Back to the Future Qasbah: Print and the Timescape of an Islamic Town in British India

Scholarship on British India has not articulated the signif cance of the qasbah to studies of the public sphere.¹ To address this gap, this article makes two connected arguments. First, while qasbahs have generally been understood as largely derivative of urban centers in British India, through Madinah (named af er the holy city, Medina) and other newspapers the residents of Bijnor qasbah increasingly asserted an alternative signif cance: as representatives of a public space that was defned over and against the public of national narratives. This argument proceeds with reference to the way Madinah positioned itself in response to the spatial disruptions of the telegraph and the railway. Statements in Madinah link Bijnor's physical isolation to a spatial and temporal distance, a spatialtemporal rif that defned a segment of the Urdu public that stood at odds with the Westernized city.

Second, while the qasbah has more recently been tied to an idealized past, close analysis of the discourse of Madinah reveals an early twentieth-century voice that saw the present, past, and future as productively intertwined in a qasbah timescape. These two arguments sug est the benefts of considering timescapes in studies of the public, by which I mean accommodating production of space and cosmologies of time in describing and defning publics. This argument proceeds with reference to the spatial disruptions of the telegraph and the railway, as well as biographical and periodical writings on prominent qasbatis, or residents of qasbahs, with links to Bijnor that explicitly discuss the past.

Introduction to a Rohilkhand Qasbah

The compelling attraction of any qasbah as spiritual heartland and ancestral home remains signif cant for many contemporary Indians and Pakistanis.² A qasbah at the turn of the twentieth century was a settlement with a population above several thousand in size, which had boasted bureaucratic and market signif cance and where a signif cant Muslim minority or majority lived alongside a Hindu population.³ For this study, what matters more than a bracket of population numbers is the sense of distinctiveness coloring the urban category of the qasbah.

In North India, qasbahs formed market towns for nearby villages, and many attracted early Suf devotional fgures before the Mughal period; their signif cance as market towns for agricultural goods attracted Mughal investment in the form of administration and patronage.⁴ As qasbahs gained signif cance beyond that of market towns and regional centers for agricultural areas, they retained strong roots in agriculture.⁵ Afer all, it was the right to agricultural revenue that indicated possession. Population and resources shifed from large urban centers to medium and small urban centers over the course of the eighteenth century, reflecting the decline of Mughal imperial centers and the success of the Rohillas's model of political power.⁶ The ashraf, or elite, benefted from the revenue-free land grants of rulers, land grants conferred by rulers for the recipient's own livelihood without the obligation to pay rent. These grants of en remained tied to the qasbahs where they had been conferred even if the ruler changed, creating institutional continuity despite constant migration. This happened in sections of large cities such as Allahabad (Shahjehani Sufs) and Lucknow (Firangi Mahallis), as well as in qasbahs. This "dig ing in" occurred between 1690 and 1830, leading to a development of, in C. A. Bayly's words, a "[qasbah] culture which ran parallel to, though not yet in opposition to, that of the Hindu commercial towns."⁷ This process established a consistent community of Muslim and Hindu Kayasth ashraf who survived the vicissitudes of specifc regimes to consolidate institutional gains and gain land ownership. It also laid the groundwork for conflict once regional states declined in power and "changes in outlook" occurred that emphasized dif erence over solidarity.⁸ Further, migration between localities, both between other qasbahs and between qasbahs and cities, were part and parcel of the life of a qasbati. This peripatetic lifestyle and the tendency of fnancial beneft to attach to a qasbah rather than to individuals contributed to the constancy of...