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A lot of welcome to new books in the Indian Ocean world, a podcast channel on the new books network. This podcast is for listeners who want to sail the waters of the expansive Indian Ocean to learn about this past and present. Thank you for joining me. I'm your host, I'm your host, I'm your master's me at PhD candidate at Princeton University.
And with us today is Dr. Noor Sobershan, the former director of the Al-Hang Documentation Center, which is a research center and archive of Islamic visual culture and urbanism at MIT. And today we will be discussing a newly published special issue titled Beyond Colonial Ratchur, Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Adernity in 19th Century South Asia, and is introduced and edited by Dr. Noor Sobershan, Lele O'Dine and Priyanka Bathour and published in the International Journal of Islam in Asia, the fair issue published in September 2023.
Welcome to new books in the Indian Ocean world. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk about the issue. Not at all, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.
Happy to have you. First, you would like to learn more about the editors in this case. So if you can say a few words about yourself, that is where you grew up, how you became interested in this theme and field of study and if you would like to mention any mentors or books along the way. Absolutely.
So I think before we dive in, I just want to also send a huge thanks to my co-editors who worked on this special edition that we're going to talk about today with me, Dr. Lele O'Dine and Priyanka Bathour, who also worked together with me at the British Library and were part of the big AHRC project that led to this publication. So anything I say today about Print or Print in South Asia really is the result of kind of collective intellectual effort. So I just want to acknowledge that at first, of course, any errors remain my own, but this was definitely a group effort.
As for me, let's see. So I was born in the States and grew up there and then wound up studying in the UK. So I did, it was still called Oriental Studies then for my undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge. I did Arabic and Persian and then went on to do a PhD at the same institution.
I actually, so now, we're going to talk about South Asia today, but my original research, really I'm a social and cultural historian of the Ottoman Empire. So I did my PhD on the, sort of, it was a sociocultural history of the 16th century Ottoman Empire focused on slavery and manumission. And then as a result of working on archival and manuscript sources very intensively, I got very interested in Islamic code ecology and paleography. And that was kind of my gateway drug to working as a manuscript curator.
So after I finished my PhD, I went to work at the British Library. My first job there was working in the Persian section on the Persian manuscripts. Then gosh, after that, where did I go? I worked at the Museum of Islamic Arts as a bit as an Islamic art curator.
Then I returned to the British Library in 2015 to take up my position as head of the South Asia collections where it was a pleasure to serve for around six years. I was there responsible for the South Asia collections and working with a really fantastic team of curators. So that's kind of my trajectory. Is that what you needed?
Ahmad, or would you like a bit more? Was there anything I left out? Any more detail I can include? That's perfect.
Thank you for sharing that. Okay, great. Let's now delve into the issue. It consists of eight articles and I will read the titles of these articles and their authors.
The first is printing a trans-regional Tarika Haji Imadud Dola, Maki, who died in 1899 and Sophie contestations from Tana Bhaban to Istanbul written by Sohay Bigg. The second article is printing Islamic modernism, Arabic text for Arab and South Asian Muslims in the early 20th century, written by Roy Bar-Sade. The third is a social space for religious reform, Macteve-Dorhan and the emergence of a vernacular print culture in colonial Balochistan between 1882 to 1948 by Hafiz Ahmad Jammali. The fourth is Arabic Malayalam text at the British Library themes, genres and production by Mahmoud Korea.
The fifth is alphabet poems and other Urdu religious booklets by Francesca Arceini. The sixth is the Garden and the Fire, the hereafter in the Bengali Muslim literary imagination by Epshita Halder. The seventh is Salatier songs, Kinta, help him saying it right dance, and participatory printed media in the 19th century North India by Richard David Williams and last but not least, Chapa, Poutis, some print house practices in mid-19th century Calcutta by Arjid Kupta. So we have a wide-ranging themes and geographies and different areas of research that relates to print culture in South Asia.
