A Conversation with Professor Faisal Devji: South Asian Intellectual History

Faisal Devji is the Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History, and Fellow of Balliol College, as well as the former Oxford Professor of Indian History. He completed his PhD in Intellectual History at the University of Chicago, and has taught at a number of institutions, including Harvard and Yale. His research focuses on the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia, including numerous publications on Gandhian non-violence and global Islam.

By Robert James Taylor, a second-year DPhil candidate in History at New College, Oxford, researching the post-1945 British counterculture and its use of Indian ideas.

RT: Could you please tell me about your background, career, and research interests? How did you come to focus on intellectual history in general, and South Asian political thought more specifically?

FD: That’s a long story to tell. As a personal matter, I was born and brought up until my early teens in East Africa, in Tanzania, in a family of Indian origin which then migrated to Canada in the 1970s. This was at a time when Indians in other East African countries were being urged – or compelled – to leave. That created new diasporic communities in the UK and in Canada specifically, which allowed those of us who had remained to then be able to leave in any case. It was part of a much larger set of migrations. I went to High School and College in Vancouver, and then on to the United States (Chicago) for my Masters and PhD. Then I worked in the US in different places, before I moved to Oxford in 2009.

Academically, I am interested in intellectual history, particularly because I felt – even as a student – that ideas were not really taken very seriously in South Asian studies or in South Asian History more generally. There was an absolute dominance of social and political history, which there was nothing wrong with, but I did think that ideas mattered and that they continue to matter. Rather than seeing ideas simply as phenomena that emerge out of hard material relations – of production, consumption, ownership etc. – they actually survive these contexts. And they work in different contexts to create new kinds of understandings and therefore frameworks for actions in the future. It is the hard material basis of history which is the most fragile, dated, and provincial, and it is the ideas which are the great survivors – although, they change of course. I didn’t see any attention being given to ideas in this manner. For me this was a problem because European history – whether intellectual or not – really did take ideas seriously. You could study a philosopher and an entire school of thinking, in a way which you couldn’t for South Asia, unless it was ancient India where the material bases were not discernible and all you had really were texts. But that was a kind of Orientalist way of studying thought, where you just describe and classify it, comparing it to other forms of thinking – say, in Europe or elsewhere.

So, this was my entry into intellectual history, as a graduate student. I was interested in it because as an undergraduate I’d studied a course on the French Revolution, and we had to read Enlightenment thinkers and commentators on the Revolution – Rousseau, Voltaire, Tocqueville, Burke etc. I found it so stimulating that when I turned my attention back to South Asia, I wanted stimulation of that kind.

RT: When did you become particularly interested in studying global Islam?

FD: My interest in global Islam has always been there but I didn’t initially propose to work on it. I was really a South Asian historian, though I did focus on Muslim South Asia. It hadn’t really occurred to me to think about Islam as a global phenomenon, even once globalisation and global history had become important to the academy. It was only after the September 11^th attacks in 2001, when I had returned from a brief period in London to the United States to teach at Yale, that I was compelled to think about it. I was surrounded by all of this ambient noise around Al Qaeda, terrorism, and Islam, yet none of it satisfied me intellectually. This was not just about the popular misconceptions, but also the scholarly analysis at the time, which I found deeply unsatisfying.

      I wanted to understand it by reading and writing my way through it; writing is an extension of reading – it forces you to put your thoughts in order, and to see possible gaps and contradictions within your own thought. I did this and somewhat accidentally ended up with my first book, which was Landscapes of the Jihad (Cornell University Press, 2005). That was simply a way of clearing the ground, as I thought I was doing, to understand what was happening differently. The ‘global’ became very crucial for me, only at that point and not before, and as a response to the unsatisfying analysis of Islam, militancy, Muslim movements, and North American or European responses to these events. You could not escape these at the time, so I was forced out of my very provincial South Asian interests and into global Islam, which was the focus of my first two books. My previous articles had been on South Asia, which I then returned to with my books on Gandhi and Pakistan. For my upcoming fifth book, I’m back to global Islam.

RT: I want to turn our attention towards the different types of primary sources and archives available to intellectual historians. When you trace these very big ideas – like global Islam – being spread historically, across numerous different societies and thinkers, what source material are you actually looking at?

FD: Sources come in a variety of formats. I’ve never really been interested in biography, and I remain uninterested in motives and intentions as such. I think that is the work of lawyers and a legalistic way of thinking about history, with history being linked to law from its very beginnings. There is nothing illegitimate about this, but it’s not something I’m particularly taken with. I also think that it is almost impossible to divine people’s intentions and motivations, without going into psychoanalysis and psychological readings, otherwise it’s unsatisfying. And that you cannot really do with historical sources. Or you can only do so speculatively.

What I am interested in are arguments. How are these made and circulated? How are these publicly understood and rebutted/modified? You can think about arguments in their own terms without linking them back to intentions and motivations, which again links them back to material considerations of production, consumption, ownership, and so on. The psychological mode of doing history is linked to the materialistic – and even Marxist – mode, even if they appear to be opposed to each other in their ways of considering the past.

         If you are interested in arguments, how they circulate, how they are manipulated and rethought, then you don’t need to go in this direction of intentions and motivations. The latter is often very opaque. In that sense, I’m a bit of a nominalist. Gandhi was like this as well, and perhaps that’s where I get it from. He just wasn’t interested in people’s intentions and motivations. He thought that the practice of non-violence did not require knowing those things, and it was impossible to know them in any case. It’s often impossible for us to know our own intentions and motivations, let alone for a historian to know those of others. This emphasises the kinds of sources which I look at. I’m interested in locating arguments and showing how they shift over time, and across space. Primarily I look at public sources, rather than private diaries and personal correspondence. I am not as interested as others have been in the minutes or notes of colonial officialdom. The backstory or secret, unknown motives, operations, and intentions do not interest me as much. I focus on the public in its own right and on the arguments which are constructed and debated in public.

         In the case of Islamic militancy, you have to reconstruct those arguments. They are not available in nice, treatise-like forms, because the historical actors making such arguments are not academics writing treatises. The work of reconstruction must happen and not simply the work of summarisation.

The focus on argument goes back to my interest in intellectual history. Not only do I seek to describe arguments or reconstruct them, but also to see where they might lead and where they can lead, where they did not go and where they were not taken. I like to open up the futurity of ideas – where does this go? Not in a predictive sense, but in terms of looking at the possible futures of any argument, as well as the possible futures which were foreclosed by any argument.

RT: You have broadly defined intellectual history as investigating the making and remaking of different ideas, over time and across space. My own research focuses on the influence of certain Indian ideas in Britain, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I particularly wanted to think about translation and how some of these ideas might get lost along the journey. The ideas which are picked up on might not be authentic to – or consistent with – their originators’ intentions. Within your research, are there examples of where this process of translation has meant that Indian ideas take on a different life in the West?

FD: Yes, this happens all the time. It creates an interesting history in its own right. I think it was Hegel who said that all philosophy is a history of misreading, not necessarily through translation but translation can be brought into that process. There is something very fruitful and productive about misreading, otherwise you really wouldn’t have development of any kind. On the one hand, misreading is a productive process, on the other it forecloses certain possibilities. By exposing it, I do not intend to argue that we should attend to only that which is authentic about the past.

          You see problems of translation with Indian political thought in particular. This can be evidenced in my work on Gandhi, for instance, and the Christianisation of his ideas. Gandhi himself participated in this Christianisation because for him Jesus was an ideal moral figure and was very important in his thought. But Gandhi cannot simply be seen as a kind of Christian thinker, though he has been accused of being as such by some of his Hindu critics, as much as by some of his Christian admirers. In dealing with someone like Gandhi, it’s really important to note both that he was an imperial figure who sat at the confluence of many different streams of thought, and at the same time to distinguish between the kinds of ideas that he brought in from Indian forms of argumentation and the ones that came from, say, Tolstoy or Ruskin, and how these were brought together in a unique mixture and synthesis. 

All of which is to say something quite banal, which is that translation can be as much of a benefit in its misreadings as a problem. The task of the historian is not simply to recover what is authentic about any one event or phenomenon in the past, but rather to see how ideas accrue and come to be linked one to the other, however various their sources and derivations. What I find most interesting is what is produced as a result of this process.

RT: Finally, can we perhaps tie some of these historical ideas together within the present political moment? How can shifting patterns of thinking help us to understand what is happening in contemporary South Asia, as well as in the West?

FD: It’s difficult because at the moment there seems to be a great process of recycling of ideas. There is nothing very much which is particularly original or new in the political debates we see happening – whether it’s in the West or in places like India. The big debates we see playing themselves out are fascinating in their turn back to the past. In India, there are these constant debates either about what happened in the late colonial period or the period of early independence, or what happened in the medieval past – the Mughals and the Muslim rulers. There is some interest in the ancient past, in terms of the history of caste, and these are all debates about categories and problems which are familiar. There have been shifts in power over time, but the ways in which people think about these debates tend to return to the debates of the past. This is in part a result of being unwilling or unable to think about the present in its own terms.

          This happens in Western Europe and America as well. In the world of Trump and tariffs, we still have debates about whether what we are seeing is Fascism, whether we are in the new 1930s, or the new 1848, or 1940s, or 1960s. There has been an extraordinary rush of historical precedents and historical framings which are being offered as ways of understanding the present. I think this is symptomatic of a certain kind of failure of the political imagination – in the West, it is a question of European or Western history no longer sufficing to explain or understand the global condition. All of these references are to a time when there was absolute Western dominance over the world. Today you really can’t get away with thinking that 1936 will explain the global condition that we’re in, because that presumes that a certain period of European history still applies universally. It might have once, but I don’t think it does any longer.

          The turn to historical precedents to me reveals the anxiety which accompanies the loss of European historical thinking in our own day. In India, you have this turn to the Indian past, whether the colonial or pre-colonial. That, too, is not very fruitful and it betrays anxieties of a different kind. Those anxieties seem to be more about a failure of the present to live up to the desires of Indian freedom, that we still haven’t achieved what we thought we should achieve. We keep saying India is great, but it really doesn’t look like that to many people, including to many people in our own country. So how are we to account for this and how are we to explain it? This is where the rush of historical precedents comes from in India. In both cases, there is an unwillingness to actually look at what is happening and a kind of absolute dissonance between these different forms of historical self-referentiality, although they might reflect each other in other ways. Migration is a problem which we’ve seen in India, as well as in Europe. They are not unrelated, but they draw from different sets of historical accounts.
      

RT: Thank you so much for a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, Faisal. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

FD: My forthcoming book on global Islam deals with this very question of the collapse of older ways of understanding the past and the incoherence of the present. It also looks to how we might think about the future. It’s a book that is called Waning Crescent (Yale University Press, 2025), and it is about how Islam comes to be seen by Muslims as an agent or a protagonist in history. This is not unfamiliar – Christianity and Hinduism are understood in similar ways – but the implications for each of these traditions is quite different. I track the emergence of Islam as such a subject, which minoritises both theological and political themes. Because it comes to be defined as a civilisation, and later as an ideology. In both cases, it is an abstract system that is seen to act in time and in place. That totality minoritises both the religion and politics within it. Today I think that this construction of Islam is coming to an end. Recent protests and populist movements have not viewed Islam as a protagonist of history in the same way.