Is all history a product of Western knowledge?
Professor Ashfaq Sarwar was one of the stalwarts of the star-studded department of English Literature at FC College, Lahore in the late 1980s. At this time the late Prof. Gilani Kamran was the head of the department and such luminaries as Sajjad Haider Malik, Agha Zia ur Rehman, Riaz Hussain, Waseem Anwar and Shahid Imtiaz figured prominently among the teaching staff. Apart from the students of literature, the younger members of the teaching staff benefited a great deal from their erudition and scholarly insights.
Prof. Gilani Kamran was exceptionally kind and generous with his time to young teachers such as myself. Being senior and elderly, the relationship was one of formality and deference. Discussions spanning many hours not only sharpened my quest for learning about ideas and the socio-cultural settings in which they germinated and evolved, but also developed my ability to think critically.
I have to confess that more informal and somewhat polemical discussion used to take place with Sajjad Haider Malik and Ashfaq Sarwar; the latter had immense clarity on such complicated philosophical formulations like existentialism, logical positivism and stream of consciousness. His prowess over literature and cultural studies astounded many, myself included. Nevertheless, he remained an unsung scholar, perhaps because he wrote very little.
Once in the course of discussion Prof. Sarwar, in an unusually reductionist manner, said something that left me absolutely dumbfounded. The twentieth century sensibility, he argued in his deep voice like that of James Masson, manifested itself in the creative formulations of four people -- Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. That list could have been more comprehensive, had he included Max Weber among their ranks. Such reductionist assertions have tremendous appeal for the youngsters till a couple of decades ago. In order to make sense of the modern weltanschauung, Prof. Sarwar continued, one cannot escape critically engaging with these intellectual giants and their theories, as well as with the impact that they had on the epistemic make-up of the 20th century. This was Euro-centrism par excellence.
Coined in the 1980s, Eurocentrism refers to the "notion of European exceptionalism" a worldview centred on Western civilisation. That view was developed during the height of European colonial empires in the third quarter of the 19th century. The epistemic superiority of the West had a lasting impression on the generation of Pakistani scholars that Prof. Sarwar hailed from. Scholars of his ilk, in fact, remained resistant to any narrative countering these deep-seated, adulatory and discursive thoughts and practices. They found works such as Orientalism, White Mythologies, The Colonial Mask or Provincialising Europe quite repugnant to their literary sensibilities.
In later years, after having studied post-colonial theory and particularly the works of Edward Said, the Subaltern Studies school and other historical works laying emphasis on cultural turn, I placed a very strong caveat on the perceived superiority of the theories of these creative ‘giants’. Through unequivocal acquiescence to such figures, howsoever towering they are imagined to be, the complete erasure of the role of the ‘colonised’ in any formulation ought to be considered as epistemic violence, but it is not. It is an oft-cited and accepted truism that modern knowledge has either eliminated local systems of knowledge or it has appropriated and processed them in such a way that they cease to be local anymore. History and folktales in particular have been galvanised so radically to look like the products of western knowledge.
R. C. Temple’s multi-volume book, Legends of the Punjab, is a prime example of such appropriation of indigenous oral texts, to be reproduced and transformed as a written account, amenable to Western sensibilities. Ironically, the English rendering of local tales and legends was subsequently translated into Urdu by Majlis-i-Taraqi-i-Adab, Lahore, under the title Hiqayat-i-Punjab. What is particularly ironic here is that the tales and legends embedded in Punjabi language and cultural ethos were translated in English first and then into Urdu.
Modernist classification techniques were also used in ethnographical surveys, resulting in social atomisation. District gazetteers, for example, are presented by historians and anthropologists as specimens of this method of classification, according primacy to caste, tribe and community, each with their distinctive traits and modes of living.
Extensive projects of history writing were also undertaken, particularly in the 19th century. While doing so, Persian sources were translated and ‘facts’ were marshalled in whatever way suited the writers’ imperial interests. Thus the methods of interpreting historical facts and the typical style of their narration eventually standardised the discourse of history, which not only deracinated plurality in history and culture but also set the tone for Euro-centric ideas and methods to strike firm roots in the subcontinent.
Consequently the whole literate culture created during the 19th century produced a new sensibility, one which had its roots in that extended project of history-writing, most of which was performed by officer-historians. We have already mentioned district gazetteers, which were written every ten years by deputy commissioners. In this scenario, it was not possible for any alternative or contrary discourse to circulate and acquire currency. Those counter-narratives that did surface managed only to exist on the extreme margins of the Euro-centric world spawned by the officer-historians whose writings had unequivocal official support.
By the concluding years of 19th century, and particularly with the onset of Swadeshi Movement in 1905, nationalism became the mainstay of Indian historiography. Jadunath Sarkar’s authoritative accounts on Mughal rule brought in religious identity as the principal determinant of historical sensibility. The same method (of separatism on the basis of religious difference) was employed by Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi a few decades later. Thus classification had its impact by having engendered separatism.
One may argue that with nationalism having found centrality in the writing of history, the Euro-centricity was indigenised, while the alternative narratives managed to survive only at the margins. In India, however, the Subaltern school tried to wean away from the nationalist trend. It tried to bring marginal voices into academic focus. Ruefully, in Pakistan, such initiative is still not in sight. Meta narrative(s) steeped in religious idiom has even vitiated the modernist discourse that Prof. Ashfaq Sarwar stood for.