Shahkaar Research Hub
Ethnographies of Resistance Technologies of Repair
Shahkaar Research Hub (SRH) is an autonomous body of researchers informed by Raqs e Bismil - Dance of the Wounded Lover, Sumaya Durrani’s critical pedagogy, expounded in her ongoing doctoral research at UNSW Sydney since 2012. Dedicated to art-based, practice-led, trauma-informed, transdisciplinary research, SRH examines the intersections between Sufi Doctrine, Neuroscience, Western Philosophy, Social Theory and Decolonial Praxis in advancing somaesthetic interventions in Critical Trauma Theory mediated through Durrani’s propositions centred around, somatic experiencing, integrative therapeutics, and transdisciplinary aesthetics. SRH invests in emancipatory praxis, informed by inclusive methodologies, cognitive phenomenology, compassionate inquiry, reparative interventions, and transitional justice to assess their cumulative impact on the mitigation of emotional dysregulation, dissociation, intrusive repetition, therapeutic change, cognitive restructuring, and the return to psychological safety in the restitution of trauma. SRH prioritizes perspectives of marginalised communities, and individuals with disabilities affected by discrimination in new research. It addresses the social harm and erasure of non-White researchers in the White Australian academic system, as well as dominant discourses in metropolitan, settler, racial, and paracolonial contexts in Australia and Pakistan. SRH reconstructs social histories to address complex, developmental, and intergenerational trauma and examines the intersection of structural determinism, racism, epistemic violence, and systemic conflict. SRH promotes counter-narratives and fosters a critical awareness of racial justice, emphasizing the interconnectedness between the advancement of people of colour and White essentialist worldviews. SRH examines plagiarism and wilful epistemic ignorance as hegemonic practices that perpetuate systems of oppression, thereby disenfranchising the subject of authentic experience. SRH navigates temporalities, normativities, and fissured histories seeking ancestral resources to reimagine subjectivities and enable the processual structures of reparation, and repair. Drawing on Sufic Doctrine, SRH advances alternative epistemologies, reframes social historiographies, investing in the economies of care, disability studies, diasporic mobilities and interfaith dialogue, situated at the intersections of Western and non-Western secularisms. Instituting decolonial praxis and trauma-informed care, SRH employs customary and emergent multi-modal media technologies that span a range of disciplines and sensory modalities, including painting, jewellery, textiles, contemporary and traditional music, digital and performance-based art, and Urdu literature and poetry. SRH is the result of transformative praxis informed by the collaboration of five researchers and art - practitioners: Sumaya Durrani, Jalal Ahmed, Mustafa Ahmed, Nadeem Ahmed, and Samrah Mustafa. An intersectional approach enables researchers at SRH to pursue their respective disciplinary domains while collaborating on mutual concerns centred around trauma and alternative narratives of belonging reinforced through the restoration of generational connections and the formation of attachment bonds with significant others, cultivation of affirmative action and flexible boundaries as migrants to address systemic barriers and inequalities within social systems. SRH strives to create transitional spaces within Western scholarship and culturally competent practices to promote environments of psychological safety, equity, and inclusion in academic contexts. By coordinating efforts and leveraging expertise from multiple sectors, SRH addresses the complex social, psychological, and systemic factors that contribute to racial prejudice in the academic, social, and cultural space in developing comprehensive, integrated solutions.
Inception
Durrani initiated the Shahkaar project in 1989, upon her return to Pakistan following the completion of her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Fine Art, with concentrations in Painting, Jewelry Making, and Metalwork at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and extended studies at the Sir John Cass School of Art London Metropolitan University. Informed by her ongoing doctoral research at UNSW Sydney since 2012, Durrani examines her grandfather Allama Tajwar’s significant work towards decolonial praxis and reparative justice exemplified in his stewardship of prominent literary journals such as Humayun and Makhzan between 1916 and 1951, Shahkaar (1934), Ittehad (1927), Prem (1922), and Adabi Duniya (1930). Durrani draws on data culled from primary sources and interviews with Tajwar's colleagues and contemporaries. Notable figures such as Professor, Dr Zawar Hussain Zaidi (1928-2009) historian, SOAS London University, and chief editor of the Jinnah Papers, Hakim Saeed (1920-1998), Governor Sindh, founder of Hamdard University, and a scholar of Eastern Medicine, Professor Dr Kazi Kader, (d. 2016), Dean Department of Philosophy and Registrar Karachi University, Professor Dr Muhammad Ali Siddiqui (1938-2013), Dean Faculty of Education Hamdard University and Durrani’s father Arshad Durrani (1935-2018) actor, and playwright were instrumental at the inception of the Shahkaar project.
Shahkaar Awards
The Shahkaar Awards are informed by a legacy of trauma, embodied transformative action and reparative justice. The awards are closely linked to Durrani’s decolonial praxis, and resistance to four decades of epistimicide, normalized plagiarism, ableist machinations, corporate hubris, structural racism, and systemic violence navigated in her tumultuous journey as an artist, academic, and researcher across zones of epistemic and structural conflict.
Conference of Words at Penguin Island
Shahkaar journals dust jackets serve as autonomous texts in Durrani's ethnography of resistance to the status quo. They offer alternative, overdetermined perspectives, reframing the patterns of domination, subordination, and subalternization, Durrani navigates as a Muslim researcher located within the Australian Academy and as an anarchist activist academic advocating the decorporatization of knowledge production and resisting the proletarianization of intellectual labour in Pakistan’s higher education sector. The texts offer substantial content to supplement translations, artworks, online publications, and limited hardcover editions. The inaugural issue of Shahkaar Art Journal, The First Step Towards Decolonization of Art Education in Pakistan’ Pride of Plagiarism, Decolonization of Art Education in Boozistan, How to Catch a Thief, Plagiarism as Hegemonic Practice, Why I am a Muslim and Khuda Ki Basti in Pedagogies of the Dispossessed and the Catalogue of Injuries, respectively present a concise and assertive stance in acknowledging the contentious issues addressed in these journals. The keynote in the second issue of the Shahkaar Art Journal is presented in both Urdu and English, delineating the depth and scope of SRH's projects.
Shahkaar Awards
Ethnographies of Resistance Technologies of Repair
Ethnographies of Resistance Technologies of Repair
Archive Archeology of Emotion and Belief Memory Journal
Editorial
Sumaya Durrani Director
My practice centres around a theoretically informed, multi-modal, transdisciplinary aesthetics, and emancipatory politics that denaturalize ableist regimes of truth, enabling alternative vernaculars of resilience that privilege new forms of knowledge in academia. To this end, my practice is underpinned by the socio-aesthetic imperative to repair the effects of trauma, epistemic violence, social injury, disability, systemic and structural conflict. I extend a radical hospitality by the distribution of an affective reparative dynamic reshaping topologies of power and visions of justice in challenging the status quo. In rethinking agential capacities, emergent subjectivities, and normative social praxis, I re-open the possibilities of truth beyond the Western canon. My peripheral positioning and insurgent politics inform my methodology as a Sufi-methodologist and Muslim thinker located on the margins of Western scholarship in Australia in the Global South and an insurgent artist-anarchist resisting proletarianized academic apparatuses in Pakistan, a nuclear nation-state in South-East Asia, under the panoptic surveillance of the Global North. Situated at the intersections of Doctrinal Sufism, Western Philosophy, Social Theory and Neuroscience, my practice militates against the subalternization of non-Western knowledges. In seeking reparative justice, I reimagine an affective care aesthetics as the preeminent site of transformation enabling equitable, liberationist futures.
My practice-led research methodology entails expansive undertakings in diverse media, lending itself to syncretical exchanges across disciplinary boundaries and subject domains enabling the realization of substantial artistic objectives pertinent to the scale, magnitude, compositional complexity, and plurality of methods, cross-fertilized in quasi-fractal, liminal structures extended in the curation of transmedial texts across modular units. My methodology is informed by transdisciplinarity, somaesthetics, and non-binary thinking. I institute intersectional, multimodal strategies of narrative representation and serial construction in transmedial ethnographies enabling storyworlds that are often complex and expansive, involving multiple narratives across numerous media platforms, immersive environments, sonic architectures, durational performances, and texts. My approach is self-reflexive and exploratory. I focus on the emergence of new forms of media literacy, media convergence, remediation, referencing, and adaptation of elements in traditional and new media to reimagine dialogical spaces across transmedial storyworlds located within non-linear, hyperreal narrative formations. The intertextual montages thus produced problematize essentialized narratives, facilitate reciprocity and inclusion enabling an alternative semiotics of knowing, being and sensing.
My aim is to articulate a framework of radical hospitality rooted in the affective and emotive economies of care found in Doctrinal Sufism. In so doing, I hope to build a more holistic picture of the seemingly contested relationships between people, places, and identity. By creating a space of inclusivity, I hope to reimagine the idea of the other, promote a sense of shared humanity, interdependence, and social justice. Given the communal context of my situated inquiry, my artistic practice and academic pursuits provide an integral platform for organic growth across diverse interpretive communities, enabling knowledge of place and a relational aesthetics in navigating the shifting modalities of habitus.
Ethnographies of Resistance Technologies of Repair
Urdu Markaz
Shahkaar Journals
Shahkaar Research Hub draws on the illustrious Urdu literary journal Shahkaar (1934), published during the first half of the 20th Century in British India. Shahkaar was founded and edited by Shams ul Ulema, Baleegh ul Mulk, Professor Allama Ehsanullah Khan Tajwar Najibabadi (1894 -1951). Shahkaar’s circulation originated in Lahore, a city with a history that is traced back to the ancient metropolis of Western Punjab that thrived along the River Ravi in approximately 2000 BC. Shahkaar’s rapid distribution extended across the cultural hubs of British India, including Western Punjab, Central India, Utter Pradesh, and the South, encompassing Hyderabad, Patna, Bihar, and Madras, in the period spanning from 1935 to1951. Shahkaar was ranked among the foremost proponents of what was widely acknowledged as the golden era of Urdu literary journalism in India, which emerged from the Ganga Jumna belt and spread across the Empire. Among the publications integral to this movement were Delhi's Saqi and Tanwir, Lucknow's Farogh-e-Urdu, Agra's Naqab, Bhopal's Afkar and Jaadah, Patna's Subh-e-Nao and Maasir, Hyderabad's Sabras and Saba, and Bombay's Asia, Shair, Nawa-e-Adab, and Naya Adab. However, the preeminent centre of this literary movement was Lahore, from where both Shahkaar and Adabi Dunya by Allama Tajwar were published, in addition to Nairang-e-Khayyal, Humayun, Alamgir, Savera, and Adab-e-Latif.
Shams ul Ulema Baleegh ul Mulk
Allama Tajwar Najibabadi
Shams ul Ulema, Baleeghul Mulk, Professor Allama Ehsanullah Khan Tajwar Najibabadi was a distinguished Urdu poet, scholar, decolonial theorist, lexicographer, and critical pedagogue. He was the recipient of the titles of Shams ul Ulema,(Resplendent Sun Among Scholars), conferred by the British Empire in 1940 and Baleegh ul Mulk (Sovereignty in Literary Prowess), bestowed by Anjuman Arbab e Ilm Punjab in 1920. In British India’s literary history, Allama Tajwar is considered the last bearer of the distinguished title of Shams ul Ulema with no further individuals bestowed with this honour. Allama Tajwar was born on the 2nd of May 1894, in Nanitaal in the district of Bijnaur in the region established by Ali Muhammad Khan (1707-1748), formerly known as the Kingdom of Rohailkhand (1721-1774), that later federated into Rampur, Moradabad, Najibabad and Bareilly amongst others. Allama Tajwar was of Afghan descent originating in the fifth generational tier of the Durrani settler tribes of Rohailkhand. He was a descendant of Hafiz Saadullah Khan Durrani, a reputed scholar, military commander and relative of Ahmed Shah Durrani-Abdali (1722-1773) the founder of the Durrani Empire in 1747. Hafiz Saadullah Khan was commissioned in Ahmed Shah's entourage to India at the behest of Shah Waliullah after the fall of the Mughal Empire. Following the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, Hafiz Saadullah Khan settled in India. There, he was bestowed the role of tutor to Zabta Khan (d.1785), the son of Nawab Najib ud Daula (d. 1770), who was the founder of the city of Najibabad (1740 /1750) in Bijnaur.
The inception of Allama Tajwar’s scholarship can be traced to Dar ul Uloom Deoband comprising eleven years of acquisition in Persian, Arabic literature, and poetry in addition to the study of logic and philosophy. A two-year teaching stint at Deoband was followed by Tajwar’s migration from Najibabad in Northern India to Lahore in 1914 where he earned Munshi Fazil and Moulvi Fazil. In 1921Allama Tajwar was appointed Professor at Dyal Singh College Lahore and subsequently honoured as a Fellow of the Punjab University. As the chief editor of the defining Urdu literary journals in the first half of the 20th Century such as Humayun, Adabi Duniya, Makhzan, Ittehad, Prem and Shahkaar, Tajwar invested in the cultivation of linguistic plurality and diachronic variation, extending to domains beyond non-Western literature. Hence, Tajwar is considered the proponent of the blank verse, and its inception in changing the contours of Urdu poetry. Allama Tajwar’s major work in the domain of sociolinguistics informed his predisposition to social action. His formative influence extended to the dismantling of systemic barriers, reframing of public discourse, and formation of a constructivist approach to institution building and public policy enabling societal structures in promoting equity and social justice. Tajwar realized his vision by establishing the Urdu Markaz in 1925 in Lahore with Sir Sheikh Adul Qadir, (1874 -1950). It was at the Urdu Markaz that Tajwar initiated the seminal research on literature and sociolinguistics, an endeavour that was both historicist, hermeneutic and revisionist in scope. At the Urdu Markaz, Tajwar was invested in the documentation of 500 years of Urdu literature and poetry. The extraordinary initiatives at the Urdu Markaz and its network of institutions in the various districts of Punjab examined the intersections between indigenous narratives and modernities. Tajwar contributed over 200 academic papers on pedagogy, in addition to his administrative obligations at the Dyal Singh Trust Library, his scholarly commitments at the University of London, and his undertakings at the BBC. Tajwar authored Ruh e Nazm the syllabus of Urdu Poetry prescribed at the London University. Allama Tajwar’s oeuvre signifies multiple border crossings and intra-cultural knowledge flows, indicative of his conception of an interpretative horizon that was syncretic, unequivocally plural, and permeable.
