One would often, but not consistently, come across mentions of Akshay Kumar Dutta in discussions on the cultural and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Bengal. He would, on most occasions, be a cursory reference, a footnote, a character on the fringes of the larger rubric of the discussion. There was a great churning of intellectual frameworks throughout the nineteenth century in Bengal – religious and educational reforms, epistemic shifts, cultural upheavals, and much of all these have been documented with care by historians and social scientists alike. Akshay Kumar Dutta, however, has rarely featured as a crucial presence in these discussions and debates. This book asks the ‘why’ question by attempting to closely read some of his works and examine if such erasure has foreclosed possible complications to certain categories of critique.

Born on 15 July 1820 in the quiet hamlet of Chupi in Burdwan district, Akshay was the youngest and the only surviving child of Pitambar Dutta and Dayamayi Debi. His father worked as a cashier in Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), and Akshay's initial years were spent in Chupi, being educated in the local pathsala run by Gurucharan Sarkar. He also started learning Farsi with Munshi Aminuddin and Sanskrit with Gopinath Tarkalankar as a young boy while still at Chupi. His father, subsequently, took him to Calcutta, where, after a brief stint at a free school run by missionaries at Kidderpore, he was admitted to Gourmohan Auddy's Oriental Seminary. His father's untimely demise in 1839 did not allow him to finish his formal education, but as his biographers have documented, his love of learning led Akshay to train himself in both the sciences and the humanities and provoked him, at an early age, to contemplate on the epistemic disconnect between Puranic and European forms of learning. As Akshay grew up in Calcutta, the city caught in the middle of multiple reforms, he was introduced, through his visits to the Bangla Bhasanushilani Sabha (a forum for the spread and practice of the Bangla language), to the poet Iswarchandra Gupta, who was also incidentally the editor of the periodical Sangbad Prabhakar.

The contemporary discourses on Kashmir turn often to the idea of Kashmiri Islam as being unique and distinctive in South Asia. Such notions have appealed to Kashmiris themselves and inform articulations of Islam and Muslim nationalism in contemporary Kashmir. Even Kashmiri historians such as Mohammad Ishaq Khan who are critical of an understanding of Kashmir's pasts as “syncretic,” and not unqualifyingly Islamic, have found it difficult to reject the idea of an exclusive, even exceptional, Islam in Kashmir. The Rishi Order of Kashmiri Sufism is fundamental to these debates about a distinctive history of Islam in Kashmir. The shruks of Nund Rishi in the Kashmiri vernacular not only turn to metaphors, symbols, and events from the Qur’ān but also rely on pre-Islamic Kashmiri cultural memory at a time (the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries) when Islam was still a minority religion in Kashmir after the establishment of a Muslim ruling dynasty in the fourteenth century. The Rishi Order is recognized by most scholars of religion, history, and literature in Kashmir to have played a significant role in Kashmir's transition to Islam. The Rishi Order is also considered central to the claims of a distinctive Kashmiri Islam because of its retention of such pre-Islamic ascetic practices as vegetarianism and celibacy.

What defines the secular in a cultural festival in Bengal that centres on the annual homecoming of Goddess Durga? How may we read the rhetoric of secularization of this event that has a long historical background and has become crucial to its contemporary identity? In keeping with the title of this volume, a question mark necessarily hovers around the nomenclature of the ‘secular’ and the extent to which it may lend itself to the profile of a festival that has well outstripped its religiosity and willed its transformation into Kolkata’s biggest public art event. Defying any easy placement within an institutionally secure realm of either religion or art, and never fully measuring up to the criterion of the secular, the Durga Pujas provide a powerful site for the interrogation of each of these conceptual categories. I will be arguing that the contemporary festival of Durga in Kolkata (and the ideas and forms it exports to Durga Puja celebrations across Bengal and other big cities of India) offers itself not just as a case study but as a constitutive ground in the dismantling of boundaries between artistic, religious, and secular practices, allowing each of these to freely trespass into each other’s domains. This sense of trespass is not one that comes from within the field of festival art and its creative protagonists. It erupts more within the fields of scholarship and disciplines such as art history and religious studies. It is in the spaces of these disciplines that the need to redefine the normative domains of art, religion, and secularity has gone hand-in-hand with the urgency of maintaining their separate jurisdictions and their different rights and prerogatives. It is important, in this context, to mark the coming of age of the field of South Asian visual studies and its tendentious criss-crossing of the disciplines of art history, visual anthropology, and the study of ritual, religion, and material cultures; and to situate my turn to the changed artistic contemporary proclivities of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas within this shifting disciplinary confluence in the initial decades of the twenty-first century.

As a mega urban spectacle that has been engaging with a spectacular array of art and craft productions, new visual technologies, and social media, the city festival holds out an invitation to the field of visual studies that is hard to resist.

