The Barelvī School of Thought

The Barelvī movement or school is a theological interpretation within South Asian Sunnī Islam with roots in developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries spanning colonial India and into the post-independence history of the subcontinent. Most of its adherents are found today in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but also in educational and religious institutions in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and other parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The Sunnī Ḥanafī scholar Aḥmad Raẓā Khān of Bareilly (d. 1921) was born in Uttar Pradesh during British colonial rule. Typically, his interpretations of certain doctrines of Sunnī Islam are seen as a response to the Deoband school and its theological ancestry that was formed in 1866-7, found in the northern Indian town of Deoband. The Barelvī school of thought is defined by a set of theological positions that revolve around the persona of the Prophet Muhammad and his special, if not exceptional, relationship and status with God. The Barelvī movement defines itself as the most authentic representative of what is known as Sunnī Islam and thus adopts the generic moniker, Ahl-i-Sunnat wa-al-Jamāʿat (The people who adhere to the Prophetic Tradition and preserve the unity of the community). Some describe the movement as first spreading among rural Muslims immersed in a selection of Sufi and shared Indian cultural practices. Today, it has its own franchise of seminaries (madrasas), scholars, and a robust industry of publications that engage in polemics with other theological sects prevalent in South Asia. It keeps its sights trained on the Deobandi movement and the global Muslim evangelical group known as the Tablīghī Jamāʿat and continuously exposes what it believes to be its doctrinal errors. Other adversaries are the anti-canonical school tradition, known as the Ahl-i-Ḥadīs, the variant doctrines of the Aḥmadis and Qādianis, as well as the Shīʿa. Aḥmad Raẓā Khān declared aspects or, all of these sects to be worthy of anathematization (takfīr) because they doctrinally depart from the true tradition and its interpretation of Islam. It would be a mistake to think of the Barelvī theological positions as paradigmatically Sufi. Indeed, the Deobandis, the Shīʿa, and even the Aḥmadis also accept variant teachings of Sufism, though they might diverge from the Barelvīs on precisely what the detailed doctrines of Sufism entails (Tareen 2020 [cited under General Overviews]).

Hidden Histories of Pakistan

Censorship, Urdu literature, Islam, and progressive secular nationalisms in colonial India and Pakistan have a complex, intertwined history. Sarah Waheed offers a timely examination of the role of progressive Muslim intellectuals in the Pakistan movement. She delves into how these left-leaning intellectuals drew from long-standing literary traditions of Islam in a period of great duress and upheaval, complicating our understanding of the relationship between religion and secularism. Rather than seeing 'religion' and 'the secular' as distinct and oppositional phenomena, this book demonstrates how these concepts themselves were historically produced in South Asia and were deeply interconnected in the cultural politics of the left. Through a detailed analysis of trials for blasphemy, obscenity and sedition, and feminist writers, Waheed argues that Muslim intellectuals engaged with socialism and communism through their distinctive ethical and cultural past. In so doing, she provides a fresh perspective on the creation of Pakistan and South Asian modernity.

Reimagining the Mughal Emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb in the 21st Century

The paper focuses on the reigns and policies of the two Mughal Emperors, Akbar and Aurangzeb, and analyses how they have been remembered in the wider social memory. While Akbar is glorified as a 'secular' and 'liberal' leader, Aurangzeb is often dismissed and ridiculed as a 'religious bigot', who tried to impose the Shari'ah law in diversified India. The paper traces and evaluates the construction of these two grand narratives which were initially formed by the British historians in colonial India and then continued by specific nationalist historians of India and Pakistan, after the independence of the two nation-states. By citing some of the most popular misconceptions surrounding the two Mughal Emperors, this study attempts to understand the policies of these two emperors in a wider socio-political narrative and attempts to deconstruct these ‘convenient’ misinterpretations. Concluding the analysis of how these two emperors are viewed differently in both India and Pakistan, the paper asserts the importance of leaving behind the modern concepts of 'liberal versus conservative' while understanding these emperors and reinforces the practice to understand these historical figures on their own terms.

