Enlightenment in the Colony

Aamir R. Mufti is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the coeditor of "Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives" and the editor of "Critical Secularism," a special issue of the journal "boundary 2".

• A Note on Translation and Transliteration ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xv Prologue: Towards a Genealogy of Postcolonial Secularism 1 Part I Emergence: Europe and Its Others Chapter One: Jewishness as Minority Emergence of a European Problematic 37 Chapter Two: Inscriptions of Minority in British Late Imperial Culture From Daniel Deronda to A Passage to India 91 Part II: Displacements: On the Verge of India Chapter Three: Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad Discovering India 129 Chapter Four: Saadat Hasan Manto A Greater Story Writer Than God 177 Chapter Five: Faiz Ahmed Faiz Towards a Lyric History of India 210 Epilogue: In My Beginning Is My End Jewish Exile and the Language of English India 244 Notes 263 Works Cited 295 Index 315

"By the late eighteenth-century...the 'protean Jew' was...'neither outsider nor one of us'. Mufti begins with the 'paradigmatic narratives' of minority existence within a liberal nation state...which constituted the so-called Jewish Question in modern Europe. He is especially concerned with the processes of secularization...[and focuses] on the connections between the violent resolution of the 'Jewish Question' and the formation of 'majoritarian' cultures. Mufti [provides] nuanced and historically grounded accounts of the 'Jewish Question'. At a time when these issues have assumed a renewed urgency--under the febrile sign of a 'new' anti-Semitism--[this] outstanding [book offers] a contextualized and scholarly approach to the subject."--Bryan Cheyette, Times Literary Supplement "Aamir Mufti's Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture offers the most substantial theoretical intervention, one that is likely to have a significant impact on the field in future years."--New Literatures