In her study of Urdu language politics in late colonial India, Kavita Saraswathi
Datla traces the rise and eventual demise of an alternative Urdu movement that
envisioned the language not as a marker of Muslim religious identity, but as a
means to articulate a modern secular nationalism with roots in India’s Islamic
past. By highlighting this largely forgotten moment of secular Urdu nationalism,
the author pushes back against two well-established historiographical narratives
on Muslims in colonial India: the dominant understanding of the
Hindi-Urdu controversy as a process of sharpening communal boundaries and
the scholarly emphasis on the epistemological struggles to make Islam and
Western science compatible. She complicates both of these existing histories
by shifting her geographic lens from northern India to the so-called colonial
periphery: the Muslim princely state of Hyderabad. Specifically, Datla’s research
centers on the establishment and initial decades of intellectual activities
at Hyderabad’s innovative and Urdu-medium Osmania University.
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences