Pious Labor

Front matter

AMANDA LANZILLO

PIOUS LABOR

Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India mm x |

Part One. Creating New Muslim Trades, Claiming New Muslim Technologies

1. Lithographic Labor: Locating Muslim Artisans in the Print Economy 21

2. Electroplating as Alchemy: Labor and Technology among Muslim Metalsmiths 45

PART TWO. THE CIRCULATION OF ARTISAN KNOWLEDGE AND TRADITIONS 3. Sewing with Idris: Artisan Knowledge and Community History 73

4. Migrant Carpenters, Migrant Muslims: Religious and Technical Knowledge in Motion 97

Part Three. Muslim Artisans, State Projects, And Hierarchies Of Technical Knowledge

5. The Steam Engine as a Muslim Technology: Boilermaking and Artisan Islam 125

6. Building the Modern Mosque: Stonemasonry as Religion and Labor 149

Notes 181 Bibliography 207 Index 221

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The process of research and writing this book was collaborative, shaped by conversations over tea and coffee and meandering walks with dear friends. I am especially grateful to the archivists and librarians who preserved and made accessible the histories and treatises at the core of this book, and to artisans and manufacturers who allowed me to visit their workshops.

The research for this book was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, an American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Fellowship, an American Historical Association Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant, and a Library of Congress Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship, as well as by Indiana University’s Department of History, Dhar India Studies Program, and the Office of the Vice President of International Affairs. Follow-up research was funded by the Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Completion of the manuscript was supported by an Association of Asian Studies Publication Support Grant.

Research for the book began as part of my doctoral dissertation at Indiana University. My adviser, Michael Dodson, has remained a dedicated mentor, guiding this work for many years. I was fortunate to have on my committee Paul Losensky, whose literary eye helped me to become a better historian; Ron Sela, whose advice shaped how I pursued my archival research; and Kaya Sahin, who pushed me to think comparatively and read widely.

My research depended on the kindness of friends and colleagues across South Asia. Namratha Rao, Koval Bhatia, and Ginger welcomed me to Delhi and made the city home. Safa Mohsin Khan and the entire Mohsin Khan family provided extensive support and welcomed me on a family visit to Meerut; they also viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS introduced me to Taab Anwer, who provided support in Aligarh. Seema Alavi enabled and encouraged my research. On return visits to Delhi, I was warmly hosted by Ayesha Jhunjhunwala and family. Rana Safvi graciously shared her knowledge of the city. I am also grateful to Sikandar Chingezi.

In Lucknow, Ahtesham Khan and the American Institute of India Studies Urdu program faculty provided extensive support. Anu, Sanjay, Kriti, and Stuti Behari became a second family in Lucknow. I appreciate the help of Shama Mahood at Lucknow University. I thank Apoorva Dixit and family for hosting me in Bhopal.

I appreciate the help of librarians across India, especially at the Raza Library and Saulat Libraries in Rampur, the Aiwan-e Urdu and Salar Jung in Hyderabad, the National Archives, Jamia Millia Islamia and Jamiat Ulama-i Hindi in Delhi, the Allahabad Public Library, the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow and Allahabad, the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna, the Awami Idara in Bombay, the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Library in Tonk, and the Maulana Azad and Iqbal Libraries in Bhopal.

In Lahore, I benefited from assistance and advice from Salima Hashmi, Kamran Asdar Ali, Zahid Usman, Nadhra Shahbaz Khan, Tahir Kamran, Doa Sarmad Khan, Kanwal Khalid, Syed Adeel Ijaz and Muhammad Zaid, as well as librarians at the Punjab Public Library, Punjab Archives, and National College of Arts.

My dear friends Mallika Leuzinger and Simon Pickstone hosted me during follow-up research in London, and Mallika also provided significant feedback on this book. My relatives, Ann, John, Emma, and Katie Buckley, provided a warm welcome in London. In D.C., at the Library of Congress, I received assistance from Jonathan Loar and Hirad Dinavari.

