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E-book Pious Labor : Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India

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Penilaian

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These verses, extracted from a longer Urdu naz?m or poem, were written by Nazir, a blacksmith and bladesmith based in the North Indian city of Rampur in the mid-twentieth century. I first encountered Nazir and his poetry as part of a collection that the librarians of the renowned Raza Library in Rampur had put together to honor the city’s artisanal and material heritage.2 Nazir’s versified account of his trade immediately grabbed my attention, because it evoked several traditions that, in researching this book, I had come to associate closely with earlier generations of Muslim artisans who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Nazir emphasized God’s revelation of knowledge and skill to blacksmiths, even as he also placed these smiths in a context of industrial labor, in a workshop sub-ject to the whims of a capitalist or sarm?yahd?r,the possessor of wealth. Through his insistence on the smith’s inherent relationship with the divine, and the imagery of the humbled capitalist forced to bow his head to the smith’s God-given prowess, Nazir asserted social status for blacksmiths. Nazir evoked a widespread belief that God had revealed knowledge of blacksmithing to the Prophet Dawud (David) by turning iron to wax in his hands, arguing that the practice of blacksmithing was a pious practice of Islam. In a context where ownership or authority was often ceded to members of the middle class and where artisans had limited control over their materials, styles, and technologies of production, Nazir offered an alternative vision of his trade: he claimed an Islamic, God-given status for blacksmiths, high-lighting not only the economic importance and social dignity of artisan communi-ties but the distinct forms of Muslim piety embedded in their trades. When Nazir asserted a Muslim past and future for his trade, he drew on ideas about the relationship between Islam and artisanship that had been rearticulated, reimagined, and circulated among artisan communities across North India over the course of the previous century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Indian artisans transitioned to new, often industrialized, wage-based sites of work, especially in rapidly expanding cities associated with colonial authority and industry.3 They also engaged with rapid changes in the materiality and technology of their labor, ranging from new plasters to steam engines, and from lithographic presses to electroplating. Muslim artisans asserted religious tra-ditions for their work to make sense of these changes and claim new knowledge. In doing so, they challenged their marginalization within strengthening North Indian social hierarchies, with many contributing to the consolidation of regional working-class identities through an Islamic idiom.Pious Labor provides a history of Muslim laboring cultures in North India, tracing the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experiences and ideas that contributed to Nazir’s portrayal of blacksmithing. It tells the stories of urban met-alsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, boilermakers, carpenters, and press workers across the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh after 1902) and Punjab in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-ries.4Pious Labor traces histories of Muslim culture making from below through creative readings of an overlooked archive of Urdu artisan technical manuals and community histories and with a specific focus on the intersections of embodied and textual knowledge.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

954 LAN p

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2024

Deskripsi Fisik

248 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520398580

Klasifikasi

954

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

History of Modern India, South Asia

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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