Medieval Persian writers such as Rumi (d. 1273) and Sa‘di (d. 1292) were central to Muslim literary, scholarly, and everyday life in South Asia. Saʿdi’s Gulistan, in fact, was perhaps the most widely read book in the Muslim world after the Quran. For centuries, it was considered a textbook of Islamic ethics and the Persian language, studied by Muslims and by Hindus and other non-Muslims in India. It was also considered, along with other texts such as Rumi’s Mathnawi and Jami’s Yusuf wa Zulaykha, a repository of religious and mystical insight. As the British took over India in the nineteenth century, however, they declared such Perso-Islamic texts ‘erotic’ and deemed them to be unsuitable for the curricula of indigenous and colonial schools. 

Earlier historians have held that these texts became marginalized and Victorian attitudes of prudery regarding sex and rejection of homoeroticism were absorbed by colonized Muslim intellectuals in India. My dissertation challenges this narrative by exploring two neglected archives: premodern manuscripts of Persian commentaries on the Gulistan produced in India; and nineteenth-century printings of the Gulistan, its commentaries, and its translations into English and vernacular Indian languages. I show that early modern Muslims engaged sexual themes based on a certain ethical framework or adab. Failing to recognize this ethics of erotics, Orientalists systematically removed and mistranslated passages from English versions of the Gulistan; colonial officials removed them from textbooks. Yet, my dissertation shows that the premodern Persian tradition of engaging Persian texts not only survived but thrived into the nineteenth century. Moreover, it continued to be engaged not just by Muslims but also by significant numbers of Hindus and other non-Muslims. Through research in multiple languages—including Arabic, Persian, and Urdu—and through close attention to the material, visual, and textual features of manuscripts and prints, my dissertation brings to light new histories of Islam, gender, and Persian literature in colonial India.

This article sheds light on the relationship between different print technologies and different traditions of engaging premodern Perso-Islamic literature in colonial India. The print histories of Saʿdi’s Gulistan, I argue, reveal two distinct traditions of engagement with Persian literature in nineteenth-century India. Each of these traditions was expressed and made possible by two different print technologies. A colonial tradition centered on typography engaged Persian classics such as Gulistan instrumentally, holding little regard for their aesthetic and ethical value. By contrast, a Persianate tradition printed on lithography continued an early modern tradition of engaging Persian classics. By focusing on the aesthetic and visual features of nineteenth-century books, this article reveals an essential link between print technology and ideology in colonial India.

Scholars of modern South Asia have remained divided on the role of religion in the creation of Pakistan. Many have argued that Pakistan’s “founder,” Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a secularist, his argument for Pakistan resting on an abstract notion of Islam within an Enlightenment framework of conceiving minority, nation, and state. Why, then, did madrasa-trained Muslim scholars, the ulama, support his demand for Pakistan? This article explores the political thought of the most influential Muslim scholar immediately before partition, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani (d. 1949). I argue that Usmani viewed Pakistan as a particular kind of Islamic democracy. While he drew on medieval Muslim juridical and political discourses, Usmani’s readings reveal his debt to Western political categories. By paying attention to the tensions and opportunities offered by this encounter of modern political conditions with Islamic intellectual thought, this article outlines an Islamic vision of the political that resonates beyond the politics of colonial India.