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July 14, 2005
Profile – Ayesha Jalal; Setting the record straight
Ayesha Jalal, the historian, researcher, teacher and writer, says she found direction through Manto. “‘Toba Tek Singh’ planted questions in my head. At Wellesley I was double majoring in political science and history but I chose to work in history as the discipline was best equipped to help me answer questions.” Dr Jalal speaks to Shazia Hasan
As a child listening to the story of a group of mental asylum inmates trying to figure out partition, Ayesha Jalal thought it very funny. She doesn’t consider the phrase from Toba Tek Singh as senseless today as she did then: “Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyan o mung di daal of di lalteen,” still easily rolls off her tongue. We laugh at the absurdity of it.
“I knew this as a child. I was born after Uncle Manto died, but I grew up with his stories. Iqbal, his only sister and my dadijan, also used to tell me some of the most fantastic stories when I was young. She had such an excellent way of narration. The detail and the beauty of the stories had me transfixed,” she said during a recent visit to Karachi.
Ayesha Jalal, the historian, researcher, teacher and writer, says she found direction through Manto. Toba Tek Singh planted questions in my head. At Wellesley I was double majoring in political science and history. I chose to work in history as the discipline was best equipped to help me answer those questions.”
They were all sorts of questions about the subcontinent. “Why was India partitioned? What were the reasons for the creation of Pakistan?” And in 1985 the answers to these questions became her first book, The Sole Spokesman. “Then I wanted to know why the military was dominant in Pakistan so I studied that in terms of the creation of the state, the initial years of Pakistan which became The State of Martial Rule: the Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence. Then I did Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: a Comparative and Historical Perspective.
The book is about how Pakistan is different from India. The question behind this book was why two states that emerged from a united India took to such different political developments — one becoming a formal democracy and the other a military authoritarian state.
“In Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850, I have looked at the Muslim identity which also has its own set of questions: what it meant to be a Muslim and how the issue of identity for Muslims was debated, constructed, written about in over a hundred years, roughly from 1857 onwards. It was a study of things that changed as the debate shifted,” says Dr Jalal.
But the book that has her entire focus right now is The Meaning of Jihad in South Asia. “It is actually a historical study which traces the concept of jihad through the 18th and early 19th centuries. It will be a full-fledged monograph.”
Some have misinterpreted Dr Jalal as saying that Mr Jinnah never wanted a separate Muslim state. “I think that’s a complete distortion of what I had said. I had said that there was a demand for Pakistan but the Pakistan which emerged in 1947 had been dismissed by Mr Jinnah as a ‘mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan’.”
She had contemplating this book much before 9/11. “The questions I had about the meaning of jihad really came out of my own work, Self and Sovereignty. You just say that so and so is a Hindu and so and so is a Sikh, so and so is a Parsi but it doesn’t tell you what their faith is, does it? So I talked about the need to make that distinction. But after that book I felt that I had spent a lot of time focusing on the differences in religions rather than looking at what religion as a faith meant. The concept of jihad was crucial to understanding the issue of faith or imaan.”
About her other writing projects she talks of the one that brought her to Karachi. “I am doing a reference book The Oxford Companion to Pakistani History.” In between she is also writing three books: a short book on Mr Jinnah, a reader for modern South Asia, and a history of Pakistan. “So,” she says, “it is lots of things but my main project for next year is the jihad book.”Books of course do not take Dr Jalal’s entire time. “Everyone knows that I love cricket.” She smiles when asked if it is an inherited trait from her father Hamid Jalal. “He was in the information ministry but I also remember him as the manager of the team which had gone to East Africa under the captaincy of Hafeez Kardar whom I used to call Kardar Uncle. When he returned I remember he had a red leather bag in which there were little bats and tour photos. I found a book by Don Bradman on cricket in that bag. I read it and I was fascinated by cricket. I even watch it in America, a country which has no interest in the sport. I have a satellite dish just for this purpose.”
And besides all this she also has “teaching and administrative work. And there are also professional demands which mean that you have to review other manuscripts for publication. You have to supervise graduate students. It is a very demanding profession because unlike those who do nine to five, one works all the time. It is true that academics get summers off but that’s when your own work supposedly begins. It is a never ending job. And this is obviously because one enjoys it.”
