Pakistan Desires

It would be fair to say that the publication of Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere is a timely move toward the internationalization of queer scholarship. The editor, Omar Kasmani, is boldly ambitious in his assertion about the book’s intervention in the field, viewing the collection as a ground-breaking representation of alternative views from the Global South that challenge the power structures of the Global North and their control over knowledge production. Its interdisciplinarity, he stresses, allows for new modes of discovery into historical and cultural knowledges hitherto neglected under dominant critical discourses about queerness. Although the book strives to demonstrate that potential, its reception depends very much on what could be a polarized readership. Deservedly, however, it must be acknowledged as one of the rare few to voice Pakistan in the rather taut field of queer studies, following on the heels of Kasmani’s own monograph, Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (2022).A seemingly deliberate emphasis in the introduction on the recurring word “fold” and its variants—also carried through, unwittingly or otherwise, in several chapters that follow—tends to sculpt the book in the style of origami; it shapes queer narratives and experiences that fold into and out of Pakistan as an idea. In “folding” into its theorization the “religious inheritances and spiritual subtexts of queer” (6), and in “unfolding” perspectives that overlook queer histories and archives of this region, this versatile collection of writings constructs an origamic architecture of understandings, a multidimensional vantagepoint that rises above the flatness of standard, geographically bound definitions of selfhood. In doing so, it also challenges the epistemic restrictions of queer identities “folded back to singular or exclusive frames of belonging” (16). Hence, with the play on the country’s name, “Pak*stan”—with an asterisk replacing the i that splits the two morphemes, pak (pure) and stan (land)—Kasmani claims to divert attention away from the cartographic rigidity of Pakistan as a nation state to a more fluid juncture between the past, present, and future in which queer desire can position its varied expression. With the unexpected delight of a pop-up book, Pakistan Desires draws us into a unique, dynamic space to convene and find alternative ways to ruminate about queer affects in a Pakistani context. It invites the readers to enter a speculative mehfil (a gathering), which is as much an ungathering of canonical, unidimensional viewpoints on queer theory, as it is a regathering that facilitates (g)local conversations to enrich cross-cultural understandings.In a mehfil that invites intersectional dialogue, it is apt that the opening essay is about language and its expressional constraints. Syeda Momina Masood’s point that “Urdu demands a certain Pakistaniness” (24) verbalizes the frustrations of being caught between a language that both roots one’s identity and negates its own description through a lack of acceptable vocabulary. One demonstration of the “bravery” of Masood’s essay—even when she contests the use of this word to define the stance of queer Pakistanis—is in identifying her body as “queer in its very Muslimness, not in opposition to it” (26), in full awareness of the precarity of drawing such parallels from within the largely hostile land that “writes” the same body. Despite Masood’s discontent with “borrowed words and incoherent languages,” articulating her queer inarticulations in English instead of her mother tongue displays her pessimism in imagining a more promising future, with the resigned conclusion that “time moves strangely for the land that has never really known how to be a place” (29). Nevertheless, the essay is deeply personal and eloquent, the most compelling in the collection.Shayan Rajani’s “Loving Men, Loving God” is a reframing of the accounts of Sufi saints in tazkira, or biographical dictionaries written in Persian, from the region that is now Pakistan. Rajani focusses on the element of “mutual transformation and movement toward each other” (35) that define these lives and how gender divisions and religious difference is superseded by love, one that both defies and inverts societal censure. Traditionally such accounts of love between men, from Sufi Sarmad’s love for Abhai Chand, and Qadir Bakhsh Bidil’s for Karam Chand, to the Mughal King Babur’s adolescent infatuation with a young boy, Baburi, evade explicit reproach by being interpreted as stages of a progressive journey from Metaphorical Love, Ishq-i Majazi, toward True Love of the Divine, Ishq-i Haqiqi. However, Madho Lal Hussain’s acceptance of blame for his earthly and unthwarted devotion to his disciple Madho raises him above such categorizations. Rajani points out that “without any guarantees of divine or devotional defense” (41) or credibility through miracles that later hagiographies attributed to him, Madho Lal Hussain speaks across time, muddling “neat periodizations” (44) of history that lament a more forgiving past of “beloveds” and a hostile heteronormative present. Although an absorbing read, it is not clear how such periodization can be avoided outside the mehfil.Keeping to a similar theme of queer history, Pasha M. Khan’s essay proposes alternative readings of the Urdu fable Qissah-i Agar Gul, beyond its value as an ancestral oral legacy that fulfils the desire to find “firm roots” (50) for transgender identities as a counternarrative to cisnormativity in modern Pakistan. Rejecting an idealistic reading of the qissah that seeks a utopian “transmale ancestor” (50) in Agar’s gender shifting character, Khan emphasizes the qissah’s role as a “nonpast,” a “what-if” (61) exemplar that offers possibilities to read a past that did not happen as a future that could yet happen.Moving away from the oral traditions of a distant past to a more modern visual medium, Gwendolyn S. Kirk sheds light on “gender-crossing and gender-bending” in Pakistani cinema that can provide “alternative emotional archive(s)” (66) to spark conversations around otherwise silenced topics. Kirk examines three films that demonstrate the precariousness of gender and social construction in Pakistan: a character in drag who crosses the boundaries of gender, class, and ethnicity in Yakkey Wali (1957); the first representation in South Asian cinema of a transgender man who undergoes gender-affirmation surgery in Jano Kapatti (1976); and a fantasy Pakistan in Aurat Raj (1979), where women wrest political power away from men in a widespread gender role reversal.Although the final resolution of these films almost always resets the narrative to heteropatriarchal norms, Kirk concludes that the use of the “comedic elements of gender role reversal” (79) provides audiences with sites for subversion and critique. That these subnarratives are blurred enough to have evaded censorship allows for “spaces of ambiguity and possibility” (79) for queer imaginaries despite constraints.Syma Tariq’s “Partitioned Listening” is an interesting essay pivoted on the application of queer theory to the Indo-Pak Partition. Instead of “partitioning” the Partition as a recorded event embedded within colonialist and nationalist histories—ones that may have silenced voices through selective listening—Tariq advocates for a counter-listening strategy to build a contrapuntal archive of knowledge from within the sonic records of the time. In parallel with the theme of resisting colonial knowledge production is Geeta Patel’s intricately written article on the poet Miraji’s queering of history. From Miraji’s outlandish physical appearance and the adoption of a female pen name to his principle of “hamdardi,” or empathy, in translating Sappho’s writings about lesbian love, and from his complicity in the colonial projects of translation as a means of “control through ideology folded into everyday commonsense” (104) to a subversion of the same project by critiquing translation as a method of transmission, Patel examines the poet’s legacy of queering gender, language, literary traditions, and colonial power structures in historical Lahore. The first mehfil of the book winds down with Nael Quraishi’s and Asad Alvi’s contemplations about homing, memory, and identity—the former through the eye of the camera, the latter through the mind’s eye. Quraishi’s poignant photos of windows that look out from his many living rooms collapse and fold time and geographies into a home he carries within him, while Asad finds that he wakes up to his existential ghum (sorrow) in the Urdu language, an inevitable mooring of his self in childhood memory.The second mehfil is a blend of public and private subjectivities. It starts with two articles on the Khwajasara/Khwaja Sira community, also called hijras in Pakistan. Vanja Hamzic’s article explores khwajasara subjectivity in Pakistan, a distinct identity negotiated along competing temporal planes of historical (non)truths and contemporary realities. Hamzic argues that the Pakistani khwajasara collective is “distemporalize[d]” as it oscillates between a precolonial claim to sharafat, or social respectability; the colonizers’ derogatory historicization that clumps all gender variants as eunuchs; and the disorienting demands for conformity by “globalized gender regimes” (127). The essay is an absorbing read about the khwajasara journey toward selfhood and agency through a jagged temporal terrain that is menaced by the universal, chrononormative view of transgenderism. Claire Pamment’s piece highlights khwajasara performances of piety that situate queerness within the highly religious social structure of Pakistan. Taking two khwajasara figures as examples, Pamment shows the “secular-religious” demonstrations of niyat (intention) and tauba (repentance): Mehak Ali, a transgender dancer who defiantly continues to perform and preach Islam at the same gatherings, emphasizing her niyat as a mark of her piety, and Almas Bobby, a senior khwajasara guru, who announced tauba publicly, renouncing femininity and dance practices under the guidance of the Sunni Islamic Tablighi Jamaʿat headed by Maulana Tariq Jameel. Through her analysis, Pamment encourages an understanding of “khwaja sira agencies in, through, and against secular-religious normativities” (147) as a transactional space between queerness and Islam.In “A Queer History of Pakistani Art,” Abdullah Qureshi closely examines Anwar Seed’s private journey as an artist, his portrayal of locally situated homoerotic scenes, his work’s reception in and outside the present LGBTQI+ scene in Pakistan, and the portal that his art opens for non-Western discourses on queer futures. Ahmad Afzal follows with an ethnographic study of the Grindr app among Pakistani men, and the extent to which the recent surge in social media platforms has changed avenues for expression and solidarity for the mostly underground gay communities in Pakistan. Afzal finds that although their appropriated language about sexual preferences “demonstrates engagements with global queer communities and a cosmopolitan queer self-positioning in digitally mediated spaces” (198), the Pakistani gay community still largely complies with the local heteronormative norms in public.Akin to a silent observer in a gathering, Nida Mehboob’s almost detached engagement with this mehfil is in the form of an internal monologue superimposed on a series of photographic images of seemingly mundane daily living in Pakistan—a stream of consciousness about “how [she] like[s] it” (203). The articulation appears daring in a country that inhibits sex talk, but is also slyly subversive, tempered by the normativity of the imagery.The second mehfil nears conclusion with Gayatri Reddy’s exploration of diasporic, Desi queer identity at the intersection of class and race politics in the post-9/11 United States. Reddy compares the flamboyant and overtly gay character of Iftikhar Nasim, or Ifti, a Pakistani American poet who named and hosted a gay club, Sangat, in his Chicago residence in the late 1980s, and Rajiv, a homonormative, middle-class, conservatively dressed gay doctor, as representatives of the two types of self-identifying queer groups in Chicago. While the latter lot feel increasingly repulsed by the “rude and just crude” (219) sexuality, drag performance, and political visibility of the Sangat members, Reddy emphasizes Ifti’s public role as a desi gay figure in defying normalization to become one of the “assimilated citizen-subjects . . . [by a] minoritizing regime” (228–29) as pivotal to the South Asian American identity.In the last essay, Jeffrey A. Redding reads queerness dimensionally by folding the Kashmir dispute and the gender debate into a single issue shaped by the British Partition of India. According to the author, “queerness is also about nonintuitive understandings and configurations of social and political power” (238) and as such, the ongoing Kashmir conflict and the wider geopolitics of the region have affected the outcomes of the fight for transgender rights in Pakistan. Redding’s convincing comment that “queer geography is queer theory” (246) is central to the “Elsewhere” claim in the title of this collection. This article is an apt reminder that geographical and cultural diversity is key to the democratization of queer studies.The afterword by Anjali Arondekar is as much an apology for the book’s seemingly amoebic trajectory as it is a celebration of the speculative mehfil it creates—one that “summons publics into lives of conversation and proximity, at once a place of frenzied engagement and quiet meditation” (251). Suggesting that its multidirectional content is “folding us into archives and histories of writerly possibility” (254), Arondkar sums up the book with the same metaphor: an origamic future that can be restructured through collective musings in and about queer Pak*stan

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