The Building of Colonial Knowledge and Its Aftermath
British Representation of Sehwan as a Metaphor
The painter, Lieutenant William Edwards, selected an infrequent view of Sehwan in order to draw what he called Entrance to the Town of Schewan, on the Side of Lal Shahbazâs Tomb, which was published in a book in 1846. The drawing was completed soon after the conquest of Sindh by General Napier and the British army. The hand-colored lithograph is dominated by the color brown, which can reflect the dominant light or the mud with which most of the houses were built, or even a British representation of Sindh. As suggested by the title, it is Sehwan seen âon the side of Lal Shahbaz Qalandarâs tomb.â But contrary to what Edwards claims, the entrance of Sehwan was not located at the main door of the shrine, as we can see in another British officerâs mapâthat of Henry F. Ainslee, drawn in 1852. The most amazing aspect of Edwardsâ painting is how he decided to represent his subject, the town of Sehwan.
Contrary to all of the following colonial representations, be they paintings, drawings, or photographs, the mausoleum where Lal Shahbaz Qalandar is supposed to be buried is not the core of the representation. For Edwards, the mausoleum was not the embodiment of the town of Sehwan. While in the mid-nineteenth century the mausoleum was considered to be the spiritual center of the town, and the most attractive building in the Kalhora architectural style,1 Edwards represented it only as a marginal element of the painting, it being reduced to the extreme right. But while it is located at the extreme right of the painting, the somewhat vertiginous perspective of the wall as given by Edwards provides a kind of threatening shadow coming from the mausoleum, as reinforced further still by its impressive size. The characters look very small in comparison with the wall, whose size has probably been exaggerated.
The other buildings still exist, so it is very easy to acknowledge the view. The main building is presently known as Bura Badl Sher Kafi, a Sufi lodge belonging to a younger branch of the Sabzwari Sayyids, one of the two most powerful Sufi groups in Sehwan. This building was given a main space in the painting, allowing the painter to show the delicate floral decoration. On the left side, after this building, one can presume there is a narrow lane which stands in the shadow, meaning that the drawing was completed at sunset. The last building on the second plan is maybe the one that has been through the most changes, especially as there are tombs which cannot be seen now. At the extreme left, one can see the basis of the qadim alam (the old standard), namely the alam of Ghazi Abbas, the half-brother of Imam Husayn.2 It is still a primary spot in the pilgrimage itinerary when driving to the mausoleum. Notwithstanding, the construction of the painting is arranged to make viewers focus on the people who are represented at the bottom, despite the fact that they look small and thus vulnerable in comparison with the wall of the mausoleum.
Although they occupy a restricted space in the whole iconographical construction, they appear to embody the final aim and meaning of the painting. There are 21 persons. They are all standing near the entrance of the shrine. Eleven among them are indigenous, some being half-naked or wearing different types of turbans. Ten characters are soldiersâapparently Sindhi soldiers as they were represented in the Talpur army. Six soldiers have guns in their hands, most of these individuals being settled close to the entrance of the shrine, as if they are taking care of it. Only the soldiers are standing, while all other characters are sitting on the ground. Nonetheless, they do not look to be ready for war, and a kind of feeling of ease is expressed through how they behave according to their representations. The last character is settled close to the alam, sitting with crossed legs on a carpet with a loincloth around the hips. Careful examination of the painting makes the viewer wonder if, finally, this character is not the intended focal point of the painting. As a matter of fact, most of the other characters are looking at him, while he himself looks at the painting. Edwardsâ representation of the character matches the archetypal figure of the jogi , or yogi, the Indian renunciant.
Edwardsâ painting works as a kind of metaphor for how the British represented Sindh, the society and also the religiosity, as well as Sufism, understood in its broader meaning. The town of Sehwan is restricted to an uncommon representation, not focusing on its most famous monuments, such as Lal Shahbaz Qalandarâs mausoleum, or it could have been Alexanderâs Fort.3 The lieutenant of the East Indian Company is not interested in what the British will later on name as antiquities. For somebody who does not know Sehwan, it is quite impossible to understand what has been drawn. The mausoleum is cut and represented from an insensate perspective, the alam is not itself painted, and the other buildings, although with pretty arabesque decorations, look like common dwellings with no special purpose.
The attention of the viewer is consequently turned toward the characters, and the ones he must remark on firstly are the soldiers with their Talpur uniforms and their long guns. Only after a while does the viewer observe that they mostly turn their faces toward another character, the jogi , with the exception of one character, a soldier who, according to the black color of his skin, should be a Shidi.4 Like the jogi , he is looking at the painter. The jogi could also be named a qalandar , since in Sindhi Sufi poetry the two figures are hardly distinguished.
However, three years after the conquest of Sindh, it is hardly surprising that a British officer, William Edwards, while supposed to be drawing a painting of a town known for its antiquity, would be obsessed by the army. He totally neglected the mausoleum, although he was obviously posted very nearby to complete his painting. For him, it was a non-subject, probably related to an irrational religiosity, which would be named, after Richard Burton, Sufism. Nonetheless, the painting is discreetly arranged to drive the viewer toward an archetypal figure, the jogi , who, in mid-nineteenth-century India, was the incarnation of the most exotic representation of the Indian religion. In the end, Edwardsâ painting accumulated both the fascination and the non-genuine interest that the British of that time would have for Indian religiosity.
In 1841, two years before the conquest, another British officer, Sir Keith Jackson, published a book of drawings in which he included the drawing of Alexanderâs Fort in Sehwan Sharif, completed in 1838, as an impressive wall of rocks. In the same book, he also presented a drawing of the mausoleum of Khwaja Khizr, located in the north of Sindh on an island of the Indus River (Jackson 1842: plate 12). Before the conquest, the British had another representation of Sehwan focusing on the main antiquity of the town, which was a symbol of strength and power, and of Sufism. As a matter of fact, Khwaja Khizrâs mausoleum was drawn with a quite romantic perspective, as a majestic and well-balanced building centered on a huge iwan,5 with many magnificent domes in turquoise and decorations of beautiful palm trees.
In the late 2000s, I was doing fieldwork in Sehwan Sharif and used to meet a young local Sayyid whose lineage, going back to the Sabzwaris, was that of one of the two Sayyid families who had been in charge of Lal Shahbazâs mausoleum before it came under government control in 1960. His father, Hasan Ali Shah, was running a local Sufi lodge known as a kafi in Sehwan, the Kat Dhani Kafi, and they were staunch Twelver Shias. For the time of Moharram, Ghazanfar Ali Shah was spending time with his brothers to prepare and decorate the family tazia, the miniature shrine of Imam Husayn at Karbala, which they were to parade during nocturnal processions. While we were talking about his ancestors, the young man told me he had a picture of one of his most important ancestors, one Bura Badl Sher. He entered another room and came back with a painting: It was Jacksonâs painting, and the jogi /qalandar was, according to him, his ancestor.
The Debate Over Colonization and Vernacular Knowledge
About 20 years ago, an intense debate emerged about the production of knowledge in the colonial context, in the wake of the groundbreaking study published by Edward Said in 1978. As summarized by Philip Wagoner, there were two positions regarding the role played by the colonized in the production of colonial knowledge. The first position, which Wagoner refers to as post-colonialist, claims that the colonized played a negligible role, if any, in the production of colonial knowledge. The Europeans imported their forms of knowledge, which they had built in Europe. The categories of European knowledge were instrumental in the submission of the colonized, beyond the military conquest of the territories. In the process, the importation of colonial knowledge produced an âepistemic disjuncture.â Wagoner explains that, according to the post-colonialist assumption, âThere can be no significant continuities across the great rift generated by colonial knowledge for all the indigenous forms of knowledge and bodies of cultural practices are effectively superceded and displaced through the imposition of new, imported epistemesâ (Wagoner 2003: 784).
The second position wishes to go beyond the Foucauldian cleavage of continuity and rupture. It accepts that colonial knowledge played a fundamental role in the process of colonization, but claims that its making happened with the collaboration of active indigenous partners. Thus, this position challenges the assumption of post-colonial theory, as well as the subaltern one. Wagoner states that if there was a process of intellectual dialogue or conversation, âOne would expect to find the impress of indigenous conceptual categories and even forms of thought on the final form and content of the resultant knowledgeâ (Wagoner 2003: 785). My own intention is different. I am not primarily interested in the building of colonial knowledge as such. In this respect, I am of the opinion that colonial knowledge was obviously a powerful means for domination in South Asia and that some indigenous collaborationists played an active role in the making of colonial knowledge in a process Wagoner refers to as dialogue or conversation.
In this study, I aim at decentering the debate from the production of colonial knowledge to that of vernacular knowledge. Briefly put, I argue that the colonizers incidentally started a process of making a vernacular knowledge focusing on what I shall call Sufism, this being a first phase that was shifted to a second phase by the indigenous intellectuals. The analysis of these complex processes will be rooted in a case study of colonial Sindh. Incidentally, I have used the word âSufismâ because there is much evidence that, for the British, Sufism was not a subject of interest per se, and moreover, in the context of colonial domination. They gave Sufism a unique role, but this was never their plan when they selected a Sufi work of poetry, the Shah jo Risalo authored by Shah Abd al-Latif (1689â1752), as a kind of textbook for the British officers to use in learning Sindhi for the purpose of their immediate administrative business.
Furthermore, Sufism has long attracted the interest of scholars. As an academic topic, one can claim that, to some extent, the history of the study of Sufism follows the development of Orientalist knowledge. Interestingly, one of the found...