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"Daechsel, Markus"
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Religion and the rise of magic in Urdu print culture: the case of Chīn aur Bangāl kā Jādū
This article offers a first survey of a novel genre of grimoires published in Urdu-reading India in the early twentieth century. It contained a wide selection of magic material from Islamicate and Tantric sources as well as Western parapsychology and spiritualism. Its applications ranged from remedies of last resort in illness, relationship troubles, and other life problems to common household cures and magical tricks performed for pleasure alone. Produced and read by members of all religious groups in North India, this material indicates important changes in popular attitudes towards magic. Magic by no means declined at the beginning of the twentieth century, but flourished as a viable commercial print genre that became increasingly detached from religion.
Journal Article
MAKING SENSE OF BREXIT - A HISTORIAN'S VIEW
To talk about Britain's momentous decision to leave the European Union after more than 40 years of membership is a somewhat unusual assignment for me. I have come to Karachi as a historian of Pakistan and South Asia, and have never conducted formal academic research into British or European politics. My sole qualification is having witnessed the unfolding drama of Brexit from close-up - and with considerable anxiety about my own personal future. As a German who has made a life in the UK for more than twenty years, I have 'skin in the game', as Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently called the most important qualification for analysing current affairs. In my attempt to at least understand a historical development that I could not influence, I have become an obsessive observer of British politics, with an insatiable appetite for journalistic and scholarly readings on the topic. Eventually, and in a very modest way, I decided to take a public stand in blogs and newspaper interviews.
Journal Article
Sovereignty, Governmentality and Development in Ayub's Pakistan: the Case of Korangi Township
This paper uses a historical ethnography of the construction of Korangi Township outside Karachi to analyse the configuration of power in the post-colonial Pakistani state of the late 1950s and 1960s. Foucault's distinction between ‘sovereign’, ‘disciplinary’ and ‘security’ power helps to reveal how possibilities of non-interventionist control were deliberately discarded in favour of an (often theatrical) exercise of ‘raw’ power. The way in which the township was conceived by the international architect and city planner, C. A. Doxiadis, often stood in contrast and tension with the ways in which it was executed by General Ayub Khan's military regime (1958–1968). Rapid early success—tens of thousands of refugee slum dwellers were resettled within six months—went hand-in-hand with equally-quick failure and abandonment later on. The Pakistani regime was only interested in demonstrating its ability to make decisions and to deploy executive power over its territory, but it made no sustained effort to use spatial control to entangle its subjects in a web of ‘governmentality’. In the final analysis, the post-colonial Pakistani state was a ‘state of exception’ made permanent, which deliberately enacted development failure to underscore its overreliance on sovereign power.
Journal Article
SCIENTISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: THE INDO-MUSLIM “FASCISM” OF INAYATULLAH KHAN AL-MASHRIQI
This essay offers a detailed reconstruction of the thought of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, a camp-follower of fascism in inter-war India who sought to reformulate Islam as a “Religion of Science” according to the precepts of Darwinian evolutionism. Mashriqi has so far been neglected because his political impact was only short-term and did not contribute to the larger story of decolonization in India and Pakistan. But far from being marginal, Mashriqi's philosophical ruminations actually provide a window for a much-needed re-evaluation of the meaning of colonial modernity. While there was much in Mashriqi's writing that conforms to the usual picture of anti-colonial nation-building—his obsession with the truth of science, for instance, and his emphasis on disciplinary political methodologies—the by now standardized critique of such features in the “postcolonial” literature no longer suffices. Behind a façade of continuities with nineteenth-century “Enlightenment” traditions stood a much darker vision of modernity that no longer had any recourse to the certainties of a grand narrative of modernization. Instead, it was a vision that fluctuated between mystical exuberance and deep pessimism. The only sense of certainty was provided by a radical notion of emotional authenticity and a related belief in quasi-religious leadership figures. The larger conclusion to be drawn from the dualistic and contradictory structure of Mashriqi's “fascism” is that the intellectual history of inter-war South Asia needs to be given relative autonomy from the standard nationalism–modernization narrative, for rather than the continuation of an earlier modernity, it should be interpreted as the starting point of a new and much darker formation that arguably continues into the present.
Journal Article
Z̤ālim Ḍākū and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity1
Detective fiction counts amongst the most successful
literary products that the metropolitan west has
exported to the world periphery. Between the end of
the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the
Second World War the genre acquired a global
presence – both in the form of translations of
existing works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories,
and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations.
This kind of literature represented a prime example
of the mass-produced and mass-circulated print
entertainment that was part and parcel of the
emergence of mass consumption as a social form.
Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and an
expression of modernity. While some literary
theorists have pointed to longstanding historical
antecedents, detective fiction would not have made
sense in earlier historical epochs. The principles
of scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout,
not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifying
glasses, finger-prints and assorted scientific
apparatuses, but in terms of the subject matter
itself – the fact that it is possible to make sense
of an increasingly confusing world by uncovering
hidden causal connections through rational
enquiry.
Journal Article
Zdbledotualim Ddotu aku and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity
Detective fiction counts amongst the most successful literary products that the metropolitan west has exported to the world periphery. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War the genre acquired a global presence - both in the form of translations of existing works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations. This kind of literature represented a prime example of the mass-produced and mass-circulated print entertainment that was part and parcel of the emergence of mass consumption as a social form. Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and an expression of modernity. While some literary theorists have pointed to longstanding historical antecedents, detective fiction would not have made sense in earlier historical epochs. The principles of scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout, not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifying glasses, finger-prints and assorted scientific apparatuses, but in terms of the subject matter itself - the fact that it is possible to make sense of an increasingly confusing world by uncovering hidden causal connections through rational enquiry. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article