The language of Secular Islam Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India By Kavita Saraswathi Datla (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013. 234 pages.)

Abstract

In her study of Urdu language politics in late colonial India, Kavita Saraswathi
Datla traces the rise and eventual demise of an alternative Urdu movement that
envisioned the language not as a marker of Muslim religious identity, but as a
means to articulate a modern secular nationalism with roots in India’s Islamic
past. By highlighting this largely forgotten moment of secular Urdu nationalism,
the author pushes back against two well-established historiographical narratives
on Muslims in colonial India: the dominant understanding of the
Hindi-Urdu controversy as a process of sharpening communal boundaries and
the scholarly emphasis on the epistemological struggles to make Islam and
Western science compatible. She complicates both of these existing histories
by shifting her geographic lens from northern India to the so-called colonial
periphery: the Muslim princely state of Hyderabad. Specifically, Datla’s research
centers on the establishment and initial decades of intellectual activities
at Hyderabad’s innovative and Urdu-medium Osmania University.
In the book’s opening chapter, Datla argues that Hyderabad’s leading
Muslim intellectuals and administrators were largely uninterested in epistemological
questions about the relationship between Islam and modern Western
forms of knowledge. To underscore this disinterest, she examines Wilfred S.
Blunt’s unsuccessful proposal from the late nineteenth-century that the Hyderabadi
state build a modern Islamic seminary. Whereas Blunt envisioned
an Islamic university as a catalyst for Islamic reform in India, Datla demonstrates
that his Muslim interlocutors remained unconvinced about the necessity
of any Protestant-style reformation of Islam. Instead of possessing such bold
theological agendas, leading Hyderabadi educators focused on extending educational
access and forging a stronger connection between the values taught
at home and the knowledge acquired at school. They located the solution to
these twin issues in vernacular education. For them, the use of Urdu instead
of Persian, Arabic, or English as the medium of instruction would remove the
existing language barriers in Hyderabad’s education system and simultaneously
ensure a greater continuity between home and school cultures. According
to Datla it was this focus on vernacular education, not Islamic reform, that
inspired Osmania University’s founding in 1918.
The second chapter provides an in-depth examination of the university’s
Translation Bureau and its projects designed to reform Urdu into a modern
scientific language. She explains that the Osmania faculty hoped to ...