ABSTRACT
The British conquest of the Indian subcontinent forced for the fi rst time the entry of a major segment of the Islamic world into the colonial system, and thereby induced a complex process of cultural contact and inexorable cultural change. As a modest step towards understanding that period, this chapter will look at modern Urdu poetry, which has been far less described in English than modern Indo-Muslim religio-political ideologies.1 The focus is upon aspects of the Islamic religiosity which was so dominant a theme of the Urdu poetry of the later colonial period, from about 1880 to 1940. From a typological as well as an historical perspective, such poetic re-expressions of Islam are indeed the thematic characteristics which most clearly distinguish the verse of the period both from the pre-modern Perso-Urdu poetic tradition and from the more recent Urdu poetry of the later twentieth century.
