7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
1/10
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
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
2/10
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
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
3/10
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
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
4/10
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
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
5/10
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
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
6/10
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
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
7/10
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.
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
8/10
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,
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
9/10
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
7/29/2019 Sadegh Hedayat: A Study of His Socio-Political Stimulus
10/10
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.
Top Related