In workshops and industrial spaces across North India, artisans practiced their trades: tailoring and carpentry, lithography, stonemasonry, and electroplating. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these skilled workers adapted to new tools and technologies, saw transmission of knowledge move from family workshops to technical schools, and dealt with the expanding presence of the British colonial state. In response to these new pressures and practices, one community among these craftspeople increasingly asserted a unique relationship to the work its members carried out. “From the nineteenth century,” historian Amanda Lanzillo writes, “Muslim workers drew on narratives of Muslim pasts and claims to distinctly Muslim identities to imagine new roles for their skills and their trades. In doing so, they reasserted and imagined traditions and practices that I term artisan Islam.”
Lanzillo earned a Ph.D. in History at Indiana University and is now Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in South Asian History at Brunel University London. She explores the world of these Muslim artisans in her first book, Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2023). Through reading Urdu technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo teases out the ways that “Muslim workers both challenged and negotiated colonial capitalism and the consolidating social hierarchies in North India” during decades of change. Lanzillo, as she explains on an episode of the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast, seeks to expand scholarship in two directions: her work broadens conversations about South Asian Islam by looking beyond theological debates and the writings of intellectuals, and in turn brings Muslim artisans into the story of South Asian labor and technology during the colonial era.
Amanda Lanzillo is a recipient of a 2022 AAS “Striving for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Asian Studies” Publication Support Grant, and Pious Labor is available open-access through the University of California Press Luminos program. My exchange with her about the book was conducted via email.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham (MEC): Amanda, congratulations on the publication of Pious Labor—this is a book that will be of great interest to anyone studying histories of religion, print, technology, labor, and empire in South Asia. Can we start with how you first conceived of the project, and how it changed over time as you accumulated sources?
Amanda Lanzillo (AL): I really conceived of the book around the sources. I knew from the beginning that I was interested in questions of artisanship, skill, and industrial change, and the ways that Muslims in colonial-era India thought about these topics. My PhD dissertation focused primarily on questions of the patronage of artisans, and elite Muslims understandings of industrial and technological change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the context of Muslim-led princely states. Following the dissertation—partly through conversations with my committee and other mentors—I realized that I had the materials to tell this story in a way that placed artisans’ and laborers’ religious and material practices at the center.
I went back to the Urdu technical manuals and community histories that I had identified during my PhD research, which had formed a smaller portion of the dissertation. I realized it was possible to center artisans’ narratives of colonial-era technological change—which were often articulated through a religious idiom—by following these sources. This necessitated some follow-up research, but more importantly it changed how I read and approached my materials. It was, for instance, the driving force behind deciding to organize the chapters by trade. I realized that the narratives of “artisan Islam” that I identified were often extremely trade specific, and rooted in workers’ distinctive experiences and religious histories for practices such as carpentry, metalsmithing, or stonemasonry.
While writing the book, I thought a lot about the categories of labor, religion, and technology that artisans used to describe their own working lives, and the ways that these often differed from the categories used in colonial archives and records. I felt it was important to center the chapters on texts that were produced within artisan communities, and to think about how these texts were used in conjunction with orality and embodied knowledge in communities where literacy was sometimes limited.
MEC: Something of note that you mention early on is your wariness about using the term “syncretic” to describe interactions among North Indian Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities. What brought on this hesitancy, and when (if ever) do you think the term can be used in South Asian Studies?
AL: My discomfort with using “syncretism” in my book emerged largely out of my readings of my sources. I noticed that colonial ethnographic reports often wrote about the communities that I studied as syncretic, and sometimes pejoratively, in a way that diminished their Muslimness. Muslim artisans were called “Muslims in name only,” or described as people who “cling to Hindu usages.” Some elite and middle-class Muslim writing (especially in the context of nineteenth-century Muslim reformist movements) also expressed distaste for artisans’ practices and claims on the Muslim past, framing them as unduly influenced by other traditions. Many focused on how Muslim workers might be taught more “orthodox” practices and histories that were circulating among members of the middle class.
But the Muslim artisans that I studied didn’t write about their histories or their practices in the same way. In most of the technical manuals and community histories that I read, they framed the ways that they practiced their trades and engaged with new technologies as based in Islamic tradition, and rooted in Muslim pasts. Of course, this may have been because they were aware of accusations that their practices were syncretic and unorthodox and were working directly to counter those accusations. In attempting to put artisans’ ways of understanding technology, craft, and skill at the center of my story, I felt it was important to emphasize how and why they understood their practices as Islamic. In some cases, this included practices and beliefs that the state or elite Muslims framed as syncretic or unorthodox, but I wanted to understand why artisans framed these practices and belief as a form of specifically Muslim piety.
