Christopher Chekuri
Department of History
University of Wisconsin-Madison
cchekuri@students.wisc.edu
&
Himadeep Muppidi
Institute for Global Studies
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
hmuppidi@tc.umn.edu
Paper prepared for presentation at the conference on
Global Diasporas: Communities of Exile and Migration
Organized by the Border and Transcultural Studies Research
Circle
University of Wisconsin-Madison
October 29-31, 1999
On May 18, 1998, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that increased the number of "skilled foreigners" allowed into the territory of the United States every year. This bill, called the American Competitiveness Bill, was passed to improve U.S. national competitiveness in the international system and thereby promote American national interests. While the local American reaction to this bill was not particularly noteworthy-you did not hear about any rejoicing in Flint, MI--it did send ripples of joy more than ten thousand miles away-in Hyderabad city, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, a state in modern India. How do we understand this resonance between localities separated by thousands of miles? What explains the joy of the Hyderabadis and the indifference of the Americans to an event in the U.S.?
Introduction
In April 1997, armed with skills in Sanskrit, Persian, Classical
Telugu and after a research proposal on early modern state formation in India,
I landed in Hyderabad. I was ready to engross myself in the temple inscriptions,
rare classical manuscripts, and village chronicles belonging to Deccani Sultanates
of half a millenium ago. I was seeking a cosmopolitan past, a pre-modern/pre-colonial
past, a past where Indians, Arabs, Persians, Mongols, Jews, Turks, Armenians,
and Abyssinians were fabled to have crossed paths. I was seeking al-Hind, the
Arab name for the Indo-Islamic world.
Diligent in finding my al-Hind, and before fully recovering from my jet-lag,
I hopped onto my cousin's vespa scooter to meet a well known historian of the
Deccan. I was particularly keen on meeting this historian since he knew how
to get me an email account that would help me stay in touch with the American
world I had left behind. Minutes into our conversation on emails, he said disapprovingly:
"You Americans, why are you so ignorant about computers!" I suppose
I, along with other researchers from Madison, did not fit his image of a citizen
of the technological world, a subjectivity that he assumed on the basis of our
U.S location.
Although trained as a historian, he seemed to have an equally good command over
the arcana of emailing: terms such "modem strings", "script files,"
"batch files," rolled off his tongue as easily as Sumati Satakamu,
Kanyasulkam, and Tuzuk-i-Jahangir. I soon realized that this was no isolated
experience but one that I would have to go through almost daily during my fieldwork
time in India. My nostalgic queries about a long forgotten cousin, a childhood
friend, a friend of the family were met with the same refrain; "Oh don't
you know! She is in Tuscaloosa, Newark, San Jose, El Paso, Detroit…";
the refrain betraying a knowledge of American geography that would be the envy
of most middle school geography teachers in the United States. This would soon
be followed by the helpful offer of a hotmail or yahoo address of those I was
trying to locate. It seemed that we were all connected now, residents and neighbours
of a vast Indo-U.S. economic world. But I had to come to Hyderabad to discover
that!
As I went through family gatherings, weddings, and other academic and social
engagements I kept encountering uncles, cousins, aunts, friends, university
professors, librarians, and archivists who were bewildered at my desire to study
history: Here was a privileged Non-Resident Indian, a diasporic Indian, an American
citizen-with the right license to study and work in the computer industry in
the US, making "sixty ", "eighty ", or "hundred K"-choosing,
instead, to come to India on a meagre dissertation fellowship to study obscure
historical themes that "did not really matter." When they were not
commenting on the oddity of my chosen profession, they were turning me into
an "expert system" on a much sought after American world: How does
one dress in American corporate places? How long is the American demand for
software professionals generated by Y2K going to last? What is the H-IB situation
right now? I had become a data-base on America: its culture, economy and technology.
