Provincializing Policies through the Urdu Public

In the case of Bijnor, the symbolic distance of the qasbah from the city allowed it first to promote League–Congress collaboration in terms of benefit to localities outside large cities. The qasbah timescape was significant in its distance from the city, but more importantly its proximity to the units of community that mattered, communities crystallized by language, geography, and culture. Madīnah’s politics in the 1920s and 1930s were a mix of opposition to the Muslim League, support for Congress, suspicion of Westernization, and justified cooperation with Hindus, all in Islamic terms. The case study of the 1937 Bijnor by-elections demonstrates that conversations in one qasbah both exposed fault lines in Muslim identity and instituted a separation from the national matrix of Congress–Muslim League alignment. In the process, the paper sought to accommodate and report on a vast array of conversations relevant to Muslims, many of which have not received attention in historiography of media prior to 1947 previously.

Viewing the Map of Europe through the Lens of Islam

This chapter discusses how Madīnah newspaper saw its relationship to the global political context and how it counseled Muslims to understand and act in the world in the early twentieth century. In the case of Bijnor, the alterity of the qasbah enabled a key transition from promoting League–Congress cooperation to justifying cooperation with Hindus, opposition to the Muslim League, and suspicion of the Westernized city, all in Islamic terms. At the same time, it argues that this particular qasbah timescape was not only oriented primarily around the issue of affiliation or alliance with specific national parties, but also significantly on a particular relationship to the past.

Back to the Future Qasbah

This chapter delves into the role of space and time in the formation of the public. Statements in Madīnah linked Bijnor’s physical isolation to a temporal distance, a spatial-temporal rift that allowed it to define a segment of the Urdu public that stood at odds with the “Westernized city,” and from this position also to reach out and connect with a broader Muslim qaum. This chapter explores the power of alternate temporalities, enabled by nostalgia, as a mechanism of power. Statements about the passage of time were irruptive, enabling the construction of an alternative qasbah timescape, and with this alternative timescape, an alternative public. While the qasbah has more recently been tied to an idealized past, close analysis of the discourse of Madīnah newspaper reveals an early twentieth-century voice that saw the present, past, and future as productively intertwined in the qasbah.

The Public as a Timescape

Out of the intersection of a modernity that shrank miles into minutes with a disjointed temporality preserved by the limitations to fast travel, Madinah newspaper delineated a new space and time. It transformed its geographic isolation into a source of moral authenticity for the modern age. As a modern Islamic voice it wove its local public into the fabric of a history being lived by Muslims in many places. From the fusion of the telegraph and the printing press with centuries-old social and communication networks it fashioned credibility and accessibility; with Western print technology, it preserved the religious significance of traditional calligraphy; with this religious visual authority it elevated the aesthetic of the newspaper form. Embodying as a business the virtuous rhythms of Muslim devotion, it became an indelible part of the life rhythm of its home qasbah and of communities beyond its borders. This indicates that this and other small-town newspapers may have been a key vector by which these political orientations were incubated, nourished, and maintained.

Urdu Lithography as a Muslim Technology

Scholarship on the lithographic press has focused primarily on books—in particular, on the print traditions emanating from large cities like Lucknow. While printers used lithography to make books look more like manuscripts, Urdu newspaper publishers used lithography to make newspapers look like the mass-produced correspondence that had previously bound together ashrāf social networks. Madīnah not only was an example of commercial publishing but also deserves consideration as a manifestation of piety. Journalism was a farẓ or duty understood in religious terms by the proprietor and editors of Madīnah. The example of Madīnah suggests that we must consider this potential dimension of other Urdu newspapers as well.

Putting the Public House of Madīnah on the Muslim Map

This chapter traces a network of regionally, nationally, and locally significant publications, with Madinah newspaper at its center. The threads of this newspaper publication are placed in context with periodicals, associations, and publishing houses to make clear newspapers’ contribution to the delineation of an Urdu public sphere in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Qasbahs not only contributed to the deeper penetration of the public sphere in North India but also influenced the path and formation of that fragmented public. In an age of urbanization where the qasbah, or Islamicate small town, has been overlooked as critical to the construction of Muslim identity, this chapter highlights the language and visual culture of these ancestral towns as influential in the development of a Muslim public in th), ^#e early twentieth century through print publishing.

A Public Is a Place and Time

Founded in 1912 in Bijnor, a small town in northwest United Provinces, the newspaper Madīnah became one of the most successful newspapers of any language circulating in North India and the Punjab. This paper’s ultimate success is not something most observers could have predicted. It was published in a qasbah, a market town with an Islamic hue, and its proprietor, Majīd Ḥasan, was not influential or rich. Nonetheless, despite its isolated beginnings, the paper Madīnah went on to become popular across North India and the Punjab and to play an important role in the independence movement. The story of Madīnah newspaper shows how understanding the relationship between distinctive urban spaces and attitudes to time is important for understanding the early twentieth-century public sphere that orbited around the star of Urdu, a sphere that increasingly emphasized ties to Islamic space and time.