An Interview with Bina Shah

Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) Cartography of Crime: Spatial and Topographical Contentions and Contestations By Abhisek Ghosal Abstract: Crime is a socio-cultural phenomenon which is in dialogue with a number of nuanced and polyvalent variables such as economy, culture, politics, topographical fabric, to name only a few, and therefore bears telling significance in the society. Since time immemorial crime has been persisting in the society and has been ceaselessly evolving in commensurate with socio-cultural developments in general and particularly with spatial and topographical alterations. It is sometimes supposed that crime seems at times to be a consequence of disjunctive and disruptive sharing of worldly resources conditioned by certain geopolitical status quo and at once a means for questioning ontological stability of certain a priori epistemological and sociological strands. At this point, one may be reminded of that contextual specificities play pivotal role in drawing the contour of crime and thus are of profound pertinence. Due to the liberalization of economy happened during 1990s, the overlapping trajectories of space and place inured by the irrevocable and irresistible forces of globalization have problematized stereotypical assumptions of crime and as a consequence of it, a number of aporias including the problematic interface between crime and space induced by changing topographical specificities, within the paradigm of crime have been triggered.1 Ensuing contradictions, on the one hand, insist that one needs to reexamine the negotiation of crime with space and place in the postglobalization scenario in order to expound the changing nature of crime, and on the other hand, induce that critics are supposed to engage themselves in examining the problematic interplay among crime, space and place. There are some Pakistani novelists who have begun to deal with problematic negotiations of crime with space and place conditioned by social, cultural, economic, political, and religious alterations in the context of Pakistan. This article is intended to intervene into select Pakistani novels incorporating Akbar Agha’s The Fatwa Girl (2011), Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisioner (2013), and Bilal Tanweer’sThe Scatter Here Is Too Great (2013) to question the representation and ontological stability of crime in the select fictions and to lay bare some inherent loopholes in Abhisek Ghosal conventional understanding of crime’s affinity with space and place, taking recourse to criminology. Key Words: Criminality; Organized crime; Globalization; Spatiality; Geopolitics; Topography. Crime has been of enormous significance in the society inasmuch as it has substantial potentials to unsettle socio-cultural status quo in a given spatiotemporal locale. Crime is certainly an appalling reality and is often experienced by dwellers in the society. Unruly and rowdy people engage themselves with different sorts of crime to scale social ladder at the expense of causing harms to innocent people. Crime has been prevalent since time immemorial and has been subject to critical overtures so as to bring out how crime evolves with the passage of time. The notion of crime has been conceptualized by several criminologists who opine that that crime does not occur all of a sudden and is quite contingent upon a number of nuanced and polyvalent variables. Gradual transformations among the variables including space, place, culture, economics, politics, religion, to name only a few, pave the way for crime to take place in the society. In1990s, globalization has hit the floor in South Asian context and has brought about drastic changes in politics, culture, economics, to name only a few. In postglobalization scenario, the interactions among the variables have become more problematic than ever before and have left criminogenic situations. The negotiation among crime, space and place has become quite clear and the problematic interactions among them invite criminologists to reexamine ontological stability of crime. This article is designed both to get in to the problematic interactions among crime, space and place as reflected in the following Pakistani novels— incorporating Akbar Agha’s The Fatwa Girl (2011), Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisioner (2013), and Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here Is Too Great (2013), and to call the contentious representation of the interactions among the trio into question, taking resort to criminological insights. At the inception of the second half of the last departed century, criminology was begun to be shaped up contemporary theoretical developments and it has been passing through a number of theoretical revisions.2 Interventions of several theoretical approaches have laid bare the negotiation of crime with its immediate spatial and topographical specificities. Critical criminologists have, in particular, pointed out that socio-cultural oppressions have led a section of people living in a society to get entangled in crimes so as to put up resistance to dominant Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) rulers. Roger Hopkins Burke in An Introduction to Criminological Theory has brilliantly encapsulated the crux of critical criminology in the following words: There are a number of different variations of critical criminology but in general it can be said to be a