This magnum opus is the latest example of the long tradition of formidable scholarship on medieval and early modern Indian history at the prestigious Centre of Advanced Study of History, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh, India. The distinguished author, Professor Gulfishan Khan, has recently retired as a sagacious and much-respected Chairperson of the reputed institution. Her avant-garde doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Oxford, which she calls her alma mater, was published as a widely appreciated monograph, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West during the Eighteenth Century (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998). The book announced an understated defiance against conservatism of old-style socio-economic history, which was conducted under a long shadow of Marxist historiography in India. This collection of fifteen essays on the vibrant Islamic intellectual practices in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—a period of massive transformation from the level playing field of early modern India to the violent British colonial rule—can be read as a fascinating sequel to the author’s previous book.
Indian Muslim intellectuals were responding to British colonial rule which was being aggressively and relentlessly established with complete control and subjugation of the life of the people. These bureaucrats and intellectuals are identified in the book as the Indo-Persian elite, that is, the Muslim elite writing in Indian Persian, even though they may have spoken Urdu or Bangla or other vernaculars at home, and their ancestors may or may not have come from Iran to work in India during the heyday of Mughal rule. They were not mute witnesses to the country being taken over by the officers and merchants of the English East India Company, which was often referred to, in popular parlance, as a difficult feminine entity to be handled with care and respect. Their varied responses to colonial rule could be seen in a vast corpus of writings mainly in Persian and sometimes also in Urdu. The author has consulted a large number of their works, mostly Persian manuscripts located in the India office Library, British Library and Bodleian Library (in London and Oxford), and also those preserved in the Maulana Azad Library of Aligarh Muslim University.
The material meticulously collected from the texts, many of which remain unpublished, has been put together in four distinctly organized sections. Included are a longish Introduction and a large Bibliography, besides Preface, Illustrations and Index. Modern Indian historical writings in English, coupled with interesting long passages translated from Persian manuscripts as well as samples of classical Persian poetry on ethics and love, are analysed by the author.
The first section, ‘Historiography, Biography, Gender Discourses and Interfaith Dialogue’, comprises six chapters detailing how Muslim intellectuals were responding to the crumbling of the old world. All kinds of issues—old and new—now required attention amidst violent confrontations. Of these, the emphasis on the longstanding significance of the writing of history is especially important. In medieval Muslim world, theology was a first-class profession which attracted all sorts of third-rate intellectuals, and history was a second-class vocation which attracted many brilliant minds. For Gulfishan Khan, one such bureaucrat, intellectual and historian was the author of Siyar-ul-Muta’khkhirin (An Overview of the Modern Times), Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai (born 1727). With deep connections in the old Mughal world of Delhi, Agra, Patna, and Murshidabad, Ghulam Husain wrote the book in 1783 for his British patrons in Calcutta. A fine English translation of the work was almost simultaneously prepared by a scholar, later identified as Haji Mustafa. Considered to be one of the best historical works produced in the late eighteenth century, it offers ‘a description of glorious past, as well as a sad narrative of the Mughal decline, and above all an indigenous critique of the impact of the early colonial rule’ (p. 46). Indeed, commenting on the decline of Mughal power, Ghulam Husain noted that the dynasty had lost its steam and more capable officers such as the Syed brothers could have been better rulers, if counterfactually a reform in the Mughal political system were possible; why should a son of the royal family be the emperor when he was not able to keep the kingdom intact.
The second section, ‘Perceiving the Colonialism’, consists of four chapters devoted to how Indian and Iranian scholars such as Abu Talib Isfahani (1752-1806), Abdul Latif Shushtari (1758-1806) and Ahmad Bihbihani (1777-1819) were responding to growth and expansion of the European powers, expressing concerns on its impact on the larger Muslim world, which was witnessing the decline of the powers of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran, Central Asian Khanates and Mughal India. Originating in Iran and much travelled, all three intellectuals and bureaucrats have left behind vivid accounts of the systematic colonial subjugation of Mughal succession states and other regional kingdoms. They sought to understand and explain the ‘burgeoning Western hegemony on Eastern nations at the turn of the eighteenth century’ (p. 278). In sum, ‘decline of the East’ was accompanied by a simultaneous process of the ‘rise of the West’ (p. 275).
The three chapters of the third part, ‘Literary Cross-Cultural Encounters and Orientalism versus Occidentalism’, go deeper into the varied dimensions of the impact of the European conquest of India specifically and domination on the Muslim world generally. The older tradition such as excellence in Persian poetry epitomized by Iranian poets who were popular in India for centuries—Hafiz, Sa‘di, Rumi, et al. —continued to flourish through Urdu and English translations; they were transmitted to the Western literary sphere through the efforts of pioneering scholars such as Sir William Jones and other European Orientalists. Gulfishan Khan also goes on to analyse the multifarious processes and means through which indigenous knowledge could be transmitted as part of serious intellectual exchange and investment, irrespective of the larger devastating consequences of colonialism and orientalism witnessed especially after the 1830s—when the imposition of an uncompromising colonial modernity was fait accompli. All things past were to be abandoned in the brave new world led in India by the British, which also meant the reverse process of knowing them—that is, Occidentalism.
Thus, the concluding cluster of essays, ‘The Mid-Nineteenth Century Perceptions of Europe and the Wider World’, turns the gaze in two chapters on the colonial rulers through a fine reading of a travelogue in Urdu (Siyahatnama, Book of Travels) and a universal history in Persian (Mir’at-i-Gitinuma, World Reflecting Mirror) of an enterprising bureaucrat and intellectual from Jhajhar in Rohtak (now in Haryana), not far from Delhi, Abdul Karim Khan Mushtaq Jhajhari. He visited Europe Asia and Africa, and was also aware of the political developments in America. The account of his travel to Britain (1839-41) is especially significant for the fascinating details relating to scientific and technological developments in Europe and British political ideas and institutions: informed and exciting remarks on the parliamentary system of government, with the Tories, Whigs, Radicals, and the Chartists publicly arguing their cases such as in the famous Corn Law debates. Gulfishan Khan has translated a particularly interesting passage in Abdul Karim’s work, in which the latter mentions a meeting with the Tory Prime Minister Robert Peel (1788-1850). Abdul Karim records that the Prime Minister asked him what he considered the most wonderful and strange things about the country, adding that perhaps he wanted to hear about the benefits of scientific and technological developments such as the fast-expanding network of the railways, steamships, telegraph, and some other electrical inventions. Instead, Abdul Karim pointed out that ‘the debates in the parliament between the Tories and the Whigs were the most exciting of all experiences.’ Growing up in India’s old world, he had thought that rivalries, jealousies, discord, and dissension in government matters could lead to disastrous consequences. By contrast, in the political system he was exposed to in Britain, he was ‘unable to understand the logic that more of this diversity of opinion and opposition meant greater prosperity for the state and the country’ (p. 569).
Gulfishan Khan suggests that Abdul Karim’s assessment of the causes of material prosperity came close to French philosopher Voltaire’s observation that in Britain the whole system was based on the governmental concern for the needs of the people, with freedom and liberty contributing to expand commerce. A certain balance was maintained to ensure that economic interests of all sections of the society, despite class-based stratification, were cared for. Together, they contributed to the ‘foundation of the greatness of the state’ (p. 570). Some of these people came to India with commercial interests managed by the East India Company—a mercantile organization which went on to acquire sovereign authority. Abdul Karim also met the scientists. Together they were creating a new world, which men like Abdul Karim could have only understood and not stopped. In decades to come, a more aggressive colonial regime was going to turn the old world upside down. The author invokes Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s opinion to conclude: ‘He sought to prove that the Western scientific thought was not antithetical to Islam, rather Islam was compatible with modern science, if the Qur’anic verses were interpreted in the light of reason’ (p. 616).
Raziuddin Aquil is Professor of History, University of Delhi, Delhi. His areas of research and teaching interests include religious traditions, literary cultures and political practices in medieval and early modern India.