Rather than focusing on Gandhi’s own use of print and media forms or textual and visual memory about him, this chapter examines how Gandhi’s contemporary Muslims imagined him within their own national, transnational and religious contexts.1 The Urdu writings of Hasan Nizami (1873–1955), a Delhi-based Chishti Sufi and friend of Gandhi, provide an important example of one such long-neglected voice. As both promoter and critic of Gandhi, Nizami offers a corrective to Gandhi studies’ general disinterest in contemporaries that made, as it were, the Mahatma possible; as a leading Sufi leader and reformer, his example challenges problematic accounts of the Muslim ‘other’ in South Asian histories today; as one of the most prolific, leading Urdu journalists and writers of his time, his works index the unwieldy breadth of the colonial press and its composite cultures.
Contrary to understandings of Urdu publishing around 1920 as a communal press foreshadowing Partition, Nizami’s works on Gandhi exemplify the largely overlooked history of interreligious, cultural and political Islamic engagements in India, South and Central Asia, and beyond. His writings thus confirm recent scholarship on the Urdu press and colonial-era Muslim cosmopolitanism tracing the expansive dimensions of vernacular print. Dubrow, for example, describes the Urdu press from Bombay and Hyderabad to East Africa as a language-based ‘cosmopolis’ beyond narrow regional, national or religious identities.2 Of course, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and others wrote and published widely in Urdu, a fact bolstered, for example, in Punjab by British language policy in education and beyond. Alavi similarly examines a particular Muslim cosmopolitanism appearing in the writings of Muslims inspired by the 1857 ‘Mutiny’, diverse figures whose international exile and prolific publication led them to look to the wider Muslim ummah as a site for contesting imperial fault lines.3 Nizami’s publications examined here—one supporting the pan-Islamic Gandhi-backed cause of the Khilafat movement and the other imagining a Muslim-Gandhian global future—position him squarely within such worlds of emergent, often resistant, Muslim cosmopolitanism and Urdu publishing. Put simply, it was a writer of the supposedly ‘communal’ Urdu press who was among the very first to anticipate the global significance of Gandhi’s nonviolence, a point today no longer hagiographical, but critical.4
Cover image, illustration, H. Nizami, Mahatma Gandhi ka Faisla, 1919
Between the Giant and the Rose: Two Gandhi Images from Hasan Nizami’s Works
The Muslim spiritual leader, author, and journalist Khwaja Hasan Nizami was a close contemporary of Gandhi, born into the Chishti Sufi lineage in 1873. His family were the keepers of the famous shrine in New Delhi, the dargah of Nizam ud din Auwliya (d. 1325). Itself the centre of emergent print media through its journal Munadi (The Crier), the shrine set a fitting stage for Nizami’s life as a writer and scholar of Persian and Urdu, composing as he did over 100 Urdu works, regularly contributing to a wide range of newspapers, and publishing myriad pamphlets and periodicals. While his early education under varied Sufi masters was traditional, his career in publishing reflected the broader ways in which colonial Sufis engaged the ‘modulations of modernity’, via education, reform and communication.8 The press, for example, offered a medium transforming the traditional master-disciple relationship once physically centred in the khanqah (hospice), expanding the range of geographical relationships through the new genre of the Sufi periodical, as Beuhler brilliantly showed.9 Aided by the steamship, telegraph and lithography, the newly expansive range of a pir’s relationships brought Nizami to Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the Hijaz in 1911. The links he made there with reformists, activists and Sufi leaders would attract British surveillance for a number of years, a pattern of printing, travel and activism much like that of his friend and future Congress leader Maulana Azad.10 As shown by his appreciation for Gandhi’s leadership and spirituality, deep study of Hinduism, and his Jewish, Baha’i and German Christian disciples, Nizami’s developing blend of transnational religion and politics maintained a spiritual inclusivity.
