Associational culture and civic engagement in colonial Lucknow

Abstract

Despite their importance in forging notions of civility, civic engagement and political participation, nineteenth century voluntary associations have received little attention in the growing body of literature on the rise and nature of civil society in India. This article explores the mutually constitutive relationship between voluntary association and middle-class formation through the example of the Jalsah-e Tahzib (est. 1868), the first voluntary society in colonial Lucknow. A cross-communal alliance of Hindus and Muslims, representing the city's traditional service elites and new professional classes, the Jalsah provided a secular forum of discourse and action to an emerging middle class in search of self-determination and empowerment. In investigating the association's public-sphere activities, its role as a self-styled intermediary between the colonial state and its Indian subjects and its transformation from a literary-cultural society into a politically vocal body, I argue that voluntary association afforded a space for cultural self-assertion and critical participation eminently suited to the aspirations of the new hybrid middle class. In highlighting the vernacular character of Indian associational culture, the article seeks to demonstrate how a more rigorous engagement with the vernacular archive will provide a better understanding of the social and intellectual networks that created the fabric of Indian civic life.

Rifah-e Aam Club, Lucknow: Public sphere and public space in urban India

“…While the following section of this article on the Club's contemporary spatial setting and the section on 'State-led public, informalization of the state, goonda raj' rest on long-term ethnographic work in the neighborhood, the two historical sections complement this with Ulrike Stark's historiography (Stark 2011) and Congress records from between 1900 and 1940, respectively. As a red thread, the oral history of the Club's then caretaker Pandey-Ji weaves all four sections of the article together, building on almost weekly, often hour-long conversations with him throughout 2012.…”

Akbar or Aurangzeb? Ethics, Empire, and Print Publics in Colonial India

“…20Stark, “Associational Culture and Civic Engagement.” Urdu publicists and intellectuals associated with the Jalsah-e Tahzib , as Stark explores, began to translate “public good” as rifah-I ‘am .…”

“…As Farina Mir has suggested of the Punjabi Hir-Ranjha epic that moved across multiple genres and registers over the centuries, 18 I will argue that stories of Mughal rulers circulating through the Indian-language press provided a sociocultural meeting place, but also a shared political language that linked older "templates of justice" 19 with nineteenthcentury understandings of the public good. 20 The nineteenth-century Indian print world that Bhatt entered in the 1870s was a site of experimentation with new genres and new ways of integrating news and entertainment, both to sell copy and to shape public opinion. Indian papers were, like many early newspapers worldwide, highly diverse containers.…”

Urban Mythologies and Urbane Islam: Refining the Past and Present in Colonial-Era Lucknow

“…Their appropriation of an Anglicised vocabulary of aspirations such as 'improvement', 'progress' and 'public good' comprised, as memorably put by Douglas Haynes, a 'conceptual straitjacket' by which these organisations further embedded colonial hegemony in India's associational life (Haynes 1991: 145-6, Chatterjee 1986. While this framework has been heavily applied in studies of colonial India's urban public sphere, it has been both implicitly and explicitly critiqued by a number of excellent recent studies of colonial Lucknow (Joshi 2001, Stark 2011, Perkins 2013). Many of these have shown that the array of public associations that emerged in Lucknow did not, like some larger 'All India' organisations, simply appear to emulate colonial deliberative models, but instead often seemed to ground themselves in motifs and symbols drawn from the city's mythologised history.…”

“…The earliest significant organisation of this kind was the Anjuman-i-Hind-i-Awadh, a landlord-based group set up in 1861 to petition the government on the loyal ta'luqdari (landholding) interest, which ultimately set a prototype for the emergence of a wider inventory of middle-class and professional associations. The Jalsa-i-Tehzib, founded in 1868 by a number of Hindu and Muslim government officials and journalists, was more deeply rooted among the city's urban literati; it sought to provide a new forum for discussing issues of public significance (Stark 2011). By the 1890s, the more openly political Rifah-i-'Am was active in pressing a particular vision of the 'common good' as was embedded in its own title, making representations before the colonial bureaucracy on this basis.…”