Sumaira Nawaz will deliver a lecture ‘From the Masjid to the Maiḳhana: Satire in Deoband’s Tajallī, c. 1949–1975’. It will be chaired by Prabhat Kumar.

This lecture examines the satirical column “Masjid se Maiḳhane Tak” (From the Mosque to the Tavern) that featured regularly in the Islamic periodical Tajalli. Launched by Maulana Amir Usmani, a scholar associated with the North Indian seminary Dar ul-Ulum in Deoband, Tajalli challenged binaries between the literary and religious in Urdu print. Unlike contemporary satirical works that mocked the “Maulvi” for his rigidity and pedantic demeanour, Tajalli’s tanziya (satirical) column recast the religious scholar as a figure capable of wit, irreverence, and self-reflexive commentary. By situating the column within the broader context of twentieth-century Urdu satirical literature, this lecture highlights “Masjid se Maiḳhane Tak” as a critical, yet underexplored, force in the development of modern Islamic popular culture and its subversive potential.

Sumaira Nawaz received her PhD from McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies, with a focus on global intellectual history and South-South relations. Her doctoral research, ‘Muslim Periodicals between Worlds, c. 1876-1919,’ foregrounds Persian and Urdu periodicals that connected Muslim editors and readers across the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, Afghanistan and British India. It shows that the rise of global and independent Muslim press was rooted within debates and disagreements over constitutionalism, treatment of minorities and modern information culture.  

Prabhat Kumar is Assistant Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Friday, 22 May 2026, 4.30 pm, CSDS Seminar Room, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054