PRINT & THE URDU PUBLIC

A groundbreaking study of a Muslim publication company in colonial India.

This book, an outgrowth of the debut author’s 2014 dissertation research at the University of Oxford, connects a parochial newspaper and publishing company in early-20th-century India to a larger history of colonialism and Muslim identity. Robb, the Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions at the University of Pennsylvania, focuses this landmark book on the understudied newspaper Madīnah, published in the “far-flung, even backwoods, town” of Bijnor in the United Provinces of British India. The paper’s initial funding came from Muhammad Majīd Hasan, who sold his wife’s jewelry to create a local publication dedicated to the region’s minority Muslim community. Madīnah would “become one of the most successful newspapers of any language circulating in North India and the Punjab,” the author notes, and would make Bijnor “a publishing hub.” Although the story of Madīnah is remarkable in its own right, what makes this book special is Robb’s interpretative framework, which considers how the new media shook up traditional ideas of space and time—as a product of modernity, he says, Hasan’s lithographic printing press “shrank miles into minutes”—and blurred the line between secular and religious life in the public sphere. It provided invaluable perspectives on international events, from the Balkan Wars to later nationalist movements, and widely disseminated religious teachings to a mass audience. Despite its attention to global affairs, Madīnah’s sense of authenticity came from its dedication to discussing regional issues as “it wove its local public into the fabric of a history being lived by Muslims.”

Robb questions the very idea of the “public” as a fixed, empirical category, providing an offbeat interpretative model for analyzing that sphere. Although the book leans heavily on social theory, it’s also full of fascinating historical details; for instance, it dedicates an entire chapter to the mechanics behind the production of India’s early-20th-century lithographic newspapers. Images of Madīnah’s elaborate cover pages, which beautifully blended calligraphy and art, are engaging on their own, but they’re made more compelling by Robb’s expert analysis of their content and style. Likewise, a wide variety of photographs and reproductions of other newspapers enhance the reading experience. With her rich endnotes and an impressive bibliography, the author shows a firm command of interdisciplinary literature on Islamic studies and colonial history and theory. This, combined with her linguistic understanding of Urdu and Hindi, makes this an especially impressive book; its sources also include local records, diaries, and oral history. But although Robb provides a glossary, timelines, and other useful information in appendices, the book’s blending of complex theoretical analysis with nuances of regional public life in a distinct region of colonial India may be disorienting to those outside of contemporary religious, Southeast Asian, and colonial studies. For scholars of Muslim identity, India, and early-20th-century print culture, however, this book is an impressive addition to the literature.

A thoroughly researched, if occasionally Byzantine, analysis of the power and influence of a local media outlet.