The Crossroads of Qaum, Millat, and Watan

The sixth and final chapter will concentrate on the diverse and disparate ways in which Muslims expressed ideas of qaum (community), millat, and ummah (religious fraternity) and their effect on Indian Muslim political identity. Chapter 6 will finally explore this trope of rootedness and will specifically illustrate how relationships to the homeland were conceived of and expressed, particularly using the tropes of qaum, millat, and watan. Some of the poetry written for the mushā‘irahs explored in Chapter 2 will be analysed, not only highlighting the diverse responses that Muslims had to the rapidly changing political climate but also demonstrating the importance given to questions of patriotism, nationality, and religious identity.

Lineages, Loudspeakers, and Labourers

Chapter 3 will also use a set of mushā‘irahs held in small and large towns across north India in order to illustrate the continuing material, structural, and cultural changes. The impact of radio broadcasting, ease of travel, dispersed forms of patronage, changing relevance of ustād–shāgird (teacher–student) relationships, and response to changing political contexts will all form the basis of this chapter. It is structured as a series of case studies in order to present the nuanced and rich details of the mushā‘irah, particularly since there is no extant work in this field and this book hopes to provide a foundation on which scholars may build further.

Poetry, Politics, and Provinces

Chapter 2 will continue to chart the changes observed in Chapter 1, using examples of a variety of mushā‘irahs, including relatively small ones held in provincial towns and larger ones held in cities in conjunction with political rallies and conferences. The second chapter will look at the way in which the space changed in the twentieth century by looking at a mushā‘irah in a small town in north India and then larger political mushā‘irahs in the 1930s.

The Mushā‘irah in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1 briefly locates the longer history of the mushā‘irah and then focuses on the Mughal mushā‘irahs in order to chart the subsequent changes that took place both in terms of their spatial configuration and content. The chapter uses the example of the Anjuman-e Punjab mushā‘irahs in order to demonstrate the intervention in the space by colonial authorities and the subsequent changes, including the rise of print as an extension of the mushā‘irah. Most importantly, structural changes will be highlighted that emphasized the inclusion and, therefore, increasing importance of the audience as a central feature of the mushā‘irah.

Introduction

Today, during a time of severe political polarization in India, Urdu literature and poetry and their attendant ‘spaces’ continue to find broad audiences. Indeed, Urdu poetry remains a medium that is deployed as a trenchant critique of the vagaries of political discourse and the communal polarization that is taking place in India. The formal and informal spaces of poetry remain crucial arenas for not only understanding the anxieties of the past and the contradictions of the present but also for discovering the possibilities of the future. The introduction discloses he aim of the book, which is to highlight the ways in which various Muslim intellectuals, often through poetry, interrogated what it meant to be Muslim and what they imagined India to be.

Conclusion

The Conclusion talks about the idea that a century ago modern ideas of identity were still in ‘the process of becoming’ and were being forged and contested but had not become fixed and defined through the apparatus of the state. There was no need to have a dominant identity like there is today. However, a more metaphysical sense of rootedness eventually got replaced by a more material and fixed conception, which obviously meant that people’s idea of home was circumscribed by physical geography rather than being propelled by imagination and multiple, often overlapping, sets of belonging. Unlike land, literature cannot easily be partitioned and it is, therefore, in the domain of culture and language that we might be able to locate future possibilities of what it means to be Muslim and Indian.

Nodes of Identity

Chapter 5 will illustrate the effect of transnational events on articulations of identity amongst these figures and will particularly argue against viewing the transnational, the regional, and the local as three distinct spheres instead of fluid overlapping spaces. In particular, this chapter will try to chart the rise of a self-consciously global Muslim identity amongst the aforementioned individuals while retaining a rootedness in India.

Ideas of the Homeland

The second part of the book begins with Chapter 4. It will trace the importance of the city as a marker of identity, in part using the genre of shahr āshōb. This, in turn, will tie into broader discussions about the peculiarly urban features of Islamic culture, the sense of rootedness in particular spaces, and a geographical imagining that constructed new cartographies of identity, given the changing social, political, and economic exigencies of the time. It will then highlight the impact of the events of 1857 on poetry and subsequently analyse the work produced by members of Anjuman-e Punjab, while also exploring the changes that literary genres underwent.