Editor’s Note: In the following discussion, A. Suneetha interviews Afsar Mohammad about his recent publication, Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad (Cambridge, 2023).
A. Suneetha is an independent scholar based in Hyderabad. She recently co-edited A World of Equals: A Textbook on Gender. Afsar Mohammad teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He previously published The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India (Oxford, 2013).
Suneetha: Your book brings together worlds and categories that are often seen as autonomous from one another — Urdu and Telugu literature, Police Action violence and Muslim belonging, autobiography and history, translation and writing. What was your process in making these connections in your book?
Afsar: Thank you, Suneetha, for your sensible and careful reading of my book. Many of these dimensions — Telugu/Urdu, Muslim/Hindu, Personal/Public — have now become more or less binaries. The dominant political discourses have fixed them as opposing viewpoints today.
Source: Author
Many political and cultural issues have trapped us in this colonial and postcolonial dilemma. They have over-simplified and generalised our understanding of the complicated realities of the 1940s and 1950s.
We have seen an overemphasis on histories of North India in our scholarship. The identity questions specific to this context still remain a stumbling block for those of us who are thinking about the histories of southern India and the Deccan. We must recognize these scholarly limitations before we can meaningfully situate historical events such as Police Action or the Telangana peasant rebellion.
In my book, I made the deliberate choice to unpack these complexities and lay bare the actual conditions of these two key decades in the history of Hyderabad. These were important for me because I believe they hold important implications for larger questions of Muslim identity.
Focusing on the then Hyderabad state and Telangana made me realise multiple dimensions of the “Muslim dilemma”- most importantly, the question of Muslim being and belonging. There is barely any discussion on how Muslims actively participated in the public sphere at this time. I felt that was a yawning gap. I wanted to show the diversity of political discourses in and about Hyderabad during the 1940s and 50s.
When it comes to process, I focused building a multilingual archive. My first intervention was to emphasize both Deccani Urdu and Telugu materials. This included both oral histories and written sources.
In everyday conversations, and scholarly debates as well, we’ve spent too much time talking about the activities and interventions of north Indian Muslims. I felt that approaching the “Muslim dilemma” through the lens of Deccani Urdu and Telugu, two locally-rooted languages and cultures, would open up many fascinating historical possibilities to explore.
Of course, it is a laborious task to transcribe, translate and organise oral histories. Making textual selections and the translations from these two languages was also time consuming.
Most of the materials I selected and translated were never considered part of the mainstream literature of the Deccan. Almost all these materials were marginalised. It required a a lot of time and effort to excavate this archaeology of knowledge. It was worth it. These materials helped me in making connections with larger questions of Deccani Muslim belonging and its contemporary manifestations after the rise of Hindutva.
Suneetha: Your book makes a compelling argument that the 1948 Police Action changed Muslim ways of belonging. The event closed some ways but opened up others. How did debates in the wake of the Telangana Statehood movement influence you? And what recent research do you think has helped in making this argument?
Afsar: In the case of Hyderabad and Deccan, 1948 was a watershed moment. However, we have never fully realised the impact of Police Action. This is due to the dominant historiography’s preoccupation with partition, Indian nationalism, Telugu language politics, and the Telangana peasants’ struggle.
We need to understand Police Action as part of a larger process that blends many historical developments such as Islamic reformism, new educational resources, new gender discourses, and the growth of a public sphere between the 1930s and 1950s. Many of these developments came to a culminating point in 1948 at a time when the very identity of Muslims was in trouble.
Yes, Partition had its impact. However, Police Action was something more than a regional Deccani iteration of Partition. It was not merely about violence and trauma. Deccani Muslims experienced many dimensions of class conflict. Hyderabadi society faced serious tensions between tradition and modernity. These led to critical shifts in the everyday lives of Muslims and Hindus in the region.
1948 was a moment of rupture – it was an end to many dimensions of Deccani life. At the same time, we must recognize this moment as the beginning of many new aspects for the region’s everyday life and the public sphere.
As related to Telangana activism, I want to highlight two key moments: the Telangana rebellion (1946-51) and the recent Telangana statehood movement. While my family witnessed the first historical moment, I personally witnessed the Telangana Statehood movement. My expressions and arguments on these two moments also have an extremely subjective stance.
Suneetha: You are an important Telugu literary critic, poet, a storyteller as well as an academic researcher. How have your other lives fed into this book?
Afsar: I truly appreciate this question! It helps me rethink my personality too! My poetry readers always complain that I’m most often taken over by these scholarly writings and they expect me to spend more time writing poetry and short fiction.
It took me more than ten years to finish this work. I totally understand their pain! I believe there’s no separation between all these lives. It’s the same living being that connects these roles. I know it’s like walking on a razor’s edge, not an easy task to keep them together.
Unlike my previous book, The Festival of Pirs (Oxford, 2013), this book brings out my personal self much more immensely and effectively. Undoubtedly, the very idea of this book was inspired by my own sense of being and belonging. Readers of Remaking History might easily see that the search begins with self and later travels through family and community. This trajectory defined my path in completing this work.
Remaking History is a blend of oral histories and literary narratives. This gave me an opportunity to bring various dimensions of my own personality into the story. Oral histories in this book begin with my family and childhood contacts. For instance, this book made me look back on my school days when I had the opportunity to meet personalities such as Dasarathi, Kavi Raja Murthy, Sadasiva and Jeelani Bano. I’ve dedicated some of my chapters to their writings and lives.
The stories I draw on begin with my earliest memories and move into their literary work. As I focused on readers’ responses across various generations, I believe that approach worked quite well. This offered me an opportunity to show that reading a literary text is no less than studying a community that produced and circulated that particular text. Within these dynamics, my positionality, too, matters!
Suneetha: Very few readers of Telugu literature are aware that the antecedents of progressive literature lay in Muslim literary figures active in the Progressive Literary Movement. You bring up Maqdoom and Jeelani Bano as Telugu literary figures. You discuss Sadasiva by referring to his contemporary Urdu poets as people we should also consider. Could you talk about how this connection was forgotten?
Afsar: A major effect of Police Action was the thickening divide between Muslims and Hindus. I’ve argued that this was something similar to Partition. Of course, Partition and the idea of Pakistan were prominent in the discourses around Police Action.
The politics of Telugu nationalism and the dominance of the idea of the mother tongue made this situation more complicated. It gradually erased the mutuality between the Urdu and Telugu literary spheres of the Deccan. I see this as another side of the violence fromt his time. Telugu became “Hindu” and Urdu became “Muslim.” We lost an entire history of mutuality and saw a partitioning of Telugu and Urdu as two separate entities.
The above examples, as narrated in the book, show that these domains were not experienced as completely separate before 1948. Due to the formation of the Telugu linguistic state in 1956, these dividing lines were further thickened. Now, later generations can’t even imagine a world where was such mutuality between Telugu and Urdu. The crude politicisation of language and literary cultures has made things even worse.
Suneetha: You grew up in Khammam in a bilingual literary household that read Telugu and Urdu. Khammam also has a history of being part of the Telangana peasant struggle. How do you think this influenced your project?
Afsar: I grew up in a small village and later moved to Khammam. This shift to a large town made a huge impact on my personality. Being a village kid, I had hard time adjusting to an urban life. You can see these tensions in my forthcoming collection of stories Sahil Will Come, to be published in 2024.
Nevertheless, these different settings, village and town, opened a wide horizon of political activism for me. It was here that I grew up listening to the stories of the Telangana peasant struggle of 1946 and 1952.
As I explained before, my life and works were shaped by two key moments of the Telangana activism. As a kid, I had the opportunity to meet stalwarts of the Telangana struggle. By middle school, I started reading about various phases of Telangana history, particularly, Hyderabad and Deccan.
In a way, many dimensions of this locality seeped into my personality and language. My previous work The Festival of Pirs also shows my interest in locality through the lens of shared devotionalism and everyday life. A similar thread runs through my new book as well.
I strongly believe that locality defines our identity and the nature of our discourses. However, it all depends on how deeply you engage with this locality and how open you are to its distinctive voice.