Poetry of Belonging : Muslim Imaginings of India 1850-1950

This book engages with the question of Muslim rootedness in India. It uses various Muslim ''voices'' in North India to explore imaginings of the local, regional and transnational at a time when the Indian nation-state did not exist. Using poetry as an archive and the site of its performance, the musha''irah, as a way of understanding public spaces, the book charts changing understandings of what it meant to be Muslim and Indian. Perhaps this will offer a new way of thinking about these relationships, especially at at time when Muslim loyalty to India has yet again emerged as a politically polarising question

This book examines facets of North Indian Muslim identity c. 1850-1950. It focuses specifically on the role of literature and poetry as the medium through which certain Muslim ''voices'' articulated, negotiated, configured and expressed their understandings of what it meant to be Muslim and Indian, given the socio-political exigencies of the time. Specifically, a history of the public space of poetry will be presented and half of the book will chart a history of the mushairah (poetic symposium) over this period. In doing so it will analyse the multiple ways in which this space adapted to the changing economic, social, political and technological contexts of the time. The second half of the book will present a history of the ideas that were often articulated in the space of the mushairah and changing notions of the watan (homeland) amongst various Muslim individuals will be analysed. In particular the book will seek to locate changing ideas of hubb-e watan? (patriotism) in order to offer new perspectives on how Muslim intellectuals, poets, political leaders and journalists conceived of and expressed their relationship to India and to the trans-national Muslim community.