Hamid Dalwai: Democratic Socialism and Muslim Politics in India, 1947-1977

• Applicant: Deepra Dandekar, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Asian Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561664512

This project explores the political thought of the mid-twentieth century Indian Muslim thinker and socialist activist Hamid Dalwai (1932-1977) from the perspective of writing a vernacular intellectual history. A rationalist reformer who wrote impassionedly on questions of Muslim belonging to India, Dalwai’s intellectual activism roughly spans the three decades of independent India between the Partition in 1947 and Emergency (1975-1977). In his writings, Dalwai exhorted Indian Muslims to consider themselves a political category rather than a religious one and during his times, Dalwai was well-known for his activism in the public sphere of the Bombay State (later Maharashtra) and India. Dalwai wrote primarily in the vernacular (Marathi), describing himself as an atheist (nirishvar) and his politics as rationalist (buddhivadi) and secularist (dharmanirapeksha) within the context of democratic socialism (samajvadi). While there has been growing interest in the history of Indian socialists and socialism, Dalwai has been inadequately theorized in this history, due to the vernacular nature of his writings and his focus on Muslim belonging. This project aims to contribute to the intellectual history of independent India by researching the treatment of Muslim minoritization within Indian socialist discourse. Based on a close reading and discourse analysis of Dalwai’s writings, and the writing of his interlocuters, this project will focus on writing an intellectual history of Hamid Dalwai. It will also discuss his conceptualisation of socialist and secularist ideas in a little-researched vernacular context and how they contributed to global intellectual discourse.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants