Liminal Time in Indian Muslim Politics of the Early 20th Century

Faridah Zaman’s paper will approach the temporal sensibilities of a number of prominent Indian Muslim political actors in the 1910s and into the 1920s, analyzing in particular the rhetorical tropes of historical closures and openings that peppered both their commentary on domestic and international affairs, and their reasoning for undertaking specific activities in this period. In so doing, her paper will seek to move away from the broad tendency to view colonial Muslim politics as a fraught contest between forces of ‘tradition’ and modernity’, and Indian Muslim politics in particular as mired in an ever-present historical nostalgia and marked by a condition of lacking. This paper will suggest that the events of the early twentieth century - not least the cataclysmic Great War - upended notions of historical order, experience, and the burden of action on the individual, such that, for a brief time at least, the future was rendered a wholly unknowable space for these actors.