Gastvortrag: Nodes of Translation and Minor Cosmopolitanism between Modern India and Germany

This talk brings together translation studies in conversation with global intellectual histories. It does so by studying histories of translation, transculturation and transformation of ideas between German and Urdu language. I conceptualize translation as a modality of minor cosmopolitanism and archive of entangled intellectual histories. I will examine the translation work of Syed Abid Hussain (1896-1978) as he moved between Colonial Delhi and Weimar Berlin. He translated Goethe, Kant and Eduard Spranger’s German writings on literature, philosophy and pedagogy into Urdu language. I hope to show the connection between translation and minor cosmopolitan discourse and practices of pedagogy as developed by Husain at the Jamia Milia Islamia University in colonial and postcolonial India.

Dr.Razak Khan is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), Georg-August-University Göttingen. He researches and writes about the socio-cultural, intellectual, and affective history of South Asian Muslims in Modern India and Germany. He is currently completing his Habilitation book project entitled “Minor Cosmopolitanism: Politics of Islam, Urdu and Secular Nationalism in the Life and Writings of Syed Abid Husain (1896-1978).” His first monograph Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Rampur was published by Oxford University Press, 2022. He co-edited Nodes of Translation: Intellectual History between Modern India and Germany (De Gruyter, 2024) and also edited the English translation edition of The Incomparable Festival (Penguin Random House India, 2021).