5. Cold War Baroque: Saints and Icons

Imperial Theology

The proposition that most political concepts are really secularized theological concepts has come close to attaining the status of intellectual doxa.¹ I am not interested in ascertaining, or disproving, the truth of this formula. Although one might suggest, by way of simple counterweight, that an equally accurate way of characterizing the same history of political thought is that all theological concepts are simply political concepts with metaphysical flourishes adapted to the historical necessities of their moments of production. Most concepts, conceived as political by such an intellectual history, are ideas of how to establish sovereignty—man’s or God’s—over the web of earthly social relations; that is, they are philosophical responses to the dilemma of establishing the grounds of human authority over other humans, the earth, the universe itself.

Syed Qutb, perhaps the most complexly important thinker for the contemporary moment, recognizes this. In Milestones he is insistent that submission to God’s sovereignty is a means to freedom of man from man-made laws.² In that text, the moment when this notion turns on itself is when it becomes clear that the sovereignty said to be God’s is to be claimed by the purified subject, who has submitted properly to God. Only upon the achievement of such purification can God’s laws be implemented. In such a case, even when sovereignty is claimed not to be man’s, it reveals itself to be in search of a purified vessel for its eventual proper expression. Qutb’s repudiation of man’s sovereignty seems to be a claim for man’s sovereignty after all, but it is attained through an ostensible self-emptying made available through a moral program. For Qutb, the theological is indeed fully political, and the political produced through a combination of a critique of Marxism, nationalism, and all human impurity and ignorance. The latter comes in Milestones, with a complete rejection of fourteen hundred years of Muslim history as all of Muslim culture and society are deemed Jahilya. Purification entails not only the repudiation but also the destruction, indeed the extinction, of Muslim history, Islamicate literature, art, and devotional practice, in other words, of all of Islamicate and Muslim lifeworlds. Qutb’s rejection of history is a form of claiming sovereignty through a return to an originary moment of embattlement, one that paradoxically erases more than a thousand intervening years of power, and extraordinary cultural production, a range of societies, and, it must be emphasized, social collectivities.³

Nonetheless, whichever way one tilts in the priority one gives to the theological or the political, that is, whether one decides that most political concepts are secularized theological concepts or most theological concepts are political concepts with metaphysics added, it is clear that contemporary discussions of politcs and secularism have been particularly interested in the surreptitious operations of theology in the most secular-seeming spaces.⁴ The interest of these various interpretations of political theology lies chiefly in their exposure of the ostensible delusions of secularism, that is, in their outing of its false and fallen consciousness.

The emphasis on exposing secularism in the cause of making its mystificatory theologies visible has had the effect of obscuring a convergence that I call imperial theology: the nexus of American, varieties of third world nationalist or postcolonial praetorian, and Saudi Arabian anticommunism, and the cultivation by these convergent groups and agents of iconoclastic and antiaesthetic brands of Islam.⁵ In the post–September 11, 2001, wars, it is this convergence that has turned in upon itself, producing religio-political effects that can only be understood locally when the global investments in the production of local religion are reconfigured and mapped. In the Afghan-Pakistani contexts, this promotion of an imperial theology and the subsequent implosion of the alliances that produced it have resulted, in turn, in what I am calling a baroque moment—a moment of involution, of a history that is collapsing in on itself, where the realignments of power and religion are producing aesthetic responses that share features of the historical Baroque: ornateness (even ornate floridity), a profound preoccupation with endlessly layered religious ideas and devotional and theological aesthetics, a preoccupation with the torn and suffering body, an attempt to expose the layers of the intricate historical webs of the present through a play on and multiple uses, sometimes ironic or comic, of theological ideas and varieties of iconicism. Moreover, in literary narratives this encounter between theology and Cold War politics has generated a fascination with the figure of the spy, the double agent, the soldier and brutalizing policeman, of the (often defeated) communist and, of course, the conservative Islamist, but also of the poet, the painter, and the aesthete. The works that comprise this formation seem profoundly antitheodicean even if there is a certain grimly amused use of a narrative structure that may almost seem (parodically) providential in a work such as Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, which I discuss at some length below.⁶ The most striking element of this formation is its explicit use of icons and theological and devotional aesthetics in the service of complexly secular visions.

The literature on the Baroque is vast, much of it sparked, as is well known, by Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque (1888).⁷ The traits I associate with the baroque can be found listed in Rene Wellek’s compendium of scholarship on the term in “The Concept of the Baroque.”⁸ My conception could be said to be present in a series attributions of the Baroque but reflects my own perception of characteristics important to the moment and formation I am describing. Cold War Baroque is not seventeenth-century Baroque. It does, however, share certain formal tendencies and, perhaps more significant, signals a longer political durée marked by the ongoing problematic of the restructuring of religion—and the relationship of that reconfiguration with the problem of the nation-state and the status of citizenship and minority—in modernity.⁹

There is a certain historical irony in the association of the Baroque with the Counter-Reformation. For in the contemporary moment the rise of Protestant power and, in the case of the United States, a Protestant empire’s cultivation of scripturalist and iconoclastic varieties of Islam has produced a secular aesthetic formation, which heavily utilizes icons, and resonates with the “Counter-Reformation” because it opposes the machinations of a Protestant empire whose very existence and consolidation is a post-Reformation effect. Insofar as the collection of aesthetic practices I describe oppose the effects of a successful Protestant empire, they are, of course, “countering” an aspect of the Reformation, or more precisely of its afterlife, and yet, because of shifts in power over time, these aesthetic practices are far removed from the sphere of the political power available to the historical Counter-Reformation. This is not to downplay the effect of the Counter-Reformation but rather to note the importance of the shifts of the balance of power within Christendom. What I am describing is not a derivative formation but instead a grounded, dialogical one that responds to immanent features of the new theology and a historical geopolitics by putting the iconographic registers of the Baroque to highly inverted secular use. Although the formation I am describing is fully engaged with politics and both new and old histories, the set of practices of representation of which it is comprised are not in any narrow way simply “reflective” of politics or history. Instead, following T. J. Clark, I would argue that these practices have a certain “cognitive power,” that they have something to tell us which exceeds mere illustration.¹⁰ In fact, these are a set of emergent practices that recognize and organize a history and a series of political, institutional, theological, and fundamentally social transformations that are yet to be named and theorized. At the same time, these practices participate in those very transformations not only revealing their complexity, but actively complicating them. This formation demands, moreover, a renewed attention to the capacities for critique and contest within aesthetic practice.

The revival of academic interest in the Baroque under the rubric of the neobaroque is a welcome reminder of the continuities between the historical Baroque and visual and literary forms in the Americas, where the aesthetic forms of the Empire have been further subjected to indigenization and themselves been transformed in the process.¹¹ The form of the Baroque I am interested in here provides a further fold in the question of the Baroque in the present. Unlike the Latin American situation, its point of departure is a Protestant empire. Moreover, what interests me in this context is its explicit engagement with theological confrontations in Muslim-majority societies and disaporic contexts. Yet the space of direct contact with the Latin American neobaroque is the global Anglophone novel and the influence of the Latin American practitioners of the Marvelous Real upon it. The most visible name in this carrying over is, of course, Salman Rushdie, on whom the influence of Latin American fiction is well known and whose own influence on the career of the global Anglophone novel is hard to overstate.

In A Case of Exploding Mangoes, his satirical conspiracy novel about Zia-ul-Haq’s death and his collusion with the United States during the 1980s, the period widely thought to have decisively secured the transformation of the political and cultural landscape of Pakistan, Mohammed Hanif, perhaps the most unsentimental Anglophone Pakistani novelist and a fierce moral intelligence, writes: “In the name of God, God was exiled from the land and replaced by the one and only Allah” (CM, 42).This follows a long list of God’s names and the places from which they were removed, as if the full extent of the erasure of culture under Zia can only be registered by a relentless recuperating list of the expunged alternatives:

All God’s names were slowly deleted from the national memory, as if a wind had swept the land and blown them away. Innocuous, intimate names: Persian Khuda, which had been handy for ghazal poets, as it rhymed with most of the operative verbs; Rab, which poor people invoked in their hour of distress; Maula, which the Sufis shouted in their hashish sessions. Allah had given himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more. But all these names slowly started to disappear—from official stationery, from Friday sermons, from newspaper editorials, from mother’s prayers, from greeting cards, from official memos, from the lips of television quiz-show hosts. From children’s storybooks, from lovers’ songs, from court orders, from telephone operators’ greetings, from habeas corpus applications, from interschool debating competitions, from road inauguration speeches, from memorial services, from cricket players’ curses, and even from beggars’ begging pleas. (CM, 42)

“Deleted” insists on the agency behind the erasure. As Hanif presents it, there is something systematic here: an editorial project of culture, executed through the control of language and, more significantly, through an attempted transformation of forms of devotion—forms fully entangled with the most ordinary actions and objects of life. Hanif is aware that the historical turn to what is perceived as a purified and authentic Islam is connected to what is presented and perceived as a turn to a “pure” Arabic mode, which, in turn, ahistorically figures Arab as Saudi and theologically aligned with Wahhabism. In the novel the deletion of the local lifeworlds—first presented as the erasure of names and thus the gouging out of inscriptions of a local language—is fundamentally linked to Zia’s consolidation of his power after the coup in which Bhutto was deposed and the Cold War machinations that were the cause for the American presence in the region.¹²

Hanif figures the destruction of these alternatives as part of a complex interaction between regional and local understandings of religion. Many of the erased alternatives are local names of God, pervasive in utterance, poetry, music, Sufi practice, and shrine culture, permeating the most mundane practices of daily life. The paradox is that the disenchantment of daily life is an effect of a particular brand of a militaristically mandated, regionally (by Saudi Arabia) and globally (farther afield—by the United States) supported version of religion.

“Cold War Baroque” is then an apt rubric for the responses that try to map, organize, reveal, and critique the history of these deletions and that, in their narrative version, write a cast of spies, soldiers, torturers and the tortured, military leaders, religious fighters, communists, and right-wing Islamist militants, responses that at the same time try to undo these expurgations, foregrounding and using that which has been targeted for “deletion.” The political history that enabled these deletions has itself been redacted, and many of these responses attempt to recuperate that history as well, employing ingenious variations on historical fiction with a variety of aesthetic and narrative devices associated with magical realism and devotional poetry while calling upon genres such as spy novels, thrillers, canonization narratives, even rape revenge stories.

The point has been made regarding Rushdie that in South Asia his books were read as history. It bears repeating. That postcolonial studies achieved ascendancy in a moment when high antihumanism and antifoundationalism were—and continue to be—institutionally powerful, forming the “spontaneous philosophy” of the humanities and social sciences, has meant that the very active political engagements of a great deal of postcolonial literature have been defanged and domesticated to conceptually curtailed effect.¹³ The aesthetic practices I describe here cannot be recognized in their complex articulations if their capacity for critique and their social and political interventions are underplayed in the ostensible service of epistemological sophistication. What the literature I am describing has in common is an attempt to produce histories of the destructive effects of Cold War theologies through fictional phenomenologies. The point is not at all that what is produced is conventional history—although, of course, that, too, is a contestable category—neither does it invite an interpretive literalism seeking meticulous correspondences between verifiable events and those presented in the texts but rather that the achievement of critique ought to be recognized. It is, indeed, in the critique and through the formal devices used to enable that critique that history is produced.

In Hanif’s novel, the protagonist—a soldier who is tortured and is enlisted into being a coconspirator in the murder of the military leader—and the ISI colonel, named after the current head of the military, Kayani, who turns him, are strange emblems of the hidden history of the enterprise of imperial theology and the Cold War clientelism that was one of its sustaining mechanisms. A theology that was, moreover, supported and promulgated by an imperial network, which also operated through what has is some circles come to be known, with the awe that a blurring between the world of pulp thrillers and political reality needs must induce, one of the largest covert operations in history.¹⁴

In literary narratives, Aslam and Hanif clarify the shape of this formation, which is evident in Aslam’s novels (which I will discuss in the next chapter) in a poetics of hyper-aestheticism and sentimental excess, a complex substructure of Sufi thought and aesthetic practice, and a relentless proximity between exaggerated, grotesque, and almost unbearably violent imagery and images of powerful, wrenching beauty. Hanif’s voice is more unsentimental, less ornate, but equally relentless in its recuperation of these hidden histories and in its complex engagement with theological aesthetics (especially, as we shall see, in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti), and even through a fairly straightforward use of magical realism in A Case of Exploding Mangoes.¹⁵

As my invocation of the Baroque suggests, the formation crosses aesthetic media. Perhaps the most visually striking examples can be found in the work of a young painter, Komail Aijazuddin, who in early 2012 exhibited a series of “altarpieces.”¹⁶ Aijazuddin’s very deliberate use of iconography associated with Christianity, and especially Catholicism, to present themes from Shia narratives, and the martyrdom of Husain at Karbala is of deep theo-political significance. For it is an assemblage that brings together the fragments of religious practices and minoritarian faiths that have been systematically marginalized over the course of the national history he engages but which were particularly shattered under the reign of Zia-ul-Haq.

The altarpieces both attempt to recuperate increasingly marginalized, though continuously lived, Shia practices and stories and explicitly link them to Christian practice, by way of the conceit of the altarpiece. The conceit is historically multiple: even as it draws on an aesthetic history from a tradition from within Western Christianity, it links the Christians with Shias through an implied context of minority. The altarpieces tend to be around two and a half by three feet and are meant to be like those used in private chapels. The private devotion implied by the scale resonates with an ongoing practice in South Asian Shia homes, particularly in Karachi, of having small imambargahs (spaces for Shia commemoration, especially during Muharram) in the house, which are often only used during the first ten days of Muharram. That an altarpiece can be shut, and the iconography thus hidden, is significant. For instead of signaling, as it might in a different context, a special sanctity reserved for particular occasions, in this case it suggests that the images can be quickly hidden should the need arise. The hands painted on many of the altarpieces are, of course, the standard icons of Shia practice, the alams—the hand of Fatima—which can be found in imambargahs with heavily worked pennants hanging from them, suggesting the standards carried into battle by Husain and his followers. That they are on the outside of the altarpieces reveals the defiant use of an icon of Shia protest. Turned horizontally, as Aijazuddin occasionally presents them, they become icons of the Sephardic Jews. This blurring of the lines between the Abrahamic religions is part of Aijazuddin’s ongoing practice—a blurring that is both dissident and historically restorative insofar as it seeks to make visible and thus produce a perception of shared parts of the Abrahamic theological traditions and cultural practices and icons, a perception that in its engagement with the historical materiality of present-day Pakistan acts as a form of historical reorientation.

For Aijazuddin, the story of Karbala, and the embattled group of seventy-two, facing a much more powerful army, is also increasingly the story of secular embattlement in Pakistan.¹⁷ Aijazuddin, who studied in the United States, has said that his position has changed since he moved back to Pakistan. At first, he had intended merely to find ways to figure the Shia narratives within a frame of marginalized religious practice; he shifted to seeing the Karbala narrative as also analogous with the plight of a secular, aesthetically inclined position, one that can draw on these stories and their devotional and theological import to insist on the history, often aesthetic, with which they have been so profoundly interwoven—a history that includes Urdu literary genres, like the marsiya, written by poets as canonical as Mir Anis.¹⁸ It is perhaps unsurprising that it is Aijazuddin’s move back to Pakistan that makes him more insistent about the threat to forms of secularism. At the same time it must be emphasized that his version of secularism is not anathema to religious practice or religious lifeworlds. After the assassination of a Shia doctor and his young son, it is with great attachment to Shia religious narratives and practice that, in his persona as the gossipy newspaper columnist Fayes T. Kantawala, he wrote: “The protest had the air of a majlis about it, of the Shia dirge and elegy. It occurred to me that a full-on procession of people doing maatam [flagellation] in front of governor’s House was as good an expression as any of collective outrage and grief.” Even more powerfully in another column he had a few months earlier identified the current plight of Shias in Pakistan with the tragedy at Karbala:

A war has been declared on Shias. They-we-are being picked out and killed all over the country. Muharram isn’t over yet—not at the time of submission of this piece, God help us all—and already we’ve suffered three terrifying attacks on gatherings.

That we, the Shias of Pakistan, have now entered our own Karbala here is more than a little ironic.

When you see us march and hear us wail this week, know that we do it not only to protest the assault on our icons, but also the one on ourselves.¹⁹

It is not surprising, then, that the tenderness regarding some of these religious narratives and practices is evident in the altarpieces. One of Aijazuddin’s most powerful altarpieces, The First Majlis (Fig. 4), tries to imagine and figure the first commemoration of Husain’s death. Each panel of the triptych figures a different type of remembrance of Husain’s martyrdom. In one side panel a young man walks on burning embers, watched and helped along by his fellow mourners, in a practice known as āg kā mātam, or flagellation on fire.

In the other side panel, young men flagellate themselves in unison in a representation of the practice of mātam while the standard reaches into a dark and angry sky. The central panel presents a vision of women keeping each other company while listening to the tale of martyrdom, within an encroaching darkness, which seems ready to engulf. The sky in the background is mottled and brown, suggesting a tumultuous mourning. The landscape, itself tormented and in upheaval, seems to threaten the assembled women, while the tree looks ready to slide down the side of the mountain, away from the women but yet as if it cannot bear to stay rooted.

The vision is of a sociality structured by mourning, and, in the side panels, by a deep, angrily inconsolable grief and by commemoration. The painting frames people tending to each other in mourning, as suggested by the man helping the younger man walk on fire in the left panel, young men self-flagellating in passionate unison in the right panel, and women sitting together sharing the story of the martyrdom in the central panel. It is a grief in which the earth itself, darkened, twisted, and in turmoil, participates. Such a vision needs must resonate with contemporary South Asian Shia devotional practice in the months of Muharram, when men and women attend several of these gatherings daily, especially women who can attend as many as four or more in a day, thus forming the community through participation in practices of remembrance. The darkness of the painting and the utterly bleak mood it evokes could well suggest a contemporary majlis on ‘Āshūrah, except that the women, and the men in the side panels, are exposed to the threatening elements in a way that they would not be in present-day Pakistan. But, by dressing the men in Pakistani clothing, Aijazuddin makes the very earliest commemoration a South Asian act. Significantly, instead of Arabizing South Asian Shia culture he makes an Arab scene South Asian, thus laying a local claim to this inceptionary moment in Muslim history.

In another painting, Pieta (Fig. 5), which figures a dead son in a mother’s arms but which is meant to imagine Husain’s death within this frame, Aijazuddin again explicitly brings together Shia and Christian stories but this time in an interpretation of a Byzantine icon replete with a gold background. The figures in red acrylic and graphite and the scale add the modern element in the painting. The colors and the angle of the male body along with the mother’s set expression, as in numerous variations on the Pietà, present a vision of the commingling of patience and suffering in mourning. The suffering mother represents the historical wrong represented by the death of a child, which is often explicitly figured in the presentations of the idea of Fatima’s suffering, had she witnessed the events at Karbala, in many a nauḥa and marsiya.

Set alongside The First Majlis and Pieta the other forms of remembrance of the multiple genealogies of South Asian culture in Aijazuddin’s work acquire the weight of commemorative mourning, a mourning that, in this case, keeps the memory of injustice alive through the reworking of practices of commemoration from Shia martyrology, evoking the importance of the element of protest in Shia thought and practice that Hamid Dabashi has discussed in Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest.²⁰

Contrapasso Fictions

In a series of paintings of Zia, Aijazuddin’s complex use of icons and iconography continues in less historically familiar and transparent forms. The paintings are imbued with an aesthetics of accusation and judgment. They challenge the viewer to remember, and to judge in the remembrance. If the altarpieces tend to make use of compositions from late Renaissance triptychs, if they use, consciously citing, the dark colors and exaggerated movement of line in body, fabric, and gesture of Baroque and Mannerist painting, the Zia paintings seem more contemporary in conception and composition. In each one of the four-by-four-foot paintings the much larger than life head of Zia in the background gives the impression of a paradoxically presiding spectral presence; that is, what strikes is that despite the disembodied, shadelike execution of the portrait in graphite, the figure seems powerful and strangely, emphatically present. The red acrylic wash recalls Shakir Ali’s work by which Aijazuddin was surrounded growing up, since his family owns a number of his paintings, and, at the same time, makes the paintings seem bathed in blood. In each painting, the figures that are arranged on and around Zia’s face complete what I can only call, blurring visual and written text, the compositional narrative. These paintings contribute to a national archive by adding their own (fragmented) narrative, even as they rely on historical stories that may not always be intelligible to their (nationally and confessionally multiple) audiences.

The Accusation (Fig. 6) pictures an astonishing fantasy of revenge imagined from the perspective of those marginalized by Zia’s religious politics. The striking figure of a man in a shalwar kameez, holding up a Shia standard, with his feet on Zia’s face, is meant to be Husain; and the painting is Husain’s judgment, rendered in response to the accusation of the people affected by Zia’s injustice. Husain’s clothing makes him a local figure, quietly reversing the antilocalism of Zia’s Saudi-facing and U.S.-backed politics. Zia’s rather spectral portrait seems drawn within the painting on a monumental slab of unidentifiable stone, looking onto a scene of claustrophobic tumult. The figures arrayed below form a group in turmoil and disarray, full of pain, two dead bodies scattered across, fleeing and also seeking. In their midst is the figure of the woman who points accusingly at the face. The man who seems to be reaching to touch the face turns the face itself into an iconic object of veneration. The figures in the foreground on the right seem a little adrift. In the group on the left some are in conflict and one is collapsed, two are turned away from the face as if they cannot bear the sight. All are close to the face, as if encircling it in hell.

The painting puts different kinds of icons and valences of iconicity at play, contrasting Zia’s status with Husain’s, thus revealing Zia’s lesser claim. This is rather unequivocally evident in the representation of the figure of Husain carrying the icon, calling upon the associations of protest, martyrdom, and commitment to justice the standard-bearing figure encodes. The painting, along with the series in which it occurs, could well be called “Nation and Icon” for it figures Zia as iconic, to at least some in the nation, even as to others he is a reviled figure only to be accused. In accord with these postures of accusation, the painting turns the heroic figure of Husain—carrying the most powerful icon, the alam, of a religious minority, rising out of this scene of misery and rage—against him in retribution as he stands with his feet and alam firmly planted in Zia’s face. The figure of Husain is to rescue the nation afflicted by Zia. If one of Zia’s projects was to permeate the nation with a Wahhabi-inspired Islam hostile to Shi’ism, Aijazuddin turns the emblematic figure of Shia heroism into the agent of Zia’s punishment.

The Flagellation (Fig. 7) reaches into a photographic archive to render its judgment. There are fewer figures and less movement in it, yet the painting is even more disturbing. Positioned at an angle in the front right foreground is a man tied to wooden beams, which form a cross, being flogged by a policeman. The two policemen behind are closer to Zia’s face. One seems almost to be carrying a book of laws or rules. It appears official, and he officious. The three policemen and the man being flogged seem more embodied as, unlike the silhouettes in The Accusation, they are painted in oils—almost as if in this blood-bathed environment only the torturer and the tortured can be given their fully embodied form. The representation of the flogging is based on a photograph taken after the Hudood ordinances were put into effect by Zia-ul-Haq.²¹ By rendering a scene from a newspaper photograph the painting declares a certain documentary, even newslike impulse. And yet the painting’s relation with its own mimetic impulses is more complex. It chooses to frame the rendering of that photograph within a larger set of relations. To translate Lukacs’s thought about realism in the novel, one might say that its complicated realism lies in that it represents the relations between the event, those who make it possible by being the petty bureaucrats (the police) who serve the apparatus implementing the law, and the authorizing figure of Zia, who imposes, one might even say “authors,” the law.²²

Aijazuddin produces a representation of a structure of relations by combining portraiture and a mimetic rendering of a scene first framed in a photograph, and through an alignment of painting with photography, in what is a distinctly modern composition in which these genres are mixed, and yet at the same time subverting any easy association with a simple secularism by inviting a reflection on the genealogies of flagellation and flogging within Christian art and traditions and their intersection with Muslim theology and practice. The realism itself symbolizes and embraces a project of witness that demands the consolidation and memorialization of an archive of atrocity. The crosslike disposition of the beams links the Hudood Ordinances to the blasphemy laws, in which Christians have been disproportionately targeted. Together the Hudood Ordinances and the blasphemy laws—attempts to implement “Sharia” in Pakistan and put in place by an unelected military dictator—might be said to have provided the seal on the project of the religious right.

The title of the painting invites us to think of the minions of the militaristic state, the police in this case, as the praetorian guard flogging an innocent blasphemer, a Christic figure in working-class—as the nonstarched, unpristine shalwar kameez he is wearing indicates—Pakistani guise.²³ The title opens a formal history that enables a host of meanings and creates multiple associations whose semiotic work comes through an interaction between the image confronting us and a series of other images the name of the painting calls up. One need not assert the priority of language as a semiotic form to understand these associations; the cross within the painting refers back to so many other crosses and floggings. Yet the semiotic importance of language in these paintings is evident in Ajazuddin’s decision to name this one Flagellation within a scene from a Pakistani context. Calling on the feature of icons that relies on the interplay between word and image, the name encourages an openness to linguistic association as well. The opening up of a connection between the Roman Imperial Guard and the militaristic apparatus—of which Zia was a product and which he did much to strengthen, through a linguistic transfer in “praetorian”—is precisely such an association. Though the word praetorian is not used, it is implied by the iconographic tradition made available by the titular reference to “flagellation.” At the same time, this flagellation is at some distance from the Shia practices of self-flagellation Aijazuddin represents in his altarpiece. Those commemorate the unjust infliction of pain by the powerful, and pressure the national narrative from another perspective. A certain claim to national exception and historical distinction—predicated on the erasure of a variety of confessional histories—is undermined by the historical associations of praetorianism. The history of such iconography challenges the coherence of the nation’s separateness, even indeed of the national religion’s distinction.

Aijazuddin’s is a vision that seeks both to accuse and to solidify an archive of an erased regional history and a shattered polity, haunted by Zia’s specter. His commitment to figural representation, his tendency to opt for a certain bodily realism, is of a piece with the impulse to both render and consolidate this historical archive. At the same time, his use of a variety of iconic objects provides elements of judgment and allows for a certain fantasy of justice, even supernaturally rendered, to be a part of the fiction of the paintings. Yet this vision of retribution is antiprovidential. It cannot provide a narrative of redemption; it can only remember and imagine justice in the form of commemoration and, in the figure of Husain and his pennant, a mythic moment of vanquishment, for, from Aijazuddin’s point of view, Husain’s story is yet no evidence of divinity.

This encoding of a fictional wreaking of justice is also part of the generic frame and governing conceit of A Case of Exploding Mangoes, which can be characterized as both a satirical whodunit about Zia’s death and as a variation on a rape revenge narrative. For although the novel’s brutal yet hilarious fiction is that many of the characters desired, plotted, and had the opportunity to kill Zia, it is in the end the curse of blind Zainab, the woman accused under the ghastly Hudood Ordinances—more particularly the Zina laws—that propels the crow that destroys the plane carrying Zia. Although Zia is not the rapist, his laws are the reason that Zainab is imprisoned for being raped, since according to them she requires four Muslim male witnesses to prove that a rape has occurred. Because she is pregnant, in the absence of such witness, she is judged guilty of fornication. Gang-raped but in prison for fornication because her pregnancy is evidence of intercourse, Zainab is one Zia’s most injured victims, multiply raped and then further brutalized by profoundly unjust and arbitrary laws. So important is her story that it seems that Noor’s mother in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti might indeed be the same character.

Hanif figures Zainab’s curse as the curse of the nation. For, on the novel’s terms, Zia is the absent Muslim male witness who should be providing justice. That he ought to be a witness to the suffering of the people without whose consent he has chosen to govern is also how he understands his own duties, which is why, in one of the many hilarious episodes in the book, he wishes to go out like Haroun Al-Rashid, disguised as an ordinary man, seeking to see how content people are with his rule. That he is unaware of the hostility and contempt in which much of the citizenry holds him is simply an extension of the nonconsensual violence of his rule; it is also what exposes the delusions that he is loved by “his” people, that he has fulfilled his duty to the citizenry he has transformed willy-nilly into his subjects, and that his rule is an expression of God’s sovereignty on earth.

The magical realist device of Zainab’s curse is used to present a fiction of retributive, divinely facilitated, justice. The curse works alongside an inexorable sense dogging Zia that something terrible is likely to happen to him. Zia lives in a world of omens and portents, which he derives from his readings of the Qur’an. Although, as the novel tells us, he is aware, with the kind of consciousness an acolyte might have, that this practice would not meet with Maududi’s approval:

He had read enough Muadudi [sic] to know that the Quran wasn’t a book of omens, to be used in worldly affairs, but like a child taking a peek at his surprise birthday presents, Genera Zia couldn’t resist the temptation.

What is a lone man standing at the crossroads of history to do? (CM, 34)

Presenting Zia as so deluded as to appear a buffoon is part of the novel’s structure of revenge. He imagines himself as an embattled savior—banalized in modern terms almost into a hero from a cowboy movie—although he is in fact an affliction to the nation and its citizens, and a disposable and disappointing prophet to the God he thinks he serves. Zia’s sense that he might be destined for a fate like Jonah’s, swallowed by the whale, turns out to be true within the fiction. But, unlike Jonah, he is not expelled. He simply dies with the exploding aircraft. The fear of Jonah’s fate comes to him in one of his morning readings of the Qur’an when “his finger hesitated on verse 21:87 of the Quran” (CM, 30). Although he would spend the next two months and two days “dreaming about the innards of a whale,” the rejoicing nation, the narrator tells us, was never to know that “General Zia’s journey towards death had started over the slight confusion he experienced over the translation of a verse on a fateful day” (CM, 30).

As in Aijazuddin’s Accusation, it is as fitting as any Dantean contrapasso that the punishment Zia experiences is borne across by a curse, and that he dies in the exploding belly of a military aircraft. His fear of the portent turns out to be justified, but that justification figures him, within his own metaphysical world, as a false and inadequate prophet. For, on the terms of Jonah’s parable, he should have been spat out alive. It is yet another one of the novel’s jokes that the portent turns out to be accurately ominous, and that the decisions Zia makes as a result of an anxiety about a confusion over Qur’anic interpretation turn out to ensure the very outcome he fears. His terror of divine abandonment and his fear of being left alone in the belly of the whale are met with the punishment reserved for the sinner who cannot be forgiven for having failed his people, for his prayers will not work. It is even more significant that the crime that involves assaulting the nation in the service of establishing a particular version of Islam should have its punishment begun in a confusion over scriptural interpretation, and even more specifically, Arabic translation. Zia’s project was to produce a population infused with a particular kind of piety through the implementation of punitive laws; his death is effected in the supernatural operations of the curse of one of his most innocent victims, a curse that confirms his—on his own hero, Mawdudi’s, terms—theologically inappropriate reading of the Qur’anic verse as a portent. Iftikhar Dadi has written of contemporary artistic practice in Pakistan that it is “beginning to look at discursive and scripturalist Islam . . . as a subject for complex artistic interrogation.”²⁴ One can see such an interrogation of scripturalism in Hanif’s work as well.

Spanning the two months leading up to Zia’s death, the novel is temporally compact, but Hanif manages, through some very concentrated references, to critically usher in a longer national history. An exemplary moment occurs in the scene where Zia launches the attack on names other than Allah for God. Hanif presents Zia as both cleverly opportunistic in his manipulative use of religion and a zealot. In his first meeting with the top brass of the military he uses religion to wrongfoot the mostly secular, whiskey-swilling generals. Once he is done with what is a brilliant establishment of his authority after the coup in which Z. A. Bhutto was deposed, the novel reports the thoughts of his generals. They run the gamut from “He really makes sense. How come I didn’t think of it before?” and “I am going to prohibit the word God at home” to “A country that thinks it was created by God has finally found what it deserves: a blabbering idiot who thinks he has been chosen by Allah to clear his name” (CM, 39–41; Hanif’s italics). Even as Hanif incorporates a range of responses, in keeping with the novel’s sustained attempt to crumble the Islamically monolithic Pakistan Zia sought to create, he manages to refer back to a strand of Muslim nationalism that imagines the nation as representing God’s sovereignty, and thus as the achievement of divine intervention. In the scene, the venality, ingratiation, and hypocrisy of these wielders of national power work against the fantasy of being a conduit of divine sovereignty Hanif’s allusion summons.

The very multiplicity of Hanif’s farce, its determined attention to the comic banalities of everyday life in Pakistan in the 1980s—references to soldiers performing karaoke to George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” people watching Dallas, wearing Levis manufactured for export, using “fake” Poison—reveals a commitment to producing a nonorientalized vision in his novels, one in which the representation of the sheer banality of contemporary life, of the cultural litter of modernity shatters a fantasy of being frozen in an aesthetic past while producing a critical fiction about an assault on aspects of that past. It is a demand, in other words, to attend to the present in its diurnal fullness without hagiographic sentimentalism.