In the two years that I was in Hyderabad researching Al-Hind, I found myself
discoursing on the minutiae of American English, on the romance and mysteries
of crossing various Indo-U.S. borders and on resumes and graduate school statements
of purpose. I even found myself discussing the status of the INS quota-system
with relatives who were taking a break from farming responsibilites. In between
conferences on the subaltern in Indian History, I was invited to speak at coaching
centers offering crash courses on American social skills to U.S.-bound software
professionals. My only relief came from the recognition that my new found identity
as a database on America partially made up for my failure to realize my diasporic
destiny. I was not, as it turned out, a completely "useless fellow."
The intensity and depth of Hyderabad's dominant discourse hit home when I overheard
my mother cautioning a cousin that, "Vibiki padipoyindi" ("The
demand for VB is down!"). VB or Visual Basic, a front-end programming language
developed by Microsoft, had been the preferred language for many corporations
dealing with database management. The new trend-hastened no doubt by middle-class
conversations across the Indo-U.S. border---was to acquire programming skills
in a package that included HTML, JavaScript, and Java.
I returned to the US in the summer of 1999 after completing my research and
satisfied at having collected and shipped nearly 200 pounds of research materials.
But Hyderabad had gotten to me, had changed me. Its "social pathology"
was so deep and so all pervasive that I now find myself equipped with the right
programming package: I find myself conversant with the C-language, C++ and Java.
I was in the U.S. I had finally come home.
But where was Al-Hind, that fabled cosmopolitan past?
I
Al-Hind: The Indo-Islamic World
Ibn-Batuta, the 13th century scholar from Morocco, travelled in a world that
was a "single cultural universe in which he was utterly at home" (Eaton:
44). In making this argument the historian Richard Eaton (44-45) claims that
most of Ibn-Batuta's travels:
…took place within what muslims have always called dar al-Islam, the 'abode
of Islam'; that is, the inhabited earth where muslims predominated, or failing
that, where Muslim authorities were in power and could uphold the shari'a. Everywhere
he went [Ibn Batuta] found the civilized company of merchants, scholars, sufis,
or princes; and with them he would converse in Arabic, on topics ranging from
mysticism, jurisprudence, and especially [events] taking place elsewhere in
Dar al-Islam. …..Ibn Batuta intuitively understood that the Muslim world
of his day constituted a truly global civilization, even a 'world system'…
Through the ages, India and the central Islamic lands were connected in some
critical ways and through a set of complex networks and cultural flows. Called
Al-Hind by Arab geographers this was a world that extended from Egypt to Central
Asia to South Asia (Wink, 1988). This "single cultural universe" was
reproduced through three important institutions; Iqta, Ajam, and Mamluks (Wink,
1988).
Iqta was an institution wherein revenue was collected and expended at the source,
without the mediation of a central treasury. Iqta holders were granted these
non-hereditary, temporary tenures by various Sultans. This was a system that
differed substantially from the european fief. But Iqta was also a form of state-making
by which the political borders of Islam were extended. [fn to different forms
of Iqta; our concern is with administrative and military iqtas]. Ajam was the
heritage of Persia, mainly its traditions of statecraft, ritualized performances
of royalty and intricate ceremonials that shaped the contours of courtly culture
throughout al-Hind.
The Mamluks were a "one generation aristocracy of alien provenance,"(Wink:37)
based primarily on an initial supply of Qipchaki Turks from the Eurasian steppes.
These aliens were recruited for their archery and cavalry skills. [ The Turkish
groups of the steppes, recently islamized, and a major resource for the Indian
states were initially of Qipchaki tribes but not entirely so ]. Their fame was
in part due to their possession of technologies not easily produced in the arid
plains and plateaus of the Indian subcontinent.
The Mamluk system arose from a failure of the Abbasid caliphate to institute
an imperial Muslim aristocracy. This, historians argue, necessitated the creation
of "an artificial aristocracy from deracinated elements." Once instituted,
the Mamluks made possible a solution to the problems of manpower shortage in
state-making and revenue collection. A sizeable number of the Mamluks (Wink,
1988: 15-16) were castrated to ensure their loyalty to the corporate body of
the sultan and the state rather than to family, kinship or other rival bodies.
