South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

11 | 2015 Contemporary Lucknow: Life with ‘Too Much History’

Raphael Susewind and Christopher B. Taylor (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3908 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.3908 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference Raphael Susewind and Christopher B. Taylor (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 11 | 2015, « Contemporary Lucknow: Life with ‘Too Much History’ » [Online], Online since 18 June 2015, connection on 20 March 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3908 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/samaj.3908

This text was automatically generated on 20 March 2020.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

SAMAJ-EASAS Series Series editors: Margret Frenz and Roger Jeffery. image This thematic issue is the third in a series of issues jointly co-edited by SAMAJ and the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS). More on our partnership with EASAS here.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Islamicate Lucknow Today: Historical Legacy and Urban Aspirations Raphael Susewind and Christopher B. Taylor

Urban Mythologies and Urbane Islam: Refining the Past and Present in Colonial-Era Lucknow Justin Jones

Jagdish, Son of Ahmad: Dalit Religion and Nominative Politics in Lucknow Joel Lee

Muslim Women’s Rights Activists’ Visibility: Stretching the Gendered Boundaries of the Public Space in the City of Lucknow Mengia Hong Tschalaer

Madrasas and Social Mobility in the Religious Economy: The Case of Nadwat al-’Ulama in Lucknow Christopher B. Taylor

The ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’: Sectarian Conflict and the Middle Classes Raphael Susewind

Postscript. Interdisciplinary Dialogue And Lucknow’s Cultural System Sandria Freitag

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Introduction. Islamicate Lucknow Today: Historical Legacy and Urban Aspirations

Raphael Susewind and Christopher B. Taylor

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Sandria Freitag, Nandini Gooptu, and our audiences at the Association for Asian Studies’ annual meeting in Philadelphia (2014) and at the European Conference for South Asian Studies in Zurich (2014) for their critical contributions to the two panels that led to this special issue. We also thank the four anonymous reviewers for their comments on this introduction. We acknowledge the assistance of Editage in language editing.

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1 The Lucknow Clocktower (ghanta ghar) rises 200 feet into the air over the old neighbourhood of Husainabad. Its orderly, measured timekeeping is juxtaposed against the chaos of traffic passing through the nearby Rumi Gate (roomi darwaza), the historical entrance to Lucknow City from the direction of Istanbul, known to the Persianate world as ‘Room.’ Erected in 1881 in the capital of the areas known to the British as the United Provinces of Awadh and Agra, the Clocktower is built testimony to changing times. In the wake of the British victory over the 1857 rebellion that was sparked within garrisons of Indian troops stationed in Lucknow and elsewhere, the city was thoroughly reimagined by its new rulers and its old residents alike. As imperial control was reinstated and deepened, Lucknow became more intensely connected with other parts of British India, both politically and through better infrastructure. Key to this process was the city’s connection to the railway network, which required exact timekeeping and, hence, a clocktower (Llewellyn-Jones 1985: 181).

2 But it was over a century ago that this all happened. For decades, the Lucknow Clocktower has been stopped, its hands frozen. No one has deigned to repair it: not the successors to the royal rulers of Lucknow who originally erected it nor the current elected government of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, of which Lucknow became capital after independence. The monument is a product of colonial politics and a nuanced past (Llewellyn-Jones 1985). Its presence stands as a metaphor for the agency (or lack thereof) that citizens of Lucknow feel with regard to their past—it is representative of history as a controlling and controllable force in the life of the present. Though we recognise that neither were intended to bear a symbolic load, we take the Clocktower and a quip from one of our informants—that Lucknow has ‘too much history’—as points of departure for examining Lucknow residents’ cultural memories of both their own histories and of ‘History,’ broadly conceived. In contrast to Hayden White’s (2014 [1966]) famous essay ‘The Burden of History’, however, we do not critique the discipline of history for having become mired in antiquated analytics of the societies under study, precluding interdisciplinary dialogue with scholars of contemporary social life. Rather, we rely on contemporary Lucknow residents’ own views of ‘history’ as a touchstone for interdisciplinarity and broader scholarly collaboration among South Asianists. 3 We have privileged emic views; thus, the various papers in this volume naturally conceive of the contemporary role of history in different ways. First, like the unrepaired Clocktower, history in Lucknow can appear visibly present while going unnoticed: unseen by the residents of Lucknow, who continue to lead their everyday lives and to move about their town and the world, the past continues to influence current events. Endeavour as they may to leave history behind, residents for instance explicitly recognise the everyday presence of history whenever they refer to the old city as ‘old’ (qadimi; purani). 4 Secondly, history’s presence can also overwhelm, casting a shadow at least as long as that of the Clocktower. In the eyes of many residents and observers that we spoke with,

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contemporary Lucknow appears frozen in time, overly burdened by its past. In particular, young people experience the oft-mentioned nostalgia for a bygone civilised culture (tehzib; see Jones, this volume) as an obstacle; they desire to escape traditional institutions and identities and not be reminded of them. As one of our informants, a young and ambitious man in his twenties, put it when asked why he decided to leave the city where he was born: ‘there is just too much history here.’ 5 Lastly, Lucknow residents today are capable of repurposing history as a tool to reclaim agency. In 2011, a team of citizens arranged for private funds to get the Clocktower ticking again, attempting to breathe life into a bygone monument, to transform heritage into a marketable resource, and hence, to illustrate the agency Lucknowis have in making the past present. This agency lies at the core of the articles assembled here. This special issue highlights how Lucknow’s history is being (re)presented in various contestations, revisions, and alternate visions in the hope that recasting ‘what once was’ can influence ‘what is to be.’ 6 The remainder of this introduction situates this special issue within the growing scholarly concern with second-tier Indian cities, reviews earlier scholarship on Lucknow and its historical development, sketches trends in urban expansion and maps out several of Lucknow’s demographic features, and finally, introduces the articles themselves. We place particular emphasis on nawabi Lucknow’s oft-cited history of Islamicate culture, referring ‘not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims’ (Hodgson 1974: 57–59). This is not only reflective of popular imaginaries of Lucknow but also of the fact that the old city—where the burden of history is perhaps most acutely felt—is still demographically dominated by Muslims, who comprise India’s largest religious minority group and who have recently become subject to increasing scholarly analysis of their socioeconomic ‘backwardness’ and urban segregation (Sachar et al. 2006, Misra et al. 2007, Basant & Shariff 2010, Gayer & Jaffrelot 2012). The subsequent articles thus focus on how the Muslims of Lucknow’s old city negotiate a remembered cosmopolitanism and a present burdened by structural violence and ghettoisation while tracing the strong influences of the city’s non-Muslim history and presence.

The City in India—Urban Locality as a Scholarly Object

7 Recalling the Gandhian ideal of India’s spirit, the village was the primary analytical trope in early studies on Indian society; it was juxtaposed with colonial urban forms and modernisation, which were represented as inauthentic and foreign (Brosius 2013: 62–63, cf. Gandhi 1966 [1921], Khilnani 1997: 109, Nandy 2006: 13–25). Yet, as Ashis Nandy writes, ‘India may live in its villages, but it also has one of the world’s oldest continuous traditions of urban living’ (2002: 126). What are the implications of a more urban perspective for the academic study of India? Is there a model ‘Indian city,’ and if so, what is it? Can scholars gain insight into the sociology of India by positing a notion of ‘the Indian city’? What contributions and interventions are possible from the study of Lucknow—overwhelmingly represented in historical accounts—as a contemporary instance of the Indian city?

8 Until recently, studies on Indian cities were largely limited to quantitative research conducted by policymakers and urban planners on urbanisation (e.g.

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Ramachandran 1989, Sharma & Sita 2001). ‘Most ethnographers ignored the centrality of urban places in the lives of ordinary Indians across the subcontinent’ (de Neve & Donner 2006: 5). When anthropologists have focused their research on cities, their conclusions have often been related to the transformation of ‘traditional’ life and related changes in village culture (Bose 1968, Siddique 1982, Rao 1986) or to specific caste groups’ efforts to maintain social continuity in the urban milieu (Singer & Cohen 1968, Lynch 1968). In this sense, rather than take ‘the city’ as a proper object of study, studies on Indian cities have taken ‘the city’ as a negative catalyst for cultural groups under observation. Urban neighbourhoods portrayed in earlier ethnographies— expressed in terms such as mohalla, para, basti, or nagar—themselves resembled classic villages: bounded, part of the background, and static (see Appadurai 1995 for a broader critique). Ironically, this has not at all been the case in the discipline of history: urbanisation and urban social relations have figured prominently in historians’ work on South Asia, especially with respect to the 19th century (e.g. Bayly 1975, Dobbin 1972, Ballhatchet & Harrison 1980, Frykenberg 1986; Subrahmanyan 1990; Gooptu 2001). 9 Since the 1990s, however, scholarship on contemporary urban India has finally begun to chime in with what Gyan Prakash (2002) has called ‘the urban turn’ in South Asian studies; similarly, Shatkin (2013: 1) spoke of India’s ‘remarkable urban moment.’ This turn began with a heavy focus on the metropolises of the subcontinent colloquially known, by their bureaucratic designation, as ‘Tier One cities’: Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Calcutta. Tier One cities have often been considered sites where (colonial) modernity was introduced to India (Haynes & Rao 2013) rather than as true ‘localities’ (Appadurai 1995) that should be studied for their distinctive emplacement of identity and sociality. In this way, India’s Tier One metropolises have been studied more as hinges between tradition and the modern era or as conduits for global flows rather than as sites with precise geographical and historical contours. 10 In their seminal edited volume, de Neve and Donner (2006: 3) emphasised that ‘smaller towns are equally important sites for the study of globalisation and its processes’ as are India’s metropolises. As we elaborate in the next section, Lucknow has been a centre of transnational trade, culture, and learning since the 18th century. It remains an important site of globalisation in India, continually inhabited by a well-educated, worldly elite, but increasingly a labour market where low-cost labour is in excess. The study of Tier Two cities in India has increased; against localised urban backdrops, national themes have appeared in sharper relief. Data from urban India has motivated a recent movement in anthropology to respatialise the state according to the ‘here’ of local institutions and everyday politics rather than as a bounded state vertically elevated above Indians’ ordinary lives (Ferguson & Gupta 2002, Gupta 2012). Moreover, recent work has portrayed the state in India as a disciplining, yet self-contradictory, entity that is ‘palpable’ even when ordinary urban Indians visit health clinics (Gupta 2012) and cinemas (Schulz n.d.). The politics of national parties like the CPI(M), for example, are subject to the influence of geographical constraints and the local concerns of neighbourhoods (Chakrabarti 2006). Social institutions like education (Jeffrey et al. 2008, Taylor, this volume), caste (Mines 2006), and gender (Donner 2006, Hong Tschalär, this volume) can refashion the very layout of urban neighbourhoods in small cities in ways that would not occur in the context of metropolitan real estate. Reframing age-old analyses of hierarchy in Indian society (Dumont 1980), ethnographies of India’s small cities have revealed new modes by which caste-based

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status is distinguished in the anonymity of increasingly urban environs through social exclusion (Froystad 2006; Susewind, this volume), consumption (Dickey 2013, Liechty 2003), and personal names (Lee, this volume). 11 Accounting for the above analyses, current scholarship on Indian cities has thus aimed to explain how local institutions remake urban space and emplace intangibles of Indian culture and discourse. Rural and urban India alike are known for their various kinds of diversity—of religion, gender, ethnicity, language, caste, class, and more—and yet every Indian city is also characterised by an astonishing multiplicity of intersections, parallel lives, frequent collisions, and trafficking of all sorts, marking everyday sociality as much as vehicular life does. Despite the flood of economic and demographic data that ceaselessly flows from government and scholarly channels, no one statistical snapshot can capture the complexity of an Indian city (though the next section is one attempt at this). The tin roofs of urban settlements appear and shift with a rapidity that frustrates the attempts of both urban planners and social scientists. City residents, visitors, and ethnographers alike remark that cities in India are bewildering places, ‘barely comprehended’ even by those living there for decades (Gandhi & Hoek 2012: 4). The Indian city is therefore quite amenable to ethnography, with its methodological sensitivity to subjectivities, inclusion of perspectival orientations, ambiguity, and ambivalence. 12 The city, on the other hand, is also home to bewildering possibilities, a second defining characteristic of Indian urban sociality in contrast to village life. Perpetual instability gives rise to creative energy as diverse communities jostle contentiously in adjacent spaces. In Lucknow, for example, we have observed how public space has been repurposed in myriad ways, as madrasa lawns host inter-city soccer matches, rickshaws conceal lovers’ trysts, old alleyways double as industrial workshops, and municipal wastelands become sacred prayer grounds. This ‘spatial potentiality,’ or the ‘use and abuse of ordinary space’ (Gandhi & Hoek 2012: 6–7), intensifies contestations. No turf is safe from intrusion. Traditional group boundaries not only must be policed but also come to be defined in opposition to new adjacent Others (Barth 1969). Urban space is particularly conducive to new openings for reworking gender roles and to facilitating opportunities for women (Hong Tschalär, this volume). Heterogeneity is on display, with differences layered on differences, and invisible class conflict may emerge in performative ritual contests, such as in the context of Shi’a-Sunni strife in the old city of Lucknow (Susewind, this volume). 13 Yet even as they intensify contestation, cities also intensify collaboration. The heightened politics of urban spaces lead to more—and stranger—bedfellows. Diversity and coexistence with the Other become themselves markers of an urbane identity. The cosmopolitanism of India’s cities affiliates citizens with the global as much as with the homogenous notions of the ‘nation’ (Lahiri 2010). Global linkages as well elicit limitless aspirations, while also tying Indians to new fetters of consumerism (Fernandes 2006). Cities are analytically ripe for the study of upward social mobility in India, as well as its opposite: impoverishment. 14 While groupism is at times superseded in urban India, kinship and group segregation remain social forms of organisation. The politics of violence have continued to remake urban spaces into the 21st century: Indian Muslims have engaged in self-segregation in search of safety, which has paradoxically also increased their socioeconomic vulnerability (Gayer & Jaffrelot 2012). Bodily performing a group identity has taken on

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a heightened importance in the anonymity of city streets; markers of class, caste, and religion can cause people to be allowed entry or denied passage in urban neighbourhoods policed through ‘apprehending’ difference (Gandhi & Hoek 2012, Dickey 2013). Identities are mapped onto the city landscape: as Ghassem-Fachandi (2012) reminds us of Ahmedabad after the riots, bridges, police posts, temples, and shrines became navigational clues regarding communal safety and danger. 15 Given their potentialities, Indian cities have given rise to new, broader forms of representation than those seen in rural areas. People of lower castes and other minorities are increasingly challenging old hegemonies, democratising elite modes of sovereignty as well as respectability. Indian cities are known for their ‘mash-up of visual styles often considered by the city’s betters to be gauche, kitsch, or derivative’ (Gandhi & Hoek 2012: 7–8). Yet this ‘democratic revolution’ in the aesthetics of modernity is not merely imitative, as new modes of respectability and ways of being modern arise through identification with the forces of economic and political progress. This is particularly true of Lucknow. Of course, Mayawati’s reign was exemplary in this regard as it facilitated a new Dalit aristocracy. But Lucknow has been home to a blend of modernities, varieties of respectability, and preferences for the old as well as the new ever since the time of the Persianate nawabs, who were famous for their patronage of both European style and Shi’a traditionalism. 16 Our focus on neighbourhoods as meaningful places runs counter to much of the literature on globalisation, in which the local is characteristically opposed to the global, with the latter representing agency, modernity, and change. Lucknow as a city with ‘too much history’ seems a perfect candidate for emplacing the local as contiguous with a timeless past. Yet seemingly new (and even neoliberal) developments in India are often characteristic more of the subcontinent’s past history than they are representative of India’s globalising present, as shown in Patrick Neveling’s (2014) long history of exclusion in ‘special economic zones’ and Nandini Gooptu’s (2013) edited collection on the traditional roots of neoliberal enterprise cultures. Similarly, the articles in this volume sharply contrast with the view that Lucknow localities are ‘of the past’ while outside forces represent ‘modernisation’ or ‘the future.’ Instead, we offer nuanced pictures of Lucknow’s residents— Dalit activists, Shi’a preachers, madrasa students, and real estate moguls—whose activities contain kernels of the 21st century’s hybridisations and creolisations, despite many attempts to represent themselves as guardians of tradition.

History and Historiography in Lucknow

17 Legends attribute Lucknow’s origins to Lakshman, the brother of the Hindu god Ram; the eponymous Lakshman Tila area of the old city retains the stamp of this history (Hjortshoj 1979: 17) and of Lakhna, the builder of Macchi Bhawan palace (Sharar 2001 [1974]: 37). In contrast to its legendary associations with Hindu rulers, Lucknow is also known as the home of the ‘Muslim’ court of the nawabs, ‘leading to the perception that the city was the court’ (Wilkinson-Weber 1999: 14). In fact, Lucknow did not exist as an urban centre until the arrival of Asaf al-Dawlah in 1775, the nawab who moved the seat of the Awadh government there from Faizabad in 1775 (Hjortshoj 1979: 20). European visitors to Lucknow from the 18th century onwards marvelled at its palaces and

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bustling commercial life but consistently remarked on the squalor and poverty among its underclass (Llewellyn-Jones 1980: 11–12, Talwar-Oldenburg 1984: 11).

18 Lucknow is remembered in the popular imagination of its inhabitants as a city rife with history, for good reason. First of all, historical Lucknow truly was a world-class city; those who know its past take pride in Lucknow’s moments on the global stage. Lucknow of the 18th and 19th centuries surpassed Delhi as ‘the most fabulous court city in the subcontinent’ (Talwar-Oldenburg 1984: 213). In 1856, its population was reckoned to be 1 million and it remained the ‘largest city in India except for the three Presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay as late as 1870’ (Trivedi 2010: 13). Lucknow was thus larger than any city in America at the time and almost half the size of London, then the largest city in the world. During this age of empires, Lucknow retained territorial and cultural integrity long after 1700, when its patrons, the Mughal court in Delhi, began to decline. Since its founding as the nawab’s capital in 1775, Lucknow was a cosmopolitan blend of world civilisations under the urbane rule of the nawabs, still visible in its art and architecture today: Edwardian verandas grace local houses that also have square Hindu-temple door frames, a Japanese pagoda covers a manor’s outbuilding, and Persian motifs are etched in numerous mosques of the era. The nawabs hired French as teachers, tailors, and merchants while protecting local industries and the economy with a tariff wall in 1773 against the East India Company’s expansions (Trivedi 2010: 13–15). Lucknow’s literati contributed whole genres to Hindustani and Urdu, shaping the development of north Indian literatures (Petievich 1992, Naim & Petievich 1997, Bard 2002, Trivedi 2010). Lucknow’s courtly elite included a well- organised Shi’i class of transnational financiers whose religious donations grew Iraq’s shrine cities into two of the most sociopolitically influential hubs of the Middle East (Cole 1988). 19 Second, though other religiocultural influences were strong (Talwar-Oldenburg 1985: 5, 80–82, 244–246), Lucknow’s past is very much an Islamicate past. As Francis Robinson (1977: 300) wrote, ‘Though the city was part of India, it was also part of a supra-national Islamic world in which men and ideas circulated with great freedom.’ Quoting Abdul Halim Sharar, the 20th-century chronicler of Lucknow’s past (Sharar 2001 [1974]), he added, ‘Persians here showed themselves in their true light. Thus Persian culture, which had been nurtured in the stately and majestic laps of the Sassanid and Abbasid dynasties, permeated the society of Lucknow.’ The ‘ulama of Firangi Mahal in Lucknow taught the Greco-Roman humanistic subjects of grammar, logic, philosophy, and rhetoric (a mainstay of Perso-Arab Islamic education) with a greater emphasis than in madrasas today. Both Sunni and Shi’a clergy studied at Firangi Mahal and went on to advise the nawab court as jurists and counsellors (Robinson 2001). The collection of texts that came to be taught as the madrasa ‘curriculum’ all over Muslim India was standardised by Maulana Nizam al-din Muhammad (d. 1748), the leading scholar of Firangi Mahal (Robinson 2001, cf. Zaman 2003: 65–68). With the leadership of Islamic scholars in Lucknow, Delhi, and Hyderabad, India attained hitherto unknown prominence in the Islamic world, leading Albert Hourani to label the 18th century the ‘Indian Century’ of Islam’s history (Metcalf 1982: 9). 20 Twelver Shi’ism is often represented as a global, transnational religious tradition cantered in Najaf and Karbala, Iraq and Qom, Iran. However, Lucknow’s Shi’i elite came to define a distinctly ‘Indian’ Shi’ism. Patronised by the nawabs, Lucknow Shi’a placed a far greater emphasis on certain ritual formulations than on the Middle Eastern roots of

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their ancestors. The ‘Great’ (bada) Imambarah of Lucknow, built in 1784 to house the Muharram majlis rituals, represented not only the nawabs’ utilisation of Shi’ism as a legitimising ideology (Cole 1988) but also represented a clear departure from similar Iranian religious structures. In global Shi’ism, ‘there were no clear precedents for the Great Imambarah. Thus, it is a highly original concept’ (Keshani 2003: 249). Associated rituals, such as mourning meetings (majlis) and elegies (marsiya), were developed in Lucknow along distinctive lines (Naim 1983, Bard 2002). Moreover, Lucknow’s Shi’i revival of the late 18th century led to Sunni-Shi’a sectarian divides and to a notion of doctrinal groups as entirely separate ‘communities’ with their own public identities (Freitag 1989: 142, Jones 2011: 27–28). ‘The divisive nature of some Shi’i practices, especially cursing the caliphs honoured by Sunnis and forbidding Hindu celebrations during Muharram, encouraged the growth of an incipient communalism’ (Cole 1988: 93). The result was the emergence of a distinctly ‘Hindustani’ Shi’ism that characterised nawabi Lucknow more than did either Indo-Persian or British colonial influence (Jones 2011: 20). 21 Third, Lucknow was the setting for key colonial encounters on the subcontinent, in particular, the 1857 Mutiny (discussed below); in historical portrayals, this Lucknow lives on today in the popular imaginary. In other, less militaristic, colonial encounters, the city’s history writ small has served as a stand-in for Indian developments writ large. Seema Alavi’s (2008) narrative of the encounter between British and Indian Muslim medical traditions based on the Greek texts of Avicenna was based in Lucknow, as was Joshi’s depiction of colonial north India’s middle-class modernities (Joshi 2001). Portrayals of the art and architecture of Lucknow’s past abound as illustrative of the subcontinent’s colonial hybrid aesthetics (Llewellyn-Jones 1985, Markel 2010). Given these strongly looming forces of history, colonial modernity itself only arrived as a ‘fractured modernity’ in Lucknow (Joshi 2001). 22 The contemporary city meanwhile became the political crucible of independent India. Six out of thirteen Prime Ministers of India have hailed from what was formerly Awadh. Lucknow and its surroundings are key constituencies for taking the electoral pulse of the Hindi heartland of north India. Lucknow was home to the rapidly alternating governments of the Samajwadi Party (SP) led by Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) led by Mayawati, India’s first Dalit Chief Minister. Both are icons of the ‘silent revolution’ (Jaffrelot 2003) of lower castes that transformed Indian politics in the 1980s and ‘90s (cf. Omvedt 1994). Mayawati, moreover, has shaped the urban landscape of the city with statues, memorials, and parks in homage to Dalit leaders—an architectural political statement that has reverberated all over India. 23 Chronicles of Lucknow have played a part in shaping genres of English historiography and the discipline of history itself. The Rebellion of 1856–57 and historical accounts of the bloody resistance in Lucknow loomed large in the British imagination, leading historians to theorise the role of popular literature in defining images of colonialism in English society in the wake of increases in mass literacy (Chakravarty 2005). For nationalist Indian historiographers of the 1950s and ‘60s, the particularly ‘nationalist’ or ‘popular’ character of 1857-era Awadh was a heuristic representation of the spirit of the nascent Indian nation (Sen 1977, Chaudhuri 1965, Datta 1967, cf. Majumdar 1957). The Mutiny also figured in Marx and Engels’ (1975) application of historical material dialectics to critique imperialist exploitation. Ranajit Guha’s path-breaking study, which launched the subaltern studies, relied heavily on revising the typical colonial

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depiction of the 1857 Rebellion (Guha 1983, Bhadra 1985). Sandria Freitag’s (1989) book was a landmark in social history; in describing the public culture of Lucknow’s built environment, collective festival activities, religious events, crowds, rites, sacred spaces and times, it added to the historian’s methodological toolkit (cf. Habermas 1991, Haynes 1991, Burke 1997, Hunt 1989). Freitag’s work on Lucknow was also an early sign of a developing productive exchange of analytic concepts, such as concepts related to communities and symbolisms (Freitag 1989: 146, Turner 1969, Geertz 1973) and visual culture (Freitag 2014, Mitchell 2014), between historians and anthropologists.

Urban Expansion and Demographic Makeup

24 The key points in the historical imagination of Lucknow that have been addressed thus have strong spatial connotations. Lucknow’s bifurcation into ‘old’ and ‘new’ cities is suggestive of its urban development as a model colonial city (King 1976; for critiques, see Haynes and Rao 2013; Chandavarkar 2009): across the banks of the Gomti River, New Lucknow faces off with Old Lucknow and life on either side proceeds according to different notions of space, order, and morality. The distinction between the old and new cities remains highly salient for residents. Migrants are said to settle on the city fringes; the old city is seen by many as the pinnacle of tehzib and a place where civility is guarded (as well as the core of Lucknow’s Muslim ethos); and for our interlocutors, crossing of the river is fraught with meaning and ambivalence. To continue our introduction of Lucknow from a different angle, we turn to a series of maps to see how this rich historical imagination relates to physical space. These maps locate key spatial features, areas, and institutions; track urban growth; and disaggregate demography by population density, gender, religion, and sect. They provide a spatial and quantitative background in which the largely qualitative case studies in this special issue can be situated (interactive versions of this and all other maps in this introduction can be found online at http://lucknow.raphael-susewind.de).

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Figure 1: Lucknow City

The population of Shia and Sunni, as well as religious institutions connected with Muharram, are shown Census of India 1961

25 The first map (Figure 1) is taken from an old Census publication (Census 1961); it shows the extent of the city roughly at the time of independence. Back then, the city was still centred west of the Gomti River and delimited to the south by the railway line. The old city had three distinct hubs: Chowk to the west, Aminabad to the south, and Hazratganj to the east (Mukherjee and Singh 1961; Hjortshoj 1979; Wilkinson-Weber 1999). Labyrinthine and narrow lanes (galliyan) connect members of the same ethnic, religious, and family groupings while, often, dividing them from others. The mansions (haveli) of the old city enclose wide expanses of courtyards; inside such houses, as well, men’s areas (mardana) were separated from women’s areas (zanana). Many families retain these gendered patterns. All three neighbourhoods of the old city of Lucknow are characterised by separations and enclosures and, in this regard, invoke for some observers the idealised ‘Islamic city’ (Wilkinson-Weber 1999: 2, Gilsenan 1983), although such street layouts have been found to be common to both Hindu and Muslim neighbourhoods (Abu-Lughod 1987).

26 However, more recent, poorer urban migrants to Lucknow have reshaped life in the Aminabad Bazaar area of the old city and the slum settlements of New Lucknow, living more openly in apartments and open streets (Hjortshoj 1979: 65–66, Wilkinson-Weber 1999: 2, Taylor, this volume, Susewind, this volume). The Aminabad section of the old city (centred around the Aminabad Bazaar but inclusive of surrounding residential clusters from Qaiserbagh in the north to Charbagh in the south) grew in the 20th century with the influx of migrants; it contains the highest proportion of Hindus among the three old city neighbourhoods. Hazratganj is the newest bazaar of the old

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city and remains home to Lucknow’s most expensive retail real estate, whereas the Chowk area is a hub of wholesaling and, as Lucknow’s oldest bazaar, is dotted with the monuments of the nawabs. Further belying outmoded scholarly notions of the ‘Islamic city,’ in today’s Lucknow, women are not simply secluded away but assert their role, as Hong Tschalär (this volume) illustrates. 27 But Lucknow is also a rapidly growing city and its contemporary boundaries hardly resemble those at the time of independence. Since it became capital of the British United Provinces in 1920, the city has grown from 241,000 residents to just over 3 million as of 2011 (the last master plan, from 2001, actually places the figure even higher, at 4.5 million people; Feedback Ventures 2006). 28 The second map (Figure 2) charts this latest phase of urban growth and shows various ways of defining the limits of the contemporary city. The city perimeter of 1961 and contemporary ‘Old Lucknow,’ shaded in the centre, are surrounded by four boundary lines—one indicates historical growth since the 1980s and the rest show the city limits defined administratively, based on residential density (using two indicators), and defined as a political unit. The map also shows the names and locations of some of Lucknow’s more prominent neighbourhoods, including those mentioned in the various articles of this volume.

Figure 2: Urban expansion

29 Lucknow has experienced two major waves of planned growth: in the 1940s and in the 1980s, when Lucknow’s population crossed the 1 million threshold for the first time (Reeves 1997: 216) and the jurisdiction of urban governance bodies was expanded (Feedback Ventures 2006: 6, cf. Majumdar 2004: 277). The neighbourhood of Mahanagar was constructed in the 1960s, Indira Nagar in the 1970s, and since the 1980s, Gomti Nagar has emerged in different stages. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the city

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continued to grow mostly towards the north and east; this is suggested by the difference between the green and red boundaries in Figure 2 and is corroborated by the further analyses of satellite imagery that can be found in Taragi and Pundir (1997). 30 However, sometime around the 2000s, growth changed direction: currently, south Lucknow (Ashiyana and surrounding areas) appears to be the most dynamic part of the city (apart from developments within the old city, which consist of densification rather than urban expansion—see Figure 3 below and Susewind, forthcoming). This major shift in urban growth has likely been triggered by the development of Lucknow as an educational hub: a string of technical training institutes and universities, including Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University and Ram Manohar Lohia National Law University, were established in southern Lucknow around the 2000s. This led not only to an increase in construction activity in this area (reflected in the difference between the red and yellow boundaries) but also to a reinvigoration of scholarship at more traditional institutions in the old city (see Taylor, this volume). 31 Where does the contemporary city begin and end? In a first attempt to delimit the contemporary city, the area under the jurisdiction of the Lucknow Municipal Corporation and the Lucknow Cantonment Board was mapped (as denoted in green in Figure 2). The boundaries of this area, as well as those of the administrative wards that compose it, change frequently, usually between local elections. The green boundary in Figure 2 is based on 1991 Census data; thus, its extent roughly reflects the limits of urban Lucknow from two decades ago, an area of 246 km2. The area under the jurisdiction of the Lucknow Municipal Corporation and the Lucknow Cantonment Board differs from that defined for state and national elections. Between the 1970s and 2008, when a major delimitation occurred, Lucknow as a parliamentary constituency was divided into five assembly segments: Lucknow East, Lucknow West, Lucknow Central, Lucknow Cantonment, and predominantly rural Mahona. After delimitation, Mahona—now called Bakshi ka Talaab—was incorporated into the rural parliamentary constituency Mohanlalganj and boundary lines within urban Lucknow were redrawn to accommodate a new assembly segment, Lucknow North. The outer limits of these latter boundaries are drawn in grey in Figure 2; they cover an area of 225 km2. 32 Urban growth has come to extend beyond Lucknow’s administrative and political boundaries. That Lucknow is a densely populated area is reflected in boundaries derived from poly-spectral satellite images (in particular from NASA’s MODIS instrument; see Friedl et al. 2003) and drawn in red in Figure 2. These data were obtained by measuring the density and character of built infrastructure vis-a-vis other kinds of land cover; based on these data, the core urban residential area could be distinguished from surrounding areas. In Lucknow, this core area amounted to 333 km2 in 2002–2003. However, these boundaries are out of date by almost a decade and more recent maps are not yet available. As a shortcut to gauge the extent of contemporary urban Lucknow, we settled on drawing a yellow boundary around areas in which polling stations featuring multiple (rather than single) polling booths predominated during the 2012 assembly elections. Larger polling stations are usually—though not exclusively—found in urban and semi-urban areas; based on the areas where they are located, densely populated areas were roughly approximated. (This method yielded boundaries that were quite similar to those derived from satellite images.) Moreover, the list of polling stations as well as the number of booths provided in each station are adjusted by the Election Commission just before each election to reflect changed

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realities on the ground, making this the most current source of data used. This last boundary is drawn in yellow in Figure 2 and covers an area of 332 km2.

Figure 3: Population density and gender distribution

33 A third map (Figure 3) combines population density by ward with gender ratios (drawn from the 2001 Census). Overall, just above 48% of Lucknow’s inhabitants were women according to the 2011 Census (up 1% compared with 2001)—a slightly more equal sex ratio than the provincial average. The map shows, first, how the older parts of Lucknow —Chowk and Aminabad—are much more densely populated than are the newer parts, as would be expected (Majumdar 2004: 29). Secondly, it reveals that men are concentrated in two areas: heavily in Lucknow Cantonment towards the southeast (a military area) and less heavily in the outskirts, where migrant labourers (unmarried or separated from their wives) tend to settle. In the outskirts, one area is an exception to this concentration of men: a cluster of wards towards the south-eastern outskirts where Lucknow’s new education hub is located, which attracts migration that is more gender-balanced (Feedback Ventures 2006: 7). In addition to urban growth, population density, and the gender balance, religious demographics are of particular interest to the papers in this volume. Unfortunately, the official data on religion remain notoriously inaccessible at the local level. Census data, for instance, is only disaggregated to the Tehsil level; since all of urban Lucknow falls within one Tehsil, this is of little use. Yet recent advances in big data analytics combined with e-governance initiatives make it possible to develop alternatives, since they enable lists of names, such as electoral rolls at the booth level, property records at the street level, and BPL lists at the ward level, to be used as novel data sources: like anywhere else, Indian names allow educated guesses regarding the religion of the person who bears the name.

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34 A fourth map (Figure 4) visualises the spatial distribution of Muslims across Lucknow on the basis of names on the electoral rolls of Uttar Pradesh; a linguistic computer algorithm that accomplishes such guesses with very high aggregate accuracy was used (Susewind, in press, 2013). The electoral rolls are a natural choice for approximating populations at large: extensive in coverage, published at a low spatial resolution, updated on a yearly basis, and closely watched by competing political parties, they are arguably the most accurate data source available. While they exclude children and those who have opted not to register to vote, there is little reason to believe that the data differ between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Figure 4: Muslim electors, Hajj pilgrims, and institutions

35 The map demonstrates that most Muslims still tend to live in the old city rather than across the river in New Lucknow. Exceptions from this general pattern are the Daliganj area (often considered part of the old city), two polling stations just east of the Nadwa Seminary (see Taylor, this volume), and fairly isolated blips scattered across Indira Nagar and Gomti Nagar (some of which are former Muslim villages now surrounded by new colonies, such as Ujariyaon, a village famous for its syncretic culture and home to the Barelvi-inspired Warzia Madaris). The map also suggests that residential neighbourhoods are more segregated in New Lucknow than in the old city, corroborating the key imaginary of the old city as a ‘composite culture’: the map shows that similar numbers of Muslims live in Muslim-minority, mixed, and Muslim-majority neighbourhoods in the old city, whereas Muslims across the river in New Lucknow are much more likely to live in Muslim-minority areas. 36 Beyond approximated population shares, deliberately included in the map are two other indicators of Muslim life: the tentative distribution of Hajj pilgrims (drawn from the 2012 qurrah), an indicator of religious practice by and large coextensive with the

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Muslim population at large, and the locations of major Islamic institutions. Most of these are found in the Chowk, including all of the major Shi’a institutions: the Jama Masjid and Bara Imambara, signs of former Nawabi authority; Imambara Ghufran Maab, the seat of Lucknow’s most powerful Shi’a clerical dynasty, headed by Maulanas Kalbe Jawwad and Kalbe Sadiq (Jones 2012); and Dargah Hazrat Abbas, the seat of their main competitor, Maulana Yasoob Abbas. In terms of Sunni institutions, the Nadwa Seminary just across the river clearly dominates the scene (Malik 1997; Taylor, this volume), seconded by the old and now defunct Firangi Mahal in Chowk (Robinson 2001) as well as the ‘new’ Firangi Mahal, headed by Maulana Khalid Rashid and located at the main Eidgah towards Talkatora (the large open area were Eid prayers are held, which was customarily located outside erstwhile city boundaries). Finally, there is a Barelvi centre frequented by both Sunni and Shi’a in the old village of Ujariyaon, a place marginalised not only in spatial terms. 37 This multi-perspectival representation is meant to preserve the notion of community multidimensionality and urban heterogeneity: does one’s being Muslim inhere in one’s name (and, by extension, lineage)? Or does it depend on the observance of key Islamic commandments (such as giving alms or taking the pilgrimage to Mecca)? Alternatively, is Muslimness nested within certain Islamic institutions, madrasas, and the clergy in particular? 38 Given that Shi’a-Sunni relations are of particular interest in Lucknow, and given that sectarian data are scarcer than are communal data, it is tempting to apply a similar methodology to identify Shi’a and Sunni names and map their approximate share of the population. However, since names in these groups are not empirically distinct, this would result in far less accurate estimates.

Figure 5: Shia electors and Muharram processions

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39 With a number of caveats, a final map (Figure 5) identifies Shi’a strongholds with sufficient reliability, although the map does not reflect how strong these strongholds are. Two major areas of Shi’a concentration are noticeable: Hussainabad (the former royal quarters) and Kashmiri Mohalla (frequently described as a ‘Shi’a ghetto’ by Lucknowites; Verniers 2012; Yadav 2012). Overall, Lucknow’s Shi’a account for a quarter to a third of the city’s Muslim population today, consistent with estimates reported by Verniers (2012) and Graff et al. (1997), but significantly higher than the 10% reported in the last sectarian Census in 1901 (Hasan 1997: 127) and the limited number of Shi’a households indicated in the first map (Figure 1). The Shi’a-Sunni map is inclusive of more than one way of mapping the sectarian landscape of Lucknow. An important part of Shi’a ritual life is the commemoration of the Karbala tragedy, which, in spatial terms, is observed in highly significant ways (Nejad 2013). Lucknow’s Shi’a take great pride in extending their Azadari activities for two months and eight days; they undertake processions, or juloos, across the city (in particular between the first of Muharram and Ashura). Due to violent sectarian clashes throughout the last century, these processions were banned for two decades; now, only nine specific processions are allowed by the district administration. 40 The spatial layout of contemporary Muharram routes depicted in Figure 5 bears testimony to this sustained sectarian tension: many smaller processions in mixed neighbourhoods remain banned or are limited to semi-public spaces; the ones allowed are restricted to areas easy to police. The Shahi and Mehndi Juloos at the beginning of Muharram run from Bara to Chota Imambara in Chowk and the Juloos on Eighth Muharram proceeds from Dariya Wali Masjid to Imambara Ghufran Maab. Neither substantially pass through residential areas. Most of the other processions, however, either follow Victoria Street, a wide main road usually cordoned off by riot police, or pass through Shi’a dominated areas (with the partial exception of southern Nakhas). Interestingly, two of the juloos permitted by the district magistrate take place outside of Muharram—during Ramadan—and have, theologically speaking, much less of a sectarian nature (as they commemorate the attack on Imam Ali much prior to the sectarian split). However, they are counted as Shi’a events, are undertaken by Shi’as, and run through predominantly Shi’a areas.

