Everything has history. So do words. History can be forgotten, misinterpreted, mutilated or even suppressed, but it cannot be erased. History runs through the phonic, orthographic and semantic veins of words. Attempts have been made to kill history, but it gets resurrected the moment someone puts into practice the art of breaking the silence seeping through the semantic veins of the words.

A plain fact: history, per se, reaches people through words. A complex fact: a history reaching people in the words of their language is not necessarily their own.

As all words are conventionally constructed — or through shared cultural processes — the befitting adjective for their history would be none other than ‘cultural’. But some words have two kinds of history: cultural and political. In contrast to cultural, the political is conscious, well-thought out, purposive, intrusive and positional.

The cultural evolution of languages involves more of shared experiences, shared values and, eventually, a common worldview. But the political progression of a language or a particular set of words entails a convoluted process of interferences, manipulations, influences, execution of power and, subsequently, institutionalisation. All words soaked in any sort of politically intended act get institutionalised, sooner or later. They can also serve as identity markers for a community or nation.

A cursory look at binary words such as ‘East-West’, ‘enlightened-decadent’, ‘modern-traditional’, ‘white-black’, ‘religion-science’, ‘masculine-feminine’, ‘civilised-brutes’ and so on will confirm the point in question.

Words have a cultural and political history. And the latter often involves manipulations and assertion of power

These thoughts came to my mind while contemplating the changing meaning of ‘wahshi’, a word employed by Nauman Naqvi in his translation of the title of Raoul Peck’s recently released docu-series Exterminate all the Brutes. The word wahshi has both kinds of histories.

Naqvi, associate professor at Habib University, Karachi, rendered the title into Urdu as Tamaam Wahshion Ko Neest-o-Nabood Kar Do. Peck borrowed his title from celebrated Swedish author Sven Lindqvist’s famous book Exterminate all the Brutes. Interestingly, Lindqvist himself was not original; he peered into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to pick out the phrase.

Mr Kurtz, a character in Heart of Darkness, while gushing hatred against black people, utters this infamous sentence: “exterminate all the brutes.” How can a single sentence from a novel written at the end of the 19th century jump out at intellectuals from various lands and times and come to acquire such an imperishable existence and, of course, significance?

Its answer, partially, lies in the novel itself. By revealing that Mr Kurtz’s father was half-English, and his mother half-French, it has been inferred that “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” So Mr Kurtz’s utterance — and actions, too — flaunt not just his own idiosyncrasies, but rather European ones.

As stated above, the word wahshi has both cultural and political histories. In classical Urdu ghazal, a phrase — dil-i-wahshi — appears frequently, being employed by a cohort of poets almost in the same context. For instance, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib says:

Main aur aik aafat ka tukrra woh dil-i-wahshi ke hai Aafiyat ka dushman aur awaargi ka aashna

[My frenzied heart is the enemy of peace and fond of waywardness]
However, Altaf Hussain Hali’s sher about dil-i-wahshi is far more delightful:

Kaun-o-makaan se hai dil-i-wahshi kinara-geer Is khanmaan kharaab ne dhoonda hai ghar kahaan

[My frenzied heart is averse to the whole universe
No one knows which place this displaced one has chosen to reside]

Distinguished poet and humourist Ibn-i-Insha chose the title Dil-i-Wahshi for his collection of poetry. In most Urdu dictionaries, wahshi means a “wild animal that runs away while encountering humans; and metaphorically a person whose states of mind and heart keep changing, and eventually unsociable.” It needs to be noted that none of the Urdu dictionaries of the late classical and early modern periods had included mentions of the likes of “barbarous”, “brutal” etc under the entry wahshi.

Here, we can grasp the whole range of meanings which the phrase dil-i-wahshi encloses. It is a heart of an aashiq [lover] that becomes wahshi — tempestuous, frenzied, crazy, subdued by a sort of madness. Finding solace nowhere, he avoids meeting and conversing with people, prefers to stay alone or stray in deserts while tearing apart his clothes, following in the footsteps of the legendary aashiq Majnoon. Dil-i-wahshi was a symbol for undying love, rejecting all sorts of material comforts, immersed in unending frenzy and a limitless wandering of the imagination.

