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An Insurgency of Interconnectedness: Bridging Gaps in Jamil Dehlavi’s The Blood of Hussain

Opening of The Blood of Hussain

One of the most common themes this semester and the 21st century world, has been interconnectedness. Whether it’s the interconnectivity of the global climate project with local grassroots efforts, or the ways in which time is reworked through weather patterns shifting the lengths of days, for example or how the duality of two worlds – East and West – can converge through the channels of Capitalism and the effects of Climate Change, interconnectedness seems to be at the core of understanding Climate Change in the contemporary period. This sense of disparate spaces – the global, the local, yesterday (the past), today (the present), East and West – becoming increasingly interconnected lies at the heart of my analysis of Jamil Dehlavi’s 1980 Pakistani film, The Blood of Hussain.

Jamil Dehlavi

The film is about the insurgency of farmers and villagers against the local tyrannical and shrewd army. Taking place in the Punjab region of Pakistan, the film follows two brothers – Salim, the Western educated banker who acts as a power broker for the newly established tyrannical government and Hussain, the sympathetic farmer who becomes inspired by a holy soothsayer to hold an uprising against the same government for whom his brother works. Along with the obvious themes of fratricide and the East and West dialectic, Dehlavi’s choice of the farmer as the central figure and the materialistic neoliberal as the brother invites an analysis of the film from a contemporary environmental perspective, with a refined definition of “eco-cosmopolitanism” at the crux of the analysis.

Though a debated term, I conceptualize “eco-cosmopolitanism” in Pakistani terms, as a tool that can be used to study the ways in which characters with nationalistic tendencies (Hussain and his followers) and imperialistic characteristics (Salim and the army) are exposed as such through their relationship with their local environment. With their connection to the local environment, such relationships inevitably relate to the greater, global project of Climate Change.

This conceptualization of “eco-cosmopolitanism” is grounded by Shazia Rahman’s paper on eco-cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel Trespassing, “Karachi, Turtles, and the Materiality of Place: Pakistani Eco-cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing.” In the paper, Rahman explains that Ursula K. Heise’s idea of eco-cosmopolitanism as an “attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of a planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both humans nonhuman kinds” (Heise 61) is a “way of extending nationalism to include the planet and nonhumans” (Rahman 261). Rahman offers an alternative conception of eco-cosmopolitanism, using Khan’s novel as the site through which her definition is presented, for “Khan posits an eco-cosmopolitanism that is rooted in the local in such a way that it implicated the planet globally. This local rootedness is not nationalism but a materiality of place, and the global thinking not necessarily imperialist cosmopolitanism but rather a kind of planetarity” (262). 

Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet

Similarly, in this analysis, I highlight how Jamil Dehlavi’s film showcases such a brand of “eco-cosmopolitanism” through the filmmaker’s depiction of the ways in which the unseen, marginalized class in society associates with nature through agrarianism and a conservative lifestyle and the ruling, tyrannical class relates to nature through their use of modern weaponry and advanced technology.

Shazia Rahman’s Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism

In addition to eco-cosmopolitanism being used to show how the local connects to the global, the story of Hussain leading a rebellion against the dominant classes while protecting his own kin is a modern rendition of Imam Hussain’s demise from the Quran (the holy soothsayer makes reference to this tale when speaking with the film’s Hussain about his destiny) and like eco-cosmopolitanism threads the line between the local and global, the film’s reference to and manifestation of an older Islamic story mitigates the distance between the past and the present, mirroring the interconnectivity of different fields of time in a Climate Change-ridden world. Here, I use anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s conceptualization of the temporal reality of Australian Aboriginals, “everywhen.” In Stanner’s essay from 1953, “The Dreaming,” the anthropologist writes of “The Dreaming” as conjuring “up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past” which is, “in a sense, still part of the present” (58). For Stanner, one “cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time; it was, and is, everywhen” (58). With “everywhen” defined as the ontological marker of the temporal character of Aboriginal reality, it is important then to use it to describe the temporal interconnectedness of the climax in The Blood of Hussain as the parameters of time collapse, with the past of Islam standing with the present conflict of the Hussain’s group of insurgents.

In addition to the interconnectedness of different parameters of time and the global and local, this analysis of The Blood of Hussain gives rise to studying the East/West dialectic of the film’s characters, most specifically the brothers and their respective insurgencies, with Salim representing Western imperialism and Hussain, religious nationalism. Such a tension and dialectic between Western imperialism and religious nationalism is a Pakistani motif, with Dehlavi contending with the presence of “both religious nationalism” and “imperialism” for “anti-imperialism has historically been linked with religious nationalism in the region” (Rahman 263). As mentioned, this East/West dialectic is captured in the background of Dehlavi himself, who is both French and Pakistani, raised in Pakistan but educated in both America and Britain. 

