History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial misery’, (Partha Chatterjee, Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories)
As a function of the dismal nature of formal social sciences in Pakistan, most kinds of intellectual activity ends up taking place either outside the country or in consumable, dumbed down form as print-media opining and commentary – very much like the piece you’re reading right now.
Nothing is more indicative of this tragedy than the fact that there has been no detailed study and categorisation of socio-economic classes in Pakistan over the last 39 years. From March 1972, when Hamza Alavi’s New Left Review piece articulated his take on the structure of power in the country, to March 2011, we’ve been stuck in the same binaries and definitions accorded to us first by the British and then by academic work in the first few decades of independence. The tragedy is further compounded by the fact that our universities and colleges are more interested in determining how the world is still attempting to deal with the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, as opposed to, well, pretty much anything even remotely relevant.
The quote I’ve so eloquently copy-pasted at the start was added not just to fill the word limit on a particularly uninspired evening, but also to give us a sarcastic take on how most post-colonial societies struggle to get taken seriously. While Mr Chatterjee was pre-dominantly concerned with the constant denial of agency to anyone not from Europe or America, another theme in his work has been the struggle of different societies to use ordained terms and categories for an adequate description of their own contexts.
If our contexts are akin to squares in circles, then we look the other way and try to ignore those pesky, obtrusive corners.
Roughly three years ago, especially in the aftermath of the lawyer’s movement, there was a lot being written about the middle class in Pakistan. The movement, due to its corporatist, professional core, was seen as the manifestation of middle class sentiment in the country; a culmination, in a way, of the slow and steady proliferation of off-the-shelf capitalism, education, and access to information.
Eager to understand this new variable in society, many churned out article after article on what this could potentially mean for our existing political and social arrangements. All of this, it has to be remembered, was done with a pre-conceived and borrowed understanding of what is meant by the ‘middle-class’ and who exactly are its members, and with more or less complete disregard to how the dynamics of power have changed in Pakistan over the last 30-odd years.
Frequent usage of the word feudal, for example, to describe the landowning class highlights either sheer laziness or a very superficial understanding of the economy. Similarly, boxing the upper class as being constituted of feudals, industrialists and ‘the establishment’ (whatever that is) is again taking a very stagnant view of the country. In the aftermath of growing urbanisation, and shifts in the economy from agriculture to low-level industry to commerce, new classes have emerged and left their imprints on our socio-political landscape.
At a cursory level, new entrants include powerful members of the commercial classes (for example construction magnates, transporters, and large-scale traders), and leading figures in our small but burgeoning corporate sector. Similarly, within society, the rise of powerful right-wing religious leaders, who command cult-like followings and maintain contacts with political forces, are part of these new elite groups.
Beyond all of this, perhaps the most understudied social dynamic is the rapid increase in size of the informal economy, which is now estimated to be about 70 percent the size of our ‘formal sector’. This cash-driven, fragmented sector employs a large portion of the labour force, is spread from Torkham to Karachi, and includes the movement of guns, drugs and other contraband. The power-brokers of the informal sector are ostensibly linked with the local authorities, with politically powerful individuals, political parties, even with the army and the bureaucracy.
Like I stated at the start, a discussion on emerging classes and the changing nature of Pakistani society is not meant to be conducted on the op-ed pages of an English language daily. These important developments should be discussed and researched with serious academic deliberation, something which, sadly enough, remains elusive in most universities. Till such time that we have a new and contextualised understanding of class and power in this country, our political commentary and praxis, both, will remain obsolete.
The writer works in the social sector and blogs at http://recycled-thought.blogspot.com. Write to him at [email protected]
