"Courtly Modernity: Re-forming Rampur under Nawab Hamid Ali Khan 1889-1930" a talk by Mr. Razak Khan at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 23rd September 2013

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to a Seminar on ‘Courtly Modernity: Re-forming Rampur under Nawab Hamid Ali Khan 1889-1930’ by Mr. Razak Khan, Doctoral Fellow,  Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Berlin

Abstract : This paper examines the notion of an “appropriate” Muslim culture in late nineteenth-century colonial north India as a discursive site where questions of class, gender and space intersected but were hardly resolved. The speaker shows how a reformed Muslim subject and community were constructed in colonial India through the production of distinctly new cultural concepts and practices. He locates this metamorphic cultural landscape of high-caste, respectable Muslim cultural reform and, in particular, recover the history of its condemned other – the princely culture. The speaker will examine this by focussing on the princely state of Rampur under Nawab Hamid Ali Khan’s rule (r.1889–1930). The paper maps the way in which the Nawab and Nawabi culture were reified and stereotyped as a symbol of “decadence” and “decline” of Muslim power and culture in reformist language. The speaker will then highlight other neglected cultural histories of Nawabi Rampur in which it emerges as a centre of art and culture.  This comprises of other minority histories of Nawabi Rampur manifested in patronage for art, literature and music. In these other histories European architects, Hindu musicians, Muslim scholars and diverse influences were brought together in the making of Rampur’s composite Nawabi culture. The project of Muslim cultural reformism of the late nineteenth century therefore becomes an important entry point to locate and understand these debates about the self, sovereignty and culture in a lesser-known, routinely dismissed site of colonial socio-cultural forms of existence and contestation.

Speaker : Mr. Razak Khan studied Modern Indian History at the University of Delhi. He is currently doctoral fellow at Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures & Societies (BGSMCS), Freie Universität, Berlin. His Ph.D. dissertation looks at issues of local histories and Muslim identities in Rampur. 

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