A Mughal Historian in Mexico City



Dr Taimiya Zaman’s reading of her paper on the experience of discovering Mexico city as a historian on Mughal history.
The paper, complete with a variety of anecdotes and addresses towards the conflicting feelings of feeling familiar and foreign at the same time, is a description of Mexico resisting and welcoming change.
The paper opened the avenue for a variety of questions like, can history be controlled and studied, and also questioned our understanding of change. Dr. Zaman questioned the idea of change when she explained that when we say, ‘Mexico has changed’, we mean that there is an unchanging essence that is Mexico city that is constant despite transformation.
She also lamented on the mutual feeling of all colonized peoples and lands over the sense of loss. At this point, I reflect over the sense of loss that I feel about the hopelessness of decolonization and a permanently changed landscape of history. Dr. Ali Usman Qasmi once said to me that as a historian then we must hold on to that immense sense of loss and navigate on from it as a starting point.
However, through her paper I realized that the people of Mexico had been through this sense of loss a long time ago and moved on from it by their acceptance of the colonization and merging practices and making them their own, holding onto others. Hearing about the thoughts of the Mexican people makes me feel like this is so far off from the status of Pakistan being a former colony as we are yet to collectively acknowledge the sense of loss and then make sense of it and move on from it. This reminds me of Memme’s writing that Europe is part of the cultural inheritance of all the colonized peoples. Denial of that is what leaves the colonized into a identity trap, an idea also perpetuated by Fanon, where one can feel like a stranger in their own land.
Furthering from that point, Dr. Zaman described her everchanging vantages through which the city could be seen. Not only did she deflect constantly from feeling familiar to foreign, she constantly saw the Mexico city from different vantages- as from the colonized and the colonizer, the pre-colonial and the post-colonized, the forcefully changed and the willful changed, the changed and the stagnant history of Mexico. It was intriguing to see how in some aspects, a place and its people can be welcoming of certain changes while completely opposed to others.
She described how we need to breakaway from the binaries such as the colonizer-colonized. This can help us look beyond the bifurcated versions of history and really understand the history without marking it by a particular standard.
This realization I believe comes from the constant relativity that is felt, between the colonized people across the world. However, one must reflect on the inherent differences of experiences of all these people, and not reduce them to an identity stemming from the virtue of being colonized.

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