The rejection of our mode of production of knowledge

Our mood of production of knowledge has been dismissed since last many centuries. During the Raj and under the legacy inherited by the Pakistani state from it, we, the Pashtuns, have been reduced to the peripheries. The inability to come up with a work detailing a particular event or events of our history and sufferings is presented as Pashtuns being the 'uncultured', 'the unlearned'. Instead the binary trope of "Pashtuns being noble savages" and "Pashtuns being brave" are produced, sustained and we are subjected to its interiorization to serve the hegemonic purpose of the Raj/Pakistani state.

The term, 'inability' also is problematic. The production of formal knowledge, scholarship, literature--fiction and otherwise-- is function of the institutionalization of the production of knowledge or the mainstreaming of particular discourses and/or tales of sufferings. Pashtuns have a strong tradition of generating knowledge, cultural understandings and literature in form of oral stories. A Pashtun kid will find himself/herself in a continuum because of the telling, retelling of historical memories. The collective memories are part of the same idiom of identity and often through invoking a tale the identity is expressed. This is not to suggest that Pashtuns have been bereft of the written word. The first written poem in Pashtu is traced back to 900 AD and since then there is a continuity of poets and from each era poets can be found who reflect the socio-political circumstances of the times. Hujra sustained the oral traditions of transmitting wisdom for centuries. Because of being dismissed to the peripheries, our knowledge and wisdom manifests itself through poetry, which is more spontaneous and unregulated--emotionally and subjectively.

The charge that from the last many decades there hasn't been a great work of literature which details the travails of the war on Pashtun lands both misses the context and highlights the ignorance of poetry created and works written. If the tales of Indian partition (not complaining of the setting of the hierarchy) are all the rage, it is because the partition provided the backdrop to the creation of the new state and the state sought its legitimacy by keeping alive the trauma of partition. The fact that the partition affected the mainstream of the new state also is the defining parameter of how they were and are relevant. The same privilege wasn't afforded to the Pashtun lands.

In the current movement, oral stories are told and re-told. This is creation of another form of literature and a feeling knowledge meant to evoke empathy and also a cerebral exercise meant to subvert the structures of oppression. These tales which we hear on social media are part and parcel of our collective memories of last many decades. This in itself is work of great literature. It remains to be seen on the part of the mainstream that whether it listens to these stories and make it part of a new ethic of understanding and empathy or again force these stories to be repressed to the consciousness of Pashtuns.