Kavita Datla has written a wide-ranging and eminently readable account of the politics of Urdu-language education in the princely state of Hyderabad in the early twentieth century. Her project is, in part, one of recovery: how is it, she asks, that the secular project of Osmania University's Muslims, embodied in its emphasis on vernacular Urdu education, has come to be effaced in the history of modern Indian nationalism? Drawing on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom and Andhra Pradesh, the author has sought to depart from narratives that assume Urdu to be the linguistic vehicle for a minoritized Muslim communal identity, focusing rather on the efforts of Muslim intellectuals associated with the university to articulate an all-India nationalism in Urdu that was at times sympathetic to the politics of the Congress Party but just as often charting a separate path. In short, the author writes, “what this book describes is a concerted effort by Muslim intellectuals to draw from Muslim scholarly traditions and history elements that would be useful to the forging of Indian citizens.” That is, she continues, Urdu was a medium for “not only asserting difference but also of imagining a common secular future” (p. 9).

The chapters are arranged thematically, each focusing on a particular moment in which scholars and educators were pushed to articulate Urdu's relationship with the broader, all-India project of secular nationalism. Chapter 1 lays the foundation for the rest of the book by situating the establishment of Osmania University as a vernacular university in 1918 in the context of a general debate over the goal of education and its language of instruction, in which Western orientalists, imperial bureaucrats, and civil servants of the Nizam's government were participants. The reigning logic of education, ultimately, was not to articulate a reformist vision of Islam, but to create a program of education that would cultivate modern subjects as part of the secular reason of state. It is in this new program of vernacular education, in which the “religious” as the domain of private belief was deemed separable from the broader concerns of the political, that the author locates the formation of an Urdu secularism (p. 16).

In the chapters that follow, Datla tracks the formation of the contested domain of the Urdu secular modern in the domain of scientific translation, the writing of history, the cultivation of Urdu as national language, and the entrance of Osmania University's student body into the field of nationalist politics. Chapter 2 follows the efforts of the Bureau of Translation (est. 1917) and associated intellectuals in establishing a systematic Urdu scientific vocabulary and a body of scientific and technical literature translated from foreign languages into Urdu. Chapter 3 turns to the university's attempt to formulate new secular histories of India and Islam by commissioning the composition of works that appealed to a largely liberal notion of secular progress while critiquing earlier Western histories. Chapter 5 moves to the politics of formulating Urdu as a national rather than communal language, looking at the activities of a group of ghair mulki intellectuals (e.g., Maulvi Abdul Haq) and the literary societies they founded in the early twentieth century (e.g., Anjuman-i Taraqqi-yi Urdu). In this chapter, in particular, the rival claims of region and nation on Urdu and its literary tradition(s) are mostly clearly demonstrated, especially in relation to the politics of the Indian National Congress, which increasingly inflected Urdu as the language of a Muslim minority. The final chapter shifts to the domain of student politics, using the conflict over the right to sing Vande Mataram at campus events in the 1930s to reveal the fragile boundaries between the secular future envisioned by the university and the broader Indian nationalist project, just as it revealed the tension between Urdu's national claims and those of other regional vernaculars.

As a whole, the book is successful in illuminating the palpable urgency with which scholars associated with Osmania approached the task of reforming and promoting Urdu as a medium of liberal progress. Yet, while the author notes that this intellectual and pedagogical project was often contested, the domain of the secular itself achieves a normative status in the author's narrative that is not quite satisfying. Although Datla notes that many of the intellectuals she discusses drew on “Muslim scholarly traditions” in articulating the boundaries of the Urdu secular modern, it is unclear how Islam as a discursive tradition informed their projects except in the most utilitarian fashion. One wishes, for example, that the author had looked more closely at the field of ethics (akhlaq), which remained a compulsory course for Osmania students in the 1930s, as a possible space in which the supposedly private domain of the religious informed the articulation of a new secular national ethics in the service of the public good rather than individual morality. Nonetheless, Datla's book is a fine addition to the growing literature on Indian secularism, the politics of language, and the critical history of the princely states.