Dr. Ilhan Niaz is a superbly impressive historian of Pakistan. His work is more convincing than any other historian our society has produced. Another name that comes to mind is Dr. Tariq Rehman—aloso an impressive Pakistani historian. I often wonder if a society can nurture people like Dr. Niaz and Dr. Rehman, how can it be described as decadent and depraved, as some moralists dub Pakistan?
Dr. Ilhan Niaz brings in knowledge from his discipline which is history, political theory, sociology, philosophy, and philosophy of history, and presents a synthesis of all these threads into compelling arguments.
I started developing doubts about my deeply ingrained beliefs about colonialism, especially British colonialism, after reading two of Dr. Niaz’s books— The State During the British Raj and The Culture of Power and Governance of Pakistan. I was born and brought up in a family which was deeply anti-colonial for generations. I was taught to hate colonialism since my childhood. My hatred was reinforced when I started reading Marxist tracts and anti-colonial philosophies of left-leaning writers. All this came crumbling down after I read Dr. Niaz's books.
The concepts of an impersonal state, independent bureaucracy, and a standing Army—not personal guards of the emperor—were introduced by the British.
To explain Dr Niaz’s thoughts, it would suffice to present the gist of this argument. He argues that it was British colonialism that introduced responsible government in the Indian subcontinent. Before the British came to rule the subcontinent, the whole territory under the Mughal empire and Sultanate of Delhi were the personal estates and fiefs of the rulers. There was no distinction between the public and private, which was later introduced by the British. Bureaucratic structures of the Mughal Empire were intended to serve the Mughal Emperor, with the state bureaucrats as his personal servants. His army and his soldiers were his retainers.
The concepts of an impersonal state, independent bureaucracy, and a standing Army—not personal guards of the emperor—were introduced by the British. Besides this, parliamentary democracy was introduced in British India by the Colonial government. It was through the Government of India Act of 1935 that a parliamentary form of government at the provincial level was first introduced in British India. Pakistan secured independence through an Act of the British parliament adopted the Government of India Act of 1935 as its provisional Constitution. Our first Constitution in 1956 inherited parliamentary structures from the same 1935 Government of India Act.
Here I would like to make a few points. Firstly—and this I inferred from Dr. Niaz’s arguments—our colonial past is not something to be ashamed of. We have learned from it. The basic political characteristics of our society and state were drawn from our colonial past. We simply cannot escape this.
Whenever we ask the question, who are we at the political level? The answer will surely take us into our colonial past. As a society and state, we cannot identify ourselves without reckoning with our colonial history. We simply cannot identify as a successor to the Mughal state—it was too ugly for our modern political perspectives and sensibilities. Our right to contest the government’s decisions and challenge government power to prosecute its citizens are all drawn from our colonial past.
The Mughals didn’t allow their subjects (remember, people weren’t citizens under Mughals) to question their decisions. Neither did the rulers and bureaucrats of British India consider the people as citizens.
The basic political characteristics of our society and state were drawn from our colonial past. We simply cannot escape this.
The wheels of time cannot be turned back, but unfortunately, Pakistan has found a workaround. The state bureaucracy is increasingly turning into personal servants of the rulers; state largesse is available only to the kin, friends, and loyalists of the rulers, and the impersonal nature of the state that was established under the British is now again turning into personal estates of political rulers and the higher ups in state machinery.
We are facing a situation that Francis Fukuyama described as re-patrimonalization of the state. Under the Sultanate of Delhi and the Mughals, the land was the personal estate of the Kings and the bureaucracy was the personal servant of the rulers. The British introduced an impersonal state, responsible government, independent bureaucracy, and the concept of private property. Now, our ruling elite has transformed it all into their fiefs.
Our ideological blindness is now preventing us from acknowledging how much we have regressed politically and administratively—our obsession with associating ourselves with our Muslim past in the subcontinent should not prevent us from acknowledging that the repeating past could deprive us of our political freedoms.
Dr. Niaz’s writings expose the deep-seated contradiction in our national discourse: on the one hand, the whole structure of our argument through which we criticize our political system requires political and civil freedoms. The right to question the government, something that is an outcome of the concept of impersonal state, which was introduced by the British. On the other hand, we never stop ourselves from expressing abhorrence towards everything related to British colonialism and loving everything that relates to the Mughal era.
To put it simply, this is not about loving or hating anyone. This is about understanding your past. Understanding your true identity at the political and social levels. History is never a static discipline. History is not something fossilized after it has been discovered by a past “big man.” Every generation constructs its history in a new fashion and manner from the same or new facts that are discovered with the help of new technologies, new ideas, and new evidence that comes to light with time. If we as a generation don’t construct or reconstruct our past (or our history) after a constructive engagement with the past, we will surely fail to successfully grapple with our future.
