NAUMAN NAQVI: A secret South Asian meta-utopia
'There are events in the past when the catastrophe that is to come has already come to pass, indeed when that coming catastrophe has never ceased coming to pass. One such event is the ‘Partition’ of South Asia – that is, the moment of our ‘freedom’, our entry into modern political subjectivity, our entry into modern, historical life, pure and simple..'
Hum maslehat-e-vaqt ke munkir nahin Akbar
Lekin ye samajh lo ke vafa bhi hai koi chiz
(We do not deny the need to compromise with the times, Akbar / But do understand that faithfulness, too, is something) – Akbar Illahabadi
‘…an impossible longing for an immemorial loss…’ – Derrida
‘This story continues to be written during travels through a country from which I’m away.’ – Michel de Certeau
OUR nostalgist, Intizar Husain, is a remarkably repetitive writer. A small set of themes, tropes, tricks, even expressions and phrases, are the motus animi continuus of his prolific oeuvre. The repeated locutions are marked by their colloquiality: ‘khave se khava chilta tha’ (‘shoulder rubbed against shoulder’), which he often uses to signify the lively sociality of bygone spaces of life, ‘ye ja vo ja’ (roughly, ‘now here and now gone’), often marking the sudden and inexplicable departures, from some given mise-en-scène, of idiosyncratic individuals with whom the past is invariably populated, come immediately to mind as instances.
Extraordinarily private and reticent, he repeatedly only ever refers to himself, if at all, as part of some species: ‘hum kale log’ (‘we black people’), indicating an anachronistic sense of racial subalternity in the modern, which South Asians would appear to have otherwise all but entirely repressed, ‘hum jo na maulvi hain na mister’ (‘we who are neither maulvis nor misters’), gesturing towards a traditionalist subject-position that eludes the dominant discursive terrain, colonised as it is by fanatic modernists and blind reactionaries.
Even as the conclusion becomes clearer by the day, it is not said axiomatically, said simply that: Progress is the most catastrophic idea in the entire history of humanity – more than just an ‘idea’ of course, it encompasses today our entire range of governing knowledges, institutions, moralities, practices, technologies: a fatal totality. As our world hurtles from every form of disaster to the next, as if towards some final catastrophe, the fate of this world, the world of Progress, is certain, even if no Nostradamus, no ancient calendar, can guide us in deciphering its exact temporality.
And the future fate, the destiny of a thing, is not a contingent aspect of its being, its life: it constitutes the nature, the reality of that thing in its very here and now, its presence – it will have made it what it is, just as much as the past that also makes it what it is. Nor is that catastrophic future given only in the emerging vectors of the present. There are events in the past when the catastrophe that is to come has already come to pass, indeed when that coming catastrophe has never ceased coming to pass. One such event is the ‘Partition’ of South Asia – that is, the moment of our ‘freedom’, our entry into modern political subjectivity, our entry into modern, historical life, pure and simple.
Intizar Husain, perhaps alone among South Asian writers, has held together in his thinking and writing, in his singularly anamnestic, mournful narratives and anti-narratives, the thought of Progress and the thought of Partition. Like the Jews who, as Walter Benjamin pointedly remarks in his anti-historicist ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, were ‘prohibited from investigating the future’, even as the ‘Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance’, Intizar Husain appears ascetically opposed to articulating an emancipatory politics for the future. Yet, there is in his works of memory a lost, a losing utopia of the past – a ‘meta-utopia’, if we remember that ‘meta-’ in Greek points not just to a beyond, but to a past, both to an intensification and a retroversion...
Read more: http://vvww.india-seminar.com/2012/632/632_nauman_naqvi.htm
see also:
Hum maslehat-e-vaqt ke munkir nahin Akbar
Lekin ye samajh lo ke vafa bhi hai koi chiz
(We do not deny the need to compromise with the times, Akbar / But do understand that faithfulness, too, is something) – Akbar Illahabadi
‘…an impossible longing for an immemorial loss…’ – Derrida
‘This story continues to be written during travels through a country from which I’m away.’ – Michel de Certeau
OUR nostalgist, Intizar Husain, is a remarkably repetitive writer. A small set of themes, tropes, tricks, even expressions and phrases, are the motus animi continuus of his prolific oeuvre. The repeated locutions are marked by their colloquiality: ‘khave se khava chilta tha’ (‘shoulder rubbed against shoulder’), which he often uses to signify the lively sociality of bygone spaces of life, ‘ye ja vo ja’ (roughly, ‘now here and now gone’), often marking the sudden and inexplicable departures, from some given mise-en-scène, of idiosyncratic individuals with whom the past is invariably populated, come immediately to mind as instances.
Extraordinarily private and reticent, he repeatedly only ever refers to himself, if at all, as part of some species: ‘hum kale log’ (‘we black people’), indicating an anachronistic sense of racial subalternity in the modern, which South Asians would appear to have otherwise all but entirely repressed, ‘hum jo na maulvi hain na mister’ (‘we who are neither maulvis nor misters’), gesturing towards a traditionalist subject-position that eludes the dominant discursive terrain, colonised as it is by fanatic modernists and blind reactionaries.
Even as the conclusion becomes clearer by the day, it is not said axiomatically, said simply that: Progress is the most catastrophic idea in the entire history of humanity – more than just an ‘idea’ of course, it encompasses today our entire range of governing knowledges, institutions, moralities, practices, technologies: a fatal totality. As our world hurtles from every form of disaster to the next, as if towards some final catastrophe, the fate of this world, the world of Progress, is certain, even if no Nostradamus, no ancient calendar, can guide us in deciphering its exact temporality.
And the future fate, the destiny of a thing, is not a contingent aspect of its being, its life: it constitutes the nature, the reality of that thing in its very here and now, its presence – it will have made it what it is, just as much as the past that also makes it what it is. Nor is that catastrophic future given only in the emerging vectors of the present. There are events in the past when the catastrophe that is to come has already come to pass, indeed when that coming catastrophe has never ceased coming to pass. One such event is the ‘Partition’ of South Asia – that is, the moment of our ‘freedom’, our entry into modern political subjectivity, our entry into modern, historical life, pure and simple.
Intizar Husain, perhaps alone among South Asian writers, has held together in his thinking and writing, in his singularly anamnestic, mournful narratives and anti-narratives, the thought of Progress and the thought of Partition. Like the Jews who, as Walter Benjamin pointedly remarks in his anti-historicist ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, were ‘prohibited from investigating the future’, even as the ‘Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance’, Intizar Husain appears ascetically opposed to articulating an emancipatory politics for the future. Yet, there is in his works of memory a lost, a losing utopia of the past – a ‘meta-utopia’, if we remember that ‘meta-’ in Greek points not just to a beyond, but to a past, both to an intensification and a retroversion...
Read more: http://vvww.india-seminar.com/2012/632/632_nauman_naqvi.htm
see also:
