Description of Forthcoming Book: Crisis and Beyond

CRISIS AND BEYOND: PAKISTAN IN THE 20TH CENTURY, ROUTLEDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, DELHI, FORTHCOMING, 2008.
SERIES: CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES

If a state were in perpetual crisis, or rather, goes from one articulation of crisis to another, how do the fortunes of its citizen body and ancillary institutions fare? Does the army, as a privileged institution, derive its strength in inverse proportion to that of the civilian state? Do political parties simply perform their differences from one another without offering meaningful options to the state and citizenry? Must the legislature, judiciary and bureaucracy now work under the taint of corruption and compromise? Do the citizenry, under the rubric of ordinary people, doggedly continue on as before dealing with new exigencies as they arise? What happens to all that which makes up a nation state but goes under the threshold of the sensible, such as, shared memories, traditions, and histories; affiliations to peoples and places; and, senses of a future together, however contested these may be? Much is assumed by way of cause and effect and little demonstrated in the instance of a postcolonial state such as Pakistan.

It is with these fighting words that we began this exercise some two years ago to put together this volume of essays. Our effort was to introduce an empirical thickness to the history and present of Pakistan. While we were not able to answer all these questions we posed to ourselves, it is from this vantage position of detail that the essays in this collection work hard to interrogate the predominant narratives that locate Pakistan under the sign of crisis, by examining how crisis is framed, sensed, registered, and refused in different ways by various constituencies. In so doing we hope to have unsettled assumptions that intercalate state, civil society, and citizenry in Pakistan and that go under the guise of common sense. Finally it is our hope that these essays will prompt not only a re-consideration of Pakistan but will also serve as a meditation on the present condition, that of "human immigrancy."

-- Table of Contents --

Acknowledgements

Foreword
Veena Das, series editor

Crisis and Beyond: An Introduction
Naveeda Khan, editor

Part I Artificiality of the State
1. Towards a Lyric History of India
Aamir Mufti
2. The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State
Tahir Hasnain Naqvi
3. A Real Terrorist, an excerpt from Sayyid Pakistani and the Wedding of the Dead
Oskar Verkaaik
4. Re-imagining the “Land of the Pure”: A Sufi Master reclaims Islamic Orthodoxy and Pakistani Identity
Robert Rozehnal

Part II Nationalist Visions
5. Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 70s
Iftikhar Dadi
6. Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistani Army, Violence and Memories of 1971
Yasmin Saikia
7. Strength of the State Meets Strength of the Street: The 1972 Labor Struggle in Karachi
Kamran Asdar Ali
8. Learning to be Left: Jamaat-I Islami in Pakistan
Humaira Iqtidar

Part III Foreignness Within
9. From Muslims to Apostates: The Legal Construction of Muslim Identity and Ahmadi Difference
Asad A. Ahmed
10. Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu and Muslim Publics in Bombay
Deepak Mehta
11. Itineraries of Conversion: Judaic Paths to a Muslim Pakistan
Sadia Abbas
12. Iqbal and Karbala: Re-Reading the Episteme of Martyrdom for a Poetics of Appropriation
Syed Akbar Hyder

Part IV The Everyday
13. Look Who’s Talking Now: Voice and Authority in Pakistani Shi‘i Women’s Gatherings
Amy Bard
14. Madrassa Metrics: The Statistics and Rhetoric of Religious Enrollment in Pakistan
Tahir Andrabi,, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Tristan Zajonc
15. Uncivil Politics and the Appropriation of Planning in Islamabad
Matthew Hull
16. What is it to build a Mosque? Or, the Violence of the Ordinary
Naveeda Khan

Afterword
Living the Tensions of the State, the Nation, and the Everyday
David Gilmartin
Anthropology and the Pakistani National Imaginary
Katherine Pratt Ewing

Biographies of Contributors

Bibliography

Index