perspective where crime is defined in terms of the concept of oppression . . . . Critical criminologists focus their attention on both the crime of the powerful and those of the less powerful. Crime is viewed to be associated with broad processes of the political economy that both groups but in quite different ways. For the powerful, there are pressures associated with the securing and maintenance of state and corporate interests in the context of global capitalism. In the case of the less powerful criminal behavior is seen to be the outcome of the interaction between the marginalization or exclusion from access to mainstream institutions . . . . (206) It is quite clear that according to critical criminologists, marginalized people are often compelled by the exploitative and manipulative forces governed by state authorities to give in crimes of different sorts. Critical criminology implies that crime is pervaded everywhere in the society and is often resorted to by people dwelling in structured power hierarchy as a means for retaining their specific positions. In fact, Radical egalitarian communitarians like Bill Jordon, Eliot Currie, Jock Young, among others, have upheld disruptive and disjunctive dispositions of spatial and topographical wealth lead marginalized sections of society to yield to crimes. All of them take into consideration “. . . inequality, deprivation and market economy as cause of crime . . .” (Burke 336) and moot that governmental polices need to be revised in tandem with socio-political and economic changes. Jock Young in “Voodo Criminology and the Numbers Game” has put forward how cultural criminology carries forward the perceptions of critical criminology in addition with its particular insistence on cultural diversities conditioned by certain spatial and topographical dispositions. Young argues: “I wish to argue that cultural criminology not only grasps the phenomenology of crime but, for that matter, is much more attuned to phenomenology of everyday life in general in this era of late modernity” (13).3 In this regard, one may argue that in order to comprehend the problematic matrix of crime, alterations pertaining to culture, economics, politics, governmentality, to name only a few, need to be taken into cognizance. In order to substantiate the previous contention, one may be reminded of K. Stenson’s pertinent insight in “The New Politics of Crime Control”: “[Governmentality connotes] the new means to render Abhisek Ghosal populations thinkable and measurable through categorization, differentiation, and sorting into hierarchies, for the purpose of government . . .” (22-23). In South Asian context, economic globalization came into being in 1990s and has brought about drastic alterations in existing social, cultural, political, and economic realms. The potent forces of economic globalization have widened the gap between rich and poor people thereby pushing less powerful people to occupy the margin in the society. West intends to make inroads into South Asian economy by making use of economic globalization so as to harvest spatial and topographical resources. Topographical dispositions in South Asian allure Western people to exploit poverty-stricken condition of the natives of South Asia in that instead of curtailing lacuna between rich and poor, Western rulers slowly but surely attempt to bring South Asian economy under its control thereby intending to manipulate prevailing socio-cultural and political conditions. As a consequence of economic liberalism, natives of South Asia have to confront a series of impediments to come to terms with the forces of economic globalization4. Arjun Appadurai has, in the seminal article entitled as “Disjuncture and Different in the Global Cultural Economy”, made attempts to map out the operation of Globalization across the globe: The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot in any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models . . . . I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relations among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a)ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapres, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) idepscapes. (32-33) Whereas Prof. Amartya Sen has conspicuously critiqued globalization as “global Westernization”5 (Sen qtd. in Lechner 19) and goes on to uphold that globalization has made rich richer and poor poorer to an extent, Joseph Stiglitz.has made desperate attempts to justify that globalization is beneficial for developing nation-states in Making globalization Work: About 80 percent of the world's population lives in developing countries, marked by low incomes and high poverty, high unemployment and low education. For those countries, globalization presents both unprecedented risks and opportunities. Making globalization work in ways that enrich the whole world requires making it work for the people in those countries. (26) Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) There are some conflicts with the realm of globalization in that a group of critics holds that globalization stands to reason as a theoretical paradigm and another group opines that it has failed to reach certain expectations at praxis. What is clear out of it is that the impact of economic globalization is quite evident in South Asian context. In this regard, one may moot that crime is consequent upon the impact of economic globalization on certain spatial and