Hindus, Muslims, and Contestations of Religion in Modern South Asia

Scholars have analyzed the relationship between the Islamic and Hindu traditions from a range of historiographical, philological, and ethnographic vantages (Lawrence 1976; Stewart 2001; Ernst 2003; Flood 2009; Bellamy 2011; Nair 2020, among others). The recent publication of SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire connects the concerns of this rich body of scholarship to work on modern South Asian Muslim religious scholars (‘ulama’) in the wake of Talal Asad’s writings on the secular, Islam as a discursive tradition, and the cultivation of ethical sensibilities whose micropolitical implications allow us to rethink the claims of secular liberalism. The papers in this panel engage with Tareen’s innovative and incisive methodological advances in different ways.

The first paper investigates the relationship between religion, language, and translation in modern South Asia, with a focus on the question of the mutual translatability of Hindu and Muslim traditions. Recent scholarship has challenged traditional notions of syncretism, urging a nuanced understanding of religious interactions. This paper thus delves into the pivotal role of translation, especially between languages linked to Islam and Hinduism, examining how it shapes the inter-religious encounter. Contrary to the belief that such dynamics were lost amid the nationalist politics of colonial modernity, this paper introduces an unexplored archive of Urdu translations of the Bhagavad Gita (1880s-1940s), mostly by Hindu authors. What were the stakes of translating a Hindu text into Urdu during a period of heightened religious and political tension? Through an in-depth analysis of Munshi Bisheshwar Prashad’s 1935 translation, “Nasim-e Irfan,” this paper explores the complexities of rendering Hindu scripture in Sufi vocabulary amid deteriorating Hindu-Muslim relations, arguing that the act of translation offers a transformative lens that challenges the notion of self as purely itself, and exemplifies a radical experiment in the context of colonial modernity.

The second paper builds on Tareen's book 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. The paper argues 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 are analyzed speak to Tareen's arguments by articulating a range of discursive paradigms to think about hostipitality. These paradigms include scripturalism, rationalism, history as well as historiography, and ethics of listening.

The final paper brings us to the postcolonial context of Pakistan but also shifts the methodological approach from textual analysis to ethnography. The paper takes us to a sewing class on the premises of a Hindu temple in small-town Pakistan where Hindu and Muslim girls met every day to learn to sew together. The class was held together as a collective space by female friendship arising from shared interests and neighborly ties. In an asymmetrical religious milieu laden with recent histories of violence, ordinary interactions could be poisoned by the past, but they also enabled alternative possibilities of inter-religious friendships. This paper attends to the management of inter-religious ritual tensions and elaborate forms of aversion by young women grasping for language to parry what they understood as religious difference, as well as to find some ritual common ground with one another. The paper shows how their commitment to maintaining and repairing relations with one another relied on shared, gendered norms and comportments that could bear some transgressions and failures but could also come apart easily.

The three papers thus offer alternative textual and ethnographic sites from where we can re-examine the range of theoretical and methodological concerns raised in the scholarship on Hindu-Muslim relations, especially as most recently articulated by Tareen.