The Historian 2008 (1&2)

The Historian
Volume 6 January-December 2008 Numbers 1&2
Department of History
GC University, Lahore
The Historian
Volume 6 (January-December 2008) Numbers 1&2
© The Historian is published by the Department of History, GC

University, Katchehry Road, 54000 Lahore, Pakistan.
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Editor: Tahir Kamran
Associate Editors: Tahir Jamil, Hussain Ahmad Khan, Noor Rehman
Design & Production Incharge: Shifa Ahmad
Editorial Advisory Board
David Gilmartin – Department of History, North Carolina State University, USA

Farhat Mahmud - Department of History, GC University, Lahore, Pakistan
Francis Robinson – Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Gyanesh Kudaisya – South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore,
Singapore
Ian Talbot- Department of History, University of Southampton, UK
Iftikhar Haider Malik - Department of History, University College of Newton Park, UK
Kathrine Adeney - Department of Political Science, University of Sheffield, UK
Mohammad Waseem – Department of Social Sciences, Lahore University of
Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan
Mridula Mukherjee - Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, India
Pippa Virdee- Department of Historical and Social Sciences, De Montfort
University, Leicester, UK
Qalb-i-Abid – Department of History, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
Sharif-ul-Mujahid – Pakistan Study Centre, University of Karachi, Karachi, Pakistan
Shinder S. Thandi - Department of Economics, Coventry University , UK
Shuan Gregory – Peace Studies, Bradford University, UK
Surrinder Singh - Department of History, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India
Tariq Rahman – National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University,
Islamabad, Pakistan
Virinder Kalra - Department of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK
DETAILED CONTENTS
THE HISTORIAN
JANUARY-JUNE 2008 (VOL. 6, NO. 1)
ARTICLES
FEMINISM: THE GROUNDS OF AN IDEA AND LOGICS OF

DISINTEGRATION …. M. AFZEL KHAN 9
THINKING FEMINISM THROUGH A MALE’S

MARGINALIZED POSITION …. UMBER BIN IBAD 27
LOCATING ‘ABORTION’ AS A BIRTH CONTROL

METHOD IN THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE …. TAHIR JAMIL 47
REVIEW ARTICLE
CONCEPTUALIZING “OTHERNESS” IN HISTORICAL DISCOURSES

(EDWARD SAID, BERNARD COHN AND O.W. WOLTERS)
…. HUSSAIN AHMAD KHAN 69
BOOK REVIEWS
ROY GUTMAN, HOW WE MISSED THE STORY (OSAMA BIN LADEN,

THE TALIBAN AND THE HIJACKING OF AFGHANISTAN)
(WASHINGTON : US INSTITUTE OF PEACE, 2008) 79
CARLO GINZBURG, THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS:

THE COSMOS OF A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MILLER
(TRANSLATED BY JOHN AND ANNE TEDESCHI),
(LONDON AND HENLEY: ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL, 1980) 85
NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS AND REVIEWERS
5
6
DETAILED CONTENTS
THE HISTORIAN
JULY-DECEMBER 2008 (VOL. 6, NO. 2)
ARTICLES
“AN INGLORIOUS END TO A GLORIOUS ADVENTURE”:

CONCEIVING AND EXECUTING THE KARGIL OPERATION (1999)
…. IRFAN WAHEED USMANI 93
DIVINE ATTRIBUTES - AN ATTEMPT TO REINTERPRET …. SOBIA TAHIR 115
EXTERIORITY OF DISCOURSE AND DISAPPEARANCE OF MAN:

NEGOTIATING WITH FOUCAULT IN CONSTRUCTING COLONIAL INDIA
…. HUSSAIN AHMAD KHAN 139
CONCEPT PAPER
ON THE POSSIBILITY OF INDIGENOUS THEORIZATION

IN SOCIAL SCIENCE: A CASE OF EPISTEMIC
MARGINALITY …. MIRZA ATHAR BAIG 155
BOOK REVIEWS
S ALAHUDDIN M ALIK , 1857-W AR OF INDEPENDENCE

OR CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS ? ( THE B RITISH PUBLIC REACTION )
(K ARACHI : O XFORD U NIVERSITY P RESS , 2008) 171
MARSHALL SAHLINS, ISLANDS OF HISTORY (CHICAGO AND LONDON:

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1985) 177
ANWAAR AHMAD, SHAUKAT SIDDIQI, SHAKHSIAT AUR FUN

(LAHORE: ACADEMY ADBIAT PAKISTAN, 2007) 183
SYED MOHAMMED HASHIM SHAH, SASSI-PANNU

(LAHORE: BOOK HOME, 2007) 185
NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS AND REVIEWERS
7
8
FEMINISM: THE GROUNDS OF AN IDEA AND
LOGICS OF DISINTEGRATION
M. AFZEL KHAN
UNIVERSITY OF THE ERFURT,
GERMANY
ABSTRACT
This paper looks at the history of the idea of

“feminism”. How it emerges with the liberal
construction of individuality that was the basis of
Enlightenment, and social contract theories of that
period. Women were the deprived minority of this
Enlightenment along with other minorities, as they
were deemed insufficient to be included in the idea of
a complete individual, and hence, a citizen. Early
feminist movement demands equality for women in
this respect. In the second wave of the feminist
movement, this demand for equality changes
proportions towards attacks on the construction of
female inferiority and subordination. But soon, it
turns into disillusionment with Enlightenment and a
realization that the Enlightenment itself is as
gendered as the earliest constructions were. As a
result, the thematics of Enlightenment become
problematic with this critique. Post-feminism
emerges, as somewhat, coeval to post-modernism, out
of feminism and modernity’s dissolution. As three
logics of this disintegration, I read Foucault, Derrida
and Deleuze, and conclude on that.
KEY WORDS: Feminism, Liberalism, Women, Enlightenment, Michel

Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Post-modernism.
The term “feminism” evokes mixed reactions when one first encounters
it. From an idea to a socio-political movement, and later, to a complete
academic discipline, it has many dimensions and multifarious
meanings. One common thread running in all these is that it is
something pertaining to women. This paper seeks to investigate the
9
The Historian, Vol. 06, No.1 (January – June 2008)
historical trajectory of this theme: How it emerges, what types of

transformations it goes through, and how these transformations impact
the discourse around it? The basic premise of the paper is that the issue
of feminism is a direct outcome of the concept of “individual” as free
and autonomous being. In its epistemic underpinnings it is modern in
the Western Enlightenment’s sense. Its political, economic, juridical,
and academic discourses are weaved around that concept. However, its
logical growth is such that it has in it the seeds of its dissolution and its
later emergence in more variegated and hybrid forms, where it is
almost unrecognizable.
For this paper, such writers are brought under analytical
spotlight who provide basic and fundamental logical thrusts of the
entire feminist movement in their respective temporal settings. These
include: Mary Wollstonecraft, to begin with as a pioneer; J.S. Mill, as a
first real theoretician of a liberal bent; Simone de Beauvoir, the
philosopher of feminism; Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone, as the
two radical representatives of second wave feminism and main
theoreticians of its politics; mention will also be made of Betty Friedan
as their prominent liberal counterpart in this phase; followed by the
post-modern critique of the whole movement, by such luminaries as
Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, as a dissolution of this earlier feminism
into post-feminism. The mainstream Marxist theory of feminism is
however side-stepped because for one, it lies outside the mainstream
feminist discourse, although its logical bearings carry lot of similarities;
and secondly, it will enlarge already expanded enquiry. Though, it must
be mentioned here that de Beauvoir and Kate Millet are left leading
feminists, inspired by Marx and Engels in many ways. I would also not
take into consideration the populist Germaine Greer, Ti-Grace
Atkinson, Eva Figes and the likes, for the same reason; and secondly,
Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millet’s theorization cover all of their
politico-logical grounds adequately, on the basis of which their
demands stem out; only Shulamith Firestone has something additional
to say. Friedan’s case is different, for once, as already mentioned, she
belongs to different stream of thought, and secondly, she is important to
understand the context in which the movement has shaped up in the
sixties.
The scope of this paper is quite broad, however, it is deemed
pertinent here to confine the discourse to an overview on the basis of
which a further research can be carried out that may be sufficient to
produce a preliminary research. If we look at the history of feminism as
a socio-political movement its earlier manifestations are to be found in
seventeenth century Europe. 1 In its earlier enunciations, it only sought
10
M. AFZEL KHAN, FEMINISM
re-interpretation of biblical texts so that a ground for better treatment of

women could be paved. It only emerges as a genuinely articulated idea
in nineteenth century as an off-shoot of the Enlightenment. Its first real
spokeswoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in 1792 demands some
sort of equality for women to perform their functions dutifully as
mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. In her opinion, it is only by
giving them their rights that they would be held responsible towards
their own being and their men folk. 2 Later on many imbibed this
theme, and on its basis, the first wave feminism took shape as a
movement for equal rights for women in the West. 3 Why this demand
for equality at that particular moment of time? Why not earlier or later?
One is entitled to ask these questions.
The tentative and preliminary answer to these questions lies
in this demand for equality in Enlightenment itself, but not in the
enlightenment of modernity, of science and progress, of democracy and
liberalism, but Enlightenment based on the conception of the individual
self that is thinking and rational, forming an individuality that is the
bedrock, the cornerstone of this modernity. How and why? We shall
examine it further.
Immanuel Kant defines Enlightenment as “man’s emergence
from his self-incurred immaturity.” 4 The immaturity alluded here is
“the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of
another.” 5 It is the idea of man’s maturity, the ability to use one’s own
understanding, that is the bedrock of this enlightenment, modernity,
science, progress, liberalism and democracy, and not vice-versa, as if
all these are epi-phenomenon and an after-event of this idea. The motto
of this idea is “Sapere aude” 6 , literally meaning “dare to be wise”
suggesting “the courage to use [one’s] own understanding”. 7 It is this
understanding, this wisdom that gives a person his/her identity; his/her
own-ness, and being. To be is to think ⎯ one thinks therefore one is!
The famous Cogito of Descartes: Cogito ergo sum 8 , literally means, “I
think therefore I am”.
Now, this cogito by its very definition disqualifies many from
the domain of selfhood. One may question: Does everyone think? The
answer to this question can only have come in the negative. Principally,
all should think, but practically few could have met that criterion and
thus many were discounted. This was the dilemma of enfranchisement
that few of the many were thinking and rational individuals. Women,
slaves, children, Negroes, non-western colonized were excluded from
the category of thinking and rational individuals and so were debarred
from having any right of enfranchisement. Even, in Locke, Rousseau
and Kant’s universal programs and manifestoes, many were excluded
11
not for any other reasons but just because of inability and lack. The
included constituted a majority and excluded became a minority; a
minority which otherwise was a majority.
Speaking in terms of citizenship, according to Michel Dusche
“the individual of the social contract is a self-sufficient entity”. 9 Kant,
while elaborating the concept, divides citizenship into two categories:
namely, active and passive citizens. Passive citizens are ‘mere
auxiliaries of the commonwealth, for they have to receive orders or
protection from other individuals, so that they do not possess civil
independence’ 10 . Kant enlists the passive citizens as:
Apprentices to merchants or tradesman, servants who

are not employed by the state, minors …, women in
general, and all those who are obliged to depend for
their living (i.e. for food and protection) on the
offices of others (excluding the state) ⎯ all of these
people have no civil personality …. 11
On the other hand, an active citizen is the one who must be

“(apart, of course, from being an adult male) … his own master (sui-
juris) and must have some property (which can include any skill, trade,
fine art or science) to support himself” 12 . So, maturity, reason, and
autarky go hand-in-hand, inconceivable without the other. Only a
mature and reasonable person is a self-sufficient one. The emergence of
political rights movements as human rights movements on the horizon
with the advent of the Enlightenment is not surprising then. It was
nothing else but the quest for inclusion in the domain of an active
individual citizen. In the presence of divine rights there were hardly
any human rights. These were only interpreted as divine/biblical
commands, either this way or that way, but never gained the acclaim
and currency which they later held. Because of overwhelming
exclusions from the ideals of active individual citizen, Proudhon
describes this social contract as an “offensive and defensive alliance of
those who possess against those who do not possess”. 13 Even Kant has
to suggest that “rulers should … encourage the greatest enlightenment
of their people” 14 so that the widest possible public participation in
policy making and public affairs is ensured. In such a way, the quest for
enlightenment was the quest for possession for those who were
dispossessed and inclusion for those who were excluded, otherwise,
enlightenment was already there with its enlightened.
Writing in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft is pleading the case for
women as a deprived segment of society, a minority (in the sense
12
described above). She pleads the case before their masters, men folk, a
la Kantian, to be encouraged for enlightenment, to have had more
responsibility as a necessary pre-requisite for a greater answerability.
Wollstonecraft writes:
It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in

some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to
expect that strength of natural affection which would
make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are
absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be
cunning, mean, and selfish. 15
In the same vein she asks that woman to be really rendered virtuous and
useful, “she must not, if she discharge her civil duties, want
individually the protection of civil laws; she must not be dependent on
her husband’s bounty for her subsistence during his life, or support
after his death”. 16 She questions the assumptions of woman’s
generosity and virtuosity that without being free and having property
rights she could not be held responsible for any deed. While indicting
in her own times a woman’s role as a wife, “who is faithful to her
husband” but “neither suckles nor educate her children, scarcely
deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen”, she
invokes the social contractarian logic, which says, “take away natural
rights, and duties become null.” 17
However, the first real case for equality for women was built
by J.S. Mill, in all its comprehensiveness, and that too under the
influence of Harriet Taylor, a women’s rights activist who later became
his wife. In a well articulated treatise on The Subjection of Women, he
at the very out-set questions the rules governing the relationships
between the sexes, “the principle which regulates the existing social
relations between the two sexes ⎯ the legal subordination of one sex to
the other ⎯ is wrong in itself … one of the chief hindrances to human
improvement”, and suggests in return its replacement by a “principle of
perfect equality”, which he defines as “admitting no power or privilege
on the one side, nor disability on the other”. 18
Although convinced of the strength of his argument he was
nevertheless wary of the would be (potential) criticism received to his
opinion on the basis of its novelty and unprecedented nature, as
established custom and general feeling went against it. Only by
showing ‘that custom and feeling from age to age … [had] owed their
existence to other causes than their soundness’, 19 could a case for
women’s equality be built. For this purpose he tries to dismantle the
13
belief in the soundness of general practices and established customs.

One reason for their weakness was that they might have outlived their
utility, “the consideration which recommended [them] may, like so
many other primeval social facts of the greatest importance, have
subsequently, in the course of ages, ceased to exist”, 20 though at the
time of their general adoption, with some evidence, they were fairly
thought to be the best. 21
Secondly, as regards woman’s position, “it arose simply from
the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every
woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her
inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to
some man”. 22 The origin of law lies in the recognition of existing
relations, “they convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right,
[and] give it the sanction of society”. 23
For Mill, the case of women’s bondage was similar to slavery,
“from being a mere affair of force between the master and the slave, [it]
became regularized and a matter of compact among the masters, who
binding themselves to one another for common protection, guaranteed
by their collective strength the private possessions of each, including
his slaves”. 24
So, it was not because of any genuine or valid reasons that
women were subordinated and made subject to men, but just because of
old habits and customs, whose origin might be of unjustified nature. On
the other hand, Mill believed that, in changing modern times, history
was taking a different course towards a progressive human society and
women’s subjection would be the “relic of the past [that was]
discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear”. 25
Mill’s optimism was thoroughly embedded in the ideals of
Enlightenment and gave a strong impetus to women rights movement,
and the demand for suffrage was the cornerstone of these rights. His
writing has also the underpinning of a relatively radical feminine
critique, which later on, professed more vehemently by the second
wave feminist writers and activists. The demand for equality entails,
equally, the question mark against the superiority of the other sex.
Mill touches this question but only as an after-question with some
suggestive hints and nothing more. Simone de Beauvoir takes up this
stream of thought, later on, in a subtle and critical fashion, and it is on
her critique that the second wave feminist movement gets its inspiration
and grounding.
Why did equality remain an inconclusive goal in spite of
Mill’s optimism and the struggle of first wave feminist movement?
Only substantial thing achieved was the right of franchise. Most of the
14
western countries, including USA, got it after the World War Ι. There
were other improvements particularly in the areas of education, work
conditions, and property rights as well, but overall women’s condition
remained subordinated to men with all the inherent dependencies. The
struggle for equality had only accentuated the pain of women’s unequal
status, they were still far behind.
Perhaps, there was a belated realization that the centuries old
societal traditions had in them a collective unconscious and any amount
of legislation would come to fail against these hard headed hidden
prejudices. They were the unconscious truths to be battled against. The
battles were fought then, to change the minds of people, in the form of
coffee house meetings and consciousness raising campaigns in the
second wave of the feminist movement, and had in them some
surprising results which we’ll come to see later. Let us first examine the
theoretical foundations of second wave feminism, whose major
articulations are to be found in the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Kate
Millet, Betty Friedan and Shulamith Firestone.
Simone de Beauvoir contests the second status of woman as
“the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential”. 26 Whereas,
“he is the Subject, he is the Absolute ⎯ she is the Other”. 27 She
considers this duality to be arbitrary, an event of historico-sociological
import, just like slavery, as Mill already spoken off, or the class
division of bourgeois as the One and the proletariat as the Other. The
Self is always conceived against the other. The division implies the
complementary nature of the terms divided in the pre-existing whole:
“Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein …. The
couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together”. 28
The whole was broken, nevertheless, and how it did all happen
remains perplexing but understandable at the same time: “No subject
will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential …. The
Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One”. 29
Man chose the Self and posed woman as the Other. It was
woman’s unique position where she could not leave man to struggle
against him that was different from proletariat’s and Negro’s; as a
matter of fact she was a partner in most of other struggles, and her own
struggle came afterwards and in a different way. The historical
precedent for this was deep rooted, perpetrated by religion,
philosophies of great many thinkers, the institution of family and its
economy linked with the powerful male as the master. Simone de
Beauvior disputes the biological and psychological basis of this
inequality, the problem lies in the fact that “in exchange for her liberty
15
she has received the false treasures of her ‘femininity’” 30 that

determined her psychology as well.
The tone set by de Beauvior was followed by many that laid
the basis for second wave feminist movement, equality remained the
goal, but for its achievement, the Other would have to challenge the
One and its superiority. Kate Millet took the challenge on political
grounds. In what she describes as “notes towards a theory of
patriarchy” 31 , she takes the whole gambit of sexual relationship as a
political field of analysis, in Weberian terms herrschaft, 32 a
relationship of dominance and subordinance. An institutionalized form
of social order whereby males rule females as a birthright priority is
achieved through “a most ingenious form of ‘interior colonization’”. 33
Its connotations are thoroughly steeped in ideology, biology, sociology,
class system, economy and pedagogy, force, anthropology, and
psychology.
Kate Millet analyses these categories separately. Ideology
functions at the level of socialization of temperament, role, and status
determination of the sexes. These are interdependent categories through
which the One is given a superior pedigree over the Other, and these
are then consented by both sexes unreflexivly. Biologically speaking,
“the heavier musculature of the male” can’t be the source of “male
supremacy, [as] like other political creeds, [it] does not finally reside in
physical strength but in the acceptance of a value system which is not
biological”. 34 So the crux is, she declares, “Patriarchy’s chief
institution is the family”. 35 Inspired by Goode’s 36 analysis, she finds
family to be “both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society;
a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole”. 37 In this whole, “the
family effects control and conformity where political and other
authorities are insufficient”. 38 It is not a coincidence that “the fate of
three patriarchal institutions, the family, society, and the state are
interrelated”. 39 As per Catholic percept, “the father is the head of the
family”, similarly the ruler is the head of the state, like a shepherd over
wives and children.
Her class analysis is interesting that even though of howsoever
low status a male may be like “a truck driver or butcher has always his
‘manhood’ to fall back upon”. 40 Again following a lead out of Goode’s
work, it entails a paradox:
While in lower social strata, the male is more likely

to claim authority on the strength of his sex rank
alone, he is actually obliged more often to share
power with women of his class who are economically
16
productive; whereas in the middle and upper classes,

there is less tendency to assert a blunt patriarchal
dominance, as men who enjoy such status have more
power in any case. 41
On the whole, the class division only confounds the issue for women,
while standing on the same ground, nevertheless, they are pitted against
each other as belonging to different classes. Patriarchy also works
while holding back educational and economic opportunities for women.
Force and violence are perpetrated against them in the form of rape and
other heinous crimes, “justified on the grounds that the enemy is either
an inferior species or really not human at all”. 42 Anthropologically
speaking, religion and myth are equal partners in the strength behind
patriarchy. Whereas all the above aspects combined have a
psychological bearing on both sexes, “their principal result is the
interiorization of patriarchal ideology”, 43 which tends “toward the
reification of the female … [as] a sexual object than a person”. 44
Betty Friedan defines this psychology in terms of a feminine
mystique. 45 She writes in the backdrop of American reversal to
feminine ideals after the gains of first wave feminism. In the 1950s and
early 1960s, the baby boom returned to America where more and more
women were encouraged to have a domestic job of a house wife rather
than a professional life outside. It was considered to be ideally suited to
their feminine nature. Friedan analyses the frustration of most of these
women as “the problem that has no name”. 46 As earlier with
Wollstonecraft’s era, the problem with these women was their leisure
time and sheer boredom without having their own identity related to
their work. They were glad to be identified with their fathers, husbands,
spouses, and children, but, in spite of that, they remained depressed and
frustrated.
Though wary and critical of this feminine mystique, Friedan
was not, nevertheless, a radical feminist. Among the radicals,
Shulamith Firestone stands out by asking some ultimate and less
probable questions. Taking on Engel’s analysis that women’s
subordination began with the development of private property, when
according to him, “the world historical defeat of the female sex” 47 took
place, she goes even further in the biological roots of this subordination
as prior to the development of private property. Woman’s woes are to
be blamed on her womb and the child bearing and child rearing
activities she performs, which make her dependant on man as the pillar
of this subordination. She thinks, by eliminating these hurdles woman
17
can be liberated? Her hope lies in developments taking place in modern

biological sciences that may make this reality possible. 48
Although following different strands of thought, all these four
leading feminists of second wave generation have one thing in
common, while struggling for equality it was not enough to demand for
equal rights but equally necessary to challenge the notions of One’s
supremacy. But, was enlightenment and modernity ready for that
challenge? My answer is an emphatic NO! In questioning and
challenging the One’s space, in the quest for inclusion on equal basis,
the women’s struggle, as all other struggles from the periphery, was
least successful in getting that space, as a matter of fact that much
space was not available from the very beginning; but in the process, it
destroyed that space as a sole and exclusive space of legitimacy, thus
opening up other spaces. In challenging the male, it challenged the
individual in terms that are limitedly defined by the Enlightenment,
thus, opening up spaces for multiple individualities, and rendering, in
the process, the individual of the Enlightenment as a hegemonic being.
The space of its sole legitimacy was no longer kosher.
Post-feminism emerges from feminism as a collapse of
feminism, as post-modernism emerges from modernity as a collapse of
modernity; whereas, all have their roots in the ideas of the
Enlightenment. It is not, however, to be described in historical terms
but purely on the basis of their logical priority. Historical traces may be
scattered but logical priorities unfold in this way, and the shift from
feminism to post-feminism, and similarly from modernism to post-
modernism constitute a discontinuity and a breach of perspective. Homi
Bhabha locates the meaning of the term ‘post’, in post-modernity, post-
coloniality, and post-feminism, not “in the popular use of the ‘post’ to
indicate sequentiality − after-feminism; or polarity − anti-modernism”
but, for him, “these terms that insistently gesture to the beyond, only
embody its restless and revisionary energy if they transform the present
into an expanded and ex-centric site of experience and
empowerment”. 49
Historically speaking, disenchantment with enlightenment has
deep roots from the very beginning of the Enlightenment.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and later on Heidegger to name
a few were its leading disenchanted souls. Disenchanted means that
they were not only its critics, but genuinely suffered in their own self,
the pangs of modernity. However, the real fall came in the seventies
and eighties, of the last century. But why has it collapsed, and why did
it have to collapse? The answers are multilayered, and one of its
18
leading fold is in the history of the idea of feminism or, in other words,
in the ontology of feminism itself.
The lacuna in the idea of Enlightenment was that it was a
particular and limited idea but claimed Universality. It had not had the
space of Universality into it. It grew in the West and only for the well
to do, educated, middle class westerners, sans the minorities previously
mentioned, including women. Its truth was a hegemonic truth. People
fell for it as a liberating idea; excluded wanted inclusion; but it failed to
carry them along. Eventually, they were given the rights but only in
abstraction, in the forms of law and juridical sanction, but not in
concrete terms as fully participating individualities. In their
desperation, the excluded, the peripheral questioned and challenged
their masters as if standing on medieval ancient grounds; but the
grounds were modern nevertheless.
Michel Foucault, leading French social thinker of the last
century, admires the feminist movement for what he considers to be its
politics of truth, the kind of politics found in Kate Millet’s writings;
feminist movement in the late sixties and early seventies was mainly
built around that kind of politics. One, other feature of this politics was
its micro nature in the forms of small gatherings in the coffee houses,
clubs and consciousness raising campaigns. This was also closely akin
to Foucault’s idea of microphysics of power and resistance. 50 This
politics of truth questioned the leading and well-established truths of its
times, the patriarchal and phallologocentric order of the period, the
modernity itself, though implicitly:
The real strength of the women’s liberation

movements is not that of having laid claim to the
specificity of their sexuality and the rights pertaining
to it, but actually departed from the discourse
conducted within the apparatuses of sexuality. 51
The contours of these apparatuses were ancient but modernity’s failure

was that it only strengthened them while professing to be doing
otherwise. It is in this sense that Foucault rejects the illusory nature of
theories of ‘liberation’ implied in the Marxist-Freudian notion of
repression. Psychoanalysis can be construed as the first real critique of
modernity’s idea of a complete individual-thinking-self by pointing out
the unconscious discrepancies and holes in that self, by splitting it
open. But its real aim was to retrieve that self and not to destroy it. The
retrieval was through the liberation of sexuality; while liberating
sexuality the self is regained from the unconscious. Foucault rejects this
19
as standing on modernity’s plane of an imposing order by means of

consent. This liberation remains, in the end, controlled liberation.
Politics of truth demands the dismantling of this idea of controlled
liberation, standing on narrow and flimsy grounds, and feminism
contributed to it by asking some critical questions. 52 The critical
questions pointed towards the single liberated self, asking and
demanding the possibility of multiple selves within and without that
single whole that could only be a male.
While dismantling the male, the order of modernity was
dismantled as that order was a phallologocentric order itself.
Describing Derrida’s sexualized practice of philosophy, Rosi Braidotti
comments, “by associating the illusion of the unitary presence of the
subject with a masculine phantasy: logocentrism is a phallic posture”. 53
Now what Derrida means by ‘logocentrism’? He takes it to be “the
recurring propensity of Western thinking to centralize or ground its
understanding on notions of ‘presence’ (logos)”. 54 What was “present”
to the West, at a particular moment of time, it considered it applicable
to all as a Universal Idea. It is not only logocentric but
phallologocentric; the order grows out of male phantasy, as all orders
grow out of it, “the enunciation of truth a typically masculine ‘habit’: it
is man who believes in women as in truth”. 55 Then, one may ask, who
is a ‘woman’? In Braidotti’s words, echoing Derrida, “that which
evades and is in excess of the phallologocentric structure of
subjectivity”. 56 And, what is feminine in woman: “which will not be
pinned down by truth is, in truth ⎯ feminine”. 57 So, how could
feminists have gained equality and inclusion in those frames of
reference which were male from their very inception? Here, Derrida
can be accused of an anti-feminist stance. But, it would be a misplaced
accusation; Derrida is writing post-feminist with the feminine to
dismantle the established truths of manhood, “I would love to write like
(a) woman. I am trying”. 58
What are required in this post-feminist age are the feminine
relational values that “privileges relationship rather than opposition,
gift rather than challenge, the offer of love rather than the declaration of
war”. 59 For Derrida, feminism itself is “the type of phallic, normative,
normalizing and hateful discourse” 60 that grew out of western
modernity. Feminism stands on “the place of phallocracy” 61 that is the
place of this modernity. Dissolve these frames of normalizing order and
its law, feminism stands dissolved as well, as no longer valid in a
relational space other than the space of exclusivity.
Post-modernity and post-feminism are trajectories towards
becoming-minority of women. If modernity represents order and
20
universality, feminism tries to stand as a counter to that order; but post-

modernity and post-feminism are not concerned with any order or
universality but multiplicity and universality in singularity that, for
Deleuze, can never be accomplished but might be lived through
becoming-minority of women. What is this becoming-minority?
Deleuze distinguishes between “the majority, as a homogeneous and
constant system, and the minority, as on the one hand sub-systems, and
on the other, the becoming-minority as process, both existent and
potential, a creative possibility”, 62 a possibility of “moving beyond the
dialectical antagonism between majority and minority”, 63 of male and
female itself. While there can be “no becoming majority, [as] majority
is not a becoming”, 64 what constitutes a minority?
Women, regardless of their number, are a minority,

definable as a state or a sub-set; but they only create
by rendering possible a becoming, which is not their
property, which they still have to enter, including
those who are not women. 65
Becoming-minority, then, is in contra-distinction to modernity’s

discourses, and of feminism as well. Like Foucault, Deleuze recognizes
feminism as ‘one of the new revolutionary possibilities’, but other than
that “for him the Women’s Liberation Movement is mistaken in its
assertion of a specifically feminine sexuality”. 66 What he envisages
instead is the desiring machines of a non-Oedipal woman:
In all the desiring machines sexuality does not consist

of an imaginary couple of woman and machine as
substitute for Oedipus, but in the couple of machine
and desire as production-desire, as real production of
a daughter born without a mother, of a non-Oedipal
woman. 67
While all the above mentioned discourses addressing the

question of the disintegration of feminism carry substantial weight,
however, their authors can be accused of anti-feminist posture, if their
posture is any posture at all; and in Foucault’s case misogyny as well. It
may be termed as improvised criticism because of two reasons: First,
they are writing post-feminism, post-gender, from a de-sexualized
terrain. Second, they admire feminism for what it had done and
achieved, but now they want to move beside and beyond it. One may
still question: What if this deconstruction is on the plane of
21
phallologoperipheria? 68 A centered de-centeredness? Again, of male

origin? There is a great deal of criticism available on this
deconstructive interpretation of feminism by the writers of such stature
like Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Michèle Le Doeuff,
who can be considered as the pioneers of post-feminist feminism,
which emerges in response to these deconstructive critiques.
But, what it entails for us? Where we stand in the moment of
history regarding feminism? In the beginning of Wollstonecraft era; in
the middle of second wave feminism; or in the third wave post-
feminism? From which stage can we follow it? May be from all three
stages! May be from nowhere at all! This discourse is not our discourse
in any way! Then, what is ours? We need to search for answers to these
questions. The best we can achieve is through looking for answers that
may arrive from the questions that are posed in the context of our own
culture and milieu, but what is taking place on the outside and for that
matter a dominant outside, and thus an inside as well, cannot be
ignored. However, it may only help to bring into sharp contrast and
focus our own possible questions and answers.
22
END NOTES
1. See Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, “Early Feminism” in Sarah Gamble, ed.,

Feminism and Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2001).
2. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of The Rights of Women, 2nd ed.
(London: 1792).
3. It is interesting to note that the term ‘feminist’ seems to have first been used
in 1871 in a French medical text to describe a cessation in development of the
sexual organs and characteristics in male patients, and thus suffering from the
‘feminization’ of their bodies. Later, Alexandre Dumas used it in a pamphlet,
on the subject of adultery, to describe women behaving in a supposedly
masculine way, in 1872. The term ‘feminism’ itself is of a later origin, but the
activity linked to it emerges long before the term came into vogue. See Jane
Freedman, Feminism (New Delhi: Viva Books, 2002), p.2.
4. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in
H. Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: 1970), p.54.
5. Ibid.
6. Originally it is Horace’s motto that Kant used here, which also means “Think
for yourself”. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. An outcome of Descartes method of doubt, his famous formula is deduced
from both of his works, Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1642),
however, exact lines are taken from Discourse on Method.
9. Michael Dusche, “Multiculturalism, Communitarianism, and Liberal
Pluralism” in Jamal Malik and Helmut Reifeld, eds., Religious Pluralism in
South Asia and Europe (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 131.
10. Immanuel Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals” in Kant’s Political Writings, p.
139.
11. Ibid., pp. 139-40.
12. Immanuel Kant, “Theory and Practice” in Kant’s Political Writings, p. 78.
13. Pierre J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth
Century (London: Pluto, 1989), p.118.
14. See Howard Williams, “Kant on the Social Contract” in David Boucher and
Paul Kelly, eds., The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls (London:
Routledge, 1994), p.140.
15. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of The Rights of Women, p.141.
16. Ibid., p.146.
17. Ibid.
18. See J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869). I have taken the extract
from Ann E. Cudd and Robin O. Andreasen, eds., Feminist Theory (Blackwell,
2005), p. 17.
19. Ibid., p.18.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., p.19.
23. Ibid.
23
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p.22.
26. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Everyman, 1993), p. xΙv.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., pp.xΙviii-xlix
29. Ibid., p.xΙvi.
30. Ibid., p.755.
31. Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1978), p.32.
32. Ibid., p.33. Herrschaft is a form of knowledge which emerges in one’s
enmeshing in its social surroundings, and conveys through work, language and
power. It is basically steeped in power; patriarchy as its one form. In German
Herr is a male referral, and schaft connotes knowledge.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., pp.36-7.
35. Ibid., p.45.
36. See William J. Goode, The Family (Englewood: Prentice-Hall, 1964).
37. Millet, Sexual Politics, p.45.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., p.49.
41. Ibid., p.50.
42. Ibid., p.64.
43. Ibid., p.75.
44. Ibid., p.76.
45. See Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique (New York: Laurel, 1983).
46. Ibid., p.26.
47. Frederick Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow:
1962), p.217.
48. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (London: The Women’s
Press, 1979).
49. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p.4.
50. Foucault has elaborated his idea of microphysics of power on many
occasions, but for its relation to feminism see I. Diamond and L. Quinby, eds.,
Foucault and Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).
51. Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh”, in C. Gordon, ed., Michel
Foucault: Power/Knowledge (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980).
52. See I. Diamond and L. Quinby, eds., Foucault and Feminism. Also see
Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance. For details see Foucault’s critique of
psychoanalysis, the major commentary on his work by Hubert L. Dreyfus and
Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982).
53. Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, p.100.
54.Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p.115.
24

56. Ibid., p.100.
57. J. Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Style (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979), pp.54-5.
58. J. Derrida, “Discussion” in Nietzsche aujourd’hui (Paris, 1973), p.299.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p.105.
62. G. Deleuze, “Philosophie et minorité”, Critique, 369 (Feb. 1978): 154-5.
64. Deleuze, Critique, pp.154-5.
65. Ibid.
67. G. Deleuze, “Bilan-programme pour machines désirantes”, Minuit, 2
(1973): 16.
68. The term coined here is meant to describe the phallologocentric periphery
that is de-centered, but again, in phallus and logos’ terms. For details on
critique of Postmodernism and Postfeminism, see Sue Thornham,
“Postmodernism and Feminism” in Stuart Sim, ed., The Routledge Companion
to Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2001), and also see Braidotti, Patterns
of Dissonance.
25
THINKING FEMINISM THROUGH A MALE’S
MARGINALIZED POSITION
UMBER BIN IBAD

GC UNIVERSITY, LAHORE,
PAKISTAN
ABSTRACT
This article, while searching through the ground of

feminism, differentiates the elements of feminism as it
generated in western social order. The clearing of the
ground of feminism brings out the point that the
struggle of feminism was the struggle to gain liberty
to live with ones identity. The struggle generates its
proponents bringing out rational constructions
defining and supporting the possibilities of liberation.
At the end of second wave of feminism, where the
feminists faced the position of leveling-subject, there,
at the same time, a larger disillusion and
disintegration also took place. The moment of
subject-levelling engenders new questions regarding
one’s identity and conception of femininity. Relating
femininity with women, as defined through multiple
traditions and cultures only helps producing
complexity. The moment demands to find out more
general essentiality of femininity and struggle to
move towards its goal. The best way is to form
identity at a distance of truth that would reduce the
binary strictness and produce the very space of living
free of coercion.
KEY WORDS: Feminism, Western Society, Liberalism, Modernism,

Women, Identity.
INTRODUCTION
I know whatever I am going to say is not normal, that is, not “normal”
as you “normally” listen. This “normally” orders speech to come out in
already familiar, therefore, already well-settled modes. I know this
27
writing is not the case of normality. And to foresee what would happen
after reading whatever is to come out I am feeling ashamed. I am not
confident enough to say what I want to say. I just want to hide myself
from you and from whatever is going to happen. I am feeling like a
feminine. But I’ll write and let you read.
I want to write from my position. By position I mean the
context of my temporality and the way I experience the signs of the
world around. But what I am to write is already destined toward the
way given to me. This destiny is part of the collectivities that fashion
my position. I am destined to write, satisfactorily, by asking to write
something on feminism.1 The writing, already mentioned in the
signified that comes with the accompanied signs and with my position,
has to be located in certain context of the discourse initiated by the
movement termed as feminism.
In my effort, from the very start, I find many difficulties. The
difficulty arises out of strangeness of my position with the generated
discourse that is understood as the discourse of feminism. This
strangeness is multifaceted . I am male, at least that is the construction
of the sign that is given to me, owned by me, displayed by me and
expected by me contextualizing my position. Yet this construction of
owning “male” constitutes a binary opposition with “female”. Only
through this binary opposition the term “female” and with it
“feminism” can get its meaning. (From where else the term “feminism”
takes its root but from female.) If the meaning of “female” is bound to
come out from its opposition to “male” then how is it possible for any
position that is constructed with one polarity to bring out other’s
position satisfactorily. (What do we mean by satisfactorily? In multiple
ways one can get satisfaction. The multiplicity may confuse us in
finding our way out. Let me change satisfactorily with “itself.” This is
an intervention and I do accept it. But to speak from my position let me
do this. The satisfaction may be achieved from multiple ways. It is a
psychological position that may be reached from inward or outward
efforts. But we are here concerned with the manifestation of the being-
itself, that is of feminism. It is only when feminism, from its
femininity, brings out being-itself only then the appearance of the being
would be the true appearance of itself.)2
Feminism means the doctrine of feminine. What do we mean
by doctrine of feminine? Is this doctrine given to Feminine or doctrine
coming out of feminine? If it is given to feminine then it can be
understood only with relation to the agency that ordered, controlled and
gave the doctrine. 3 Why? If the essence of a being is not its existence
28
UMBER BIN IBAD, THINKING FEMINISM
then its presence is dependent upon the defined essence and the agency
who defines the essence. 4
Who else can give the doctrine but it’s very other that is male
itself? But then it is the fate of female to live with this order, with
femininity, since the known history. Feminism must not be this
doctrine. It must be different. It must be something coming out of
feminine itself in its effort to understand itself from itself. Then it must
be historical. Being a rational-being feminine must have tried to
understand itself from the very self-reflective moment the feminine
ever experienced. 5 But we are talking here about doctrine. The doctrine
can only be doctrine when it comes out in a systematic way to put
forward its truth with the clear sense of its ‘Other,’ what it is not. 6 But,
is it really the case that feminism, as a doctrine, produced its other,
while already being other of male, through defining distinctively the
very limits of its own self? If it is, then, is it the case that the doctrine
defined through feminism kept its distinctness and has not dissolved
itself altogether? Is it the case that the very movement of feminism
retained the very essence of feminine itself, and kept itself distanced
from becoming male itself, that is, becoming what it is not?
Following is an effort to bring out answers, though no claim of
finality has been made. The article must be understood as an effort to
understand the primary essentiality of feminism from a programmatic
perspective. I shall take Derrida as my guide to analyze the multiple
texts and the lines to pursue. I shall trace the history of feminism, but,
shall give significance to the second wave of feminism. I’ll try to find
out the ground of feminism to understand its essentiality, instead of
perusing on historical facticity. Bringing out self-understanding of
second wave feminism through Friedan, Shulamith Firestone and Rosi
Braidotti, I shall bring forward understanding of Simone de Beauvoir
emphasizing women’s being as social construction transformed into
being feminine. To signify the conception of modern subject I shall
trace its origin in Descartes and engage his conception with the critique
of Derrida and Foucault. It is important to understand the construction
of male as it is developed through psychoanalysis, as a re-assured
paradigm of modernity’s male order. I’ll try to bring out the
construction through Freudian readings, and thus bring the sexualized
expression of male-hood of modernity into the light.
It will be shown that the larger strand of second wave
movement faced disillusionment as it entered into post-modern
condition. Many earlier theorists, like Friedan, find themselves in the
condition of distress. The expression of their very disillusionment
brings back, on the one hand, the owning of the very roots of femininity
29
that was vehemently opposed during second wave of feminism, while,

on the other hand, it provides conservative scholars in the very world of
ours the strong justifying ground to oppose feminism. I’ll not engage in
debate with any current conservative theorist. I’ll content myself with
bringing out the “order” maintained through “tradition” preserving
through Iqbal’s, a modern Muslim thinker, writings.
I’ll try to bring out the essentiality of feminism and try to see
that very essentiality that I understand as struggle to find freedom from
the unique but oppressed positionality, despite group position. It is not
important to be women, as a gender, to be in the condition of feminine.
Any individual can find itself in the position of femininity. The
importance is to be as one-self, truly, without consuming one’s other
for enhancing one’s existence. And it can only happen if the self lives
and relates with its other at its margins. Only through this, the life free
of oppression and injustice can be envisioned and lived through.
(I)
As a historical phenomenon feminism came out in Western Europe.