The diversity of print media during this period is mirrored in the impressive number of genres embraced and invented by Nizami himself. These range from fiction, parody and works in comparative religion to his invention of new forms of autobiography, daily diaries and a chronicle of the 1857 Mutiny compiled from eyewitness interviews. In my view, Nizami’s wide range of work, much like the role of visual images examined here, can help us expand on recent methodological connections between the literary and the journalistic, the periodical and the pamphlet, and, I would add, the image-making press.11 In this context, the figural focus of Nizami’s cover for his Faisla pamphlet is especially relevant. Given Nizami’s close relationships with journalism, we should begin by noting that this specific image of Gandhi is itself closely tied to contemporary newspapers. Gandhi’s figure here is remarkably similar to a much-reprinted photo of Gandhi newly arrived back in India from South Africa in 1915: the details of the image match the latter so well as to be a direct copy.12
Much like the unnaturally large scale of his figure in this drawing, though, Gandhi’s ‘naturally’ Indian—actually Kathiawadi—dress in the photo should not be taken for granted. Dress itself is never ‘natural’ in any simple sense, as Tarlo argues, in photographs as in life.13 Photographs from South Africa in the 1890s of a tie-wearing, up-and-coming lawyer, for example, remind us of Gandhi’s sartorial shape-shifting. The need to appear extra-recognizably Indian was especially important as Gandhi returned after having been in South Africa for over 20 years. Like the many newspapers reprinting Gandhi’s Indian-dress photograph, supporters such as Nizami aided Gandhi, via Urdu text and roughly improvised hand sketches, to spread just the kind of physical, sartorial image he was trying to promote.
This photographic echo, however, makes the lack of straightforward naturalism in Nizami’s cover image all the more striking, with Gandhi’s hulking presence overshadowing the crowds and architecture. Gandhi appears here not simply through a common hieratic scale repeated in a number of later twentieth-century images, but almost as a giant.14 Something of Nizami’s own role as a humourist seems to be at play here, an ironic sense of reversing the myriad images of Gandhi’s scrawny body pervasive in the Indian and British press and beyond. This visual trope was established at least as early as Gandhi’s first civil disobedience campaign in South Africa in 1906. The scrawny body of the ‘Asian’ figure associated with Gandhi’s causes, as well as Gandhi himself, indexes his weakness and freakishness in Boer and British imaginaries in contrast to the massive strength of civilised, imperial bodies.15 In contrast, but also according to a similar scalar logic, here Gandhi’s size embodies his power: he holds the keys to Indians’ release from British imprisonment.
As mentioned, the historical context of the pamphlet is the first mass, all-India non-cooperation campaign of 1920—and Gandhi’s crucial support for the Khilafat movement. This was, first, an Indian Muslim, and soon an all-India, Congress-backed response to Britain’s World War I defeat of the Ottoman Empire. At issue was the British abolishment of the office of the Caliph in Istanbul, the symbolic centre of Islamic authority. While the Ottoman caliph never had had this kind of global attention before, an age of growing pan-Islamic and nationalist networks activated Muslims protest well beyond Turkey.16 Indian Muslim leaders such as Shaukat Ali and Abul Kalam Azad worked with Gandhi towards solidarity of the nationalist cause with the specific transnational, religious concerns of Indian Muslims. As Devji has argued, the Khilafat movement appealed to Gandhi and Muslim leaders precisely for reasons of scale: more than any domestic injustice the Khilafat was an empire-sized issue, which also helped reveal not so much a pro-Islamic stance, but the struggle against empire as itself religious in character.17 More locally, much of Nizami’s Urdu text urges the Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the most important Muslim rulers of a Princely State, to join the movement, which, however, he did not. Although many Indians remained enclosed in the Indian Princely states as shown in this image, scholars have recently explored the subtler ways publications such as Nizami’s may have moved court officials to foster dissent in the local Urdu press, illuminating the ‘fragmented’, rather than absolute or unquestioned, sovereignty of the Raj itself.18