At stake, of course, is also what has been done to that past, and some of the ways it is being used in the present. Under-officer Shigri is taken to the Lahore fort, built long ago by Mughals, to be tortured. The history of the fort, and its present, militates against any sentimental recuperation; as he crawls around in the dark, he is sardonically appreciative of the Mughal ability to build dungeons: “It’s the kind of darkness that is ancient, manufactured by the sadistic imagination of the Mughals. Those buggers might have lost their empire, but they knew how to build dungeons” (CM, 136). Shigri has no idea of the more modern history of the fort, which was notorious for a long time as a place of torture. Although the novel doesn’t tell us of that history except in the very elliptical reference in the thought Shigri has while in another cell in another location, “Who the fuck quotes poetry in prison unless they’re a communist or a poet?” The fort is the place where Hasan Nasir the communist is said to have been tortured to death. Nasir’s murder was the occasion on which Faiz, himself both imprisoned communist and poet, wrote “Khatm hū’ī bārish-e sang” (The Rain of Stones Has Ended).²⁵ The reference evokes the history of the struggles of the communists who resisted the various regimes, which were not always religious. The Ayub Khan regime invoked here was secular and was seen as creating a model developed modern nation. The role of writers and poets in progressive struggles in South Asia and more particularly in Pakistan is well known, yet attempts at suppressing them and the knowledge they produced are ongoing.²⁶ The suppression is continuous with the hiding of the role of both secular and religious militarism in the destruction of political processes and, perhaps even more damaging, of forms of sociality in Pakistan.

Hanif repeatedly constructs a critique of political institutions through the production of a fictional history of the institutions of state the novel satirizes. It is a complex form of fiction, which seeks to produce a historical narrative by imagining a hidden history. The subplot of Under-officer Shigri’s confinement and torture in the fort imagines the military devouring itself, visiting upon one of its own a practice of counterinsurgency it has usually appeared to reserve for the civilian population. Indeed, historically the military’s attitude toward this population could be described as one of permanent counterinsurgency, a form of governance, which has involved the manipulation and exacerbation of sectarian and ethnic tensions that have fragmented myriad historical forms of social life. The military’s nationalism has continued and sustained colonial and imperial policies rather than reversing them. Writers and intellectuals such as Hanif, Nadeem Aslam, Ayesha Siddiqa, Zia Mian, and Pervez Hoodhbhoy are producing a growing body of work chronicling and critiquing its role, including quite specifically of secret service machinations.²⁷

To use Fredric Jameson’s very useful term here, Hanif has produced a cognitive map of a hidden history usually only understood or even referred to in conspiracy theories, political rumor, or, occasionally, the personal testimony of those who dare survive.²⁸ Shigri’s entry into and subsequent imprisonment in the fort is also an encounter with this history (and present), an encounter that results in a cognitive remapping of his understanding of the nation he has chosen to “serve,” of the military in which he has chosen to do so, and of the nation’s vision of that military. In keeping with the references to Levis and Dallas, and “Careless Whisper,” that is, with the attention to the banalities of everyday life, Hanif presents Shigri’s approach to the fort in Kayani’s custody, juxtaposing historical grandeur with mass production and modern consumption, in the anarchically humorous voice of a barely postadolescent male:

In the historic city of Lahore, the fort is a very historic place. It was built by the same guy, who built the Taj Mahal, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. He was thrown into prison by his own son, a kind of forced premature retirement. I have never been to the fort but I have seen it in a shampoo ad.

Do I look like the kind of person who needs a lesson in history at midnight? (CM, 86)

Two paragraphs down the same splendor is juxtaposed with the sinister apparatus of modern militarism: “The only signs of life in this deserted sprawl of useless splendour are two army trucks with their headlights on and engines idling” (CM, 86). At stake in the narrator’s reflections on his approach to the fort is nothing less than the status of postcolonial nationalism. It is hard to overcome the sense that the question, “Do I really need a lesson in history at midnight?,” is an allusion to Midnight’s Children, for if that novel’s governing metaphor imagines an involuted past that leads to the excesses and disappointments of decolonization which culminate in the twin atrocities of the 1971 war, leading to the formation of Bangladesh, and Indira Gandhi’s emergency, Hanif’s novel is no less about the betrayal of the people nationalism’s promise was to liberate, by a governing, in this case, praetorian elite. To turn the fort into a center for the torture of the people within the nation is, of course, to turn the military’s warlike capacities inward; it is also to turn the Muslim past that provides some of the narrative that authorizes, or just authors, the nation against its inhabitants. The splendor of the Mughal past, of the Muslim past, and, by extension, the historical narratives of nationalist glory have been transformed into a backdrop for shampoo ads and army jeeps. A far more sinister conscription is evident in the way that the fort has been turned into a warren of torture cells, which in the novel were built by Colonel Shigri, Under-officer Shigri’s father. Although he has known of his father’s role in the war in Afghanistan (that he “was liasing between the Americans, who were funding the war, and the ISI, which was responsible for distributing these funds to the Mujahideen” [CM, 125]), it is in the fort that Shigri learns of his father’s role in strengthening the apparatuses of torture in the nation and of his participation in the torture of its citizens: “To think that the hands that cradled you also put electrical wires to someone’s testicles is not a very appetizing thought. A shudder of loathing runs through my body” (CM, 160). Mimicking as it does a bodily response that might follow electrocution, the shudder figures what it is to be tormented by the knowledge of what one’s parents have done, more metaphorically, by the knowledge of the genealogy of one’s own social production. Knowledge of truth in such circumstances as those Shigri encounters is a form of torture.

The absurdism, farce, and humor in the novel are part of Hanif’s mechanisms for describing the phenomenological encounter with horrors too difficult to assimilate. The learning of difficult truths, including the contempt in which the civilian population hold the military, continues in the fort even as Shigri’s painful bewilderment is expressed through his recurrent wonder at how the torturers managed to achieve “blood-spattered ceilings.” These features work with the anger, restrained and tightened in Hanif’s work through the very tonalities of farce and comedy, manifest in the fiction of revenge and metaphor of the curse. The cognitive mapping of the secret past of the nation is achieved through a fictional and formal combination that refuses sentimentality and nostalgia in the effort of a historical recovery that cannot, the novel seems to suggest, be effected without judgment. At the same time, the protagonist’s familial and professional complicity in the militaristic apparatus and the imperial—American and Saudi—machinery that has guaranteed, underwritten, and grown it suggests that there is no escape from the genealogical burden of such knowledge. Comedy is a means of exposing such complicity. Combined with narrative structures that foreground and seem even to take a certain glee in revenge, it enables an understanding of the writing of history as a form of judgment, using, as Srinivas Aruvamudan has claimed of G. V. Desani and James Joyce, laughter as an ethical and destabilizing tool.²⁹Comedy in Hanif’s work enables an alienation effect that allows a critical distance from the characters and events. This particular combination of comedy and revenge suggests that literary narrative can have a special aptitude for such an exercise in history without too sentimental and morally paralyzing an empathy.

Murder, Martyrdom, and Canonical Fictions

In Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Hanif’s vision of the Pakistani body politic is presented through a novelistic frame that plays with canonization narratives, an intense engagement with Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous short story “Toba Tek Singh,” and the use of the hospital as a central location for much of the novel’s action. These narrative strategies and tropes are united by the emphasis Hanif places on the body, which, vulnerable to being tortured, diseased, displaced, confined, and loved, quite literally, to death, is both the fundamental site of the nation (what is a nation without the citizen’s body to populate it?) and, in its many orientations, a challenge (can every body be recognized as a citizen?) to that same nation. The body emerges as a locus of social forces and by being so resists any simple vision of the nation and society that claim to represent it. Everywhere in the novel is an attempt to disarticulate the national body politic, necessarily inflected with ideologies of state, from a multiple and varied society—that is, from a social body that demands attention to its many differentiations, indeed from a cluster of bodies that need to be rethought as “social” because of their many differentiations, thus prompting a meditation on the possibility of society in the presence of differentials of power and pervasive injustice. The social body is both body as formed by society and a cluster of bodies that, in their relation to each other, to institutions, discourses, and even to violence, forms a web of relations that, in turn, forms each body.

Hanif’s representation of what I am calling the social body is not merely confined to the framing of a challenge to the nation-state’s construction of its citizenry as an entity that reflects the hegemonic narrative of the nation and its identity. Hanif’s meditation on love in the novel is both entangled with the problem of the nation (what sort of love does it allow between unequal citizens?) and exceeds it as an anti-Platonic philosophical reflection on the way love and the feminine object of love are formed by a society that idealizes women out of their bodies. So that when Teddy Butt encounters the sheer materiality of Alice’s body, of her pubic hair, and of her walking around without her shalwar, he is unable to respond in any way that would signal care or appreciation. The Platonic mystery of love is hard to sustain in the presence of bodies that sweat, bleed, and grow pubic hair, and Hanif is particularly attuned to the violence of the demand that women’s bodies be airbrushed out of existence.

At the same time, Hanif’s representation of the body in society becomes a reflection on the inadequacy of a metaphysics of suffering, more broadly of transcendental narratives, to provide redress or explanation in the world. The body’s encounter with power produces society as permeated with metaphysically authored forms of injustice, which when they do not reinforce injustice and the operations of power, provide nothing by way of relief and are called into question by the worldliness of the social body.

The almost anarchic irony that courses through A Case of Exploding of Mangoes is equally in evidence throughout Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. As deadly in its judgments as Hanif’s first novel, the vision of an economically and socially varied Pakistan, often invisible in narratives that privilege—even if through a negative focus—elites is more central to the structure of this novel than A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Even in that novel the intimation of the desire to engage the social body, so often rendered invisible, is evident in the use of lists, which Hanif uses to stretch the boundaries of the generic frame of the novel, rupturing its refraction through the consciousness of the bourgeois subject and the narrow stylistic focalization such a consciousness invites. As I suggested earlier, the list is also an archival rejoinder to the official production of an Islamized state. Even a truncated version of the page-long list of those held up so that a VIP motorcade can pass in A Case of Exploding Mangoes conveys a sense of Hanif’s effort to incorporate, indeed his demand to look at, the lives that constitute Pakistan—lives, in this scene quite literally, sidelined and stalled by the powerful he satirizes relentlessly in that novel. The motorcade is the modern spectacle of indifferent and occulted—one might think of the dark windows—power; and the clearing of the roads, the holding back of people going about their lives, is Hanif’s metaphor for the cordoning off of the life of the society. The VIP motorcade is increasingly a symbol in Pakistani cultural production of the violence of the political elite and the marginalization of a disparate population, as, for instance, in the music video of “Umeed-e-Sahar” by the pop group, Laal (Red), in which a motorcade holds up a range of vehicles, including an ambulance.³⁰ It is a society that Hanif suggests is rife with ironies brutal (a blind woman escaped from prison who cannot be recognized as anything but a beggar), bleak (a seven-year-old condemned to hawk “dust-covered” chickpeas), and playfully comic (a drunk husband mock-fearfully chewing betel nuts to remove the smell of alcohol):

A teenager anxious to continue his first ride on a Honda 70, a drunk husband ferociously chewing betel nuts to get rid of the smell before he got home, a horse buckling under the weight of too many passengers on the cart, . . . a seven-year-old selling dust-covered chickpeas, an old water carrier hawking water out of a goatskin, . . . a husband and wife returning from a fertility clinic on a motorbike, an illegal Bengali immigrant waiting to sell his kidney so that he could send money back home, a blind woman who had escaped prison in the morning and had spent all day trying to convince people that she was not a beggar[,] . . . a black turbaned truck driver singing a love song about his lover at the top of his voice, a busful of trainee Lady Health visitors headed for their night shift at a government hospital. (CM, 82–83)

The ironic details work against the banalization of social life into the undifferentiated mass of society produced by national narratives that rely on homogenization and on a paradoxically brutal and violent sentimentality for their occlusive political power.

In Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, one of the ways in which Hanif demands attention to this social body is through his rewriting of “Toba Tek Singh,” which occurs perhaps most fundamentally through his use of the hospital as a central location for the novel.³¹ The mental hospital of “Toba Tek Singh” is replaced by the public hospital of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, which also houses what the hospital staff and some of the patients call the Charya (crazy’s) ward. The hospital allows Hanif to frame and foreground the violence that has gripped Karachi since the 1980s as it appears to those who have, quite literally, to pick up the pieces and who are yet glad to have that thankless and brutal job: “‘A shift here and a shift there,’ Noor whispered excitedly in Alice Bhatti’s ear. ‘And before they know it, you’ll have a full-time job here.’ They were surrounded by eight gunnysacks full of body parts that couldn’t be identified and placed with any of the deceased” (AB 26). As Hanif frequently reminds his readers in his newspaper articles and interviews, the result of the violence has been ethnic battles between the MQM (Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the party that began by claiming to represent people displaced during Partition from India) and Pushtoon groups, internecine battles within the MQM, confrontations (and occasional collusions) between the MQM and the army, sectarian violence, jihadi action, and, as the novel makes very clear with the character of Inspector Malangi, a state that frames and tortures its citizens with impunity and chilling bonhomie.³² Hanif calls upon a range of genres to frame the violence raging through Karachi since Zia’s time to show the many fissures in the postcolonial nation and the attitude of counterinsurgency to its own population by the praetorian elements of the state that has resulted in the cultivation of armed groups with a variety of ideological inflections, suggesting Hanif’s ongoing commitment to chronicling the social aftermath of Zia’s reign.

The public hospital receives the bodies of the protagonists and many—perhaps the majority—of those caught in the crossfire of many of these battles. The centrality of the hospital within the novel makes visible the torn bodies that are too quickly forgotten in the many failures and incoherencies of postcolonial nationalism. If Manto’s story foregrounds the psychic pressure resulting from the inconceivability of Partition, of the effect of the shifting of ground from beneath one’s feet, and suggests that the patients in a mental hospital are best able to articulate that inconceivability, Hanif’s use of the hospital returns us to a wrenchingly matter-of-fact awareness of the torn bodies littering the streets of the city and the country. The hospital is a starkly material reminder of the rent in the partitioned nation’s fabric.

That the Christian nurse Alice’s romance with the Punjabi Muslim wrestler begins in the Charya Ward locates the plot directly in an engagement with Manto’s story. As if Hanif is addressing a question from “Toba Tek Singh” (“yeh Pakistan kyā hotā hai?”), “What is this Pakistan?,” by first reconfiguring it as “What is love in this Pakistan?”³³ Teddy rescues Alice from the ward where she is assailed by its inmates and walks out from it carrying her, singing “We are one under this flag. We are one. We are one . . . ” (AB, 36; Hanif’s italics), turning that very rescue into a fantasy of union overseen by the emblem of the nation. The homage to Manto is clearly marked: the episode covers a chapter, early in which another Christian nurse, Hina Alvi, says, “But as far as I’m concerned, the whole country is a nuthouse. Have you read “Toba Tek Singh”? Nobody reads around here anymore. Manto wrote about the nutters in a charya ward and then ended up in one himself” (AB, 28–29). On Hina Alvi’s terms, Manto’s own breakdown in the new nation is merely a prefiguration of the insanity of the entire country; the Charya Ward is then a symbol of the mental state of the entire nation qua nation, that is, as the outcome of a nationalist enterprise that involved the carving out of a space within the Indian subcontinent. The segment of the Christian population in Pakistan that is usually thought of as lower caste is from the Punjab, and as I suggested in the previous chapter, the partition of the Punjab has had a tragically ironic effect on Punjabi Christians, the majority of whose leaders aligned themselves with the Pakistani cause at the boundary commission proceedings regarding Partition.³⁴ Their decision to align with Pakistan, a nation made for the Muslim minority, in which they might have expected to be treated better than Hindu-majority India, did not in fact protect Christians from the discrimination they so feared. The Charya Ward, by way of the allusions to Manto’s story, becomes representative of the nation and of its birth in the founding act of violent partition. It might begin to seem overdetermined, then, that a love, born in such a space, between a Christian “untouchable” woman and a minor thug in the service of the state would end in the terrible atrocity of Teddy Butt throwing acid on Alice’s face—that the acid is given to him by Inspector Malangi makes it a case of state-assisted homicide. The inspector’s name “Malangi” (a somewhat Sufi, fakirlike, and mystically carefree figure) becomes a dark joke about the “encouragement” of Sufism by the state under Musharraf and of the implication of the variety of the range of orientations participating in the violence of the state. There is no aspect of society that is free of the taint of the violence unleashed by the securitized state.