I wrote this book during my time with the Princeton University Society of Fellows, where I was encouraged to experiment with new ideas and learn from other disciplines. Michael Gordin, Beate Witzler, and Rhea Dexter made the Society a warm intellectual home. Michael Laffan, Gyan Prakash, Divya Cherian, Daniel Sheffield, and my frequent coconspirator Harini Kumar shaped my growth as a scholar. I benefited from conversations with Muhammad Qasim Zaman and Ben Baer and support from Sam Evans. My fellow Cotsen fellows continue to inspire and challenge me, and I am especially grateful to Célia Abele, Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Maya Kronfeld, Melissa Reynolds, Joshua Freeman, and Nicolas Sánchez-Rodríguez. I appreciate the friendship and skilled librarianship of Deborah Schlein and Ellen Ambrosone.

The book was improved thanks to the close reading and advice of Prasannan Parthasarathi, Megan Robb, SherAli Tareen, Julia Stephens, Michael Laffan, and Gyan Prakash at my 2022 book workshop, supported by the Princeton Society of Fellows. The trajectory of the book was shaped by advice from Projit Mukherji, Anand Yang, J. Barton Scott, and Andrew Amstutz at the 2020 American Institute of Indian Studies dissertation-to-book workshop. I also received helpful advice from Aleksandra Kobiljski, Aparajith Ramnath, Eugenia Lean, and Joseph Alter at the Association for Asian Studies Technology in Asia Workshop in 2022.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Many individuals have helped me with translations from Urdu and Persian. I am especially grateful for suggestions and help from Ahtesham Khan, Mohammad Asad, Tabrez Ahmad, Safwan Ahmad, Ashutosh Srivastava, Mohsin Khan, and Paul Losensky. Vinit Vyas and Kajaal Joshi provided translations from Gujarati and Hindi respectively. Haidar Ali of Rekhta, Syed Muneeb Iqbal, and Nabila Khadija Ansari provided me with several images. I thank Farima Mostowfi for sparking my love of languages.

I have recently found a new intellectual home with the Brunel University Division of Politics and History, as well as interdisciplinary community in the Brunel South Asia Studies research group. I am grateful to my colleagues at Brunel for their warm welcome, and I look forward to growing new relationships here in London.

I thank the British Library, the Raza Library and Rekhta Digital Library for permission to use images in their collections. My writing has benefited from the skilled editing of Amber Riaz.

Working with the University of California Press has been a delight. I thank Shahzad Bashir, as editor of the Islamic Humanities series, for his enthusiasm and for advice that shaped the trajectory of this project. Eric Schmidt guided this work and helpfully demystified the publishing process. LeKeisha Hughes has provided great assistance in preparing the book for publication. I am grateful to Elisabeth Magnus for her work as copy editor. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and helpful suggestions. I feel fortunate that funding from the Islamic Humanities series has enabled the open access publication of this book. I appreciate the indexing work of Alexander Trotter.

This book exists thanks to the boundless patience of my family. My parents, Jo-Ann and Richard Lanzillo, have been constant sources of love and support, embracing my long periods of travel in South Asia. My sister, Eliza Lanzillo, and her partner, Patrick Kellett, kept me in good spirits over many years of researching and writing. My in-laws, Kathy Charlotten, Alberto Ramos, and Benjie Ramos Charlotten, lovingly welcomed me into their family and home. My dog, Fara, took me for long walks. My husband, Alberto Ramos Charlotten, has embraced many roles, as cheerleader, critic, editor, travel agent, and my primary source of emotional support. This book would not exist without him.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

In transliterating Urdu, Persian, and Arabic words, I have followed the American Language Association-Library of Congress (ALA-LC) romanization standards, with adjustments for readability. A few of the Urdu works that I study here had English titles, transliterated into Perso-Arabic script. In these cases, I noted the Urdu spelling and kept it in all notes but used the common English spelling in the main text (Indian Architect in the text, Indiyan arkitikt in notes). For terms that are frequently used in English, I used the common American English spelling, typically that reflected in Merriam-Webster.