Catalogue of Injuries
Ethnographies of Resistance Technologies of Repair
Raqs e Bismil Dance of the Wounded Lover
Ethnographies of Resistance Technologies of Repair
Prof. Dr Zawar Hussain Zaidi, Professor of History at SOAS, Hakim Saeed Governor Sindh, Scholar of Eastern Medicine & Founder Hamdard University,
Arshad Durrani, Actor, Playwright, Sumaya Durrani at SOAS University of London 1987
Sumaya Durrani is a transdisciplinary artist - epistemologist, Sufi methodologist, decolonial theorist, dissident political ontologist, anarchist-activist, and an academic with a neo-marxist bent. Durrani locates her practice at the intersections between Doctrinal Sufism, Western Philosophy and Social Theory, Neuroscience, Postcolonial Discourse Analysis and Transdisciplinary Aesthetics. She is undertaking a Doctorate in Art at the University of New South Wales Sydney. Durrani holds a Master and Bachelor of Fine Art Cum Laude from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, subsequently extending her studies at the Sir John Cass School of Art London Metropolitan University. She has served in academic, higher executive and advisory capacities in the public and private sectors in higher education in Pakistan, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Durrani served as the Director General and Principal of the Pakistan Gem and Jewellery Institute, TDAP Government of Pakistan. She founded the Punjsher Foundation Postgraduate Pilot Project in collaboration with Hamdard University, intiating an academic program grounded in Traditional Art and Islamic Sacred texts. She presently serves as the Founder - Director of Shahkaar Research Hub, Jaanbaaz, and Urdu Markaz initiatives centred around decolonial aesthetics and Sufi praxis, interfaith dialogue, raparative justice, transgenerational and complex trauma, structural violence and epistemicide. Durrani has served as the Pakistan Commissioner at the Asian Biennale Dhaka in 1995. In recent years, she was nominated for the Abraj Capital Prize, at Art Dubai in 2010 and the Jameel Prize in 2015 at Victoria and Albert Museum London. Durrani was the recipient of the UIPA Australian Award in 2012 and the First Womens Bank Award in 2011. She has exhibited widely with 40 solo exhibitions and several group shows at public and private institutions in Australia, Japan, USA, Canada, Norway, France, UK, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Her works are in the permanent National Collection of Pakistan at the National Art Gallery Islamabad, and at the Trade Development Authority Government of Pakistan. Durrani is initiated in the Chishti, Quadri, Qalandari, Naqshbandi and Suhrawardi Sufi Orders. Her dominant spiritual persuasion is Chishti defined by Qalandari alignment with a strong Hallajian bent.
Sumaya Durrani Editor
Jalaluddin Ahmed
Jalaluddin Ahmed is a composer based in Sydney. He studies Contemporary Art Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. Jalal holds a Master of Music (Composition) from the Australian Institute of Music. His graduate research is grounded in Indian Classical Music, Chamber Music, and Orchestral Music. Presently, Jalal draws on Minimalism, Futurist Aesthetics, Sound Design, and Electro-acoustic Music, intersecting with Contemporary Art Music and Popular Music. Jalal earned his Undergraduate degree from the Western Sydney University.
Samrah Mustafa
Samrah Mustafa is a Special Education Teacher with a focus on the Autism Spectrum Disorder. She has designed and implemented interactive lessons framed within a student-centred approach and has significant experience with the TEACCH Autism Program. Samrah has worked with various Special Education organisations in Pakistan including Mehran Institute of Special Education & Rehabilitation and Centre for Autism Rehabilitation Training Sindh. She is founder of Autism Splash, an online awareness project for advocacy of the autistic community. Samrah holds Masters in Special Education from the University of Karachi, Pakistan. She earned a Bachelor in Special Education from the same institution. Presently, Samrah is undertaking training in AutPlay Therapy.
Nadeem Mohiuddin Ahmed
Nadeem Mohiuddin Ahmed has worked in the fields of Banking, Finance and Research. He received a Masters in Research Studies ( Pathway to PhD) from Western Sydney University. His research focuses on the Adverse Effects of Aggressive Selling of Financial Products. Ahmed holds a Master of Economics from the University of Karachi and an MBA in Marketing from Preston University Karachi. Presently, Nadeem works as a Security Specialist for Cloud Operations Security. Nadeem is a trained vocalist in the North Indian Classical Music style of Rampur Gharana. He received his training from Ustad Muhammad Iqbal in the 80s. As a non-commercial artist, Nadeem focuses on Ghazal, Thumri and Semi-classical music.
Mustafa Ahmed Editor
Mustafa Ahmed is a researcher at The University of Sydney. His area of research is International Security, Conflict in the Middle East, Fragile States, Country Risk Analysis, War & Strategy and New Security Challenges. Ahmed holds a Master of International Security and a Graduate Certificate in Peace & Conflict Studies from The University of Sydney. Ahmed graduated with a Bachelor of Business & Commerce from The Western Sydney University.