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Countervailing Connections: Islamicate Mobilities in Imperial Moments
Organizer: Eric L. Beverley, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Engseng Ho, Harvard University
The Age of Imperialism saw individuals, communities and polities across the Indian Ocean – and the larger Islamicate world – transformed and reconstituted under pressure of colonization. Europeans had entered the Indian Ocean as latecomers to an Islamicate maritime realm. Moments of colonization reenergized and rendered visible pre-existing transregional connections across this vast space, and endowed them with new political valences. Our panel takes advantage of these moments to reflect on what they reveal of these established connections and their renewed significance. Sebouh Aslanian examines how the collapse of the Julfa trade network compelled Armenian elites in India in the latter half of the eighteenth century to shift from an identity based on exclusionary membership in a “coalition” to one based on membership in a larger, more inclusive Armenian “nation.” Mana Kia considers the importance of place of origin as category of difference in the travel narrative of a Persian speaking Shia Indian in Iran in the 1820s. Manan Ahmed focuses on travelogues of Indian munshis at the London court of the East India Company, in the mid-nineteenth century, seeking justice for their Indian masters – the Nawab of Surat and the Mirs of Sindh. Eric Beverley discusses the discursive environment in the semi-autonomous Indian State of Hyderabad around the beginning of the twentieth century, and the articulation there of diverse visions of the polity’s place in a modern Muslim world. Together, our research explores ways in which expanding European imperialism in the Indian Ocean and beyond paradoxically provided conditions for the regeneration of countervailing connections across a revitalized Islamicate ecumene.
From Coalition to Nation: Julfan Merchants in Madras and the Birth of Modern Armenian National Discourse
Sebouh D Aslanian, Columbia University
This study explores how a community of “trade diaspora” merchants, originally from New Julfa, a mercantile suburb of the Safavid capital of Isfahan, sought to transform themselves into a modern nation. Through an examination of Julfa dialect documents stored in various European archives as well as Armenian language texts published by Julfan merchants in Madras in the 1770s and 1780s, including legal and constitutional treatises, the study argues that the transformation of these Julfans, whose identity was circumscribed by their membership in a merchant “coalition,” was the result of the collapse of the Julfan trade network in the second half of the eighteenth century under the combined pressure of Nadir Shah’s destruction of the coalition’s nodal center in New Julfa, on the one hand, and the fierce rivalry of the imperializing network of the English East India Company in India, on the other. The discussion will focus on how a small group of Julfan merchants in Madras began to reassess their identity after the collapse of the Julfan trade network. As a community defined by their status as a “diaspora within a diaspora,” Julfan merchants in India began to expand the rather narrow and exclusionary coalition-centered identity to one that included the wider community of Armenians. The analysis contextualizes the birth of modern Armenian nationalist discourse in India by examining how the collapse of their trade network compelled the Julfan elite to shift their identity from one based on membership in an exclusionary “coalition” to one based on membership in a larger and more inclusive Armenian “nation.”
The Importance of Place of Origin as a South Asian Shia in Early 19th-Century Iran
Mana Kia, Harvard University
After performing Hajj, Ali Mirza Maftun, a minor poet from Delhi resident in Patna, visited the Iranian cities of Shiraz, Isfahan, Tehran, and Mashad in 1826-27. Maftun encounters Iran during the reign of Fath ‘Ali Shah, the second Qajar monarch, at a time before the rise of Indian or Iranian nationalism. The Persianate world, already fractured under the devolutions of centralized power from the Safavid and Mughals in the previous century, faced new pressures in the early 19th century. The British had fanned out across South Asia and were consolidating colonial rule. Iran, although more politically stable than most of the previous century, was under pressure from the opening moves of the Great Game between Russian and Britain. With this context in mind, I examine Maftun’s travel narrative through Iran and ask, in the context of intra-Asian forms of relation, how do the fracturings of the Persianate world and the rise of European power manifest in the text? In what ways do they register? How does place of origin factor as difference, and how is that negotiated? As a Persian speaking Shi‘ite Muslim, Maftun’s primary difference with the inhabitants of Iran is his origin in Delhi. I will also bring in the travel narrative of Aqa Ahmad Bihbihani, a Shia traveler from Iran to various Indian cities between 1805-1810, as a foil where applicable.
Munshis in London: The Art of Petitioning a Monarch
Manan Ahmed, University of Chicago
This paper focuses on two narratives of Indian visitors to London in the 1840s. These were munshis [secretaries] in service of the Nawab of Surat and the Talpur Mirs of Sindh who went to the Queen to petition against the disbandment of their respective kingdoms by the Company. Reflecting not only a journey across the Islamicate worlds and into the colonial metropole, the memoir, petitions and letters brilliantly frame the application of native knowledges onto colonial dominions. The first narrative, the Nawab of Surat's personal munshi Lutfullah Khan's memoir, demonstrates the dependence and interdependence of colonial power on local knowledge-systems. It is especially successful in highlighting, as Tavakoli-Targhi terms it, Orientalism's genesis amnesia. The second narrative is a collection of letters and petitions written by, Akhund Habibullah, Diwan Mitharam and Diwan Dayaram, the three official munshis of the Mirs of Sindh in their pursuit of justice after the British annexation of Sindh in 1843. In an effort to present their case to the highest authority, the three munshis take their fruitless quest to London. The negotiation of these knowledge-brokers across bureaucratic, geographic and class boundaries are emblematic of the interplay of power and knowledge in colonial Britain. I will show that the memoir and the petitions reveal transformations in the notions of self, identity and the other as the munshis traversed and travelled across the the pan-islamic and the imperial worlds.
Prince’s Progress: Modernization and Islamist Internationalism in Hyderabad
Eric L. Beverley, Harvard University
This paper examines representations of Hyderabad’s political modernity, which are marked by complex relationships with both transregional Islamicate networks and British colonial discourse. The Muslim-ruled Indian Princely State of Hyderabad underwent an extensive process of institutional modernization starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, and these administrative and technological changes were enthusiastically reported in texts penned by state employees and aimed at publics and officials well beyond South Asia. Combined with the renewed importance of the Nizam of Hyderabad in Pan-Islamist global visions and the increasing ease of travel in this era, Hyderabad became a locus for the articulation of a wide range of Islamist ideas – ranging from radical anti-colonialism to qualified loyalty to British rule – that claimed for the Princely State the mantle of Muslim modernity. I work from various published and archival materials written by British and Indian employees of the Nizam and travelers to and from Hyderabad to map the discursive environment in the Princely State. Articulating the meanings of modernity in Hyderabad with reference to Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, British India, and nations in general, authors served as cultural mediators between the terms of a colonial vision of political modernity and the perceived implications of the Islamic character of the state’s leadership. The aim of the paper is to consider political possibilities in a major Islamicate polity amidst the layered sovereignty structure of South Asia in the era of British rule, and to reflect on how these Hyderabadi developments suggests a history of modern India told from the outside in.