History is a discipline that makes your biases and prejudices melt away like ice statues in the sweltering heat.
Dr. Niaz’s works are unique in the sense that he helps us understand our present and our future in a better way. My own opinion is that we can never understand our political identity as Pakistani without understanding what role colonialism and its underlying philosophies played in the formation of our political institutions. The weight of history weighs heavily on our shoulders and minds whenever we go into constructing new political institutions in our human societies. Parliamentary democracy in Pakistan will never function smoothly until and unless we as a nation succeed in grappling with our colonial past.
History is a discipline that makes your biases and prejudices melt away like ice statues in the sweltering heat. Dr. Niaz is one such historian who greatly contributes to washing away your biases if you give his work a serious read. Most of the biases in our society have their origin in a lack of knowledge about our past.
In this way, we as a society are hostage to history and deeply ignorant about history at the same time. There are no concerted and institutional efforts to construct, reconstruct, and discover history. We live in the present and have a deeply distorted image of the past. Any attempt to remember historical facts could push you into the realm of profanity and blasphemy.
I often wonder why Dr. Ilhan Niaz’s work is not widely known. Before I answer the question, I can say with a certain level of certainty that this is a strong indication of our cultural regression that people like Dr. Niaz and Dr. Tariq Rehman are not household names. In our society, the past is a mistress of powers that be, whose overuse of the past has left it in distorted bodily shape.
I am sure if someone is under the influence of a narrative about the past built by powers that be, he gets a chance to read Dr. Niaz’s books, he would declare Niaz a British agent. The point is that if you don’t have a clear picture of what colonialism was, you would not be able to successfully create a narrative against it. Therefore, what we are teaching our students in the name of anti-colonialism is nothing more than shallow fables about a distorted past. For cultural refinement and advancement of our society, reading Dr. Ilhan Niaz and historians like him is a must. In the absence of such practices, we would be left only with the endless prattle of cheap polemics about politics and history that we see on prime-time talk shows. The fact that Hamid Mir is a household name in Pakistan, and not Dr. Ilhan Niaz speaks volumes about the direction our society is heading.
If we accept Dr. Niaz’s argument about British colonialism introducing an impersonal state and political modernity in this part of the world, then we have a problem at hand—a problem of Muslim history and how we perceive it. We as a society have an embellished image of the Muslim history of India.
For Dr. Niaz, facts are sacred as they are discovered, constructed or reconstructed as part of a painstaking process of investigation and interrogation of the past. On the other hand, people like Hamid Mir—or we can name any other talk show host with a proclivity for sensationalism—shoot from the hips. For them, colonialism—any other political phenomenon for that matter-- is bad because the majority of their viewers think so. For them, political correctness is a form of religion. And someone presenting an out of the box perspective on colonialism that doesn’t match with the majoritarian view point, is an outright traitor.
On the other hand, Dr. Niaz’s perspective on colonialism or its relationship with our political and administrative institutions is unique. Dr. Niaz presents political modernity in our society as the direct outcome of our colonial inheritance. Of course, nobody is justifying colonialism and its brutalities that it inflicted on Indian society. Obviously, if we propagate an obsessive love for Muslim political dominance in Indian history and its institutions, we will be preparing the masses to revolt against the very modern political institutions, which, although, we have inherited from the British, but which nevertheless are meant to provide social and political stability in our society. For example, the parliamentary system has been part of our political culture for more than 150 years, which means it is deeply rooted in our political culture. But our educational system, our drama writers, our poets and intellectuals don’t project the parliamentary system as an ideal system. On the other hand, an obsessive love with our Muslim past and its political institutions is all-pervasive in our society.
If we accept Dr. Niaz’s argument about British colonialism introducing an impersonal state and political modernity in this part of the world, then we have a problem at hand—a problem of Muslim history and how we perceive it. We as a society have an embellished image of the Muslim history of India. The Mughal past is perceived as a glorious past with a lot of cultural and intellectual development. Obviously, Mughal political institutions appear extremely backward from a modern perspective. Certainly, those institutions don’t have any place in modern day Pakistan. But here lies the problem: does that mean we should reject Mughal history out rightly.
The question is how to reinterpret India’s Muslim history in the light of what Dr. Niaz has to say. Obviously judging Mughal history from the perspective of Modern political ideas will be unfair. After all, the modern political institutions and concepts that the British introduced in India developed over the course of centuries.
What relation should Pakistani society have with the Mughal era and its political institutions? Especially when we see an obsessive love for a glorious Muslim past. It would be fitting for Dr. Niaz to pay attention to these questions.