And about that I'll be asking you a few questions just to introduce the listeners to these articles and their broader context and arguments and contributions and interventions. But we cannot delve into all of them unfortunately, but hopefully in this journey we can learn something about them. First in the context of colonial modernity, we have a growing body of literature that tackles different aspects of that. And I would like to ask first about the impetus behind this issue, how it came about and how it was organized into this issue.
Sure, I can definitely talk a bit about that. The other thing I should mention is that, so this special issue, which turned into a double issue actually because we have quite a few articles in here covering a range of geographies and languages So this scholarship emerged out of a research and digitization project at the British Library. So in 2016, I think it was, I was lucky enough to receive a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Newton-Baupha Fund to do a big research and digitization project. So I was the principal investigator and my colleagues, Lélia Dean and Priyanka Vasu were curators in that project.
And the goal of this project was basically to research and digitize and catalog and make available the British Library's quite substantial collection of early print projects. So as some of you who are listening may know, the British Library as a result of basically what amounts to colonial legal deposits. So in 1876, you have the registration of Books Act and you had to fundamentally, it required publishers in South Asia to give one copy of everything they published in South Asian languages to the British Museum, to the then British Museum and the India Office Library. Those two collections then came together to form the collections of the British Library.
So as a result of that, the institution had a very, very rich collection of, I guess what could be called grey literature. I mean, it was a very, very wide ranging selection of titles that hadn't really survived elsewhere because they necessarily weren't deemed worthy of collecting. So it's everything from chapbooks to manuals on hygiene to instructions for how to set up a printing press to popular literature, instructions on how to take make talismans, religious literature, reform literature, really every genre of popular printing and writing. So this collection is kind of captured in this collection.
So this project, which was called the two centuries of Indian print project, and the goal of it was to make these materials more accessible. So we started off working on the Bengali collections. I myself am not a specialist in Bengali, but my colleagues, Lely and Priyanka are, and so they did the brunt of the intellectual work on that part of the collection. And we inherited a lot of the intellectual framing of this project from a grand show who was the previous head of the Asian Africa collections at the British Library from Abhijit Gupta, who's also one of the contributors here and Pardon me, the Rymari.
And we had a group of contributors helping us shape the kind of intellectual questions we were asking as part of this project. The project went on for quite some time. So from 2016 until 2021. And initially we had an idea to organize a seminar series where every, every two weeks we would invite emerging scholars as well as more established scholars to present their work on the South Asia print collections and manuscript collections in the British Library.
And so, in terms of the examples we managed to showcase a lot of a wide range of scholarship on a number of languages in the South Asia collections. So that was kind of the background to the creation of this special edition. We also did a workshop in 2018, where we specifically ask these questions around the relationship between the advent of print in South Asia and colonial modernity and whether the introduction of print constituted, you know, kind of an epistemic rupture or whether there are elements of continuity that can be identified by way of intellectual, both in terms of kind of intellectual history, as well as the form and visual and aesthetics of print. So that's kind of the genesis to this and that's also why we, you'll notice as you look through the titles we aimed for a wide variety in terms of the languages that we captured in these articles so we have, you know, some of the languages that have been very well studied such as the blue or Bengali in terms of print culture, but we also aimed to present research on languages and geographies that are a bit less examined, for instance, you know, the publication of Persian Sufi texts in the relationship with Makka and circulation, which is in, you know, so hipfig's article, the circulation of texts on a much wider geography than South Asia, but that are fundamentally tied to questions of modernity in South Asia.
You know, as both the Jama'li's article on print in colonial below just on, for instance, looks at a range of like the advent of print in a range of languages that have here to form an elected in scholarship and arguably the same thing with Mahamud Kurya's article on Arabic Malayalam texts, which introduces a corpus of texts in the British Library that again had not really been examined very closely by scholars. So that's, I hope that gives you a sense of the reason for the quite wide variety and some of the questions that we asked in this special issue. Right, it's really amazing how you brought all these scholars together to think about this question. And regarding the overall framework of this issue, the issue challenges the concept of epistemic rupture.
Could you please elaborate on this concept and how this idea is critiqued and what nuances emerge when examining continuities and changes in the Islamic knowledge economy? Yeah, absolutely. So we were specifically looking at a production of texts by Muslims and Muslim intellectual context in South Asia. So, gosh, a lot of nuances emerge.
And I would say each, so the thing is, I don't think we, I mean, the main overarching argument that you can identify throughout all of the articles and the introduction. The primary argument is that obviously the question of print being introduced into South Asia isn't as simple as the creation of an intellectual rupture. There are a number of elements where you can say, for instance, the introduction of print actually gave new life to certain genres of intellectual production that we as consider perhaps to be quote unquote enchanted, although obviously that's a whole other discussion about what that term implies. At the same time, the introduction of print allowed for the dissemination of scribal practices and the forms of lithography, for instance, and the dissemination of manuscript culture as well, certainly in the in the Urdu sphere or in works that are produced in person out of the script, the introduction of print actually allowed for the proliferation of a number of types of knowledge production that would be considered kind of pre modern in the sense that they don't adhere to a kind of rationalist reformist agenda.
So I would say that's one thing that you can identify in all of the papers, but what's what I like about each of the articles is that each one has very much its own specificities according to the context, the language, the type of production that's being examined. And I think each one identifies some idiosyncrasies of the type of production that they're looking at. Like I found Richard Williams article particularly interesting in so far as it traces, you know, it looks at the way that this particular type of, you know, kind of salacious song is linked to kind of Islamicate cultural practices in 19th century North India, you know, and kind of what, you know, how that can be seen as a rupture, but then it draws on earlier traditions and at the same time becomes a kind of canonized form of music by the time it reaches the Caribbean. So again, it plays on this idea of like, okay, what actually does this constitute a rupture?
Does it constitute actually the creation of a new genre? And then the creation of this new genre of dance and music itself becomes canonized as a kind of classical form of musical production. So, and I think each article explores these kinds of nuances, you know, in their own way. So, you know, for instance, Hafiz Jamal, these article I thought was very interesting because it looks at the way that so his follows a slightly different argument and so far as he looks at how the introduction of print culture in Balochistan actually does promote a reformist agenda, which largely adheres to in many ways the kind of received argument of what the introduction of culture does in colonial South Asia, you know, and yet he examines how, you know, the introduction of different forms of typography might have altered intellectual production.
So again, I would say each article looks at a very specific context and each one brings out the specific that context that do in some way relate to the overarching argument, but I would say it's difficult to generalize across all of them. Right, it's probably unfair to ask you to synthesize and try to bring all of them under one umbrella. And there is quite a diversity in print genres and languages as we've mentioned. But I think it's also helpful to think about these, you know, grand narratives and how we are arguing against them.
And one of the the existing one is the argument against the, you know, that colonialism brought significant rupture in the way Muslims have been interacting with texts. So can you please delve deeper into the ways that pre-colonial practices and cultures of writing and reading persisted in the print landscape, especially in terms of text copying, adaptation and circulation. Yeah, absolutely. And I might actually, if you don't mind to answer that question, I think I also have to draw on some scholarship outside of this, outside of the specific special edition of you know, because you have some really interesting, so you have a lot is kind of going on right now in the field, the history of print.
And there's some appreciate. Yeah, exactly. So you have really excellent work by Megan Rob and pronounced for cash. Amanda Lanzillo is doing really interesting work on the history of lithography and kind of the relationship of labor actually in scribal practices to the production of print.
So, and also I have a couple of articles outside of this that address that exact question, the themes of which are definitely present in this article. But in very general terms, what I can say is that, you know, the survival of kind of pre-modern or I guess you could say pre-print practices of intellectual production in terms of the copying of manuscripts in terms of, you know, glossing in terms of production of colofins or, you know, even the way that the title page will look by way of illumination and the layout on the page, which I would have to say Mahmoud and Roy's articles both touch on that and touch on that point actually of the kind of continuation of very specific visual tropes that are specific to Islamic manuscript production in print culture. So there's definitely a continuity in that respect. Many of the scribal practices also continue.
And again, I think Roy's article is really interesting. It addresses that particular point and looks at the ways that scribal practices, or not so much scribal practices, but the visual quality of print, the way that it might appeal to different audiences and draw on different aesthetic registers. So he talks about the use of kind of Nusk versus Nastaliq and typography versus lithography to appeal to audiences that had been kind of habituated to a kind of visual engagement with texts. But you know, he kind of gestures at this argument that a South Asian or Muslim audience would expect a certain type of, you know, Nastaliq script, for instance.
And so even printed texts would cater to this in order to make the text more aesthetically appealing. So that's in terms of visuals. The other thing I can say is that it's not in this special edition as such, but something I've researched elsewhere. You also have the reproduction of images as well from my perspective.
Often quite directly, almost as though the images and illustrations from manuscripts themselves had been kind of taken and copied and reproduced either in engraving or lithograph. So, you know, in some respects, there's a very direct visual connection between the manuscript tradition and the print and the print tradition in terms of content. In many cases, in many cases, you do have, you know, the introduction of reformist texts and it's a completely new intellectual endeavor. At the same time, I would say what you also see is a proliferation of whatever existed in manuscript form.
So the full gamut of genres of Islamic intellectual production that existed in pre-modernity, you find them in print as well. And often they're very popular. So if you take things like, you know, magical practices and casting spells and things that are not necessarily considered to be a high literature, as such. And in many ways, if you actually look at the volumes themselves, they're kind of very practical manuals for divination.
They just give instructions. They're not necessarily even theoretical. If you look at those, and again, I mean, if we're taking this category of enchantment at face value, they're definitely enchanted texts that indicate some kind of continuity with pre-modern practices, although that, you know, of course, put that between brackets and put a question right next to it. But what you see is that this type of textual production absolutely proliferates with the introduction of lithography.
So if we're looking, you know, if we're judging the popularity of a text based on how many times it gets published and how many editions it has, you'll find that, you know, this kind of text, which was obviously very kind of lowbrow and popular, gets, you know, reproduced widely in print. And probably, I would guess, would have circulated much more widely in print form than in manuscript form, just because it's easier to produce more copies. So, I mean, this might be an example of how, you know, this idea of the introduction of a rupture is perhaps turned on its head. The other thing I would say is just to complicate this idea of rupture and complicate the idea of enchantment of it.
The other thing I would say is that what I've seen is that you have the emergence of new genres as well in print, which again, was not uncommon in manuscript either. Obviously, you would often have authors, you know, basically taking and adapting, anthologizing different texts and putting something together to create a new treatise. But I feel like the speed at which that happens accelerates with the introduction of print in South Asia. And so you see a lot of a lot of these very popular texts that produce, they do cite their sources.
They'll say, Oh, I took, you know, this paragraph from this manuscript and this chapter is taken from that manuscript, and then they kind of remix it and put it and publish it in print. So, you know, there's an argument to be made for continuity, right, these kind of pre-modern elements of Islamic intellectual production are finding a new life and proliferating and being kind of remixed into new forms. So there's an element of continuity. There's also an element of rupture in that the speed at which they're being produced almost creates a new form of knowledge production and new genres of writing.
So I would say you can identify elements of both perhaps. And if I may add more works to that biography, I recommend listening to my conversation with Christopher Ball, where we talk about the volume on call phones for more than an hour. Specifically in South Asia, but also the work of Nal green, or based on his very useful in regard. So I'm thinking about the role of new technologies and networks on which activities and authorities.
We also come to think about vernicalization of Islam and new Muslim publics. And the issue grapples with this theme and its role in shaping new Muslim publics. Can you please say more about the significance of this process and its impact on the formation of new geographies and imaginaries within the Islamic framework. Yeah, absolutely.
And I would say that is one of the major themes of the special edition that we tried to bring out is this question of the vernacularization of Muslim knowledge production and how it intersects with print. So I think there are some great examples of that in this special edition, especially if Shita Halder's work on the Bengali Muslim literary imagination, Francesca Orsini, who looks at religious booklets and who else I think also so he bigs article is a good example of that as well. And Mahmoud also, who's work looks at the creation of a kind of intellectual ecumen in the Indian Ocean through the production of Arabic Malayalam texts. So it's something, it's a theme that requires throughout the special edition for sure.
And certainly, again, I think there's an argument to be made in both respects, and I might be about to say something quite controversial. We certainly, and one of the arguments that we make in this special edition is that the introduction of print on lithography and the proliferation of literacy and the proliferation of the production of text goes hand in hand with a process of vernacularization. And I think that is true to a certain degree. However, I would also say that the continuation of the production of texts in Arabic and Persian also proliferates, but I would say for reasons of disciplinary boundaries and specific types of training, we don't look as much at Arabic and Persian texts, either in manuscript or printed form in South Asia, because of the way that South Asian studies as a field is constructed.
So I would say yes and no, I would say there's an argument to be made both ways there. And perhaps the next special edition should be on that. On this question of the continuity of these quote unquote classical languages in print in South Asia. Right, there's this divide between who does Persian and who does in the languages.
Yeah, exactly. And what you get trained in, depending on which department you do your PhD in, but I think actually there's a big argument to be made for the continuity of Persian and Arabic intellectual production in South Asia, even after the introduction of print, I would say. Indeed. And this goes also for East Africa as well between Houston, Swahili and Arabic and the Arabic script and who only works on ethnographies or all histories.
So yeah, a part of it is academic training and part of it is legacy, I guess, of former scholarship. So the some of the articles also tackle the link between the transnational or global connections and how that was impacted by the publishing of print materials, which can be to these connections between the new Muslim public and their connection to the transnational Islamic community. Right. I would like to think about that in connection to genres.
And conventional genres, we have, you've mentioned, tell us Henry and the cult sciences, you also have the original poems and slasher songs, appearing within Islamic print landscape. So how do these genres challenge or expand our understanding of religious discourse and practices within the context of print culture, both locally or transnational. I mean, I think what this special edition captures is the range of the way that Muslim religious practices, how diverse they are and how much they differ from language to language and geography to geography. So, I mean, one good example of what a lot of these are a good example of transnational practices.
I think as Sohipiks articles, an excellent example of the circulation of Sufi texts from India all the way to the Ottoman Empire and the creation of a kind of transregional Sufi Teriyot through the circulation of texts. And again, you know, looking at, you know, we have an article of Sufism, we have one about reform, we have several on reformism, you know, one on dance. And, you know, sort of what I've termed quote unquote vulgar songs as a mode of knowledge production that extends all the way from Bengal to the Caribbean. So, you know, and you know, certainly my moods, I'm a hood curious article that looks at the way that texts shape an intellectual community in the Indian Ocean.
So, I mean, I think it's clear that the variety of religious expression gets captured through these different textual communities. And, you know, hopefully we've managed to present some of these and study and analyze them in the eight articles that comprise the special edition. And this impacts quite profoundly religious authorities, right? The proliferation of print materials impacted the traditional forms of religious authority.
Would you like to mention any instances where new forms of authority emerged due to the advent of print? I mean, that's an excellent, excellent question. I have, well, I should probably give some already very well documented examples of that, but I have, and I have, I'm doing a bit of research on this element of the kind of the circulation of manuscripts in South Asia, and when that comes to an end, the kind of space that opens up for print and for religious reform. So, I would say, you know, in terms of the creation of new religious authorities, the kind of rise of print and the way that it allows for reformist ideologies to take space in South Asia has been very well studied.
But I think that what we also need to think about is the role that the circulation of manuscripts used to play, not so much before the rise of reformism in keeping, you know, the, you know, some of the, you know, for instance, Sufi networks alive or in keeping different, more local networks of knowledge production alive that gets, I wouldn't say erased by the introduction of print, but certainly altered quite widely and I'm thinking of things like, you know, the Delhi collection, for instance, and the way that, you know, this large collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts circulated and kept a network of scholars connected, a specific network of scholars connected in a specific geography, and how, you know, with the removal of that collection and how it was looted and then, you know, that kind of intellectual production and the circulation of texts gets in many, in many ways, superseded by the production of print, which then allows for new networks and new authorities to emerge. And I think that, you know, we should certainly look at print and print production, but I think we also have to look at what came before it and how it alters that pre-existing landscape, which has been a little bit, I think absent from the scholarship on print. Indeed, I remember while researching at the British Library, the Delhi collection kept coming up again and again, and it was wondering, what is this, the Delhi collection that is this thing yeah, what is it. And then that, you know, motivated me to go look it up and learn about this history and story which is fascinating to think about, you know, sitting in London and touching the materials that I've been looked at from the, you know, the Mughal Palace and libraries so there's a lot to cover in this special issue and I highly recommend exploring the articles, even if some of the listeners might not be interested in certain geographies but the analytical sophistication that these articles advance is really useful to transplant to other locations and think about these different questions and genres and how they grapple with the question of colonial modernity and print culture.
So thank you so much for sharing these insights from these articles and to wrap it up, I would like to ask you who do you hope will read the English colonial rupture and what sort of impact would you like to have? Well, I mean, it's in many ways it's aimed at scholars of print culture and specifically South Asianists. At the same time, the journal we published in the International Journal of Islam in Asia has a much wider scope. So as you mentioned, we're hoping also to make a methodological intervention in the field.
And I actually hope that anyone who's interested in studying print and colonialism and the advent of modernity kind of, you know, across any geography would be interested in reading, reading our special edition and the introduction where we lay out some of the, you know, the methodological interventions that we're hoping to make. So yeah, I mean, that's who I hope reads it and you know anyone who's interested in these topics as well because, you know, not only do we try to make an analytical intervention, we do look in a great deal of detail at some of the texts themselves at the context in which they were produced at the imagery at the visual tropes at elements of kind of the labor that went into producing the text. And that's very rich special edition from that perspective as well. Indeed.
And the fact that some of the articles study quite overlooked languages and traditions really opens the door for other researchers to explore the tip of the iceberg that these articles are exploring because there's an entire archive behind these under study languages to be explored. So I'm really grateful for that. Before we let you go, there was one traditional question that we ask our authors, which is since this is off your desk, what are you working on now or hope to work on in the future. So that's a very interesting question.
I mean, it's kind of off my desk, but it will never really be off my desk because I all of the kind of research that you know I went into producing it and you know the research that went into the large two centuries of Indian print, you know the HRC project that generated this. So I'm still very much working on the topic of lithography and I'm very, very interested in this question of the way that manuscript production gets adapted into lithography in 19th century and early 20th century South Asia. So I'm hoping to publish some of that in the near future and then just keep going with it because it's really a huge I've looked in specifically at the occult sciences but I'm hoping to look at other genres as well and see how, you know, see how this is this question of manuscript production continues into into lithography. The other big question I'm interested in is this question of the Delhi collection itself.
You mentioned the edited volume that my friend and colleague Christopher Ball produced on call of funds. So I had an article in there on the Delhi collection where I argue that it's not actually the mobile library it's a collection of much smaller libraries, including possibly some of those from the milieu of Shahwali Allah that looted in 1857 and then reconstituted as a collection. So I looked at you know really just a handful of those manuscripts that were all copied by one particular scribe, but I'm very interested in continuing to work on that collection and trying to understand what the impact was of, you know, the large scale removal of such an important collection that circulated so widely amongst a large group of scholars, you know what the intellectual implications are of removing that material from South Asia and taking it to to London and the impact that would have had on, you know, Muslim intellectual life in 19th century Delhi. So those are the two big kind of sets of materials that I'm working with and questions that I'm trying to answer.
Amazing. And we look forward to learning more about your project and how it unfolds. And if you would like to learn more about this culture, Professor, your service time. So there's also a talk that you gave on YouTube about your work on the lithographs and their contents.
So I would refer the listeners to that as well. Thank you so much for sharing these insights again from these articles and giving us a glimpse of the wealth treasured in this special edition and thank you for the listeners for tuning in to today's