Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus

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    Sadegh Hedayat: A study of his Socio-Political StimulusParminder S. Bhogal

    (Draft conference paper only)

    International Conference Indo-Iran Cultural Relations A focus onSadeq Hedayat and India(17 - 19 Feb. 2013) hosted by the

    Department of Persian Studies, School of Asian Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad 500605 India.

    Sadegh Hedayat lived during a very historically significant period of time in Iran, during the reign

    of Reza Shah. He was born in Tehran on February 17, 1903. After his elementary education he joined theDar al-Fonun in 1915, where he began to receive a Western education under the supervision of European

    teachers. There after initial experiments with science and mathematics he finally opted for learningFrench instead.

    Although the country was never formally colonized, Iran came to the twentieth centuryconfused about its past and unsure of its futurecaught as it was between the traditional and the modern,the Asiatic and the European and a helpless pawn in the diplomatic, economic and military rivalry

    between the Russian and British empires. Meanwhile, the French were at the height of their intellectualreign, and many Iranians were, as a result, influenced by, and educated in, France. Thus a politically

    subdued Iran was in a way "intellectually colonized." Moreover, Reza Shah's quest for modernity, as wellas his rebellion against the clergy, led him to introduce the Western education system in Iran andsecularise Iranian society, so that it might more closely resemble a Western one. Hedayat was at the

    height of his career during this period of European socio-political and cultural imperialism in Iran, hisexposure to this queer mix of inflicted Westernized Eastern sociopolitical system and culture left him

    torn between two worlds. This paper is a moderate attempt to assess the political and social environmentof his times.

    One fine leisurely autumn morning when I picked up the English translation

    (by D. P. Costello) of Sadegh Hedayats magnum opus THE BLND OWL and began

    reading it, I was awe struck by its very opening lines There are sores which slowlyerode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker. It is impossible to convey a just idea of

    the agony which this disease can inflict. In general, people are apt to relegate such

    inconceivable sufferings to the category of the incredible. Any mention of them in

    conversation or in writing is considered in the light of current beliefs, the individuals

    personal beliefs in particular, and tends to provoke a smile of incredulity and derision.

    The reason for this incomprehension is that mankind has not yet discovered a cure for

    this disease. And by the time I finished its first reading, the challenging question that

    Hedayat raises Will anyone ever penetrate the secret of this disease which transcends

    ordinary experience, this reverberation of the shadow of the mind, which manifests itself

    in a state of coma like that between death and resurrection, when one is neither asleep

    nor awake? began to haunt the bit of a social scientist that I have been trained to be,

    time and again. With whatever little insight that I have been able to cultivate after reading

    some of the highly impressionable writers of different ages, it did not take much time

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    for me to realize that Sadegh Hedayat must have lived through some of the most

    turbulent socio-political circumstances, and needless to say, that he was a highly sensitive

    person who continuously smothers in the agony of his times, the agony of his land and

    people and of course his own personal agony and ultimately allows the latent fires of his

    troubled times to consume him up, but not before a last long loud shriek which lingers on

    for ages to come and keeps reverberating in the soul-ears of men who follow in times and

    keeps reminding them of that same old difficult question and keeps motivating them to

    look for relevant contemporary answers and possible remediesCulture, language and literature are movements within the creative

    practices of every society. Literature is a form of discourse, though distinct but always

    closely linked with other forms of social discourse, including the historical, political and

    scientific discourse.The relation between literature and society, and the place of literature

    in human activity are largely determined by the social and political conditions in which a

    writer lives. When we study the relations between literature and society then the focus is

    invariably on to see as to how much one of the most important products of human mind

    has been molded by socio- political and historical conditions. And, may be, in turn has it

    attempted to mould some of these and to what extent?

    In the words of Richard Hoggart, (G)reat works of literature (like THE BLIND

    OWL) supremely embody the meanings within cultures; that they perceptively and

    honestly explore and recreate the natures of societies and the experiences of human

    beings within them; that great writing bears its meanings by creating orders within itself

    and so helps reveal the orders of values within societies whether by mirroring them or by

    resisting them and proposing, usually obliquely, new orders, and so the expressive arts,

    and especially literature, are guides of a unique kind to the value-bearing nature of

    societies. (1995, 87).

