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Since the publication of Said’s Orientalism (1978) some forty odd years ago, both the work and the eponymous structure that it refers to have become contested categories. While it is difficult to reiterate all of the resulting scholarly engagements with Said’s arguments and archive, Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! Orientalism and World Literatures (2016), Srinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (2012), Urs App’s The Birth of Orientalism (2011), Suzanne Marchand’s German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (2009), and Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer’s Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (1993) can be counted among some of the more compelling volumes on this question. Almost all of these works explore the contours and possibilities opened up by Orientalism for disciplines such as comparative literature, English, religious studies, and history.

In a partial departure from the broad concerns that inform the above-mentioned works, I argue that eighteenth-century Anglo-French orientalist fictions, heralded by works such as Antoine Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits (~1703), and the scholarly orientalism pioneered by figures such as William Jones quite literally invent, and subsequently import, the idea of a modern, religio-political Muslim identity to the North Indian colony. Less an explication of Said’s argument and more an elaboration of his method and ostensibly contentious claims, I show how what can only be termed a crisis of religio-populism in a postcolonial site such as Pakistan has its antecedents in a seemingly obscure moment in the history of British orientalism.

In my use of the term “British orientalism,” I gesture toward the massive eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual project, engineered by scholars, travelers, writers, artists, and bureaucrats, whose specific task was to amass knowledge and expand the imaginative possibilities around the territory that was then loosely known as “the Orient.” British orientalism, to be clear, was one part of a much larger European complex, whose major players, France and Britain, were joined in the nineteenth century by a number of German orientalists. While German orientalism has been defended in part by Marchand as a scholarly practice that was not “primordially or perpetually defined by imperialist relationships,” it remained crucial, as Mufti argues, to the broader imperial effort that defined Europe’s relations with South Asia and North Africa in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁴ Described by the latter in Forget English!, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientalisms were “simultaneously singular and pan-European” hydra-like systems of knowledge about the orient.⁵ In my use of the term “British orientalism,” I invoke both the discipline as it was broadly developed and expanded in modern Europe, but also the specific fashion in which it emerged given British imperial interests and expansion in South Asia, Egypt, and adjoining Arab territories.

That is to say, after Said’s searing exposition, orientalism, long considered an academic discipline of philological bearings in Europe, could no longer be treated as an apolitical or hermetic intellectual exercise. Neither could Western humanists defend its practices—literary, visual, and scholarly—as benign representations, for as Said argued, orientalism did not merely represent; it, quite literally, invented the orients and oriental identities it imagined.⁶ While the latter claim has been hotly critiqued by self-described Marxist scholars in particular, their accounts emerge from narrow disciplinary grounds that fail to consider the powerful role the idea and construction of literature has played in shaping colonial and later postcolonial cultures. To phrase the matter more succinctly, we can turn to Mufti’s unequivocal definition of orientalism as “the cultural logic of colonial rule in the post-Industrial revolution era,” or what he calls the “cultural logic of the bourgeois order in its outward or nondomestic orientation.”⁷ Orientalism, thus considered, is the literal export of structures of knowledge and knowing from the metropolis to the colony, imposed upon peoples and practices designated as “oriental.” Literature, a category that is conceived and constructed first in eighteenth-century England and then in colonial India within orientalist institutions such as the Royal Asiatic Society and Fort William College, is instrumental for both the colonial, and subsequently, the national project of the postcolonial state. The newly invented “literature” of an equally newly invented language, in this case, modern Urdu, I argue, is not merely the literal realization of a moment in eighteenth-century British orientalism but becomes foundational for the formation of a modern Muslim identity in North India, one that persists and evolves in accordance with its orientalist ideals well into the present moment.

There remain some misconceptions regarding orientalism, which are worthy of mention given the scope of this project. One of the more elementary of these is the trend in eighteenth-century English literary studies, where a number of scholars, including the late Srinivas Aravamudan and Felicity Nussbaum, have argued for the rehabilitation of forms of “Enlightenment orientalism,” which Aravamudan, in particular, described as self-critical, intended to encourage “mutual understanding” across cultures of East and West.⁸ Aravamudan, Nussbaum, and Ros Ballaster, among others, invoke the eighteenth-century English oriental tale as an example of Enlightenment orientalism, reading the genre’s critique of a rising English identity as a kind of productive or positivist orientalism. This position, as I show over the course of this book, is only tenable if our understanding of orientalism remains restricted to the metropolis. While Aravamudan’s or Ballaster’s insightful readings into the political and social positions taken up by the oriental tale remain invaluable to eighteenth-century studies, they fail to consider that the oriental tale continued its career beyond the metropolis. Traveling from the European Republic of Letters to a colonial city such as Calcutta, the oriental tale became a prototype of sorts for the invention of new and useful literature for Indian natives, transforming aesthetic traditions and extant textual practices for perpetuity.⁹

On a slightly divergent note, it is also worth briefly clarifying Said’s idea of the secular, a critical element of his method that has serious relevance to the arguments and ethical positions that move this book. Emerging out of the premise visible in Orientalism as well—that all texts, literary and other, are essentially “worldly,” historical events—Said’s essay argues for a new critical practice in the academy and beyond, one that he describes as “secular.”¹⁰ Described with startling clarity, secular criticism is a practice premised on a “suspicion” of “totalizing concepts,” “reified objects,” “guilds,” and other religio-nationalist orthodoxies that seem all too familiar in our present moment.¹¹ At the heart of this concept, however, are not religion or ethnic politics, but nationalism and the nation-state, for it is within the latter that the falsely organic ideals of belonging and kinship are reinvigorated to create socio-political and religious structures of majority and exclusion. This does not mean, however, that we limit the possibilities Said’s conception of the secular offers. His powerful reimagining is one that is oppositional to any form of hegemony that seeks to exclude, be it ethno-nationalism, religious orthodoxy, or other. The task of a secular critic, as Said saw it, was to function as “life-enhancing, and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse.”¹² In other words, the secular critic resists any form of coercive authority, religiously deployed or other. As Bruce Robbins reminds us, Said’s method—exemplified in Orientalism as an elaboration of what a secular scholarship could look like—offered a new humanism, one that existed in a critical, paradoxical continuity with its predecessor. This last point marks also what I can only describe as an ethics of generosity that Said brought to the field of postcolonial studies, one that is increasingly marked by scholars whose rigid positions against modernity and strident calls to recover an idyllic precolonial past only obfuscate the potential of a meaningful postcolonial engagement.

It is with this concept of critique at the forefront, then, that this book traces the powerful influence British orientalism and its attendant institutions exercised on the invention and subsequent canonization of a modern Urdu prose literature in North India. It offers, therefore, a historical elaboration of how a series of writers, scholars, and entrepreneurs, as well as research institutions and educational networks, were able to produce a literary corpus that accorded with orientalist conceptions of the forms that a “Mahometan” literature could take. But the process by which the Mahometan of the eighteenth-century Anglo-French oriental tale becomes the Muslim of North Indian colony—the latter, at once a religio-political and aesthetic category—is by no means a dormant legacy of empire and orientalism, nor can it be divided along the overt lines of “secular” (here: a- or non-religious) and “religious.” In our present, the powerful traces of the British orientalist project in North India exhibit themselves in the affiliation of Urdu—today Pakistan’s declared national language—with Sunni Islam. This is a symbiotic partnership that over the course of a century and by way of a wide range of aesthetic forms—novels, stories, and television serials—has subsumed the national into the religious, the vernacular into the sacred, the state into a living Mecca, in short, the Pakistani into a Salafi Muslim (a term reserved for the first followers of Muhammad and his call to Islam in 610 A.D.). This impulse, which in our times is nothing short of religio-populist in its bearings, is gradually suffocating regional vernaculars such as Pashto and Sindhi, a diversity of folk practices, lived Islams, and above all, the claims of women and religious and ethnic minorities to dignified citizenship.

This is not a study of theology or law. Nor does it intend to essay a suitable, alternative response to the question that it argues has been coded into the canon of modern Urdu. This is a study of how a systematic series of answers to the question “Who is a Muslim” is disseminated predominantly through the imperially invented domain of literature, first in eighteenth-century England, subsequently in colonial India, and in its most alarming iteration, in present-day Pakistan. In answering this central question, I am not, either by training or by interest, attempting to solicit a pure Islam or a better way of being Muslim, or reclaiming an idyllic Muslim past in precolonial India. My concern arrives out of the danger and political isolation that populist responses to this question pose to so many individuals and communities in a postcolonial Muslim state such as Pakistan. My task, as a secular critic, is to understand how, and through what historical institutions and ideas, has the present moment been brought to its crisis. The various literary members of a modern, colonial vernacular, such as Urdu, I argue, have been and continue to be instrumental in the creation and perpetuation of a narrative that overwhelmingly defines the exclusionary and evangelical realms of culture and politics in contemporary Pakistan.