UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Translated Orientalisms: The eighteenth-century Oriental tale, Colonial Pedagogies, and Muslim Reform Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65j5t0nf Author Khan, Maryam Wasif Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Translated Orientalisms: The eighteenth-century Oriental tale, Colonial Pedagogies, and Muslim Reform A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Maryam Wasif Khan 2013 © Copyright by Maryam Wasif Khan 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Translated Orientalisms: The eighteenth-century Oriental tale, Colonial Pedagogies, and Muslim Reform by Maryam Wasif Khan Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Aamir R. Mufti, Chair This dissertation positions itself within the disciplines of English and Comparative Literature, its specific intervention in the areas of translation studies, eighteenth-century fiction in English, colonial culture and pedagogy in nineteenth-century India, Urdu prose fiction, and world literature. I argue that the Oriental tale, a popular form in metropolitan England, produced tropes of despotism, homelessness, and itinerancy around the figure of the Muslim over the course of the eighteenth century that eventually travel from the metropolis to the Oriental space itself. The European idea of what I call an Islamicate Orient, therefore, is premised on the notion of a roving and transient empire best exemplified in a series of works that include Antoine Galland’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (~1707), Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nourjahad (1762), and William Beckford’s Vathek (1786). These tropes are then replicated and reinforced in the late eighteenth-century scholarly Orientalism around the Indian colony, most noticeably and influentially, in the work of Nathaniel Halhed and William Jones. The Muslim, in texts such as Jones’ Discourses (1784-9) presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, emerges as alien and invader to the original civilization that the British Orientalists claim to discover in ii India. The second part of the dissertation shows how a system of colonial pedagogy that begins with the establishment of Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800 becomes a conduit through which the arguments of the metropolitan Oriental tale travel from the European republic of letters into the Oriental space itself. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Fort William curriculum, designed largely for the linguistic instruction of Company officers in India, is disseminated through a colonial nexus of native schools. The critical contradiction produced here lies between the English desire to cultivate a “vernacular” language through which to govern, and the loosely, yet purposefully arranged local language complex the Orientalists encounter in north-India of which Urdu is hardly suited for universal utility. Texts commissioned at the College, including Bāġ-o Bahār (1804), modeled as an Oriental tale in a native Indian language, are mistakenly categorized under the names “Urdu” or “Hindi,” causing, in the case of the former, a cleft tradition of prose writing. In the years following the Mutiny of 1857 and the fall of the titular Mughal throne, the association of the idea of a “literature” with native pedagogy becomes increasingly directed towards an infant, but emerging class of Muslim bourgeoisie. Just how deeply tropes of the metropolitan Oriental tale come to inhabit writing in the colonially sponsored vernaculars is best illustrated in Nazir Ahmad’s reformist fictions, Mirāt al-‘Arūs (1868), Taubat al-Naşūĥ (1872), and Ibn ul Vaqt (1888). In the first two of these novel-like works, bourgeois Muslims struggle to define themselves against both the plebian and the aristocratic, but also seem to mark themselves as essentially displaced in India, their true center located in the abstract notions of an Islamic center. I read the final text as a somber depiction of the inability of the Muslim to thrive in an empire that is not his own. The Oriental tale, then, finds a home in these reformist fictions, but with transformative effects on the way Muslim culture comes to define itself in colonial and independent India. iii The dissertation of Maryam Wasif Khan is approved. Ali Behdad Felicity A. Nussbaum Jennifer A. Sharpe Aamir R. Mufti, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Transliteration Guide vi Acknowledgements vii Vita ix Introduction 1 Chapter I: Orientalism’s Tale 23 Chapter II: The Translated Orient 73 Chapter III: Colonial Pedagogy and the Oriental Tale 124 Chapter IV: Muslim Reform and the Oriental Tale 184 Bibliography 240 v TRANSLITERATION GUIDE For all transliterations