The shruks of Nund Rishi bring us face-to-face with an existential encounter with death's imminence. But what work does the recognition of death's imminence do? We have already seen that Nund Rishi's insistence on death's imminence is a call to a dying before death. The call to a dying before death is often also in Nund Rishi a call to becoming Nothing. Let us turn to the first two lines of a shruk taken up by Rahman Rahi in his critical essay on the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi that we also discussed in the previous chapter:

Rahman Rahi turns to the modern theatre stage in an attempt to interpret this shruk. He sets up a play between zū, or zuv (life), and lōbh (greed), which meet their end in the nothingness of death. Zū nēri brōnṭh (the first to leave, or depart, is life) gives us a palpable sense of someone's departure (in this case, zū, or life) before that of someone else (lōbh, or greed). It is, in other words, impossible for human greed to end before the end of life. Lōbh, greed or avaricious desire, has such a tenacious hold over us that it only leaves the stage of existence after life has already departed. What life and desire leave behind is a space of emptiness (shunya), and this play has the form of nothingness (shunya ākār). The idea that everything is empty (śūnyatā, or emptiness) is central to Mahayana Buddhism, which held sway in Kashmir between the third century BCE to about the fifth century CE (the Sanskrit term śūnya also means zero). Such a stance was not seen in the Buddhist tradition as nihilist. Graham Priest identifies the core meaning of the idea of śūnyatā: “Nothing exists in and of itself. Everything that exists does so inasmuch as, and only inasmuch as, it relates to other things.

In Jeelani Bano's 1963 novel Aiwan-e-Ghazal (The palace of the ghazals), two ashraf Muslim women, Qaiser and her daughter Kranthi, join the radical squads of the Telangana armed rebellion led by the communists that fought valiantly between 1946 and 1951. Members of an extremely conservative family known for its absolute loyalty to the Nizam and its conservative Islamic practices, Qaiser and Kranthi take a path that unsettles the entire family and the local community. In fact, Qaiser's cousins Chaand and Ghazal had been predecessor rebels in the family; however, Qaiser's leftist politics—according to one of her elderly family members—“create nothing less than extreme chaos in the family.” The entire confrontation begins with what historian Mahua Sarkar terms an “invisible everyday agency.” However, in the case of these four Hyderabadi Muslim women characters whom I will introduce in this, this everyday agency gradually becomes strikingly visible in their interactions with the family, thanks to their explicit interventions in the political sphere of Hyderabad. Along with Qaiser and Kranthi, Chaand and Ghazal demonstrate two modes of gender activism with their participation in the Hyderabadi public sphere. In what follows, I discuss the magnitude of such gender activism and of the political dimension of Muslim women's selfhood as manifested in this novel. This chapter explains how amidst the intersections of the rise of new politics in the city, the system of modern education, the Telangana activism of the 1940s, and the progressivist ideology—all four of these women forcefully demonstrate their agency as resistance against traditionalism, and specifically against the normative definitions of Muslim womanhood and the hegemonic patriarchy. During my interviews and field research, I came to realize that the life story of the author also plays a crucial role in the making of this compelling political agency of Muslim women and their participation in the public sphere.

Writing this letter was a defining moment in the life of Sultan, the protagonist in Nelluri Kesava Swamy's short story, “Vimukti” (Liberation). Against the long history of the nawabi and ashraf practices of his family, this act of writing a letter itself was a groundbreaking move—and signifies his desire to embrace a version of modern Islam and reformism. Whereas this specific period of the 1940s represents several strands of modern and reformist debates in the larger Islamic world, I suggest that the case of Hyderabadi Muslim identity offers us a quite different example—one of an entirely modern Islamicate milieu. The short stories published during and around this period seem to function as a site of tension between the normative expressions of Islam and the shifting paradigms in the everyday life of Muslims in Hyderabad. Basing my discussion on Swamy's stories, I will examine how these two mutually connected concepts deal with gender equality, social justice, and pluralism—the key ingredients that shaped an alternative Muslim identity in the aftermath of the Police Action in Hyderabad. The production and circulation of such an intriguing discourse led to the creation of what we can call a version of the “New Muslim” (nayē musalmān) in the history of the Hyderabad state during the turbulent 1940s. I take this term “New Muslim” from my interlocutors such as the post–Police Action writers and activists, who were specifically mentioning the rise of a new Muslim consciousness in the wake of the Police Action.

For the entire community of Hyderabad state that had suffered either directly or indirectly during and after the Police Action, the Muslim identity was a daily recurring challenge for at least two decades after the event.

