6 February 2025. Zehra Kazmi, School of English
Tell us about your research and how it connects to memory/identity studies?
I have recently submitted my thesis titled, “Indo-Muslim Nostalgia: Memory, Modernity and the Nation”. It examines historical memory and nostalgia in South Asian Muslim writing within the context of sectarian violence and cultural disintegration following the Partition. I have analysed the category of the ‘Indo-Muslim’ as existing beyond the grand narrative of nation and showcased how literary nostalgia recuperates Indo-Muslim identity prior to the Partition and the ways in which these maps of memory provide spaces of alterity to question the political present. I contextualise Indo-Muslim nostalgic literary expression by focusing on recent historical events shaping Indo-Muslim society and connecting those with theoretical work in nostalgia studies in the western academy. Focusing on nostalgia, my work highlights the emergence of Indo-Muslim Modernism as a distinct literary phenomenon furthered by post-Progressive Urduphone Muslim writers in the 20th century.° While significant attention has been given to the Marxist Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and its fraught relationship with religious identity, little scholarship exists on the Modernists—an influential but underexplored group of Muslim writers. I have highlighted the ways in which the storytelling and poetic genres of the subcontinent interacted with western, anglophone literary stylings to impact the aesthetic features of Indo-Muslim modernist writing.
What are you working on now?
Currently, besides teaching, preparing for my viva and sending in job applications, I am working on two potential postdoctoral ideas. One of them, which I recently presented on at the School of English PG Forum, is on the literary and cinematic representations of affective architecture in provincial India. This project continues to explore the continuities of memory and literature in South Asia, but I am moving away from my focus on Muslims and the Partition to instead examine the reconfiguration of Indian identity under colonialism by connecting space and its representations.
The other project, which I am still developing, is on the Muslim Gothic in South Asian popular culture.
° I borrow the term Urduphone from historian Sarah Fatima Waheed to denote a shared Indo-Persianate, Hindustani linguistic and literary arena largely present in urban North India and signal the interconnected histories of expression in Urdu and English in postcolonial South Asia.