In addition to the ironic gestures and propagandistic functions of this image, Nizami’s exaggerated hieratic vision foreshadows his own next piece of writing on Gandhi, Gandhinama, discussed below and in which Gandhi is imagined as a figure of historic and global significance. Seen in relation to the Mughal court painting Nizami was very familiar with, Gandhi’s imposing figure can be said to echo the hieratic visual scale accorded to shahs (emperors) in Persianate contexts. The greatness of an emperor, of course, was routinely described in terms of global and cosmic frames, a model of ‘charismatic sovereignty’ long tied tightly to saintly Sufi figures.19 Admittedly, such courtly and devotional sensibilities and their archaic Persianate and Sufi contexts may seem far removed from what we might anachronistically take to be the cold, hard world of news, fact and opinion of the emerging, modern press. Yet, as Amin showed, the vernacular, Indian press at just this time was a key site for the making of a supernatural, holy man ‘mahatma’ image for Gandhi, an argument in many ways supported by this examination of a more formally Muslim, Urdu-language context.20 More broadly, the world of reformist organising and voluntary associations, of which Nizami was a part, used the vernacular press for popularising the biographies of Carlylean ‘great men’, especially in Punjab and UP, often reconfiguring the relationship of myth and history within new religious forms, developing what van der Linden terms a broader ‘moral language’.21
The mythic and moral features of Nizami’s work, more prominent still in his Gandhinama than in this Faisla cover and text, are undeniably marked by the premodern Mughal and Sufi precedents to be explored below. At the same time, interpreted within the broader context of colonial print culture, Nizami’s publications should not be seen as uniquely ‘Muslim’ but as quite at home in the alternative print world of the vernacular and what Hofmyer terms the ‘colonial-born press’.22 As she shows in her study of Gandhi’s own Indian Opinion , first, resistance to imperial rule could work at vernacular presses by challenging not only imperial policy, but the imperial reading habits of newspapers and their sense of time, in contrast to the world of the periodical and the pamphlet. Thus, in order to combat the ‘fast’ reading encouraged by imperial news culture, Gandhi regularly juxtaposed ‘news and ethical extract’ throughout Indian Opinion , with a range of short quotes from the likes of Thoreau, Ruskin and Balzac to encourage the reader to resist the ‘fetish for literacy and mundane knowledge’.23 The central role given to the creative image of Gandhi by Nizami in the Faisla and especially the interspersed images in the Gandhinama interrupt, as it were, the textual reading surface in parallel ways. Second, Gandhi’s international sources and experimental reimagining of his readership fostered a geographically expansive consciousness, proactively fashioning a sense of Indian unity among the diverse religious, linguistic and caste sub-groupings of his readership—especially, Hindus and Muslims, for example. His was an emergent rather than an assumed unity, paradoxically dependent, argues Hofmyer, on Gandhi’s experience of diaspora. While Indian presses are not ‘colonial-born’ in Hofmyer’s precise, diasporic sense, Nizami’s promotion of Gandhi’s Khilafat decision also works to internationalise his readers and point towards an elusive Indian national unity from an ‘outside India’ (here, Central Asian) vantage. Lastly, for Hofmyer, Gandhi’s print work, marked by slow reading and a transnational, proactive approach to forging national unity, was philosophically grounded in his emphasis on the individual. As articulated in Hind Swaraj , political independence or ‘self-rule’ was grounded in the control and ‘self-rule’ of the individual through the everyday and the concrete specifics of ethical practice and local communities such as the ashrams in which Gandhi’s press was operated. Strikingly, as we will see, these are just the aspects of Gandhi’s legacy that Nizami focuses on: the bodily practices of diet, dress, walking, labour and economy, spinning, poetic recitation and concrete conflict-resolution. In fact, the parallel orientation continues right down, in what seems an uncanny parallel to Hofmyer’s analysis, to Nizami’s emphasis on Gandhi’s ‘sayings’, marking the importance of the aphoristic in ethical reflection.24
Wandering the Future Gandhian-Muslim Cosmopolis in the Gandhinama
