Kavita Datla has written a wide-ranging and eminently readable account of the politics of Urdu-language education in the princely state of Hyderabad in the early twentieth century. Her project is, in part, one of recovery: how is it, she asks, that the secular project of Osmania University's Muslims, embodied in its emphasis on vernacular Urdu education, has come to be effaced in the history of modern Indian nationalism? Drawing on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom and Andhra Pradesh, the author has sought to depart from narratives that assume Urdu to be the linguistic vehicle for a minoritized Muslim communal identity, focusing rather on the efforts of Muslim intellectuals associated with the university to articulate an all-India nationalism in Urdu that was at times sympathetic to the politics of the Congress Party but just as often charting a separate path. In short, the author writes, “what this book describes...
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