Daily Times

Please tell us about your foray into the field of education and lectureship? How did it begin for you?

I studied medicine at Dow Medical College in the 1980s. Even before entering college, my developing political sensibilities had led me to question the social and economic inequality that was prevalent in society. Based on this, I had thought of pursuing a career in public oriented health system. During my college years, in the early1980s, I became involved in a theatre group, which brought together a range of activists from various progressive persuasions. This association was in itself a major learning experience that pushed me to think more deeply about the problems facing our society. It was mere serendipity that around this time I was introduced to a faculty member from a US university who was conducting research in Pakistan. I owe it to this scholar, Ashraf Ghani as he was instrumental in my being admitted to the anthropology department at his university to pursue my doctoral studies. So, in a way my entry into academia was accidental and not part of a planned trajectory for my future.

How did you develop an aptitude for anthropology, Middle Eastern and Asian studies? How were you yourself as a student? What camaraderie did you share with your teachers?

When I arrived in graduate school I had very little understanding of anthropology, let alone the social sciences. My training as mentioned earlier was in Medicine. This said, I was a reader of literature and political writings. I had some basic familiarity with Marxist tracts and some understanding of world history. The joke that I share with friends is that when I started my doctoral studies, I did not know the difference between Levi Strauss and Levi Strauss. As a person of my generation I was influenced by the struggles for national sovereignty and socialist ideals in Latin America and Vietnam. For the first year of my graduate studies my teachers encouraged me to pursue my interest in Latin America and I learned Spanish. During the summer after my first year of course work, I did fieldwork in low-income neighbourhoods of Queretaro on living conditions among the poor. However, I was keen on doing research on Pakistan and discussed this with my mentors. They suggested that I will have time to work on Pakistan in the future, at this stage of my training I should choose another culture, even if it was not going to be somewhere in Central America. This is how I chose Egypt for my doctoral research. I wanted to be in a society that was similar to Pakistan, but also different. For the purpose, I chose a topic that built on my past studies in medicine. One of my thesis mentors was the anthropologist Emily Martin who had just published a book that critically looked at medical discourse and how it structured women’s birthing practices and reproductive health. This influenced my own work and I lived in Egypt in the early 1990s for two years and learned Arabic to conduct ethnographic field research in a village and in urban poor neighbourhoods. My doctoral thesis was a critique of international development initiatives and structural adjustment programs and their relationship to birth control policies in less developed countries. I argued that irrespective of the benefits of family planning, bodies of poor women, in Egypt or elsewhere, became the contested sites of control and disciplining to achieve national development goals. This is how I started my work on the Middle East, later on I moved my research to Pakistan and started studying urban issues, wrote on popular culture and studied the political Left. In graduate school, I can best characterise myself as a curious, but struggling student. In the US university system, the graduate seminar is the quintessential learning space. Every week students are expected to read a book or a number of articles and discuss them during the class hours. With three such classes a week, with reading from a range of disciplines it was a steep learning slope. More importantly, there is an emphasis on having good writing skills. Although I had written for newspapers in Pakistan, but this was not adequate training for the rigor required for scholarly competency. This is where I owe my utmost gratitude to my teachers. They would read my term papers and hand it back with red ink all over, their stylistic corrections helped me improve as a writer. Apart from the line editing and grammatical suggestions, there was also an insistence on being concise and on clarity in communication. Further, the department was a small one, they admitted only four-five students a year into their PhD programme and there were at a time seven-nine faculty members. So, the relationship was extremely cordial and non-hierarchical with everyone on first name basis. I remain indebted to my teachers Sidney Mintz, Michel Rolph Trouillot, Emily Martin, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Katherine Verdery, and Ashraf Ghani, they taught me to think critically, encouraged my research, bestowed me with the skills and abilities to conduct my study and continued to support my scholarship.

What are you currently working on? Is there another book in the pipeline?