Overview of This Special Issue

41 Against the backdrop of the themes and discourses mentioned in this introduction and the spatial layout just outlined, this special issue aims to bring disciplinary diversity to an object overwhelmingly represented in historical accounts and seeks to add fresh empirical and theoretical insights from Lucknow to recent debates on South Asian cities—debates in which the city of nawabs seems so conspicuously absent. The first section of papers directly addresses the appropriations and popular revisions of Lucknow’s history. Both Jones and Lee revisit and question ‘cosmopolitan,’ elite culture of the city made famous in history and literature. Justin Jones illustrates how colonial- era representations of Lucknow constructed imaginaries of the city’s past, inverting the conventional Habermasian model of the public sphere as replete with the symbols of modernity and reform. Lucknow’s old ‘fashions’—particularly the traditions of tehzib— are better understood as politically motivated symbols of the remembered city intended to model contemporary Indian cosmopolitanism. Joel Lee continues the re-

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examination of Lucknow’s purported cosmopolitanism with rich ethnography of Dalits from the Balmiki, Lal Begi, Dhanuk, and Jallad groups. Despite the increasing communalism of the 20th century, which has been said to have fractured Indian society along religious lines, Lee’s account of the city’s sanitation workers reveals that Hindu and Muslim rituals and identities have become blurred and that concomitant bureaucratic struggles (such as that of Jagdish, son of Ahmad) have taken place.

42 The contributions of Susewind and Hong Tschalär turn to contemporary developments and explore the politics of intra-Muslim diversity in the context of examples of class, gender, and Shi’a-Sunni relations. By breaking with the idea of a uniform Muslim ‘community’ in the present, they implicitly also question its existence in the past. Susewind takes us to the neighbourhood of Wazirganj, the site of a highly publicised murder and Shi’a-Sunni skirmishes that lacerated the city’s societal fabric. He complicates the conventional sociological explanations of interreligious violence, instead emplacing it as the product of vernacularised democracy, transformed local economies, and ideologies of upward social mobility propounded by Shi’i Muslim preachers. Mengia Hong Tschalär in turn presents the city’s Muslim women’s rights activists as they challenge patriarchal ideas within their communities and carve out space for themselves in the public sphere. The new visibility of Muslim women activists is starkly noticeable in their gatherings in parks, a newly built women’s mosque, bodily intrusions into men-only congregational prayer, and legal assertions. Christopher Taylor’s contribution illustrates how Lucknow’s Muslim ‘ulama keeps the city’s traditions of Islamic learning alive through fundraising from its urban and transnational donor base. Describing madrasa students’ career aspirations, Taylor analyses their perceptions of Islamic learning. For these students, Islamic learning is not an outdated mode of education but, rather imparts cultural capital and skills translatable to India’s modern urban economy: the past and the present combined. In a postscript, Sandria Freitag, a historian among anthropologists (cf. Cohn 1987), reflects on the value of interdisciplinarity and reviews how the studies on Lucknow assembled here contribute to the growing scholarly corpus on the cultural history of Indian cities.

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Wilkinson-Weber, Claire (1999) Embroidering Lives: Women’s Work and Skill in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry, Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Yadav, Sarvendra (2012) Social Mobility among the Shias: An Intergenerational Study of Muslims of Lucknow, Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert.

Zaman, Muhammad Qasim (2003) The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

ABSTRACTS

Lucknow, a city once dominated by Shi’a nawab rulers, is now known for elites’ nostalgia for Islamicate pasts and masses seeking better futures. This special issue builds interdisciplinary dialogue about a city overwhelmingly represented in historical accounts and emplaces Lucknow within recent investigation of urban India in which the city of nawabs is largely absent. Focusing on the old city of Lucknow where Muslims still demographically predominate, our introduction blends ethnographic exploration of cultural memory with new statistical data on the old city’s changing population, socioeconomic ‘backwardness,’ and segregation. We frame Lucknow’s Islamicate old city in contemporary times as a place where north India’s beleaguered Muslim minority negotiates between their remembered cosmopolitan past and a present burdened by structural violence and communal riots—blending (rather than choosing between) modernity and tradition, cosmopolitanism and provinciality, melancholia and aspirations, history and future.

INDEX

Keywords: urban studies, Indian Muslims, Lucknow, demography, historiography, history

AUTHORS

RAPHAEL SUSEWIND

Associate of the Contemporary South Asia Studies Program, University of Oxford

CHRISTOPHER B. TAYLOR

Visiting Researcher, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University

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Urban Mythologies and Urbane Islam: Refining the Past and Present in Colonial-Era Lucknow

Justin Jones

Writing the Lucknowi tehzib: urban myths and urban history

1 If any single work has served to cement the impressions of cultural sophistication associated with Lucknow, it is Hindūstān mēn Mashriqī Tamaddun kā Akhirī Namūna ya‘ni Guzushta Luckna’u, (‘Lucknow: the Last Phase of an Oriental Culture’), by the Lucknowi novelist and essayist ‘Abdul Halim Sharar (1860-1920).1 In introductory remarks imbued with heavy affection, Sharar evoked the court of Awadh, and the urban capital of its heyday from 1775 until 1856, as ‘the last example of eastern refinement and culture (mashriqī tehzīb-va-tamaddun) in India.’ He continues: We still have memories and present examples of several other courts, but the court in which the old culture and lifestyle reached its culmination was this court, which reached such heights and then, suddenly and sadly, vanished so fast… the place in which this court was established had a greater distinction and importance than any in India. (Sharar 2000 [1914-1920]: 41) 2 The text then describes many of the city’s lavish cultures and fashions, ruminating upon the particulars of its costumes, calligraphy, gastronomy, cock-fighting, kite- flying, poetry recitation and etiquette, among many others. Sharar depicts a unique and sophisticated Islamicate2 civic culture which, as well as being a pinnacle of Indo- Muslim cultural achievement, was also one of successful integration, amalgamating artistic contributions from across South and West Asia, and facilitating engagement from both Muslim and Hindu populations.

3 Accessible, informative and translated into several languages, Sharar’s portrait has heavily influenced modern perceptions of Nawabi Lucknow; yet, this work was hardly a first-hand account. First published in 1914-1920 as a series of articles in the Urdu

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periodical Dil-Gudaz, this was a retrospective evocation of the city’s history, penned by an author who had not lived during the era described, and reconstructed from oral testimonies and the recovery of local mythologies. Sharar’s essays on his city, then, need to be taken not as historical fact, but as projections of history influenced by his contemporary concerns and the background against which he wrote. In particular, his writings offer a key example of the nostalgia felt by many of north India’s Muslim nobility for past glories. Studies of the remembrance of history by Muslim intellectuals in colonial India have often emphasised their sense of loss, crisis and humiliation at the recent ebb of Muslim power in the subcontinent (e.g. Hasan 2007a, Zaidi 2009); however, this lament at Muslim decline was in practice often tempered in Urdu literatures of the period with an active and slightly contradictory romanticisation of bygone achievements. Like Syed Ahmad Khan’s evocations of old Delhi, Altaf Husain Hali’s elegy for Abbasid Baghdad or Muhammad Iqbal’s verse on Cordoba (Khan 1861, Hali 1998 [1879], Iqbal 1993 [1932]), Sharar’s account of this Muslim city revealed a longing for its historic splendour and luxuries, even as he simultaneously scorned its decadence. 4 Sharar’s glamorous, quixotic evocation of Nawabi Lucknow was hardly the only one to be penned during this period. Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s tale of the courtesan Umrā’ō Jān Ādā (Ruswa 1993 [1899]) and Munshi Premchand’s legendary Hindi short story Shātranj kē Khīlārī (‘The Chess Players’: Premchand 2007 [1924]) are just two fictional accounts dating from roughly the same moment around the early 20th century that shared Sharar’s alternation between affection for and scathing criticism of his urban setting. Indeed, Premchand’s depiction of the city in the final years of the Nawab’s reign was especially evocative, as well as proving that this perception of the city was confined neither to Muslim authors nor to Lucknowi residents: All Lucknow was steeped in the pursuit of luxury… while some favoured soirees with music and dancing girls, others dedicated themselves to intoxication, to opium. In every department of existence, entertainment and pleasure reigned supreme. Whether in the administration, or in the field of literature, in the arts as in commerce, in everyday living itself, indulgence had become the norm. Employees of the state dedicated themselves to the pleasures of the flesh, poets sang of love and of the pangs of separation, craftsmen turned out fine embroidered fabrics, tradesmen provided cosmetic refinements, perfumes and rare unguents. (Premchand 2007 [1924]: 53) 5 While Sharar, Ruswa and Premchand’s works remain perhaps the most iconic, they were hardly the only such portraits of old Lucknow to be published within this same quarter-century. Many other tracts emerged thanks to the city’s status as home to major publishing houses like Nawal Kishore Press (Stark 2007), as well as an emerging public sphere that voraciously consumed ephemeral and serialised publications (Perkins 2013). Among these, Najmul-Ghani Rampuri’s encyclopaedic chronicle Tārīkh-i- Awadh was an empirically rich account of the intrigues and dynastical conspiracies within the Awadhi court, reflecting new tastes for authoritative historiography in Urdu literature (Rampuri 1919). Other texts catalogued the so-called fashions (wa‘zdaran) of the Nawabi city’s courtly elite, from dress to dining, in a style that smacked of colonial ethnographies as much as Sharar’s historical reflections (Lucknowi 1912). Yet others, influenced by the Urdu genre of advice literature that marked the period, sought to instruct readers on embodying their city’s cultural ethos in their daily lives. One such volume, describing itself as a ‘goldmine of refinement (ma‘adin-i-tehzib) for young Hindustani gentlemen’, outlined the etiquette supposedly characteristic of Lucknow,

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including personal qualities like honesty and integrity (rast-guftari, diyanat), the strictures of household conduct (tadbir-i-manzil) and the proper protocols for entertaining, corresponding and conversing (Husain 1900).

6 Of course, much academic work has often made this utopian ethos ascribed to old Lucknow hard to fully accept. Historians of pre-colonial Awadh have confirmed the existence of deep courtly clientelism within state structures and recurrent social instability in the city’s rural hinterlands (Fisher 1997, Alam 1997), combined with a series of religious conflicts over temples, mosques and Muharram processions triangulated among Shi‘is, Sunnis and Hindus alike (Cole 1988: 223-50, Cole 2002: 161-72). Such might well lead us to conclude that Nawabi Lucknow’s lauded ‘last phase’ was in fact one wrought with turbulence and stagnation: indeed, the East India Company annexed it on this pretext. This being the case, it seems fair to argue that the image of a luxuriant, harmonious Lucknow was less a historical reality of the early 19th century, and more a product of a retrospective mythologisation of the city in the early 20th. Moreover, far from being limited to these decades, this romanticised vision of Lucknow has been carried forward even to contemporary times. Urdu and English histories reflective of this wistful character have continued to be penned by the city’s resident writers for local consumption (e.g. Husain 1981, Kidwai 1993), while a comparable branding exists beyond the city, whether carried via literature, film, costume or cuisine. Even academia has often taken on this tone: recent scholarship in English has continued to frame Lucknow in terms of the survivals of its past (Graff 1997), to evoke it as a ‘city of dreams’ bound to memories of fallen grandeur (Llewellyn-Jones 1997), and to extol the celebrated sham-i-Awadh along the lines of a later-generation Arabian nights (Oldenburg 2007). 7 While this volume’s essays all address the various bearings of history upon contemporary Lucknow, this article seeks to trace this practice of invoking the city’s past to an earlier period. It suggests that it was, in fact, in the colonial era, and particularly the early decades of the 20th century, that this distinctive historical mythology of old Lucknow was constructed. While many terms were used to evoke the distinctive cultural life of Lucknow in colonial-era writing (saqafat, adab, wa‘zdaran, etc.), no term perhaps encapsulates the period’s rebranding of the city’s past more than that of tehzib. This ‘semantically rich’ (Stark 2011: 5) term, often translated as ‘refinement’, in fact blended together ideas of urbanity, civility, morality, erudition and sophistication. While the term had been used earlier to describe specific cultural accomplishments within the city,3 its holistic application to describe the totality of Lucknow’s historical culture is something that was consolidated long after the fall of the city to the British rather than beforehand. As C. M. Naim has argued: It was some time in the second half of the 19th century that the many diverse matters that earlier used to be considered separately under such rubrics as adab (‘protocols’), akhlaq (‘moral codes’), a’in (‘administrative rules or constitution’), rusum (‘customs’), riwaj (‘local practices’), riwayat (‘traditions’), funun (‘arts and crafts’) and so forth, began to be subsumed within one overarching word, tahzib, whose main function… was to imply and then underscore a link between all of them and a single, and almost autochthonous, past. (Naim 2011: 196) 8 This retrospective articulation of a distinctive Lucknowi tehzib, then, remains key to understanding the mythologisation of the city’s history. Seeking to offer a survey of a large body of recent academic historiography on the city, and also engaging a range of predominantly Muslim-authored Urdu publications from the city dating from the

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period in question, this article explores how this imagined version of Lucknow’s historical tehzib was produced, disseminated and applied by a number of authors, public figures and organisations in the colonial city. It seeks to show not simply that this refined vision of the city’s history was largely a construct of the colonial period, but that this vision was also used as a model for refining various aspects of the city’s contemporary public and political life. Significantly, this article’s approach of tracing the historical mythology that matured around the city, and charting these myths in terms of the functions that they played for those who transmitted them, differs from many urban histories that have been written for colonial South Asia. As Prashant Kidambi has perceptively noted, studies of associational and political life in colonial India have tended to focus upon the city chiefly as a site of ‘practice’, namely, a place whose capacities for networking and communication allowed new social and political organisations to arise, and enabled self-styled public men to exact influence over civic populations. More rarely, he argues, have such studies considered the city as an object of ‘thought’ or imagination itself (Kidambi 2012: 963). This article’s approach, arguing that Lucknow acquired a distinctive urban mythology that could be applied to many contemporary ends, draws closer to the approach of some recent anthropologists who have suggested that cities might be considered to hold their own so-called ‘urban charisma’. As these scholars argue, cities might be considered to possess their own certain distinctive ‘‘soul’ or mythology’ that lives through both their physical spaces and their residents, and that links their past and present (Blom-Hansen & Verkaaik 2009: 5-9). Some recent studies of South Asian cities, particularly some recent works on Mumbai, have explored the idea of their modern mythologisation, showing how ruminations upon a city’s glorious past can inspire nostalgia in their residents, or act as idealised imaginaries against more recent traumas (Prakash 2010, Chandavarkar 2009: 121-90). Perhaps, though, few South Asian cities have been so heavily mythologised as Lucknow, a city whose modern stagnation often seems to have further entrenched the myths of its reified past.

9 Expanding beyond the written portraits of tehzib described above, the article’s next section turns to colonial Lucknow’s public sphere, exploring the city as a space for the performative recollection of tehzib, and examining why Lucknow’s past was so recurrently evoked in the colonial city’s associational life. The remainder of this article then assesses how this mythologised Lucknowi tehzib was, in the early 20th century, appropriated and instrumentally harnessed, as a means of addressing contemporary social and political demands. Hence, the article’s third section turns to political life in the city, specifically the projection of Lucknow’s tehzib into nationalist politics, while the article’s final pages address how tehzib was harnessed by many Muslim voices as a basis for fashioning a distinctive Muslim cosmopolitanism in South Asia.

Performing tehzib: old Lucknow in new publics

10 Recent decades have seen an abundance of academic interest in the interlocked entities of the relatively elite ‘associational culture’, and the broader and more Habermasian ‘public sphere’ of civil participation, as they emerged in colonial India’s urban centres. This associational life, comprised of an array of new public groups and societies, socialised an English-educated elite in the liberal ideals of volunteer activism, philanthropy and social and educational progress, and ultimately paved the way for the

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development of political and nationalist activity among Indian elites by the late 19th century (e.g. Haynes 1991, Watt 2005). Much historiography has argued that, positioning themselves as representatives of the Indian population before the state, these organisations were compelled to adopt elements of the language, organisation and procedure of the colonial administration with which they aspired to engage. Their appropriation of an Anglicised vocabulary of aspirations such as ‘improvement’, ‘progress’ and ‘public good’ comprised, as memorably put by Douglas Haynes, a ‘conceptual straitjacket’ by which these organisations further embedded colonial hegemony in India’s associational life (Haynes 1991: 145-6, Chatterjee 1986: 1-17). While this framework has been heavily applied in studies of colonial India’s urban public sphere, it has been both implicitly and explicitly critiqued by a number of excellent recent studies of colonial Lucknow (Joshi 2001, Stark 2011, Perkins 2013). Many of these have shown that the array of public associations that emerged in Lucknow did not, like some larger ‘All India’ organisations, simply appear to emulate colonial deliberative models, but instead often seemed to ground themselves in motifs and symbols drawn from the city’s mythologised history. As such, these organisations became major participants in the reproduction of a certain perception of Lucknow’s past, while turning Lucknow’s public sphere into a space for the performative recollection of the city’s tehzib.

11 Before endeavouring to explain why the city’s associational life was often so wilfully evocative of the city’s history, it is worth providing a roadmap of the labyrinthine array of literary and reform societies, debating clubs and public service organisations which emerged in the colonial-era city. The earliest significant organisation of this kind was the Anjuman-i-Hind-i-Awadh, a landlord-based group set up in 1861 to petition the government on the loyal ta‘luqdari (landholding) interest, which ultimately set a prototype for the emergence of a wider inventory of middle-class and professional associations. The Jalsa-i-Tehzib, founded in 1868 by a number of Hindu and Muslim government officials and journalists, was more deeply rooted among the city’s urban literati; it sought to provide a new forum for discussing issues of public significance (Stark 2011). By the 1890s, the more openly political Rifah-i-‘Am was active in pressing a particular vision of the ‘common good’ as was embedded in its own title, making representations before the colonial bureaucracy on this basis. Many other associations existed to represent limited groups bonded by kinship, profession or common interest. Examples included the Anjuman-i-Khandan-i-Shahi, an organisation of the former royal family founded after the death of Wajid ‘Ali Shah in 1887. Some groups represented particular professional elites, such as the Anjuman-i-Wuqala (Society of Lawyers) founded in the 1870s (Stark 2011: 11), indicating the importance of public organisations in fashioning new middle-class identities bonded by shared aspirations to public participation (Joshi 2001: 1-10, 23-48). Other organisations were more communitarian in focus, among them the All India Shi‘a Conference, created amongst one of the city’s most influential minority communities in 1907 (Jones 2012: 114-25), and the Indian Kayasthas Association, a caste sabha representing a community with long local history as officials and pensmen of the Nawabi court and British Raj (Bellenoit 2014). 12 Additionally, a number of predominantly Muslim literary and cultural societies were established in Lucknow from the 1890s onwards to safeguard the city’s perceived cultural distinctions; among these were the Da’ira-i-Adabiya, founded by the famed

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marsiya poet ‘Ali Naqi Safi for the discussion of Lucknowi poetry and literatures, and the Anjuman-i-Me‘yar-i-Adab, which organised musha’iras (poetry galas) resonant of the old city’s cultural life (Husain 1981: 262-7). Similar efforts were made by the city’s influential bodies of ‘ulama (Islamic scholars), who sought to preserve the city’s parallel stature as a centre of Islamic learning. In 1910, a number of the city’s Shi‘i ‘ulama established the Anjuman-i-Yadgar-i-‘Ulama, an organisation dedicated even by name to the memorialisation of earlier generations of scholars via the commissioning of biographies and republication of their works (Hindi 2010 [1918]: 15-9). Several organisations also sprung up pledging the reparation or beautification of the city’s Nawabi architecture, including the Anjuman Mushir-i-Iman, established in 1912 to restore the city’s antiquated mosques and imambaras (Jones 2012: 76). Such organisations contributed as much as any printed works to perpetuating public awareness of Lucknow’s past and venerating its distinctions. 13 In many ways Lucknow’s associations did reflect broader trends identified in studies of colonial India’s urban public sphere: most leading members of these organisations, many of whom were old nobility, landed gentry, lawyers or government officials, were tied to the colonial bureaucracy by careers or interest, and used these new forums to seek public and political influence. Yet, if we examine Lucknow’s organisations not as state-facing entities but in terms of the languages they applied and the performances they enacted, we see a very different relationship with the city, construed around an invocation of Nawabi Lucknow’s fashions and manners. For instance, one frequent reference made by these organisations to the city’s past was an often striking preservation of an Indo-Muslim linguistic idiom. It has long been suggested that many organisations seeking public influence in colonial India adopted an Anglicised vocabulary (Conference, Society, Resolution, Statutes, Presidents, etc.) and procedural style. In reality, however, comparatively few of these Lucknowi organisations took on such Anglicised terminologies. The Jalsa-i-Tehzib, for instance, in contrast to many Muslim-led socio-cultural organisations of the same generation, such as Syed Ahmad Khan’s Scientific Society or Ameer Ali’s Central Muhammadan Association, avoided such linguistic acculturation. Instead, grounding itself even by name in tehzib, it could be seen as maintaining foundations in the city’s history and a linguistic and cultural distance from the colonial public societies upon which, in other ways, it was apparently modelled. Likewise the Rifah-i-‘Am, whose name could be read simply as a vernacular translation of the liberal notion of ‘public good’ (Haynes 1991: 145), could alternatively be interpreted as evoking India’s Islamicate past: it is noteworthy that the same phrase was being used in Urdu historical writings of the same period to describe the progress bestowed upon India by Muslim rulers,4 while the concept also invoked Islamic legal concepts of common benefit and social concern (maslaha), that were circulating in transnational scholarly debates of the era (Opwis 2005: 182-4, 197-201). 14 As well as their designations, much of the imagery and ritual protocol adopted by these organisations looked not to European cultures of public volunteerism, but to old Lucknow. As we can see from proceedings (ru’idad) compiled by these organisations, their flamboyant, Perso-Urdu rhetoric and performative style remained heavily reminiscent of old Lucknow. The Jalsa-i-Tehzib, for instance, conducted ‘rigid ceremonial’ audiences with ‘elaborate etiquette’, all later documented in writing within a ‘highly formulaic Persianate idiom’ (Stark 2011: 9): records note the taking out of numerous antique formalities (adab-va-taslimat) and the making of offerings (nazr) to the session chair (Stark 2011: 9). Likewise, the Rifah-i-‘Am and Shi‘a Conference took on

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imagery dimly reminiscent of the Nawabi court: their sessions were described as darbar, with the presidential chair as a throne (takht); they paid great attention to the Persianate terms of rank and nobility held by their speakers; and they addressed their delegates with such exalted and lofty titles as Nawab, Janoob, buzurg and huzoor (Jones 2012: 125). Even the entirety of Lucknow’s public sphere itself could be construed in Nawabi imagery: Sharar himself sometimes construed the city’s ‘public’ as a darbar: an acknowledgement of the importance of public opinion, but equally an allusion to the city’s courtly past (Perkins 2011: 13). 15 As such, the mythologies of old Lucknow were frequently invoked in the language, procedure and performance of the colonial city’s associational life. Moreover, while some associations recalled Lucknow’s tehzib more explicitly than others, the consistency of its evocation is striking. Many traditional methodologies applied to urban history in South Asia, particularly the ‘Cambridge school’ approach of various studies of the 1970s-80s, tended to conceive urban society as factional and prone to organising along lines of class, community and ‘interest groups’ (Bayly 1975: 271-83); quite in contrast, the evocation of old Lucknow seemed to be a perhaps surprisingly collective phenomenon across the city’s associational life. While some studies have identified the Lucknowi public sphere with an emerging middle-class, and therefore argued that it carried an ‘anti-aristocratic edge’ that aspired to ‘marginalise the older elites of the city’ (Joshi 2001: 23-48), it is important to recognise how extensively even middle-class associations made symbolic nods towards the Lucknowi tehzib, perhaps seeking to draw from historical as well as colonial models of urban respectability. 16 It is perhaps in this sense that colonial Lucknow’s public sphere can only be seen as making a partial, ‘fractured’ or ‘hybridised’ transition towards a colonial modernity (Joshi 2001). While the city’s public associations did address the government bureaucracy on the basis of liberal appeals, a focus on the linguistic and performative elements of Lucknow’s civic life shows a contrary effort to invoke remnants from the city’s pre-colonial past. This apparent ambivalence, between discussing contemporary questions on the one hand and evoking old tehzib on the other, meant that the city’s public figures found themselves sometimes attempting to communicate through multiple meters simultaneously. One might take, for instance, the example of the Awadhi ta‘luqdar, Yusuf Husain Khan. In the 1910s, he was a well-known contributor to the English-language press, writing on liberal causes such as constitutional reform, Muslim-Hindu unity and progressive Muslim education (Robinson 1974: 378). However, he simultaneously kick-started a debate with a newspaper article simply entitled ‘Awadh’, in which he called for an agitation for an independent ‘small state [to] be formed in the vicinity of Lucknow’ and returned to the former royal family.5 The article, unsurprisingly, sparked heavy debate across the vernacular press about the possibility, or indeed wisdom, of reinstating Lucknow as rehabilitated Nawabi capital.6 But it also encapsulates the frequent thinness of the boundaries between formal political discussion and fantastical political thought that fetishised past glories. 17 Several reasons might be posited for the retention of symbolism drawn from old Lucknow in the modern public sphere. One, of course, is that much of the public sphere remained the preserve of established elites, for whom the constant invocation of established imagery of social authority and procedures associated with nobility contained clear personal advantages. Alternatively, we may speculate that this ongoing performance of history could provide sanctuary from a present that may, in various

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ways, have been deemed hostile. The realities of colonialism in the city, which had seen the infliction of harsh reprisals by the Raj on post-Rebellion Lucknow (Oldenburg 1984), followed by a half-century of population decline and economic stagnancy (Thomas 1982), may have compelled a turn to perceptions of past wealth and luxury. Alongside these tribulations, it could also be that ruminations on old Lucknow’s decadent pleasures and leisurely living offered light relief from a fraught contemporary context of socio-religious reform, in which various Hindu and Muslim organisations alike placed a new emphasis upon austere behaviour and so interpreted such activities as obscenities (Gupta 2005). Either way, if the preservation of ‘old’ lifestyles by the city’s old elites, whether landowners, courtly pensioners or courtesans, could comprise one form of ‘resistance’ (Oldenburg 1997), then perhaps the ongoing public ritualisation of old Awadh could similarly be used as a means of defying these contemporary misfortunes. 18 Markus Daechsel has spoken of colonial India’s urban public sphere as combining two different lives: the ‘politics of negotiation’, by which Indians participated in formal socio-political and constitutional discussions, and the ‘politics of self-expression’, an articulation of imaginative and often anarchistic ideals that often conjured highly divergent visions for India’s future (Daechsel 2005: 18-9). This framework might be applied to colonial Lucknow’s often multi-vocal public sphere. With the city’s associations engaging the colonial bureaucracy in word while simultaneously invoking the city’s past in performance, and with authors like Yusuf Husain Khan reflecting on contemporary constitutional minutiae while also fantasising about the re-imposition of Awadhi monarchs, it perhaps makes sense to think of the city’s public sphere as a place of both discussion and imagination. The city did not, as some established frameworks might have it, merely host the public sphere, but also became its subject. Through an ongoing performance of Lucknow’s tehzib, the urban public sphere could articulate and sustain the city’s charisma, and in the process, could defy colonial modernity at the same time as engaging it.

Politicising tehzib: urban mythologies in nationalist politics

19 As noted earlier, one major feature of Lucknow’s mythologised tehzib was its perceived ability to cultivate harmony between the city’s religious communities. While in reality communal conflagrations occurred both pre-1857 and particularly in the colonial period, the imaginary of an urban peace built upon an ethic of collective geniality among city residents became part of the mythology of old Lucknow’s refinement, and distinguished it from the social turbulence characteristic of other towns. Again, Sharar’s account of Lucknow’s history is one example of this, emphasising the integration of Shi‘is, Sunnis and Hindus alike into Awadh’s court and culture. He documented at various points the good relations between Shi‘is and Sunnis, quoting King Wajid ‘Ali Shah as saying ‘of my two eyes, one is Shia and one is Sunni’; he also made frequent nods to Hindu-Muslim cultural exchange, for instance in his noting of the same king’s composition of rahas (Hindu operas) and his theatrical performances of the role of Krishna in these events (Sharar 1975 [1920]: 74-5, 84-5).

20 With the so-called ‘Hindu-Muslim question’ becoming a dominant issue in early 20th century north India’s politics, Indian public figures were forced to adopt one of several

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strategies to address it. Some, echoing colonial rhetoric and principles, adopted notions of balances and safeguards (whether legal, educational or political) to protect the needs of different religious communities, while others called upon an ideal of ‘Indianness’ that overrode religious particulars. Another, less-noted approach was to look to local histories of inter-communal harmony as providing a prototype for Hindu-Muslim cooperation on a contemporary national canvas. At important junctures in the colonial period, it seems that Lucknow’s mythologised tehzib thus assumed more explicitly political applications, with the city’s harmonious past being referenced as a model for fostering collective concord and remedying communal controversies. Indeed, even Sharar’s ruminations on old Lucknow contained within them what Perkins has identified as a ‘politics of nostalgia’, an attempt to extract contemporary messages from Lucknow’s illustrious past. Sharar’s aim, he argues, was ‘not to give a balanced and accurate historical picture of Lucknow’, but to use this vision of a ‘utopian past to foster the creation of a contemporary climate free of sectarian tensions’ (Perkins 2011: 338, also 296-310, 316-41). 21 The clearest means of examining the use of tehzib as an ethic of political accommodation is to turn to political activity in Lucknow at two key junctures at which the city’s own distinctive culture was appropriated as a model for harnessing a composite nationalist politics. The first was the holding of concurrent sessions of the Indian National Congress and All India Muslim League in the city, in December 1916. With a conglomerate of nationally important politicians present in the city, including Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Annie Besant, both Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, these meetings gave rise to the so-called ‘Lucknow Pact’, an agreement between the organisations on mutual aims and strategy which directed nationalist activity for several years. This was, of course, a coup for the city itself: not only had ‘the name of the city […] been given to one of the great icons of Indian nationalism’, but it foreshadowed several years in which, thanks to the influence of the Pact and the prominence of the city in the Khilafat movement, Lucknow’s national political profile was at its highest (Robinson 1997: 208-11). 22 Scholarship on the Lucknow Pact has typically focused upon its political significance, especially its forging of unity between Congress and the Muslim League, or between Moderate and Extremist factions within Congress itself (e.g. Owen 1972). Much less has been said about the Lucknow Pact as a symbolic performance. But newspaper accounts and memoirs reveal that the sessions appeared to be branded with a series of Lucknowi motifs and insignia. Sessions were held in the Qaiserbagh Baradari, the archetypal edifice of Lucknow’s public sphere, and were opened with recitations of Urdu verse by delegates: an allusion to Lucknowi traditions of poetry reading. Hindu Congressmen attended the Muslim League sessions and vice-versa; in the former case, they made ‘offerings’ to the session president at his ‘throne’ in rituals further reminiscent of darbari culture. Many delegates wore embroidered chogas, a form of Islamic noble regalia, rather than the Anglicised dress classic to early nationalists. And perhaps most bizarrely, Tilak had the tyres of his automobile slashed by enthusiasts outside the city to compel him to travel to the sessions by carriage, as was more befitting of the city’s tehzib.7 Equally significantly, the term often used subsequently to describe the political agreement in the vernacular press was not, as one might normally expect, the transliterated English word ‘Pact’; but the more loaded Arabic-Urdu term mu‘ahida, indicating ‘covenant’. A term of Qur‘anic progeny which implied the sense of trust between God and man as well as political treaty (Ebstein 2011), it echoed an Islamicate

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political language, and the diplomatic terminology of the Ottoman Empire or Qajar Iran, more than anything usually apparent in Indian politics. It equally, moreover, evoked classical Islamic jurisprudence on the notion of ‘contract’ (‘ahd) with zimmis (non-Muslims) living under Muslim rule (March 2009: 53-4), hence perhaps alluding to a historic Indo-Islamic precedent for a contemporary political treaty between the two communities. 23 This example therefore reveals how old Lucknow’s memorialised tehzib was cast anew as a distinctive political ethic. With its alleged courteous ethos and its supposed history of cross-confessional cordiality, the city was seemingly appropriated as a fitting backdrop to India’s most significant declaration to date of Hindu-Muslim political unity. One might speculate that the proliferation of Lucknowi imagery at these political events owed to the role played by city lawyers and politicians, especially Wazir Hasan and the Rajas of Mahmudabad and Jehangirabad, in organising the sessions, and the dominant presence of local delegates: perhaps by immersing political conventions in the imagery of old Lucknow, it was felt that the city’s gracious mannerisms could infuse their sessions’ deliberations. In any case, the fact that the city had its name etched upon one of colonial India’s most significant statements of cross-community cooperation would serve retrospectively to embed further the city’s identification with communal harmony, for both colonial-era politicians and later historians alike. 24 A second episode which illustrates the harnessing of a distinctly Lucknowi idiom for national political purposes relates to events in the city during the Quit India movement of 1942. In this year, Lucknow’s influential Shi‘i scholar ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi, together with a number of the city’s Sunni and Hindu lawyers and journalists, organised a so-called ‘Husain Day’, an event to commemorate the 1300th anniversary of the martyrdom of the Shi‘i Imam Husain. ‘Ali Naqi was renowned for his evocation of Husain as a universal exemplar, whose central message and struggle for justice were relevant to all religious communities (Jones 2014: 422-29). His was a highly ecumenical perspective on Husain that, in identifying Husain as a figure of cross-confessional relevance, echoed past efforts in pre-1857 Lucknow to use the remembrance of Husain and associated Muharram ceremonials as collective acts to unite the city’s communities (Cole 1988: 92-119). While this commemorative event had been fore-planned as a notionally non-political gathering, its occurrence in August 1942, at the heart of the Quit India movement, unexpectedly linked the convention with the nationalist agitation, with Husain being revered as a suitable icon in the universal struggle against oppression. Held like so many public events (including the 1916 Lucknow Pact sessions) in the Qaiserbagh Baradari, this was a distinctly Lucknowi performance in its procedure, its Shi‘i subject, its recitals of Lucknowi marsiya poems and its elicitation of participation from across religious communities. Addressing the crowd, ‘Ali Naqi remarked on the presence of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others, all gathered together in Lucknow and pledging admiration for the martyred Imam (Husain c. 1943: 41-3): an evocation of the Karbala story imbued with the ethics of harmony and cross-confessional participation particular to Lucknow’s tehzib. As in 1916, this particular municipal ethos was projected once again onto the national level as a model for the construction of an ecumenical politics. 25 These two examples, of the lexicon of symbols applied to the 1916 Lucknow Pact sessions and the use of Imam Husain as model for composite nationalism in 1942, show how an imagined mythology of Lucknow could be appropriated in the service of

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distinctive political causes, and applied as a symbolic backdrop to key junctures in the nationalist movement. What can we learn from the summoning of symbols drawn from Lucknow’s mythologised history as a standard for modern politics? On one level, colonial Lucknow offers a clear example of how new forms of urban associational life could be used to foster communal accord, by inculcating a sense of common orientation and collective history shared by residents of particular towns (cf. Varshney 2003). From another angle, the examples may remind us to interpret nationalist thought in India not as a totalising political discourse drawn from liberal Western prototypes, but rather, as something grounded in the histories and symbolic languages of particular precolonial South Asian polities. Invocations of nationality, in other words, could incorporate ‘regional patriotisms’ that called upon ‘modes of thought drawn from the Indian past’ (Bayly 2001: 19-21, 98-104), in this case, the courtly civility of Awadh. Either way, this particular application of Lucknow’s past indicated a wresting back of claims to cross-confessional political cooperation. In other words, forms of contemporary communal accord were to be grounded not in colonial-style rubrics of tolerance, safeguards and representation, but in old Lucknow’s incorporative ethos. This invites us to investigate further these intricate links between the evocation of Lucknow’s historic tehzib and modern questions of cross-community accommodation.

Tehzib-ul-Islam: Lucknow’s Muslim cosmopolitanism

26 Lucknow was not, of course, an exclusively ‘Muslim’ city, and a welcome body of recent work on colonial Lucknow’s Hindu publics has shown how vibrant and vocal these were during the colonial period (e.g. Joshi 2001: 96-131). This said, the focus of this article upon a body of primarily Urdu and Muslim-authored portraits invites us to reflect further upon how the city’s colonial-era Muslim writers and residents harnessed the city’s perceived past as a glorious Islamic centre, in a period seen as so definitional to the construction of communitarian Muslim identities in South Asia. In this section, we consider how Lucknow’s tehzib defined the city’s status as a Muslim centre; and further, how Lucknow’s distinctive history could be applied by Muslim voices to navigate modern questions of pluralism, tolerance and inter-communal accommodation. Lucknow, this section suggests, has at times become a point of reference for such questions relating to the often-evoked ‘Muslim predicament’ in 20th century South Asia.

27 It was the idea of tehzib, once again, that best reveals how colonial Lucknow was conceived and conveyed by so many authors and orators as a quintessential Islamic city, even after the traumatic fall of Muslim power. The term of tehzib, of course, was not a purely local concoction specific to Lucknow, but one with long-standing roots in Islamic thought. Elaborated as a notion of ethical refinement by classical-era philosophers including ibn Miskawayh and al-Ghazali (ibn Miskawayh 2002-3, al- Ghazali 1995 [1095-1106]), it was henceforth adopted in various contexts both in and beyond South Asia. In colonial India, the language of tehzib was broadly associated with the Muslim modernist circles clustered around Syed Ahmad Khan, who founded the journal Tehzib-ul-Akhlāq in the 1870s (Devji 2007: 72, Stark 2011: 5). These weighty connotations meant that the application of the term to colonial-era Lucknow established the city as a definitive expression of Islamic cultural and ethical refinement, linking its cultural distinctions both to the reformist agendas of contemporaneous South Asian Muslim modernists and also to a wider ethical paradigm

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with centuries of history across the Islamic world. This argument that Lucknow was construed as a particular urban embodiment of universal Islamic values is supported by the fact that, in the same years as tehzib was being holistically applied to Lucknow’s civic culture, it was simultaneously being used increasingly within the city in reference to exclusively ‘Islamic’ laws and manners: in the 1900s-1920s, several prominent city ‘ulama, Shi‘i and Sunni alike, compiled major hadith commentaries under the title of Tehzib.8 This could, of course, indicate the existence of contrasting senses of refinement under the same broad term, but conversely, it could represent an attempt to amalgamate the distinctions of transnational Islamic expertise with Lucknow’s distinctive cultural sophistication. For the ‘ulama, moreover, the articulation of a tehzib- ul-Islam perhaps allowed their commentaries to carry the hallmark of their city of production, and hence boost their city’s (and therefore their own) standing within a wider network of religious learning. 28 If Lucknow’s historical tehzib, therefore, was evoked as one of inherently Islamic character, how did this relate to an urban culture that, as noted above, was widely described as incorporating residents of all religions? Significantly even authors like Sharar, who were keen to document Hindu participation in Lucknow’s cultural life, were nevertheless clear that tehzib was insolubly rooted within Islam: only India’s Muslim rather than Hindu courts, he argued at one point, ‘could be considered refined and cultured’ (Sharar 1975 [1920]: 78). Unlike, say, the notion of the ganga-yamni culture which is sometimes used in reference to this stretch of riverine northern India and implies the blending together of Hindu and Muslim cultural influences (Kudaisya 2007), most key accounts of Lucknow’s tehzib framed it as a culture that came from within Islam, but which, despite this, was not restricted to an explicitly Muslim collective. This was an authentic Islamicate culture that, due to its great accomplishments and universal relevance, could compel participation from others. 29 Interestingly, this definition of Lucknow as an epithet of a wider Islamic ethical paradigm in which all could partake compares strongly with a number of recent studies of modern so-called Muslim cosmopolitanism, both for South Asia and beyond. Moving beyond a rubric of interaction between universal/ classical ‘religious’ and local/ little ‘cultural’ traditions characteristic of some anthropological works on Islam (e.g. Geertz 1971), these studies have argued that examples of cosmopolitanism were articulated as having their origins within an Islamic code of refinement, rather than through compromise with external elements. One study, for instance, defines Muslim cosmopolitanism as ‘a form of public conduct that was shaped by Islamic learning’; it ‘cultivated urbane civility as Muslim universalist virtuous conduct’ while, despite its cross-confessional transferability, remaining ‘deeply rooted in the scriptures’ (Alavi 2011: 1, 28). In other words, perhaps we should understand living forms of Muslim cosmopolitanism, including Lucknow’s retrospectively mythologised tehzib¸ not as local cultural systems combining an invariable ‘Islam’ with regional or non-Muslim elements, but rather, as particular expressions of an Islamic universalism embodied in specific historical and geographical circumstances, and based around shared standards of ethical comportment (cf. Kresse & Simpson 2007: 26). 30 This definition of an Islamicate cosmopolitanism in Lucknow rooted in local expressions of civility and refinement, ones derived from Islam but in which those of other religions could participate, has implications for how Lucknow’s Muslim authors conceived the city’s cultural and confessional pluralism. It helps us to understand why

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Muslim attempts to evoke cross-community harmony in colonial Lucknow were so often conveyed not in a liberal vocabulary of equality or dialogue between different religions, but through a lexicon of Islamic motifs and symbols. The imageries of cross- confessional coexistence discussed earlier in the article, ranging across darbari protocols, concepts of rifah-i-‘am, zhimmi contract, shared reverence for Imam Husain and others, were all drawn from within an Islamic frame of reference. Perhaps echoing other historical Muslim ruling strategies for managing religious diversity across culturally plural Asia (Reid 2009), these Lucknowi writings and practices all grounded Lucknow’s ethics of co-existence within Islamic understandings of cultural conduct and legal thought. In doing this, they managed to evade the colonial language of majorities and minorities, and abrogated the need for neutral arbitration. This was, furthermore, a striking, locally-formulated urban solution to the Hindu-Muslim question, at a time when national politics was increasingly working through communitarian frames, and when political movements such as Muslim separatism and pan-Islam appeared to be viewing Muslim political destinies in exclusivist terms. 31 As such, in an era which witnessed the growth of communalism in India and frequent debates about Hindu-Muslim relations in public life both beyond and within the city’s confines, old Lucknow took on particular resonance for some of its Muslim authors as a model for a pluralist and harmonious society that nevertheless remained embedded in Islamic values. Even since independence, these visions of a historic Lucknowi Muslim cosmopolitanism have been engaged to articulate the place of Muslims within modern India. One might here note arguments put forward by Abu’l Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi, former principal of Lucknow’s Nadwa’t ul-‘Ulama madrasa and one of 20th century India’s most influential Islamic scholars, who has often been analysed as a key exponent of inter- religious dialogue (Sikand 2000: 34-44). In his discussions of Islam’s interaction with the Indian environment, he spoke of Islam as a ‘way of life’ and ‘code of conduct’ that was able historically to permeate India on the grounds of its ethos of morality, simplicity and sincerity (Nadvi 1960: 67-71). While his argument was articulated around Indian Islam more broadly, we can perhaps see in this line of argumentation the influence of his own city’s mythologised tehzib, and he indeed cites Lucknow among the centres in which ‘the graceful, easy and well-mannered mode of life’ drawn from Islam matured and in which ‘Indo-Islamic fusion’ was most perfected (Nadvi 1960: 75). Even after independence, then, the mythology of old Lucknow’s Muslim cosmopolitanism could be called upon as a solution to the contemporary questions of the place of Islam within Indian society, and its contributions to it.

Conclusions

32 This article has argued that the frequently invoked idea of Lucknow’s tehzib, one that still endures today, was less a historical reality of the early 19th century than it was a particular mythology that was constructed in the early 20th. The re-imagination of Lucknow’s past, as pursued by writers, public leaders and politicians of the city both in and since the colonial period, has served various purposes at different junctures. In the early 20th century, it could offer retreat from an unsympathetic colonial present, could allow the perpetuation of ‘old’ lifestyles and structures of authority, and could provide a model for sustaining contemporary urban peace and harmony. Significantly, the city’s heavily mythologised cosmopolitanism was also harnessed at important moments

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to endorse a pluralist national politics, and was also subsequently re-visited as a distinctively Muslim response to questions of cultural and religious pluralism in India.

33 Lucknow, of course, was not the only South Asian city to be retrospectively mythologised according to later concerns, and the arguments made above may perhaps readily apply elsewhere. To take another former north Indian centre of Muslim power, colonial-era Delhi had its pre-colonial history used in similar ways. The city’s Muslim intellectuals comparably lauded the late-Mughal city as a place of sophistication and pleasure, glorifying its poetry and courtliness (e.g. Baig, 2010 [1900s]: 51-154), while late-colonial nationalists also evoked memories of Delhi’s pre-colonial Hindu-Muslim amity as evidence of the inherent possibilities for inter-communal harmony.9 Similar arguments may well be applied to other South Asian cities whose Muslim inhabitants have continued to invoke their pasts, from Lahore to Hyderabad. Nevertheless, the point remains that, both in Lucknow itself and in other settlements and districts elsewhere in former Awadh, the mythology of old Lucknow remained potent as both a lived experience and a political reference point throughout the colonial period. One might also suggest that, by comparison with the enormous resettlements, social upheaval and political reconstruction that took place in cities like Delhi upon India’s partition and independence, Lucknow’s apparent dormancy and waning of national prominence after 1947 has simply cemented a tendency to read the city in terms of its earlier heyday, explaining why the city’s mythologies have endured so powerfully. 34 Partha Chatterjee has drawn attention to what he describes as a ‘lack of agency by the Indian elite in thinking about the city’. He argues that ‘two or three generations of social and political thinkers, scholars and artists, poets and novelists, living and working in the era of nationalism,’ considered the city as ‘a profane place’ riddled with bureaucracy and alienation, and instead ‘devoted most of their imaginative energies to the task of producing an idea not of the […] Indian city, but of a rural India’ (Chatterjee 2006: 140-1). It is well-known that many of colonial India’s key political thinkers, from Gandhi to Nehru, fetishized Indian ruralism; they evoked a somewhat Orientalist notion of ‘village community’ as a model for remaking an authentic India, and attempted to mobilise the countryside as a mark of their national legitimacy.10 Following such thinkers, scholarship has sometimes itself also served to marginalise the Indian city, framing it as a place of organisational convenience rather than an object of thought. That these mythologies of a collective civic tehzib, so recurrent in nationalist-era Lucknow, could take on so many social and political applications might remind us of the importance of considering the colonial South Asian city as more than a mere space for the conduct of Indian bourgeois associational or political life. By contrast, as this article has illustrated, the city could also function as a thing of imagination: it could possess its own charisma that informed the thoughts of its inhabitants; it could, like the village, acquire its own mythology, and become a focus for the recollection of India’s idealised pasts. It is this enormous investment in Lucknow’s history, as it first took shape in the colonial era, which perhaps provides the background to the ongoing historical consciousness associated with the city and which, as this volume’s essays show, both offers inspiration to and exacts burden upon the city’s present.

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Sharar, Abdul Halim (2000 [1914-1920]) Hindūstān mēn Mashriqī Tamaddun kā Akhirī Namūna ya‘ni Guzushta Luckna’u, New Delhi: Maktaba Jami‘a Millia.

Sharar, Abdul Halim (1975) Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, translated and edited by E.S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Sikand (2000) Muslims in India Since 1947: Islamic Perspectives on Inter-faith Relations, London: RoutledgeCurzon.

Simpson, Edward and Kresse, Kai (2007) ‘Cosmopolitanism Contested: Anthropology and History in the Western Indian Ocean’, in Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse (eds.), Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean, London: Hurst Publishers, pp. 1-42.

Stark, Ulrike (2007) An Empire of Books: the Nawal Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, Delhi: Permanent Black.

Stark, Ulrike (2011) ‘Associational Culture and Civic Engagement in Colonial Lucknow: the Jalsah- e Tahzib’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 48(1), pp. 1-33.

Thomas, David (1982) ‘Lucknow and Kanpur 1880-1920: Stagnation and Development Under the Raj, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 5(2), pp. 68-80.

Varshney, Ashutosh (2003) Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Watt, Carey (2005) Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association and Citizenship in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Zaidi, Akbar (2009) ‘Contested Identities and the Muslim Qaum in Northern India, c.1860-1900’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.

NOTES

1. Recent studies of ‘Abdul Halim Sharar and his work include Naim (2011) and, especially, Perkins (2011), which provides the fullest and most sophisticated treatment of the subject to date. 2. I borrow this term from Marshall Hodgson, who famously used it to ‘refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam… both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims’ (Hodgson 1974: 57-59). It has been widely elaborated in studies of South Asian Islam, e.g. Gilmartin & Lawrence (eds.) (2000). 3. For instance, to describe Unani medical sciences in a text by a city hakim (physician): (Ihsani 1878).

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4. The influential reformist and historian Shibli Nu‘mani used the phrase to describe the administrative and technological developments brought to India by Jehangir (Nu‘mani 1993 [1890s]: 321-4). 5. The Leader (Allahabad), 21 April 1911, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. 6. All India Shi‘a Gazette (Lucknow), 21 April 1911; Tafrih (Lucknow) 21 April 1911; Mashriq (Gorakhpur) 18 April 1911; Advocate (Lucknow) 30 April 1911; Zamindar-va-Kashtkar (Bijnor), May 1911, Awadh Akhbar (Lucknow) 5 August 1911, United Provinces Native Newspaper Reports (UPNNR), British Library. 7. These details are taken from: Ambika Bazaar Patrika (Calcutta), 1-3 January 1917, British Library; Hindustani (Lucknow), 21 January 1917 and Mashriq (Gorakhpur) 23 January 1917, UPNNR; Ambedkar 1946: 141; Owen 1972: 561; Robinson 1997:207-8. 8. These include the Arabic hadis collection Tehzīb-ul-Akhlāq compiled by ‘Abdul Ha’i al-Hasani, one of Nadva’t ul-‘Ulama’s most significant formative-era scholars (al-Hasani n.d. [1910s]; Stark 2011:5; Gaborieau 2011), and Ahmad (2005[1920]), a translation and commentary of a collection of Shi‘i hadis compiled in Safavid Iran. 9. See this description of late Mughal Delhi by one nationalist campaigner: ‘the two communities, Hindu and Musalman, had come to live peaceably side by side under the wise guidance of the Moghul emperors… this general contentment had been a growth of centuries; and the Moghul Emperors… deserve credit for the manner in which they had overcome within themselves bigotry and prejudice, and…were able to treat their Hindu subjects with kindly consideration’ (Andrews 2003 [1929]: 27). Andrews’s account bears comparison with Sharar’s work in various ways: its basis in oral testimonies from Muslim residents; its nostalgic tone; its location of communal unity in pre-colonial civility; and, significantly, its implied grounding of pluralism and tolerance within Islam. 10. Gandhi described India’s major cities as India’s ‘plague spots’, as ‘a matter for sorrow’ and ‘a snare and useless encumbrance’, in contrast with much-lauded ‘village India’ (Gandhi 1997 [1909]: 69). Similarly Babylonian ideas of the city as source of degradation populated the thought of many anti-colonial and anti-Western thinkers globally during this period (Buruma & Margalit 2004: 13-48).

ABSTRACTS

Many frameworks for the writing of urban history in South Asia have interpreted the city as a space of socio-political organisation, rather than an object of thought itself. By contrast, this article examines how a mythologised version of Lucknow’s illustrious pre-colonial history, particularly its supposed cultural refinement (tehzib), was evoked in the colonial-era city. Examining the remembrance of old Lucknow in print and public life, this article argues that this historical mythology was at points harnessed for many contemporary purposes, including offering respite from a hostile present, providing a model for Hindu-Muslim political concord, and articulating a distinctively Islamic interpretation of modern religious pluralism.

INDEX

Keywords: Lucknow, tehzib, mythology, urban history, public sphere, Islam, cosmopolitanism

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AUTHOR

JUSTIN JONES

University of Oxford

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Jagdish, Son of Ahmad: Dalit Religion and Nominative Politics in Lucknow

Joel Lee

‘We were Lal Begis. Then when Congress came to power we became Valmiki’—Daulat Ram (son of Anwar).1 ‘The profit that accrued to us upon becoming Hindu [Hindu ban karke], well, it was myriad: many kinds of benefits and schemes, as well as political gains and economic improvement’— Ratan Lal ‘Sadhu’ (son of Ali). 1 In 1947, members of the caste that supplied most of Lucknow’s sanitation labour neither referred to themselves as Valmiki nor were referred to by others as such. As Lalta Prasad, born in 1923, put it to me, ‘In my childhood we were all Lal Begis. When I was eight, ten, twelve years old, there was not even mention of the name Valmiki.’ The Lal Begis of Lucknow and nearby districts, like their caste fellows across the subcontinent who were variously called Bhangi, Chuhra, Mehtar, and Halalkhor, nurtured a tradition of beliefs and practices centred on a prophet named Lal Beg, from whom they derived their title. The Lucknow Lal Begis had, in 1947, predominantly musalmānā nām, that is, personal names in a Muslim style: female names like Rukhsana, Nazira, and Allah Rakhi; male names like Nabbu, Ramzanu, and Anwar.

2 When I conducted ethnographic and archival research in Lucknow a little over 60 years later, in 2011–12, I met not a single person who referred to himself or herself as Lal Begi —at least not initially, and not in mixed company. Most men and many women in the community called themselves Valmiki (or Balmiki, with significance rarely attached to the variation in pronunciation or spelling). Valmiki was also the prevailing term used by others to denote the sanitation labour castes. And in terms of personal names, hinduānā nām—names in a Hindu style—predominated: female names like Shanti, Sunita and Asha; male names like Ganesh, Vinod, and Ram Kumar. If one were to assume—as is

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normatively and consequentially done by everyone from journalists to political scientists to census enumerators—that personal names function as transparent indices of religious identity, then the current generation would appear to be of an entirely different religious community than their grandparents were at the time of Indian independence. 3 How did this transpire? How did a community come to radically alter its traditional nominative practices, replacing an Islamicate repertoire of names with a brahminical one? What role did the state play in this act of mass resignification, and what does the Lucknow story tell us about related processes that took place elsewhere in north India? Before explaining how this article will address these questions, let me briefly sketch the historical significance of our subject and its scholarly treatment to date. 4 As current controversies over both the ‘ghar vāpsī’ campaigns of the Hindu right and the conversions of Valmikis to Islam in Uttar Pradesh (e.g., The Hindu 2015, Tiwari and Abbas 2015) remind us, the question of the religious affiliation of the sanitation labour castes has long been perceived as a matter of high stakes—not only for the immediate actors involved, but for the nation. The historical reasons for this are clear enough: with the growth of representative bodies in the initial decades of the 20th century, that fifth of the people of South Asia then known as ‘untouchables’ and Depressed Classes was transformed, for the first time in history, into an enumerated community (Kaviraj 1992) whose vast numbers made it the decisive factor in the determination of whether India had a Hindu majority or not. As the Arya Samaj and Congress leader Swami Shraddhanand pithily put it in the early 1920s, ‘If all untouchables became Muslims then these will become equal to the Hindus, and at the time of independence they will not depend on the Hindus, but will be able to stand on their own legs’ (Jordens 1981: 141). To this terrifying prospect there was only one solution: ‘their assimilation in the Hindu polity is the very plinth on which alone the edifice of free India can be constructed’ (Jordens 1981: 163). The rancorous debate between the Muslim League, Congress, ‘untouchable’ leaders and the colonial administration over how the Depressed Classes should be categorized in terms of religion is a story that remains largely obscured in the historiography of the period until the moment of its ‘resolution,’ the Poona Pact of 1932, in which Gandhi wrested from the colonial state governmental approval of his discursive framing of untouchability as a problem internal to Hindu society and thus of ‘untouchables’ as Hindu.2 While this framing ushered in a new governmental and sociological commonsense—the same commonsense that remains with us today—it did not quell the anxiety that Dalit religious autonomy provoked, and continues to provoke, in a broad spectrum of Indian nationalist thought and practice. 5 If nothing short of the existence of a Hindu majority rests on the question of Dalit religion, within the Dalit population the sanitation labour castes have historically played a unique role both in the struggle over this question and in its representation. There are multiple reasons for this, including the numerical preponderance of the sanitation labour castes in regions of intense interreligious competition: in some districts of Punjab they constituted more than ten percent of the overall population in the colonial period (Ibbetson 1970: 290–92). Also significant is the trans-regional spread of the most populous of the sanitation labour castes: unlike most Dalit castes, which were largely confined to particular linguistic regions, the labour migrations of the Chuhra caste under Mughal, Maratha and British dispensations brought them in

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numbers to cities and cantonments from Karachi to Calcutta and Amritsar to Hyderabad. Their being the most pan-Indian of the Depressed Classes, alongside the nature of their labour in the city, made them highly visible to a nationalist elite newly concerned with the ‘untouchable’ problem. Gandhi further heightened this visibility by presenting the sanitation labour castes—whom he referred to as Bhangis—as a synecdoche for all of the Depressed Classes (Zelliot 1998: 155, Prashad 1996: 552). Indeed, so large did the sanitation labour castes loom in Gandhi’s representation of the caste question that the number of references to ‘Bhangi’ in his collected writings and speeches is higher than the number of references to Chamar, Dhed, Mahar, Mala, Paraiyar/Pariah (to name a few prominent Dalit castes), Rajput, Baniya, and Shudra combined.3 6 Thus, in terms both of the actual numbers of the sanitation labour castes and of their prominence in the nationalist imagination, the stakes of the contest over their religious identity were high. Relative to its historical and contemporary importance, this contest —a century-old, ongoing series of interlocking struggles over names, practices and ideologies, spread across the subcontinent, into which our story of mass renaming in Lucknow is an illuminating entry point—has attracted little scholarly attention. The few existing accounts make sense of the rise of the Valmiki title and claims of Hindu belonging in one of three ways. First there are scholars in religious studies who have sought to explain the puzzling link between the sanitation labour caste and the putative author of the Sanskrit Ramayana, whose impeccable Brahmin lineage is multiply attested within the epic, by tracking the name Valmiki through a range of Sanskrit and vernacular religious texts (Sahdev 1997, Leslie 2003). While these accounts do not address the modern period in which the link was actually forged, they make the significant discovery that there have been many Valmikis—the literary traditions of South Asia feature at least seven distinct figures by this name—which helps to explain the context in which Arya Samaj activists were able, in the early 20th century, to conflate a magician and swineherd of Dalit oral tradition with the Sanskrit poet of high brahminical tradition. A different approach is taken by Bhagwan Das (1973) and Vijay Prashad (2000), who emphasize that the adoption of Valmiki is a 20th century phenomenon and describe the process as ‘Hindu becoming’ (Hindu bannā) and ‘Hinduization,’ respectively. The third set of accounts characterizes the same process as one of ‘Sanskritization,’ M.N. Srinivas’s term for the attempt by subordinated castes to improve their social status by adopting the cultural practices of the privileged castes (Shyamlal 1984, Jaoul 2011, O’Brien 2012: 193–94). Nicolas Jaoul, though, modifies the concept considerably in his rich ethnography of the conflict over Valmiki in Kanpur; what he finds is an ‘institutionalised and politically engineered Sanskritisation rather than the kind of cultural spontaneity with which Sanskritisation is usually equated’ (Jaoul 2011: 280). 7 In conversation with these accounts, I will describe in this article moments in the contest over the religious identity of the sanitation labour castes as it transpired in Lucknow in the middle decades of the 20th century. Of the many loci of change I will foreground transnomination—the renaming of persons using hinduānā rather than musalmānā names—because it throws into relief three highly consequential aspects of the transformation of the sanitation labour castes that are absent or understated in the existing studies. First, to focus on naming practices is to glimpse the stark alterity that characterized the sanitation labour castes’ self-understanding vis-à-vis Hindus prior to the Valmiki movement. This, as I will elaborate shortly, is why our subject does not

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conform to even a modified version of the Sanskritization model. Second, the circumstances under which most Lal Begis in Lucknow were renamed points to hitherto unexamined dimensions of political engineering. While Prashad emphasizes the role of Hindu municipal officials in Delhi and Jaoul demonstrates that state-level Congress politicians in UP also worked to promote the Valmiki movement, my findings reveal that in collaboration with these government actors, the Hinduizing cause was given a decisive impetus by the national level Congress administration in the form of its Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950. Third, the sweeping success of the effort to transform naming practices in Lucknow, when compared to the fierce and ongoing internal controversies over other aspects of the Valmiki movement (e.g., whether to venerate Lal Beg or Valmiki, how to conduct life cycle rituals, what degree of intimacy to maintain with Muslim neighbours), suggests that for much of the community, there is a politics of tactical dissimulation at work: appearing to accept the offer of majoritarian inclusion, while retaining, with varying degrees of secrecy, autonomous traditions. Here the Lucknow material provides an important counterexample to studies in which Dalits, and in particular urban Valmikis, are enrolled in projects of Hindu majoritarian violence (Prashad 2000, Narayana 2009, Jaoul 2011). Analytically isolating transnomination from other aspects of the contest over religious identity enables us to question whether the nominative Hinduization of the sanitation labour castes constitutes the Hindu majoritarian triumph that it appears to be. 8 Before turning to our main narrative—how the Lal Begis of Lucknow became Valmikis— a few matters remain to be clarified. In the next section, after briefly explaining my disquiet with the Sanskritization model, I will consider one of the earliest critical assessments of the Valmiki movement—Ambedkar’s—and relate it to the regime of recognition that the Poona Pact of 1932 put in place and that the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950 chiselled into law. This is necessary in order to understand the decisions Lucknow Lal Begis made in the following decades. The subsequent section introduces the sanitation labour castes of Lucknow in more detail.

Recognition in the New Regime

9 Nicolas Jaoul’s formulation of the adoption of Valmiki as ‘politically engineered Sanskrisation’ is salutary in that it both draws our attention to the political content of the particular history in which we are interested and politicizes the concept of Sanskritization more generally. At the same time, though, the culturalist frame of Sanskritization that Jaoul rightly criticizes is not the concept’s only problem.4 Equally fatal in the Dalit context is that Sanskritization, like Dumont’s ‘whole’ and Alfred Lyall’s organic model of Hinduism, plots all of subaltern religious life into a brahminical narrative. This is erroneous: neither is brahminical Hinduism a necessary telos of subaltern religiosity—as the social history of vast communities like Jats and Julahas will confirm5—nor does it inevitably pervade the ‘tribal’ context that such narratives take as their starting point. On the contrary, the assumption, implicit in many uses of the concept of Sanskritization, that before their efforts at upward mobility, subaltern groups lived in a kind of transhistorical, proto-Hindu condition—that they were waiting in the wings of Hinduism, as it were—is a clear case of the backward projection of modern categories, a projection that does violence to the self-representations of at least some of these groups. The Lal Begis, as we will see, were among those who gave

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voice to their alterity from the Hindus before the campaign to adopt Valmiki became popular. For this reason, Sanskritization, insofar as it implies upward movement within, rather than a rupture of religious boundaries, is not a fit concept for the phenomenon at hand.

10 It is important to bear in mind that the common-sense that imagines the subaltern communities of South Asian history to have been Hindu or proto-Hindu by default was not securely in place in the early decades of the 20th century. In the period before the Poona Pact, the religious ‘identity’ of the Depressed Classes was by no means a settled question, and it remained a possibility, however slight, that the colonial state could confer recognition on the de facto autonomy of the various religious communities that caste subalterns understood themselves to constitute, as it did, briefly, with the Ad Dharmis in the 1931 census (Juergensmeyer 2009). This prospect died, however, in the wake of Gandhi’s ‘epic fast’ against the communal award; the Poona Pact politically ratified the discursive confinement of the Depressed Classes within the category of the Hindu (Tejani 2007, Conrad 2007, Adcock 2014). As Gandhi triumphantly put it to Ambedkar in February 1933, ‘In accepting the Poona Pact you accept the position that you are Hindus […] You cannot escape the situation that you are Hindus in spite of your statement to the contrary’ (Gandhi 2000: vol. 59, Appendix X). 11 If the Poona Pact framed the terms of a new regime of recognition, it did not abolish the old common-sense overnight, and traces of the preceding state of affairs remained even in governmental practice. There were Muslim and Sikh castes listed among the colonial government’s first ‘schedule’ of 1936, for instance. Upon independence, however, the Congress eliminated these contradictions. The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950 unequivocally stated that ‘no person who professes a religion different from the Hindu religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste.’ Combined with the raft of political safeguards and economic and educational benefits that the Constitution and subsequent legislation made available to Scheduled Castes, this religious restriction on state recognition of disadvantaged status worked, in effect, as a national governmental incentive to ‘profess’ the Hindu religion. As we will see, its consequences in Lucknow were considerable. 12 Ambedkar’s assessment of the Valmiki movement—one of the earliest—reflects the discursive imprisonment of the ‘untouchable’ within the house of Hinduism that the Poona Pact helped bring about. In his essay ‘Away from the Hindus,’ written in the years following the Poona Pact, Ambedkar wrote the following: There is a general attempt [by Untouchables] to call themselves by some name other than the ‘Untouchables’ [...] the Bhangis call themselves Balmikis. All of them if away from their localities would call themselves Christians […] they give themselves other names which may be likened to the process of undergoing protective discolouration […] The name matters and matters a great deal. For, the name can make a revolution in the status of the Untouchables. But the name must be the name of a community outside Hinduism and beyond its power of spoliation and degradation. Such name can be the property of the Untouchable only if they undergo religious conversion. A conversion by change of name within Hinduism is a clandestine conversion which can be of no avail (Ambedkar 1989: 419–20). 13 In judging the adoption of Valmiki as a ‘change of name within Hinduism,’ Ambedkar implies that the ‘Bhangis’ were ‘within Hinduism’ in the first place. Whether he was aware of the degree to which the sanitation labour castes of north India understood

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themselves to constitute a distinct religious community is difficult to know. But to whatever extent he was acquainted with the traditions of Lal Beg, in the passage quoted Ambedkar cedes the ground that Gandhi so keenly sought him to cede: that the ‘untouchables’ are to be considered Hindu by default. Deprived of a political discourse that would recognize the autonomy of already existing Dalit religious traditions, Ambedkar had by this time committed himself to an emancipatory project that accepted the terms of the categorical schema installed by the Poona Pact as a starting point—he acquiesced to being defined as Hindu6—but sought to escape this confinement by conversion.

14 Given this context, it is unsurprising that Ambedkar gives a negative view of the adoption of Valmiki as ineffectual or even damaging as a means of ‘untouchable’ emancipation. On another occasion Ambedkar is reported to have said that ‘Valmiki is a one-man advertising agency for Ram Rajya’ (Prashad 2000: 154). For our purposes, Ambedkar’s assessment of the politics of the sanitation labour castes is important for an additional reason. His characterization of their adoption of new names as ‘undertaking protective discolouration’ perceptively suggests a theme in evidence in the identitarian struggle in Lucknow. Throughout the colonial period the sanitation labour castes were described as ‘chameleon-like in their copying of the externals of other faiths’ (Griswold 1934: 227; cf. Strickler 1926, Rose 1902, Burn 1902). The oral traditions of the community valorise the subaltern tactic of dissimulation, particularly in the domain of religious practice: appearing to conform to the religious norms of political overlords while discreetly maintaining autonomous rites. This kind of furtive politics did not end in the colonial period but perdures in my interlocutors’ stories of the post-independence period, as well as in silences, smiles, gestures, and other non- verbal signs. In flagging this dimension of the sanitation labour castes’ apparent embrace of Valmiki, then, Ambedkar, unlike subsequent observers of the same process, alerts us to that which makes the Lucknow story so distinctive. His evocative phrase ‘clandestine conversion’ is thus both accurate and misleading: the adoption of Valmiki was indeed a ‘conversion’ of sorts—a donning of the mantle of a new religion. But it was not the claiming of Hindu identity that was ‘clandestine’—this took place rather out in the open. What was ‘clandestine’ was not the embrace of Valmiki but the retention—in back rooms, away from the reformist gaze—of the old, non-Hindu ways of Lal Begi ancestors.

The Sanitation Labour Castes, Lal Beg, and the 583

15 But what was this Lal Begi tradition, what kind of religious community did it imagine, and to what extent were the practices of the sanitation labour castes of the Lucknow region distinctive from those of their caste fellows elsewhere in the subcontinent?

16 First I should separate out terms in what is a very dense and complex field of nomenclature. The protagonists of our story have been known by a welter of names: titles of specific castes (Chuhra, Dom, Dhanuk, Hela, Bansphor, and others), occupational labels that transcend caste specificity (Khakrob, Halalkhor, Jamadar, Mehtar, sweeper, scavenger), religious titles that come to connote caste belonging (Lal Begi, Valmiki), and the hotly contested appellation ‘Bhangi.’ By ‘sanitation labour castes’ I mean to denote all of the preceding: those Dalit castes that perform the vast majority of sanitation work in contemporary South Asia. The term is a translation of

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safāī kāmgār jātiyāṅ, a self-designation used by ordinary people, by Hindi writers who take up the topic, and by a number of non-governmental organizations whose members belong to these castes. By using the term I do not mean to endorse or reproduce the brahminical social ideology that reifies the contingent link between a people and an occupation—a concern thoughtfully raised by Ramnarayan Rawat (2011)—but rather to acknowledge, with my interlocutors, the extraordinary degree to which this domain of work impinges on their lives. 17 Songs, stories, rites and practices related to Lal Beg constitute one sphere in which the distinct sanitation labour castes appear to have found common ground. It is not clear to what extent all of the castes participated—Chuhras and Dhanuks certainly did (Rose 1902: 183–86, Strickler 1926, Ibbetson 1970: 294–96), whereas Doms may not have—but to many observers the veneration of Lal Beg appeared so widespread across regions and communities that the title Lal Begi, meaning disciple of Lal Beg, was used as a synonym for sweeper (e.g., Fallon 1879: 303, Dihlawi 1898: 165, Azad 1907: 394, Kipling 1901: 158– 59). In oral traditions recorded by missionaries, folklorists, administrators and ethnologists in Punjab, Bengal, the Deccan and the United Provinces in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lal Beg (literally ‘Red Lord’), also known as Bala Shah, was a prophet (nabi, paighambar) and guru created by god (alif allah, khuda, rabb, akal purakh) who lived among the sanitation labour castes and secured their salvation in the afterlife. In songs and legends Lal Beg is miraculously born from a pot in Ghazni, eats bread baked by Fatima, wins praise from ‘Ali, sweeps the steps of heaven (bihisht), rescues the sweepers of Delhi from an enraged emperor, drives camels in Kashmir, conquers Kabul, and generally leads an extraordinary life (Ibbetson 1970, Temple 1884A, 1884B, Greeven 1894, Youngson 1906: 340–54, Kaul 1911: 131–33, Strickler 1926: Ch 3). To the extent that there are historical referents in the corpus of Lal Begi oral traditions, they are largely Mughal; the theological vocabulary is heavily Islamic, though Sikh terms and concepts also appear. 18 How did the Lal Begis perceive themselves vis-à-vis other religious communities? The oral traditions suggest a community that understood itself as other to Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Lal Begi liturgical songs transcribed in the late colonial period have as one remarkable feature usages of the terms Hindu and Muslim as contrastive to the Lal Begi self. Some of these usages relate to the shrines of Lal Beg, which are affirmed as distinct from the religious architecture of other communities. One of the songs performed at the annual feast of Lal Beg in Benares, for instance, contains the line ‘The Hindu has his temple, the Muslim his mosque, but I give to you this altar of mud’ (Greeven 1894: 43, 48).7 Another song, transcribed in Punjab, presents a similar sentiment: ‘As Hindus revere the Ganga, as Muslims have their Mecca, so the Shahis [another name for Lal Begis] adore your name and build your shrines in every village’ (Youngson 1906: 343).8 In these verses, the Lal Beg shrine is contrasted with its correlates in the religious communities of others. 19 Some of the clearest assertions of Lal Begi difference from other religious communities are soteriological in nature. There are a number of stories and songs that imply, more or less explicitly, that Hindu, Sikh and Muslim paths to salvation are false or inferior to that made possible through Lal Beg. A representative example is a song transcribed in Sialkot District, in which a Lal Begi ancestor petitions God: Hindus forbid my approach Muslims refuse to bless my dead

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Listen, O God I want to form my own nation [ummat]9 20 God assures the sufferer, by means of a letter delivered by Lal Beg, that: On the Day of Judgment [qayāmat] Only you will be blessed […] The partisans of Ram and Rahim Will be scattered When the sun sinks to a length-and-a-quarter I will send them to Hell [dozakh] To you I will show Paradise [bihisht] Which I have built beyond Into this Paradise [bihisht] Your nation [ummat] will swiftly enter10 21 Here the Lal Begi tradition enunciates a soteriological claim neither ambiguous nor inchoate—as the axioms of subaltern religions are often represented to be—but all too clear: on the Day of Judgment, it is the long-suffering Lal Begis, beloved of God, who will attain paradise, while their earthly oppressors, here specified as Hindus and Muslims, will suffer in hell.

22 Before the movement to adopt Valmiki spread across north India, there is scant evidence for what the naming practices of the sanitation labour castes were—at least in terms of personal names. From the family histories that I collected in Lucknow and its surrounding districts, it is clear that musalmānā names predominated for both women and men in that region until the middle of the 20th century. Valmikis today sometimes attribute their grandparents’ Muslim-styled names to the mimetic tactics already mentioned—the adoption of the outward practices of the locally dominant group, jaisā rājā vaisī prajā (as the king, so the people). And indeed Awadh was a region with a relatively high proportion of Muslim landowners (Nevill 1904, Hasan 2007). But this explanation does not hold for other parts of north India: there is some evidence that musalmānā names were common among the sanitation labour castes in the Shimla area (Bhagwan Das, personal communication) and ‘Muslim names like Akbur, Jamal, Multan, Data Deen, Aladeen, etc.’ were the norm among ‘Bhangis’ until about 1930 in Jodhpur, another place lacking a significant Muslim landowning presence (Shyamlal 1984: 30). I would venture that before the Valmiki movement, personal names among the sanitation labour castes reflected the Islamicate world of the Lal Begi liturgy at least as much as it mirrored the naming practices of the locally dominant caste. 23 There is one more name that we must introduce. In Lucknow two of the sanitation labour castes of north India predominate: Chuhras (in the cantonment, the old city, and north of the Gomti) and Dhanuks (in the city’s western and southern quarters). The two have followed different identitarian trajectories and in this article I am discussing only the former. Most of the Chuhras of Lucknow belong to a group known as the Pāñch Sau Tirāsī—the 583. The 583 are a regional clan (the usual word is the Arabic qabīla: ‘tribe; clan; family’ [Platts 2000: 788]) or unit of self-governance (panchāyat) of the Chuhra caste in Awadh. There are other such regional clans in central UP—the Hazara (Thousand) of Mahmoudabad and the Bāra Ghar (Twelve Houses) of Sitapur, for example —but the 583 constitute by far the largest clan in Awadh. Their traditional territory stretches between the Gomti and the Ghaghra rivers from Sitapur in the northwest to Faizabad in the southeast: the better part of six administrative districts. At the geographical center of this territory stands Dewa Sharif, a complex of Sufi shrines in

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Bara Banki district where the 583, until quite recently, convened meetings of the panchayat or caste council. The 583 trace the origins of this institution to one Jumma Mehtarani, a sagacious (dimāghdār) ancestress whose strategic dealings with her royal employers won the caste concrete benefits in land, patronage and protection. Some say she came from Iran or accompanied Babur’s Mughal army; others place her centuries later, as an accomplice of Begum Hazrat Mahal, the queen of Awadh known for sponsoring the insurgents against the British in the great rebellion of 1857. Other than their unique foremother, the 583 have traditionally distinguished themselves from their caste fellows in other regions by various occupational and dietary practices, several of which relate to swine: in addition to sanitation work, the 583, unlike the Chuhra caste elsewhere, rear and trade mules, donkeys and horses, and do not rear or sell swine. Nor do they eat pig flesh, whereas in many parts of north India the consumption of pork is central to Chuhra ritual life. Lastly—and this is to get ahead of the story—the 583 are known today for their continuing attachment to the old ways. If there remains a bastion of the once-ubiquitous Lal Begi tradition in north India, it is in Lucknow and the villages of Awadh. 24 Having introduced our protagonists, let us now turn to how they came to be renamed.