The practices and institutions of iqta, ajam, and the Mamluks were crucial for
state formation in Northern India during the 13th century; and they continued
in the peninsular Deccan into the 17th century. Peninsular Deccan is essentially
the region around modern day Hyderabad. Even those states considered "non-Islamic,"
such as the Vijayanagara Empire of the Deccan, replicated these three institutions:
they imported Mamluks, instituted iqta, and adopted a highly Persianized courtly
culture. The early East India Company also could not completely avoid replicating
some of these practices.
The production of Al-Hind through such institutions was not, however, a simple
question of supply meeting demand, but one of the reproduction of complex and
culturally informed practices in different local settings. The Deccani states,
such as the Golconda Sultans for example, sent ships to the Iranian port of
Hormuz to bring horses and Turks back (Subrahmanyam: 342). The Delhi Sultanate
also sought to secure these military and technological resources by overland
routes into Central Asia. But however highly skilled, why would Turks come across
such vast distances?
The answer to that lay in how India was imagined. For those in Persia and the
Persianized Turkic lands, India was a fabled place of wonders and plenty. Youngmen
imagined, in Al-Hind, opportunities in courts, iqta tenures and memberships
in sufi tariqas.
India, Hindustan, is here as elsewhere …[is]…Dar al-aman, 'the abode
of security'…(Digby: 251).
The story of Khwaja Mahmud Gawan Gilani (d.1481), [who lived through the 15th
c] one time wazir (prime minister) of the Bahmani Sultanate exemplifies some
of the diasporic pulls of this period:
Gawan was an adult migrant to the Deccan who had studied in Cairo and Syria;
one of his brothers, Ahmad, remained in Egypt as a trader, while one of the
latter's sons settled at Mecca. Mahmud Gawan's own letters, which include extensive
correspondence with rulers and intellectuals in Lar, Hurmuz, and other centers
in Iran, contain references to his own son Abdullah, who continued in the 1470s
to act as his father's agent in the trade between the Deccan and Iran, thus
suggesting that those who migrated to the Bahmani Sultanate did not cut off
their ties with their homeland. Given the evidence of Gawan's own considerable
trade in horses and desire to import military specialists from the Middle East
to pursue his campaigns in the Deccan (his letters to the rulers of Lar and
Hurmuz in 1473 ask their aid in procuring Futtak-I-atrak wa jawanan-I chalak-Turkish
boys and adept youths), he would have been foolish to cut himself off from the
very sources of these commodities." (Subrahmanyam, 1992: 343).
Al-Hind also contained elite groups such as the Iranians. These Iranians were
extremely adept in participating in the complex economy of the Deccan in activities
ranging from holding iqtas to trading rights to important administrative posts.
But, like many diasporic groups, they never really lost contact with their lands
of origin. Not only did they participate in the trade of skilled Turks and horses
but they often maintained large retinues under their own command. These itinerant
Iranians can be conceptualized as a type of mobile state-making apparatus or
as diasporic corporate states.
There was thus not only a "flow of talent" into the Deccan from Iran,
but also a "remittance economy" that existed between the Iranians
and their homeland. In that sense there were global flows of meanings, money,
bodies and commodities in the fabled world of Al-Hind. The Al-Hind world was
an open world across gender and ethnic spaces. Kingship, although primarily
defined in masculine terms, accommodated women sultans such as Razia Sultana
and Rudrama Devi in 13th century North India and the Deccan.
But of what significance is Al-Hind in understanding the production of global
diasporas?
II
The modern global economy
The modern global economy faces a severe shortage of information technology
skills. The global demand for IT skills, according to one study, will outstrip
supply by 20% in 2004. Within the U.S., about 10% of IT service and support
jobs---or 268, 740 positions---remain unfilled. It is estimated that the shortage
of IT professionals will cost the U.S. approximately $ 33.4 billion in 1999
alone.
According to one report, 67.5 % of all Asian American computer professionals
in the US are from Hyderabad. Hyderabad currently has at least six universities
and ten engineering colleges, not to mention hundreds of computer-training schools.
Computer-training in Hyderabad, as one commentator noted wryly, is a "social
pathology."