That said, I think the term “syncretism” has its place in South Asian studies. There are—and long have been—people and communities that understand their own practices as syncretic, and embrace that designation, and many who engage with it as an idea that can counter religious majoritarianism. Likewise, I think it may have a place in describing certain socio-cultural ideals. What I am uncomfortable with is applying that terminology to communities who were often explicit in framing their work and their histories as Islamic, in a context where accusations of syncretism sometimes denied them that identity.
MEC: Each chapter of Pious Labor focuses on one skilled trade community—lithographers, electroplaters, carpenters, etc.—and how its members articulated their relationship to what you term “artisan Islam.” To what extent were such conversations taking place across those trades? How did craftworkers understand themselves as part of a larger community, beyond their respective trades?
AL: One reason that I chose to organize the chapters by trade was because I found that specific trades were often the loci of religious and social identities. Whether it was tailors and blacksmiths tracing the revelation of their work to the Prophets Idris and Dawud respectively, or scribes asserting the relevance of their skills to the preservation of the Quran and Islamic knowledge, the practices of “artisan Islam” that I studied were often rooted in knowledge of a specific trade.
But there were also spaces of collaboration and connection across trades, and these were especially important for Muslim artisans who moved between trades or shifted to new forms of labor in industrialized factories and workshops. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were periods of upheaval in many Indian artisan trades, due in part to colonial industrial policy and shifting patterns of demand. Many artisans who transitioned out of “hereditary” trades into other practices of artisanal and/or industrial labor emphasized their identities as kārīgars. Kārīgar, I note in the book, was a term “used to reference both the skills associated with craftworkers and the status of a wage earner.” The term was used to capture, for instance, the experiences of skilled blacksmiths who transitioned to boilermaking in the colonial railways, as well as those who retained independent workshops. Similarly, it was embraced both by weaponsmiths who sought to maintain their trade despite colonial regulations that limited their sales, as well as to members of their communities who transitioned to practices like surgical tool manufacture to sustain themselves economically.
In addition, in several chapters of the book I argue that shared understandings of Muslim artisanal piety contributed to laborers’ decisions to participate in movements for working class solidarity. This was not universal. But for many of the trades that I studied, shared Muslim kārīgar experience informed laborers’ decisions to join strikes and unions and to engage with other organizations that called for improved wages or working conditions. Several of the lithographic workers from Chapter One, carpenters from Chapter Four, and boilermakers and other railway laborers from Chapter Five drew on their Muslim kārīgar identities in their engagement with broader working-class movements.
MEC: Looming behind and above all of these artisans is the increasingly interventionist British colonial state. Across the decades that you cover in Pious Labor, how did the state approach the Muslim artisan community? Do you see elements of this relationship that could be investigated by scholars of other colonies in Asia to their respective contexts?
AL: An important connective theme in the book is the colonial state’s cultivation of new hierarchies of technical knowledge, leading to the marginalization of artisans’ forms of knowledge and authority over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was often rooted in the development of new colonial industrial and engineering schools and other forms of technical training associated with the state. As members of the consolidating Indian middle class embraced the credentials associated with state education, artisans often found themselves pushed to the bottom of regional hierarchies of industrial knowledge and work. There were, of course, important exceptions. For instance, a boilermaker from a hereditary artisan background who successfully secured well-salaried employment in a colonial locomotive workshop is an important figure in Chapter Five. Likewise, I show that sometimes artisans were able to reorient training associated with the colonial state for their own purposes, as in the case of migrant Muslim carpenters and woodworkers, who seemed to have used the Lahore Railway Technical School’s night classes in part as a space to cultivate community.
However, for Muslim artisans, not only was their knowledge of how to perform work and engage with technology was pushed downwards in colonial technical hierarchies over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the religious contours of this knowledge were also increasingly displaced. Many Muslim laboring communities continued to insist on the relevance of their forms of “artisan Islam” through their engagement with the popular vernacular press. Likewise, their continued understanding of the Islamic traditions for their trades also sometimes informed their participation in class-based labor movements. But Islamic practices of technologies and trades were—of course—excluded from the colonial administration’s understanding of the forms of knowledge that were needed within the industrial workshop, and Muslim artisans thus often saw their technical knowledge devalued.
