Print and the Urdu public : Muslims, newspapers, and urban life in colonial India / Megan Eaton Robb.

Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)--University of Oxford, 2014.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: A Public is a Place and Time: Dimensions of an Urdu Public Sphere -- Putting the Public House of Madīnah on the Muslim Map -- Back to the Future Qasbah: The Timescape of Bijnor -- Urdu Lithography as a Muslim Technology -- Viewing the Map of Europe through the Lens of Islam -- Provincializing Policies through the Urdu Public -- Conclusion: The Public as a Timescape.

"In early twentieth century British India, prior to the arrival of digital medias and after the rise of nationalist political movements, a small-town paper from the margins became a key node for an Urdu journalism conversation with particular influence in the United Provinces and Punjab. Understanding this newspaper's rise shows how a print public characterized by bottom-up as well as top-down approaches influenced the evolution of a new type of Urdu public in 20th century South Asia. Addressing a gap in scholarship on Urdu media in the early 20th century, during the period where it underwent some of its most critical transformations, this book contributes a discursive and material analysis of a previously unexamined Urdu newspaper Madinah, augmenting its analysis with evidence from contemporary Urdu, English and Hindi papers, government records, private diaries, private library holdings, ethnographic interviews with families who owned and ran the newspaper, and training materials for newspaper printers. Madinah identified the Urdu newspaper conversation both explicitly and implicitly with Muslim identity, a commitment that became difficult to manage as the pro-Congress paper sought simultaneously to counter calls for Pakistan, to criticize Congress' treatment of Muslims, and to emphasize Urdu's necessary connection to Muslim identity. Since Madinah delineated the boundaries of a Muslim, public conversation in a way that emphasized rootedness to local politics and small urban spaces like Bijnor, this study demonstrates the necessity of considering spatial and temporal orientation in studies of the public in South Asia"--