This phenomenon becomes phenomenon when it gathers itself around
similar form of its truth. Only when the phenomenon of feminism
brings out for others its essence in a way that gathers its sameness,
could this qualify to be called a phenomenon. Whether it happened is a
questionable matter. “In many ways it is still too soon to write the
history of feminist thought, and besides, feminism is neither a concept
nor even a systematic set of utterances about women. It is, rather, the
means chosen by certain women to situate themselves in reality so as to
redesign their feminine condition.” 7
The means chosen by certain women to redesign their feminine
condition remained directed to achieve equality from the order
oppressing their rights since long. From Stonecraft to suffrage
movement the effort of the phenomenon remained to ask same rights
for the women as that of men. Voices remained manifold, sometimes
low and sometimes high but they kept their presence in the last two
hundred years in Europe and USA, specifically, and in the world, in
general. 8 The presence however kept its identity or tried to keep its
identity: an effort to be equal and similar to its opposite, that is, to
become male.
The rational construction of first wave women, succinctly, comes
out through Mill’s logical explanations. He, epitomizing the
enlightenment’s movement, questions the rules within the order
governing the relationships between the sexes, “the principle which
30
regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes ⎯ the
legal subordination of one sex to the other ⎯ is wrong in itself … one
of the chief hindrances to human improvement”, and suggests in return
its replacement by a “principle of perfect equality”, which he defines as
“admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the
other.” 9
The dynamism of the first wave, with the forces of capitalism,
soon transformed into a struggle for juridical equality, while leaving the
struggle for rational equality linked with the tradition of enlightenment,
so strongly demonstrated by Mill through his rational argumentation,
into an oblivion. 10 After the World War I the story of feminism was a
story of old days. The economic prosperity lost the motive to struggle
for the rights when women can get all the leisure in the world within
existing social order. The period of baby-boom, conclusively, brought
out the triumph of prosperity and defeat of the struggle for freedom. 11
The defiance, however, emerged from the very ground of wealth and
prosperity. The dialectics of self-development defied the pleasure trap
of passivity, and the struggle began. 12
The struggle for freedom and equality found its next and fullest
stage in the second wave of feminism. The voice, so far sporadic, found
its central point and that is, patriarchy, the prevailing male’s social
order, in general, justifying the rules of gender development and
relationship, as a seed for generating oppression and injustice.
“Whether the authors be of the liberal kind (Betty Friedan and National
Organization of Women) or radical (Ti Grace Atkinson and her
political battlefield maps in Amazon Odyssey) they all develop in their
own ways a precise standpoint on the forms and impact of a situation of
oppression.” 13
Only at the later stages of its presence the phenomenon could also
bring out its presence in the gathered sameness. And only then the
name of feminism was owned by the sporadic voices of female. The
voices were bringing out desire of feminine to be known as feminists
that is “the desire to discover, understand and share the experience of
women, in a sense of commonness that cuts across all the established
differences of class, race and lifestyles that separate women.” 14 The
later stage, as called by many as second wave of feminism, is a special
moment in the long history of women’s struggle.15
The mid-twentieth century wave of feminism has

gone further and asked more than its predecessors.
Like patriarchy itself, the extent and influence of the
anti-patriarchal women’s movement is difficult to
31
grasp. It is not defined by the specific organizations,

groupings, or factions, though these exist in
abundance. It exists in many stages of development,
throughout the world, at the most local, pragmatic
levels, as a network of formal and informal
communications, as a growing body of analysis and
theory, and as a profound moral, psychic, and
philosophical revaluation of what it means to be
human.16
Only through the long struggle the women remained able to bring out
their voices from the condition of femininity. The long established
dialectical historical relation between male and female, forming the
ground of patriarchal social order only enabled male to exist on the
consumption of its other, that is, female. The relationship between this
dialectic could only be shattered through resisting the other. The
struggle of women, in the condition of femininity, brought out that
resistance, in the hope of enabling women and society at large to live in
a condition of justice and non-oppression. 17
The second wave of feminism or “feminism-owned-stage” 18
conclusively brings out the point that inequality would finally be
abolished through a leveling of women and men. The condition of
woman they thought was:
I’m not real in this culture that gave birth to me and

has used me. I’m just a collection of myths: a bit-
player in the drama of existence. The idea of me is
real: temptress, goddess, child, mother-but I myself
have no reality. Women’s mythical dimension is real
and recognizable; its their human dimension that is
clearly false and will be denied to the last, to my last
breath. 19
The disillusionment from the culture, from the larger social order,
produced the struggle of women that remained susceptible to the
difference between male and female. This difference for them remained
the point of oppression and inequality, their condition of femininity.
Only through denying the difference the system of domination and
oppression would finally be abolished. When Atkinson maintains that
feminism must begin by criticizing the hold exercised over women’s
bodies by the culturally dominant sexuality, that is, monogamous
heterosexuality, she is representing the mood of the whole movement.
32
Men neatly decimated mankind by one half when

they took advantage of the social disability of those
men who bore the burden of the reproductive process.
Men invaded the being of those individuals now
defined as functions, or females, appropriated their
human characteristics, and occupied their bodies. The
original rape was political, the robbing of one half of
Mankind of its humanity.20
The redemption of original political sin would be to give back the one
half of Mankind its humanity. It happened, and happened through
resistance yet the change occurs without completion. The struggle
achieved it largely, though, in the West, and tried to achieve it in the
other part of the world. But the success remains half-won battle. The
other of male, female, showed its separate existence through its
struggle yet what it gained is the male-ness. Instead of one male,
culture has to live with two males. In the words of Betty Friedan
criticizing the ideal for which she had fought for fifteen years; I sense
other victories we thought were won yielding illusory gains; I see new
dimensions to problems we thought were solved. 21
In West, it is perfectly possible for a woman to be treated if it
wants to be treated in social relations like a male. The advanced
capitalist society has given way to the “liberating” women and opened
almost all the doors to the working force coming from the women side.
The progress towards equality has also led women towards a situation
in which, according to the treacherous logic of the system, they run the
risk of achieving a new invisibility: equal to and distinct from men. 22
The feminist movement, at the end of second wave of
feminism, finds itself in the need of revision and new insight. It finds
itself in the age of post-modernity, in the condition of post-feminism. 23
The question “what has feminist achieved?” is being asked again and
the suggestions to relocate the struggle are being suggested. Post-
feminism is an age of lost identities and subjective conceptions. The
concept of women has itself become a problem. The concept becomes
problematic “because it is crowded with the over-determinations of
male supremacy, invoking in every formulation the limit, contrasting
Other, or mediated self-reflection of a culture built on the control of
females. In attempting to speak for women, feminism often seems to
presuppose that it knows what women truly are, but such an assumption
is foolhardy…No matter where we turn-to historical documents,
philosophical constructions, social scientific statistics, introspection, or
33
daily practices…For feminists, who must transcend this discourse, it

appears we have nowhere to turn.” 24
(II)
Living in a world deeply structured around religio-patriarchal order, the

world where feminism is already in infancy and exists among multiple
contesting, if not condemned positions, while even those are marginal
points, the effect of the very un-decidability of post-feminist position
coupled with the achievements of second wave of feminism results in
producing negative condition. It is the world where a large number of
religious- minded or even non-religious persons embedded deeply into
religio-conventional orders, in a fore-having possible threat of
feminism, like, family dis-integration, abortion rights, AIDS threats,
etc., understands feminist activities, the very reason of social distress.
The liberation of women is viewed as a lost struggle and disillusioned
path that has to be avoided. The whole history of feminism, instead of
giving a fresh spirit towards liberation, seems to have the potential to
reduce to the conservatism and threat to women’s liberation in pushing
back their condition of femininity. It is the moment to ask once again
“what is feminism” from the very position of our residing.
In order to bring to light the very essentiality of the struggle
I’ll try to bring out the main ground of the feminist movement already
rooted in the intellectual and political movement of enlightenment and
structured at the very same time within western social order that, under
pressure of multiple material forces, gave its liberating essentiality the
way out. It is the very movement of enlightenment that creates the
possibility of feminist struggle by epitomizing the developmental
rational possibilities of patriarchal social order.
The liberating essentiality of feminism, however, lies in the
conception of subject that remained prevalent throughout the modern
western enlightenment and can be considered to be rooted in the
theoretical construction of Descartes. The conception of subject as
rooted in Cartesian theoretical construction was also encountered in
modern Muslim world. The need arises to look at this encounter closely
only to find out the very ground of patriarchal social order. I’ll try to
engage, therefore, briefly with the writings of Iqbal, a major religio-
logo-centrist figure of modern Muslim world, especially of
subcontinent, to bring out the sexualized-order of our major
philosophical tradition.
34
CONCEPTION OF SUBJECT: AS A GROUND OF FEMINISM
Lévi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of

primitive societies, reaches the following conclusion: ‘Passage from the
state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to
view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation,
opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms,
constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and
immediately given data of social reality.’ 25
The fundamental and immediately given data of social reality
also produces and congeals the contrast between man and woman as a
biologically different beings. When nature produces two beings
differently, how can it be changed? But the difference soon transformed
into the difference of privilege making social order responsible for
keeping it. A little-known feminist of the seventeenth century, Poulain
de la Barre, put it this way: ‘All that has been written about women by
men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party to the
lawsuit.’26Everywhere, at all times, the males have displayed their
satisfaction in feeling that they are the lords of creation. ‘Blessed be
God ... that He did not make me a woman,’ say the Jews in their
morning prayers, while their wives pray on a note of resignation:
‘Blessed be the Lord, who created me according to His will.’ The first
among the blessings for which Plato thanked the gods was that he had
been created free, not enslaved; the second, a man, not a woman. But
the males could not enjoy this privilege fully unless they believed it to
be founded on the absolute and the eternal; they sought to make the fact
of their supremacy into a right. 27
Man’s superiority founded upon the conception of absolute
and eternal principles emerged out of his understanding of his, and in
fact the whole Mankind’s, very own self. How does he understand
himself and with it understand Other is important and pertinent for the
feminists and therefore for me to bring out the very structure for whom
man stands for and for whom feminists’ envy to transform themselves.
To find out our way we can look into two directions. One
would show us how the unity of subject is formed, though, without
body. This line of thought is normally taken by the subjectivist and
religiously bent proponents. The other shows us how, after including
body in the constructed subject, the conception of subject keeps it’s
holding on truth and unity without change. Both the lines, however,
merge to create a powerful image of subject as a male though not
necessarily centered on the very tradition of Rationality. The subject
without body, though always already a sexualized subject, subject-
35
male, carried on its movement of creating rational order and re-

presenting truth. The logo-centricism of subject later gets supplemented
with phallo-centricism, only to become more powerful.
The conception of subject, as the first line of movement
shows, has its modern, western origin in Descartes’ conception of self;
cogito ergo sum. To elevate one’s identity to the level of thought,
Descartes enables rationality to achieve truth without surrendering to
the traditional mode of rationality that is heavily burdened through
authority. The cogito works as the founding moment to give way to the
multiple knowledge disciplines only to give them the very unifying
ground knowledge-subject needed always. 28
This line of thought, whether religious or non-religious,
produces a certain conception of rationality. This very conception is the
ground of the rational order that can be produced and justified either
through invoking religion or not. Cartesian subject claims to have that
unifying central ground that can produce universal and eternal truths
without moving away from it to some external authority. Its
transcendence or self-reflectivity provide the very ground of
justification. The subject is centered upon logos.30 The situation,
however, developed differently in a strand of thought led by Iqbal.
Rationality was taken not in Cartesian sense but little differently.
The duality produced by Descartes was accepted by Iqbal, a
modern religiously bent thinker, that is, in Muslim thought, though
only with some reservations. The reservations include, only, giving
biological roots its due importance. His acceptance of duality was to
rescue subject from its enervating tendencies in the hands of the British
philosophers of his time like Bradley who, following Hegel, considered
self as the seat of opposing tendencies only to struggle to attain that
unification that Iqbal was so eager to put forward. Iqbal’s concept of
ego, or the very principle of unification of personality, was founded
upon his interpreted Islamic conception of personality. This conception,
though coming out of biological roots, yet ignored the sexualized
division and takes male as the ground of human characteristics. Only
through participating in this ground can any one of male, in a condition
of being human, attain its true nature. 29
Iqbal accepted the Cartesian dichotomy of Subject / object or I
and Other but at the very same time he lets emotions include with I. In
this way he dissolves the hardened dichotomy of I and Other that was
already linked with the mind and body duality. Iqbal’s acceptance of
duality and at the very same time dissolving its boundaries is to include
an element of the Other of I into I. The ego, though, at the very same
time maintain its identity yet this identity allows to enter into itself that
36
was otherwise refuted to get entered by Descartes into his constructed

cogito. Descartes thereby saved rationality to get corrupted from the
particular influences of passions and thus ensured possibility of
objectification of representation in the geometrical space. He didn’t
allow passions because they would have distorted the representational
reality. Iqbal’s introduction of passions into Cogito, also means letting
passions distort rationality or letting particularity distort universality.
How can we understand this situation? Descartes understood
Cogito only through its Other. What will be the other of “the included
Cogito and its Other” in this situation? There must be something and
that must be nothing. When there is everything it is hard to distinguish
it from nothing. Descartes gave the name to himself only because there
is its Other. Naming can only make sense in this regard. How can we
make sense of Iqbal’s ego? What is its Other here if not passions? His
ego is not constructed for bringing out rationality in its transparent and
absolute form. Against whom his ego then stands for?
When we are unable to name any activity, the activity denies
it’s holding to ourselves. The denied holding remains in the absence
and does not come out in the presence. What was in the presence keeps
on presencing. What was in the presence before the effort of Iqbal in
bringing out “included Cogito and the Other”. It was Ego. It was the
Ego of theological history of Iqbal. In the absence of “included Cogito
and the Other” the already present Ego of theological history takes its
re-presence.
Cartesian constructed Cogito distanced itself from the body to
which it remained attached mysteriously. The condition of body that
could only make possible the determined existence of subjectivity
repressed into the absence. Only after releasing that repression the
Cogito could discover its own conditions. In the history of western
ideas it was Freud and Nietzsche who gave that repression a way out to
seat already repressed subject on its condition. The condition remained
passions coming out of body that was already earlier than anything but
sexualized rift arising into male/female dichotomy.
If Cartesian Cogito was conditioned by sexualized body then
to which condition Iqbal’s Ego was linked? It must have been
conditioned by body because otherwise Ego has to face the very same
problem of Cartesian mind / body dichotomy. Even Iqbal’s inclusion of
passion into cogito denied any such reading. The inclusion of passion
links body from Ego. This inclusion conditions Ego through body. But
what is this body that conditions Iqbal’s Ego as Iqbal’s Ego is already a
theologically historically rooted. The body is sexually dichotomized in
37
a way the male rules the female. Only in that prioritized dichotomy
does Iqbal’s Ego and body make sense.
Iqbal, in its repulsion of colonizer, takes back the theoretical
framework of understanding. Instead of looking forward the paradigm
of “Muslim” understanding developed while looking back. But in the
tradition woman is already a point of neglect. There is no feminine
theoretical tradition. If there is any theoretical tradition it is only of
Muslim males, though even that is a questionable matter. If woman has
to find its place it is only through the interpreted boundaries of male. 32
The other way towards the conception of subject moves while
including body, in fact by giving priority to the body and Desires.
Pychoanalysis from Freud through Lacan is one of those lines that
presented such a conception. It is the un-thought that drive and orient
the very rational activity. It is not the centre that decides; it is the very
seat of desire, called unconscious, drives and moves human being and
form that very concept called subject. The unconscious remains a seat
of unfulfilled desire and a seat of complexes developed with the growth
of personality in the very effort of organism to live in an otherwise
hostile world. The most significant complex in human development
remained Oedipus complex and Castration fear because of their ability
to produce the identity of the living organism, called human being.
Both Oedipus and castration complexes are the description of male
development and his fear to lose its identity of being male. The identity
of male-subject depends upon the penis it has and the battle between
son and father to win, in a dialectical struggle, the very same desired
woman. Due to its physical weakness the son loses the battle and
remained within the fear of losing his penis. The whole struggle of
development remained a struggle to become male in a condition of
being human and win over the desired woman. The stress from
logocentrism shifted to the phallocentrism, the actuality re-translated
into symbolic imagination. Yet the situation remained same.
Traditional order is that of man, and only around his understanding the
condition and rules exist and prevail; woman has to accept its very
own-self defining within man’s prevailing order or itself become a
male. 31
With a brief overview of the conception of subject that
appears as the conception of male-subject what becomes clear is the
conception of woman. The woman was defined by male and for male in
the condition of femininity. The only tradition and order left for woman
is to let her-self merged in the traditions and orders of the male. But
then the initial question creeps in; how can “male” bring out something
38
that may otherwise could come out from its opposition that is “female”
and this bringing out should have to remain bringing out from “itself”?
To follow the path that may bring out answers, satisfactorily,
let us look again the very categories defining the whole debate, that is,
male and female. What do we mean by male and female? Is it some
thing fixed both biologically and naturally? Is the binary opposition
between male/female, translates in the binary opposition of
masculine/feminine un-problematically is fixed and transcend
language?
For many it is so obvious that they may find it strange to doubt
it and find it an occasion to make fun of my own male-ness. This is fine
but doesn’t give us answer. Is it fine to live there with self-evident
truths and to consider self-evidence as the only criterion of truth? To
question self-evident means opening new space in which self-evident
shows it-self. Whether self-evident could show itself is a matter of
showing in temporality. Let us question the un-questionable.
MALE AND FEMALE: IN SEARCH OF SOCIALIZED CONSTRUCTIONS
If man and woman are fixed and determined categories biologically,

nothing further could change their construction. Man has to develop
further as a male, in the condition of masculinity and woman as female
in the condition of femininity. Is it really the case? Simone says woman
is the construction of civilization. Woman becomes female, in the
condition of femininity, through socializing tactics. A certain order in
certain tradition forms a specific sort of feminine being. Biological
differences between male and female do not determine their
personality.
Generally a man is male because it has penis. Even Freud’s
description of male is grounded upon this conception. But then there
are many living beings (like animals) that have penis but they don’t
turn up to be male-subject. Biological difference can only bring out
condition, or to use Simone’s words, situate facticity, that may direct to
develop personality in certain direction to attain their respective
identities. Yet this difference does not and can not produce difference
between man and woman qua male/female, in which male shows
certain privileged position over female. Differences are there,
everywhere around in the world, yet those differences do not arrange,
being difference, in pejorative hierarchies.
Following Simone, it is to be pointed out, that already existing
norms and social values produce identities, with learned traits and
characteristics, later to be termed as male and female. This construction
39
of identities must be understood as a dialectical process where subject

is constructed through gender identification and desire. 33 But here we
should bring further clarity in the concepts, masculine and feminine.
The biological differences, that is, on the ground of sexual and
reproductive organs, prior to any socialization process may be
classified as male and female but the characteristics developed through
socialization that develop one category as a privileged identity over the
other may be termed as masculine and the oppressed as feminine. The
very term masculinity, regardless of its linkage with male-ness, brings
out the situation of agency and power. While feminine becomes a
general condition in social structure as oppressed and dominated
position.
FREEDOM FROM UNIVERSALITY;A CONSTANT STRUGGLE FOR LIVING

THROUGH ONE’S POSITION
Throughout the whole discussion we have used the terms male or

female and masculine or feminine as a universal category applicable to
every one in the world. The point, however, arises, now, that how is it
possible that if subjects are developed through masculine or feminine
attributes or even criss-crossing of them, and these are developed
through and within certain normative orders, they are universally
similar. As normative and social orders are different for different social
groups the masculinity and femininity must have been developed
differently in different groups, regardless of their gender position. Each
normative order must produce different form of oppression and
coercion for its presence. Then how much is it rational to talk of binary
oppositions of masculine/feminine or male /female in gender situation
for segregating man and woman? To bring forward Spivak to support
my point let me quote her few lines:
The position that only the subaltern can know the

subaltern, only women can know women and so on,
cannot be held as a theoretical pre-supposition either,
for it predicates the possibility of knowledge on
identity. Whatever the political necessity for holding
the position, and whatever the advisability for
attempting to “identify” (with) the other as subject in
order to know her, knowledge is made possible and
sustained by irreducible difference, not identity. 34
40
It is difference that makes knowledge possible. It is not listening but

saying that makes knowledge possible. It is the enunciation and
therefore the positioning of the subject in certain normative context that
makes knowledge possible. Each enunciation brings out form of
controls and domination of power. Each form of control and
domination of power takes its force through its universality claim that
is applicable for all the other subjects. Each naming is a form of control
and each identity is an owning of a name. In the words of Deleuze: “A
text, for me, is only a small cog within an extra-textual practice. It is
not a question of commenting (on) the text in terms of textual practice,
nor of any other methods, but of seeing its use in the extra-textual
practice into which it extends.” 35
Owning universal identity makes subject prone to oppression
and oblivious of its very true self. In a society, among the network of
relations and hierarchy of power, a subject becomes subject only when
it gets recognized in its identity. This identity is not chosen by the
subject but given to it through subject’s very determinations and
conditions. Subject becomes what the network of relations fashions it
into. The very owning of identity produces the illusion of self that
never belongs to it but stands, as a particular, for the dominating
universal. 36
Each subject, however, resides in body or, to put it another
way, it is body that generates subjectivity. Each body is unique through
its environment, power relations, forms of control and oppressions
under which it resides and keeps its presence. In the words of Foucault:
What I want to show is how power relations can materially penetrate
the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the
subject’s own representation. 37
By bringing forward individuality does not mean the
ideological liberal construct. It means stress on each individual to get as
close to its very own self as possible and with it get engaged in
discourse bringing out forms of power of oppression and with it
struggle to possess its very own power. To be identified as woman does
not qualify woman in the condition of femininity due to its universal
subject-participation. It is possible that situation may be other way
round. It is the position of subject, within the network of power
relations that determines the position of femininity regardless of gender
conditions. Women have a special and privileged role to play in the
development of this revolutionary awareness, but they are not the only
active subjects.
41
WOMEN, IN THE CONDITION OF FEMININITY, AS NEGATION OF MALE

AND THEREFORE TRACING OF MOVEMENT OF TRUTH
Patriarchy, as a social system, excludes woman from participating
within it as a meaning-generating subject. The exclusion makes woman
as other of male and at the very same time point of meaninglessness.
The social order and construction of forms of control and their presence
keep the privilege of male. To be a male means not to be a female.
What is, then, to be avoided to become that is male; all those
characteristics that are not required to maintain the social order.
Feminine is needed as a mirror to be looked upon for the righteousness
that may be achieved by possessing and, at the very same time,
subletting the other that is female.
Femininity is the very ground of the truth of masculine
patriarchal system. Yet this ground remains evasive. “There is no such
thing as the essence of woman because woman averts, she is averted of
herself.” The woman, in the condition of femininity, in a totality of
relevance, comes out as a symbol of non-identity, the place appears as
truth to be pinned down but yet remain distanced from logocentrism.
That, which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth-feminine.
The evasiveness of the woman, however, does not reduce her
position of truth. She remains the point of truth and the moment of
force in patriarchal system. The sailing of the ship get its force through
the sails of the ship. The sails that remained controlled yet provide the
impulse and force to the ship. The truth of the masculine society resides
in the silence of its feminine. Only the presence of that silence gives the
validity of truth to masculinity. Only the possession of the feminine
enables masculinity to display its truth. 38
CONCLUSION
I found knowledge positioned within binary opposition of male/female.

Then came the resistance of a category, that is, female in the form of
Feminism against other. It shook the binary opposition but ended only
to reduce binary opposition into a single category of male. The
resistance itself becomes an alliance of oppression. In the words of
Derrida:
Feminism is nothing but the operation of a woman

who aspires to be like a man. And in order to
resemble the masculine dogmatic philosopher this
woman lays claim just as much as he-to truth,
42
science, objectivity in all their castrated delusions of

virility. It wants a castrated woman. 39
Logocentrism and phallocentrism remained the characteristics of

defining subject. Iqbal’s conception remained no exception, in fact it
reinstate logocentrism with theological affirmation where truth remains
enhancing the power of one category within binary opposition. The
truth keeps its movement towards dominating one category upon
others. The search for a relation where each subject maintains its
independence and can still be able to enter into relationship remained a
futile effort.
From each side the developing subject wants to possess the
truth and the whole truth. While the truth remains evasive, always at
some distance, always come out as feminine. A woman seduces from a
distance. In fact distance is the very element of her power. Yet one
must beware to keep one’s distance from her beguiling song of
enchantment. A distance from distance must be maintained. 40
The seduction to find truth, however, makes oblivious to this
advice and the desire to possess truth reduces all the distance. But there
is no truth beyond the distance. The possession of truth turns into the
possession of feminine. The desire of truth transforms into desire to
possess the feminine. “There is no such thing as the truth of woman,
but it is because of that abyssal divergence of truth, because that
untruth is truth. Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth.” 41
The only possibility of finding truth is to maintain distance
from truth. This distance opens up doubt and reduces the force of
possession. Only that opening makes the other comes out as oneself.
Only when the binary opposition male/female is not that much an
opposition, both the categories can live as they want to live. Only by
losing their hardened binary opposition will it be possible to bring out
something that is not of one-self but of other’s self. Only by locating
within one’s positional collectivities, that is already constituted by
signs owned in hardened binary oppositionality, a space of criss-
crossing, a space where binary oppositions do not seem to be
oppositions at all and one pole seems to be loosing its’ owning in
another; only in such a situation justice rules and oppression recedes.
43
END NOTES
1
.For discussion Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (NY: Routledge,
1972)
2
. This discussion can be traced in the history of philosophy. For instance, see
Heidegger’s discussion of being-itself. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time.
Trans. Joan Stambaugh, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)
3
. The reference here is towards the fact that the very term feminism was used
initially not by women struggling to find their repressed equality. Instead it is
male theoretician who brought forward this term in order to point out the
women moving away from conventional norms and becoming reason for the
moral degradation. Alexandre Dumas used it in a pamphlet, on the subject of
adultery, to describe women behaving in a supposedly masculine way, in 1872.
Even earlier, in 1871, the term was used to differentiate sexual organs of
human body, in a French medical text. See Jane Freedman, Feminism (New
Delhi: Viva Books, 2002), p. 2.
4
.For this discussion see the writings of Heidegger. David Farrell Krell ed.,
Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (NY: Routledge, 2007)
5
Heidegger explained this point of view quite clearly. Especially his essays
“On the essence of truth” and “Humanism” published in Farrell Krell ed.,
Martin Heidegger.
4
For this Simone de Beauvoir provided brilliant understanding. Simone de
Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Everyman, 1993)
5
. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns Of Dissonance (Sydney: Polity Press, 1991), p.147.
6
For the detail see Sarah Gamble ed., The Routledge Companion To Feminism
and Post-feminism (London: Routledge, 2001)
7
. See M Afzel Khan article, being published in this journal.
8
. For the detail see Gamble ed., The Routledge Companion To Feminism.
9
. Ibid.
10
. The argument is taken from Betty Friedan “The Feminine Mystique” quoted
in Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, p.152.
11
. Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born (New York: W.W Norton, 1976), p.152.
12
. Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, p.152.
13
. Rich, Of Women Born, p.153.
14
. For argument see Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1978)
15
. Ibid
16
. T.G. Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey, quoted in Braidotti, Patterns of
Dissonance, p. 156.
17
. V.Gornick, and B.K. Moran, Women in Sexist Society (New York:Menton
Books,1971), p. 144.
18
. Betty Friedan, The Second Stage, quoted in Braidotti, Patterns of
Dissonance, p.160.
19
. Ibid.
20
. Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-structuralism: The Identity
Crisis in Feminist Theory”, Signs, Vol.13, No.3.(Spring. 1988), pp.405-406.
21
. Ibid.
44
22
. Reference is towards Pakistan.
23
. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Everyman, 1993)
24
. Ibid.
25
. Ibid.
26
. See Descartes, Discourse on Meditations (1642) or for commentary see John
Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)
27
See Muhammad Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
(Lahore, 1930) especially IV and V essays.
28
. Descartes, Discourse on Meditations (1642) or for commentary, John
Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)
29
. See literature on psychoanalysis, especially Derrida on psychoanalysis in
Jack Reynolds and Jonathon Roffe (eds.), Understanding Derrida (NY:
Continuum, 2004).
30
. See Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.
31
. For details see Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s
Second Sex”, Yale French Studies, No.72, (1986), pp.35-49.
32
. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak quoted in Gamble ed., The Routledge
Companion To Feminism, p.58.
33
. Ibid.
34
. G. Deleuze quoted in Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, p.69.
35
. Ibid, p.77.
36
. See GWF Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.B. Baille (London:
Harper Colophon Books, 1967)
37
. For detail, see Derridas’ works, like Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans.
Barabara Harlow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979)
38
. Jack Reynolds and Jonathon Roffe (eds.), Understanding Derrida (NY:
Continuum, 2004), p.144.
39
. Ibid., p.145.
40
. Ibid.
41
. Ibid.
45
LOCATING ‘ABORTION’ AS A BIRTH CONTROL
METHOD IN THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
TAHIR JAMIL
PAKISTAN
ABSTRACT
The women rights movements in various parts of the

world are resisted by different forces, normally
tagged as conservative segments of the society. These
movements are complex in many ways. The
“abortion” when connoted in the Pro-Choice and
Pro-Life position remained not only a gynecological
issue but it became social, religious, political issue
and construction of this issue around the given
structures had far more implications for the women
rights movement. Abortion in any society, from
primitive to the modern involving medieval in
between, was practiced in certain social, economic,
and religious context and had direct implication for
the women. Although male domination was the major
determining factor to practice it but to a larger
extern it remains a part of women domain.
KEY WORDS: Abortion, Christianity, Catholic, Greeks, Europe, Africa,

Egypt, Women, Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Prostitution.
Abortion emerged as a definitive issue in the United States in 1970’s

particularly after the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade case on
22nd January 1973. Both positions pro and anti are very strong in the
United States; abortion is as earnestly supported as enthusiastically it is
opposed. It has almost jeopardized the American morality and politics.
Catholic Church is the major exponent of anti-abortion movement.
Anti-abortionists consider abortion as the very violation of the
sacredness and dignity of human life thus it should be prohibited in all
its forms. Pro-abortionists have their own moral justifications. They
argue that it is solely a question of women’s domain, which is deeply
linked with their life, and living, thus the decision should be left to
them. To understand the complexities of the issue, it seems imperative
to locate the issue within historical perspective; by examining primitive
47
societies, legal codes of the ancient Rome and Greek, Biblical ethics,
Christian traditions, official position of Church and the interpretations
made by the Theologians from time to time. It is not to suggest that the
issue has been developed over a period of time, in fact, the paper
attempts to highlight the various inter-related political and sociological
issues in different societies connected to the practice of abortion. How
this issue has different connotations in different society is the larger
question this paper attempts to explore. It is divided into three sections.
First, deals with the practice of abortion in the primitive societies along
with the social and economic dynamics re-defining and re-orienting the
issue according to certain moral and ethical values. Second part deals
with the codification of abortion practice in the legal codes developed
during the Greek and Roman period, and later when Christianity
affected the legal processes around this practice. The last part deals
with the adjustment of modern American society with the issues related
to women generally and abortion particularly. During this period, there
was a need to give a historical revision to this issue alongwith its moral,
social, economic and political contingencies in the wake of feministic
paradigm and women emancipation.
(I)
Abortion has always been practiced, debated, favored, and opposed on

ethical, moral, religious, political, social, and legal grounds even in the
primitive and medieval societies. E.A. Wrigly, a historical
demographer, argues that “abortion is an absolutely universal
phenomenon and it is impossible to build image in which abortion is
non-existent” as the abortion practice was found all times in all
populations.1 Various researches like Gorton Carrudh, Janet Ferral
Brodie, and James C. Bohr, have contented the existence of induced
abortion in the primitive societies. Written records of most of the
primitive societies like Egyptian, African and Roman, refer to this
practice. They were aware of various methods and techniques ranging
from completely worthless such as the use of raspberries and magic to
the very dangerous techniques like belly beating and purgatives.
One of the techniques called herbal method is found in the
ancient medical texts. It is ingestion of the substances to the cell
nucleus, as a result of which the fetus was killed without any long term
harm to the woman. The most commonly adopted substance was the oil
of juniper, called Saven, used by Romans and Greeks. From southern
Europe this technique was exported to the northern parts of the
continent. It is also mentioned in the medieval European medical texts
48
TAHIR JAMIL, LOCATING ‘ABORTION’
and even in the seventeenth century English home medical manuals.2

The primitive societies also used drugs that were helpful in abortion.
Some of these drugs such as herbs, insects, animal secretions, raw eggs,
fossil organic matter, inorganic matter and sea water were taken
internally. Some of them were effective while the others had only
physiological effects rather than physical.3 Written three thousands
years before Christ, Chinese medical texts also discuss various
techniques of abortion such as herbal remedies, and abdominal
massages. Same techniques can also be found in ancient Roman and
Greek literature, in the writings of Sornas Ephesus and Islamic medical
literature of middle ages.4 During the same period, home medical
manuals and Church newspapers regularly advertised the abortificients
(techniques of abortion and the substances used in this practice),
midwives and clinic under the cover of treating menstrual irregularities,
however, they practiced abortion.5 Archaeologists have discovered
instruments, which were used in the ancient societies for abortion.
Although these instruments wee not sophisticated and were injurious to
the body and life of the women but their discovery proves that these
societies were aware of the techniques. These instruments were found
in the ruins of herculanium of Pompeii. Moreover, fifth century BC
Hippocratic corpus mentions a set of dilators and probes.6
The practice of abortion as a mean of fertility control has been
time and again taken up by most of the historians, naturalists,
archaeologists and anthropologists like Ovid, Juvenal and Seneca have
confirmed the presence of abortion in Roman Empire as an effective
mean of birth control. An historian Pilmy has listed the names of drugs,
which were used for abortion as a mean of birth control.7 Plato and
Aristotle were also engaged in this debate and accepted in as a useful
technique to control population.8
Besides abortion ancient societies also knew several methods
to control fertility. Various techniques such as post partum, abstinence,
infanticide and contraceptives were used for limiting family size,
controlling fertility and reducing surplus population. Nomadic hunters
excessively and deliberately used these techniques for controlling and
spacing births. The felt difficulty of transporting more than one baby at
one time, Himes describes in detail several contraceptive techniques
used among Eastern and central European women in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.9 Contraceptive techniques are also described in
Egyptian Papyri (1900-1100 BC) and these are also mentioned in
Greek and Roman scientific literature.10
People of the ancient societies did not seek abortion only for
the sake of pleasure but there were several factors, which compelled
49
them to go for this practice. Social responses toward abortion constitute

a complex mix of causes, which compelled women along with society
as a whole to resort to abortion in the ancient times. Factors that
compelled them for abortion were economic, social, societal, love,
shame, religious, fear of losing reputation, family dynamics, slavery,
political and structural. In most of the cases there was an arrangement
for assisting a woman who sought abortion. These arrangements were
often made by the family itself and at times by the state. Moreover, this
assistance was also provided by the unspecified old women who were
considered expert in this job. One of the wives of Sultan of Turkey,
known as bloody midwife in the history, worked as a midwife in the
harem, who particularly performed abortions.
In India, barber women did this practice. A Mohane schoolgirl
was assisted by her schoolmates. Among the Wolof medicine men of
Cayone were very much skilled in this practice.11 In the middle ages
over-population was considered a burden on the finances of the family
and the society as well. Financial crises might lead to disintegration of
nuclear native institutions along with families. In some part of
Melenesia people have disillusionment to bear more children. Abortion
was excessively practiced in the areas, which were administered by the
Spaniards. In these areas women sought abortion to save their children
from abuse and slavehood. In Melekula, where wealth was considered
the main source to gain social prominence, the economic factor played
a role of motivating force behind the abortion practice. In such societies
working women could not afford to sit idle at homes and waiting for
delivery, and then afterward engaged in raising children. Women
deliberately sought abortion in order to work in gardens for raising the
finance of the family to achieve social prominence and economic
success. Same case happened to the nomadic families, they could not
bear the burden of many children because it restricted their mobility.
Women who had many children and not contributed to financial
strength of their families were not given due regard, attention and
relegated to the second status within family, that is why they resorted to
abortion to deliver themselves from the burden of many children. In
most of the cases their families and even their husbands forced and
helped them to go for abortion. Turkish women prefer to get their
fetuses aborted after having born two children because their husbands
otherwise declined to support them. Another factor was illegitimacy
and moral pressure. They could not afford to bear a bastard, otherwise
it would incur shame to her family, moreover, mother had fear of her
own penalization, along with her kin. The only safe way to avoid all
these consequences was abortion. In most of the primitive societies
50
cohabitation between a woman and her lover other than her fiancé was
permitted, but if she got pregnant then she must have to marry her
fiancé with whom she was not ready to live like a wife, the only way
left to postpone her marriage with her fiancé was to go for abortion. In
the religiously motivated primitive societies, for example, in Fiji,
shame was the most important factor, which resulted in abortion. That
is why women of these societies were not ready to lose their
reputation.12
(II)
Pro-abortion and anti-abortion debate is not only confined to modern

period, it extends back to the ancient Rome and Greek. Although the
debate was not as intensified as it is today and fault lines were not very
clear and hard. Moreover, the available knowledge of the embryo was
not as advanced as it is today. Pythogerians disapproved abortion and
considered embryo equivalent to the child. On the other hand, Stoics
believed that although embryo had same rights of already born children
but it was not equivalent to the child morally, thus its removal was not
exactly equal to a murder.13 Roman Empire had no laws of such type,
which regulate abortion. Roman law considered the child in the womb
of mother not exactly equal to a full born child hence abortion was not
equal to a murder rather it was considered a family affair and the family
itself regulated it. Husband had a right to force or encourage her wife to
resort abortion, otherwise if she aborted her fruit of womb without the
consent of her husband, then he had right to punish or divorce her.14
It was the advent of Christianity which influenced the Roman
law and abortion was regulated but these regulation were designed
primarily to protect the right of father rather than that of embryo.15
Pope Sixtus V in 1585 started a movement against prostitution in
Rome. According to him abortion at any stage of pregnancy was wrong
and embryo whether ensouled or not was exactly equal to born child.16
In the beginning Christians were blamed as the homicides and
the devourer of human beings. Athenagoras, a second century
philosopher convert Christian theologian, answered these objections
laid against the Christians before the Emperor. He argued that how
could they kill a person when they considered a person who even used
abortifications as homicide and abortion was definitely the killing of
man. According to him fetus in the womb is the expression of God’s
providence, not an animal. Those who did so would be accountable for
there doings.17
51
Another theologian Tertullian, who was lawyer by profession

and converted to Christianity, propounded the same ideas regarding
abortion. He wrote to the Emperor in second century in order to answer
the accusations raised against the Christianity, that they practice
cannibalism and infanticide. He said that murder for the Christian was
forbidden once for all. They did not even permit to destroy what had
been conceived, and considered the fetus exactly equal to a human
being.18 Christian doctrine even condemns contraception and considers
it against the object of procreation, which is the sole purpose of
marriage and the use of any technique, which intervenes procreation, is
sinful. Eastern Church endorsed this view and considered intervention
as homicide. St. Jerome disseminated this idea to the Western church.19
Augustan also shared the same view rather more emphatically.
According to him those who practice abortion must be subjected to the
ecclesiastical penalty for homicide which involved ten years of
penance. Latin Church in the West endorsed this view. Fathers of
eastern Greek Church also had the same view and they were equally
emphatic for the penalty.20 At the early stage Christianity faced enough
opposition by the prevailing cultural trends and norms. Christians were
striving hard to save their faith and fundamentals. The Roman and
Greek cultures tolerated both abortion and infanticide while Christian
constantly opposed it because they considered it against their religious
ideals. In the “Didache” or “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” a
manual of the Christian principles, which was written in the first
century, abortion was clearly declared unlawful, “Thou shall not
procure abortion and commit infanticide” (Did 2:2).21 Historically both
traditions in western Christianity (Catholics and Protestants) opposed
Abortion. Catholic moralists specifically considered abortion equal to a
murder but Protestants were relatively less specified and vague, they
considered abortion a disgrace to “the sacredness of life” which was a
kind of vitalism.22They were even against the therapeutic abortion
(abortion to save the life of the mother). For them both lives were equal
and important and God had created them equal thus abortion was
gravely sinful and forbidden by the natural law and the revealed law of
the God.23Abortion was even condemned in 20th century by the
Catholics, they reasserted the same doctrine that a fetus is ensouled at
the time of conception thus abortion is unjustified whatever reason it
has. Pope Pius XI declared in 1930 that abortion was illegal even if the
life of mother was threatened.24 Pope Paul in his Encyclical Humane
Vitae in July of 1968 said, “we must once again declare that the direct
interruption of the generative already begun and above all, directly
52
willed and procured abortions even if for therapeutic reasons, are to be

absolutely excluded as illicit means of regulating birth.”25
Christian ethics regarding abortion are firmly grounded in
Biblical principles, such as, sanctity of human life created in the image
of God, the personhood of the unborn child, relationship between God
and the unborn and the incarnation of the Christ. These principles
provide a transcendental approach rather than pragmatic and relative to
understand the value of human life. The most crucial question for
Christian regarding abortion is whether God considers the unborn child
a person because scriptures do not clearly indoctrinate the status of
personhood of the unborn. Theologians have inferred the doctrine of
personhood of the unborn by interpreting the Biblical texts as evident
from exegesis of the Bible written from time to time.
They divide the biblical data into five kinds of texts:

(1) those where personal pronouns and proper names
are used to refer to unborn; (2) texts which speak of a
personal relationship between the God and unborn
child; (3) provisions in Mosaic law relating to the
unborn, particularly Exodus 21:22-25; (4) texts
reflecting the psycho-physical unity of man created in
the imago Die [image of the God]; (5) those dealing
with incarnation of Christ.26
God has sanctified the human life by declaring that he created

him on his own image. The doctrine of image of God affirms the
transcendent dignity of human life and declares it inviolable as
expressed in the Genesis. Then God said, “let us make man in our own
image, after our likeliness… so God created man in his own image, in
the image of God he created him; male and female (Genesis 1:26, 27).”
God has sanctified the blood of man to be shed by another man
(Genesis 9:6). On one hand shedding of blood perpetrated against a
man is declared a heinous offence, on the other hand, it is considered
not only an attack on the man itself but also equally an assault on the
dignity of one who has created him. At another place even cursing a
man is strictly prohibited (Genesis 1;26), because it violates God’s will
as man is created in image of God. The sacredness of human life as the
divine image precludes not only violent actions against others but even
prohibits the harmful verbal expressions, which meant to hurt
someone’s heart. Decalouge’s prohibition of murder declares the
sanctity of human life (Exodus29: 13; Deut 5:17). Christ emphasized
upon the ethical implication of the Decalouge in his sermon on mount.
53
He, in his sixth commandment not only prohibited the outward

destruction of a neighbor’s life but even the attitude of contempt which
meant to devalue the worth of others (Matt,5:21,22). Christ loved
children and attended them enthusiastically. According to him child
was the very paradigm of the kingdom of heaven (Matt 18:1-4; Luke
9:46-48). A child can not live independently, his parents are held for
his subsistence which is a parable of man’s dependence on God. In the
eyes of God no human being is completely viable, in no sense, has
control over his life or independent capacity. The God of Israel does
not judge human value on the basis of his physical appearance, age,
size, and viability (cf. 1 Sam. 16:7). God’s providence is overwhelming
and all encompassing that is why God can demonstrate his glory even
in the unwanted infants.27
In the biblical text, certain nouns are used to personify the
unborn child, which the theological writer adopted to determine the
personhood status of the fetus. In the third chapter of Job, Job is
cursing the day of his birth and when he was conceived in the following
words, “let the day perish when I was born, and the night which said, “a
man child [Geber] is conceived” (Job 3:3). At another place, for
example in the New Testament, Luke speaks about the sensitivity of the
unborn John in the womb of his mother Elizabeth. In chapter 1
Elizabeth greets her visiting cousin Marry, the mother of Christ, as
follows, “behold, when voices of your greetings came to my ear the
babe in my womb leaped for joy: (Luke 1:44).It was John the Baptist
who was leaping in womb of his mother when she saw the mother of
Christ. Here the term Brephos is used to describe John. Two possible
objections can be raised to the personalization of the fetus. In case of
Job the word Geber is used to describe the Job in womb of his mother
and the biblical writer try to describe him in the personal term. In
Hebrew the word Geber is freely used to describe the postnatal life and
translated as man, male, or husband. In the second case when Marry
visited her cousin Elizabeth, she was probably in the sixth month of her
pregnancy. Now it is scientifically proved that an unborn child can
respond to touch even at eight week and at 25 week can respond to
human voices and feel pain and disturbance, moreover Luke has also
specified that Elizabeth was speaking to Marry under the inspiration of
the holy spirit instead of her won knowledge. The second point to be
noted is that the term Brephos is used to describe the John in the womb
of his mother, the same term is often used in the New Testament to
describe infant and unborn. Thus the term Brephos does not explicitly
explain status of person of the unborn from the time of conception.28
54
The Mosaic code is considered to speak more clearly of the

status of personhood of the unborn. The text Exodus 21:22-24 is given
considerable attention in this regard but there is a difference of
interpretations and assumptions adopted by the translator of the
Revised Standard Version and King James Version. In the RSV the text
is given as follows.
22) When men strive together, and hurt a woman

with child, so that there is miscarriage and yet no
harm follows, who hurt her shall be fined, according
the women’s husband shall lay upon him; and he
shall pay as judges determine. 23) If any harm
follows, then you shall give life for life, 24) eye for
eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25)
burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
(III)
In this translation the term miscarriage is used to describe the

premature birth. Two exclusive positions have been adopted in
assuming the interpretation of this term. According to one position
miscarriage refers to the premature birth of living child. If mother
suffers a fetal injury by striking a person who causes miscarriage, then
she will be compensated in terms for the loss of child and her own
injury as per claimed by her husband and determined by the judges. If
the woman got the fetal injury then the hitting person will be given the
capital punishment. Thus Old Testament Law gives more value to the
life of the mother than that of her child. Those who have adopted the
second position argue that this translation of miscarriage is
inappropriate. According to them miscarriage refers to the premature
live birth and monetary compensation is for the trauma of premature
live birth and harm caused to the woman. According to this view the
Mosaic Law makes no distinction between the value of life of the
mother and that of the unborn child. On the other hand, King James
Version directly speaks about the premature birth.
22) If a man strive, and hurt a women with child, so

that her fruit of womb departed her, and yet no
mischief follow, he shall surely be punished,
according as the woman’s husband lay upon him; and
he shall pay as the Judges determine 23) if any
mischief follows, then thou shalt give life to life.
55
The New International Version has taken this view to refer to

a premature live birth, which supports the fist position. Professor
Meredith Kline has observed, “the most significant thing about the
abortion Law that there is none. It was so unthinkable that an Israelite
woman should desire an abortion and that there was no need to
mention this offence in the criminal code”.29 David Fieldman explains
that induced abortion is ignored in most of the central Christian Judo
writings. It is not mentioned in the Christian and Jewish Bibles. The
opponents of abortion some time argue that Bible does express
disapproval in Exodus 21:21-23, but it actually refers to the accidental
miscarriage which is caused by two fighting men who strike a
pregnant woman, as a result of which she loses the fruit of her womb.
It does neither directly deals with induced abortion nor the induced
abortion is mentioned in the Talmud.30
The question of animation of the fetus has got a crucial
importance in this debate. The ancient Roman and Greek culture gives
dualistic understanding of man. There is a distinction between the
spiritual and the physical life of man. The Aristotle theory of
ensoulment gives the three stages of the development of the fetus;
nutritive, sensitive, and rational soul which is infused at the eightieth
day in case of a female and at the fortieth day in case of a male.31
Bible negates all these theories. The man is conceived as
psychophysical unity, he is a body animated by soul and there is no
distinction between flesh (Sarx) and spirit (Pneuma). The text Genesis
5:3 narrates the seminal transmission of the image from the Adam to
his son Seth. This text does not restrict the image to the man's
conscious mental capabilities rather it emphasizes upon the
transcendent value and dignity which is conferred upon him even at
the time of his conception. In other Biblical texts conception is
considered the time when one's personal history begins and it is
mentioned for forty times in the scriptures. 32
Incarnation of the Christ is the most significant and it is
oftenly referred to substantiate the doctrine of conception. It is
recorded in the text of Luke 1; 26-56. In verse 31 angel Gabriel said to
Marry, "you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall
call his name Jesus". This account of the personal history of the Jesus
not only includes the prediction of his birth but even his conception.
Then Marry reached her cousin Elizabeth who was in sixth month of
her pregnancy (V: 36). Marry greeted her, when her greetings reached
Elizabeth, the baby John leaped in his mother's womb · (V: 41,44).
John's response was the first acknowledgement of the Jesus because
56
John's mission in life was to confirm the arrival of the Jesus and to
prepare people to receive him. This text indicates the humanity of
Jesus even in his embryonic state. There is an objection that the
circumstances of conception of the Jesus were unique and
extraordinary. We can draw no parallel between the conception of the
Jesus and the normal process of human conception.33
The early Christians were actively pro-natalists. They
denounced abortion, contraception exactly equal to murder, but the
point to be noted is that moral and legal treatment was void of the
rhetoric. It is a fact that abortion was denounced by early Christian
writers such as Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and St Basil, but
the position of the Church was not that much strict. The Church
councils of Elviva and Ancyra outlined the legal groundwork for the
Christian communities, specified penalties only for those women who
commit adultery and prostitution. From the third century onward
Christian thoughts were divided as whether early abortion of an
unformed embryo was in fact' a murder. Moreover, the different
sources of church teaching and law did not agree that early abortion
was wrong.34 There are also some evidences, which prove that some
early theologians did not consider therapeutic abortion wrong.
Tertullian in the third century gave justification of therapeutic
abortion or therapeutic feticide on ground of necessity if there was a
direct threat to life of mother. Moreover, there is a long list of
medieval, renaissance and Counter Reformation theologians who
justify therapeutic abortion prior to the rational ensoulment by direct
means and after ensoulment by indirect means.35 According to
Encyclopaedia Americana, with the advent of Christianity abortion
became more widely condemned, but the early church doctrine
considers it as murder only after the point at which rational soul
became animated usually said to be forty days after conception.36 We
also find in most of the theological work of Middle Ages abortion was
approved. For example, in a monumental treatise on matrimonial and
sexual morality by a Spanish Jesuit Thomas Sanca the abortion is
allowed in certain circumstances. He says that a girl is impregnated by
rape or some ravish, Soon afterward, before she know that she had
been pregnant by the crime, marries another person then discovers her
condition after wedding, is not bound to carry the fetus to term, but
may abort it. Moreover, if she fears that her husband's relatives may
discover that she is carrying a child who does not belong to him and
they may kill her for it, then she is allowed to go for abortion.
According to some pro-natalists this justification owes much to the
medical ethics of that age because surgical abortion of healthy women
57
at that time oftenly caused infection and proved fatal and the
physician could not control the surgical operation hence abortion at
the later stage of the pregnancy would be impossible. But the point to
be noted is that Sanca is talking about the social cause of abortion
rather than that of medical.37 Thomas Aquinas, the leading theologian
of the middle ages, however, opposed abortion but he made a
distinction between the moral gravity of the early and late abortion.
Aquinas assumed the embryology of the Aristotle who thought that
rational soul was not present before the fortieth day in case of male
and eightieth day in case of female.38 Augustine disapproved abortion
on moral grounds but he had hesitation about the exact time of
ensoulment of the fetus. Martin Luther also talked about the morality
but he did not directly address the question of abortion.39
Church position on abortion began to change in the sixteenth
century. Abortion was considered morally disgraceful and
unjustifiable at any stage of pregnancy because the fetus was ensouled
at the time of conception. The Pope Sixtus V denounced previous
doctrine that allows early abortion in 1558. He emphasized that the
fetus was infused with a soul even from the time of conception,
therefore the termination of pregnancy violates the sacredness of life.
This position is even assumed by the present Roman Catholic
Church.40 But the prevailing opinion of the Catholic moral theologians
remains unchanged from 1450 to 1895.41 By the middle of eighteenth
century catholic teaching moved away from the earlier position of
Aristotle and Aquinas and identified conception at the time of
ensoulment. It is argued that the earlier position adopted by Aquinas
was due to inavailability of new embryological information to
Aquinas. 42 In last decades of nineteenth century, decrees of holy
office 1884, 1889 and 1895 for the first time in the ecclesiastical
history explicitly condemned craniotomy, another form of
embryotomy and abortion even it was resorted solely for therapeutic
reason to save the life of a pregnant woman. 43
In colonial America abortion was neither forbidden by the
written Law nor persecuted under the common Law yet minister
abhorred abortion and exhorted women who abort their fruit of womb
was equal to a murder. In English custom abortion was -allowed till
mother detected the fetal movement which usually occurred in the
fourth month of pregnancy. Women knew certain Abortifications and
primitive techniques to end their pregnancies, while midwives and
doctors used relatively safe and medically advanced intrusive
methods. During eighteenth century women usually used coitus
interruptus, abstinence and oftenly abortion to limit their family size.44
58
Historically, Native American women knew herbs, plants and

medicines, which were effective to induce abortion. They used
abortion, infanticide and contraceptives to control fertility. Slaves
from the Caribbean brought with them the knowledge of
contraceptives and abortificients.45 Enslaved African women preferred
abortion to avoid coerced reproduction and enslavement of their
children, for this purpose the knowledge of African based midwifery
culture and folklore medicines was used.46 Women who sought
abortion also did the strenuous exercises or ingested botanical
remedies, which were known in the folklore as effective abortificients
such as savin. tanry, pennyroyal, cotton root, ergot, black cohash and
blue cohash. These remedies continued to be used even after 1840’s
when advances in medical facilities were available to them by the
physicians and midwives. Some women ceased efforts after
quickening while others intensified the use of drugs, exercises more
vigorously, sought more drastic solutions for example, the insertion of
slippery elm bark in cervix or in a serious situation went to the
professional abortionists.47
Abortifications were advertised as "medicines or ladies".
Birth control information, products and services were widely available
to the women between 1840 and1880. Products and techniques were
broadly distributed among urban women and via mail to the rural
women. Men also participated in the reproductive control and
encouraged their wives.48 Home medical manual was the chief source
of information in this period. It can be divided into two categories.
One gave the details to release menstrual obstruction and other
specified the things, which were to be avoided during a suspected
pregnancy because they were considered to bring abortion. During the
first decade of nineteenth century William Buchan's domestic
medicine was frequently used than any other home medical guide in
American homes. He suggested several methods and medicines to
restore menstrual blockage such as bloodletting, bathing, iron and
quinine concoctions and if the condition is serious then a violent
purgative such as tincture of black hellebore is used. The abortionists
up till 1870's had commonly used bloodletting. It was considered that
bloodletting had same effect on the womb that the menstrual bleeding
is known to have. He has prescribed in the common causes of abortion
such as great evacuations and vomiting, the same treatment that is
meant to restore the suppressed menses, and if a woman sought
abortion he suggested violent exercise, raising great weights, reaching
too high, jumping, stepping, strokes on the belly and falls. Peter
Smith’s 1813 brochure entitled the “Indian Doctor’s Dispensary”
59
gives a detailed account of the better known Cathartics with native

American ingredients which were considered very effective to restore
menses. Smith recommended a concoction, which he called “Dr
Reader Chalybeate”. Its ingredients were myrrh, aloes, liquor, sugar,
vinegar, iron dust, ivy and Virginia or Seneca snakeroot. Moreover, a
sweet and sour cocktail was considered very effective. Regular
physicians also knew the surgical techniques, which were necessary to
terminate a pregnancy. They knew that the dilation of cervix was
necessary for the expulsion of the uterine contents, and the rupturing
of the amniotic sac in the middle and later stage of the pregnancy
induces expulsion and contraction. They were taught much more
complex techniques in their textbook and lectures such as utero
decapitation and fetal pulverization, which were adopted in very
dangerous situations.49
In nineteenth century the fertility in the United States began
to decline. Despite the availability of advanced contraceptive
knowledge abortion was considered a useful and safe way to end the
pregnancies. Marie Costal observes that the decline in the fertility rate
was because of the excessive use of abortion.50 In eighteenth century
there was a shift in ideas regarding family and childbirth. Virginian
women created a “feminine reason of birth control” through a fear of
dying during birth. This idea was becoming popular in the women and
also men that child births and pregnancies were something unnatural
and caused a decline in women’s health.51
In the beginning of the nineteenth century there was no law
in the United States to govern abortion. The English common law was
adopted in this regard; abortion before quickening had no legal
punishment. To declare quickening was the sole prerogative of the
pregnant women. In nineteenth century United States and Europe,
abortion in first trimester and in the second trimester usually faced
little regulation. Courts oftenly adopted the common law in such
cases. In 1809 Supreme Court of the Massachusetts dismissed an
indictment when prosecution failed to give evidence the woman was
quick with a child. Between 1850-1900, abortion laws were adopted
in most of the states. The sociologists attribute this change to the
emerging demographic pattern, which brought a profound change in
the status of abortion. During this period the population changed from
one that was primarily agricultural and rural to that which was
predominantly urban and industrial. The birth rate in term of fertility
declined from 7.04 births per woman in 1800 to 3.56 births per
woman in 1900. Moreover, immigration had also a profound effect on
the demographic pattern of the society.52 According to historians brief
60
abortion laws between 1820 and 1860 were primarily concerned to

save the life of the mother. The New York lawmakers wanted to
protect women from the dangerous medical treatment when they
passed strict abortion regulations in 1928. Massachusetts was the first
state to deal with the question of abortion by including it in her
revised criminal code in 1821 and enacted it in 1845.53The other state
was Connecticut who also criminalized abortion in 1821; its primary
concern was to secure women from the dangerous techniques and
substances which were used in the termination of pregnancies. These
legislation were enacted as a result of collaboration between the
legislators and the physician and university trained medical doctors in
the area of obstetrics.54 According to the “Hand Book of American
Women’s History” the movement to declare the male physicians led
abortion illegal from 1860 to 1880, but despite all the oppositions the
newspapers and magazines kept on accepting advertisements from the
abortionist.55
The forces of supply and demand in the 18th and 19th century
had a profound effect in the homes affecting both the natures of
women’s social lives and their work. Through the history women’s
lives have been changed along with the shifting economic and
technological pattern at home.56 Women’s right movement in first half
of the 19th century was launched by the married women as they were
the victim of whole range of restrictions that prevented them from
realizing their individual potentialities they engaged to meet their
primary duties of domesticity and gentility. In the early period
movement was concentrated more on the legal and social rights than
on suffrage and reproductive freedom. The movement succeeded to
win right to own and control their own property which previously
owned control by the husband, right to divorce and the right to retain
children after divorce.57 There were also other movements in which
women were actively involved and prepared them in long run for most
challenging and organized struggle for women rights. The Genteel
Motherhood and Temperance movements were more or less meant to
deliver women from the repressive surroundings in the 19th century.
But it was not until 1900 that the values and approaches of genteel and
household women would have changed enough to allow a mass
movement of middle class women.58 In the beginning women
advocating women right were not encouraged by the males of their
families. Grimke sisters were very prominent in the women rights
movement during 1837. Grimke’s started an abolitionist movement
along with other influential women, which later turned toward the
women issues. They were not even aided by their brothers who were
61
involved in anti slavery movement. They advised their sisters to

continue their work for the slaves but not to speak out or write
specifically on women rights.59
In 1800’s physicians in the west and U.S. began to provide
abortion and its training with no legal prohibition. In 1803 first anti-
abortion law was passed in Britain and the United States followed the
example. By 1880 most of the abortion, except to save the life of the
woman, were illegal.60 In 1847 a year before Seneca Fall Convention,
American Medical Association was founded fighting abortion was on
the top priority of its agenda. In 1859 AMA committee on abortion
was rejected and American law was criticized as it ignored the
inherent right of the fetus. Later on AMA passed a resolution in which
state legislatures were demanded to criminalize abortion. AMA move
had a profound effect on the future legislation passed in the several
states. By the time of 1868 every sate in the union had almost
endorsed AMA recommendations on abortion.61
There was a trend of humanitarian reforms in the U.S., which
lead to the criminalization of abortion, as the surgery was dangerous
to the life of woman. This is not a well-accepted motive behind
legislation because far more dangerous surgical techniques adopted to
save the lives of the patients were allowed to at that time. Actually
legislation was meant to control women and to restrict them their
traditional child bearing role. There was an anti feminist movement
against the growing movement for suffrage, voluntary womanhood
and other women rights movements in the 19th century. Another
reason was the declining birth rate among whites in late 1800’s. This
decline was termed as race suicide and the concerned organizations
and authorities were urging native white women to produce. The
industrial capitalism needed a continuous supply of the workers while
the emerging movement for reproductive freedom impinging upon its
interest which was symbol of emancipation for the women and the
only way through which they can change their traditional role.62
The women rights movement in nineteenth began to stress
upon women right to decide to have a child or not. This movement
brought a realization to increase women’s control over reproduction
through “voluntary motherhood” which could only be achieved
through the use of periodic abstinence. But this movement was still
confined to very few and not well defined. According to Professor
Gordon although feminists favored voluntary motherhood, neither the
free lovers nor the suffragists approved of contraceptive devices and
abortion. They condemned abortion because it destroyed human
body.63 Frances Wright, a British reformer, made several lecture tours
62
to the United States between 1818 and 1836. She not only advocated
radicals in the legal position of women but also a whole range of
women’s natural rights from education to sexuality.64 In 1850 women
in United States began to attract the attention of the people by various
odd means such as odd dressing and abortion was also on their
agenda. Madame Rosette a practitioner of abortion in New York,
advertised herself as a “women physician.”65 Birth control movement
got momentum in 1910’s and 1920’s but there was no change in
Federal legal restrictions. A Bill lobbied by the physicians to prescribe
birth control measures was defeated in the state legislatures. Despite
the defeat in legislatures, other developments made birth control a
widespread movement. In 1918 New York court of appeal exempted
physicians from persecution for prescribing contraception necessary to
cure or prevent a disease. Sanger opened first birth control clinic in
the country in 1923, which supplied contraceptive information to 1208
women in a year and the number of Sanger clinics increased to 28
across the country. American Birth Control League founded by
Sanger facilitated domestic manufacturers to produce diaphragm,
spermicidal jellies, and clinic’s contraceptives of choice. She also
managed to smuggle female contraceptives such as German mad
Minsinga diaphragm and contraceptive jellies in oil drums with the
help of her husband who was the president of three in one Oil
Company.
In 1925 Holland Rantos Company began to manufacture
female contraceptives in the United States with the financial help of
Sanger’s husband.66 The post suffrage movement consisted of tow
groups; one group was comparatively more conservative struggling on
the lines determined on the occasion of Seneca Fall’s “Declaration of
Sentiments” while other group, lead by Margaret Sanger who was
public health nurse, was more liberal and started the birth control
movement. The idea was that a woman had control over her body
through control over reproduction and sexuality. It radicalized the idea
of women emancipation. The opposition was very strong;
consequently, antiwomen rights laws were enforced. But in 1936
Supreme Court gave a decision, which declassified birth control
information as abscene.67
During the great depression the number of abortions soared
because economic constraint forced women to do so. The number of
exposes and the persecution of abortion were declining and the
physicians were co-operating more with women than with the
government officials who were executing abortion. According to
many observers anti-abortion statutes were not fully observed till
63
1960’s.68There are so many reasons of this salutary negligence.

Women were more conscious of their rights than at any other time in
the past, Women rights movements were very assertive, women were
becoming more educated, and the politicians were facing the threat of
increasing population.
64
END NOTES
1. E.A Wrigly, Population and History (New York: McGraw Hill,

1969) cited in Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Abortion and Women’s
Choice (London: Verso, 1986), p. 29.
2. Women Studies Encyclopedia, Vol. 1 S. V. “Abortion” by Tierny
Helen.
3. George Devereux, A Study of Abortion in the Primitive Societies
(New York: The Julian Press, Inc., 1995), pp. 37-38.
4. Petchesky, Abortion and Women’s Choice, p. 28.
5. Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Verkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), p. 12.
6. The Encyclopedia Americana, International ed., S.V. “Abortion” by
Edwin M. Schur.
7. Women Studies Encyclopedia, Vol. I, S.V. “Abortion” by Tierny
Helen.
8. Petchesky, Abortion and Women’s Choice, p. 28.
9. Women Studies Encyclopedia, Vol., I., S.V. “Contraception” by
Tierny Helen.
10. Devereux, A Study of Abortion in the Primitive Societies, p. 47.
11. Ibid, pp. 10-16.
12. Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, p. 11.
13. The Encyclopedia Americana, International Ed., S.V. “Abortion” by
Edwin M. Schur.
15. John Jefferson Davis, Abortion and Christian: What Every Believer
Should Know (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing
Company, 1984), p. 5.
16. Athenagoras Embessay for the Christian, cited in Davis, Abortion
and Christian, p.4.
17. Apology 9:9, cited in Davis, Abortion and Christian, p. 4.
18. Women Studies Encyclopedia, Vol, III S.V. “Contraception” by
Tierny Helen.
19. Davis, Abortion and Christian, pp. 4-5.
20. The Apostolic Fathers, Trans. Kisopplake (Cambrigde: Harvard
University Press, 1912), pp. 312-313, cited in Davis, op. cit., p. 6.
21. Robert E. Hall, ed., Abortion in the Changing World (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 25.
22. Ibid, p. 77.
Edwin M. Schur.
24. Pilpel Harriet, “The Right of Abortion,”
http://www.theatlantic.com/issue/95sep/abortion/pilp.htm, (Accessed
March 24, 2000).
25. Davis, Abortion and Christian, p. 40.
26. Ibid, pp. 36-39.
65
27. Ibid, pp. 41-43.

28. Ibid, pp. 49-51.
29. David Fieldman, Birth Control in Jewish Law, p. 225, cited in Luker,
op. cit., p. 12.
31. Ibid, p. 54.
32. Ibid, pp. 55-56.
33. Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, pp. 12-13.
34. Hall, ed., Abortion in the Changing World, p.6.
Edwin M. Schur.
36. Hall, ed., Abortion in the Changing World, p. 18.
37. William’s Religious Residues, p. 31, cited in Davis, op. cit., p. 5.
38. Ibid, pp. 4-5.
Edwin M. Schur.
43. Elizabeth Frost; Knappman; and Sarah Kurian, Women’s Progress in
America (California: ABCP-Clio, Inc., 1994), p. 4.
44. Janet Ferral Brodie, “ Birth Control,” in The Readers Companion to
US Women’s History, ed. Wilma Mankler (n.p.: Houghton Mifflin,
1998), p. 9.
45. Rickie Solinger, “Abortion,” in The Readers Companion to US
Women’s History, ed. Wilma Manikler (n. p.: Houghton Mifflin,
1998), p. 4.
46. Brodie, “ Birth Control”, p. 59.
47. Ibid.
48. James C. Mohr, “ Abortion in America” in Women’s America:
Refocusing the Past, ed. Linda K. Kerver and Jane De Hart mathews
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 181.
49. Frost; Knappman; and Kurian, Women’s Progress in America, p. 4.
50. Susan E. Klepp,” Revolutionary bodies “Women and Fertility
Transition in the Mid Atlantic Region, 1760-1820,” The Journal of
American History, vol. 85 (December 1998): 914.
52. Christopher Tietze, Induced Abortion: A world Review 1983, 5th ed.
(New York: The Population Council, 1983), p. 5.
53. Solinger, “Abortion”, p. 4.
54. Frost; Knappman; and Kurian, Women’s Progress in America, p. 4.
55. Edith Hoshino Altbach, Women in America (Lexington D. C.: Health
and Company, 1974), p. 3.
56. Ibid, p. 94.
57. Ibid, p. 95.
58. Ibid, p. 87.
66
59. Feminist. Com, “Abortion,” http://feminist.com/abor.htm, (Accessed

December 26, 2000).
60. Davis B. Sobelsohn, “Human, All too Human: Abortion Law in
America,” Journal of Sex Research, 33 (1996): 168.
61. Feminist.Com., “Abortion”.
62. Ramesh Ponnuru, “Abortion History,” National Review, 21 October
1995, p. 29.
63. Altbach, Women in America, pp. 86-87.
64. Gorton Carruth, Women, Power and Policy, ed. 8 (New York: Harper
& Row Publisher, 1987), p. 329.
65. Andrea Tore, “Contraceptive Consumers: Gender and the Political
Economy of Birth Control in the 1930’s,” Journal of Social History,
29 (Spring 1996): 92.
66. National Women’s History Project, www.nwhp.org, (Accessed
November 12, 2000).
67. Solinger, “Abortion”, p. 5.
67

REVIEW ARTICLE
CONCEPTUALIZING “OTHERNESS” IN
HISTORICAL DISCOURSES (EDWARD SAID,
BERNARD S. COHN AND O.W. WOLTERS)
HUSSAIN AHMAD KHAN
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE,
SINGAPORE
BOOKS REVIEWED
Edward W Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980)
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in

India (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996)
OW.. Wolters, History, Culture, And Region in SouthEast Asian

Perspectives (NY: SEAP, 1999)
Apart from many concerns, one of the key interests of post-colonial

literature is ‘place and displacement’. According to Bill Ashcrof, “it is
here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the
concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying
relationship between self and place”. The relationship of self with a
particular place has been eroded or dislocated by “cultural denigration,
the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality
and culture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model”. 1 The
colonizers found themselves in a completely different situation of
physical and social landscape of the colonies, which prompted them to
construct a place for themselves in this alien terrain. It created a gap
between the “place of experience” and “the language available to
describe it”. 2 However, relationship between colonizer and colonized
becomes more problematic when the colonial state devises various
strategies to naturalize and authenticate their (colonizer’s) sense of
“Otherness”. The colonial epistemologies, and assumed universal
language system based on rationality, scientific method, similar human
nature and experience were radically challenged in postcolonial
theories. These theories also suggested the ways of identifying sense of
69
“Otherness” in colonial literature. The present essay also studies the

methodologies suggested by Edward Said, Bernard S. Cohn and O.W.
Wolters to conceptualize “Otherness” in historical discourses.
(I)

One of the many possible ways of looking at Saidian discourse in his
(un)famous work Orientalism is to contexualize it within his personal
life which may be termed as a defining force behind the construction of
this narrative. “My own experiences....are in part what made me write
this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in
America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous
consciousness that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed
that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental”. 3 Experiences
within such cultural nuisances, racial stereotypes and political
imperialism provoked Edward Said to “use” his “humanistic and
political concerns for the analyses and description of a very worldly
matter, the rise, development and consolidation of Orientalism”. 4
For Said, Orientalism is “a way of coming to terms with the
Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western
experience. The Orient ... is also the place of Europe’s greatest and
richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages,
its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images
of the “Other”. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or
the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. The
Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.
Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even
ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions,
vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies
and colonial styles”. 5 Said defines Orientalism “as a Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”. 6 For
Said, because of Orientalism, Orient could not acquire the status of a
free will.
This very agenda of exploring (or perhaps proving) the
hegemonic apparatus of Orientalism is the defining feature of his
methodology of studying “Otherness”. He extracts strength from Michel
Foucault’s concept of discourse as discussed in The Archaeology of
Knowledge and Discipline and Punish. For Said, Europeans configured
Orient by creating a systematic disciplinary society in the colony. Such
disciplinary society constituted Orient “politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively”. 7 Saidian
70
HUSSAIN AHMAD KHAN , CONCEPTUALIZING “OTHERNESS”
discourse also infers from Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony by

incorporating domination with consent to study the “flexible positional
superiority” and to explore the relationship between the West and the
East.
By relying upon above mentioned paradigms, Said also
stresses that there is no starting point in human sciences. It should be
very clear to enable readers to figure out author’s objective. Said calls
this methodological device as “strategic location---- a way of describing
the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he
writes about and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the
relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types
of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential
power among themselves”. 8
By relying upon this methodological device, Said argues that
various Orientalists texts have close affiliation with each other. These
discourses were disseminated though print media and institutions (like
schools, libraries, and foreign sources) etc. fabricating the whole web of
inter-textuality. By adopting the methodology of intertextuality and
exteriority, Said contends the cultural discourse has nothing to do with
reality/truth and is merely a representation or misrepresentation.
Therefore, “all of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient:
that orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on
the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western
techniques of representations rely upon institutions, traditions,
conventions, agreed upon codes of understanding for their effects, not
upon a distant and amorphous orient”. 9 Said uses textual reading “to
reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex
collective formation to which his work is a contribution”. 10
(II)

Bernard Cohn’s strategy of studying “Otherness” in colonial text is to
emphasize upon institutional practices fully laden with classification of
peoples, groups and communities. For Cohn, the presupposition in his
research is that “metropole and colony have to be seen in a unitary field
of analysis. In India, the British entered a new world that they tried to
comprehend using their Ours forms of knowing and thinking. There was
a widespread agreement that this society, like others they were
governing, could be known and represented as a series of facts. The
form of these facts was taken to be self-evident, as was the idea that
administrative power stemmed from the efficient use of these facts”. 11
71
“Investigative modalities” were devised to collect, classify and

categorize the facts. For Cohn, these investigative modalities are the
means of studying otherness in colonial discourses.
The colonial state attached a great significance to the local
practices and history. The colonial officials approached history with
particular enquiries (as in case of Bengal in the 1770s) to collect
information about essence and process of land settlement. For British,
History “has an ontological power in providing the assumptions about
how the real social and natural worlds are constituted. History, in its
broadest sense, was a zone of debate over the ends and means of their
rulership in India”. 12 This is what Cohn terms as Historiographic
Modality. He places Alexander Dow, Robert Orme, James Mill, and
James Tod in this category.
Observational/ travel modality involves “repertoire of images
and typifications that determined what was significant to the European
eye....It was a matter of.... seeing the sights in predictable ways”. 13
Earlier accounts provided blue prints for the later travelogues which
included description of monuments, religion, dresses, customs like Sati,
trade and nature of the locals. All these observations were placed/
judged on the basis of particular aesthetic principles, like “sublime, the
picturesque, the romantic, and the realistic”. 14
The survey Modality was used to explore the natural resources
and social landscape of the eighteenth century India. It involves the
collection and classification of botanical specimens, architectural and
archaeological remains and minute details of peasant’s fields,
ethnography, economic products, history and sociology. Cohn terms it
“an imaginary grid on which the government can locate any site in
India”. 15
In order to measure the progress of their rule in India, the
British collected basic information about the locals regarding literacy,
age, religion, caste, profession etc. In this Victorian model for total
knowledge “entailed in the construction of the census operations was
the creation of social categories by which India was ordered for
administrative purposes---- (which) also objectified social, cultural, and
linguistic differences among the peoples of India”. 16
Europeans used four walls of museum/ exhibitions to generate
particular type of discourses strongly embedded in Western thought.
Ethnographic artefacts like pottery, dresses, food, machines, texts,
paintings were collected and arranged in a particular “way” to
substantiate the western superiority. Not only had this but collection and
selection of artefacts led to the construction of particular Eurocentric
historical discourses. It is called museological modality. By surveillance
72
modality, the British identified social groups and categories whose

practices threatened the order of colonial state, in India. Imagination of
“criminal tribes and castes” and subsequent establishment of Thagi and
Dacoity Department are a few instances of surveillance modality.
Cohn analyses in detail the political use of language to
command the locals. Compilation of dictionaries and standardization of
vernaculars “turned into tools to enable the Sahibs to communicate their
commands and gather information”. 17
(III)

In his book, History, Culture, And Region in SouthEast Asian
Perspective, O.W.Wolters not only traces the background of the earlier
South East Asia, but also challenges the issue of “Indinization” of whole
regional history. He suggests various methods and paradigms to study
“Indian Otherness” in the “prevailing history” which needs complete re-
interpretation. Wolters tries to remove the historians’ misconception that
“the South East Asian peoples could graduate to statehood only with
assistance of Indian influence”. 18 For it, he brings into light the
statements of different historians and then redefines them. According to
him, unlike what the Western historians portray, there is no universality
in delineation of one’s culture, style, law, and language. By putting forth
the viewpoint of Coedes “that the states of Southeast Asia were
continuously shaped and sustained by Indian culture influences”, 19
Wolters takes into account the cultural diversity in this region (the
Khemers, the Javenese, and the Chams). In case of localization, Wolters
quips, “Localized foreign materials do not have to be Indian to tell us
something about the society”. 20 In account of any society, language
plays a role of an important “signifier”. 21 Wolters raises this issue by
counter arguing on Mabbett’s view that the Indian symbols are utilized
to propagate Southeast Asian features. According to him, the status of
Sanskirt has been varying and it is evident from the difference between
tenth century and twelfth century Sanskirt, used by the Khamer.
In short, it is Wolters’ way to raise the controversy and then
digging out the truth by tracing back the history. In his case he deals
with two “Others” – the Western historians and the Indian influences.
However, he also takes the support of the Western historians in order to
refute the misconception of the Indianization with regard to the cultural
diversity. For instance, he quotes M.B. Hooker, who asks the legal
historians to be “cautious because the mode of congruence of Indian law
with indigenous laws has varied greatly throughout Southeast Asia”. 22
73
(IV)

Edward Said, Bernard Cohn and O.W. Wolters see the intrusion of
outside forces in the formulation and restructuring of internal fibre of
colonized societies. All three identify various methodologies and
paradigms to underscore the sense of alienation/”Otherness” in
colonizers texts. Prime emphasis is laid on linguistic discourses by
highlighting the limitations of colonizers to appreciate the local
practices. One distinguishing feature of Cohn’s work is the
acknowledgement of the process of osmosis, or in other words,
negotiation between colonizers and colonized. He identifies various
operational strategies pursued by the colonial state. However, Said, to a
great extent, ignores the role of locals in influencing the colonizer’s text.
In fact, Said is being blamed for oversimplifying the
complexity of colonial context by adopting the same methodological
tools of binary oppositions. He treats colonizer and colonized as
homogenous and coherent entities politically, culturally, ideologically
and institutionally. Said may not be a simplistic scholar but his
discourse certainly led to a simplified representation of complex
processes. In case of Wolters, he emphasizes more on local perspectives
by criticizing the works of some Western historians. These three writers
address the issue of “Otherness” differently. Said sees “Otherness” in
binary opposition, Bernard Cohn identifies colonial modalities and
various apparatus of control to classify and control the colonized and
Wolters delineates localizated definition “Self” in South East Asian
historical discourses by negating the western historians’ definition of
“Self” and “Other”.
74
END NOTES

