Politics of Sufism in Pakistan
Contemporary Relevance of Shah Abdul Latif as an Icon of Sufi Sindh
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.21249Keywords:
South Asian Studies, Sayedism, Casteism, Sufism, Poetry, Life-history, hegemony, progressive literature, postcolonial historiographyAbstract
This paper is an attempt to explicate the emancipatory limits of a historical figure in a caste society. As a case study, it offers a critical analysis of a metaphor of Shah Abdul Latif, the eighteenth-century poet who inherited enormous caste capital as a Sayed and custodian of a Sufi shrine. The poetry and life history of Shah Latif are often invoked by Sindhi nationalists to pose an ontological challenge to the narrative of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Situating Latif in the South Asian political context, this paper offers a historiographical analysis of the vernacular literature on the projection of Latif as the prime symbol of emancipation for the Sindhi nation. It contends that Latif, as we know him today, is an anachronistic construct that was initially inspired by the Orientalist motive, and later used by privileged caste Hindus and Ashrafiya morality to feed the performative Sindhi nationalist agenda.
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