Eve Tignol joins the growing list of scholars, most of whom are based in the West and writing in English, who have made extensive use of the Urdu public sphere – the print world of Urdu books, newspapers, magazines and such like from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This trend amongst a new, and mostly younger, generation of scholars, builds on the considerable contributions made to our understanding of Muslim South Asia in the catalytic and formative period of Muslim self-identity and subsequent nation formation, undertaken by scholars who published in English in academia, in the 1970s and 1980s. The earlier trend made considerable use of the colonial archive with limited exposure to the languages of the people of India. Today, it is inconceivable to write a serious work of history, especially of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, without a substantial reading and understanding of any of the languages of India and South Asia. This book is a welcome addition to this dynamic and growing field, particularly because it is of some quality (unlike some other texts published in the recent past), and offers a bibliography which surpasses most similar texts. Tignol’s book also avoids a major problem which many recent authors on South Asian Muslims/Islam have created for themselves – see below – and shows a more nuanced understanding of her subject and theme.

As anyone familiar with South Asian Muslim history over the last two centuries would know, 1857 and its consequences paved the way for how Muslims saw themselves, and how others saw them, very differently compared to the past. The fiction of Mughal ‘rule’, in the region known as Hindustan, was assimilated into the myth of the Great Mughal dynasty continuing its rule from the sixteenth century to the 1850s, even when it was clear that the descendants of Babar were prisoners of the British even prior to the British takeover of Delhi in 1803 — Sultanat-e-Shah Alam, Az Dili ta Palam. While there has been some debate amongst historians around the notion of continuity or rupture after 1857, it is clear that amongst the Muslims of Hindustan, a great deal had changed, especially in their symbols, cultural practices and expressions, position amongst the governing elite, and much else besides. The physical destruction of Delhi and Lucknow, vestiges and primary symbols of an assumed Muslim power (and decadence as well), was a major blow to what remained of the Muslim/Mughal aristocracy, with many Muslims exiled from their homes in Delhi for many months, with their places of worship and places of pleasure and recreation, turned into stables or otherwise demolished by the British. For Muslims the grief, pain, zillat, humiliation, and complete destruction of, in particular, Delhi, was ‘traumatic’ and an annihilation of their past way of life. It is here, and with this theme of destruction and grief over this loss, where Eve Tignol’s book begins, building throughout on key themes and notions of memory, nostalgia, regret, pain, suffering, emotions, largely using Urdu poetry and prose to make her arguments.

The lament for Delhi, ‘a garden lost’ after 1857, forms her first chapter, where Tignol uses the trope of shahr ashob, to explore the themes alluded to above. She examines, in much detail, how, ‘by looking at Urdu poems that described and lamented the devastation of Delhi’ (p 22) the events of 1857 were remembered in the decade after. Using the 1863 compilation Fughan-e Dehli and the 1931 Faryad-e Dehli, she shows how the poems expressed grief at the events that had happened, and how pain and rupture become themes related to the past and to the city. Both collections of poems were meant to display the ‘collective grief of the post-1857 period’, with the poems belonging to the shahr ashob genre, a genre which predates 1857 and which was adapted to the (new) destruction of the lived city, with the ‘ruined garden’ emerging as a symbolic theme. This ‘suffering’ and ‘mourning’, were reflective of other forms of expression, particularly the marsiyah, where a feeling of ‘collective grief’ and communal weeping solidified community.

In some ways, the immediate consequences of 1857 are easier to express through themes of grief, lament, zillat, etc, but what becomes more difficult is to express any continuity of such themes much later, with the past. Tignol does so, and moves on to how the Aligarh Movement in the 1880s enlarged and developed the trope of shahr ashob in very different settings compared to that of the destruction of Delhi. Tignol shows how the earlier poems had ‘mourned the devastation of Mughal cities [but subsequently] started lamenting the condition of the whole world’ (p 63), where Urdu poets extended the genre to just ashob, dunya ashob, and dahr and zamanah ashob, focusing on pan-Islamic developments and consciousness and a pan-Indian community. The Aligarh Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in the 1880s was the perfect incubator for such ideas expressed in prose and poetry, where past glory and present ruin were themes troubling the Muslim elite and their intelligentsia. What better instrument than Altaf Husain Hali’s Musaddas-e Madd-o Jazr-e Islam, to express both local and global loss, shame, grief, memory and nostalgia, a publication which Tignol examines in detail. She examines the highly emotive nature of Hali’s Musaddas, arguing that ‘Hali valued grief, not despair’, and suggesting that this was a ‘positive’ emotion since it was ‘transformative and led to self-reformation’ (p 83), so she claims.

