Military, in general, encompasses and holds a very specific and a symbolic meaning of reverence, pride and loyalty for the larger Pakistani populace. It is very difficult to bring forth the discrepancies in a nationalist narrative that idealises the tangible and intangible methods of recruitment.
Dr Maria Rashid’s groundbreaking study Dying to Serve Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice on Pakistan Army, uncovers the army’s relation with the families of the deceased soldier, its sustenance in the context of “modern militarism”, grounds for kinship and the material compensation and the grand shows put up to honour the deceased soldier. It shows how “grief” and “sacrifice” sustain the army’s strong hold over the public’s imagination and state’s politics.
Dying to Serve
Maria Rashid
Stanford University Press (2020)
The book follows a lyrical setting, starting with a poem by Naaman Tamuz and ending it with Wilfred Owen. Its cover is a plaque by the British in Chakwal with the following inscription: “From this village 460 men went to the Great War 1914-1919 of these 9 gave up their lives”. This ostensibly shows the colonial legacy and its morphed interpretation in modern day militarism, synonymous with the ‘grandeur’ which is accorded to the families of the deceased on nationally televised ceremonies.
The book is a “political ethnography” set in Chakwal, also known as “the land of the valiant”. Dr Rashid begins the book with spectacular displays of emotion mixed with the “battle of narratives” which is honed to appeal to the nation at large. It then further delves into the famed ‘martial race theory’ by juxtaposing the recruitment of a Sikh soldier in the 20th century with that of today’s (in lieu of a permanent job and compensation that comes after the death of the soldier).
The Pakistan army continues to recruit on a voluntary basis and has never employed conscription. Dr Rashid makes use of these explanations offered by the military officers and the families of the deceased to show what goes in the making of this “affect” and what comes into play that holds the enduring appeal of the military when the markers of religion and national identity are erased.
It puts the intangible and immaterial components like grief and sacrifice that carries on the military/state’s narrative. It discusses the same “affect” produced by the “testimonies” given by the mothers and fathers (also wives) of the deceased solider, while further illustrating how this affect is used in redefining the quintessential ideological boundaries of the state.
Dr Rashid explores this concept through the anthropological lens by putting the women, mother (asexual/pure love) and occasionally wife (romantic love) in perspective. As given in the book, the gendered segregation of the duty, the masculine (Iqbal’s Mard e Momin) and feminine display of emotions and duty shows the dominance of the former over the latter in the making and sustenance of the modern nation-state and standing armies. Dr Rashid explains it as “this book affixes its gaze on to the military as an institution, the affective bonds it cultivates with soldiers and their families, and the function of these relationships in fashioning the appeal of militarism in modern society”. It further unravels the meaning of the word shaheed, and its history in a ‘Pakistani’ context.
Research on Pakistan’s militaristic project or at best on its military is scant. Previous work on it has often produced literature that centres on its political and economic linkages and effects. The only other work that can be found on the topics of sacrifice is the romanticisation of the subject in Inter Sevices Public Relations productions or war dramas which perpetuate the national narrative. Dr Rashid’s book is pioneering in a sense that it brings forward the sociological and anthropological constructs that go in the “making of a soldier” and the popular appeal of the military. It deconstructs and deciphers the imagery that grief and sacrifice hold, and the resonance they cause with the audience present in the show as well as with those watching it on their television screens.
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The debate around nationalism, religion, class, gender and identity has a regurgitated resonance in research produced on Pakistan. But it does not look into the different social interpretations of grief, sacrifice and loss in terms of a (national) militaristic project. What Dr Rashid does with this tricky debate is show the fragile nature of grief and sacrifice to be “part of a delicate oscillation between crippling grief and resolute commitment to further sacrifice”. This explains the intricate and innate question of “affect” and effect on the subject (family and the nation) and the larger debate of securitisation.
Though grief and sacrifice hold a primordial religious significance in Pakistan’s ideological genesis they nonetheless have been synonymous with an “empty idea of religion” which has often been part of considerable debate. This intertwining of religion and military provides longevity, a sort of ‘permeability’ and social justification of war. Tracing the link between the social and cultural consequences of sacrifice, forming links with the gendered debate within modern militaries and identifying their historical implications can help better explain the phenomenon that modern day warfare is.
Dr Rashid’s book in this regard is a remarkable study, as it provides a social lens to understand the layered complexities of the relationship between the Army and its relation with its ‘immediate’ subjects (family of the deceased soldier) and the nation at large. The right amount of emotional display and the “stoicism” that holds together the public appeal military feels they are capable to influence. The book has unearthed and provided pathway for other dimensions of antiwar, cultural and feminist research to be studied in the Pakistani military’s context.
Faiza Farid is a Lahore-based freelance columnist who worked as a researcher at Pakistan Navy War College.
Featured image credit: Reuters