Partitions and Palimpsests

Partitions and Palimpsests: Transgressions of Form and Territory in Postcolonial Urdu and Arabic Writing

Dissertation Abstract

Partitions and Palimpsests compares the literary and cultural legacies of partition-based colonial politics in Asia. It develops a palimpsestic mode of comparatively reading postcolonial literature from India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Palestine by analyzing generically layered and dissonant texts as a response to partition, occupation, and exile. Despite the many parallels between the partition of South Asia in 1947 and of Palestine in 1948, including historical simultaneity and the role of British colonial policies, these events and literary responses to them have not been studied together. To bridge this lacuna, I read Urdu and Arabic postcolonial writing within a south-south comparative framework. I argue that in response to the limiting frameworks of colonial and nationalist politics and historiographies, postcolonial writers and poets in Urdu and Arabic have fashioned texts that are layered with precolonial genres. The use of these precolonial genres and narrative modes allows them to transcend territorially-bound concepts such as the nation by invoking a long history of literary and cultural exchange across an Afro-Asian landscape. My readings excavate these submerged histories of contact across Asia and Africa and look for ways in which this deep history impinges on and frames postcolonial literary imagination.

The dissertation unfolds in two parts. The first part, situated geographically in South Asia, explores literary responses to the partitions of 1947 (India and Pakistan) and 1971 (Pakistan and Bangladesh) and the attendant processes of exclusive nationalisms and linguistic minoritization. In the second half of the dissertation, I develop comparative readings with contemporary Arabic literature as it contends with the vicissitudes of Arab nationalism in relation to the question of Palestinian independence and the promise of south-south solidarities.

In the first chapter, I analyze the narrative prose of Intizar Husain as it responds to the enduring challenge and absurdity of defining a national literature in Pakistan (after 1947) sequestered from Indian literature and history. My reading of Husain’s novellas, novels, and shorter fiction outlines the palimpsestic mode of his writing in which traces of various precolonial genres and literary traditions such as the shahr ashob (Indo-Persian lament poetry), dastan-goi (oral romances), the Jatakas (Buddhist tales), and the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (Sanskritic epic) are registered. Through his sedimented poetics, Husain challenges both nationalist as well as European literary histories and writes against the amnesias engineered by colonial modernity which posit the vernacular novel as a European inheritance. Against readings of Husain’s work as romanticized nostalgia, I argue that the allure of a pre-Partition past in his fiction represents a constant refusal to be circumscribed by nationalist memory-making.

The second chapter continues this investigation of post-1947 Urdu literature as it invokes earlier histories and literatures by examining the work of Qurratulain Hyder through the context of linguistic minoritization and communal politics in post-Partition India. Hyder’s 1959 magnum opus, Aag ka Darya, casts a longue durée historical arc in which characters recur through a 2500-year old political history of the South Asian subcontinent. Her 1999 self-translation (“transcreation”) alters the plot, magnifying the colonial period to, as I demonstrate, reassess religious and linguistic identity formations. In this chapter, I argue for the reading of her “transcreation” against the context of its publication – communal strife in India in the 1990s culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the multi-city riots that followed and show how the fault lines of the postcolonial nationhood and secularism are exposed and undone through this “incomplete” translation.

The third chapter moves the geographical and temporal focus of the dissertation to Beirut in the late 1970s and early 1980s where Pakistani and Palestinian writers in exile negotiated the exigencies of national liberation and socialist internationalism. Turning to the archives of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, focusing specifically on their trilingual publication, Lotus: Journal of Afro-Asian Writing (1967-1991), I consider the decolonial project of inaugurating a modern and revolutionary Afro-Asian literature in the post-Bandung, post-Tashkent era as it centered on Palestinian nationhood. Finally, I look at Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s tenure as the editor of Lotus in Beirut (1979-82) and the corpus of his poetry on the Palestinian question to think through the poetics of solidarity in decolonial movements.

The final chapter returns to the later works of Intizar Husain and frames them through readings of the later works of Egyptian author, Naguib Mahfouz which moved away from realism to formal experimentation. I query this writing through Mahfouz’s changing relationship with Nasserite nationalism and the partition of Palestine vis-à-vis the longer trajectory of Arab nationalism. I demonstrate how the two authors draw on a shared literary economy of the Thousand and One Nights, Kalila wa Dimna, and precolonial travel writing to fashion modern texts that respond to enduring crises of territorial sovereignty in postcolonial nations.

In the conclusion, I examine Agha Shahid Ali’s English ghazals on Kashmir in terms of the crisis of territorial sovereignty and the poetic genealogy that he draws from Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mahmoud Darwish. If the first two chapters examine territorial crises in the post-Partition nation, by turning to Kashmir, the conclusion thinks through the deterritorialization engendered by that very nation. Through a triangulated reading of the three poets, whose poetry meditates on occupation through an exilic positionality, I ruminate on militarization and occupation as they are currently unfolding in the two regions and the relationship between political commitment and the lyric.