Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan

Anomalous Visions of History and Form

Wali Ahmadi

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134072767
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Littérature
• Categoría: Critique littéraire

With the unleashing of the "War on Terror" in the aftermath of 9/11, Afghanistan has become prominent in the news. However, we need to appreciate that no substantive understanding of contemporary history, politics and society of this country can be achieved without a thorough analysis of the Afghan encounter with cultural and literary modernity and modernization.

Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan does just that. The book offers a balanced and interdisciplinary analysis of the rich and admirable contemporary poetry and fiction of a land long tormented by wars and invasions. It sets out to demonstrate that, within the trajectory of the union between modern aesthetic imagination and politics, creativity and production, and representation and history, the modernist intervention enabled many contemporary poets and writers of fiction to resist the overt politicization of the literary field, without evading politics or disavowing the modern state.

The interpretative moves and nuanced readings of a series of literary texts make this book a major contribution to a rather neglected area of research and study.

Winner of the Iranian World Prize for Book of the Year in Islamics Studies 2009

1 Beyond “Mist and Pebble”

Ordering the culture of modernity

Now that the canoe of the sky
floats in the stream of blood,
and the broad desert is
the falling place of conviction—
now that beyond our thirsty sight
are only mist and pebble,
you may pause and second guess
—O my fellow traveler—
but I have no desire to remain
in the four corners of the night.

Nawzar Eliās

Dravot’s fall on the edge of Empire

In Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, two European adventurers, open up the kingdom of Kafiristan—“[b]y my reckoning,” as Dravot says, “it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan.” The two British subjects in Kafiristan are drawn into “sweep[ing] the valley so there isn’t a bug in a blanket left!”¹ Their grandiose exploits come to naught as they are ultimately consumed by their own avarice, personal ambition, and, above all, obliviousness to the demands of the “natives.” Even when he is revealed to be “[n]either God nor Devil but a man!” and in spite of Carnehan’s warning that “[t]his business is our Fifty-Seven,” Dravot obdurately proclaims that “[a]n Emperor am I [and] next year I shall be a Knight of the Queen.”² This dream never materializes as he loses his life. His friend is scarred by the misadventure for as long as he lives.

“The Man Who Would Be King” may signify a “complex negotiation between the embedded adventure and the frame [that] exteriorizes cultural and historical conflicts between the desire to colonize, connect, and possess (country and woman) and the warning against such desire, between the glorification of imperial adventure and the cynical debunking of its origins in greed, self-aggrandizement, and childlike games of power.”³ One may also regard the downfall of Dravot and the destruction of Carnehan as the result of their failure to “secure equivalent dominion over an internal landscape” of homophilia and heterosexual desire.⁴ Above all, the story can be read inevitably as a commentary on the intricacies of British colonial designs and imperialist ambitions. As Edward Said remarks in Culture and Imperialism, Kipling in his oeuvres “is writing not just from the dominating viewpoint of a white man in a colonial possession, but from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning, and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature.”⁵ Kipling seems to allude to the danger of “degeneracy” immanent in the “over-extension” of European colonial interventions in certain parts of the world.⁶

What stands out in “The Man Who Would Be King” is not so much what happened to the two British men intriguing in the midst of some “natives” than its inherent allegorization of the British system of “adventures” in the volatile region between Central and South Asia, between Turkistan and Hindustan. The fall of Dravot, then, may signify less the collapse of the imperial (dis)order than the necessity of a sensible, methodic approach to the moral mapping of the colonial “sweep.” As an essentially Orientalist representation of “the other,” “The Man Who Would Be King” attributes such traits to the “Kafirs” that were largely reserved for the “Afghans” in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British imagination.⁷ What needs to be emphasized is that effective colonial management of the “rebellious” and “disorderly” Afghanistan—as Kipling’s Kafiristan—would require the re-determination and re-imposition of British power based on calculated imperial strategizing and not on crafty adventures or slapdash schemes.

