IISA 2024 | Vernacular Sufi texts & Hindu-Muslim contexts with Afsar Mohammad

Recorded as part of the online colloquium, Interreligious interactions in South Asia. 3 April 2024.
Focusing on the early publications between 1900 and 1920, this presentation discusses how the early phase of print culture in Telugu produced a wide variety of Sufi texts- both original writings in Telugu and then the translations from various Islamic languages. Circulated widely as chapbooks and popular editions, these texts were successful in creating a dialogue between Muslims and Hindus as related to pluralism and religious diversity. Although a similar paradigm extends further into contemporary times after the advent of Hindu nationalism, I will show how such a history of interactions paved the way for a counter-narrative to the mainstream literary cultures in Telugu.  
About the speaker
Afsar Mohammad is an internationally acclaimed South Asian scholar working on Hindu-Muslim interactions in the Telugu-Urdu speaking states of Telangana and Andhra in South India. Afsar is now teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and he recently published "Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad" with the Cambridge University Press. He previously published "The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India" with the Oxford University press in 2013. 
This series was convened by Hina Khalid (Cambridge), Pranav Prakash (Oxford) and Ankur Barua (Cambridge) with support from the Cambridge Interfaith Programme.