If honor bound young men step back

Fǝkhray Āfğānȃ, the girls will win [the fight]

Syeda Bushra Begum first shir of “a few verses” Pukhtun Jan 1940

My current book project, “The Ecstasy and Anarchy of Nonviolence: The Intersectionality of Khudai Khidmatgar Resistance in the North-West Frontier of British India,” reads the vernacular literature of a popular, subaltern movement of the 1930’s and 40’s led by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known also as Bāchā Khan and the Frontier Gandhi. The long legacy of racial and gender categorizations denoting the Pashtuns a martial people—who are, furthermore, situated on a volatile border territory—has marginalized this remarkable history; therefore, my scholarship fills a large gap by reading a hitherto untranslated Pashto archive to interpret the self-imaginaries of the Khudai Khidmatgars, or the Servants of God. They embodied nonviolence with great alacrity and became the largest peace “army” in British India yet this remarkable history has been silenced not only through nation-state narratives, and the violence intrinsic to such political structures, but also because of racial and gendered categorizations and representations of the “Pathans”—as the Pashtuns are often called. As such, extant literature explains Pashtun nonviolence as an exceptional phenomenon instigated by the saint-like character of Bāchā Khan; yet, the extensive body of women’s poetry, in particular, discloses the contextual specificity of how nonviolence was so readily embodied: indigenous codes of conduct, or Pashtunwali, and Islamic Sufi tropology were (re) interpreted through the framework of nonviolence to produce alternate normative values and the requisite inner (self) transformation.

This book project rethinks and revises my doctoral dissertation and research; here is the link to the dissertation abstract: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98s5t77b

Forthcoming is my chapter, “Silence, Subversion and the Subaltern in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome,” in Amitav Ghosh’s Texts and Contexts: The Culture Chromosome, edited by Asis De and Alessandro Vescovi, Brill Publications. In this article I read Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Calcutta Chromosome, through the lens of the Subaltern Studies historians to argue that Ghosh posits a radically alternate framework of knowledge in the novel through the overarching trope of “Silence;” furthermore, I also argue that it is only through such subversive and alternate epistemologies that the historically silenced subaltern can be heard, seen, acknowledged or even recognized.

I have translated a selection of poems by an iconic, modern Pashtun poet: “Ghani Khan: A Postmodern, Humanist, Poet-Philosopher,” published by Sagar: South Asia Research Journal, (volume 24, spring 2017); a journal published by the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas. http://sagarjournal.org/latest-issue

Publications generated through my doctoral research include a chapter titled, “Nonviolence, Pukhtunwali and Decolonization: Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar Politics of Friendship,” in the volume, Muslims Against the Muslim League: Critiques of the Idea of Pakistan, Cambridge University Press, September 2017. Chapter 8, pp. 220-253  (2017). https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/muslims-against-muslim-league-critiques-idea-pakistan?format=HB

This article reads the vernacular articulations of political friendship intertextually with Jacques Derrida’s politics of friendship and compares Ghaffar Khan’s envisioned utopian community with Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s legitimations for creating Pakistan. I argue that the latter reinstated the normative political—exemplified by Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy binary—that led to the destruction of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement subsequent to the partition of India.

it has hailed upon my heart’s garden

spring flowers will become fragrant when it’s spring again

Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Autobiography: zmā žwand āw jdow-jeẖd