I have written the names of the artisans and authors that I profile in this book without diacritical markers in the text. The names of authors who wrote in Urdu or Persian are given in ALA-LC romanization in the notes, adapted to reflect the pronunciation of names (Karimullah, rather than Karim Allah).

In most cases, I have indicated the plural of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic words by adding an s to the singular, for instance kdrigars. A notable exception is ashraf (sing: sharif). Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

Introduction

The pure Lord gave such power to the blacksmith To turn to wax what was iron by nature.

You have raised the status of the jeweled blade;

Now all acknowledge the mettle of your sword.

All workshops depend on your wisdom;

The capitalist keeps his head bowed before you.' These verses, extracted from a longer Urdu nagm or poem, were written by Nazir, a blacksmith and bladesmith based in the North Indian city of Rampur in the mid-twentieth century. I first encountered Nazir and his poetry as part of a collection that the librarians of the renowned Raza Library in Rampur had put together to honor the city's artisanal and material heritage.* Nazir’s versified account of his trade immediately grabbed my attention, because it evoked several traditions that, in researching this book, I had come to associate closely with earlier generations of Muslim artisans who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nazir emphasized God's revelation of knowledge and skill to blacksmiths, even

as he also placed these smiths in a context of industrial labor, in a workshop subject to the whims of a capitalist or sarmayahdar, the possessor of wealth. Through his insistence on the smith’s inherent relationship with the divine, and the imagery of the humbled capitalist forced to bow his head to the smith's God-given prowess, Nazir asserted social status for blacksmiths. Nazir evoked a widespread belief that God had revealed knowledge of blacksmithing to the Prophet Dawud (David) by turning iron to wax in his hands, arguing that the practice of blacksmithing was a pious practice of Islam. In a context where ownership or authority was often ceded to members of the middle class and where artisans had limited control over their materials, styles, and technologies of production, Nazir offered an alternative vision of his trade: he claimed an Islamic, God-given status for blacksmiths, highlighting not only the economic importance and social dignity of artisan communities but the distinct forms of Muslim piety embedded in their trades.

When Nazir asserted a Muslim past and future for his trade, he drew on ideas about the relationship between Islam and artisanship that had been rearticulated, reimagined, and circulated among artisan communities across North India over the course of the previous century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Indian artisans transitioned to new, often industrialized, wage-based sites of work, especially in rapidly expanding cities associated with colonial authority and industry? They also engaged with rapid changes in the materiality and technology of their labor, ranging from new plasters to steam engines, and from lithographic presses to electroplating. Muslim artisans asserted religious traditions for their work to make sense of these changes and claim new knowledge. In doing so, they challenged their marginalization within strengthening North Indian social hierarchies, with many contributing to the consolidation of regional working-class identities through an Islamic idiom.

Pious Labor provides a history of Muslim laboring cultures in North India, tracing the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experiences and ideas that contributed to Nazir's portrayal of blacksmithing. It tells the stories of urban metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, boilermakers, carpenters, and press workers across the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh after 1902) and Punjab in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pious Labor traces histories of Muslim culture making from below through creative readings of an overlooked archive of Urdu artisan technical manuals and community histories and with a specific focus on the intersections of embodied and textual knowledge.

Muslim artisans engaged with religious pasts to make sense of changes wrought by the transition to a colonial economy. Their claims on the piety of their work reflected an effort to reassert authority over technology and material knowledge in a moment when technical authority was increasingly vested in the colonial state and the middle class. From the expansion of European political influence in India in the eighteenth century, colonial administrators had sought to discipline Indian labor to address European economic interests.’ As a result, over the course of the subsequent decades, Indian artisans were deprived of many historical forms of technical authority and autonomy.* But by engaging with new sites of knowledge circulation that expanded from the mid-nineteenth century—especially vernacular print and urban industrial workshops—Muslim artisans sought to challenge their economic, technical, and religious marginalization within Indian class and social hierarchies.

