What is Quettawali ? Part 3: Identity
( Part 1, Part 2 )
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” Michel de Montaigne
“Only religion allows people to be magnificent without egotism.”
“Only religion allows people to be magnificent without egotism.”
Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad
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In this part 3 of my ruminations on Quettawali, I want to take up the issue of identity which I think is of critical importance if we want to understand how things have changed, or devolved, over the years in Quetta. To recap, we have already seen the importance of community and what happens when communities break down and anomie and alienation take over. Communal breakdown is a universal phenomenon, a malaise of late modernity that afflicts societies the world over. Sociologists have for long grappled with this issue, from Durkheim, Marx (when he was in his sociologist mode), Weber, Veblen, C. Wright Mills, to Anthony Giddens, Christopher Lasch and Zygmunt Bauman, to name some of the well-known figures in the discipline. One of the more recent books on this societal malaise is the brilliant socio-cultural survey of America by the sociologist Robert D. Putnam, a book aptly titled as Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities. Communities are, of course, made up of individuals who hold on to notions of the self and the other, or have identities, that define the collectives they form. The communities will be healthy and effective to the extent that the identities of the individuals are healthy and whole.
In the community where we grew up, the elders were elders first and then anything else. Children respected---and often feared---those elders as children first than as anything or anybody else. Age, belonging, a strong sense of community and familiarity transcended all ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian appellations. My father, a Quettawaal Hazara, never tires of telling me stories about the days when a Pashtun or a Punjabi elder, who knew my grandfather and the family (everybody knew everybody else in those days!), would reprimand him in public because he had been caught red-handed, say, loitering at the cinemas (called bi-scope in those days) during school hours. The elder from the other community would often grab him, or one of his equally mischievous friends, by the ear and would only let go when he was finally at the door of the house lecturing my father in front of his parents who, in turn, would quickly join the elder in those acts of rebuke. The same would happen the other way round. In addition to their many immediate ethno-linguistic and religio-sectarian identities, the Awans of Tel Gudam, the Fateh Khans of Nichari, the Marri Balochis and the Kasis of Khudaidad Road and the nearby mohallas (from Lodi Maidan, to Nichari and all the way up to the foot of Koh e Murdar) were also all part of the same bigger, inclusive community of Quetta where we all lived. Many of their mischievous youth used to receive similar rebukes from my elders. That is how things were then.
There was mutual respect, there was trust and communal belonging, fraternity, sharing and caring, all of which were informed by the traditional understandings of the self and the other. In that worldview, the “I” was not indiscriminately exclusive---like it often is nowadays where it is defined by artificial ideological constructions--- just as the “other” was not completely a stranger, or a dreaded and feared alien. Then, the identities were multi-layered and complex even if there were no sociologists to theorize them as such and then publish papers and books on them. People were many things at the same time, and equally true to each level of their identities. People did not understand themselves in utterly negative terms, in the sense of “I am what I am because I am not what you are” or “I am what I am because I am not you”. Identity was not "aridly singular" but was "a nested series which spiraled out" as Shiv Visvanathan has said. The self was not rigidly understood and the other was not vilified and violently demonized as a threat, as the totally other that must be sidelined, even destroyed. In other words, there was an ethic of accommodation and a generosity of spirit, all religiously informed. Entertaining difference was part of the ethos of all communities. The Quettawali ethos knew how to entertain the “otherness” of the other, while at the same time cherish similarities.
There was a certain kind of fluidity, or open-endedness to identities, not of the amoral post-modern type (“anything goes!”), but one imbued with traditional virtues of empathy, concern for truth, goodness and beauty, for love and caring. Difference and separateness were there, for sure, but the frontiers that defined them were comfortably porous. What was said and done always had an other-worldly dimension to it and was not exhausted by the dictates of instrumental cost-benefit reasoning that is the hallmark of the modern “entrepreneurial” mindset which starts and ends with “What’s in it for me (or for my group)?”. Modernity and its materialist-worldly cult of hustling, after all, is nothing if not a narrowing of the horizons of consciousness. It is a shrinking of the horizon of thought and the coarsening of the faculty of feeling, “a way of drowning into nothingness” as a sage has said. "Hell is other people!" says one character in a famous work No Exit by the quintessentially modern existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. While its proponents make so much noise about human rights and human equality, its actual nineteenth and twentieth century record is abysmal on many fronts. From racist colonialism, ethnocidal nationalisms to ecocidal capitalist imperialism, everywhere we look the “other” of the dominant modern-western-white “self” is the enemy that must be controlled, dominated, opposed, marginalized, ghettoized and annihilated.
One could even say that, in the olden days in Quetta, there was a certain charm in the way people understood themselves and others. Or, it was an “authentic innocence”: an innocent charm, yet full of wisdom. It was what we see in an innocent child where the duality of self and the other has not yet manifested itself, not because of the child’s immaturity but because of the child’s pure consciousness which has yet to be sullied by the ways of the world. It is the same consciousness that becomes whole and united again at the other end of life’s spectrum, in spiritual union, when one becomes old and gets ready for departure to where one has come from, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr has so beautifully explained in one of his important writings on the self and other. The time I am recalling was a time when not everything had become secularized and profane yet. There was symbolism and an understanding of the qualitative aspects of things in addition to their quantitative sides. Above all, the sense of the sacred in everything, of something bigger than our trivial selves, still pervaded the cultural landscape of the city. There was more authentic religion, both understood and especially practiced and lived, and less pretentious, toxic religiosity. The values have been reversed now; an inversion has taken place.
Based on such notions of identity and community, Quetta was a sane society then. One’s identity was not merely an extension of one’s ego yearning for worldly gains, an ego ceaselessly engaged in the cost benefit analysis of the crassest type, but it was a notion of self that was embedded within a system of concentric circles each of which was a rich layer of identity. There was an awareness and respect for the perennial Golden Rules such as, what we do to others we cannot but invite the same upon ourselves; or, what we do to our own, we cannot but invite others to do the same to us; and, do unto others what you want done to you by others. These were all the constituent principles of the code of life shared by all the communities of old Quetta, something which I have been calling Quattawali in these articles.
In this age of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and especially TikTok (the newest and the deepest of the chambers of cyber/digital hell!) things have radically changed. People now still have fluid and complicated identities, but of a totally different type. These identities that many wear like masks and badges nowadays are the readily available avatars on the Internet. These are the plug and play, the use and discard type of identities available for download and upload on the innumerable digital platforms. In the wake of collapse of real communities of real people, and in the absence of nuanced and historically informed notions of identity, these one dimensional, disoriented, atomized individuals who populate the cyber “communities” and social media networks with their ever changing disposable identity labels, are like floating weeds. They can be easily pushed and pulled in any direction by the manipulative entrepreneurs, the psychopathic merchants of the new attention economy, and the captains of the “perception management” industries. These zero-empathy, psychopathic gurus of the capitalist corporate world are people who subtly and invisibly “govern us, control and mold our minds, form our tastes and suggest our ideas” without our knowledge as the father of modern propaganda, Edward Barnays, wrote a century ago.
In short, in old Quetta, people were often contented and secure in their skins. Time moved slowly and humanely without making everybody its prisoner; thought and speech had quality and gravity, and when there was no speech, the silences were rich, meaningful and pregnant with the sublime; the old zeitgeist valued self-effacement and humility, not vulgar exhibitionism and toxic narcissism; feelings were profound yet subdued and often sincere; relationships had depth, were cultivated and rooted in communal soil and nurtured carefully with age-old virtues. One’s identity and self-respect were not dependent on the demonization of the other as “kaffir” or “traitor”, or on the number of “likes” or “followers” on the anti-social digital wastelands euphemistically called "social media", but on the ineffable, on perennial iqdaar (values), some of which I have listed in these articles on Quettawali.
Continued... (see Part 4)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In this part 3 of my ruminations on Quettawali, I want to take up the issue of identity which I think is of critical importance if we want to understand how things have changed, or devolved, over the years in Quetta. To recap, we have already seen the importance of community and what happens when communities break down and anomie and alienation take over. Communal breakdown is a universal phenomenon, a malaise of late modernity that afflicts societies the world over. Sociologists have for long grappled with this issue, from Durkheim, Marx (when he was in his sociologist mode), Weber, Veblen, C. Wright Mills, to Anthony Giddens, Christopher Lasch and Zygmunt Bauman, to name some of the well-known figures in the discipline. One of the more recent books on this societal malaise is the brilliant socio-cultural survey of America by the sociologist Robert D. Putnam, a book aptly titled as Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities. Communities are, of course, made up of individuals who hold on to notions of the self and the other, or have identities, that define the collectives they form. The communities will be healthy and effective to the extent that the identities of the individuals are healthy and whole.
In the community where we grew up, the elders were elders first and then anything else. Children respected---and often feared---those elders as children first than as anything or anybody else. Age, belonging, a strong sense of community and familiarity transcended all ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian appellations. My father, a Quettawaal Hazara, never tires of telling me stories about the days when a Pashtun or a Punjabi elder, who knew my grandfather and the family (everybody knew everybody else in those days!), would reprimand him in public because he had been caught red-handed, say, loitering at the cinemas (called bi-scope in those days) during school hours. The elder from the other community would often grab him, or one of his equally mischievous friends, by the ear and would only let go when he was finally at the door of the house lecturing my father in front of his parents who, in turn, would quickly join the elder in those acts of rebuke. The same would happen the other way round. In addition to their many immediate ethno-linguistic and religio-sectarian identities, the Awans of Tel Gudam, the Fateh Khans of Nichari, the Marri Balochis and the Kasis of Khudaidad Road and the nearby mohallas (from Lodi Maidan, to Nichari and all the way up to the foot of Koh e Murdar) were also all part of the same bigger, inclusive community of Quetta where we all lived. Many of their mischievous youth used to receive similar rebukes from my elders. That is how things were then.