In the context of South Asian history, I think there is still much more research to be done regarding the colonial state’s relationship with religiously-minoritized laboring communities. I would also be especially interested to read comparative or connective work that traces colonial hierarchies of technical knowledge across other regions in Asia, the Indian Ocean world, and into other colonized regions.
MEC: Something that I noticed on your website is the impressive number of public-facing articles you’ve written, many of which draw on your research. How do you integrate this kind of writing into your work—both on a conceptual level and logistically? Do you have any advice for fellow Asianists seeking to blend academic publication and writing for general audiences?
AL: I see my public-facing and academic writing as connected, and I hope that my public-facing writing improves my academic writing (and vice versa). I find it is useful to think about which parts of my materials and histories might be compelling to different audiences, and why, and the different ways I might frame stories to pull in these different audiences. My decision to write for media organizations also comes out of the wealth of fascinating archival materials I’ve encountered over the years, and the realization that not all of it is best suited to academic articles or books. I often identify archival materials that contain stories that I wish more people knew about, and particularly stories that I think counter assumptions about how ordinary people lived and worked in colonial-era India. I enjoy thinking about how I can make these stories accessible and compelling for as many people as possible. These also encourage me to stretch and read more widely outside of my narrow fields, and they’ve had the added benefit of helping me connect with other scholars.
I should acknowledge my colleague Arun Kumar (Nottingham), a fellow historian of artisanship and labor in South Asia, with whom I co-authored a series of articles on artisan and labor histories for the Indian media site The Wire. I think Arun was initially more confident in the popular appeal of our work than I was, and he was right! It’s been wonderful to discover how many people (both within and beyond the academy) are eager to engage with our scholarship. I now realize that there is quite broad interest in the histories of trades and industries, in how people worked in the past, and in what their laboring lives might have looked like.
For others who are interested in blending academic publication and writing for general audiences, I would say firstly that we don’t have to sacrifice nuance and complexity to tell interesting stories that will engage people beyond the academy. I love the challenge communicating nuance clearly and concisely. And second, I’d reiterate that I think more people are interested in our scholarship than we realize. For historians, we engage with so many amazing stories during our archival work—why wouldn’t we want to share them!?
MEC: You’ve embarked on a new research project about Pashtun labor migration in the British Empire. How is that going so far, and what’s next for you in the development of that project? Do you have other concerns, hobbies, interests, etc. that you’d like to share with #AsiaNow readers?
AL: My second book traces the histories of Pashtuns who migrated from Afghanistan and the Indo-Afghan border regions to major cities in British India and parts of the Indian Ocean world between the 1840s and 1960s. They are often remembered as peddlers and moneylenders—think of Rabindranath Tagore’s famous Kabuliwala—but others were also recruited for millwork, military labor, dock-work, mining, boilermaking, and guard work. Migrant Pashtun communities were subject to colonial efforts to regulate and control their mobility, and they sometimes faced arrest or deportation if they couldn’t prove their employment. I frame them as “peripheral subjects” not just because they came from the physical periphery of empire, but because their subjecthood and ability to move under empire were often uncertain, due to the complex political statuses of both Afghanistan and the frontier regions.
Despite this, my goal is not only to tell a story of imperial control and regulation, but also the ways that communities sustained and asserted themselves despite it. I have begun collecting Pashto-language treatises about how to live and work ethically, many printed in Indian cities, which circulated in both the diaspora and in Afghanistan and the frontier regions. I’m likewise tracing their reception by other Muslim communities in the cities where they settled and worked, primarily through Urdu newspapers and histories. I ultimately aim to examine histories of Pashtun community cultivation and social identity that persisted despite the forms of recruitment, control, and exclusion used within the British empire.
It is a geographically, temporally, and conceptually big project, and I’m very fortunate to have received support from the ACLS Fellowship program and the American Institutes of Sri Lankan, Indian, and Afghanistan studies. This will allow me to conduct multi-sited archival research in collections across South Asia, the UK, and elsewhere.
Outside of work, I enjoy running, cycling, and exploring parks with my partner and dog. I am running the London marathon this week! A lot my time recently has gone to training, and all the long runs have allowed me to explore new parts of the city. [Update: Since our exchange, Amanda did run and complete the London Marathon! — MEC]
MEC: Amanda, thank you for your time and congratulations again on the publication of Pious Labor! I encourage any interested #AsiaNow readers to download the open-access version of your book on the University of California Press Luminos site.
AL: Thank you for these thoughtful questions, Maura! I am grateful for the support of AAS and the “Striving for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Asian Studies” Publication Support Grant, which was fundamental to my completion of the book.