Sufism and liberation across the Indo-Afghan border: 1880–1928

Abstract

How do we understand links between Sufism and pro-egalitarian revolutionary activism in the early twentieth century; and how did upland compositions of self and community help constitute revolutionary activism in South Asia more broadly? Using Pashto poetry as my archive, I integrate a history of radical egalitarian thought and political practice into a holistic study of self-making, of imperial spatiality, and of shifting gradients of power in the regions between Kabul and Punjab. Amid a chaotic rise of new practices of imperial and monarchic hegemony around the turn of the twentieth century, I argue, older sedimentations of ‘devotee selfhood’ in the high valleys of eastern Afghanistan gave rise, in social spaces preserved by self-reflexive poetic practice and circulation, to conscious desires for avoidance of all forms of hierarchy or sovereignty, in favour of a horizontal politics of reciprocity. Such inchoate drives for freedom later played a role in constituting anti-statist revolutionary subjectivities across great geographical and social distance. From upland Sufi roots, they rippled outwards to intersect with the work of transnational socialist and anti-imperialist militants in Indian nationalist circles too and even influenced scholars at the heart of the nascent Afghan nation state.