topographical dispositions within a particular locale. On the contrary, Eamonn Carrabine et al. have raised a pertinent question in Criminology: A Sociological Introduction thereby calling crime’s negotiation with spatial and topographical specificities into question6: Where does most recorded crime occur? Where do offenders and victims live and spend time? Are particular places perceived as more threatening than others, and if so, when and to whom? Is it possible to prevent crime by changing people’s surroundings? How can we theorize the surroundings, environments or spaces in which we live? What does it mean to think ‘spatially’? (137) What it implies is that uneven economic, social, political, to name only a few, developments in a locale generate criminogenic situations and draw deprived people to take to resort to crimes. Here one may put forward that criminality is less a choice than a compulsion for those marginalized and deprived people who fail to avail the benefits of economic globalization and to come to terms with swift changes in the society. In other words, those people who cannot find substantial roomfor expressing their subjectivities and cannot vie with rich people in terms of money are forged to consign to topographically inferior positions in the society. Interestingly, crimes usually happen in spatially and topographically advantageous conditions inasmuch as these cater better opportunities to criminals to breach laws.7 In other words, criminal prefer to carry our crimes in spatially and topographically propitious conditions so that crimes can unsettle existing socio-cultural status quo.8 Here, one may moot that equal distribution of wealth across spatial and topographical locales can reduce the number of crime in reality. But this contention can be contested on the ground that specific socio-cultural and economic issues need be dealt with utmost attention and sincerity so as to put check on crimes. Apart from it, the contention of Eamonn et al. can be pinned down inasmuch as mere changes in surrounding atmosphere can hardly reduce the number of crimes; rather governmentality should be formulated keeping individual’s needs in mind. One may further problematize interconnection among crime, space, and place in this way that as crime cannot take place in isolation, it is bound to make Abhisek Ghosal proximity to space and place. On the contrary, it can be put forward that contentious trajectories of space and place trigger crimes. What this argument connotes is that the matrix of crime is very problematic in that several factors such as unemployment, poverty, lacuna in socio-cultural patterns, identity politics, gender, etc. have been constantly and consistently interacting with each other and thus it becomes very difficult for criminologists to intervene into tripartite interactions among crime, space, and place with certain preconceived assumptions. In other words, the matrix of crime is always in flux and thus cannot be put in certain straightjackets. One may reasonably argue that the correspondence among crime, space, and place is at times linear and at once incoherent inasmuch ascrimes are not always bound by space and place. One may illustrate this contention in this way that the exact spatial and topographical occurrence of crime can hardly be predicted in well advance because crime is ontologically constitutive of strong reactionary sentiments that are unleashed when a person is coerced to take resort to criminality. Thus, ripe spatial and topographical situations, sometimes, fail to trigger crime. In other words, crime definitely requires a fitting milieu to occurbut a congenial setting may sometimes fail to trigger crimes into actions because crime is exclusively predicated upon a series of interconnected factors which are manipulated both by external factors as well as by the attitudes of criminals. This article seeks to examine the problematic interface among crime, spatial and place as reflected in select Pakistani novels— Akbar Agha’s The Fatwa Girl (2011), Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisioner (2013), and Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here Is Too Great (2013). Akbar Agha is a distinct Pakistani author who has also served Pakistan Foreign Service as a shrewd diplomat in various parts of the world, has penned The Fatwa Girl in 2011 to depict how sectarian politics being coupled with religious fundamentalism dominates on the lives of naïve natives of Pakistan in post-globalization scenario. The Fatwa Girl which is set against formidable political turbulence in Pakistan in 1990sis a poignant tale of an intrepid girl named Amina who, right from her childhood, encounters a series of religious constraints imposed by fundamentalists while trying to break free of rigid conventions, eventually meets Omar and later falls in love with him. Amina shows her keen interests in Western music and plans to launch a music band near a madrasa. Anima has been vocal against suicide bombing and makes attempts to eradicate prejudiced thoughts in the minds of the natives by means of music. Fundamentalists immediately put a label on her— a Fatwa Girl— to deter her from indulging in Western cultural practices. Anima brags of sheer strength of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) mind and ties a marital knot with Omar intending to consolidate her standpoint. Later on, the conjugal relationship between Amina and Omar ends up in a