Saturday, March 12, 2011

Ayesha Jalal, THE Historian of Pakistan

"People are generally comfortable wearing multiple identities," says Ayesha Jalal, Pakistan’s acclaimed historian, sociologist, researcher, teacher and writer, "I'm quite comfortable being a woman, a Muslim, a Pakistani, an American."1

I happened to take a course with Ayesha Jalal when she came to teach at Lahore University of Management Sciences for a semester last year. She changed many of my perceptions about different historical facts and events.

During her lectures, a thought often came to my mind. I imagined meeting her for the first time on a busy road and not knowing who she was, imagined getting into a historical debate with her. She could sweep me off my feet with her factual arguments, just as she was doing right at that very moment as I listened to her in class. I would obviously have thought that I had met a very vociferous yet intelligent and eloquent pedestrian, one who knows how to argue her case. I would have wondered how she knew so much about history. Only her being Ayesha Jalal could have explained it all.

A short lady with a thin frame and a face increasingly getting lined due to age, you get a sense of her confidence when you hear her speak and see her body language. Ayesha Jalal does not give a perception of someone capable of attracting controversies, yet in recent years she has, both at home and abroad. She caused much controversy when she made public her research findings that the creation of Pakistan was a historical accident and that Jinnah had never meant to create Pakistan.2

Dr Jalal is a grand-niece of the famous and controversial Urdu novelist, Saadat Hasan Manto, her grandmother being the sister of Manto. She is the daughter of Manto’s favorite nephew, Hamid Jalal, Additional Secretary to the Prime Minister in Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s time. Her father worked in All India Radio before Partition in 1947 and later in Pakistan’s Information Ministry. Dr Jalal first came to the United States of America in 1970 at the age of 16 when her father was posted in the United Nations.

Dr Jalal says she was inspired to study history because of her uncle Manto. Her grandmother often used to read out Manto’s works to her.

“ ‘Toba Tek Singh ' planted questions in my head and made me question the Partition of India,” she says. She used to be amused in childhood at this Manto story of insane people trying to interpret Partition.

In 1971, while studying at Stuyvesant High School in New York, she was attracted to studying sciences, but the events of that year in Pakistan made her question her identity.1

"It really made me question some of my received perceptions of myself as a Pakistani," says Ayesha Jalal. She belonged to a very patriotic family, with family members being in the civil service, and had been brought up in Pakistan under prevailing notions of Pakistan’s history. Hence, witnessing the break up of her country was a “mental trauma” for her.1

“It was a very awkward time,” she speaks.1

Such questions eventually made her want to study history and find answers for herself. When she returned to Pakistan in 1972 with her family, she enrolled in a science school but did not find the quality of education up to scratch. She instead started to pursue the social sciences and never regretted it. Eventually, Ayesha Jalal completed her Bachelors in History and Political Science from Wellesley College in 1978, and went on to do a PhD in History from the Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 1983 with a dissertation “Jinnah, the Muslim Leage and the Demand for Pakistan”.

Ayesha Jalal has led an enviable career. She has been a Leverhulme Fellow at the Center of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC and Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, she is Mary Richardson Professor of History and Director of the Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University.

Dr Jalal maintains that she never sought to become a historian, but was "propelled to do so".1

"I felt that the methods of history really allowed me to question the things I was interested in," she says. "1971 was a very difficult time. The Pakistan army in the name of preserving national integrity massacred people in the eastern wing. That kind of discomfort can spark off anger and a quest to understand."1

When General Zia ul Haq came to power and began the Islamization of Pakistan under the notion that it was formed on the basis of Islam, Jalal began to question the way by which Pakistan was created. At that time also, the papers of the transfer of power at the time of Partition were released. Jalal used these papers during her PhD at Cambridge in those days and eventually used them to publish her first book on Jinnah in 1985.1

As an author, Ayesha Jalal has seven books to her credit, including Partisans of Allah and The Sole Spokesman. She is married to Sugata Bose, a Hindu from India and the grandnephew of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and grandson of nationalist leader Sarat Chandra Bose. He is also her research partner. Together, they have written a book called Modern South Asia which is the first South Asian history book that has been written in joint collaboration between a Pakistani and an Indian.

During her time at Columbia as Associate Professor in the 1990s, she opposed the university for accepting funds from the Hinduja Group, who are nationalist Hindus, to establish a research center for Indic studies at Columbia. She was denied tenure and filed a case against the university for ethnic, gender and religious biases against her as she maintained that her fellow Indian Hindu faculty members "were uncomfortable with a Pakistani woman teaching Indian history" and had “blocked her tenure application”. New York District Court acquitted Columbia, stating that Dr Jalal’s accusations were “thin but suggestive”.2

Ayesha Jalal has received several awards during her career. In 1998, she won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship of $ 265,000, and on Pakistan Day, 2010, she received the Sitara-i-Imtiaz from the Pakistani government during her tenure at LUMS.

In her teaching methods, Ayesha Jalal always tries to help her students make their own interpretations of different aspects of history and encourages them to reach their own conclusions about it, helping them find answers to their own questions in the light of facts.

"I cannot tell people what to think. I myself wrote against the grain of everything I was supposed to believe in," speaks Dr Ayesha Jalal. "I believe in helping people question, to think and really create a sense of awkwardness with some received wisdoms. That's where my own personal intellectual journey began."1

External works cited:
1. http://www.tufts.edu/home/feature/?p=jalal
2. http://rethinkingislam-sultanshahin.blogspot.com/2009/07/ayesha-jalal-interpreter-of-jihad.html