1
Bill Ashcrof, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature (London: Routledge, 1989), p.
9.
2
Ibid.
3
Edward W Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p.27.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid., pp. 1-2.
6
Ibid., p.03.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., p.20.
9
Ibid., pp.21-2.
10
Ibid., pp. 23-4.
11
Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in
India (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), p.4.
12
Ibid., p.5.
13
Ibid., p.6.
14
Ibid., p.7.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., p.9.
17
Ibid., p.53.
18
O.W. Wolters, History, Culture, And Region in SouthEast Asian Perspectives
(NY: SEAP, 1999), p.24.
19
Ibid., p.51.
20
Ibid., p.61.
21
Ibid., p.84.
22
Ibid., p.51.
75
BOOK REVIEWS
ROY GUTMAN, HOW WE MISSED THE STORY (OSAMA BIN
LADEN, THE TALIBAN AND THE HIJACKING OF AFGHANISTAN)
(WASHINGTON: US INSTITUTE OF PEACE, 2008)
“How we Missed the Story” by Roy Gutman is an investigative study

of what happened in Afghanistan from the Soviet withdrawal to the
9/11 tragedy. The author has extensively written about several
international conflicts such as the ones in Nicaragua, El Salvador and
the Balkans. He has been associated with Reuters, Newsweek, etc. and
has won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant
reporting. This work is equally revealing as it is based on his first hand
observations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and access to US policy makers
on the Afghan conflict.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and
gradually their troop level peaked to one hundred and fifteen thousand.
During the next nine years and fifty days of Russian occupation, about
a million Afghans and fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers lost their lives.
Before the Russians actually invaded, there was a procommunist
Afghan government and US President Jimmy Carter’s administration
had begun to secretly aid the anticommunist rebels in July 1979 with an
initial seed money of $500,000. This covert aid was raised to $ 30
million a year after Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 and it
ballooned to $ 630 million in 1986. During the 1980s, the Americans
poured about $ 3 billion among the Afghan resistance (projected as
‘Mujahideen’). The objective was to defeat the Soviets. Neither the US
was directly controlling the resistance movement nor did it have any
plan as to who would rule once the ‘Reds’ would be kicked out of
Afghanistan. American largesse in Afghanistan was equally matched
by Saudi Arabia when King Fahd assured CIA Chief William Casey at
a Jeddah meeting: “What I tell you I’ll do, I’ll do. But you have your
Congress to deal with. So you do what you can, and I’ll match it.” The
author asserts that once the humiliated Russians were booted out, the
Americans made no effort to help the resistance leaders to take power
in Afghanistan.
Henry Kissinger, a US foreign policy guru argued
“Washington should only insist on a swift (Soviet) withdrawal.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser under Carter and the
champion of ‘Afghan jehad’ stated that US had no interest in becoming
‘mired in complex negotiations’ over an interim Afghan government
after the Russians had left. Michael Armacost, the US under-secretary
of state was more elaborate when he said, “the general supposition was
79
that the Russians and British had broken their spears trying to govern
these people. They resisted outside authority. They were notoriously
difficult to govern even when left alone. The question of who governs
was not prime subject for us.” Karl Inderfurth, the assistant secretary
for South Asian Affairs, admitted before the US Senate in 1997, “Let
me be very clear about our policy toward Afghanistan: The US is
neutral between the factions.” Probably, Robin Raphel, the assistant
secretary of state for the South Asian Affairs from 1993 to 1996, was
the only high level official who wanted the US to remain engaged with
the Afghans: “I would say if you walk away because you got what you
were after when the Russians left, and not considering the mess you left
this country in, you are going to pay. It is not the right thing to do.” But
when no one listened to her, she expressed her frustration in these
words: “I did everything except dance naked on the secretary’s staff
table” to draw the attention of all concerned to the Afghan cauldron.
After the Soviet retreat, the three figures that were to dominate
the Afghan scene for the next decade were Ahmed Shah Masood,
Mullah Omer and Osama Bin Laden but none had good relations with
the Americans. Mullah Omer, the head of Taliban had a vision in which
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) appointed him to bring peace to
Afghanistan. In 1995, the Taliban clearly told the US diplomats visiting
Afghanistan that after taking Kabul, they would institute sharia and
crush all opposition. Osama was their guest but his harangues against
the Americans so much irritated the US government that the CIA
director George Tenet rushed to Riyadh and in a meeting with Crown
Prince Abdullah got a commitment that the Saudis would use all their
means to prevail upon the Taliban to expel Osama from their country.
When Prince Turki al Faisal, the Saudi intelligence Chief demanded
Mullah Omer to hand over Osama, the latter replied, “He is our guest.
It is not our tradition to ask the guest to leave. And where would he go?
He would be arrested.” When Turki indicated that he had an open
cheque book, Omer angrily told him to leave which Turki did, but after
delivering his final warning: “You will regret it, and the Afghan people
will pay a heavy price.”
While on one hand the Saudis threatened Mullah Omer of dire
consequences on the US prodding but at the same time the author has
quoted several sources who held that the US officials viewed the
Taliban takeover as a ‘hopeful development’ because according to the
AFP correspondent Stefan Smith, “At our end, we had the very general
impression, including from US diplomats in Islamabad, that the Taliban
were not such a bad bunch at all.” In the ensuing Afghan civil war the
Americans had to make a choice between the fundamentalist Taliban
80
and the secular Northern Alliance’s maverick head, Ahmed Shah
Masood. Concerned officials for the Afghan desk at the State
Department such as Al Eastham and Mike Malinowski opposed the
American assistance to Masood because they believed that he could not
defeat the Taliban. Gary Schroen, who remained the CIA officer for
seven years in Islamabad, quoted Eastham as saying, “A Taliban
victory would mean no more fighting, no more civil war, and that
would in itself be something for Afghanistan.” In other words if the US
did not actively support a Taliban victory, they also made no effort to
stop them from coming into power.
Retrospectively, Masood could have been a better alternative.
Often compared with Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and Marshal Tito, he
was the most capable resistance leader who not only repelled nine
Russian offensives in north-eastern Afghanistan but also led the
bloodless takeover of Kabul in 1992 after the fall of Najibullah and
successfully defended his government for four-and-a-half years. A man
of action rather than words, the story of ‘Lion of Panjshir Valley’ is
almost unknown to the world due to the dearth of published writings on
him. His major shortcoming was his failure to develop a reliable
relationship with an outside patron. This does not mean that he was
unwilling to accept any foreign aid but the important point was that he
was not willing to accept any ‘direction or instruction’ from the
foreigners because in his view, his struggle was an “Afghan national
struggle, not a proxy war.” He admitted, “we Afghans erred, too. Our
shortcomings were as a result of political innocence, in-experience,
vulnerability, victimization, bickering and inflated egos but this by no
means justified the response of former cold war allies to destroy and
subjugate Afghanistan.”
Masood was much clearer about the potential threat of the
Taliban and Osama than the ‘Babus’ of State Department. Three years
before the 9/11, while elaborating the potential of threat from Osama
and the Taliban, he said, “the terrorists will grow deep and wide, right
and left, up and down to terrorize and entangle the West, and especially
the United States.” In a strong worded message, he tried to shake the
slumbering Washington establishment: “If President Bush doesn’t help
us, then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very
soon—and it will be too late.”
It is not that he was a power hungry leader who did not want
to share power with other stakeholders. After Najibullah had stepped
down, Masood urged him to join the Northern Alliance but the former
replied, “the Taliban had not only Pakistan’s backing but also that of
the United States.” Masood even phoned Mullah Omer for grand
81
reconciliation suggesting a cease-fire, an interim administration, a loya
jirga and free elections but when Omer said, “You are not corrupt. But
you have become an obstacle for Islamic Emirate. Don’t do that. You
can play a role in Tajikistan. The Tajiks like you. You can expand the
Islamic Emirate to Tajikistan,” Masood interrupted, “We are talking
about Afghanistan. There is a war going on in Afghanistan in which
people are suffering. This is not the way to stop it,” Omer interjected,
“Tajiks should go to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, Hazaras to Iran.
We are Afghans. This is our land.” The night before his assassination at
the hands of Qaeda, he prophesied, “If we are out of Afghanistan, the
next (to fall) will be Central Asia. Bokhara (Uzbekistan) will be the
capital of the Islamic movement of al-Qaeda.”
Masood died fighting the Taliban and Qaeda. He was the only
leader who could have turned the tables against his foes but neither
Clinton nor George W. Bush sought his counsel or used his talents or
provided him adequate assistance to shift the balance of power in the
volatile situation. Gutman feels that the most critical juncture for the
US policy shift from neutrality to support Masood was the August 1998
attack on the American embassies in East Africa because by that time it
had become crystal clear that Mullah Omer was fully committed to
grant sanctuary to Osama.
The author has also meticulously researched Osama’s
emergence as a top level non-state threat to world peace. His
association with Afghanistan dates back to 1980. It is believed that
Osama was offered asylum in Afghanistan by three men: Molvi
Saznoor, a commander of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf’s Ittehad-i-Islami,
Engineer Mahmood, a commander of Gulbadin Hikmatyar, and Fazlal
Haq of Yunus Khalis’ party—all three groups were beneficiaries of US
largesse during the ‘Afghan jehad.’ Interestingly, Osama departed
Sudan for Afghanistan along with his family in two chartered flights on
May 18, 1996 – one of the aircraft belonged to Ariana, the Afghan state
airline. Although the then Afghan President Rabbani denied having
anything to do with Osama’s arrival, the fact of the matter is that the
$50,000 paid in cash for the Ariana chartered plane went straight into
the state coffers. Even more surprising is the fact that Osama’s
departure from Sudan to Afghanistan was at the urging of CIA. The
Americans had begun to put pressure on the Sudanese government to
expel Osama from their soil. When the Sudanese defense minister
visited US in March, 1996, the CIA repeated their demand. And when
the minister enquired as to where should Sudan send Bin Laden, the US
officials responded, “Just ask him to leave the country, but don’t let
him go to Somalia.’ Knowing Osama’s preference, when the minister
82
informed that he might go to Afghanistan, the Americans said, “Let
him” (p 87).
Consequent to his arrival, he began to dominate the Taliban
regime because of his invaluable support to them during the civil war
as well as to their regime that lasted from 1996 to 2001. In this way, a
non-state actor ‘hijacked’ a state. The author thinks that Bin Laden’s
financial resources enabled him to become a decisive force in a very
poor country. According to one estimate, he is a billionaire with a net
worth of $250 million whereas Prince Turki put it between $40 to 50
million. In addition, the US intelligence analysts held that Osama
“raised some $ 30 million a year for al-Qaeda and invested $10-20
million a year in the Taliban.” With such a fortune, he could pay $300
monthly to his each fighter and it is widely held that the $16 to 18
million cost of the Taliban offensive that routed the Northern Alliance
was also borne by Osama. He proved more intelligent than the most
intelligent minds of the West, particularly the US. The way he
manipulated the Muslim grievances worldwide, made him a magnet for
jehadis with an extremist global agenda justifying terror tactics.
Gutman’s conclusion is that the ascendancy of Taliban and the
‘hijacking’ of the Taliban regime by al-Qaeda which culminated in the
9/11 attacks was less of an intelligence or military failure and more of a
strategic US foreign policy failure. With the collapse of the Soviet
empire, power vacuum was bound to occur in different parts of the
globe, particularly in the periphery of the US empire, which, if not
addressed on time, was likely to create situations as happened in the
case of Afghanistan. In their frenzy to beat the Russians, the American
policy makers completely ignored the “need to try to achieve a stable
political end-state in Afghanistan.” Without formulating a long term
policy to steer the Afghan imbroglio to its logical end, both Clinton and
Bush thought that Osama could be eliminated by an intelligence or
military operation. The author thinks that the US should have adopted a
tough policy vis-à-vis Taliban after the attacks on their embassies in
East Africa but the general mood prevailing in the Clinton
administration at that time was: “We don’t go to war over dead
Africans.” He contends that as terrorism is a tactic to attain a political
purpose, it cannot be eliminated by waging a war against terror rather it
can be addressed only by a political counterstrategy, otherwise the
terrorists will continue to rebound.
Afghanistan has been a burial ground of empires. The Russian
empire was humbled when the last Soviet soldier crossed out of
Afghanistan. This was February 15, 1989. The mood at the CIA
headquarters in Langley, Virginia became jubilant when their
83
Islamabad station Chief Milton Bearden sent a two-word teletype
message: “We won.” The victory was all the more heady because not
only that not a drop of American blood was shed in the entire conflict
but with just six billion dollars and a handful of Muslim ‘jehadis’, the
CIA had achieved what the entire might of the American empire could
not during the course of Cold War. Since 1989, it is almost two
decades, now, and there is no end of Afghan conflict in sight. In fact,
US President-elect Obama has promised the deployment of more
American troops in Afghanistan. Only time will tell, who will have the
last laugh, this time.
BASHARAT HUSSAIN QAZILBASH

GC UNIVERSITY, LAHORE
84
CARLO GINZBURG, THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS: THE
COSMOS OF A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MILLER (TRANSLATED BY
JOHN AND ANNE TEDESCHI), (LONDON AND HENLEY:
ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL, 1980)
Carlo Ginzburg’s book addresses some critical issues in the

contemporary tradition of history writing. By borrowing the concepts
from Marc Bloch for systematic investigative study of historical
documents and Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of lower categories, he tries
to explore the negotiating grounds of “higher culture” and “popular
culture”. The book is about the trial of Dominico Scandella, a miller of
the Friuli, who was burned by the Order of the Holy Officer on charges
of heresy. Ginzburg uses archival records to reconstruct the popular
sensibility about changing religious ideas, interaction of common
people with the Church, and more significantly the relationship
between print and oral cultures. He terms his hero, Scandella, not an
average peasant, yet his construction of differentiation, may help us to
understand some inferences of popular culture. He locates these
relationships within a larger context of Reformation, and economic and
social changes in the small town of Friuli. 1
(I)
Carlo Ginzburg’s concept of history is simple at one level and complex

at the other. It is simple in a sense that it studies history at micro-level
but at the same time it is complex one because it conceptualizes “a
plural configuration (which) can be represented as “a house with many
mansions”. 2 In many of his works, Ginzburg discusses “low
knowledge, which exists everywhere in the world, without geographic,
historical, ethnic, gender or class exception” 3 but remains marginalized
in the existing discourses. The Cheese and the Worms attempts to
highlight “the relevance of the notion of the individual in history −to
transfer the portrayal of individuality from elite culture to what we
generally refer to as "the masses". 4
Many postmodernist theorists and historians believe that every
History is in fact, historian’s autobiography, or at least, projects his
own perspective. For instance, Hegel’s German background provoked
him to marginalize Jews in his conception of History, Derrida’s sense
of loss mourning may be attributed to Jewish background. Ginzburg, to
some extent, also believes in the same philosophy. His Jewish
background can be connected to Menocchio. 5 Consciously or
85
unconsciously historian does represent his own past in his works. But it
is, according to Ginzburg, “obvious that our own experiences will
govern our interests as researchers. And there is no reason why such
subjective elements should have to impose limitations on an historian’s
work, instead of presenting opportunities”. 6
If history is a perspective, like The Cheese and the Worms,
then how far is the possibility of truth in historical discourse? Ginzburg
terms “Truth as the daughter of time”. 7 Historians are definitely aware
of the fact “that all phases through which research unfolds are
constructed and not given: the identification of the object and its
importance; the elaboration of the categories through which it is
analyzed; the criteria of proof; the stylistic and narrative forms by
which the results are transmitted to the reader” 8 . That’s why history has
strains of truth, fiction, consciousness and unconsciousness.
The fictional aspect in Ginzburg’s work may be prominent
because of his inspiration from Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He terms The
Cheese and the Worms as a “small, distorted product of Tolstoy’s grand
and intrinsically unrealizable product: the reconstruction of the
numerous relationships...”. 9 Since History is the reconstruction/re-
enactment of the past, therefore, Ginzburg acknowledges the power of
reader over the text. His hero, Mannochio, customizes every text which
he reads, and that’s why Ginzburg “is not sure that Mannochio is being
heard”. 10 Through this he not only creates new spaces for readers’
subjectivities but also highlights the interaction of oral tradition with
the print culture. 11
(II)
Should history-writing carry some purpose or objective? According to

Ginzburg, it should “acknowledge the importance as well as themes
that had been previously ignored or relegated to spheres considered
inferior, such as local history”. 12 In this way, the book deals with the
life of an individual who has no historical significance. Ginzburg is
also critical of meta-narratives. He terms Hyden White as fascist
because of his Metahistory. 13 Although, the said book is about a
defeated hero, Ginzburg advises historians to avoid creating a “culture
displaying a gallery of defeated heroes. That would turn history into an
ideology that is not a good thing”. 14
For Carlo Ginzburg, history cannot be reconstructed without
conjectures and speculations. He suggests “conjectural model” for the
reconstruction of knowledge because it would “help us to go beyond
the sterile contrasting of rationalism and irrationalism”. 15 In this way,
historical research becomes a sign-reading. Ginzburg’s model is
86
somewhat similar to “abductive model of testimony” which “treats
judgment of testimony as an instance of inference of hidden causes
from manifest vestiges and signs”. 16 On the use of inference and signs,
Carlo Ginzburg argues that in the 19th century, in most of the
disciplines like history, philology, art history, criminology, signs were
taken like means, clues, “in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, as a
science of systematic reconstruction of absent or hidden realities from
present.....”. 17 He adopts the same Sherlock Holmes’ strategy of
looking at the testimony in a systematic way in The Cheese and the
Worms. While analysing the inquisition record, he reads it like a text of
sign-posts/clues and applies rationality to extract possible actions of his
characters. 18 That’s why constructions like “apparently”, “it appears
so”, “it may be the case”, “perhaps he had thought this” are too
frequently used in the text. He takes record as sign-posts (what has
been done by Umberto Eco) and thinks historical text as a kind of
hermeneutical circle. One of the prime factors of negating prima facie
of historical evidence is his awareness of the subjectivity of historical
record. 19 As a result, he imaginatively chooses not to rely on
inquisition record at various places. It is the same strategy which Marc
Bloch suggests in probing the past. 20
Sometimes, Ginzburg adopts Foucauldian theory of
knowledge-power relationship to substantiate his point of view.
Especially when his hero, Scandella criticizes Church, he relates
religious knowledge/perspective as a source of legitimacy. The book
suggests that various centres of power constructed their own
episteme/epistemology for defining and redefining their own order and
disorder. 21
However, locating Ginzburg’s work within the strict
Foucauldian concepts may not be altogether correct. Multiplicity of
voices, tensions within ideologies, confusion, simplicity, complexity,
clarity and vagueness place this work beyond such conception.
Ginzburg suggests such complexities as a very core feature of
microhistory. Interestingly, he locates this multiplicity of
voices/ideologies by discourse analyses of trial record. In other words,
he locates “other voices” within the text that is ought to project self. He
is analysing the document of high culture (i.e., Trial record of Holy
Officer), and reconstruct “other” (i.e., an illiterate ordinary miller of
low stratum). 22
The book, as a whole, is useful contribution not only to the
16th century Europe, but also to the history-writing. The author aptly
uses discourse analysis and hermeneutics to reconstruct the
marginalized or neglected past. The negotiation of elite and popular
87
cultures, contextualization of an individual and his associations and
alienation with these developments, interaction of print and oral
traditions are analysed in an imaginative way.
HUSSAIN AHMAD KHAN

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
88
END NOTES

1
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-
Century Miller (Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi), (London and Henley:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. xxvi, 13-17.
2
Ginzburg's talk, entitled “Coleridge, Exoticism and Empire”, St Catherine's
College, 16 February 2007.
3
Carlo Ginzburg and Anna Davin, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes:
Clues and Scientific Method”. History Workshop, no. 9 (Spring, 1980), p.6.
4
Carlo Ginzburg’s Interview, www.eurozine.com.
5
"I am a Jew who was born and grew up in a Catholic country; I never had a
religious education; my Jewish identity is in large measure the result of
persecution", Carlo Ginzburg writes in the preface to one of his recent books.
Ginzburg was born in Turin in 1939. His father, Leone Ginzburg, taught
Russian literature at the university there until, in 1934, he lost his position,
having refused to swear an oath of allegiance imposed by the Fascist regime.
He died in 1944, in a section of the Roman prison controlled by the Germans.
Carlo Ginzburg was therefore brought up by his mother, Natalia Ginzburg
(1916−1991), one of the leading Italian writers of the twentieth century”. Carlo
Ginzburg’s Interview, www.eurozine.com.
6
7
Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Carlo Ginzburg”. The Journal of Modern History,
Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jun., 1976), p.306.
8
Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or
Three Things That I Know about It”. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn,
1993), p. 24.
9
“....the impetus towards this type of narration (history narration) (and more
generally for occupying myself with history) came to me from further off: from
War and Peace, from Tolstoy's conviction that a historical phenomenon can be-
come comprehensible only by reconstructing the activities of all the persons
who participated in it.51 This proposition, and the sentiments that had spawned
it (populism, fierce disdain for the vacuous and conventional history of
historians), left an indelible impression on me from the moment I first read it.
The Cheese and the Worms, the story of a miller whose death is decreed from
afar, by a man (a pope) who one minute earlier had never heard his name, can
be considered a small, distorted product of Tolstoy's grand and intrinsically
unrealizable project: the reconstruction of the numerous relationships that
linked Napoleon's head cold before the battle of Borodino, the disposition of
the troops, and the lives of all the participants in the battle, including the most
humble soldier.” Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, Anne C. Tedeschi,
“Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It”. Critical Inquiry,
Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993), p.16.
89

10
11
For instance see for discussion, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms:
The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, pp. 31-47, 51.
12
Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or
Three Things That I Know about It”. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn,
1993), p. 24.
13
Ewa Domanska (ed.), Encounters: Philosophy of History After
Postmodernism. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia,
1998), p.16. Also see F. R. Ankersmit, “Hayden White's Appeal to the
Historians”. History and Theory, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May, 1998), p.185.
14
15
C. Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Homes”. History
Workshop, No. 9 (Spring, 1980), p. 06.
16
Nick Jardine, “Explanatory Geneologies and Historical Testimony”.
Episteme, 2008, p. 165.
17
C. Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Homes”. History
Workshop, No. 9 (Spring, 1980), pp. 5-36.
18
For instance, when Menocchio very vaguely identifies 15-20 years as a
period of his beliefs, and fails to identify the person who inspired him to think
like that, Ginzburg very smartly relates Mennochio’s beliefs to Nicola da
Porcia on the basis of Don Ottavio’s statement although Nicola was released by
the Holy Officer because of the testimonies of two ecclesiastics of Porcia. “It
seems, then, that Menocchio must have spoken with someone about religion
fifteen or sixteen years before--- in 1583, probably, because at the beginning of
the following year he had been imprisoned and tried. In all probability it was
the same person who had lend Menocchio the incriminated book, Decameron.
Menocchio named him a couple of weeks later: Nicola de Melchiori. In
addition to the name, the dates (coincidences that escaped the inquisitors) lead
us to identify this person with Nicola da Porcla, whom in 1584, Menocchio had
not seen for precisely a year. Don Ottavio Montereale was well informed:
Menocchio must actually have discussed religious questions with Nicola da
Porcia. We don’t know if Nicola had been part of the group of artisans who
gathered to read the Gospel more than twenty-five years before”. Carlo
Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century
Miller, p. 21.
19
Ibid., pp. xv, xvii.
20
Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Carlo Ginzburg”. The Journal of Modern History,
Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jun., 1976), pp.299-300.
21
For instance see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of
a Sixteenth-Century Miller, pp. 02, 10.
22
Ibid., p.xix.
90
Notes for Authors
1. Research papers, notes, review articles, comments, rejoinders and book reviews-in
English only should be sent in duplicate together with floppy in MS-Word to:
Dr Tahir Kamran, The Editor, The Historian, Department of History, GC University,

Lahore (e-mail: tahirkamran_gcu@yahoo.com, history_department_gcu@yahoo.com).
2. Papers will be accepted for consideration on the understanding that they are original
contributions to the existing knowledge in the fields of History, International Relations,
International Political Economy, Current Affairs, Strategic Studies, Women Studies,
Sociology Journalism, Political Science, Statistics, Psychology, Philosophy, etc.
3. Each paper should be typed and should carry a margin of an inch and a half on the left-
hand side of the typed page.
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abstract and any acknowledgements.
5. Tables for the main text and each of its appendices should be numbered serially and
separately. The title of each table should be given in a footnote immediately below the
line at the bottom of the table.
6. Endnotes should be numbered consecutively.
7. All references used in the text should be listed in alphabetical order of the author's
surnames at the end of the text. References in the text should include the name(s) of
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to the style of the Journal. Further information on questions of style may be obtained
from the Editor of this Journal.
8. Each author will receive two copies of The Historian.
9. Book Reviews should give a description of the contents of the volume and a critical
evaluation of the book. It should not exceed 05 or 06 typewritten pages. Each request for
a book review in the journal must be accompanied by one copy of the book concerned.
“AN INGLORIOUS END TO GLORIOUS
ADVENTURE”: 1 CONCEIVING AND EXECUTING
THE KARGIL OPERATION (1999)
IRFAN WAHEED USMANI

PAKISTAN
ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the background of the Kargil

operation along with highlighting the significant
developments in Kargil (mis)adventure, which serves
as a most glaring example of inconsistency in
Pakistan's Kashmir policy. It played a central role in
the derailment of Lahore peace process, it was also
indicative of the dominance of hawkish elements over
doves with respect to Pakistan's Kashmir policy.
Failure of Pakistan’s hawkish policy makers to
withstand international pressure is evident from the
retreat of Pakistani Mujahideen from Kargil. The
subsequent reliance of the hawks on the civilian
leadership, comprising pacifist elements virtually
sidelined by the military elites during planning and
execution of this operation, also alludes to their
misplaced expectations. Consequently confusion was
compounded. Ironically the military leadership tried
to place the onus of withdrawal on "civilian
government" which later turned out to be a major
cause of difference between the Prime Minister,
Muhammad Nawaz Sharif and the Chief of the Army
Staff, General Pervez Musharraf. This sudden shift in
Pakistan's Kashmir policy later triggered the blame
game as to who was responsible for this
"misadventure"; the Prime Minister or the Army
Chief. Particularly after the dismissal of Nawaz
Sharif’s government on October 12, 1999, Pervez
Musharraf and the deposed Prime Minister brought
to surface new facts about Kargil, further exposing
93
The Historian, Vol. 06, No. 2 (July – December 2008)
the inconsistencies in Pakistan's Kashmir policy at

the highest level.
KEY WORDS: Kargil, Kashmir, India, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf,

Nawaz Sharif, Mujahideen, Militancy.
It was in 1998. Several hundred militants were rigorously training in

the mountainous region of Pakistani Kashmir (Azad Jammu and
Kashmir). Ever since 1989, these militants were infiltrating into the
Indian administered Kashmir however they seemed to be far more
determined to launch a decisive offensive. 2 The hawkish element in the
Pakistan’s military establishment devised this plan which was to be
executed in 1999. The plan was simple yet extremely ambitious:
Mujahideen would enter through Kargil and block the supply route for
the Indian troops posted at the Siacheen Glacier. The key players of this
operation were General Pervaiz Musharraf the COAS, the Chief of
General Staff Lt. General Mohammad Aziz, Lt. General Mahmood
Ahmed, GOC 10 corps, Major General Javed Hassan, Force
Commander Northern Areas (ECNA) and Lt. General Tariq Zia, the
DGMO. 3 This plan in fact dates back to 1984, when the Pakistan Army
planned the invasion of Kargil Daras to cut off India's road connection
to Siacheen. Indian military deployed the same modus operandi when it
infiltrated and occupied Siacheen through operation Meghdoot. This
plan was the brainchild of Brigadier Aziz-ud-Din, who was entrusted
with the charge of the Pakistan Brigade in 1985. This plan was worked
out after an intensive study of the topography of Azad Kashmir but he
was called back to Rawalpindi before it could be executed. 4 Why did
the hawks in military reconsider such an aggressive plan? General
(Retd.) Javed Nasir, former chief of Pakistan’s Inter Services
Intelligence (ISI), provides a clue to the question. To him, the
underlying motive was to internationalize Kashmir dispute as Pakistani
circles apprehended that the resolutions about Kashmir might be
excluded from the main agenda of the United Nations. 5
An Indian analyst, Ridanda Mchengappa, opines that
Pakistan's intrusion into Kargil was an act of desperation since
insurgency in Kashmir did not fructify as such. 6 Therefore, Pakistani
hawkish lobby opted for the military adventurism option with all the
zeal possible in order to internationalize Kashmir dispute. Pakistan’s
avowedly nuclear status after 28 May 1998 provided enough raison
d’eter to the hawks to follow that strategy. It enabled the Pakistani
policy makers to fulfill two objectives: one; the regime of Mutual
Assured Destruction (MAD) in the region emboldened Pakistan’s
94
IRFAN WAHEED USMANI , “AN INGLORIOUS END TO GLORIOUS ADVENTURE”
hawkish military elements to infiltrate with well-armed guerillas into

Kargil region. Therefore, Islamabad could hereby draw a renewed
international attention to insurgency while remaining confident that its
demonstrated nuclear posture would deter New Delhi from extreme
action. 7 Two; by internationalization of Kashmir dispute through such
maneuverings, the Kashmir could be portrayed as a "nuclear flash
point" in order to induce third party mediation and possibly a
settlement of dispute on terms favourable to Islamabad. 8 Another
plausible explanation of Kargil operation could be to perceive it as a tit
for tat response to Indian infiltration and subsequent occupation of
Siacheen through operation Meghdoot. 9
This article is divided into three parts: First part deals with the
Pakistan’s strategy, Indian response and other significant developments
of Kargil operation; second section focuses on international efforts
particularly the US role to de-escalate the crisis; whereas the last part
scrutinizes the controversies surrounding Kargil more specifically it
underscores the question of ownership of Kargil (mis)adventure leading
to the blame game between the Chief of Army Staff and the Prime
Minister. It also analyses Kargil operation as an upshot of erratic policy
making. Thus it highlights inconsistencies in the strategic planning of
the policy makers.
(I)
From military perspective, Pakistan's strategy may be divided into three

main planks: First, to occupy the dominating heights over-looking the
Srinagar Kargil Lah Road which was left vacant by the Indian troops
during the winter. Second, after establishing a firm base, the next
strategy was to cut off the line of communication to Ladakh which
would frustrate the operation of Indian forces at Siacheen. The third
part of the strategy was to use these bases to facilitate infiltration of
militants and mercenaries into the Kashmir valley. 10
Pakistan's strategy was to internationalize the Kashmir issue
and to undermine the de jure status of the Line of Control (LoC), which
had been in existence for twenty-seven years. Pakistani planners
believed that through the Kargil operation they would secure the
intervention of the UN or a third party as they had succeeded earlier in
1948 and 1965. By cutting off the Sri Nagar Kargil Lah Road, the build
up of supplies and Indian troops would not be possible and it would
also prevent further enforcement in Kargil sector from the Indian
side. 11
95
The other major element in this strategy was secrecy and

surprise. In order to retain the element of surprise all major troop
movements were made via northern areas prior to the operation and
were kept secret. Radio silence was observed till Indian Air Strikes
began. Battalions of the Northern Light Infantry (NLI) under the FCNA
were formed into a number of columns and groups. 12 There was
sprinkling of Special Services Group (SSG) for undertaking commando
operations. These columns consisted of regular officers. 13 Pakistani
government categorically denied the involvement of Pakistan's military
though the incident was flashed by international media. Outlook
reported that infiltrators were assisted by Pakistan’s 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th
light infantry troops; one battalion of SSG and two crack mountain
divisions. 14 It is also corroborated by former Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif in his first interview to a journalist, Sohail Warraich, published
in the Daily Jang during his exile. 15 A number of western diplomats
also believed that such a major offensive could not be launched by
militant groups (as projected by Pakistan's official claims) without the
active support of the Pakistan Army. 16
Another feature of Pakistan's strategy was the use of militant
groups drawn from Jehadi outfits viz Tehrik-Jihad (TJ), Al-Badar,
Harkatul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e- Tayyeba (LT). 17 Later on when
conflict intensified in Kargil, two more groups Hizbul Mujahideen
(HM) and Harkat-e-Jihad (HJ) also joined to provide reinforcement. 18
Abdullah Muntazir, a spokesman for the LT, stated that his
organization had setup 2200 camps in various parts of Pakistan and
Azad Kashmir to provide military training to the fresh recruits to fight
across the LoC. 19 He reiterated that they had planned the Kargil
operation in 1998. He claimed that one thousand Mujahideen belonging
to LT were in Kargil. 20 During the course of operation Fazal-ur-
Rehman Khalil of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen claimed that their cadres were
active in Kargil and they would welcome all the Muslims for the Jihad
from Egypt, Chechnya and Sudan. 21
During the spring of 1999, under the cover of heavy artillery
and mortar fire, six hundred militants moved into the 16,000 ft. high
mountains in the Kargil area. Unlike the regular skirmishes however,
this operation, which resembled the surprise airlift of Indian troop onto
the Siacheen glacier in April 1984, involved occupation of one hundred
and thirty previously held Indian piquet. Unobserved by the Indians,
the militants had succeeded in taking over strategic positions which the
Indians manned in summer but vacated during winter and had failed to
patrol. 22 From these strategic vantage points, the militant’s claimed that
they had liberated one hundred and twenty square miles of Indian-held
96
Kashmir. 23 They were able to penetrate along 140-kilometers stretch of

Himalayian ridges, some 05-15 Kilometers on the Indian side of the
LoC. It enabled the intruders to watch the movement on National High-
way 1A, which was the only usable road between Srinagar and Leh and
seriously threatened the only ground supply route to Indian military
forces manning the border between the Ladakh and China. 24 The
occupation of twenty-nine peaks across a 40-km stretch over the
National Highway that connected Leh with Srinagar proved a severe
blow to Indian security efforts in that area as Leh serving the staging
point for 20,000 feet high Siacheen Glacier area occupied by India in
1984. 25
India’s predicament and subsequent reaction on the occupation
of Kargil heights by Kashmiri Mujahideen proceeded from two
reasons: First, it took New Delhi by surprise; second, it posed a serious
threat to India's supply routes to its armed forces stationed in the
Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir. This occupation was seen as
New Delhi's inability "to protect the Eastern approaches to the popular
Kashmir valley”. 26 Indian government believed that the incident posed
a challenge to not only on military front but also on political and
diplomatic fronts. 27 Indian government constituted a core group of the
advisory board of the National Security Council which held meeting on
daily basis to advise the government on handling the Kargil issue. 28
Indian military strategy in Kargil was based on three
objectives: First was to contain the Kashmiri Mujahideen's intrusion,
and prevent any further build up and consolidation; Second objective
was to evict the intruders and restore the LoC; the final objective was to
consolidate vacated places in order to avoid any such intrusion in
future. 29 To dislodge the Pakistan backed Kashmir Mujahideen,
constituted a daunting challenge for the Indians entailing various
tactical problems. For example, to launch a strike against well prepared
defences in the mountains, the attack required a sufficient rationing of
almost 9:1 as against 3:1 in the plans. 30
The key targets of the Indian military plans in Kargil were:
First, to side step reinforcements from Leh and Srinagar to contain the
ever increasing barnacle like encrustation of hills and peaks by
intruders. Second, to address the pockets of intrusions sector by sector,
in order of priority of threat to Kargil i.e. Daras, Batalik, Muhkoh and
Kaksar respectively. Third, to use overwhelming and concentrated fire
power, including air strikes to interdict Mujahideens supply lines and
neutralize their ground positions. 31 The Daras Heights which
dominated a very long section of Srinagar Leh road camping ground in
Daras where the Brigade Headquarter was located, were undoubtedly
97
the center of gravity of Kargil. The clearance of the Daras Heights was,
therefore, given first priority. Insurgency in Batalik did not pose any
immediate threat to Kargil, however it would have opened a route for
further intrusion in Shyok valley and its adjoining areas turning the
flank of the affected sector. Therefore it was accorded second priority.
The last priority was accorded to the Mushkoh and Kaksar intrusions as
they were considered less important and could be tackled once the
Daras heights had been cleared. 32 In the initial phases, only one brigade
was available. As gravity of the situation became clear; an infantry
brigade from the Leh sector and a mountain division along with the
reserve brigade of fifteen battalions were rushed to tackle the
intruders. 33 Within fortnight 20,000 Indian troops were entered into
Kargil, the number increased to 35,000 till June 16 in Daras sector. 34
Two more mountain divisions from Batalik sector moved to the
western sector to thwart any eventuality, 35 the total strength of Indian
army rose to 50,000 troops within a few days. Besides, troops rushed to
Rajauri Paanch, Kapwara and Gorez. 36
In the late May 1999, India resorted to aerial bombardments at
the Islamic militants in Kargil. 37 It was for the first time, that India
used airpower to drive out militants in Indian-held Kashmir. 38 About
1,200 air strikes were carried out, which included reconnaissance
sorties, search and destroy missions, close support tasks, etc. For
Indians, it had a moral boosting effect on ground troops alongwith
neutralizing the Mujahideen. It was perhaps, for the first time that
battlefield strikes were carried out at night. 39 The whole operation,
named as "operation Vijay", aimed at recapturing Kargil from the
Kashmiri Mujahideen.
An aspect of Kargil war was the battle for the control of
strategic hills; the battles for Tololing Heights and Tiger Hill may
specifically be mentioned. Indian Army's first attack was to clear the
intruders from the vital Tololing and Tiger Hill heights at 15,000 feet as
they were on the highway near Darass. 40 Indians widely publicized
their recapturing of strategic locations along eighty-five mile battle
front. They described their success as unparalleled in the history of
mountain warfare. 41 The second important Indian attack aimed at
blocking a major incursion on Jubar-Kukareong massif near Batalik
that descended from 18,100 feet high Shangruti hill in Azad Kashmir.
However, Pakistan successfully defended these heights including
Jubar. 42 The battle for Tiger Hill in July was described by India as a
"turning point" since the 16,500 feet peak was over the main road from
Kargil to Leh. 43 Pakistan army described the Indian claim of capturing
Tiger Hill as a "make believe". 44 Analysts believed that due to the
98
difficult conditions in which the Indians were fighting, and their own
un-preparedness for high attitude campaign, the victories were less
glorious than their spokesman portrayed. Brian Cloughly opines that it
is more likely that the forces holding Tiger Hills scuttled their
operations and then Indians reclaimed their positions. 45
Controversy surrounds the story of capturing Tiger Hills as it
was alleged by certain Pakistani circles that India did not capture Tiger
Hills by force rather these Hills were handed over to India as a "good
will gesture". This view is lent further credence by certain reports
which were published in the Pakistani press during the months of July
and August 1999. According to a veteran Pakistani Urdu Journalist
Ata-ur-Rehman, US President only agreed to meet Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif on the pre-condition of Mujahideen's withdrawal from
Kargil. Subsequently, on 4th July, when Nawaz Sharif left for the
United States at 3:00 a.m. the Mujahideen on Tiger Hills had
abandoned shelling. 46 Moreover, strategically it was not possible for
the Indians to occupy Tiger Hills before 4th July. 47 Ata-ur-Rehman
revealed that a crucial meeting of defence committee was held on 2
July, which was also attended by COAS General Pervaiz Musharaff. It
deliberated for five hours and the decision of withdrawal from the Tiger
Hills was taken to appease the US and to demonstrate Pakistan's
sincerity towards it. 48
The Kargil war led to the sudden deterioration of Indo-
Pakistan relations. At political levels, Indo-Pak relations were far from
cordial and the temperature kept soaring. At the end of May, the UN
Secretary-General Kofi Anan offered to send an envoy to New Delhi
and Islamabad to defuse tensions but Vajpayee rejected this offer by
saying “if an envoy needed to be sent to discuss peace, he should be
sent to Islamabad and not to New Delhi”. 49
Following the visit to New Delhi by Pakistani Foreign
Minister Sartaj Aziz, Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh remained
skeptical about the outcome of any talks. The conduct of Pakistan
raises serious doubts about the professed aim of "defusing tension" as
averred by Aziz. 50 A day after the talk-process collapsed, Indian Prime
Minister Vajpayee visited Kargil and blamed Pakistan of "betraying
Indian friendship". 51 The pressure mounted further when Principal
Secretary to Indian Prime Minister, Barjesh Mishra, traveled to
Geneva, where he held talks with the participants of the G-8's Annual
Conference and with the American Security Advisor, Sandy Berger. He
also handed over to him Vajp'ayee's letter for President Clinton. The
letter made it very clear if Pakistan refused to withdraw its forces from
Kargil, India would attack Pakistan. 52
99
When the tensions rose between the two nuclear rivals, the
international community, especially America, began its diplomatic
efforts to avert a possible war. On his way back to Washington from
Geneva on June 23, President Clinton sent General Anthony Zinni, C-
in-C of Central Military Command and Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for South Asia, G. Lanpher, as personal envoys. They held
meetings with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif the then Chief of Army
Staff General Pervaiz Musharraf and other important government
officials. General Zinni conveyed a message from the American
President asking Pakistan to withdraw the forces unconditionally from
Kargil. Zinni implicitly threatened, “the US would not bailout Pakistan
if India decides to launch a major attack across LoC." 53
General Zinni co-authored a book with a novelist, Tom
Clancy, which provides some details about the Kargil operation. “If
you do not pull back, you are going to bring war and nuclear
annihilation down to your country. That's going to be very bad for
everybody”. 54 He writes that no one quarreled with his "rationale" but
no one wanted to "lose face". 55 Withdrawal to the LoC was seen as a
"political suicide" 56 , so a face saving device was found in the form of
meeting with President Clinton but only after the "withdrawal of
forces". 57 General (Retd.) Javed Nasir reveals: after these negotiations
the Muiahideen opened Kargil Daras highway for heavy traffic of
Tololing height that could not be recaptured; Zinni assured Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif that in return the US President Bill Clinton
would initiate Camp David type negotiations to resolve the Kashmir
dispute. 58 It was a crucial moment, when American pressure brought
decisive shift in Pakistan’s stance towards Kargil. However, Pakistani
authorities kept this change so secret that even the members of the
Cabinet's Defence Coordination Committee were not aware of it. It was
the American Ambassador who gave indication to “a member about
visible flexibility in Pakistan's stance and told that 'Pakistan would be
allowed to negotiate with India according to the spirit of Lahore
Declaration in lieu of that concession”. 59
Throughout the Indian offensive against Mujahideen in the
Kargil district, Pakistani government kept calling on the international
community to assist in the resolution of Kashmir dispute. Not
convinced by Pakistan's denial of involvement, the western response
was far more supportive to India's demand for a withdrawal than
Pakistan's request for discussions to solve the core issue of Kashmir.
The response from the UN and multilateral organization such as G-8
also supported Indian stance in the June G-8 summit in Cologne in their
100
statement on regional issues, the member countries expressed their

concern about:
The continuing military confrontation in Kashmir

following the infiltration by armed intruders which
violated the line of control. We regard any military
action to change the status quo as irresponsible. We
therefore call for an immediate end to these actions,
restoration of the Line of Control and for the parties
to work for an immediate cessation of the fighting,
full respect in the future for the line of control and
resumption of dialogue between India and Pakistan in
the spirit of Lahore Declaration. 60
Earlier the Foreign Minister of European Union had urged Pakistan to

stop fighting in Kargil sector, withdraw the infiltrators - respect LoC
and resume talks to resolve outstanding dispute through peaceful
negotiations. 61
The Pakistan's government perhaps expected that this
incursion would prompt the US intervention to stop the fighting and
cool down a "nuclear flashpoint". Unlike their expectations,
Washington's reaction was sharply critical. 62 At the height of Kargil
conflict, former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told the US
President, Bill Clinton that he was prepared to help resolve the crisis if
India was committed to settle the "larger-issue" of Kashmir in a
specific time frame but the American leader snubbed him saying it
would amount to a "nuclear blackmail". 63 Pakistani sources believed
that Islamabad had conveyed its point of view to Washington through
General Zinni and Pakistani negotiators were expecting a positive and
balanced approach from America. 64 The Pakistani side demanded that
Americans should adopt a balanced Indo-Pakistan Policy, and should
not isolate Kashmir from Kargil. 65
Recently published accounts on the crisis also suggest that
Clinton Administration was not only unsympathetic towards
Islamabad's position but also arrogant. 66 Strobe Tallbot recalls the
event: “I called Jaswant to reinforce Clinton's assurance that under no
circumstances would the US associate itself with any outcome that
rewarded Pakistan for its violation of the line of control; Sandy Berger
did the same thing with Barjesh Mishra”. 67 During the Kargil crisis, US
supported the Indian stand and urged Pakistan to defuse the tension and
called for the withdrawal of its regulars. 68 President Clinton blamed
Pakistan in a message to Nawaz Sharif advising him to withdraw the
101
infiltrators, whom the American believed were Pakistan soldiers from

the Northern Light Infantry. 69
During the visit of General Zijnni, State Department
Spokesman James Rubin, in a one sided tone said: “we want to see
withdrawal of forces supported by Pakistan from Indian side of Line of
Control”. 70 A senior US administration official stated that, “Pakistan is
the instigator here…Pakistan has to figure out how to restore the status
quo”. 71 Robin Raphel, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia,
explains the US policy: “US policy towards India and Pakistan will not
be a zerosum game. US will deal separately with each other according
to specific gravity of each country”. 72 Kashmir was considered "a
nuclear point in South Asia" but US declined to equal it with Kosovo
and East Timor which called for its active intervention. 73 J. Robin, a
senior State Department Official, stated that “Kashmir is neither
Kosovo nor East Timor”. 74
Unlike Pakistan’s expectations, China remained neutral in the
Kargil conflict. The Chinese foreign minister’s spokesman stated that
“China hopes India and Pakistan will exercise restraint, peacefully
resolve their differences and problems through patient and sincere
dialogue”. 75 Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan told the visiting
Pakistani Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz that China hoped Pakistan and
India would find a political solution to the Kashmir conflict through
negotiations and constitutions. 76 Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif also visited Beijing for seeking Chinese support on the issue.
Jiang Zemin, however reiterated the Chinese position and told the
Pakistani Prime Minister that India and Pakistan should jointly ease the
current tense situation in Kashmir and settle existing problems through
dialogue and talks. 77 Shireen M. Mazari, a renowned Pakistani defense
analyst, believed that “by not being specific in terms of Kargil, the
Chinese leadership made it clear to Pakistan that it was not prepared to
condone the Kargil action, even though it was prepared to reiterate
general support for its longstanding ally Pakistan. This detached
approach of China on Kargil did contribute to influence world opinion
that Pakistan was indeed culpable, as the Indians had claimed”. 78
Russia openly backed up India by declaring that it would fail
Pakistan's bid to internationalize the Kashmir issue whilst reiterating its
support for New Delhi's action against the infiltrators in Kargil. 79 In
Moscow, Deputy Foreign Minister, Grigory Karasin asked Islamabad
to withdraw the infiltrators. 80 Farzana Shakoor has very aptly identified
the misperceptions of international community regarding Kargil and
Kashmir. “The international community led by the United States in its
bid to defuse the Kargil crisis overlooked certain basic facts; first LOC
102
is not a permanent boundary, it is a temporary arrangement pending the

final settlement of the Kashmir issue, therefore, respect for LoC is
subject to ground realities. Secondly, Kargil could not be isolated from
the larger issue of Kashmir”. 81
(II)
Mujahideens' abrupt withdrawal from Kargil, mystifies the whole

conflict. In the tense atmosphere of continuing conflict, Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif requested for a meeting with President Clinton. By that
time Pakistan had limited options which eventually led Sharif to visit
Washington. 82 Nawaz Sharif met with Clinton at the White House on
July 4, 1999, and promised to end the Kargil operation. In their joint
statement, the two leaders agreed that it was "vital for the peace of
South Asia that the line of control…be respected by both parties”.
Clinton stated that he would take a "personal interest" encouraging the
resumption and intensification of dialogue that Sharif and Vajpayee had
initiated in Lahore a few months earlier, once the sanctity of the LoC
has been fully restored. 83 They also declared an end to the Kargil crisis.
The statement included an agreement known as “Washington
Agreement” between the two leaders on the following:
(1) Respect for the LoC in Kashmir by India and Pakistan in

accordance with the Simla Agreement;
(2) Withdrawal of infiltrators from the Indian part of Kashmir
without any pre-conditions;
(3) A bilateral framework for future negotiations between
Pakistan and India.
The Clinton-Sharif statement clearly demonstrated the US tilt towards

India. After this joint statement, forces in the forward positions
accepted Sharif's request. 84
Nawaz Sharif in his broadcast speech to the nation, on 12 July
explained the reasons behind withdrawal: "Our decision to give
diplomacy another chance has not been taken out of any pressure, haste
or worry”. 85 He told a nationwide audience that the objective of the
militants in capturing the Kargil heights was to draw the attention of
the international community to the Kashmir issue. "Their action has
vindicated our stance that Kashmir is a nuclear flashpoint". 86 “With the
promise by the US to assist in a resolution of the Kashmir issue, the
attention of the world community had been drawn towards the Kashmir
103
issue, it was therefore no longer necessary for the insurgents to remain

in the Kargil mountains”. 87
Notwithstanding the public posturing of Prime Minister, many
other reasons may be attributed to decision of withdrawal: This
decision was taken at the behest of military or at least it had the tacit
approval of military high command. For instance, General Zinni has
revealed that, “Sharif was reluctant to withdraw before the meeting
with Clinton was announced, but after insistence, he finally came
around and he ordered the withdrawal; we setup a meeting (with
Clinton) in July. That got Musharraf's attention and encouraged Prime
Minister Sharif to hear me out”. 88 Taking cue from this contention
Khalid Hassan infers that the mastermind of Kargil was prepared to
back down. 89 The Army Chief came to see off the Prime Minister when
he was leaving for Washington also subscribes to this opinion. 90
The second factor was American role. The involvement of
fighter aircrafts alarmed the international community and pushed the
US to act as a mediator. 91 The escalation of conflict in Kargil led
Americans to believe that India was prepared for all out war. A report
published in the Washington Post revealed that India had planned to
cross the LoC to attack Pakistan. 92 Therefore, a fear of nuclear war in
the region prompted Washington to put pressure for bringing to an end,
the Kargil misadventure. 93 Withdrawal of forces from Kargil also
reflects Pakistan's failure to muster international support from the “key
international actors". 94
(III)
The controversy pertaining to the withdrawal of Mujahideen triggered a
blame game between the political and non-political actors, i.e. civilian
government and the military. As the military tried to “place the onus on
the former the accompanying acrimony with Chief of Army Staff
General Pervaiz Musharraft paved the way for another military
takeover in Pakistan on 12 October 1999”. 95 This controversy became
far more complex and compounded when Pakistan's former Prime
Minister in his sensational interview revealed that the civilian
government had no prior knowledge of this operation, his government
only came into fray when military was caught on the horns of dilemma
and was only obliged to seek civilian government's help. Military asked
the civilian government to bring an end to this conflict through
mediation in order to put it out of the Kargil quagmire. 96 According to
Lawrence Ziring, “the operation was launched after Vajpayee's visit,
104
and Nawaz Sharif’s protestation that his government did not give
advance word about the action was almost believable”. 97
Nawaz Sharif insisted recurrently that his government was not
privy to the action. 98 During the Kargil crisis Indian Home Minister
George Fernandes also accused Pakistan Army for planning the Kargil
operation without government's approval. This statement created furor
in Indian Parliament and Fernandes was charged with an attempt to
exonerate Nawas Sharif of wrecking the Lahore process. 99 Benazir
Bhutto, former Prime Minister and leader of opposition during Nawaz
Sharif second stint as premier, vehemently criticized the government
for sending infiltrators into Kargil. In an interview with BBC, she
accused Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of authorizing the intrusion to
divert the attention from domestic failures and charges of corruption. 100
During the same period this statement was also attributed to her that it
was blunder of Nawaz Sharif and all Kargil drama was staged to help
BJP in its electoral campaign. Benazir in her another interview on a
private television revealed that, there is some element of truth in both
statements: “I did not mean that Kargil was staged to facilitate
Vajpayee's victory but Nawaz Sharif could have prevented the
unfolding of this development”. 101 While Schofield, on the basis of
circumstantial evidence, asserts that, “the head of the ISI Lt. General
Zia ud Din Ahmed was nominated by Nawaz Sharif, it did not therefore
seem possible for either the ISI or Sharif not to have known about-and
consequently sanctioned”. 102 She further maintains that, Nawaz Sharif
also appeared to be well in control of the army. In October 1998, he
had obliged the Army Chief Jehangir Karamat to resign after he had
openly criticized the government and installed General Pervaiz
Musharraf in super-session to other senior generals. 103 It seems hardly
credible that soon after Lahore Declaration in February 1999, Sharif
could have covertly sanctioned an operation across the line of control
which was bound to have far reaching repercussions on their attempts
at re-conciliation.
Stephen P. Cohen contends that, “Apparently, Nawaz Sharif
decided to give permission for an incursion by the Pakistan military and
either it was larger than he though it would be or it got to off hands”. 104
The most plausible explanation of this episode is provided by Samina
Yasmeen. She argues that, “Sharif was briefed about the case but he
apparently did not comprehend the nature and possible consequences of
adventurism”. 105
Pakistan's military strategy in the Kargil war had some
strategic blunders that led to its failure: First, according to some
analysts Kargil operation was a grave "miscalculation". The army
105
commander took a short term view of tactical gains while the

government could not fully comprehend the implications of India’s
panic reaction. 106 As it unfolded in May and June 1999, the Pakistani
game plan appeared to have had a limited agenda. Its planners failed to
anticipate its prospective fallouts and had no contingency plan to
continue the operation. This view is further corroborated by an Indian
Analyst who opines that Pakistani planners expected that the Kashmiri
Mujahideen would stick to their positions till the onset of the
approaching winter. Thus under adverse climatic conditions their
military objective would have a greater chance of success against the
Indian forces. To a “limited extent, the Pakistan planners had
formulated an innovative military operation which faltered due to an
anticipated and hard-hitting response”. 107 The Pakistan possibly did not
expect Indians to re-capture the area as they (Pakistanis) were
strategically well-located. 108 Second, if Kashmiri Mujahideen could
prolong their hold, the offensive might have led to a similar sort of
advantage which India had in Siacheen. 109 General (Retd.) Hamid Gul
also expounds the same view:
The positive and beneficial results could only be

accrued if the Mujahideen were able to prolong their
occupation in Kargil. That might have provided
unprecedented impetus and it could also force India
to abandon its drumbeating of actootang (integral
part). He also predicted that Kashmir issue could
have acquired more significant position
internationally if the government could sustain the
US pressure and continued to encourage
Mujahideen. 110
Third, the whole operation was conceived and executed by army

leadership alone, without consulting the foreign office. According to
some accounts even the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) was not taken into
confidence, therefore when the army requested for aerial cover, the air
chief declined to do so as it would totally destroy the air squadron. 111
Another factor which led to the failure of this operation was lack of
coordination among the policy makers. This lack of coordination was
due to two reasons: The Kargil operation was planned by the military
without consultation of the political leadership and Foreign Office
under the pretext of ensuring “operational secrecy". 112 The critical
short-comings in the Pakistani political decision making are quite
obvious both at conceptual and operational level. The whole Kargil
106
operation serves the most explicit example of flawed decision making

system. 113 Highlighting this aspect in context of Kargil situation Shirin
Mazari identifies the following lacunas:
Lack of strategic policy coordination between the

military and. political leadership was so apparent that
no serious attempt was made to cover it up. The
political leadership did not make any serious effort to
think through the unfolding military situation on a
strategic plane, until late in the day-June 3, 1999-this
leadership did not feel the need and made no attempt
to even try and discuss the issue in the federal
cabinet. 114
She has brought to light two major defects in the Pakistani policy. At
one level, the problem partially stemmed from the nature of the
political leadership, with its dependence on personal linkages and
rapports, and reliance on individuals rather than institutions. 115 Besides
these factors, deficiency can also be attributed to system factors rather
than individuals alone. To put explicitly, “Pakistan utterly lacks strong
civilian institutions/bureaucracies, inclusive of any national security
apparatus that can integrate various inputs at the upper echelons of the
government and then render appropriate advice to the Chief Executive
of the country, or set out policy options for him”. 116
Kargil operation can be seen as a shift in Pakistan's strategy of
a low intensity conflict operation (LICO) to mounting an attack by
infiltration undertaken by professional military personnel. The previous
strategy was: first, dependent on infiltration through Jehadi groups into
Indian territory; 117 Second, waging a proxy war along LoC remained
hallmark of Pakistan’s strategy particularly during pre-nuclear phase;
Third, the government distanced herself from any involvement in overt
military operations conducted in Indian Kashmir. 118 After the nuclear
detonations, Pakistan evolved a strategy similar to that in Afghanistan
where the Pakistani military personnels through their overt and covert
support successfully installed Taliban to power. 119 However, Pakistan’s
policy makers, who were primarily obsessed with the Afghan type
solution, miserably failed to decipher the difference between Kargil and
Afghanistan conflict.
The Kargil plan was shrouded with mystery and confusion. It
is not clear that who had conceived the idea, General Aziz or General
Pervaiz Musharraf, or any other else. Another controversy surrounding
Kargil pertains to the statements of high ranking policy-makers and top
107
leadership such as Benazir Bhutto, Farooq Leghari and the former

Chief of Army Staff, General Jehangir Karamat. According to their
assertions, there had been a longstanding “Kargil plan” which had been
presented to them at different times, but they rejected it. The
revelations of the ISI former Chief, General Javed Nasir, further
vindicated to the stance of Pakistan’s civilian leaders. Another
controversy surrounding Kargil was the Nawaz Sharif’s policy towards
the operation. In the beginning he enthusiastically championed the
cause of Kargil just to extract political mileage out of it. But after he
was deposed, he revealed that he was kept in dark and as a prime
minister he had no prior knowledge of Kargil. He claimed that this
misadventure had caused a huge loss to the Pakistan Army, as nearly
2700 soldiers of NLI lost their lives. Another aspect of erratic policy-
making was that Pakistan government tried to camouflage the real
objective of this operation under the pretext that Kargil was a product
of an indigenous and spontaneous uprising and this operation was not
launched with the complicity of Pakistan and its government had
nothing to do with this operation. But the developments in Kargil
belied all these assertions and during the entire Kargil crisis what was
witnessed was an unending series of secret deals, behind the scenes
negotiations and compromises. Eventually, the Pakistan’s government
had to relent before this pressure which led to sudden retreat from
Tolloling Heights, Tiger Hills and, finally, the Pakistan sponsored
Mujahideen had to vacate the captured mountains. The manner in
which Kargil hills were vacated further led to various untold stories,
speculations and provided an opportunity to conspiracy theorists and
spin doctors to weave an aura of mystery around all this episode.
Pakistan’s strategic policy-makers pursued aggressive military policy
and did not leave any space for secret negotiations by tacitly damaging
the civilian government’s endeavours for the peaceful solution of
Kashmir.
108
END NOTES
1
The quote is taken from the Editorial, Newsline (13 July 1999).
2
Zafar Abbas, "War Cover Story", The Herald (July 1999), pp.30-31.
3
Vinod Anand, "India's Military Response to Kargil Aggression", Strategic
Analysis, Vol. XXIII, No.7 (October, 1999), p.1056.
4
R. N. Sharma, et.al, The Kargil War: A Saga of Patriotism (Delhi: Suubhi
Publications, 2000), p.55.
5
Lt. General (Retd.) “Javed Nasir’s Interview”, Weekly Zindagi, Vol.19,
No.6 (July 1999), p.11.Also see Abbas, "War Cover Story", pp. 30-31.
6
Bidanda M. Chengappa, "Pakistan's compulsions for the Kargil
Misadventure", Strategic Analysis, Vol. XXIII, No.27 (October 1999), p.
1079.
7
Devin T. Hagerty, "Kashmir and Nuclear Question Revisited" in Craig
Baxter and Charles H. Kennedy (eds.), Pakistan 2000 (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 2001), p.132.
8
Ibid., p.128.
9
Irfan Waheed Usmani, “Kargil Ki Indrooni Kehani” (The Inside Story of
Kargil) Weekly Takazey, Vol.4, No.34 (15 September, 1999).
10
Anand, "India's Military Response to Kargil Aggression", p. 1056.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., p.1057.
13
Ibid.
14
"Outlook Report "cited in Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict:
Pakistan and Unfinished War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000),
p.209.
15
For details, See Jang, Sunday Magazine (24 January2002).
16
Abbas, "War Cover Story".
17
Ibid. Tehrik Jihad drew its cadres from Kashmiri Al-Badar members
which included Kashmiris and Pakistanis. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen had in its
fold a few Kashmiri and many Pakistanis and Afghans and Lashkar-e-
Tayyeba members largely hailed from Pakistan.
18
Ibid.
19
Zahid Hussain, "The Holy Warriors Rise Again", Newsline (June 1990).
20
Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, p.211. Lashkar Tayyeba even warned the
Sharif government that if under foreign pressure, they were asked to
withdraw from Kargil, they would destroy the government.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., p. 208.
23
Ibid., p. 209.
24
Hagerty, "Kashmir and Nuclear Question Revisited", p.127.
25
Tehmina Mehmood, "Kargil Crisis and Deteriorating Situation in South
Asia", Pakistan Horizon, Vo1.52, No.4 (October 1999), p.26.
109
26
Farzana Shakoor, "The Kargil Crisis: An Analysis", Pakistan Horizon,
Vol. 52, No.3 (July 1999), p.58.
27
Anand, "India's Military Response to Kargil Aggression", p.1057.
28
It comprised: National Security advisor to the Prime Minister Brajesh
Mishra, a noted analyst on strategic affairs A. Subrahmanyam, former
Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit, former Defence and Home Secretary N.N.
Vohra, former Air Chief Air Marshal (Retd.) S.V. Mehra, Major General
(Retd.) Afsir Karim and Economist. Sanjaya Bard, Satish Chandra was
appointed the convener of the NSC secretariat, he was also convener of this
group. Sharma, The Kargil War, p.58. Mishra decided to constitute the group
after criticism that twenty-seven member National Security Advisory Board
was too disparate and unwieldy to advise the government during a crisis.
This group was functional for four weeks.
29
Anand, "India's Military Response to Kargil Aggression", p.1058.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., p.1059.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
Sharma, The Kargil War, p.58.
35
36
37
Ahmed Rashid, Daily Telegraph (28 May, 1999).
38
Muntazra Nazir, “The Political and Strategic dimension in Indo-Pakistan
Relations (1999-2004)”, Pakistan Vision, Vol.5, No.2 (December 2004),
p.30. Pakistan immediately retailed to the aerial activity so close to the line
of control by shooting down to M.G- fighter planes which had reportedly
crossed the Line of Control into Pakistani airspace One pilot was killed, and
the other was captured as a prisoner of war (and later returned to India).
Reports varied as to whether these planes were actually shot down or
developed engine trouble. One report stated that the M.G.21 had strayed
across into Pakistani airspace and hit by a surface to air missile while M.G.
27 developed engine trouble and crashed. A day later, an Indian helicopter
gunship was also shot down. See Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, pp. 209,
262.
39
40
41
Rahul Bedi, Daily Te1egraph (22 June 1999) cited in Schofield, Kashmir
in Conflict, p.216.
42
43
Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, p.216.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
46
Ata-ur-Rehman, "Tiger Hills, Bharti Qubzey Ki Asli Kahani", (The Real
Story of Indian Occupation) Weekly Zindagi, Vo1.19, No.6 (11-17 July,
1999), pp.12-13.
110
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid.
49
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid.
52
Shireen M. Mazari, The Kargil Conflict 1999: Separating Fact from
Fiction (Islamabad, Institute of Strategic Studies, 2003), p.104.
53
Ershad Mehmood, "Post Cold War US Kashmir Policy", pp-95-96.
54
Khalid Hasan, "Post Card USA: General Zinni on Pakistan", Daily Times
(06 June 2004).
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Lt. General (Retd.) Javed Nasir, "Kargil: A War averted", cited in Irfan
Waheed Usmani, “Kargil Ki Indrooni Kehani”.
59
Kamran Khan, “Investigative Report”, The News (5 July 1999).
60
Text G-8 Statement on Regional Issues, G-8 Cologne Summit Documents,
Transcript June 18-20.
61
"Statement of the Foreign Minister of the European Union, Helsinki
Session", Dawn (3 June 1999).
62
Howard B. Schaffer, "Reconsidering the U.S. Role", The Washington
Quarterly, Vol. 24(2) (Spring 2001), p.202.
63
Strobe Talbott, Engaging India Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb
(Washington: Brookings’s Institute Press, 2004), p.63.
64
Tariq Butt, “Kargil, Kashmir cannot be linked US told”, The Nation,
(Islamabad, 26 June 1999).
65
Ibid.
66
Mahmood, “Post Cold War US Kashmir Policy”, p.95.
67
Talbott, Engaging India, pp-202-3.
68
Mehtab Ali Shah, “Pakistan-US relationship in the Post Cold War Era”,
Pakistan Journal of American Studies, Vol. 17(1 and 2), (Spring and Fall
1999), p.15.
69
70
Dawn (25 June, 1999).
71
Thomas Lippman, The International Herald Tribune (28 June 1999).
72
Dawn (30 June 1999).
73
Dawn (16 June and 9 September 1999)
74
The News (9 September 1999).
75
Ashley J. Tellis and C. Christine Fair, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear
Umbrella India and Pakistan : Lesons from Kargil Crisis (US, National
Security Research Division, RAND, 2001), p. 21. Also see Muntzra Nazir,
“The Political and Strategic Dimension in Indo-Pakistan Relations”, p. 31.
76
John W. Graver, “China’s Kashmir Policies”, India Review, Vol.3, No.1
(January 2004), p.16.
77
The News (30 June 1999).
111
78
Mazari, The Kargil Conflict 1999, pp.61-62.
79
Tellis and Fair, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella, p.21.
80
81
Shakoor, “The Kargil Crisis”, p.50.
82
Mahmood, “Post Cold War US Kashmir Policy”, p. 96.
83
“News Week Report” cited in “Zia ud din’s News Story”, The Dawn (9
July 1999).
84
Howard B. Sehaffer, “Reconsidering the U.S. Role”, The Washington
Quarterly, pp. 201-202.
85
Mahmood, “Post Cold War US Kashmir Policy”, p.96.
86
“Prime Minister’s address to nation”, The Nation (13 July 1999).
87
Ibid.
88
Ibid.
89
Hasan, “Post Card: General Zinni on Pakistan”.
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid.
92
“Prime Minister had prior information of Kargil operation”, The News (02
July 1999).
93
Samina Saeed, “Western Perception of Kargil Conflict: A flawed strategy
or failure of Diplomacy”, Quarterly Journal National Development and
Security, Vol. III No. 3 (February 2000), p. 24.
94
The News (12 July 1999)
95
Mazari, The Kargil Conflict 1999, p.59.
96
Ahmad Rashid, “Decision making process” in Saeed Shafqat (ed.),
Contemporary Issues in Pakistan Studies, (Lahore: Vanguard, 1999), p.194.
97
“Nawaz Sharif’s Interview with Sohail Waraich”, Jang (24 January
2002). Also see Suhail Warraich, The Traitor Within: The Nawaz Sharif
Story in his own Words (Lahore: Sagar Publishers, 2008).
98
Lawrence Ziring, Pakistan: At the Cross Road of History (Lahore:
Vanguard, 2004), p. 269.
99
Ibid.
100
Khalid Mahmood, “Back Channel Diplomacy”, The News (29 September
1999).
101
See website: http:/bbc.co.uk/hi/English/world/southasia (accessed on 23
July 1999); Daily Jang (24 July 1999).
102
“Benazir’s Interview”, Daily Khabrain (10 February, 2005).
103
104
Ibid.
105
“On the Line: The India-Pakistan Dispute”. See website:
http/www.fas.org/news/India/1999/990824-indopak.htm. (accessed on 26
May 2005)
106
Ibid.
107
Mahmood, “Backchannel Diplomacy”.
108
Chengappa, “Pakistan’s compulsions for Kargil Misadventure”, p.1080.
109
Ibid.
112
110
“Editorial”, Newline (July 1999), p.13.
111
Hamid Gul, “Barhtey hua qadam wapins nah houn” (the advancing steps
should not retreat)”. Kashmir Today (July 1999), pp.7-8.
112
Interview with Squadron Leader who requested to be anonymous.
113
114
Mazari, The Kargil Conflict 1999, p.72.
115
Ibid.
116
Ibid., p.73.
117
Ibid.
118
119
Ibid., p.1072.
113
DIVINE ATTRIBUTES-AN ATTEMPT TO
REINTERPRET
SOBIA TAHIR
ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud was definitely not a theologian;

however, being a multi-disciplinary rather trans-
disciplinary personality, he influenced a number of
areas beyond his own. Most interestingly he has
resolved an age old issue of theology
“unconsciously” in his land-mark essay, “Moses and
Monotheism”. The problem of divine attributes,
common in Jewish, Christian and Muslim
theology/philosophy has been traditionally traced
back to Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. It is often said
that the idea of a pure, simple, one and indivisible
essence of God was borrowed from Greek Philosophy
which was reconciled with revealed scriptures.
However, it had never been an easy task to
accommodate plural and diversified attributes with
simple divine essence.
Freud, however, in the mentioned essay
explored the roots of monotheism in the Egyptian
religion of Aten, developed by Akhenaten. Judaism is
a product of the same religion. The one and most
powerful Aten absorbed all the small deities into its
mighty being, who lost their “existence” but their
different characteristics, however, could not be
dissolved in the same manner. Hence these appeared
in the form of divine attributes subsequently. In this
paper, the issue is discussed from this perspective.
KEY WORDS: Sigmund Freud, Jews, Christian, Muslim. Egypt, Aten,

Akhenaten, Monotheism, Divine Attributes.
The divine essence has always been considered by Philosophers as one,

simple, indivisible, unanalysable and pure without any sort of plurality.
The question which subsequently rather immediately arises is: how
115
then the multiple and diversified rather contradictory “attributes” may

be reconciled with an essence having above mentioned qualities? First
part of this essay is brief overview of traditional approach.
The origin of the problem may be traced back to Plato’s major
works, that is, Republic and Timaeus. It is also claimed that problem of
divine attributes is based on his “Theory of Ideas”. The theory,
however, gives contradictory ideas about nature of God and His
mechanism of creating the world. That is why it has been interpreted
differently and from diverse angles by Philosophers as well as students
of Philosophy and theology 1 . The same has been stated by Irene
Samuel who writes, “A part of that [Platonic] teaching is much
disputed theory of Ideas. The theory is doubtless basic to all Plato’s
thought, but is presented in so many ways and attended by so many
difficulties that scholars have been far from certain about its
meaning” 2 .
What is the relation of these Ideas to God? At places Plato
uses the language giving a clue that these Ideas have an existence
external to God, either ungenerated and co-eternal with God; or
produced and made by God, hence extradeical. However, sometimes
his language gives a hint that these Ideas are thoughts of God,
therefore, intradeical. A number of methods have been applied by
students of Philosophy to resolve these seeming contradictions which,
however, are beyond the scope of this essay. In Timaeus, Plato
describes the supreme deity as a Craftsman, who exists independently
of forms (Ideas/Universals) and uses these as models in fashioning the
sensible world. However, a great logical and metaphysical problem
appears; how could the Craftsman be independent of the forms if “the
Good” (God/Form/Idea) is the source of everything other than itself?
Plato never cleared this up. It is interesting to note that Timaeus is the
same dialogue about which Bertrand Russell has commented, “This
dialogue contains much that is obscure and has given rise to
controversies among commentators. On the whole, I find myself in
most agreement with Cornford’s admirable book, Plato’s Cosmology” 3 .
Plato said nothing further about “the Good” in Timaeus after
mentioning it in Republic, whereas he said nothing about “Craftsman”
in the Republic which he uses in Timaeus 4 . The same Craftsman has
also been named as Demiurge and the model (mentioned above), Plato
calls this model, “intelligible animal”. It is to be remembered that this
model is co-eternal with Demiurge. The Demiurge looked at the
intelligible animal and it created this world in its likeness which is
called “visible animal” by Plato.
116
SOBIA TAHIR , DIVINE ATTRIBUTES
It was, however, Plotinus who interpreted Plato in such a way

to reconcile him with revealed scriptures and thus gave prominence to
the problem of divine attributes. The problem gained supreme
importance is Judaism and Islam’s Philosophy which will be discussed
in detail. The gradual induction of Greek Philosophy into Islam
introduced the same problems here as well. According to Wolfson, the
problem of attributes became identical with problem of Platonic Ideas
or rather with problem of Universals. It is pertinent to mention here
that the term “attributes” has come into Muslim Philosophy through
Aristotle, who impressed Muslim mind more than anyone else.
Aristotle was held in high esteem by Muslim Philosophers, whose
metaphysics and logic were soaked in dualism. His metaphysics
bifurcates reality into principles of “form” and “matter”; whereas his
logic presents a dichotomy of “subject” and “attributes”. Subject is the
logical substratum of attributes. Attributes cannot be imagined to exist
without a logical substratum, however, at the same time subject in its
own behest cannot be conceived to exist if the attributes are withdrawn
from it. Though both interdependent, both are real and necessary per
se, and, for each other. This makes the problem rather more
complicated since a simple, unified and indivisible divine essence may
not exist on its own without attributes. Hence the existence of God as
such without attributes is a logical absurdity 5 .
(I)
After this brief introduction or prelude, let us concentrate on Plotinus

(205-270 AD) who really brought the problem to prominence and
stretched the idea of divine unity to its utmost logical limits. Tribute
must be paid to his pupil Porphyry who arranged his difficult and
scattered works into six groups of nine treatises. These “Groups of
nine” – Enneads, in Greek, are what have been handed down to us.
How does Plotinus conceive the “One” or “Unity” may be appreciated
from following excerpts, taken from the sixth of Enneads,
What then must, The Unity be, what nature is left for
it? …….It cannot be a being ………Generative of
all, the Unity is name of all; neither thing nor
quantity nor intellect nor soul; not in motion, not at
rest, not in place, not in time: it is the self defined,
unique in form or better, formless, existing before
Form was, or Movement, or Rest, all of which are
117
attachments of being and make Being the manifold it

is ………… 6
He further writes in the same part:
Strictly no name is apt to it, but since name it we

must there is certain rough fitness in designating it as
unity with the understanding that it is not the unity of
other things [that is, the Unity that is God is not, like
the unity of other things, a unity of distinguishable
aspects or parts]………. It is great beyond anything
………infinite not in measureless extension or
numerable quantity [extension and quantity in
general imply distinguishable parts] but in fathomless
depths of power ………. This is utterly a self-
existent ………supremely adequate, autonomous, all
transcending, most utterly without need 7 .
Dealing with divine attributes the same line of thought was followed by
Jewish and Muslim Philosophers later on, only with slight changes and
adjustments. Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD), the outstanding
Jewish Philosopher of Hellenistic age was nonetheless a contemporary
of Christ, when the latter was preaching his sermons in the synagogues
of Galilee, the former was doing the same in the yeshivas of
Alexandria. He, however, was an admirer, follower and loyalist of
Plato, whose ultimate objective was to reconcile Old Testament’s Book
of Genesis with Timaeus of Plato. He is the founder of the most
famous terms of theology, that is, “Logos”. However, his considerable
direct influence may be noticed in Christian Fathers instead of Jewish
thinkers. It will be pertinent here to clarify that theology is a later
development in Judaism as compared to Islam, inspite of the fact that in
hierarchy and chronological order of Semitic Religions, Islam is junior
to Judaism. The reason being that from first century, the focus of
Jewish intellectual life shifted from Alexandria to Babylonia where
Palestinian Jews found relief from Roman persecution. In Babylonia
three Jewish academies were established at Sura, Pumbedita and
Nehardea to preserve the Oral Law (Talmud). The rabbis at the
academies were preoccupied with Talmudic scholarship and completed
the monumental task of transcribing oral law into Babylonian Talmud.
In the meantime Muslim theologians have started taking interest in
Greek Philosophy by the end of eighth century. However, it was in
tenth century that the head (gaon) of Sura Academy, Saadia ben Yousaf
118
was prompted by Muslim example to develop Jewish defense for

scriptural positions 8 .
Saadia elaborated the problem of divine attributes in his major
work The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs (933 AD), which is the first of
its sort in medieval Jewish Philosophy. After him there is a galaxy of
brilliant Jewish minds exploring the problem. These included Issac ben
Solomon Israeli (855-955), Joseph ben Abraham (probably eleventh
century, dates not certain) Jeshua ben Judah (a pupil of Joseph ben
Abraham, dates not certain), Solomon ben Gabirol (1022-1070), Bahya
ben Pakuda (late eleventh century), Abraham bar Hiyya (early twelfth
century), Joseph ben Zaddik (died in 1149), Judah Halevi (1085-1141),
Abraham ben Daud (1110-1190), Moses ben Ezra (1078-1138) and his
brother Abraham ben Ezra (1092-1167) besides the towering Mosesben
Maimonides (1135-1204) amongst the most prominent 9 .
Saadia, being the founder of Jewish theology has laid special
emphasis on the Unity of God and treated the problem of attributes
after the fashion of Mutazilites 10 . He stressed to define divine
attributes as relations or negations, since nothing positive may be
ascribed to Him. Saadia, however, affirmed four attributes, that is,
Existence, Unity, Power and Wisdom. No other attribute may be
accepted without surrendering to crude anthropomorphism. 11
Reason tells us, Saadia says, that God cannot in any literal
sense be compared to human beings. The many anthropomorphic
expressions in Old Testament should be interpreted figuratively. For
example, when Hezekiah prays, Lord, bow down thy ear and hear: open
Lord thine eyes II Kings 19:16, we may not infer that God has eyes and
ears, and a prophet like Hezekiah, who is a staunch opponent of
idolatry II Kings 18:14 may mean such things. Deuteronomy 4:15-19
strictly warns men against establishing any similitude of God to
animals, humans or heavenly bodies 12 .
The fascination of Jewish Philosophers by Aristotle is obvious
here. As expressed earlier, he was the person who made distinction
between fundamental being and its fundamental properties
[Metaphysics, iv, 30, 1025a, 30 and De Anima Portibus (i, 3,643a, 27)].
So Saadia asserts that First Master has taught us that the world is
composed of substances and the attributes of substances – attributes
that may be classified into quantities, qualities, relations, places, times,
positions, states, actions and affections. God Himself is the creator of
all this schema, hence Himself out of it and not a part of it. He,
therefore, is beyond attributes which are hallmarks of created things. In
Him, there is neither the distinction of subject and attribute nor the
distinction of one attribute and another 13 . However, his position does
119
not let him affirm four attribute too, without being going into self-
contradiction.
Bahya been Pakuda goes into further refinement and in his
“Duties of the Heart,” unable to deny or affirm attributes altogether, he
divides them into categories, that is, of Essence (Dhatiyat) and Actions
(Failiyat). The essential attributes are Existence, Unity and Eternity.
But these may not be literally applied to Him, these simply negate the
possibility of having the opposite attributes (Duties of the Heart-x).
Judha Halevi literally follows Mutazilites in the denial of
attributes, and insists that divine attributes may be stated in negative
terms only. He, however, divides them into three categories i) active
(taziriyah) ii) relative (idafiyat) and iii) negative (salbiyyah), quoted by
Cuzari, pp. 73 et seq. ed. Hirschfeld. However, the problem is not easy
at all to deal with as Abraham ben Daud is again compelled to
acknowledge at least eight attributes in God enumerated as Existence,
Unity, Immutability, Truth, Life, Knowledge, Power and Will. 14
The problem reached its culminating point in Moses ben
Maimonides, who shares his basic views with Saadia, who could not
develop them fully to their implications. As far as Maimonides’
theology is concerned, he takes the line of Mutazilites and asserts that
we may not ascribe anything positive to God, we may simply say what
God is not. He has expressed his thesis in considerable detail and with
great fervour. He writes,
I will give you ……..some illustrations ……. A

person may know for certain that a “ship” is in
existence, but he may not know to what object that
name is applied, whether to a substance or to an
accident; a second person then learns that a ship is
not an accident; a third that it is not a mineral; a
fourth, that it is not a plant growing in the earth; a
fifth, that it is not a body whose parts are joined
together by nature; a sixth, that it is not a flat object
like boards or doors; a seventh, that it is not a sphere;
an eighth, that it is not pointed; a ninth, that it is not
round-shaped nor equilateral; a tenth, that it is not
solid. It is clear that this tenth person has almost
arrived at a correct notion of a “ship” by the
foregoing negative attributes.
As if he had exactly the same notion as those have,
who imagine it to be a wooden substance which is
hollow, long and composed of many pieces of wood,
120
that is to say, who know it by positive attributes. But