breakup because of Omar’s perfidy. Individual frustrations incorporating abrupt breakup with Omar, forcible abortion, Omar’s physical intimacy with Gulbadan, to name only a few, towards the end of the novel, lead Amina to take resort to suicide to give vent to her repressed emotions. One may argue that crime is in dialogue with spatial and topographical specificities so far, The Fatwa Girl is concerned. In support of this argument, one may refer to the immediate setting of the novel. In Pakistan, suicide bomb attack is quite common and the trail of it can be traced back to the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan, which is followed by the assassinations of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, among others. What it implies is that political turmoil has been constant in Pakistan and it seems conducive to criminal activities. One may further illustrate this point in this way that globalization has made way for Western economic and cultural practices to disrupt indigenous economic and cultural practices. Consequently, local issues remain unresolved and a sect of people who belong to affluent class, start to derive benefits out of globalization. It generates trepidation and frustration among poor and marginalized natives who are forced to take resort to crimes to sustain their lives: We are primitive in so many ways but do nothing about it. We don’t have running water in most homes. We can’t manufacture a keyboard or a computer. And yet we ‘ve had no problem producing a nuclear bomb! I caught sight of Amina six months later when we carried out our first nuclear explosion. What a glorious day it was for the country! There were celebrations on the streets, cars would not stop blowing their horns, even lame beggars threw down their crutches and whirled around like dervishes. They were still hungry and in rags, but what did that matter . . . . On the day of the nuclear exploration you would have thought the nation had experienced a collective orgasm. (Agha 19-20) This excerpt exposes the loopholes in governance and the invariable impact of globalization on Pakistan. It also attests to that the unresolved local issues make ordinary lives extremely miserable and leads poor natives to ponder over crimes to get rid of some immediate problems. On the contrary to it, one may refer to the following instance from the novel to question sceptical assumptions pertaining to globalization: “American sailors spending big money in Karachi was not only a boon to merchants but their presence gave the country a sense of security” (Agha 28). Apparently, it seems Abhisek Ghosal that globalization is triggered into action by West to sort out local issues across the globe but the Father of Amina deflates positive approach to globalization subsequently: “. . . we became the victims of a collision between superpowers . . . power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Agha 30-33). Here, one may safely remark that disruptive political ambience in Pakistan followed by the invasion of the forces of globalization in the territory induce opportunist politicians to make desperate attempts to hold on to power even at the expense of demands of poor natives. Topographical specificities need to be taken into account as well to comprehend the matrix of crime so far Pakistan is concerned. Diverse topographical features including rough mountain ranges, unequal developments across Pakistan, concentration of business class in certain locales, infertile agricultural lands, among others, forge favourable milieu for crimes. One may draw the following reference to substantiate diversity in topography of Pakistan: “But Saidu was a beautiful place. I thought I’d spend a few days relaxing and looking around. In Karachi it was but and humid, but here the weather was delightful” (Agha 138). Here one may tend to deduce that certain spatial and topographical diversities pave the way for crimes to occur. This contention can be refuted by straightway referring to how individual causes lead the fatwa girl, i.e., Amina to blow her up as a suicide bomber. It shows that congenial situations do not always trigger crimes to take place. The emergence of Amina as a suicide bomber implies that Amina has failed to keep all the wounded emotions repressed in her mind and has succumbed to internal duress. One may tenably argue that Amina does not take resort to suicide attack willingly; rather she has to give in spatial and topographical situations that are conducive to crimes. This argument seems to be valid to an extent but cannot be totally accepted because Amina does not have any criminal record till her suicide attack and therefore it is obvious that Amina has taken recourse to crime only to get rid of psychological anguishes. What it suggests is that crime has definite proximity to space and topography yet these are not the only factors concerning criminal activities. It thus implies that the matrix of crime is quite problematic and cannot be comprehended with preset assumptions. Agha’s The Fatwa girl is replete with the instances of how globalization has problematized the matrix of crime and the inherent contradictions within the notion of globalization has made it more difficult for readers to comprehend the overlapping trajectories of crime, space, and place. Omar Shahid Hamid is a stout police officer turned novelist who has written The Prisoner to uncover criminal underworld and pervasive corruption in police