Hybridity in the Vernacular: Nineteenth-Century Muslim Reform and Resistance

Extract

[W]hat attracted Nussooh's immediate attention was a cabinet of books. There was a large collection of volumes; but whether Persian or Urdu, all were of the same kind, equally indecent and irreligious. Looking to the beauty of the binding, the excellence of the lithography, the fineness of the paper, the elegance of the style, and the propriety of the diction, Kulleem's books made a valuable library, but their contents were mischievous and degrading; and after Nussooh had examined them one by one, he resolved to commit them also to the flames.

—Nazir Ahmad, The Repentance of Nussooh

In the past twenty-five years, no theoretical conception has summed up the complexity of the colonial experience, and the possibilities of its interpretation, as well as Homi K. Bhabha's “hybridity.” “he sign of the productivity of colonial power,” but also the “name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal,” hybridity exposes the uncomfortable state in which colonial culture settled and expanded and, today, continues to beleaguer the state of being “postcolonial” (Bhabha 112). Signiied by the “discovery of the book,” hegemony was marked by the miracle of an object that was at once authoritative and unknowable, one that the supposedly unlettered native could hold in reverent hands (102). In the dark space of the native's hands and narrated within a native register, however, the “colonial text emerges uncertainly” (107). he intent to civilize and anglicize a body of social, religious, and aesthetic practices in the colony, then, is adulterated, perhaps even unconsciously resisted, once it is disseminated by way of the seemingly irrefutable book.