Genres of Hostipitality: Rethinking Hindu-Muslim Relations in Modern South Asia

Religion-making in modern South Asia has been deeply connected with the strife of communalism, and time and again the frame of "Hindu-Muslim relations" has been deployed as a discursive-cultural matrix for the production and management of political violence. Some scholars have addressed this present-day problem by looking at the resources of the past, hoping to recover a different set of relational realities between Hindus and Muslims. Other scholars have not relied on a hermeneutics of recovery but have highlighted the fluid nature of religious identities in contemporary South Asia. It is in the terrain of this historiographical and ethnographic work on "Hindu-Muslim relations" that SherAli Tareen intervenes to raise a range of other questions that direct our attention to questions of religion-making and colonialism, the shifting logics of the secular as well as political theology, and negotiations of identity and difference vis-a-vis translation and imitation. Yet, the master concept behind his arguments is Jacques Derrida's term, hostipitality (the ambivalence of belonging and identification rooted at the heart of all friendship). I extend this analysis by highlighting the concept of genre, and in turn raise questions about hostipitality's literary forms as well as relational forms that are embedded in certain texts not examined by Tareen. 

This paper builds on SherAli Tareen's monumental book, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire, to describe and analyze a range of multi-genre sources in Urdu that touch on Hindu-Muslim relations in modern South Asia. The paper takes Tareen's argument and theoretical assumptions to new texts to construct a theory of "genres of hostipitality." These texts include Shiblī Nu'mānī's "Hindu Musalmānõ kā ittiḥād," Sanā’ullāh Amritsarī's Ḥaqq prakāsh bajavāb Satiyārth prakāsh, ‘Abdur Raḥmān Shawq's Islām awr Hindustān, and Ḥasan Niẓāmī's Hindu mazhab kī ma‘lūmāt. I argue that these writings offer perceptive portals into the intellectual terrain in which “religion” was being constructed and contested in response to colonial modernity. The colonial-era Indo-Muslim authors whose writings I draw on to speak to Tareen's arguments appealed to a range of discursive paradigms, such as scripturalism, rationalism, history as well as historiography, and ethics of listening.

These paradigms related to colonialism and the colonial reification of religion in different ways. Some authors’ appeal to reason and history, for example, explicitly resonated with the colonial preference for universalizing modes of thinking about metaphysical as well as moral truth and the search for historical origins. Other paradigms, such as ethics of listening, were part and parcel of an indigenous response to the splintering of social life that was occasioned by colonial policies. It is important to study how various authors invoked scripture, reason, history, and ethics of listening in inter-religious relations and debates in order to understand the ways in which colonialism implicitly or explicitly shaped religious life in modern South Asia.

It is noteworthy that many indigenous authors did not acknowledge the significance of their colonial context. They often presented their writings on the religious other as a continuation of their doctrinal tradition. Yet, elements of colonial power are easily traceable in their texts and their preferred modes of dissemination. Moreover, we can see overlaps between the political impulses that undergird many of these texts and colonial logics and practices. The colonial context certainly mattered, and colonialism did transform how Muslims represented Hindus and the Hindu tradition. 

This brief foray into colonial-era Indo-Muslim writings on the Hindu tradition has sought to identify the colonial underpinnings of many of these writings. The attention to paradigms of discourse and religion-making enables us to examine how Muslim authors constructed their own authority by tapping into colonial discursive paradigms (such as reason and history). My analysis demonstrates the validity of Tareen's astute observation about the reification of Hinduism as a single Indian religion entering into Indo-Muslim culture only in the colonial period (a point also made by Carl Ernst). The Muslim authors who appealed to reason and history in their writings on the Hindu tradition directly channeled colonialist logics and practices of representation. The appeal to the authority of scripture spoke to the rise of Protestant religiosity as universal religion, itself a mark of colonial modernity. The deployment of these discursive paradigms in Muslim representations of the Hindu tradition attests to the significant role played by colonialism in structuring inter-religious contestations in British India. Yet, colonial discourse must not be approached as a totality; its territorializing aspirations and achievements were not unbounded. We must also include in our assessments those Muslim authors who bracketed colonialism and communalism, not necessarily as an expression of quietist tendencies, but as a political strategy to carve out a different space of relating to the religious other. It is important to scan the archives for those discursive practices of world-sharing through which Hindus and Muslims sought to listen to each other and exchange words of experience.