Paper short abstract:

To study the progress and dissemination of ideas often requires study into moments of epistemological repression. This paper will look at the censorship, internment, and high-profile court trials of two prominent Muslim intellectual leaders of the 1910s and 1920s, Muhammad Ali and Abul Kalam Azad.

Paper long abstract:

Any attempt to write an intellectual history for early twentieth-century India without figuring in the presence of the colonial state is futile. The potency of ideas and the men who espoused them might well be measured by the very notoriety that the colonial regime ascribed to them. This is not to say that Indian intellectual currents were produced solely in reaction; rather, it is to recognise the contextual realities that shaped them, and to further recognise that instances of repression in particular afforded platforms on which ideas were developed and contested, and from which they were disseminated both to an Indian audience and for the benefit of the colonial state, which often had the very language of liberal imperialism quoted back to it. In trying to assemble a picture of what some of the most vocal contenders for the leadership of Muslim intellectual opinion in the 1910s and 1920s were thinking and why, I will turn to moments of confrontation with the juridical violence of the colonial state, looking specifically at two prominent individuals, Muhammad Ali and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. It will be argued that the process of censorship, internment, and the high-profile court trials of men like Ali and Azad were formative to a more uncompromising approach of Muslim politics to the colonial state, which was in exactly such moments revealed in all its illiberal guises.