system in Pakistan. The novel turns out to be a detailed account of how Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) spatial and topographical specificities trigger police officers to give in corruption thereby facilitating criminals to rule the underworld. The novel relates a thrilling tale of kidnapping of an American journalist named Jon Friedland ahead of Christmas Day. Kidnappers hold Friedland in an unknown location and police officials initiate serious probe into the matter. As the novel progresses, the corruption within the police system gets exposed to readers. Finally, Fiedland is rescued and the tension between America and Pakistan is resolved. One may argue that spatial and topographical situations in Karachi forge a congenial milieu for criminals to cause nuisances and police officers to yield to corruption. In order to substantiate the negotiation of crime with space and place, the following textual instances can be drawn: A cool breeze blew across the front of courtyard of the prison, causing a solitary figure to shudder. The gentle rays of the morning sun were breaking through the early mist. The weather was chilly by Karachi standards, although it couldn’t have been colder than a particularly crisp November day in London or New York. The balmy climate of the city was such that Karachiites only bothered to take out their sweaters and shawls barely for about fifteen days in a year. This year, however, had been different. A cold snap had hit the city and lasted for most of the month. Temperatures had been the lowest in recorded history. (Hamid 1) The Central Prison, or CP, as it was called, was a hive of information and a virtual university for crime. Jihadis, terrorists, activists of all the political parties, along with the average, run-ofthe-mill murderers, rapists and robbers— CP Karachi had them all. They were living together, learning from each other. An offender would be locked up for a minor offence in the Cp, and after spending a couple of years there, he would come out with a Masters degree in Criminality. The concept of rehabilitation in prison went out the window with the CP. You came out of there a much bigger, better and more dedicated criminal. When it had been constructed, at the beginning of the last century, it was meant to house between 3000-4000 prisoners. It now housed at least six times that number in the same area. (Hamid 4-5) It becomes quite evident that Karachi Central Prison courtyard turns out to be a hotbed for imprisoned convicts and crooked police officers. Loopholes in coordination among jail authorities coupled with the excess of criminals abet Abhisek Ghosal criminals and dishonest police officers alike to work hand in hand. The novel is fraught with instances how crimes are being carried out under the noses the police officers and how it leaves impact on Pakistan’s diplomatic understanding with America. Kidnapping of the American journalist of San Francisco Chronicle exacerbates Pakistan’s relation to America and exposes major lapses in Central Prison jail. One may argue that the impact of globalization on Pakistan is unavoidable so far the tripartite relation among crime, space, and place. There is a point in the novel where the novelist registers how globalization turns out ineffective in the context of Pakistan: Across the road was a line of shanties, where marble cutters are already at work, even at this early hour, cutting and shaping the blocks of stone that had been taken out of the hill. The sole concession of to modernity was a shack at the corner that had a faded Coca-Cola advertisement on it. This was Mangopir, one of the localities of the city before Karachi evaporated into the vast, arid languages of the Baluch desert. The area had a look of a frontier town in the American West, not quite part of the encroaching civilization f the city yet also not ready to be swallowed by the neighbouring wilderness. It seems that poverty, unemployment, scattered developments, intolerable living conditions, among others induce marginalized men to commit crimes. Even in the prison house, unhealthy ambience, corruption in police system, cannot help convicts rectify their behaviour. Eradication of local problems needs to be immediately sorted out to put check on crimes. On the contrary, one may argue that eradication of local problem cannot alone help one understand the interactions among the trio. Spatial and topographical specificities, to a large extent, leave impact on crimes. This contention can be contested on the ground that certain spatio-topographical features do not always ensure that crimes will happen in a particular time and place because of the problematic matrix of crime, which cannot be deciphered with certain predetermined assumptions. One may draw the following textual instance to validate the previous contention: The American President had just concluded a successful state visit to Pakistan and had praised the country as a ‘bulwark in the War on Terror’. He had made special mention of the Friedland kidnapping, and had cited the professionalism, and dedication of the Pakistani law enforcement Agencies in bringing the case to a successful conclusion. (Hamid 338) Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) This excerpt implies that the Government of Pakistan is at last able to retain a clean image of the nation-state before America by dint of the sheer professionalism of some honest officers in Intelligence Service to