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In the early modern period, Persian scholars deliberated on the complexities in the Islamic doctrines in distinct ways. Several Sufis and scholars engaged in intellectual debates regarding ideal Muslim conduct. This paper focuses on 'Abd al-Haqq Muhaddis Dehlawi (1551–1642)—a polymath with specialised training in the Ḥadīs̤ and Sufism—to situate his ideas within the larger intellectual discourse about Islam in South Asia. On account of his training and scholastic approach, an a priori label of orthodoxy and revivalism is associated with 'Abd al-Haqq. However, his letters to Mughal courtiers and his Sufi taz̠kirāt showcase his complex pedagogy as a scholar of Islamic praxis and Sufism. This paper delineates his lucid approach in underlining Islamic tenets and the history of the Sufis in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the thought of the Indian revolutionary and philosopher M.N. Roy (1887–1954). The essay argues that Roy's pivot from Marxism to a liberal 'New Humanism' over the course of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by his thinking about fascism and represents a broader turn away from a materialist reading of history and loss of confidence in the Indian working class. The paper begins with an analysis of Roy's early communism, and considers his later critique, elaborated from the 1930s onwards, that 'Gandhism' represented an Indian form of fascism, and explores how these arguments led to his rejection of Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an interpretation of the Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project as a new archive for studying the intellectual history of South Asia. It explains that an important outcome of the nexus between oral history and intellectual history is the construction of an 'unintended autobiography' of each subject interviewed in the project. By considering the centrality of autobiography, the paper offers insights into rethinking the methodological approaches to writing the intellectual history of South Asia. Finally, it provides a reading of Partha Chatterjee's seminal writings, along with his oral history, as a way to consider the convergence of autobiography with political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the roots of a Hindu nationalist economic agenda. Beginning with a critical overview of Deendayal Upadhyaya's economic manifesto, Integral Humanism (1965), it delineates the eclectic set of ideas drawn together by this early Hindu nationalist leader to formulate an alternative ethical and economic agenda from either centralised planning or its liberal critics. The paper then gauges the influence of Integral Humanism on two successive Hindu nationalist political parties. The analysis shows more discernable influence on the economic position of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (1951-77) than on its successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party (from 1980). The conclusion offers some observations as to why this is the case, and outlines prospects for the economic future of India under a Hindu nationalist government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on intellectual histories of the Global South explore the nature of inheritance and the incorporation of ideas from diverse places into colonial and post-colonial histories. Though research into the histories of science, liberalism and nationalism have multifaceted reference points in the discipline of history, histories of intellectuals in conversation with the history of decolonisation remain a missing link in the history of the twentieth century. Through engagement with the 'Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project' (BIOHP), this paper argues that intellectuals from West Bengal, India, maintained a complex vector of inheritance with Western social thought when contrasted with their East Bengali/Pakistani/Bangladeshi counterparts. The primary interlocutors of eastern Bengali intellectuals were not 'the West', but were western Bengal, inside a regional, as opposed to an increasingly global, audience and marketplace of Indian intellectuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines connections between biological anthropology in India and Nazi German anthropology, particularly through Profulla Chandra Biswas (1904–84), a Nazi sympathiser and founding head of the University of Delhi's Department of Anthropology. Influenced by his PhD supervisor, Nazi anthropologist Eugen Fischer, Biswas propagated eugenics ideologies and used them to advance his academic career and determine foundational priorities for one of the largest anthropology departments in the Indian subcontinent. Ethnographic fieldwork from a kinship perspective demonstrates that although they are often forgotten by present-day anthropologists, efforts to 'cut off' these intellectual genealogies merely allow their intellectual and ethical legacies to continue without critical reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a thematic and methodological introduction to the Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project. This interpretive oral history collection reckons with and complicates the over-representation of Bengalis in the study of South Asian intellectual history. As editors, we propose a new framework to study intellectual life in the period of decolonisation—the study of Third World humanities from South Asian perspectives. We situate West Bengal and Bangladesh as important, but obviously not exclusive, vantage points from which to explore formations of Third World thought from the 1940s to the 1980s. Methods in oral history collecting and curation help us to comprehend the intelligibility of Third World humanities expressed from regionally grounded, and diasporically mobile, South Asian perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The short-lived geopolitical entity, East Pakistan (1947-71), left a deep impact on its successor state, Bangladesh, through the networks of intellectual kinship it enabled for its young elites who subsequently became Bangladesh's nation-builders. Drawing on memory studies and literary critical reading methods, I examine the testimonies of nine such elites interviewed by the 'Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project' (BIOHP), alongside their writings published before and after the creation of Bangladesh. This first sustained account of East Pakistan's intellectual legacy thus also illustrates how a post-colonial intellectual history may be extracted from oral histories as the private and inchoate domain of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses M.C. Siddi Lebbe's (d. 1898) Sufi treatise,Asrarul Alam(Mysteries of the Universe), with attention to the literary networks operating among late nineteenth-century South Asian Muslims. The diversity of Lebbe's source material and complexity of his argumentation signal his broad engagement with Islamic thought old and new, foreign and local, Arabic and Tamil. Furthermore, Lebbe cast his literary network especially wide, incorporating non-Islamic ideas like theosophy and yoga from Euro-American and Indic sources as foils for the explication of Sufism. This philosophical mosaic in turn sparked debate among Muslim scholars.Asrarul Alambecame an impetus for identity definition in a controversy that involved high stakes in translation choices and the unique complexities of works by a trilingual author such as Lebbe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]