Conveners: Imre Bangha, Nayanika Mathur, Matthew McCartney, Polly O’Hanlon, Kate Sullivan de Estrada, and David Washbrook
Speaker: Faridah Zaman (Oxford)
In the history of anticolonial internationalism, pan-Islamism occupies a vexed position. Its history prior to the First World War, particularly in India, suggested it could be a friend to nascent anticolonial movements and a vehicle for a critique of European imperialism; after the War, it was vocally supported by India’s most famous anticolonial leader and thinker, M. K. Gandhi, and mobilized Indian support in tandem with the Non-Cooperation Movement, the first all-India nationalist mobilisation in British India. And yet, its most high-profile demonstration – the Indian Khilafat Movement (1919-24) – was a project that sought to defend the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate in the post-War settlement, a goal seemingly out of step with the spirit of nationalist self-determination that pervaded discussions about the future of empires in this moment. The Khilafat Movement appears to sit uneasily, too, with socialist and Communist projects of anticolonial internationalism in this period. This paper revisits the immediate post-War period to ask whether the Indian Khilafat Movement was really so much as odds with the spirit of the 1920s as this account would suggest. It asks in particular whether the movement, bound up in the preservation of a centuries’ old empire, could be perceived as pursuing a form of anticolonial, religious internationalism in this moment – one that transcended anxiety about the future of the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate and drove at broader issues of world-remaking in the aftermath of war.
Faridah Zaman is Associate Professor of the History of Britain and the World at the University of Oxford, and Tutor of Modern History at Somerville College. After completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago before joining Oxford in 2018. Dr Zaman is a historian of the modern British Empire, South Asia, and global intellectual history.
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