A Bloodied Horse in the middle of a Muharram ceremony, in commemoration of prophet Hussain

As mentioned in the opening paragraphs, interconnectedness is the most apparent theme of Jamil Dehlavi’s film. This evidenced by the characters who are connected to the environment in an eco-cosmopolitan sense to the life of the filmmaker himself, whose East/West life story can be projected and connected to the political battle at the heart of Pakistan, where Pakistani nationalism coexists with Western imperialism, mirroring the internal conflicts of Salim and Hussain to the Imam Hussain story, which the film manifests, connecting the present moment to the “sacred, heroic past.” With this, it can be observed that the film’s interconnectedness demonstrates the kind of interconnectedness central to the project of Climate Change, where the local and global converge and spatial and temporal gaps are mitigated.

Astoundingly enough, Dehlavi’s chosen artform is film and considering the film is not directly about environmentalism nor does it lay bare its environmentalism, in this essay, it is looked at as an environmentalist film, a form of allegory that can help shed light on the most important environmental project of the contemporary world.

Soldiers of the local army face the valleys of Punjab

Main Sources:

Ahmad, Ali Nobil. “Meeting Jamil Dehlavi – Pakistan’s Most Intriguing Filmmaker.” The National, The National, 9 Aug. 2018, www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/meeting-jamil-dehlavi-pakistan-s-most-intriguing-filmmaker-1.758505#2.

Bhutto, Fatima. “Jamil Dehlavi: ‘In Pakistan, There Is Always Something in the Offing’.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 Aug. 2018, www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/09/jamil-dehlavi-pakistan-film-maker-blood-hussain-interview.

Crossette, Barbara. “Mahbub Ul Haq, 64, Analyst And Critic of Global Poverty.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 July 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/07/17/world/mahbub-ul-haq-64-analyst-and-critic-of-global-poverty.html.

Dehlavi, Jamil, director. The Blood of Hussain. Dehlavi Films, 1980.

Haq, Mahbub ul. Human Development in South Asia: 1997. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Rahman, S. “Karachi, Turtles, and the Materiality of Place: Pakistani Eco-Cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 18, no. 2, 2011, pp. 261–282., doi:10.1093/isle/isr040.

Ruddiman, W.F. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago. Climatic Change 61, 261–293 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:CLIM.0000004577.17928.fa

Sayeed, Raza Ali. “Weekly Classics: The Blood of Hussain.” DAWN.COM, DAWN, 7 Sept. 2012, www.dawn.com/news/747719/weekly-classics-the-blood-of-hussain.

Talpur, Mustafa, et al. “The World Bank in Pakistan: See No Suffering, Hear No Cries, Speak No Truth.” The Reality of Aid 2008: Aid Effectiveness: “Democratic Ownership and Human Rights”, IBON Books, 2008, pp. 86–94.

“The Blood of Hussain (Dual Format Edition).” BFI Shop, British Film Institute, 2018, shop.bfi.org.uk/the-blood-of-hussain-dual-format-edition.html.

“The Dreaming.” The Dreaming and Other Essays, by W. E. H. Stanner, Black Inc. Agenda, 2009, pp. 57–72.

FYI: I have included a link to the film below (it is available ad free on YouTube):

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet by Ursula K. Heise

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Summary:

Introducing “eco-cosmopolitanism” and its connection to different forms of artistic, philosophical and practical expressions, the Introduction and Part 1 of Ursula K. Heise’s A Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global provides an approach to environmentalism that transcends place and is interconnected to different locales and regions, mirroring the interconnectedness of a globalized world. 

In her meaty introduction which provides a broad overview of the conflicting opinions and thoughts on the subject of localism as place as an environmentalist strategy, Heise writes, “With this wave of countercritiques, the theoretical debate has arrived at a conceptual impasse: while some theorists criticize nationally based forms of identity and hold out cosmopolitan identifications as a plausible and politically preferable alternative, other scholars emphasize the importance of holding on to national and local modes of belonging as a way of resisting the imperialism of some forms of globalization” (12). Heise then presents one of the central ideas of this text, “eco-cosmopolitanism” which she defines as an “environmental world citizenship,” arguing that “ecologically oriented thinking has yet to come to terms with one of the central insights of current theorists of globalization: namely, that the increasing connectedness of societies around the globe entails the emergence of new forms of culture that are no longer anchored in place…”(13). 

Exploring the ways in which the Earth’s inhabitants, regardless of cultural differences, can be tied by a borderless ecosystem, Heise strongly argues against a sense of place tied exclusively to the local writing “…what is crucial for ecological awareness and environmental ethics is arguably not so much a sense of place as a sense of planet – a sense of how political, economics, technological, social, cultural and ecological networks shape daily routines” (55). Heise projects this “sense of planet” on her conceptualization of “eco-cosmopolitanism,” which acknowledges “varieties of environmentalism,” “preservation of natural ecosystems and their sustainable human use” and the awareness of an interconnected world where the “‘more-than-human world’” is connected to the human world through “animate and inanimate networks of influence and exchange” (59-61).  

