Peripheral epistemologies: Voicing the unvoiced oral histories, digital spaces, and marginalised voices in the agrarian-feudal societies of the postcolonial world

Abstract

This keynote address examines the concept of marginalised voices within the subtheme of Oral Histories, Digital Spaces, and Marginalised Voices, taking as its central text Sarmad Sultan Khoosat's film Zindagi Tamasha (The Circus of Life, 2019/2023). Through close reading of the film, the address argues that the figure of the social outcast — the tawaif, the eunuch, and Rahat Khawaja with his non-conformist passion for dance — participates in a long tradition of Urdu literary and cinematic moral discourse about the relationship between deviance, humanity, and social belonging. The keynote situates this analysis within a critical interrogation of the Eurocentric character of contemporary discourses on marginalised communities, arguing that the theoretical frameworks of Foucault, Spivak, and the liberal democratic tradition emerged from specific historical conditions — the Industrial Revolution, the two World Wars, and the capitalist-democratic order — that do not map straightforwardly onto the agrarian-feudal social formations of the postcolonial world. Drawing on the author's published film criticism and interviews in The Friday Times, and on recent scholarship in postcolonial theory (Spivak, 1988; Foucault, 1980), documentary and film studies (Zafar, 2017), the sociology of development (Mody, 2023), and Urdu literary studies (Dewan, 2019; Vanita, 2016), the address proposes that the dismantling of social taboos in Pakistani and South Asian societies is most durably achieved not through the importation of Eurocentric liberal ideologies but through the structural transformation from agrarian to industrial society, of which investment in girls' education is the most critical lever.