The New York Times
Dec. 26, 1998
Arts & Ideas section
Ayesha Jalal--Taking On Pakistan's Hero, Then Taking the Heat
By JONATHAN MAHLER
At first glance, Ayesha Jalal seems like an unlikely
agitator. She is a tiny, angular woman whose small
frame is accentuated by her flowing beige shalwar
kameez, a traditional Pakistani outfit
consisting of a loose tunic and baggy trousers. Her
scholarly credentials -- Wellesley, Oxford, Harvard -- are
purebred establishment.
But in recent years, Ms. Jalal has taken on the academic and
political mainstream in her native Pakistan as well as the
administration of Columbia University, where she taught
history for seven years. And while her historical work on
South Asia has elicited anonymous threats, it also earned
her a MacArthur Fellowship (commonly called the genius
grant) this year, worth $265,000, no strings attached, and a
reputation as one of the most innovative scholars in the
history of the region.
What has angered so many Muslims here and in her homeland is
Ms. Jalal's assertion that the revered founding father of
Pakistan, the slender, eloquent Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had
feet of clay. She argues that the 1947 partition of India --
the event that opened the door for the creation of Pakistan
-- was an accident, a colossal miscalculation. What's more,
she says that Jinnah never wanted a separate Muslim state;
he was only using the threat of independence as a political
bargaining chip to strengthen the voice of the Muslim
minority in the soon-to-be sovereign India.
For proof, she maintains, look no further than Jinnah's
reaction to the partition. "The state-sponsored nationalist
attitude seems to suggest that what Jinnah had dismissed as
a mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan is what they were actually
fighting for," the 42-year-old scholar explained in a recent
interview, adding that Jinnah twice rejected what turned out
to be the final model for Pakistan.
This is heresy to most Pakistanis, for whom the partition is
a point of pride, a landmark historical event comparable to
the declaration of the state of Israel for Zionists. And to
many Pakistanis, the individual most responsible for the
partition is nothing less than a Muslim paladin. "It's as
though you're telling Americans that George Washington
wasn't a starry-eyed nationalist but a coldblooded,
opportunistic militarist," remarked David Ludden, an
associate professor of South Asian history at the University
of Pennsylvania.
India scholars around the world have found Ms. Jalal's work
no less provocative. "In Pakistani terms, she takes a very
pro-Indian perspective, but in Indian terms, she's still a
Pakistani," observed David Washbrook, a professor of modern
South Asian history at Oxford University in Britain.
What may be most unusual about Ms. Jalal is that she studies
Pakistan at all. There are only a handful of scholars of
Pakistan in the United States; most South Asian specialists
here focus on the country's considerably larger neighbor,
India. And to hear Ms. Jalal tell it, the state of Pakistani
history in Pakistan is no better. The country didn't even
have a free press until the late 1980s and four decades of
military rule have left a legacy of media self-censorship.
The country's liberal arts colleges, for their part, are
controlled by the national government.
Ms. Jalal uses the word "tragic"to describe the fate of
historical scholarship in her homeland. "There just aren't
many Pakistanis who are historians," she said. "They're not
interested in history, they're interested in projecting an
ideological position."
Her three books, starting with "The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah,
the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan" in 1985, have
been credited by scholars of South Asia with breaking new
ground. "She is the foremost historian of modern Pakistan,"
Washbrook said.
Still, her view of Jinnah and the partition is hardly
conventional. In his biography of Jinnah, Stanley Wolpert, a
professor of South Asian history at the University of
California at Los Angeles, painted a different picture of
the partition, ascribing Jinnah's zealous quest for
Pakistani independence partly to a religious metamorphosis
toward the end of his life. Wolpert's perspective conforms
much more closely to that of the traditional Pakistani
narrative.
Indeed, when "The Sole Spokesman" was published, several
Pakistani newspapers assailed Ms. Jalal for understating the
role of religion in Jinnah's push for partition and accused
her of being under the sway of an Indian academic adviser.
Ms. Jalal is teaching at Harvard University this year after
a bitter fight with Columbia. At Columbia, she says,
enrollment in her South Asian history courses doubled from
1991 to 1995, but she was denied tenure in June 1995.
