James Caron

Sufism and liberation across the Indo-Afghan border: 1880–1928

ABSTRACT How do we understand links between Sufism and pro-egalitarian revolutionary activism in the early twentieth century; and how did upland compositions of self and community help constitute revolutionary activism in South Asia more broadly? Using Pashto poetry as my archive, I integrate a history of radical egalitarian thought and political practice into a holistic study of self-making, of imperial spatiality, and of shifting gradients of power in the regions between Kabul and Punjab. Amid a chaotic rise of new practices of imperial and monarchic hegemony around the turn of the twentieth century, I argue, older sedimentations of ‘devotee selfhood’ in the high valleys of eastern Afghanistan gave rise, in social spaces preserved by self-reflexive poetic practice and circulation, to conscious desires for avoidance of all forms of hierarchy or sovereignty, in favour of a horizontal politics of reciprocity. Such inchoate drives for freedom later played a role in constituting anti-statist revolutionary subjectivities across great geographical and social distance. From upland Sufi roots, they rippled outwards to intersect with the work of transnational socialist and anti-imperialist militants in Indian nationalist circles too and even influenced scholars at the heart of the nascent Afghan nation state.

Popular Culture, Radical Egalitarianism, and Formations of Muslim Selfhood in South Asia

ABSTRACT This article introduces the project represented in the articles of this special section of South Asian History and Culture, as well as the articles that will appear in a subsequent issue this year. The editors of this project reconstruct a conversation on surprising resonances in subaltern sources in Pashto and Bengali of early twentieth-century grassroots indigenous traditions of radical Muslim egalitarianism. What should we make of these resonances? Building on Latin American decolonization theory in the wake of Subaltern Studies, we introduce a series of articles that together illustrate what Ramon Grosfoguel calls a ‘pluriverse’ of perspectives on the ethical self: some rooted in the local lifeworlds of Bengal and some in the Afghan borderland; all interlinked through a series of ‘middle actors’. In so doing, we excavate some dense but hidden two-way traffic between subaltern worlds of Muslim piety and devotion on two distant ends of South Asia, and all-India, international or cosmopolitan politics. These together helped constitute a surprising amount of what we know as the South Asian left, from what are usually seen as its geographical, social, and especially intellectual peripheries.

Borderland historiography in Pakistan

ABSTRACT In this article, I survey historical writing related to the twentieth-century Afghan–Pakistan frontier, particularly Pashtun-majority locations in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa: the former Northwest Frontier Province. I focus on works that help conceptualize history beyond issues of political economy. Some locate themselves solely in the Anglophone academy, but this is not intended as a complete survey of their field. Rather, I place those works in dialogue with, and prioritize, eclectic histories that are both ‘about’ and ‘of’ the borderland; and I discuss this combined field with reference to other scholarly work on ‘thinking from borders’ in both the political–economic and intellectual–cultural senses. My goal is to intervene in the second set of borders, to disrupt boundaries between global academic culture and ‘other’ intellectual milieus. Taking tazkiras and autobiographies as examples, I argue that genres of writing from regions heavily fragmented by imperial bordering, among other factors, are social theory in action, not just representation for historians to appropriate. Engaging border history genres and taking seriously the insight they offer requires a willingness to engage the webs of social commitments that produced these works: to work in contribution to their milieus rather than merely writing about them.

Activism, knowledge and publishing: some views from Pakistan and Afghanistan

ABSTRACT How can academic publishers support the study of regions and fields that receive comparatively little attention within South Asia-related humanities and social sciences? Approaching this question with regard to Pakistan and Afghanistan opens a series of conceptual questions that are useful beyond these cases. Above all, we contend that support to marginal specializations, particularly in service of making them less marginal, must involve an openness to the world beyond professional academic life. By this, we first mean an openness to different purposes for knowledge that are related to political and social stakes in countries other than India. Second, we suggest the need for a greater openness to different sources and forms of knowledge than have traditionally been admitted into academic conversation in the global north.