Vazira Zamindar: “Photos of Gandhi and Bacha Khan together have always moved me” | Hindustan Times

School history textbooks in India and Pakistan have been used to instil national pride, which often casts the neighbour in an unflattering light. How do you see your book intervening in this environment?

Historian Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar (Courtesy A Suitable Agency)I was aware, but not directly thinking about the present political context when I was writing. It was a much more deeply felt and organic process, where I drew upon my two decades of teaching history, including a seminar on Gandhi that I loved. Called “Gandhi’s Way”, it focused on anticolonial praxis and where I always felt this absence of interesting material on Bacha Khan in the history of nonviolence, given my own research on the frontier.

After my book, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, I have been doing research on Gandhara art and the image archive of the northwest frontier which is soon forthcoming as a digital monograph called Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive: Notes on Art, Repair and the Writing of Indian History. Much of the graphic novel’s story comes from this research in which I also look at photographs of Gandhi and Bacha Khan. These photographs of them together have always moved me by their extraordinary tenderness and gentleness. The graphic novel form allowed me to make their friendship and the work of repair central to the story.

If citizens of both countries got to learn about the friendship between Gandhi and Bacha Khan at a young age, how might that influence the way they understand the Partition?

We have a shared anticolonial inheritance that has shaped the 20th century, and should be a resource for us as we face planetary challenges in the 21st. The book designer, Veronica Borsani, who helped me with making collages with Sarnath’s drawings and archival materials was based in Buenos Aires, but for her too this became a deeply felt shared anticolonial inheritance. So, I want this to be a resource of stories, of acts of love, of gestures that will make us — people of all ages — find our way, for we have to rebuild this world. We must!

What made you tell the story of their friendship through Mahmud and Sita’s eyes?

Our anticolonial struggle was not just made up of singular exemplary figures like Gandhi and Bacha Khan. There were many ordinary individuals who rose to the challenge of their times with leadership, friendship and courage. So, the story has both exemplary and ordinary protagonists. Furthermore, Mahmud and Sita gave me greater narrative freedom! And finally, it allowed me to make Mahmud a photographer and Sita a student of history, and bring to the foreground the fact that the anticolonial struggle was very self-aware that colonialism used communally driven history-writing and image making to maintain its power. And so, the anticolonial struggle too was committed to making images of its own and writing histories of its own. Mahmud and Sita bring that consciousness to the foreground.

As a scholar who is usually bound by conventions of academic writing, what was most exciting and challenging while working with artist Sarnath Banerjee?

Around 2016, Sarnath reached out to me as he wanted to work with historians. I invited him to Brown University, and there a friendship emerged. During 2020-21, I was on a fellowship in Berlin, and there was a pandemic. So Sarnath and I started walking together, and swapping stories of what I was working on in my scholarly monograph. That’s when the idea of this graphic novel was seeded — a simple idea of Gandhi and Bacha Khan walking together.

I wrote some university grant applications based on it. When we won those grants, we were confronted with this task of turning the idea into a book. My instinct was to read widely and do further research. I hired two of my beloved students to immediately go through Gandhi’s Collected Works to build a detailed day-to-day timeline on the two men when they were together.

Sarnath, who has a master-instinct for storytelling, kept warning me that this was too much research. He helped me to let go (and it took several drafts), and just write. I wrote from deep feeling, trusting that my years of teaching and research would guide me. I wrote then in two forms — the meditative form that became the opening to each act of love and did not require his drawings, and the storytelling form that worked in tandem with his drawings.

What was your intention behind translating satyagraha as love-force rather than truth-force? Would you call it as much of a political as a literary choice?

Gandhi himself translated satyagraha as both love-force and truth-force in Hind Swaraj, and certainly with the self-awareness of the philosophical implications of this. Pukhtoon, the journal of the Khudai Khidmatgars was full of poetry where the figure of the beloved — as in Persianate poetry — was extremely important. Love’s significance is that it places us in relation to both the apprehension of the divine and in relation to others around us. Although society and politics attempt to regulate love, which is at once truth, it always exceeds that control. Thus, the love story genre is so important. The anticolonial struggle carried that self-awareness. You cannot build a movement only through opposition. Gandhi and Bacha Khan reached deep into their traditions, and both came out with love. So, the graphic novel moves us through four acts of love.

What do you make of Bacha Khan’s legacy in Pakistan today? Apart from the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, inspired by his ideals of nonviolence and pacifism, which other movements draw on his work?

After we got the two grants from Brown University, I went to visit Bacha Khan’s home in Utmanzai, Charsadda (ancient Hashtnagar) in 2022. I flew into Peshawar airport that is now named after him. There is also a university named after him. The Awami National Party (ANP) uses his image, so it was everywhere on posters and billboards. There are debates, scholarly and political, on how to interpret him, and that is a great thing. He is a vital presence.

Is this presence limited to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, or does it extend across Pakistan? Is he a pan-national icon, invoked by all parties or only the ANP?

I answered your previous question as a historian and from personal experience because I am not a researcher or commentator on contemporary politics and so do not know.

It may be helpful to separate “national”, which can be understood as state-sanctioned or state-centered, from “people”. Bacha Khan has been an important regional figure for people.

In the last decade, perhaps post 9/11, there has been a growing interest in him for a different global context. Mukulika Banerjee’s book Pathan Unarmed got a new lease of life, and his biographies began to circulate in bookstores. There are at least two new translations into English now of his autobiography. A growing number of young emerging scholars outside of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are working on him. Certainly, the graphic novel hopes to further stir that interest. It is written to restitute a shared anticolonial inheritance. Gandhi and Bacha Khan belong to everyone on both sides of the border. We cannot parse them apart into nation-states.

The repatriation of antiquities stolen by colonisers is a major theme in your book. As a historian, how do you feel when you run into archives and museums that store records and objects that were stolen from South Asia?

My book Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive is centrally about the plunder of Gandhara art, so I have a lot of thoughts on it, and hope people will read it when it comes out. It is not simply that these objects were removed under colonialism and entered museums around the world. Bodies of knowledge came to be formed around them that we need to grapple with. Mahmud and Sita’s claim on the fragments of the Gandhara Buddha sculpture reflects my view that we need to take Mahmud’s claim on the sculpture seriously. For many years at Brown University, Ariella Azoulay, Yannis Hamilakis and I formed the Decolonial Initiative on the Migration of Objects and People. We did a lot of collective thinking on “decolonizing the museum”. So, this is a very important part of the graphic novel for me.

Since the Greco-Buddhist Gandhara civilization is a shared cultural heritage, what possibilities do you envision for collaborations between Pakistani and Indian governments to protect artefacts that still exist?

It is indeed a shared inheritance, and a resource for continued enquiry but it should not be regarded as a possession for extraction and control. It is like a forest that many people had many different kinds of knowledge about and used for different purposes but under colonialism became a commodity for extraction, to be controlled by scientists, and dispossessed from the very people who lived in them for centuries.

Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, literary critic and arts writer championing queer narratives, interfaith dialogue, and environmental issues. He also writes poetry and fiction.