Hanif’s most structurally profound invitation to a meditation on the meaning of martyrdom, and consequently his meditation on the development of the post-Independence nation in which martyrdom and the language of the “shahīd” (martyr) has become central to the rhetoric of nationalism, occurs in the epilogue. Written as a letter by Joseph Bhatti addressed to the Vatican, the epilogue invites the reader to imagine the entire novel as a saint’s life, a canonization narrative of sorts. Concluding the letter by asking the Vatican to reconsider its decision and canonize Alice after all, Joseph Bhatti writes, “And since Alice Bhatti’s story can’t be told without telling the story of her time at the Sacred, why not start the story when Alice Bhatti came to the Sacred, looking for a job?” This, the last line from the novel, is a challenge inviting us to begin again and reread the novel as a saint’s life. Bhatti’s attempt to get his daughter canonized represents a desire to find a redemptive account of her suffering, in which the tools of her destruction, the violence directed at her throughout her life, as a poor Christian woman in an environment where the poor, Christians, especially “lower-caste” ones, and women are humiliated and harassed, are turned into instruments of future and heavenly glory.

The reflection invited by Bhatti’s letter is already present in the description of Alice’s mother’s funeral. What no one comes out and says aloud at that funeral is that the woman was raped and murdered by an employer while cleaning the stairs in the house where she worked. The priest’s refrain about God—“He took her”—becomes a sinister pun about the circumstances of her death. A benevolent God’s “taking” into heaven of one of his creatures raises the other question: why would he let one of his creatures be treated so? “He took her” says what remains unsayable in the scene—that she was raped—equates divine taking with the sexual kind, and suggests that divine benevolence was culpably absent from the scene of murder and rape. But for a moment Hanif allows for the entertainment of the possibility that divine intention might not have been: “When he wants to take you, He can make the marble staircase slippery” (AB, 119). A few lines down this divine agency is questioned again: “but it’s not very likely that when you slip on that staircase you’ll also accidentally scratch yourself on your left breast . . . [or] . . . that during that fall you’ll somehow manage to spill someone’s sperm on your thighs” (AB, 119). Then, yet again, the refrain: “He took her” (AB, 119).

Hanif’s representation of the torment of the Muslim gardener who attends the funeral further troubles the temptation to transform horror into redemptive benevolence:

The person sitting on the gardener’s left . . . insisted that he had heard him saying “murder, murder, murder” during the prayer. The person sitting on the right of the gardener accused the person sitting on the left of spreading vicious rumours and violating the sanctity of a post-funeral meal. He even offered to swear on the Holy Bible to prove that the stranger was actually saying “martyr, martyr, martyr.” (AB, 120)

This scene is a precursor to the more systematic reflection on trial narratives the epilogue invites. Divine agency and the insistence on divine benevolence suggest a providentialism compatible with a redemptive account of human suffering—so, too, does the possibility of martyrdom. But in this scene the potential interchangeability of “murder” and “martyr” suggests that the very idea of martyrdom is a redemptive misunderstanding, indeed, that the willful human mishearing of murder as martyr is a result of the temptation to find redemption in suffering. Martyrdom involves an erasure of the body and transforms suffering into a form of sacred virtue; it absorbs the disappearance of the body into a teleology that further rationalizes and thus abstracts suffering into virtue and reward.

The epilogue turns this slippage between “murder” and “martyr” into an ongoing critical reflection on the premises of the trial narrative in which suffering is a sign of redemption, or at the very least of some divine presence. Alice’s own consciousness is crucially critical: “What kind of universe does He run? An exchange mart? Where was Himself when she was on the run from Senior’s men, hiding in Charya Ward? Probably on His own lunch break. Or probably busy with this charya world that he has created?” (AB, 170). Alice’s clarity extends to the plight of Muslims as well, as we hear when she reflects on those Christians who want to pass as Muslims: “They remind her of those people in French Colony who give their children these names in the hope that they’ll pass as Muslas. As if there weren’t already enough Muslas who were called Saleem or Salamat and who were as poor as the poorest Choohra” (AB, 181).

The novel’s earlier claim that both “sacred texts and profane novels don’t record everything” (AB, 20) has already set up an equivalence between the profane and the sacred that deprives the sacred of its priority even as it emphasizes the provisionality of the novel. But the epistemological and ethical authority of the canonization narrative is also called into question by the Vatican’s racism, the class structure within the Christian community, by Alice’s own lack of a devout religious sensibility, and the quotidian tribulations of poverty that affect the poor regardless of the religions they profess, and of which Alice and the Christian characters are more than aware.

The saint’s tortured body may well be one of the more important features of classical saints’ lives. Alice’s death from an acid attack is the atrocity that could meet one of the requirements of canonization. But within the novel the tortured, acid-attacked, body that might qualify Alice as a saint is a culmination of the quotidian violence she experiences because she is poor, powerless, a woman, and a Christian. The flirtation with, and simultaneous aversion to, the grotesque, that is, with the excess and brutality of violence, is important in the novel, whose representations of the varieties of violence matches and is interwoven with its many ways of thinking the body for which Baroque excess and bodiliness provide powerful genealogies and tropes. Hanif does not focus on her mutilated body, and the reader learns of the actual attack only through an indirect report, as if Hanif has deliberately denied the reader the prurient spectacle of her destruction. The refusal to abject and simultaneously turn Alice’s murder into a spectacle is of a piece with Hanif’s emphasis on Alice’s shrewdness, sense of irony, and determination to fight back. Perhaps the most significant instance of this occurs in the way Hanif represents Alice’s handling of the man who forces a blow job on her in the Emergency Room. The deftness with which she cuts the penis and escapes is central to Hanif’s representation of Alice’s fierceness and dignity, whom he describes as “an all-weather, all-terrain fighter” (AB, 175):

Her twenty-seven-year-old body is a compact little war zone where competing warriors have trampled and left their marks. She has fought back often enough, with less calibrated viciousness maybe, definitely never with a firearm, but she has never accepted a wound without trying to give one back. And like all battle-hardened warriors she has managed to preserve her gift for the fight but forgotten why she became a fighter in the first place. (AB, 174–75)

Despite the great tragedy of her murder and the many quotidian injustices and trials she suffers, her ironic and assessing sense of the absurdities that abound in the world she has to navigate militates against any patheticization of her life. Indeed in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Hanif’s absurdism is a means of allowing Alice the dignity of a certain emotional distance, which denies the reader the moral comfort or the prurience of empathy. At the same time, it contributes to Hanif’s refusal of what Paul Amar has recently called “the politics of respectability.”³⁵

The fundamental challenge to the redemptive reading of tribulation and, through it, to the saint’s life comes from the priority given to the fact of Alice’s poverty and her femaleness. In an episode describing Alice being measured for a shirt, Hanif weaves an extraordinary meditation—presented as Mr. Dulhousie’s, the tailor’s, awareness of Alice’s social circumstances and Alice’s own cognitive mapping of the way she inhabits her body in the world—on the convergence of poverty and femaleness, and the consequent formation of the body as a locus of unjust social forces. All this becomes clear because despite being malnourished to the point of emaciation she has opulent breasts and a figure that young girls dieting to the point of starvation would do anything to attain. Mr. Dulhousie knows that in the kind of house in which Alice grew up “starvation is passed off as fasting,” the last week of the month dinner is bread soaked in water, “dhal and rice is a Sunday special and every fourth Sunday of the month is compulsory Lent” (AB, 93). As a result, Alice’s ribs can be counted through her shirt, her collarbones stick out, and her ankles are “like a display from an anatomy lab” (AB, 93). Yet she has breasts that seem to have thrived, “despite the lack of a balanced diet” (AB, 93). Her very body—described by a nun, in a telling joke, as being “like a cross with tits” is a product of her poverty, and a source—crosslike—of tribulation.

This is also an engagement with Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable (1935). It is the father who wants to abstract her suffering into a redemptive metaphysical superstructure. Joseph Bhatti is a more satirical and destabilizing figure than the nervily masculine Bakha, whose masculinity is held up against the injustice of caste. Bakha is enraged by the way his sister is treated and his reflection on what has been done to her turns into an uncomfortably possessive eroticization of her body:

Her slim, pale-brown figure, soft and warm and glowing . . . was so silent and subtly modest and full of a strange tenderness and light. He could not think of her being brutalized by anyone, even by a husband married to her according to rites of religion. . . . He loathed the ghost of her would-be husband that he conjured up. He could see the stranger holding her full breasts and she responding with a modest acquiescence.³⁶

Hanif’s presentation of Alice’s reflection on her own breasts rewrites Bakha’s eroticized horror at his sister’s “violation,” which leads him to think of her death as a blessing as it might free him from shame, and Anand’s attempt to use Sohini to motivate the story by using the insult to her to retrieve Bakha’s masculinity and then disappear her from the narrative.³⁷ Hanif privileges Alice’s own consciousness of her body and the sociophysical navigations in which she has to engage in order to protect herself. Joseph Bhatti’s attempt to get his daughter canonized is at some distance from Alice’s own consciousness, which is presented as profoundly antiredemptive—repudiating both the abstraction into identitarian communal honor represented by Bakha’s anger and into an idealized religious redress indicated by Joseph Bhatti’s letter.

