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

In a sewing class on the premises of a Hindu temple in small-town Pakistan, 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. I show 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.

This 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 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.

This paper builds on SherAli Tareen's monumental book, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire, 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." I extend this analysis by highlighting the concept of genre, and in turn raise questions about hostipitality's literary forms as well as relational forms that are embedded in certain texts not examined by Tareen. 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. I argue 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 I draw on to speak to Tareen's arguments appealed to a range of discursive paradigms, such as scripturalism, rationalism, history as well as historiography, and ethics of listening.