Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (review)

This review is written under the shadow of the Ayodhya verdict by a special bench of the Allahabad High Court of India set up to decide a title suit on ownership of the territory on which the Babri Mosque stood before its demolition on 6 December 1992. This detail is worth mentioning since the act of demolition is the point of departure, as it were, of Aamir R. Mufti’s inquiry into the minority-majority relationship in European, colonial, and postcolonial societies. The verdict in the Ayodhya case has demonstrated rather shockingly how faith rather than commitment to secular laws influences judgments. At the same time, immigrant communities in contemporary Europe face exclusionary pronouncements (the recent book by Thilo Sarrazin in Germany particularly targeting Turkish migrants and the debate that it sparked) and measures (expulsion of Roma and banning of the veil in France) that qualify them as “guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society.”¹ This is evocative of the pressure on Jews to assimilate through conversion to Christianity following their emancipation from the ghettos in Napoleonic Europe and the famous dictum of the German poet Heinrich Heine that baptism was the ticket to European culture. While Mufti’s work draws links between the Jewish question in Europe and the Muslim question in the Indian subcontinent in colonial and postcolonial times, current tendencies of asserting majoritarian cultural identity and demarcating difference highlight the more general relevance of his inquiry.

The author approaches his subject through a study of the literary dimensions of the contradictions and conflicts that emerge around the figure of the minorities in the processes of imagining and defining national identity/selfhood in post-Enlightenment Europe in the throes of nationalism and imperialism and in colonial and postcolonial India after the crushing of the revolt of 1857. His choice of texts is based on the roles these texts played in the intellectual history of defining nationhood and the specific responses to these definitions from the point of view of the concerned minority. Part 1 of the book traces this history through readings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise, Moses Mendelsohn’s philosophical treatise Jerusalem, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s political speeches Addresses to the German Nation, Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, Heine’s narrative fragment The Rabbi of Bacherach, and the novel Daniel Deronda by George Eliot; it concludes with Rudyard Kipling’s Indian stories and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which provide the possible route through which the Jewish question is transposed from its European origins to that of the Muslim question in colonial India. Part 2 shifts to the Indian subcontinent in the context of the communalization of colonial society in the aftermath of the revolt of 1857, the beginnings of the national movement, and the fissures that found their traumatic denouement in the Partition and the fractured selfhood that is its legacy. This long journey from colonial to postcolonial and post-Partition times is brought alive through readings of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, Abul Kalam Azad’s Ghubar-e khatir (Sallies of Mind), several short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, and selections of the lyric verse of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. These fascinating and illuminating readings are central to Mufti’s exercise and are reason enough to read the book even if one does not agree with all aspects of the theoretical framework. While most of these readings, particularly in part 2, are also extremely poignant accounts, my favorite is the section on a “conference of birds,” which focuses on two letters of Azad written in prison that narrate his experience of first trying to protect his prison room from an invasion by a flock of sparrows and eventually learning to share the space with them. The account is read as an “allegory of conflict and coexistence” (171) and of how majority and...