In their report on the ‘social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India’, the Sachar Committee (2004–2006) noted:

The members of the committee thus hinted at the importance of context in defining women's role vis-à-vis their community. They suggested that Muslim women are more likely to act as guardians of community identity—either out ‘of their own volition’ or ‘because of community pressure'—at a time when large sections of India's Muslim population feel discriminated against. By adopting ‘visible markers’, women come to embody a community identity to be protected from external interference. In this type of context, any attack against women's visibly Muslim markers quickly comes to be seen as an attack upon the entire community. The recent row on the hijab ban in Karnataka (2022) is a good case in point.

Projecting women as guardians of community identity reinforces, in turn, the notion of the ‘Muslim woman’. Be it in the media or in political discourses, Muslim women in India and elsewhere are often projected as a homogeneous category—‘oppressed and often shrouded in a stifling burqa’. These images then feed into equally homogenising notions of Islam. To counter these (mis)representations, scholars have for a long time challenged the monolithic conception of the Muslim woman. In her anthropological study in Delhi's Zakir Nagar (near Jamia), Nida Kirmani stresses the need to examine how gender and religious identity ‘continuously form and re-form along with various other identities’, thus highlighting the ‘contextual nature’ of these identities. Before her, already, several scholars insisted on the need to take into account socio-economic factors, such as education or employment, in order to understand the living conditions of Muslim women in India.

Introduction

In 1953, the Arabic litterateur Wadiʿ al-Bustani received the Golden Medal of Merit for his Arabic versification of the Indian Mahabharata in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) building in central Beirut. Camille Chamoun, then president of Lebanon, awarded the honour to this member of the famous literary and scholarly al-Bustani family. Wadiʿ's life encapsulates the high degree of global mobility of intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. His hometown, Dibbieh, now lay in the newly independent state of Lebanon. He was born in 1888 in what was then still the Ottoman Empire, studied at the prestigious Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), worked as an interpreter at the British Consulate of Hodeida in Yemen in 1909, translated Umar al-Khayyam's Persian poems into Arabic in London in 1911, and set sail to India in 1912 to dedicate himself to Indian literary works. While in India, he met Rabindranath Tagore. The following years brought him to Johannesburg in South Africa and through political appointments to Cairo and the British mandate in Palestine. He became a vocal critic of Zionist politics and a founding member of several Muslim–Christian societies, taking part in the countrywide general strike of 1936. Later in life, he turned away from politics and dedicated most of his time to versifying Arabic translations of Indian literary works. In 1953, he finally returned to Lebanon, where he died in 1954.

While scholarship has shed light on translation movements from Sanskrit into Arabic during the early Abbasid period (eighth–tenth centuries), such as the Arabic ‘telling’ of Kalila wa-Dimna, there is a huge gap in academic research in terms of studying such translation itineraries between the Arabic and the Indian literary-intellectual spheres, when it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, there are several recent advances which aim to remedy this by approaching those intellectual exchanges and itineraries from an Indian Ocean perspective. Esmat Elhalaby studied Wadiʿ al-Bustani's life and work through the notion of an ‘Arabic rediscovery of India in the 20th century’. Elhalaby writes an intellectual history across the modern Indian Ocean region and thereby globalizes the Nahda, often framed as the ‘cultural and literary reawakening’, beyond the Middle East.5 He places Wadiʿ within the conceptual framework of ‘a history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame’.

After independence, the Indian government tended to project JMI primarily as an experimental institution à la Gandhi, focused on basic education and social reform. Although religion played a central part in JMI's ethos, the government was more likely to compare JMI to Visva Bharati, Tagore's experimental school in rural Bengal, than to AMU. AMU, by contrast, appeared to be the Muslim university par excellence. For many Muslims, it was a source of pride and a symbol of Indian Muslim culture. The institution epitomised Sayyid Ahmad Khan's efforts to uplift the community and preserve the legacy of the glorious Mughal past. However, due to the widespread support of teachers and students for the Muslim League in the 1940s, the university also came to be seen, in certain quarters, as a symbol of Muslim separatism. Long after the riots had ceased, it remained a lieu de mémoire of partition, crystallising resentment against Muslims’ supposedly communal and disloyal attitude.

