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Abstract
This article argues that the history of a damaged Urdu library in Delhi reveals new perspectives on the ways in which prominent Indian Muslim scholars dealt with the violent displacements of the 1947 Partition of British India and imagined new futures for the Urdu language across the borders of India and Pakistan. The library of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Association for the Advancement of Urdu), an influential Urdu literary association, was damaged during the violence following Partition in August 1947. In contrast to the relative absence of official commemorations of Partition in post-colonial South Asia, the Anjuman’s leaders documented and publicised the violence of Partition on their library. Moreover, these Urdu scholars used the material process of restoring the damaged library in 1947 and 1948 to rethink the role of the library as a repository to preserve evidence of the continuing production of Urdu knowledge in India. In turn, the disputed division of the library in 1949 illuminates competing visions for Urdu’s future in India, Pakistan, and beyond. This story of one Urdu library demonstrates how changing library collecting priorities and material practices shaped broader debates over Urdu’s place in twentieth-century South Asia.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the generous feedback of the two anonymous reviewers of this article, as well as the helpful suggestions and support of Kama Maclean, Vivien Seyler, David Boyk, and C. Ryan Perkins.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, in Syed Hashmi Faridabadi (ed.), Panjah Salah Tarikh-e Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Karachi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu [Pakistan], 1987 [1953]), p. 182.
2. Ibid., p. 190.
3. Ibid., p. 175. According to Abdul Haq, these were the only Anjuman workers who were killed during the violence in Delhi. However, many other Anjuman intellectuals were displaced to Pakistan.
4. For a discussion of the ways in which Urdu libraries became important arenas for Indian Muslim political and intellectual aspirations, see David Boyk, ‘Bound for Home: Books and Community in a Bihari Qasba’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 3 (June 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1740413.
5. See Christopher King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994).
6. Amrit Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi–Urdu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984).
7. Alyssa Ayres, Speaking like a State: Language and Nationalism in Pakistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8. For more on the Anjuman’s history, see Andrew Amstutz, ‘Finding a Home for Urdu: Islam and Science in Modern South Asia’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University, New York, USA, 2017.
9. For the relationship between Hindi language politics and institutional spaces, see Aakriti Mandhwani, ‘The Hindi Library and the Making of an Archive: The Hindi Sahitya Sammelan from 1911 to 1973’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 3 (June 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1743043.
10. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
11. Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, p. 2.
12. For the importance of material objects in understanding Partition, see Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2017), pp. 4–5, 8–9, 16, 18.
13. See Salma Siddiqui, ‘Archive Filmaria: Cinema, Curation, and Contagion’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 39, no. 1 (2019), pp. 196–8, 203–5, 208–9. Elsewhere, Siddiqui delves into the ways in which cinematic humour was used to deal with the trauma of Partition. See Salma Siddiqui, ‘Meena Shorey: The Droll Queen of Partition’, in BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, Vol. 6, no. 1 (2015), pp. 44–66 (pp. 44–6). In this article, Siddiqui examines the making of a ‘productive cosmopolitanism’ in film ‘against the stark identity logics of Partition’, pp. 46, 62.
14. Siddiqui, ‘Archive Filmaria’, p. 197.
15. For example, in the early twentieth century, most Urdu printed books were not published using movable type, but instead with lithographic technology that relied upon the handwritten expertise of calligraphers. See Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008), pp. 45–9.
16. Hundred Years of Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), 1903–2003 (New Delhi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu [Hind], 2003), p. 12. One interpretation of this ambiguity is suggested by the longer history of book cultures in Urdu and Persian. In his scholarship on early modern Aurangabad, Nile Green explores how ‘books were not considered independent sources of knowledge, but were appendages to the personal pedagogical relationships through which knowledge was transferred’. See Nile Green, ‘The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge between Person and Paper’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (2010), pp. 241–65 (p. 243). It is entirely possible that this historical memory of libraries as ‘accessed through personal affiliation to a teacher’ shaped Abdul Haq’s relationship to his library (p. 243).
17. For Abdul Haq’s important role in Urdu educational projects in Hyderabad, see Kavita S. Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), pp. 65–8, 109–24.
18. For the impact of Aligarh on Indo-Muslim intellectual life, see David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
19. Syed Hashmi Faridabadi, Panjah Salah Tarikh Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Karachi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu Pakistan, 1987 [1953]), p. 51.
20. Green, ‘The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya’, pp. 248–9. For more on Aurangabad, see Nile Green, Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books, and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (New York: Routledge, 2006).
21. Faridabadi, Panjah Salah Tarikh Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, p. 51.
22. Choudhry Rahim Ali ul-Hashmi, Brief History & Works All-India Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Delhi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu [Hind], 1943), p. 26.
23. For library and manuscript collecting projects in the Hindi sphere, see Mandhwani, ‘The Hindi Library and the Making of an Archive’.
24. Hashmi, Brief History & Works All-India Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, pp. 35, 27.
25. Ibid., p. 5.
26. Ibid., p. 27.
27. Institutional histories of the Anjuman attest to the enduring memory of this binary. See Hundred Years of Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), p. 13. However, the collecting practices of other Urdu libraries challenged this focus on either manuscripts or printed books. See Boyk, ‘Bound for Home’.
28. Seh Salah Taraqqi ya’ni Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Hind) ki Guzishtah Tis Baras ki Khidmat aur Ruvadad ka Khulasah (Delhi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu [Hind], 1946), p. 34; and Abdul Haq, Urdu-e Musafah: Doctor Maulvi Abdul Haq Baba-e Urdu ke Khatut ka Majmua’ah (Karachi: Abdul Haq Jubilee Committee [Karachi], 1961), p. 26.
