Reclaiming Karbala

Analysing an extensive range of texts and publications across multiple genres, formats and literary lineages, Reclaiming Karbala studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of the tenets of the battle of Karbala, this multi-layered study explores what it means to be Muslim, as well as the nuanced relationship between religion, linguistic identity and literary modernity that marks both Bengaliness and Muslimness in the region.This book is an intervention into the literature on regional Islam in Bengal, offering a complex perspective on the polemic on religion and language in the formation of a jatiya Bengali Muslim identity in a multilingual context. This book, by placing this polemic in the context of intra-Islamic reformist conflict, shows how all these rival reformist groups unanimously negated the Karbala-centric commemorative ritual of Muharram and Shi?i intercessory piety to secure a pro-Caliphate sensibility as the core value of the Bengali Muslim public sphere.

This magnificent book sheds completely new light on the literary production and language choices of Bengal Muslims over three centuries, considering a vast array of texts in manuscript and printed form against the backdrop of successive waves of religious reform. Reclaiming Karbala shows how shifts in vocabulary, register and narrative focus need to be understood in the light of theological, political and aesthetic positions and debates. The book greatly adds to our understanding of the articulations of Muslim modernity, but also of Bengali literary modernity. The Bengal Renaissance will never look the same again.

-Prof Francesca Orsini, Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature, SOAS, University of London, UK

The struggle of Muslims in Bengal to create an identity-based literature is generally lost in nationalist historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; here Epsita Halder has painstakingly peeled away the complex layers of this engagement by focusing on the central role of the Karbala narrative. The Shi?i insistence on martyrdom and Muharram ritual enactments faced a Sunni reaction that sought to suppress practice while appropriating the trope, emphasizing the place of Hasan and Husayn in Muhammad?s family, ahl al-Bayt. Identity mediated through story ignited vigorous debates over the role of Urdu, and the utility of Persian- and Urdu-inflected dobh??? Bangla versus the formal standards of Sanskritic s?dhu bh???, including for the translation of the Qur??n. This is a must read to understand the spirited literary legacy that still shapes contemporary sensibilities of what it means to be both Bengali and Muslim.

-Prof Tony K. Stewart, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities, Emeritus, Vanderbilt University, USA