The language of Secular Islam

Abstract

In her study of Urdu language politics in late colonial India, Kavita SaraswathiDatla traces the rise and eventual demise of an alternative Urdu movement thatenvisioned the language not as a marker of Muslim religious identity, but as ameans to articulate a modern secular nationalism with roots in India’s Islamicpast. By highlighting this largely forgotten moment of secular Urdu nationalism,the author pushes back against two well-established historiographical narrativeson Muslims in colonial India: the dominant understanding of theHindi-Urdu controversy as a process of sharpening communal boundaries andthe scholarly emphasis on the epistemological struggles to make Islam andWestern science compatible. She complicates both of these existing historiesby shifting her geographic lens from northern India to the so-called colonialperiphery: the Muslim princely state of Hyderabad. Specifically, Datla’s researchcenters on the establishment and initial decades of intellectual activitiesat Hyderabad’s innovative and Urdu-medium Osmania University.In the book’s opening chapter, Datla argues that Hyderabad’s leadingMuslim intellectuals and administrators were largely uninterested in epistemologicalquestions about the relationship between Islam and modern Westernforms of knowledge. To underscore this disinterest, she examines Wilfred S.Blunt’s unsuccessful proposal from the late nineteenth-century that the Hyderabadistate build a modern Islamic seminary. Whereas Blunt envisionedan Islamic university as a catalyst for Islamic reform in India, Datla demonstratesthat his Muslim interlocutors remained unconvinced about the necessityof any Protestant-style reformation of Islam. Instead of possessing such boldtheological agendas, leading Hyderabadi educators focused on extending educationalaccess and forging a stronger connection between the values taughtat home and the knowledge acquired at school. They located the solution tothese twin issues in vernacular education. For them, the use of Urdu insteadof Persian, Arabic, or English as the medium of instruction would remove theexisting language barriers in Hyderabad’s education system and simultaneouslyensure a greater continuity between home and school cultures. Accordingto Datla it was this focus on vernacular education, not Islamic reform, thatinspired Osmania University’s founding in 1918.The second chapter provides an in-depth examination of the university’sTranslation Bureau and its projects designed to reform Urdu into a modernscientific language. She explains that the Osmania faculty hoped to ...