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Many years ago I visited a cemetery in a small town in southern California with a friend. She showed me a lonely section, where there were some, not very new, Muslim graves. A few carried the name of a district in Punjab. Some years later I visited a cemetery in Karachi and saw graves that carried the names of some, most obscure, villages in my own home district in India. In both instances, the poignant desire to hold on to a "place" was palpably visible. It would be fair to say that the first powerful experience of wrenching displacement felt by Urdu writers was in 1947, when in the wake of the Partition of British India, many of them moved, unwillingly or deliberately, from India to Pakistan. The massacres that preceded and followed the Partition were so overwhelming that most of the poets and fiction writers of the time exclusively reacted or responded to them, and said little about their subjective experience of displacement. But some did, including Qurratulain Hyder and Intizar Hussain, perhaps the two most important names in contemporary Urdu fiction. Hyder, after spending a few years in Pakistan, then in England, returned to India, while Hussain, a native of Western UP, made Pakistan his new home. Hyder's fiction is full of displaced persons, persons who, in a most organic way, are tied to a history and a place but who, overwhelmed by a yet another, more powerful history, must live out their days elsewhere. They may differ in their material successes or failures, in their cognizance of the existential situation they are in, but, in the writer's eyes, they are all deeply wounded people. Even those of her protagonists who don't physically move from one country to the other undergo, in the aftermath of the Partition, a kind of displacement in their psyches. What is more interesting is that in Hyder's fiction we also find that for her female characters the experience of displacement often does not mitigate or alter the experience of betrayal and exploitation that was already there. Intizar Hussain, on the other hand, combined his sense of displacement and loss with the sense of a forward movement in history. Contrary to his detractors who accused him of indulging in nostalgia, Hussain repeatedly declared that his use of the past was to recover it for a creative vision of the future. Whether he succeeded or failed is not my concern here; that question has been amply discussed by M. U. Memon in his two essays on Intizar Hussain./1/ Of greater interest to me is the word hijrat, used by Hussain and his friends, and by everyone else in Pakistan for that matter, to describe that experience of displacement. They named the movement of Muslims from India to Pakistana hijrat, and those who performed that act, muhajir. Hijrat, as we know, is a most potent word in the vocabulary of Islam. It links a Muslim with that moment in the remote past from which all of Islam's temporal history flows: the hijrat of the Prophet and later of his followers, from Mecca to Madina. Now there was an earlier hijrat too, when the Prophet sent many of the believers to Habasha for safety, but curiously that hijrat has never been given much significance. It is the second hijrat, the hijrat of the Prophet himself that is always invoked as a paradigm. The hijrat to Madina led to the formation of the first Muslim community and a triumphal return of the Prophet to Mecca. It was a uniquely creative act. It also conferred upon its participants a permanent and privileging identity, as became evident in subsequent Muslim history. To my knowledge, hijrat has been invoked by various portions of the Muslim community in the subcontinent on three occasions. First, in the nineteenth century when Shah Isma'il Shaheed and his followers migrated from Rajasthan, UP and Bihar to the North-West Frontier area to wage a jihad against the Sikhs. That was on the model of the second hijrat. Later, in this century, in resentment against the British role in the destruction of the Ottoman Caliphate, some Muslim leaders, including Abul Kalam Azad, asked their coreligionists to leave British India and migrate to Afghanistan. Perhaps that too was modeled on the second hijrat, though at least not in its public face. (It proved to be a disaster and caused several thousand people to die.) The third time was after the Partition, when again it was the experience of the second hijrat that was explicity invoked. The hijrat of the Muslims from India to Pakistan was expected to lead to a new triumph of Islam, at least at first within Pakistan. What actually happened is history. In India, the Hindus and Sikhs who fled there from Pakistan, were called sharanarthi or "refugees." It was anything but a privileging title. Understandably, it was soon discarded. Also, in India it was easier for the refugees to soon identify themselves as Sikhs, Punjabis, Bengalis, and Sindhis. That didn't happen in Pakistan. Instead, the subjective elevation of the exilic experience encapsuled in the term hijrat, that potent symbol from the past, eventually contributed, one may rightly argue, to the emergence of a Muhajir "national identity" and the formation of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement in the Eighties. We choose a label and must live with the consequences of that choice. On the other hand, we are neither altogether innocent of motives nor entirely free of subjective and objective pressures as we make our choice. So far I have not come across any use of the word hijrat in the fiction and poetry produced by Urdu writers in North America. They prefer such words as be-watani ("the state of not having a homeland"), jila-watani ("exile"), awargi ("wandering"), be-ghari ("homelessness"). The non-writers, of course, make use of whatever seems most rewarding at any given time: immigrant, permanent resident, Green-card holder, Indian-American, Pakistani-American, East Indian, Caucasian, Non-Resident Indian, what have you. Perhaps the only imaginative new term has been the contribution of the second generation South Asians: "ABCD" (American-Born Confused Desi.) In an article on the subject of "Identity" published a few years ago, a South Asian intellectual now living in the West described himself as "an anglicized postcolonial migrant who happens to be a slightly Frenchified literary critic."