Urdu Print Culture in the Princely State of Hyderabad

My current doctoral research is an attempt to look at multiple questions including the ‘delayed’ introduction of print in the princely state of Hyderabad, knowledge production, engagement of modernity with tradition and the other way round, social reform and infrastructural modernity. It endeavors to develop a conjectural reading of how media, modernity, region, religion and language are connected and disconnected in a Muslim princely context.
The first section of the thesis will deal with the introduction of printing technology in Hyderabad. The British authority/resident was not really interested in Nizam owning and operating printing press in the state. The British had an agenda to keep Indians away from technology in order to sustain their power and authority. They perceived it as a ‘dangerous instrument’ when it is used by the native rulers.
The first printing press was established in Hyderabad by Nawab Muhammad Fakhruddin Khan Shams ul Umara in 1834. He established a translation bureau in the same year and translated many works from English and French to Urdu. The press was known as Shamsul Umara lithography press. 50 books on various subjects such as physics, chemistry and astronomy were published from this press. Fakhruddin Khan acted as a ‘middleman’ to introduce printing technology in the state. Instead of passively receiving western science through translation he was placing knowledge in a traditional epistemic terrain. The creative tension was active in his printing activities and educational endeavors.
Second part of the thesis will engage with print and social reform in Hyderabad. Scholars of Islam in India have shown that the reformist Muslims were among the first to avail them of the printing press (Metcalf: 1982, Robinson: 1993, 1996, 2001). This section will examine Muslim internationalist and Pan Islamist scholar Jamaluddin Afghani’s writings on science, philosophy, language and nationalism in the ‘Muallim-e-Shafiq’ journal during 1880-1882 in Hyderabad. He was redeploying tradition/religion in a modern context with activating epistemological tension.
Third section of the research will analyze the editorials of the princely Hyderabad’s longest run Urdu newspaper ‘Rahbar-e-Deccan’. Without repudiating tradition the newspaper was critically engaging with the modernity. The aspects of ‘infrastructural’ and ‘monarchical’ modernity will be extensively examined in this section.
In a nutshell the thesis will be a demonstration of how tradition and modernity were mutually constitutive and confrontational simultaneously in the realms of science, reform and infrastructural modernity/development. To do so, the project depends on the archival data such as biography, journals, newspapers, reports on the administration of Nizam’s dominions and secondary sources. The data has been collected from various archives and libraries in Hyderabad such as Telangana State Archive, Salar Jung Museum and Library, State central Library/Asafia library, Nizam Trust Library, Idara e Adabiyat e Urdu and Osmania University library.
As a historical research, archival methodology has been deployed in the project. Depending on the Foucauldian methodological framework the print in Hyderabad is located as an instrument of dispersion of events across the time and space. The history has been dispersed in succession and simultaneity. Like the colonial archive has been theorized and criticized, the theorization of princely archive becomes the major task of the current research. The objects have to be formed. Media archive, state archive and local/regional/personal archive have to be connected in various ways to formulate a theoretical and methodological lens of the research. The princely state of Hyderabad was structuring an archive of knowledge and socio-cultural system through creatively negotiating with modernity without repudiating past/tradition. The current research will also attempt to conceptualize archive as theory and method.