The local daily, the Deccan Chronicle, also points out that:
"Irrespective of which [computer software] course is in vogue in the world,
the city will immediately have some 50-odd institutes offering training in that.
It started with mainframe programme with over 85 institutes offering the same
and then 60-odd giving Oracle Financial training and now its the turn of the
enterprise resource planning programmes. Whether it is PeopleSoft, SAP or any
other programme, the city has institutes coming forth to teach the same."
The Hyderabad of Al-Hind now participates in a different global economy and
it is America that dominates the imagination of contemporary Hyderabadis. The
flow of talent, of money, and of meanings, is now not between the steppes of
Central Asia and the Deccan but between the Deccan and Dallas, Sanathnagar and
Sauk City, Ambakhandi and Appleton, Kavali and California. Urban and rural Deccan
bodies are increasingly imbricated in the urban and rural spaces of the United
States.
Like the Qipchaki Turks centuries earlier, Hyderabadis armed with computer programming
skills come to serve the modern Iqtadars of the global economy, the American
Multinationals. In the pattern of the empty ships sailing for Hormuz, consulting
agencies regularly leave for South Indian cities to get plane-loads of H1Bs.
Like the Mamluks of old, some of these Hyderabadis come on restrictive terms
and are condemned to be constantly mobile.
The need for constant mobility forces them to minimize or ceaselessly renegotiate
their family, kinship and social ties in "foreign" provinces. As individuals
of "alien" provenance, they lack the empowerment that comes with green
cards or citizenships. Corporate power is reproduced by facilitating the entry
of H-1B bodies while restricting the entry of their family members. The new
Mamluks are thus symbolically castrated at existing national borders. Twice
deracinated in the global economy-from their homes and from their work places-their
status resembles that of the Mamluk eunuchs: potent in relation to corporate
needs, powerless to fulfill personal desires. As workers in the modern day Dar
al-aman, the abode of economic security, they constitute a labor aristocracy
that reaches out and expands the frontiers of technology but reaches home primarily
through economic resources.
There is also a different group of software Mamluks: the "Indian hordes"
of the Jim Clarks, the Larry Ellisons, and the Bill Gates's---the modern Sultans
of Software. These "Indian hordes" have a relatively more privileged
position in the modern global economy enjoying a slightly greater share of the
overall revenue-in the form of IPOs--collected by the new iqtadars. As a recent
article in the NewYorkTimes magazine puts it, "the smell of a startup in
the Silicon Valley is the smell of curry." Unlike the first group, and
more like the Iranians performing ajam, this latter group is intimately familiar
with the social rituals of modern corporations. They are the wazirs to the Software
Sultans. Many of these diasporic Indians also come from Hyderabad.
But where was Al-Hind then?
Al-Hind, as it happens, was all around us.
But what explains this phenomenon? Is it entirely coincidental that the Deccan/Hyderabad
is an important participant in two distinctive global systems stretched across
time? How did Hyderabad get to be the node between the past and the emerging
future?
III
Why Hyderabad?
Identity and hybridity before and after the nation
Historically, Hyderabad has been the space of hybrid productions. These hybrid
productions have acted as strong challenges to the binary contributions of western
colonialism and its response, the post-colonial nation.
Hyderabad was the largest of the princely states in the British Empire. As a
state headed by a Muslim King with Hindu subjects it initially resisted joining
the newly independent India. The Muslim Nizam wanted to join Pakistan. His Hindu
subjects wanted a communist state. Postcolonial India disciplined both through
its military forces.
Within the newly postcolonial nation, Hyderabad was the northernmost of the
southern regions and the southernmost of the northern ones. Reflecting legacy
of its precolonial cultural plurality, its lingua franca, Dakhni was a combination
of at least five Indian languages: Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and Urdu.
Dakhni's syntactic template is common to its two subsequent off-shoots: Telangana
Telugu and Hyderabadi Urdu. Hyderabadi Urdu is different from the Persianized
Urdu of the North and its Telugu is different from the Sanskritized Telugu of
the South.
