Recent scholarship in the fields of Global Anglophone and World Literature understands colonialism as having introduced an irreducible rupture within the colonial societies. While responses to colonialism might have taken different shapes and forms, from active and passive resistance to collaboration and collusion, the net effect of colonialism, according to this approach, was a complete overhaul of the material and social infrastructure of the native societies (Mufti 2016, Khan 2021). In the South Asian context, approaches that emphasize discontinuity and rupture often prioritize the interventions of colonial institutions and native elites based in North India, overlooking the myriad forms of engagements undertaken by actors from different parts of the subcontinent (Darwadker 1997, Jalal 2002, Uddin and Basu 2023). Scholars working on South Asian textual cultures have also cautioned against ‘playing up’ the transformative role of colonialism, drawing attention to how even at centers of ‘English influence’ like Delhi College and Fort St George, natives and British officials often produced scholarship that did not align well with colonial interests (Washbrook 2004, Pernau 2006). Understanding colonialism to have ‘invented’ native traditions also risks presupposing native literary, linguistic, and religious traditions to be static and resistant to argued changes (Haj 2006, Tareen 2020, Ganguli 2023).

Engaging with these theoretical and methodological concerns, this session emphasizes the need to attend to the formal experimentations initiated by native scholars and centers of learning during the colonial period. Taking literary form as a space of contestation and experimentation in South Asia (Mukherjee 1985, Dubrow 2016), the various papers in the session focus on novels, historiography, polemical tracts and religious homiletics in Arabic, Urdu, Arabi-Malayalam, and Malayalam produced within the colonial context.

In the first presentation, titled “(Re)Conquering Al-Andalus: Historical Novel, Orientalism, and the early-20th century Print Markets of Cairo and Lucknow,” Jaideep Pandey compares two historical fictions from two distinct linguistic traditions and political contexts; Jurji Zaydan’s Arabic novel Fatḥ al-Andalus published in 1901 from Cairo and Abdul Halim Sharar’s Urdu novel Fath-e undulus published in 1910 from Lucknow. Examining how the Conquest of Andalusia is thematized in both the novels, Pandey explores how colonial literary forms were put to formal and political experimentations by both the writers. Pandey highlights the importance of attending to the dynamics of South-South interactions as central in exploring routes of literary exchanges that go beyond the East-West framework.

Ifrah Javaid’s presentation, “Forms of Colonial Duress: On the Miracles of Muhammad,” investigates how the formal style of religious genres were shaped through a creative engagement with the matrix of Euro-colonial modernity. In particular, Javaid examines the reconfiguration of sīrah tradition (Prophetic Biographies), which performed the dual role of engaging critically with Orientalist scholarship while simultaneously addressing the concerns within the Muslim reading public about the legibility and verifiability of miracles. Focusing on the narrativization of miracles, Javaid shows how elaboration as mode of narration enabled the reconstitution of the genre, rendering it legible within the novel epistemological-perceptual regime introduced by colonial modernity.

Turning to the South Indian context, Musab Abdul Salam’s paper “Polemics, Homiletics, and Print Publics: Makti Thangal and the Making of 19th-Century Mappila Public Sphere” explores the emergence of new print genres and modes of public address within the Mappila public sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through a close reading of the textual and rhetorical elements in the writings of the reformist figure Makti Thangal, Salam shows how Thangal’s homiletical and textual polemics draw as much from traditional genres such as khutba (sermon) and va‘z (moral preaching) as it does from the language of contemporary missionary writings, orientalist scholarship and Biblical higher criticism. Against approaches that read native efforts at reform as indicating a form of ‘protestantization,’ Salam highlights the need to place them within the longue durée of oceanic encounters and exchanges that played a crucial role in shaping the Mappila textual tradition.

Together these papers explore the formal experimentations and innovations that was definitive of the textual cultures of the subcontinent. In highlighting the intellectual contributions across region (Lucknow, Hyderabad, Malabar, and Cairo) and languages (Arabic, Urdu, Arabi-Malayalam and Malayalam), the session aims to broaden the conversations surrounding the non-western traditions’ encounter with colonial modernity from a comparative framework.

Each presentation will be approximately 15 minutes. The presider will allot final 15 minutes for unstructured discussion on the topic.