Nationality and Fashionality: Hats, Lawyers and Other Important Things to Remember

Abstract

The Persianate genre of the tazkira, or biographical compendium, typically concerns poets and Sufi saints, but a different approach is taken in Yadgar-e Rozgar, published in 1931 by Sayyid Badr al-Hasan, an aristocrat and honorary magistrate from Patna. Hasan focuses on the ordinary people—landlords and courtesans, doctors and bakers, lawyers and counterfeiters—who made up Patna’s social world as the city transformed from a provincial town into the capital of a new province. While many Patnaites celebrated these changes, Hasan was deeply ambivalent about the dilemmas of colonial modernity. He struggled to reconcile modernist ideals with his sense that older ways were essential to Patna’s cohesion and distinctiveness. As he worriedly put it, ‘Asian breeding’ had been replaced by a fickle disregard for social norms, as ‘nationality’ increasingly gave way to ‘fashionality’.

Keywords:

• Bihar
• biography
• cities
• memory
• modernity
• Muslims
• Patna
• provinciality
• tazkiras
• Urdu

Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the helpful commentary I received from the anonymous South Asia reviewers and the editors of the special section, and from the attendees at the European Conference on South Asian Studies in 2018, the ‘Literary Sentiments’ workshop at Northwestern University in 2017, and early presentations of this material in Kochi, Kolkata, Berkeley and Madison.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Mere Sansmaran (Patna: Bihar State Archives, 2012), p. 2.

2. Hamilton Gibb, ‘Islamic Biographical Literature’, in Bernard Lewis and P.M. Holt (eds), Historians of the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 54–6.

3. Marcia Hermansen, ‘Religious Literature and the Inscription of Identity: The Sufi Tazkira Tradition in Muslim South Asia’, in The Muslim World, Vol. 87, nos. 3–4 (July–Oct. 1997), p. 319.

4. Marcia Hermansen and Bruce Lawrence, ‘Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications’, in David Gilmartin (ed.), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), p. 159.

5. Richard David Williams, ‘Songs between Cities: Listening to Courtesans in Colonial North India’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 27, no. 4 (Oct. 2017), pp. 591–610; and Stefano Pellò, ‘Persian Poets on the Streets: The Lore of Indo-Persian Poetic Circles in Late Mughal India’, in Katherine Butler Schofield and Francesca Orsini (eds), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016), pp. 303–25.

6. Sunil Sharma, ‘“If There Is a Paradise on Earth, It Is Here”: Urban Ethnography in Indo-Persian Poetic and Historical Texts’, in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 240–56.

7. Hermansen and Lawrence, ‘Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications’, p. 168.

8. Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 268, 295.

9. Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib to Nawab Ala al-Din Ahmad Khan Alai, 16 Feb. 1862, in Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Ghalib ke Khutut, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: Ghalib Institute, 1984), pp. 383–4.

10. Frances Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 46–59.

11. Sharma, ‘“If There Is a Paradise on Earth, It Is Here”’, pp. 241, 249, 251.

12. David Boyk, ‘Collaborative Wit: Provincial Publics in Colonial North India’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 38, no. 1 (May 2018), pp. 89–106.

13. Sayyid Ahmad Dihlavi, Farhang-e Asafiya (Lahore: Rifah-e ‘Am Press, 1908), s.v. rozgar. The term derives from the Persian roz, or ‘day’.

14. Yadgar-e Rozgar has never been widely known and is not even mentioned in a book devoted to the tazkiras of Bihar. See Muhammad Mansur ‘Alam, Bihar men Tazkira-Nigari (Patna: Kitab Manzil, 1980).

15. Sayyid Badr al-Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 1991), pp. 3–4.

16. Ibid., pp. 27–8.

17. Ibid., pp. 61–2.

18. Ibid., pp. 61–4.

19. Ibid., p. 263.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 69.

22. Ibid., pp. 264, 1168–87.

23. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, pp. 65–6.

24. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, pp. 69, 264.

25. Ibid., p. 69.

26. Ibid., pp. 263–4.

27. Ibid., p. 1046.

28. Ibid., p. 1166.

29. Ibid., p. 1046.

30. Ibid., pp. 61, 264, 1047, 1244.

31. Boyk, ‘Collaborative Wit’, pp. 94–8; and ‘Qaum ko Ek Nayi Khushkhabri’, Al-Punch (17 May 1906), pp. 5–6.

32. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), p. 90.

33. Naqi Ahmad Irshad, ‘Kuchh Badr al-Hasan aur Kuchh Un ki Yadgar-e Rozgar ke Bare men’, in Sayyid Badr al-Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 1991), p. 1297.

34. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, p. 264.

35. Irshad, ‘Kuchh Badr al-Hasan aur Kuchh Un ki Yadgar-e Rozgar ke Bare men’, pp. 1299–1300.

36. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, pp. 405, 544, 868.