By recontextualizing the greater environmental project in this globalized sense, Heise believes it being a more viable strategy for handling all things environmental in a world already marked and situated around the forces of globalization. 

Recommended Reading:

Le Guin, Ursula K. Vaster than Empires and More Slow: A Story (A Wind’s Twelve Quarters Story). Harper Perennial , 2017.

In Guin’s short story, a group of human space travelers find a Earth-like planet, with one of the explorers sacrificing himself to the humanless nature of the planet. Heise decorates Part 1 of her book with an excellent climate analysis of Guin’s short story, writing “The idea that all the planet’s life forms are linked in such a way that they come to form one world encompassing, sentient superorganism echoes James Lovelock’s well-known Gaia hypothesis, according to which Planet Earth constitutes a single overarching feedback system that sustains itself” (19). Heise then writes on the importance of “allegory,” specifically the challenge of artists to create “a vision of the global that integrates allegory – still a mode that is hard to avoid in representations of the whole planet – into a more complex formal framework able to accommodate social and cultural multiplicity.” In this work and her overall art, Guin demonstrates Heise’s conceptualizations of eco-cosmopolitanism and allegory through metaphorical and symbolic representations of a world that is interconnected to a world both familiar and foreign to us, a manifestation of the network that connects the “animate to the inanimate.” 

Rahman, S. “Karachi, Turtles, and the Materiality of Place: Pakistani Eco Cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 18, no. 2, 2011, pp. 261–282., doi:10.1093/isle/isr040.

Rahman, Shazia. Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism: Pakistani Women’s Literary and Cinematic Fictions. University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

In Shazia Rahman’s paper on eco-cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel Trespassing, “Karachi, Turtles, and the Materiality of Place: Pakistani Eco-cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing,” Rahman identifies Ursula K. Heise’s idea of eco-cosmopolitanism as an “attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of a planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both humans nonhuman kinds” (Heise 61). For Rahman, Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism is a “way of extending nationalism to include the planet and nonhumans” (261). The writer then offers an alternative conception of eco-cosmopolitanism, using Khan’s novel as the site through which her definition is presented, for “Khan posits an eco-cosmopolitanism that is rooted in the local in such a way that it implicates the planet globally. This local rootedness is not nationalism but a materiality of place, and the global thinking not necessarily imperialist cosmopolitanism but rather a kind of planetarity” (262). In reading this essay, along with her book on eco-feminism which has chapters in eco-cosmopolitanism in Pakistan Punjab, the reader receives two differing perspectives on an idea that seems to connect the world through an awareness of modern environmentalism. “eco-cosmopolitanism.” 

“The Dreaming.” The Dreaming and Other Essays, by W. E. H. Stanner, Black Inc. Agenda, 2009, pp. 57–72.

At the center of this essay from 1953 is anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s expression, “Everywhen” which borrows from approaches to temporality from Aboriginal Australians, highlighting how interconnected the past, present and future is for Australia’s indigenous population. Though Heise doesn’t make an explicit connection to Stanner in this portion of her book, Stanner’s methodology of bridging the gaps of understanding nature and the environment between different cultures and locales (The Modern West against the Aboriginals) as well as the Aboriginals’ sense of temporal interconnectivity exemplifies Heise’s structure of a “sense of planetarity” and make Stanner’s essay a prescient, important work in climate literature. 

Discussion Questions:

  1. Given Heise’s insistence that her mode of “eco-cosmopolitanism” is influenced by the work of postcolonial scholars’ work on cosmopolitan (I.e. Homi Bhaba) and how separated it is from imperialism, to what degree are Rahman’s arguments justified? Are these arguments reactionary or is there perhaps something substantial in Rahman’s writing when it comes to developing a unique perspective to Heise’s “eco-cosmopolitanism”? 
  2. Given Heise’s consistency in holding globalization as a harbinger of contemporary life, is she too much of an idealist who may not fully appreciate and recognize the detrimental effects of the current capitalist framework and how tied it is to globalization and instead, see globalization’s potential for environmental thought? 
  3. One of the most provocative elements in Stanner’s essay is the research itself; considering that Stanner is a white, Westernized man performing research on indigenous tribes, when may Stanner become too problematic in his research and could that expose flaws in Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism? Meaning, if an outsider is to connect himself or herself to another locale in the name of eco-cosmopolitanism, how can we “check” the West to ensure cultures of other locales do not become further  eliminated and acclimated to a globalized, less localized world?