Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia: Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

By Soumen mukherjee

This is an excellent contribution to Ismaili Studies and a riveting read for students of the Nizari community’s understudied contemporary period. Soumen Mukherjee explicates the public career of Aga Khan III amid heightened religious internationalism and explores the development of a Shia Ismaili identity in the context of the larger Muslim and global historical forces that conditioned the modern in late colonial South Asia. The monograph is conceptually ground-breaking in examining the enduring legacies of questions such as the Ismaili Imam’s engagement with colonial modernity, his idea of India, restructured modalities of community governance, the evolution of Imamat-sponsored institutions, and a burgeoning sense of Muslim universality vis-à-vis denominational particularities that first radiated from the western Indian Ocean world and subsequently transcended the modular nation/state structure. Whereas Khojas have started receiving more scholarly attention of late, this work situates them in an entirely new context of transnational philanthropy, self-governing institutions, and emergent epistemes of the communal self (i.e. “Ismaili Studies”) in the imperial and post-colonial world. A singular contribution of the book is how it helps us see the emergence of a global cosmopolitan order with its signature ethical codes and institutions of governance through the lens of this community.

The early 20th emerges as a pivotal period in the formation of the contemporary Ismaili subject. Mukherjee shows how the current conceptions of service within and without the community, a transnational outlook, and modern self-awareness have their roots in that period’s engagement with colonialism, internationalism, and larger intellectual currents. Particularly intriguing is the author’s proposition that the ideological tactics of Twelver Khojas in their legal challenges against Aga Khan III accentuated his interaction with modernity. The book elicits a series of new insights from a corpus of texts that have long been in the public domain, taking us on a critical examination of the mind-set of the celebrated Aga Khan Case’s defence counsel and the implications of pan-Islamism on South Asia. The work is theoretically well-grounded and methodologically innovative. It engages with other work in the general area, responding to assertions like those of Nile Green – although the discussion on the Das Avtar is wanting. More rigorous attention to communal sources in Indian languages would have served to enhance the research. Nevertheless, this is clearly a major statement on the communal, national and international leadership of Aga Khan III and its consequences for the contemporary and future trajectories of the Nizaris.