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This short article introduces the Forum on Muslim modernity in South Asia, placing its four articles—by Muhammad Qasim Zaman, SherAli Tareen, Julia Stephens, and Justin Jones—in the context of existing scholarship. I highlight the authors’ contributions to the study of Islamic reform and of women’s agency, in particular, in understandings of Muslim modernity in South Asia. Each of the contributions is on a discrete topic; this introduction therefore endeavours to pull at the threads within each that underscores their interventions in the study of Muslim modernity and that tie them together in this Forum.

This rich cultural history set in Punjab examines a little-studied body of popular literature to illustrate both the durability of a vernacular literary tradition and the limits of colonial dominance in British India. Farina Mir asks how qisse, a vibrant genre of epics and romances, flourished in colonial Punjab despite British efforts to marginalize the Punjabi language. She explores topics including Punjabi linguistic practices, print and performance, and the symbolic content of qisse. She finds that although the British denied Punjabi language and literature almost all forms of state patronage, the resilience of this popular genre came from its old but dynamic corpus of stories, their representations of place, and the moral sensibility that suffused them. Her multidisciplinary study reframes inquiry into cultural formations in late-colonial north India away from a focus on religious communal identities and nationalist politics and toward a widespread, ecumenical, and place-centered poetics of belonging in the region.

In Islam, ethics in a broad sense—that is, as a set of moral principles—is derived from a number of sources, principally the Qur’an and hadith (traditions of Muhammad) but also “the works of theologians, philosophers, mystics, historians, political thinkers, and other writers” (OEIW, s.v. “Akhlāq” [I. Kalin]). As Fazlur Rahman suggests, however, a more specific tradition emerged in Islam as well: “The moral tradition that grew out of religion [principally the Qur’an and hadith] and further developed under the influence of philosophy,” he writes, “was called elm al-aklaq” (EIr, s.v. “AKLĀQ” [F. Rahman]). This chapter is concerned with

In 1849, administrator-turned-historian Ganesh Das Vadhera completed Char Bagh-i-Panjab, a history of his native region in India, the Punjab. The Char Bagh was a Persian manuscript written as the Sikh Kingdom of Lahore was being dismantled and the Punjab incorporated into British India, and documented the establishment, decline, and fall of Sikh rule in the area. Vadhera's account was more than a political history of the Punjab, however; it also gave detailed descriptions of many of the towns, cities, and villages of the region leading some contemporary scholars to refer to it as a geography (Brand and Westcoat 2001). Guru Nanak Dev University recognized Vadhera's Persian text as being not only a historical account but a source of valuable “information on social, religious, and cultural life of the Panjab,” and published it in 1965 (Grewal and Banga 1975: 9). Two scholars of the region published a partial English translation a decade later (Grewal and Banga 1975).

This chapter provides an overview of Urdu ethics literature in colonial India. It focuses in particular on akhlāq in the vernacular circulation in late-colonial India. Akhlaq literature, as a genre and as represented in philosopher Ibn Miskawayh's text, is a specific Islamic tradition of philosophical ethics that can help reconstruct a more popular history of Islam. The chapter explains that Muhammad Farooq's 1910 publication, Mehboob al-Akhlaq (Beloved ethics), reflects the popular print culture of the era and the capacious forms of Islamic knowledge in colonial India. It cites how Islamic and colonial knowledge production were co-constitutive in correlation with popular Urdu akhlaq literature.

In the Time of Trees and Sorrows is an engaging and elegant exploration of the history of the former kingdom of Sawar, an area of twenty-seven villages in Rajasthan. The authors focus on the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, an era of dramatic changes in Sawar's (and India's) political and ecological landscape. Drawing on interviews with subjects of the former kingdom, mostly non-literate farmers, herders, and laborers, the authors provide a textured account of the pre-independence period (pre-1947) marked by what they term the “double oppression under colonial and regional rulers,” and a landscape rich with trees and wildlife, albeit resources to which the king's subjects were mostly denied access (p. 1). This period is contrasted with the post-independence period, during which India's princely kingdoms were absorbed in the Indian Republic, and the subjects of Sawar experienced “the sudden and radical transformation to democracy and modernity” (1). This latter period also witnessed, as the authors draw attention to from the outset, the complete devastation of Sawar's landscape which “transformed from one of rich biodiversity of trees and growth to one where hillsides have been stripped of indigenous growth and are now dominated by a single alien species” (3). In bringing political and ecological history into the same frame, Gold and Gujar explore a compelling paradox of the area's postcolonial history: as the residents of Sawar gained political rights, their environment was transformed and, in many ways, devastated.

The East India Company’s half-century of vigorous territorial expansion in India began with the marquess of Wellesley’s governor-generalship in 1798 and culminated in the annexation of the Punjab in 1849. The Punjab’s Sikh kingdom of Lahore (map 3), established by Ranjit Singh in 1799, had proved a particularly capable adversary, and the Company conquered the region only through a combination of political intrigue and military might. The new colonial administrative unit that resulted from this conquest—Punjab province—encompassed all or parts of what had been the Mughalsubas (provinces) of Lahore, Multan, and Kabul before they had been wrested

Punjabi print culture in the late nineteenth century continued many distinct practices of precolonial Punjabi literary culture. Most significantly, during the first half-century of print production, the overwhelming majority of Punjabi printed books were composed in classical verse genres. As discussed in chapter 2, this continuity provides evidence of the resilience and significance of these literary traditions for their composers and audiences. If the genres of late nineteenth-century Punjabi printed books show the tenacity of classical compositional styles, then they also point to the aural and performative dimensions of Punjabi literature. This is because these genres (theqissa, var, dole,