Pious Labor shows that from the mid-nineteenth century, Muslim workers drew on narratives of Muslim pasts and claims to distinctively Muslim identities to imagine new roles for their skills and their trades. In doing so, they reasserted and reimagined traditions and practices that I term artisan Islam. I use artisan Islam to refer to a broad range of narratives about laboring Islamic pasts, claims on the piety of work or technology, and the development and intersection of Muslim social, religious, and laboring spaces among artisans. In Pious Labor, I argue that through artisan Islam, Muslim workers both challenged and negotiated colonial capitalism and the consolidating social hierarchies in North India. Through claims on the piety of their work, Muslim artisans integrated their material and embodied knowledge with religious narratives, asserting social status and technological authority in a colonial economy that often robbed them of both.

DEFINING ARTISANS AND ARTISANSHIP

"Artisan" is a category so broad that its utility can sometimes be questionable. For E. P. Thompson, artisan could refer to anyone "from the prosperous master craftsman, employing labor on his own account and independent of any masters, to the sweated garret laborers"" Moreover, Indian artisans often did not—and do not— identify with this term. Instead, as Nita Kumar demonstrates, many preferred identities that were expressly associated with their specific trades.* The chapters of this book are thus organized by trades and practices in recognition of the fact that individual trades often held greater salience for artisans than the category of artisanship itself.

At the same time, I have chosen to use the term artisan because it intersects with categories that the authors of Urdu-language trade manuals and community histories used to describe their communities. The most important of these was karigar, which I translate both as "artisan" and “laborer; reflecting the fact that in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Urdu (as well as Hindi and Punjabi) the word was used to reference both the skills associated with craftworkers and the status of a wage earner. The authors of artisan manuals and community histories often relied on the category of kárigar to emphasize their own shared interests with people who read their texts (or heard them read aloud). Karigar was an especially important identifier for communities in which many artisans were shifting between trades, such as bladesmiths who turned to surgical tool manufacturing, or woodcarvers who turned to furniture making. While "artisan" was often a category applied from above— by the colonial state, middle-class overseers, or Indian patrons—its rough equivalent, karigar, held widespread relevance in the worlds of Indian labor.

Another factor complicating our definition of artisan is that colonial industrial policy in India often enforced distinctions between "artisanal" and "industrial" labor that did not reflect these workers’ own understandings of their trades and communities. Pious Labor argues that as many artisans transitioned to new fields of industrial work—such as boilermaking, railway carpentry, or print labor—they adapted both their technical skills and their community narratives of the Muslim past. Despite the distinct challenges inherent in colonial industrial capitalism, many artisans moved flexibly between familial workshops and capitalist- or state-run factories, transferring and applying their technical and religious knowledge from one to the other.

Consequently, I have maintained a capacious definition of artisan, one that upends colonial depictions of industrial laborers as divorced from artisanship. Simultaneously, my approach to the category of “artisan” seeks to challenge colonial portrayals of “cottage artisans” as uninterested in technological and material change. The category of kdrigar may ultimately suggest paths beyond the artisan-industrial worker divide, providing space to consider the flexibility and multiplicity of individual experiences of industrial and artisanal labor.

WHY MUSLIM ARTISANS?

The histories of South Asian labor and artisanship have often assumed Hindu social, religious, and caste identities as a norm among workers, positioning Muslim workers as complications or sources of potential religious conflict. This is due, in part, to what Chitra Joshi characterizes as the dominance of studies of “fragmentation and conflict” among Indian workers.’ For instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s study of jute-mill workers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Calcutta remains among the most prominent theorizations of community and religious identities among Indian laborers. Chakrabarty critiques portrayals of religious community and identity that “situate this working class in a web of immutable, unchanging loyalties,” arguing, instead, that “the meaning of these [religious] ‘ties’ changed through colonial-era industrialization?'?