you must be careful, in what you negate to negative
by proof, not by mere words, for each time you
ascertain by proof that a certain thing, [popularly]
believed to exist in the Creator, must be negatived,
you have undoubtedly come one step nearer to
knowledge of God……..
There is a great danger in applying positive attributes
to God……….Every perfection we could imagine,
even if existing in God in accordance with the
opinion of those who [incorrectly] assert the
existence of attributes [in Him], would in reality not
be of the same kind as that imagined by us, but would
only called by the same name ………it would in fact
amount to a negation. Suppose, for example, that
you say He has knowledge, and that [His] knowledge
which admits no change and of no plurality,
embraces many changeable things; His knowledge
remains unaltered, while new things are constantly
formed, and His knowledge of a thing before it exists,
while it exists, and when it has ceased to exist, is the
same without the least change: you would thereby
declare that His knowledge is not like ours; similarly
that His existence is not like ours. You thus
necessarily arrive at some negation, without
obtaining a true conception of an essential attribute;
on the contrary, you are led to assume that there is a
plurality in God, and to believe that He, though one
essence, has several unknown attributes. For if you
intend to affirm them, you cannot compare them with
those attributes known by us, and they are
consequently not of the same kind. You are, as it
were, brought by the belief in the reality of the
attributes to say that God is one subject to which
several things are predicated, though the subject is
not like ordinary subjects, and the predicates are not
like ordinary predicates. This belief would ultimately
lead us to associate other things with God, and not to
believe that He is One 15 .
Though the loftiest Jewish minds have grappled their best with the
problem of divine attributes but no clear-cut “solution” has been found
121
out. Most of them have affirmed the attributes somehow or the other,
their arguments of denial come near to sophistry and careful play and
interplay of words, which, however, leads to nothing. Let us have a
quick glance on their Muslim counterparts before moving to the turning
point in the discussion.
Mutazilites were the first Muslim group of theologians who
tried to interpret faith in rational terms. It is interesting to note that the
title “Mutazilites” (separatists) has been assigned to them by their
opponents, whereby they called themselves “Men of Unity and
Justice”, since they over-stressed the both. To safeguard divine justice
and unity they went to utmost possible extremes. The problem of
divine attributes was a matter of life and death for them as this was
directly related to oneness of the Lord. One of the chief exponents of
Mutazilites, that is, Abu al-Hudhail’ Allaf (748-480) held the view that
divine attributes are one with the essence of God, he does not deny
attributes rather declares them identical with divine essence, for
instance, when it is asserted that “God knows” it does not mean that
knowledge is part of His essence rather “knowledge is His essence”.
The God is knowing, powerful, and living with such knowledge, power
and life as are His very essence (essential nature). Al - Shahrastari has
tried to interpret it in this way: God knows with His knowledge and
knowledge is His very essence. He is powerful with His power and
power is His very essence. He lives with His life and life is His very
essence. Another interpretation says that divine knowledge means that
God knows with His essence and not with His knowledge. The
difference in both positions is that, in latter the attributes are altogether
denied whereas in the former (as is accepted by Allaf) they are
admitted but identified with essence of God 16 .
Almost all the Mutazilite theologians held similar opinion
with minute differences. One of their representatives, Abu Ali al
Jubbai (b.849) affirmed that the attributes do not have any separate
existence other than essence since that would imply eternality of
attributes. The attributes are identical with divine essence. He also
denied “states” and said that there may not be any state which enables
God to acquire the “state of Knowing”. However, his son Abu Hashim
did believe in states. According to him, to say that God is all hearing
and all seeing really means that God is alive and there is no defect in
Him. The attributes of hearing and seeing in God originate at the time
of the origination of what is heard and what is seen 17 . The theory of
states is rather a solution to seek a midway between essence and
attributes. The essence remains one, simple and unchanged only states
change. These states are in themselves inconceivable; they are known
122
through their relation with essence. Though they are different from
essence even then may not exist separate from it. In his own words, “A
state-in-itself is neither existent nor non-existent, neither unknown, nor
known, neither eternal nor contingent, it cannot be known separately,
but only together with essence” 18 .
Abu Hashim had an intricate and complex argument to support
his conception of states which runs like this: Reason evidently
distinguishes between knowing a thing absolutely and knowing it
together with some attribute. When we know an essence, we do not
know that it is knowing also. Similarly, when we know a substance,
we do not know whether it is bound or whether the accidents subsist in
it. Certainly man perceives common qualities of things in one thing
and differentiating qualities in another, and necessarily gains
knowledge of the fact that the quality which is common is different
from the quality which is not common. These are rational propositions
that no sane man would deny. Their locus is essence and not accident,
for otherwise it would follow necessarily that an accident subsists in
another accident. In this way states are necessarily determined.
Therefore, to be a knower of the world refers to a state, which is an
attribute besides the essence and has not the same sense as the essence.
In like manner Abu Hashim proves the states for God; these states are
not found apart from essence 19 .
Al – Jubbai, however, denies states and refutes the theory of
Abu Hashim and says that these states are really mental aspects, not
contained in divine essence rather found in the percipient, that is, in the
perceiver of the essence. In other words, these are just generalizations
or relations which do not exist externally but are found in percipient’s
mind alone 20 . Ibn Taimiyyah also denied states, in one of his famous
couplets he asserted, “Abu Hashim believes in states, al-Ashari in
Acquisition and al-Nazzam in Leap. These three things have verbal and
no real existence.” 21
The other major Theological School of thought in Islam, that
is Asharism tried to tackle the problem of attributes in its own way.
Ash’arites were the middle roaders who strived to reconcile two
extreme views of Sifatists (literal believers of attributes) and the
Mutazilities, who somehow or the other denied the attributes.
Ash’arites divided the attributes in two main groups i) Sifat-i-Salbiyya,
or negative attributes and ii) Sifat-i-Wujudiyyah or existential / positive
attributes. The latter are also called Sifat-i-aqliyyah, that is, rational
attributes being seven in number: Knowledge, Power, Will, Life,
Hearing, Sight and Speech. Regarding anthropomorphist attributes,
they held the view that these should not be understood literally. These
123
are to be taken as “bila Kaifa wa bila tashbih” meaning, “without

asking how and without drawing any comparison” 22 .
They also put forward the doctrine of mukhalafah, that we are
not allowed to ascribe any attribute to God unless it is expressly so
applied in Quran. God’s attributes differ from those of creatures, not in
degree but in kind, that is, in their whole nature. They also maintained
that attributes are “neither identical nor different from divine essence
(la aina wa la ghair),” henceforth the attributes are, in one sense,
included in, and, in another sense, excluded from the essence of
God” 23 .
The formula that “attributes are neither Allah nor other than
Allah” was first presented by Suleman b. Jarir al-Zaidi who flourished
at about 785 AD. The same formula was used by Hashim bin Aakam
(d. 814). The next to the same formula is Ibn Kullab (d. 854), a
Sunnite. About a century later it was adopted by Abu Hashim.
However, he replaced the term “attributes” with “states”. Interested
readers may study “The Philosophy of the Kalam” by H. A. Wolfson,
Harvard University Press, 1976 for detail on the subject.
Before concluding this part, a third opinion about divine
attributes from another distinguished Muslim school of theology will
be interesting; the author is no other than Ibn Hazm, the spokesman of
Zahirism. He writes, “God has no attributes, which modify his essence:
His qualities are names and not adjectives, nor are they derived from
His adjectives. He says of Himself: “God’s are the fairest names.
Invoke Him by them” 24 . Thus, only these names, ninety-nine in
number, by which God has named Himself, may be said to His; we are
not allowed to call Him by names which He has not mentioned as His
for example, the happy, the healthy, the beloved, the noble, or the
brave, although these titles are, in themselves, true of Him and
cherished by us.
We are also not allowed to call Him by names, derived from
the verbs with which He predicates Himself. God says, “And when
they (the disbelievers) meet the faithful they say, “We believe”; but
when they are apart with their satans (comrades) they say, “Verily we
hold with you and at them we only mock”. God shall mock at them” 25 .
God says further, “And they (Jews) plotted, and God plotted: but of
those who plot, God is the best” 26 . He also says that, “And the heaven
with our own hands have We built it up” 27 . But according to Ibn
Hazm, inspite of all that we cannot call Him the Mocker, the Plotter
and the Builder because He Himself did not call Himself by these
names. Moreover, we do not interpret His names to know how or why
124
He is called thus: He called Himself, for instance, the hearer, the One
who sees, but we cannot say that He has the sense of hearing or sight 28 .
That was a briefest though inconclusive possible summary of the view
presented by eminent Muslim theologians about the problem of divine
attributes. It may not be presented exhaustively because of limited
space.
Till now we have discussed the issue purely on logical and
philosophical ground and traced back its origin to Plato, Aristotle and
Plotinus; but can it be explored from any other angle? Has the problem
some other dimensions too? May some tradition, other than Hellenism
be also a contributory factor? Is there any other underlying stimulant
present leading towards idea of unity along with problem of attributes?
Part II of the essay is the same endeavour!
(II)
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in his landmark essay, “Moses and

Monotheism” has provided us with invaluable information about the
origin of monotheism, that is, the belief in strictly one God. He has
derived Judaism, the first monotheistic religion in Semitic chain, from
the Egyptian religion of Aten, introduced by a young Pharaoh
Amenophis-IV who later changed his name as Akhenaten.
Freud, in his essay, with his peculiar logical skill, has tried to
prove that Judaism is actually the same religion of Aten. The essay,
though has nothing to do with divine attributes as such, even then it
gives us a novel and fresh clue to understand the controversy. This
research of Freud falls outside the framework or parameters of
“religious beliefs” common both in Islam and Judaism. It is,
nonetheless, a trans-religious approach but does deserve consideration
on its own merit.
Freud has discussed in detail how a one, mighty, powerful and all
embracing god was brought into existence in Egypt during Eighteenth
Dynasty and under which motives. It will be both interesting and
fruitful to read this account in his own lucid style and language. He
writes, “In the glorious Eighteenth Dynasty, under which Egypt first
became a world power, a young Pharaoh came to the throne in about
the year 1375 B.C. To begin with he was called, like his father,
Amenophis-IV, but later he changed his name and not only his name.
This king set about forcing a new religion on his Egyptian subjects – a
religion which ran contrary to their thousands – of – years – old
tradition and to all the familiar habits of their lives. It was a strict
monotheism, the first attempt of the kind, so far as we know, in the
125
history of the world, and along with the belief in a single god religious
intolerance was inevitably born, which had previously been alien to the
ancient world and remained so long afterwards. The reign of
Amenophis, however, lasted only for seventeen years. Very soon after
his death in 1358 BC, the new religion was swept away and the
memory of the heretic king was proscribed” 29 . He has also explained
the motive behind the move of Akhenaten, “The political condition in
Egypt has begun at this time to exercise a lasting influence on the
Egyptian religion. As a result of the military exploits of the great
conqueror, Tuthmosis III, Egypt had become a great power: the empire
now included Nubia in the south, Palestine, Syria and part of
Mesopotamia in the north. This imperialism was reflected in religion
as universalism and monotheism. Since Pharaoh’s responsibilities now
embraced not only Egypt but Nubia and Syria as well, deity too was
obliged to abandon its national limitation and, just as the Pharaoh was
the sole and unrestricted ruler of the world known to the Egyptians, this
must also apply to the Egyptian’s new deity. Moreover, with the
extension of the empire’s frontiers, it was natural that Egypt would
become more accessible to foreign influence; some of the royal wives
were Asiatic princesses, and it is possible that direct indictments to
monotheism even made their way in from Syria” 30 .
The consolidation of gods for political purposes had already
started from the predecessors of Akhenaten. At the sun temple of On
(Heliopolis), the efforts had been underway to develop a universal God
with higher ethical qualities. Ammenophis III had focused great
attention on promotion of sun god Ré. Earlier, Amon of Thebes had
been a powerful god. He had been brought forward by XIth and XIIth
Dynasties as a national god. The XVIIth Dynasty from Nubia held its
capital at Thebes, promoted him as an equal of Ré. For the sake of
national unity he was united with Rā or Ré of Heliopolis thus Amon-
Rā became figure head of Egyptian Religion, King of the gods and
“Lord of the thrones of the earth” 31 . It is interesting to note that Rā had
number of qualities and each king took a quality of Rā as a name on his
coronation, much in the same Semitic style as 99 names of Allah 32 .
Very pertinent to note here is that Rā himself was not an Egyptian or
only sun-god. Atmu was another sun-god which was worshipped in
Syria in the form of conical stones and figures. The “city of the sun”,
Baalbek also showed a similar worship. Atum or Tum was regarded as
the setting sun, in some connexion with the Semitic origin of his name
that means “the completed, finished or closed” 33 .
All these gods were “slaughtered” at the altar of Aten, which
was a radiant disk of the sun, however, entirely different from Rā. It
126
never possessed any human or animal figure. The objective of worship

was not sun as such rather the rays of the sun. The worship of Rā was
proscribed for the sake of Aten. The name of Aten gives us another
clue that establishes its link with Judaism. It is a derivative of Syrian
Adon (the Lord), whereas in Judaism God is also called “Adonai” (my
Lord).
Aten was declared the one and only God by Akhenaten, for
whom he declared in one of his hymns as “O thou sole God, besides
whom there is no other” 34 . This statement bears a striking resemblance
with the declaration of faith in Islam, that is, La illaha ill-Allah (There
is no god but Allah). Aten was regarded as a jealous god, who would
not tolerate any other worship or figure of a divinity. Aten was the
source of life and action; all lands and people were subject to it, and
owe to it their existence and allegiance. His functions may be
compared with verses of “Al-Fateha”, the opening chapter of Quran.
Just like Semitic God (Allah or Elohino) he does not forgive any
association or partnership (shirk) with him. Freud further asserts in
proving that Judaism is the same religion as of Akhenaten, “there
would be a short path to proving our thesis that the Mosaic religion was
no other than that of Aten --- namely, if we had a confession of faith, a
declaration. But I fear we shall be told that this path is closed to us.
The Jewish confession of faith, as is well known, runs: Schema Jisroel
Adonai Elohino, Adonai Echod “(Listen, O Israel: the Lord our God is
one Lord”, Deuteronomy, iv, 4). If it is not merely by chance that the
name of the Egyptian Aten (or Atum) sounds like the Hebrew word
Adonai (lord) and the name of Syrian deity Adonis, but it is due to a
primaeval kinship of speech and meaning, the Jewish formula might be
translated thus: “Hear, O Israel: our God Aten (Adonai) is a sole
God” 35 .
Akhenaten did not permit any graven image to be made of
Aten. The true God, said the king, had no form; and held to this
opinion throughout his life (Weigall, 1922, 103). A similar Quranic
verse also indicates that “there is nothing like Him” 36 . Judaism in the
like manner strictly prohibits his followers to make any image of the
God. No personal image of Aten has been found till date inspite of the
fact that Amarna art was at its zenith in that era and one of the best in
the world 37 .
Before Aten, Khepri or Khepera and Harkhty were also sun-
gods beside Rā and Aten, but as per the orders of Akhenaten, they
could no longer be accepted as manifestation of sun. The concept of
new God was not so much the sun disk, but rather the life giving
illumination of the sun. To make this distinction, his name would be
127
more correctly pronounced as “Yati(n)” 38 . Like Judiac-Islamic God, he

has not wife and does not need any companion. This mighty God first
of all eradicated Orisis and Seker from the front and ultimately
suppressed all deities. He was the first manifestation of dictatorship in
human history.
Akhenaten summed up his new creed as, “There is no God but
Aten, and Akhenaten is His Prophet” 39 . Most surprisingly this is the
Islamic declaration of faith that reads, “There is no god but Allah and
Muhammad is Allah’s Prophet”. Before concluding this part of the
discussion and moving to our original question of divine attribute, it
will be very fruitful to compare Akhenaten’s “Hymn to the Aten” with
Psalm 104 of Bible wherein we find surprising similarity between the
two. The Psalm bestows same “attributes” on god which are
characteristics of sun. The idea and analogy of sun run throughout the
Bible whether it is Old Testament or New. To quote a few examples
following verses may be seen: Genesis 1:14-18, Deuteronomy 33:14,
Matthew 5:45 (In all these, name of the sun has been mentioned as
such). To see sun as a symbol of permanence and endurance these
Psalms may be consulted: 72:5, 72:17 and 89:36. The splendour of
sunlight is mentioned in Job 40:10 and Matthew 13:43. Worship of the
sun (though disapprovingly) may be traced from these parts of the
Bible: Deuteronomy 4:19, Psalm 136:7-8 and Ezekiel 8:16-17 40 .
The comparison of “Hymn to the Aten” with Psalm 104 will
make an interesting and beneficial reading. J.H. Breasted has made an
eight point comparison between the two as given below:
AKHENATEN’S HYMN TO THE ATEN PSALM 104

1. When thou settest in the 1.The sun knows its time
western horizon of the sky. for setting. Thou
The earth is in the darkness makest darkness, and
like the dead it is night, when all
They sleep in their chambers the beasts of forest
Their heads are wrapped up creep forth. (verse
Their nostrils are stopped 20)
And none see the other
While all their things are
stolen
Which are under their heads
And they know it not
Every Lion cometh forth
from his den.
2. All serpent they sting 2.The young lions roar
128
for their prey seeking

their food from God.
Darkness The World is in
silence When the sun rises,
He that made them resteth in they get them away
his horizon. and lie down in their
dens. Man goes
forth to his work and
to his labour until the
evening. (verses 21,
22 & 23).
3. Bright is the earth when thou 3.When the sun rises,
riseth in the horizon. they get them away
and lie down in their
dens (verse 22).
4. When thou shinest as Aten 4.Man goes forth to his
by day work and to his
Though drivest away the labour until the
darkness evening (verse 23).
When thou sendest forth thy
rays
The two lands (Egypt) are in
daily festivity
Awake and standing on their
feet
When thou has raised them
up
Their limbs bathed they take
their clothing
Their arms uplifted in
adoration to thy dawning
Then in all the world they do
their work
All cattle rest upon their
pasturage
The trees and the plants
flourish.
129
5. The birds flutter in their 5.By then the birds of the

marshes air have their
Their wings uplifted in habitation, they sing
adoration to thee among the branches
All sheep dance to their feet (verse12).
All winged things fly Yonder is the sea,
Thy live when thou hast great and wide which
shone upon them. teems with things
innumerable. Both
small and great
beasts (verse 25).
6. The barges sail upstream and 6.There go the ships, and

downstream alike. the Leviathan which
thou didst form to
sport in it. (verse 26).
7. Every highway is open 7.These all look to thee,

because thou dawnest to give them their
The fish in the river leap food in due reason
before thee (verse 27).
Thy rays are in the midst of When thou hidest
the great green sea thy face, they are
Creator of the germ in dismayed. When
woman thou takest away
Maker of the seed in man their breath, they die
Giving life to son in the and return to dust.
body of his mother (verse 29).
Soothing him that he may
not weep Nurse (even) in the
womb
Giver of breath to animals,
every one that he maketh
When he cometh forth from
the womb
On the day of their birth
Thou openest his mouth in
speech.
130
8. Thou suppliest his 8.These all look to thee,

necessities to give them their
When the fledgling in the food in due season.
egg chrips in the shell (verse 27).
Thou givest him breath
there-in to preserve him
alive
When thou hast brought him
together to (the point of)
bursting it in the egg
To chrip with all his might,
He goeth about to his two
feet
When he hath come forth
therefrom.
How manifold are thy works
They are hidden from before
(us)
O Sole God, whose powers
no other possesseth
Thou didst create the earth
according to thy heart
While thou wast alone
Man, all cattle, large and
small
All that are upon the earth
That go about on their feet
(All) That are on high
That fly with their wings
The foreign countries, Syria
and Kush,
The land of Egypt
Thou settest every man into
his place
Thou suppliest their
necessities
Every one has his
possessions
And his days are reckoned
The tongues are divers in
speech
Their forms likewise and
131
their skins are distinguished

(For) thou makest different
the strangers 41 .
The comparison clearly shows that the “Judiac – Islamic One God” is
actually a derivative of Aten. Aten became one by suppressing,
overpowering and swallowing all (114) of his “colleagues” or fellow-
gods of which the complete list is as under:
No. Name No. Name No. Name No. Name

1) Aah 24) Bennu 47) Horemakhet 70) Nefertem
2) Ahti 25) Bes 48) Horus 71) Nehebkau
3) Ahy 26) Buchis 49) Hu 72) Neit
4) Aker 27) Buto 50) Imhotep 73) Nekhbet
5) Amentet 28) Djed 51) Isis 74) Nemty
6) Ammut 29) Duamutef 52) Kek 75) Nephtys
7) Amon 30) Ernutet 53) Keket 76) Niau
8) Amsit 31) Geb 54) Khentamentiu 77) Niaut
9) Anat 32) Hapi 55) Khentykhety 78) Nun
10) Anedjti 33) Hapy 56) Kheper 79) Nunet
11) Anhur 34) Harpakhrad 57) Khum 80) Nut
12) Ankhet 35) Hathor 58) Khons 81) Orisis
13) Antaios 36) Hat-mehit 59) Maahes 82) Pakhet
14) Antewy 37) Hauhet 60) Ma,at 83) Ptah
15) Anti 38) Hedjwet 61) Mafdet 84) Ptah-sokar
16) Anubis 39) Heh 62) Mehurt 85) Qadesh
17) Apis 40) Heka 63) Menhit 86) Qabehsennuf
18) Asar – Hap 41) Heket 64) Mentu 87) Ré
19) Ash 42) Heptet 65) Meret 88) Re-Horakhte
20) Babi 43) Heret 66) Meretseger 89) Reshpu
21) Banebdjedet 44) Herishef 67) Meskhenet 90) Satet
22) Bast 45) Hertept 68) Min 91) Sed
23) Bat 46) Horakhte 69) Mut 92) Sekhmet
132
93) Selket 101) Sopdet 109) Urthekau

94) Serapis 102) Sopdu 110) Wadjet
95) Seshat 103) Tatenen 111) Wasret
96) Set 104) Taueret 112) Wepwawet
97) Shesmu 105) Thoth 113) Woret
98) Shu 106) Unknown 114) Worset 42
99) Sia 107) Unut
100) Sokek 108) Upuaut
Note: There is a slight difference of spellings in the names of Egyptian
deities when taken from different sources. However, effort has been
made in this essay to keep the spellings consistent.
However, all these gods were not equal in importance, these have been
broadly sub-divided into three categories:
a)Animal-headed gods,
b)Human gods and
c)Cosmic gods.
Aten not only obsorbed their beings in his one and only powerful,
mighty existence but also their functions and qualities. This is the most
important point in our entire discussion. Though the other gods lost
their physical identities in the larger self of One God, their qualities and
more appropriately assigned functions could not be so diffused, they
remained separate, different, discreet and independent as ever and later
appeared in Muslim and Jewish theology under the name of “Divine
Attributes”, since the One God of both great Semitic religions is no
other but the One God “Aten” introduced by Akhenaten and later
adopted and developed by Moses, as described at length by Freud in
“Moses and Monotheism” 43 .
However, in the theology of both religions, the problem became very
acute as to how to accommodate or adjust a number of contradictory
states/names and attributes in a simple, one and unified substance of
God. Both did their best (but failed) as has been discussed at length in
Part one of this essay.
To prove this thesis further, a number of examples may be quoted and a
remarkable resemblance may be traced between functions of Egyptian
deities and names and attributes of Allah or Elohino. In Judaism and
Islam a number of symbols, similies and ideas have also been borrowed
from Egyptian religion and its gods. Some major similarities have been
quoted below.
133
i) Amon: comes quickly to him who calls him,

compare with divine names, viz, “Vali” (friend)
“Nasir” (comrade) “Mujeeb” (replier);
ii) Ptah: hears petitions, compare with divine name,
“Samee” (hearer);
iii) Khanumu: creates man out of mud, compare
with divine names, “Khaliq”, “Bari”, “Musawwar”,
Hebrew - “Boreh” and with Quranic verses: “Who
has made perfect everything He has created. And He
began the creation of man from mud (clay) 44 .
“……..Them (Men) We have created of cohesive
mud” 45 . “It is He Who created you from
dust……….” 46 . And surely We created man from
dry ringing clay; from black mud wrought into
shape 47 . There is a belief that it was Ptah who
created the world by spoken word. It may be
compared with Quranic verse, “Verily His command,
when He intends a thing, is only that He says to it,
“Be”! and it is” 48 .
iv) Sekhmet: represents wrath and destruction,
compare with divine names, “Qahhar/Jabbar”,
(forceful) “Muntaqim” (revengeful); Hebrew - “El-
Gibbor”.
v) Thoth: represents learning, compare with divine
names, “Aleem” (knower), “Khabeer” (learned);
vi) Khepher: creates life and resurrects; compare
with divine names, “Hayee” (live) “Muhayyee”
(bestower of life), “Bais” (resurructor), “Mumit”
(causes death), “Muid” (recreates), Hebrew - “El-
Hai”.
vii) Ma,at: represents truth, the balance and order;
compare with divine names, “Al Haq” (the truth),
“Adl” (the Just), the concept of the Balance (al-
Meezan) has been derived from Ma,at. Hebrew –
“Emet”. Ma,at is also linked with Rā and Thoth,
specially Ptah, who is also called “the Lord of Truth”.
This may be compard with Quranic verse, “Exalted
then be Allah, the True Lord. There is no God but
He, the Lord of the Glorious Throne” 49 . Ma,at being
a higher goddess lacked physical personality that is
why Akhenaten though proscribed the names of all
134
the gods in favour of Aten, he still kept the name of

Ma,at being associated with his own in placing his
motto after his name, “ankh em maat” ‘living in
truth’ 50 .
viii) Amon-Rā: King of Gods and “lord of the
thrones of the earth” compare with divine name,
“Malik-al-Mulk”, Hebrew - “Malech Ha Melachim”.
ix) Qadesh: means holy goddess of sacred ecstasy,
compare with divine name, “Quddus” (holy),
Hebrew - “Kodosh”.
x) There is also a category of gods, whose names
do not have any corelate with divine names either in
Arabic or in Hebrew, that is, in Islam and Judaism
respectively. However, their functions and tasks do
match with those of Allah and Elohino. For instance:
a) Shu: is the god of space and his function is
to separate the earth from heaven. He is
facilitated in the task by Nut, a female diety
studded with stars. This may be compared
with the verse of Quran, “Do not the
disbelievers see that the heaven and the
earth were closed-up mass, then we opened
them out. And we made from water
everything living. Will they not believe”? 51
b) Safekht (Seshat): goddess of writing,
whereas writing is one of the cherished
functions of Allah. The “tablet” and the
“Pen” have bee mentioned a number of
times in Quran. See the verse, “Who taught
man by the pen. Taught man, what he knew
not”. 52
This brief review, if not conclusive, but definitely is indicative of the

fact that Semitic God common in Judaism and Islam is a derivative of
Egyptian God Aten, promoted by Akenaten due to political motives.
This god absorbed in himself all the other deities and their functions
and tasks which were diversified and at times contradictory. These
different aspects appeared in the One God as attributes which were
quite in contrast with His absolute unity and simple substance as
conceived later by Judaism and Islam. The influence of Greek thought
further strengthened this insistence on unity and reconciliation of
plurality of attributes with indivisible divine substance. However, the
135
problem could never be resolved through all efforts because it was

ontological in origin and not epistemological only. The attributes taken
from heterodox sources may never be homogenized. Though the
problem is no more alive as it had been in classical theology or
Religious Philosophy, but it is still unresolved even if treated from any
angle. Divine attributes may not be ignored by calling them states,
accidents or good names etc. These are positive and genuine attributes
each one having its own ontological reality, the source(s) of which we
have discussed thoroughly in Part II of this article. And finally a small
note on Christianity which stands as an intermediary link between
Judaism and Islam and an important member of the family of Semitic
Religions. Christianity has not been discussed in this essay because it
markedly deviated from pure monotheism and moved towards trinity.
However, it will be very interesting to note that like Judaism and Islam,
Christianity also did pick, lift and choose symbols and motifs from
Egyptian religion and Egyptian gods; as is evident from the following
account:
Aset, or Isis, was originally an independent goddess,

but due to political needs and pressures, was united
with Orisis as a sister and wife. Horus was combined
to her as son and she was considered as mother
goddess. She is seldom shown as nursing mother till
XXVIth dynasty; but from that time the worship of
the mother and child became increasingly general and
spread to Italy and all over Roman Empire. Through
later developments, Horus, as an infant carried by
Isis, or being suckled by her, is the most general type,
continued till 4th or 5th century. The absorption of
this type as an entirely new motif, into Christian art
and thought took place under the influence of Cyril of
Alexandria, by whom Mary was proclaimed as
Mother of God in 431 AD. Henceforth, these figures
are now no more of Isis and Horus, but of the
Madonna and Child 53 .
A number of other concepts common in all the three religions may be

interpreted in the light of Egyptian religion and its various phases, this,
however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
136
END NOTES
1
H.A. Walfson, ed. “Extradeical and Intradeical Interpretation of Platonic
Ideas” in Religious Philosophy (A Group of Essays) (Harvard University Press,
1961), pp.28-29.
2
Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Cornell University Press, New York, 1965),
p.131.
3
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (George Allen & Unwin
Paperbacks, London 1985), p.157.
4
James N. Jordan, Western Philosophy – From Antiquity to the Middle Ages
(Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1987), p.259.
5
Abdul Hafeez, “H.A. Walfson and A. H. Kamali on the Origin of the Problem
of Divine Attributes in Muslim Kalam”, Iqbal Review Volume 40, No.3,
(October 1998), pp.91-92.
6
Jordan, Western Philosophy, p.258.
7
Ibid., p. 258.
8
Ibid., p.357.
9
Ibid., pp.357-58.
10
A prominent group of Muslim theologians are treated in detail in the same
article.
11
Kaufmann Kohler, Ludwig Stein and Issac Broydé, “Divine Attributes”,
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artd=1201 & letter=A. (accessed
on 27 July 2008).
12
Jordan, Western Philosophy, p.361.
13
Ibid, p. 362.
14
Kohler, et.al., ”Divine Attributes”.
15
Jordan, Western Philosophy, p. 373.
16
Mir Valiuddin, “Mutazilism” in A History of Muslim Philosophy, Vol. 2,
M.M. Sharif, ed., (Germany: Allgaüer Heimatverlag GmbH. Kempten, 1963,
Reprinted in Pakistan 1983), Volume I, p. 208.
17
Ibid., p.217.
18
Ibid., p.218.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., pp. 218-19.
21
Muhammad Najam al-Ghani Khan, Madhahib al – Islam, (Lucknow, 1942),
p.132.
22
Abu al Hasan ben Ismail al-Ashari, Kitab al Ibanah ‘an Usual al-Diyanah,
(Hyderabad Daccan, 1903), p.47.
23
Abu al – Ala, Sharh – i- Mawafiq (Newal Kishore Press, Lucknow, n.d.),
p.571.
24
Al-Quran, 7:181.
25
Ibid., 2:15.
26
Ibid., 3:55.
27
Ibid., 51:48.
137
28
Omar A. Farrukh “Zahirism” in A History of Muslim Philosophy, Sharif, ed..,
p.285.
29
Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism” in The origin of Religion,
(Penguine Freud Library, Volume 13 tr. & ed. James Strachey, co-ed Albert
Dickson, 1985), p.258.
30
Ibid., p.259.
31
W.M. Flinders Petrie, “Egyptian Religion” in Encyclopedia of Religion and
Ethics, James Hastings (ed.), Vol. V, p. 247.
32
Ibid., p. 248.
33
Ibid., p .248.
34
Freud, “Moses and Monotheism”, p. 260.
35
Ibid., p. 263.
36
Al-Quran, 42:12.
37
Freud, “Moses and Monotheism”, p. 262.
38
Jimmy Dunn, “Aten Before and After Akhenaten”,
http://touregypt.net/featurestories/aten.htm. (Accessed on 21 July 2008).
39
Ibid.
40
“The Question of Psalm 104”,
http://www.seanet.com/~realistic/Psalm104.html (Accessed on 21 July 2008).
41
J.H. Breasted, Cambridge Ancient History, Vol.II, Chapter 5&6; “The Rock
Tomb of Tell el Amarna”, Archaeological Survey, Egyptian Exploration
Society, (6 volumes, 1903) N. de G. Davis.
42
Ottar Vendel, “The Spirit of Nature, Religion of the Egyptians”,
http://www.nemo-nu/ibisportal/0egyptintro/1egypt/inde.htm (Accessed on 21
July 2008).
43
Freud, “Moses and Monotheism”, pp. 262-269.
44
Al Quran, 32:8.
45
Ibid., 37:12.
46
Ibid., 40:68.
47
Ibid., 15:27.
48
Ibid., 36:83.
49
Ibid., 23:117.
50
Petrie, “Egyptian Religion”, p. 249.
51
Al Quran, 21:31.
52
Ibid., 96:5-6.
53
Petrie, “Egyptian Religion”, pp. 246-7.
138
EXTERIORITY OF DISCOURSE AND
DISAPPEARANCE OF MAN: NEGOTIATING WITH
FOUCAULT IN CONSTRUCTING COLONIAL INDIA
HUSSAIN AHMAD KHAN
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE,
SINGAPORE
ABSTRACT
This article argues that by using Michel Foucault’s

conception of exteriority of discourse and
disappearance of man in constructing colonial India,
the South Asianists are overlooking the most
important aspect of colonial experience, i.e., the local
sensibility or response of locals to the colonial
institutionalization. The deployment of these concepts
tends to ignore the absence of rigid grid of modern
state system in colonial India, subaltern classes, and
continuities of pre-colonial traditions in the colonial
structures. Such histories which use Foucault’s
exteriority of discourse and disappearance of man
also fail to define the “accidental encounters” in the
colonies.
KEY WORDS: Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Discourse, Loss of

Subject, Colonial India, Historiography.
Disappearance of man or loss of subject is ingrained in Michel

Foucault’s writings. This is not a new concept in European history of
ideas as Lacan, Ronald Barthes and Levi-Strauss have reflected upon it.
Foucault uses his concept of ‘exteriority of discourse’ to project the
notion of ‘loss of subject’ from the historical processes. This article
argues that the Foucauldian use of discourse also introduced a sense of
loss of subject in constructing colonial India in the historiography of
post-Orientalism. Many scholars like Tony Ballantyne, 1 Rosalind
O'Hanlon and David Washbrook 2 have maintained that the South Asian
history writing experienced Foucauldian turn from the 1980s onwards
for which Edward Said provided a window to analyze colonialism.
Such exposure to Foucauldian style helped South Asianists to develop a
139
rigid framework in order to understand the hierarchical relationship of

colonizer and colonized. The hierarchical relationship was studied in
multiple ways: analysis of colonial institutional practices (like legal
system, education, military, police, etc.), categorization of peoples into
various ethnic, religious, ideological groups, relationship of gender,
development of economic mechanisms, etc. Such studies of
hierarchical relationship were a kind of “State-centric” in which the
colonial state was presumed to have controlled its subjects by
knowledge rather than violence, hence, attached primacy to Foucault’s
conception of knowledge-power relationship.
In their search for modes of dominance, South Asianists
redefined “colonial archives” by deploying Foucauldian conception of
“discourse” and “subject”. Now colonial archives is seen as the
empire’s world view, and a source of generating colonial
interests/discourses. 3 Bernard Cohen’s, Nicholous Dirks’, and Gyan
Prakash’s works subscribe to this epistemic specificity. These theorists
claim that the colonial state generated a particular discourse keeping in
view its own interests (economic, political, etc.) which defined the
position of subject within the specific time and space. However, other
historians and theorists, like Partha Chaterjee, Ranajit Guha and Spivak
argue for the customization of Foucauldian paradigms; still others like
David Washbrook, CA Bylay, and William Glover altogether reject
such approaches. This article studies such negotiations of South
Asianists with the Foucauldian conception of subject and discourse in
the construction of colonial India. The article is divided into three parts:
the first part deals with Foucault’s definition of discourse and subject,
and how did Said use such conception in Orientalism; the second
portion scrutinizes those historical accounts which adopted Foucault’s
concept of subject and discourse; the third section discusses those
histories which altogether refute Foucault’s concept of discourse and
subject.
(I)
If death of God is an important theme in Nietzsche’s philosophy,

Michel Foucault lays the same emphasis on discourse in his writings.
Foucault defines discourse as a “language in action” or a way of
knowing world. Discourse is “what is produced by the groups of
signs...acts of formulation, a series of sentences or propositions--- a
discourse is constituted by a sequence of signs, in so far as they are
statements.. assigned particular modalities of existence”. 4 He believes
that no theory can fully elaborate the concept of discourse; only time
and space generate particular discourse(s). This definition leads to two
140
Hussain Ahmad Khan, Exteriority of Discourse and Disappearance of Man
interrelated concepts: context and truth. Foucault’s concept of truth is

highly subjective, a “thing of this world” and “each society has its own
regime of truth....the types of discourses which it accepts and makes
function as true”. 5 Mechanisms, procedures, and techniques construct
truth through discourses and make them function in the society, like
clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history,
psychiatric discourse, etc.
Discourses are linked together to work for the discursive
regime, or in other words, discourses are not a reality but a process by
which discursive functions become audible and instrument of thought. 6
The “exteriority” institutionalizes the discourses; hence, Foucault
conceptualizes discourse as a space/site of power. “It is in discourse
that power and knowledge are joined together”. 7 Foucault gives
examples of medical discourse, judicial and political discourses, etc.
which manage individuals rationally within particular spaces. 8
Foucault signifies the exteriority of discourse which construes
non-reflexive subject. The rationality and truth of Foucauldian
discourse do not exist in individual rather within the spaces. In other
words, discourse is associated with what we speak rather than what we
think. Emphasis on what we speak also communicates estrangement of
an individual with the sense. 9 Here individual is dependent upon
discursive practices or discourses rather than on mind. Foucault
substantiates this point by his studies of madness and prison. Hence,
discourses and discursive practices constitute “subject” which is not a
self-reflexive individual. The very rejection of self-reflexive individual
comes because of Foucault’s ordering of discourses by different
fields/spheres like science, sports, politics, education, etc. These
spheres/fields define rules, assign roles to the individual subject, and
regulate his behaviour through various hierarchies. These discursive
formations and discourses help the subject to make sense of the
external world and a way of distinguishing between what is right and
wrong, true and false, legitimate and illegitimate, etc. Hence to him,
“we [subjects] are prisoners of certain conceptions about ourselves and
our behaviour. We have to liberate our own subjectivity, our own
relation to ourselves”. 10 Michel Foucault’s main intention is to analyse
this mechanism of power which “reaches into the very grain of the
individual, touches his body, intrudes into his gestures, his attitudes, his
discourse, his apprenticeship, his daily life”. 11
Two factors may have contributed in negating Cogito---a
thinking being in many contemporary discourses; problems in defining
“subject’s authority” and the “development of disciplines like
linguistics and ethnology that dramatize the subject’s anomalous and
141
unprivileged, even untenable position in thought”. 12 Foucault absorbs

this concept and assigns it a primacy in his conception of discourses
which separates him from other theorists like Lovejoy, Collingwood,
Freud and others. 13
Foucault’s discourse becomes ahistoric in nature because he
only intends to study the European episteme and its consolidation in the
age of modernity. That’s why he does not analyse “epistemological
claims and discursive formations” in “evolutionary mode” rather he
sees particular characteristics scientifically in institutional systems.
This feature, according to Aijaz Ahmed, is inspired by structural
linguistic model rather than deriving strength from history. 14 A historic
Foucauldian discourse is not meant to study any evolutionary process
of institution building, rather it investigates four inter-related
propositions: First, instrumentality of Reason in the Age of Modernity
by studying the relationship of “knowledge and power, humanism and
terror, reform and domination”; the second proposition suggests that
power is everywhere and it can be figured out in various autonomous
spaces; third consideration is that discourses control body through
various technologies like religion, morality, judiciary, sexuality; and
fourth consideration is that the origins of power cannot be traced, as it
is everywhere, therefore, it does not provide space for resistance, each
discourse carries its own conflicts, and resistance is neither static nor
unitary in nature. 15 Foucault himself acknowledges “historical fiction”
and “singleminded exaggerated” tendencies in his writings. 16 Keeping
in view the present circumstances, he uses past to construct the picture
of future. His intention is to make people sensitive about the coming
times. Thus, truth of his discourses and subjects can neither be located
in the past nor in the present but in future. 17 Edward Said finds many
methodological problems in Michel Foucault’s works, like French
context 18 , discursive formation regarding individual writer, 19
overgeneralization and Eurocentricism 20 .
Although Said was aware of many problems in Foucault’s
work yet he fails to resolve them in his own work. 21 By borrowing
many Foucauldian concepts like archaeology, archives, genealogy and
discourse, 22 Said seems to be working on the same lines. Foucault’s
rejection of origin to historicize the problem replicates itself in the
Saidian discourse of decolonization. It liberates Said from digging out
any pre-colonial meanings beneath the text and enables him to judge
the text’s surface or exteriority. 23 The concept of discursive field is also
common among Foucault and Said. This notion of material power
space enables Said to relate colonial texts/discourses with colonial
institutions (administrative apparatus, economic and military). At
142
ideological level, there is a strong tangible measure of correspondence

between Foucauldian discourses and Saidian paradigms, i.e., anti-
institutionalist/anti-colonialist drive to liberate subjects. Foucault’s
intention is to overemphasize modern European institutional matrix to
make Europeans realize about possible exclusion and confinement of
subject, 24 and Said’s purpose is to liberate Orient or in more precise
term Palestinians from Orientalism or the West. 25
One of the many reasons for adopting notion of a non-
reflexive subject in the Orientalism was Said’s experience with the
western society 26 while conceptualizing the rise and development of
Orientalism. For Said, “Orientalism expresses and represents that part
culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with
supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines,
even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles”. 27 To him, Orientalism
is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority
over the Orient”. 28 It is Orientalism which did not allow the Orient to
acquire free will. Europeans created systematic disciplinary societies in
the colonies which constituted the Orient---“politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively”. 29 The
difference between Foucauldian and Saidian discourses is negligible.
Former deals with the western episteme and presumes rigid grids of
modern institutions established between sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries, while the latter deals with the Orient, constructed by
Europeans since Greek civilization. 30 This difference is insignificant as
Said himself acknowledges the use of Foucauldian discourse 31 which
brings to the fore non-reflexive subject.
(II)
Foucauldian style histories of colonial South Asia faced two

interrelated problems: How to trace or ignore origins of structures
(especially pre-colonial) and how to locate resistance, disorder and
innovations in colonial India. Both these problems were either over-
looked or least addressed in such histories because of the inherited
notion of discourse and non-reflexive subject. This implies that all the
attention was focussed either on the colonial institutional matrix
(universities, prisons, police, military) formed the central place in these
histories, or state’s authority over persuasive strategies. Similarly, the
deployment of Foucauldian discourse primarily focussed upon the
documented identities constructed by the colonial state at the expense
of the plurality of South Asian society. Gyan Prakash’s, Bernard
Cohen’s and Ronald Inden’s works may be put in this category.
143
Gyan Prakash’s study of science in colonial India may be

designated as a typical Foucauldian conceptualization in terms of the
loss of subject and exteriority of discourse. While studying the function
of science as an instrument of power, he argues that the discourse of
science was manipulated by the colonial state through various
discursive practices. This relationship of science and state formed the
“modern civil society in India and overshadowed its functioning as an
arena of public discourse”. 32 He emphasizes on the exteriority of the
discourse of science generated through various colonial institutions. In
order to describe such institutional discursive practices, Prakash
borrows the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. 33 He discusses
the role of exhibitions and museums as a source of generating discourse
on science to construe British authority. Prakash also highlights
urgency among ‘Hindu’ intellectuals to search for ‘Hindu scientific
past’ and universality. For Prakash, “colonial governmentality operated
as the knowledge and discipline of the other; it was positioned as a
body of practices to be applied upon an alien territory and
population.” 34 For instance, the works of Brajendranath Seal and
Prafulla Ghandra Ray popularized concept of Hindu science: Seal
wrote The Positive Science of the Hindus in 1915 under inspiration of
Auguste Comte, whereas Ray wrote about the history of Hindu
chemistry. 35
The locals accepted the discourses of positivism because of
the colonial state and local elites “drew their force from the
representation of western science as a sign of modernity and
progress”. 36 Prakash terms British colonies as “underfunded and over-
extended laboratories of modernity”. 37 He argues that the local
concepts of kinship, love, family and community were made part of
science as configured by “a space by colonial technics”. 38
Bernard Cohen’s “investigative modalities”, like
historiography, observation and travel, survey, enumeration,
museology, and surveillance, to construct colonial knowledge also
categorize them with Foucault’s exteriority of discourse and
disappearance of man. The knowledge acquired from these modalities
helped the British to “classify, categorize and bound the vast social
world that was India so that it could be controlled”. 39 While
conceptualizing the role of languages in establishing the British
apparatus, Cohen believes that discursive formations and their
discourses transformed the Indian languages and were meant “to
establish and regularize a discourse of differentiations which came to
mark the social and political map of nineteenth-century India”. He
highlights the British efforts to develop “a pedagogical and scholarly
144
apparatus” between 1770 and 1820. 40 While constructing colonial

