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Speaker: Anand Vivek Taneja, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology, Vanderbilt University

This talk explores an emergent trend within Urdu public culture in north India, in which the poet Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib” (1797-1869) is portrayed as a saintly and prophetic figure. Prof. Taneja aims to show that claiming Ghalib as an authoritatively Islamic figure, and hence his life and poetry as Islamically authoritative and legible at this historical moment, a moment of unprecedented Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bias in India, is a profoundly radical claim, which gestures towards a Muslim—and crucially, also non-Muslim—reclamation of pre-colonial lifeways and intellectual, literary, and spiritual traditions as an antidote to the poisonous discourses of modern religious nationalism and sectarianism. Ghalib holds open very different potentials for people in contemporary India than those hitherto celebrated and affirmed in postcolonial nationalist modernity: a different relation to language, and hence to selfhood; a different relation of the citizen to the nation-state; and a different relation of the individual to religious authority.

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