There was mutual respect, there was trust and communal belonging, fraternity, sharing and caring, all of which were informed by the traditional understandings of the self and the other. In that worldview, the “I” was not indiscriminately exclusive---like it often is nowadays where it is defined by artificial ideological constructions--- just as the “other” was not completely a stranger, or a dreaded and feared alien. Then, the identities were multi-layered and complex even if there were no sociologists to theorize them as such and then publish papers and books on them. People were many things at the same time, and equally true to each level of their identities. People did not understand themselves in utterly negative terms, in the sense of “I am what I am because I am not what you are” or “I am what I am because I am not you”. Identity was not "aridly singular" but was "a nested series which spiraled out" as Shiv Visvanathan has said. The self was not rigidly understood and the other was not vilified and violently demonized as a threat, as the totally other that must be sidelined, even destroyed. In other words, there was an ethic of accommodation and a generosity of spirit, all religiously informed. Entertaining difference was part of the ethos of all communities. The Quettawali ethos knew how to entertain the “otherness” of the other, while at the same time cherish similarities.
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| The Great Chain of Being: hierarchy within and without |
One could even say that, in the olden days in Quetta, there was a certain charm in the way people understood themselves and others. Or, it was an “authentic innocence”: an innocent charm, yet full of wisdom. It was what we see in an innocent child where the duality of self and the other has not yet manifested itself, not because of the child’s immaturity but because of the child’s pure consciousness which has yet to be sullied by the ways of the world. It is the same consciousness that becomes whole and united again at the other end of life’s spectrum, in spiritual union, when one becomes old and gets ready for departure to where one has come from, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr has so beautifully explained in one of his important writings on the self and other. The time I am recalling was a time when not everything had become secularized and profane yet. There was symbolism and an understanding of the qualitative aspects of things in addition to their quantitative sides. Above all, the sense of the sacred in everything, of something bigger than our trivial selves, still pervaded the cultural landscape of the city. There was more authentic religion, both understood and especially practiced and lived, and less pretentious, toxic religiosity. The values have been reversed now; an inversion has taken place.
Based on such notions of identity and community, Quetta was a sane society then. One’s identity was not merely an extension of one’s ego yearning for worldly gains, an ego ceaselessly engaged in the cost benefit analysis of the crassest type, but it was a notion of self that was embedded within a system of concentric circles each of which was a rich layer of identity. There was an awareness and respect for the perennial Golden Rules such as, what we do to others we cannot but invite the same upon ourselves; or, what we do to our own, we cannot but invite others to do the same to us; and, do unto others what you want done to you by others. These were all the constituent principles of the code of life shared by all the communities of old Quetta, something which I have been calling Quattawali in these articles.
In this age of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and especially TikTok (the newest and the deepest of the chambers of cyber/digital hell!) things have radically changed. People now still have fluid and complicated identities, but of a totally different type. These identities that many wear like masks and badges nowadays are the readily available avatars on the Internet. These are the plug and play, the use and discard type of identities available for download and upload on the innumerable digital platforms. In the wake of collapse of real communities of real people, and in the absence of nuanced and historically informed notions of identity, these one dimensional, disoriented, atomized individuals who populate the cyber “communities” and social media networks with their ever changing disposable identity labels, are like floating weeds. They can be easily pushed and pulled in any direction by the manipulative entrepreneurs, the psychopathic merchants of the new attention economy, and the captains of the “perception management” industries. These zero-empathy, psychopathic gurus of the capitalist corporate world are people who subtly and invisibly “govern us, control and mold our minds, form our tastes and suggest our ideas” without our knowledge as the father of modern propaganda, Edward Barnays, wrote a century ago.
In short, in old Quetta, people were often contented and secure in their skins. Time moved slowly and humanely without making everybody its prisoner; thought and speech had quality and gravity, and when there was no speech, the silences were rich, meaningful and pregnant with the sublime; the old zeitgeist valued self-effacement and humility, not vulgar exhibitionism and toxic narcissism; feelings were profound yet subdued and often sincere; relationships had depth, were cultivated and rooted in communal soil and nurtured carefully with age-old virtues. One’s identity and self-respect were not dependent on the demonization of the other as “kaffir” or “traitor”, or on the number of “likes” or “followers” on the anti-social digital wastelands euphemistically called "social media", but on the ineffable, on perennial iqdaar (values), some of which I have listed in these articles on Quettawali.
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