“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” says George Orwell in his chilling novel Nineteen Eighty Four. As members of a race, or inhabitants of a region, we are defined by our history. History is important because it provides us with an identity. But what happens if some agency from outside gains control over our past? This would happen if some outsider got to write our history. This would also give the outsider the authority to define us. Professor Tahir Kamran makes a similar point in his foreword to Jiwan Khan’s recent book called Beggar’s Bowl.
As post-colonial subjects, we Pakistanis are disconnected from our history. This has to do with our past. We were a British colony. The colonisers used the opportunity to define us. This they did by writing for us. Armed with a crusading western modernity (reinforced by technology) that helped them overpower the backward parts of the world, they wrote from the intellectual vantage of the liberator. We have all seen movies where a white man comes into contact with a primitive native in a dense forest in some outpost of civilisation. Keep that picture in your head. Imagine a European adventurer offering a cigar to a half-naked aborigine, “Hello. My name is Percy. Would you like to try something nice?” The brute is wary at first but the genial white man says, “It is alright ol’ boy. Try it.” The native hesitates but then gives in. He coughs, grunts and then takes another shot at it. He begins to like it now. “What did I tell you?” says the white man.
There are laughs all around. Gradually, the white man will introduce more refinements. He will tell the native that smoking expensive cigars is a mark of elegance. So is dressing up in suit pants, playing golf and going to the gymkhana (club) in the evening. The native will ape the liberator. Soon he will see everything the way the liberator sees it. When the native learns to read English, he will read the Cambridge History of Banana Land. According to Dr Kamran, that is where the real problem begins. The Oxford History of the Apes will be written from the perspective of the white zookeepers. It will pick and choose the contents of the monkeys’ past, and interpret and present them in a way that will not only adulterate the past but also morph it. By now the ape has learned to swear in English, wear a uniform, join the civil service and play bridge. It is progress but when the ape wants to read about who he is and where he comes from, he reads that his people climbed trees to fetch bananas because that is the only history book you get to read in a zoo. That is how disconnected the post-colonial subject is. But that is just half the story.
Some of the subjects will try and reclaim their past. Professor Kamran says this is often tried by a group of the faithful by creating an image of prelapsarian glory, a pristine era when ‘we’ dominated the white man. The professor claims that such histories are revisionist and exclusivist. He says that certain ulema (clergy) in northern India tried this apparently by attempting to purge their belief system through adopting an Arab-influenced literalist interpretation of their faith. He goes on to claim that some of these efforts often culminated in violence, first against the coloniser then against fellow subjects who did not follow a purist inclination.
So, how do we reclaim ‘our’ past when all of it has been adulterated by historians? Even if it existed in its pure form somewhere, the post-colonial subject is not capable of negotiating meaning with it. They say imitation becomes second nature, and if you keep up with it for a long time, the second nature subsumes the first. The ape has worn a tie for so long he feels naked without it. Post-colonial subjects approach a text with the heuristic devices they have picked up during their stay in colonial-era installed educational institutes. They will see the world in a lopsided way, a way that is dichotomous and relies on binary categorisations like modern versus backward, educated versus ignorant or even moderate versus fundamentalist. There is no going back then.
What about doing away with these categorisations? This might be attempted by looking beyond the prism of the west. At the same time, we would need to hold our training, our tendencies in abeyance and approach different sites where meaning can be negotiated. If we cannot reclaim the past, can we try to claim the present?
Jiwan Khan’s book suggests we take the eclectic approach. We should aspire for our students to learn a wide variety of ideas, neither solely western ones, nor just our own exclusivist ones. We should try to design a heterogeneous instruction by combining the best features of knowledge systems coming from diverse cultures and regions. This could provide a blend that produces an optimal overall result — the greatest good for the greatest number — in helping students achieve worthy educational goals. The book brings together anecdotes, proverbs, extracts and quotations from a variety of sources that go beyond race and region. In this way, the post-colonial subject might develop an outreach farther than that of the ex-coloniser. While most western intellectuals will remain wedded to their ideas of modernity, the post-colonial subject can read Buddha and Jesus, Iqbal and Baba Ramdev, Tagore and Emerson. In a way, instead of being in a position of disadvantage, the post-colonial subject may be in a position where it is easier to access the best that the world has to offer. If we can do that, we have made the most of our time, and that is akin to claiming the present.
From Orwell we know, “who controls the present controls the past”. Perhaps someday we might write The Banana History of Cambridge.
The writer is a lecturer in English Literature at Government College University, Lahore