The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India

Chapter 3 Muslim Pasts: Writing The History of India and The History of Islam

82 Chapter 3 Muslim Pasts Writing The History of India and The History of Islam I belong to two circles of equal size, but which are not concentric . One is India, and the other is the Muslim world. . . . We as Indian Muslims came in both circles. We belong to these two circles, each of more than 300 millions, and we can leave neither. We are not nationalists but supernationalists, and I as a Muslim say that “God made man and the Devil made the nation.” Nationalism divides; our religion binds. No religious wars, no crusades, have seen such holocausts and have been so cruel as your last war, and that was a war of your nationalism, and not my Jehad. MuhammadAli,speechatLondon RoundTableConference,1930 Muhammad Ali’s declaration of the equal solidarity of Indian Muslims to India and to Islam came in the wake of devastating political events of prior decades. As a leader of the Khilafat movement, Muhammad Ali had to face his, and Indian nationalism’s, failure to protect the Ottoman caliph from international as well as Turkish politics, the devastation wrought by World War I, and, domestically, a rising tide of communal (Hindu-­ Muslim) riots and carnage. The cruelty of nationalist politics was everywhere present. Muhammad Ali questioned the political forms and violence released by nationalism while maintaining the inescapability of Indo-­ Muslim allegiance to India and Islam. It was in the history of these two subjects, India and Islam, that Osmania University commissioned—a decade prior to this statement by Muhammad Ali—the publication of original texts. The composition of these texts was a Muslim Pasts 83 significant departure from the normal course of textbook production in Hyderabad . Only a small fraction of the textbooks produced by the Translation Bureau at Osmania University, thirty-­one in total, were compilations (i.e., original compositions that drew heavily upon previously published materials). History was singled out early and brought to the attention of the government as a subject requiring special consideration and effort. “Because books worthy of being translated on Indian and Islamic history do not exist in English, separate books are being composed for Matriculation, F.A., and B.A. Indian history.”1 The key phrase here is “books worthy of being translated,” since there was no lack of publications in either Indian or Islamic history in English or other languages. The two histories that resulted from this commission reveal the extent to which those associated with Osmania University in the 1920s and 1930s were involved not only in the reformation of the Urdu language but also in revising and formulating narratives of their own past, laying claim to both an Islamic and an Indian heritage as part of their attempts to place themselves politically in the present. If, as Muhammad Ali suggested, Indian Muslims naturally had allegiances to both India and Islam, then examining the Urdu historiography of Osmania University allows us to understand how those natural allegiances were conceived. The History of India (Tārīkh-­i Hind), written by Sayyid Hashmi Faridabadi, and The History of Islam (Tārīkh-­i Islam), by Abdul Halim Sharar, asserted the importance of Islam to the history of civilization and the importance of Muslims to the history of the nation. Both underscore the extent to which the intellectuals associated with Osmania University, in the high period of Indian nationalism’s anticolonial struggle, accepted and engaged in shaping modernizing and nationalist narratives. These authors attempted to create novel narratives of their own past that both engaged and criticized the scholarship being produced in Europe and, in the case of the history of India, explicitly engaged historical writing and nationalist imaginaries in other Indian vernaculars. With both these projects, emphasis was consistently placed on recovering the secular achievements of a Muslim past that would serve India ’s new national purposes. The History of Islam “In the same way, and in accordance with the firmān of 14 Ramzan al-­Mubarak 1336 H. [June 24, 1918] the work of composing a history of Islam has been 84 Chapter 3 given to Abdul Halim Sharar.”2 The two-­ volume Tārīkh-­i Islam was likely read by Osmania University students studying Islamic history. Students sitting for the intermediate examination in the arts, for example, were examined in English literature—a compulsory subject—and had also to choose three of ten possible additional subjects (ranging from Greek, Roman, English...