We are just building better rooms for the discussion to happen in. Less churn for us, more weight for you.
Open Thread: AfPak – Cocktail 2
We are busy but we found this comment amusing:
The origin and variation of ethnic violence in South Asia
It’s been a few days since I last appeared here, so I don’t know what’s going on here. Either way, I had previously mentioned in some of my past comments about a few useful sources for understanding communal and caste conflict. One of the books that I mentioned was “The Colonial Origins of ethnic violence in India” by Ajay Varghese. I have been meaning to make a post about the book, but I couldn’t really fully summarize everything in a meaningful manner until I remembered a summary the author wrote in the concluding chapter himself, which I am just going to fully quote below since I think it’s an interesting insight about violence in present-day South Asia.
Summary of the Book
This book has argued that patterns of ethnic violence in India stem from legacies of colonial rule that were reinforced over time through institutions. India is well known as having been the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire; less well known is that the British never controlled the entire country. Most of the areas that were already British colonies prior to the conquest of India had been brought under direct rule, but the Rebellion of 1857 prevented the subcontinent from being entirely annexed. Afterward, roughly one-fourth of the Indian population lived in princely states ruled by largely autonomous native kings. This key historical divide forms the colonial origins of ethnic violence in contemporary India. Both the British administrators and the princely rulers governed heterogeneous populations, but they had very different conceptions of how to manage this ethnic diversity. In the provinces, British administrators emphasized the centrality of caste. Colonial officials chose this particular identity after the Rebellion of 1857, which they perceived as a religious(primarily Islamic) uprising, because they were intent on de-emphasizing religion. Caste (along with tribal identities) was promoted as the central organizing principle for a new, modern society. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the caste system was divorced from its Hindu origins and became largely a system of social categories. It was subsequently viewed as scientific in character, bearing resemblance (depending on the administrator) either to race or to the class structure of Victorian England.
Continue reading The origin and variation of ethnic violence in South Asia
Gender statistics in India
Normally I’m wary of India-Pakistan comparisons but since a comment was made on an earlier thread that “India is light-years ahead of Pakistan” when it comes to gender, let’s look at some objective statistics. I have no problem conceding that India is indeed ahead of Pakistan in many things. For example, India has decriminalized homosexuality (by getting rid of the British colonial Section 377). This is something that is currently unimaginable in Pakistan. Partly this is because India is a constitutionally secular state while Pakistan is an “Islamic Republic”. Islam has clear views about homosexuality which don’t need to be elaborated here.
Yet, India is by no means a Western feminist paradise. Arranged marriage remains the norm (just as it is in Pakistan). Marital rape is not a crime (just as it isn’t in Pakistan). So Indians can indeed take satisfaction in being more progressive than Pakistan but they are nowhere near Western standards.
Take the Global Gender Gap Index for example. While Pakistan is the bottom ranked country on the list (with a score of 0.567) India is ranked at 0.644. This is just above Saudi Arabia at 0.643. Meanwhile, the UK is ranked at 0.838 and the US is ranked at 0.756. Clearly, India needs to make a lot of progress to catch up with the so-called “civilized world”. Continue reading Gender statistics in India
Lucknow’s Composite Culture and its Destruction in Qurratulain Hyder’s Novels
I am sharing an excerpt from this piece in the context of Fly Die’s piece on ethnic violence in India. I believe that sometimes Literature provides a different lens on these issues than academic research does.
I was tuning my tanpura for riaz in the morning to sing Khayal Jaunpuri, and one string snapped. Gautam, there’s symbolism for you. Hussain Shah’s tanpura broken into two,’ said Talat ruefully.
— Qurratulain Hyder, River of Fire, pg. 273
In the passage quoted above–from Qurratulain Hyder’s novel River of Fire (her own translation of her Urdu magnum opus Aag Ka Dariya)—the speaker, Talat, is a member of Lucknow’s Muslim elite. She is speaking to a group of friends—both Muslim and Hindu—after the Partition of 1947. Two new nation-states–“India” and “Pakistan”– have been created and the group of friends is splitting up in different directions: Talat’s cousin Amir Reza has already left for Karachi, Talat herself is imminently departing for further studies in England, and Gautam is soon to leave for America. The broken tanpura symbolizes the death of the composite culture, which could not survive the politics of religion and the force of the Two Nation Theory. This theme—the destruction of the Lucknawi way of life—runs through many of Hyder’s novels, particularly through My Temples, Too (Hyder’s translation of her debut novel Mere Bhi Sanam Khane) and the later sections of River of Fire.
In this paper I will examine Hyder’s novels and use them to discuss some arguments about the formation of the composite culture of Lucknow (and of UP generally) and the failure of this culture to prevent the Partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan in 1947. By focusing on Muslim elites who, despite all the odds, chose to retain their belief in a united India, Hyder problematizes the prevailing discourse that sees Hindus and Muslims as inherently opposed and Partition as the inevitable outcome of Independence.
The rest of the essay can be read on Substack. See also my review of Hyder’s novel “Fireflies in the Mist”
Review: Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan Through Its Women Singers by Fawzia Afzal-Khan
I am sharing this review in the context of the ongoing discussion on women’s rights in Pakistan. Though Afzal-Khan’s book is specifically about women singers, it is relevant to this discussion since it makes broader points about “respectability politics”.
Afzal-Khan’s book is wide-ranging and covers a time period from the years preceding Pakistan’s creation in 1947 to the present. It includes many genres, from khayal to Sufi-Pop. The central theme of the book is articulated in the first two chapters entitled “The Respectable Courtesan” (focusing on Malka Pukhraj) and “Roshan Ara Begum: Performing Classical Music, Gender, and Muslim Nationalism in Pakistan.” In these initial chapters, Afzal-Khan develops her notion of “respectability politics.” This refers to the ways in which these artists had to negotiate their public image in order to align themselves with the norms of ashraf Muslim families, which hold that a woman’s primary place is in the home. Though they were both great artists, Malka Pukhraj and Roshan Ara Begum identified themselves primarily as “good” wives and (in Pukhraj’s case) mothers. This allowed them to distance themselves from their alleged “courtesan” backgrounds, considered dubious by mainstream society. In Pukhraj’s case, she was a court singer in the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, ruled at the time by Maharaja Hari Singh. It is telling that, according to her daughter Tahira Syed (1958-) – herself an accomplished singer – Pukhraj’s children didn’t learn about this aspect of their mother’s background until she wrote her autobiography in her eighties (Afzal-Khan 2020: 5). It is also important to note that Pukhraj dedicated her memoirs to two men: first her husband and then her patron (Maharaja Hari Singh). Afzal-Khan deems this another “normative gesture of respectability” (2020: 3).
The rest of the review can be read on Substack.
“And who knows, in the distant future we can prop up Afghanistan like China does Pakistan.”
We are going to watch this in a few hours?