from Urdu, I have followed the Annual of Urdu Studies revised guide (2007) with some variations that are listed below. Vowels a, ā, e, ē, i, ī, o, ō, u, ū, ai, au Consonants bē b dāl d źuād ź lām l pē p đāl đ țō`ē ț mīm m tē t zāl z żō`ē ż nūn n/ñ ŧē ŧ rē r ‘ain ‘ vā`ō v śē ś ŗē ŗ ġain ġ hē h jīm j zē z fē f dō čē č sīn s qāf q čāshmī ĥē ĥ shīn sh kāf k ħē ħ ķē ķ șuād ș gāf g yē y hamzā vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS If this dissertation were a ship, it would have had two sets of guiding lights directing its course from start to finish. I was told when I was first admitted to the program at UCLA that Professor Aamir Mufti was a “brilliant reader”— to me he has been a patient teacher, a tough critic, a mentor, and a friend. The most precious intellectual lesson I have learnt under his utterly transformative instruction is to treat a text, and by extension, any aesthetic expression with respect and empathy while remaining uncompromising of my own ethical position. I can only hope to keep this and other lessons with me as I begin my academic career. Three years ago, my other beacon, Professor Felicity Nussbaum generously took me on for my general exams, but she has taught me so much more than how to approach the complex realm of eighteenth-century English studies. It would be an understatement to describe her as just a tireless and invested advisor, and yet I find myself at a loss to properly express the relentless passion with which she helped me shape and reshape this project. Professor Jenny Sharpe has been a steady influence and judicious teacher for the past few years in her seminars, as an examiner, and as a committee member. Professor Ali Behdad has always been available for conversation and advising despite a bursting schedule, and I am particularly grateful for his presence on my dissertation committee. Also in the department of Comparative Literature, Professor Efraín Kristal has been a second mentor, leading me from Dante to Borges on so many occasions. On the third floor of the Humanities Building, Michelle Anderson has been a great friend, and an expert problem solver—her wonderful smile and readiness to help eased many a difficult moment. I can never forget Professor Michael Heim, whose untimely passing left an irreplaceable void, and who helped me get through my first, vii difficult year at graduate school. Ben Conisbee Baer has always sent support and encouragement from Princeton. I wrote mostly in Lahore where the incredible generosity of familial friends, often in professional capacities, made the process seem so painless. Dr. Muhammad Ramzan, the chief librarian of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, permitted me seamless access to the library and its resources when I most needed it. Dr. Arif Nazir Butt, the dean of the Suleman Dawood School of Business at LUMS and a member of the MBA Class of ‘89, gave me an office of my own in the frantic last few months of finishing. During this time of tired eyes and ten-hour workdays, Tariq and Zahid, office assistants who have seen me grow up at the university, took care to keep me caffeinated and fed. Mian Shehzad Saleem, also of the Class of ’89, with characteristic kindness handed over his lovely apartment in central London to me while I researched the education archives at the British Library. More than the privilege of these spaces, it is the privilege of having these people in my life that I am so very grateful for. Almost all of my relief and relaxation during the writing process and before came from the beautiful, sororal friendships I am so very lucky to have in so many parts of the world. At UCLA, I found Dana Linda and Michelle Lee without whom getting through the program would have been so much harder, and both of with whom I have wonderful memories in wonderful cities. Shad Naved has been a friend, a colleague, a critical teacher, and an excellent host on my trip to Delhi. Rebecca Rojansky was a caring roommate and an even better friend whose love for cooking was infectious, and later, for me, a therapeutic contagion. Julia Liu kept me grounded for my four years at Princeton, hosted me during my summer in Cambridge, and has remained supremely understanding of my mad schedules on visits to the US. Ammara Maqsood sent realistic advice, as she has done for the past dozen years, sometimes adding scans from the viii Bodleian Library at Oxford. Anisa Heravian, nothing less than a sister bound to me by Tehrangeles and Brentwood, has never got sick of my obsessive and selfish work habits, and I owe her many trips to many magical cities but none to nightclubs. In Lahore and always, despite all kinds of distances Meher Tiwana, Nida Qureshi, Amina Samiuddin, and Urooj Masud have never compromised our friendship.