Abstract
The title of this book might appear to be a contradiction in itself to some people. They might argue that there is no such thing as ‘secular Islam’ or that there should not be. As the latter opinion is a matter of one’s faith one need not engage with it. As for the former, we are indebted to the author for introducing us to a phenomenon which is of great interest to those who want to understand Muslim culture in India in its totality. For it is one significant aspect of this totality, namely that of language and education in the Muslim community of India before the Partition, which is the main subject of this book. To be precise, the book deals with the formation of the Osmania University in Hyderabad and related subjects concerning the Urdu language and the cultural lives of Indian Muslims.
The book has five chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion and the usual bibliography and an index. It is, therefore, a scholarly work undertaken by a scholar of Indian origin now settled in the United States. The main argument of the book is that Muslim intellectuals in the early twentieth century, when Urdu was seen as a Muslim language and Hindi a Hindu one, ‘sought to secularize and therefore radically reformulate their own linguistic, historical, religious, and literary traditions’ (p. 9). By secularism Datla means the forging of certain institutions, processes, narratives, etc., involving Muslims and their conceivable future in India. Urdu was at the heart of these projects and the major institution which is the focus of this book is the creation of the Osmania University in Hyderabad. Another aspect of the imagination of a secular future shared with other communities was the language policy in Hyderabad which, among other things, contributed to the creation of an Urdu-medium university. The focus being the imagination of a common future, and a secular one, this book is a unique study as most other studies focus on separatism among Muslims. In short, here are Muslims who would rather not be minoritised in an independent India but would rather construct institutions and processes which would ensure a niche for their cultural experiences and needs.
The book begins with the establishment of the Osmania University (Chapter 1) at Hyderabad. It argues that Urdu, rather than Islam as a formal belief-system, provided the common intellectual background of the university. This made the new institution both Urdu-medium and inclusive rather than communal. The second chapter continues with the academic projects of the university. The major one of these was the creation of text books. This, in turn, meant reforming the Urdu language so that it should bear the burden of modernity without losing all touch with the past and Islamic culture. But while a balance might have been achieved in Hyderabad itself, Urdu was engaged in a political battle for identity-construction in the rest of India against Hindi (Chapter 4). This meant that the reform of Urdu to serve secular needs clashed with the communal needs of the situation. This tension came to a head in 1938 when the non-Muslim students of the Osmania University protested against the pro-Urdu (for them anti-vernacular) policies of the University. After this, the author points out, the course of the language politics in Hyderabad, as elsewhere in India, changed and the secular dream became a minority preoccupation which expressed itself, if it did so at all, through overt political processes rather than cultural and linguistic ones.
The author’s major argument is persuasive and powerful. It is true that the prospect of being turned into minorities—minoritisation—did create distortions in the worldview of many Muslim intellectuals and leaders. The communal response, culminating in the creation of Pakistan, is the best known. However, there were other ones too and this book is an attempt to salvage the one based upon linguistic, cultural and educational institutions and processes. That it failed eventually is regrettable, but only by knowing about it in more detail can we learn what went wrong.
The book is based on authentic sources and the author has tried to make it interesting and erudite at the same time. It is a definitely a valuable contribution to the literature of cultural politics, language planning about Urdu, educational history and the cultural history of Muslims in India. I recommend the book to all scholars of South Asian studies in particular and the interested reader in general. In the end I congratulate the author and the publishers for having given a valuable intellectual contribution to the scholarship on the Muslim culture of South Asia.