SARC: Poetry of Belonging Muslim Imaginings of India 1850-1950

Speakers: Ali Khan Mahmudabad (Ashoka University, India); Faisal Devji (Oxford University)

Poetry of Belonging is an exploration of north-Indian Muslim identity at a time when the Indian nation state did not exist. Between 1850 and 1950, when precolonial forms of cultural traditions such as the musha’irah were undergoing deep and intricate transformations, certain Muslim voices imagined, negotiated, and articulated ways of what it meant to be Muslim through new and shifting vocabularies. Using poetry as an archive, the book traces the history of the musha’irah, the formal site of the poetic symposium, as a way of understanding public spaces through the changing economic, social, political, and technological contexts of the time. It seeks to chart changing ideas of watan (homeland) and hubb-e watanī (patriotism) in order to offer new perspectives on how Muslim intellectuals, poets, political leaders, and journalists conceived of their relationship to India while simultaneously expressing attachment to the umma or transnational Muslim community.