In the past two years, I have published a book on the history of the Left in Pakistan. This took some time to write, but in the interim I have been publishing articles on urban issues and popular culture. My short-term project is to work on a collection that includes some of my published essays along with a few new ones that reflect my long-term engagement with the cultural history of Karachi. The papers will be based on various events or cultural artefacts from the different decades of the past seventy years. So, there is a paper based on the writer, Qurutulain Haider’s book Housing Society on the way in which refugees from India created new and hierarchical worlds in Karachi, there is another on the issue of how this world was experienced by those on the lower end of the economic ladder, one on the 1969 film ‘Behn Bhai’ and its depiction of Karachi as a cosmopolitan space, yet another on Mustafa Zaidi, the poet who was found dead in his apartment in 1970 and the scandal that followed, there is also one on a serialized story from the popular digest, Alif Laila about a female detective in Karachi of the early 1970s. The endeavour through these essays is to share a different history of Karachi, that is less based on the stereotypical rendering of conflict and violence or a nostalgia for a serene past, but to put forward a complex story of urbanisation, sociological stratifications, bourgeois pleasures and working-class struggles. There are other side interests, including an essay that I am working on about the history of alternative theatre in Pakistan, this stems from my own association with Dastak, but I am now interested in experiments done by people like Sarmad Sehbai and Najam Hosain Syed in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Lahore. Further, I have started research on a paper about the 1969 film by the writer and intellectual Ahmad Bashir, Neela Parbat. It is an experimental film that deals with issues of sexuality, incest and gender relations. As these projects near completion in the coming months, I have started to gingerly move toward starting an ethnographic study of a village in Punjab. The counters of this research are still vague, but we do not have many grounded studies of rural Pakistan that represent the changing social and economic life of small towns and villages. I intend to conduct this research in the coming two-three years.

Growing up, who were some of the writers you greatly admired? Was there anyone in the field of education you really looked up to?

Similar to the middle-class Pakistanis of my generation who went to English Medium schools I too grew up on authors such as Enid Blyton, read comic books and followed Hardy Boys and their escapades. I was also an avid reader of the children magazines, Taleem o Tarbiyat, Khilona and Nonehal and was a fan of the Urdu books for children published by Ferozsons. But by the time I was in eighth or ninth grade, I had some adult guidance and I started reading of all kinds of fiction. In those days Karachi still had some excellent libraries, the British Council Library was near Metropole Hotel and the American Centre was opposite Frere Hall. There were also KMC libraries all across the city, on Frere Road, in PIB Colony, in Liaquatabad, in Nazimabad and many other places. They would stack books and were extremely well used. This became my world for some years. I read voraciously, from pulp fiction coming from the West to more cerebral authors such as Andre Gide, Camus, Kafka and others. There was a time that I would borrow books by Bernard Shaw from the British Library, Clifford Odets from the American Centre and buy Ibsen’s plays from the Pak-American book store on Elphinstone street. Later on, around the time I was doing my matric exams, I started getting introduced to Marxist literature and also to Russian fiction writing. The Standard Book Company was in Saddar and sold Soviet and Russian literature at very reasonable prices, and a number of us took full advantage of it. With our meagre financial means, the shop was an amazing resource for a number of us. By the time I entered my first year of intermediate college, I was starting to get interested in Urdu prose and poetry. As my generation gravitated toward Faiz, Faraz and Jalib, I also started reading Manto, Krishan Chandar and Ghulam Abbas’s short stories. Maktab e Danial, the publishing house on Victoria Road run by Malik Noorani sahib published works by Sibte Hasan, Moosa se Marx Tak and others, which inspired us to read more on culture, literature, religion and mythology. Further, as an adolescent, there was a time I devoured the plays by Oscar Wilde and appreciated his wit, his use of humour and social commentary. Later in my late teens I had the opportunity to read Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird which exposed me to the injustices of racial divided society in the US and finally as a 20-year old I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, a magico-realist book about South Asia’s division. These and many more remain the formative influences on my thoughts. When I was growing up, there was no Internet and news about books and ideas traveled at a slower pace. We read what we could lay our hands on. Our heroes were those who writings defied the status quo and questioned existing norms. In Pakistan there were people like Professor Karar Husain who from within a religious discourse showed us a path of a humane future, there were people like Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Sibte Hasan who through their poetry and prose would become a major influence on our developing ideas. Not having studied in a liberal arts college for my first degree, I did not have any formal teaching with educators in Pakistan, but some of people I can call my teachers, people who opened my mind to different ideas and approaches to philosophy, literature, aesthetics and art. Among the many whom I owe a major debt are people like Riaz Najmi, Miss Val, my 8th grade English teacher, Kaleem Lashari who mentored me from a young age and played a major role in my intellectual development, Mansoor Saeed, who was one of the founders of Dastak and introduced me to the world of literature and ideas and Aslam Azhar, who as the principle force behind Dastak shared with us his immense learning and love for the dramatic arts.

