This chapter reviews the history, culture and politics of South Asian languages in the UK. South Asian migration to the UK dates back to the British colonial period. It expanded in the twentieth century, first with British Indian participation in the two World Wars and then with post-war British policies that initially encouraged South Asian immigration for low-skilled labour. South Asian communities in Britain share some characteristics but differ markedly in other respects. Overall, sustained migration, relatively large settlements, and a reduction in the early explicit hostility to migrants has meant that South Asian speech communities have tended to maintain their languages, though with inroads by English in each successive generation. South Asian languages initially struggled to be included in school curricula and university provision. Some languages, such as Urdu and Arabic, have wider religious or cultural appeal and see much higher uptake through education than other South Asian languages, even languages with more native speakers. Almost no research has been conducted on structural change within South Asian heritage languages, a rich area for future research on language contact and generational change.

Salman Rushdie’s work has been linked to innovations in form in relation to the genre of the novel. What he has been most credited for is the bringing of subcontinental storytelling traditions into the Indian novel in English. This chapter traces these origins with reference to prose and poetry contexts of Urdu and Hindustani, so important to Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Enchantress of Florence, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Moreover, the chapter considers his engagement with poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a family friend and a much admired poet. Rushdie’s position in relation to Urdu opens up stylistic innovations on his part as well as an indebtedness to the storytellers and writers who have engaged with the tradition/modernity debate before him. This chapter thus considers Rushdie as part of a wider contextual framework of ideas of the secular and sacred on the Indian subcontinent, often neglected in discussions of his work.

Detective or crime fiction has had a long and varied history in South Asia, at times inflected by local concerns, at other times transporting readers into a world of international intrigue. This chapter traces its development from its colonial origins under the aegis of a local boom in print media, ‘intrusive’ colonial law and policing and the influx of European narratives combined with precolonial tropes. The chapter focuses on iconic ‘homegrown’ detectives like Byomkesh Bakshi in the 1930s, the quintessential Bengali gentleman detective engaged in the high pursuit of truth, the debonair detectives Faridi and Imraan created by Indo-Pakistani writer Ibne Safi in the 1950s–1970s, and the heroes of ‘hard-boiled’ Hindi crime fiction in the 1970s–1990s. Crime fiction has also allowed women writers to imagine bold female detectives who challenge and debate gender norms, from Kamala Satthianadhan’s trailblazing Detective Janaki (1934) to Sujatha Massey’s Perveen Mistry. Crime fiction in South Asia has been intensely translational, not just from English but also across South Asian languages. It has pioneered its own distribution channels and spawned adaptations across media platforms.

The controversy over Angāre in the early 1930s has always been interpreted as a contest between religious and secular forces given the furor around the publication for being “blasphemous.” Turning to relevant legislation in the period, contextualizing debates around blasphemy in the legal and literary spheres, and analyzing responses to the text, I problematize assumptions behind seeing the controversy as one about religion vs. secularism. I argue that the text and the reception to it is best read as a crisis over ethics within the colonized, Urdu-speaking Muslim upper classes of urban North India, who were beginning to stake their raison d’etre and sense of selfhood on minority political status. This status had enormous consequences a decade later in the demand for Pakistan. This chapter shows how this early controversy was about how a class of Indian Muslims were identifying as an ethical community, not a religious one.

A historiography of South Asian Muslim nationalism and the place of Urdu progressive literature within a broader political context of independence struggles against colonial rule in India and Pakistan.

The sixth chapter focuses on Victorian anxieties about the empire’s powerful women, as reflected in Yusuf Khan Kambalposh’s Urdu travelogue, Tarikh-i-Yusufi. Published in 1847, it records the dreamlike vision of the Lucknow Muslim captain who arrived in England on August 1837 and three months later witnessed Queen Victoria’s stately procession for the Lord Mayor’s feast. In Yusuf’s eyes, this spectacle renders Britain a fairyland, an immersive virtual world indeterminately woven with the actual and the artificial. Its wonders emanate from visual recreations like Astley’s Amphitheater, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Diorama, the Colosseum, Vauxhall Gardens, Madam Tussauds Wax Museum, and the British Museum – what he calls “magic houses” that connect disparate geographies, creeds, and languages virtually. Through his repartee with female fairies in these tourist sites, he imagines an ephemeral empire of strangers. Refashioning his masculinity in this empire, he behaves like the autonomous subject of a new female monarch who is yet to become an icon of imperial self-confidence.

The Bengal delta now became part of Pakistan, a uniquely complex post-colonial state: founded upon religious nationalism; administering two discrete territories, separated from each other by about 1,500 km of Indian terrain; and not heir to any of the colony’s central state institutions. Tensions between West and East Pakistan immediately surfaced. East Pakistani grievances crystallised around the question of the national language (Urdu or Bengali), leading to the language movement. After a decade the army stepped in, establishing a military dictatorship that would dominate the remaining years of ‘united Pakistan’.

In this chapter, the author describes language as a location and the site of belonging, as well as a political tool for the empowering of one linguistic over another within a particular province and nation. It also describes the struggle to link Muslims with Urdu, thereby isolating both and deepening existing fractures in society, alongside attempts to privilege Sanskrit over all other ancient and modern languages.