Abstract

This book provides an important and original illustration of the centrality of qasbahs (small towns or large villages) in India’s social history and Muslim life. Contesting popular and academic perceptions that the ‘local’ is parochial, peripheral, and provincial, this book systematically demonstrates qasbahs as inclusive, diverse, global, and universal. It presents qasbahs as hubs of intense intellectual and cultural activity and as networks of social life, education, print culture, literary production, and intellectual dialogue. Based on an extensive fieldwork, a deep understanding of the qasbah topography, and a wide-ranging consultation of untapped Urdu, English, Hindi, and Persian sources, this work focuses on qasbahs as the new nuclei of Muslim social and cultural life upon the decline of the regional Indian states and their urban centres in the late nineteenth–early twentieth century, in much the same way as the successor-states had taken over from the Mughal Empire earlier. This book expands our understanding of the qasbahs and thereby foregrounds small towns as integral—and even critical—to India’s social history in general and Muslim life in particular. It further revises and complicates the question of how Muslims have historically dealt with the Western culture. This book asserts that the emergence of modernity among Muslims was yet another episode in almost a millennium-old tradition of cultural encounters, familiarities, and sensibilities—a context unique to South Asian Islam and Muslims. Furthermore, qasbahs were as much about contradictions as conformities, whether externally such as their encounter with the West or internally as in Hindu–Muslim relationships or even among Muslims.