Remoteness and Modernity: Transformation and Continuity in Northern Pakistan
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Remoteness and Modernity: Transformation and Continuity in Northern Pakistan
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| ISBN-13: | 9780300213355 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/28/2015 |
| Series: | Yale Agrarian Studies Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Remoteness and Modernity
Transformation and Continuity in Northern Pakistan
By Shafqat Hussain
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21335-5
CHAPTER 1
Lifting the Veil
The Sacred and Political Geography of Hunza
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the British and the Russians were locked in geopolitical rivalry that came to be known as the Great Game. The term refers to the struggle between the two powers to mark their spheres of influence in the countries along the northern borders of the British Indian Empire. The British became alarmed by the slow but steady expansion of tsarist Russia eastward into Central Asian khanates to the north of Afghanistan and into the western edge of the Chinese Empire. Although the British never objected to Russian conquest of these Central Asian khanates, which paid allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, they did worry about Afghanistan, farther to the south and east: they did not want Afghanistan to fall to the Russians. The British had left Afghanistan in 1842 and they feared that a Russian foothold in Afghanistan would mean a threat of Russian invasion of British India, the crown jewel of Britain's imperial possessions.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, in response to the perceived or real threat of a combined Franco-Persian attack, the British had already expended a significant amount of political and diplomatic energy in extending their sphere of influence to local societies and certain strategic mountain passes, such as the Khyber Pass near Peshawar and the Gomal Pass near Quetta, on the northwestern frontier. The British now looked toward the region north of Kashmir beyond the great Himalayas and the mighty Indus, up to the Central Asian watershed, as a possible route by which the Russians could invade India. The region is the meeting place of the world's three highest mountain ranges—the Hindukush, the Karakorums, and the Pamirs. The maze of remote and inaccessible mountain valleys became a field for the political machinations and social imagination of the Great Game between the British, Russian, and Chinese empires as well as various smaller players who were drawn into the struggle (Alder 1963).
By the mid-nineteenth century, a primary geopolitical goal for the British became defining and delimiting the territorial boundary of their empire in this trans-Himalayan region through mapping and explorations in order to thwart Russian designs on the area. The Russian expansion in Central Asia ushered in an era of British exploration of the Hindukush, Pamir, and Karakorum watershed that divided South and Central Asia. It was around this time that the British public and colonial officers, especially those belonging to the East India Company, were beginning to grasp Hunza in their imagination as distant yet geopolitically important. In 1926, George Curzon, the viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905 and architect of India's northwestern frontier policy, wrote this about the state of Hunza: "Eighty years ago, when Golab Singh, the Raja of Jammu, to whom the British Government had just given, or rather sold, Kashmir, was endeavoring to subjugate and define the outlying and Trans-Indus portions of his new possession, and when neither he nor the Indian Government knew very clearly where that border was, we catch a glimpse of Hunza-Nagar states" (183).
The British knowledge of the physical geography of the region, however, was limited. On its northern border there are about half a dozen mountain passes through which an invader could enter. As Curzon stated, "This remote mountain valley has an importance for Englishmen which its geographical isolation would lead few to suspect. It is one of the northern gates of India, through which a would-be invader must advance if he advances at all" (1926, 149). The British were latecomers to the region, and the northern frontier of Kashmir remained relatively uncharted territory till the 1860s, when the Great Trignometrical Survey was done (Edney 1997). They did, however, have some vague idea about the sacred geography of the area through their readings of either primary sources such as the ancient Brahmanical texts or derivative work of scholars of the East India Company. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Orientalist scholars of the East Indian Company (EIC), such as William Jones, Nathaniel Halhed, and Henry Colebrook, had studied and translated sacred Sanskrit texts of the Brahmans for the company's administrative purposes (Cohn 2004; Inden 2000). Jones and other Orientalist scholars of the EIC became interested in references to a golden civilization that had once existed in the ancient past somewhere in the region north of India and west of China (Bryant 2001; App 2009). The stories referred to a sacred river that flowed from the base of a mountain around which this civilization flourished. These scholars postulated that this was the civilization of Indo-Europeans, the common ancestors of Europeans and Indians. Some argued that these Indo-European people were the original Aryans, the predecessors of those Aryans who came to India in the post-Harrapa period. Similar stories and tribal names also appeared in the classical Greek history familiar to the Orientalist scholars. They looked for a common structure and meaning in Latin, Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit texts and languages as proof of the existence of a proto-language spoken by these people. Jones even considered Sanskrit to be the language most closely related to this original one (App 2009, 42).
