Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals

This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity and crucial aspects of the historical forces that conditioned the development of the Muslim modern in late colonial South Asia. It traces the legal process that, since the 1860s, recast a Shia Imami identity for the Ismailis, and explicates the public career of Imam Aga Khan III amid heightened religious internationalism since the late-nineteenth century, the age of 'religious internationals'. It sheds light and elaborates on the enduring legacies of questions such as the Aga's understanding of colonial modernity, his ideas of India, restructured modalities of community governance and the evolution of Imamate-sponsored institutions, key strands in scholarship that characterized the development of the Muslim and Shia Ismaili modern, and Muslim universality vis-à-vis denominational particularities that often transcended the remits of the modular nation and state structure.

Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Glossary; Note on transliteration; Introduction; 1. The Khoja Ismailis and legal polemics: religion and customs in nineteenth-century Bombay; 2. The Howardian moment: morality, Aryanism and scholarship; 3. Pan-Islamism and an Asiatic spirit: postnational subjectivities in an age of 'transition'; 4. The Hazir Imam, Ismailism and Islam in late Colonial South Asia; 5. The importance of being Ismaili: religious normativity and the Ismaili International in the age of global assemblages; Concluding reflections; Select bibliography.

Soumen Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of History at Presidency University, Kolkata. His research interests are in the fields of socio-religious and intellectual history of modern South Asia, with particular focus on questions of identity, religious normativity and social service, sacred travels and sacred space, and on the intersection of religious traditions and scientism. He is also interested in histories of South Asian diasporas and religious networks on the Indian Ocean, and in understanding religious and cultural encounters on the Himalayan borderlands.