Memory in making of political identity: A case of Pashtun political consciousness

 

Yeats lamented, “Too long a sacrifice can make stone of the heart.” But does too long a sacrifice make you forget too? And whether that forgetting is desirable or memory of the sacrifices and oppression has some normative value? If we throw memory into the jinx of morality then isn’t it that the very nature of memory will be questioned and the purposes it serves in today will be put on the pedestal? But given all the complications and lack of any straightforward answer to the complexity of historical remembrance and invocation of memory in the present there is a very real fear that forgetting is almost always synonymous with oblivion. Trotsky was not that off-the mark when he said, “You may not be interested in geological record but the geological record is interested in you!”

Memory of a past political status and a past may not always be organic or always desirable. The construction of a past for serving of a present order of chauvinism and fascism has been the tool of fascists and empires, from Hitler and Mussolini, and to the British Empire’s desperate attempts at locating its roots in the Roman Empire. The current memory wars in France and the US’s south and the invocation of a glorious Hinduvata past in India not only contain elements of fantasy and thus in parts are purely constructs which disfigures the past but also work in tandem toward an exclusionist and reactionary set of politics. Such revisionism is not only a disservice to historiography and hence reprehensible on that count alone, it also works to held future hostage to a past that never was.

The invocation of memory for revisionism is declared futile by Adorno, the German philosopher, when he declared, “Just as voluntary memory and utter oblivion always belonged together, organized fame and remembrance lead ineluctably to nothingness.” This may very well be true of employing memory for a resistance, political and cultural or otherwise, against a totalitarian force of oppression. But there can be some kind of resistance and a desirability too when a collective consciousness works on memory to create a collective memory to crystallize the collective consciousness into a concrete form of political identity. That is desirable only if the history is not reduced to instances of glory to serve the present but to rescuing the past in the future in order to wake-up from it, as Walter Benjamin would formulate. According to Benjamin each epoch has something of a dream-like feature which is never fulfilled and recalling of memory in today is “awakening of a not-yet conscious knowledge of what has been.”

So, in a desirable framework of memory the past becomes a precursor to what is today and thus knowing the past is finding the lost promises which were part of a political struggle to inform the political and cultural debate of today. There can at-best be approximation of the past and that too may not always be possible but here again Walter Benjamin comes to rescue in how memory can inform a present in consistent way by discovering, “in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the whole event.”

In Pakistan the relationship of the federation/center is always that of antagonism toward the ethnic minorities and small federating units. That is the result of the very basic founding principle of the state that in order to create the nation for the ‘nation-state’ the plurality of other nations contained by the ‘nation-state’ has to be either denied or downright neutralized.  There has been consistent resistance to that onslaught of the centrist mode of state and nation building from ethno-linguist minorities of the country. If pluralism and diversity are desirable values then the resistance against a Unitarian conception of polity, that excludes multiple identities as the condition of inclusion, is a memory which has to be kept alive. The political struggle in today for a diverse Pakistan where all the ethno-linguistic collectives are able to enter into the fold of ‘nation’ with their existential identities intact is kept alive and informed by memory of a continuity of this struggle. A case in point is the narrative of Pashtun national political struggle in Pakistan.

Two events stand out and in their uniqueness which contain the crystal of the epoch of oppression that Pashtuns were subjected to. One is Qissa-khwani massacre carried by British on 23^rd April, 1923 and another the Babarra massacre carried by the newly create state of Pakistan on 12^th August 1948. The first defines how a collective of Pashtun political identity sees its relation with the British Empire and the other informs that consciousness viz-a-viz the Pakistani state. The Qissa-Khwani massacre happened when the British opened fire on procession of Pashtuns in Qissa-Khwani bazaar, Peshawar  and killed to some estimates around 400. The historiography of the new state of Pakistan and of the whole subcontinent under the British rule either pay lip-service or totally ignores this event. But this became the rallying cry for Pashtun nationalism in the coming years and decade to follow. In British ruled India, this event along with the memory of struggle of Peer-e-Rokhan who led a rebellion against the Mughals were the defining metaphors in political resistance. That struggle had assumed poetic dimensions when it inspired the rebellion of Khushal Khan Khattak against the Mughals. The tradition of Pashtun nationalistic resistance in British India was thus a continuation against the oppressive steamrolling of the centripetal forces of the empires.

Then on August 12, 1948; the day the Babarra massacre happened, the new phase of carving a political identity on the basis of worst of trauma of oppression began. The new state of Pakistan opened fire and carried a massacre in broad daylight consuming 630. Remembering that day gives the core to Pashtun political consciousness and informs what can be expected from the Pakistan and at what cost. There was a peaceful march but an argument with authorities soon turned into bloodshed and the machine guns roared till they were out of ammunition. The injured were not taken to hospitals because they will be arrested. Jinnah was alive. Since then there is amnesia. Ruthlessly enforced amnesia. But for Walter Benjamin revolution in the highest form was the liberation of the past. And the political struggle and political consciousness of ethno-linguistic identities of the country in one way or another has dared revolutionary acts and have kept alive that image of rebellions against empires and of massacres. If memory is a process of dialectic and if history contains images, moments or events which capture the now, then that Now is captured by that day in Babarra. The today can be recognized in that one singular moment and from the workings of memory it will seem that the present is just a continuum of that fateful day. The history from that day on is not an empty time. We have been visited by atrocities which were variations of that defining day.

Under the alluvium of the recent past, in the wake to war on terror and the perennial operations, Pashtuns are adding a new set of memories to the already handed down memory of resistance. The new memories are traumatic in the modernist sense in that it has come on the top of constitutional and legal protections. But the nature of the trauma of the memories formed under the state’s high-handedness, the same principle of exclusion of diverse ethno-linguistic minorities is in work. Hence, the past refuses to die down and keeps on shaping the present. To counter the oppression of today, perceiving the similarities with the past is a mechanism giving a temporal breadth to the struggle. Waking up the memory of the past and fulfilling the unfulfilled promises of an inclusionary future is an act of defiance against forces of exclusion. Again, as the great Walter Benjamin said, “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears an end within itself.” The Now today has seeds to germinate into an inclusive, equal future. We have to dream well and expedite the end of this epoch.