    An overview of Sadeq Hedayats times reveals that he lived in an age marked

    by significant changes in almost all aspects of life in Iran. The Constitutional Revolution

    (19061911), the rise to power of Reza Shah (19251941), and the ensuing

    industrialization, modernization, and westernization of Iran were among some of the

    major currents that propelled Irans social, political, and cultural spheres away from its

    past at a speed unprecedented in the preceding centuries of the countrys history. In the

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    wake of this break from the past, Sadegh Hedayat and many of his contemporaries

    developed a critical approach toward the history and culture into which they were born,

    forcing upon themselves the task of reinvestigating the very foundations upon which their

    identity and self-conception traditionally rested. Their initial encounter with modernity

    one of the earliest such encounters outside Western Europelaunched them on a cataract

    of conceptual oppositions: East vs. West; old vs. new; regressive vs. progressive;

    traditional vs. modern. In the words of Houra YavariFarfrom seeing these concepts as

    continuous rather than distinct, dialectically related rather than diametrically opposed,

    these turn-of the- century Iranian thinkers internalized the incongruity between their

    inherited local realities and the appropriated Western models as a structural deficiency.

    Traces of such a problematic and conflicted encounter between inherited history and

    infiltrated culture are widely visible in the literary production of this period; one marked

    by a novel awareness of its own present-ness and singularity. Past and present, culture

    and history, inherited ideals and adopted values merged in the narratives of the period,

    all re-functionalized to serve an anxiety-driven quest for the reconstruction of a newly

    fragmented collective identity caught in a search for a meaningful reply to the question:

    Who am I? or rather Who are we? [Houra Yavari ; Homa Katouzian (ed): 2008, 44]

    A brief Socio-political backdrop of Sadegh Hedayats times:

    Sadegh Hedayat was born in 1903. However the tone & tenor of his times

    was set in the concluding years of the Qajar Dynasty The Qajar state was a feudal state

    of typical oriental despots whose despotism, existed mainly in the realm of virtual

    reality. In actual reality, however, the power of the shah was sharply limited due to the

    lack of both a state bureaucracy and a standing army. His authority carried little weight at

    the local level unless backed by regional notables. The Qajars had few government

    institutions worthy of the name andhad no choice but to depend on local notables in

    dealing with theirsubjects. The Qajar shah presided over the center through ministers,

    courtiers, princes , hereditary accountants, and nobles (ashrafs). But they reigned over

    the rest of the country through local ayans (notables) khans (tribal chiefs), arbabs

    (landlords), tojjars (wealthy merchants), and mojtaheds (religious leaders). These

    notables retained their own sources of local power. Even after a half-century of half-

    hearted attempts to build state institutions, Nasser al-Din Shah ended his long reign in

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    1896 leaving behind merely the skeleton of a central government. The ministries were

    sparsely manned by families of scribes who had held similar positions since the early

    days of the Qajarssome ever since Safavid times in the seventeenth century. The Shah

    did not pay them regular salaries hence it was a common practice to consider their

    positions as assets to be bought and sold to other members of the scribe families.

    The population mainly consisted of four major classes, each representing

    the four basic elements in nature as well as the four humors in the human body. Men

    of the pen represented air; men of the sword, warriors, represented fire; men of

    trade, merchants and tradesmen, represented water; and men of husbandry, the

    peasantry, represented earth. The Shah was depicted as a doctor whose main duty was to

    preserve a healthy balance between the four humors in the human body. In fact, justice

    meant the preservation of a healthy balance. But lacking a central bureaucracy, the Qajarsrelied on local notables tribal chiefs, clerical leaders, big merchants, and large

    landlords. In most localities, whether town, village, or tribal areas, local elites enjoyed

    their own sources of power as well as links to the central court. Since the Qajars lacked

    real instruments of coercion and administration, they survived by systematically

    exploiting social divisions. They described themselves as Supreme Arbitrators, and did

    their best to channel aristocratic feuds into the court. At the local levels they never

    hesitated to take advantage of the communal divisions among the general population

    where these divisions demarcated ethnicity, especially when neighboring villages spoke

    different dialects or languages. or they reflected tribal rivalries, both between major tribes

    and between clans within the same tribe.