But it was the European lexicographers who added new meanings to wahshi in their daily usage and dictionaries. For instance, in John T. Platts’s A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi And English, we find the following definition: “wahsh (rel. n. fr. wahsh), adj. Wild, untamed; shy; unsociable; — uncultivated; uncivilised, barbarous; savage; intractable; fierce, ferocious; brutish; cruel; — s.m. A wild beast; a brute; a savage: — nm-wahsh, adj. Half-tamed; half-civilised, semi-barbarous, &c.”

Hence, the political history of the word wahshi came into existence. It is true that, in pre-colonial Urdu, wahshi would mean ‘a wild animal’, but they were not characterised with the brutality and savageness that endanger human lives. I wonder if this description of wild animal was made in contrast to domestic animals. This was a difference of tamed and untamed animals. Clearly, wahshi did not connote an uncivilised and beast-like person. Absolutely, this connotation was a purely colonial invention.

Syed Ahmad Dehlvi’s dictionary Farhang-i-Aasifiya went with the meanings employed by classical Urdu poets. But the dictionaries compiled in late colonial or postcolonial periods, such as Noorul Lughat and Urdu Lughat Tareekhi Usool Par, have registered the changed meanings of the word wahshi, adding words such as ghair muhhazzib [uncivilised] and ghair mutmaddin [uncultured].

Writing in a letter from London to the secretary of the Scientific Society of Aligarh, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan termed all Indians wahshi in comparison to the highly educated, cultured English. Furthering the idea of wahshi, celebrated Urdu critic Kalimuddin Ahmad declared Urdu ghazal a neem [half] wahshi genre.

The word ‘brute’ has the same history. Its etymological trajectory tells that it came into usage in the early 15th century, meaning “of or belonging to animals and non-human” — a meaning close to that of wahshi. Reaching English through the Old French brut (coarse, brutal, raw, crude) and Latin brutus (heavy, dull, stupid, insensible, unreasonable), it acquired the meanings of “wanting in reason, blunt or dull of sentiment, unintelligent.”

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines brute as: “involving physical strength only and not thought or intelligence.” Beyond doubt, only non-Europeans lack thought and intelligence. In the eyes of European modernity, lacking thought and intelligence is an abominable crime. Rationality begets rationality and physical strength invites bio-power.

Hence, it appears quite logical to exterminate all the brutes by using brutal force.

Extermination seems to have gotten ingrained in the epistemology of imperialism. In Peck’s words, “Imperialism is a biologically necessary process that, according to the law of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races.” He went to say sarcastically, “I am frightened; therefore, I exist. The more frightened I am, the more I exist.”

None of the politically defined words is innocent. It does not simply express a specific meaning; it provokes, instigates, moves people to act, to materialise what had been semantically intended. Speaking is acting.

‘Cannibal’ has the same history. According to scholar of comparative literature Susan Bassnett and scholar of postcolonialism and translation studies Harish Trivedi, “the very term cannibal referred to a group of Caribs in the Antilles, it entered the English language in the OED of 1796 meaning ‘an eater of human flesh’ and subsequently passed into other European languages. The name of a tribe and the name given to savage peoples who ate human flesh fused into a single term.”

How the name of a tribe was permanently associated with the horrendous act of eating human flesh unravels the colonial politics of identity. Colonial identities were not simply naming, but purposive, intrusive and positional naming. Wahshi, brutes and cannibal were all identities formed by the colonisers to segregate, marginalise and stigmatise the colonised in the name of naming. Stigmatised identities — of people, groups, communities or countries — are a form of semantic violence and a first step to suppress any claim to live humanly.

How can the colonised get rid of these identities? Identity formation at the very basic level seems tantamount to confinement and imprisonment. Real and metaphorical confinements go hand in hand. For instance, Native Americans were confined in forts, boarding schools, orphanages and on reservations, writes Luana Ross, author of Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality. “Today, they are not free; they are a colonised people seeking to decolonise themselves,” she states.

To get entangled perpetually in decolonising is also a form of colonial confinement; you are not moving ahead on your own. Your pace, direction and nature of movement is being administered by the historical nature and epistemological formation of colonisation.

However, the colonised have no choice but to break the silence imposed on them, on their cultures and literatures by deconstructing the whole process and history involved in the formation of identity, and speaking truth to power.

The writer is a critic, short story writer and Professor of Urdu at the University of Punjab, Lahore. His book Jadeediat Aur Naubadiyat was recently published by the Oxford University Press.
He tweets @NasirAbbas65

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 29th, 2021