37. Ibid., p. 251.

38. Altaf Hussain Hali, Musaddas-e Hali (Karachi: Urdu Academy Sindh, 1957), p. 90; and Muhammad Iqbal, ‘Tarana-e Milli’, in Bang-e Dara (Hyderabad: Ghulam Muhi al-Din, Bookseller, n.d.), p. 173.

39. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, pp. 877–9.

40. Ibid., pp. 703–6.

41. Ibid., pp. 876–9.

42. Ibid., p. 879.

43. Ibid., pp. 255–61, 283–7.

44. Ibid., p. 254, for instance. Such a tripartite division of society was common in early twentieth-century Bihar. See ‘Bangali University’, Al-Punch (31 May 1906), pp. 3–4.

45. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, pp. 404, 1060–1.

46. Ibid., pp. 744–6.

47. Ibid., pp. 712–6.

48. Ibid., pp. 925–7.

49. Ibid., pp. 558–61.

50. Ibid., pp. 428–30.

51. Ibid., p. 302.

52. Ibid., pp. 302–3.

53. Ibid.

54. See C.M. Naim, ‘Interrogating “The East”, “Culture”, and “Loss”, in Abdul Halim Sharar’s Guzashta Lakhna’u’, in Karen Leonard and Alka Patel (eds), Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 189–204; Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940)’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 54, no. 1 (Jan. 2012), pp. 65–92.

55. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, p. 250.

56. On the place of the qaum in Muslim reformist thought, see Faisal Devji, ‘A Shadow Nation: The Making of Muslim India’, in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 126–45.

57. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, pp. 250, 252.

58. Ibid., pp. 250, 257.

59. Ibid., pp. 254, 258.

60. Ibid., p. 262.

61. See, for instance, ‘Mazedar Safarnama’, Al-Punch (25 June 1904), pp. 4–7; Ram Gopal Singh Chowdhary, ‘Indian Games’, The Express (7 Sept. 1915), reprinted in Ram Gopal Singh Chowdhary, Select Writings and Speeches of Babu Ramgopal Singh Chowhdary [sic], B.A., B.L. (Bankipore: Bishun Prasad Sinha, 1920), pp. 52–5.

62. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, pp. 1085–6.

63. Ibid., pp. 254–5. For a fictional glimpse of the frenzied market for new fashions in hats and other items, see Ratan Nath Sarshar, Fasana-e Azad (New Delhi: Maktaba Jami‘a, 2004), pp. 193–4, translated by Frances Pritchett as ‘Azad Goes to a Railway Restaurant’, in K.M. George (ed.), Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology, Vol. 2 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1993), pp. 1131–6.

64. See Bernard Cohn, ‘Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century’, in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 106–62; and Margrit Pernau, ‘Shifting Globalities—Changing Headgear: The Indian Muslims between Turban, Hat and Fez’, in Achim von Oppen and Ulrike Freitag (eds), Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 249–67. On the fez’s contemporary resonances, or lack thereof, see Shahid Amin, ‘Representing the Musalman: Then and Now, Now and Then’, in Shail Mayaram, M.S.S. Pandian and Ajay Skaria (eds), Muslims, Dalits, and the Fabrications of History, ‘Subaltern Studies 12’ (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005), pp. 1–35.

65. Ranjur ‘Azimabadi, Diwan-e Ranjur: Nuskha-e Khuda Bakhsh Library (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 2000), pp. 144–5. See also cartoon in Al-Punch (1 Feb. 1906), p. 5; and Ahmad Yusuf, Bihar Urdu Lughat (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 1995), s.v. sarkhule.

66. Bihar Bandhu (15 Sept. 1901), p. 2. The article refers to jatiyata (from jati, indicating caste or other affiliation by birth), which it glosses with the English word ‘nationality’.

67. Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 82–6.

68. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, p. 882.

69. Ibid., p. 1249.

70. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, pp. 979, 1159–61.

71. C.M. Naim, ‘Syed Ahmad and His Two Books Called “Asar-al-Sanadid”’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, no. 3 (May 2011), pp. 3–23, 37; and Naim, ‘Interrogating “The East”, “Culture”, and “Loss”’, pp. 201–2.

72. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, p. 1161. The metaphor of the dream is commonplace in such histories. Sharar, for instance, writes that ‘whatever I learnt is now no more than a dream’. Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, Fakhir Hussain and E.S. Harcourt (trans.) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 112.

73. Sayyid Badr al-Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 1991), p. 993.

74. Ibid., pp. 727–8.

75. Ibid., p. 867.

76. This is a reference to the Persian poet Sa‘di.

77. Hasan, Yadgar-e Rozgar, pp. 743–6.

78. Ibid., pp. 879–82.

79. Ibid., pp. 302–3.

80. Ibid., pp. 303–5.