ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies, 2024
The article is an attempt to unpack the famous "Hindutva verdict" of 1995, by specifically paying... more The article is an attempt to unpack the famous "Hindutva verdict" of 1995, by specifically paying attention to the construction of culture and its relationship with Hinduism in India. The verdict opens up an avenue to think afresh about the relationship between the state and religion in the context of Hinduism, supporting me to argue that the question of (religious) authority for Hinduism is distinctly connected to secular sovereignty unlike in the case of Islam or Christianity. This in turn suggests that there is no authoritative distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva since these discourses are the products of the state's ongoing effort to define Hinduism as the context demands. The practice of the state in authorizing acts, attitudes, norms, and sensibilities that are deemed Hindu is encased in the construct of culture and its various enunciations such as legal and rhetoric. One must attend to the genealogy of culture in order to understand the nature of authority in Hinduism as well as the form of sovereignty recognized and exercised in India.
The purpose of this article is to tease out and question the problem of responsibility that domin... more The purpose of this article is to tease out and question the problem of responsibility that dominates the discourse about the Palestinian confrontation with Israeli colonization. In my approach, the notion of responsibility is not a self-evident expression of the causal relationship between act and actor, but rather a particular narrative enacted in certain discourse. That is, the question of responsibility tends to be viewed as an instantly available category of explanation for any act, as it helps to locate the relationship between the act and the actor. My point is that one must take a step back and understand that responsibility is primarily a narrative produced by certain actors (scholars, commentators, lawyers, and so on) either for legal, political, or moral purposes. This narrative is used by scholars, policymakers, and politicians from a dominant discursive location that sustains the colonial relationship of power between Israel and Palestine in order to justify certain actions as opposed to others. The latter half of the essay also includes a brief foray into how action and responsibility were narrated in relation to each other in the Islamic tradition of resistance in Gaza.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat, a Bollywood period drama, engendered a variety of conversation... more Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat, a Bollywood period drama, engendered a variety of conversations about identity, history, etc. in India. This article examines the ways in which the reception of the film performatively produced a genre of history in the Indian public sphere. Such performative productions of history as a genre runs counter to the prevalent notion of history as pre-given with concrete referents and past incidents. The allegation of "distortion" (of "history") is mobilized as a psychoanalytic resource to demonstrate this point. In the process, I note how the existing approaches to Hindu nationalism are inadequate in their critical clarity.
This article, in reviewing Charles Hirschkind's The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and A... more This article, in reviewing Charles Hirschkind's The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalucia (2020), makes an attempt at expanding on the notion of feeling. This attempt is partly motivated by various critical reviews of the text that operate in the distinction between feeling and thinking as a disciplinary requirement for doing history. In challenging that distinction, I propose to understand feeling as 'encounter' that a subject is affected by in her present. A conception of encounter requires a particular tradition of feeling in order to be 'affected' by it (here that tradition is Andalucismo). This particular activation of subject in her encounter with the past needs to be understood in distance with the conventional wisdom of subject as an author of her history (or agent/agency). Drawing on Talal Asad and Ananda Abeysekara, this paper further illuminates on the idea of feeling as a disciplining practice situated within a horizon of time. In the process, it exposes how the critics of The Feeling of History fail to understand the dynamic of feeling and takes refuge in the conventional secular strategy of capturing it as the major property of right-wing political groups in engaging past.
This blog post investigates and problematizes a certain narrative strategy in the historiography ... more This blog post investigates and problematizes a certain narrative strategy in the historiography of Malabar rebellion, in which “war” (“yudham”) and “riot” (“lahala” or “mutiny”) were configured on the model of “politics” and “religion”. The post asks what kind of sovereign formation was imagined in such a narrative strategy and why it needs to be addressed.
The symposium initiates a conversation on the forms and practices of sovereignty in South Asia in... more The symposium initiates a conversation on the forms and practices of sovereignty in South Asia in the context of a peasant Muslim insurgency against British colonialism in 20th-century Malabar in South India.
This article is part of an ongoing effort to think about tradition in the context of empire, race... more This article is part of an ongoing effort to think about tradition in the context of empire, race and nation state.
Chapter in the Routledge book on Research in Islamic Context, 2022
To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell (Martin Heidegger 197... more To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell (Martin Heidegger 1971, 145).
ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies, 2024
The article is an attempt to unpack the famous "Hindutva verdict" of 1995, by specifically paying... more The article is an attempt to unpack the famous "Hindutva verdict" of 1995, by specifically paying attention to the construction of culture and its relationship with Hinduism in India. The verdict opens up an avenue to think afresh about the relationship between the state and religion in the context of Hinduism, supporting me to argue that the question of (religious) authority for Hinduism is distinctly connected to secular sovereignty unlike in the case of Islam or Christianity. This in turn suggests that there is no authoritative distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva since these discourses are the products of the state's ongoing effort to define Hinduism as the context demands. The practice of the state in authorizing acts, attitudes, norms, and sensibilities that are deemed Hindu is encased in the construct of culture and its various enunciations such as legal and rhetoric. One must attend to the genealogy of culture in order to understand the nature of authority in Hinduism as well as the form of sovereignty recognized and exercised in India.
The purpose of this article is to tease out and question the problem of responsibility that domin... more The purpose of this article is to tease out and question the problem of responsibility that dominates the discourse about the Palestinian confrontation with Israeli colonization. In my approach, the notion of responsibility is not a self-evident expression of the causal relationship between act and actor, but rather a particular narrative enacted in certain discourse. That is, the question of responsibility tends to be viewed as an instantly available category of explanation for any act, as it helps to locate the relationship between the act and the actor. My point is that one must take a step back and understand that responsibility is primarily a narrative produced by certain actors (scholars, commentators, lawyers, and so on) either for legal, political, or moral purposes. This narrative is used by scholars, policymakers, and politicians from a dominant discursive location that sustains the colonial relationship of power between Israel and Palestine in order to justify certain actions as opposed to others. The latter half of the essay also includes a brief foray into how action and responsibility were narrated in relation to each other in the Islamic tradition of resistance in Gaza.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat, a Bollywood period drama, engendered a variety of conversation... more Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat, a Bollywood period drama, engendered a variety of conversations about identity, history, etc. in India. This article examines the ways in which the reception of the film performatively produced a genre of history in the Indian public sphere. Such performative productions of history as a genre runs counter to the prevalent notion of history as pre-given with concrete referents and past incidents. The allegation of "distortion" (of "history") is mobilized as a psychoanalytic resource to demonstrate this point. In the process, I note how the existing approaches to Hindu nationalism are inadequate in their critical clarity.
This article, in reviewing Charles Hirschkind's The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and A... more This article, in reviewing Charles Hirschkind's The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalucia (2020), makes an attempt at expanding on the notion of feeling. This attempt is partly motivated by various critical reviews of the text that operate in the distinction between feeling and thinking as a disciplinary requirement for doing history. In challenging that distinction, I propose to understand feeling as 'encounter' that a subject is affected by in her present. A conception of encounter requires a particular tradition of feeling in order to be 'affected' by it (here that tradition is Andalucismo). This particular activation of subject in her encounter with the past needs to be understood in distance with the conventional wisdom of subject as an author of her history (or agent/agency). Drawing on Talal Asad and Ananda Abeysekara, this paper further illuminates on the idea of feeling as a disciplining practice situated within a horizon of time. In the process, it exposes how the critics of The Feeling of History fail to understand the dynamic of feeling and takes refuge in the conventional secular strategy of capturing it as the major property of right-wing political groups in engaging past.
This blog post investigates and problematizes a certain narrative strategy in the historiography ... more This blog post investigates and problematizes a certain narrative strategy in the historiography of Malabar rebellion, in which “war” (“yudham”) and “riot” (“lahala” or “mutiny”) were configured on the model of “politics” and “religion”. The post asks what kind of sovereign formation was imagined in such a narrative strategy and why it needs to be addressed.
The symposium initiates a conversation on the forms and practices of sovereignty in South Asia in... more The symposium initiates a conversation on the forms and practices of sovereignty in South Asia in the context of a peasant Muslim insurgency against British colonialism in 20th-century Malabar in South India.
This article is part of an ongoing effort to think about tradition in the context of empire, race... more This article is part of an ongoing effort to think about tradition in the context of empire, race and nation state.
Chapter in the Routledge book on Research in Islamic Context, 2022
To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell (Martin Heidegger 197... more To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell (Martin Heidegger 1971, 145).
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Papers by Muhammed Shah Shajahan