IN his recent book Savage Harvest, Carl Hoffman retraces the steps of a long unsolved murder mystery involving an American man who went searching for ‘primitive art’ in the remote islands of Papua New Guinea.

The man was not just any man; Michael Rockefeller was the son of one of the richest men in the United States. He would never return from that trip, the purpose of which was to make contact with and possibly collect artefacts from the Asmat, one of the world’s most remote, untouched tribal regions. There was something else notable about the people he was going to see: they were cannibals.

This central fact of the Guinean tribes and the American man’s disappearance — the fact that he could not only have been killed by the tribes, but also eaten — drives the narrative of the book. It is also perhaps why the story still garners attention so many years after March 1961, when Michael Rockefeller disappeared.

Revivalist movements in Pakistan focus on a primitive aspect that may never have existed.

Collisions of cultures, taking place as that one did on the cusp of the end of colonialism, tell stories about either side. Among other reasons, Michael Rockefeller wanted to access this remote place was because it was untouched by civilisation, and was by definition of its isolated nature, pure, pristine, a more honest version of life than the one touched by modernity.

The trope of imagining non-Western cultures as primitive and being fixated on their ‘savage’ aspects was a mainstay of colonialism. After all, the existences of practices such as cannibalism (however prevalent they may or may not have been) allowed the arriving Westerners to justify their own existence within these lands and promoted the rationalisation that invasions were altruistic.

In New Guinea, the colonists were the Dutch, and, unbeknownst to Michael Rockefeller, they had conducted a few lethal raids of their own, felled tribesmen in confrontations beset with misunderstandings and miscommunications. The lime powder that the men threw into the air was thought to be gunpowder, and the resulting showers of bullets killed many who were actually only armed with bows and arrows.

Such misunderstandings and reductions of colonialism are, of course, well known in South Asia, where the British imagined natives to be similarly gullible, childlike, somehow less complicated than themselves. Again, the aspects of the culture that were most starkly different from their own were highlighted, so that the arrival of the colonists — their greed for resources — could be packaged as a blessing.

Since the historical record of the time was largely created by the colonists themselves, it is this picture — the noble colonist educating the savage native — which remains embedded in the world’s imagination as the image of Western intervention.

In the decades since the colonists breathed their last, post-colonial theorists have railed against the distortions that such skewed and self-serving records have imposed on our understanding of the present. Like many other post-colonial nations, Pakistan is a hodgepodge of what was before, what existed during colonialism, and what remains now, over half a century after the British made their exit.

Like so many other post-colonial nations, particularly Muslim ones, there is a beguiling fascination with the past, the romance with its imagined purity. As the generation of Pakistanis who are now young will know well, the location of glory is not what we will achieve, but what we once achieved. Under this novel definition of progress, a return to the truth requires a regression, and a turning away from the future.

The irony in this present predicament is its untenable likeness to the same colonial caricatures that boxed colonised natives into either cartoons or savages. Dominated by these definitions, revivalist movements in Pakistan, preaching a return to a purer era, place almost exclusive emphasis on an embrace of primitive aspects that may never have actually existed prior to colonialism.

In this sense, they seek not to revive pre-colonial institutions that showed that the past of colonised peoples (apart from the Western lens put upon it) was actually just as complicated, rich in context and culture, and meaningful in multiple dimensions as Western society itself.

In keeping with the colonial oversimplification of the native, the contemporary religious revivalist wants to put energy not in reviving the many examples of Mughal cosmopolitanism, or the vast and complicated jurisprudential rules of the Ottoman courts. The art of miniature painting or oral storytelling has languished into near oblivion, replaced by bonfires of books, intellectual apathy, and an absolute intolerance for dissent.

In its stead, the crude caricatures of Pakistan’s current revivalisms — that centre on dress codes, or the ethics of male facial hair, or the length of trousers — imagine the pre-colonial past through exactly the stereotypes that colonial intruders applied upon their arrival. A varied legal system, with multiple schools and doctrinal flexibility, replaced by poorly drafted statues roughly imposed, the reduction of justice to visible hackings, the sudden disappearance of women.

This recreation of the past imposes the primitive on what never was primitive in the first place, and creates yet a new layer of misunderstanding and misinterpretation on one that was first imposed by Western colonists. In this definition of progress as a deliberate embrace of the visible primitive lies the particular pain of the present, the murder first conducted by colonialism now enacted a second time by those who believe going back is somehow going forward.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2014