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.

Comments

This work was published before Shahzad joined Aga Khan University.

Publication (Name of Journal)

Sophia

DOI

10.1007/s11841-023-00961-4

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