Abstract
In Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India, the author covers the struggle for freedom by ‘Urduphone’ intellectuals, predominantly Muslims from Pakistan and India who were active in leftist politics. The book is divided into five chapters where the author describes the experiences of these individuals as they fought legal trials and literary controversies related to accusations of blasphemy, obscenity and sedition from the 1930s through the 1960s.
In the opening chapter, ‘Introduction: Writers on Trial’, the author recounts prominent literary intellectuals who confronted the limits of permissible and impermissible speech and presented themselves as ethical interlocutors in a colonial and postcolonial era of censorship. The Urduphone intellectuals of Muslim backgrounds formed the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in 1936 and played a crucial role in reflecting inequality among the sexes, oppression by the powerful and the latent capacity of ordinary people. The author pays less attention to the historical background of their actions and plans and how they evolved, however, and there is no explicit definition of progressivism in the chapter. It is unclear whether the writers in their community adhered to the same definition or even if they had different perspectives within or beyond any religious parameters.
In the second chapter, ‘Blasphemy: Progressives, Literary Ethics, and the Case of Burning Embers’, the author discusses the censorship of the publication of the short story collection Angare (Embers), written in 1932. Here, the author could have devoted greater attention to the linear narrative of late nineteenth-century progressive Urdu literature as well as the response and protest ignited by their writings on the other. It would have been preferable if they had gone into more historical detail when stressing the progressive's adherence to communist doctrine and how far their voice reached the people. It is important to know this, because this publication of Angare, depicted a conflict between religious and secular forces, sparking outrage for being ‘blasphemous’. Most of the writers for Angare belonged to the Communist Party of India and were English-educated déclassés with Muslim upper-middle-class backgrounds from the city of Lucknow. It was written by Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rasheed Jehan, and Mahmud-uz-Zafar and had nine short tales and one play that critiqued traditional Muslim middle-class values. The important ones include Sajjad Zaheer’s Jannat Ki Basharat, Mahmud Zafar’s Jawanmardi, and Rasheed Jahan’s Parde Ke Pichhe, and together the Angare tales broadly call attention to the marginalisation and oppression of women. The progressive writers contested the traditional Muslim aristocratic social standing: their criticism was developed on a class basis. Nay adab, or ‘new literature’, was the name given to the progressive literature that emerged after Angare.
In the third chapter, ‘Obscenity: Manto’s Texts, Manto’s Trials’, the author discusses hitherto undiscovered archive records about Saadat Hasan Manto's court cases from 1942 to 1943 and his trials from the early 1950s. The author gives a detailed description of the controversies over Manto stories such as Bu, Dhuan, Khol Dol, etc. The chapter probes why Manto was subjected to legal proceedings and controversies and how he used to defend his short stories against obscenity allegations. This chapter is one of the greatest successes of the monograph, as the author makes explicit the relationship between Manto and the PWA. ‘Sedition: A Poet, a Plot, and Pakistan’s First Conspiracy Case, The Fourth Chapter’, explores the years 1951–55 in Pakistani history and how Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a key figure in the All-Pakistan Progressive Writers Association at the time, along with other leftist writers, was accused of plotting a coup against the Pakistani government in 1951 and was arrested as part of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. Intriguingly, instead of focusing on the disillusioned high-ranking military officials who were detained or the function of the state, this chapter instead concentrates on Faiz Ahmed Faiz as a writer. The case study importantly illustrates how leftist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz applied ethical critique to his poetry and writing in response to censorship.
In chapter five, ‘Feminist Literary Ethics and Censorship’, the author contextualises the work of feminist Urdu poets in Pakistan during the 1970s and 1980s. Here it is clearly and importantly argued that the emergence of feminist Urdu literature in this period represents a revitalisation of the progressive literary movement, usually perceived as having ended in the 1950s or 1960s. The chapter discusses Fahmida Riaz, a leftist feminist poet from Pakistan, exploring how she dealt with censorship. The author also mentions how Fahmida Riaz underscored the marginalisation of women writers in Urdu by dedicating her volume of poems to the poet Sarah Shagufta, whose story exists on the periphery. The epilogue in the book relates a fiction story, ‘Dhanak,’ written by Ghulam Abbas, a progressive writer, that questions blind adherence to territorial nationalism and narrow sectarianism.
Overall, the author raises concerns about the status of Urdu Progressive Writers in postcolonial Pakistan and India on the one hand and at the same time highlights their crucial contribution to the fight against colonial rule and oppression, marginalisation and subordination of the downtrodden in society. Understanding the ethics, selfhood, communities, and traditions of thought of literary intellectuals with progressive ideals is the aim of the book. A key focus is to illustrate how progressive Urduphone intellectuals who supported the Pakistan demand, shaped political and social imaginations outside narrowly defined territorial and moral allegiances, as well as the intensifying authoritarian suppression of their freedom of expression after migrating to Pakistan. By concentrating on instances of censorship experienced by Urduphone progressive intellectuals, the author develops a history of the relationship between literature and intellectual identity from a perspective that takes seriously the role of ethical self-fashioning in relation to ‘Islamic’ thought and Muslim belonging along the axis of ‘leftist’ articulation. There are, however, certain limitations. Many of the terms the author employs are in Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Arabic, making them challenging for the casual or inexperienced reader to grasp. Further, the contributions of the group's Hindu and Sikh writers were not analysed, nor was the extent to which the Urdu Progressive writers were inclined towards humanism and beyond all forms of religion, caste, and creed. Despite these issues, however, the book is a useful resource for understanding the contribution of Muslim Urdu intellectuals to colonial Indian nationalism and post-independence Pakistan.