This Orientalist narrative caught the imagination of members of the Royal Geographical Society and others in the geographical explorers' community who led efforts to map and survey this region. They determined that the common ancestors of Indian and European people had lived in the Pamir region on the northern frontier of Hunza state, in what is known today as the Wakhan corridor in northeastern Afghanistan. Their exploration focused on two things: charting the physical geography of the region, especially the condition of mountain passes, and searching for the source of the river Oxus—the location of an ancient Aryan paradise.
This intersection of British interest in the region's geopolitics and its mythology was not contingent. Rather, the British fostered this somewhat out-of-fashion Orientalist narrative to energize their explorations aimed at creating a boundary of their empire. As David Harvey states, "Geopolitical conflicts often imply a certain aestheticization of politics in which appeal to the mythology of place and person has a strong role to play" (1999, 209). The use of the appellation "Great Game" to represent a geopolitical conflict indicates that the appeal to players was not merely political but also involved interest in the myths of the region in which it was played—in this case its extreme remote location.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the predominant Orientalist influence on British exploration accounts of the region began to be replaced by Darwin's theory of evolution. This shift was not very sudden; for a time the Orientalist myth of an original Aryan race existed side by side with Darwin's theory of geographical race. But the gradual decline of the influence of Orientalism on British policy accompanied the rise of a more imperial and masculine form of British colonialism.
Most important for our purpose here, the credibility of both of these narratives depended on remoteness. The geographical isolation of the region provided the credible spatial setting in which both the Orientalist narrative of an original but now forgotten and hidden Aryan race and the Darwinian narrative of a biological evolution based on geographical isolation made sense. In addition to this spatial setting, remoteness also bestowed prestige and status on the explorers who succeeded in reaching the region.
There are two important metaphors that aptly describe the way the British framed their explorations and journeys in the region during the period between the 1830s and 1890s: "lifting the veil" and "blank on the map." Taken individually, these metaphors represent the form of colonial political rhetoric and the nature of British knowledge of the region respectively. Read together, they represent the process of imperial territorial expansion in faraway places and its justification as the spread of civilization as well as the role played by geographical knowledge in that process.
These metaphors were related to the British exploration in another way. Their power in exploration narratives is due to the values they ascribe to the domain and practice of exploration: challenge and discovery. These values are held together in imagination by a common thread of remoteness. And it is remoteness that gives these two central values of geographical exploration their meaning. Relatively more truth value and symbolic status is attached to the exploration of geographically remote and inaccessible areas because remoteness signifies distance and hence invokes other categories associated with challenge and discovery, such as endurance, risk, estrangement, and fascination. The remoteness of Hunza meant that knowledge of it was beyond the everyday knowledge of the colonial state, but it was nonetheless within the horizon of exploration. The colonial state supported exploration, private and official, while explorers provided knowledge and lifted the veil from this remote region.
"Blank on the Map" and "Lifting the Veil"
Although the wording of the metaphors "blank on the map" and "lifting the veil" did not appear as such in the colonial geographical and speculative accounts of the region, various other expressions meaning essentially the same thing appear in the British imperial language of frontier expansion and military conquests of the region in the mid-nineteenth century. The knowledge of Himalayan geography produced because of the Great Game is well captured by Trench's metaphor: "During the last 20 or 30 years ..., the rays of European light and enquiry have, after so long an interval of night, begun to light up the darkness of Central Asia; and owing chiefly to the gradual approach of the Russian frontier from the North to the English boundary on the Himalayas, immense additions have, by the exploration and surveys of British and Russian officers, been made to our general geography of Central Asia" (1869, 34; emphasis added).
A decade later, expounding on the role of geopolitical conflicts in the production of knowledge of the "least accessible" regions, John Biddulph, the first British political agent to Gilgit, wrote, "Within the last half a century, war and private adventure have contributed so largely to making known the least accessible regions of the continent of Asia, that few parts remain of which a fair general knowledge does not exist" (1880, 1; emphasis added).
These expressions of "lighting up the darkness" and "making known the least accessible regions" were used to denote the accumulation of both the geographical and the historical/ethnological knowledge of the region. The forays made by the British in the region did not seek only to explore the mountain passes at the Karakorum watershed; they were also conducted to verify the significance of the region as the center of the universe, as mentioned in ancient classical texts (Yule 1872, xxi–xviii). Accordingly, almost all the explorers, officials, and scholars interested in the region speculated that the region north of Hunza where the Oxus flows is the primeval paradise mentioned in both Eastern and Western classical texts. A British Army officer stationed on the Afghan frontier during the mid-nineteenth century wrote in 1869 on the question of this region: "Probably the principle of omni ignotum pro magnifico has never been more fully exemplified than in the interest which this region of the world has, for a great number of English geographers and ethnologists, long possessed. As regards the former, the mystery which so long enveloped the whole subject naturally whetted their desire for the acquisition of more accurate knowledge, while to the latter, the origin and history of the primeval races who had here their dwelling, and the successive changes through which in the course of bygone ages they have passed, has always presented a very wide field of enquiry" (Trench 1869, 33; emphasis added).