an extent but even at the end of the novel, the genuine local problems remain unresolved, which is indicative of that the contentious matrix of crime is yet to be explored. Bilal Tanweer is one of the emerging novelists in recent time in Pakistan, who has made debut in the realm of Literature by authoring The Scatter Here is Too Great (2013)which succinctly encapsulates the interface between how Karachi is shattered and battered by militant assaults and how a communist poet poignantly strives to find out apt words to give vent to his subjectivities.This novel is a concatenation of scattered events including bomb blasts, criminal activities, shattered marriage, a communist poet’s poignant struggles to put the appalling reality in poetic words, among others, occurred in Karachi. One may tenably argue that certain spatial and topographical specificities pave the way for criminals to commit crimes. The novel centers on the city Karachi which turns out to be conducive to crimes because of its certain spatiotopographical features: I had not been on the bus before, so I was happy and wanted to go with Baba. Baba says that it is one and same sea everywhere around the world, but he also says there are only very few cities that have the sea. Karachi has a sea. (Tanweer 10-11) It implies that Karachi is a port city and therefore is cynosure for criminals. But one may argumentatively encounter that the spatio-topographical characteristics incorporate socio-cultural, economic, political, and religious issues which lead ordinary men to take resort to criminality. Internal politics conditioned by Globalization is sometimes held as one of the causes behind the rise in crimes: “Americans gave him [General Zia] the money and guns and a carte blanche for drugs to fight the Soviets, and he fucked the country and this city for his jihad next door, thank you” (Tanweer 22). One may cite deep-rooted fundamentalist ideologies among natives in Pakistan, which pull politicians from taking serious actions against specific local problems: “In this country, everything is either Muslim or non-Muslim, everything, everything. Is your shoe Muslim? This cap, does it go to the mosque with you? Do your spoon and knife say their prayers on time? Everything, bloody everything is Muslim or non-Muslim! Is this colour a Muslim colour? (Tanweer 23). One may refer to the congestion in Karachi to be an ideal situation for criminal activity: I am sitting with Baba on the roof of a tall building and we are both looking down. It is like flying, really— so little noise, full of Abhisek Ghosal air and happiness. You look below and think the world is a lovely thing playing many games. Cars are small, buildings have shapes, and everything moves in regular clumps within the straight lines of the roads. ‘You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it,’ he says looking at me. ‘We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.’ It is suggestive of that the city Karachi is in flux and one must not approach the city Karachi with preset assumptions. In other words, the nature of Karachi’s spatial and topographical dispositions goes through changes following bomb blasts. Thus, crime’s negotiation with space and place is bound to be altered with the passage of time. In this regard, one may argue thatthe interactions among crime, space, and place are bound to be problematic following the swift mutability of spatial and topographical dispositions. One may draw the following reference from the novel: “Look again at the bullet-smashed screen: the bullet hole is a new territory. It cracks new paths, new boundaries. These are maps of an uncharted city. They tell different stories” (Tanweer 161). What it implies is that intersections among crime, space, and place are, to an extent, conditioned by its immediate milieu but the specific crisscrossing among the trio are, at praxis, unpredictable and hence the interactions among the trio are quite problematic. Thus, it has become quite clear that the fictions selected in this article reflect how an incident of crime is conditioned by the interactions and intersections between space and place. What is striking is that the spatial and topographical dispositions have been constantly and consistently changing and as a result of which, it impacts upon one’s understanding of an incident of crime. Along with it, the notion of crime, too, has been in flux, and therefore, it shares a contentious relationship with space and place. Although the select fiction writers chosen in this context deserve applause for attempting to explore the problematic interface among crime, space and place, the mutability and unpredictability of crime, in a given point of time and induced by spatial and topographical alterations, may lead one to critique these fiction writers on the ground that their representations of the interface are incomplete and bear inherent flaws. Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) Notes: 1. Interdisciplinary nature of Criminology has been corroborated by Eamonn Carrabine et al. in Criminology: A Sociological Introduction: Criminology has many meanings but at its widest and most commonly accepted it is taken to be the study of crime, criminals and criminal justice. There are many different approaches to criminology and the subject itself has been shaped by many different academic disciplines. (3) Sandra Walklate in Criminology: The Basics has pointed out the problematic matrix of Criminology in the following terms thereby making an attempt to trace the contour of Criminology: Criminology is inevitably and inexorably a potentially different creature dependent upon how crime itself may be brought into being in different social and legal contexts. Thus, what might be understood as crime, and as criminal, in France may vary from how that is understood in the United States. (2) 2. Jock Young goes on to argue in “Voodo Criminology and the Numbers Game”: . . . [There are] two fundamental contradictions: firstly, a heightened emphasis on identity in a time when lack of social embeddedness serves to undermine ontological security, and secondly a stress on expressivity, excitement and immediacy at a time when the commodification of leisure and the rationalisation of work mitigates against this. This is a world where narratives are constantly broken and re-written, where values are contested, and where reflexivity is the order of the day. (13) It is quite clear that Young has situated Cultural Criminology within the domain of Liquid Modernity which Zygmunt Bauman has elucidated in the following terms in Liquid Modernity: These days patterns and configurations are no longer ‘given’, let alone ‘self-evident’; there are just too many of them, clashing with each other and contradicting one another’s commandments, so that each one is stripped of a good deal of compelling, constraining powers. (7) 3. Globalization has expedited the free flow of capital across the world by means of technology and convenient transport system thereby affecting indigenous economic frameworks. Indulgence in the forces of Globalization entails complete Abhisek Ghosal submission to Western economic dominance in that the moorings of Globalization are regulated by West chiefly. Globalization fails to resolve context-specific problems and thus people living on the margin find it harder to come to terms with it. The idea of Globalization has been theorized by a number of eminent scholars. For instance, David Harvey in an article entitled as “Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition” elucidates and traces out the consequence of Globalization in the following words: We thus approach the central paradox: the less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of the capital to the variations of place within space . . . the result has been the production of fragmentation, insecurity, and ephemeral uneven development within a highly unified global space economy of capital flows . . . . Plainly, the new round of time-space compression is fraught with as many dangers as it offers possibilities of survival of particular places or for a solution to the overaccumulation problem. The geography of devaluation through deindustrialization, rising local employment, fiscal retrenchment, writeoffs of local assets, and the like, is indeed a sorry picture. (295-296) Roland Robertson in an article named “The Universalism-Particularism Issue” puts the crux of Globalization as “. . . a massive, twofold process of involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism . . .” (Robertson qtd. in Connell 23). 4. Prof. Amartya Sen in “How to Judge Globalism” said: There is also a need for more clarity in formulating the distributional questions. For example, it is often argued that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. But this is by no means uniformly so, even though there are cases in which this has happened. Much depends on the region or the group chosen and what indicators of economic prosperity are used. (22) 5. In this context, one may be reminded of Oscar Newman, a renowned architect, who employs ‘defensible space’ to contend that it was “. . . possible to modify the built environment to reduce the opportunity for crime and to promote community responsibility” (Newman qtd. in Carrabine et al. 145). 6. Keith Hayward in a seminal article entitled “Space— The Final Frontier: Criminology, the City and the Spatial Dynamics of Exclusion” has brought out the enormous significance of space in the realm of Criminology and has insisted that subjective intervention is required to decipher the space-crime dialectics: The city has always been a flickering presence within criminology, variously the source of immediacy, concern, visibility and inspiration. Yet, Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) despite this interest, the concept of the city has rarely been fully integrated into developed analyses of crime. This tendency is even more pronounced today . . . . Even within contemporary criminological theory, the city is all too frequently lost in the moment of abstraction, appearing only as an afterthought, a sort of theoretical shadow or ‘sideshow’. Urban crime is thus torn free from its physical context – the city. Street crime, for example, exists not as in any way connected to street life (or, for that matter, the life of the street), but as an autonomous, independent act, divested of all the complexities and inequities that are such a feature of the daily urban round. (Hayward qtd. in Ferrell et al. 155) In the same article, Hayward has divulged crime’s proximity to topography of a terrain which ultimately turns out to be a place for voicing dissents against free capital flow conditioned by capitalism. Hayward puts forward: The era of understanding urban space from a purely rational (as in the discourse of crime prevention) or structural perspective has passed. Our complex, contradictory