I was born alien. Native, but not local. Local, but not native. Growing up in The Gulf left me, and many others like me, feeling a little Out of Place.[1] This primary estrangement was a soft exile of sorts, where, absolved of the civic and political responsibilities that accompany citizenship, we floated in a post-political, consumer paradise. It left us susceptible to the romance and bombast of patriotism, all the while remaining tempered by a traitorous mistrust of all nationalism, yearning for but suspicious of the utopia of complete belonging. The dialectic of belonging and betrayal is the subject of this Manual for Treason.

A colleague expressed skepticism about treason as a theme for a biennial, fearing that the insatiable spectacle of contemporary art would—like avant-garde, revolution and resistance before it—simply render treason inert and empty in its potential for radical politics. Although artist-rebels may be inspired by the idea that an accusation of treason is the inevitable consequence of speaking truth to power, it is always the sovereign—be it monarch or state—that defines the limits of treacherous acts, that marks one as a traitor. The sovereign is both the beloved and the betrayed.

In this spirit, the book begins with a call to action, part earnest part ironic, evangelical in tone and using fervid language drawn from both religious and political scriptures. It seeks to wrest treason from the state’s clutches, reclaiming it as a necessary ethic of dissent, and shifting it from a noun defined by the state to a verb enacted on our own terms.

The four portrait-essays that follow, each stemming from a distinct historical moment, trace the shifting contours of the dialectic of national affiliation and treason through the last two centuries in South Asia—an era marked by periods of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism, decolonization and nation building, and various separatist movements that challenged nationalist hegemonies to varying degrees of success. The essays bring into focus marginal figures, while simultaneously reflecting on the complex processes of history and collective memory through which they are forgotten and remembered.

The final essay reminds us that traditio, the Latin root of treason, means handing over or surrender. It illustrates how trust structures the informal banking system of hawala – which operates through an ancient filial network that transcends the nation – rehabilitating its reputation as the tool of criminals and terrorists.

As these plots unfold, it becomes evident that treason is nationalism’s dark heart and conscience. For South Asia, this plays out most dramatically through Partition, which made some traitors before they were ever properly citizens or patriots. Concurrent with independence from colonial rule, the trauma of Partition violence revealed faults in newly forged nationalist ideologies. Freedom’s dawn was “night-smudged” at its very onset, as the Faiz Ahmed Faiz poem that introduces the six ‘Proposals for a Memorial to Partition’ suggests. As speculative and utopian as the concept of nation itself, the proposals suggest possibilities for commemorating history’s largest mass migration, one marred by horrific violence, while attending to trauma’s inherent resistance to representation.