/2/ Though the rest of his comments were too complex to follow, these few words raised a couple of questions in my mind. I wondered if he would have liked it if someone else, perhaps someone like Alan Bloom, had used those exact words to describe him. Secondly, when I tried to describe myself in a similar fashion I found that I had to make an arbitrary closure somewhere, otherwise the litany of descriptive words and phrases would never end. In other words, any definition of myself seemed to depend on the context within which the question was asked and what control I had over it. To the extent I already shared the context I found it easier to go through an interlocution. To my daughter's teacher I cheerfully said I'm Farah's father. To the receptionist in the doctors' office I offered only my name. And to the teller at the State Bank of India I confidently declared: I'm an NRI. In each instance the description was painless and had a closure. Only in the luxury of my own solitude did I indulgently ask, "Who am I?" and found that any closure killed the fun. On the other hand, I know that if some total stranger were to ask me out of the blue: who are you?, my response most likely would be rightful indignation. I may even call that person a racist. I also became aware that just as a shared context made an interlocution more tolerable, so did I tend to prefer those interlocutions that seemed to privilege me. That feeling really came to the fore when I made a list of all the different descriptive words or phrases that are currently being used in such contexts: Exiles, displaced persons, people of the diaspora, expatriates, immigrants, ethnic minority. "Exile is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home. The essential sadness of the break can never be surmounted." So begins an elegant and eloquent essay by Edward Said, entitled "The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life inExile."/3/ A few lines later he asks the question that is the focus of his essay: "If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has that loss so easily been transformed into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture?" That is an important question, but what intrigues me here is that simple qualifier "true" that Said has placed before "exile" in his sentence. When I first read that article I complacently felt I had found a description of myself in Said's powerful words. Then I began to have some doubts. Said had described Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Eqbal Ahmad as exiles from a totalitarian Pakistan and I knew that was not quite true. There had been no banishment, not even a threat of it. Neither of them was a victim of "modern warfare, imperialism, quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers," as Said seemed to have concluded. That made me wonder about our tendency to valorise exile, how we would rather regard ourselves and our friends as exiles than use the word for someone whom we despise. I asked myself, perhaps somewhat perversely: what about Idi Amin Dada in Saudi Arabia and Imelda Marcos in California? Were they not exiles? Did they not feel an unhealable rift forced between themselves and their respective native places, between their selves and their true homes? I discovered that though I was willing to stretch the definition of "exile" in the case of Faiz and Eqbal Ahmad, I felt no similar desire in the case of Marcos and Amin. Any possibility of their inclusion seemed a threat to my own comforting view of myself. I gave up on "exile" and decided I would be a "displaced" person. But that didn't seem particularly right. Not having been born in the Delhi of the Grand Mughals or the Florence of the Medicis, I had always felt myself somewhat "misplaced" in that post-Partition, postcolonial, post-what-have-you India. To be a few thousand miles away from it was not quite a displacement. I then decided to view myself as an expatriate, "voluntarily living," to use Said's definition, "in an alien country for personal reasons." But the word "alien" in that definition still made me uncomfortable. Until a few years ago I was quite content thinking of myself as an immigrant, but then Bharati Mukherjee moved down from Canada and received the New York Times seal of approval to be the spokesperson for Indian immigrants. I hastily withdrew from the ranks, because I couldn't presume that my story was of the sort she could use to achieve her avowed aim to update Henry Roth's classic Call it Sleep./4/ Now I think I should follow the example of my youngers and call myself "CIA": Confused in America. In any case, no matter what I call myself, two facts stand out: by my presence here I demand that the host people change their definition of themselves as Americans, and secondly, my presence here requires that I strenuously re-examine and question my Indianness, not only in relation to this country but also in relation to what I imagine I left behind, as if frozen forever in time. N O T E S /*/
Originally published in The Toronto South Asian Review 11,2 (Winter
1993). Abridged version of a talk given at the University of Pennsylvania,
on 23 November 1991, at a conference on "The Literature of Displacement:
the Writer and the South Asian Diaspora."
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