The contemporary print culture of Nizami’s times helps us interpret his fictional Gandhinama, a text which explores an imagined Gandhian future, as it were, crossing the borders of past and future worlds. As Nizami tells us in the Foreword, this text and its accompanying sections are drawn from the various written pieces on Gandhi he had contributed to newspapers and periodicals, now gathered together in this pamphlet for the first time.25 Thus a modern, journalistic setting informs Nizami’s imaginative text in which he recounts his wandering from New Delhi to Meerut and Afghanistan on to Central Asia, Turkey and Europe; this rambling world tour is set in 2050 to determine Gandhi’s future global influence. The mysterious Quranic prophet Khwaja Khizr, a figure central to Sufi narratives of initiation, eternal life and wandering, grants Nizami these special powers.26 Thus both the framing and the landscape of the work reflect not only Nizami’s characteristic interest in India’s Mughal glory, but also two other non-Arab Islamic empires, the Safavids and Ottomans, and beyond, the broader transnational networks of Sufi orders.27 Religiously, this landscape itself closely maps the geography of what Ahmed characterises as the distinctive Islam of the ‘Balkans-to-Bengal complex’, marked by Sufism and its characteristic literary traditions.28
Nizami encodes these Islamicate histories, geographies and sensibilities in the title of his work: A nama is a Persian genre, looking back to Firdausi’s tenth-century Shahnama and the Akbarnama of Mughal court historian Abu‘l Fazl Allami (d. 1602). Such texts chronicle an emperor’s court, conquests and glory as a sovereign, at times claiming the ‘divine source of the Emperor’s royalty’, in exaggerated style.29 Paradoxically, then, Nizami’s vision of the future draws on an archaic sense of transregional connections and literary traditions, South and Central Asian horizons traceable at least as far back as Biruni’s eleventh-century Kitab al Hind. The genre and geographical terrain of Nizami’s text can thus be seen as a visionary but also historically grounded landscape resonant with Gandhi’s use of the archaic Hind in Hind Swaraj .30 As Ramaswamy has argued, the layering of the divine, the nationalist and religious identities upon real and imagined colonial landscapes was a fundamentally visual negotiation, core to emerging literary, linguistic and journalistic sensibilities in this very era.31
Nizami’s literary geography thus not only destabilises the British imperial map, but also offers a cosmopolitan horizon for repositioning Gandhi beyond the categories of Indian nationalism. In many of the sites his text details, he focuses his futurist vision on the possibilities for Gandhi’s legacy in ethical and cultural practice, highlighting subtler dimensions of nonviolence (ahimsa) and self-rule (svaraj). His journey thus begins ‘after the revolution’ (inquilab), the precise character of which must be read out of the tales’ Gandhian details. As he sets out from Delhi, Nizami catalogues new practices, now widespread across borders, that closely mirror Gandhi’s emphasis on bodily discipline as a precondition for any worthwhile political freedom in Hind Swaraj . Travel is on foot since railcars are banished, clothing is self-spun and simple, manual labour is the price of the vegetarian food prevalent, including among once but no longer meat-loving Muslims. Culture too registers Gandhi’s impact: at a poetic gathering (mushaira) in Iran, a Gandhian repertoire of metaphor has transformed the basic tropes of the ghazal: ‘The Beloved’s slender body and sweet speech are like Gandhi’s’.32 In Shiraz, Gandhi’s sayings are quoted conversationally along with the city’s great poets, Sa‘adi and Hafiz.
Taken together, these South and Central Asian episodes suggest that Gandhi is remembered most powerfully in everyday practices such as diet, dress and travel, broadly speaking, ethics, and art. Nizami’s text thus anticipates recent scholarship on the bodily, everyday and neighbourly grounding of Gandhi’s political theory, suggesting alternative sites for rethinking democratic and imperial communities.33 While Nizami’s Urdu press, like that of some of his contemporaries, can be seen as cosmopolitan in contrast to colonial conflations of nation, language and religion, his emphasis on poets and poetic gatherings also suggests a wider, practice-based arena to language itself. That is, the literary and linguistic are elements of a wider range of performative practice, again, akin to Hofmyer’s analysis of Gandhi’s ethically reflective, slow-reading approach to print culture. Importantly, this expansive sense of the everyday includes religious practice and community in ways that depart from secular and modern cosmopolitanisms.34 Nizami mentions, for example, that Gandhi’s well-known stance as being a ‘well-wisher’ to all religions has become the widespread norm of a future in which plural religious communities thrive and interreligious conflict is virtually unknown. The Gandhinama goes so far as to imagine one city in which Gandhi himself is remembered as a convert to Islam, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Yet, while religious conversion is typically seen by scholars of the colonial period as a key marker of an anti-cosmopolitan communalism and modern religious nationalism, Nizami describes Kabul as full of fruit-eating residents wholly committed to nonviolence, who ‘meditate on Gandhi and stop fighting’ even at the slightest hint of conflict.
Nizami’s final adventures in the Gandhinama return to the macro, exaggerated scale appropriate for the regal and divine sovereignty of an Islamicate imperial history: Gandhi’s victories over whole countries. Russia, for example, has renounced weaponry and Turkey has converted to Gandhian nonviolence because of Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat movement. In Paris, also now significantly Gandhian, Nizami hears that London has disappeared and soon verifies that the banks of the Thames are indeed barren. Much like the parodic logic of a scrawny Gandhi turned monumental giant seen on the cover of Faisla, the Gandhinama’s prediction of London’s future disappearance offers a striking symbol of reversal, banishing British empire from the global map. We might say that Nizami has turned the all-seeing eye of imperial knowledge into a geographical ‘blind spot’.35
Gandhi and the Prophetic Rose
Rose, illustration, H. Nizami, Gandhinama, 1922
Like the tension of the great and the small, this passage addresses the prophetic in terms of scale, in terms of the relationship between the cosmic and the earthly, the cosmopolitan and the nationalist. As a Muslim writer, it is of course not surprising that Nizami preserves the ultimate religious and cosmic prestige for Muhammad. What is perhaps more interesting are the terms of that comparison itself: Gandhi is a lesser figure if seen within the nationalist frame of the freedom struggle, when compared to the Prophet’s universal message. This of course may seem like a contradiction to the cosmopolitan scope of Gandhi’s global legacy explored in Nizami’s world tour. However, Nizami says specifically in the above passage that understanding the continuity between Muhammad and Gandhi depends on the ‘spread’ of Gandhi’s ‘ideology’, a phrase pointing to the universal relevance of nonviolence beyond nationalist struggle, that is, a diffusion at the level of the everyday ethics and far-flung cultural contexts described above.Muslims have still not understood that Allah is using Gandhi as a messenger to present the Prophet’s teachings. And as much as Gandhi’s ideology is spread, the beauty of Mohammad’s preaching is revealed to people … Mohammad was addressing the entire universe, while Gandhi was only fighting for the freedom of one country.40
Seen in the wider context of Islamic traditions, it is important to note that it is the ‘beauty’ and universality of Muhammad’s teachings Gandhi is here said to help reveal. This aesthetic emphasis presupposes the ways many Muslims relate to the Prophet foremost as a model of an exemplary life, rather than as the mouthpiece of abstract or propositional theological truths. This exemplarity is traditionally manifest in areas as down to earth as the Prophet’s sartorial practice and as elevated as his poetic, mystical and cosmic description. Ethical modelling and religious message are thus, importantly, not ‘ethical’ in a thin, rule-based or prescriptive sense, but rather of a narrative, devotional and intimate character, often tied to the sense of the Prophet’s physical beauty, even physical fragrance. In one story, drops of the Prophet’s perspiration grow into a rose.41 In this context, Muhammad’s particular features and everyday habits—the types of things one knows about one’s intimates—make up a large part of the Hadith literature preserving his sayings and doings for the Muslim community. An everyday ethical emphasis in this sense resonates with the kinds of nonviolence that interested Nizami in his assessment of Gandhi’s global legacy, and, as important points of prophetic family resemblance. Nizami points out that, like the Prophet, Gandhi eats little, wears simple clothing, does his own house work, doesn’t drink.42 More importantly still, Gandhi speaks in support of the lower castes and the poor, features Nizami highlights as very much like Muhammad’s advocacy for women, girls, orphans and others on the margins of Bedouin society.
Concluding Reflections
Following Anderson, scholarly accounts of print capitalism’s central role in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagining of nationalism have produced rich studies of novels, newspapers and modern nationalism, especially in South Asia. Analyses of print, literary texts and imagined communities have important parallels in religious studies’ work on the ways the modern ‘religions’ of Hinduism and Islam emerged as similarly homogenised unities. Scriptural, linguistic and organisational layers of uniformity shaped or even invented themselves according to western, Orientalist and missionary models of religion and, often, the political frame of the nation-state, even as they pushed back against imperialism.43 Much as subaltern and postcolonial critique of nationalist historiography has questioned unidirectional frameworks for ‘modular’ forms of modernity, however, so too recent religious studies work has complicated the idea of a unilateral semiticisation or westernisation of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and other South Asian religions.44 As mentioned above, western forms of secularism themselves have been greatly contested in South Asia, by far more than so-called ‘fundamentalists’ of Hindutva or Islamist varieties.45
To take one relevant media-specific example, the centrality of visuality and orality as against literacy or the literary writ large in India has led some scholars to argue that the national imaginary in India has been formed by film far more than print. Advocating a different form of a ‘secular’ India, film scholars have shown particular sensitivity to the creative role of religion: for example, British press censorship in early twentieth-century north India set the scene for new forms blending myth, epic, hagiography and modern media.46 In the sant films of the 1920s and beyond, the traditional stories of bhakti saints were retold with implicit and explicit reference to Gandhian anticolonialism; Prahlad’s resistance to an unjust demon king, a story which Gandhi himself promoted as a model of satyagraha, is one filmic instance among many. Though the prevalence of embodied deities, visual sacred practices (darshan) and gurus might seem to privilege Hindu traditions, Islamicate history, Muslim notions of the gaze, Sufi holy men and Urdu poetry have formed a major part of filmic worlds and shaped national consciousness, indeed paralleling the case made here.47
Thus, to consider film and visual studies within nationalist imaginaries and beyond them is not to oppose attention to print and text. It is rather to relocate each as modes within an expansive framework of everyday practice and imagination, evident within the study of press and print culture, as modelled in Hofmyer’s brilliant study of Gandhi’s press. As noted, she argues that the quintessentially logocentric, modern technology of the printing press needs to be rethought in terms of visual modes, ethical reflection and experimental, transnational contexts of emergent, imagined communities. Indian Opinion’s promotions of great Hindu epics, civilisation histories and biographies of great religious and political figures such as, for example, Muhammad are not nostalgic archaisms or political appeals to constituencies, but are themselves tools within a repertoire for novel experiments in slow reading, ethical reflection and new community relationships across presumed religious boundaries of Hindu and Muslim. Building on Hofmyer’s analysis of the colonial-born press and recent accounts of Urdu and Muslim print culture, I have emphasised the specifically Sufi framing and cosmopolitan vision of Hasan Nizami’s representation of Gandhi. In important ways, these recall the broader contexts of Persianate artistic and literary traditions and the spiritual terrain specific to the ‘Bengal-to-Balkans’ Islam that Nizami leads the reader across. Crucially, however, I have argued that a close reading requires greater attention be paid to reading, viewing and other habits ripe for reconfiguring and shifting forward into the future. The religious and imperial frontiers of Gandhi’s South African context, much like the geography and regional Islam of border areas crossed in Nizami’s imagined tale, can be seen as dynamic spaces for ‘altered normativities … generated in tandem with altered subject formation’.48 The experimental and miraculous tilt of Nizami’s work, like the wonder-filled Sufi holy man stories they draw on, ultimately evokes the ‘subjunctive in the exploratory mode’ that ‘test-driv[es] ideas that could find no other easy outlet’.49 That print-mediated utopian horizon offers a religion oriented towards geographically and temporally expansive, inclusive and embodied ethical practices rather than exclusive communities or identities. Nizami thus not only rightly foresaw a global Gandhi and imagined a rich transnationalism at the borders of empire and the nation, but can also be seen as a precursor to contemporary theory of religion’s critical reconsideration of models based in Protestant iconoclasm, privatisation and western secular modernity.50