Interview with the Book Author, Kavita S. Datla . The Author refers to creation of a separate state of Telangana, recently approved by Congress Party, in India. Can someone familiar with Indian politics comment on it-How it will affect Muslim population and local politics? ( F.Sheikh)
Q; What is your book arguing?
My book tells the story of a set of vernacular projects in the Urdu language in the early twentieth century. It argues that the people involved in these projects were self-consciously trying to ‘modernize’ the Urdu language and make it fit for new national, and secular, purposes. Given Urdu’s associations with Muslims, these projects were simultaneously about finding a place for Muslims in the nation.
The book begins by considering the general character of education in the Hyderabad state, and the different projects of reform that were proposed by late nineteenth/early twentieth century administrators and thinkers – from a plan to create an Islamic university that would usher in a theological reformation in the larger Muslim world, to a proposal to found India’s first vernacular university. Ultimately, it was the latter that was taken up and the new university became a site for a massive project of translation, and for the unfolding of new research agendas. Many of these projects sent intellectuals sifting through the Indian past and non-Western (and especially Islamic) scholarly traditions to identify vocabularies and experiences that might be retrieved and used for a newly defined common good. Ultimately, the book tries to recover some of the tensions and debates involved in this process (as people argued about which vocabularies or traditions to draw from) and also the political impasses that they led to; the latter most dramatically in discussions with figures like Gandhi over India’s national language (Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani). In that sense, it is as much about language as it is about the political questions opened up by Indian nationalism.
Q; My favorite chapter, if I may be so bold, is your chapter on “Muslim Pasts: Writing the History of India and the History of Islam”. In your discussion of Abdul Halim Sharar (1860-1926) and Sayyid Hashmi Faridabadi (/), you argue, convincingly, that these scholars were articulating an alternative space both in history and in historiography for Muslims (alternative to the Oriental scholarship). Could you speak to why the earliest history of Islam was so pivotal a period for these scholars and their projects?
I am both delighted and surprised to hear you say that! When I finished my dissertation, that chapter was lying on the chopping room floor. I knew that there was something there but had done an awful job developing it. That chapter was especially difficult for me to write as it took me into the (then unfamiliar) terrain of Arabic historiography.
Clearly, the time of early Islam has always been important to practicing Muslims and to Muslim scholarship. But, it is also true that in late nineteenth-century South Asia there was a heightened interest in writing about it. So, we see a proliferation of historical biographies of the Prophet, for example. In fact, Shibli’s monumental Sirat-ul nabi is produced in this period with the financial assistance of the Hyderabad government. I think there is a lot more that we could do to think about why this happened at this particular moment. This was, of course, a time when scholars in other parts of the Muslim world, like Egypt, were composing modern Prophetic siras as well. My small contribution was to look at how one series of texts on the History of Islam was constructed, to think about the choices that were available to the author as he wrote and to understand his particular narrative decisions. Clearly, Sharar was responding to western scholarship on Islam. But, he was also interested, I think, in trying to understand historical “decline”. In this, he shared a context with many other thinkers in the colonial world. It was a question that especially preoccupied Indian Muslims in the wake of the permanent displacement of the Mughal emperor and one that led them to think in terms of a model of civilizations, to which Gibbon was central. It is also striking that the Hyderabad state made the determination that there were no fitting books on the History of India or Islam that they could use in their classrooms. Clearly, history was a uniquely politicized academic subject in this period and those writing in Hyderabad had their eye on the evolving state of the field, keeping track of archaeological excavations of the Indus Valley civilization, or writings about Dravidian civilization, as well as those works being produced by European authors on the early history of Islam and the history of India.
Q; In a sense your work traces a network of British and Indian intellectuals at the early 20th century moment in Hyderabad. Simultaneously, you are also tracing the history of an institution – that is the Osmania University? Is there a tension between these two foci? What theoretical framework helps you move from the individual to the institution?
You might be surprised by how many different individuals are hailed as ‘the founder’ of Osmania University. Obviously, that is not the relationship between individual and institution to which you refer.
I think there is a tension here, but I hope that it is a productive one. On the one hand, the archives themselves seemed to suggest a project on Osmania University, as it was so important to education in the state and had effects that rippled out into the countryside. But I also wanted to get more involved in the challenges that the institution was trying to address, and one way to do this was to work through the many publications of the individuals associated with it. So there was an element of intellectual history here, an attempt to understand why certain concepts, like that of the vernacular, became particularly and peculiarly loaded at the turn of the twentieth century. The focus on the trajectories of scholars associated with the institution also allowed me to write about the larger political debates that characterized this period, and to do so in a way that the dilemmas resonated to readers today. But ultimately, I was also interested in finding out as much as I could about how these intellectual debates came to shape the system of education in the state and therefore also affected a larger public. So, in the last chapter, I look at some of the statements made by students during the course of a protest movement, trying to take their ideas about language and religion seriously. Osmania University continues to be a nerve center for political movements, today for a separate state of Telangana, and it is important to think seriously about the (not identical) political motivations that have inspired these movements in different periods. Click link for full article;