Enlightenment in the Colony

The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture

Aamir R. Mufti

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691057323, 9780691057316
• eBook ISBN: 9781400827664
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the "Jewish question" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India.


Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls "the exemplary crisis of minority"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the "Jewish question" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance.


Mufti examines the literary dimensions of this crisis of identity through close readings of canonical texts of modern Western--mostly British-literature, as well as major works of modern Indian literature in Urdu and English. He argues that the one characteristic shared by all emerging national cultures since the nineteenth century is the minoritization of some social and cultural fragment of the population, and that national belonging and minority separatism go hand in hand with modernization.



Enlightenment in the Colony calls for the adoption of secular, minority, and exilic perspectives in criticism and intellectual life as a means to critique the very forms of marginalization that give rise to the uniquely powerful minority voice in world literatures.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• A Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• PART ONE Emergence: Europe and Its Others
• CHAPTER ONE Jewishness as MinorityEMERGENCE OF A EUROPEAN PROB
• CHAPTER TWO Inscriptions of Minority in British Late Imperial
• PART TWO Displacements: On the Verge of India
• CHAPTER THREE Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad DISCOVERING I
• CHAPTER FOUR Saadat Hasan Manto
• CHAPTER FIVE Faiz Ahmed Faiz
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited