DFG Project  “Hamid Dalwai: Democratic Socialism and Muslim Politics in India, 1947-1977”

In this project, Deepra Dandekar explores the vernacular intellectual history and legacy of mid-twentieth century Indian Muslim political thinker Hamid Dalwai (1932-1977) whose activism spans the three decades between Indian independence and Partition in 1947 and the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Writing searingly on the predicaments of Indian Muslims, Hamid Dalwai, a self-professed socialist, critiqued Indian Muslims for clinging to colonial-period debates that he argued, produced them as an identarian group. Dalwai was a humanist and secularist, and well-known in the public sphere of postcolonial India, especially as the founder of the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal in Pune that still continues with his legacy. Dalwai wrote relentlessly and fearlessly on questions of Muslim women’s rights in intense essays, novels, and short stories and was a rare voice advocating for a secular uniform civil code for Muslim women. Though he wrote almost entirely in Marathi, the vernacular of Bombay Presidency, Dalwai discussed national-level issues that concerned all Indian Muslims. The significance of Dalwai’s political and intellectual contribution is unique, possibly constituting an epistemic third space between the views of religiously-oriented political Hindus and Muslims of his times that provides us with new insight on the diversity of Muslim voices in India. 

This project seeks to make new space for an analysis of vernacular history from the global south. Dalwai’s contributions inform national and global intellectual debates on the relevance of democratic socialism that disturbs predefined categories surrounding Muslim identity, religion, and reform in modern India. 

This project is part of Dandekar’s sustained interest in vernacular intellectual history, translation, life narrating and writing, biographies and autobiographies from 19th and 20th-century South Asia.