Class Distinction in Zakia Mashhadi's The Cover Faces

Society is a combination of the upper and the lower class:The upper class or Bourgeoisie is busy in their world endeavors and their quest for 'more and more; whereas, in contrast, the lower class or proletariat strives for a proper one-time meal. Over time, this disparity between the classes gets horrible. The drastic consequences of this disparity become observable in society in hatred and injustice. Different authors of colonial India have jotted down social imbalances of the subcontinent, including Zakia Mashhadi. Her short story, ‘The Cover Faces’,extracted from an English translated collection ‘In Search of Butterflies’ by Saeed Naqvi (2017), was taken for qualitative textual analysis under Lois Tyson’s (2006) ‘Theory of Class Distinction’. Zakia Mashhadi showed the two parallel classes in society, where Bourgeoisie have almost everything;however, in the same society, Bourgeoisie even deprived the proletariat of the fundamental rights and necessities of life

Travelling Wives and Unprotected Women: Representing the Female Traveller in Tom Taylor’s mid-Victorian Comedies (1860)

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain would boast of an economic and social prosperity, improving both national and international transport and tourism. However, certain social issues such as the Woman Question, or the altercations in the colonies raised questions about the Empire’s stability. In London, galleries, museums, and theatrical stages, would reproduce images of the colonies to satisfy the people’s appetite for the foreign. In these, mobile women were usually reduced to stereotypical characters. Thus, we can find a clear categorization of the female traveller: on the one hand, the faithful wife who accompanies her husband, and, on the other, the wild, undomesticated female (Ferrús 19). This article scrutinises women’s position and representation as travellers during the Victorian period. With this purpose in mind, we analyse two comedies written by English playwright Tom Taylor (1817-1880) for London’s stages: The Overland Route (Haymarket 23 February 1860) and Up at the Hills (St. James’s Theatre 22 October 1860). The plays’ setting (colonial India) offers us the opportunity to further discuss gender ideology and its relationship with travel during the mid-Victorian period.

Artificial Intelligence from Colonial India: Race, Statistics, and Facial Recognition in the Global South

This article examines the history of a similarity measure—the Mahalanobis Distance Function—and its movement from colonial India into contemporary artificial intelligence technologies, including facial recognition, and its reapplication into postcolonial India. The article identifies how the creation of the Distance Function was connected to the colonial “problem” of caste and ethnic classification for British bureaucracy in 1920-1930s India. This article demonstrates that the Distance Function is a statistical method, originating to make anthropometric caste distinctions in India, that became both a technical standard and a mobile racialized technique, utilized in machine learning applications. The creation of the Distance Function as a measure of “similitude” at a particular period of colonial state-making helped to model wider categories of classification which have proliferated in facial recognition technology. Overall, we highlight how a measurement function that operates in recognition technologies today can be traced across time and space to other racialized contexts.

Keeping the master cool, every day, all day: Punkah-pulling in colonial India

This article studies how the distribution of the work of punkah-pulling in European households and barracks of colonial India involved European masters making gradually multiplying claims on their servants’ labouring time and how these claims fared in practice. The laborious task of punkah-pulling in such establishments was often resisted by native servants on counts of caste, custom or simply exhaustion. In the context of such conflicts, this article tries to understand how the colonial state and its legal and regulatory functions mediated the contested terrain of domestic and service work over the nineteenth century. Over the latter half of this century, punkah-pulling became a separate occupation, even as this occupation slid down the hierarchy of service work and became a more pronounced target of recurring racial violence. Against this background, the article also tries to grapple with the material limits encountered by the regimes of work involved in the cheap, day-and-night conduct of punkah-pulling that eventually led up to the acceptance of mechanised alternatives.

Cultural Jugaad in historic city transformations: India

Several historic Indian cities have managed to retain the original urban character by using readily available materials, craftspeople, and cultural traditions despite increasing urban transformations. This notion of sustaining/preserving/continuing certain cultural elements and rituals has survived in various forms in the last two centuries. Historic cities showcase their living heritage at the global level and are exemplars for studying the strong linkages within traditions and indigenous modes of preservation. In such situations where stakeholders have centuries of association with the site, it is essential that professionals look beyond conventional solutions to better understand local perceptions and thereby establish the appropriateness of any urban level interventions. This article draws from various urban conservation works carried out in the historic cities of Rajasthan over the last two decades. It illustrates the discoveries and challenges in understanding the traditional local mindset for working in such areas. The indigenous methods practiced in these historic living cores are often at variance with the norms and logics of Western city planning being followed in post-colonial India. Examples in the cities and settlements of Jaipur, Udaipur and Ajmer, feature in this article, highlighting the urgent need to understand the local community mindset and the Indian approach to solutions for rapidly modernizing historic urban centres