Narrating Decline, Imagining Revival: Abdul Halim Sharar and the Reconstruction of Muslim Memory under Colonial Rule

Abstract

This article examines Abdul Halim Sharar (1866–1926) as a case study in how historical fiction functioned as a vehicle for collective memory-making among Indian Muslims under colonial rule. While existing scholarship on Sharar and late-nineteenth-century Urdu literature has explored emotion, reform, and political resistance in the period’s fiction, it has largely treated history as backdrop and has not examined how Sharar deliberately reconstructed Muslim collective memory or used narratives of civilizational decline as a strategy for imagining revival. Addressing this gap, the article traces Sharar’s formation within a declining Lucknow courtly milieu, his theological and journalistic apprenticeship, and his turn to the historical novel following his encounter with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s fiction, situating his major works against the political and intellectual upheavals of the 1900s–1920s, from the Muslim League’s formation and the Morley-Minto Reforms to the Ottoman Caliphate’s collapse and the Khilafat Movement. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of culture as a site of hegemonic negotiation and Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, alongside Georg Lukács’s account of the historical novel and Hayden White’s notion of employment, the article argues that Sharar’s fiction reworked colonial narratives of Muslim decline into emotionally resonant stories of heroism and moral discipline. In doing so, his writing operated simultaneously as an act of historical recovery and a project of communal reinvention, demonstrating that the loss of political sovereignty did not entail the loss of cultural and spiritual identity, and leaving a durable imprint on the subsequent tradition of Urdu historical fiction.

Keywords: Abdul Halim Sharar; Urdu Historical Novel; Collective Memory; Colonial Muslim Identity; Khilafat Movement