The emergence of the largest “army” of nonviolence on the heavily policed North-West Frontier of British India is a unique yet silenced history. The Khudai Khidmatgars, or the Servants of God, were organized to reform Pashtun society through modern means: education, the emancipation of women and the reinterpretation of traditions, especially of normative violence. They became an anti-colonial resistance movement after the Peshawar Riots of 1930 and, despite being brutalized by colonial authorities, the ranks of this “army” swelled to a hundred thousand volunteers in a relatively short span of time. Almost every household in the Province had a member enlisted in the grassroots Khudai Khidmatgar army, and yet this remarkable phenomenon remains unrecognized in global narratives of nonviolent resistance. The idea of Pashtun nonviolence was so contrary to long-standing tropes classifying them as an intrinsically violent and martial race—with the additional tropology of Islam as an intrinsically violent religion—that it silenced this unique expression through the dominant representational framework which categorized them as such. Generally called the “Pathans,” I use “the figure of the Pathan” as a signifier for the epistemological framework that produce both the tropology and the silences. Moreover, by reading colonial literary and ethnographic representations against the grain, I trace how this figure was produced in tandem with the tripartite, north-western frontier of imperial India, which, although one of the first “scientific” borders of India, has not received the scholarly attention it merits.

In contrast, how nonviolence was embodied on such a massively, popular scale becomes much clearer in reading the rarely analyzed Pashto resistance literature of the Khudai Khidmatgars, one that included a significant number of women contributors writing in their journal the Pukhtūn. By closely reading this heretofore unexamined literature, the women’s discourse in particular discloses the quotidian ways in which nonviolence was embodied through altered constellations of normativity affecting subject formation. I also contest the hitherto scant scholarly literature explaining Khudai Khidmatgar nonviolence as an exception of the Pashtun habitus, one that is credited to the exemplary character of Abdul Ghaffar Khan alone. More widely known as the Frontier Gandhi, or Bāchā Khan in the vernacular, he is attributed to have singlehandedly transformed the Pashtuns to the ideology of nonviolence, yet who, in turn, is classified as merely a follower of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Instead, by reading their vernacular literature I argue that the Khudai Khidmatgars were positing a new kind of political altogether by interpreting nonviolence through local registers: the indigenous codes of Pashtunwali, including local forms of radical democracy, the discourse of a liberatory Islam—especially calling upon its poetic metaphors of ecstatic enlightenment—and an anarchic nonstate imaginary. I compare Khudai Khidmatgar self-representations of nonviolence, in which love, friendship and justice were central concepts, with Jacques Derrida’s formulation of “a politics of friendship.” In opposing the normative political, one that Carl Schmitt articulates through the “friend-enemy” binary, this new political in particular posed an anarchic threat to colonial state structures. As such, they were always more suspect and policed much more harshly than other nationalist movements of the time, while their location upon the strategic yet ever-restive North-West Frontier of Imperial India justified the brutal disciplinary measures constantly meted out against them.

Given that the postcolonial nation-state of Pakistan was also grounded upon the normative political of the colonial state, the Khudai Khidmatgars were, inevitably, charged with sedition in 1948 and the movement and its literature destroyed, while its history defamed and distorted through state narratives. Right before the partition of India, therefore, the call for Pashtunistan represented, as I postulate, not only Ghaffar Khan’s utopian aspirations but was premised upon the new politics of friendship that had been painstakingly cultivated. A political toward which Gandhi’s own utopian vision of “enlightened anarchy” also aspired but which the Khudai Khidmatgars had made concerted efforts to actualize in their own terms. Therefore, as the vernacular literature aptly illustrates, the philosophy of nonviolence represented a much broader and a much more ambitious endeavor than narrow definitions of the term denote; more than merely a non-engagement with physical violence the Khudai Khidmatgar articulation was a radically new narrative for organizing communities differently, one that resonates with silent significations and urgently calls upon us to examine more closely today.

This dissertation pursues the literary-historical tracks of the image repertoire of "boy-love" (amradparasti) versified for over two centuries in the Urdu ghazal. It critically engages with key positions in sexuality studies and ghazal criticism that have reduced this theme to visible sexuality, submerging its historical narrative elements. It is a part of my argument to show why the ghazal (as genre and predominant form of poetry) matters to the study of modern South Asian identities (sexual and political) and what historical forces have operated through its aesthetic lineaments to give it the illusion of traditional cultural continuity.

The dissertation is divided into two parts presenting the concentric circles of a historical problematic including poetry, sexual representation, the colonial archive and historiography. In Chapter One, I broadly describe colonial reformism in which sexuality emerged as a category of social and intimate experience. My aim is to show that modern sexual identities (e.g. homosexual) belong to a nationalist problematic whose assumptions are still with us in our postcolonial, `sexually liberated' era. Chapter Two narrows the genealogical focus on "boy-love" as a distinct historical-narrative element in the ghazal as well as in literary-historical recountings of its tradition. This chapter mirrors the larger argument as it places reformist (Hali), postcolonial (Firaq) and premodern (Yaqin) meditations on the image of the beautiful boy in the same argument.

In Part Two, I cross the threshold of the premodern into the South-Asian eighteenth century but not before delineating, in Chapter Three, the historiographic roadblocks in transitioning from categories of modern analysis (the state, family, subjectivity, identity) into the pre-existing social unities of premodern life. I make a critique of revisionist historiography to argue against a naively mimetic and sentimental understanding of literary objects from the past and posit the condensation of an erotic terrain in the rhetorical and vignette-like patterns of `classical' ghazal poetry. To highlight the operation of this terrain I study the formation of the boy-love image repertoire as part of the vernacularizing process from which elements of later "Urdu" first emerged. The exemplary figures here include the satiric-obscene verse of Jafar Zatalli and the iham set of poets (Abru and Naji in particular)

Finally, Chapter Four presents the case of Muhammad Taqi Mir and through the canonized stability of his oeuvre I draw the outer form of its erotic content as a social value form in whose negative relation with social conditions, a historical expanse becomes possible to imagine. In the final turn to Mir, I demonstrate that it is possible to read historical forms of subjectivity in the heavily routinized idiom of the ghazal, and not settle for a depoliticized history of surfaces (images, representations, typologies) which has been the fate of the ghazal and several other expressive practices in the postcolonial world.

From Oliver Twist to Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp to Jude Fawley, the nineteenth-century British literary horizon is replete with orphans. Both their ubiquity and prominence in so many canonical texts raises a question. Namely, how do figures often associated with social and material abjection -- "Please sir, I want some more" -- take center stage in a narrative form profoundly connected to the individuality and agency of the modern subject? My dissertation answers this question by making a case for what I call orphanhood as a central thematic in the history of the novel. Rather than fabricate some key to all orphans, I argue that the figuration of orphanhood crystallizing in the nineteenth-century British novel provided a discursive space to imagine modern individuated life--something made up of an infinite web of affiliations. Taken together, the different narratives and histories I analyze over four chapters highlight how orphans showcase some of the ideal qualities of bourgeois individuality: deracinated, mobile, and above all, blank. In this sense, orphanhood can help us understand the link between literary production and the Empire, an imaginative venture that inscribed Britishness on a blank and colonizable map of the world. Accordingly, I have built my dissertation around three authors who exemplify the formal, geographic, and temporal globality of the nineteenth-century "British" novel: Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. In my concluding chapter on W.G. Sebald, I show how long after the bond between national languages and literature has been broken, orphanhood remains a perch to view the rise of the global individuality of the refugee as well as the transformations taking place in what is coming to be called the Global English novel.

Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris compares the formal differences of 20th and 21st century British South Asian novels and French North African novels that depict the lives and spaces of urban immigrant communities while attending to historical contingency, legal archives, and public debates. This dissertation argues that novels of immigration bridge a transition from the categorical binaries of (post)coloniality to the multitudes of globalization. Fluctuations in legal and public discourse surrounding immigration profoundly affect the lived spaces of immigrant populations, and the literary rendering of these communities and neighborhoods reveals the volatile and productive forms of identity, solidarity, and radicalness that arise in the immigrant enclave. I examine not only the encounter between Europeans and postcolonial immigrants in the enclave, but also different kinds of immigrant figures—the intellectual and the laborer, the urban and the rural, the Caribbean and the South Asian, the Antillean and the North African, the Muslim and the Hindu. The confrontation between different categories of immigrants plays out not only in the content of novels of immigration, but also on the level of form. My research investigates the relationship between vacillations in the status of immigrants in 20th century Britain and France and shifts in novelistic style across eight novels. I analyze the depiction of South Asians in London in novels by Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Monica Ali, which are placed in comparison with French novels depicting North Africans in Paris by Rachid Boudjedra, Driss Chra?bi, Le?la Sebbar, and Le?la Marouane. By transposing, and thereby complicating, the postcolonial problematics of hybridity, hegemony, and subalternity onto the contemporary European metropole, my dissertation challenges the geographic divide between center and periphery in conceptions of global culture—from theories of economic world systems to recent discussions of world literature. Other Cities posits the novel of immigration as the most symptomatic literary category through which to read the contemporary anxieties endemic to postcoloniality and globalization.

This dissertation examines the reception of Urdu and Persian ghazal poetry in primitivist scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While seventeenth and early eighteenth-century poets writing in Urdu or Persian would have regarded the Indo-Persian ghazal as a cosmopolitan literary tradition, starting in the eighteenth century, scholars begin to represent ghazal conventions in ‘naturalistic’ terms that seek to imagine it as a folk tradition. I highlight the discourses of ‘nature’ in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Anglophone and Urdu literary scholarship to illustrate the particular challenges that writers faced in assessing the ghazal by primitivist standards of authentic expression. I demonstrate how the reengineering of the ghazal towards more ‘natural expression’ sought to transform ghazal poetry into a literary tradition that represented its ‘people’.

The colonial conquests of the European nation-state and the ascendance of science and technology within European society characterize the modern era. Among those French writers who ventured into the non-European world, Eugène Fromentin, Victor Segalen, André Gide, and Michel Leiris saw how a politics of representation inheres in the literary task of describing the world peoples. In questioning the limits of their worldview and their aesthetic training, as well as the limits of European knowledge, these writers begin to articulate new forms of literary description. In their works, description emerges as a multi-tiered forum of representation in which epistemological and aesthetic thinking conditioned by an ethical principle shapes textual practice. Ethnographic textual production forms the outward limit of what these literary writers consider aesthetic. In their minor tradition, these writers move beyond the picturesque for more ethically minded descriptions of world peoples.

This dissertation considers the foundation of discourses of Orientalism and Postcolonialism in representations of the Caucasus in the literature of Russians and Muslims of the empire from 1828 through 1920. From the mid-nineteenth century through World War I, the Russian empire continued an era of expansion, colonizing the diverse ethnic and cultural territories of the Muslim Caucasus and Central Asia. The oil boom, the creation of an international Turkic language press, the spread of Russian language education and the construction of the Transcaspian Baku-Batumi Railroad during this period all contributed to the development of a cosmopolitan literary and artistic scene in the administrative and industrial capitals of Tbilisi and Baku. While discussions about the destiny of the Russian Empire - its relationship to the European Enlightenment, Byzantium and its own imperial acquisitions percolated in Moscow and Petersburg, debates about the role of Islam and language politics as well as Pan-Turkic, Pan-Islamic and proletarian discourses of identity dominated discussions among writers and thinkers in the Caucasus. Russian writers imagined a civic identity amidst an expanding empire, and in so doing, they represented the Caucasus as a space of freedom, heroism and spiritual enlightenment. I trace the ways in which Muslim writers and thinkers of the Caucasus translated and transformed this imaginary, debating the role of Islam and language politics in the construction of supranational discourses of cultural, ethnic and political identity. Building on Edward Said's theory of Orientalism and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of narrative discourse, I present a portrait of the intellectual milieu between a series of intertextual encounters across Europe, Russia and the Turkic Muslim world.

