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, 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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