Despite this prejudice, Zakir Husain strongly believed that AMU could contribute, more than JMI, to the development of an ‘integrated nationhood’. It was precisely because of its legacy as a centre of Muslim politics and educational reform that the university could, he believed, channel the efforts to ‘revive hope and faith’ among the ‘despondent Muslim masses’ and help them feel part of India's ‘secular democratic state’.

A few Congress leaders, particularly Nehru and Azad, shared a similar vision of the university's mission in post-independence India. In 1951, AMU became, along with Banaras Hindu University (BHU), one of the three central universities under the control of the central government. For Nehru, it was essential to ensure that, despite partition, Indian Muslims would feel part of the Indian nation in order to build a secular stat

In her ethnographic survey conducted in Aligarh city in the mid-1980s, the anthropologist Elisabeth Mann noted:

Mann was quick to remind the reader that tensions remained rife between Aligarh's Muslim elites and non-elites. However, she also recognised that external pressures—the constant suspicion of their loyalty since partition and, increasingly in the 1980s, the sharp rise of Hindu communalism—reinforced a sense of collective identity among co-religionists. In this context, she suggested that invoking Islam could serve as a ‘refuge for the persecuted’. What this chapter will argue is that it could also serve as a language of contestation and empowerment in a context perceived as increasingly hostile.

The 1980s saw a resurgence of communal tensions in India, fed by the development of identity politics. Following the Congress’ crushing defeat in 1977, political competition intensified at the centre, boosting opposition parties that spoke the language of caste or religion to mobilise their constituencies. Although these evolutions were already under way by the 1960s, it was mostly after the emergency that they became prominent at the national level, leading to a shift in norms from national unity to group-based interests in the mainstream political discourse. Other domestic and transnational evolutions accentuated communal tensions. Within India, reports of Muslims’ demographic growth enhanced a sense of insecurity among some sections of the Hindu population. So too did the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly in neighbouring Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq. The boom of Gulf economies added to these tensions as part of the Hindu population feared that oil money may fund mass conversions to Islam and ‘give to Islamism in India a new glow of self-confidence in one sudden sweep’. These evolutions fed into the ‘vulnerability syndrome’ of the majority population that boosted the rise of the Hindu right.

Introduction

German philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reacted with much interest and even enthusiasm to the growth of knowledge about Indian intellectual history at that time. Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schlegel praised India as the cradle of human culture, and Indian thinkers were dealt with in contemporary histories of philosophy. Philosopher and philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt participated in this intellectual development. He was proficient in Sanskrit, knowledgeable about Indian culture, and keen to share his knowledge with his contemporaries. His publication of two commendatory articles about the Bhagavadgita can be seen as the apex of the positive reception of Indian philosophy in Germany.

The positive attitude towards Indian thought changed at some point in history. It seems to be the influence of G. W. F. Hegel, in particular, that led to a negative evaluation or, more often, to a disinterest in Indian literature and thought that is typical for German philosophers since the second half of the nineteenth century. Hegel expressed his position concisely in his critical review of Humboldt's two positive articles about the Gita. Basically, he denies that the Gita – or any other ancient Indian text – deserves to be included in the scope of philosophy. The dispute between Humboldt and Hegel was a crucial turning point for the evaluation of Indian thought in Germany and, thereby, for the future development of philosophy as a discipline. It is thus no exaggeration when Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra state that ‘the reception of the Gita was critical to philosophical developments taking place in Germany’.

In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, the question of whether there are philosophical texts and debates that are not ‘footnotes to Plato’ – as Alfred North Whitehead poignantly defined Western philosophy – is of eminent concern. Although the question still does not receive the attention it deserves, there is nowadays an ongoing debate about non-Western philosophy. The controversy between Humboldt and Hegel is an important contribution to this debate for two reasons. First, it is a very early dispute that defined the contours of later discussions. Second, in contrast to many contemporary debates about non-Western thought, Humboldt and Hegel argue explicitly and elaborately about the question of whether such thought should be understood as philosophy.

When Perso-Arabic script renditions of the Mahabharata receive popular or academic attention, it is often in defence of elite Indo-Islamic cosmopolitanism. Mughal engagement with the Mahabharata is held up as evidence of interest in Hinduism or pre-Islamic Indic traditions among Muslim South Asian dynasties. Because the Mughal Persian translation of the Mahabharata, known as the Razmnamah (Book of War), was a courtly project, it is easy to overlook the fact that Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script reached broader, and increasingly transregional, publics, especially in the age of lithographic print. Focusing on the preparation and circulation of Persian and Urdu print editions of the Mahabharata, this chapter aims to reorient discussions of Persianate understandings of Sanskrit epics, emphasizing middle-class, popular readerships in both Iran and India.

