Book Review: Kavita Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India

Abstract

Kavita Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2013, 248 pp., ₹885.

The university in modern South Asia: Historiographical framings between the local and the global

“…These institutions are the subject of a small but rich strand of historiography, which generally places their genesis within the politicization of community, identity, and culture that marked the high period of Indian nationalism (1905–47) (Abbas, 2014; Bhagavan, 2002; Brunner, 2020; Datla, 2013; Fischer‐Tiné, 2001, 2003; Gautier, 2020; Hasan, 1998; Hasan & Jalil, 2006; Hashmi, 1989; Lelyveld, 1978; Minault & Lelyveld, 1974; Renold, 2005). The university is unpacked for its symbolic, ideological, and political features, becoming a site for the articulation of competing visions of nation and community.…”

“…The university is unpacked for its symbolic, ideological, and political features, becoming a site for the articulation of competing visions of nation and community. Kavita Datla's work on Osmania University (Datla, 2013) remains an excellent example of this kind of framing, demonstrating how the university‐idea was reconstituted — not simply as a blunt instrument of nationalism or communalism — but as a vehicle for imagining novel political futures. For the Urdu intellectuals at the heart of Datla's study, the idea of a “vernacular university” provided an opportunity to delineate a unique Muslim nationalist imaginary: one that was not simply identitarian or separatist but cosmopolitan and secular.…”

“Our blood is becoming white”: Race, religion, and Siddi becoming in Hyderabad, India

“…Explicitly invoking Zinda Tilismath, another siddi resident of AC Guards, Aftab bhai said, “just like people say ‘ har marz ki dawa ’ [the medicine for all ills] about Zinda Tilismath, just like that, the AC Guards were the medicine and protector of the Nizam.” Although many siddis had probably converted to Islam generations ago, they were not seen through the lens of religion, but were valued for their strength and loyalty to their owners or patrons. Today, with the loss of prestige they had as valued soldiers, the disappearance of the cosmopolitan ethos of “secular Islam” (Datla, 2013) during the Nizam's era, and intermarriage with non‐ siddis , that is rapidly changing; their blood, their lineage is quite literally getting diluted, and with it, their strength and respect.…”

“…99Space does not allow for an elaboration of what it meant to be a Hindu (woman) conducting research in this Muslim neighborhood, even as Hyderabad has a particular history of cosmopolitanism that belies the religious/ethnic cleavage and anti‐modernity constructed and mapped on to Muslim spaces/communities both by the British and the Hindu Right (Beverley, 2015; Datla, 2013; Sherman, 2015). Please see my forthcoming ethnography for a delineation of these issues.…”

National language dilemma and its potential role in nation building: Academicians’ perception in Pakistan

“…Adoption of Urdu as national language by a multi lingo-racially mosaic country, Pakistan, has the religio-historical and cultural inspiration of the nation (Datla, 2013). Moreover, teaching-learning objectives framed for the interest of the country stem from the socio-cultural learning theory of Vygotsky (Maqbool et al, 2018).…”