Kavita Datla
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824836092
- eISBN:
- 9780824871208
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824836092.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
During the turbulent period prior to colonial India's partition and independence, Muslim intellectuals in Hyderabad sought to secularize and reformulate their linguistic, historical, religious, and ...
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During the turbulent period prior to colonial India's partition and independence, Muslim intellectuals in Hyderabad sought to secularize and reformulate their linguistic, historical, religious, and literary traditions for the sake of a newly conceived national public. Responding to the model of secular education introduced to South Asia by the British, Indian academics launched a spirited debate about the reform of Islamic education, the importance of education in the spoken languages of the country, the shape of Urdu and its past, and the significance of the histories of Islam and India for their present. This book pursues an alternative account of the political disagreements between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, conflicts often described as the product of primordial and unchanging attachments to religion. It suggests that the political struggles of India in the 1930s, the very decade in which the demand for Pakistan began to be articulated, should not be understood as the product of an inadequate or incomplete secularism, but as the clashing of competing secular agendas. The book explores negotiations over language, education, and religion at Osmania University, the first university in India to use a modern Indian language, that is, the Urdu language, as its medium of instruction, and sheds light on questions of colonial displacement and national belonging.Less
During the turbulent period prior to colonial India's partition and independence, Muslim intellectuals in Hyderabad sought to secularize and reformulate their linguistic, historical, religious, and literary traditions for the sake of a newly conceived national public. Responding to the model of secular education introduced to South Asia by the British, Indian academics launched a spirited debate about the reform of Islamic education, the importance of education in the spoken languages of the country, the shape of Urdu and its past, and the significance of the histories of Islam and India for their present. This book pursues an alternative account of the political disagreements between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, conflicts often described as the product of primordial and unchanging attachments to religion. It suggests that the political struggles of India in the 1930s, the very decade in which the demand for Pakistan began to be articulated, should not be understood as the product of an inadequate or incomplete secularism, but as the clashing of competing secular agendas. The book explores negotiations over language, education, and religion at Osmania University, the first university in India to use a modern Indian language, that is, the Urdu language, as its medium of instruction, and sheds light on questions of colonial displacement and national belonging.
