Poetry, mainly Urdu poetry, played a very significant role in India’s freedom struggle. This book explores the poetic contributions going back centuries of colonial rule, which became songs of freedom and captured both the poignancy and fervor of revolution, protest, and hope. Urdu became one of the essential languages in colonial India, used by both political leaders and many young revolutionaries in speeches and writings as slogans for freedom and a call to action. Poets such as Josh Malihabadi, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Sahir, Makhdoom, Kaifi Azmi, Majaz, Majrooh, and Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote highly patriotic poetry which was used not only to inspire and help mobilize people but also to offer criticism of existing socio-cultural practices in India and promote reform and equality. This work – a creative and selective translation of the book Hindustan Ki Tahriik-e Aazadi aur Urdu Shaa’yiri by Professor Gopi Chand Narang – includes English translations of poems from rare historical manuscripts as well as banned and witnessed poetry confiscated by the British. It looks at key events in India’s struggle for freedom through the prism of literature, language, poetry, and culture while also delving into the lives of poets who became the voice of their generation. This book is an essential read for students and researchers of colonial and postcolonial literature, cultural studies, comparative studies, history, and South Asian literature and culture.

In pre-partition days Urdu has been the vehicle of learned expressions in Social Sciences and humanities but in the post-partition era it was not in much use by the scholars, partly because the young generation of scholars was not so familiar with Urdu. The present work is a meticulous effort to unfold the vast learned material on Modern India for research scholars. Had this effort not been made a large segment of valuable material it would have remained untapped by them. Primary sources like articles in Urdu newspapers and journals have been scanned. The entries give names of authors and titles in transliterated form but annotation is given in English in each entry. The book contains author, title and subject indices.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the historical and cultural linkages between India and Iran in terms of art and architectural traditions and their commonality and diversity. It addresses themes such as early connections between Iran, India and Central Asia; study of the Qutb Complex in Delhi; the great immigration of Turks from Asia to Anatolia; the collaboration of Indian and Persian painters; design, ornamentation techniques and regional dynamics; women and public spaces in Shahjahanabad and Isfahan; the noble-architects of emperor Shah Jahan's reign; development of Kashmir’s Islamic religious architecture in the medieval period; role of Nur Jahan and her Persian roots in the evolution of the Mughal Garden; synthesis of Indo-Iranian architecture; and confluence of Indo-Persian food culture to showcase the richness of art, architecture, and sociocultural and political exchanges between the two countries. Bringing together a wide array of perspectives, it delves into the roots of connection between India and Iran over centuries to understand its influence and impact on the artistic and cultural genealogy and the shared past of two of the oldest civilizations and regional powers of the world. With its archival sources, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of medieval history, Indian history, international relations, Central Asian history, Islamic studies, Iranian history, art and architecture, heritage studies, cultural studies, regional studies, and South Asian studies as well as those interested in the study of sociocultural and religious exchanges.

This book is a brief historical account of Khilafat, an Islamic political institution mired in controversies from its inception. It is an attempt to present an objective critique of the Islamic polity that, in a way, was primarily responsible for crafting schisms in Islam with its commencement. By the time the last Khilafat of the Ottomans came to an end in the aftershock of the Second World War, the Muslim political elite in India launched a movement for the restoration and continuation of the Ottoman Khilafat. The most paradoxical dimension of the issue was that in the Arab peninsula, the epicenter of Islam, the people were struggling to cast away the yoke of the Ottoman Khilafat, then why were the Indian Muslims emotionally involved in a movement that was vehemently condemned and assailed by a majority of Muslims outside the Indian subcontinent? This title is co-published with Aakar Books. Print editions not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

Presents the Indian literatures, not in isolation in one another, but as related components in a larger complex, conspicuous by the existence of age-old multilingualism and a variety of literary traditions. --

An in-depth study of the 1857 Indian mutiny-rebellion, exploring the political and social themes of this remarkable phenomenon.

Poetry of Belonging is an exploration of north-Indian Muslim identity through poetry at a time when the Indian nation state did not exist. Between 1850 and 1950, when precolonial forms of cultural traditions, such as the musha’irah, were undergoing massive transformations to remain relevant, certain Muslim ‘voices’ configured, negotiated, and articulated their imaginings of what it meant to be Muslim. Using poetry as an archive, the book traces the history of the musha’irah, the site of poetic performance, as a way of understanding public spaces through the changing economic, social, political, and technological contexts of the time. It seeks to locate the changing ideas of watan (homeland) and hubb-e watanī (patriotism) in order to offer new perspectives on how Muslim intellectuals, poets, political leaders, and journalists conceived of and expressed their relationship to India and to the transnational Muslim community. The volume aims to spark a renegotiation of identity and belonging, especially at a time when Muslim loyalty to India has yet again emerged as a politically polarizing question.