Censorship, Literature, and Secularism in Late Colonial India
Cambridge University Press • 2022A timely examination of the cultural politics of the Left in the Pakistan movement and South Asian modernity.
How did progressive Muslim intellectuals, writers, and poets engage with socialism and communism through their distinctive ethical and cultural past in the mid-twentieth century? Hidden Histories of Pakistan shows how left-leaning intellectuals drew from long-standing literary traditions of Islam during a period of intense upheaval across late colonial India.
Rather than seeing 'religion' and 'the secular' as distinct and oppositional phenomena, this monograph demonstrates how these concepts themselves were historically produced in South Asia. Through a detailed analysis of trials for blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition, as well as feminist literary voices, Dr. Waheed provides a fresh perspective on the creation of Pakistan.
Complicating conventional narratives of Partition, secularism, and Urdu literary culture.
Challenges western-centric frameworks that treat secularism and religion as mutually exclusive categories. Shows how Urdu progressive poets and writers negotiated Marxist critique through Islamic ethical vocabularies.
Examines famous colonial-era legal trials over obscenity, blasphemy, and sedition (including writers associated with the Progressive Writers' Association), revealing how state censorship shaped modern literary expression.
Highlights the pivotal role of female writers and radical feminists who used fiction and poetry to critique both patriarchal social structures and colonial censorship in the decades preceding Partition.