Naveeda Khan

Flaws in the Flow: ROADS AND THEIR MODERNITY IN PAKISTAN

On 26 November 1997, the then Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif inaugurated a new highway connecting the capital city of Islamabad to the historic city of Lahore. The six-lane, 333-kilometer-long M2 Motorway, which took five and a half years to complete and cost 987 million U.S. dollars, or 45 billion Pakistani rupees, was the first Americanstyle highway ever built in the Indian subcontinent.1 Nawaz Sharif claimed as much as he shouted “There is not one motorway in the entire Hindustan” from his Caravan of Progress bus, which traversed the road from Islamabad to Lahore during the Motorway’s inauguration.2 Camels bedecked in festive colors danced in step to the beat of drums and Punjabi folk songs, while foreign and local dignitaries and members of the press looked upon the start of something new. However, the inauguration carried premonitions of troubled times ahead as onlookers complained of falling victim to pickpockets, government officials took an unofficial holiday to attend the cavalcade, public cars were impounded to provide transportation to the Motorway, and the windscreens of cars shattered as people drove onto the hard shoulder of the road despite instructions to the contrary.3 The road appeared to be not yet free of the old habits of the corrupt state and the unruly crowd. In the year that followed the Motorway’s inauguration, Nawaz Sharif’s claim that one hundred thousand vehicles per day would ply the road within the first few months alone, allowing the state, or rather its creditors, to make money hand over fist through tolls, service charges, and, later, tourism, had fallen far short of reality.4 By 1998, a mere five thousand vehicles had been coaxed into using the road per day, despite promises of “sale” or toll-free days.5 Pakistani officials claimed that this was due to slow public adaptation to new technology. However, recent enthusiastic support for flyovers, dams, luxury coaches, and nuclear bombs in Pakistan would suggest that this was not the case. How do we account for the Motorway’s lack of popularity? Debates in the Pakistani press provide us a useful point of entry into

Geddes in India: Town Planning, Plant Sentience, and Cooperative Evolution

In this paper I focus on the ideas and efforts of Patrick Geddes, which are well known but not often discussed, by which he attempted to elevate the status of Indian sweepers and sewage collectors into gardeners by transforming sewage into fertilizer for gardens. Geddes transmitted his vision by means of religious performances, and through these efforts he attempted to produce change in Indian society in the register of human evolution. In this paper I take seriously the triangulation of waste, gardens, and performance as a reasoned means by which Geddes attempted to aid evolution. I suggest that by ‘evolution’ Geddes had in mind less an abstract process and more a state of awareness of ones capacities for self-transformation and relationship with ones environment. Furthermore, this awareness would largely be inculcated by taking into consideration the environment from the plants point of view. In other words, expanding ones consciousness to be able to sense plant presence would not so much ready one for evolution as it would indicate that one had already evolved. This was town planning toward evolution. To make my arguments, I draw on Geddess 1918 town planning reports for the Princely State of Indore, India, and draw out his intellectual engagements with William James, Henri Bergson, and Jagadis Chandra Bose implicit in these reports and elsewhere in his writings.

River and the corruption of memory

With a focus on three films about rivers in Bangladesh, Titash Ekti Nodir Naam (A River named Titash), Padma Nodir Majhi (The Fishermen of Padma) and Chitra Nodir Parey (Beside the Chitra River), this article considers how the corruption of a river, that is, the entropy and decay immanent to it, produces the conditions of possibility for the corruption of social relations within the context of riverine lives. These filmic meditations serve as the springboard for considering the limits of ‘adaptation’, increasingly mainstreamed in policy discourse and development projects to redress the ravages of global warming and climate change, and that increasingly target the lives of Muslim farmers who live on chars (silt islands) that accrete and erode within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. The article explores how the focus on adaptation to climate change, while producing preparedness for a looming future, carries within it the destructive potential for the corruption of chaura inter-relations and the further corruption of their memory of co-existence with Hindus/fishermen and the elision of issues of historical injustice. Taking a river’s point of view within the milieus of the films and the chars enables a perspective, necessarily fleeting, on how the politics and policies of climate change stand to short-change the present and the past.

The fate of our corruption: An introductory note

This special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology began life as the best collaborative ventures do, as a conversation in a panel, this one for the 2012 South Asia Studies Conference at Wisconsin, Madison. The theme of the conference was corruption and the paper presenters on the panel sought to explore how corruption was constitutive of the everyday. We were, and remain, convinced that corruption is not just a structural blip in the social to be stamped out by greater surveillance and more effective policies. We maintain that there is something to the fact that even as so many of our interlocutors decry corruption for the suffering it imposes on their lives, they also feel that it is an obdurate element of the world, one with its own time and place. But our claims first call out for the need to specify what we mean by corruption. Rather than privilege the popular understanding of corruption as the abuse of power for personal benefit, we take more seriously the dictionary meaning of it as forms of debasement, a lowering from a state of excellence into depravity or the impairment of judgement and integrity. The reason for moving away from the more common understanding of corruption is because that understanding, increasingly prevalent in global discourses on governance and clearly important as a rhetorical device, leeches the word of its many nuances that may resonate with people’s myriad experiences of it. In contrast, thinking of corruption as debasement draws our attention to prior or even desired states of excellence, the tumble from grace and the likelihood of us befalling such fates. The

The question of the political: Thinking with Matthew Hull

Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nineteen A story

In this article I present the story of Dr Rashad Khalifa, a US-based Egyptian scientist who claimed to have scientifically shown how the text of the Quran was the immutable speech of God. He did this by means of computer-based calculations that showed how the number 19 was embedded in the formal structure of the Quran, thereby indicating a superhuman level of coding. I locate such efforts at the conjuncture of the long history of textual polemics that aim at undermining religious traditions by exposing errors within authoritative texts, the history of magical squares within Islamic sciences, and the more recent history of the subfield of Islam and science that attempts to study the Quran to show how it forecast scientific discoveries. I suggest that Dr Khalifa was attempting to definitively address the aspect of doubt that accompanies written texts, for which he elicited mixed reactions from a wide audience of Muslims. In this instance, tracking the fate of a number through a man’s life suggests how some doubts may not be addressable within the rubric of scientific facts.