Postcolonial India faced one of its first domestic crises on the issue of the
national language. What was to be taught as the national language, given that
a truly self-respecting postcolonial self would quickly discard English, a colonial
inheritance? Forced to prioritize the "sub-national," national, and
ex-colonial linguistic legacies, the postcolonial center threatened to collapse
in its fight with northern and southern states. The compromise of a three-language
formula satisfied very few with the exception of Andhra Pradesh. The state into
which the Telugu speaking districts of Hyderabad were "integrated,"
institutionalized the three-language formula more seriously than either northern
or southern states. Hyderabad complicates any easy slippage from the speaking
of Urdu to a Muslim or Pakistani identity. Hyderabad is one of the few places
where you are likely to encounter an Urdu speaking Malayali Syrian Orthodox
Christian.
Hybridity rules contemporary Hyderabad's urban and rural spaces. Cyber-cafes
co-habit with Iranian-chai shops; the economic organization in the former is
temporally based, and in the other spatially, on an iqta-like table serrvice.
Urdu and Telugu educational systems dot its rural spaces.
Hyderabad's cuisine too mocks the postcolonial nation's gastronomic purities.
If after Gandhi, the postcolonial nation presented itself as a vegetarian non-violent
nation, with all its obsessions with the cow-protection movements in the Hindi
speaking heartland, Hyderabad boasts of delightful menus serving beef biryanis
and the largest beef export processing center to the Arabian world, Al-Kabeer.
Hyderabad's hybridity constantly challenges the desire of the postcolonial state
for its arrogant claims over the loyalties of its citizens, for its desire for
historical permanence, for immortality. In its hybridity, in its ceaseless mixing
of the past and present, in its capacity to hold multiple worlds it resists
hegemonizing polarities of the postcolonial nation. It represents a "borderlands,"
a frontier where borders ceaselessly cross each other, a space that neither
colonialism nor postcolonial hegemony ever really mastered. This freedom from
the postcolonial, this resistance to the postcolonial binaries has facilitated
modern Hyderabad's entry into the global economy.
How so?
Globalization is a crisis for the postcolonial self. The postcolonial self-caught
between mimicking and mocking the economic practices of the west-has no convincing
answers to questions of national identity if it ceases a periodic mocking of
the west. Globalization-by intensifying the imitation of the west, by inviting
the west to participate in this mimicry-leaves little room for postcolonial
resistance to the west. The inability to mock the west raises disturbing questions
of what the nationalist fight against colonialism was all about if it was not
about establishing some difference from the colonizer. Was the freedom struggle
only about becoming the colonizer? Faced with such questions, postcolonial politics
constantly impedes any effort at economic globalization. Globalization becomes
an identity crisis for postcolonial nations.
Hyderabad, we assert, was never really organized through postcolonial meanings.
Its historically produced hybridity acted as a constant check, a constant interrogation
of the oppressive claims of the postcolonial nation or a rival sub-nationalism
based on essentialized claims of linguistic unity. Never having been hegemonized,
unlike lands farther to the east, Hyderabadis have had fewer limitations in
interactions with the world outside the postcolonial nation. Often bypassing
the postcolonial center, Hyderabadis have flowed into the Gulf as much as into
the U.S. But globalization has not created a crisis for the hybrid Hyderabadi
identities as it has for those more steeped in the center's postcolonial discourse.
Hybridity allows Hyderabad to escape the crisis of the modern nation-state in
the age of globalization.
IV
Conclusion
For many social scientists, the nation-state is the taken-for-granted background that underlies analysis. Given that perspective, border crossing is either ignored as an unimportant process or conceptualized primarily in terms of geographical/territorial borders. So borderlands are those areas that literally abut the territorial boundaries of existing nation-states. We have sought to portray a different geography, with different borders-a geography of meanings and identities. On our conception, places that are territorially at the center of the modern nation-state-such as Hyderabad-could potentially be "borderlands" or "frontiers"--parts of different world-systems spatially and temporally. Our intention in doing this is not so much to celebrate Hyderabad and its hybridity as to suggest the possibility of recovering/'liberating' many Hyderabads from the oppressive grip of the modern, postcolonial, nation-state.
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