Communalism – Brown Pundits

Review: Lineage of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music by Max Katz

July 12, 2025KabirBook Reviews, Culture, History, IndiaBhatkhande, Communalism, Ethnomusicology, Hindustani Classical Music, Lineage of Loss, Max Katz2 Comments

This review was published in South Asia Research Vo1. 41 (3), 2021

Max Katz, Lineage of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), xii + 201 pp.

Professor Janaki Bakhle (2005) described a meeting between Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936) and Karamatullah Khan (1848-1933), a sarod player from Allahabad. During this meeting, which took place in 1908 or 1909, Khan argued that knowledge of Hindustani music did not come only from Sanskrit texts, but also from those in Arabic and Persian. To him, it did not matter if the ragas had come to India from Persia or Arabia or gone from India to those countries. Since Bhatkhande was obsessed with finding a Sanskrit origin for an Indian national music, he was deeply upset by these arguments. Bakhle (2005: 112) writes that Karamatullah Khan was voicing a prescient and progressive claim against national, ethnic and religious essentialism when it came to music, while Bhatkhande was looking for a ‘classical’ music ‘that existed in his time, not one that used to exist in ancient times’. For Bhatkhande, Khan was a member of the class of hereditary Muslim musicians who were responsible for what, in his view, was the degradation of ancient Hindu music.

Katz focuses on the Lucknow gharana, an hereditary musical lineage of sarod and sitar players, of whom Karamatullah Khan was a major representative. The son of Niamatullah Khan (d. 1903), a court musician of the last Nawab of Lucknow, Wajid Ali Shah, Karamatullah in turn served as ustad of his nephew, Sahkawat Husain Khan (1875-1955), one of the most renowned sarod players of the early twentieth century and a teacher at the Marris College in Lucknow, now Bhatkhande Music Institute Deemed University. Continue reading Review: Lineage of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music by Max Katz

Fireflies in the Mist: An Exploration of Bengali Identity

June 30, 2025KabirBook ReviewsBangladesh, Communalism, Firefiles in the Mist, Pakistan, Partition, Qurratulain Hyder6 Comments

This book review was originally published on The South Asian Idea in July 2012

Fireflies in the Mist, Qurratulain Hyder’s own translation of her Urdu novel Aakhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar, spans the history of East Bengal from the time of the nationalist movement against the British, to the creation of East Pakistan, and finally to Bangladeshi independence. The novel centers around Deepali Sarkar, “a young middle-class Hindu who becomes drawn into the extreme left wing of the nationalist movement, and Rehan Ahmed, a Muslim radical with Marxist inclinations who introduces her to the life of the rural deprived. Their common political engagement draws them into a quietly doomed love affair. Through their relationship, Hyder explores the growth of tensions between Bengal’s Hindus and Muslims, who had once shared a culture and a history.”

In his introduction to the novel, Pakistani writer Aamer Hussain notes that Fireflies can be seen as another chapter in Hyder’s epic history of the Muslim presence in the subcontinent, and particularly in the era of the Raj. My Temples Too (Mere Bhi Sanam Khanay) chronicles Awadh; River of Fire (Aag ka Darya) takes us to newfound Pakistan; Fireflies adds the saga of East Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yet Hussain notes that the Muslim narrative of Fireflies is merely one among many. He writes: “Never bound to a single ideology or perspective, Hyder articulates one viewpoint only to contradict it in another voice. Colonial officers, native Christians, feminists, fishermen, artists, the victor, the vanquished, the exiled, and the dispossessed, all take the platform to recount their stories, or to be represented, in a collage composed of omniscient third-person narration, letters, diary entries, extended exchanges of dialogue, dream sequences, interior monologue, bone-spare chronicle, and oral history” (xviii-xix). Continue reading Fireflies in the Mist: An Exploration of Bengali Identity

Lucknow’s Composite Culture and its Destruction in Qurratulain Hyder’s Novels

June 23, 2025KabirHistory, IndiaCommunalism, Lucknow, My Temples Too, Partition, Qurratulain Hyder, River of Fire, Two Nation Theory15 Comments

This essay was originally written in 2012 as a term paper for a South Asian History class at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

I was tuning my tanpura for riaz in the morning to sing Khayal Jaunpuri, and one string snapped. Gautam, there’s symbolism for you. Hussain Shah’s tanpura broken into two,’ said Talat ruefully.

— Qurratulain Hyder, River of Fire, pg. 273

In the passage quoted above–from Qurratulain Hyder’s novel River of Fire (her own translation of her Urdu magnum opus Aag Ka Dariya)—the speaker, Talat, is a member of Lucknow’s Muslim elite. She is speaking to a group of friends—both Muslim and Hindu—after the Partition of 1947. Two new nation-states–“India” and “Pakistan”– have been created and the group of friends is splitting up in different directions: Talat’s cousin Amir Reza has already left for Karachi, Talat herself is imminently departing for further studies in England, and Gautam is soon to leave for America. The broken tanpura symbolizes the death of the composite culture, which could not survive the politics of religion and the force of the Two Nation Theory. This theme—the destruction of the Lucknawi way of life—runs through many of Hyder’s novels, particularly through My Temples, Too (Hyder’s translation of her debut novel Mere Bhi Sanam Khane) and the later sections of River of Fire.

In this paper I will examine Hyder’s novels and use them to discuss some arguments about the formation of the composite culture of Lucknow (and of UP generally) and the failure of this culture to prevent the Partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan in 1947. By focusing on Muslim elites who, despite all the odds, chose to retain their belief in a united India, Hyder problematizes the prevailing discourse that sees Hindus and Muslims as inherently opposed and Partition as the inevitable outcome of Independence. Continue reading Lucknow’s Composite Culture and its Destruction in Qurratulain Hyder’s Novels