FINDING A HOME FOR URDU: ISLAM AND SCIENCE IN MODERN SOUTH ASIA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Andrew McKinney Amstutz May 2017 ©2017 Andrew McKinney Amstutz i FINDING A HOME FOR URDU: ISLAM AND SCIENCE IN MODERN SOUTH ASIA Andrew McKinney Amstutz, Ph.D. Cornell University, 2017 Finding a Home for Urdu: Islam and Science in Modern South Asia follows the Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu (Association for the Advancement of Urdu), an Urdu literary and promotional association with branches across South Asia that comprised hundreds of Muslim intellectuals, writers, and small-town science enthusiasts in the first half of the twentieth century (1903-1961.) Urdu is a North Indian vernacular language that is written in the Perso-Arabic script and historically associated with Muslim elites. The decline of British colonial power and the rise of mass nationalism in India in the early twentieth century posed challenges for Muslims who constituted a minority spread across the Indian subcontinent. In response, Muslim intellectuals in the Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu (henceforth, the Anjuman) transformed Urdu into a medium of integrative scientific knowledge dealing with medicine, urban commerce, type, and naturalist observation that could connect different social classes and regions across South Asia. Urdu has largely been studied in North India as a language of courtly poetry. In contrast, Finding a Home for Urdu rethinks not only what Urdu constituted in modern South Asian history, but where Urdu’s history is found. The Anjuman sought to expand Urdu’s frontiers beyond North India in southern India, eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh), and Sindh (now in Pakistan) in the late colonial and early postcolonial eras by advancing Urdu as a connective and urbane language of scientific knowledge. This dissertation connects virtually unstudied multilingual archives across the borders of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to offer a new take on the making of Muslim politics in South Asia and to expand understandings of trans-local collectives of belonging that emerged alongside Hindi and Urdu nationalisms. Broadly, this study contributes to scholarly understandings of South Asian Islam across the early modern and modern eras, the history of science in colonial societies, and comparative Muslim modernities. ii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Andrew Amstutz received his Ph.D. in History at Cornell University in May 2017. He was a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellow in 2014 in India and Bangladesh, as well as a research fellow with the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS.) He received his M.A. in South Asian History from Cornell University in 2012 and his B.A. in History and Italian from Middlebury College in 2008. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I conducted most of this research with the generous support of the U. S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellowship and grants from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS). The History Department at Cornell University supported preliminary research in India and the U.K. My language training in India and the United States was supported by the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS) Program. I am grateful to all of these organizations. At Cornell, I greatly benefitted from the guidance of Durba Ghosh, Robert Travers, and Anne Blackburn. It has been a real privilege to learn from them over the past nine years, and I am deeply grateful for their mentorship. Durba Ghosh’s intellectual generosity and creative approach to historical questions made this project possible. I would like to thank Robert Travers for encouraging me to work across the chronological divisions of South Asian history and for his insightful approach to Indo-Persian texts. Also, I am very grateful to Anne Blackburn for inspiring me to think of wider historical contexts and religious connections that have enriched my research. This project would not have been possible without the generosity of Urdu scholars who discussed their writings with me and welcomed me into their libraries and institutional archives in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. I would like to thank Dr. Ather Farouqui, the General Secretary of the Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu [Hind] and Dr. Fatema Hassan, the Honorary Secretary of the Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu [Pakistan] for their kind support. I am especially grateful to Shahid Khan and Tanveer Siddiqui, the librarians of the Anjuman’s library at Urdu Ghar in Delhi. Their kindness, assistance, and patience made the foundational research for this dissertation possible. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists of the Salarjung Museum, the Idārah Adabīyāt-i Urdu, and Urdu Hall in Hyderabad (India); the Iran Culture House in New Delhi; and iv the West Bengal Urdu Academy and the National Library of India in Kolkata. In Kolkata, I am grateful to Syed Perwez Hasan for his guidance between different Urdu libraries and Muslim social institutions in the city and Rajarshi Ghose for his generative suggestions for thinking about the history of Urdu in Bengal. A special thanks is due to Professor S. M. Zabed Ahmed and Azizur Rahman Khan in the Oriental Manuscript Section of the Dhaka University Library in Bangladesh. In Dhaka, I would also like to thank Ahmed Ilias and Hasan Mohammad for discussing the history of the Urdu-speaking community in Bangladesh with me. I am deeply grateful to the language instructors who patiently taught me Urdu, Persian, Hindi, and Sindhi and their rich literary cultures. At the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Urdu Language Program in Lucknow, I would like to thank Dr. Ahtesham Ahmed Khan, Sheba Iftikhar, Basharat Husain, Dr. Zeba Parveen, Dr. Shahnaz Ahmad, and Fahmida Bano. The two years that I spent studying Urdu and Persian in Lucknow with the support of AIIS made this research possible in so many ways. In the United States, I would like to thank Wafadar Hussain, Naaz Rizvi, Dr. Iago Gocheleishvili, and Sujata Singh as well. I owe a debt of gratitude to friends and fellow students at Cornell University and beyond for their thoughtful suggestions and stimulating questions that reshaped this dissertation at every step of the research and writing processes, including Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Joseph Giacomelli, Osama Siddiqui, Leslie Hempson, Rishad Choudhury, Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi, Brinda Kumar, Carter Higgins, Yasmine Singh, Kelsey Utne, Hannah Archambault, Kasia Paprocki, and Anders Bjornberg. Specific thanks is owed to those who read chapters and offered suggestions that greatly improved the dissertation, including Nick Abbott, Hafsa Kanjwal, Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Joseph Giacomelli, and Osama Siddiqui. All mistakes and oversights are my own. v Febe Armanios and Ian Barrow have continued to provide guidance and friendship long after I graduated from Middlebury College. I would like to thank Febe for the opportunity to collaborate on an undergraduate research project many years ago that inspired my initial interest in academic research. At Cornell University, I would also like to thank Iftikhar Dadi, Daniel Gold, Mostafa Minawi, Ernesto Bassi, Rachel Weil, and Barb Donnell for their support and encouragement throughout graduate school. The good humor and hospitality of lifelong friends has made dissertation writing not only endurable, but quite enjoyable, including Owais Gilani, Joseph Giacomelli, Sarah Bellemare, and Lizz Huntley. Most importantly, I want to thank Rajendra Parihar for his love and friendship which have enriched this dissertation and my life. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to my parents, step-parents, and brother for their constant support and good humor as I made my way through graduate school. Likewise, my aunts and uncles have generously provided encouragement and necessary diversions along the way. This dissertation is dedicated to my grandparents, Maria Cataldo McKinney, Jim McKinney, Nan Grindle Amstutz, and Bruce Amstutz, whose intellectual curiosity, love for good books, and global travels have shaped my life. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vii Note on Transliteration viii Introduction 1 Chapter One: A Persian Golden Age for Urdu Science, 1896- 1921 27 Chapter Two: The Lead Letters of Nasta’līq: Calligraphic Type and Urdu Technology in the Deccan, 1913- 1938 74 Chapter Three: The Emperor of Dhaka: Urdu Healing in Eastern Bengal, 1930- 1945 125 Chapter Four: Queen of the East: Urdu Promotion and Naturalist Observation in Karachi, 1941- 1947 171 Chapter Five: Coming to Terms with a Global Economy: Defining Urdu Economics, 1939- 1962 228 Conclusion 282 vii NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION The transliteration of Urdu (and Persian) terms in this dissertation has attempted to balance between accurately representing the spoken pronunciation of Urdu and noting the wider linguistic connections of the Urdu script. Various letters in Urdu that have the same sound (particularly, s, t, and z) have not been has been noted with an apostrophe and the letter nun ghuna [ع] differentiated. The Urdu letter ‘ain has been rendered as ā and alif madda [ا] has been approximated with the letter ṅ. Likewise, alif [ں] .has been given as ī [ی] has been rendered as A, while the letter i/ ee [آ] I do not transliterate the names of people and cities and instead use the most common usage in the roman script. All transliterations