Indeed, what proved to be quite significant in the course of the Afghan encounter with modernity is the fact that, in the classic age of European imperial ventures, Afghanistan evaded the experience of direct colonial rule. This is not to say that it remained immune from the global contests of power and domination. The historical specificity of the Afghan situation vis-à-vis European encroachment led to its emergence as a peculiar “buffer” state situated on the periphery of the “jewel of the [British] Empire” (India) as well as the principal pawn in the Anglo-Russian “Great Game” in the region. Twice during the course of the nineteenth century (1839–42 and 1879–80 respectively) the Afghans resisted the juggernaut of British military might. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, as the British opted to “orientalize” their policies especially in the aftermath of the “business” of “Fifty-Seven”—a reference to the Indian “Sepoy” revolt of 1857—they perceived that the most orderly and convenient way to exercise their power over “the land of the Afghans” was not through its direct annexation but rather through advancing an intricate policy of “indigenization” of colonial dominance.⁸ Considering the Orient as “either a motley collection of local, ascriptive communities or as a form of generalized slavery controlled by despots,” the imperial system of rule would effectively resort to the discourse of Orientalism with its “ontological essences and vast generalizations about [other] civilizations.”⁹ To the British imperialists, in the “Oriental” world of Afghanistan, which “supposedly lack[ed] the sense of history, vitality, organization, or altruism needed to construct genuine national communities,”¹⁰ the construction of a national-territorial order would require, above all, the establishment of an indigenous “despotic” authority. Precisely as part of this political objective, the British actively assisted the assumption to power in Kabul, in 1880, of the “Iron Amīr” ‘Abd al-Rahmān. The Amīr was given complete autonomy in internal affairs so long as he “consigned his foreign policy to British tutelage and agreed to conduct diplomatic relations with them only.”¹¹ The authoritarian reign of the “Iron Amīr” became paradigmatic of state oppressive rule in Afghanistan. The impact of such rule far exceeded the arena of politics and shaped a discursive practice that, during most of the twentieth century, substantially encroached upon the domain of cultural production. It is within this intrinsically political-cultural framework that notions of social commitment and aesthetic purposiveness in modern literature of Afghan should be configured.

Amīr ‛Abd al-Rahmān’s despotism transformed the traditional kingdom of Afghanistan into “a new species of state,” a modern institution principally concerned with disciplining “subjects.”¹² Describing his chief task as putting “in order all those hundreds of petty thieves, plunderers, robbers, and cut-throats [and] breaking down the feudal and tribal system and substituting one grand community under one law and one rule,”¹³ ‛Abd al-Rahmān concentrated, almost exclusively, on the use of pure violence to effectively subdue contending and competing forces that could potentially challenge his authority. “His desire,” as the anthropologist David Edwards writes, “was to see gratitude reflected in the eyes of his subjects, and if it was not forthcoming, then he would at least see fear. The desire to have his authority confirmed in the expression and posture of those he ruled led him to exercise ever greater increments of force.”¹⁴ Relying on sizeable subsidies as well as on substantial supplies of arms from the British authorities in India, the Amīr was able to build a “horrific, oppressive, yet powerful and evil” state apparatus intent on quashing internal dissent and, if deemed necessary, “relieving whenever he willed the shoulders of those who resisted his rule from the ‘burdensome’ weight of their heads.”¹⁵ Thus, Afghanistan, a land that had long been the focal point of several civilizations, entered the twentieth century a territorially unified but socio-economically backward, remote, isolated country, with traumatized, disoriented, and culturally insulated inhabitants. Yet, as the rest of this chapter attempts to demonstrate, paradoxically, the early decades of the twentieth century also marked the introduction and reception of the ethos of modernity—in all its intricacies, ambiguities, and antinomies—in Afghanistan.

Remapping knowledges of modernity

In the specific context of Afghanistan, the introduction, dissemination, and reception of modernity coincided with the imposition of the nation-state as the paradigmatic and ubiquitous form of political authority and the emergence of a sense of Afghan collective identity. In fact, as some scholars have pointed out, the constitution of modernity outside Europe has been charted primarily in conjunction with the development of nationalism and the institution of the nation-state formation as “the predominant, and soon almost the only legitimate form of political organization, as well as the dominant vehicle of collective identity.”¹⁶ Yet, in Postcolonialism, which is intended as a standard text on the subject of post-colonial studies, Robert J.C. Young contends that nationalism in Afghanistan was part of the category of “some forms of anti-colonial nationalism … which were expressed as antimodernist, anti-secular, cultural and religious revivals.”¹⁷ Nevertheless, while the historical nature of Afghan modernity was not unaffected by the exceptional historical nature of the Afghan encounter with the colonial order and imperial hegemony, Postcolonialism’s contentions that “Afghanistan was nationalist without ever being reformist or ‘progressive’,” and that Afghan conditions reflected a “radical nationalism derived from tradition and opposed to modernity,”¹⁸ fall into the category of studies that, in dealing with the issue of modernity in non-Western societies, often draw from facile generalizations and schematic simplifications that insist on the dichotomous relations between such abstractions as innovation and tradition, or progress and reaction, often pointing to their irreconcilability and necessarily, if implicitly, privileging one over the other.¹⁹

In fact, the historical context of Afghan nationalism in the era of modernity signifies that early twentieth-century proponents of modernity were predominantly neither “anti-modernist” nor even “anti-secular,” and they largely refused to articulate an overtly anti- or counter-modern(ist) discourse of “authenticity.” This can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that even though the process of Western penetration in Afghanistan was deeply bound to colonial designs and imperial cartographies, the experience of modernity was not a direct reflection of the colonial-imperial enterprise. Therefore, with the relative absence of explicit colonial mediation, a colonially-determined social consciousness, derived from the dichotomy of a West—with its “civilizing” mission, and an East—that needed to be “civilized” or modernized, was not formulated in the modern history of Afghanistan, although Afghan intellectuals of the early twentieth century were critical of European colonial encroachments in the rest of the world and felt sympathetic towards colonies that were being “swallowed up” by various European powers.

Given the context of the introduction of modernity in non-Western regions of the globe, nearly all modern “Third-World” or “post-colonial” responses to Western domination and imperial rule have been summarily categorized as taking place within one (or more) of the following paradigms: an uncritical embrace of modernity as a Western model designed to completely supplant and reshape the local cultures and traditions; a shift to a liberationist, emancipatory ideology that critiques imperial domination and justifies struggles for national sovereignty but still fundamentally adheres to the project of modernity and its universality; and/or a turn towards an “authenticist” discourse on the part of the local indigenous intelligentsia, a form of “reverse-orientalism.”²⁰ But the reception and diffusion of modernity can be manifestly variegated and heterogeneous. Modernity, by its very essence, cannot constitute a consistent and coherent totality—neither in its original form of germination in Europe nor in its subsequent, implanted forms elsewhere in the “Third-World.” It is within the purview of this dynamic inconstancy and flux that one can discover how the cultural dialectic of modernity works itself out. In elaborating “alternative modernities” Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar introduces the idea of “creative adaptation,” which he astutely considers to be a distinctive reflection of the “manifold ways in which a people question the present.” “[Creative adaptation] is the site where people ‘make’ themselves modern, as opposed to being ‘made’ modern by alien and impersonal forces, and where they give themselves an identity and a destiny.”²¹ The writings of Afghan intellectuals of the early twentieth century, primarily in the pages of the journal Sirāj al-Akhbār (1911–1918), show that the way these intellectuals questioned and complicated the past heritage, explored alternative routes to cultural change, and positioned themselves as vanguards of modernity and modernization, was not along the exclusive lines of either assuming or rejecting a modern identity. It consisted, to a large extent, of “creative adaptations” within a “site-specific” context.²²

When Amīr ‘Abd al-Rahmān’s son Amīr Habīb Allāh assumed power in 1901, his principle objective was still, not unlike his father’s, “an Afghan monarchy absolute in its authority.”²³ Nonetheless, he allowed some degree of reforms to be broadly implemented. It was during this period that Habībiyah College, the first modern educational institution in the country, was inaugurated. Concomitant with this development, the versatile intellectual Mahmūd Tarzī (1866–1935)—who had returned to Afghanistan after nearly two decades of life in exile in the Ottoman territory—and his associates launched the bi-weekly journal Sirāj al-Akhbār.²⁴ Nowhere was a distinctive trajectory of Afghan modernity, with particular emphasis on the nature and structure of modernity and its mode and fashion of reception, more cogently epitomized than in the pages of Sirāj al-Akhbār. The lasting legacy of this pioneering journal was that it charted the intellectual framework of the subject of modernity and the modern subject throughout the course of twentieth-century Afghanistan.

Tradition and its dynamics

Not unlike some of their contemporaries elsewhere in the Muslim world who also encountered the challenge of Western colonial and imperial designs,²⁵ Afghan intellectuals, as part of their broadly defined “adaptation” of modernity, configured their task to be precisely “a constellation of practices used to subvert the center-periphery model by showing the provisionality and instability at the heart of both positions.”²⁶ These intellectuals did not mount a discourse of wholesale imitation of the West and hardly saw modernization as an inexorable process of social transformation ending in direct importation and far-reaching reproduction of Western paradigms. They believed, rather paradoxically, that tradition and change could, and indeed do, coexist and effectively work together.²⁷ Afghan modernity, in the process of its own self-legitimation, maintained a resilient and supple ambivalence towards tradition. At times, it sought to negate and repudiate past traditions; often times, it...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the conundrum of modernity
• 1 Beyond “Mist and Pebble”: ordering the culture of modernity
• 2 The poetics of (national) truth content
• 3 Perilous ends of history: the rhetoric of commitment and the poetics of nationalism
• 4 Literature of Commandement and the crisis of commitment
• 5 De-centering dissent
• Epilogue: contending with history
• Notes
• Bibliography