Description:

Speaker: Amanda Lanzillo, Assistant Professor, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago

Artisans in colonial India were not passive subjects of colonial industrial and technological change. Instead, many creatively reasserted longstanding religious narratives and genealogies of their trades, engaging with the print economy to reclaim technical authority and status within the Indian economy. This talk draws on Prof. Lanzillo's recent monograph -- Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2024) -- to argue that Muslim artisans in north India and Punjab challenged their own marginalization by claiming distinctively pious, artisanal practices of Islam. It explores how Muslim artisans engaged with local, lithographic print cultures between the 1860s and 1930s, drawing attention to an underutilized archive of artisan experiences: Urdu technical manuals and community histories that circulated within laboring communities. Through these materials, Prof. Lanzillo tells the stories of artisans not only as producers of material culture, but also as religious and intellectual agents, who developed their own compelling narratives of their trades and Islam. In this presentation, she will draw on several case studies from the book, profiling the experiences of Muslim blacksmiths, print workers, and other laboring communities.

Presented by The Language of Islam, an Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities research workshop.