Imperialism and Exile: Reflections on Edward Said's 'Reflection on Exile' and Nazir Ahmad's Ibn-ul Vaqt (The Son of the Moment)

W.B. Yeats aptly says that ‘exiles were not emigrants, neither, however, were they immigrants’ (Exiles, ‘Evangelizers’, and Anti-imperialists: Ireland’s Disputed American ‘Empire’).

The quintessential feature of the exilic condition is marked by the fact that a person in this state feels not only displaced, but misplaced while existing in a space that they cannot call their own. It’s odd that the first image that came into my mind was amnesia, mainly the retrograde type. The person, may it be a man, a woman or a transgender remembers fragments of a homeland that once was and tries to find meaning in the land they are now in. Essentially, ‘nothing is secure’ (Reflections on Exile) and everything is meaningless.

When one often tries to put the word imperialism into context, an inherent human quality is to somehow romanticize the notion and what it entailed. One often hears about the ubiquity of spices in India or the precious jewels that were native to the subcontinent but behind all of these seemingly beautiful qualities lay a dark, almost morbid story of human survival. What imperialism did to most people is not only make them forced hybrids succumbing to both foreign and native denominations but gave birth to the exilic experience by emphasizing the need for cultural agnosticism; where if one person was asked where he/she belonged, the ultimate answer would be ‘I don’t know’.

When one embraces the nuances in Nazir Ahmad’s Ibn ul-Vaqt, the inextricable link between imperialism and exile becomes more evident where one is able to realize how the state of exile becomes a perfect marriage of the two terms. What imperialism did is not only rob people off their native ethos but marred the cultural spirit of people who clutched on to tradition and orthodoxy and a means of refuge and colonial escapism. However, in Ibn ul-Vaqt, the protagonist becomes a concrete representation of the colonial figure- one who respects the indigenization of value systems but falls into an ultimate socio-political crisis of not fitting into either foreign or native molds. It is here that the paradox of the colonial experience becomes more porous; that while the point of imperial ventures was a civilizing mission to make people privy to local as well as foreign systems creating dark-skinned doppelgangers of the Western powers, they all fell prey to the displacement of identity. Questions such as ‘who are we?’, ‘what we represent?’ and ‘where we belong’ became hypothetical notions at best.

I feel that at this point, it is necessary to invoke the Hegelian distinction between the public and the private being and how Ibn ul-vaqt felt sidelined and marginalized within his own home but at the same time, felt marginalized at the hands of colonial representatives who viewed him as a puppet of the British- and while the British were the masters of dictating policies to the people they ruled, the protagonist become a ventriloquist dummy to the foreign culture, held by the strings of confusion, detachment and non-being.

One of the most spine-chilling parts of reflecting on Ibn ul-Vaqt’s journey under imperial rule and his subsequent exile was the concrete English tongue behind which lay an abstract tussle between whom he was and who he aspired to be. He was surrounded by his culture, yet had no culture. He was ultimately in what I feel I can call purgatory- exile.