Convinced that a cadre of Indian and India-centric faculty
members who objected to a Pakistani woman teaching Indian
history had put the kibosh on her tenure application, she
sued the university the next year, alleging religious and
ethnic discrimination. Columbia refuted her contentions, and
this spring, a federal judge in New York's Southern District
dismissed the case, labeling the evidence of bias "thin,"
though "suggestive."
While she was pursuing her claim against Columbia, Ms. Jalal
was selected for a new chair in modern South Asian history
at Brown University. But after winning the approval of the
history department and a tenure review committee, she said
she was rejected by Brown's administration.
So come June, Ms. Jalal may find herself unemployed. She
plans to stay in the United States, where she first arrived
in 1970, when her father, a lifelong civil servant, was
posted to the United Nations in Manhattan. When the family
returned to Pakistan two years later, Ms. Jalal, then 16,
finished her studies at the American high school in
Islamabad, the capital city. She spent much of her senior
year in Pakistan trying to persuade her mother to allow her
to return to the United States for college.
"At that time, it was very unusual for Pakistani women to
come to America to study," she said. "The vast majority of
women in Pakistan don't take to reading." But when Wellesley
College offered her a full scholarship, she finally
persuaded her mother to let her go.
From Wellesley, she went on to pursue a Ph.D. in South Asian
history at Cambridge University, where she wrote the
dissertation that would provide the foundation for "The Sole
Spokesman." That the individual who had set out to puncture
the iconic grandeur of Jinnah was a woman played no small
role in the book's chilly reception in Pakistan. "There is
still a great deal of resentment there about that," she
said.
Ms. Jalal credits her father with inspiring her to rethink
the partition. As a child, she would listen raptly as he
reminisced about Muslim friends who had been left behind in
India, which is home to some 120 million Muslims, roughly as
many as in Pakistan. If the division of British India and
the resulting creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan were
really events for Pakistanis to celebrate, he wondered, why
were so many Muslims, including many of his dearest friends,
still stuck in the predominantly Hindu India?
Jinnah's "Pakistan had to remain part of a larger all-India
whole in order to raise some safeguards for Muslims in the
minority areas or those who would invariably be left in
India," said Ms. Jalal, who studied the Koran in Arabic as a
child and characterizes herself as a secular Muslim with a
religiously informed identity.
Jinnah died of tuberculosis and lung cancer only a few days
after the first anniversary of independence, leaving a
leadership vacuum in Pakistan that is often blamed for many
of the country's subsequent political and financial woes. To
Ms. Jalal, though, most of those problems can be traced
right back to 1947.
The proximity to India, she argues, has put Pakistan in the
untenable position of trying to square its considerable
security costs with its limited economic resources, an
imbalance that has in turn taken a toll on the democratic
process in Pakistan. Years ago, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father
of the country's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto,
predicted that if India got the bomb, Pakistan would too,
"even if we have to eat grass."
As it turns out, he wasn't far off. With the sanctions
slapped on Pakistan after the recent nuclear blasts, the
flow of international capital into the country has slowed
markedly. The country now stands on the brink of bankruptcy,
unable to pay the reservicing costs on some $26 billion in
external debt incurred largely for military purposes.
"The country has paid a hefty price to fend off India," Ms.
Jalal said, "and the price has been Pakistan's democracy."
Her 1995 book, "Democracy and Authoritarianism in South
Asia," also irked partisans of India and Bangladesh, the
Muslim nation that splintered off from Pakistan in a bloody
civil war in 1971. In the book, she argued that military
nationalism has undermined democracy not just in the two
Muslim states but in India, which is generally considered
the world's most populous democracy. And indeed, many
Indians are now concerned that the Hindu nationalist
government, run by the Bharatiya Janata party, represents a
threat to traditional democratic rights.
Nonetheless, scholars of India have criticized Ms. Jalal for
underestimating the country's representative government.
"The comparison makes me uncomfortable," said Francine
Frankel, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of
India at the University of Pennsylvania. "I do feel that
India has accomplished what Pakistan could not accomplish
through an authoritarian system: It has brought politics to
the majority of impoverished humanity."
Ms. Jalal remains unmoved: "Either you're giving a Pakistani
line or you're giving an Indian line, which I think is very
problematic in an academic environment."