India, Cohen uses the Foucauldian conception of discourse and
subjects: “the production of these texts and others that followed them
began the establishment of discursive formation, defined
epistemological space, created a discourse, and had the effect of
converting Indian forms of knowledge into European objects”. 41
Similarly, he argues that “it was the British who, in the 19th century,
defined in an authoritative and effective fashion how the value and
meaning of the objects produced and found in India were determined. It
was the patrons who created a system of classification which
determined what was valuable.” 42 In Bernard Cohn’s narrative, the
individuals become non-reflexive Foucauldian subjects working in the
interest of institutions/ power structure. For instance, works done by
Alexander Dow, Robert Irme, Charles Grant and others were the
“formation of a legitimizing discourse about Britain’s civilizing
mission in India”. 43
Similar is the case with Ronald Inden’s text. 44 His position
relies on RG Collingwood, Michel Foucault, Gramsci, with some
influences from Jacques Derrida. While analysing Indological
discourses, Inden contends that the Orientalist discourses construed the
truth about India without involving locals. Inden suggests these
Indological discourses had roots in German idealism and European
romanticism. He takes Herder and Hegel to conceptualize the
Orientalists’ understanding of the Orient. While appreciating the
Subaltern Studies, Inden claims that “Indians are perhaps for the first
time since colonization, showing stained signs of reappropriating the
capacity to represent themselves...”. 45 Although Inden asserts that he is
restoring the human agency, but in his overall narrative, he treats
Indians in the colony as non-reflexive subjects whose subjectivities
were displaced by the overarching European discourses.
Several other writers used the notions of exteriority of
discourse and disappearance of man in their analysis of colonial India.
Martha Kaplan, Zahid Chuadhery and Rachel J Tolen can be quoted as
examples. Martha Kaplan 46 deploys Foucauldian notion of power and
knowledge to study Mountstuart Elphinstone’s project of building
panopticon prison in Poona. Like Foucault, Elphinstone was also
impressed by Jeremy Bentham. Before building the prison, he surveyed
to know about local customs----“a subtle exercise of knowledge and
power”. 47 By analysing Elphinstone’s reports and correspondence,
Kaplan finds “paradigmatic instances of panopticism”. 48 Similarly,
Zahid Chaudhery uses photography in studying the “precise shift in the
ordering of colonial power” and extension in “its scope into the life
145
worlds of colonial subjects”. 49 He uses Foucauldian notion of

governmentality to argue that photographic discourses ordered the
colonial subjects. Same is the case with Rachel J Tolen who contends
that the British used European discourses of crime and class to
understand the dynamics of Indian society. These discourses placed
certain habits and characteristics within the category of crime. A
Salvation Army was created to transform these criminal tribes into
“subjected and productive bodies” through disciplinary practices. 50
Like Foucauldian concept of madness, the discourses of new British
social order defined the categories of inclusion and exclusion. At some
point of time, Subaltern Studies did show some inclination towards
Foucault but soon reverted to its original agenda of restoring the
sensibility of local subalterns. 51
(III)
The genre of anti-Foucauldian histories was developed as soon as

Foucault started casting influence on South Asianists. This tradition of
history writing either ignored or rejected Foucaultdian paradigms
primarily because of four reasons: first, Foucauldian histories assume
non-reflexive subject because of rigid grid of modern state system
which was perhaps absent in colonial South Asia; second, discourses of
marginalized or subaltern classes cannot be overlooked while
understanding colonial India, in fact, Foucauldian theories overlook the
way in which social life in colonial South Asia may be explained; third,
Foucauldian notion of discourse and subject do not provide any clue to
the origins and continuities of pre-colonial structures in colonial
structures; fourth, Foucauldian notions ignore the crisis faced by the
British government in colonial India in the wake of resistance posed by
the locals which implied that the locals were not a subject in strict
Foucauldian sense. Works by William Glover, CA Bayly, Washbrook
and Rosalind O’Hanlond may be quoted here.
William Glover rejects Foucauldian notions of exteriority of
discourse and non-reflexive subject. While discussing the role of
colonial state in the making of modern Lahore, he argues that the
colonial discourses did not “habituate their (native’s) body to particular
behaviours”, but were meant to mould their sentiments and reasoning
through persuasive methodologies. 52 The very use of persuasive
methodologies points to the British acceptance of cogito in the
colonies. At this particular point Glover differs from Foucault’s
“disciplinary” notion, which is “a modern form of control that identifies
the docile body (rather than reflecting mind) as a site that can be
146
‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ through a process of

uninterrupted, constant coercion”. 53 Glover also finds problems in
studying colonial household manuals with Foucauldian lenses, because
household manuals were not simply intended to produce family
practices in a colony but “presented a matrix of overlapping disciplines
in the bungalow, rather than depicting a single type. The spatial
practices the servants engaged in around the bungalow are rendered
quite thinly in these manuals as the products of ‘custom’ or ‘habit’- in
short, as timeworn cultural predilections”. 54
Rosalind O’Hanlond and David Washbrook 55 are critical of
the use of Saidian customization of Foucauldian paradigms in
explaining the colonial histories. By relying on the Marxist type of
social theory, Washbrook objects that in such explanation, class and
capital are not given due consideration, therefore, poverty and
deprivation remained inexplicable in such discourses. The problems of
methodology and preconceived notion are to some extend resolved by
CA Bayly in Empire and Information 56 who emphasizes upon the
“contact point” between the colonial administrators and locals. He
studies the “information order” by considering local tradition and
literacy more closely. He mentions local elites and religious reformers
who not only moulded the colonial knowledge but also contested it in
various spheres. Such element of contestation and contact point, which
to some extent brought considerable changes in the colonial
imagination of local culture remain unexplained in the Foucauldian
histories. Partha Chatterjee also brings out the issue of customizing
Foucault before applying him to South Asian context. He argues that
the Foucauldian analysis of imperialism revolves around the concept of
“management of space” by hospitals, prisons, asylums. It “forecloses a
reading of broader narratives of imperialism”. Because of restricted
modernity in colonies, Foucauldain analysis has to negotiate with a
wide range of possibilities. 57 Peter van der Veer expresses the same
point of view: “the colonized subjects are not passively produced by
hegemonic projects but are active agents whose choices and discourses
are of fundamental importance in the formation of their societies”. 58 He
contends that like the west defined east, east has also defined the west.
Therefore, the notion of Foucauldian non-reflexive subject construed
by exteriority of discourse cannot be used as a conceptual category.
David Arnold holds the same point of view in Colonizing the Body in
which he emphasis the resistance of locals to the western medicine.
Homi Bhaba and Ranajit Guha also see negotiating grounds
and collaboration between the state and society where state may
become “dominant” but not hegemonic. Some of the studies suggest
147
that the British did accept their “inability to grasp the local politics”
when they had to face revolts, protests, rumours, and clashes among
various ethnic groups. 59 Such type of reading of the colonial India
leads us to “accidental encounters” rather than planned social order as
envisioned in the Foucauldian discourses. Arimdan Dutta in his book
highlights that the act of British Bureaucracy may also be associated
with “the sense of an extrarational perception of wonder that the British
administration wanted to invoke in its subjects”. 60 He argues that the
“colonial governance is marked precisely by a calculus of extreme
sensitivity to situational circumstance...the codes of imperial power
sought to be inextricably entwined with the native’s codes of
cognition”. 61 By taking the clue from earlier Subaltern Studies, he
contends that in the wake of protests, violence and resistance “the
discourses of power and knowledge that govern that situation undergo a
mode of crisis”. 62 The British had to redefine their epistemological
discourses to accommodate those changes. This paradigm of crisis
management might be more helpful as it not only defines the mode of
resistance but also reduces the possibilities of presuppositions in
historian’s writing. The theory of situational circumstance becomes
more relevant to the 19th century colonial India because, unlike 1960s
France, the institutional matrix in India was not entrenched in the
public sphere. The British state structure had to evolve collaborative
strategies rather than coercive methods to negotiate with the diversified
subjects.
While highlighting the problems in Foucauldian notions of
non-reflexive subject and exteriority of discourse few historians
challenged the precise relationship between colonial power and
colonial knowledge, and emphasized upon the continuities of pre-
colonial structures which remained unaffected during the colonial
period. Sheldon Pollock’s work 63 is important in this regard who
stresses the continuities of old and un-effected structures during the
colonial period by taking the example of Sanskrit knowledge from
1550 to 1750. Sheldon highlights the “unreliability” and limitations of
colonial discourses, thus questions the very notion of truth in the
discourse. He also questions use of colonial discourses in ascribing or
describing power structure within the matrix of colonial state. The
dependence of colonial state on its subjects remained the central point
in such studies.
The basic objective of this article was to see the concepts of
discourse and thinking being in the Foucauldian and anti-Foucauldian
histories on colonial India. Foucauldian histories have introduced new
themes like gender, institutional practices, identity formation, etc. in the
148
tradition of postcolonial history writings. Primacy is attached to

discourses and colonial institutional matrix rather than truth and origin
of pre-colonial traditions. These histories also challenged essentialist
accounts of colonial India and highlighted various possibilities and
perspectives without laying claim to truth. However, these Foucauldian
histories dislocated the very existence of humans in the historical
process and emphasized upon the exteriority of discourse. The histories
which completely reject the Foucauldian paradigms somehow more
explicitly highlighted the forces at work in terms of resistance posed by
the locals which showed that the locals were not the perpetual
customers of dominant discourse. Thus the focal points of these
histories are thinking being, crisis, change, resistance which are rarely
mentioned in the Foucauldian styled histories. If Foucauldian histories
have analysed constructed fact, anti-Foucauldian studied constructing
fact in historical processes. David Ludden comes out with more severe
criticism against the use of Foucauldian paradigms in South Asian
histories. To him, “Foucault can conjure discursive formations in
history but cannot write their histories, having blinded himself to
dynamics of creation, tension, contest, and change”. 64 These paradigms
cannot help in historisizing and “locating forces at work” which
produced, transformed and composed meanings of discourses over a
period of time. 65
149
END NOTES
1
Tony Ballantyne, Archive, Discipline, State: Power and Knowledge in South
Asian Historiography, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 3, 1 (June, 2001),
Also see Tony Ballantyne, “Colonial Knowledge” in Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The
British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
2008).
2
Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, “Histories in Transition:
Approaches to the Study of Colonialism and Culture in India”. History
Workshop, No. 32 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 110-127.
3
Few historians like Richard Eaton become quite critical of methodologies of
Foucauldian style of South Asian histories. He argues that “the 1980s and
1990s saw a sharp drop from levels of earlier decades in the number of
historians who applied for support or permission to conduct research in the
mufassal---that is, in district archives, local libraries, private collections,
zimandari records, and so forth. Most ended up in London, and a few in
national and state archives in India, studying colonial records that were then
subjected to discourse analysis”. Tony Ballantyne, “Colonial Knowledge” in
Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire.
4
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock
Publications, 1972), p.107.
5
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977 (Colin Gorden, ed.), (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 131.
6
Discursive practices offer discourse “objects of which it can speak, or rather
(for this image of offering presupposes that objects are formed independently
of discourse), they determine the group of relations that discourse must
establish in order to speak this or that object, in order to deal with them, name
them, analyse them, classify them, explain them, etc. These relations
characterize not the language used by discourse, nor the circumstances in which
it is deployed, but discourse itself as a practice”. Foucault, The Archaeology of
Knowledge, p.46.
7
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol.01: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 100.
8
Foucault terms this rational management of individual as prime objective of
his works:“My own problem is the rationalization of the management of the
individual. My own work is (about the) history of the rationality as it works in
institutions and in the behaviour of the people”. Millicent Dillon and Michel
Foucault, “Conversation with Michel Foucault”, The Threepenny Review,
No.01 (Winter-Spring, 1980), p. 4.
9
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.122.
10
Millicent Dillon and Michel Foucault, “Conversation with Michel Foucault”,
The Threepenny Review, No.01 (Winter-Spring, 1980), p. 4.
11
Ibid., p.4.
150
12
Edward Said, “Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination” in Barry
Smart (ed.), Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments, Vol. 01 (London and NY:
Routledge, 1994), p. 41.
13
Philip Barker, Michel Foucault: Subversions of the Subject (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)
14
Aijaz Ahmed, “Postmodernism in History”, in K N Panikkar, Terence J
Byres and Utsa Patnaik (eds.), The Making of History: Essays Presented to
Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), p.467.
15
Ibid., pp. 467-68.
16
Dillon and Foucault, “Conversation with Michel Foucault”, p. 5.
17
“I know very well that what I say is not true...I have written a lot about
madness in the early 60’s---a history of the birth of psychiatry...the book and
my thesis have a truth in the nowadays reality. What I am trying to do is
provoke an inference between our reality and the knowledge of our past
history. If I succeed, this will have real effects in our present history. My hope
is my books become true after they have been written---not before....I have
tried to underline trends in the history of prisons. Only one trend people could
say...Two years ago there was turmoil in several prisons in France, prisoners
revolting. In two prisons, the prisoners in their cells read my book. They
shouted the text to other prisoners. I know that it’s pretentious to say, but that’s
a proof of a truth---a political and actual truth---which started after the book
was written.....the truth of my books is in future”. Ibid., p. 5.
18
According to Said, Foucault and his peers: “emerged out of a strange
revolutionary concatenation of Parisian aesthetic and political currents, which
for about thirty years produced such a concentration of brilliant work as we are
not likely to see for generations. . . . Yet all of these Parisian intellectuals were
deeply rooted in the political actualities of French life[:] ... World War II,
response to European communism, the Vietnamese and Algerian colonial wars,
and May 1968”. Edward Said, "Michel Foucault, 1927-1984," Reflections on
Exile, p.188. Quoted in Rubén Chuaqui, “Notes on Edward Said's View of
Michel Foucault”. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 25, Edward Said
and Critical Decolonization 2005 ) ‫رامعتسالا يكقنلا ضيوقتلاو كيعس كراوكإ‬
/ ), p.96. Said also believed that by importing French theories would
decontexualize the historical text. “By the time "theory" advanced intellectually
into departments of English, French, and German in the United States, the
notion of "text" had been transformed into something almost metaphysically
isolated from experience. The sway of semiology, deconstruction, and even the
archaeological descriptions of Foucault, as they have commonly been received,
reduced and in many cases eliminated the messier precincts of "life" and
historical experience”. Edward Said, "Michel Foucault, 1927-1984,"
Reflections on Exile, p. xviii. Quoted in Chuaqui, “Notes on Edward Said's
View of Michel Foucault”, p.97.
19
Said writes: "[U]nlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted,
I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise
collective anonymous body of texts constituting a discursive formation like
151
Orientalism”. Edward W Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1980), p. 23.
20
"In order to make shorthand generalizations about major social and
epistemological shifts in several European countries, Foucault resorts to
maddening, unsupported assertions that may be interesting rhetorically but
cannot pass muster either as history or as philosophy.... [I]n the last part of his
career he had a tendency to venture comically general observations " E Said,
"Michel Foucault, 1927-1984": Power (189), Quoted in Chuaqui, “Notes on
Edward Said's View of Michel Foucault”, pp.104. & 105 (for Eurocentricism).
Aijaz Ahmed finds the same problem of Eurocentricism in Foucauldian
discourses. See Aijaz Ahmed, “Postmodernism in History”, in K N Panikkar,
Terence J Byres and Utsa Patnaik (eds.), The Making of History: Essays
Presented to Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), p. 469.
21
David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial
Knowledge”, in Carol A. Breckenridges and Peter van deer Veer (eds.),
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p.250. Also see Rashmi
Bhatnagar, “Uses and Limits of Foucault: A Study of the Themes of Origins in
Edward Said’s Orientalism”. Social Scientist, Vol. 14, No. 07 (July, 1986), pp
3-22. Also see Chuaqui, “Notes on Edward Said's View of Michel Foucault”,
p.98.
22
Chuaqui, “Notes on Edward Said's View of Michel Foucault”, pp.98-99.
23
Rashmi Bhatnagar, “Uses and Limits of Foucault: A Study of the Themes of
Origins in Edward Said’s Orientalism”. Social Scientist, Vol. 14, No. 07 (July,
1986), p.6.
24
Dillon and Foucault, “Conversation with Michel Foucault”.
25
Bhatnagar, “Uses and Limits of Foucault”, pp.15-16.
26
“My own experiences....are in part what made me write this book. The life
of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening.
There exists here an almost unanimous consciousness that politically he does
not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an
Oriental”. Said, Orientalism, p.27.
27
Ibid., pp. 1-2.
28
Ibid., p.03.
29
Ibid.
30
“Foucault uses the term discourse in dealing with a western episteme, he
presumes the presence of modern state forms and institutional grids that arise
between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. Said seems at points to refer to a
singular, transhistorical orientalist discourse, tracing back to ancient Greek
theatre, that really essentializes “the West” to the considerable extent. The
challenge of orientalism is precisely the challenge of a discursive formation
that has complicated extratextual and non-discursive implications and
consequences”. Breckenridges and Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the
Postcolonial Predicament, p.5.
152
31
“I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault's notion of a
discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in
Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without
examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the
enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to
manage-and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily,
ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment
period”. Said, Orientalism, p.03.
32
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern
India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.8. Also see Gyan
Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India”. Representations, No. 40,
Special Issue: Seeing Science (Autumn, 1992), pp.153-178.
33
Prakash, Another Reason,p.10.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., p.100-101.
36
Ibid., p.227-228.
37
Ibid., p.13.
38
Ibid., p.23.
39
Bernard S. Cohen, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in
India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 05.
40
Bernard Cohen, The Command of Language and the Language of Command,
p. 284). Subaltern Studies IV.
41
Cohen, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, p. 21.
42
Ibid., p. 22.
43
Ibid., p. 06.
44
First published in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 20, no. 3 (1986), pp.401-446.
Reprinted in Ronald Inden, Text and Practice: Essays on South Asian History
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).
45
Inden, Text and Practice, p.59.
46
Martha Kaplan, “Panopticon in Poona: An Essay on Foucault and
Colonialism”. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 85-98.
47
Ibid., p.87.
48
Ibid., p.87.
49
Zahid Chaudhary, “Phantasmagoric Aesthetics: Colonial Violence and the
Management of Perception”, Cultural Critique, No. 59 (Winter, 2005), p.71.
50
Rachel J. Tolen, “Colonizing and Transforming the Criminal Tribesman: The
Salvation Army in British India”. American Ethnologist, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Feb.,
1991), p.106.
51
Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World:
Perspectives from Indian Historiography”. Comparative Studies in Society and
History, Vol. 32, No. 02 (April, 1990), p.400.
52
William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a
Colonial City (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p.xxi. Also see
William J. Glover, “ Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating
153
Sentiment in Colonial India”. The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 64, No. 3
(Aug., 2005), pp. 541, 553.
53
Glover, Making Lahore Modern, p.xxi.
54
Ibid., p.180.
55
O’Hanlon and Washbrook, “After Orientalism”, also see Washbrook,
“Colonial Discourse Theory”.
56
CA Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social
communication in India 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996)
57
See for a detailed discussion, Gyatori Spivak, Subaltern Studies:
Deconstructing Historiography, Ranjit Guha (ed) Subaltern Studies IV:
Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1985), p. 348 -349. Aijaz Ahmed also believes that Foucault’s concepts are
‘restricted’. See Aijaz Ahmed, “Postmodernism in History”, p.471.
58
Breckenridges and Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial
Predicament, pp.4-5.
59
Ballantyne, “Colonial Knowledge”, p.189.
60
Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, p.12.
61
Ibid., p.12.
62
Ibid., pp.12-3.
63
Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit,
Culture, and Power in Premodern India (California: University of California,
2006).
64
David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial
Knowledge”, in Breckenridges and Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the
Postcolonial Predicament, p.252.
65
Ibid., p.252.
154
CONCEPT PAPER
ON THE POSSIBILITY OF INDIGENOUS

THEORIZATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE: A CASE OF
∗
EPISTEMIC MARGINALITY
MIRZA ATHAR BAIG

PAKISTAN
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this paper is to explore, at a preliminary level, some of

the themes and issues pertaining to the discourses of social science as
they manifest themselves in a supposedly universal epistemic frame of
reference and their phenomenological reinterpretation as a case of
epistemic marginality, in historically particular and culturally specific
settings. The paradigms of universality, objectivity and public
verifiability are widely recognized as the cornerstones of scientific
knowledge as developed in the West, and, in a very basic sense,
constitute the epistemic dynamism underlying the emerging modernity.
SUBJECTIVE MEANING CONTEXT
Kasulis, an ardent advocate of the role of cognitive differences in the

study of cross-cultural philosophical world views, recognizes: “The
modern West, at least ideally, has made the commonality of human
experience its authority and public verifiability its method. This kind of
modernism has tried to replace ignorance, superstition, and inquisition
with reason, observation and justice”. 1 The statement in fact succinctly
sums up the ideal social epistemology of the Western modernity. But
like in all ideals, deviations from the ideal are not inconceivable, and in
this case have strong and far reaching implications. First, at a purely
disciplinary, hierarchical level, it is well known that the purported ideal
of universally objective knowledge, though fairly well adapted to the
nature of the natural sciences, comes to be blurred and fuzzified when
applied to social sciences, and perhaps because as Bishop 2 puts it: “The
difference is that the social science studies self-interpreting beings
while natural sciences do not.” The paradigm of the study of the self-
interpreting beings by the self-interpreting beings, finds its
155

phenomenological rendering in Schultz’s fundamental question for the
social sciences: “The problem of every social science can therefore be
summarized in the question: How are sciences of subjective meaning
context possible” [Original italics]. 3
The cherished ‘commonality of human experience’, however,
comes to be compromised in the realm of social sciences, taken as
sciences of the interpreting beings by the interpreting beings, or as
sciences of the subjective meaning context, not only due to the essential
reflexivity involved, in the condition of being simultaneously the
subject and object of knowledge, but also due to the vulnerability of the
‘interpreting beings’ to undergo drastic cognitive changes in their
‘subjective meaning contexts’ as a result of their varied socio-cultural
particularities. The determining roles of the historico-cultural identities
and their religious and civilizational Weltanschauungs in the
formulation of their epistemic frames of reference, are fairly well
recognized intellectual positions, in philosophy and post-colonial
theory, even going to the extent of challenging the ‘universality’ of the
Western paradigm of universality of knowledge itself. As Kasulis
comments: “The irony of course …… is that in insisting that
philosophy be “universal”, the dominant Western tradition
inadvertently shows its own social, historical and cultural roots. The
insistence on universalization boils down to one cultural philosophy’s
trying to exclude the very possibility of another”. 4 Or, in the famous
work, The Empire Writes Back: “European theories themselves emerge
form particular cultural traditions which are hidden by false notions of
‘the universal’.” 5
SECULAR INDUCTIVE VERSUS DEDUCTIVE RELIGIOUS
In this context it is not hard to see that a society’s sense of time and
history and the placement of its own cultural identity in the total sweep
of humanity tend to have a profound impact on its cognitive potential to
think and theorize in terms of the aesthetic and theoretical modalities
called literature, philosophy and social sciences. So it is at least
reasonable to hypothesize that, in an academic milieu situated in a
society like ours, where the worldview or theory of reality, supporting
scientific thought and practice, is either totally unacceptable or only
ambivalently accommodated simply due to the exigencies of modern
education, and also where an unresolved—assumed or real— conflict
exists between secular inductive reason and the authoritative and
deductive religious paradigms, the very existence of science in its
creative dimensions would be uniquely problematic.
156
MIRZA ATHAR BAIG, ON THE POSSIBILITY OF INDIGENOUS
The academic discourse of science in a society and its relation

to modernity is deeply informed by that general public perception of
science which in the contemporary literature of the sociology of science
is termed as “the public understanding of science”. “As much as
theories of modernity draw on particular ideas about science, so too do
they draw on ideas about the public understanding of science”. The
‘public understanding of science’ in fact furnishes the sociological
substratum which accommodates the dissemination of scientific
knowledge in a society in the first place and then may or may not
nurture the processes of creative theorization and inventive practices of
science in the same society. In the West, the public understanding of
science comes to be widely allied to the ‘rationalized’ mindset and has
its own unique problems which affect the academic theory and practice
of science. “Sociologists have tended to characterize the public’s
understanding of science as being of a particular form – i.e.,
rationalized – using this characterization as the basis for further
theorizing about apparent social changes and developments said to be
affecting modern society” 6 .
UNIQUE EPISTEMIC SITUATIONS
The interpreting beings interpreting themselves in non-western cultural

domains have to recognize the uniqueness of their epistemic situations,
and instead of blindly and ineffectively imitating the ‘rationalized’
hypothetico-deductivism of the universal epistemology, should first
inquire into the existing structure of their own cognitive systems of
belief which are inevitably going to interact with their intellectual
inquiries and attempts to theorize. In other words, a cognitive self-
consciousness of the relationship between the ‘public’ understanding of
science’ and the academic discourse of science in their culture is the
primary requirement for a social scientist in a society like that of
Pakistan. That is the first step towards the so-called indigenization,
which cannot hope to evolve its unique epistemic and heuristic
dynamism, unless the indigenous theorists are fully conscious of the
peculiarities of their cultural a priories and cognitive structures of their
own society.
This is true about all sciences but especially so about the
social sciences, because unlike the natural sciences the very basic data
the so-called observable facts of social sciences are not culturally
neutral and universally objective. So the indigenous factor comes to
reshape what has to be explained and theorized about, and any
simplistic application of some assumed universal theory of social
157

science fails to explain the complexities of social phenomena in its
socio-cultural particularity.
Let us take a simple example to elucidate the point in
question, an example in fact nearest to our present concern, I mean the
whole gamut of academic and educational discourses of this
conference, a social science conference. Obviously at one level a social
science conference, too, is a social event, and is understandable or
should be understandable within the academic parameter of some social
science, and arguably through the most trans-disciplinary among all the
social sciences, I mean the discipline of Education. In other words, a
social science conference derives its epistemic and heuristic
significance from a theory of Education, with its claims of universal
explanation. But the problem is that the explanandum i.e. that which is
to be explained, the event called ‘the social science conference’ is not
an event uniformly stable and well demarcated like the fall of an apple
or the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen, but it comes to
be drastically reshaped by the mere fact of its divergent settings and
occurrences. In simple words, we may have two different events at
hand, one, a social science conference taking place within the precincts
of some advanced western university, comfortably enmeshed in its
secular outlook and with a deep rooted conceptual and theoretical
footing in western science and philosophy and along with that a smug
mindset-well entrenched in the intellectual and political dominance of
the West. Event number two, a social science conference taking place
in a non-western peripheral university, located in a cognitive social
space profoundly influenced not only by the religious and supersensible
systems of beliefs, but also as they manifest in their militant postures,
tangibly threatened by the annihilating logistics of various varieties of
terrorism. Common sense suffices to be cognizant of the different
phenomenology of these two events, and ‘the interpretation of their
subjective meaning contexts, by interpreting beings’. 7 They also serve
as a starting point for zooming out and making visible the entire range
of two social life-worlds, the purportedly universal and the indigenous
and which require two independent yet interacting courses of
theorizations for their comprehension.
THREE SCHOOL SCENARIO
Theorization in social sciences, both in its explanatory and predictive

dimensions, more often than not appears to follow three approaches,
which are broadly categorized as naturalistic, interpretive, and critical.
This so-called three school scenario of the contemporary philosophy of
158
social science comes to be influenced by the postmodernist

interventions, especially that of Lyotard and Foucault. 8 The naturalistic
school, with its legacy of positivism, maintains that social phenomena
must apply methods from natural sciences to discover causal
regularities, whereas interpretive school, with its philosophical
perspective of the Hermeneutics of Gadamer and the phenomenology
of Husserl and Heidegger rejects the reductionist stance of the
naturalistic school and hold that the social scientist should seek to
interpret the significance of human actions, also in their communicative
and cooperative modes, but the nearest they can get to the systematic
theories will be systematic exposition of rules. 9 The critical school with
its backdrop of neo-Marxist thinkers of Frankfurt school, and with its
modern proponent, Habermas, rejects the naturalistic approach, but also
the interpretive approach, because interpretation of social phenomena
could be biased or may be really serving the purpose of the forces
benefiting from a particular interpretation, whereas the goal of social
science should be emancipatory. 10 Postmodernism as a late arrival with
its roots in post-structuralism, comes to reject the absolute sanctity of
all grand narratives, and, “The most that can be hoped for… are limited
narratives and local bodies of knowledge, confined to transient social
practices”. 11
The above can be construed as a portrayal in miniature of the
conceptual and philosophical ambience and the tools of the social
science, available to the theorists in the paradigm market of the western
academy. So, in our hypothetical event#1 i.e. in a social science
conference taking place in some advanced university of the West, the
contributors would be demonstrating a sense of intellectual belonging
to any one of the four theoretical positions alluded to above or even to
some of the many hybrids forms thereof. But their intellectual and
philosophical positioning would be ultimately grounded into the
cognitive structures, cultural systems of beliefs, and not the least in the
‘public understanding of science’. Can we assume that an identical
situation exists here, in our event #2? Can we assume that our social
scientists be naturalistic, interpretive, critical or postmodernist, in their
epistemic and theoretical pursuits, in an identical sense as their western
counterparts? Perhaps not so simply!
My contention is that the problematiques of the explanatory or
predictive roles of western theory of social science as encountered in
the non-western societies, are at least partially caused by ignoring the
question raised above and by naively positing three identities; which
can be explicated again by referring to the example of the two social
science conferences, as test tube cases, (1) the ontological or objective
159

identity: the assumption that the event #1 and event # 2, are essentially,
conceptually and definitionally identical, (2) the epistemic and
subjective identity, the assumption that the human agents ,i.e. the
social scientists and the participants, in event #1 and event#2 have
identical cognitive positioning towards the discursive details of the two
events, (3) the disciplinary identity, the assumption that the disciplinary
space underlying the two events is identical.
HANKERED AFTER IDEAL
The assumptions of onto-epistemic and disciplinary identities between

the western and the non-western academy which I have discussed with
reference to two micro events pertaining to the social science of
education, obviously apply to the entire range of our educational
discourse, and their role in terms of our sociology of knowledge, is that
of an hankered after ideal. The manifestations of this syndrome are not
hard to be traced in such popular exhortations, like: We will bring our
universities at par with the most advanced universities of the West, we
should make great progress in science and technology to prove our
greatness to the West, soon our research journals would be of
international standard, and so on. The naiveté of such wishful
exhortation is not hard to demonstrate in a society where the public
understanding of science, is that of some sort of black magic coming
from the west and which though believed to be ultimately false as a
theory of truth and reality, is necessary for making atom bombs,
computers, airplanes, and for making all sorts of worldly progress.
Science and science education at all levels is a difficult proposition in a
society where even the intelligentsia and the academia share this
popular mindset which assumes that science can just walk into a society
in general and its academic world in particular by some official decree,
or by spending a lot of money on mindlessly imitating western
discourse of scientific progress. Science obviously is a world view and
a whole set of cognitive positions about phenomena. So a society’s
collective posture on science in the ambience of its civilizational and
cultural identity has a profound impact on its cognitive potential to
think and theorize in terms of modalities called natural sciences and
social sciences.
The point is that in the absence of a cognitive framework
supporting inductive reasoning and creative theorization, a society in
general and its academic world in particular cannot hope to go beyond
some degree of achievement in applied sciences and technology (the
atom bomb thing, of course), but it cannot hope to make any ground
160
breaking advancement in the theoretical dimensions of natural science,

which indeed is the real forte of the West. As regards the academic
discourse called social science the matters cannot go beyond a clownish
mimicry of the western theory and its repetitive drill in the curricula of
sociology, psychology, political science, economics, etc., all hopelessly
failing to explain the indigenous ground level realities of our socio-
cultural and historical space. The failure of our educational discourses
to generate processes of a passionate involvement in theoretical
pursuits in natural sciences and producing indigenous theorization in
social science is due to our basic position vis-à-vis western systems and
structures of knowledge, which I would like to conceptualize as a
condition of epistemic marginality, emerging from a centre-periphery
model in the global ecology of knowledge. In what follows I would
present some of the phenomenological analyses of this post-
disciplinary condition.
ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF EPISTEMIC MARGINALITY
My contention is that, all that which is given in discursive terms as our

lamented ‘predicament’ in the field of social science or sciences are
ultimately determined by the structures of a ‘life world’ of epistemic
marginality. In the remaining part of this write- up, I would try to
conceptualize and isolate the essential features of this condition of
knowledge, through descriptive phenomenological analysis.
1. THE VERTICAL AND THE HORIZONTAL AXES OF KNOWLEDGE: THE
CENTRE-PERIPHERY MODEL: In the centre-periphery model of
knowledge, with west placed at the centre and the rest or the non-west
at the margin or the periphery, the ‘distance from the centre’ becomes
the ultimate marker of learning, knowledge and education for the
marginal epistemic agent. So the epistemic movement for the
peripheral knower is horizontal, and only the centre is free for vertical
ascendance.
161

2. BRIDGE THE GAP SYNDROME: When reduction of the distance from

the centre becomes the hallmark of heuristic, academic and pedagogic
excellence for the marginal world of knowledge, a whole set of
discourses is generated which it would be convenient to call, ‘bridge
the gap syndrome’ or BGS. Some typical symptoms accompanying
BGS are, mechanical and senseless mimicry of the central discourses
of knowledge and learning, pseudo academic elitism, reduction of
qualitative processes of learning and education into simple quantitative
parameters: imposition of quasi quantitative parameters for the
apparent enhancement and evaluation of the quality of education, an
endless regimen of data collection, without any clear insight about its
real transformation into the processes promoting the generation of
knowledge and higher learning in our indigenous cognitive space, an
obsession for ‘buzz numbers’ like, number of universities, number of
research papers, number of PhDs, number of desks, number of foreign
professors, number of linkages with foreign universities, etc., etc.
3. THE EPISTEMIC SWING: The phenomenological profile of the life-

world scenario of individuals more actively engaged with the trade of
knowledge, learning and education in our society, the teachers,
academicians, students, researchers, etc, cannot be complete without
taking into account the implications of their perceptions regarding the
‘distance from the centre’, both in the cultural and subjective spaces. At
a personal and subjective level, the real or imaginary distance form the
epistemic centre operates as an intra-subjective schema of judgement
and evaluation of one’s personal worth as a knowing subject. This
schema generates a dynamics of movement both towards and away
from the centre and I will call it as ‘epistemic swing’ in its centripetal
and centrifugal loci. We as epistemic subjects of the world of
162
knowledge, created by the West, oscillate between the periphery and

the centre through an ambivalence of attraction, and repulsion. This
centripetal-attractive and centrifugal-repulsive epistemic movement,
which understandably originates in the cultural space of the unresolved
cognitive and conceptual differences, between the indigenous and the
foreign, and which is further perpetuated by the exigencies of the
contemporary identification of techno-science and human development,
has its toll to make for the marginal knower. The epistemic swing, as an
unrecognised taken for granted feature of the life-word of the
peripheral subject of knowledge is not a transparent mental structure, as
if casting no effect on his or her cognitive and creative potential, rather
it fundamentally debilitates it.
4. THE ONTO-EPISTEMIC RUPTURE AND THE DOUBLE UP-ROOTEDNESS:

That the positionality of the knower influences if not determines, the
contents of the known, is a well-recognized piece of wisdom in
physical sciences, the so-called Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It can
be argued that a similar logistics of the perspectival variables operate as
a socio-cultural conditionality in all centre- periphery transactions of
knowledge. The epistemic swing due to its eternal movement to and fro
between the centre and the margin brings about an onto-epistemic
rupture in the cognitive space of the marginal aspirant of knowledge,
making him/her doubly uprooted both from the world of his/her origin
and the hypothetical world to be known through the epistemic centre.
This double up-rootedness is clearly manifested in the life-world of our
students and teachers, bearing, on the one hand, the alien burden of
western knowledge, generating a world suspended in the textual space
of books, and losing, on the other hand, a creative and conceptual
insight into the fabrics of their own socio-cultural realities.
5. CREATIVE DEMENTIA: The severing of the organic relationship

between the knower and the known, due to the onto-epistemic rupture
leads to a marked deterioration in the conceptual and theoretical
potential of the marginalized epistemic subject. The urge to
conceptualize and theorize, especially in the field of human behavior in
its social and cultural dimensionalities, demands a correspondence
between the lived experience of the subject and his/her explanatory
frameworks. The theoretical models emerging in the historical
trajectory of the epistemic centre fail to serve as explanatory devices
for the marginal subject leaving him/her with a plethora of unresolved
conceptual conflicts between his traditional cultural apriories and the
learned wisdom of the west, converting his mind into a junk yard of
163

cognitive monstrosities. Living for a prolonged time with the psychic
tension of mutually antagonistic cerebral structures has its toll, and
results in a cultural and creative dementia.
6. DEGENERATION OF EDUCATION INTO TRAINING: Education in the true

sense of the word provides a broader epistemic framework for the
integration of existing knowledge and understanding and thus becomes
a conatus for the production of new knowledge, whereas training is
work specific and performance oriented. For the marginal epistemic
agent due to the onto-epistemic rupture, instead of being a perennial
concern of the society, culturally rooted and historically determined,
education becomes a ‘present occupation’ with specific and predictable
goals, a performance centred training, a training to demonstrate oneself
as educated in accordance with the external parameters set up by the
epistemic centre. With the loss of perspective, learning is degenerated
to a mere drill, and a regime of mechanical textual retention, to meet
the external requirements of the so called systems of education. This
issue had been extensively discussed by the writer as post-colonial
vocationalism, elsewhere. 12
7. TRAUMA OF THE ORIGINAL LOSS: As a creature of the doubly

uprooted ontologies, the marginal subject is neither fully in his own
world, nor in the other’s world. His relation with his own world
becomes gradually vacuous epistemologically whereas it becomes
unfounded at the other end. His is a phenomenological profile of a
relentless though very often unrecognized and even deliberately denied
trauma of some original loss, and the anguish of the equally recurring
failure to ‘bridge the gap’. The resultant is a vitiation, a deterioration,
and distortion, in the wider sense of being creatively cognitive,
because epistemic processes in their creative dimensions, as theorizing
and discovery, involve very often if not always a denial of the known
as a given; a given, taken as a firm point of acceptability in a tradition
of representation or expression. The life-world of the subject of
epistemic marginality is devoid of both these conditionalities of
creativity, being not a part of the centre, it is also not a part of the
traditions of knowledge, where he could exercise the dialectics of
acceptance or rejection, rather, his is the conditionality of ‘epistemic
swing’ which is neither acceptance nor rejection, but a suspended state
of epistemic groundlessness.
8. MARGINALITY WITHIN MARGINALITY: Epistemic marginality leads to

a loss of cultural perspective on knowledge, which locates the subject
164
as a knower of the world. So far we have been, focusing more on the

life-world of the central in the marginal, a bit of the paradoxical
existent, the elite, and the learned academician, and, of course, all the
varieties of the bridge-the- gap theorists, and saviours. What about the
more humble, the so-called less educated, the marginal within the
marginal? For this layer of the peripheral humanity, the master
discourse of the other, the Science, with a capital S, is akin to wizardry.
And technology emerging from the centre is a magical intervention in
the complacency of the marginalized ontology. The ready acceptance
of the ‘miraculous’ gadgetry, evokes a quasi-magical trepidation in the
hearts of the lay public inhabiting the margin, and further reinforces the
wider patterns of dominance.
9. DE-CENTERING AND RE-CENTERING- MOVEMENT AWAY FROM

