Abstract The text introduced and translated below represents a fragment from the narration and proceedings of an interreligious polemical festival known as “The Festival of Deciding (or Recognizing) the (True) God” (Melah-e Ḳhudā-shināsī) that was held for two consecutive years in 1875 and 1876 in the village of Chandāpūr in the Shāhjahānpūr district of the United Provinces (UP). More specifically, the translation below presents the discourses of the leading Muslim scholar who participated at this event also featuring major Hindu scholars and Christian missionaries, Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautvī (d. 1877), one of the founders of the prestigious Islamic seminary the Deoband Madrasa, on the questions of prophetic miracles and the normative status of Hindu avatars in Islam. Nānautvī’s discourse on these issues showcases an excellent example of the confluence of Muslim traditionalism and resoundingly modern logics of religion and history.

Abstract Muḥammad Ilyās Barnī’s (1890–1959) ʿIlm ul-Maʿīshat (The Principles of Economics) is an economics textbook that was published in Aligarh in 1917 and claimed to be the first book of economics in Urdu. In the chapter selected for translation here, Barnī narrates the history of India’s trade relationship with Europe, showing how European colonialism exploited Indian industry and gradually placed it in a position of economic subordination. The accompanying introduction to the translation provides a brief overview of Barnī’s life and works, placing the book in the context of his writings on Islam, ethics, and economics. It also situates the book in the larger context of Indian economic thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly within debates on poverty, protectionism, and Indian trade. Ultimately, the introduction argues that the study of economic thought and economic history in Urdu reveals a key facet of early twentieth-century language politics in India by highlighting the project of making Urdu a language of social scientific modernity, while also pointing to the development of a vernacular economic critique of empire that became increasingly influential in colonial politics at the turn of the century.

Abstract The following is an English translation of three essays by the late nineteenth-century Urdu novelist, historian, and essayist ʿAbd ul-Ḥalīm Sharar (1860–1926). In the essays translated here, Sharar offers commentary on contemporaneous world-historical events such as the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (which had garnered huge public uproar in British India, later culminating in the Khilafat movement) and the “Great Game” in Iran that resulted in its bifurcation into Russian and British spheres of influence. These polemical pieces concerning major imperial changes of the early twentieth century oscillate between impassioned pleas to the colonial government to save Islamic empires from total ruin and rousing calls to action to the Muslim community to band together and save themselves. The first essay, “The Fall of the Persians” (Zavāl-e ʿAjam), reflects on the twilight years of Qajar Iran and presents “Islamic” Persia as the civilizational fountainhead of large swathes of Asia from “the Bosphorus to China.” The second essay, “The End of Ottoman Power” (ʿUṡmānī Sat̤vat kā Ḳhātimah), responds to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1912 by analyzing the material reasons for the triumph of Europe. The third piece, “The Democratic Spirit of the Arabs” (ʿAraboñ kī Jamhūriyat-pasandī), captures the style for which Sharar was primarily known: narrating history through entertaining stories for moral edification. Here, a short vignette about the Andalusian ruler ʿAbd ul-ʿAzīz and his gradual decline towards conceit, at the behest of his Gothic wife, is framed by a historical review of the many ways in which Islamic rulers avoided inadvertent polytheism by not using grand titles like sult̤ān and bādshāh for themselves. This is held up as representing the intrinsic democratic ethos of the Arabs which was forfeited by later Islamic rulers under the influence of Persian culture. These essays will be of interest to literary scholars and historians of twentieth-century India interested in imperial transitions. They preserve trends in Urdu historiography that were central to the fashioning of national publics, providing a window into negotiations of the place of Urdu and Indian Muslims in the world.

Abstract This is a translation of two prefaces to Urdu translations of Arabic- and English-language histories, published in 1921 and 1922, respectively, around the topos of medieval Muslim Spain. Both translations were prepared by Maulavī Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān, who is also the writer of the first preface. The second preface is an introduction by Muḥammad ʿInāyatullāh written partly to acknowledge the immense labor undertaken by Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān, and partly to introduce the larger project of translating Islamic histories into Urdu. The first translation is of Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Maqqarī at-Tilmisānī’s (d. 1632) Andalusian history, written in 1617 in Arabic and titled Nafḥ ut̤-T̤īb (The Breath of Perfume). The Urdu translation was published from Aligarh in November 1921. The second is a translation of S. P. Scott’s (1846–1929) English-language history written in 1904, The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, which was published in Lahore in 1922 under the Urdu title Aḳhbār ul-Undulus. Through these prefaces, Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān’s translations reveal a vibrant world of translational activities centered around the Department of Composition and Translation in Osmania University, Hyderabad Deccan. Both prefaces demonstrate the centrality of the practice of translation in the project of (re)claiming the history of Muslim medieval Spain specifically, and Islamic history broadly. Both prefaces take up the context of translating medieval Spain into Urdu as an opportunity to meditate on global Islamic histories and the role of translation in reviving connections lost because of colonial violence. At the same time, Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān’s translations of these voluminous works of Andalusian history are not a one-off event, but signal a much larger, concerted effort to bring (back) al-Andalus into Urdu. At the same time, even as the two prefaces together seek to bring historical knowledge into Urdu, they themselves constitute significant intellectual productions in their own right, comprising intensive research around the idea of Islamic history writing in Urdu. Both Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān and Muḥammad ʿInāyatullāh engage with multiple strands of scholarship, ranging from past Islamic scholars writing in Arabic, nineteenth-century Orientalist accounts, as well as works by Urdu- and English-language scholars contemporaneous to them. Straddling these multiple worlds, these texts together provide a meditation on the role of translation and history writing in the elaboration of a Muslim intellectual production in colonial modernity.