But what did shifting ties of religion look like for Muslim workers? Were workers’ religious identities reflected primarily in the strengthening of oppositional religious communities, of modern “communalism,’ as suggested by Chakrabarty’s exploration of “riots” among Muslim millhands?! Were they directed toward shifting socioreligious authority, shaped by the Muslim elite, sparking mass participation in political projects related to both Indian independence and Muslim “separatism, ultimately reflected in the Pakistan movement?” This book does not discount the strengthening of these forms of assertion of Muslim identity in the context of urban industrialization, but it also argues that Islam held a far wider range of meanings for Muslim artisans and laborers. Artisan Islam was never siloed, and Muslim workers did engage with elite, middle-class, and nationalist movements, but these were rarely the only ways that Muslim artisans and laborers asserted ties of religion. Instead, Islam was central to how Muslim kdrigars narrated and taught their work, learned new technologies, negotiated shifts to new fields, and contested their marginalization within North Indian social and economic hierarchies.

Pious Labor thus joins recent scholarship that analyzes the religious, social, and laboring worlds of Muslim artisans and workers on their own terms, both historically and in the contemporary context.? At the same time, Pious Labor not only integrates Muslims and Islam into the study of artisanship and labor but also centers artisans and labor in our study of South Asian Islam. Persistent colonial-era narratives portray laboring-class Muslims as religiously marginal and less orthodox than their elite counterparts. Scholarship about Islam in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia may inadvertently reinforce these narratives because of the frequent focus on the Muslim middle class, on the ‘ulama, and on new sites of intellectual production, to the exclusion of laboring-class Muslims."

I therefore integrate workers’ experiences of Islam into an understanding of Islamic history beyond the “exclusive” claims of a supposed canon, emphasizing the way in which karigars made meaning for Islam in their specific social and economic contexts.’ I draw, for instance, on Nile Green's study of the promotion of “customary” Islamic practices and forms of authority among millworkers, dockhands, and other laborers in colonial Bombay, which emphasized the role of Islam in working-class life.'^ Green studies workers’ participation in Muslim "theolog [ies] of intervention" via “holy men,’ through the archives of mobile religious leaders." I reorient this analysis by centering Muslim narratives embedded within technical manuals and community histories that were authored by Muslim artisans themselves, drawing on an Urdu-language archive of artisanal production and artisan practices of Islam.

In a few cases, the spaces and practices of worship among North Indian Muslim artisans intersected with those of their Hindu and Sikh counterparts.'* I have chosen, deliberately, not to characterize these forms of shared space or practice as “syncretic.” In its most positive use, syncretism highlights shared experiences to argue for a potential world not riven by the contemporary majoritarianism that threatens the lives and livelihoods of religious minorities across South Asia. But as we shall see throughout the book, concepts such as "syncretism" have also been taken up pejoratively by those who hope to “purify” workers religion, and they frequently fail to account for how practitioners themselves understand their faith practices.

Most significantly, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial administrators were invested in drawing class and caste boundaries within Indian religious communities and identifying orthodox religious practices. Colonial ethnographers frequently described artisan Islam in India as perverted by contact with Hinduism and as not really Islam at all but instead a reflection of laboring-class Muslims lack of understanding of their supposed faith. One British administrator summed up this perspective succinctly in 1895, describing local Muslim artisans as "followers of the Prophet only in name?” Moreover, as SherAli Tareen demonstrates, debates among Muslim reformist scholars likewise often included polemics about the need to “purify” the religious practices of the so-called cattle-like Muslim masses.? And colonial and elite Muslim anxieties about the religious practices of laboring-class Muslims were sometimes in conversation with each other, retrenching understandings of artisan Islam as deviant.

In many of the community histories and technical manuals that form the backbone of my archival approach, artisans sought to demonstrate the specifically Muslim pasts of their trades and the specifically Muslim piety reflected in their work and technologies. Their careful insistence on the exclusively “Islamic” nature of their practices likely reflected artisans’ own cognizance of elite and colonial framings of their practices as unorthodox. Like many Muslims whose practices have been externally labeled “popular” and “syncretic” rather than “normative” or “formal,” they engaged in what Torsten Tschacher termed “a defense of contentious practices” against the ascriptive assumptions of both elite Muslims and the colonial state.” Rather than reading syncretism into these archival materials, I follow the lead of the authors of these histories and manuals and, in turn, analyze artisan Islam as reflective of a distinctly Muslim practice. Simultaneously, I consider whether and why artisan manuals might reflect a conscious effort to "defend; reshape, or even elide material and religious practices that were criticized or debated by other Muslims or by the state.

CONFRONTING CASTE THROUGH ARTISAN ISLAM

Taking artisans’ engagement with Islam seriously also forces us to contend with the complex and sometimes ambiguous role that caste plays in South Asian Muslim communities. The relative paucity of studies of labor, artisanship, and the working classes within South Asian Islam has contributed to an elision of the role of caste in shaping conflict and contestation within Muslim communities. Caste— and experiences of caste marginalization—are motivating factors in many of the Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories that I analyze in this book. And as several recent works have noted, from the mid-nineteenth century, caste-like social hierarchies often underscored the writing of members of the consolidating Muslim middle class, who sought to advocate for their economic and class position based on sharif (pl. ashraf), genteel, descent.” But the very existence of the ashraf and their practices of social distinction necessarily imply a community against which “genteel” Muslims defined themselves.

Sociologists of South Asian Islam often note the category of ajlaf, laboring or “common” classes, to identify this “other” against whom ashraf communities defined themselves. The term ajlaf, however, was rarely embraced as a social identity by Muslim workers themselves. Instead, Muslim artisans and laborers more often advocated for their own trade or kinship communities beyond the supposed ashraf/ajlaf binary.” Indeed, whether ajlaf as a category held widespread salience beyond efforts to distinguish the non-ashraf—often by ashraf writers—seems unlikely. Laboring-class Muslims more often sought to highlight what made their communities distinctively pious and skilled and to emphasize their histories as sites of potential religious or technological authority.

By arguing that caste-like hierarchies informed the experiences of Indian Muslim artisans and laborers, I am not suggesting that their experiences can be mapped directly onto Hindu artisans’ experiences of caste, which themselves were also plural.” Studies of Muslim birádaris—kinship networks that are usually endogamous and sometimes tied to specific trades—have emphasized that they are not always direct corollaries of Hindu jatis or caste groups.” Moreover, like Hindu caste structures, birddaris and other Muslim forms of caste-like association in North India underwent significant change as a result of both urban industrialization and colonial property law and ownership practices. In Punjab especially, mid-nineteenth-century colonial property law and inheritance practices were often implicitly or explicitly tied to biradari, contributing to a reconstruction and reification of genealogical pedigrees as the basis for status and community.”

Against this backdrop of reified caste marginalization, laboring-class Muslims wrote and circulated manuals and community histories through which they aimed to improve their social standing and promote their forms of religious and technological authority. In some cases, these efforts conformed to a process of “ashrafization,” which Joel Lee, in a study of Dalit Muslims, defines as “the effort to raise one’s social status by claiming ashraf status and adopting the social practices of the Muslim elite"? I do not argue that "ashrafization" was a universal approach among Muslim artisan communities. Instead, following Lee, I recognize that Muslims excluded from ashraf status employed a variety of religious and social narratives, often simultaneously, to claim dignity and status for their communities. Some of these reflected ashraf aspiration, but they coexisted with narratives that emphasized the piety of labor and the social importance of laboring communities.?? Caste contestation took place not only along ashraf-ajlaf lines but also within and across laboring communities as Muslim workers sought to define their trades and their communities as possessing specific, sometimes exclusive, Muslim pasts.

