L’orientalisme en miroir

S. Subrahmanyam propose une histoire des représentations orientalistes de l’Inde dépassant la conception de la rencontre culturelle comme subjugation de l’Autre. Son attention se porte plutôt sur les fécondations mutuelles et les circulations intellectuelles entre l’Inde et l’Europe

A Note on the Origins of Hali's Musaddas-e Madd-o Jazr-e Islām

International audienc

L'orientalisme en miroir: Recension de Sanjay Subrahmanyam, L’Inde sous les yeux de l’Europe, Mots, peuples, empires, 1500-1800. Alma éditeur, 2018, 494 p.

Recensio

Compte Rendu: Claude Markovits, De l’Indus à la Somme. Les Indiens en France pendant la Grande Guerre, Paris, Éd. de la MSH, 2018, 272p.

International audienc

From Wakīl to Numā’indah: A History of Urdu Concepts for Political Representation in North India, 1858–1919

International audienceThis article explores the (contested) concept of political representation in Urdu during the colonial period to address “deceptive familiarities” and highlight multilingual and transnational influences on contemporary Indian Muslim claims. Drawing on official documents, letters, speeches, and newspapers from the late 1850s to 1919, it argues that the “politics of presence”—or descriptive representation—of “Old Party” leaders stemmed from their aristocratic concept of representation as trusteeship ( wakālat ). Despite changes in terminology, the concept was only challenged in the 1910s by the “Young Party” and by the embracing of democratic values. Conceptual change was then materialized by the appropriation of the Persian numā’indagī in Urdu—a term that might have consecutively accredited descriptive claims and the use of religious symbols in election campaigns

Nostalgia and the City : Urdu shahr ashob poetry in the aftermath of 1857

After the Uprising of 1857, many poets from north Indian cities resorted to the Urdu nostalgic genre of shahr ashob to recall mournfully pre-colonial urban landscapes and articulate emotional and poetic narratives of loss. This article proposes to open new perspectives for the historical study of collective memory and trauma among Urdu-speaking ashraf in the nineteenth century by looking at one collection of such poems entitled 'The Lament for Delhi (Fughan-e Dehli)' (1863), which has recently started to attract the attention of historians. Although scholarship has generally emphasised the continuity of these poems with the shahr ashob tradition, this article re-assesses this body of texts through a careful analysis of their main literary motifs and highlights their originality and divergence from previous shahr ashobs. Beyond the stereotypical, the poems of 'The Lament for Delhi' both construct 1857 as cultural trauma through the use of powerful literary devices and the performance of collective grief as well as re-channel memory and melancholy into the urban landscape by emphasising its materiality and reinvesting it with new meanings and stakes. This paper more broadly underlines the importance of this under-studied source to understand the impact of 1857 on the imaginary of Urdu-speaking ashraf and on the cultural and social history of colonial India

Genealogy, authority and Muslim political representation in British India

International audienceAbstract This article reflects on the significance of genealogy for Sayyids and other Muslim elites in British North India by exploring some literary productions and political endeavours of the Aligarh movement. At the end of the nineteenth century, poems recalling the extra-Indian origins of Muslim elites became increasingly popular, as Altaf Husain Hali's Musaddas best exemplified. Translating an anxiety of seeing their power and influence reduced in the colonial world, such nostalgic discourse, intertwining representations of lineage and authority, promptly entered the political realm. The genealogy rhetoric deployed in Urdu poetry played a significant role in sustaining the claims of the leaders of the Aligarh movement as they strove to bolster a cohesive sharīf community identity and secure political leadership during the anti-Congress propaganda of 1888 as well as to obtain advantages from British officials according to their so-called political importance. In this context, this article emphasises that in Aligarh's nostalgic poetry, the greatest political weight was put on belonging to the ashrāf category rather than to the Sayyids, who only occasionally feature in the sources

La performance politique de la poésie nostalgique en ourdou au sein du mouvement d’Aligarh. Fin xixe - début xxe siècle

International audienc