Andalusi Histories in Hyderabad: Loss, Temporality, and the Translational Self

My paper looks at early-20th century Urdu translations of Arabic and European histories of Al-Andalus produced by translators at the Bureau of Translation and Composition within Osmania University, constituted in 1917 through a royal charter by the Nizam of Hyderabad. Osmania University (including the Bureau) touted itself as the first modern institution with Urdu as its medium of instruction, and thereby at the helm of a new historical epoch. These histories comprised 15th Arabic historiography (compiled and edited in modern print format in universities across Germany, Spain, and France in the first of the 19th century) and 19th century German, French, and Spanish Orientalist ones. Through closely reading the long translators’ prefaces that accompanied these large-scale translation projects, I ask— under what ethical compulsion did these translators choose to translate voluminous histories of a region distant from them in spatio-temporal terms? How did a turn to Al-Andalus through translation allow them to articulate both alternate axes of geographical cohesion, as well as a new historical temporality through which the past, present, and future could be reconstituted? I especially focus on Islamic macro-temporalities that are invoked variously throughout the prefaces, through Quranic verses, Hadith, and other references to Prophetic and early Islamic events, both in order to offer a new framing to familiar and known temporalities, as well as to recast Orientalist historical scholarship from the vantage point of South Asian Muslim politics. Through this recasting of both historical knowledge and spatio-temporalities axes, I argue against literal, historicist translation as a passive activity within colonial power equations, and for a more complex understanding, whereby colonized subjects were able to powerfully offer new affective, temporal, and geographical orientations (to borrow Sarah Ahmed’s term) to familiar power dynamics between Europe and colonial South Asia through translation.