Fiction and service to power

The best examples of how fiction can serve the power structures and rather than being inquiry into the human condition can act to subvert a culture of tolerance and acceptance is the example of what happened to Urdu literature under the “baba ji ka thaila” movement, starting from 1980’s. “To open up a bit our world” is the definition of fiction I subscribe to. The pedagogy that was the focus of the pietistic and quietist fiction of Ashfaq Ahmad, Banu Qudsia, Qudratullah Shahab and others of their ilk served to complement a power structure. Their fiction wasn’t born in a vacuum and their fiction didn’t occupy that tier of cultural hierarchy on its own merit. Rather it was pushed up when the alternative voices were either erased or subdued. When fiction is separated from the human condition and instead it is made to serve obscurantism, half truths will be born. And the problem with fiction is that these half-truths can seep in through the backdoor.

When the world of fiction parallels the parlance of the realpolitik and when the vocabulary of the fiction works as a playbook for myopic realism, absurdities are born; which makes atrocities tolerable. Women have to be quiet and know their place, which doesn’t lie in equality but which is above equality only if she accepts her inferior role sanctioned by tradition, is the stance. Nasim Hijazi and Inayatullah created the ‘other’ where the ‘other’ is the cunning Hindu to provide a backdrop for soldier of Islam. Such bigotry is not only tolerated but in-fact is promoted, then, because the power was with soldiers and people had to be made believe that in this time when the Hindu are going to get them, only the soldier of Islam can save them. In the Sufism trope the diversity and complex tapestry of the Sufi shrines were reduced to another extension of the lego-juridical arm of the religion. Never mind that from shrines of Lal Shahbaaz to Ajmeer Shareef your religion was a very personal affairs and the unity-in-diversity through which the mysticism of Wahdat-ul-Wajood operated was accessible to everyone. In order to serve the purist designs of the power, the cultural practices which were seeped in tolerance and acceptance, were stripped out of the hybrid elements. In Hashim Nadeem, you can find the tales of spiritualism but for spiritualism you have to be seeped in the religion of Islam and be a one-dimensional purist to attain the light of “Fanaa” (annihilation in the will of God). The possibilities for non-Muslims to attain that level of spiritual experience are foreclosed at the outset. Tell that to Shahbaz Qalandar!

Producing fiction as knowledge of human condition does become a project of the tyranny. It becomes just another project of perception management and subconscious signaling of the powers that be. The appeal of stories can be direct as they are read with the conscious guards of intellect being down. Perhaps it is the biggest dishonesty that instead of creating art, the writers start to selling myopia while complementing a hegemonic power structure.