social world – ‘a world in transition’ – made more opaque by the muddiness of human action, demands more. It is hoped that a (culturally-inspired) criminology can help focus attention on both sides of the exclusionary coin – those who can afford to protect themselves and those who for whatever reasons are forced onto the margins of society. That this is the current situation is not in question, but what we must now strive for are theoretical analyses that can help us work through (perhaps even with?) such a situation – analyses with the ability to look forward as well as back, while at the same time avoiding broad generalisations that fail to take into consideration the specificities of locality, culture and nation. (Hayward qtd. in Ferrell et al.162) 7. Jeff Ferrell has subscribed to Hayward’s argument regarding crime’s affinity with space and mooted that crime is proximate to topography of a terrain as well in “Scrunge City”: Over the years, criminologists have sometimes noted the city’s social and cultural ecologies: its close proximities of people and populations, its concentrations of habitation, its zones of revitalisation and decay, its shifting patterns of human movement and symbolic interaction. Criminologists have also posited connections between urban ecologies and particular forms of crime and criminality. Perhaps patterns of criminality reflect the tension between social organisation and disorganisation as the populations of urban areas ebb and flow. Perhaps urban gangs emerge in part out of the cultural proximities and externalised standards of success Abhisek Ghosal that the city offers, if not enforces. Perhaps the city surrounds its residents with such sharp contrasts in wealth and status that relative deprivations are experienced as unbearable inequities, to be confronted through violence or other interpersonal violations. The city’s dense human ecology suggests something else as well. It’s not just people and populations that exist in intimate proximity, their cultures and experiences crowded close together – it’s their possessions that are crowded together, too, in many cases uncomfortably so. Just as the city’s residents exist and move about at close quarters, so does the city’s everyday material culture, piling up on itself here, circulating there, in networks tightly woven one against the other. Housing, employing, unemploying millions of inhabitants, a large city also houses astounding amounts of personal property, generating countless items of consumption and survival each day. Accumulating in flats, garages, closets, shopping carts, automobiles, storage facilities, rubbish bins, vacant lots and alleyways, this overwhelming material culture gives the city a collective cultural weight, a distinctive urban density and identity, as significant as the shared experiences of its inhabitants. (167) Works Cited Agha, Akbar. The Fatwa Girl. Hachette, 2011. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Different in the Global Cultural Economy.” Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of Globalization, by Appadurai, Oxford UP, 1997. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000. Burke, Roger Hopkins. An Introduction to Criminological Theory. 2001, 3rd ed., Willan Publishing, 2009. Carrabine, Eamonn, et al., editors. Criminology: A Sociological Introduction. 2004, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2009. Harvey, David. “Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition.” The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, edited by Harvey, Blackwell, 1990. Coleman, Clive, and Clive Norris. Introducing Criminology. Willan Publishing, Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 7 (2019) 2000. Connell, Liam, and Nicky Marsh, editors. Literature and Globalization: A Reader. Routledge, 2012. Ferrell, Jeff. “Scrunge City.” Cultural Criminology Unleashed, edited by Ferrell et al., Glasshouse Press, 2004. Gibbons, Don C. Society, Crime, and Criminal Careers. 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall, 1977. Hamid, Omar Shahid. The Prisoner. Pan Books, 2013. Hayward, Keith. “Space— The Final Frontier: Criminology, the City and the Spatial Dynamics of Exclusion.” Cultural Criminology Unleashed, edited by Jeff Ferrell et al., Glasshouse Press, 2004. Sen, Amartya. “How to Judge Globalism.” The Globalization Reader, edited by Frank J. Lechner and John Boli, Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Stenson, K. “The New Politics of Crime Control.” Crime, Risk and Justice: The Politics of Crime Control in Liberal Democracies, edited by K. Stenson and R.R. Sullivan, Willan Publishing, 2001. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Making Globalization Work. W.W. Norton and Company, 2006. Tanweer, Bilal. The Scatter Here Is Too Great. 2013, Vintage, 2014. Walsh, Dermot, and Adrian Poole, editors. A Dictionary of Criminology. Routledge, 1983. Young, Jock. “Voodo Criminology and the Numbers Game.” Cultural Criminology Unleashed, edited by Jeff Ferrell et al., Glasshouse Press, 2004. About the Author Abhisek Ghosal is currently pursuing Ph.D at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He has completed both M.Phil. and M.A. from the University of Burdwan. His areas of research interest include South Asian Literature, Diaspora Studies, Criminology, Continental Philosophy, and Transnational Studies, among others. He has published research articles in different peer-reviewed journals.