The question of how one enjoys a dry subject such as history brings on a frown. “That’s only a perception that has been nurtured in Pakistan, I think, because of the way history has been taught here. History for me is not a series of dates or names. History is about analytical concepts. The way I teach history to my students is different. One has to understand themes and issues.”
Dr Jalal’s views have overturned previously held assumptions. But trying to change people’s thinking has its repercussions. There have been misunderstandings. She has been labelled as a controversial historian by some. “It depends who’s calling me that. What does controversial mean?” The analytical mind takes over: “Does that mean that one is less grounded in history and historical methodology or does it mean that one is simply causing some difficulties to those who are too firmly entrenched and ingrained in certain ways of thinking? I have made people question and if that means controversial then I think it is fun.”
Some have misinterpreted Dr Jalal as saying that Mr Jinnah never wanted a separate Muslim state. “I think that’s a complete distortion of what I had said. I had said that there was a demand for Pakistan but the Pakistan which emerged in 1947 had been dismissed by Mr Jinnah as a ‘mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan’.
“The error is to assume that the Pakistan which emerged in 1947 is precisely the Pakistan that was wanted. I tried to investigate how the demand for Pakistan evolves and in that context you have to take account of the aspirations of Muslims in regions where they were in a majority as in Punjab and Bengal and regions in which they were in a minority as in the UP or central provinces.
“It becomes evident that because Muslims could never occupy a coherent, clearly demarcated geographical territory, in any creation of a Pakistan based on the Muslim majority areas there would be almost as many Muslims outside Pakistan as there would be Muslims within.”
She explains: “To say that Mr Jinnah who raised the demand on behalf of all Indian Muslims only wanted exactly the Pakistan that emerged, not only defies history because there are problems in that argument but assumes that he had no concern whatsoever for Muslims in his own constituency. He himself was from Mumbai, a minority province for Muslims. Many of the strongest supporters of Pakistan were from the minority provinces.”
Clearing the misconception, she adds: “Mr Jinnah accepted the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan in which the British offered a three-tiered power sharing arrangement where there would be a federal centre, a group of provinces and just provinces at the bottom. It was the Congress who did not wish to weaken the centre and share power with the Muslim League and because Mr Jinnah needed the Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal undivided — because if there would be non-Muslims there, the Congress would have reason to negotiate — the Congress simply divided those provinces. In that sense he got a weakened Pakistan. Congress also accepted partition on the condition that Mr Jinnah would cease to make demands on behalf of Muslims and the rest of India.”
When asked if she thought Jinnah wanted a secular state, she says: “Mr Jinnah envisaged a liberal, democratic and progressive Pakistan. If by a theocracy we mean the rule of mullahs then there is no question that Mr Jinnah was opposed to that. The meaning of secularism has been distorted. I don’t see Islam and secularism as opposites necessarily. I mean you could have wanted a Muslim state but one that was not necessarily discriminatory towards other citizens simply on account of their different religion.”
She gives the example of India. “India is a state whose majority population is Hindu but it is not a Hindu state, and even though there are elements as we know that wish to turn it into a Hindu state, India likes to define itself as secular on the grounds that it does not discriminate against any community on account of their religion. So I think in that context Mr Jinnah was talking a similar language.”
Dr Jalal has taught at various prestigious colleges. “I have been at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I’ve been at Columbia and now I am at Tufts. My first job in America was in the political science department at the University of Wisconsin but while the department and university were very good, I was not very comfortable in Madison. I am basically an East Coast person. I lived in New York as a teenager so I am more comfortable in the East Coast and the weather in Wisconsin is really harsh for me so I took up a two-year fellowship at Harvard, taught at Tufts for one year, then I got a position at Columbia.”
In 1995, she was denied tenure at Columbia. There were various political reasons behind the decision. “I was supported by my department wholeheartedly but of course there were these other factions with a particular variant of Indian ideology that thought that I would be a threat. So I left Columbia, went to Harvard for a year and then I got a tenure position at Tufts.” Currently she is professor of history at Tufts. “Jobs were few in my time because Americans were then focused on Europe or China but now there is a bonanza of jobs in South Asian history.”
As a teacher Dr Jalal teaches her students the methods of history and it is up to them to use those methods to come to their own conclusions. “History is written from different perspectives and one presents those perspectives and explains to them that these are also factual evidence. It is not to recreate the past but to learn from the mistakes of the past.”
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