    The population lived in small face-to-face communities almost as

    autonomous entities with their own structures, hierarchies, languages and dialects, and,

    often, until the late nineteenth century, self-sufficient economies. Physical geography lay

    at the root of this social mosaic. The large central desert famous as the Kaver, the four

    formidable mountain ranges; the Zagros, Elborz, Mekran, and the Uplands, as well as the

    marked lack of navigable rivers, lakes, and rain fed agriculture; all played a part in

    fragmenting the population into small self-contained tribes, villages, and towns. In such a

    scenario the taxes were not paid to the government but tribute was rendered to the khans.

    The peasants, who constituted more than half the population, were mostly sharecroppers

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    According to custom, village residents enjoyed the right to work on particular strips of

    land even though that land in theory belonged to the landlord. The countryside was

    formed of some 10,000 villages owned wholly or partly by absentee landlords.

    Independent farmers were found mostly in isolated mountain valleys and rain fed

    villages. An American military advisor employed by a Khurasan landlord wrote in the

    1920s that this was feudalism similar to medieval Europe since landlords owned

    numerous villages, treated peasants as serfs, and retained their own armies. His own

    employer lived in a castle with a private army of 45 full-time soldiers and 800 part-

    timers. These soldiers, he commented, were the worst scoundrels in the region. Such

    a system may have worked satisfactorily in its earlier days but it is not hard to perceive

    its fate and distorted version in times when Qajar state was weakening and in fact

    withering away especially in the times of the last Qajar Shah.

    This declining feudal order was decimated by another serious dimension.

    This was the acute western interference in Iran. In other words Iran paid the price of geo-

    political tug of war between the British and Russian spheres of Influence in the 19th

    century. It began with military defeats, first by the Russian army, then by the British. The

    Russian swept through Central Asia and the Caucasus, defeating the Qajars in two short

    wars and imposing on them the humiliating treaties of Gulestan (1813) and Turkmanchai

    (1828). Similarly, the British, who had been in the Persian Gulf since the eighteenth

    century, started to expand their reach, forcing the Qajars to relinquish Herat, and

    imposing on them the equally humiliating Treaty of Paris (1857). Iranians refer to the

    two powers as their northern and southern neighbors. These treaties had far-reaching

    consequences. They established borders that have endured more or less intact into the

    contemporary age. They turned the country into a buffer and sometimes a contested zone

    in the Great Game played by the two powers. Their representatives became key players

    in Iranian politics. This gave birth to the notion which became even more prevalent in

    the next century that foreign hands pulled all the strings in Iran, that foreign

    conspiracies determined the course of events, and that behind every national crisis lay the

    foreign powers. The paranoid style of politics which many have noted shapes

    modern Iran had its origins in the nineteenth century. The foreign powers obtained a

    series of commercial and diplomatic concessions known as capitulations. They were

    permitted to establish provincial consulates, and their merchants were exempted from

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    high import duties as well as from internal tariffs, travel restrictions, and the jurisdiction

    of local courts. The term capitulation became synonymous with imperial privileges,

    arrogance, and transgressions.

    Though Iran was never actually colonized by any of these powers but their

    interference proved to be much worse than the situation in any actually colonized

    country. It was neo imperialism at its worst. And Hedayat happened to be born and

    growing during this period in Iran when old deteriorating feudal reign was crumbling

    under the ruthless onslaught of the external interference and worst politico-economic

    exploitation. As I said, although the country was never formally colonized, two imperial

    powers -- the British and the Russians -- nevertheless had tremendous economic &

    indirect political control over it. Meanwhile, the French who were at the height of their

    intellectual reign, and many Iranians especially the new generation from among the

    aristocratic families were being attracted towards and educated in and under the powerful

    contemporary French intellectual influences, right from Darul FAONOON to the

    French universities in Paris and elsewhere. Thus the French political and ideological

    influences of the age were playing their own role influence of . Thus, it is reasonable to

    assert that Iran was "intellectually colonized."

    Thus Iran entered in to the twentieth century confused about its past and

    unsure of its futurecaught as it was between the traditional and the modern, the Asiatic

    and the Europeanand a helpless pawn in the diplomatic, economic and military rivalry

    between the Russian and British empires. The most important and immediate program of

    its modernizing intellectuals was to abolish the traditional system of absolute and

    arbitrary rule and replace it by the rule of law hence their campaign for constitutional,

    constrained or conditioned government. The religious leadership and community

    generally also supported their position, because there was nothing in Islamic doctrine

    which approved of arbitrary rule, the arbitrary state was not legitimate even in the Shia

    theory of government, and the ulema would not alienate themselves from urban society

    including landlords, merchants and the ordinary public which was increasingly getting

    committed to a political change.

    The years of 1906-07 were all the more turbulent. The heightened public

    discontent over increasing inflation, food shortages, unemployment and foreign

    exploitation resulted in acute political disturbances which ultimately lead to what is

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    known in the Iranian History as the CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION. This resulted into the

    creation of a parliament (MAJLIS) and a written constitution. Muhammad Ali Shah who

    ascended the Qajar throne in January 1907 had no choice but to bend to parliamentary

    will and sign the fundamental laws. But soon the political scenario began to take further

    turns and twists.

    First, the constitutionalists suffered a major setback in 1907 with the

    signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention. This development remains very significant

    from the point of view of the study of the developments of Iranian Politics not only of the

    that period but also for several later decades . Britain, having grown fearful of the rising

    power of Germany, decided to resolve long-standing differences with Russia throughout

    Asia, including Iran The convention divided Iran into three zones. It allocated the north,

    including Isfahan, to Russia; the southwest, especially Kerman, Sistan, and Baluchestan

    to Britain; and demarcated the rest as a neutral zone. The two powers agreed to seek

    concessions only within their own zones; to retain the Belgian customs officials; and to

    use the customs revenues to repay the previous loans. The constitutionalists felt not only

    betrayed but also isolated in their dealings with the shah.

    Second, the Majles created an inevitable backlash once it tried to reform the tax

    system. It restricted the practice of auctioning off tax farms. It transferred state lands

    from the royal treasury to the finance ministry. It gave the ministry jurisdiction over

    provincial mostowfis. It reduced allocations to the court treasury, which, in turn, was

    obliged to streamline the palace stables, armories, kitchens, kilns, warehouses, harem,

    and workshops. It was even forced to close down the Drum Towers. Abdallah

    Mostowfi, in his long memoirs, reminisced that young deputies were so

    enamored of all things modern that they summarily dismissed such venerable

    institutions as medieval relicts.

    The third element of crisis in the constitutional revolution was an attempt

    by some liberals towards far-reaching secular reforms. They accused the ulema of

    covering up slimy interests with sublime sermons. They advocated immediate

    improvements in the rights not only of religious minorities but also of women. They

    criticized the constitutional clause that gave the ulema veto power over parliamentary

    legislation. They even argued that the sharia had nothing to say about state laws . This

    invited a strong backlash from the clergy.

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    The constitutional revolution of Iran and the series events that followed it

    up till 1921, when Brigadier REZA SHAH finally struck and took over, draws some

    good parallels to the French revolution of 1786 wherein, although everyone knew as to

    what was to be gotten rid of but there was not even a near consensus over what was to

    come in to replace the demolished order. The situation worsened further, and soon it was

    the beginning of a Civil war situation in Iran.