Abstract In late 1924–1925, ʿAbd ul-ʿAzīz us-Saʿūd of Najd invaded and conquered the Hijaz. Guided by their austere Wahhabi convictions, his victorious forces quickly destroyed religious and historical sites and banned myriad “un-Islamic” religious and social practices. These changes had a significant impact on Indian pilgrims to the region, who reacted swiftly and emotionally. Some lauded the reforms and others reviled them, but all spoke with the conviction that they were stakeholders in the region’s future. Most Western scholarship on this event examines its geopolitical complications, but in India the rise of the House of Saud had deep emotional and even existential implications. This article examines early responses to Saudi rule as reflected in Urdu print sources, showing how Indian Muslims responded to it by renegotiating the logistics of pilgrimage, debating restrictions to religious tolerance, and recalibrating their own status and place with the emergent “Muslim World.”

Abstract Sayyid Aḥmad Dihlavī’s (1846–1918) essay, “The Initial, Intermediate, and Final Language of Mankind,” was first published as a pamphlet in 1895 and again in 1900. It would subsequently be included in the introduction of his celebrated four-volume Urdu dictionary, the Farhang-e Āṣifiyah (published in 1908, with a second edition appearing in 1918). In this idiosyncratic and rambling treatise, the author attempts to advance a universal history of language by introducing a theory of the origin and development of language. He concludes with a discussion of the state of the Urdu language in British India by drawing comparisons with the linguistic situations of the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay Presidencies. Though he bemoans its low status, the unnecessary influx of English terms, and lack of official state support, he concludes by praising the Niz̤ām of Hyderabad for his patronage of the Urdu language.

Abstract Arguably the most “popular” Hindi-Urdu poet today, Jaun Elia involuntarily migrated from his hometown of Amroha in 1957 and soon after started his literary and intellectual activities in the foreign sprawling landscape of Karachi. He served as an editor and publisher of a literary journal titled Inshā’, produced scholarly works, and translated important philosophical and theological texts from Arabic and Persian into Urdu. But Jaun’s most sincere investment remained towards the craft of poetry, particularly to the ghazal, which he wrote prolifically and recited routinely at local and international mushāʿarahs till his death in 2002. The dibāchah (prologue-essay) from his first poetry collection, Shāyad, that was published only when Jaun was approaching sixty, is a formidable—even if at times formally complex—example of modern Urdu prose. This translation of the prologue-essay is not only intended to introduce Jaun’s philosophical, ideological, and aesthetical influences to the broader English-speaking publics but also to provide an aperture to those symbolic flashes from the poet’s biography which he wished to share with his readers.

Abstract Urdu fiction writers have employed diverse ways and techniques to register the theme of migration. Perhaps the most well-known literary voice to explore this theme is that of Intizar Hussain, one of the pioneers of modern Urdu short story, who migrated from Bulandshahr (UP) to Lahore. Surendra Prakash, who migrated from Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) to Delhi and is also considered a pioneer of modern Urdu short story, offers a contrasting approach to the theme. Born to a Hindu Punjabi family in 1930, Prakash learned Urdu—not Hindi. His experience of migration differed much from that of Intizar Hussain. While Hussain’s fiction about migration contains the traces of ideology, Prakash had to migrate to Delhi not because of any ideological leanings, but rather urgent necessity. We find the theme of migration lurking in all four collections of his short stories (Dūsre Ādmī kā Drawing Room, Barf par Mukālamah, Bāz-goʾī and Ḥāẓir, Ḥāl Jārī). His short stories seem to subvert the very idea of “one nation” which was based on the formula of “one language and one religion.” This study aims at how Prakash’s work juxtaposes the plural, synthetic culture of pre-Partition days to the monolithic, religious-nationalistic culture that took shape after Partition.