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This essay casts light on the alternative but unrealized futures imagined through the Indian Muslim encounter with Japan in the inter-war period. Echoing other attempts to destabilize the empire-to-nation teleology of Indo-Pakistani independence, the essay uncovers a set of aspirations, actors, and spaces of comparison by which Indian Muslims sought an independent future for Muslim-ruled princely states such as Hyderabad. Through comparison with similar patterns in other Asian princely states, a case study of Urdu writings on Japan shows how East Asia became a place to imagine for Hyderabad a future that never came to fruition. By locating India in a trans-Islamic pattern of engaging Japan, the essay shows how, between the Russo-Japanese War and the Second World War, Japan provided newly globalized intellectuals with a template for empowering Muslim-ruled polities that either never came into existence or were subsumed by Asia's postcolonial nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the impact of nineteenth century religious reform on the voicing of mystical experience in Urdu poetry. Shifting the focus away from the better-known literary milieu of colonial North India, the article turns towards the more neglected setting of princely Hyderabad. By setting the mystical lyrics produced there by Iftikhar 'Alī Shah Watan (d. 1324/1906) in relation to the poetry of his contemporaries, it argues that in a new public sphere in which poems were distributed through print no less than performance the poetry of mystical experience took on more morally conservative idioms that eschewed the sensual metaphors of older Urdu and Persian tradition. In this way, the article highlights the compromises that Sufi poets were required to undertake to protect their message from the critiques of moral impropriety that were a potent force in literary no less than religious debates during India's fin-de-siecle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]