29. For the transformation of Delhi during Partition, see Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 121–51.
30. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, pp. 181–2.
31. Datla, The Language of Secular Islam, pp. 95–6.
32. Faridabadi, Panjah Salah Tarikh Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, p. 67.
33. See Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 11–20.
34. Until the establishment of the Partition Museum in Amritsar, India, in 2017, there was no permanent museum devoted to Partition in South Asia. However, there are a growing number of digital projects to commemorate Partition, including the Museum of Material Memory [http://www.museumofmaterialmemory.com/the-museum/, accessed 17 Jan. 2020]; and the digital 1947 Partition Archive [https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/, accessed 3 Feb. 2020].
35. Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation, p. 16. For other scholarship on material culture, see Andrew Jones, Memory and Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Nicholas Saunders and Paul Cornish (eds), Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). For an example of influential scholarship on material culture in South Asia, see Finbarr Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu–Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
36. Khan, The Great Partition, pp. 5, 206.
37. Abdul Haq, Urdu-e Musafah, p. 229.
38. Ibid., p. 254.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., pp. 153–4.
42. Ibid., p. 254
43. Ibid.
44. Hashmi, Brief History & Works All-India Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, p. 35; and Seh Salah Taraqqi, pp. 34–6.
45. See Abdul Haq, Urdu-e Musafah, p. 155.
46. Abdul Haq’s correspondence suggests that he anticipated the possible opposition to shifting the library to Pakistan from the newly independent Indian government as early as the autumn of 1947. See ibid., p. 153.
47. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, p. 178.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., pp. 178–9.
50. Ibid., p. 178.
51. Ibid., p. 179.
52. Ibid., pp. 179–80.
53. Ibid., p. 179.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., p. 180.
56. Ibid.
57. Hashmi, Brief History & Works All-India Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, p. 27.
58. For a discussion of collecting priorities in Urdu libraries in India, see C.M. Naim, ‘Disappearing Treasures: Public Libraries and Urdu Printed Books’, in The Annual of Urdu Studies, no. 26 (2011), pp. 53–63 (pp. 53–4).
59. Green, ‘The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya’, pp. 245, 247.
60. The manuscript collection of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Hind) at Urdu Ghar in New Delhi includes a number of book drafts, as, for example, Syed Ali Ahsan Husaini Bilgrami Marharvi, Wali Ma‘ Savanah-e Wali and Farhang-e Zewarat.
61. See the Letters section of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Hind) website [http://www.atuh.org/archives, accessed 1 July 2019].
62. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, p. 180.
63. Ibid., pp. 180–1.
64. Abdul Haq, Urdu-e Musafah, p. 158.
65. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, p. 181. Here Abdul Haq used the Urdu term jigar (liver), which in classical Urdu poetry is considered the bodily site for emotions. I have rendered it as heart for accessibility.
66. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, p. 3.
67. Siddiqui, ‘Archive Filmaria’, p. 198.
68. For a methodological discussion of writing histories of Partition-era migrations through material objects, see Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation, p. 34.
69. Abdul Haq, ‘Khat be Nam Rukshan Abidi’ (7 Feb. 1947), Letters Section (New Delhi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu [Hind]).
70. Ibid.
71. For the enduring importance of the politics of place for Urdu, see Datla, Language of Secular Islam, pp. 107–10.
72. Abdul Haq, Urdu-e Musafah, p. 157.
73. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, p. 182.
74. Ibid., pp. 184–5.
75. Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, pp. 120–1, 124–5, 132–4.
76. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, pp. 184–5.
77. Ibid., p. 185.
78. Ibid., p. 198.
79. Ibid., pp. 198–9.
80. Ibid., p. 178. For a discussion of Maulana Azad’s understanding of Urdu’s place in India, see Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 129–76.
81. Ibid., p. 203.
82. Ibid., p. 204.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., pp. 204–5.
86. Ibid., p. 205.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., p. 206.
89. Ibid., p. 208.
90. Ibid., p. 209.
91. Ibid.
92. As Zamindar observes, ‘the record is littered with ideas in which relationships between citizen and state, nation and territory are nebulous, even for leaders of the time’. See Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, p. 5.
93. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, pp. 210–11.
94. Ibid., p. 211.
95. Ibid., pp. 212–13.
96. Abdul Haq, Urdu-e Musafah, p. 166.
97. Ibid., pp. 22–5.
98. Ibid., p. 25.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid., p. 26.
101. Faridabadi, Panjah Salah Tarikh Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, p. 230.
102. Abdul Haq, ‘Taqseem-e Hind ke Fasadat aur Anjuman ki Hijrat’, p. 227.
103. Ibid., pp. 227–8.
104. Faridabadi, Panjah Salah Tarikh Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, p. 232.
105. See Hundred Years of Anjuman, pp. 12–13.
106. See Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind) [http://www.atuh.org/about, accessed 8 Jan. 2020].
107. Hundred Years of Anjuman, p. 13.
108. Ibadat Barelvi, ‘Muqadama’, in Khatut-e Abdul Haq (Lahore: Majlis Ishaa’t Mukhtutat, 1977), p. 65.
109. See the website of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Pakistan) [https://atup.org.pk/%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%b1%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%b7%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%db%81/, accessed 9 Jan. 2019].