The book, Creating a New Medina: State, Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India by Venkat Dhulipala, examines how the idea of Pakistan was articulated and debated in the public sphere and how the popular enthusiasm was generated for its successful achievement, especially in the crucial province of U.P. (now Uttar Pradesh) in the last decade of British colonial rule in India. It argues that Pakistan was not simply a vague idea that serendipitously emerged as a nation-state, but was popularly imagined as a sovereign Islamic State, a new Medina, as some called it. In this regard, it was envisaged as the harbinger of Islam's renewal and rise in the twentieth century, the new leader and the protector of the global community of Muslims, and a worthy successor of the defunct Turkish Caliphate. The book specifically foregrounds the critical role played by Deobandi ulama in articulating this imagined national community with an awareness of Pakistan's global historical significance. It demonstrates how these ulama collaborated with the Muslim League leadership and forged a new political vocabulary fusing ideas of Islamic nationhood and modern state to fashion decisively popular arguments for the creation of Pakistan.
Venkat Dhulipala is an Associate Professor of History and teaches courses on the history of modern South Asia, comparative colonial histories and introductory surveys in Global History. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Minnesota in 2008. Dr. Dhulipala's next project extends his research interest in the study of India's Partition. Tentatively titled Sundering a Subcontinent: Partition and the birth of modern Indian and Pakistan. It will try to provide a more encompassing narrative of the Partition by linking 'high politics' of the Partition with popular upsurges from below, connection the politics of Muslim minority provinces with those of the Muslim majority provinces, and juxtaposing memories of Partition against the historical record to explore how these diverse ways of representing and remembering the past interact and impact upon the historical imagination in contemporary South Asia. A second project that he is also working on involves a study of the Deobandi ulama's vision of the Islamic state and their quest for its achievement in Pakistan in the nation-state's early days. It analyzes the ulama's relationship with both Muslim modernists as well as Islamists led by Abu Ala Mawdudi as they worked towards competing visions of this goal that later provided inspiration to Islamic movements in the Middle East.
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