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Beyond Nostalgia: time and place in Indian Muslim politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2017

FARIDAH ZAMAN
FARIDAH ZAMAN*
Affiliation:
University of Chicagofaridah@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

This article begins with the premise that nostalgia haunts histories of Indian Muslim cultural and social life but remains curiously underspecified with relation to Muslim political life. By looking at the figure of Mohamed Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) and a constellation of transnational initiatives around the year 1913 in particular, it suggests ways in which we might redeploy nostalgia in order to look for temporal and spatial ambivalence in historical moments. In turn, that ambivalence points to the limitations of understanding nostalgia as purely a longing for another place and a past time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 27 , Special Issue 4: Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia , October 2017 , pp. 627 - 647
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2017 

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References

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31 Comrade, 19 October 1912, p. 298. See also M. A. Ansari to Secretary, Government of India, Foreign and Political Department, 28 February 1914, in Ansari, M. A., Muslims and the Congress: Select Correspondence of Dr M. A. Ansari 1912–1935, (ed.) Hasan, Mushirul (Delhi, 1979)Google Scholar, pp. 4-5. It seems the idea of such as mission was first put forward by Mohamed Ali's elder brother, Shaukat Ali – Comrade, 12 October 1912, p. 269.

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34 Comrade, 30 November 1912, p. 432.

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36 Ibid .

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39 Comrade, 14 December 1912, p. 470. For a first-hand account of the organization and its travels by one of its members – an Aligarh student who had been recruited by Dr Ansari at the college – see Khaliquzzaman, Choudhry, Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore, 1961)Google Scholar, pp. 20-26.

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42 ‘Pictorial Supplement’, Comrade, 5 July 1913, 4pp.

43 In the Comrade issue of 3 May 1913, for example, a letter from Ansari about the Medical Mission was published on p. 350 and a cable sent from Constantinople by Ansari on Arab success at Benghazi was published on p. 353.

44 Comrade, 5 July 1913, p. 8.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Times of India (Bombay), 4 July 1913, p. 5.

48 Times of India, 5 July 1913, p. 5.

49 Hamdard (Delhi), 11 July 1913, pagination obscured.

50 ‘Pictorial Supplement’, Comrade, 5 July 1913, p. iv; Times of India, 5 July 1913, p. 10.

51 Ibid .; Times of India, 8 July 1913, p. 8.

52 Times of India, 8 July 1913, p. 8.

53 ‘Pictorial Supplement’, Comrade, 5 July 1913, p. iv.

54 Comrade, 5 July 1913, p. 8. The sentiment was shared by colonial officials. Private Secretary to the H. E. the Viceroy wired Mohamed Ali in Bombay to state: “The Viceroy would be glad if you would on his behalf, extend to the Mission a cordial welcome on their return to India”. Times of India, 4 July 1913, p. 5.

55 Comrade, 12 July 1913, p. 26.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., p. 27.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid. Before joining the Nadwat ul-ʿUlama (‘Assembly of Islamic Scholars’) in Lucknow in 1904, Shibli had been an historian and scholar of Arabic and Persian at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh; as a boy, Mohamed Ali had snuck into his undergraduate lectures on the Qurʾan – see Ali, Mohamed, My Life: A Fragment, (ed.) Hasan, Mushirul (New Delhi, 1999)Google Scholar, pp. 65-67.

62 Times of India, 8 July 1913, p. 8; Hamdard; 12 July 1913, pagination obscured.

63 Comrade, 12 July 1913, p. 27.

64 Ibid. The distance between the two mosques is roughly one mile.

65 Ibid.

66 Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan, pp. 27-28.

67 Basu, Aparna, ‘Mohamed Ali in Delhi: The Comrade Phase, 1912-1915’, in Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, (ed.) Hasan, Mushirul (Delhi, 1981)Google Scholar, p. 111.

68 Comrade, 12 July 1913, p. 27.

69 Comrade, 9 August 1913, pp. 90-91.

70 Comrade, 12 July 1913, pp. 27-29.

71 Ibid.

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79 Ibid., p. 8.

80 Ibid., p. 9.

81 Ibid .

82 Ibid., pp. 11, 15-16.

83 Ibid., p. 16.

84 All of these ideas were described in a letter to Talat Paşa – see Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali to Talat Bey, 8 July 1914, ff. 1532-45, Mohamed Ali Papers, Nehru Museum and Memorial Library, New Delhi (henceforth MAP).