Tell us about the Shehr Network.

The Shehr Network was formed through a process of intellectual exchange with my friend and colleague Martina Rieker, who is a historian by training and is currently the Director of the Women and Gender Studies Programme at the American University in Cairo. Martina and I did research in Cairo during the same years and started a dialogue about cities in the global south. This culminated in bringing a group of scholars together to create a network involved in examining particular social histories of contemporary Middle Eastern/North African, South Asian and African cities. From 2002-2009 we raised funds to organise a series of workshops on topics such as Urban Poverty, Gendering Urban Space, Cities and Conflict and Neo-Liberalism and the Urban Milieu. These workshops were held in regional cities like Istanbul, Khartoum, Cairo and Lahore. We have three publications based on the proceedings of these workshops; Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, Comparing Cities: Middle East and South Asia and a special issue of the journal, Social Text with the title, Urban Visions of the Margins. Both Martina and I are not as active in the Network these days, but it has flourished and played an important role in initiating comparative scholarly research and exchange on the topic.

‘I owe my utmost gratitude to my teachers. They would read my term papers and hand it back with red ink all over, their stylistic corrections helped me improve as a writer’

You are a senior professor, scholar and a writer. What according to you, has been your biggest achievement so far?

To be honest my biggest achievement as a scholar has been my teaching. My writing and scholarly publications may have their value, but these are academic in nature and may not interest many people beyond a very small circle. Yet, as a teacher for the past twenty-two years I have been fortunate to teach hundreds of undergraduates at the two Universities where I have spent my career, the University of Rochester and the University of Texas, Austin. While at UT, Austin, I trained scores of MA students and served on multiple PhD committees. In the process, I feel fortunate to have supervised almost twenty PhD theses. My students have worked on South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the US on topics that range from reproductive and sexual health issues in the US, to the everyday lives of the Kurdish population in conflict zones of Turkey. My ability to work with these students from different economic and national backgrounds has given me the most satisfaction in my academic career. A majority of them are employed in academic positions in the US and elsewhere and it gives me much pride as I see them mature as scholars and teach the next generation. I feel this is how the circle of life continues; my way of repaying my teachers was to invest in the future of my students, as they hopefully will do with theirs.

Your work takes you places far and wide. Which is your favourite vacation spot?

I am not sure I am the vacation type in the general sense of the word. Whenever, my family and I have gone on trips they have been mostly been to large cities. So, rather than going to a sea side village or a mountain resort, we head for cities that have large populations, disorganized urban life, conflicts and contradictions. So, places like Cairo, Mexico City, Istanbul, Rome Paris, Berlin, Seville have been destinations that we have tended to favour. I personally like Cairo and Mexico City, two large metropolis that have a certain kind of energy that is unique to them. Both are old cities with a historic centre and both have functioning public transport systems that help move millions of people every day. Perhaps being from Karachi, I gravitated toward these two cities as they remind me of the pleasures and pitfalls of my own hometown.

What motivates you to excel no matter what?

I would not use the word excel for anything I do. Whatever I have achieved in life has been average and middling at best. What motivates me to continue in my line of work is the passion to continuously think outside the box and find ways to explain social phenomena in new and different ways. I do believe that all scholarly work is built on a long history of intellectual labour of others, I do not claim originality. But based on my own readings and understanding the quest is to find ways to think about our current situation, our past and our future. Despite the many changes that we have faced in our lives in the past two-three decades, the issue of social and economic justice remains a crucial question for our collective future. Until the 1980s there were many ideological certainties in social and political life. But currently we seem to be at an impasse. Further with the advent of artificial intelligence there is a looming fear of how human labour may become redundant. Some of the upheaval in Western Societies may be reflective of these changes, as people are being replaced by automation and robots in production processes. These are the questions that motivate me to think and to write. Of course, the answer to these complex issues cannot come from one person alone. But many in different ways are trying to tackle such questions and collectively at some moment in time there will be a coalescing of ideas about how to produce a socially just, economically equitable and politically pluralistic society for all humans. This along with the extremely urgent subject of the environment and climate change needs our immediate attention.

Tell us about a memorable experience during your career.

There have been many small and large experiences. I was lucky to be a human rights monitor for the UN in El Salvador in the 1991-92 and saw history being made in that country when the Peace Accords were signed to end the violent civil war and the two sides, the Leftist FMLN and the Government of El Salvador, agreed to create a democratic and inclusive system of government. The experience has stayed with me on many levels. On a more academic note, the time spent as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during the academic year 2010–2011 was the best of times. The leadership, the staff and the fellows made it one of the most exciting spaces to have intellectual exchanges in an atmosphere of prevailing sense of humour and developing friendships. For an academic it was like we had expired and were in scholarly heaven.

What is your vision for Pakistan and what does it mean to be Pakistani for you?

Collectively we are hard working, sincere, generous and caring people. We are a land of high mountains, long rivers, flowing fields and serene deserts. It is not clichéd to say that from them we have learnt how to be wise and how to be humble. The land is full of much promise due to its amazing individuals. Our problem is not our struggling and decent masses, but our elite and their selfish disregard for the betterment of our people. Power should be about using it to serve others, here it is the opposite. Our leaders are self-serving, autocratic and hierarchical in their demeanour. What we need to collectively struggle for is a just, humane, tolerant and egalitarian society for everyone.

We, at Daily Times, consider you one of our national heroes. Who are some of yours?

You honour with me with this notion that I am some kind of a “hero” let alone a “national hero. The playwright, Bertolt Brecht has a scene in his famous play Galileo in which his assistant says that unhappy is a land that has no heroes. Galileo replies, “No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” I think Brecht is correct, we do not need heroes to worship and admire, but we do need to respect each and every one among us who have selflessly worked to make this world a better place. When I think of people whom I have known and who share this vision of service and sacrifice, I think of the writer, teacher and intellectual, Eqbal Ahmad who dedicated his life to speak up for the people of Algeria under colonial rule, for the war of liberation in Vietnam, the struggle for justice and sovereignty in Palestine, against apartheid in South Africa and for democratic and humane values in Pakistan. But there are many more unrecognised and unsung heroes in Pakistan who on a daily basis contribute to the betterment of their surrounding through their dedication, enable others to live better lives.

                                     

                                      Achievements

A HIGHLY QUALIFIED INDIVIDUAL

Dr Kamran Asdar Ali is a highly qualified individual. He did his Bachelors in Medicine & Surgery from Dow Medical College, University of Karachi, Pakistan and Masters in Anthropology from John Hopkins University. He’s a PhD in Anthropology from John Hopkins University.

A RECOGNISED SCHOLAR

In 2010, he was awarded with the fellowship at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute of Advanced Study). He was a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden, The Netherlands.

AN AVID WRITER

Dr Kamran has a number of books to his credit. Some of which are Communism in Pakistan – Politics & Class Activism, Gender, Politics & Performance in South Asia and Urban Margins – Envisioning the Contemporary Global South. He is the author of Planning the Family in Egypt – New Bodies, New Selves. He is the co-editor of Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia & Africa and Comparing Cities – Middle East & South Asia, both with Martina Rieker, with whom he also coordinates the Shehr Network on Comparative Urban Landscapes.

AT THE HELM OF AFFAIRS

Dr Kamran is professor of anthropology, Middle East Studies & Asian Studies and the Director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. He has previously taught at the University of Rochester. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Published in Daily Times, August 24^th   2017.