The irony that underpins Hanif’s absurdism is aligned with Alice’s perception of her situation. In learning to navigate the attention her body attracts, Alice has acquired a darkly sardonic sense of the world around her. It is a body Alice has learned to fear for the uninvited attention it gets, and in attempting to not be noticed, she covers herself as much as she can, pulls her hem down compulsively in order to draw attention away from her chest. At the end of the chapter she even asks the tailor if he can make her chest seem more flat. She has learned that being untouchable does not preclude being touched, that those who would not touch a glass she has used or take a banana from a bunch from which she has taken a fruit have no qualms about groping her. As a nurse men have asked for her attention and attempted to masturbate while she checks pulses or looks down throats. On being rejected, one has threatened to cut her up and throw her into a well. This leads into her reflection in the chapter on the kinds of violence women suffer, a violence she is determined—in a bleak moment of dramatic irony—to avoid:

Alice Bhatti is not interested in understanding the rules but she also doesn’t want to be the kind of girl who attracts the wrong kind of attention and ends up in the wrong place. . . . She doesn’t want to be someone who walks around demanding to be hacked to bits.

During her house jobs she worked in Accidents and Emergencies for six months and there was not a single day—not a single day when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or burnt, hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband brother, protecting his honour, father protecting his honour, feuding farmers settling their water disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body. (AB, 96)

The litany of violence, occasionally interrupted by recognition of certain extraordinary women who have resisted and ended up in prison, continues for two pages. Alice’s remarkably lucid sense of the violence that surrounds her and her—failed—refusal to be destroyed by it are effects of a consciousness that her body and the fact of bodiliness have given her. Clarity about the social world may well be a result of her body’s location in it and her own refusal to delude herself, as a part of her desire for survival, about how that world operates. Yet the novel carefully navigates the irrelevance of that agency in encounters with the arbitrary causal externality of violence. The plot refutes the fantasy that one can avert such violence by taking upon oneself the burden of erasing one’s own body. Alice is not able to forestall Teddy’s violence, which is propelled by a randomized violence that works paradoxically in concert with intricate social webs of injustice—hence, for instance, the significance of Inspector Malangi handing Teddy the acid, which reveals the randomness of the attack on women to be part of a more general structure of violence and inequity. Malangi’s name implicates even a traditional Sufi structure in the violence of the state and in the more socially diffuse conditions of violence against women.

Hanif’s representation of Alice’s body, of the bodies in the hospital, of Noor’s mother’s cancer, of Noor’s own habits of self-protection against molestation acquired in the Borstal come together as a profound reconsideration of the idea of the body politic. If one of the drives in modernity has been the increasing alignment of popular sovereignty with the modern nation-state and with national sovereignty, even a democratic majoritarianism does not allow for those who are at odds with the identities privileged by the nation’s self-understanding to be recognized, nor is there any political or discursive space for the sovereignty of such identities to be expressed. Hanif’s many bodies allow him to reveal the thought of the alignment between popular and national sovereignty to be a fiction—one that enables complex varieties of violence visited upon the bodies of those who are only nominally citizens. The notion of the body politic is deployed only to be pulled apart by the invitation to read the novel as a canonization narrative. Hanif’s deployment of the possibility of reading the novel as a saint’s life pushes powerfully against the anarchic vision of Manto’s story. The mutual pressure enables a critical reflection on the varieties of sovereignty in collision in a nation-state that quite literally claims its sovereignty from God and Islam.

As I mentioned earlier, in A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Hanif made a joke through a general’s thoughts about the nation that thinks it was made by God. The problem of the sovereignty of God is very much a part of the constitutional history of Pakistan, and the Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman’s reflections on the 1956 constitution’s claims to be representing God’s will are acerbic.³⁸ Qutb’s reflections on the importance of subjecting oneself to God’s sovereignty in order to create the possibilities for social transformation are not removed from the South Asian context even before the 1980s, for Qutb references Mawdudi’s reflections in Milestones, suggesting a cross-fertilization of political theology that cannot be accounted for through an Arab-centric lens.³⁹ Qutb’s form of subjection to the sovereignty of God reveals a reversal where such subjection leads to God’s sovereignty being expressed in the religious state and the right sort of religious citizen. God’s sovereignty turns out to be itself an authorizing relation for state power.

The questions surrounding the status of religious minorities foreground the problem of divine sovereignty in the modern nation-state; for it is not clear how the nation with its disparate population and its claim to representing a variety of bodies can then manifest divine Muslim sovereignty in or through (say) the Christian body. The nondemocratic theory of the monarch’s divine right circumvents the multiplicity of the bodies that form the state and is better able to align the monarch’s body with the body politic. Hanif’s representation of the body politic, or, more accurately, of the polity’s many bodies, reveals the incommensurability of divine sovereignty, national sovereignty, and the minority citizen’s sovereignty; it becomes indeed an interrogation of what the possibilities of sovereignty, of subjectivity, and of citizenship are for the minority. Yet Hanif is careful not to idealize or romanticize the minority into an undifferentiated heroic mass, or group, with “recognition” as its political quest. For Alice’s death is as much a product of her poverty and her femaleness as it is of her Christianity—it is, in fact, a result of the way those different social materialities converge on her body. Her own skepticism about religion, and thus the novel’s positioning of her at some distance from a redemptive vision of her Christianity as a heroic minoritarianism, is in line with Hanif’s representation of the Shia communist doctor who refuses to marry her after she becomes pregnant because of pressure from his mother: “For generations there has never been a single marriage outside our Shia clan, let alone a marriage into another religion. . . . He seemed to have discovered that the only chains he couldn’t lose were those forged centuries ago in some Arab tribal feud” (AB, 180).

In the same vein, Hanif’s skepticism about the absence of human rights lawyers who can descend on the courts to defend people from the blasphemy laws but are unable to respond to the ubiquitous, arbitrary injustice of the criminalization of the poor and thus to Alice’s imprisonment for attacking a doctor who should not have left a student nurse alone with a patient, and who evades prosecution by offering her up in his stead, is part of his demand to look at the intricate structures of social inequity. Thus his reference to Pakistan’s laws regarding religion is itself a brilliant instance of stylistic indirection: as Noor reflects on the unintelligibility of love he thinks, “Surely if there are laws against non-believers pretending to be Muslims, there should be a law against people with perfect eyes pretending to be blind” (AB, 78). Earlier on a lawyer has wondered whether it is even legal for Joseph Bhatti to recite the Qur’an (AB 45). The reference to the Ahmaddiya declared non-Muslim, who are according to the law not allowed to “pose” as Muslims, is worked into a more complex web of social, national, and even metaphysical—Platonic and religious—injustice. Even love is not possible in such circumstances.

Hanif’s refusal to romanticize the question of minority while foregrounding the question of justice has everything to do with the way he represents the body without idealization. His vision of the body, his complex meditation on the question of sainthood, produces a dramatically critical Baroque. The social body is unwieldy and fully enmeshed in the mess and struggle of the world. One might offer as a precursor Caravaggio’s Baroque as one finds it in St. Peter’s Crucifixion, with its emphasis on the dirt and struggle in the infliction, and the endurance, of pain. The terrible worldliness of the dirt on the feet of the crucifier and Saint Peter’s twisting body’s refusal to fit the cross is fundamentally anti-Platonic, refusing any idealization of suffering. Hanif’s representation of the body and Alice’s tribulations, too, is anti-Platonic and reveals the power of the Baroque to produce a critique of the idealization of suffering through a confrontation with the social and worldly embeddedness of the body. This critical Baroque works against bodily abstraction. The point is not merely analogical or even straightforwardly genealogical, for Hanif’s practice is no less illuminating of Caravaggio’s work than Caravaggio’s painting is of Hanif’s vision. Hanif’s refusal of a redemptive reading of trial is a refusal of resignation, indeed of Job as a model for human endurance.

Hanif’s version of Cold War Baroque invites the reflection that saints are merely the ghosts of those the world murders. The geopolitics of the Cold War—the ideologies cultivated, the theologies nurtured, and the political structures dispersed throughout society in the context of that geopolitics—forms the very worldly historical machinery of that murder.