Colonial Sense and Religious Sensibility: Understanding Injury and the Body of Nation in Censored Literature in South Asia

ABSTRACT

This essay critically examines Angarey, a collection of nine short stories and one play by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar, first published in December 1932. Considered a foundational work in Urdu literature which supported the Progressive Writer’s Association in South Asia during the pre-partition era and hailed as an act of literary resistance – especially in the context of the nationalist movements for freedom in India – the stories offer a succinct critique of social and religious practices. Because they exposed the oppression against Muslim women and promoted resistance against the colonial state, the text was banned in March 1933 by the British government. The historical account of its censorship characterizes the British colonial state as the rational and neutral arbiter of its presumed emotionally excitable colonial subjects. In observance of the relationship between affective politics of colonial empire and religion in late colonial India, I critically examine not just the text but also the contextual background of its censorship to explore the link between the colonial ideas about Muslim sensibilities and colonial regulations. In this respect, relying on Asad Ali Ahmed’s critique of the colonial genesis of censorship [“Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, The Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament.” In Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, edited by Raminder Kaur, and William Mazzarella, 172–205. Bloomington, 2009], Talal Asad’s insights on the complicated relation between injury and the discourse of blasphemy [Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, and Ann Laura Stoler’s argument about the Enlightenment’s relationship to empire “Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013], this study attempts to understand how the embodied representation of the Muslim self figures in Angarey as an affective attachment, following the context of literary censorship in late colonial South Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonial sense
• religious sensibility
• injury
• nation
• censorship
• Angarey
• South Asia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mahmud, “Angāre and the Founding of the Progressive Writers',” 447.

2 Ahmed, Specters of Macaulay, 173.

3 Agathocleous, Disaffected, x.

4 Ahmed, Specters of Macaulay, 173.

5 Ibid, 173, 197.

6 Ibid., 196.

7 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 66.

8 Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change, 110.

9 ibid

10 Ibid., 109, 379.

11 Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 51.

12 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 43.

13 Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change, 147.

14 Brown, “Introduction,” 18.

15 Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” 22.

16 Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 51.

17 Nolden, In the Face of Adversity, 7.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 1.

20 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 67.

21 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 63.

22 Agathocleous, Disaffected, 73.

23 Ibid., 59.

24 Agathocleous, Disaffected, 73.

25 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 94.

26 Ibid., 93.

27 Anderson, Imagined Communities.

28 Brennan, The Transmission of Affect.

29 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25.

30 Shingavi, “Introduction,” 11.

31 Ibid., 10.

32 Ibid., 12.

33 Ibid.

34 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 87.

35 Kamran, Angaaray: Research and Criticism, 18.

36 Ibid., 20.

37 Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change, 91.

38 Kamran, Angaaray: Research and Criticism, 19.

39 Ibid., 17.

40 Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 63.

41 Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change, 184, 193.

42 Thapar, The Past as Present, 30.

43 Butler, Excitable Speech, 02.

44 Ibid.

45 Scheve, et al., Affect and Emotion, 2.

46 Asad, Formation of the Secular, 5.

47 Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” 54.

48 Shingavi, “Introduction,” 8.

49 Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change, 104; Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 64.

50 Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change, 104.

51 Ibid., 114.

52 Butler, Excitable Speech, 41.

53 Scheve, et al., Affect and Emotion, 2.

54 Ibid., 4.

55 Ibid.

56 Zink, “On Conversion,” 141.

57 Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 48.

58 See Ahmad, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

59 Scheve, Affect and Emotion, 8.

60 Ahmed quotes Pandey 1999; Ludden 1993 in The Cultural Politics of Emotion 177.

61 Ibid, 177.

62 Ibid.

63 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 57.

64 Ibid., 74.

65 Ibid., 94.

66 Quoted in Ahmed 176.

67 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 72.

68 Ahmed, Specters of Macaulay, 197.

69 Mazzarella, “Between Sedition and Seduction, 9.

70 Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 47.

71 Ibid., 60.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid., 47.

74 Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” 36.

75 Taylor quoted in Brown et al 10.

76 Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 60.

77 Ibid., 61.

78 Ahmed, Specters of Macaulay, 173.

79 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 87.

80 Nair, Hurt Sentiments, 5.

81 Rekhta.

82 Dehkhoda.

83 UrduInc.

84 Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect,” 65.

85 Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 17.

86 Ibid., 50.

87 Shingavi, “Introduction,” 11.

88 Ibid., 16.

89 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 181.

90 Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change, 91.

91 Zaheer, Angarey, 82.

92 Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, 8.

93 Zaheer, Angarey, 82.

94 Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, 186.

95 Quoted in Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 70.

96 Ibid., 76.

97 Ibid.

98 Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 57.

99 Zaheer, Angarey, 86.

100 Ibid., 71.

101 Brown, “Introduction,” 14.

102 Stoler, Duke University Press, 2016.

103 Zink, “On Conversion,” 141.

104 Zaheer, Angarey, 117.

105 Brown, “Introduction,” 14, 17.

106 Zaheer, Angarey, 120.

107 Brown, “Introduction,” 21.

108 Zaheer, Angarey, 121.

109 Ibid., 120.

110 Ibid., 118.

111 Zaheer, Angarey, 129.

112 Shingavi, “Introduction.” 20.

113 Ibid.

114 Zaheer, Angarey, 144.

115 Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect,” 67.

116 William Wilson Hunter quoted in Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 47.

117 Stoler, “Reason Aside,” 66.

118 Shingavi, “Introduction.” 21.

119 Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect” 96.

120 Mahmud, “Angāre and the Founding of the Progressive Writers’,” 447.

121 Ahmed, Specters of Macaulay, 173.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sumera Saleem

Sumera Saleem is a lecturer in the department of English, the University of Sargodha, Sargodha, gold medalist in English literature, the University of the Punjab, and former sub-editor in the department of English, the University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD research in Environmental Humanities at the Australian Catholic University, Australia. Her research focuses on the representation of Muslim, nation, and environment in South Asian literature.