Challenging the discursive positioning of young British Muslims through the multilingual performance of devotional song and poetry

This article presents data which challenge current hegemonic discourses in public and media spaces which reductively position young British Muslims as linguistically problematic. Framing these data are public space statements which argue for an overly simple linguistic basis to so-called extremist behaviour based on the presence or absence of the English language. Through an analysis of a questionnaire and interviews carried out with young performers, singers and reciters of devotional song and poetry in a range of language varieties, this article shows how such performance practices lead to the deployment of complex and mobile language resources which help negotiate and fashion rich linguistic repertoires and fluid identities for these young British Muslims. The article argues that these are (a) more representative of the wider British Muslim youth community, (b) unmarked, and thus generally invisible within public discourses and (c) a far cry from the prevailing discursive attempts to frame young Muslims as posing a linguistic problem

Challenging the discursive positioning of young British Muslims through the multilingual performance of devotional song and poetry

This article presents data which challenge current hegemonic discourses in public and media spaces which reductively position young British Muslims as linguistically problematic. Framing these data are public space statements which argue for an overly simple linguistic basis to so-called extremist behaviour based on the presence or absence of the English language. Through an analysis of a questionnaire and interviews carried out with young performers, singers and reciters of devotional song and poetry in a range of language varieties, this article shows how such performance practices lead to the deployment of complex and mobile language resources which help negotiate and fashion rich linguistic repertoires and fluid identities for these young British Muslims. The article argues that these are (a) more representative of the wider British Muslim youth community, (b) unmarked, and thus generally invisible within public discourses and (c) a far cry from the prevailing discursive attempts to frame young Muslims as posing a linguistic problem

Globalisation, the practice of devotional songs and poems and the linguistic repertoires of young British Muslims

This article provides empirical data from transnational religious contexts which highlight the complexity, fluidity and indexicality of language and religious practices in globalising settings. Through an examination of the role of devotional song and poetry in the Islamic world, and in particular, among young multilingual and multivarietal British Muslims, an attempt is made to show how globalising processes of the present age contribute to, on the one hand, novel forms of language resources and innovative religious practices and, on the other, co-existing traditional approaches to faith and language practices. It also shows how young people deploy their linguistic repertoires and language resources in order to re-construct their religious and linguistic identities. A conclusion is presented that such practices, whilst drawing on old and traditional roots, become transformed when enacted in these newer settings, both linguistically and religiously

The Role of Muslim Devotional Practices in the Reversal of Language Shift

Fishman’s 1991 scale for evaluating language vitality proposes a stage in language shift where exclusively the older generation takes part in ‘rituals’, ‘concerts’ and ‘songfests’ in the minority language. Once this generation dies away, according to the scale, these cultural practices disappear with them. Within certain Muslim youth communities in the UK counter examples exist where the younger generation leads the way in reviving, performing and extending the repertoire of this religio-cultural heritage. Although this emerging expanded repertoire of song and poetry is clearly multilingual in nature, recitation and performance of the community heritage languages, Urdu and Punjabi, feature strongly. What remains to discover is whether such increasing familiarity with poetic language and form can impact positively on reversing the language shift these communities are experiencing in their third and fourth generations. Although there is evidence (Ostler & Lintinger 2015) that singing and reciting in other minority language settings, secular and religious, are not infrequent pursuits of youth, it is argued in this article that an accompanying religious revival provides an important extra, galvanising, boost to the process of possible reversing language shift. It is suggested that available scales for evaluating language vitality are inadequate in the face of complex diasporic minority language settings

The Performance and Patronage of Baloch Culture through Music (and Related Arts) in the Eastern Arabian Peninsula

This dissertation is a study of Baloch musical—and ritual—idioms as cultivated (and variously innovated, embellished, patronized, and reconstructed) in the relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan urban environments of the coastal Eastern Arabian Peninsula—the third major concentration of Baloch population after Balochistan and Karachi. Due to historical and geographic particulars, the origins of Peninsular Baloch communities lie primarily in the Makran region that extends along the Arabian Sea coast and across the political boundary separating Iran and Pakistan. If musical activities play a significant role in orienting Baloch communities socially and politically, what are the presentational strategies implied in the foregrounding of specific performance genres and how do social dynamics structure the relationships between performers, patrons, connoisseurs, poets, and publics? Relying on data from a series of fieldwork residencies from 2014-2017 in Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, I give close attention to the internal diversity in values, outlooks, and expressive domains found within Baloch communities as well as to relationships between Baloch and the other cultural groups that contribute to the demographic make-up of the region. In addition to its focus on musical genres and aesthetics, this is a multidimensional study of intellectual and literary activity. As cultural activism, the patronage and promotion of musical idioms is central to preserving and amplifying a traditionalist cultural consciousness as well as to framing impassioned contemporary political expression. This dissertation contributes to extant studies of Makrani Baloch music and culture and speaks to a growing interest in the political and ethnographic character of Baloch society in the Gulf states, adding an in-depth study of cultural performance to the handful of survey articles by distinguished scholars (Jahani 2014, Peterson 2013, al-Ameeri 2003). This work also contributes substantially to ethnomusicological scholarship on the Persian Gulf region as a complex and highly interactive sphere of culture and can be counted as one of many projects that address flows of culture that intersect in different ways across the Indian Ocean

The Multilingual Local in World Literature

This essay questions the geographical categories used to underpin current theoretical and methodological approaches to “world literature,” which end up making nine-tenths of the world, and of literature produced in the world, drop off the world map or appear “peripheral.” Focusing on the multilingual north Indian region of Awadh in the early modern period, it argues that an approach to literature and space that takes multilingualism within society and literary culture as a structuring and generative principle and holds both local and cosmopolitan perspectives in view is more productive for world literature than approaches based only on cosmopolitan perspectives of circulation and recognition

Cinema and the Urdu Public Sphere: Literary imaginaries in the making of film cultures in north India (1930-50)

Urdu language and its literary culture had a considerable influence in shaping the narrative and aesthetic vocabularies of cinematic practice in India. While film scholars have recognized the role of Urdu in film dialogues and lyrics, few have attempted to understand the crucial processes by which film culture was fashioned within the Urdu public sphere. This dissertation aims to map the entangled networks of the literary with the cinematic and brings to light the vibrant debates of the Urdu public sphere on cinema from 1930 to 1950. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, extensive archival research was conducted to excavate previously undiscovered materials in Urdu on film. In the thesis, these marginalized texts in Urdu are juxtaposed with and studied alongside film sources in Hindi and English to complicate and diversify existing discourses on film in India. The thesis is divided into two sections. The first part focuses on the relationship between cinema and the Urdu public sphere through a study of printed texts such as Urdu film journals, translations of film theory, and biographical dictionaries of actresses and acting manuals. These textual artefacts highlight how cinema as an institution was formalized and disseminated in Urdu with an active engagement in values and codes of etiquette borrowed from an Urdu cultural milieu. I show how these texts were produced with serious pedagogical intent to refine the taste of the cinephiles and at the same time make accessible global film theories through translocation and translation. Part two engages with early sound cinema’s mobilization of the tropes from an Urdu imaginaire, a term I have coined to refer to an affective literary imaginary that provided not only narratives but also cultural frameworks for representation in north Indian cinema in the 1930s and 40s. The coming of sound technology in the 1930s was a momentous technological shift. The thesis demonstrates how cinematic aurality ensured that the Urdu imaginaire blossomed within the film texts through the strategic evocation of the semantics of authority, romance and reform. I employ speculative research trajectories to contextualize the place of the Urdu imaginaire within a heterogenous and variegated film aesthetic by discussing case studies of film personnel, genres, film styles, literary adaptations and codes of respectability in the cinema from 1930 to 1950

Problem of national identity of the middle class in Bangladesh and state-satellite television

This thesis is about the construction and reconstruction of the national identities in Bangladesh, from the Pakistan era to the birth of Bangladesh, to present time. In the light of this political framework, I am looking at the ways in which the state, through the control of the medium of television sought to shift a more syncretic and secular nationalism to a more Islamicist one called Bangladeshi nationalism. I am also looking at Satellite television and the way in which this ruptures the national identities. The study employs the qualitative method to offer an elaborate description of the problem of this national identity by exploring the role of TV officials as cultural artists and the political brokers, as well as the state, in utilising the medium of television for inculcating the certain kinds of identities. The responses of the various professional groups as the middle class viewers of the state television and satellite television in this context has been examined, regarding the question of national identity. The qualitative method has been employed in this work to obtain an in-depth analysis of the problem of nationalism and its association with the history, culture and religion of the middle class in Bangladesh. Through such a procedure this work contributes in demonstrating the fragmentation, multiplicity and plurality of the national identities of the middle class of Dhaka City who find the narrative of the history of the Liberation War and cultural heritage in anomalous ways in various televised programmes under the different political constituencies of Bangladesh

The Guru in South Asia

This book provides a set of fresh and compelling interdisciplinary approaches to the enduring phenomenon of the guru in South Asia. Moving across different gurus and kinds of gurus, and between past and present, the chapters call attention to the extraordinary scope and richness of the social lives and roles of South Asian gurus. Prevailing scholarship has rightly considered the guru to be a source of religious and philosophical knowledge and mystical bodily practices. This book goes further and considers the social engagements and entanglements of these spiritual leaders, not just on their own (narrowly denominational) terms, but in terms of their diverse, complex, rapidly evolving engagements with ‘society’ broadly conceived. The book explores and illuminates the significance of female gurus, gurus from the perspective of Islam, imbrications of guru-ship and slavery in pre-modern India, connections between gurus and power, governance and economic liberalization in modern and contemporary India, vexed questions of sexuality and guru-ship, gurus’ charitable endeavours, the cosmopolitanism of gurus in contexts of spiritual tourism, and the mediation of gurus via technologies of electronic communication. Bringing together internationally renowned scholars from religious studies, political science, history, sociology and anthropology, The Guru in South Asia provides exciting and original new insights into South Asian guru-ship