    Infact by 1920 Iran was a classic failed state to use modern

    terminology. The ministries had little presence outside the capital. The government was

    immobilized not only by rivalries between the traditional magnates and between the new

    political parties, but also by the Anglo-Persian Agreement. Some provinces were in the

    hands of war lords, others in the hands ofarmed rebels. The Red Army had taken over

    Gilan and was threatening to move on to Tehran. The shah, in the words of the

    British, was no longer accessible to reason, and was packing up his

    crown jewels to flee. What is more, the British, having realized they had

    overreached, were evacuating their families from the north, withdrawing

    their expeditionary forces, and preparing to streamline their South Persia

    Rifles. The British minister in Tehran told London that Britain had two

    choices: either let the county stew in her own juices, or concentrate in

    the center and south where some healthy limbs remain.

    Reza Shah is often seen as a great reformer, modernizer, and even

    secularizer. However his main aim in establishing new institutions was to expand his

    control by expanding his states power into all sectors of the country into its polity,

    economy, society, and ideology. The legacies he left behind were byproducts of this

    single-minded drive to create a strong centralized state.

    A British diplomat posted in Iran, reported as early as 1926 that Reza Shah

    appeared to be working towards a militaryautocracy and his sole aim seemed to be to

    discredit not only elderstatesmen but parliamentary government itself: He has created

    an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. The Cabinet is afraid of the Majles; the Majles is

    afraid of the army; and all are afraid of the Shah. Deputies and other politicians who

    openly criticized the shah met sticky ends. For example, Samuel Haim, a Jewish deputy,

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    was executed fortreason. Mirzazadeh Eshqi, a prominent socialist poet and editor of

    Qarn-e Bestum (The Twentieth Century), was gunned down in broad daylight. So was

    Kaykhosrow Shahrokh, a Zoroastrian deputy. Muhammad Farokhi-Yazdi, another

    deputy and former editor of the socialist paper Tofan (Storm), died suddenly in a prison

    hospital. Sayyed Hassan Modarres, a leader of the Moderate Party, was exiled to an

    isolated village in Khurasan where he suddenly died. It was rumored that he had been

    strangled. We can well imagine as to what sort of excesses, corruption and other

    irregularities keep going in such regimes. The new regime aroused opposition not so

    much among the landed upper class as among the tribes, the clergy, and the young

    generation of the new intelligentsia.

    In Iran it has been seen since those days that larger sections of common

    public, dis-satisfied with such modernizing but despotic regimes as that of the Pahlavis

    often rally behind a well organized clergy. This happened in 1928, 1935 and onwards and

    then much later in 1979. But then clergy comes into direct conflict with the modern

    intelligentsia. All this leaves visible impacts upon the creative and sensitive minds in that

    society.

    Thus such socio-political turbulences, as suffered by Iran at the turn of the

    previous century and well onwards produce different reactions in different persons. Some

    may turn violent revolutionaries; some may turn religious fundamentalists or extremistswhile others may go in search of ancient roots of their respective civilizations and

    cultures or even in the lap of spiritualism. All such people cope with such destabilizing

    situations in different ways.

    Today when I lookat Sadegh Hedayats years and his personality through

    the above described socio-political prism then I am not all surprised at the trajectory of

    his life and its sad end. Hedayat was a recluse by nature. Rather than confront people and

    voice his opinion about contemporary socio-political issues, he tried to influence the

    public through his essays and stories. To this end he organized his thoughts

    independently and on a high plane, avoiding the daily squabbles of his peers who

    jockeyed for better and more lucrative social positions. The more he delved into the

    insurmountable social problems of Iran, however, the more he became depressed and

    dejected. The atrocities of the monarchy, the clergy, the landed gentry, the nobility, and

    the intelligentsia were such that one could not see where even to begin to reform the

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    society. To ward off the depression of genuine helplessness, Hedayat turned to drugs and

    alcohol. And to expose corruption he turned to a less symbolic, nevertheless allegorical

    mode, of writing. The best example of which is his THE BLIND OWL.

    .I turned away from the window and looked down at

    myself. My clothes were torn and soiled from top to bottom with

    congealed blood. Two blister-flies were circling about me, and tiny

    white maggots were wriggling on my coat. And on my chest I felt the

    weight of a womans dead body.