In later chapters, the themes of emotion, memory, nostalgia, remembering, move to the twentieth century, with the (re)construction of Delhi after it was proclaimed the new Imperial Capital in 1911 with its (re)conquest by the British. While Tignol talks about how Muslims in the old Dilli/Dehli envisaged and coped with the (New) Delhi, she misses a beat here, and could have elaborated on how Muslims, both the elite and the masses, could have responded, at least intellectually (as well as emotionally), to how Delhi was to become the centre of their world once again after their Mughal world collapsed in 1857. For centuries Delhi had been the pinnacle of an expanding empire, and under a new emperor it became the Imperial capital of another empire after a span of more than half a century. Tignol does talk about the ‘felt hurt’ of Muslims as they witnessed the destruction of their city and its Mughal and pre-Mughal monuments in the name of the modern vision of imperialism, and how ‘resilient reminders of past power’ were replaced by new symbols of the new rulers, and ‘how memory had become an important stake among the local Muslim population’ ( 145).

We then move to the Khilafat Movement and the Ali brothers with their newspapers and polemics which play a role in anti-colonial sentiments, and to the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, particularly that of the 1920s, on Qurtaba, his lament to God and God’s reply; all collectively ‘transformed the poetry of lament into a revolutionary poetry of resistance’ ( 176). For the final chapter, we return to Delhi, this time focussing on the prose of Rashid ul Khairi, Farhatullah Beg, and many other writers, all remembering an (old) Delhi which they could only imagine. Tignol argues that ‘the construction of the New Delhi threatened to wash away memories of a Mughal past’, and that nostalgia enabled many writers ‘to maintain continuity with their former collective selves by recalling (idealised) qualities which made their present less daunting’ (p 181). She argues that idealised, imagined histories by many writers writing of a long-gone past, these ‘nostalgic memories … engaged less with contemporary gham than with past happiness’. Moreover, nostalgia ‘marked a generation of Delhi authors who constructed a shared multi-sensory heritage of their locality, and aimed at sustaining a local Muslim collective identity through the memory of past powers’ (p 209).

This book has become one of the few works in English – very few on South Asia – which deal with themes related to emotions in history, a fairly recent development in our understanding of history. Notions of nostalgia, memory, melancholia, humiliation, and similar themes, have only recently been analysed in South Asian contexts in English by historians, although there is a huge literature in Urdu – in poetry, prose, around Karbala alone – which has been doing so. Such work is a welcome addition to the ever widening ways we look at the past. Eve Tignol’s excellent and extensive bibliography also leads all of us to new and different paths. However, there are a couple of areas where engagement with her work needs to be made.

The first issue is with her use of the term ‘grief’, for which she uses the Urdu word gham. Most Urdu-English dictionaries would translate gham as grief, but as anyone who comes from the Urdu tradition would argue, gham could encompass so many emotions, but grief by itself is highly insufficient. Grief and gham may be on a spectrum, but grief has far greater intensity and implication than a mere ‘gham’. This is not really Eve Tignol’s fault, but is a bigger problem of how and what is translated and the intensity of meaning that words convey. Muslims did not feel gham at 1857, but grief, certainly. The other concern with this book is the complete absence and silence of prominent Muslim and Islamic traditions which emerged from the wreckage of 1857. The Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahmadi and Ahle Hadis traditions in South Asia find not even a passing mention in Tignol’s work. How did these Muslims demonstrate their grief, how did they represent this trauma in their writings? The writings of Islamists in South Asia after 1857 do not belong to the shahr ashob genre, so where do they belong? These other writings, too, empowered Muslims to create new and very different futures from those of Aligarh, the Khilafat Movement, or Muhammad Iqbal: what of them? Why are so many ‘political communities of feeling’ of Muslims created by the same (?) histories? Or are their histories so different that they evolve so differently to give rise to so many variable and contradictory notions of a ‘political community of feeling’? Questions of a broader Muslim/Urdu (not the same thing, here) public sphere (or spheres) are worthy of further enquiry.

Finally, Eve Tignol does well to avoid wading into a pit which has ruined the work, and arguments and quality of some scholars working on Islam and Muslims in South Asia in recent years. This distinction between Islam and that between Muslims (however we choose to define either – not an easy task to start with) – is often misunderstood, ignored, or treated carelessly. Often ‘South Asian Islam’, a highly contentious, blanket, term is substituted for a social and cultural sense of being Muslim, those who live in South Asia, very differently. For the most part, Tignol, focuses on Urdu literature written and read by Muslims, she only occasionally strays into areas where it blurs notions of whether the ‘collective grief’ she is talking about is Islamic or Muslim. Scholars need to distinguish the overlapping, intersectional, categories of South Asian Islam with South Asian Muslims. These are not the same.

© Bloomsbury Pakistan 2025