Colonial India in a crusades mirror: Fantasy and reality in a nineteenth-century Urdu novel
Document Type
Article
Department
Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London
Abstract
This article extends Georg Lukács’s theorization pertaining to historical fiction by considering a novel written in response to colonial conditions. It treats Abdulhalim Sharar’s Urdu Malik al-‘Aziz and Virginia (1888) as a case where a fictional version of the encounter between Muslims and Christians during the crusades in the twelfth century is used to counter the colonial Indian present in the nineteenth century. I suggest that novels such as Sharar’s exemplify a vein of global thought since the nineteenth century that resisted historicism but without abandoning the notion that the past was real. Deploying a genre that came to the fore in colonial conditions, Sharar imagines an alternative future by narrating the past otherwise via fiction.
Publication (Name of Journal)
Sophia
DOI
10.1007/s11841-023-00961-4
Recommended Citation
Bashir, S.
(2023). Colonial India in a crusades mirror: Fantasy and reality in a nineteenth-century Urdu novel. Sophia, 62(2), 419-432.
Available at:
https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_faculty_publications/304
Comments
This work was published before the author joined Aga Khan University.