Locating Colonialism, Imperialism and Coloniality in Post-Colonial Pakistan

Imperialism derived from the Latin word “Imperium” meaning “power”, is often understood in terms of exercising power, acquisition, and control by one state or territory over other states or territories. It is a systematic formative study of the making and maintenance of empires. It studies the exchange of capitalist/modernist/colonialist/rationalist/patriarchal/Christianity-dominated ways of transactions between the dominant sovereign metropolitan centre and the subordinated subjugated periphery being managed by the colonial state’s elite system. Johan Galtung defines it as a special type of dominance of one collectivity/nation over another. The centre in an imperialist nation and the centre in a subordinate nation is tied with common means of harmony of interest. Inequality permeates through the membrane of the state through inner elite structures when they establish bridgeheads in the elite structures of the dominant nation, the fruits of the imperialist regime are more equally shared on the top than on the bottom. ¹

Colonialism is generally understood in terms of practices and modes of forms employed for the systemic repression of indigenous people’s agency and forcible imposition of the colonial master’s political will in occupying the territory and paralyzing the resistance of local people against the hegemonic colonial rulers. It is the full or partial control of the sovereignty of a nation by another through economic, political, and military conquest. It is a practice of racialized exploitation and unequal distribution of resources in a bid to maximize the utility of the colonized land and people to increase the power of the empire driven by the anarchical international realm.

The essence of colonialism is gaining power and establishing imperial hegemony. It generally tends to control knowledge production, historical writing of local indigeneity, census-taking, law- making, and decision-making/administrative bodies. Characteristics of colonialism can be categorized as coloniality of different forms persisting through imaginative and material colonial legacies. In Mamdani’s axiomatic understanding, it is described as an indirect rule.

Coloniality, according to Maldonado-Torres, is an ongoing pattern of power that emerged as a result of colonialism in 1492 CE and with the representation of Americanity as modernity in the formation of a world capitalist society. Coloniality constructs the non-Western people as objects of deterrence at the intersection of realism and constructivism with impeccable intersubjective relations. Its character is preserved through the codification of law, knowledge synthesis, and re- synthesis in books, administrative documents, governmental policy papers, and academic practices, by supplanting languages, cultural patterns, self-imagination of peoples, common sense, and aspiration of self in a way that modern subjects breathe coloniality all the time and every day:

Coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects, we breathe coloniality all the time and every day. ²

Coloniality is the darker side of Western modernity that continues to survive through a long- established complex matrix of power.³ ‘Coloniality’ originated during the invention of Americanity in the transformational project of changing an agrarian-based economy into a more fast-paced industrialized capitalist economy. This change was not violence-free, rather it was witnessed in the destruction of Indigenous population. Quijano and Wallerstein theorized that Americanity-modernity was a project of the New World branded in the four-fold integrational approach comprising coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and newness. ⁴

Similarly, the scholars and academicians ⁵ in Pakistan have extended the framework of coloniality to theorize dimensions of coloniality that survives colonialism in post-colonial Pakistan. Fatima Sajjad has expanded this framework further to explore the pervasive coloniality of mind present in popular aspirations of the people of Pakistan.

An analysis of the innovative educational structure Single National Curriculum (SNC) to eliminate education apartheid as asserted by the political party Pakistan Tehreek i Insaf (PTI) reveals the coloniality of mind delusionally present in which the new educational practices have been shaped. She highlights that the desire to create something new cannot take place in the post-colonial temporality, given that the new is perceived in the sense of a phenomenon that has not been seen before. She terms this dilemma as “the coloniality of disobedience” which means that the aspiration to disobey Western epistemes and hegemony reproduces the similar imperial encounters of Eurocentricity and validation of beings from the Western Being which the proposed innovated education structures aim to defy ⁶.

Adding to the logic of “coloniality of power, being/non-being, and knowledge” she highlights disobedience as the popular liberation idea of setting one’s being free from the predominant materialist, oppressive, and subjugating Being fails because of the constitutive nature of modern/colonial systems. Coloniality pervasive in its utmost ubiquitous form is the one that controls mind by controlling the knowledge and the ways of knowing of one’s being in a linear and non-linear relation to its historical civilizational genealogy of knowledge evolution.

Coloniality eliminates the original identity of the ‘other beings’ and fits them in overarching racialized and hierarchically impregnated forms of demographic definitional systems of homogenizing Being. The mononaturally assumed space-time box divide ‘the other’s forms of beings’ into many segmented halves by enacting controlled discursive devices and knowledge re- construction practices through realism imbued with social constructionism. Coloniality in non- colonialism periodical reproduces and reify Western epistemes at the cost of sabotaging others’ localized diverse forms of beings in how the other beings’ sociopolitical reality is depicted in educational practices, their political leaders’ activism, and consequential contribution in policy praxis. This is evident in the manner as Fatima Sajjad points outs:

“the modern/colonial system controls the minds, the language, the imagination and the worldview of the oppressed, and hence it deceives and distorts their desire to disobey. Disobedience of colonised minds often reeks of coloniality” ⁷

Education in Pakistan is under surveillance since the time Mujahideen were nurtured and trained to fight Soviet Union in Afghan jihad of 1980s. In the post-9/11 context, the Madrassa schools are the central focus of the counterterrorism regime to counter/prevent violent extremism by monitoring/controling education for these are the incubators of the prevalent threats. The imperial coloniality of knowledge is profoundly persistent in setting the identity markers in categories of being/non-being through violent knowledge production by constructing ‘the subjugated Pakistani other’. Epistemic violence as Spivak ⁸ refers to violent imperial knowledge production to what Foucault⁹ referred as a complete overhaul of the episteme of the colonial subject meant to justify the domination. These systemic organizations are designed to mask historical genealogy of the knowledge production of ‘the other’ civilizations which is hirarchically inferior and scientifically improbable when viewed in enacted singularity or one-dimensionality. Fatima argues that US funded reforms in modern curriculums for public, private, and religious education in Madrassas in post/9/11 periodical have been narrowly framed by taking the ‘radical mind’ in ‘the otherized being’ as the source of problem and using education to counter/prevent violent extremism. She disrupts the patterns of White hegemony by casting a subaltern gaze on White ignorance by pointing out that the new education reforms do not develop the indigenous knowledge for these do not aim to empower indigenous people. ¹⁰

To this problem many scholars have highlighted that knowledge production is the site of political projects, and the colonial matrix of power is prevalent in post-colonial Pakistan produced and sustained from the site of knowledge production. It is important to make the unknown known of what purpose does education serves, and who benefits from it? Education as a tool of this project was employed by the colonial power to write the nativity of colonial subjects in India ¹¹ as a political project to reclaim the indigenous personhood, criticality in pedagogy as a knower of ‘the subjugated Pakistani identity’ is the way forward ¹². Malik Hayat 13 notes that the contemporary education system perpetuates ‘intellectual colonialism’ based on what kind of education should be introduced to Indigenous people in India in 1835, Lord T. B. Macaulay, believed:

“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of person, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”. ¹⁴

This helps us understand how the heterogeneity and differences of the socio-political and religious groups of the Indian subcontinent gained an institutionalized form. The “coloniality and modernity/rationality” were subsumed in the colonized subjects through the creation of disparity between the minority yet powerful colonial state elite and the majority subjugated masses. Hence, colonialism survives in post-colonial Pakistan by the presence and pervasive nature of coloniality of several kinds, and how imperial projects of countering violence perpetuate coloniality by extending global de-contextualized policies. There is an urgent need to re-constitute the knowledge production processes by inscribing localized knowledge to inform and reform policies