Modernity and Islam in South Asia: Piety, Poetry and Politics

Undergraduate / Graduate

What did the experience of modernity and colonialism look like for Islamic South Asia? How did South Asian Muslims, especially in North India, respond to the many challenges and opportunities modernity brought in its wake? This course explores how custodians of Islamic religious and poetic traditions responded to colonial modernity. We also introduce some key ideas of postcolonial studies, and apply as well as think critically about them in the light of the Indo-Islamic case-study. We begin the course by exploring the possible meanings of modernity and colonialism, before diving deeper into Indo-Islamic modernity using two broad and highly intertwined themes: religion, encompassing subthemes of science, rationality, and progress, and literature, especially poetry and the fate of the Persian and Urdu ghazal tradition, occasionally making comparisons with other pre-colonial genres in other Indian languages. We will look at the creation of new genres and new kinds of poetry in Persian and Urdu that emerge both to answer the call of modernity and sometimes to reject and attack it.