EPISTEMIC MARGINALITY: The central question underlying the entire
discussion would obviously be, whether the marginalized epistemic
subject is eternally doomed to be marginalized or there could be some
hope of escape from the centre periphery incarceration. The obvious
answer to the obvious question would be to terminate the horizontal
movement of knowledge and substitute it with the vertical one after a
process of de-centring and re-centring. The not so obvious modalities
necessary for the execution of such a cultural, cognitive and epistemic
tour de force, would only be possible through a process of indigenous
theorization, which would involve the condition of epistemic
marginality as a conceptual and discursive given, inescapably present
in the primary data of every social science. Again such indigenous
theorization has to be predominantly post-disciplinary, because the
disciplinary confinements of social science also operate to strengthen
and entrench the establishment of the global ecology of knowledge.
Only through such a radical movement in the sphere of non-western
social theory construction, and a simultaneous attempt to theorize the
West, an attempt to answer the question can be made, as to how natural
sciences, and social sciences could be genuinely possible from a
position of epistemic marginality. How a cultural perspective on
contemporary processes and products of knowledge can be re-opened,
which could illuminate the possibility of epistemic movement, in some
new verticality. The rootless and mechanical input from the horizontal
‘epistemic swing’, has to be grounded in some new point of reference,
a new orientation on being and knowing, in other words, instead of
making futile attempts to ‘bridge the gap’ between the margin and the
centre , the onto-epistemic rupture has to be repaired. It is precisely
here that, that elusive activity called Philosophy can have some role to
165

play in its position of marginality, or rather marginality within
marginality. Philosophy operates in the conflictive space, between
centralizing champions of knowledge and truth, and as such remaining
always de-centred, creates new centres as disciplinary spaces of
knowledge, and also their cultural perspectives in the form of their
critiques. It is only Philosophy, which can accommodate both the
positionality of the knower, in terms of the multi-cultural referential
distances, its cognitive movements along different directions, and yet
can open the possibilities of disciplinary spaces in new cultural
perspectives, in which knowledge could be grounded and generated.
10. POST DISCIPLINARY REQUIREMENTS: Disciplines emerged as a result

of the knowledge explosion which followed enlightenment in the West,
as a strategy for developing an intellectual division of labour and
management through specialization. For the marginal epistemic agent
a slavish adherence to the disciplinary schema of the centre further
fortifies the condition of epistemic marginality. Indigenous theorization
on the nature of the socio-cultural, post-colonial condition of epistemic
marginality, demands a movement from disciplinarity to
postdisciplinarity, while creatively employing the intermediate levels of
epistemic association, relationship, integration and transcendence,
marked by interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Postdisciplinarity
is already being employed for a better understanding of marginalized or
hitherto unchartered conditions of knowledge. As Bob Jessop and
Ngai-Ling Sum comment while analyzing the pre-disciplinary and
post-disciplinary perspectives on new political economy: “But we are
now witnessing the emergence of a post-disciplinary approach that
reflects the crisis in the received categories of analysis and the
disciplines that correspond to them”. 13
The crisis in the received categories of analysis in the present
context is the debacle of social science based scholarly analyses of our
society, in our society; where academic disciplines, like political
science, economics, history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc,
have miserably failed to become a source of enlightenment, as tools of
explanation and prediction, of our ground level realities. The scenario
is that of a failed academy, unable to establish any reciprocal discursive
relationship with the society. The prospect of indigenous theorization
will remain dismal unless the social science disciplines are
‘rediscovered’ and renegotiated in the face of the multifarious
discourses of epistemic marginality—very obviously a postdisciplinary
academic venture.
166
END NOTES

∗
This paper is also published in ‘Critical Perspectives on Social Sciences in
Pakistan: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on the State of Social
Sciences in Pakistan, organized by faculty of Social Sciences, GC University,
Lahore in collaboration with Higher Education Commission (HEC), March 27,
2008’, Pervez Tahir, Tahir Kamran, Rizwan Omer Gondal (eds.), (Lahore: GC
University, 2008)
1
Thomas P. Kasulis, Intimacy or Integrity (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 2002), p.33.
2
Robert C. Bishop, The Philosophy of the Social Science (London, New York:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), p.353.
3
Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Chicago:
Northwestern University Press, 2001), p.223.
4
Kasulis, Intimacy or Integrity, p. 15.
5
Bill Ashcroft, The Empire Writes Back (London and New York: Routledge,
2001), p.11.
6
Simone Locke, “Sociology and the Public Understanding of Science: From
Rationalization to Rhetoric,” British Journal of Sociology 52 (1), (March.
2001), p.2.
7
Bishop, The Philosophy of the Social Science also see Schutz, The
Phenomenology of the Social World.
8
David Bray Brook, “Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science.” In
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, version 1.0. (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998).
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., p.80.
12
Mirza Athar Baig, “Post/Neo-colonial Academic Vocationalism” Quest: A
Research Journal, vol. 14. (Lahore: Department of Philosophy and
Interdisciplinary Studies, GC University, 2004), p. 15.
13
See website: http://www.ru.nl/socgeo/colloquium/PrePostDisciplinarity.pdf
167
S ALAHUDDIN M ALIK , 1857-W AR OF I NDEPENDENCE OR
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS ? ( THE B RITISH PUBLIC
REACTION ) (K ARACHI : O XFORD U NIVERSITY P RESS ,
2008)
Much has been written about the 1857 war between the British and the
Indians. And out of this material, the bulk has been penned down by the
British writers. “1857 – War of independence or clash of civilizations?”
by Salahuddin Malik is a unique work because for the first time a
Pakistani scholar has researched how the British public and officialdom
in England and India reacted to this event.
The war of 1857 was fought over 100,000 miles of Indian
territory: 500 miles in length from Meerut to Banaras and 200 miles in
breadth from Fatehgarh on the borders of Awadh to Banda on the right
bank of the Jumna. According to a conservative British estimate, out of
one hundred and fifty million Indians, only two hundred thousand
rebelled against the authority of the East Indian Company (EIC). The
Punjab saved the British empire because with the exception of one or
two zamindars, not only that the rest helped the company’s government
but when the British were short of troops, the Punjabis enlisted in the
English army to fight against their fellow Indians. In spite of the long
physical distance between Britain and the subcontinent i.e. 6000 to
11,160 miles via the Red Sea and Cape routes and the time distance of
six to thirteen weeks, the British were able to defeat the Indians due to
their military superiority.
The author rejects the idea that there was a centrally planned
conspiracy to overthrow the colonial rule but admits that several
rumours circulated widely to turn the natives against the company’s
government. For example, General Hearsey was able to identify that
the greased cartridge story was invented by ‘Dharma Sabha’, a Calcutta
based society. The distribution of flour cakes in the countryside and
lotus flowers among the regiments also figured in instigating the
sepoys. Similarly, it was rumoured that carts or boat loads of bone dust
were also sent to the cities and the cantonments to be mixed with flour.
Another absurd rumour was that the British were importing English
Crimean War widows into India to spread Christianity by forcing the
leading landlords to marry them. Yet another widely circulated rumour
was that on the first centenary of the British rule i.e. 23 June 1857,
there would be a simultaneous uprising from the Himalayas to the
Hooghly in which all Europeans would be either expelled or massacred.
171
During the Delhi trial, the Advocate Judge of the British army
blamed the Muslims for the circulation of the ‘Chapatis’ to inculcate
the feeling that in future ‘there should be but one food and one faith.’
During the same trial, he asserted, “….it is a most significant fact, that
though we come upon traces of Mussulman intrigues, wherever our
investigation has carried us, yet not one paper has been found to show
that the Hindus, as a body, had been conspiring against us, or that their
Brahmins or priests had been preaching a crusade against Christians.”
Was the war actually a result of the cartridge issue? A large
section of the British society rejected this argument and Benjamin
Disraeli while opening the debate on this issue on 27 July 1857 in the
House of Commons, observed, “the decline and fall of empires are not
affairs of greased cartridges. Such results are occasioned by adequate
causes….” And he was quite right.
Lord Macaulay had noted a sharp decline in the prestige of
Englishmen almost six decades before this war. Unlike the Mughal rule
in which persons from all communities and all ranks had the
opportunity to rise to high offices, the natives were completely
excluded from all share of the government under the British despite the
introduction of the ‘liberal’ Charter Act of 1833 which abolished all
distinctions of caste, colour and creed in the recruitment of company’s
services. Malcom Lewin, the Second Judge of the Sardar Court of
Madras ruefully remarked, “Our rule has been that of the robber and the
bandit and we are suffering from the natural result—insurrection.” The
process of de-Indianization of services that had started with Warren
Hastings reached its peak under Lord Cornwallis. While criticizing the
British judicial system ‘Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’
highlighted, “Our courts of justice…were too slow, too
expensive…they promoted litigation….they were hardly accessible (to
the poor) from their expense and nearly useless from their delays.”
The British were more concerned about the Indian revenue
than the happiness of Indians as there were taxes on stamps, petitions,
food, houses, eatables and ferries. The company amassed exorbitant
profits by virtue of its monopolies in opium, salt, arrack and ferry. The
police was expected to be the guardian of the people but in effect, it had
become ‘the bane and pest of society, the terror of the community’ and
a British newspaper aptly commented in its editorial that ‘the system
could not afford even as much protection to the natives as they enjoyed
under the earlier Hindu and Muslim rulers.’
The British and the Indians were poles apart in their outlook.
The Mughals were foreign in their origin but after the conquest of the
subcontinent, penned the ‘Quarterly Review’ they had ‘made India
172
their home and adopted Indian customs and manners and so ceased to
be…….foreigners.’ On the contrary, hardly any British preferred to
settle in India after retirement because ‘their affections, their loyalty,
their love and wealth were all for Great Britain and not for India.’ W.H.
Russell, the special correspondent of ‘The Times’ aptly summed up the
relationship between the ruler and the ruled: “There is no bond of union
between the two….The West rules, collects taxes, gives balls……The
East pays taxes on what it eats grown on taxed lands, grumbles,…..sits
in its decaying temples, haunts its rotting shrines……and drinks its
semi-putrid water…Between the two there is a great gulf….”
Sadly, even today, there are people in Britain as well as in the
subcontinent who still sing hymns in praise of the British rule. How
oppressive and rotten the British administration was to the core can be
well-understood from the letter of Charles Napier, the Commander-in-
Chief of India, when he wrote to one of his friends in Calcutta, in May
1850: “The high compliment you pay the Indian government makes me
laugh, because I know that while you believe in it, it is not correct. No!
No! I will neither concede to you that ‘we are strong, just or regular’; or
that ‘we take no more from the people than the law declares’, or that we
‘pay every mouth.’ Ourselves, yes! But not others…..you know nothing
of the Indian government beyond its theories…..The atrocities which
go on are beyond description…….I on my horse, passing through all
countries saw and learnt them on the spot; and very indignant I am at
them.” Napier also mentioned of a judge whom he personally knew that
openly bragged “when either of the parties before him was a woman,
and a pretty one, he always made the sacrifice of her honour the price
of his decree.” There were a few sane voices in England which were
quite unhappy over the ways of governance in India and a Tory MP
Henry Drummond was one such voice, when he observed in June 1858,
“If we are going to look upon India as we had looked upon it hitherto,
as a mere place of plunder for English officials, we should surely lose
it, and we deserve to lose it.”
No doubt the exploitative nature of company’s government
was responsible for the Indian upsurge but the messianic activities of
the Christian churches had compounded the problem. Religious beliefs
are sensitive issues and the British should have known that but the
meddling continued in the religious life of the Indians. Revenues from
India were used to patronise the activities of the Church of England in
the subcontinent. Salahuddin Malik has built a strong case in this
regard. Not only that missionaries were appointed as inspectors of
schools and the Bible was taught as a classroom book but the bishops
were also awarded royal protocol with military escorts. There were
173
‘missionary colonels’ and ‘Padree Lieutenants’ who gave lectures on
Christianity, distributed Bibles and awarded out of turn promotions to
the soldiers on the basis of religious considerations. When Colonel
Wheler, the Commander of the 34th NI at Barrackpore was charged of
using his position wrongly to proselytize in the army, he stated in his
defence that he was ‘rendering unto Ceasar the things that are Ceasar’s
and unto God the things that are God’s. When the missionaries were
blamed for their share in the insurrection, all the clergymen, with one
voice declared that ‘Christian preaching was not at all responsible for
the outbreak of mutiny in India. Indeed they contended that the lack of
sufficient missionary activity had led to it.’ Instead of realistically
sharing the blame, the British priesthood shifted the entire blame on the
age old Muslim animosity towards Christianity by arguing that as the
Indian Muslims had always been threatened by the British rule
therefore the uprising of 1857 was just another manifestation of a
ferocious outburst of Muslim bigotry towards Christians. Reverend
Edward Storrow of the London Missionary Society nailed the point that
‘Christianity has no foe in India, so fierce, unyielding and formidable
as Mohamedanism’ because the Indian Muslims regarded all Europeans
as ‘infidels and unclean.’ The ‘Missionary Magazine’ quoted Major
General W.H. Sleeman, who served as the British Resident to the court
of Lucknow, stating that ‘for nearly the last hundred years daily prayers
have been offered in the mosques throughout India for the House of
Timur and the re-establishment of the King of Delhi on the throne of
his ancestors’ because the people thought that their ancestors had eaten
the salt of the Timurid Mughals and therefore owed unswerving loyalty
to the emperor. Their primary worry was that ‘We have lost our King
and our country’ to the alien rulers. Even the sectarian differences were
set aside by the Shia and Sunni houses of Awadh and Delhi to forge a
united front against the British. The author has referred to a document
bearing the signature of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the dethroned Shia
ruler of Awadh, addressed to the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah in
which he proposed invitation by the Emperor to all the princely rulers
suggesting that they should rebel as a single unit on a fixed day to
restore the native rule as it existed before the advent of the British
‘under the general sovereignty of the King of Kings of Delhi.’
All this was enough for the British public opinion to go for the
blood of the Muslims during and after the war. An Anglo-Indian opined
in the ‘Calcutta Englishman’ that ‘respectable’ Muslims of Delhi
should be subjected to torture by means of thumbscrew or the rack.
Philip Egerton, the Magistrate of Delhi, proposed that the Jamia Masjid
of Delhi be turned into a Church with each brick named after a
174
Christian martyr. The city of Delhi with its predominant Muslim
population was pivotal in challenging the colonists. What the British
felt about it can be gauged from the author of ‘A few words from the
Khyber’, who suggested that as Delhi had been a stronghold of
Islamism in the subcontinent and the nerve centre of the rebellion
against Christianity therefore it should be completely destroyed and in
its place be built a new city ‘from which victorious Christianity should
radiate to every point from north to south, from east to west, from
Bombay to Calcutta, from the Himalayas to the Cape Camorin.’ In
comparison to the far more lenient treatment given to the Hindus after
the conquest of Delhi, not only that every Muslim house was attacked
by the British victors but all Muslim inhabitants were banished out of
the city for six months. Almost one-and-a-half years after the sack of
Delhi, Reverend James Smith noted in the ‘Missionary Herald’ in
January 1859, “As yet Mohammedans have not been admitted to the
city. The beautiful masjids are all occupied as barracks by the Sikhs,
and there can be no doubt that the humiliation of Mohammedans is
complete.’
Lastly, Salahuddin Malik has analysed the role of the British

and Anglo-Indian Press in the whole episode. He has cited dozens of
newspapers, magazines and journals which sensationalised the
massacre of the Europeans at the hands of the Indians, particularly the
Muslims. When the war broke out, Lord Elphinstone, the governor of
Bombay offered Governor General Lord Canning to immediately
convey the news of the outbreak to the authorities in London through a
special steamer which was luckily available in Bombay at that time but
not only that he declined the offer but also made deliberate efforts to
suppress this news and the extent of the war for almost two months. In
addition, he adopted draconian methods to gag the native and Anglo-
Indian Press. As it was not in the interest of the shareholders of the East
India Company to public the popular disaffection against the
company’s rule in India, therefore they tried to depict the whole
episode as merely a military mutiny. It was this reason that ‘the Nation’
observed in an editorial that ‘the company was trying to corrupt the
press and even intimidate it.’ Ironically, not only the proprietors of the
company and the British politicians in the government as well as the
members of the two Houses praised the curbs on the press but this
condemnable policy of the government in India was supported by the
mainstream British newspapers such as ‘The Times’, ‘The Manchester
Guardian’, ‘The Saturday Review’, ‘The Examiner’, etc. Instead of
adopting a realistic approach to the insurrection, events in India were
175
deliberately fabricated and concocted to malign the Indians and frighten
the British public. This manufacturing of falsehood in England at that
time was beautifully exposed by ‘The Nation’ in a pithy comment:
“There is an atmosphere of untruth all over England. Lords lie and
commoners lie,…the leading journal is the greatest liar in the world and
the little journals try to lie as much as the great one. The war with India
has given a powerful stimulus to the lie manufacture and at the same
time increased the popular demand for the article.”
BASHARAT HUSSAIN QIZILBASH

176
MARSHALL SAHLINS, ISLANDS OF HISTORY (CHICAGO AND
LONDON: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1985)
Marshall Sahlins’ main contention in writing this book is to explore the

complexities and meanings of those cultures which are considered
history-less. 1 By challenging the claim of explaining non-European
societies on the basis of Enlightenment philosophies, Sahlins expounds
the concept of cultural relativism. 2 He gains strength from structural
and cultural anthropologists and linguists like Levi Strauss and Clifford
Geertz, Franz Boas, White, Bakhtin and Saussure. By emphasizing
upon the functional revaluation of cultural categories, structural
transformation and system-change, Sahlins claims that all cultures are
historical ordered and vice versa. His main intention is to study the
changing meanings in a particular cultural context (encountering with
other groups) over a period of time. Such investigation leads him to
unpack the nature of meanings, structures and cultures, and the way of
historicizing them. 3 Sahlins also asserts that interpretation is only
possible through “conjecture of structure” whose logic can be located
in present rather than the past.
Nature of meanings in a society is dependent upon two things:
people’s perception and subjectivity. People’s perception comprises
social exposure and practices. For instance, “Captain Cook appears as
an ancestral god to Hawaiian priests, more like a divine warrior to the
chiefs, and evidently something else and less to ordinary men and
women”. 4 Unlike meanings, the things have comparatively stable and
independent existence. However, the volatile nature of meanings leads
to the connotative interpretations of things. This process is “the
functional revaluation of the categories”. 5
Like Levi-Strauss, 6 Sahlins believes that meanings and things
cannot be understood in isolation of the nature of structures. To make
the sense out of the sign, it is necessary to analyze it in relation with
other signs. Thus the sign is dependent on semiotic system for the
interpretation of its meanings. Sahlins contends that this system of
signs is exhaustive in nature and people use only part of it, according to
their own experiences. Thus structures and their significance depend on
the way they play a pragmatic role in establishing meanings. Sahlins’
concept of variations in synchronic and diachronic study is a departure
from Sassauraen system, whose categories, according to him, are
ambiguous and contradictory in nature. 7 He gives the concept of
“internal diachrony” that can be seen in synchronic structures. Both
time and space are bound together instead of intersecting each other.
177
Meanings change due to the process of structural transformation.
People attach value to different objects and infer meanings from culture
and traditions that are developed over a period of time. The categories
of meanings are negotiated and revalued according to their “culturally
relevant significance and the old system is projected forward in its
novel forms”. This leads to ‘the cultural transformation’ of meanings,
like the concepts of tabu 8 and mana. 9 Every change has also its cultural
reproduction, like the tendencies among the Hawaiian chiefship to
deploy foreign identities and material means to celebrate their cosmic
status. 10 This transformation depends upon the very nature or working
of structures which can be divided into prescriptive and performative
structures. In the former, rules are prescribed while in latter,
"relationships are constituted by choice, desire, and interest." 11
An event may be historicized by a “Structure of Conjuncture”.
The event has its causes but it is heavily dependent on its interpretation.
The relationship between event and the structures used for its
interpretation, is described by Sahlins as “the situational synthesis of
the two in a structure of the conjuncture”. The structure of the
conjuncture brings into light the cultural and historical significance of
an event and its interpretation. Sahlins defines the structure of
conjuncture as “the practical realization of the cultural categories in a
specific historical context”. 12 He emphasizes to “find the conceptual
place of the past in the present, the super structure in the infrastructure,
the static in dynamic”. 13 Here, Sahlins criticizes the theories of
materialism and idealism with their mechanical ‘cause and effect’
relationship between event and its interpretation. It overlooks the forces
at work in that society. 14
The book as a whole is a very useful contribution. By arguing
the plurality and relativism in cultural domain, the work very neatly
explores the historicization of events. To some extent, it has also
derived its strength from contemporary historiographical trends of
searching not for truth but for possibilities. That’s why we find words
and sentences like “hence my hypothesis”, “it is likely that”, “my own
guess is”, etc. It precisely points out his sensitiveness towards
ambiguities and possibilities of many interpretations of the same event.
This very concept suggests that he follows Levi Strauss by
transforming “objectively remote into subjectively familiar”. 15 Unlike
other historical and anthropological texts, this reading argues the
recovery of subject, gives voice to marginalized and suppressed
history-less people by highlighting the process of thinking and change
in societies like Hawaiian and Fauji. One of the important contribution
of this work is that it locates colonized in a colonizer’s structure and
178
tries to highlight the negotiating grounds and influences on each other.
Therefore, forces at work become the defining feature in narrating the
events in the colonies whose responses can be judged through cultural
and historical context. In this way, Sahlins retrieves Cogito in colonies
which is to a great extent remains absent or interpreted as body or
subject in the contemporary literature. Although Sahlins’ Cogito remain
subordinated to the cultural order and historical process, yet he is fully
aware of the historical consciousness and has the capacity to not only
change himself but also to influence the colonizer’s culture. It is very
neatly constructed text, however, one may find two problems in the
book. Sahlins argues that one interpretation is a fraction of collective
consciousness, if it is so then how can Sahlins generalizes his work as a
representative of Hawaiian culture? The other problem is concerned
with the objectivity of anthropology. Sahlins argues that outsiders with
the knowledge of inside culture may well interpret the cultural order.
Now the question arises is this not Eurocentric approach that he takes
away the right of individuals within that culture to interpret their own
culture.
HUSSAIN AHMAD KHAN
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
179
END NOTES

1
Robert Borofsky, Herb Kawainui Kane, Gananath Obeyesekere, Marshall
Sahlins, “CA Forum on Theory in Anthropology: Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere,
and Sahlins [and Comments and Reply]”. Current Anthropology, Vol. 38, No. 2
(Apr., 1997), p.273.
2
In another article Sahlins argues the retrieval of “the historical capacities of
indigenous peoples and the vitalities of their cultures. In too many narratives of
Western domination, the indigenous victims appear as neo-historyless peoples:
their own agency disappears, more or less with their culture, the moment
Europeans irrupt on the scene”. For Europeanization of anthropological
theories, see Marshall Sahlins, “What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some
Lessons of the Twentieth Century”. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 28
(1999), p.ii.
3
Apart from present study, Sahlins also addresses these issues in Historical
Metaphors and Mythical Realities. In this study he argues that “historical
anthropology is not merely to know that how events were ordered by culture,
but how, in that process culture is re-ordered. How does the reproduction of a
structure become its transformation”. See for details, Sahlins Historical
Metaphors and Mythical Realities (University of Michigan Press: 1981), p. 08.
4
Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1985), p.x.
5
Ibid., p.ix.
6
According to Strauss, “[Anthropology could] be in a position to understand
basic similarities between forms of social life, such as language, art, law and
religion, that on the surface seem to differ greatly. At the same time, we shall
have the hope of overcoming the opposition between the collective nature of
culture and its manifestations in the individual, since the so-called ‘collective
consciousness’ would, in the final analysis, be no more than an expression, on
the level of individual thought and behaviour, of certain time and space
modalities of the universal laws which make up the unconscious activity of the
mind”. Claude Levi Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jackobson
and Brooker Grundfast Schoepf, (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p.65.
7
According to Saussure: “Thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no
pre-existing ideas and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.
Against this floating realm of thought, would sounds by themselves yield
predelimited entities? No more so than ideas... The characteristic role of
language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for
expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under
conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units...
language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless
masses”. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade
Baskin, (London: Fontana, 1974), p.112.
180

8
The Concept of ‘Tabu’: Through the frequent visits of Cook and his seamen,
the concept of tabu/ forbidden is changed. The Hawaiian meaning of ‘tabu’ was
gender marked, where men and women could not eat together, whereas the
British sailors saw no harm in it. After becoming mistresses of the European
shipmen, they began to eat together on ships. Now that tabu was transformed
into class categorization system. Thus ‘the dominant structure of the initial
situation that the chiefs distinguished themselves from their own people in the
manner that Europeans were different from Hawaiians in general, became a
conceit of personal identity.
9
The concept of ‘mana’ was transformed from the ‘children of land’, the native
concept of god on land i.e. the chief into the ‘ostentatious consumption of
foreign luxury goods’ in order to show off status.
10
Sahlins, Islands of History, p.144.
11
Ibid., p.xii.
12
Ibid., p.xiv. Within the field of historical ethnography he argues the synthesis
of “form and function, structure and variation, as a meaningful cultural process,
sequitur to a specific cultural order rather than an eternal practical logic. The
practical functions of institutions will appear as meaningful relations between
constituted forms and historical contexts”. See Marshall Sahlins, “Goodby to
Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History”. The
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), p. 11.
13
Sahlins, Islands of History, p.xvii.
14
Ibid., p.154.
15
Robert Borofsky, Herb Kawainui Kane, Gananath Obeyesekere, Marshall
Sahlins, “CA Forum on Theory in Anthropology: Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere,
and Sahlins [and Comments and Reply]”, p.257.
181
ANWAAR AHMAD, SHAUKAT SIDDIQI, SHAKHSIAT AUR FUN
(LAHORE: ACADEMY ADBIAT PAKISTAN, 2007)
Sans Shuakat Siddiqi our Urdu literature will never be complete. His
works continue to remain relevant. One can not tag his works as
‘outdated’. The working conditions of the lower middle class are the
same. The sufferings of the underprivileged have multiplied
exorbitantly. Every thing is same as it used to be in the days when
Shaukat Siddiqi wrote his celebrated novel ‘Khuda Ki Basti. What we
sorely miss is a master chronicler who may paint the life stories of the
wretched of the earth. Only future will tell whether Urdu literature will
see another Shaukat Siddiqi or not. The book under review “Shaukat
Siddiqi Shakhsiat Aur Fun”is a nice attempt by renowned scholar
Anwaar Ahmad to document the life and literary achievements of a
giant of literature. This book has been written under the aegis of
Academy Adbiat Pakistan under its series “Pakistani Adab Kay
Ma,maar”.
Born in Lucknow in 1920, Siddiqi was always fond of books.
But his academics saw many ups and downs as he had to disconnect his
education a couple of times due to certain problems. However in 1944
he passed his gradation as a private candidate. It was in the same period
that he served the army. His infatuation with military proved to be too
short as he left it after three years. Perhaps his love for literature was so
deep that military job did not envy him at all. In his younger days he
found a chance to read a lot as his father was very fond of books. From
“Tilism Hoshruba” to the woks of Premchand and even that of Deputy
Nazeer Ahmad, he read extensively. However he also struggled to do as
far as his studies were concerned. In 1946 he passed his M.A. in
Political Science from Lucknow University. Literary bug prodded him
to join literary magazine ‘Turkash’ that used to be published from
Lucknow. Through this magazine, Siddiqi got a chance to make a
liaison with leading literary men like Israrul Haq Majaz, Prof Ehtesham
Hussain, Dr Ebadat Brelvi, Prof Mumtaz Hussain and few others. It
was the same time that he came under the influence of socialism due to
his friend, Ali Mazhar Rizvi, a die hard socialist at heart. His love for
socialism also brought him into the folds of Progressive Writers. After
landing in Pakistan in 1950, Shaukat Siddiqi‘s life proved to be no bed
of roses. Jobless and homeless, he had to live in abject conditions
among the people who belonged to various walks of life.
Reminiscing about those early days in Karachi he says, “I was
twenty seven when I left Lucknow and landed in Karachi. Karachi of
183
those times was altogether different from what it is today. It existed
only up to Jahangir road. Most of the people lived in huts and foot-
paths. There were people of all hues and cries. Everyone was eager to
set its foot in a new atmosphere. I minutely observed the life. Many of
the people sactttred around me became subjects of my stories. I got
influenced by the environment of Karachi. Quickly this city became a
blend of people from many regions. I saw lot of strange people. My
story “Teesra Admi” is reminiscent of those days. At times I came
across much poverty stricken and criminal people too. I observed their
lives so deeply that these people penetrated into my stories”.
Though he worked in many newspapers after coming to
Pakistan, but it were his novels and short stories that won him acclaim.
He started off with a novelette “Kameen Gah” that he wrote in 1945.
but it was published in 1957 from Lahore. But it was his masterpiece
“Khuda Ki Basti” that made him a household name in the world of
Urdu literature. His brutal portrayal of ‘outcasts’ shocked everyone. It
is a bold attempt to unmask those people whom no one cares to notice.
These characters are from our everyday life. One can relate with them
easily. He is an honest craftsman. He attacks the exploitative system
ruthlessly. He can be likened to Charles Dickens who also presented
the hard realities of British working classes. “Khuda Ki Basti” was
translated into twenty six languages all over the world. “Jangloos” won
huge following when it was made into a T.V. serial. He wrote profusely
as six collections of his short stories saw the light of the day. The
author of this book, Anwaar Ahmad, claims that there are many short
stories scattered in many magazines that have never been published. As
a columnist he also proved his mettle.
This book is labour of love. Anwaar Ahmad, a scholar, critic,
and a distinguished academic has really done a remarkable job by
piecing together details about Shaukat Siddiqi. The author deserves a
salute for his hard work.
ALTAF HUSSAIN ASAD

184
SYED MOHAMMED HASHIM SHAH, SASSI-PANNU (LAHORE:
BOOK HOME, 2007)
Stories of love are a precious asset of every culture. They reveal the
creative strength, cultural diversity and social organization of a
particular nation. Days of yore are preserved and the beauties of the
moments are captured through such literary creations. Certainly time
surrenders before such heritages of human passions and sacrifices.
Lovers become immortal and their stories add pride to their culture,
language and nation. Punjabi literature is a living example of this fact.
Primarily, the leading themes in this literature are mysticism, culture
and historical issues but love legends also form a significant part of it.
The most outstanding feature of these stories is that the feel of love
simply doesn’t remain confined between the two lovers. Neither does it
show a flesh oriented approach, a bodily desire or a mere lusty
infatuation. It rather exhibits a uniquely different and realistically
compelling force of attraction between the two lovers. They tend to
enter into the metaphysical realm. They enjoy the state of ecstasy. Their
worldly union shows them the ways to God. In this way Punjabi love
legends come out to be a powerful presentation of purest passions,
innocent feelings and strongest emotions connecting mankind with
God.
The under review legendary tale of Sassi-Pannu comes from
the land of sand, heat and thirst. Desert is known for its vastness and
wilderness. It is a thinly populated habitat. Its mammoth grandeur
makes you feel small and fearful of the oblivion. But every difficulty
associated with the desert crumbles before the mighty will of lovers.
The hardships of Sassi and the passionate devotion of Pannu
immortalize their love. The barren lands of Thal receive a reputable
fame. A story is born. Desert may remain a desolated place but Sassi-
Pannu buried in its warmth would not. They would continue to inspire
generations of lovers. Poets and writers in different times wrote about
this famous legend. The one composed by Syed Mohammed Hashim
Shah in Punjabi rose to the pinnacle of fame. Indeed this poetic
presentation of Sassi-Pannu’s love story deserves the claims of a
standard version of the famous love legend. The first printed version of
the story came in 1871. It certainly motivated the traditional story
telling in Punjabi literature. Hashim Shah wrote nearly 28 books in
Punjabi, Persian and Hindi. This poetic composition of 128 stanzas has
been ably translated and compiled in Urdu by Dr. Anwar Ahmed Ijaz.
185
The parents of Sassi had no child. Many prayers and humble
worships hastened the birth of Sassi but the infant child was received
with quite inhospitality by the fortune tellers of her city Bahmbhore.
They prophesied like the oracle of Delphi that Sassi would grow into
Hellenic beauty and would earn disrepute to her family by eloping with
a lover. Her father was not ready for such a compromise and while her
mother wept and requested, she was laid in a wooden box covered with
precious jewels and floated on the river. The whole story of her
separation from her parents was written on a piece of paper to be tied in
a necklace around Sassi’s neck for future remembrance. Probably such
was envisaged in the Divine Scheme. The floating box carrying Sassi
landed on a washerman’s bank. Precious stones attached with the box
were enough to turn his fortunes and he raised a palace to upbring the
royal child.
As the years rolled on Sassi turned into an unmatchable beauty
of her times. The poet has given a graphic and an arresting description
of her beauty. She was innocent, sensitive and humane. Very soon the
fame of her beauty reached her father who called her and her guardian
to his palace. But when her father Aadam Jam saw that particular
necklace hanging around her neck, he was abashed beyond measures.
He pleaded forgiveness. Sassi was quite uncompromising. She not only
refused to live with her father but also left her weeping mother as she
was left weeping by her parents. It was an important turn in her life.
Back to her place when one day she saw a portrait of Pannu in the
annex of a garden, she was moved by his beauty. That was love at a
first sight. Pannu was indeed famous for his youthful beauty. He was a
son of the ruler of Kech city in Thal. Distances in land were great but
the heart of Sassi throbbed for union with Pannu. They were made for
each other. She ordered her personnel that any body entering
Bahmbhore from Kech should be brought before her. Incidentally, a
group of Baloch merchants claiming to be Pannu’s relatives came to
her city. Sassi made them her guest and, after making sure of their
relations with Pannu, she arrested them. Only Pannu could get them
released. One of the captives was sent to Pannu with this message. The
messenger told Pannu about the bewildering beauty of Sassi. He was
ready to leave for Sassi’s palace. His family tried to stop him from this
venture but it was a union written on the skies.
Certainly the journey of Pannu didn’t go in vain. The beauty
of Sassi was marvelous and her love was immortal. It was the meeting
of two souls. They had entered into the metaphysical realm and life was
sweet. But as the tragedy would have it, this union was not likable to
the hostile world. The father of Pannu ordered to take him back. A
186
group of men managed to tie unconscious Pannu and took him to Kech.
Pannu was taken away from Sassi. She was deprived of her love. Now
there was a wild desert between the two lovers. There at Kech, Pannu
found himself helpless before the domineering personality of his father.
But the woman of those days had that much moral courage to show this
to the insensitive and selfish world that what she can do. Without
caring for the adversities of the weather, Sassi set to liberate her love. It
was an emotional decision. But love is not love which surrenders
before the hostilities of the society. Her journey was difficult but her
determination was stronger. Hearing about the departure of Sassi,
Pannu ran away from his place. But the wilderness of the weather came
in her way. It was too late for Pannu. Sassi died braving the heat and
thirst of the desert. Now life was meaningless for Pannu and eternity
awaits him in his union with Sassi. Pannu died of the pain and grief at
the tragic demise of his true love. He was buried along with Sassi in the
desert. But that place no longer remains desert. It is a paradise of love
where eternity and passion reside.
The story brings a perfect catharsis. Towards the end everything
remains except the innocent lovers. This adds glory and grace to their
lives. Tragedy heightens the effect of their story while the wilderness of
the desert receives the coloring of love. The poetic tale of two
legendary lovers is an unsurpassable classic of its times. The story of
Sassi and Pannu has all the essentials of a truly great love story. The
book contains both the Punjabi and the translated Urdu versions which
provide an opportunity to read and enjoy the classic Punjabi.
Translation of the story is very fluent, absorbing and simple. The
subject matter abounds with words of wisdom and advice. It is a
valuable addition for the lovers of Punjabi literature.
TARIQ AZIZ SINDHU

CIVIL SERVICES ACADEMY,
LAHORE
187
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The Historian

Volume 6 January-December 2008 Numbers 1&2

© The Historian is published by the Department of History, GC

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Price: 250 PKR

Associate Editors: Tahir Jamil, Hussain Ahmad Khan, Noor Rehman

Design & Production Incharge: Shifa Ahmad

Editorial Advisory Board

David Gilmartin – Department of History, North Carolina State University, USA

FEMINISM: THE GROUNDS OF AN IDEA AND LOGICS OF

THINKING FEMINISM THROUGH A MALE’S

LOCATING ‘ABORTION’ AS A BIRTH CONTROL

CONCEPTUALIZING “OTHERNESS” IN HISTORICAL DISCOURSES

ROY GUTMAN, HOW WE MISSED THE STORY (OSAMA BIN LADEN,

CARLO GINZBURG, THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS:

NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS AND REVIEWERS

“AN INGLORIOUS END TO A GLORIOUS ADVENTURE”:

DIVINE ATTRIBUTES - AN ATTEMPT TO REINTERPRET …. SOBIA TAHIR 115

EXTERIORITY OF DISCOURSE AND DISAPPEARANCE OF MAN:

ON THE POSSIBILITY OF INDIGENOUS THEORIZATION

S ALAHUDDIN M ALIK , 1857-W AR OF INDEPENDENCE

MARSHALL SAHLINS, ISLANDS OF HISTORY (CHICAGO AND LONDON:

ANWAAR AHMAD, SHAUKAT SIDDIQI, SHAKHSIAT AUR FUN

SYED MOHAMMED HASHIM SHAH, SASSI-PANNU

NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS AND REVIEWERS

This paper looks at the history of the idea of

KEY WORDS: Feminism, Liberalism, Women, Enlightenment, Michel

historical trajectory of this theme: How it emerges, what types of

re-interpretation of biblical texts so that a ground for better treatment of

Apprentices to merchants or tradesman, servants who

On the other hand, an active citizen is the one who must be

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in

belief in the soundness of general practices and established customs.

she has received the false treasures of her ‘femininity’” 30 that

While in lower social strata, the male is more likely

productive; whereas in the middle and upper classes,

can be liberated? Her hope lies in developments taking place in modern

The real strength of the women’s liberation

The contours of these apparatuses were ancient but modernity’s failure

as standing on modernity’s plane of an imposing order by means of

universality, feminism tries to stand as a counter to that order; but post-

Women, regardless of their number, are a minority,

Becoming-minority, then, is in contra-distinction to modernity’s

In all the desiring machines sexuality does not consist

While all the above mentioned discourses addressing the

phallologoperipheria? 68 A centered de-centeredness? Again, of male

1. See Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, “Early Feminism” in Sarah Gamble, ed.,

55. Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, p.103.

UMBER BIN IBAD

This article, while searching through the ground of

KEY WORDS: Feminism, Western Society, Liberalism, Modernism,

that was vehemently opposed during second wave of feminism, while,

As a historical phenomenon feminism came out in Western Europe.

The mid-twentieth century wave of feminism has

grasp. It is not defined by the specific organizations,

I’m not real in this culture that gave birth to me and

Men neatly decimated mankind by one half when

daily practices…For feminists, who must transcend this discourse, it

Living in a world deeply structured around religio-patriarchal order, the

CONCEPTION OF SUBJECT: AS A GROUND OF FEMINISM

Lévi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of

male, carried on its movement of creating rational order and re-