85 Comrade, 12 July 1913, p. 28. See also Times of India, 5 July 1913, p. 10.

86 See Zafar Ali Khan, Dr Ansari et al.’s letter to Comrade, 26 July 1913, pp. 50-52; Ansari's letter to Comrade, detailing their travels while looking for a suitable site for the colony, same issue, pp. 52-57.

87 Comrade, 3 May 1913, pp. 355-357.

88 Comrade, 3 May 1913, p. 350.

89 See Charles M. Marling to Sir Edward Grey, Constantinople, 4 July 1913, forwarding Note by W. D. W. Matthews, Adana, 23 June 1913; Grey, Foreign Office, to Under-Secretary of State for India, 9 July 1913; Matthews, Adana, 7 June 1913, all in L/PS/11/57, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library (henceforth OIOC). In Matthews’ 7 June letter, he mistakenly asserted that three Muslims (Zafar Ali Khan, Ansari and Ahmed Ansar) wanted to purchase land to settle 300 Indian Muslim families, or maybe Turkish muhājirīn (emigrants). It was later clarified that the colony was to be for refugees from Rumelia, and officials believed it was realistically intended for 300 individuals rather than 300 families. Regardless, the settlement was never intended to house Indian or Turkish Muslims, contra Robinson's, Francis Separatism Among Muslims: The politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860-1923 (Delhi, [1974] 1993)Google Scholar, pp. 207-208.

90 Comrade, 3 May 1913, pp. 355-357, at p. 356.

91 Ibid . Money raised in other places was also being redirected to Ansari and the Colonisation scheme. See for example Manager of the Comrade to Secretary of the Chulia Moslem Association (Rangoon), 9 January 1914, f. 1343, MAP.

92 Comrade, 26 July 1913, p. 52. See pp. 52-57 for a full account of the tour. For the proceedings of the first three meetings of the ‘Society for the Assistance of the Mussalman Refugees from Rumelia’, see Comrade, 26 July 1913, pp. 50-51.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid., p. 56.

95 On Punjab, Ian Talbot, ‘The Punjab Under Colonialism: Order and Transformation in British India’, Journal of Punjab Studies 14, 1 (2007), pp. 3-10. On Anatolia, Shaw, Stanford, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic (New York, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 211.

96 Comrade, 3 May 1913, p. 356.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid., pp. 356-357.

99 Mohamed Ali, ‘The Future of Islam’, Selected Writings and Speeches, (ed.) Afzal Iqbal, Vol. I, pp. 51-71, at pp. 64-65. See also Comrade, 24 February 1912, p. 171.

100 Rohilkhand Gazette, 8 December 1912, extract in ‘Selections from the Native Newspapers published in the United Provinces. Received up to 14 December 1912’, L/R/5/87, p. 1033, OIOC.

101 Extracts from the Comrade, 31 May and 7 June 1913, contained in Report by F. Isemonger, Assistant Director of Criminal Intelligence Department, 20 February 1914, Home Political (A), May 1914, 46, National Archives of India, Delhi (henceforth NAI). The articles in question are at pp. 437-438 and pp. 457-458 of Comrade respectively; the quotations are from the issue of 7 June, at p. 458. See also Criminal Intelligence Office file on ‘Anjuman-i-Khuddam-i-Kaaba, 1913-14’, L/PS/20/H/137, OIOC.

102 ‘Rules framed for the Anjuman Khuddam-i-Kaaba’, Appendix A, in Report by Isemonger, NAI; Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali to Talat Bey, 8 July 1914, MAP.

103 Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali to Talat Bey, 8 July 1914, MAP.

104 Comrade, 25 November 1911, p. 451.

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106 Comrade, 25 November 1911. The line is drawn from Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyum (1859).

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109 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, [2000] 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 250.

110 Iqbal laid this philosophy out most fully in a series of lectures delivered in 1930. See Iqbal, Muhammad, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, (ed.) Saeed Sheikh, M. (Stanford, 2013)Google Scholar.

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112 Boym, ‘Nostalgia and its discontents’, pp. 12, 15-16.