Indo-Muslim nostalgia : memory, modernity, and the nation in 20th century South Asian Muslim writing

This thesis examines historical memory and nostalgia in South Asian Muslim writing within the context of sectarian violence and cultural disintegration following the Partition. Focusing on nostalgia, it highlights the emergence of Indo-Muslim Modernism as a distinct literary phenomenon furthered by post-Progressive Urduphone Muslim writers. While significant attention has been given to the Marxist Progressive Writers' Association and its fraught relationship with religious identity, little scholarship exists on the Modernists—an influential but underexplored group of Muslim writers. I have provided a trajectory of Indo-Muslim modernism as a discrete literary movement that had its own intersections with and divergences from the more well-known Progressive Writers’ Movement. Drawing on postcolonial theory, memory studies, affect theory, global modernisms, and Muslim feminisms, my thesis examines key writers such as Ahmed Ali, Qurratulain Hyder, Intizar Husain, Zeenuth Futehally, Khadija Mastur, and Attia Hosain. Writing after the chaos of Partition and the redefinition of Muslim identity through emerging nationalisms, these authors sought to address questions of belonging and fragmented identities. These authors broke away from the dominant Progressive tradition, creating works that grapple with the traumatic complexities of Muslim belonging in a new postcolonial South Asian reality. Critics have noted the nostalgia that permeates these texts, often interpreted as simply bidding farewell to a lost cultural past. However, I propose that this nostalgia should be understood as critical and subversive—an avenue for forging alternative solidarities and countering Hindu nationalist and Islamic majoritarian narratives in contemporary India and Pakistan. These writers produce an eclectic, indigenized South Asian modernism that reflects a unique intellectual and aesthetic sensibility. In response to the symbolic and real marginalization of Muslims in independent India and the struggles of Mohajir assimilation in Pakistan, these authors reclaim public and private spaces as distinctly South Asian Muslim. Through this reclamation, they centre the Muslim experience of loss, life, and nationhood, offering complex, alternative visions of belonging that resist hegemonic political and cultural frameworks.