Talk by Dilip Menon (Department of International Relations, Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand)

This is a preliminary paper on the remarkable figure of Vakkom Mohd. Maulavi (1873-1932) of Travancore, on the south-western coast of India, through his writings in the journal Deepika, that he edited. The articles spoke to the reforms of Islamic modernism that were ongoing in Egypt (reported in the widely circulated Al Manar), and imagined a space of Indian Ocean Islam. Vakkom Maulavi was also concerned with the question of people’s rights under the rule of the autocratic Maharaja of Travancore. As publisher of the newspaper Svadeshabhimani edited by the redoubtable and intemperate journalist Ramakrishna Pillai, the duo waged a war of words on the questions of ethical governance and popular representation. There has been a tendency in South Asia to study the history of Muslims separately from their conjoined lives with Hindus and those of other religions. This paper thus speaks to the emerging literature on Indian Ocean Islam (Nile Green, Wilson Chacko Jacob, Seema Alavi, Mahmood Kooria et al) while at the same time arguing for the role of Muslim intellectuals in defining a democratic and secular public sphere.

Dilip M. Menon is the Mellon Chair of Indian Studies and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Oxford and Cambridge and earned his PhD from Cambridge. His research for the past decade has engaged with issues of caste, socialism and equality in modern India. He is the author of Caste, nationalism and communism in south India: Malabar, 1900-1948 (Cambridge 1994), The blindness of insight: Essays on caste in modern India (Navayana 2006), The cultural history of Modern India (editor, Social Sciences Press and Berghahn 2006), Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (co-editor, Oxford, 2020), and the translator of Potheri Kunhambu's 1893 Malayalam novel Saraswativijayam (Book Review Literary Trust 2002)

Cosponsored with the South Asia Program