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‘South Asian politics being guided by desire to undo history’

February 03, 2018

News Desk

Eminent scholar Dr Markus Daechsel from Royal Holloway, University of London, said at a two-day international conference at Habib University that instead of arguing with and about history, South Asian politics “has increasingly been guided by a desire to bypass or even undo history”.

The conference, titled ‘Questioning South Asia’, was held on February 1 and 2. It invited contributions from scholars willing to think beyond the construct of South Asia as a territorially bound space with discrete nations.

Both days saw attendance by large numbers of people, including academics, students and civil society representatives, said a press release on Friday. The conference brought together top global academics from South Asia, the US and the UK and Pakistan, including Dr Markus Daechsel, whose keynote speech addressed the nature and value of history in South Asia.

According to Dr Daechsel, the evidence of such a neglect of the South Asian region’s history is visible “in the field of heritage destruction and architecture, but can also be observed elsewhere, in debates about school curricula or simply in the relatively low prestige enjoyed by history as compared to the social or natural sciences”.

The keynote address offered reflections on a number of themes related to this larger question: What does this new status and politics of history mean for our ability to write a decolonised history South Asia? Dr Daechsel concluded his keynote speech by suggesting that “such explorations have barely begun but will acquire increasing importance when many of the old certainties of the 19th and 20th century modernity will be superseded”.

The conference was organised around five panels, and the first panel, ‘Revisiting Urdu Literary Traditions in South Asia’, offered insights into the diverse genre and forms of cultural representation of the region.

Sarah Abdullah and Amina Wasif of Lahore College for Women University presented thought-provoking papers on the way the traditions of storytelling or dastangoi produced unique fictional characters, especially in Tilism-e-Hoshruba, the subcontinent’s first wholly indigenous Indo-Islamic fantasy epic. The second panel illuminated the pressing contemporary challenges affecting the world.

Dr Nauman Naqvi of Habib University presented an apocalyptic worldview arising from the geological changes occurring from the disastrous effects of the ‘Anthropocene’. He said, “This generation is what is called the generation of the great acceleration. […] as we are living in an era of massive catastrophe and there are massive holes in our ecology”.

Saba Pirzadeh of LUMS highlighted a “contemporary South Asian literature as a viable discourse for exploring the repercussions of war”, especially as enacted on bodies and their urban movements. She encouraged a view that “literature, if encouraged as a dialogue process can be used for political potential […] One should not disassociate, as that is where the problem starts. The idea is see how things connect across the board.”

The third panel, ‘Performance, Language, and Politics’, highlighted the cultural logic of South Asian societies. Dr Sean Pue of Michigan State University in the US asked “how literary studies of poetic performance can extend beyond single literary and language communities” in order to break away from a monolingual cultural milieu.

Dr Shirin Zubair of Kinnaird College discussed the images and representations of women in South Asian popular culture. She argued, “In the wake of post-feminism, globalisation, and international development discussions, the imagery and representation of women in South Asian popular culture has significant issues regarding women’s changing social roles and identities. How do women themselves relate to these images?”

The fourth panel, ‘Retheorising South Asia’, brought together two well-known academics, Dr Edward Simpson of SOAS, University of London, and Dr Aasim Sajjad Akhtar of Quaid-e-Azam University.

Both speakers reflected upon the changing contours of the region due to mega infrastructure projects. Dr Simpson asked the important question “how are infrastructural politics changing the shape of the region” in terms of how they shape our subjectivity or how we think of boundaries.

Dr Sajjad argued that recent investments in border regions took the form of a new imperialism that were still purely for strategic reasons. The fifth panel, ‘Religious Movements, State and National Identity’, offered an insightful commentary on the confluences of religion and politics.

Dr Karen Ruffle of University of Toronto presented a paper that called into question hegemonic historical narratives of Shi i origins in the Deccan.

Shedding light on the “central place that material objects had in the formation of Shi ism in Hyderabad, India”, she suggested a more complicated history of the Qutb Shahi dynasty and its relationship to Safavid Iran. Another panel member, Dr Amina Jamal of Ryerson University, Canada, presented a paper on a “feminist subjectivity that is shaped by distinct experiences of gender, nation, secularism and Islam that are unaccounted for in the framework of modern secularising state versus moral community that upholds postcolonial critiques of secular feminism”.

Dr Jamal argued for “a more nuanced understanding of what is at stake when secularism is supported or denounced”. The conference also arranged a roundtable discussion, ‘Future of South Asian Studies and Research’, engaging eminent scholars in the field. The discussion was guided by the key questions, what is South Asian Studies and what role it plays in shaping the intellectual discourse and the allocation of resources to the various inquiries taking place under its rubric?