Paper short abstract:

This paper considers a memoir and biographical dictionary of the Afghan and Hindustani scholars who had relocated themselves to Lucknow at the end of the eighteenth century. Through my reading of this work, I foreground the varied resources that scholars drew on as states subdivided in this period.

Paper long abstract:

In 1774 the Mughal successor state of Awadh annexed parts of Afghan-ruled Rohilkhand as the East India Company crafted a shrunken Rohilla Afghan state in Rāmpur under the Nawāb Faizullah Khān (d.1793). Historians have examined the annexation, disassembling and reorganization of states in late Mughal India through the lens of economic outcomes, administrative failures, militarization and growing colonial ascent. Keeping in view the social consequences of these restructured states, this paper shifts the focus towards a parallel reconfiguration of intellectual circles, scholarly relationships and the growing portfolios of mobile intellectuals in times of political upheaval.

ʿAbdul Qādir Khān was one such mobile scholar. He was the author of a Persian memoir and biographical dictionary of the Afghan and Hindustani literati who like him had relocated to Lucknow at the end of the eighteenth century. Tracing his own family's emigration from Āzerbāijān to Rāmpur, he outlines the wandering scholar-soldier's quest for appropriate social circles, familial support and intellectual guidance. Finding favor with the Nawāb's tutor, his family had been able to leverage its social standing and secure his intellectual and physical training at home and at school. The move to Lucknow subsequently wrought many changes in his life as well as in the careers of the Afghan scholars in his company. Through my reading of this account, I will shed light on the multiple social and intellectual resources that scholars relied on as states lost autonomy and subdivided in late eighteenth-century India.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Urdu literary production by Muslims of Rampur to understand the shifting contours of locality and local identity from colonial to post-colonial context.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines Urdu literary production by Muslims of Rampur to understand the shifting contours of locality and local identity. Rampur was the last Muslim-ruled princely state after the decline of the Mughal and Awadh kingdoms and, therefore, became an important site of princely patronage and cultural production in the colonial United Provinces. The paper concerns itself particularly with the issue of space and subjectivity by exploring place-identity of inhabitants of Rampur (Rampuri) and sense of belonging to Rampur (Rampuriyat) that also conveys emotional attachment of self and space. Inspired by the material yet evoking the metaphoric, these ideas also flourish in and are transformed by the alternative "space of imagination" - literature - whose discursive formulations hold the key to an appreciation of the conceptualisation of Rampur as a distinct locality. Additionally, it also provides us opportunity to explore the multiple identities of Muslims in Rampur where various markers of identity like class, clan, sect, caste, gender and individual qualities emerge as crucial determinants of local historical experience and identity in its shifting contours. The paper draws upon the literary tradition of the biographical compendium (tazkira) to map the changing historical, social and cultural aspect of locality and Muslim identity in Rampur. The specific meanings accorded to the genre within the context of the nineteenth-century princely milieu of Rampur become all the more apparent when studied in relation to an extended survey of its usage in contemporary, post-colonial writings.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines genealogy as a genre of history, in particular by looking into how individuals, families, and communities in colonial India situated themselves within the larger social spheres and claimed a distinct status for themselves.

Paper long abstract:

A study of the tradition of compiling, preserving, and handing down of genealogies is one of the most effective ways to understand concepts of individual, family, and community in a society. Among the Muslims of South Asian qasbahs (unique small towns), continuous and meticulous production of shajrahs (genealogies) was a marked feature through which the compilers and those discussed attempted to situate themselves in their social spheres for greater claims to status and respectability. What is interesting is that this practice was popular not only among the Shia and Sunni Muslim gentry but also among Hindus such as those of the Kayastha caste who amassed their own vamshavalis (family trees).

These genealogical compilations were not only about preserving ancestral information, embellishing ornate family trees, and claims to an elevated status, howsoever contestable their veracity, but also about making sure that their hasb-o-nasb (lineage) does not get unsettled which was executed through the practice of endogamy. Genealogies were also a major tool to enumerate the past achievements of a family or community to which an individual was invoked to live up to. Compilations such as the one by Syed Faizan Ali Naqvi that begins with the Prophet and ends with all sharif Muslims living in the lanes and by lanes of Amroha up until 2000 CE is not uncommon. This paper looks into several genealogical trees and related literature to investigate how they were closely tied up to the history of specific individuals, families, and communities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the questions of 'historicism' and discursive ruptures in the vernacular history writing tradition of Mappila Muslims in Malabar. The influence of various trends including secular scientific history and Subaltern Studies project are also analysed.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an attempt to look at the discursive impacts of post- colonial South Asian historiography on Muslim identity movements of North Kerala in South India, focusing on the 'Muslim History Conference' held in Kozhikode, Kerala in December, 2013. Apart from more than a hundred of papers that were presented by mostly 'non-professional historians' in Malayalam what was significant about this conference was the addition of the term 'Muslim' to the title of the conference. This addition, however, is not seen as an attempt at communal history but is rather one of documenting community history, in a way similar to that attempted by historians on Dalit castes in South India. This paper analyses the influence of Subaltern Studies project and particularly volume 12 'Muslims, Dalits and the Fabrications of History' and its discussions in Malayalam vernacular publications and in a Mappila Muslim public sphere as a background to the conference. This paper focuses specifically on the critique of Nationalist and Marxist historiography by Professor M.T. Ansari's essay in Subaltern Studies Volume 12 'Refiguring the fanatic: Malabar. 1836-1922' and it's celebratory reception by the Muslim organisations in this region in past few years . In this paper an attempt is made to understand the 'discursive ruptures' in Mappila Muslim history-writing tradition(of pre-colonial origin) in vernacular along with the recent influences of academic/professional history-writing. Overall, this paper attempt to explore the academic origins of a new popular history in the context of Mappila Muslims of Malabar.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how women survive and negotiate the contradictions of life in a city like Karachi. In order to explore the interstices we turn to women’s voices that are present is diaries, biographies, memoirs and even fiction; sources where we find women speaking in non-public spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore how women in Pakistani cities like Karachi survive and flourish in the interstices of the city and negotiate its contradictions in their own particular way. Hence in Karachi women use urban space for mobility, transgressions, and the different pleasures that they seek, in the process "negotiating" the everyday in favorable and unfavorable terms. They may also exist in a social and cultural landscape of potential harassment, with their movements being regulated by the imminent threat to their bodies and emotions. In order to explore these interstices we may have to turn to women's voices that are present in non-formal archives such as diaries, biographies, poetry memoirs and even fiction; sources where we find women speaking in non-public spaces.

For this presentation, among other sources, I will use the poet and author Azra Abbas' short book, Mera Bachpan (My Childhood) which depicts Karachi of a not so distant past and gives us a window into Abbas' early life. Another source would be the poetry of the poet Sara Shagufta (who dies young) that shares the challenges she faces in a city where her being a woman and her notions of sexual freedom are commented upon and censored. The paper will be sensitive to the inaudibility of women's voices in public spaces, as suggested above, and will turn to archives of non-sociological writings, and genres of representation to bring forward a different story of a city.

.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the nature of the evolving and contingent local with reference to a gali (by-lane) in Old Delhi, Gali Batashan by juxtaposing two historical moments and accounts: one a literary account from the early 20th century and the other a contemporary view from my recent field visit.

Paper long abstract:

Located on the western flank of the Fatehpuri area in Old Delhi, Gali Batashan is named after its preponderant sugar candy shops. This paper will explore the nature of the evolving and contingent local with reference to this gali (by-lane), by juxtaposing two moments and accounts focused on visits to the house of the well-known 19th century Urdu writer, Nazir Ahmad, located in this gali. The first of these is a personal memoir by the Urdu humourist Mirza Farhatullah Beg, translated into English as Nazir Ahmad in his Own Words and Mine first published in 1927, recounting the period c. 1905. This account, I argue, narrates the personality of its biographical subject through the specifics of location within the walled city. The second account emerges from my own field visit to the same house in Gali Batashan, by then occupied for more than a century by the descendants of Nazir Ahmad. This visit took place in 2014 shortly before the national general elections in India which in the event ushered in an unprecedented electoral victory for a right wing Hindu party. Based on my interviews and supplemented by a photographic archive, the paper probes the family's changing relationship with their habitat, including their plan to sell the property to neighbourhood commercial interests, and opens up questions about the economic and communal transformations of that local, positing the little known story of this changing by-lane against the largely static and monumentalized images of Old Delhi as a quintessentially Muslim locality.

Paper short abstract:

Through reading novels written in Hindi by Muslim authors published before and after the Babri Masjid demolition and the rise of Hindutva, this paper examines the way a minority represents itself in the national language and participates or struggles against the dominant modes of nationalism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on two of Manzoor Ahtesham's novels: Sūkhā Bargad (1986) and Dāstān e Lāpatā (1995) written and set in Bhopal tracing the changing relations between Muslims and Hindus in independent India . Minor Literature has the potential for changing our understanding of the borders of the idea of the nation, and can prove an invaluable starting point for its critique. I deploy "Minor Literature" according to Deleuze and Guattari's definition: "A minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language".In the light of the above, questions of belonging, vocal critical engagements with post-independence state nationalism, tensions in personal relationships with friends and loved ones belonging to the "majority", even strange and unnamed malaises—all these can be read, as narrative manifestations of the "political unconscious" (to use Fredric Jameson's term) of minority existence . Furthermore, the position of a Muslim author in Hindi provokes questions about Hindi's role as the national language and the relationship between Hindi and Urdu.