Following a brief overview of the translation and circulation of the Razmnamah in Mughal India, the chapter analyses lithographic publications of Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the rapid growth of lithographic print in South Asia allowed for the relatively inexpensive publication and circulation of Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script. The chapter argues for a reconsideration of the intellectual work of cadres of printers, translators, scribes, and other workers employed by Indian presses. Late nineteenth-century Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas reflected norms of production within a negotiated system of capitalist print labour, distinguishing them from their courtly manuscript predecessors.

The chapter subsequently turns to the transregional consumption and reception of these Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script. In the late nineteenth century in both India and Iran, readers within a Persianate cultural–intellectual milieu understood the Mahabharata in a comparative frame, often with reference to the Persian epic poem, the Shahnamah. Popular audiences in Iran often read the two works through an emerging ‘national’ lens that associated epic literature with discrete peoples and nations. In India, on the other hand, middle-class Persian and Urdu readers often used both the Mahabharata–Razmnamah and the Shahnamah to claim an elite Persianate and cosmopolitan past.

Ultimately, the chapter reorients narratives of shared Indo-Iranian intellectual history by critiquing portrayals of Persianate transregional exchange as exclusively elite or courtly projects. Centring lithographic printers and popular reading publics, the chapter interrogates the reinterpretation of the Mahabharata within transregional communities of Persian and Urdu readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Can a Muslim university be an Indian university? In his landmark article ‘Can a Muslim Be an Indian?’ Gyanendra Pandey draws a revealing comparison between two common expressions—Hindu nationalists and nationalist Muslims. While Hindus are considered to be ‘natural’ Indians, who are nationalist by default—Hindu nationalism being one brand of nationalism— Indian Muslims are taken to be primarily Muslims, whatever their political stance may be. Unlike Hindus, their commitment to the nation cannot be taken for granted; it has to be proven, for their Muslimness casts doubt on their Indianness.

Similar apprehensions affect Muslim institutions, including universities. By Muslim universities, I refer to institutions established by Muslim individuals or organisations, primarily—though not exclusively—for Muslim students. Unlike madrasas, these universities offer mostly non-religious education along the same lines as other non-Muslim universities. Therefore, their ‘Muslim’ character rests on their foundation's history and on their Muslim-majority population, much more than on their educational programmes. Visible Islamic symbols, such as mosques or tombs, may act as reminders of this character; so too can students, teachers and administrators’ frequent allusions to the need to preserve and promote ‘Muslim culture’. However, there is no consensus on either the interpretation of ‘Muslim culture’ among university members or how and to what extent it should frame life on campus.

For many external observers, there seems to be a fundamental tension between these universities’ Muslim character and their capacity, or even their willingness to serve the nation. These apprehensions, inherited from partition, surfaced again recently during the debates around the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). In December 2019, a wave of protests broke out across India when the parliament adopted this Act, which introduced, for the first time, a religious criterion in the rules of access to Indian citizenship. On 15 December, amidst growing student mobilisation, police forces stormed into two of India's prime universities—Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) and Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). These two institutions had one clear common denominator: they were both Muslim universities. For part of the press and the political body, this was reason enough to suspect a ‘jihadi’ influence behind students’ protests.

