A culture of dignity

We deal with abject material poverty in two ways: either by looking head-on in utter mortification or by shuddering away in utter apathy. The latter has become par for the course in our contemporary urban metropolises. While economists may study the nature or mechanics of poverty, I am more interested in how this is historically tied to culture, identity, and modernity.

Centuries of colonial rule in South Asia not only decimated our material development, it also mutated how we understood reality. The radical possibilities of emancipation that were birthed in aftermath of the Indian partition were soon extinguished with the dying embers of violence that accompanied it. The capture of capital in the form of land, industry, and political positions quickly dashed common aspirations. Many fell into the now familiar cycle of pursuing respect and privilege through petty nepotistic collaborations in service to higher interests. The emerging citizen-subject of the post-colonial state neither fully enjoyed the supposed benefits of being an equal member of a democratic society or of an Islamic society that had roots in pre-modern conceptions of sovereignty, which placed the individual in a complex yet understandable web comprising God, badshah, local rulers, and man.

Political and religious authority was fractured as modernity refashioned how people understood their place in the world. Metaphysical notions that had illuminated the nature of man’s relation to space and time were to give way to the unbridled fever of “modernisation”. The “golden age of development” in the 60s was golden only in its veneer. Beneath this thin coat of pretension were harmfully abstract underlying first principles like “catching up to the West”. We were not “stuck in the past”; we had been rendered timeless by the march of modernity’s linear time. The emergence of a certain cantonment mentality, previously embodied by our British overlords and their local collaborators, now possessed our aspirations. Alienating and resource-inefficient housing enclaves, mimicking forlorn American suburbs, sprang up in representation of our frenzied pursuits of residing in spaces that were birthed through the decimation of local communities and villages.

The bifurcation between the haves and have-nots starkened. Soon, the colonial military logic of “order” would dominate elite perceptions. Venturing out into the shehr, the “city”, would become an exercise wherein one would wince at and bemoan the “disorder” and “chaos” in the streets. Spontaneity and mobility would become suspicious; its heaviest burden falling on women. Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, had cautioned against such contorted logics of order in noting how “spontaneity…. with its incalculability, is the greatest of all obstacles to total domination over man”. Not ones to heed such warnings, our growing metaphysical poverty aggressively transmuted dignified powerlessness into the utter degradation of man. How then could our high-politics, mired in its cult of grandiose pomposity, self-righteousness, and intellectual arrogance, care for notions like dignity?

Pre-modern Muslim societies were often cultures of dignity. While poverty was a fact, it was manifest in more dignified iterations. Poverty had meaning; it was but one of man’s transient states. Some years ago, I strolled the idyllic tree-lined Rudaki avenue in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, among the poorest nations in the region. Named eponymously for the exquisite Persian poet, it was on those pavements that I saw what I imagined to be remnants of an old Persianate age, when lands across South, Central and Western Asia were fused into a magisterial complex predicated upon an entire culture of adab and akhlaq. Notwithstanding my alien position within this new culture and despite material poverty, I could not as easily distinguish class based on appearance. While religion and culture there had been subdued for decades, brutalist Soviet rule had been unsuccessful in completely rooting out local presentations of dignity.

While we have much to learn from our shared pasts, let us not succumb to romanticised fantasies that would have us teleport centuries past to an ideal world; such ahistorical notions only serve political sloganeering. But what is to be done? The often-heard phrase of “what can be done?” signals absolute helplessness as well as the disintegration of our collective moral imagination. While poverty may be rationalised by those who bear it, the loss of dignity erases one’s personhood — a loss that cannot be endured. Be it protesting disgruntled students, workers, religionists, or the unhoused, regaining dignity in this pure land remains elusive.

To accept the flow of this moral apathy through us as individuals is deplorable; this much seems clear. Participating in these fabricated realities by passing the buck up to corridors of power is nothing but personal moral abdication. Then, let our last words be Rudaki’s contestation to our slumbering consciences:

Why are you so content with this world,

When everything is not in order?

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2021.

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