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What Goes Without Saying: Symbolic Violence and Inequality in Pakistan

    A SCENE. THREE SCENES, ACTUALLY.   Picture a village in rural Sindh, a hari —a sharecropper—bows his head before the wadera , the landlord. No one asked him to. There’s no gun to his head. There are no shackles on his wrists. Now, shift the scene. Imagine a posh drawing room in Lahore. A family patriarch speaks. Everyone else falls silent. They aren't afraid of being hit; they just "know" that his opinion carries more weight. They seat themselves according to an unwritten hierarchy. Finally, think of a classroom in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A young girl is told her ultimate destiny is to be a "good wife." She doesn't argue. She isn’t lacking intelligence; she’s just been convinced, through every fiber of her upbringing, that this is the "natural" order of things. Three scenes. No guns. No courts. No police. And yet — in each — power is being exercised perfectly. This is what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic violence: the most elegant, the ...
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The Religion That Never Was: Din-i-Ilahi and the Making of a Historical Myth

  A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLCHILDREN Let me begin with a thought experiment. Picture two children sitting in classrooms, roughly the same age, on either side of the Wagah Border. Both children are opening a history textbook. Both textbooks have a chapter on Akbar. And both — I want you to hold this image in your mind — are learning about something called Din-i-Ilahi . The Pakistani child reads that Akbar was a misguided emperor who invented a heretical religion, who abandoned the faith of Islam, and who serves as a cautionary tale about what happens when a Muslim ruler loses his moorings. The Indian child reads that Akbar was a visionary emperor who founded a grand syncretic tradition, who celebrated religious harmony, and who serves as a glorious ancestor-figure prefiguring Indian secularism [i] . Same emperor. Same set of historical events. Completely opposite conclusions. How is this possible? That, my friends, is precisely the question this article is designed to a...
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