Scottish Orientalist scholar Henry Yule took this idea further in his preface to a new edition of John Wood's A Journey to the Source of the River Oxus (1840), the first comprehensive colonial account written on the Oxus. Yule, himself an explorer, the president of the Royal Asiatic Society, and an officer in the British Indian Army, wrote about the importance of the region as the origin of human civilization:
Few regions can present claims to interest and just curiosity so strong and various as that heart of Asia which gives birth to the Oxus. Forming the great physical and political watershed of the old Continent, it has been through difficulty of access long shrouded in mist that has darkened and distorted a variety of ethnological and geographical problems, mist which only now begins to lift; it is a center of primeval tradition as well as of modern theory regarding the primitive history of mankind.... Here is the one locality of earth's surface to which, if some interpretations be just, the Mosaic narrative points, in unison with the traditions of Aryan nations, as the cradle of our common race. (1872, xxi; emphasis added)
If for Trench, writing in the 1860s, the region was still enveloped by mystery, for Henry Yule, writing in the 1870s, the mist under which the region was shrouded was beginning to lift.
Yule's reference to the "Mosaic narrative" is the biblical version of history, whereby the descendants of Noah, having built the tower of Babel, were scattered throughout the earth speaking different languages. Yule and others like him seemed to see the origin of the Oxus as connected with this original people. We cannot be sure that Yule himself believed the biblical narrative, given the prevailing challenges to that narrative from Darwin's evolutionary theory, but this practice of reading biblical story into the history of the people of the world was a familiar Orientalist strategy. Yule's contemporary Henry Rawlinson, a giant of that special breed of explorer and Orientalist and president of the Royal Geographical Society from 1874 to 1875, felt that the people surrounding the Hunza region had significance in the sacred texts of the Hindus themselves. Rawlinson thus established some correlation between the biblical and the Brahmanical narratives.
The present inquiry naturally opens with a glance at the antiquities of the region in which the Oxus rises. There is no need of an elaborate discussion, for the subject has been extensively, not to say exhaustively treated by Humboldt and Ritter; but I shall desire to draw attention to certain points which do not seem as yet to have received sufficient consideration. The region, then, I may say, which embraces the headwaters of the Oxus is not of less interest geographically and politically than it is on the account of its connection with the primitive traditions of the Aryan race. Whether Bounouf may or may not be right in regarding the term Pamir as a contraction of Upa Meru ("the country above Mount Meru") and is thus associating the name directly with the holiest spot in the Brahmanical cosmology, it is certain that the geographical indications of the Puranas do all point to this quarter of Central Asia as the scene of the primeval Aryan paradise. (1872, 489)
Even George Nathaniel Curzon, a prolific scholar and viceroy at the turn of the twentieth century who, as we shall see later on, was heavily influenced by the Darwinian narrative, speculated on the region using Oriental discourse. For example, to Curzon the Oxus was "that great parent stream of humanity, which has equally impressed the imagination of Greek and Arab, of Chinese and Tartar, and which, from a period over three thousand years ago, has successively figured in the literature of the Sanskrit Puranas, the Alexandrian historians, and the Arab geographers.... Descending from the hidden 'Roof of the World,' its waters tell of forgotten peoples, and whisper secrets of unknown lands. They are believed to have rocked the cradle of our race" (1896, 15–16; emphasis added).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Mirs of Hunza, xiii,
Chronology of the Hunza State and Its Relationships with Surrounding Polities, xv,
Introduction, 1,
CHAPTER 1. Lifting the Veil: The Sacred and Political Geography of Hunza, 21,
CHAPTER 2. The Friction and Rhetoric of Distance and the Alterity of Hunza, 43,
CHAPTER 3. Frontier Matters: Irrelevance, Romanticism, and Transformation of Hunza Society, 62,
CHAPTER 4. Rural Romance and Refuge from Civilization, 88,
CHAPTER 5. The Origin of a Nation: Hunza and Postcolonial Identity, 108,
CHAPTER 6. On the Edge of the World, 128,
CHAPTER 7. Strange Strangers in the Land of Paradise, 160,
CHAPTER 8. Romanticism, Environmentalism, and Articulation of an Ecological Identity, 189,
Epilogue, 210,
Notes, 217,
References, 239,
Index, 255,