Lal Beg versus Valmiki, Deg versus Bhagaunā

25 In Lucknow and its hinterland, it was largely the first generation of Congress MLAs and MPs11 from the sanitation labour castes, most of whom were also Arya Samajists, who led the movement among their caste fellows to abandon Lal Beg and adopt Valmiki from 1947 onward. They convened meetings in the bastīs of Lucknow where they performed bhajans of their own composition and pressed their caste fellows to reform. Munnu, a sanitation workers’ union leader who witnessed such performances in his childhood, recalled to me the reformists’ message in this way: Munnu: ‘Abandon all of these bad habits. Our guru is Valmiki ji. Adopt him [unko apnā lo]… Be Hindus, become Hindus, remain Hindus.’ Joel: Wait, was it ‘become Hindus’ or ‘remain Hindus’? Munnu: ‘Become.’ Joel: Become? Munnu: ‘Become.’ Yes. ‘And if you become Hindu then you will get benefits. From the government you will get this, you will get that.’ The government certainly took care of them! Made them MLAs and MLCs12… They also talked about Gandhi, ‘Gandhi did this, Gandhi did that.’ There was a lot about Gandhi and Valmiki… ‘Quit these dirty habits, study, educate your children, quit drinking liquor, don’t do bad things,’ they said all this… ‘Don’t convert to Islam, caste brothers! Don’t do all this, don’t keep Muslim names, otherwise you won’t get reservations, you won’t get any government benefits,’ this is what they said. ‘It’s government policy.’ 26 The sardonic edge to Munnu’s remarks is not unrepresentative. Many in the community were put off by the wholesale criticism of tradition put forward by the young, Congress-backed, aspiring caste leaders. One of the reformists’ best- remembered verses—authored, significantly, by a non-583 from the cantonment—was this: Lal Begi nām chhoṛo, rishiyoṅ kī santān ho (Abandon the name Lal Begi, you are the descendants of sages) 27 Here Valmiki (the sage referred to) was figured in contrastive opposition to Lal Beg; the reformers held that to embrace Valmiki as the caste progenitor was, perforce, to

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abandon allegiance to Lal Beg. In response to this hectoring refrain, quipsters among the 583 composed verses of their own that inverted the attack and ridiculed Valmiki and his advocates. For example: Netwā āye, netwā āye, hamkā jhāṇṭ mīki batāran (‘Leaders’ have come, ‘leaders’ have come, they’re saying our pubic hairs are ‘mīki’) 28 Mīki is a nonsense word that, conjoined with jhāṇṭ (pubic hair), rhymes with Valmiki. The quip thus corrupts and parodies the speech of the reformists; their oft-repeated phrase ‘You all are not Lal Begi, you are Balmiki’ becomes ‘You are not Lal Begi, your pubic hair is mīki.’ I heard several versions of this witticism from elderly interlocutors on both sides of the reformist divide.

29 Undeterred, the advocates of Valmiki continued their efforts. As one of the reformists himself told me, ‘What we preached [prachār karte the] was Hinduism [Hinduat]. Meaning: ‘You all are Hindu, you should do the circumambulations [a Hindu wedding rite], you should celebrate nuptials with Hindu rites and practices [Hindu rasm-rivāj se śādī kareṅ].’’ 30 Weddings became one of the primary sites of conflict between the traditional 583 leadership and the reformists. Everything was fought over: what rites to perform, whom to invite, what food to prepare, whether or not to serve liquor, whether or not to have the fātiha (Quranic prayers) recited over the meal, and so on. Symbolically the conflict crystallized into the struggle between the deg and the bhagaunā. Both are large metal cauldrons used for cooking over an open fire; the only necessary structural distinction is that degs are rounded whereas bhagaunās are cylindrical with a flat bottom. But for complicated reasons the deg has come to represent ‘Muslim’ cooking whereas the bhagaunā is taken to be a ‘Hindu’ vessel. In Lucknow the Lal Begis had long used degs to prepare their wedding meals because Muslims willingly rented them out (or sometimes lent them for free), whereas Hindus refused to allow the sanitation labour castes use of bhagaunās even when they could pay. With the arrival of Valmiki, though, the reformists began to rail against the use of the deg at weddings because the Hindus they had begun to invite to their weddings (friends in the Congress and Arya Samaj) would not eat food prepared in a deg—even if the dish were vegetarian. The reformists established a cooperative (within the caste) for wedding equipment— bhagaunās and cooking utensils—from which members could borrow when the occasion arose. They began to boycott weddings (and funerals) at which degs were used or the fātiha recited. Rancour ensued, divisions hardened, and a series of accusations and counteraccusations led to a civil case being brought before the city magistrate, who decided in favor of the reformists. The result, though, was not resolution but a simmering factionalism that continued to erupt in smaller disputes every few years for decades. Degs gradually disappeared from 583 weddings, and the fātiha is no longer recited. But the reformists did not win a total victory: even in the now-ubiquitous bhagaunās, it is not vegetarian fare, but biryani and goat curry that continues to be cooked and served at most Valmiki weddings in Lucknow. 31 If much of the contest over the religious identity of the sanitation labour castes of Lucknow has had an agonistic character of this kind, the change in naming practices provides a significant contrast. More than other objects of reform, naming practices were pragmatically linked to education; since education was widely desired in the community, the revolution in naming practices that accompanied the admission into schools of a generation of sanitation labour caste youth in the 1950s and 1960s proved

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the least contested aspect of the reformist project within the community. That is to say, the destruction of Lal Beg shrines and efforts to prevent the serving of meat at weddings incited resentment and dissention in the community to a far greater degree than the equally unprecedented application of Hindu-styled names to an entire generation of children. It is my argument that the relative ease with which this transnomination was secured has a great deal to do with the constitutional requirement that Dalits ‘profess’ Hinduism to be recognized as Scheduled Caste—the post-independence regime of recognition that Dieter Conrad (2007: 216) has called ‘legal Hindutva.’

Jagdish, son of Ahmad

Shuru mai merā nām muslim thā. [Originally my name was Muslim.] 32 This utterance, or a variation on it (usually musalmānā rather than muslim), was so frequently given voice in my interviews with Lucknow Valmikis born before the 1980s that I learned to expect it. Many stories of renaming that I heard resonated with that of Rishi Kumar, a poet, song-writer and retired hospital sanitation worker born in the 1940s: Rishi Kumar: Originally my name was Muslim. Hasanu. That was the name I was given at first […] Joel: Your parents, sisters, brothers, everyone called you by this name? Rishi Kumar: Earlier they called me by this name. Now everyone knows me as Rishi Kumar. Joel: Did you change it yourself? Rishi Kumar: No, no, my name, in truth, changed on account of my studies. When I was studying, that’s when my new name got written [likhā gayā]. Joel: Do you remember how it came about? Rishi Kumar: Yes, my father had it written. My father said, ‘His name is not good. In the future it will cause problems, give him trouble. In studying, in going other places, it will cause him difficulties.’ So he renamed me according to his own thinking. There was an MLA, one Kanhaiya Lal Balmiki [a major reformer and champion of the movement to embrace Valmiki]. He had a brother named Rishi Kumar. I was renamed after him. […] My name was changed in 1955. It was when my name was recorded at school. When admissions happened, the form was filled, at the time of filling the form my name was written as Rishi Kumar. 33 Rishi Kumar was not singled out for this treatment. His parents changed their names as well: My father’s original name was Rahim. Later, when we came here from the village, he took the name Ram Das. […] My mother’s name was Hafiza, but afterward it was changed to Ganga […] because it would be difficult for her to go to temples; when she would say ‘My name is Hafiza,’ they wouldn’t easily let her enter the temple. 34 The nominative practices of virtually the entire 583 clan transformed between the late 1940s and the 1970s. With regard to his mother, Rishi Kumar mentions the ‘difficulty’ [dikkat] of entering Hindu temples bearing an apparently Muslim moniker. This is relatively rarely cited as a factor in transnomination, though it is worth noting that names did function as one of many signs of Lal Begi alterity from Hindus in the old order. A more common context for adopting hinduānā names was the obtaining of government employment. In many accounts, women and men changed their names precisely when they applied for positions as sanitation workers in the municipality, at

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the university, or in government hospitals. Rishi Kumar hints at this when he remarks that Rahim became Ram Das ‘when we came here from the village.’ For his parents, as for many of the 583 who urbanized in the middle decades of the 20th century, leaving the village and joining government service were simultaneous, almost coterminous, events. Relatives or caste fellows who had migrated to Lucknow earlier and already held government jobs advised them to apply for work with hinduānā names. Having musalmānā names, especially in the years immediately following independence and partition, was seen as a liability, a potential source of ‘difficulty’ [dikkat] or ‘trouble’ [pareśānī], for fourth class employees in government departments where anti-Muslim sentiment sometimes ran unchecked. Transnomination at the moment of securing government employment was, for a period, so widespread that it gave rise to the term ‘ sarvis nām’ [service name], the hinduānā name used for employment purposes, as distinct from ‘ghar kā nām’ [home name], the often musalmānā name used among family and community.

35 More than any other, though, it was the context of Rishi Kumar’s own renaming— school admission—that prevailed in my interlocutors’ accounts. The reformists consistently stressed the practical value of the adoption of hinduānā names—both given names/forenames and the surname Valmiki—in securing admission to government schools and exemption from school fees. Education, and the governmental financial assistance that brought education potentially within reach, were themes rarely absent from the appeals the reformists made to their caste fellows. As the reformer Lalta Prasad put it, their message had as its refrain the following: ‘Brothers, we people are not Lal Begi but Balmiki. We should write ‘Balmiki’ [as our surname]. And by doing this we will get exemptions from fees, our daughters and sons will get fee exemptions. If we write ‘Lal Begi’ then they will not get scholarships and fee exemptions.’ He then described a particular incident from around 1960: I had this friend. There was a Gitā Vidyālāy [a government-supported school in our neighbourhood, run by prominent local Congressmen]. They had a column on the application for admission asking what your religion is. Isn’t it? So my friend wrote ‘Lal Begi.’ He submitted the forms. Then [the admissions officer] said ‘Kindly pay the full fees.’ My friend replied, ‘Why?’ So [the admissions officer] said, ‘You are Lal Begi, Muslim. Therefore you will have to pay full fees.’ So he came and told me about it, and told Govind Prasad, and we advised him, ‘You’ve made a mistake, bring the forms to us, we’ll fill out a new one.’ So the second form we filled out, and we wrote ‘Balmiki’ and in brackets ‘Hindu.’ Meaning Scheduled Caste. […] Then he did not have to pay fees. 36 Awareness of the legal recognition of the category of Scheduled Caste, and of state programs designed to address caste-based inequality by creating educational and other opportunities for Scheduled Castes, arrived in the bastīs of Lucknow piecemeal in the years after the Constitution took effect. Lalta Prasad’s friend knew that under Congress rule, his caste status should entitle his children to a fee exemption in school, yet he remained unaware of the religious exclusions that qualified that entitlement. Having naively identified himself according to his community’s traditional self-description—as Lal Begi by religion—he found himself confronted by a legal regime for which the de facto autonomy of Dalit religion was illegible. That is, he experienced locally the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order: professing a religion ‘different from the Hindu religion,’ he was not ‘deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste.’ The admissions officer—the local face of the state—understood Lal Begis to be Muslim, or at least to be more akin to Muslims than to the other recognized religious communities, and

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accordingly declared the family ineligible for financial relief. Since even modest school fees were beyond the means of Lalta Prasad’s friend—as they were for most sanitation labour caste families—securing his children’s education meant formally relocating his family vis-à-vis the state’s regime of recognition. It meant becoming—or at least professing to be—Hindu.

37 Gauhar Lal, born in 1939, a retired government accountant and one of the most highly educated members of the community in his generation, told the following story of his own experience in accessing education at a government school in Lucknow: I filled out the scholarship form for intermediate [eleventh and twelfth standard]. On the form, for religion, for caste I wrote Mehtar. And I was disqualified 13 for scholarship. I didn’t get it. They said, ‘This is not allowed.’ So the principal called me and said, ‘You’ve written Mehtar as your caste, why didn’t you write Balmiki?’ I said, ‘What is Balmiki? I don’t know Balmiki.’ He said, ‘This has been recognized, from the government this has been already recognized, that only Balmikis will obtain scholarships.’ So I got a magistrate—an acquaintance—to make out a certificate saying ‘Now I am Balmiki.’ […] So when I got the Balmiki certificate, and again sent the form, then I got the scholarship. 38 Such stories were legion. Sometimes only the children’s surname or title was changed (from Lal Begi or Mehtar to Balmiki), other times the given name was changed as well. Not infrequently, the parents changed their names at the same time, in order to avoid scrutiny by admissions staff, or embarrassment to their children, on account of the mixture of musalmānā and hinduānā names in the same family. Ratan Lal ‘Sadhu’ (born in 1948), for instance, told me that: When I went to school, one of our community leaders said to me, ‘Your father’s name is Ali. This will not do, your classmates will laugh at you […] So in place of Ali, write Alok Nath.’ […] So then—my father’s real name [aslī nām] is Ali—then for school papers I wrote that my father’s name was Alok Nath. And to this day he’s known as Alok Nath.

Conclusion

39 If the above account appears to take a narrowly instrumentalist view of the politics of the Valmiki movement in Lucknow, it is because so many of the women and men who related to me the stories of their and their families’ renaming emphasized precisely this aspect. Not every front in the Hinduizing campaign looked like this: the efforts to encourage vegetarianism, to discourage the rites of Lal Beg, and to introduce cremation instead of burial, for example, made less frequent reference to the state and fewer direct appeals to calculations of self-interest, though the latter were by no means absent. As the case of the degs and bhagaunās was meant to illustrate, these and other domains of reform were also more hotly contested, and remain divisive issues in the community today.

40 But while meat remains popular at Balmiki weddings in Lucknow, burial continues to vie with cremation, and the rites of Lal Beg persist (albeit in increasingly secretive forms), the Islamicate repertoire of personal names with which the community formerly named its children, and the title Lal Begi itself, have virtually disappeared. In no other sphere of the Valmiki movement have the advocates of Hinduization achieved a more complete success. As we have seen, this had partly to do with the advantage hinduānā names gave their bearers in obtaining jobs in the municipality and in

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government hospitals and universities in the years following Partition—a consequence, in other words, of the normalization of anti-Muslim sentiment in the Congress administrations in UP and in Lucknow city government. This gives further support to the contention of Prashad and Jaoul that municipalities operated as crucial sites for the induction of the sanitation labour castes into the project of Hindu majoritarianism. 41 Even more than employment, though, we have seen that it was access to education that decisively influenced naming practices in the accounts of Lucknow Balmikis. This reveals a dimension of the political engineering of subaltern Hinduization hitherto neglected in the analysis of the Valmiki movement, and the literature on the postcolonial politics of caste and religion more broadly. The religiously exclusionary definition of the Scheduled Castes inscribed into law by the Constitution (Scheduled Caste) Order of 1950—a postcolonial echo of the Poona Pact—effectively brought into being a raft of powerful material incentives for Dalits to ‘profess’ to be Hindu, chief among them being scholarships and student fee exemptions. In the Congress dispensation of the 1950s onward, Ahmad and Ayesha had to become Ganesh and Gayatri to afford schooling. 42 Nominative politics, however, cut both ways. If the 1950 Order and the de facto policies of Congress municipal administrations ushered in a wave of transnomination and produced a generation of apparently Hindu youth, these conversions were not without their clandestine continuities. Recall the frank instrumentalism of Ratan Lal ‘Sadhu,’ who appreciated the ‘profit that accrued to us upon becoming Hindu,’ as well as his equally unguarded remark, ‘my father’s real name [aslī nām] is Ali.’ When the sanitation labour caste tradition of ‘undergoing protective discolouration’ is taken into account, the very ease with which the revolution in names was secured casts doubt on the nature of this apparent triumph of the Hindu majoritarian project.

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NOTES

1. All names of persons in Lucknow in this article have been changed—though the apparent ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ character of the names is carefully retained—to protect the identity of my informants. The only exceptions are public persons (the Member of Legislative Assembly

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Kanhaiya Lal Balmiki) and the late reformers Lalta Prasad (1923–2014) and Govind Prasad (1926– 2013), who requested, in our many interviews, to be named. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from recorded interviews conducted in Lucknow between February 2011 and May 2012 in Hindi/Urdu, and the English presented here is my translation of the same, with key terms provided in brackets. 2. As C.S. Adcock (2014: 14) rightly notes, ‘the premise, now enshrined in the Constitution of India and in much common-sense understanding, that Untouchables are Hindu by religion… was put in place with the agreement between Gandhi and Ambedkar in 1932.’ See also Conrad 2007: 198 and Lee 2015:Ch. IV. 3. The only caste categories that are more frequently mentioned than ‘Bhangi’ in the index of Gandhi’s Collected Works are ‘Harijan’ and ‘Brahman.’ 4. There has been a host of critical engagements with Srinivas’s concept over the last sixty years; for our purposes a few of the relevant critiques include Tambiah 1967, Lynch 1969, Guru 1984, and Roberts 2008. 5. Julahas adopted Islam in great numbers in the Sultanate and Mughal periods, becoming the single largest occupational Muslim caste of north India; Jats on a similar scale became Muslim and Sikh. See Ibbetson 1970, Eaton 1982. 6. Thus the first part of his famous declaration of the intention to convert: ‘I was born a Hindu.’ 7. In Greeven’s (1894: 43, 48) transliteration, Hindu ka dehra, Mussulman ki masjid; main sewun teri kachchhi marhei. At this point in the song, the speaker is ‘Ali and his addressee is Lal Beg. 8. In Youngson’s transliteration, Jon Hindu Ganga nu parsann/ Jon Makka Mussalmanan/ Shahi nam tere nu nun mannan/ Pind pind than banavan. Youngson translates the passage thus: ‘The Ganges Hindus fear, and Muslims make their weary pilgrimage to Mecca far, but thee the Shahis love and build to thee unnumbered shrines o’er all the crowded land.’ (Youngson 1906: 343) 9. Youngson’s transliteration of the original oral text is: Mainun Hindu na nere aun denge/ Mussalman na parhnge janaza/ Tu sun Khuda raja/ Main ummat rakhna chahunan. 10. Youngson’s transliteration: Roz Qiyamat waqt de/ Tainun milegi vadiai […]/ Ram te Rahim kian/ Chhap chhap jana/ Sava neze te din avega/ Haoe dozakh pana/ Par bihisht banake/ Samne vikhana/ Ummat teri bhajjke/Bihishti var jana. (Youngson 1906: 350–51) 11. MLA: Member of Legislative Assembly. MP: Member of Parliament. 12. MLC: Member of Legislative Council. 13. In this passage italics are used to indicate English words in Gauhar Lal’s otherwise Hindi remarks.

ABSTRACTS

Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, the sanitation labour castes of Lucknow radically altered their nominative practices, replacing Islamicate personal names with names in a Hindu style, and abandoning the caste title Lal Begi in favor of the surname Valmiki. Based on oral histories and ethnographic research with the Valmiki community in Lucknow, the article presents and evaluates evidence for how and why this transformation took place. Building on Nicolas Jaoul’s (2011: 280) insight into the ‘politically engineered’ nature of the consolidation of the sanitation

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labour castes under the sign of a Hindu sage, the article argues that Congress policy at the national level played a decisive role in the renaming of an entire swath of the Dalit population. At the same time, working with Ambedkar’s assessment of the Valmiki movement as ‘clandestine conversion’ and ‘undergoing protective discolouration,’ it is argued that the nominative Hinduization of the sanitation labour castes may not constitute the Hindu majoritarian triumph that it appears to be.

INDEX

Keywords: Dalits, naming, religious identity, Sanskritization, Valmiki, Lal Begi, Congress, Ambedkar, Lucknow

AUTHOR

JOEL LEE

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

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Muslim Women’s Rights Activists’ Visibility: Stretching the Gendered Boundaries of the Public Space in the City of Lucknow

Mengia Hong Tschalaer

One thousand four hundred years ago, at the time of the prophet Muhammed, Muslim women participated in wars, worked as nurses and doctors, owned and operated businesses and were actively involved in public religious life. I am fighting to get our quranic rights back and to make Muslim women visible in public again! 1 These are words of the Muslim women’s rights activist Naish Hasan, co-founder of the Indian Muslim Women’s Movement (Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan or BMMA), established in 2007, in an interview conducted at her home near Lucknow University in winter 2010. Hasan’s claim to work toward stretching the boundaries of the politically contested public legal space via struggles over competing definitions of religious knowledge and authority1 reflects a central plank in the agenda of Muslim women’s activism in the city of Lucknow. For example, Shaista Amber, president of the Lucknow- based All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB) established in 2005, insists that the Muslim leaderships’ misogynist interpretations of the Quran and the Hadith prevent women from participating in pubic religious life. In a similar vein, Shehnaz Sidrat, president of Lucknow’s oldest Muslim women’s organisation founded under colonial rule in 1934, Bazme Khawateen (women’s club), takes issue with patriarchal interpretations depicting women’s active participation in the public space as an onslaught on their modesty and, hence, as a religious ‘sin.’ Recent fatwas released by the eminent Lucknow-based Sunni seminaries Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama reflect the patriarchal leaning in the ulema’s (community of eminent religious authorities) interpretations of the religious texts. These fatwas (legal opinions) strongly advise

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women against becoming a qazi (judge), a mufti (law expert), or an alima (scholar), and discourage them from praying in public mosques. By making their bodies seen and their voices heard within Lucknow’s contested public space, these middle-class Muslim women blatantly disrupt generally accepted assumptions of women’s respectability, egalitarianism, freedom, and equality.

2 To open up questions on ‘who’ has the authority to interpret the Islamic scripts and of ‘what’ is the ‘true Islam’ currently dominates the agenda of Muslim women’s activists not only in the city of Lucknow—but also in the Muslim world more generally. Against the backdrop of the proliferation of hard-liner patriarchal groups, the spread of fundamentalist thought and practices, and the growth or reappearance of political Islam, Muslim women’s rights activism worldwide is geared toward the re-reading of the Islamic texts and history so as to deconstruct ideas of womanhood in Islam (Al- Ali 2012). By deconstructing gendered Islamic discourse, these Muslim women’s rights activists, often termed as ‘Islamic feminists’ (Badran 2008; Mirza 2008), produce alternative proposals of Islamic justice that challenge the authority and power of conservative religious circles and/or the state.2 The aim of many Muslim women’s rights organisations and networks in India is similar: to challenge the masculine bent of current interpretations of the religious texts and history (Kirmani 2009; Vatuk 2008). In India, Muslim women-led networks and organisations started emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s in urban centres (Kirmani 2011: 74). At that time, religious and political conservatism was growing. In this context, the orthodox All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) reduced the category of Muslim woman to a symbol of a religious tradition that needs to be ‘protected’ from the onslaught of Hindu nationalism (Sunder Rajan 2003). This political process of homogenising and solidifying Islamic discourse and tradition adversely affected Muslim women’s position under state law. The lack of advocates and supporters in the secular Indian women’s movement for the cause of improving the lot of Muslim women sparked some middle- and upper class Muslim women to split from the women’s movement in the late 1990s and find their own women’s organisations (e.g. Muslim Women’s Forum in Delhi, the Mumbai-based Women’s Research and Action Group, the Muslim Women’s Rights Network, Awaaz-e- Niswan, AIMWPLB, and the BMMA) (Kirmani 2009; Hasan 1998).3 Although still few in numbers, this ‘nascent Islamic feminists movement,’ in the words of Sylvia Vatuk (2008), or ‘minority feminism,’ as Nida Kirmani (2011a, 2011b, 2009) terms it, has in the last decade gained considerable visibility within the public space.4 In fact, women’s activism and organising around the Gudiya 2004 and Imrana 2005 cases contributed to the growth in Indian Muslim women’s activism since the 1980s.5 3 Within the last decade, the city of Lucknow has—like no other city in India— experienced a proliferation of Muslim women’s organisations which aim at publicly overturning chauvinistic ideals of women’s subjectivity in Islam within a contested socio-political landscape. Such a landscape includes the patriarchal state, the conservative male-dominated AIMPLB that claims to represent the entire Muslim community at the national level, and the equally male-dominated more recently formed (in 2005) All India Shia Personal Law Board. The current rise of political Islam in the city of Lucknow, nourished by ideological tensions between Sunni and Shia groups (Freitag 1989: 249), galvanised both Sunni and Shia women to openly destabilise relations of power and question established ideas of gender equality in Islam. However, whereas Shia women tend to debate issues of Islamic law and practice within the

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intimate comfort zone of their traditional spiritual meetings called majlis, which usually take place on religious sites such as mosque courtyards, Sunni women have more recently carried their struggle for justice into the politically and ideologically contested public sphere. The presidents and founding members of the AIMWPLB, the BMMA, and Bazme Khawateen, which are at the centre of this study, are amongst the most vocal Muslim women’s activists in the city. Interestingly, despite being co-players in a project of decentering the AIMPLB, they see themselves as competitors, rather than auxiliaries in their struggle for justice within an Islamic framework. These activists prefer different Islamic clothing styles, live in different neighborhoods, use different ideological and political strategies to vie for the support of Muslim women (and men) within a highly competitive political and discursive field, and, not surprisingly, cultivate unique relationships with the state and with Muslim leadership. In short, Muslim women’s activists’ positioning is neither uniform nor simple, but fragmented along lines of politics and religious ideology. 4 Drawing from the findings of 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the city of Lucknow,6 this paper looks closely and comparatively at the manner in which the presidents and founding members of the AIMWPLB, the BMMA, and Bazme Khawateen, create space for their activism within contested local and national contexts. I argue that these public contestations over the meaning of womanhood, freedom, egalitarianism, and equity evince the fluidity of the categories of Islam and women’s rights on the ground—revealing Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’ (Asad 2009 [1986]) rather than as a fixed system of belief and practice. Whereas scholarship on Islam, gender and law in India tends to discuss Muslim women’s rights struggles in relationship to the state and through the lens of Muslim women as the oppressed subject (Patak and Sunder Rajan 1989; Hasan 1998, 1999; Agnes 1999; Sunder Rajan 2003; Chhachhi 2005), this micro-level study explores the multiple strategies of public self-representation used by these Muslim women’s activists to contest widely-accepted notions of Muslim women as relegated to the private sphere and with no political agency. Such analysis illustrates the multiple positions of Muslim women’s rights activism—an aspect often neglected in liberal and modernist scholarship on Islamic gender justice struggles.

1. Muslim Women’s Activism in Lucknow – Manufacturing Respectability within the Public Space

5 The visible Sunni woman who accesses the public space purposely—she organises political rallies, teaches about Islam in parks and mosques, and engages in policy making—stretches the gendered boundaries of what is considered to be a ‘good’ (shareeef) or ‘bad’ (haram) woman in ultra-conservative discourse—as for example promoted by the AIMPLB. Within such discourse, notions of the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ woman converge with the idea of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ sphere. All too often, scholarship on Islam and gender theorises Muslim women’s entrance into the public sphere as radical and new and as breaking with core ideas of Islamic ideology (Papaneck 1982; Forbes 1982; Minault 1982). However, as I will show below, to frame Muslim women’s subjectivity within the binary of the public and private sphere neglects the intermediary spaces within which these Muslim women’s activists currently negotiate political agency as Islamic subjects. Phadke, Ranade, and Khan (2009) make an

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important observation in this regard. Drawing on an intersectional analysis of gender and space in the city of Mumbai, the authors point out that women who self-assertively enter the public space tend to represent themselves as ‘bearers of all moral and cultural values that define the family/community/nation’ (2009: 187). However, instead of analysing such public self-representations as a form of backwardness—as modernists tend to do—they analyse the transfer of such moral discourse, or discourse of respectability, into the public space as an opportunity for women’s participation within Mumbai’s strongly male-dominated public space.

6 Similarly, more recent works on Islamic feminism view Muslim women’s goal to achieve respectability in public as a means to create space for political activism, and consequently agency. For instance, the political scientist Nilüfer Göle (1996) analyses the Islamist veiling movement of university students in Turkey during the post-1983 period as an incident where a specific Muslim identity is constructed within the public space. In this context, she convincingly argues, the veil emerges as a strategy for enlarging women’s space for political activism in the context of modernisation and liberal aspirations of nation-building in Turkey. Similarly, Saba Mahmood in her ethnography Politics of Piety (2005) offers a compelling exposition of the possibilities such embodiments of religious practices hold for political agency. Mahmood’s work draws on the example of a grassroots women’s piety movement in the mosques of Cairo to show that women’s embodied religious practices are not simply a reflection of their personal beliefs, but the very means through which subjectivities are cultivated and agency acquired. Mahmood argues that this form of pious subjectivity, although seemingly incommensurate with assumptions of the liberal subject undergirding feminist scholarship, does not stifle women’s agency. In fact, it constitutes an altogether different form thereof. Such a conceptual framework, as developed by critical feminist scholarship, is helpful in understanding Lucknow’s Muslim women’s activists’ claim to assert agency through the embodiment of respectability—a claim which is often couched in a symbolic language of piety. 7 Let me illustrate. Shehnaz Sidrat (Bazme Khawateen) is a former interior designer who later took over Bazme Khawateeen, or the women’s club, founded by her mother-in-law in colonial India. In the position of the club’s president she designed her own ‘modern Islamic dress,’ as she calls it. This dress consists of a knee-length and loose beige coat, loose trousers (salwaar), and a colourful or black scarf tightly wrapped around her face. When in public, Sidrat often complements this outfit with a pair of big sunglasses. For Sidrat this kind of dress conforms to the Islamic tenets of ‘modesty’ and ‘simplicity’— attributes that she considers key for women to maintain respectability within the public space. This is to say that Muslim women manufacture their religious and gender identity in public within the complexly layered gendered hierarchies that leave unquestioned the concept of sexual difference as established and re-produced through the idea of the ‘private’ and the ‘public.’ The dress that covers her entire body allows Sidrat to forge a specific ideal of the good Muslim woman and pay respect to the clergy affiliated with Lucknow-based Islamic Sunni seminary Firangi Mahal—an institution to which her family is linked through ties of kinship. 8 Similarly, Shaista Amber, the president of the AIMWPLB, substantially changed her way of dressing when she became president of the AIMWPLB in 2005. As a wife of an army officer, and dressed in expensive sarees and wearing the family jewellery, she was in the line of fire of the criticism by the clergy affiliated with the Darul Uloom Ndawatul. ‘In an

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editorial of some Urdu newspaper published by the Deobandi,’ Amber recalls, ‘it was said that my work and lifestyle were non-Islamic and that I spoke of non-Islamic things. The Deobandi called me a deharia, which designates a person who doesn’t believe in any religion.’7 In an attempt to counter such accusations, Amber donned the headscarf and the simple ankle-length coat. For Amber, the bodily transformation from the upper- class and spoiled officer-wife to the ‘respectable Muslim women’s activist’ secured her the respect and trust from the Sunni community, and allowed her to engage in politics without being labelled as a ‘bad’ (kharab) woman or a non-believer. Similarly to Sidrat, Amber ‘bargains with patriarchy’ (Kandiyoti 1991b)—that is, she conforms to patriarchal ideas of women’s modesty and purity—to secure the legitimacy of her presence within the public space. 9 There exists a convergence in methodological terms between Sidrat’s and Amber’s, and the conservative clergy’s deployment of the discourse of ‘the good Muslim woman.’ Both discourses are anchored in a hierarchic framework of male supremacy. However, Sidrat and Amber instrumentalise such discourse differently. Whereas Sidrat activates the image of the ‘good’ Muslim woman not only to facilitate her activism, but also to express her respect toward the religious Sunni clergy in Lucknow, Amber mobilises such an image to gain legitimacy as a representative of Muslim women among Muslim groups in Lucknow and beyond. Critics of Islamic feminism, such as Qudsia Mirza (2008), lament that such ‘bargains with patriarchy’ could be detrimental to the reformist endeavour of these women to secure women’s social, economic and, political rights. 10 Naish Hasan, founding member of the BMMA shares such concern. She responds with alarm to the growing number of Muslim activists who challenge public space hierarchies by ‘uncritically submitting their bodies to the dictates of a bunch of self- appointed religious leaders’ (read: the orthodox Sunni and Shia clergy), as she bluntly states.8 Without denying the importance the female body occupies in Islamic thought and practice, Hasan stresses the flexibility the religious texts offer for the interpretation of what codifies the ‘respectable’ Muslim woman. Although fighting a similar fight as Sidrat and Amber, Hasan focuses on the mind and not the body as a tool for destabilising ultra-orthodox notions of the public space as exclusively reserved for men. For Hasan, the terrain of struggle is the pious mind rather than the body, and her focus is inward. Therefore, Hasan questions the idea of space arguing; ‘respect and dignity can be instilled through the pious mind alone…. There is no need to cover our entire bodies.’ Like most Muslims in Lucknow and elsewhere in India, Hasan wears the salwaar-kurta: a pair of loose fitting trousers combined with a long, knee-length shirt. She additionally covers her chest with a long shawl (dupatta). This typical Indian dress is common as well among Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, and Christians.9 11 So, eager to amalgamate their public activism with their identities as ‘good’ Muslim women, these activists participate in a complex process of self-representation wherein the feminine Islamic attributes of simplicity and respectability are infused into their public self-representations as autonomous and independent activists. These different interpretations of the ‘good’ Muslim woman reveal once again Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’ (Asad 2009 [1986]) or, an area of contestation. Moreover, these specific representations illustrate the fact that the formation of subjectivities, religious identities, and political agency are situational, rather than rigid. However, women’s visibility within the public space alone does not (yet) substantially disturb the social

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order of the public space—or translate in women’s rights to access it (Phadke et al. 2009). Rather, there needs to be a radical shift away from a conception of the (Islamic) public space as an inherently dangerous space for women toward a feminist consciousness of the public space that establishes women’s right to the public space as a ‘fundamental claim for a more inclusive citizenship’ (Phadke et al. 2009: 186). 12 To this end, between 2005 and 2008, Sidrat, Amber, and Hasan have deployed the Hindi, Urdu, and English language press to push back widely-accepted monolithic renderings of Muslim women as a symbol of a religious tradition and as relegated to the private sphere. Using the media as an input channel, these women have—to different extents— upset monolithic ideas of gender and the Islamic public space. In what follows I focus on India’s English language press as an analytical lens through which to analyse the manner in which these women initiate a more public debate of women’s rights to an equal share of religious public life.10

2. Muslim Women’s Rights Activists’ Public Visibility and the Media

13 Only a decade ago, Muslim women’s voices hardly surfaced in India’s English language press. Similarly to Western media coverage, India’s English language press had heretofore employed a discursive economy in their representation of the issue of Islam and women that constructed Muslim women as stripped of their civil rights: deemed to wear the burqa, confined to their homes with no access to education, deprived of political participation and victims of triple talaq.11 Sabina Kidwai (2005: 392) argues that even the positive media coverage of Muslim women’s issues typically affords ‘no other face for Muslim women than one embodying stereotypes.’ Although Indian media’s emphasis upon veiling and upon triple talaq is still alive and well, there currently exists alongside it reportage that engages ‘positively’ with issues of Muslim women. Taking into account the request for greater debate on rights of Muslim women’s activists and academics, the media started creating room for making visible disagreement amongst different sections of Muslims, as well as amongst Muslim women’s activists, in contemporary India. The result is reportage that goes beyond the political controversies and that is far more progressive and rational (Kidwai 2005: 383). Such coverage increasingly features interviews with and stories about Muslim women activists and organisations (Schneider 2009: 62; Kidwai 2005: 391). This coverage offered what is often considered from a modernist-liberal view a ‘new’ identity for Muslim women: that of a heterogeneous group of individuals who critically analyse and argue for social, political, economic, and legal reform, all from varying perspectives.

14 Sidrat, Hasan, and Amber have taken advantage of this growing tendency in India’s English language press to highlight their voices and the activities of their organisation as a vital part of public life. Within a transnational media space, where Islam predominantly appears in conjunction with imagery of war, terrorism, and women’s subjugation, Muslim women’s activists and Islamic feminists tend to emerge as harbingers of ‘women’s empowerment,’ ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom.’ Using liberal language, the English language press portrays Muslim women’s activism in terms of its progression toward the liberal goal of absolute equality—or shows the great distance it still has to go. Through the media, Muslim women’s activists discuss new trends in religious thought on gender and the public space; women too could participate and

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perform hitherto men-assigned religious duties as knowledgeable Muslim women and Indian citizens.

Guiding prayers for women in the public women’s (zenana) park

15 Shehnaz Sidrat (Bazme Khawateen) made national headlines when she invited journalists to report about the prayers that she has been leading for women in Lucknow’s only women’s park (zenana park).12 Located at the heart of the city of Lucknow but sheltered by high walls, the park was deemed an appropriate space because of its capacity to shield its female occupants from the gaze of men. The idea was to offer women a space outside the home in which to congregate, learn about the Quran, sing religious songs, recite poems, drink tea and pray. Men were not allowed to participate in these activities. I will note that the influential clergy in Lucknow affiliated with the AIMPLB, with its conservative interpretations of purdah, strongly discourages women from praying in public. Glorifying an image of the Muslim woman as a good mother and housewife, the clergy sees a conflict between women’s freedom to pray in public and their responsibilities as good homemakers.13 Challenging the clergy’s discursive economy that locates Muslim women entirely within the domestic sphere, Sidrat flung open the gate of the zenana park for journalists eager to report about an unusual woman-led collective prayer in 2004.

16 Every year, at the occasion of eid (feast of breaking the fast), Sidrat organises a collective prayer in the park, entitled Salaate Tasbeeh. This is a special prayer—one that the devout believe may purge them of all sins. Her personal initiative to read the Salaate Tasbeeh, a privilege otherwise reserved for men amongst Sunnis in Lucknow, met the interest of the media. Keen to bring to the fore ‘the other face of Islam,’ The Times of India described this unconventional prayer, attended by several hundred Muslim women, as ‘a testimony to the free spirit of Lucknow women, who have ensured that it survived male scepticism.’ Giving voice to Sidrat and some of the participants, The Times portrayed the event as an opportunity for Muslim women to ‘bond’ and to demonstrate ‘female emancipation.’14 This coverage applied a modernist discursive framework within which Muslim women’s inroads into an otherwise male-dominated arena were labelled ‘modern’ and posited as a form of ‘empowerment.’ 17 In our interview, however, Sidrat frames her intervention within the public space beyond the binaries of women’s empowerment versus Islamic patriarchy. As she tells me, Muslim women have offered namaz in the zenana park for over 75 years. Due to the relative seclusion of the park, the religious clergy had never opposed this. As long as the gate was shut and the women remained invisible, there was no uproar. However, when she became president of Bazme Khawateen in 1994, Sidrat decided to disrupt the spatial boundaries that shielded Muslim women’s activism from the public eye for so long. Arguing that ‘purdah [here the term purdah is used in terms of the spatial segregation of the sexes] is not a hindrance for publicising Muslim women’s public prayers,’ she started to invite the press to the weekly meetings. She explains that her motivation behind this initiative was less to solely disrupt the well-travelled imagery of the subjugated Muslim woman than to contribute to the creation of a feminist consciousness of the public space and the fact that women too can engage in religious activities outside the domestic sphere. To her mind, common understandings of the public space in Islam with their specific configurations of gendered subjectivities and

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senses of belonging have to be de-naturalised. The publicising of Sidrat reading namaz is, I argue, transformative as it de-centres—at least to a certain extent—the public space as a site for normalising male supremacy.