My dissertation is organized into four chapters, each of which addresses intertextual encounters in these diverse literary traditions. My first chapter, "Heterodoxy and Heteroglossia: Axundov on the Threshold of Russian Literature" discusses Mirza Fatali Akhundov's contribution to the foundation of a modern Azeri literary tradition through his invocation of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin's orientalist literary legacy. Drawing upon Pushkin's representation of the Caucasian imaginary as a prophetic legacy of freedom, Axundov generates supranational texts that incorporate diverse Islamic, Russian and European theological, philosophical, cultural and political discourses. My second chapter, "Prisoners of the Caucasian Imaginary: Lermontov and Kazy-Girei's Heroes in Exile" examines the idea of heroism in Russian Romantic representations of the Caucasus through the Caucasian tales of Mikhail Iur'evich Lermontov and a Russophone story by the Adyghe writer Sultan Kazy-Girei. I illustrate the ways Kazy-Girei contests and expands the ideas of heroism embedded in Russian representations of the Caucasus through his foundational contribution to Muslim Russophone literature. My third chapter, "Textual Deviance in Russian Empire: Gogol' and Mammedquluzadeh's Parodic Innovations," discusses the comedic space of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Comparing the works of Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol and the Azeri writer Jalil Mammedquluzadeh, I discuss the role of textual deviance in Russian literature. Though Gogol's work entered a supranational Soviet literary space through his appropriation by Formalist literary critics, this chapter highlights the importance of his work in the literature of the Muslims of the Russian empire more broadly, as well the early twentieth century in the Caucasus. My final chapter, "Translating Early Twentieth Century Baku: The Romantic Poetic Futures of the Russian and Azeri Avant-gardes," examines the role of Romantic poetics in the emergence of revolutionary and early Soviet politics. I compare the works of Russian writers in Baku, including Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh, Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Maiakovskii to the works of the Azeri writers Abbas Sahhat, Mehammed Hadi, and Mikayil Rafili. In so doing, this chapter illustrates the role of the Baku avant-garde in shaping Soviet hegemony, as well as diverse forms of anti-imperial agency. This moment in the formation of the Soviet Union, envisioned from the vantage point of the Caucasus, frames my discussion of the architecture of a supranational literary tradition informed by Russian Orientalism, anti-imperial Soviet hegemony, and postcolonial politics.

This dissertation positions itself within the disciplines of English and Comparative Literature, its specific intervention in the areas of translation studies, eighteenth-century fiction in English, colonial culture and pedagogy in nineteenth-century India, Urdu prose fiction, and world literature. I argue that the Oriental tale, a popular form in metropolitan England, produced tropes of despotism, homelessness, and itinerancy around the figure of the Muslim over the course of the eighteenth century that eventually travel from the metropolis to the Oriental space itself. The European idea of what I call an Islamicate Orient, therefore, is premised on the notion of a roving and transient empire best exemplified in a series of works that include Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights' Entertainments (~1707), Frances Sheridan's The History of Nourjahad (1762), and William Beckford's Vathek (1786). These tropes are then replicated and reinforced in the late eighteenth-century scholarly Orientalism around the Indian colony, most noticeably and influentially, in the work of Nathaniel Halhed and William Jones. The Muslim, in texts such as Jones' Discourses (1784-9) presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, emerges as alien and invader to the original civilization that the British Orientalists claim to discover in India. The second part of the dissertation shows how a system of colonial pedagogy that begins with the establishment of Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800 becomes a conduit through which the arguments of the metropolitan Oriental tale travel from the European republic of letters into the Oriental space itself. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Fort William curriculum, designed largely for the linguistic instruction of Company officers in India, is disseminated through a colonial nexus of native schools. The critical contradiction produced here lies between the English desire to cultivate a "vernacular" language through which to govern, and the loosely, yet purposefully arranged local language complex the Orientalists encounter in north-India of which Urdu is hardly suited for universal utility. Texts commissioned at the College, including Bāġ-o Bahār (1804), modeled as an Oriental tale in a native Indian language, are mistakenly categorized under the names "Urdu" or "Hindi," causing, in the case of the former, a cleft tradition of prose writing. In the years following the Mutiny of 1857 and the fall of the titular Mughal throne, the association of the idea of a "literature" with native pedagogy becomes increasingly directed towards an infant, but emerging class of Muslim bourgeoisie. Just how deeply tropes of the metropolitan Oriental tale come to inhabit writing in the colonially sponsored vernaculars is best illustrated in Nazir Ahmad's reformist fictions, Mirāt al-`Arūs (1868), Taubat al-Naşūĥ (1872), and Ibn ul Vaqt (1888). In the first two of these novel-like works, bourgeois Muslims struggle to define themselves against both the plebian and the aristocratic, but also seem to mark themselves as essentially displaced in India, their true center located in the abstract notions of an Islamic center. I read the final text as a somber depiction of the inability of the Muslim to thrive in an empire that is not his own. The Oriental tale, then, finds a home in these reformist fictions, but with transformative effects on the way Muslim culture comes to define itself in colonial and independent India.