TECHNOLOGY, LABOR, AND RELIGION

Pious Labor integrates the study of South Asian Islam with the study of artisanship and labor. It also brings both fields into conversation with histories of technology. Recent scholarship in the expanding field of South Asian history of science, technology, and medicine has emphasized elite Muslim religious engagement with technological and scientific change in the wake of colonial claims on scientific authority.” Likewise, the relationship between craft, artisanship, and technology in colonial and postcolonial South Asia has been central to several recent studies.?^ The contributions of Muslim artisans and laborers, however, have remained largely absent from both trends. Pious Labor not only addresses this lacuna but also places Muslim artisans at the center of technological change in colonial India, asking how Muslim claims on technology informed class and laboring identities. It disrupts persistent assumptions about the technological marginality of both colonized peoples and laborers, highlighting Muslim artisans’ creativity in their use of and meaning making for new technologies.

Muslim artisans did not present their adoption of shifting technologies—even technologies closely associated with the colonial state—as technological “transfer” from Europe to Asia.?' Instead, as Projit Mukharji has argued in the context of small-scale medical technologies, their narratives "braid[ed] distinctive strands of knowledge and practice"? Specific practices—boilermaking, electroplating, and others—became the spindle around which Muslim artisans braided their forms of knowledge.? These processes of meaning making for artisan-industrial technologies might also be characterized by what David Arnold has termed “acculturation,” in which new machines simultaneously “conform[ed] to" and were "transformative of" cultures that used them.*

Pious Labor expands our understanding of how technology was “acculturated,” and how knowledge systems were “braided,” by highlighting distinctly Muslim claims and imaginations of technical knowledge. Beyond this, however, it also centers the importance of these claims on technical practices within class identities. It argues that artisans sought to assert new places for themselves within the consolidating social and class hierarchies of North Indian Muslims by asserting their distinct physical relationship with the technologies they used. Muslim artisans sometimes argued that the very thing that placed them in "lowly" positions in class or caste hierarchies—the physical labor carried out with their own hands— made them masters of technology in ways that members of the middle classes could not hope to achieve. Because they understood these technologies and skills as Islamic, their command over them implied a Muslim practice that elevated artisans as distinctly, even inherently, pious.

Practices of translation, vernacularization, and linguistic adaptation were central to Indian efforts to assert new, localized uses and meanings for technologies that were introduced through European colonial authority. Adapting scientific and technical knowledge into South Asian languages required the integration of new knowledge with the material and social culture of the vernacular language.?* Simultaneously, as Charu Singh shows, the authors of Indian scientific and technical treatises worked to establish equivalences “at the level of the word itself??? Within artisan manuals, however, practices of vernacularization and translation not only cultivated localized meanings but also established difference from and awareness of elite claims on technical knowledge. Most of the artisan manuals and treatises examined in this book did not describe themselves as translations from other languages. Nonetheless, practices of translation and vernacularization underscored manual composition. Many manual authors compiled materials drawn from contemporary English-language treatises—or earlier translations thereof—that circulated in South Asia.

Efforts to localize technologies and establish linguistic equivalences through artisan manuals reflected artisans’ struggles to negotiate shifts associated with the colonial industrial economy. Sometimes this meant rooting new terms in Indian and Islamic artisanal and material pasts. In other instances, it meant promoting adapted, transliterated English terminology as more accessible to artisan and industrial workers than the Urdu neologisms—sometimes created from Arabic roots—preferred by elite Muslim scientists and scholars. In either case, artisan decisions about how to express concepts and practices in Urdu reflected their cultivation of authority over new technical knowledge. Their practices of translation claimed new technologies as relevant to their own physical skills, trades, and histories. Through this process, they distinguished their translated knowledge from the emerging scientific and technical translations that circulated among both middle-class supervisors and Muslim scientific societies.

AN ARCHIVE FOR MUSLIM ARTISANS?

Muslim artisans have often been overlooked as intellectual and technological agents, in part because of the nature of the archive that they produced. Engaging this archive, which is constituted primarily of artisan technical manuals and community histories in Urdu, requires taking seriously the cultural and religious narratives embedded in artisan technical knowledge. In Pious Labor, I read vernacular manuals that explained new technologies and material practices not only for their technical descriptions but also for their minor asides and use of metaphor, their introductory poems and marginal notes, their small statements that reveal popular imaginations of technological change.