Construction of a women’s mosque

18 As mentioned, Shaista Amber is yet another Muslim women’s rights activist who currently strives to establish a feminist consciousness of public religious life. Like Sidrat, Amber has sought to create a public space for Muslim women to lead in worship, but the way she approached the problem is somewhat different. In 2008 Amber built a women’s mosque on an empty plot of land near Lucknow. Drawing inspiration from STEPS, a Tamil Nadu-based women’s development organisation that set up India’s first exclusive women’s mosque in 2004,15 Amber works to create a space for women where they have the opportunity to ‘share and discuss their concerns with peers other than the family’ and to ‘offer namaz in the mosque,’ as she says. In the city of Lucknow, as in most parts of India, to pray in the mosque is a privilege generally reserved for men.16 Needless to say, the construction of the construction of the women’s mosque created a stir among the religious elite in Lucknow. Scholars affiliated with the Darul Uloom Deoband in Lucknow, for instance, argue that such ‘revolutionary methods to communicate with Allah’ compromise women’s honour and reputation and create social evil.’17

19 For Amber, such rhetoric does not originate from the religious texts. Rather, she argues, the clergy deploys the image of the sexualised female that poses a danger to the order of the public space as a means to ‘keep women in the dark about their rights’ and to ‘curtail women’s freedom of movement.’18 Evoking the iconic Islamic figure Hazrat Bibi Hafsa, one of the wives of prophet Muhammed who acted as an imam and led women in offering public namaz, 19 Amber profoundly challenges such imagery. ‘A women’s mosque,’ Amber explains, allows for women to discuss their concerns outside the family. It is an opportunity for women to mingle and share their views on religion and everyday life. Such a mosque therefore fosters women’s self-esteem and community feeling. Through prayers, women can learn a lot about their rights and duties of wives and daughters and husbands and sons. To withhold women from praying in public, therefore, violates women’s right to information. Also, in the future I intend to have a female imam leading prayers in this mosque. 20 In order to finance the construction of the mosque, Amber sold her heirloom jewellery handed down to her at the time of her wedding. ‘A maulana (Muslim religious scholar) with a big name,’ she proudly asserts, ‘laid down the foundation stone of the mosque in 2006.’ The mosque is a modest white-painted one-storey building featuring a sunlit prayer hall and a hostel (dharamsala). Its minaret—long and thin in shades of green and white—rises high in the air, dominating the otherwise undeveloped and still affordable area near the Lucknow airport. A Pakistani maulana inaugurated the mosque in 2008 in the presence of ‘a lot of journalists and reporters,’ as Amber tells me proudly.

21 Amber strategically involved the media to address public opinion herself. As a result, the English newspaper The Telegraph praised this unusual women’s mosque as the ‘need of the hour’ and as a well-travelled concept that is ‘finally knocking on the door of Lucknow, the centre of Islamic learning.’20 With the support of the media, Amber points to the new political possibilities such a mosque could open up for women in a

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religiously conservative city such as Lucknow. She envisions it redefining the possibilities for women’s participation in public religious life. Accordingly, the media reportage stressed the relevance of such a women’s mosque as a marker of progress and as a timely concept representing Muslim women’s possibilities in India’s democratic political system. India’s English language press refers to such intervention within the public space as ‘highly relevant’ and as a ‘promise’ for women’s future integration into a male-dominated society. 22 However, ‘change needs time,’ demurs Amber. ‘Women and men in Lucknow have to realise that the prohibition for women to pray in public, which has been imposed upon them by the mullahs, only serves the interest of the clerics but not the community.’ In fact, notwithstanding the positive media coverage, women did not frequent Amber’s mosque on a regular basis until two years after it was built. At my visit in 2009 there were only one or two women offering namaz in the mosque behind the men-folk. However, at my second visit in 2011, the number of women who joined the men in offering namaz had visibly increased. Indeed, instead of just one or two there were now a handful of Muslim women from Lucknow and nearby villages who had come to pray in the mosque. One was an economics student from Lucknow University, who had just recently began coming there; she informed me that she liked to worship Allah while in the company of men and women. She said that offering namaz in public gave her a sense of belonging and community. Moreover, she enjoyed discussing matters concerning women and religion with people who, like her, are truly devoted to Islam. It should be noted as well here, that both women learned about the mosque via newspapers and television.21 23 The question of whether or not Muslim women should be allowed to pray in public is widely discussed by Muslims from all over the world. In fact, a closer look at online platforms such as islamweb.net, islamqa.info, or islamicislamic.com reveals the transnational debates underway amongst Muslims worldwide. These platforms serve as discussion boards, where believers ask ‘knowledgeable’ Muslims for advice on various issues ranging from the Quran, the Shariat, family, politics to health and science. The construction of the mosque is therefore more than just a local phenomenon; it is a part of the ‘social life,’ to take the phrase of Abu-Lughod (2010: 2), of international struggles and discussions on Muslim women’s rights taking place across distance in geographical spatiality and religious orientation. That is to say, Amber’s mosque is a visible marker of Muslim women’s struggles for social inclusion and integrity as currently debated locally, nationally, and transnationally.

A female qazi and an unconventional wedding

24 The story of Naish Hasan’s unorthodox wedding offers yet another example of how Muslim women’s rights activists strive for a more inclusive public space. On August 30, 2008, Naish Hasan achieved (trans-)local celebrity status with her unorthodox marriage (nikah) to a PhD scholar from Aligarh Muslim University. The wedding was unorthodox for several reasons. First, Hasan altered her mode of dress. Deciding to break with the well-accepted custom amongst Muslims in which the bride completely hides her face behind the veil during the ceremony, Hasan instead donned an embroidered red saree. The end of the saree (pallu) only loosely covered her long hair, leaving her face revealed. Furthermore, Hasan abstained from wearing ‘big, big jewellery,’ which in her opinion, reduces otherwise contracting agents to mere objects of the religious tradition.22

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Second, at Hasan’s wedding the BMMA introduced its version of the ‘secular’ marriage contract (nikahnama) to the public. 23 This contract asks for registration and makes specific stipulations regarding divorce, maintenance and property. However, the third and most important reason that this wedding received such enormous national and international media coverage was the fact that it was solemnised by a female qazi. Dissatisfied with the omnipresence of men at Muslim marriages, Hasan asked Syeda Hameed—a founding member of the Muslim Women’s Forum, a member of the Planning Commission and a former member of the National Commission on Women—to solemnise her marriage. Considering such a well-educated and knowledgeable woman as Hameed as well-qualified to take over the function of a qazi, Hasan saw no need for a man to perform the rites. After having received approval from reform-oriented maulanas in India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, Hameed agreed to perform the nikah.

25 Just a few days prior to the marriage, Hasan mentioned her unusual wedding ceremony to a friend of hers—a journalist. The next day, the story was on the front page of a local newspaper. The article created a big stir among Muslims in Lucknow. Muslim women’s organisations, including the AIMWPLB, supported the marriage. The clergy, as well as some scholars of the influential Sunni-dominated AIMPLB, conversely labelled the event, which would considerably push the radius of women’s activities into the public space, ‘useless’ and ‘unnecessary.’24 AIMPLB executive committee member Naseema Ali Iqtedar Khan said there is no need for a female qazi to perform the wedding if a man is otherwise available.25 Fauzia Naseema, also a member of the AIMPLB executive committee, was even more critical. She dismissed Hasan’s wedding as ‘nothing else than a media stunt.’26 Meanwhile, the orthodox Lucknow Idgah Committee went as far as to deem the marriage ‘invalid’ and the ceremony a ‘cruel joke on Islamic law.’27 These voices reflect the lines of fragmentation that run through the Muslim community, laying bare the heterogeneity of perspectives on gender in Islam that exist on the ground. 26 Hasan believes this unprecedented wedding to have been the first of its kind in India, if not in the entire Muslim world, and it continued to arouse wide media interest. The national press The Hindu described Hasan’s wedding as ‘unheard of,’ while the Telegraph likened its effects to ‘smashing a centuries-old glass ceiling.’ India Today dubbed the wedding as ‘breaking with tradition’ and the Times of India wrote that Naish Hasan’s wedding ceremony ‘breaks many shackles.’28 Television stations all over India broadcasted footage of Hasan’s wedding, which can now be downloaded from YouTube29 and other websites. The footage neatly shows the crowd of journalists wrangling for a premium spot from which to capture the moment when ‘the woman qazi creates history in Lucknow.’ 30 The English press, without exception, viewed this unorthodox marriage as ‘modern,’ ‘progressive,’ ‘provocative’ and as a true ‘challenge’ to conservative conceptualisations of women’s identity in Islam. Within this media explosion, the protagonist, Naish Hasan, surfaces as independent, modern, self- assertive, and outspoken—qualities which challenge conservative and orthodox interpretations of the feminine ideal that stresses female modesty and subservience. In a personal conversation, Naish Hasan expressed her gratitude toward the media for publicising her unusual wedding. ‘It is only through the dissemination of positive imagery of women,’ she asserted, ‘that the gendered boundaries proscribed by the religious authorities can be effectively probed.’

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27 This wedding, like the mosque and the public prayers, shatters hegemonic Islamic ideology that normalises women’s inability to perform religious duties, or any other functions in public life. Using the technique of ijtihad (interpretive science of juridical reasoning), or, what Qudsia Mirza (2008: 31) terms the ‘cultural revival’ strategy, these Lucknow-based Muslim women’s activists have successfully demonstrated the possibilities that Islamic ideology holds for women within the public space, and they have shrewdly enlisted the media as a tool to ensure that their positions reached as broad an audience as possible. In short, such publicly visible interventions create an important environment for Muslim women to work toward a more inclusive conceptualisation of the public Islamic space. I therefore argue that current efforts by Muslim women’s rights activists to resist widely-accepted ideas of Muslim women’s restricted access to the public space, using religious discourse and rhetoric to do so, open up new possibilities for political agency.

3. Women’s Spaces within the Patriarchal Legal Landscape

28 The comparative analysis of Muslim women activists’ multiple strategies to stretch the gendered boundaries of the public space, renders insight into dimensions of power that profoundly shape Muslim women’s participation in the domain of politics, law, and religion in contemporary India. The three Muslim women’s activists at the centre of this paper challenge the authority of the orthodox clergy with their overt representations of alternative proposals of women’s possibilities in Islam—through embodied dimensions of knowledge production. They provocatively challenge hegemonic ideas on gender. Instead of accepting widely-accepted definitions of purdah, or Islamic modesty, they re-frame them. Instead of complying with the dictate of Muslim women’s invisibility, either by staying at home or hiding their bodies underneath a loose niqab, they point to the quranic female icons that have earned respect with their contributions to public life. Through intellectual engagement with religious texts, these activists probe the misogynist understanding of public space. Specifically, by enlisting the media to circulate their alternative interpretations of women’s rights in Islam, Sidrat, Hasan, and Amber are currently working toward the democratisation of the political and legal space—destabilising the political power wielded by various orthodox factions. In short, using the Indian mass media as an input channel, these Lucknow-based Muslim women’s activists work toward carving out spaces of autonomy from which to demonstrate the possibilities that Islamic ideology holds for women within the public (and the private) space.

29 In its abstractions, these activists’ approach points toward an understanding of the flexibility of Islamic ideology and practice that is indicative of the unevenness of the categories of justice and gender within ideologically contested legal and political sites (Asad 2009 [1986]). Sidrat, Amber, and Hasan do not feel uncomfortable with their religious beliefs and precepts; rather, it is the power configuration that hinders their participation within the public space that sits uncomfortably with them and hinders their full participation in religious life. So instead of rejecting religion as a framework through which change can be achieved—as Western liberal feminists would do—they self-assertively appropriate religious language and practice to establish a women- friendly consciousness of gender relations in Islam.31 Muslim women’s activists’ efforts

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to consciously reshape women’s subjectivity through a religious framework not only destabilises hegemonic ideas on women in Islam, but also contributes to the pluralisation of Islamic thought and practice on a (trans-)national and local level. Muslim women’s activists in the city of Lucknow see Islamic cultural practice as ‘object of humanistic inquiry,’ according to the legal anthropologist Annelise Riles (2005: 1032), rather than a fixed and unchangeable ideology. In order to successfully challenge widely-accepted configurations of gender and power relations, these activists have to convincingly demonstrate that Islamic culture and practice are not static, but can be adjusted so as to secure women’s respectability, egalitarianism, freedom, and equality.

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NOTES

1. Santos (2002: 360) defines power as social relations of interests and knowledge. What makes social relations an exercise of power, however, is, according to Santos (2002: 356–362), drawing on Foucault, the unequal distribution of knowledge that exists among individuals and/or organisations. According to Foucault (2010: 174–175), power and knowledge directly imply one another as there are no power relations without the correlative field of knowledge. Nor is there any knowledge that does not presuppose as well as constitute power relations. 2. In the context of the Middle East and Northern Africa there exists a large body of scholarship on Islamic feminism. See for example Margot Badran (1995) for Egypt, Anouar Majid (2002) for Morocco and Valentine M. Moghadam (2002), Ziba Mir-Hosseini (1999) or Afsaneh Najmabadi (1993) for Iran. 3. Muslim women’s rights activism in India is by no means a new phenomenon, but dates back to colonial times. Back then some elite reform-oriented Muslim women discussed issues of education and purdah in elite ‘clubs’ (Minault 1998; Lateef 1990). However, Muslim women’s rights organisations and networks that openly contest misogynistic interpretations of the religious texts as well as Muslim women’s political and economic discrimination and marginalisation – issues that are by and large left unaddressed by the state as well as the Muslim leadership – emerged only in the aftermath of Shah Bano in the 1980s (Kirmani 2009: 76). 4. Shaista Amber, Shehnaz Sidrat, and Naish Hasan all see themselves as activists rather than feminists. Although acknowledging the fact that a lot of their activism corresponds with liberal feminists’ endeavours to further women’s participation in the spheres of politics and law, they strongly feel that a ‘radical’ feminist label could discredit their community membership. 5. The first case concerned the 28-year-old Imrana, mother of five children, who accused her father-in-law of raping her in June 2005 in a small village in Uttar Pradesh. In this case, the jati- panchayat decided that by having had sex with her father-in-law, Imrana had in fact become the mother of her husband. Her husband was henceforth haram or illegal. Imrana ignored the decision made by the jati-panchayat and continued to live with her husband. As a response, the leading Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband issued a fatwa (legal opinion) based on the Hanafi- school of Islamic jurisprudence, stating that Imrana is no longer rightfully married to her husband. The second case concerns Gudiya, who was carrying the child of her current husband when her presumed-dead first husband returned after five years from the Kargil war. In this particular case, the elders of the village council forbade Gudiya to stay with her husband of three years, whose baby she was expecting at that time. Instead, in the name of Islam, the religious authorities ordered Gudiya to return to her soldier husband to whom she was originally married for only two weeks before he was called to service. The attempts of her second husband to

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reinstate the marriage were futile, and Gudiya died a year later of blood poisoning, at the age of 26 (Kirmani 2009: 74). 6. I conducted over 70 open and semi–structured interviews with members and representatives of the AIMPLB, the AISPLB, the above-mentioned Muslim women’s rights organisations, and the state courts. These interviews were conducted in English, Hindi, or Urdu. 7. Interview with Shaista Amber by the author, Lucknow, 15 December 2009. 8. Interview with Naish Hasan by the author, Lucknow, 26 January 2010. 9. Of course, within an orthodox and conservative institutional environment, Hasan subjects herself to criticism on the part of mainly the ultra-orthodox Muslim clergy. For example, in April 2010 the orthodox seminary Darul Uloom, Deoband, India, issued a controversial and highly criticised fatwa, which forbade women to work in the public sector and enter politics without wearing the full-body veil (hijab). See also Yoginder Sikand’s discussion on the Darul Uloom’s fatwa (http://www.countercurrents.org/sikand140510.htm, accessed 11 November 2012). 10. One reason for my focus on India’s English language press is that it is, compared to local Hindi and Urdu newspapers, easily accessible. Nationally and internationally well-respected newspapers such as The Times of India, India Today, The Hindu, or The Telegraph are readily available online. Another reason for focusing on India’s English language press is the fact that all three activists discussed in this paper were eager to explore the possibilities that national and international reportage offered for their activism beyond their locality. Often, Sidrat, Amber, and Hasan pitched their stories to both the national English and local Urdu and Hindi press so as to maximise their outreach, and strengthen the voices of women’s activists in India and abroad. It is, however, important to keep in mind that such exclusive focus on English sources comes with certain limitations. First, it narrows the scope of my analysis to the reportage produced for India’s English-speaking elite. Second, such reportage tends to follow Western opinion-making— reproducing modernist liberal perceptions of Islam and women. During my research I also collected and translated Hindi and Urdu newspaper articles which appeared between 2009 and 2011. These reportages, mostly concerned with the various rallies, workshops and seminars that have been organised by Sidrat, Amber or Hasan, were very useful for analysing some of the contests and dissensions that exist amongst Muslims in Lucknow regarding issues of gender- related religious practices and ideologies. 11. The reporting by the mass media in the West has suffered from the same misinterpretations and misrepresentations of Muslim women, which has substantially contributed to their stereotyping as victims and as mute. For instance, Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) has criticised the ways in which the media and the U.S. government have deployed the popular standard knowledge about Muslim women that portrays them as oppressed, as forced to wear the burqa and as relegated to the domestic sphere in their rhetoric on the war in Afghanistan (2002: 785). Similarly, Katherine Bullock (2002: 122–133), who analysed the representations of Iraqi women in articles that were published in the New York Times since the official beginning of the war, argues that in the context of such press releases Islam and Muslim women have been subject to strong normative and stereotyping discourses. She asserts that the trope of the covered female body emerged as a yardstick according to which progress is measured. Along such lines, Islam is depicted as incompatible with Western notions of secularism and liberalism (2002: 89). Such representations of Muslim women were also criticised for being Orientalist (Said 2003 [1978]). For instance, postcolonial scholars such as Homi Bhabha (1984), Talal Asad (2009 [1986]) and Chandra Talpade Mohanti (1988) decried Western Orientalist representations of the non-West as a strategy which normalises the dominance of ‘the West’ over ‘the East.’ 12. The women’s, or zenana, park is a piece of land in the heart of Old Lucknow that was allotted by the city to the then newly-formed Bazme Khawateen in 1934. 13. AIMPLB member Ateeq Qasmi, interview by author, Lucknow, 3 March 2011.

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14. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2004-10-31/lucknow/27159961_1_muslim- women-offer-prayers-bazme-khawateen (accessed 15 April 2012). 15. For more information on the women’s mosque see: http://sports.rediff.com/news/2004/aug/ 11muslim.htm (accessed 26 September 2012) and http://www.outlookindia.com/ printarticle.aspx?224749 (accessed 26 September 2012). 16. http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_clerics-rattled-over-namaz-by-women_1163193 (accessed 15 April 2012); http://www.hindu.com/2008/05/07/stories/2008050753660500.htm (accessed April 15, 2012); http://www.indianexpress.com/news/begum-has-many-aces-under- her-veil/449378/ (accessed April 15, 2012); http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/ Women_offer_prayers_at_mosque_defy_seminarys_edict-nid-41858-cid-3.html (accessed 15 April 2012); http://wunrn.com/news/2008/05_08/05_19_08/051908_india.htm (accessed April 15, 2012). 17. As Mahmood (2005: 65) argues in the context of the women’s piety movement in Egypt, the reasons behind restrictions on women guiding collective prayers are twofold. First, there is the general belief that since the Quran makes men the guardian of women, the latter should not serve in significant positions of leadership over men. Second, there is the prevailing notion that a woman’s voice can nullify the act of worship since her voice is capable of provoking sexual feelings in men. The orthodox clergy’s opposition to Amber’s, Sidrat’s and Hasan’s notable interventions within the public space was most explicitly expressed through political debates. However, all three activists state that they have experienced actual threats by individual Muslim representatives over the phone. These verbal harassments ranged from simple defamations to actual threats of bodily harm and even death. 18. Interview by the author with Shaista Amber, Lucknow, 15 December 2009. 19. See: http://www.hindu.com/2008/05/07/stories/2008050753660500.htm (accessed 26 September 2012). 20. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080507/jsp/nation/story_9236894.jsp (accessed 15 April 2012); http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_clerics-rattled-over-namaz-by-women_1163193 (accessed 15 April 2012);http://www.hindu.com/2008/05/07/stories/2008050753660500.htm (accessed 26 September 2012); http://twocircles.net/2008sep02/ women_pray_along_men_lucknow_mosque.html (accessed 15 April 2012). 21. Interviews by the author, Lucknow, 10 March 2011. 22. The phrase ‘big big jewellery’ used by Hasan indicates the heavy and opulent bridal jewellery worn by Muslim women in India. This includes finger rings, bangles, a big nose ring, a heavy choker necklace, earrings, a tikka (forehead jewellery) and a waist belt. For Hasan, this kind of bridal jewellery signifies women as mere objects within marriage rather than active agents. Naish Hasan, interview by author, Lucknow, 22 January 2010. 23. The New York Times termed the BMMA marriage contract as a means ‘to seek gender equality in marriage.’ See: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/world/asia/25iht-letter25.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed 19 September 2014). 24. The AIMPLB did not entirely oppose Hasan’s marriage being solemnised. Many clerics believe that a marriage can be solemnised without the presence of a qazi. As according to the Islamic scripts, the approval of the bride and groom to the marriage and the public announcement of the wedding to the wedding guests is enough for the marriage to be considered valid. Naseema Ali Ikhtedar Khan in Lucknow, interview by author, 13 February 2011. 25. Naseema Ali Ikhtedar Khan, interview by author, Lucknow, 13 February 2011. 26. Fauzia Naseem, interview by author, Lucknow, 9 February, 2010; Rukhsana Lari, interview by author, Lucknow, 9 February 2010. 27. See: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26263977/ns/today-weddings/t/women-led-muslim- wedding-sparks-debate-india/#.T47tLIuRBvw (accessed 18 April 2012).

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28. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080813/jsp/frontpage/story_9686772.jsp (accessed 18 April 2012); http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/13/stories/2008081360251400.htm (accessed 17 April 2012); http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/aug/12up.htm (accessed 18 April 2012); http:// articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-08-13/lucknow/27920567_1_triple-talaq-nikah- woman (accessed 18 April 2012); http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/Married+to+controversy/ 1/13563.html (accessed 18 April 2012). 29. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g35Lhqmsc7k (accessed 17 April 2012). 30. http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/13/stories/2008081360251400.htm (accessed 17 April 2012). 31. Here it is worth noting that groups like the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a progressive association of American nuns in the U.S., or groups seeking to ordain women to the priesthood in Christian denominations and Mormonism, such as the Mormon women’s organisation Ordain Women (http://ordainwomen.org/ accessed 16 December 16 2014), also work within the framework of piety. Similar to the Muslim women’s activists discussed in this article, these women use the strategy of appearing devout and committed to the faith, a discursive strategy designed to protect the movement from (the plentiful) accusations of apostasy.

ABSTRACTS

Within the last decade, Muslim women’s rights activists in postcolonial India have acquired increasing visibility within the contested public space. This paper looks pointedly at the manner in which three ideologically different Muslim women’s rights activists work toward carving out women’s spaces within the men-dominated political and legal landscape in the city of Lucknow. In doing so, it examines first: how Muslim women’s activists carefully orchestrate their appearance within the public space, and second: their strategic utilisation of the media for the dissemination of their alternative proposals concerning the ‘true Islam’ and the ‘ideal Muslim woman.’ This paper argues that Muslim women’s rights activists’ interventions within the public space destabilise hegemonic patterns of knowledge and authority. Laying bare the possibilities Islamic discourse and its embodiment offer for women’s agency, this paper challenges liberal and modernist perspectives that view religion as being obstructive to women’s freedom and autonomy.

INDEX

Keywords: Muslim women’s rights activism, Islamic justice, political activism, public space, media, women’s agency

AUTHOR

MENGIA HONG TSCHALAER

Adjunct Assistant Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

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Madrasas and Social Mobility in the Religious Economy: The Case of Nadwat al-’Ulama in Lucknow

Christopher B. Taylor

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This article is based on research conducted with the assistance of the National Science Foundation (Grant No. DGE-1247312). I would like to thank Sandria Freitag, Filippo Osella, Robert Hefner, Charles Lindholm, and four anonymous reviewers for their comments on prior versions of this work.

Introduction

1 The madrasa (Islamic seminary) of Dar al-’Ulūm Nadwat al-’Ulama was constructed in Lucknow in 1906 on the bank of the river Gomti in Lucknow. Nadwa (as the madrasa is locally known) overlooks a wide swath of the city-scape of old Lucknow (qadimi lacknau) across the river. ‘New’ Lucknow, such as the neighbourhoods of Gomti Nagar and Aliganj, have filled in behind Nadwa as urban development has ballooned to the north and east—effectively making Nadwa the geographical centre of this expanding provincial capital. For many ordinary north Indians, however, this madrasa and the ‘traditional’ Islamic identity it is perceived to represent seem increasingly out-of-place in the 21st century.

2 Nadwa is one of the most famous among India’s reformist madrasas, and purportedly the country’s largest after recently surpassing Deoband in student numbers (Zaman 2002: 160). Its founders envisioned an institution that would bring traditional Islamic learning into the modern world. Their hope in this regard was twofold. First, Nadwa would ‘synthesize the profitable past with the useful modern’ (Moosa 2007) by training religious scholars (‘ulama) in the Islamic sciences combined with modern topics, such as

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the English language, that would enable them to interact with the world as ambassadors. Second, they imagined that Nadwa would rid Indian Islam of sectarianism by incorporating ‘ulama of all groups into its ‘conclave’ (nadwat). In the heady environment of 19th century revivalism that spawned numerous Islamic movements, Nadwa’s founders sought to unite them (Sikand 2005: 79). However, Nadwa’s leadership failed to achieve ‘as much reform as intended,’ and most observers view Nadwa today as nearly as indistinguishable from Deoband as a traditional madrasa (Zaman 2002: 72). 3 As the institution charged with preservation of Islamic tradition in India, madrasas play a key role in reproducing Muslims’ religious distinctiveness. However, many forward-thinking Lucknowis view Nadwa as clinging to outdated values. Recent concerns over militancy among radical Muslim groups (while unfounded) only heightened suspicion of Nadwa and what it symbolizes, such as in the 1995 night-time raid on Nadwa by police hunting for suspected terrorism links (Sikand 2005: 288–89). The Sachar Committee report (2006: 17) found substantial evidence for ‘a general acceptance of an urgent need for the modernization of madrasas’ and numerous government schemes have been launched.1 India’s news media perennially publish articles repeating characterizations of madrasas as ‘medieval’ or keeping the Muslim community in a ‘backward’ mind-set.2 This critique emerges also within Muslim communities (Alam 2011: 1–3). Imtiaz Ahmad (2002: 2285–7) questioned if madrasas are ‘effective as education’ at all in contemporary India. ‘Now, times are changing. People are saying, ‘I have no use for the madrasa system,’ ’ a businessman from a prominent Muslim family told me in Lucknow, ‘because [students] study there [in madrasas] for eight years and still get no ‘service’ [jobs].’3 4 Yet despite widespread perception of their declining usefulness and refusal to modernize, madrasas across India are increasing in number, size, and budgets. Nadwa in Lucknow now educates nearly 4,000 students, in addition to its dozens of affiliated branches across India. Madrasas in India were estimated to number over 30,000 (Sikand 2005: 95; Metcalf 2007: L14134; Riaz 2008: 173) and more are being opened annually in rural areas around Lucknow (as I observed) and elsewhere in Uttar Pradesh (Jeffrey et al. 2004). Jeffrey et al. (2004: 36) attributed such continued growth to the increased demand among all Indians for formal education, to increased income among rural Muslims that correspondingly increases donations to madrasas, and of course to increasing population. In the north Indian region that includes Uttar Pradesh and Lucknow city, 7% of all school-enrolled Muslim students in 2002 attended a madrasa as opposed to a private or government school (Sachar 2006: 76), and since a vast majority of madrasas are for boys, this proportion could be as high as 10–13% of Muslim boys attending madrasas full-time (on girls’ madrasas and their rarity, see Winkelmann 2005).5 Thousands of Indian Muslims continue to select a full-time madrasa education over government schools. 5 The bulk of criticism has centred on madrasa education as not being useful in modern times. By and large there is truth to assessments of madrasa schooling that identifies low quality of instruction, lack of resources, and low educational outcomes (Metcalf 2007). Yet the continued enrolments and even expansion of madrasas in India present a puzzle: do students—and Muslims more generally—perceive any practical usefulness or economic utility in a madrasa education? 6 This article illustrates how Nadwa madrasa exists within a religious sphere that is a marketplace for jobs in scholarship and ritual leadership, one that is undergirded by an

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economy of national and international proportions fuelled by almsgiving. I explain how students perceive the madrasa as (among its other roles) providing opportunities for lower class Muslims, linking village youth who had few educational prospects to skills and jobs in Lucknow’s urban economy and beyond—and to channels for fundraising from donors in Lucknow, Delhi, and Bombay as well as Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. 7 Much recent social science research has remained mired in policy-related questions of ‘modernization’ reforms of South Asian madrasas and whether these have succeeded or failed (e.g. Hartung 2006b; Sikand 2006; Bano 2014; Malik 2007; Jhingran 2010; Basit 2012) although a few notable studies are exceptions (Sikand 2005; Winkelmann 2005; Metcalf 2007; Alam 2011; Moosa 2015). The approach of this article is to take a different tack in the study of madrasas and to investigate how madrasas are already ‘modern’ and emplaced within contemporary Indian society and economy. Rather than ‘modernization,’ I follow scholarship that has emphasized the ‘modernity of tradition’ (Rudolph & Rudolph 1967) as embodied in Indian madrasas (Metcalf 1982, 2007; Zaman 1999, 2002; Ingram 2014). 8 Yet Nadwa’s relevance today is distinct from the role played by reformist madrasas of the 19th century in certain ways. Historical characterizations portray reformist madrasas as having led the Indian Muslim community in a strategy of an ‘inward turn’ to address societal problems by way of individual moral reform in Lucknow and elsewhere (Metcalf 1982: 5; Robinson 2008). This article illustrates the contemporary perspectives of Nadwa students and ‘ulama on how madrasa education today has integrated them into society at large and prepared them to participate in India’s modern economy. As educated religious specialists, Nadwa students gain cultural capital and translatable skills that lead to perceived social mobility—a turn outward and upward rather than ‘inward’ that represents progress on intertwined indices of moral and material development conducive to spreading Islamic ethics to the modern world. 9 In the three sections of ethnographic and interview data that follow, I discuss how Nadwa provides free education to significant numbers of Muslim students, resulting in perceived employment opportunities, as well as in other forms of social mobility that are highly salient such as gains in social status and overcoming caste barriers. These data shed light on north India’s growing religious occupational sector and the transferable job skills obtained through Islamic studies. While maintaining that madrasa education stands in need of improvement, even at elite madrasas like Nadwa, students voiced considerable approval for the utility and value of a Nadwa education as compared to other available options. Such student perspectives given in this article, as I discuss in the conclusions, provide an indispensable contribution amidst India’s growing public debate over the value of madrasas in the contemporary, globalizing economy.

Table 1: Representativeness of Stratified Network Sample for Student Interviews

Type of Student Sample Institution

Scholarship recipients 64% (16/25) 60%

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Senior students 36% (9/25) 33%

Lower caste 32% (8/25) n/a

10 This article’s data stem from 18 months of anthropological fieldwork in Lucknow during 2012–13 on public perceptions of the socioeconomic conditions of Muslims and attempts to address them. Data-gathering occurred most intensively during three months of study in Nadwa, which included participant observation in student residence areas during afternoons and evenings. I also administered a structured interview questionnaire, from which a portion of the interview quotes are drawn. The topical sections included: students’ family backgrounds, prior education, motivations for enrolling in Nadwa, motivations for pursuing non-madrasa or university education (if any), and future career aspirations. I defined a sample of 25 student interviewees by using stratified, network sampling beginning with students randomly selected in two locations: the first-year hostel and the main mosque after prayers. These structured interviews—while not fully representative in the statistical sense—comprise a stratified quota sample that gives a proportional snapshot of the general student body of 3,000 students according to (a) socioeconomic status, i.e. scholarship-recipient versus fee- paying, (b) year, i.e. senior (last two years of the six-year ‘alim degree) versus junior students, (c) caste, i.e. upper versus lower caste.6 The Nadwa administration generously granted me unique permission to administer the questionnaire but only for this sample size. Other quotations are drawn from unstructured interviewing and ethnographic observation, as noted.

Free education in a time of state failure

11 Madrasas are primarily viewed as preserves of Muslim tradition, but a secondary, often implicit theme that emerged during my research in Lucknow was their role in providing educational services to the poor. As one senior administrator at Nadwa told me, If your research is on welfare, madrasas are also part of that system [madaris bhi us nizam main hein]. They feed and house many poor children and provide them with training for later employment. For example: here at Nadwa. Nadwa’s materials and statements by its leadership contain no mention of its role in such ‘welfare’ for the poor. Indeed, the pride that Nadwa students have in the Islamic scholarship at their institution suggests that to characterize this instruction as charity would be disingenuous. Yet, while this view of madrasas as part of the welfare safety net for poor Muslims was not an oft-discussed theme, it did come up occasionally. Jamal,7 a senior Nadwa student told me, mixing English with Urdu: Even though students expect more from Nadwa—better English and whatnot…what [Nadwa] is doing is really good. At least Nadwa is providing education free to students! So many students are poor—so poor that I buy them breakfast if they’ve run out of money. These students would just go to some crappy government school —or not go to school at all.8 Although religious education was explicitly recognized as Nadwa’s mission, it played a role in providing free basic education of an acceptable quality. This view remained at

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the forefront of both students’ and administrators’ views. As many of my contacts at Nadwa saw it, the Indian public (and madrasa students themselves) may criticize madrasa education for its failings, but it still often remained seen as better than comparable local government schools. 12 Even as they complained about them, students understood why certain aspects of Nadwa education were low-quality, such as the English instruction, or why there was a lack of topics such as accounting and management that students might even find helpful in their work as leaders of mosque organizations or madrasas. Nadwa had trouble recruiting or maintaining high-quality instructors with credentials for such positions, since other institutions could pay better salaries. Business education and English-language were simply in very high demand in Lucknow. Nadwa administration had chosen to spend its resources elsewhere given that many madrasa students could take such courses off-campus at reasonable rates, and many students affordably did so. The curriculum generally devoted one class out of seven to non-religious subjects. For example, a third-year student’s schedule included these seven classes on typical day: Qur’an, hadith, Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), principles of jurisprudence, advanced juridical commentaries, Arabic literature, philosophy, and English and/or General Education (for a full description of the Nadwa curriculum, see Sikand 2005).

13 As a parallel system to government schools, Nadwa and other madrasas operate on private religious alms-donations—not costing Indian taxpayers a rupee—in order to extend basic literacy, and advanced literary and humanities education to upwardly mobile Muslims. Lucknow Muslims of means give religious charity regularly, as almsgiving in Islam is not merely an act of goodwill but is also an annual obligation revealed in scriptures; for Sunnis, the rate is 2.5% of assets and for Shi’a it is 20% of profits. Through ethnographic observation and interviews in the Aminabad bazaar of Lucknow, I gained a broadly comprehensive picture of almsgiving in the city.. A majority of Lucknow Muslims who give Islamic charity do so primarily to madrasas, more than to other Muslim organizations, once they have fulfilled obligations to needy relatives and neighbours. Madrasas such as Nadwa receive the majority of their income through these channels, fundraising locally and in major cities in India (see Taylor 2015; Jeffery et al. 2007). 14 The administration reported to me that 60% of students receive scholarships in the form of fee waivers and stipends, due largely to the institution’s charitably fundraised income. Education at Nadwa is free for all students, rich or poor, as the school charges no tuition fees. The only fees are an application fee and fees for room and board. Over half of the students in a small sample to whom I gave the questionnaire were receiving a complete scholarship (wazifah) from Nadwa (16 of 25; 64%), and this percentage in the questionnaire’s stratified sample is comparable to that reported for the overall student body (60%). The scholarship included room and board (costing 730 rupees per month, $13), sets of clothes tailored on-campus, and a small 100 rupee stipend for ‘pocket change’ (jebi kharch). Two other students (8%) were receiving half-scholarships of 350 rupees discount off the total. Scholarships were distributed on the basis of family need, which was determined through an evaluation visit by a Nadwa representative to the student’s home. 15 Zahir was a 26-year old 3rd year student at Nadwa who came from a small village near the Nepal border and was receiving a full scholarship for his studies. He related his caste as ‘vegetable seller’ (sabzi-farosh) though his parents and uncles were farmers. His

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father died when he was quite young, and as an orphaned9 boy he left his mother and enrolled in a small village madrasa near Gorakhpur and subsequently won admittance into Nadwa. A diminutive young man with an intense gaze, Zahir explained, ‘I began madrasa for two reasons. First, I didn’t want to have an entirely worldly (dunyavi) education. Second, I had no money. They’re not supposed to take fees but many government school teachers do.’10 His older brother had already been sent to a Hindi- medium school an hour journey from his home, which expended his uncles’ funds such that there were none left for Zahir’s education. But Zahir refused to join manual labour or farming work, ‘Our village had basically no literate people! There was a madrasa operating in the next village over, but ours had no school at all. It’s a very backward [pasmandah] place.’ Capitalizing on the opportunities for language study at madrasas, he had learned Hindi up through 5th standard and was currently energetically engaged in his Arabic studies at Nadwa. He had won six awards in Nadwa’s speech-giving society for spoken Arabic. Throughout, he also studied in Urdu. ‘[Nadwa] is the best madrasa in India. In others, there is only religious studies [deeni tahlim] but here there is both,’ he explained, presumably referring to the English classes and General Education course which covered the basics of the government school curriculum in one class. 16 Zahir’s case is representative of other scholarship students in terms of illustrating educational opportunities afforded many of the Muslim families with sons who attend Nadwa. The language instruction at madrasas, such as basic literacy in Hindi (taught at the primary level in all madrasas) and the additional languages whether Urdu, Arabic (as in Nadwa), or Persian was the most transferable credential for students’ entry into the university system. Zahir planned, as did many other Nadwa students, to sit for the government exam that certified madrasa graduates with a ‘matric’ (matriculation) degree, or 10th standard equivalency. 17 The results of the stratified sample I took of the student body show the impact of Nadwa’s free education upon social mobility for a snapshot of 25 students. Over a third (35%) of these Nadwa students’ parents had no formal schooling. Most of that 35% had parents who were farmers or manual labourers. Over 50% of them had parents with an education of 12th standard or less. These students were the first in their family to receive an education above Post-Matric (12th standard; i.e. finishing secondary school). Nearly all Nadwa students, despite their often humble origins, would soon be proud holders of a BA or MA degrees, obtained through simply sitting for equivalency credentialing exams once they finished Nadwa’s ‘alim (BA) or faziliat (MA) courses. 18 North Indians, particularly those from lower classes and castes, embrace education as a means to social mobility and even fetishize schooling for its cultural capital and apparent role in ‘development’ (Jeffrey et al. 2008). The Constitution of India guarantees education as a right free of cost for all children provided—at a minimum—by the government. Unfortunately, the continuing educational value of madrasas is very much a result of the massive failure of the Indian government to provide basic education. As Corbridge et al. (2013: 53) wrote, ‘The Indian state’s failure to satisfy this Directive [of the Constitutional right to education] is perhaps the most damning of its failures in the post-Independence period’ of all the state’s efforts at development for the nation. 19 The demand for education in India has simply been too vast to be met by government and private institutions. ‘[Indian] madrasas exist in a larger ecology of educational provision in which education over all, and particularly rural education, has been sadly deficient’ (Metcalf 2007: L1514). Over 30 million children are out of school nationwide,

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the highest absolute number of any country in the world, and Muslims make up a proportionally lower amount of graduates—comprising 11% of the population over 20 but only 6% of higher education graduates (Riaz 2008: 164–66). Moreover, the liberalization of the Indian economy in the late 1990s strongly impacted education, as the government granted massive numbers of certifications to private schools and universities that now make up the majority of educational institutions in cities and towns, even as government spending dropped (Gupta 2011: 29–31). This shift is part of a larger trend, as India’s government increasingly defers responsibility for welfare services from public to private domains (Dreze & Sen 1995; Harriss-White 2003: 41–44). However, despite the gains that private educational entrepreneurs have made in opening new private schools, their profit-driven motive and fee-based structure essentially shut out lower-income students from such opportunities (Jeffery et al. 2005). High-quality private schools were also rare in Muslim areas of Lucknow (cf. Metcalf 2007: L1514), and the ones that I visited were of very low quality and I heard numerous stories of corruption.