1. Nizam of Hyderabad, 10 lakhs (lkhs)

2. Nawab of Bahawalpur, 2 lkhs

3. Nawab of Bhopal, 1 lkh

4. Ruler of Khairpur, 1 lkh

5. Aga Khan, 1 lkh

6. Holiness Mulla Tahir Saifuddin, 1 lkh

7. Ruler of Junagadh, 1 lkh

8. Nawab of Malerkotla, 50,000

9. Maharaja of Darbhanga, 50,000

10. Maharaja of Kashmere, 25,000

11. Maharaja of Bikaner, 20,000

12. Maharaja of Jodhpur, 50,000

13. Bhikampur Estate, Aligarh, 25,000

14. Ruler of Zanjira, 15,000

15. Ruler of Mangrol (Kathiawar), 22,000

16. Mahraja of Ratlam, 10,000

17. Lady Haroon, Karachi, 10,000

18. Raja Saheb Jahangirabad, 10,000

19. Hafiz Md Siddq Sb Rais, Cawnpore, 50,000

20. Haji Md Hamza Sb Rais, Cawnpore, 10,000

21. Ali Janab Nawab Saheb, Dojana, 10,000

22. Nawab of Tonk, 20,000

23. Haji Shah Md Din Sb Rais, Gujrar, 20,000

24. Sir Sorab Saklatvala, Chairman, Dorabji Tata Trust, Bombay, 10,000

25. Mr. Rusi Mistri, Bombay, 25,000 (plus one ring worth 60,000)

26. Haji Habib Tar Md Janoo, Bombay, 10,000

27. Haji Uusuf Sueleman Botawala Charities, Bombay, 25,000

28. Haji Abdul Wahab Sb, Delhi, 10,000

29. Mr. Ispahani Calcutta, 25,000

30. S.A. Latif, Calcutta, 10,000

31. Mr. Ferozuddin, Calcutta, 10,000

32. K.S. Wachal Molla, Calcutta, 10,000

33. Seth Adamji Haji Daud, Calcutta, 25,000

34. S.M. Hanif, Calcutta, 25,000

35. Dawood Yakoob Gandhi, Calcutta, 25,000

36. G.A. Randeria Ltd, Calcutta, 10,000

37. A.G. Mohammad, Calcutta, 10,000

38. Mahboob Chowdhury, Calcutta, 10,000

39. S. Rehman, Calcutta, 10,000

40. Sueleman Chowdhury, 11,000

41. K.B. Farid Ad Chowhury (sic) Chittagong, 25,000

42. Ismail Haji Isa Sait, Cochin, 15,000

43. M.K. Macker Pillay Esq, Alwaya, 15,00

The campaign for AMU's minority status propelled the university to the forefront of Muslim politics in the 1960s and 1970s, making AMU's status one of the key ‘Muslim issues’ of the period. By pressing for the recognition of Muslims’ minority rights, the campaign revealed the limits of the so-called Nehruvian consensus. It highlighted the difficulty of transcending religion-based differences in a context where notions of majority and minority continued to mediate conceptions of the nation—among the population as well as among state actors—and to shape state policies on the ground.

Yet the demands for religious minority rights continued to suffer from a ‘justificatory deficit’: many state actors continued to see them as threats to the nation's unity and to its secular Constitution. In this context, Muslim groups at AMU and JMI sought alternative, more legitimate discursive frameworks to claim support from the state and to defend their conceptions of the nation and citizenship. The following chapters will examine the different discursive frameworks that emerged within and around Muslim universities in response to the rise of minority politics in the post-Nehruvian period. In this way, the book questions the simplistic notion that secular nationalist politics gradually gave way—from the 1960s onwards—to communal identity-based politics. To start with, the book has shown in the preceding chapters that there was no consensus around the secular nationalist discourse, even under Nehru. The next chapters will highlight the different forms of resistance to minority politics that developed within Muslim universities in the subsequent period. These resistances did not usually come from a purely areligious standpoint. As we will see, they often stemmed from competing—yet sometimes overlapping— understandings of Muslim identity. We may argue, drawing inspiration from Barbara Metcalf, that Indian Muslimness ‘offered a wide range of orientations, not one single stance’. The comparison between AMU and JMI further allows us to highlight differences of rhythm in the evolution of the dominant discursive frameworks in these two institutions. Muslim politics was neither monolithic nor did it unfold in a homogeneous time. One therefore has to bear in mind the differences in institutional cultures, proximity to power, regional anchorage and visibility in the public sphere to account for the diachronic evolutions at AMU and JMI.

Arguably, the Mahabharata is India's most influential political text. Kautilya's Arthashastra may seem a close contender, but it never attained the epic's social depth and was, in any case, forgotten for a millennium before its rediscovery in 1905. The Constitution of India certainly plays a more important role in shaping the modern Indian state, but, as a text, it hardly permeates popular consciousness in the way the Mahabharata does. For over two millennia, the Mahabharata has shaped Indian politics. It has nourished the statecraft of Hindu rajas and Mughal emperors, stirred anti-colonial nationalism and peasant rebellion, moulded Dalit–Bahujan and feminist activism. Beyond India, it has profoundly shaped political cultures across Southeast Asia, inspired pan-Asian thinking in China and Japan, activated the philosophical imagination of European and Arab thinkers, and conversed with Iranian nationalism.

Like one of its protagonists, the divine statesman Krishna, the Mahabharata exists in multiple avatars. The Sanskrit text, ascribed to Vyasa, coexists with versions in several Indian and extra-Indian languages. For many decades now, scholars have written about these textual traditions as well as about the popular appeal of Mahabharata stories. Historians, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and philosophers have all written about the epic. Admittedly, much more has been said about the pre-modern lives of the Mahabharata than about its modern incarnations – but even on the latter the scholarship is rich and growing.

In this milieu, why is a new book needed about the epic? We offer two compelling reasons. First, there exists no single volume that engages with the Mahabharata's role in shaping modern social, political, and religious thought.

Introduction

The Bhagavadgita is an 18-chapter philosophical dialogue between Arjuna, the despondent warrior hero reluctant to raise arms against his kin, and his divine charioteer, Krishna, who exhorts him to wage war with detachment as an instrument of divine will. It is set on the battlefield in the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, moments before the beginning of a war. The Bhagavadgita (henceforth Gita), as Richard H. Davis elucidates in his ‘short biography’ of the text, intrigued scholars with its ‘doubleness’ – ‘its historical specificity and its continuing, even eternal, life’. Its ambiguities and accommodation of multiple theological currents made it possible (and continues to do so) for the text to appeal to diverse groups of readers and commentators in medieval, pre-colonial, and colonial India and beyond. It gained a transnational community of readers in Europe and America, as colonial commentators, Christian missionaries, Romantic philosophers, and Indologists popularized it as a Hindu philosophical text at par with the Quran and the Bible. By the early twentieth century, it came to provide a wide range of Indian political thinkers, from Aurobindo Ghose to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who were occupied in anti-colonial struggle with an opportunity to ‘rethink politics in a novel language of action without consequence’. Among such engagements, M. K. Gandhi's approach to the Gita as a guide to moral action in the realm of politics has attracted maximum scholarly attention. Such works have accorded due focus to the genealogies of (mostly Western) political and religious thought that informed his readings and the innovative agency of Gandhi himself.

This chapter, however, shifts the optic from Gandhi to the Gandhian(s) to draw attention to the hermeneutics of reading the Gita through the prism of non-violence (ahimsa) that Gandhi introduces in Indian sociopolitical thought and constructs an intellectual history of such hermeneutical exercises. Through this, I wish to move beyond the individual centricity that has characterized the global intellectual history of Gandhian thought.

Introduction

The renewed and persistent interest in the Mahabharata in the twentieth century has most often been linked to the rise of the Indian national(ist) movement in general and a specific nativist and parochial understanding of nationalism in particular. Seen from this perspective, the interest in the Mahabharata stands for an understanding of modern India that is based on the presumption of an ancient and everlasting homogeneous identity of the Indian people as well as a forced equation of ‘Indian’ with ‘Hindu’. While this standard account of the relationship between the Indian epics and right-wing nationalism has been as influential as it is convincing, it fails to analyse the larger historical and epistemological changes that provided the background for the renewed interest in the epic as form. In order to address this epistemological aspect, I propose to look at the larger history of the epic and the construction of a national identity in a global context in order to ask what prompted the interest in the epics on a functional level. Why were they read and retold so many times apart from the certainly true but hardly sufficient reason of them serving as a reminder of and evidence for the existence of a historical basis for the allegedly homogeneous identity in question?

In order to engage with the global significance as well as the philosophical and political implications of the relationship between the epic and nationalism, I look at three specific actors and at how they drew from, as well as referred and contributed to, the discourse on the epic form through their specific reading and reception of the Mahabharata: Friedrich Schlegel's analysis of the allegedly shared roots of Indo-European philosophical thought in ancient folk literature (specifically in his book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 1808), Maithilisharan Gupt's attempt to recount the history of India as the history of the Aryan race from the mythico-historical times of the Mahabharata to the future of an independent India in his long narrative poem Bharat Bharati (1912), and Jawaharlal Nehru's seemingly uneasy (as well as rather sporadic) rejection of any form of a potentially political engagement with the Mahabharata as inevitably contributing to a parochial and Hindu supremacist notion of Indian nationalism.