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I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today

that such responses of readers altered the serialization of Fasana-e Azad where Sarshar commented on his narrative in light of the letters received. Illustrating pluralistic traditions is a necessary step to undoing nationalist damage in South Asia. Jennifer Dubrow’s analysis in Cosmopolitan Dreams is a much-needed intervention to highlight that Urdu literary history needs to be studied beyond the Hindi–Urdu language divide and that Urdu doesn’t just illustrate Muslim culture of colonial South Asia. Inversely, it also opens the possibility that Muslim writers and their positions on religion, culture and society need to be investigated in other South Asian languages. Crucially, ‘Islamicate’ needs to be dissociated from its exclusive connection with Urdu, Arabic and Persian, and contextualized in other linguistic traditions as well. Yet while religious identity was open ended in Urdu, Dubrow’s claim that Urdu print culture could also eschew identities of caste and even class is a much harder proposition. Indeed, the author herself demonstrates how respectability remained a paramount concern and that ‘the democratizing potential of print existed in tension with readers’ continued attention to social position, a fact pointing to the contested nature of the print public sphere’ (92). Respectability and literacy, crucial to reading and print culture, remained closely imbricated in caste and class positions in South Asia. Dubrow also illustrates how the Hindi–Urdu divide became important to the competition between Avadh Akhbar and Avadh Punch, and the ways in which the attacks of Avadh Punch on Fasana-e Azad highlight the emerging overlap of religious and linguistic communities in the late nineteenth century. It seems then that Urdu’s particular cosmopolitanism had to compete with exclusion that its gatekeepers imposed on the language not only when it was weak but also in its moments of seeming dominance. This, of course, does not erase what its idealism imagined or the dreams it could promise, which Dubrow demonstrates, but that it was perhaps always a fragile space that needed to be protected before it was damaged seriously by the more brazen politics of later times.