Description
Routledge Reclaiming Karbala 1st Edition 2022 Hardbound by Epsita Halder
The book Reclaiming Karbala is a groundbreaking study of an extensive range of texts based on the trope of the battle of Karbala diachronically from the early modern period to the 1940s, something not explored so far in Bengali literary historiography.Reclaiming Karbala offers the first comprehensive study of discursive and creative literary endeavours of the ulama and the Muslim literati to explore the connections between Islamic reform, jatiya (national) ethos and literary modernity in the region of Bengal.This book, without exhausting the dynamics of identity formation of the Bengali Muslims in the narrative of the Partition of Bengal, exposes other deliberations related to the issues of mother tongue and literary modernity of the Bengali Muslims in a multilingual local.Reclaiming Karbala reads analytically, for the first time, the issues of literary modernity and jatiya sensibilities in the Bengali Muslim public sphere in the context of intra-Islamic reformist rivalry.It is the first comprehensive study of the jatiya (national) ethos of the Bengali Muslims so far marginalized or even ignored in the hegemonic national Hindu public sphere of Bengal.Reclaiming Karbala offers visual references of texts from various timeframes that the book covers. The images impressively include a page from an unpublished scribal manuscript of the seventeenth century, and rare cover pages of printed books of multiple genres not yet included in any cultural representation or scholarly work. Reclaiming Karbala, for its study of extensive literary texts, will attract non-academic readers generally interested in regional history, vernacular literary history and South Asian nationalism and the Islamicate world.Though Reclaiming Karbala is an extensive study of the Bengali Muslims, it does not confine itself to the scholars of regional Islam. By bringing forth conceptual issues of what does it means to become Muslims in the vernacular and multilingual Islamicate worlds, the book can interest scholars in the local(ised) dynamics of Muslim identity formation. At a time when neo-nationalism in the Indian sub-continent is reasserting communal boundaries in territorial terms, Reclaiming Karbala, by focusing on the Bengali Muslims, offers a timely scholarly reminder about multiple forms of collective spatial and affective belongingness within the nation.