Minority Pasts

Dr. Razak Khan is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, Germany. He researches and writes about the socio-cultural, intellectual, and affective history of South Asian Muslimsin Modern India and Germany. He has published articles and edited special issues in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (Brill, 2015) and Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Duke University Press, 2020). He recently also edited The Incomparable Festival (Penguin, 2021).

Although Minority Pasts places Rampur under a specific research lens, the methodology used by Khan could easily be applied to other cities in contemporary India. The topics discussed in the book force us to reassess how we perceive the modern inhabitants of cities whose social groups allegiances have been fractured by the displacements following 1857 and 1947. While Minority Pasts addresses a post-1857 Rohilla society, the broader study of Rohilla culture and history still offers readers access into an untouched area of scholarship that is fruitful to furthering explorations, particularly for the decades following the defeat of the Rohillas by the British in 1774.