Employment prospects

20 A majority of graduates aspired to religious occupations. Jamal, whose grandfather, uncles, and some cousins were Nadwa graduates, related to me his experience: Government schools here are crap. You learn virtually nothing there. My uncle teaches at one. His students won’t get a job as anything but a rickshaw driver. Madrasa graduates, though, they can make a minimum of at least 10,000 rupees a month for teaching ‘tuitions’ [lessons in Urdu, Arabic, or Qur’an]. You’ll get at least 1,000 per family. Maulanas will tell you they only make 300 rupees per family to be modest, but that’s not really true—most pay more and everyone knows it. ‘Alims [madrasa graduates, pl. ‘ulama] can always get jobs. There are new mosques being built all the time. Look around Lucknow and you can see them. The prior ‘alim is often moving out as the imam of the mosque to other things—to go get a BA, to teach in a new Islamic school, or teach in a madrasa—so there’s jobs.11 Being the imam of a mosque certainly did not pay well, being based largely on donations from the community board of the mosque and collections at Friday congregational prayers when a box or bag was passed around the rows of worshipers. Nevertheless, it was seen as a very stable job with a regular—if fluctuating—income. As I had observed myself, in addition to hearing from Jamal and all other interviewees, many imams supplemented their mosque-income with private tuitions for wealthy Muslim families who wanted their children to learn the Qur’an and Urdu script at home, even as they attended private English-medium schools during the day. Religious occupations, as Jamal related, were constantly opening up especially in urban areas. Another interviewee, Ehsan, confirmed this view of his class fellows: People from Bihar [from humble backgrounds], they study here only to get earnings [afterward]! They are so brilliant. They work so hard…They don’t have much money, not even enough for continuing studies. That’s why they came to the madrasa in the first place, because everything was paid for. Even if they don’t do well in their studies, they at least will receive a job at a mosque.12 In the view of these students, and their families that supported their entry into the madrasa, Nadwa graduates were essentially guaranteed employment of some sort— which was not a sure thing in the economy at large, as urban unemployment hovered around 29% in UP (NSS 2013: 277). Students who worked particularly hard could rise to teach in prestigious madrasas like Nadwa, or even pursue further Islamic education

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abroad in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, while even the most mediocre student believed they would have little trouble securing work at one of the numerous mosques in big cities such as Lucknow. 21 As with the above student, many students at Nadwa compared the types of jobs that a madrasa graduate would likely obtain with those of graduates of government schools who remained barely literate. Unlike thousands of other secondary school graduates that pursued low-skilled work in north India’s supply-heavy labour market, madrasa graduates could claim a specialized niche. Even though in Lucknow elite madrasa students such as Nadwa graduates were in the most demand, occupational opportunities in the religious sector in India overall do seem to be growing nearly as quickly as the pool of madrasa graduates, even as the Indian economy modernizes and globalizes. A discourse analysis of education narratives in a western region of UP uncovered steady, if low,13 levels of popularity for religious occupations for youth educated in madrasas. ‘Interviews suggest that this form of work is becoming more popular’ (Jeffrey et al. 2004: 93).

22 Moreover, occupations in the urban Islamic sector were in fact perceived by Muslims as more ‘modern’ than the village-based occupations, as the growth of mosques in recent decades has created a remarkable rise in urban-based opportunities for youth whose primary goal is to migrate from home districts. This view was common even among students, such as Zahir above, who had obtained non-madrasa credentials already but nevertheless aimed to teach in a madrasa himself, albeit preferring to start his own. Research by Jeffrey et al. (2004: 974) uncovered similar sentiments among Muslim youth in Bijnor, many of whom ‘saw nothing shameful about having collected mainstream qualifications and wanting to do religious work.’ Unlike agriculture, daily wage labour and other manual work, religious occupations were viewed as respectable jobs that evidenced an individual’s social standing as an educated person and their capacity for academic learning, even if they had only attended a madrasa (Jeffrey et al. 2004: 974). 23 While at a minimum all students knew they could avoid manual labour and join the educated classes as the prayer leader in a mosque or teacher at a madrasa, they often hoped they could become university-educated professionals. As one student put it, ‘Every Nadwa graduate who really works hard, at a minimum, can get a job as a translator,’ referring to the vibrant printing enterprises that distributed books in English, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, and Persian. Muslims I spoke with outside of Nadwa had similar views, sharing stories of Nadwa graduates who worked in Lucknow’s travel agencies, universities, for newspapers, and even as accountants in construction companies. 24 Nadwa is distinct among India’s madrasas for its long tradition of Arabic instruction, which opens up further opportunities for Indian students (Hartung 2006). Nadwa’s founders designed the institution explicitly with an eye towards Arabia, claiming to even have improved upon the outdated management and instruction in Egypt and Saudi. When a young Moroccan student named al-Hilali arrived at al-Azhar to study in 1917, his Egyptian mentor ‘described the education [in India] as being much more organized and therefore effective’ and counselled him to travel onward to Lucknow. He studied at Nadwa, then later taught there as the Arabic instructor (Hartung 2006: 138). 25 Today, as well, this high-quality Arabic instruction at Nadwa makes graduates particularly competitive in India’s religious economy. In mosques across India, it is common practice during Friday prayers for the prayer leader (imam) to give a sermon

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in Arabic, if possible. Nadwa graduates in particular, however, were distinguished by their intensive study of Arabic. Their lessons included classical Qur’anic Arabic, but also required them to become familiar with a variety of dialectical variations: non-Islamic Arabic poetry, conversational Arabic, formalized Arabic of the news media, and the genre conventions of Arabic sermons. Many Nadwi instructors themselves have lived or travelled in Arab nations. The classroom curriculum was supported by numerous clubs that fostered an environment for Arabic proficiency. A speech club (an-nadi al-‘arabi) held weekly events for students to give Arabic sermons. Students ran Arabic conversation and study groups daily in the mosque. A student-run journal printed articles in Arabic by students. In the dorms and administrative buildings, Arabic newspapers, magazines, and journals were lying around for consumption; at least one I saw is printed at Nadwa and circulated among its donors and supporters (Arab and expatriate Indian alike) in Arab nations. Most Nadwa students in interviews, in response to my standard question about how their home community perceived them and their Nadwa studies, cited knowledge of Arabic as a key achievement. One said: People respect me more when I go home now. I give sermons on Fridays. There have been imams in my village for years, but they don’t give Arabic sermons! I am the youngest ‘alim of all of them, and I am the one that leads tarawi [long Qur’anic readings] and sermons. I give these sermons without preparations! They were so impressed. They’ll say, ‘Look! This boy grew up in this very village and is now giving speeches in Arabic!’ A high-quality madrasa education provides alternative tracks to employment outside of one’s home region, even abroad in the Middle East, due to the relative demand for a small number of Arabic speakers.14 In this regard, Nadwa provided a form of education only available within religious schooling. The appeal of Arabic-language and Islamic instruction has a pull on Muslim students and their families from all strata of society who would not otherwise have access to such chances for travel and rarefied learning. As such, many upper-class students gain skills in Nadwa not available at government or private schools, and it would be a mistake to consider madrasa schooling as a tool of social mobility only for the underprivileged. 26 Students who graduated from Nadwa with particular skill in Arabic could make even further use of Nadwa’s contacts, especially for international fundraising. Two preachers that I knew in Lucknow who had graduated from Nadwa both showed me their fundraising materials printed in India for use when they travelled to Saudi Arabia. The glossy pages between clear plastic covers and a spiral binding contained colour photographs of ‘modern’ madrasas for which these two graduates fundraised. One had already begun construction on an educational campus that would contain separate Islamic schools for girls and for boys that taught the government curriculum as well as Islamic sciences from primary school through college, with additional plans for a health clinic and dispensary.

27 Nadwa has long been known as north India’s institution most closely linked with Islamic scholarly circles in the Arab Middle East (Hartung 2006; Zaman 2002). Dr Khalid Bin Ali al-Ghamidi, one of the men known as Imam-e-Ka’ba (leader of the Ka’ba) who lead prayers at Mecca’s most sacred mosque, paid a visit by invitation to Nadwa during my research in May 2012. Students overheard him discussing a prior visit to the madrasa campus when he had asked why the mosque was so hot, then proceeded to donate sufficient funds to line the walls and ceiling with air conditioners (within each archway in Figure 1). Visitors from Mecca had great respect for Nadwa and often made

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financial contributions to the school, in cash, during their visits, other senior students confided. While the donations were not large enough to constitute a significant portion of the budget, they did enable Nadwa to make certain improvements.

FIGURE 1

Interior of Nadwa Mosque during Night Prayers Credit: Nihal Ahmed Khan

28 Such international ties were also sources of hope for enterprising students. Omar was one of the tallest madrasa students at Nadwa, although still bone-thin, and he stuck out in the crowd outside the mosque when I approached him and asked for an interview. He was a business student who received a Bachelor of Commerce at Lucknow University before enrolling in Nadwa, and his pedigree evidenced itself in the way he spoke and envisioned his future, but his ultimate goal was firm: I want to work in service to Islam [khidmat-i dīn]…and open a ‘high-tech’ madrasa. Universities are so beautiful, with the best tiles and buildings, and we should have more madrasas like that, because this is where the Holy Qur’an is taught!... I’ll make a ‘proforma’ [business plan] which I can give to wealthy people. I’ll contact partners in other cities like Mumbai and in the Emirates online to get their support. Mostly the rich madrasa donors are there, each one with eighty lakh rupees [$14,800] to give! There are enough alms-givers for sure. But everyone wants to see the results [natījeh]! We will have to show results.15 Omar was correct in thinking that wealthy Muslim donors in large cities and abroad responded to colourfully illustrated business plans and evidence-based annual reports with ‘results’ (natījeh). He planned to print his business plan and reports in English and Arabic that he would write himself and get checked by senior Nadwa graduates he knew.

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29 Arabic language skills led many other such students to fundraise beyond India, once they graduated from Nadwa, utilizing a linguistic talent and cultural capital not obtainable in universities. I personally met two madrasa graduates in Lucknow who had recently begun residential madrasas, and fundraised about $10,000 apiece from urban donors with glossy colour reports in Urdu, English, and Arabic. While Indian ‘ulama rarely have the upfront resources required to travel themselves to the Middle East in order to fundraise for small madrasas, the Arabic reports are for Muslims visiting from the Emirates or Saudi Arabia who occasionally tour Indian madrasas, curious about these institutions of higher learning whose fame they have read about in their home countries and sympathetic for the (comparatively) poor conditions for Indian students studying there. For example, instructional texts on hadith that were penned by Nadwa’s most famous director, Maulana Sayyid Abu’l Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi (d. 1999) are still taught in Saudi Arabian seminaries and recognized as classics in the genre of hadith studies (Zaman 2002: 162).

Social mobility

30 Across all interviews I performed, students responded that they saw a difference in how their families and home communities perceived them once they began their studies at Nadwa, illustrating the potential cultural capital acquisition and social mobility resulting from full-time madrasa study. Completing even a year of studies in Nadwa invariably increased students’ perceptions of their own status in their communities and the world at large. This perception of increased status was true even for higher status students (i.e. students with relatives or peers of high socioeconomic positions in society, those who also had completed non-madrasa schooling, and higher caste students) but the status gains from a Nadwa education were much more salient for students from humbler backgrounds.

31 One sunny day, I met a senior student, Wahid, for tea. Other students rudely pushed ahead of us in line as we reached for teacups, eliciting glares, then a sigh, from Wahid. He confided in me once we sat down, ‘Students from rural [dehati] and poor [gharīb] backgrounds are taking over Nadwa. It’s not as fine [sharif] a madrasa as it used to be.’16 Putting aside Wahid’s haughty air, his remark reflected an actual demographic shift occurring in the Nadwa student body. Nadwa faculty and students alike told me that in recent decades Indians from lower societal strata were entering the madrasa in greater numbers. Nadwa over the years has also allowed its numbers to swell (as has Deoband) from 600 students in the 1980s to over 3,000 students today. The absolute number (and proportion) of lower-strata students has increased.17 One senior instructor with whom I spoke emphasized that, ‘When Nadwa began there were mostly wealthy people’s children attending…Now, it has become more public [awāmi].’ 32 Other interviews, however, indicated a caste dimension to this demographic shift. Muslims in Lucknow often mention how Islam lays a strong emphasis on equality / across racial and ethnic boundaries, and many educated Muslims would claim to me, ‘caste does not exist among Muslims.’ As my fieldwork progressed, however, I observed occasions in which Muslims attended to boundaries of caste-like communities, most overtly of course in marriage arrangements (cf. Basant & Shariff 2009: 4–5). A few interviews with Nadwa students confirmed that madrasas were, nonetheless, one institution which transcended caste boundaries. Answering my interview question

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regarding an increase in perceived social status (‘izzat, ehtarām) upon returning to his home village, Ehsan said, ‘Yes, I did [notice increased status] because everyone sees Nadwa as a good opportunity to become a defender of Islam. Now anyone can study in Nadwa—it’s very democratic [jomhūrī].’ 33 For example, Asif is a younger student from Mewat district, belonging to the Meo community, who is studying on full scholarship at Nadwa, and his hometown of Mewat is highly segregated into Hindu and Muslim groups, following riots during his grandparents’ time. The Meo community there has been designated part of the ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBC) and thus eligible for reservations. I asked him my standard interview question of what changes he perceived in how his hometown received him after his Nadwa studies began, and his face broke into a wide smile: First my older brother, and now me, have studied at Nadwa…There were no other madrasa-educated people [‘alim] in the whole village!18 I asked him if he had ever led prayer in the masjid at home, where Muslims of various caste backgrounds attend. I didn’t used to, but I have begun to do it. The imam asked me to. He also asked me to give the [Friday] sermons! The first time [he asked], I hesitated. I felt weird. But [that imam] respects me in his heart. He said, ‘Give the sermon and lead prayer as long as you are here. People will be pleased to be able to pray behind an ‘alim. He now leads prayer in the masjid every time he returns home on break. The imam there was not madrasa-educated but rather has merely memorized the Qur’an. Custom in north India dictates that the man who has studied (and memorized) the most Qur’anic verses or has the greatest degree of Islamic learning, is often designated as the leader during prayer times regardless of who is the sitting preacher of the mosque. Unlike caste status or other ascribed status, scriptural learning is acquired by an individual, and thus madrasa studies are consistent with the modern ethos of individual advancement through personal endeavour. As Asif’s story illustrated, in Muslim communities such as Mewat that increasingly prize scriptural learning, lower-caste Muslims have a chance at societal mobility through the respectable pursuit of madrasa knowledge. Those who pursue studies as an ‘alim are encountering opportunities that surprise even themselves. 34 Farooq, another student from a low caste background (he refused to answer which caste) spoke openly about Nadwa’s environment of freedom and equality among castes and across other social divisions. When I asked if he perceived an increase in his relatives’ pride and esteem of him, he replied: So much so [bahut essa hai]! I’ve seen it. Actually, whoever’s child is a memorizer of the Qur’an [ḥāfiẓ] or—even better—studies in a madrasa, they get respect everywhere they go, especially for the sake of [the student’s] parents who get so much respect from others, ‘His son is the one studying in that madrasa, getting the religion [dīn], gaining knowledge [‘ilm]. Everyone basically wants their children to become an ‘alim! When I came to Nadwa—in particular—I saw that Nadwi graduates are people who can stand on any stage [and give speeches] in front of anybody, and in any language. I’ve seen many Nadwis speak and work throughout society and they gain people’s approval. Nadwa’s aim is to keep Muslims united—unity [itehād] is the goal. There’s no ideological disagreement [iktalāf] here. Just as there is complete equality in Islam, I see that equality here, too. All sects [masālak] are [represented] here. All types of people. It’s that sort of unity.19

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As Farooq’s explanations illustrate, some degree of Islamic learning is of value in rural Muslim families of his hometown, even the sort of learning children obtain in memorizing the Qur’an in local religious schools. Nevertheless, he also emphasized that Nadwa (unlike some smaller or less famous madrasas) is viewed as an institution with sufficiently high-quality instruction that individual students’ efforts are rewarded with broad-based recognition in their communities. The mission of Nadwa to serve as a centre of all-India Muslim leadership, moreover, keeps a certain focus on scriptural knowledge for all Indian Muslims, explicitly side-lining caste or sectarian orientation.20 It is this ‘unity’ that Farooq and other classmates I spoke to appreciate and benefit from, when they perceive that their academic achievements go unhindered by prejudices they felt in other contexts. 35 Madrasas in contemporary India, not only Nadwa, can constitute a key forum for reworking social statuses and de-linking them from customary caste hierarchies, as Arshad Alam has demonstrated in his study of caste groups and the politics of madrasa leadership. ‘The importance of upward mobility is most radically felt in the symbolic domain,’ he wrote. ‘A young boy belonging to one of the many low castes and a first- generation learner…leading the Islamic prayer disrupts many social solidarities of the old order…most importantly, caste’ (Alam 2011: 204–05). As the opportunity to study in madrasas reaches more students in remote villages, and even local madrasas offer a route to the elite, nationally renowned madrasas with which they are affiliated, they also become sites of ‘low-caste Muslims’ aspirations to find a place within the textual tradition of Islam’ (Alam 2011: 202).

36 Yet caste is by no means disappearing as a relevant cultural mark of distinction in India. While the decline of the hierarchical system founded on pollution and purity is well underway, castes are increasingly seen as more ‘horizontal’ arrangements in society. Caste groups retain a sense of identity and solidarity through continuing mutual support and inter-marriage, even in cities. Status gains by lower castes have not made caste irrelevant, it has merely become less of a basis for discrimination (Corbridge et al. 2013). 37 Another reason for the continuing, if not increasing, utilization of madrasa education by Muslims in India is the status attributed to the elite madrasas of India and their graduates, particularly Deoband and Nadwa but also the Dar al-’Ulūm in Saharanpur and others. Alam (2011) provides an in-depth examination of the reproduction of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1977) in madrasa education, usefully delineating ‘social fields’ in which such cultural capital is most salient. As one explicit marker of the salience of such societal status, madrasa graduates continue to affix ‘Qasmi’ (signifying a Deoband pedigree) or ‘Nadwi’ after or in place of their last names, a practice that I observed even among those graduates who joined businesses or took university positions in Lucknow where presumably their madrasa credentials were not professionally relevant. This theme is also illustrated in many of the interviews I carried out with students, even with those who came from middle-class, land-owning, or otherwise already high-status family backgrounds.

Conclusion

38 This article illustrates how Muslim students view madrasa studies as one credential among many that are available in modern India. They take for granted that the

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contemporary Lucknow economy is comprised of highly differentiated divisions of labour, including growing jobs in religious occupations. They explicitly reject the (widespread) myopic public perception that becoming a doctor or engineer is the best path to employment in India’s diverse labour market. This religious credential is often sufficient for achieving students’ goals in the modern economy, in the world beyond their village and beyond the calm of madrasa walls: it brings cultural capital among urban educated Muslims which they lacked previously, social status in their home villages, escape from the remnants of caste prejudice, a back-door into university education via government credentialing exams, and Islamic learning and Arabic skills that open the doors to geographical mobility to other regions and, indeed, other countries. While students are certainly aware of and accept the criticisms of madrasa education, they also believe government education to be a less effective alternative. On the other hand, fee-based English-medium education such as in convent schools remains out of the reach of many. Madrasa education was thus much more than merely a means of preserving cultural identity as a religious minority. For Muslims seeking upward mobility, it was perceived as having real economic utility in imparting some degree of white-collar career skills and stable employment—at little or no cost to students’ families.

39 At other times, however, this religious credential was insufficient for their goals and students explicitly criticized madrasa education for many of the same reasons as policy-makers or others who seek to reform it. Nearly all students lamented the low quality of English instruction at Nadwa. Many sought additional MA, MBA, and PhD degrees from universities, even concurrent with their madrasa studies although this went against Nadwa’s policies. Other students declared that their prior education in rural schools did not prepare them, and Nadwa studies were a critical intermediary step for university, which also brings BA-equivalency upon completion, and told me in detail of their plans to gain acceptance to the Lucknow University that was tantalizingly adjacent to the grounds of Nadwa. 40 Yet taken as a whole, these data on Nadwa emphasize its place within the economy of Lucknow’s religious sphere that links it to wealthy Muslim donors in India and abroad to foster channels of upward social mobility. As such, these data represent Nadwa not only in the typically understood role of madrasas in reproducing Islamic knowledge, but also represent the larger relationships of exchange in which madrasas are embedded and which they co-create. The transnational dimension of this social mobility is a critical but as-yet understudied theme. A more specific focus on international ties of Nadwa graduates was outside the scope of this research; such a comprehensive study of employment and fundraising opportunities abroad awaits its author. At a time when madrasas are so widely debated in Indian media and public discourse, however, the students’ views on the religious labour market of Lucknow presented here do capture a less studied aspect of socioeconomic development in north India, showing madrasas such as Nadwa within a ​flow of alms, wealth, and job opportunities that lower-class Muslims of Lucknow perceive as having a substantial impact. Such a rationalization of religion has not necessarily led to the withering away of religion from the public sphere, as Max Weber (1978) proposed (cf. Casanova 1994; Eickelman & Anderson 1999; Zaman 2002), but rather to an advanced division of labour between mutually interdependent sectors and sub-economies—including clerical occupations and religious education.

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NOTES

1. To name a few by way of example, the national government welfare schemes targeted at madrasas include the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and the Area Intensive and Madrasa Modernization Programme, as well as more recent 2014 additions: Scheme for Providing Quality Education in Madarsas (SPQEM), the Infrastructure Development in Minority Institutions (IDMI), and the Maulana Azad Talim-e-Balighan (education for adults) scheme. Many state-level schemes also exist. 2. See for example, Mohammad Wajihuddin. 2011. ‘The Price of Moderation,’ Times of India, July 31, 2011. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/The-price-of-moderation/ articleshow/9427018.cms 3. All quotations from interviews in this article are translated by the author from the Urdu, unless noted as spoken in English. 4. Page numbers prefaced with an ‘L’ in citations refer to e-book Locations in the Kindle e-book edition. 5. Madrasa attendance rates are significantly higher in north India than in other regions. The Sachar Committee reported as follows: East 3.5%, South 1.5%, West 3.5%, and all-India 4%. 6. While official figures were not available, the caste breakdown for the institution as a whole was estimated at less than one-third students from ‘backward’ (OBC) or dalit groups, through conversations with the administrative officials and senior instructors. 7. All names of interviewees are pseudonyms. This dialogue was taken from a translated interview transcript audio recorded during fieldwork. All other quotes in this article are also from interview transcripts, unless otherwise indicated, recorded via digital audio or handwritten fieldnotes. All quotes are in Urdu, unless otherwise noted, and were translated into English by the author. 8. Jamal, interview by author, Lucknow, 4 April 2013. Jamal was in his final year of the ‘alim (BA- equivalency) course at Nadwa, from an upper-class family with many members educated at Nadwa and abroad (including himself), and from a caste in general category. 9. Children without a father are often known as ‘orphan’ (yatim) in north India, even if their mother is still alive because she is assumed not to have earning power. 10. Zahir, interview by author, Lucknow, 28 June 2013. 11. Jamal, Interview by author, Lucknow, 4 April 2013. 12. Ehsan, interview by author, Lucknow, 3 July 2013. Ehsan’s family was upper-class, living in Saudi Arabia for his childhood where his father was a manager for an American corporation, and from a caste in general category (Beg/Moghul). 13. In western UP, the vast majority of respondents engaged in agricultural, artisan, or wage labour. Equal numbers of respondents entered ‘business’ and ‘religious’ (mosque and madrasa) employment (Jeffrey et al. 2004: 973–74).

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14. The international ties and mobility were not an explicit part of my research questionnaires; however, see Hartung (2006) on the primacy of Nadwa’s ties with the Arab region. 15. Omar, interview by author, Lucknow, 23 June 2013. Omar was from a family in which advanced university degrees were common (his father was an engineer and mother held an MA in Islamic Studies), and was of Siddiqi/Sayyid caste. 16. Wahid, informal conversational interview, Lucknow, 6 June 2013. I did not interview Wahid about his socioeconomic or caste background, but he is from a family with elder members educated at Nadwa in prior decades. 17. This trend is not documented in any official data, as Nadwa administration does not keep records on the caste background of students. 18. Asif, interview by author, Lucknow, 29 June 2013. Asif’s father was an uneducated laborer. 19. Farooq, interview by author, Lucknow, 27 June 2013. Farooq was in his first year at Nadwa, was from a family of farmers, and refused to answer the caste background question (the interview carefully addressed sensitivity to discussing caste among Muslims and encouraged respondents to do so if they chose). 20. Of course, Farooq is speaking of various Sunni sects; Shi’a were originally included by Nadwa’s founders as part of their revivalist movement, but due to an early conflict, Shi’a were subsequently excluded (Jones 2011: 56).

ABSTRACTS

Lucknow is world-famous for Islamic learning. The city produced the ‘ulama of Firangi Mahal, the Sunni seminary of Nadwat al-’Ulama, and the revival and consolidation of a distinctly Indian Shi’ism. In contemporary India, however, critics lament madrasa education’s obscurantism, decrying its declining ‘usefulness’ in the 21st century. Yet a view of madrasas as merely cloistered spaces, impervious to traffic with contemporary life, is misleading. As clamour over ‘Muslim backwardness’ has become more shrill in recent years, Nadwa madrasa has claimed a role as a provider of welfare in Lucknow. This paper presents the religious sphere in Lucknow, viewed through the case of Nadwa and its students, as a marketplace for jobs in scholarship and ritual leadership as well as a site in the transnational economy of alms. I evaluate its influence in Lucknow’s social circles and its ability to maintain prestige (and Saudi funding) amidst 21st century constraints.

INDEX

Keywords: Madrasas, Lucknow, Muslims, development, social mobility, religious charity

AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER B. TAYLOR

Visiting Researcher, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University

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The ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’: Sectarian Conflict and the Middle Classes

Raphael Susewind

Acknowledgements: An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2014 convention of the Association for Asian Studies where it won the South Asia Council’s Best Graduate Student Paper prize. I would like to thank my friends and interviewees in Lucknow for their insight and hospitality and Sandria Freitag, Nandini Gooptu, Sandrine Gukelberger, Éva Rozália Hölzle, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Chris Taylor and four anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback. I also acknowledge the assistance of Editage in language editing.

1 Scholars of intergroup conflict in India, particularly those studying Hindu-Muslim riots and anti-Muslim pogroms, have long argued that attackers and their masterminds incite violence for electoral and economic gain and later mask their instrumental calculations in religious idioms (Wilkinson 2005). This argument has most forcefully been developed by Brass (2006: 15), who divides the production of Hindu-Muslim violence in contemporary India into three phases: (1) preparation/rehearsal, (2) activation/enactment, and (3) explanation/interpretation. Brass (2006: 18) draws attention to the cyclic ‘relationship between the immediate acts that precipitate riots and the ‘underlying causes’ that make it possible for such acts to be followed by large- scale crowd violence’ and argues that this vicious circle becomes organised in ‘institutional riot systems,’ in which ‘conversion specialists,’ who are well versed in instrumental calculations, ‘decide when a trivial, everyday incident will be exaggerated and placed into the communal system of talk, the communal discourse, and allowed to escalate into communal violence’ (Brass 2006: 32). Consequently, ‘riots persist because they are functionally useful to a wide array of individuals, groups, parties, and the state authorities,’ but this usefulness is sustained because of a ‘discourse of Hindu-Muslim communalism that has corrupted history, penetrated memory, and contributes in the present to the production and perpetuation of communal violence in the country’ (Brass 2006: 33).

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2 Initially in a similar mode, this paper examines both an immediate act and the underlying causes that enabled its escalation. It explains how a local business rivalry between Sunni and Shi’a real estate developers in Lucknow went awry, leading to an attack on a Shi’a majlis (religious assembly) in the inner-city neighbourhood of Wazirganj. Yet, unlike other instrumentalist studies of intergroup violence, I explore what happens when attackers’ calculations turn out to be miscalculations, thus questioning Brass’s notion of ‘institutionalisation.’ The Sunni attackers in Wazirganj apparently wanted to eliminate a business rival and dampen growing Shi’a economic and political assertion, which fits instrumentalist assumptions. They did not, however, anticipate that their actions would escalate to state-level politics and spiral so much out of their control as to temporarily send them to jail. Their miscalculation demonstrates that the vicious circle of rehearsal, enactment, and interpretation is no quasi-mechanic automatism. Rather, it is a more complex phenomenon, in which creative agency and the entanglement of specific events with broader social change play an important role (as Brass would likely agree). In the case of the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack,’ as the event soon became known, a distinctly Muslim version of ‘middle class moralities’ (Saavala 2010: title) took on sectarian overtones and began to challenge the established clerical hierarchy. Besides immediate instrumental calculations, this paper thus also unpacks the cultural changes accompanying upward social mobility. 3 Most academic studies of intergroup violence in India and the role of social mobility therein have concentrated on the political and economic incentives for violence. This paper complements that argument with close attention to the shifting ‘moral registers’ (Schielke 2009a, 2009b) of the emerging middle classes and thereby links those political and economic incentives to the wider cultural undercurrents of social change. With an emphasis on morality, I wish to highlight that ‘middle class’ is no neutral economic category delineated by economic aspirations and perhaps achievements, but primarily an emic marker in which both those who belong and those who don’t invest meaning and moral judgment. Indeed, I intend to show that it is precisely their moral projects that deeply implicate the middle classes in the violence that they outwardly reject. Self- identified middle class families in Wazirganj—Shi’a, Sunni and non-Muslim alike— discursively construct themselves as the guardians of propriety, as the ‘clean’ and utopian counterforce to both ‘corrupt’ and ‘criminal’ political and economic elites on the one hand and the allegedly ‘unruly’ population of poor people on the other (Donner & de Neve 2011, Saavala 2010; Liechty 2003). Furthermore, their self-understanding goes beyond rhetoric in that it is underpinned by iconic practices such as conspicuous consumption and related practices of fashioning the ‘proper’ self. Importantly, the intersection of class with other social categories also easily results in exclusionary political projects. This argument is not entirely new (see, for Lucknow, Gooptu 2001 and Jones 2012 and see, more generally, Corbridge & Harriss 2000); however, as many of my conversations with people in Lucknow have suggested, the disassociation of the middle classes from ‘dirty politics,’ and more specifically from sectarian violence remains a prominent idea in popular imagination. 4 My argument is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Wazirganj over a 16- month period just prior to the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ and during a one-month follow-up visit conducted one year later. During these visits, I spoke with most of the people involved on either side (one of the attackers was my Badminton partner a year

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earlier, and I sipped many cups of tea with one of his victims) and with the administration, police, and clerical establishment. Although I was not present at the majlis that was attacked, I had previously observed similar assemblies addressed by the same orator in the same venue, examined official documents pertaining to the attack, and conducted extensive participant and non-participant observation in the neighbourhood before and after the incident. 5 The paper first introduces the Lucknow and Wazirganj social context and reconstructs the attack using eyewitness accounts, press reports, and official documents. Then, it discusses some of the straightforward political and economic calculations that arguably motivated the attackers. These motivations can explain the event itself but they cannot address the rapid escalation that immediately followed it. The discursive significance and political impact of the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ can only be understood in light of contentious projects of religious reform and an emerging middle class morality, which are the focus of the second part of this paper. That section proposes that two conflicts came to overlap in one incident: (1) the direct business rivalry between a Shi’a and a Sunni real estate developer and (2) the indirect conflict between established and emerging Shi’a clerics over morality in modern times. The attackers’ instrumental calculations were miscalculations because they were ignorant of the latter conflict, as became evident when the local incident spiralled out of their control. The paper concludes with a discussion of two implications of this analysis for the study of intergroup violence in contemporary India more broadly: (1) intragroup contestation often underlies intergroup conflict, and (2) instrumental calculations are fallible in lived practice even if they appear stringent in retrospect.

Contemporary Lucknow

6 Contemporary Lucknow can be a strange place: It is neither a market town nor quite a metropolis; it feels at once melancholic and vibrant, genteel and abrasive. Lucknow is the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and politically influential, yet economically struggling, state. As a city of historical importance, this spiritual centre of sub-continental Shi’ism boasts centuries of cosmopolitan exchange with the Persian world. Consequently, Lucknow is the only city in India, apart from perhaps Hyderabad, where Shi’a are politically and socially influential. Its colonial rulers, the Nawabs and Taluqedars of Awadh, lavishly spent whatever they earned from British colonial purses on poets and craftsmen, erotic pursuits, and culinary refinement (Sharar 1975). Self- identified proper Lucknowites, usually men with elitist pasts, elitist aspirations, or both, still despise paid work. Every year, the old city grinds to a halt during Muharram and Safar, the two months of Shi’a ritual mourning when no business can be conducted, no engagements can be agreed upon, no children can be named, and no parties can be arranged. However, plenty of these activities happen under the carpet, contrived over cups of Kashmiri chai before or after religious gatherings when rich and famous clerics stop by for a chat and a deal.

7 Many residents of the old city enjoy recounting Lucknow’s glorious past to visitors, at times in a smugly ironic performance of self-exotification. However, one cannot deny that this Lucknow of gardens and palaces is in decline, if it ever did exist for a broader population (see Jones in this volume). In 1857, the city was the centre of what the British termed the Great Mutiny and what many Indians today refer to as their First

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War of Independence (Llewellyn-Jones 1985). Colonial purses were stowed and traded for imperial canes and carbines (Oldenburg 1984). Since the early 20th century, several waves of heavy immigration reshaped the face of the city (Majumdar 2004) and independent India’s land reforms cemented the elite’s financial decay. While the city always oscillated between grandeur and melancholy, undoubtedly influenced by popular Shi’a piety and its emphasis on ritual mourning, melancholy ultimately became pervasive. To complicate matters, since the 1980s, Uttar Pradesh has been the grand stage for lower caste politics in India, a scenario in which Dalits and Other Backward Classes profit and many Muslims feel excluded (Jaffrelot 2003, Jaffrelot & Gayer 2012, see also Lee in this volume). Old Lucknow largely keeps its distance from state-level politics, proud to host big leaders but quick to point out that such ‘uncivilised’ people do not truly belong there (Graff 1997). The sense that what remains is ‘just another provincial town, with little opportunities, few jobs, and fewer women still’ was particularly apparent in the attitudes of my younger informants. At first glance, little seems to be happening in this place where everything of relevance allegedly happened long ago. 8 Yet, interestingly, expressions of Lucknow’s famous melancholy rarely feel melancholic. Although outwardly looking back and claiming heartbreak over the city’s decay, most people are quite busy looking forward and carving out opportunities in the new order. Whereas traditional crafts such as Chickan embroidery are in decline (Wilkinson-Weber 1999) and positions in the burgeoning bureaucracy rarely go to Muslims (Sachar et al. 2006), a new Muslim middle class is emerging on the fringes of the old city, largely unmentioned in people’s popular perceptions of Lucknow. In sections of the old city where many Muslims (Sunni and Shi’a alike) are highly successful, a veritable real estate boom is in progress because of perceptions that a proper ‘flat’ (a dwelling or apartment always spoken of in English) is an important, although ambivalent, indicator of middle class life (Guiu Searle 2014, Donner, forthcoming, Susewind, forthcoming). This real estate boom propels a virtuous circle of upward social mobility and further tilts the economic and political balance away from the former aristocratic elites. 9 Religious change is as palpable as the economic and political transformations in Lucknow and a number of aspiring young ulema (clerics) propagate an individualistic morality for the emerging middle classes (a fresh take on earlier reinventions of their role; Jones 2012, Joshi 2001). Many people find it difficult to adjust to the ulema’s rigid demands, some people find strength and solace in them, and others simply earn a fortune from spreading checklists of religious do’s and don’ts. Indeed, whoever wants to make money in old Lucknow today either enters a shady world of builders and developers parcelling and selling off the estates of the impoverished elite in collusion with local goons, politicos, and city officials or works for one of the mushrooming religious cable television channels or sectarian social media platforms. Frequently, a person does both, and more, by letting one brother contest local elections and asking another to run the declining family workshop. 10 Wazirganj, a mixed neighbourhood that is squeezed between the old and the new cities, is in the midst of this imbroglio, and it is where I lived and worked for 17 months. Formerly the leafy home of the wazirs, or ministers, of Avadh’s rulers, the neighbourhood’s demography changed drastically in the aftermath of 1857. While a handful formerly aristocratic families remain, reataining nostalgic memories of the

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past, contemporary Wazirganj is very much a crowded popular area on the brink of becoming middle class, representative of the wider changes described above. About half of its population is Muslim, divided into one-third Shi’a and two-thirds Sunni. The Shi’a have grown in numbers and economic strength but the Sunni dominate local politics. Even though real estate developers have recently invested money in the neighbourhood, the benefits of social change are unevenly distributed along sectarian lines, which has led to increasing tensions between successful Shi’a and powerful Sunnis. Last, but not least, Wazirganj is highly political turf. It is the home of Christian College, where many young politicians start their careers—mostly Muslims and Hindus despite the College’s colonial-era designation. Christian College is adjacent to Balrampur Hospital, where criminal legislators go to escape the hardships of jail. The hospital is supported by a micro-economy of assistants and small-scale political entrepreneurs, most of whom are Sunni Muslim or Hindu cowherds close to the ruling Samajwadi Party—and locally known to enforce their will by violent means if necessary (Michelutti & Heath 2012). 11 Indeed, violence between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims increased during the 20th century and there was a series of sectarian riots in the old city that continue intermittently today. Importantly, the use of the term ‘sectarian’ in this paper is based on the prevalent emic descriptions of Shi’a-Sunni contestation, but I do not propose such contestations are essentially about minute maslaki (school of thought) differences between them. To the contrary, ‘sectarianism became a means by which a Shi’a community was defined, negotiated and presented, an alternative framework for collective modernization’ (Jones 2012: 230). Several authors have described this process of community formation as being essentially similar to Hindu-Muslim communal agitation (Cole 1988, Freitag 1990). Similar to the way that Hindu-Muslim conflicts often emerge from intra-Hindu disagreements about what it means to be Hindu in contemporary times, ‘Shia-Sunni arguments . . . were in fact frequently something of a smokescreen for competition, or even conflict, within Shiism itself [so that] the ‘other’ was primarily a stylistic mechanism, by which particular dynamics of change internal to Shiism could be facilitated’ (Jones 2012: 231). I agree with this argument and endeavour in this paper to demonstrate that the miscalculations that led to the escalation of the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ came about mostly because of the Sunni attackers’ ignorance of intra-Shi’a clerical politics.

The ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’

12 In recent years, a group of aspiring Shi’a real estate developers has begun to revitalise the observance of Muharram, the Shi’a month of ritual mourning, in the neighbourhood. Over the past few years, they have invited Maulana Abid Bilgrami, a successful businessman turned cleric, to address the local youth in a one-week series of majalis (religious assemblies). The size of the gathering has grown each year and it has been particularly attractive to the emerging local middle classes. In 2013, it was so popular that the local Sunni strongman, municipal corporator, and self-styled guardian of the poor, named ‘Nammu,’ issued an ultimatum to stop Bilgrami’s majalis because he considered them a public nuisance. The organisers refused to back off, the resulting tension was palpable, and, as Bilgrami was finishing his talk on 16 January 2013, somebody cut the electricity.

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13 As soon as ‘Doctor,’ one of the organisers, stepped out from the venue to find out what was happening, he found Nammu at the front door and a heated argument ensued. Who drew his pistol first remains unclear (police reports state that they both were armed); but, in the midst of their dispute, several attackers opened fire at the swelling crowd from a dark corner across the street. About fifteen minutes later, the District Magistrate arrived with a heavy police presence just as three injured people, including Doctor, were rushed to hospital. Police officers were busy dispersing the Sunni crowd and arranging for the safe passage of the Shi’a from the place of attack when the news broke that a Hindu bystander, apparently mistaken for one of the original attackers, had been murdered in a side alley. Simultaneously, one of the injured people (Doctor’s close and trusted assistant) was declared dead on arrival at the hospital, where a large crowd, led by Maulana Kalbe Jawwad (the most prominent Shi’a cleric in Lucknow), had already formed in protest. 14 At this point, the focus of events expanded from Wazirganj to the old city at large. To pacify the crowd that had gathered in front of the hospital, the authorities promised to immediately arrest Nammu and his family members, who had fled the scene. Indeed, police captured one of his brothers early the next morning and put him to jail for two weeks, a circumstance unheard of in the history of that family’s hold over the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, throughout the night, stone pelting was occasionally reported. In the early morning hours after the attack, the District Magistrate tried to negotiate to obtain a quiet funeral for the victims to avoid further tension. However, Maulana Kalbe Jawwad’s major clerical rival foiled his plan by using one of the dead bodies to block a heavily trafficked road through the old city and then demanding the immediate arrest of the absconding Nammu and his cousin, who was a former Member of Parliament (MP). When rumours flew that another Shi’a had been stabbed in the old city, a Sunni rickshaw driver who was there at the edge of the roadblock became the victim of a revenge attack. The police then cane-charged the protesters, dispersed the crowd, and unilaterally took the dead bodies to a nearby graveyard, which triggered another wave of protest. 15 Latest then, the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ began to impact state-level politics. Four First Informal Reports had already been lodged at the Wazirganj police station by the victims’ relatives, a co-organiser of the majlis, and by prominent Shia citizens. They named, among others, Nammu, his arrested brother, and their MP cousin as the attackers. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, his father and Samajwadi Party supremo, Mulayam Singh Yadav, became personally involved and assured Maulana Kalbe Jawwad that more arrests would follow. 16 The next morning, barely 48 hours after the attack, the state government announced that the families of the victims would be compensated five lakh rupees (roughly five times the annual per capita income in urban Uttar Pradesh) and that there also would be payments to those who had been injured. Nammu was briefly arrested but he was quickly cleared of all of the charges in a report hastily drafted by a police officer newly transferred to Wazirganj station. Two weeks later, Nammu’s brother left jail on bail as well, which prompted large demonstrations in the old city and a request to transfer the enquiry from the local police to a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Anti- Terrorism Squad. The SIT was indeed formed but it has not yet submitted its report. The Superintendent of Police was promptly transferred out of Lucknow the day after he announced that stern action would be taken.

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17 The attack also caused a rather exceptional, albeit short-lived, unity among Lucknow’s notoriously infighting Shi’a clerics under the leadership of Maulana Kalbe Jawwad. Later, a Sunni procession was attacked during Ramadan in retaliation, a first in Lucknow’s long history of sectarian clashes, and when I returned to the city 10 months after that attack to ascertain what exactly was going on there, police pickets were still guarding sensitive street corners in Wazirganj. My Shi’a and Sunni contacts, including family members of victims, attackers, and sources in the administration and police, confirmed what I had gleaned from afar: the whole episode had quickly moved to higher political ground than that on which those who were initially involved were standing and any prior instrumental calculations by the attackers soon became irrelevant because a much larger machinery sprang into action.

Politics and political economy

18 In short: the sectarian politics of identity and belonging that have come to be seen as synonymous with contemporary Shi’a-Sunni relations in Lucknow seemed to have, once again, escalated out of control. The movement from the alleged decay of a tehzeebi (civilised) past into a violently sectarian future is the theme of many folktales about Lucknow. The former elites often blame the so-called uncivilised, lower class Sunni migrants, so the initial interpretation of the sequence of events in Lucknow itself was foreseeable. The Shi’a wing of the Urdu press and many sectarian online platforms quickly chose to frame the event as a ‘terror attack just like targeted killings [that have] taken place in Pakistan [and] Syria’ (lucknowshianews.com, 19 January 2013). The Hindi press also published articles about ‘sectarian clashes’ and speculated about the potential electoral motives of the attackers. The dominant perspective in the Indian English language press was that a business rivalry had become violent, again suggesting potential electoral motivation. The latter interpretation reflects the dominant scholarly perspectives on intergroup violence in India that tend to deconstruct the shifting forms of religious belonging and try to explain violence through presumably hard political calculations for economic gain (Brass 2006, Varshney 2002, Wilkinson 2005).

19 That the Wazirganj incident might have been part of an electoral gamble and, more specifically, an attempt to divide the so-called Muslim vote along sectarian lines had already been discussed in Shi’a circles and in the wider community. At a large meeting of Shi’a clerics on 4 February 2013, Maulana Kalbe Jawwad hinted at a political conspiracy when he pointed out that, ‘political parties which [attempt to] foment trouble [that they] should not underestimate the [electoral] strength of Shi’as, for also many Hindus, Sunnis, Sikhs, Christians were azadars [mourners].’ In other words, observers of Muharram would not accept attacks on majalis lightly and retaliate at the ballot box. Barely 24 hours after the incident, one of Jawwad’s confidants posted the following online comment: We should consider that just as [Lalji] Tandon [Lucknow’s powerful BJP leader] announced that [Narendra] Modi [the controversial chief minister of Gujarat, and now India’s Prime Minister] will fight elections from [a seat in] Lucknow, on the very same day . . . preparations began to destroy the unity of Sunni and Shi’a [displayed in the assembly elections] so that the BJP would win at the time of elections as always. One more important issue is that one idiot Shi’a leader and 15–20 boys with him

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performed tabarra [curses against Sunnis] yesterday night at the Trauma Centre and demolished a number of cars in nearby alleys. This is also part of this attempt to incite disunity. In this way, one group of Yazidis is paid well from Tandon’s pocket and throws oil in the fire. The command over both groups is in the hands of one man. (lucknowshianews.com, 18 January 2013) 20 Unfortunately, these allegations can be neither proven nor disproven. Lalji Tandon naturally denies his involvement and, even if we knew them, sectarian voting patterns cannot be linked to specific causes on the flimsy basis of temporal coincidence. There are, however, good theoretical arguments that explain why, at least in this instance, electoral calculations are an unconvincing explanation of sectarian violence. In January 2013, the general elections were more than a year away and any strategy following a crude ‘divide and rule’ logic would be ill-timed; an attack during the following Muharram would have been much more effective. Moreover, when the elections took place, Muslims in Wazirganj voted similarly to those in Lucknow at large by generally supporting the Congress (Susewind & Dhattiwala 2014), which had never had an investment in the conflict between Nammu and Doctor.

21 Elections to the state assembly and municipality in turn were held months before the attack, in which Nammu and his family were highly successful, rendering a revenge attack from their side unnecessary. Indeed, in the assembly elections, Wazirganj was one of the few areas in old Lucknow where Muslims rejected the Samajwadi Party’s sweeping victory elsewhere, no doubt because Nammu had campaigned for the incumbent Bahujan Samaj Party. In the local elections that were held shortly thereafter, Nammu’s powerful grip on the neighbourhood led Wazirganj to be the only municipal ward that went to a candidate uncontested for the second consecutive time. That candidate was Nammu’s wife. To ensure that nothing unforeseen would happen, family members also controlled the local polling booth on election day with no apparent opposition from the police. Nammu’s brother, who later went to jail for the attack on Bilgrami’s majlis, boasted to have voted ‘at least 15 times’ when I met him by noon, and even half-jokingly invited me (the foreign researcher) to cast a few votes in his sister-in-law’s favour (which I politely declined). In sum, inciting sectarian tension for electoral gain was unnecessary at the local level and premature at the national level. 22 However, politics might enter in a different way. Nammu and Doctor were both involved in real estate, which is a sector that is believed to deeply influence election financing (Kapur & Vaishnav 2011) and is a major playground for goonda (strongman) politics (Michelutti 2010). Moreover, Imambara Deputy Sahib (the place of the attack) is located on prime waqf (religious endowment) land. Before Doctor and the group of aspiring Shi’a developers around him began to invigorate Muharram observance in Wazirganj, the Imambara had almost ceased to function and had already been encroached upon by Nammu and his associates. However, now that the place had returned to its original use, further deals would require the approval of Shi’a developers. Through his spiritual activism, Doctor had therefore conveniently secured a share of the lucrative business, circumventing the otherwise greater numerical strength and political power of his Sunni competitors. During my last visit, it was indeed rumoured that Doctor had arranged a land deal with some members of Nammu’s family but that all of them fell out with each other shortly before the attack on the majlis.

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23 How could a piece of land in old Lucknow have become so precious as to warrant murder? To understand this, we need to detour into a discussion of the political economy of real estate. A century ago, ‘a third of the members of the Municipal Board were ‘contractors’ . . . and clearly both the Board and the Improvement Trust were seen by many members as a means of furthering personal, family and clique interests’ (Reeves 1997: 218). The city has been expanding since then and many municipal corporators are still involved in real estate. However, apart from a few large landowners, Muslims have benefited little from urban growth. With the exception of a few old Muslim villages now enclosed by modern suburbs, new Lucknow has become almost exclusively non-Muslim (see Susewind & Taylor in this volume). This outcome can be attributed to a political economy of bureaucratic collusion that creates economic incentives for Muslims to invest in the old city: in the old city, Muslim developers enjoy closer social proximity to bureaucrats than non-Muslims, possess greater electoral strength, and exert clerical control over religious endowments, all of which translates into lower bribe levels and thus higher profit margins (Susewind, forthcoming). Higher margins in turn contribute to a distinctly Muslim, yet increasingly crowded, market segment in the old city, in which relatively larger profit margins attract an increasing number of players. 24 In Wazirganj, Nammu and his family have long dominated this lucrative market. However, their former Shi’a contractors (Doctor and others) have recently made enough money to become developers in their own right. They still cannot politically compete with Nammu, but they are increasingly important economic competition in the scramble to provide flats to the aspiring middle classes. The competition with Doctor over waqf land might have been a warning sign for Nammu that his competition was attempting to gain independence. Was this a potential motive for the attack? Locally it was common knowledge that Nammu and his family used violence to protect their interests and that they had escaped punishment in the past. Nammu may have attempted to kill two birds with one stone by eliminating a major business rival while weakening the rising Shi’a assertiveness in his neighbourhood. Thus, he may have been motivated to attack Doctor immediately following the majlis rather than in a more private setting. Apparently, however, Nammu and his family grossly miscalculated their freedom to do as they chose because the events rapidly escalated. The escalation suggests an underexplored aspect in the research literature on inter-group violence in India: instrumental calculations might well lie behind incidents such as the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’—but what if they turn out to be miscalculations?

Middle class morality

25 Power shifts in the public sphere, corrupt markets and Shi’a-Sunni competition for upward social mobility set the context for the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ and reveal some of the material incentives and restraints under which it occurred. However, these conditions cannot fully explain why a business rivalry developed such violent momentum. To understand this escalation, one has to move beyond the individuals’ immediate instrumental calculations and examine long-term social changes unfolding in the neighbourhood and the accompanying intra-Shi’a (clerical) politics. Nammu’s ignorance, as a Sunni, of these developments led him to seriously misjudge the impacts

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of his actions, a misjudgement that almost sent him to jail for a long time despite his considerable political clout.

26 For instance, Nammu did not know that he and his family were not the only ones annoyed at Doctor and his group. Maulana Kalbe Jawwad had a different axe to grind. Consequently, two conflicts came to overlap in space and time. There was the immediate one between Nammu and Doctor and there was a more subtle and long-term one that simmers in Lucknow’s Shi’a clerical landscape and reflects the wider social and moral transformations of urban North India. On the one hand, Jawwad, had complicated interests in waqf administration himself. More importantly, however, he was increasingly under pressure from young and energetic clerics (such as Maulana Abid Bilgrami, who had been invited to Wazirganj by Doctor) who bring a different tonality and a different political project to the moral registers (Schielke 2009a, 2009b) of Shi’a belonging. They particularly strike a chord with the new Shi’a middle classes, whose allegiance consequently threatens to slip away from the clerical establishment. Therefore, the attack on Bilgrami’s majlis was a perfect opportunity for Jawwad to reassert his supremacy by rendering a local issue into a large-scale sectarian confrontation. 27 This section thus shifts to an analysis of Bilgrami’s theological project to explain the reasons that he became a threat to the clerical hierarchy as well as to the neighbourhood’s poor, most of whom happen to be Sunni. I argue that the cultural undercurrents of social change (exemplified by Bilgrami) ultimately explain why the relatively better established Shi’a clerics attempted to gain control of the protests against the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack,’ and, by extension, the rapid escalation of the issue to the level of state politics. Similarly, the discursive significance that the attack acquired in this process points to factors beyond the immediate instrumental calculations of Nammu and his family—they may have wanted to get rid of Doctor, but surely not become associated with ‘terror.’ This turn to the attacked assembly itself should not imply that the victims were in any way responsible for what happened to them—but help us to better understand the limits of instrumentalist explanations of group violence. 28 What is so special about Maulana Abid Bilgrami? When I first heard one of his majalis in Wazirganj one year before the attack, I was particularly struck by his rhetoric. He spoke mostly in plain, colloquial Hindustani rather than the fairly stylised Urdu that one commonly hears in Lucknow. He frequently inserted key terms or short phrases in English, mirroring the linguistic practices of his largely lower-middle class audience. This class tends to use select English nouns in their vernacular sentences, often to signal their aspirations to participate in ‘Shining India,’ and perhaps also in some imagination of a globalised modernity. 29 What Bilgrami said was just as interesting as his language and word choices and it was indicative of middle class aspirations. Bilgrami avoided narrating the painful history of Kerbala or engaging in a polemic portrayal of world politics, which is common among clerics in Lucknow. Instead, he mostly took on the minutiae of individual practices, especially public practices or those that are otherwise particularly visible to the public. For example, the majlis that I attended began with a customary acknowledgement of the piety of those who invited him. But, Bilgrami immediately reminded his audience that akhlaq (everyday behaviour) was at least as important as ritual observance. In Wazirganj, Bilgrami cautioned people not post pictures on Facebook, but if they did (as

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a male), to make sure that they grew a beard first. Similarly, he exhorted his audience to avoid ‘mixed gatherings’ of boys and girls and called for greater respect for the dignity and equality of men and women (in their respective roles). He asked us to stop listening to popular music and to dress ‘suitably’ in modern fashion yet he allowed marziya (devotional music) and loose-fitting jeans. In all these examples, Bilgrami carefully carved out ‘the delicate balance between not-too-much and not-too-little, between the vulgarity of the poor and the vulgarity of the rich, [which] is endlessly negotiated in middle class discourses of ‘suitability’ (Liechty 2003: 256). 30 Bilgrami’s emphasis on the everyday and mundane kept his audience engaged long beyond the official end of his majlis. Most of the people paid close attention throughout, although a few continued to use their mobile phones and one friend even updated his Facebook status during the talk, posting, ‘Maulana Bilgrami: don’t use fb [Facebook]’ to silent giggles in the back row. However, despite subversive acts such as this, almost no one left before the end. Bilgrami hit a nerve. After he concluded the day’s program with a short round of matam (ritual chest-beating), one of the organisers and friends of Doctor stormed up to me and commented how useful he had found the detailed guidance that Bilgrami provided, particularly for the many ‘youth’ (a term used exclusively in English by both the organiser and Bilgrami) in the audience. Other short conversations that I had as people trickled out into the night expressed similar sentiments. 31 To flesh out the theological reasoning behind Bilgrami’s insistence on the primacy of akhlaq (everyday behaviour), I bought a video (VCD) recording of the complete How to help our Imam series, based on its initial delivery at Khoja Masjid in Mumbai. It was sold in Lucknow’s bazaars one year later. The cycle consists of eight majalis, each about 45 minutes long, the penultimate of which I had witnessed in Wazirganj. This is the series’ opening statement, My topic for this whole Ashura is the help/victory of the Imam—that is, how to help our Imam—which is the most important aspect of Muharram. After all, Muharram is not the term for an activity, Muharram is not a culture of ours—Muharram is a prime opportunity for introspection for Shi’a. We might not have engaged in introspection our whole lives, we might not have thought about how we can assist the Imam for the whole year, but this is the perfect opportunity, this is the time that our neighbourhood can formulate their complaints and requests and can jointly help those of Kerbala. So pay attention, friends, for this is an opportunity for everybody, everybody can grab it, everybody will get the chance! (VCD 1, 1:15, emphasis in original) 32 Bilgrami again skilfully used English language words at key points. Indeed, the very first words that he spoke were ‘meri topic ye hai ki’ (‘my topic is the following’), which is his trademark formulation that encapsulates the essence of his distinct style, quoted verbatim by most of the people who I asked about his majalis. The fact that he explicitly constructed the cycle as a series of lectures under a unifying topic rather than according to the events of Kerbala is another significant innovation. Although few orators refrain from contemporary commentary, equally few would use this commentary as the organising principle of their majalis, and the denunciation of a cultural understanding of Muharram is highly significant in tehzeebi Lucknow. Finally, his introduction concludes with the exclamation that ‘everybody will get the chance!’ (i.e. the chance for introspection and reform), a promise that he made like a

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motivational speaker at a stereotypical marketing seminar, completely abandoning traditional rhetoric.

33 Many of my interviewees, particularly the young adults, said that the universalism in the address and the fleeting casual mention of women’s education mark Bilgrami as particularly ‘modern’ and ‘progressive.’ Similar to other contemporary ‘modernists’ or ‘reformers’ (Osella & Osella 2007, 2013), Bilgrami ‘place[s] the responsibility of fashioning Islamic society on each individual Muslim’ (Robinson 2007: 177). 34 However, Bilgrami also goes a step further because the Islamic society imagined here is clearly middle class with complicated, and often ambivalent, desires to become ‘suitably modern’ (Liechty 2003: title). Dress codes and Facebook are just the beginning and subsequent majalis guide the audience to the proper use of mobile phones, how to live a suitably Islamic life in a nuclear family with a ‘job,’ in a ‘company,’ and how to protect one’s Shi’a identity while aspiring to emigrate or relocate. With respect to all of these indicators of middle class life, Bilgrami promised the audience a precise idea of ‘what all to give up and what all to emulate’ to ensure a life in peace and zukun (calm) ‘despite the demands of modern times’ (VCD 1, 11:30). 35 There is more to this insistence on akhlaq, as becomes increasingly apparent throughout the majlis series. For example, in his third lecture, Bilgrami complains that some of the people who listen to his majalis apparently have musical ring tones on their mobile phones and then he makes an interesting remark about social status and class distinction, Music is forbidden in Islam. If you ever listen to music, well, don’t complain, don’t complain then. Listen carefully! Four days have passed since I arrived in Bombay. Five days perhaps. Day in, day out, my phone rings, I keep meeting poor people. All of them have one request: ‘Maulana, I am troubled, I have this problem, that problem.’ I regularly reply: oh come on my friend, [leave it], at least in Muharram, at least in the month of Imam Husain. . . . Whenever you encounter troubles, then you have to check yourself, check: ‘am I doing something wrong?,’ is there a chance that I myself have done something wrong? Everybody should check first themselves, then their family, their relations, their talk and their actions. . . . There is a simple method, everybody can use it, men and women, even labourers and watchmen. I myself check everyday . . . and if you want to know, if you really want to know, . . . then first check yourself, check 24/7! (VCD 3, 28:00, emphasis in original) 36 This excerpt and similar remarks in subsequent majalis reveal the flip side of an ethical life imagined purely in terms of propriety, which Saavala (2010: title) fittingly termed ‘middle-class morality.’ Considering the example of Hyderabad, she argues that the central moral predicament of the Indian middle classes is not how to justify one’s own privileged position, because they do not feel a need for such a justification in the absence of a universal moral code. Rather, the main moral issue at stake is how to defend one’s own position as ‘one of us,’ how to be on a par with one’s status equals by pointing out the moral differences between ‘the poor’ and oneself as a middle class person. (Saavala 2010: 118) 37 Associating poverty with moral misconduct is not uncommon in India and elsewhere. However, with respect to an Islamic cleric, it is nonetheless surprising, given Islam’s central theological concern with social justice. Indeed, Bilgrami’s emphasis on each individual’s responsibility for the minutiae of his or her conduct is driven by a political economy of guilt that helps him to reinterpret the key Islamic commandment of equality and social justice in favour of a narrow middle class politics of the self: ‘If we do not implement this . . . how can we be called Hussaini? . . . Change your life, change

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it! Kerbala means revolution, but [most precisely] a revolution in one’s own life. Revolutionise yourself!’ (VCD 3, 39:00).

38 In sum, Abid Bilgrami not only mimics the linguistic practices of his middle class audience (a distinct style for which he is well known) and focuses his rhetoric on iconic consumer items, he precisely addresses the material sensitivities of the aspirational classes in Lucknow and elsewhere. Ultimately, Bilgrami naturalises privilege and limits social responsibility by effectively blaming poor people for their own predicament. If one were to assist them, one would effectively encourage them in their bad ways. Thus, he promotes a model of upward social mobility in which ethics are reduced to a code of propriety, a list of moral do’s and (especially) don’ts for individual conduct. 39 Bilgrami’s approach is such a strong innovation of mainstream Islamic perspectives on social justice, solidarity and charitable obligations that it is not surprising that tensions have erupted regarding the extent to which his advice is being followed. The organisation that invited Bilgrami to Wazirganj continues to distribute food to the poor every year on one of the first days of Muharram, awards stipends to deserving Shi’a students, and runs a blood donation camp that receives about 60 donations before and after each of Bilgrami’s programs. But while some people who have attended them merely appreciate that Bilgrami’s majalis have a clear structure, a ‘modern style’ as one visitor told me, a refreshing alternative to the ritualistic approach of other orators, there also is my friend who left his wife in part because of arguments about which practices were proper enough to label their young family as ‘educated rather than poor,’ as he once framed it. Since then, he has fancied books on divorce. Other people fully commit to and happily embrace the theory that poverty is of no concern to them, that individual propriety is key, and that poor people themselves ‘have to check themselves, check: am I doing something wrong?’ 40 So far, this narrow focus on propriety remains an exception in the wider Shi’a clerical landscape of Lucknow, and even Bilgrami’s most ardent followers acknowledge that other clerics are more influential. Broadly speaking, these clerics either pursue a project of identitarian groupism (exemplified by the politics of Maulana Kalbe Jawwad), aesthetic refinement (most celebrated by Maulana Agha Roohi but also discernable in many smaller, traditional neighbourhood majalis), or social reform (propagated by Maulana Kalbe Sadiq and his associates). None of them breaks as clearly with traditional rhetoric as Bilgrami, nor do they address a specific class base in their considerable following. But all strive to attract the newly rich, not least to secure their own income; consequently, the considerable impact of Bilgrami’s innovations on the emerging Shi’a middle class in Wazirganj suffices to make the establishment nervous, as several of those mentioned above admitted in private conversation. In fact, I believe this was the main reason for Kalbe Jawwad’s intervention in the aftermath of the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ and its subsequent escalation in the first place, as argued above. 41 A second reason, however, is the fact that Bilgrami’s middle class morality also easily took on sectarian overtones in Wazirganj, where most of the poor people are Sunnis and Shi’a lead the scramble for upward social mobility. Although it may not have been his intention, his theology is particularly susceptible in this social context to sectarian instrumentalisation. Many people on the Sunni side with whom I spoke 10 months after the attack on his majlis explicitly referred to the rising real estate prices and diminishing rent markets in Wazirganj to justify it. Although these types of complaints

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were at least partly motivated by Sunnis’ competing business interests rather than concerns for poor people (an aspect discussed more fully in Susewind, forthcoming), the complaints demonstrate that Bilgrami, who rose to local prominence in an intra- sectarian competition over what it means to be Shi’a in contemporary times, began to influence inter-sectarian relations through the entanglement of sectarian identity with other axes of social difference.

Understanding sectarian conflict

42 This entanglement of religion and class has wider implications for the study of intergroup violence in contemporary urban India, implications with which I will conclude this discussion. On one hand, the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ cannot be understood in isolation from the local politics and the political economy in which it occurred. Nor can it be understood without considering the business rivalry between Nammu and Doctor over a lucrative segment of Lucknow’s booming real estate market: without the threat that growing Shi’a wealth poses to Sunni political dominance in the neighbourhood, the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ would likely not have happened. This reinforces mainstream scholarship that seeks to explain communal and, by extension, sectarian violence in India through political instrumentalisation and economic incentives (Brass 2003, Varshney 2002, Wilkinson 2005).

43 On the other hand, I have argued that such political and economic calculations are underpinned by cultural and religious idioms that nurture and sustain those calculations over time. Unfortunately for Nammu, his conflict with Doctor became entangled in the wider social and moral dynamics that were expressed more within the Shi’a community of Wazirganj than between Shi’a and Sunni. In recent years, a reformist perspective on middle class morality has gained prominence in Wazirganj, a variation of Shi’ism that reduces Islamic ethics of social justice to a checklist for individual propriety. This middle class morality quickly became clothed in sectarian overtones because most poor people are Sunni and simultaneously challenged the established Shi’a clerical hierarchies that have so far resorted to differed moral registers, thus drawing the attention of state-level politics to an otherwise local problem. 44 The ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ therefore demonstrates that the rapid discursive and political escalation of violent conflict between groups can often only be understood by deeply examining the rivalries and contestations that occur within groups. Moreover, we saw that intergroup violence may well emerge from instrumental calculations which appear stringent in retrospective reconstruction—but that these calculations are fallible in lived practice. 45 Finally, when close attention is paid to the reasons why miscalculations occur, we see that intergroup conflict is not exclusively (perhaps, not even primarily) a situation in which underprivileged, uneducated people are easily manipulated by vicious elites for political and economic gain. Local discourse in India still situates the middle classes as a clean and civilised counterforce to political and economic elites perceived to be corrupt and criminal on one hand and seemingly unruly popular politics on the other hand. Many Lucknowites attribute Shi’a-Sunni conflict to a lack of education and autonomy of the poor Muslims in the old city, people who have been exploited by unscrupulous political entrepreneurs. In contrast to these popular perceptions, however, is a growing

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body of academic literature that links upward social mobility to at times violent othering and argues that these links are frequently mediated through novel moral registers (Schielke 2009a, 2009b) and associated practices (Ahmad 2009, Ghassem- Fachandi 2012, Ring 2006, Verkaaik 2004). These types of connections are not necessarily new phenomena. In Lucknow, the links can be traced back to the early 20th century when sectarian clashes first began and were financed by the emerging business class of the time (Hasan 1997). Reeves (1997: 221) suggested that from the very beginning, ‘urban concerns [such as poverty and development] may have been displaced onto the ‘sectarian’ because of the class position[s] of Shi’a and Sunni groups’ (cf. Gooptu 2001, Jones 2012). Seen through the prism of the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack,’ there is no difference today: group violence may not be ancillary but indeed integral to the processes of social change in contemporary North India.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmad, Sadaf (2009) Transforming Faith: The Story of al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women, New York: Syracuse University Press.

Brass, Paul R (2006) The Production of Hindu-Muslim-Violence in Contemporary India, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cole, Juan (1988) Roots of North Indian Shi’ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Corbridge, Stuart; Harriss, John (2000) Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism, and Popular Democracy, Cambridge: Polity.

Donner, Henrike (forthcoming) “Daughters are just like Sons now’: Negotiating Kin-work and Property Regimes in Kolkata Middle-class Families’, Journal of South Asian Development.

Donner, Henrike; de Neve, Geert (eds.) (2011) Being Middle-class in India: A Way of Life, London: Routledge.

Freitag, Sandria (1990) Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis (2012) Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India, Princeton (New Jersey): Princeton University Press.

Gooptu, Nandini (2001) The Politics of the Poor in Early Twentieth-century India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graff, Violette (1997) ‘A View from Lucknow: National, Communal and Caste Politics in Uttar Pradesh (1977–91)’, in Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 227–72.

Guiu Searle, Llerena (2014) ‘Conflict and Commensuration: Contested Market Making in India’s Private Real Estate Development Sector’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(1), pp. 60–78.

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Hasan, Mushirul (1997) ‘Traditional Rites and Contested Meanings: Sectarian Strife in Colonial Lucknow’, in Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 114–35.

Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003) India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India, London: Hurst.

Jaffrelot, Christophe; Gayer, Laurent (eds.) (2012) Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation, London: Hurst.

Jones, Justin (2012) Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Joshi, Sanjay (2001) Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Kapur, Devesh; Vaishnav, Milan (2011) Quid Pro Quo: Builders, Politicians, and Election Finance in India, Washington: Center for Global Development Working Paper no. 276.

Liechty, Mark (2003) Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society, Princeton (New Jersey): Princeton University Press.

Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie (1985) A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British, and the City of Lucknow, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Majumdar, Paramita (2004) Dynamics of Urban Development: The Changing Face of Lucknow, Delhi: Abhijeet.

Michelutti, Lucia (2010) ‘Wrestling with Body Politics: Understanding ‘Goonda’ Political Styles in North India,’ in Pamela Price & Arild Ruud (eds.), Power and Influence in South Asia: Bosses, Lords and Captains, London: Routledge, pp. 44–69.

Michelutti, Lucia; Heath, Oliver (2012) ‘Political Cooperation and Distrust: Identity Politics and Yadav-Muslim Relations, 1999–2009’, in Roger Jeffery, Jens Lerche & Craig Jeffrey (eds.), Development Failure and Identity Politics in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi: Sage.

Oldenburg, Veena Talwar (1984) The Making of Colonial Lucknow 1856–1877, Princeton (New Jersey): Princeton University Press.

Osella, Filipo; Osella, Caroline (2007) ‘Introduction: Islamic Reformism in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, 42(2–3), pp. 247–57.

Osella, Filipo; Osella, Caroline (eds.) (2013) Islamic Reform in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reeves, Peter (1997) ‘Lucknow Politics: 1920–47’, in Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City, Delhi (India): Oxford University Press, pp. 213–26.

Ring, Laura A (2006) Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building, Bloomington (Indiana): Indiana University Press.

Robinson, Francis (2007) Islam, South Asia, and the West, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Saavala, Minna (2010) Middle-Class Moralities: Everyday Struggle over Belonging and Prestige in India, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Sachar, Rachinder; Hamid, Sayid; Oommen, T K; Basith, M A; Majeed, Akhtar; Shariff, Abusaleh; Basant, Rakesh (2006) Report on Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India, Ministry of Minority Affairs, URL: http://www.minorityaffairs.gov.in/sachar.

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Schielke, Samuli (2009a) ‘Ambivalent Commitments: Troubles of Morality, Religiosity and Aspiration among Young Egyptians’. Journal of Religion in Africa, 39(2), pp. 158–85.

Schielke, Samuli (2009b) ‘Being Good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, Fragmentation, and the Moral Self in the Lives of Young Egyptians’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(S1), pp. S24– S40.

Sharar, Abdul Halim (1975) Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Susewind, Raphael (forthcoming) ‘Spatial segregation, real estate markets and the political economy of corruption in an Indian city,’ Journal of South Asian Development.

Susewind, Raphael; Dhattiwala, Raheel (2014) ‘Spatial variation in the ‘Muslim vote’ in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, 2014’, Economic & Political Weekly, 49(39), pp. 99–110.

Varshney, Ashutosh (2002) Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, New Haven (Connecticut): Yale University Press.

Verkaaik, Oskar (2004) Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan, Princeton (New Jersey): Princeton University Press.

Wilkinson, Steven (2005) ‘Introduction,’ in Steven Wilkinson (ed.), Religious Politics and Communal Violence, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Wilkinson-Weber, Clare (1999) Embroidering Lives: Women’s Work and Skill in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry, Albany (New York): State University of New York Press.

ABSTRACTS

On 16 January 2013, a Sunni real estate developer opened fire at a Shi’a religious assembly in Wazirganj, a mixed neighbourhood in old Lucknow, India, killing one and injuring two. At its core, this was a business rivalry gone awry, but was soon labelled the ‘Wazirganj Terror Attack’ by Shi’a activists. Demonstrations were staged, politicians were arrested, and religious gatherings were invigorated. Based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper considers why the attack took place and why it escalated. The political economy of real estate and local politics are argued to have motivated the attack, but the attackers miscalculated and lost control of the incident. The subsequent escalation can only be understood in light of Shi’a clerical competition over new moral registers and an emerging middle class morality that replaces ethical concern for solidarity with narrow codes of ‘proper’ conduct. This underlines the importance of intra-group contestation to intergroup conflict, and the limits of purely instrumentalist explanations of sectarian violence.

INDEX

Keywords: Muslims, group violence, instrumentalism, middle classes, morality, India, Lucknow

AUTHOR

RAPHAEL SUSEWIND

Associate of the Contemporary South Asia Studies Program, University of Oxford

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Postscript. Interdisciplinary Dialogue And Lucknow’s Cultural System

Sandria Freitag

Introduction

1 Does Lucknow ‘suffer’ from ‘too much history’ as the informant commented to our editors? This postscript suggests that, however far the city may have moved from its Nawabi beginnings, the inherited strategies that shaped Lucknow’s cultural system under the Nawabs made space for its residents to play an active role in defining that system. This contribution is fundamental to understanding life in this urban central place over more than two centuries: the inclusiveness essential to claiming legitimacy by a Successor State in its locality also provided the flexibility and authority for the cultural system to respond creatively to new challenges as its historical context changed. At the heart of our narrative, then, lie the strategies inherent not only in the Nawabs’ approach to their kingdom, but in the larger implications for contemporary India of a Successor State’s creation of an inclusive and responsive cultural system shaped by the agency of its residents.

2 Given that the key elements in a cultural system—that set of practices and collective cultural expressions that add up to a distinctive modality—provide a range of socio- political, cultural, and economic attributes that are approached in complementary if distinctive ways by the disciplines of history and anthropology, this collection of essays has provided an ideal entry point for understanding the Successor State cultural system operating in Lucknow. The re-emergence over time of key issues in their changing guises helps to chart characteristic practices and dynamics essential for this place. Here, despite the constraints on depth and length inherent in a ‘postscript’, I’d like to suggest the ways in which this distinctiveness delineates the outlines of a larger pattern.

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3 Jones’ essay in this collection has provided background to Abdul Halim Sharar’s potent (if nostalgic) description of the cultural system associated with the Nawabi Successor State. Particularly apt for our purpose is Sharar’s comment that Outwardly the court of Lucknow became so magnificent that no other court could rival it and the town of Lucknow acquired great splendor. The money which Shuja- ud-Daula had spent on the army and on provision for war, Asaf-ud-Daula started to spend in satisfying his desire for voluptuous living and on the embellishment and comforts of the town. In a short time he had collected to himself all the pomp and splendor that could be found in the world. His one desire was to surpass the Nizam of Hyderabad and Tipu Sultan and his ambition was that the magnificence and grandeur of no court should equal that of his own. (Sharar 1975: 44-5) 4 Sharar’s chapter continues by listing the building program of Asaf-ud-Daula, the fourth Nawab of Awadh, who moved the capital city from Faizabad to Lucknow in 1775, and so had a relatively clean slate on which to ‘construct’ both a cultural system and the urban built environments that conveyed this Successor State’s identity. As compared to nearby Banaras (or Varanasi), for instance, Lucknow was a very different kind of city, designed to be a political capital for a different style of rule: the Nawabs were a Persian Shia Muslim dynasty, and used their Shi’ism to call out distinctive elements as markers of their cultural system, while also becoming known for their inclusiveness and even ‘secular’ characteristics of rule (marked, for instance, by their patronage of Basant [kite festival] and even acting the part of Krishna in courtly theatre). At the same time, the Nawabs could use their reliance on Persian to attract poets and other artists previously resident in Delhi to move to Lucknow; indeed, poetry became the most prominent marker of court culture in Lucknow.

5 As observed by Jones, Sharar wrote at the turn of the century, and rode a wave of nostalgia for that Nawabi cultural system that had dominated the city for the preceding century and a half. We might note two revealing aspects of Sharar’s description: first, his language adopts the British tone of denigration (e.g., ‘voluptuous’, ‘pomp’), which reflects the political changes under which Sharar wrote: Sharar accepts the characterizations and blame placed on the Nawabs by the British. A second revealing aspect of the quotation, however, is the frame of reference Sharar presents: for the Nawabs (as for Sharar?), it is the Successor States, and only those ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad and Tipu Sultan of Mysore, that the Nawab wants to ‘surpass’. The neighbouring Rohillas (the closest kingdom) are only worth mentioning because they are so uncivilized that everyone moves on quickly to Lucknow; other princely states emerging in the South and West are not mentioned; and the East India Company lands are, apparently, also too uncivilized to be considered. Moreover, the Mughals present neither the standard to measure against nor even an appropriate comparison. 6 These revealing contexts for Sharar’s description of the city point the way to the argument that frames our treatment. As the capital of the Successor State of Awadh, Lucknow became the centre of a new kind of rule and expectations for a cultural system that was distinctive both from what had gone before, and from what the encroachment of British/ European ‘modernism’ represented. One of the most significant embodiments of this new mode was the Nawabi building programme, a topic little considered in this collection. Nevertheless, a form of ‘visual history’ is a most compatible partner with ethnography, as I hope the remainder of this postscript will attest. As Sharar comments about Asaf-ud-Daula’s buildings, they are [asserted to be] ‘nothing like the Mughal Emperor’s stone buildings… [they] have a rare beauty and

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great dignity and distinction…[moreover, they] are in no way influenced by European architecture. In style they are purely Asiatic, without ostentation but with genuine splendor and dignity’ (Sharar 1975, 47). 7 This helps us to see the importance of built environments for shaping a place, not least by creating a long-lasting physical context, and for serving as the way that new claimants to civilizational significance could put their mark on the city. The buildings thus helped to outline characteristic patterns of similar Successor States, including a distinctive space created for the state’s ‘public’ and popular participation. That is, this cultural system’s components point us to what was most valued in this urban place over time (for instance, other functions related to these key buildings) and served to tie the royal house to popular culture and the urban population. While the Nawabs’ motivation was to demonstrate their authority and legitimacy through this strategy, it also made a space for popular as well as elite shaping of the new cultural system and its capital city.1 In the process, it established precedents and processes that helped shape participants’ responses to changes and challenges over time. Indeed, interactions of bodies and buildings in everyday life as well as ritual events lie behind several of the occasions investigated in the essays in this volume (e.g., those by Jones, Hong Tschalär, and Susewind).

Lucknow’s Cultural System

8 As with all these Successor State rulers—not least those with whom the Nawabs compared themselves—creating a local system with legitimacy depended on a Janus- like function that situated these regional kingdoms in a distinctive way. On the one hand, they linked their authority to a relationship with the greater sources of rule— here represented by the Mughals—while trying to increase their distance and hence independence from these sources. On the other hand, they located their legitimacy in part by connecting to what the local population valued, especially through activities staged in public spaces. A focus on public devotional activities enabled the implicit connection between local religious understandings of devotion and loyalty to the royal house. The strategy of facing two ways to claim authority and legitimacy, then, set up Successor States to create cultural systems that also possessed a crucial flexibility, enabling them to adjust as circumstances altered the larger context in which they operated (e.g., from Mughal to British rule, and then to independence in the mid-20th century). It also made space for adjustments to local changes of leadership and influence, and related claims to power, among the local populace. One of the strong suits of this essay collection are the examples provided of recent adjustments, including the agency exercised through Dalit strategies, Muslim middle-class negotiations, and the range of enacted claims to women’s empowerment.

9 Serving as patrons of a wide range of cultural activities, the Nawabs could direct public activities towards Shia narratives to put a distinctive stamp on the resulting cultural system. In this way, they pursued the same strategies as the Sharar-cited comparison Successor States as well as closer competitors, such as the Raja of Banaras (a comparison to which we will return). The central events of the Shia narrative, focused on the battle for leadership at Karbala during the month of Muharram, thus came to frame many of the public aspects of the Nawabs’ cultural system.

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10 One key site in the city was the dargah for Hazrat Abbas, step-brother and water carrier of Husain during the Karbala battles. Asaf-ud-Daula established the shrine, and virtually every Nawab to follow added to the complex. The popular appeal of the shrine can be measured not only by the practice that arose of bringing the alams paraded during Muharram to be blessed by the saint, but also attendance at the kitchen established by Malka Zamani (favourite queen of Naseer-ud-din Haider, r. 1827-37), distributing free food to the poor. 11 The propensity for processions—whether the mourning processions wending their city way over the ten days of Muharram observances, royal processions, or other processions enacting additional stories and devotional activities—fundamentally shaped the layout of Nawabi Lucknow. As the processions either proceeded in boats down the river Gomti, or along a wide avenue paralleling the river, they passed increasing numbers of significant royal-sponsored buildings that punctuated the cityscape with palaces, imambaras, gates (most notably the Rumi Darwaza), mosques, even the Residency built to house the representative of the East India Company. Establishing the edges of this universe were Karbala grounds, to which the tazias (tomb replicas) were taken during Muharram processions for ‘burials’. The purposes of these built environments helped to convey the cultural system being established: imambaras represented not only the elaborate and highly illuminated buildings in which the permanent tazias were stored and displayed year-round, but their large, open rooms also hosted the crowds who attended majalis twice-daily to lament and to hear sermons, as well as nightly instalments of the Karbala story.2 They served discrete audiences for the majalis; such gatherings could tell quite different versions of the Karbala story and so accommodate a wide range of participants and their understandings of the narrative. Imambaras also came to be the staging centres for poetry readings cum contests, marking the high status accorded to this literary form in Lucknow’s cosmopolitan culture. Finally, imambaras could be built not only for these purposes but to serve as private tombs for wealthier families. Taking such purposes altogether, the imambaras may thus reveal much to us about various associations attached to the families, neighbourhoods and social groupings who shared distinct viewpoints, values, and responses to particular leaders, and who made up the social fabric of Lucknow. 12 Collective life, then, as expressed through processions and other public observances that underscored shared experiences, along with discrete gatherings that enabled differing understandings, fostered an inclusive cultural system within the social hierarchies common to the time. This was essential, since Shias were and remain a minority even in Lucknow, and the royal emphasis on Shi’ism gave it a particular and unusual bent (that is by using a minority culture often focused on martyrdom to express what was meant to be an inclusive and majoritarian cultural system3). During the Nawabi period, inclusiveness took public-space expressions in which other residents participated in large numbers, often through particular kinds of alliances: e.g., Shias and Kayasths had affinities connected to executive and financial administration and cultural expressions; Sunnis, Baniyas and others dominated the economic life of the city. Lower-class/caste Hindus participated in the mourning culture as well, drawing parallels and seeing similarities through devotional practices as well as being situated within socio-economic interdependencies. One British observer, Emma Roberts, commented in 1835, for instance, that ‘A very large proportion of Hindoos go into mourning during the ten days of Mohurrum, clothing

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themselves in green garments, and assuming the guise of fakeers’ (Roberts 1835, 2:192-3). Reciprocally, Shias and Sunnis participated in ostensibly Hindu observances as well, and shared at least similar practices of devotionalism that fostered Lucknow’s pride in cultural inclusivity. 13 Among the many intriguing complexities of the Nawabs’ cultural system is the particular contribution made by women, which was connected in part to the emphasis on Shi’ism and to the place enabled for subcultures. For instance, the 1911 district gazetteer noted that two-thirds of those who identified themselves as Shi’as were women. Despite rulings by the Lucknow mujtahids against Sunni-Shi’a marriages, such marriages remained common, and the devotional culture of the women’s quarter of a household could plausibly have perpetuated Shi’ism with relatively little interference from men. That many of the Muharram activities took place in gender-divided observances no doubt facilitated the perpetuation of this devotional culture. Shi’ism was especially popular among courtesans, perhaps in part because it offered legal protection for them by recognizing temporary marriage (mut’ah). Also, in part, however, it undoubtedly related to the nature of the alternative culture created by these women, characterized by scholar Veena Oldenburg as ‘a style of non- confrontational resistance and packaged… not as a sporadic activity, but as a way of life’ (Oldenburg 1990). This way of life, we should note, was based on economic independence as well as personalized religious devotionalism (where the combination often provided outlets for ostentatious display and patronage). 14 Different Karbala grounds also serve as markers for us of this complex cultural system and its impact on the changing map of Lucknow city. There were always multiple grounds, established for various reasons. But two in particular mark important moments in the history of the city. The main Karbala grounds during the Nawabi period were located towards the eastern part of the city, but were closed down after the 1857-58 Uprising, as the British reshaped the city with roads designed to move troops easily throughout, and took over the area abutting that eastern Karbala location to form the Civil Lines where the British would live. The relocated Karbala grounds moved to the south-western part of the city, where they functioned as the ‘main’ grounds until Shia reformist activity underscored the very different styles of observance between Shias and Sunnis; in 1906-08, the role of these particular Karbala grounds became problematized. We do not have space to outline these events, but want to draw attention to the fact that then, as in the more recent developments described in these essays, Lucknow’s experiences reflected connections to changes in larger, external contexts. At the time, a major characteristic shared between Lucknow and other cities with disturbances was that these intra-community tensions then become routed through inter-sectarian conflicts.4 This intra-community pattern of conflict can be seen still, as Susewind’s essay makes clear. Not least of the similarities with Susewind’s case study is the fact that the early 20th century conflict arose from the emergence of a reforming and fairly aggressive new middle-class Shi’i component who emphasized differing personal behaviour’s as well as reworking of imambaras, and used these bases to assert new claims to leadership (Jones 2012). One result was a separation of karbalas for Sunnis and Shias, respectively, and the infusion of a measure of divisiveness into what had been an integrative enactment in public spaces.

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The Urban Context in Successor States

15 Lucknow’s role as capital city of the successor state of Awadh cannot be overstated; the Nawabs came to represent the Mughal system there. At the same time, Lucknow’s history demonstrates the larger process of devolution of power and political authority to those in a region. The devolution of power and patronage also turns our attention to the urban centres emerging in this period of change.

16 Interest in the Indian urban place has enjoyed a renaissance in history as it has in anthropology (see Introduction). Influential case studies such as those by Will Glover, Nandini Gooptu, Janaki Nair and Swati Chattapodhyay,5 have all suggested the rich expansions possible through interdisciplinary approaches, especially those that connect the visual and spatial to the socio-political aspects of a city. In particular, this direction points to the possibilities opening up as historians explore the range of evidence informing locally contextualized identity-narratives and everyday life as aspects of significant historical patterns—where such new historiography no longer treats political developments as the only elements with explanatory power. 17 Perhaps most revealing for us, in this respect, is how Lucknow could be compared to Banaras/Varanasi (or ‘Benares’ as the British knew it). The Raja of Banaras, in his turn, was supposed to serve as tax collector for Awadh, and did make a tax payment each year to the Nawabs. He too worked hard to establish and maintain independence from this supposed overlord, and to a large extent succeeded (not least because the Nawabs’ reach outside of Lucknow became increasingly tenuous the greater the distance from the capital city). In this independent stance, the Raja’s actions were important primarily because they served as a kind of comparison and goad to the Nawabs’ own efforts: both were intent on establishing cultural systems that worked within similar (though not identical) regional contexts. That is, just as the Nawabs created an inclusive system in which popular values, especially around devotionalism and enactments in public that could serve to connect people, so the Raja created new symbolic structures to express the Bhumihar Brahmin house of Narayan and its relationship with those it ruled. Both drew on the urban structures of mohullas (neighbourhoods), occupational networks, akharas 6 and the like to link a devotional- style religion to the ruling house. These parallels led, not surprisingly, to a kind of cultural competition, in which Ramlila enactments expanded in the 19th century alongside the elaborations of Muharram nearby. The cities were also tied together in part by their differences in social composition: because Banaras lacked much in the way of upper-class Muslims, and this group occupied a relatively large social space as courtiers and other elites in Lucknow, the lower class Muslims of Banaras (most of whom were artisans otherwise tied to their upper caste Hindu ‘paymasters’) looked to Lakhnawi Muslims for leadership, advice and even a safety net not available in their own city. There were as well distinct differences, occasioned not least by different treatments by the British.7 Despite these differences, what was shared was a reliance on cultural patronage as a key element that underscored their authority in the creation of the two cultural systems. This was one of the strongest shared characteristics for Successor States in general. (Not least, it was one of the few avenues for rulers’ actions left open as the British constrained them within the confines of ‘indirect rule’.) 18 Cultural patronage, then, as an important aspect for both Successor State systems, was tied both to the patronage extended by the ruler himself, and to the range of cultural

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activities supported by courtier and literati participation and encouragement. Virtually all successor states, for instance, supported particular literary forms that also helped to develop regional languages and created critical masses of works within literary genres (especially poetry and literary criticism). These courts also had ateliers in their palaces for fine artists (painters, sculptors) and performers (musicians and dancers): their creations not only flattered the ruler and conveyed the stories of kings, gods, and key historical figures but provided material underpinnings to the cultural systems being developed. So too did the handicrafts of the region, which began to be consumed by the elite in each society: in Banaras this was marked especially by silk saris (the silk woven by Muslim weavers); in Lucknow it was chikan and other embroidery arts (involving zari, also primarily produced by Muslim craftspersons); local craft production thus could be used to undergird the local identities of these cities. Across these forms of cultural production, we see formative roles played by city dwellers in a wide range of socio-economic positions, a key indicator of the agency operating within the cultural system. 19 Once again, these contributions relate to larger processes affecting popular participation in the Lakhnawi cultural system and in the formation and influence of a ‘public’ in the region. Efforts to inform and shape public opinion drew on what Bayly has called ‘techniques of communication, debate and persuasion’ emerging from Indian norms (Bayly 1996, chapter 5). These kinds of literary productions expressed through handwritten media ‘the views of bazaar people and artisans’ as well as the ‘Hindustani- writing literati.’8 In this way, cultural inclusiveness reached across caste and class boundaries and laid significant groundwork for what was to come, even after the removal of the Nawabs. This form of language was ‘inclusive; it mirrored and even stimulated the rapid social mobility which was characteristic of post-Mughal [that is, Successor State-era] north India’ (emphasis added). Bayly goes on to note that this inclusiveness enfolded ordinary artisans, people of the bazaars, and women within various cultural-production fields. We see here, then, a first example of the Successor- State cultural-system flexibility that became so important for the more recent period studied in the ethnographic essays published here.

Emerging Middle Classes and Lucknow’s Cultural System

20 In these ways the Successor States provided important intermittent historical ‘moments’ during which ideological identities could be created that bound them to their subjects and vice-versa. Not least important result of these functions was the ability developed in these places both to negotiate with the changes introduced by the British, and to utilize their cultural systems to create new expressions as well as to withstand or adapt in ways that made sense to city residents. These processes, shaping responses not only in the late 19th century but in the following century as well, help to explain larger patterns of ‘middleclassness’ described in the essays included in this issue, and to connect to that ‘Janus-faced’ function elaborated by these Successor State cultural systems. The emerging flexible (even ambiguous) frames long outlived their originators. In Lucknow, that took a particularly striking form: the ruling house had been from an alternative form of Islam (later perceived as a minority within a minority), and yet had taken Shia traditions and adapted them to succeed as a powerful

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force at the apex of a socio-political hierarchy. The cultural system that the dynasty designed was so flexible it could survive a decline in those fortunes, and the exile of the house itself. What remained behind was a mode of social inclusiveness that, while requiring important adjustments at key historical moments, nevertheless remained a powerful component of Lakhnawi self-identity, as individuals and as constituent communities of an inclusive realm.

21 As our earlier references to Lucknow’s built environment have suggested, the changes in the physical fabric of the city reflected not only socio-economic changes taking place in the second half of the 19th century among the city’s residents, but also the impact of direct British rule on this urban centre. We can see this in both the actual urbanscape itself, but also in what the British called out as the significant places in the city (see Freitag 2014, 1989a). Indeed, by the 1870s, at least two competing understandings of Lucknow had emerged, one as the site of a continuing Successor-State styled cultural node (albeit with sub-narratives featuring different middle-class groups), and another as the premier site of the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ and its British martyrs. Guidebooks created for British travellers to India depicted the ‘Mutiny Trail’ most dramatically: Murray’s Guide (in its eighth edition in 1911), for instance, devoted one page to the history of the Nawabs and almost sixteen pages to ‘Mutiny’ history, accompanied by a special map focused on the key spots figuring in the repeated battles for the city waged during 1857-1858, with the Residency receiving the most intense attention. 22 In fascinating contrast to Murray’s is the guidebook created in 1874 by Abbas Ali, who served as both darogah of a Lucknow imambara and also a (‘pensioned’) municipal engineer of the Public Works Department, turned photographer (‘under the Patronage of His Honour the Lieutenant Governor of the N.W. Provinces and Oudh’ as cited on the back of his carte de visite). So far as can be determined, this guidebook is the first to combine photographs with text and maps; called The Lucknow Album, it contains ‘50 photographic views of Lucknow and its environs’. As its introduction explains, it is aimed at both the touring audience of Britons and ‘intelligent natives’. Accordingly, photographs include not only ‘Mutiny’ sites and Nawabi buildings, but bridges built by each (with an engineer’s evaluations of the construction practices of each ruling entity). Most revealingly, it includes sites never before listed in guidebooks: sites that would have meaning for Indians, such as the shrine of Hazrat Abbas and the Talkatora Karbala grounds. It also includes a number of kothis, buildings often originally built by the Nawabs and their courtiers, then taken over by high-ranking Britons as residences and, by the end of the century, beginning to be repurposed: in several cases, their functions shifted into buildings serving modern and economic purposes, such as the Railway Administration office, and banks. Our argument would be that this guidebook’s array of images represents the photographer’s attempt to capture a third understanding of Lucknow—one that included ‘traditional’ buildings created by the Nawabs; sites significant to a larger and inclusive ‘public’ (including Muslims); and the buildings housing middle-class functions of a modernizing cultural system. 23 In support of this understanding of the nature of Lucknow’s turn-of-the-century cultural system, we might note briefly two other collections of photographs produced by Abbas Ali.9 One was a reference work focused on the taluqdars (large landowners) and other elites of the area, with whom the Indian Civil Service staff would have to interact, The Illustrated Album of the Rajas and Taluqdars of Oudh. The audience for this volume was clearly British and Indian administrators of the Raj’s north Indian

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bureaucracy. The other—The Beauties of Lucknow, with a text in Urdu—pictured actresses and courtesans of the city, still important figures in the perpetuation of the cultured life reflecting Nawabi style and values. The introduction to this volume makes clear it was aimed at a very different audience, made up primarily of those who still embraced the Lakhnawi cultural system, for whom these performers were immensely important. 10 Taken altogether, the audiences addressed by these three volumes suggest to us the layering of many understandings of the city and how their advocates contributed actively to Lucknow’s changing cultural system emerging around the turn of the century. The layers suggest Lucknow’s capacity to adjust to changing circumstances while retaining the collective sense of its self and significance. Indeed, the repetition from one essay to the next in this collection, of the sense of Lucknow as distinctively inclusive (even if this attribute is lamented as decreasing) suggests both the informants’ sense of their city and a historically validated characteristic of Lucknow as a particular urban place.

20th Century Challenges and Lucknow’s Cultural System

24 This particular polycentric use of public spaces and multiple narratives concerning what matters, affecting how the past and the present should be understood, are unique to Lucknow but, still, are akin to experiences in other urban centres over the turn of the 20th century, not least the movement from intra-community to inter-community conflict. It is worth noting for our purposes (and as a precursor to the information provided in the Introduction) that the distribution of urban centres in U.P. in the colonial period, and the proportion of the provincial population that could be termed urban,11 were unusual and may have led to the pattern of distinct urban styles that emerged in U.P. by the mid-19th century. Equally revealing is the pace of urbanization, for the number of urban centres increased substantially between 1850 and 1880. By then the province contained over one-third of the largest cities (population greater than 250,000) in the subcontinent—more than any other province—and almost one- fifth of the next largest cities (100,000 to 250,000). Four of its five largest cities (the exception being Banaras, see Freitag 1989b) came to dominate the ‘communal’ history of the region.

25 The overall pattern, then, was similar throughout urban UP; what distinguished Lucknow from other cities was the way in which existing tensions became routed along conduits predominantly marked by Sunni-Shia conflict, rather than Hindu-Muslim (see Susewind in this volume for a contemporary example). When the next great outburst of Sunni-Shia conflict emerged in the late 1930s, the characteristics we saw for the early 1900s appeared to directly link those earlier protests with ones in the 1930s. These similarities, however, may distract us from the very different circumstances in which this second big protest took place. From dominance, the community now had to operate under parity. And, as the state structures shifted towards majority rule, Shias experienced more tenuous support from the government than previously. Significantly, however, these public recitations of verses (Shias used the verses to curse those responsible for killing Husain and his company) were not really aimed at the community of Others; in the changed and highly politicized context of the 1930s, both sets of protests were quite formally being staged as attacks against the government. A larger pattern in this period of change, then, was the shift from aiming protests at an Other community to protests about the perceived shortfall of ‘government’ efforts to

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protect minority interests. This was true whether ‘government’ was exercised by the British, a Maharaja, or an elected political party such as Congress. 26 That these ostensibly distinct targets could be used to comment on the inability of an unsympathetic state to protect varied community interests is one important measure of the changed perceptions expressed in public protest after numerous nationalist mobilizations. It also suggests a much larger gap between state and constituents, one that—at least in the 1930s—could not be filled by the Cultural-System glue of the locality. Mobilization, too, marked changed circumstances by the 1930s: such protests now appealed far beyond the particular urban place in which they occurred. Indeed, what was most alarming to authorities was the daily arrival of ‘batch’ after ‘batch’ of protestors traveling to support fellow Shias by joining the expressions of civil disobedience.12 27 Undoubtedly, experiences of staging the nationalist movement’s myriad protests (joined during the early 1920s by the Khilafat Movement) had provided models for how public protests could be enacted. Even more importantly, these experiences had sharpened the perception that much of the problem between contending communities could be laid at the state’s feet, though by now the ‘state’ was not so much British as it was Congress. Closer to the locality, the contestation reflected altered socio-political standing in the city, with the Sunnis now reaching beyond parity for their ‘right’ to religious freedom to recite madh-sohban (‘attack’ verses recited on street corners)—a right Sunnis had never previously been able to claim. 28 Writ large, these protests underscore the importance of communication networks in expanding notions of what constituted ‘public interest’. Underscored, as well, was the significance of those issues when the call for action came to express, bodily and en masse, values understood to convey individual and collective identities. At the same time, such protests also bring our attention back to the specifics involved when bodies and buildings interact, in a specific set of urban spaces. The street corners on which protestors chanted their competing verses; the gates used to include and exclude particular groups; the city centre within and through which each group passed to physically express its claim on the city: all of these served as the stages on which identity-narratives and values could be enacted. This parallel may suggest to us that, in the face of a changing political system increasingly based on majority rule, minorities began to work to organize appeals that could bring outsiders to their cities for support in protests. In particular, flexible cultural systems were faced with very new kinds of demands as Partition lines were delineated, and mass population shifts occurred. How would all of these developments affect Lucknow’s cultural system?

Post-Independence Reworkings of the Cultural System

29 As the range of essays here suggests, there are many ways we may examine the ongoing role played by Lucknow’s cultural system in the post-independence period. Continuing our focus on the built environment, and how urban space is deployed for ‘performing middle-classness’ and related processes of identity-narrative expression, may help to suggest how history and anthropology contribute to an interdisciplinarity of understanding of these processes. Beginning with the implications for families of the imposition of boundary lines dividing British India into the two nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947, recent scholars have looked especially at families and women in

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the massive transfers of population related to those lines (Zamindar 2010). For Lucknow, the very large number of refugees flooding into the city’s environs made an immediate impact. Not least was the permanent alteration of Aminabad’s park setting into ‘a densely populated Shanty town,’13 filled now by these refugees.

30 Outside of Delhi and Karachi, we still have too little systematic research to be able to grasp the full impact of these dramatic changes, beyond likely statistics of death and family dislocations (and, not least, the fate of women in areas subject to population movements). We do not yet understand, especially, the experiences of particular cities, including Lucknow, and the extent to which we can generalize regarding larger patterns. Not least of these experiences was the frequent assumption that if the family were labelled the minority community in each state (i.e. ‘Muslim’ in India or ‘Hindu’ in Pakistan), their claims to property were dangerously jeopardized. Only with systematic study can these phenomena be traced for Lucknow, but we do have evidence that suggests several developments that necessarily altered the fit between the built environment and the cultural system whose inclusive outlines had served Lucknow so well in the past. 31 Among the ethnographies included in this issue, we can see, especially, how reworkings of what it meant to be a Muslim (from ‘cosmopolitanism’ to ‘Muslim middle-classness’) or a Dalit (from ‘Muslim’ Lal Begi to ‘Hindu’ Valmiki) were being undertaken after Independence. The enactments of these changing identities certainly affected participation in educational systems (including access to school buildings, see Lee’s article) and in consumption patterns, both of which affected how the groups experienced inclusiveness. Two other instances may be revealing, as well. Certain infamous examples may suggest the extremes of larger patterns, such as repurposing of imambaras and other significant buildings for goods storage and other prosaic (and ultimately detrimental) usages by newly arrived entrepreneurs after 1947.14 Only as the Archaeological Survey has intervened for careful restoration do legal issues about repurposing, as well as the impact of encroaching shops and residences, seem to have been addressed. Both the size and significant value of these properties have made their fate of great import, even without the symbolic and praxis issues embraced by Shias and others of Lucknow and beyond. That context is well explored in the essays collected here. Indeed, from the historian’s perspective the varied strategies by which the actors identified here are reshaping Lucknow’s inclusiveness are immensely revealing, be they those whose identity-narratives place them as new leaders with special skills (such as Arabic-speaking for Nadwa students, or Dalits/Valmikis seeking education, or middle-class Muslims pursuing globally recognized markers of their status). 32 In this larger cultural-system context, the prolonged court case and legislative follow- up regarding the holdings of the Raja of Mahmudabad, where the Government of India’s seizure of ‘evacuee properties’ (which were then declared ‘enemy properties’ in the wake of the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965) should be seen as setting a pattern of making these properties available to others in Lucknow and elsewhere.15 Although the scale of these holdings make them unique, the larger processes of shifting property ownership and control to refugees and entrepreneurs—whether through direct ownership or through dramatically low rents that do not reflect property values— necessarily affected the close relationship between the values of Lucknow’s cultural system and its use of built environments and other land usages, as well as its sense of

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inclusiveness. The Mahmudabad case study is especially important for us, since it is this family in particular that has contributed so much to perpetuating the cultural system’s emphasis on Muharram and related public-space activities in maintaining a sense of enacted inclusiveness through Lucknow’s long-lived style and far-reaching networks. 33 The flip side of these developments has been that post-partition newcomers would contribute substantively to the reworked cultural system, as the availability of such properties provided opportunities to establish both residential and business roots. Not least among these has been the renowned bookseller, Ram Advani, whose shop became an intellectual centre in Hazratganj, open to authors, students and public intellectuals alike (Ahmad 1997). We do not want to overlook the point that in all of these shifts, the active participation by Lakhnawis has been responsible for reshaping both local and far-flung understandings of the cultural system of the city, and the nature of its inclusiveness. Indeed, the longstanding value placed on ‘inclusiveness’ has enabled residents to expand the cultural definition of which groups could be included, as the social context shifted first from emphasis on courtly elites to middle classes, then to broadly defined members of a democracy. 34 It is impossible, with a focus on built environments, to ignore the impact in post- Partition UP (if not India as a whole) of the presence of a state government run by the Dalit party, BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party). As though taking up profound lessons from the Nawabi legacy in shaping this urban place, Mayawati’s seven huge new parks and installations recognizing Dalit contributions have wrenched the map of Lucknow in very new directions, both literally and figuratively. With the exception of Parivartan Chowk, located within the city proper in the Kaiserbagh Historic District, these new built environments have pushed the city’s outlines ever closer to the airport (Sinha & Kant 2015). In these essays, an indication of this spatial shift is the new women’s mosque constructed in the area near the airport—see Hong Tschalar’s essay. Coupling these monumental government-sponsored BSP constructions with both the Lee and Hong Tschalar essays, then, we can see how additions to Lucknow’s built environment still reflect the inclusiveness on which Lakhnawis pride themselves, now extended in a democracy to a greater reach that enables new claimants to public space and recognition. Moreover, we should certainly situate Mayawati’s construction program within the larger frame of Hindutva’s emphasis on near-by Ayodhya; it may even be possible to view these competing UP-based claims to cultural significance as parallel to the earlier competition between Lucknow and Banaras, where the strategies urged each other on.

Conclusion

35 This focus on built environments, then, should serve as a context for understanding the ethnographic examinations in this collection. Not least might be Taylor’s study of Nadwa’s increasingly central position, both in terms of geography and its intermediary role in bridging school and university, and/or training and professions, be they religious or linguistic (given the rare access to Arabic). Mayawati’s architectural insistence on a place for Dalits16 might also be paired with the strategies of the Valmikis (examined by Lee) for moving themselves within the definition of state-approved identity: the two suggest differing but related ways that the inclusive propensity of the cultural system’s inclusivity has provided precedents relating to both spatial

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statements and identity-narratives linking people to authenticity through place. And, finally, the insistence of Muslim women activists’ assertions in public-spaces and through public media to gain recognition of place in Lucknow’s cultural system also reflects earlier contestations around exercises in public.

36 These developments after 1947 suggest both continuities and significant disjunctures in the history of Lucknow. Among the continuities is the self-perception of Lakhnawis that they all help shape, through their participation, the distinctive cultural system that marks them out from residents of other cities. This leads to ongoing efforts by various marginalized groups to shift the understandings of whom and which values will be incorporated. That Lucknow is ever more tightly connected to other central places in the subcontinent and its larger global contexts also means, of course, that the fissiparous patterns that have so marked both the political and social history of India have affected developments in Lucknow as well. The impact of Hindutva as a political as well as social force cannot be denied. Yet Lucknow’s cultural system has marked, as well as and more dramatically than almost anywhere else in the subcontinent, the very space that marks out the city itself. ‘Inclusiveness’ of the Lakhnawi cultural system has broadened fundamentally yet remains a significant characteristic of place.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmad, Imtiaz (1997) ‘Through the Eye of a Street,’ in Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bayly, Christopher Alan (1996) Empire and Information, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Belli, Melia (2014) ‘Mayawati’s Lucknow: ‘Making Subaltern Space in a Historic City’,’ paper presented to the European Conference for South Asian Studies (ECSAS) at the University of Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland, July 24-27, 2014.

Fisher, Michael H. (1987) A Clash of Cultures, Delhi: Manohar Publications.

Freitag, Sandria (forthcoming) Acts of Seeing, Ways of Knowing.

Freitag, Sandria (2014) ‘A Visual History of Three Lucknows,’ South Asia, 37(3), pp. 431-45.

Freitag, Sandria (1989a) Collective Action and Community, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Freitag, Sandria (1989b) Culture and Power in Banaras, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gell, Alfred (1998) Art and Agency, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hansen, Kathryn (1991) Grounds for Play, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hasnain, Nadeem (forthcoming), An Ethnographical Study of Lucknow.

Sharar, Abdul Halim (1975 reprint) Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, E. S. Harcourt & F. Hussain, (eds.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Jones, Justin (2012) Shia Islam in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Khan, Muhammad Amir Ahmed (2014) ‘Local Nodes of a Transnational Network,’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 24(3), pp. 397-413.

Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie (1993) A Fatal Friendship, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Markel, Stephen & Gude, Tushara Bindu (2010) India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, New York: Prestel.

Oldenburg, Veena (1997) ‘Lifestyle as Resistance,’ in Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pinney, Christopher & Thomas, Nicholas (2001) Beyond Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Roberts, Emma (1835) Scenes and characteristics of Hindostan, London: William H. Allen Publishers.

Sinha, Amita & Kant, Rajat (2015) ‘Mayawati and memorial parks in Lucknow, India,’ Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 35(1), pp. 43-58.

Spate, O. H. K. & Ahmad, Enayat (1950) ‘Five cities of the Gangetic Plain,’ The Geographical Review 40, pp. 260-78.

Strulik, Stephanie (2014) ‘Modernization Means Pepsodent, Colgate, Closeup…,’ paper presented to the Association for Asian Studies 2014 annual meeting, March 27-30, Philadelphia, PA.

Taj, Afroz (2007) The Court of Indar and the Rebirth of North Indian Drama, New Delhi: Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind).

Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali (2010) The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, New York: Columbia University Press.

NOTES

1. Key to this shared analytical space may be the Anthropology of Art argument about the meaning-making made possible as viewers brought their understandings of that image/built environment to the interaction itself. This theoretical approach began with the work of Alfred Gell, in his posthumously published work (1998). Since Gell had no time to reconsider or revise this seminal work, perhaps most useful for our purposes is the essay collection by his colleagues, Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (eds.) 2001. 2. The concept of an imambara thus meant that not only the large and decorative buildings constructed by the court or city elite could be imambaras, but that other city dwellers could devote a room in their house, no matter how modest, to this purpose as well. 3. ‘Majority’ and ‘minority’ are terms applied a bit anachronistically for this period, in order to provide a consistent conceptual framework to compare with patterns of the late 19th century. 4. The conflict in early 20th century Lucknow followed a pattern parallel to what had happened in cities like Bareilly and Agra, where intra-community tensions became routed to Hindu-Muslim conflict instead (Freitag 1989a). 5. See, e.g., Gooptu (2001), Chattapoadhyay (2005), and Nair (2011). 6. Akharas are used, for instance, by Sufis, musicians, wrestlers and medical practitioners for spiritual (and often professional) lineages or silsilahs marking fictive-kin connections among a leader/pir and the generation of followers. The term is also used as reference to the space used by the group, for instance, by wrestlers to compete. 7. Compare, for instance, the British treatment of Awadh (as described in works such as Fisher 1987) and that of Banaras described in Freitag (1989b). Some of the comparisons are also dealt with directly in Freitag’s essay, in Nadeem Hasnain (ed.), forthcoming, ch. 1).

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8. Bayly points out that such a ‘literati’ included Indo-Islamic notables and officers of state, many of whom were Hindus, especially Kayasths, Kashmiri Brahmins and Khattris. Indeed, Bayly terms Urdu-Hindustani a ‘public tongue’, a ‘popular language spread by Sufi saints and Hindu devotees, [as well as] a language of the court and a discerning literati’ (Bayly 1996: 193). 9. For examples of photographs from these three volumes, see especially Markel (2010: 21, 161, 162, 240). 10. The most obvious connector to this is Mirza Ruswa’s novel Umrao Jan Ada; see also Hansen (1991) and Taj (2007). 11. Although no one centre can compare statistically with Calcutta, these trends refer to the province as a whole. See Spate & Ahmad (1950). This article is also the source of the data that follows. 12. Report by Lt.-Governor H. G. Haig on the Lucknow Madha Sahaba Controversy, British Library, India Office Records, L/P&J/7, file 2587 for 1939, especially p. 10. 13. Thanks to anonymous reviewer no. 4 for this contribution. 14. For example, the Sibtainabad Imambara in Hazratganj, used by a firm of carpenters: it took several efforts at restoration, finally taken over by the ASI, to return it to its impressive state. 15. The holdings of Raja Mohammad Amir Ahmed Khan have certainly been the most celebrated of these cases because of the scale involved; when the Raja migrated to Pakistan in 1962, he had left his son and heir, and his wife, behind in Lucknow, as property owners of these immense holdings. Even after September 2005, when the court case aimed at restoring the properties to the present Raja was resolved in his favour by the Supreme Court of India, the Raja was prevented by an ordinance passed by the Government to nullify the Supreme Court decision. Such steps were taken by the Government of India to prevent a substantial impact on government as well as private citizens: Mahmudabad’s holdings included half of Hazratganj Market, as well as bungalows occupied by various (BSP) state government officers. Mayawati’s efforts to implement the Government’s actions apparently included sealing of buildings and land to ensure that her government could gain possession of the buildings. Only after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh intervened in 2010 were the holdings finally secured to the Mahmudabad Raja. 16. Our understanding of Mayawati’s impact on Lucknow has also been enhanced by Belli’s paper presented with others in this collection to the European panel, 2014. Belli analyzed Lucknow’s new Buddhist monuments as yet another political utilization of history. They replicated the design of India’s oldest stupa, a Buddhist burial shrine, thus emplacing Dalits as heirs of India’s lost Buddhist rulers. Dalit’s political challenge to Hindu elites is also a cultural and architectural challenge.

ABSTRACTS

A new kind of cultural system emerged under the (Mughal) Successor State of Awadh that shaped especially its capital-city of Lucknow. The inclusiveness essential to claiming legitimacy by a Successor State not only helps to explain how this new Janus-faced kingdom could succeed, but enabled it to bequeath flexible strategies that worked for local urban dwellers under British imperial rule, and provided models of creativity for responding to altered contexts of life in contemporary India. This distinctive modality provides a range of socio-political, cultural, and economic attributes that are approached in complementary if distinctive ways by the disciplines of history and anthropology, as this collection of essays demonstrates very intriguingly. We treat

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here the emergence over time of key strategies, in their changing contexts, to chart characteristic practices and dynamics essential for this urban place.

INDEX

Keywords: Cultural System, Nawabs, built environment, interdisciplinarity, Successor States

AUTHOR

SANDRIA FREITAG

Department of History, North Carolina State University

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