17 October 2019 at 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Scholars have long been interested in Jewish-Muslim connections, but despite the long and crucial presence of both Muslim and Jewish communities on the subcontinent, they have received little attention in South Asian studies. I suggest that Indian Jewish literature reframes both Indian history and Jewish-Muslim solidarity outside the subcontinent, by challenging the memory of partition and reclaiming a narrative of lost, Indigenous cosmopolitanism. More precisely, I argue that Jewish-Muslim commensality is at the heart of this cosmopolitan vision, recasting the home as the center of cosmopolitan experience rather than the public realm of political life.