Many of the objects of Indian art history began their life as religious buildings or things. Some remain under worship and attract devotees; others have entered the secular frame as artworks and monuments, and are now valued for their aesthetic and historic significance. As they move from one category to another, buildings and artefacts find themselves placed within one of two regimes of care. Icons that are under worship are nurtured through regular lustrations and offerings of clothing and food, and living temples are often expanded and altered to serve growing congregations and changing needs. These processes support the spiritual life of the artefact while impinging upon its material body. But in the case of musealised artefacts and monuments, the priorities are reversed: utmost attention is paid to the preservation of their physical bodies and not the numinous presences that are meant to inhabit them (Image 13.1). Icons are to be stripped of extraneous matter, cleaned, and protected from touch and corrosive substances; temples are to be preserved in their original form without additions and alterations or coats of garish paint. Practices and substances that sustained the spiritual life of a building or artwork are seen as harmful for the material body of the art object, and secular institutions that took charge of India’s artefacts were able to justify their desacralization as a necessary condition for a superior kind of care that would ensure the survival of these objects in the longue durée. In this framework, it was the secular regime of care that possessed the expertise and the protocols that could preserve India’s heritage, which worshippers would actually damage and wear down through their devotions. This claim—that secularism preserved what devotionalism destroyed—gave authority to the state institutions as the legitimate entities responsible for the protection and conservation of monuments and works of art.

The protocols of the two regimes produced artefacts and monuments that had very different ‘looks’: bare metal or stone on the one hand, and embellished and encrusted surfaces on the other. In this essay, however, I study a growing trend in south India in which the boundary between devotional care and professional conservation is getting blurred through the work of several civil-society initiatives which combine professional conservation standards with devotional care.

In the preceding chapters I have laid out the two major, albeit connected, narratives of religion and science that were instrumental in shaping the intellectual horizon of Akshay Dutta's mind. His milieu was one of debate and discussion, influences that emerged out of a complex network of intellectual practice qualified by colonial modernity and its associated implications of a global labour–capital dynamic working from within a colonizer–colonized binary. It was a space where the principal aim of science education and practice was to develop a utilitarian template leading to motives of profit through governance and vice versa. The questions of religion and individual religious practice, on the other hand, were implicated by complex processes of reform and refashioning that often had their own transnational and global influences and subversive intent. The figure of Akshay Dutta emerges through this web-like narrative as part of the bhadralok milieu of nineteenth-century Calcutta through events and articulations that will not be subsumed within an easy and overbearing trope of either colonialism or nationalism, modernity or otherwise, but remain as a symptom of the fraught nature of the intellectual tendencies of the period.

Akshay and Rammohun: Imagining the Universe

Akshay Dutta spent the most crucial and active years of his working life as the editor of the Tattwabodhini Patrika between 1843 and 1855. A substantial part of his oeuvre, books or tracts that were subsequently published as individual volumes, germinated in the pages of the Tattwabodhini. It may be said that the larger part of Akshay's intervention into the intellectual and social structures of nineteenth-century Bengal was initiated or provoked through either what he wrote or what he, as the editor, published in the pages of the Tattwabodhini. It was during this Tattwabodhini period that, one might say, Akshay emerged as a crucial player in the larger canvas of Bengali intellectual history through the way he shaped the debates and discussions around the pages of the periodical. In the first chapter I have referred to his ideological debate with Debendranath Tagore regarding the nature of the Brahman and the infallibility of the Vedanta. Although there remained a clear ideological rift between the two, the pages of the Tattwabodhini bear ample testimony to Akshay's considerable independence in choosing the subject matter for the issues of the periodical

The ‘fragile social achievement’ that is modern secular life has needed many symbolic fictions—some enduring, others more ephemeral—to sustain itself over time and across numerous (rivalling) constituencies. Among the most intriguing of these fictions in modern India, with its own specific history of secularity, is the mother/goddess, a more-than-human figure with roots in a hoary ancient past but with a palpable consequential presence in the present, a being whose simultaneous claim to transcendent divinity and earthly maternality undercuts any easy separation as sacral or secular, divine or worldly. In this essay, I offer some reflections on what I have learned as a professional historian over the past two decades and more as a series of these intriguing more-than-humans succeeded in capturing my imagination, in disturbing the terms of my engagement with official documentary archives, in troubling the text-saturated categories of my analysis, and in redirecting my work along paths that I had not envisioned before my unanticipated encounter with them, compelling me to become, in the process, goddess-aware. This awareness, I would insist, does not imply ‘a nostalgia for religious forms that would oppress selves and impede reason’, but rather a willingness ‘to enter into productive assemblages with them’, and an inclination towards cultivating ‘a porous self’.

You have to take my word: I did not seek out these multi-armed miracle-working beings of my own accord; instead, they erupted over and again in the most unexpected ways and places, demanding my scholarly attention and refusing to go away. Unlike scholars of religion who work on the South Asian subcontinent, especially feminist scholars of Hinduism, for whom the goddess is indeed a staple, the respectable card-carrying historian of modern India typically maintains a discreet distance from these sites of affective intensity. We keep them at bay on the margins of our disciplinary practice, occasionally invoking them in passing sometimes, but then moving on, all too quickly, seemingly embarrassed about incorporating them more centrally into our ‘objectivist’ narrative(s).