Peeking under the Asian Iron Curtain: Socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial modes of friendship between Pakistani and Tajik poets

Abstract

ABSTRACT While Cold War historiography often foregrounds severed or frayed political ties, this article ethnographically explores unexpected friendships forming across apparent Cold War divides between Soviet Central Asian and Pakistani intellectuals – most notably, Muhammad Iqbal, Mirsaid Mirshakar, Mirzo Tursunzoda and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. These exchanges were initially made possible by Soviet agendas to build anti-colonial relations abroad by sending Soviet Central Asian intellectuals to international, anti-colonial conferences. Progressive communists like the Pakistani poet Faiz attended these forums too and formed rich friendships with Soviet Central Asian writers like Tursunzoda. I show however, that while Soviet agendas facilitated these friendships forming on shared socialist and anti-colonial grounds, their depth must also be attributed to a shared Persianate heritage. At least three modes of friendship were therefore formed between the same sets of people (socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial), which were made possible by the multiple subjectivities these figures inhabited as simultaneously socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial selves. Through this intersubjective affective relation, high-profile intellectuals found ways of connecting across and beyond Cold War divisions. I thus conceptualize friendship as multiple and generative, whereby two people can form more than one mode of friendship, each premised on markedly different social values and conceptions of self and Other. Despite their differences, these multiple, overlapping subjectivities and affective relations were not incompatible, allowing these intellectuals to connect in other-than-socialist ways at the height of the Cold War.