Chai and Islam

On a cold Thursday evening in January 2023, I accompanied a friend to the Shah Farid graveyard in the Sabzazar Housing Scheme. Located on the western edge of Lahore, right off Multan Road, which is the main traffic artery in this part of the city, Sabzazar is a dense mix of planned middle-class housing, expanding commercial markets, and pockets of working-class neighborhoods. The Shah Farid graveyard takes its name from the eponymous saint entombed here, whose glittering shrine hovers over the area. However, we were not here to visit this shrine but were looking for Sakina Bibi, an acquaintance of my friend, who had invited us to spend the evening with her sangat. Even before we had alighted from our car, we spotted her waving and gesturing toward us. After exchanging warm greetings, Sakina beckoned us to follow her to the baithak of her saint, Syed Shabbir Shah. This was a narrow clearing between graves in a section of this graveyard where a group of men were seated close to a fire. Sakina proudly informed us that this was the place where her Qalandari sarkar, Shabbir Shah, spent many years when he was alive. While his actual grave and tomb are in another part of the city, his local followers had carved out a small space around a replica grave, which they claimed to be imbued with his sacred presence.

A few minutes after I had paid my respects to the saint by bowing and touching this “grave,” I found myself comfortably seated next to the fire, using a grave as a backrest. Sakina proudly introduced the four men present here as members of her Qalandari sangat and fellow devotees of Syed Shabbir Shah. I also noticed another small group of men a few feet away, who all seemed younger and were seated in a row in a narrow crevice between another set of graves. Initially I was under the impression that Pannu, who was seated right across from me, was the leader of this gathering as the others were showing him some deference.

Introduction

In 1953, the Arabic litterateur Wadiʿ al-Bustani received the Golden Medal of Merit for his Arabic versification of the Indian Mahabharata in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) building in central Beirut. Camille Chamoun, then president of Lebanon, awarded the honour to this member of the famous literary and scholarly al-Bustani family. Wadiʿ's life encapsulates the high degree of global mobility of intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. His hometown, Dibbieh, now lay in the newly independent state of Lebanon. He was born in 1888 in what was then still the Ottoman Empire, studied at the prestigious Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), worked as an interpreter at the British Consulate of Hodeida in Yemen in 1909, translated Umar al-Khayyam's Persian poems into Arabic in London in 1911, and set sail to India in 1912 to dedicate himself to Indian literary works. While in India, he met Rabindranath Tagore. The following years brought him to Johannesburg in South Africa and through political appointments to Cairo and the British mandate in Palestine. He became a vocal critic of Zionist politics and a founding member of several Muslim–Christian societies, taking part in the countrywide general strike of 1936. Later in life, he turned away from politics and dedicated most of his time to versifying Arabic translations of Indian literary works. In 1953, he finally returned to Lebanon, where he died in 1954.

While scholarship has shed light on translation movements from Sanskrit into Arabic during the early Abbasid period (eighth–tenth centuries), such as the Arabic ‘telling’ of Kalila wa-Dimna, there is a huge gap in academic research in terms of studying such translation itineraries between the Arabic and the Indian literary-intellectual spheres, when it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, there are several recent advances which aim to remedy this by approaching those intellectual exchanges and itineraries from an Indian Ocean perspective. Esmat Elhalaby studied Wadiʿ al-Bustani's life and work through the notion of an ‘Arabic rediscovery of India in the 20th century’. Elhalaby writes an intellectual history across the modern Indian Ocean region and thereby globalizes the Nahda, often framed as the ‘cultural and literary reawakening’, beyond the Middle East.5 He places Wadiʿ within the conceptual framework of ‘a history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame’.

As months passed at the bazaar my claims of conducting research without seeming to do much were for many of the jhupri labourers really a distraction from a more obvious reality: I was unemployed. The group were then impressed by my swift change in status in subsequent years evidenced by a business card, jumping from a hanger on who drank too much tea to a ‘professor’, as they generously framed various post-doctoral positions. This admiration was accompanied by requests to detail my income and expenditure in minutia, starting of course with salary, tax and housing costs and later, at my own insistence, the much-dreaded nursery fees. Jobs are hard to come by in Dhaka and anything vaguely formal a distant dream for the jhupri labourers. Government positions in particular are rare and much coveted, often requiring extortionate bribes to acquire, similar to how jobbers once mediated work in industry. Many municipal sweepers in Dhaka, for example, are known to have paid up to 10 lakh taka to gain a job, bringing debts but conferring stability of income and other opportunities. A younger labourer in the jhupri group, clearly exaggerating, once claimed to me while looking at the road being cleaned that ‘even the sweepers on this lane are government people, but only us labourers don't have papers.’

The jhupri group have few avenues for getting salaried jobs. Being the sons of labourers, fishermen, small-scale farmers or faded one-time santrashis and having spent years apart from them, means family is rarely a source of strength. Few here can rely on family capital, security, contacts or opportunities. Whatever the jhupri labourers have, they have it despite this background. As children they learned to fend for themselves. The friendships formed here were not only their fictive bhais and schoolmates to play and joke with, but something even closer, brothers to survive with. Viewed from the side of the jhupri lane, their world then is much smaller, framed by the corners of the bazaar. It is here that they can earn, and here that they seek opportunities.

Introduction

In the context of postwar Europe, Germany was long an exception (Decker and Hartleb 2006). Unlike in neighbouring France, Austria, Denmark, or Poland, for example, in Germany, until fairly recently, populist parties and movements did not play a major role. Only with the emergence of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) did populism become a significant political force in German politics. Founded on 6 February 2013, the party only narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold needed to enter parliament in the September 2013 federal elections. Within the next 12 months, it successfully contested the elections for the European parliament and in the East German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.

The AfD's first leader, Bernd Lucke, was a professor of economics who pursued a neoliberal political agenda and advocated for Germany to leave the Eurozone. While the economic policies of Lucke and other AfD founders attracted many followers in the wake of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, the AfD's meteoric rise between 2013 and 2019 was largely due to its ability to gain the support of voters dissatisfied with official attempts to value cultural diversity and with Germany's asylum and immigration policies, particularly the Merkel government's decision in 2015 to not close Germany's borders and to admit more than a million asylum seekers over a two-year period. In the 2017 federal elections, the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the votes and became the third-largest party in the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament. Although immigration did not feature prominently in the next federal election campaign, in September 2021 the AfD was largely able to consolidate its position; in Saxony and Thuringia, it finished ahead of all other parties.

In terms of its elected representatives, its members, and its voters, the AfD has included and appealed to a wide range of people, from social conservatives at one end of the spectrum to sympathizers of the New Right at the other. The AfD's heterogeneity has been a strength because it has broadened the party's appeal, but it has also been a weakness because the AfD has always been riven by factional conflicts.

A switch was flicked, and a hologram, 8 metres long and 2 metres wide, appeared. Under the impressive India Gate of New Delhi, on 23 January 2022, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated a hologram monument of the politician and military leader Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) (ABP News 2022). The statue celebrates the controversial, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic Bose for his defiance of the British during the independence struggles in the 1930s and 1940s. It fits with the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) agenda to show that ‘the history of India is not just what was written by those who enslaved the country’ (Times of India 2021). Modi's party seeks to challenge a supposedly ‘elitist’ and ‘colonial’ narrative of Indian history (Khan et al. 2017; Zachariah 2020). The BJP finds examples in ‘heroes’ such as Bose, uses DNA to claim a link between contemporary Hindus and India's first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and treats ancient Hindu scripture as fact and not myth (Chapter 5; Jain and Lasseter 2018).

Sixteen thousand kilometres away from New Delhi, a different populist ‘politics of history’ unfolded over the past two decades. Evo Morales, the leader of the left-wing populist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and the first indigenous president of Bolivia between 2006 and 2019, promoted a policy of anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal ‘cultural and democratic revolution’ to inaugurate a ‘new phase of history’ after colonialism (Morales 2006). By performing highly mediatized political ceremonies at indigenous heritage sites such as his alternative ‘spiritual’ inauguration at the Tiwanaku site, by celebrating figures such as eighteenth-century indigenous rebel Túpac Katari (c. 1750–1781), and by using indigenous notions such as pachakuti (the future in the past), Morales attempted to ‘decolonize’ Bolivian history (Dangl 2019; García Jerez and Müller 2015). Grand symbolic gestures were familiar to Morales, too. On 21 June 2014, his government installed a counterclockwise running timepiece on the Congress building of La Paz. Symbolizing that Bolivians must ‘undo their history’ and challenge colonial standards, this ‘clock of the south’ invited them to ‘think creatively and disobey Western norms’ (BBC News 2014). Although the MAS started out along ethno-populist lines and was dominated by Quechua-speaking indigenous people, it never defined this indigeneity in strict exclusivist terms.

In 2013, when I first met the elderly Baba Nazir, he was introduced to me as the jharu kash of the Bodianwale shrine. Jharu kash literally translates as “the one who sweeps” and evokes a life of selfless devotion and service to a saint and their shrine. In fact, one of its most common representations in Punjab is the image of a woman sweeping the floor of her saint's shrine with her long, flowing tresses. However, in many shrines, including Bodianwale, jharu kash are assigned the far more “worldly” role of a caretaker, which involves looking after the shrine's premises and managing its everyday affairs. Nazir had been appointed to this particular position, a few years ago, by pir Syed Hassan Gillani (henceforth, pir Hassan), the gaddi nashin of Bodianwale and scion of a powerful Sufi family that had controlled Bodianwale and an associated shrine complex for many generations. Nazir had been associated with this family for almost fifty years and served them in a variety of capacities. His position in Bodianwale as pir Hassan's point person required him to live on the shrine's premises and shoulder several responsibilities. He was given authority over the other men who lived in the shrine and supervised their work of cleaning and maintaining the space. Ensuring the shrine's security, keeping an eye on things, and reporting the goings-on to pir Hassan were all part of his mandate. Importantly, he was also assigned the duty of collecting and delivering cash and other offerings made by devotees to the pir as well as encouraging devotees to contribute to the upkeep of the shrine.

Nazir generally adopted a laid-back approach to the caretaker role. While he kept a vigilant eye on things, he preferred to not get involved in most aspects of the shrine's operations. Instead, he ceded space to other individuals and groups to take the lead in organizing and managing events and daily activities at Bodianwale. Even though he possessed the powers and authority that come from being the pir's appointee, Nazir was hardly pushed to exercise and expand his influence. His identification as a malang, which calls for a distance from worldly affairs, was certainly a factor in his attitude toward this managerial role.