Gail Minault

Secluded scholars : women's education and Muslim social reform in colonial India

This volume gives a detailed account of the individuals, organizations, and institutions that were influential in India in the promotion of education for Muslim girls in the colonial period.

Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and ‘Huquq un-Niswan’: An Advocate of Women's Rights in Islam in the Late Nineteenth Century

Sometime in the late 1890s, Sayyid Mumtaz Ali visited Aligarh and happened to show Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan the manuscript of his treatise in defense of womens rights in Islamic law, Huquq un-Niswan . As he began to read it, Sir Sayyid looked shocked. He then opened it to a second place and his face turned red. As he read it at a third place, his hands started to tremble. Finally, he tore up the manuscript and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Fortunately, at that moment a servant arrived to announce lunch, and as Sir Sayyid left his office, Mumtaz Ali snatched his mutilated manuscript from the trash. He waited until after Sir Sayyids death in 1898, however, to publish Huquq un-Niswan .

Urdu Political Poetry during the Khilafat Movement

The Khilafat movement, which took place among Indian Muslims immediately following the First World War, was so called because it was a political agitation designed to pressure the British government to preserve the defeated Ottoman Empire and its ruler, the Caliph of Islam. The Khilafat movement was also, more fundamentally, a campaign to unite Indian Muslims politically by means of religious and cultural symbols meaningful to all strata of the community. The movement gained added significance because it took place simultaneously, and cooperated fully, with Gandhis first non-violent non-cooperation movement against British rule. Muslim and Hindu were thus engaged in parallel political activity: the broadening of national political participation from the elite to the mass through new techniques of organization and communication.

II Some reflections on Islamic revivalism vs. assimilation among Muslims in India

These reflections are prompted by reading ’Islam and Muslim society in South Asia’ by Francis Robinson in a recent issue of Contributions (Robinson 1983). This article is, among other things, a critical review of Imtiaz Ahmad’s edited volume, Ritual and religion among Muslims in India (1981), and by implication also criticises the other volumes in Ahmad’s series dealing with Muslim society in India (see Ahmad 1973,1975 and 1983).’ The point of view represented by Imtiaz Ahmad and the other contributors to his various volumes is, briefly, this: heretofore, much of the scholarship on Muslims in India has treated the Muslim community monolithically, without taking adequate cognisance of its regional variations, the extent to which Muslims in their daily lives deviate from some textual standard of what Islam is and what Muslims are supposed to believe and practice. These volumes, therefore, undertake to look at Islam ’on the ground’ in various regions of India. They observe Muslims interacting in socially stratified ways, evaluating the injection of caste into the theoretically egalitarian ethos of Islam. They observe Muslims acting according to local custom in their married lives and in the way they treat their women and transmit property. They observe Muslim worship in shrines and household rituals and find parallels with local Hindu devotionalism. And they observe Muslims in the process of social and economic change and note similarities in those processes with people of similar classes in other religious communities. In short, these volumes highlight what is Indian about Muslims in India, the degree to which Islam in India is unique, and the degree to which it is a composite of different regional cultures, customary observances, and sectarian loyalties. Of course, this is much too brief a summation to encompass all that is contained in the four-volume series. Like many such editorial collections, the volumes are uneven in quality, diverse in both methodology and ideology. Ahmad, in his various editorial introductions, attempts to bring some harmony

Making invisible women visible: Studying the history of Muslim women in South Asia

(1986). Making invisible women visible: Studying the history of Muslim women in South Asia. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 1-13.

Women's Magazines in Urdu as Sources for Muslim Social History

Gail Minault is a Professor in the Department of History, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. The educative power of the printed word has been causatively linked to the emergence of the Renaissance and the Reformation in Europe (Davis 1975; Eisenstein 1979) and to the creation of national identities all over the world (Anderson 1983). In India in the 19th and 20th centuries, the printing press similarly changed the nature of social discourses. While oral performance and word-of-mouth communication remained of paramount importance in a society where the vast majority were illiterate, print broke the monopoly of access to knowledge enjoyed by the priestly, .

Aloys Sprenger German Orientalism’S ‘Gift’ to Delhi College

Aloys Sprenger (1813–1893) was an Austrian scholar with a medical degree who joined the British East India Company’s medical service in order to pursue in India his real passion, the study of oriental literatures. He became the Principal of Delhi College in 1845, and presided over an experiment in learning at Delhi College, an institution that taught both eastern and western literatures and sciences through the medium of Urdu. The college attempted to bring about a creative synthesis of the two curricula, via an active programme of translation and publication. Sprenger helped launch a series of scholarly journals published by the college, thus contributing to the dissemination of knowledge and the nurturing of a group of students and faculty with whom he maintained an active correspondence after leaving the college. This collection of letters has not been adequately evaluated earlier as an indication of the collaboration between western and Indian intellectuals in the period before the revolt of 1857. Most accounts of Sprenger’s contributions to Delhi College have been laudatory. There was, however, a darker side to Sprenger’s stewardship that deserves elucidation. Based on archival research, the present article seeks to evaluate Sprenger’s ambiguous intellectual legacy to Delhi College and to the evolution of education in British India.1

Book Reviews : PRADIP KUMAR DATTA, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Twentieth-Century Bengal, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 312:

evolving nature of oral texts. Nonetheless, this book should be regarded as a very significant contribution to the study of epic literature and medieval/early modem culture, primarily because it will alter the course of future investigation. That is, the value of Rethinking India ’s Oral and Classical Epics lies not so much in its conclusions as in the issues it raises. Scholars will no longer be able to analyse the oral epics in total isolation from each other nor ignore the possible impact of the classical epics. Even better, from the historian’s perspective, is the attention drawn to a martial culture transcending regional and communal boundaries. Hiltebeitel has set an admirable precedent in attempting to situate oral epics in a specific socio-

Book Reviews : KHALID B. SAYEED, Politics in Pakistan: The Nature and Direction of Change, New York, Praeger, 1980, pp. x+195,

two previous books to his credit. In particular, his Pakistan, The Formative Plaase has become a classic history of the development of Muslim nationalism in the subcontinent under the leadership of Jinnah and the Muslim League. But such a study, with its emphasis on the centralising force of Muslim national identity, is inadequate to explain the centrifugal forces at work in post-partition Pakistan. The breaka.way of Bangladesh has been studied in a number of books, but the complex politics of the remainder of Pakistan awaited analysis. Clearly, the time had come for a new work which would explain the often problematic nature of the support for the Muslim League in the Muslim majority provinces, the subsequent failure of the League as a national party, the ambiguity of the promise of an Islamic state vs. a state for Muslims, the recurring cycles of political violence and military rule, and the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in the post-Bhutto period. Sayeed takes on all these problems in his new book.

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to be said about the subject. McLane’s contribution, as he admits, deal more with &dquo;the fringes of the Congress&dquo; than with the party itself, and as much with what Congress members did not do as with what they did. As such, the work sheds new light on why early Congressmen were isolated from many of the compelling social and political issues of their time, and why they were regarded by the government as a &dquo;microscopic minority,&dquo; of little consequence to the future of Indian politics. We have here not only elite politics, but also the emergent politics of mass mobilization and Hindu self-assertion: cow protection, swadeshi, religious fundamentalism, terrorism. McLane gets beneath the surface of early nationalist politics and analyzes emerging ideologies with considerable skill. The first section of the book introduces the new Indian professionals who eventually joined the Congress movement. They were politically active, but to