It is 10:30 am. I wait for the clerk as the blades of an old ceiling fan pull through the humid beginnings of the day dispelling partly some of the sweet smell coming out of the baking factory that touches the back wall of Idara-i-Adabiyat-i-Urdu, a historic archival establishment in Hyderabad, India. I am told only he could lead me into its inner sanctum. Perhaps in the way a caretaker of an abandoned tomb leads a visitor inside. One cannot enter and leave as one might wish. Archives are no less than a cemetery. There are stories at rest here. Rituals must be followed.
As I reach the top of the stairs behind the clerk an hour and a half later, I find myself following him into a library setup towards the right, unlocked for the first time today. A short aisle where bookshelves rest on either side precede this inside section. The window at the corridor is the only glacier for the oasis of noon lights forming on the ashen floor, its radiating yellow unmistakable against the surrounding matrices of books (in all shades of black and blue hardcovers) and dust (in all shades of grey). The corridor, as the aisle begins, is big enough to accommodate two digitisation machines too, their presence forcing on me that this is indeed the present, not the past. I am left alone in the section by the clerk amidst stained handwritten catalogues, frayed papers and wooden racks. Before going out, he reminds me that the door behind opens to the rare section. I realise I am not in the inner sanctum yet. History lies elsewhere, always.
Archives put together the past in the present in a way that the past irrupts it. An archival document brings about a tear in our present, in our plane of historicality. If “history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings” as the famous Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot said, the latter two are what archives are and with luck you might stumble upon the other two in them as well. But in the towering presence of every page, I was getting buried. Words breathed, moved, turned themselves. Is archival unshrouding merely an empirical exercise, merely a discovery of something new to add to the already overwhelming corpus of writing on the history of Urdu language and literature during colonialism? Historians give in too much to the allure of the archives, fetishising the trip as almost (not surprisingly though) a pilgrimage to an undercroft where ghosts of the past brought them the parchment scrolls they came in search of. Is archival exercise merely a duplication of a colonial voyage into the deep horizons? Could I take myself out of it?
History is a synthesis of mentions and silences. It is a relational arc between what is understood to have happened and what is hidden—silenced—from such ordinary understanding. On its own, the latter by itself is insufficient as an account of what happened. The silences of which so much is thought to be hidden in archives are no less impervious to power as what lies outside of it. An archive too is a consequence of the past, it is not by itself the past resurrectum. It is dead—like history. It has nothing of its own but instead violently made to possess. The silences of the archives are not geometric inverses of the mentions of history. They don’t lie outside of the purview of historical production. They are patched within each other, not in opposition but as impressions created by power and authority.
This summer trip to Idara was the end of my research in India where I visited Aligarh Muslim University, Osmania University and Sudarayya Vignan Kendram after which I spent some time at the Library of Congress in Washington DC as well. The pre-dissertation grant by the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota made all my visits possible. However, I came back to Minneapolis with a question (among many others) that puzzled me to an extent that I had not expected when I was leaving. The question lay at the meeting precipices of history and fiction.
Sulaiman Nadvi (1884-1953), was a prominent historian of Urdu and Muslim history who wrote extensively against the British Empire. He wrote on Islamic origins and Arab contact with Asia in medieval ages making a case that Indian Muslims were as historic as the Aryans in the Indian subcontinent—an argument that espoused Orientalism even as it claimed to ‘reject’ modernity. He relied on highly critical historiography that referred to multilingual sources and categorically rejected fables and fiction. Right at that very time, another writer Abdul Halim Sharar and his historical novels found exceptional readability among the Urdu reading masses. Called as the pioneer of Urdu historical fiction, he also made history of Islam and Urdu his forte. History interested both but historicity, Nadvi thought, was lost in fiction. History, for all matters, was not a fiction. It is an account of real events in narrative. But that didn’t stop Sharar from writing his own history of Islamic origins. For him, fiction re-enacted history. The historicality of real events is retold in fiction, in an iteration fragmentarily superimposed on history. Between these precipices, both Nadvi and Sharar remade the past for a tender present, a present that would make sense in the face of all that was inexplicable in it.
So what did the walls of the archives I spent the summer visiting hold? History? Fiction? What was it that formed between both? On my last day at Idara, I came across a copy of one of Nadvi’s books in the rare section and I asked Mr. Saifuddin, the archivist for Rekhta going through the rounds at the digitisation machine that day, if this particular copy is available on Rekhta’s digital archive yet? He replied saying that another edition has been put online already. But what I had found—a list of references to European texts by Nadvi in the copy I was holding— was missing in the uploaded version. I had found a small part of history in the crevices of erasure, in the dying heart of a building that was hanging on against the present.